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Branislav Dimitrijević
The Grand Compromise: On examples of the Use of Political References in Serbian Art of the 90's, and its Historical Background

I.

One of the general conclusions about the Yugoslav art after the Second World War(1), is that it was not affected by the dogma of the socialist realism as was the case in other countries which became single party states after 1945. Only the brief period until 1948 when Tito broke off his relations with Stalin is considered as a period in which socialist realism was the official style that was dedicatedly followed both by those artists who were involved with politically leftist social art of the 30's, and by those who were considered bourgeois in their inclination towards Parisian modernism and limited their references to the analysis of objects found in nature or in their immediate surrounding, in their apartments and studios. In these three years after the war, painters who had the experience of spending almost four years in the forests fighting Germans and different quisling units, painted the same motifs as their bourgeois colleagues who had to adopt to the standards of the time. After 1948, as the argument goes, it took only a couple of years to completely break off with socialist realism, and modernism was adopted as a lingua franca of visual arts.

The question to be posed is of course what happened to the socialist realists? Did they simply lack any ideological conviction and shift to the new style without any difficulty? On the level of the official art commissioned by the Communist Party some of them continued making realist works suitable for immediate representation of the state (especially portrait painting), but even here, as the case of public sculptures show, a special type of 'symbolic modernism' took over(2). As a consequence, a work of art was no longer obliged to represent the socialist reality, but to enhance artistic 'freedom and self-awareness' as a necessity to create a new Weltanschauung of the 'post-revolutionary generation'(3).This trend of safe modernism (abstract painting and sculpture either lacking any representational references or including non-figurative symbolism) was labelled by the literary critic Sveta Lukić as 'socialist aestheticism', and later by some other critics with a more general term 'socialist modernism'. The very idea behind this is ultimately modernist, in fact very 'greenbergian': the content is to be dissolved and the subject matter was something 'to be avoided like the plague'(4).

One can therefore be very tempted to conclude (given the split between the form and content dominant in the art discourse of the time) that the form of official Yugoslav art was Modernist and the content was socialist-realist. However, it is not the readable content of images or objects that was socialist-realist but simply the whole state organised art system was. It was, in a sense, a 'grand compromise'. A compromise between the ideological demands of those speaking in the name of the working class (the class that somehow did not include artists) and the already built-in art practices of the bourgeoisie. It is striking that socialist realism in Serbia did not engender any artists that had not been known previously, and that the only Homo novus was Boža Ilić who rose to socialist stardom in the course of months and was then instantly forgotten (in a slightly Stalinist manner) when this style was no longer considered hegemonic. Later on when some writers reviewed the works by Ilić, they tried not to consider him a socialist-realist but rather a socialist-romanticist, having in mind the great deal of naďveté this artist had in relation to the political frameworks(5). Other artists were not that naďve, they were in fact realists. Political realists. Yugoslavia was the only socialist country where, in Belgrade, the Museum of Contemporary art was established back in 1965, and even more importantly it was established by a painter who was not even the member of the Communist Party, Miodrag B. Protić. In my opinion, the atmosphere of the 'grand compromise' fully shaped the future discursive practices in Serbian art and in writing on art. It simply left the door closed for art to become more critical and less anti avant-garde then in the Western counties of developed capitalism. Until the late sixties there was no explicit break of this compromise. On a couple of occasions Tito warned of the danger of abstract art, but these warnings, which could have been considered a major threat if spoken about some other activity (economic or education policy, for instance) was overcome by the existence of artists who remained loyal to a tradition of portrait painting where Tito's face was an omnipresent theme. The quintessential rule was created: a certain degree of critical freedom was possible but only if it did not address the president personally.

Tito's images could be found in every public space, some of them were photographs, some of them were reproductions of famous paintings and drawings. The style was realist, and even towards the end of his life Tito signed the law that regulated the use of the most important state symbols, i.e. the flag, the emblem, the anthem and the 'image and name of the President of the Republic. In article 29 of this law one can read the following: 'in the premises of the federal organs photographs of the president may be displayed, but only those that are approved by the federal organ dealing with the affairs of science and culture(6). In the case of the president, socialist realism never died. His image was fully protected from different styles and interpretations.

II.

Another common event in art historiography in Serbia is that during the sixties the first voices of the opposition to the mainstream cultural activities had been heard. This was the time when 'dissident' cultural projects made a strong impact within the intellectual circles as well as in the wider social sphere. It was not as difficult to be a dissident in Tito's Yugoslavia as it was in the countries of the Soviet bloc. Some of them had been verbally attacked by the Party apparatchiks, but still had the opportunity to use government money for their films or other projects. Only one major rule applied: Tito, as 'the image and the name', was not to be touched. And in fact only those works that directly and critically alluded to his personality were seriously dealt with and their authors were arrested. Examples include both types of dissidents, nationalists (the most influential group, that during the 80's played a key role in bringing Milošević to power) like the poet Dušan Djogo, as well as leftist dissidents like the filmmaker Lazar Stojanović, got arrested for their works. The others managed to keep a low profile when attacked.

