Art and Theory After Socialism

Jordan / Miles Art and Theory After Socialism Edited by Mel Jordan and Malcolm Miles Art and Theory After Socialism A...

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Jordan / Miles

Art and Theory After Socialism Edited by Mel Jordan and Malcolm Miles

Art and Theory After Socialism

Art, cultural production and criticism in both the East and the West faced radical new challenges after the end of the Cold War. Art and Theory After Socialism considers what happens when theories of art from the former East and the former West collide, highlighting the work of former Soviet bloc artists alongside that of their western counterparts. Academics, artists and critics assert that dreams promised by consumerism and capitalism have not been delivered in the East, and that the West is not a zone of liberation as it is increasingly drawn into global conflict. New critical insights and practices are discussed: collaborative efforts by groups of artists, and the emergence of dissident art that subverts and challenges the institutional structures of the art world. This volume is a unique take on the overlap of art and everyday life in post–Cold War societies. Mel Jordan is part of the Freee Art Collective whose practice is defined by its political and social engagement. Mel is Senior Lecturer in Art at Loughborough University. Malcolm Miles is Professor of Cultural Theory at the University of Plymouth.

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First Published in the UK in 2008 by Intellect Books, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK First published in the USA in 2008 by Intellect Books, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, USA Copyright© 2008 Intellect Ltd All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Cover Design: Gabriel Solomons Copy Editor: Holly Spradling Typesetting: Mac Style, Beverley, E. Yorkshire

ISBN 978-1-84150-211-3 EISBN 978-1-84150-265-6

Printed and bound by Gutenberg Press, Malta.

Contents

Introduction Chapter 1 From Shamed to Famed – The Transition of a Former Eastern German Arts Academy to the Talent Hotbed of a Contemporary Painters’ School. The Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst, Leipzig Sophie A. Gerlach

7

9

Chapter 2 Attacking Objectification: Jerzy Bere´s in Dialogue with Marcel Duchamp 21 Klara Kemp-Welch Chapter 3 On the Ruins of a Utopia: Armenian Avant-Garde and the Group Act Angela Harutyunyan Chapter 4 Art Communities, Public Spaces and Collective Actions in Armenian Contemporary Art Vardan Azatyan

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43

Chapter 5 Appropriating the Ex-Cold War Malcolm Miles

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Chapter 6 The End of an Idea: On Art, Horizons and the Post-Socialist Condition Simon Sheikh

67

Chapter 7 Exploring Critical and Political Art in the United Kingdom and Serbia Sophie Hope & Marko Stamenkovic

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6 | art and theory after socialism

Chapter 8 Other Landscapes (for Weimar, Goethe and Schiller) Daniela Brasil

89

Chapter 9 The Ecology of Post-Socialism and the Implications of Sustainability for Contemporary Art 101 Maja Fowkes and Reuben Fowkes Chapter 10 Functions, Functionalism and Functionlessness: On the Social Function of Public Art after Modernism 113 Freee Art Collective

Introduction

The papers collected in this book concern recent and contemporary European art and theory in context of the end of the Cold War, dismantling of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991. They range from theoretical reflection to accounts of art practice and curating, from Armenia (an ex-constituent republic of the Soviet Union), Germany and the United Kingdom. For want of a better term, the condition of post-socialism indicates the conceptual arena opened by the demise of the East bloc (and, hence, of a West bloc defined in opposition to it). More accurately, it indicates European culture after the demise of state socialist regimes in the East bloc while, I would argue, socialism as an ideology is not erased by the failure of state socialist regimes. The book offers a series of specific windows on this field, and does not aim to be comprehensive or to offer a definitive critique of a still shifting cultural, social and political re-alignment. The chapters are more like snapshots of a partly disappearing and a partly emerging terrain. This book and its companion volume, Public Spheres, originated in collaboration between the Critical Spaces Research Group at the University of Plymouth and the National Association of Art Critics, Armenia. In June 2005, a seminar was held at University of Plymouth. In October 2005, a group of UK-based academics took part in a major conference on the public sphere at the American University, Yerevan, organized by the National Association of Art Critics. Other speakers were from Armenia, Austria, France, Germany and Turkey. The debate was robust. There were interesting overlaps and edges between readings of modernist art theory in Armenia and re-readings of the same material in the West. Meanwhile, much of the city’s centre was under reconstruction. Several nineteenth-century buildings in a characteristic dark grey volcanic stone were prepared for removal to storage and eventual reconstruction elsewhere by the numbering of each stone. Yet the eventual reconstruction remains as unlikely in popular estimate as the re-erection of a statue of Lenin currently in storage in the basement of the National Museum, replaced after 1991 by a large public video screen.


It is too easy for a westerner such as myself – whose student years were those of the boom economy and expansion of contemporary art of the 1960s – to be nostalgic about a political system under which I never lived. In fact, I never even went to an East bloc country until 1986 (although I was one of a peace movement delegation to the Russian Embassy in London in about 1967 – we were well received, but disappointed to be offered American cigarettes). Ian McEwan writes, in the voice of Florence, the female protagonist of On Chesil Beach, this part of the narrative set in the early 1960s, that she ‘knew in her heart that the Soviet Union, for all its mistakes – clumsiness, inefficiency, defensiveness surely, rather than evil design – was essentially a beneficial force in the world.’ (McEwan 2008: 53). I would have shared that view. Of course, I realize that to hold such views seriously today is a luxury, and that to lament the passing of the East bloc is enabled by temporal and cultural distance. Still, however, I remember a conversation in an eco-village in the ex-German Democratic Republic, in 2004, when a member of the community recounted the sense of loss among local people when a previously widespread non-money economy in which skills were freely shared was replaced by consumerism and prices on everything. He and I are not alone in this feeling. In Requiem for Communism, Charity Scribner notes a performance artwork in Berlin in 1996 in which a mock funeral procession crossed the city from west to east. She comments: ‘This collective sorrow [for the collapse of the workers’ state] has motivated a proliferation of literary texts and artworks, as well as a boom of museum exhibits that survey the wreckage of socialism and its industrial remains.’ (Scribner 2005: 3). Later in the book she writes of the Ostalgie as this nostalgia for a socialist past is known in Germany. Perhaps my own paper in this volume is an example of such nostalgic reverie, or, and more, it is necessary to differentiate the history that took place, with its industrial pollution and abuses of human rights, from the ethos of solidarity and value of public welfare that remain key to a vision of socialism. As Scribner states, ‘The strongest accounts of the second world sound out the potentials sedimented into the most obstinately inaccessible moments of history.’ (Scribner 2005: 87). Art does not reproduce such moments but is a route by which cultural memory takes form to offer a basis for continuing critical, dialogic encounter. Malcolm Miles References McEwan, I. (2008), On Chesil Beach, London, Vintage Books. Scribner, C. (2005), Requiem for Communism, Cambridge (MA), MIT.

1 From Shamed to Famed – The Transition of a Former Eastern German Arts Academy to the Talent Hotbed of a Contemporary Painters’ school. The ‘Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst’, Leipzig

Sophie A. Gerlach A decade and a half after the fall of the Berlin Wall the output of cultural heritage and theoretical production in the two former German states needs to be critically revised. During the early times of governmental and societal change and reorganization, Eastern German frameworks were generally regarded as politically unacceptable and immoral whilst Western German cultural politics a priori claimed to be just and politically correct having been created within an essentially liberal and democratic system. While there are no doubts about the totalitarian nature of the former GDR per se, the developments of the past years have proven that such polarized dichotomies are not tenable. Some of the attitudes and modes of artistic production, specifically in the East, turned out to be nonetheless valid, adding a surplus value to contemporary debates and developments. As a result, western theoreticians, critics and artists alike needed to accept that their belief system had to be critically re-examined. In addition, the tasks that governments, cities, districts, schools


and individuals had to face were so manifold that theoretical blueprint planning was simply impossible. Many changes happened organically or were brought about by individuals who exposed specific situations and set about the process of change by refusing to work under conditions which were not yet clarified or reorganized, or by proposing different and new approaches. The developments within the cultural scene are evident when considering the art academies, as the institutional setting allows an analysis of the kinds of changes being made including their purpose and timing. The former Eastern German state only maintained four main centres for artistic training: Berlin, Dresden, Halle and Leipzig. The latter proves a useful example as it is the one academy which is currently well discussed within Germany and abroad, due to the success of the New Leipzig School of Painting, a heterogeneous painters’ group closely tied to the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst (HGB), Academy of Visual Arts Leipzig. The prominence the artists are currently receiving can partially be attributed to the traditional painter’s training at the HGB which follows curricula different from the majority of other art academies in unified Germany. Although this study will take into account the situation of the entire HGB, it must be clarified that changes happened in very different ways for the four different departments: namely photography, book art and graphic design, media art (founded in 1993) and painting and graphics. I will be focusing attention on the developments in the latter department. In the following chapter, I will discuss how theories, curricula and academic structures were altered or accepted in transition after 1989 and what the specificities of the HGB are today. In order to discuss these ideas, the historical background of the academy needs to be clarified. This exploration will include brief explanations of cultural policy made by the former Eastern authorities at specific times, as developments within the arts were closely monitored and even influenced by the Eastern German government. Furthermore, the term ‘Leipziger Schule’, Leipzig School, which dates as far back as the early 1950s, shall be explained. Finally, an evaluation will be made of how the bringing together of two diametrically different political systems has worked out at the level of artistic production looking at its successes and failures. Brief Historical Overview Founded in 1764, the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst in Leipzig by the 1920s had become one of the most important art schools in the country. Renown for its letterpress and printing faculty, the school attracted students from all over the country. All this came to a halt during the Nazi regime and the academy had to be re-established in 1945. A quick succession of two headmasters defined the formative years of the school in the about-to-be-founded German Democratic Republic: Walter Tiemann, who had been headmaster since 1920, and who was reinstated as a commissioned director in 1946, followed by Kurt Massloff, who became headmaster in 1946 and remained in this post until 1958. Massloff was a highly politically active anti-fascist whose goal was to turn the school into a socialist visual art school where the concept of realism (as developed by Andrei Zhdanov) was to be taught and produced without any inquiry into, or consideration of, other art forms. This development turned into the harsh and highly politically charged ‘Formalism-Debate’ which led, in 1951, to the dismissal of any member of the GDR community of

from shamed to famed | 11

artists and teachers who did not conform to the state-affirmed version of realism (Hübscher 1989; Gillen 2005; Goeschen 2001; Thomas 2002; Schuhmann 1996; Vierneisel 1996). Any continuation of the art forms of the early twentieth century was regarded as a deliberate separation from the socialist people, portrayed as formalistic and condemned as the remains of a bourgeois attitude. Therefore, teaching focused on the imitation of classical and traditionalist styles of the nineteenth century. This concept paralyzed the entire development of art and literature for a long time in the GDR, specifically because the ‘humanistic cause, which had become an issue for many artists through the acquisition of important artistic tendencies of the 20th century were questioned in their moral integrity and artistic substance’ (Pachnike 1989:16). It was a step back towards traditions of the past, where the artist was trained to fulfil the wishes of the patron who commissioned a painting, but no individual artistic education took place. Werner Mittenzwei describes the situation as follows: ‘The criterion for realism and popularity was not its testing as a means to the political class battle and in the cultural practice, but to what extent the new socialist art works followed the traditional norms and laws’ (Mittenzwei in Pachnike 1989: 16). The dismissal of the expressionist artist Max Schwimmer in 1951, among other faculty members, led to the voluntary withdrawal of two of his students in protest against the unfair treatment of their professor(s). One of them was Bernhard Heisig, who was later to become one of the most influential headmasters. Quite a few, even among the faculty, were extremely dissatisfied with the situation: The new fact is that we are opening our mouths and have stopped allowing them to step over us. Doing this we have certainly already accomplished quite a bit for our situation here. On the other hand I am certainly aware that still an incredible amount remains to be done. Our faculty is still a quantitatively large pile but qualitatively quite thin. It is not easy but we’ll keep on banging the drums. Either we accomplish a situation in which it is possible to work at the academy or they kick us out (Meyer-Foreyt in Blume 2003: 293). Some tension was lifted from the ‘Formalism-Debate’ situation in 1954 when the state commission for art, which was directly linked to the Soviet forces, was disbanded and the ministry for culture was founded. However, cultural affairs from 1959 onwards were treated along the guidelines of what became known as the Bitterfelder Weg (Bitterfeld Path). The first Bitterfeld Conference, in April 1959, was organized by the government and brought together authors and working people with an active interest in writing. It took place in a chemical factory in Bitterfeld. The conference set the course of how cultural affairs and specifically painting had to be dealt with in order to serve the socialist cause. The aim was to bring together ‘art and life’ in order to blur the lines between professional art production and the working-person’s life. Three main goals were to be reached: a close-to-life depiction of the working world and cultural influence in the life of workers according to the party’s ideas; the early recognition of talent among the workers in order to educate them to become faithful interpreters of the socialist image of the people; and the mixing of academically taught artists with workers in order to dilute the intellectuality of the former and to introduce them to the real worker’s life (Thomas 1980: 55–58).


The programme was, as would be expected, unsuccessful and the motto and resulting programme of the second Bitterfeld Conference in 1964, ‘The Arrival of the GDR in the Socialist Everyday’, addressed itself once again exclusively to professional artists (Thomas 1980: 55–58). The artistic atmosphere in the HGB firstly became more liberal in the department of letterpress and bookbinding when Albert Kapr was appointed head of the department and, in 1959, also headmaster of the school. An even more open and critical discussion about Socialist Realism and how it could be applied politically was introduced when Bernhard Heisig, a former student, became headmaster in 1961. His aim was to give academy students the possibility to find their own means of expression, including critical approaches, to serve the socialist cause as artists. The same year he also introduced the first independent painting class, although director König stated explicitly in 1964, ‘The faculty holds the opinion that studying painting can be a positive influence on the use of colour in the graphic arts’ (Schiller 1964: 38). Judging from this quote, it becomes clear that painting had to establish itself slowly in order to become an equally accepted subject. It would, however, later receive the status of a main discipline at the Leipzig art academy. The following years, during which time the term ‘Leipziger Schule’ was coined, were strongly shaped by the work and exhibitions of the three most well-known HGB artists: Werner Tübke, Wolfgang Mattheuer and Bernhard Heisig. The artist Willi Sitte, who held a professorship at the arts academy Burg Giebichtenstein in Halle, is often included in the group. Their interpretation of Socialist Realism was not only very personal, it also introduced the ‘simultaneous image’, Simultanbild, which lifted the traditional unity of space, time and action within a painting, as well as using montage and collage. Furthermore, the logical course of a painting was not determined by the narrative anymore, but more by the stream of consciousness of the artist, a process which included irrational elements. They were able to overcome the harsh criticism they received by convincing the public of the meaningful use of these elements and the high artistic quality of their paintings. In addition, for the first time, they claimed to treat the public as an equal in dialogue, rather than an audience that had to be educated as the positioning of the artist within the communist system suggested. Heisig formulates this on the V. Congress of Visual Artists 1964 as follows: ‘In order to really establish a contact to the viewer, an art is called for, which must, in any case, be interesting as well as interested, but this can only be triggered by a type of art which challenges the viewer mentally, which provokes, annoys and attacks’ (Heisig in Pachnike 1989: 20). Other specific traits of the Leipzig School as formulated by Werner Tübke (Hartleb 1989: 44) were a strong tie to realistic painterly traditions, among them Verism and New Objectivity, the use of allegory and ties to the literary. Commentaries on everyday life conditions bearing subliminal political criticism can be added to this list (Hartleb 1989: 43). Politicization in the service of communism was strongly encouraged, yet hints of doubt or even disagreement strictly forbidden. Thus, any such claims had to be made by smartly avoiding censorship. Encouraged by Heisig, who strongly shaped the school with his decisive personality and opinion about the responsibilities of an arts academy, a climate was created in which debates and discussions, even about political topics, were possible to a certain extent. Quoting from a speech Heisig gave at the VIII. Congress of Visual Artists of the GDR 1978:


Acknowledging that the existence of an artist is only one in a long succession, with many preceding artists and many to follow and not for the first time I am realizing that our historical, or, if this provocative term is uncomfortable for you, our feeling for larger contexts is deeply disturbed. I would […] like to measure this with something which I want to call historical conscience (Geschichtsbewußtsein). […] However I do not only believe this because as a headmaster and head of a painting class of the Leipzig School for Visual Arts I have been experiencing, how little younger colleagues [Heisig calls his students colleagues as well] know where they are coming from and how badly they are fed with what is superficially dismissed as “history”, but because a process of ‘holding on to oneself’ is more and more becoming the norm. The great internalization, the personal, the too personal is setting in. The lack of historical conscience, of large themes and topics can neither be balanced out by a visit of a factory nor by a work placement in a Kollektiv.[…] No people can live without its past, there is no nation and of course there are no visual arts, no architecture and no cities. A people without its past is art-incapable. Nobody shall claim that Picasso, Klee and Beckmann were not aware of this. The old ones knew this in any case. Maybe this will be a reason and I am not saying it is the only reason to create something, to start dealing with larger topics again. Something that will make it possible to shift the personal out of the centre of attention, to reorder from a new point of view and to strengthen the artistic means. Maybe this way we will not have to quarrel anymore if, for the artist, the human figure and her points of reference are, if not the measure then at least a measure of things (Kober 1981: 192).

A further example of this is a memo from 1967 in the form of a requested report from the headmaster, in which the faculty members had to justify their own position in relation to the political education of the students as well as: (1) the results they could achieve; (2) which obstacles might harm political education; (3) and how the teachers thought they could contribute (to the best of their knowledge) to the political education of the students, which would facilitate their emergence as supporters of the state (Kapr 1967). While the reports from all other faculty members are clearly very formal, affirmative answers to their own political positions, as well as to their teaching and actions, Bernhard Heisig’s report is the only one in which quite harshly formulated criticism becomes obvious. He states that the work of an artist a priori necessitates a very strong political stand, and that such issues are discussed and debated on an everyday basis in his classes. In his answer to the third question, Heisig criticizes the fact that most obstacles are coming from within the HGB itself: We are lacking the open discussion within the faculty and resulting obviously also among the students. The call for opinion debates fails due to an exaggerated caution and the fear of possibly saying something wrong and therefore to a personal disadvantage. I cannot welcome this, but understand it. I realize for myself that the blame for interest and active participation in discussions and touching of so called “hot irons” [controversial discussion topics] is always with the one who engages himself in the discussion. Consequently, one part of the faculty, similar to most of the students, takes a neutral point of view in any discussion in order not to have to fear personal disadvantages.


In this school obviously the maxim rules, that who does not act at all will not risk making faults (Heisig 1967). Neo Rauch, an artist who studied during the last years of Heisig’s term as a headmaster and who became his Meisterschüler (Master Student) in 1986, confirms in an interview: ‘He would give us all the space we wanted, we were able to experiment, to debate; complete freedom within the walls of the academy. He said: “Do whatever you want, as long as you stand there next to me on the 1st of May when we all have to parade.” And this is what we did’ (Gerlach 2005). The rigid political guidelines artistic production had to follow in the GDR were gradually loosened, so that in the late 1970s more progressive developments were able to take place. One example is the Experimentalklasse (Class for Experimental Art), a unique class at the time, for which Bernhard Heisig appointed Hartwig Eberbach as its first teacher in 1979. The former Heisig student Arno Rink, who had worked as an assistant teacher since 1972, became headmaster in 1987 until 1994; thus, the years of turmoil and change after November 1989 entirely fell into his term. A strong believer in the realist tradition and in art as a medium inherently connected and needed for societal processes, Rink continued the heritage of his predecessor, stating in a catalogue published at the occasion of the 225th anniversary of the academy: If realism exists […] it will more and more show defects and disturbances in the material of the paintings as well as sorrow about losses, it will refocus onto the private, which again reflects the social environment. If society has asked the artist to be actively involved in public matters and supported him in that position, then that has to happen all the way and the artist must also be allowed to utter criticism, without being dismissed. The artist as a ‘yes-sayer’ (Ja-sager) is not of use for anything; ultimately such a position would be unrealistic (Rink 1989: 9). The Situation after 1989 After the fall of the Berlin Wall, chaos seemed to control the country. Overnight, values were questioned, the future was uncertain and a belief-system under which many former Eastern Germans had grown up was not valid anymore. The cultural scene, which often takes on the role of a commentator and even advocatus diaboli, was shaken profoundly. Each individual involved in cultural production had different questions to grapple with before critical commentary could be uttered from a stable position again. Among those questions were ones as crucial as: whether one could affirm to a capitalist system; whether artistic motives and subject matter were still relevant; whether one’s artistic expression would have any meaning and validity in a system in which everything was allowed; and whether an adaptation to, and acceptance of, the new societal forms were possible for the individual and how this might come about. In such a situation of turmoil, changes often do not take place in an organized, planned manner, but rather happen organically with different agents at play. These different factors brought in


varying and individual positions driven by a need for renewal and the opening of new horizons. This was also the case for the HGB. Whilst immediately after the fall of the Wall courses would continue as before, the year 1992 proved significant for the future developments. A group of first-year students, who had all grown up in the former GDR, decided to speak out about their discontent with the traditional set-up and teaching. While formally tied to the officially ‘still valid’ course regulations, their dissatisfaction with the situation led them to a complete refusal to take part in classes (Gerlach 2007). This resulted in a moment of paralysis, also among the faculty, as no guidelines existed as to how to deal with such a situation. The painter Cornelia Renz, born in south-western Germany, came to Leipzig in 1993 to start her studies in painting and graphics. Her description of these years is one of a complete lack of structural planning and vision. According to her there was a very early split within the school which can be described in terms of East-West dichotomies, but not in the sense of individual origin (Gerlach 2007). While one group of the students intended to study at the HGB specifically because it was well known for excellent training in craftsmanship and technical skills and had a strong commitment to traditional figurative painting, another group opposed the older methods and demanded that renewal, change and an orientation to more contemporary teaching methods and aims should be used at Western German academies. The division of the different programmes at the time fostered an early specialization from the first year on. Although compulsory courses in all disciplines (for the painting and graphics programme, these were woodcut, lithography and etching) intended to provide an overview of various techniques of artistic expression, the structure aimed at providing a classical training with the scope to master the problems of figuration. Yet the refusal to take part led to a crisis which left the cohort of 1993 with hardly any compulsory structure for their first two years of study before being grouped into specialized classes with professors of their choice each with different teaching foci. According to Renz, the situation was intensified due to uncertainties about the continuation of posts and functions among the faculty (Gerlach 2007). Yet, already one year later, the class of 1994 was able to study under more structured circumstances even incorporating new concepts such as a media class (introduced during the academic year 1993). The long-discussed fusion of the foundation courses of all different programmes took place in 1998. The Grundkurs, still in place in the current curriculum, enabled the students to be introduced to all the various disciplines taught at the academy, regardless of their specialization in the third year of studies. Thus, the main impulses for change were instigated by students and only later validated by the introduction of new course programmes. Arno Rink, headmaster at the time, describes his aims during those years as lingering between ‘preservation and renewal’ but also postulates that ‘the main force for preserving and renewing were the students. […] Curricula are not a static entity and intelligent young people have partaken in the changes until today, they have altered and stabilized things, have created an attitude’ (Werner in Blume 2003: 22).


In the early 1990s every former GDR academy underwent critical evaluation by a commission formed by various representatives coming from the fields of science as well as business who made recommendations to the Ministry of Education in Dresden. In the case of the HGB, it was suggested to keep all the structures in the artistic sections and to eliminate the subject of Marxism/Leninism from the curriculum. These changes were implemented from this point onwards (Werner in Blume 2003: 22). Thus, hardly any changes were put upon the school by external agents, and the developments were successively driven by students and by a faculty which found itself in a process of reorientation. The securing of the professorships remained in question until 1993 and 1994 and resulted in 28 new professors being appointed in 1993 (Blume 2003: 299). The theoretical courses accompanying all four major disciplines are nowadays taken care of by the Institut für Theorie (Institute of Theory) which divides the course contents into arts and media theory as well as philosophy. The former aims to communicate the foundations of art history, including the history of letterpress and photography, as well as dealing with functions of art in contemporary society and the relations between current and older artistic media. The latter focuses on central questions of philosophy and theories of perception aiming to encourage the students’ artistic autonomy. Thus, not only structural changes took place but also the student body underwent a transformation. According to Renz, the first students from Western Germany were admitted in 1992, and only one year later, in 1993, almost one-third of the studentship came from the West, which is a high number considering the political and structural uncertainties at that time (Gerlach 2007). Today the school has 580 students (HGB webpage) and receives applications from all over Germany as well as abroad in numbers far beyond its capacities which is partly rooted in the success of the ‘Neue Leipziger Schule’. The ‘Neue Leipziger Schule’ The ‘Neue Leipziger Schule’ is a heterogeneous mix of different artists who share their training and education at the HGB. The term, which has acquired a similar standing as the label ‘Young British Artists’, during the late 1990s, does not stand for a pronounced movement or school. It was first used by the press in 2002 when eleven former HGB students, namely Tilo Baumgärtel, Peter Busch, Tim Eitel, Tom Fabritius, Martin Kobe, Oliver Kossack, Jörg Lozek, Bea Meyer, Christoph Ruckhäberle, Julia Schmidt, David Schnell and Matthias Weischer, opened the artists’ co-operative gallery LIGA. The gallery and its artists very soon received a great amount of media attention. After its closure in 2004, Tim Eitel, David Schnell and Matthias Weischer started to be represented by Gerd Harry Lybke’s gallery Eigen + Art, which is closely connected to the phenomenon of the ‘Neue Leipziger Schule’ and also represents the painter Neo Rauch. Although often cited as the protagonist of the movement, he technically belongs to one generation prior to his younger colleagues, as he already taught as an assistant at the HGB in the years 1993 to 1998. Associated with the term ‘Neue Leipziger Schule’ is a return to figurative painting after the 1990s during which time painting had almost no standing on the international arts market or in exhibition practice. The ‘New Leipzig School’ is closely tied to the predecessors who constituted the ‘Leipziger Schule’, Mattheuer, Tübke, Sitte and Heisig,


but also to their students Arno Rink and Sighard Gille, who both hold professorships at the HGB. Similarly to their oeuvre, the work of the younger artists is marked by a strong figurative element, well-trained technical painterly skills and, for some painters, the use of the allegorical. The significance of the ‘New Leipzig School’ today can be found in the re-evaluation painting has experienced alongside figurative art, especially in the German and North American art market. Yet, this development is not only confined to the commercial sector but also questions the possibilities of painting and figuration. Such possibilities are currently debated as well as specifically German characteristics from pre-World War I art movements until today. Traditional mediums are consciously employed to find ways of expression for the representation of the complex relations of contemporary inner and outer worlds and of the individual and society. Thus, new artistic ways and tendencies are sought and explored by using the most traditional of artistic techniques, which, in turn, allow the term retro-garde to label this process. Continuities While exhibitions and conferences since the 1990s are trying to examine the artistic developments in the former eastern part of Germany,1 a more profound scientific analysis of the totalitarian system still remains to be done. The recent past has not yet become history and the level of detachment required for such analyses is not yet given. An example for the complexities of dealing with one’s own past is the so-called deutsch-deutscher Bilderstreit (EastWest German Iconoclasm) which took place during the 1990s. A predecessor of this debate can be found in an early éclat during the documenta 6, 1977, the first documenta including Eastern German artists like Mattheuer, Tübke, Sitte and Heisig. As a response to the invitation of GDR artists, the painters Markus Lüpertz, Gerhard Richter and Georg Baselitz withdrew their works from the exhibition as they refused to partake in the same event as Eastern German state artists. Specifically, Richter and Baselitz, who were former citizens of the GDR, emphasized their well-known attitude against the totalitarian state at this occasion. At the end of 1993, the integration of the two collections of the old and new National Galleries in Berlin marked the starting point of the Bilderstreit after 1989 (Schuster 2003: 10). In early 1994 a heated debate took place, intensified by the press (Jahrbuch Preussischer Kulturbesitz 1994). Western artists reproached the National Gallery for exhibiting the former Eastern artists, who they accused of having collaborated with the regime. At the same time, oppressed and dissident artists who were disadvantaged by the totalitarian system were enraged about the same Staatskünstler (state artists) who were to be celebrated and exhibited again, this time in the recently unified state (Lindner 1998: 229). In 1999, another exhibition in Weimar Aufstieg und Fall der Moderne stirred the debate again, as the strong and opinionated catalogue commentary went as far as to suggest comparisons to the art produced in the years 1933 to 1945 (Bothe, Föhl 1999; Preiss 2001). One of the final climaxes was the exhibition Kunst in der DDR (Art in the GDR) in the New National Gallery in Berlin 2003, as well as the conference organized within the framework of the show. It brought together many of the protagonists of the previously heated Bilderstreit Kunst in der DDR and attempted to give an overview of the art


production in the former Eastern state. The very consciously chosen title was already supposed to indicate that the exhibition did not mean to exclusively present the state artists, an idea which would have been suggested by the title Kunst der DDR, but also in exhibiting dissident art, the curators’ intent was to present the entirety of GDR art chosen mainly by the criterion of quality (Blume and März 2003: 31). These examples illustrate the explosive power and difficulties when dealing with a very recent past. It can easily be imagined how much more complex the situation becomes when an active arts academy tries to restructure itself in order to be able to face a future under completely new parameters. Arno Rink, the headmaster until 1994, was able to put through profound changes, while at the same time allowing traditional teaching methods and a conservative classical training approach to prevail. While the faculty in the three departments photography, book art and graphic design and media art experienced a larger influx of faculty, the department of painting and graphics remained relatively stable. Even the most recent changes, the taking over of Rink’s class by the painter Neo Rauch and the appointment of Annette Schröter, who were both trained at the HGB in the late 1980s, emphasize the intended continuity in this department. Due to the diversity of programmes offered at the academy, it was able to remain open to new influences and adjust to the very different needs and interests of today’s art students. Although Rink could not have known that figurative painting would see a renaissance as fulminating as the one that had its beginning at the end of the 1990s, he decided to give the HGB a profile that would differentiate it from most other German arts academies (Baier 2005). This adherence to traditional practice and realism in art helped the ‘Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst’ to turn into an arts academy with a very individual profile and a reputation that is far spread beyond the borders of the German cultural scenery. Despite the current success of many former HGB students and other artists who work figuratively, heated debate has not yet come to a compromise. It takes place between those who esteem figuration and painting as a reactionary method and medium which is unable to provide valid possibilities for contemporary artistic expression, and those who see it as an alternative to more modern media which still has the potential to be meaningful. One solution might lie in the acceptance of various means of expression and the understanding that even traditional media and an artistic heritage, which is stained by the mark of a totalitarian system, might today bear potential for new artistic ideas in a liberal and democratic set-up. Sophie Gerlach is a doctoral researcher at the University of Bremen, Germany.

Notes 1. List of exhibitions (it is not extensive and only attempts to compile the larger exhibitions pertaining to the topic): Auftrag: Kunst 1949–1990 Deutsches Historisches Museum Berlin, 27.1–18.4.1995;Deutschlandbilder Martin-Gropius-Bau Berlin, 7.9.1997–11.1.1998; Rahmenwechsel – Dokumentationszentrum Kunst der DDR Burg Beeskow, 13.11.1998–27.6.1999; Aufstieg und Fall der Moderne Schloßmuseum and Mehrzweckhalle Weimar, 9.5.-26.9.1999 (closed early due to reproaches and pressures from the public); Sammlung Friedrich Seiz. Kunst der achtziger Jahre aus der DDR Potsdam/Altes Rathaus, 1.6.-22.8.1999;Enge und


Vielfalt. Auftragskunst und Kunstföderung in der DDR Exhibition of the Kunstfonds of the free state Saxonia at Festung Königstein, 6.8–31.10.1999; Dialoge. Werke aus der Sammlung der Grundkreditbank Kunstforum at the Grunkreditbank Berlin, 17.9.1999–2.1.2000; Jahresringe. Kunstraum DDR. Eine Sammlung 1945– 1989 Kunsthaus Apolda, 26.9–12.12.1999; Klopfzeichen. Kunst und Kultur der 80er Jahre in Deutschland. Doppelausstellung Mauersprünge und Wahnzimmer Museum der bildenden Künste Leipzig, 3.8.27.10.2002, Museum Folkwang Essen, 3.12.2002–23.3.2003; Kunst in der DDR. Eine Retrospektive der Nationalgalerie Neue Nationalgalerie Berlin, 25.7–26.10.2003.

