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Authors join peers, scholars, and friends in conversation. Topics include environment, humanities, race, social justice, cultural studies, art, literature and literary criticism, media studies, sociology, anthropology, grief and loss, mental health, and more.
There's an emphasis on doing, on failure to learn, to grow, to express oneself that I think lies at the core of what makes these artworks sort of ongoingly, emotionally poignant and relevant.
Mechtild Widrich:You have an amazing ability to think through artworks without allowing preconceived notions of what they might or might not mean to suffocate them.
Adair Rounthwaite:Hi, everybody. My name is Adair Rampvwaite. I'm a historian of contemporary art. I'm an associate professor and chair of the division of art history at the University of Washington. I'm here in conversation today with my colleague, Mechthild Vidrich, who's a professor of art history theory and criticism at the school of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Adair Rounthwaite:I have recently published my second book with the University of Minnesota Press. It's called This Is Not My World, Art and Public Space in Socialist Zagreb. This book is about the experimental milieu of the city of Zagreb in late socialist Yugoslavia from 1975 to 1985 and the different kinds of actions, objects, and expanded artworks that artists made in that context that engaged with questions of public space. These were, in some cases, artworks that were explicitly about public space. They were also works that artists showed in public spaces so that they, either produced during public actions or produced and then showed in public to passerby audiences.
Adair Rounthwaite:And in a number of cases, there are also performances that took place in public space, so ephemeral time based works that unfolded for a particular audience in city streets, squares, and sometimes other sites like urban beaches, for example. So I'm here to talk about the book today with Mechthild, who just last year in 2023 published her new book, Monumental Cares, Sites of History and Contemporary Art, which came out with Manchester University Press. I wanted Mechthild to be the one, to have this conversation with today because I feel that these are books that have a certain kind of intellectual kinship with each other. So at a basic level, there are two books which are both about public space, about the broader questions of the public sphere and belonging to which public space is connected. They're also about the body, about performance, about ephemerality.
Adair Rounthwaite:They, in terms of concepts, share some significant common ground, though at the same time, they're really differently sort of organized and executed studies. Mechthild is a comparative study across a number of different geopolitical contexts over the past several decades. So, yeah, I'm just interested to talk about these books together and to get into some of the conceptual and methodological stuff as well as the material of the case studies that drives them forward.
Mechtild Widrich:Yeah. Thank you so much. I'm really excited to be here today. As said, we're both very interested in public space, performative and participatory practices. Also, I think the theory of public spheres, in the plural.
Mechtild Widrich:And I think my first question is about your enormous ability to focus and probably not that good at it because your first book asking the audience is about New York and artistic practice in New York. And now you chose SAGRAP or Croatian and Croatian conceptualism as your second big research study. And I think I'm I'm generally wondering, how did you get interested in in the topic? Why SAGRATH?
Adair Rounthwaite:Yeah. That's a great question. I really enjoyed working on contemporary American art for my first book, but I realized even when I was in the process of doing that research in its dissertation form that I did not wanna be a historian of American art. I just didn't identify that way. I'm not personally American or, like, now I technically am, but I'm not from The United States, and so I didn't want a career devoted just to American modern and contemporary.
Adair Rounthwaite:And I wanted to open myself up to a more global perspective on contemporary art, and I just sort of intuitively felt that that was gonna involve closely getting to know a different context. And so I was essentially looking for something. Like, I was looking for what that new project would be, and it could have gone, in a number of different directions. But in 02/2007, I, by chance, encountered Milan Stilinovich's major, work of the nineteen eighties exploitation of the dead when I when when I was at Documenta. I found out that he was part of a group called the group of six authors, the Autora, who did actions in public spaces.
Adair Rounthwaite:So it was a group of six young dudes who were friends. Two of them were brothers. Laden's younger brother Sven was also part of the group, and they kind of worked together not to collaborate on making artwork, but to hold these sort of open ended public exhibition events. Due to my interest in audience participation, I found that really compelling and sort of realized it was a case study that I wanted to learn more about. I also realized that I was gonna have to put in some time, to get at least to a kind of decent level of competency in Croatian and to build a regional research network.
