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Project Political Practices of (Post-)Yugoslav Art,
Prelom
kolektiv and ŠKUC gallery present
SKC in ŠKUC
The Case of Student's Cultural Centre in
the 1970s
...
documents, images, texts, films, testimonies, researchers'
notes ...
You are
kindly invited to attend the opening of the
exhibition Thursday, May 8 at 8 pm at Galerija Škuc.
May 8 –
23, 2008
This
exhibition, in a form of a notebook in space, offers the
insight into the present stage of a part of an ongoing
collective research project Political Practices of
(Post-)Yugoslav Art, initiated in 2006 by WHW (Zagreb),
kuda.org (Novi Sad), SCCA/pro.ba (Sarajevo) and Prelom
kolektiv (Belgrade). The project traces, problematizes and
articulates the interrelationships of visual arts,
intellectual production and socio-political practices in the
ex-Yugoslav space. It tries to give back the political voice
to the art that has been taken from it, both actively
(through the domination of “cultural industries” approach)
and retroactively (through the way it is historicized).
The “case”
of Student’s Cultural Centre (SKC) in Belgrade reveals
numerous important traits of the general constellation of
art and politics in Socialist Federal Republic of
Yugoslavia. It is characteristic of the strategies after
1968 to contain, pacify and institutionalise student or
youth culture as an offered or
organized “alternative”. Like many
of student’s cultural centres throughout SFRY, SKC was an
official state-constituted cultural institution offering
young artists and cultural workers “roof over their heads”.
At the same time, it was a place of avant-garde
experimentation – the introduction of new technologies, new
artistic expressions, new forms of cultural activism and
self-organization.
In the
present cultural-political situation SKC is fetishized and
marginalized at the same time. On the one hand, it is seen
as a space of unlimited freedom and individual creative
expression in the midst of oppressive, totalitarian state.
This romantic and nostalgic view is usually followed by
reactionary fascination with the formalist re-turn of
language and symbolism of the (neo-)avant-garde
characteristic for our post-socialist condition. On the
other hand, inside predominantly conservative stream of
national culture, its historical contributions remain
excluded from the contemporary system of evaluation. The
symptomatic non-existence of the experience of SKC’s artist,
activist and organizational practices shows the erasure of
potentially still viable strategies for contemporary
regional cultural institutions.
The research of The Case of
Student's Cultural Centre in the 1970s
aims to extricate the concrete
relationships and transactions between artists and the
institution in order to reveal the political genealogy of
contemporary art practices.
Our goal,
therefore, is not to “discover” and historicize what is
nowadays seen as the underground art practices of some
“brave” individuals in the face of a totalitarian system. It
is a call for re-examination that could point to the
possibilities of reviving progressive and critical
experiences that existed on the cultural, artistic and
intellectual scene in former Yugoslavia from the
contemporary standpoint of the post-Yugoslav situation in
artistic and cultural production within the neo-liberal
constellation.
CULTURAL
INSTITUTION AND SELF-MANAGEMENT:
The reforms
of Yugoslav self-management socialism in 1965 and especially
in 1974 set forth an economic system that could be seen as
an anticipation of the contemporary neo-liberal model of
entrepreneurship in culture and even of cultural industries.
The “case” of Belgrade’s Student’s Cultural Center during
the 1970s reveals a complex mode of functioning which is in
a number of ways parallel to the problems that contemporary
cultural institutions are facing. Even though it was
established and budgeted by the state, it presented a space
for alternative cultural production. Although it was a
professional institution of culture with the administrative
distribution of roles, it operated in a non-hierarchical way
and without respect for traditional divisions between
cultural producers and audiences or disciplinary and
professional specificities. Those contradictory traits allow
us via this historical example to examine the
possibilities of different and defying practices within the
institutions and to shed light on the present-day
possibilities of critique within the institutions.
OCTOBER
75 AND STRIKE STRIKE IN THE ART PRODUCTION:
The
emancipatory project of “Conceptual art” has been formulated
as tactical replacement of marketable art product by
critical art attitude, that is, the replacement of the
“object” by the “idea”. From the contemporary
cultural-political-economical perspective, it seems that
this project rather contributed to formal radicalization of
art than to a real change of its social function. It
resulted in practicing the “methods” of self-reflexivity and
self-referentiality within the enclosed disciplinary field
of art. In other words, the replacement of the “object” by
the “idea” remained internal to the discourse of the
“institution of art” on one hand, and on the other hand well
situated in the logic of the post-Fordist (re-) production
and what is referred to as a “cognitive capitalism”. Through
the re-examination of collective art projects in SKC like
October 75 and different individual artistic concepts
which favored various forms of strike over the cognitive
production, this chapter of the show tries to discuss
ultimately radical approaches to the Conceptual Art project
in former Yugoslavia.
TESTIMONIES, MEMORIES AND INTERPRETATIONS:
Testimonies, memories and interpretations of the SKC actors
bring into the light a more differentiated and complex
picture of art and cultural practices than the smoothed and
pacifying discourse of dominant art histories. Less being
souvenirs of the “good old times”, they depict the complex
field of different practices, strategies and relations that
made up SKC. Those conflicting and, often, conflictual
interpretations, also indicate political developments and
shifting social positions that represent the stakes in
today’s games in the production of art and culture and in a
broader battle for unified ideological discourse of the
neo-liberal era.
SKC IN
PUBLIC
Selected
articles from Yugoslav press during the 1970s provide a
mosaic of complex interplays between public opinion,
official statements and SKC. Generally seen as a part of
“pessimism in culture” movement since the 1960s – countering
technocratic progressivist and growingly petit-bourgeois
bureaucratic ideology – SKC was treated very contradictory.
On the one hand, it was depicted as the evidence of
providing the youth culture with necessary infrastructure,
while, on the other, it was scorned as a locus of then
called anarcho-liberal, anti-socialist tendencies. The
clippings also include articles on SKC programs as
beginnings of an informed cultural journalism, various
statements of party and cultural officers on SKC, debates on
financial sustainability of such institutions, etc. thus
piecing a picture of the presence of SKC in a broader social
life of SFRY.
KINO
BELEŠKE/CINEMATIC NOTES:
This for
many years lost and recently found experimental film was
produced in 1975 by famous British-German director Lutz
Becker in collaboration with Dragomir Zupanc and the group
of artists, curators and critics gathered around SKC. The
film includes verbal statements and performative gestures of
the numerous protagonists of the 'New artistic practice' in
former Yugoslavia, referring to the role of art in society
and re-thinking concepts of 'form', 'autonomy', 'economy', 'politicality'
and 'institutionalization' of contemporary art.
Participating: Bojana Pejić, Raša Todosijević, Goran
Đorđević, Ješa Denegri, Jasna Tijardović, Marina Abramović,
Dragica Vukadinović, Slavko Timotijević, Zoran Popović,
Dragomir Zupanc, Biljana Tomić, Dunja Blažević, Nebojša
Filopović, Goran Trbuljak, Gergelj Urkom.
EVENTS:
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Guided tour through
the show by exhibition curators
Friday, May 9 at 6 pm
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Film screening/Film evening 1:
Art in Revolution, Lutz Becker, London, 1972
Tuesday, May 20 at 7 pm
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Film screening/Film evening 2:
June Movements [Lipanjska gibanja], Želimir
Žilnik, Neoplanta film, Novi Sad, 1968
Thursday, May 22 at 7 pm
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