Marina Gržinić: Fiction Reconstructed: Eastern Europe, Post-Socialism and the Retro-Avantgarde (1997/2000)

“In this book, my point of departure is a difference between Eastern and Western Europe that I try to conceptualize philosophically, insisting on a difference – a critical difference within and not a special classification method marking the process of grounding differences, such as apartheid, as Trinh T. Minh-ha has suggested. The question of who is allowed to write about the history of art, culture and politics in the area once known as Eastern Europe must be posed alongside questions of how and when those events are marked.

The largest part of the book focuses on selected artistic projects and concepts by Mladen Stilinovic (Zagreb), Kasimir Malevich (Belgrade, 1986), and the group Irwin (NSK) (Ljubljana), which were developed in the territory of the former Yugoslavia, and continue to function, develop, and mutate. These projects are read via dialectic positioning (i.e., thesis, anti-thesis, and synthesis) within not only countries of the former Yugoslavia, but also Eastern Europe in general. Finally, they are linked with the notion of ‘Retro-Avant-garde,’ or, as I label it, the new ‘ism’ of the East.” (from the Introduction)

First published in Slovenian as Rekonstruirana fikcija, Ljubljana, 1997.

Edited by Springerin
Publisher edition selene, Vienna, 2000
ISBN 3852661536, 9783852661537
230 pages
via Neda Genova

Review: Franco Torriani (c2005).

WorldCat

PDF (15 MB, no OCR)
PDF (8 MB, OCR’d, from MoW, added 2015-12-4)

Arkzin (1991–1998) [Croatian, English]

Arkzin was a periodical published in Zagreb, Croatia, from 1991 to 1998. It began as a political fanzine and later on the editorial board widened the scope and included international members and topics. Arkzin gradually changed to a hybrid magazine in which politics, culture, theory and art met, crossed and overlapped.

In total, 106 issues appeared, including eight in English (between April 1993 and January 1994). Five issues of the periodical for critical writing Bastard were published as a supplement to the magazine.

The editors-in-chief of Arkzin were Vesna Janković (I/1-3, II/1-90), Miroslav Ambruš Kiš, Zoran Oštrić (I/1-3), Vladimir Desnica (I/5-6), and Dejan Kršić (II/91-93, III).

PDFs (Monoskop wiki, via MaMa & Human Rights Archive)
See also Prospects of Arkzin catalogue (48 pp, 2013)

Pavle Levi: Cinema by Other Means (2012–) [EN, SR]

“Cinema by Other Means explores avant-garde endeavors to practice the cinema by using the materials and the techniques different from those commonly associated with the cinematographic apparatus. Using examples from both the historical and the post-war avant-garde — Dada, Surrealism, Lettrism, “structural-materialist” film, and more — Pavle Levi reveals a range of peculiar and imaginative ways in which filmmakers, artists, and writers have pondered and created, performed and transformed, the “movies” with or without directly grounding their work in the materials of film. The study considers artists and theorists from all over Europe — France, Italy, Soviet Union, Germany, Hungary — but it particularly foregrounds the context of the Yugoslav avant-garde. Cinema by Other Means offers the English-language reader a thorough explication of an assortment of distinctly Yugoslav artistic phenomena, such as the Zenithist cine-writings of the 1920s, the proto-structural Antifilm movement of the early 1960s, and the “ortho-dialectical” film-poetry of the 1970s.”

Publisher Oxford University Press, 2012
ISBN 019984142X, 9780199841424
224 pages

Reviews: Matilde Nardelli (Oxford Art Journal, 2013), Greg DeCuir (Jump Cut, 2013), Bojan Jovic (Biblid, 2013, SR).
Exh. review: De Cuir (ARTMargins, 2013).

Publisher

Cinema by Other Means (English, 2012, updated on 2024-4-26)
Kino drugim sredstvima (Serbian, trans. Đorđe Tomić, 2013, added on 2024-4-26)