The City as a Space of Plastic Happening: From Grand Proposals to Exceptional Gestures in the Art of the 1970s in Zagreb

The New Artistic Practice in Yugoslavia

The idea, of course, was neither new, nor endemic to the Zagreb art scene. Under the aegis of the “democratization of the arts,” it appeared already in the proclamations of the Soviet avant-garde, which, together with the 1968 student movements and the reactivation of leftist politics, became a source of inspiration for artists active within the emerging transnational network of the “new art” of the 1960s and 1970s. ² In the Yugoslav context, such art practices became known as nova umjetnička praksa—new artistic practice, which was also the title of the exhibition that documented and historicized them at Zagreb’s Gallery of Contemporary Art in 1978. ³ New artistic practice was informed by an attitude of resistance towards the modernist understanding of art as an autonomous field, as well as an opposition to the bourgeois idea of art as a source of aesthetic enjoyment. Instead, it called for a decommodification and democratization of art, a critique of institutions and the art system, and active engagement of art in social processes and ideological discourses. It also abandoned conventional artistic media in favor of performative actions, ephemeral gestures, and the use of inexpensive, everyday materials.

Some of its best known Yugoslav protagonists—OHO Group, Gorgona Group, Sanja Iveković, Mladen Stilinović, Goran Trbuljak, Braco Dimitrijević, Tomislav Gotovac, Marina Abramović, Raša Todosijević, and Goran Đorđević—started their careers at the Student Centers in Zagreb and Belgrade, or amateur cinema clubs, both of which were hubs of alternative cultural activity. ⁴ But so were some bigger institutions, such as the Zagreb Gallery of Contemporary Art, and the Belgrade Museum of Contemporary Art, whose curators exhibited, theorized, and collected the “new art.” This is why in the case of Yugoslavia it is impossible to speak of the divide between “official” and “unofficial” culture, which has served as a cornerstone of interpreting the art of former socialist countries along the lines of the resistance of “unofficial” artists to the totalitarian regime. ⁵ In fact, the exhibitions that I discuss here were all institutional endeavors, and in some cases, their curators were more radical in expressing demands for a revolution of the arts and the art institutions than the artists themselves.

“From the Totality of the Urban Tissue to the Ornament of Human Steps”

The City as a Space of Plastic Happening project was itself part of an attempt to reform the conventionally structured institution of the Zagreb Salon. Established in 1965, the Zagreb Salon was a yearly survey exhibition of visual and applied arts. In 1971, the Salon was reinvented and assumed what Lidija Butković describes as the “temporal structure,” consisting of three sections that brought together the past, the present, and the future. ⁶ “Situation” gave an overview of contemporary artistic production, “Critical retrospective” reevaluated a selected historical artistic phenomenon, and “Proposal”—with its emphasis on ideas, regardless of the (im)possibility of their immediate realization—was defined as the “domain of the future, domain of the possible.” ⁷ Proposal was an intervention into the traditionally static nature of the Salon: instead of a neutralized space where art is merely showcased, it imagined art as a catalyst of social transformation, citing at the same time the “social responsibility” of the Zagreb Salon as a “social institution.” ⁸ As already noted, there was nothing unusual about this in the era of the 1960s and 1970s, when avant-garde notions about the transformative power of art were revived to become a signature trait of what was enthusiastically proclaimed the “new art.” However, Proposal was the first curatorial event in Yugoslavia to focus exclusively on the urban sphere, recognizing the “problematics of the city and its functioning as a local and global priority.” ⁹ It invited painters, sculptors, architects, designers, photographers, and anyone interested to submit their ideas for reshaping the city, because the “realization of the humane living environment is a common possibility and a common task,” in which “plastic activities” often play a crucial role. ¹⁰

Although the notion of “plastic activities” used in the text is simply a reflection of the critical discourse at the time, in which the term “plastic” was used as an alternative to the more conventional term, “visual arts,” and the disciplinary divisions it implied, the text opened up a way toward further theoretical potentials of the notion of plasticity, as it proposed a vision of the city as a collectively coordinated body immersed in an ongoing “plastic happening”:

[T]he domain of plastic happening extends from the totality of the urban tissue to the ornament of human steps, from the performing stage of the city square to that of the window shop, from the screens of the facades to those of the placards, from the programmed light-effects to the accidental reflections. ¹¹

Words such as ornament, performing stage, screen, and light-effects indicate that the city was imagined as a kind of spectacular Gesamtkunstwerk, a collective work-of-art-in-progress, created both “programmatically” and “accidentally,” without a clear division of roles between performers and audience. The routine steps of passers-by were an integral part of this ongoing urban performance, just as much as the carefully designed window-shops. Although in its English translation the word zbivanje in the original title of the Proposal exhibition (Grad kao prostor plastičnog zbivanja) coincides with “happening,” an emergent artistic form that dissolved the boundaries between art, author, and audience, here it implied a continued flow of a diverse range of phenomena, events, and occurrences in the city.

The Coming Out of Art

And there certainly was no lack of “happening,” as Proposal took place at the peak of a series of political rallies and protest movements that had shaken up Yugoslavia in the late 1960s and early 1970s. According to Boris Kanzleiter, the 1968 student protests in Belgrade were only “the most visible event in a protest cycle, which began in the mid-1960s and lasted a whole decade, until the mid-1970s.” ¹² Already in 1966, Belgrade students had clashed with the police in protests against the war in Vietnam and Yugoslavia’s ambivalent politics toward the United States. ¹³ Two years later, students rebelling in June 1968 in Yugoslavia—most notably, in Belgrade—criticized the hypocrisy of the Yugoslav state, accusing it of preaching one thing (socialism), and practicing another (capitalism). ¹⁴ It was on the basis of identifying themselves not as opponents but rather as true believers in the authenticity of the Yugoslav socialist project, including the politics of socialist self-management and Non-Alignment, that they demanded changes and the democratization of society. At the same time, in Zagreb, the quest toward Yugoslavia’s democratization gained a nationalist emphasis, as the leadership of the Croatian League of Communists spoke out against unitaristic tendencies and what they perceived as the economic and cultural inequality of the Socialist Republic of Croatia within Yugoslavia. The Party’s political rallies were supported by a growing student movement that placed itself in opposition to the leftist “1968-ers” and became part of what came to be known as the Croatian Spring, culminating with mass demonstrations in late 1971, which Tito finally brought to an end by dissolving the Croatian political leadership and arresting the prominent members of the student movement. ¹⁵

Even if most Zagreb artists and curators of the new art practice did not—at least not explicitly—identify with the demands of the Croatian Spring, it is reasonable to assume that this explosion of unpredictable mass “happening” on Zagreb’s streets strongly influenced the “coming out” of art into urban space, reinforcing the idea of art’s democratization, that is, of bringing it closer to the people. ¹⁶ Vladimir Gudac, a founding member of the Group TOK (Group “Flow”), which started its activities precisely around this time, recalls this context as crucial for the group: in 1971,

things constantly happened outside . . . there were demonstrations, lecture halls were occupied . . . banners were paraded . . . what today is called embodied space was literally taking place at the time; the city was constantly blocked, the roads were empty . . . someone would always stop you and ask for an ID. ¹⁷

