AVANT-GARDIST PRACTICES AND THE PROBLEM OF SOCIALLY

COMMITTED ART IN SOCIALISM

Rastko Močnik

Zgodovinske avantgarde so program, da odpravijo zaporo buržoazne umetnosti, udejanjile tako, da so

se povezale z gibanji, ki so hotela radikalno spremeniti družbo. V jugoslovanskem kontekstu so ta
problem reševali v »spopadu na književni levici«, v slovenskem ga je rešila socialna književnost
tridesetih let. Partizanska umetnost je predelala to rešitev in proizvedla novo umetnostno formacijo. Po
socialistični revoluciji je »kritična generacija« na novo postavila in reševala te probleme.

Ključne besede: avantgarda, spopad na književni levici, partizanska umetnost, kritična generacija

Historical avant-gardes implemented the program to remove the closure of bourgeois art by
connecting with movements that wanted radical social change. In the Yugoslav context, this problem
gave rise to the "conflict on the literary left", in the Slovenian context it was solved by the social
literature of the 1930s. Partisan art reworked this solution and produced a new art formation. After the
socialist revolution, the "critical generation" posed and solved these problems anew.

Key words: avant-garde, conflict on the literary left, partisans’ art, critical generation

Can any meaningful relation be established between artistic practices in the

times of Yugoslav socialism and their socially and politically committed counterparts
in the periods during the national liberation struggle and earlier in the nineteen-
thirties? How did “progressive” artistic practices in socialism confront the historical
realisation of the pre-revolutionary and revolutionary artistic endeavours?
More precisely, our question is the following: Did any cultural practices continue
to operate in the avant-gardist mode in the time of socialism – when the avant-garde
project seemed to have been accomplished by the revolution?

General considerations

The problem of socially committed (or “progressive” or just socialist) artistic

practices after the socialist revolution seems inversely symmetrical to the problem of
artistic avant-gardes before the revolution. Before the revolution, artistic avant-gardes
searched for the ways to associate themselves with revolutionary political
movements; after the revolution, the new artistic practices declared the need to
dissociate themselves from the revolutionary politics that had come to power.
The historical avant-garde project was to break out of the aesthetic closure and
to intervene directly into historical processes. Artistic practices were themselves not
able to accomplish this project unless they were to encounter a political movement
equally committed to destroy the existing world of oppression and exploitation, to
break down its institutions, including those of bourgeois culture, and to start the “real”
history of humanity. At the point of this encounter, however, avant-garde practices
revealed themselves caught within the bourgeois “autonomous” sphere of culture
with their specific elitist idiosyncrasies, while “masses”, the presumed public of avant-
gardist artefacts, appeared trapped within the clichés of the bourgeois (and even pre-
bourgeois) ideologies. The encounter between avant-gardist art and revolutionary
politics seemed doomed to fail.
Aesthetic practices invented several exits from this seeming dead-end. Some
Soviet constructivists (Aleksej Mihajlovič Gan, Aleksandr Mihajlovič Rodčenko,
Ljubov Sergejevna Popova, Varvara Fjodorovna Stepanova) abandoned properly
artistic practices and engaged in what we would now call industrial design. Some of
the proponents of the Italian architettura razionale (Giuseppe Terragni, Giuseppe
Pagano Pogatschnig, etc.) combined rational functionalism with selected traditional
elements to produce fascist monumentalist architecture. Yugoslav surrealists (Oskar
Davičo, Đorđe Kostić, Dušan Matić, Koča Popović) abandoned surrealism and
adopted social art in line with the political doctrine of the Communist Party.

“Conflict on the literary left” in Yugoslavia

These breaks out of the closure, produced by the completion of the modern
artistic/cultural formation in historical avant-gardes, were achieved amid great
intellectual turmoil, as they were subverting the very foundations of the artistic and
cultural practices and ideologies, established centuries ago in the early modern
beginnings of capitalism. Yugoslav literary history treats these debates under the
name of “conflict on the literary left”.1 The discussions were conducted in the terms of
the “tendency in the art”, relation between “the form and the content”, “fidelity to life”
and the like – with a notional apparatus that may appear rather naïve. However, even
with these inadequate pre-theoretical tools, they were confronting the problems that
were left unresolved by the historical avant-gardes’ challenge to “bourgeois art”, and
were establishing a historically new problematics – one that has been constitutively
obscured by the aesthetic tradition from Baumgarten, Lessing and Kant on.

