Yearbook of the Independent Performing Arts Scene in Serbia - TkH

What was common to Yugoslav retro-avantgarde phenomena (and, consequently,to performance art-related ones), was their relation to ideology 3 .That relation was manifested in the work with ideological matrices of thelocal-specific socialist context. Such local avantgarde practices related topostmodernism in their use of retrograde tactics, in form of: appropriation,reference, repetition, and re-presentation or display, but also in theirengaged eclecticism. What they were disclosing were various totalitarianmodels and avantgarde utopian iconography rendered empty – devoid ofmeaning.Art of the 90s emerged after the traumatic artistic pursuits of late socialism,as the art of the new global era. The 90s saw what used to be subversivestrategies of conceptual art (performance art included) becomingdominant mainstream working practices.One of the characteristics of the Nineties is the redefinition of the ontologyof artwork according to the idea of the work of art as critical informationin the conceptual art of the Sixties and the Seventies. The difference isthat ‘the new work of the Nineties’ is being realized according to the massivemedia infrastructure of late Postmodernism with the expectations ofthe positive micro-social projection of political correctness (environment,local customs, the logic or repression of everyday life, the rights of themargin in relation to the center, the gender issue, discursive formations ofidentity). This new art finds itself between the critique and the apology ofsocial reality; in itself, it is an offer to reality as an imaginary and symbolicalrepresentation of possible ‘co-existence’ of identities and their differences 4 .Today, performance art represents a form of specific engagement andintervention from the realm of art into the culture and society – in the particularhistorical and social context. This practice plays with material effectsof culture 5 which, in turn, represent different facets and manifestations ofideology. Performance art is, therefore, material production of potentialitiesrelating to the world which fosters its actuality 6 .3 Marina Gržinić, Fiction Reconstructed. Eastern Europe, Post-Socialism & TheRetro-Avantgarde, Springerin (Hg.), Vienna, 2000, p. 38.4 Miško Šuvaković, “Critical Phenomenology of Artwork: The Status, theFunctions and the Effects of the Artwork at Manifesta 3”, available online:http://www.ljudmila.org/scca/platforma2/suvakovicang.htm5 Culture understood as a system of signification which stands for every materialform of representation and its material effects. See: John Storey, CulturalTheory and Popular Culture: A Reader, Pearson Prentice Hall, 2006.6 Miško Šuvaković, “Koncepti i paradigme izvođenja u performans umetnosti”(Concepts and paradigms of performance in performance art), in MiškoŠuvaković, Konceptualna umetnost (Conceptual Art), Museum of ContemporaryArt Vojvodina, Novi Sad, 2007, pp. 672-697.