As he once said, he wrote the book "Spent Socialism" primarily for young people, who learn almost nothing about Yugoslavia in regular education. "I would say that maybe 90 percent of my students, when they finish high school, know almost nothing about Yugoslavia, that is, after hearing such conflicting views, they choose not to know anything about it. Of the other 10 percent, half are 'partisans' and half are 'Chetniks', depending on what kind of family they grew up in," explains Professor Branislav Dimitrijević, a Belgrade theorist and art historian in an interview with "Vijesti". Recently, Dimitrijević was a guest of Cetinje and the Institute of Contemporary Art, where he presented his books to the audience through a lecture, film screenings and a conversation: "Slatki film by Dušan Makavejev" (MSU, Belgrade, 2017) and "Spent Socialism - Culture, Consumerism and Social imagination in SFR Yugoslavia" (Fabrika knjiga, Belgrade, 2016).
That is why Dimitrijević tries to present some facts to the students, before they try to take their position. "For example, the fact of how many people died during the war from the occupiers of their local collaborators, that Belgrade met liberation with 70 percent of its electrical infrastructure destroyed, but also that during the fifties Yugoslavia recorded the highest economic growth in Europe in the 20th century..."
The Museum of Contemporary Art was recently opened in Belgrade, after ten years of renovation. Let's put things in context: the generations of young people who in the meantime finished high school and obtained a university degree, did not have the opportunity to visit that museum, nor to get acquainted with the huge collection of works of art and the extremely rich library. What do you think are the consequences of that, can we measure the damage?
What happened with the Museum of Contemporary Art became a striking example, first of all, because the people who ran the museum and started the reconstruction made public the process and the circumstances of such a dramatic delay. Anyone who wanted to take an interest in the reasons why the museum was closed for so long could do so - in 2012 MSU made an exhibition entitled "What happened to MSU?", where the reconstruction crisis was documented and empty political promises were disclosed.
But do we have such self-reflection elsewhere? These days, the Law on Higher Education is being changed, and the academic community is silent, even though this law places it in a tertiary position in the education system, after state-bureaucratic and private-business interests. The collapse of the education system is what causes the most damage, and MSU is a rare positive example, because after 2000 it took a clear course and I hope it will continue its educational role and restore the reputation it had.
Even during the reconstruction, MSU organized exhibitions in other areas, the library was working, and now it remains to be seen how MSU will be managed in the future, as a competition for a new director is expected soon.
For Josip Broz Tito, we can safely say that he was not a fan of contemporary art - he mostly kept classics in his residence, he spoke publicly against abstraction... Nevertheless, at the height of his "mandate", the Museum of Contemporary Art was opened, monuments, works of architects and sculptors Bogdan Bogdanović, Dušan Džamonja, Miodrag Živković... Is it about some kind of Tito's (or Titoist's) internal paradox, or about emancipatory cultural politics?
First of all, it is about the fact that Yugoslavia was not a state of monolithic political unity. As you mentioned, the Museum of Contemporary Art began to be built in the same year when Tito, in a couple of his public addresses, attacked the "bourgeois decadence" of modern art, although, as he himself says in those speeches, he did not deprive it of its "decorative value". What was characteristic of Tito's regime, at least in the period of the fifties and sixties, was that it was open to "progressive intellectuals" - cultural policy was led by personalities such as Marko Ristić, Aleksandar Vučo, Oto Bihalji Merin, and of course Krleža, although at that stage, the role of this perhaps the greatest writer of our "common language" was quite conservative. The cultural policy of socialist Yugoslavia was multidimensional - on the one hand, it was a culture of imposing modernism "from above", and on the other hand, the development of culture "from below" was encouraged through the encouragement of various forms of amateurism, through mass literacy, through technical education projects, through the development of homes culture and art societies, but also youth and alternative culture. I think that this first characteristic of cultural politics has been dealt with in historiography, and the monuments you mention are becoming a planetary phenomenon, but now researchers are paying more and more attention to this second aspect of cultural development "from below".
Recently, a conceptual solution for a monument to Zoran Đinđić in Belgrade was presented, which differs from the majority of monuments erected in recent years in that city, which caused sharp reactions and controversy on the Internet. If we compare the monuments to Borislav Pekić and the Russian Emperor Nicholas II in Belgrade, as well as the "Montenegro Oro" and the monument to King Nicholas in Podgorica, with those from the 60s and 70s, we get the impression that we are returning to the distant 19th century. How, as an art historian, do you see this trend?
