Branislav Jakovljević's study on performance and self-management in Yugoslavia and Armin Medosch's research on New Tendencies and post-Fordism share a number of analytical frameworks that the review argues partake in a broader shift towards political economy as a key framework for art historical inquiry. This shift elicits what could once again be called a world-historical perspective: both of these books anchor their narratives in post-war Yugoslavia but only in order to show that the telling of the story of Yugoslav art requires the telling of the story of the world, a story that is not simply an instance of global or transnational (art) history. Instead, these accounts affirm a certain political teleology; they (re)turn to Yugoslavia to recall something that is lost, a ruptural, future-bound history that never saw its future, and whose interrupted course they historicize, offering a recourse to historical understanding as a step towards a new strategy of resistance.

The text proposes a comparative reading of two self-organized projects of the 1970s, Podroom — the Working Community of Artists, founded in 1978 by a group of artists in Zagreb, and La Galerie des Locataires, founded in 1972 in Paris by art historian Ida Biard. The analysis addresses the issue of work/labor as one of the key preoccupations of both projects, situating it within the theoretical perspectives that define the crisis of Fordist labor in the 1960s and 1970s, as well as its resolution in the transition to the post-Fordist era with its emphasis on immaterial labor, keeping in mind the specificities this transition implied in the context of Western capitalism and socialist self-management in Yugoslavia. Since confronting these questions in the examples of the two discussed projects involved primarily a search for autonomous and non-servile spaces — for art, work and life — they are examined here within an overarching conceptual framework of hospitality as discussed by Jacques Derrida.