Curator and director of the Student Center Gallery, Želimir Koščević, himself an initiator of a number of urban art actions and interventions (including his participation in the organization of the Proposal section) grants an analogous relevance to 1968, stating that it resulted in an “eruption of youth energy in Zagreb, Belgrade, and Ljubljana . . . After 1968, it was clear that something completely different was going on.” ¹⁸ One of the most famous works of Group TOK directly emulated protest culture: in a street action carried out in the summer of 1972 in Zagreb, and later in Graz and in Belgrade, members of the group carried canvases filled with geometric forms typical of abstract painting in the place of banners with political slogans. Maja Fowkes interprets this action as a “conscious comment” on the public protests and the right-wing demands of the Croatian Spring of the previous year. ¹⁹ She also cites Gudac’s understanding of the antagonism between the “so-called extreme leftists and the new rightists” as mirrored in the artistic antagonism between abstract (internationalist) and figurative (nationalist) art. ²⁰ The canvas procession was thus at the same time a provocation of this conflict and an ironic comment on the trend of art in public space, which claimed a socially engaged agenda in its interpellation of the ordinary citizen, but remained bound by the formalist criteria of an art object, albeit a more avant-garde object of abstract art. ²¹

“Molestation by Unconscientious Citizens”

Such a failed encounter between the citizens and the art manifested itself in the case of one of the best remembered interventions presented in the first edition of Proposal, Ivan Kožarić’s sculpture Grounded Sun. A two-meter fiberglass sphere painted in gold was installed on a pedestrian island in the city center, only to receive violent reactions from unidentified citizens. After it was attacked with black paint and, on another occasion, almost set on fire, the city council ordered the removal of the work, as it “had become a target of molestation by unconscientious citizens, who cover it with various paints, fire and texts . . . which altogether makes the environment very ugly.” ²² The unconventional nature of the work is usually cited as a reason for hostility: it was the first noncommemorative public sculpture in Zagreb, and it was confusingly both abstract (a sphere) and figurative (as much as it represented the Sun). ²³ However, video footage shot in 1971 by Ivan Ladislav Galeta and later incorporated into his experimental film sfaĩra 1985-1895 (1971-1984) testifies to a cautious curiosity, rather than aggression, as the typical reaction of passers-by toward the sculpture (Figure 1). ²⁴

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Ivan Ladislav Galeta, sfaĩra 1985-1895 (1971-1984), 16 mm/35 mm, b/w, silent, 10 min. Video still. Courtesy of Karlo Galeta.

The sphere must have appeared as a foreign body fallen from the sky, a sun deciding to ground itself on the busy Zagreb asphalt. The gold was deceiving, suggesting that the sculpture was made of bronze, when it was in fact made of much cheaper fiberglass. Passers-by approached it, looked at it for a while, then touched it, carefully examining its materiality; they knocked on it to hear the sound it makes, and some tested their own strength by attempting to roll it forward. All this ritualized activity created a constant flow of improvised choreography around the sculpture, its spherical shape repeatedly reaffirmed by people circling it in order to inspect it. As per Proposal’s recipe, Grounded Sun was truly a catalyst of plastic happening, an unpredictable flow of program and accident, of admiration and aggression, coinciding with the historical moment at which the prospect of youth-led radical political transformations suddenly flashed on the horizon, only to be extinguished, or “grounded” the next day. Rather than “ordinary citizens” unable to understand “abstract” art, it is more likely that the aggressive clash between the “grounded sun” and “unconscientious citizens” might have after all been, as is in any case suspected, an intra-artistic clash, not quite one between the “internationalist” abstraction and “nationalist” figuration art, but rather between proponents of the new art and those who tried to protect its traditional boundaries (which in Yugoslavia already included nonfigurative painting and sculpture). ²⁵

At the same time, the “ordinary citizen” became the star of another art project realized during the first Proposal exhibition: Braco Dimitrijević’s Passers-By I Accidentally Met at 11:15, 16:23 and 18:11 in Zagreb. Large-format photographic portraits of people the artist had met in the streets were placed on facades of several buildings located on three central squares in the city, including the Square of the Republic, the main square where political rallies were traditionally held. As Maja and Reuben Fowkes note, on May 7, 1971, merely a day before the opening of Proposal, a mass political rally was held on the square, with Savka Dabčević-Kučar, the leader of the Croatian League of Communists and of the Croatian Spring, addressing the masses while standing in front of the same façade where Dimitrijević’s works were later installed. ²⁶ After seeing Dimitrijević’s portraits of casual passers-by the following morning, citizens were thus justified to “wonder whether there had been a change of government.” ²⁷ Dimitrijević’s unrealized proposal was to hang Japanese flags all over the city for the duration of the exhibition. Both projects identified chance, with elements of the absurd, as a factor of historical and political transformation, reflecting in this way the social and political turbulence of the moment and the uncertainty of the future. Just like in his 1969 work in which car drivers accidentally “became artists” by driving over a package of milk that Dimitrijević had set up in advance, so here random people could be perceived as important by having their portrait hung on city facades. In the context where democratization was passionately summoned within the political, activist, as well as artistic discourse, Dimitrijević’s works invoked what Jacques Rancière identified as the disturbing but potent core of democracy: the threatening idea that anyone—whether citizen or stranger—could potentially take over, or become a protagonist of historical change. ²⁸

Duty toward the “Living Past”

Only a minority of Proposal contributions were realized; others were exhibited at the Student Center Gallery exactly as proposals, or, according to Butković, “a repository of ideas for some future time.” ²⁹ Still, despite the organizers’ emphasis on the future and on shifting the boundaries of the possible, most submissions presented rather prosaic interventions, such as making urban space more attractive or pleasant by inserting fountains, flowers, or public sculptures. ³⁰ A few, predictably those by architects, included plans for new neighborhoods and buildings. The breadth and diversity of the submitted material, however, reflected the desire of the organizers to break through the confines of individual disciplines and artistic genres, and foreground instead the collective effort toward social change. This made Proposal a perfect fit for the Salon’s “Critical Retrospective” section, which took as its theme group Zemlja [Land], a leftist association of architects, painters, and sculptors active from 1928 to 1935, when they were ultimately banned in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia due to their political views. ³¹ Zemlja advocated socially engaged art, and one that would be adapted to local needs, rather than copy Western trends. Democratization or “popularization” of art was among their central ideas, realized in practice by their leading member, painter Krsto Hegedušić, who initiated a painting school among talented peasants in the North Croatian countryside, from which a style of “naïve painting” developed.

The choice of Zemlja as a theme for the historical segment of the Salon was certainly not an accident, but rather another indicator of the social and political upheavals in the midst of which artists, critics and curators reactivated and reaffirmed the avant-garde idea of the social and political power of art. The introduction to the catalogue of the Proposal section explicitly defined the relation between art and what it called the “contemporary moment.” According to its vision, the task of the Zagreb Salon was to assume a “wholesome attitude” towards the “contemporary moment,” which means that it had to take into account “the living past that endures in the contemporary moment” and to embrace the “duty” to “always again define our relationship towards this past.” ³² By the same logic, the present was also seen to contain the “seeds of the future,” and thus required our active involvement. ³³ This identification of the debt of the present toward the past and future is among the most powerful aspects of Proposal. It embodies the saturated character of the “contemporary moment” in which the exhibition took place and in which both art and politics turned toward the artistic and political revolutions of the past in order to draw from there a sense of direction toward the future. Maja Fowkes reads the Salon’s emphasis on “social responsibility” as an example of “socialist curatorial practice,” which she describes as having declared freedom of artistic expression while at the same time enacting “self-control” and assuming an “instructive” approach toward the artists. ³⁴ If such an ironical reading were to be accepted, the engaged temporal investment of the Salon cited above could also appear as nothing more than a routine, “socialist-curatorial” reproduction of the usual, “official” rhetoric about the debt toward the communist, revolutionary past as a pathway into the future. However, I view this coincidence of the Salon’s curatorial discourse with state ideological discourse not as an Ironic, but rather as a Romantic gesture—in the sense of Northrop Frye’s archetypes ³⁵ —that was in sync with the way in which the 1968 protesters appropriated the historical ideals of the Yugoslav socialist revolution, precisely because they saw them to be betrayed by the state.

