Beyond good and evil? Popular songs, mathemes and bus rides (art and transition in the region of the former Yugoslavia)

Abstract

Art production and art reception play a vital role in transitional societies. However, their actual operation and patterns of impact often appear ‘messy’ to those who use and evaluate art in transitional contexts: an artwork can serve as a catalyst for peace building and transitional justice processes, but it can also obstruct such processes, or impart ambiguous meanings to them; and its modes of operation (including the art producers’ awareness of their role in transitional justice processes), its reception trends and its influence on transitional society all vary over time. Framed by transitional justice theory and an interdisciplinary approach that incorporates the insights of psychosocial cultural studies, comparative arts and the phenomenology of embodiment, this article scrutinizes this ambivalent operation in relation to the fluctuating sphere of reception in the region of the former Yugoslavia since the establishment of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in 1993. The author juxtaposes art practices widely different in terms of expression, format, scope, reach and ambition, but comparable insofar as they all operate in the ‘open’ and appeal to senses and repetition engagement to create patterns of affiliation. These include various types of popular music (turbo-folk, rock, hip-hop, soft pop) and the public intervention activities of the Serbian DAH Theatre and pan-regional art and theory collective Monument Group. The article argues for the development of hermeneutic and axiological thinking that befits the complex functioning of art in transition: nuanced and multilevelled, challenging inherited hierarchies and paradigms while appreciating the prolonged life/impact of art practices and the sensorial, cognitive and ideological variation in their reception. It proposes moving beyond the binary assessments and adopting a more dynamic approach to the evaluation of artworks in transition for the benefit of both scholars and practitioners in the field.