SEMINAR NO.5: ART AND EMPIRE

ABSTRACTS

programme
abstracts
biographies

Politics and Art after the Fall of the Berlin Wall
Misko Suvakovic ( Belgrade University)

The author will point to the crucial changes that happened in society, philosophy and art after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, more precisely, after the end of the cold war division of the world.

The historical period after 1989 is characterized by the turn from the time of postmodern social, cultural and artistic plurality into a period of globalization and of restructurating of social, political, cultural and artistic local-global relations. These proceses of restructuring global and local relations are marked in art by a fundamental change in the media of artistic representation and expression. The mainstream art of this epoch is not that of painting or sculpture, but of the new media practices (digital photography, video, computer multimedia, internet, VR or bio-technological performances). As such, this art appears to be no longer an autonomous artistic practice, but that of activist work and interventions into the cultural and social contexts. Artist becomes a peculiar “artivist” (art + activist) agent.

Parallel to the already mentioned processes in art, in philosophy and aesthetics after 1989 an unusual conflict occurs – that between antiessentialist theories of culture and the arts, and the new-essentialist and new-universalist quests of Neo-Marxist philosophers and cultural theorists. Thus in his Manifesto for Philosophy Alain Badiou restores the claim for a systematic studying of philosophy, and renews and reinterprets the traditional philosophical notion of ’truth’. Philosopher and aesthetician Jacques Rancière in his The Politics of Aesthetics points to the difference in status of ’political’ and ’aesthetic’ in the European tradition and in modernity. Philosophers Paolo Virno in his book A Grammar of the Multitude and Giorgio Agamben in his “Privation is Like a Face” and “Poiesis and Praxis” develop the notions of the place of human labour and the historical change of human labour in performing interpretations of the aesthetic and the artistic.

Finally, the author will point to the critical questions of antiessentialism and anti-utopian postmodernism in the work of philosophers such as Terry Eagleton and Slavoj Žižek. These rather different examples point to the fact that in philosophy a complex process of questioning of modern and postmodern contradictions between universalism and particularism, i.e., pluralism and globalism takse place. This conflict is not just philosophical, but also aesthetic and often artistic as well. The conclusion drawn out of this discussion is that the notion of the aesthetic, as well as of the artistic, is not necessary determined as a ‘disinterested’ notion (Kant) or an ‘autonomous’ one (Baudrillard), but as a critical and material conflict between dominations of theoretical platforms that offer (1) the view on the aesthetic and the artistic as a ‘free territory’ intrinsic to the social necessities, and (2) the view on the aesthetic and the artistic as specific ‘political regimes’ of very social necessities.

A cynical aesthetician would resolve these positions by an attempt at proving that there is no art without autonomy within the society, for every autonomy of art is a political regime. This is a paradox with which the contemporary aesthetics has to deal with.

YOU LOOKING AT ME:
On cultural mobility and Arrivals: New Art from Europe
Suzanne Cotter (Modern Art Oxford)

Suzanne Cotter will present the concept and outcomes of Arrivals, in terms of observations and lessons learnt. Apart from it being an incredibly value project for the curators and institutions involved, it raised interesting questions about curating by nationality, and also, more interestingly perhaps, about notions of local and global and the relationship of artists to the cultural contexts of these two constituencies.

Cartography and empire: mapping Eastern Europe
Katarzyna Murawska-Muthesius (London University)

During the last decade of the 20 th century the phantom of ‘ Eastern Europe’ has been disappearing from sight. The familiar label ‘ Eastern Europe’, even if always somewhat vague in spatial terms, but nonetheless increasingly popular as a common signifier of the Other Europe in the everyday-vocabulary, media-language as well as in academic books, is not there any more. Or, if it still pops up, it does not appear to have the same aura of correctness about it. When and under what guise did the phantom of ‘ Eastern Europe’ first appeared on the horizon? How was the notion of the difference and hierarchy fixed by regimes of truth? Using some of the recent approaches of the New Cartography and Critical Geopolitics (J.B. Harley, Klaus Dodds, Geraróid Ó Tuathail and Simon Dalby), this paper will look at the ways in which the separateness of ‘Eastern European’ space and the distinctiveness of an ‘Eastern European’ body was produced by maps. It will compare different visual regimes of dominating and fixing this part of Europe, juxtaposing historical maps of the ‘region’ produced in the 'West' in the early modern period and throughout the turbulent twentieth century, to those made in the Soviet Union, as well as to the most recent ones, made post 1989, and post 2004.

The reception of Czech body art from 1960 to the present
Tomaš Pospiszyl ( Academy of Performing Arts, Prague)

It is commonly perceived that avant-garde art in post war Eastern Europe was isolated from western cultural capitals. This isolation and its negative consequences are often described by Eastern European artists and art historians, and are used by their western counterparts as an explanation why Eastern European artists are so often missing from histories of global avant-garde. But was the Iron Curtain really so impenetrable? As a case study of information traffic of the Cold War era, I will try to track the reception of action art in communist Czechoslovakia and the reception of Czech body art in the rest of the world.

The isolation of 1960s Czechoslovakia from western cultural currents was less than one can assume from later recollections. The cultural elite in Prague learned about happenings and performance art within weeks of the news about them reaching western publications. As recent exhibitions and publications demonstrated – most recently Fluxus East in Kunstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin - Czech and other Eastern European artists took part in international festivals, exhibitions and publications. Thanks to trips by western artists and the activities of Czech artists and art historians, Czech body art of the 1960s came to be fully integrated into the wider art world community. A more surprising fact is that the term “happening” found its way to mainstream Czech magazines of the late 1960s, describing everything from wild student parties to unusual cooking recipes.

