Transitional Aesthetics: Languages, Bodies and Ecologies 9781350053410, 9781350053441, 9781350053403

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Transitional Aesthetics

Also available from Bloomsbury Radical Aesthetics – Radical Art Series editors: Jane Tormey and Gillian Whiteley (Loughborough University, UK) Promoting debate, confronting conventions and formulating alternative ways of thinking, Jane Tormey and Gillian Whiteley explore what radical aesthetics might mean in the twenty-first century.This new books series, Radical Aesthetics – Radical Art (RaRa), reconsiders the relationship between how art is practised and how art is theorized. Striving to liberate theories of aesthetics from visual traditions, this series of single-authored titles expands the parameters of art and aesthetics in a creative and meaningful way. Encompassing the multisensory, collaborative, participatory and transitory practices that have developed over the last twenty years, Radical Aesthetics –Radical Art is an innovative and revolutionary take on the intersection between theory and practice. Published and forthcoming in the series: Practical Aesthetics: Events, Affects and Art after 9/11, Jill Bennett Working Aesthetics: Labour, Art and Capitalism, Danielle Child Eco-Aesthetics: Art, Literature and Architecture in a Period of Climate Change, Malcolm Miles Civic Aesthetics: Militarism in Israeli Art and Visual Culture, Noa Roei Counter-Memorial Aesthetics: Refugees, Contemporary Art and the Politics of Memory, Veronica Tello For further information or enquiries please contact RaRa series editors: Jane Tormey: [email protected] Gillian Whiteley: [email protected]

Transitional Aesthetics: Contemporary Art at the Edge of Europe Uroš Čvoro

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2018 This paperback edition published 2020 Copyright © Uroš Cˇ voro, 2018 Uroš Cˇ voro has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. Cover image © Igor Grubic, Monument (video still), 2015. Courtesy of the artist. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-5341-0 PB: 978-1-3501-4181-0 ePDF: 978-1-3500-5340-3 eBook: 978-1-3500-5343-4 Series: Radical Aesthetics – Radical Art Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

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For all Yugoslavs, anytime and anyplace

Contents Acknowledgements Preface List of Illustrations Introduction: In Transition 1 The Politics of Transitional Aesthetics 2 ‘We Came to Take Your Jobs Away’: Migration and Agency in the Work of Tanja Ostojić and Angela Melitopoulos 3 Going Too Far: Translation and Over-Identification as a Critique of Transition 4 Halfway Tradition 5 The Afterlife of Abandoned Monuments 6 Transitional Archives: Art and Historical Memory in Former Yugoslavia Afterword: Beyond Transitional Aesthetics Bibliography Index

viii ix x 1 15 37 61 85 107 129 151 157 170

Acknowledgements The research and writing of this book were supported by Faculty Research Grants from UNSW Art & Design in 2016 and 2017. Thank you to friends who generously lent their time and considerable brainpower to make this book better: Verónica Tello, Chrysi Lionis, Astrid Lorange. My thanks to Anna Munster for her mentorship, and Marie Sierra and Ross Harley for their support. I am grateful to artists who shared and discussed their work: Marta Popivoda, Angela Melitopoulos, Tanja Ostojić, Igor Grubić, Mladen Miljanović, Vladimir Nikolić, Zoran Todorović, David Maljković. Also, thank you to Frankie Mace at Bloomsbury, the editors of RaRa book series Gillian Whiteley and Jane Tormey, and Elena Knox at Rhubarb. Parts of this book have been published in earlier form: Chapter 6 appeared in Continuum, parts of Chapter 4 in Družboslovne Razsprave and parts of Chapter 2 in edited collection Europe Unfinished. My thanks to the editors and anonymous peer-reviewers for their feedback. The biggest thank you is to Marijana and Ena.

Preface The RaRa series explores what aesthetics might mean in the twenty-first century by integrating practice and theory and firmly embedding the discussion of artworks within their contemporaneous social and political contexts. All published and forthcoming RaRa titles deal with contemporary practices emerging at a time of global political upheaval. In this particular case, Uroš Cˇ voro’s Transitional Aesthetics: Contemporary Art at the Edge of Europe focuses on radical contemporary art from former Yugoslavia, with all the historical, political and cultural complexities that have affected and reshaped the country in recent decades. Specifically, Cˇ voro considers the ‘multiple temporalities’ of transition from an insider/outsider perspective and in relation to the ideological formations that shape the country’s history. Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s conception of temporality and his ideas on the philosophy of history, Cˇ voro conceives transitional aesthetics as mobilizing the present, not only with regard to location or to definitive histories, but to the processes and tensions of historical transition. Examining cultural production in a period of post-communist and post-conflict transition, this book engages with real lived experience, interrogating what Cˇ voro refers to as ‘the mythology of a Yugoslavia that oscillates between criminalisation and uncritical nostalgia’. With his formulation of ‘transitional aesthetics’, the author refutes the inevitability of neoliberal and nationalist frameworks and moves beyond conventional perspectives. This book makes a significant contribution to the current scholarship on art and its contexts in post-communist countries, especially in the emergent field of Balkan studies. Furthermore, its fresh approach provides a new context for radicality and the intersection of art, aesthetics and politics and it makes a valuable addition to the RaRa series. RaRa series editors Jane Tormey Gillian Whiteley September 2017

List of Illustrations Figure 1

Marta Popivoda, Yugoslavia, How Ideology Moved Our Collective Body (film still), 2013

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Angela Melitopoulos, Corridor X (film still), installation, 88’00”, double projection, three audio levels

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Angela Melitopoulos, Corridor X (film still), installation, 88’00”, double projection, three audio levels

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Angela Melitopoulos, Corridor X (film still), installation, 88’00”, double projection, three audio levels

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Janez Janša, Janez Janša, Janez Janša, PB0241858 (Passport), booklet, spread 17.5 cm × 12.5 cm, 2007. Courtesy of Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana

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Katarina Zdjelar, Shoum (video still), DVD, 7’00’’ loop, 2009. Courtesy of the artist and SpazioA, Pistoia

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Vladimir Nikolić, Death Anniversary, video installation, 4’00”, 2004. Courtesy of the artist

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Mladen Miljanović, The Garden of Earthly Delights, engraved drawings on granite, metal construction, 2013. Photo Drago Vejnovic. Courtesy of the artist

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Igor Grubić, Monument (video still), 2015. Courtesy of the artist

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Figure 10 Igor Grubić, Monument (video still), 2015. Courtesy of the artist

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Figure 11 David Maljković, Scenes for a New Heritage (still), 2004– 06. Copyright David Maljković. Courtesy of Annet Gelink Gallery, Amsterdam

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Figure 2

Figure 3

Figure 4

Figure 5

Figure 6

Figure 7

Figure 8

Figure 9

List of Illustrations

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Figure 12 Aleksandra Domanović, 19:30 (still), HD video, colour, sound, 11’00”, 2010–11. Tanya Leighton Gallery Berlin. Image courtesy of the artist and Tanya Leighton

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Figure 13 Zoran Todorović, Gypsies and Dogs (video still), 12’00”, 2007. Image courtesy of the artist

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Introduction: In Transition

After returning from temporary work in Austria, a man was asked: ‘How is life over there?’ ‘Nice, but they are thirty years behind us.’ ‘How is that?’ ‘They still live well.’

The punchline of this joke, heard in different variations across post-Yugoslav societies, captures the widespread public disillusionment with post-socialist transition.1 On the one hand, in using the lived experience of a temporary migrant-worker to apprehend the devastating realities of life in the region – from impoverishment, unemployment, public and private indebtedness, widespread deindustrialization, political corruption, social degradation to diminished life expectancy and emigration – the joke shows how the narrative of ‘transition’ of the Yugoslav successor states to a free-market and neoliberal democracy has become a euphemism for a ‘monumental neo-colonial transformation of this region into a dependent semi-periphery’.2 On the other hand, in positioning the lived experience of the migrant-worker within a temporal montage (‘the present predicament of the former Yugoslavia is analogous to the future of the EU’), the joke shows transition as a continuous process of change that occurs continually and without a definable objective of

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Post-Yugoslav societies refer to the successor states of Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia (Socijalistička Federativna Republika Jugoslavija). SFRJ was established in 1945 under the rule of Josip Broz Tito and the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, and consisted of six republics (Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro and Macedonia) and two autonomous regions (Vojvodina and Kosovo). SFRJ disintegrated in 1991 in a civil war that resulted in over 140,000 dead, the displacement of millions and the destruction of a multiethnic country. By transition, I am referring to what Leslie Holmes calls ‘the second transition’ (the move towards ‘new destinations’); which is distinct from ‘the first transition’ (the move away from communism). See Leslie Holmes, Post-Communism: An Introduction (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997), 7. Igor Štiks and Srećko Horvat, ‘Introduction: Radical Politics in the Desert of Transition’, in Welcome to the Desert of Post-Socialism, ed. Štiks and Horvat (London: Verso, 2015), 1–20, 16.

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resolution, despite being officially proclaimed complete or ‘over’.3 But more than just a damning characterization of the present, the temporal montage in the joke also points to the continuing presence of Yugoslavia as a historical and political reference, despite its persistent discrediting by the political and nationalist elites over the last three decades. This discrediting spans: demonization of Yugoslav socialist system as corrupt, undemocratic and selfdestructive; trivialization of the lived memory of Yugoslavia as nostalgic and naïve; destruction of socialist monuments; and rehabilitation of local Second World War fascists and their collaborators. This book investigates the ways in which post-socialist transition of Yugoslav successor states (in particular Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina) is apprehended and critiqued in contemporary artistic practices. Taking 1999 as the officially mandated start of the post-socialism and post-conflict European integration of former Yugoslavia,4 I argue that this process has been supported by the historical revisionism which discredits the existence of Yugoslavia, deeming it a deviation in the history of national development. Yugoslav transition is marked by the political validation of twin narratives of neoliberalism and nationalism, which have imbued the recent past with the imperative of neoliberal democracy within the nation state as a historical inevitability. As Tanja Petrović argues, neoliberal deregulation supports and legitimizes nationalist narratives of protectionism and selfcontainment, rather than presenting an alternative to them. In discourses of transition, the twentieth-century nation state is deployed as the frame within which to rewrite history, establish clear ethnic majorities and marginalized minorities, and demarcate territorial sovereignty.5 Artworks that I describe as

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On transition as a process without a visible destination, see Michael Burawoy and Katherine Verdery, ‘Introduction’, in Uncertain Transition: Ethnographies of Change in the Postsocialist World, ed. Burawoy and Verdery (Lanham, 1999) 1–17, 14. Cited in Cristofer Scarboro ‘Living after the Fall: Contingent Biographies in Postsocialist Space’, Südosteuropa 3, no. 64 (2016): 277–83, 278. On politicized proclamations of transition as finished, see Maria Todorova ‘Introduction’, in Remembering Communism. Private and Public Recollections of Lived Experience in Southeast Europe, ed. Maria Todorova, Augusta Dimou and Stefan Troebst (Budapest, 2014), 1–25, 3. In 1999 the European Union and the IMF declared ‘transition’ as one of the explicit aims for the region. See Leonard J. Cohen and John R. Lampe, Embracing Democracy in the Western Balkans: From Postconflict Struggles Toward European Integration (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), 81. Tanja Petrović, Yuropa: Jugoslovensko Nasledje I Politike Buducnosti u Postjugoslovenskim Drustvima (Beograd: Fabrika Knjiga, 2012), 189.

Introduction

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‘transitional aesthetics’ engage this neoliberal–nationalist nexus by revealing how its narratives manifest forms of remembering and identity permutation. They explore the shift to neoliberalism through images of migration and translation, the reinvention of nationalism through symbols of tradition, and the discrediting of Yugoslavia as a historical and political event through monuments and archives. Transitional Aesthetics uses the concept of time to examine transition as a regime of historicization in the former Yugoslavia. Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s philosophy of history, it argues that artists create images of temporal clashes that uncover the workings of ideology in transition and create the possibility for different experiences of history. The process of disclosure constitutes a critique of the normalization of neoliberal and nationalist ideologies in transition; the subsequent process of creation and transformation galvanizes the lived experience of transition: states of cultural, spatial and temporal displacement, acts of translating experience, echoes of erased histories vibrating in monuments and archives. Transitional aesthetics activate the lived experience of history as a site of political resistance by establishing relationships between critical gestures and imaginings of affirmative collectivities that mobilize the progressive legacies of socialism in Yugoslavia. These critical gestures represent the different modalities of transitional aesthetics: circumventing unjust migration laws (Chapter 2), creating ‘incorrect’ translations (Chapter 3) and traditions (Chapter 4), and remembering emancipatory socialism through monuments (Chapter 5) and archives (Chapter 6) in the face of ideologically driven amnesia.

The return of temporality At the start of the twenty-first century, historical time is back in focus in the public sphere. From comparisons of the 2008 global financial crisis (GFC) to the 1929 market crash that caused the great depression, through the spectre of the Cold War returning through series of post 9/11 ‘micro-conflicts’, to the protectionist and racist rhetoric that surrounds discussions of the future of the European Union and the United States, the present is once again firmly fixated on the past. Therefore, political, cultural and social aspects

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of time are playing an increasingly important role in contemporary debates about art,6 while a number of social science and humanities disciplines are experiencing a ‘temporal turn’.7 Recent years have also witnessed a rise in studies of geopolitically specific experiences of time from postcolonial and post-socialist perspectives.8 All these discussions emerge against a pervasive sense that the future holds even more bleak prospects of permanent crisis or impending catastrophe (ecological, military or economic). Within this context, as reflected in the growing field of ‘global Cold War’ studies, there is a renewed interest in the histories and legacies of the twentieth century, and in particular the political role that communism plays in the present landscape.9 The former Yugoslavia presents an exemplary case study through which to consider the relation of art, historical memory and geopolitical constructions of time. As part of the former Eastern Bloc, former Yugoslavia has undergone changes in the last three decades that encapsulate the global realities of the present: the end of state socialism, the global spread of neoliberalism, and the rise of nationalism and fascism as populist mobilizers. Yet in comparison to the rest of the former Eastern Bloc, the historical condition of Yugoslavia derives from distinctive starting points. Yugoslavia had a more open brand of

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Georges Didi-Huberman, Confronting Images: Questioning the Ends of a Certain History of Art (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2004); Terry Smith, What Is Contemporary Art? (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2009); Christine Ross, The Past Is the Present: It’s the Future Too: The Temporal Turn in Contemporary Art (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2012); Keith Moxey, Visual Time: The Image in History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013); Peter Osborne, Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art (London: Verso, 2013); Veronica Tello, Counter-Memorial Aesthetics: Refugee Histories and the Politics of Contemporary Art (London: Bloomsbury, 2016). A full account of the increasing importance ascribed to time in social sciences is beyond the scope here. For a good overview, see Roland Bleiker, Aesthetics and World Politics (London: Palgrave, 2009). For a recent collection of essays exploring time in the field of IR (international relations) see Andrew Hom, Christopher McIntosh, Alasdair McKay and Liam Stockdale, ed., Time, Temporality and Global Politics (Bristol: E-International Relations Publishing, 2016). On post-socialism and time, see Susan Buck-Morss, ‘The Post-Soviet Condition’, in East Art Map, ed. IRWIN (London: Afterall, 2006), 494–9. On postcolonialism and time in art, see Okwui Enwezor, ‘The Postcolonial Constellation: Contemporary Art in a State of Permanent Transition’, Research in African Literatures 34, no. 4 (2003): 57–82; Sharad Chari and Katherine Verdery, ‘Thinking between the Posts: Postcolonialsm, Postsocialism, and Ethnography after the Cold War’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 5, no. 1 (2009): 6–34; Hana Cervinkova, ‘Postcolonialism, Postsocialism and the Anthropology of East-Central Europe’, Journal of Postcolonial Writing 48, no. 2 (2012): 155– 63; Marina Gržinić and Šefik Tatlić, Necropolitics, Racialization and Global Capitalism (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014). The most well-known re-evaluations of communism in the last decade are the series of international conferences titled ‘The Idea of Communism’ (2009 in London, 2011 in New York, and 2013 in Seoul) followed by the publication of three edited volumes of conference proceedings.

Introduction

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socialism10 that created conditions for cultural and artistic output that did not fall into the Cold War East–West binary, but that strategically adopted aspects of both East and West. This seemingly favourable position for joining the post-socialist global world was, however, delayed by over a decade due to the outbreak of war, meaning that 1989 – the zero hour of transition in the former East – has a different historical resonance in Yugoslavia.11 On the one hand, Francis Fukuyama’s 1989 ‘end of history’, which announced the turn from oppositional Cold War politics and the end of grand ideological narratives, coincided in Yugoslavia with the realization of a pressured nation state whose public narrative reduced geopolitical and economic processes to questions of purely national interest. On the other hand, the neoliberal narrative of transition from centralized economies, totalitarianism and conflict towards deregulated markets, stability and European democracy reflected the entire region through the prism of belated modernization. Since 1989, the region of the former Yugoslavia has taken on a series of signifiers – Eastern Europe, Southeastern Europe, Western Balkans – all of which have defined it as a space of lingering values incompatible with those of democracy.12 These signifiers affect the way art from the region has been described – post-socialist, post-communist, post-Yugoslav, Balkan, East Art – in attempts to define it in relation to the global art market. Its historical and political complexities make the cultural and political space of former Yugoslavia a powerful crucible for thinking through radical contemporary artistic practices.13

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Sabrina Ramet, The Three Yugoslavias: State-building and Legitimation, 1918–2004 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006). On the ‘end of history’, see Francis Fukuyama, ‘The End of History?’ The National Interest (Summer 1989): 3–18. On the global rise of neoliberalism, see David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). Rastko Močnik, ‘Will the East’s Past be the West’s Future?’ in Les Frontières Invisibles, ed. Caroline David (Oostkamp: Stichting Kunstboek, 2009). Slovene art historian Igor Zabel remarked that in discussions of art at the end of the 1990s, frequent mentions of ‘Former East’ art – implying another world that no longer exists – were never accompanied by mentions of ‘Former West’, revealing the hierarchical power politics of global art. See Igor Zabel, ‘The (Former) East and its Identity’, in 2000+ Arteast Collection: The Art of Eastern Europe in Dialogue with the West: From the 1960s to the Present, ed. Zdenka Badovinac (Ljubljana: Moderna Galerija, 2002). Significant work has been done on post-1989 artistic practices by theorists including Slavoj Žižek, Rastko Močnik, Marina Gržinić, Boris Buden and Miško Šuvaković, and parts of this literature have been translated into English. However, the period after 2000 remains largely overlooked. For an account of transition in a similar context, see Anca Pusca’s excellent study of representations in film, photography, architecture and theatre that challenge the meaning of 1989 as the ‘start’ of heroic

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In this regard, an interesting observation was made by a friend while I was writing this book. Speaking about the challenge of finding a global audience for the artwork under study, he quipped that ‘the Russians and the Chinese have had their moment, Eastern European art is pretty hot right now; laws of global curatorial geopolitics stipulate that the Balkans should be next’.14 Art from the former Yugoslavia had a brief moment in the global spotlight through a series of ‘Balkan-themed’ exhibitions in the early 2000s.15 Problematic as many of them were (partly through the totalizing adoption of the moniker ‘Balkan’16 and partly through their management by NGO cultural projects), these exhibitions have been the only attempts to present artistic practices from the region on an international stage.17 To be sure, there have been several exhibitions focused on ‘post-Yugoslav’ artistic practices in the years since,18 and many artists featured in Transitional Aesthetics have established international careers (meaning, as will be explained in Chapter 4, that they have become de facto native informants for the region). But there have been no attempts to present a sustained argument about Balkan art responding to the realities of transition in the region in the twenty-first century. Transitional Aesthetics addresses this subject by considering a body of work from and about the former Yugoslavia in the context of recent global changes.

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transitional transformation in Romania; in Anca Pusca, Post-communist Aesthetics: Revolutions, Capitalism, Violence (London: Routledge, 2015). Thank you, David McNeill. The exhibitions include After the Wall: Art and Culture in Post-communist Europe (Stockholm 1999/2000), 2000+ARTEAST Collection, Ljubljana (Innsbruck 2000/2001), In Search of Balkania (Graz 2002), In the Gorges of the Balkan. A Report (Kassel 2003), Blood and Honey: The Future’s in the Balkans (Vienna 2003), Interrupted Histories (Ljubljana 2006), Cold War Modern. Design 1945–1970 (London 2008/2009), Gender Check. Femininity and Masculinity in the Art of Eastern Europe (Vienna 2009/2010). For a survey of these exhibitions, see Maria Oriskova, ed., Curating ‘Eastern Europe’ and Beyond: Art Histories Through the Exhibition (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2014). For a critical analysis of the use of the term ‘Balkan’ in these exhibitions, see Maja Ćirić, ‘Constructions of the Balkans as the Other in Contemporary Art Practices’, Remont Art Files 1, (2005): 27–39. While I will explore this dimension in more detail in Chapter 2, here I want to flag the phenomenon of the so-called ‘SOROS aesthetic’ as a precondition to global visibility of art from the region. For a brief account of NGO and EU projects in Former Yugoslavia and the broader region see Zhivka Valiavicharska, ‘Culture, Neoliberal Development, and the Future of Progressive Politics in Southeastern Europe’, in Globalization and Contemporary Art, ed. Jonathan Harris (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell, 2011), 496–509. Two exhibitions that have addressed the question of temporality of Yugoslavia in the present are Political Practices of (Post-)Yugoslav Art: RETROSPECTIVE 01 (2009) at the Museum of Yugoslav History in Belgrade, and Spaceship Yugoslavia: The Suspension of Time (2011) at Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst in Berlin.

Introduction

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The scope of transitional aesthetics It is important to acknowledge that, while I argue that there emerges a transitional aesthetic across the artistic output of former Yugoslavia, each work discussed here reflects a slightly different relationship to Yugoslav history. Not all artists I consider are from the region, not all live in the region; those that are based in the region come from various successor states. In approaching transition through Benjamin’s philosophy of history as a time-space in which geopolitical location expresses temporality – historical consciousness, stages of development, (dis)continuity with the past – I am less interested in the ‘where’ of the artists and more in the ‘when’. This reflects my position in relation to the material, which is informed by biography (I was born and grew up in Yugoslavia, migrating to Australia as a refugee in 1995 after experiencing the dissolution and the war that followed it), and by my interest in considering the temporality of transition beyond the interpretative frameworks of nationalism and neoliberalism. In order to highlight transition as temporality as much as location, I analyse artistic practices that share my insider/outsider relation to the region and to the ideological formations that have shaped its art history.19 After the Second World War, socialist realism under the influence of Soviet politics was the prevailing mode of art in Yugoslavia.20 From the perspective of socialist realism, international modernism was an expression of bourgeois decadence and artistic formalism that was incompatible with progressive art. State socialism moved towards realism as a projection of the revolutionary present and future of communist utopia. However, by the early 1950s, with Yugoslavia’s increasing distance from the Eastern Bloc and Stalinist influence, its official art shifted from socialist realism into a ‘moderate socialist modernism’ that forged ‘a middle path between the abstract and the figurative, between

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For a historical survey of avant-garde practices in Yugoslavia in English, see Dubravka Đurić and Miško Šuvaković, ed., Impossible Histories: Historical Avant-gardes, Neo-avant-gardes, and Postavant-gardes in Yugoslavia 1918–1991 (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003). It should be noted that even in the early-post-Second World War years, some artistic practices in Yugoslavia were characterized by a ‘mixture of transgressive socialist and modernist aesthetic’. This mixture created the potential for the development of a new artistic model structured by the Yugoslav cultural climate. See Bojana Videkanić, ‘Yugoslav Postwar Art and Socialist Realism: An Uncomfortable Relationship’, ARTMargins 5, no. 2 (2016): 3–26.

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the modern and the traditional, between regionalism and internationalism’.21 The specific political circumstances within which Yugoslavia formed exerted a considerable influence on the resulting art system, a unique system that functioned ‘outside both the rigid ideological pressures prevalent in the countries of real socialism and the advantages and the demands of the art market in the countries of liberal capitalism’.22 This cross-pollination of the properties of the Eastern and Western art model remained closely supervised by the authorities, although they were largely supportive of it, because it could be used to build an international image of Yugoslavia as self-management socialism ‘with a human face’.23 For much of the time between 1960 and 1970, Yugoslavia was a cultural space that recognized correspondences between the universalism of modernist art and the universalism of socialist emancipation.24 The uniqueness of Yugoslavia’s post-1968 political and economic systems in the former Eastern Bloc was crucial for enabling platforms for avant-garde experiments in art and critical thought, including the rise of internationally renowned figures such as Marina Abramović, Mladen Stilinović and Sanja Iveković. However, it is important to steer away from idealizing the nexus of Yugoslav state ideology and cultural politics into an exemplar of an open society: its cultural centres operated according to an implicit pact with the authorities that aesthetics would steer clear of politics. As Branislav Jakovljević explains, Yugoslav self-management was simultaneously the platform that enabled the emergence of critical avant-garde practices such as performance art, and the key factor in Yugoslavia’s economic, political and cultural implosion.25 As the unresolved tensions of Yugoslav self-management became more apparent in the late socialism of 1970–80, the crisis produced critical avant-garde practices, such as those of the collective New Slovenian Art

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Miško Šuvaković, ‘Impossible Histories’, in Impossible Histories, 11. On the notion of ‘middle ground’ also see Nevenka Stanković, ‘The Case of Exploited Modernism: How Yugoslav Communists used the Idea of Modern Art to Promote Political Agendas’, Third Text 20, no. 2 (2006): 151–9. Ješa Denegri, ‘Inside or Outside “Socialist Modernism”’, in Impossible Histories, 170–209, 172. Radina Vučetić, Koka-kola Socijalizam: Amerikanizacija Jugoslovenske Popularne Kulture Šezdesetith Godina XX Veka (Beograd: Sluzbeni Glasnik, 2012), 240. Ana Janevski, ‘As Soon as I Open My Eyes I See a Film: Experiment in the Art of Yugoslavia in the 1960s and 1970s’, in As Soon as I Open My Eyes I See a Film: Experiment in the Art of Yugoslavia in the 1960s and 1970s (exh. Cat.), ed. A. Janevski (Warsaw: Museum of Modern Art, 2010), 17. Branislav Jakovljević, Alienation Effects, Performance and Self-management in Yugoslavia 1945–91 (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2016).

Introduction

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(Neue Slowenishe Kunst or NSK), that corresponded to alternative political movements and calls for reforms of socialism towards democracy.26 These widely discussed practices worked in the framework of late socialism, and used political cynicism and irony to proclaim the end of socialism from within.27 But the following war (during the 1990s) effected a local marginalization of these artists, and revealed the failure of artistic practices to establish a viable opposition to the ambiguous ideological mix of post-socialism, nationalism and pseudo-democracy.28 As socialism gave way to neoliberalism, avantgarde artistic practices were incorporated into the global art market under the moniker of ‘Balkan art’ as a non-conflictual way to play out relations between the global and the local.29 This brief periodization has positioned artistic practices from the former Yugoslavia in relation to predominant ideological models of early socialism (1950s–60s), late bureaucratic socialism (1970s–80s), nationalism (1990s) and global neoliberalism (after 2000). Transitional Aesthetics expands this chronology by articulating artistic practices critical of the rampant neoliberalism and nationalism in twenty-first-century former Yugoslavia, while departing from such terms as ‘post-socialist’, ‘post-communist’ and ‘post-Yugoslav’ that are usually used to describe the region’s art.30 In one sense, my use of the term ‘transitional’ is

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Nikola Dedić, Ka Radikalnoj Kritici Ideologije: Od Socijalizma ka Postsocijalizmu (Novi Sad: Prodajna Galerija Beograd, 2009), 55. Aleš Erjavec, ‘Introduction’, in Postmodernism and the Postsocialist Condition: Politicized Art under Late Socialism, ed. Aleš Erjavec (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2003), 1–54, 4. Laibach and NSK are, according to Erjavec, exemplary of late socialist art that expresses the historical situation that led to ‘the first transition’ away from communism. Also see Inke Arns, ‘Avant-garde in the Rear-view Mirror: From Utopia under General Suspicion to a New Notion of the Utopian’, in Seven Sins: Ljubljana-Moscow, ed. Zdenka Badovinac, Viktor Misiano and Igor Zabel (Ljubljana: Moderna Galerija, 2004); and Marina Gržinić, Fiction Reconsidered: Eastern Europe, Postsocialism & the Retro-avantgarde (Vienna: Springerin, 2000). For an account of art practices in Serbia in the 1990s and the general cultural retreat from the onslaught of nationalism see Branislava Anđelković and Branislav Dimitrijević, ‘The Final Decade: Art, Society, Trauma and Normality’, in exhibition catalogue On Normality – Art in Serbia 1989– 2001, Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade, 2005; also see Nikola Dedić, ‘The Notion of Underground in Serbian Art during the 1990s’, Zivot Umjetnosti: Casopis za Pitanja Likovne Kulture 90, (2012): 52–65. Nikola Dedić, Ka Radikalnoj Kritici Ideologije: Od Socijalizma ka Postsocijalizmu (Novi Sad: Muzej Savremene Umetnosti Vojvodine, 2009), 299. On the relation of ‘Balkan’ discourses to globalization and neoliberalism, see Rastko Močnik, ‘The Balkans as an Element in Ideological Mechanisms’, in Balkan as Metaphor: Between Globalization and Fragmentation, ed. Dušan I. Bijelić and Obrad Savić (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 79–116. On ‘post-communist art’, see Boris Groys, ‘Europe and Its Others’, in Art Power (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 173–82. On ‘post-Yugoslav’ artistic practices, see Nikola Dedić, ‘Yugoslavia in Post-Yugoslav Artistic Practices: Or, Art as …’, in Post-Yugoslav Constellations: Archive, Memory, and

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guided by Susan Buck-Morss’s warning that positioning Balkan artistic practices as ‘post’ betrays a continuing dependency on the imagined units of ‘Europe’ and ‘West’,31 leading to the conclusion that post-1989 artistic practices from the region amount to little more than cultural affirmation of the global hegemony of neoliberalism.32 But my use of ‘transitional’ is also intended to signal that these practices don’t just function as suppliers of cultural and historical difference, or as embodiments of unresolved geopolitics. Transitional aesthetics radicalize historical moments (what Benjamin calls ‘now time’) when location becomes a temporal marker of identity, and when historical and spatial contingencies of the world (West/East, North/South) are ‘in transition’.33 In critically questioning the temporality of the nationalist–neoliberal nexus, these practices understand transition as officially mandated oppression, but also as an opportunity to imagine better futures by dislocating normative constructions of time.

The approach In bringing the study of art from the former Yugoslavia into the twenty-first century, this book seeks to connect to contemporary discussions of radical artistic practices. Its touchstones are thinkers, such as Jill Bennett (drawing on Jacques Rancière), who have conceptualized aesthetics as a political intervention into unfolding historical events that creates conditions under which new forms of perception and experience arise.34 In tracing how socialist heritage is activated in art, I draw on the work of Boris Buden, Tanja Petrović and Miško Šuvaković to engage the socialist past of Yugoslavia as a political and aesthetic agent in the present.35 This helps me to articulate transitional aesthetics as an

31 32

33 34 35

Trauma in Contemporary Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian Literature and Culture, ed. Vlad Beronja and Stijn Vervaet (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016), 169–90. Dedić is drawing on Miško Šuvaković’s understanding of ‘post-Yugoslav’ art. Buck-Morss, ‘The Post-Soviet Condition’, 495. Aleš Erjavec, ‘Eastern Europe, Art, and the Politics of Representation’, Boundary 2 41, no. 1 (Spring 2014): 52–77, 72. My thanks to Veronica Tello for this observation. Jill Bennett, Practical Aesthetics (London: I. B. Tauris, 2012). Petrović, Yuropa; Boris Buden, Zona Prelaska: O Kraju Postkomunizma (Beograd: Fabrika Knjiga, 2012); Miško Šuvaković, Umetnost I Politika: Savremena Estetika, Filozofija, Teorija I Umetnost u Vremenu Globalne Tranzicije (Beograd: Savremeni Glasnik, 2012).

Introduction

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expression of post-Yugoslav politics, united by a discontent towards the present and awareness of the transformative political value of the past. The role of art in this context is to generate clashes in historical time and show the ideological normativity of the present. In this respect, the critical modality of transitional aesthetics is articulated through Benjamin’s ‘dialectical image’: a visual dialectic that defines the present as the result of historical tensions and as the time in which these tensions can be understood.36 For Benjamin, images have the ability to show traces of past struggles in the present and uncover the working of difference within history. This operates on a macro scale by establishing relations between the traces of socialism to the transitional present, but also on a smaller scale wherein lived experience of transition has the potential to dislocate life’s normativity. By highlighting lived experiences across multiple temporalities, I recast Benjamin’s dialectical critique into an affirmation of identities beyond the confines of a nationalist–neoliberal nexus. From a broader perspective, I argue that all artistic practices considered in this book share what Ana Hofman describes as state-sanctioned projects of ethnonationalization of the legacy of socialism and the anti-fascist struggle.37 Yet from a local perspective, things are complicated by the different political landscapes in Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina: their different experiences of the war in the 1990s, and the ways in which those experiences shape understandings of the present in each successor state. Addressing the legacy of Yugoslav socialism in this context requires the awareness that not only does socialism mean different things in different spaces, it also means different things at different points in time, and encompasses a complex matrix of relationships to the conflict of the 1990s. Our approach must acknowledge genocide and suffering as constitutive parts of contemporary consciousness in the region, while investigating how art apprehends the nationalist sequestering of post-conflict trauma. This involves studying how Yugoslav heritage continues to play a progressive political role,

36 37

Uroš Čvoro, ‘Dialectical Image Today’, Continuum 22, no. 1 (2008): 89–98. Ana Hofman, Novi Život Partizanskih Pesama (Beograd: Biblioteka XX Vek, 2016), 8. For a work that deals with the revision of recent history in a single site (of a notorious 1990s Bosnian Serb camp for Bosniaks and Croats), see the project Four Faces of Omarska initiated by artist Milica Tomić. On historical revisionism in Croatia, see Dragan Markovina, Povijest Poraženih (Zagreb: Naklada Jesenski i Turk, 2015).

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spanning its institutional memory,38 its role in everyday life,39 and nostalgia as a critical form of remembering.40 Transitional aesthetics mobilize the past as an expression of what Igor Štiks describes as the ‘new left’ in post-Yugoslav spaces: a critique of the neoliberal capitalist transformation of the post-Yugoslav societies; of the conservative, religious, patriarchal and nationalist hegemony that accompanied that transformation; and of an anti-nationalist approach to the region.41 Transitional aesthetics mobilize the emancipatory social, political and class structure of Yugoslavia: the notion of ‘social property’ and worker self-management;42 the conception of moderate socialist welfare state; and the notion of NonAligned43 international politics. But rather than being explicitly referenced in the artworks I will discuss, Yugoslavia provides the historical frame of common cultural space,44 with a rejection of nationalism as an ideological norm.45

38

39

40

41

42

43

44

45

For a summary of this body of work, see Milica Popović and Petra Belc, ‘Yugonostalgia – Yugoslavia as a Meta-space in Contemporary Art Practices’, Život Umjetnosti 94 (2014): 18–35, 22. There is a growing body of literature on the role of consumerism in everyday life – and interaction with principles of socialism – in Yugoslavia. For examples, see Gorana Ognjenović and Jasna Jozelić, ed., Titoism, Self-determination, Nationalism, Cultural Memory Volume Two: Tito’s Yugoslavia: Stories Untold (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); Igor Duda, Pronađeno Blagostanje: Svakodnevni Život i Potrošačka Kultura u Hrvatskoj 1970-ih i 1980-ih (Zagreb: Srednja Europa, 2014); Radina Vučetić, Koka-kola Socijalizam (Beograd: Službeni glasnik, 2012); Vukić i Kostelnik, Osamdesete!: Slatka Dekadencija Postmoderne (Zagreb: HDLU, 2015); Lada Duraković and Andrea Matošević, ed., Socijalizam na Klupi: Jugoslavensko Društvo Očima Nove Postjugoslavenske Humanistike (Pula: Srednja Evropa, 2013); Maša Kolanović, ed., Komparativni Postsocijalizam: Slavenska Iskustva (Zagreb: Zagrebačka Slavistička Škola, 2013); and Breda Luthar and Maruša Pušnik, Remembering Utopia: The Culture of Everyday Life in Socialist Yugoslavia (Washington: New Academia, 2010). There is a general tendency to treat any form of engagement with the socialist past as atavist and uncritical nostalgia, despite work that has shown the complexities of post-socialist remembering (such as the notions of ‘critical’ or ‘reflective’ nostalgia). On the critical potential of nostalgia in the Former Yugoslavia, see Mitja Velikonja, Titostalgija (Belgrade: Biblioteka XX Vek, 2010). Igor Štiks, ‘“New Left” in the Post-Yugoslav Space: Issues, Sites, and Forms’, Socialism and Democracy 29, no. 3 (2015): 135–46, 137. Introduced between 1952 and 1954 by the Communist Party of Yugoslavia as a socialist version of autogestion – in contrast to the Moscow-style central planned production – self-management was promoted as the highest level of democracy. See Edvard Kardelj, Democracy and Socialism, trans. Margo and Boško Milosavljević (London: The Summerfield Press, 1978). For a critical analysis of self-management, see Chapter 3 in Renata Salecl, The Spoils of Freedom: Psychoanalysis, Feminism and Ideology after the Fall of Socialism (London: Routledge, 1994). After the 1960s Yugoslavia based its international profile on three ‘special relationships’, balancing its accommodation with the Soviet Union by close relations with the United States and the new NonAligned Movement. See John R. Lampe, ‘Yugoslavia’s Foreign Policy in Balkan Perspective: Tracking between the Superpowers and Non-Alignment’, East Central Europe, no. 40 (2013): 97–113. Ješa Denegri used the term ‘common Yugoslav cultural space’ (jedinstveni jugoslovenski kulturni prostor) for the 2000 exhibition he curated at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade. Here, I am following Dragan Markovina’s articulation of Yugoslavism in the present. See Markovina, Jugoslavenstvo Poslije Svega (Beograd: Mostart, 2016), 23.

Introduction

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This book will address the different ways in which this socialist legacy has been taken up in artistic practices, attending to narratives of transition that clash with unfinished historical legacies. Chapter 1 articulates the politics of transitional aesthetics as historical clashes between normative accounts of temporality (nationalism and transition), in order to question the temporal ideology after the ‘end of history’. The following chapters detail how these politics engage post-Yugoslav spaces, temporalities and identities in transition. Chapter 2 considers how artists Tanja Ostojić and Angela Melitopoulos engage with EU migration politics by establishing a relation between the Yugoslav idea of a transnational community and the monopolization of states into a supranational European Union. Chapter 3 looks at The Janez Janša Project and the work of Katarina Zdjelar, both of which articulate transition as a historical process of translating one political and cultural condition to another, and getting the translation ‘wrong’. Chapter 4 examines the use of ‘halfway tradition’ as a critique of the post-socialist nationalist cult of tradition in the work of Vladimir Nikolić, Mladen Miljanović and Marina Abramović. Chapter 5 discusses the works of Igor Grubić and David Maljković, who use images of monuments as symbols of excess socialist heritage to thematize the rewriting of history in the present. Chapter 6 discusses the ways in which Hito Steyerl, Aleksandra Domanović and Zoran Todorović exploit the aesthetics of the archive to problematize historical and temporal narratives that construct the present as a historical inevitability. In different ways, each chapter takes historical memory and narratives of belonging as key points in the transitional nationalist–neoliberal ideological nexus, and as the framework through which to imagine collective identities. Even though this book is about a body of work responding to historical events and changes in a specific region, its arguments about art as a critique of geopolitical constructions of time and affirmation of erased historical memory aim to contribute to larger discussions about the political relevance of culture. At a time of global transitions, uncertainty, and old/new forms of political conservatism and xenophobia, this book makes a claim for the ability of art to imagine progressive identities beyond the present.

