- I would say that there is a reality of trauma in Serbia that is often suppressed. The traumatic moment is defined by people’s inability to respond adequately to the present situation. “Reality” is usually connected with the idea of an “objective” view of conditions and references to social and economic life. But this view can be fully conflicting, driven by frustrations, unfulfilled desires and different defense mechanisms. What kind of future for Serbia is emerging from this past? In Serbia, unresolved wartime experiences and the trauma of the transition to capitalism have coincided. The gap caused by the lack of a critical public discourse on both main structural events that have reshaped Serbian society has now been filled by constant local squabbling and complaints about our inability to cope. The crisis has also produced a certain energy. I believe that in the domain of contemporary art, one can intersect these “realities”. We can see this in works of artists as diverse as Uros Djuri, Milica Tomić, Biljana Djurdjević, Skart, Vladimir Nikolić, Rasa Todosijević, Apsolutno, and many more. This is a broad topic and the recent show of art of the nineties in Serbia (“On Normality”, MOCAb, Belgrade, 2005) tries to address this topic in a comprehensive way.

- The artists you have mentioned represented something like the “third option” in the artistic climate of former socialist Yugoslavia which was dominated by two versions of “official” art: the late modernist “aestheticism” of academic art and the bourgeois “dissident” art. Till recently the artists you mention were not known properly even among, say, art students: people like Todosijević were proscribed because of their strong criticism towards conservative art education. I think that other artists of this generation, Era Milivojević und Nesa Paripović in Belgrade, Sanja Iveković and Mladen Stilinović in Zagreb, and certainly Braco Dimitrijević, as well as the “mysterious” figure of Goran Djordjević, play a very important role for several young artists. But they were never father or mother figures.

- The issue of the use of irony is very complex. It is for sure that irony is omnipresent in art when there is no structural connection between the marginalized position of artists and the self-sufficient political and institutional system-in-crisis. On the other hand, irony has become a predictable language, as is the language of “neo-conceptualism”. However, it is “our” language, the way how to articulate and mediate our inability to seriously influence the world at large.

- The period of conceptualism in Yugoslavia, in the late sixties and seventies, was part of the international movement. This made the “opening” possible. It is interesting because it showed that the Yugoslavian artists were in fact very much aware of Western conceptualism and were influenced by it, for example by Kosuth, De Maria and Beuys. Yugoslavian artists wanted to be part of this trend, but also developed their unique local character based on economic, political and educational differences. However, the particular discourse around this production was never fully developed and was strongly influenced by Western art reception, then as now. Principally, we need a form of critique (both of the socialist era and particularly of the present-day neo-liberalism), which encourages and does not disillusion a practice. At the moment I see a certain dead-end in the argumentation because of the economic and intellectual frustration.

- The cultural logic of capitalism is a strange affair. On the one hand, the attention economy of the media and of cultural reproduction have the effect of a public “wanting more of the same”, on the other, if the cultural product is not accompanied by the strength of an established discourse – and this is the big difference between modern or post-modern art in East and West –, it can at the most become a product of anthropological origin. Modern and contemporary art in the Balkans is seen as an interpreted vis-à-vis of the Western reception – and it has mostly been narrated in this connection.

- We should perhaps assume that the first post-communist impulse could already be found in Yugoslavia in the early fifties – as Stalin’s dogma crumbled and the processes of Westernisation and liberalisation began. They were manifested at first in popular culture and images. This later led to events, as in the demonstrations of the “68ers”, when students demanded “more communism” in a communist state. The death of Tito was primarily a sign of the disintegration of Yugoslavia.

- The term “communism” or “post-communism” can produce misunderstandings. Communism could be the desired content of a socialist society, but was not lived out. After the Second World War, communism stayed on as a pure vision that had to be filled with images. Even if communism as a classless society was never achieved in practice, one can maintain, like Ivaylo Ditchev (Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Sofia University), that communism is a “state of mind” and socialism is a “state of facts”. For this reason, we speak of “post-communism” in connection with a particular way of thinking, and not as a historical phenomenon. In relation to a utopian promise, the term “post-communism” is an ideological invention that proclaims the end of all universal projects, a sign of some post-historical or post-ideological situation. Yet, this notion of a post-ideological realm has already crumbled.

- I spoke about the term “socialist consumerism” to emphasise an important aspect that describes the anthropology of everyday life, of an ecological and political system and a cultural identity. It is about the way the ideological basis, the “transition to communism”, was blurred with a dream world of consumption. From the mid-sixties, the Titoist system created a public sphere made up of an ideological and practical mixture of the utopian promises of communism and the consumer promises of capitalism.

- When America’s entertainment industry broke in upon Eastern Europe and Asia in the nineties with its “colonisation of the subconscious”, as the German film director Wim Wenders put it – and this started in a controlled way in Yugoslavia as early as 1950 – it was a sign of the liberalisation and new openness of these countries.The spread of Western popular culture became synonymous with the process of democratisation. This type of cultural dominance prevented other forms of or experiments with democracy. In Tito’s Yugoslavia, the illusion of a high standard of living, a relatively free market, freedom to travel and the receipt of foreign currencies in fact prevented the development of a real alternative to dogmatic socialism. I think that socialist consumerism numbed the entire Yugoslavian society and created a new form of class distinctions – which in the end led also to the national conflicts. However, your question implies a much broader analysis.