Cultural Identity Politics in the (Post-)Transitional Societies

From productivity to creativity - the role of art collectives in solving the contradictions...
In this exposé, already by the end of the 1980s, there was a very strong tendency among
the art and cultural networks to believe that Yugoslavian socialist society was an obstacle
to the normal flow of capital (“obstacle in the interest groups of corporate capital”) and
humanistic spiritual emancipation, and because of that entropic situation its destruction
was inevitable. Bakal’s alternative of “networking normalization” is still the prevailing
one: first because it gives a broadly representative and democratically neo-liberalist
justification for art collectives and, second, because it postulates that activities are still
part of the lively artistic and cultural collectives and networks in the country.
In addition, Bakal and his colleagues, immediately after “the savagery of nationalist
extremism”, founded the Anti-War Campaign of Croatia (AWCC), which gathered
together many different initiatives which did not identify with the savagery of the
early 1990s. The organization, which had collaborated with various opposition groups,
such as Hare Krishna and the gay movements, and also had international collaboration
with the Catholic University of Louvain-la-Neuve, gave rise to the most alternative
journal – Arkzin. The ideology which this network initiated, according to Bakal,
led to the formation of a successful cooperation network, Zagreb Cultural Capital
3000. Bakal’s advice for this social utopia is “tangible revenue”, which he defines as:
“surplus social value of the community, deriving from the quality and creativity of the
collective, becomes a precondition for a potential surplus of the production value of
community” (Bakal, 2006: 420). This definition has all the attributes of art and cultural
networks ideal collaboration with managerial, national and democratic representational
tendencies. According to these cultural networks and collectives they will have a crucial
role in the restoration of the previous dogmatic collectives, and by the very definition of
its nature this will allow the coexistence of different and antagonistic tendencies in the
same system of cultural production.
With the following two examples I will try to demonstrate what has been transformed
in the conceptualization of the collectives through the cultural policies determined
by the transition-based discourses. My proposal is that in the ideology of transition,
“productivity”, as the constitutive element of the concept of the collective, has been
replaced or suppressed by experiential and psychological terms, such as creation or
individual emancipation. This transformation in the conceptualization of the collective
is also visible in many exhibitions realized by East European curators. In order to
demonstrate this transformation of the value of collectivism from productivity to
creativity, it is interesting to have a look at the remarkable exhibition Collective Creativity
curated by the collective WHW (What, How and for Whom), in 2005 at Kunsthalle
Fridericianum, Kassel. In the introductory text of the catalogue the curators are trying to
explain the diffusion of collective-based art practice from a geographical point of view
linked to places with similar “troubles with modernism”, namely, according to the text,
East European countries, primarily the former Yugoslavia, and some Latin American
countries. But it is difficult to understand the relationship between collectivism in
145