1

The Politics of Transitional Aesthetics

In a striking visual analogy of how communism is perceived in the present, Boris Buden recounts his encounter with a pair of shoes at the Museum of Communism in Warsaw.1 Buden describes an unassuming display of a worker’s shoes as the core of the museum’s vision of the past, a vision conjured up by an accompanying caption which reads: ‘a pair of left shoes – a bonus that each worker of the Warszawa Steelworks was given in the mid 50-ties [sic’]. The mixture of cynical mockery and historicization that this museum display represents is in many ways paradigmatic of the broader social, political and cultural discourse about the communist past in the last three decades. On the one hand, according to Buden, the Museum of Communism in Warsaw transforms the past into a point of difference marked by ambivalence (‘our past but not our past’).2 On the other, it produces a ‘postcommunist subject’ characterized by ‘free will’ that has broken free from the chains of totalitarianism in favour of neoliberal democracy, and is using the space of the museum to appropriate its past. And through the display of two left shoes as the absurd (double left) reward for hard work and participation in building a communist future, this past is being displayed as a fraud that turned its citizens into dupes, forcing them to accept an irrational and absurd life.3 But, as Buden asks, even if we accept the shoes as an authentic example of irrational communist totalitarianism, what do they tell us about our post-communist present? He answers this question by recalling Frederic Jameson’s discussion of Vincent Van Gogh’s painting A Pair Of Shoes (1886) and Andy Warhol’s Diamond Dust Shoes (1980), in terms of the relation

1

2

3

Boris Buden, ‘U Cipelama Komunizma – Nekoliko Napomena o Mehanizmu Postsocijalističke Normalizacije’, Up & Underground 7, no. 8 (2004): 35–9. Buden, ‘U Cipelama Komunizma – Nekoliko Napomena o Mehanizmu Postsocijalističke Normalizacije’, 39. Ibid., 36.

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between modernism and postmodernism.4 Jameson argued that, while Van Gogh’s work creates the ‘raw material’ for a hermeneutic reading of the shoes as key to understanding the brutal reality of the life they represent, Warhol’s work is characterized by a surface that resists interpretation. The Warsaw shoes, for Buden, represent a hybrid of Van Gogh’s and Warhol’s shoes, in that they capture the cynicism of communism while not allowing for a reconstruction of the historical reality that produced them: they fetishize socialism into a dysfunctional and corrupt bureaucracy that has stripped the basic human dignity from its citizens and workers. In demonstrating the historical ‘normalization’ in the Warsaw museum, where socialism is an anomaly to be purged from history, Buden’s account connects the neoliberal narrative of the return to ‘normality’ with the nation state as the frame through which this ‘normalization’ occurs. In this context, post-socialist subjects appear in a historical–ideological paradox: as the agents that overthrew totalitarianism, and as immature political subjects with a disjointed historical experience. Yet, according to Buden, this paradox presents an opportunity to think beyond nationalist and neoliberal constructions of history and activate the history of socialism. In suggesting that the two left shoes fuse modernist universalism of Van Gogh with postmodernist emphasis on the surface and death of authorship in Warhol, Buden argues that the shoes are not so much objects that come ‘after’ communism, but objects that open up the potential for an alternative history: that they mix the universality of communism (including its failures) with lived history. They present an opportunity to re-evaluate our conception of the present, beyond approaching the past through the binary modes of historical relativism or nostalgia.5 Taking Buden’s mobilization of untapped historical images as its departure point, this chapter articulates the politics of transitional aesthetics as a critique of ideological normativity in the transitional present, and as an imagining

4

5

For Jameson’s discussion, see ‘The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’, in Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), 1–54. Branislav Dimitrijević argues that Yugonostalgia is the longing for the cultural imagination of Yugoslavia’s liberalization in the 1960 and 1970s, but that the economic, social and cultural liberalization during that period should itself be understood as the origin of Yugoslavia’s postsocialist transition. In this sense, Yugonostalgia is a depoliticized and ahistorical loop to the ground zero of the present historical revisionism. See Dimitrijević, Potrošeni Socijalizam: Kultura, Konzumerizam i Društvena Imaginacija u Jugoslaviji (1950-1974) (Beograd: Fabrika Knjiga, 2016).

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that history is open to different possibilities. Transitional aesthetics uses Walter Benjamin’s principle of dialectical montage to problematize normative accounts of the present as a historical inevitability. Benjamin observed that aestheticization of politics was intrinsic to fascism, wherein visual culture is subordinated to ideological interests, and ideological messages are deployed visually. But Benjamin also believed in the revolutionary potential of images. Images can not only redeem our historical consciousness, but also effect a change to our experience. Crucial to this potential, for Benjamin, was the ability of images to intervene in how time and temporality are understood. If the imagining and visualizing of historical time is politically charged, this is starkly apparent in normative temporal ideologies that have dominated the politics of remembering in former Yugoslavia for over two decades. This includes the manipulation of histories by nationalists for the purpose of constructing narratives of ethnotraditional conservatism, but in equal part, it also includes the narrative of post-socialist transition as a temporal ideology of neoliberal normalization following the socialist episode. Transitional aesthetics intervenes into this neoliberal–nationalist nexus through images of temporal clashes that mobilize socialism as a means of imagining alternatives in the present/past. After outlining Benjamin’s dialectical image as the key modality of transitional aesthetics, I articulate the way in which it engages nationalist and neoliberal temporal formations. My discussion takes the form of a montage of theoretical exposition with analyses of how art responds to normative historical teleologies. The intention is to layer short ‘flashes’ of transitional aesthetics over the discussion of nationalist and neoliberal temporality, which is unpacked in more detail in consequent chapters. In the final section of this chapter, I show how transitional aesthetics captures Yugoslavia as a non-linear historical event that is rearranging the relation of the past to the present.

Walter Benjamin and the dialectical image The key to my understanding of aesthetics emerges from Benjamin’s formulation of the relation between images and historical time in the ‘dialectical image’. Having in my previous work discussed the potential of the dialectical image

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to serve as a critical framework for understanding the present,6 here I want to emphasize the ways in which it produces temporal clashes, and uncovers difference within history. Benjamin’s historical time operates through the visual logic of montage. His central temporal image – the dialectical image – emerges out of the suspension between two temporalities: one that sees history as the teleology of empty homogenous time, and another that is the revolutionary freezing of history. Normative accounts of transition have framed the political, social and cultural reality in the region in teleological terms: as ‘moving away from’ socialism and ‘towards’ democracy; as ‘immature’ political subjects ‘stuck in history’. In contrast, Benjamin’s approach to understanding history juxtaposes fragments of historical experience in the form of a constellation in order to reveal underlying tensions. This constellation intends to define the present both as the result of historical tensions and as the time in which these tensions can be understood. For Benjamin, historical images can be read in relation to the present, and the revolutionary potential of this moment is in understanding and seeing our historical condition. The picture of history that emerges in these montages is realized in Benjamin’s understanding of the revolutionary power of the image. His historical images were the leftovers of capitalism, which had become lodged in the collective consciousness as ‘dream images’. Dream images turned history into a commodity used for marketing capitalism. Yet, dream images could also produce a different picture of history by suggesting that the future is made of traces of past struggles in the present. Benjamin’s articulation of objects as dream images suggests the potential of differentiation, in the commodified fabric of history, to dislocate the workings of capitalism by working within its own structure. Dream images operate with a dual relationship to capitalism, where objects as commodities are a constituent part of capitalism, yet are set apart from the narrative of its progress. According to this logic, commodity becomes a site of capitalism where historical difference is allowed to enter into the universal history of capital, while remaining deeply imbricated in its structure. Just as historical objects that have transformed into commodities can never escape the logic

6

Čvoro, ‘Dialectical Image Today’.

The Politics of Transitional Aesthetics

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of capitalism (because they are a constituent part of it), so capitalism cannot escape the politics of historical difference. And the difference in history will emerge through repetition of temporalities through objects that carried their traces. When Benjamin conceptualizes difference within history he envisages a practice through which the components that make up historical narratives are reordered. The point of this practice is less to reveal the existence of difference within history per se than to put past traces together in ways that generate different actualizations of history. These modus operandi are at play in Sanja Iveković’s series Lost & Found (2003–4), which juxtaposes past and present photographs of locations under Yugoslav socialism and in transitional Croatia.7 The series includes images of socialist shops and their contemporary counterparts: store names such as Solidarity and Freedom disappear or are given entirely new meanings by the montage. By visualizing the changing ideological context of consumerism, Iveković presents history as the clash of two historical realities occupying the same space. A particularly striking image from the series is a photograph of a cinema in downtown Zagreb that used to be called Balkan, and has been renamed Europe. The act of renaming captures the process of purging the Croatian cultural space of the Balkan ghost and aligning it instead with European civilization. By allowing the continuities and discontinuities of dream images to emerge in the consumerist spaces of socialism and neoliberalism, Lost & Found does not rewrite history; rather, it complicates our perception of the present as punctured by history. Socialist slogans collide with marketing strategies in the present, past utopias overlap with free-market aspirations, and different collectivities (Balkan/Europe) claim different experiences and politics of time and space under global capital. Iveković creates montages that critique how histories have been manipulated to show the present as a historical inevitability. Transitional aesthetics operate by recalling the past as a return to difference, which creates a leap in perspective and allows for historical discrepancy to emerge. While Iveković’s Lost & Found forges alternate perspectives of consumer desires in shops and cinemas, this book will examine other key ‘dream images’ of transition: juxtaposed speeds of movement in migration (Chapter 2), modes of speaking in translation

7

For images of the work, see https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/1134?locale=en.

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(Chapter 3), praxis of traditions (Chapter 4), and temporalities in monuments (Chapter 5) and archives (Chapter 6). Each dream image explicates processes, discourses and spaces that are inherent to nationalist and neoliberal narratives, but which also dislocate historical normativity through difference.

Temporality and nationalism in the former Yugoslavia It is a well-worn trope that historical time in former Yugoslavia is politically charged. This interest in the politics of temporality was awakened by the violent breakup of Yugoslavia, fuelled by the manipulation of history in nationalist rhetoric, and taken up and normalized in ill-informed and sensationalist journalism.8 Despite my suspicion towards the wholesale way in which historical time and temporality in the region have been nominally tied to the nationalist cause and defined in opposition to progressive politics, it is impossible not to observe the ease with which historical time travel occurs in the Balkans. When speaking to people with lived memories of the Second World War, the conversation will inevitably recall history by indiscriminately jumping between events that are decades if not centuries apart. In an important sense, this conversational historical montage – wherein the lines between the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires, and between the Gestapo and NATO, become blurred – can be explained in generational terms not unique to the region: after all, current Balkan generations can have witnessed multiple conflicts and belonged to at least three states in one lifetime, often without ever having left their place of birth. Their narratives will also often depend heavily on the national framework (and political orientation) of the storyteller. Yet, there is something striking about understandings of the relationship between conflict, history and temporality in the Balkans, involving a nonlinear conception of historical time. In his discussion of historical memory and war in the Balkans, Wolfgang Hoepken notes that Balkan societies have favoured a historical memory centred around wars and based on ‘a particular

8

For an overview of media sensationalism in reporting on the Yugoslav conflicts, see Enika Abazi and Albert Doja, ‘The Past in the Present: Time and Narrative of Balkan Wars in Media Industry and International Politics’, Third World Quarterly 38, no. 4 (2017): 1012–42.

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understanding of time … that does not distinguish between former and present historical periods’.9 Similarly, in his analysis of Serb nationalist discourses, Ger Duijzings argues that Serbian nationalism maintains a particularly telescopic way of ‘being in history’.10 Duijzings uses the example of Ratko Mladić’s references to the Battle of Kosovo of 1389 in his speech to Bosnian Serb soldiers at Bijeljina in July 1995, days before the attack on Srebrenica, and his subsequent presentation of that event as revenge for Turkish actions during the First Serbian Uprising of 1804–13.11 It is important to note that, in many cases, such historical montages were used for their emotional appeal to transhistorical injustices and victimhood. In her account of the nationalist narratives used to justify violence in the war of the 1990s, Ilana Bet-El observes that a montage-based concept of historical memory in which past and future converge in an instantaneous present was used by Balkan political leadership (on all sides) to inflame nationalism.12 Bet-El argues that there are five distinct units of historical time ‘which could appear within this simultaneity, without any consistent scheme’: from the Battle of Kosovo in 1389 to the end of the nineteenth century, including the Ottoman and Habsburg empires, based in nineteenth-century romanticist narratives of slavery, martyrdom and glory; the First World War and the postwar Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, including narratives of collapsing empires, resistance, national recognition and the domination of Serbs in the kingdom; the Second World War and narratives of interethnic genocide, denial and communist repression; the historical memory of Yugoslavia, featuring narratives of repression (Kosovo), domination (by Serbs), favouritism (Tito towards Croats) and harmony (interethnic coexistence); and the 1987–91 downward spiral into war, including narratives of economic hardship, betrayal and heightening ethnic tensions.13

9

10

11 12

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Wolfganag Hoepken, ‘War, Memory, and Education in a Fragmented Society: The Case of Yugoslavia’, East European Politics and Society 13, no. 1 (Winter 1999): 191–227, 192. Ger Duijzings, ‘Commemorating Srebrenica: Histories of Violence and the Politics of Memory in Eastern Bosnia’, in The New Bosnian Mosaic: Identities, Memories and Moral Claims in a Post-war Society, ed. Xavier Bougarel, Elissa Helms and Ger Duijzings (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 141–66, 146. Duijzings, ‘Commemorating Srebrenica’, 142. Ilana Bet-El, ‘Unimagined Communities: The Power of Memory and the Conflict in the Former Yugoslavia’, in Memory and Power in Post-war Europe: Studies in the Presence of the Past, ed. J. Müller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 206–22, 210. Bet-El, ‘Unimagined Communities’, 210–13.

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There are more recent historical periods that we could add to Bet-El’s schema, including the 1991–5 war’s narratives of international favouritism, genocide and martyrdom, and the post-2000 shift towards a market economy, privatization and slow warming of interethnic relations. Moreover, there are more nuanced accounts that point out significant continuities in experiences of time between seemingly opposing ideological systems. Slavenka Drakulić describes how Balkan communism modelled itself on an ‘eternal’ system in which its ideology was the only one conceivable according to the ‘iron laws of history’;14 there is a striking parallel with the post-GFC Europe where ‘more’ neoliberal austerity is promoted by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the European Union as the only solution. Nevertheless, Bet-El’s fivefold account demonstrates the ubiquity and symbolic power of the historical montage and temporality in the region. In wanting to use historical montage as a critical device, the challenge for the present book is how to wrestle the technique away from the forces of conservatism (which are interested in establishing or historicizing notions of tradition and historicism), and to employ it instead in the service of exploding capitalist teleology in the Benjaminian sense. I will illustrate the capacity of art to draw attention to the proximity of nationalism and capitalism in historical formations by looking at how Thomas Demand’s work Podium (2000) engages one of the most powerful nationalist devices of a historical clash, the zero hour of history. The most well-known construction of the zero hour of history was the production of the mythology of Kosovo by Serb nationalists at the 600th anniversary of the Kosovo battle, held on 28 June 1989 at Gazimestan near Pristina in Kosovo. As the largest political event in Serbia’s history, the gathering featured the high political functionaries from all Yugoslav republics and was attended by over a million people and broadcast on all state televisions. The event was framed as a celebration of an important anniversary, yet it was a politically motivated spectacle responding to unrest that had been growing in Kosovo since the early 1980s, due to demands for increased autonomy by the Kosovar Albanian population from Serb domination. It marked the rise of Slobodan Milošević from a mid-level party apparatchik to a powerful demagogue who spoke about ‘national awakening’ and ‘national

14

Slavenka Drakulić, How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed (Zagreb: VBZ, 1992), 22.

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pride’. Milošević conflated Serb martyr mythology of the Battle of Kosovo in 1389, nationalist anxieties from 1989 and the future destiny of the so-called ‘heavenly nation’. He connected the two ‘zero hours’ of history (1389 and 1989) in order to mask over the historical condition of 1989 (Yugoslav debt crisis, global recession, crumbling of state socialism, intensification of globalization) and to articulate the present as a historical–existential question of preserving the future of national identity in opposition to ‘others’ (Kosovars, Bosniaks, Croats). Demand’s Podium is a photographic recreation of the lectern used by Milošević at this event. Demand made a cardboard diorama of the stage, which was then photographed. The unassuming appearance of the stage is at odds with the magnitude of the event it represents. The only connections to the event are the red wall lettering that reads ‘1389–1989’, and the presence of Milošević as invoked through an empty water glass. Podium captures the spatial framework of the Kosovo Battle anniversary as an event, but leaves out its ideological centre. It draws attention to the stage as a spatial and temporal frame of the media spectacle of ‘national awakening’. The stage becomes the sculptural trace of the birth of Serb nationalism, while Milošević as the demagogue of this nationalism is reduced to an empty glass. One of the most notorious political figures of the late twentieth century transformed into an empty drinking container is a powerful symbol of an empty post-socialist subject ready to be filled with opportunistic ideological content: Milošević as an ex-communist morphing into a nationalist at the right moment. Demand reassembles the context for understanding the political meeting as a historical ‘zero hour’, reminding us that such temporal conceptions have significant consequences for our understanding of individual and collective agency and responsibility.15 In this context, 1989 emerges not as a moment of national awakening, but as an ideological field of struggle between then-

15

It is interesting to compare Demand’s Podium with Bojan Fajfrić’s video work Theta Rhythm (2011). Framed through a ‘day in the life’ perspective of Fajfrić’s father – who worked as a bureaucrat in Belgrade’s City Committee – the work reconstructs the eighth session of the Central Committee of the Communist League of Serbia (23 and 24 September 1987), the outcome of which helped to ensure Slobodan Milošević’s rise to power. The event was broadcast live on the state television (this was common practice) and due to its excessive length featured scenes of Fajfrić’s father falling asleep. Theta Rhytm reconstructs this act as a metaphor for historical responsibility. For an image of Podium, see http://www.artnet.com/Magazine/features/tuchman/tuchman3-18-3.asp Theta Rhytm is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RpvOk2eRTNw.

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emerging groups with overlapping yet different political and temporal frames: opportunistic post-communists, religious elites, nationalists, neoliberals. Podium thus articulates transitional aesthetics as a gesture of demystifying nationalist teleology by connecting it to its neoliberal temporal framework. By placing historical events and images within a materialist dialectic, transitional aesthetics show the post-1989 ‘revolutions’ to be symptomatic of neoliberalism as a temporal ideology.

Transition as a temporal ideology Transitional aesthetics question the way in which the historical condition and social reality in the former Yugoslavia continues to be shaped by Cold War and neo-imperialist divisions: socialist/post-socialist; conflict/post-conflict; Balkan/Europe.16 The term ‘transition’ has been one of the key framing devices for the economic and political changes in former Yugoslavia in the last two decades. In May 1999 the political and economic representatives of the European Union and the IMF set transition as one of the explicit aims for the region’s post-communist and post-conflict European integration process, known as the Stabilization and Association Process.17 These macro policies created a sense of historical inevitability about the ‘accession’ from centralized economies, conflict and leftovers of colonial empires (Ottoman, AustroHungarian and Soviet) towards deregulated markets, stability and European democracy. I approach transition as an ideology whose interpretative schema is articulated in temporal terms.18 This ideology has provided the key parameters and framed the political, social and cultural reality in the region in the last two

16

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18

The ongoing presence of the Cold War world view is noted on a more general level by Sharad Chari and Katherine Verdery. See Sharad Charad and Katherine Verdery, ‘Thinking between the Posts: Postcolonialsm, Postsocialism, and Ethnography after the Cold War’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 5, no. 1 (2009): 6–34, 18. Leonard J. Cohen and John R. Lampe, Embracing Democracy in the Western Balkans: From Postconflict Struggles Toward European Integration (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 2011), 81. For articulation of transition as a neoliberal ideology, see Adrian T. Sirbu, ‘Communism in Real Effigy and its Living Artwork’, in Genealogies of Post-communism, ed. Adrian T. Sirbu and Alexandru Polgar (Cluj: Editura, 2009), 159–210.

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decades. It frames historical events through series of ‘zero hours’: the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989; the dissolution of Yugoslavia and the onset of war in 1991; the Dayton Peace Accord of 1995; and the ‘official’ start of transition in 1999. It frames the experience of post-socialism as a teleology of normalization, moving ‘away from’ the historical error of socialism and ‘towards’ capitalism and the free market. It articulates the challenges of everyday life in temporal terms – people in difficult situations are painted as being ‘left behind’ or ‘stuck in history’. The temporal schema of this ideology has proclaimed that the ‘process’ of transition is officially complete (insofar as most of Eastern Europe has been absorbed into NATO and co-opted into deregulated markets), even though its effects continue to be felt in daily life. The countries of former Yugoslavia are the perfect crucible through which to examine the ideological contours of the ongoing (and seemingly neverending) experiment in the political, social and economic engineering of former socialist states into liberal democracies and free-market economies. Rethinking the relation of this present in the region to the emergence of new political subjectivities, there are insightful scholars who articulate transitional societies not as ‘bridges’ between socialism and capitalism but rather as permanent states of historical conditions with their own dynamics, and with destinations that look nothing like the contemporary Euro-American world. For example, in their work on post-socialism, Katherine Verdery and Susan Buck-Morss position the temporal schema of transition as ‘an expectation’ located after the failure of modernity, and facing an uncertain present and future.19 In this understanding, transition does not operate as an event with clear temporal boundaries, but rather as what Jill Bennett calls ‘between time’: events unfolding one after another without discernible starting points or end points.20 Miško Šuvaković likens this between the time of the postsocialist transitional state to a hybrid ‘monster’ made up of parts and traces of almost all historical forms of capitalism. It’s a socially inward realization

19

20

Katherine Verdery highlights the evolutionary teleology of the transitional journey towards a freemarket democracy: transition as ‘an expectation, a telos’. See Verdery, What Was Socialism and What Comes Next? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 227; Susan Buck-Morss articulates transition as ‘a universal historical condition’ located after the failure of history and grand narratives of modernity to fulfil their promise, and in the face of an uncertain present. See Susan Buck-Morss, ‘The Post-Soviet Condition’, in East Art Map, ed. IRWIN (London: Afterall, 2006), 494–9, 498. Jill Bennett provides a good model from reframing contemporary events as ‘between time’ that falls outside of clear temporal boundaries. See Bennett, Practical Aesthetics, 78.

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of tribal blood-relations into a nineteenth-century romanticist nation state. It’s an economically assertive-yet-stumbling global neoliberal state attempting to fit into contemporary networks of capital. It’s a symbol of the ‘second world’ where political and economic elites (former communist apparatchiks, former members of the police state apparatus and nouveaux riche tycoons) effect the ‘first-phase’ accumulation of capital through aggressive (and often illegal) privatization of the public sphere.21 These different forms of capital move at different speeds and produce different experiences of time: fantasies about social and class structures of nineteenth-century European nationalbourgeoisie collectivism rub up against aspirations towards twenty-firstcentury global, diffused, neoliberal, techno-managerial capital. According to Šuvaković, these conditions create a society that is profoundly disjointed in historico-temporal terms, and this is evident if we consider the way in which cultural practices from former Yugoslavia tend to be understood through four temporal formations: leap, where the forty-year rule of real socialism prevented the realization of Western high modernism; lateness in which the techno-consumerism of post-socialist states can never match their counterparts in the developed world and end up being a mimesis (of a postmodernist mimesis); return in which the rise of post-socialist ethnonationalism is seen as a return to traditions and cultural origins; and loss in which post-socialist states are the dysfunctional remainders of the past.22 Pronouncing delayed modernism the primary narrative for understanding cultural output from the former Yugoslavia, Šuvaković establishes a context in which art can politically mobilize historical symbols and narratives as counterpoint to normative understandings of transition, even while remaining critical towards the past. Artists dealing with migration (Chapter 2) and cultural translation (Chapter 3) question the narrative of loss irrespective of which past it represents; artists dealing with the production of ethnonationalist tradition (Chapter 4) question the cult of a ‘purer’ tradition returning; artists capturing abandoned pasts and fictional futures in socialist monuments (Chapter 5) question the revisionist narrative of modernist historical leaps; and artists dealing with archives (Chapter 6) question lateness as a system of ordering

21 22

Šuvaković, Umetnost I Politika, 206–7. Ibid., 208–9.

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knowledge within ideological systems. These plural and overlapping temporal categories orient the critiques brought by these artists of representations of the present and of romanticized views of the past. Transitional aesthetics intervenes into this field by highlighting the polarity between two cycles of capital accumulation, moving at different speeds, one being forced to catch up with the other: the ‘new’ economies of former Yugoslavia trying to ‘rejoin’ the late capitalism of the European Union/global market.23 And in engaging the idea of historical correction (letting go of the past), transitional aesthetics also addresses the micropolitics of social control in post-socialism: transition excludes social groups that are ‘stuck in history’.24 The relationship between deindustrialization and the historical displacement of gendered labour is captured in Darinka Pop-Mitić’s artwork Useful Idiot (2016), a series of small fresco-like paintings of industrial labour which were glued to the facades of Belgrade buildings that had been made over from socially owned factories to private office spaces.25 Like Iveković’s Lost & Found, Useful Idiot layers different forms of collectivity organized around notions of labour and gender. But if Iveković’s montage of spaces then and now signal the transformation of consumerism in the public sphere, Pop-Mitić directs her work at the roles of gender and labour in this process of transformation. Photographs documenting Pop-Mitić in the process of gluing the small paintings to building facades are displayed as part of murals depicting middleaged women who have been left unemployed by transition. The mural work connects our experience of the artwork to the disenfranchised workers and to the passers-by in the photographs, capturing the lived temporality of the postYugoslav cultural space. The emphasis on temporally articulated traces of difference in the present is also addressed in the works 366 liberation rituals (2008) by Igor Grubić, and 365

23

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25

Also, this ideology of the East catching up with the missed modernity of the West is inherent not only to the ideologues on the Right. Even Jürgen Habermas defined the 1989 revolutions, famously, as the ‘catching up revolutions’, because they gave Eastern Europe the chance to catch up with the missed modernity of the West. This defines the time and space of the East as the space of belated modernity. See Jürgen Habermas, ‘What Does Socialism Mean Today?’ New Left Review no. 1/183 (1990): 3–21. Here, I am drawing on Sarah Sharma’s articulation of temporality as micropolitics of social control. See Sharma, In the Meantime: Temporality and Cultural Politics (London: Duke University Press, 2014), 9. Images of the work are available at http://www.mg-lj.si/en/exhibitions/1854/exhibited-works/.

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(images of time) (2013) by Radenko Milak.26 These artworks explicitly position the experience of history within the duration of one year. Grubić dedicated 2008 to performing actions in public spaces of transitional Croatia, including correcting nationalist graffiti, placing five-pointed red stars on Christmas trees, putting banners on public monuments, and colouring the water red in the fountain of the Croatian National Bank in Zagreb. Milak produced a watercolour painting each day over the course of 2013, using documentary photography of local and global historical events in the twentieth and twentyfirst centuries as source material. Both artists capture lived experiences of history punctured by multiple temporally layered events. Historical visions, anniversaries and milestones jostle lived experience; the labour of artists connects with the destruction and disappearance of the working class in the present; and the production of ‘new’ national histories and traditions refutes the past that has been repressed. The mapping of seemingly unrelated historical events against the ahistorical present mobilizes difference in order to imagine possibilities beyond the present, orienting towards what Rosi Braidotti calls ‘affirmative alternatives’.27 These alternatives refer not only to rememberings of repressed histories within their material and lived contexts, but also to nonnormative forms of belonging that are enabled in this process. Identifying with history through these works means galvanizing the past that ‘never existed’: remembering Yugoslavia as a political agent in transitional aesthetics.

Yugoslavia in-between, post and beyond Marta Popivoda’s essay film Yugoslavia, How Ideology Moved Our Collective Body (2013) traces the experience of Yugoslavia through mass public displays of collective bodies. The film consists of television footage, aired between 1945 and 2000, of public state celebrations, public counterdemonstrations, gatherings and protests. The footage is accompanied by a soundtrack of revolutionary songs from the periods, and Popivoda, in voiceover, reflects on

26

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Image of Grubić’s work is available at http://kadist.org/work/366-liberation-rituals/. Images of Milak’s work are available at http://radenko-milak.blogspot.com.au/2013/03/365.html Rosi Braidotti, ‘Nomadism: Against Methodological Nationalism’, Policy Futures in Education 8, no. 3–4 (2010): 408–18, 413.

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Figure 1 Marta Popivoda, Yugoslavia, How Ideology Moved Our Collective Body (film still), 2013.

the events from the perspective of someone who came of age during Yugoslavia’s dissolution. Part of the ‘last generation’ of Tito’s Pioneers – as suggested by the opening footage in the film which shows primary school children swearing the Pioneer oath – Popivoda’s voiceover tells a personal story that intersects with the mass performances. Her lived experience of this period provides a counterpoint through which to understand the images of choreographed mass bodies. Summoning continuities and discontinuities between her memory of Yugoslav socialism and its public displays, Popivoda’s film ‘traces how communist ideology was gradually exhausted through changing relations between the people, ideology, and the state’.28 The ideological hollowing-out of socialism can be mapped across the two main sections of the film. The first part deals with public displays of the state 1945–89, and the second with public displays of the crumbling of that state. In the first part, we see the formation of Yugoslavia’s collective identity at the 1946

28

See https://vimeo.com/ondemand/yugoslavia/69460014 (accessed 19 May 2016).

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Rally of the People’s Front of Yugoslavia; post-war May Day parades; Youth Work Actions building roads and railways; celebrations of Youth Day including the Relay of Youth; and 1968 student protests. This section concludes with news footage from 1980 announcing the death of Tito and public displays of mourning (mass groups of citizens observing a minute of silence). It includes Tito’s funeral, which is still regarded as one of the largest ever state funerals, and included high-ranking officials from 128 countries from both sides of the Cold War. The second half of the film starts with the celebration of Tito’s birthday in 1987, set against the rising tide of nationalism. We then shift to the 1989 Gazimestan Rally, the infamous speech by Milošević (on the podium featured in Demand’s work discussed earlier), and shots of the crowd singing Serb nationalist songs. We then see footage of demonstrations in Belgrade (1991 and 1996) and the ‘5th of October revolution’ in 2000 that overthrew Milošević. The film concludes with footage of burning and looting during the protests, described by Popivoda’s voiceover as the moment that joins the failure of communism with the misery of what she calls new individualism. Yugoslavia, How Ideology Moved Our Collective Body explores how socialism in Yugoslavia performed ideology through public displays of collective bodies. It recalls Renata Salecl’s description of the youth as a central point around which the socialist ideology in Yugoslavia structured itself: The youth being the embodiment of the future generation of communism presented a traumatic point around which the socialist ideology structured itself, the point through which the socialist ideology tried to affirm its goals. … But because of this very investment in the future through youth, the youth was also a kind of ‘alien’, an agency that disturbed the socialist symbolic universe. Socialist ideology therefore tried to symbolize youth so that its traumatic character and its contingency became invisible. In this process of symbolization, socialist ideology produced diametrically opposed definitions of youth and of the goals society must have regarding its social role.29

Salecl argues that at every stage of socialism, the official ideology reacted to youth in a different way, amounting to collective bodies: as a ‘communist ideal’ (after the Second World War); as vulnerable to infiltration from ‘external

29

Salecl, The Spoils of Freedom, 44–7.

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enemy’ (at the end of the 1940s); as evil in itself (1950s and 1960s); as filled with internal intellectual enemies (1970s); and as a contamination of the political space (1980s). Popivoda’s film captures the changing forms of collectivity that accompanied the crumbling of Yugoslav socialism in the late 1980s: the socialist youth as representative of the future became the nationalist revision of the past. But yet within this transformation, the collective body of socialism was replaced by a post-socialist ‘individualism’ that was supposed to overthrow totalitarianism. Popivoda shows the convergence of the two transformations in scenes of destruction and looting, echoing Buden’s claim that shortly after 1989, post-socialist revolutionary subjects became historically immature and politically undeveloped obstacles to the introduction of democracy.30 We can trace this infantilizing discourse in former Yugoslavia through three figures that emerged between the late 1980s and 2000s as the embodiment of the different stages of Yugoslavia’s dissolution. The internal tensions of socialism during the late 1980s and early 1990s were explained through the figure of homo yugoslavicus. Discussing local perceptions of transition in Croatia, Ines Prica suggests that the ‘unrealistically comfortable’ and ‘undemanding’ life under ‘unrealistic socialism’ in Yugoslavia is held as one of the main culprits for the difficulty in adjusting to the new conditions.31 Prica identifies anthropological accounts that argue how the experience of Yugoslav socialism produced a rhetorical figure of ‘homo Sovieticus squared’ enhanced with a ‘Balkan difference’: a subject that has interiorized a series of irreconcilable binaries of state-based socialism: party/ people, repression/freedom, coercion/resistance, truth/propaganda, economy/ grey economy, official culture/counterculture, totalitarian language/everyday speech, public/private identity.32

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Buden euphemistically uses the term ‘children of post-Communism’ to describe this shift. See Boris Buden, Zona Prelaska: O Kraju Postkomunizma (Beograd: Fabrika Knjiga, 2012). Ines Prica, ‘Problem Interpretacije Tranzicije iz “Nerealnog Socijalizma”’, in Antropologija Postsocijalizma, ed. Vladimir Ribić (Beograd: Srpski genealoški centar, 2007), 24–50, 44. Prica is drawing on the work of Alexei Yurchak, who critiqued pseudo-psychological observers of life under socialism that created the rhetorical figure of ‘homo Sovieticus’, such as Francoise Thom’s Newspeak: The Language of Soviet Communism (London: The Claridge Press, 1989). Thom argued that in the Soviet Union linguistic symbols lost all meaning because of the ideologically contradictory and fragmented reality, producing a split subject of ‘homo Sovieticus’. See Alexei Yurchak, ‘Soviet Hegemony of Form: Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 3, no. 45 (2003): 480–510.

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The early to mid-1990s descent into nationalist violence was symbolized through the figure of homo balkanicus. Maria Todorova argues that there have been attempts in literature and popular discourse to postulate the linguistic and cultural basis for ‘the existence of a homo balkanicus’: Europe’s dark shadow and despised alter ego.33 She argues that ‘Balkan mentality’ has been one of the most abused mythologemes in journalistic and popular discourse surrounding the war.34 This emphasis on the mentality of the locals as the explanation for historical events is evident in countless journalistic and academic accounts that dwell on ‘transgenerational socialization of negative stereotypes’ and publicize a ‘destructive ethos’ that has purportedly been passed down through generations.35 Post-2000 transition to neoliberalism became symbolized through homo postcommunisticus, a term used by Serbian psychologist Mikloš Biro to describe the ‘socio-psychological obstacles to the development of democracy’ in the process of post-socialist transition in the Balkans.36 Biro argues that certain attitudes that were socially learnt under the long-term communist rule have impeded successful implementation of free-market liberal democracies in the region: these attitudes are complacency, corruption, nepotism, clientelism and authoritarianism. Biro’s critique is primarily aimed at the political oligarchy in the region, which in most cases features actors – or their pupils – from the previous system. In this respect, there is validity to his argument about the autocrats as symptomatic of a corrupt, bureaucratized socialist state, who not only contributed to its implosion, but also hypocritically emerged as great benefactors in the process. However, Biro’s analysis of homo postcommunisticus devolves into generalizations about mentality in the region, depicting the

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Maria Todorova, ‘Introduction: Learning Memory, Remembering Identity’, in Balkan Identities: Nation and Memory, ed. Maria Todorova (New York: New York University Press, 2004), 1–24, 6. Todorova, ‘Introduction’, 5. While Todorova (inspired by the work of Edward Said) was the first to identify this discourse, her work is part of a broader critique of misrepresentations of the Balkans that includes literature across a number of theoretical positions including psychoanalysis, postcolonialism and Marxist critique. Other key texts include Vesna Goldsworthy, Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of the Imagination (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998); and Dušan I. Bjelić and Obrad Savić, ed., Balkan as Metaphor. Between Globalization and Fragmentation (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2002). Sabrina Ramet identifies the work of Leonard J. Cohen internationally and Branislav Anzulović regionally as typical of this historical determinist approach. See Sabrina Ramet, Thinking about Yugoslavia: Scholarly Debates about the Yugoslav Breakup and the Wars in Bosnia and Kosovo (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 60–2. Mikloš Biro, Homo Postcommunisticus (Beograd: Biblioteka XX Vek, 2006), 11.

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historical condition of the decimated working class (a consequence of transitional deregulation rather than of ‘unrealistic’ socialism) as ‘its own fault’ for not being in sync with market-based democracy. These identities all articulate post-Yugoslav subjects as either historical dupes who had been forced to accept the irrationality of socialism before it was abandoned for neoliberalism, or immature political subjects incompatible with democracy. They all inevitably culminate in the xenophobic and violent form of collectivity captured so well in Igor Grubić’s artwork East Side Story (2006–8). The two-channel video installation juxtaposes documentary footage with a re-enactment of that footage and captures events that in many ways function as a post scriptum to Popivoda’s narrative. Grubić combines television footage taken from two separate LGBTI parades that took place in Belgrade (2001) and Zagreb (2002), at which the participants were subjected to verbal and physical violence by neo-Nazi groups and their sympathizers, as well as by passers-by. Grubić alternates footage of violence from the two parades with a re-enactment of the events by a group of dancers in the same locations for audiences of disinterested pedestrians. One way of understanding the scenes of mob violence towards the LGBTI minority is as political extremism, bred in post-socialist ethnonationalism, that starts turning towards ‘internal others’ in the absence of a clear national enemy. Yet, there are striking similarities and compatibilities between anti-LGBTI and nationalist groups: they are mirror images of each other, shouting the same insults (steeped in religious ethnonationalist heteronormative conservatism) and using the same slogans (with the national prefix as the only difference). They are the fusion of the patriarchal elements of socialism – glorification of the heterosexual family – with the discourse of post-socialist moral majority.37 But what if there is another way of understanding post-Yugoslav identity beyond the ultraconservative xenophobic mob, opportunistic neoliberals or orphans of socialism? What if we can imagine a political consciousness that re-evaluates Yugoslav socialism as a historical event in full light of its shortcomings, and galvanizes it as a political agent that cuts through the neoliberal–nationalist nexus? In recent years, there has been a growing body of work dedicated to rethinking the historical legacy of Yugoslavia in the

37

Salecl, The Spoils of Freedom, 25–6.

