Incomplete Modernities: Historicizing Yugoslavian Avant-Gardes

Abstract

Impossible Histories: Historical Avant-Gardes, Neo-Avant-Gardes, and Post-Avant-Gardes in Yugoslavia, 1918–1991. Dubravka Djurić and Miško Šuvakovi´c, eds. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003. Pp. xviii + 605. $44.95 (cloth). Modernism in Serbia: The Elusive Margins of Belgrade Architecture, 1919–1941. Ljiljana Blagojevi´c. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003. Pp. xiii + 286. $34.95 (cloth). Out of the traces left behind by the dissolution of a country once known as Yugoslavia, a new history is taking shape, a history that indeed occurred in the past, yet which could only really happen now when the events that make up this history's content are already irreparably over. The paradoxical, "impossible" history of Yugoslavian modernism and the Yugoslavian avant-garde is becoming newly present in the vacant place marked by a still contested, but largely empty sign that was once a proper name, Yugoslavia. Moreover, as these two rich and provocative books suggest, the curiously equivocal time of this history-under-construction echoes the original, problematic temporal structure of the modernist arts in the historical Yugoslavia. Through their focus on the brilliant but dispersive production of modernist visual artists, writers, musicians, architects, and performers in the South Slav lands, both books help to illuminate the fantastic national-utopian fulfillment of modern time under the sign of "Yugoslavia" as the ultimate message of its dissonant collage of cultural, linguistic, and territorial elements—a time that has now definitively passed beyond its end. The editors of the compendious essay and document collection Impossible Histories, Dubravka Djurić and Miško Šuvakovi´c, present readers with a kind of avant-garde remapping of Yugoslavia's impossible [End Page 713] territory, drawing the interconnections and borderlines between different historical moments, linguistic-cultural zones, and media. Across political and disciplinary divisions, they have assembled some of the best scholars, theorists, and artist-participants in Serbia, Croatia, and Slovenia as contributors, who together cover topics including experimental poetry, visual arts, conceptual art, photography, periodicals and books, architecture, theater, classical and rock music, film, video, as well as specific art movements such as the early avant-garde Zenitism or the Slovenian multi-arts "alternative state," the Neue Slowenische Kunst. Along with the critical and historical essays, the editors have provided a small selection of translated documents to supply readers with some primary points of reference in a bewilderingly complex, multi-linguistic, multi-medial body of artistic and theoretical work. Simply at the level of providing information about a wide range of artists, works, publications, and movements, as well as the national and international contexts that framed this artistic activity, the book is a treasure trove. No reader, from the curious beginner to the scholarly expert in the avant-garde or in central European cultural history, will come away from the book without having discovered new facts, arguments, and interpretations. As the editorial conception symbolized by the volume's title suggests, however, and as several of the contributors explicitly consider in their essays, the work presented here also raises a number of questions for the historiography of art and culture and for the theory and history of the avant-garde as it has come down to us primarily on the basis of materials from a few key "Western" centers, such as Paris, London, Berlin, Milan, Vienna, and New York. Notable for the symbolic geography of modernism at issue in these books, in sheer geo-physical terms, Berlin, Prague, and Ljubljana are nearly connected by a longitudinal line, as are Vienna and Zagreb, Stockholm and Belgrade. Yet the North-South gradiant seems to make some "Wests" more "western" than others. What Antonio Gramsci termed the "southern question," the uneven development and cultural difference between the northern and southern parts of his not fully nationalized territory, also has a trans-national, European dimension that has received insufficient attention in the comparative study of modernisms and modernities. Both the Impossible Histories volume and Ljiljana Blagojevi´c's study of Serbian modernist...