Pessimism of the Intellect, Optimism of the Will

Institutional Critique in Serbia and its Lack of Organic References

Stevan Vuković

Cultural Confinement – Under the Rod of the Forest Warden

One of the seminal works of Belgrade conceptual art in mid seventies, even though still under-interpreted, was Raša Todosijević’s Edinburgh statement, with a parallel title: Who makes a profit from art, and who gains from it honestly[1]. It was published as a poster on the 21^st of April 1975 listing all art profiteers, including various social parasites and red bourgeoisie. Among others, it listed the following: “the factories that produce materials necessary to artists, the firms that sell materials necessary to artists, their workers, clerks, sales personnel, agents, etc […], sales galleries and their staff, non-profit galleries, gallery owners, gallery administration, gallery curators and their personal secretaries and friends, the subsidized gallery council, the voluntary gallery council which collects money because they are not paid […], the photographer who shoots the pictures for the catalogue, the catalogue publisher, the catalogue editor, the printing firm responsible for printing the catalogue and invitations, the workers who set the print, bind the catalogue and the invitation […], the insurance companies and their personnel, the night guards of museums, galleries, collections, and this and that type of compilations or legacies, the organizers of symposia, meetings and art festivals […], organizers granting scholarships for study abroad that are usually granted to the children of high government officials, to the children of the masked and hidden bourgeoisie in socialism […], camouflaged ideologists, demagogues and reactionaries in institutions, schools of higher learning, universities and academies who have a greater interest in power and influence in the art world than in education and culture, which don’t offer any kind of profit, and all those who cover their decadent, dated, reactionary chauvinist and bourgeois models of art and culture with verbal liberalism, in order to attain positions outside the art world, outside of culture, thus being both above and beyond art and culture […],” There were about two hundred items on the list, including the author of the text himself, with the explanation that “the author wrote this text in order to profit from the good and bad in art”.

Three decades later, the same text appeared as the appendix of a book entitled Management of Art in Turbulent Circumstances[2], authored by Milena Dragićević-Šešić and Sanjin Dragojević, university lecturers and consultants in the areas of cultural politics, cultural management and institutional upgrading to Council of Europe, UNESCO and European Cultural Foundation. It was printed in full length, which is about ten pages, and was interpreted as showing the “multifaceted interdependency of involvements in the field of culture as a basic question of its significance and the possibility of survival of all its visible and less visible proponents”[3]. In other words, it was used as a plain illustration of the holistic notion of the institutional structure, and the tactics of moving within it, turning the artist’s argument against itself, stating that if all these factors really do depend on the symbolic and financial capital gathered in the arts, then there is a functional system, so that the point becomes only how to push it towards adaptable quality management, and get the most out of what circulates among its constituent parts and segments.

Using the words of Robert Smithson, from his essay written in 1972[4], one can state that what has happened to Raša Todosijević is a kind of cultural confinement – neutralization, rendering the work “ineffective, abstracted, safe, and politically lobotomized”, in order to be easily consumable and understandable, or, in this specific case, flattening it down to a simple positive statement, almost a kind of a shopping list of institutional segments that make a system of art. According to Smithson, that task, which was in this case performed by instructors of cultural management, is the one of the warden-curator, keeping art at a safe distance from the political, just like the forest warden in Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, where historical futurists were presented as “a group of small schoolboys who escaped from a Jesuit college, created a small ruckus in the nearby woods, and were brought back under the rod of the forest warden”.[5]

 
Trasformismo as the Local Institutional Logic

The whole issue is not specific to the present state of affairs only. The institutional logic of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, especially in the sector that played the role of civil society (consisting, in the jargon of socialist self-management, of socio-political organizations and socio-political communities) was based on the principle which Gramsci (borrowing from Croce) called trasformismo, whereby actual and potential leaders and initiatives coming from the subordinate groups were constantly being incorporated into the dominant project, in order to prevent the formation of counter-hegemony. That counted for the youth organizations, student organizations, unions of artists, writers and other cultural producers, cultural communities based on common ethnic, religious and other grounds, as well as different self-organized sub-cultural groups. Even the so called dissident intellectuals were in fact provided with ways to be safe in their activities (without being sent to some Gulag), for that showed the difference between the political system they were questioning and the proper Stalinist system.