In fact, the work of the Zemlja group was first exhibited in Belgrade in 1969, a year following the 1968 protests, as part of the exhibition Nadrealizam – Socijalna umetnost 1929-1950 [Surrealism—social art 1929-1950]. ³⁶ The exhibition brought together interwar artistic movements that were once on the opposing sides of the legendary “conflict within the literary left,” with Belgrade surrealists and the Zagreb writer Miroslav Krleža on one side, and proponents of “social literature,” and later, socialist realism, on the other. The Belgrade exhibition reactivated the forgotten history of this conflict, at the same time as the conflict was being narrated in Zagreb by Stanko Lasić in his famous book Conflict on the Literary Left, published in 1970, and first presented in a lecture at the Zagreb Philosophical Faculty, the hub of the Zagreb “1968-ers” as well as the academic home of the influential philosophical group Praxis. ³⁷ In his 1969 review of the Belgrade exhibition, art critic Božidar Gagro affirmed the rationale of the organizers in bringing these different artistic phenomena—including also the art of the Narodnooslobodilački rat (NOR / People’s Liberation War during World War II)—by stating that, despite their differences, they were all driven by the idea of engagement in art, as an opposition to the “unique stylistics of bourgeois painting cultivated according to the fine tradition of the Paris school.” ³⁸ It is this renewed quest for engaged art that imposed once again the “duty” to reevaluate the past.

“The City as Accumulation of Construction Material”

For our purposes here, the relevance of Zemlja for the “contemporary moment” resided also in the fact that it was the first example of an artistic collective in Yugoslavia to join together painters, sculptors, and architects, under a common program. The genealogy of the Zagreb “plasticians,” that is, those who “explored a new plastic language,” was usually traced back to the EXAT 51 Group (1950-1956), and the New Tendencies movement (1961-1973), both of which, in different ways, advocated for a socially transformative art, with EXAT 51 specifically claiming the synthesis of the visual and applied arts as one of its aims. ³⁹ But now Zemlja could be added to that genealogy, and with it, a reflection on the period that preceded socialist Yugoslavia and during which socialist and communist ideas were relegated to the underground, but could now be seen as seeds for the revolution to come. ⁴⁰ However, such a reflection could spark nostalgia for what was no longer there, like in a short text by Željka Čorak, published in the journal Život umjetnosti [Life of art] in 1971. Meditating on the park “Zrinjevac”—part of a system of squares and parks built in the late nineteenth century in the Zagreb city center—Čorak identified the contemporary state of this “beautiful, inherited space” as an example of “active indifference” toward the city, which, despite growth and population increase, preserved its urbanity only in the city center (that is, its presocialist core). By contrast, “the new parts of Zagreb” (that is, those built in socialist Yugoslavia) were marked by “emptiness” as they were “devoid of any content that could create a feeling of community.” ⁴¹ If we take into account that Čorak was one of the organizers of the 6th Zagreb Salon, in fact the initiator of the Proposal section and author of the idea of “plastic happening,” her critical meditation on the state of socialist urbanity—which also warned that the “questions of urbanism, urbanization and urbanity” could not be resolved by simply building and destroying, but by paying attention to seemingly minute details—must be viewed as the subtext of the Proposal project. ⁴²

So, even if Proposal itself did not feature an open critique of the socialist city, but referred quite neutrally to the local and global relevance of achieving a “humane living environment,” such a critique underlied the very initiation of the project. In the 1969 issue of Život umjetnosti, the journal where Čorak’s text was published, two other contributions expressed similar concerns: Žarko Domljan warned of the discontinuities with the prewar architecture caused by the revolution, and the weight of the ideological dictate governing postwar developments. ⁴³ In another reflection on postwar Croatian architecture, Eugen Franković pessimistically concluded: “We are facing the danger of a city that is an accumulation of construction material, rather than a functional core of the urban formation of space, of urban civilization.” ⁴⁴

In the period of 1969 to 1972, during which major artistic interventions into the Zagreb urban sphere took place, the journal Život umjetnosti regularly featured discussions on architecture, urbanity, and the “environment” by domestic and foreign authors, alongside presentations of spatial explorations of the “Yugoslav plasticians.” Beginning with the already discussed review of the Belgrade exhibition by Božidar Gagro, the journal also engaged in a critical evaluation and presentation of the documents related to the Zemlja group. ⁴⁵ Because of this, and also due to the fact that some of its contributors were at the same time among the organizers of the Zagreb Salon, the journal itself must be counted as an integral part of the “plastic happening,” or the coming out of arts into the public sphere in Zagreb in the late 1960s and 1970s.

“A Pure and Open Contrast to the Perfectly Ordered World”

Proposal was not the only art event to proclaim the streets to be the artists’ brushes, and squares their palettes, as Vladimir Mayakovsky famously exclaimed in 1917, when the Moscow avant-garde artists exercised their own attempt to bring art to the people and back into life. If Proposal paid the duty toward the past by reconnecting with Zemlja, Student Center Gallery’s director Želimir Koščević did so by paying homage to the Soviet avant-garde. In 1967, he curated an exhibition titled October, in which he showed reproductions of works of Russian avant-garde artists, and in 1970, he organized Total Action, which consisted of pasting over the existing street advertising with minimalist, black-and-white posters, while handing out a Draft for a Decree on the Democratization of Art. ⁴⁶ Inspired by the Russian Futurists’ Decree No. 1 on the Democratization of Art (1918), Koščević’s text called for the abolition of all existing art disciplines, a ban on art history and art criticism, as well as canceling all exhibition activities in galleries and museums. ⁴⁷ Art venues—and, generally, all indoor spaces—should be used only in the case of “bad weather”; culture, history, science, and art should be reexamined according to new criteria, and all that is ultimately deemed useful for society should be “brought out onto tram stops, open markets, esplanades, disco-clubs, factories, and department stores.” ⁴⁸ The text closes by warning that the “struggle taking place on almost all relevant fronts of our society” is not adequately reflected in the arts; in fact,

the monstrous creation of Yugoslav contemporary art, made up of thousands and thousands of paintings, sculptures, prints . . . stupid architectural and urbanistic ideas and realizations, and even more stupid “critical interpretations” . . . increasingly appears as pure reactionary work in a society that more than ever necessitates the ideational power of art. ⁴⁹