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present.38 As Tanja Petrović explains, these contemporary cultural practices of remembering Yugoslavia introduce narratives in which Yugoslavia is a flawed but nevertheless emancipatory project with an international orientation: a society that has empowered social groups such as workers, women and youth to experience themselves as part of a global collective.39 Recalling the lived experiences of these social groups becomes a political act when juxtaposed against the present in which such identities have been disenfranchised by the ethnonationalist elites. Empowered workers have become disempowered precariat; women and the unemployed youth have become marginal social minorities burdening the economy; internationalism has become the desire to enter the global market. Yugoslavia, How Ideology Moved Our Collective Body incorporates the affective experiences of the abovementioned social groups (women, workers, youth, children) into the history of Yugoslavia, in order to problematize the production of ideological narratives during its existence and dissolution. Rather than as moralistic, revisionist or nostalgic, this experience is captured as being complex and fragmented, through the artwork’s acknowledgement of ambiguities and disorder in lived experience. This acknowledgement includes critically engaging the internal contradictions of the narratives of Yugoslav history as a way to de-essentialize them. Popivoda’s film shows how transitional aesthetics can capture a collective subjectivity that is based on dis-identification from normative models of identity, while also recalling the internationalist

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For studies of post-Yugoslav literature, film and visual culture, see Vlad Beronja and Stijn Vervaet, ed., Post-Yugoslav Constellations: Archive, Memory, and Trauma in Contemporary Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian Literature and Culture
(Berlin: Walter de Gruyter GmbH, 2016); Rajka Gorup, ed., After Yugoslavia: The Cultural Spaces of a Vanished Land (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013); Gordana Crnković, Post-Yugoslav Literature and Film (London: Continuum, 2012); Slobodan Karamanić and Daniel Šuber, ed., Retracing Images: Visual Culture After Yugoslavia (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2012). There have also been several exhibitions dealing with post-Yugoslav artistic practices. For catalogues, see Gal Kirn, Gašper Kralj and Bojana Piškur, ed., New Public Spaces: Dissensual Political and Artistis Practices in the Post-Yugoslav Context (Moderna Galerija Ljubljana: Ian Van Eyck Academie Maastricht, 2008); Zorana Dojić and Jelena Vesić, ed., Political Practices of (Post-) Yugoslav Art: Retrospective 01 (Beograd: Prelom, 2010); Naomi Henning and Jovana Komnenić, Spaceship Yugoslavia: The Suspension of Time (Berlin: Neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst, 2011); Antea Stoijnić and Nikola Dedić, De/re/construction: Space, Time, Memories, 15th Biennial of Art in Pančevo, Serbia, September 2012. Petrović, Yuropa, 159. This is not to suggest that Yugoslavia here operates as an idealized internationalist past, but rather what Ivana Spasić calls ‘conditional cosmopolitanism’, where Yugoslav international anti-racist, anti-colonial orientation was often connected with forms of elitist parochialism, which she calls ‘our-thingness’ (našijenstvo). See Ivana Spasić, Kultura na Delu: Društvena Transformacija Srbije iz Burdijeovske Perspective (Beograd: Fabrika Knjiga, 2013), 207–16.

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and emancipatory class structure of Yugoslavia and thus rendering the present a productive political space for reflecting on history, temporality and the future. The space has room for the notion of ‘social property’ and worker self-management; the conception of a moderate socialist welfare state; and the notion of Non-Aligned international politics.40 Popivoda articulates a post-Yugoslav subject that harnesses multiple histories and temporalities, via transitional aesthetics, to generate affirmative forms of belonging. *** This chapter has argued that in the cultural imagination of Yugoslavia, transitional aesthetics offer an alternative to the neoliberal, nationalist present, and also an awareness of the transformative political value of the past. I have outlined dialectical montage, based on Walter Benjamin’s philosophy of history, as being the critical modality of transitional aesthetics: a way to recall Yugoslavia as a historical event, and to problematize normative accounts of the present as historical inevitability. In engaging nationalist and neoliberal teleology, the politics of transitional aesthetics operate on two interconnected levels. First, they repoliticize models of democracy that fall outside of neoliberal managerialism: from the social state and worker self-management, through the Non-Aligned rejection of geopolitical hegemonies, to modernist utopias of emancipation. Second, they recall the idea of Yugoslav socialism against historicism, revisionism and denial, which act questions the very possibility of remembering after the ‘end of history’, in the post-political, post-historical present. The chapters that follow examine how these two levels of politics play across key historical images: migration, translation, tradition, monuments and archives. They show how transitional aesthetics emerge in the lived experience against teleologies of nationalism and neoliberalism.

40

Another work that should be mentioned here, in particular in relation to Non-Aligned politics, are the series of performance lectures (2014–) ‘On Neutrality: Between Non-Aligned Movements and Neoliberal Curatorial Economies’ by curator Jelena Vesić and artist Rachel O’Reilly. These lectures make a claim for ‘active neutrality’ of the Non-Aligned Movement as a dynamic category of position-taking in contemporary art and politics.

2

‘We Came to Take Your Jobs Away’: Migration and Agency in the Work of Tanja Ostojić and Angela Melitopoulos

Bosnian artist Šejla Kamerić’s work EU CITIZENS/OTHERS (2000), produced for the Manifesta 3 exhibition in Ljubljana, Slovenia, was a direct response to the regulation of movement across borders in the European Union.1 The installation comprised border-crossing signs plastered with the terms ‘EU CITIZENS’ and ‘OTHERS’ on the iconic Tromostovje (Triple Bridge), a group of three bridges that connects the historical part of Ljubljana with the city centre. The setting for Kamerić’s work was a pretext for an exploration of mobility after the post-1989 unification of Europe. Following the establishment of the Schengen Area in 1995, Europe was split into two zones, the internal memberstate zone that permits almost unlimited mobility and the non-member zone that highly restricts international movement. EU CITIZENS/OTHERS featured different signs on the different sides of the bridge, transforming the casual movement of pedestrians into acts of border crossing. The techniques of border control and management of people’s movement were mapped against the public space and set in the idyllic Ljubljana cityscape with striking results. EU CITIZENS/OTHERS is driven by the key issues that underpin this chapter: movement across borders as a privilege, infrastructures that define the space between the European Union and its ‘others’, and the temporality of the migrant. Kamerić stages the division of incoming passengers into manageable groups to remind us of the geopolitical hierarchy of international travel, a hierarchy that would also apply to the audience at Manifesta. To a holder of a passport of a state that does not have visa requirements for entry into

1

Image of the work is available at http://www.sejlakameric.com/art/eu_others.htm.

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the European Union (such as Australia), the work here recalls the feeling of curious amusement by being classified as the (privileged) exotic other during their international travels. Yet to a holder of a passport that carries heavy visa requirements – or to someone like me, who surrendered such a passport through gaining Australian citizenship – this work is a painful reminder of the experience of being stopped at the border, intimidated as a second-class subject, and possibly refused entry, detained or deported. While the hierarchy that underpins international movement across borders drives the meaning of EU CITIZENS/OTHERS, the work also taps how this hierarchy has been mapped onto the post-socialist transition of former Yugoslavia. Slovenia was the first former Yugoslav republic to become a member of the Eurozone. Kamerić’s gesture plays on this status of Slovenia as the initial outpost of ‘Fortress Europa’ (Croatia also became a member state in 2011) by setting the work in a public space in Ljubljana. In the symbolic hierarchy of former Yugoslavia, Slovenia has been historically considered the ‘most European’ Yugoslav republic, based on its presumed cultural, social and political liberalism. This proclamation of ‘Europeanness’ was used as a tool of identity-building in the wake of Yugoslavia. It established a system of ranking the former republics according to their perceived degree of primitiveness: to Slovenia, Croatia is the geographical and symbolic start of the Balkan primitivism that does not belong in Europe (proven by Slovenia’s 2008–9 boycott of Croatia’s ascension to the European Union); to Croatia, Serbia is the start of the primitive Balkan (as exemplified in the Croatian delegate boycott of Serbia’s move towards ascension in 2016); to Serbia, the border of the ‘dark Balkans’ starts in Kosovo.2 This symbolic process of cultural ranking through small differences was named ‘nesting Balkanism’3 by Maria Todorova, and here it helps us to describe the dynamic of maintaining borders between Europe and the Balkans. As the symbolic hierarchy of Europeanness is internalized, geopolitical relations in the region are articulated through the discourse of gatekeeping.

2

3

Slavoj Žižek describes this as the deferral of the ‘Balkan ghost’. See Slavoj Žižek, The Fragile Absolute (London: Verso, 2000), 5. A few years earlier Milica Bakić-Hayden described the same process as ‘nesting Orientalism’. Both were in different ways drawing on the work of Edward Said in Orientalism (London: Pantheon Books, 1978). See Bakić-Hayden and Robert Hayden, ‘Orientalist Variations on the Theme “Balkans”: Symbolic Geography in Recent Yugoslav Cultural Politics’, Slavic Review 51, no. 1 (Spring 1992): 4; and Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (London: Oxford University Press, 1997), 19.

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Recalling this discourse also helps to further clarify the meaning of ‘otherness’ in Kamerić’s work. If EU CITIZENS/OTHERS intentionally left ambiguous the question of who the ‘others’ are, Kamerić answered it two years later in her most well-known work, Bosnian Girl (2002): a confronting photograph of Kamerić that is overlaid with the wartime graffiti of a Dutch United Nations soldier serving in Srebrenica: ‘No Teeth … ? A Moustache … ? Smel Like Shit … ? [sic] Bosnian Girl!’4 The striking contrast between the image of a self-affirming woman and the crude sexist contempt of an anonymous soldier is a powerful condemnation of Western complicity in the Srebrenica genocide, wherein UN Dutch soldiers stood by while Bosnian Serb forces murdered 8,000 Bosniac men and boys. Further, the restated words, that were directed at the refugee women of Srebrenica, also recall the urban/rural divide in former Yugoslavia and the tendency (even by locals) to view refugees as ‘primitive’.5 Bosnian Girl deals in the interplay between local conceptions of taste and cultural identity. It mobilizes a series of oppositions that map onto transition, and which are maintained in the region: cosmopolitan–primitive, urban– rural, Europe–Balkans, superior–inferior. Yet, there is ambiguity at the core of Kamerić’s work as representative of Bosnia, delivering another layer of meaning. The term ‘Bosnian girl’ denotes all young female inhabitants of Bosnia regardless of their ethnic origin, even though the graffiti reproduced in the work refers to refugee women in Srebrenica under protection from the United Nations, all of whom would have been Bosnian Muslims or Bosniaks. Kamerić points to the cultural ignorance and insensitivity of the graffiti author towards the people he was deployed to protect, but is aware that the term ‘Bosnian’ does not carry an ethnic denominator and signifies a transnational, regional sense of belonging. Using the regional adjective ‘Bosnian’ to describe oneself in transition is the symbolic equivalent of calling oneself Yugoslav: both are stigmatized and politically charged. The complexity of Bosnian Girl and the contentious relation between its meaning and the group it purports to represent raises questions about the agency of any artist speaking for an oppressed and marginalized group.

4 5

Image of the work is available at http://www.sejlakameric.com/art/bosnian_girl.htm. Elissa Helms, ‘East and West Kiss: Gender, Orientalism, and Balkanism in Muslim-Majority BosniaHerzegovina’, Slavic Review 67, no. 1 (Spring 2008): 88–119, 112.

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Chapter 4 will discuss in more detail this position of ‘local informant’, taken up both wittingly and unwittingly by artists from the Balkan region who exhibit local idiosyncrasy in an international context in order to establish a ‘dialogue’ between the periphery and the centre. In the context of the present chapter, I am interested in the way Kamerić’s work opens up the relation between migration and art as a vehicle for social mobility in troubled regions. I consider how transitional aesthetics engages with EU migration policies in the context of transition. In the following, I examine images by artists in various states of cultural, spatial and temporal displacement – works that posit a connection between economic and political exploitation, migration, and art as a marker of social mobility. The positioning of the artist as a ‘migrant subject’ appears in the work Looking for a Husband with EU Passport (2000–5) by Tanja Ostojić, where the artist literally uses the work to gain entry into the European Union, and in Corridor X (2006) by Angela Melitopoulos, which juxtaposes the artist’s own biography and subject position with those of people she encounters in the Balkans. These two works critique EU geopolitics, specifically the current laws regulating EU migration. In so doing, they signal new subjectivities and temporalities that are emerging from migration in transition. Transitional aesthetics here manifest in the creative use of strategies employed by migrants and refugees to circumvent unjust laws, and also in different models of artistic agency: from irreducible cultural difference to the flexibility of the decentred neoliberal subject. Ostojić captures the agentic transition from subject to commodity, or from person (cultural difference) to resource (flexible neoliberal personality), blurring the distinction between the inside and the outside that is used to define the space between former Yugoslavia and the European Union. Melitopoulos connects her experience – her family history, trips through Europe and post-Second World War migration – with the experience of migration, and juxtaposes the construction of a unified European space and time (through transport corridors) against discontinuities.

Temporality of Europe Transitional aesthetics intervene into the metaphorical space of Europe at a time when the very notion of Europe as a territory framed by borders is

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being redefined by the realities of the twenty-first century. As of 2015, global headlines abound about the mass exodus of refugees from Eritrea, Syria and Iraq into the European Union. The reaction of many European countries has included the erection of border fences (between Hungary and Serbia) and heavy-handed police response.6 Events such as the Paris attacks in 2015, the Nice attack in 2016 and series of sexual assaults on the 2016 New Year’s Eve in Cologne fuelled the far-right parties’ feeding on fears of cultural otherness, and once again reignited the Left/Right ‘migration debate’ in the European Union. In this context, borders that define Europe are shifting away from clear spatial structures that regulate and define territory, sovereignty and population, towards what Etienne Balibar calls ‘borderlands’: a multiplicity of overlapping and intersecting spaces that mediate tensions between internal and external forces and movements.7 Borders in Europe are not defined as fixed by their relation to the territory of the nation state, but rather by the historical and geopolitical construction and multiplication of such territories. For instance, we can map the geopolitical paradoxes of the present by overlaying the spatial limits of Europe according to the different bodies that define it: Council of Europe, NATO, the Schengen Zone and Corridor X all have different versions of limits and exclusions within the European Union. In this context, as Slavoj Žižek suggests, the question ‘Are immigrants a threat to Europe?’ needs to be replaced with the question ‘What does this obsession with the immigrant threat tell us about the weakness of Europe?’8 This reversal highlights the fact that the fear of immigrants (they are hidden fundamentalist terrorists; they undermine our traditions and values) is an ideological pathology that is currently necessary to sustain the edifice of ‘European identity’. I am interested in the way in which transitional aesthetics tap into the temporal aspect of the border to question the normalization of ‘Europe’, and generate affirmative forms of belonging. Transitional aesthetics connect the historical continuities and discontinuities of Europe to the history of

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In terms of responses to the refugee crisis, I should mention the notable exception of Germany. Also, the ruthless response to the influx of refugees by many European countries was in sharp contrast to the solidarity displayed by many of their citizens. Etienne Balibar, ‘Europe as Borderland’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 27 (2009): 190–215, 200. Slavoj Žižek, ‘Stranger Danger: To Resolve the Migrant Crisis We Must Recognize the Stranger Within Ourselves’, In These Times, 19 March 2016, http://inthesetimes.com/article/18991/strangerdanger-to-resolve-the-migrant-crisis-we-must-recognize-the-strange (accessed 23 March 2016).

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Yugoslavia as a way to question Eurocentrism as a historical event. Ostojić and Melitopoulos portray a prior European identity as against its restrictive exclusionary present. The displaced people in these artworks recall Yugoslavia as European ‘before Europe’; a cosmopolitan international identity that was dedicated to worker solidarity, emancipatory anti-colonial politics (of the Non-Aligned) and a vision of working for a better future. For the migrant, in these artworks, the idea of Europe is not connected to the European Union but to a global democratic welfare state based on socialism, democracy and freedom of movement. (Post-1989, this utopian societal ideal – in the Yugoslav region the idea of a transnational community – has been replaced by the monopolization of states into a supranational European Union.) This democratic understanding of collectivism is based in the practical knowledge and lived experience of women and other marginal subjects in response to the changing infrastructure and bureaucracy of the European Union, and is artistically rendered by mapping materially grounded and specific locations against historical changes. In this way, transitional aesthetics expose the shortcomings of the narrow and normative notion of Europe today, by showing another option of Europe, which aligns with what Rosi Braidotti describes as a ‘nomadic European citizenship’ distributed across social relations in diverse spaces and timeframes, and strikes an affirmative route between empowerment and entrapment in the existing power structures.9 The nomadic European citizen corresponds to the notion of ‘migrant artist’, defined by social mobility and use of cultural capital as labour. In becoming physically and historically displaced and stripped of their right to travel, Balkan artists are resorting to strategies of micro-resistance within the existing structures. I draw on Thomas Nail’s understanding of ‘the migrant’ as a persona of ‘mobile social position or spectrum that people move into and out of under certain social conditions of mobility’.10 Nail’s understanding of migration as a regime of social motion (both free and forced) pulls focus on the socio-historical conditions that produce migration, from forced labour and mass displacement of people to mass migration in search of employment. The artworks discussed

9

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Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Theory: The Portable Rosi Braidotti (West Sussex: Columbia University Press, 2011), 241. Thomas Nail, The Figure of the Migrant (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015), 236.

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in this chapter offer images of migration created by different conditions and forms of capitalism: forced labour under the nineteenth-century nation state, social engineering and mass migration under the socialist state, and the mass infrastructural projects of the global neoliberal enterprise. In studying these artworks, migration appears as a field of social motions that not only move through situations, but also shift in historico-temporal terms. Movements are repeated under different conditions, mobility becomes historical repetition and cultural heritage becomes a form of cultural passport.

Looking for a husband with EU passport In 2000, Ostojić placed a personal advertisement announcing her search for a husband, and after extensive correspondence with potential suitors, met and married the suitable candidate in 2001. After receiving a visa, she moved to Dusseldorf, and in 2005 Ostojić and her husband divorced. Looking for a Husband with EU Passport incorporates photography, video, installation, performance and online interaction into a powerful critique of the exploitative gender and racial politics implicit in EU migration laws. Since the establishment of the Schengen Area in 1995, continental Europe has been split into two zones, the internal member-state zone that permits mobility and the non-member zone that restricts movement. Ostojić explains that her work addressed the inequalities created by this arrangement: In order to claim my own rights, which I have been deprived of by current EU laws, I explicitly applied the strategy of tricking the law … to gain the right to move freely and live and work in diverse locations.11

By marrying ‘for papers’ in Looking for a Husband with EU Passport, Ostojić intentionally transgressed the rules of migration and exploited the legal institution of marriage in order to gain economic independence and geographic mobility. In this sense, Ostojić ’s work is part of a broader artistic response to Europe’s exclusionary migration policies, which uses

11

Tanja Ostojić, ‘Crossing Borders: Development of Different Artistic Strategies’, in Integration Impossible? The Politics of Migration in the Artwork of Tanja Ostojić (Berlin: Argosbooks, 2009), 161–71, 163.

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‘ethnographic procedures and documentary tactics to expose the living conditions [of non-member-state citizens and the] … economic and political structures that produce those conditions’.12 This kind of work shows that, today, borders are not merely territorial or geographical edges, but complex social institutions for managing the movement, time and space of global capitalism. Ostojić approaches contemporary mechanisms of power by placing herself inside the power structures and thereby exposing their underlying racism, sexism and general intolerance. She embodies the figure of the ‘illegal’ migrant as subjected to a full institutional, political and armed force that is supported by an international network for gathering and managing information. Her work explores the way in which vulnerability is distributed across sociopolitical and economic processes.13 In Looking for a Husband with EU Passport, Ostojić indefinitely occupies the position of the vulnerable migrant who comes up against the bureaucratic structures that define the difference between the European Union and the Balkans. Her border crossing is an autobiographical act in which she exchanges her identity for a passport; she treats her life (her personal history) and her gender as information to be processed and articulated through the border system. However, and crucially, in Ostojić’s ‘tricking’ of the law, rather than being simply vulnerable, she strategically uses her vulnerability. At the same time as taking a subjective position – of the vulnerable migrant – Ostojić also identifies with the administrative power and process that bears on that identity. In her study of Ostojić’s earlier Strategies of Success project, Suzana Milevska argues that the powerful gesture in Ostojić’s work is the over-identification with the ‘established regimes of power and representation’.14 In deliberately occupying both positions at the same time, Ostojić collapses the premise of the debate on migration; she simultaneously represents both sides of the debate. On the one hand, she harnesses the

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T. J. Demos, The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary during Global Crisis (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013), 15. A more recent example of artists dealing with the fencing of Europe in response to the ‘global refugee crisis’ is the series of wall drawings Fragile Presence (2016) by Rena Rädle and Vladan Jeremić. See https://visualcultureaberdeen.wordpress.com/2015/03/23/tanja-Ostojić-marriage-migrationmarkets-misunderstandings/. Suzana Milevska, ‘Objects and Bodies: Objectification and Over-identification in Tanja Ostojić’s Art Projects’, Feminist Review no. 81 (2005): 112–8, 118.

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conservative right-wing paranoia of migrants as manipulative foreigners thwarting the system in order to get social and material benefits (‘our jobs’). Yet on the other hand, she plays out the well-intentioned but often patronizing critique of that paranoia wherein migrants ‘just want to have the freedoms that we take for granted’, while ‘because they are so desperate they are willing to do anything’. Ostojić’s work proceeds by staging a series of events that cohere into a narrative as they are understood though the bureaucratic process of migration. It follows a temporal logic, such as that articulated by Lane Relyea in his study of the neoliberalization of contemporary art, in which ‘the basis of identity and meaning shift from territorial shapes to temporal situations’.15 Relyea is interested in the increasingly precarious economic status of artists, and the increasing similarities between the global art market and deregulated neoliberalism. In this milieu, artists (and the legion of gallery workers) are forced into series of unstable short-term contracts in a permanent condition of precarity, as artists transfer their cultural capital through series of episodic encounters with institutions. Applying this logic to her encounters with bureaucratic procedure, Ostojić layers the multiple temporalities of economic migration into a single temporal montage: the (artistic) event of her sustained performance. This layering is already apparent in the ‘personals’ advertisement released online and in art magazines by Ostojić in 2000, announcing her search for a husband. It features a confrontational photograph of Ostojić, naked with her head and body shaved. The photograph is staged as an event, following conventions of a 24-hour news cycle media narrative. It transmits a captivating story of an individual openly using the legal institution of marriage to transgress the rules of migration and gain economic independence and geographic mobility. Ostojić isolates her body in the photograph, where it becomes the social body, the ground from which a series of larger relationships are established (gender and the media complex; gender and migration; sex trade in migration). It operates as a dialectical image by bringing together conflicting meanings in a single frame (seduction and violence; love and pragmatism; advertising and the labour camp; desperation and empowerment). Ostojić

15

Lane Relyea, Your Everyday Art World (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2014), 33.

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intentionally compresses oppositional meanings into the image, forcing us to think through these connections and slowing down our experience of time in the image. In Looking for a Husband with EU Passport, this initial image is then expanded into a larger story – and a larger series of events – involving documentation of corresponding with potential suitors, meeting the suitable candidate Klemens G. in Belgrade in 2001 in a public event that was also broadcast online, and marrying him in front of two witnesses (who wrote an article about the wedding for an exhibition catalogue). After receiving a visa, Ostojić moved to Dusseldorf and lived there for three years. In 2005 she organized a ‘Divorce Party’ in a Berlin gallery. Ostojić expands the contradictions contained in the initiating image into a framework within which to deploy herself within the legal (and art) system, utilizing the temporal dialectic between events and their narration through bureaucracy/documentation. She uses laws and legal institutions as the material of her work in order to repurpose their management of movement across borders. The work under discussion acts as a series of events wherein everyday life intersects with administrative procedure. Looking for a Husband with EU Passport is part of Ostojić’s Crossing Borders Series, that features earlier works about getting into the EU. In Illegal Border Crossing (2000), Ostojić illegally entered Austria from Slovenia, which was not in the Schengen Area at that time. A few months later in Waiting for a Visa (2000), Ostojić unsuccessfully tried to apply for Austrian visa by queuing for six hours in front of the Austrian consulate in Belgrade. Looking For a Husband was the third ‘action’ in the series. Ostojić’s success in being admitted to the European Union and her continuing struggles with gaining permanent residence mean that in some ways the series is still active. Her ongoing dealings with securing permanent residency suggest a continuity between queuing for visa, detention and the recurrent experience of migrants as targets of ‘integration’ in metropolitan areas. The work functions less as a performance than as an event with no clear temporal boundaries. It questions how long migrants remain migrants – such temporalization, which singles out certain moments, produces an alternative chronology. Ostojić does not so much ‘stage’ events as ‘exhibit’ them via the constellation of oppositional elements built into the process of migration: the European Union and fortress Europa, mobility and stasis, humanitarianism, exploitation. Every step of both the migration and the artmaking process is

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complicated and problematized by its reverse. Importantly, the events are not staged, but rather they simply collide with the daily events of the artist’s life. There is no distinction between the two modes of being. She registers events not only as they actually happen, but also as they realign (with) her life. This collision of events in art and life is integral to how Looking for a Husband with EU Passport shifts the understanding of the institutional nexus that regulates migration in the Balkans. If Ostojić’s work is made up of events, positioned in constellations, that reflect the temporality of migratory experience, it is also about the confrontation of migratory temporal experience with the abstract time of capital. Sandro Mezzadra’s and Brett Neilson’s analysis of contemporary border regimes introduces the term ‘temporal border’ to highlight the deployment of administrative delay, filtering and detention as technologies that produce temporalities of waiting, holding and withdrawal as migrant subjects negotiate their way through the rules.16 For Mezzadra and Neilson, the tensions between these temporalities are played out across the many borders that cross their [prospective migrants’] biographies, often in ways that question the easy chronology of future and past. Echoes of the past and uncertainty about the future invade a present in which experiences of life and techniques of measure at once overlap and clash.17

This description resonates with Ostojić’s endeavour, which blurs the distinction between historical condition and personal narrative (the dissolution of Yugoslavia rendering her without papers and limiting her mobility), generating an uneasy non-chronology that necessitates a conscious transformation of her subjective position within the work. Starting from a position of cynical distance towards institutions, Ostojić evolves a new model of artistic practice and agency: improvisational pragmatism. She performs transition between two models of artistic agency, one based in irreducible cultural difference, and the other based on the position of the entrepreneurial neoliberal subject. In Illegal Border Crossing she finds a pragmatic, though dangerous, solution to her geographic and cultural

16

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Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson, Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labour (Durham: Duke, 2013), 132. Mezzadra and Neilson, Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labour, 134.

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immobility: crossing the border illegally, Ostojić like so many migrants foregoes all her legal rights. Waiting for a Visa documents Ostojić’s participation in an exercise of following protocol. Her act of queuing was predestined to fail precisely because she was a private citizen with no symbolic, political or cultural leverage. This work intends to show the cynicism and failure of the bureaucratic process: the impossibility of gaining access to the Austrian consulate without already having the right connections.18 In Waiting for a Visa, Ostojić expresses her institutional invisibility and geographic immobility by standing in one spot for hours, a required action that concomitantly activates the trope of spatial and temporal immobility of the Balkans with respect to the European Union. In Looking for a Husband with EU Passport, Ostojić becomes an entrepreneur of the self, who strategically manipulates her identity to collapse her human capital into artistic cultural capital. Her subjectivity has shifted from that of an outsider unsuccessfully waiting for a visa, and then a ‘bare life’ illegally crossing the border, to being now an artist who can actively inhabit and manipulate the administrative process. Ostojić gets the visa by soliciting an artist husband, and stating to authorities that she and Klemens G. met on an arts project. She massages the information regarding her identity to suit the requirements of the visa application, crossing the border by turning her subjective art labour into a cultural commodity whose value is measurable and exportable. As Peter Osborne argues: Art is a kind of passport. In the new transnational spaces, it figures a market utopia of free movement, while in actuality it embodies the contradiction of the mediation of this movement by capital.19

In her gesture of strategically manipulating her identity as an artist, Ostojić highlights the contradictions of citizen movement as mediated by capital: one person can at the same time be a desirable commodity in a labour market, and an intruder posing a threat to that market. By occupying this contradiction, Ostojić draws attention to the distinction between skilled and unskilled migration, wherein unskilled migrants (often considered as equal to ‘illegal’

18

19

This is especially pertinent if we also take into account that Ostojić had guarantor letters and invitation to galleries in the European Union. In other words, she had the ‘right’ paperwork. Osborne, Anywhere or Not at All, 27.

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migrants) encounter the full force of border control, while skilled migrants are managed according to the rules of cultural integration. Ostojić’s work shows us how the international positioning of the artist, dictated by the politics of identity, is already inscribed into the labour relations of the contemporary art system. Her intervention brings to light artists from the periphery being cast as ‘catching up’ when participating on the international art circuit.20 In the decade since the start of transition, such artists have been designated with the prefix ‘from’ on the international scene. This usage is crucial in understanding the dissemination of practices from former Yugoslavia. Miško Šuvaković uses the term ‘Soros realism’ to describe the emergence of a style of exhibition such as Manifesta, which created a specific type of a work of art that was ‘political’ only within the acceptable boundaries of the EU model of pluralism and multiculturalism. According to Šuvaković, the activities of the Soros network and exhibitions such as Manifesta created an international ‘second division’ of art that acts as the feeder body of young talent for the international art circuit without endangering the art establishment.21 In this respect, Ostojić’s work aligns with younger artists from former Yugoslavia that deals with the politics of being labelled as an artist ‘from the Balkans’. Here I should mention works such as Attack, a painting series by Mladen Miljanović (whose work I discuss in Chapter 4), which uses the language of military maps to plan how to get accepted into prestigious exhibitions in European art centres. Artists such as Miljanović, Ostojić and their contemporaries attempt to make visible the ideological contours of the Balkan–EU relation, in the physical and symbolic spaces where they intersect.22

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This attitude is itself an extension of the broader view of the East. In 1990 German philosopher Jürgen Habermas defined the democratic revolutions in Eastern Europe that brought an end to historical communism as the ‘catching up revolutions’. Habermas is referring to the way in which these revolutions clear the way for catching up with the West: namely, modernist development. After 1989, as Habermas believes, the Eastward expansion of modernity can be resumed, and the East – conceived as a space of belated modernism – can finally catch up with the West. See Jürgen Habermas, Die Nachholende Revolution (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1990), 203. Miško Šuvaković, ‘The Ideology of Exhibition: On the Ideologies of Manifesta’, in Platforma SCCA no. 3 (Ljubljana: Center for Contemporary Art, 2002). Also, they are rendering problematic the notion of what Boris Buden, drawing on Gayatri Spivak, calls the ‘native informant’, whose role it is to represent a specifically (local, true) Balkan experience and facilitate exchange between the periphery and the centre of power. See Boris Buden, ‘What to Do with the Question: What Will the Balkans Look Like in 2020?’ http://www.wus-austria.org/files/ docs/Boris%20Buden%20Text%20BCC%202010_edited.pdf.

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Corridor X Corridor X (2006) is an eighty-minute ‘road movie’ by Angela Melitopoulos about the historical migration and transit route connecting Germany and Turkey via former Yugoslavia and Greece. Corridor X is the multimodal system of highways, rails, ports and telecommunications cables stretching across Southeastern Europe, from Salzburg and Budapest to Thessaloniki and Sofia. The so-called tenth Pan-European Transport Corridor runs along the Berlin-to-Baghdad railroad constructed with German capital in the early twentieth century, and also along the route that partially overlays the Highway of Brotherhood and Unity built by Tito’s Yugoslavia. Melitopoulos’s work captures the different speeds and directions of people-movement along this immense transport infrastructure.23 Corridor X follows Melitopoulos’s journey along the route from Cologne to Thessaloniki, retracing her family summer holiday trips from Germany to visit her father’s village in Turkey. The film is presented as a double-screen projection featuring footage from her family trips, footage shot on the retracing journey, and footage gathered and created by her collaborators along the route. The film juxtaposes different audio and video tracks from at least three historical periods, including archival footage about the building of the highway from the nineteenth century to the present; recent interviews with Croatian, Serbian and Macedonian intellectuals about their experiences of the highway; Melitopoulos’s discussions with her mother and brother about their experiences; shots of open landscapes; footage from the German-Yugoslav co-produced film Winnetou (1963), which was shot on locations close to the route and depicts conflict between a greedy Great Western railway company and an Apache tribe; old media reports; and footage of political protests in Greece. The film consists of twelve parts separated by title cards. Each part is

23

Corridor X was made as part of a larger collaborative project, B-Zone: Becoming Europe and Beyond, about movement and migration in the European Union. Within the umbrella of B-Zone, a collective of artists from Germany (Hito Steyerl and Melitopoulos), Turkey (VideA Media Collective), Greece (Freddy Viannellis) and Serbia (Dragana Žarevac) collected and shot footage between 2003 and 2005 from their respective locations along the Corridor X highway, and made the footage available to each other through an online database. The collaborators then used the footage to create their contributions, collectively titled Timescapes (2003–5).

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located in a different time and place along the route and each features different protagonists. The length and complexity of Corridor X are intended to mirror the magnitude of the geographical area and the multiplicity of non-linear and fragmented temporal experiences that coexist along the corridor. Melitopoulos constructs a metanarrative out of the movement along the route, weaving multiple voices, locations and temporalities, via a range of subject positions (her own and those of her collaborators). This metanarrative never quite settles down into a pattern, instead constantly shifting between spaces and times and the different speeds of movement between them. Corridor X is dialectically defined by its narratives and histories as they occupy the same space, which is itself indeterminate. For Melitopoulos, non-linear editing means working with migrants’ cognitive experience of migration: a modulation of the attention that informs our memory, our thought and our spatial awareness. In all senses a moving picture, Corridor X layers the artists’ travels and her father’s migration over the recurring building of roads: the mass mobilization of the Yugoslav population for work on the Highway of Brotherhood and Unity (Autoput Bratstva i Jedinstva), the construction of the Berlin-to-Baghdad railway in the early twentieth century, and the digging of the Loibl Pass during the Second World War. The artwork also evokes the actuality of Corridor X, in that technical information and political events inhere in the gestures and voices of those who experience the impacts of the planning and construction processes on their everyday lives. The two-screen installation compliments this approach to editing, allowing for parallel narratives and historical contrasts to emerge, and using repetition between screens to generate rhythms that pass through the landscapes, the faces and histories.24 These rhythms all converge on the experience of the migrant.

24

This mode of editing also extends to the very process in which the work was made. As Brian Holmes describes it: ‘The participants, who filmed along the routes of Corridor X and beyond, accept to place their results in common, constituting a stock of video images which each then receives back as a collective memory bank (around 25 hours of rushes). Each video-maker then works in an isolated studio; but a specially conceived internet platform allows the editors to share the timecodes of their cuts with all the others, and to relay any additional material such as subtitles, image overlays, supplementary scenes, etc. In this way, the editing software can reconstruct every new sequence from the raw material stored in the memory bank, so that at any given point in the process, each one can see the video that the other is in the midst of creating. A billboard function allows everyone to post observations and commentaries on their reciprocal borrowings and contrasting narratives. What this amounts to is an invitation to experience the other’s construction of reality as it unfolds, and to integrate that experience as a troubling, inconclusive element within one’s own expression.’

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Figure 2 Angela Melitopoulos, Corridor X (film still), installation, 88’00”, double projection, three audio levels.

As Ginette Verstraete puts it in her analysis of this work, Melitopoulos captures the ‘corridorial condition of a migrant subject’.25 This is reflected in the way in which time unfolds in Corridor X: as multiple, heterogeneous, the time of haste and waiting, the time of movement as privilege and stagnation. Yet Melitopoulos is careful to always juxtapose this multiplicity of speeds and temporalities in relation to the migrant as an emotional and experiential vector. This juxtaposition amplifies the double meaning of the ‘corridorial condition’: as an expression of experience in a corridor as a geopolitical infrastructure; but also as the ontological precondition for constituting the migrant inside a linear image. A clash of historical temporalities as they map onto space through movement in Corridor X is most clearly evident when the artwork focuses on the section

25

See Brian Holmes, ‘Differential Geography: Research and Rhythm in Artistic Representation’, https://brianholmes.wordpress.com/2008/01/26/differential-geography/. Ginette Verstraete, ‘Timescapes: An Artistic Challenge to the European Union Paradigm’, European Journal of Cultural Studies 12, no. 2 (2009): 157–72, 147.

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of the route that goes through the former Yugoslavia. The establishment of Corridor X in 1997 followed the traditional route E5 between Salzburg, Ljubljana, Zagreb, Belgrade, Niš, Skopje, Veles, Thessaloniki and Istanbul, and was seen as key to including the countries of former Yugoslavia into the European community and trade. It involved significant state investment (through international loans) into the rebuilding of highways, in particular the main highway (Autoput) between Ljubljana, Zagreb, Belgrade and Skopje. This main highway, known as the Highway of Brotherhood and Unity, was built between 1949 and 1985 as the symbol of cosmopolitan and transcultural Yugoslavia (and a collective symbol for Turkish and Greek migrants as well as German tourists). In the 1990s wars, the highway became the front line and the main route for forced movement of refugees, especially the forced exodus of Serbs from Croatia during the so-called operation Storm (Oluja) in 1995. Corridor X thus recalls the Balkans as a space with a long history of transition: of being subject to changing political and economic systems, of being the crucible for larger geopolitical ploys. Historical systems and events clash in the work but without repelling each others’ meaning: rather, they overlap with each other in a modality of repetition. The work repetitively juxtaposes, for instance, footage of refugees in former Yugoslavia with footage of refugees in Turkey and Greece. (This cultural repetition resounded again even a decade after the work was produced, when in 2015 Corridor X once again became the route for refugees travelling on foot from Greece to Germany.) In relation to historical repetition, as Verstraete explains, Corridor X takes us back to an archival collective space where capitalist enterprises in the present resonate with communist and pre-communist pasts, while macropolitical developments in the area of transport and communication become tools for exploring a plurality of repressed historical and personal experiences.26

In the film’s historical overlap and repetition (both as tragedy and farce), there is a particularly striking sequence set in the Loibl Pass near the AustrianSlovenian border. Built using the forced slave labour of Mathausen prisoners under the Nazi Kommando X during the Second World War, tunnel is now used by German and Austrian tourists travelling to cheap holidays in

26

Verstraete, ‘Timescapes’, 166–7.

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the Balkans. Its history is rendered all but invisible (Melitopoulos’s layering redeems it) in the convenience of speedy consumer movement. Melitopoulos’s use of footage in the section of Corridor X about the former Yugoslavia similarly presents geographical space through the ideologies that have held it together at different points in time. Even though these shots are deliberately presented non-chronologically, they are nevertheless differentiated by particular speeds of movement which correspond to periods of socialism, late socialism, post-socialism and transition. The socialist period is defined by the speed of moving bodies constructing the highway, slowly ‘picking away at the landscape’, as one of the interviewees puts it. We see archival footage of ‘youth work actions’ that helped to garner popular support for the highway as the symbol of united Yugoslavia. This footage is complimented by interviews with three intellectuals (from Serbia, Croatia and Macedonia) recalling the feeling of being Yugoslav and the sense of connectedness with the world brought on by this identity, with the highway at the centre of it. This section is followed by one on the late socialist period, defined by growing disparities between Yugoslav republics’ economic and political development. We see media reports on the progress of the highway construction, talking about disputes between Slovenia and southern states over the pace (Slovenia finished their section sooner). The post-socialist period is defined in Corridor X by the speed of the refugee convoys fleeing the war that tore Yugoslavia apart. Transition is defined through material and symbolic mobility (unlimited freedom of movement) as one of core principles of European citizenship.

Figure 3 Angela Melitopoulos, Corridor X (film still), installation, 88’00”, double projection, three audio levels.

