Or does even a hint of yearning for revolution necessarily get “salonized”, becoming part of the globalized, amorphous mixture of market and spectacle? What does it mean today to “be young” and how can the Youth Salon justify the appropriation of this attribute, not simply by delineating an age limit as the easiest, bureaucratic way of defining “youth”, but by activating new content and forms which oppose the “old” ones? What are, if they exist, institutions, norms, values, authorities, etc. in opposition to which new generations position themselves or could (should) do so? The title of the exhibition for the 29th Zagreb Youth Salon contains a deliberate paradox, creating a space of uncertainty about its determination and presenting itself primarily through questioning of the possibilities, responsibilities, and positions which contemporary art can activate and create today.
The title also evokes the two contrasting approaches to contemporary art, as they have been formulated throughout the 20th century: the modernist dogma of art as an autonomous activity, independent of anything beyond the domain of visual laws and the artist’s inspiration, and the opposing idea of art that not only critically reflects on, but also actively participates in reshaping everyday life and socio-political reality. In Croatian art history this opposition was established in the late 1940s and early 1950s as the locus of polemics and disputes which began by announcements of the sots-realist program, advocating art which consciously participates in the building of a new society of progress (as opposed to the hedonistic purposes of bourgeois salon-like art and culture). This tension was resolved, however, with an evident triumph of the Western-oriented, high-modernist canon of the autonomy of art that established abstract art as the dominant form of expression during the 1950s and 1960s in Croatia. Having in mind the developments in socialist countries belonging to the Eastern Bloc, the failure of the sots-realist project in Croatia could be regarded a fortunate circumstance which helped avoid blatant instrumentalization of art for ideological and propaganda purposes. On the other hand, revisions of the modernist project celebrating the autonomy of art show that, also here, we can in no way speak of the non-biased, universal art that escapes ideological dictates, which additionally points to the fact that it is impossible to view the cultural and artistic production of any period outside the specific socio-historical moment and geopolitical constellations. Later practices of conceptual and the so-called socially committed art of the 1960s and 1970s, carried on the wings of radical social and student movements which demanded in-depth socio-cultural change, sought to emancipate art from all outdated paradigms and find for it new meanings and purposes, as well as new models of artistic participation in the public, political, and intellectual spheres, and the sphere of everyday life.
Today, however, at the time of a uniform neoliberal order, in a moment when there seem to be no tangible, big revolutions on the horizon, when there are no longer homogeneous identities which those revolutions might be directed against and when the world that should be changed, cannot be conceived as a closed, coherent entity – what is the position and role of the artist as a social subject and public intellectual? Are the policies and strategies of resistance, as active subversions of existing norms, truly disunited and fragmentary, dematerialized and invisible? Is any artistic practice, which actively and critically questions its own context, ultimately and inevitably drowned in the matrix of entrepreneurial culture, where artists take on the role of skillful and flexible cultural managers? And finally, does the situation in the Croatian context and in the region still differ from this globally painted (but above all, Western) picture, as a result of the mere fact that here the system that would be responsible for art’s commodification or instrumentalization simply doesn’t exist yet?
The conceptual backdrop of The Salon of Revolution is the 40th anniversary of 1968 which, in the collective consciousness, has gained an almost mythological status, as a historic and social phenomenon, very generally connoting resistance to established civil institutions (school, state, nuclear family, church, etc.). 1968 thus evokes a mythologized and “nostalgia-zed” primordial paradise of Possibility: possibility of action, change, revolution, participation, freedom, and rebellion, as opposed to the present, the time of an unbearable lightness of passivity, characterized by lamentations about the end of history, end of politics and end of utopia. What does it mean today to mark the forty years of the 1968 revolts in contemporary art practice, critical theory and the media? Is it an act of celebration, empowerment, “fidelity to the event”, or merely its historization and commemoration? The very echoes of the radical battle cry of the 1968 generation, “Be realistic – demand the impossible”, are often bluntly quieted down by the newly re-fashioned whisper: “Be realistic – demand nothing”. Is the time of rebellion and resistance really behind us or are we just dealing with another ideological trap, which not only discourages thinking about transformative action, but also ignores the real revolutions and expressions of resistance and disobedience taking place around us (even if they can only be defined as fragmentary, “molecular”, disunited, etc.)? Does such a paralyzing, melancholic, often cynical attitude toward the past thwart the creation of new relations and visions directed toward the future?
1968 is just the allusive starting point for the project The Salon of Revolution, which links the strategies of resistance and reasons for revolt at the time with those of today. On a more general level, it explores the ways in which we look into the past and ways in which looking back into the past, even with nostalgia, can become not only a paralyzing and passive attitude, which Walter Benjamin reproachfully dubbed “left melancholy”, but the driving force of a new reflection on art and the present moment. The relation towards the past which The Salon of Revolution wishes to activate is closest to Alain Badiou’s concept of the “fidelity to the event” and, besides 1968, the project maps also a series of other “events” from the past (some of which are, more or less by accident, also anniversaries). Together, they form a series of empowering references, or at least moments whose heritage is today worth questioning and whose “anniversaries” we can, without cynicism, congratulate. This list does not, of course, form a closed circle: it is offered primarily as a series of starting points, that will continue to be developed and upgraded, through the exhibition and other events.
