Nonaligned Modernism

In less than half a century, the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia successfully defeated Fascist occupation, fended off dominating pressures from the Eastern and Western blocs, built a modern society on the ashes of war, created its own form of socialism, and led the formation of the Nonaligned Movement. This country's principles and its continued battles, fought against all odds, provided the basis for dynamic and exceptional forms of art. Drawing on archival materials, postcolonial theory, and Eastern European socialist studies, Nonaligned Modernism chronicles the emergence of late modernist artistic practices in Yugoslavia from the end of the Second World War to the mid-1980s. Situating Yugoslav modernism within postcolonial artistic movements of the twentieth century, Bojana Videkanic explores how cultural workers collaborated with others from the Global South to create alternative artistic and cultural networks that countered Western hegemony. Videkanic focuses primarily on art exhibitions along with examples of international cultural exchange to demonstrate that nonaligned art wove together politics and aesthetics, and indigenous, Western, and global influences. An interdisciplinary book, Nonaligned Modernism highlights Yugoslavia's key role in the creation of a global modernist ethos and international postcolonial culture.

In less than half a century, the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia successfully defeated Fascist occupation, fended off dominating pressures from the Eastern and Western blocs, built a modern society on the ashes of war, created its own form of socialism, and led the formation of the Nonaligned Movement. This country's principles and its continued battles, fought against all odds, provided the basis for dynamic and exceptional forms of art. Drawing on archival materials, postcolonial theory, and Eastern European socialist studies, Nonaligned Modernism chronicles the emergence of late modernist artistic practices in Yugoslavia from the end of the Second World War to the mid-1980s. Situating Yugoslav modernism within postcolonial artistic movements of the twentieth century, Bojana Videkanic explores how cultural workers collaborated with others from the Global South to create alternative artistic and cultural networks that countered Western hegemony. Videkanic focuses primarily on art exhibitions along with examples of international cultural exchange to demonstrate that nonaligned art wove together politics and aesthetics, and indigenous, Western, and global influences. An interdisciplinary book, Nonaligned Modernism highlights Yugoslavia's key role in the creation of a global modernist ethos and international postcolonial culture.

After a summit in Belgrade in September 1961, socialist Yugoslavia, led by President Josip Broz Tito until his death in 1980, initiated a movement with states in the Global South. The Non-Aligned Movement not only offered an alternative to the Cold War polarization between NATO and the Warsaw Pact but also expressed the hopes of a world emerging from colonial domination. Socialist Yugoslavia and the Non-Aligned Movement investigates the Non-Aligned Movement both as a top-down, interstate initiative and as a site for transnational exchange in science, art and culture, architecture, education, and industry. Re-invigorating older debates by consulting newly available sources, the volume challenges studies that marginalize the role of socialist Yugoslavia in the Non-Aligned Movement. Contributors address topics such as women’s involvement, antifascism and anti-imperialism, cultural and educational exchange, tensions in Yugoslav diplomacy, competing understandings of economic development, the role of the Yugoslav construction company Energoprojekt, Yugoslav relations with Latin America and Africa, and contemporary support for refugees and asylum seekers as a kind of practical and affective afterlife of Yugoslavia’s non-aligned commitments. Socialist Yugoslavia and the Non-Aligned Movement offers an innovative approach to one of the twentieth century’s most important international movements and confronts issues of economic, social, and cultural rights that remain relevant today.

Throughout the twentieth century in the lands of Yugoslavia, socialists embarked on multiple projects of supranational unification. Sensitive to the vulnerability of small nations in a world of great powers, they pursued political sovereignty, economic development, and cultural modernization at a scale between the national and the global – from regional strategies of Balkan federalism to continental visions of European integration to the internationalist ambitions of the Non-Aligned Movement. In Mediating Spaces James Robertson offers an intellectual history of the diverse supranational politics of Yugoslav socialism, beginning with its birth in the 1870s and concluding with its violent collapse in the 1990s. Showcasing the ways in which socialists in Southeast Europe confronted the political, economic, and cultural dimensions of globalization, the book frames the evolution of supranational politics as a response to the shifting dynamics of global economic and geopolitical competition. Arguing that literature was a crucial vehicle for imagining new communities beyond the nation, Robertson analyzes the manuscripts, journals, and personal correspondence of the literary left to excavate the cultural geographies that animated Yugoslav socialism and its supranational horizons. The book ultimately illuminates the innovative strategies of cultural development used by socialist writers to challenge global asymmetries of power and prestige. Mediating Spaces reveals the full significance of supranationalism in the history of socialist thought, recovering a key concern for an era of renewed geopolitical contestation in Eastern Europe.

This collection takes a case study approach to enter into and explore spaces of 'Second-Third World' interaction during the Cold War. From the dining halls of a university, to hospital wards, construction sites, military barracks, pubs and more, the chapters drop the scale down from the global to the particular to better see, understand and interpret the complex nature of these spaces. These ordinary spaces are examined to understand how they were conceived, constructed, shaped and reshaped by people over time. Many are physical places of encounter, while others are more abstract, embodying ideological goals. In exploring these spaces the contributors show how the Second and Third World actors understood them and connected them to ideas such as gender and space, the space of the nation, of the modern and of the self. Essentially, it seeks to unravel how these spaces between Second and Third Worlds worked, and what, if anything, was distinctive and consequential about them. Second-Third World Spaces in the Cold War explores the ways in which these Second and Third World actors collaborated and clashed in these everyday spaces, and brings these multi-faceted, multi-actor histories to a vital centre ground.

This edited collection explores the visibility of modernization in architecture produced in different capitalist regions across the world and provides readers with a historico-theoretical and historico-geographical discussion. Focusing on a particular building type, an influential architect’s work, as well as relevant texts and documents, each chapter addresses the many facets of "delay" which are central to the problematization of capitalism’s progressive dissemination of technological and aesthetic regimes of modernism. This collection underlines the centrality of temporality for a critical understanding of colonialism, modernism, and capitalism. The book is primarily concerned with the historical timeline, the tangential point when a nation enters modernization processes. In exploring modernism in diverse regions such as East Asia, Pacific, Eastern Europe, and Iran, each chapter addresses the historiographic and architectonic unfolding of modernization beyond the western hemisphere. The exploration of these diverse case-studies will be of interest to students of architecture and researchers working on the collision of temporalities and the subject's critical importance for different country’s built-environments.

An account of a major international art movement originating in the former Yugoslavia in the 1960s, which anticipated key aspects of information aesthetics. New Tendencies, a nonaligned modernist art movement, emerged in the early 1960s in the former Yugoslavia, a nonaligned country. It represented a new sensibility, rejecting both Abstract Expressionism and socialist realism in an attempt to formulate an art adequate to the age of advanced mass production. In this book, Armin Medosch examines the development of New Tendencies as a major international art movement in the context of social, political, and technological history. Doing so, he traces concurrent paradigm shifts: the change from Fordism (the political economy of mass production and consumption) to the information society, and the change from postwar modernism to dematerialized postmodern art practices. Medosch explains that New Tendencies, rather than opposing the forces of technology as most artists and intellectuals of the time did, imagined the rapid advance of technology to be a springboard into a future beyond alienation and oppression. Works by New Tendencies cast the viewer as coproducer, abolishing the idea of artist as creative genius and replacing it with the notion of the visual researcher. In 1968 and 1969, the group actively turned to the computer as a medium of visual research, anticipating new media and digital art. Medosch discusses modernization in then-Yugoslavia and other nations on the periphery; looks in detail at New Tendencies' five major exhibitions in Zagreb (the capital of Croatia); and considers such topics as the group's relation to science, the changing relationship of manual and intellectual labor, New Tendencies in the international art market, their engagement with computer art, and the group's eventual eclipse by other “new art practices” including conceptualism, land art, and arte povera. Numerous illustrations document New Tendencies' works and exhibitions.

In Art Work, Katja Praznik counters the Western understanding of art – as a passion for self-expression and an activity done out of love, without any concern for its financial aspects – and instead builds a case for understanding art as a form of invisible labour. Focusing on the experiences of art workers and the history of labour regulation in the arts in socialist Yugoslavia, Praznik helps elucidate the contradiction at the heart of artistic production and the origins of the mystification of art as labour. This profoundly interdisciplinary book highlights the Yugoslav socialist model of culture as the blueprint for uncovering the interconnected aesthetic and economic mechanisms at work in the exploitation of artistic labour. It also shows the historical trajectory of how policies toward art and artistic labour changed by the end of the 1980s. Calling for a fundamental rethinking of the assumptions behind Western art and exploitative labour practices across the world, Art Work will be of interest to scholars in East European studies, art theory, and cultural policy, as well as to practicing artists.