The formalist discourse that encompassed the visual art production prevented any direct allusions to politics but at the same time it influenced the mechanisms of decision-making of various forums organised by the Party through which scholarships or study trips could be arranged, commissions given, etc. For example, the painter Mića Popović, probably the biggest dissident when talking about visual arts (N.B. the numbers of examples are considerably larger in film or literature) was one of the first artists to receive a grant for a study trip abroad (three months in Paris) back in 1950(7). This happened after his first solo show in Belgrade, which has been generally considered path-breaking in relation to the socialist-realist dogma. Historian Predrag Marković rightly points out that there was another event that happened six months before this one which allowed local artists to behave more freely in relation to the tradition of modernist art, and that was the exhibition of New French Fine Art from the famous Shlomovich collection and the collection of prince Paul Karadjordjević. The show included works of Van Gogh, Rouault, Matisse, Picasso, and many others. I think that it is quite indicative how one of the leading communists, Veljko Petrović, made a speech at the opening which summed up the position of the Party (at least its intellectual part) and inaugurated the grand compromise between the communist aspirations and the bourgeois tradition of art: these 'pure bourgeois artists ...opened the eyes of humanity for grace and subtle pathos of statures and movements of the small man, the man in the mass, during work, relaxation, play...this, so called, decadent art is full of technical inventions, ideas, colouristic and linear subtleties ...that "will be used in decorative painting in future, in some more ordered and healthier times". We are not preventing ourselves from exhibiting the works of these artists. We want "our man", our working socialist man, not to be deprived of anything that is human"(8) (my italics).

The most apparent paradox in these words is that it appears that the bourgeois modernism is the art style for some better, happier times in the future that was in Yugoslavia usually defined only with one word: Communism. This moderate mode of employing the socialist jargon of the times for the purposes not strictly associated with the dominant political and economic trends, was spoken in opposition to a strict line of a more hard-line Party 'spokesmen' who attacked any form of modernism, i.e. formalism, even by presenting them as a denial of 'art as such'. A rather well known Croatian art historian, who later abandoned his hard-line attitudes, provoked by his visit to the Venetian Biennale in 1948 and particularly by the work of Henry Moore, wrote the following lines: 'From Manet to Moore there is a closed line with an internal dialectic that can offer a classic example of an important phenomenon - how one great culture is denigrated to primitive stuttering, how one class denies art and artistic knowledge of reality because it denies reality as such (9). This kind of rhetoric was not to be abandoned the next thirty years, and it continued to be spoken even after Tito died. However, this time from the mouths of right-wing conservatives who understood modernism as a deviation produced by their own bourgeois class.

It is important to emphasise that both, the alleged disappearance of socialist realism after 1948/50, and the appearance of critical art practices in the 60's, had been strictly controlled affairs and the result of an intellectual infiltration of non-communists into the official structures. As opposed to literature there was simply no considerable resistance to modernism in the field of visual art. For instance, the person who spoke about this non-existence of any relevant 'anti-modernist' visual artists was Miodrag B. Protić, the first director of Belgrade MOCA(10). Apart from the occasional and very mild witch hunts (for example the one after Tito's speech in opposition to abstract art in 1963), there was no resistance to the development of modernist art including the very bourgeois values promoted by it. These values were generally fixed by the trend of the so called 'intimist painting' in the 30's, inspired by the Parisian art scene, that was reintegrated into the Serbian art community following the aforementioned French exhibition in 1950. To show that this kind of bourgeois mainstream stepped towards a high place in the official ideology in socialism, we can clearly notice that the only artistic movement that was systematically cut out of any debates was the period of the avant-garde movements of the 20's that had clearly leftist political aspirations. Something similar happened to the period of conceptualism in the 70's, or 'new art practice', that unknowingly inherited the local tradition of the avant-garde and that mostly included artists with unmistakably working class backgrounds, but without any direct links to the Communist Party(11).

Before we proceed to see how the critical attitudes were developed within the climate of the 'grand compromise', it may be interesting to see what happened to those who expected the socialist revolution to have an impact in the field of arts as it did in the economic policy or other social fields. Apart from the almost forgotten artists who were identified with the post-war socialist realism, like for instance the unfortunate Boža Ilić, many artists had been members of the Communist Party, and even fought in the revolution. They remained in certain Party structures (or in the Union of Artists) and protested against bourgeois tendencies in art. However, surprisingly their voice, allegedly the voice of the official cultural policy, was not heard beyond the usual propaganda that aimed at the wider masses. One of them, the Bosnian painter Ismet Mujezinović, who joined the Partisan forces at the beginning of the war in 1941, and was decorated with Partizanska spomenica ('Partizans' remembrance medal), most often complained that 'to be a Marxist is almost an illegal activity nowadays', and that 'everyone is now ridiculing Marxist aesthetics (12). There is even a document which mentions a demand made by Mujezinović to the Commission for International Cultural Relations to include a figurative painter in one of the exhibitions of Yugoslav art abroad. The reply he was given was that such kind of paintings might be sent only to exhibitions in under-developed countries. One of the participants at the meeting said that none of the Party members reacted, afraid they would be qualified as primitives and conservatives(13).

Thanks to professor Ješa Denegri, I have recently come across a monograph on Ismet Mujezinović where I found a particularly striking image. By reading this book it appeared as certain that Mujezinović took his artistic practice simply as a part of his revolutionary feelings, as a way to express his ideological inclinations and to commemorate the harsh struggle after which the socialist system was achieved. He painted a number of self-portraits that made this story more personal, but there is one he started in 1966 and finished in 1970 that is particularly striking. It shows him as an old man, but still vital and lean, standing shirt-less with his palette and with his famous partisan medal attached to his naked body. It appears that Mujezinović painted this picture in 1966 as a straightforward self-portrait in his studio, and that four years later the medal and the bleeding wound it caused were added(14). Mujezinović, who prior to 1966 stressed a sense of betrayal of fundamental Marxist positioning of arts and culture in the Yugoslav society on numerous occasions, in the years of the second half of the 60's - when many economic and political revisions were made, and when students' demonstrations attacked the old Party members who prevented the rejuvenation of the political system - his disappointment took a shape of an ultimate 'pathos'. Within the current political and cultural climate he felt as a loser. What remained of him was his ageing naked body, his traditional painting skills, and his medal which was to become a status symbol but not in the sphere of culture. By the end of the 60's this sphere was mostly inhabited by non-communists, still afraid to openly state that they were anti-communists, but achieving various levels of political criticism especially by using and manipulating political references and symbols. As I stressed above, the only symbol that was to remain untouchable was the name and the image of the President.