1
Lasić, Stanko. Sukob na književnoj ljevici 1928-1952. Zagreb: Liber, 1970; Iveković, Mladen.
Hrvatska lijeva inteligencija 1918-1945. Zagreb: Naprijed, 1970; Kalezić, Vasilije. U Krležinom
sazvježđu. Zagreb: ''August Cesarec'', 1982; Kalezić, Vasilje. Ljevica u sukobu s Krležom. Beograd:
KIZ Trag, 1990; Kalezić, Vasilje. Pokret socijalne literature. Beograd: Narodna knjiga-Alfa, 1999.
 We can conceive, roughly after Medvedev,2 artistic practice as an elaboration of
socially determined ideological elements, an elaboration itself socially determined,
but unaware of its own determination. 3 Through the lens of this concept, we see that
the debates “on the literary left” about “tendency”, “contents and form” etc., attempted
to conceptualise precisely this specific socio-historical determination of artistic
practices themselves, the constitutive blind spot of the modern aesthetic.
Unawareness (or denial) of own socio-historical determination produces the
belief, constitutive of modern aesthetic ideology, that the aesthetic (or even largely
cultural) artefacts are trans-historical, a-temporal, emancipated, as it were, from their
socio-historical conditions of production.4 In anthropology, this type of belief is
conceptualised as “specific scepticism”, and was classically formulated by Evans-
Pritchard: “Most of my [Azande] acquaintances believed that there are a few entirely
reliable practitioners [of witchcraft], but that the majority are quacks.” 5 Likewise,
examining aesthetic artefacts, we are critical of every singular creation in its
specificity, while believing that (trans-historical, a-temporal) aesthetic creation is

