The Expertise of an Amateur: Building the Canon of Socialist Artistic Production during the Yugoslav Partisan Struggle

• In Event: Yugoslav (Re)Visions III: What is a People? Yugoslav Perspectives

Abstract

In this paper, I contribute to the broader conversations on artistic production in socialist Yugoslavia as offering an alternative to the capitalist forms of production and labor divisions by focusing on the amateur-professional nexus. I explore the cultural activities in the WWII Yugoslav partisan units that laid the foundations for the “people’s musical life” that encourage people from all social strata to overcome the fixed positions of musical producers, reproducers and consumers established by the pre-World War II bourgeois canon. While these positions remained, they were no longer reserved for a certain group of people according to their social status, education or expertise. The class stratifications based on expertise thus stood in the way of revolutionary strivings and its abolishing was essential for the building of the new model of socialist artistic production. I show how this historical moment helps us untangle the exclusive theorization of amateur music-making as a practice from below reserved for “lower” musical genres that serve as a corrective to professionalized forms of “high art,” and instead reveals the complex strategies and organizational models not only of the encounter, but also of the profound reconfigurations of these two fields.

Author

• Ana Hofman, Scientific Research Centre SAZU (Slovenia)