In Yugoslav cinema of the 60's and early 70's there are numerous examples of political subversion which were aimed at playing (and sometimes openly mocking) socialist standards including certain allusions to the President. One of the most famous filmmakers, Dušan Makavejev, made the film Nevinost bez zaštite (Innocence Unprotected) (1968) in which he made a subtle analogy between the character of the 'Serbian Houdini' Aleksić - who produced the first Serbian sound film about his adventures during the Nazi occupation - and President Tito. This analogy was apparent but too subtle to cause an open reaction because this reaction would simply recognise the fact that the ageing President was as pompous and funny as Aleksić. On the other hand, there are probably only two well known examples when artists made open allusions about the President in the field of visual arts. Both of them illustrate the position of the bourgeois dissident intelligentsia in relation to the dominant ideology and its practical implications.

It took 24 years after the first show by Mića Popović in order for an art show to be banned by the authorities. This happened in 1974 when Popović wanted to exhibit his Svečana slika (Ceremonial painting), a painting inspired by the newspaper photograph taken at the meeting of President Tito and his wife with the Dutch Royal couple. Somehow, this painting was too much for the authorities. It showed that both couples in this painting were visualised as "ruling families", it showed a stark contrast between the glamour of the setting and costumes, and the grim reality of guest workers (Gastarbeiteren) from Yugoslavia that left for developed countries like the Netherlands(15). This painting goes along a path taken by a number of artists since the late sixties, when the renewal of figurative art attempted to achieve some form of social critique. It was very difficult to identify the ideological position of these artists, but they were typical Serbian dissidents: 'productive'; 'multi-disciplinary' (some of them like Popović appeared as painters, film or theatre directors, writers...); 'trend-setting' (Popović, for example, departed from his revolt against socialist realism and his interest in medieval art and folklore at the beginning of the 50's, and moved through his first abstractions and his 'Enformel' period towards the end of 50's and early 60's, and finally arrived at his figurative social painting of the 70's); etc. However, Popović's work also marks a fundamental split that took place in the 70's when a new generation of artists belonging to the conceptualist circle questioned the whole position of an official dissident and departed, both politically and artistically, in a completely different direction. Artistically speaking Popović's work was not radical, it was illustrative and literary, and for a number of critics and artists the radical change of artistic practice was a prerequisite for the politicisation of art. Strangely enough Popović's work was much more appreciated in the literary circles where his realism was fully understood and 'read' than among the radical art community that got organised around the Student's Cultural Centre in Belgrade(16). Politically, was an important figure however, artistically he was an object of controversy. On the other hand it is interesting to identify another artist, who similarly to Popović also painted an unauthorised portrait of the president, as a man of compromise.

In 1969, after serving his military service, the Belgrade painter Dušan Otašević organised a show of his painted wooden objects, made under the influence of the American Pop-art but with many local particularities and associations. Otašević (1940) belonged to a generation of artists who first posed the question of the actual domination of the French-type modernism and of abstract painting as representative of this ideology. 'New figuration', or as Denegri more correctly calls it 'New objectness', was to reintroduce the notion of representation and the overall referential capacity of art, but instead of using flat rectangular surfaces Otašević constructed objects-surfaces inspired by scenery, signs and assemblages of everyday life. Most of the Otašević's works are polyptiches in which, as Denegri wrote, the status of an existing object is transformed to a 'meta-reality' of the object, that, 'in place of an initial singularity of meaning, opens up a field of ambiguity and plurality of interpretations(17). Apart from the right-wing anti-modernism of the Mediala group(18), and artists associated with it since the late 50's, this was the first recognisable post-modern impulse in Serbian art. At the mentioned show in 1969, Otašević exhibited an object entitled Druže Tito ljubičice bijela, tebe voli omladina cijela...(Comrade Tito, the white violet, you are beloved by our Youth), that referred to a famous poem celebrating the President. The work consisted of a painted aluminium flag of Yugoslavia and the red flag of the Communist International that surround a portrait of Tito painted after one of his famous and omnipresent photographs in which he poses in the Partisan uniform. From the documents of the time, it is impossible to create a deeper sense out of this work. The text for the exhibition catalogue does not mention this work, so there is a feeling that this installation was smuggled into the exhibition without creating much fuss about it. The formalist discourse of art writing allowed no political references to be mentioned even when provocative works like this were discussed(19). However, it is quite apparent that this irony with the key political emblem of Titoism (i.e. the image of Tito himself) gathered different fractions of dissidents under one compromising solution. The main protagonists of the 'new figuration' were Otašević (as the liberal and west-orientated artist), Dragoš Kalajić (as the right-wing anti-modernist) and Radomir Reljić, who was to become the representative of the most conservative currents at the Belgrade Academy of Fine Arts. For the catalogue of Otašević's first solo exhibition in 1967(20) texts were written by five authors including Denegri and Biljana Tomić, as young promoters of new radical practices in art, Kalajić as an anti-modernist influenced by Enrico Crispolti, as well as Irina Subotić as a prolific main-stream art-historian who have written equally admiringly on the radical avant-garde (Dada and Zenithism) and moderate mainstream modernism. Otašević achieved the position that has not been attached again to any other artist, the position of a general agreement about the work that combined the first postmodernist impulses coming from the international art scene with exclusively local references that became quite readable for the wider cultural scene in Serbia that constructed its identity through moderate political dissidence.

