engleski

Between social activism and Academia – Art history in Yugoslavia during the Cold War period

Compared to other countries of the socialist East, art history in Yugoslavia, or – more precisely – art history in each of Yugoslav republics was devoid of any obvious, direct political pressure affecting methodologies, procedures or interpretative strategies of the discipline. Liberal cultural policy, well defined and developed academic and institutional framework providing the scientific output of the discipline and appropriate professional education, a successful engagement of Yugoslav art historians within numerous UN / UNESC-o initiatives in urban planning and heritage protection, who already in mid- 1950s gained respectful international reputation, the internal stratification of the discipline into an agile academic scene, engaged art criticism, and high-quality curatorial staff facilitating a rapid development of museums and galleries in 1960s meant to simultaneously contribute to the ever more intense cultural exchange with Non- aligned countries and growing public interest in the local art production, as well as the open- minded approach to a variety of theoretical insights and analytic tools of sociology, semiotics, and structuralism, that from the beginning of 1960s on were included into research practices local art historical community, outline a quite rosy picture of its relation with the socialist State. In order to examine the particularities of that relation we shall explain the motivations and standpoints of key participants in the early post-war public polemics on nature of modern art, analyze forms of art history’s "social activism" in 1960s and its contribution to the notion of modernity as it was exported to the Non-aligned countries together with the concept of "socialism as a world process" in 1970s, also taking into account the main features of the global Cold War cultural politics and its influence on local disciplinary practices. In order to understand the nature of that influence within Yugoslav context special attention will be paid to Federal Commission for the International Cultural Exchange and to the consequences of its activities regarding social visibility of art history, as well as to certain "blind spots" in the art historical narratives produced during Cold War period that clearly point to the (ideological) vulnerability of the discipline in spite of its seemingly privileged and comfortable position within the realm of Yugoslav culture and its unproblematic relation to the dominant political order.

art history, politics, activism, Yugoslavia, Cold War

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