By Christian Parenti
THE DARK, one-bedroom apartment of Yugoslavian artist Vladimir Peric feels like a tricked-out bomb shelter from some mad future. He keeps the shades down because it's 100 degrees outside and the sun's radiation is, as he reminds me, "very dangerous." Most walls hold shelves stuffed with books, technical manuals, electronics gear, or fur pelts. Other surfaces are hung with tools, old watches, bird wings, and strange metal shapes that look like the letters of a lost alphabet.
With more than 30 major shows to his name, Peric is just one alpha artist among many in Belgrade's beleaguered but still thriving cultural scene. Once considered the hippest metropolis in Central Europe, "the white city" has spent the last decade on its knees, racked by regional warfare, sanctions, and economic meltdown. As a result, artists - who, under Yugoslavian socialism, lived well and tended to be apolitical - are now more than ever forced to deal with two difficult, intertwined questions: economic survival and politics.
These questions certainly find expression in Peric's art, which combines high-tech detritus with found objects from nature. One recent piece consists of a series of flat rectangular forms made of black chain-link mesh, the bottom halves of which are filled with fur that seems to be pressing down or out of the sometimes ruptured cages. The stocky, balding artist also makes nonfunctional tools: industrial handles are connected to bones or birds' feet instead of blades. The combination suggests the handicraft of postapocalyptic nomads.
It's fitting that Peric's art should deal with motifs of industrial breakdown and environmental crisis: last year his country - in fact his immediate neighborhood - was bombed by NATO jets and mildly radioactive Tomahawk missiles. Next door to his home and studio sits the burnt shell of a former Air Force office. A few kilometers beyond that, in a swath of overgrown park, rises a shattered modernist office tower, one floor of which housed the administration of Radio and Television Serbia. Next to that are the ruins of the Chinese embassy. And two blocks away from Peric's pad is the mighty Danube, which in April was choked with dead fish and fowl, thanks to a massive cyanide spill upstream in Romania.
The last decade has left the 38-year-old artist very pessimistic. Like many Yugoslavs, he is haunted by an uncertain future, feeling that he lives in a time and place of decline and foreboding. Momcilo Milosevic, Peric's young friend and junior collaborator on money-making graphics projects, agrees: "I feel like I am always catching the end of things. Everyone's leaving or remembering what was."
Survival nation
Despite the gloomy talk, the economic landscape in which Peric, Momcilo, and the rest of their generation must try to make art and money is at first glance bafflingly normal. For a country that's had its industrial base smashed and its trade links with the world strangled, there is an awful lot of cash around, with very few queues or shortages.
Sanctions-busting and "gray market" wheeling and dealing - along with a debt-ridden but still robust state sector - manage to keep most people busy, get the pensions paid, and even make a few folks rich. Somehow the government is finding the capital to rebuild a few bombed-out factories and bridges. And though incredibly anxious about the future, Belgraders are renovating old homes, adding illegal extra floors to apartment buildings, and opening small businesses of all sorts.
Ironically, much of this off-the-books boom is the result of a nearly collapsed banking system. Since the hyperinflation and financial crisis of the early 1990s, most people refuse to trust their hard currency to banks for fear they might never get it back. After a while the proverbial mattresses get full of deutsche marks, and people start investing in real property. So while the big industrial firms are hungry for investment, there is a bizarre street-level liquidity, and with it a million and one ways to make ends meet.
It's past midnight in Peric's "submarine," and Momcilo sits wedged in a corner, bathed in a computer monitor's blue light. On the screen float the faces of a dozen angelic German choir boys. Behind Momcilo stands Peric blasting away in Serbo-Croat. They're trying to find the right font to use on a poster that must be shipped DHL to Germany first thing in the morning.
"It's a shit. Stupid pictures! Look what they send us." Exasperated, Peric thrusts a thick hand toward the silly-looking choir boys on screen, lets loose with a few more intense instructions for his young colleague, then returns to the next room, where he is shooting portfolio photographs for a local gallery's retrospective catalog. The lights are huge and hot and there are dozens more pieces left to go. Tomorrow there is another job from Germany waiting.
Increasingly, this is how artists in Belgrade survive: by inserting themselves via the gray market into the larger economy of Europe. Thanks to the Internet and international courier mail, many of Belgrade's best photographers and graphic artists are becoming the low-wage labor for Northern Europe's art and design industry.
For Momcilo and Peric the process usually works like this: The pieces arrive by DHL (in this case photos of choir boys and some German text); the components are assembled and designed as posters; then a few prints and the disks are shipped back to Germany. Remuneration arrives, somehow, in deutsche marks, or it gets deposited into European bank accounts that can be drawn on from a handful of ATMs. Then it's on to the next job.