In the 1970s, Czech performance art found itself in a very different situation. Groups of artists that devoted themselves to this type of art could not work in public, but only for a small group of initiates. But these small events were covered by major western art magazines like Flash Art, or by art magazines in former Yugoslavia or Poland. While unknown in their home country, group of Czech performance artists was successfully communicating with wide range of foreign artists or art institutions.

On a more general level, the penetrability of the Iron Curtain depended on the political situation of the regime that controlled it. But another important element in international exchange seems to be the relevance of art to foreign communities. If political obstacles are still remembered by artists working during the Cold War era, they may be less important for the future reception of certain types of avant-garde art.

Avant-garde and neo-traditionalism: competition, cohabitation and compromise in Romanian art in the 1940s and the 1950s
Erwin Kessler (Institute of Philosophy, Bucharest)

For the seminar, I would like to present a paper focused on the most delicate issue of the local inter-war art, that is the more and more visible willingness, during the "peaceful" 1930s, of both the avant-garde and neo-traditionalist art, of complying with the "social demand', that is the corporate ideological needs of the time. The avant-garde artists grounded industrial-like workshops and ateliers providing the bourgeois clientele with "modernist" accoutrements (architecture, furniture, interior design, couture, photography). The meeting point of "radical" art with fashion was also its melting point into consumerist vocabulary. Its external outcome was the penetration of the state system by the late avant-garde figures, who increasingly exhibited in official salons and international shows (like the ones in the fascist Italy!). The avant-garde rhetoric of dynamism, its praise of industry and entertainment-bound criticism, turned it into a fitting piece in the authoritarian edifice of the corporate state. The Neo-traditionalist trend, overtly and heavily supported by the government, frantically espoused the apparently opposite ideals of praising the archetypal figure of the local peasant, of the land and of the "glorious" national history as major themes of a nationally specific style and iconography.

Unsurprisingly, avant-garde and neo-traditionalism fused together in the inter-war corporate propaganda, their antagonistic values being transcended by the political instrumentalization in the state system. This process was an early preface to their further employment by the communist propaganda machine, which took advantage of the previously established cohabitation and compromise. This is the explanation of a disconcerting reality of the 1950s, when major figures of avant-garde art, such as Maxy and Perahim became leaders of the communist propaganda art, resurrecting the belated odes to speed, industry and mechanisms, while neo-traditionalist artists furnished the basic stylistic idiom of it, the dull, academic stiffness and presumptuous aesthetic naivete.

The point of my presentation is that, beside the imperial imposition of a certain aesthetic dogma by the Soviet occupation, the very existence and future features of the local art under the communist regime could not be understood without exploring the previous cohabitation and compromise, during the 1930s and the 1940s, of the two warring factions on the local art scene, the avant-garde and the neo-traditionalist trends.

Art and Empire: Doubly mined semantic minefield
Magdalena Radomska ( Poznan University)

I would like to submit to the general discussion the main thesis of my PhD analysing the strategies of Hungarian neo-avant-garde artists, who established a peculiar (in Central and Eastern Europe ) relation with the discourse in power thus creating a strongly politically orientated art. The high level of the language consciousness of Hungarian artists - which spoke Marxism fluently thus revealing its language character and turning it as a tool against itself- contributed not only to a very high level of their art, but especially to their resistance to any proposal of universal language. The political situation served as a vaccine enabling them to speak many isms as languages without dogmatic servility, which is misleadingly ascribed to their art both by Hungarian art historians and the western discourse. Therefore my style of art history writing enables the escape from the discourse that is the tool of delay and depreciation of C-E European art and allows the presentation of the unique, conscious art which by working on the ‘semantic minefield’ (the notion of Ryszard Kapuściński) of two clashing seemingly universal languages (political and western art history) has worked out certain meta-language, which is able to compete with the best art of its time.

Art in the Age of Immaterial Production
Benjamin Cope ( Zacheta Art Gallery)

The changing face of production is having a profound influence on the nature of the work of art. Just as the world economy is now driven by the fluctuating fortunes of exchange capital, so a conception of art as an author producing an art-object which he or she instils with value is no longer adequate. Rather an artist intervenes in a complex set of networks (at least some of which will surely be incompatible), in the hope that his or her intervention may be given new senses through further interactions with others. This situation is particularly relevant to art produced in Eastern Europe where the value of an artist is often decided through their success in the west, but where the question of what it means to make an artistic intervention in local society is not at all clear. My paper will explore what it means to produce a work of art in contemporary Poland: a country where the question of production is especially relevant (e.g. 1 million Poles now work in Britain). To do so, I will look at examples of works in public space made by contemporary Polish artists, especially those by Joanna Rajkowska.

Empire in Different Colours
Szacsva y Pal (artist, Hungary)

Is it necessary to criticize philosophical works in an artistic context? Is it possible? Is it enough? These were the first questions I had to ask to myself before engaging to carry out my research about what I later called the Empire Effect.

I finally could not find very definitive answers to these questions, but Empire had made such an important impact on the art world that I simply felt I should not let myself be intimidated by the awarness of the poor chances art generally can have when confronting theory...

And finally what I found was that this time theory confronted itself. Indeed Empire confronts itself with its multitude of contradictory enunciations and through its multiple confusing effects.

Whether you are or you are not a follower of Tony Negri and Michael Hardt’s book, you have to admit that Empire has received a crushing critique in the academia. A critique which was almost completely ignored by the „art intellectuals”, most of whom still today find on its pages theoretic inspiration and scientific legitimization for their professional decisions.

In my talk I will briefly present the research and the resulting show I made in 2004 at Ludwig Museum Budapest in which I simply confronted the two spectacularly contradictory receptions Empire had encountered in two different areas of intellectual life: the so enthusiastic welcome it enjoyed in the art world with the so trenchant critique to which it was often exposed in the sphere of the social sciences and the humanities.