When Otašević chose this kind of political installation as ideologically indicative for the absurd but benign direction that the Titoist ideology was taking, he recognised the visual framework of Yugoslav socialism as some kind of a setting, of a mis-en-scene, which shaped the everyday environment and which was the only outcome of 'Marxist aesthetics'. 'High art' was not the site where the interpretation of socialist aesthetics took place, socialist-realism rightly departed from the sphere of fine arts and left this space for western-orientated bourgeois art. On the contrary, the space of everyday life was shaped by the aesthetics which were to become identified as typically socialist: Party conferences settings, public space arrangements, department stores displays, etc. Titoism become a setting, rather than an ideology, and had been usually treated by its opponents with some kind of distance that created the sense of irony and ambivalence as the main tool for critically dealing with it. In the private spheres, the aesthetics of socialism was ridiculed at the bourgeois soirees, publicly this form of criticism took shape in some kind of ambiguousness that secured the minimum recognisability of the critical act, but also provided a kind of evidence that this act did actually exist. At this point Otašević's work is taken as an example of a model of critical art that was to signify the situation in Serbia in the 90's when politics of fear and violence was omnipresent and when a critical act appeared as to be put in the right direction but with a sense of detachment ranging from shyness and insecurity to cynicism.

III.

The radical art of the 70's will not be discussed in this text. It takes an entirely different perspective to view this break with political and artistic conformism of dominating artistic trends. But, what has to be stressed in this context is that the radical practice of the 70's has been marginalised and even erased in the same fashion as it happened with the avant-garde of the 20's. Only writers who have also been fellow-travellers, such as Ješa Denegri, Biljana Tomić, Dunja Blažević, Jasna Tijardović, and others, put this practice in the historical perspective. By the end of the 70's it was evident that this practice did not make any significant impact on the mainstream understanding of art, as well as on the relation between art and politics. However, the greatest achievement of this group of artists (apart from their exceptional art projects) was to disclose the alliance between the conservative academic practices and the socialist-realist art system.

During the first years following Tito's death in 1980, art in Serbia became heavily influenced by the conservative trends on the international art scene. Painting was back, as well as literary references, not so much in a political sense then in a philosophical, historical; in one word: Anti-Modernism understood as postmodernism reigned. This situation introduced the Serbian cultural scene to the new era that started in 1987, when Slobodan Milošević staged a coup within the Serbian Communist Party and purged the faction of his chief rival Ivan Stambolić. This event announced as an'anti-bureaucratic revolution' was to a great extent supported by a main-stream cultural elite consisting mostly of anti-Titoist dissidents and disappointed communists with a great deal of nationalist sentiment. In the period between 1987 and 1991 the main-stream cultural sphere was exclusively hegemonised by reinventing Serbian national tradition as a particular, unique and autochthonous identity-maker.

'Although in the era of post-Yugoslavism and post-Titoism the desacralised use of the image of Josip Broz Tito could be interpreted as a sign of visual 'de-Titoisation', I am not siding with this opinion. I am more inclined to see this as a clear pro-titoisation...(21), argues Bojana Pejić when writing about an inspiring series of photographs by Goranka Matić, titled Dani bola i ponosa (The days of sorrow and pride). The photographs were taken during the days of mourning when President Tito died in May 1980. Matić took photos of shop-windows in which the usual arrangements of socialist settings were supplemented by a photograph of the President endowed with a black ribbon. What is of crucial importance for this series of photographs is the politics of display Goranka Matić has chosen. This series was not exhibited at the time it was made, but some 14 years later, when the political climate drastically changed. One may argue that the series would have been understood as 'desacralisation' if displayed in the early 80's, but that was not the author's intention. It was shown in a Belgrade gallery in 1993/94, at a time when the use of the 'name and image' of Josip Broz Tito evoked some happier and more prosperous period in relation to the grim reality of war and economic collapse in Serbia. It was a kind of sympathy given to the dead President by those who tended, if not to openly criticise at least to laugh at the manifestations of his power, it was a nostalgia for a moderate or enlightened autocracy in comparison to the fully destructive regime of Slobodan Milošević. The name and image of Milošević was not protected by law, but in the first years of his rule his images were more or less spontaneously displayed in public spaces. However, in terms of his representation the new Serbian leader kept a low profile and was very careful not to show off visual proofs of power (as it happened with Tudjman in Croatia and his Latin-American military 'look'). Hence his image has never become a crucial political reference as was Tito's. But the events he provoked have.

A parallel can be drawn in terms of the system of controlling and 'canonising' a certain type of images. The images of war atrocities (committed upon Serbs during WW2) have become an important tool in forming an aggressive sentiment within the people in order to have a popular authorisation for the atrocities that would be committed by Serbs in Bosnia and Croatia. On the other hand, to point at images that proved the direct involvement of Milošević's troops in the worst kind of war crimes, has been considered either insignificant ('all sides committed crimes') or simply bad taste ('so many horrible things happened, and why should one watch them again?'). This concealment of war (as if it happened somewhere else on the planet) was the major political symptom in Serbia since the early 90's, and therefore a reference that has become culturally coded. High culture was the main tool of concealment, the indispensable apparatus of breaking the links with the traumatic reality.

