Section: Reader, Artist
Kenny McBride. October 2009
Eastern European Time-Based Art Practices Contextualised Within the Communist Project of Emergence and Post-Communist Disintegration and Transition.
Introduction
1. What and Where is Eastern Europe?
Spectacle in the latter part of 20th century Europe is characterised, perhaps most of all, by a single event: the 1989 breaching of the Berlin Wall that signalled the collapse of the Communist system in Europe. Played out as a live event in a cold November, the sight of hundreds, then thousands, millions, of people gathering from all over the world to protest and chip away at the Wall, making holes and passages so both sides could join together in celebration became, in the western continent at least, the abiding image of the times (1).
Simultaneously, thanks to advances in satellite technology, it was beamed around the world on live television and witnessed by tens of millions more(2). It seemed for a short while that the freezing and reunification of Europe had been condensed into a single historic televisual moment, and one might be forgiven for being carried away by the moment and thinking that the collapse of Communism simply returned Europe to a natural state of things, a historic spectacle where the will of the people had triumphed, overnight, over the forces of oppression.
For the people of Eastern Europe, who had fought a decades-long struggle against the oppressive forces of Communism to arrive at this point, the Autumn of Nations was nothing less than a miracle. History, however, also has a terrible knack of forgetting.
Although linked together by an overarching ideology, each country developed its unique brand of politics that was a mix of exported hard-line Soviet rule and “homegrown socialist experiments of one kind or another” (Hoptman & Pospiszyl, (eds.) 2002, p.9). While some enjoyed a peaceful transition to democracy, and all at different times to each other, others were drawn out in blood, most notably, the 1989 Romanian revolution.
Gržinić (2004) demonstrates further that, despite the mythic status that surrounds 1989, from an ex-Yugoslav perspective it was the death in 1980 of President Josip Tito that marked the arrival of a new epoch, one that would be marked by a gradual but chronic descent into the hell of incendiary nationalisms and ethnic conflict (3). Hoptman and Pospiszyl (2002) present the case of Russia; that despite having their own unique history and culture, they were inextricably linked to Eastern Europe through the Communist project, and thus the thesis includes Russia within its frame of reference.
In seeking a definition of ‘Eastern Europe’ that will serve the thesis, we discard any notion of Eastern Europe being one place, one culture, one time. We assert instead that, while ‘East’ and ‘West’ were essentially mythological structures created at the Yalta conference in 1945 (4), the resulting histories “are produced under the sign of ‘not being the West’” (Sandomirskaia, 2007).
Similarly, when we apply the words ‘Communist’ and ‘Communism’ to Eastern Europe we do so from an ideological perspective while, in reality, it was much closer to State capitalism. That is, that the Communist governments exclusively managed the means of production while, from a Marxist perspective at least, Communism advocates the people's control of the means of production.
While the “lost world of Communism” (BBC, The Lost World of Communism, 2009) is gradually becoming more widely known to the rest of the world through documentary films and history book best-sellers the representation of its art practices is altogether less adequate. The fragmented nature of both the European Communist sphere and the unstable transition period that followed its collapse makes the task of analysing Eastern European art practices infinitely more complex than any Western European equivalent would be.
The Slovenian art group, Irwin, illustrate this contrast by applying an analogy about Joseph Beuys to the problem of locating artistic production in Eastern Europe: mention the name Beuys to anyone familiar with his work and they would “instantly perceive it in relation to an entire network of other artworks and artists, among whom Beuys occupies an important place” (Irwin, 2004).
Conversely, the opposite is true if we reference an Eastern European artist since “one is at a loss to say just where and in what way such-and-such a work belongs” (Irwin, 2004). The reasons for this, they claim, are not only the result of the secretive nature by which dissenting artists practised but are, “rather a constitutive part of the art system in these territories” (Irwin, 2004). Therefore, the emergence of a self-historicization industry, such as the Irwin project belongs to, is highly significant and much needed, although a lack of knowledge is also attributable to the ambivalence and dominance of Western European art canons,
"Even though Central [Eastern] Europe is nearby, the West did not reveal any serious interest in the art of its close neighbors before 1989" (Piotrowski, 2003).