Adair Rounthwaite:And so I started doing that in 02/2010, going to Zagreb a couple of summers in a row for intensive language training and also to meet people and kind of begin exploring the scene. And, you know, something I've reflected on across this particular trajectory in my own research is the different paths that people can take towards this question of the global and global contemporary art. It sounds like kind of a simplistic point, but at a basic level, whenever we're thinking about the global in global contemporary art, there is a comparative aspect to how we're thinking, and there's a sort of deeply engaged site or region or nation specific aspect to how we're thinking. So, you know, we have in the field some studies that are more fundamentally or, I would say, sort of structurally comparative. I'm thinking about Carolyn Jones' or Terry Smith's work in that respect.
Adair Rounthwaite:But then also work that's like a very focused analysis of a particular national context, like Chika Okeke Ogunu writing on Nigeria or Sunil Kumar, writing on India. And I think that it's a less typical trajectory to do what I did, which was sort of switch from one area to another. But I think that it has provided me with a fundamentally comparative perspective that obviously revolves around the nodes of North America and formerly socialist Europe, but is seeing them also in the context of a a world that's beyond just those regions. At the same time, though, it's important to sort of stress the randomness of how I got to this project. The reality is that when we're in exhibition spaces like Documenta, like the Venice Biennale, these are highly saturated exhibition spaces that provide us with so much work from all over the world.
Adair Rounthwaite:And what strikes an individual viewer or researcher as important or compelling or worth investigating further is so incredibly contingent. There are our own interests that go into that, but also just the contingencies of, like, do you really have time to spend with one particular works? Are you hungry and distracted because of that? And so, like, not open to absorbing in something that you otherwise might like. So I think that that randomness quality to writing the history of global contemporary art is something under acknowledged, but it is really important to what we are doing, and it was certainly important to my own journey towards this material.
Mechtild Widrich:I mean, what I think is really amazing in the book is that because of your knowledge of global art history and developments elsewhere, you are able to situate the practice in Croatia also in a broader context. So I remember, there's a moment where you think through dematerialization in the 1960s, Lucy Lipper, and so on and so forth. It allows someone, at least that was my feeling, who does not come in with a specialized knowledge to really engage. So So this is also to the audience out here. Do not be afraid if you think, you know, you don't know enough about Croatia.
Mechtild Widrich:This book really provides a framework we are familiar with to set the stage, so to speak. While at the same time, then you are extremely specific, extremely knowledgeable. And as you as you say, you sit with each work for a little bit, thinking through what it means in in relationship to state ideology, in relationship to language, in relationship to mediation. I wanna maybe talk a little bit about mediation because it seems that it's something we're both very interested in. So for my book, Monumental Cares, part of, you know, maybe also the randomness of my case studies came about because, the starting point was the monument activism, which, of course, due to social media, appeared, you know, not everywhere at the same time, but appeared at some point globally, with different causes and different concerns.
Mechtild Widrich:That made me think, so where's that public space? How does the mediation, how does the public space of social media come into the practice on the ground? Is there actually a ground? Is the virtual sphere disconnected from the body? So I personally, I don't think so because you have, you know, a phone in your hand and so on and so forth.
Mechtild Widrich:Now in the 1960s, that plays out differently, of course, in in Croatia. But I was quite amazed. I think it's in your last chapter about kitsch, looking at practice that deals with media images quite a bit and how that relates to public space. So again, the question, how do media images in Croatia at the time, sixties, seventies, eighties, I think is what you're talking about there, relate to the public sphere.
Adair Rounthwaite:Yeah. I mean, I agree that mediation is such an important concern between the two books. You know, one of the things that I really enjoy that you note about mediation via social media is that social media are already mediating people's experiences of their own realities. So it's sort of understanding these particular memorial practices and the kinds of memory that they encourage people to have within that sort of ongoing flow of people already being very habituated to and enthusiastic about having their realities mediated by social media, was a really important takeaway for me from your book. And in the final chapter that you're talking about about kitsch where I'm focused on the work of Vlasta Delimard and Tomislav Goltabac, who were two artists who were quite far apart in age.
