Artists and culture in the aftermath of war in the former Yugoslavia

Artistas y cultura en el periodo de posguerra en la antigua Yugoslavia

This preliminary study examines how visual art has shaped memory, culture, and identity in the former Yugoslavia during and after the recent wars in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. It relates the experiences of several artists and presents their views regarding the function of visual art in the physical and psychological rebuilding of war torn societies. This on-going study is based on interviews with 25 visual artists and arts professionals representing all national groups in the former Yugoslavia during the summer of 2000. Further interviewswill be conducted in Kosovo, Serbia, Slovenia and Montenegro in 2001.

My preliminary findings reflect varied experiences among the artists interviewed based on their nationality, age, economic status, and place of residence during the war. All of the artists interviewed cited corruption and lack of community as threats to productive creative expression in most of the former Yugoslavia. Nearly all resisted the idea of any kind of pre-existing regional aesthetic. Economic status affected all those I interviewed. Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian art centers reported that increasing numbers of young artists are departing for Slovenia and the West, where they can find creative and economic opportunities seldom afforded them at home.

Older painters and sculptors (those born before 1955) suggested that the countries that had once comprised Yugoslavia were now passing through a kind of artistic "identity crisis". They attributed this Rubicon to the fact that the former republic, having emerged from Tito's totalitarian regime in the 1980s with it's mandated "official aesthetic" was then suddenly plunged into a war-induced climate of "national propagandism." While older artists maintained a pre-war aesthetic, the next generation of artists-many of whom had fought in the war and/or were "emerging" or mid-career professionals when the hostilities began--reflected their own personal experiences of war and suffering in their work.

Younger artists reported very different experiences. For the most part, they possessed a fascination and familiarity with modern technology and communications that exposed them to global art theories and aesthetics. Increasingly drawn to new media, such as video, installation and performance, they tended to reject their own history and culture and to embrace ideas being explored "in the West," particularly in New York and Europe. This situation is compounded by the presence of "outsiders", including NATO troops, foreign journalists, and aid workers, who have created a large subculture of their own in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo, and to a lesser extent, in Croatia.