Take that life and transform it into a miracle of art!

I.I. Anisimov

    After the end of World War II, avant–garde art, primarily surrealism, got in Yugoslavia, like it did in the Soviet Union after the October Revolution, a unique historical chance to, according to Boris Groys, “perceive not only an undeniable confirmation of its theoretical constructs and aesthetic intuition, but also a singular opportunity for translating them into reality.” 110 The Soviet Union was, not only to Yugoslav communists but also to members of art avant–gardes, “the most progressive country in the world, the protector of all small and oppressed peoples, a society of freedom, justice, national equality and progress, a society of already developed socialism on the road to communism”.¹¹¹ It was the ideal which the agitprop culture in Yugoslavia aspired to and tried to emulate in every respect. The new world, of which the avant–garde dreamed, had to be not only much more beautiful but also much more just. That was, ultimately, the platform of the specific aesthetic–political project which was functionalized in the agitprop era. The aestheticization of ideology and vice versa, the ideologization of aesthetics, can also be read as a mass spectacle and a Gesamtkunstwerk project, which engages in the exchange of ideas between aesthetic ideology and totalitarianism.¹¹²

    One can read about the grandiosity of mythical time and space and the mass spectacle or specific Gesamtkunstwerk of 1 st of May parades, celebrations of Youth Day and voluntary work drives, in upbeat Party and press reports, where these, like all other phenomena, were eagerly translated into the statistics of numbers. The language of propaganda, based on the well–known “before and after” matrix, shaped the ideological rhetoric which permeated all segments of life: from industrial production to those attending illiteracy courses. In contrast to general, meaning comprehensive, numerical as well as textual reports, photography can only fragmentarily reconstruct the contours of the socialist mass spectacle of progress. “The lens cuts out part of reality as with an ax”, says Eisenstein.¹¹³ On the other hand, however, the lens of the still camera, as opposed to the film camera, does not record sound and musical rhythm which were of fundamental importance in the multi– media experience of the mass Gesamtkunstwerk or performance.¹¹⁴ The rhetoric of photography has, in both respects, limited possibilities. Its message is anchored in the world of real phenomena and restricted to the borders of the medium. But, precisely this markedly realistic expression was in the spirit of the times because it supported the aesthetic norm of socialist realism as an agitation art. However, we should bear in mind that socialist realism “advocates a strictly “objective,”“adequate” rendering of external reality, at the same time it stages or produces this reality”.¹¹⁵ With its indisputably “truthful” picture, photography agitated for the transformation of the world, i.e., its task was to visually document the utopist thesis that “the socialist transformation of the economy and society transforms man also”.¹¹⁶

    The representative publicity of the mass spectacle, as one of the most exciting representations of the staged future, was inconceivable without the presence of cameras. Like film, photography was the crown witness attesting to the fact that the concept of monumental propaganda, as part of the allusion to the ideal city of communism, necessitated a new urban design. It warns the viewers that the “ramshackle” facilities of limited duration, as well as specifically designed temporary interventions in the urban ambience, were not devoid of monumentality or propagandist functionality. On the contrary, site–specific structures in socialism supported the essential effect of the theater. The concept of staged reality relied on the scenic effects of the new orchestration of objects in space built on the counterpoint principle – the dynamic and unexpected confrontation of the traditional and the new, the stable and the friable, the durable and the ephemeral. A spatial and then a semantic dialogue as well was established between the triumphal arch and the five–pointed star, the airplane and the pedestrian, the enlarged wheels and downscaled urban quarters – to mention just a few characteristic examples registered by photography.

    One of the famous avant–garde dramaturges, S. E. Radlov, believed, in connection with the new dramaturgy of the representative mass spectacle that “there is probably no such “super–practical” people in the world that would not experience the over–powering need to reflect the greatest moments of their life and their history by creating monuments. This feeling of magnificence, of the monumental nature of what is happening or has been momentous in the past is given concrete, tangible shape by the power of art. … Essentially it is all the same if it is made out of bronze or plaster, whether it is to last for a millennium or for one day …” ¹¹⁷ Although the temporary structures at the mass spectacles in Yugoslavia did not have the Soviet grandiosity, they were built with the same objective and are a recognizable model of the mass spectacle in the agitprop era. Later public mass performances discarded the concept of undertaking temporary interventions in space and the construction of gigantic models, as a specific type of the spectacle of goods, so that instead on banal products, which were still desired by most of the inhabitants of Yugoslavia, stress was laid on bold scientific achievements and the strengthening of military power – the photographs show astronautical club members or columns of tanks and trucks packed with armed soldiers.

