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AVANT-GARDE AND CRITICAL REALISM

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This paper deals with a re-reading of avant-garde and critical art practices that were emerging and developing in the interwar period in Yugoslavia, and their interrelations. Unlike dominant modernist art historical analyses that see a discontinuity and breakup with the avant-garde practices that pre-date it – in the “socialist art” of the fourth decade of the twentieth century – this research is trying to read the above mentioned art practices as a certain continuity and with organic coherence. Through a case study of artistic practices of Mirko Kujačić, the paper will show strong influences of Zenithism and Surrealism on the “socialist art”, defining it the art of “critical realism” (term by Lukács). It is stated that one can find avant-garde tendencies in the art of critical realism that take on different art methods and forms due to the changed socio-political circumstances, fast fascistization of the society and the proximity of war. In such political atmosphere, the avant-garde currents are reflected in the “temporal overlaps” of art and politics.

DIALECTICS OF THE BODY – FEMINIZATION OF THE FILM LANGUAGE

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Film as a language system, selecting and crossing certain elements, uses special connotations and forms its own meanings. Female body on the film, however, can be viewed and studied as a specific platform within the cinematic language through which new and different meanings can be read and also communicated as relationships between them. For decades have art theorists speculated about a possible feminist film language, as a new cinematic language that would open and set free а space for the representation of the female subject outside the socially coded form. Is such a discursive space in the area of film as a media possible, and what has the art of cinema offered to date these are the questions answered in this study. A particular research challenge is the issue of the inability of the feminist representation of the subject in the movie as a stereotyped signifying system. The autonomy of art as a practice framed in terms of ideological discourse production is reorganized and transformed thanks to the influence of materialist approach to semiotics – a concept which involves erasing established social differences and transformation of signifying structures in language. Post-structuralist theories of the twentieth century, including “Semiotics” by Julia Kristeva, launched a revision of the study and interpretation of the film, with a special contribution to the feminist studies of images, linking semiotic with the female, trying to reach out to the language independent symbolic structures and oppressive, eroticized view of the female body. What both these theoretical streams are trying to signify is a field in which a woman appears as a signifier of the female subject, regardless of the dominant masculine discourse in the visual field of communication: the one that constructs the view, the subject and the object and the language itself. Such examples can be found among the directors of primarily surrealist, experimental and feminist films, such as Men Rey, Cocteau, Maya Deren, Lora Malvi, or contemporary ones like David Lynch, Lars von Trier and Wim Wenders, whose poetics examine the limits of operation of such a language using a variety of art approaches and technologies, giving priority to the extension of the semiotics into a symbolically established reality.

A NETWORKED AVANT-GARDE: SERBIAN, FRENCH AND SPANISH SURREALISTS

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The surrealist avant-garde movement has set the ideological and cultural globalization processes into the very heart of their individual and collective research, relentlesly erasing geopolitical as well as artistic, cultural, linguistic and psychological borders alike. The cooperation and exchange of ideas among French, Spanish and Serbian surrealists was rooted in their personal aquaintances and personalised contacts starting from the 1920s. From 1923 to 1928, a rich network of contacts was built, while the widest and most prolific communication took place from 1929 to 1932, during the years of publishing the almanach Nemoguće–L’impossible (1930) and the magazine Nadrealizam danas i ovde (1931-1932) (Surrealism here and today). Surrealist have fully used the mailing in order to internationalize their movement. In addition to letters and postcards, almost daily they exchanged telegrams and packages that arrived at their resident addresses – those dispersed throughout Europe, but also the ones found within quarters of the same cities. This intranet established along the lines of French/Spanish/Serbian cooperation, functionally removed Serbian surrealists from the geographical and cultural margines into a much wider net of communication that allowed a free flow of creative information, which altogether, whether coming from the centre or margines, offered equal participation in profiling globale contours of the surrealist avant-garde ideology.

AVANT-GARDE EROTIC PHOTOGRAPHY

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Multidisciplinarnim pristupom analizira se kompleksnost ideološke i perceptivne produkcije erotske avangardne fotografije, pre svega dadaizma i nadrealizma. Identifikacija žene i njene erotičnosti u sistemu avangardne reprezentacije prati ideje o ženskom telu i odnosu žene naspram avangardne ideološke konstrukcije. Erotska fotografija u delima avangarde prvenstveno se ogleda u destrukciji dominantnih perceptivnih predstava, kao i u preispitivanju vizuelnih ideoloških formalnih i tematskih elemenata. Fotografski univerzum “epohe spavanja” sublimira erotizam kao konstitutivni element nadrealističkog pokreta. Halucinantna fantazija nadrealista, Nikole Vuča i Vana Bora, demaskira stvarnost tako što transfiguriše vizuelne kodove reflektujući nesvesna i seksualna ograničenja i provocirajući građanske moralne norme. Nadrealistička erotska fotografija počiva na modelu subverzivne seksualnosti u okvirima desadovskog sveta.