However, it is not only within Western Europe that these histories remain elusive. Pospiszyl (2003) shows that within the region itself there is a large and eager audience who seek to discover what were to a large extent works produced clandestinely within their own, and neighbouring, countries.
Therefore, we may question how these works might fit into existing European art canons or whether an altogether different method of reading and positioning is required. It is a concern that artists and art historians are being faced with in an enlarged, and increasingly enlarging, Europe: chiefly, its complexity in terms of how to approach the interfaces of cultural and historical spaces, and art histories and their representations. The issue is an extremely complex one, not only because of the conditions imposed upon artists and artistic production but also because understanding requires the acquisition of knowledge about context,
"What is recounted… happened in distant, closed countries that, at least in the case of the Soviet Union, virtually did not exist on the artistic map of the world from the 1930s until the 1980s" (Kabakov, cited in, Hoptman. & Pospiszyl, (eds.) 2002, pp. 7-8).
The accelerated pace of our globalized world seems recklessly prone at times to prefixing the context ‘post-’ to everything in its rush to create new discourses. And, quite rightly, a fair degree of doubt is cast on the validity of this practice since it inherently suggests that we are no longer ‘there’ but are somewhere ‘new’, and therefore we must develop new stratagems accordingly. Therefore, in our search to find a legitimate way to talk about the post-Communist period the thesis adopts the definition offered by Emilia Palonen as being, “the era that started in the late Soviet sponsored period and that which stills bears the legacy of the previous era” (Palonen, 2008, p. 219).
Altogether then, it is not simply a matter of art history being updated or rewritten to become more inclusive, or accommodating, of a still emerging history of practices emanating from Eastern Europe. What is required is a commitment to engage the intersections of these art histories - the social, political, and cultural conditions under which artists operated - and to understand Eastern Europe as having a unique history of art practices that are struggling to find their place alongside other European, and global, histories.
This thesis has been charged with bringing some order to this fractured state of affairs, and to contribute uniquely to our understanding of time-based art practices by teasing out inter-relationships between framed contexts, named conditions, and assumed behaviors.
Time-based art has been singled out as the field of practice most capable of communicating temporal and corporeal experience (action art and performance art); an engagement with environmental impermanence (installation); and the deconstruction of the past in order to more fully understand our present (video and re-enactment).
A number of such works have been selected for analysis and are contextualized in relation to historical ‘milestones’, or events that, in one way or another, affected the internal dynamics of Eastern Europe, the effects of which resonated through the lives of artists.
These milestones are not presented as anywhere near a complete guide to the complex history of the Soviet-era in Europe but, rather, they act as contextual frames that will assist the analysis of why particular artists produced particular works at particular times and how these works were produced.
We will see as we move along that the activities of art and artists share a state of emergence with the contexts from which they sprung, and that we are wholly reliant on these contexts to ascertain the work’s meaning. We will understand them as exemplar examples of what became known as ‘non-official’ art, that is, art that dissented in one way or another from the official realm promoted by the dominant political discourse.
At this point it will be useful to set out the primary questions that the thesis will engage with.
1. What was the past, how did it impact on artistic production, and how did artists respond to it?
2. What is the status of trace documents (image, film, and text) through which we know these works, and what insights into context do they offer beyond mere representation of visual acts?
3. What strategies do artists employ that allow new readings of the past for our present age, and what forms of memory are being engaged?
4. How did artists respond to the disintegration of the Balkan region? And how did artists throughout Eastern Europe respond to the transition process?
By approaching these questions as a sequence of chapters in this written element, we will see that they are overall linked to our enquiry into the Communist and post-Communist context. The thesis will demonstrate its analysis of selected works and make clear its unique contribution to our understanding and knowledge of these art practices and to the historicization process of Eastern European art.
2. Methodologies and Curatorial Strategies.
Since this written element is only one part of the thesis we will pause now to draw an outline of the methodologies and strategies that the project overall engages.