References Baier, U. (2005), ‘Ich bin feige, wenn ich vor einer leeren Leinwand stehe’. Interview with Arno Rink, in Die Welt, 10.10.2005. Blume, E. and März, R. (2003), ‘Re-Vision Kunst. Denkmäler und Sinnzeichen‘ in Blume, E., März, R. (eds.) Kunst in der DDR, exhibition catalogue, Berlin: Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. Blume, J. (ed.) (2003), Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst Leipzig, Leipzig: Institut für Buchkunst. Bothe, R., Röhl, T. (1999), Aufstieg und Fall der Moderne, exh.cat., Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz. Gerlach, S. (2005), interview with Neo Rauch, Leipzig, 10 September 2005, unpublished. Gerlach, S. (2007), telephone interview with Cornelia Renz, 8 January 2007, unpublished. Gillen, E. (2005), ‘Die Formalismuskampagne‘ in Gillen, E. Das Kunstkombinat DDR. Zäsuren einer gescheiterten Kunstpolitik, Cologne: DuMont. Göschen, U. (2001), Im neuen Deutschland: 3, Beziehung zur Sowjetunion, Kulturoffiziere und Formalismuskampagnen‘ in Ibid. Vom sozialistischen Realismus zur Kunst im Sozialismus, Berlin: Duncker & Humblodt. Hartleb, R. (1989), ‘Die Malerei der ‘Leipziger Schule’ und die Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst‘, in Rink, A. and Gleisberg, D. (eds.) Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst Leipzig 1945–1989, exh.cat, Leipzig: Seemann Verlag. Heisig, B. (1967), Report to the Headmaster Albert Kapr, 12.11.1967, HGB Archive. HGB webpage: http://www.hgb-leipzig.de/index.php?a=hgb& accessed: 20.01.2007. Hübscher, A. (1989), ‘Die Jahre des Neubeginns: 1945–1959, Dokumentation zur Geschichte der Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst Leipzig‘ in Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst 1945–1989, exhibition catalogue, Leipzig: Hochschule für Graphik und Buchkunst. Kapr, A. (1967), Note from Albert Kapr to the Entire Faculty, notes and minutes from the Senate meetings of the HGB, HGB Archive. Kober, K.-M. (1981), Bernhard Heisig, Dresden: Akademie der Künste der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik. Lindner, B. (1998), Verstellter, offener Blick, Köln, Weimar, Wien: Böhlau Verlag. Pachnike, P. (1989), ‘Traditionslinien der Hochschule‘ in Leipziger Schule: Malerei, Grafik, Fotografie; Lehrer und Absolventen der Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst Leipzig, exhibition catalogue, Oberhausen: Ludwig-Institut für Kunst der DDR. Preiss, A. (2001), ‘Die Debatte um die Ausstellung, Aufstieg und Fall der Moderne’, in Timmermann, H. Die DDR in Deutschland – Ein Rückblick auf 50 Jahre, Berlin: Duncker und Humblodt. Rink, A. (1989), ‘Man wird nicht als Realist geboren‘ in Leipziger Schule: Malerei, Grafik, Fotografie; Lehrer und Absolventen der Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst Leipzig, exhibition catalogue, Oberhausen: Ludwig-Institut für Kunst der DDR.


Schiller, W. (1964), 1764–1964 – 200 Jahre Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst, Leipzig: Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst. Schuhmann, H. (1996), ‘Leitbild Leipzig – Beiträge zur Geschichte der Malerei in Leipzig von 1945 bis Ende der Achtziger Jahre‘, in Feist, G. et al. (eds.) Kunstdokumentation SBZ/DDR 1945–1990, Cologne: DuMont. Schuster, P. -K. (2003), ‘Kunst in der DDR. Eine Retrospektive in der Nationalgalerie‘ in Blume, E.; März, R. (eds.) Kunst in der DDR, exhibition catalogue, Berlin: Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. Thomas, K. (1980), Die Malerei der DDR 1949–1979, Cologne: DuMont. Thomas, K. (2002), ‘Treibhaus geteiltes Deutschland: Formalismus Streit und Sozialistischer Realismus‘, in ibid., Kunst in Deutschland seit 1945, Cologne: DuMont. Werner, K. (2003),‘Interview with Arno Rink‘ in Blume, J. (ed.) Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst Leipzig, Leipzig: Institut für Buchkunst. Vierneisel, B. (1996), ‘Die Kulturabteilung des Zentralkomitee der SED 1946–1964’, in Feist, G. et al. (eds.) Kunstdokumentation SBZ/DDR 1945–1990, Cologne: DuMont. (1994), Jahrbuch Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin: Stiftungsrat vom Präsidenten der Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz.

2 Attacking Objectification: Jerzy Bere´s in Dialogue with Marcel Duchamp

Klara Kemp-Welch

What was the relationship to the historic avant-gardes of the new forms of systemic critique proposed in the heterogeneous action-based practices that became so prevalent in the 1970s? Was the relationship between these differently inflected in a late socialist context than in a capitalist one? If so, how? And if the same theoretical frameworks cannot adequately illuminate both historical contexts, then which way should we look to find new models for thinking through these problems? In answer to these questions, this chapter analyses how a dissident artist in East-Central Europe forged an unexpected dialogue with an artist of the western historic avantgarde whose work can be read as an early critique of capitalism. To trace such dialogue is still to follow a new trajectory in Anglo-American art history which continues to exclude from its canon the neo-avant-garde of the former ‘Eastern bloc’, and would reluctantly admit that these marginalized, ephemeral and sometimes underground practices could produce any significant dialogue with a figure so paradoxically embraced by the canon as Marcel Duchamp. The focus of the chapter will be the unlikely set of conceptual exchanges orchestrated by the Polish action artist Jerzy Bere´s with what was undoubtedly Duchamp’s key strategy: the readymade. Bere´s’s five polemical ‘dialogues’ and later ‘disputes’ with Duchamp were a series of what the artist called manifestations that explored the wider ramifications of Duchamp’s strategy for art but also for politics and people caught in particular political situations. Although these manifestations, which Bere´s carried out between 1981 and 1995, all referred to the specific character of the Polish situation, they used the specificity of the local as an anchor for the exposition of general concerns. This universalizing ambition may explain the diverse locations for the five events: Lublin, Oxford, Warsaw, Bochum and, finally, Alma, Quebec.


Bere´s called his actions manifestations largely so as to distance himself from the Happening phenomenon, claiming his works had a ‘programme, purpose, and range of meaning’, which he found altogether lacking in happenings. Bere´s was not a happener then (although he was involved with the hippies), nor, he was equally keen to stress, was he a performance artist. And although he trained under one of Poland’s most important sculptors, Xavery Dunikowski, he said he was not a sculptor (Bere´s 1978: 50). When, in the 1950s, his teacher made a project for a fifteen-metre-high monument to Stalin, intended to stand in front of the vast Palace of Culture and Science in Warsaw, Bere´s made up his mind to avoid at all costs this sort of ‘entanglement’ (the project was a fiasco as Dunikowski faced the complexities of state disapproval). Bere´s recalls deciding that the most important matter for an artist working in these times was ‘finding a conception, a formula that will be sufficiently independent that the artist will not become entangled in anything’ (Bere´s 2001: 23 [my trans.]). However, this did not mean that Bere´s followed suit with the overwhelming majority of artists in Poland under Gierek, who steered well clear of politics so as to profit from the tolerance the state gave to any form of a-political art. He did say that he was not a political artist – but then nobody ever seems to admit outright to having been a political artist in East-Central Europe. Although Bere´s’s insistence on terminological distinctness came with the (neo) avant-garde territory, his choice of the term manifestation was more generous and revealing of the practice it defined than most. The Oxford English Dictionary definition points up three main registers of meaning: perceptual, political and spiritual.1 These are, absolutely, the threads woven together in this work, Flux. Although Fluxus artists had previously appropriated this word (Flux-manifestations), they had not attempted or intended anything like the sustained investigation of its multiple dimensions that Bere´s had embarked on in 1968, when he first began working in this form. Although the first Duchamp-related manifestation was carried out in the dramatic context of Polish realities of the Solidarity period, the series continued in much the same vein after the end of communism through to the aggressive capitalism of the 1990s a continuity that highlights further methodological challenges posed in writing an integrated history of postconceptualist, action-based practice from both sides of the Iron Curtain. As part of the first manifestation, Jerzy Bere´s stood in front of a small fire, naked, with a sign around his neck, which read, in Polish, ‘readymade’ [Figure 1]. Bere´s’s expansion of Duchamp’s strategy to include his physical self, framed in a socialist context, is an intriguing transposition. And it is one that requires a parallel expansion of our critical framework to accommodate it. Readymade translates into Polish as ‘ready object’. This translation links the strategy more explicitly than the English does, to the condition of objecthood. By wearing the sign around his neck, Bere´s proposed himself as a readymade; transforming himself from subject to object. Having kindled a fire on entering the room, and then hung the board around his neck, Bere´s provocatively burned the sign in the fire. After this, he invited a young woman from the audience to join him in a game of chess. This sequence of events suggests a symbolic re-enactment of Duchamp’s perhaps more mythic than actual ‘giving up’ of art for chess. If so, then Bere´s began at the end; this was to be a dialogue less with the man than with his legacy, in relation to which the game of chess was the

attacking objectification | 23

first of a number of challenges. Bere´s was naked and his female opponent clothed, in a pointed reconfiguration of the sexual politics rehearsed in Duchamp’s notorious 1963 game with twenty-year-old Eve Babitz. Duchamp and his opponent reportedly played three games in quick succession (all of which he is said to have won in a few moves without once looking up from the board). Bere´s’s game, on the other hand, was drawn out. Whilst playing, he was also busy painting something on his body, a stroke for each move. He interrupted the game (with a prematurity that showed contempt for the competitive spirit of the game) as soon as he had painted on his torso a green question mark. If the aim of chess, as is often pointed out, is to ‘mate’, then Bere´s deliberately failed to deliver. Taking charcoal from the fire, he crossed out the question mark on his body and made one under the name of Duchamp on the board on Figure 1. First Dialogue with Marcel Duchamp the wall, which he then signed and dated, (6 November 1981). Bureau for Artistic Exhibitions in a provocative parody of the process of (BWA), Lublin. Photograph by Andrzej Polakowski. inscription. Courtesy of Andrzej Polakowski.

Through this manifestation, Bere´s positioned himself in critical opposition to that branch of the neo-avant-garde which conducted its formal enquiries across the bodies of women (think only of Manzoni’s Living Sculptures of 1961). However, this was partially incidental, for he stood opposed to objectification of every kind. In the Second Dialogue with Marcel Duchamp at the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford on 17th September 1988, this time wearing a wooden board with the word ‘object’, he made a programmatic statement announcing that he was going to put an end to what he called ‘the objectifying line in art’, which, he argued, could be traced through Yves Klein’s anthropometrics to Joseph Beuys’s ‘proposal of his life as a work’ (Hanusek 1995, 142). He maintained that this tendency had begun with Duchamp’s ‘irresponsible’ ‘playing’ with the object in the form of the readymade, and stated that Duchamp had been either short-sighted or irresponsible for failing to foresee, or just failing to care, that his irreverent gesture would end by institutional acceptance.2 According to Bere´s, the fetishization of Duchamp’s readymade originals and other objects served as a pretext for the further spread of an ‘objectification’ that seemed (particularly to anyone not well versed in the intricacies of Duchamp’s insistence on the ‘indifference’ of his selection process) to suggest that anything, including a person, could become art. However, behind the Dadaist spirit of irreverence and the immediate humour of a proposition such as


Fountain (1917), and arguably behind the replicas, lay the crucially serious message about the unnameable fetishism in art and society. It was this, I believe, that really interested Bere´s. It was not a matter of being ‘influenced’ in any conventional sense, though. Bere´s’s engagement and disengagement with Duchamp was a way of waging his own war on fetishism. Whilst acknowledging the obvious difficulties with applying the philosophy of Alain Badiou to a late socialist context, there may be a productive friction in reading Bere´s’s continuation of Duchamp’s critique of fetishism as a sign of fidelity to the encounter with the readymades as Event, in the sense elaborated by Badiou in his most important work to date, ‘Being and Event’ (1988). I mean by this that the readymade can be read as being the first dimension in a truth process. An event, Badiou wrote, ‘brings to pass ‘something other’ than the situation, opinions, instituted knowledges; the event is a hazardous [hazardeux], unpredictable supplement, which vanishes as soon as it appears’ (Badiou: 67). (At least two of the readymades inadvertently fulfil Badiou’s condition of ‘vanishing’ without attracting much interest, soon after being exhibited in 1916. The rest, arguably, never really appeared, having been left behind in Paris and lost, or just hung idly from the ceiling in Duchamp’s New York studio – shadows. Although these were immortalized in a number of photographs, they remained un-curated for decades: the degree to which the readymade strategy is usually narrated as dependent on the legitimizing context of the gallery, from this point of view, becomes something of a misnomer.) Whether it was by virtue of ‘choosing, designating, signing, inscribing, encountering, [or] exhibition’, it was certainly on account of an action that the readymades were accomplished (Ades 152). And this action constituted, I would suggest, what Badiou has called an ‘immanent break’ which ‘meant nothing according to the prevailing language and established knowledge of the situation’ (Badiou 43). New challenges to the production of values were implied: systemic critique appeared on the table, arguably, for the first time. To continue with Badiou’s schema, a new truth process was under way. For a truth process to develop, ‘fidelity’ had to follow: there needed to be a ‘sustained investigation of the situation’ in order to attain the end point: the production of a ‘multiple truth’ (Badiou 68). If the ontological characteristics of an event are, as Badiou says, ‘to inscribe, to name, the situated void of that for which it is an event’ then, in the case of the readymade, this void must be the negation of industrial production by the art market, or, more broadly, the reified heart of capital (Badiou 69). As Bere´s showed, however, this critique could equally be brought to bear on the conditions of late socialism. Bere´s dramatically enacted his termination of what he called the ‘objectifying line’ in art through the symbolic smashing of an empty vodka bottle against a stone during the Third Dispute with Marcel Duchamp at the Centre for Contemporary Art in Warsaw (24th April 1990). By smashing the bottle, and insisting that it would never become a work of art, he took issue with Duchamp’s sardonic remark that if he were to toss aside a bottle, people would be sure to call it a work of art. The errant narrative Bere´s symbolically ruptured was, however, more interestingly tied to the problem of performative objects. In a performance scenario, Bere´s claimed performer and audience objectify one another and, therefore, themselves. He declared his own aim to be to nourish ‘a situation of partnership on the basis of subjectivity’


(Bere´s 1990: 47 [my trans.]). (In Badiou’s terminology, this amounts to an invitation to spectators to become ‘subjects of truth’.) Bere´s saw that this is a difficult path: a body artist, whether he wished it or not, faced a dilemma which he called an ‘entanglement’ – entanglement in, as he put it, a ‘whole conglomeration of fetishisation, idolisation, from which there is no way out’ (Bere´s cited in Hanusek 1995: 147). Bere´s’s manifestations laid bare the power relations in which the performer is embroiled, but they also explosively attacked the dichotomy of subjects and objects that effects situations globally. Whilst a film or theatre director, Bere´s suggested, could perhaps justify his instrumental treatment of his actors in the name of creating a perfect work of art, the ‘creation of empires’, as he pointed out in the address he made as part of the Second Dialogue (1988), at the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford, involves the ‘objectification of millions of people’, whilst paradoxically standing no chance whatever of becoming a ‘perfect work’ (Bere´s 2002: 51). The analogy highlighted the aesthetic dimension of large-scale political projects. Towards the end of the same action, Bere´s, again naked – this time with the word ‘shame’ painted on his body in the colours of the Polish flag – referred to the example of the objectification of the Polish nation by the politicians at Yalta (Hanusek 1995: 142). Margaret Thatcher was to visit Poland later that year, and Bere´s provocatively said in his manifestation that he thought she would do well to bear this historical event in mind as she toured. Bere´s repeatedly drew attention to the objectification of nature in industrial societies. So much so, that the affirmation of nature was the end point towards which the dialogues seemed to proceed. The Last Dispute with Marcel Duchamp, at the Galeria Langage Plus, Alma, Quebec, 14 March 1995, was structured around the signing and dating of a stone. Bere´s’s readymades were not mass-produced objects but elements excised from the natural world. If Duchamp’s inscriptions of indifferent everyday objects were intended as less than invested reflections on the aesthetic capability of the industrially produced, Bere´s’s action with the stone was a disavowal of this potential. Holding the stone in the air, he declared: ‘what is natural, is stronger than what is artificial’ (Hanusek 1995, 160 [my trans.]). The word he painted on his torso on this occasion was ‘sense’. Bere´s’s commitment to nature had begun under Dunikowski. Bere´s’s early works deviated from the smooth surfaces of his teacher in all but material. The wooden sculptures he made, which he called ‘phantoms’ were rough trunks and branches, often virtually un-changed or re-assembled in crudely anthropomorphic forms and inserted into new situations. In 1966, whilst at a state-sponsored Symposium of Artists and Scientists in Puławy, Bere´s found an impressive oak, uprooted and dumped by industrial machinery so as to clear space for a factory. His contribution to the exhibition that followed the symposium was to transport the tree to the site of the factory and put it upright once more. He called it his Great Phantom (Zwid wielki). A number of Bere´s’s ramshackle sculptures, or ‘material documents’, as he preferred to call them, disappeared soon after their exhibition on the instructions of the censors. Whilst Duchamp’s Bottle-Rack (1914) looked too much like a ‘product’, Bere´s’s ‘material documents’ did not resemble products enough. It was clear to those with the power to decide that neither ‘belonged’ in a gallery.


At the heart of the network of problems mobilized by the readymade strategy lay a profound anxiety about the fragility of identity; and it is this anxiety that links Bere´s to Duchamp (and both of them, though differently, to Freud). Duchamp, through his readymades, investigated the distinction between the work that is not a work of art and the work that is, outrageously proposing that an object made by workers in a factory might have the rarefied value reserved for art (a distinction that would transmute, by the late 1930s, into the infra-thin). Bere´s’s archaic sculptures and his meticulously executed manifestations pushed back the horizons still further, to highlight the irresponsible abuse of nature at the root of industrial civilizations. His environmental commitment was threatening a threat embodied in the powerful, looming ‘phantoms’. The pressing question of the day was no longer to tackle the lure of the commodity as a philosophical protest, but on a practical level, to address the environmental consequences of the industry that produces these commodities. Bere´s commented bitterly on how the People’s Republic of Poland ‘measured its success by the number of smoking chimneys’ (Bere´s 1993: 181 [my trans.]). The rampant consumerism that followed the entrance to the free market has hardly improved matters. Although the chimneys were kept smoking in the People’s Republic of Poland, the situation on the ground was at breaking point. The contradictions of reality became glaringly apparent by 1980: According to one contemporary account from that year, just ‘driving from Łódź to Warsaw, one could find shops selling the same cuts of meat at four different prices – a novelty for the planned economy. At Huta Warszawa, the works’ canteen alternated the new and old prices, sometimes several times a day’ (Kemp-Welch 2007:159). Food prices had been frozen at 1960s rates by huge subsidies, and the government, on the eve of disaster, tried to tackle this economic time bomb by introducing, unannounced, a tiered system of pricing, giving better cuts of meat to ‘commercial’ shops, which sold for higher prices. These price increases were amongst the factors that mobilized the spread of strike action that provided the base for ‘Solidarno´sć. The Solidarity movement is explored from a theoretical perspective in Bere´s’s important essay ‘The Work as Stimulator of Judgement’. He describes it as a ‘creative fact’, a term he generally used in place of the word ‘art’ (Bere´s 1981: 43). The success of a creative fact was for Bere´s measured by its capacity to interrupt the suspension of judgement that all too often is at the root of social as well as aesthetic stagnation. Bere´s’s description of Solidarity as a paradigm of a social ‘work’, which ‘brought together millions of people’, serves as an unexpected counterpoint to his dystopian comments about the dangers of the ‘perfect work’ (Bere´s 1981: 52). His manifestations from the early 1980s were tied to the struggle to provoke judgement. As well as the First Dialogue, in November 1981, Bere´s made his famous Romantic Manifestation, in which, arriving with his crooked wooden ‘romantic cart’, he lit a series of fires in the main square in Krakow [Figure 2]. Around these were painted the words: ‘fire of hope’, ‘fire of dignity’, ‘fire of love’, ‘fire of truth’ and ‘fire of freedom’. That these words had been removed by morning is testimony of their power. (The same thing happened when he repeated the action in November 2000.) Such words galvanized popular involvement and attracted attention. Bere´s also controversially incorporated into his programme religious terminology and ritual, calling some of his manifestations ‘masses’ and some of his wooden assemblages ‘altars’ and rehearsing actions that approximated practices such as transubstantiation and flagellation.


When martial law was declared in December 1981, many artists agreed to boycott official cultural institutions. Instead, churches became home to exhibitions. Bere´s saw enormous potential: ‘The spectators, who came to the church for patriotic or religious reasons and found an exhibition there, tended to overcome a certain reluctance, make a certain effort, to get to the art’ (Bere´s 1990: 43 [my trans.]). The Catholic Church and its rituals are a constant frame for his manifestations. If Duchamp appropriated for his own ends the ‘language of industry’, as Molly Nesbit has argued (see Nesbit), the language appropriated by Bere´s has been that of Catholicism. The particular circumstances of Poland produced a situation in which, for a time at least, religion became the most effective medium for transgression: a pragmatic response to circumstances. Interestingly, though, religious symbolism is still prominent in the Fourth Dispute with Marcel Duchamp (which, Bere´s mentioned in passing, had as its secondary theme a dialogue with Beuys) at the Museum Bochum, in the Ruhr (11 May 1991). But by this time, I think, the reasoning behind this language was different. Bere´s entered the gallery naked with a rope around his neck, and waited whilst a series of officials gave introductory speeches (waiting long enough to make the bureaucracy seem jarring). He painted on his body the word ‘geist’ and, in a strange restating of Christ’s humiliation by the soldiers, he tied knots in the rope and made of it a ‘crown’ which he put on his head. The manifestation culminated with Bere´s standing on a podium wearing his crown and with the word geist on his torso, asking that the audience judge whether what they see is a good work of art. The Protestant Bishops, who made up the majority of the audience on this occasion (being gathered in the region for a symposium that had also become the occasion for an exhibition on the theme of Spirituality in Art), were eager to debate the questions Bere´s had raised through his piece. Bere´s materializes concepts: a word becomes a body. The artist acts as their vehicle exploring how they resonate: de-familiarizing them, singling them out for consideration in unlikely contexts, in an acknowledgement that any truth-process must pass through language. His manifestations frequently end with an invitation to open discussion and to share a drink. Social and supernatural collide in a ritual of communion/consumption. The artist repeatedly states that his aim is ‘open dialogue’, suggesting the usual neo-avant-garde rhetoric of desire for audience fusion and the erasure of the presumed subject/object relations of spectatorship. Jacques Rancière has recently suggested that the problem lies in the terms of this equation rather than in relations themselves: ‘one condition typically thought necessary for the politicization of art is the becoming-active of the spectator’ (Rancière: 264). Rancière contends that the premise upon which such an assumption is based that ‘to be a spectator means to be passive’ is false (Rancière: 264). He argues that ‘to look and to listen requires the work of attention, selection, reappropriation, a way of making one’s own film, one’s own text, one’s own installation out of what the artist has presented’ (Rancière: 264). Emancipation begins, therefore, ‘when we dismiss the opposition between looking and acting’ (Rancière: 264). Although his humble invitation to dialogue shows he intuited a solution, Bere´s himself, as previously mentioned, could not see his way out of the problem of the performer’s ‘entanglement’. Badiou’s particular definition of the subject, as induced by the process of truth, may provide a way out of the dichotomy by which Bere´s was confounded. He gives as a model ‘the subject


of love’: ‘the subject induced by fidelity to an amorous encounter […] the lovers as such enter into the composition of one loving subject, who exceeds them both’ (Badiou: 43). In the same way, works of art are not ‘objects’ any more than their ‘authors’ are their ‘subjects’, they become, rather, ‘subject-points’ into whose composition the artist enters (Badiou: 43). Bere´s’s manifestations might then become part of the ‘evental’ chain proposed by Duchamp stages in the same truth-process. Therefore, it is not a case of Bere´s merely adopting Duchamp’s strategy and applying it to his situation. The dialogues were a polemical continuation of the same project that, I would argue, took advantage of their altogether different perspective not only to point out weaknesses of the ‘original’ strategy, but also to salvage what was most radical from within the strategy and use it to explore the possibilities of constructing a new mode of collective subjectivity. In view of the scepticism and cynicism brought about by the monumental failure of communism’s utopian aims and the stagnant consensus as to the ‘end of grand narratives’, it is perhaps surprising, if, in the end, refreshing to find Badiou returning to unfashionable concepts such as truth. In the debate over what forms of action/activism are appropriate to the situation of globalization, the voice of Jerzy Bere´s shares this uncompromising simplicity. He is undaunted by exposing his ageing, naked body to public scrutiny. Bere´s is widely considered one of the most poetic of twentieth-century Polish artists, a true Romantic; this unfortunately serves to obfuscate his radical capabilities. Piotr Piotrowski, the foremost Polish art historian of post-war art, has constructed the following argument around Bere´s’s perceived Romanticism: Referring to the grand narratives of Polish culture, the romantic myth of the artist-prophet and the sense of national mission, he did not put tradition into doubt or propose any kind of critical discourse. On the contrary, Bere´s explored the national heritage as a source of authority to criticise the reality of Communism (Piotrowski 2002: 233). Although this assessment of the relation between tradition and the contemporary situation in Bere´s’s manifestations is undeniably correct, Piotrowski is, I think, mistaken in suggesting that Bere´s therefore proposes no critical discourse of his own. He contends that this ‘tradition and its related identity politics [cannot] match the danger of globalisation’ and may not be able to ‘resist the temptation of nationalism, trying to defend the local against global cultural developments’ (Piotrowski 2002: 233). And this might certainly be the case if, indeed, this sort of romantic and prophetic ‘national mission’ were an adequate summary of Bere´s’s project. I would contend, however, that this description does not do his strategies justice. His project is far broader: more complex, more self-reflexive and more interesting. Bere´s is well aware of the dangers of fetishization of the nation. In the Third Dispute (1990), he issues the following warning: ‘the tragedy begins in the situation when a given nation considers itself to be the chosen nation. And I would like to warn my nation, that is to say the Poles, us, against making of ourselves a chosen nation…This is the source of nationalism’ (Bere´s cited in Hanusek 1995: 147 [my trans.])


What models of subjectivity should art purvey in the post-socialist situation? Piotrowski rightly acknowledges that a paradigm shift away from the opposition national/international is needed. In the end, he proposes the model of feminist, gay and ethnic-minority cultures that, he claims, through a ‘deconstruction of the imperial subject (…) point to distinct places from which they speak and to specific values which they affirm, formulating distinct identity politics’ (Piotrowski 2002: 233). In the ex-West, however, there is growing feeling that such identity politics, whilst important, may itself mark an abandonment of a larger political project. One of the main challenges faced in the twenty-first century is how to overcome the collapse of radicalism into ‘identity politics’ (see Eagleton 1990: 5–7). For Badiou, ‘minorities’ are defined externally and, therefore, not the subject of truth. Their political meaning is problematic. He asks: ‘Can this identity, in itself, function in a progressive fashion – that is, other than as a property invented by the oppressors themselves?’ (Badiou 2001:107). I would argue that Jerzy Bere´s may provide a more flexible model, if we see in his extraordinary dialogue with Duchamp, a crucial acknowledgement of how singularity and universality intersect. Bere´s’s example seems to propose a new mode of being that refuses the problematic of individual versus collective in favour of convocation to a multiply conceived truth, in which communication, even if much of this must be in the form of a multitude of opinions, is the key. And if Bere´s seems at times ridiculous, this may well be because ‘the power of a truth is also a kind of powerlessness’ (Badiou 2001: 85). This is so because there must always remain ‘at least one point that truth cannot force’: this Badiou calls the ‘unnameable’ of a truth. In political truth, one such unnameable is ‘community’ (Badiou 2001: 85). ‘One just has to have contact with authentic reality’, Bere´s once wrote, ‘Our post-war struggle could be decoded on the principle that there exists authentic reality and artificial reality, built through propaganda, ideology’ (Bere´s 1990: 46–47). This, though, turned out not to be exclusively a problem of Stalinism, or of the Gierek era. The fact that Bere´s continues to repeat many of his earlier manifestations today is a sign that we need to be on our guard still. Bere´s did not stop with the regime change. Repeating his Romantic Manifestation in 2000, Bere´s commented that ‘the moral exultation which was synonymous with those times [the early 80s] seems to be petering out and perhaps bringing it back at this moment will be significant’ (Bere´s 2000). As Jerzy Hanusek observed in the mid-1990s, although one might suppose …that after a systemic revolution, which we have just experienced, [Bere´s’s manifestations] would lose much of their relevance […] the reverse is the case. Intensifying certain processes and slowing down others, the communist system let the artist have insights into the nature of social and political phenomena which in the democratic system are disguised and alleviated, or seem as natural as air and hence do not provoke reflection (Hanusek 1995:2 ). Bere´s’s rituals, quite simply, cause us to pause and reflect. In the end, the role they claim for art is surprisingly humble; perhaps it is no more than to provoke discussion about how we form our material and spiritual values about reality and its transformation. Still, to achieve such discussion would be a great deal. Klara Kemp-Welch is a doctoral researcher at University College London.


Notes 1. i). a. The action of making manifest; exposition, explanation; the fact of being manifested; the demonstration, revelation, or display of the existence, presence, qualities, or nature of some person or thing.(…) b. An instance of making manifest; the particular form in which someone or something is manifested; that by which something is manifested.(…) c. Christian Church. The action of making known to another the state of one’s conscience. rare.(…) d. Demonstration.(…) ii). Spanish Law. A process by which an accused person might be protected form the animosity and precipitate action of judges and removed to a special prison out of their reach. Obs. rare.(…) iii). A public act on the part of a government intended as a display of its power and determination to enforce some demand. Obs. rare.(…) iv). Spiritualism. A phenomenon or collection of phenomena by which the presence of a spirit is supposed to be rendered perceptible. Freq. in pl.(…) Oxford English Dictionary Online accessed 2001. 2. Art historians continue to disagree as to whether the 1964 editions of replica readymades that Duchamp authorized undermined his critique of authenticity or reiterated it when questioned by Joan Bakewell about his decision to permit the replicas, Duchamp replied: ‘repetition is good and you know why, because the collectors can collect’.

References Ades, D., Cox, N., Hopkins, D. (1999), Marcel Duchamp, London: Thames and Hudson. Badiou, A. (2001), Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter Hallward, London: Verso (first published editions Hatier, 1993). Bere´s, J. (1978), ‘Nie jestem rze´zbiarzem’, Odra, no. 11. Bere´s, J. (1990),’ Jestem za otwarciem dialogu’, z Jerzym Beresiem rozmawiaja˛ Ł. Guzek i W. Bosak’, Tumult: Niezalez.ne pismo społeczno-kulturalne, no. 6. Bere´s, J. (2001), ‘W poszukiwaniu wolno´sci. Z Jerzym Beresiem rozmawia Paweł Łubowski’, Arteon, no. 7. Bere´s, J. (2002), ‘Dzieło stymulatorem osa˛du’ (1981), reproduced in Bere´s, Wstyd, Kraków: Otwarta Pracownia. Bere´s, J. (2002), ‘Zwidy’ (1993), reproduced in Bere´s, Wstyd, Kraków: Otwarta Pracownia. Bere´s, J. (2002), Wstyd, Kraków: Otwarta Pracownia. Hanusek, J. (1995), ‘Jerzy Bere´s: Tworczo´sć jako wyzwanie’, in A. We˛cka (ed.), Zwidy. Wyrocznie. Ołtarze. Wyzwania (Phantoms. Prophets. Altars. Challenges ok), exh. cat., Poznań: Muzeum Narodowe. Hanusek, J. (2005), Katalog twórczo´sci Jerzego Beresia, 1954–1994 (Catalogue of Jerzy Bere´s’s work 1954–1994) part II: Manifestacje (Manifestations), in A. We˛cka (ed.), Zwidy. Wyrocznie. Ołtarze. Wyzwania (Phantoms. Prophets. Altars. Challenges ok), exh. cat., Poznań: Muzeum Narodowe. Eagleton, T. (1990), Ideology of the Aesthetic, Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Kemp-Welch, A. (2007), Stalinism in Poland, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nesbit, M. (2000), Their Common Sense, London: Black Dog Publishing.


Piotrowski, P. (2002), ‘Male Artist’s Body: National Identity vs. Identity Politics’, in Laura Hoptman and Tomáš Pospiszyl (eds), Primary Documents: A Sourcebook for Eastern and Central European Art since the 1950s, New York: MoMA. Rancière, J. (2007), in ‘Art of the Possible’, Fulvia Carnevale and John Kelsey in Conversation with Jacques Rancière, Artforum International, March, XLV, no. 7, pp. 256–269. We˛cka, A. (1995), (ed.), Zwidy – Wyrocznie – Ołtarze – Wyzwania, exh. cat. Poznań: Muzeum Narodowe. ‘Marcel Duchamp Interviewed by Joan Bakewell’, 5 June 1968, BBC TV, view at http://www.toutfait. com/auditorium.jsp.

