Pisarovic, Vesna
The Great Yugoslav Songbook
Vesna Pisarovic's The Great Yugoslav Songbook does not enlarge the burden of cultural wealth which we carry on our shoulders, nor does it turn a new page in our cultural history. To the contrary, this Songbook seizes the cultural legacy of the past in its own hands, in order to turn it into a new artwork, breathing new life into it. Not in some general, abstract sense, but in a very concrete historical, political and cultural context. . Their originality was nothing else but the result of innumerable borrowings and mixtures from the reservoir of popular music of that time: from twist, the ballade, chansons, or swing or Latin rhythms, to Italian canzone, jazz or the local ethnic tradition. Even then, there was no place for homogeneity on which the identitary discourse insists. Why should there be today, when the radical transformation of all forms of contemporary life, not only of the cultural sphere but also the sphere of labor, or the economy, of social relations and of politics, has become the elementary and even an imperceptible element of our reality, in a local as much as in a global sense? And herein lies the interpretational key for The Great Yugoslav Songbook of Vesna Pisarovic, which nota bene, is not so easily decipherable: how to simultaneously go against the current and be this current itself? Only those works which succeed in doing so deserve to be called artworks. As is the case here. Boris Buden