How Are Independent Cultures Born?
A Genealogy of the Independent Cultural Scene in Post-Yugoslav
Zagreb
Student: Sepp Eckenhaussen
Text: rMA-Thesis in Arts & Culture: Art Studies at the University of Amsterdam
Supervisors: Prof. Dr. Crhista-Maria Lerm Hayes, University of Amsterdam Prof. Dr. Leonida Kovač, Academy of Fine Arts, University of Zagreb
Contact details: sepp@planet.nl +31 6 46792676
Krelis Louwenstraat 5A2, Amsterdam
Date: 4 July 2018
INTRODUCTION: WHAT IS INDEPENDENT CULTURE? 4
Independence: Four Levels of Significance (and the Aesthetics of the Scene) 5
Narrating Independent Cultures: Approach, Methods and Structure 9
Mapping the Civil 13
From Amsterdam to Zagreb 15
Tactical Transnational Networks 16
Neo-Imperialist Reason 17
The Native Informant and (Un)Translatability of the Other 18
I Take Position 21
GENEALOGY: WHERE DO INDEPENDENT CULTURES COME FROM? 22
1. Point Zero: The Disintegration of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia 22
2. Independencies of Independence 26
2.1. Arkzin and the Anti-War Campaign 27
2.2. The Institutional Crisis 31
2.3. The Emergence of a Parallel System 36
3. Systemic Territorialisation 39
3.1. A Crack in the Political System 40
3.2. Tactical Networks 42
3.3. Hybridisation 43
3.4. Curatorial Collectives 44
3.5. Outreach 46
4. Prefigurative Praxes 47
4.1. Right to the City 49
4.2. A Bottom-Up Approach to Cultural Policy-Making 51
4.3. The Student Occupation of the Faculty of Philosophy 53
4.4. Historiographical Turn 56
4.5. Non-Native Research 59
5. Appropriation and Re-Orientation 63
5.1. Inside the European Union 63
5.2. The Neo-Conservative Backlash 64
5.3. Neo-Liberalism and Neo-Conservatism as Two Hands of the Same Body 65
5.4. The Emergence of New Civil Movements 67
5.6. Zagreb je NAŠ! 72
5.7. Independent Cultures as Generation-Specific Phenomenon 74
5.8. The Lack of Feminist Art History 75
CONCLUSION: WHOSE INDEPENDENT CULTURES ARE THESE? 78
BIBLIOGRAPHY 84
Interviews 84
Introduction: What is Independent Culture?
After the disintegration of Yugoslavia and the establishment of the independent state of Croatia in 1991, a new field of cultural organisations not aligned to the state-funded cultural infrastructure emerged throughout the country, especially in its capital Zagreb. The most well-known and most established of these organisations include Multimedia
Institute/MAMA, the Center for Drama Arts, What How and for Whom?/WHW,
Attack!/Medika, Booksa, BADco., BLOK, Clubture, Kulturpunkt, and Right to the City.1 Amongst insiders, this field of cultural organisations is referred to as ‘independent culture’ or ‘non-institutional culture’. None of these independent cultural organisations work within the strict confinements of the art world or artistic production. Instead, their programming entails a broad range of cultural and social practices, and, as such, independent culture dwells on the intersections of various activisms, such as urban activism, anti-fascism, pacifism, commons activism, feminism and queer activism, decoloniality, and ecological activism. In its
organisational and programmatic independence from the state and local governments,
independent culture claims to work, indeed, independently. Since this independence is argued to produce space for criticality, independent culture is thought to produce more urgent
cultural programming than government-dependent institutional culture, or, at least, relevant cultural programs that cannot be realised within that institutional sphere.
Yet, from the moment of its emergence in the 1990s, the independent cultural infrastructure to a great extent existed by the grace of international philanthropist
organisations, such as the SOROS Foundation, the Rosa Luxembourg Foundation, and the European Cultural Foundation, as well as funding by for-profit organisations such as the Viennese Erste Bank. Moreover, since the mid-2000’s, international funds have retreated, rendering the independent cultural scene more dependent on state funding than before, de facto incentivising the independent cultural organisations to engage actively in advocacy, self-institutionalisation and cultural policy-making. It is questionable, then, how independent or how non-institutional this independent cultural scene now really is. Is it a product of local urgency, or of neoliberal and neo-imperial phenomena like globalisation and cultural
entrepreneurship?
1 MAMA/Multimedia Institute: www.mi2.hr, Center for Drama Arts: www.cdu.hr/about/index.htm, WHW:
www.whw.hr, Medika: www.facebook.com/akc.medika/, Booksa: www.booksa.hr, BADco.:
www.badco.hr/en/home/, BLOK: www.blok.hr, Clubture: www.clubture.org, Kulturpunkt: www.kulturpunkt.hr, Right to the City: www.pravonagrad.org.
At the heart of this debate is the question of the relation between artistic and cultural production, the institutional, the state, and the market in the context of global neoliberalism as it has historically played out in the specific context of the former Yugoslav area of Croatia. This specific Croatian situation is characterised by a discourse of continually contested notions such as ‘democratic culture’, ‘civil society’, ‘grass-roots’, and ‘NGO-isation’ that emerged over the past decades and started occupying the same discursive spaces as the discursive tradition inherited from the socialist era, featuring concepts like
‘self-management’, ‘common/communal ownership’ and ‘social art’. Furthermore, the discursive field has been inhabited by traditional or bourgeois art-theoretical notions such as ‘autonomy’ and ‘purity’, as well as counter-cultural tendencies. It is within this peculiar discursive field, reflecting a complex political and institutional condition, that organisations with critical practices have started self-articulating in terms of ‘independent culture’, ‘non-institutional culture’, and ‘civil society’.
The vagueness of various central terms in the discourse around independent culture, independence, non-institutional, and civil society triggers a myriad of questions. During three months of in situ research in Zagreb, including sixteen interviews with actors of independent culture, a large number of gallery and museum visits, the reading of a number of ‘organic’ theoretical texts, and general engagement in the scene, I have sought an answer to the following questions: What exactly are the practices employed in the scene? What communities and publics are addressed by and involved in independent culture? What knowledge is produced in it? What is the relation between art, politics, and independent culture? What is the institutional status of independent culture? How did the existing practices of independent culture come into being? How does the independent cultural scene relate to the old national situation of Yugoslav Socialism and the new situation of Croatian nationalist neoliberalism? Whom does independent culture serve? Is independent culture a homogenous phenomenon in terms of genealogies, political orientations, practices, and identities? If not, what are the differences dividing independent culture? In short: What is independent culture?
Independence: Four Levels of Significance (and the Aesthetics of the Scene)
The first major problem in understanding independent culture is the very terminology used to define it, which will be puzzling to the uninformed outsider. ‘Independent culture’ is an organic term, which has gathered a set of specific meanings over the course of time. Whatindependence is at stake here? Although some degree of untranslatability should be
cherished, I need to elaborate some layers of meaning of ‘independence’ in order to outline a preliminary basic terminological understanding: a hypothesis to be re-evaluated in the conclusion. For the moment, ‘independence’ will be considered to have four levels of supplementary, if sometimes contradictory, significance: formal, identitarian, systemic-positional, and subjectivising.
