COURSE READER

040.081 Central and South Eastern European Art Histories Suzana Milevska, Univ.-Prof. Dr.

0400 Art Theory and Cultural Studies ]a[ akademie der bildenden künste wien 1010 Wien, Schillerplatz 3/M20, Winter Semester (2014-2015) Tues. 12-2 pm, Wed. 1-3 pm COURSE READER

Central and South Eastern European Art Histories

Table of contents

I. Introduction:

Course Description and Syllabus

II. Texts:

• Pioneers and Their Manifestos (from Primary Documents)

• James Elkins, The Terms Western Non-Western

• Susan Buck-Morss, The Post-Soviet Condition

• Piotr Piotrowsky, Writing on Art After 1989

• Boris Groys, Art Power (Chapters: Beyond Diversity; Privatizations)

• Zoran Eri , Is There a New Basis for a "Dialogue" Between East and West?

• Suzana Milevska, Readymade and the Question of the Fabrication of Objects and Subjects

• Suzana Milevska, The Portrait of an Artist as a Young “Strategic Essentialist”

• Suzana Milevska, Objects and Bodies: Objectification and Overidentification in Tanja Ostojic's Art Projects

• Svetlana Boym, Tatlin, or, Ruinophilia

• Suzana Milevska, Four Patches for the World Game: Game Theory and Art Practice in the Balkans

III. Course Literature

(A list of required and optional readings) Prof. Dr. Suzana Milevska

Art History Central and South Eastern European Art Histories Dr. Suzana Milevska

M20, Tuesday (12:00-2:00 pm), Wednesday (1:00-3:00 pm)

COURSE DESCRIPTION Course Methodology and history of art history Instead of clinging to “backwardness” as a notion to describe the regional specificity (M. Todorova) this course will focus on unique and complex relations between different historic styles and movements relevant for the mid of the XX century in CE and SE Europe. Discussion of the emergence of regional modernity and modernist art in concrete socio-political and economic situation will be addressed and based on comparisons between different artists and media and the routes of influence as specific for different national art schools. Starting with the emergence of different post Second World War modernist art movements and abstraction and moving towards high modernist re-interpretations and re-appropriations of Western styles and movement this course will try in its first part to reveal the inner contradictions of the regional and peripheral modernist phenomena. Besides at individual artists and art groups these sessions will look at the monumental sculpture and public art in socialist modernist period and in transitional societies. While crisscrossing beyond the national borders and linear chronology the session will also deal with art that addresses and encompasses issues such as collective memory and trauma, temporality, authority, surveillance, biopower, gender and sexuality. Various phenomena and strategies of both hegemonic regimes of representation and subversive artistic projects will be addressed through strategies as performativity, overidentification, social intervention, renaming, etc. The urgent need for a course that focuses on this particular region will be explained through several case studies of misunderstandings related to art from the region because of overlooking some relevant contextual background in terms of history, socio-political and cultural specificities. A glimpse in seminal texts and concepts written by art historians and critics will be given as a kind of direction to critical understanding of the highlights and limits of previous efforts to understand the specificity of art history in the region. Throughout different lectures and seminars the course will also offer a short overview of relevant institutions (faculties, art institutes and courses, museums, galleries, NGO’s, artist run spaces and exhibitions that contributed towards the knowledge production and more comprehensive reflection and evaluation of specific qualities delivered in the region. Simultaneously students will be invited to an institutional critique of the limits and contradictions created by these institutions through open discussion and further research that will be spread out during the whole course. EVALUATION AND MARKING: The students will be divided in smaller groups and will be asked to develop research projects that could eventually lead to art production. One suggested format is the PEN-PAL project. The project PEN-PAL is imagined as one of the assessment methods of the course CSEEAH. The students have the assignment to establish correspondence with their peers from any of the universities or art academies from the Former Eastern countries (via their own contacts or in collaboration with the Prof. Dr. Suzana Milevska). The topics of the correspondence will stem out various comparative research questions raised during the CSEEAH course and will address the different roles that art and artists may have in different cultural and historic context, artistic production, art institutions and exhibitions, etc. The expected media of communications are open and the students will be able to use any means according their preference (snail mail/mail art, e-mail, skype, telephone, video letters, etc.). Note: 04.01.2015 - deadline for submitting of the PEN-PAL diaries (or the 2000-word essays). The final results will be presented during the exam for the course in scheduled dates in January 2015 and the students completing successful projects will receive marks. The main aim of this project is to investigate the potentials of different research tools and methods within the context of teaching art history to students of art academies with particular focus on exploring and deconstructing the preconceived relation East-West in the field of art and art history systems. In addition evaluation via individual research presentations will be possible. The research themes, topics and aims will be discussed in advance throughout the course and should lead to research files in which each student will contribute with individual archive related to a case study or investigation of a particular art phenomenon, artist or project. The project will however need to be presented in a group so the aims of the assignments are manifold: besides to develop research skills and methodology at the end of the course the students will also develop skills of self-organisation and working in groups as well as to be able to apply the learned information and methods in their own practice. Individual essays will be also possible in a case of students who are not based in Vienna. Calendar October 1. Tuesday 14.10.2013 – 18:00-19:30 “Over-identification and Recuperation in Art” First introductory lecture (public)

2. Wednesday 15.10, 1:00-3:00 pm Introduction to the course’s methodology (teaching, participatory research and assessment)

3. Tuesday 21.10, 12:00-2:00 pm-lecture Rare Window and Backwardness Conundrums Introduction to Socialist Variations on Avant-Garde and Modernist Art (the debate of Stylized Figuration and Abstraction vs. Traditional Figurative Art, Presocialist Modernism, Socialist Realism, Socialist Surrealism and Socialist Modernism,)

4. Wednesday 22.10, 1:00-3:00 pm – comparative workshop-close reading session (three texts-three groups of students) Susan Buck-Morss, “The Post-Soviet Condition,” in IRWIN (eds.), East Art Map. Contemporary Art and Eastern Europe, London: Afterall Book, 2006, p. 498. Boris Groys, Art Power, Cambridge MA: The MIT Press, 2008 pp. 149–163, pp. 165-172 Piotr Piotrowsky, Writing on Art after 1989, http://globalartmuseum.de/site/guest_author/326 Ana Devic, “Reception of Modernism Within the Context of Croatian Art Since the 1950's” http://www.apexart.org/conference/devic.htm

