A strategy for maintaining populist illusions

photo: marija janković

Until recently, the residents Skopje scoffed at the fact that Nikola Gruevski and his ignorant crew made Skopje, as they say, the European capital of kitsch. Indeed, when you pass through the center of this city, you look away from discomfort in front of the nebulous imitation of antiquity (there is also a golden antique lion leaping that looks as if it has just been electrocuted). The Renaissance also imitated the ancient Greeks and the ancient Romans, but, how can we say, the Renaissance imitators were called Leonardo, Raphael and Michelangelo (and they were not ninja turtles). The government after Gruevski did not have the strength and courage to remove all that garbage. In the meantime, Belgrade is slowly taking over the primacy from Skopje because growths on the City's body - what else to call it than growths, goiters, festering blisters - spring up at every step, polluting our view in the midst of polluted air. Every now and then you come across a sculptural feat of progressive aesthetics. Tsar Nicholas II next to the old Parliament, that sculpture monster in front of the kidnapped Railway Station, the unfortunate Despot Stefan near the Botanical Garden (looks like transformers), Gavrilo Princip hopelessly lost somewhere in the Financial Park, the singing fountain on Slavia which, fortunately, no longer sings, but unfortunately is still there, Cvetni trg all in white marble looks like a ritual dumping ground, the senseless concrete area in front of the Youth Center and the even more senseless "jumping ground" on Slavija, a sculptural freak at the Archives of Serbia (is he a man, is he a centaur)... anyone is free to continue the list. It's huge. We talk about progressive aesthetics, the attitude towards the city (and life), simpletons, lack of bones, kitsch and maliciousness. Dejan Atanacković, fine artist, writer (winner of the NIN award for the novel Lusitania 2017), a columnist and, since suffering forced him, a councilor in the Assembly of the City of Belgrade (coalition "Moramo", 2022-2023), a guard of the Sava bridge and a rebellious citizen who was recently arrested. Atanacković is currently being prosecuted in a private criminal lawsuit against "Millenium Team" due to statements and texts that link this company close to the regime of Aleksandar Vučić to illegal activities and systematic pollution of Belgrade. His new novel "The Secret Life of Goran Grolović" will soon be published.

WEATHER: How would you explain to the less informed readers of Vremen why it is important to draw attention to the monumental heritage of the era of Aleksandar Vučić?

DEJAN ATANACKOVIĆ: First, I must emphasize that I do not agree with the use of the word legacy. This is a temporary condition that simply should not be allowed to become a legacy. What we have as a legacy of Aleksandar Vučić's regime are not monuments, but ruins and the dead - disfigured cities, millions of tons of construction and other waste that are scattered all over Serbia, poisonous fog from burning landfills that envelops entire settlements and cities. We have unprecedented corruption and probably the upcoming debt slavery, the consequences of which will be suffered by generations, we have unsolved murders, police torture, and in addition, severe cultural pollution caused by decades of habituation to stupidity and lies. At the same time, we should by no means forget that, along with all that has accumulated in the past decade as a legacy left behind by Aleksandar Vučić, we also have mass graves in the 1990s, expulsions of people, assassinations, calls for bloodshed, and bloodshed that took place during the time of the government to which he belonged. I am convinced that, although we are talking about things that come out of the domain of culture, it is only in the domain of culture, and of course education, that society can thoroughly face them, and even create clear insights about what everyone already knows, but is not talked about enough.

The reign of vulgarity and kitsch, therefore...

As a society, neither at the end of the eighties, nor ten or fifteen years ago, were we able to recognize the perniciousness of simpletons and kitsch. We didn't see that singing fountains, crazy New Year's lights, idiotic monuments, and all of that followed by a media frenzy, directly announce totalitarianism, ruins and death. This, in my opinion, is the reason why the legacy of Aleksandar Vučić must be analyzed extremely precisely, and those statues erected in honor of him and his government should not be singled out as something special, but should be viewed exclusively in the context of organized crime and social devastation. As for the statues themselves (I would not like to use the word monument), they should definitely be removed from the public space, and there is no place for any rhetorical discussion about what should be removed, what could someone demand to be removed, what consequences would it produce, etc. It is all a matter of precisely formulated cultural strategies and the decision of a mature society to differentiate between, on the one hand, the characteristics of a time, whatever it may be and however ideologically close it may or may not be to someone, and on the other, anachronistic follies that arose as a result of the psychosis of one individual and the organized robbery of public money.

Unskilled realism is springing up around us. The Nazis offered "healthy" realistic art versus "perverted". Soviet art too. What is it like? "secret" the connection between totalitarian (dictatorial) projects and realism in art?

It is certainly about the lightness of the propaganda message, about the abolition of ambiguity, whereby realism appears only as an artistic expression, not in the sense of its original meaning, which concerned the depiction of everyday life. Realism in the art of totalitarian regimes is primarily dedicated to the promotion of physical strength, perseverance, health, fertility, and thus the health of the nation or the health of an ideologically shaped society. At the time it was created, it carried with it many wrong conclusions from the nineteenth century, ideas about superiority, racial theories, ideas of progress, all of which sought to acquire its own artistic expression that would give something essentially unfounded the appearance of eternal and unchanging truths, to connect it all with some ancient times, with something primordial. The Soviet Union could not tolerate the avant-garde for long, just as Nazi Germany had to declare contemporary art "degenerate". Nevertheless, even those worst regimes in history produced sometimes very thoughtful visual expression, in architecture, painting, sculpture, film, and sometimes exceptional narrative skill in works of art, even when all of this is in the service of the worst evil, and certainly none of that will ever be able, nor should it, be separated from the context in which such works were created.

photo: Tanjug

So what is this here??

