Karaoke Culture. Dubravka Ugrešić

socialist Yugoslavia in the early nineties and the emergence of new states and the ideology of nationalism, the practice of amateurism has seen its re-articulation. Today, as before, institutional, financial, and media investment is geared towards nurturing local folk traditions (songs, dance, customs), there being both ideological and commercial imperatives at work. On the one hand, local folk traditions are useful in cultivating regional identities, and on the other, they’re handy in developing regional tourism. Under communism, folklore festivals offered symbolic support for the brotherhood and unity of the nations and nationalities[3] of Yugoslavia, and today these very same festivals offer symbolic support for the particularities of national and ethnic identities. The thing is, communism or post-communism, Eastern European amateurs dance their ring dances and pluck their tamburice[4] in exactly the same way they have danced and plucked down through the ages. It’s just that every now and then the ideological pretext changes.

      Although the beliefs that culture was a matter for the people (and not just the elite), and that one day everyone would get to try his or her artistic hand, were firmly rooted in the practice of the communist culture of amateurism, the practice was never intended to undermine the canon. Amateur and “professional” art (literature, painting, ballet, opera, theatre) existed alongside each other. Amateur art tried to imitate professional art, but never set out to take its place. Amateurs knew they were amateurs and left the power games, turns, shifts, and battles over the canon to professional artists. Technology, market principles, globalization, and the death of communism have radically altered the order of things. The utopian cliché that one day everyone will get to try his or her artistic hand has actually become the dominant and completely chaotic cultural practice that we know today. Communism came to power with the Great October Revolution and ended as fiasco. But communist ideas (Technology for the people! Culture for the people! Art for the People!) have risen from the ashes, successfully realized in the Great Digital Revolution.

      Karaoke for Comrade Tito

      Let’s imagine that in the future archaeologists will be able to put geographical regions through scanners, like the ones airport customs officers use to check our suitcases. Imagine the relief—no more futile digging in the wrong places! Now let’s imagine putting Yugoslavia, a country that no longer exists, through this kind of scanner. Millions of mysterious phallic objects would show up on the imaginary scanner’s giant screen. “What the hell is this?” the shocked archaeologists would ask. “What kind of relic could this be? What kind of civilization? A civilization that worshipped the phallus?”

      It was a country that worshipped one man, not necessarily his phallus, although from a (psycho)analytical perspective we probably shouldn’t exclude the hypothesis. The mysterious phallic object was neither a phallus nor a police baton. It was precious cargo. The object was known as the relay baton, was made mostly of wood, and in the middle had a hollow, and in this hollow, just like in a bottle, there would be a letter—containing birthday greetings for Tito. Yes, the man’s name was Tito. And yes, the catchy brevity of his name contributed much more to his popularity than commonly thought. On this score, there isn’t a president, not even Obama, who has ever come close. If this kind of thing weren’t important, Bono would have called himself Engelbert Humperdinck.

The relay baton—both a letter and letter box in one—was shaped like a torch, easy to hold, and easily passed from hand to hand.[5] In May of each year every village, town, and city in the former Yugoslavia would organize a youth relay (Tito’s birthday was also Youth Day), and the baton was passed from one pair of hands to the next. The baton was meant to symbolically link all Yugoslavs, all the country’s nations and nationalities, and on May 25th, Tito’s birthday, the baton would finally arrive, to much fanfare, in Belgrade. The boy or girl of the year would run the final stretch and solemnly hand the baton to Tito himself. The relay batons were unique handicrafts, and competition was fierce to make one’s baton more original, beautiful, and impressive than the rest.

