I got interested in 'partisans' through the two projects I was working on at the end of 2001: one was the art historical analysis of the socialist modernist cycle of murals by a Croatian painter Krsto Hegedušić - memorial to the WWII, dedicated to the anti-fascist struggle of Yugoslav Partisans and the principles of sovereignty of Yugoslav Socialist state; the second was the ideological analysis of the cultural policies in Serbia after Milošević and so-called democratic changes on the example of cultural journalism in the newspapers and other press clipping collected by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade. What attracted my attention in the both analysis was a certain political Iconophilia, that is belief in the power of the image - the power of transmission from "representation" to "represented", characteristic for the Orthodox-Christian theory of icon/image. In the first example it was manifested through devastation of the murals during the wars in Bosnia in the 90s. New military formations passing trough were shooting from automatic weapons at the images, demonstrating the belief that ongoing wars and suffers are not caused by them - the active warriors, but precisely by Tito and his partisans, because they kept the nations in the prison of supra-national Yugoslav ideological state, and that therefore they should be punished and removed, even as the pictographic documents. The second example, connected to the representation of culture in the new-democratic Serbian state in the field of popular journalism, has shown that the most attention [the biggest number of articles during the six months period] was dedicated to the modest retrospective of provincial and average painter Mihailo Milovanović, for whom the public should get to know about only because he was executed by the partisans during the WWII. This programmatic fact was highlighted in all the articles. Both examples are showing not only the common cultural strategies of post-socialist revisionist politics, but are created to allegedly liberate the culture from the chains of ideology - and this is the tendency that is at the same time linked to the geopolitical and historical moment, but it is also universal - valid for the dominant framework of aesthetical analysis [from the standpoint of victorious capitalism] in the XX and XXI century. This viewpoint reclaims the tendentious autonomisation of the field of culture and the romantic subject of the authorship. This viewpoint also proclaims partisans to be enemies of culture: they are burning down the libraries, executing painters, expose actor's troupes to exuberant investigations and court of law procedures. [it has been the topic of the numerous TV series, films and texts created during the 90s in all the former Yugoslav states, but also in the international context].

Discussing partisan culture under the term of 'anti-fascist symbolic production', Slovene philosopher Rastko Močnik says that we are capable to observe partisan 'creativity' as culture and art today only because it is finally liberated from its original ideological imprisonment/captivity, and set up in the framework of modern aesthetic ideology [culture today implies distance, disinterest, oblivion and even hypocritical ignorance of its own conditions, possibilities and consequences]. In other words, partisan creativity is more readable and more watchable now because its historical consequences had been removed. Rastko Močnik asserts that 'partisan creativity precisely wanted to act ideologically by artistic means' and that 'therefore the standpoint which in ideology sees the opposition to art or its negation, which the relation between ideology and art sees in the terms of servility, that's why this modern, bourgeois view, remains blind for the historical innovation of partisan creativity'. He explains this historical innovation through the simultaneity of people liberation struggle and cultural revolution: 'partisan cultural revolution is radical not because it transforms the 'inner' formation/order of culture or the very position of 'cultural sphere' in the social structure, but because it removes the cultural sphere which by its own existence embodies barbarity of the classes on power and re-establishes culture in the sphere of human emancipation'.

All these examples and interpretations makes me interested in the discussion about partisans as enemies of culture, or what does it mean to be enemy of culture, and does this tactical approach contains any emancipatory potential today? This question appears to me as a relevant, especially because contemporary culture and contemporary art in their majestatic forms of art biennials and concurrent critical discussions meticulously build and insist upon the concept of international friendship supported by that very field of culture. In this context, any attempt of critique, harsh and engaged critique, easily ends up in the polite representation of the friendship of the all the people of the world. This is just one of the consequences of neo-liberal strategy of culturalisation followed by the export of political issues into the sphere of cultural production and attempts to conceive the culture as the site of [symbolic] overcoming of political problems [... of race, class differences etc]. And this makes contemporary art to be the ultimate symbol of neo-liberal, globalist modernization and is the reason of its recent popularity worldwide.

The second topic worth discussing here is the historical notion of 'socialist modernism' and 'socialist modernization', connected to the Yugoslav governmental concept of 'self-management' and 'relative autonomy of culture', as the possible different/opposite way to join the ongoing discussions about 'XX century modernity', 'art autonomy', 'meaning of form' etc. Arising from the partisan cultural revolution, this language of modernism at the same time resisted the universal, allegedly a-political and de-ideologized tendency of the human progress, as well as purely formalist, contemplative and self-referential status of art.