war; and finally, by the fiasco of the nationalist-inspired state projects and the inability of today’s leaders to create “respectable,” and at least semi-reliable, states.
The “women’s” gifts include embroidered pillows, hand towels, knitted sweaters, gloves, tapestries, cushions (in the shape of a red star!), stocking caps, dolls in folk costume, children’s slippers and clothing, Tito’s portrait imprinted on silk, and hand-woven rugs bearing Tito’s image, among them a bizarre specimen with the motif “Josip Broz’s Sons Žarko and Miša Visit Their Father after His Operation.” The many embroidered messages bear congratulations, little verses (The bee belongs to the flower, Tito belongs to the world!), and political slogans (Let’s go the unaligned route!). The “men’s” gifts are more “sturdy,” either cast in metal or carved from wood, often representing the sender’s trade. The gifts include a stuffed trout (from a fisherman); a stuffed snake (!); die-cast figurines of workers, cranes, cars, trains, yachts, boats, planes, ovens, ink pots; ash trays (Tito was a smoker); car-shaped cigarette lighters; and even oddities such as a mini artificial leg (from an orthopedic factory), a mini dental surgery (from the Yugoslav Dentists’ Association), and a false tooth mounted on a plinth (from the Yugoslav Dental Technicians’ Association). Some gifts distill the essence of Yugoslav ideology at the time, as understood by the sender, the amateur artist. Carved from a tree trunk, Ivan Demša’s “Trunk of Peace” is emblematic in this regard. Tito’s head grows out from the top of the tree, or, in other words: Tito is a tree, and his branches wrap themselves around the globe. Birds sit on the branches of the “Trunk of Peace” and build their nests, symbolizing the strength, fertility, and global reach of his pacifist politics.
Visiting the exhibition it occurred to me that this heap of “artistic” objects which were anonymously gifted to Tito was a kind of symbolic mega-magnet that had held Yugoslavia and Yugoslavs together. The most popular Yugoslav slogan was We are Tito’s, Tito is Ours, but with the death of Tito, Yugoslavia fell apart, and nobody belonged to Tito any more, because in the simple, physical sense Tito no longer belonged to us. “The art of Josip Broz was called Tito . . . Tito is a romantic pop star, above all he is the realization of the romantic ideal that our life is a work of art.”[6] As far as his media image goes, Tito was a kind of star, a communist James Bond. He wore a white suit, was a man of learning, had a lot of women, was a snappy dresser, smoked expensive Cuban cigars, liked fine wine, adored his two white poodles, and had famous actresses (Sofia Loren, Elizabeth Taylor, Gina Lollobrigida) and famous actors (Kirk Douglas, Richard Burton, who played Tito in the film Sutjeska) as his house guests. Tito was a “playboy” who dared to say “no” to Stalin. Tito founded the Non-Aligned Movement, played golf and tennis, was a keen photographer, and, judging by the many photos, liked to dance; he even had a yacht. All in all, “he could sit down at the piano, but he could shoot a bear just as well.”[7]
A quick glance at the hundreds of miniature exhibits, and the thought of the thousands and thousands of similar objects stored in the basement of the Museum of the History of Yugoslavia, makes one’s head spin. I asked myself what drove people to embroider, crochet, sew, and braid, to craft replicas of everything and anything, and then send their amateur “installations” to a single recipient, to Tito. And then I thought of the rituals of contemporary pop culture and tried to visualize the millions of letters, gifts, and artifacts that are sent to today’s megastars. At rock concerts girls throw their lingerie on stage, their bras and knickers, in the hope that in a given moment their idol will use their knickers to wipe the sweat from his forehead, and in doing so, symbolically become one with his fans. For the same symbolic reasons, at concert’s end a star strips off a T-shirt soaked in sweat and throws it out into the crowd. Famous tennis players do the same with their sweatbands. Let’s rewind the tape. The grandmothers and great-grandmothers of today’s young girls sent their mothers’ slippers and bodysuits (from when they were babies), the most intimate things they owned, to Tito. Absorbing the sweat of thousands of runners, the relay baton passed from hand to hand and ended up in Tito’s. Symbolically the people became one with their idol, and the idol one with his people.
And so, in the end, why are gifts sent by the anonymous masses karaoke? They are karaoke because the whole point of the gift is symbolic rapprochement with one’s idol. Like the legion of Elvis impersonators who both idolize and carnivalize their “King,” the anonymous singer sidles up to Elvis by doing a karaoke version of “Only You,” but inadvertently soils his aura in the process. The amateur portraits and miniature wooden sculptures of Tito exemplify this symbolic idolatrous “cannibalism,” the idol transformed into his own farce. The gifts sent to Tito are collective karaoke, a mute collective song.
[1]Membership in the official Soviet literary, fine arts, film, and translation organisations gave one the prized status of freelance artist. In the absence of this status anyone who was unemployed could be prosecuted for parasitism (tunejadstvo), the law under which Joseph Brodsky was sentenced to five years of forced labor in 1963.
[2]The Croatian writer Ivo Brešan’s play Performing Hamlet in the Village of Mrduša Donja (Predstava Hamleta u selu Mrduša Donja) is a brilliant comedy about an amateur company in an isolated Croatian village. The company performs Hamlet in its local rural dialect, changing the meaning of Shakespeare’s text to suit local ideas and the ideological principles of the (communist) time.
[3]Translator’s Note: In the former Yugoslavia the terms “nations” (narodi) and “nationalities” (narodnosti) had particular meanings. The constitutive nations of the former Yugoslavia were those named as such in the constitution: Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Macedonians, (Bosnian) Muslims (from 1971), and Montenegrins. The “nationalities” designated what in other languages would be referred to as “national minorities,” in this case, Hungarians, Italians, Slovaks, Czechs, Albanians, and others.
[4]Translator’s Note: A stringed instrument similar to a mandolin used to accompany folk songs, particularly popular in former Yugoslav regions along the Danube River basin and on the Great Pannonian Plain.
[5]“As opposed to the sceptre in the hands of kings and religious leaders, which could not be touched by anyone else, the relay baton gained its symbolic political power from the very fact that it passed through many hands. While the sceptre, one end pointing down towards the earth, and the other upwards towards the sky, is a symbol of its bearer’s connection to a heavenly power and his authority to represent this power on earth, the relay baton was a symbol of the connection between leader and people, of his legitimate power exercised in the name of the people.” (Ivan Čolović, “O maketama i štafetama” [On Maquettes and Relay Batons] in VlasTito iskustvo past present (Belgrade: 2005)
[6]Rastko Močnik, “Tito: majstorstvo popromantizma,” [Tito: the Mastership of Pop-romanticism] in VlasTito iskustvo past present (Belgrade, 2005).
[7]Ibid.
4.
Karaoke
People
Doubles
Pulsing in the very idea of karaoke is the old legend of the doppelgänger, of the double, the lookalike, the twin and the surrogate. Karaoke-people are wannabes.
Legends about doubles have always fired the human imagination. With the epochal birth of Dolly the sheep, the first live clone, not to mention the recent