In the times of former Yugoslavia, there was no outside of the system. All initiatives were sooner or later appropriated  by official institutions, and the spaces that seemed to be small autonomous zones beyond the reach of dominant social and cultural paradigms were actually recruitment centers for future leaders of the joint Yugoslavian community. In the jargon of Lacanian terminology, it was clear that “the structures of institutions are not merely imposed on the otherwise freely existing practices”, but that “all practices are always part of some institutional structure beyond which no practice, no critique, no speech is possible.” [6]

In that sense, Todosijević’s act of listing himself among the ones profiting from art by criticizing all those that profit from it, points to a very interesting feature of his work that opened paths for the next waves of local institutional critique. Namely, his standpoint of active cynicism, as Ješa Denegri called it ,[7] always distinguishes between the narrative subject and the subject of narration[8], of which the most illustrative example could be the text that is part of his 1996 work, featuring his self-portrait in a mocked Picasso style, in a typical newspaper illustration type of setting, saying: “No, madam, I am not a Serbian artist, I am just part of the conceptual art piece called a Serbian Artist”[9]. Whatever he does in his work, he does it while abandoning the sovereignty of the position of the artist as producer, a sole creative source of the work, putting himself into the position of critically reflecting the desire of the system he is entangled in.

In that same spirit, Pavle Ćosić, one of the Illegal Confectioners, a group of cynical social and media activists that have become active in the local scene in recent years, claims that since people in general believe what they desire to be true, his and his group’s role (the other members are Ivan Tobić, Aleksandar Belčević and Miloš Trajković) is to simply provide them with what they desire. For instance, their first intervention was materialized as a widely distributed image of a letter scanned from the local youth magazine with a long tradition, called Politikin Zabavnik, in which a twelve-year-old boy asks how he could manage to stop growing, because he is already too tall for his age. The point was  that the signature under the letter was changed into that of Vlade Divac, basketball player of Serbian origin at the time playing in the NBA, who was publicly presented as a kind of a natural born player. Their second intervention targeted the US Embassy with fake news, which was distributed via BBC, CNN, the Independent, and the Observer to many distant parts of the globe. The news was about the café-bar called Osama, which in Serbian would simply mean Lonesomeness, being closed due to the intervention of US Embassy authorities, for the reasons of suspicion that it had something to do with the first name of Bin Laden. The next news, a big hit in Croatia, was about fake Croatian car license plates allegedly being sold to Serbian tourists using their cars to travel to the Croatian coasts, for keeping their vehicles safe …

These and other fake news were distributed from the fake B92 blog site (www.be92.mojblog.co.yu), in a wishful form without donor control and without censorship such as the one existing on the “real” B92 site. When prevented from activity on the B92 blog, closed for messages questioning the values of the civil society or legitimacy of international institutions such as The Hague Tribunal, they simply made an improved one.

Donor Interventions in Civil Society and the New Hegemony

The difference in the context for the actions of artists from Todosijević’s generation and that of the Illegal Confectioners is in the abandonment of the idea of a welfare state, sovereign and self-sustainable, so the situation the latter were acting from was significantly influenced by the aggressive presence of different international institutions, which have taken upon themselves the role of the former state institutions in dominating the civil sector. As Cox has argued, their hegemonic influence is based on the following:

(1) They embody the rules that facilitate the expansion of hegemonic world orders;
(2) they are themselves the product of the hegemonic world order;
(3) they ideologically legitimate the norms of the world order;
(4) they co-opt the elites from peripheral countries, and
(5) they absorb counter-hegemonic ideas.[10]

In fact, in the late 1980s and 1990s, civil society has emerged in general as the prime target in the policy agendas of the major lenders and development agencies, purportedly simply in order to enable pluralism and democratic political choice, but in fact to scrutinize what were seen as errant governments, which ultimately led to a regularized type of democracy with inevitable neoliberal economic policies. It is still the case that the recent 2002 World Development Report of the World Bank, bearing the title Building Institutions for Markets, was concerned with institution-building and “good governance”, which would mean the creation, protection, and enforcement of property rights, promoting competition, eliminating corruption, and using the powers of the civil sector to support the legitimacy of the public institutions that support markets.[11]

Specifically in the region of former Yugoslavia, a vast number of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and grassroots organizations (GROs) received support as long as they demonstrated commitment to the promotion of liberal democracy and economic liberalism. Radio, and later Television B92, which not only came out of that sector, but was initially, in the early 1990s, even seen by many as a kind of organic intellectual of the urban Belgrade youth in  its protests against the hegemonic elite, was severely compromised later as the levels and proportions of financial aid to regional electronic media, channeled through it, increased, putting it into the position of a profitable company and a regional leader in media business.