2
Medvedev, Pavel N.: Formalni metod u nauci o književnosti, Nolit – Sazvežđa, Beograd, 1976
[Formalnyj metod v literaturovedenii. Kritičeskoe vvedenie v sociologičeskuju poètiku, Priboj,
Leningrad, 1928. Now available in: Mihail M. Bahtin (Pod maskoj): Frejdizm. Formal'nyj metod v
literaturovedenii. Marksizm i filosofija jazyka. Stat'i, Labirint, Moskva, 2000.
3
We elaborated the concept of aesthetic practice in: “EastWest”, Maska, Ljubljana, Summer 2004, no.
3–4/86–87, pp. 10–19. We conceptualised “artistic practices […] as doubly articulated: they are
‘horizontally’ articulated to the ideological formations upon which they ‘work’; simultaneously, they are
‘vertically’ articulated to infrastructural determinations that ‘refract’ themselves in artistic practices in
the same way as they ‘refract’ themselves in any other component of the ideological realm. […] Artistic
secondary elaboration works upon ideological representations in their concreteness. It takes them as
representations of concrete particular social ‘facts’, i.e., as ideological moments within concrete social
practices. To put it in the impoverished vocabulary of semiotic formalisation, artistic secondary
elaboration produces ‘representations of representations’: it produces representations ‘with internal
distance9, it presents mechanisms of representing rather than the fascination of representation […].”
See also: “Teorija umetnostnih praks” and “Prelomne umetnostne prakse”, in: Rastko Močnik, Veselje
v gledanju, Založba /*cf., Ljubljana, 2007, pp. 49 – 81 and 82 – 98.
4
In a study of historical emergence of the modern “autonomous sphere of culture” during the period of
humanism and renaissance, Maja Breznik shows how the emergence of an “autonomous sphere of
culture and art” is at the same time the result of class struggles and a decisive factor in the march to
power of the new proto-capitalist classes. Modernity, i.e., capitalism replaced feudal physical
oppression with a much more effective symbolic violence that we now call “culture.” Cf. Maja Breznik,
"La borsa e la cultura" [The purse and the culture], Metis. Ricerche di soziologia, psicologia e
anthropologia della comunicazione, Vol. 12, no. 1, 2005, Padova: Cooperativa Libraria Editrice
Università di Padova, 2005, pp. 73—98; Maja Breznik, “L'oubli épistémologique: les ancrages du
savoir dans l'histoire culturelle”. Filozofija i društvo, ISSN 0353-5738, 2013, vol. 24, no. 4, pp. 5-18.
http://instifdt.bg.ac.rs/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/01_I_Breznik_2013-4.pdf.
5
Evans-Pritchard, Magic, Witchcraft and Oracles among the Azande, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1937,
p. 185. The opposition “specific / general scepticism” is elaborated in: Geoffrey E. R. Lloyd,
Demystifying Mentalities, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1990.
possible in general. The belief in general is the condition of the scepticism in
particular.6
We can conceptualise the opposed positions of traditional artistic practices, of
avant-gardes and post-avant-gardist practices (like Soviet productivism, social
literature and fascist architecture) in the terms of “specific vs. general scepticism”:
- Traditional modern art rests upon the ideology of specific scepticism. Every
particular artefact is critically scrutinised on the background of the general belief in
the possibility of an authentic aesthetic phenomenon.
- Avant-garde art relies upon generalised scepticism. Past art in general is
considered to be passéist and non-authentic; only avant-gardist practices and
artefacts are admitted as authentic.
- Post-avant-gardist practices (Soviet productivism, social literature, fascist
architecture, but also contemporary art) are supported by general scepticism. Artistic
practices and institutions as such are considered non-authentic and false; authentic
practices challenge and subvert the art-system in general.7
The opposed positions in the “conflict on the literary left” can accordingly be
classified in the following way:
- Surrealists: their ideology was avant-gardist generalised scepticism. They
considered past art in general to be passéist and non-authentic; they admitted as
authentic only surrealist practices and artefacts.
- Social art was a post-avant-gardist practice, and accordingly its ideology was
general scepticism. Social artists regarded other artistic practices and cultural
institutions in general as bourgeois, therefore non-authentic and false. In their view,
authentic practices should challenge and subvert the bourgeois cultural and art
systems in general.8

Krleža: the impossibility of the median position

6
Maja Breznik. “General skepticism in the arts”, Primerjalna književnost, vol. 33, no. 2. Ljubljana:
Slovensko društvo za primerjalno književnost, Aug. 2010, pp. 243-255.
http://sdpk.si/revija/PKn_2_2010_Kdo%20izbere.pdf
7
Maja Breznik. Posebni skepticizem v umetnosti, Sophia, Ljubljana, 2011.
8
In the specific Yugoslav situation, modernism was additionally discredited by the “modernist intimist
aestheticism” being officially promoted by the authoritarian and proto-fascist Yugoslav regime after the
“6th January (1929) dictatorship”. (See: Rade Pantić, Ideologija intimističkog estetizma u srpskom
modernističkom slikarstvu izmedju dva svetska rata = Ideology of intimist aestheticism in Serbian
modernist painting between the two wars, in: Miško Šuvaković (ed.), Istorija umetnosti u Srbiji, XX. vek
– 3. tom = History of Art in Serbia, XX. Century – Volume 3, Orion Art, Beograd, 2014; Rade Pantić,
Umetnost skozi teorijo, Založba /*cf., Ljubljana, 2020.)
 We can now understand the difficulty of the unique position adopted by Miroslav
Krleža in the debate on the left. 9 While opposing the traditional (bourgeois) art and
avant-gardisms, i.e., rejecting both the specific and the generalised scepticism,
Krleža was unwilling to adopt general scepticism, and wanted to safeguard a minimal
core of aesthetics, i.e., of specific scepticism. This ambition was contradictory. The
contradiction remains in Krleža’s final (and, according to most historians, presumably
reconciliatory10) intervention at the 3rd Congress of the Writers’ Association of
Yugoslavia in 1952 in Ljubljana.11
Contradiction between the rejection of bourgeois aesthetics and of the avant-
gardist challenge on one side – and, on the other, the pretension to safeguard the
aesthetic ideology and its institutions, is shared by the Soviet socialist realism (the
cultural pendant of the Stalinist politics, inaugurated at the 1st congress of the Soviet
writers’ association in 1934) and the “new realism”, the cultural analogue to the
“united anti-fascist front” politics introduced by the 7 th congress of the Komintern in
1935. The paradoxical common feature of socialist realism, new realism and Krleža’s
progressive aestheticism is their incapacity to overcome the traditional bourgeois
aesthetics. Despite their verbal rejection, none of these practices seriously
confronted the problem of re-articulation of traditional aesthetic ideology. Its material
existence in (bourgeois, national) cultural institutions provided for the rest: after the
break with cultural “dogmatism” in 1952, Yugoslav cultural scene was overtaken by
academic modernism in visual arts12 and variants of existentialism in literary genres.

