Prelom Conversation Booklet

BREAK
Conversation
BREAK Journal of the School for History and Theory of Images vol. 2, no. 2-3, January-June 2002 Publisher: Centre for Contemporary Arts - Belgrade The School for History and Theory of Images Sarajevska 3/VI, 11000 Belgrade, YU phone/fax: (+ 381) 11 361 35 84 e-mail: cca@dijafragma.com www.dijafragma.com Editors: Andrej Dolinka, Du{an Grlja, Slobodan Karamani}, Dragana Kitanovi}, Vesna Madòski, Vladimir Markovi}, Svebor Midì}, Sini{a Mitrovi} (Editor-in-Chief), Milan Rakita, Jelena Vesi} International Advisory Committee: Glenn Bowman (Canterbury), Boris Buden (Wien), Elisabeth Cowie (Canterbury), Tom Holert (Kln), Neboj{a Jovanovi} (Sarajevo), Alexei Monroe (London), Bojana Peji} (Berlin), Renata Salecl (Ljubljana), Mark Terkessidis (Kln), Slavoj @ièk (Ljubljana) Proofreaders: Dragana Kitanovi}, Vladimir Markovi} English translations: Vanja Savi}, Barbara Vasi}
Cover: Phil Collins, Young Serbs, 2001 ( 2001 phil collins) Design & lay-out: Andrej Dolinka Typeset: preLOM Printing: Akademija, Beograd, 2002 Poster: Phil Collins, becoming more like us, 2002 ( 2002 phil collins) Phil Collins, Dejan (leaving), 2002 ( 2002 phil collins) Printing: Forma, Beograd, 2002 Editorial Office: Sarajevska 3/VI, 11000 Belgrade, YU Phone/fax: (+ 381) 11 361 35 84 E-mail: prelom@dijafragma.com www.dijafragma.com/school 2002 Copyright by Prelom
CONTENTS:
[7] [ 11 ] [ 15 ] [ 24 ]
Conversation, The polemic on Phil Collins Young Serbs Branislav Dimitrijevi} Suspended Adolescence Aleksandra Sekuli} Defense from the Protection (Re: Suspended Adolescence) Slobodan Karamani} Post-traumatic Youth and the Conservation by Way of Individual Experience Du{an Grlja (De)generation in Protest Milan Rakita Conversation Piece Vesna Jovanovi} The Sixth Head
[ 34 ] [ 45 ] [ 52 ]
CONVERSATION
the polemic on Phil Collins Young Serbs Phil Collins (not THE pop-star!) is an artist based in Belfast. This year hes on the international progam at the PS1 Contemporary Art Museum, New York and makes work in, and about, representation in places conventionally called hot spots. Phil Collins photographic series entitled Young Serbs was shot during the summer last year in Belgrade. In October 2001 two of the photographs were shown in The Museum for Contemporary Art, Belgrade in an exhibition called Conversation. This exhibition re-opened the Museum and marked the change in the institutional policy and curatorial conception which characterized this cultural institution during the nineties. Its title itself implied, in many accompanying meanings, one of its fundamental aims: to provide a possibility for an informal interchange of thoughts, and to signal the ability to open that interchange within an isolationist environment. In the following months, Phils work produced exactly such an interchange. Led in the beginning as a kind of informal polemic, through an intensive e-mail correspodence, and even more intensive discussions over the phone, at numerous house-parties, on the town, and in Break journal editorial meetings. It gave us a proof that the aspirations we advocated in the editorial of our first issue (to spark off continuous and open debate in culture and art, boost all forms of alternative and uninstitutionalized thinking, develop and update mecha-
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nisms of constitution and communicational standards of an intelectual community) were not merely an illusion. Therefore we are proudly presenting it in this issue. The word conversation repeated here as a title for the section in this case means actual support to every genuine dialogue which encourages polemical and critical reflection. Instead of adding A WRITTEN comment, the artist is giving us a gift - a limited edition pull-out poster produced especially for this occasion. It contains two photographs from his latest series becoming more like us (shot in Belgrade as well) shown for the first time in January 2002 in a solo show in Dublin. Are we facing an another polemical turn?
Branislav Dimitrijevi}
THREE
BELGRADE PHOTOS
BY PHIL COLLINS
SUSPENDED ADOLESCENCE:
...anyway here they are romantic, sexy, deathly, intimate, posed, bucolic, disappointed, suspicious. When I was taking stuff, or even when I felt I couldnt take stuff, I wanted to escape the urban grit and aggressive posturing of western photography in Belgrade and try and pick at a romantic sensibility - hinting somewhere near a commercial/shampoo ad. Please let me know what you think even if you cant bear them... (Phil Collins in an e-mail with three attached images, all close-up photographs of 20-something year old people, two male, one female, lying down in the grass.) Well, yes, I can hardly bear them. They appear too intense, too close, too physical. But what I think I cannot really bear is the gaze from their eyes. The eyes of people lying down, resting their heads; a gaze you encounter only in the most intimate situations. On the other hand, for a trained art historian, the myth of Narcissus immediately comes to mind. One can almost smell the pool just a few metres away. Unfortunately, since I know where these photographs were taken, the magic might go for me. But does not. The photos were taken in a rather busy Belgrade park, no pools nearby, only uncut grass and poorly maintained trees and bushes. In the city famous for... - whatever it is famous for - the sentiments of intimacy and sensuality escape even us who live there. These
are the remotest notions possible in a context where private life has been utterly influenced and directed by political events. Have I said anything new or just confirmed the dictum that everything private is political? Either way, the rediscovery of an image of intimacy in Belgrade struck me a year ago, when I saw a video by an artist from Ireland, Phil Collins, that was shown in Ljubljana at Manifesta3. The video was a low-tech recording of tales told directly to camera by three young Belgraders (in fact the very same three that are now in these photographs). They reply to different questions that put in motion relations between their most intimate living and the world that surrounds them. They sound disappointed but accustomed to it, there is a touch of melancholy but, confronted with the stubbornness of the camera, the overall impression is very poignant without being tragic. I have to admit that I was unexpectedly captured by these photos. The whole story of what happened in the place I live in, and in places all around me, became poeticized for the first time. In other words: I took it quite personally. There is no sense of detachment now that I see the sequel to the film in the form of a short photo-play consisting of these images. Now the story has finally gone: there are not even the subtlest references to war, isolation, poverty, guilt... There is nothing that defines the images as they were in the video, there is nothing that yells out: This is Serbia, this is the place where Slobodan Milosevic was in power for more than 13 years, this is the country where at the beginning of the 90s the majority of inhabitants authorised military intervention against neighbouring nations, this is the place where there are still many people who do not have any sense of shame (well, yes, shame and guilt are two different things, as Joyce once put it) for atrocities done in their name, this is the place where the average salary is under 50, where the remains of industry were destroyed by NATO air-strikes, and where
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reports say, that the accomplishment of a sexual life among the young (and the rest) has acquired a most uninspiring shade of grey. These real-life Belgraders in the photographs are in their 20s. Yet they disclose a kind of sexuality that is almost adolescent. There is a retro mood about them, they look stuck in their youth, and aware of it. This most striking aspect of these photographs hits an interesting spot in the peculiar social sphere that can be observed in contemporary Serbia. Collins openly expresses his intention to escape the urban grit and aggressive posturing of western photography in Belgrade. That is indeed the case. Usually, visitors to Serbia who make it their mission to take images of a hot spot, aim their camera at two common sights. The first is to look at ruins. Ruins as a sign of social collapse, for those who want to show that the sanctions against Serbia really worked; ruins as a sign of an unjust bombing for those on the Left who want to show that western countries heavily participated but did not solve the conflict in the region; and ruins as a sign of Art for those who attempt to achieve a sense of sublimation, by taking these images and making them look artistic. The other sight is the urban culture of Belgrade. This was invented by admirers of Serbian opposition movements, of the activities of the Radio B92 and by all those who believed that there is such a thing as the other Serbia visually manifest in rock n roll bands playing in smoky garages or westernlooking kids in gritty urban landscapes. Collins took a look at something else, something just half-discovered: at faces not surrounded by explicit cultural and social settings, at sexuality without aggressiveness, and, at some firm disappointments affecting all of us here... He captured a fascinating feature that defines the psychic structure of that urban culture that has been portrayed so many times as something that is good in itself because its shown an alternative to the dominating political framework of Milosevics Serbia. Collins captured
something I might try to define as suspended adolescence in the country where youth is extended up to the point when people suddenly get old. There are mostly economic and social reasons behind it, of course: unemployment, no committed relationships, conservatism at universities, and so on. However, there is also something eternally narcissistic about this position. It is cherished, it is a part of a self-construction; of sexuality, of rejection of maturity. The pictures reveal narcissism as the core of their sexuality, they are sexy and deathly, reposing as lovers and corpses. There is no pool where their images are reflected, but the camera plays that role. It seems very evident that another persons narcissism has a great attraction for those who have renounced part of their own narcissism and are in search of object-love, wrote Freud in On Narcissism. As observers we share this position with the person who took the photos. Our position is impossible, we are either looking out of the pool (as the corpse in Billy Wilders Sunset Boulevard) or share the same grass with someone who is there but looking through us. We can hardly bear these images because the gaze we encounter is directed towards us but not reaching us. We are faced with a sexuality that is entirely self-absorbed, echoing the lines from Ovids Metamorphoses describing Narcissus self-deception: Himself admiring, by himself admired. Lover and loved, desiring and desired.