On the other hand, what emerged in the early 1990s out of protest against the existing institutional frame as the so-called Belgrade independent art community, mainly based on personal and collective human and material resourcing, was soon recuperated by the local Soros Center for Contemporary Art, as the major articulating force in the non-governmental sector in visual arts, and B92, as the executive producer of all the events in exhibition format and publications in printed format made by local SCCA funds in the domain of the visual arts. If we add the fact that B92 was also the major media sponsor of those art events, one can easily understand that when it was transformed into a private company, it took the discourse of the independent art scene hostage, cleansing it fully from the contents and approaches that did not fit its ideology.

Appearing after the gradual withdrawal of the Soros funds and the shift of cultural policies in Serbia, mainly towards the incorporation of the former NGO sector into public administration (the most striking example being the collective transfer of staff from SCCA to the Museum of Contemporary Art), the

Illegal Confectioners neither built their strategies of critique in relation to the (barely existing) local art system (as was the case with Todosijević), nor in relation to the state administration as corrupted by ethno-nationalist ideologies (as the artists from the 1990s did). Their main target of criticism was the complete dominance of an anesthetized and fully depoliticized urban culture, as promoted by B92, which for instance is currently producing the Big Brother reality show locally. It appeared to them that B92 was setting up the rules that impose models of social behavior and interactions in local urban culture by providing/producing the “information about how [acculturated] people are expected to act in particular situations”, structuring cultural choices of the youth and instituting the manners of being “recognized by those who are members of the relevant group as the rules to which others conform in these situations”.[12]

Politics of Repair or Redress

In what is usually called the institutional critique in visual arts, the institutions are mainly considered as exhibition places, such as museums and galleries, or exhibition events, such as festivals and biennials. But, in a more general field, the term institution can be associated with “a system of rules, beliefs, norms and organizations that together generate a regularity of (social) behavior”[13], so that those places and events can only be seen as the material remains of their instituting practices. On the other hand, besides their generative potential, the institutions also include “any form of constraint that human beings devise to shape human interaction”[14]. But whether they are seen more as endogenously appearing and self-enforcing or as exogenously given constraints on behavior, and whether they operate from the public sector, the private sector or the civil society, they determine and enforce the modality of governance.

The agenda for transforming Serbia into a liberal-democratic society, which defines freedom, efficiency, justice and affluence as core social values, also had as one of its transitory aims to destroy all the basic values, beliefs, and social norms of the former socialist state[15]. That process operated both on the level of changes in the internal governance of first non-governmental, then also governmental organizations, and on the level of overall societal change. As “the social world presents itself to us, primarily, as a sedimented ensemble of social practices accepted at face value, without questioning the founding acts of their institution”[16], the social world of state socialism was also not considered so much in its instituting aspect. The effect of this lack of consideration was that its emancipatory aspects were neglected, and it was not taken into account that if freedom is defined as a freedom from public constraints, if the notion of efficiency is entrepreneurial, if the pursuit of the value of justice is related mainly to the management of ethnic conflicts, and affluence is valued for itself, out of the social context, significant portions of the population will be quite underprivileged and limited by the unbalanced level of their social and physical abilities.

This agenda was set by the political scientists and economists in the region, who were, in the period from right after 1989, as Erich W. Streissler stresses, strongly “inspired by the earliest critics of socialism, Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich von Hayek, who believed that “socialism really should never have gotten ‘off the ground for it should have failed from the start’”[17]. Most of these political scientists and economists from the region who shared secular, non-nationalist viewpoints, were invited to the boards of those foundations which started investing in the region, under the flagship of a vision that presented the civil society as an autonomous realm of associational life, independent of state influence, in which all various interests of the social groups neglected in the time of state socialism could be pursued in a free manner. The major task for the NGOs was to provide the institutional framework for that, and so they have become the privileged civil society actors in terms of democracy assistance.