Another survival strategy for culture workers is to pool their deutsche marks and start DIY collectives and businesses that feed the domestic market. That's how Sasah Nikolic and four friends opened Beopolis, a funky independent bookstore specializing in Serbian literature but carrying everything from translated classics to underground comics. Most of the start-up capital was fronted by Nikolic, who sold his flat for 20,000 DM and converted it into books. Despite being housed in a cultural center connected with a royalist opposition party, Nikolic only seems partisan about drinking beer, chatting up the ladies and lounging on the sandy shores of the Danube.
"All factories upstream have been closed for years, so the water is incredible. You can see into it for almost two meters," Nikolic said, flashing his crooked smile through a haze of tobacco smoke.
Another example of a culture industry start-up is Rende, a publishing house whose name translates as "cheese grater." Helping to push this forward is Vladimir Arsenijevic, whose 1997 debut novel, In the Hold - which was translated into English - chronicles Yugoslavia's drift toward war in the early '90s through the eyes of a thirtysomething Yugo slacker.
Art + politics = money
Economic crises aside, seat-of-the-pants underground business schemes are not the only thing that keeps artists and writers solvent. Though official funding isn't what it used to be, there is still a surprising amount of patronage. Everyone from the Milosevic government, to George Soros and the CIA, to the state gas company, Jugopetrol, to a slew of private firms and European foundations is funding culture.
Along with this incoming cash, artists still rely on the physical and organizational infrastructure left over from socialism. For example, Belgrade, with a population of almost 2 million, has more than 100 cultural institutions, which include museums and theaters as well as galleries, libraries, and youth-oriented "culture centers." Despite a dire macroeconomic climate, the government still gives money to most of these institutions, still pays artists' pensions, and even funds the projects of opposition organizations.
"Milosevic doesn't really care about the arts. He just gives the money so he can say, 'Look, so many shows, so many galleries; there is no censorship here,' " insists Vesna Danilovic, program director for Kulturi Center Beograd, one of Belgrade's main cultural centers connected with the opposition. Despite being openly hostile to Milosevic, the Kulturi Centar - which houses a gallery, a café, a bookstore and numerous offices - gets its space on Belgrade's main pedestrian promenade rent-free, compensated by the government. The government also provides the center with 30 percent of its budget. "Yes, sometimes I think we do the regime's best work for it," says the frustrated but employed Danilovic.
But the vast majority of patronage - no one is keeping track of the total amount - comes from European foundations and U.S. government organs like the Agency for International Development and the National Endowment for Democracy. Since the bombing, Washington has boosted funding for the Serbian opposition to more than $50 million annually. Once the independent and opposition media and political groups get their cash, they almost always break a bit off for arts projects.
This style of arts patronage, practiced by all political parties in Yugoslavia, has its roots in the cold war. As far as larger-than-life former president Marshal Tito was concerned, anything that capitalism could do, Yugoslavian socialism could do better. That included sculpture, abstract painting, and nearly-impossible-to-watch auteur cinema. (Check out the New Wave flicks of directors like Dusan Markavejev.)
Under Tito, artists were pampered, given wide political latitude, and encouraged to travel. This method of "showing the flag" is part of what made Tito wildly popular at home and abroad. The same logic still applies: in Yugoslavia, any serious political institution must have an arts component. "It's like having a team in the Olympics," Peric says. "It shows that you are important."
To make ends meet in such an environment, artists will often play mistress to all sides of the political equation and do their best to keep their patrons in the dark. One designer, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told me how she and colleagues secretly took money from both the ruling Socialist Party and the Soros Foundation to fund an independent educational campaign about air quality and alternative transportation. Neither funder would have appreciated their infidelity.
Processing war
It's still amazingly hot in Belgrade, and the cell-phone system has crashed: everyone's mobiles are ringing periodically only to go dead once answered. I am sitting in one of the city's innumerable cafes with Slobodan Markovic, a skinny, good-natured techno-savant whose talents keep opposition Web sites working. Lately he's helping an online multimedia lab called Cyberrex. Markovic is giving me the rundown on War Frames, a collaboration between himself and Belgrade visual artist Zoran Naskovki.
"War Frames is a picture of the Serbian television landscape during the bombing," Markovic says. Accessible online at Cyberrex.org, this piece of Web art is a surreal parade of video stills culled from Belgrade's seven television stations, six of which are private, one of which is state-run. This is perhaps as good a view of the war as any outsider can get. Even for those like Markovic, who stayed at home with his mom during the bombing, or like Peric, who avoided the bomb shelter and endured two months of intermittent bombardment in his freezing windowless apartment, the war was intensely real and yet surrealistically mediated by television.
"During the bombardment everything stopped. The bombing always started after 9 p.m. And every TV station would show their own little air-raid logo when it was time for bombing. We even got reports of where would be targeted next," Markovic says. "So all you could do was get together with friends, make a bunch of popcorn, and watch TV."
