SEMINAR NO.4: ART AND MEMORY

ABSTRACTS

programme
abstracts
biographies


Self-portrait with a Hammer and Sickle. Defining the Self through Socialist Symbols
Katarzyna Ruchel-Stockmans (University of Leuven)

Artists from various Eastern European countries have sought to define themselves using Socialist symbols of power and ideology. As early as 1973 Sandor Pinczehelyi (1946, HU) photographed himself holding a hammer and sickle in front of him in such a manner as to frame his face. In the 1980s Komar and Melamid portrayed themselves as young pioneers paying tribute to a bust of Stalin; whereas Zofia Kulik (1947, PL) created a series of large photomurals with herself surrounded by various relics and images of the “Soc-Ages”. Sanja Iveković (1949, HR) explored the relationship of her individual experience to the public sphere in the performance Triangle (1979). These self-representations question the relationship between a historical symbol and an individual identity in Eastern Europe . Had these tokens of a historical reality a lasting influence on the formation of the Socialist (or dissident) identity; and – by extension – on the so-called postsocialist condition? Or were they used as a sheer decoration, in a conscious attempt to devoid them of their overwhelming power? This paper seeks to investigate subversive strategies used across the former Eastern Bloc, in which artists aimed at an ironic self-representation by means of political symbols and tokens of Socialist visual culture.


Performance as “Ethical Memento”: Art and Self-Sacrifice in Communist Czechoslovakia
Lara Weibgen (Yale University)

In its insistence upon the irreducibility of the human body in an increasingly depersonalized and depersonalizing public sphere, performance art has always been a politically charged genre. Nowhere was this more true than in Communist Eastern and Central Europe, where for decades strict censorship and regulation of public conduct severely limited the range of activities that could be carried out in the open. The political dimensions of Eastern-bloc performance art are perhaps most subtly articulated in the case of Czechoslovakia, where the history of the genre falls into two distinct phases, separated both temporally and in their strategies by the Prague Spring. It will be my project to argue that the evolution of Czech performance from acts of ludic rebellion during the 1960s to intimate, often masochistic body rituals during the 1970s is closely related to the events of 1968 and their aftermath, particularly the public self-immolation of Charles University philosophy student Jan Palach in January 1969. Indeed, Palach’s highly performative suicide may be viewed as a model for Czech art-actions of the 1970s, which likewise posited the human body as the last frontier of self-determination in a repressive society. To assert control over one’s body was to deny that control to the authorities; by logic of metonymy, we might say that to maim oneself was to claim oneself. In short, there was no radical declaration of individuality in Communist Czechoslovakia that did not also imply a radical critique of the state.

Ra/i/sed Memory
Zdenka Badovinac (Moderna Galerija, Ljubljana)

The topic of my paper relates to the experience of our common communist past, or rather, the fact that it is slowly being erased from our memories.

We can find the reasons for this amnesia on the one hand in the recent changes in the European ideological identity, which was formed after the Second World War as antifascist unity (and, as many would say today, came into existence only after the communist regimes had collapsed); and on the other, in the new capitalism in Eastern European countries, which has penetrated into virtually all the pores of our lives, leaving less and less space for the past. My questions are: How do artists react to this new situation? And in what way can art still be different from other spheres of life?

Amnesia in social and political life never happens accidentally; it is always stimulated by different interests. In Eastern Europe there have been many discussions about the need to redefine history.

This demand for a redefinition of history is not only coming from politicians, but from artists as well. While politics selects those versions of history that best serve its needs, art looks to its local history for the predecessors of its ideas. The global world is a world of permanent exchange, and artists want an equal share to be coming also from their own histories.

A lot of effort has already gone into trying to create an Eastern European history as a collective narrative. 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. When memory is erased in one local situation, this helps to create at the same time a false picture of a fixed global identity. It doesn’t matter how hybrid and shifting the global identity is, as long as it communicates among other things also local needs and different social and political tendencies.

Modernism and Modernisms in East European Art
Miško Suvaković (Belgrade University)

In the text I will discuss the types of modernist praxises (socialist
realism, high modernism, moderate modernism, socialist modernism,
neo-avant-garde, conceptual art) in the East Europe. I will perform the disussion of reconstruction of the memory, erasing, reconstruction or otherness in relation to the Western modernism in the discours of East, first of all in EX-YU art.

Why PRL now ? Translations of memory in contemporary Polish art
Andrzej Szczerski (Krakow University)

The heritage of communist Poland , known as PRL (the acronym of its official name People’s Republic of Poland , in Polish), has become the major issue in Polish cultural and political life. The attitudes to post-1945 country range from complete condemnation, through naïve nostalgia to undisputed appraisal of its history and still occupy the prominent place in the media, scholarly debates and day-to-day life of the Poles. PRL returns as traumatic experience, which although apparently forgotten, continues to ask difficult questions not only about the past but above all about the present. Hence the issue of memory, of what and how is remembered, largely defines individual and collective identities today. It is particularly current for the generation of the artists born in the early 1970s, who were the first to graduate from the art schools in the independent country and who witnessed the debates about PRL from their outset.

