| In the 1960s and 70s, throughout the world artists were questioning traditional methods, structures, meanings and role of art, and at this time artists in Yugoslavia contributed an exceptional conceptual art from their particular political situation that had a formative influence on building civil society in the Western Balkans today. This dissertation proposes that instead of operating as mimicry or time-delay of Western avant-garde, postwar experimental art in Yugoslavia offers from its specific socio-political condition a productive and influential new paradigm. This strategy of relay took place as communication and mobility between different cities of Yugoslavia, exchange with artists from the West, and most significantly through artists' interactive use of public space and resulting redefinition of public institutions.;The dissertation addresses the questions: How did neo avant-garde art in postwar Yugoslavia change notions of public space and communication at the time and what does it add to artistic practice in the Western Balkans today and to the international discourse of conceptual art? How did the artists put to use the special conditions of socialist self-management and non-aligned status to further their concerns? The main hypothesis to be tested is: Their specific strategy of interactive relay through mobility and communication networks made for a conceptual art that emphasized the role of individual subjectivity more so than in the West through activating public space for creative and civic expression.;Through a discussion of the key artists of the time, the dissertation claims that individual and collective subjectivity and existential investigations played a much stronger role in conceptual art in the Western Balkans than in the West. Artists in Yugoslavia posed questions about ontology, utilitarianism, imagination, collaboration, and communication through the public realm. Furthermore, because public space was not an accepted venue for art, by simply activating this realm with creative expression, artists opened a new definition of place that was not orchestrated by state socialism. This approach to art provided the tools for today's artists and art managers to create their own organizational structures in the wake of the wars of the 1990s to forge constructive cultural and socio-political policy-making today. |