This text is printed in Source The Irish Photographic Magazine, no. 28, Autumn 2001
Aleksandra Sekuli}
THE DEFENSE FROM THE PROTECTION SUSPENDED ADOLESCENCE)
(RE:
I was lying and in my sleep I saw heads cut off. Those were all the heads of my enemies. (Milo{ Bodnar: Heads cut off, 1998.)
Because one of those faces is mine, I partly take Branislav Dimitrijevi}s text Suspended Adolescence, which accompanied Phil Collins portraits Young Serbs in Source magazine, as a letter addressed to me. Partly means I will take personally only the possible consequences of the protection from the discourse of Other Serbia offered by the author, relying on the other hand on another stereotype, equally unacceptable for me. Recognizing Dimitrijevi}s successful veer away from the usual urban grit, the author applauds Collins for revealing something he calls suspended adolesescence. In opposition to an old stereotype he
presents a model of posttraumatic youth which he defines as a generation which is, because of social and other reasons, stuck in its youth until it suddenly wakes up old. Automatically, as models usually work, emotions and behaviour expected of posttraumatic youth are attributed to me. Being already promoted in Other Serbia once, I remember very clearly how sticky the obligation to confirm or to reject some given context could be; or one just falls into the expected form of behaviour, feelings, and symptoms. The irresistible urge to defend myself from this protection is also because I found this text very important, since it is: 1. written with suggestive prowess; 2. anticipating a clash with the discourse of the Other Serbia; 3. relying on the terms such as generation (which offends my taste). On top of that it generalises dangerously (which offends my hypertrophied pride) the experiences of the people I know, whose richness/lack of experience naturally assures the originality of its classification and attempts to transpose it into individual cases. This may be their only hope of having something still under their control. My hope is not going to be sacrificed in the name of coherence for some system of interpretation. In this case, the model is the easier way, and when it is applied with such grace and charm, it is dangerously seductive. I enjoyed it myself, the protection is cosy, but I remembered that its me we are talking about and that actually it doesnt agree. So, I am going to speak for myself, since one of my goals is to prove that you cant make a clinical diagnosis of something that doesnt exist. Our generation doesnt exist (axiom: generation = a generations shared memory.)
AND ME, TOO, ALMOST (For Low-fi we die, cause Low-Fi cant lie) Diving through the precious archive of the Low-Fi Video movement, I myself was tempted to generalise the experience of the authors. Works which are very specific and original responses to certain situations. Considering aspects of sociological, psychological, even literary rules they should be: posttraumatic refusal of the body, postraumatic substitution of the body, posttraumatic. . . this and that. Fortunately, I study these works from people who didnt expect any mass-compassion or world fame. So the same process of production and screening was protected by a sheltered atmosphere, therefore I was unafraid of possible pragmatic exhibitionism and construction of illness. But I constantly feel the resistance of particular works to any classification; they look me straight in the eyes with dignity, with the strength of a true life, which is not similar or one of. So, it is best to leave them their dignity of the original, and observe them as particulars. THE BEST WAY TO WRITE ABOUT US IS BY USING BODNARS POETRY. Henry Fielding, in eighteenth century, found his language corrupted and began its purification by irony. By filling the empty pots of words with meaning using dramatic exemplification. He could pull this off. We found a situation of totally banalized verbal articulation of the experience but, driven into an escapism (metatextual, and Bodnar, Tijana, Dejan and I South Banat metaphysical1), we got an ability to communicate 1 South of Banat is an area in Vojvodina, famous for its under the language. To use it as an attitude. Bodnar choose to borrow the metaphysical atmosphere
Literature (and Literature happened a long time ago), but to show what we have learned: to read under the language, in spite of the bad translations. Which is so hard that we almost accept the limping form of the bad translations as a simple prothesis, to show the invalidity beside our healthy legs. The true lack is real, but it is harder to show it. We faked our limping to make a link to our true invalidity. What Bodnar did is formalize the languages imperfection. Deliberately giving up the language, which doesnt deserve any more to be the means for the expression of our enormous experience, turned into the paroxysm by its historical burgeon, like Nervals extension until the disappearing. Therefore, we are deprived of the generation experience, because we have so much of it, and in its richness it is broken into individual selections. Whether it is horrible night, or the day, tired and pale, I barely breathe, struggling, clenching, but though I am living, I am alive. (Milo{ Bodnar, antic writing, 1997) In one of our Bobas texts two images are introduced as the key images in forming our generations conscience: the image of the death of Josip Broz Tito and the image of the Nato bombing of Yugoslavia. Their significance is undoubtful, but I cant speak for the generation. I ll speak for myself.
In the eighties, when we were having state holiday performances, we sang many songs about Tito, and one of the most remarkable was the one with the refrain If there is eternity, Tito is its name. It always opened some strange visions in my head, like we shall be in the Star Trek future, but we will still remember our Tito, because it has been almost three, four, five years since he died, and we still remember him. Eternity is remembrance forever, and it is connected with death. Two hours before the first NATO air strike on Yugoslavia, in Zora caf in Belgrade, we gathered to celebrate the new album of the band Jarboli. Some camera spontaneously appeared and we recorded our ritual beer drinking and cheerful confusion, farewell to friends who were leaving town with their bags. Daniels sung exotic Iron Maiden hit Seven deadly sins, the song of little Angela (eight years old): So, Serbs, drink, smoke cigars and kill each other.... There was a song on that album which was made a few years before, it was called The day before the end of the world, and Jarboli and Low-Fi Video edited a video for it in the first days of the war, using the recordings from that evening. One rainy afternoon during the bombing, Daniel, Boris and I were going to friends to show them Low-Fi Video works (Jarboli were dressed like illegal partisan resistance from the movies and I looked like their girlfriend who is spying as a Gestapo secretary. We laughed when we saw our illegal reflection in the shop windows, it was a sort of Bachtinalian carnival therapy). Yet when we saw it again, the video was somehow touching but untrue. The lyrics are Nothing else cant disturb, Ill die peacefully the day before the end of the world.... We had died in advance in a way, in that farewell of ours, but it was just a reconciliation with the possible. . . When you die, you die to someone, so dying peacefully is selfish.