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This section of Melitopoulos’s film is interspersed with shots from inside cars driving fast though the open plains of Croatia and Serbia. One of the voices heard is Melitopoulos’s brother, recalling the boredom of how slow it used to be to drive through Yugoslavia. This linkage of speed to mobility is repeated several times in other sections of Corridor X, for example tourists driving through Yugoslavia in fast expensive cars juxtaposed against local people that are permanently ‘fixed’. We are constantly reminded by Melitopoulos of the different speeds at which social actors move – there are several references to how fast foreign car models move in comparison to the local cars. Tourists and goods moving south travel faster than refugees attempting to go north. Melitopoulos shows movement as privilege, and the direction of that movement as an auxiliary privilege. Regarding this notion of movement as a privilege, in her analysis of Corridor X Verstraete reads the work as defined less by precise spatial or historical positions than by a neoliberal flow that is facilitated by an ideology of privileged movement, to particular spaces, for particular subjects.27 Melitopoulos collages a flow of labour. If Ostojić’s work performs a transition from ‘being’ to ‘resource’ as a strategy to gain entry into the European Union, Melitopoulos’ work presents a fragmented history of mass directed migration flow from the East to the West of Europe, as against the ‘natural’ or ‘easy’ movement of privileged beings in both directions along the same axis. Verstraete argues that Timescapes provides a multilayered picture of panEuropean corridors of mobility ‘from the local to the global, from past to present and future’, out of which emerges a provisional form of collectivity where singularities engage in a variety of encounters.28 However, rather than simply framing these micronarratives in terms of ‘local’ resistances to globalization – and thus reaffirming a global–local dichotomy – Verstraete argues that the resistance to neoliberal movement emerges out of an unexpected and complex range of relations. Here we can again read Mezzadra’s and Neilson’s ‘temporal border’ as indicative of Corridor X’s relationship between agency and movement. Corridor X uses montage to capture the production by various

27 28

Ibid., 161. Ibid., 163.

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Figure 4 Angela Melitopoulos, Corridor X (film still), installation, 88’00”, double projection, three audio levels.

agents of stasis and movement in the present, as well as the history of that stasis and movement during European expansion. Corridor X isolates and mobilizes the different sections of the transport hub in terms that organize the transformation of the region through resources and travel. Temporality unfolds not in linear fashion but in waves that follow the flow of labour power towards the heartland of Europe. Time acts as the extension of the geography of privilege rather than its actual representation. The interviews feature narratives that describe the boredom that characterizes movement through impoverished regions. The human perspective is predetermined by the directionality of the flow of labour, which is in turn directed by invisible infrastructure. As Anselm Franke notes in his introduction to the catalogue for the exhibition of Corridor X, at the centre of this work is the ‘silent language of infrastructure’29 that redistributes the flow of time according to a hierarchical order. Accordingly, the aesthetic that defines Corridor X is the silent symbolic, political and economic language of the infrastructure it scrutinizes. Much as metaphorical language is used to sustain space between the European Union and Balkans, the metaphors of infrastructure define and orient the Balkans themselves. As Brian Holmes argues in his analysis of Corridor X, the transportation net should be read as the material emanations of corridor planning, which planning extends the infrastructures of capitalist production

29

Anselm Franke, ‘Introduction’, in B-Zone: Becoming Europe and Beyond (Barcelona: Actar, 2005), 7.

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from its historical centres (the ‘A Zone’) to the peripheries (the ‘B Zone’).30 As Holmes suggests, the Roman numeral X, that is supposed to represent this immense infrastructure, is also a powerful designation of its fundamental lack of meaning. The segmented void of the corridor infrastructure mirrors the ontological void of Europe, which can only be transformed by the movement of its users. Corridor X captures the Balkans in the process of ‘becoming Europe’ by being integrated, or dissolved, into the infrastructure of capitalist production. Its foregrounding of invisible (and unstable) infrastructure transformed through new mobilities links Corridor X to the NSK (Neue Slowenische Kunst or New Slovenian Art) work State in Time (1992–). Both artworks show the shift from post-socialist to transitional aesthetics in terms of the dissolution of the state, positioning this shift in relation to possibilities it opens up for the agency of migrants. The NSK collective and all its components – including IRWIN art group and industrial band Laibach – has since its formation in 1984 been defined by ‘statist aesthetics’ that mimic the symbolic power structures of the state (socialism) to reveal its inconsistences and destabilize its ideological operation.31 In 1992, in the aftermath of the breakup of Yugoslavia and Slovene independence, NSK announced itself as a state in time, symbolically seceding from a newly seceded Slovenia in the name of what it described as ‘the first global State of the Universe’.32 NSK created all the insignia, symbols and rituals of the NSK State, including postage stamps and calendars. In May 1992, it publicly announced the formation of the state. Its members adopted the dress and behaviour of politicians, and its embassies and consulates were opened in Moscow (1992), Berlin (1993), Ghent (1993), Florence (1994), Umag (1994), Glasgow (1994), and Sarajevo (1995). Following the opening of the NSK Passport Office in Amsterdam in 1993, members of public could apply for NSK passports. Soon, NSK started producing ‘official’ personal documents, even while national identity documents for citizens of such disappearing countries as Yugoslavia

30 31

32

Holmes, ‘Differential Geography’. Aleš Erjavec, ‘Introduction’, in Postmodernism and the Postsocialist Condition: Politicized Art under Late Socialism, ed. Aleš Erjavec (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2003), 1–54, 4. Miško Šuvaković, ‘NSK: Critical Phenomenology of the State’, in Aesthetic Revolutions and Twentiethcentury Avant-garde Movements, ed. Aleš Erjavec (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), 215–54, 225.

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were being rendered invalid. Producing realistic passports for its citizens was a natural extension of NSK’s use of state aesthetics to blur art and life, yet these gestures took on a whole new set of meanings through events that followed: in 1994 and 1995 a number of citizens managed to escape from Sarajevo using NSK State fictional diplomatic passports.33 NSK’s dematerialization of its state in the early nineties mirrored the dematerialization of nation states into global transnational markets, and expressed the historical situation that lead to ‘the first transition’ away from communism.34 NSK’s State in Time signals the shift from working within the state (and within the ‘national’ frame) to within forms of trans-state collective identity. NSK not only adapted their critical aesthetics for the new age of decentralized and deregulated capital, but also created the ground for nonnational ‘parastate’ collectivities to emerge. This was especially evident around 2000, when NSK passports were requested en masse by Nigerian nationals, who tried to use them to gain entry into Europe. NSK had successfully used fictional documentary strategies to invent a new collective formation, affecting a re-spatialization and re-temporalization of social relations, albeit with limits.35 *** The current global fixation on the perceived threat presented by the figure of the migrant/refugee is marked by a relation to temporality; it is focused on anticipating and identifying possible present and future threats. This cultural paranoia is nevertheless ahistorical and apolitical, in that it operates at the level of emotional reflex and response, and ignores the visible and invisible structures that make it possible. Ostojić and Melitopoulos materialize the invisible structures that regulate and police access to the European Union:

33 34

35

Alexei Monroe, Interrogation Machine (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2005), 255. Leslie Holmes’ account of post-socialism differentiates between ‘the first transition’ (the move away from communism) and ‘the second transition (the move towards ‘new destinations’). See Leslie Holmes, Post-communism: An Introduction (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997), 7. This is also evident in the continuing activities of the project: in 2007 Icelandic citizens held an NSK embassy event in Reykjavik; in 2010 the first NSK Citizens’ Congress was held in Berlin. Here I am drawing on Peter Osborne’s discussion of ‘fictional collectivities’ in the work of The Atlas Group. See Osborne, Anywhere or Not at All, 195. On the work of artistic collectives in the former Yugoslavia (including Spomenik, Abart, Kontekst, Prelom, The Ignorant Schoolmaster and his Committees), see Nikola Dedić, ‘Yugoslavia in Post-Yugoslav Artistic Practices: Or, Art as…’, in Post-Yugoslav Constellations: Archive, Memory, and Trauma in Contemporary Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian Literature and Culture, ed. Vlad Beronja and Stijn Vervaet (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016), 169–90.

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temporal structures, by which bureaucracies regulate the speed of movement across borders and capital transport infrastructures regulate movement. Ostojić and Melitopoulos produce artwork that pits lived experience against these types of invisible structures, namely the hierarchies that police access to the European Union. In Melitopoulos’s Corridor X the opposition between stasis and movement is shown to be a historical and geopolitical construct, yet one whose direction and rhythms of movement have very real consequences in people’s lives. In terms of recouping agency, despite being subject to larger forces Melitopoulos’s migrants use those forces to propel and inform their experiential times and spaces. In Ostojić’s Looking for a Husband with EU Passport, agency for the migrant is achieved by collapsing the distinction between ‘true’ and ‘false’ migrants in the figure of the artist herself. Ostojić openly declares her ‘desire’ to enter the European Union, but in doing so translates this desire into a strategy of using one patriarchal and heteronormative economic structure (marriage) to subvert another sexist and racist bureaucratic structure (migration policy). All artists discussed in this chapter confront official structures in order to turn them into spaces of resistance, thereby uncovering gendered and racialized hierarchies that police the access to the European Union. The next chapter will examine transition as a form of translation across these hierarchies, and the way in which translation also presents opportunities for forms of resistance.

3

Going Too Far: Translation and Over-identification as a Critique of Transition

Phil Collins’ video work zašto ne govorim srpski (na srpskom) (2008) (why I don’t speak Serbian (in Serbian)) comprises interviews conducted in Serbian with Kosovar Albanians about why they no longer speak the Serbian language. Shot in a black-and-white documentary style and produced on the eve of Kosovo’s declaration of independence from Serbia, the work addresses the emotionally and politically charged use of language as a mechanism of conflict and domination. In Kosovo, this is an especially sensitive topic because for Kosovar Albanians, Serbian language was for decades the official language of police, administration and the legal system – the language of cultural and political hegemony. Upon Kosovo’s independence from Serbia in 2008, by many Kosovar Albanians the Serbian language was gradually, though in many cases intentionally, ignored and forgotten. Early in Collins’s work, during an interview with journalist Dukagjin Gorani, there is a striking moment of linguistic slippage. In trying to explain that in Kosovo there is not even the memory of the Serbian regime, he struggles to recall the Serbian term and uses the English word ‘memory’. Collins has reflected on the significance of this scene: It is a beautiful moment when he looks for the word, utters it in English, and says, ‘I cannot find the word for memory’, and then he says memorija [which is not a word Serbs would normally use either]. Somehow it plays out the complete film in one sentence. … He was making explicit that you have two completely segregated and linguistically separated communities, especially among the young who are not learning each other’s language. English is indeed the language most people would use, also as a form of disguise.1

1

‘zašto ne govorim srpski (na srpskom) [Why I Don’t Speak Serbian (in Serbian)]: Phil Collins in conversation with Ger Duijzings’, Slovo 25, no. 2 (Autumn 2013): 18–31, 29.

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There is a strong sense in this scene that the interviewee’s forgetfulness is performative rather than entirely spontaneous act, designed to make a point out of being unable to find the Serbian word for memory: showing that his amnesia reflects the cultural separation from the former oppressor. Gorani’s (perhaps) intentional forgetting of Serbian can be read as an act of defiant unlistening to a hegemonic language which, considering his middle age, he would have been forced to learn in school. It is an active refusal to acknowledge the linguistic and cultural connections between Kosovars and Serbs. Yet Gorani’s choice to use the English language as the stand-in (as opposed to Albanian, for instance) is significant in that it is intended as the neutral translation. In the context of the history of Serbia–Kosovo conflict and the 1999 NATO air strikes on Serbia (largely initiated by political pressure from the United States), the use of English here doesn’t simply function as a reversion to the assumed familiarity of the contemporary lingua franca. In his essay for Collins’s exhibition featuring this artwork, Boris Buden picks up on this subtext by suggesting that the act of using English reveals more than the suppression of the language of the former oppressor. What appears as the ultimate liberation from a foreign linguistic and cultural hegemony is in fact a mere submission to another kind of hegemony, even if it is subjectively experienced as liberation.2

This linguistic gesture, according to Buden, signals new kinds of cultural dependences and hierarchies in the semi-colonial status of Kosovo as a US protectorate (albeit under a new guise of neoliberal global democracy). English functions here as a translation of geopolitical changes in the region, communicating emerging forms of commonality (global mobility and access) as much as separation (liberation from political and cultural oppression). However, for Buden, the substitution of the English word for ‘memory’ for the Serbian word is also reflective of a subjective understanding of historical experience: an ideological forgetting according to which the shared political experience of the communist past in former Yugoslavia was a catastrophe that needs to be forgotten.3 It represents the erasure or repression of the historical

2

3

Boris Buden, ‘Is There Anything Else … Except Bodies and Languages’, in Phil Collins – Jarla (Stockholm: Partilager, 2011), 181–7, 184. Buden, ‘Is There Anything Else … Except Bodies and Languages’, 184.

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and temporal experience of socialism in Yugoslavia, specifically from the position of social groups (workers, minorities) who enjoyed a higher degree of autonomy (especially true of Kosovo) under socialism, which has since been lost. In capturing on film the dialectical process by which the tension between two languages is sublimated into a third, Collins shows the role of translation in transition. His focus on the translation of the very terms in which local histories are remembered makes visible the telos of socialism ‘catching-up’ to neoliberal capitalism via the English language as the (presumably neutral) mediating expression of democracy. In this chapter I will look at further works that engage transition as a process of cultural translation. The Janez Janša Project (2007–) concerns the political subjectivity of three artists who all changed their names to that of a conservative and corrupt politician, by intentionally misinterpreting the instruction of a political slogan from his party as an imperative to do so. Shoum (2009) by Katarina Zdjelar has two workers with no knowledge of English transcribing the lyrics of a popular English-language song and, in so doing, producing a new language: they are unsuccessfully translating local experience into English-based popular culture in order to catch up with the centre. I argue that Janša and Zdjelar strategically get their translations ‘wrong’ by over-identifying with the process of translating one political and cultural condition into another.4 Transitional aesthetics in this chapter emerge via post-socialist transition as a form of cultural translation.5 My understanding of translation in the process of transition goes against the prevalent positive teleology of translation in the European Union, which sees it as practice of promoting integration, understanding and collaboration. Understanding translation as a form of mediation is evident in the common image of the translator as the ‘in-between’ (between two politicians talking, or between the author of a text and an audience, or between two cultures attempting to communicate). Following

4

5

Slavoj Žižek originally deploys the term to describe the political provocations of Slovenian industrial band Laibach (affiliated with NSK), which adopted the stylistic and aesthetic expression of fascism within Yugoslav socialism. See Slavoj Žižek, ‘Why are Laibach and NSK not Fascists?’ reproduced in Primary Documents: A Sourcebook for Eastern and Central European Art since the 1950s, ed. Laura Hoptman and Tomas Pospiszyl (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2002), 285–8, 287. Cultural translation is a growing research area that spans multiple disciplinary fields. Here I am drawing on the articulation of cultural translation in Boris Buden et al., ‘Cultural Translation: An Introduction to the Problem, and Responses’, Translation Studies 2, no. 2 (2009): 196–219.

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Buden, I focus on the ideology that underpins this historically specific and politically biased conception of translation in the European Union. Far from modestly but steadily contributing to a growing integration of a politically united Europe, translation often does the opposite. It draws the boundary lines, both within the European Union and at its outer fringes, upon which it ideologically filters all sorts of political and cultural contents, creating and purifying the so-called Europeanness; it governs over the processes of enlargement by enclosing the European political edifice as a space of a homogeneous, transparent, contemporary, ‘good’ interiority and at the same time does the dirty job of exclusions, constantly recreating Europe’s ‘bad’, that is, obscure, incomprehensible, belated exteriority that is all too different to integrate; finally, it makes an open, conflictual, contradictory, unpredictable, in short, political challenge appear as already historically accomplished and its role in it as intrinsically positive and innocent.6

In this account, translation is understood as the neocolonial cultural, social, political and economic engineering of a region, to have it fall in line with the requirements of the centre. In normative accounts of the Balkan transition – from both within and without the region – the West, or Europe, or advanced neoliberal capitalism, is always already fixed, while the Balkan region is that which has been in transition, that which has undergone transformation in order to close the gap that separates it from the presumed stability of the centre.7 Accordingly, post-socialist transition is translational because it marks the region as an unstable field in a perpetual process of change. Despite an ostensible project of searching for commonality – whether political, economic, cultural or linguistic – the transitional translation of former Yugoslavia into the European Union appears as a never-finished and always unequal process of synchronization. Janša and Zdjelar approach translation, the mechanism for constructing the EU neoliberal democracy as the common condition, as a process in which certain aspects of the past are lost while other forms of inequality are preserved and aligned with the new order. If all the processes of cultural translation above

6

7

Boris Buden, ‘Translating Beyond Europe’, Transversal (June 2013), http://eipcp.net/transversal/0613/ Buden/en (accessed 11 August 2016). Anita Starosta, ‘Perverse Tongues, Post-socialist Translations’, Boundary 2 41, no. 1 (2014): 203–27, 216.

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can be described as top–down, transitional aesthetics captures the cultural and political meaning of transition from the position of the translated. Janša and Zdjelar give voice to disenfranchised political subjects. However, rather than simply carving out a position in which they can be heard (and ignored), Janša and Zdjelar demonstrate the strategy of getting the translation ‘wrong’ as a way to imagine alternative, agentic possibilities.

Transition as cultural translation Post-socialist transition operates as social, political and economic translation, realigning societies with the requirements of the global market. Suzana Milevska cites the numerous examples of renaming towns, institutions, streets, monuments and countries in former Yugoslavia, often as the first step in appropriating, erasing or translating inherited national, cultural and personal identities.8 This includes acts of translating civic, cultural, legal and linguistic infrastructure including institutions (e.g. Yugoslav Academy of Arts and Sciences); individuals (e.g. people who bear the names of politicians, or of the country); and countries (e.g. the dispute over the use of the name Macedonia between the Hellenic Republic (Greece) and the Republic of Macedonia, which caused postponement of the admission of the Republic of Macedonia to NATO and the European Union). It also includes renaming towns, squares, streets, factories and organizations that have proudly carried the names of partisan heroes or socialist workers. This act of changing and erasing events and personalities attached to places and times in Yugoslavia translates the very terms of remembering and forgetting. These official processes represent forced translation at the neoliberal– nationalist nexus. Transitional aesthetics, by contrast, springs from the position of the translated subject as a disruptive and transformative enterprise. Buden and Stefan Nowotny locate the disruption and transformation as over-identification with the cultural translation process.9 First, they identify

8

9

Suzana Milevska, ‘The Renaming Machine in the Balkans as a Strategy of “Accumulation by Dispossession”’, in Europe Unfinished, ed. Zlatan Krajina and Nebojsa Blanusa (London: Rowman & Littlefield), 2016. Buden et al., ‘Cultural Translation: An Introduction to the Problem, and Responses’, 196–219.

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citizenship tests as the typical example of cultural translation from the perspective of the translator, in which a subject is expected to learn and assimilate specific codes and symbols that construct a notion of a national identity. Citizenship tests, which feature a range of historical and cultural questions, demonstrate the way in which our political reality is culturally framed, and the way in which cultural translation defines interactions within globalization both as a series of respectful and productive interactions, and of all sorts of exclusions. But even as it attempts to shape a political community, a citizenship test also provides space for disruption and evasion. There is no guarantee that those who adhere to the notion of identity the test promotes will successfully pass it, nor that it will filter out all that do not adhere: it is possible to get the answers right without believing in what they represent. Moreover, it also provides other modes of resistance that reject the very premise of the cut-and-dried question, and use cultural translation to morph social relations. To illustrate this potential, Buden and Nowotny cite the 1943 Bertolt Brecht poem ‘The Democratic Judge’, which bears repeating here in full: In Los Angeles, before the judge who examines people Trying to become citizens of the United States Came an Italian restaurant keeper. After grave preparations Hindered, though, by his ignorance of the new language In the test he replied to the question: What is the 8th Amendment? falteringly: 1492. Since the law demands that applicants know the language He was refused. Returning After three months spent on further studies Yet hindered still by ignorance of the new language He was confronted this time with the question: Who was The victorious general in the Civil War? His answer was: 1492. (Given amiably, in a loud voice). Sent away again And returning a third time, he answered A third question: For how long a term are our Presidents elected? Once more with: 1492. Now The judge, who liked the man, realised that he could not Learn the new language, asked him How he earned his living and was told: by hard work. And so At his fourth appearance the judge gave him the question:

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When Was America discovered? And on the strength of his correctly answering 1492, he was granted his citizenship.10

The poem features an act of breaking (or circumventing, at the very least) the law by a compassionate judge acting in the interest of a hard-working migrant with difficulties in learning the host language. It raises all sorts of questions about the power imbalance in migration and translation, and reduces acts of humanitarianism to the level of individual mercy. However, it also reframes the relationship between the question and answer that define the ability to be included: rather than the applicant needing to learn the right answer, the static legal institution must search for the right question to ask in preemptive response to the answer posed by cultural translation. In Brecht’s creative solution, translation doesn’t operate as a process of policing and regulating national and cultural codes, but one in which these very codes are disrupted and transformed.

The Janez Janša Project The Janez Janša Project is deceptively simple to describe. In July 2007 three artists, Emil Hrvatin, Žiga Kariž and Davide Grassi, changed their names to Janez Janša, the leader of the right-wing Slovenian Democratic Party since 1993, and twice the Slovenian prime minister (serving between 2004 and 2008, and 2012 and 2013). From the start of this art action, the three artists maintained that the decision to change their names was not politically motivated, but personal and intimate. After changing their names, the artists did not stage any events or actively ‘perform’ their new identities; they continued with their daily lives and usual professional activities (making artwork, exhibiting it, attending public events, and contributing columns to daily newspapers), albeit under their new name/s.11 For his part, Janša the politician largely ignored their

10 11

Ibid., 206–7. Artists have used renaming as a way of questioning identity, authorship and ownership as evident in the use of multiple names by Marcel Duchamp, Claus Oldenberg and NSK (as a local example).

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action, except for attacking it as political opportunism in a 2011 speech while he was in opposition. Thus The Janez Janša Project creates meaning not through performances, planned activities or targeted interventions, but through an open-ended and ambiguous collection of ongoing and developing relationships between people and institutions, and through the representations of these relationships in bureaucracy and in the media.12 Yet it is precisely this absence at the centre of the artwork – that it has no ‘core meaning’, that it operates as a non-event – that lends it a unique critical perspective about political life in transition. I argue that this work is an act of over-identification with the absent ideological centre of transition. By this I don’t mean to suggest that transition has no ideology, but rather that transition requires an empty and infinitely malleable political subjectivity informed by cynical pragmatism and opportunism. Janša the politician is the perfect example of such political subjectivity, which is why the three artists chose his name. His political evolution (or mutation) over the last two decades involves a cynical and opportunistic translation of political values as a way to remain in power. His identity has shifted through that of a communist functionary, a dissident imprisoned by the (previous) regime, a hero of Slovene independence, a rightwing prime minister (twice), a right-wing demagogue firebrand, and a corrupt politician charged and imprisoned (2014). His strategic choice of a name, his plagiarism and manipulation of history are the makings of an ideal transitional political career. In over-identifying with this name (as empty signifier), The Janez Janša Project exposes the operation of this political cynicism. Janša, Janša and Janša never make any of this explicit, instead constructing the work as what Slavoj Žižek calls series of ideological ‘quilting points’: seemingly arbitrary gestures that stitch together a range of political issues.13 The project establishes connections and relations in a field of ideological meaning that connects seemingly unrelated elements of everyday life, art, media representation and the political state apparatus. Thus, in order to examine this field, we need to outline some of the issues that the work connects to. The Janez Janša Project is an incisive critique of the cynicism of power in the contemporary political system in Slovenia. It was a widespread practice across

12

13

Blaž Lukan, ‘The Janez Janša Project’, in Name Readymade (Moderna Galerija Ljubljana, 2008), 11–30, 24. Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), 87.

Going Too Far Figure 5 Janez Janša, Janez Janša, Janez Janša, PB0241858 (Passport), booklet, spread 17.5 cm × 12.5 cm, 2007. Courtesy of Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana. 69

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former Yugoslavia in the early 1990s for people to change their names in an attempt to assimilate into communities with a national majority. In taking the name Janez Janša, its three artists draw attention to the fact that it is also not the original name of the politician. Janša the politician changed his first name Ivan to Janez, the most common Slovenian name as well as the colloquial term for Slovenians. The artists are merely repeating a politically motivated rebranding of self as the ‘all Slovenian’ figure. However, a crucial difference is that the politician Janša did not legally change his name, thus making the artists – who retrospectively changed all their documents, including their birth certificates – administratively ‘more Janša’. The three artists over-identify with the need to rebrand one’s identity by adopting a name that appeals to a particular type of ethnonationalist patriot. The relation between national identity and the act of renaming also connects the project to the dispossession of human rights as justified through bureaucratic procedure carried out in the early 1990s. In 1991, over 25,000 individuals – primarily those with Yugoslav citizenship who did not acquire Slovenian citizenship – had their legal status annulled from the official registers. The so-called ‘erased’ (izbrisani) were dispossessed of their legal rights and had their documents systematically perforated by the Slovenian state.14 In many cases the official status of those people in Slovenia remained in legal limbo for years. Perhaps more than anything else, The Janez Janša Project is about the effects of the serialization of a name and its multiplied appearance in new and unexpected contexts. The activities of the three artists after the name change caused considerable confusion, including Janez Janša getting married with Janez Janša as the best man; media reports of Janez Janša directing plays, exhibiting artwork and generally appearing simultaneously in multiple locations; a newspaper containing multiple columns and opinion pieces authored by Janez Janša; different Janez Janšas giving interviews to the media during the campaign for the 2007 election; the ‘wrong’ Janez Janša (the politician) being sent court summons for offences committed by an artist; and the establishment of a crowdsourcing campaign, Free Janez Janša, for funding to complete a documentary about the project while the politician was still in

14

Jelka Zorn, ‘A Case for Slovene Nationalism: Initial Citizenship Rules and the Erasure’, Nations and Nationalism 15, no. 2 (2009): 280–98.

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prison. Clearly part of the project’s creative strategy was to participate in the broadcast media in order to saturate its sphere with the name and confuse the message. This approach is reinforced in the documentary My Name is Janez Janša (2012), in which one scene features a number of people repeating the title in a mechanical fashion, rendering it an empty signifier. The Janez Janša Project can clearly be analysed in relation to a range of social and political issues, yet somehow it still manages to remain ambiguous. Slovenian philosopher Mladen Dolar writes about this core ambiguity thus: The lack of justification for the name change, the fact that it was not accompanied by a conversion to some new faith, the cloning of three identical names that precisely excludes individuality and uniqueness and, lastly, the choice of the name that does not borrow from any celebrated and mythical past, but points to the not-so-glorious present – all this makes it impossible to make sense of this gesture and its message in any immediate or obvious way. The gesture obviously has a strong message, but it is not quite clear what this message is supposed to be.15

Dolar’s reading of the work tries to describe a gesture that, despite being connected to a range of loaded questions, still remains framed around a central absence. In fact, the absence of centre is what makes the work work. It is its sharpest criticism and its widest application. Despite not being ‘immediate or obvious’, it is important to remember that this absence of ground or mythology does not point to a lack of meaning but rather to an excess of what is present. Articulating this excess, we can turn to Blaž Lukan’s analysis of the ‘disappearance’ of the extra-present Janez Janša. What is at stake, then, is not the disappearance of Emil Hrvatin, Davide Grassi and Žiga Kariž as artists, public figures or citizens, but rather the concurrent disappearance of Janez Janša, as the name and its owner: the disappearance of the ‘original’ Janez Janša and its symbolic function. The multiplication of the name as a signifier leads to the disappearance of the referent, and the … motto of the party has to be taken literally; the more individuals called Janez Janša there are, the faster we can achieve the goal of emptying out the subject. … What is crucial here … is the emergent empty

15

Mladen Dolar, What’s in a Name? (Ljubljana: Aksioma, 2014), 57.

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space – the void in which the ideological mechanism, as such, is revealed – which can be territorialized by a new political subjectivity. (my emphasis)16

According to Lukan, the artists serialized the name, and in doing so they serialized the otherwise empty space of a cynical politician. The only reason for the name change that the artists ever gave – in addition to the cursory explanation that it was a personal and intimate act – is available in the letter that they sent to the politician Janša (and the SDS party), in which they state that they were motivated by the motto of his political party: ‘The more of us there are, the faster we will achieve our goal.’17 So, the professed trigger for the work is an act of clever, subversive, literal over-identification with a political slogan. On the one hand, we all know that political slogans are by definition empty promises, delivered by politicians seeking votes and understood as such by the saturated public. However, should we instead be asking: What is the ideological space of the ‘we’ in the glib slogan? In her analysis of political discourse in post-socialist societies, Renata Salecl outlines two levels of discourse: its ideological meaning, and the fantasy which functions as its surmise.18 Salecl argues that when hearing a political message or a slogan, a subject recognizes herself as the addressee in a political discourse and thereby comes to identify with a certain political position. However, rather than simply hearing and identifying with the message, when the subject identifies with a certain political discourse they concurrently identify with its surmise, even at the level of that which is left unstated. In other words, according to Salecl, the ‘trick’ of a successful political discourse is not to directly offer us images with which to identify – to flatter us with an idealized image, to portray us the way we would like to appear to ourselves – but to construct the discourse in such a way that it leaves the space open to be filled out by our own imaginations.19 In messages that extol the virtues of neoliberal free-market economies, the explicit discourse will refer to the possibility of individual financial success and independence through entrepreneurship. Similarly, conservative moral political messages will offer idealized images of community wherein ‘love’,

16 17 18 19

Lukan, ‘The Janez Janša Project’, 22. The letter is reprinted in the book Name Readymade. Salecl, The Spoils of Freedom. Ibid., 33.

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‘family’ and ‘virtue’ are held in high value. Salecl argues that these didactic images are, by themselves, not sufficient for the discourse to be effective; they must be supported by an unspoken ‘fantasy scenario that stages its economy of enjoyment’.20 Using this term ‘enjoyment’ in relation to political discourse requires a specific understanding of the role of ideology in everyday life: first, that public values (e.g. democracy, freedom) are always determined by an invisible set of values and practices operating in the background of public life; second, that our relation to ideology is determined by what Žižek calls ‘theft of enjoyment’.21 According to Žižek, because political communities rely on ideology for social cohesion and political inclusion, ideology is structured around exclusions reinforced through institutional rituals and social practices. The excluded are usually minorities, migrants, women, etc. In participating in the practices and rituals, we reproduce social cohesion through exclusion. This ideological system of exclusion is supported by a fantasy of our ‘enjoyment’ (of nation, tradition, democracy) positioned as under threat from the excluded groups. This understanding of ideology is at the heart of the complex critical practice in The Janez Janša Project. On one level, the project is an ideological critique that exposes exploitation at the core of our contemporary reality. However, this insight is not surprising, since we all know that many politicians are corrupt and manipulative. But on a deeper level, in taking the system literally ‘at its word’, the artists’ over-identification naively acts out the exclusion inherent in social and political cohesion, and makes the enjoyment of excluding others public. This focus on social sadism may explain the level of discomfort experienced when viewing the works. Their acts extract the enjoyment that is internal to exploitation of those less fortunate than us, including our own investment in being on the ‘right’ side of social exclusion. In thinking about whether the new Janšas ‘really mean it’, we are forced to examine whether we rely on practices of radical inclusion, and thereby radical exclusion, to maintain our sense of social reality.

20 21

Ibid., 34. This understanding is derived from the Slovenian school of post-Marxism (Althusser) crossed with Lacanian psychoanalysis, popularized in the work of Žižek, Salecl and others. While full accounts and critiques of these theories exist elsewhere, and are beyond the scope here, it will suffice to posit two main ideas that explain its analysis of the fundamental irrationality at the core of our relation to ideology: we know that certain things are wrong or incorrect but we persist in doing them.

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‘The more of us there are, the faster we will achieve our goal.’ In Janša the politician’s universe, ‘we’ refers to an ideal community, yet in this broadcast it is not based on the usual moral conservative values (family, virtue, tradition), but on simple multiplication. In other words, this slogan refers to little more than the securing of numbers, which will ensure gaining political influence and reaching ‘our’ goal. The apparent cynicism openly acknowledges the complete absence of political orientation, exhibiting instead a ruthless pragmatism. In fact, rather than being an exception, Janša’s sloganeering typifies a common practice in contemporary politics in which governments, in the firm grip of their political donors, routinely change or abandon their political platforms for pragmatics once they are in power. I argue that ‘we’ is the empty ideologic centre that can be filled by whatever content is necessary or required. Janez Janša is the placeholder for an emptiness which is infinitely flexible and translatable. His personal story (rags–riches–imprisonment) is one of political opportunism, and follows the trajectory of transition. The infinitely malleable Janša is a symbol of transition: the politician with no beliefs, the ruthless pragmatist, willing to do whatever it takes to win the desired goal. Perhaps even more universally he can be seen as symbolic of politics today, which has lost connection to the big narratives (and utopias) of the previous century. He severs all connections to the past in rushing towards the goal, where the goal is bluntly seizing and maintaining power. ‘We’ contribute to the achievement of this goal not by answering the call, but rather by accepting post-historical, post-empirical authoritarian managerialism as the condition of contemporary political discourse, and our participation in it. Writing about post-socialism, Susan Buck-Morss argues that it is ‘a universal historical condition’ located after the failure of history and grand historical narratives to fulfil their promise, in the face of uncertain present. If I speak of the ‘post-Soviet condition’, it is to say that ‘post-Soviet’ refers to an ontology of time. … Post-Soviet is a half way condition, where we have recognized the inadequacies of modernity, but are still too insecure to leave them behind.22

22

Susan Buck-Morss, ‘The Post-Soviet Condition’, in East Art Map, ed. IRWIN (London: Afterall, 2006), 494–9, 498.

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Boris Groys defined post-communism as a historical condition that is essentially shaped by a rejection of the future.23 According to Groys, with the fall of communism the dimension of the future lost its historical importance and its power to transform reality, not only in former communist countries but worldwide. Post-communism is a condition in which our perception of reality is no longer influenced by the future, unless the future is articulated as a dystopian or apocalyptic scenario. Janez Janša is the symbol of the futureless, halfway present: at once universal (void of specific content) and ‘emancipated’ from the burdens of history, intent on rewriting the past to suit the myopic present. This temporal void is possibly what the artists had in mind when calling their 2012 campaign ‘Free Janez Janša’: the liberation of our historical subjectivity captured in the halfway house of transition. The broader Janez Janša Project has its own internal temporal logic of ‘in-between’ as it engages different personal, social and institutional vectors and jumps between different situations. It deftly calls attention to our present futurelessness because its logic necessarily extends into the future: what happens when the politician Janez Janša retires or dies? Will any of the artists ever change their names back to their previous name? If so, will they have to go through another historically retroactive purge of documents and works to reinstate that name? Will they do this privately or publicly? When does the project end?24 The public relations aspect of the project is crucial and worth revisiting here. Just as The Janez Janša Project is never materialized and only exists in the nexus of (media) relations, it is argued by some that the politician also only exists as a media figure. Lukan suggests that, therefore, The Janez Janša Project is a media event. But perhaps we can push this claim further to suggest that the work may in fact be a media non-event: something that never really happened because there was no ‘artistic’ event that triggered the media event; the ‘performance’ never existed. This claim can be both rebutted and substantiated by virtue of the project’s prevailing quality of being ‘in-between’.

23

24

Boris Groys, Anne von der Heiden and Peter Weibel, eds, Zurück aus der Zukunft. Osteuropäische Kulturen im Zeitalter des Postkommunismus (Suhrkamp: Frankfurt am Main, 2005). Žiga Kariž reversed his name change in 2009 but continues to operate under the pseudonym Janez Janša when contributing to the project, and that Grassi and Hrvatin did not change their names in their countries of birth Italy and Croatia. I do not see this to be changing the work in any way, since the politician also uses both his original name (in court) and his stage name.

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For instance, taking part in the exhibition NAME Readymade in Graz in 2008, the Janša artists sent their (Janša) passports and official identification cards to be exhibited. In order to enable their travel to and from Graz, they requested temporary replacement documents, but were rejected because the documents are considered government property. So, even though they themselves are ostensibly the artwork, the artists did not attend the exhibition’s opening or even visit it, because for its duration they were caught in the gaps between state mechanism, art industry and personal identity. In this instance, the artists came up against the administrative border technology of delay, which produced the temporality of waiting and suspension (resulting in prevention). This encounter with the border raised the issue of identity as property,25 simultaneously rendering the Janez Janšas ineffective (within the space of a single nation state) and extremely effective (exposing the operations of ideology across multiple nation states).

Shoum Katarina Zdjelar’s video work Shoum (2009) unpacks the process and struggle through which linguistic expression is translated and incorporated. The work shows two middle-aged men from Belgrade transcribing the lyrics of the hit song ‘Shout’ (1985) by the English new wave band Tears for Fears. Neither of the men understands English. Shoum shows their attempts to write down the lyrics while listening to the song on an iPod. The men translate the lyrics into phonetic English (the title of the video is taken from their pronunciation of the word ‘shout’), treating the language as a code to be deciphered. Throughout Shoum we haltingly hear fragments of the song and conversation as the men take turns in guessing the possible pronunciations of the lyrics. Zdjelar describes the work: Thus they phonetically transcribe what they hear, based on their own vocabulary and capacity to vocally interpret the unfamiliar. ‘Shoum Shoum Lajdi o Lau’, they write and sing, in a strange invented language somewhere

25

S. E. Wilmer, ‘Renaming and Performative Reconstructions: The Uncanny Multiplication of Janez Janša’, Theatre Research International 36, no. 1 (2010): 47–63, 56.

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Figure 6 Katarina Zdjelar, Shoum (video still), DVD, 7’00” loop, 2009. Courtesy of the artist and SpazioA, Pistoia.

between phonetic transcription, Serbian, and English, as ‘Tears for Fears’ sing ‘Shout, shout, let it all out’. We witness how through errors and deformations an entirely ‘new language’ is being created, which intriguingly relates to the original in a shifted way, namely acoustically.26

The video ends with a black screen and the voice of one of the men singing his version of the lyrics. Shoum recalls the strategies used by artist Candice Breitz in her video Karaoke (2000), which features migrants struggling with the English lyrics of famous pop songs. In her analysis of Breitz’s work, Jill Bennett calls this struggle ‘bad performance’, suggesting that people in the video resemble actors struggling with a script.27 Like Breitz, Zdjelar makes the onscreen struggle of the two protagonists of Shoum palpable in their frustration at the task of reading and transcription. However, while Breitz’s actors sing along in real time to a karaoke machine, in Shoum the contemporary device used to play music (an iPod) is sharply contrasted with the distinctly predigital mode of handwriting. The flow of the music is repeatedly interrupted and suspended by the slow labour of the men capturing and translating the language, rendering

26

27

Zdjelar’s description from the work is available at https://vimeo.com/36410053 (accessed 8 March 2016). Bennett, Practical Aesthetics, 115.

