MDRN Lecture || Thursday 15 May 2025, 16:30 || Jos Creten (LETT 01.52)

The Subversive Pedagogy of Belgrade Surrealism: Aleksandar Vučo and Dušan Matić’s The Fine Feats of the “Five Cockerels” Gang

The 1933 collaborative surrealist book The Fine Feats of the “Five Cockerels” Gang marks the end of the historical avant-garde in Yugoslavia. Created by two prominent Belgrade Surrealists—Aleksandar Vučo, who wrote the verses, and Dušan Matić, who authored the foreword and created the collages and accompanying prose texts that "explain" them—The Fine Feats is a unique example of an avant-garde photopoetry book for children and a rare instance of a surrealist “novel in verse” accompanied by photomontages. This lecture introduces the lesser-known practices of the Belgrade Surrealists, particularly their engagement with the renewal of children’s literature, with a focus on The Fine Feats. It examines the aesthetic and ideological concepts that the Belgrade Surrealists developed and employed in service of the Revolution. By exploring key surrealist concepts—the wall, the marvelous, spacing/doubling, and the interval—the lecture unpacks the latent meanings and emancipatory potential of this socially significant pedagogical project. Finally, the lecture offers a close analysis of several of Matić’s collages and their accompanying prose captions, highlighting their subversive, “Aesopian” function within the symbolic economies of contemporary Yugoslav society. It concludes by tracing the historical trajectory of the Belgrade surrealist circle and the subsequent editions of The Fine Feats in socialist Yugoslavia.

Aleksandar Bošković teaches at Columbia University and specializes in avant-garde literature and experimental art practices explored through the lenses of comparative media. He is the author of The Poetic Humor in Vasko Popa’s Oeuvre (in Serbian, 2008), and co-editor of The Fine Feats of ‘Five Cockerel’s Gang’ with Ainsley Morse (Brill, 2022) and Zenithism: A Yugoslav Avant-Garde Anthology with Steven Teref (Academic Studies Press, 2023). His articles have appeared in scholarly journals (Apparatus, Cultural Critique, Digital Icons, Književna istorija, Russian Review, SEEJ, Slavic Review) as well as in various edited collections. He is the recipient of several grants and fellowships, including Collegium de Lyon Fellowship (2019-2020) and Columbia Affiliated Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome (2023-2024). He is currently working on a project entitled Nothing (:) Made in Yugoslavia, which investigates the relationship between negation practices across different arts and media in the former Yugoslavia—literature, film, visual arts, radio—and the notion of artistic value.