SEMINAR NO.9:
NETWORKS AND SOCIABILITY IN EAST EUROPEAN ART

ABSTRACTS

programme
abstracts
biographies

 
Early Networking in the 1960s and
1970s:_East_West_Out_In_
Miško Šuvaković (University of Belgrade)

Beuys, Rasa Todosijevic, Braco Dimitrijevic,
Studentski kulturni center, Belgrade, 1974.

I will discuss the ’drama’ and extasy’ of international communication in late socialism in East Europe, focussing on socialist Yugoslavia. I will deal with policy of administrative cultural ’closing’ and ’opening’ in the context of Cold war politics. I will point to the differences in cultural politics and tactics of international networking of experimental neo-avant-garde and conceptual art. The focuss will be on the'administratively controlled openness’ of Yugoslav socialist international exchange, and on state projects that stimulated international neo-avant-garde manifestations such as: international  exhiibtions of New Tendencies in Zagreb, The Zagreb music biennale, BITEF (Belgrade international theatre festival), and Atril Meetings – Festival of expended media in Belgrade. I will develop the ’theory’ of cultural reservats, and the ’theory’ of free territory, pointing to the results of international conference held during the IV April meetings in Belgrade in 1974.

I will focuss then on the exhamples of networking in neo-avant-garde magazines Gorgona (Zagreb, Croatina), and Rok (Belgrade, Serbia). I will also dicuss communication strategies of Group OHO (Ljubljana/Kranj, Slovenia) and their collaboration with American artist Walter de Maria. I will point to the alternative project Gallery French Window realized by Croatian curator Ida Biard in Paris, i.e., international exhibitions organized in Balatonboglar by Hungarian artist and curator Galantai Gyorgy.  

The Look of Libé : Cieslewicz and his circles between Warsaw and Paris
Sarah Wilson (Courtauld Institute of Art, London)

Extensive Polish immigration to France started after the first world war: from Apollinaire onwards a Polish elite was a constitutive part of the School of Paris. Paris, not New York, was the beacon for artists in Eastern European countries after 1945. Not only the great Pompidou exhibitions from 1977 onwards, but their precursors at the CNAC, the review Opus International, even the daily, post 1968 newspaer Libération were designed by the poster artist and master of collage, Roman Cieslewicz. This paper situates him in  a world which functioned on a Poland-Paris axis, involving figures such as Ryzard Stanislawski (with whom he shared the artist Alina Szapocznikow) the artists of the Malakoff suburbs (Boltanksi and Messager), the group Panique . where Cieslewicz and Polish theatre producer  Roland Topor were joined by French artists joined by Fernando Arrabal and Alejandro Jodorwosky. Despite Szapocznikow’s reticence as an artist and domestic joie de vivre one could argue she was part of a network of Eastern European female artist emigrés; her network around Chapel of the Polish Pallotines intersects with other Polish friends of Cieslewicz such as Jan Lebensteyn, whose exhibition catalogues he designed, or the great writer Czesław Miłosz. Cieslewicz’s circle, extending later to his last companion, the artist Chantal Petit and her friends, symbolises the cosmopolitan elite intersecting with French institutions that define a Paris as brilliant as the Montparnasse 1920s. Deeply aware of crises in Poland – especially around 1968 – Cieslewicz nonetheless created the `look’ of an epoch.

Galantai and Mail Art
Jasmina Tumbas (Duke University, USA)


Galantai, Liberty/Prison, 1979

This paper seeks to unpack some of the intellectual and actual contacts between underground artists and political dissidents that shaped Hungary’s oppositional culture and its practices during the 1970s and 1980s.  Focusing on György Galántai, who was particularly influential because he created exhibitions and events that generated dialogues within this oppositional culture and on an international scale, this paper will identify the conceptual and practical approaches he shared with the political resistance and the international experimental art scene. Galántai’s position as an artist complicates this analysis; his practices were not only informed by the oppressive political climate under communism where non-traditional modes of art became heavily politicized, but also by the international artistic currents such as Fluxus, a highly experimental and non-conformist movement. My analysis is therefore challenged by three major issues: What were the connections between Galántai and the Hungarian political opposition? What relation did he have to the international Fluxus and mail art movements and how did these relations inform his practice? And lastly, how did Galántai build and sustain connections to other artists outside of Hungary? The analysis will address these questions by examining Galántai’s relationship to the political opposition and its samizdat practices, shedding light on Galántai’s major long-term project Artpool, which functions as archive, art institution, exhibition space and artwork.