These two beautiful but untrue songs illustrate my starting point in explaining the heterogeneousity of the reactions and original expression of those reactions. They problematize the common diagnosis and the clinically doubtless announcement of the behaviour expected of posttraumatic youth in Serbia. Threatening the context of general and Generation is an equally dangerous generalization which could make the biggest achievement of my carefully maintained group of friends worthless, efforts of the people who transpose their experience differently but together, in unrepeatable and original lives, with sincerity and honesty, not following the clichs or constructing them. Posttraumatic youth is nothing new under the sun, and we could fall into the model of the interpretation which would be applied to explain everything related to us as the consequences of the social and other reasons. The biggest mistake is in overlooking the fact that our trauma wasnt just one whole event, it was a continuous, rich, decade long series of traumas. The selection of the most important impressions is completely individual, because stating a minimum of common experience is almost impossible in such diversity. The expected self-sufficiency and narcissistic behaviour is the rarest reaction among the people I know, which doesnt mean that it doesnt exist, but it cant be announced for a model of, alas, generation. On the contrary, we didnt have time to stick to something like that, we spread ourselves in each other to indestructibility. That was the point of those two songs, we distributed ourselves and remembered each other for eternity, the strong emotional relationships and the need for sharing is much more often the case.
THE LAKE, THE SUN The part in Dimitrijevi}s text regarding Narcissus and the impossibility of the spectators situation is beautifully written. The vision of the spectator as a corpse floating in Narcissuss lake is terribly inspiring, because, looking into the camera in spite of the sun, I felt myself how it was possible for Camus hero to kill only because the sun was in his eyes. Maybe I did kill some spectator. And he fell into the lake. On which I am reflected. Great, great, please, I know its hard for your eyes, just one more, dont smile...how can I not smile, when this reminds me of that series about secret agents working undercover as models and fashion photographers (I need a hero.. was the song, my favourite in the summer holidays in 1983. or 84...) yeah, thats fantastic, great Phil was satisfied, and after the photo session, we went for a coffee on the Kalemegdan fortress terace. There was some fashion show rehearsal going on, and we were watching some twiggy models and their musculine Rollex boyfriends (The First Serbia?) sitting across us, in a strange situation of a grotesque Kraft solidarity. This reading of our absent look as paralysing and unbearable is a projection of the panic among the generation of the author, their fear of the unknown consequences of the trauma that my unrecoverably damaged generation had survived so young and therefore become somehow mysteriously different. From my point of view, the fact that we survived those things young is comforting as proof that we got ready to fear for future young people
in the face of horrible new traumas they are going to struggle with. Maybe it was easier for us to endure such a gradient of trauma during our youth than it was for the middle-aged people to whom it looked, no matter how long it lasted, as a sudden disaster, abnormal and unbearable. The dull misfortune, a leftover, no longer as sharp as a bomb or police intervention, is now taking our parents quietly - by heart attacks. I cant seem to forget the prophetic warning of a neuropsychiatrist who said that the real consequences of the bombing will appear in a few years. When people start to complain of the unexplainable fears, neurosis, nightmares, psycho-somatic diseases; like that postponed leukaemia in the south of Banat in Vojvodina, as the consequence of the spielbergesque-apocalyptic 99 Eastern NATO bombing (poisonous clouds over the Pan~evo petro-industry, when the Etylen factory was hit). The most remarkable biological catastrophe that I can remember was the recommendation to the women in south of Banat, whose pregnancy was under three months, to have an abortion, as the effects of the disaster on children are unpredictable. I searched for this announcement like for the proof of a divine response to the hubris of a society whose phantasm to sacrifice its own children for the graves of the ancestors in so many wars is crowned by the silent and deathly swipe. The hand who executes this will also defend itself from the horror soon (now, maybe), in the ancient circle of justice. We, the survivors, can escape the trap in which our parents were caught, making up the years of the spiritual deficit by some sort of totemism. We dont substitute our ancestors with the graves of our children, we are investing them into our children lives. But what is utterly unacceptable is the qualification stuck in their youth, which suggests the image of us, confused and stunned, helplessly young until we wake up old. This is now seen as deathly and sexy - stuck youth as a consequence of the difficulties in the nat-
ural process of maturation - (and social and economic reasons are numbered, No sex, please, we are the Post Serbs2). Again, its a prejudice, which I-the object, had to reject. Helplessness is the state of mind that I had been through in 1998, and it is over. I called it by its name, recognised it and buried it forever that year. I dont accept any attempt to read me as helpless, and if these portraits give any reason for such an interpretation, then they are my enemies. If it happens that I felt hostile once more, after all that I saw and went through, I might fall into the essential helplessness, like Bodnar wrote, and I remember too: I was lying and in my sleep I saw heads cut off. Those were all the heads of my enemies. (Milo{ Bodnar, The Heads Cut Off, 1998)
English redaction: Khadija Z-Carroll
2 Paraphrase of Slavoj @ièk text No sex, please, we are Post Humans, published in Prelom magazine, magazine which is going to fight the Other Serbia discourse, wish them luck, and I mentioned @ièk in my text, who doesnt mention @ièk, dont save him, God, from German planes and angry women (the paraphrase of the epic speech before the Masinka Lukic show, in front of McDonalds in Belgrade 1999, organized by Zoran Naskovski, who doesnt know Zoran Naskovski. . .)
Slobodan Karamani}
POST-TRAUMATIC YOUTH AND THE CONSERVATION BY WAY OF INDIVIDUAL
EXPERIENCE
Dear Caca, Ive finally read both texts. I think that the polemics you broached is very important and requires further discussion. Your reaction appears to me quite natural, especially when one bears in mind that it comes right from your habitat and precisely the target of my forthcoming criticism your ideological discourse. Therefore I will here try to show main threads of my disagreement with your proposition. I was not only urged to do it by an extraordinary inspiration you awoke in me (because it will certainly not result in any poetic expression in my discourse that is basically incapable of it) nor by the need to defend the author of Suspended Adolescence, but precisely by the fact that the meaning of your text far exceeds the simple (negative?) reaction to an interpretation and is to that extent equally dangerous as the one you held dangerous enough to make it an object of your critique. Namely, it touches the nerve of our (that is my, but not only my) reasoning. First of all, I cannot agree that your hope is not sacrificized in the name of coherence of some system of interpretation. The sacrifice has already been made, and a big one too.
Your desire to avoid it, however, can serve as an excuse for certain inconsistencies you might have made in the process of concluding, but I will do my best to prove that your system of thinking is far from inconsistent, that it is moreover logical and well-grounded, albeit also riven with contradictions. Marshall Titos funeral Your position could be designated in broad terms and in terms of contemporary theory as a critique of essentialism. Concretely, you object to a simple substitution of one pair of stereotypes (the first/second Serbia) with another (post-traumatic youth). However, it doesnt mean a thing without further explication and without thinking an anti-essentialist critique to its conclusions. In other words, even if we both take a critique of essentialism as our starting point, nothing guarantees us that we will get to the same place. In accordance with our point of departure and further steps we take, we can end up anywhere within a broad spectrum of political options from liberal individualistic pluralism/multicultural postmodernism to lesbian separatism or Maoist collectivism. You take yourself as example and consider your own experience so different that it cannot be fit into a model, not even a one of a generation: Therefore, I will speak only for myself, because my aim is to show how impossible it is to clinically make diagnosis of something that does not exist. Our generation does not exist (an axiom: generation=generation s shared memory)
Although you speak strictly for yourself, its not worth pointing out because your discourse as it is cannot speak for somebody else apart from yourself personally. However, this is the whole point of such an ideological discourse. It is linked to the following questions: speaking for yourself, do you really speak for yourself or does someone else (or something else) speak through you? This is one question. The other is: speaking for yourself, do you speak in the name of others (in my name, for example)? In other words, protecting yourself from Brankos protection, do you protect me as well (though that might not have been your basic intention)? Taking yourself as example, did it occur to you that your insistence on the personal experience was just a part of a broader ideological strategy?1 In the final analysis of your answers, we might perhaps learn that you speak either from the position of the subject of ideology or, simply from the position of an ideological subject. I have to admit that Ive been reading philosophical anthropology lately and that it seems to me that this kind of literature boils down to endeavors at substantializing man by way of various determinations. Apart from the fact that I consider that type of philosophizing outmoded, I found it extremely useful to get acquainted with concepts often encoun1 Here I would like to advise you tered today in twisted modulations and various modes of expression on a reference. Namely, instead even on the level of everyday speech. Hence your poetic speech also of late carnivalesque Bakhtin, read the Bahktin of Marxism and reminded me of Jasperss apprehension of human existence. Just like the Philosophy of Language. You you, he adduces certain intimate quality: a man can reach it only will find that individual consciousness is a social ideological through himself. This quality is instilled into human subjectivity fact, although the ideological sign but is at the same time transcendent (only, this transcendence is hidis alive by the token of its psychiden). A man is not once and for all, he is a road which represents the cal fulfillment and its emotional possibility, due to the freedom on the basis of which he decides what charge.