5. Tuesday 28.10, 12:00-2:00 pm - lecture Labor, Work and Art: Collectives, Community Based Art and Hippies

6. Wednesday 29.10, 1:00-3:00 pm Comparative reading of texts, manifestos, exhibitions dealing with culture of work and art November

7. Tuesday 04.11, 12:00-2:00 pm – lecture Conceptual Art, Praxis and Liberal Socialism

8. Wednesday 05.11, 1:00-3:00 pm – seminar Close reading session – texts about East-West paradigm Zoran Eric, “Is there a New Basis for a “Dialogue” between East and West”

James Elkins, “Jim Elkins on the Terms Western and non-Western”, http://www.jameselkins.com/index.php/experimental-writing/255-the-terms-western-and-nonwestern 9. Tuesday 11.11, 12:00-2:00 pm – lecture Body and Gender in Art, Photography and Public Media in Central and South Eastern Europe

10. Wednesday 12.11, 1:00-3:00 pm – seminar Do Communists Have Better Sex? Documentary video projection and a discussion

11. Tuesday 18.11, 12:00-2:00 pm - lecture Freedom of Art vs. Censorship - Critical and Subversive Contexts Related to Hegemonic Powers (Experimental Films, Film Clubs and Apartment Art)

12. Wednesday 19.11, 1:00-3:00 pm – seminar Art Trials Sinyavsky-Daniel trial (vs. Pussy Riot Trial) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinyavsky-Daniel_trial Louis Proyect’s blog http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/culture/guilbaut.htm http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/culture/trotsky_art.htm

13. Tuesday 25.11, 12:00-2:00 pm – lecture Performance and Activist Art in 70s and 80s

14. Wednesday 26.11, 1:00-3:00 pm – seminar The Myth of the Dissident Artist: Case Study December

15. Tuesday 02.12, 12:00-2:00 pm – lecture Ruins and Memories: Brutalist Architecture, Invisible Monuments, Visualised Traumas

16. Wednesday 03.12, 1:00-3:00 pm Death of the Monument, seminar with the artist Marko Lulic http://www.schlebruegge.com/en/content/death-monument http://www.galeriesenn.at/werke-detail/items/Luli%C4%87/img/14.html

17. Tuesday 09.12, 12:00-2:00 pm The Myth of the Dissident Artist: Case Study

18. Wednesday 10.12, 1:00-3:00 pm – seminar Writing with Art

19. Tuesday 16.12, 12:00-2:00 pm Socio-Popisms: Pop-Art and Consumerist Culture in CE and SEE Soc-Pop Music, Art and Culture (projections of video and music spots)

20. Wednesday 17.12, 1:00-3:00 pm ARGUMENTS: Individual students’ presentations and projections

January 2014

21. Wednesday 07.01. 2015 1:00-3:00 pm, exam 22. Tuesday 13.01.2015, 12:00-2:00 pm, exam 23. Wednesday 14.01.2015, 1:00-3:00 pm, exam

