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The exhibition Vojin Bakic, held in Zagreb, 2007, production: WHW, Zagreb

The recent intensification and proliferation of independent cultural production in Zagreb, which is positioning itself in opposition to dominant models of representation and as a reaction against the inadequate work of institutions, is directly related to the possibilities of its institutionalization and influence on that process. Although in the last years we have witnessed significant changes in the vocabulary used by decision-makers and representatives of institutional »state« culture, the cultural domain in Croatia is still characterized by the logic of identity, particularly national identity. Antagonisms that deeply stratified society throughout the 90s have been temporarily suspended under consensus, which is, obviously, exclusionary, and nationalistic rhetoric is certainly watered down, but the basic understanding of culture has not changed at all. In that context, the exhibition of Vojin Bakic (1915-1992), organized by the curatorial collective »What, How & for Whom / WHW« in the public, city-owned Gallery Nova in Zagreb in June 2007, intervenes in the highly restricted and institutionally guarded area of high modernism.

Vojin Bakic is an artist on the one hand perceived as an »authentic« modernist sculptor, a key figure in the break with socialist realism and a proponent of abstraction who forged the paths for freedom of artistic expression in the 1950s, and on the other hand is seen as a »state artist« whose art has been serving ideology; highly acclaimed in official art histories, yet his monuments to the anti-fascist struggle have been devastated in the heat of the nationalism and anti-communism of the 90s.

In that narrative Bakic is understood as a propagator of abstraction who struggled for freedom of artistic expression, and his use of clean abstract forms is interpreted as a victory of art not only over socialist dogma, but over ideology in general. What such an understanding fails to comprehend is the fact that modernism is not a monolithic construction nor is it ideologically empty; notions of artistic freedom and the autonomy of art are only seemingly disconnected from ideology and politics. Neutralization of art as a means of social critique, performed through the abdication of the avant-garde, and the possibility of introducing precise ideological messages into the self-referential forms of high modernism, without direct »program intervention« on behalf of the centers of political power and without openly violating the institution of autonomous art, was politically functional both in the West and in former Yugoslavia.The common understanding of Bakic acclaims him as visionary who played a »historic« role of breaking with soc-realism in sculpture.