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| SocialEast Seminars | |
Nineteen Sixty-Seven 1968 was plainly a revolutionary year. But what of 1967? It, after all, was to see a golden celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the October Revolution around the world. In the Soviet Union the most dramatic symbols of material progress were assembled by Brezhnev’s regime: the opening of the world’s tallest building, colour television broadcasting and a lunar fly-pass were all timed to coincide with the anniversary.
The aftermath of 1968 for the Krakow art scene
The Polish political events of 1968 had a fundamentally distinct character from those of the French student riots or American university demonstrations and occupations of the same period. It was specific to the Polish situation that the social outburst coincided with a major conflict within the system of power. The suppression of the student movement, was connected to various other repressions - firings, arrests, forced army recruitment and an aggressive anti-semitic and anti-intelligentsia campaign. People supporting the student movement, criticizing the ruling party or suspected of Jewish origins were abused by militia, lost jobs or were forced to emigrate.
The ball “Farewell to Spring” – organized in June 1968 by the group of avant-garde artists and critics from Foksal Gallery in Warsaw, was a clear opposition to the official ban on public gatherings as well as it was a response to the feeling social and political breakdown. The scenery designed by Edward Krasiński appropriated, exaggerated and exposed the pure fiction of the ubiquitous propaganda slogans creating a heterotopic space of illusion and compensation. I propose that the Ball in Zalesie can be interpreted as Durcharbeitung of the traumatic experience through play and as a statement of both opposition and adaptation to the political and social reality after March 1968. The “Enlivening” arranged by Paweł Althamer and the Ball in Zalesie. Reconstruction exhibition (Document Gallery, CCA Warsaw 2006) referring to the event 40 years earlier, pointed primarily to the specific temporal aspect of traumatic memory governed by the logic of Nachträglichkeit. I state that these projects could be seen as an effort to rewrite the history of modern art in Poland posing questions about the relation between memory and history, “now” and “then” and the anxiety-ridden nature of the reception of the past.
Josef Koudelka / Prague 1968 1968 was a significant year in the history of communist Czechoslovakia. The short-lived optimism and euphoria of the Prague Spring was brutally crushed by Soviet military force in August 1968. Josef Koudelka, a young photographer at the time recorded the events with accuracy, emotions and eloquence. These photos of the Prague Invasion became renowned after appearing anonymously in newspapers and magazine covers all over the world. The mysterious identity of the “Prague Photographer” helped to cerate a sense of secrecy and myth around the images and their creator.
My paper will analyse the way new media art and politics affected the Venice Biennale in the late 1960s and the legacy of 1968 for the Biennale as an art institution engaged in rethinking the notion of art. My case in point is the Venice Biennale, and particularly the impact of its 1968 exhibition as a key moment in the history of technology, politics and art. The paper will investigate how the developments of technology in art amplified the critical situation the Venice Biennale was facing at that time and how the art institution responded to this crisis. 1968 represent a pivotal node in the history of this institution, when Categories and First Prizes were abolished by the Biennale’s Charter. Responsible for such a change was not only the cultural revolution against bourgeois society and capitalism that shook Europe in the late 1960s, but also the parallel revolution that computer art and experiments in art and technology brought to the art world during the same time.
This paper will focus on the Kraków scene in 1968 and right after the date (the circle of Tadeusz Kantor, the hippies and their contacts with Kraków avant-garde scene - a forgotten chapter in the history of the hippies movement in Central-Eastern Europe, new figurative painting with strong social commitment). Kraków would be the background to analyze the differences between 1968 on two sides of the Iron Curtain (anticommunism in Poland and leftist May 68 in France), but also to show the similarities (questioning the East/West division of the post-Yalta Europe, anti-totalitarian character). The paper will examine the end of the dream of communism with the human face in Poland (the eradication of the reformist groups in Polish communist party, the antisemitic purges, the end of hopes for democracy under communism)
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copyright 2007 |
In my paper I will examine strategies of Slovak Actionism and Conceptualism in the reference to changing social and political context of Central Europe before and after the fall of the Iron Curtain. Bratislava, the capital of Slovak part of Czechoslovak Federation, city situated near the former border between East and West, was strongly rebuilt in the style of cold socialist modernism during the culmination of Communist Era. Slovak Actionism was formed in the middle of the 1960s by the group of artists around Alex Mlynárčik. After so called “consolidation“ (1970–72) in the Communist party new tendences of art such as Pop Art, Conceptual Art, Action Art were prohibited from showing in the public and their protagonists were excluded from official artistic organisations. I will focus on the phenomenon of borders that means borders of art and life as well as real political borders in relation to utopian cosmic imagery of Slovak neo-avant-garde. Examining relation to local architecture and social life I will analyze some selected works of Július Koller, Stano Filko, Alex Mlynárčik, Peter Bartoš, Rudolf Sikora, Michal Kern, Ľubomír Ďurček, Vlado Havrilla, and other members of Slovak conceptual art scene. My paper will focus on problematic funcion of the neo-avant-garde in Central-East Europe and will make an attempt to draw its specific local aspects in Slovakia. Further question will be the legacy of the generation of 1968 in present art practices as well as its parallels and repetitions in contemporary art. 
Herbert Marcuse lectured at the Free University, Berlin in 1967, where he argued that the concept of utopia as a dream was at an end, and that the new society was technologically possible. That it did not arise was a result of repressions within the dominant society. In 1968 he was in Paris, and met Lefebvre - who criticizes Marcuse's reliance then on an aesthetics of revolution. Later, after the failure of revolt, Marcuse goes further into aesthetics. But perhaps the difficulty is not only of process, but also of the retention in Marcuse's thought of a temporal trajectory - freedom is tomorrow. This contrasts with Lefebvre's theory of moments of liberation within everyday life - an immanent rather than imminent revolution. The paper reconsiders Marcuse's work in this context.
My paper concerns the immediate impact of the 1968 Cannes Film Festival, which was canceled by filmmakers and jury members in a famous show of solidarity with striking workers and over the firing of the director of the Cinemateque Fran�oise, on filmmakers from Poland and Czechoslovakia. Following the festival, a quote from French director Pierre Kast came to define the defiance against the capitalist system that the Western European mutineers disparaged: "All films are born free and equal. We must help them to remain so." In their memoirs and interviews, the Eastern European participants in the revolution have claimed that their understanding of this principle was much different than that of their Western counterparts. The 1968 Cannes Film Festival exposed the misconceptions and unfulfilled expectations that filmmakers on both sides of the wall held about each other. In this paper, I analyze participants' recollections of the event and illustrate the impact of it on the cinema of 1968-1970. Finally, I consider how the theoretical East-West conflict of 1968 became a reality with the economic changes of 1989. The films to be discussed include Andrzej Wajda's "Everything for Sale" (1968), Roman Polanski's "Rosemary's Baby" (1968), Wojciech Has' "The Doll" (1968), Vera Chytilova's "The Fruits of Paradise" (1969), Marek Piwowski's "The Cruise" (1970), and Jaromil Jires' "Valerie and her Week of Wonders" (1970).
