Behind the Yugoslav art movement that predicted the birth of digital art
Sixty years ago, a modest exhibition featuring a group of little-known artists opened in the Gallery of Contemporary Art in Zagreb, capital of what was then the Croatian republic of a federal Yugoslavia. Named Nove Tendencije, or New Tendencies, it aimed to represent a snapshot of what was happening in the art world of the time. Europe was emerging from over a decade of post-war austerity and reconstruction, and its artists were refashioning the modernist avant-gardes of the inter-war years to address a new age of economic growth and technological progress.
It became an international phenomenon. Four more New Tendencies exhibitions launched between 1961 and 1973, attracting hundreds of artists, critics and intellectuals to a city that was fast emerging as a haven on the cultural cutting edge.
Nurturing neo-abstraction, early premonitions of op-art, and the beginnings of computer art, New Tendencies represents one of Europe’s forgotten avant-gardes. From the abstract “meander” paintings churned out obsessively by New Tendencies regular Julije Knifer, to the eddying kaleidoscopic patterns of Miroslav Šutej and the computer-generated light installations of Vladimir Bonačić, New Tendencies seemed to rescue the flagging modernist tradition and provide it with a new sense of energy and power. By emphasising the role of new technologies in defining how artists saw their world and communicated to their audience, it anticipated everything from video art to bio-art and robotics. Based in a maverick communist country that was open to the west, it also emphasised the social role of the artist, and promoted the idea of collective work in an attempt to overturn the “bourgeois” myth of the artist as a lone genius.
