Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explores the art practices of networked communities across Cold War borders. It describes different modes of "tactical networking" between institutional and neo-avant-gardist areas of Yugoslavian performance art which undermine the strict division between the first and second public sphere. The book demonstrates that kind of complex international connectedness by providing insights into the participation of Yugoslavian performance and conceptual art at the Edinburgh Festival, and into the Bosch+Bosch Group's event-based collaborations between internationalism and underground existence. It shows the extreme expansion of art practices in Poland by examining the dependence of the demonstrations and mass protests of the 1980s on their aesthetic and even theatrical dimensions in subverting the dominant social and cultural ideologies of the time.