3 On the Ruins of a Utopia: Armenian Avant-Garde and the Group Act

Angela Harutyunyan

At the very moment when homo sovieticus wanted most of all to leave the utopia and return to history, there suddenly was the discovery that history no longer existed and there was nowhere to return to (Groys 1992: 110). In this chapter, I propose that the common construction of the body in the discourses of contemporary Armenian art is one which denies historical memory and is situated outside of the social realm. It opens up a space for modernist utopian dreams of progress on the one hand, and a retreat into the isolated space of atomized creation on the other. I will examine the practice of the artists’ group Act (1994–1996) and that of its prominent member David Kareyan since the breakdown of the group in 1996. I will argue that Kareyan’s practice is exemplary of the shift from socially committed art to the segregation and retreat of the artist behind the enclosed façade of a personalistic utopia. To conclude, taking Boris Groys’ notion of a “post-utopian condition” and applying it to the contemporary art practices in Armenia, I will briefly elaborate on some of the social, political and cultural implications of historical amnesia amongst the artistic community. Located on the periphery of the Soviet Union, Armenia was often regarded as a small but culturally ‘wealthy’ country, always expected to present something extraordinary in Soviet exhibitions and cultural fairs. Armenian artists, in their turn, conformed to this image imposed on them by the system. As a result, Armenian contemporary art developed as a distinct


phenomenon having little communication with other countries of the Soviet bloc. However, contemporary art in Armenia also shared similarities with the Soviet bloc countries in that, since the early 1980s, it had developed largely as a reaction against similar kinds of oppression imposed upon by the cultural politics of the communist regime.1 Many Armenian artists of the post-socialist period, along the lines of their late Soviet counterparts in the USSR and socialist Eastern Europe, believed in the socially communicative potential of artistic actions. The practices of the group Act in Armenia exemplified this ideal. Conceptual artists’ group Act operated from 1994 to 1996 and was comprised of artists David Kareyan, Diana Grigorgyan, Vahram Aghasyan, Narine Aramyan, Narek Avetissian, among others. Inspired from the promise of Independence and the construction of a new democratic society,2 Act, in its demands for New State, New Culture, New Art, Free Market Relations in Art and Economy3 was enthusiastically utilizing strategies of political and social activism common since the late Soviet years of perestroika and glasnost (1984–1988).4 Through artistic dissent and a referendum, Act called for political participation both in art and society. In 1995, the same year the Armenian people voted for their first constitution, the group organized a procession of artists from the early-twentieth-century modern painter Martiros Saryan’s statue in the centre of Yerevan to the Museum of Modern Art; a symbolic gesture that utilized a tool for political expression (the public march) to make a statement about art. It is not accidental that the demonstration started from the prominent modernist painter’s statue and ended up in the Museum of Modern Art. In this way, apart from making political and economic statements, Act was also associating itself with the tradition of Armenian modernist art. Parodying the participatory tools of political action from representative democracies (such as the referendum), the artists, along the lines of official economic policy, were calling for free market relations in the general economy as well as the art world. However, as Vardan Azatyan has argued: With all their socially committed position they…believed that art is a domain of pure creation (artistic formalism was transformed from imagery into the analytical linguistic practices inspired by Josef Kosuth). They also inherited the universalizing rhetoric of the 3rd Floor reflected both in their ultimately abstract concerns with abstract categories of art and action, and the resulting universalist claims of the demonstrators5 (Azatyan 2005). At the same time, the group, through defining its agenda as resistance against the instrumentalization of the artist in Soviet times by calling for art as a political oppositional action, also relied on the old Marxian model of a completely centred, intentional individual capable of directly producing social change. In spite of reviving the group formation of the historical avant-garde, Act, nevertheless, represented a unique type of a group, a “possible/impossible” formation, if we borrow Azatyan’s term, which lacked cohesion. In the context of neo-liberalizing post-Soviet Armenia, Act represented a group of individuals who confused neo-liberalism with neo-marxism, thus,

on the ruins of a utopia | 35

producing a type of neo-conservatism where Hayek and Adorno could be on the same side as critics of collectivization and the defenders of individualism. As I argue, Act’s very formation, its social-artistic activism and subsequent collapse, epitomizes the relocation of the site of utopia from society to the body. After the collapse of Act, in the absence of a corporeal body, there was an attempt to transform the social body.6 However, it was the utopian ideal of the corporeal wholeness of the body and the abandonment of the social body that emerged in the works of Act’s former members, and especially in David Kareyan’s artistic practices. After the disillusionment from the failed attempt to construct a new social and political order as an artistic project, society and the mainstream culture were perceived by the community of Armenian avant-garde artists as fragmenting the body between various dominant discourses and, therein, ignoring the corporeal body and its needs. The rejection of the body as fragmented and incomplete was parallel to the search for the body as a whole, one which precedes the subject’s social constitution and resides outside of history and language. In the next section, I will briefly discuss Kareyan’s work from the post-Act period in order to provide a contrast between Act’s avant-gardist desire to transform society and the subsequent refusal of its former members to participate in larger social, political and cultural discourses. David Kareyan’s work particularly exemplifies the shift from attempts to produce socially communicative art to the articulation of the corporeal body as a site of utopia. Arguably, this shift was both a result of, and fed into, larger dimensions of social and political crisis of the late 1990s in Armenia. This crisis, which many artists radically reacted against, was largely triggered by the resignation of the first president of Armenia, Levon Ter-Petrossian, after independence in 1998. He was seen by the community of contemporary artists as an advocate of democracy, cosmopolitanism and the neo-liberal market economy.7 The so-called ‘political crisis’ occurred when the rhetoric of transition, hitherto serving as an instrument in the hands of the dominant political power to justify social inequality, economic and political stagnation, was no longer a viable rhetoric to maintain the existing power relations. The rhetoric of transition arising from the change from the Soviet centralized economy and oneparty political power to competitive capitalist market relations and decentralized democratic institutions was bankrupt. It brought a neo-nationalist political group to power, represented by the former president of Nagorno Karabagh, Robert Kotcharyan. With these changes in the political landscape of the country, many artists were disenchanted and disillusioned by the earlier aspirations of the artist possessing social agency or free will. The culmination of this crisis came with the 1999 parliament shooting that killed the prime minister, the speaker of the National Assembly and six other government officials. The absurdity of this violent slaughter came to be seen as even more absurd when, after a threeyear trial extensively covered by the media, the government announced that the assassinations were not politically motivated acts. Instead, the shooting was announced to be an act of psychically imbalanced and unstable individuals, many of whom were under the influence of narcotic drugs. This was a moment when the seemingly immaterial body politic that functions


through its mostly invisible mechanisms of power and control was seen as literally composed of human flesh, bones and blood. Both David Kareyan’s artistic and curatorial practices of the time were a radical response to the new state of disillusionment. The violent killing in the parliament that brought the mortal body into close proximity to people’s everyday lives through mass media broadcasts, was literally translated into the representational field by Kareyan’s videos and performances of the late 1990s and early 2000s.8 In many of the works of the period, Kareyan, in his attempts to transgress the materiality of the body as well as to refuse the body-image as constructed by society, gave expression to the themes of sacrifice, bodily mutilation and suffering. The performance of these transgressive rituals was aimed at transcending social reality in order to regain the primordial and coherent self, a self that supposedly existed beyond any symbolization. In the video installations: Dead Democracy (1999) Kareyan continuously rubs blood onto his naked body; in Eucharist-450 (2001) he is shown repetitively axing a cow’s head; in Call of Ancestors (2001) he is depicted chewing raw flesh. These works and the multimedia performance No Return (2003) are amongst several of Kareyan’s works of the period that articulate the trauma of the failed promise of democracy through rituals of sacrifice and suffering. These ideas are particularly evident in No Return (realized in collaboration with Eva Khachatryan in ACCEA, Giumry Biennale and Venice Biennale 2003) where depictions of sacred and primordial ritual are the most intense. This multimedia audio-visual installation, accompanied by a performance, adopts Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art) strategies in terms of its use of media as well as the total psychological effect that it intends to achieve. The music accompanying the work is a mixture of electronic beats and liturgical medieval Armenian music. The reversed lyrics by early-twentieth-century Armenian poet Eghishe Charent, uttered with a baritone masculine voice, are totally incomprehensible. This process reinforces the myth even further, as any act of speech or production of signs would be likely to break the atmosphere of sacred devotion. Together with this aural component, the central video projection depicts the artist’s figure in a female nightgown juxtaposed with flames of fire, referring to Christ’s sacrifice and ‘rules’ over both the audience and the performance taking place below this huge projected image. On the second screen, the video Madness Paid for Speech Capability (2002) presents different juxtaposed images of political turmoil. Politically charged signs such as the half-crescent and star of the Turkish flag and the Soviet hammer and sickle are auto-generated by computer with accompanying words. The English words are barely graspable due to the fast pace of delivery (and if one does not speak English, s/he will fail to grasp them altogether): “No more History”, “Terror”, “Suicide”, “You are in a Logic Trap” etc. These generated signs refuse to enter into semiosis as their incompleteness prevents them from participating in meaning construction. The videos are accompanied by a performance of seven female figures who are dressed in black, priestly attire, rhythmically drumming on a wooden base and making noises with steel sheets. They are ‘paying homage’ to the Christ-like figure of the male artist on the central screen and are acting as his ‘priestesses’.


The tormented body (covered by blood in Dead Democracy, tumbling in mud in The World Without You, and appearing in fire as with Bill Viola’s Crossings in No Return) is, in David Kareyan’s work of the late 1990s and early 2000s, not only defined against the present social and political conditions in Armenia but also in relation to the dominant cultural discourses that have shaped and continue to shape desirable conceptions of the body now. In Kareyan’s work, the instrumentalized view of the body within these discourses is considered to be a central political and social problematic faced by post-independence Armenian society. Kareyan’s rituals, supposedly granting a voice to the body as such, mark the retreat of the artist as a social/political subject from his activism within the group Act into subjective interiority where history is viewed as threatening the alienation of the subject from its pure state of being and primordial bodily coherence.9 With the breakdown of the group Act in 1996, the participating artists, and particularly David Kareyan, retreated into the private individualistic realm of ‘art for art’s sake’. Unlike other post-socialist countries where artistic scenes are characterized by collective actions and group formations, after the collapse of Act, no other group or collective has been formed in Armenia. The reasons for this failure have not yet been researched and documented. The absence of artists working in groups in Armenia contradicts Groys’s argument that artists working under group logic characterize all post-socialist art. Act’s work of the mid-1990s crystallizes the utopian avant-gardist ideal of striving for a new society and collective solidarity on the one hand, and embracing historical oblivion on the other. The group’s activities which are situated within the framework of art production and reception and the larger political and social contexts of the mid-1990s in Armenia, inevitably generate questions relating to the broader problems of the construction of a new society after the collapse of Sovietstyle communitarian affiliations and relations. Act’s main focus was not the corporeal body and its individual needs, but the total reconstruction of the social and political body politic including the restructuring of social relations, political organisms and bureaucratic apparatuses. Act, in its avant-gardist utopian idealism and its aims to construct a new society as an artistic project, failed to negotiate the emergence of a new type of post-Soviet subjectivity. It also failed to articulate the location of the body within the conflicting discourses of Armenian national (and more often – nationalist) history, communist ideology and the emerging narratives of globalization. In the aftermath of the group’s collapse, the separate members, particularly David Kareyan, rejected these narratives and history in general. They accepted a version of the body of the artist as transcendent, as that which refused to be a carrier of historical and social meaning. Within this construction of the artists’ body as ahistorical, the oblivion of the historical and communist pasts play a crucial role; the rejection of time and history is linked to embracing utopian ideas of a new society. The forgetting and denial of both the recent (communist) and the historical past, was a modernist strategy that resulted in an embrace of neo-liberal economic values and their cultural entailments. According to Vardan Azatyan, ‘[s]igns of Western consumer culture in the context of Armenian


contemporary art were viewed not only as antagonistic to Soviet values but that of Armenian traditions as well…To remember [meant] to give in to reactionary conformism.’ (Azatyan 2006)10 The role of forgetting has been crucial in welcoming consumerism and the effects of globalization since these were not associated with Armenian tradition and history. However, they have been romanticized by the virtue of being prohibited and out of reach during the Soviet era. The unequivocal acceptance of the West and disassociation from all that was Soviet, including the erasure of history, fed into Act’s utopian dream. This thinking was manifest in their project Art Demonstration (1995) where they eliminated the distinction between art and life and offered the construction of a new society as an artistic project. Nevertheless, I would suggest that the group’s activities had affirmative moments, as through its demonstrations and public actions it was making the artists’ public presence visible. Despite adhering to a universalizing rhetoric, Act’s goal was to participate in, and have a concrete impact upon, larger debates about an emerging civil society and post-Soviet models of economic and cultural life. Unlike these earlier attempts to produce socially communicative art, the practices of Act’s individual members, after the breakdown of the group, signalled the shift from a belief in socially committed public art to a return to the enclosed and isolated space of pure creation. Even though Act’s former members abandoned public activism, they preserved and further articulated the notion of a newly emerging utopian body. Nevertheless, there is a crucial distinction in the notion of the body here. Whilst Act was striving to reconstruct the social body by addressing larger problems, then confronting the emergence of democracy and human rights, we witness in the post-Act artistic practices, the relocation of the place of utopia from the social realm to the individual corporeal subject. In the face of disenchantment from the promise of a new society in the late 1990s, there was no longer a dream for a utopian neo-liberal future, but for a utopian wholeness of the body emancipated from social ‘malaise’ and discontent. The utopian desire to achieve wholeness of the body was now combined with the notion of the disenchanted and alienated individual at odds with his/her social surroundings. After the collapse of Act, to a large extent as a reaction to the new political reality in Armenia, a new individualistic romanticism arose from the ashes of the recent dystopia of failed social and political hopes. This romanticism was revealed in the retreat of Act’s members to the imagery of the suffering artist who is rejected by society but who nonetheless stands morally above it. I hold that this reaction largely replaced the socially expressive and communicative aspirations of post-Soviet Armenian art with a new narcissistic retreat and regression, one driven by an inability to find recognition and identity in its new circumstances. Boris Groys’s notion of post-utopian art as described in his book Total Art of Stalinism: AvantGarde, Aesthetic Dictatorship and Beyond (Groys 1992), serves as a valuable model to explain Armenian contemporary artists’ total rejection of history in that it helps to unfold the specific postsocialist condition of finding oneself beyond history and not being able to return to it. According to Groys, during the dominant rhetoric of the ideology of dialectical materialism, post-Soviet artists appeared in an ahistorical utopian condition as, according to the concept of the history of dialectical materialism the former is constructed upon class struggle. For this teleological narrative,


the ultimate goal of communism the elimination of the class struggle implied the consummation of history and historical time. However, after the collapse of communist utopia and real socialism, post Soviet artists were prevented from inclusion in the modernist grand narrative of world/western history by postmodernism. Postmodernism had come to reject and deconstruct the very idea of a grand historical narrative and gave proliferation to multiple and dispersed accounts. Appearing between these two diametrically opposed concepts of history, modernist transcendentalism and postmodern fragmentation, post soviet artists were striving to ‘overcome history’ (a postmodern gesture) by transcending it (a modernist gesture). Thus, they found themselves in a post-utopian condition; i.e. between modernist utopia and post-modernist dystopia. I would contend, in the case of Armenian contemporary art, dystopia is defined by the inability to find an identity in the new circumstances and to position oneself both locally and internationally. Because of this uncertainty, there is a longing for a community which would not resemble the failed collectivist utopia of the past, and where, paradoxically, the locus would be the individual and his/her needs. I would suggest that any dys(u)topia is necessarily against history, as it not only declares the end of any temporality but also space (topos), thus decontextualizing and ahistoricizing any kind of praxis. It is a condition that denies the subject’s relation to lived time and memory. The postutopian (between utopia and dystopia) condition simultaneously gives rise to two contradicting notions of a subject: on the one hand, there is the revolutionary, self-centred avant-gardist hero who is capable of producing social change, and on the other, there is the disillusioned, disenchanted being who feels himself a victim of circumstances. Paradoxically, these two notions co-exist in the same subject. As Slavoj Žižek puts it in psychoanalytical terms: [The] notion of the subject as an irresponsible victim involves the extreme narcissistic perspectives, from which every encounter with the Other appears as a potential threat to the subject’s precarious imaginary balance; as such, it is not the opposite, but rather, the inherent supplement of the liberal free subject: in today’s predominant form of individuality, the self-centered assertion of the psychological subject paradoxically overlaps with the perception of oneself as a victim of circumstances (Zizek 2006: 493).

The avant-gardist denial of history as something regressive, folkloristic and anti-modern, in that it contradicts the modernist myth of the new society and newly constituted subject, opens up a space for the utopian dream of progress and enlightenment. Utopia is dreamt of as a condition of absolute freedom and equality, which is, however, bourgeois in nature.11 In their total rejection of history as opposed to rejecting its specific narratives or ideological constructions,12 Armenian artists of the Act group heroically strove towards absolute freedom but at the same time this drive to freedom was itself an artistic project. By rejecting the body as a site for the historical contestation of both memory and forgetting and by subscribing it to a modernist belief in progress and Enlightenment, they embraced the rhetoric of Western neoliberal economic and free market values. The refusal to accept the body as constituted in specific social and historical circumstances made them uncritically receptive to the transcendental and abstract universal narratives of globalization. As Boris Groys points out, within the post-


socialist condition, being anti-capitalist means being anti-contemporary art (Groys in IRWIN 2006: 405). Unlike in the West where contemporary art often reflects upon the limitations of modernization and offers a critical commentary on the expansionism of the West, in the post-socialist East it is perceived as a sign of western capitalist expansion. The community of contemporary artists therefore tends to strive for and welcome western capitalism. While rejecting their own history for the sake of being non-conformist, contemporary artists welcomed neo-liberalism and the free market economy. As dominant political powers and the cultural mainstream actively appropriated the discourse of history for their own nationalist and ideological ends, the rejection of history in this context was perceived by the community of contemporary artists (also referred to as alternative artists) as heroic non-conformism. Hence, being revolutionary in their total denial of history and desire for a complete reconstruction of the social order, also meant being pro-capitalist and pro-globalization. According to Peter Burger, while modernist artists worked to subvert prevalent aesthetic categories within the framework of liberalism, including institutions of art and art as an institution, avant-garde artists’ strategies differed in that their goal was a total assault of the social order ˇufer suggests, the historical avantand its complete transformation (Burger 1984). As Eda C garde was a ‘utopian political imaginary [striving to] erase the distinctions between the cultural ˇufer 2006: 364). Armenian contemporary artists are and political definition of revolution’ (C arguably situated between Burger’s two poles, deploying revolutionary avant-gardist strategies to negate and radically transform the dominant social order whilst at the same time employing modernist formal experiments of subverting art and adopting a post-modernist scepticism about the notion of the subject as having any agency or free will. However, even Armenian artists’ art of resistance and revolution is carried out exclusively within the space of art as institution with a view to entering the global art market and embracing its value system. Consequently, the dominant perception in Armenia is of both modernism and the avant-garde as formalist aesthetic categories, rather than cultural discourses. At the same time, the isolation and categorization of the artists, specifically of David Kareyan within the realm of subjective creation, was to a large extent a response to the new political and social situation in Armenia. This framing not only prevented artists from coming up with collaborative projects but also signalled the abandonment of public discourse, subsequently appropriated by the dominant narratives of the state and the church. As opposed to the instrumentalized constructions of the body in dominant discourses, Kareyan’s works of 1998 through 2003 were characterized by the search for the lost wholeness of the body situated outside of the symbolic order. This shift of the site of utopia from society into the subjective body where the artist is seen as transcendent, I would suggest, amounts to a crisis for artistic agency. It surrenders the potential of the public sphere and the possibility for participation in the formation and development of a post-socialist culture and identity to the state and church: both of which currently hold main control over defining the boundaries of the public sphere and its cultural contents. Angela Hartyunyan is a curator in Yerevan, Armenia, and doctoral researcher at the University of Manchester.


Notes 1. In dating the origins of contemporary art in Armenia to the mid-1980s, I refer to the moment when various dissident artistic practices started occupying the public sphere. 2. Armenia became independent from the USSR in September 1991. 3. These are some of the slogans that Act used in its Art Demonstration of 1995. 4. In Armenia, Gorbachev’s rhetoric of the liberalization of economy and society was echoed in the Karabagh movement. As early as 1988, hundreds of thousands of people would regularly march in the city centre of Yerevan demanding radical reforms in society, the economy and ecology. They called for the separation of the Nagorno Karabagh region from Azerbaijani SSR and its reunification with Armenian SSR. 5. The 3rd Floor was the first alternative artists’ group in Armenia formed in 1987. Vardan Azatyan, Art Communities, Public Spaces, and Collective Actions in Armenian Contemporary Art was a paper presented at the conference ‘Public Spheres: Contested Monuments, Meanings, Identities, and Spaces’ at the University of Plymouth, 21st June 2005, Exeter, p. 5. 6. This striving, again, reflects the early hopes for independence, to construct a new and just society as well as importing the neo-liberal mode of economy. 7. I would like to specify here that the artists perceived the state of affairs in late 1998 in terms of crisis. As the results of the 1998 presidential elections showed, the majority of the population favoured the new political orientation that combined the rhetoric of nationalist ideology with the promise of rapid commercialization and economic growth. 8. It is worth mentioning that the parliament session taking place when the killings occurred was being broadcast on public TV in Armenia. 9. It is, perhaps, worth mentioning the following text that accompanies No Return: “No More history… You get up in the morning and you don’t know what to do. Life has become mechanical and unbearable. You have lost your ideals. To act for satisfaction is as senseless as not to act. Nature does not obey you. You grow old. You strive for illusions, you are forgetting the reality, which is indifferent towards you. You have appeared in the middle of a frantic storm. You do not know how and on whom to take revenge. To become a terrorist or to commit suicide.” 10. Vardan Azatyan, ‘Hishoghutyun ev/kam moratsutyun: Patmakanatsnelov Hayastani jamanakakic arvesty’, Revisor, no. 1, December 2006 (to be published). 11. According to Robert Anchor, the ideology of eighteenth-century Enlightenment combined two oppositions: the heroic striving towards absolute liberty and freedom, on the one hand, and the bourgeois desire to control this freedom by the dictate of one class on the other hand (Anchor 1967: 10). 12. It is worth mentioning an example of a different kind of rejection of history that is also gender-specific: Lusine Davidyan, a female artist of a younger generation working in the same period, elaborates upon the repressive backlash into traditionalism in a different and more subtle manner. Her photo installation My Blood Does Not Remember Your History (2003) is not the total rejection of history but its narratives constructed by specific ideologies rooted within biological associations of nation, race and ethnicity that the artist refuses to accept.


References Anchor, R. (1967), The Enlightenment Tradition, University of California Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London. Azatyan, V. (2005), Art Communities, Public Spaces, and Collective Actions in Armenian Contemporary Art”, paper presented at the conference “Public Spheres: Contested Monuments, Meanings, Identities, and Spaces” at the University of Plymouth, 21st June, Exeter. Azatyan, V. (2006), “Hishoghutyun ev/kam moratsutyun: Patmakanatsnelov Hayastani jamanakakic arvesty” in Revisor, No. 1, December (to be published). Burger, P. (1984), Theory of the Avant-Garde, University of Minnesota Press. ˇufer, E. (2006), “Enjoy Me, Abuse Me, I am Your Artist: Cultural Politics, Their Monuments, Their Ruins” C in (ed.) IRWIN, East Art Map, Afterall, University of the Arts, London. Groys, B. (1992), The Total art of Stalinism: Avant-garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship and Beyond, Princeton University Press. Groys, B (2006), “Art Beyond the Art Market” in (ed.) IRWIN, East Art Map, University of the Arts, London.

4 Art Communities, Public Spaces and Collective Actions in Armenian Contemporary Art

Vardan Azatyan The 9th December 1988 was the day of my 8th birthday. Two days earlier, on 7th December, a disastrous earthquake shook Northern Armenia, killing more than twenty-five thousand people and leaving hundreds of thousands homeless. We had many friends in the cities at the epicentre. After three agonizing days of endless searching, the dead body of our close friend’s sister at last was found on my birthday. For me, death and birth were interwoven on that day. Earlier, in the autumn of the same year, members of the 3rd Floor, an artistic-cultural movement (1987–(1990)–1994), performed a happening with the symptomatic name Hail to Artists’ Union from the Nether World/Official Art has Died. The artists intervened in the annual official exhibition of the Artist’s Union in the guise of resurrected ghosts to demonstrate the end of the official art through ritually interweaving death with life through their metamorphic rebirth. In the late 1980s it was indeed difficult to differentiate between what was alive and what was dead in perestroika Armenia both factually and symbolically. Symbolically, Armenia was experiencing the death of the whole Soviet system which, like a birthday, could indeed be a matter of celebration. In fact, Armenia experienced this transition most dramatically. Anti-Soviet mass demonstrations started to take place in early 1988 marking the birth of a strong nationalist movement. This was the start of the campaign for Nagorno-Karabakh to be separated from Azerbaijan and united with Armenia. Thousands of Armenian refugees fled from Azerbaijan (a


great number of them were living in the streets and city parks of Yerevan). At this time the first military engagements of Armenians and Azerbaijanis took place, which then transformed into a bloody war between the two states lasting until the truce in 1994. These events were followed by the devastating earthquake with enormous causalities shook the country. The urban space became an arena flooded with social unrest, nationalist sentiments, preparation for war and refugees. Along with all this there were the coffins of the victims of the earthquake on the cars passing by. It seemed that death was literally walking the streets of the city, just as the ghostly members of the movement walked through the exhibition. The 3rd Floor artists were very much inspired by hard rock culture, and the happening was at the same time reminiscent of the theme of the songs by Black Sabbath about the resurrection of an antihero. Thus, the happening can be interpreted as an artistic ‘sabotage’ of the official exhibition (it was not by chance that one of the sketches of the 3rd Floor exhibition poster was in the style of Black Sabbath’s album Sabotage). The happening was one of the first examples of collective artistic actions appropriating public/state space in Armenia. The artists were like characters from a phantasmagorical play; one was a blind man with nuts in his eyes, the other had a Kiss-style make-up on his face. The procession of these heroes from the abyss (perhaps a metaphor for the cultures repressed by the Soviet regime) walked silently through the exhibition. After viewing the works, the ghostly procession left the show. The message was quite clear; the dead are the proper audience for an official exhibition of an already dying system. The preoccupation with the rhetoric of rebirth was quite symptomatic for the Soviet avant-garde of Perestroika. One can draw a parallel between the happening by the 3rd Floor artists and Grisha Bruskin’s The Birth of the Hero in Moscow of the same year. But there were also important differences; unlike The Birth of the Hero, for example, the 3rd Floor happening did not have an individual author. But, ironically, a number of important members of the movement at that time were officially affiliated with the administrative structure of the same Artists’ Union: they were in charge of the youth art section of the Union after the success of the first 3rd Floor exhibition in 1987 (it was held in the third floor of the Union, hence, the name of the movement). Thus, the ghosts in the exhibition at the same time were legitimate parts of the official institution they wanted to sabotage. This was a typical example of the way in which the 3rd Floor appropriated the space offered by perestroika politics: they occupied the space in order to destroy it, a sort of parasitic strategy which, as a rule, overlaps with self-destruction. This strategy, in turn, marked the ‘death’ of the avant-garde that opposed the Soviet system in a confrontational way. And it is not at all surprising that the happening enjoyed a general success; the prevailing and popular need (even among the circles of the ‘official’ painters affiliated with the Artists Union) to see something new in boring and uniform exhibitions of the Union was very much in tune with the avant-garde artists’ stance. Their philosophy, however, was formed in opposition to the official cultural politics of the Soviet Union. The dynamics of the functioning of the Soviet avant-garde in opposition to the system is well described by Boris Groys:

Art Communities, Public Spaces and Collective Actions | 45

Official censorship in Soviet Russia, which was grounded in the combined power of existing political institutions, can be seen as the only means by which Soviet culture could maintain itself as “high” culture. The struggle against this system of censorship involved an attempt to expand available “Soviet” space by appropriating the maximum number of signs betokening the “non-Soviet” (Groys 1997: 82). One can assume that this kind of resistance was possible in as much as there remained Soviet cultural institutions to resist; one can regard the happening in the Artists Union as an example of such resistance. But the failure of these institutions (in our case already exemplified by the fact of incorporating the avant-garde artists into the system) ‘has therefore meant, among other things, the impossibility of any further cultural transgression against them’ (Groys 1997: 82). Groys continues: ‘But to the extent that Russian culture remains Other to Western high culture (as theorists of classic modernism always claimed), the only remaining possibility for post-Soviet Russian art is to appropriate itself within the context of Western, modernist high art’ (Groys 1997: 82). According to Groys, ‘The system of unofficial art thus functioned as a kind of analogue to “high” art…But since this unofficial art had no institutional power whatsoever, its appropriative strategies were more of a fantasy than reality’ (Groys 1997: 83). In our case, this emphasis on fantasy is of fundamental importance; it was a dream, I would claim, that first became the available ‘Soviet space’ where Soviet artists could appropriate ‘signs betokening the “non-Soviet”’. This idea, in turn, is confirmed by Arman Grigoryan’s vignette (he was the ideologue of the movement): During one of the never-ending discussions accompanying the first 3rd Floor exhibition, I recall that an artist frustrated by my works directed me a question-accusation; “Why did you paint Cadillac? There is no such car in Armenia”. I gave him a hamasteghtsakan answer, saying: “When we were students [my friend] told me his dream where he saw the Led Zeppelin concert (except photographs [my friend] saw neither movies, nor video films (which were not widely spread at that time) about Led Zeppelin)” (Grigoryan 1993). Signs like Cadillac and Led Zeppelin, though quite different, were perceived as being the same for Soviet avant-garde artist in a sense of being ‘non-Soviet’ dreams. An interesting parallel can be drawn between the 3rd Floor and the Independent Group formed in the immediate post-war period in Britain. British pop artists endorsed what Alloway dubbed as an ‘aesthetics of plenty’. However, as David Hopkins puts it (and this, in a sense, can be true for the 3rd Floor, as well): …the IG openly celebrated Americana, avoiding political side-taking…at a time when Britain was attuned to scarcity…In this dour climate it is understandable that they looked to the consumerist diversity of a post-Depression culture. Broadly speaking they welcomed the shift in power from the state to the marketplace, but it was unclear at times where their sympathies lay (Hopkins 2000: 98–99).


We can assume that Soviet avant-garde communities, including the art produced there, embodied imaginary communication with the contemporary culture of western democracies. Thus, the anti-Soviet art community was a small ‘dream in reality’ functioning as a sphere of collective dreaming about ‘high’ art (Arman Grigoryan’s ‘Armenican Dream’ signifies this logic); a dream which, in the official Soviet public space, had the appearance of a nightmare in the happening Hail… This imaginary communication became the main artistic strategy of the 3rd Floor, which was later to be confirmed by Nazareth Karoyan, the art critic of the movement. In 1995, he distinguished two main lines that helped to shape the artistic situation in Yerevan in the late 1980s and early 1990s: ‘First, is the passionate desire to be in communication with the experience of others, and second is the vital need to create “your own balance”, your measurement. Because of the absence of this measurement, various distorted views about the surrounding reality emerge’ (Karoyan 1995: 95). The tension between the desire to communicate and the need for self-consciousness was implicit in the 3rd Floor’s practices in that western cultural signs here were significantly transformed in the process of being transferred from western context into the Soviet one (as was the case with Cadillac and Led Zeppelin), thus producing a false conception about the contextual meanings of the signs. This means they could literally refer to anything in the Soviet context. As a consequence, the 3rd Floor produced extremely fluid and diverse art that had no particular conceptual framework. Nazareth Karoyan dubbed it Hamasteghtsakan or, collectively, made in Armenian. Arman Grigoryan, reflecting upon Karoyan’s initial conceptualization of the terms, writes in his essay ‘What is Hamasteghtsakan Art’: ‘…Hamasteghtsakan Art once and forever liberates the work of art from the chains of high and low, old and new, ours and others’, objective and subjective, figurative and non-figurative, expensive and cheap, accepted and unaccepted, styles and schools, technique and technology’ (Grigoryan 1993). Apparently they strove to liberate both the creative process and subjectivity literally from everything. Nevertheless, I would argue that this total freedom was itself a ‘sign betokening the “non-Soviet” (Groys 1997) or “the experience of others”’ (Karoyan 1995). Therefore, the dream about absolute artistic freedom refers to the liberal individualist ideology of freedom. An excerpt from the 1992 3rd Floor manifesto illustrates this point: The human, realizing himself as an actively creative individual, also realizes that the sole meaning of life is life itself. By this he overcomes the tragic schism with nature, and as opposed to pre-individualistic periods, he obtains confidence in his abilities. Freedom is the dynamic belief based on spontaneous activity. Freedom appears as a sense of human individuality…Freedom is an opportunity to be with yourself. Nothing and no one is able to deprive man of his inner individuality or diffuse his inner self-will1 (Grigoryan, Grigoryan, Matsakyan et al. 1992: 96). As a whole, we can assume that the 3rd Floor was a laboratory of contemporary art history whose function was to make up for the lack of contemporary art discourse within the framework of a limited number of exhibitions.