      The day after Tito died (May 4th, 1980), the photographer Goranka Matić began taking pictures of the displays in Belgrade shop windows. She called the series “Days of Pain and Pride,” the cliché on which the Yugoslav media seemed to have agreed. Overnight, ordinary people—hairdressers, butchers, and bakers—became artists. Tito’s portrait with a black mourning crepe was the connective element in the many fantastic, touching, and grotesque amateur art installations. In one window display Tito’s photo is happily set among fresh fruit and vegetables. In another Tito’s portrait is among funeral candles. Then there is Tito’s portrait with typewriters. Tito with sporting apparel (a tennis racket levitating from the side of the frame). Tito in the window of a hairdresser’s, wedged among photos of young beauties who are showing off the latest styles. Tito in a cake shop window, among the cakes. Tito in a butcher’s window, surrounded by legs of lamb, the butcher wiping his tears. Tito in a barbershop window (an enormous comb suspended overhead). Tito’s picture on the wall of a hardware store, the photo taken through the glass display, on the left a board reading Signs for Public Display (the kind hung in public spaces), on the right, the shop’s advertising slogan—A Man Doesn’t Have Spare Parts—and in the middle, Tito’s portrait and a mourning crepe.

      In April 2009, Belgrade’s 25th of May Museum hosted an exhibition of gifts given by Yugoslavs to Tito, the majority dating from the early seventies. Only a fraction of the diverse collection was actually exhibited. In Tito’s lifetime, staff at the Museum of the History of Yugoslavia had diligently archived, classified, and numbered the items, and in the automatism of their jobs probably never thought that this “rubbish” would ever see the light of day. Following Yugoslavia’s disintegration the archive gathered dust, and only today, thanks to enthusiasts, is this enormous collection slowly having its time in the spotlight. The overwhelming visitor interest was propelled by a number of factors, including the twenty-year stigmatization of communism, Tito, and Titoism; the tacit prohibition of “everything Yugoslav” (particularly in Croatia); the aftershocks of the nationalist hysteria and war; and finally, by the fiasco of the nationalist-inspired state projects and the inability of today’s leaders to create “respectable,” and at least semi-reliable, states.

      The “women’s” gifts include embroidered pillows, hand towels, knitted sweaters, gloves, tapestries, cushions (in the shape of a red star!), stocking caps, dolls in folk costume, children’s slippers and clothing, Tito’s portrait imprinted on silk, and hand-woven rugs bearing Tito’s image, among them a bizarre specimen with the motif “Josip Broz’s Sons Žarko and Miša Visit Their Father after His Operation.” The many embroidered messages bear congratulations, little verses (The bee belongs to the flower, Tito belongs to the world!), and political slogans (Let’s go the unaligned route!). The “men’s” gifts are more “sturdy,” either cast in metal or carved from wood, often representing the sender’s trade. The gifts include a stuffed trout (from a fisherman); a stuffed snake (!); die-cast figurines of workers, cranes, cars, trains, yachts, boats, planes, ovens, ink pots; ash trays (Tito was a smoker); car-shaped cigarette lighters; and even oddities such as a mini artificial leg (from an orthopedic factory), a mini dental surgery (from the Yugoslav Dentists’ Association), and a false tooth mounted on a plinth (from the Yugoslav Dental Technicians’ Association). Some gifts distill the essence of Yugoslav ideology at the time, as understood by the sender, the amateur artist. Carved from a tree trunk, Ivan Demša’s “Trunk of Peace” is emblematic in this regard. Tito’s head grows out from the top of the tree, or, in other words: Tito is a tree, and his branches wrap themselves around the globe. Birds sit on the branches of the “Trunk of Peace” and build their nests, symbolizing the strength, fertility, and global reach of his pacifist politics.

Visiting the exhibition it occurred to me that this heap of “artistic” objects which were anonymously gifted to Tito was a kind of symbolic mega-magnet that had held Yugoslavia and Yugoslavs together. The most popular Yugoslav slogan was We are Tito’s, Tito is Ours, but with the death of Tito, Yugoslavia fell apart, and nobody belonged to Tito any more, because in the simple, physical sense Tito no longer belonged to us. “The art of Josip Broz was called Tito . . . Tito is a romantic pop