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the soundtrack into a montage of smaller, disjointed sound bites. Our frustration with the interruption of the song by the slow pace of the process is mirrored by the two protagonists: at one point, one of the men exasperatedly utters ‘Fucking English!’ in vexation at his inability to pronounce the words or decode the language, and at the constant temporal delay this engenders. The men’s production of a hybrid Serbo-English in Shoum is framed around the central theme of mistranslation or ‘failed’ translation. This theme plays out in the cultural and temporal synchronization between centre and periphery; between intergenerational technologies of music consumption; between class-based methods of communication; and between historical modes of subjectivity. While these seemingly irresolvable tensions evoke the often-discussed cultural deadlock of globalization and international exchange, the over-identification of Shoum’s protagonists with cultural translation cuts through the stasis by collapsing the very terms of cultural translation. Ostensibly, Shoum is about the way that the language of the centre is understood at the (isolated) periphery. As Zdjelar explains: Cut off from the lingua franca of a globalized world, with perseverance these two men create something of their own that lies between the foreign and the familiar.28

Zdjelar’s work actively inhabits the transitional time between the periphery in its ‘becoming global’, and the mirage of the elusive centre. Shoum captures the process of perpetually moving towards something (learning English), where that something is the condition of desired inclusion.29 A clash between different temporalities exists in the process of incomplete and incorrect translation from the fast-moving (absent) centre of contemporary capital to the economically stumbling post-socialist periphery, perceived as slow-moving despite the extra effort and time-spend required to translate everything. Post-socialist translation here appears as ‘a process of a never-

28 29

Katarina Zdjelar, ‘Shoum’, http://katarinazdjelar.net/shoum. An interesting reversal of this process can be found in Ana Hušman’s video work Postcards (2013), which features staging educational sketches about textbook Croatian language intended for children of migrants. The work stages learning of the language as a medium for learning ‘national pride’.

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finished synchronization among multiple temporalities’,30 which results in tensions between understandings, experiences and representations of time. Shoum stages the slowness and ‘stasis’ of its workers against the fast-paced global mobility of technology. The montaging of the iPod and pen-and-paper as cultural objects addresses the generational (and financial) gap inherent in the contemporary experience and consumption of music: to be able to speak English and own an iPod carries the promise of being able to move freely across cultural and temporal borders. An iPod can encompass a global flow of digitally compressed music across all kind of borders as thousands of files. The failure of the transcribers to ever completely synchronize with it distils the discord, malfunctions and dashed hopes of transitional translation at the periphery. Asynchronous relation is also highlighted by the juxtaposition of latest technology (iPod) with ‘retro’ popular culture (the song ‘Shout’). The English language mediates between these two layers of temporality, both because it predates the medium through which the men are listening, and because of the message transmitted using it. With its repeated chorus line ‘Shout, shout, let it all out’, the song is an upbeat anthem about verbally expressing frustration. Yet the inability of the two men to understand English means they are also completely oblivious to this meaning, and to the cultural–temporal codes of the song (such as the distinction between 1980s ‘retro chic’ and contemporary consumption, curation or remixing of the ‘retro’ sound). The two men in the video never raise the question of the meaning of the words (the call to arms, to voice our grievances), remaining focused on their translation into nonsense Serbian and on learning this script. Zdjelar calls the style ‘para-poetics’, describing the struggle with learning a new language that results in violating the linguistic rules of expression.31 It is this para-poetics that opens up the act of cultural translation to a more subversive reading. If The Janez Janša Project approaches cultural translation as a matter of top–down political pragmatism and neoliberal survival strategy, Zdjelar’s work examines the experience of cultural translation from the

30

31

Anita Starosta, ‘Perverse Tongues, Post-socialist Translations’, Boundary 2 41, no. 1 (2014): 203–27, 205. Katarina Zdjelar, But if You Take My Voice, What Will Be Left to Me? (The Serbian Pavilion at the 53rd Biennale di Venezia, 2009), 76.

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perspective of the translated. Shoum establishes the tensions and hierarchies implicit in the process of cultural translation, wherein English is a hegemonic language because it is so plural and open to repurposing, yet precisely because of this mutability (supported by neoliberal geopolitics) can maintain its global ubiquity.32 Importantly, Zdjelar’s suggestion that English actually isn’t a definable thing – insofar as it can withstand a homophonic translation to a Serbian nonsense para-poem – is driven less by the identity politics of giving voice to the voiceless (which voice can then be easily absorbed into the status quo as another perspective), than by an assertion that this perspective can transform – and sideline – the power hierarchy of cultural translation. This venture originates in the performance that inspired Shoum. According to the artist, Shoum was inspired by an audition performance on the 2008 Bulgarian Idol – available on YouTube – in which candidate Valentina Hassan misunderstood English while learning to sing Mariah Carey’s ‘Without You’ (1993). With no knowledge of English, Hassan learnt the lyrics mimetically by repeatedly listening to the song. As result, her phonetic pronunciation dislocated the linguistic signifiers of English, rendering it into sound poetry. The chorus line ‘I can’t live, if living is without you; I can’t live anymore’ became ‘Ken lee, tu libu dibu douchoo; ken lee meju more’, turning the performance into a hilarious (and playful) subversion of the original. Since it first aired on television, the footage of Hassan’s audition has gone viral online, and her consequent internet celebrity status had her brought back for a second performance of ‘Ken Lee’ on a Bulgarian talk show. The popularity of Hassan’s performance ostensibly stems from the comedic effect of the audition, her pronunciation of English and limited vocal skills, and in particular the contrast between her earnestness and obliviousness. When asked by a member of the judging panel the condescending question ‘What language was that?’ she replied with an assured ‘English’. Hassan struggles with language in the same way that the protagonists of Shoum do. Each undergoes the process of mentally incorporating language from an exterior space, and a bodily struggle to take command of that language as a tool for identification. The enjoyment (or discomfort) of watching this struggle acts as a powerful reminder of the cruel voyeurism inherent in contemporary popular culture,

32

On this point, also see Nicoline van Harskamp’s work Englishes (2013–ongoing).

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which can be said to largely mirror geopolitical relations. On the one hand, Hassan becomes the inspiration for scores of hopeful contestants – William Hung is another notable ‘failed’ contestant who was able to monetize his offkey performance of Ricky Martin’s ‘She Bangs’ (2000) on the 2004 season of American Idol into pop cultural stardom (though his rise was perhaps mainly due to his proximity to the United States as a global cultural centre). Hassan, Hung and many other individuals have been submitted to public humiliation for the schadenfreude of the audience in carefully stage-managed, corporatespectacle quests for ‘talent’. On the other hand, Hassan’s struggle with and translation of English reflects the linguistic barriers faced daily by countless migrants: anyone with a migrant background watching her performance could relate through first-hand experience, and probably also has relatives or friends with a similarly hybrid linguistic arsenal. Her predicament becomes symbolic of a contemporary global neoliberal nexus of cultural and political hierarchies. And yet crucially, both Hassan’s performance and Shoum highlight specific histories that populate and contest this nexus. Hassan’s performance and Shoum function within post-socialist Eastern European societies’ almost slavish embrace of Western popular culture. Since the early 1980s, the immense popularity of Western culture in post-socialist societies has replaced the imposed ideology of socialism, offering instead the rhetoric of individualism and freedom. In this context, the influx of Western pop finds its equivalent in the influx of economic deregulation and privatization into local contexts. In this sense, the misunderstanding of English in Shoum becomes a reflection of broader political misunderstandings in recent years. The perfect examples here are the two main European responses to the post2008 implosion of the Greek economy. The German version blamed Greek laziness; the Greek version German financial neo-imperialism. The stand-off represents the inability of each side to translate the demands of the other side, and the inability of both sides to fully grasp and incorporate the language of global capital. Or, to put this in blunter terms, regardless of any sympathies with the Greek challenge to cold and calculated neoliberal austerity measures, it represents the Greeks refusing to accept that ‘more neoliberal austerity’ is the only or the right answer to the predicament. Neoliberal austerity’s effect on living and working conditions shapes Zdjelar’s positioning of the interpreters’ socio-economic and cultural identities. Even

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though the men are rarely, except for occasional glimpses, fully visible in her video, their voices and hands lead the work. The rough texture of their hands points to a class identity: they are working class, worn by physical labour. Their voices are even more clear markers of socio-economic identity: the off-key singing that concludes Shoum is akin to the tune a working-class labourer sings while working. The ‘bad performance’ is the short circuit between the historical time of Shoum and the ‘real’ time of the present. The discomfort felt at the sound of the bad performance is the recognition that these men are from a generation that is being left behind in time. This is a montage between socialist temporality (the redundant physical labour of two unemployed workers) and global capital temporality (represented by the efficiency and inscrutability of the iPod). Shoum is about the voice of the socialist working class, whereas ‘Ken Lee’ is the voice of their post-socialist children as the new underclass. Here localized conceptions of taste (superior/inferior) map onto generational rifts between different types of music as key axes of sociocultural identity. Of course, this generational relation predates transition in former Yugoslavia, and is always the way in which older cultural hierarchies get preserved and encoded in the present, or, conversely, overthrown or discarded. This type of cultural identity is encapsulated in the question often heard during conversations between people trying to get to know each other, intended to uncover a key marker of social, political and cultural identity: ‘What music do you listen to?’33 As Ljerka Vidić Rasmussen (following Pierre Bourdieu) argues, in Yugoslavia, enjoying a particular song ‘is not a culturally inconsequential choice; it is an indication of musical preference that is tied to cultural affinity and one’s own sociocultural identity’.34 During the 1980s, when the song ‘Shout’ was released, one of the key cultural lines of demarcation in Yugoslavia was carved out between the folk music audience, and the urban, cosmopolitan rock and new wave audience. This division marked the folk audience as generally from lower-class or workingclass families with limited education, and the rock/punk/new wave audience as the culturally sophisticated middle class. Sociocultural differentiation between

33

34

I explore the relationship of popular music and identity in Uroš Čvoro, Turbo-folk Music and the Cultural Representations of National Identity in Former Yugoslavia (London: Ashgate, 2014). Ljerka Vidić Rasmussen, ‘From Source to Commodity: Newly-composed Folk Music of Yugoslavia’, Popular Music 14, no. 2 (1995): 241–56, 251.

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the working class and the cultural intelligentsia in Yugoslavia is expressed in Shoum through the men’s lack of familiarity with both the song and with the English language. Their inability to move beyond phonetic mimicry of the lyrics is a marker of a class identity, of the inability to participate in the global language of progressive popular culture. Yet, it is in this very inability that they undermine the legitimacy of that language as lingua franca. Zdjelar’s use of Shoum rather than ‘Shout’ as the title, and the presentation of the hybrid language rather than the original lyrics, are over-identifications reminding us that for increasing numbers of globally displaced people (migrants and refugees), broken English is the daily means of communication, and that it is changing and shaping the very language. Zdjelar points to Yugoslav artist Mladen Stilinović’s An Artist Who Cannot Speak English Is No Artist (1994–6) as a key reference point for her understanding of the power dynamics implicit in language. Stilinović’s work operates in the tradition of 1970s conceptual art, using a slogan on a flag to pamphlet a politically loaded sentiment. The directness of his work resonates with Zdjelar’s: it flags cultural difference as the source of institutional exclusion of former Eastern Bloc artists from the Western art business and market, and the Anglo-centrism of the global art market as the universal and often invisible operant. Like Stilinović, Zdjelar positions knowledge of the English language as a precondition for an individual’s functioning in the new international art economy: for being ‘of one’s time’. Both artists highlight the relevance of (English) language to the quest of the Balkan East towards the potentially unreachable temporal and spatial horizon of the West. In her analysis of Stilinović’s work, Marina Gržinić asserts that, if read as a statement, ‘An Artist Who Cannot Speak English Is No Artist’ captures the ethos of the 1990s gradual emergence and absorption of post-socialist art into the global market.35 Reading the work a decade after its production, Gržinić argues that the statement should now be updated to ‘An Artist Who Cannot Speak Good English Is No Artist’, to warn us about the standard of PR skills required of artists in order to remain visible and survive on this market once they have been absorbed into its circuits. If English is the marker of inclusion,

35

Marina Gržinić, ‘O Repolitizaciji Umetnosti skozi Kontaminacijo’, in Filozofski vestnik (Ljubljana: Letnik XXVI, br. 3, 2005), 115–25.

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good English is the condition of survival. Does this mean that excellent English is the marker of success, of the artist’s brand transforming and translating its cultural difference into a marketable asset? English, herein, becomes the marker of the emptying-out of any disruptive historical or local content, or of the homogenization and standardization of that content according to the standards of the market. In this scenario, English is producing the ‘former East’ as ahistorical. But in Zdjelar’s work, just as in Hassan’s performance and Brecht’s poem, we see the reframing and translating not just of Stilinović’s forthright statement, but of the power structure it represents: via Shoum ‘An Artist Who Cannot Speak Good English Is No Artist’ becomes ‘Art That Does Not Understand Broken English Is Not Global Art’. *** The experience of transition in former Yugoslavia is in many ways an attempt to translate the past into the promise of an (uncertain) future. The work of Janša, Janša, Janša and Zdjelar registers the power structures of, and strategies of resistance to, that process of translation. By making seemingly personal gestures – that connect to and hold together debates about democracy and cultural exchange – these artists create expose fields, or constellations, of ideological meaning. Two and a half decades after the start of transition from socialism into capitalism, most of the successor states find themselves in political and economic positions of unfinished translation. While the member states Slovenia (2004) and Croatia (2013) have been included in the European Union, albeit relegated to its ‘second tier’ economic and political periphery, non-member states Bosnia, Serbia and Macedonia remain caught in the perpetual cycle of the holding pattern. In different ways, the Janšas and Zdjelar take up this perspective of the perpetually translated, by engaging in acts of mimicry that refuse all distance. Their transitional aesthetics critique the neoliberal order by reproducing its hierarchies while manifesting embodied refusals of them. This chapter has examined cultural translation (of political structures and of popular music) as a strategy of resistance; the following chapters will address other types of transitional translation.

4

Halfway Tradition

In recent years, a figure has emerged in popular culture across the countries of former Yugoslavia that is perfectly representative of post-socialist transition: the halfway everyman.1 Popularized in the series Mile versus Transition (Mile Protiv Tranzicije) (2003–7) produced by Belgrade-based B92 Television, the halfway everyman can best be described as an exaggerated comical collage of national stereotypes caught in a society of perpetually fluctuating and conflicting values. Mile is middle-aged, working-class, male, married with children, plagued by economic difficulties and frustrated by changes in society. He swings helplessly between the residual mindset of socialism and his newly discovered national pride. The format of Mile versus Transition alternates between Mile’s humorous monologues about the frustrations caused by transition, and scenes of his ‘fight’ against transition. The ‘fight’ usually involves some kind of cunning (and illegal) solution, such as his response to the introduction of traffic laws that mandate the wearing of seat belts in cars: he makes a T-shirt with a seat belt sewn to the front. Mile’s home is adorned with symbols of Yugoslavia (Tito’s portrait, postcards from summer holidays in Croatia) and symbols of Serbian traditionalism (garlic cloves and peppers hanging on the wall, Serbian traditional ‘Šajkača’ cap). The fusing of the symbolism of national awareness typical of post-Milosević Serbia with symbols of socialist heritage is reflexively underscored in the key traits of

1

Different versions of this figure have existed earlier, the most well-known being ‘the peasant urbanite’ from the 1960s to 1980s. The term ‘peasant urbanite’ was coined by Andrei Simić to describe the cultural experiences and social interactions of a generation displaced by the rapid modernization and rural-to-urban migration in Yugoslavia after the Second World War. While the halfway everyman is in many ways an updated version of this figure, its key feature is the position of confused observer of the process of transition. See Andrei Simić, The Peasant Urbanite: A Study of Rural–Urban Mobility in Serbia (New York: Seminar Press, 1973).

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Mile’s character – he is arrogant, stubborn, cunning, cynical and prone to conspiracy theories.2 Portrayals of a contemporary subjectivity split between the impossibility of returning to pre-transition ‘normality’ and the refusal to adapt to the perpetually changing present have appeared in a range of other cultural creations. Serbian comedian Dragoljub Ljubičić Mićko wrote a two-part comic book parodying the pitfalls of contemporary life in Serbia. The second part, National Park Serbia 2: Half-apocalypse of the half-world (Nacionalni Park Srbija 2: Polusmak Polusveta) (2006), treats the reality of transition post-2000 through presenting a series of stereotypical characters as exotic species in a national park. Bosnian artist and musician Damir Nikšić has an ongoing, highly popular short video series on YouTube titled No’ere Else in the World (Niđe Na Svijetu) in which he performs a Bosnian ‘everyman’ ironically admiring and celebrating the spoils of transition in Bosnia (illegal urban construction, corruption in politics, failing higher education, general social decay).3 Nikšić’s catchphrase ‘no’ere else in the world’ (nowhere is intentionally pronounced colloquially as no’ere) is used to communicate the state of a society whose corruption and dysfunction keep it ‘behind’ the rest of the world, and to parody the self-exoticization of Bosnia’s present predicament. Split subjectivities operating in gaps between old and new have permeated every aspect of contemporary life in the region. My departure point for this chapter is the peculiarity that the above popular culture creations capture: an unwanted consequence of transition being ‘halfway traditions’ that effectively, if unintentionally, act as parodies of ethnonationalist traditionalism.4 The chapter examines art practices that use ‘halfway tradition’ to critique nationalism and the cult of tradition. Death Anniversary (2004) by Vladimir Nikolić, Balkan Erotic Epic (2005) by Marina Abramović and The Garden of Earthly Delights (2013) by Mladen Miljanović each stage forms of tradition that fall outside and problematize the narrative of the Balkans moving away from primitivism and towards the civilization of

2

3 4

Vesna Trifunović and Jovana Diković, ‘“Mile Versus Transition”: Social Changes and Clashes of Values through the Prism of a Television Show’ (Belgrade: Etnografski Institut SANU, 2014), 141– 53, 148. Videos are available at http://youtube.com/almaymun (accessed 1 August 2016). In addition to the characters mentioned above, as I argued elsewhere, turbo-folk music functions as the symbol of transitional degeneration away from the ‘ideal’ of folklore and tradition. See Čvoro, Turbo-folk Music.

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Europe. The artists focus on unusual practices of commemorating the dead (Nikolić and Miljanović) and discourses about the role of sexuality in the national body (Abramović). They simultaneously problematize the normative teleology of Balkan progression and parody the nationalist reinvention of tradition. Nikolić, Abramović and Miljanović use sex and death as symbols of tradition to position their practice between local informants and ‘expert’ global artist ethnographers, questioning the ways in which politics of identity are inscribed into the contemporary art system.

Between the European Union and the Balkans as symbolic spaces Since 1989, the international art circuit has incorporated art as cultural difference within the neoliberal model of pluralism. In this context, the role of Balkan artists is to represent a ‘true Balkan experience’ and facilitate exchange between the periphery and the centre. Halfway traditions problematize this exchange by making visible the ideological, physical and symbolic production of cultural difference in a local context as well as the reinvention of traditions for global art audiences. They are a time-warp in the teleology of transition: the return of tradition as an ambiguous and unwanted historical difference (‘our’ tradition, but not our preferred tradition). That said, halfway traditions act out temporal clashes that uncover the ideology of transition and create the possibility for an experience of history outside the nationalist–neoliberal nexus. In her analysis of political discourses concerning the accession of the former Yugoslav countries to the European Union, Tanja Petrović shows how the narrative of EU integration in the Balkans is presented as the only way for former Yugoslav societies to unburden themselves from historical baggage, from nationalism and other twentieth-century anchors, and join the future-oriented international community.5 However, rather than providing an alternative to nationalism(s), transition and EU integration have produced new forms of nationalism: reconfiguring historical timelines to provide continuity

5

Petrović, Yuropa, 10.

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between the present and the ‘authentic’ national history through reburials of dead bodies;6 exhibiting cultural idiosyncrasies through the international art circuit; ‘traditionalizing’ societies (such as post-1990 Serbia) through giving traditional names to newborn children and promoting consumption of traditional food, music, arts and crafts.7 Halfway tradition is the accidental consequence of the production of national past. Sociologist Ildiko Erdei, in her account of subjectivities in post-socialism and the formation of the halfway position, argues that the transition from socialism to capitalism is underpinned by an assumption that it will also involve a change from socialist subjects to capitalist subjects.8 Yet once decoupled from the socialist way of life – such as dependence on the state for social support, belief in a better tomorrow, cynical distance towards the system, opposition to Western values – the subjects of post-socialism never successfully transitioned into neoliberal subjects and remained caught in-between, even taking on the ‘worst’ parts from both systems: corruption from old socialist networks and cynical opportunism and exploitation from neoliberalism.9 This halfway position operating between ‘the worst’ of old and new systems can be performed as a parody of the ethnonationalist cult of tradition. Nikolić stages an encounter between Balkan tradition (soulful weeping) and Euromodernism (empty universality). Abramović provides an alternative narrative of ‘returning to tradition’ by showing forms of sexuality repressed by the Christianization of the region, and Miljanović explores the self-representation of desire in commemorative practices that disturb notions of propriety about the afterlife. These artists approach sex and death as parts of the reproductive cycle of the nation, at the moment of the import of new national identity and the export of tradition as a global brand. But rather than articulating branded tradition from an ethnically based platform, they juxtapose the production

6

7

8

9

Katherine Verdery, The Political Lives of the Dead: Reburial and Postsocialist Change (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999). Miroslava Malesević, ‘Tradicija u Tranziciji: U Potrazi za “Još Starijim i Lepšim” Identitetom’, in Etnologija i Antropologija: Stanje I Perspektive, ed. Dragana Radojičić (Beograd: Zbornik Etnografskog Institut SANU 21, 2005), 219–34. Ildiko Erdei, ‘“Rocky Made in Serbia”: Globalne Ikone’, in Horror Porno Ennui: Kulture Prakse Postsocijalizma, ed. Ines Prica and Tea Skokić (Zagreb: Biblioteka Nova Etnografija, 2011), 273–98, 276. Erdei, ‘“Rocky Made in Serbia”: Globalne Ikone’, 276.

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of tradition against earlier historical events.10 Through historical montage, Nikolić, Abramović and Miljanović reassemble the context for understanding the emergence of tradition in post-socialism; they see it not so much as a moment of national awakening, but more as the opportunistic filling of empty space with ideological (national) content by different groups: religious elites, nationalists, neoliberals. Halfway tradition exposes the high-stakes struggle over placing this content, and the consequences for our representing of collective agency and historical responsibility.

Death anniversary For Death Anniversary (2004), Vladimir Nikolić employed a professional weeper and visited the gravesite of Marcel Duchamp in Rouen, France, on the thirty-sixth anniversary of Duchamp’s death. The video features footage of Nikolić sombrely standing over the tombstone while the weeper wails a mournful dirge about Duchamp’s legacy. It is accompanied by extensive textual documentation on Nikolić’s website about the difficulties faced during the planning and making of the work, including securing the services of the weeper and the process of obtaining visas and passports. According to Nikolić, his intention in Death Anniversary was to take ‘a true Balkan artist’ to ‘the wrong place’: to stage an encounter between the irreducible cultural difference of the shepherdess from Montenegro performing an archaic social ritual and what Nikolić describes as ‘the ultimate point of art universality’, symbolized in Duchamp as ‘the Godfather’ of European modernism.11 Death Anniversary is ostensibly about the European perception of art ‘from the Balkans’. The work uses an idiosyncratic cultural form as a strategy to make visible the identity-branding engaged in by artists seeking visibility on the global art circuit. Nikolić explains: They (art catalogue text writers, curators, journalists, etc.) always read my work in the geopolitical context of the country I represent. So no matter

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Their use of Christian and Serb iconography could be read as a critique of the rise of Serb nationalism in different contexts. Vladimir Nikolić, ‘About Death Anniversary 1968–2004’ (2007), 24, http://www.vladimir-Nikolić. com/foto/about%20death%20anniversary.pdf (accessed 2 July 2015).

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Figure 7 Vladimir Nikolić, Death Anniversary, video installation, 4’00”, 2004. Courtesy of the artist.

what my work was about – it was seen only in the light of this Balkan communism – post-communism, war-post-war, anti-modern tradition, weird local habits, and described in terms of cultural, social and political references related to the place I come from.12

Accordingly, as Nikolić suggests, Death Anniversary’s mourning ritual shows what it looks like to be ‘an artist with geopolitical burden’ [sic]. ‘Death Anniversary’ lies somewhere between the western image of contemporary art in The Balkans, and the idea of a ready made from The Balkans as a way climbing onto the international art scene.13

Since the 1990s European–Balkan encounters have served as key framing devices for art from former Yugoslavia. For example, three exhibitions staged in different countries in 2003, In Search of Balkania (curated by Peter Weibel,

12 13

Nikolić, ‘About Death Anniversary 1968–2004’, 1. Ibid., 3.

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Roger Conover and Eda Cufer), Blood and Honey: The Future’s in the Balkans (curated by international superstar Harald Szeeman), and In the Gorges of the Balkans: A Report (curated by Rene Block), all attempted to narrate the encounter between the Balkans and Europe to international audiences.14 The setting of Death Anniversary ironically restages this encounter: the cultural power imbalance between the centre and periphery in the exhibition of art becomes the central thesis of this work. Nikolić becomes the artist-asmiddleman who brings an Eastern ‘native informant’ (the weeper) to the centre (Europe) in order to initiate an unequal and skewed dialogue with universality. Death Anniversary positions the figure of the weeper as the ‘Balkan readymade’: an archaic cultural form symbolizing the historically frozen Balkans. Nikolić deploys the cultural specificity of his work to make explicit the complex relationship between art history and constructions of identity, and also as cultural remembering. Death Anniversary suggests the repetition of history through ritual (commemorating death), but it’s important that it repeats a very particular history of weeping as a medium: his weeper operates metaphorically broadly as a medium for repeating history, but also specifically to convey a culturally recognizable feeling of time. The flow of history is suspended in the performance, reflecting both locally meaningful traditions and also external perceptions of the backward Balkans. Death Anniversary creates a symbolic universe that ‘Balkanizes’ Duchamp by acknowledging him  – and his legacy – through the cultural lens of the ‘dark side’ of the civilization he represents. The scene of Nikolić standing over Duchamp’s grave, dressed in a suit, while the weeper kneels and weeps is striking for the way in which it juxtaposes two modes of commemorating time and tradition. On the one hand, Duchamp’s Parisian grave recalls a specific mode of pilgrimage that is associated with heroes of modernism. On the other hand, the weeper represents a folkloric way of mourning the passing of Duchamp – albeit the Balkan version comes thirty-six years too late. It is worth noting that Nikolić’s use of the weeper is not strictly according to tradition, as weepers are usually only employed at

14

Katarina Luketić, Balkan: Od Geografije do Fantazije (Zagreb: Algoritam, 2013), 95.

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funerals, not used to mark anniversaries. Nikolić creates a temporality that is an ‘in-between’ fusion of European and Balkan ritual practice. Death Anniversary operates a triple parody: of the role of the international art circuit in the production of mythologized Balkan identities; of the veneration of Eurocentric heroes of modernism; and of nationalist populism as reinforced through tradition. The quirky and humorous mismatch of the tradition of weeping and the legacy of European modernism problematizes national association in both local and international contexts: it looks equally curious to both audiences for different reasons. Nikolić intentionally selects a highly idiosyncratic and archaic form of communicating with the dead to parody the vocabulary of epitomized national identity as performed through the dead body. Yet, Nikolić’s weeper is included distinctly strategically. In hiring a weeper, Nikolić outsources the affective labour of mourning for Duchamp (and for history, the geopolitical burden). Claire Bishop describes this form of artistic practice as ‘delegated performance’: The act of hiring nonprofessionals or specialists in other fields to undertake the job of being present and performing at a particular time and a particular place on behalf of the artist, and following his or her instructions. This strategy differs from a theatrical and cinematic tradition of employing people to act on the director’s behalf in the following crucial respect: the artists … hire people to perform their own socioeconomic category. (original emphasis)15

As a parodic, delegated performance, Death Anniversary occupies the space between the socio-economic category of the shepherdess from the margin and the central figure of Eurocentric Modernism. This space is an almost unbridgeable gap built on cultural divides between ‘high’ and ‘low’ and ‘East’ and ‘West’. The space or gap, meanwhile, acts as an exotic distraction in the work, allowing Nikolić, having delegated the emotional labour of art, to remain preoccupied with the ‘proper’ art business of presenting cultural capital in order to gain recognition internationally. Nikolić’s employment of the weeper represents a tactical use of tradition, a reinvention of an established tradition of delegation into a cultural–financial

15

Claire Bishop, ‘Delegated Performance: Outsourcing Authenticity’, October 140 (2012): 91.

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transaction for the present. In Balkan societies that still use weepers at funerals, the service is first and foremost a business transaction. Weepers often have a repertoire of mourning songs from which some are chosen in discussion with the customer. Slavoj Žižek picks up on this aspect of weeping when he humorously remarks that the employment of weepers in a ‘traditional’ sense enables families to outsource mourning, so they can get on with negotiating for the fortune of the deceased.16 The slippage between the intentionally exaggerated cultural distinctions in Death Anniversary and the self-aware, cynical artistic gesture prevent us identifying the work with any one national identity. It does offer an alternative form of knowledge about capitalism’s commodification of the individual via its strategic updating of tradition. Duchamp’s status as a national hero and as the ‘Godfather’ of modernism is undermined, just as the ethnologic perception of the weeper is problematized by the norms of contemporary labour being suspended and transgressed. Perhaps, instead of the weeper symbolizing a ‘Balkan readymade’, Death Anniversary reveals Duchamp’s legacy as the readymade of a specific set of privileged and centrist social relations. The modality of materializing social practice through performance is also evident in Nikolić’s earlier video work Rhythm (2001), which features five people repeatedly making the Christian-Orthodox sign of the cross to the beat of a techno music track. Rhythm highlights the proximity of ritualistic repetition to the materialization of ideology in everyday practices. It does so by connecting the three implicit meanings of a single act. The first is blessing oneself by making the sign of the cross. The second uses the same gesture to express disbelief at something undesirable or disagreeable. The third connects the first two into a gesture expressing a national identity: during the 1990s, the Orthodox sign of the cross (using three fingers) became a political sign of national coherence (distinguishing oneself from, for example, Catholic Croats, who make the sign with an open hand). In Rhythm, Nikolić locks the three levels of the ritual into a repetitious performance keyed to the techno beat, mobilizing the fusion of religious ritual, nationalism and popular culture that was so prevalent in Serbia during the 1990s. Moreover, he connects expression of religio-national identity to the techno-driven repetitious labour, recalling

16

Slavoj Žižek, ‘Will You Laugh for Me Please’, http://www.lacan.com/Žižeklaugh.htm.

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Blaise Pascal’s often-quoted remark on the relation between ritual and belief: ‘Kneel down [often enough] and you will believe.’17 Nikolić connects popular culture, repetition and traditional ritual to bodies being-in-history. As I will discuss next, this scrutiny of bodies in history via ritual and repetition also underpins Marina Abramović’s work Balkan Erotic Epic.

Balkan Erotic Epic Even though she made work earlier in her career about Yugoslav history and ideology (Rhythm 5, Tomas Lips), Abramović’s ‘Balkan turn’ (1997–2005) coincided with the post-1990s war years, when international attention was attuned to the region. Abramović produced two major works in these years: Balkan Baroque (1997) for the 1997 Venice Biennale, and Balkan Erotic Epic (2005) upon an invitation to contribute to a collection of short films titled Destricted, based around the theme of pornography. While Balkan Baroque used confrontation to address the war – a performance by the artist involving scrubbing animal bones – Balkan Erotic Epic took a more light-hearted approach by producing a multichannel projection of short videos about the use of sex in Balkan pagan rituals. This move led some authors to argue that Abramović ‘marketized Balkan ambiguity’18 as a cultural product based on a stereotypical view of the Balkans as a powder keg of sex, violence and eccentricities. Abramović allegedly fused this perception of the Balkans with her own personal experience, thus constructing a highly problematic apolitical and ahistorical picture of the region. It can be argued that Abramović’s universalization of the Balkan experience monopolized stereotypes of the region at an opportune moment when the Balkans came to the foreground of international interest. But this claim against the most easily identifiable – and by far the most internationally established – ‘Balkan artist’ overlooks the complexities and nuances of her engagement with tradition. While Balkan Baroque presented a more overt critical response to nationalism within the

17

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Žižek often uses this line in his conception of ideology. For example, see ‘With or without Passion: What’s Wrong with Fundamentalism? – Part 1’, http://www.lacan.com/zizpassion.htm. Louisa Avgita, ‘Marina Abramović’s Universe: Universalising the Particular in Balkan Epic’, Cultural Policy, Criticism and Management Research, no. 6 (Autumn 2012): 7–28, 8.

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context of the Venice Biennale,19 I argue that Balkan Erotic Epic aimed its critique at the invention and production of tradition in ‘Balkan art’ at the moment when this kind of work came into the global spotlight. Abramović created stereotypical narratives about Balkan epic patriarchal traditionalism and repressed pagan sexuality to problematize the geopolitics of international art that considers the Balkans to be culturally exotic. Balkan Erotic Epic consists of a series of short videos featuring Abramović as ‘the Professor’: a parody of an impartial narrator-observer of Balkan otherness, informing us about the role of sexuality in Balkan pagan rituals, such as the practice of a husband making the sign of the cross on his wife’s chest with his phallus to ensure easier child delivery. The Professor introduces footage of re-enactments of pagan fertility rituals in which bodies are used to regulate weather: Abramović dressed in folk costume massaging her breasts; a group of women massaging their breasts in a field to a soundtrack of a woman singing ancient songs; a man standing in a field masturbating in the rain; a group of men lying naked and face-down in a field, thrusting into the soil; a group of women dressed in folk costume running around a field in the rain lifting their skirts and exposing their vaginas to the sky. (In the last scene, the women’s showing their genitals to the heavens was believed to have the ability to scare higher powers and make the rain stop.) Emphasis on the mythical power of sexuality to ensure romance, fertility, healing and agricultural fecundity is reinforced in the work through the inclusion of short drawn animations that illustrate rituals designed to control the world through sex: one shows a woman inserting a small fish in her vagina, keeping it there overnight, then the next day grinding it into powder and mixing it into her lover’s coffee to ensure his everlasting devotion; another shows a woman touching her vagina and then touching her child’s face to ward off the evil eye.

19

It is important to note that this line of argumentation overlaps with nationalist objections to Abramović’s representations of the Balkans. Abramović’s high international profile and her living outside the Balkans (she has not lived there since 1976) were used as justification by the then Yugoslav minister of culture for her removal as the artist representing Yugoslavia in the 1997 Venice Biennale. In reality, the minister disapproved of Abramović’s provocative piece Balkan Baroque, and she was replaced by a traditionalist landscape painter, Vojo Stanić. In the end, the curator of the Venice Biennale, Germano Celant, invited Abramović to exhibit at the Italian Pavilion. A detailed account of the circumstances is available in Bojana Pejić, ‘Balkan for Beginners’, in Primary Documents: A Sourcebook for Eastern and Central European Art since the 1950s, ed. Laura Hoptman and Tomas Pospiszyl (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2002), 325–39.

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Balkan Erotic Epic features much that can be described as sensationalist exoticization of ‘Balkan otherness’, in that it portrays its inhabitants as sexobsessed and superstitious primitives studied by a famous artist-ethnographer. Yet, Abramović self-consciously undermines her authority over the narrative by switching between the position of an impartial expert, and a local informant who is actively participating in the production of the traditions she is documenting. Furthermore, the formal composition of the work and the chosen ‘examples’ of custom position the production of tradition within a specific set of historical circumstances. The high production values and aestheticization of Balkan Erotic Epic deliberately skew the subject matter through the filter of Hollywoodesque stylization, removing from it any semblance of being a genuine ethnographic record, and preventing any attempt to interpret it through realist or documentary convention. Abramović is upfront about not finding any illustrations of these rituals during her archival research, and taking artistic licence in visualizing (staging) them. However, if there is any ethnographic accuracy in these representations, this is because they are intentionally created against searching for any supposed authenticity. For example, though Abramović set out to recreate pagan (pre-Christian) rituals, the garments worn by the performers are nineteenth-century Serbian folk costumes. Abramović’s interest in pagan rituals focused on genitals is temporally at odds with both her own theatrical setting of it, and contemporary sensibilities about tradition: symbols of sex and sexuality have been steadily eradicated with the Christianization of the Balkans from the ninth century. In this respect, Abramović’s work is a representation of the Balkans that originates in tradition and folklore, but is not located in any specific time, place or event.20 It is precisely this historical malleability in Balkan Erotic Epic that connects it to the reinvention of foundational national myths in post-socialism. Its use of sex – particularly heterosexual male sexuality – as symbolic of tradition references the heteronormative phallocentrism at the core of post-socialist traditionalism. As Katherine Verdery argues, a central attempt in post-socialist

20

Steven Henry Madoff, ‘The Balkans Unbound’, in Balkan Epic: Marina Abramović, ed. Adelina von Furstenberg, Catalogue for exhibition Marina Abramović Balkan Epic (Hangar Bicocca Milan 20 January–23 April 2006), 18–24, 21.

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nationalist gender politics is to reshape the nation against the debilitating ‘mothering’ of socialism, and to restore men to their ‘natural’ place of symbolic authority.21 Part of this task is to reshape and recast the past. In the central scene of Balkan Erotic Epic, men in Serbian folk costume stand motionless on a stage covered with a red folk-pattern-embroidered cloth, their erect penises protruding out of their trousers. The soundtrack to this scene features Olivera Katarina, a Yugoslav film icon, singing in Russian a song titled My People Sleep a Deep and Lifeless Sleep. The title and lyrics of the song are derived from Montenegrin Petar Petrović Njegoš’s epic verse The Mountain Wreath (1847). The use of Njegoš’s words gives the scene its ‘epic’ element. The Njegoš epic is widely known and studied in schools throughout the region. The poem uses the conflict between the Serbs and the Ottoman Empire as a cipher for the very concept of religious and national identity. Abramović talks about this scene as a reflection of phallocentric masculinity and national pride: I was overwhelmed by this image because you’re touching national pride, you’re touching this idea of muscular energy, touching the idea of sexual energy as a cause of war, as a cause of disasters, as a cause also of love.22

However, she also adds: The one thing I was very surprised at, that at least I was not expecting: the image was not erotic at all … usually when you have male genital organs, there’s always something happening: either they’re making love, or they are making strip-tease or some kind of action. Here just by making them static and absolutely not moving them, you completely go somewhere else in this image. It became somehow an image of new Balkan heroes.23

This suggestion by Abramović that she turns the men into phallic monuments to ‘new heroes’ reveals the answer to the question: What is the tradition represented in this segment? The scene functions as a symbolization of the phallocentrism of nationalism in the cult of tradition. It can be interpreted as an act of usurping patriarchal laws. As much as Abramović’s representations in Balkan Erotic Epic have

21 22

23

Verdery, What Was Socialism and What Comes Next? 80. Fredrik Carlstrom and Marina Abramović, ‘A Conversation on Balkan Erotic Epic’, in Balkan Epic, 65–9, 66. Ibid., 67.