Adair Rounthwaite:Goltabac was much older, but they were really close friends, especially later in life. They both really foregrounded the primacy of, the performing body, and they both love to be naked in performance. Nudity is a really big thing that they share. That chapter indeed does draw out a lot of the use in their performance of existing imagery or even tropes of gendered subjectivity and how it is, present in the public sphere. And I think that with Gottovec, whose performances and, I mean, his artworks generally really revolve around the appropriation of American popular cultural imagery.
Adair Rounthwaite:So sort of going against the grain of how many people in the former Yugoslavia from the sixties onwards were thinking about the nature of experimental film, which was totally opposed to what they saw as a kind of debased kitsch of, American commercial film. Gotthawatz really embraced those foreign and commercial sources and use them intercut with this very rigorously avant garde lineage approach to the body and to media to combine into this totally different kind of experimental practice. But the power that those familiar images, for example, Superman of a street cleaner, of a newspaper seller, There's another performance in which he dresses up as a grim reaper, like wearing a kind of, skeleton mask with a business suit. So there's interesting things going on there about sort of like a commentary on capitalism and the figure of the businessman as a sort of harbinger of death. He was creating works where these familiar images were able to deliver a sort of intense, emotional, or affective experience to passersby.
Adair Rounthwaite:They could be read by people in very intuitive ways, especially because of their existing associations with these kinds of characters. But at the same time, when we look more closely at the performances, they also build into very layered commentaries about the nature of creativity, about the nature of experimental art practice. So in his work, I really see media images and popular cultural images as effective touchstones that can make the work carry across audiences and across contexts even though there are things about it where we can really only understand the sort of fleshed out conception or his goals with the performance based on, like, a close analysis of interviews and archives. So, yeah, I mean, that sort of ability of appropriated imagery to travel through different layers of the public sphere to be kind of striking or intense to people even if their frameworks of viewing are not transparent to or identical with each other is an important thing in that chapter. And, also, you know, one thing I I really get into there too is the different ways in which Gottovac and Delimar use that kind of familiar imagery based on their different gender and subjectivities.
Adair Rounthwaite:So Golto Vaz, for example, was able to create performances in public space in the nude, especially because he was a large, tall, imposing man and largely didn't have to worry about his personal safety even if the performances would draw the attention of, law enforcement, which they did in a number of cases. But with Delimar, she was a a woman and wasn't able or interested in using her naked body in the same way in, performances in open public spaces, though she did use it in gallery spaces and in more private spaces in in the nude. But she drew on these various tropes of perceptions of and stereotypes about women to offer audiences, again, an effectively intense, but also remapped understanding of the gendered body, and how women's bodies relate to public space.
Mechtild Widrich:Yeah. I would I would love to hear a little bit more about the gender assumption and how they might be different under socialist conditions. But before we do that, may I ask you to talk a little bit more about the affective and sensory qualities of the artistic practice you're looking at? Because we started saying, oh, this is a book about conceptual art practice, which doesn't sound like you would have emotion and naked bodies. Right?
Adair Rounthwaite:Right. Yeah.
Mechtild Widrich:So what's going on there?
Adair Rounthwaite:Yeah. And that kind of, you know, circles back to something that you were mentioning earlier about the book providing a way into the material for people who are not familiar with it. And really, really important to me while writing this book was trying to write something that would work for different audiences, including people who are very familiar with this work, very invested in it, who, you know, at a basic level, because of their closeness to the region, know more about these practices than I will ever know about them, and also people who are brand new. And so the foregrounding of the warm, emotional, affective aspects of conceptualism was really important to that. And it essentially came out of my own historical removal from this material.
