THE GROTESQUE INFANTS OF THE REVOLUTION

Neo N.O.B. Ivan Fijolić, Lauba, May 1^st – 26^th, 2012

By: Bojan Krištofić

During the declarative commemoration of a few of the existing domestic antifascist holidays, the most influential media and government organs nearly never mention the following fact: in the whirlwind of war and conversion, 2965 monuments of the National Liberation War were ruthlessly ruined in Croatia, some manually, others by explosives, while the political will to appropriately punish the “unknown” vandals was never present then, in the early 1990s, and it mainly isn’t present today either.  Only some of these monuments have been restored, and, among them, one of the undoubted masterpieces of domestic postwar sculpting – Augustincic’s amazing monument of Marshall Tito in his birth town of Kumrovec.  This work of art, which was created in the short-lived phase of rigid Yugoslav socialist realism (from 1945 to 1949), which died down with the breaking of close relations with the USSR, has long since overcome the stylistic obstacles of statehood art, and it has maintained an undeniable aesthetic legitimacy.  The infamous fate of the monument after the breakup of the former Yugoslavia is one of those tragic metaphors that symbolically sums up the essence of the breakup of Yugoslavia.  When looking at this as a whole, in the past twenty years, all the antifascist monuments of various stylistic characteristics (from social realism to the modern abstract) have been regarded as disturbances by political nomenclatures, or, in best-case scenarios, as a necessary evil, as fossils of a buried time which is associated with riots, skirmishing, and outbursts of hate, and, sometimes, physical violence as well.  Very few people, however, rarely uncompromisingly oppose violence against our valuable cultural heritage.

Nevertheless, this covered up theme emerges on the daily schedule from time to time.  This time, sculptor Ivan Fijolic (born 1976) spoke up about this theme in his artwork at the Neo N.O.B. exhibition at the Zagreb “house for people and art” Lauba, which was held from May 1^st to 26^th.  Fijolic rose to fame nearly ten years ago when he created his Bruce Lee statue in fragmented Mostar.  Soon enough, however, the same fate befell the statue as the antifascist monuments – its nunchucks were stolen, and after this, the statue itself went missing, only to be found in the mud a few days later, damaged and defeated.  Unfortunately, the only thing that Fijolic achieved here was set a precise diagnosis of the port-war psychological state of the individual for whom the ideology no longer permits sober judgments regarding the most benign and simple phenomena.  In his text Known Perpetrator, Boris Dezulovic claims that the statue of Bruce Lee would fit in perfectly with the Neo N.O.B. exhibition concept – it would represent Fijolic’s authentic post-modern view of a national hero that became the product of both mass culture mythology as well as of the aesthetic and thematic heritage of socialist realism.  However, since Bruce Lee wasn’t present at Lauba, Fijolic tried to combine two ostensible opposites in the sculptures he exhibited – because, after all, what were national heroes prior to the breakup of Yugoslavia if not action superstars of the socialist Pantheon?  However, Fijolic doesn’t want to ironize their historical role with a pop cultural glaze – on the contrary, he attempts to revitalize their pathetic, revolutionary guard with a transformation of gender and social roles.  Thus, his interpretation of Augustincic’s classic statue of Tito, whose worried head had been torn off historically, has Jovanka Broz’s head instead, which applauds Fijolic’s second sculpture – an upright Venus from Willendorf with her arms heroically raised up in the air, which was meant to be an archetypal expression of a desperate revolt in the wilderness of historical reality.  It can thus be said that by doing this, Fijolic develops his own mythology about a national liberation battle that is adapted to modern circumstances, but also revives that which has died.  By unifying the female and male revolutionary identity, that is, the character of the female and male partisan, he symbolically gives birth to a new generation of rebels that can be seen all around us in the past few years, on the streets of Croatian cities as well – humiliated and offended students, workers, and intellectuals.  However, although he doesn’t mock anti-fascist values, Fijolic observes them with a noticeable dose of melancholy.  His grotesque statue Baby Boom, an oversized infant of the revolution in a combat-like pose, seems to be exerting himself in vain in hope of a better tomorrow, and lacks any child-like innocence that is supposed to be the basis of his survival.  The statue observes its idols that are positioned across form it – The Three Kings, grinning, mechanical twins that are made up of Elvis’ legs and hips, as well as Stallone’s and Schwarzenegger’s torsos.  No battle can be lost with these tough guys.  On the other hand, the technique of the bas-relief reveals that their pumped up muscles are hollow much like a sponge, while their grinning faces contribute to the tragic effect, thus revealing the pointlessness of the politics of violence and pointing to the stupidity of the revolutionary macho affectation.  Anti-fascist values are compromised by the actual revolutionary practice, and their monuments are symbolically emasculated in their conversion.  By developing this idea and building a subtle narrative sequence, Fijolic comes to the final metaphor of his interpretation of revolution, which has mainly been overlooked by previous interpreters of the Neo N.O.B. exhibition – the ready-made car wreck of the Yugo 45.  Placed on its side on the floor of Lauba, the “Yugo” is no longer a means of transportation, but instead, merely a sad and somewhat ugly piece of junk that represents the failed political movement and the former Yugoslav state which was too small for all its angry inhabitants.  This cult car, which was once a symbol of the Yugoslav industrial progress and was accessible to almost everyone, is today merely a monument of everything that came to be after the N.O.B., which passed without any hope of returning forever, and so the image of it ruinously lying there in the gallery is as disturbing as the image of the destroyed statue by Augustincic.  Today, the infants of the revolution drive different cars that are more expensive, better, nicer looking, and faster.  But who can guarantee that these cars also, one day, won’t be merely a banal reminder of a world that inevitably crashed and fell apart?  Because of this, Fijolic’s exhibition is at the same time a protest against the relativization of anti-fascism and the mystification of the N.O.B., but also a warning about what some future revolution can essentially turn into – a graveyard of the lifeless junk of our post-industrialist society.