he is in the course of his factual action. According to Jaspers, the purpose of this road is transcendence. When you say that the experience of people whose richness/lack of experience naturally assures the originality of its classification and attempts to transpose it into individual cases.This may be their only hope of having something still under their control, Jaspers supports you: The true philosophy of existence is a question which signifies the appeal by way of which man today strains to return to his own self. He goes on to say that the creation of a metaphysical material world or the obviousness of the source of being is nothing when detached from existence. You in turn remark that driven into an escapism (metatextual, and Bodnar, Tijana, Dejan and me, south-Banat-metaphysical), we got an ability to communicate under the language. 2 However, the problem with such a way of comprehending the human as being-foritself as opposed to being-in-itself, as in any other liberal ideology, is that the levels of analysis of subjectivation have been confused. In his famous The Meaning of Contemporary Realism, Lukcs, cracking down on modernist writers, invokes Hegels distinction between abstract and concrete potentiality: Abstract potentiality entirely belongs to the realm of subjectivity; while concrete potentiality is concerned with dialectics between the subjectivity of an individual and an objective reality. Literary description of the latter hence implies the description of real persons that inhabit a tangible, recognizable world. Concrete potentiality of an individual can be isolated from the good infinity of purely
2 Taking into account that I originate from similar though mid-Banat regions, I am quite familiar with the philosophy of metaphysical mysticism present in the speech of the young in Zrenjanin who think that they have grown terribly old in their troubles. As for the metalanguage you are allegedly capable of, it is also acceptable only in a metaphysical determination.
abstract potentiality only in an interaction of character and environment and appear as a decisive potentiality of this very individual and this very phase of his development. The principle itself enables the artist to distinguish concrete potentiality from the multitude of abstractions. Otherwise, if we start from the ontologically based conception of man as lonely, ultimately wretched, mortal but also wondering and open to the world, we can never effect concrete analysis of a certain individual under certain circumstances. On the contrary: If the difference between abstract and concrete reality disappears, if human inclination towards the inner world is identified with an abstract subjectivity, human personality inevitably has to fall apart. A claim about the imperfection of language can also serve to illustrate your ontologization. The claim itself is not disputable, but your celebration of conceptualization of that imperfection and your raising it to the level of the tragic which essentially characterizes philosophy of existentialism certainly is. Apart from similarity with Jaspers, what is indicative is you mentioning Camus, your Kierkegaardian rejection of Hegelian totality by finding various contradictions in plural and by defending individual subjectivity against objective universality, which inevitably ends up in religious distanciation from the Creator. However imperfect, language is all we have. The very claim that it is imperfect remains within language, and I dont really see why it should be problematized. Only a psychotic person can think she stands outside language. And Ive never noticed any such symptoms on you. On
the contrary, your reaction, along with your entire social engagement up to now, tells of your quite successful castration into the symbolic register of the Belgrade milieu, be it a Low-fi production. Hence rather than accept your attempt to distance yourself, I consider your reaction as a characteristically liberal rejection of the totalization of thinking. Yet, what is disputable here is precisely that we live in a total relationship of mutual production, to which your own speech can testify and from which it originates. The choices we are presented with are utterly constricted; theres no denying this. They are reduced either to a false alternative of the first/second Serbia, rural/urban, war/anti-war, authoritative/democratic, which is utterly hegemonic, or to the possibility to decide to transcend this nausea by invoking personal experience. When you say that our generation does not exist, I can be even more radical and say along with Laclau (combined with Lacan) that not only generation but also that society does not exist either. In other words, the place, which appears instead of the possibility of empirical foundation of society, is empty. Society is the place that is only filled with certain contents through specific signifying formations. Identification you accept or renounce depends equally on the contents proffered or forced upon you and your place in the given structure of relations. @ièk is even more radical when he thinks Lacan to his conclusions and designates the subject as an empty space in the structure. @ièk thinks that split in the subject which makes him incapable of actualizing his full identity has to be distinguished from social antagonism. The subject is thus only a co-relation of his own constrictions since he is incapable of possessing any substance. Therefore, I agree one cannot speak of concrete and empirical entity called a generation. It is, however, possible through special articulation called forth by certain circumstances.
Brankos text does not however speak of a specific generational experience but of bridging a specific dichotomic representation which has to find a way out in a third element, an element irreducible to such polarization. Only now the problem becomes visible - to what extent this third element can perform its function and break the rigid dichotomy? Or is it again a place of closing? It certainly is. By the same token it however offers the salvation from the bad infinity of invoking personal experience and a multitude of small and continual traumas. Branko is concerned not only with a certain trauma of context, but with a special representation and conceptualization of that trauma in the image of the first and the second Serbia. Besides, he presents a phenomenon of narcisism as a form of production of subjectivity. Suspended Adolescence can thus be comprehended as a moment of decontextualization i.e. pulling this experience out from a specific traumatic space and fitting it into a wider context of narcissism as a general subjectivity model (see Christopher Lash, Narcissistic Culture). You admit that there is an experience we have all shared. But we are trying to disperse it into fragments at any cost. In effect, you accept the concept of Suspended Adolescence entirely, but interpret it in a special and deeply disputable way: as an impossibility of a common elaboration of experience. You claim that we have too much generational experience and that it is precisely the reason why we are left to make our own selections. In the midst of, in your own words, richness/ lack of experience, what happens is that it naturally assures the originality of its classification and attempts to transpose it into individual cases. What a perfect formulation of an apolitical narcissism of the New Age ideology! Although a designation Du{an Grlja thought of is equally telling an underground naivete. In my view, what we should do is precisely elaborate and create that experience our-
selves by gaining knowledge of the causes of our present situation and make it politically active by doing so. But we will certainly not be able to do it if we invoke an authentic world of life only to transcend it, but through a collectively produced ideology i.e. exactly the reverse of what you are forcefully rejecting, understanding it as an extraction of your piece in the name of a group. And why would you sacrifice your own authentic person when the covering of your own New Age ideology perfectly suits you? So it turns out that paradoxically, you advocate precisely what Branko wrote about: the narcissism of personal experience. Thats why you dont manage to realize that suspension of adolescence he refers to did not happen nor will happen on the level of individual experience. We all went through it more or less successfully. The metaphore of the tower of your childhood (you fail to mention the asylum) plastically speaks of your successfully overcome adolescence. Your ability to reflect on your childhood proves it. Yet, some adolescences can never be overcome, especially the ones that have been articulated within ideological mechanisms. It does you and your friends credit that you are honest and do not seek fame, but then why mock the artists who actually succeeded in making a breakthrough from their own self-blamed underage of Serbia you yourself fight against. For, although Low-fi will go on showing fragments of human destinies of being-for-itself and being there in Heideggerian manner, such a model of the production of knowledge will forever remain marginal, narcissistic and closed. Therefore it will always differ from our attempt to ground collective action (regardless of the name of a collectivity which carries it out) in a stable and totalizing discourse able to interfere in the stream of real relations of the production of knowledge. A politics that would be able to invoke what Badiou called an endless situation. If, on the contrary, our action
remains locked within the bounds of the permissible (e.g. art) and ineffective in forcing its own hegemony on a broader sphere, it will designate our own death. In that case we can do nothing but abdicate. In the cosy shelter of your own privacy, you will not have any problems fitting in and conserving your experiences in a can of some who-knows-what Serbia Serbia which is for you fundamentally-ontologically unthinkable entity. Therefore I am not your Boba. The images I presented are not the images of life of a Low-fi video, real events or deep traverse of my spiritual life, but political and geo-political metaphores, alegorical representation of social reality which is only an abstraction, an insight, an interpretation. It would be necessary to clarify the genesis of such a mode of interpretation, but it would be too long and I will pick up most important point. Namely, a good deal of my thesis relied on a text entitled Etwas Ganz Anders that was written as a critique of the ruling scientism and essentialism in our social sciences. At that stage of research there was no better suggestion than the one I got from Branimir Stojanovi}-Tr{a, who designated it as porno nihilism. After that, my conceptions experienced radical rearticulation. I retained the concept of the third television generation as a necessary delimitation of my object of study. I wanted to touch on the phenomenon I consider a general trend (and hence is not merely generational) of speeded-up articulation by way of new media calling forth, on one hand, an illusion of dispersiveness and proliferation of meaning and producing a homogeneous stream of articulation of that dispersiveness as a form of collective experience on the other. Today I would reject many of the claims I made there, but two images I showed have indeed been a reduction (too true to be true) I made due to specific theoretical-practical reasons. Had I chosen the images of people at Usce and at the Freedom Square, that would be another matter. Let me repeat, these are not existentialistic images of the world, but