Adair Rounthwaite:So not being one of the scholars or critics who had experiential access to this moment when it was unfolding or who was closely connected to a network of friends and peers who did have that experiential access. I came at this from a level of remove. I mean, having to build in, as we talked about, the language skills, the historical context in order to understand what was going on. Coming at the movement from essentially its remnants, from these works that are made in very poor, very simple materials. I mean, I really can't overemphasize the sort of low keyness or the deskilling of the works.
Adair Rounthwaite:They make Arte Povera look like Jeff Koons at the level of production. Like, they're just extremely simple using materials that almost seem like they're gonna kinda slip away or disintegrate. But they still provided for me a very, kind of compelling and emotional entry point into the material, which made me kind of feel that there must be something there. Right? Like, these objects are not doing nothing.
Adair Rounthwaite:They're not simply conduits to conceptual ideas. They're not simply leftovers from practices that you really needed to see in the flesh in order to be affected by. They really do carry a kind of emotional charge into the present. And I felt that that emotional charge was something that was downplayed in the scholarship, especially the regionally based scholarship because of the continuing importance of discourses of dematerialization. One of the things I'm really trying to do here is to see discourses of dematerialization more as performatives that are deployed in a certain historical moment in order to facilitate understanding of a new type of art practice then as a lasting framework for reading those same practices.
Adair Rounthwaite:So in the seventies, in this moment, there was a lot of discussion of the dematerialization of these works that was really important for helping people in that context articulate and understand what the practices were trying to do, articulate their distance from not only the kind of mainstream expressive types of modernism that came in the prior decades, but also the technologically oriented data driven modernism of the so called new tendencies movement that was very important in Croatia in the nineteen sixties. So those discourses were really important in their moment, but my sense was that the degree to which they continue to loom large in the scholarship made us overlook these emotional qualities of the works, and I wanted to return to that both giving people who didn't know this stuff a sort of entry point into it, but also maybe kind of inviting people who are very familiar with it to look at it again through this different lens. Though it take political and historical context into account, doesn't try to overexplain the work based on its context, but rather lets the works come forward in the emotional and impactful terms that they really do when you see them, when you're a viewer of the the pieces in person.
Adair Rounthwaite:And I think that that was also too related to wanting to let the artworks function in the book in ways that were more akin to how scholars often treat material from Western Europe or from North America, where we feel like we can kind of background the historical political context when we want to do that. I wanted to sort of give this moment the ability to have that treatment without having sociopolitical concerns totally overdetermine the readings.
Mechtild Widrich:So just so that people who listen don't think this is a book that doesn't have interesting images, it has beautiful images. It has a color insert with extremely appealing artworks and, naked people. It's also what I'm seeing here, performance photographs. And I think a question I have for you is how do you go about thinking through these performance photographs? Because there's an event that took place, then someone else photographs or a photo, which is the tool, at least that's how I would read it, to enter in a relationship with the action?
Mechtild Widrich:Or how would you describe it? Often, they are constructed. Right? So I looked at at performance in Belgrade and in Europe and The US, and so it's often interesting once you think about who was invited to photograph the event, how the layer of mediation was already thought through in the in the performance itself. Is that the case here too?
Adair Rounthwaite:Yeah. That's a good question, and I'd love to hear in a minute too from you about how that is working in Monumental Cares. I mean, I think that with the treatment of photos in this book, I go a little less heavy than I did in asking the audience on sort of really interpretation of the images, quad images. I think that an important, thing to note about this particular context is that, you know, some of these artists, some of the group of sixes' actions were held in very busy public spaces. So, you know, on the, Republic, the, like, Central Square Of The Republic in the middle of the city where they had, like, a thousand people come and see the work in one day.
Adair Rounthwaite:But, generally, their work as a whole had smaller audiences. It was really kind of like a pretty intimate cohort of people within the city who were highly invested in this work, who came to see it a lot. And you can actually kind of looking back historically, almost map that audience on, like, a person by person basis in terms of the people who had really strong investments in their practice. So with the documentation images of this work, I see them as, an extension of that kind of close, almost verging on incestuous sort of collegial friendship peer familial circle. So initially as part of an attempt to record for those people already closely connected to the practices, what happened, how they should be remembered.