The first of these levels of significance concerns the ‘intuitive’ (and therefore
deceptive) meaning of formal independence: economic and governmental independence from any external body or force. The problem of this formal use is evident. Cultural production is always dependent upon either private money, public money, unpaid labour, or a combination of these. Hence, it is immediately clear that ‘independent culture’ cannot be understood as a straight-forward formal definition. However, on a programmatic level, independence defined as a far-reaching formal freedom in programmatic self-determination, can be achieved and is one of independent culture’s main characteristics. It should be noted that the concept of ‘non-institutional culture’ is regularly used as improved equivalent to ‘independent culture’ in its formal sense. However, the latter term is equally context-specifically defined (i.e. in
opposition to the local ‘institutional sphere’ of large, government-run cultural institutions) and too formalist to my understanding. I will therefore adhere to the adjective ‘independent’.
The second level of significance in ‘independence’ regards identitarian aspects of the term. Cultural workers often speak about independent culture in the first-person plural and actively use the word ‘scene’, which is unsurprising because there is a large overlap in people working for different independent cultural organisations. Many independent cultural
organisations, such as MAMA, Booksa, and BLOK, actively employ the term ‘community’, invoking an element of locality-based positive identity as a basis of cultural production. More importantly, people running independent cultural organisations are predominantly of the same generation, which was in its twenties during the disintegration of Yugoslavia and the subsequent establishment of independent culture and is by now in its forties. The shared lived experience of this historical trajectory constitutes a positive element of identity at the basis of independent culture. Yet, to claim that independent culture is hence merely an identitarian notion would be an oversimplification. Even though community-based collaborations and solidarity are important values in the economy of independent culture, there is simply no programmatic or political homogeneity within independent culture.
A useful concept in developing a differentiated understanding of independent culture that of the ‘fault-line’. This term is used by Tomislav Medak to describe the constellation of
the cultural field in Zagreb and Croatia, and independent culture within it, ‘running from centrist liberalists to anarchist factions’.2 It specifically signifies that ‘there is no strict
internal identity of the independent culture’.3 Despite the existence of these different critiques and the fault-lines they reflect, Medak argues that ‘the specificity of Zagreb’s context is that there is collaboration across these fault lines. Attack!, which you could see as prone to anti-systemic, works well with Booksa, which is in no way anti-systemic. This has something to do with the fact that people who are trying to organise independent cultural scene around strengthening its position in the cultural system, were always thinking about how to bring in more people.’4 In other words, although factionism exists within independent culture and the larger cultural field, pragmatic collaborations across fault-lines have created an important basic sense of trust and collectivity.
This leads to the third level of significance in ‘independence’, which is the systemic-positional level. ‘Independent culture’ can be considered to denote a historically specific, often marginal or subaltern systemic position, which is that of post-Yugoslav civil society. More specifically, two almost simultaneous historical developments have created this systemic position, both being to great extent the result of the so-called post-Socialist
transition after 1991. Firstly, the conservative-nationalist governments under Franjo Tudjman streamlined and homogenised the cultural system to create a new, historically revisionist narrative of Croatian national identity – a development which is referred to as the
‘institutional crisis’ in culture.5 Since these institutional cultural organisations were
established by local or national governments, the governments exerted direct organisational and programmatic power. A second development in the post-Socialist transition was the adoption of the Western model of the liberal-democratic state with a free-market economy. While the institutional sphere closed down to critical cultural practices, another sphere opened up which allowed for cultural production outside of the institutional system: civil society. Independent cultural organisations were, contrarily to institutional culture, established as NGOs. The split between ‘independent culture’ and ‘institutional culture’ commenced. Therefore, the establishment of independent culture is a result of the historically determined political-systemic configuration of Croatia since 1991: the post-socialist
2 Tomislav Medak, interview by author, recorded Skype interview, 29 March 2018. 3 Idem.
4 Idem.
5 Jasna Jaksić, interview by author, audio recorded interview, Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb, 13 March
transition produced both its urgency and possibility. To significant extent, the defining characteristic of independent culture is thus a systemic position.
However, the above has already made clear that independent culture cannot be
understood as equivalent to cultural activity in civil society in Croatia. Still missing is the last level of significance in the term ‘independence’: that of subjectivation. The shared historic experience, political subjectivation and agency of the cultural workers have shaped (the understanding of) independent culture as much as their subaltern and to large extent contingent systemic positionality. Despite differences in approach to cultural production, some basic programmatic and social common ground exists within the field: these organisations are politically left-leaning, socially engaged, inspired by the traditions of artistic modernisms and Yugoslav self-management socialism, and they aim to be critical and politically effective.
Hence, ‘independent culture’ simultaneously refers to organisations with some degree of formal programmatic independence, a heterogeneous social system divided by ‘fault lines’, the marginalised systemic position of civil society, and an active, left-wing-oriented political subjectivation. What consequences does this insight have for the defining concept
‘independent culture’, as used in this thesis? Taking into account the conceptual intricacies as described above, I propose a small terminological adjustment: from ‘independent culture’ to ‘independent cultures’. In its plural form, the concept ‘independent cultures’ is cleared of any suggestion of primitive homogeneity. For ‘independent’ now no longer refers to some
external system but suggests differentiation and independence amongst these cultures. Thus, ‘independent’ simultaneously functions as an externally differentiating and therefore
internally consolidating definition, but also as an internally differentiating one. As such, ‘independent cultures’ acknowledges both the common political subjectivity of and the fault-lines within the independent cultural scene. I will henceforth use the term independent cultures.
Taking all of this into account, the concept of ‘scene’, often used by actors in the field of independent cultures, in combination with that of ‘independent cultures’ is useful. This becomes clear in an etymological analysis of the word ‘scene’. Scene is derived from ancient Greek ‘skènè’, which was the name of the tent, hut, or building in the back of the stage of the theatre. It was the décor in the context of which actors engaged in collective practices based on systemic functions and roles. These roles were not only social, religious, and aesthetic, but also antagonistic of character. For the ancient Greek theatre was the space of ‘parrhesia’:
speaking truth in the face of power.6 Moreover, in simultaneously being an entry point to the stage and a cover from the visibility of the stage, the skènè held a specifically aesthetic-political function in the regimes of distribution of the sensible, to borrow Jacques Rancière’s notion.7 According to Goran Sergej Pristaš, the term scene is used in independent culture today exactly do describe and criticise ‘what is seen’ (and what is not).8 The scene is therefore best understood as a self-questioning community, sometimes more porous, other times less, but never hermetic, which creates, claims, and constantly re-negotiates a specific common-yet-heterogeneous space of articulation within and beyond the cultural system. We can see that the scene is a shifting community that engages ‘actively’ with the distribution of the sensible, mapping ‘a common world by determining forms of visibility of phenomena, forms of intelligibility of situations, and modes of identification of events and connections between events’ and thereby ‘determin[ing] the ways in which subjects occupy this common world, in terms of coexistence or exclusion, and the capacity of those subjects to perceive it, understand it and transform it’.9 In the following, the scene of independent cultures will be considered a heterogeneous community engaging in the aesthetic project of mapping, understanding, and transforming the common world.
