Retracing Images – Visual Culture after Yugoslavia

By Daniel Šuber & Slobodan Karamanić. Brill: Leiden & Boston, 2012.

Retracing Images – Visual Culture after Yugoslavia

The essays in this collection explore cultural and political dynamics both before and in the wake of Yugoslavia’s destruction by analysing visual data such as film, art, graffiti, street-art, public advertisements and memorials. Although such materials have rarely been considered significant empirical evidence within Balkan Studies, the contributions in this volume offer insights into such phenomena as ‘Titostalgia’, nationalist mobilisation, nation-branding, the rewriting of history, inventing of traditions, and symbolic violence that have surfaced in recent years. Nebojša Jovanović argues against post-Yugoslav tendencies to appropriate or rather ‘nationalise’ the Yugoslav film-makers and thus eradicate the notion of ‘Yugoslav cinema’ entirely. By reassessing the controversial case of Kusturica, he goes about the task of “re-inventing the legacy of socialist Yugoslav cinema” against ideologically-motivated misconceptions. Against the widespread picture of the pre-Underground Kusturica as a vanguard in critically displaying the purportedly ‘totalitarian’ character of socialist Yugoslavia, Jovanović shows how Kusturica’s early filmic universe cannot be interpreted through dichotomist lenses such as private vs. public, individual vs. state or Party vs. family.

Mimicry

Zoran Terzić borrows the concept of ‘mimicry’ from ecology to highlight a peculiar and rarely accounted for social mechanism of symbolic power. He uses the notion of strategically seeking to adapt to a social environment to illustrate “the post-Yugoslav political scenery of the 1990s.” He describes how national homogenisation created a particular “career structure” that provided opportunities to satisfy one’s ‘mimetic desire’ or, to be more precise, for bureaucrats to become demagogues, dissidents to become tyrants, and writers to become warlords. Hence, according to Terzić, “war and career are synonyms.”  In contrast to many accounts which show the artistic actions of the Slovenian ‘retro-avant-garde’ (Neue Slowenische Kunst or Irwin) in a rather positive light, Miklavž Komelj’s text is fundamentally critical about their political, ideological and aesthetic impact. While pointing to the paradox that Yugoslavia had been rarely perceived as a totalitarian state before the fall of the Iron Curtain, he describes the strategies of the Slovenian retro-avant-garde and its totalitarian imagery as “another mode of incorporating ‘the East’ as such into the space of the western globalized art market, harboring the effect of an utter pacification of ‘the East.’”

Second Collectives

Sezgin Boynik’s chapter deals with the transitional dynamics and predicaments that have occurred within the post-Yugoslav cultural domain since the 1990s. More specifically, he analyses the artistic strategies of art collectives and thereby draws a line between those pertaining to the Yugoslav and the post-Yugoslav era. While the former were artist-led communities, the latter function like management agencies for the artist: the Yugoslav notion of ‘self-management’ becomes distorted by the utilitarian impetus of the current discourse. He thus discloses specific strategies of art practice in the ‘Second Collectives,’ supposed “to accelerate, and if possible, to monitor the current economic transformations.”

Subcultural grafiti

Gregor Bulc’s chapter explores cultural dynamics in street art production. In his empirical case study of the Slovenian art scene he examines the work of certain curators as ‘cultural intermediaries’ operating between two ‘regimes of value,’ i.e. ‘high culture’ and ‘popular culture’. Bulc traces the case of Slovenian subcultural graffiti entering the graffiti exhibition of the International Centre of Graphics Arts in Ljubljana in 2004. Employing sociological and anthropological methods and taking advantage of his acquaintance with members of both fields, he draws a rich picture of the complex ideological and social interrelations of the encounter between ‘high art’ and street-art.

Yugoslav cinema

Davor Beganović’s Changing Fates: The Role of the Hero in Yugoslav Cinema in the Early and Late Sixties discusses how the notion of the ‘socialist hero’ was challenged and subverted by two films from the 1960s, City in Ferment (1961) by Veljko Bulajić and Želimir Žilnik’s well-known Early Works (1969). Despite the fact that the Yugoslav Communist Party was quite aware of the power of moving images, and made great use of them, a “small revolution” still occurred in the liberal era of the 1960s. However, they also display the wide spectrum of liberal positioning, ranging from Bulajić’s “enthusiastic idealism” to Žilnik’s “complete disillusionment” with regard to the possibility of reconciling socialist and liberal-humanist ideas.