Between 1987 and 1991, the main-stream cultural sphere was a monolithic apparatus of the national re-birth, and the logistics were being laid down for determining the national and territorial aims. This period will remain a blind spot in Serbian history (as is the period of Nedić's rule (22), simply because 'too many' people took part in the premeditation of war. The events of 1991 were authorised by a large majority of the Serbian population, including those civic layers now fragmented into various options, some of whom unwillingly remember their former thoughts. Speaking of the loss of meaning of the names of social classes, of the 'haemorrhage' of names such as 'bourgeoisie' from 'reality' into 'representation', from 'economic man' to 'mental man', Roland Barthes notices that the 'haemorrhage' of the name 'bourgeoisie' is expressed precisely through the notion of 'nation'. The term 'bourgeoisie' is submerged in the term 'nation' because thus this class finds new allies in the series of shapeless strata created in the modern society(23). To speak of a bourgeoisie in a totally impoverished society such as the Yugoslav one is impossible from the position of the 'economic man', however, it is possible from the position of the 'mental man'. The Serbian bourgeoisie has shown how easy it was to transform its idea into the idea of a nation. Before the beginning of the war it light-heartedly gave up its idea of itself because its economic reality was just as lightly deprived of its economic reality. After all the return, or 'revival' of the idea of the bourgeoisie during the war and after it is based on the force of representations to which this class was exposed, representations of suffering which were ignored as much as their morale about national identification was absorbed. However, there was no way back, the only exit was to once more create a system of representations which would return the bourgeoisie its original identity. Zdravko Čotra's film Dnevnik uvreda (Diary of Insults) (1993), is symptomatic of this forced attempt of bourgeois revitalisation. The film laments over the difficult position of respected Belgrade citizenry exposed to the economic crisis, over the 'unjust' sanctions imposed upon it by the international community, but never over the representations of killing and destruction coming from only a few hundred kilometres away. It laments over the economic fact that the bourgeoisie now must engage in the most inappropriate practices in order to survive, and one of the heroines is forced to earn a living by making rag dolls (which is an allusion to Miloš Crnjanski's Novel About London, the arch-example of the Serbian bourgeoisie's inability to adapt to the logic of its class abroad). The illusion of a national flowering into which so much was to have been invested becomes not a national defeat, but a class defeat: unrealisable national heroism/martyrdom is replaced by the possibility of class martyrdom.

What the thin layer of the bourgeoisie, the champion of the great game of psychological repression, especially identified with the never-lived belle époque was the concept of culture, of Culture which in these 'murky times' was the only thing to remain depoliticised, non-partisan and above party politics, beautiful and autonomous, elevated and consoling. There was a broad consensus on the 'autonomy' of art, although this autonomy was also interpreted in diametrically opposed ways, showing thus that the ideological position on which the interpretation depended was the key precondition for a view on art, and so unconsciously undermining the very concept of 'autonomy'. However, the idea of 'art above the situation' usually boiled down to classical aesthetic judgements(24). The extreme rightist bloom of symbolist art which marked the preparations for the war by focusing on different fantasy models (evoking the Kosovo battle of 1389, folk motifs, and even stating some pre-historic archaeological sites as distinctly Serbian), through time started causing either revulsion or laughter, and any thought of a different politicisation of aesthetics was rejected as unseeming in the traditional bourgeois view of art. According to this logic, it was art that was supposed to provide consolation in dangerous social relations, in a situation when the original idea of the national re-birth had become so complicated that the whole class realised it was living in a mutant state in which the heritage of civilisation which this class took for granted had degenerated. Furthermore, the idea of 'art of safety' provided refuge from the impossibility of solving real social problems caused by the boomerang effect of the Bosnian war. Taking shelter in the art of safety offered consolation, but above and beyond this, it was supposed to mark the vitality of the bourgeois class, its ability to survive, to endure.

In primarily discussing the use of references in 'art', it is important to take a look at an example of art practice which pretended to become the official art of the Milošević era, however, it never fully succeeded in achieving this. This is the practice which usually caused laughter amongst art professionals for its use of references (historical myths, religious symbols, folk motifs, etc.) as well as for its blatant anti-internationalism. The peek of this trend in art, or the moment when the politics of display of major institutions carefully selected only this practice, was the exhibition Balkanski istočnici (The Balkan Sources) held in the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade in 1994. The exhibition was curated by the chief right-wing ideologist in culture, Dragoš Kalajić. His strategy was simple: to create a historical perspective of the Serbian art in the 20th Century that does not define its identity by the appeal to a modernist and internationalist narratives. Curiously enough, most of the exhibits dated up to the mid-eighties were done by artists who had been usually present at previous, modernist, historical surveys. It appeared that there was only one narrative, and that there are no side-narratives of some 'real' dissident art that was suppressed in Titoism for its nationalistic content, which is the usual fantasy of right-wing 'intellectuals'. The perspective only changed in selecting contemporary artists who did not share the same cultural space either with the main-stream 'culture of safety' or with the alternative artistic scene which had in the early 90's become politicised in its opposition to all aspects of Milošević's rule.

It is hard to briefly illustrate this exhibition, but we can take a couple of examples that may be considered as symptomatic. The painting Na mnogaja ljeta (1994) (archaically said: To many years) by Željko Tonšić uses explicit religious references. One can see the figure of Christ on the cross surrounded by some expected symbols such as for example a fish. However, Christ is also surrounded by the aspects of contemporary representations with an explicit erotic content such as the woman under whose skirt we can almost peep. The mixture of religion and eroticism was a very powerful aspect of identity, and this can be illustrated by the fact that the ideologically utmost rightist TV station, TV Palma, during this period showed a hard-core pornographic film every night. The Serbs were to be portrayed as simultaneously pious and sexual, and these two important segments of their identity fought a major battle in which after many temptations religion finally won and the place in Heaven was secured. Erotisation of an epic myth is the aim of another artist who has been identified with the position of the New Serbian Right, Kosta Bunuševac. In the painting Kraljević Marko i vila Raviojla (Prince Marko and the Nymph Raviojla, 1994) he takes characters from the Serbian history and folk stories (in the mind of the majority of people this is one and the same) and transports them into a setting straight from a SF film. The prince is strong and heroic, the nymph is naked and voluptuous. Like the previous image, this one also, paradoxically, does not display any formal characteristics which might put it in the tradition of Serbian painting as belonging to the Eastern Christian cultural space, marked by Byzantium. There is nothing from fresco paintings or icons that influences the form or style of these paintings, they are fully westernised in referring to the iconography of films, comic strips or popular culture in general. However, it is interesting to see how the art critic who wrote the second text in the exhibition catalogue (the first was naturally written by Kalajić himself) interpreted this work. For the value of a 'world' created on this painting (and presumably having in mind the paradox between the nationalist subject-matter and the western representational matrix) he claims that 'in spite of its international premises, it does not reject the national and ethnical, but attempts to give it an aura of transcendental and sublime through glamour and gloss as expressing beauty and exclusivity(25). These lines illustrate the dominating ideological paradox of Miločević's rule, a fictional synthesis of fully confused concepts, the nebulousness of which had one primary goal: to become a counterpoint, a mask of something that happened in real-politics, a mask of a policy manifested by violence and ethnic cleansing.

