Not Red, but Blood!

Abstract

Not Red, but Blood! establishes a connection between Yugoslav communist, revolutionary, and partisan poetry and performance—artistic practices related to the act of utterance, the eternal present tense. Immaterial and intended for performance—which cannot exist without the social and collective—poetry arose in the guerrilla warfare of the Yugoslav National Liberation War as one among many art forms: graphic art, comics, plays, and even choreography. Through their self-reflected and precise poetry, these poets threw art right onto the battlefield, not as a substitute for politics, nor subjected to an idea, but as an inseparable part of it. Therefore, artistic creativity, revolution, and struggle are inextricably linked with the verses of Popa, Kajuh, Župančič, and others, and this is the “red thread” that shapes the text of this performance. The poetry is placed into the coordinates of a performance, a collective time and space, the public sphere of today, which generally treats revolutionary ideas with, at best, postmodern cynicism and anti-ideological hysteria. The title for the performance is taken from Marina Gržinić’s paraphrase and repoliticization of a statement by Jean-Luc Godard, an author who systematically addressed the question of что делать? in the art of cinema. This paraphrase could be further clarified by adding a third element, for instance: it is either red, or blood, but certainly communism.