This article analyzes Regards from Serbia (2007), a comic strip diary by Aleksandar Zograf, a Serbian underground cartoonist, as an instance of the alternative, anti-nationalist oppositional media space during the Yugoslav War. Zograf’s and Šejka’s work not only shows us that popular culture can articulate serious theoretical questions (about cultural remembering, the cultural tradition, aesthetic value, the artistic imagination), it also revives age-old practices of collecting, cataloguing, and re-assembling as primordial artistic activities, equating the work of the artist to that of a demiurge. Secondly, I demonstrate that both artists show a profound affinity with literature, which is illustrated by their use of the figure of the double as well as of abundant intertextual and intermedial references and eventually leads to their blurring of the boundaries between visual art and literature. I argue, firstly, that by interrogating the link between material traces of the past, the affect(s) generated by objects, and the possibility of a genuine experience of the past, both artists create unexpected constellations between past and present. Specifically, I explore how and to what effect comics author Aleksandar Zograf and neo-avant-garde painter Leonid Šejka incorporate discarded objects into their artwork. This article investigates the way in which popular culture from (the former) Yugoslavia in the 1950s–1960s and today performs cultural memory. This evolution also has brought about an increased interest in the role of and interaction between different media, including those associated with popular culture, in processes of cultural remembering.
Recent developments in memory studies show a shift from a concept of cultural memory as bound to specific, often institutionalized memory sites to an understanding of cultural memory as an active engagement of actors in the present with the past.
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