The new society relies on solidarity and rhythm.

O. E. Mandelstam

     Boža Ilić's picture Trial Boring in New Belgrade from 1948, the monogram of socialist realism, synthesizes the principal representative model in the agitprop era. It should be read as a monogram, in the sense of a coded message which is in the course of visual communication broken to introduce the observer into the aesthetic, political, moral and cultural layers of Yugoslav socialism. “Boža Ilić articulated the problem of enthusiasm for work, the rhythm and happiness of collective creation in the building of the socialist homeland”, wrote Oto Bihalji–Merin, one of the representatives of the avant–garde in art immediately after its emergence. ⁶⁸ This is a picture–emblem which rests, on the one hand, on the experiences of the tradition of realism, from Velasquez to Courbet, and on the other, on technologically advanced perception based on the experience of mechanical optics.

    The illusion of space in the picture is not built on the constructive rules of linear perspective but on a look through the lens of a camera. However, the grandiosity and epic narrativity of the picture concentrate on the foreground, i.e. the whole event is pushed towards the observer and the edge of the picture. The broad and deep area of construction where work is going on is merely indicated and is occasionally outside the real interest of the painter – buildings and cranes on the horizon are just outlined. Space is the material which should be reshaped by the new man, and it is accordingly represented as open, it spreads in all directions and even beyond the frame of the picture. Its monumentality is also underlined by the line of the horizon which is raised above the heads of the workers led by a brawny female figure.

    The effects of mechanical optics are most pronounced in both the interpretation of space in the picture and the proportions of the figures of the builders in the foreground. As opposed to the illusion on the grandiose void of space, the figures are decoratively presented, as on a poster as it were, parallel to the surface of the canvas. Their massive voluminosity, led by the central female figure – which also appears as the prefiguration of the genius of work – threatens to spill over the edges of the picture. The counterpoint established between endless space and the gigantic figures in the foreground, their dark contours pointedly precise and clear, is additionally dynamized by the replication of verticals and diagonals in the picture. Perception mediated through the camera lens, hence, photographic or mechanical optics, in a way deforms the picture of reality because it uses a special wide–angle lens. The lens can “paste” the large figures in the foreground to the unfathomably distant ambience of the square, stadium, building site or the high vertical plane of a building. The Soviet film frame which insists on perspective, clashing volumes, clashing light, clashing space, etc., imposed the visual model for both painting and photography.⁶⁹ If Trial Boring in New Belgrade appropriates the model of Soviet socialist realism, we should add that together with it it also adopts the procedures of mechanical optics offering the observer a considerably increased number of pieces of visual information within the chosen wide–angle framework.

	Друг Тито прима рођенданске еститке у Белом двору, Београд, 1956. Comrade Tito Receiving Greetings for His Birthday at the White Palace, Belgrade, 1956

    Not only this one, but also some other pictures of socialist realism, such as for instance: Young People Building the Railroad by Boža Ilić, Morning at the Youth Railroad by Ljubica Cuca Sokić, The Construction of the Bridge in Bogojevo by Milan Konjović, The 14 th of December by Djordje Andrejević Kun, bear out the conclusion that “socialist realism once again institutionalizes the genre of historic painting after its demise from the historic scene”.⁷⁰ In the construction of space, which was always the symbolic layer in the picture, as Panofsky taught us, the model known in the topographic scenes of battles in 19 th century historic painting was reconstructed. That is why not only painting but photography also insisted on grandiose space which is open and ready to receive masses of people in a stadium or a construction site, at military parades, and even when the interior is in question, factory halls, for instance, it was impressive. We should, however, emphasize that the traditional genre of historic painting is renewed in a new key which proceeds from mechanical optics in representing the mass spectacle.

    The “technologically transformed model” of representing mass historic situations, such as parades or events at stadiums, and communism readily proclaimed mass gatherings to be historic events, which means that it also imposed on it photographic blindness in dealing with history”.⁷¹ The photograph of multiplied, bare–chested young men carrying an enormous iron length of railroad track in their arms, instead of using a crane, at the Šamac–Sarajevo railroad line in 1947 is an extraordinary example of not only a bold perspective in the frame, but also of a specific photographic blindness in the interpretation of historic events. All cultural, national and individual differences among the builders, their previous and current habits and rites have remained outside the frame. Being a chance excerpt in space and time, photography does not provide insight into the overall organization of the cultural, historic and construction enterprise which, in the course of a single year, reshaped not only nature but also the living environment of hundreds of thousands of people – to list just some narrative aspects on which photography is silent. The photograph of a group of young men building the Šamac–Sarajevo railroad or of girls with Red Cross satchels marching through the streets of Belgrade at the 1 st of May Parade in 1945 in front of the images of Lenin and Stalin, differ only in terms of topic, but essentially bear the same visual message. Masses of people are there to be shaped, organized and distributed according to the established hierarchy of the new rituals such as voluntary labor drives, parades, athletic rallies or just ordinary events, for example.⁷² This symbolic representation of the mass spectacle of the body registered by photography screened and masked the actual manipulation of people.