A unique model of curation has been conceived that contributes new knowledge to the field in three ways: first, there is this written element set out in this introduction and in the following chapters. Second, the thesis has created a unique Internet resource that contains the thesis and displays the works featured alongside available primary research materials. Third, the re-enactment by this author of a small number of historical works from the Eastern European past that we have come to know though their lingering traces.
Regarding what constitutes trace the thesis proposes it as comprising those documents that exist as relics of past works and which prove the work’s existence and sheds light on past events, for example, a photograph or text. These traces are the mediated experience of works that prove that they happened in other places and in other times.
While the issue of trace is complex and deserving of its own research study, we can assert that trace allows us to create a particular archaeology of absent realities. Trace documents carry not only the artistic and ideological references that “the document absorbs from society and carries in itself” (Guéniot, 2009, p. 4) but are also capable of revealing what is not shown, whether unintentionally or by design.
Trace can be employed as a strategy by artists in situations where dialogue with others is proscribed, trace can act as a basic recording of an artworks physical state within the time and space of the art event, or trace can be appended to already performed work in order to complete its meaning. Thus, the status of trace can vary widely from one artist to another, and from one work to another, so that eventually we come to view it as “a contested subject and medium in itself” (Merewether, 2006).
In regard to the first two elements of written survey and visual display, we can say that, alongside trace documents, additional material has been collected from a range of other sources, including artists, theorists, critics, curators, as well as discussions between artists and this author. The process of collecting these primary sources placed great emphasis on collecting ‘voices’ from within the region itself so as to be reflexive of its own contemporaneous discourses and histories.
If, “the understanding of cultural production begins with the revelation of its sources” (Hoptman & Pospiszyl, (eds.) 2002, pp, 10-11), then the use of indigenous material locates the thesis in far closer proximity to a credible historicization process of Eastern European art than would have been possible to achieve if it had relied on Western European sources. While there are many levels to this argument it would be timely to recall the example of Beuys proposed earlier by Irwin.
While Western European art history is, in comparison, ‘given’, through the meticulous documentation and referencing of aesthetic disciplines, networks, and countries, in Eastern Europe no such cartography or canonicity exists (5). While non-official art production did not lend itself it to an active historicizing process, due in part to its clandestine nature, inter-regional networks operated differently from those in the West: travel was severely restricted in most countries, ruling out opportunities for foreign exchange and exhibition support. Similarly, the lack of any art market in Eastern Europe produced different values through which work was made and would be judged.
"The creation of this nonconformist tradition was impelled by the fact that an outsider in the Soviet empire stood alone against a tremendous state machine, a great Leviathan that threatened to engulf him. To preserve one's identity in this situation, one had to create a separate value system, including a system of aesthetic values" (Backshtein, 1995, cited in (eds.) Rosenfeld & Dodge, p. 332).
Thus the value of a work of art was not determined by trend or categorization but “in its interpretation, its message. We do not judge the object, but what it tells us” (Ilya Kabakov, 1995). Kabakov points to an even more fundamental problem where, “deprived of a genuine viewer, critic, or historian the artist himself [had to] guess what his work meant 'objectively'” (Kabakov, cited in, (eds.) Hoptman & Pospiszyl, 2002, p. 8).
It follows then that, if in our present day there is no coherent strategy, or strategies, through which to approach these practices, or more accurately, the contextualizing of these practices, artists will stay “deprived of a genuine viewer” (Kabakov, cited in, (eds.) Hoptman & Pospiszyl, 2002, p. 8).
The 1994 exhibition of Eastern European art Europa, Europa (6) in Bonn has been roundly criticized for its disregard to context. It brought together a range of artists from the ‘East’ but made no distinction as to places other than they weren’t from the ‘West’. Further, work form the pre-Yalta era was displayed alongside post-Yalta work, thus disregarding a pivotal turning point in both European history and subsequent the conditions for artistic production (Piotrowski, 2006). Europa, Europa is considered the paradigm that all subsequent shows of Eastern European art were set against since,
"It inscribed itself in the perspective of its mythology: into the myth of European universalism as a neutral tool of writing art history... and showed that there was no "other Europe," just Europe" (Piotrowski, 2006).