Narrating Independent Cultures: Approach, Methods and Structure
This thesis speaks about the genealogy, discourse, and practices of the independent cultural scene in Zagreb, Croatia. It is not, however, the one and only narrative of Croatian
independent culture, for such a thing does not exist with regard to this heterogeneous field. The very constellation of organisations and practices of independent culture undermines any claim to the monopoly of creating common narratives which characterises nationalist and conservative identity politics. This is not to say my thesis is a random patchwork of remarks.
6 Present-day understanding of ‘parrhesia’ in ancient Greek tragedy and its social function was developed
mainly by Michel Foucault in the series of six lectures ‘Discourse and Truth: the Problematization of Parrhesia’, delivered between October and November 1983, at the University of California, Berkeley.
7 The theoretical frame of aesthetic-political regimes of distribution of the sensible is one adopted from Jacques
Rancière. Distribution of the sensible is most elaborately theorised in Jacques Rancière, The Politics of
Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (New York: Continuum, 2004 (2000)).
Rancière’s work is diverse but always concerned with a ‘cartography of a common world’ created by means of excavation of the regimes of the distribution of the sensible – a phrase taken from the philosopher’s most recent book, which was the publication I used most for this thesis. Jacques Rancière, ‘Time, Narration, Politics,’ in
Modern Times: Essays on Temporality in Art and Politics (Zagreb: Multimedia Institute, 2017), 12.
8 Goran Sergej Pristaš, interview by author, audio recorded interview, Mali Café, 14 May 2018. 9 Rancière, ‘Time, Narration, Politics,’ 12.
It is the result of three months of research in Zagreb, prepared and finalised in Amsterdam. In order to make a substantial analysis, while avoiding enforcing or claiming any definite authority, the approach of this research has in the first place been inductive, and analytical only in the second instance.
The inductive part of my research commenced in Amsterdam with a necessary preliminary analysis on the basis of literature research. I mainly used ‘organic’ or ‘native’ literature produced within the field of independent culture, but also theoretical interventions from outside-perspectives and critical theory of a general character. Important authors in this phase of the research have been: Sezgin Boynik, Boris Buden, Ješa Denegri, Ana Dević, Braco Dimitrijević, Srećko Horvat, Ljiljana Kolešnik, Mark Mazower, Tomislav Medak, Ozren Pupovac, and Emina Višnić. Upon arrival in Zagreb, I continued literary analysis, but shifted my focus to conducting a series of dialogues and loosely structured interviews with actors from independent culture, including curators, theoreticians, professors, students, funders, and artists. These people, who have thus contributed to the substantial material at the basis of this text, are: Boris Buden of Arkzine and EIPCP, Miljenka Buljević of Booksa, art history student Maja Flajsig, media artist and researcher Darko Fritz, Jasna Jakišić of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb, Leonida Kovač of the Academy of Fine Arts, Dejan Kršić of Arkzine and WHW, Tomislav Tomašević and Lana Pukanić of the Institute of Political Ecology, Ana Kutleša and Ivana Hanaček of BLOK, Antonija Letinić of
Kursiv/Kulturpunkt, Tomislav Medak of MAMA and BADco., Petar Milat of MAMA, Goran Sergej Pristaš of BADco. and the Academy of Drama Arts, Darko Simičić of the Tomislav Gotovac Institute, Klaudio Štefančić of Galerija Galženica, Lea Vene of Galerija Miroslav Kraljević, Dea Vidović of the Kultura Nova Foundation, and Janka Vukmir of the Institute of Contemporary Art (former Soros Center of Contemporary Art Croatia).10 Observations of major influence also included visits to most of the independent cultural spaces in Zagreb, as well as discussions with my friends from the Academy of Fine Art’s New Media Department, from the performance art community, and from other places within the independent cultural scene.
The analytic part of this research consisted of the processing and analysis of interviews and the formulation of a structure to present and critically discuss my findings.
10 Due to time and word-count constraints, not all of these interviews and conversations have been processed as
thoroughly in the following text. However, all of them have informed my general frame of reference and I am extremely grateful for the time, energy, and knowledge that these people have donated to my research process. For the complete details of all sixteen interviews, see Bibliography.
Authors that significantly informed this process included Boris Buden, Pascal Gielen and Philipp Dietachmair, Michel Foucault, Kerstin Jacobsson, Isabell Lorey, Tomislav Medak, Gayatri Spivak, and Jacques Rancière. The resulting main text of this thesis consists of an ethnographic genealogical narrative of independent culture that traces the birth of
independent culture to the ‘point zero’ of 1991 and, after that, distinguishes four phases in the history of independent cultures. That is to say, I see four phases with differently formulated self-definitions, different systemic positions, and different positions towards the changing regimes of distribution of power. These are periods respectively characterised by the notions ‘independencies of independence’, ‘systemic territorialisation’, ‘prefigurative practices’, and ‘appropriation and re-orientation’. The specific meaning these respective terms will unfold over the course of the following text, but it should be emphasized already that there is no evolution, in the Hegelian sense, in this sequence of phases. Rather, new constellations are born every time the hand of power redistributes the playing cards. Moreover, the division of phases is a set of hopefully sensible proposition rather a definite claim. Furthermore, the discussion of the fourth and current phase presents an active theoretical intervention in contemporary ‘living’ discourses on independent cultures: it aims to address topical issues and to contribute the insights of my outside perspective to cultural production in Zagreb today in the global context.11
The Foucauldian title Genealogy is adopted because the narrative considers historically shifting constellations of both material circumstances and regimes of ideas, concepts, and knowledge as determinants of the practices of independent culture. Concretely speaking, I simultaneously discuss institutional developments in artistic and cultural
production, political changes, artistic tendencies, important developments in discourse, historiography and theory, as well as the interrelation between these different levels of historical events and the problems that occur in attempts to comprehend them. Thereby, I hope to avoid any messianic or imperialist employment of the bourgeois myth of progress to produce a linear chronology. At the same time, Genealogy, in presenting occurrences as historically specific moments, does not abandon the traditional conventions historiographic narration altogether. What makes it genealogical of character is that it looks for the
‘Herkunft’ rather than ‘Ursprung’ of organic discourses on independent culture; in Michel
11 These topical issues include neoliberalism and neoconservatism as two hands of the same body, civil society
as a contested field, a general trend of precarisation in the cultural sphere, the independent cultural scene as an established generational phenomenon, and the lack of a feminist art history of Yugoslavia and Croatia.
Foucault’s words, ‘It opposes itself to the search for ‘’origins’’.’12 It uses historical events and developments as pinpoints to locate shifts and transformations of discourse and practice. Thus, it aims to provide an analysis of the situated historical emergence of independent culture as an effective history, i.e. as a genealogy of a praxis.13
What makes this genealogy ethnographic of character, is the fact that the entire text bears witness to the initial inductive research process by using extensive citations from the interviews. Of inspiration to this method has been Paul Stubbs, who in The ZaMir (For Peace) Network (2004) formulated a ‘netnographic’ methodology which ‘usefully draw[s] on ethnographer as informant and embrace[s] the reflexive dimension such that reflexivity is applied not just to the work of individual ethnographers, but to the methodology as a whole’ and thus to achieve a ‘multi-voiced netnography’.14 By incorporating different voices from the field of independent culture, with different perspectives, I engage with various views on socialist histories and cultural heritage, the arguments that are formulated from these
perspectives, and the way history is articulated from them, whether that be as source of inspiration for contemporary practice and activism or as factual deduction and disinterested understanding. It also allows for the presentation of different understandings in contemporary debates about the relation between art, culture, politics, civil society, and market forces that constitute fault-lines between groups of actors in the scene.
