{"id":13688,"date":"2024-02-19T18:17:30","date_gmt":"2024-02-19T21:17:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.voluspajarpa.com\/?post_type=texts&#038;p=13688"},"modified":"2024-02-19T18:17:43","modified_gmt":"2024-02-19T21:17:43","slug":"142-yugoslav-fanonism-and-a-failed-exit-from-the-cultural-cold-war","status":"publish","type":"texts","link":"https:\/\/www.voluspajarpa.com\/en\/texts\/142-yugoslav-fanonism-and-a-failed-exit-from-the-cultural-cold-war\/","title":{"rendered":"142. Yugoslav Fanonism and a Failed Exit from the (Cultural) Cold War"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In this text, I take up and strategically exaggerate Stanko Lasi\u0107&#8217;s implicit periodization of Yugoslav history into a history of revolution (with its \u201cFanonist\u201d cultural vision), followed (and betrayed) by the history of art, which he made in his famous 1971 book on the literary conflicts on the left in Yugoslavia. The text comparatively examines two official, \u201cparapolitical\u201d presentations of Yugoslav art made during the 1950s: L\u2019Art m\u00e9di\u00e9val yougoslave (Yugoslav Medieval Art), masterminded by writer Miroslav Krle\u017ea and staged in 1950 in Paris, and the Yugoslav pavilion at the Expo \u201958 in Brussels. Both exhibitions affirmed the singularity of Yugoslav socialism in the international, cultural, and geopolitical arena. The one coordinated by Krle\u017ea, with the clear imprint of his \u201cFanonist\u201d vision, did this by promoting the purportedly authentic, artistic expression of the self-taught sculptors of a heretic medieval sect, the Bogomils, while the Expo \u201958 pavilion, designed by sculptor and architect Vjenceslav Richter, mobilized the allegedly universal, modernist, abstract language of the (neo)-avant-garde. Ultimately, the two projects can be seen as two failed attempts to emancipate a national culture from its status of peripheral dependency, one by explicitly articulating its position of colonial difference, and the other by taking the Enlightenment promise of universal culture to task and claiming equality in the right to speak the international language of art. By examining the distance that separates the two exhibitions, I argue that L\u2019Art m\u00e9di\u00e9val yougoslave, staged at the moment of Yugoslavia\u2019s historical exit from what Krle\u017ea called the \u201cAntithesis\u201d (of East and West), marks simultaneously the peak and endpoint of politicized, decolonial Yugoslav aesthetics, after which one can only speak of Yugoslav\u2014and, following 1968, of post-Yugoslav\u2014art.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"template":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.voluspajarpa.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/texts\/13688"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.voluspajarpa.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/texts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.voluspajarpa.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/texts"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.voluspajarpa.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/texts\/13688\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13691,"href":"https:\/\/www.voluspajarpa.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/texts\/13688\/revisions\/13691"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.voluspajarpa.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13688"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}