Arguably, they were united not because they all shared some positive idea; rather they were united in order to be against the system. It is not accidental that after the breakdown of the 3rd Floor in 1994, Arman Grigoryan made an attempt to form a new movement on the basis of the 3rd Floor called DEM (meaning ‘against’ in Armenian). The solidarity developing, by merely being against everything denoting the Soviet Union, signified an ideological weakness which resulted in uncritically embracing the liberal individualist ideology of freedom. Art communities, analogous to their exhibitions, resembled domestic laboratories trying to function like bourgeois public spheres within and against the discourse of the state-socialist public sphere. These were public spheres existing mainly in private spaces (i.e., studios, apartments, etc.) while their artistic positions were essentially bourgeois: the individual liberty of the artist, the notion of a homogeneous and inseparable artist/subject, the autonomous nature of art, art’s ability to affect and delight, etc. These values, however, were seen as politically resistant and, therefore, ‘leftist’ in the context of the Soviet system. Nevertheless, as previously mentioned, during perestroika, it was almost impossible to maintain a critical distance, as to be anti-Soviet in the late 1980s was itself somewhat Soviet. At the same time, as Nancy Fraser argues in her seminal essay, it is doubtful whether the sphere of total freedom and equality can be developed in the larger discourse of non-freedom and inequality: ‘This conception [of a bourgeois public sphere] assumes that a public sphere is or can be a space of zero degree culture, so utterly bereft of any specific ethos as to accommodate with perfect neutrality and equal ease interventions expressive of any and every cultural ethos’ (Fraser 1990: 64). The bourgeois view of art as ‘utterly bereft of any specific ethos’ is clearly expressed in Arman Grigoryan’s definition of Hamasteghtsakan Art. If we are to believe Nancy Fraser, we should assume that the relations of subordination present in the larger society of Armenia should penetrate into the art communities as well. This assumption is confirmed by the marginalized status of women artists in the movement.2 The preservation of artistic individuality was dependent upon the status of an individual artist outside the art community, and male artists enjoyed the privilege of being qualified as individuals. Not to mention that the notion of an inseparable individual artist/author is itself a masculine ideal, reflecting the ‘theological’ persona of the ‘Author-God’, as described by Barthes. The 3rd Floor was a male-dominated movement. In their first manifesto of 1988, the members listed and quoted were all male, despite the fact that there were also important women members in the group (3rd Floor 1989: 54–57). It was common to refer to the group members by other members ‘as the guys of the group’ (Nazareth Karoyan, Arman Grigoryan) (3rd Floor 1989: 53–54). This masculine behaviour itself was in tune with the typical image of the 3rd Floor in general. As Arman Grigoryan explains: We were often criticized for being aggressive. Perhaps this attitude is triggered by the posters of the 3rd Floor which often depict shameless punks or males shooting at the audience. Or perhaps it was due to our direct attitude freed from psychological complexes or our appearance that challenged conventions as well as our statements


intolerant to any denigration. But to me, one of the guys of the 3rd Floor, this criticism does not sound to be convincing since amazement and the desire to amaze lies at the foundation of art (3rd Floor 1989: 54–56). As a result of this, Karine Matsakyan appears as one of the ‘guys of the 3rd Floor’ in Mshakuyt monthly. This masculinity was certainly present in the stylistic and technical dimensions of the 3rd Floor exhibitions. Their artworks were almost always on a large scale and were aimed to have a strong visual affect on the viewer. In the 3rd Floor exhibitions, size did matter. At the same time, the references to vandals, the motive of bulls and sharks in the work of Arman Grigoryan and the gestural ejaculative action of Kiki, another important member of the movement, again betray their positions of masculinity. This, in turn, could be found within the art communities, where relations of domination over each other were, after all, a common thing. These relationships were further fostered by the closed system of information: those who had access to information were privileged.3 Thus, in an already segregated society the working of the abstractly emancipatory avant-garde discourse is, indeed, subject to the relationship of domination and subordination. Nancy Fraser concludes: ‘Where societal inequality persists, deliberative processes in public spheres will tend to operate to the advantage of dominant groups and to the disadvantage of subordinates’ (Fraser 1990:66). As the community of the 3rd Floor artists was semi-private and semi-public, so the Hail…can be considered as a private public collective initiative.4 And it is not by chance that their characters were united by the fact of being dead. One can say that it wasn’t a collective action per se. Rather, it was a cluster of different individuals with individually chosen heroes. Their heavy reliance on fantasy, dreams and myth gave their action theatrical and carnivalesque pathos, as contemporary art was, to an extent, a means of transcendence (to recall Arman Grigoryan’s vignette). Embracing the logic of the spectacle, the 3rd Floor artists were not free from the inner logic of ‘The Society of the Spectacle’: a logic of success and domination. On one hand, the success-oriented mentality already reflected the major changes in the whole political-economical structure of the Soviet Union: independence from the state enterprise and the promotion of private enterprise had been launched by the Soviet government in 1987. On the other hand, the successful businesses were those who already possessed Soviet capital (for instance, former state chinovnik’s who were overnight transformed into ‘businessmen’ operating on a ‘free market’). This new configuration of power continues within the discourse of masculinity, which was culturally the neo-conservative side of these neo-liberal changes. In short, the freedoms of a neo-liberal economy did not get rid of the traditional patriarchal hierarchy. It is significant that while in the 1980s in Europe and the US, there was a strong anti-neoconservative mood in the conceptual art camp, in the former USSR the neo-conservative politics of the free market economy was endorsed by the perestroika avant-garde as a progressive alternative to stateplanned socialism. But from the late 1980s on, neo-conservative ideology was becoming mainstream in the political-economical map of the former Soviet Union.5 Post-Soviet Armenian contemporary art inherited the assumption from Hamasteghtsakan Art that formalist art is politically leftist and resistant. An attempt to overcome the 3rd Floor’s


preoccupation with the rhetoric of aesthetics and its resulting political formalism was made by a short-lived group of artists (1994–1996) formed in immediate post-Soviet years. This group was called ACT, and its practices exemplified a shift from creation to action, from image to text, and from closed/gallery spaces to open/public spaces. The project which incorporated all of these features was a group action called Art Demonstration that took place in 1995 within the framework of a Russian-Armenian contemporary art exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. The members of the group organized a public march from one of the main city parks in front of modernist painter Martiros Saryan’s statue to the museum along the main avenue of Yerevan. They were carrying slogans such as No Art, New State, New Culture, New Art, etc. By 1995, people in Armenia had already become well accustomed to huge street demonstrations where the urban space became the main arena for the mass articulation of political positions. In this context, Art Demonstration has usually been interpreted as art’s response to this socialpolitical situation and an example of utilization of the methods of this social articulation (Saxenhuber, Schöllhammer 2003: 17). But there were two other important sides of this action which were connected with significant institutional transformations in the newly formed state. The first transformation was related to the coming to the fore of the issue of citizenship (which was fostered by popular referendums and elections); the new state required active citizens, who would be involved in the continuous processes of shaping democracy. Demonstration aimed at showing that this changed role of the citizen affected art’s realm and that it touched the artist as well. The artist is an acting citizen, and art (or making art) is a means of civic action. This essentially post-Soviet principle of the politically active artist/citizen was in opposition to the still Soviet image of the 3rd Floor artists as being resurrected dead men. The Art Demonstration was entirely void of any theatrical and mythical allusions; it was conceived as a pure action of civic commitment demanding an Art Referendum (another text on their slogans). Another important aspect of the Demonstration was reflected in the economic changes in the independent state, and most important, the neo-liberal economic policies of privatization and the price liberalization programme that the government launched the same year. The Demonstration, as well as transforming the realm of contemporary art into a voting arena, aimed at equating the domain of the market economy with the domain of art, calling for Free Market Relations in Art and Economy (yet another text on their slogans). The celebration of market economy logic as an alternative to Soviet state-planned economy, however, was considered to be a progressive virtue of the post-Soviet alternative art. This, in turn, shows that with all their conspicuous opposition to the 3rd Floor imagery, they continued the heavy reliance on the liberal individualist ideology used by Soviet artists. The methodological individualism of the free market philosophy seriously threatened ACT’s solidarity. With all their socially committed positions they, again with the general stance of the 3rd Floor, believed that art is a domain of pure creation (artistic formalism was transformed from image into the analytical linguistic practices inspired by Josef Kosuth). They also inherited the totalizing and abstracting rhetoric of the 3rd Floor, and this influence was reflected both on their concerns with abstract categories of art and action and the resulting universalistic claims of the demonstrators. This totalizing and abstract language again betrays the masculine stance


of the group, symbolically manifested by the fact that the female artists were in the rearguard of the Demonstration. However, ACT, through appropriation of the urban space, attempted to enthusiastically address the issues of democracy rather than confronting the newly formed Armenian state. On one hand, they were still under the influence of the Soviet avant-garde legacy and, on the other, they were committed to an ideal of democracy (however obscure) characterized as a liberal representative democracy. This ideal of democracy is defined by David Held as ‘a cluster of rules, procedures and institutions permitting the broadest involvement of the majority of citizens, not in political affairs as such, but in the selection of representatives who alone can make political decisions.’ (Held in Archibugin and Held 1995: 97). Endorsing this model of democracy, the artists found themselves very much in tune with the political course adopted by the official policy of the neo-liberal government of Armenia. Hence, the post-Soviet avantgarde artists in Armenia were aligned with mainstream politics, as their predecessors were in the vanguard of perestroika politics. Thus, while attempting to overcome the theatrical pathos of the 3rd Floor, the social-political messages of Demonstration turned into the examples of pure art inside the walls of the museum, as they installed their slogans on the walls like pictures. Thus, the slogans became commodified elements of the exposition. This move from an open public space to a representative museum space was very much in accordance with the effects of representative democracy in Armenian society. In this dynamic of moving from an open social representation to a closed ritualized representation, one can discern what I call the main problem of Armenian contemporary art with social claims; the quest for socially conscious art is confined by the ideal of pure art. This dynamic inherited from the Soviet avant-garde almost always disappoints artists who see their art as a vehicle for democracy. The tension between pure art and social art resulted in the dissolution of the ACT group. Later, artists tried to provide individual solutions to the problem. One of the ways to solve this tension was again to resort to myth and allegory; a solution exemplified by the later work of David Kareyan, an important member of the ACT group. In the late 1990s his pure art of text and action was turned into an extremely mythologized art production sated with brutal imagery of barbarism, which I describe as sexual-political rituals (scenes quite close to Herman Nitsch’s Theatre of Orgy and Mystery). Here, the political was traumatically internalized and then articulated through the body politics of suffering and violence. In 2000 David Kareyan did a performance called Sweet Repression of Ideology with a strong political message. In the performance, the artist sits in a wheelchair tearing and cooking the pages of a book by Armenian nationalist academicians; he also reads excerpts from the book with a megaphone. The performance took place in the closed space of the Armenian Center for Contemporary Experimental Art (ACCEA) at the opening of the exhibition Collapse of Illusions (curator Sonia Balassanian). Interestingly enough, the entrance to the exhibition had an age restriction (because of the explicit nature of some works). Thus, the work, due to the obviously strong political message, could only be seen behind closed doors.


This isolationist strategy was arguably partly forced by the turbulent political situation in Armenia in the late 1990s. In 1998 nationalist Robert Kocharyan was elected president after his predecessor’s, Levon Ter-Petrosyan, resignation over the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. On 27th October of 1999 gunmen opened fire in the Parliament; the prime minister, parliamentary speaker and six other senior officials were killed. This unprecedented act of bloody terror was a violent intervention into, perhaps, the main focal point of official public deliberations; speech was interrupted by violence. It symbolically represented the objective distrust Armenian society had towards official procedures of public deliberation. This violence, which seriously damaged the whole society, was symbolically represented through the damaged body of the artist in the wheelchair, who in accordance with a general distrust towards language and speech was cooking texts. Kareyan, an artist who once was in the vanguard of the public Art Demonstration, was overwhelmed by texts. But, from a historical perspective, the fate of Demonstration was not very different: the public initiative intended the museum space as its final destination, and the texts they carried turned into further material for exhibition. These texts, just like the texts cooked in David Kareyan’s performance, later ended up as material for an art-book with the symbolic title ‘Dissolving Words’. Thus, they were again subject to commodified representation. After all, the role of the artist as a closed-space protestor had its precedence in the 3rd Floor’s Hail…We can assume that David Kareyan in his performance again resorted to the Soviet posture of a repressed avant-garde artist whose resistance is in his ability to ritually appear in the role of a victim. But was there any alternative besides again resorting to the pathos of the Soviet avant-garde model of a victimized artist? Perhaps not. The reason for this restoration, I would argue, was partly the persistence of the totalizing political rhetoric in art communities, as opposed to a socially specific perspective on the relationship of art and politics. As a result, the politics articulated in art appears to be Big Politics.6 In the former USSR, as almost all information was officially politicized, the addressee of the artists’ political message was ‘the official Other’ (in the case of the 3rd Floor’s happening it was the official Soviet cultural politics embodied in Artist’s Union). This approach, by implication, fostered the totalizing political rhetoric of artists and made them overlook the socially specific problems underlying official politics. This thinking laid the ground for, perhaps, the main belief of the Soviet avant-garde, that it is possible to make socially conscious art in a socially isolated space and that it is possible to solve social problems within art itself. The logical consequence of this situation would be an elitist conception of contemporary art as ‘high’ art (to recall Groys), which is a rarified sphere of progressive individuals located above the larger society. Meanwhile, the latter is considered nothing but a crowd; an obscure object of resistance. The favorite tool for this kind of resistance is allegory and other transcending strategies (as was the case with the sexual-political rituals of David Kareyan). This ‘miraculous’ strategy of being isolated from the public sphere but at the same time being an active part of it could be seen as an artistically analogous to representative democracy. However, direct artistic intervention in the public sphere entails the problem of democracy which is, of course, more than representative democracy and which, perhaps, coincides with what C. B. Macpherson described as ‘participatory democracy’. In the words of Rosalyn Deutsche, this would mean ‘taking democracy seriously’(Deutsche 1992: 34), a position which is needed in order to overcome the understanding of democracy as a


‘method’ and to proceed towards democracy as ‘content’, as a system promoting social and not merely legal rights.7 This means not only legal representation for the majority, but the social representation of socially marginalized groups or anti-public spheres. The artist in this case would be neither a mythic symbol of a dying system (Hail…), nor a formal citizen of a newly formed state (Art Demonstration), but a social agent working in direct contact with the public sphere and dealing with actually existing social stratifications. Art, in this sense, is not a ceremony which appropriates social realities into mythologized discourses, nor is it an attempt to wash away this reality through formal slogans of civic action. Nevertheless, both of these strategies were indeed important and relevant for the period in which they emerged. But today in order to go beyond the strategies of ritualized myth and formalist language, perhaps one has come to terms with the afterlife of the Soviet past in today’s Armenia and to seriously re-address the problem of the relationship between the artistic avant-garde and political power. Vardan Azatyan is an art historian, critic and curator, teaching at Fine Arts Academy, Yerevan, Armenia.

Notes 1. The manifesto was signed by Arman Grigoryan, Ruben Grigoryan, Karine Matsakyan, Arevik Arvevshatyan, Arax Nerkararyan, Gagik Charchyan, Arshak Nazaryan, Arthur Sagsyan, Narine Mkrtchyan, Nazareth Karoyan, Ara Hovsepyn, Kiki, Raffi Adalyan, Karen Andreassia, Ararar Sargsyan, Ofenbach and Arsen Azatyan. 2. These concerns about male domination in the movement were keenly expressed by one of the more important female representatives of the movement, Karine` Matsakyan, in a private conversation. We can view Matsakyan’s painting I Am Afraid of Myself (1989) as an expression of the internalized fear and inner dilemma of a female artist. 3. In this light, perhaps it is not by chance that Arman Grigoryan in his important essay dealing with the art communities in perestroika Armenia connects the possession of information with fear. See Arman Grigoryan, ‘Informed but Scared: “the 3rd Floor” Movement, Parajanov, Beuys and other Institutions’, in Adieu Parajanov: Contemporary Art from Armenia, (eds.) H. Saxenhuber and G. Schöllhammer, Vienna: Springerin, 2003, pp. 10–12. 4. For information regarding the Soviet unofficial public sphere as a private public sphere, see Victor Voronkov, ‘Life and Death of the Public Sphere in the Soviet Union’, in Debates and Credits: Media/ Art/Public Domain, Amsterdam: De Balie-Centre for Culture and Politics, 2002, p. 103. 5. In the early 1990s, the most successful representatives of the movement were engaged in organizing a number of important state-sponsored contemporary art exhibitions abroad, particularly in Moscow and Germany. 6. Examples of such work are Arman Grigoryan’s Killer Without Pay (2004), Hovhannes Margaryan’s CNN (2005) and David Kareyan’s They Drink Oil (2002). 7. This distinction between democracy as method and democracy as content was made by Cerroni in Torres (1998: 151).


References ‘Artistic Manifesto’, (1992), Garoun, no. 10 (in Armenian). Cerroni, U. in Torres, C. A. (1998), Democracy, Education, and Multiculturalism; Dilemmas of Citizenship in the Global World, Boston: Rowman & Littlefield. Deutsche, R. (1992), ‘Art and Public Space: Questions of Democracy’, in Social Text, no. 33, Duke University Press, pp. 34–53. Fraser, N. (1990), ‘Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy’ in Social Text, no. 25/26, Duke University Press, pp. 56–80. Grigoryan, A. (1993), ‘What is Hamasteghtsakan Art’ http://www.naac.am/html/htmarm/textsarm/ hamastextsakan.htm (in Armenian) accessed 1993. Grigoryan, A. (2003), ‘Informed but Scared: “the 3rd Floor” Movement, Parajanov, Beuys and other Institutions’, in Adieu Parajanov: Contemporary Art from Armenia, (eds.) H. Saxenhuber and G. Schöllhammer, Vienna: Springerin, pp. 10–12. Groys, B. (1997), ‘A Style and a Half: Socialist Realism between Modernism and Postmodernism’, in Socialist Realism Without Shores, eds. Lahusen, T. Dobrenko, E. Durham: Duke University Press. Held, D. (1995), ‘Democracy and the New Political Order’, in Cosmopolitan Democracy: An Agenda for a New World Order, (eds.) Archibugi, D. and Held, D. Cambridge, England: Polity Press. Hopkins, D. (2000), After Modern Art 1945–2000, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 98–99. Karoyan, N. (1995), ‘In the Labyrinths of the becoming of the Alternative Tradition’, Garoun, no. 2 (in Armenian). Voronkov, V. (2002), ‘Life & Death of the Public Sphere in the Soviet Union’, in Debates and Credits: Media/Art/Public Domain, Amsterdam: De Balie-Centre for Culture and Politics. 3rd Floor: “They about Themselves” (1989), in Mshakuyt, no 2/3, pp. 54–57 (in Armenian).

5 Appropriating the Ex-Cold War

Malcolm Miles In the new world order of free market capitalism, residual signs of state socialism are appropriated for new purposes. How are such signs read when the ideology they once denoted is encapsulated in history? What happens when signs which exist as material objects, or are re-created as visual icons, are de- and then re-contextualized? Do they act as if the freely floating signifiers of a system of difference (Barthes 1982), evacuated of the meanings they once carried; or are they haunted by traces of their pasts? Would a re-categorization of these already re-located visual signs recover their meanings? My aim in this chapter is to open these questions. I will focus on four cases: two material elements of the visual culture of the Soviet period; and two appropriations of the emblematic representation of that past for market purposes, one in the ex-East, the other in the ex-West. They are a statue of Lenin removed to a forest park in Lithuania; a section of the Berlin Wall in an urban plaza in New York; a hammer and sickle outside a restaurant in Yerevan; and the word Revolution as the name of a bar in Manchester. I will outline a context in which to reconsider these traces or appropriations of the Cold War; in seeking to know how to read these signs, I will turn to Baudrillard’s idea that an economy of signs has replaced an economy of things but note that Baudrillard’s position is contested by some writers in the social sciences. I will look next at the sculpture park at Grutas, Lithuania called Stalin World to which Soviet-period statues were removed. I wonder if the park is like a museum of modern art where disparate objects are presented in the unifying aesthetic of a value-free space. But, I am unsure how I will read these emblems of an ideology which never realized its potential, aware I am a foreigner.


Context After 1989 and the dismantling of the Berlin Wall, and after 1991 and the break-up of the Soviet Union, the boundary between an East bloc and a West bloc, each defined in the eyes of the adversary as not-the-other, dissolved. These events were sudden, though the growth of East-bloc consumerism in the 1970s followed by an economic downturn in the 1980s, with problems of distribution and price rises as state socialism tried to adjust to market forces, can be seen as contributing to a breakdown of compliance to regimes already regarded as corrupt and inept (Stitziel 2005; see also Singer 2001). It was never, though, that the rival ideologies had completely distinct visual cultures. Just as their space exploration programmes competed on broadly similar terms, so elements of their visual cultures had similarities as well as differences. Despite Clement Greenberg’s attack on Socialist Realism in his essay on art and kitsch, in which he sees the function of an avantgarde as keeping art moving ‘in the midst of ideological confusion’ (Greenberg 1986: 8) its depiction of farm and factory workers is not so different from that of rural and small-town people in North American regionalism. Similarities are evident, too, in architecture. Susan Buck-Morss observes the visual debt of designs for the (unbuilt) Palace of the Soviets to the Empire State Building in New York. (Buck-Morss 2002: 174–205). In a different way the Moscow metro with its lavish decoration reverts to the visual language of an aristocratic visual culture, thereby referencing a pre-revolutionary period in which Russian culture was essentially European. Buck-Morss relates that in the glasnost era, residents of Moscow compared the metro to Disneyworld ‘except that it cost only a few kopecks to enter’ (BuckMorss 2002: 208). To find a more striking divergence between Soviet visual culture and one of its adversaries, it is necessary to look at the pavilions of the Soviet Union and Germany in the 1937 Paris World Exposition. These stood facing each other. On top of one stood Vera Mukhina’s Worker and Collective Farm Girl (1937 see Wilson 1993); on the other a tightly stylized German eagle. Human empathy faced a de-humanizing abstraction, but Nazism had its own blood-and-soil version of regionalism as well. And, as Ernst Bloch argued in his essays on Nazi culture, they appropriated the torchlight parade, the rousing song and the banner from the Left in an aestheticization of politics (Bloch 1991). Today there is no border between an ex-Federal and an ex-Democratic Germany. Most obstacles have been removed for travel between ex-East and ex-West states. Elements of the East’s security system remain but as relics to remind tourists of a past that becomes a historical curiosity or negative exotic [Figure 1]. Many of the states of the ex-East bloc are now members of an expanded European Community. Many of their citizens are affected by the new economy’s prices which float as freely as signifiers in postmodern linguistics. But then, in the ex-West, people must adapt to flexible working patterns and a fluidity in the siting of production. Buck-Morss writes: During the Cold War…there was a political as well as an economic motivation behind the West’s promotion of consumerist dreams. Now…it is not clear that the working classes in these countries will continue to be wooed by the carrot of commodity consumerism…Under the new order of global capitalism, workers in the first world are dispensable. And so are the homes and cities in which they dwell (Buck-Morss 2002: 209).

appropriating the ex-cold war | 57

Perhaps the new world order unites the non-rich of all countries in an abjection in face of which there is no obvious tactic of resistance. Zygmunt Bauman remarks: Thrown into a vast open sea with no navigation charts and all the marker buoys sunk and barely visible, we have only two choices left: we may rejoice in the breath-taking vistas of new discoveries or we may tremble out of fear of drowning. One option not… realistic is to claim sanctuary…(Bauman 1998: 85). Meanwhile, the poor grow more distanced globally from the rich, in mobility and legal protection as well as money. The categories East and West are not, however, the only categories to have dissolved in the new world order. Well before the dismantling of the Wall, categories such as the fine arts (beaux arts), defined as not-popular culture, were challenged in Pop Art and new media. In academic work, the rise of Cultural Studies introduced intermediate cultural forms such as film and jazz, then popular culture and sub-cultures, to critical discourse. By the 1990s, artists, designers, architects and art school-educated advertising and publicity executives saw themselves as an emerging cosmopolitan, cultural class. Also in the 1990s, the term Visual Culture united all visual media in an undifferentiated field of academic work increasingly open to digital media and electronic communications. So, today the boundaries of art, new media, fashion, design, architecture, advertising, public relations, leisure, sport and lifestyle consumption are no longer policed in the way taken for granted fifty years previously. One side of this is the co-option of contemporary and museum cultures to city marketing in global competition for inward investment and tourism; another is the efforts of cultural producers (including artists and independent curators and critics) to re-formulate the autonomy claimed in Modernist art. While, then, the immaterial production of creative work is central to the symbolic economies of cities (Zukin 1995), and the cultural production is increasingly subsumed in entertainment and spectacle (assisted by artists’ desire for fame), or conscripted to non-arts-funding agendas in health and education in an expediency Figure 1. Watchtower in the Harz Mountains, Germany, of cultural policy (assisted by an expanding cultural bureaucracy‘s desire for status see on the previous Federal-Democratic border.


Yúdice 2003), the naïve question arises what else? If art is the means to celebrity status, what price its claims to authenticity or insight? The Wall and the Hammer and Sickle The Berlin Wall, officially termed by its builders in 1961 the Border Security System West, was a visual icon of the Cold War alongside statues of Marx and Lenin and the May Day parades in Moscow. The Wall’s west-facing side was covered with graffiti by the time of its dismantling (the fourth construction constituting the Wall). The first Wall was a set of concrete blocks linked by wire. Successive improvements led to the use in the 1980s of pre-fabricated concrete sections as used in systems-built mass housing. This gave a flat, blank concrete surface an excellent canvas for graffiti. In the East this was not allowed (but artists articulated opposition in coded ways). In the West, people added their amateur or professional images and slogans to the Wall. New York graffiti artist Keith Haring was commissioned to decorate a 400-metre section promotion of the West‘s free art (paid for by the sponsor). When the Wall was dismantled people hacked it, taking away small pieces to prove they had been there, had really participated in history; or to prove by re-enactment that the old regime had really fallen. In contrast to informal appropriations for personal memory, at least two complete sections of the Wall were removed and transported to the United States: one to the University of Texas at Austin, where it stands near the pet cemetery; the other to New York,

Figure 2. Section of the Berlin Wall in New York.


where it decorates a small plaza near the Museum of Modern Art. The East-facing side, as it had been, is next to the wall of an adjoining building, out of sight. The West-facing side with its graffiti looks out to the spectator, behind neatly placed white garden furniture at which strollers take coffee [Figure 2]. This may be simply the extraction of spoils by the victor, like a captured flag in earlier wars. The colourful graffiti is a sign for freedom equivalent to Jackson Pollock‘s drip painting artists were not allowed to do that in the Soviet Union re-presented as victory monument. I ask, only, how the graffiti on the Wall compares in style and meaning to that which appeared at the same time on New York Subway trains. This latter graffiti was read as a sign that an underclass living in subway tunnels and sewers was about to rise up like a phantom to destroy the city. Tim Cresswell writes, ‘The fight against graffiti is a fight against all perceived forces of disorder and a conflict over the proper place to one’s meaning over different notions of dirt’ (Cresswell 1996: 46). In one view graffiti is transgressive, read as anti-social behaviour, vandalism of public property, and portent of urban doom (more or less along comic book lines). In another view, graffiti conveys freedom. In New York galleries it was also traded as art (Cresswell 1996: 36). Meaning seems not to have been evacuated from the Wall, though; more re-configured and adapted. I remember seeing the Wall on visits to New York in the 1990s. More recently, in 2005, I was walking to the metro in Yerevan, Armenia (a constituent republic of the Soviet Union until 1991). On a street corner, I noticed a rusting steel hammer and sickle a metre high [Figure 3].

Figure 3. Hammer and sickle, CCCP Restaurant, Yerevan.


At first, naïvely or nostalgically, I read it as part of the detritus of the Soviet period not cleared away when the statue of Stalin on a hill overlooking the city was replaced by Mother Armenia (still in Socialist Realist style), and a life-size Lenin was replaced by a public video screen in a flower bed in Republic Square. Armenia is low on resources. Many parts of the city are in transition. My second thought was that it might be art, a work of postmodern irony in a place where younger artists talk of making work in a context which is the absence of context after the passing of the old context of the Perestroika days. It was the sign for a restaurant called CCCP. Looking up I saw that these letters were also made in rusty steel a metre high, set on the wall of the building containing the restaurant in its basement. Next door was the head office in Armenia for Porsche (a German sports car manufacturer). The restaurant caters to a global market, like Porsche, and the derivation of signs such as the hammer and sickle, CCCP and the name Porsche is less important than their function as denoting brands, or a general idea of brands as the ideological currency of the new world order. The statue of Lenin remains in store in the basement of the National Museum. I can imagine it, assuming it to be like others, cap in hand or on head, arm outstretched or at the side…and so forth. Many buildings are also in store after making way for redevelopment, their grey and pink tufa blocks numbered in white for removal to store and eventual reconstruction in a heritage site elsewhere in the city. No-one believes they will be reconstructed, of course, any more than Lenin will again watch over Republic Square, or the poor will be given free money. Yet the sign CCCP has meaning; it is just that its meaning is non-specific; it does not require interpretation, only acceptance within a category of visual signs for the new world order in which the ideological imagery (but not the imaginary) of the ex-East is for sale. This does not mean the new world order has total sway, however: in the melting pot of cultural streams, residual socialism and internationalism collide with globalization but also with post-socialist nationalism. Some of the statues have been replaced by figures from a pre-Soviet history, in the same style and scale.

Figure 4. Genocide Memorial, Yerevan.

But the city has another monument on a hill overlooking the city a Genocide Memorial and Museum to commemorate the murder of 800,000 Armenians within the Ottoman Empire, beginning with the intellectuals, and loss of half the national territory. On 25th April 2006 Genocide Day I joined about three-quarters of a million people walking to the Genocide Memorial to lay flowers [Figure 4]. The experience suggests that in specific conditions public monuments retain a


capacity to create a public, to be invested with meanings which are both personal and social. This investment, that lends currency to the monuments concerned, is by mass consent, and although obviously mediated by all kinds of narratives it suggests a projection onto a more or less blank, grey monumental surface of feelings felt to be authentic by those who are there at the time. Intermediate Reflections: Withdrawing to the Bar I never lived under the system of state socialism. From the West, as a Leftist academic, I regard the philosophy on which it was based as open to revision. Marx is, with Freud and Darwin, one of the key thinkers of the century before last. The full potential of his work remains to be understood, but this involves critical adaptation in a postmodern world in which the working class is no longer a revolutionary force. Nonetheless, I dispute the claims of consumerism to give me an identity. As Adorno said of mass culture: ‘The dream industry does not so much fabricate the dreams of the customers as introduce the dreams of the suppliers among the people’ (Adorno 1991: 80), and ‘advertising becomes information when…the recognition of brand names has taken the place of choice’ (Adorno 1991: 73). Within brand-culture, the word Revolution is the name of a chain of bars in England [Figure 5]. One is in the Castlefield district of Manchester, next door to another bar called Fat Cats. The bar is specific in its reference. It sells vodka cocktails, and the letter ‘e’ in the name is reversed as a letter in the Cyrillic alphabet.

Figure 5. Revolution bar, Castlefield, Manchester.


