Ludizam: zagrebački pojmovnik kulture 20. stoljeća
What you have before you is not an ordinary collection – it is a vibrant, multidisciplinary map of a specific intellectual and artistic world: 20th-century Zagreb culture, seen through the prism of "Luddism" as a key, programmatic category.
Editors Živa Benčić and Aleksandar Flaker (two of the most important theorists of the avant-garde and Russian literature in Croatia) have gathered papers from a scientific conference held at the Faculty of Philosophy in Zagreb. The book is not a strict glossary with definitions, but a collection of essays, studies and fragments that revolve around the idea of "luddism" - a term that Flaker uses to describe the irrational, playful, absurd and subversive impulse in art and culture of the 20th century, from Dadaism and Futurism through Zenitism, Expressionism, Surrealism to Concrete Poetry, Experimental Prose and Neo-Avant-Garde.
The title "luddism" is not accidental: it evokes play, madness as a method, rebellion against reason and bourgeois order - with a special emphasis on the Zagreb context. The book dissects how this impulse manifested itself in Croatian (and Yugoslav) art: in Krleža's expressionism, Gorgon, the Dadaists from Zagreb (e.g. Travelers, Zenit), in the works of the Gorgona group, EXAT-51, New Tendencies, and all the way to the neo-avant-garde movements of the 1960s and 1970s. The essays address topics such as absurdity in literature, play in the visual arts, irony, the destruction of language, parody, and performance art – all that makes "madness" a productive force in culture.
The style is erudite, yet lively, with a touch of humor and irony – typical of the Flaker school. There are no dry definitions; instead, the authors (along with the editors and numerous collaborators such as Zdenko Lešić, Dunja Fališevac, and others) show through concrete examples how Zagreb was an important center of avant-garde movements in the Balkans and beyond.
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