The Misfits.pdf - Muzej suvremene umjetnosti Zagreb

traces' of art within the process and practice function of this fascination is, according to Slavoj
of culture. In the history of transfiguration, iek, entirely ideological ("in Eastern Europe, the
from art to culture, one can identify 'parallel' West is looking for its own lost starting points, its
histories: international (global), transnational own lost experience of the 'democratic invention,
(nomadic) or local (geographical). But also while "Eastern Europe stares back at the West, fas-
present are conflicting interpretative para- cinated by its democracy"2), it is the function of the
digms: intertextualism and contextualism, ego-ideal that transmits the difference of contextu-
fighting to insure conquest in their own con- al bases. The context is localised in order to remain
struction of reality. within the local "mythical courtyard of eternal
In order to answer the needs of this exposi- present, surrounded by one's ancestors and descen-
tional history of artistic practices entitled The dants"3, but rather in order to use its transmittance
Misfits, chosen and constructed in a biased to decipher the paradigm of art, taking up equal
(why not?) mannerand also to critically amounts of the edge and the centre of the world.
stress the conceptual strategies of Croatian Actually, in the identification of the specific con-
artists in the wide time-frame which makes textual position. one can clearly discover the
them present in continuo from the late fifties process of the creation of the new role of art
to this day, we can reach for the topos of returning in the function of culture. Of course, it has its
from the centre to the margin, where "everything is international history of the transformation
and nothing is as before". There is no reality that from the "autonomy" of the aesthetic struc-
can be finally checked, not between the global ture of art to its media transfiguration and the
intertextualistic rhetoric of multiplicity that can, let artefact of culture; but it also has its local his-
us admit, show its repressive universalist face and tories, which include the Croatian story, in
the contextualism of Babylonian variety with the which the twist, the very act of transfigura-
"right to the story of one's own life"; thus, the dif- tion. did not take place on the vertical of cul-
ference gets the right of way. Like a theoretical ture but rather at a certain angle, taking the
conductor, therefore, at the heart of the interna- hard, roundabout, sometimes even risky way
tionalist reading/observing mind and supertextual of transfer from "art and ideology", through
artistic polyphony. I shall turn the attention pre- "art in society", to "art as culture".
cisely on the traces of contextual difference. And This was, at the same time. the initial work of
this is where, in the words of an artist involved in re-semantisation of ideological, political,
this story, Mr. Vlado Martek, "the trouble with East" social actuality, in which the artists used con-
begins. But it is time to focus on the better side of ceptual strategies. but, paradoxically. with the
the story, showing itself as an open map of traces- mark of "warmed-up avant-garde"4 the attack,
indexes "breaking up the narcissist charm in which the subversion, the excess... in a time entirely
the West, self-satisfied, recognises its own values in unfriendly towards collective projections to
the East" (S. iiek). the future and towards utopias of historical
The circumstances of this case placed the trace and avant-gardes. Above those strategies, there
the difference at a specific geographical and cultur- floats a certain, still indefinite feeling of sub-
al road-stop. but also at the overlap of two mutu- jective misfitting, remarkably expressed in an
ally fascinated worldviews - the "West" and what artist's sentence - a simulation of a "motto":
used to be known as "Eastern Europe". Although the This is not my world (eljko Jerman, 1976). But,
19 I THE MISFITS