engleski

Rethinking the Monument. Dialogical and Anti- monumental Strategies of Yugoslav Memorial Practices

The term “counter monument”, coined by James E. Young in the early 1990s, has become one of the central theoretical concepts in the field of memory studies. Beside the fact that the term has often been uncritically adopted by art historians in order to explain and “label” formal and conceptual innovations that occurred in the field of memorial practices in the wake of the post-modern shift, its negative prefix and thus constructed, binary semantic field of “monument” can also be understood as a product of the West-oriented narrative of the history of modern art. This is especially the case with twentieth-century monumental sculpture/architecture, burdened with overt ideological/political functions. Although the term “counter monument” originated from the need to address specific socio-political circumstances of the 1980s in Western Germany, it soon came to be understood as the breakthrough in the history of twentieth-century memorial practices, which limited the recognition of similar strategies which had occurred before the term was officially inaugurated in the early 1980s, especially those originating in former socialist countries, such as Yugoslavia. This is further complicated by the implicated binary relation between the term “monument” and “counter monument”, which seems to echo and perpetuate a binary ideological worldview inherited from Cold War cultural politics (East vs. West, democratic vs. totalitarian, etc.). Consequently, the official narrative (the “canon”) seems to suggest that the introduction of dialogical and anti- monumental strategies in the field of memorial practice could only have been possible within Western democracies (Western Germany, the USA). This paper will show that features recognised as characteristic of “counter monuments” (Q. Stevens, et al., “Counter-monuments: the anti- monumental and the dialogic”, Journal of Architecture, Vol 17, 2012/6) can be recognised in projects, realisations and discussions about monuments in socialist Yugoslavia already in the late 1950s/early 1960s. Although the application of such strategies did not “counter” or challenge the official WWII narratives, intense rethinking of the monument by artists and art critics resulted in radical inversions of formal and conceptual premises of the “traditional” monument.

WWII memorials, WWII monuments, counter-monument, SFRY, anti-monumentalism

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