Three years earlier, in 1967, Koščević curated the exhibition Hit Parade at the Student Center Gallery, which he (self)historicized as the beginning of the “transformation of space into environment,” which eventually led to full-blown artistic interventions in the city. ⁵⁰ Four artists—Mladen Galić, Ljerka Šibenik, Ante Kuduz, and Miroslav Šutej—created sculptural environments that provoked interaction with the audience. These artists belonged to the generation associated with the Zagreb-based New Tendencies movement, rather than the emergent “new artistic practice.” ⁵¹ The Hit Parade exhibition thus testifies to the link between the New Tendencies and the “new art practice,” or the two generations of Yugoslav artists who shared the belief in the transformative power of art, and who both based this belief in affirming the legacy of the historical avant-gardes. However, the quest for social transformation of artists belonging to the new art practice was no longer based on constructive and rational principles—as the approach of the New Tendencies, and its predecessor, EXAT 51, was characterized ⁵² —but rather on a more ludic and rebellious spirit of (post-)1968, which was, in fact, reflected already in the Hit Parade exhibition. According to Koščević, installing the works in a gallery was just an experiment, a test-drive, because “we envision [these objects and ideas] in the urban space, in the real flow of life . . . This is merely an initiation of the problem.” ⁵³

In his book Examining the Interspace, drafted in 1974, Koščević theorized and historicized examples of the work done by international and local artists to make art a factor of this society-wide struggle, focusing specifically on art in the urban sphere. The book is also a historical account of the projects he himself devised or curated, as well as a manifesto that summarized his own ideas about art as an agent of social transformation. What makes art in the urban sphere so powerful, he wrote, is the fact that when art takes to the streets, it can no longer be ignored. ⁵⁴ The key word he used throughout is “action,” which he opposed to deification and aestheticization of art. Action is a “duration of a certain state of emergency . . . which counters reality with a simultaneous mix of estrangement, creation and insight, instead of a hedonistic, functionalist and profit-driven enjoyment and manipulation of art.” ⁵⁵ If understood as action, art transforms itself into “work of agitation, a pure and open contrast to the perfectly ordered world.” ⁵⁶

“A Narrow Passageway”

With his insistence on agitation, indeed, the idea of a permanent “state of emergency” and opposition to a notion of an “ordered world,” Koščević certainly exposed himself to the risk of being labeled an “anarchist,” a classification used by party officials and the press at the time to denounce the rebelling Yugoslav youth, including filmmakers and artists. In one of their statements, Belgrade students denied that they ever advocated for the “anarchistic destruction of all existing institutions”; rather, the students’ ideal was “democratic socialism.” ⁵⁷ Such a stance was in line with the Yugoslav-1968 logic of struggling not against socialism, but for more socialism, or a better one. However, Koščević’s position is more ambivalent, and I bring attention to it in order to argue for its affinity with a certain “style” of many works produced in the urban sphere in Zagreb—and, more broadly, its affinity with the Yugoslav new art practice in general. Koščević opens his book Examining the Interspace with a poetic statement: “I go. On each side a huge building. Glass and concrete. Institution. . . . There remains but a narrow passageway: left and right . . . I go left because I’m left-handed. I go, because I believe—left.” ⁵⁸ The author seems to have decided on which metaphorical turn to take, however, just a couple of lines below, we are no longer sure whether he had really turned anywhere:

In front of me and behind me—as much as I can see them—my friends walk into [the buildings]; some walk through doors on the left, others through those on the right. Then they wave to each other from the windows, they yell out something that I don’t understand and they spit onto the narrow passageway that is my path. Sometimes, in front of me or behind me, from a window of the building on the left or on the right, they drop some toothless corpse of some familiar character. I am in-between, and I move. I go. ⁵⁹

This fidelity to moving forward alongside a narrow passageway in-between loud proclamations from both left and right is surely meant as much more than a comment on the concurrent social and political situation in Yugoslavia; however, it is also an insightful poetic reflection on the deep split in the Zagreb student scene between the “1968-ers” and “proljećari” (supporters of the Croatian Spring), evoking at the same time the deep crisis of Yugoslav state and society, balancing between a unified socialist project and increasingly stronger (nationalist) identity politics. ⁶⁰ While most artists of the “new art scene” were certainly not “dissident artists” and, like Koščević, would prefer to “turn left,” they were still critical of the society they lived in, and insistent in voicing out calls for the transformation and the estrangement of the seemingly ordered reality—without, however, necessarily knowing or suggesting exactly what kind of transformation they were seeking. This lack of concrete political orientation is what indeed situates them more on the “anarchist” political spectrum, to which some of them, such as the members of the Group of Six Artists, more or less explicitly claimed alliance. ⁶¹ Thus, as Antonia Majača and I have suggested, the oft-cited illegal night action at Savska Street in Zagreb in October 1974, in which artist Željko Jerman pasted an advertising board with a large banner stating “This is Not My World,” should not be read simplistically as a dissident negation of the Yugoslav socialist state; rather, its transgressiveness lies precisely in the fact that, unlike the loud parading of the slogans of both left and right, the artist does not pretend to know where he is headed or what the alternative to “this world” could be. ⁶² The statement is also not a mere negation, as it immediately incites us to think of potential other worlds, setting us off on a search for alternative perspectives, through the narrow and quiet passageways of the in-between.

The same is true of another illegal night action, Red Peristyle, performed in January 1968 when the central square within the ancient Roman Diocletian Palace in Split was painted red by a group of artists. ⁶³ Without a clear statement on the part of the participants, the meaning of this action has become an object of speculation of a number of urban myths: the red color was interpreted as establishing a direct link of Peristyle to Moscow’s Red Square, while another reading claimed that the original idea was to use not red but orange as a symbol of Buddhism; the action was framed as a radical protest or, on the contrary, as a mere act of urban beautification. However, the “truth” is ultimately irrelevant, or rather, the truth is that the action was a “plastic happening” par excellence, or, in Koščević’s terms, a creation of a “state of emergency.” Almost as a kind of prophesy of May 1968 in Paris and June 1968 in Belgrade that were yet to happen, the splashing of color onto the ordered, monochrome city square, transformed the ossified monument of the past into the space of living action.

“Common Good for All Citizens”

Seen from the perspective of these spontaneous and self-organized actions—which were increasingly occurring in the period of late 1960s and early 1970s—events such as Proposal seem conservative, to the extent that they attempted to preserve and perpetuate such art by means of an organized institutional framework, but more importantly, because they tried to give it a programmatic character of constructive social transformation that it did not necessarily possess. If Proposal was, in Butković’s reading, a way to “stimulate social and artistic activity in creating a common living environment” ⁶⁴ and an expression of a “will towards a focused work on humanizing the human environment,” ⁶⁵ then its most successful artistic actions, such as Kožarić’s Grounded Sun or Dimitrijević’s Passers-By, were effective precisely because they went against, and not along with, such harmonizing ideas on the relation between art and human (and humanist) life. In the place of harmony, these works provoked conflict, and, like Red Peristyle, embodied excess, rather than coordinated “focused work.” At the same time, with the idea of a city as an unforeseeable “plastic happening,” Proposal itself surpassed—or contradicted—its supposedly rationalist agenda.