James Elkins Jim about the terms Western Non-Western

[Note to readers: this is an excerpt of a work in progress titled North American Art History and Its Alternatives. Please send all comments to me via my website, or on Facebook. This book is being written online, on Google Drive and on pages embedded in my website. The image is just so the page shows up better on Facebook posts etc.: it is housing prices from the Atlas of the Real World. It’s interesting how housing prices correlate well with the production of art history: both depend on a large upper middle class.] http://www.jameselkins.com/ https://www.facebook.com/james.elkins1 North Atlantic Art History and Its Alternatives James Elkins Chapter 2 Some Terms One of the principal difficulties in studying worldwide practices of art history is that many fundamental terms are fundamentally contested. Here I consider several sets of terms: 1. Western, non-Western, Eurocentric, Euramerican, North American, Anglo-American, and American 2. The choice of North Atlantic 3. Central, Peripheral, Marginal 1. Western, non-Western, Eurocentric, Euramerican, North Atlantic, North American, Anglo-American, and American “Western” and “non-Western” are perhaps the least useful terms in the discussion of the worldwide practices of art history, theory, and criticism. The reason isn’t that they are inaccurate or outdated, and it isn’t that they are irremediably biased or that they rely on too many overdetermined assumptions. Nor is the problem their generality. The reason these terms are not useful is that there is an impasse between communities who use these terms and those who do not. On the one hand, scholars in Europe and North America often wish to set aside talk about “Western” and “non-Western.” The concept of "Western art history"—or Western scholarship in general—is widely and properly rejected, because it carries so many unexamined notions about what counts as central. Claire Farago has done extensive research on what might be said and done without these words. The various world art history projects in Leiden, East Anglia, and elsewhere, began from the conviction that it was time to pay attention to the world’s art practices without categorizing them into “Western” and “non-Western.” Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe and other critiques in political theory and area studies have effectively removed the concept of “Western” from serious discussion. But on the other hand, the term “Western” is routinely used in East Asia, Southeast Asia, Africa, and eastern Europe. Its opposite, in those contexts, is not usually “non-Western” but African, Asian, Chinese, or any number of specific regional and national labels. Often when I am traveling, I find myself engaged in discussions that take “Western art history” as a given: it isn’t always well defined or geographically precise, but it is useful in those contexts and it corresponds well to the ways that scholars think of themselves and their places in the world. But “Western” and “non-Western” are non-starters in western Europe and North America: and that difference is itself one of the most interesting, and intractable, problems with the words. The challenge, then, is double: it's necessary to find terms that can bridge that gap (between the rejection of "Western" and its routine use); and it's necessary to find working synonyms for "Western" that will allow conversations to go forward in Europe and North America. I continue to use “Western” and “non-Western” in several carefully defined contexts when I lecture, even though I have found that the western European and North American resistance is so strong that I’m often compelled to abandon the terms, even though that means playing false with the self-descriptions of historians and other art writers elsewhere in the world. One of the restricted uses of “non-Western” that I find particularly helpful in conversations outside Europe and North America is what I call the “narrative definition.” There is a typical pattern in books on world art history written outside western Europe and North America: the author says she will not rely on narratives and examples from western Europe or North America, but the book ends up describing artists by reference to western European or North American examples. A Filipino painter might be said to have a style “reminiscent of Bernard Buffet,” for example, or a Hungarian modernist might be said to work in a manner indirectly influenced by Cézanne. That narrative form, in which an artist from outside western Europe or North America is described, if only provisionally, in terms of a western European or North American model, is very common and almost unavoidable. For example, in Modern Art in Eastern Europe, Steven Mansbach mentions the Hungarian modernist Vilmos Perlrott Csaba, and remarks that Csaba was influenced by Cézanne. He reproduces Csaba’s Bathing Youths, saying simply that its composition “[stems] from the work of Cézanne and Matisse” (p. 271). At first glance—and even in front of the original, which is in Budapest—Mansbach seems entirely correct, but the form and the economy of this kind of reference drains the artist of their interest by making them conceptually, historically, or artistically dependent on an artist from the master narratives of modernism. (Paraphrasing my review in The Art Bulletin 82 no. 4 [2000]: 781–85.) For me, the form of such references makes narratives “non-Western.” A “Western” narrative in this sense is one that avoids the dependence on references outside its own narrative. A restricted, working definition of “non-Western,” then, would be a tradition in which the historical narrative of the country’s art depends on the conceptually or historically antecedent narrative of western European and North American art. “Western,” in this working definition, would be whatever narratives are sufficient in themselves and do not require explanations taken from outside their purview. Examples of “Western” art histories in this sense would be Gombrich’s Story of Art, or the book Art Since 1900. (This theme is developed in Stories of Art, and in Is Art History Global?) This kind of heuristic definition (and there are others) can be useful in discussions that take place outside western Europe and North America, because this sense of “non-Western” corresponds well with the ways that some nations’ historians understand their geographic and historical position. But it just doesn’t work, in my experience, in western Europe or North America, where the resistance to any use of “Western” is quite entrenched. (My own book Chinese Landscape Painting as Western Art History is aimed principally at Chinese scholars, and at Western scholars of Chinese art who have experience of this use of the word “Western.” But that book should probably have been titled Chinese Landscape Painting as European Art History.) For this book, I had the choice of a number of other terms: “Eurocentric,” “Euramerican,” “North Atlantic,” “North American,” “Anglo-American,” and “American.” My principal subject is those practices of art history that are emulated by so much of the world, and there is no single way to adequately localize those practices. It is tempting to think of this as a series of concentric circles: These labels are only synecdoches, with arbitrary examples; but they serve to indicate that the subject of this book—whatever sense of art history is being emulated by art historians in different countries—is a mobile target. It does often have a “center,” and that center is the sum of the most active art historians working in the principal universities in the US, along with their principal journals and university presses. Any young art historian in the US could quickly rattle off a list of the ten or so top-tier universities, the four or five acceptable journals, and the ten or so acceptable university presses. The second circle expands this to include the UK, Australia, and New Zealand. (Again my examples of institutions and publications is arbitrary.) The third circle includes German-language literature, and the more diffuse and general conversations about art history throughout western and central Europe, Scandinavia, and individual countries in the rest of the EU. [Does this fit? Material possibly to add, from Circulations.] Sometimes, when terms are especially vexed, it is best to let them rest. Piotr Piotrowski’s paper in the book Circulations is a good example. Both Uruguay and Poland in the 1970s, he writes, “worked at the margins of Western culture,” and in general “both Latin American and East European art are somehow Western.” I like the “somehow,” which allows his argument to proceed without hobbling it by overly rigid definitions. Often, but not always, “Western” and “non-Western” are best treated as placeholders—words without special emphasis, inserted to ensure grammatical correctness. 