I am not a vodka drinker and have not been inside the bar. My response is thus limited to the visual sign. How do I read it? Jean Baudrillard proposes a concept of sign-exchange as replacing the value previously invested in exchanges of goods, in an environment of simulacra. Drawing on Maussian anthropology, he is sceptical as to the prospect for empowerment through commodity consumption, seeing its triumph as sweeping away alternatives to its power a view not unlike Adorno’s. In the triumph of the sign, the desire and intention of the consuming subject are subsumed in a total system denoted by an array of signs for brands, a ‘system of objects’ (Gane 2003: 159). The sign assumes a universality of a kind previously aligned with the aesthetic. Yet, signs, like words in a language, are mutable in reception, and this may extend to the reintroduction as well as evacuation of meaning. If the currency, as it were, of a sign is mediated by its use, as money currency fluctuates in value according to the extent of confidence in its exchangeability, a possibility opens which Baudrillard does not deal with, for the recovery of meaning in signs. This will not re-enact past uses, but offers a (metaphorical) site of intervention, another chance for dialectics. This is not to say there is ever an authentic meaning for a specific sign, or can be after Saussure’s observation of an arbitrary relation between a verbal signifier and a signified thing. But if signs are completed in reception, so that completion is always in the future, unfinished and provisional, this offers an exit from the totality of the sign which Baudrillard tends to assert. Gary Bridge observes, citing Baudrillard’s For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign of 1981, that sign value heralds ‘a proliferation of signs and simulacra that collapse the distinction between the original and its copies’ (Bridge 2005: 122), which extends in a negative way Walter Benjamin’s frequently cited idea that reproducibility announces a democratization of culture. But there is a limit to how far the required reading of brands as superior to non-branded goods and experiences can be enforced, and, hence, a gap into which a recovery of other, possibly transgressive or subversive, meanings might emerge. The bar appropriates a history of revolution, of the Revolution of 1917, and an ideology now encapsulated in history the more so by its use here but it may act, too, as a reminder of history’s yet-to-be-gained potential. I have used the term appropriation above for the co-option of a sign to consumerism. But the word has another meaning in religious hermeneutics as an act of interpretation by which to achieve ‘an intimate communion of sense’ (Schökel 1998: 90). The reference is anachronistic but supports a possibility for re-reading signs, and a re-contextualization of the de-contextualized sign as an intentional act. Intentions are mediated by conditions, are not the free will of liberal humanism, and the idea of authenticity as unmediated representation is self-contradictory, viable only in reference to the pre-verbal. But this does not mean everything is fake; more that a grey area exists between the authentic and the equally impossible inauthentic. To pursue this in relation to Baudrillard, Vincent Mosco outlines two ways in which political economists take issue with his work: First…the argument for the emergence of commodification suggests one-dimensionalism, essentialism, and…fatalism…Second, it is not clear what the victory of commodity actually means because the sense of the term changes…in Baudrillard’s analysis…But to


the extent that it holds a specific meaning, sign value is limited to the needs of capital to produce a dense, hierarchical system of meanings, of status identifications, in order to cement its power (Mosco 1996: 156). Baudrillard does not see consumers, anyway, as hapless dupes of a system but as able to engage it. I have reservations as to the extent of this, seeing such subversion as can be achieved within consumption as likely to be subsumed by the market; but in alternative social movements and anti-consumerism a possibility for a withdrawal from the power of globalized lifestyle consumption is extant, shifting at least the horizon of what can be done. For Ian Angus, members of new social movements engage in identity formation ‘in a manner that transforms a drop-out rejection into a political project demanding social change’ (Angus 2000: 129). This requires a vocabulary re-invested with meanings, yet, as said above, not a reclamation of previous meanings for signs but a re-investment on new terms. The idea denoted by Revolution is now encapsulated in history, just as the model of a proletarian uprising is no longer credible (nor that of an intelligentsia as avant-garde). Similarly, the emblem of the hammer and sickle is encapsulated in the same history, now open to appropriation in ex-East bloc countries as in those of the ex-West. The idea of radical social change as attempted in Russia in 1917 is not, however, defunct. It takes shape in other ways in other places, and coins its own vocabulary in direct action and anti-capitalism. But I am not an activist, more a tourist. Stalin World Stalin World is another case of appropriation. The badges, T-shirts and other (mostly newly produced) detritus of the Soviet period are consumed as souvenirs of a past world equivalent in its distance from the mundane to the exotic. The badges are simulacra in Baudrillard’s terms, but visually identical to the original versions. Acquired at the Soviet-style souvenir kiosk they show the tourist to have been there, as branded goods denote a visit to the mall. Nearby is a large statue of Lenin re-sited from one of the main squares of Vilnius [Figure 6]. Opinion on Stalin World is divided some saying it trivializes history, others that it reminds people of a difficult period that should not be forgotten. I would argue that these signs are not evacuated of meaning, that in the ambivalence of response to their re-presentation is a space between appropriation and personal interpretation that opens the possibility of renegotiating meaning. What appears to happen in Stalin World is that some spectators focus on specific monuments, others see them in a generalized way, as a class of objects, the latter not unlike perception of a unified class of art called Modernism in the white, value-free rooms of a modern art museum. Those white spaces are not, of course, value-free at all, but enforce an aesthetic reading of the objects while the manner of the hanging enforces a selective narrative of art likely to be distanced from and diminishing the specific histories of artworks and the circumstances of their production and reception. Among commentators on the cultural legacies of the ex-East bloc, Laura Mulvey argues that the monuments of the Soviet Union should be preserved. Mulvey went to Russia in 1991 with Mark Lewis to make the film Disgraced Monuments (1992). She cites Walter Benjamin’s observation from the 1920s of a shop selling figures of Lenin in all sizes, and adds her own:


The poses had become fixed and stereotyped: Lenin with one arm outstretched, with both arms outstretched, standing still, walking forward, sometimes holding a cap…One favourite anecdote was of a statue which had got muddled and appeared with Lenin both holding and wearing a cap (Mulvey 1999: 222). Mulvey adds that the problem of what to do with such statues is a problem of historical memory, that those she interviewed in Russia felt an ability to live with them may herald an ability to live with the past. Buck-Morss, however, argues that if revolutions are legitimated by histories they appropriate, ‘the suturing of history’s narrative discourse transforms the violent rupture of the present into a continuity of meaning’ (Buck-Morss 2002: 43). A similar debate took place in Bucharest in 2005 over the future uses of The People’s Palace, built by Nicolai Ceaucescu after a visit to Phenian in North Korea as the centrepiece of a New Figure 6. Lenin, Grutas Park (Stalin World), Lithuania. Bucharest. Renata Salecl recalls, ‘Some people insisted that the palace had to be demolished; others proposed that it become a museum of the communist terror; still others suggested that it be transformed into a casino.’(Salecl 199: 100). For Salecl, the building spoke of psychotic delirium under the previous regime. She argues that to keep monuments in place after a shift of power assumes ‘the current and former rulers do not differ in how they deal with historical memory’ (Salecl 1999: 99); and notes that in Germany after 1945 images of the Führer were not expected in public places. I take Salecl’s point. The removal of monuments to a past regime is necessary at least as re-enactment of the shift of power. Similarly, the case for destruction of statues of English King George by Irish Republicans is a legitimate tactic. But I would argue that erasure does, as Mulvey argues, lead to forgetting. I do not see a way out of the dilemma, nor a need to pronounce one, as an outsider. In the case of Stalin World at Grutas, removal leads to both retention and forgetting. The forest de-contextualizes the monuments to allow the park to be a place of all-day family entertainment, with its restaurant, play area, and a small zoo in sight of a train used for deportations parked at the site entrance. Yet most of the visitors are Lithuanians who, if adult, lived through the Soviet period. They can go, like tourists, to the Museum of Genocide Victims in Vilnius, housed in part


of the buildings that formerly housed the KGB, near where Lenin once stood. A guidebook says, ‘Many of the guides are former inmates, and will show you around the cells where they were tormented’ (Lonely Planet guide to Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, 2003: 331). As a foreigner, I have no mental framework in which to imagine this. I see only people walking past the statues. For me, the park suggests the suture suggested by Buck-Morss (above), closing the argument between rival ideologies. Reading these signs from a viewpoint aligned with successive New Lefts, I have to say the project is not finished. But if it is not finished this begs the question as to how it is to be continued in intervention in the habitual received or imposed categories which frame signs? In the work of artists groups in the West, such as Freee, or Cornford and Cross in England, I perceive a new dissidence that can be loosely compared to the dissident art of the East bloc prior to 1989. It employs codes to say to a mainly cultural constituency that things are not all as they are said to be. Parallel to the work of dissident cultural production is the capacity for everyday objects and situations to carry traces of a utopian dream, as Benjamin projected onto the Parisian arcades (Buck-Morss 1991: 110–120). This may be wishful, yet meanings are produced and reproduced in culture. If the signs which surround us condition how we live the lives we do, to intervene in their making and reading is to re-inflect the conditions by which we are conditioned, in what amounts to a renewal of dialectic materialism. This, too, is limited. Catherine Belsey writes of culture as ‘the vocabulary within which we do what we do…[which] specifies the meanings

Figure 7. Socialist Realist sculptures on the Green Bridge, Vilnius, 2005.


we set out to inhabit…the values we make efforts to live by or protest against’ (Belsey 2001: 7). I like that. It gives me hope. But Belsey adds that the protest, too, is cultural. From that, as from the problem of representation and impossibility of authenticity in the mediation of language, there is no exit. Malcolm Miles is Professor of Cultural Theory at the University of Plymouth, UK. References Adorno, T. W. (1991), The Culture Industry: selected essays on mass culture, London, Routledge. Angus, I. (2000), Primal Scenes of Communication: communication, consumerism and social movements, Albany (NY), SUNY Press. Barthes, R. (1982), Empire of Signs, New York, Hill and Wang. Bauman, Z. (1998), Globalization: The Human Consequences, Cambridge, Polity. Belsey, C. (2001), Shakespeare and the Loss of Eden, Basingstoke, Palgrave. Bloch, E. (1991), Heritage of Our Times, Cambridge, Polity. Binnie, J., Holloway, J., Millington, S. and Young, C., eds. (2006), Cosmopolitan Urbanism, London, Routledge. Bown, M. C. and Taylor, B., eds. (1993), Art of the Soviets: Painting, Sculpture and Architecture in a One-Party State, 1917–1992, Manchester, Manchester University Press. Bridge, G. (2005), Reason in the City of Difference: pragmatism, communicative action and contemporary urbanism, London, Routledge. Buck-Morss, S. (1995), The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project, Cambridge (MA), MIT. Buck-Morss, S. (2002), Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West, Cambridge (MA), MIT. Cresswell, T. (1996), In Place, Out of Place: Geography, Ideology and Transgression, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press. Gane, M. (2003), French Social Theory, London, Sage. Greenberg, C. (1986), Collected Essays and Criticism, ed. O’Brien, J., vol. 1, 1939–1944, Chicago, Chicago University Press. Katsiaficas, G. (2001), After the Fall: 1989 and the Future of Freedom, London, Routledge. Leach, N., ed. (1999), Architecture and Revolution: Contemporary Perspectives on Central and Eastern Europe, London, Routledge. Mosco, V. (1996), The Political economy of Communications, London, Sage. Mulvey, L. (1999), ‘Reflections on Disgraced Monuments’, in Leach (1999), pp. 219–227. Salecl, R. (1999), ‘The State as a Work of Art: the trauma of Ceaucescu’s Disneyland’, in Leach (1999), pp. 92–111. Sandercock, L. (2006), ‘Cosmopolitan urbanism: a love song for our mongrel cities’, in Binnie et al. (2006), pp. 37–52. Schökel, L. A. (1998), A Manual of Hermeneutics, Sheffield, Sheffield Academic Press. Singer, D. (2001), ‘1989: The End of Communism?’ in Katsiaficas (2001), pp. 11–19. Stitziel, J. (2005), Fashioning Socialism: Clothing, Politics and Consumer Culture in East Germany, Oxford, Berg. Wilson, S. (1993), ‘The Soviet Pavilion in Paris’, in Bown and Taylor (1993), pp. 106–120. Yúdice, G. (2003), The Expediency of Culture: uses of culture in the global era, Durham (NC), Duke University Press.

6 The End of an Idea: On Art, Horizons and the Post-Socialist Condition

Simon Sheikh

…in effect, that today, one cannot even imagine a viable alternative to global capitalism (Zizek 2000: 321). This, then, is the ‘post socialist’ condition: an absence of any credible overarching emancipatory project despite the proliferation of fronts of struggle; a single general decoupling of politics of recognition from the social politics of redistribution; and a decentering of claims for equality in the face of aggressive marketization and sharply rising material inequality (Fraser 1997: 3). This applies to references to ‘capitalism’, which disappeared from the sociological currents we have briefly described. Dethroned from its status of key concept of the 1970s, ‘capitalism’ has been reduced to an inferior status a somewhat indecent swear word because it implied a Marxist terminology that many sociologists wished to forget, but also because it referred to something too ‘large’, too ‘bulky’ to be immediately observable and describable via the observation of specific situations (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005: xi). First there is only darkness, then a picture emerges, and the mumble of voices. A figure in a landscape appears, brandishing a microphone. The figure walks towards the horizon, in what seems to be an endless, flat and barren landscape. Another crosses the screen, far from the camera, barely identifiable. The first person stops the second person and asks the following question: ‘Uh, excuse me… ‘scuse me, can I ask you something? Ehm…what is…I’d like to know,


what is capitalism?’ Thus, begins What Is Capitalism?, a video installation from 2003 by Katya Sander. The screen is installed with mirrors on both sides, giving the illusion of a literally endless landscape but, obviously, also one that repeats and doubles back on it self. Into this landscape, but never out of it, a number of figures walk, all being met with the same question from the first figure, a female interviewer. And before exiting, each of them tries to give their answer to the before-mentioned question that is also the title of the piece. Now, it may seem odd to begin a text on (post)socialism with just that question but let us look at some of the answers given in the film to understand why (although the epigraphs may have already given a first answer…). Ranging from the technical to the suspicious, the critical and the ideological, what they all have in common is a certain difficulty in defining capitalism precisely. They share a certain sense of disarticulation – capitalism is intimately known, it is all around, taken for granted and almost common sense, but hard to pinpoint exactly as an economic or ideological system. How does it work? What does it do? It seems to be all-pervasive, like the horizontal landscape in the film: everywhere and everything, to a degree where it cannot be easily separated from the world as such, or rather our world, our surroundings and perceptions. There is no outside, as the mirrors illustrate: only an endless plane, that is, nonetheless a confined space, only disappearing into itself. And, perhaps, this can serve as a preliminary definition of the so-called post-socialist condition, that capitalism is everywhere, the only game in town, and almost naturalized. By the disappearance of capitalism’s dialectical other, its great opponent, communism, and by extension socialism, we have, ironically, lost the ability to describe, criticize or define either. Indeed, capital and the laws of the market are often naturalized in the current language game of politics, where its focus is on security and liberty, democracy and human rights as universal, as opposed to any discussion or proposition about social change and economic redistribution, not to mention equality and solidarity. Current debates in the mainstream constantly stress that there is no plausible alternative to the market and capital itself, and no other way ahead than neo-liberalism and its deregulation of labour and the dismantling of the social state, as we can see it in the media, in academia and even in everyday language. However, truth is always produced through discourse and a certain misé-en-scene, which is the last thing I want to address with the example of Sander’s work; namely, the staging of events, of a specific horizon. Obviously, despite the subjects appearing in a rustic landscape, the setting is not natural, but staged and directed, clearly referencing the ‘interview’ with Eve Democracy in the forest in Jean-Luc Godard’s famous 1968 movie, One Plus One. And, similarly, the ‘answers’ given by the interviewees are composed and scripted, in fact, all composites from ‘real’ interviews, here read out like lines by actors. In this way, the film urges us to look beyond the appearance of things, as Marx always claimed for critique, and see the staging of the real; the discourse behind the naturalization. So, how has this naturalization of capital and representation of inevitability come about or, put another way: where are we in our actuality? (to use Michel Foucault’s famous phrase). How did this become our horizon? Arguably, the triumph of capitalism had to do with the failure of

the end of an idea | 69

communism, with the disappearance of the bipolar world of the Cold War. This would, then, indicate a very clear beginning, or rather a ‘new’ beginning, coming as it did after the fall of the Wall and the collapse of state socialism, as it was practiced in the so-called Eastern bloc of Europe. This date would be, obviously, 1989; a date that is now as symbolic as 1789, 1917, 1968 and, indeed, now, 9–11 (where the year is less important than the state of emergency those figures indicate). Here, then, the post-socialist, or more concretely, the post-communist, condition can be historically specified, as the period after the breakdown of the communist countries and the interim period between that event, 1989, and the (re)integration of those countries into capitalist and democratic Europe. It is a condition perhaps signaled by most of the countries joining the EU in recent years, and what some commentators and economists have termed as a period of transition and incredibly catch-up Modernism(!), indicating that we will afterwards enter a new phase, no longer post-socialist or in transition, but something else, presumably the endless equilibrium of market economy, capital and liberal democracies. Such an understanding of post-communism not only indicates and clearly demarcates a certain historical moment and time frame, but also a certain geography, a certain region, namely Eastern Europe, giving it not only a historical specificity, but also a cultural one and perhaps even an ethnic one. Indeed, in recent years, this historiography and the art of managing the interim and the new market economy in this region has become a major academic growth discipline not only in Eastern Europe, but also in the West and particularly in the USA. Here, the ideas of the American neo-conservative philosopher Francis Fukuyama are very much in vogue, both in academia and politics, specifically his notorious book, The End of History and the Last Man, published in 1992. In this highly controversial book, Fukuyama suggests that we have indeed reached an end to history with the collapse of the Eastern European communist countries, symbolized by the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and that we are now in an endless state of stability within liberal democracy and capitalist market economy. However, what Fukuyama was engaging in wasn’t only an attempt at representing the state of things, but a very specific, ideological as well as idealized picture of the world, but he did so in what can be termed depresentation. That is, not only representing a view of the world, a possible view of a possible world, but doing so through the exclusion and elimination of other possible as well as impossible worlds. A depresentation is an act of rhetorically, and sometimes physically and violently, removing certain ideas from history and the horizon, from the spectrum of the representable; from the thinkable as well the unthinkable. This setting up of a horizon, and simultaneously making others invisible, can be described as the implementation of a certain imaginary. It suggests not just that which can be imagined, but also what can be encompassed by this imagination; that is, setting up its boundaries, its limits; from where a world (and world-view) goes and where it ends. In the case of Fukuyama and his ilk, a specific moment in history is privileged and made determinate, apparently bringing about a specific situation with a fixed outcome. Thus, a situation might hold a specific potential but also has specific limits to the imaginaries of a situation: after 1989 one can never think communism again. In this way, the aforementioned


naturalization of capitalism is made possible precisely through the depresentation and, thus, elimination of its other, communism, not just as a specific historical regime in a specific area but as an idea, as what can be termed an imaginary institution. Here, I am referring to the work of philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis on societies as symbolic constructions, held together by specific social imaginaries and institutions. Societies are not created through a natural rationalism or through historical progressive determinism, but are instituted through creation, through imagination(s). Society and its institutional forms and norms are thus as much fictional as they are functional. According to Castoriadis, society is an imaginary institution: That which holds society together is, of course, its institution, the whole complex of its particular institutions, what I call ‘the institution of a society as a whole’ – the word ‘institution’ being taken here in the broadest and most radical sense: norms, values, language, tools, procedures and methods of dealing with things and doing things, and, of course, the individual itself both in general and in the particular type and from (and their differentiations: e.g. man/woman) given to it by the society considered (Castoriadis 1997: 122). These institutions and ways of instituting (meaning, subjectivity, legality and so on) appear as a more or less coherent whole, as a unity, but can appear so through praxis and belief. This also means that these social imaginaries can be redefined through other practices, or even collapse when no longer viewed as adequate, just or true. Social change thus occurs through discontinuity rather than continuity, either in the form of radical innovation and creativity (such as Newtonian physics) or in the shape of symbolic and political revolutions (such as France 1789). It can never can be predicted or understood in terms of determinate causes and effects or an inevitable historical sequence of events, the way, say, most liberalist commentators view the fall of communism as being brought about by some natural law of economics. Change emerges, then, through the establishment of other imaginaries without predeterminations, through praxis, and will that establishes another way of instituting. This requires a radical break with the past in terms of language and symbolization and, thus, of ways of doing. However, one of the problems of any revolutionary project is exactly this: how to implement a radical change, not just in the significations and sedimentations of institutions, but in the very way they institute, that is, how they produce social relations anew. Indeed, the example Castoriadis gives has some relevance to our social-historical context, the post-communist condition, since he mentions the case of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, and the problem they had of naming the new government, since Lenin found the name Council of Ministers highly problematic and reactionary in its mirroring of bourgeois ministers and their role. Instead, Trotsky came up with the term ‘the Soviet of people’s commissars’ that was welcomed and adopted by Lenin because of its revolutionary ring. But, as Castoriadis wryly remarks, their function (and power) remained unchanged: ‘The revolution was creating a new language, and had new things to say; but the leaders wanted to say the same old things with new words’(Castoriadis 1987: 122). We can, thus, ask, in our contemporary post-communist situation, and within the institution that is contemporary art, which new languages are being created? Which new imaginaries


are being produced? And which old things are being said with new words? And this is where the notion of post-socialism becomes poignant, namely, as a certain imaginary that naturalizes the condition of capital and excludes any notion of societal, collective change. The post-socialist condition, then, is a global condition, it is where we are in our actuality and, thus, not a specific location in time (after the Wall) nor place (Eastern Europe). This also means that it should be seen as a conceptual tool to understand the actuality in which we find ourselves, and not as an outcome, a destiny. It can be seen as parallel to the two other post-conditions that are being prefixed to the present: postmodernism, naturally, but surely also post-Fordism, that is, changes within the symbolic order, within conditions of production and the politics of identity. Or, in other words, both exchange value and sign value. The post-socialist condition has to do not only with the fall of communism, but with developments within capital as well, arguably leading to the demise of socialist reformist ideas in capitalist countries, most notably the withering away of the social democratic welfare state in places such as Britain, Scandinavia and (West) Germany since the late 1970s, a good decade before the fall of communism (and its supposed socialist ideals) in Eastern Europe. And with these profound structural changes, we witnessed not only a crisis of the economy (as in the 1970s, mainly) and of representation (be it democratically or in visual culture), but also a crisis in the oppositional forms towards capital within the capitalist sector, within what Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello have termed the two critiques: the social critique and the artistic critique. Briefly put, the two critiques – the one in form of labour unions (and later new social movements) making demands and the other in terms of bohemia and alternative culture positing a different lifestyle – have been co-opted by contemporary capital and allowed it to transform itself. This process, in turn, has made these critical forms partly obsolete, or at least out of step with capital itself, being directed more towards its more disciplinary, industrial forms than to its current dematerializations of both labour and capital. Which brings us back to the question of contemporary art and the imaginary: Which new languages are being created, which new imaginaries are being produced, and which old things are being said with new words? Or, we could say: What can be imagined and what cannot be? Which modes of critique are affirmative and which are transformative? And which artistic creations are illustrative, sometimes even celebratory of the ‘new’ post-socialist phase of global capital? An aesthetic gesture consists, thus, like a political one, in the creation of a new ensemble of things, in a (re)staging of the (perceived) real. This also means that one cannot distinguish between political and nonpolitical works of art (or, in a broader sense, representations), but rather that there – in the very imaginings of each specific mode of address, lies, what Jacques Rancière has, in a wholly other context called ‘the politics of aesthetics’, which is nonetheless a useful notion here (Rancière 2004). For Rancière, the politics of aesthetic practices does not lie so much in their political intentions or motivations, but rather in how they partake in the partition and distribution of the sensible, that is, of what can be seen and sensed, what can be said and not said. Whereas the political in connection with works of art are usually described either in a) a sense of use value, or even propaganda, or b) in the so-called politics of representation that is, how and who are represented by the artwork, we can expand upon this notion and analyze artworks through their imaginary character. We can consider what kind of horizon they


set up, set themselves up against, or are limited or framed by, without these aspects necessarily standing in opposition to each other, one such imaginary being the post-socialist condition. We can now, with these theoretical tools in hand, proceed to how works of art, like the previously mentioned piece by Katya Sander, negotiate, and are in turn negotiated by certain imaginaries and, here specifically, the end(s) of communism or socialism, and we can look at them as transformative and affirmative modes of representation and critique. We can see how the piece by Sander set up a horizon (quite literally) that had to do with how subjects are not only placed, but also how they try to situate themselves within this setting. We can compare these subjects to the subjects in Johanna Billing’s works, partly because these artists share a specific experience of the post-socialist condition and the demise of social democracy in Scandinavia, and partly due to the common artistic methods of placing unnamed subjects in a specific narrative frame dictated by the surroundings, architecture and scenery in which their position as subjects are produced. However, in Billing’s work, such as the video Project for a Revolution, 2000, the subjects are not put through the test of the microphone, indeed they do not speak, but only move through the scenery. This articulation is one of loss and mourning, suggesting a different kind of failure to articulate oneself in ones surroundings than in the Sander piece. Art historically speaking, it references Michelangelo Antonioni’s work rather than Godard’s which is here not a strange, barren land, but a recognizable institutional space, probably a school of some kind. The uncanniness of the situation is not so much due to the setting, but rather connected to the lack of language and the cutting between shots and scenes. Whereas the first piece employs humor as its strategy, the second piece evokes feelings of melancholia. The young people depicted in Billing’s works are symbolic of a lack of collective experience and action, but fulfill what Derrida would call ‘the task of mourning’ (Derrida 1994). There is a mourning for the loss of revolutionary utopia, or, put in other terms, the loss of an imaginary. In this way, the work is strangely nostalgic, not for some real or imagined past, but rather for a missing future that could have been, and would have been, projected and imagined from that past history of revolutionary struggle. The loss of a credible revolutionary articulation and the nostalgia for collective action can also be seen in two other popular and recently widely discussed narrative (video) works: Carey Young’s short, single-channel video I am a Revolutionary and Jeremy Dellar’s epic film and performance, The Battle of Orgreave, both from 2001. Deller’s heavily publicized and much-celebrated The Battle of Orgreave employs the modernist strategy of a dialectical clash between words and actions, text and context. The work was produced by Artangel, an agency commissioning large-scale public projects in the UK and, in a way, consisted in two parts, the first being a re-enactment of an event, the second an accompanying ‘behind-the-scenes’ documentary directed by Mike Figgis for Channel 4. The re-enactment part was concerned with the idea of juxtaposition and the writing of history. It used the format of a historical re-enactment; big spectacular operations executed with great detail in an attempt to re-stage famous battles, predominantly from the American Civil War. The irony being, of course, that the battle was from recent history, referring to a different history, namely, not of glorious wars of nations, but of working-class struggle, specifically the miners strike of 1980s Britain. The film follows this


process showing the re-enactment and images from the original battle, as well as interviews with both participating police officers and striking unionists. Indeed, some of the miners from the 1984 battle are now performing in the re-enactment, some of them even portraying police officers. What does this shift in time and format produce? First of all, the event is being inscribed into today’s event culture and spectacular society. It is shown to be the possible topic of a re-enactment despite its quite different history: all things can be as easily enacted and spectacularized, it seems. But does this put the miners’ strike into the same orbit as historical battles that are otherwise worthy of re-enactments? Undeniably it does, but also, at the same time, it erases its difference from these battles, relegating it to history rather than actualizing it. After all, a re-enactment is not an actualization, but a spectacularization. It is, also, a way of making it kitsch, and as such the work, as is the case with Young’s, is not so much a case of radical chic, but rather of radical kitsch. Deller’s re-enactment does attempt to rewrite history, not in an invocation of the spectre of working-class struggle, but by leaving it behind and, in turn, literally transforming the (class) position of miners themselves. As we can see in the documentary, some of the miners are now employed in the re-enactment, but what is their (class) position in it, in its politics of the image and production of spectacle? Despite being a documentary about the production of the event, it does not tell us much about the actual conditions of production in a political economic sense. It could be argued that the miners are yet again workers, but in a different industry, namely the culture industry, and that they are again disposable after the particular production (before it was mining, now they are disposable after the event and the film has run its course). Perhaps, then, in order to actualize the strike, the (former) miners, now extras in a cultural spectacle, should have been unionized exactly as that: cultural workers, demanding the right to work, a living wage and social redistribution from the producers, Deller, Artangel and Channel 4, rather than settling for apparent cultural recognition. If there is a politics of labour involved in the piece, then, it is surely those of Tony Blair’s New Labour, conjuring the new spirit of capitalism rather than the spectres of Marx. Carey Young’s piece is also a matter of enactment or, perhaps, rather embodiment. This short video, looped for exhibition use, is set in a corporate landscape of offices and atriums, and it foregrounds the figures, engaged in the act of rehearsing what appears to be a business speech or sales pitch. The two figures, a middle-aged man and a younger woman, both wear business attire, and the man is instructing the woman how to speak in a convincing manner. The woman, portrayed by the artist, is struggling with the words ‘I am a revolutionary’, as she somehow cannot put them across in a manner that is satisfactory to either of them. She finds it hard to say the words, as if they were unutterable, which, as I have tried to argue, would seem to be the case in the post-socialist condition and its neo- liberal hegemony. The video thus works with absurdity, with juxtaposition of the words and their meaning (lessness) on the one hand, and the person and place from which they are spoken on the other. Again, humour and irony are the chosen artistic tools but, perhaps, also mockery and sarcasm. The apparent discrepancy between the words and who is speaking them, and how they are spoken, can be read in two ways, either as a mockery of the business world and capital’s co-optation of


critique or as a mockery of revolutionaries, activists or even artists who might say such words? However, whereas the words seem(s) uninhabitable to the protagonist, the body language and self-imaging suggest that the identity of the businesswoman is somewhat easier to embody for the artist. It is not the business world and business speech that is ridiculed, but rather the idea of revolution, since the failure of the businesswoman’s speech is exactly not speaking business, but speaking, and we could add embodying and performing, revolution. These two works, by Deller and Young, can, within the conceptual framework of post-socialism, be compared to two pieces that have been produced in the so called post-socialist countries, and which very deliberately refer to this notion. These works are Milica Tomic’s video Reading Capital from 2004 and the group Chto delat?’s The Angry Sandwich People, Or, In Praise of Dialectics, an action and video installation/documentation from 2006. Tomic’s video is also concerned with the task of speaking revolution, or at least critique, and how this speech positions the subject, and operating with a dialectical clash between text and context. Whereas Tomic usually performs the central part in most of her works, in Reading Capital she has engaged prominent citizens from San Antonio, Texas, who speak before the camera. The participants quote passages from Marx’s Capital in private surroundings of their choice, and which they think represent themselves in the best way; domestic landscapes of wealth. Reading Capital takes its cue from Sergei Eisenstein, who, incidentally, planned to film Karl Marx’ Capital in the 1930s, a film that was never realized. He believed that it was possible to provoke dialectical thinking in the audience via the method of montage. However, Tomic does not employ Eisenstein’s technique visually, but only conceptually by having present-day capitalists read out central passages from Marx’s radical critique of capitalism. These subjects do not seem to have any difficulties in speaking the words, although they do it a bit dispassionately, creating a strange effect of annulment, of vacuity. The works seems inconclusive and in between states of historical meaning. A similar approach is seen in the Chto delat?’s [Russian for ‘what is to be done?’] work, that also consists of a (re)reading, in this case of Bertolt Brecht’s poem on dialectics. The work was posted on a number of sandwich boards (normally a tool of advertising) and was worn by a diverse group of people inhabiting the square in St Petersburg previously reserved for communist parades and demonstrations. The video documents this action through a number of black-and-white stills; totals and close-ups; voice-overs reading Brecht’s text; and this strange gathering of the young and old, men and women. Who are these angry sandwich board people? And how can Brecht’s critique and political aesthetics be actualized today? Post-socialism here is an open concept that not only marks the demise of socialism, but also of current critiques of post-Fordist communism. Terms such as ‘post’ can be seen not only in the negative sense, but also in a productive sense as with post-Marxism and post-feminism which are both critical tools that do not depart from their historical forms and meanings, but rather attempt to re-evaluate some of their basic tenets. In this text, I have tried to show how the post-socialist condition can be understood conceptually and how it can be employed in an analysis of contemporary art production. For direct comparison, I have mainly focused on more narrative, video-based works, but it is my contention that all kinds of works can be seen as (political) imaginaries, as setting up a horizon of


the possible and the impossible, that directly or indirectly has to do with the current liberal democratic articulation of a post-utopian endgame. In conclusion, I, therefore, want to look at a work that is not narrative video, but time-based in a different way, a work by Susan Kelly and Stephen Morton that bears the same name as the above-mentioned Russian collective: What is to be done? This ongoing archive was originally started at the Lenin Museum in Tampere, Finland, in 2002, and consisted of a questionnaire bearing Lenin’s famous question ‘What is to be done?’ There was subsequent filing and the addition of new answers or comments as the piece was installed in different venues and contexts. Again, we are dealing with an obvious shift in time and meaning from when Lenin posed the question after the Bolshevik revolution in Russia and the current post-socialist situation in the beginning of the twenty-first century, or put another way, between the spectres of Marx and the new spirit of capitalism. As such, the work urges the spectators to become participants in pointing to the horizon (as Lenin was always depicted doing): Where do we go? How do we get there? What kind of politics and society can we imagine now? Or, where are we in our actuality? Simon Sheikh is an independent critic and writer in Berlin.

References Boltanski, L. and Chiapello, E. (2005), The New Spirit of Capitalism, London: Verso (French original published 1999). Butler, J., Laclau, E., Zizek, S. (2000), Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, London: Verso. Castoriadis, C. (1997), World in Fragments, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Castoriadis, C. (1987), The Imaginary Institution of Society, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press (French original published 1975). Derrida, J. (1994), Spectres of Marx, the State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, & the New International, London: Routledge. Fraser, N. (1997), Justice Interruptus Critical Reflections on the “Postsocialist” Condition, London: Routledge. Rancière, J. (2000), The Politics of Aesthetics, Continuum: London (French original published in 2000).

