1968 International Artistic and Social Praxis at the Korčula Island

Darko Fritz will present his research on the International Artists Meetings in Vela Luka at the symposium Forgotten Dreams In Foreign Lands: Legacy Of ‘68  — Art Practices And Present-Day Utopias.

During the Cold War, socialist and non-aligned Yugoslavia proved to be a central place of gathering of progressive artists and thinkers from both sides of the Iron Curtain. The first International Visual Artists’ Meetings had its kick off in summer 1968 in Vela Luka on Korčula Island in Croatia, with participation of twenty-nine artists and art critics. They created around 70 mosaics, some of which are still at the display in public spaces of Vela Luka. The 1970 edition focused on the synthesis of urbanism, architecture and fine art, and in 1972 it dealt with multidisciplinarity, amateurism and the participation of the local population, as well as the artistic use of mass media. The development of the Meetings reveals the organization of creative work in different schemes of relations ranging from personal to the collective and team work of creative individuals connected with the local management and economy and, thereby, articulating several modalities of participation of the local population in creative art processes. Inauguration of local participants in art events was introduced in 1968 within the performance orchestrated by French composer Luc Ferrari, envisioned as a folk festival, whereby he successfully included the local population in a music procession which made its way along the coast of Vela Luka, making all kind of sounds, music and noises. Among them were guests that came from the other side of the island, participants of the Korčula Summer School, that took place at the same time on the other side of island. The Summer school was organized by the publishers of the journal Praxis from 1964 to 1974 in Korčula town, with the exception of 1966, when the gathering was cancelled due to the intense attacks by the League of Communists of Croatia. The School was a meeting place for philosophers and social critics from the entire world. Some of the prominent attendees included Ernst Bloch, Eugen Fink, Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, Jürgen Habermas, Henri Lefebvre, Richard J. Bernstein, and Shlomo Avineri, to name a few. Each summer, the gathering focused on a particular topic, while in 1968 it took place under the title 'Marx and Revolution’.