The year 1898 was marked in Europe, among other things, by the appearance of a new word and a new concept – that of the intellectual. At the peak of the Dreyfuss affair in France, an affair which shook up European cultural and intellectual space at the time, after Émile Zola’s famous protest letter to the French president titled “J’accuse”, in which he condemned anti-Semitism, lively debates arose as to whether it was appropriate for cultural workers, artists, and writers, then collectively labeled “intellectuals”, in their artistic and academic ivory towers, to meddle in political and state affairs. In the present constellation in which we lack a coherent entity that would be juxtaposed with another equally coherent entity, in a clear binary opposition of the good and evil, to what extent can the artist as public intellectual enact the emancipatory potential of becoming an active political subject which speaks and takes action? And finally, what is the role of cultural and art institutions in the legitimization and enforcement of artistic practice as a relevant social activity?
One of the unavoidable starting points for The Salon of Revolution is the institution of the organizer of the exhibition, Croatian Association of Artists and the venue in which the exhibition takes place, whose turbulent history is hinted at already in the visionary statement by its author and designer Ivan Meštrović, quoted at the very beginning of this text. The very inception of the House of Artists represents an emancipatory moment in itself. In the early 1930s, faced with the king’s commission to make a “gaudy rider on a horse”, that is, a monument to the kingdom and its ruler, Meštrović skillfully used his position of the regime-supported artist, to subvert the commission and construct the monument as a “home” for artists instead. In the more recent past, at the very end of the 20th century, Meštrović’s House of Artists which had, since then, gone through many transformations of the “plaque and the letters on it” (first by transforming from an artists’ house into a mosque, then from the mosque into a revolution museum, finally becoming an art venue again) managed to withstand the masterplan of another ruler, Franjo Tuđman, intending to transform it into a monument to himself and other Croatian “nobles”. Thanks to the joint initiative of Croatian artists and intellectuals, it was returned to the Artists’ Association. The history of the building, here reduced to two sentences and so deliberately idealized, thus emanates an energy of resistance, the sustainment of which asserts itself almost as a duty. In 2008, when the institution of the Croatian Artists Association underwent another transformation – a change in its structure and management, the duty is at least to question the possible roles and responsibilities which this, as well as all other cultural institutions and ultimately artists and art itself, can activate/assume today in the public, intellectual, and political sphere. And so, is it time for the Salon or a Revolution?
Today the concept of the salon has difficulty breaking free from its negative connotations: for leftist thinkers it represented a metaphor of bourgeois, elite culture, according to which art is primarily a source of pleasure and fulfillment of one’s privileged position as participant in the production and consumption of high culture. Thus the term “bourgeois left”, evoking also the spirit of a “salonized” culture or revolution, is used to refer to those who, only nominally and in a patronizing way, represent the interests of the oppressed classes. However, from the Salon of the Refused in Paris and, in the local context, the Croatian salon of 1898 or the Rijeka salon of 1954, art history chronicles a series of events which deserve the status of anniversaries, because they all used conventional formats to herald turning points or subversions of the conventional ways of thinking about art. Like Ivan Meštrović, they simultaneously accept and refuse the task assigned to them, that is – they accept it only in order to refuse it.
The last in the series of anniversaries, which, by chance or not, coincides with the rebellious 1968, is the one of the Red Peristyle action that took place in Split, Croatia and which, similarly, has been mythologized in the local context. This year it has become again a subject for reevaluation and questioning, which took place through texts in the newspapers, several exhibitions and discussions. The point which is considered the most problematic is the fact that the radical nature of the action cannot be proved, i.e. that it is impossible to be certain whether the motivation behind it consisted in a strong political statement or merely a symbolic and formalist one. Starting from this impossibility to reconstruct the past and its consequences, The Salon of Revolution questions the art practices of the 1960s and 1970s, the way in which they are transformed into heritage and the way younger generations of artists are able to find in them legitimization of politically engaged and critical strategies of making art. How can artistic practices of the 1960s and 1970s in the region be perceived, without nostalgia or mystification, as critical, if not “radical” or oppositional, and how is this reflected today, in the transitional societies of the New Europe?
At the time when the melancholic bourgeois left buries and mourns past revolutions, lamenting on the fact that revolution with physically present and solidary bodies, will not happen again, isn’t the present moment most similar precisely to the dispersed revolt of 1968, which had no clear political program, but consisted of a multitude of heterogeneous tendencies subsequently elevated to mythical status? Today, in 2008, when we are witnessing molecular, decentralized, deterritorialized protests all over the world – against China’s policy in Tibet, against the indifference of the international community to the situation in Darfur, against the next G8 summit – here, in a small corner of Eastern Europe, as the final portions of “stabilization and association” are being served, the country is preparing for the visit of George Bush and trembling at the very thought that Europe might pause the negotiations for Croatia joining of the EU, which is expected to absorb all traumas and neutralize social tensions. Isn’t this neutralized, normalized, civil Europe precisely an example of a perfect basis for a totalitarian, uniform public sphere, where fragmentary resistance is even more easily subject to shock-absorption and neutralization, or can we read into it a certain potential for facilitating the communication of oppositional thought and action, in which artists will be able to preserve the autonomy of their cultural and symbolic capital more easily and more actively assume the position of political subjects?
(April, 2008)
I was entrusted with building a monument (to the king). I didn’t want to just make some horse with a flashy rider on top. I thought of building a house which would be a home for artists. It was accepted and, as you can see, the house has been built. It’s no use quarreling about what the plaque will look like and what will be written on it. Nothing’s ermanent. The plaque can be changed and the letters on it, too. The house will stay. The exhibition Half a Century of Croatian Art will be here and whoever wants to, will exhibit. Who doesn’t want to, no big deal. Everybody will be invited.
IVAN MEŠTROVIĆ, 1938
(architect of the exhibition venue)