7 Exploring Critical and Political Art in the UK and Serbia

Sophie Hope and Mark Stamenkovic

The following texts present perspectives on art production in two different political, economic and ‘post-socialist’ contexts. Written by Belgrade- and London-based curators, respectively, the essays form part of a continuing attempt to try and understand the overlaps and misunderstandings involved in art production across Europe. These texts form part of Reunion, an ongoing programme of meetings, residencies and exhibitions involving artists and curators based in the UK, Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia, Italy and Macedonia critically exploring the political potential of art practices in Europe. The Pitfalls of Post-Socialism by Marko Stamenkovic We are suffering from a kind of post-partum depression: having long been pregnant with a future to which the world has now given birth (to paraphrase Marx), we are frankly disappointed (Buck-Morss 2005). The depression that Buck-Morss talks of is very much present within the current political climate of post-totalitarian Serbia. More than ten years after Dayton and eight years after the NATO bombing, the priority of EU integration and accession to NATO has clearly been set as political priorities by the newly elected government(s). Only a few weeks before the new parliamentary elections (21 January 2007), however, it is evident that Serbia is, once again, lagging behind its progressive neighbouring countries. After the non-violent separation of Montenegro from the


State Union with Serbia in May 2006, the two major current unresolved political issues that determine Serbia’s future are the future status of Kosovo and the urgent obligation towards the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague. It is within the framework of these obstacles (or possibilities?) that Serbian society faces its seventh year after the fall of the previous regime. With negotiations between the EU and Serbia at a standstill and a society that is in some ways incapable of moving on from the past, a new kind of ‘blockade’ is determining the bio-political realities of everyday life in the country. The process of ‘transition’ therefore remains invisible to the majority of Serbians. Contemporary art and culture are not exempt from this. With regard to the explicit problem of our living conditions in Serbia, this text specifically relates to the phenomenon of critical curatorial practice, by which I mean the strategies of action and alternative political engagement in the broad cultural field. I depart from my experience of developing a self-organized curatorial working platform entitled ‘art-e-conomy’ [www.arte-conomy.org]. This international research and educational platform explores contemporary art in a post-socialist condition via the dominant global capitalist paradigm and through the intersections between artistic and economic realities of a country in transition. The principal aim is to foster creative forms of partnership between the cultural and business sectors in the local environment. More precisely, art-e-conomy was initiated with an attempt to re-think the ideas behind the relations between economy and art and the cultural and aesthetic dimensions of economic changes in the post-socialist Eastern European situation. ‘Art-e-conomy’ is a curatorial strategy for exploring critical exits from this social and political ‘blockade’ we are experiencing. Through research, exhibitions, writings and discussions, ‘art-economy’ considers possibilities for a collective long-term transformation, be it mental, economic or political. I would first like to introduce my understanding of context in which this work is being done. Post-Socialist Eastern European Postmodernism A post-socialist (and/or post-communist) Eastern European postmodernism generally relates to so-called Second World societies (i.e. the former socialist and/or communist societies of the European East) during the late twentieth century and at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Post-socialism could be defined as a particular social, political, economic and cultural certain state, that floats between bureaucracy and liberalism, real-socialism and late capitalism, production and consumption (enjoyment), but most notably -- between the two orders: a real state order and a fictional state order, denoting a shift from a previously dominant ‘socialist’ paradigm toward a new, still indefinable ‘capitalist’ paradigm. What is even more important is the fact that this transition paradoxically reveals a separation between the political and the economic. A transfer is witnessed from a previously dominant politicized condition (in terms of the old, socialist ideology) toward an upcoming, economically dominant condition (in terms of a new, capitalist ideology). According to Mikhail Epstein, post-communism is parallel to postmodernism, or (more precisely) post-communism is a postmodernism of the social and political spheres, where there is the same

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free play of signs and reality, signifier and signified, as in postmodernist poetics (Barry, E. Johnson, K. Miller-Pogacar, A.: 1993). The postmodern, as he sees it, is essentially the same in the East and the West (in spite of economic differences). In the East, the underlying patterns of cultural postmodernism are not economic, but ideological. Epstein draws upon Engels and Lenin who had emphasized long ago that, in different countries and under different circumstances, ideology may take the place of economics as the basic structure of society, which was precisely the case with the communist countries – ideas produced the material, not vice versa. In order to avoid a specifically spatial determination of the subject, I insist (following Marina Grzinic) on reading the Eastern European space not as a geographically, but rather a conceptually, articulated phenomenon. Regarding this attitude, the post-socialist Eastern European postmodernism should be located within the context of the former Second World that has emerged (and is still undergoing the processes of emerging) from the previous state of invisibility. While becoming visible it is being (temporarily) recognized as Central, Eastern and South-Eastern Europe. I understand the idea of ‘Eastern European’ as coming from the fact that there is no place for us outside our ideologically controlled and mediated society. The meaning, function and effect of Eastern European art and culture (in its complex, discursive field of signification) addresses the choices one has to make with respect to place, position, and (re)presentation of the Eastern European political and historical entity. Eastern Europe is still functioning on the premises of the safe distance between the two worlds, thus keeping the hygienic border relationship between the First and the Third World. Instead of taking into account only the new European identity as proposed by the multicultural logic of cultural diversity, Eastern Europe should be approached from a radically different point of view: as the impossible space, re-articulated and made visible, parallel and juxtaposed to the dominant/absolute/united Europe. Instead of saying that Eastern Europe is the Other (that is: instead of explaining the difference between the One and the Other, or the double/the repetition of the One) we must insist on the Other as the Two, meaning: to be present at the same time, to be parallel, not to become the other from the One, the Other after the One. This is a strategy in art and culture; juxtaposing reality and its fantasy, just as proposed by Grzinic (2005). In economic terms, the concept of ‘Eastern Europe’ is a product of the struggle between the two conflicting economic philosophies: capitalism and socialism. As the only alternative to capitalism, socialist Eastern European space pursued non-capitalist and anti-capitalist economic and political doctrines, created with the intention of defining zones of dominant (Western European and American) capitalist market and bourgeois influence. As it had already been precisely described, ‘after the Second World War two conflicting political and cultural projects appear: the liberal bourgeois one, built primarily on technical and social progress (from an industrial to a postindustrial society and from imperialism to late capitalism); and, on the other hand, the socialist one, built primarily on the notions of political revolutionary progress (proletarian dictatorship, bureaucratic system of management, utopia of the classless society and self-management)’ (Suvakovic in Erjavec 2003: 92). However, the model of economic


organisation is generally understood in a simplified and deviated manner (‘capitalism against socialism’ or vice versa), thus, usually exaggerating the differences between these two models (mostly due to a specifically antagonistic Cold War perspective). In this respect, the so-called ‘third way’, as proposed and put in practice by Titoist Yugoslavia, clearly confirms the possibility of taking an alternative stance toward both sides in conflict. In cultural terms, the Soviet Union, as the original socialist country and the foremost state of both the Eastern bloc and international socialism, defined the political and cultural parameters for what became known as ‘Eastern Europe’ based upon the political and economic system of ‘really existing socialism’ (the consequence of which was the model of ideologically controlled, utilitarian cultural production). In terms of Yugoslav art and culture, the situation was equally interesting: while opening up certain possibilities for ‘innocence’ floating on the edge between the two worlds, the East and the West, the official climate was reacted against by all the artists and art institutions that did not succumb to the dominant models of the so-called ‘socialist modernism’. On the contrary, they proposed another point of view, being more open to a whole variety of contemporary experimental international trends. According to Slovenian philosopher Ales Erjavec (Erjavec 2003), the dominance of this common political ideology is what determines the primarily politicized nature of Yugoslav art (and Eastern European art in general). What is really important in this context is to point out that it was exactly the ideology of the self-managing socialism that provided conditions to bring Yugoslav art close to the West, and, at the same time, set it apart from the Western art, predominantly conditioned by the principles of late capitalism and developments of the art market. As a rare example of an artistic atmosphere, simultaneous to other (Western) European (and especially Italian, Austrian and German) artistic tendencies at the time, new media art in 1970s Yugoslavia could serve as a good point in analyzing the general issue. This specific ambiguous character of Yugoslavia’s self-managing socialism is what counts for a particular positioning of its art (including new media) in the 1970s, with the most prominent examples of experimental art venues such as SKC Gallery in Belgrade, SKUC Gallery in Ljubljana, Contemporary Art Gallery in Zagreb, Motovun and Brdo in Istria and the relationships between the phenomenon of new media art and late socialist cultural and political trends. Critical Curating The issue of social engagement, in everyday life as well as in professional cultural activity, imposes an urge for well-thought-out planned action and step-by-step mobilization of resources at hand. Administrative and financial limits and constraints are signs of reality and give a unique chance to problematize, visualize and interpret the context of such obstacles in the best possible way. The intention is always to rely on given resources while applying the relevant theoretical and visual methodologies by those who are ready to tackle them in their own professional missions. A lack of funds is no excuse: it is a starting point that could possibly facilitate a historical reference point in the analysis of the conditions as such, while at the same time putting this problematic into the very core of the actual work. If new economic realities are to be faced in a full-frontal way, then art emerging from these specific ‘miserable’ contexts has all the rights and powers to work from within it, for the benefit of a possible, hopefully near, change.


My own way of dealing with such a theoretical construction is framed by the interpretation of contemporary art practices in the context of globalization. It is exactly this transnational aspect of cultural production, determined by sound theoretical and political coordinates, that opens up a new discursive matrix for the articulation of meaning and values in the contemporary art world. In my case, there are two precise theoretical and political patterns pertaining to global capitalism and post-socialist (Eastern European) transition that are used as interpretive tools: the institution of art and the dialectics between public and private property (and, consequently, the issue of ownership). Contemporary global culture is an appropriated version of economically oriented global marketing. Its effect of ‘internationalization’, ‘exchange’ and ‘communication’ reflects the way global capitalism flows, circulates and functions. What is evident (and important for such an articulation of the global capital) is that global capitalism teaches its consumers to enjoy such a condition, just as much as they enjoy the fictionalized (ready-to-buy) objects of their desires. To conclude: the post-socialist Eastern European postmodernism (as here considered) is a subject of utmost importance because it identifies a fundamental and still existent (theoretical, political and cultural) lack dependent on the new global world order. The fact that after the end of the Cold War this lack (recognized as the gap between the East and the West) has not been completely bridged, urges for a proper theoretical re-thinking of the field as a whole, and most notably with respect to contemporary situation that, above all, reveals the different conditions in which the cultural discourse in the East and the West had developed before the Fall of the Berlin Wall.1 The crucial difference is supposed to be identified in different approaches to art and culture: the Western being situated in a consumerist desire and defined by economic (market) value, the Eastern in an ideologically controlled desire for the political correctness. Post-socialism has an ambiguous meaning, standing in-between the continuity and discontinuity, or revivalism and distance (Foster in Wallis 1986: 189–201). It refers to the notions of both past and future, and is quite similar to the term la différance (or ‘razluka’, according to Slovenian theoretician Braco Rotar) a schism denoting a clash without the possibility of a solution; it refers to a historically finalized period that belongs to the past, but it departs from it, puts it into question and enters into another unpredictable future. The term ‘post-socialism’ here seems a contradiction, but its transcendental character is a result of its functioning after the end of a certain paradigm and the emergence of another (not necessarily new) paradigm. Post-socialism is being developed exactly between the two paradigms, and produces meanings in the space of a ‘paradigm shift’, i.e., in the space providing a possibility to take a radically different point of view. Starting from the critical positioning within the global sphere of exhibition-making and art production, art-e-conomy is all about the paradigm shift taking place in what has been politically termed as South-East Europe, a territory still gaining much of its daily disturbances from what could be highlighted as suffering from a ‘non-EU’ syndrome. This status of ‘non-being-but-stillsomehow-belonging-to’ the political matrix of united heterogeneity (that is to be recognized today as the ‘European Union’) is actually revealing a double-sense process insisting on political


change, while at the same time being entirely supported by the new economic paradigm (that is to be recognized today as the ‘Global Capitalism’). It might be that this ambiguity still contributes to the kind of depression Buck-Morss was referring to; however, there is no more time for playing – the depression could only be eradicated by concrete and responsible political acts towards a sober state of being. Emotion Mapping by Sophie Hope I strap a small device onto two fingers of my right hand. It is a ‘galvanic skin response sensor’ which measures my emotions and is connected to a global positioning system so that I can measure my physical reactions to the environment I am walking through. The peaks and troughs, reds and blues on the resulting map record my stress levels, feelings of excitement and indifference. The couple I am with live in the nearby Millennium Village. We are walking around East Greenwich, an area of London that has changed dramatically over the past 50 years and is due to morph again over the next 25 years into ‘a new 1.4 million square metre masterplanned community’ (Our Vision Greenwich Peninsula, Meridian Delta Limited). The Millennium Dome, now branded The O2, is being developed into an entertainment, music, sport and leisure attraction by the American company, Anshutz Entertainment Group. Just beyond the Dome, the old hospital in East Greenwich is being converted into housing by English Partnerships. As we walk around we discuss the changes in the area; the new Beckham Football Academy; the active industrial buildings and factories; the first communications cable to be laid across the Atlantic and the progression of technologies since. Is this just like any other walk on a summer’s afternoon? What is the significance of us mapping this walk? Who will use the data we are producing? The experience I am describing was part of ‘Emotion Map’, a project by Christian Nold and one element of his ongoing work into ‘Biomapping’. The final printed map includes images of the places visited by people on their walk, annotated with descriptions of their experience. Christian was commissioned by Independent Photography (an arts organization based in East Greenwich) as part of their programme ‘Peninsula’. The ‘Peninsula’ programme consists of a series of six artists’ commissions that involve local people in investigating the Greenwich Peninsula and its regeneration. The project has received funding from Arts Council England, Heritage Lottery and City Parochial Foundation. While the programme does not receive funding directly from the regeneration funds in the area, ‘Peninsula’ is seen as a valuable asset to its development. A member of the Greenwich Peninsula Partnership points out: The role of projects like ‘Peninsula’ is to take the fear away from these changes by getting people involved in what’s going on locally…Greenwich Peninsula Partnerships is keen to support Independent Photography in engaging people culturally in this process of change. People don’t like coming to meetings, it’s a way of breaking down those barriers and giving people a voice…Independent Photography are like the conscience of the area, [a constant reminder that] it’s not just about maximising profits – it’s a really good way of ensuring that that conscience is always there…(Greenwich Peninsular Partnerships 2005).


I will take ‘Emotion Map’ as an example of a publicly funded art project in order to explain the context in which much art takes place in the UK today. I will begin to explore the meaning of criticality for an art practice that is approved, supported and funded to aid social change and begin to identify what the politics might be of a socially engaged art practice. Context in the UK Increasingly in the UK, people working in diverse aspects of contemporary urban society, from developers to park wardens are turning to the arts for new ideas, regeneration, problem solving and community bridge-building. The employment of artists in these (traditionally noncultural) fields, where there are other non-art issues and agendas at stake, is becoming the norm. Alongside the high-profile, large-scale capital projects that emerged from the Lottery Act of 1993, there has been a spate of commissioned, community-based arts projects promoted as the road to urban renewal. These projects derive from New Labour cultural policy that sees art and culture as central to making society better. Within this rhetoric, short-term arts programmes in deprived neighbourhoods are endowed with the potential to reduce crime rates, build private/public sector partnerships, improve community relations and create new resources. These projects are based on the notion of the artist as an external agent, able to enter into a context with fresh eyes, offering ideas and solutions. In a speech made in February 2005, the chairman of the Arts Council England, Sir Christopher Frayling, indicated that art and regeneration would remain friends for a while to come: ‘The arts have much more to contribute to urban and rural development – not to mention the creation of new communities such as in the Thames Gateway, which will need substantial cultural investment if they are to be places where people will want to live’ (Frayling 2005). Art and artists are seen as central to the creation of community. When commissioned as part of regeneration schemes, however, they also become a lucrative marketing device to promote the appeal of an area, lining developers’ pockets and in some cases reducing artistic activity to a branding exercise. Art is assumed to provide a positive transformation from bad to good, unbearable to bearable, socially excluded to included. This simplistic stance brushes over the complex, problematic relationships embedded in urban change in the quest to create a glossy picture of participation and collaboration. One of the loudest criticisms of this current situation lambastes the instrumentalization of culture and calls for the reclamation and recognition of artistic autonomy. In their recent essay, ‘Championing Artistic Autonomy’, the independent organization The Manifesto Club, for example, argues for artistic autonomy from ‘physical, political and financial restraints’ in order for the artist to ‘realise a creative vision’ (Artquest, December 2006). The Manifesto Club has been set up to ‘challenge growing policy regulations, instrumentalism and market-based thinking, all of which contribute to a culture of restraint’. How does this fight for autonomy relate to an art practice that does not rely on individual creativity and expression, but on collective action, facilitation and social change?


An Alternative to Artistic Autonomy Socially engaged art practices are influenced by histories of activist, community, performance and conceptual art, all of which have questioned and challenged the notion of an institution of art based on individual production that remains at a critical distance from daily life. Current government cultural policy in the UK incorporates both an understanding of art that goes beyond the confines of the gallery into ‘daily life’ where others become implicated in the making of art and also on the idea of an artist, with her special genius powers, who is able to parachute in to improve the social problems in an area. There is widespread criticism of this as it is believed that such a policy results in both bad art and bad social work. Rather than react to the current climate in a way that reclaims artistic autonomy, however, there is a need to urgently review the politics of social engagement through art. Certain artists are now engaged in a serious and rigorous critique that reflexively approaches the role that cultural work has in making the illusion of ‘social inclusion’ stronger while making the division in wealth and poverty wider. The arts are implicit in this move and it is here that the critique of the context in which art is employed is most relevant. Strategies of Critique A process of revealing and understanding the politics of production is applied in practice by recognizing and responding to ‘failures’. Another tactic used by artists is to engage those involved in the decision-making processes of the commissioning of art and the development of real estate as participants in the work itself. As in the case of the ‘Emotion Map’ and other ‘Peninsula’ projects which have involved local residents, politicians and developers. This way it is possible to question the values placed on art with a wider community of people allowing these values to be disrupted and challenged not just by artists but also by those supporting art and getting involved in its production. There are two areas of socially engaged art practice that I would like to analyze in more detail in order to determine what signifies the critical or political potential in publicly funded art. They are participation as production and the combination of futility and effectiveness in art. Participation as Production There are many histories of artists opening up their work to involve participants throughout the twentieth century from the use of people as subjects in the making of the artists’ work, to the handing over of artists’ initiatives to individuals who go on to author the work as their own. Many of the projects that are considered socially engaged embody a variety of types of participation (maybe at different times of the project – at times the project may be more participant- than artist-led). What I want to focus on here, however, is to identify what is ‘critical’ about participation in art. Participation in an art project does not automatically result in the politicization and activation of the participant. Walter Benjamin in his essay ‘The Author as Producer’ describes a notion of production:


…which is able first to induce other producers to produce, and second to put an improved apparatus at their disposal. And this apparatus is better the more consumers it is able to turn into producers, – that is, readers or spectators into collaborators (Benjamin 1934). This statement would perhaps ring true to many practicing artists today as something that inspires them to develop projects, create platforms and facilitate collective production. It could also refer to New Labour policies of social inclusion and the rising trend of corporate social responsibility through which much socially engaged art is funded. This top-down process of empowerment, however, has been heavily criticized by the communities of ‘consumers’ themselves, as being patronizing and vacuous. Through the veil of social inclusion (often delivered through community consultation and socially engaged or public art) one witnesses or experiences the realities of regeneration such as increased control and privatization of public space and rising house prices. Due to the specifics of this economic situation, the critical aspect of a socially engaged art practice shifts a gear from direct action (to activate and empower individuals) to question the very nature and meaning of a socially inclusive agenda. Rather than becoming the vehicle through which urban developers can market their social responsibility, such projects have the potential to demand a more thorough, democratic involvement of different people in the inevitable development of the ‘master planned community’. This marks a shift in the focus of the critique to a questioning of the means of production, thereby unravelling the reason why the money is there for the socially engaged art project in the first instance. The critique now involves a probing of the motivations of corporations and governments to empower and make producers of us all and questions the artists’ role and position in carrying out these objectives. How does the ‘Emotion Map’ do this? Does it invite people to question the nature of surveillance technologies by inviting participants to survey and map their own movements through public spaces? Or could this project be seen to be paving the way for clever market research techniques to help companies decide which areas are ‘emotionally productive’ and, therefore, ideal advertising locations? Is the Emotion Map enticing people to take an active role in the changes in their area or is it providing a diversion and an illusion of participation? I am interested in exploring if both the original critical or political intentions of the artist extend to include the participants. According to Christian Nold, the ‘Emotion Map’ asks: ‘how will our perceptions of our community and environment change when we become aware of our own and each others intimate body states?’ (Nold 2005). One of the participants in the project expressed how as an older person she had not had much contact with technology and that the project made her aware of how this technology in the hands of the wrong people has different connotations. She talked about how easy it is for the powers that be, to know who you are, where you are and how you feel. This reflects Christian’s intentions for the project in finding a new way of using this technology, reclaiming it and devising alternative ways of mapping an area. According to


another participant, however, the technology became redundant after their direct involvement in the initial mapping exercise and did not provide any ‘conclusions or directions’. The potential for a project to be political lies in the aftermath. How is the map, the walk, the technology used, adopted and manipulated? There have been discussions locally about this technology being used to map the content of local meetings in order to adopt a visual mode of communicating key issues or concerns to other groups and decision-makers. There are also plans to develop the project further in collaboration with a local artist so that the project is embedded in the local context and has the potential to become even more locally relevant. Returning to Walter Benjamin, the ‘Emotion Map’ has the potential to be understood as an ‘improved apparatus’ that has introduced a shared, ‘bottom-up’ notion of production that acts as an alternative to more dominant processes of change and regeneration happening in the area. The future use of the technology and the maps will determine to what extent the users will become producers. Being Useful and Useless In the case of ‘Emotion Map’: Is a ‘uselessness’, in terms of not providing a clear outcome or conclusion, a negative aspect? Was it part of the project to provide possibilities and questions rather than solutions and conclusions? If the people taking part experienced this on the walk itself but not afterwards is this a problem? There is often value placed on the useful and useless aspects of art depending on the context in which one produces or presents the work. For example, in an art context, one might claim the useless aspect is of utmost importance, adding to the ambivalence and ambiguity of the work. When at a meeting with a group of planners, one might stress the function of the work. Both aspects are important in that they hide the useless element to those who like to see only the functional side and the useful aspect of the project to those who deem such claims to be unworthy of art. It could be argued that an art that ignores or hides its useful side is unable to be political and that an art that purely promotes its functionality loses out on being able to be critical. Do we then need to acknowledge and revel in both the useful and useless acts in order to claim the political and critical aspects of art? It is the element of ‘surprising functionality’ that is significant here; that is, being useful in an unexpected way, rather than providing a useful service or carrying out a set of instructions. The Senior Regeneration Manager at English Partnerships, and one of the participants of the Emotion Map project, thought the emotion topography was interesting and could see how this could translate back to a developer and to architects: ‘You could be mindful of this when designing…[it might] take a bit of a leap for some developers and planners in order to justify it as a meaningful consultation exercise…I came away thinking – that was a serious study in human behaviour’.


How can the ‘Emotion Map’ be useful in an unexpected way? The ‘Emotion Map’ is not an obvious consultation exercise. On the one hand, it evolves into a useful study and, on the other, it remains abstract and useful only for those taking part. For the Emotion Map, then, it is both the potential ‘readability’ and ‘unreadability’ that is important. The political action lies in the possibility of finding something pragmatic in what appears to be absurd. Sophie Hope is a curator and member of the collaborative group B+B in London, UK. Mark Stamenkovic is a critic and curator from Belgrade, Serbia. Notes 1. See: http://www.postcommunist.de, a project directed by Prof. Dr Boris Groys, under the auspices of the Federal Cultural Foundation, Germany, in cooperation with the Center for Art and Media (ZKM), Berlin 2004.

References Buck-Morss, S. (2005) quoted from her lecture ‘The Post-Soviet Condition’, May, Faculty of Architecture, Belgrade. Epstein, M. in Barry, E. E. Johnson, K. And Miller-Pogacar, A. (eds.) (1993), ‘Postcommunist Postmodernism. An Interview with Mikhail Epstein’, Common Knowledge, vol. 2, no. 3, New York. Foster, H. (1986) in Wallis, B. (ed.) ‘Re: Post’, Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation, The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, pp. 189–201. Frayling, C. (2007), ‘The only trustworthy book…’ Art and Public Value speech by Sir Christopher Frayling at RSA, 16th February. Grzinic, M. (2005), ‘Uselessness, Theory and Terror VS. Abstract Collaboration’, www.absoluteone.com accessed 2005. Nold, C. (2005), Emotion Map, Peninsular programme (publically funded artwork). Reunion http://www.reunionprojects.org.uk/ accessed 2005. Suvakovic, M. (2003), ‘Art as a Political Machine. Fragments on Late Socialist and Postsocialist Art of Mitteleuropa and the Balkans’ in Erjavec, A. Postmodernism and the Postsocialist Condition. Politicized Art under Late Socialism, California University Press, Berkeley.

8 Other Landscapes (for Weimar, Goethe and Schiller)

Daniela Brasil

This chapter will travel through the themes of memory and commemoration within the context of the iridescent history of Germany, focusing especially on three case studies from the former German Democratic Republic. What role can memory and its representation play in the delineation of the present? How does the moulding of the past influence everyday life and the permanent construction of the city? Firstly, I will consider two recent and different approaches to rebuilding and destroying urban objects with high symbolic significance, through a brief examination of the examples of the reconstructed Frauenkirche in Dresden in 2005 and the demolition of the Palast der Republik and its planned substitution for the re-fabrication of the former Stadtschloss in Berlin. I will introduce one of my ‘artistic actions’ carried out in the city of Weimar in 2006, where I proposed that the central figure of German classical culture, the Goethe and Schiller monument, could go on vacation. As a Brazilian artist who came to study art in public space in Germany, I initially felt absolutely overwhelmed by the burden of memory in this country. Coming from a completely different historical background, where memory is perhaps evoked more intensively through rituals and events than through the cult of historical monuments, I sketched out an attempt to help history for a little while to get rid of its constraints.


Memory and Amnesia The history of the representation of collective memory and identity, relating to monuments, buildings and toponym, is made of a sequence of movements of building and destroying, presences and absences; of a constant shifting between pride and shame. The tension between remembering and forgetting is a constant negotiation in the history of power. History has chosen a succession of icons to be remembered who, in the next moment, are removed in order that the ideas they represent might fall into oblivion. Parallel to this process, the issue of re-creating an atmosphere of a ‘beloved past’ or of ‘memorial times’ arises constantly in the construction of our cities (although some cities may spend more time and money on this issue than other cities). This is precisely the case in post-socialist cities, especially in Germany. Perhaps due to the history of the country, with the deliberate removal of important references, cities were given special status in a diversity of approaches towards iconoclasm, commemoration and attempts to eliminate absences. It is not my intent here to explore the deep and long discussions that took place in German society during the last century regarding constructing, reconstructing, deconstructing and again constructing its past. (There are surely enough reasons certainly registered in countless books.) I actually find public debate on this matter extremely necessary, because debate encourages the positioning of both political power and society, engaging citizens with the issue of memory and, hence, allowing the constant negotiation of past and present to be kept alive. The Frauenkirche in Dresden, the Augenstern city of East Germany, was almost completely destroyed in the end of WWII. The baroque church was kept as a ruin and declared a Mahnmal1 during the GDR times. After the fall of the Wall, it was decided that it should be rebuilt. The reconstruction was completed in 2005 with vast celebrations, giving rise to ideas like ‘Dresden has its soul back’ being published. This suggestion reveals a wish to rescue an identity that has been somehow stolen from the city, although it is doubtful if it would be possible to accomplish this intention. Doesn’t this process simply erase a period of history, reinventing which version of history should be remembered and which should be forgotten, respectively, remembering the glorious baroque times and the scars left by war? Or is it a truly respectable citizen’s prerogative to rebuild their main church, to remove the scars of pain and reconstruct the skyline with an expressive landmark? All attempts to re-create a past, in spite of what caused its disappearance, is absurd and senseless, simply because time is irreversible. Time flows constantly, and it is perhaps the only thing we can never grasp with our hands. Moreover, if architecture is an expression of the arts and technology of an epoch, building something in the twenty-first century that was originally thought and made in the eighteenth century is a ‘quasi-architecture’, a step back in history. It is impossible to recover the character imprinted in an object by time. Time and only time can determine the density of history. All the rest is superficial reinvention.

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Figure 1. (Above) 1946. Ruins of the Frauenkirche after World War II, dome of the Dresdener Kunstakademie in the background. Ewald Gnilka, 1946. Photo archive of the Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin.

Figure 2. (Left) 2007. Frauenkirche after its reconstruction, ongoing renewal of the surrounding public space on the foreground. Nathalia Larsen, 2007. Courtesy of the author.


What is now happening with the Palast der Republik in Berlin is even more complicated. It is not simply the removal of a statue of Lenin, but the former GDR Parliament is being torn down. Although the main reason to condemn this former socialist building in the heart of Berlin depends on technical reasons ( the building was contaminated with asbestos; hence, dangerous for health)2 it is still debatable whether the skeleton could be kept as a memorial and a symbolical place for cultural activities, in a form of resistance to capitalism. Instead, its dismantling will give place to the reconstruction of the former Berliner Stadtschloss3 in an absurd urbanistic action that will cost several hundred millions of euros. It is proudly supported by private investors, affluent citizens with extravagant urban desires. A terrifying Disneyfication of the main centre of Berlin will allow tourists, among a series of questionable 24-hour attractions, to ‘spend the night as the Kaiser in luxurious ambience’; a place where ‘art and culture will be staged’, and ‘where artworks from the whole world can be enjoyed, without one having to queue for hours’.4 What would happen if the whole world started to destroy the symbols of former powers and rebuild the heritage that has disappeared, under the logic of a pathetic theatrical consumerism? Is the Disneyfication of memory the ultimate allegory of capitalism?

Figure 3. 1980. Palast der Republik on the right, Fernsehturm in the middle, Berliner Dom on the left, and the Trabbi – the DDR classic car – in the foreground. Gerhard Kiesling, 1980. Photo archive of the Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin.


Figure 4. 2007. Ongoing demolition of the Palast der Republik, with the open-air exhibition of the history of the building in the foreground. Undine Siepker, 2007. Courtesy of the author.

Figure 5. 1910. Overview from the Schlossbrücke towards the Stadtschloss. Unknown photographer, 1910. Photo archive of the Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin.


The Classical Weimar Weimar has always played a symbolic role in Germany’s political life. Every political system has taken special care of the city due to its importance as the epicentre of German humanities. The Deutsches Nationaltheater was the chosen place for the foundation of the ‘Weimar Republic’ and the Bauhaus movement in 1919; Weimar was one of Hitler’s favourite cities; the German Democratic Republic not only kept the city centre5 but invested in the quality of its public spaces in a programmatic preservation. After the Wall fell, Weimar was the first German city to be nominated to hold the title of City of Culture in 1999. Weimar is a celebration of the past, a moulding of memory and an idealization of a selected historical time. Therefore, in order to preserve the ‘classical image’ an ensemble of buildings and monuments were inscribed at UNESCO’s World Heritage protection in 1998. The façades and the public spaces in the old city are all beautiful and cared for, as if in a fairy tale. There is a strong effort to keep the ambience of effervescent Romanticism, when Goethe, Schiller, Herder, Wieland and other important figures used to wander around the little passageways and narrow streets. Furthermore, the history of the city is already filled with other illustrious figures, such as the Renaissance painter Lucas Cranach the Elder and, in the second half of the nineteenth century, Nietzsche. Obviously, the main income of the city is dependent on cultural tourism or, as it was referred to in 1999, on ‘Goethe’s rentability factor’. It is quite difficult to find physical traces of the times of the GDR downtown. Besides one plattenbau building and a few other reminders, the last true examples of a lifestyle with some solidarity against, and aversion to, consumerism are disappearing. In 2005, the first Burger King opened up the way to junk food and IKEA Erfurt. IKEA is slowly replacing the domestic remains of 1960s furniture kept by students. We can still find scents of the socialist past in the stories of some of the inhabitants of Weimar; on bits and pieces of old, flowered wallpapers in buildings and at the small Ostshop that sells commodified and pop goods of the Ostalgie.6 But even this shop is more then secondary in the city’s tourism scenario. The scene belongs to Goethe and Schiller. One can find almost every aspect of them in the form of souvenirs, from a table set of Goethe’s head salt cellar along with Schiller’s head pepper cellar, posters, pens, key hangers, to all sizes of replicas of their famous monument. The interesting point is that the classical history of Weimar has stayed somehow untouched, as if these characters could represent the German cultural and historical ideal, almost as if they were cultural saints. The idealization of Classicism, embodied by the Goethe and Schiller monument, has been important for every regime, surviving all political changes. Zeit zu gehen (or an attempt to take the Goethe and Schiller monument on vacations) If monuments move for political reasons, why shouldn’t they move for poetical ones? Zeit zu gehen was a project I presented to the City of Weimar in 2005 and 2006. A series of street interviews with passers-by, plus an official letter sent to the mayor, all city hall-related


Figure 6. Fresh air: Goethe and Schiller go on vacations. Drawing by Daniela Brasil.

departments, museums and prominent people, asked if Goethe and Schiller should also have the freedom to see other landscapes. The proposition was based on the idea of re-animating history, by bringing the poets back to the place where they first met. On this journey they could drift through beautiful landscapes, breathe fresh air and relaunch themselves from their plinthattached lives. Saying that a statue has feelings, that it should have freedom to see other landscapes, is a provocation that aims to stretch the frontiers between reality and fiction. The argument that the statues deserve vacations from their long-lasting position of surveillance over Weimar is an artifice to propose a shift in the perception of everyday life. When the subject is not ‘the statue’ but ‘Goethe and Schiller’, the form of the discourse engenders a play with reality and its perception. The attempt of beauty in this way to address the object is to make it embody a feature that is absolute fiction; it is the belief in impossibility. Or, in the possibility, that history could be temporarily released from its burden. What would Weimar be without Goethe and Schiller? Is the presence of the monument that brings memory alive? As mentioned before, monuments, buildings and typonyms are devices that attempt to materialize memory. Memory, going back to the Greek notion of ‘mnemotechnics’, is a technique of ‘impressing’ images and places in the mind. As Aristotle defines it, memory ‘is like the imprint or drawing in us of things felt’ (Carruthers 1992). Facts of the past appear in a sort of mental picture that is disconnected to the real object, therefore, as Albertus Magnus says, they belong to the sensory soul and not to reason.


‘Memory is what enables images to persist over time; it is thus an essential feature needed for imagination to play its role in linking perception and thought’ (Krizan 2005). Therefore, memory exists only in the imagination. What remains with corporeal quality is the absence. What we remember is necessarily not there anymore. It is a void, an empty place. I am speculating what effect on collective memory the temporary absence of the central figure of this city could have had as it represents the ‘official identity’ of this place. Hence, this work aims to explore the notions of the ‘Lieu de mémoire’ where memory is a ‘crystallization of the past’ and ‘Milieu de mémoire’ where it can have an active role in everyday life as introduced by Pierre Nora. It speculates how artistic interventions can be effective in inquiring about the meaning of memory, rather than controlling it. When we talk about the notion of «Milieu de mémoire”, we immediately think of rituals and events where memory comes alive in a certain kind of ‘commemoration’. There are many forms of rituals and traditions where the collective memory becomes present without the need for enduring symbolism. Some religious festivals use more ephemeral artefacts that vanish easily, in order to keep memories alive. The creation of a public event to commemorate a special occasion makes people engage with an idea, allowing meaning to be reinterpreted and reconstructed in the present. The event is a moment of disruption. It transforms the public space into a stage for individual and collective manifestations within a certain theme; which, in this case, is a local discussion of the burden/lightness of history, memory and identity. Therefore, there were two movements orchestrated: moving the monument and moving ideas. To move ideas and thoughts it is not necessary to move the monument itself, although the second option would be obviously more effective. Inserting The Proposal as a theme for public discussion was the aim of the project. Can the heavy bronze structure and all that it represents on a symbolical, historical and political level suddenly become light enough to be lifted in the air? As everyone says, Weimar is a conservative place, Zeit zu gehen sought to infuse ossified thoughts with new perspectives. Moreover, its proposition was concerned with how people engaged with the idea. And that is what the project moved: people’s minds. By bringing the question of Zeit zu gehen into the public realm, especially into the media and directly to the ‘powerful characters’ of the city, it brought instantaneous reactions, generating an uncontrollable process of dissipation. The idea propagated itself as gossip and, after a while, many more people than predicted had heard about it. Considering the relatively small scale of Weimar, interference in the media did not need to be as massive as a metropolitan area would require. All it needed were some articles in local newspapers, street interviews, e-mails, faxes, phone calls, official meetings, casual conversations, radio, posters, mailings, invitations, a website, and it was spread all around.


