The Salon between Situation and Revolution

Although Salon and Revolution are, as concepts, not only opposed in principle, but, what is more, mutually exclusive - or perhaps for that very reason, their histories have been known to meet every once in a while.
Founded as a regular exhibition of works by members of the French Academy in the time of the Ancien Régime, the Salon has always been a statist institution par excellence and as such necessarily a target for the Revolution. For example, when, after the establishment of the Paris commune in 1870, a separate ministry of art was founded, its first task was precisely to reform the Salon with a view to abolishing the instance of the jury in favour of the authority of the artists. Among the people invited to participate in the organisation was Gustave Courbet - one of the first declared artist-revolutionaries, whose biography includes an intense and conflicting personal relationship with the institution of the Salon; although he accepted the reform as a step in the desired direction, he made it clear that he didn’t consider it sufficiently radical, criticising precisely the state paternalism still implied in the new statute of the Salon and preferring an undefined form of artistic self-management. There had, of course, been such attempts before: in 1863 the Salon des Refusés (Salon of the Refused) was founded as an alternative to the discriminatory policy of the official Salon jury and the practice would continue afterwards, resulting in a host of renegade salon institutions, which have held out to this day as an expression of democratic pluralism, with names - Independent, Autumn, Spring, or Youth Salon - which no longer even evoke the idea of the universal liberation of art from state and other repressive apparatuses.
There is therefore little sense in approaching as a historical problem, that is, at the level of the historical destinies of all revolutions, the sustainability of the Salon as dictatorship of the masses, but instead as a problem of principle. At the level of principle too, the structural level, the Salon is no more than a symptom of democracy in general; founded at the beginning of modern times, precisely with the intention of opening art up to public opinion, with the ideal goal of making “good” (once academic, today modern or contemporary) art assert itself as the authorised representative of the citizenry, that is the expression of the political power of the people, the institution of the Salon still embodies the norm of political consensus based on a liberal pluralism of opinions and interests.
Understanding society as a heterogeneous totality, the Salon is thus in principle open to everyone: in this system, all of the exclusions that some new generations rebel against can only be temporary, meaning that their inclusion into a series of particular identities is simply a matter of historical time. To misuse Badieu’s thought, as long as it is understood as a situation, the Salon cannot be a revolution; as long as the democratic nature of the Salon is understood as the pragmatic possibility of naming in detail the elements of the set it refers to (in this case the totality of the world of art), the Salon cannot be a revolutionary event of radical renaming - an event which eliminates participation on a representational basis, but opens up the possibility of universal subjectivisation in the process of discovering a new artistic truth. More simply put, understood as a revolution, not a situation, the Salon does not have a descriptive, but a normative function: instead of the passive image of a state, that is, a pragmatic nomenclature of the artistic situation in the local, national, or global community, the Salon becomes an artistic event that is propelled towards an uncertain future.
It is upon the dilemma of situation or revolution that of course the Croatian Youth Salon has mainly faltered; it has mostly routinely satisfied the former, as the name of the central exhibition of works entered for the competition after all runs (the situation). Started in revolutionary 1968, the Youth Salon was conceived as a response to the needs of the younger generation of artists, that is, those who considered themselves discriminated against by a situation in which the grander exhibition institutions were reserved for established artists. Presupposing in the start the identification of young artists as a socially discriminated group as compared to the privileged cultural elite, the foundation of the Salon, rather than an expression of revolutionary rebellion, seemed more like a paternalist gesture of the state apparatus, which decided to provide for young artists, by offering them a Salon of their own; since the form of a formal, official exhibition (which up to 1996 took place at the Art Pavilion) hindered the qualitative differentiation of the art of the young generation, the Youth Salon was overshadowed from the beginning by the image of a review of prematurely aged artists aspiring to social status. In the catalogue of the 2nd Salon a set of questions was posed to the participants about the role and destiny of the new salon; most of the despairing answers emphasized the necessity of a certain form of self-management and an uncompromising selection, indicating that things were not moving in the desired direction. In the forty years of its existence, in spite of the best intentions of the organisers, who took turns in office in conformity with democratic regulations, the Salon has survived more as the simulacrum of a situation on the basis of negative selection, rather than as a revolutionary artistic event, and the occasional deflections in the latter direction can be counted on one hand: at the 5th Salon, for example, as a gesture of protest, all of the received works were exhibited without selection; the 6th Salon was organised as an “open studio”; starting with the 13th Salon, “author concepts” were introduced, which opened up the possibility of a theme-centred and critical approach and resulted in the exhibition expanding to additional gallery spaces, heralding the possibility of exhibiting in alternative circumstances; the 20th Salon was the only one to leave out “Situation” in exchange for exclusively authorial concepts; at the 23rd Salon the Ego East group emphasized collective instead of individual identity by including the older generation of artists into its programme; the 26th is the only Salon which tried to offer a radical alternative to the form of a gallery review of works: by organising an exhibition and a host of other cultural events the Zagreb Fair, it acquired the reputation of a failed attempt, from which it has still not succeeded in freeing itself, unfortunately never outgrowing the status of an experiment. In those forty years, the discourse accompanying the Youth Salon has mostly been defeatist: during the very first years of its existence, most of the introductory forewords consisted simply of the shrugging of shoulders; stating pluralism as the basic characteristic of the art of the moment, an attempt was made to justify a perfunctory representative review as the democratic confrontation of differences.
The reason why this pluralist way of understanding the situation did not seem convincing even to the organisers of the exhibition themselves is, of course, simply the fundamental paradox of pluralism: since the endless differentiation and the principle of inclusion that the nomenclature of a certain set allows necessarily rest on an elementary exclusion, the more the Salon strove to be more open to different forms of artistic expression and to enrich its fare with a broader spectrum of cultural products, the deeper the symptomatic reality of this abundance sank into the abyss of the unpresentable. Although the first Salons mostly presented traditional art forms (put kindly, based on the notorious modernist heritage), in time the Youth Salon created the conceptual prerequisites for including in principle all of the existing artistic and visual-cultural practices: starting with the 11th Salon (1979), the competition was split into three sections with separate juries - one encompassing painting, sculpture, and graphics; a second which under the common name “media explorations” understood everything from photography, film, and video, through conceptual and performance art, to comics and other printed matter; and a third which included architecture and design. A further particularisation was made possible by the above mentioned author concepts, which often functioned as a prosthetic supplement to “Situation”, instead of a possibility of cutting through the existing inventory with a new, revolutionary definition of art. Within the framework of the definition that the standard scheme of “Situation” allowed, the “media explorations”, finally initiated and presented at the 11th Salon by the president of the jury for the section, Josip Stošić, could not outgrow their isolated ghetto; from then on, authors and works related to the concept of New Art Practice would sporadically appear, but they would not change the characteristic face of the Salon’ what is more, they would stick out as the miserable scars of its dark side, bearing witness to the historical existence of a phenomenon that the Youth Salon failed to recognize (and which matured at other exhibition institutions, like the Student Centre Gallery). The reason for this is again not a mathematical fact, that is the quantity in which certain artists or artistic phenomena are represented, but the assumption of the concept itself: settling for the discourse of an event which defines art according to the medium as its essential ontological characteristic, Stošić’s “media explorations”, whatever their date, could not have the universal potential for redefining salon art. One of the rare, although not the only moment in the history of the Salon which succeeded in establishing this perspective, was the phrase “the New Painting”, inaugurated by Zvonko Maković’s authorial concept at the 14th Salon. As a critical statement which consisted in the rehabilitation of a traditional medium in the context of the post-conceptual state of art, “New Painting” had the potential for re-evaluating all of the elements of the set, remaining actually one of the few artistic phenomena that the Salon managed to articulate in the phase of its emergence, thereby bringing Croatian youth up to date with the international artistic contemporaneity. As far as the older, at times left out, generation of “media explorers” is concerned, it could only appear at the Youth Salon as a symptom of the repressed past: since that was not possible at the moment of legalisation, when the nominal section was opened, it finally happened as late as the war year 1992, when, at the 23rd Salon, a group of young artists called Ego East, referring to a continuity of artistic and worldview orientation, exhibited at the Art Pavilion, along with their own works, the works of pioneer “media explorers”, transgressing not only the criterion of the age limit, but the very taboo of the democratic nature of the sample presented by the Youth Salon.