Before turning towards the actual genealogy, some contextual theoretical and historical outlines must be drawn. The following paragraphs briefly elaborate the history of civil society in post-socialist areas and some frameworks to understand it within a global context and with a broad urgency. Furthermore, the position of the research(er) is considered at some length, outlining my imported urgency, reflecting on the gesture of my journey and the issues around translatability with the use of post-colonial discourses.
12 Michel Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,’ in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays
and Interviews, D.F. Bouchard, ed. (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1977 (1971)), 140.
13 I use the notion of praxis in line with that of the school of critical theory, ‘in which the performatives of
praxis are seen to be […] directly associated with the entwined phenomena of discourse, communication, and social practices’, to signify that the discourses shaping the practices of independent culture as discussed below mainly emerged from the field itself in reaction to changing social and political realities and shifting regimes of power. Calvin O. Schrag, ‘Praxis,’ Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, Robert Audi, ed. (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge UP, 1999), 731, Gale Virtual Reference Library,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/CX3450001234/GVRL?u=amst&sid=GVRL&xid=f25e1fba, accessed 21 May 2018.
14 Paul Stubbs, ‘The ZaMir (For Peace) Network: From Transnational Social Movement to Croatian NGO,’ in
Mapping the Civil
What is the nature of the political-systemic common ground of independent cultures? What is the nature of civil society in post-Yugoslav Croatia? This question has been important to independent cultures for a long time and has recently become highly debated once again. The contemporary discussions on civil society within the scene of independent cultures will be elaborated below, but some historical and theoretical perspectives must be outlined here. These perspectives, in being of a general character, will unpack the translocal urgency of the context-specific analysis presented in this thesis.
Distinguishing three types of civil organisations that emerged in three specific historical conditions in (post-)socialist contexts, Kerstin Jacobsson has provided a comprehensive framework to understand the genealogy of civil society in post-socialist countries, including, in this case, Yugoslavia. Firstly, in the era of state-socialism, there was a ‘state-controlled associational life’.15 Secondly, she distinguishes the ‘Western-sponsored ‘liberal’ civil society’ in the so-called transitional period of the 1990’s and early 2000’s.16 Thirdly, there is a recent wave of new, grassroots ‘mobilisations enabled by social media and Internet calls for action’ that go beyond NGO-isation.17 The typical organisational models for these different types of organisations are, respectively, associations, NGOs, and grassroots movements. Indeed, the genealogy of civil society in Croatia includes all three of these types of organisations. Socialist-era clubs, community centers and associations were important hubs with pockets of critical culture, as examples such as SC Gallery, PM Gallery, and Galerija Nova show. A new wave of cultural NGOs emerged in the 1990’s and 2000’s, funded by (former) Western money from the SOROS and other foundations. The new phase of re-emerging grassroots movements has, in Croatia, taken the form of conservative and right-wing appropriation of the discourses and institutional spaces of independent culture that pretend to be emergent grass-roots movements but are in fact hierarchically coordinated reactionary movements. With funding from, amongst other sources, the Croatian Fund for Civil Society Development, these new NGOs have recently organised pro-life marches and anti-same-sex marriage campaigns.18
15 Kerstin Jacobsson, ‘The Development of Urban Movements in Central and Eastern Europe,’ in Urban
Grassroots Movements in Central and Eastern Europe, Kerstin Jacobsson, ed. (New York: Routledge, 2016), 4.
16 Idem. 17 Idem.
18 ‘March for Life Starts in Zagreb,’ N1, 19 May 2018,
These historical insights show that specific and situational analysis are necessary to understand genealogy of independent cultures within the post-Yusoslav context. This situational analysis, however, is not only significant to the local context. On the contrary, Jacobsson convincingly argued that ‘the laboratory of urban politics is richly illustrative of the complex nexus of state-society-market relations within post-socialism, but also of relevance in understanding the impact of neoliberalism elsewhere in the world. In few regions of the world have marketisation and privatisation been more pervasive than in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe.’19 As will be elaborated in the main text of this thesis, Croatia is no exception to this general tendency.
A similar stance is taken by Pascal Gielen and Philipp Dietachmair, who convincingly argue, in their introduction to The Art of Civil Action (2017), that there is relational
(transnational) significance in mapping specific historically and geographically determined constellations of the civil.20 They produced three helpful concepts for understanding, in a differentiated manner, the specific developments and conditions of civil societies under neoliberalism, including that of independent cultures in Zagreb: ‘civil space’, ‘civic space’, and ‘public space’.
Civil space is defined by Gielen and Dietachmair in a Certeausian manner as ‘a space that remains fluid, a place where positions still have to be taken up or created’.21 It is a not yet regulated space, at the doorstep of legality, inherently risky to enter. Civil space is the space inhabited by grassroots movements. As such, civil space is contrasted to civic space, defined as ‘the place that is established or has taken roots in policies, education programmes, regulations or laws’.22 It follows from this opposition that there is a possibility to inhabit or insurrect the fluidity of civil space to question, critisise, and alter the dominantly ossified
19 Kerstin Jacobsson, ‘The Development of Urban Movements in Central and Eastern Europe,’ in Urban
Grassroots Movements in Central and Eastern Europe, Kerstin Jacobsson, ed. (New York: Routledge, 2016), 3.
20 Philipp Dietachmair and Pascal Gielen, ‘Introduction: Public, Civil and Civic Spaces,’ in The Art of Civil
Action: Political Space and Cultural Dissent, Philipp Dietachmair and Pascal Gielen, eds. (Amsterdam: Valiz,
2017), 11-33. Drawing on a broad variety of examples, ranging from the Zapatistas (Latin America), Pussy Riot (Russia), Recetas Urbanas (Spain), the Umbrella Movement (Japan), the Maagdenhuis appropriation (The Netherlands), Teatro Valle (Spain), Culture2Commons (Croatia), Hart boven Hard (Belgium), and Refugees Welcome initiatives (Europe), Gielen and Dietachmair state that ‘all over Europe, discourses in civil society have started to question, criticize, and attack the traditional role of the state in culture and its established civic institutions’. Because these various ‘discourses in civil society’ are very situated and different, it is problematic to consider them manifestations of a single development. Gielen and Dietachmair aim, perhaps, to be
inspirational and activating rather than analytical. Ibidem, 16.
21 Ibidem, 15. 22 Idem.
civic space. Indeed, Gielen and Dietachmair interpret, not unconvincingly, the recent wave of civil protest around Europe and beyond as such contra-civic civil resistance. A third space, defined by Gielen and Dietachmair, is public space: ‘the space we can enter freely, that is or should be accessible to anyone’.23 Public space is differentiated from civil space, in the sense that the former is a passive, faciliatory space of free exchange, whereas the latter is a space of active organisation and formation. Civil space thus needs public space, but public space also needs civil space for it to be claimed as public. ‘The interaction between both constitutes the famous praxis, where the action is suited to the word but also where actions can and may be put in words.’24
An important point to take from this is that the space outside the spheres of market and state – whether it’s called the civil, civic, common, or communal sphere – is not necessarily systemically homogenous nor historically constant. Within the praxis of civil action, different discourses emerge in reaction to historically specific regimes of distribution of power. Material and discursive structures are of constant mutual influence to each other. This is an important background understanding throughout the text below: independent cultures in the 1990’s were, in systemic terms, not the same as what independent cultures are in 2018, and they were never homogenous. Furthermore, these concepts show that, in being common, spaces of civil action are always constantly re-negotiated and vulnerable to
appropriation. Hence, as we will see, the question of ownership over spaces of articulation is of central importance to civil society and independent cultures.