Deploying ethnic stereotipes

Robert Alagjozovski’s article The Nationalistic Turn and the Visual Response in Macedonian Art and Cinema takes a critical stance vis-à-vis the post-Yugoslav Macedonian artists, who are accused of succumbing to the ‘nationalist turn’ and “deploying ethnic stereotypes.” He draws on films such as Milčo Mančevski’s Before the Rain (1994) and Teona Strugar Mitevska’s How I Killed a Saint (2004), as well as art installations and billboards, to show the visual and artistic strategies by which stereotypical depictions of ‘Albanians’ and ‘Others’ and the naturalisation and normalisation of the Macedonian state are constructed.

Victimological narratives

Elissa Helms demonstrates how images of women are used to construct discourses of Bosniac victimhood. In many post-Yugoslav settings, victimological narratives and discourses were exploited to nationalise the public sphere. Through a close reading of billboards depicting women, Helms analyses the visual means by which they achieve an association with the Srebrenica massacre and even the Holocaust, their capacity to incite “feelings of collective victimhood” and to enforce patriarchal views of the “wretched, pitiable victim from the underdeveloped world.” She concludes that the artistic photographs portraying women – that in some cases, as with Šejla Kamerić’s Bosnian Girl!, launched professional careers for their authors – in fact “overlap with discourses of Bosniac nationalism, and in a way with all nationalisms of the region that interpret wars and politics through collective ethnic categories.”

Newborn

Isabel Ströhle focuses on post-independence Kosovo to illustrate the kinds of strategies that may be employed to ideologically ‘restart’ a state with a socialist past and the experiences of escalating conflict and war. While exploring how the lack of sovereign statehood in Kosovo today was substituted through symbolic means, Ströhle carefully discloses how the policies decreed by the UNMIK and other international agents were translated into specific visual branding campaigns. Most notably, the launching of the “New Born” slogan and prescribing the ideology of multiculturalism, as well as an implied call for partial historical amnesia, led as a first step to a search for ancient statehood and a glorification of a tradition of resistance against foreign occupation. Ströhle thus takes a critical stance against the mechanisms and visual “technologies of governance” that the United Nations have employed to fulfil their self-imposed goal of creating a modern, unified nation-state.

Transformation of memorial sites

A peculiar ‘post-socialist’ phenomenon is described in Gal Kirn’s Transformation of Memorial Sites in the Post-Yugoslav Context. It explores the post-Yugoslav politics of memory vis-à-vis the socialist past by focussing on the destruction of partisan and anti-fascist monuments in Slovenia and Croatia, and how they have been treated by local nationalist ‘grassroots’ movements. He proposes that the relationship between the nationalist tendencies in the public and cultural spheres of both countries must be understood at all levels, from the bottom to the top. It is through visualisations that Mitja Velikonja, in his study Titostalgia. On the Post-Yugoslav Cognitive Map, assesses the phenomenon of ‘Titostalgia’, which to the surprise of many analysts – has spread to all regions of the former Yugoslavia. By presenting an astonishing body of detailed case examples, Velikonja elucidates a facet of post-Yugoslav history often neglected or diminished by political analysts. His conclusion is that this invocation of the era of the former Yugoslav president must not be dismissed as a conservative or irrational longing for the past. Instead, this discourse “creates new forms of affiliation and socialising”.

Serbian October Revolution

Šuber & Karamanić’s Symbolic Landscape, Violence and the Normalization Process in Post-Milošević Serbia sheds light on the social and political dynamics in post-socialist Serbia, especially in the wake of the so-called ‘Serbian October Revolution’ of 2000. After noting that the observation of physical violence has become an increasingly likely aspect of the Serbian public sphere, they account for this development by focusing on the politics of symbols as initiated by the Milošević regime and – allegedly in opposition to the former – continued by the democratic regime. By displaying different episodes in this story and focusing on visual data such as street graffiti, state iconography, public advertisements, and visual campaigns launched both by state ministries and by civil-societal groups, the authors reveal lines of convergence between the allegedly democratic, pro-European oriented, state authorities on the one side, and right-wing civil movements on the other.

Retracing Images – Visual Culture after Yugoslavia
Mimicry
Second Collectives
Subcultural grafiti
Yugoslav cinema
Deploying ethnic stereotipes
Victimological narratives
Newborn
Transformation of memorial sites
Serbian October Revolution
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