Review: Toward a Concrete Utopia: Architecture in Yugoslavia, 1948–1980

Abstract

Toward a Concrete Utopia: Architecture in Yugoslavia, 1948–1980 Museum of Modern Art, New York 15 July 2018–13 January 2019 The grating melodrama of newsreel audio—or its retro heroism, depending on one's previous relationship to twentieth-century propaganda—sampled and simulated in the triptych of videos encountered in the first space of Toward a Concrete Utopia , powerfully reoriented this exhibition's visitors from their reality in New York City and the atmosphere of the lobby spaces of the Museum of Modern Art. The first room was darker than those that followed in the enfilade of this salon-style survey, curated by MoMA's Martino Stierli and visiting curator Vladimir Kulic (associate professor at Iowa State University), with assistance from Anna Kats. Those entering read some fairly straightforward and earnest curatorial promises on the wall out front, but absorbing what the “third way”—neither socialism nor capitalism—or “self-management” might mean, or that this show might be an invitation for the audience to contemplate its own failure to conceive an alternative world, was a demanding task of historical and political imagination. It was also immediately complicated by the visceral reaction invoked by the sounds of the newsreel voice-over and the bodies and technology organized into “mass ornaments” in the original film material and heightened by the reediting in Mila Turajlic's commissioned videos.1 Few artifacts were displayed in this first room, but those that appeared stood in for two enormously ambitious projects: the transformation of the soggy land along the rivers Sava and Danube into a new federal capital, New Belgrade (Yugoslavia's largest testing ground for housing), and the territorial plan for developing the Adriatic coast with sensitivity to its natural beauty and its status as a common good. Each of these projects was represented in oversized drawings, and together they introduced the first of the four major themes that organized the exhibition: “Modernization,” “Global Networks,” “Everyday Life,” and “Identities.” The juxtaposition of the first room's artifacts—the …