Zones of Transgression: A research into the idea of border crossing in the art of the late GDR
Angelika Richter (Curator, Berlin)

Why have there been hardly any structures for informal exchange between (fine) artists from East Germany and their colleagues in the socialist countries? Why is this one of the most striking features when looking at the subversive artistic practice in East Germany during the Cold War? What were the reasons for this lack of alternative communication from BOTH sides?

Else Gabriel, Der Daumen der Strafe, 1986 / 1999
Black & white photo, 24 x 18cm, courtesy: Else Gabriel

I am not sure whether there is an (satisfying) answer. But in this context we need to pay attention to the following considerations:

- The GDR belonged to the most restrictive countries in the Eastern Block where almost no exchange or discourse could be established.
- The GDR had the most unusual cultural and political background in the Eastern Block: The division of the two Germanys and their two divergent cultural programmes that ignored and referred to each other over the period of the Cold War.
- If subversive artists were looking for collaboration and networks than foremost with artists from West Berlin and West Germany.
- A few artists in the GDR preferred an inner emigration pursuing modern or conceptual art.
- The agents an avant-garde left the country for West Germany where they highly influenced the Western culture like A.R.Penck, Gerhard Richter, Georg Baselitz.
- The younger generation that mainly became active in the late 70s and 80s was organised in numerous monadic and sometimes hermetical scenes in the cities Berlin , Dresden, Leipzig,
Karl-Marx-Stadt, Halle or Erfurt. Even the communication structures between the scenes were highly fragile or sometimes not permeable: “Betrayal was the law of the subcultural scene.” (Gabriele Stötzer)
- In return artistic production within these boundaries became more and more process oriented, time and body based. Art then, especially in the 80s, was a cross over of music, theatre, of performance, dance, Super-8-film, painting and writing. ACTION was the key word.

What we witness today in current art history writing on the alternative art world in the GDR:

- It opens up the comparison between the similarities and differences of the art in East and West Germany (e.g. Art of Two Germanys) or it looks at its art isolated from any other country.
- First steps in publication and exhibitions have been taken for a contextualisation on an international level like Body and the East, Gender Check or the publication In the Shadow of Yalta. (When you take a look at the Fluxus East show you will find only one representative from the GDR, Robert Rehfeldt, in this broad network and movement in Eastern Europe. Although numerous fine artists from East Germany and other countries of State Socialism have never met or heard about each other their works especially in the field of body art, artistic action and performance show many similarities in content, subject, in formal and aesthetic realisation.

Exhibitions as a Public Site for German/German Grass-Root Collaborations
Jutta Vincent (University of Birmingham)

Penck mal Immendorff. Immendorff mal Penck is the title of an exhibition showing works by the Beuys pupil Jörg Immendorff (1945-2007) and the Dresden-based A. R. Penck (1939-) in a commercial, non-state funded Galerie Michael Werner in Cologne in 1977. While Immendorff and to a lesser degree Penck (in the light of the reception of East German artists a point of interest in itself) have received national and international recognition through exhibitions (including the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin in 2005/6 and the Essl Museum, Vienna in 2008), this show seems to have been forgotten. This paper will look at the design and practicalities of the exhibition and its reception in the West and East as an example of public ways of contesting and undermining official cultures of the GDR as well as the BRD, establishing their so-called ‘German-German Action Alliance’  through friendship beyond the German/German border. I will argue that the exhibition created an imaginary, utopian space of publicly addressing the artists’ discontent with both the capitalist, so called-democratic West and the communist/socialist East. The paper will make use of the archival material to the exhibition and its reception of the Galerie Michael Werner at Cologne as well as the ‘catalogue’ to the exhibition published two year after the show in 1979.