From Amsterdam to Zagreb
The fact that, for this research, I undertake a journey diagonally across Europe is evidently of major influence on the resulting thesis and it conjures a set of important questions. What local urgency incentivises the researcher to undertake the journey? From all the places one
23 Ibidem, 17.
24 Ibidem, 18. The major problem in these definitions, as given by Gielen and Dietachmair, is their
unproblematised acceptance of Habermasian liberal-democratic values such as ‘human rights’, the ‘sovereign public’, ‘civil rights’, and the teleology implied in such discourse. They fail to address that civil society and grassroots organisations throughout Europe are increasingly advocating nationalism, ethno-centrism,
protectionism, religious dogmatism, and other values that are in direct contradiction to the classical concepts of democracy and human rights; that the existence of these organisations shows the inherent contradictions within the model of liberal-democratic capitalism. This is especially surprising since Gielen has proven before to be very conscious of these problematics. See, for example, Pascal Gielen, Repressief Liberalisme: Opstellen over
could travel from Amsterdam, why Zagreb? What does the recent tradition of cultural exchange between Zagreb and Amsterdam look like? What is the urgency of such research journey for the field and discourse of (art) history? Implied in these matters are social and ethical questions that break with the traditional scientific convention of disinterested
objectivity, in the sense that it explicates the urgencies behind this research in terms of values – both moral and instrumental. Which form of criticism or sympathy informs my research? How can I avoid neo-imperialist reasoning? What sort of positioning is required from my side to allow for equal exchange of ideas and experiences? Of what use might my research be to the independent cultural scene, the Amsterdam art world, and myself? If Marx, Nietzsche and Foucault have taught anything to the historian, it must be that historiography will always be instrumentalised for purposes beyond ‘pure knowledge’ and academic insight. History is a tool of power serving someone or something. But who’s instrument will this thesis be? Whom will the meaning that this text produces serve?
Tactical Transnational Networks
There is a significant tradition of cultural exchange between Amsterdam and Zagreb.
Peculiarly, this exchange was enforced by the atrocities of the Yugoslav Wars in the 1990’s. In this violent period, many artists and intellectuals emigrated from Yugoslavia to Western Europe. A small but important Yugoslav diaspora settled in Amsterdam, including people such as Darko Fritz, Sandra Sterle, Dubravka Ugrešić and Dan Oki. Simultaneously, 1991 constituted what Tomislav Medak calls the ‘point zero’ of independent cultures in Croatia, with the institutional crisis and the establishment of the Peace Movement, probably the most important organisation established in early Croatian civil society, and one of the main roots of present-day independent cultures.25 Important to note is that the actual NGO behind this movement was established in Amsterdam rather than Zagreb, for the law on NGOs in Croatia would only be passed in 1995. Furthermore, all media in Croatia were strictly controlled by the local government, which made independent anti-nationalist and anti-war communication extremely hard. To circumvent national censorship, the bullet board system (BBS) ZaMir was set up by new media artists and activists to facilitate free communication within Yugoslavia through access to telephone and internet connections via a laptop in the
Netherlands. A last notable connection between Amsterdam and Zagreb within the
activist activities during the Yugoslav Wars concerns the most important periodical produced by the peace movement: Arkzin. Even though a Croatian-language periodical published in Zagreb, three members of Arkzin’s advisory and editorial boards were the Amsterdam-based at the time: Dubravka Ugrešić, Geert Lovink and Jan van der Spek. The newly emerging, grassroots, politicised culture of new media transcended national cultures and provided for the opportunities of transnational, transveral action and solidarity between Amsterdam and Zagreb. This tradition of exchange is highly inspiring to me.
Neo-Imperialist Reason
However, around the same time, another dynamic between Amsterdam and Zagreb was established that is less grassroots and less reciprocal. The disintegration of Yugoslavia and the post-Socialist transition caused a large increase of international philanthropic funding for culture, arts, and civil society in Croatia as well as in the other former Yugoslav countries. The most important fund was the Soros Foundation from New York, which established the Open Society Foundation Croatia in 1993, and largely financed the boom of
non-governmental and civil society organisations and is therefore often regarded to be the second main root of present-day independent cultures. When the twenty-two Soros Centres for Contemporary Art from around Europe established an official network, I_CAN, in the late 1990’s, it was registered in Amsterdam. Three other important foundations funding these new organisations were the Dutch New Press and Matra Fund and the Amsterdam-based
European Cultural Foundation (ECF), a lottery-money funded grant-giving organisation. Contrarily to the Soros Foundation, the ECF continues to provide project-based funding to independent culture. This means that, today, independent cultures in Croatia are financially partly dependent upon the Dutch lotteries. The neo-imperial characteristics of these money flows bound up with NGO-isation of the cultural sphere as well as their implications for me – the traveling researcher – cannot be ignored in this research.
In A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Towards a History of the Vanishing Present (1999), Gayatri Spivak reminded the reader that ‘the great narrative of Development is not dead’ in the post-historical era.26 The neo-colonialism that has replaced colonialism in the decades after 1989 was characterised by the progressive imperialism of globalisation that subsumed international discourses on emancipation of the subaltern into the flow of capital
26 Gayatri Spivak, A Critique of Post-Colonial Reason: Towards a History of the Vanishing Present
and the American hotpot. Especially today, during the decline of American hegemony and the rise of anti- or alter-globalist sentiments amongst neoconservative elites throughout Europe and beyond, it seems of import to reconsider the implication of independent cultures in the dominant cultural order and the flow of capital in historical perspective. Two issues that will be elaborated at some length in this thesis are, firstly, how civil society in Croatia is a contested area between ‘indigenous NGOs’, local nationalist movements, and progressive imperialist organisations, and, secondly, how the experience and political reality of the Non-Aligned Movement is historiographically under-represented. On these issues and their interrelation, Spivak stated: ‘The governments of developing nations are, with the
disappearance of the possibility of nonalignment in the post-Soviet world, heavily mortgaged to international development organizations. The relationship between the governments and the spectrum of indigenous non-governmental organizations is at least as ambiguous and complex as the glibly invoked ‘’identity of the nation’’. The NGOs that surface at the ‘’NGO Forum’’s of the UN conferences have been so thoroughly vetted by the donor countries, and the content of their so organized by categories furnished by the UN, that neither subject nor object bears much resemblance to the ‘’real thing,’’ if you will pardon the expression.’27 In other words, radical, decolonial, grass-roots stances are almost impossibly formulated now that cultural dominants in the globalised field of civil society are (former) Western
organisations such as the UN, the World Bank, the Soros Foundation, and the European Cultural Foundation.