    Festivals and mass spectacles lasting for a number of days were, as standardized norms of collective rituals, organized not only as part of 1st of May parades and celebrations of the birthday of the President of the state, “comrade Tito”, but also to commemorate Victory Day, then as a welcome to Tito on his return home from trips or to welcome visiting foreign statesmen, but also on the occasion of funerals, for instance that of Boris Kidrič in Ljubljana in 1953. That heterogeneity is deceptive – it only to a certain extent disguises the real dramaturgy of the socialist mass spectacle whose aim is to construct virtual reality on the basis of a staged reality. Aestheticization, or, better said, theatralization of the current political reality screened the apparata of might, blurring the boundaries between the public and the private sphere, between art and life.

    In the agitation and propaganda period, which officially lasted from 1945 to 1952, but stretches to 1958 with certain modifications, the rhetoric of photography is systematically included in the centralized structure of the mass media which do not advertise various products and do not encourage consumption, like in capitalism, but agitate for an aesthetic–ethical ideology along the lines of the revolution successfully carried out.¹¹⁸ Photography, as a popular medium of visual communication, with its multiplied image, in which not even the negative has the status of an original, simultaneously produces and articulates mass spectacle as the typical product of agitprop culture.

    In that way and with the enormous help of photography, the socialist mass spectacle spread the myth of progress far beyond the borders of space and time. In the frozen structure of the photographic image it went on even after the final beats of the Kozara reel, and every new publishing and multiplication of photographs reproduced its once focused fragments anew. The Marxist theoreticians of popular culture knew well that “every piece of news, every report and every article has its beginning and its end; photography does not have them! It speaks for hours and days, it speaks a language understandable to both the worker and the intellectual, understandable and convincing to every man.” ¹¹⁹ Therefore, if we can say that temporary structures transformed, for a short while, real ambiences into the ideal spaces of the future, the ideological “work” of photography evolved “over the long run”, shrouded as it was in the opaque veil of arrested time.

	Војници Jугословенске народне армије на прослави Дана младости, Београд, 1961. Soldiers of the Yugoslav People's Army at the Celebration of Youth Day, Belgrade, 1961

    The photographic camera does not reflect reality but produces photogenic pictures of socialism which are in the service of the propaganda of that new social reality. We all know that the camera cannot arrange reality so tangibly and obviously as can painting or literature, for instance, but remaining faithful to the principles of the visual chronicler, it employs a series of technical and stylistic effects with which it does not so much reveal how things really look like as how they could look if the picture was built on the basis of socialist ideas. If one of the chief values of a photographic image is its realism, then precisely the rhetoric of photography was suitable for publicizing new victories on the road to communism. To whatever extent photography reduced the representation of reality to typically scenic, i.e. ideological tableaux, these framed fragments were perceived as objective, mechanical pictures. The custom of the camera to focus only on specific events and phenomena while leaving others out altogether or losing them from its field of vision, became its key advantage as a medium, for fragmentary images of an event, as allusions, could replace the whole. In other words, different montage procedures or specific optical deformations, close–ups, unusual perspectives and similar, allow the subsequent constituting of an “objective” and “total” picture of reality. The reading of these photographs is therefore, in certain respects, like “reading tracks or a cardiogram”, constantly inducing us to ask ourselves what has been isolated and what has been represented of the continuity of events, but also what has been left out and what we have not seen.¹²⁰

    The instrumentalized position of photography, like of other arts in the era of agitation and propaganda, was justified by “historic tasks” and class interests. It is particularly important to alert the contemporary reader to the fact that some authors, like Voja Marinković, realized its instrumentalization, i.e. “educational” engagement: “Photographic art was placed in the service of great objectives and “historic human endeavor”, as were all other arts.” ¹²¹ The radically changed function of photography also changed its context: it was no longer only in the domain of art but also in “the service of great objectives” and that then reversed the traditional role of the author and his relationship towards the work of art.

