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PUBLICATIONS  
2009  

Socialist Eastern Europe: Special Issue of Third Text
Issue 96 (January 2009)
Guest editor: Reuben Fowkes

This special issue of Third Text includes essays by leading theoreticians dealing with the problematic of how to rewrite the art history of Europe after the Cold War to take into account the multiple histories of the countries of Eastern Europe. It also highlights the work of a new generation of scholars whose approach to European art history is comparative, pluralistic and goes beyond the binary oppositions that has structured much thinking about Modernism, Socialist Realism, and Conceptual Art. The thematic areas covered range from the modalities of Socialist Realism under Stalin, the achievements of the Post Avant Garde in Hungary, Poland and Czechoslovakia, to public attitudes to the socialist past and recent reflections on the cultural legacy of East European socialism in contemporary art...(more)

Revolutionary Decadence: Foreign Artists in Budapest since 1989, Maja and Reuben Fowkes (Museum Kiscell/MMU, 2009)  

The exhibition Revolutionary Decadence at Museum Kiscell considers the contribution of foreign artists to the art life of Budapest since the rendszerváltás of 1989. One of the starting points for the project is the observation that foreign artists are barely mentioned in local art history and tend to be passed over when it comes to putting together survey or travelling exhibitions of Hungarian art. This is despite the fact that since the changes of 1989, there have been dozens of artists from across Europe and the World who have made their home in Budapest and contributed to the art life of the city, both through their work as artists, as well as by establishing new art institutions and generally making the Hungarian art world a more open and international place...(more)



2008

Revolution I Love You: 1968 in Art Politics and Philosophy
Edited by Maja and Reuben Fowkes
Published by Manchester Metropolitan University
ISBN 978 1 905476 34 3

The exhibition publication considers the interconnection of art, politics and philosophy in 1968 across a divided Europe. It is a mosaic of interviews, statements and essays by prominent theorists, historians, curators, cultural workers and artists that shows the multipolar and interrelated experience of that extraordinary year...(more)

SocialEast Seminar on Art and Revolution
Transcripts published on ArtMargins

The Seminar took as its primary focus the legacy of political, social and cultural revolutions for art and visual culture in Eastern Europe. This included discussion of the role of the historical avant-garde, the specific trajectory of Conceptual Art in Central Europe, and the re-evaluation of Socialist Realism as an art historical problem in the context of modernism, post-modernism and the polarised aesthetics of the Cold War. 

2007

Revolution is not a Garden Party
Edited by Maja and Reuben Fowkes
Published by Manchester Metropolitan University
ISBN 978 1 905476 12 1

Exhibition publication that includes interviews with the artists and new essays by Gerald Raunig, Benda Hofmeyr, Simon Sheikh, Chus Martinez and Maja and Reuben Fowkes that engage with issues such as art and revolution, aesthetics and politics, and ecology and anarchism...(more)

SocialEast Seminar on Art and Documentary
Audio published on ArtMargins

The “Art and Documentary” seminar coincided with the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Hungarian Revolution in Budapest, and covered issues such as the role of contemporary art in commemorating historical events from the socialist period; revolutions and counter-revolutions; the history and treatment of public monuments in Eastern Europe; relics of Socialism in contemporary visual culture, and the use of photographic and film archives in visual research.

2006

Europe in the Fifties: Legacies of Political Change in Art and Visual Culture
A Special issue of Third Text edited by Reuben Fowkes and Nancy Jachec

Contributors: Nancy Jachec, Natalie Adamson, Nevenka Stanković, Susan Reid, Éva Forgács, Kasia Murawska-Muthesius, Reuben Fowkes, Piotr Piotrowski, Jennifer Way, Rasheed Araeen, Genoveva Garcia, Harriet Standeven, Natalie Aubert and Istabelle Moffat

The essays in this collection, which have grown out of the conference 1956: Legacies of Political Change in Art and Visual Culture (September 2004, Oxford Brookes University), reconsider the production and dissemination of art in Europe in light of wider geo-political shifts that occurred during the 1950s. Events like the Suez Crisis and France’s war in Algeria, presaging the trauma of de-colonisation, prompted Europe to renegotiate its relations with newly emerging states. Equally, the dramatic oscillation between Khrushchev’s denunciation of the Stalin Cult at the Twentieth Party Congress and Soviet suppression of the Hungarian Revolution, affected the European art world both directly and more subtly, altering systems of patronage, the control of artistic resources, and the way art and artists were internationally promoted...(more)

 

 
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