As the figure of Tito was simultaneously omnipresent and forbidden in the era of Yugoslav socialism, the images of war violence were also allowed only if fully controlled by the state officials, however, they were fully avoided in symbolical spaces such as the artistic one. To illustrate this point, one can take the example of the exhibition on the genocide against the Serbs in Croatia during WW2 held in the Museum of Applied Art in Belgrade in 1994 (!) where a series of extremely graphic photos were on display, contextualised for political purposes but actually taken almost aesthetically. The violence committed in Croatia and Bosnia by the Serbian troops and paramilitary did not ever get mentioned in the official discourse and was omitted from any representational forms. The strange mechanism of censorship could be detected when we finally take a look at the so called activist art practices that positioned themselves in full opposition to the dominating political and cultural orientation, but also to a bourgeois mainstream that kept a low profile after the initial nationalist exaltation that ended in 1991 when the real war started, and when the bourgeoisie could not stomach any longer the immediate application of their own nationalist rhetoric.

IV.

The final chapter of this text may sound problematic for readers both in Serbia and internationally. It is difficult to take a critical position towards an activity that has grown in an extremely hostile political environment. The very existence of art practices that attempted to make political statements and used political references as rough material, was an achievement per se. Also, regardless of its defined historical and geographic placement, the Serbian activist art of the 90's faced all the problems never resolved in art practices that have defined their identity by the appeal to the political struggle. The very nature of political art lies in its failure. It is either a political failure since the radical political goals usually do not get realised, or an artistic failure when the political goals do get realised and the art practice becomes an emblem for some political movement and loses its critical integrity. It appears that by worrying not to lose its artistic integrity, the Serbian political art of the 90's adopted the political failure as an integral part of the project. But let us not jump to conclusions and let's take a look at some prominent artistic projects with political pretensions. The examples will be mostly collaborative artistic efforts because collective projects usually have to make a more precise political platform then an individual effort.

In terms of this collective effort we can distinguish two tendencies in resolving the conflict between artistic and political discourses. Both tendencies recalled what was crucial for artistic practices with wider social ambitions: the use of public space. The change of scene, literally and metaphorically, the reluctance to stay 'indoors', in galleries or other art spaces, was the first step in achieving the social relevance of these practices. The goal to be achieved here may be illustrated by a crucial statement of one of the most focused political artists of our time, Adrian Piper: 'Political content may be collaboratively constructed through an interactive process in which the object explicitly confronts the viewer with her own condition, and the viewer reacts to that confrontation by constructing an interpretation of it that expresses her own particular level of political self-awareness.' And as Christian Kravagna comments: 'Piper thus involves the viewer in generating the political content of the piece, in a way that goes beyond the reading of a content or the reception of a message(26). The questions that always remain are: 'who is the viewer?', and 'how is her condition constructed?'. These are still questions to be, at least hypothetically, resolved in the 'piece' itself that attempts to interpellate the viewer. Although sharing the similar desire to interact within the public field, the two tendencies I am trying to discern here, understood their roles in interpellating the public differently. One of the basic questions was whether to include the members of the public in the 'piece' itself, or to construct the 'piece' and present it to the public and then wait for their reaction.

For the first tendency art projects are to be immersed in the public space and the outcome will be an aesthetic interaction with some forms of creative practices that are marginalised or unacknowledged. The work of the Škart group is the best example of this strategy, however, we should also mention certain other projects linked with radio station B92 and its role in re-shaping and re-politicising the public space. During the years of Serbian isolation by the international community, Škart actions praised single endeavours by unlikely 'heroes' of civic life: radio presenters cut off from broadcasting, newspaper sellers accused for distributing independent journals, etc. On the other hand, they did works which can be defined as audio-visual farces, works challenging not so much the state oppression but the very concept of living a 'normal life' within an ultimately hostile social environment. The interventions were on the level of micro-social spaces, spaces beyond the visible representations of public life, spaces which can simultaneously be tragic or comic if juxtaposed with the general mainstream behaviour. And these actions gave the full meaning to the word škart (scraps): discarded and rejected human practices suddenly reappearing.