Adair Rounthwaite:And then those images have subsequently been circulated to much bigger audiences. So I would say that it's a very different modality for creating performance documentation images than, for example, like Anna Mendieta, who is really sort of performing for the camera in these very structured and intentional ways with almost no live audience of some actions and then being intentionally authorial about which images were selected and circulated to represent the performances. With these ones, there's much more of a kind of partial quality to, a, what was produced, and, b, what survived. And that's actually the case with the the performance images as well as the artworks themselves because the artists in the early days were, like, not good at saving their stuff. So there's a kind of, like, loss from the archive that happened just organically partly because of the spontaneity of the movement.
Adair Rounthwaite:Speaking of images, though, I mean, I would love to hear how you were thinking through that with Monumental Cares. I mean, your first book, Performative Monuments, is so important for me in its conception of the image as something that not only reflects, but also constructs a history and can construct it in these, I don't exactly wanna say deceptive, but ways that are not necessarily anchored by or tied to whatever live event took place. How do you think that your use of performance images evolved with the second book?
Mechtild Widrich:Yeah. Thank you so much. That's a big question, of course. So in the first book, I made the claim that a lot of photographs are performative. And that is not just to say that they are performance photos, but that they actually are part of some kind of social contract about what happened.
Mechtild Widrich:And that they have agency in themselves, which might or might not relate indexically to what actually happened. That interested me. And I think in my second book, I still believe in a certain performativity in the mediation, not just through the images, but also through the artworks. So the subtitle of the second book is Sites of History and Contemporary Art. Maybe Sites and History might have been a better subtitle in contemporary art, because that's really what interested me.
Mechtild Widrich:So how do sites and history come together? And how are they mediated through art to an audience. And so that means when I'm looking at monuments, for example, that is already a mediation of an event, again, which might or might not have happened, could be a mythical event to the audience. So then once you start mediating that even more, let's say, through activism or performance recontextualizations in front of monuments, you add another layer. But you do want to make a claim, I think, with that layer.
Mechtild Widrich:That is at least, you know, maybe not often a social contract that is clearly defined, but one that you hope the audience would take up when they encounter this in social media. Right? Resistance, resistance to the dominant power, for example. The artworks in the second book are newer. So So my first book is more about, you know, sixties and seventies.
Mechtild Widrich:In the eighties, nineties, and February, everyone, artists, obviously worked with the camera, with mediation. There are photographs. There's much more video documentation, for example. So it just becomes much more part of the practice where it seems that experience and needed experience are just different layers of a more comprehensive effect of the artwork. I mean, it's obviously different in each case, but that's what I saw in many of the examples.
Mechtild Widrich:I have, you know, Emilio Rojas is the artist who is on my cover, and I'm talking about a performance he did in Canada where he steals grass, soil from the university, which is on indigenous land, and then drags that grass, which is industrial grass. Right? This is not nice stuff. This is like the crappiest stuff you buy in a supermarket. And then he drags it to an indigenous reservation and gives it back.
Mechtild Widrich:That took him twenty five hours. He had a camera person who fell asleep came back. So that's kind of a spotty video that shows most of the action. And the belief, I think, that a video, even though it's not us participating in the performance, can stand in for opening up the questions he is interested in. And again, maybe it is like performing in a basement in the 1970s, and there's only five of your friends there.
Mechtild Widrich:Maybe there there is a similarity, but I think he he wouldn't even question that that wouldn't reach people.
Adair Rounthwaite:Yeah. And, you know, I I see too in, like, the Emilio Roxas works, especially the one that is on the cover of your book where he's curled sleeping in the lap of the Lincoln Monument, something somewhat similar to what I was talking about with Tomislav Gotzowatz. I mean, that work is a layered citation of Charlie Chaplin's city lights. I mean, there's so much sort of cross Atlantic commentary on the nature of public space and, like, a lot of things going on. But at the same time, it is also a performance that you could see as a passerby in public space that would give you an effectively intense experience or could without knowing any of that context.
