The City as a Space of Plastic Happening: From Grand Proposals to Exceptional Gestures in the Art of the 1970s in Zagreb

《The City as a Space of Plastic Happening: From Grand Proposals to Exceptional Gestures in the Art of the 1970s in Zagreb》

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关键字: Yugoslav art and art criticism; 1968 in Yugoslavia; socialist city; exhibitions in the urban sphere

作者单位: [Bago, Ivana] Duke Univ, Dept Art Art Hist & Visual Studies, Campus Box 90766, Durham, NC 27708 USA. Bago, I (reprint author), Duke Univ, Dept Art Art Hist & Visual Studies, Campus Box 90766, Durham, NC 27708 USA. E-Mail: ivana.bago@duke.edu

摘要: In the period of the late 1960s and early 1970s, a number of Zagreb-based artists, critics, and curators advocated the idea that art should leave the museum and engage in a direct encounter with the city and its inhabitants. Starting with the 1971 Zagreb Salon and its Proposal section titled The City as a Space of Plastic Happening, art took to the streets in a series of exhibition projects at the same time as Yugoslav students did so in protests that began in June 1968 in Belgrade, and continued in other cities, including Zagreb, where they were then followed by their ideological antagonist, the Croatian Spring movement in 1971. The notion of plasticity was a central discursive tool in the critical and theoretical accounts of the time, and the city was both the stage and target of the artistic gestures of plastic transformation. The article reads these projects and the discourses surrounding them as critiques of the Yugoslav socialist city, and by metonymical extension, of the failure of the Yugoslav state to live up to its promise of a just socialist society.