There were no direct political references in their work, but nevertheless the local and international artistic community discovered something political about it. One might argue that this 'something' is of an aesthetic nature. To put it simply, the Škart products (ranging from graphic designs to 'ready-made' choirs singing) became a trademark for NGO activities within the hostile political environment of Milošević's Serbia. The lack of immediate political content is expected precisely as a clear political statement of creating a parallel sphere to the one that belonged to the state apparatuses. In these terms Škart-art produces political references where they are not expected, in promoting personal and marginal endeavours as heterogeneous political statements that create an alternative to the dominating political sphere rather then constantly referring to that sphere. Other artists also collaborated in constructing this parallel sphere, but there was a sense that the explicit political position from which these artists were speaking remained absent. Probably the only exception is Saša Marković - Mikrob who was, not only as an artist but also as a radio presenter, very outspoken in affirming his left-wing views. Marković participated in an influential but politically vague project called Urbazona initiated by the artist Miomir Grujić - Fleka who also had his show on Radio B92. This project was aimed at affirming an urban culture in the midst of the nationalist euphoria. Miomir Grujić - Fleka clearly stated the methods of the project: 'Envisaged as a collection centre of creative energies, as a meeting-point and asylum for all ideas and expressive forms which, in the ruling circumstances, are not understood and are left with no chances to enter the public scene, the URBAZONA project aims at promoting such ideas and authors individuals whose language and energetic impulse can hardly be put into narrow, intolerant and tragicomic system of cultural values as well as at animating new ones, potential participants, and finally the whole cultural audience. (...) The methods of acting and strategies of the movement are not protests, nor laments, nor direct confrontations, nor vulgar clashes, but constant and visible proving of the existence of all the values this movement aims for(27)

On the other hand, it seems that the second tendency performs exactly the opposite. It constantly refers to the widely known political references as a way of communicating in the public space. The public space is thus seen not as a collection of heterogeneous practices, but as a homogenous space firmly shaped by the dominating ideology that creates common references even for those who found themselves in opposition to Milošević's ruling system. The example of this tendency are actions of the Magnet group, as well as, in a slightly concealed way, the actions of the Led Art collective. In the Magnet public actions (mostly influenced by the key ideologist of the group Nune Popović), political space was seen as a collection of ready-made references: the image of the president Milošević as referring to his absolute power (in the action Phallus-Serbia in which his photo was attached to a blown-up model of a penis and then taken to the streets); gold bars taken to the National Bank as referring to the economic and monetary crisis in the action where a false gold bar was handed to this bank in an ironic gesture; eggs thrown at the Belgrade City Hall as referring to the betrayal of principles that brought the opposition parties local authority following the mass protests in 1996/7 when eggs were thrown at key institutions of Milošević's system of power; etc. These references were extremely local and a result of an 'isolationist' atmosphere in which the Serbian cultural production found itself in during the 90's. On one hand, this isolationism was caused by the international embargo on Serbia, but on the other hand it was self-created as a gesture of self-importance that was attached to most acts of opposition that were regarded as self-righteous.

The key symptom of the misconception of the political space in the actions of Magnet was the way in which these actions were presented to the public. The power of their work was certainly in directly challenging and confronting Milošević's apparatuses, first of all the police. The members of the group were occasionally arrested after resisting to stop their actions and refusing to remove their work from the public space. However, rather then using this opportunity to make an open political gesture - as was the case when they presented their work in friendlier circumstances - Nune Popović tried to defend his rights as an artist, presenting their act as a free artistic endeavour. They have thus entered a paradox: they represented their work as purely artistic in the immediate political field, whilst they represented it as utterly political in the artistic field. They have inadvertently continued the spirit of the grand compromise: the political is again a reference in the world of art that is reluctant to lose its autonomy even when directly confronted with the political system that is recognised as the main topic of an artistic project. And to quote Piper again: 'Representation of political content alone is unlikely to be successful in effecting political change in the viewer, because it directs the viewers attention away from the immediate politics of her own situation and toward some other space-time region that may have only the most tenuous connection, if any, to the viewer's immediate personal circumstances(28).

Political art is expected to create a certain form of political change in the viewer. However, it appears that political art in Serbia of the 90's did not have this utopian belief in the capacity of art to effect any changes. It was rather fatalistic - as was the general climate of disbelief and isolationism - in its approach to politics. For example, the Led Art (Ice Art) group entered the public space with their first project that consisted of a refrigerator truck parked in a square in central Belgrade in which artists produced works in ice that were stored inside so passers-by could visit this mobile gallery. Effective aesthetic presence of these works in ice is grounded upon the act of symbolic 'freezing art for some better time', upon the miracle of the very survival of art in the world that does not welcome artistic creation. The system of 'contextualisation through decontextualisation' was embraced by the art community, and a system of 'subtle reactions' to social reality was created, and its success, naturally, was measured by the acuteness of this subtlety. Seen as a political act, this project just confirms the apathy and disbelief in political changes.

The projects of Led Art and Magnet have been usually labelled as political art. Their usage of political references or creation of some kind of literal symbolism found its space within the cultural sphere. Their activities were seen as 'brave' acts of defiance against an irresolvable political crisis. However, retrospectively, in their work there is a symptomatic omission of a reference that has been a major issue when the situation in Serbia has been discussed internationally. This reference is probably not the War as such, but rather the degree of violence carried out during that war. What was the major issue internationally, was omitted in an isolationist atmosphere of Serbia that could not produce any sense of coping with the responsibility for the atrocities that were carried out in the name of the Volk. We can only call it a repressed collective trauma. This trauma was concealed by an obsessive notion of special identity that was displayed in all of its absurdity in the exceptional series of installations by Raša Todosijević entitled Gott Liebt die Serben. Todosijević denies that he is a political artist, but his work in the 90's possesses something that other works that dealt with politics did not have: a thorough analysis of the ideological discourse accompanied with the sense of self-irony rather than self-righteousness. Todosijević aimed at creating a failed strategy of political action through an ambiguous confusion of meanings and ideological positions. Todosijević's works subvert the whole system of thought by 'virusing through appropriation', that is, by taking over models, or patterns, and dealing with contexts in which a statement such as 'Gott liebt die Serben' can be found.