    In the mentioned photographs, like in many other recordings of the mass spectacle of the body, there is no room for individuality. Focus is on collective action, the rhythmic movement of the crowd which is emphasized in the visual structure of the frame too. Individuality, of women and men alike, is drowned in the long shot of the building site, factory hall, stadium and parade. Work on the restoration and building of the country is collective, the celebration of the revolution is collective, and that ideological concept of the mass spectacle of the body is supported by the representational model of the picture, both the traditional one, like oil on canvas, and the mechanical one. Photography in socialism radically abandons being a neutral chronicler of reality, it chooses dynamic foreshortening, diagonal challenges and counter–lighting as well as photomontage techniques. “Neutral objectivity is reactionary utopia”, maintained Ervin Šinko in the magazine of amateur photographers and film–makers of Yugoslavia in 1949, in an article entitled “Bourgeois Objectivism and Partisanship”.⁷³ The picture of the mass spectacle of the collective body as the ideological model and visual allegory of new relations in the socialist society is constructed by the language of the photographic frame and its dynamic structure.

    Art disciplines, from architecture to music, as forms of representative but also didactic practice, supported and articulated the metaphor of the building of the new world, for “in every work of art a certain ideology is expressed, it is manifested in the manner the artist approaches the sub-ject–matter at hand, in the manner of his articulation, in what he seeks and in what he does not seek to express”, wrote Ervin Šinko further in the above–mentioned “Bourgeois Objectivism and Partisanship”. Party leaders were most consistently concerned precisely with the ideological message of every work of art, their instructions sometimes resembled recipes,⁷⁴ but the mass spectacles of the body formed key cultural models of behavior according to which the whole apparatus of the new social community functioned, and within it, on the principle of the theory of reflection, photography as well.

	Слет за Дан младости, Београд, 1986. Athletic Rally on Youth Day, Belgrade, 1986

    One of the most spectacular ideological–aes-thetic projects or a mass Yugoslav performance was by all means the construction of the Šamac– Sarajevo railroad line in 1947. If the avant–garde and primarily surrealism dreamt about a revolutionary transformation of the life of the petty bourgeoisie, then the Party's invitation to young people to join in the labor brigades radically changed the lives of many families and not only Yugoslav ones at that. We should add here that these young people were for the most part from rural and patriarchal, rather than from workers' and bourgeois families, making the change of behavior in the community all the more important in terms of quality and much more dramatic. The mass mobilization of the youth, their voluntary work as well as the voluntary work of engineers, welders, fitters, as well as of artists, was organized by the Communist Party of Yugoslavia with the intention of representing and directly promoting the newly–established moral and political values of the revolution, in the domestic and foreign public alike. Propaganda in totalitarianism, according to Hannah Arendt, is always aimed at convincing and winning over not only those already involved in the new system but also all those who are still opposing it or who have remained outside it. Artists, painters, musicians, photographers, etc. also, according to centralized Party directives, discharged important functions in promoting the new aesthetic and ideological principles of the revolution. They were sent not only on big excursions following the trails of war offensives, but also organized work in popular chapters, as shown by the totalitarian project of the construction of the Šamac–Sarajevo line.⁷⁵ Moša Pijade, a painter and high–ranking Party official, stated, on the occasion of the adoption of the First Five–Year Plan, that “the building of socialism is not a hazy figment of imagination”, but reality, “visible and tangible, one that can be captured through the still and film camera lens, as well as through numbers”.⁷⁶

	Јосип Броз Тито, из албума “Тен и његов господар”, 1955. Josip Broz Tito, from the album “Ten nd His Master”, 1955

