engleski

Migrating Signifiers – Croatian Post-WWII Art History and its Relation to the Inter-war Avant-garde

Relation to avant-garde as it was articulated in the discourse of Croatian post WWII art history – and for that matter in art history of other Yugoslav republics at the time – was rather complicated, but more at the level of semantics than actual cultural politics. Yugoslav cultural policy after the break with USSR was rather tolerant towards different types of experimental art practices – “old” and new ones alike – but almost to the end of 1950s the notion of the avant-garde was directly associated with the radical and revolutionary social/political practice of the Yugoslav Communist Party and thus turned into “unavailable” cultural signifier. The lack of unambiguous terminology and proper analytical apparatus considerably affected a clear perception and description of the inter-war modernism, re-framed in a number of complicated ways by the appearance of new art phenomena in the early post-war period who were also claiming the avant-garde position in regard to both –political order and signifying order of art. In this paper we shall examine the consequences of such claims in relation to the very concept of the avant-garde – how it was understood, described, interpreted an applied during 1950s, as well as in 1960s when it was finally dislocated from the realm of politics and re- established within the discourse of culture. We shall also explain the reasons why – after it gained momentum at the beginning of 1970s – the interest for the avant-garde among the artists, art historians and general public was constantly rising to reach its culmination at the beginning of 1980s with series of exhibitions presenting local “non-paradigmatic” avant-garde movements and their networking practices.

WW I; avant-garde; post-war art history; historiography of art; theory of art and literature

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