9
Miroslav Krleža: ''Najnovija anatema moje malenkosti'', Danas 1 (1934), pp. 106-113; ''Svrha Pečata i
o njojzi besjeda'', Pečat 1-2 (1939), pp. 119-128; ''Izjava Miroslava Krleže'' Pečat 5-6 (1939), pp. 377-
388; ''Dijalektički Antibarbarus'', Pečat 8-9 (1939). – Stanko Lasić, Mladi Krleža i njegovi kritičari,
Globus, Zagreb, 1987. – Vasilije Kalezić, Ljevica u sukobu s Krležom, KIZ Trag, Beograd, 1990.
10
Lasić (op. cit.) considers that Krleža's referat at the Ljubljana congress marks the end of the “conflict
on the literary left” and the final victory of the anti-Stalinist cultural forces. Central Committee of the
CPYu actually proclaimed the freedom of scientific, cultural and aristic creativity at its third plenary
session in December 1949 (Branko Petranović, Momčilo Zečević, Jugoslavija 1918 – 1988, Beograd:
Rad, 1988, pp. 982 – 984). Đilas points out that Krleža’s presentation was co-ordinated in advance
within the Central Committee of the CPYu, specifically with himself and “probably” with Edvard Kardelj
(Milovan Đilas, Vlast i pobuna. Memoari, Europa press holding – Novi Liber, Zagreb, 2009, pp. 314-
315). See also: Rade Pantić, 2018: From Culture during “Socialism” to Socialist Culture, in: Vida
Knežević in Marko Miletić (eds.), We Have Built Cities for You. On the Contradictions of Yugoslav
Socialism, Beograd: CZKD. pp. 201 – 218;
https://www.czkd.org/meta-content/uploads/2018/06/Publikacija-We-Have-Built-Cities-for-You.pdf (3.
5. 2023); Rastko Močnik, Časi jugoslovanskega leta 1968, in: Med majem '68 in novembrom '89,
Marko Juvan (ed.), Založba ZRC, Ljubljana, 2021, str. 95 – 112.
11
Velimir Visković, Sukob na ljevici: Krležina uloga u sukobu na ljevici, Narodna knjiga-Alfa, Beograd,
2001.
 Partisan literature: a revolutionary solution to the problem of post-
bourgeois artistic practices

