The Misfits.pdf - Muzej suvremene umjetnosti Zagreb

put up in 1961. while the Weekend Art project
sprang from the climate after its fall in 1989.
What, then, in an ideological sense, could
there have been in common to the two
groups, considering that the circumstances in
which they worked were so fundamentally
diverse?
Both these times, from the sixties and from
the nineties, were characterised in this region
by profound social ferments, rapid and radical
changes, instability and uncertainty, all of it
forcing the 'incapable' and the 'indecisive' to
the side, to the margins of life. However, while
in the sixties the approach to the ideal of
Western consumer society was made under
the mask of socialist prosperity for all,
although actually intended primarily for the
political and communist elite, and for those
who kept the Party in power (the police and
the army), in the nineties the masks fell off
of wanting to have it out with the levelling princi-
ple. for everyone was worth as much as his work.
and not according to need (although not all were
given equal opportunity for work), and yet there
was an endeavour to blur the edges of social differ-
ences in order to preserve the brittle political peace
in a multi-ethnic and multi-confessional communi-
ty like the former-Yugoslavia. There is no need to
be surprised that for many of the nations behind
the Iron Curtain, with still more rigid political sys-
tems and fewer liberties, this country could well
look like the West, like a promised land.
After the collapse of Yugoslavia, the independence
of Croatia and the aggression carried out against it,
the nineties were a time of simultaneous enormous
national pride and of shame. After the initial patri-
otic euphoria came a time of sobering up and fear
for one's own existence in a situation in which lib-
eralism and profit were the new war cries. The
results of attempting to implement late capitalism
in circumstances that had not yet achieved the con-
ditions for the initial accumulation of capital are
well known to all: on the one hand semi-literate
nouveaux riches, often hand in glove with politics
and crime, and the new managerial layer, and on the
other a wiped-out middle class, a working class
impoverished to the extreme, an enormous growth
in the unemployed and those who were socially at
risk.
Aleksandar Battista Ilic
quite voluntarily. The sixties gave a clear indication Weekend Art: Hallelujah the Hill. 1996-2000
(collaborators: lvana Keser I Tomislav Gotovac)
How, in these turbulent conditions, did the
Gorgona and WA groups work, and to what
measure did the social reality participate in
the formulation of their artistic views?
Gorgona, the "last European avant-garde", is
an excellent example of the project called
Modern, the highest ideal of which was the
ideal of individual emancipation.7 Melancholy.
emptiness, reduction, ellipsis, giving up - these
were key words in the understanding of the
Gorgona artistic and life ethic, the world-view
that at the time was most often stuck with the
pejorative label of bourgeois decadence.
Instead, like many of their contemporaries, of
being inspired with the socialist ideology of
collectivism and eternal progress, the Gorgona
people were inspired by oriental philosophy,
39 I THE MISFITS