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folk tradition as their starting point, they renounce submitting to the terms of that gendered tradition. It offers provocative and playful interpretations of tradition through sexual functionality articulated in temporal terms, yet located outside of history. As the scene progresses it becomes a comical test for the actors of maintaining the erection, and of holding still: a form of temporalphallic competition between the men. Abramović captures the phallocentric bonding and heteronormative confederacy that underpin the production of nation and of tradition. The scene critically suggests a historical and temporal lineage reproduced through sexual excitement without recourse to women: the singing voice of Katarina represents more as a mournful spectral presence than an object of desire, or a subject with desire. The continuity of the nation is ensured through male production of culture and heroic deeds (maintaining erections). This scene encapsulates halfway tradition in two main ways: as a visualization of obscenities as a social glue, and as a montage of the monstrosity of post-socialist tradition. As a visualization of perceived obscenities, this scene reverses – as indeed does the whole artwork – the common-sense perception of tradition, wherein old social customs and exchanges are politely performed in public while the sexual symbolic realm (read by some as obscenity) that underpins them only emerges in private. Balkan Erotic Epic reverses this relationship by staging the sexual structure of everyday interactions as primary, and structuring the performance of tradition around it. And in manifesting the sexual core around which tradition is structured, it also reminds us of the important role of dirty jokes (obscene humour) as a social glue. As Žižek notes, exchanges of ‘obscene’ jokes in former Yugoslavia established a ‘symbolic pact’ between different ethnic groups.24 Sharing of embarrassing obscene idiosyncrasies establishes a sense of solidarity. The obscene solidarity in Balkan Erotic Epic is created for and among the ‘primitives’ in the Balkans, and is at the expense of the third party, the global art audience left with the mystifying, foreign, non-inclusive spectacle of sex-crazed exotica. Abramović’s gesture of patriotic, partisan idiosyncrasy reveals the underlying power relations of a ‘Balkan artist’

24

Slavoj Žižek, Vladimir I. Lenin Revolution at the Gates: Selection of Writings from February to October 1917 (London: Verso, 2002), 203.

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performing halfway tradition on a global stage: it is a resistance to the fake universalism of global geopolitics. The context is the post-socialist transitional state, described by Miško Šuvaković as a hybrid ‘monster’ made up of clashing temporalities.25 Balkan Erotic Epic shows us three versions of tradition: a realization of tribal bloodrelations into a nineteenth-century romanticist nation state (the power of the phallus returning); a post-socialist accumulation of cultural capital through privatization of the social sphere (privatization of communal sexual practices); and a neoliberal branding process of attempting to fit cultural difference into contemporary networks of capital (institutionalization, circulation of cultural difference). These versions of tradition each move at different speeds and produce different experiences of time. For instance, fantasies of reproducing the class strata of nineteenth-century Europe (national-bourgeoisie collectivism) contain a different rhythm to fantasies of merging with the diffused, neoliberal social structures of the twenty-first century. Abramović does not seek to resolve the different rhythms and temporalities, she mobilizes historical symbols in order to question the cult of a ‘purer’ past returning, or a monolithic future ahead.

The Garden of Earthly Delights In contrast to Abramović’s performances, which are but loosely connected to historical events and geographical spaces, Mladen Miljanović takes historical, cultural and geographical specificity as his inspiration, which is then abstracted into a more comprehensive symbolism of the historical condition in the region. Miljanović’s work The Garden of Earthly Delights (2013), created for the Bosnia and Herzegovina (BIH) national pavilion in the 2013 Venice Biennale, carried a heavy symbolic burden because it was the first work in a decade to represent Bosnia and Herzegovina at the international event. This pressure on the artist was compounded by the ever-present tension within BIH between the Muslim-majority Federation, with its capital Sarajevo, and the Serb-dominated Republika Srpska, with its capital Banja Luka. The fact

25

Šuvaković, Umetnost I Politika, 206.

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Figure 8 Mladen Miljanović, The Garden of Earthly Delights, engraved drawings on granite, metal construction, 2013. Photo Drago Vejnovic. Courtesy of the artist.

that Miljanović is based in Banja Luka presented a potentially volatile scenario – one that he engaged directly with in both the title and the theme of his work. The ‘delight’ in the title counterintuitively played against expectations of a work from a country heavily burdened with nationalist tensions. It raised a question: What did it mean, to represent BIH two decades after the end of a bloody war and in the face of ongoing economic hardship, political corruption and ethnic tensions? Miljanović’s answer was the fine arts equivalent of Damir Nikšić’s ‘nowhere in the world’: to capture a tradition (through a prism of ‘delight’) that departed from and parodied all national frames, and emerged as though from the conceptual underside of post-socialist transition. The Garden of Earthly Delights features three granite panels engraved with tombstone drawings as found in parts of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The source material was drawn from Miljanović’s work as professional tombstone engraver, and he employed the method used in commercial tombstone manufacture of transferring an enlarged photograph onto the stone to trace for the engraving. In this approach, Miljanović operates as an artist-ethnographer who collects and assembles local cultural forms and exhibits them to an international audience. According to Miljanović, his intention was to capture the personal

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pleasures, desires and hopes of everyday people, as manifested through posthumous representation.26 The work’s title, composition and background are taken from Hieronymus Bosch’s famous Renaissance triptych and presented through a strikingly idiosyncratic cultural form. Instead of depicting sinners from a divine all-seeing perspective, Miljanović populates his work with images of deceased people accompanied by their precious objects (cars, musical instruments, hunting gear) – objects that represent their profession (e.g. shepherd, policeman, chef, pilot) or passion in life (e.g. dancing, singing, horse-riding). The figures are also accompanied by global symbols of love, passion and mourning, such as birds and flowers. The figures are arranged across three panels, similar to Bosch’s otherworldly landscape. Miljanović replicates Bosch’s compositional scheme of the left panel depicting the gardens of Eden, the right depicting hell, and the middle (largest) panel representing humanity. The left panel shows Bosch’s idyllic gardens of Eden with a fountain in the centre; however, instead of Adam and Eve, Miljanović inserts an elderly couple. The right panel reproduces Bosch’s scene of hell with ominous lights and haunting silhouetted buildings; but instead of people, Miljanović inserts tanks, fighter jets and homemade brandy distiller kits. The centre panel shows figures, buildings and vehicles carefully arranged in a mise en scène (discussed below). How can these images be understood as symbols of tradition? Actually, they represent a continuation of aspects of tradition (Balkan practices of commemorating the deceased), and also an important departure from tradition. They show evidence of what Serbian cultural anthropologist Ivan Čolović identifies as forms of populist social communication that retain aspects of tradition (and canon) but are distinctly different from that tradition.27 Čolović studied epitaphs that began appearing in graveyards in parts of Serbia in the early 1980s, and argues that they played an important role in dealing with death at the time. The epigraphs provided a form of social communication that enabled a public display of profound emotions; portraying and confirming

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‘Interview between commissioner Sarita Vujković and artist Mladen Miljanović, held during the preparation of the exhibition “The Garden of Delights” for the 55th International Art Exhibition of la Biennale di Venezia’, in Mladen Miljanović: The Garden of Delights, Pavilion of Bosnia and Herzegovina at 55th International Art Exhibition – la Biennale di Venezia (2012), 102–12, 106. Ivan Čolović, Divlja Knjizevnost (Beograd: Nolit, 1985), 9.

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belonging to a social group, place and time; providing a meta-commentary on life and death.28 Miljanović’s work is such a non-solemn, colloquial metacommentary, taking an approach to tombstone art that commemorates death through romantic and futile attempts at symbolic immortality and control.29 The Garden of Earthly Delights offers a counterpoint to what Verdery describes as ‘dead-body politics’.30 In this use of dead bodies by post-socialist societies to emblematize and support revisions of history, the intention is to use death as a symbol of nationalist politics. By contrast, Miljanović’s production of micronarratives speaks to transnational and transhistorical collectivity. Commemorated figures in Miljanović’s work are not marked by national identity, but by their manifest enjoyment of everyday pleasures in life. As a medium of history, his tombstone images recall Walter Benjamin’s claim that everyday objects always carry traces of a utopian dream. The utopia in question is the everyday social sphere, not an imagined story about national origin or traditional lifestyles.31 Miljanović establishes a communal scene in which individual figures – each captured in the singularity of its death – look like a group of friends at social event posing for a photograph. Yet, unavoidably, the connection of the work to the social sphere of Yugoslavia – everyday customs and traditions – locates it in the emergence of nationalism. According to Miljanović, The Garden is about the appearance of kitsch in 1980s Yugoslavia, as a herald of the violence that would follow shortly afterwards.32 Miljanović sees the vernacular emergence of these kitschy engravings as a perversion of tradition that was responsive to the broader, political transformation of tradition into kitsch for the purposes of nationalism. This agenda is most clearly evident in his central positioning of the Šešlije Motel on the middle panel. The large building sits in the background as the focal point and pseudo-temple out of which all the figures emerge. It is the only built structure on the panel, and its garish mix of high-modernist

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Čolović, Divlja Knjizevnost, 19–20. Petru Lucian Curseu and Ioan Pop-Curseu, ‘Alive after Death: An Exploratory Cultural Artifact Analysis of the Merry Cemetery of Sapanta’, Journal of Community & Applied Social Psychology no. 21 (2011): 371–87, 374. Verdery, What Was Socialism and What Comes Next? 41. In this respect it is instructive to juxtapose the gathering of the deceased in Garden with the final scene from Miroslav Lekić’s film The Knife (Nož) (1999). Based on the novel by Serb nationalist writer and politician Vuk Drašković, the film uses a scene of the deceased standing still in a landscape to symbolize the ongoing presence of nationalist tensions. Personal communication with the artist.

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minimalism with Chinese temple ornamentation is arresting in its vulgar specificity. The specific historical context signalled by Miljanović’s central positioning of the Šešlije Motel is the anarchy of uncontrolled and illegal construction in the early 1990s, which Srđan Jovanović-Weiss describes as ‘turbo-architecture’.33 Even though Jovanović-Weiss primarily associates turbo-architecture with the lawlessness and corruption enabled and tolerated by the Slobodan Milošević regime in Serbia – close to one million houses, hotels, banks, gas stations and shopping centres were erected in Serbia between 1989 and 2000, most without permits – Miljanović’s artwork suggests that there is wider and earlier evidence of this phenomenon across the region. The popular tombstone engravings are part of the same para-legal cultural milieu from the 1980s as turbo-folk and turbo-architecture. Elsewhere I have discussed the accidental postmodernism of turboarchitecture: the fact that the hybridity and pastiche of symbolism and design in buildings like the Šešlije Motel were not the product of architecture as a discipline or of architectural theory, but amalgams of systemic lawlessness and lack of regulation.34 In this book, I want to highlight two aspects of turboarchitecture that relate to the production of halfway tradition. First: both sides of the political spectrum in Serbia outright rejected the intersection of accidental postmodernism and criminality in turbo-architecture. The conservative nationalists perceived it as a sign of the degeneration of taste and tradition, while the cultural and intellectual elites identified it as synonymous with everything wrong with Serbia under Milošević. Yet, following Milošević’s arrest and transfer to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague, turbo-architecture was paradoxically promoted as a new national style at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2002, as proof of endurance against the 1999 NATO bombing of Serbia. Miljanović’s work marks the second appearance of this aesthetic in an international context – as well as BIH’s first appearance in Venice in a decade – and its establishment as a regional aesthetic. The halfway tradition of Miljanović’s transitional aesthetic in The Garden functions as both diagnostic and symbolic of the Yugoslav social reality.

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Srdjan Jovanović-Weiss, Almost Architecture (Stuttgart: Merz & Solitude, 2006), 39. See Chapter 4 in Čvoro, Turbo-folk Music.

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Second: thinking about halfway tradition in The Garden may prompt us to position its tombstone illustrations as examples of what Boris Groys calls a post-socialist paradise of symbols. Writing about the predicament of art that came in the wake of the historical collapse of communism, Groys argues that post-communist art appropriates from the enormous store of images, symbols, and texts that no longer belong to anyone, and that no longer circulate but merely lie quietly on the garbage heap of history as a shared legacy from the days of Communism. Post-Communist art has passed through its own end of history: not the free-market and capitalist end of history but the Socialist and Stalinist end of history.35

Interpretation of The Garden of Earthly Delights as portraying a post-socialism positioned between two ideological systems and populated by images that belong to both (and neither) is reinforced by the structure of the triptych. In this, post-socialist transition is the permanent condition between heaven and hell. The stability of socialism corresponds to the idyllic left panel, with its two pensioners representing the elder generation, while the violence of global capitalism is symbolized on the right panel by tanks and alcohol. The middle panel seems captured between them, frozen in transition. Yet in this middle space, semi-discarded historical symbols have the ability to transform history. Groys’s diagnosis of the historical condition of images (the post-socialist paradise of symbols) recalls Walter Benjamin’s conception of historical images as the leftovers of capitalism, which became lodged in the collective consciousness as ‘dream images’.36 Dream images turned history into a commodity used for the marketing of capitalism. Yet, dream images also remind us that the future is made of traces of past struggles in the present. They have a dual relationship to capitalism, wherein objects as commodities are a constituent part of capitalism, yet are set apart from the narrative of its progress. According to this logic, commodity allows historical difference to enter into the universal history of capital. Just as commodified historical objects can never escape capitalism – because they are part of it – so capitalism

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Groys, Art Power, 168. I discussed the potential of Benjamin’s historical images in Čvoro, ‘Dialectical Image Today’.

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cannot escape the politics of historical difference. And the difference in history will emerge through the repeated symbolism of objects that carried its traces. According to Miljanović, his reference to Bosch establishes a dialogue between artists across 500 years of history. The linking of historical realities establishes a sense of continuity. Bosch’s sinners are transformed into ordinary people with ordinary desires.37 Additionally, connecting two periods 500 years apart suggests a present cultural remembering of the position of tradition in the social structures of the past. Garden’s tombstones symbolize the historically frozen Balkans. Miljanović’s cultural specificity presents recently deceased people and their commodities, objects or dream images as mediums for articulating a particularly Balkan feeling of lifeless quasi-chronology. *** What do the ‘halfway everyman’, Nikolić’s weeper, Abramović’s pagan sex rituals and Miljanović’s kitsch tombstones have in common? Transition must address the promise of the future while attempting to deal with the past. Halfway tradition engenders a language of ‘in-between’ time, concerning fragments of the past that problematize leaving the past behind. By making visible the temporality (and historicity) of halfway tradition, transitional aesthetics in the artworks discussed filter the political reality that surrounds them. They reveal repetitions in the production of traditions: parallels between, for instance, the erasure of pagan sexuality by Christianity and the erasure of socialist sexuality by nationalists, or between Renaissance and postsocialist views on the afterlife. They speak to the role of tradition in periods of political change, the role of experts in the production of tradition, and the role of the body politic in processing violence and suppression. Presenting the post-socialist collective body through practices of commemoration and sex, these Balkan artworks appraise how the destruction of the social sphere and economy in post-socialist countries has arguably rendered the sexed body as the only remaining commodity. 37

This is also evident in the exhibit that accompanied the work: a series of text messages from members of the public answering the question of what they would like to see in the work. Here it is also instructive to think about Miljanović’s work in relation to the work of British artist Phil Collins who also deals with the intersection of obsolete technology, monumentality, everyday life and collective desire. In free fotolab (2004–) Collins invites the inhabitants of a city in which the project takes place (including Belgrade and Banja Luka) to submit undeveloped rolls of 35mm film which are processed and developed for free, on the understanding that they relinquish the universal rights to the artist, so he may select and present any of the images as his own work.

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All three artists activate Maria Todorova’s critique of the way in which the Balkans are captured through series of descriptions – semi-developed, semi-colonial, semi-civilized, semi-oriental – that paint the Balkans as an ‘in-between’, incomplete self.38 Works discussed here all turn on this notion of ‘in-betweenness’, which has itself been the fodder of precisely the kinds of essentializing accounts that Todorova is talking about. These hybridizing accounts reduce the Balkans to a state of child-like dependency and arrested development always in need of supervision and guidance. In fact, the very teleology of transition is a form of reductivism of a subject that is always striving towards something, or destroying something precious (the nation). The in-between position articulated by the artworks discussed picks holes in both sides of this argument. On the one hand, they parody and exaggerate the cult of tradition in ethnonationalist discourses after 1989. The rebirth of tradition is either dislocated by providing alternative (and overlooked) traditions, or by insisting on halfway tradition as the only true depiction of the present state of the region. On the other hand, they parody the essentializing discourse around ‘Balkan aesthetics’ that has appeared in the series of international ‘Balkan-themed’ exhibitions since the early 2000s.39 These artists knowingly perform ‘Balkan exotica’ by staging encounters between it and global (and Eurocentric) universalism. And at the level of metanarrative, they parody the state of being caught permanently ‘in-between’. They exaggerate the Balkanist discourse identified by Todorova in being ‘too Balkan’ (performing the exotic identity) and/or ‘not Balkan enough’ (engaging with discourses that exceed the local frame of reference). In strategically repurposing ethnonationalist conservatism through their practices, Nikolić, Miljanović and Abramović show us ways in which art can imagine alternative and critical counterpoints to normative historical teleologies. They insist that ‘halfway’ is a condition not of Balkan incompleteness, but of the wider world today.

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Todorova, Imagining the Balkans, 17. The exhibitions include After the Wall: Art and Culture in post-communist Europe (Stockholm 1999/2000), 2000+ARTEAST Collection, Ljubljana (Innsbruck 2000/2001), In Search of Balkania (Graz 2002), In the Gorges of the Balkan. A Report (Kassel 2003), Blood and Honey: The Future’s in the Balkans (Vienna 2003), Interrupted Histories (Ljubljana 2006), Cold War Modern. Design 1945–70 (London 2008/2009), Gender Check. Femininity and Masculinity in the Art of Eastern Europe (Vienna 2009/2010). For a survey of these exhibitions, see Maria Oriskova, ed., Curating ‘Eastern Europe’ and Beyond: Art Histories Through the Exhibition (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2014).

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In 2015, two events coincided with the seventieth anniversary of Victory Day over fascism in Europe. On 15 May, while shunning the official commemoration of the liberation of the Jasenovac Concentration Camp in Croatia (one of the largest and most notorious camps in Europe during the Second World War, established under the Croatian Nazi puppet state Independent State of Croatia (NDH)), Croatian president Kolinda Grabar Kitarović paid tribute to the Bleiburg Memorial in Austria where Yugoslav partisans executed NDH Ustaše militia after they fled Croatia at the end of the Second World War.1 One day earlier, in Serbia, the Supreme Court of Cassation rehabilitated Dragoljub ‘Draža’ Mihailović, the leader of the Serb nationalist Četnik movement trialled and executed by Yugoslav communists in 1946 for high treason and collaboration. The clashing coincidence of these two events with the anniversary of Victory Day represents the culmination of the ongoing normalization of fascism in public discourses across former Yugoslavia. The last twenty-five years have witnessed the resurgence of political efforts to reframe recent history in the region in order to establish local Second World War collaborationists as anti-fascists. Whether through revisions to school history curricula, renaming of streets after well-known collaborationists (such as the Nazi-installed puppet prime minister of Serbia, Milan Nedić) or overturning of internationally accepted legal decisions, there is a clear and concerted effort to purge historical baggage from fascist sympathizers so that their legacy can live on in the present.2

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There were some civilians fleeing with the soldiers, who were also murdered. This particular event was largely ignored/repressed in Yugoslavia causing it to become an important call to arms for nationalists and pro-fascists. More examples can be added to this list, including appointments of political figures with pro-fascist affiliations such as minister of culture in Croatia, Zlatko Hasanbegović; pro-fascist statements by politicians; and general tolerance towards extremist views.

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According to the narrative of the broader post-socialist ‘normalization’ of history discussed in earlier chapters as a key narrative of transition, former Eastern Bloc societies are returning to a ‘zero point’ before the history of capitalist growth (supported by the development of the nation state) was disrupted by disastrous, totalitarian socialist episodes. The wholesale engineering of the past across Europe was perfectly epitomized in the resolution passed by the EU Parliament on 2 April 2009 on ‘European conscience and totalitarianism’.3 This resolution announced Europe as historically liberated from two totalitarianisms – fascism and communism – as a way of securing the path to democracy in the twenty-first century. While it is undeniable that communism produced suffering and deaths under dictatorships such as Stalin’s in Russia, this resolution placed communism and fascism on the same totalitarian plane; it also established the present as a post-ideological and posthistorical platform from which the past can be (questionably) relativized. What sets the former Yugoslavia apart from other post-socialist revisions of history is that relativization was compounded by bloody conflict in the 1990s, producing ‘new’ national histories and traditions – as discussed in the previous chapter – and appropriating Second World War violence into narratives of victimhood. The parallel occurrence of erasure and revision of socialism with the nationalization of Yugoslav history created a complex web of politics of remembrance, recalling Winston Churchill’s quip that ‘the Balkans produce more history than they can locally consume’.4 Collective trauma and historical responsibility from the 1990s overlaps with unresolved historical traumas from the Second World War; historical revision of Yugoslavia takes place in parallel with the rehabilitation of local Nazi collaborationists; the role of war as the

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Available at http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-//EP//TEXT+TA+P6-TA2009-0213+0+DOC+XML+V0//EN (accessed 13 May 2016). The ‘Balkan’ quote is attributed to Churchill, and certainly bears all the hallmarks of his famous quips. However, it has been suggested that the quote does not come from Churchill but has been attributed to Churchill by Margaret Thatcher in her speech ‘New Threats for Old’ at a commemoration of the 50th anniversary of Churchill’s ‘Iron Curtain’ speech in 1996. Speaking about the entry of Central European countries into the European Union, Thatcher said, ‘Given the stormy past of that region – the inhabitants are said to produce more history than they can consume locally – everyone should have wished to see it settled economically.’ While the quote may not be Churchill’s, the patronizing neo-colonialist sentiment towards the ‘other’ of the European Union is expressed equally well by Thatcher. For the quote, see Margaret Thatcher, ‘Epilogue: New Threats for Old’, in Winston Churchill’s ‘Iron Curtain’ Speech Fifty Years Later, ed. James W. Muller (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999), 151–69, 160.

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unacknowledged first (primitive) phase of (criminal) capital accumulation in post-socialist transition is subsumed under the larger teleology of transition. Second World War monuments in former Yugoslavia stand as material embodiments of this complex and vexed relationship between ideology and remembering: the ways in which the history of Yugoslavia has been constructed and rewritten in the last fifty years, ways in which this history was usurped, manipulated and erased in the 1990s, and ways in which these events are once again being rewritten in the present. This chapter examines the work of two artists who approach Second World War monuments from former Yugoslavia against the backdrop of historical revision and denial in postsocialist transition. Igor Grubić’s Monument (2015) creates portraits of the monuments’ afterlives5 and David Maljković’s trilogy Scenes for a New Heritage (2004–6) imagines unrealized futures6 through the site of the Petrova Gora Monument.7 While post-socialist teleology of transition to capitalism is based

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In her study of memory practices in India, Deborah Cherry uses the term ‘afterlives’ to describe the way in which monuments live on through interactions, interpretations and (corporeal, mnemonic and sensory) engagements between people and sites/objects. See Deborah Cherry, ‘The Afterlives of Monuments’, South Asian Studies 29, no. 1 (2013): 1–14, 3. On monuments as symbols of ‘unfinished histories’ and ‘unrealized futures’, see Robert Burghardt and Gal Kirn, ‘Hybrid Memorial Architecture and Objects of Revolutionary Aesthetics’, in Signal 03, ed. Alec Dunn and Josh MacPhee (Oakland: PM Press, 2014), 99–131. Recent years have witnessed a number of artists across the region engaging with the legacy of the symbolism and aesthetics of the monuments. While I am focusing on the works of Grubić and Maljković, other artists have also engaged with the monumental aesthetics, including Marko Lulić (whose work will be briefly addressed in this chapter), Aleksandra Domanović (discussed in the next chapter), Siniša Labrović, Sandra Vitaljić and others. For a discussion of Labrović’s and Vitaljić’s engagements with contemporary sites of collective trauma (including partisan monuments), see Sanja Potkonjak and Tomislav Pletenac, ‘The Art and Craft of Memory: Re-Memorialization Practices in Post-socialist Croatia’, in Post-Yugoslav Constellations: Archive, Memory, and Trauma in Contemporary Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian Literature and Culture, ed. Vlad Beronja and Stijn Vervaet (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter GmbH, 2016), 65–81. Even though it does not deal with Second World War monuments, most public engagement with the politics of memorialization is in the work of the Belgrade-based Grupa Spomenik (The Monument Group), including Damir Arsenijević, Ana Bezić, Jasmina Husanović, Pavle Levi, Jelena Petrović, Branimir Stojanović and Milica Tomić. Formed in 2002 in response to the announcement by Belgrade City Municipality of the competition for ‘monument dedicated to wars on the territory of former Yugoslavia’, the group took the following question as its departure point:Is it possible to produce a monument that is dedicated to the wars and dissolution of Yugoslavia if its dissolution disputes the very context of the State that proclaims itself to be the keeper of the historical continuity and memory? Is it possible for the State to represent imperial wars, refugees, terrorized civilians and genocide on the citizens of the states that seceded from Yugoslavia without any insight into its own responsibility for these tragic events? The group formed in protest against what they saw as an attempt by the Serbian Government to dehistoricize and universalize responsibility and culpability for the wars. Starting with the first public performance in 2007 at the 49th October Salon in Belgrade (Oktobarski Salon), the modus operandi of the Monument Group includes a series of ‘lecture performances’ and debates that problematize the very possibility of monumentalizing the 1990s conflict. The group reconstructs the different contextual layers used to frame the past while keeping the process of facing the past collective, open-ended and self-reflective. Their departure point is that there could be no monuments built to the wars,

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on discrediting the socialist past and steeped with the politics of remembering associated with that past, Grubić and Maljković intervene in this historical – ideological field by mobilizing temporal montages that evoke lived memories and experiences of history. They present monuments as utopian narratives and ideologically motivated state-sponsored art, as ruins of socialism, as cannon fodder for neoliberal–nationalist revision and destruction – they try to articulate the emancipatory ideals of transnational anti-fascist solidarity of Yugoslavia in the lived experience beyond the teleology of transition.

Abandoned futures According to Henri Lefebvre, a monument is a ‘singular spatial representation of collective identity’: an attempt to materially transcend time through the political and public memory of the nation state.8 Lefebvre reminds us of monuments’ complicity in the grand historical narratives of the last two centuries. His writing sits in context of the critical work produced in the same period directed at unpacking the oppressive and grandiose historicism and traditionalism of ‘the monument’: Friedrich Nietzsche’s rejection of the monument, the modernist questioning of its totalitarian tendencies, scholars’ critical rethinking of commemorative practices in the wake of the Second World War, and global memory studies.9 As James E. Young notes, monuments have narrated and reflected historical, political and cultural events of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, from the heroic self-aggrandizing of the late nineteenth century to the ‘antiheroic, often ironic, and self-effacing

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and the only possible commemoration can take place through public discussions. Each of their performances (Belgrade 2008, Zagreb 2009, Novi Sad 2010, and Banja Luka 2010) is accompanied by a ‘distributive monument’: a physical object containing a poem and a short essay. More recently, between 2008 and 2010, the Monument Group devised a series of interventions entitled ‘Mathemes of Reassociation’ – including art exhibitions, publications, performances, workshops and public readings – that addressed the way in which the 1995 Srebrenica genocide became the object of law, science, administration, media and political manipulation. See https://grupaspomenik.wordpress. com (accessed 22 February 2016). Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1991), 221. Here I am drawing on Veronica Tello’s survey of critical discussions of monumentality. See Tello, Counter-Memorial Aesthetics, 16–23. Also see Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000); and Peter Carrier, Holocaust Monuments and National Memory: France and Germany Since 1989 (New York: Bergham, 2005).

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conceptual installations that mark the national ambivalence and uncertainty of late twentieth century postmodernism’.10 Young’s account has been influential in discussions of monumentality; he provides a powerful critique of the monolithic, homogenizing tendencies in monuments via the idea of ‘counter-monuments’, which are brazen, painful and self-conscious spaces that challenge the very premise of their own being.11 Counter-monumentality has been taken up in a range of theoretical discourses and artistic practices as a critical tool for re-evaluating the relationship of public art to changing ideological systems. But what happens when the monument assumes an oppositional character to its official premise through outliving the ideology it was intended to represent, rather than through any critical or conscious counter-memorial gesture? And how, then, does Young’s framework help us to understand the fate of monuments in former Yugoslavia, whose abstract forms symbolized anti-fascism, but also stood in opposition to the doctrine of socialist realism? After 1989, how to deal with ‘residual signs’ of socialist heritage12 such as monuments has been a key question for Balkan post-socialist societies. As Boris Groys details, almost overnight the socialist heritage of the region shifted from symbolizing the future to a historical excess that needed to be erased in order for the former East to catch up to the former West.13 A crucial imperative of this erasure had to do with what Young describes as the monuments’ ‘consort’ with two of the twentieth century’s most egregiously totalitarian regimes: Nazi Germany and Soviet Union’s revival of monumentality.14 The expressive abstract forms of Second World War monuments in former Yugoslavia – reminiscent of their international contemporaries yet largely ignored by the Western art historical canon until very recently – represent failed modernization, but this is a different kind of failure to that which has produced the monumental ruins of the East and West. In order to fully understand the symbolic significance

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James E. Young, At Memory’s Edge: After-images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000), 93. Young, At Memory’s Edge, 7. Malcolm Miles, ‘Appropriating the Ex-Cold War’, in Art and Theory after Socialism, ed. Malcolm Miles and Mel Jordan (Bristol: Intellect, 2008), 55–66, 55. Boris Groys, ‘NSK: From Hybrid Socialism to Universal State’, e-flux #67 (November 2015), http:// www.e-flux.com/journal/nsk-from-hybrid-socialism-to-universal-state/ (accessed 8 November 2015). Young, At Memory’s Edge, 96–7.

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and forms of remembrance associated with Second World War monuments in former Yugoslavia – as well as the work of artists engaging with them – we need to revisit their history. The remembrance of the role of partisans and the Communist Party of Yugoslavia in the People’s Liberation War (Narodnooslobodilačka Borba or NOB) was a central theme of the official memory of Yugoslavia from 1945 to the late 1980s.15 The narrative about the heroic triumph against the fascist occupiers provided the foundational myth of Yugoslavia and one its key elements of collective identity. This narrative was promoted through active transformations of the public sphere, including changing the names of towns, streets and squares to names of famous partisan heroes or Josip Broz Tito; producing myth through popular culture (movies and music), media, education and literature; establishing public holidays and celebrations connected to the NOB; and building monuments and memorial park centres. Second World War partisan monuments play a key public role as sites of commemoration, celebration, school excursion and tourist destination.16 They are part of what Groys calls the ‘collective mental territory’ of socialism.17 Most Second World War partisan monuments were built between the 1960s and the early 1980s at the initiative of The Association of Veterans of the Peoples’ Liberation War (SUBNOR), with the help of the federal authorities, as part of a larger project of memorialization and glorification of the NOB. This project promoted the ‘three fundamental narratives’: victory of revolution over fascism, suffering under fascist occupation and significance of certain events and locales.18 These narratives reflected the official party line of celebrating the events of the Second World War as the formative struggle that lead to the defeat of fascism, while subsuming the ethnic identities of the fallen under the banner of ‘victims of fascism’. Yet, as much as these monuments ideologically towed the official party line about remembering the past, they also represented an attempt to shift away

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Darko Karačić, ‘Od Promoviranja Zajedništva do Kreiranja podjela’, in Re:Vizija Proslosti – Politike Sjecanja u Bosni I Hercegovini, Hrvatskoj I Srbiji od 1990. Godine, ed. Darko Karačić, Tamara Banjeglav and Nataša Govedarica (Sarajevo: ACIPS, 2012), 17–90, 20–2. Haike Karge, Sećanje u Kamenu – Okamenjeno Sećanje? (Belgrade: XX Vek, 2014), 157. Groys, Art Power, 166. Gal Kirn, ‘Transformation of Memorial Sites in the Post-Yugoslav Context’, in Retracing Images: Visual Culture after Yugoslavia, ed. Daniel Šuber and Slobodan Karamanić (Boston: Brill, 2012), 251–81, 259.

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from pre-war commemorative practices and towards less dogmatic and nonfigurative representations of communities whose traditions were shattered by historical discontinuity.19 Eminent Yugoslav artists and architects such as Bogdan Bogdanović, Vojin Bakić and Dušan Džamonja were commissioned to design memorial parks with an emphasis on abstract-expressionist aesthetics and materiality and conceptually free form. Their monuments expressed history as the compounding of past, present and future: past sacrifices and suffering in struggles against oppression, rebirth through socialist revolution and seeds of a socialist future.20 This layering of temporalities is evident in the otherworldly retro-futuristic style of the monuments, and in the frequent use of symbols of struggle, defiance and rebirth such as fists, stars, hands, wings, flowers and rocks.21 In their relation to temporality, Second World War partisan monuments were not static sites of frozen memory. They were, since their inception and even during their discussion and planning phases, sites of active and often heated debate. Heike Karge’s study of the public and official debates in former Yugoslavia about commemoration of the Second World War illustrates a number of tensions that were inherent to the official memory of socialist Yugoslavia as built into the monuments. Proponents debated commemorating partisan heroes (as symbols of active struggle) and civilian casualties (as apolitical collateral victims). They vacillated between approving the memory of the Second World War as a bloody interethnic conflict with multiple factions, or as a universal socialist struggle; between the universal heroism of the partisan fighters, and the unconditional betrayal of collaborators; and between modernist aesthetics and traditional communal forms of remembering. The aesthetic of these monuments eventually captured these tensions and attempted to translate them into a temporal constellation that imagined a better future. Yet, while the symbolism of the monuments imagined a better future, because this future failed to materialize – instead bestowing another conflict – the monuments were (often violently) re-inserted into historicity.

19

20

21

In this respect, they are an example of what Carrier describes as the broader trend towards nonfigurative memorials and monuments – and away from pre-war commemorative practices – that emerged during the 1960s. See Carrier, Holocaust Monuments and National Memory, 19. Heike Karge, ‘Mediated Remembrance: Local Practices of Remembering the Second World War in Tito’s Yugoslavia’, European Review of History 16, no. 1 (2009): 49–62, 51. Burghardt and Kirn, ‘Hybrid Memorial Architecture’, 99.

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As Dubravka Ugrešić argues, the collapse of Yugoslavia in the 1980s and 1990s began with the confiscation of ‘Yugoslav collective memory and its replacement by the construct of national memory’.22 Changing street names, and removing and destroying monuments, became ways to reframe the past to erase socialism, manipulating the historical trauma of the Second World War to serve the nationalist agenda. Vjeran Pavlaković suggests that during the 1990s in Croatia, approximately 3,000 monuments, statues and plaques commemorating the partisan movement and anti-fascism were damaged or destroyed.23 Others were vandalized or simply left to deteriorate. Robert Burghardt and Gal Kirn use the term ‘abandoned monuments’ in discussing how historical and political transformations changed these monuments from powerful reminders of an ideologic and collective identity into ‘an invisible network of symbolic places, generating an alternative map of the former Yugoslavia’.24 This map includes thousands of sites – of large and small monuments – that spatially document rituals of public memory of socialism in Yugoslavia, as well as their destruction. Contrastingly, attitudes towards monuments across former Yugoslavia during the 1990s reflected the relationship of each political leader to the memory of the Second World War:25 while greater numbers of monuments were destroyed in Croatia as part of a historical revisionism tolerated by Franjo Tuđman that ‘debased the antifascist resistance and rehabilitated the Ustaša regime’,26 the lack of destruction in Serbia reflected Milošević’s ethnonationalist politics that absorbed Second World War narratives of suffering into the greater mythology of Serbian martyrdom. In the almost two decades since 1999 – marked by the arrest (and death) of Milošević, the death of Tuđman and the slow shift to post-war stabilization in the region – socialist monuments in former Yugoslavia (as symbols of a

22

23

24 25

26

Dubravka Ugrešić, ‘The Confiscation of Memory’, New Left Review no. 218 (July–August 1996): 26–39, 34. Vjeran Pavlaković, ‘Symbols and the Culture of Memory in Republika Srpska Krajina’, Nationalities Papers: The Journal of Nationalism and Ethnicity 41, no. 6 (2013): 893–909, 903. While no partisan monuments were destroyed in Serbia, this was largely because Slobodan Milošević’s rehabilitation of nationalism adopted a different relation to the Second World War narratives. The documentary Damnatio Memoriae (2001) shows the destruction and conversion of these monuments in Croatia. Burghardt and Kirn, ‘Hybrid Memorial Architecture’, 104. Robert Bevan, The Destruction of Memory: Architecture at War (London: Reaktion Books, 2006); Bogdan Bogdanović, ‘Urbicide’, Space and Society 16, no. 62 (1993): 8–25. Pavlaković, ‘Symbols and the Culture of Memory in Republika Srpska Krajina’, 894.

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vexed past) have been appropriated into competing nationalist narratives and forms of remembering.27 Football-related war memorials in Serbia and Croatia fuse socialist patriotism with 1990s nationalism.28 Monuments to Second World War collaborators erected in Slovenia use the symbolism of partisan monuments.29 The legacy of anti-fascist struggle is appropriated into narratives of victimhood in Bosnia and Herzegovina.30 This complex web of post-conflict memorial practices uses Second World War memories and symbols to lend legitimacy to universalizing narratives of victimhood. Monumental rewriting of narratives about the 1990s war through the prism of Second World War martyrdom has had significant consequences for conceptions of collectivity and historical culpability. It has not only obfuscated discussions of responsibility by framing the recent history in simplistic terms of a nation-based victim–perpetrator binary, but it has foreclosed the shared past from forms of remembering beyond the nationalist-revisionist key. Remembering Yugoslav transnational anti-fascist solidarity in the work of Grubić and Maljković seeks to preserve the emancipatory potential of the past against such revisionist tendencies, and to simultaneously criticize hegemonic interpretations of the dissolution of Yugoslavia, which legitimize the transitional teleology of ‘returning to the capitalist future’. Grubić and Maljković imagine a future when monuments have moved beyond narratives of unfinished histories and unrealized futures. Their counter-monuments are transitive symbols that are visible within the frame of history, but are no longer part of that history. They remind of an inconvenient past by refusing to disappear or be sublated into political consensus,31 refuting ideological systems that preclude incorporating collective lived experience of history and time.

27

28

29

30

31

Sandina Begić and Boriša Mraović, ‘Forsaken Monuments and Social Change: The Function of Socialist Monuments in the Post-Yugoslav Space’, in Symbols that Bind, Symbols that Divide, ed. S. L. Moeschberger and R. A. P. DeZalia (Switzerland: Springer, 2014), 13–37, 14. Richard Mills, ‘Commemorating a Disputed Past: Football Club and Supporter’s Group War Memorials in the Former Yugoslavia’, History 97, no. 328 (2012): 540–77. Oto Luthar, ‘Forgetting Does Not Hurt: Historical Revisionism in Post-socialist Slovenia’, Nationalities Papers 61, no. 6 (2013): 882–92. Nicolas Moll, ‘Fragmented Memories in a Fragmented Country: Memory Competition and Political Identity-building in Today’s Bosnia and Herzegovina’, Nationalities Papers 41, no. 6 (2013): 910–35. I am drawing on Veronica Tello’s articulation of counter-monumentality contra Young. See Tello, Counter-Memorial Aesthetics, 16–23.