On the margin of the “conflict on the left”, a debate opposing social writers and
expressionist literati arose during the thirties in Slovene cultural journals. Its practical
outcome was what the guardians of the “aesthetic core” failed to achieve: a
revolutionary re-articulation of traditional aesthetics. On the background of anti-
bourgeois general scepticism, Slovene social writers performed the aesthetic
“secondary elaboration” upon the aesthetic ideology itself. They brought to the open
the blind spot of aesthetic ideology, the socio-historical determination of artistic
practices, and explicitly subjected it to the reflexively conceived procedures of artistic
re-elaboration.
In Slovene “social literature” of the nineteen-thirties, the problem of overcoming
bourgeois aesthetics without abandoning the artistic practice was resolved in a
practically efficient way. Progressive and revolutionary writers were refusing the
established and traditional literary forms and would have logically opted for avant-
garde procedures. However, they had to confront the question how to address the
masses. The first answer was negative: certainly not with avant-garde extravagance.
Blocked by this impossibility, they reverted to the material disseminated among the
masses by the dominant ideology, especially to the material of the school literature
(canonical forms such as sonnet, consecrated metric and rhyme systems, text-book
“pieces”) and to the forms of popular devotion (funeral rites, apocalyptic visions,
prayers).
However, pre-war “social art” remained enclosed within the small world of
literary journals, intellectual circles and “educated public” where its work on the
dominant ideological forms passed largely unnoticed and was understood as stylistic
moderation, “concreteness” and loyalty to the tradition. 13 It was only with the armed
resistance and revolution that the problem how to reach popular masses imposed
itself with urgency. In a very short time, partisan artistic practices retraced the
itinerary of the pre-war “social art” and reached beyond its limitations.14
12
A historical analysis of the return of modernism in the fifties would certainly profit from a comparative
study of the post-WW2 Yugoslav academic modernism and the pre-WW2 modernist aestheticism,
along the lines established by Rade Pantić (see note 8).
13
This misunderstanding can be inferred to from contemporary critical appraisals of “social literature”
and “social art”.
14
Matej Bor (Vladimir Pavšič) is a case in point: after having joined the partisan armed struggle, he
passed from free verse and “Mayakovskian” style to canonical verse and meter in a couple of months
 Partisan artistic practices radicalised their attitude and, while occasionally still
working on ideological forms of the school-apparatus, 15 they definitely turned towards
“popular” forms.16 The conditions of armed struggle constrained the artists seriously
to consider the ideological forms, which they would have simply repudiated as
“passéist kitch” in their previous avant-garde years.17

Artistic practices in socialism

In the socialist period, there were at least two outstanding types of

“appropriation” of cultural forms, which had been invented in other historical
situations and developed by practices overdetermined by other contexts. One
strategy was a straight and simple adoption and “naturalisation” of international
literary trends, such as existentialism, nouveau roman, theatre of the absurd etc. The
other strategy was importation of international mass-culture fashions, such as rock or
punk-rock. We shall examine the “appropriation” of existentialist dramatic procedures
in the work of Slovene writer Primož Kozak; and the re-articulation of the punk-rock
music upon the Yugoslav alternative scene.