	Слет за Дан младости, Београд, 1978. Athletic Rally on Youth Day, Belgrade, 1978

    The idea of Boris Arvatov, one of the leading theoreticians of productionism, that “Artists must become the colleagues of scholars, engineers and administrators”is crucial for understanding the position of the author in both the land of the Soviets and generally in the cultural context of socialism.¹²² The author in socialism, among other things, is not a subject who acts and creates individually, he is primarily part of the collective, of class–labeled identity and almost always on the side of the aes-thetic–political objectives of the Party. According to Barthes, the author is “a modern phenomenon, the product of our society which has, … discovered the prestige of the individual.” ¹²³ In the culture of agitation and propaganda he had to abandon the position “I state” or “I represent” in favor of the impersonal “We create” according to the Laws of the Party. The radical about–turn from the in- dividual to the collective concept of creativity did not kill the author but pushed him into the shadow of ideology. He had to forget previous, individual, artistic experiences or at least adapt them to the new forms of collective practice, for a neutral position was as unacceptable as the rejection of new forms of agitation art. The identity of the author was pushed to the background in the public sphere as well. Collective exhibitions, organized on the hierarchic principle – from club to federal and international ones, with the obligatory institution of the jury, took precedence over one– man shows. The change of the political course in 1952 practically coincides with the staging of one–man shows. The first, quite independent exhibition with an enormous number of photographs (250) was that by Stanoje Bojović in Vrnjačka Banja in 1952, and then, already next year, of Tošo Dabac in Zagreb.¹²⁴ In their ultimate configuration, exhibitions fulfilled a “theological” meaning – the program principles of the Party, i.e. the concept of the leader. Only he, Josip Broz Tito, possessed in agitprop culture the identity of the Author – he was the creator of the new Yugoslav community and the “symbol of the nation”. Everyone else subordinated their identity of author to the identity of producers, or “workers in culture” as they used to be called. Through the network of the Popular Engineering Society, associations and clubs, they received directives, instructions, tasks and guidelines for creating works, which had to be properly coded not only in terms of topic and style, but particularly on the ideological level.

    Isolated instances of rejection of some patterns of behavior in a totalitarian culture coincide in time with the decision of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia to abandon the bulky system of agitation and propaganda. Namely, after 1952, the Party offered an ideologically revised model of totalitarianism dominated by the concept of “socialist humanism”. It continued to be a concept of a society in which the Communist Party still puts itself in the position of a sacrosanct ideological avant–garde. It creates “abstract freedoms” i.e. a model of “free form and limited content of cultural creation”.¹²⁵ That was, partly, a call to return to order, i.e. to abandon revolution and the utopian project of the transformation of life. The new platform opened up possibilities for “vulgar socialist realism” to be replaced by its brushed–up variant – “socialist aestheticism” in photography as well as in other arts. That moment saw the reopening of modernist discussions on the autonomous aesthetic principles of a picture, while in respect of photography the possibilities of a “humanized camera” are indicated. Photography, like painting, abandons the revolutionary phase and reestablishes continuity with the ideas of modernism, although in the opinion of some authors, Vidoje Mojsilović, for instance, “there is a lot of formalism in those works”. With the intention of having reality “documented in a poetic manner”, i.e. having the formal aspects of the picture suppress the obligation of visualizing ideological canons, the cover page of the 1958 Foto–kino revija features the boldly cut–up Portrait by Mirjana Knežević.¹²⁶

    Like all totalitarian cultures, agitprop culture in Yugoslavia established a firm system of hierarchy among the different arts which was, it goes without saying, based on the possibilities for mass–scale ideological reeducation through the media. If literature and film were on the top of the pyramid, immediately following and far ahead of traditional painting were sculpture and photog-raphy.¹²⁷ The photographic picture is articulated more as an informative and representative than as an aesthetic message. It functioned in the sphere of the mass media and visual communications together with the poster, the press and film, which institutionally occupies the position of the leading medium of popular culture in socialism.

	Фискултура на радној акцији, 1954. Gymnastics at a Voluntary Labor Drive, 1954

    The principles of the new social system, in which art could not, but neither wished to retain an autonomous position, were demonstrated in the public sphere of mass one–day or several–month long socialist performances, from parades to work drives and courses. In any case, the historic avant–garde's ultimate request was the necessity of transforming life, i.e. the idea of involving art in everyday life. If surrealism failed to effect a revolutionary change of life and if it became nothing more than art or poetry, as Bataille thinks, it at least offered a model of collective creativity which was put into practice by the agitprop culture. If cooperation between the art and the Party avant–garde is viewed from that standpoint, then, among other, we can also say that this specific mix of the aesthetic–political ideology of revolutionary and productivist action enlisted a large number of readers and viewers as active collaborators in shaping the new culture of socialism. In other words, it managed to motivate the masses and to involve the consumers in production, as Benjamin says, because “tendency is a necessary but never a sufficient condition for works to have the function of organizing.” ¹²⁸ It was in that sense that the concept of mass cultural, technical and physical education in the agitprop era was primarily geared to the “production” of the new man, and that process of overall transformation could, ultimately, as many, from Mondrian to Argan, expected, “turn every individual into an artist–creator”.¹²⁹