A paradox appears then: the fact that such an exhibition could even take place shows that there is interest in the works despite the disregard to context. That is, while it is relatively simple to exhibit works to a willing viewer it is altogether another matter to equip the viewer adequately so they can discuss them reflexively.
The case of Europa, Europa demonstrates that, in the hands of some curators, “art from Eastern Europe is still often approached… as an obscure margin” (Pachmanová, 2003). However, it can be from the “powerful position” (Piotrowski, 2001) of these margins that a critical discourse with the centre can be created. What is required is to find a language that will allow an analysis of these histories that reflect their unique contexts.
It is a task that we must acknowledges carries an innate sense of impossibility since, “a system fragmented to such an extent, first of all, prevents any serious possibility of comprehending the art created during socialist times as a whole” (Irwin, 2004). At the same time, however, this thesis is only one system or proposition among several more, each of which contributes positively to a research community that is passionate about how we read artistic activity from Eastern Europe.
In the past the agora was the public meeting place of civil society; people would meet to discuss matters of interest, goods would be sold, and entertainment would hold forth. It was, overall, a socializing realm defined by its own contributors. More recently the agora has been “invaded, colonised and destroyed by totalitarianism” (Martin, 2000), and the exchange of ideas, cultural activity, and economic markets censured: a set of prohibitions that led to a state of withering.
In the post-Communist world it is interesting to conceptualise a rebuilding of the agora as the site where the historicizing of Eastern European art takes place.
When this thesis talks about curating, or displaying, art works what it actually means is that it is putting forward a form of exhibition (Piotrowski, 2001). Piotrowski (7), who has written at length on post-colonialism in relation to the west’s reading of Eastern European art, points us to one meaning of the word ‘exhibition’ as "submitting for inspection, a public examination" (Piotrowski, 2001).
He shows that, after the collapse of the Communist system, art from Eastern Europe was subject to a “sort of inspection… from the ‘other’ side of the continent; knocking unexpectedly on the doors of the ‘right’ side of Europe” (Piotrowski, 2001).
The point he is making is an entirely valid one: power lies in the domain of the ‘examiners’ and it doesn’t help to have examiners, such as in our example of Europa, Europa, who are not knowledgeable, or are disregarding, of context. Zdenka Badovinac proposes that Eastern European artists do not necessarily wish to be included in already existing systems but to be a part of a new, and bolder, system,
"When Eastern European artists raise questions of their own history of art or history of ideas, this is not because they are striving for the right to be included in the already existing system of canonical history. What they want is a new and different system of history in general. That is why the question of redefining history is not a question of identity, but a question of the priorities of today, one of which is also a possible global history, or better, a new system of different possible histories. The active difference of Eastern European artists is in their fight against amnesia, against forgetting a past that doesn’t fit in with the current political or commercialised forms of communication" (Badovinac, 2007).
Piotrowski proposes one solution where art histories may be broken down into horizontal frames, for example, “around some particular key dates in both a history of art and politics, such as 1956, 1968-70, and 1980” (Piotrowski, 2001, p. 209). While this shares some sensibilities with the thesis there is a different point of departure in our interests.
The most critical aspect the thesis adheres to in its analysis of Eastern European art is that each country developed their own particular discourses and practices in relation to the unique social, political, and cultural conditions they were subject to.
As an example we can take the case of Czechoslovakia in the late 1960-70s. Following the brutal suppression of the Prague Spring, Czechoslovakian borders were effectively sealed to the import of western art and ideas whereas, in Poland, the government actively promoted cultural relations with the west, at least on an incoming basis and, crucially, as Piotrowski (2006) reveals, imposed no restrictions on art historical research. Thus, it is reasonable to assume that artists had different frames of local references to respond to.
Piotrowski’s idea remains close to the thesis however and interestingly invites an analogy: while the Polish trade union Solidarność was built around a horizontal structure, and was thus able to forge links with other party organisations and become an extremely effective opposition, Communism itself was a vertical political system (Machin, 1983). This impacted on many fronts including artists’ networks, which have been shown to suffer from a lack of horizontal maturity.