By contrast, the exhibition Possibilities for 1971, which took place in the summer of 1971, immediately after Proposal, remained within the dry rhetorics that theorized art in urban space as a “common good of all citizens.” Curated by Davor Matičević and organized by the Zagreb Gallery of Contemporary Art, the exhibition focused on “enriching and reshaping” the oldest part of the city, Gornji Grad (Upper Town). ⁶⁶ The relevance of the exhibition is primarily historiographical, as it reaffirmed the trend of interventions in urban space as a generational phenomenon of the “Zagreb plasticians (zagrebački plastičari),” who turned their art to “immediate reality” and the “needs of everyday life.” ⁶⁷ In retrospect, the exhibition also reveals the inherent tension between the desire that art be a tool for social change and the simultaneous insistence on its uniqueness and autonomy. As its central theme, Matičević identified the artists’ quest for a “solution to the basic problem: the link of art with life” which is why the artists “start rationally from actual needs of the public for organized, formulated and planned space.” ⁶⁸ This, however, reads more as a description of the responsibilities of architects and urban planners, rather than artists whose interventions, such as Gorki Žuvela’s placing of a multicolored plastic tube on the old funicular rails, were as a rule not driven by an organizational or rational agenda, but rather the idea of poetic estrangement of the city. Recent reflection by Sanja Iveković on her own work presented during the same event testifies to this tension between the simultaneous desire for functionalism and the autonomy of art. Iveković placed a series of neon arches in a narrow passageway leading up to the Upper Town and was surprised to see a journalist misrecognizing her artistic gesture for an intervention by the city’s Secretariat for Municipal Affairs (Figure 2). The journalist praised the city’s decision to illuminate the dark passageway, where young girls have been known to have “unpleasant encounters.” The fact that her work was confused for a mere instance of public illumination made the artist question her approach as well as abandon for the time being the practice of art in urban space. ⁶⁹

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Figure 2.

Sanja Iveković, Passage, neon-lights installation, 1971. Courtesy of the artist.

This “misunderstanding” with “the people” to whom the work is addressed casts an ironic shadow on the prevalent discourse of the democratization of art, according to which, as per Davor Matičević, artists were to present “communicative” and “simple” ideas, “understandable” to all, for the works to be “close and accessible to everyone” and for them to be “a common property of all citizens” in the “socialist society [which] should promote and sponsor such art.” ⁷⁰ According to the semiotic reading performed by this successfully targeted, ordinary socialist citizen, neon lights were a simple and communicative enough signifier of city illumination beneficial for society, but, ironically, the artist seems to have had a more complex and less transparent signification and social contribution in mind.

Crisis of the Grand Proposal

Although certainly the most representative and the most financially demanding event to present urban art in Zagreb, Possibilities for 1971 can at the same time be seen as an expression of crisis of the “grand proposal” according to which art was to rationally and constructively transform society, to the benefit of all its citizens in need of art’s mediating hand. Artists continued to work in urban space throughout the 1970s, but outside of this “constructive” and institutionally organized scheme, as the curators seemed to have abandoned the initial zeal for merging art with life and improving society. Without the constructive vision of “socialist curating,” Zagreb artists continued with the ludic tradition of Red Peristyle and the individual, exceptional gestures such as Jerman’s earlier-cited renunciation of the world. In the second part of the 1970s, Group of Six Artists programmatically made the streets and open-access spaces into their exhibition venues, even if their initial impulse had to do with their (initially) outsider status in the context of the new art, and the need to find their own way to exhibit. ⁷¹ In the period from 1975 to 1979, they organized twenty-one “exhibition-actions,” and the very choice of this name indicates a detachment from conventional exhibition forms, and their recalibration toward action (Figure 3-4).

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Figure 3.

Group of Six Artists, Exhibition-action at Republic Square, Zagreb, 1975 (with work by Sven Stilinović). Photo-documentation by Mladen Stilinović. Courtesy of Branka Stipančić.

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Figure 4.

Group of Six Artists, Exhibition-action at the Sava Bathing Resort, Zagreb, 1976. Photo-documentation by Fedor Vučemilović. Courtesy of Branka Stipančić.

Group of Six Artists explored the potential of the city, ostensibly a public space par excellence, to become a stage for private, even “intimate” significations. Thus, Mladen Stilinović joined the explosion of banners and slogans during the 1975 May Day celebration in Zagreb, by inserting hand-written banners that expressed love for his partner, Stipa (art historian Branka Stipančić) (Figure 5). He presented this work in an artist book that documented the city covered with May Day decorations and slogans, among which his “Ađo [Mladen] loves Stipa” and “Branka loves Ađo” stood on a par with banners proclaiming “30 years of freedom” and faithfulness to “Tito in war and peace.” Stilinović’s use of deliberately messy handwriting is another means by which he inserted the virus of personal “design” into the usual May Day aesthetics of the city. “Bad” handwriting at the same time represented his lifelong dedication to amateurism and vernacularism, or, more specifically, what he called “the aesthetics of the marketplace,” inspired by simple, handmade cardboard signs citing prices of potatoes, salads, and other products at the farmers’ market. He used photography to document amateur-designed advertisements for various small shops and services, as yet another intervention that went against the grain, or simply, extended beyond the scope of top-down city design. His series documenting the self-made ads for meat-shops and restaurants that offered “lamb on a spit”—whose authors, as if belonging to some unified artistic movement, regularly attempted to realistically draw this (in)famous local meat specialty—is a precious vernacular monument to Yugoslav self-management.

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Figure 5.

Mladen Stilinović, Ađo Loves Stipa, 1975. May Day Street Intervention. Courtesy of Branka Stipančić.

These ads—together with Mladen Stilinović’s own artistic aesthetics—were indeed a far cry from the sleek, constructivist aesthetics promoted by the New Tendencies movement in the 1960s. Its key theoretician Matko Meštrović described New Tendencies as the “plastic-visual research that strives to determine objective psychophysical bases of the plastic phenomenon and visual perception, thereby excluding any possibility of involving subjectivism, individualism and Romanticism.” ⁷² The further one looks into the seventies, the more subjectivism, individualism, and Romanticism we note in Yugoslav contemporary art practice, perhaps best embodied in the works of Tomislav Gotovac and his provocative urban actions, such as Zagreb, I Love You, in which he walked naked on tram rails, while bowing down to kiss the pavement. If there was any idea of “plasticity”—the rather vague term used by both New Tendencies and promoters of new art practice in the urban sphere—left, it was the poetic plasticity of Proposal’s “plastic happening,” bound to the unexpected interactions between the city and the artists’ body, or its written and visual indexes, while abandoning the assumption that art could enact transformation on a larger scale.

Melancholic Histories

By 1975, when Koščević’s book came out, and by 1978, when the New Artistic Practice in Yugoslavia exhibition was mounted, the ecstatic encounter of “plastic art” and the living urban environment was already a matter of history. In 1970 and 1971, writes Davor Matičević in his survey essay on the new art practice in Zagreb, “the most discussed subject among the Zagreb artists and theoreticians who espoused progressive art trends was the work of visual artists in shaping the urban environment.” ⁷³ He cites Proposal as the first major realization, but places its beginnings in the television broadcast Urban Painting (Urbano slikarstvo), which included painted façade interventions by artists Julije Knifer and Boris Bućan, and was conceived by art historian Vera Horvat-Pintarić. Matičević, however, does not discuss any art historical or theoretical references that might have influenced such a turn toward the urban environment, or those that might have formed its integral part. It is interesting that he places two institutionally organized projects at the origins of this turn even though, as he himself was surely aware, there were artistic interventions in the city that preceded these events, such as Pictorial Knot by Boris Bućan and Josip Stošić—a long, monumental, abstractly painted plastic hose they placed in the yard in front of Galerija Centar in 1969, or street actions by Braco Dimitrijević and Goran Trbuljak in the same year. This privileging of initiatives by curators and art critics is another sign of what I argue to be a particularly institutionally driven character of the Zagreb version of the “grand proposal” according to which art could change society by reaching out to the people on the streets. Artistic urban interventions also took place in Ljubljana and Belgrade during the late 1960s and 1970s, however, it is only in Zagreb where they assumed a decidedly programmatic character thanks to the curatorial projects discussed here.