While the United States and its allies flew 38,000 sorties and dropped more than 6,300 tons of munitions, TV worked overtime. To provide some distraction during those long, cold nights, and as a defiant "fuck you" to the West, TV stations competed with each other to show the best and latest bootlegged films. "We had The Matrix the day after it opened," says Markovic with a touch of pride. "We also saw the old war films: Saving Private Ryan, Full Metal Jacket, Apocalypse Now."
Yugoslavia's captive audience was also treated to The United Voice of NATO, a program broadcast on UHF channel 21 by the Pennsylvania Air National Guard's Psychological Warfare Unit during air raids, from 20,000 feet in the sky.
"Those psy-ops were for mongoloids," recounts a grinning Markovic. "Like their leaflets, most of it was in broken Serbian. Then we had the message from Madeline Albright, assuring us that the war was only against Milosevic. And then they'd give you the weather and the local sports." All of these media events and others are sampled in War Frames.
Scrolling through the piece, it becomes clear that Naskovki and Markovic are exploring the way the meanings of televised messages hemorrhage out of control when air-raid warning logos appear in the corner of Disney cartoons about "little Indians" as Tomahawk missiles are ripping through the night sky above. As Markovic says: "It was all totally insane."
Nationalist visions
Belgrade art also cuts inward to criticize Serbian nationalism. One example of this is the work of Mileta Prodanovic, a novelist, theorist, conceptual artist, and professor at the University of the Arts in Belgrade. Prodanovic's main object of scrutiny these days is the way art lubricates and facilitates ethnic hatred. All sides in the Yugoslavian wars - Bosnian Muslims, Catholic Croats, and Orthodox Serbs - have invoked artistic representations of ancient mythological imagery and religious iconography to justify their present-day barbarism. Some Serbian paramilitary units in the Bosnian war even made commemorative calendars, heavily laden with Eastern Orthodox imagery, chronicling their exploits.
A recent piece by Prodanovic dealing with the intimate connection between religious art and ethnic warfare is a series of large prints of butterfly wings, inside of which one sees not the natural patterns, but rather a close-up of Judith beheading Holofrenes. "They're about what I call the 'unbearable lightness of killing'," Prodanovic says. Another piece on the same theme is a series of knives engraved with more violent images quoted from Eastern Orthodox frescoes.
In attacking both nationalism and religion, Prodanovic seeks to make the point that the ultraviolent hatred of recent years has been lubricated and justified by the use of religious imagery, mythology, and storytelling. For example, Serb paramilitaries presented themselves as defending Christendom from the Islamic hordes, but in reality they were just killing their neighbors.
American nationalism is also a subject of critique. One of most interesting summer shows in Belgrade is the 25-year retrospective of the Serb-Canadian Bratsa Bonifacho being held at Progress Gallery in the heart of Belgrade. His works, all large oil paintings, are overtly anti-American, and range from abstract expressionism to surrealism. One of the most politically fitting pieces - given the context - is The American Factor, a broad canvas across which charge disturbingly blurred racing hounds; their apparent finish line is a cluster of overlapping crosshairs and bull's-eye targets. The same ingredients show up in other pieces, some of which also incorporate lurid, bright American flags. The whole series conveys the same sense of mindless distress and frenetic, empty speed.
"I am an environmentalist. I really hate nuclear pollution," the affable 64-year-old painter says. Bonifacho's critiques of America were originally launched from Canada as environmental statements in the early 1980s. "All the lakes on the southern border are dead, and this makes me really angry. It's America's fault. They are the biggest polluter in the whole world."
Clearly history and geography - and the trip to Belgrade - have given Bonifacho's canvasses a new layer of meaning. The desperate racing dogs, the targets, the American flags with their arterial red strips are now, inevitably, comments on the recent war, which Bonifacho bitterly opposed from his home in Vancouver. "I was on the street for 78 cold days, in front of the U.S. consulate," he says.
The painter's latest works, also part of the Belgrade retrospective, are big, intense, aggressively textured fields of color. At first glance these abstracts seem to have left overt politics behind. And, as the ever candid Bonifacho says, this was partly intentional: "They are less disturbing, more decorative - just easier to sell." Thus, his newer works show up in the collections of banks and insurance companies.
But returning to the air-conditioned sanctuary of Progress Gallery one last time before leaving town, I can't help but recall Prodanovic's point about aesthetics lubricating nationalist hatred. Standing before these beautiful abstract paintings - made for Western consumption - they now appear to be cryptic encapsulations of how we Americans have acclimated to the politics of war. And Bonifacho's words echo once more in my head: "less disturbing ... more decorative ... easier to sell."
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