Adair Rounthwaite:Right? Because you're you're, you know, you're seeing this person sort of curled in this vulnerable way in the lap of this monument that, represents power, lineage, and vulnerability. These moments of affect or resonance is to travel through the different layers of reference and meaning is something going on in these these works too. I also, you know, really liked in Monumental Cares the way in which you're addressing these different performances that relate to memory, but that have what I would consider very kind of different effective temperatures, or maybe we could think about that as scales. So you said you start with the monument debates, you know, these kind of hot button public issues about whether monuments that reflect racist, colonial, and violent histories should remain in public space.
Adair Rounthwaite:But the book def definitely doesn't end there. And I think that one of the things that you kind of enable yourself to do is both to really go big with that question, like to look at the investment of nation states in certain kinds of memory like you do in the chapter about Holocaust memorialization, but also to go small. Right? To look at Roxas or, like, Alexandra Piricci and the kinds of historical memory that they're manifesting just through their their bodies in space.
Mechtild Widrich:Yeah. I mean, the chapter on Holocaust commemoration was was difficult to write because it is, you know, a cornerstone in memory studies. And yet I realized, you know, several years ago that the audience in Germany, of course, is a different audience. So what do you do when, you know, you have thousands, hundred thousands of refugees from Syria becoming citizens and coming in with a very different understanding of history. Does it mean that the site where you live can automatically ask you to fully embrace their way of thinking about their own history and commemoration.
Mechtild Widrich:Does a multiethnic audience have to be addressed differently? And I noticed, of course, that German commemoration commemoration had a strange national flavor then to it retrospectively. It was very German. And it obviously it was important, but I think we need to reconsider it at this point. And I'm not going into the current debate about Israel and Gaza, but you'll see that there as well.
Mechtild Widrich:So those are big questions also relating to our theoretical models. So like, what theoretical models become successful in memory studies in, the way we think about monuments. And I think that is changing, and that's probably fine to have more than a single model. With the monument debate, I I got initially very interested in the question of what themes are monumental enough to be considered. If we want to move outside a national framework, climate crisis is an obvious one.
Mechtild Widrich:We need or can we use artistic practice to understand what's going on, to visualize what's going on, Even though that sounds as if that is a problem or challenge that is not related to history, I think it very much is. Not just because it's a monumental theme that, you know, could be the new task for monuments. That's one one issue. But obviously, once you think about how materials have been used, how sites have been marked as historical sites, is there a practice that allows us to enter such sites through the framework of, you know, what what some call the Ankhulvizin. I'm not sure I solved everything beautifully in the book.
Mechtild Widrich:Obviously, that's, impossible, but I'm very happy that I at least tried. There are a couple of chapters where I'm engaging pretty deeply with Romania, as you said, Alexander Pilic, for example. And that has, you know, again, a somewhat random reason. I married a Romanian person eighteen years ago. And so I started to learn the culture and was extremely fascinated.
Mechtild Widrich:You know, this is also state socialism, but on a different scale. I think Ceausescu certainly was a different kind of authoritarian person than Tito, for example.
Adair Rounthwaite:Yes. I remember interviewing Mladen Stilinovich in 02/2012 or 02/2014, and he was talking about living under state socialism in Yugoslavia. And he was like, oh, you know, we knew that our socialism had its limitations, but it was way not as bad as other people's socialism. And, you know, Romania is a pretty dramatic example of that. Yeah.
Adair Rounthwaite:You know, your talk about, the Anthropocene and climate crisis makes me think about maybe one of the things that the two books do between them is kind of bringing into focus, you know, when we do and do not make choices to frame a practice relative to the nation state. There's been a lot of scholarship on the relationship between nation states and modern and contemporary art. One manifestation of that is the whole discussion of biennales and biennale culture. But I think that whereas you are moving towards the sort of trans border or transnational concerns and how these issues that are impacting all of humanity can be the subject of monuments. One of the things that I was really interested in doing with this book is looking at the city as opposed to the nation as the fundamental framework for understanding contemporary art practice.