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Monument The present as an encounter between unfinished pasts and unrealized futures is a central aspect of Grubić’s essay film Monument. Created as a portrait of nine monuments located in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, Monument plays off the striking and iconic appearance of the structures to capture multiple layers of the past in the present.32 These monuments are easily recognizable to anyone living in the countries of former Yugoslavia, providing Monument with a distinctive sense of aesthetic familiarity (and a direct connection to subjective lived experience). But Grubić is not interested in nostalgically reflecting on the position of monuments in the collective memory of a country that no longer exists. He tries to approach the monuments as an interested, yet unfamiliar, observer discovering them for the first time in their present state. The work provides almost no contextual information (dates, titles or locations) and relies on the interplay between the timeless otherworldly appearance of the structures, subdued sound effects and the ambiance of the surrounding landscape.33 Grubić’s alternation between slow panning shots of the environment and extreme close-ups of the surfaces of structures mimics the gaze of a fascinated – and possibly slightly disoriented – observer encountering the monuments in their overwhelming solitude. This tone of discovering history in the present is set in the first scene featuring Vojin Bakić’s iconic Petrova Gora Monument, which also appears in Maljković’s work. It opens with a slow pan across the garbage-littered foggy landscape that surrounds the structure. The shots alternate between closeups of the stripped aluminium surface panels and the dilapidated interior. The curved lines of the structure slowly emerge out of the fog, providing a striking contrast between the retro-futurist aesthetic of the building and its advanced state of disrepair. Grubić’s juxtaposition of the surroundings and the appearance of Petrova Gora – which looks something between a derelict

32

33

The work is the first part of a planned trilogy of films about the spatial and architectural legacies of socialism in the region. The second part is going to be about abandoned factories, and the third part about the architecture of apartment blocks. The featured monuments are: Petrova Gora, Podgora, Podgarić, Sutjeska, Kozara, Košute, Makljen, Jasenovac and Kamenska. According to Grubić, he is engaging in a historical dialogue with Dziga Vertov, who made experimental documentary essay films that (idealistically) accompanied the building of a better world. Grubić returns to the abandoned pillars of this world. Personal communication with the artist.

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space station and a precursor to Frank Gehry’s Bilbao Guggenheim Museum – engenders a ‘return to future’ aesthetic: a visual rediscovery of how the (socialist) past imagined our future. The artist offers both too little information and a sense of how every detail might be activated as a historical object, and every moment mapped across multiple historical and temporal narratives. Following Michel Serres, we can describe this as ‘temporal thickness’: an idea of presentness constituted by a multi-temporal assemblage of disparate concepts, solutions and conflicts aggregated from different moments in time.34 Grubić is not simply (re)discovering forgotten ruins from the past, or documenting historical decay, he is capturing the process of change in social and political consciousness. The Petrova Gora monument embodies transitional aesthetics as distinct from archival or historical aesthetics (seen in the work of artists such as Tacita Dean) by being the present as unfortunately (evocatively) lodged between an unfinished past and an unrealized future. Monument comprises layers of history within a place where an environmental process of decay is happening. Grubić captures the monument in a state of advanced dilapidation after years of systemic and institutionalized neglect. Rather than destroying the structure at Petrova Gora – as they did many other monuments – the Croatian state ignored it, allowing the ‘natural’ process of post-socialist privatization to take place: the aluminium panels covering the surface were removed (by ‘entrepreneurs’) and sold on the black market, the stone paving was removed (and presumably used in someone’s garden), and the interior was progressively stripped and covered in graffiti. Reading the graffiti on the walls provides a glimpse into the post-1990 history of Petrova Gora, encompassing Serb nationalist pronouncements (the territory was under Serb control in the early 1990s), expressions of Croat nationalism from the late 1990s (most notably the letter ‘U’, symbol of Ustaše), and a possibly-more-recent expression of post-Oedipal irony that proclaims, ‘I love you mother in law.’ This process of privatization of a common good (through

34

Serres applies this notion to objects in which temporality is captured and perceived. This is most clearly articulated in his often-cited description of a car: ‘Consider a late-model car. It is a disparate aggregate of scientific and technical solutions dating from different periods. One can date it component by component: this part was invented at the turn of the century, another ten years ago, and Carnot’s cycle is almost two hundred years old. Not to mention that the wheel dates back to Neolithic times. The ensemble is only contemporary by assemblage.’ See Michel Serres and Bruno Latour, Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time, trans. Roxanne Lapidus (Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 1995), 45.

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looting, destroying and defacing) mirrors the broader process of (often illegal) post-socialist privatization of the once taken-for-granted social and public sphere. The panels covering the surface of the monument were intentionally made from aluminium for its reflective properties – inviting reflection from the devoutly socialist audience – and the opportunistic criminal act of their removal suggests the present as closed to historical self-reflection and removed from utopian future-driven projects from the past.35 The act of removing panels from the Petrova Gora monument symbolically represents turning away and disconnecting from the ideals of the past. In attentively filming their absence, Grubić captures the aftermath of this process of privatization. Grubić’s filmic approach throughout Monument creates similar effects across different monuments and their surroundings. Grubić repeatedly contrasts the monuments against the landscape, establishing a relationship between weathering and human production/destruction as two temporal modes: the sleek features of the warped V-shape of Podgora Monument in the second scene are contrasted against the blue Adriatic Sea and a passing speedboat in the background; the imposing proportions and features of the giant, bulky, bird-like creature with outstretched wings in the Podgarić Monument are filmed against the sky with a passing passenger airplane overhead. Grubić registers the passing of time by contrasting movement with stillness and historical traces with technological advancements, and by emphasizing the effects of natural disintegration on the surfaces of the monuments. His frequent use of the close-up shot to emphasize the skin-like materiality of the surface – bumps, moss, traces of destruction, graffiti, ‘bleeding’ rust residue – keys into the theme of monuments as the site for the clash of natural and human time. Yet this contrast between temporalities is most aptly illustrated by the almost complete absence of people in Monument. Bodies are indexed through the aftermath of conflict traces such as looting, destruction and vandalism (Petrova Gora), through the transience of ghostly figures moving in patterns (Kozara), or through politically charged allegorical referencing of a flock of goats guarded by two shepherd dogs (Košute). This notable human absence in effect transforms the monuments into the deputized representatives of social bodies.

35

Ibid.

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Figure 9 Igor Grubić, Monument (video still), 2015. Courtesy of the artist.

For Grubić, human presence exists on the same plane as the ideologies that have destroyed or failed to support the monuments: both humans and their ideas are temporary and gradually disappear among nature. This montage of human destruction and natural cycle as two temporal orders of disintegration (and growth) is strikingly illustrated in the short final scene following the credits featuring a tree growing out of a crater from the explosion that destroyed the Kamenska Monument. Monument registers the complexity of the passing of time in transition between socialism and nationalism. In the Košute scene, the juxtaposition between the devastated monument and some domestic animals creates a powerful historico-temporal montage. Grubić films a flock of goats shepherded by working dogs past the destroyed star-shape of the graffitied monument. The image of docile domesticated animals – as suggested by their tagged ears – routinely grazing on and climbing over a monument to fallen partisans conjures an array of associations, from the political dystopia of George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945) to the Pre-Raphaelite moralizing fable of William Holman Hunt’s The Hireling Shepherd (1851). Transitional aesthetics are at play here in the montage of at least four historical temporalities. The monument (erected in 1961) represents the utopian socialist drive to commemorate as its foundation the anti-fascist struggle during the Second World War; the monument reflects the aesthetic retro-futurism that was characteristic of the Yugoslav

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brand of socialist modernism; the monument’s state of disrepair (subsequent to its targeted destruction in 1991) betrays the post-socialist resurgence of iconoclastic conservatism and nationalism; and the Orwellian goats guarded by large dogs are highly suggestive of the constrained relationship between freedom and historical agency in the post-socialist present. Viewing this scene, I could not help but remember the song ‘Shepherd Has Just Left the Building’ (Čoban Je Upravo Napustio Zgradu) (2000) by Montenegrin avant-garde jazz musician Antonije Pušić, who is better known as Rambo Amadeus. Featuring the chorus lyric ‘Shepherd come back, your sheep can’t do without you’, the song is an ironic call to the symbolic paternal ‘leader’, and a powerful condemnation of the willingness to subordinate oneself to national and political authority.36 As the animals pass through the scene at the Košute Monument, we are left wondering about the identity of the absentee shepherd. The theme of historical revisionism is even more apparent in the scene of post-socialist destruction at Makljen. Set on a wind-battered snowy hill, it shows a monument whose destruction has reduced its original shape, the combination of a flower with a clenched fist, to its structural frame, which resembles bare religious crosses.37 The transformation of one universal symbol (struggle for freedom from fascism) into another (submission to religious ethnonationalism) renders the act of destruction into a perverse form of architectural reinterpretation. Carried away by nationalist euphoria and willingness to erase the past, the destroyers of the monument have symbolically performed the violent rewriting of Yugoslavia’s history that characterized the 1990s. I believe the scene at Makljen represents the core of Grubić’s transitional aesthetics; it is a montage between different ideological systems, and also between future-driven socialist teleology, cyclical religious narratives of death and rebirth, ethnonationalist mythologies of national awakening, and millennial obsession with the apocalypse. These experiences synchronize and freeze only in the act of destruction, which in turn creates a liminal structure caught in an impractical state of ‘in-between’: no longer figured as necessary for a new history, and no longer understood as a memorial.

36

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For a detailed analysis of Rambo Amadeus’ lyrics and performances, see ‘Conclusion’, in Čvoro, Turbo-folk Music. Ivana Bago, ‘Razgovor s Partizanskim Spomenicima kao Svjedočanstvo i Forum o Prošlosti Sadašnjosti i Budućnosti’, unpublished manuscript written to accompany the work Monument.

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Figure 10 Igor Grubić, Monument (video still), 2015. Courtesy of the artist.

Asynchronous temporality is repeated throughout Monument, in that all the structures appear as suspended ideological leftovers. They refer to a series of events, histories and activities that remain offscreen and that implicate the audience into their unfolding. Regarding the question of culpability, we can consider Grubić’s stated intention of making portraits of the monuments;38 we might suggest that, in this instance, the portraits should not be understood as studies of iconic landmarks, or critiques of their destructions, but as series of images that refer to events that have happened offscreen. Grubić registers the monuments through a range of already performed gestures – abandonment, destruction, reuse, appropriation, modification – which are themselves invisible (or past) but have left traces and afterlives. The portraits emerge through the medium of video, with its multiple heterogeneous temporalities, and are thus supported by new narratives and modes of engagement. Rather than simply lamenting the violence and destruction that has led to the provisional (transitional) present, Grubić’s portraits of monuments, through their focus on absent action, reassure us that the present is always pregnant with possibilities for a more successful future. This emphasis on the futurity of monuments is also key to Maljković’s work.

38

Personal communication with the artist.

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Scenes for a New Heritage Maljković’s Scenes for a New Heritage (2004–6) comprises three short videos shot at the location of the Petrova Gora Monument, envisioning three future moments and three relationships between the audience and the site. Inspired by the futuristic abstraction of the structure, Scenes for a New Heritage is concerned with imagining modes of inhabiting the monument outside of the historical denial and revisionism that has permeated the discourses of the recent years.39 The first video, titled New Possibilities (2004) opens with the caption ‘Croatia 25 May 2045’, the official birthdate of Tito and official public Youth Day (Dan Mladosti) in Yugoslavia, celebrated through expensive and spectacular public ceremonies (featured in the Marta Popivoda work discussed in Chapter 1). The precise date for the scene connects the work to a historical revisionism that predates the transitional present: Tito’s actual birthdate was 7 May, however 25 May was adopted for its symbolic value after an unsuccessful attempt on his life on this date by Germans in 1944. The work flags the importance of the date by a second text screen that suggests that the film’s travelling protagonists know the past is there ‘to haunt them’, even though this haunting is never realized onscreen. We then see a tinfoil-covered car slowly ascending the mountain road to the monument, and three young men emerging from the vehicle to engage in a conversation about the significance and possible use of the building. We read the men’s conversation through English subtitles against an audio track of high-pitched ululating Croatian folk singing (‘Ganga’). The penetrating vocals are deliberately asynchronous with the subtitles, and echo awkwardly over vision of the grandiose decaying structure, creating a comical effect. Maljković uses this humour to accentuate the historical distance between the site and the visitors: the young men are seemingly no more able to understand the significance of the site than we are to comprehend their speech. The second scene, titled Generation II: Second Coming (2006), is set twenty years later on 29 November 2063. Maljković again chooses an important anniversary, this time of Republic Day, the chief public holiday that

39

David Maljković interviewed by Fiona Liewehr. ‘Temporary Projections’ (exh. Cat.) (Vienna: Georg Kargl Galerie, 2011), 63.

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Figure 11 David Maljković, Scenes for a New Heritage (still), 2004–6. Copyright David Maljkovic. Courtesy of Annet Gelink Gallery, Amsterdam.

commemorated the establishment of Yugoslavia. The video features a solitary young man visiting the Petrova Gora site in winter, guided by a magical shining ball (a tinfoil-covered football). He moves through the decaying interior of the monument, looks over the landscape and plays around with the football in his hands. The iconic setting and the historically loaded anniversary are once again played against the ostensibly trivial, solitary movement of the figure. The third scene, titled New Visitors – Visitors Forever (2006), is set at an indeterminate moment in the future. Groups of young people (surrounded by parked, tinfoil-covered cars) gather around the Petrova Gora monument; they socialize, play soccer, throw a Frisbee and casually glance over the landscape. Their low-key picnic activities and general air of disinterest is even more removed than Maljković’s previous actors from the historical significance and baggage of the iconic site. Scenes for a New Heritage is a three-part archaeology of the future speculating about what happens to monuments after they have outlived their ideological systems of reference. This archaeological mode of temporality is a typically non-linear overlaying of episodes that both elucidate and destabilize

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the multiple timescales of the past.40 As Maljković explains, the monuments’ fate shifts between historical amnesia created by the passing of time, and fictionalization of their history as enabled by that amnesia’s absence of ideological baggage. I followed a group of people who set out in quest of their heritage and everything seemed without pressure; history became an issue of fiction, and time created a collective amnesia.41

The three Scenes show us the slow process through which the Petrova Gora Monument is exhausted of its historical baggage.42 Historical controversies, politically charged memories, revisionism and destruction all gradually dissipate from lived memory, becoming indistinguishable from the landscape. Maljković relies on time and nature in the same way as does Grubić: as unstoppable forces above and beyond all ideologies. However, rather than encountering the monument in a single historical moment thick with stories and temporalities, Maljković serializes the encounters, calling to mind both the art historical triptych form and the popular culture form of sequels. Structuring the work as a trilogy also references the narrative of ‘the end of history’: Scenes in fact shows us three ‘ends of history’, each marked by social rituals reflecting historical repetitions, continuities and discontinuities. History, for Maljković, becomes fiction. With historical distance, narratives in the monument are forgotten and dislodged from their intended meaning. But Maljković’s ‘fiction’ scenes do not simply retell these stories, even blurring the distinction between fiction and fact; he creates what Jacques Rancière describes as ‘another set of connections between spaces and times’.43 Maljković captures the imperfect subjective truths of the Petrova Gora Monument, placing emphasis on the unstable, fleeting and temporal experience of the audience. Scenes is fixed in one spatial location but represents a collection of

40 41

42

43

Serres and Latour, Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time, 45. Yilmaz Dzeiwor, ed., Almost Here (exh. Cat.) (Hamburg and Cologne: Kunstverin Hamburg and DuMont, 2007), 207. Annie Fletcher, ‘Sources in the Air’, in Sources in the Air: David Maljković, Exhibition at Van Abbemuseum 6 October 2012 to 27 January 2013 (Gateshead: Baltic, 2012), 31–49, 31. Jacques Rancière, ‘Documentary Fiction: Marker and the Fiction of Memory’, in Film Fables (Oxford: Berg, 2006), 157–70. Cited in Veronica Tello, ‘Counter-Memory, Heterochronia, and “History Painting” (After Géricault): Dierk Schmidt’s SIEV-X – On a Case of Intensified Refugee Politics’, Contemporanenity 3, no. 1 (2014): 20–37.

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social and personal interactions. This approach intentionally ignores the past of the site, instead focusing on the promise of the multiplicity of its futures. These imagined futures span past utopian desires (of socialist modernism) and science fiction, using scripted, theatricalized social interactions as the mediator between them. Aesthetics of socialist modernism have been a key aspect of Maljković’s practice. The retro-futurism of Petrova Gora is a historical referent for past innovation and for Yugoslav international modernism: between abstraction and figuration, between internationalism and regionalism.44 This ambivalence permeates the monument’s structure, whose abstract form was crafted by Vojin Bakić in shapes and materials that denote futurism and neoconstructivism as much as they anticipate the postmodern deconstructivism of Frank Gehry’s Bilbao Guggenheim. Maljković does not attempt to resolve this ambiguity, but uses future-oriented time-settings as a frame for his low-budget science fiction. Maljković sets his three scenes in a near future (2045/2063/unknown date), borrowing symbols, themes and sound effects from B-grade science fiction tropes. His tinfoil-covered cars and footballs, lo-fi effects and electronic soundtrack bounce off the reflective surfaces of the futuristic building. Maljković’s aesthetics also reference the Yugoslav brand of commercial socialism, whose feature films hybridized Western narrative structures to present easily defined dramatic situations and archetypal characters who embodied teamwork, self-sacrifice and collectivism.45 In effect, Maljković creates socialist heritage sci-fi: a new artistic realization of the historical, symbolic and aesthetic claims of Yugoslav socialism. And while the unpolished look of Scenes stands in contrast to the at-times grandiose universal claims and teleologies of socialism (e.g. ‘sacrifice today for a better tomorrow’), it does accomplish one of the most important tasks of the Petrova Gora Monument: addressing future generations. In his trilogy, Maljković explores the relation of monuments to different modes of social interaction. The Petrova Gora Monument is transformed through audience actions at its site. The first film features an ‘archaic encounter’

44 45

Šuvaković, ‘Impossible Histories’, 2–35, 11. Radina Vučetić, Koka-kola Socijalizam: Amerikanizacija Jugoslovenske Popularne Kulture Šezdesetih Godina XX Veka (Belgrade: Sluzbeni Glasnik Srbije, 2012), 138.

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in which visitors use an anachronistic cultural form – an obscure and idiosyncratic form of folk singing – as a medium through which to address the architectural relic from another past. This encounter is extraordinary for the mutual estrangement of the structure, the visitors and the language through which they attempt to grasp its meaning. The second film tells a story about ‘coming-of-age individuality’46 in which a young man treats the monument as a physical object of curiosity. Here, the monument operates more as a material – rather than symbolic or ideological – obstacle to be navigated through physical skill. In the third film, Petrova Gora almost entirely vanishes into the background as a stage set for everyday social interactions. While this scene involves a collective (of visitors), it is starkly removed from any sense of official observance or ritual celebration. In viewing this trilogy, it is instructive to recall the artwork Kosmaj Monument (2015) by Marko Lulić, which also juxtaposes state-sanctioned rituals of memorialization, abandoned monument sites and present-day social interactions. Kosmaj Monument was part of Lulić’s collaboration with LA-based artist Sam Durant, titled Spomenici Revolucije (Monuments of Revolution), inspired by a 1970s children’s collectable sticker album of the same name. The album was part of a commercial socialist industry that used Western models of marketing and advertisement to bring revolutionary ideals closer to children. Lulić’s video is set at the Kosmaj Monument near Belgrade, Serbia, and features dancers responding to the imposing shape of the monument through improvised interpretative movement. They attempt to establish a dialogue with the object in the present, and perhaps to answer future generations’ uncertainty as to its historical and utopian relevance. Lulić, like Maljković, responds to the ambivalent, troubled historical presence of the monument by dramatizing an encounter with the future generations to which it was presumably originally addressed. The artists’ responses are not based in staged commemorative state-rituals, but appear to be unofficial, relatively individual, spontaneous interactions. And in this subjective engagement with history, Lulić and Maljković establish ‘the youth’ as the demographic through which to engage with historical anxieties. Petrova

46

Fionn Meade, ‘David Maljković Abundant Motives’, http://cargocollective.com/fionnmeade/DavidMaljković-Abundant-Motives (accessed 10 October 2015).

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Gora was built to address the ‘youth of tomorrow’, and Scenes features young people bothering to visit the site. Yes, the proximity of youth as a collectivity to the commemoration of state ideology recalls ‘the youth’ as one of key symbolic points around which the official ideology in Yugoslavia structured itself.47 But whereas socialism presented youth as a unified body, Maljković is interested in how individuals interact with state-rituals. After the end of the Yugoslav socialist symbolic universe and its collective body, and its replacement by new collectivities (such as religious ethnonationalism), Maljković’s imagined connections stand against revisionism by imagining multiple, ‘authentic’ future interactions with the Petrova Gora Monument based in lived experience. He aspires to connect the (forgotten) ideals and aspirations inhabited by the structure, and to create an imaginative space for new versions of connection. *** The resurgence of the historical relativization of fascism in the countries of former Yugoslavia today is seemingly at odds with the post-2000 ‘Europeanization’ of the region, which sees the new countries as shifting closer to EU standards in protocols of social justice, cultural heritage and home affairs. However, as Tanja Petrović suggests, Europeanization more often than not supports and legitimizes nationalist discourses rather than presenting viable alternatives.48 If we examine Balkan societies’ ‘letting go’ of history in recent decades, we find they are mostly doing so by establishing a twentieth-century style of nation state with all its key neoliberal characteristics: rehabilitation of the past (manipulative, selective narration of history and erasure of heritage); establishment of an ethnic majority (with manageable minorities such as the Serbs in Croatia and the Muslims in Serbia); and clear territorial demarcation (as evident in the 2015 posturing by Serbia and Croatia over control of Syrian refugee movement). Petrović draws attention to the re-emergence of the nation state in the Balkans as intrinsic to the restoration of capitalism: EU-style capitalism requires the nation state to be its universal (and invisible) frame of reference. While the present Europeanization requires the historical purging of socialism, we might also envision a future in which socialist heritage, and its remaining monuments, become what Paul Ricoeur calls ‘forgetting kept

47 48

Salecl, The Spoils of Freedom, 44. Petrović, Yuropa, 189.

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in reserve’: history to be reintroduced if and when it becomes suitable for political ends.49 Abandoned monuments in former Yugoslavia are the standing reminders of how ideology is replaced by other ideology; and how commemoration of one conflict can function as an index of another conflict. While monuments are by definition anachronistic, and often reflective of outdated concepts, Grubić and Maljković use this anachronism to activate the experience of emancipatory ideals from the past as existent in lived history, in order to reimagine futures. They wish to conceptualize the future as more than an excuse for the transitional decimation of the social sphere in the present. They also want to cast the role of socialism as more than mere fodder for historical revisionism. Grubić and Maljković go to the future to remind us that, in the time of post-socialist transition, not only did history repeat itself twice – the first time as a tragedy and the second as farce – but it is also being continually rewritten, as tragedy and farce together.50

49 50

Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2004), 414. Nikola Začević, ‘Puna Usta Antifašizma’, Pescanik 17 May 2015, http://pescanik.net/puna-ustaantifasizma/ (accessed 10 October 2015).

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Transitional Archives: Art and Historical Memory in Former Yugoslavia

Slovenian artist Marko Peljhan’s work Territory 1995 (2006–10) collects extensive documentation about the technological, military and legal circumstances of the Srebrenica massacre. The planned and systematic murder of over 8,000 Bosnian civilians in July 1995 by Bosnian Serb forces and Serbian paramilitary units, in the presence of UN peacekeepers from The Netherlands, was the biggest war crime in Europe since the Second World War. Based on years of research, Territory 1995 consists of glass plates that display maps, communications, and command and control networks of the Bosnian Serb army; tactical intercept documents of the Bosnian army; CIA and UN topographical maps; and expert evidence reports that are part of ongoing cases before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). The glass plates are accompanied by audio recordings and reconstructions of the perpetrators’ communications links. Peljhan’s extensive archive thus approaches the traumatic event from a range of perspectives, with the notable exception of survivor testimonies. The work strongly suggests a gap between the lived memory of the event and its bureaucratic documentation. The meticulous investigative process of gathering, verifying and assembling information is also contrasted against the peacekeepers’ failure to stop the killing despite their awareness of the horrific events as they unfolded. Peljhan’s forensic aesthetic does not intend to draw us any closer to understanding the bloody logic behind the violence, or its uncomfortable position in the broader political spectrum of Europe. The ever-growing mountain of independently collected evidence must continually confront Serb insistence that the Srebrenica massacre is an invented event, or at the very least that its circumstances are questionable. Rather, Territory 1995 is a creative

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rendering of the legal memory of the trauma. Peljhan’s archival work explores the increasing influence on all aspects of life of the collecting and storing of information; in fact, control, ownership and manipulation of archives is one of the key historico-political concerns of our time.1 Territory 1995 deftly reports that knowledge does not necessarily lead to action, and that evidence does not necessarily lead to acknowledgement of crimes or reconciliation. Peljhan’s work strategizes the layering (or mapping) of archives against what Michel Foucault called regimes of truth: historically specific mechanisms that produce discourses which function as true in particular times.2 In this chapter, I will consider the work of artists that engage with the aesthetics of memory and archives as temporal mechanisms for producing historical truth-claims in former Yugoslavia. As I have claimed in previous chapters, the last three decades in the region of former Yugoslavia have been marked by revisionism, denial and erasure of history, and the production of new historical narratives. These uses of history are connected to specific constructions of identity and performances of memory and, more broadly, to shifts between sociopolitical contexts that produce specialized ‘regimes of truth’: self-management socialism, nationalism, Western democracy.3 If socialism represented an attempt to establish a relationship to the past (that repressed interethnic violence and conflict during the Second World War in favour of a narrative that highlighted anti-fascist internationalism), and nationalism was an attempt to erase that history (by ‘revealing’ the fifty years of socialism as a corrupt regime that acted against specific national interests), then the shift to a Western-style democracy is presented as entailing recognizing accountability for the unresolved problems caused by those earlier administrations. In this context, the ICTY archive operates as a political mechanism of the current regime of truth.

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Frederic Jameson, ‘Foreword’, in The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, ed. JeanFrancois Lyotard (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1984), xii; also see Pierre Nora, Realms of Memory: Conflicts and Divisions (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), xxvi. Michel Foucault, ‘The Political Function of the Intellectual’, Radical Philosophy no. 17 (Summer 1977): 12–4. Vlad Beronja and Stijn Vervaet, ‘Introduction: After Yugoslavia – Memory on the Ruins of History’, in Post-Yugoslav Constellations: Archive, Memory, and Trauma in Contemporary Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian Literature and Culture, ed. Vladislav Beronja and Stijn Vervaet (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter GmbH, 2016), 1–19, 1.

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The ICTY was established in 1993 by the United Nations as an international legal body designed to deal with war crimes that took place during the conflicts in the Balkans in 1990s. Founded in the interest of ‘transitional justice’, it is meant to arbitrate ‘how successor regimes should deal with past human rights abuses of their authoritarian predecessors’.4 Despite the admirable goals of the ICTY, since its inception there has been a growing gap between the international community’s aspirations for justice, and how the application of such forms of justice have been perceived by those affected by the war.5 EU membership has often been employed as a motivational ‘carrot’ to entice cooperation in the region, leading to the misuse of transitional justice by political elites who seek to dispense with political opponents and gain material benefits such as EU loans.6 Furthermore, given the still contentious nature of the legacy of the 1990s and a series of procedural flaws in legal trials, the ICTY is often painted by local nationalists as merely a foreign policy weapon for key geopolitical players such as Germany and the United States, to be used for writing ‘official history’ of the Yugoslav wars rather than for dispensing justice and facilitating reconciliation.7 In this context, the ICTY archive is a complex beast subsuming, along with the depository of the ‘legal memory’ of war that should enable its legal accountancy,8 a ‘living memorial’ to the twice-over victims used for (re)constructing historical narratives with high political stakes.9 Against this background, I will discuss ways in which artists Hito Steyerl, Aleksandra Domanović and Zoran Todorović deal with the vexed status of historical memory in former Yugoslavia by highlighting the process of producing the archive. Steyerl creates a transhistorical constellation of archival

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Zala Volčič and Olivera Simić, ‘Localizing Transitional Justice: Civil Society Practices and Initiatives in the Balkans’, in Transitional Justice and Civil Society in the Balkans, ed. Zala Volčič and Olivera Simić (New York: Springer, 2013), 1–14, 1. Eric Stover and Harvey Weinstein, My Neighbour, My Enemy: Justice and Community in the Aftermath of Mass Atrocity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). See Jelena Subotić, Hijacked Justice: Dealing with the Past in the Balkans (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2009); and Maire Branif, Integrating the Balkans: Conflict Resolution and the Impact of EU Expansion (London: I. B. Tauris, 2011). Eric Gordy, Guilt, Responsibility and Denial: The Past at Stake in Post-Milošević Serbia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). Kristen Campbell, ‘The Laws of Memory: The ICTY, the Archive, and Transitional Justice’, Social & Legal Studies 22, no. 2 (2012): 224–69, 258. Gabrielle Kirk McDonald, ‘Everything to Everyone: Debate over the Final Location of the ICTY Archives’, in Assessing the Legacy of the ICTY, ed. Richard H. Steinberg (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 93–4.

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narratives (and film representations) that span and conflate temporalities of the Second World War, post-war socialist modernization, the 1990s wars and the present. Domanović draws attention to the temporal patterns of the nightly news cycles in late socialism, and how they inflect our apprehension of collected information. Todorović reveals the process behind producing and using the horizontal and supposedly democratic crowd-sourced archive (on online user platforms) as a medium of exploitation. The three artists share an understanding of the archive as a ‘quilting point’ that brings together and manifests antagonisms and conflicts in contemporary life.10 It is important to highlight that the works I discuss don’t explicitly deal with the ICTY, but rather with how the complex relations between the ICTY, archives, historical revisionism and the heritage of Yugoslavia translate into the field of current ideology. Archives problematize the present as well as the nostalgia for an idealized past, bringing into question narratives that construct the present as a historical inevitability.

Reconfiguring time through the archive In many ways, the artistic practice by Steyerl, Domanović and Todorović is reflective of recent decades’ broader interest in the aesthetic and political potential of archives, described by Hal Foster as the ‘archival impulse’.11 Foster points out the extent to which contemporary art has been dismantling and diffusing traditional structures of disseminating knowledge by drawing on the symbolism of the archive. Cultural anthropologist Andreas Huyssen highlights the relation of this kind of work to the development of a ‘global field of memory’ that archives local events in terms of broader cultural repositories.12 In his essay accompanying the exhibition Archive Fever, Okwui Enwezor reasons that ‘rituals of archival retrieval and performance’ have been a prominent feature of Eastern European societies since the fall of communism.13

10 11 12 13

Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), 87. Hal Foster, ‘The Archival Impulse’, October 110 (2004): 3–22. Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000). Okwui Enwezor, Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art (London: Steidl, 2009).

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However, the work of Steyerl, Domanović and Todorović also speaks about the temporality of archives in ways that are specific and idiosyncratic to the Balkans and not accounted for in these broad frameworks. Expressing this particularized temporality, Croatian author Slavenka Drakulić responds to her witnessing of war crimes trials at the ICTY: This was the third time I had been confronted with the ‘point zero’ of history. First it happened with my father’s generation after the Second World War, that is, after the communist revolution. All history before then was rewritten. The second time it happened was after the collapse of communism, when we had to forget about communism and begin again (and start rewriting history again) from the year 1990. And the third time is now, the present, following the end of the last war.14

Drakulić’s reflections present an attempt to come to terms with the Balkan problem of having to remove and discard of sections histories; this entails constructing sub-narratives that connect particular points in history and justify the present approach to it. Since the fall of state socialism in 1989, the most common construction of historical narrative in the Balkans involves replacing the communist past (an unnecessary detour) with a more triumphant one.15 For example, in the case of Croatia, the nationalist narrative in the 1990s – driven by communist-turned-nationalist Franjo Tuđman – revolved around the centuries-old dream of Croatian independence from the ‘prison’ of socialist Yugoslavia.16 In this process of revisionism, archives were a crucial role means through which to reconstruct a triumphant history of the rebirth of a nation, and to validate claims of communist state repression. To paraphrase Jacques Derrida,17 rewriting the archives produced salient temporal events including ‘zero hours’ of history, ‘return’ of repressed histories and ‘leaps’ into the past. The artwork discussed in this chapter engages historical narratives, the technological media used to disseminate them, and political manipulation. Steyerl examines the foundation and disintegration of socialist Yugoslavia as mediatized through state-produced film (e.g. modernization and

14 15 16

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Slavenka Drakulić, They Would Never Hurt a Fly (London: Abacus, 2004), 13–4. Verdery, What Was Socialism and What Comes Next? 124. The irony of course is that this independence barely lasted a decade before Croatia joined another transnational entity: the European Union. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 19.

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literacy campaigns) and popular culture. Domanović examines Yugoslavia’s neoliberalization alongside its disintegration through the role of the evening news cycle, and Todorović juxtaposes the brutality and violence acted upon vulnerable minorities in the present-day act of creating an archive, with the present-day general position of those minorities in former Yugoslavia. The artists insist that the archive is unable to ever account for the contingencies of lived experience – and as such, it remains radically open to the future. This future is not a predetermined teleological destination (such as socialist utopia, national unification or the European Union). It carries the promise of dehistoricizing the past by remaining open-ended, and their open-endedness is deliberately ambiguous. Just as Peljhan’s Territory 1995 deliberately ignores the existence of survivor testimony, these works emphasize the absence of institutionally disenfranchised groups (women, youth, minorities) from the political dialogue of transition. Openness is the product and the condition of irreducible traces that can never be completely erased or forgotten, but are as yet under-served. Yugoslavia was fundamentally a modernizing and emancipatory project based around key groups: youth, women and minorities.18 When these groups’ utopian visions perished, Yugoslavia stopped. In this sense, the transitional aesthetics of the archive in the works of Steyerl, Domanović and Todorović should be understood as an expression of ‘post-Yu’ identity, united by frustration with the present and awareness of the role of the past in understanding this present. Insofar as these artists are critiquing transition and the hegemony that makes it possible – insofar as they have an internationalist approach – they can be aligned to post-Yugoslav identity. Specific connection to the socialist heritage of Yugoslavia is also what differentiates Steyerl, Domanović and Todorović from other post-socialist artists who also make archive-as-art. For example, Dan and Lia Perjovschis’s work Contemporary Art Archive (CAA) creates an open archive of ‘obsolete or forgotten histories’, and is about rediscovering forgotten dissident art in Romania.19 It was designed as a critique of the state-controlled archives in

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For a discussion of Yugoslav socialism as centred around key symbolic points such as ‘the youth’, see Chapter 3 in Salecl, The Spoils of Freedom. Anthony Gardner, Politically Unbecoming: Postsocialist Art against Democracy (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2015), 268.

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Romania, which regulated public access and dissemination of information about artists, and used archival information as means of state repression. In Yugoslavia, which was considerably more open than Romania, archives don’t carry such associations of state repression. Therefore, whereas the Perjovschis’s work can be read as an attempt to empower artists through the opening-up of archives, the work that I am interested in shows the unreliability and corruptibility of the archive, and attests that the opening of archives does not in itself lead to democratization. Yet I do believe that archival artistic practices can play an emancipatory role in mediating the legacy of Yugoslavia.20 This is especially important since the practices appear despite an effort by political powers across the region to foreclose any chance of ‘another Yugoslavia’. Political paranoia surrounding the prospect of another Yugoslavia is perhaps a silent acknowledgement of the power of Yugoslavian cultural imagination and memory, both as an alternative to the present and a potential mobilizer in post-Yugoslav spaces.21

Journal No 1 – An Artist’s Impression The relation between the political and cultural ownership of the archive, and the failure of that archive to reconstruct collective memory in post-conflict Yugoslavia, is central to Hito Steyerl’s video Journal No 1 – An Artist’s Impression (2007). The work follows Steyerl as she attempts to locate one of the first newsreels produced in post-Second World War Yugoslavia. Titled ‘Journal No 1’, this newsreel was filmed in 1947, and lost in 1993 when the Sutjeska Film Museum in Sarajevo was hit by grenades during the Serb siege of the city. The lost newsreel was part of a news series produced by the Yugoslav government about the state’s post-Second World War social reforms, and documented literacy classes for elderly rural people, particularly Muslim women. Steyerl combines several layers of narrative in an attempt to reconstruct the lost

20

21

Nikola Dedić proposes three ‘theses’ as a framework for Post-Yugoslav interest in Yugoslav heritage in contemporary artistic practices: art as a form of archive; art as a counter-public sphere; and art as a class-motivated ideological critique of the neoliberal concept of transition. See Dedić, ‘Yugoslavia in Post-Yugoslav Artistic Practices: Or, Art as … remembrance’, 169–90, 172. Igor Štiks, ‘“New Left” in the Post-Yugoslav Space: Issues, Sites, and Forms’, Socialism and Democracy 29, no. 3 (2015): 135–46.

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film: interviews with the director of the Sarajevo Film Museum archive Devleta Filipović and with the museum’s projectionist; conversations with eyewitnesses of the shelling and destruction of the film archives; attempts by a police draughtsman to visualize the storyboards of the original film based on recollections; archival footage from a surviving ‘Journal No 4’; and scenes from popular Yugoslav partisan films. Unsurprisingly, the reconstructions are disparate and diverse even though they are based on the same film. In this sense, the artwork Journal No 1 creates a transhistorical constellation of overlapping narratives that span several decades and temporalities of cause and effect. Memories of the Second World War and of war in the 1990s infuse the attempts to locate the film and discover its exact contents, and are in turn mediated through popular culture representations of those memories.22 Immediately striking about Steyerl’s work is that it formally and structurally incorporates the failures and limits of living and recorded memory. Journal No 1 – An Artist’s Impression explicitly problematizes the reliability of personal memory, positioning it within broader political and social consequences of the conflict. The interviewees provide conflicting accounts about what happened to the film: the local Bosnian Muslims insist that the Sutjeska archive was destroyed and that the Serbs took the film to Belgrade, a charge to which the Serbs respond by flatly accusing the Muslims of lying. Steyerl commissions a police draughtsman to ‘draw’ the newsreel according to the memories of the Sarajevo Film Museum’s director and projectionist, and we witness his palpable difficulty and tension in visualizing it: this scene is structured around the director’s and projectionist’s constant corrections of the sketch artist in his depiction of their memories (‘You don’t understand what I mean!’), highlighting the inadequacy of the reconstruction of events through (collective) memory. Steyerl’s search for truth in testimony produces uneasy results, where the process of retrieving memories clashes with the mediated regime of representation. While one of Steyerl’s aims is to reflect on the unreliability of art as cultural memory, she is equally interested in problematizing the truth-claims of the archive. Her film’s narrative is grounded in her repeated inability to organize

22

On the mediation of memories of Yugoslavia through popular culture, see Iva Pauker, ‘Reconciliation and Popular Culture: A Promising Development in Former Yugoslavia?’ Local-Global: Identity, Security, Community 2 (2006): 72–83.

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the testimonies as artist material. As Jill Bennett suggests, Steyerl debunks the idea that art can ever be properly evidence-based, because ‘it cannot organize evidence without corrupting it’.23 Journal No 1 takes the form of a search that remains unfinished: the lost film is never found, nor are the exact circumstances of its destruction established. However, although Steyerl does not locate the film, the process of searching and creating a narrative about the film displaces the absent evidence, in effect becoming the archive. The ‘failure’ of Steyerl to complete the search gives rise to a multiplicity of connections to a bigger history ‘behind’ the film. These connections converge in the figure of the sketch artist, whose personal story (forcible removal from his home town by the Serbs) occupies a central position in the second part of the film. His story brings the histories told by Journal No 1 – An Artist’s Impression into the present, showing how they still bear on everyday lived experience. It sharpens Steyerl’s critique of terms such as ‘archive’ (whose?) and ‘postwar’ (reconciliation, or lack of?). There is a stark contrast between the (ideologically loaded) optimism of the historical footage promoting literacy among elderly Bosniak women, and the bleakness of the present, evident in the draughtsman’s experience of ethnic cleansing. Journal No 1 – An Artist’s Impression traverses the historical legacy of an archive that spans two wars and two post-war realities. At several points in the film we are reminded of the uncertainty with which war is being talked about. This historical doubling of the present is intended to confuse the audience, perhaps even more so an audience not attuned to the cultural specificities of the film. But the confusion is not just a byproduct of cultural idiosyncrasies novel to the international eye, it also conversely utilizes the familiar, oft-repeated media trope wherein the Balkan region is an exotic, unstable powder keg that erupts in war and violence in regular intervals. Steyerl does not provide a counterpoint to the perception of Balkan war as an inevitable natural force; though Journal No 1 – An Artist’s Impression registers the cyclical nature of history (by emphasizing the repetition of war), she avoids falling into cliché about the Balkans as a carnivalesque scene of endless violence. The film is structured around the failures of memories and archives (which may lead to historical mistakes being repeated), yet Steyerl locates each failure in the

23

Bennett, Practical Aesthetics, 153.

