The Misfits.pdf - Muzej suvremene umjetnosti Zagreb

Nataa Hit
reg,RLEAz .
1-
With the definite social affirmation of Croatian
conceptual art praxis during the nineties, in recent
years we have witnessed a stronger interest in re-
thinking the artists' position within the labor mar-
ket, that is, an interest in establishing coordinates
of value and significance of artistic labor within
broader social structures. This interest has been
developing through a series of art projects where
artistic work has either been the main subject or
where their organizational model establishes
new possibilities of artistic work. Artistic labor
entered the field of the artistic profession par-
allel with the processes by which the state
becomes the main sponsor and supporter of
art structures, and the artist enters the labor
market. Ever since the sixties when the critique
of aesthetic practice of modernity and the
object status of artwork has run parallel to
political critique and emancipation, the status
of artistic work has gained in political value,
uniting both the critique of exploitation and
alienation as the two main challenges to capi-
talism. But as contemporary post-industrial
societies wholly managed to absorb the
"Great Refusal" of the late sixties and early
seventies that was clearly aimed at military-
industrial complexes, work discipline, the cul-
ture industry, and the existential and psy-
chosocial condition of the 'authoritarian per-
sonality', so did the strategies that contempo-
rary art has used to shake up the fortress of
'high' art and its market value valuing process,
impermanence, accumulation and discursive
quality, become a part of the art mainstream.
In the work of the younger generation of
artists what is evident is a certain continuation
of local conceptual art practices developed in
the seventies as the so-called 'new art prac-
tice: a term that encompassed the variously
oriented activities of broadly understood con-
ceptual art including happenings and perform-
ance, body-art, art in social and urban con-
texts, installation art and ambience, art actions
and video art. Even though the assimilation of
that legacy was made more difficult to subse-
quent generations due to the impossibility of
having an insight into these artworks and a
lack of publications and documentation, today
we can certainly trace a kind of relevant cul-
turological continuity.
The aforementioned social affirmation of this
local conceptual practice is connected to the simul-
taneous breakthrough that the contemporary art
scene in the late nineties managed to occupy with-
in the realm of articulation of social conflicts.
Perhaps for the first time after the fifties when,
after the breakup of the "official" doctrine of
socialist realism, abstraction begins to be promoted
as an appropriate way of expressing the optimistic
visions of socialist reconstruction, the orientation
of contemporary art towards delicate social themes
and their positioning in the media began to shift
closer to the center of a new cultural hegemony.
Showing both a conceptual and content misunder-
standing, yet simultaneously the symbolic moment
when an image becomes the intersection of social
45 THE MISFITS