Adair Rounthwaite:And I'm definitely not the first person to do that. Right? But there have been some other interesting studies. I'm thinking about, in an Asian context, Sasha Suling Wellen's experimental Beijing and Jenny Lin's Above Sea that are using Beijing and Shanghai respectively as a sort of lens or case study for thinking about Chinese contemporary art. But with my book, and this is sort of back to this question about wanting to not overdetermine the works through a reading of sociopolitical context, There's been so much incredibly rich and important scholarship in the last decade about Yugoslavia and about the political imaginary that was inherent in its project, and that has outlasted the country in some very important ways even following the genocides of the important ways even following the genocides of the nineteen nineties.
Adair Rounthwaite:You know, there's a lot of good stuff to be said about Yugoslavia as a nation state, a lot of important work to be done there. But I also found that in the particular case of this movement, that to say that the work was fundamentally about Yugoslavia as its frame of reference was simply not accurate and not really didn't really do justice to people's lived subjectivities as young people who were interested in art making and in a bunch of other things and certainly sometimes made work that was directly addressed to their sociopolitical context, but did not always do that. So, I mean, I'm happy to see that, like, increasing range of different frameworks of studies relative to the nation state that I think has really opened up in the past decade, and now we have a bunch of different models for that that we might not have had before.
Mechtild Widrich:Yeah. You had and I'm I'm just looking at the chapter written as assignments and math tech's poetic agitations, for example. And you are starting with the question of ideology and then shifting it a little bit more to pedagogy, if I remember that correctly. Can you elaborate on that a little bit?
Adair Rounthwaite:Yeah. That chapter is about the work of Vlad and Stiminovich and Vlado Martek who were friends of the people in the group of six authors who had substantial intellectual and creative common ground. I would say that Martek and Stilinovich were especially close. They were both very interested in language. And with Dilinovich's work in particular, his use of language is a lot about ideology, about language as a kind of found form or what, Liz Katz in her study of British and American conceptualism calls language in general.
Adair Rounthwaite:These sort of pieces of language that come to us, that bring with them aspects of the world as it is structured, the bureaucratic world, the capitalist or socialist world, depending on your context. So language is something that we kind of find and grapple with. It's but it's already, conveying many more meanings than we intend to bring to it. Maritek, on the other hand, uses language in a way which is much more romantic. It's kind of about a tribute to past modernist avant gardes and also about this almost kind of melodramatic staging of himself as somebody who desperately wants to make art, but is always gonna be somehow, kind of blocked from doing so, whether that block lies in the nature of materials or just in his own, sort of subjectivity.
Adair Rounthwaite:And so that chapter looks at their work with language together, but as you say, sort of starts with ideology and then winds its way towards questions of pedagogy, but pedagogy kinda practiced as both learning and unlearning. So they sort of both enact in their work these kind of childish procedures of acquiring or failing to acquire language, and knowledge. But at the same time, in doing that, they also convey a sense of the ongoing experimental growth and forward movement of creative subjectivity. And in the chapter, I'm kind of situating that as a potent way to think about the nature of artwork in the nineteen seventies in Yugoslavia, which came after the, major protests of 1968 in Belgrade, which were student protests that were ultimately shut down and reabsorbed by the regime. So the seventies is kind of a decade of, like, a sense of political disappointment or deflation on the part of youth.
Adair Rounthwaite:But at the same time, the enactment of a sort of learning, developing subjectivity had residents with the Praxis School philosophers who were important philosophers of socialism in its Yugoslav form, who had, actually some pretty direct, connections with official state ways of considering the uniqueness of Yugoslav socialism, as opposed to Soviet socialism. So there's a kind of resonance with praxis there, but at the same time, an emphasis on on on undoing, on impotence, on failure to, to learn, to grow, to express oneself that I think is lies at the core of what makes these artworks sort of ongoingly, emotionally poignant and relevant.