images which the world associates with us. For me these were the images of decisive political moments within which scandals are possible, such as various rearticulations starting from the fundamental humanism (I as a man, a humanist) to active nihilism (.) to populistic fascism. Therefore, even within an essentialistic representation of a political situation it is possible to encompass all the variants of quite special experiences in love with its own context, self-interpretation, self reflexion or whatever creative existential New Age philosophers can think of. Yours truly, Slobodan Karamani} November 8, 2001
NATOs bombing, Greetings from Belgrade, postcard, photo: Andrija Ili}, 1999
Du{an Grlja
(DE)GENERATION IN PROTEST OR THE DEFENSE AND THE LAST DAYS OF OTHER SERBIA
It such a pleasure to see a dialogue restored among us after it had been exiled for so many years. In the lumber room of the dominant paradigm of Communication, the only thing worth recycling is the exchange of opinions faced by those who try to lead vita activa (Hannah Arendt). A polemic is an excellent way to try to wriggle out of the imagined positive roles and make a contact with other agents, differentiating at least ones own approach in the process. Of course, there is always a danger that multitude of monologues has been established rather than a dialogue, illustrating a popular saying that two of a trade never agree. Before I vindicate the objections that I generalize things (that, in keeping with my trade, I sociologize too much), let me elucidate my understanding of the positions of the participants in this modest, but - I am convinced - very significant debate. I would by the way also like to present my own views based on the attempt to interpret the entire debate in terms of the passage from other Serbia to a representation of the global Serbia. I consider focal points of this debate to be question of a generation as a social agency,
the question of a political engagement of this identity group and the question of the new representation of Serbia as global. And I would like to offer answers to those questions taking a research conducted by An|elka Mili} and Ljiljana î~kari} entitled A Generation In Protest (abb. GIP) as my starting point, since I consider it a paradigmatic achievement of local empirical researches of the student protest. Phil Collins has attempted to offer a representation of a liberated Serbia, an everyday Serbia cleansed of the political context, that is, something completely different from the representation of the other Serbia. Trying to avoid urban grit and catch a romantic sensibility, well-meaning Phil is proud of his intention to represent young Serbs as faces from the neighbourhood coming straight from a commercial/shampoo ad. Young Serbs thus fit into a transformation society of eastern Europe as an integrated part of the EU, which reads in the following way: even if you cant bear them, you have to admit an uneasy resemblance to our own youth. If there were not for the title young Serbs, those faces could easily be found anywhere within the Union, even if they have a bucolic, dissappointed, suspicious look. Branko Dimitrijevi} protested against Collinss offer of such an intimate context, since a Serbian intimacy cannot be separated from the political, stating a suspended adolescence of young Serbs and citing unemployment, no committed relationships, conservatism at the universities and so on as the causes. However, using this perhaps too weakly argumented descriptive term for young Serbs, Branko puts them into a context of globalized society, probably intending to do the opposite, namely, to give them a specific, autochthonic Serbian context. The terms such as sustained youth and social childhood entered the arsenal of social sciencies towards the end of the 80s to designate the position of the young in the
developed world. However, Branko is for once right: narcissism is a constituent part of that suspended adolescence. It is however connected to sexuality only insofar as we regard sexuality as one of the mechanisms constituting modern subject. Narcissism is a cultural model of subject production in contemporary capitalism and consequently a narcissistic personality of young Serbs has to be seen as a systematic requirement if we attempt to think Serbia as a part of the civilized world. Above mentioned processes of sustained youth and social childhood described by the (not so) recent sociological imagination can clearly be observed in the current trend of the extension of youth to more than one third of human life and a postponement in the age of employment, marrage and founding a family. Taking this into account, Brankos characterization of young Serbs as suspended adolescents is less a product of traumatic times than a tendency to get Serbia closer to the civilized Europe. Namely, the young or youth is a historical social category, meaning that it has been created during social development and that it is characterized by a specific role within a historically changeable social framework. Youth as a social category emerges in modern society (mass phenomenon of Western late-capitalistic consumer societies) and can be defined as an entity partly characterized by certain features of a group and a unique structural matrix of growing-up i.e. specific institutional relations and institutional roomin the form of a specific socio-historical order of generational relations by means of which young people.are socially defined, positioned and the process of their growing-up and initiation in the world of grown-ups controlled. (GIP, pp.13-14). The young and youth become a category along with the poor, the undeveloped, persons with low IQ, intellectuals, women, children and the old who remain outside the field of activity of independent, rational subjects. To boot, the basic char-
acteristic of the social position of the young and youth is that they do not fall within the category of adults (in the Enlightenment tradition those who are materially independent of others i.e. have their own means of subsistence and who are spiritually independent of others i.e. capable of using their own reason to judge and act accordingly. The conception of de-synchronized youth also allows for the existence of those who are not adult but are also no longer young. This overlaps with certain deconstruction of youth in some postmodern conceptions within which Brankos suspended adolescence could be broadened to embrace the life of the entire nation. I think we could all agree that the personality of the saviour embodied in Slobodan Milo{evi} has not been readily embraced only by authoritative personalities of our traditional mentality, but has also served as a general excuse for failed lives, poverty-stricken existence and junkie paranoia (I have recently heard a useful formulation: Run-aways are not those who went away, but those who stayed on.) Regarding Aleksandra Sekuli}-Cacas defense against the stereotype of personal experience and its subsumption into a form of post-traumatic generation, I feel very sympathetic towards it since I am myself a young Serb in his (late) twenties. What is however disputable, in my view, is Cacas investment of hope in the quality of the network of friends I cherished for a number of years, who, all of them in their own way but also together, transpose their experience (heavy to the point of turning into its own deprivation) into an irreproducible and honest (rather than schematically construed) answer. The problem is not that there is a group of people who exchange their experiences, but the form of the network in which works sincere almost to the point of naivety are produced, an operation typical of the dominant mode of cultural models production. Namely, Cacas rejection of a generational unity in her formulation: we are deprived of the generational experience
because we have had too many of it, and in that variety it has been cornered into individual selections, in my view, clearly implies an understanding of a generation as a group of unrelated initiatives which in the final analysis are associated by the similarity of existential problems. This implied (unrecognized) content adequately conveys an understanding of youth in the prevailing political discourse as a part of informal civic initiatives, that is, a part of the civil society. In the prevailing scientific discourse we can also find a corresponding characterization: After 1968, what emerges is a society without youth. In place of a unique youthful matrix of growing-up, a new quality emerges: pluralization of models, ways and lifestyles of the young; rather than how to conform the young to a socializing model, the issues of building and strengthening individual identity come to prevail. The young have cast off the yoke of a uniform socializing model of a modern society that had previously been imposed by the grown-ups and have embarked on an adventure of postmodern search for their own identity (GIP, p. 22). The conclusion, which corresponds to both Cacas and the official position, is that the youth has dissolved into a concrete self-identifying practice. Characteristic of Cacas refusal to recognize ideologized contents in her own position is her claim about Low-fi that the same process of production and screening was protected by a sheltered atmosphere. Emphasizing personal creative shaping of life experience in Serbia in the 90s, Caca puts the process of sending and showing the videos in the context of friendly exchange. That would be quite true of an informal group of enthusiasts who privately gather to enjoy their friends videos. But, though this remains the content of Low-fi, there is the fact that Low-fi is also a part of local (Rex and B92) as well as international (various festivals and organizations who give them financial support) cultural institutions. And precisely this institutional context makes us see Low-fi as one of those unrelated civic ini-
tiatives which fit into a model of networking as a dominant organizational form of multi-cultural society. Taking the risk to sound old-fashioned (and ostentatious) let me say that we are presented with a problem of adequate understanding of ones own generational position within the relations of the production of social life. In an attempt to provide arguments for this point of view, I will once again employ the achievements and relevant findings of contemporary social sciences so as to advance my own argumentation. Every government keeps saying that the young generation harbors an elite (referring predominantly to students) who will replace the existing elite. Students, future experts who will take top positions in social life, are thus the primary target of a political socialization which should produce the material operative within the prevailing order. In institutionally segregated space, the young are exposed to unifying, homogenizing, socializing formation the aim of which is to bring up future subservient members of society, efficient carriers of its economy as a productive backbone of the order (GIP, p. 19). That institutionally segregated space, in which candidates for initiation into the world of grownups reside, is characterized by a fundamental contradiction. It lies in the relative autonomy from the rest of society and a permitted aberration from the normal behavior of a grown-up individual. But domination and stability of a (political) system is measured by the broadness of the margin i.e. the permitted aberration from what is normal. In other words: a system is more stable the more heterogeneous elements it successfully interpellates. The concept of generational politics, used by contemporary social science in an analysis of the position of the young, is symptomatic in that regard. It includes a process of dethroning an older generation which belongs to the past epoch and an old system and the process of empowering a new generation which emerges on the eve of the new millenium (GIP, p.