In her sculptures and architectural works, Monika Sosnowska quotes the fragments of the PRL architecture as signs of the failed modernist utopia. The claustrophobic labyrinth of corridors, architectural decorations falling apart, or ruined walls represent not the everyday experience of the PRL but rather the architectural environment of post-communist era of shattered dreams. In the same time Sosnowska looks at the strategies of remembrance, showing both the negative consequences of communist experience but also the currency of its utopian heritage today.

Wilhelm Sasnal paintings are equally composed of fragments: accidental scenes, individual faces, re-painted photos, landscapes. They refer to everyday experience of the artist as well as comment on historic events or political issues, occasionally turning into abstraction. Yet, in all their diversity they appear as clichés of memory, as if the past was palpable in what seems to be the present tense. Sasnal talks about loss and uncertainty as well as hopes for the reconstruction of the individual subject, learning the lesson from the world which failed apart. Although his paintings have universal appeal, they seem to be particularly rooted in the experience of the country which went through the Holocaust, the shift of borders and the communist social engineering. Sasnal paintings with their subdued colors, visible traces of paint, accidental composition illustrate the idea of the research and investigation.

For Marcin Maciejowski the visual culture of the PRL becomes the reference point for his paintings of contemporary society in the process of transition from communism to free market economy. His focus is the hybrid structure of the modernization process with a peculiar mixture of the die hard post-communist habits, and the appraisal of ‘wild capitalism’ in the 1990s. Maciejowski paints the scenes of everyday life in provincial Poland , or reworks the photos published in popular press to show the effects of modernization among the Poles. In the same time his paintings become the allegory of the modern society, which seeks its new identity at the expense of memory. The glossy ‘supermarket’ colors and the pop-art stylistics try to hide their dependence on communist propaganda posters and prints, which offered equally simple solutions ‘for the better living’.

The myths about PRL either positive or negative do not disappear, but have less and less currency. Today PRL seems to be the only common experience which the post WWII Polish society shares and which largely defines its contemporary status. The arts attempt to translate this common experience into the language of communication, which could accommodate both the conflicts and the common grounds.

Past - Unmastered: Comparing Hot and Cold Memory
Hedwig Turai (ELTE University Budapest)

After the political transition, in the post-socialist countries it was an important issue what to do with the public monuments, sculptures made in the spirit of socialism. The question was not simply whether to pull them down but what to do with them after pulling them down. At the end of the 20th century destroying "art" seemed a barbarious response. One solution was to put them into statute parks ( Hungary and Lithuania). This way, as Eleod Akos, the concepient of the architectural part of the Hungarian statue park put it, book burning could be avoided. However these statute parks themselves are different. The Hungarian one, still unfinished, is at the border of the capitol, in a no-man's land, at a place without spirit. The Lithuanian one is relatively far from Vilnius, in a park that is shaped like a fake gulag camp, also called Stalinworld. By comparing the two statue parks, I would like to compare two attitudes to the past and tomemory. I would like to make another, more general comparison as well, that of the memory of fascism and socialism. Why do we remember in different ways? Why can we laugh at one and why it is forbidden in connection with the other? Why do we have, to use Charles Meier's words, a hot and a cold memory?

On A Wing and a Prayer: flying in the face of national expectation - Lithuania at Venice 2007
Simon Rees (Curator Vilnius)

"Villa Lituania in Rome is a building associated with the Lithuanian nation: it was the Embassy of the first independent Republic of Lithuania (1918–1940) to Italy . The Embassy operated in the Villa from 1933–1940 but became a possession of the USSR after the Soviet occupation of Lithuania . The keys to the property, which had been in safe keeping, were handed by Italian authorities to Soviet officials in step with the alliance of powers signaled by the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact (1939). Since the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1990–91 and the formation of the Republic of Lithuania the Villa has remained the property of Russia ; operating as the Russian Consulate in Rome . It is considered the last occupied territory of Lithuania , and successive Lithuanian governments have lobbied internationally for its restitution.

Now two of the Lithuania ’s leading artists are taking up its cause. Their approach—qua the anarchitects Acconci, Matta-Clark, and Smithson—belongs to the symbolical field and will unfold in Venice , Vilnius , and Rome in the coming months..."

Utopia Inflated / Deflated
Marko Lulić (Vienna)

'Marko Lulic paints New-York-School-replicants, sculpts Titoist Yugoslavian Modernism, circulates posters and invitation cards from the Kippenbergian tradition of proactive embarrassment, shoots Reichian-internationalist propaganda videos, photographs series of trash design facades and researches the life of Nikola Tesla (Serbian rival of Edison in the battle between AC and DC). His system knows no boundaries. But it¹s not about nostalgia. Lulic appropriated Yugoslavian partisan monuments for the project ³Modernity in YU² (2001/02), which ran over the course of several exhibitions or Mies van der Rohe¹s memorial for Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg (which the Nazis destroyed in 1935) for the different versions of ³Entertainment Center Mies² (2003/2004), but he did so with a full awareness of the fact that there is something profoundly ³inappropriate² in transferring a public memorial as a ³private² sculpture into the gallery space. The inappropriate however is precisely the leverage that allows Lulic to shake fragments of Modernism out of their historic and heroic paralysis in order to examine their potential for being reactivated for the questions of the present.' (Joerg Heiser, Funky Lessons, Buero Friedrich, Berlin; Bawag Foundation Vienna, Revolver Books, Frankfurt, 2005)