Contesting the Human Agent. Art and Socialist Humanist Philosophy in Yugoslavia 1960–1980
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Year of publication | 2024 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | This paper examines artworks and exhibitions in Yugoslavia from the 1960s and 1970s in a parallel reading with local philosophical reflections on the potential of human agency. Scholarly literature has often pointed to how cultural producers in this same period strove for a democratic approach toward art production and reception. However, there has been no attempt to investigate the underlying concepts of the human actor, which is fundamental to understanding democratic action and agency. The paper fills this gap by analyzing how both theory and art contested the potential of emancipation and freedom of individuals and collectives in the realm of culture and society in general. The protago- nists of this paper are artworks and exhibitions from the 1960s and 1970s, realized at the Student Cultural Centre (SCC) in Belgrade and at the Student Centre (SC) in Zagreb, as well as the discourse of Yugoslavia's Praxis philosophy. Human agency and the role of the individual in society were investigated or even contested both in theory and artistic practice. The 1960s saw the rise of a programmatically humanist Marxist philosophy in Yugoslavia: the Praxis group. Key terms for the philosophers were “kreacija” (creation) and “stvaranje” (creatorship). Both notions convey political and philosophical concepts only partially linked to artistic creation, being used in connection with phenomena as broad as self-management, free development of individual potentials, and revolution. Art production at that time shared the interest in human potential with theory but with- out teleological impetus. After the optimistic beginnings of the late 1950s, understand- ing human agency and the potential of a democratic and participatory cultural approach quickly became more complicated. The philosophical reflections confronted the possi- bility of a better and more just society with much skepticism, but such a society re- mained a final and achievable goal. As this contribution seeks to show, artists were more inconclusive in assessing human action’s liberating, emancipatory potential, criti- cally investigating the audience’s ability to meaningfully and ethically engage with art. |
| Related projects: |