Before the Art of New Media. By Lidija Merenik
The restaging of Tendencies 4, the 1968 Zagreb based exhibition series and colloquium, in the recent show bit international – [New] Tendencies – Computers and Visual Research does more than deepen and internationalise our understanding of computer art’s early history. It also presents an opportunity to revisit the cultural landscape of Tito’s Yugoslavia. Here Lidija Merenik considers the show in Graz and [New] Tendencies’ unique engagement with international avant-gardist concerns, technology’s utopian potential and the socialist cultural landscape of ex-Yugoslavia Even though they have been reviewed extensively in historiographic terms, primarily in the work of Professor Jerko Denegri, [New] Tendencies were the subject of their first serious retrospective: bit international – [New] Tendencies – Computers and Visual Research at the Neue Galerie am Landesmuseum Joanneum in Graz this summer.[1] Curated by Darko Fritz, the show was comprehensively prepared in cooperation with the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb,[2] which possesses a major collection of [New] Tendencies works, and the Neue Galerie in Graz. Like all pioneering projects, this exhibition comprehensively follows the genesis of [New] Tendencies, offering a lot of art works rarely seen or not exhibited until now. The curatorial rationale lies, it seems, not only in the need to mount a ‘pioneering’ retrospective, but also in the actual logic of the progressive developmental phases of [New] Tendencies. Without the representation of its early stages, it would be impossible to understand the group’s ultimate achievement – its movement towards computer art and its final exhibitions in 1968/69 and 1973. However, it must be said that the importance of this exhibition lies not only in its comprehensive approach – which sheds light on a little known phase of a strong international movement of post-war avant-garde – but also in its highlighting of a unique moment of artistic, ideological and ethical opposition to the ‘liberalised’ modern art of Tito’s Yugoslavia. Indeed it provides us with insight into [New] Tendencies as a sort of [un?]proclaimed ‘dissident’ art of the socialist era. more... http://www.metamute.org/en/Before-the-art-of-new-media _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