Perhaps the (albeit short) sway of the “urban” curatorial trend in Zagreb could be related to the legacy of the earlier mentioned “art of the constructive approach,” as critic Ješa Denegri theorized the work of EXAT 51 group and the New Tendencies movement. ⁷⁴ What characterized these movements was not only their neo-avant-garde, transformational drive but also their pronounced interdisciplinarity. Active in the first half of the 1950s, EXAT 51 were the pioneers of geometric abstraction in Yugoslavia, and its members included a diverse company of painters, sculptors, designers, and architects, advocating for abstract art—in place of socialist realism, which, never gained a strong footing in Yugoslavia due also to the Tito-Stalin split in 1948—and for the synthesis of visual and applied arts in shaping the human environment. The New Tendencies movement (1961-1973) turned toward the relationship between art, science, and technology, while keeping alive the idea of the potentially transformative impact of such transgressions of the boundaries of “pure,” object-based art, and its venture into “plastic-visual research.” ⁷⁵ Although curators of the “plastic happenings” of the early 1970s did not cite these precursors, their legacy was recognized by contemporary critics, and perpetuated in their own version of the attempt at shattering the conventional notions of art.

These attempts, however, were ultimately historicized as failures by some of the very people who initiated them. Davor Matičević, curator of Possibilities for 1971, wrote that urban interventions of the period were “the last and most radical attempt of artists’ participation in social engagement . . . part of the illusion of a possible constructive relation that never received unreserved support in practice.” ⁷⁶ Marijan Susovski referred to the “euphoric state of artists and theorists at the beginning of the the 1970s, who wished to completely link art with life” but did not manage to go beyond initial principles. ⁷⁷ Both art historians see “society” and its lack of support for utopian ideas as the primary reason why such art remained only an illusion. According to Susovski, the artists “saw their place in society but they could not realize it,” ⁷⁸ or, in a defeatist conclusion by Matičević, “no matter how dangerous art was (or still is) society overpowers it.” ⁷⁹

However, perhaps Grupa TOK were closer to the truth when they criticized the trend of urban projects as claiming social engagement but remaining within the confines of exclusively artistic preoccupations with the art object—regardless of the changes that this object underwent within the aesthetics of the “new art.” ⁸⁰ Aside from marginal comments on actual architectural, urban, and social problems of Yugoslav society, such as Koščević’s already cited reference to “the stupid architectural and urbanistic ideas and realizations,” ⁸¹ the artists and curators of this period rarely pointed to any actual problems of life in the city, or their potential solutions. It seems as if for Koščević architecture was simply dismissed altogether as a potential space of experimentation and transformation, while art was presumed to be able to successfully compensate for its impotence. However, there was no compensation, as artistic and curatorial interventions remained mostly preoccupied with reproducing—and relishing in—the avant-garde slogans of the merging of art and life. In the same way, the artist groups and initiatives of the 1970s no longer reflected the desire for the synthesis of the arts, and no longer brought together artists, designers, and architects, as was the case in the 1950s and 1960s. The last example of such a synthetic, transformative vision was the 1972 meeting of young theorists and practitioners of “open art” in Šid (a small town in Serbia), who agreed to make Šid a testing ground for

selective orientation towards a humanly designed environment, all based on understanding the city as a total (and not only plastic) happening, which would result in [to quote the conclusions of the meeting] “the engagement of not only architects and urban planners, but also industrial and graphic designers, art pedagogues, film experts, performers, urban interventionists, sociologists, and psychologists joined in a team work which the town of Šid would readily embrace.” ⁸²

This final grand proposal of total plastic happening—which, again, resurrected the Soviet avant-garde by titling the project Public Festivities—remained an unrealized vision, with which the chapter of the ecstatic evocation of the city as a stage where art and life merge in a spectacular, revolutionary Gesamtkunstwerk, came to an end.

In a Postscript to the second edition of his Theory of the Avant-garde, Peter Bürger situates the origin of his book in the “historical constellation of problems that emerged after the events of May 1968 and the failure of the student movement in the early seventies.” ⁸³ He critically refers to the unfulfilled “hopes of those who believed at the time (without a social basis) that they could build directly on the revolutionary experiences of Russian futurism, for example,” but also, more self-critically, to the hopes of those, like himself, who believed in the possibility of “more democracy.” ⁸⁴ We could say that the ambitions of the Yugoslav New Art Practice and, in particular, its venturing out into the streets, to the people, embodied both of these hopes at once. Bürger’s critique is particularly important in its identification of the uncritical appropriation of the (Russian) avant-garde, and the belief in the change that stems directly from art “without a social basis.” This lack of concern for the social basis is reflected also in the work of most “new art” artists and curators, whose commitments ultimately remained bound to the sphere of art, which ultimately is the sphere they wish to revolutionize. The very fact that the curators of New Art Practice blame “society” for the failure of the potential of artistic urban transformations reveals to what extent they themselves perceived (and reproduced) the two realms as separate.

The Power of the Uninitiated

This is not to say that we should also judge these projects as failures, nor dismiss even the political potential of their aesthetic and poetic visions. But they are indicative of a sort of withdrawal of art, right at the moment when it claimed its spectacular entrance. This is also evident in the absence of significant theoretical formulations of the art in public space in Yugoslavia. Besides Koščević’s elaboration of the poetics of the “interspace,” or the “narrow passageway in-between,” which successfully captures the underlying spirit of the Yugoslav new art, there is no significant theoretical account of this encounter between art and the city, and especially not one that would make references beyond art history. While New Tendencies theorists referred to scientific, cybernetic, philosophical, and sociological ideas, the absence of references to contemporary theories of architecture and urbanity is surprising, given that the city was consciously chosen as both the content and context of urban art interventions, and given the vivid intellectual exchanges between Yugoslav and international thinkers, most importantly thanks to the Praxis journal and the summer school they organized on the island of Korčula. ⁸⁵

One exception is to be found in the writing of Vera Horvat-Pintarić, whose television project Urban Painting Matičević mentioned as a precursor of art in public space. Writing about the medium of television, she notes that its true potential had already been realized in the field of “plastic arts,” that is, in “environmental creations and in mixed media.” ⁸⁶ In such works, she argues, the dogma of the “average” or “mass” viewer has been refuted:

Confronted with such works, “un-initiated” spectators respond much better than the so-called initiated public [ . . . ] When the “un-initiated,” average person enters such a changeable and transformation-open space, he accepts the offered challenge without inhibitions, surrendering to the surprise game and immediately accepting participation; thus, he soon discovers that he can influence the events around him, that he is becoming a protagonist, changing, prolonging and enriching these events. ⁸⁷

By contrast, the so-called initiates are too bound by their preexisting ideas about art, which makes them refuse these new forms of aesthetic communication. ⁸⁸ Horvat-Pintarić argues that models developed in these new forms of aesthetic communication should be applied to television, which she recognizes as a medium with much unused potential, especially within the context of socialist management.