The Proposal was represented with a mixture of reality and fantasy to keep the imaginary dimension clear. In terms of representation, the methodology employed entailed never using a photomontage that would betray the spectator and make him believe that the action occurred, like Krzysztof Wodiczko´s Homeless projection in New York.7 Rosalyn Deutsche defends him on the basis that the photomontages he exhibited in a gallery were effective enough, since they presented the statement of the artist to the public. Art does not necessarily have to be physical; proposals like Wodiczko’s ‘Homeless projection’ and ‘Zeit zu gehen’ do not need to be realized to exist as an artistic and political statement. But, in this case, I wanted to keep it clear whether it was realized or not, and the statement has to be brought to the general public opinion as an imaginary possibility. Therefore, the project demands a language that can access the heart of the public realm and not just remain within the art world. I am not interested in doing art only for artists; I am interested in processes where the public has an active role. The public presentation of The Proposal was held in the Deutsches Nationaltheater Weimar and focused on bringing the idea, the process and its reasons for public discussion. This choice of venue had a clear metaphorical and strategic reason behind it. Besides being the location within which the statue is placed, a theatre is also the space of representation par excellence, as it constitutes the public space. Of course, another reason for this choice was the fact that it is easily recognizable by anyone, it needs no explanation where it is. It is just as relevant, central and symbolic for Weimar as the Monument. The city mayor, the press and interested citizens were present. A general artistic explanation explored the main concepts, i.e., the idea of lightness/heaviness, travelling and the pursuit of new landscapes, as well as the need to breathe fresh air. An argument based on technical aspects attempted to prove that there are no reasons besides the symbolic ones for a denial of permission for the project. Selected movie scenes, where statues were hanging from helicopters flying over cities, were shown. They were selected for their poetic power to generate feelings of enthusiasm and joy, confusion and disappointment, shown respectively in Fellini’s classical La Dolce Vita and the well-humoured production on the fall of the Wall from Wolfgang Becker, Good bye Lenin! Other artistic projects, as Rudolf Herz’s ‘Lenin on Tour’ realized in 2003, were also mentioned. The artist’s wish to show Lenin to his contemporaries and the twenty-first century to Lenin resulted in a beautiful drift through the Alps, where the three communist statues disposed of Dresden and could finally breathe fresh air and see other landscapes beyond the former Iron Curtain. Giulio Carlo Argan mentions in his work ‘The history of art as the history of the city’ that there are two ways of treating an art object as an object of value: one is to classify, conserve and restore, and the other is to acknowledge its value through researching what it consists of, how it is generated and transmitted and how it is recognized and pursued. With this idea in mind, together with the idea of creating a ‘Milieu de mémoire’ previously mentioned, I defended the


Figure 7. “Potential in loss”. Article and photomontage by Thuringer Allgemeine newspaper. 06.February.06.

idea that moving the statue from its place is not putting the value of the object at risk, instead, it is another way of valorizing it. If this monument is an object of value, what is the nature of this value? Intervening in the public opinion of Weimar with this provocative idea was, finally, the artistic piece in itself. And it proved successful – without moving the statue in creating an event; finally, it managed to create a ‘Milieu de mémoire’. In this sense, the proposed action, which the Denkmalschutz8 understood as an opposition to the idea of conservation is, on the contrary, a way of investigating the monument’s symbolic importance and meaning. Artistic heritage survives through its constant reinterpretation, not through its crystallization or its recreation. Time flows constantly, and the past should be introduced as lively and meaningful to the present, otherwise history remains in danger of losing its density and its importance. ‘Le patrimoine sera vivant ou il ne sera pas’9 Daniela Brasil is an artist from Rio de Janeiro, working in Lisbon, Portugal, and Weimar, Germany.


Notes 1. Mahnmal is a German word for a type of monument that refers to a negative historical moment as a reminder or a warning for future generations. 2. The city’s castle was first built in the fifteenth century and was altered throughout the centuries. It was the residency of the kings of Prussia and German emperors until the fall of the monarchy in 1918. It was used as a museum until WWII, when bombing seriously damaged it. The GDR government finally demolished everything in 1950 in order to use the symbolic place to build their parliament. 3. After the asbestos had been removed in 2003, the building remained as an empty structure until February 2006 when demolition started. During these times, it was used for a series of initiatives including: art exhibitions, music, concerts, parties, discussions and debates. Details of the programme may be found at: http://www.volkspalast.com. 4. Translated from: http://www.stadtschloss-berlin.de., the scary official website of the whole initiative. 5. The main urban politics of the GDR involved using modernist architecture as a symbol of power. Thus, many cities had their centres rebuilt mainly with the plattenbau technique, creating the iconography for a new lifestyle. 6. Ostalgie is a German term to acknowledge the nostalgia of the former German Democratic Republic. It combines Ost (east) with nostalgie (nostalgia). 7. Rosalyn Deutsche’s description of his work is in Deutsche (1998). 8. City office for ‘Monument Protection’ is the literal translation. No authorization was given to the action, and the official document of refusal argued basically that the request accomplished no objective reasons to put ‘the monument substance’ at risk. 9. ‘Heritage will be alive or it will not be’ (Audeire 2003 [author’s trans.])

References Audeire, D. (2003), Questions sur le Patrimone. Éditions Confluences, Bordeaux. Carruthers, M. (1992), The Book of Memory: a Study of Memory in Medieval Culture. Cambridge University Press, UK. Deutsche, R. (1998), Evictions – Art and Spatial Politics. MIT Press. Krizan, M. (2005), Does Mind Think All Things? A New Puzzle for Aristotle’s Philosophy of Mind. https://webfiles.colorado.edu/krizan/. Accessed 2005.

9 The Ecology of Post-Socialism and the Implications of Sustainability for Contemporary Art

Maja Fowkes and Reuben Fowkes The emergence of sustainability as a key concept in worldwide debates happened precisely in the years around the fall of communism in Eastern Europe. The Bruntland Report, commissioned by the UN to examine the connection between the environment and development, was published in 1987 and introduced the influential definition of sustainable development as: ‘how to meet the needs of the present generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.’1 However, it was not until 1992 that the Earth Summit in Rio provided the first global forum at which the connection between ecology and social justice was made clear. Concomitantly, the division of the world crystallized along the lines of the ‘economic development’ of the South and the ‘economic growth’ of the North, superseding the ideological divide between East and West. The year of the Rio Summit also marked the end of the optimistic period following the fall of the Berlin Wall, as countries were confronted with the hard realities of international Realpolitik and the socially corrosive effect of the rapid marketization of the former East. Perhaps it was the disintegration of the ideological polarities of the Cold War that made it possible for the notion of sustainability to emerge in the context of a global understanding of ecological and social crisis. Reflecting on the changed relationship of humans to nature on the occasion of the Rio Summit, conceptual artist Gustav Metzger drew attention to the way in which the Cold War had for decades provided a pretext for ignoring the systematic ruination of nature:


Under the cover of darkness – the manipulated perception of a threat coming from the Eastern Bloc – the emergence, or one could say construction of the Cold War, the West put everything into the melting pot. Production expanded; ceaseless invention took place. There came the rise of the military industrial complex…The Information Explosion occurred, the Personal Computer was launched. And all the while, the earth was overrun with waste and poisoned (Metzger 1996: 15). The fall of communism was the moment when radical theorist Felix Guattari re-oriented his thinking towards the ecological crisis of the world and criticized the purely technocratic perspective towards the environment seen in terms of simply tackling industrial pollution. His study The Three Ecologies, first published in 1989, laid the blame at the door of Integrated World Capitalism (IWC), which through a series of techno-scientific transformations, has brought us to the brink of ecological disaster. Guattari called for an ‘ethico-political articulation’ of the problem according to the principles of ecosophy that takes into account the three ecological registers of the environment, social relations and human subjectivity (Guattari 2000: 27). His contribution is vital precisely for bringing out, along with the more widely acknowledged environmental and social dimensions, the third element of mental ecology. Guattari argues that the structures of human subjectivity are threatened by the pollution and saturation of the unconscious, in conformity with global market forces, to the extreme of being faced with extinction. Significantly, the approach of mental ecosophy to tackling these issues draws on the methodologies of artists rather than scientists (Guattari 2000: 27).2 Insight into the degree to which capitalism has spread throughout society, interfering in an ever increasing number of spheres of human behaviour, can also be found in the work of social ecologist Murray Bookchin, as he argues that ‘capitalism today has become a society not only an economy’ (Bookchin 1990: 91). Social ecology asserts that problems in the environment have their roots in problems within society, as hierarchies and oppressions in society manifest themselves in our relationship towards the environment. Bookchin was a vehement opponent of deep ecology, which he accused of propagating biocentrism, fetishizing wilderness and showing an ‘unfeeling Malthusianism that views famine and disease as Gaia’s retribution for human intervention into “Nature” (Bookchin 2005: 17). In his keynote speech at the first American Green gathering in 1987, he criticized much environmentalism for its western-centred approach, arguing that global environmental solutions are impossible without global social justice. Significantly, his opposition to deep ecology coincided with the appearance of the concept of sustainable development (Fowkes and Fowkes 2007: 78–83). The key problems addressed by sustainability are, therefore, the ecological effects of the capitalist model of growth onto the environment, society and human subjectivities, manifested through consumerism, hierarchies in society and social injustice. The transformation of society into a more sustainable one entails putting into practice the principles of ecology, grassroots democracy, social justice and non-violence, as first put forward by the German Green movement. Ecological citizenship acknowledges the right of other species to exist without damage in an expanded moral community (Mills in Smith 1999: 394).

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Bringing the principles of sustainability into the sphere of contemporary art has complex implications, as it questions the wider context around the production and reception of artworks. It challenges the sacrosanct status of the art object as the highest value of civilization, which is implicit in much art theory and in the institutional structures of the art world. Perhaps parallels could be drawn between the tendency to stop seeing nature as an endless resource and the search for alternatives to the common understanding of art as commodity. Consideration of the sustainability of artistic practices does not imply the instrumentalization of contemporary art as a vehicle for the propagation of a specific social or environmental ideology. In other words, it is perfectly possible for a work to be sustainable without having a direct political or environmental message. The perpetual dualism of form and content comes to the fore in a new way here, and, arguably, it is sustainability of form that takes priority over content (Fowkes and Fowkes 2006: 104). Sustainability of form implies an awareness of the environmental impact of the created work, responsible use of materials or resources and a non-exploitative approach. To paraphrase deep ecology, sustainable form is about making do with enough. It means avoiding damaging the environment, or affecting the rights of other species to exist without harm, as well as eschewing the exploitation of individuals and communities for artistic ends. In short, if for Modernism form was a question of aesthetic values, in the sustainability of art, form is a matter of ethical values. Dematerialization and recycling are two possible modes for realizing sustainable form. Dematerialization questions art as commodity and asks whether there are limits to growth of our stockpile of art objects. Art practices that eschew the creation of art objects have a potentially much smaller ecological impact, often involving minimal interventions in existing situations. Recycling in its widest sense is another element of sustainable form and can be opposed to a constant search for novelty in the media industry and consumerism. A key trait of recycling in sustainable art is its application to concepts rather than materials. The legacy of conceptual art practice of the early 70s here proves to be a renewable resource for contemporary artists. To take a particular example, the work of Adrian Paci is not at first sight a typical case of ecological art, although it meets many of the requirements for sustainable form. In his film PilgrIMAGE (2005), the artist intervenes in the centuries-long parallel, but shared, history of a painting of the Madonna and draws on the intertwined legends connecting Italy, as the artist’s place of residence, and his native Albania. According to the Albanian legend, Our Lady of Shkodra, the most venerated icon in Albania, escaped from the Ottoman siege by floating up into the sky and was followed by two Albanian witnesses all the way to Rome, where they lost sight of her. This is where the Italian story begins, according to which in 1467 the Madonna del Buonconsiglio miraculously appeared in the town of Genazzano near Rome, descending from a cloud and hovering before an unfinished church wall and immediately became a site of pilgrimage and devotion. The artist filmed the painting of the Madonna, showing it carefully secured in its chapel, subsequently holding a public screening in Shkodra for her Albanian faithful. The artist recorded this encounter and, in the most exquisite manner, projected it back to the Madonna herself in the solitude of the church.


PilgrIMAGE has the quality of sustainable art, in the sense that the work creates a significant artistic effect by intervening in the web of interactions and meanings around an object, without excessive use of materials or unjustified actions, through the efficient use of new technologies. Furthermore, this work resists the customary interpretation in terms of binaries such as engaged versus autonomous art, as well as the division between the mode of the solo artist as self-referential and the contemporary affection for the collaborative, socially engaged, community-based artist. Although very much an individual artist’s project, a film such as PilgrIMAGE has the potential to contribute more to the quality of life for a community than many self-declared collaborative projects that on closer inspection turn out to be vehicles for the enhancement of an individual’s ego and exploitative of the community with which they claim to collaborate. In the act of showing the projection of the Albanian faithful to the Madonna in her chapel, the artist even admits the possibility of the miraculous and points to experiences and knowledges that are beyond commonplace reality. His treatment of the icon and the myths around it can be related to Theodor Adorno’s concept of ‘appearance’ that refers primarily not to empirical appearance but to a reality that remains ungraspable. Such artworks relate to the rest of reality as an ‘apparition’ that is at one moment present and in the same instant no longer there: ‘The artwork as appearance is most closely resembled by the apparition, the heavenly vision’ (Adorno 2004: 80). Post-Adorno theorists have explored further the implications of the enhanced assessment of the status of aesthetic experience to be found in Adorno’s unfinished Aesthetic Theory. For Martin Seel, the potential of art in providing access to ‘the unfathomable particularity of a sensuously given’ allows us to gain insight into the ‘indeterminable presence of our lives’ (Seel 2005: ix). He also considers the legacy of Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, who saw the strengths of aesthetic knowledge in perceiving complex phenomena and presenting them in their intuitive density rather than attempting to analyze their composition. The insight that the goal of artistic knowledge is not the universal, but the consideration of the particular, is of clear relevance to the aspirations of contemporary art towards a form of knowledge production that offers alternatives to the techno-scientific framework: ‘To know the particular in its particularity is the real accomplishment of cognitio sensitiva (sensuous knowledge), which is something no science will be able to achieve’ (Seel 2005 ix). Art which no longer sees itself as completely self-referential and separate from the world of non-art has the potential to explore the notion of the artist as knowledge producer. This can be understood in terms of bringing a specific artistic contribution to the tackling of environmental or social problems, or to awakening wider social consciousness in the manner of an intellectual or spiritual vanguard. Rather than ‘objective spirit’ or ‘pure ideas’, art has also been attributed the ability to descend into a chaos devoid of ideas and convey the ‘indeterminacy and ultimate uncontrollability of the real’. Martin Seel has thus argued that ‘sensuous perception can go beyond the limits of epistemic consciousness’, through the experience of a ‘visual resonating,


an occurrence without anything recognizable occurring, something that can be followed sensuously but not cognitively apprehended’ (Guattari 2000). When Beáta Veszely lays out the goals of her practice, she aims to explore the impossible: Experience is really experience, something that really happens, something to make work about, only when we are pushed to the limit of the possible…The experience of the impossible is the very quality that defines religion and there is a fundamentally religious quality to human experience itself. The artist’s means for engaging with the impossible is through the practice of horse archery, an ancient martial art that offers a way to reconnect with old knowledge neglected by the modern world. Horse archery is a way of life, the artist states, and through her connectedness with the animal, the natural environment, and indirectly with the traditions of the nomadic culture of the Eurasian Steppes, she evokes a forgotten quality of life. She sees the practice of horse archery as ‘performing the artist’s body in the landscape’ and in that way blurs the distinction between art and life. Here we cannot talk about ecologically engaged art, as Beáta Veszely proceeds intuitively; however, there are parallels with Felix Guattari’s insight that mental ecosophy will lead us to ‘reinvent the relation of the subject to the body, to fantasme, to the passage of time, to the mysteries of life and death, it will lead us to search for antidotes to mass-media and telematic standardization, conformism of fashion, the manipulation of opinion by advertising surveys, etc’ (Guatarri 2000). The mythical figure of the horse archer also appears as a kind of timeless superhero drawn on press cuttings. Veszely exhibits these cuttings along with films, and they act as a source of protection and guidance in uncertain times, somewhere beyond the misleading messages about life projected by the mass media. Another aspect of the most successful sustainable artistic practice is a concern for one’s own history and locality, often accompanied by the desire to reconnect with old knowledges. This can be opposed to the postmodernist tendency towards a quasi-anthropological fascination with the cultural patterns of the Other. In this sense, Adrian Paci intervenes into the sacred spheres and religious beliefs of his own community, while Beáta Veszely shares a similar desire to reconnect with her own community’s past and lost knowledges. Confronting the problems of urban living, artist Nils Norman researches the social and cultural effects of the process of inner-city gentrification and offers alternative models to the marketdriven ideology of urban development. In his book The Contemporary Picturesque, he gives us a structuralist critique of the repetitive and oppressive features of the modern city. For instance, he shows how in the interests of efficient social control, urban planning has devised street furniture that is too small and uncomfortable to lie down on, barriers and bollards that direct the flow of crowds, ubiquitous surveillance cameras, patented anti-climb paint and anti-sitting bumps on fences and pavements. The artist also illustrates the subversive techniques and possibilities


of resistance offered by the modern city, such as lock-ons, barricades and tripods, describing the methods used by insurrectionaries and protestors to reclaim urban space from state power. Barricades, for example, ‘unlike the official barriers and guard rails of city spaces, [are] built to obstruct the distribution of capital (and the paid representatives of the state) and to bring it to as long a standstill as possible’ (Norman 2002: 14). Another Nils Norman book, An Architecture of Play, traces the instructive history of London’s adventure playgrounds from origins in post-war bomb sites, through their heyday in the 70s, to rare examples surviving today (Norman 2003). The artist explains: ‘I have come to see adventure playgrounds as radical models of alternative public space playful spaces of disruption, disorder, and undevelopment, in direct opposition to the relentless privatisation and dismal redevelopment of every sad scrap of urban space’ (Smith 2005: 86). Being replaced with standardized, ‘safe and tested’ play equipment, adventure playgrounds represent a counterpoint to the obsession with public safety in a risk society that masks the real origins and consequences of danger. Ulrich Beck’s Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity argues that we are living in a new phase of social existence characterized by uncertainty and anxiety, where science can offer few concrete reassurances. Risk is defined as a ‘systematic way of dealing with hazards and insecurities induced and introduced by modernisation itself’ (Beck 2005: 21). He points to the failure of democratic institutions designed for an age of industrial society to keep up with the unforeseeable demands of a ‘risk society’ and calls for the reinvigoration of the ‘preserving, settling, discursive functions of politics’ (Beck 2005: 235). In this sense, Nils Norman’s Adventure Playgrounds project responds to Ulrich Beck’s observation in Risk Society, that ‘Progress is a blank cheque to be honoured beyond consent and legitimation. The sensitivity of democratically legitimated politics to criticism contrasts with the relative immunity to criticism of techno-economic sub-politics’ (Beck 2005: 203). When we search for the origins of sustainable art practice, the logical starting point would appear to be the land art movement of the 60s and 70s. However, the problem with land art is that it was not very sustainable (Fowkes and Fowkes 2004: 7). Land artists famously left the white cube of the gallery to make dramatic interventions in the living landscape. ‘Instead of using a paintbrush to make his art Robert Morris would like to use a bulldozer’ (Smithson in Kastner and Wallis 1998: 19) is a statement by Robert Smithson that highlights the ‘earthmovers’ preoccupation with marking, removing and rearranging natural materials on a grand scale, arguably treating nature as a giant canvas. For example, a truck, two tractors and a large bulldozer laboured to shift 6,783 tonnes of earth to create Smithson’s notorious spiral shape in the Great Salt Lake. Land art was also severely criticized by feminist art critics, who called it ‘the most macho of all post-war art movements’ (Adams and Gruetzner 2000). A more fruitful ground for searching for the origins of today’s sustainable art is in the innovative practices of the conceptual artists of the same period. Their radical questioning of the art system, alternative strategies for making and presenting work, engagement with social and


political realities, ethics and encouragement of independent thought are all important legacies for contemporary art. Furthermore, dematerialization, through the disavowal of the art object and shift towards process-based practices, performances, actions, as well as ephemeral works, was an invaluable inheritance for later sustainable art. We would like to suggest that it was the Eastern European version of conceptual art, which thrived without the context of commercial market forces that has most relevance to contemporary sustainable art practices. The history of the western branch of conceptual art, as Alexander Alberro has asserted, is intimately related to the role of the American dealer Seth Siegelaub. By actively promoting the artists, curating ground-breaking shows, organizing symposia and publications, Siegelaub played a key role in managing the careers of artists who were making ‘something from nothing’. Alberro places the movement in the context of the increased commercialization and globalization of the art world (Alberro 2004). By contrast, the situation in Eastern Europe was quite different, as this account by Boris Groys of the hidden universe of Moscow conceptual artists in the 1970s makes clear: Russian unofficial artists had no access to Soviet official exhibition spaces and to the media. There was no art market, no spectators from outside. This means that these artists made their works for colleagues for other artists, writers, or intellectuals involved in the unofficial art scene. There was almost no competition among the unofficial artists they built a really utopian community (Groys and Vidokle in IRWIN 2006: 403). Considering the legacy of Modernism for contemporary sustainable art, a useful distinction can be made between the divergent lines of the classical avant-garde and high modernism. High Modernism stressed formal evolution of style and, in its Greenbergian version, entailed the progressive purification of the visual field, and the maintenance of strong disciplinary boundaries. The avant-garde strain of Modernism is more attractive for contemporary sustainable art, essentially for the utopian element that contains and engenders the desire to radically transform society. The conceptual art of the early 70s, especially in its Eastern European market-free incarnation, transmitted the avant-garde impulse into the contemporary era and, at the same time, marked an epochal divide from Modernism’s interest in pure art, stylistic novelty and dichotomous thinking. If we are to excavate one example from the neglected history of East European conceptual art that is of interest in this context, it would be Grupa TOK from Zagreb that was active in 1972. The group realized a series of actions and installations which dealt with the problems of art in public space and adopted a critical position to the sudden influx of non-monumental public sculpture. For TOK, the foremost problem of the city was the ecological one. They made see-through rubbish bins, put in several places in the city, in order to point out that the problem of waste does not end when it’s thrown away. Car tyres were soaked in paint and then rolled around the pavement, to show how parked cars determine the path for pedestrians. Small mirrors were installed on the colonnades by the main square that were frequented by prostitutes, and so pointing to the territories of the city that are used by marginal groups in a


non-exploitative way. The artists also printed postcards with the words ‘Greetings from Zagreb’ against a smoking factory chimney (Susovski 1982: 31). In Croatian art history Grupa TOK figure only marginally this is where sustainability is also a concept for questioning art history. They were neglected because of the dominance of the modernist aesthetic ideology that valorized individual artistic genius, the purity of artistic form and art for art’s sake. While politically engaged artists could in some circumstances be understood, those that went a step further and dealt with nature and environment were perceived by society as seeking an escape or asylum there. The notion of the autonomy of art, which was a fundamental principle of Modernism and is still implicitly adhered to in much art writing, is both a challenge to and challenged by the assumptions of sustainable art. Since Adorno, it has been convincingly argued that art’s autonomy creates a space for critique and enables resistance to the universalizing discourses of the capitalist culture industry: ‘The purity of bourgeois art, which hypostasised itself as a world of freedom in contrast to what was happening in the material world, was from the beginning bought with the exclusion of the lower classes – with whose cause, the real universality, art keeps faith precisely by its freedom from the ends of the false universality’ (Adorno and Horkheimer 1976). Christoph Menke has likewise argued that along with autonomy, art in modernity achieves sovereignty: art can be considered as ‘a sovereign subversion of the rationality of all discourses’, while the sovereignty of art is ‘premised on the autonomy of the aesthetic, rather than its curtailment’ (Menke 1998: ix). It can, therefore, be argued that it is autonomy that gives art, as well as artists as social actors, the potential to be free and able to offer alternatives to dominant ideological paradigms. In this case, sustainability of art recognizes no contradiction between autonomy and engagement, as long as the formal qualities are fulfilled, and is able to draw on the radical independence of art from external forces. There is, though, a second approach, according to which sustainability brings into question the hermeneutic notion of artistic autonomy. The kinds of challenges to liberal assumptions about individualism made by a revised notion of ecological citizenship, in particular the abandonment of the distinction between private and public in response to the claim of inter-generational justice, may also have parallels in the sphere of art. According to an expanded ecological ethics, individualistic choices can be overridden in cases where they damage the rights of future generations and of other members of the biotic community. This can be taken to imply a challenge to the Kantian basis for autonomy that still structures much thinking about art, to the extent that art may be forced to give up some of its autonomy in recognition of the high stakes of ecological meltdown. According to the Kantian model, in exercising aesthetic perception we are free from the constraints of conceptual knowing, free from the reckoning of instrumental action and free from the conflict between duty and inclination. This kind of reasoning raises the question whether it is still useful to consider art completely free from the environmental and social impacts it creates. Despite its extremely reduced and concentrated form, the work of Tomo Savić Gecan touches on issues from the critical potential of autonomous art to the contemporary engagement with


conceptual art. His work is both decidedly autonomous, usually consisting of little more than a sentence on a gallery wall, and yet directed outwards to society, encouraging criticality through the succinct philosophical dilemmas it poses. A work for the Croatian Pavilion in Venice 2005 consisted of a text that read: ‘During the 51. Biennale di Venezia movements of the visitors of W139, Centre for Contemporary Art in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, change the temperature of the water in the swimming pool of Spordiklubi Reval-Sport in Tallinn, Estonia by 1° C.’ There is an undeniable reference to well-worn conceptual practices, but his work escapes text-based self-referentiality by always pointing to a concrete effect in the real world. With Gecan, we are clearly dealing with an individual artist, yet his concerns are contemporary and unselfish, his work gaining its meaning from the responses and interactions with people, and the overcoming of conventional binary oppositions, such as between gallery-based and public art. The artist’s radical questioning of the art object and its place in the gallery and museum system is additionally addressed in the following work: ‘Please do not touch. Why can’t you touch the art? Invisible salts and oils on your hands destroy the surfaces of works of art. We want to preserve the art for future generations, so please don’t touch.’ As sustainability questions the capitalist model of growth in society, in art it questions the status of the art objects and art projects as commodity. If we are to reinterpret the schematic division between high and low art in terms of sustainability, strictly speaking, all art that is intended for the market, belongs to the category of low art. This resonates with Adorno’s critique of ‘minor art’, which is reduced to a ‘recreational activity’ in the ‘evening hours’ of the working day (Menke 1998: 9). At a time when ecological concerns are addressed everywhere and for a mixture of motives, the ideas of sustainability have been adopted as a popular content for contemporary artworks. In Stories are Propaganda (2005), Rirkrit Tiravanija and Philippe Parreno deal with the impact of globalization, in the wake of their joint trip to China, where the film was shot. A picture of a magician pulling a rabbit out of his hat stands as a symbolic condensation of the film, while a young boy’s voice recites an elegy to the slipping away of the past into the unstable category of nowness. They conjure up the ‘good old days’ before ‘cappuccino and sushi and ruccola went global…Before adventure became a sport, and nature became a spot. Before cell phone conversations were banned on trains. Before Googling became an aspect of human behaviour… Before we started looking at the world as a standing stock of material.’ Despite what appears to be strong criticism of the unforeseeable effects of globalization on the environment and quality of life, there remains a note of ambivalence, as suggested by the get-out clause of the title. If their narrative confesses to being a modern fairy tale, then the precious ambiguity beloved of the consumerist art game is preserved. The autonomous practice of Heath Bunting derives from his ultimate freedom, freedom to climb trees, fences and other urban structures, to break rules and conventions he considers to be wrong. He protects his autonomy from outside interference, in particular from the institutionalized structures of the art world, which affect the choices artists make from conception to realization, through their programmatic funding strategies. His website lists many projects


as funded by ‘none, none, none’, and they are characterized by complete independence from the managed settings of gallery and ‘public space’. The Net, earlier championed as a virtual space of freedom, exists for Heath Bunting as an extension of public space, subject to the same forces of social control, and, therefore, he significantly moved from the realm of Internet art to real-life situations. The experience of ‘sports art’ such as canoeing, rehearsing evacuation to a cave, bridging a river or practicing survivalism can be considered in terms of high art, while a transmission of the nonconformity of the avant-garde gives an enigmatic and irreducible quality to his work. Heath Bunting investigates the wide possibilities open to the creatively minded twenty-first-century urban dweller. His work suggests a radically different model to that of the metropolitan flaneur, a figure so beloved of modernist art and literature. The artist of today does not drift through the city seeking sensory stimulation and fleeting impressions, but sets out on a skateboard in search of the ingredients for a sustainable existence. Food for Free (2005) is one such project, which maps the sources of naturally occurring food in the bio-region of Bristol. Detailed information about edible plants and organisms, their locations and seasons, is plotted on an online map, which significantly has no street names, as if to insist on the primacy of the natural ecology of the city beyond the overlays of modern culture.3 Giorgo Agamben observes that the situation becomes productive ‘exactly there where the zones of the indistinguishability of artistic practice and political activism are at stake, always then when a temporary moment of the indifference of life and art arises, through which both undergo a crucial metamorphosis at the same time’ (Agamben in Raunig 2006), which is certainly relevant to many artists discussed here. Artists concerned with sustainability develop strategies to frustrate attempts to assimilate their work to dominant liberal capitalist discourses in order to avoid appropriation and taming of radical ideas. There is, though, a thin line between artists genuinely engaged in sustainability and those who employ the same models and deal with the same issues for the sake of art spectacle. To recall Walter Benjamin here: ‘The best political tendency is wrong, if it does not demonstrate the attitude with which it is to be followed’ (Benjamin in Jennings 1999: 777). Maja Fowkes and Reuben Fowkes co-ordinate a network of academics and artists on postsocialism.

Notes 1. Our Common Future [Bruntland Report], World Commission on Environment and Development, 1987. 2. ‘[Ecosophy’s] ways of operating will be more like those of an artist, rather than of professional psychiatrists, who are always haunted by an outmoded idea of scientificity’ (Guattari 2000: 27). 3. See, also, Maja Fowkes and Reuben Fowkes, ‘The Art of Making Do with Enough’, in The New Art (Rachmaninoff’s: London, 2006).


References Adams, S. and Gruetzner, A. (eds.) (2000), Gendering Landscape Art, MUP: Manchester. Adorno, T. (2004), Aesthetic Theory, Continuum: London. Adorno T. And Horkeimer M. (1976), Dialectic of Enlightenment, Continuum: London. Agamben G. quoted by Raunig, G. (2006), Art and Revolution: Artistic Activism During the Long 20th Century [e-book] (eipcp: Vienna). Alberro, A. (2004), Conceptual Art and the Politics of Publicity, Cambridge, Mass. Beck, U. (2005), Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, Sage:London. Benjamin, W. in Jennings, M. (ed.) (1999), ‘The Author as Producer’ in Selected Writings, Vol. 2: 1927–1934, Harvard University Press: Cambridge, Mass. Bookchin, M. (1990), Remaking Society, Black Dog Books: Norwich. Bookchin, M. (2005), The Ecology of Freedom: the Emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy, AK Press: California. Bruntland Report (1987), Our Common Future, World Commission on Environment and Development. Fowkes, M., Fowkes, R. (2004), ‘Unframed Landscapes: Nature in Contemporary Art’, in Unframed Landscapes [exhibition catalogue] Croatian Society of Fine Artists: Zagreb. Fowkes, M., Fowkes, R. (2006), ‘The Art of Making Do with Enough’, in The New Art Rachmaninoff’s: London. Guattari, F. (2000), The Three Ecologies, Althone Press: London. Groys, N. and Vidokle, A. in (ed.) IRWIN (2006), ‘Art beyond the Art Market’, in East Art Map, Afterall Books: London. Menke, C. (1998), The Sovereignty of Art: Aesthetic Negativity in Adorno and Derrida, MIT Press: Cambridge, Mass. Metzger, G. (1996), ‘Nature Demised Resurrects as Environment’, in Damaged Nature, Auto-Destructive Art, (coracle@workfortheeyetodo): London. Mills, M. in Smith, M. (ed.), (1999), ‘Green Democracy: the search for an ethical solution,’ in Thinking through the Environment, Routledge: New York and London. Norman, N. (2002), The Contemporary Picturesque, Bookworks: London. Norman, N. (2003), An Architecture of Play: A Survey of London’s Adventure Playgrounds, Four Corner Books: London. Seel, M. (2005), Aesthetics of Appearing, Stanford: California. Smith, S. (2005), Beyond Green: Toward a Sustainable Art, Smart Museum of Art: Chicago. Smithson, R. in Kastner, J. and Wallis, B. (1998), Land and Environmental Art, Phaidon: London. Susovski, M. (1982), Inovacije u hrvatskoj umjetnosti sedamdesetih godina [Innovation in Croatian art of the 70s] Gallery of Contemporary Art: Zagreb.