2. The choice of North Atlantic The diagram doesn’t represent a tpopgraphic truth: German Kunstwissenschaft is not somehow “outside” or secondary to English-language art history, and none of these three circles are unitary or otherwise well defined. It is a diagram of a perception. What matters, in the study of world art history, is what is being emulated (or rejected), and how that object of emulation is identified by the people who admire or study it. Hence among the possible choices of words, “Eurocentric,” “Euramerican,” “North Atlantic,” “North American,” and “American,” one of the better choices is “North Atlantic,” because it names the general geographic region that art historians in places as different as Uzbekistan, Paraguay, Belarus, China, and Uganda take as optimal practice. “North Atlantic” has drawbacks: it omits major centers such as the west coast of the US, and it is vague about what matters in central and eastern Europe. In addition it is reminiscent of Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic and Jigna Desai’s Brown Atlantic (for example in her book Beyond Bollywood), although Gilroy and Desai’s projects are aimed at the creation of fluid identities in contrast to previous models of diaspora, while my purpose here is more to delimit a region that threatens to expand unhelpfully or contract until it has no critical purchase. “North Atlantic” also echoes North Atlantic Studies, an established specialty that has nothing to do with this subject (as in books like The Mortal Sea). “North Atlantic” is also an unusual term in the context of art history, somewhat like John Clark’s “Euramerican”—a term I would have used, except that much of the argument in this book turns on differences and divisions within North America and Europe. By the same logic, “Anglo-American” is a little too narrow, because the art history that is discussed in South America, east Asia, and Africa includes whole regions and individual countries in the continent of Europe. On the other hand, it probably wouldn’t be productive to try to narrow the focus any more than “North Atlantic.” For some people, the hegemonic model of art history should be identified with just a few institutions (Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Berkeley, University College London, and the Courtauld among them) and just a couple of dozen art historians (most of them also writers in English). Others point to the crucial publications as art history’s real center; in that case the central models of art history would be found in books by Yale University Press, or in The Art Bulletin, Art History, or October. And still others might prefer the synecdoche of New York City to the less precise “east coast” or “North America.” Vicenç Furió puts this very well when he paraphrases Serge Guilbaut’s famous phrase: New York didn’t just steal the idea of modern art, Furió says, but the idea of modern art history (Arte y Reputación, p. 219). Both the focused and the unfocused models have their strengths. “North Atlantic” is a compromise: it’s not a common usage, but I hope its slightly unfamiliar sound might also draw attention to the fact that the practices of art history that are emulated throughout the world are themselves not well defined. That is the reason I have adopted “North Atlantic” in the title of this book. 3. Central, Peripheral, Marginal Usually talk about center and periphery has to do with visual art, not the writing about it. It’s art historians, theorists, and critics who talk about art practices as central or peripheral. But in this book center and periphery apply to art history: art history departments, individual historians’ texts, publishers who maintain art history lists, as well as conferences and other elements of art historical writing. “Central” is my general term for whatever practices and institutions of art history are understood to be the models, norms, standards, or exemplars of art historical practice at any given time or place. “Central” might be as general as “Western” or as focused as “the first decade of October” or Yale University. For someone in the art academy in Xi’an, central might be CAFA in Beijing or the China National Academy in Hangzhou. In most of this book, art history has a series of “central” practices spread roughly over the North Atlantic. Contrasted with these central instances of the discipline are whatever practices and institutions see themselves, or are seen, as “marginal.” (From this point on I will omit the scare quotes around these terms, with the understanding that they do not name truths as much as perceptions, and that there is no one center or definable margins.) In most of this book, marginal or peripheral are intended as non-judgmental terms designating a geographic distance that is also perceived as a way of naming relatively isolated, belated, incomplete, perhaps simpler, less connected, less well financed, or smaller versions of what happens in the center. The mechanism of the relative isolation of center and periphery might be geographic, or it may also be political, historical, ethnic, economic, institutional, or linguistic. Two conclusions are often drawn from the “center / periphery” relation when it is applied, as it usually is, to visual art. Neither one, I think, is justified by the discourses that make use of the terms, and the two conclusions need to be carefully distinguished from one another, if not always separated. First, it is said that studies of local art contexts, “minor” practices (in Deleuze’s sense), subaltern discourses, and glocal examples will eventually dissolve the fundamental relation between what is perceived as center and what is perceived, or perceives itself, as margin. This hope—that attention to local contexts can resolve or avoid the hierarchy of center and margin —is repeatedly resurgent in art history, area studies, and postcolonial theory. I am not convinced that the many studies that articulate local contexts have eroded the hold of the dichotomy of center and periphery. (See the Afterword to Art and Globalization for an elaborated, footnoted argument on this point.) This is the argument I would make about art, and I think the same is true of art history. In this book I will be assuming that emphasis on individual art historians’ work, on local practices of art history, or on “unusual” methodologies, interpretive concepts, publishers, institutions, or venues, does not erase the underlying distinction between center and periphery, which usually remains impervious to such attention. Second, the rhetoric of the center and periphery can be so strong that it can obscure the fact that in any given case neither one might be well defined. In art, it’s common to read about the central narrative of modernism or the exclusion of practices that do not conform to it. Yet it is far from easy to say precisely what that central narrative is, aside from many individual examples, such as the privileging of cubism in Paris, surrealism, Russian constructivism, and other movements. Rhetoric about central and marginal are also used in talk about art history, and in that case it can be even more difficult to specify what is meant because the canonical examples might not be available. When some Chinese scholars at a conference in Beijing in 2010 called for the abandonment of “Western art history,” the rhetorical context gave the claim a kind of urgency, but the center itself was not clearly defined. This kind of dependence on the rhetorical force of claims about the center and margin can make it seem as if it may not be sensible to explore ideas of center and margin more systematically. It can then be concluded that the distinction is empty, or overdetermined, or that it should be avoided as an example of an restrictive binarism. I do not think that those conclusions are always warranted, because the rhetoric of center and periphery continues to do a tremendous amount of work in contemporary art. I think the same is true when center and periphery are applied to art history: an awareness that you’re in a central place, or a peripheral one, can have a tremendous effect on your work as an art historian. Regardless of how vaguely “center” and “periphery” might be understood—it’s never easy to find adequate examples or definitions— they form the interests of young art historians, the syllabi of art history classes, the themes of conferences, and ultimately, entire institutions and national traditions of art history. These two conclusions about central and peripheral art practices—that the distinction between center and margin can be vitiated by paying attention to local cases, and that the distinction should perhaps not be entertained at all—are at times conflated. The second is taken to imply the first, and the first is understood as leading to the second. Personally I find both conclusions, and their implied interdependence, Eurocentric in the worst and most old-fashioned way, and I think the same is true when center and periphery are applied to art history. The scholars who draw such conclusions almost always speak from universities in the first world, and virtually always, at least in my experience, from Europe and North America. In those settings it can indeed seem that talk about the “center and margin is unproductive. Elsewhere, center and periphery are absolutely crucial to any talk about art history, theory, and criticism. (The situation is similar with the pair Western and non-Western: as I mentioned the previous section, scholars who object to those terms almost always work in major universities in North America and western Europe. Elsewhere those terms are often fundamental, even if they are always also problematic.) It is essential, I think, not to lose sight of this: the philosophic critiques of center and periphery by Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault, and many others up to Bhabha and Chakrabarty are cogent, but both when they are applied to art, and when they are applied to art history, they effectively continue the very imbalances their authors were so concerned to critique. Here I want to emphasize four aspects of the center / periphery difference that might be productive in conversations about art historical practices worldwide. My examples come from applications I read in 2013 for an international travel grant for art historians. An earlier version of this section described that grant, and quoted the applications anonymously, but I was informed that wasn’t legal: I am bound not to say what grant I helped judge, and I am not permitted to quote any material from the applications, even if it is anonymous and untraceable. So in what follows I have omitted all quotation marks and all discussion of the particular grant. A. center and periphery in art history operates at several scales: regional, national, at the level of the department, and at