As part of her refutation of the idea of the “average” viewer, Horvat-Pintarić cites Yona Friedman, among other “designers of macro-urban structures,” who similarly came to the conclusion that “the category of the average person simply does not exist,” which ultimately led to creating “open and flexible micro-models of future macro-urban structures.” ⁸⁹ Still, her account is not really concerned with urbanity, but rather reiterates the mantra of plastic art’s initiation of the uninitiated citizen, albeit one who in this case lost his or her averageness and “ordinariness.” As Matičević and Susovski already concluded, however, the uninitiated, or society, were not necessarily interested in joining the religion. Group of Six Artists, who insisted on being present alongside their work in public space, to communicate its intention to the people, recorded the often negative and even aggressive reactions they received. This was true even in the case of their exhibition-action in the halls of the Zagreb Faculty of Philosophy, from whose students artists expected a more enlightened treatment and not what Jerman described as vandalistic and barbarian reactions. ⁹⁰ During the two actions at the main Zagreb square, the Group recorded and collected comments of passers-by, creating a document that provides a precious insight into the feedback they received and a glimpse into the atmosphere in the Zagreb square.

International idiocy/Is this folklore/The wind should blow this all away!/This is fantastic/This is shit, really awful/It’s better than stealing/instead of cleaning up the square you’re piling it up with rubbish/they are just bothering people and preventing them from feeding the pigeons/how naïve/this has political connotations/what is this?/you’ve got to ask whether it’s a cow or a horse, that’s modern art for you/we don’t have time for this/why do they need this, why don’t they just beat their women at home/there’s worse bullshit than this around/this is wonderful/they are sick/let’s all be artists/a vaginal theologian/they are glad there are people around because they can talk to them/the newspapers mentioned an exhibition but this is just rubbish/they are simply amateurs/it is beautiful, not only beautiful but clever too/they are students, saving up for the seaside. ⁹¹

Despite the diversity, and even the creativity of some of the comments, the general impression is still one of people’s alienation from the “progressive” ideas of art, exemplified by the Group’s work. The idea of art’s democratization, such as the protagonists of the new art practice, and their international soul-mates, imagined it, seems to have remained rhetorical. Some artists toyed with this very ideal. In his 1972 performance Referendum, Goran Trbuljak staged a public vote in which passers-by were to decide whether or not he was an artist by circling the “yes” or “no” on the ballots he collected. Held under the slogan “The artist is the one whom others grant the opportunity to be an artist,” the work’s play with the absurdist idea of a democratically elected artist can be read as a satire of the movement to democratize the arts, as well as an irony of the very ideal of democracy, ultimately based on the randomness and volatility of public opinion.

“The Dark Underbelly of Socialist Urbanization”

Even if they contained no direct references to theories of space, urbanity, and architecture, the art interventions in the city were certainly part of the post-war, transnational trend of rethinking the city and the human agency within it, such as in the work of the artist group Situationiste Internationale and their psychogeographical urban explorations, Foucault’s theoretization of heterotopia and Henri Lefebvre’s notions of everyday life, social production of space, and right to the city. Proposal’s articulation of the “domain of plastic happening” as extending

from the totality of the urban tissue to the ornament of human steps, from the performing stage of the city square to that of the window shop, from the screens of the facades to those of the placards, from the programmed light-effects to the accidental reflections ⁹²

shows a striking correspondence with Archigram’s idea of the Living City, presented at the exhibition Living Cities at the London Institute of Contemporary Art in 1963. “When it is raining in Oxford Street the architecture is no more important than the rain, in fact the weather has probably more to do with the pulsation of the Living City at that given moment,” wrote Peter Cook in the special issue of the journal Living Arts, which accompanied the exhibition. ⁹³ Or, in a programmatic text on the concept of “Situation”:

Cities should generate, reflect, and activate life, their environment organized to precipitate life and movement. Situation, the happenings within spaces in the city, the transient throw-away objects, the passing presence of cars and people are as important, possibly more important, than the built demarcation of space. ⁹⁴

So, despite the lack of direct intertextual exchanges, the artistic adventure to join the plasticity of everyday urban life was part of a global trend, whose examples we find not only in the United States and Western Europe but also in other socialist European countries, besides Yugoslavia. ⁹⁵ To what extent is it possible, however, to situate them more explicitly in the context of socialism, and read them as critical statements about the socialist city? As evident in Željka Čorak’s critique of the emptiness of the new parts of Zagreb, Matičević’s and Susovski’s disappointment with the support of “society,” and Koščević’s reference to “stupid architectural and urbanistic ideas and realizations,” such a critique certainly forms a subtext of artistic and curatorial public interventions. Maja Fowkes presents the work of Group TOK as a rare—and lesser known—example of direct engagement in the context of Zagreb “plastic” interventions. ⁹⁶ The series of their urban interventions, produced in 1972, in the framework of the second edition of Proposal, problematized the lack of ecological consciousness in Zagreb, the presence of industrial pollution, the problems of urban living and social alienation. She also cites the group’s interest in the opposition between the public and the private, inspired by the reading of Gaston Bachelard and his book The Poetics of Space. ⁹⁷

Discussing the public/private dichotomy, Fowkes relates it to contemporary critiques of local urbanization models, which created a division between working space and living space. ⁹⁸ This resonates with Čorak’s critique of socialist urbanization and the creation of the New Zagreb, which was often cited as an agglomeration of sleeping units, without any organization of social and communal life. According to Vladimir Kulić and Maroje Mrduljaš, by the late 1960s, the “criticism of the anomie of new modernist neighborhoods” gained popularity, and was raised simultaneously by “sociologists and the public.” ⁹⁹ They do not cite specific examples of this critique, but they claim that “the dark underbelly of socialist urbanization,” including unregulated developments, marginal social groups, and social pathology, which all contradicted “the promise of a just socialist society,” acquired “considerable visibility in the public,” through studies of sociologists, sensational treatment of the topic by journalists, and the films of the Black Wave. ¹⁰⁰

As was already shown, neither the curators nor the artists confronted this “dark underbelly.” In fact, most artistic interventions took place in the old parts of Zagreb, which were barely touched by socialist urbanization. Several projects, however, did happen in Novi Zagreb (New Zagreb), the major stage for socialist urban development in Zagreb, devised as the mirror project of the more monumental and representative Novi Beograd (New Belgrade). ¹⁰¹ An exhibition-action by Group of Six Artists (in 1975) and Koščević’s 1972 event Public Festivities (Pučke svečanosti)—again inspired by the Russian avant-garde—took place at the Sopot neighborhood, the latter involving an exhibition of works by inhabitants and their children, poetry recitations, and open-air film screenings. Both events attempted to animate the neighborhood and its residents, however, at least in the case of Group of Six Artists, the inhabitants were not particularly receptive. ¹⁰² A more successful, and more original, concept was realized by artist Vera Fisher in 1978, in the form of an exhibition in front of the largest building in Novi Zagreb, popularly known as “Mamutica” (Mammoth). The artist invited twenty workers of the city’s sanitation department to search trash containers for select items that the residents discarded, which were then exhibited, with the sanitation workers credited as selectors. According to art historian Branka Hlevnjak, the exhibition sparked great interest among citizens and the media. ¹⁰³

“Not by Concrete, but by Mud”

However, this was all rather innocuous when compared with the social and urban reality shown in the films of this period, which feature explicit references to homelessness, poverty, and destitution, whose symbolic embodiment was in fact not the socialist city, but its periphery. As Owen Hatherley has argued, the target of critique in Yugoslav films of the 1960s and 1970s is not—as the stereotype of a dissident artist opposing socialist oppression would have it—the image of the alienated life of the monumental, gray, monotonous socialist housing projects, but rather their absence. Instead, “in the context of a massive modernizing project,” the films show “the embarrassing persistence of grinding and usually rural poverty,” and the shabby, amorphous, poverty-stricken settlements on the periphery of big cities, dominated not by concrete, but by mud. ¹⁰⁴

