The Contradictions of 1980s Alternative Art

Lecture of Katja Praznik, Slovenian cultural researcher

1135 Budapest, Szabolcs utca 33–35., Building C (OMRRK campus)

#conference #the 80s 2022.06.14. 18:00 - 20:00

The recently published volume Art Work: Invisible Labour and the Legacy of Yugoslav Socialism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2021) by Katja Praznik, a Slovenian cultural researcher at the University at Buffalo’s Arts Management Program, opens up a new perspective on the study of Eastern European art in the 1980s. Praznik argues that it is through understanding creative art as labour that we can understand how some alternative artists of the 1980s were suppressed and others assimilated by the late socialist Yugoslav regime.

Katja Praznik’s presentation is closely related to the ongoing research into 1980s art at KEMKI’s Research Department, and we hope it will contribute to laying the methodological foundations of this research and putting it into international context.

Abstract of the presentation:

This lecture focuses on two different approaches to the alternative production model; the first rejected the socialist institutional model of art and aimed to exist in a parallel universe as it were, and the other wanted to reform it. They both failed to unveil the process through which the artist as worker was transformed into a socialist entrepreneur in a way that contributed to their own undoing and the end of labour rights. The 1980s alternative art scene in advocating for new production models of culture did not consider, for instance, the class stratification and the legislative transformation of the working relations of freelance art workers. While these movements aimed to redefine Yugoslav socialism and its system of cultural production by criticizing socialist ideology, they failed to address the deteriorating working conditions of art workers and to critique the Western notion of art’s autonomy, which affects the invisibility of artistic labour. The process which, during the 1990s, resulted in a transformation of the protagonists of the alternative art scene into members of the post-socialist precariat of self-employed cultural entrepreneurs paradoxically took place through the obscuring of art as labour on the account of artistic autonomy.

Discussants:
> Kristóf NAGY (art historian-sociologist – KEMKI Research Department; Central European University)
> Eszter ŐZE (art historian – KEMKI Research Department; Hungarian University of Fine Arts)
> Krisztián TÖRÖK (curator – Modem, Debrecen; CuratorLab, Konstfack University of Arts)