IVANA PERICA: CABARET OF YUGOSLAV JOURNALS (1928-1933)

lecture in the framework of the exhibition "The Art of the Collective. Case: Zemlja"

Tuesday, January 24, 2017, 7. p.m.
BAZA, B. Adžije Str 11, Zagreb

The lecture represents Zagreb and Belgrade magazines from the period between 1928 to 1933, which overlaps with the duration of the group Zemlja. It focuses on the dynamics of rapid turns on the international political and artistic scene of the late twenties and early thirties and their reception and actualization in national journals. The year 1928 is a milestone in many ways: In the text "Cabaret of Yugoslav journals" from 1929 Theodor Balk critically reviews the majority of the then Yugoslav magazines, and cites Miroslav Krleža’s Literary Republic and Stevan Galogaža’s Critique as two valuable exceptions. While the Literary Republic already becomes a thing of the past (suspended in 1927), in 1928 the Critique takes over and sharpens its artistic-and-political connotations. The articles published in the Critique and other journals launched in the same year (Social Thought and New Literature) and in magazines from the early thirties (Pivot, Literature, Culture) address the key issues of the then discussions on the international artistic left: conflict of aestheticism and engagementin art, the question of political telos and realistic pessimism, the relationship between the dialectical and vulgar materialism, the issue of talent in respect to the political imperative of dialectical consciousness in art, the development of proletarian art and appropriation of civic art traditions. The thesis of the presentation is that, unlike the later stages of the Conflict , which culminated in the polarization of the Communists on one side and Krleža‘s defense of freedom and talent on the other, these discussions have established the eminently left positions in local art, even more so than was the case in the later discussions that are remembered as the central axis of the Conflict on the left.

Ivana Perica graduated from German and Croatian language and literature in Zagreb and acquired her PhD on the subject of the relationship between private and public in the political thought of Hannah Arendt and Jacques Rancière. The book Die Privat-öffentliche Achse des Politischen. Das Unvernehmen zwischen Hannah Arendt und Jacques Rancière was published in 2016 with the Königshausen & Neumann. The exposure is based on research conducted during the half-year residency at the Zagreb Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research, funded by the Austrian Academic Exchange ÖAD (the "JESH" programme). In the summer semester of 2017 she will be lecturing at the Institute of Political Science at the University of Vienna.

The programme is supported by: The Ministry of Culture of Republic of Croatia, City Office for Education, Culture and Sports Zagreb.

The exhibition is part of the project Cartographies of Resistance, organized by Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung Southeast Europe in partnership with [BLOK].