Abstract
The article conducts a comparative discussion on the strategic poetic and political similarities/differences between the respective contexts of neo-avant-garde and retro-avant-garde practices in relation to aesthetic, artistic, and cultural revolutions. I juxtapose two revolutionary potentials and effects of their actualisation: the utopias and projections of the international revolution relating to the “new sensibility” and the unity of “art and life” of 1968, and several projects and practices that undermine totalitarian systems, from punk cynicism to the national revolutions of 1989 that overthrew real socialism in the Eastern and Central Europe. In my comparative discussion I focus on two specific cases in Slovenian art and alternative cultures, highlighting the position of “experimental poetry,” “new sensibility,” and “conceptual art” of the OHO group, active between 1966 and 1971, and the position of “political cynicism” and “retro-avant-garde art” in the Neue Slowenische Kunst movement founded in 1984.
Highlights
In the 1960s, the left and liberal revolutionary potentials within the student and youth movements came into confrontation; they pursued either a “new sensibility” (Marcuse 23–24) or a “radical change in everyday life” in both developed and real socialist societies
The student and youth movement and its new leftist, spiritually exotic, and emancipatory political platforms were directed against the bureaucratization
The revolutions on the eve of 1989 and in its wake took place mainly because the project of state socialism was coming to an end, accompanied by the collapse of the late-socialist USSR
Summary
In the 1960s, the left and liberal revolutionary potentials within the student and youth movements came into confrontation; they pursued either a “new sensibility” (Marcuse 23–24) or a “radical change in everyday life” in both developed and real socialist societies. The movement of OHO – Katalog included poetic, artistic, activist, theoretical, and cultural practices that were carried out around 1968 in Ljubljana.
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