Straight import

Primož Kozak was an outstanding member of the “critical generation”, the “last
left-wing cultural critique of Yugoslav socialism” according to Lev Kreft. 18 He was an
author of Yugoslav relevance,19 and arguably the best dramatic writer of the socialist
period in Slovenia.
(1941-1942), and then in less than a year to “popular” forms.
15
While having an extraordinary sense for “popular” formulation, Kajuh (Karel Destovnik)
experimented with the “inverted sonnet” (Jože Javoršek, “Vstaja slovenskega naroda in poezija”,
Sodobnost, vol. 29, no. 4, 1963). In 1944, Peter Levec published a poem in six elegant elegiac
distiches and resolved a century long debate about the transfer of classic quantitative metric schemes
into Slovene accentual-syllabic metrics (The Burnt Village).
16
Two important supplementary causes over-determined the preference for traditional meters and
“popular” style: the lack of paper imposed oral dissemination of poetry, even often forced the authors
to memorise their own creations – “and how do you memorise free verse?” (Javoršek, op. cit.); visual
works were distributed as leaflets and posters, poems were meant to be sung.
17
Nikolaj Pirnat, head of the agitation and propaganda department at the Central Committee of the
Communist Party Slovenia, brought this radicalisation to the extreme and rejected still life and
landscape as “petit bourgeois” genres in his controversial circular letter of 29 January 1944.
18
Lev Kreft, Perspektivovci in perspektivaši, ZPS, Ljubljana, 1998.
19
Afera [The Affair], prize for the best staging at the Sarajevo Festival of small stages, 1961; prize for
the text of the drama Kongres [The Congress] at Sterijino pozorje, 1969; first prize at the competition
of the Yugoslav Television for the drama Director in 1970.
 Kozak makes Sartrean existential agonistic dialogue the aesthetic principle of
his plays. However, he “appropriates” it as a strictly aesthetic procedure, only after
having first emptied it of its ideological “contents”. In a 1950 critique of Satre’s Huis
clos, Kozak approvingly analysed Sartre’s art, contrasting it against his philosophy,
which, for Kozak, only expressed the cultural dead-end of European bourgeoisie.
Kozak considered Sartrean dramaturgy to be an aesthetically powerful way to
organise the conflict among various existential positions, and, in the development
propelled by the conflict, to analyse their specific logics.
Even without entering into the discussion whether it is possible to separate an
aesthetic “form” from its ideological “contents”, we should note that Kozak’s
procedure ideologically belongs to, and actually reproduces the modern (“bourgeois”)
cultural apparatus. The existence of the traditional bourgeois culture depends upon
its being ideologically perceived as an autonomous sphere. Its elements are
produced and reproduced as being “independent” from their socio-historical
conditions of possibility. Kozak’s procedure is contrary to the practice of the “social
art” of the nineteen-thirties that appropriated and re-articulated canonical aesthetic
“forms” in order to break out of the cultural closure. Adopting Sartrean dramaturgical
procedures, Kozak reproduces them as “cultural forms”, as elements of the traditional
autonomous sphere of culture, and in this way reproduces the very “bourgeois”
character he denounces in this same elements, taken as ideological forms.20
Kozak’s “tendency” is artistically to present, and aesthetically to analyse, the
existential position of post-revolutionary domination, in conflicting confrontation with
positions that oppose it and practically criticise it. However, he is at pains to find an
adequate antagonist. Besides the position of the “authentic revolutionary” who, in
Kozak’s elaboration, is only the past position of the present “Stalinist”, Kozak cannot
find critical positions that would be on the level. Marginally, he introduces the petty-
bourgeois moralist who, of course, cannot be a valid antagonist, since he belongs to
the past even more radically than the authentic revolutionary does. He then
experiments with the “aesthetically cultivated, morally refined” critical position 21 or
with some sort of “early Christian” evangelical position. Although Kozak is a master of
dialogue and dramatic tension, it is obvious that he can neither find nor invent a

20
The following remarks refer to Kozak’s dramas: Dialogi (1958), Afera (1961), Kongres (1968) and
Legenda o svetem Che (1969).
21
Kristijan in Dialogi, according to Taras Kermauner; in Slovenska dramatika – modeli, Kermauner
uses the same predicates to indicate Kozak's own ideological position.
credible antagonist to the tough Party cadre that is the standard protagonist in his
dramas. Like the social literature of the thirties, Kozak’s dramas remain trapped
within the small world of literary journals, intellectual circles and the “educated
public”. In fact, there was no historically adequate opposition to the “Stalinist” politics
in this layer of society at that time.
Consequently, we should revise the presently prevailing opinion 22 that Kozak’s
dramas artistically formulate the left critique of post-revolutionary domination that was
presumably the general socio-political project of his cultural and artistic group. 23
Characteristically unable to formulate a political alternative to the practices of post-
revolutionary domination, Kozak’s group, as long as it lasted, 24 engaged in purely
cultural, predominantly literary practices, thus continuing the 19 th-century model of
“cultural critique” based on belles lettres.
In Kozak’s dramas the continuation of pre-war avant-garde aesthetic practices
was therefore only formal. In social art and partisan art, the appropriation and re-
articulation of bourgeois aesthetic and folkloristic clichés made possible the aesthetic
secondary elaboration of ideological material from the perspective of emancipatory
politics. The “imported” elements were considered ideological and non-aesthetic, in
need of specifically aesthetic re-elaboration: it was in this way that they were
“appropriated” by being re-articulated.
Kozak, on the other hand, took Sartrean dramaturgy as a purely “cultural form”,
as if, by being treated as a “neutrally” aesthetic procedure, it could have been
hygienically separated from the ideological material upon which it “worked”, and
liberated of its structural determination (in Kozak’s own terms: of its “bourgeois
blockade”). In this, Kozak practiced a pre-avant-garde notion of “culture” as reservoir
of presumably timeless values disconnected from their socio-cultural conditions of
production. Kozak appropriated an aesthetic procedure without re-articulating it. In
Kozak’s dramas and in the work of the “critical generation” in general, the cultural
sphere was re-established in its autonomy, while historical achievements of the
avant-gardes, of the social and partisan artistic practices were liquidated.

