| Summary: | In the late 1960s Yugoslavian artistic production underwent radical change
prompted by the emergence of a "New Art," which pursued the "dematerialization" of the
art object. This enterprise necessitated new artistic approaches, methods and media, and
challenged the very assumptions of established artistic discourse, rendering codified
modernist art into the realm of obsolescence.
Modernist art and architecture was adopted by the Titoist regime after Yugoslavia
broke with Stalinist Soviet Union in 1948, initially as a sign of difference from that
regime. Indeed during the fifties, modernism was a trope of progress. Formalist
modernism was a potent ideological tool for the Titoist regime during the Cold War in
Yugoslavia, which, playing the role of a buffer zone between the two adversary blocks,
was considered an open country. While offering an aestheticized picture of reality
detached from everyday life, formalist modernism became, in effect, the officially
sanctioned artistic vocabulary.
The tension between the new art and modernism manifested itself primarily in the
conception of the individual and in the relationship between artistic practice and everyday
life. In a radical shift, the new art practitioners promoted practices and forms of
representation that destabilised an autonomous creator by introducing local narratives and
active spectators. The bureaucrats concerned with artistic production in established
institutions of art such as the Academy of Art understood this approach as an intervention
into the official image of reality. After the outburst of students' discontent in 1968, the
officials opened "The Student Cultural Centre" as a safety valve under the banner of
accommodating "experiments in art." From the very beginning this institution fostered
the wide array of cultural activities and became a "cult" space among the youth.
Although it is reasonable to suppose that the regime's hidden agenda was to ghettoize the
"New Art," the Student Cultural Centre, served to transform the art scene in Belgrade.
In my thesis I address the socio-historical reasons that prompted this shift in the
sphere of art production. The Belgrade artistic scene in the early seventies was split
between canonized modernism and a periphery reserved for new art practices. The 19th
century building housing Student Cultural Centre was the site where proponents of
conceptual art struggled against the entrenched modernist canon by introducing new
methods and media. In the analysis of new art practices I follow the work of the two
artists, Marina Abramovic and Zoran Popovic, whose activity epitomized this struggle at
the turn of the seventies. === Arts, Faculty of === Art History, Visual Art and Theory, Department of === Graduate
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