10 Functions, Functionalism and Functionlessness: On the Social Function of Public Art after Modernism Freee Art Collective

Dave Beech, Andy Hewitt, Mel Jordan Conceiving of art as having a social function either one chosen voluntarily by artists or one encouraged or imposed by big business or the state comes into conflict with the conception of art’s autonomy. Art is not in a unique position in this regard; journalism, political debate and scientific research are also expected to serve social functions while being defended as free to pursue knowledge and truth. In fact, they serve their various social functions, the argument goes, only by preserving their autonomy. What does autonomy mean today? After the optimism of Modernism has waned and after big business has eclipsed state power, has autonomy been colonized by society so that art, journalism, politics and science now function only for the private interests of the wealthy and powerful? Is art’s autonomy under threat, and, if so, should we be concerned? ‘The essence of Modernism lies’, Clement Greenberg wrote, ‘in the use of characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself, not in order to subvert it but in order to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence’ (Greenburg 2003: 774). This was written,


we should remember, at the time, 1965, when the Minimalists were conducting their anti-art assault on art. Artists like Sol LeWitt, Donald Judd, Robert Morris and Carl Andre systematically exceeded art’s competencies and art’s disciplines, emancipating themselves and the rest of us from the constraints that those competences and disciplines arbitrarily impose. The assault on art was not a once-and-for-all subversive act or shocking gesture. Minimalism questioned every aspect of art, from the gallery, the artist to the art object and the aesthetic subject. They did this by breaking down the barriers between art and life, substituting mundane materials for specifically artistic ones, and eliminating hierarchies within works as well as between the artist and everyone else. The assault on art is always, in part, a challenge to the privileged social position that art has obtained and the function that art has in maintaining the cultural and social status quo. Painting and sculpture were abandoned for the production of objects; found and prefabricated materials freed art from craft, taste and the artist’s hand; artistic competences were spurned for mundane and informal techniques: in these and other ways, the Minimalists left Greenberg’s formalist version of art’s autonomy for dead. Judd abolished all apparent constraints on art by saying, ‘if someone calls it art its art’. Here is a perfect example of Minimalism’s systematic negation of art’s pre-established objects, qualities, techniques, modes of attention and forms of address. This is subversive in precisely the sense that Greenberg wants to rule out. Joseph Kosuth, in his essay Art after Philosophy, separates art from aesthetics in an attempt to describe art, not merely as a development of an aesthetic and formal language, but as a proposition presented within the context of art as a comment on art. Kosuth advocates the questioning and exploration of the function of art as the actual nature of art. He says, Formalist criticism is no more that an analysis of the physical attributes of particular objects which happen to exist in a morphological context. But this doesn’t add any knowledge (or facts) to the understanding of the nature or function of art. And nor does it comment on whether or not the objects analyzed are even works of art, in that formalist critics always by-pass the conceptual element in works of art. Exactly why they don’t comment on the conceptual element in works of art is precisely because formalist art is only art by virtue of its resemblance to earlier works of art (Kosuth in Harrison and Wood 2003: 855). Nevertheless Kosuth’s Conceptualism does not subvert art’s proper boundaries. In fact, Kosuth never fully frees himself from the Greenbergian schema that he criticizes. His anti-formalist version of art’s autonomy renews the content of what is, essentially, the same container for art. Kosuth’s definition of art has the same contours as Greenberg’s even if the young Conceptualist persistently distances himself from the old critic. ‘Formalist critics’, Kosuth says, ‘do not question the nature of art’ (Kosuth 2003: 855) Nevertheless, Kosuth’s questioning of the nature of art is restricted to the field of art that Greenberg would find familiar – it is his field. When Kosuth argues that ‘a work of art is a kind of proposition presented within the context of art as a comment on art’ (Kosuth 2003:856–7) he echoes Greenberg’s own position, expressed in his famous essay ‘Modernist Painting’, that modern art is characterized by self-criticism in the

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Kantian tradition of immanent critique. Kosuth’s Conceptualism does not subvert Greenberg’s conception of modernist art, it breathes new life into it, albeit perhaps a different, unexpected life. Functions and Functionalism Kosuth concludes Art After Philosophy with two bangs of the Conceptualist drum: ‘Art’s only claim is for art. Art is the definition of art’ (Kosuth 2003: 860) Thus, while he speaks extensively about the function of art, this is not for him a social function. The purpose of talking about the function of art for Kosuth is to distinguish Conceptualism from Formalism, which he describes as ‘the vanguard of decoration’ (Kosuth 2003: 854) and characterizes as functionless. But his conception of function is narrowly Duchampian. Consequently, Kosuth fails to acknowledge how art functions beyond art he doesn’t question or explore the politics of art’s autonomy its social function. To speak of art’s functions is to attend to the political and social totality of art and not to be limited to discussions around the ideology of the aesthetic or the ontology of art that cuts art off from everything else. If the assault on art fixates on art’s institutions, however, then it never frees itself from Greenberg’s horizon. Institution critique, for instance, is plagued by the agenda set for it by the pre-existing institution. The subversion of art, on the other hand, must exceed that horizon and set its own agenda or else it offers self-criticism rather than subversion. There is also a political mistake at the heart of immanent critique, including institutional critique. In its attention to the frameworks of art, institutional critique sets a limit on the scope of the political and social critique of art: institutional critique is incapable of asking serious questions about the social structures that produce art’s institutions except insofar as these are evidenced in the institutions themselves. And if art’s institutions are perceived as autonomous institutions then we can expect some significant social processes, including the functionless functions to which art is put by society, to be hidden, suppressed and made invisible within the institutions themselves. To talk about public art as having functions is to point out how it is connected to, complicit with and instrumental for wider social forces. Studying the function of a social practice or institution, according to Anthony Giddens, is to analyze the ‘contribution which that practice or institution makes to the continuation of the society as a whole’ (Giddens 1993: 711). This position derives from Bronislaw Malinowski’s study of the religious practices of the Trobriand Islanders. Religious beliefs and customs, he said, could be understood only by showing how they relate to other institutions within the society as a whole. In this way, functionalist sociology can be explained through an analogy with the human body: if you want to understand how the heart works, you must see how it is related to all the other organs. The heart plays a vital role in the continuation of the life of the organism. This is the heart’s function. And the heart’s function tells us what the heart is by identifying what the heart does. Isolate the heart or religion, or art and it can never be fully understood according to the functionalist. Consider, for instance, the rain dance of the Hopi Indians of New Mexico. The Hopi dance is linked to a belief that the ceremony will bring the rain that their crops need. But within Emile


Durkheim’s functionalist sociology, which sees religion as social glue that reaffirms shared values, thus contributing to social cohesion, the dance is a social, not supernatural, event its function is to consecrate the membership of a social group, a ritual of belonging. Referring specifically to the problem of functionalism in the analysis of art, Art & Language criticized the Malinowskian approach to the Trobriand Islanders’ religion insofar as it rules out the possibility of internal critique and resistance (Art & Language 1982: 45–53). If everything is functional for society as a whole, then individuals are condemned to complicity. But instead of saying that functionalism does not explain resistance and insubordinacy, we need to see that the recognition of functions is a motivation for resistance. Functions change our perspective on things. For this reason, functionalism, especially in the elevated fields of religion and art, secularizes and politicizes by drawing the metaphysics of sacred practices back into social relations and networks of power. Theories of the Public Before we can proceed with a critical discussion of public art, then, consideration of what we mean by the public is required. The Sloganeering project – (by the Freee art collective). prosecutes the contradictions inherent within the concept and conventional practices of public art. Through the placement and dissemination of these texts we point to the possibility that public art has no public at all. Strictly speaking, public art does not have a public, just passers-by. Without endorsing the conservative notion of the public as a placid community of abstractly equal individuals, there seems, nonetheless, to be more to the public than an aggregate of tourists, shoppers, workers, commuters and residents. The public may not be a coherent body of citizens, but it connotes a minimal degree of shared purpose or common experience. In his book The Function of Criticism, Terry Eagleton indexes the inauguration of a specific literary public to the development of the bourgeois public sphere. ‘The periodicals of the early eighteenth century’, Eagleton writes, ‘were a primary constituent of the emergent bourgeois public sphere’ (Eagleton 1984: 17). Two aspects of the conception of the public take root here that have survived the social conditions that produce them. One is the coherence of the public as a body – which derives here from the fact that the public consists of gentlemen of the same class; the second is the notion that the public represents the social whole – which is achieved here by the hegemonic imposition of gentlemanly culture as universal culture. It is the dissolution of the social conditions of the bourgeois public sphere that Eagleton uses to demonstrate the waning altogether of the concept of the public – and of criticism with it. The concept of the public sphere that shapes Eagleton’s analysis of the literary community derives from Jurgen Habermas’ theory of the public sphere. In Habermas’ account, the bourgeois public sphere – which consists of public forums such as newspapers, journals, clubs, salons, public assemblies, pubs and coffee houses, meeting halls, TV and the Internet – mediates between the private concerns of individuals and business, on one hand, and politics


and the state, on the other. For the first time in history, according to Habermas, individuals and groups could potentially shape public opinion and put a check on state power. It does this by acting as a discursive space which overcomes private interests to discover common interests and shared values. Individuals gather in the bourgeois public sphere to debate common public affairs and to organize against arbitrary and hostile government. In the eighteenth century public opinion could take shape in the public sphere, whereas today, in the debased public sphere of the mass media, public opinion is administered, monitored, managed and manufactured by the private interests of big business, including the private interests of the owners of global media companies and the commercial interests of advertisers and sponsors. The very sphere which was meant to mediate between private interests and the state has been colonized by private interests. Thus, in Habermas’ social theory, contemporary politics is characterized by the struggle among groups to advance their own private interests in which citizens become spectators, via the media, of a political process with which they do not participate. Habermas’ social theory of the debased public sphere is a bleak account that, despite its limitations, depicts a persuasive historical trajectory of the emergence and degradation of an effective civic society, echoed by Richard Sennett in The Fall of Public Man. The public of public art is imagined to be the ‘general public’ of the bourgeois disinterested public sphere, which no longer exists in that form, if at all. Within the context of the debased public sphere of marketing, opinion polls and text votes, the customary modes of address of public art have withered. There is no public for public art to address because the public sphere has been instrumentalized by business and public relations. Monumental public sculpture cannot generate a public sphere of its own and has no extant public sphere on which to draw. Instead, public art has become an adjunct to the economic and cultural system, through tourism, town planning, regeneration and the heritage industries. Public art, like the public sphere in general, has been privatized: it is produced for private interests, paid for by or on behalf of business and is attended to by individuals who fail to add up to a public. The public of public art is a nostalgic fantasy. As ethnic, gender and class exclusions were removed in modernity, there is a concurrent deformation of the public sphere due to the forces of large private interests. Thus, although Habermas’ social theory of the public sphere has been successfully challenged by a range of thinkers, either for its idealization of the bourgeois public sphere or blindness towards the public spheres established by alternative and excluded groups, this has not led to the revival of the sort of coherent, effective, participatory bourgeois public sphere that monumental public art presupposes. Inclusion of these groups into the overall project of the bourgeois public sphere is unsatisfactory. Having been criticized for its failure to document alternative public spheres by women’s groups, the working class and other groups excluded from the classic bourgeois public sphere of propertied gentlemen, Habermas’ theory of the debased public sphere can provide ‘spaces of hope’ (Harvey 2002) if – and only if – the original exclusive bourgeois public sphere is subjected to critique in order to explore alternative publics and alternative


public spheres. Eagleton points out, for instance, that E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class charts the emergence of a ‘counter public sphere’ that threatens the bourgeois consensus with ‘a whole oppositional network of journals, clubs, pamphlets, debates and institutions’ (Eagleton 1984: 36). Among the networks of the oppositional and radical counter public sphere were unions and political parties. Unions and workers’ parties can be the agent for social transformation only because they socialize the individuals that come together to form them. Collective agency threatens forces that the individual is powerless to change. This is only possible, though, if unions and workers’ parties successfully develop a counter public sphere that unites the workers, institutionalizes debate among its members and sanctions certain actions. Barry Barnes has provided a persuasive theory of this kind of social action. In Barnes’ social theory, the kind of interaction that is only possible in a counter public sphere leads to organization, the development of collective interests and ultimately to collective action. What this sequence requires is a public sphere that encourages persistent dialogue: ‘some degree of shared knowledge, shared culture, shared experience’ (Barnes 1995: 85). When a group recognizes its collective good, ‘in thereby being formulated, the good is also by that very fact sanctioned and encouraged’ (Barnes 1995: 84). Common or collective goods require a public sphere of one sort or another. The public sphere is the social mechanism by which individuals come together to discuss, debate and come to agreement on their shared interests. What Barnes adds, which is central to the organization of unions and parties, is that ‘thinking the collective good as a collective is sanctioning it, in the sense of encouraging its enactment by individual members’ (Barnes 1995: 85). The counter public sphere calls for action. One of the ways that debate within a counter public sphere leads to action is through political slogans. There is a history to be written of the slogan’s descent from radical political agitation to advertising that would, no doubt, correspond to the trajectory of Habermas’ debasement of the public sphere. Still, the slogan has always been a potent element of the counter public sphere. Whether chanted during a march or printed onto hand-held banners, slogans mobilize groups and ritualize their communal bonds by publicizing their common interests, motives and beliefs. From the banners carried by the French revolutionary army (e.g., ‘Live Free or Die’) to the slogans of the Suffragette movement (e.g., ‘Votes for Women’) and the campaigning slogans used today (e.g., ‘No Blood for Oil’, ‘Make Poverty History’), slogans call for individual action for collective goods. Slogans state collectively sanctioned actions, but in addition they are also performative acts that play a vital part in the formation and maintenance of protest and political action. The slogan’s relationship with the counter public sphere is controversial. Slogans are charged with simplifying complex issues and of bypassing rational or critical debate. In such views, slogans are a propagandistic symptom of the centralization of power within political struggle, issuing centrifugally from the leadership to its passive membership. And it is true that political slogans are closer to advertising slogans than at any other time in history. And yet, just as the official public sphere of marketing and opinion management is always accompanied and


threatened by multiple counter public spheres of excluded and alternative groups, the descent of the slogan from political protest to advertising motto has not obliterated the slogan’s political function altogether. The slogan, it seems to us, is a promising and complex format for intervening in public space with the development of a counter public sphere in mind. The critique of public art, which has traditionally operated within the official public sphere, is open to challenges from the counter public sphere, and what better way of doing this than using the formats of the counter public sphere as public art? Context, Dissemination and Reception The Sloganeering works appear in the public realm, produced and distributed within the context of existing art systems, be it a public art conference or an art biennial. Although the work does not resemble mainstream public art (monumental sculpture), it is nonetheless designed for the public of public art, the passer-by. Passers-by may or may not engage with the work. The success of the work is not measured, as it would be in a promotional campaign, by its impact on the consumers or spectators that witness it. This first audience is not the primary audience of the Sloganeering works. The works are made with a second ‘primary audience’ in mind: an audience who might not pass by or see the work in its first context. This primary audience consists of two opposed groups within the specialized field of public art: one, the radical new generation of artists, writers and curators working in the public realm; and, two, the conservative establishment of public art including monumental sculptors and the commissioners and policymakers of public art. We intend some discomfort for those engineers of ‘publicness’ and social cohesion in seeing questions of the various political and social functions of public art raised openly in the public sphere. Outside the economy of the production of unique art objects, it is possible for our public works to be disseminated via posters, postcards, web mail, essays and lectures without loss. While in the mainstream art world the ‘secondary material’ of catalogues, pamphlets and talks habitually implore the public to go and see the original work, the Sloganeering works are designed to dispense with the original empirical encounter with the object to become a documented event and a point of departure for discussion. Insofar as the ‘primary audience’ typically encounters the work through these modes of documentation and dissemination, it is possible to consider the information surrounding the work in the form of its documentation as the primary experience of the work. Photographs of the slogans in situ, for instance, are not conceived as documentation of artworks in the way that we are familiar from conceptual art and land art. Rather, we understand the photographs as one of many vehicles of dissemination of the slogans. In this respect, the photographic documentation of the slogans is the reason why the texts are produced and displayed originally in public spaces. Questions of dissemination are central to Habermas’ conception of the public sphere, the founding moment of which is the publication and distribution of journals such as Tatler. The public sphere is brought to life with the flow of information and exchange of cultural opinion. When Habermas describes the development of the public sphere he refers to changes in the conventions of private letter-writing and the emergence of the eighteenth-century idea that the


letter should be written from the individual’s point of view, not as a neutral record of event. Opinion is necessary for the private sphere, but it is not sufficient. For that we need public forums, public media and a public. In the current political, economic and cultural climate, many, if not all, of the public sites of debate are in private hands or subject to the private interests of big business and, therefore, we would argue, the public sphere has to be built anew, creating little pockets for private spheres to flourish, if only fleetingly. The text-work The economic function of public art is to increase the value of private property, commissioned by Public Art Forum for their annual conference, was printed as a billboard poster on a Sheffield street in the UK. The billboard was displayed for one week only. This established a public of passers-by over a short period of time that would not amount to much of a public sphere of Habermasian ambitions. Thus, from the start, the photographic document of the text in a public space was essential to the work’s function within a more substantive public sphere. From the outset, the project was going to be featured in Public Art Forums’ annual journal, Desirable Places, consequently, it was likely to be seen by delegates of the conference and other industry members – a second audience that in terms of the public sphere functioned as the primary audience of the work. Although the text-work was presented on an advertising billboard on the street, it was not just intended for the passer-by, but purposely for a specific second primary audience; the arts management industry, which controls the systems by which public art is commissioned and sanctioned. And extending this, the photograph of The Economic Function was also printed in Art Monthly, placing the debate within public art in the broader context of art per se. ‘The aesthetic function of public art is to codify social distinctions as natural ones’, was both a banner on a Venetian bridge and large edition poster distributed freely as part of the 51st Venice Biennale. Providing us with the backdrop of the ultimate aesthetic city and the history of diplomatic relations based upon aesthetic and cultural agreements, the Venice Biennale also provided us with an actually existing, commercially and politically debased, form of the public sphere. The text-work was an attempt to eke out a slither of genuine public debate in the midst of the frenzied commercial and promotional activity of the art world. The banner was produced in both Italian and English and fixed to a bridge near St Marks Square. The poster constituted a photograph of the banner in place and further information about the two projects. It was distributed both at the opening of the project on the bridge and at venues in Venice. The photograph of the Italian banner was also printed in a magazine. The work establishes for itself a miniature and temporary public sphere not only in its intervention into the debased public sphere that already exists, but also in its form as public signage and published material. If the context and form that establishes the works as existing in the public realm, it is the content of the text-works that singles them out as pointing towards a Habermasian public sphere. These text-works are slogans of a particular kind. They do not read as advertising slogans or political sound bites; they are clearly the result of reflection and solicit considered responses; they express strongly held opinion and call for agreement, disagreement and dialogue as a response. What’s more, the slogan works question fundamental aspects of the social structure of culture in which they sit. If contemporary art can be considered a living example of the bourgeois public sphere despite the debasement of that arena then the slogan-


works simultaneously question the social basis of that public sphere and open up the possibility of new, fragmented, ephemeral ones. What these sloganeering public artworks do, therefore, is bring something of a Habermasian concept of the public (as an arena of collective intercourse) into the very fabric of the work of public art. Art can be controversial, even deliberately so, but if these slogans are controversial, inflammatory perhaps, that is simply a result of them being triggers of debate – they are not shocking or sensational. That is to say, they are attempts to open the cultural, commercial and political practices of public art to the kind of discussions and scrutiny typical of a counter public sphere. Public art is no longer capable of participating in a Habermasian public sphere, but the critique of public art (as public art) does not hanker for that impossible bourgeois public space, it calls up a critical counter public debate on the nature of the public and the politics of the public of public art. The Function of Art’s Autonomy The social function of public art – including the instrumentalization of art by the state and big business – comes up against the autonomy of art as a limit on its instrumentalization and, paradoxically, as a guarantee of the value of the social use of art. The Habermasian public sphere was always meant to be autonomous from state and economic power, of course. Which is why, perhaps, the autonomy of modernist art has become a stand-in for the desecrated autonomy of the public sphere. It is not surprising, then, that the autonomy of art informs every detail of the new agenda for art in the public sphere and art’s role in social regeneration. The policy subverts itself: it is because art is supposed to be entirely free from social functions that it can function efficiently for social policies that spread civic behaviour, self-improvement, local pride, de-criminalization and so on. When art’s autonomy is deployed as an instrument of the state then its functionlessness is both retained and rejected: functionlessness is functional. In order to understand the role of art’s autonomy within contemporary debates on public art it is necessary to examine critically the legacy of High Modernism, which is responsible for promoting a conception of art’s autonomy, appropriated from Kant that has not yet been fully offloaded. The seminal text for High Modernism is shaped by the Cold War. Greenberg’s essay ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’ divides high and low culture along the same contour as the division between East and West, Soviet and American culture but, also, between autonomous and commercial culture. Socialist Realism, for Greenberg, contains the same threat to ‘genuine culture’ that popular music and pulp fiction pose: they are spectacular, seductive. Greenberg’s denunciation of kitsch goes well beyond harsh aesthetic judgements of populist, low culture and low tastes; kitsch, for Greenberg, is inextricably caught up in every great social scandal of the day. Kitsch is capitalism’s specific corruption of culture as well as a tool of fascism and communism; it is the technological and scientific corrosion of art and the victory of inactivity over invention; it is the will of the ignorant mass over the minority of the cultivated and it is the imposition of impoverished art onto the masses by a minority in search of nothing but profit.


Despite his reputation, Greenberg did not present a narrowly formalist account of kitsch. Greenberg consistently drew his analysis of kitsch from the social conditions of its production, distribution and reception. He defined kitsch in terms of two types of relationship, one social and one historical: kitsch loots and arrests genuine culture; and kitsch lags behind genuine culture. Clearly, there can be no adequate formalist explanation of kitsch if it is made up entirely of material that is taken from the avant-garde, for this would erase the distinction between them: if kitsch consists of the cold leftovers of art, it is not the formal qualities of its material that separates it from art. Which is why Greenberg stated right at the beginning of the essay that the question of avant-gardism and kitsch ‘involves more than an investigation in aesthetics’ (Greenberg 2003: 540), it requires the examination of ‘the social and historical contexts in which that experience takes place’. What distinguishes kitsch, including Socialist Realism, from avant-gardism or ‘genuine culture’, for Greenberg, is the latter’s autonomy. Kitsch is produced with the consumer in mind and the market determines its content and form; Socialist Realism must appeal directly to the sentiments of the masses, he says, in order for the propagandist message to find root. Neither, therefore, is autonomous. Rather, they are prime examples of instrumentalized culture. The social function of kitsch is economic, while the social function of Socialist Realism is political. Avant-gardism has no social function in Greenberg’s eyes because it is rejected by society and rejects society in turn. Avant-gardism’s alienation seems, in fact, to be proof of art’s autonomy. Shock tactics and the public’s outrage at contemporary art keep up the pretence today that avant-gardism has no social function and remains completely autonomous. However, autonomous art has a very specific social function, and Greenberg trades in it even as he denies it: autonomous art is testament of a society’s freedom. No surprise, then, that seemingly autonomous, abstract art is touted by the American authorities all around the world as icons of a free individualist society. Functions and Functionlessness For institutional critique, art’s politicization is immanent to art. This contrasts sharply, of course, with the unconcealed political content of Socialist Realism and political art where the explicit politics of a work might be undermined by the political form of its production, reproduction, distribution and exchange. However, the immanence of institutional critique is self-limiting its strength lies in taking care of itself and turning its back on everything else. Institutional critique stands for a critique of society without leaving art’s confines. Autonomous art remains within its institutional limits while its autonomy stands for a critique of society that is never fully exercised or tested. This has a Greenbergian odour. However, the retreat into art’s autonomy, which was sanctioned by Greenberg, was not as clear-cut as that. Within Greenberg’s promotion of avant-gardism, he tells us that it is ‘becoming more and more timid every day’ (Greenberg 2003: 542). His denunciation of popular culture and Socialist Realism is peppered with acknowledgements of kitsch’s seductive threat. The power of kitsch is its appeal. Greenberg himself appears to be in grave danger of giving in to the temptations and pleasures of the culture he is warning us against. ‘It is not


enough today’, he says, ‘to have an inclination towards [genuine culture]; one must have a true passion for it that will give him the power to resist the faked article that surrounds and presses in on him’ (Greenberg 2003: 544). Whether Greenberg is making a confession here, or reporting the seduction of others, the fear is palpable: kitsch is dangerous. Kitsch needs to be resisted and resistance to it must be cultivated within the person. You cannot merely avert your eyes; you must educate them. What you have to teach them is the value of functionlessness without the stain of the function of functionlessness. That is, you have to be alert to the social functions of kitsch and Socialist Realism and blind to the social function of autonomous art. ‘Kitsch is deceptive’ (Greenberg 2003: 544), Greenberg says, the shortest sentence in the essay and one of the most tense and revealing. Kitsch can’t be trusted; it does not always announce itself as kitsch: it cannot always be identified and consequently legislated against. Some of it, Greenberg says, is not altogether worthless and is of a high enough quality ‘to be dangerous to the naïve seeker of true light’ and to ‘have fooled people who should know better’ (Greenberg 2003:544). What’s more, because kitsch fuels itself from material borrowed from genuine culture, your eyes must be vigilantly and continuously retrained. Resistance to kitsch is never won once and for all. Kitsch is fascinating and magical for Greenberg; the proof is the intensity required to hold it off. Anybody who thinks that kitsch or Socialist Realism is easily overcome or can be rejected out of hand does not understand the power of kitsch or the dialectical connection between kitsch and avant-gardism. Kitsch is deceptive, for sure, but what Greenberg does not admit is that avantgarde autonomous art is deceptive too. Adorno is better on the deceptions of art’s autonomy insofar as he recognizes the price that has to be paid for it. This is why Adorno’s aesthetic theory is shot through with anti-art and dissonance: art’s autonomy cannot be siphoned off from art’s alienation from society nor from art’s relentless critique of art. Among the other things that can be said of Adorno’s conception of dissonance, it sheds light on anti-art’s immanent assault on art. Adorno calls dissonance and its counterparts in the visual arts the ‘trademark of modernism’ (Adorno 2004: 21). Dissonance is less sanguine that Greenberg’s modernist self-criticism. In Adorno’s thought, dissonance is what autonomous art needs in order to live with its functionless function. Adorno is keenly aware of ‘the interest inherent in disinterestedness’ (Adorno 2004:18) and that ‘distinterestedness debases all art, turning it into a pleasant or useful plaything’ (Adorno 2004: 18). And yet, Adorno is a rigorous champion of art’s functionlessness insofar as it shows that artworks fall ‘outside the means-ends relation governing the empirical world’ (Adorno 2004: 202). This places art within the space of autonomy preserved by the bourgeois public sphere, though Adorno, one of the architects of the interrogation of the debasement of civic society, does not buy art’s autonomy at retail, so to speak. ‘Adorno reads autonomy as double’, says J. M. Bernstein, ‘both as art’s loss of a (direct) social purpose, and as art’s refusal of the kind of purposiveness that has come to dominate society’ (Bernstein 1992: 208). Giving art a function is to instrumentalize it, while to accept art’s functionlessness is to condemn it to isolation neither is acceptable to Adorno. And rightly so.


Adorno’s aesthetic theory derives its central antinomies from Kant’s aesthetic philosophy. The link between purposefulness and social instrumentality is not stressed in Kant but it is strongly implied when he contrasts the aesthetic with utility with his formulation of the purposeless purpose of the aesthetic: The beautiful, which we judge on the basis of a merely formal purposiveness, i.e., a purposiveness without a purpose, is quite independent of the concept of the good. For the good presupposes an objective purposiveness, i.e., it presupposes that we refer the object to a determinate purpose (Kant 1997:73). Autonomous art’s purposeless purpose exceeds rationalization and utilization, freeing art from instrumental reason and social function simultaneously. When Adorno says, ‘works are purposeful in themselves, without any positive end over and above their complexion’ (Adorno 2004: 181), emphasis needs to be given to extrinsic purposes ‘over and above’ the works themselves. Purposelessness is a social achievement, not an absence of social relation. Pierre Bourdieu calls this the ‘denied social relationship’ (Bourdieu 1984: 491–494), explaining that ‘Kant’s analysis of the judgement of taste finds its real basis in a set of aesthetic principles which are the universalization of the dispositions associated with a particular social and economic condition’ (Bourdieu 1984: 493). Acknowledging that ‘a philosophically distinguished reading of the Critique of Judgement cannot be expected to uncover the social relationship of distinction at the heart of’ (Bourdieu 1984: 500) the text, Bourdieu warns against reductive readings of the social relationships underlying aesthetic principles but insists that the ‘social categories of aesthetic judgement’ can only function, for Kant himself and for his readers, in the form of highly sublimated categories, such as the oppositions between beauty and charm, pleasure and enjoyment or culture and civilization, euphemisms which, without any conscious intention of dissimulating, enable social oppositions to be expressed and experienced in a form conforming to the norms of expression of a specific field’ (Bourdieu 1984: 493–494). While there is justified resistance within art to incursions threatened by the political and commercial utilization of art from regeneration policies and sponsorship deals, it would be naïve to cling to art’s autonomy as if the corrupt world could gain no purchase there. When Adorno argues that the function of art and the aesthetic is its functionlessness, we should not focus entirely on the functionlessness in that formula, but understand that that functionlessness has a very definite social function, several, in fact. It is in part to reveal these latent functions of art’s functionlessness that the Sloganeering works were initiated. They also intend to provoke the sort of discussion that the public sphere was meant to host. Taking public art as their target, these works therefore raise issues for a potential public sphere that public art falsely takes for granted. This is because public art locates itself within the official public sphere, which has been debased by big business and the state, whereas the Sloganeering project locates itself within a potential counter public sphere, which questions the false universality of notions like the public, art and social function. Hence, we can say the same for public art as Eagleton said of literary criticism in the bourgeois public sphere: ‘modern criticism was born of a struggle against the


absolutist state; unless its future is now defined as a struggle against the bourgeois state, it might have no future at all’ (Eagleton 1984: 124). Freee Art Collective (Andy Hewitt, Mel Jordan and Dave Beech) are artists working for social change in Sheffield and London, UK.

References Adorno, T. (2004), Aesthetic Theory, Continuum: London. Art & Language (1982) ‘Painting by Mouth’ in Art and Language, volume 5, number 1, October, pp. 45–53. Barnes, B. (1995), The Elements of Social Theory, New Jersey: Princeton Press. Bernstein, J. M. (1992), The Fate of Art, London: Polity Press. Bourdieu, P. (1984), Distinction: a social critique of the judgement of taste, trans. Richard Nice, London and New York: Routledge. Eagleton, T. (1984), The Function of Criticism, London and New York: Verso. Giddens, A. (1993), Sociology, London: Polity Press. Greenberg, C. (2003), ‘Modernist Painting’, in Art in Theory, London: Blackwell. Greenberg, C. (1939), ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’ Partisan Review, New York, VI, no. 5, Fall. Harvey, D. (2002), Spaces of Hope, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Kant, I. (1987), Critique of Judgement, trans. Werner S. Pluhar, Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing. Kosuth, J. in Harrison and Wood (eds.) (2003), Art in Theory, London: Blackwell. For more information on the Sloganeering project please visit www.freee.org.uk.

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Public Spheres After Socialism art & design Public Spheres After Socialism Edited by Angela Harutyunyan, Kathrin Hörschelmann, and Malcolm Miles ISBN 9781841502120 / £19.95 / $40

The idea of a public sphere has long been associated with urban environments – city parks, waterfront bike paths and bustling squares. Public Spheres After Socialism contests this in light of the end of the Cold War and the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Drawing together contemporary experiences from Armenia, Germany, Austria, France and the United Kingdom, this innovative volume reconsiders the public sphere as a figurative or mythical location in which the members of a society shape and determine its values. Esteemed academics examine a wide range of issues, including public time, monuments, urban reconstruction, film and new media to ask whether public spaces are viable in an age of globalized consumerism.

For other related titles go to www.intellectbooks.com Intellect. Publishers of original thinking The Mill, Parnall Rd, Bristol BS16 3JG, UK

Jordan / Miles

Art and Theory After Socialism Edited by Mel Jordan and Malcolm Miles


Art, cultural production and criticism in both the East and the West faced radical new challenges after the end of the Cold War. Art and Theory After Socialism considers what happens when theories of art from the former East and the former West collide, highlighting the work of former Soviet bloc artists alongside that of their western counterparts. Academics, artists and critics assert that dreams promised by consumerism and capitalism have not been delivered in the East, and that the West is not a zone of liberation as it is increasingly drawn into global conflict. New critical insights and practices are discussed: collaborative efforts by groups of artists, and the emergence of dissident art that subverts and challenges the institutional structures of the art world. This volume is a unique take on the overlap of art and everyday life in post–Cold War societies. Mel Jordan is part of the Freee Art Collective whose practice is defined by its political and social engagement. Mel is Senior Lecturer in Art at Loughborough University. Malcolm Miles is Professor of Cultural Theory at the University of Plymouth.

ART AND THEORY AFTER SOCIALISM Mel Jordan & Malcolm Miles >H7C.,-"&"-)&*%"'&&"(

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Art and Theory After Socialism

Public Spheres After Socialism

The Chinese Worker after Socialism

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After theory

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After Socialism: Reconstructing Critical Social Thought

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Socialism and Modernity (Contradictions)

Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy

Socialism, Positive and Negative

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Socialism and Invidualism

Black Liberation and Socialism

Marxism and Scientific Socialism

Man And Socialism

A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism: Economics, Politics, and Ethics

Beyond Marx and Tito: Theory and Practice in Yugoslav Socialism

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Life After... Art and Design: A Practical guide to Life after your Degree (Life After University)

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Art and Theory After Socialism

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Socialism after Hayek (Advances in Heterodox Economics)

After Socialism: Reconstructing Critical Social Thought

A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism

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After Modern Art 1945-2000

Socialism and Modernity (Contradictions)

Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy

Socialism, Positive and Negative

Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy

Socialism and Invidualism

Black Liberation and Socialism

Marxism and Scientific Socialism

Man And Socialism

A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism: Economics, Politics, and Ethics

Beyond Marx and Tito: Theory and Practice in Yugoslav Socialism

On the Economic Theory of Socialism (1936)

Socialism and the Individual

Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy

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