Let's go back to Tito first. How many monumental figural monuments to Tito do you know in public space? Apart from a few casts of the one by Augustinčić, for which the draft was created back in Jajce in 1943, or the one by Kršinić, we hardly have any significant examples. And in Croatia alone today there are almost 30 monuments to Tuđman, and in Belgrade, instead of a monument to Tito, we have a monument to the Azerbaijani dictator Heydar Aliyev. The center of Skopje has become a symbol of this monumental craft, ad absurdum.
The hyperproduction of monumental plastic, apart from the simplified technical conditions for the accelerated production of such, as a rule, artistically unsuccessful works, shows that we want to quickly remove all the achievements of modernity from the public sphere. As the American theoretician Louis Mumford said in the thirties - the concept of a modern monument is a contradiction: if it is a monument then it is not modern, if it is modern it cannot be a monument.
On the occasion of the monument to Đinđić, polemics are being waged that completely shake off the topics of contemporary debates about ways to overcome ceremonial memorial plastic as a form of commemoration in public space. There is still controversy over whether the monument to Djindjic should be figurative or not. The competition was won by an artistically "advanced" solution backed by two respected professors of the University of the Arts. Now they have to face all kinds of nonsense and vulgar insults uttered by their critics.
But it would be better if they, in their capacity as educators, opened debates that would deal with alternative and participatory forms of commemoration in public space. Well, for example, the "Monument Group" was active in Belgrade in the previous decade, which dealt with these issues, but such discussions are still ignored in the artistic-academic space. It is too early to conclude what the monument to Djindjic will finally look and sound like.
Another solution from the competition seemed interesting to me, that of Milorad Mladenović, which is "constructive" and not "symbolic-expressive", and is similar to some kind of public speaker that evokes the projects of the Soviet constructivists and gives citizens a kind of platform for expression and not just " a totem" around which they will gather. However, these topics remain in the shadow of what is also an ethical question - is this monument in the service of washing the biography of those who are now in power, who until recently danced on Djindjic's grave and glorified Ratko Mladic?
Let's go back to the Museum of Contemporary Art for a moment. Although the reconstruction was completed in September, October 20, i.e. the 73rd anniversary of the liberation of Belgrade in World War II, was chosen as the date of the official opening. What do you think, how did the political "elite" (from Prime Minister Ana Brnabić, through Siniša Malog, to Maja Gojković), who deny the Yugoslav heritage at every step, find their way in this con text? Could they have learned something?
I think it was especially difficult for the Minister of Culture, who is a declared Serbian royalist, crypto-Chetnik and anti-Yugoslav. In a certain way, Maja Gojković is also a kind of "camp" figure - and she is "deserving" of another monument that, fortunately, has not yet been erected in Belgrade - a figural monument to the American pop artist Andy Warhol. The Serbian political elite would show that they have learned something only if they themselves, e.g. the mayor of Mali, admitted their plagiarism and their fake diplomas.
When it comes to Yugoslav heritage, there is also an interesting attempt at appropriation - Vučić repeatedly refers to Tito as a significant historical figure, but to say that he supposedly built more in Serbia than that Tito. Tito's ghost still hovers, but performances of historical revisionism are constantly performed. What one of my friends said - based on this celebration of the liberation of Belgrade, one could conclude that Belgrade was liberated by the Russians and the Chetniks together.
You insist that the system in SFRY was dynamic, and that what we call today "dissident culture" was actually the official culture. How did it come to be that various critical voices were treated as dissident, even though they were articulated by staunch socialists?
My generation grew up with this division between some official culture, which we mostly criticized (e.g. films by Veljko Bulajić, choreography for Youth Day or some pompous choral-musical celebrations dedicated to the revolution), and some critical, dissident culture which we glorified - films black wave, conceptualism in art or punk music. As if we were not aware that in the most important, production sense, all these were aspects of the culture of socialism - that the socialist social and economic frameworks enabled cultural diversity.
And that those differences found in the domain of power relations and closeness to the political bureaucracy - that Bulajić, unlike Žilnik or Makavajev, had enormous structural power - existed and exist in other political circumstances that are apparently more permissive and culturally developed. In every system, some artists court the political bureaucracy, while others seek to preserve their independence.
Bonus video:
