"Paradigm Shift" Participants

ABSTRACT
During the times of the Yugoslavian neo-avantgarde (about 1960 – 1975) art was radically redefined in a process of systematic conceptualisation and through the introduction of new media to the Arts. By focussing on their materiality as such, language, photography and the book were regarded as art and obtained new functionality as primary carriers of meaning. In other words, the artefact was being replaced by the discourse. Language and photographic documents were no longer utilized as means of expression or as explanatory, second-degree substitutes but redefined within an aesthetic framework where art itself became “language-like”, which implied that art was part of an extensive social practice and not an individual act of expression. By using examples of several locally distinct neo-avantgarde initiatives in Yugoslavia, this paper will explore the paradigm shift of mediality in photography and language in the Yugoslavian neo-avantgarde as a specific local poetics of dynamic interplay within the context of the contemporary theoretical avantgarde discourse of the 1960ies.

BIO
Dietmar UNTERKOFLER (PhD), born in Bolzano/Bozen 1979, studied Comparative Literature and German Studies in Vienna and Bologna. From 2003 – 2006 he was a research fellow within the Vienna based Graduate School “Cultures of difference: Transformation processes in Central Europe after 1989”. He is currently a lecturer at the Novi Sad University in Serbia.
His second monograph: “Grupa 143 – Critical Thinking at the Borders of Conceptual Art” was published in 2013.