Another artist who did not choose a direct action but rather attempted to analyse the causes and consequences of political discourses, managed to establish a particular way of interaction with the wider community through analysing the very trauma that causes the issue of violence to be put aside. The work XY Ungelöst by Milica Tomić was a 'reconstruction' of a crime committed by Serbian forces in Kosovo back in 1989. In the video the appearance of some known members of the Belgrade art community referred to the murdered Albanians. In the very process of inviting her colleagues and friends to appear in her video, she involuntarily adopted a restricted method of disclosing the content of their act. They were to pose in shabby clothing from the mid-eighties, in order to mark individual symbols for each and every ethnic Albanian murdered in a particular incident. These garments were an actual reconstruction of the original clothing worn by the murdered citizens, i.e. Tomić re-created these garments according to the family photos of the victims she managed to obtain. The restricted method was based upon her insight into a particular political orientation of her actors, i.e. upon the recognition of their political identities. To those for whom she knew that have taken a clearly anti-nationalistic standpoint she explained in details her request for that person to identify with a murdered Albanian; those who 'did not mind' (the majority of her actors) were informed on their roles but claimed inexplicit political orientation of the work; finally, those who would have objected to this idea, following their nationalistic attitude, were in effect manipulated by the artist, and were trapped by a 'magic' invitation for their faces to appear in the art work; and who can decline that? Apart from making this an unintentional revenge for effectually supporting the state of affairs in Serbia, more or less silently authorising the crimes committed in the name of protecting the Serbian national interest, Milica Tomić exposed the fundamental recognition, and a belief in that recognition, of the arts as an autonomous sphere unaffected by social and political contexts. In order words, an invitation for one to stand in shabby mid-eighties clothes in front of the camera, was enough of an explanation: the artist's deliberation is sacred. This reveals a more fundamental attitude towards the cultural production in Serbia, even the part that is considered to be unofficial, which is to remain above politics, autonomous, elevated and comforting. According to this logic, it was art that was supposed to provide consolation in a social and political crisis, art was supposed to present a mask of traumatic political identifications and relations(29). With XY Ungelöst, Milica Tomić pursued an opposite direction: this video installation operates precisely with the content of a political trauma. This work did not just symbolically accumulate images of bodies massacred by Milošević's forces, but behind it on the collective ideological body of a nation, the Volksgemeinschaft materialised in individual rituals and a collective course of action.

Postscript (or, On Responsibility)

The case of Yugoslavia has confirmed that the institution of democracy has failed yet again to address the question of collective responsibility. Until the start of the bombing campaign in March 1999, the two approaches towards collective responsibility of one nation and its elected government had been mixed in the most paradoxical way: sanctions were introduced which allegedly aimed at compelling the Serbian government to 'back-off', but had been in fact addressed to persuade the 'Serbian people' to (somehow) overthrow its regime. The sanctions were to create a more 'adequate' representation of the real condition of existence of the Serbs: to aggravate an economic collapse as a manifestation of the real state of affairs in which the regime is leading its citizens. A mis-en-scene had to be created in which the ordinary citizens will "feel the pain" which will somehow remind them of the atrocities executed in their name in Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo. However, the expected outcome never occurred, which has, perversely, finally corroborated the collective responsibility and the whole conflict-solution ended up in the bombing campaign. If we now go into Hegelian dialectics between the Master and the Slave, the western policy attempted to replace the pre-existing Master by another Master, even bigger and more serious Other who discloses the existing Master as irresponsible to his servants. But by playing this role of bigger authority, the western policy has already answered the fundamental question 'what the Other wants from me' (Che vuoi?) and has killed any fantasy regarding it, there was no enigma about the desire of the Other. Therefore the mis-en-scene has not been created: the existing Master (not Milošević, but the whole national programme which had brought him to power) had already posed enigmatic wishes to which the response was articulated in the purest form of jouissance: suffering, a paradoxical satisfaction that the subject derives from his symptom. So, how may this subject be responsible? He has already entered the mentioned dialectic, his participation was already conditioned. So the question of responsibility does not reside in the collective enjoyment of suffering, but rather in fantasising about it. How can this be the case?

Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners(30) discusses the excess of enjoyment of those who carried out the Nazi policies found in their murderous actions, defining them responsible for the Holocaust. But the question of collective responsibility does not aim at the executioners (they can, at least in theory, be eventually tried for their actions) of one policy, but at the participants in policy-making. Before Goldhagen, Gitta Sereny's investigation in the same field brought about a few striking definitions of why the Nazi policies were carried out with such excesses cruelty and humiliation of victims. The reply given by one direct participant was simple: 'in order to condition those who actually had to carry out the policies ... to make it possible for them to do what they did(31). The responsibility therefore lays in the fantasy-formation, fantasy understood as a mis-en-scene of desire. The Master who has this enigmatic desire to which his servants respond to with the fantasy, is the national project in which many people collectively participated in Serbia during the 80's. This is the master-narrative of a collective consensus which spoke of redefining borders, forcing amounts of people to move according to the plan...

To condition the executioners, this narrative strategically used excessive language in the midst of clear-minded intellectualisations that represented the plan: Albanians do not have a big birth rate but they 'excessively breed', they will not be moved out but 'thrown over the mountain of Prokletije', some of them will not be killed but 'slaughtered with rusty spoons', etc. The main support for this fantasising is of course the original Freudian fantasy 'the child was beaten' (the Serbs were abused by Communism, Tito, international conspiracy, Slovenian underwear, Croats, Albanians...), however, the main instrument was the concept of national culture, pure, unspoiled against all the odds, the only structure in which one can measure the level of collective spirituality of one's nation. This role was attributed to culture precisely because of the feeling of responsibility, and for us to explore the issue of responsibility it is important to explore its final manifestation: oblivion. This oblivion has been a final representation of Serbian nationalism: we no longer want to know what our original fantasy was. This outcome resembles a proverbial cartoon situation in which a character who instigated a fight gets out of the whole mess while the others remain in a tumult. Even more, he is now scandalised by the behaviour of the others fighting each other.

Notes: