E D I T O R I A L S T A T E M E N T
FROM THE EDITORS
With the many symposia and exhibitions commemorating the fi ftieth
anniversary of 1968 now behind us, this fi rst issue of 2019 asks how to
historicize the art of the moment after. The articles in the current issue
displace events that often serve as historical markers, asking instead
how to interpret the artistic production of gradual and contradictory
processes of economic modernization and political institutionalization.
In so doing, they question how to reconstruct artistic tendencies and
institutional norms without confi rming the inevitability of the present,
searching for utopian images, or trying to redeem social experiments
that capital has long since assumed as its own. The topics and contexts
explored in the articles in this issue serve as more than mere illustra-
tions of failed or passing moments of political or symbolic experimen-
tation. Rather, they function as occasions for questioning prevailing
assumptions about the critical-methodological approach supposedly
best suited to a given period, socio-political context, or medium.
Marko Ili´c’s “ ‘Made in Yugoslavia’: Struggles with Self-
Management in the New Art Practice, 1965–71” studies the socio-
economic and institutional determinations of Conceptual art in the
former Yugoslavia. Ili´c offers a reading of “New Art” forms that
emerged in major cultural centers of the Socialist Federal Republic of
Yugoslavia (Belgrade, Ljubljana, Novi Sad, and Zagreb) following major
economic reforms. The author discusses the artist groups OHO and
© 2019 ARTMargins and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
https://doi:.org/10.1162/artm_e_00224
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KÔD, as well as the role played by the so-called Student Cultural
Centers, emphasizing the extent to which they responded to the com-
plex historical-political conjuncture of market reform and socialist self-
management of the mid-1960s. Ili´c ultimately asks how to interpret the
New Art Practice in relation to socioeconomic modernization and the
reform of self-management without reducing its experiments to a form
of heroic antitotalitarianism or complicity with US consumerism.
In “Instructive, Dramatic, and Corrective Collectivity: Socialist
Realism in the Mirror of Collegial Debates,” Ma¯ra Traumane studies
the trajectory of the Artists’ Union of the Latvian Soviet Socialist
Republic during the second half of the 1940s and early 1950s. In an
effort to identify distinct modes of collective behavior in the processes
of socialist art production, Traumane traces the effects of changes in
Soviet Union cultural policy as they pertained to the promulgation and
reception of Socialist Realism. Her article invites us to locate these
effects not at the level of form or representation but rather in the lan-
guage and logic of the collectivity that they produced. In doing so, it
underscores the contingent institutional constraints that shaped this
purportedly triumphant moment of Stalinist Socialist Realism.
Lidia Klein’s preface to the translated document “Common Space
and Individual Space: Comments on a Group Task from the First Half
of 1993” also reflects on the limits of artistic experimentalism in a
moment defined by a sense that time is out of joint. “Common Space
and Individual Space” compiles the accounts by Polish artists Monika
Zieli ´nska, Jane Stoykow, and Artur Z˙ mijewski of a performative group
activity entitled Pieroz˙ ek drewniany, zimnym mie˛sem nadziewany (The
Wooden Dumpling, Filled with Cold Meat) that took place in 1992–93.
First published in the Polish magazine Czereja, the text was intended
as a living document of the experimental artistic practices and peda-
gogical methods of Kowalnia, a studio for diploma art students run
by Grzegorz Kowalski in the Department of Sculpture at the Academy
of Fine Arts in Warsaw. As Klein signals in her introduction, “the dis-
cussion around The Wooden Dumpling provides a valuable account of
Kowalnia from the perspective of its own graduates, just prior to their
entrance onto the Polish art scene.” In a broader sense, the text also
sheds light on the tensions and skepticism among the participants with
respect to the activities’ transgressive potential and articulates a sense,
in the words of Jane Stoykow, that “everything ended before it really
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started and gained speed,” thus foreshadowing, according to Klein,
“the failed aspirations of Poland in the 1990s.”
Ivana Bago’s review essay, “Yugoslavia as World History: The
Political Economy of Self-Managed Art” addresses two recent critical
accounts of art and performance history: Armin Medosch’s New
Tendencies: Art at the Threshold of the Information Revolution (1961–
1978) (2016) and Branislav Jakovljevi ´c’s Alienation Effects: Performance
and Self-Management in Yugoslavia, 1945–91 (2016). Bago claims that
these two studies do more than tell the story of a particular national
art, and that they do so by questioning commonplace ideas about
Yugoslavia’s purportedly exceptional cultural and political Cold War
status and by situating such concerns among broader attempts to
rethink the narrative strategies adequate to globalization. Rather than
embrace the particularity of Yugoslavia’s historical development in
the second half of the 20th century, Bago considers the potentially uni-
versal consequences of the failed or truncated project of worker self-
management for theorizing socialism after the so-called end of history.
Labor Power Plant, Romana Schmalisch and Robert Schlicht’s
Artist Project, begins where the attempt at worker self-management
leaves off, unfolding a dystopian present in which the now common-
place idea of cultivating “human resources” reveals capital’s attempt to
quite literally produce labor power. Labor Power Plant cannily presents
an uncanny world defined by the economic productivity of the self, on
the one hand, and the purported autonomy of capital, on the other.
However, in the pages of the Artist Project, such contemporary forms
of exploitation are not “beyond Marx,” as some contemporary theories
of immaterial labor suggest, but rather appear in the opening lines
of Capital: “The wealth of our society presents itself as an immense
accumulation of human resources.”
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