the level of individuals. An applicant from Brazil noted she had studied in Paris, with Georges Didi-Huberman, Alain Badiou, Danièle Cohn, and others. She had also supervised the translation of a dozen European and North American scholars into Portuguese. Several applicants were strongly international: one was born in Africa, studied in Germany, and worked in Egypt. Another was so accomplished and had so many international connections that it seemed the opportunities afforded by the travel grant weren’t that important to him. He wrote that the present and future of art history open a path that we should transit only in an international researchers’ community and in a global scale. By comparison with these scholars, the panel of judges was more provincial. As a panel we had various obligations, but if we had accepted only scholars like these, we would have been the provincial institution inviting the global scholars to enrich its practices. That would have been an interesting inversion of the usual state of affairs, in which the better funded countries and institutions are also the more international; but it would have been in line with the program’s interest in internationalism. Center and periphery in art history cannot always be equated with nations, cities, or university departments of art history. There are departments in developing countries with art historians who travel internationally and look for positions outside their country. It is common, in my experience, to find small, under-funded faculties in developing nations that include one or two scholars whose breadth of reference is greater than the average for larger North American and European art history departments. B. Some first-world departments of art history are as isolated as some in developing nations. An applicant from Romania wrote that art history in his country was nourished with innumerable ingredients of belatedness. One could argue, he said, that ”international” does not imply East and West anymore, that it abolishes the divide, but everyone he knows rightly believes the opposite. This kind of observation can sometimes obscure a more subtle phenomenon, which is just as prevalent. Marginality doesn’t just apply unexpectedly to certain centers of art history: some smaller, provincial and regional institutions in first-world countries can be as isolated, as belated in relation to the discipline of art history, as entire countries or regions in the developing world. There are whole art history departments in first-world countries that are peripheral in the sense that their faculty do not engage the latest scholarship, don’t travel beyond what is necessary for their specialties, and wouldn’t be viable on the job market. Several applications for the travel grant were from art historians who worked in minor institutions in first-world countries. The countries themselves could not reasonably be called culturally isolated, but some of their institutions could be. One applicant said she worked in a medieval Croatian town that was culturally insensate. An applicant from Poland wrote eloquently about the relative isolation of her institution, saying she cannot ignore the inequalities that still exist between different parts of the world. She wrote that she can’t easily get the newest books or catalogues, that she can’t easily travel, and that her salaries are lower than in the West. Even so, she and her colleagues make use of the same topics and theories as in the West, and so she is part of the same “knowledge community.” It is easy for western Europeans and North Americans to underestimate the influence of apparently slight economic inequalities. And it bears saying that those economic disparities, even though they are slight in comparison to differences between Europe and sub-Saharan Africa, for example, are still more substantial than they might seem. Effective income for art historians in Poland is one-seventh what it is in France. For most of Eastern-Central Europe, art historians need to have second and even third jobs. And the amount of disposable income that is left over for travel and books can be vanishingly small. It wasn’t a surprise to the panel that applicants from countries like Romania might need help traveling even within Europe. But it was harder to understand how that kind of inequality could apply to applicants from smaller countries in western Europe. An applicant from Italy wrote that she felt Italy is struggling with a sort of isolation, and is underrepresented at an international level. My own experience working for three years in Ireland, in 2005-7 (that is, before the banking crises, and only just after the co-called Celtic tiger), was that even the major art history departments in Ireland had very small book acquisition budgets, and the university libraries had to consider seriously before acquiring even the basic electronic databases. The universities’ budgets for bringing scholars in to talk were vanishingly small. At one stage the university where I worked, University College Cork, had a limit of € 250 to invite speakers, which effectively limited the speakers to people from the U.K. Who could pay part of their way. If there is a center of art history, in this case, it is the approximately five hundred private and state universities in the U.S., each of which can afford to buy any research materials, subscribe to all pertinent databases, invite speakers from anywhere in the world and pay them fees in the thousands of dollars, and help send its faculty abroad. In Europe many fewer institutions can do that: center would include only the largest art history departments in all of western Europe, Scandinavia, Germany, Switzerland, and Austria, and some in other places. If there were a way to quantify this I think the ratio of such departments in the U.S. to those in Europe might be on the order of ten to one. C. Peripheral institutions almost always gravitate to the “center.” Part of the prejudice against words like center and periphery or Western and non-Western that is common in major North Atlantic institutions comes from the idea that at the periphery there are local cultures of scholarship, which are self-sufficient or inwardly directed. Those departments and scholars are imagined to be largely unconcerned with what happens in the center. I find this neatly universally untrue. One of the candidates for the grant wrote describing conditions of art history in his institution in South Africa. He said that aside from the national organization SAVAH (South African Visual Art Historians), hardly anyone shares knowledge, so scholarship goes on in relative isolation. This paints a picture of endemic partial isolation of the kind that could, in theory, produce different research cultures. On the other hand the magnetic pull of the distant center is very strong. This candidate went on to describe the excitement of meeting someone from the States or in Europe who was doing similar research, and how rare it was to meet anyone working on similar subjects face to face. Another applicant from South Africa drew the consequences of this situation, saying that he thought the majority of ideas and discourses around the methodologies and cutting-edge approaches to art history remained centered in the proverbial “Western hegemony.” He said he’d initiated a few conversations with colleagues about this subject, and he’d found a general acceptance that the very idea of art history as a field of study is a Western one. What matters, he said, is the possibility of developing new ways to theorize or engage non-Western art practices. It was never clear, in the grant review process, which marginal locations were producing writing that might be different from writing done in central locations: this will be the subject of Chapter 6. D. Sometimes scholars at the margins do not appear as part of art history. Our panel also got some applications from people in less well represented parts of the world, like Togo, Cameroon, and Kazakhstan, and in some of those cases it wasn’t clear whether the applicants knew what art history is. One wrote that art history helps humanity to take account of the past, and that without art history the present and the future cannot easily be foreseen. He added that art history helps humanity understand the way of life of our grandfathers, traditional know-how, and old ways of thinking. From a North Atlantic perspective, that applicant had a strange way of putting things, and it seemed he was guessing at art history rather than responding to it. The notions of art history, theory, and criticism become less well-defined in places that are very culturally isolated or impoverished, and at a certain point it becomes necessary to ask: what, in any given context, should reasonably be counted as the practice of art history? Does this applicant have a working idea of what art history is, or is this a kind of hope provoked by the questions on the application? For the panel judging the travel grant, there was a practical question in applications like this one, because we wanted to be sure the applicants could make use of their exposure to art historians in North America. But underlying that was a more troubling sort of question, which I’ll develop in chapter 6: what are the limits of what is usefully considered to be art history? From these four points I conclude that there are interesting difference between the ways words like “central” and “peripheral” are used in relation to art, and the ways they might be applied to art history. When they are used to describe art historical practices, “center” and “periphery” have a different structure. None of these differences imply that issues of center and periphery are critically ineffectual. The center or centers of art history, in their various forms—many hard to define adequately, some depending on not being adequately defined—retain