The Third Front: From Anti-Imperialist Internationalism to the Provincialization of the West

• In Event: Yugoslav Aesthetics I: October 75—Fifty Years On

Abstract

In parallel to October 75 in the Student Cultural Center in Belgrade, an international art movement emerged in Poland in 1975. The movement sought global allies to promote art practices that engaged with the "context of reality," challenging the conceptualism dominant in Western capitalist art centres. The initiative assumed that Western conceptual art had become detached from social reality. Between 1975 and 1977, a series of international art events, meetings, and discussions were held in Gdańsk, Lund, Toronto, Paris, and Warsaw, fostering transregional artistic collaboration.

The initiative was both a theoretical vision and a pragmatic strategy to unite peripheral art scenes under a so-called Third Front. It sought to develop artistic practices rooted in social reality—practices capable of responding to rapid societal changes that reshape the meaning and reference of artistic "signs."

This study examines the negotiation and articulation of the “third position” on the artistic peripheries in the mid 1970s in their provisional convergences, cross-cultural transfers and creative misunderstandings, in their exposure of a-synchronicities, radical inequalities in the working conditions and means of distribution that persist until today.

Author

• Zsuzsa László, Museum of Fine Arts Budapest (Hungary)