Image: Jörg Immendorff, no title, 1976

The Gallery as an Idea. The Participation of Ewa Partum and her Gallery Adres in the conceptual network of the artists from Eastern Europe
Dorota Monkiewicz (National Museum, Warsaw)

Being fascinated by the work of a Czech artist - Jirzi Kovanda while visiting Krobath-Wimmer Gallery in Vienna, I glimpsed into his catalogue which was available in the Gallery. To my surprise I discovered in the list of one-man exhibitions, that the first solo show  of the artist was held in Warsaw in the Mospan Gallery in 1976, that means that Kovanda was exhibiting in the famous students’ club of Polytechnic University in Warsaw. In the seventies in Poland that was not a unique situation. There were  some galleries which unofficially maintained contacts and cooperation with the artists of the Eastern Block. These were mostly so called “Authors’ Galleries” attached to the universities and other types of high schools, which were allowed to run their activities under the political umbrella of  “students culture”. “Students culture” was understood as nothing really serious and therefore was able to enjoy more freedom, than the official, “responsible” state institutions.

However the case, I am going to deal with in my paper is slightly different. Ewa Partum , a conceptual and feminist Polish artist was running a gallery “Adres” at her private apartment in Łodź in the years of 1973-1977. The gallery was active in organizing exhibitions at the place, artistic actions in the public space of the city, and even an international film festival under a title “Film as an Idea, Film as Art, Film as Film”. The gallery was maintaining contacts with the artists from Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Hungary as well as France, Germany and the United States. The question I am going to investigate in my paper is the notion of conceptual art including its special mail art medium in creating independent institutions in the countries of The Eastern Block and founding the artists internationale over the iron curtain and the states’ borders.

A Space under Poetic License - Andrzej Partum’s Bureau de la Poesie
Maria Matuszkiewicz (Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw)
Ewa Borysiewicz (Warsaw University)

Andrzej Partum was one of the most original and controversial conceptual artists in Poland during the socialist regime. In 1971 he brought into being the Bureau de la Poesie (the name ironically referring to the state bureaucratic institutions), an austere space in the artist’s flat in Warsaw’s city centre.  Conceived as “a space under poetic licence” (the title of our paper is borrowed from Ewa Partum’s action – the first event that took place at the Bureau), it functioned as an exchange cell between international mail-artists and the representatives of the Polish neo-avant-garde.

“As an artist I can exist exclusively in a vortex of permanent change, not leaving any clues for those who do not follow the traces of art,” that is how Andrzej Partum described his art practice in one of his manifestos. Although the artist declared an attitude of elusiveness and un-stability of the art object, the impressive archive of the Poetry Bureau he assembled and carefully arranged consists of over four hundred artists‘ portfolios. The archive is a unique record of a process of establishing a global artistic network as well as a document of the artistic activity in Poland, a country that seemed to be isolated from the international art world by the state apparatus.

Andrzej Partum in the Poetry Bureau taken by Zbigniew
Warpechowski on New Years Eve 1974/1975

The paper, based on research in the archive of Partum’s Poetry Bureau and a series of interviews, aims to investigate the effectiveness of the artist’s strategy of denouncing official institutions through provocative gestures and relocating his own activity in the semi-private sphere. We will also address Partum’s legacy for the subsequent generation of artists and critics who questioned the dominant artistic canon by creating counter-histories of art.

On the Edge of Art and Life: Meaning of Bohemia in Latvian Art from 60s to 80s
Anda Kļaviņa (Curator, Riga)

In my paper I will explore the meaning of artistic bohemia in Latvia in the period of late 60s till early 80s in constituting deterritorialized territory where new meanings emerged that enabled creative alternative to Soviet reality. I will take a look at the unofficial artistic collectivities that developed around semi-authorized places like café “Kaza” and “Putnu dārzs” in Riga and individual residences of artists: “Vāgūzis” in Liepāja, “Ķēķis” in Valmiera, Andris and Inta Grīnberga’s flat and Huberts and Biruta Delle’s flat in Riga.

