engleski

Conflicting Visions of Modernity and Postwar Modern Art

The period from the end of the Second World War until the beginning of the 1970s was, both politically and culturally, undoubtedly one of the most dynamic and complex periods in the history of Socialist Yugoslavia. Thanks to the overall enthusiasm triggered by after-war modernization processes (industrialization, urbanization, compulsory elementary education and easier access to high education, development of media and popular culture, etc.), as well as by the absolute faith in science and technology, this era gave birth to modern Yugoslav society. Approximately two and a half decades – from 1950 to 1974 – that constitute the timeframe of our analysis are on the one side defined by a moment in which Yugoslavia, after the conflict with Cominform in 1948, reinvented itself by introducing a new, modernist and experimental model of social organization (socialist self- management) and almost completely embraced Modernism as its official cultural matrix. The end of this period in the early seventies was determined by loss of faith in the utopian dimension of self-managing socialism – both by artists and, in a somewhat different way, by the whole socio-political sphere. Instead of re- establishing the anthological status of individual artworks, artists and phenomena, the intention of the author is to detect social, political, economic and cultural circumstances that conditioned their formation and relation to ideology of European high modernism. Associated with political, social and economic context of the time, cultural and artistic practices dominating Croatian art are articulated, intertwined and mutually contextualized within a specific, but by no means monolith and unambiguous ideological and economic system.

socialist Yugoslavia, modernism, politics, modern art, neo-avant-garde, conceptual art,

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