Mud is another connective tissue with interwar Yugoslavia and the artistic group Zemlja, the historical counterpart of the Proposal exhibition. Miroslav Krleža used the motif of “Pannonian mud” to designate the state of backwardness, poverty, and the provincialism of the periphery, especially in relation to the subjugated political position of Croatia in Austro-Hungary. And he found this condition to be depicted with acute precision in the work of Zemlja’s member, painter Krsto Hegedušić. ¹⁰⁵ Just like Krleža, Krsto Hegedušić was preoccupied by the peripheral position of local culture. Informed by European artistic modernism, and particularly inspired by the socially engaged painting of the German painter Georg Grosz, he at the same time inscribed in the program of Zemlja “a fight against foreign trends” and “independence of our expression.” ¹⁰⁶ In Hegedušić’s work, Grosz’s satirical dissection of the alienated life of the European metropolis was translated into a portrayal of life at the rural periphery of Croatia, still predominantly a rural territory, with its major center, Zagreb, still developing the outlines of a modern city. In other words, there was no modernity to satirize. Similarly, in the films of the Black Wave, if we follow Hatherley’s interpretation, there is no socialist city from which the artists can dissent. Rather, the mud of the periphery reveals the absence of the concrete core of the socialist modernization project.

But although the Black Wave films show this underbelly of socialist modernization, they do not explicitly take architecture as the target of their critique. A lesser-known film, Živi bili pa vidjeli [May We Live and See], directed by Milivoj Puhovski and Bruno Gamulin in 1979, long after the glory era of the Black Wave films, does precisely this. Živi bili pa vidjeli tells the story of the rebellion of a young architect Janko, who—significantly—comes from the province to study architecture in Zagreb (Figure 6). He eventually gets a job in a successful Zagreb construction company, but it is the father of his girlfriend who hires him, and this origination of his own career in nepotism is the first symptom of the overall corruption that he will subsequently come to denounce. In the beginning, he is enchanted with the company, and its plan for a new urban development, which he finds to reflect all the virtues that socialism can offer to man. Even if his soon-to-be father-in-law, inhabiting an urban villa in the most elite part of Zagreb, is far from the embodiment of socialism, Janko is initially not bothered by his marrying into a markedly bourgeois family. As he starts working on the project, however, he witnesses the gradual disintegration of the original construction plan. Cultural and recreational facilities are discarded one after the other, in order to cut costs and feed corruption and private gain. . Janko himself gets embedded in the corruption circle and unexpectedly receives a bribe, or an additional “reward,” by the business partner of his father-in-law. However, during a meeting when yet another change of plan was to be voted on—in yet another ironic portrayal of self-management democracy, where workers just raise their hands in approval to be able to go home as soon as possible—Janko bursts out into spontaneous, rebellious monologue. He warns his colleagues that “architecture solves the most crucial questions of human destiny” and that by removing the proposed content and leaving merely cubicles, “rooms to cry in, cells for loners,” they would remove all that “can give meaning to a life in one such neighborhood” and all that could “give dignity to our profession.” Having only irritated his colleagues, who worry about their time and salaries, he violently destroys the beautiful architectural model, which he had previously cherished so much. After this, he quits his job, and finds cheap, illegal housing at the city periphery, where he moves in with his wife and newborn. Ironically, the next job he manages to get is in a company that demolishes illegal housing, and as can be expected from this allegorical narrative, he ends up tearing down his own home. Jobless and homeless, Janko and family move their furniture onto the Republic Square, in a gesture of stubbornly claiming their homelessness as a public problem, as well as claiming their right to inhabit space, both literally and symbolically, in the country with the system of societal ownership. After they eventually get expelled from the square, the film ends with Janko and his family riding the back of a tractor, moving toward an unknown destination, but with rebellious laughter.

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Figure 6.

Živi bili pa vidjeli [May We Live and See], dir. Milivoj Puhovski and Bruno Gamulin, 1979, film still.

At the end of the 1970s, at the same time as the Zagreb curators wrote their melancholic histories of failure of both art and society, Živi bili pa vidjeli—its title pointing (albeit with suspicion) to something that is promised but is yet to occur—narrates the failure of Yugoslav socialism as the failure of architecture, originally appointed with a prime role in the construction of the new society and the urbanization and edification of the predominantly rural country. After the initial economic and cultural growth, and the inauguration of the idiosyncratic Yugoslav project of socialist self-management and the foreign politics of Non-Alignment, by the late 1970s the political and economic crisis deepened, with architecture, just like the Yugoslav economy, increasingly in the grips of private interest and market demands. ¹⁰⁷ With Tito’s death in 1980, Yugoslavia entered the phase of so-called “decadent socialism,” preceding its disintegration. Already in 1968 the student movement called out the Yugoslav leadership for abandoning the country’s founding principles, and it did so not with an attitude of resignation, but the will toward change. Open spaces of the city became the ground for exercising such visions of change, both artistic and political, and the notion of plasticity, which dominated artistic discourse during this turbulent period, is itself a testament to the belief in the transformative potential of art. Even if the artists and curators of this period generally did not point to concrete social issues of city life, with their spatial interventions and their attempts to engage “the ordinary citizen,” they reaffirmed both the aesthetic and social relevance of the urban environment and the way it affects people’s lives.

Socialist Curatorial Practice

Recent interpretations of Yugoslav art and culture of the 1970s tend to point out that the critique of Yugoslav society they expressed was not dissident, that is, antisocialist but rather socialist, as it focused precisely on the antisocialist reality of the nominally socialist country. ¹⁰⁸ This was the logic of the 1968 student denouncement of the “red bourgeoisie” and the “princes of communism,” as well as the interpretative logic of identifying the lack of socialist spaces in the films of the Black Wave. The same can be said about the curatorial projects in urban space in the late 1960s and early 1970s, both in relation to their implicit critique of socialist urbanity (or rather, its lack) and in relation to their insistent denouncement of the bourgeois aestheticization of art. Željka Čorak’s identification of precisely the inability of socialist architecture to incite a sense of community implies in fact that such architecture is not socialist. Proposal’s alignment with the leftist project of the past, Zemlja, only confirms this attitude. Zemlja’s manifesto, authored by architect Drago Ibler, stated that the artist “cannot defy the aspirations of the new society and stand outside of the collective . . . because life and art are one.” ¹⁰⁹ Želimir Koščević’s passionate identification with the attempts of the Russian avant-garde to merge art and life and contrast the “perfectly ordered world,” and Davor Matičević’s rationalist discourse on art in the service of the “needs of everyday life” and the “actual needs of the public for organized, formulated and planned space,” are just two opposite ends of the same drive toward social transformation. If Maja Fowkes referred to Proposal as an example of “socialist curatorial practice” with irony, perhaps we can conclude that these projects really should be theorized as examples of socialist curating, but without irony. Just like Janko’s rebellious speech in which he tried to shake his colleagues out of complacency by reminding them of the social responsibility of architecture, the socialist-curatorial call for the responsibility of art in shaping the collective environment lasted only for a brief moment, before they no longer felt—just like Janko—to have a place in society. The film Živi bili pa vidjeli can stand as an allegory of a whole decade of artistic quests for a place in Zagreb’s social and urban fabric, from the moment of enthusiasm about their participation in a constructive contribution to building a just socialist society, to their disowning of “this world,” and pursuing uncertain paths through narrow passageways between loud proclamations, which finally led onto open roads, away from the “socialist” Yugoslav city. ¹¹⁰