    The construction of the Šamac–Sarajevo railroad line can be seen as a model of a total work of art, that specific mass Gesamtkunstwerk of Yugoslav communism. It was the first successful application of the formula which guaranteed the synchronized shaping of the new man, the classless society and the new reality. The material of this total work of art were the actual lives of over two hundred thousand participants rather than the rugged mountain chains in Bosnia and Herzegovina . “The railroad line was constructed with the voluntary participation of 887 work brigades with a total of 211,371 builders, members of the People's Youth of Yugoslavia. It also involved 6,328 engineers, technicians and specialized workers and 56 foreign brigades with 5,842 young men and women from 42 foreign countries”, we can read, among other things, in the picture album the builders presented to Josip Broz Tito, the President of the Party and state.⁷⁷

    The concept of the mass spectacle of labor implied, just as later the theory on the social spectacle made topical, the constant production of pictures and not only goods, in this case, thousands of pictures of kilometers of sections of the railroad line. Beginners' visual art works of young people, builders of the railroad, were immediately printed in the papers not because they “took one's breath away” with their artistic qualities but because they promoted the concept of new collective creative work stripped of the aura of a unique and authentic work of art. The practice of displaying works by workers and children, typical of the avant–garde and its ideas on the demystification of artists and art, was revitalized in the framework of the strategy of advertising and propaganda in the mass media. Photographs of the construction of the railroad line are massively reproduced on the pages of daily papers, at commemorative exhibitions and “bulletin–board newspapers”, with radio stations reporting on the new feats of the railroad builders on a daily basis. As a rule, the production of information and pictures, i.e. the establishment of mass communications and a spectacle of pictures, evolved in parallel with the construction of something tangible: a highway, an airport, New Belgrade, factory installations, hydro–power plants and similar. By repeating the once adopted iconography of the concept of collective creation, of “concert in action”, the mass media made it possible for the photographic image to emotionally mobilize and enlist new participants.

    The pattern of dynamic tension in the frame – between large figures and a deep and broad working or parading space, the rhythmic distribution of light and dark masses as well as emphasized vertical movement, shaped the representational idiom of the art of socialist realism. Mechanical optics, i.e. a view through the camera lens and a new perspective, are not the discovery of socialist realism. That subject was written about much and debated even more in the German and Russian avant–garde circles, but the photograph of socialist realism adopted and quoted some avant–garde visual matrices which were no longer limited to the narrow circle of art, but were reproduced en masse in Party papers, such as the Komunist. Photomontage, for instance, as a process of using ready–made pictures, freely confronts several planes in the frame, employs unexpected juxta-positioning, manipulates proportion in order to glorify mass consensus and collective work in the multi–layered visual structure of the picture. It is in the service of agitating for the realization of the projection of the Five–Year Plan which ambitiously dreams of new cities, bridges, roads, factories, etc. “Socialist realism represents the Party–minded, collective surrealism”, says Groys, “that flourishes under Lenin's famous slogan 'it is necessary to dream' and which announces the “magnificent vision of the world built by the party, the total work of art born of the will of its true creator and art-ist”,⁷⁸ Stalin or Tito.

	Посета пионира уочи рођендана Jосипа Броза Тита, Београд, 23.05.1955. Visit by Pioneers Before Josip Broz Tito's Birthday, Belgrade, 23 May 1955

    An event, especially one lasting several months, like the construction of a railroad line, or several days, like the celebration of Tito's birthday, i.e. Youth Day,⁷⁹ cannot be represented by the language of the photographic image. A photographic report, no matter how hard it tries to bridge the gaps in the continuity of visual narration, is always perceived as a sequence of individual photographs, as a series of frozen moments. The arrival of the baton at the Yugoslav People's Army stadium in Belgrade in 1957, for instance, can also be represented by subsequently selecting several photographs of the God knows how many taken during the event. “To tell a story”, says Barthes, “the painter has at his disposal only one moment, the moment he will arrest on canvas and which he, therefore, must choose well, securing for it in advance the highest possible yield of meaning and pleasure. Of necessity all–encompassing, this moment will be artificial.” ⁸⁰ As opposed to the painter, the photographer has at his disposal an infinite number of individual moments to tell the story of the mass socialist performance at a stadium or building site, but not every moment carries the meaning or the message. That is why he needs to capture those moments which he assumes beforehand will impart the ideal meaning. The frozen picture, i.e. fragment, cannot replace the whole, but the construction of its frame, i.e. the turning of the lens in this or that direction, to this or that segment of the action, as well as the free cutting out of reality, can modify the meaning of the visual message and agitate for a given ideology.

