Art Is for Everyone: Why We Cannot Have Emancipatory Art without Emancipatory Understanding of It

• In Event: Rethinking Yugoslav Art II: Charting Liberation: Insights on Art from Yugoslav Socialism and Post-Socialism I

Abstract

This paper argues that as long as art maintains its hierarchical divisions based on media, professional status, or its character as one of capitalism’s commodity forms, it will not be able to extricate itself from the grips of alienation. On the other hand, it must also maintain its mediatory role, or as Ernst Fischer writes, it should reflect society’s own decay. Its mediatory role has a complex relationship to social and political contexts, dialectically revealing its own alienated predicament. Croatian theater and literary critic Vlado Madjarevic has described art’s mediatory role as a “humanist myth,” a utopian, symbolic projection from the past through the mediated present into the future. Of course, in capitalist and transitional (socialist) societies, the effects of alienation, and art’s struggle against it, are complex and have to be accounted for. I wish to interrogate the ways in which peripheral artistic practices (amateur, outsider, children, Näive, popular, vernacular), as they thrived in Yugoslavia, were integral in the struggle for emancipation. Moreover, their exclusion from artistic historiography and theory is detrimental to art’s goal of liberation from alienation.

Author

• Bojana Videkanic, U of Waterloo (Canada)