The City as a Space of Plastic Happening: From Grand Proposals to Exceptional Gestures in the Art of the 1970s in Zagreb

In the period of the late 1960s and early 1970s, a number of Zagreb-based artists, critics, and curators advocated the idea that art should leave the museum and engage in a direct encounter with the city and its inhabitants. Starting with the 1971 Zagreb Salon and its “Proposal” section titled The City as a Space of Plastic Happening, art took to the streets in a series of exhibition projects at the same time as Yugoslav students did so in protests that began in June 1968 in Belgrade, and continued in other cities, including Zagreb, where they were then followed by their ideological antagonist, the “Croatian Spring” movement in 1971. The notion of plasticity was a central discursive tool in the critical and theoretical accounts of the time, and the city was both the stage and target of the artistic gestures of “plastic” transformation. The article reads these projects and the discourses surrounding them as critiques of the Yugoslav socialist city, and by metonymical extension, of the failure of the Yugoslav state to live up to its promise of a just socialist society.