232). The term itself is ambiguous: it can refer to a policy pursued in respect of a generation or a policy pursued by that generation. Precisely in the blurring of this difference and the tacit emphasis on the first conception one can recognize ideological function of such a discourse. Emphasizing that the process of empowerment of ones generation should be interpreted as cultural-political symbolical act of announcing ones presence in the public space and a multi-cultural act of self-identification and ones own self-fulfillment rather than as a party-ideological struggle and the generational change on the positions of power and authority (GIP, p. 232), the authors reiterate a consistent demand that the young keep away from everyday politics. Now we observe how both political/systematical and scientific characterizations of a generation tend to create ideologically grounded social category and contents of its activity. If a generation is not a group of informal civic initiatives or an empirically (re)constructed social group measured by certain indicators within a representative sample showing a concentration of those indicators around certain value (datebased selection of cohort aggregation), what is it then? I think a generation can only appear as an agency (the subject of immediate political activity) if it is effectively politicized and if it performs activities within existing and emergant institutions. For a discussion of the relationship between the young/youth/generation and politics, Cacas claim that we are driven into escapism is symptomatic. She is certainly right in the sense that we are condemned to rummage through the ruins of language or social structure and it does not necessarily lead to a politically passivized escapism. This is however not a specific characteristic of the position of the young in the Serbian society of the 90s, but a general characteristic of the position of the young in a modern era. Those who care about Marxist terminology would say that escapism represents an ideology of the young
bourgeois class striving to construct the reality of young people according to its own unfinished Rousseauian myth of freedom, an escape into nature and the world of pure emotions. Hence fierce rejection and prevention of interference of politics in the world of the young and their growing-up. As for the Serbian society of the 90s, the best excuse for a disgust with politics has been furnished by politicians themselves. In my view, a general characteristic of the position of the young in Serbian public arena in the 90s is something I would term the state of protest. From the velvet revolution on Terazije Square in 1991, to student protests in 1992 and 1996/7 to the revolution of October 5, we can see a kind of a history of political engagement of the generation. That engagement could be seen in a liberal perspective as the student protests demand that the political i.e. public space of action of free citizens (constitution libertatis in Hannah Arendt) be established. For the authors of GIP it is indubitable: As a newly emerged collective identity, the student protest reacted to the negative social and political phenomena: the lack of the rule of law and a civil society, a threat to civil rights and freedoms, the manifestation of political and spiritual regression (GIP, p. 68). However, a deeply ideological meaning of such a formulation can be detected in the phrase the means of attainment of a new political culture i.e. in the defense of basic political values of a democratic society. The means of attainment are associated with the dislocation of social conflicts from traditional spheres to the spheres of culture, personal identity, individual style, spare time and everyday life (GIP, p. 213). The insistence on the symbolical arsenal of cultural rebellion on the level of everyday life is especially present within the prevailing social science in terms such as post-modernist spectacle, street-theatre or carnival. Actually, the protest represented the carnival only insofar as it represented a celebration in which ruling norms and hierarchies have been exposed to ridicule. But the
mechanism of a celebration has an entirely different goal: to bring life back into the normal/the established/the sanctioned in the wake of crisis and catharsis. Integrative value of this celebration can be discerned in a complicity in crime which remains a basic characteristic of the life in Serbia in the 90s. This phrase is supposed to designate an impossibility of political action outside the situation in which the existence of the repressive regime of Slobodan Milo{evi} is the sole alibi for the existence of the opposition. Every common sense now justly wonders how can a transpolitical action constitute the political. This contradiction corresponds to the prevailing politicization of the civil society towards an extra-institutional practicing of democracy through various NGOs. Thus a true nature of political engagement of the young/ youth/ generation is revealed as in effect politically passivized (which is most often accomplished by alleged neutrality within the political the apolitical). The apolitical is political par excellence, because its passivity sustains prevailing political constellation. In my view, protest as the state of the generation in Serbia in the 90s represents an apolitical resignation. The 80s in Yugoslavia attest that forms of this state can also be discerned in previous generations. As Caca mentioned, in the 80s some people have developed something what might be termed an underground naivety. Here I refer to extra-institutional activity and creativity through self-taught cultural forms and the activities of the Student Cultural Centre in Belgrade during the 80s can serve to illustrate that. An underground naivety corresponds to the ripe state of collapse of the self-management socialism and its role is more or less exhausted in portending the imminent catastrophe. However, a catastrophic consciousness of the collapse of the reality of self-management socialism (and a Marxism with a human face) turned towards the end of the decade into a running away from the disin-
tegration of the individual and from the physical break-up of the state (the civil war). What ensued is abovementioned apolitical resignation in the form of a protest. An alternative was recognized in a return to expressiveness of the underground naivety, but very soon it was to adopt mostly owing to B92 - a proffered path towards progressive Balkanization of the creative expression of the young. And however Caca might dispute it, Low-fi is a part of it, along with the protest as a part of the representation of the other Serbia. One does not have to be especially well versed in theoretical elaboration of the topic to conclude that this representation of the other Serbia corresponds to this Serbia where we find proprietary monopoly of the ruling party over the state, its material resources and the future of its people (GIP, p. 7). In my view, after the changes of October 5, the other Serbia has become a representation of the globalized Serbia that takes part in civilizational trends. However, one element is retained which seems to contradict this rapprochement with the world. That element appears in discussions about the so-called turbo-folk culture, understood to correspond to the process of re-traditionalization of our society. This may seem a tendency that sets Serbia apart from world trends. However, precisely the reverse is true: re-traditionalized Serbia perfectly fits multi-cultural trends of the postmodern world. Albeit far from the everyday milieu, the confirmation of this can be found in the fact that television Pink has done more to spread contemporary global cultural models than any Education for Democracy program. Therefore, the problem is not to fight for or against globalized Serbia, because in the eyes of the world we remain the representation of the Other, but to find our own modes of activity within the offered representation.
