Art and public space in socialist Zagreb

In the decades leading up to the dissolution of socialist Yugoslavia, a collective of young artists based in Zagreb used the city’s public spaces as a platform for radical individual expression. The Group of Six Authors and their circle in the period from 1975 to 1985 are the focus of Adair Rounthwaite’s book This Is Not My World: Art and Public Space in Socialist Zagreb, which highlights the friction between public and private that was the foundation of their innovative practices. Rounthwaite is joined here in conversation with Mechtild Widrich.

Adair Rounthwaite is author of This Is Not My World: Art and Public Space in Socialist Zagreb and Asking the Audience: Participatory Art in 1980s New York. Rounthwaite is associate professor of art history at the University of Washington.

Mechtild Widrich is author of Monumental Cares: Sites of History and Contemporary Art and Performative Monuments: The Rematerialisation of Public Art. Widrich is an art historian, curator, and professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.   

REFERENCES:

Caroline A. Jones

Terry Smith

Chika Okeke-Agulu 

Vlasta Delimar

Tomislav Gotovac

Ana Mendieta

Sasha Su-Ling Welland

Jenny Lin / Above Sea

Liz Kotz / Words to Be Looked At

Vlado Martek

Mladen Stilinović

Gina Beavers

This Is Not My World is available from University of Minnesota Press.