142. Yugoslav Fanonism and a Failed Exit from the (Cultural) Cold War
In this text, I take up and strategically exaggerate Stanko Lasić’s implicit periodization of Yugoslav history into a history of revolution (with its “Fanonist” 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, “parapolitical” presentations of Yugoslav art made during the 1950s: L’Art médiéval yougoslave (Yugoslav Medieval Art), masterminded by writer Miroslav Krleža and staged in 1950 in Paris, and the Yugoslav pavilion at the Expo ’58 in Brussels. Both exhibitions affirmed the singularity of Yugoslav socialism in the international, cultural, and geopolitical arena. The one coordinated by Krleža, with the clear imprint of his “Fanonist” 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 ’58 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’Art médiéval yougoslave, staged at the moment of Yugoslavia’s historical exit from what Krleža called the “Antithesis” (of East and West), marks simultaneously the peak and endpoint of politicized, decolonial Yugoslav aesthetics, after which one can only speak of Yugoslav—and, following 1968, of post-Yugoslav—art.
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