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The primary aim of our research (which was started in 2008 under the working title How to think partisan art?), which is only fragmentarily presented in this exhibition, is not to fill in the gaps in our knowledge of this art, which was created between 1941 and 1945 during the revolutionary anti-fascist struggle of the Yugoslav nations (which we summarise here under the signifier partisan struggle). We are primarily interested in how did the partisan struggle (within the process of creating a new revolutionary subjectivity) establish new coordinates for thinking art. Partisan art, therefore, interests us mainly as a break and the birth of an empty space for not-yet-existing work.
 
This is also a good point of departure for critical reflection on contemporary art. Partisan art production, in some aspects, exhibited a surprising closeness to contemporary art, but at the same time was decisively different from it.
 
In today’s cultural and political situation the politicisation of art, connected to revolutionary anti-capitalist rhetoric, mostly takes place as a substitute for absent politics and as a kind of excuse for contemporary art’s inability to make a true break with the capitalist art system. Even the declared problematisation of the relative autonomy of art can serve precisely the interests of this art system. Partisan art, on the other hand, left the horizon of bourgeois society by breaking with the existing order and joining the revolutionary movement’s struggle, thus entering into the process of building a new world.
 
This process allowed even not explicitly politicised artistic articulation to become deeply political. Since art at that time was not a ”substitute” for politics or struggle, its role in this struggle cannot be reduced to instrumentalisation. Art has, within this struggle, produced a certain new autonomy, which was not identitary (vulgar instrumentalisation of art and ideologies of ”absolute art” were rejected as manifestations of the same logic. Boris Kidrič spoke about this very clearly) but has emerged as a thematisation of the unbearable tension within which this new autonomy heroically defied its own impossibility. It was precisely this moment that connected partisan art so deeply to the partisan struggle, in establishing new coordinates for the possible and the impossible.
 
This unbearable tension was already thematised in the ”first partisan poem”, as Boris Kidrič named the first poem to be printed and published (in the summer of 1941) by Yugoslavia’s liberation movement, (a poem by Oton Župančič, Sing after Me! After the war the title was changed to Do You Know, Poet, Your Duty?). The poet, signed as Unknown, ordered to throw into a world a ”poem useful now”, responded by facing the impossibility of speech which burns his throat. In the poem he identifies himself with a wolf, who stands on four legs among the mountain rocks, howling and screeching and crying into the wind. He calls upon the ”wolf choir” to make its way through the winter with forceful noise. This poem thus symbolises the impossibility of speech and with that symbolisation of the impossibility breaks through a barrier and establishes new coordinates for the possible and the impossible when a poem is articulated in the name of a poem which does not (yet) exist, and by doing so, performatively invokes the presence of this not-yet-existing poem.
 
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The point of departure of the research How to think partisan art?, is the material from the Slovenian People’s Liberation Struggle, although our problematique is not set within the confines of national culture, but within the context of both the Yugoslav partisan struggle and the world-wide context of the revolutionary movements of the 20th century. Dialectics of national liberation and revolution, as reflected by Partisan art, connected national liberation with liberation from nationalism.