a strong pull on the ways people imagine their positions in in relation to art history. [Material to add to the preceding section, from the Circulations book] A good way into these issues is provided by Carolyn Guile’s chapter on early modern architecture on the Polish-Lithuanian borderland. First comes the question of political geography, which so often confuses or obscures artistic practices. She notes that “the artificial divisions of regional architectures created by state or national boundaries obscure the often multi-ethnic or multi-denominational, or transitory, migratory component of these architectures.” In particular borders should be considered “as inherently porous and multivalent in their consequences for cultural circulation.” Once the discourse of art history is liberated by the geography of art—and here she takes her cue from Kaufmann’s Toward a Geography of Art—then “we can consider visual expression in the realms of artistic phenomena and architectural development as regional matters first and foremost.” Terminology becomes important here as the focus shifts from borders and borderlands to regions. The term “vernacular,” for example, “becomes more than simply a designation for a ‘lesser’ account of the periphery that cannot fully grasp the diffused formal and theoretical language of a center.” But “vernacular” is a term that is often mixed with indigenous and autochthonous (Gruzinski’s term), and these words lead to talk about regionalism (as in the sentence I quoted just above), provincialism, and parochialism. Nor does the absence of talk about political borders make it less necessary to define “periphery,” “margin,” “center,” or for that matter “borderland.” I have some suggestions to make about these terms: for example it can be helpful to use regionalism for cases in which the artists or craftsmen are aware of the art in neighboring areas, but choose to continue making art in a certain way. Parochial practices occur when the artists are reticent or afraid to find out too much about the art of some center, and prefer to continue working without discovering too much about what is done elsewhere. Psychologically, that is a common state in a number of local practices of contemporary art. And Provincial could be reserved for cases where the artists or workers are actually prevented from knowing about the art that is taking place in the center; that was a common condition, for example, in the Balkans during the Soviet regime. Distinctions like these, I think, might be the productive focus of future conferences, in order to help individual scholars connect to one another’s subjects. “Center” and “periphery” are theorized in my online project North Atlantic Art History, so I will not rehearse the arguments that are made there. Instead I want to mention an issue that is developed in Sophie Cras’s chapter. She opens by recalling that the book and exhibition Global Conceptualism were founded on the rejection of the center. The exhibition, she says, suggested “a multicentered map with various points of origin” in which “poorly known histories [would be] presented as equal corollaries rather than as appendages to a central axis of activity.” The very notion of centrality was altogether repudiated, as Stephen Bann made it clear in his introduction: “The present exhibition… explicitly rejects the customary practice of plotting out the topology of artistic connections in terms of ‘center’ and ‘periphery’.” Cras also notes Peter Wollen’s claim, in the catalogue, that conceptualism had no center, and therefore did not disseminate outward, so that its manifestations are all potentially equal. Her argument is that negating “the notion of an opposition between center and periphery in favor of a supposedly de-hierarchized panorama is problematic at three levels at least”: First, artists of the time… effectively perceived the artistic scene in terms of centers and periphery, if only to contest its structural inequality. Second, leveling practices… does not allow an understanding of the process by which some established themselves historically while others had to wait for a belated rehabilitation… Third, this proscription of the notions of center and periphery… does little justice to the discipline of geography. It’s necessary, Cras argues, to retain “center” and “periphery,” but to consider “circulations between these spaces… dynamically and dialectically” in order “to understand processes of emulation, domination and exclusion.” Centers “create, or feed on, their peripheries,” creating a “dialectical tension,” and the idea of multiple simultaneous equally important centers is a rhetorical move, a hope rather than a reality. Her essay includes an excellent succinct criticism of Lucy Lippard’s Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object From 1966 to 1972 by contrasting Lippard’s claims of the “decentered internationalism” of conceptual art with maps of the places she mentions, which turn out to have “defined centers and peripheries.” I agree almost entirely with Cras’s criticisms of Global Conceptualism and of Lippard’s book. Almost, but not entirely, because what interests Cras the most seems to be the conceptualists’ inexhaustible experimentation with maps. The many photocopied maps in On Kawara’s 12- volume collection I Went “suggest the endless possibility of other places, rather than the fixity of this or that art center or art capital.” Here Cras is attracted by the “visually striking… diversity of maps, scales, typographies and alphabets,” records of the artist’s endless circulation. I would just be wary of the difference between a critique of the claim that “center” and “margin” do not apply, and a celebration of endless circulation or the poetry of forgotten “non-sites” or deserted places like the ones shown in Art & Language’s Map of a 36-square-mile area of the Pacific Ocean, or Ger Van Elk’s La Pièce (a blank map of part of the North Atlantic Ocean). On Kawara’s interminable wandering and Art & Language’s or Van Elk’s poetics suspend talk of “center” and “periphery” just as much as Camnitzer’s project. The real critique, as Cras says, is in the arena where “center” and “periphery” are still very much present, and circulations are finite and specifiable rather than endless. There is a common theme that links Cras’s and Guile’s chapters with the chapters I mentioned in connection with the term “circulations”: the expectation that an emphasis on cultural exchanges might itself remove or solve the traditional focuses of art history or “escape the hierarchization and exclusion that underlies the narrative of modern art.” The more I read in this book, the more I felt that emerging as my principal concern. [More material from Circulations] One of the touchstones of global art history in the last twenty years is the catalog Global Conceptualism (1999). Piotr Piotrowski mentions this in an essay in the book Circulations, praising the way it combines “geographical and historical” perspectives, but saying that “in terms of global comparative art studies, however, one has to go further”: Luis Camnitzer drew a geo-historical panorama of conceptual art, a kind of world atlas of such a practice. What we need to do is to compare East European and South American conceptual arts on a more detailed level. The question here is what the “more detailed level contributes” to art historical methodology, to “breaking down the dominance of the Western paradigm in analysing conceptual art,” or to re-conceptualizing the global. Piotrowski first notes that “East European conceptual art” was not “uniform,” and neither was “South American conceptual experience.” He registers the “interesting paradox” that “anti-Soviet attitudes, although shared by almost everyone, did not produce any common transnational platform for subversive art in Eastern Europe.” Piotrowski also makes distinctions among the reasons for conceptualism in different parts of the world: Mari Carmen Ramirez is more specific on this issue, and has polemicized against Benjamin Buchloh’s famous essay which sees the origins of conceptual art within the ‘administrative drive’ of late capitalist society. Following Marchan Fiz, she repeats that unlike the Anglo- Saxon self-referential, analytical model, Latin American conceptualism was ‘ideological’ and revealed social realities. As Piotrowski’s argument develops, it begins to seem plausible that an extended inquiry into conceptualisms in Poland and Uruguay, and in Eastern Europe and Latin America in general will reveal differences so deeply informed by local contexts that the very project of studying global conceptualism (or even global conceptualisms, in the plural) will itself begin to fragment. This possibility appears, for example, when Piotrowski writes, near the end of his chapter, that “neutral, purified, tautological projects such as Valoch’s… or Kozłowski’s… gave them universal, worldwide circulation, but their meaning came from local circumstances, making them entirely different from Latin American political projects.” Piotrowski concludes by mentioning “the limits of reception of circulating ideas.” For me, this is one of the most interesting passages in the book Circulations. On the one hand, the comparison of conceptualisms in different places is made “more detailed”; on the other hand, that very detail threatens to make local and regional differences more important, more fundamental, than whatever label is used to link them in books like Global Conceptualism. Like circulation, globalism only makes sense at a certain level of generality and scope: but if the drive of the art historical inquiry is toward greater detail, which is the case with several of the chapters in Circulations, then the “discordance between contexts of production” (Christophe Charle’s expression) overrides similarities, and circulation gives way to local meanings.

