Bad Comrades: Art and Answerability after Socialism

This dissertation examines continuities and critical affinities between contemporary art and histories of socialism in southeastern Europe. Across three chapters, I consider why and to what ends the artists Igor Grubić (b. 1969 in Zagreb, Croatia) and Anri Sala (b. 1974 in Tirana, Albania) and the artist collective IRWIN (founded in Ljubljana, Slovenia in 1983) replicate and reexamine socialist-era institutions, sensibilities, and artistic traditions. Combining close analysis of artwork with research into the political transformations, aesthetic motivations, and philosophical problems that have shaped visual art in Albania, Croatia, and Slovenia since 1990, I identify within this tendency to repeat and return neither longing nor nostalgia. For each artist, repetition and return instead present opportunities to stave off capitalism’s amnesiac proclivities, test outmoded ideals, and cultivate political alternatives shaped by the lessons of history and the experiences of past generations. Grubić, Sala, and IRWIN’s artwork spans film, photography, painting, and performance. While their artistic practices vary in terms of media, style, and approach, I demonstrate how the work of each artist coalesces around efforts to reclaim what remains viable from 20th-century socialism. Eager to examine contested political histories, each artist draws on examples salient and familiar —from Russian Constructivism, Yugoslav partisan art (IRWIN), and anti-fascist monuments (Grubić), to the party affiliation of artist mentors and family members (Sala). From such instances where artistic and political interests converge, where art becomes embedded in but not subservient to state politics, each artist recognizes a latent potentiality stemming from an acknowledgement of complicity. Simply put, they recognize that when art is part of the system and thus part of the problem, it has a stake in the matter and skin in the game. Each chapter examines the different ways Grubić, Sala, and IRWIN use reenactment and repetition as aesthetic devices and investigative tools that enable them to trade the political innocence of the anti-state artist for the accountability and shared responsibility of the artist as insider, as self-critical fellow-traveler, as, what I call, a “bad comrade.” The scholarship on East European art often overlooks the possibilities this continued investment in socialism offers. Still reliant on Cold War-era misconceptions, many scholars cast artists’ responses to socialism as adversarial or misguided, or as political dissent or nostalgia. Privileging a Soviet or Soviet satellite context, this framework loses sight of how socialism’s distinctive histories impact contemporary art. Just as Yugoslavia’s system of workers’ self-management and Albania’s hardline Stalinism differed from the post-war Soviet model, so too did the response of artists to each system before and after 1990. Centering artworks and histories from across southeastern Europe, Bad Comrades reveals an alternative to dominant critical perspectives in contemporary art. In place of an anti-institutional and anti-state ethos, the reinvestment in socialism’s institutional and aesthetic forms that I trace offers a model for contending with, learning from, and rising above the system’s 20th-century failures. This dissertation thus aims to demonstrate how artists after socialism model their art after socialism in an effort to visualize new approaches to institutionalized equity and intergenerational solidarity that destabilize the concept of “post” socialist art.