The Native Informant and (Un)Translatability of the Other
A crucial problem to the logic of neo-imperialist reason, as described by Spivak, is the imperative of complete, commensurable translatability of language, experience, economies, and social systems for the good of accumulating and expanding capital. The simple example of the Big Mac Index, produced by The Economist every year since 1986, is self-evident.28 Boris Buden even describes the post-1989 condition as ‘translational’.29 The supposed configuration of the world order in the post-historical era of translatability is defined by a
27 Spivak, A Critique of Post-Colonial Reason, 372.
28 ‘The Big Mac Index,’ The Economist, https://www.economist.com/content/big-mac-index, accessed 24 June
2018.
29 Boris Buden during ‘Rad i jezik nakon prevodivih društava: Kratko predavanje Stefana Nowotnyja i razgovor
s Borisom Budenom,’ Galerija Nova, 25 May 2018, http://www.whw.hr/galerija-nova/radi-i-jezik-nakon-prevodivih-drustava.html.
simple dichotomy: the (former) East and the (former) West. The (former) West functions as the original, always one step ahead, the (former) East as the copy, always one step behind.30 This supposed post-historical translatability applies to virtually all aspects of social and personal life including the free market, the institutions of liberal democracy, universal human rights, the English language, and free culture and press.
Since this thesis is situated in between (former) East and (former) West, the question of translatability is of import here. One of my biggest limitations is my inability to speak Croatian, which leaves myself, the interviewees, and the produced thesis no opportunity to escape the hegemony of the English language. The pitfalls of assumed commensurability therefore exist for me and my research too. During a recent conversation, Boris Buden told me: ‘You have to put yourself into question here [in Zagreb], because let us be frank about what [interviewees] are to you. We are Native Informants.’31 The point to be taken is that the voice of the activist striving for emancipation in the (former) East (including the former so-called Third World) is often considered the testimony of a Native Informant, that is, a univocal representation of an entire social group, and as such it can be instrumentalised by the (former) West as a justification of interventionist politics and military action.32 The question, then, is how to avoid (the pretense of) primitive translatability directly serving primitive accumulation in the age of neo-imperialism.
In Reconfiguring the Native Informant: Positionality in the Global Age (2005), Shahnaz Khan ‘rethink[s] the relationship between researcher and informant’ in order ‘to produce an account that is neither orientalist nor apologetic and to work toward building transnational feminist [decolonial] solidarity’ drawing on experience of her specific research on Pakistan’s ‘zina’ laws.33 Khan distinguishes between at least three types of native
informants: the native informant over there (the conventional native informant), the native informant over here (the researcher in the (former) West), and the reader. What makes interviewee, writer, and reader into native informants is the contribution their own frames of
30 Idem.
31 The Native Informant is the central figure in Gayatri Spivak’s A Critique of Post-Colonial Reason and as such
has been picked up on by many postcolonial thinkers. Boris Buden and Dejan Kršić, interview by author, audio recorded interview, Kino Europa, 5 May 2018.
32 This problematic conception of the native informant is unpacked in Sharareh Frouzesh, ‘The Politics of
Appropriation: Writing, Responsibility, and the Specter of the Native Informant,’ The Yearbook of Comparative
Literature, vol. 57 (2011), 252-268.
33 Shahnaz Khan, ‘Reconfiguring the Native Informant: Positionality in the Global Age,’ Signs, vol. 30, no. 4
reference and layers of meaning, which simultaneously render complete understanding of the other impossible and create space for creating of new knowledges. This differentiated
understanding of the native informant allows for a transgression of the ‘imagined monolithic and homogeneous Other’, to borrow Sharareh Frouzesh’s words.34 Instead, a gathering of native informants with different local experiences may constitute a differentiated (in the most direct sense of the word) translocal perspective, a ‘moving base’, with a privileged insight in global regimes of power and how they play out locally.35 It is with this understanding of native informing that I hope to, in Sarat Maharaj’s words, ‘recode the international’ while taking into account ‘the untranslatability of the term other’.36
This is certainly not an easy balancing act. For there should be some caution with regard to the naïve optimism about alter-globalism that arguably characterised critical discourses in the 1990’s. In a recent talk at Galerija Nova, Zagreb, Boris Buden stated that the global economic crises and ‘migrant crisis’ have had their impact, which means that we no longer live in a translational condition. Instead, we find ourselves in a transitional condition, which has radically altered the general discourse regarding moving bodies and goods.37 In the case of Croatia, this transitional condition is a double one defined by the post-socialist transition as well as the status of being a transitional space for migrants. Transition, according to Buden, creates another condition of language, which no longer presumes complete commensurability, but entails a ‘revernacularisation’.38 At the same time, globalisation of capital continues as Google markets readymade meaning carried over by translation with incessant ease and new world powers have risen to challenge the lasting hegemony of the US in its own language. Balancing between the clannish language of neoconservative nationalism inherited from Apartheid, the unspeakable traumas of war and migration, and the commensurable language of neo-imperialist reason, I must take position, which I will, here, now, as follows.
34 Sharareh Frousesh, ‘The Politics of Appropriation: Writing, Responsibility, and the Specter of the Native
Informant,’ The Yearbook of Comparative Literature, vol. 57 (2011), 253.
35 ‘Moving base’ is term employed by Spivak in A Critique of Postcolonial Reason to define the
positional-methodological space for transnational examination of the vanishing present. Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial
Reason, x.
36 Sarat Maharaj, ‘Perfidious Fidelity: The Untranslatability of the Other,’ in Global Visions: Towards a New
Internationalism in the Arts, Jean Fisher, ed. (London: Kala Press and the Institute of International Visual Arts,
1994), 28.
37 Buden, ‘Rad i jezik nakon prevodivih društava,’ 25 May 2018. 38 Idem.
I Take Position
In its analysis of independent cultures, the following text is at times sharp and critical. The struggles it speaks of are real and addressing them can, as I’ve learned, be sensitive at times. Yet, in the end, my account is always informed by solidarity and, hopefully, awareness of the limitations of my own capabilities to understand what I observed. I deeply appreciate the existence of the organisations gathered under the umbrella of independent cultures. Sensing the political subjectivity and collectivity of the scene, however fragile, is a relieving and inspiring experience, especially when coming from Amsterdam, a place where neoliberal hegemony is by now so complete that elements of collective resistance are nearly completely absent from the circuits of cultural production. I am grateful for the willingness and openness with which interviewees and conversation partners approached me. I am even more grateful to my supervisor Leonida Kovač and the other the people I met through the Academy of Fine Arts, who welcomed with inquisitive but appreciative curiosity and have become dear
friends. After three months of engagement, I feel like neither alien nor insider, which is a wonderful position to speak from.
Being founded on personal engagement with and emersion in the object of research thus, this research is not a mere speculative exercise or a contribution to some indefinite global academic discourse. Instead, it is a contribution to or intervention in a context-specific social-discursive praxis with a specific relation to global capital and the regimes of neo-imperialism. Even though I accept the position of my research within the structures of the University and comply with the academic standards of research in the Humanities, I reject the neoliberal and neo-imperialist demand of direct and complete translatability that subjects academic research to the regimes of commodity-value, only to be subsumed in the global circulation and accumulation of capital. Rather than creating a perfectly consistent, analytic and instrumental argument, my main motivation in this text is to produce meaningful reading experiences for the people I engaged with in Zagreb, for other readers in the local context, and for critical minds around the world willing to accept some level of non-equivalence and untranslatability.