22
Lev Kreft; Taras Kermauner.
23
“Critical generation” expressed itself mostly in the literary journals: Beseda (1951-1957) – Revija 57
(1957-1958) – Perspektive (1960-1964), and in theatrical group Oder 57 (1957-1964).
24
The “critical generation” was hegemonic in Slovene culture until approximately 1968; its more or less
distinct, albeit already anachronistic, presence persisted until the establishment of Nova revija in 1982.
 Strategic re-articulation

The cultural form of the punk-rock was imported naively and its transfer upon
Yugoslav popular music scene seemed a logical effect of the hegemony of Western
cultural industry. However, three features of this transfer are reminiscent of the
appropriation of the hegemonic ideological forms by the social literature of the
nineteen-thirties.
First, punk-rock was radically appropriated in its sheer materiality: with the
minimalism of its instrumentation and its practice of rough amateurism it was easily
adopted by culturally expropriated masses of Yugoslav youth. In Yugoslavia, punk-
rock was historically probably the first youth mass-culture that was produced from the
bottom up, and maybe even the first cultural movement in absolute terms, where
smaller and even small provincial towns were successfully challenging metropolitan
centres.
Besides this popular and even proletarian dimension, paradoxically supported
by an originally hegemonic and commercialised cultural form, Yugoslav punk-rock
reminds of the pre-war social literature by its being adopted by an emerging
alternative scene. The “alternative”, as it was self-identified in order to underline its
independent and creative character, was a pan-Yugoslav conglomerate of new social
movements, independent political and cultural initiatives, independent media and
journalism, theoretical production, un-orthodox entertainment venues etc. Besides its
artistic and theoretical output, the alternative was the social base of important
political achievements of the nineteen-eighties, esp., at least in Slovenia, of the
effective freedom of expression from 1984 on.25
Finally, Yugoslav punk-rock was the galvanising element of a new popular
culture that resulted from the self-organisation of culturally expropriated masses of
young people. In this, it went beyond the project of the nineteen-thirties social art
whose program, not really achieved, had been the construction of an authentic
working-classes culture. Punk-rock and its concomitant alternative scene actually
succeeded to produce a genuine Yugoslav “culture”, perhaps the only one in history:
it carried in itself a promise of an alternative socialist future – had not its
preconditions been destroyed together with the socialist federation.

25
For a brief presentation of the circumstances of this break-through, see the introduction to: Rastko
Močnik, Alterkacije. Alternativni govori i ekstravagantni članci, Bibioteka XX vek, Beograd, 1998.
 To conclude

Let us summarise our schematic ideas. Every radical artistic practice has to
deal with the hegemonic and dominant ideologies of its time. Those practices that are
committed to radical socio-historical transformation have to confront the repressive
heritage in a double way: as an obstacle to artistic invention and as a constraint upon
socialisation of the radical art. Social art of the nineteen-thirties resolved this task by
appropriating traditional hegemonic cultural forms and by re-articulating them into a
radically new artistic formation. During the liberation struggle, the partisan art
radicalised the procedures invented by the social art, and actually achieved the
abolition of the bourgeois closure of the autonomous cultural sphere. In the practices
of the post-war “critical generation”, although they resorted to the “appropriation”
techniques, as had the social and the partisan arts, the autonomous cultural sphere
was re-established, and the avant-gardist and revolutionary achievements were lost.
Finally, the spontaneous appropriation of commercialised pop-cultural punk-rock
produced, in the specific Yugoslav context of the late seventies – early eighties, a
new “bottom-up” and pan-Yugoslav culture that was not destined to last long.

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