New Tendencies: Art at the Threshold of the Information Revolution (1961–1978) by Armin Medosch (review)

Armin Medosch presents New Tendencies, a Yugoslavian art movement of the 1960s and '70s—properly speaking a series of exhibitions and events—as more than a topic of art history. In his book, he focuses on the interconnections of aesthetic activities with technological ones, with new media and their political and social dimensions. This approach is necessary, as Eastern European art was even more contextually grounded than any other art phenomenon during the same period. Maybe some kind of "underground" existed everywhere, but in communist countries, even in liberal Yugoslavia, there were different possibilities for international communication and exchange, for travel, for the establishment of institutions, and for provocations of the establishment or academic mainstream. Any and all of this required a kind of a special performance, an intentional act, an overcoming of obstacles.

In this sense all art activities and processes were not only ideological, but also part of creating a singular shadow civic society, combining achievements of contemporary philosophy and humanities with scientific and technological ambitions. "New tendencies" in the sciences also had a fragile status (as the art did) in the state, where progress was a prominent slogan, but at the same time the kind and the content of the progress was managed by the politburo.

New Tendencies was a title of five major international exhibitions organized in Zagreb between 1961 and 1973, with seven issues of a programmatic Bit International magazine, edited by Božo Bek, a director of Gallery of Contemporary Art and an influential art historian.

Those exhibitions were a place where new coalitions between art and computers, art and technology, art and new media were established, and at the same time it was the place of remarkable encounters (in some cases face-to-face, in some cases in absentia) for authors from different communities all around Europe and the United States. So it was possible, for example, to see at the New Tendencies 3 (1965) works by the American group Anonima (founded by Ernst Benkert, Francis Hewitt, and Ed Mieczkowski) not only together with many Yugoslavian artists (Vjenceslav Richter and others), but also with the Czechoslovakian geometrical abstractionist Zdeněk Sýkora, author of spatial forms and happenings, Edward Krasiński from Poland, and the Dviženie (Movement) group of Lev Nussberg from the USSR. Armin Medosch reconstructs precisely, and in a readable form, the content of each show, sometimes with insight into the details of single works, other times with intelligent generalization and contextualization, as when he gives a brief but useful description of the "Croatian Spring" of 1971, a political crisis with a deep impact on the independent art scene.

In the author's conception the exhibitions did more than present singular works, and his book not only tells us about art, but also involves the reader in the community, background, context, exchange, and transfer of influences. In doing so, Medosch describes the atmosphere of communication through visual arts during the cold war from the very singular Yugoslavian perspective.

An important genre in his story is a colloquium, a discourse activity from the border between art and science, a site-specific dealing with a topic. An example is "Art and Computers" held at Moša Pijade Workers' University in Zagreb in 1971, with statements and talks held or sent by Hiroshi Kawano (author of the world's first computer-generated art) and digital artists Jonathan Benthall and Hervé Huitric, pioneers in digital and interactive art.

Ironically, the impact of New Tendencies became nostalgic, and the exhibitions themselves are now exhibited and analyzed. (See the book edited by Peter Weibel, under the title A Little-Known Story about a Movement, a Magazine, and the Computer's Arrival in Art: New Tendencies and Bit International, 1961–1973, MIT Press, 2011).

Medosch has written a story that is thrilling for many reasons: he shows artistic dynamism in its social and political singularity as an act that combines, without...