The Misfits.pdf - Muzej suvremene umjetnosti Zagreb

forces, is represented in the now famous persistence in time, local and international affirma-
graphic by Edo Murtit the canonized pioneer tion of its protagonists, and through the undeniable
of the reestablished tradition of modernism in quality of the historic background within which the
Croatia during the fifties following the official works of the youngest generation of artists takes
break with socialist realismpresented to the place. At the same time, the process through which
new social dignitaries following the change of contemporary art gradually positions itself as an
government in January 2000. attractive media material and vital space for the
While during the seventies conceptual art articulation of social frustrations and antagonisms.
which was characterized by a strong social and the fertile ground for social experiments
engagement that functioned critically within amnestied from the responsibility of failure, is also
the social contextoperated on the social unfolding. A greater number of such projects which
margins and mostly outside of the institutions deal with socially relevant subjects and which con-
of official visual culture, in the nineties, paral- front different audiences, is based on some
lel with a restored interest in the critical evaluation form of collective cooperation in which the
of local conceptual tradition, this has come to a organizational tasks and creative expression
shifting toward the main venues of financing and overlap within the artistic work itself.
distributing culture, which are no longer tied exclu- In this way, the one-day project from July
sively to state sources. To a certain degree, the con- 1998Book and Society - 22% as organized by
temporary art scene becomes active within the civil artist Igor Grubi (b. 1969) and the alternative
scene, capitalizing on the knowledge and especially organization Attackgathered together some
on the know-how developed during the nineties 30 artists who, through a series of actions.
within a very dynamic and independent civil scene2. installations and performances, acted against
The manner in which this occurs is, of course, ques- the then actual value-added tax which did not
tionable. No matter how thrilled one may be with exclude books. The moment that the Law dis-
the fact that contemporary visual culture has rupted the freedom of public gathering, the
once again become a significant field of artic- founding of civil organizations and freedom of
ulation of social phenomena, which during the speech in different ways, the joint action by artists
seventies and eightiesin the heroic period of against the very concrete and relatively narrow
alternative cultural movements in the context social issue clearly added a more prominent, or at
of ex-Yugoslaviawas primarily connected to least more transparent. social relevancy to the
pop music3, the other side of this discontent is whole action. This manifestation by the artists calls
caused by the fact that an artistic critique of on the model of self-organizing and the changed
the system, as well as the general critique of relation towards the public which in the time of
culture which during the sixties and seventies, 'new art practice' is best exemplified by exhibitions-
gave an intellectual focus to intensive and actions. The term 'exhibition-action' unites the stat-
widespread dissatisfaction, is today 'caught in ic and dynamic, and describes the event that most
the distorting mirror of a new hegemony'4. often takes place in public spaces of the city, calls
During the second half of the '90s, conceptual on the interaction and communication with the
art acquires a more prominent repositioning audience and presents works in various media. In
on the cultural map of democratic Croatia, the '70s exhibitions-actions were most often col-
legitimizing itself in different ways through its lective manifestations and a large number of groups
THE MISFITS j46