In the early 1950s the Yugoslav state had decided not to interfere directly in the stylistic tendencies of contemporary art. As a result, there was no censorship, as long as art remained within the conventional system of galleries, art magazines and art schools. At the same time, in the 1960s avant-garde artists withdrew from the public arena into a closed world of performances and exhibitions put on for a select circle of admirers. The activities of the Gorgona Group, 59-66, fall largely into this category - until they were museumised in the 1970s, their existence was hardly known outside of the art scene. This situation encouraged experimentation to turn inwards towards the art world structure itself. Dimitrij Bažicevic Mangelos, for example, practiced a deconstruction of the system of meanings upon which art objects depend. This was both an advantageous and problematic position, as without censorship or state pressure, and with the additional factor of the lack of a domestic art market, there were no external forces at work on the artist, who existed in a social vacuum.

The social upheaval of 1968 brought a change of spirit and direction. Sanja Ivekovic came straight out of this context, having studied during the student protests and graduating in 1971. Her work was directly political and went beyond stylistic and intellectual freedom of expression. It also challenged the conservative social values that were shared by communist politicians and patriarchal society. Braco Dimitrijevic also made direct use of public space, in work that sought to abolish the distinction between artist and spectator, and the role of the spectator as a passive recipient of art. His work elevated passers-by to the position usually occupied by political or social icons, in effect reversing the gaze of public display to suggest that the lives of ordinary people are as important as those of celebrities or politicians.

This paper therefore looks at the shift that took place after 1968 in Croatian art that brought artists out of the official gallery system, which had offered freedom at the price of social irrelevance, to engage with the wider social sphere. An important aspect will be to bring out the special qualities of the Croatian social sphere at this time, including the political and social context of a decentralised but authoritarian communist system, with its own brand of social institutions and contexts. Artists here often had a particular relationship to a politicised public space, such as Tomislav Gotovac, whose performances included the persona of a communist hero, who was known for his cleanliness, reincarnated as a street cleaner. The Group of Six carried on performances and explored group behaviours in ways that could not be contained or fully conveyed in a gallery situation. At the same time, Goran Tribuljak was exposing the structures of the conventional art world by pointing out the arbitrariness of the system of selecting and promoting professional artists. A further issue is the existence of inner connections between the art in the social sphere of the 1970s and the socially-engaged art that emerged in the 1990s. This was ensured both by the personal continuity of practice by figures such as Sanja Ivekovic and Tomislav Gotovac, and by the space the counter-cultural artists of the 1970s had succeeded in carving out within Croatian culture for social and political interventions.