Genealogy: Where Do Independent Cultures Come From?
1. Point Zero: The Disintegration of the Socialist Federal Republic of
Yugoslavia
1991 saw the disintegration of Yugoslavia and the outbreak of the Yugoslav Wars, including the Croatian War for Independence. The Fukuyaman ideology of the post-historical condition that had settled in the former Soviet Union in 1989 violently spread to the Yugoslav area during a decade of wars. The Yugoslav Wars have their own historiographies and will not be elaborated at length here. It is, however, evident that these years were a period of such radical social, institutional, political, ideological, and cultural change and destruction, that they can be rightfully marked as a point zero. In ideological terms, it was the start of post-socialist transition characterised by the promise of liberal democracy and free market prosperity. In their book Welcome to the Desert of Post-Socialism (2015), Igor Štiks and Srećko Horvat argue that ‘the dismantling of the remnants of the socialist state was legitimised by demands for the rapid reduction of the omnipresent state apparatus. This process usually entailed the dismantling of existing social protection as well as privatisation […] or the total corruption of what remained of the state apparatus. […] When the dust finally settled, ordinary citizens found themselves not only in a devastated country, but also with empty pockets and without the old social safety net’.39
This transition presented, as Boris Buden has illustrated in the same volume, not only a traumatic lived experience or simply a period of time in between two societal models, but also a discursive tool of neo-imperial and neo-liberal subjugation of the (former) East by the (former) West by means of ‘repressive infantilisation of societies that have recently liberated themselves from communism’.40 After the end of history, the only rational way forward for post-socialist countries was to follow the lead (or the tutelage) of the already-democratic (former) West by ways of direct imitation. Thereby, Buden states, ‘not only are the
protagonists of the democratic revolutions robbed of their victory and turned into losers; at the same time, they have been put under tutelage and doomed blindly to imitate their
39 Igor Štiks and Srećko Horvat, ‘Radical Politics in the Desert of Transition,’ in Welcome to the Desert of
Post-Socialism: Radical Politics after Yugoslavia, Igor Štiks and Srećko Horvat, eds. (New York: Verso, 2015), 5.
40 Boris Buden, ‘Childern of Post-Communism,’ in Welcome to the Desert of Post-Socialism: Radical Politics
guardians in the silly belief that this will educate them for autonomy. It is not only the arbitrariness of the new rulers, but above all the logic of their rule that reveals itself.’41
It appears that what has been replaced by this new logic of rule, is not so much the teleologic view of history, but rather the aspiration of emancipation (historic justice) that was always present in the grand narratives. Some insights into this logic of rule and its regimes of distribution of the sensible are produced in Jacques Rancière’s essay Time, Narration,
Politics (2017). In this text, Rancière analysed how the so-called end of the grand narratives in fact was a redistribution of the hierarchy of temporalities creating a new ‘relation between justice and the order of time’.42 At first, the post-historical era seemed to have a temporality which was ‘the bare reality of time, stripped of any inner truth and any promise of justice and brought back to its ordinary course’, but ‘it soon turned out […] that this absolute present had not so easily gotten rid of the passions engendered by the weight of the past and the
anticipation of the future.’43 As is clear by now, seemingly ‘outdated’ discourses of protectionism and ethno-nationalist narratives revived in both (former) East and (former) West soon after 1990. Rancière asserts that ‘it thus appears that the simplistic opposition between the past illusion of history and the solid realities of the present hides a division inside the ‘’present’’ itself, a conflict about what is present and what a present is.’44 The struggle implied in this conflict is that concerning the ‘orderly’ hierarchical distribution of temporalities and forms of life between those who can actively shape the time that might arrive – those living in the time of science – and those who passively receive time – those living in the time of ignorance. From this understanding that the so-called grand narratives were animated by the split of knowledge of necessity and possibility and ignorance thereof, ‘it is clear that neither the plot of historical necessity, nor its inner splitting have vanished in the so-called reign of the present. […] While the end of the grand Marxist narrative was loudly trumpeted everywhere, capitalist and State domination simply took over the principle of historical necessity. […] Historical teleology was replaced by a simple alternative: either the lone possible produced by good management of the existing order or the great collapse.’45 Three world orders were reduced to two, the second of which always derivative.46
41 Ibidem, 133.
42 Rancière, ‘Time, Narration, Politics,’ 14. 43 Ibidem, 15.
44 Ibidem, 16. 45 Ibidem, 22-23.
46 An influential example of these politics of history, that were mainly fueled by the US, is Samuel P.
This flattening out of history itself and the abandonment of historical justice obscured the historical political reality of Yugoslavia and the radical decolonial potential of Non-Alignment, which was illustrated well if somewhat Yugostalgically by Ozren Pupovac in Why is the Experience of Yugoslavia Important Today? (2013).47 I leave the historiographic discussions on what are factual and what are revisionist general histories of Yugoslavia (whether it was the ‘state that withered away’, what was the condition of self-management socialism and the ideology of decentralisation) to the experts in the field.48 Yet, I will make some specific remarks on the interrelation of Yugoslav-era experimental artistic practices and historiography to lay out crucial historical background understanding to my argument.
In terms of the obsolutised dichotomy between (former) East and (former) West (respectively copy and original), Yugoslavia has been presented as ambivalent at best, schizophrenic at worst, for being part of the socialist-communist East while flirting with the capitalist-democratic West.49 The influential art historian Ješa Denegri has developed the concept of ‘moderate modernism’ to describe how Socialist Yugoslavia’s cultural policies and institutional cultural productions leaned simultaneously to the East and the West and thereby receded in moderateness.50 Denegri’s account is insightful, and undoubtedly right in pointing out that state influence neutralised criticality in cultural production to large extent. It
47 Ozren Pupovac, ‘Why is The Experience of Yugoslavia Important Today?’ in Sweet Sixties: Spectres and
Spirits of a Parallel Avant-garde, Georg Schöllhammer and Ruben Arevshatyan, eds. (Berlin: Sternberg Press,
2013), 481-496.
48 Some helpful texts, ranging from traditional academic publications to radical/activist perspectives, include
Jason Robertson, ‘The Life and Death of Yugoslav Socialism,’ Jacobin Magazine Online, 17 July 2017,
https://jacobinmag.com/2017/07/yugoslav-socialism-tito-self-management-serbia-balkans. Ana Dević, ‘Ethnonationalism, Politics, and the Intellectuals: The Case of Yugoslavia,’ part of ‘I: Disintegrating Multiethnic States and Reintegrating Nations: Two Essays on National and Business Cultures,’ International
Journal of Politics, Culture and Society, vol. 11, no. 3 (1998), 375-409. Mark Mazower, The Balkans (London:
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2000). Dejan Jović, Yugoslavia: A State that Withered Away (West Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue UP, 2009). Juraj Katalenać, ‘Yugoslav Self-Management: Capitalism Under the Red Banner,’ Insurgent
Notes: Journal of Communist Theory and Practice, 5 October 2013,
http://insurgentnotes.com/2013/10/yugoslav-self-management-capitalism-under-the-red-banner/. Stevo Djurasković, The Politics of History in Croatia and Slovakia in the 1990s (Zagreb: Srednja Europa, 2016).