However, in our present age we must also acknowledge that the modes of preservation and display of artworks have now substantially entered the digital age and allow us to solve, retrospectively at least, Kabakov’s problem of a “genuine viewer” (Kabakov, cited in, (eds.) Hoptman & Pospiszyl, 2002, p. 8).
[Fig. 1] Kenny McBride. (2009) agora8.org website banner. Photo: Kenny McBride
With this in mind the thesis has constructed an Internet resource - agora8.org Contemporary Art Histories From Eastern Europe, Time-Based - to display a number of works and materials gathered during the research period and from which the thesis has been conceptualised around [Fig. 1]. It thus acts as both a curated space and a platform for the thesis.
The word ‘agora’ as a project name was chosen to reflect the conceptual reasons mentioned earlier and actively supports the argument for art historicization outwith the dominant canons. '8' is adjoined to denote the eternal dialogue in art.
It shares similar sensibilities with a small number of exemplar web resources such as Art Margins, i_CAN, SocialEast Forum, and East.Art.Map, the latter which extends the invitation, “History is not give, please help to construct it” (Irwin, 2001). Published as a periodical three times a year Art Margins reflects the “the processes of differentiation that continue to shape contemporary art in the region today” (Art Margins, 1999), and has been the primary online source for the thesis. East.Art.Map aims at “(re)constructing the history of art in Eastern Europe between 1945 and the present beyond ex-Socialist 'official' chronicles” (East.Art.Map, 2001). i_CAN, acts as an “open platform for cross-cultural exchange and collaboration throughout East-Central Europe” (i_CAN, 1999), and SocialEast Forum offers "a platform for innovative, transnational research on the art and visual culture of Eastern Europe " (Social East Forum, 2006).
All, however, clearly aim to fill gaps in knowledge and to counteract the lack of traditional print publications in the field. There are, of course, many other Internet sources engaging with the field of study but they are, on the whole, far less technologically mature and not curated around such defined frames of enquiry. Chief among these are the primary sources that the thesis draws on and that are, on the whole, either published online as individual articles or as part of an exhibition archive.
Furthermore, they are overwhelmingly and chaotically spread over many websites so that the researcher must traverse a minefield of search results, only and often to arrive at less than complete information. agora8.org displays material in such a way as to reveal the primary sources that the thesis prioritizes between art and its social, political, and cultural contexts. It thus reflects a unique curatorial remit.
That is, that it treats each artistic production as a uniquely individual work that has emerged from an individual’s argument with particular contexts and the imposed order that they were subject to, and which impacted on their means of production.
It does not situate work within chrono-frames as Piotrowski and East.Art.Map do but privileges the unique individual’s exposure and response to landmark events, the ‘milestones’ we encountered earlier. It does not imagine that one work of art could ever speak authoritatively about an entire system spread fractiously across a vast area and timeframe, and that contains within it diverse demographics. It does believe, however, that one artist can respond to a lived and experienced situation in such a way that their activity reveals their own individual emergence within a larger historical process of emergence.
We will come to understand the Utopian drive behind the Communist project as a project of emergence distinct from any other contemporary ideology.
When we view these manifestations now we approach them from a contemporary spatial reference that allows an archaeology of the past, a “trying to figure out from the ruins what really happened” (Abramović, 2005). Captured in images, they become, in our present day, the mediated experience of the past. Arns (2007) argues that the mediated realm allows history to be all around us, to be ever present, whilst authenticity of the past is prone to a weakening through the status imposed upon the image as the bearer of events.
A more embodied, or experiential, relationship with what lies beyond mediated representation means to enter the image and to create it anew, to interpret and place a “previously recorded gesture into a completely altered reality” (Klímová, 2006, p. 7).
The third pillar of the thesis’ curation examines re-enactment as an artistic strategy through a practical engagement with four works from the Eastern European past. By choosing to re-enact historical works of other artists the author acknowledges a particular aspect of dialogism within trace documents that forces a blurring of the roles of artist and spectator. This can be as true of corporeal experience as it of empathy.
We can understand the author’s re-enactments as a mechanism that allows an experiential discourse with works that have influenced him even although he never witnessed them as live events. On a secondary level these re-enactments compliment the artist’s longstanding interest in performance as a mechanism through which to engage notions of memorial and requiem.