Therefore, in an effort to represent everything, the Salon conceived as situation necessarily only represents some, excluding others: reducing its own institutional authority to the passive representation of a hypostatised category of youth as an aspect of artistic reality determined by milieu, moment, and race, the Salon merely supports the specific interests of a certain socio-cultural hegemony, which prefers the status quo based on categories of individual authorship, national affiliation, differentiation according to media, etc. As a representative survey of Croatian artistic reality, the Salon will necessarily seem to be, not a statement of young artists, organised by themselves, but a paternalist higher court, a provider of a consensual social opinion on young people, shedding its responsibility under the aegis of liberal pluralism. At a Salon of this kind the paradoxical situation will always be possible where the exhibited art is simultaneously criticised for its imitativeness and for being insufficiently informed, while shifting responsibility to educational institutions or art critics - which is certainly an urgent issue, but not an excuse for the defeatism of the exhibition institution as an authorised subject in defining artistic standards.

The dilemma between situation and revolution, like the question to be or not to be, is therefore for the Salon not a dilemma between exhibiting all or exhibiting some, but a dilemma of whether those who momentarily occupy the place of a young Croatian artist as empty signifier have a normative character for all those who could potentially find themselves in their place, whatever their age, nationality, cultural affiliation, or any other characteristic outside the reality of the Salon. The abandoning of the ideological model of democratic representation in favour of dictating with commitment the Art of the Day undoubtedly asks not for objectivity, but for the radical subjectivity of the Salon as a unique and unrepeatable art institution: the possibility of giving a subjective answer to the question of the kind of art that young people want and the kind that they are ready to create, an answer that will be guided not by individual interests or envy of the Other, but by the idealism of art itself as an authentic expression of egalitarian utopia.