Mechtild Widrich:You have an amazing ability to think through artworks without allowing preconceived notions of what they might or might not mean to suffocate them. Right? So it's really beautiful. And I think this is also what you just talked about. I mean, the way you're talking about it is it's clear that there are relationships to, you know, to practice, to ideology, and so on and so forth.
Mechtild Widrich:But you are really coming in as someone who's interested in seeing how these artworks fit into maybe their own sphere. You're not just using them to pluck them into a particular space that you constructed beforehand, if that makes sense. That is really amazing in the book. Which brings me to the question, were there a lot of surprising finds? What was unexpected?
Adair Rounthwaite:Yeah. That's a great question. Part of what was surprising was that people were so nice to me while I was doing this research. They were so welcoming. I mean, I think especially coming from working on New York based artists who sometimes were very helpful, though not necessarily so and had pretty existing codified notions in some cases of how they wanted their histories to be interpreted.
Adair Rounthwaite:With this book, I just felt really humbled by the amount of help and support that I got and the extent to which people in Zagreb were helpful to me and open to what I was trying to do even really before I had acquired any type of adequate framework for understanding the movement. So there were, you know, some people who really sort of facilitated my relationship with the material, including Dara Khosimicic, Janko Vukmir, and Branka Stepanciic, without whom I could not have done this book in this particular way, and that was a very different experience than I'd had with my first book. So that was really fun. I mean and I think that at a kind of conceptual level, this highly emotional quality of the work was a big surprise. I mean, it's something that I believe sort of spoke to me intuitively and got me initially interested in the practices, but it's not where I thought I would end up when I started the study.
Adair Rounthwaite:I mean, it was very much thinking about questions of audience participation, of public engagement, And I I don't think I expected to get so strongly to this question of affect as I did throughout the course of developing the book. What about with Monumental Cares? What was the biggest surprise?
Mechtild Widrich:As I was thinking through new forms of commemoration or how activism and commemoration might come together to address monumental themes, COVID happened. So that forced me to rethink public space, public sphere, commemoration of events that are not tied to national borders. It was confusing, certainly, and I paid very close attention to attempts to commemorate what's what was going on. I mean, we're still you know, we are we're at the tail end of of the pandemic, but it had certainly had implications for me how I thought about public space.
Adair Rounthwaite:Yeah. I mean, that that totally makes sense, and I'm actually sort of surprised that I didn't think about that more when reading the book. But you're right. I mean, I I can see how that state of being in a necessary position of mediation to almost everything, including these things that we're used to experiencing, quote, unquote, in person would really shift the thinking. That sort of makes me think about, do you know the work by Gina Beavers called painting Franz Kline on my lips?
Adair Rounthwaite:So, you know, she's a New York based artist and was used to being able to go to MoMA and see major works, like works by Franz Kline. And during the pandemic, she produced work that was Instagram based, and this particular one, she's also really interested in in sort of makeup, like makeup as a commodity, makeup as a culture. And in this particular one, you see her with, like, a little mini black and white Franz Kline, painted on her lips. And I find that just a really sweet embodiment of that condition. I mean, a, of being, like, very physically confined because she was in New York City, but also experimenting in this micro scale with the kind of creativity, the creative license enabled by this sort of forced mass mediation of the of the pandemic?
Mechtild Widrich:Yeah. I mean, ultimately, public space and the public sphere are one of the most interesting subjects to think about, and they change rapidly. So I'm really excited to talk to you about that, hopefully, again soon.
Adair Rounthwaite:Totally.
Mechtild Widrich:Let's see where this goes.
Adair Rounthwaite:Yeah. Thanks so much.
Narrator:This has been a University of Minnesota Press production. The book This Is Not My World, Art and Public Space in Socialist Zagreb by Adair Rantheweig is available from University of Minnesota Press. Thank you for listening.