Preliminary communication
DOMESTIC POST-SOCIALISM’S ART OF VEXILOLOGY, OR, FLAGS AS A SUBVERSIVE ARTISTIC SYMBOL
Suzana Marjanić
orcid.org/0000-0002-6158-3006
; Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research, Zagreb, Croatia
Abstract
In the article I observe the subversive use of flags as exhibitional and performance art symbols in the works of Croatian artists from the post-Socialist, corporative-capitalist transitional 1990s, with the emphasis of the period from 2005 – Cvijanović’s Nazi EU flag up to 2011, concluding with the Agrokor Republic flag as conceived by the H-Alter journalists Mašenjka Bačić and Tamara Opačić, as well as with the Bojan Šumonja’s white Croatian Underwater Flag (2012).
It is notable in that process that the artists use the flag as a subversive means of ironising the political forces in power – as fictitious, dismantling allegorical flags (for example, in the case of Nemanja Cvijanović, Nada Prlja, Mašenjka Bačić and Tamara Opačić, Zoran Pavelić, Božidar Jurjević, Bojan Šumonja); furthermore, as actual flags (for example, the flags and coats-of-arms of Marko Marković, the flags in Borut Šeparović’s productions Timbuktu [2008] and Mauzer [2011], the case of the Janez Janša/Emil Hrvatin’s flag) or, for their part, as Utopian flags (the patchwork flags of Robert Sošić and the God flag of Tomislav Brajnović and his father Marčelo Brajnović).
Keywords
flags; exhibitional and performance art flag-symbols; activist art; post-Socialism; anthropology of art
Hrčak ID:
93675
URI
Publication date:
14.12.2012.
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