Whichever way the viewer approaches and responds to these works one fact presents itself clearly: re-enactments demonstrate how historical work can be transferred from “the original environment in terms of exterior [to] a different socio-political context and a different period” (Pospiszyl, 2005:74). These concerns will be fully analysed when we look at the works in detail further on.
The author has selected the following three performances for re-enactment,
1. Karel Miler (1977) Close to the Clouds. Prague region, Czechoslovakia.
2. Nenad Bogdanovic (1984). A Minute of Silence for Performances. Odzaci, FYR/Serbia.
3. Balint Szombathy (1972). Lenin in Budapest. Budapest, Hungary.
A further three performances have been devised by the author in response to the histories and materials unearthed during the research period.
1. Meant Lament (2006). Piotrkow Tribunalska, Poland.
2. Tutaj Między Teraz (Here Between Now). (2008). Tarnow, Poland.
3. Requiem for The Line (2009). Giswil, Switzerland.
In order to allow the main body of the text to flow more freely the documentation of these re-enactments and performances are set out within their own section, both in the written element and on the website.
3. Defining the Communist Project as Emergence.
We will now turn our attention to Communism as a universalist system not designed for leaving.
The truth, in fact, is quite the opposite; it was designed for arrival. The real deceit of Communism was to make citizens believe that in order to create the future Utopia all life meanwhile must be directed towards its construction,
"Future generations will enjoy social justice at the cost of a cynical acceptance of an outrageous historical injustice – the exclusion of all past generations from Socialist, or Communist, society" (Groys, 2006, p.14).
In his analysis of emergence Mikhail Bakhtin identifies one unique model where “man’s individual emergence is inseparably linked to historical emergence” (Bakhtin et al, 1986, p. 23). Bakhtin contrasts this type of emergence as the character of a world in progress against a world that is “ready made and basically quite stable” (Bakhtin et al, 1986, p. 23).
In order to draw a critical distinction between the ‘ready made’ and ‘stable’ world that, for the purpose of illustration, we will propose as western democracy, and the ‘unmade’ and ‘unstable’ ideological world of Utopian-minded ideology, we can say that the Communist Utopian project was entirely a project of historical emergence.
That is to say that, since the fundamental aim of the Communist project, Utopia, did not exist, actually or physically, in any shape or form but, rather, was conceived entirely as one actively generating its own process of becoming, it was thus concerned with erasing all previous histories of the world in order that its own inner logic would take on flesh.
"They [the Communists] cling to their own conception of man, which recognizes as human only those individuals who are willing to live in the realization of an idea whose future is yet to be implemented" (Chalupecký, 1949, cited in (eds.) Hoptman & Pospiszyl, 2002, p. 35).
As Groys demonstrates, “we must say that Communism is a universal futuristic project… in the name of the future, not of the past” (Groys, 2003). Thus, when we consider non-official art within the Eastern European context we can understand it as a movement that “emerges along with the world and reflects the historical emergence of the world itself” (Bakhtin et al, 1986, p. 23).
In other words, the artistic productions of non-official artists are a kind of heteroglossia: at one and the same time they act independently from the dominant discourse by rejecting propagandist whim, while at the same time they are absolutely dependent on that discourse for their meaning.
In Bakhtinian terms the dominant and ideological language of the State is a “centripetal force” (ed. Morris, 1994, p. 15) that unifies their sloganeering as the one and only truth. Monologic by nature, it neither invites nor engages criticism or dialogue, but proposes itself as the sole “unitary perception of truth” (ed. Morris, 1994, p. 15).
Without the possibility for dialogism there exists only monologism.
What defines the character of heteroglossia, on the other hand, is that by being a “centrifugal force… [it] stratifies and fragments ideological thought into multiple views of the world” (ed. Morris, 1994, p. 15). Heteroglossia is “saturated with ideology” (ed. Holquist, 1981, p. 274) and produces “multiple views” that are always linked to the dominant discourse through an oppositional and antagonistic quality. That is, they do not, and cannot, exist in any other way than as products of their relationship to the dominant discourse.
