Art Work: Invisible Labour and the Legacy of Yugoslav Socialism

I come from a family of undercompensated and overexploited artists: visual artists, actors, musicians, an arts fabricator, and a dancer, all having spent much of their professional lives surviving on the system of grants, donations, commissions, and gig work through which many artists cobble together a living with little recognition of or compensation for the enormous labor behind their craft. Thus, I am acutely aware of the phenomenon that Katja Praznik analyzes in Art Work: Invisible Labour and the Legacy of Yugoslav Socialism.As Praznik argues, rather than treating the artist as a worker in need of a salary, benefits, and protections, an obscuring and mystification of the labor leading to the final “product” we view on gallery walls has resulted from the Western tradition of valorizing the genius and autonomy of the artist, allowing for the precarity that so often characterizes artistic life (18, 21). Much like the domestic labor of a household that is rendered invisible by its essentialization as the fulfillment of women's natural, caregiving instincts, artistic labor is similarly unseen and devalued as the by-product of the artists’ essential need for self-expression, the assumption that the act of creation is its own reward (41, 43).Praznik demonstrates these points using the example of postwar, socialist Yugoslavia, arguing that it was possible for artists’ compensation to reflect the value of their labor and the role of the arts in a society. But Yugoslavia's eventual introduction of a neoliberal political economy undermined the stability and working conditions of artists, turning them from the artistic workers of the first postwar decades into entrepreneurs (49, 71). Beyond the pressures for neoliberal reform exerted by the Western countries on which Yugoslavia depended, Praznik also points to the experimental and alternative arts movements that emerged in the 1960s as embracing the Western practice of celebrating the autonomy and genius of the artist as part of the explanation for the late Yugoslav art world's worsening conditions (66, 71).Art Work represents a welcome contribution to the body of studies seeking to understand the ideological complexities of Yugoslavia's unusual system of self-managing socialism and its diffuse impact on Yugoslav life. By inscribing the arts world and artistic labor into the story of the rise and fall of self-management as an experiment in a more participatory form of socialism, Praznik opens a new window into what is often a narrative of economics, consumption, or elite ideology. Particularly thought provoking is her argument that in their preoccupation with the state's repressive apparatus, the alternative and experimental artists of late socialism ignored the growing dangers posed by liberalism and marketization (101–3). Here she joins historians like Radina Vučetić, who argues that much of Yugoslavia's Western-influenced avant-garde and critical culture undermined rather than strengthened the search for an alternative socialism.Also fascinating is her discussion of the era of “socialist aestheticism,” the underexamined window between the Tito-Stalin split and the upheavals of the 1960s. In this moment the arts were treated as a public service and artists were treated as workers and compensated for their labor. Cultural engagement and access for the masses was considered an ideological goal (51, 57). This section as well as later parts of the book is so interesting that it leaves me wishing for even more. The relatively brief chapter dealing with the moment where artistic work was treated as labor and the chapter's focus on cultural policy might have been extended into a deeper look at what art as labor looked like, felt like, and sounded like to both its producers and the masses it was meant to serve.I also wonder whether more comparative engagement with other socialist states could have teased out a few more nuances in Praznik's argument. If Yugoslavia was uniquely vulnerable to Western pressure and its artists unusually in thrall to the Western ethos of artistic genius, were there other examples from the socialist world—Bulgaria? China? Cuba?—where the labor of artists remained adequately recognized? If not, might that not pose questions about artistic labor under state socialism more broadly? Nor was Yugoslavia the only socialist country to struggle with adequately addressing workers’ needs. If creative work is to be recognized as a category of labor, might it not be productive to more explicitly position artists within Yugoslavia's more traditional labor struggles, to say nothing of Poland's striking shipyard workers or Romania's Jiu Valley miners?In Art Work Katja Praznik has ably demonstrated that state socialism was hardly immune to the exploitative labor policies of the capitalist world. To the contrary, despite the alternative path offered by self-managing socialism and embodied in the moment of “aesthetic socialism,” the labor of Yugoslavia's artists ultimately became, like the fate of the country itself, precarious, underfunded, and bound up with the agendas of Western powers.