I'm afraid that what we see around us now, that "sloppy realism" as you called it, that remains behind the regime of Aleksandar Vučić, is actually very far from anything that we saw in the past as an expression of the ideology of any, even the worst regimes in history. Here, first of all, there is no ideology, nor any idea that could possibly result in some kind of amalgam, consistent artistic expression, let alone style, direction, tendency. The only "ideology" is robbery, the only "artistic" tendency concerns the modality of laundering public money - for something to be monumental, therefore monstrous, threatening and overpriced, or for it to be cheap, flimsy and non-existent, so that public money is extracted through an unreasonably high cost of production, or for the "monument" to not be constructed at all, but to simply waste the budget for some commissions and awards. I witnessed this, when I was a councilor in the City Assembly, how various amounts, tens of thousands of euros, were spent over the years for monuments that were not realized at all, such as the monument to Dijana Budisavljević. The fake Nemanja on Sava Square is certainly the peak of a pathology, because it is, if anything, a "monument" to Aleksandar Vučić's narcissistic disorder, but also a lucidly implemented plan to rob citizens.

After the top modernist works in Yugoslavia, we are experiencing the deepest imaginable decline in monumental art...

Yugoslav society and the Yugoslav state knew how to create, and they created, and they left a real and rich legacy in architecture, in monumental art, and in the construction of cultural institutions, which is directly related to high expertise and professionalism, therefore with completely opposite intentions to what we have today. Some of the fine arts gained value with the passage of time, some of them were in themselves indisputably great art, at the same time timeless and completely rooted in the expression of the era. I am thinking above all of the memorial complexes of Bogdan Bogdanović, but also, for example, of the painting of Ismet Mujezinović. Quality art has precisely the characteristic of simultaneously speaking of its time and always being current.

I am not inclined to idealize Yugoslav society, the fact cannot be ignored that a society that creates a cult of personality, that creates entire rituals around a cult of personality, is simply not and could never be a completely normal society. Of course, from today's point of view, we can ask what a normal society is and whether some kind of compromise is necessary, including a compromise that implies restrictions on freedom and which, in the end, produces a society where people live happily and safely. And in Yugoslavia, undeniably, at least during my childhood and adolescence, life was to a considerable extent happy and safe, not so much in the time before my birth, but I believe that socialist Yugoslavia, when everything is added up, left solid cultural foundations on which many of the problems of that society could have been solved over time, many necessary questions could have been asked and good answers found. Nationalism destroyed everything. Above all, this awareness of the welfare of society, of architecture, of art, of politics, of identity, which contribute to something dobrom. Even today, when we have discussions about unresolved issues, such as the Kosovo issue, we do not hear a single word about strategies for the production of well-being, but only strategies for maintaining populist illusions.

Everything is, therefore, went to ruin when the Serbs discovered nationalism...

Nationalism introduced suicide into the collective experience of national interest. But I strayed a bit from the question. When I think of Yugoslavia, I think of a society that is tirelessly being built, that is fully aware of its time, tendencies, ideas, that invests in the expertise and creativity of its creators, that, even when it limits the freedom to condemn the state system and the cult of personality, leaves freedom for building a modern society, for actively thinking about the future, and for a simultaneously subtle and strong social criticism and irony. Ismet Mujezinović, for example, was able to paint his own self-portrait with the medal buried in his chest from which blood flows.

When you are, with other citizens, tried to defend the Sava Bridge, what are you, actually, defended? The construction certainly. You also defended the function of the bridge.. But what else??

We defended the rule of law, what was left of it, or what needed to be rebuilt in the place of the abolished rule of law, and the state as such. But it is certainly true that we defended the construction of the bridge, the function of the bridge, the memories associated with the bridge, its historical meaning and significance, and its place in the view from and towards the rivers. We defended Belgrade from those who occupied Belgrade. The attack on the Old Sava Bridge was essentially a war operation in apparent peace. It was an armed occupation of a strategic object for the sake of expanding the occupied territory, which is growing under the name "Belgrade on the water" and which cancels the Belgrade we know. In fact, it is just a continuation of the war policy of the nineties, which was largely aimed at destroying cities, and now, after all the lost wars, the same occupier of foreign territories has now attacked our cities, nature, and natural resources.

By destroying architecture, urban structures and sowing kitsch, the past is being destroyed (tradition), but also the future. An ignorant team imposes bad taste.. How would you, in this context, determined the taste?

Aesthetic experience always brings with it the possibility of a deeper understanding of the nature of things. The question of taste is therefore important, because it concerns the subjective experience to which every citizen has the right, just as he has the right to be a member of a society that encourages free and critical thinking, which should therefore competently set high aesthetic standards, in which aesthetic judgment interprets not only whether something is beautiful or ugly, but also the justification, meaning, ethical integrity of a thing or phenomenon. None of that is in line with the needs of an unfree society and a hijacked state. It doesn't matter where the megalomaniac fake Nemanja, with his aesthetic "qualities", was created on that desolate square, and it is enough to see that megalomaniac construction and through an aesthetic judgement, with a glance, come to a conclusion about the crime behind it. That's why, on the one hand, investing in junk and bad taste is the real scope of this regime, and on the other hand, its conscious assessment that by imposing bad taste, megalomania, simpletons, it creates permanent noise and pollution useful for the regime, and thus successfully suppresses and marginalizes much that is dangerous for the government, while maintaining, to the detriment of morality, prudence and reason, a stunned, poisoned society.