    The representational idiom of socialist realism functions as a truthful allegory – the term was proposed by Courbet in connection with the manifest picture of realism, The Painter in His Studio, a Real Allegory, in 1855. Pictures and the recording of moments of concrete construction serve as associations with the building of the new world and the new man. In other words, the myth of progress has configured the actual social context, establishing not only a new economic and moral, but also a new aesthetic order. The ideologically “truthful” representation of socialist realism registers a staged, directed and pre–planned reality of mass parades, voluntary labor drives, shock worker competitions and collective athletic manifestations at stadiums, as reality itself. “It may appear to today's spectator”, says Predrag Marković, “that the socialist art theoreticians and critics had trouble with perceiving reality, for creating a picture of the world was not in fact the artist's task”.⁸¹ For Ervin Šinko and many other theoreticians of socialist realism, objectivism was an illusion and part of the baggage of the bourgeois past. However, while not abandoning the documentary qualities of a chronicle of reality, in socialist realism photography took over the function of the mass media as it was able perfectly to retouch the cracks between reality and the theater, namely between the truth and fiction.

Првомајска парада, Београд, 1953. 1st of May Parade, Belgrade, 1953	Првомајска парада, Београд, 1947. 1st of May Parade, Belgrade, 1947	Првомајска парада, Београд, 1955. 1st of May Parade, Belgrade, 1955

    Photographs of the mass spectacle of the body are in essence theater, i.e. stage sets or pictorial tableaux towards which the gaze of the audience is directed, of which Barthes speaks in connection with Diderot. They register only individual moments and scenes in the drama of the building of the new man and the new social community on the vast stage of construction sites and ritual mass parades. Moments of the action cut out and bordered by the frame are scenically and pictorially prepared tableaux: “they are scenes that are laid (in the sense in which we say a table is laid).⁸² Eisenstein also was thinking along those lines about the composition of the film frame when he claimed that “class determination” lay at the base of what “looks like an arbitrary cinematographic relationship towards the objects placed in front of the camera or found there.” ⁸³ Situations are always laid or found for both the film and the still camera. The camera, as an instrument, is never able to distinguish between the staged and the real here–and–now. But, we should also bear in mind that every frame contains a grain of truth, for once some people really marched hoisting flags through the streets of Belgrade and Rovinj, and some did carry heavy lengths of railroad track. But, the power of photographic rhetoric partly lies precisely in the fact that the relationship between the referent and his image is so stable and unbreakably fixed.

    In the mass theater of communism, the photographer is not an objective witness but one of the actors who, just like the other participants in the spectacle, is costumed or identified by an appropriate selection of attributes. His status of a privileged observer requires of him to inform on the casting, the harmony and rhythm, both in thesymbolical plane of the mass spectacle and in theconcrete sphere of building the new world. If the builders of that new world had to be young, healthy and strong, then they are, logically, represented in photographs as bare–chested muscular heroes of labor or uniformed soldiers and workers. Female “comrades” were also costumed. They donned uniforms, coveralls and aprons,but also white blouses combined with skirts, trousers and shorts.

	Тошо Дабац, Раднички савет у фабрици “Раде Кончар”, Загреб, 1958. Tošo Dabac, Workers' Council in the “Rade Končar” Factory, Zagreb, 1958

    According to Vladimir Macura, the young are the true representative of the “new man”, they have discarded the trappings of the bourgeois past. Through the bodies of children and young people, in gymnastic spectacles, “the regime reassured itself of its vitality and optimistic the future. The use of youth in Tito's cult”, on the occasion of the celebration of Youth Day, “symbolically revitalized the power of the aging leader”.⁸⁴

    Photographs of mass parades and Tito's birthday celebrations, especially those with “live pictures” at stadiums and mobile floats on which young people exercise, as well as “accidental” shots from building sites constitute the true allegory of communism. It is a picture of “reality”, of idyllic order in the new society, constructed for the leader, and indirectly, via the mass media, for all the passive participants in the mass spectacle, to gaze upon. In agitprop photography Party law is what: “looks, frames, focuses, publishes”, for in it, like “in the theater, film and traditional literature, things arealways looked at from somewhere.” ⁸⁵ When Dušan Makavejev's film The Parade (1961) or Želimir Žilnik's A Journal on Youth in the Village, in Winter (1967) and Early Works (1969) put events outside the official stage in the frame, outside the ideologically desired reality, the alarm sounded, for someone had come to doubt the canonized norms of representation, the still valid lawsof the Party.