49 See, for instance, Tvrtko Jakovina, ‘Historical Success of Schizophrenic State: Modernisation in Yugoslavia
1945-1974,’ in Socialism and Modernity: Art, Culture, Politics 1950-1974, ed. Ljiljana Kolešnik (Zagreb: Institute of Art History & Museum of Contemporary Art, 2012), 7-44.
50 Importantly, Denegri distinguished between the institutionally supported ‘first line’ in cultural production and
the extra-institutional ‘second line’, in which actual radical and avant-garde practices, according to Denegri, did take place during the socialist era. This localisation of the radical strictly outside of state-governed cultural institutions is problematic with regard to historial reality, as will be elaborated below. Ješa Denegri, ‘Inside or Outside ‘’Socialist Modernism?’’ Radical Views on the Yugoslav Art Scene 1950-1970,’ in Impossible
Histories: Historical Avant-gardes, Neo-avant-gardes, and Post-avant-gardes in Yugoslavia, 1918-1991, ed.
is an established fact that both artistic communities and ‘the public’ were indeed relatively well-aware of and centered on the Western-European art historical tradition.51 However, narratives like Denegri’s obscure the historical political reality and the radical decolonial potential of the Non-Aligned non-compliance with either East or West. Instead, time after time, it evaluates Yugoslav art history in terms of ‘Westernness’, which renders the histories of radical and critical practices in Yugoslavia, to use Dubravka Djurić and Misko
Suvaković’s term, ‘impossible histories’.52 The impossibility at stake exists only within the affirmative teleologic framework of art history as a critical and therefore self-developing mechanism that was, within the Yugoslav context, embraced by scholars like Denegri, and in which Yugoslavia was always-already disqualified for not being univocally Western, that is, not running at the supposed fore-front of historical development. Hence, by partly post-factual internalisation of (former) Western, teleological standards, Yugoslav art history is considered always-already failed.53 The absence of Non-Aligned and decolonial
51 This is convincingly shown in Jasna Jaksić’s Art on Tour: The Invention of the Audience (2015), which
elaborates the ‘didactic exhibition’ of Western modernist art traveling though Yugoslavia. The exbhition was ‘probably the most visited exhibition of contemporary art in what was then Yugoslavia’, having been on display in Zagreb, Rijeka, Sisak, Belgraja, Skopje, Novi Sad, Bečej, Karlovac, Maribor, Sremska Mitrovia, Osijek, Bjelovar, and Ljubljana. Jasna Jaksić, ‘Art on Tour: The Invention of the Audience,’ in Didactic Exhibition, Fokus Grupa and Jasna Jaksić, eds. (Zagreb and Rijeka: Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb and Fokus Grupa, 5-11.
52 Dubravka Djurić and Misko Suvaković, eds. Impossible Histories: Historical Avant-gardes,
Neo-avant-gardes, and Post-avant-gardes in Yugoslavia, 1918-1991 (Cambridge, Mass., London: The MIT Press, 2003). It
should be noted that Kolešnik’s ‘The Recent History of Art History in Croatia and the Crisis of Institutions Today’, as well as other texts from the same author, also reproduce the dominant narrative of the Westernness of Yugoslav conceptual and experimental art.
53 The way in which Yugoslavia’s dominant art historical narrative has been constructed, is best illustrated by
the example of New Art Practice in Yugoslavia: 19660-1978, which took place in the Gallery of Contemporary Art in Zagreb in 1978. By means of its catalogue, the exhibition produced one of the most important literary reflections of, if not contributions to, the canonical narrative of experimental or ‘retro-avant-garde’ art practices of the 1960’s and 1970’s in Yugoslavia. The exhibition included works of many artists who were already or would later become internationally recognised and successful, such as Marina Abramović, Braco Dimitrijević, Tomislav Gotovac, the Group of Six Artists, Sanja Iveković, Jagoda Kaloper, Julija Knifer, Ivan Kožarić, Delimor Martinis, OHO Group, and Goran Trbuljak. Marijan Susovski’s foreword to the catalogue states that ‘art is not formal evolutionism’ but a social and dialectical process defined by ‘confrontations with out-dated attitutes towards art in the new social situation – the middle class ‘’Weltanshaung’’’ such as created by Braco Dimitrijević in Tractatus Post Historicus. However, Art in the Past Decade, Denegri’s introductory chapter to the catalogue, defines exactly this generational break of the conceptualists with the formalist pre-occupations of their predecessors as a next step in the process of art history. Moreover, this process is defined in terms of ‘development’ by comparison to the ‘general’ or ‘international context’ of Western European and American phenomena including Arte Povera in Italy, Op Losse Schroeven in the Stedelijk Museum, When Attitudes
Become Form at the Kunsthalle in Bern, and The New Art at the Hayward Gallery – a trend that is continued in
the rest of the articles in the catalogue. Ješa Denegri, ‘Art in the Past Decade,’ in The New Art Practice in
perspectives in this dominant account of Yugoslav art history has been rather useful for the post-1991 nationalist re-evaluation of historical Croatian cultural identity.
2. Independencies of Independence
In its occurrence during the disintegration of Yugoslavia and the establishment of the independent Croatian state, the birth of independent cultures is inherently tied to the post-socialist transition. I propose to call the first phase of independent cultures, ranging roughly from 1991 to 2000, a phase of independencies from independence. Independence, in singular, refers to the emerging dominants of the newly established independent state of Croatia: post-historical, culturally conservative or revisionist, economically ‘crony capitalist’, and
nationalist in every sense. Independencies, in plural, refers to the logic of independent
cultures, that, contradictorily, resisted these cultural dominants while making use of the same post-historical and liberal discourses of ‘transitology’. These resistant self-articulations of the independent cultures were specifically liberal, anti-nationalist, political, and counter-cultural. ‘Counter-politics’, in the sense used here, does not signify depoliticisation, but a refusal to practice politics by the way of established norms and institutions. Instead of directly targeting societal systems and thereby taking an anti-position, independent cultures assumed a place outside of the existing institutional system.
Looking back at this time from the mid-2000’s, Emina Višnić argued that
‘organisations were mostly self-centred, they worked more or less independently, and the whole field of became atomized’.54 Moving away from the institutional sphere thus, independent cultures performed a simultaneous retreating and re-politicising gesture that is arguably best characterised as autonomist. For example, Arkzin, which was initially a straight-forwardly sociological and political anti-war newspaper, became an autonomist counter-cultural and counter-political magazine after a few years. Furthermore, during the war, and in the first years after, the squatted former medical factory and autonomist cultural space Medika, run by the anarchist collective Attack!, held an important place in the
independent cultures. The best, although late, example of this attitude is Petar Milat’s remark
Susovski, ed. The New Art Practice in Yugoslavia 1966-1978 (Zagreb: Gallery of Contemporary Art, 1978). Marijan Susovski, ‘Foreword,’ in The New Art Practice in Yugoslavia 1966-1978, Marijan Susovski, ed. (Zagreb: Gallery of Contemporary Art, 1978), 3. Braco Dimitrijević, Tractatus Post Historicus Aaron Levy, ed. (Philadelphia: Slought Books, 2009 (1976)).
