COURAGE

Свързване на колекции

After years of collecting prohibited literature in the office of the director of the National and University Library in Ljubljana, it was decided to establish a separate D-fund in 1978. Milica Strgar, who until then was an employee of the Interior Ministry and a participant in the war as Partisan and a member of the Communist Party, was appointed to manage this collection. Strugar managed the collection so as to catalogue it (interview with Janežič, Helena).

Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest

After the 1977 elections, the new board renewed the conception of the jubilee exhibition planned for the twentieth anniversary. Based on the innovative proposal of Dezső Váli, the concept was formulated in a way that segmented the exhibition space into “boxes” and “places” in order to provide an array of more intimate, separated spaces.

According to the first surveys, more than half of the members were going to show their works this way, but later the jury significantly reduced the number of installations. In the end, only twenty-eight “boxes” and five “places” were put on display. However, even in this limited form the exhibition became a spectacular demonstration of experimental practices: this was the first time in Hungary that installations as an art form appeared in a prominent and symbolically important exhibition space.

The creation of separate spaces paradoxically strengthened community spirit, as these installations were created personally by the artists over the course of several days. The artists met in person, and they could observe the development of one another’s works. The unpredictableness of the works was one of the pretexts for the rigidity of the jury, as the final forms of the pieces were clear only days before the opening, so it was more difficult to judge them in advance on the basis of sketches.

According to the initial plans, only an “inner jury” (consisting of the board members) would make the selections, but this proved impossible. Finally four separate “outer” juries went through the list of works on exhibit in the preparatory phase. On one of these occasions, deputy minister of culture Dezső Tóth raised “six objections from a political and moral point of view,” and he personally took down one of the problematic pieces – a painting by András Wahorn entitled The Minister’s Mercedes Passes by the Liquor Store No. 1124. (Beings in the Lap of the Liquor Store).

In 1978, Lydia Sklevicky edited the "Current Topic" section in the journal Pitanja (year 10 (1978), no. 7/8) and entitled it "Women, or about Freedom." Sklevicky wrote an introduction to the issue's topic in which one of the questions the articles should answer was: What is our response to the "women’s question" today, in the fourth decade of self-management socialism? Later in the text, she gave a partial answer to this question, and also a critique of Yugoslav socialism, claiming that there is no developed theoretical framework in Yugoslavia, nor a categorical apparatus and methodology for approach that would allow researchers to deal with this question, and she concluded that: "This situation clearly demonstrates inadequate social respect and the noticeable absence of the "women’s question" in Marxist thought (Sklevicky 1978, 4).

Besides Sklevicky, who edited the issues topic and wrote an introduction to it, articles were published by Žarana Papić ("Gender Relations - Neglected Discrepancy"), Nada Ler-Sofronić ("The Odyssey of Women's Human Identity"), Gordana Cerjan-Letica (“Indications of the Socialist Mercantile Production of the Family“), Anđelka Milić ("Employment of Women and Their Emancipation") and Đurđa Milanović ("Women's Press – the Industry of Happiness").