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mediation of collective memory via popular culture, a process that is always incomplete. Each time a failure of memory or archive happens in the film, we switch to footage from two iconic Yugoslav fiction films, Do You Remember Dolly Bell? (1981) and Walter Defends Sarajevo (1972). In one scene, the set design of Dolly Bell functions as a visual archive for describing household items from the years after the Second World War: as we see the old, iconic footage, we hear offscreen voices struggling to describe an old lamp to the police sketch artist. To help him visualize the lamp, they refer directly to this film. In another scene, during a discussion with the custodian of the Sutjeska archive about the destruction of film props and reels, Journal No 1’s vision shifts to footage from Walter Defends Sarajevo. Steyerl thus highlights the blurring of personal memory with popular culture, demonstrating popular film as a central object and mode of recollection. The multiplicity of voices and narratives in Journal No 1 are thus all grounded in popular films as important sites of remembering. In this respect, the ‘archive’ produced by Steyerl is a collection of recollections of the past mediated through film. In her account of Journal No. 1, Steyerl writes that she aimed for a ‘creative fictionalisation’ of the missing newsreel.24 In being reconstructed from memory, the artwork becomes a document but also a fiction: ‘less about what the scene was really like and more about how the scene should have been’.25 Steyerl’s fictionalization of the lost newsreel is an attempt to represent documentary images as afterimages that are imbricated with collective fantasies and private memories.26 This is consistent with other works by Steyerl, which are also characterized by eclectic montage combining fictional and non-fictional materials such as animations, drawings, movie snippets, newsreel footage, interviews and other documentary images. They often take the form of a (futile) search for a person or image that has moved through different arenas, changing its meaning in the process. Her work is about the tracking of these changes.

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Hito Steyerl, ‘From Ethnicity to Ethics’, in A Fiesta of Tough Choices: Contemporary Art in the Wake of Cultural Policies, ed. Maria Lind and Tirdad Zolghadr (Oslo: Torpedo, 2007), 58–70, 69. As Steyerl notes in her account of the work, the projectionist flatly stated that he never even saw the original film. Ibid., 69. Paolo Magagnoli, Documents of Utopia: The Politics of Experimental Documentary (New York: Wallflower Press, 2015), 64. According to Magagnoli, Steyerl achieves the fictionalization of the missing film through the use of the split-screen, the appropriation of feature films and the deployment of drawing as a technique for the reconstruction of the lost document.

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Walter Defends Sarajevo is a war film loosely based on the life of a partisan leader of resistance, and is one of the most popular Spaghetti Westerns in Yugoslavia’s cinematography. The partisan Spaghetti Western genre is an idiosyncratic mix of political, social and cultural influences from ‘East’ and ‘West’ in post-1960 Yugoslavia.27 Yugoslav directors fused the iconography and aesthetic of North American Western films with themes of Yugoslav antifascist struggle. Partisan Spaghetti Westerns have clear narrative structures, easily defined dramatic situations and archetypal characters who promoted values such as friendship, loyalty and heroism. However, unlike the American Westerns, the Yugoslav versions fuse these values with socialist insistence on modest, collective behaviour, resulting in the formation of a hybrid genre that used the popularity of the American Western to bring partisanship and socialism closer to the youth of Yugoslavia. Walter Defends Sarajevo remains a hugely popular cult classic, and its characters and expressions have been incorporated into everyday popular culture. In inserting footage from Walter Defends Sarajevo into key moments (of failure) in her work, Steyerl draws attention to the role played by popular culture in mediating (and confusing) historical events. In other words, the question of ‘what the scene was like’ becomes, for viewers of Journal No 1 – An Artist’s Impression, less ‘what it should have been like’ and more ‘what it would have been like in the movies’. Steyerl’s articulation of the relation to historical memory to popular culture should be viewed in relation to the popular and controversial films of Serbian director Srđan Dragojević. Dragojević’s film Pretty Village, Pretty Flames (Lepa Sela Lepo Gore) (1996) – widely criticized for its representation of the war in Bosnia as pro-Serb28 – is about popular culture as the cultural memory of Yugoslavia. Dragojević communicates this cultural memory through cinematic bricolages of familiar symbols: aesthetic homages to partisan film icons such as actor Velimir Bata Živojinović (who played Walter in Walter Defends Sarajevo), and pastiches of archival footage. This approach suggests that popular culture, and film in particular, participates fully in the struggle over the ownership of the cultural legacy and memory of the shared space

27

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Zoran Janjetović, From the Internationale to Commercial: Popular Culture in Yugoslavia 1945–1991 (Belgrade: Altera, 2011). See Dina Iordanova, Cinema of Flames: Balkan Film, Culture and the Media (London: British Film Institute, 2001).

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of Yugoslavia. For Dragojević, film is a form of historical remembering for generations whose only memory of Yugoslavia, and its brand of socialism, is through film narratives. Whereas Dragojević is interested in the location of cultural memory in popular culture, in Journal No 1 Steyerl is interested in when this memory fails, concomitant to the imperfection of lived memory. Croatian artist Renata Poljak’s video Staging Actors/Staging Beliefs (2011–12) similarly uses historical memory embedded in popular culture as its medium. This work revolves around Ivan Kojundžić, a child actor who played the lead in Boško Buha (1979), one of the most well-known Yugoslavian partisan films. Staging Actors/Staging Beliefs juxtaposes highly emotional and ideologically charged scenes from Boško Buha (of heroic children sacrificing themselves in the fight against fascism), and an interview with a 48-year-old Kojundžić. It is revealed that, a little over a decade after playing this icon of Yugoslavia, Kojundžić got involved in the Yugoslav civil war. Staging Actors/Staging Beliefs explores failed political ideals and the damaged Balkan present through the contradictory logic espoused by Kojundžić. Like so many of his compatriots, he says he is glad that Yugoslavia is over, but nostalgically laments the loss of the old fairness and egalitarianism of Yugoslavia. By her filmic montage, Poljak effectively demonstrates the mixing of popular culture and political ideology through (auto)biography: a man who was brought up on one set of ideals (communism, Tito, brotherhood and unity), and embodies these ideals for a whole generation through his onscreen performance, fights in a real war that destroyed those ideals. Like Steyerl, Poljak presents a striking rift between the emancipatory drive behind socialism and the bleak present. Popular culture here preserves Kojundžić’s celebrity in a country which does not exist anymore, and archives for cultural memory ideals and achievements that are being actively repressed in the present.

19:30 Addressing the accumulation and arranging (or manipulation) of information in archives, 19:30 by Aleksandra Domanović draws attention to the way in which temporality inflects apprehension of information. 19:30 has three components. The first is a publicly accessible online archive of idents (introductory graphic and music sequences) for evening news broadcasts aired on Yugoslav

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Figure 12 Aleksandra Domanović, 19:30 (still), HD video, colour, sound, 11’00”, 2010–11. Tanya Leighton Gallery Berlin. Image courtesy of the artist and Tanya Leighton.

Radio Television (JRT) from 1958 to 1992, as well as news programme idents from television stations in all ex-Yugoslav republics. The second, website nineteenthirty.net, features remixes of ident music by DJs invited by Domanović, providing the soundtrack for live ‘dance parties’ organized by the artist in 2010 and 2011. The third, video footage of the live events and the news idents, is presented as a two-channel video projection featuring remixed news idents and footage of the crowds from the dance parties. 19:30 combines archive aesthetics with installation and live events by the remixing and reassembling of existing cultural objects. The work presents multiple temporalities, events and histories as a fragmented archive built from the consumption and production of popular culture. 19:30 is about the way in which archived information is structured and mediated by technologies of storage. Domanović’s creative process constantly evolves, seeking entries to her archive that are readily available for editing. She notes the difficulty of tracking down and sourcing the idents around the Balkan region, due to facilities having been destroyed in the war, or to insufficient funding that leads to poor archiving practices. The website for 19:30 becomes a substitute for material archives, in the same sense that online archives such as YouTube are becoming the ever-growing repositories for all kinds of video footage that was previously inaccessible to the public.

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Remixing and reusing public broadcast material, the ‘offline’ components of 19:30 highlight the structure and the form of the media cycle. The title of the work refers to the standard time for evening news bulletins. The pitch and the inflection of the project’s electronic music are designed to call its audience to attention and announce the coming news bulletins, in the manner of the pre-recorded music that forms a routine component of broadcast schedules. The idents are intended to suspend everyday domestic activity (albeit briefly), and to create a symbolic and perceptive framework for what Jill Bennett calls a ‘media event’. The regulation of bodies engaged in daily domestic activities is not only paused, but effectively temporally effected by the stories coming through. Bennett argues that the distinguishing feature of the media event is that it defines its own beginning and end.29 In 19:30, Domanović works with the framing device for announcing the beginning of a media event. Understanding news announcements as media events that suspend daily life is especially pertinent in the context of former Yugoslavia, given the role of media in manufacturing narratives of interethnic hatred through series of singular ‘scandalous’ events that ‘uncovered’ evidence of nationalist tensions.30 These events were decontexualized from the broader political spectrum (of crumbling socialism) and reinterpreted through the nationalist prism. As Slavenka Drakulić explains about 1980s Yugoslavia, ‘Long before the real war, we had a media war.’31 Yet, in 19:30 the idents function as introduction to a media event that is never realized, and hence never ends. The music builds anticipation for an announcement that is perpetually suspended in the present. Domanović offers endless repetition of the audio code of the ident as an empty signifier. This repetition is enacted through the archiving and remixing of idents – the frameworks for experiencing history through media – that are here acknowledged as a particular history. Conversely, the idents are remixed and extended from being media events into live events (the dance parties). Domanović juxtaposes the history of ex-Yugoslavia and its demise (as told through news idents) against the rise of electronic music. The news idents

29 30

31

Bennett, Practical Aesthetics, 77. For an account of the role of media in the Balkan conflicts see David Bruce MacDonald, Balkan Holocausts? Serbian and Croatian Victim-centered Propaganda and the War in Yugoslavia (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002). Quoted in Jonathan Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century (London: Cape, 1999), 130.

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reference the socialist public sphere and the collective experience of socialist media (and its destruction). The remixes of same speak to the experiences of children of post-socialism and their shared experience of dance parties as live (media) events. The gap between socialist and post-socialist generations is translated into live events, suggesting 19:30 to be about the different modes of experiencing (and performing) of history. Domanović’s remixed archive of idents is a mediation between what Boris Groys calls the ‘collective mental territory’ of socialism and their private appropriation under capitalism.32 The idents operate in the vacuum left behind by the demise of the Yugoslav state, both economically – because public property is now available for private appropriation – and symbolically – by tapping into the legacy of collective emotions that were made available for private appropriation, and are experienced by subsequent generations. Groys argues that the privatization of the legacy of socialism is only possible because it addresses the public in a language that is immediately recognizable. For Groys, this language ‘appropriates from the enormous store of images, symbols, and texts that no longer belong to anyone, and that no longer circulate but merely lay quietly on the garbage heap of history as a shared legacy from the days of Communism’.33 This sense of the present as the ironic end of utopia is also the subject of Bosnian artist Nebojša Šerić Šoba’s sculptural work Monument to the International Community (2007). Erected in central Sarajevo on the fifteenth anniversary of the Bosnian war, the work is a giant can of spam. It ridicules ‘both the UN’s humanitarian assistance during the war, and the internationally influenced project of post-war commemoration’.34 It captures the inadequacy and the belatedness of the international community’s response to the atrocities in Bosnia, by symbolizing international humanitarianism as unappetizing, simulated, mass-marketed, Western, contrived, approximated and often past its expiry date. Monument to the International Community uses the familiar scale, placement and aesthetic of Balkan monuments, referencing the large number of monuments of the Second World War anti-fascist struggle, some

32 33 34

Groys, Art Power, 166. Ibid., 167. Anna Sheftel, ‘Monument to the International Community, from the Grateful Citizens of Sarajevo’: Dark Humour as Counter-memory in Post-conflict Bosnia-Herzegovina’, Memory Studies 5, no. 2 (2011): 145–64, 157.

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of which were discussed in the previous chapter. Šerić’s Monument enlists the aesthetic of the communist monuments as a signal of historical absence. Like Domanović, Šerić uses irony to articulate historical repetition: the regurgitation by the international community of aspects of a communist utopia in the present. In addition to nostalgic socialist news idents, Domanović’s project 19:30 includes live events at which young people dance to these old tunes remixed. This is a more nuanced reading of historical repetition. Her dance parties have originated at a historical moment in the late 1980s that saw not only the demise of socialism, but also more broadly the global slide into neoliberalism. The Western economic context of the rise of electronic dance parties was the decline of manufacturing industries in the first world and their gradual outsourcing offshore, often to the East. Their social context is the decrease in the working classes’ welfare safety net, particularly in the United Kingdom under Margaret Thatcher. So, even though Western-originated dance parties would seemingly suggest a new subjectivity at odds with a Balkan socialist working class, their socio-economic context admits a continuation of precisely that subjectivity. The act of going to an extended (sometimes night-long) event to perform physically demanding and repetitious activity (dancing) to a machinic beat can be said to mimic the labour conditions associated with the working class. As David Harvey points out, under the post-industrial conditions of postmodernism, an increasing number of cultural practices become mimetic of the changing social, political and economic climate.35 Thus the children of the now-dismantled Balkan socialist working class (e.g. the middle-aged men in Katarina Zdjelar’s Shoum, discussed in Chapter 3) re-enact the physical movements of previous generations, while dancing the history away towards the global market. The youth of Yugoslav socialism arguably become a consumer-oriented cipher anticipating the ‘inevitable’ introduction of neoliberalism and austerity. 19:30 draws attention to these performative parallels by highlighting repetition as cultural formality in both the news idents and the dance parties. This cultural recurrence is evident in what Simon Reynolds calls the ‘retromania’ of the first decade of the twenty-first century: he claims that

35

David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1989), 113.

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the obsessive recycling of music and fashion from the twentieth century is reflective of the economic and political instability of the present.36 Today’s technology, furthermore, enables the cultural past to constantly remain in the present. Online archives created by music and fashion enthusiasts render the (curated) past constantly and instantly available, disturbing our sense of historical sequence and freezing the present into a contemporaneous constellation. Such archives can serve to erase historical remembrance, rather than to reinforce it. Or, they can counteract the erasure of communist history of Yugoslavia in the transitional present. This history is, as it were, performed through the temporal cycle of bodies moving through the milieu of media events and dance parties. In framing the experience of the present through the socialist media cycle and popular culture as our archives, Domanović emphasizes in 19:30 the incompleteness of archives in relation to their inability to fully capture historical events. Her constructed archive is unfinished in acknowledgement that not everything is documented. As for other artists discussed in this book, her work carries the promise of dehistoricizing the past by remaining openended: open to the myriad options of the future.

Gypsies and Dogs Zoran Todorović’s confronting video installation Gypsies and Dogs (Cigani i Psi) (2007) edits together footage recorded with microcameras on collars worn by Roma child-beggars and stray dogs in Belgrade during the summer and autumn of 2007. It was first exhibited in the Belgrade October Salon in 2009 as a two-channel installation. Its shaky and grainy footage follows the subjects’ movements through the streets of Belgrade, and is accompanied by written explanations of the work’s intent. Gypsies and Dogs caused fierce public reactions over its ethically ambiguous position, which allegedly employed borderline hate speech – the title provocatively links animals with an offensive name for a highly disadvantaged group of people – and employed questionable

36

Simon Reynolds, Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past (London: Faber and Faber, 2011), 191.

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Figure 13 Zoran Todorović, Gypsies and Dogs (video still), 12’00”, 2007. Image courtesy of the artist.

strategies of production. Todorović repurposes the street-work of Roma children seemingly without parental consent, and may have exploited them in this sense to create the artwork.37 Todorović’s work may be viewed as unethical because it cynically reproduces exploitative behaviour already present in his environment. However, Todorović problematizes the very opposition between documenting everyday social reality and socially responsible art activism.38 Gypsies and Dogs is about the visible and invisible circuits of exploitation of minorities in contemporary Serbia. Todorović focuses on children, the most vulnerable part of Serbia’s Roma population, which is one of the most marginalized and oppressed minorities in Europe. His intentionally provocative gesture of placing collars on the children draws attention to the abuse they suffer daily on the streets of Belgrade, challenging us to consider the objectification of minorities in everyday life. Todorović’s gesture of reproducing exploitation against the already oppressed to highlight injustices implicit in contemporary life – similarly to the work of Spanish artist Santiago Sierra – is performative, but also stresses the labour involved in producing and managing archives. Todorović acts as the manager of the processes of archiving. He provides a crude mode of

37

38

During 2007 Todorović noticed a Roma family begging on the street nearby his residence. He approached the family, suggesting that the children wear microcameras hidden in a document pouch worn around the neck. Even though the family agreed, the agreement was never legally formalized, thereby rendering the work ‘illegal’. See Jasmina Čubrilo, ‘Moć Slike, Moć Reprezentacije, Moć Interpretacije’, http://www.supervizuelna.com/moc-slike-moc-reprezentacije-moc-interpretacije/ (accessed 18 September 2015). Nikola Dedić, ‘Multiculturalism, Media, Art in the State of Exception’, Treći Program 145 (2010): 320–6.

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‘crowdsourcing’ as a means through which to capture the movement of the children and dogs, and arranges and curates the collected information into an art archive. Todorović’s artwork, concerned with social micro-mechanisms of control in everyday life, can be mapped across the processes of exploitation involved in producing an archive, as well as the power imbalances involved in the control, arrangement and interpretation of the information. In a more generous reading than those by some critics, the children in Gypsies and Dogs are enabled by Todorović (as facilitator or curator) to participate as users in the creation of video recordings. Todorović outsources the activities of documenting everyday life and of generating content. He is a ‘user’ of sociotechnological practices whose power relations are manifested through the documentation;39 the children are symptomatic of the proliferation of discourse about empowering the public by providing them the means of feedback.40 (Exponents of this discourse include art galleries and museums that are creating online platforms so that audiences may respond to content.) Online archives such as YouTube are based in often-anonymized, user-generated content that is accumulated, managed, distributed, and ‘freely’ available to everyone. In this sense, Gypsies and Dogs is about the user-generated archive, particularly on platforms that exhibit interest in ridiculing others. In addition to YouTube, in Serbia there are several websites that specifically feature hours of ‘humorous’ user-uploaded videos ridiculing the Roma population and their general lower socio-economic status as the outsiders of society.41 Todorović’s

39 40 41

Šuvaković, Uetnost I Politika, 585. Jodi Dean, Blog Theory: Feedback and Capture in the Circuits of Drive (London: Polity, 2010), 14. Roma are a unique people in Europe in that they are a diaspora with no claimed homeland, or aspirations to establish an independent state. This lack of a territorial base has caused them both to be viewed as outsiders lacking stability and permanence, the quintessential ‘other’; and to be routinely denied their civic and political rights accorded to ‘nationalities’. This lack of territorial claim has meant that Roma have been completely overlooked in discussions and negotiations over territorial claims. But this lack of territorial claim and ‘stable’ national identity has also meant that Roma have been perceived as timeless people in the Balkans. In public discussion and popular culture texts (films by Emir Kusturica and Goran Bregović’s music), Roma operate as the signifier of the ‘joy of life’ of Balkans – as people who have been oppressed over the centuries, yet endure this oppression with a smile of their faces. Because Yugoslavia had one of the largest populations of Roma in Europe, with a few extremely large population concentrations (in Niš, Belgrade, and Skopje), the government did pay attention to Roma in important ways. In the early 1970s, the ethnic designation ‘tsigan’ disappeared from print, radio, television and official documents, and the designation ‘Rom’ was substituted. From 1981 to 1991, the official political status of Roma in Yugoslavia was that of ‘nationality’. Since the 1989 revolutions toppling the socialist governments of Eastern Europe, harassment and prejudice towards the Roma of Eastern Europe have intensified

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work is exposing representational exploitation in contemporary circuits of image storing and circulation. Jodi Dean uses the term ‘communicative capitalism’ to describe the present conditions of proliferating media wherein everyone is a producer and a consumer, arguing that circulation of content online is more important than the content’s message.42 For Todorović, the Roma children are contributing to the circulation of spectacle already by being documented and circulated by others: why then should they not document their own position as outsiders? Yet they are not in the position to consume or control the footage, which is the position assumed by Todorović. Management, control, dissemination and interpretation of the accumulated information – rather than the process of documenting – is Todorović’s ambivalent exploitation. Two aspects of Gypsies and Dogs are crucial in relation to the control and interpretation of information. First, Todorović documents the public reactions and discussions prompted by his artwork, and purportedly makes them part of the work. He archived two sets of debates about Gypsies and Dogs, from 2009 to 2012. The 2009 showing of the work was followed by heated online engagement (including a group of activists attempting to legally pursue Todorović and the exhibiting gallery), which was in turn documented and made available as a book and an online archive on Todorović’s website. The book accompanied future exhibitions of Gypsies and Dogs. And in 2012, Belgrade-based cultural centre Rex organized an international conference responding to the ethical questions raised by Gypsies and Dogs.43 The artwork as a larger entity thus problematizes the ethical position and responsibility of the audience as well as of the ‘enlightened’ art theorist. In participating in debates that are then co-opted into the artist’s presentation of his work, audiences contribute to the ever-growing feedback loop about the work. Second, Gypsies and Dogs is not a documentary of the life of Roma people in Serbia, even though their everyday reality as the invisible outsiders is present. The work traces the looseness of movement in public spaces captured by the

42

43

along with a sharp decrease in economic and social status. The war in the former Yugoslavia has produced ethnic cleansing of Roma (both Muslim and Christian) as ‘undesirables’. Jodi Dean, Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies: Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics (London: Duke University Press, 2009), 24. In 2014, the two sets of debates were presented in a publication (in Serbian and English) titled Gypsies and Dogs II: Symptoms and Traces of the Public Reception.

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recording technology, and yet we glean little information from the available footage. The children move between cars begging for money, and we see hands being extended with money or waving them away. We hear muddled conversation blocked out by street noises, including several disturbing scenes, such as a dialogue between an under-aged Roma girl and a male bus driver with barely audible, yet clear, sexual overtones.44 Yet Todorović does not bring us much closer to understanding the lived experience of the Roma children, or ‘explain’ the acts of prejudice directed at the Roma people daily. His aesthetic reflects the current modus operandi of the digital photograph, which as Steyerl describes it is characterized by ‘documentary uncertainty’: an aesthetic effect born out of the dissemination and transmission of low-resolution images on the internet, which generate something akin to ‘abstract documentarism’. Like Peljhan’s Territory 1995 discussed at the outset of this chapter, Gypsies and Dogs translates the experience of violence and prejudice into archived memory. In a mediated remapping of events, layers of information and evidence become a world unto themselves. Todorović positions his work (the archive) as a ‘quilting point’ that brings together antagonisms and conflicts in contemporary life. It manifests the temporal contours of violence, the power relations that underlie the production of knowledge through documenting, archiving and disseminating information. In this way, his work exposes the brutality and occlusion implicit in the act of creating archives today. Gypsies and Dogs is about the documentary management of the underprivileged child and animal bodies; their (lack of) agency is captured and documented in the archive. It is about the translation of the lived experience of prejudice, exploitation and racial violence into the medium of the archive: to be classified and arranged, but not to be understood. *** Archives as art have, like monuments, produced their own global aesthetic in recent times. The ‘archival impulse’ and its more recent variants occupy increasing amounts of space in international exhibitions like Manifesta, Documenta and Venice Biennale. In this respect it may be difficult to argue

44

Hito Steyerl, ‘Documentary Uncertainty”, A Prior 15 (2007), http://www.aprior.org/apm15_steyerl_ docu.htm.

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that the artistic practices examined in this chapter add anything more to the existing canon than a ‘Balkan variant’ on a familiar theme. Indeed, the work of Steyerl, Domanović and Todorović plays out according to the conventional tropes of archival aesthetics: commemorative acts bring the past into the present in order to dislocate linear narratives; ‘imperfect’ lived experience is contrasted with the institutionalized archival memory; grand narratives are contrasted with politically charged, marginal social narratives; forgotten or repressed histories are revisited. The challenge for these artists – and for our understanding of their provocations – is that they must intervene into concentrated history and memory wars that have been at play in the Balkans for decades. Certainly, it is a truism that archives are used for the rewriting of history to suit the present. But each version of history also reconstitutes the temporal experience and relation to the future. To address this, Steyerl, Domanović and Todorović employ transitional aesthetics that combine historical narratives, micro-stories and technological mediation with conceptions of the future. Steyerl employs and dissects cinema as a memory device for forgotten stories of socialist modernization and its emancipatory effect on the marginalized; by this she tries to reconstruct a future. Domanović contrasts the manufacture of fear in late socialist media (surging towards an inevitable war) against youthful ahistorical hedonism: her own take on the fin de siècle fascination with the end of history. Todorović takes the millennial obsession with participatory social media to its logical conclusion, critiquing implicit violence against minorities via the suffocating presentness of contemporary technoliberalism. By shifting emphasis from the search for forgotten histories to analysis of the relation of historical moments to their (imagined) futures, I am not arguing that these works are guarantors of truth or political engagement. Rather, in presenting a chronology-of-sorts of relations between Balkan sociopolitical regimes both past and future, I believe that Steyerl, Domanović and Todorović creatively analyse being-in-history rather than the relative morality of the past. Their works find conditions of possibility for understanding the past–present– future continuum. Their situated identity leads each of them to emphasize emancipatory potentials in both the Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav projects.

Afterword: Beyond Transitional Aesthetics In recent years, global geopolitics, the post-2008 economic crisis and mass migration have prompted a resurgence of interest in art as a mode of critique of neoliberalism. In the worst cases, this critique comes in a top–down curatorial-cum-thematic approach that loosely assembles a diverse body of work around an idea. In the best cases, there is an in-depth engagement with a specific context framed by a close reading of the intersection between its macro and micro histories.1 It is the hope of this book to contribute to the latter discourse by arguing for a new critical and aesthetic approach emerging from the transitional aesthetics of the former Yugoslavia. Yet there is a sense in which this approach can be cast as the return of area studies, raising both the spectre of Cold War politics – which produced this strand of work – and the risk of being the latest faddish geopolitical ‘scene’. To illustrate, future scholarship in transitional aesthetics could easily slip into speculation about the next crisis hotspot to be consumed by theory. As of 2017, Greece seems to be taking on that mantle, with Documenta running a second location in Athens together with series of public events featuring international ‘art humanitarians’. Insofar as this book has argued that transitional aesthetics stands for bodies of work that critique the hegemony of neoliberalism and nationalism while attempting to convey emerging forms of collectivity, the question ‘What next?’ points us in the broader direction of emerging forms of political mobilization. I believe transitional aesthetics can be seen as vanguard attempts to capture in art what is, in fact, taking shape across a range of cultural phenomena including popular music (notable examples are Dubioza Kolektiv in Bosnia, Rambo Amadeus in Serbia/Montenegro and TBF in Croatia), theatre (Oliver Frljić in Croatia) and ‘partisan music’ choirs in Slovenia (discussed by Ana Hofman).2 Uniting this diverse body of work in its negation of neoliberalism and nationalism 1

2

See Chrisoula Lionis, Laughter in Occupied Palestine: Comedy and Identity in Art and Film (London: I. B. Tauris, 2016); and Tello, Counter-Memorial Aesthetics. Although the focus on this book has been on artistic practices dealing with the former Yugoslavia, a broader comparative approach could also consider the work of artists outside of the region – such as collectives The Otolith Group and Chto Delat – that share similar political and conceptual concerns.

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as the present’s sole options is the mobilization of ideals that have been written off by the establishment as nostalgic or outdated. Crucially, this cultural output is appearing at a time of growing discontent and public protest across former Yugoslavia, and it is tapping into the lived experience of transition. While this book has touched on the lived experience of transition in the general sense, I hope to suggest that there is a homology between transitional aesthetics in art and the everyday strategies that citizens use to come to terms with the realities of transition: perhaps in single countries with multiple and mutually incompatible ethnonational histories being taught to children in schools (Bosnia and Herzegovina), and perhaps in societies that are actively  rehabilitating fascists and their collaborators as heroes (Croatia and Serbia). Transitional aesthetics points to the way in which lived history works within mythologies: of economic growth, of national unification, of historical origins. This includes the mythology of Yugoslavia – to be more precise, the mythology of a Yugoslavia that oscillates between criminalization and uncritical nostalgia. Transitional aesthetics attempts to articulate positions that move beyond this binary in the Yugoslavian context and promote affirmative collectivities. One such position is attained in the fictional docu-drama Houston, We Have a Problem! (2016). Directed by Slovene Žiga Virc, this film tells the history of a secret Yugoslav space programme that lasted from 1957 to 1961. Set at the height of the Cold War, the film claims that Yugoslavia had some initial success but due to lack of resources had to stop its space project. In the same period, the United States was pursuing its race against the Soviets to the moon, but despite its significant financing it also had no results. The film starts with the secret purchase of the Yugoslav plans by Americans for US$2.5 billion, and the transporting of the documentation under the guise of diplomatic visits. The film then follows the political games after the discovery by the Americans that the plans and programme had not worked. There is a diplomatic stand-off between Tito and American administrations, the sending of Yugoslav scientists to NASA and increasingly complex economic machinations that eventually lead to Yugoslavia’s demise. Houston, We Have a Problem! is composed of montages of archival footage, real locations and fictionalized characters such as the scientist whose death was faked in order to go to NASA under a different identity. The narrative has the aged scientist returning to former Yugoslavia after fifty years in the

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United States, and meeting his middle-aged daughter for the first time. This interaction provides a first-person counterpoint to the grand historical events and pseudo-mythological locations of secret army bases, Tito’s opulent residences and exclusive hotels (the scenes of top-level meetings). The conceptual meta-key to the film is provided by an interview with Slavoj Žižek, who discusses the Balkans as a paradoxical place of mythological codes of honour and relentless swindling, and Morocco as a mythological space of conspiracy theories. He further expounds on other fantasies that sustain our reality, such as his analysis of non-belief in Santa Claus (children don’t believe, but play along to get presents, and parents don’t believe, but participate ‘for the children’, thus preserving a fiction that sustains a social ritual). Out of this mix, the film constructs a study of mythologies and their relationship to historical memory and narrative. This includes the mythology of Yugoslavia as a global power-player cunningly guided by Tito as a political cult celebrity, and the dissolution of Yugoslavia as a result of grand geopolitical conspiracies (absolving the present of historical responsibility). It also includes the realization that, even after demystification, erasure, mockery and historical discrediting, Yugoslavia still remains a ‘serious’ country that meant something on the international stage (in arguably stark contrast to all the post-Yugoslav societies). As Žižek explains near the end of the film, it is less important that viewers realize they have been manipulated, than that they understand that everything in the movie is true despite never having happened. As Tanja Petrović suggests, this reading of the film reveals a desire, a longing for the possibility to tell, listen to, enjoy and engage with diverse, real and unreal, possible and impossible histories from the second part of the twentieth century, the period which brought dramatic social and economic changes, and which still represents a part of experienced memory for millions of citizens, but is usually subject to normative interpretations that view socialism as a totalitarian system that invaded all spheres of public and private life, and denied any possibility for citizens’ agency.3

Truth in the guise of fiction appears in the film as removed from any nostalgia or longing for a paternalistic leader; in the last scene, the aged, now wheelchairbound scientist visits Tito’s grave and curses him. 3

Tanja Petrović, ‘Towards an Affective History of Yugoslavia’, Filozofija I Društvo 3, no. XXVII (2016): 504–20, 506.

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Philosopher and art theorist Peter Osborne argues that one of the main characteristics of the ‘global post-communist historical present’ is the penetration of all existing social forms (communities, cultures, nations, societies) by the enforced interconnection of global capital exchange relations. However, he maintains, new ‘speculative collectivities’ (non-national or ‘parastate’ collectivities) are emerging and affecting a radical re-spatialization of social relations.4 Osborne uses The Atlas Group as his primary example of art practice in this regard, suggesting that its ‘fictional collectivity’ – its use of fictional narratives to invent new collective formations – stands for the missing political collectivity of the globally transnational. The radical aspect of these collectivities, for Osborne, is that they change the status of the national by problematizing the purpose of its existence. This fictionalization of the national acts as the de-nationalizing condition of its transnationalization; a transnationalization that is effected via the sociospatial structure of the artwork/artworld. This is not transnationalism as the abstract other of the nation, but transnationalization as the mediation of the form of the nation-state with its abstractly global other. (original emphasis)5

These collectivities are usurping nationalism as the de facto shock absorber against the structural imbalance of global capital. They show us that nationalism is only retroactively understood as resistance to the onset of neoliberalism and is in fact intrinsic to it. If there ever was a fictionalized transnational collectivity par excellence, it was the project of socialist Yugoslavia. The art discussed herein is representative of a silent collectivism in the background of transitional aesthetics. This is absolutely not to suggest that these works represent some kind of Yugonostalgia. In fact, many of the works are directly or indirectly critical of aspects of Yugoslavia, and others make only abstract references to Yugoslavia. However, these works engage with Yugoslavia as the historical referent and interpretative frame through which to articulate a transtemporal subject that generates affirmative forms of belonging. Yugoslavia is an idea of a cosmopolitan social state founded in anti-fascist struggle and progressive postcolonial politics that rejected Cold War geopolitical divisions. This idea

4 5

Osborne, Anywhere or Not at All, 195. Ibid., 35.

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is present in some works in their incorporation of material objects that are reminders of Yugoslavia, of popular and everyday culture from Yugoslavia, or of social actors who originate from Yugoslavia. They all establish subjects, at the intersection of histories, temporalities and ideologies, who engage in subversion and resistance. Collectively, the strategies include engagement with transnational anti-fascism, use of socialist popular culture to confirm shared heritage, exposing of political power in a post-ideological era after grand narratives, and subversion of nationalist and neoliberal discourses. Transitional aesthetics articulate a radical epistemological shift in orientation towards past utopian projects – one that looks beyond the bleak present to reimagine possible futures.

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Index Abramović, Marina 8, 13, 86, 87, 88, 89, 94–9, 105, 106 archives 3, 13, 20, 26, 35, 129–50 Benjamin, Walter 3, 7, 10, 11, 35, 102, 104 dialectical image 17–20 historical time 20–4 Bosnia and Herzegovina 2, 11, 21, 39, 84, 86, 99, 100, 115, 116, 129, 139, 143, 151–2 Braidotti, Rosi 28, 42 Buck-Morss, Susan 10, 25, 74 Buden, Boris 10, 15–6, 31, 62, 64, 65–6 children 29, 34, 82, 85, 88, 126, 140, 146–9, 152–3 of post-socialism 143–4 Collins, Phil 61–3 communism 4, 15–16, 22, 30, 58, 75, 90, 104, 108, 132, 133, 140, 143 Croatia 2, 11, 19, 28, 31, 38, 50, 53, 54, 55, 84, 85, 107, 114, 115, 116, 122, 127, 133, 151–2 Demand, Thomas 22–3, 30 Domanović, Aleksandra 13, 131–5, 140–5, 150 European Union (EU) 3, 22, 24, 27, 37–50, 55–9, 63–5, 84, 87–9, 134 fascism 4, 17, 107–8, 111–2, 120, 127 Groys, Boris 75, 104, 111, 112, 143 Grubić, Igor 13, 27–8, 33, 107, 109–10, 115, 116, 121, 124, 128 halfway tradition 13, 85–150 Hassan, Valentina 80–1 history end of (Francis Fukuyama) 5, 13, 35, 104, 124, 150

and events 10, 13, 17, 24–5, 28, 32–3, 35, 42, 89, 99, 139, 145, 153 zero hour of 5, 22–3, 25, 133 Hofman, Ana 11, 151 International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) 129–33 Iveković, Sanja 8, 19, 27 Janez Janša Project

13, 63, 67–76, 79

Kamerić, Šejla 37–40 Kosovo 21–2, 38, 61–3 Lefebvre, Henri 110 Lulić, Marko 126 Macedonia 54, 65, 84 Maljković, David 13, 109–10, 115, 122–8 Melitopoulos, Angela 13, 37, 40, 42, 50–9 migration 3, 13, 19, 26, 35, 37–59, 67, 151 as temporality 40–3 Milak, Radenko 28 Miljanović, Mladen 13, 49, 86–9, 99–106 Milošević, Slobodan 22–3, 30, 85, 103, 114 monuments 2, 3, 13, 20, 26, 28, 35, 65, 97, 107–28, 143–4, 149 nationalism 2–4, 7, 9, 12–13, 30, 35, 86, 87, 93–4, 97, 102, 115, 117, 119, 120, 130, 151–4 as temporality 20–4 neoliberalism 2–4, 7, 9–10, 19, 24, 32–3, 35, 45, 88, 144, 151, 154 Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK) 9, 57–8 Nikolić, Vladimir 13, 86–7, 88–94, 105–6 Non-Aligned Movement 12, 35, 42 Ostojić, Tanja 13, 40, 42, 43–9, 55, 58–9 over-identification 44, 65, 68, 72–3, 78, 83

Index Peljhan, Marko 129–30 Petrović, Tanja 2, 10, 34, 87, 127, 153 Poljak, Renata 140 Popivoda, Marta 28–30, 31, 33–5, 122 Pop-Mitić, Darinka 27 post-socialist transition 1–3, 9–10, 15–17 as catching up 49, 63 as a temporal regime 24–7 post-Yugoslav 1, 5, 9, 27, 33, 35, 134–5, 150, 153 new left in 12 politics 10–11 Salecl, Renata 30–1, 72–3 Second World War 2, 7, 20–1, 30, 40, 51, 53, 107–9, 119, 122, 129, 130, 132–3, 135–8, 143 monuments 111–15 Serbia 2, 11, 21–2, 41, 50, 54–5, 61–2, 84–8, 93, 101, 103, 107, 114–15, 126–7, 146–8, 151–2 Slovenia 2, 11, 37–8, 46, 54, 57, 68, 84, 115, 151 erased people in 70

171

Srebrenica 21, 129 genocide in 39 Steyerl, Hito 13, 131–4, 135–40, 149–50 Stilinović, Mladen 83–4 Šuvaković, Miško 10, 25–6, 49, 99 Tito (Josip Broz) 21, 29–30, 50, 85, 112, 122, 140, 152–3 Todorović, Zoran 13, 131–4, 145–50 translation 3, 13, 19, 26, 35, 59, 61–84, 149 Tuđman, Franjo 114, 133 Yugoslavia art in 7–8 historical subjects in 31–5 self-management in 8, 12, 35, 130 women in 27, 34, 42, 134–5 workers in 27, 34, 63, 65, 79, 82 Zdjelar, Katarina 13, 63–5, 76–84, 144 Žižek, Slavoj 41, 68, 73, 93, 98, 153