Self-Management Index: Art & Language on Yugoslavia​

In his text “Another Look at the Social Dimension of Indexing”, Michael Corris, member of Art & Language (A & L) group, has discussed the political and social implications of group's practice of indexing. According to Corris, the main issue with A & L's practice of indexing was to find out the historical, theoretical and social confines of their - the art collective called A & L – existence and definition. Their point of departure was to discover the heuristic and ideological commons of their own collective. This procedure of inquiry into its own constitutive elements leads to questioning their relationship with the ideological commons of the outside world (the institutions, the state, and the other art practices, etc.). Corris' text “Another Look” was written in 2002, and it was retrospectively looking at his own involvement in the project of indexing the language of Yugoslavian self-management in 1975 in Belgrade. Together with Andrew Menard and Jill Breakstone, Corris, in collaboration with Yugoslavian conceptual artists, organized the seminar on indexing practice in order to discuss the question of collective in self-management socialism and the implication of cultural imperialism to conceptual art practices. 

In my talk, I will actualize this encounter by asking the question of the ideological elements of commons in art collectives. Based on archive materials, unpublished texts, interviews and the artworks that are the outcome of this encounter I will present the theoretical and political implications of this encounter from the point of view of “belatedness” as discussed by John Roberts.