That was palpably present in the way the civil sector was handled in the states that were (and some of which still are) in the process of formation in the territory of former Yugoslavia. Since a bloody war was going on there through the last decade, the civil sector, especially in the domain of culture, received support from international donors mainly for getting involved in the whole range of activities that were pursuing a kind of a politics of repair or redress. They were supposed to provide the injured with a symbolic shelter, demonstrating thereby both the inability of the state institutions to do that, and also the values of cultural humanitarianism in the liberal West. By the end of the war, most of these agents from the civil sector actually merged with the state institutions, or they have simply turned into companies.

 “The Balkan war has not only destroyed the old frontiers in the Balkans,” wrote Leon Trotsky in March 1913, at the time a war correspondent on the Balkan front, adding that “it has also lastingly disturbed the equilibrium between the capitalist states of Europe.”[18] This equilibrium, disturbed at the time when the political empires in the territory of Europe were becoming balkanized, was regained as the effect of the so-called “new Balkan war” by the end of the century. As the system of state socialism was destroyed, these empires were re-established in the economic sense, while the former Yugoslavian state became balkanized.

 
Organic Intellectuals Without Any Organic Point of Reference

Some time ago Stuart Hall wrote a few lines that could as well be used to describe the position of some of the actors in the realm of critical cultural production in Serbia in the last fifteen years. “We were trying to find an institutional practice […] that might produce an organic intellectual”, he reflected on the time of the 1970s, “we were organic intellectuals without any organic point of reference […] we were prepared to imagine or model or simulate such a relationship in its absence: ‘pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will’.”[19]

The most logical and expected instituting practice, aimed at forming the organic intellectual for all those who were showing dissent to policies of the new political parties in Serbia at the very beginning of the war and the final dissolution of the Yugoslavian state, was the establishment of the Center for Anti-war Action. It took place on the 15^th of July 1991, when a number of alternative organizations, as they were locally called at the time, established an institutional framework that was supposed to represent “all those who did not want any part in the war”[20]. The list of the organizations was the following: European Movement in Yugoslavia, Union of Yugoslav Democratic Initiatives, Women’s Parliament, Women’s Party, Helsinki Committee in Yugoslavia, Helsinki Parliament of Citizens and the Forum for Ethnic Relations. It also provided space for cultural activists by initiating, about a year after it was founded, the first of a number of anti-war cultural events, which was a concert titled: Don’t count on us. The event was co-produced by the Independent Radio B92, which gradually took over that representative role with support from urban youth and a large number of students during the students’ protests in 1991 and 1992.

Unlike, for instance, the Republika magazine or the Belgrade Circle Magazine and the Belgrade Circle of Intellectuals, as the founding body of the magazine and the initiator of debates over social and political questions at the time, which were oriented mainly towards non-nationalist intellectual elites that stayed in the country during the war (which were almost insignificant in numbers), B92 has, from the very start, deployed different populist strategies, which has proven to be more than successful. At the time when one of the leading members of the board of the Republika magazine published a booklet titled Serbian Populism – from a Marginal to a Dominant Phenomenon, in which he exclusively linked that phenomenon with the domain of right-wing politics and folkloric culture (spring 2003), B92 started with the Urbazona project. Using funds from the Soros (Open Society) Foundation, this project mobilized urban youth through different popular cultural actions in various venues, gaining positive feed-back even from the oppositional political parties, and getting a chance to use Rex, a former Jewish Community Center for actions of a kind. A bit later, in 2005, the Belgrade Circle also got a space like that, naming it Center for Cultural Decontamination, but as it was reduced mainly to elitist culture, it never acquired as much influence.

By the time of the massive civic protests in Belgrade in 1996, B92 was considered the voice of the rebellious urban people of the city of Belgrade, then run for several years by the anti-Milosevic coalition of the so-called oppositional political parties. It established a video production, organized massive rave parties, and became the executive producer for all the exhibition projects of the local Soros Center for Contemporary Art. During the protest, which mobilized up to 700.000 people at the time, after being forcibly cut from the air on December the 3^rd, it became the dominant non-governmental electronic media, soon to become a leader in the regional electronic broadcasting, and a privately owned company.