Piotrowski, Piotr

Guest Author of October 2012 Piotr Piotrowski Writing on Art after 1989. The fall of communism in Europe in 1989 was one of the factors that supported rethinking art history, or – in general – writing on art, particularly on contemporary art, but not only. The year 1989 is a challenge to construct a horizontal cultural plane, which includes art history understood as a discourse on past and contemporary art practices. The fall of communism in Europe, which coincided with a series of much more profound historic shifts, functioned as a catalyst for this project. It is important to note that the events in Eastern Europe, namely the Polish Round Table Agreement signed on April 4, 1989, which led to the first democratic elections in Eastern Europe, the tearing down of the Berlin Wall, and collapse of the Soviet Union, coincided with the collapse of the apartheid regime in South Africa (instituted as a state policy in 1947, again coinciding with the introduction of Stalinist cultural policies in the countries of the Eastern Bloc) and a dramatic increase in interest in postcolonial studies. The year 1989 also witnessed the Tiananmen Square massacre and the shift in the “new” Chinese policies initiated in 1978, which did not, however, stop the development of Chinese contemporary art. On the contrary, its development became much more dynamic and its Western reception (including its energetic rise within the international art market) began to reach ever-wider audiences, and soon became a global phenomenon. However, this growth was not accompanied by a sustained art critical discourse within China. Rather, Chinese contemporary art attracted attention mainly in the West, but also in Eastern Europe. Post-communist condition as global. If we add to the horizontal historic plane established by the date 1989 earlier events that culminated in the rejection of the totalitarian regimes by various South American countries (Argentina, Brazil, Chile), as well as discussions about the “former West” that began taking place on the eve of the new millennium, we could arrive at a conclusion that the collapse of the Eastern Bloc was a component of a much larger shift that impacted politics and culture on a global scale. However, before developing this line of thought any further, let us consider in greater detail what has been called the post-communist condition in a much broader perspective. Seeing it in this way it raises two basic questions: What has been the significance of the fall of communism not only for Central and Eastern Europe, but also for the world, and how is this event situated within the conditions of global contemporaneity? In her short text Susan Buck-Morss notes, for instance, that the post-communist condition is not only affecting Eastern Europe. In other words, it does not have a spatial, but rather a temporal character and therefore describes a historic moment in which we are still situated. In other words, the post- communist condition describes a historic and universal condition of contemporaneity1. Boris Groys, however, presents a much more detailed and multifaceted attempt to define this phenomenon2. He also discusses the post-communist condition from the perspective of universal categories. Groys sees the post-communist condition as a particular current vision and description of the world, its parameters and points of reference. He tries to reanalyze the historic significance of the post-communist condition in the context of the evolution/fall of communism as well as post-modernism. The historic process that shaped contemporaneity began with premodernism, and continued through modernism and postmodernism. The last phase, which rediscovered difference and returned to the idea of individual expression, did not reject modernity; on the contrary, it intensified its experience. Groys associates modernity with the “artificiality,” which functions as the opposite of the premodern notion of the “natural.” However, it is artificiality with universal ambitions. In reality, this shift from the modernist uniformity (artificiality) to postmodern diversity constitutes a move towards the market. It is this postmodern market that generates purely aesthetic intensification of artificiality – difference sells. At any rate, this shift towards diversity, which has the character of a commercial, aesthetic produces ever-greater artificiality.

Let me add another point of view. In the communist era, which – as we have already mentioned – should not be referred exclusively to Eastern Europe, but to the whole modernist condition of the twentieth century, the world was based on a binary order. Now, since 1989, such an order has apparently become totally useless as an instrument of description. Modernism, part of which was the communist utopia3, favored thinking in terms of binary opposition. Even though that idea was first challenged a long time ago, it is only now that we can see the proper, global frame of the critique of the “modernist subject” and a broader meaning of the subject that is referred to as “nomadic” or “hybrid” or “unstable.” In other words, although the critique of the Cartesian subject began several decades earlier, particularly in philosophy as part of a new project of the humanities, the effects of that critique in global culture could only be discerned in the last few decades of the twentieth century. The studies by Judith Butler and Rosi Braidotti, which radically disrupted stable human identity, were published in the 1990s. Certainly in Eastern Europe, for the reasons mentioned at the beginning of this essay, such efforts were quite rare. Understanding politics and culture in terms of oppositions – us, dissidents, and them, communists – did not favor alternative ways of thinking, which was why cultural critique developed much more freely in the West. Still, when the (“former”) Eastern Europe became free of Soviet/communist domination, the activists and artists of both sexes from that part of the continent also joined the emancipation movements. Hence, one could say that the deconstruction of gender in the last two decades of the twentieth century overlapped with the fall of communism and its consequences, which implies a general revision of the world perception. I do not mean that one factor determines the other; that is, that the debate on the “nomadic subject,” “performative gender,” and “unstable identity” is directly related to the fall of the world organized by binary oppositions, the fall of communism as a political system, and the change in the mode of thinking; I just believe that the two processes shed some light on each other.