In the examples of works that we will look at we will see that they all share this quality of heteroglossia: they all “aimed sharply and polemically against the official language” (ed. Morris, 1994, p. 115). Thus, each work exhibits, and relies on, its total context as the driving force that has sprung from within an axiology of heteroglossia.
Emergence as a discourse, then, is a common denominator in both the ideology of the Communist system and the artistic manifestations we will look at, although the purposes for applying it is at odds one with the other. We may illustrate this by saying that, in art activity, emergence is what allows process to be an ongoing event, that it demands a permanent repositioning of oneself against the closed and localized world of ideology (Ippolita, 2009).
Furthermore, and crucial to our understanding of emergence in relation to artists, is that it is wholly grounded in where it is coming from. In this critical point it is at variance to the project of Communism.
In order to convince the masses that the future Utopia was a cause of which to be proud and to actively participate in, the Soviet’s undertook the most extravagant propaganda campaign in the history of the world. Groys, in his curatorial essay that accompanied the exhibition Dream Factory Communism (8) frames it thus,
"The art of Stalinist Socialist Realism was a huge promotion campaign beating the drum for the building of Communism. Communist agitation, which is far closer to Western commercial advertising than to Nazi propaganda, was not aimed at a limited target group but rather called on all mankind to purchase a product named Communism" (Groys & Hollein (eds.), 2004).
In the chapter that follows we will see how artists tackled this ‘promotion campaign’ through the appropriation of its very symbols and images, and that this method produced its own non-official narrative of the Communist project.
References
1. The Tiananmen Square Massacre in China had occurred in June the same year so it is doubtful if events in Berlin overshadowed the gravity of events in China throughout the Asian continent. [back]
2. Applying the emergence of satellite technology to the domestic realm had been championed by the United States since the 1960s as a means to instill civil unrest in foreign countries. The broadcasting of western soap operas alongside information was seen as a way to influence people so that they would eventually bring about resistance and change themselves. In other words, a new front in hostilities was perceived that, in certain contexts, could do away with the need for bloody invasion. In the 1964 Committee on Foreign Affairs paper, ‘Winning the Cold War: The American ideological offensive’, they stated that, “Certain foreign policy objectives can be best pursued by dealing directly with the people of foreign countries, rather than with their governments. Through the use of modern instruments and technologies of communications, it is possible today to reach large and influential sections of national populations – to inform them, to influence their attitudes, to motivate them to particular courses of actions. These groups, in turn, are capable of exerting, noticeable, even decisive pressure on their governments”. Morley & Robbins. P. 143. [back]
3. On May 4, 1980 Tito died in Ljubljana after a long battle with his deteriorating health. He was buried in Belgrade in The House of Flowers and at his funeral there were 209 delegates from 127 different world nations, making it the largest funeral of any political figure in the 20th century. The funeral procession attendees included Margaret Thatcher, Yasser Arafat, Saddam Hussein and Leonid Brezhnew among others. [back]
4. In 1945, following the end of WW2, Britain, America, and Russia met at the Yalta Conference to draw up the administrative authorities of Europe. The geo-political division of the world was irrevocably decided at Yalta as a consequence of the Second World War. It set out to redraw the European map according to economic and political ‘zones of influence’. The subsequent carve up saw the Soviet Union administering the territory between East Germany and Russia, as far north as the Baltic coastline and south to the Mediterranean Sea. America held on to West Berlin. Russia itself did not come under the Yalta agreement since it remained one of the powers deciding the fate and administration of Europe. Nonetheless it is fair to say that for artists in the Soviet Union this was of no comfort and certainly did not bring any privilege. [back]
5. It is interesting to consider the effects of Yalta on art produced in the West. Piotrowski, for one, considers it to similarly have a character of being political even if “less seen… in the West art was in the shadow of Yalta also” (Piotrowski, 2009). [back]
6.The exhibition was held at Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik, Bonn, 1994. [back]
7. Piotrowski is one of the selectors for the Irwin project, East.Art.Map. [back]
8. The exhibition was held at Shirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt 24 September 2003 - 4 January 2004. [back]