Zenitism and orientalism

Reflecting on the centenary of the birth of Zenitism, this essay examines how the movement engaged with stereotypes about the Slavic Orient, and in particular the discourse on Balkanism. The European orientalist reading of the Balkans became especially profound in years surrounding the World War I. Seeking to invert derogatory characterisations of the Balkan Peninsula, Zenitists would embark on a mission to "Balkanise Europe" by presenting the artist from the East as a rejuvenating, revolutionary force emerging from a cultural tabula rasa. Zenitism sought to destabilise the dominant Orient-Occident discourse by establishing parallels between existing negative stereotypes of the Balkans and the aesthetic tropes of the European avantgarde. Specifically, Zenitists established the Balkan "Barbarogenius" as the archetypal modernist primitive - precisely the figure conjured by the European intelligentsia as the saviour for its listless modern condition. In addition, the Zenitist movement established an analogy between the hallmark fragmentation of the Balkans and the cultural cacophony of the avant-garde. The political and aesthetic strategies of the movement, the authors assert, bear a striking similarity with those of the Black Atlantic, and its 'in-betweenness'-its ambition to straddle two opposing worlds. Organised around its eponymous journal Zenit, which was conceptualised as "the first Balkan journal in Europe and the first European journal in the Balkans," Zenitism employed European avant-garde aesthetic strategies while simultaneously rejecting European claims to cultural supremacy. For Yugoslav, Soviet, and Western European audiences, the journal had two parallel goals: the creative "Balkanisation" of Europe, and a commitment to dismantling Yugoslav "nesting orientalisms" by fighting against the reproduction of negative stereotypes among the region's own inhabitants. Against a backdrop of European crisis and a global demand for a renewed emancipatory struggle, the ambition of Zenitism holds strong appeal today.

Creative derivatives the poetics of derivation and its formative assumptions

The creative derivatives phrase has in itself two terms: creativity (lat. creatus - having been created) and derivation (lat. derivatio - derivation, departure). Creativity presupposes the realisation of the new, the non-existent. Derivation, on the other hand, means transition, formation or arrangement. A derivative is what is derived or comes from something else (like gasoline which is a petroleum derivative). Creative derivations would therefore be processes in which a new is derived from the existing; procedures of rearranging the existing, conversion (transitioning) from one system to another. There are two basic requirements that are necessary for the realisation of these and such actions: an adequate poetic means and a common denominator of two or more phenomena, i.e. two or more systems that are brought into contact. We define the poetic means here in Jakobson's terms as the axis of combination (syntagm) and the axis of selection (paradigm). The paper systematises the poetic possibilities of artistic modeling, which is based on the template of already existing works of art. Different versions of the approach to modern and postmodern practice of taking over the already existing form and content aspects of a work of art are briefly explained and described. When choosing examples, the author adheres to the principle of representativeness instead of compendial comprehensiveness. The outcome of the paper should be twofold. On the one hand, the aim is to get to know and understand the poetics of taking over, which is one of the preconditions for aesthetic pleasure and cognitive insight when encountering works of art of that provenance. On the other hand, the work should be useful to students in their own creative work. The poetic means exhibited in it should facilitate a creative approach to the inexhaustible source of tradition.

Education of conservators-restorers at academies and faculties of art

Cultural goods are recorded, valorised, processed, preserved, conserved and restored because of the artistic, cultural-historical and documentary values attributed to them. In addition to these, they have other values and functions that must be taken into account. For example, the religious value of a cult object, the emotional value of a certain object in personal ownership, material value and others. A wide range of materials and artistic techniques requires specific knowledge that must be possessed by experts in the field of conservation and restoration. The subject of interest in this paper is education in the field of conservation and restoration of works of fine and applied arts. How are those who will deal with conservation and restoration of such values educated in the modern world? What knowledge and skills do they need and what training models are there? Do conservators of works of art stand out among conservators of different specialisations? What is the tradition of conservation education in Serbia? How can academies and faculties of art be places of quality education for conservators-restorers? The paper analyses different European models of conservation education, as well as the changes that have occurred with the shift of conservation as a craft to a defined profession which requires higher education. It is also discussed how such changes, through university education reforms, have affected the level of skills and knowledge conservators need, as well as whether these changes have led to the recognition of conservation and restoration of cultural heritage as a science. Among the various possibilities for the education of conservators at higher education institutions in Serbia, master academic studies in Conservation and Restoration of Works of Fine and Applied Arts at the Academy of Arts in Novi Sad is analysed as a case study.

Krleža's unfulfilled love or comfortable restlessness of gender conflicts

The fundamental idea of this article is to connect the gender antagonism in Krleža's border works of the first dramatic cycle, the rarely performed plays On the Eve (1919) and Adam and Eve (1922) with the tradition of tabooing sexuality from the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, by the inventiveness of the sociological analyses of that time, and the achievements of modern evolutionary psychology. The psychographic points of a "couple in a sexual snuggle" (Gašparović, 1977), dissolve in the characters as bearers of universal symbols. Although enclosed in the apparent triviality of exaggerated psychologisation (Donat, 1970), Krleža's malefemale miniatures through zoometaphors and mythico-dramatic parallels raise the question of how love relationships from the early 20th century managed to maintain the dominance of the spoken word over the physical and the emotional.

