engleski

Negotiating Cold War Divisions – International Artist Networks of the 1950s and Yugoslav Practices of Cultural Exchange

The changes at the Yugoslav art scene in the beginning of the 1950s, following a brief and complicated encounter of the national culture with soc-realism, were rather intense and comprised – along with the heated public debates on the social function of art – an accelerated involvement with the currents of high modernism, mediated by the numerous exhibitions of French, Italian, Swiss and Scandinavian art, held in Yugoslavia from 1952 on. The reinstatement of artistic production in the early 1950s and simultaneous, pragmatic utilization of modern art as an argument in favour of the experimental and liberal nature of Yugoslav self-managing socialism, led to a rather quick inclusion of the local art scene in the ongoing processes of international cultural exchange. It was initiated as a range of ill-coordinated activities, which have turned, already in the mid-1950s, into a carefully structured model of Yugoslav presence at the European art scene. Framed by wisely applied key features of Cold War Culture, it included a regular participation at Venice, Sao Paulo, Alexandria and Tokyo Biennales, the launch of similar, biannual and triennial international exhibitions in Ljubljana, Zagreb and Rijeka, the establishment of international artcolonies, the intense involvement with the international professional organizations (AICA, INSEA, CIAM), and a rather frequent, numerous personal contacts between Yugoslav artist/curators and their foreign counterparts. Out of these contacts emerged quite interesting, transnational cultural networks, whose spatial expansion clearly points out to the fluidity and permeability of national and ideological borders at the time. Personal structure and spatial distribution of these networks, as well as the geographic routes along which circulated events, objects and concepts involved in their creation, are the topics of this paper. They will be approached from the perspective of art history and social network analysis, and further explained by the series of network visualizations and interactive spatial presentations.

cold war cultural politics ; modern art ; cultural diplomacy ; Socialist Yugoslavia ; artist networks

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