As the elements of the new civil society in Serbia of the 1990s were being formed in the framework fully contaminated by the neoliberal political imaginary, most of the cultural workers that still shared some radically emancipatory ideas were, in a way, feeling more and more isolated from the actually existing institutional practices. This feeling has proven right in most of the cases, for most of the NGOs became companies, such as, for instance, the Belgrade Circle, which now functions as a publishing house, changing the publishers’ signature of the magazine from: “The Belgrade Circle: journal of the non-governmental and non-profit organization The Belgrade Circle” (N^o 0/1994) to: “Belgrade Circle: Journal of the non-governmental, non-profit and non-political organization The Belgrade Circle” (N^o 1-4/2003).

 
I Love You as I Love B92

The profile of cultural producers that B92 fostered from the very beginning can be easily grasped through the description from one of the (group) participants in a series of exhibitions installed onto the wall of the office shared by Radio B92’s  editor-in-chief Veran Matić and director Saša Mirković at the time (the exhibition went on from 1994 to 1996). Darka Radosavljević, who ran most of the visual art projects for B92 in 1990s, wrote in the text on the Bumpkins in Pudding that the cultural producers form a group “made of young men who grew up in the very center of the city […], they are regular visitors to the cinematheque, classical music concerts, Kalemegdan park, and are familiar with the very urban secrets of Dorćol”.[21]

In other words, based on their origin and social habits, these nice urban youngsters already had cultural competences to qualify them to get into the field of production that would then be distributed via the powerful B92 network to whoever wanted to become acculturated that way. There is nothing further from the Rancierian emancipatory project on the archives of the proletarian dream, putting forward dreams and thoughts of men and women who attempted to conceptualize in theory, or express in literary works, the moral, intellectual, social, aesthetic, and political experiences of the exploited, being both renegades of their own proletarian class, and transgressors into occupations which were reserved for the bourgeois.

There is also nothing as distant as the B92 cultural production both to the sphere of experience of the working class, or the sphere of the experience of youth not concentrated in urban city centers. In fact, the policy of B92 was never related to the production of solidarity links or chains of equivalences between the marginalized groups, but rather to building a system parallel to the one of the oligarchy around Milošević[22], in a manner that mirrored their strategies. B92 simply joined into the power block that aspired to the so called Second Serbia[23], waiting for the present system to fall into an organic crisis, furthered by foreign military, economical and diplomatic pressure, to simply take over whatever could be taken over.  

The constant presence and influence of the B92 production established a cultural paradigm that was and is still used as a tool for the culturalization and aesthetization, or even the anesthetization of public dissent. Therefore, the following generations of activists in the field of art and culture, such as the Illegal Confectioners, kept targeting B92 as the policing force which constantly stands on the way of activities that seriously question the local cultural, social and political status quo. Therefore, the cynical lines of one of the songs performed by Tobićtobić from the Illegal Confectioners (I Love You as I Love B92)[24] in fact critically reflects a commandment of the system, prescribing a definite model of urban culture (the one exclusively distributed by B92) carrying in itself the promise of a fixed, non-problematic urban identity.

“The Emotional Function of Independent Media”, which is the title of a chapter in Eric D. Gordy’s book The Culture of Power in Serbia, published in 1996, unintentionally shows the conservatism of emotions, which resulted in quite a few of the opponents to the power block led by Milošević becoming libidinously attached to the media such as B92: “More than the information these media offered, members of the audience wanted the feeling of having access to a variety of sources”[25]. Many of them were simply striving to be in a position to show their taste in music or preferences in media appearance, and B92 was so much more appealing, selling a more up-to-date lifestyle. It gave to its audience a sense of distinction, of being non-local, non-parochial, and of not belonging to the average. But even that is gone now. It is simply a commercial media house that shows sitcoms and quizzes, reality shows and MTV type music videos. It is, however, the case that the ones who participated in its privatization have no financial problems in their personal lives. On the other hand, from time to time they still go to conferences to talk about the brave old days of civic struggles. That is probably how capitalism works. The question is, how could we envision a different system?

Edited by Aileen Derieg

Stevan Vuković

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