CONCRETE UTOPIA TV
The strongest pop of color comes in the gallery devoted to "Everyday Life," which has the exhibition's most diverse presentation: photos and drawings, to be sure, but also furnishings in the center of the room and a wall of screens displaying clips from films and TV shows set in the socialist housing blocks. Far from groundbreaking, the colors nevertheless do a good job in orienting visitors within the exhibition's four sections and subsidiary parts, and they serve as a foil to Jeck's photos and the other artifacts that lean to the gray and monochrome. There are grays, beiges, and greens, but also brighter shades of yellow, pink, and red.
Moving through the exhibition galleries in the prescriptive counterclockwise rotation, the monochrome models, desaturated photos, and architectural drawings are presented across shifting colors of paint on the walls. Although Thaler's images are more aligned with traditional architectural photography, with sunshine and blue skies, here they serve to illustrate how MoMA's specially commissioned photos intentionally went in a different, more dramatic direction to elicit particular reactions. He photographed Yugoslavian modern architecture for the 2012 book Modernism In-Between: The Mediatory Architectures of Socialist Yugoslavia (image above), which happens to be co-authored by Vladimir Kulić, who curated Toward a Concrete Utopia with Martino Stierli. The latter is clearly evident in the photographs of Austrain photographer Wolfgang Thaler. Jeck's photos appear to focus on this climatic flip-side, preferring the desaturated appearance of winter rather than the crisp blue skies found in the summer months. Belgrade's July is almost as sunny as Barcelona's, in fact, but its winters are considerably grayer. A cursory glance at charts of sunlight duration reveals, for instance, that Belgrade, Serbia, sits in the top 15 of major European cities in terms of annual sunlight hours, with more than 2,100 per year. Looking at Jeck's photos of architecture in the exhibition, it's excusable to believe that cities from the former Yugoslavia are starved for sunlight. Although the country would host the Winter Olympics in Sarajevo in 1984, four years after Tito's death and six years after the International Olympic Committee's selection, ethnic strife and insurgencies would lead to the breakup of Yugoslavia into five successor states come 1992. The wall text at the entrance to the exhibition explains its political context: " Toward a Concrete Utopia focuses on the period of intense construction between the country's break with the Soviet bloc, in 1948, and the death of its longtime authoritarian leader, Josip Broz Tito, in 1980." The relevance to an architectural exhibition at MoMA is found in this accompanying statement: "Architects, designers, and artists played a key role in imagining the future of socialist Yugoslavia … the federation of six republics and two autonomous provinces brought together by antifacsist struggle during World War II." Implicit in these statements are a sense of optimism following disaster and the country's dependence upon a singular figure.
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