APPENDIX: At the end of this polemical pamphlet confusing as much as its topic, I think my authorial duty is to give a personal view of the possibility of escaping the described generational situation of politically frustrated generation. Far from wanting to make the following statement a doctrinaire What is To Be Done? but with the intention to be equally far from the comfortable contemplation of institutional environment, I think there are two combinations/strategies. The first would be a simple way out of the state of protest i.e. a state of apolitical resignation, into direct political activity. All those who delude themselves with the idea that one can be politically active outside of what is considered to be political life (including political parties, Yugoslav, Serbian and local institutions of government legislative, executive and judicial as well as strategic points in the economic life, which, taken together, represents an inextricable skein of local politics) are very much mistaken. Therefore, instead of apolitical or underground naivety of disconnected, informal civic initiatives, one has to become an actual politician and dirty ones hands. The second possibility is to pass from the state of protest to the position of criticism. The content of the activity of that position could be termed within academic scientific paradigm as the social role of an intellectual. Now who manages to attain the ideal of the unity of thought and action deserves credit, but without striving towards that end we cannot entertain a hope in the conscious political activation.
Milan Rakita
INSTEAD OF A PROLOGUE AND SUMMARY
CONVERSATION PIECE
Although directly invited to give his opinion on the artwork and the polemic, and maybe in fear of being involved once more in the questioning of his own identity, the author of these lines hesitated for a long time to embark on another adventure of inscribing meaning to these ever so direct photographs, left as an ungratifying duty by the artist, a mischievous rascal and crook, the devil himself. The swindler ran away, leaving us with the empty photographs, empty meaning void of the typical topos which defined the image of the collective identity of this region in the recent past. We were left alone in front of our own image in the mirror. At once, it became clear that, apart from not being young any more, we can neither be the old, well known Serbs. As in the meantime, according to a widespread opinion, a revolution took place, which symbolically divided our time to the time before and the time after. This partition left us alone, confronted with the possibility of choice, to which we became unaccustomed. Or, perhaps, the freedom of deciding comes down to a choice between false alternatives. But, on the most universal level, the scope of variations according to this post-revolutionary default does not amount too much. It ranges from the recuperation of the historic Serb identity or its countering other Serbian, to the possibility of
construction, but also the recuperation of the new post-traumatic, i.e. current third way identity model. Which of these will make us more or less Serbs, and which will make us more or less old or young, is a question of entirely subjective estimations, but still not of an agreed articulation of the current historical position in all the spheres of its manifestation. In any case, the projection of the image of ones own identity had to be directed, first of all, towards the logic of personal as political, bearing in mind the specific local context in which it had been positioned for a long time. Thus, in the polemic, The Young Serbs were left at the mercy of individuals who represent those Young Serbs, but, who, I dare say, in direct confrontation with the offered model of representation, experienced a feeling of unease. It is possible that this apprehension was an expression of a certain locally generated anxiety, which emerged in contact with what Collinss photographs implicate only slightly - an open possibility of becoming something other in relation to the standard repertoire of the aforementioned identity strategies. Anyway, initiating an investigation of the origin and quality of the trauma and political frustration, which, by the way, abounds more or less in all the individual texts of the polemic, we can begin with an observation that practically every one of them, in their own specific way, almost unconsciously refuses to resolve their representational role, indicated by the title, in Collinss work. Deadly serious, narcissistically and self-confidently, we undertook to measure the extent of the political in the work in question. And once again, an elementary consensus was absent! The reactions varied between defending the right to be apolitical, a reserved neutrality of a para-academic and para-prose discourse, to a significant politisation of the content of Collinss work. In the meantime, as in every heated discussion, the initiating photographs of Collinss work were somewhat forgotten. In the beginning, not one of the partic-
ipants noticed that they could suddenly become specifically emancipating. And not in some sort of political sense projected by ourselves. The picturesque and pictorial quality of the scene in the photographs could have led us to a completely different interpretation. A more flexible one, and with a more moderate disengagement from the assumed representational role, to a different projection of our own view of the world which wouldnt necessarily be dispossessed of its designated political aspect. On the contrary! In this way the self-inflicted proliferation of an overload of political threatened to turn us into New Serbs, a particular sort of Very Young Serbs. And we obviously forgot that, after all, it was only art, although, indeed, politically intoned art. But, let us, for the moment, leave aside this undoubtedly significant (hyper) polemical aspect of the polemic, in order to pose a question: What is really the catch in Collinss photographs? Why did we naively believe that the work presented by the artist really deals with some young Serbs? Where did this self-inflicted excess of vague recognition come from? Why are these photographs veristic to such an extent for us that we take their authenticity for granted? The impression is that everyone exploited Collinss work to promote their own truths, feverishly holding onto them as if a colossal investment were at stake, rejecting the offered chance to be something other. This is the focal point of Collinss attempt to come up with a different kind of observation and a new view. Because of this interesting and symptomatic, but at the same time, engaging detail, I will try not to offend any of the participants of the polemic by questioning their personal contributions through my observations. Furthermore, my primary intention is not to deal with a persons particular text, but to attempt, in the succession of different investments and reactions which created this polemic, as we named it,
to discern a specific perceptive/communicational logic which, although comprising antagonistic views, undoubtedly proposes a context (or several potential contexts) to Collinss photographs, which for their part possess a certain surplus, i.e. shortage of meaning, that forms a precise context for a work of art. This is why I will be interested in the fluctuating relation which is formed between the polemic and Collinss work, and vice versa: how is the channel of their communication formed and at what points the course of influence changes, securing priority status to one of the two parties in defining the other, i.e. in relation to which position of one of them, the context (artistic, historical, social, cultural, political) of the other is defined. Risking to simplify this issue completely, the question I ask is: What comes first, Collinss Young Serbs or the texts of the polemic? THE ADVENTURES OF CONTEXT Thanks to its ironic ploy using a completely new representational model by which it deconstructed an all too recognizable policy of representation, and seemingly clearing it of all the meanings typically associated with a suggestive representational idiom, the presented image of The Young Serbs became a little too clean in respect to the code of perception in this environment. Thus, in line with the logic of interpretational mannerism it had to be placed in a clich in which potential slips would not disturb the customary representational scheme. The discrepancy between what the naked scene of The Young Serbs offers and what is only discretely indicated by the title of the work, brings out a true trauma to the view accustomed to the habitual practice in representing the political. The inability to assimilate the object visually, which now became unrecognizable, impels us to project our own worn
out old view, receptive only to the familiar representations of the political, into the not so transparent remains of what was once the structure of a privileged representational model. In this way, the search for the signs of social history, i.e. for the social factors which outline the signs in Collinss photographs, comes down to a direct provoking of context, political indeed. As for the status of truthfulness of the created context which provides different readings of the photographs, it can be said that it is as true as much as we invest it with certain truths. That is how the truth about The Young Serbs perpetually shifts from context to context, through the (auto) reflection of each participant in the polemic, gaining entirely new meanings. In connection to this, another, less important question arises: Does this mean that Branislav Dimitrijevi}s text (which chronologically precedes the others) loses its precedence in interpretative status, and is it not that in this way, Collinss work indirectly enters a new series of unpredicted designation chains, which now in return, each according to its own truth, i.e. specific context in which this truth is articulated, present it with a totally different context and new life? Even when in some texts it is not the artwork that is directly referred to (which is the case in almost all of them except the one by Dimitrijevi}) but the previous texts, this unique transformation of contexts takes place concurrently with the change of the internal direction and course of the polemic, although the logic of this change can only seemingly be lead by some uses of its own, independently of the photographs. And here we discover the position and status of Dimitrijevi}s text. Namely, the connection between the rest of the polemic and the artwork is established only through this text, which (although in my opinion is also part of the polemic), at any rate, plays the role of an external mediator in this communication. In other words, it is an important factor through which
a dual contextualisation of the artwork is established. Firstly, as an inherent part of the work, the text gives Collinss photographs its primary (for the polemic, initial) context. Later, through the imposed role of mediator, it accomplishes another contextualisational function in two directions. On the one hand, it allows the positioning of all the latter texts, which only in relation to this primary contextual function find their own context from which they reflect/speak out. On the other hand it is in this way that the text a posteriori opens a new channel of communication between The Young Serbs on one, and the real life Belgraders on the other side. All questions that arise from Suspended Adolescence, in the further course of the polemic acquire, through the connotation and denotation of the integral elements of its original interpretation, a whole line of new, processed meanings. Since this is a polemic, and like every other, it is naturally linear, or more precisely, typified by a certain processuality in the forming of the horizons of meaning, this facilitates the creation of (potentially indefinite) new designation chains, which in the reverse direction reconsider the primary, original context of the artwork, i.e. the work itself. Thus, they actually make it open to the possibility of continuous repositioning in relation to its assumed intentionality and a possible primary meaning, i.e. truth that might be ascribed to it in this way. As a result, a particuar condition appears within this positively established correlation, which makes any attempt to grasp the essence of The Young Serbs at least ambiguous. It seems that, among all the possible aspects of the polemic, it is this specific segment that can be singled out as one of its focal points. Without disregard to the importance of the hyper-polemcal content, which, for the first time after a long period clearly opens some questions directly implicating the local cultural, political and mental scene, hence this exchange undoubtedly deserves to be called a polemical conversation (one of the decisive factors for
giving it this name, according to the policy of the Prelom magazine), I tried to indicate one of its aspects which are not so manifest and can easily be overlooked if too much emphasis is put on any of its particular polemic content. Namely, as a whole, such an exchange can readily, and from a certain political standpoint even desirably, be acknowledged as a conversation of its kind (I think it is unnecessary to mention that it was The Young Serbs that held one of the central places at the grand exhibition in the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade, titled Conversation). It investigates in a roundabout manner, indirectly, but actually very directly, the contemporary context of this environment (political, historical, social, cultural, artistic) in which Collinss work appears and with which it plays, not by wrapping up and hiding, but on the contrary, always revealing anew the mechanisms of the politics of representation in art, i.e. the representation of the political in art. Through an impressive range of critical opinions of different provenance in every single contribution to the polemic, through that direct, but certainly not entirely independent exchange of thoughts, opinions, affects, the idea of conversation takes form. On the other hand, this idea, through the inherent polemical potential of the polemic itself, actually defines itself as a means for the development of a form of consensuality, which is lacking in our environment, and which is always a form and articulation of a certain social/political consensuality. And there lies the significance of this exceptional polemic, which by this means, in the most direct possible way confirms the idea that art plunged into immediate, or unmediated, human relations. In other words, although maybe hyper-polemical on occasions, the authors of the polemic were brave enough to look into their bucolic, disappointed, deathly, sexy, etc. faces, and try to find in them directions for a new, relative as much as stable moral. For this they should be congratulated, in each particular case. And, certainly, the artist who induced them to do it.