These places became not just cafe or party place but a source of information, books and ideas; a territory of mixed, open-ended and unpredictable exchange; a platform for interdisciplinary creative expression on the edge of art and life.

Using Alexei Yurchark’s term „being vnye” (Alexei Yurchak, “Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More”, Princeton University Press, 2007, pp. 126 - 158) I argue that these bohemian places and artistic production coming from them cannot be reduced to the discourse of non-conformismas these people distanced themselves from disident discourses or political protests. Their position to the rhetorical field of authoritative discourse was neither in support nor simply in opposition to it. By being interested in „leading a very fun life” these bohemians created a deterritorialized space that helped to creatively transcend oppressive Soviet reality.

This research has been conducted as part of the major research project commissioned by the Latvian Museum of Contemporary Art – „And Others...: Unofficial Artistic Practices in Latvia 1960 - 1985”.

Where Have Some Women Gone?: Women Artists? Networks and Trajectories within Central European Counter-cultures
Beata Hock (Central European University, Budapest)

During my recently defended PhD project, I have found evidence about informal connections and networking between women artists of the Central and South Eastern European region and beyond. Some of these connections reveal a feminist orientation or feminism-oriented inquiries. This is a valuable finding because the assessment of women artists’ activities from a feminist perspective has been characterised by a ‘discourse of lack’ in the region. This estimate is partially correct since—as my interviews with Hungarian female artists active in the 1960s-80s testified—Western feminists’ struggle for the equal rights of women was largely impenetrable for them. They have witnessed the enormous and in many respects appealing differences between their own lives and that of their mothers’ generation and took the achievements of the state-socialist emancipation for granted.

Yet, my research turned up documents (photographs, events brochures, manuscripts, tape recordings) that record short-lived connections between women artists from Hungary and other European countries throughout the 1970s:
- performing together at art festivals (Judit Kele [H] and Katalin Ladik [YU] at Bitef, Belgrade);
- attending feminist conferences and symposia in Linz at Ljubljana (at the latter event, Western participants included Lucy Lippard, Juliet Mitchel and Julia Kristeva);
- making contacts with feminist art groups abroad (Dora Maurer and the Viennese union of women artists “IntAkt”).

These occurrences have so far remained blurred in recent art historical narratives, which have mostly focused on the rehabilitation of the male-dominated counter-culture of the period. My talk intends to fill in a niche in existing accounts by presenting the above findings.

Looking Forward, Looking Back: Re-presenting Sociability after Communism
Anthony Gardner

What is the legacy in contemporary art practice of alternative or nonconformist modes of sociability from the late Communist era? How have artists addressed this legacy in their works? And what purpose might such an address or return to past aesthetics serve after the collapse of European Communism? Such questions have been central to the pressing need to remember and to re-evaluate the critical, alternative histories of art practice in East-Central Europe, and to refuse to let those histories become vanishing mediators since 1989. These questions also lie at the heart of much recent art practice, underpinning the historiographic turn in art from within and outside Europe’s borders since the early years of Post-Communism. Through an analysis of specific works – the narrative depictions of the Moscow Conceptualism Circle in Ilya Kabakov’s installation NOMA (1993), the restagings of Apt Art in the 1992 NSK Embassy Moscow, and particularly the globally-mobile studio that was Lia Perjovschi’s Center for Art Analysis (1990-2007) – this paper will chart the transformation of nonconformist sociability into historiography since the early 1990s. Three modalities for re-presenting sociability will emerge – refusal, anamorphosis and embodiment – through which artists have sought to retrace alternative aesthetic politics from the past, and thereby critique the present, ongoing conditions of cultural authority and isolationism.