Errata

Due to a production error, the abstract of the English version of the article “Fight the Dragon Long, the Dragon You Become: Performing Viewers in the Graffiti Monument” by Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll, in issue 2 of 2013 (special issue on Ethnographic Conceptualism), was printed without the first sentence. The abstract should read:

Through a history of performances in public spaces, this article develops a theory of “performing viewers.” It theorizes a conceptual art that gives viewers the opportunity to participate using the example of how drawing graffiti on monuments or on their pedestals redefines the monument, author, and artist. Performing viewers are considered in the article as vital constituents of ethnographic conceptualism—the artist’s version of informants.

Taking the situation and history of pedestals (such as one, in Mostar, Bosnia-Herzegovina, without the Bruce Lee monument it was built to support) as an artifact of ethnographic conceptualism, the pedestal is turned into a document for urban ethnographers studying the Balkans. Structured as an experiment in conceptual writing, this piece is a continuation of the author’s art practice, which explores the history and politics of multiple kinds of authorship in the Balkans. The article reflects current debates on nationalism through the lens of ethnographic conceptualism. It analyses the interviews and statements about the future of the Balkans that were collected during the project Graffiti Monument.

The author regrets inaccuracies that occurred in the citations of the online Lexicon for Provisional Futures entry by Azra Akšamija. The beginnings of passages in the article on pages 109 (bottom of the page) and 111 (top of the page) should read, respectively, as following:

The context of monument making in the Balkans into which I inserted Graffiti Monument can be given through just a few examples. The first monument to Bruce Lee was unveiled in 2005, “one day before the Chinese star’s sixty-fifth birthday, not in Hong Kong but in Mostar, Bosnia-Herzegovina.” Designed by the young artists Veselin Gatalo and Nino Raspudić of the Mostar Urban Movement, this gilded monument was erected as “a symbol against the ethnic animosities” in the divided city of Mostar (Akšamija 2007).

and

As Akšamija (2007) has argued,

The replacement of the Yugoslavian motto under socialism of “Brotherhood and Unity” with paroles of nationalist separatism announced the beginning of a disjointed ideological era, in which diverse and competing political sentiments are still in search of new icons for public representation. While the meaning of the sculptural monuments to the pan-Slav revolution has been seriously contested in the war of the 1990s, the repertoire of recent national heroes that could be monumentalized as statues is shrinking with each war crime trial in The Hague. Yet, the search for new heroes that could fill the cultural gap produced by the Balkanization of Yugoslavia seams to have been satisfied with icons from the entertainment industry—hence forcing an unlikely conjunction of Hollywood and the recent political crisis in the Balkans.