Vesna Jovanovi}
6 THE SIXTH HEAD

We should begin with the fact that could only be mentioned, without staying insignificant: all the participants in the polemic which ensued from the artwork Young Serbs, the author himself (Phil Collins) and all the photographed people in the work, know each other quite well. This text is inspired firstly by the numerous verbal polemics, which took place at the same time as the written discussion, and a series of situations, which, though often unseen, always lie behind texts.
SIXTH HEAD OR: ON YOUNG SERBS, FOLLOWING THE POLEMIC INITIATED BY THIS WORK Thinking about Collinss work and reading Relational Aesthetics by Nicholas Bourriaud (an accidental coincidence), I cannot but notice how the work Young Serbs perfectly fits into the notion of relational art (of the nineties), and how the polemic, following the work (and not 1 A successful work always the text, as I will explain later) is a product of an ideally successful pertains to something more work of art1. Furthermore, as Jelena Vesi} notices (in one of her e-mails than a mere existence in space; in connection with the publishing of the polemic) since the work was it is open for dialogue, discussion, Nicholas Bourriaud, also shown at the exhibition Conversation in MSUB (Museum of Relational Aesthetics Contemporary Art in Belgrade), it perfectly, and surprisingly, corre-
sponds to the idea of conversation of the exhibitions curator. Therefore, I will quote Bourriaud once again: Every work of art creates a model of sociability by which reality is transposed or represented. Thus, before any aesthetic product, the following question may justly be posed: Does this work provoke dialogue? Can I and how do I exist in the space defined by this artwork? To simplify the matter Yes, Collinss work provoked dialogue and the ones called to account obviously dont feel at ease in the space that is defined by it. But, what kind of space is defined by this work? This became the focal point of the polemic that followed, not as an interpretation, but as a product of the work. I think that for this reason, Young Serbs deserve additional interpretation. In the beginning, we should clear up the question of the form and presentation of the work. Without the intention of referring to the autonomy of the artefact, I think that it is sensible to start with the material itself. Collinss work was made for Source magazine, where it was originally published as five whole-page photographs with an accompanying text, and all together with the full title Branislav Dimitrijevi} introduces Phil Collins Portraits of Young Serbs, Belgrade, 2001. The work, as we see, comprises five photographs each of which shows the head of a person lying on the grass and struggling with the sun in their eyes. Although grass can also be, and indeed is, some sort of context, in the case of these photographs, it was generally pointed out that they were portraits of young people removed from a cultural context. This is not without a reason. Firstly, these photographs, in the form already described in which they were published, have the title Young Serbs. This title does not derive from the content, it was added to the work. It actually explains who these young people looking at us from the paper are; it was chosen among a series of possible titles for the photographs in question.
Aside form the title, there is the text by Branislav Dimitrijevi}, which further explains the title of the work, i.e. what is represented in the work. In that sense, the text Suspended Adolescence is not only an act of interpretation of Collinss work. It has a dual function (which is also noted in the text when Dimitrijevi} says that to him as an art historian the image of a lying Narcissus comes to mind, which means that he is not speaking only as an art historian). Thus, apart form its interpretative function, the text Suspended Adolescence, together with the full title from Source magazine, signifies that cultural context which the work lacks on first impression, i.e. it also works as an expanded subtitle. The artist chose the faces that he will photograph, as well as the author of the introductory text and title of his work. In this way, Dimitrijevi}s text is something of a sixth photograph from Serbia, a context which Phil Collins wanted to escape. And yet, another meaning - which it will acquire in the context of a spontaneously created polemic - will strengthen even more its position as sixth photograph, the sixth head cut off. Finally, the work Young Serbs does not evade context, it provokes it. The work actually operates in such a way that it provokes what it does not possess. And here the intention of the author to name it as he did is very important, just as is his choice of the author who will represent his work through text. To clarify this, I will quote the words of R. Barthes who, . talking about newspaper photography, says: that from the aspect of purely immanent analysis, the structure of the photograph is not isolated, it is related to at least one more structure, i.e. the text, be it a title, legend or article. Further, if we observe the text in view of the contents of the polemic it provoked, we can even see it as a parody (ironic allusion?) on newspaper photography, i.e. media representation. Namely, in the last ten or more years, numerous media representations of Serbia
were created. Branislav Dimitrijevi} mentions these in his text. Now, Phil Collins places some faces on the grass, calls them Young Serbs, and at once, these Young Serbs called to account cant agree which context they were taken out from. They try (as well as the author of Suspended Adolescence) to fill in this blank media representation which Phils work resembles. Therefore, I will not argue Dimitrijevi}s interpretation of the work, because, as I said, it is not only that. In his text, Dimitrijevi} not only interprets the work, he also reacts to it. Falling into the trap of its functional mechanism, he tries to fill in the empty space which the work produces, the place where these young faces come from - some of whom will indeed fall into the trap themselves, and thinking that they are only arguing with other writings, they will be actually providing true legitimacy to Phils work2. Unfortunately, only on having written this text, I read the one by Branislav Dimitrijevi} Wittgensteins Balls, in the catalogue for the exhibition Conversations; as well as the text by Milan Rakita Conversation Piece; I would like to refer to them, as I believe that they essentially talk about the things that might have been added to those of mine.
2 Thanks to their works talking about artists whose work is based on relational aesthetics onto the scene come out social relations, interactions with the audience in the framework of the experience which it is offered, communicational processes in their concrete form, as tools, means of linking individuals and groups of people. N. Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics

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BREAK

THE DEFENSE FROM THE PROTECTION SUSPENDED ADOLESCENCE)

English redaction: Khadija Z-Carroll

POST-TRAUMATIC YOUTH AND THE CONSERVATION BY WAY OF INDIVIDUAL

INSTEAD OF A PROLOGUE AND SUMMARY

6 THE SIXTH HEAD

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