The ethical power of music in the 'Ave Maria' motet by Claudio Monteverdi

Since ancient times, the concept of ethos has been a distinguished part of cultural heritage, living in various spheres of social, cultural, intellectual and religious life. During the Renaissance, the encounter of rhetorical categories and Christian doctrine opened the space for the manifestation of ethos in sacred music. Ethos is important as a rhetorical category, therefore, as a way to achieve persuasiveness, in which the theory of ethos of the Greek rhetorician Hermogenes of Tarsus will be consulted. Following this theory, which was also known in the Renaissance, a series of counterpoint methods will take form, which may indicate the manifestation of certain subcategories of ethos in music. Having in mind Hermogenes' concept of ethos on the one hand, and the significance of ethos in the Christian figure of Mary on the other, this paper examines a chain of manifestations and, given Hermogenes' subcategories, offers an in-depth reading of the text and music in the motet from the end of the 16th century. It is an early work of Claudio Monteverdi on the words of the Ave Maria prayer, which, according to its religious function and meaning, represents not only a concise appeal to the ethos of believers, but also the ethical foundation of Marian devotions.

Silhouettes of the Revolution: Ideas of V. I. Lenin, L. D. Trotsky and A. V. Lunacharsky in Zenith (1921-1926)

The matters of the October Revolution are present on several levels in Zenit from the first issue until the closing of the magazine. The October Revolution appears as a topic in Zenit in discussions about Soviet Avant-garde art, as well as the sociopolitical consequences of the Revolution, but also as a symbol of the destruction of old civilisation, one of the fundamental programme principles of Zenitism. This paper analyses the strategies for shaping the concept and discourse on the October Revolution in Zenit. First, the intertextual connections between the texts that speak about the Soviet artistic Avant-garde and the texts about the political Avant-garde of the October Revolution are reconstructed, i.e. their ideological and aesthetic unity as a product of Ljubomir Micić's editorial policy. Then, the second level of analysis occurs through a comparative reading of the programmatic principles of Zenithism and the ideas of the representatives of the Soviet political Avant-garde - Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, Leon Davidovich Trotsky and Anatoly Vasilyevich Lunacharsky. The aim of this paper is to examine how the figures of revolutionary leaders and artists, and the reception of their works and texts in the Zenit magazine, shaped the Zenitist understanding of the historical role of Avant-garde art as new art. Furthermore, special attention is paid to the interpretation of Zenit's artistic ideology in the context of revolutionary Marxism, i.e. to the analysis of implicit ambivalences between artistic individuality, on the one hand, and the Avant-garde and Revolution, as collective events, on the other.

Topology of narrative in the poetry of Friedrich Hölderlin

Significance and peculiarity of the appearance and influence that Friedrich Hölderlin had with his poetic work, both on the whole thematic-motive structure of later poetry (indications of this turn were already present in theoretical form with Diderot, but completely deprived of their true poetic articulation until Lamartine), as well as the character of the philosophical foundation of the new dialectical reversal of thought, brought by German classical philosophy, are thematised in this paper as an organically consistent and continuous process within the framework of the indicated problem, from attempts to enter the world of Hellenism, as a fundamental source of creative unity of poetry and reality, thought and action, battle and truth, to the disappointment in the possibility of objectifying the poetic experience into a coherent basis for reconciling the contradictions of the then social and political situation, which was expressed in the existential gap between alienated everyday life and his spiritual essence, which, in the end, led to Hölderlin's insight into the futility of his own poetic testimony and the role of poetry as a harbinger of the oncoming deduction-out-of-the-oblivion of the being of the existent in its original unity.

Affirmation of Islamic artists on the example of Shirin Neshat and Mona Hatoum

The role of women in Islamic countries is very different from the notion of women in Europe, because the religious worldview has been dominant for centuries so much that it has subdued all other spheres of society. The struggle for equality, which has been going on for decades in the so-called Western world, in Islamic countries is just getting started. Consequently, it is not surprising that the portrayal of women and everything related to them in the art and literature of Islamic countries is limited in relation to the West. Islam is a very strict religion and forbids the display of objects that lead to fetishism, such as human figures and cult images, because it represents a threat to the creative power of Allah. In the past, Islamic women did not have the opportunity to affirm themselves in the arts, because despite the fact that Islam does not support "discrimination" between men and women, at the same time it does not defend the idea of "equality". However, the postmodern era brings a revival, and today they are finally enjoying their rights and are greatly represented on the world art scene. By presenting historical themes, the artists in a special way convey emotional messages about the suffering of individual members of the Islamic faith, and in addition define and reexamine patriarchy, feminism and fundamentalism through their works. The themes of suffering are best depicted in the work of two Islamic women, Shirin Neshat and Mona Hatoum, so this paper will talk about their opus and the way in which Muslim women are affirmed in the modern age through historical-artistic and sociological approach.