Thus, the question of the global is one of the impacts of the post-1989 world. I am not suggesting that the Cold War was not global in character; on the contrary – it was. However, it was organized by two competing systems, and both of them sought to be understood as the universal project, including the culture they promoted as two universalist myths: socialist realism, on the one hand, and modernism, especially abstract art, on the other. Today, we are facing a different view, especially in art. There is a great deal of literature on the issue of the global4, and one of the most important aspects is Hans Belting’s view that contemporary art is global by definition because it touches on problems important all over the world5; that is, its critique targets the processes shaping the present time anywhere. What is more if it touches on locally specific questions concerning, for example, production, exploitation, labor, Internet control, migration, wars, rebels, and so on, it is in fact still addressing global issues, since what is local in the frame of the Empire (in terms of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri) is global at the same time. Obviously, such a process accelerated in 1989, not only because of the end of communism in Europe, which coincided with changes in China transforming “classical” communism into state capitalism governed by the mono-party political system after the massacre on Tiananmen Square, but also because of other social, political and – what is very important here – communication transformations. Alexander Alberro argues that 1989 marks the new period6. Certainly, the most spectacular events in the arts in 1989 were three exhibitions with a global character: first – organized by Jean Hubert-Martin – Magiciens de la Terre, at Centre Pompidou in Paris; second – curated by Rasheed Araeen – The Other Story. Afro-Asian Artists in Post-war Britain at the Hayward Gallery in London; third – the third edition of Havana Biennial curated by Gerardo Mosquera. Those three shows were followed by Documenta in Kassel, especially Documenta 11 curated by Okwui Enwezor (2002), just to mention some of them. These mega exhibitions can be seen in a wider institutional and global context, such as biennials. Of course,there are many views about biennial art as a global phenomenon and one of them is its critical role. For example, Boris Groys writes that such initiatives can help to constitute something as a global “politeia,” a global constitution of international democracy, which would be able to create mechanisms to defend the global society from globalization understood as the “Empire7.” Comparable critical potential of the biennial exhibition network is stressed by Charles Esche, too 8. Also one of the key figures in that field, namely, Okwui Enwezor, sees mega world exhibitions as a “counter-hegemonic,” or “counter-normative” approach to the Western art system9.

The most recent event showing how (former) Easter Europe could be seen on the global scene is the latest Berlin Biennale (the Seventh Berlin Biennial), curated by well-known artist Artur Żmijewski. His idea was the reverse the 1960s situation, when the artists used to defend art against institutions. What he did, instead, was something like giving up art practice to make way for direct political involvement seen on the global scale, and he used art institutions to promote this action. A good example was the socalled terrorists’ congress, organized by Dutch artist Jonas Staal, New World Summit, which gathered together the representatives of organizations recognized by the EU and USA as the terrorists, and who discussed the several issues dealing with this. This meeting had nothing to do with art, but it would not be possible to organize this outside the art world. The Berlin Biennale (art institution) was simply used as an umbrella for the questions raised there. It was like many projects in Berlin at that time, most of them with a very strong political slant, let’s say direct political action, and not necessarily politically engaged art, and – what is worth noting – all of them have been done under the slogan “forget fear.” What is important in our context here is that there were many East European artists (or activists), whose message was quite global, including Marina Naprushkina with the Belarusian cartoon project showing a political situation under Alexander Lukashenko’s dictatorship, or the Pussy Riot performance in Moscow, shown in the socalled “news room.” The conclusion of the Biennale was clear: the world is global, and any response to a particular violation of human rights, whether it is in Palestine, New York, or Poland, should be global, too. This is the point of departure to create a global politea. The Post-communist and the postcolonial. The other perspective I would like to mention here is the postcolonial condition and its relation to the post-communist one. It is quite complicated, but this does not mean that postcolonial studies have made no impact on our discipline. On the contrary, their influence has broadened significantly since the end of the twentieth century. The work of authors such as Rasheed Araeen, Okwui Enwezor, or Partha Mitter, to mention but a few, has mainly focused on the colonial diasporas in Europe, and historic studies of the modernist culture of European colonies and postcolonial countries10. Art historians who have embraced this type of perspective have by and large avoided the “intra-European” problematic, intra-European colonialism or occupations, which is indeed not the same, even though they have tried to generalize their critical analysis. An example of this is a very interesting exchange published in The Art Bulletin, which consisted of responses to the important article by Partha Mitter “Decentering Modernism: Art History and Avant-garde Art from the Periphery11.” Mitter’s conclusions concern the socalled new art history, which was supposed to have heterogeneous character, break down of the monolith of Western modernism, reveal through art historical studies the resistance of the colonial world to the dominance of the metropolis, be contextual and transnational, deal with such regions as Asia, Africa, South America, and Australia. However, the author does not mention the tensions internal to the socalled metropolis, or the “Old World,” which has its own centers and peripheries, and where development of modernism should also be decentered. The respondents to Mitter’s article did not mention them either, though they did make some very interesting observations concerning “provincializing modernity” (Rebecca M. Brown) and “comparative modernism” (Saloni Mathur)[12], which suggest their consistency with the conception of horizontal art history, as I have called it elsewhere13.

It is significant that postcolonial studies were invented in American universities, and they play an important role there, in the country which somehow incarnates the Empire (in the sense of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri), rather than in Western Europe, that is, the former imperialist powers. Such studies may be very fashionable, but the question is: how can postcolonial studies provide a common background for the politics of emancipation? To look at this issue closer we of course realize that the colonial experience of India is completely different than that of South America, even from a historical point of view. India gained its independence in 1947, and somehow that was the beginning of the postwar struggle for independence not only in Asia, but also in Africa. Yet at that time there were no European colonies any more in South America. Therefore: To what extant (ethnically, culturally) are South American societies, and even nations, postcolonial? How and on what level can we compare them with India? Furthermore, if we look at African countries and their struggle for independence with West European colonizers, how we can deal with South Africa, which was then already an independent country? Was apartheid in South Africa colonial within the same framework as the experience of the black Africans in Congo, or Arabs in Algeria in the 1950s and 1960s?

To go into details let’s discuss vocabulary, or at least some basic concepts of the postcolonial scholars. The first notion that should be formulated more clearly and precisely is “Eurocentrism,” or “a crisis of Eurocentrism,” or even – simply – “Europe.” Most of the scholars, whether they come from the Global South (or the former Third World), or from the West, not only from the U.S., but also from Western Europe, completely neglect inner European tensions, especially East–West relations. To them Europe is simply a homogeneous continent. For us East Europeans, however, this issue is a crucial one. There is not one Europe; socalled postcolonial Europe is just a part of the continent, actually the Western part, or even merely a section of it. Western Europe, especially countries such as France, the UK, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Portugal, earlier also Spain, are postcolonial to different extents. The other countries which are considered Western, such as Italy, had only little experience in such issues, as did the Scandinavian countries. Ireland may be located in the West, but it is obvious that it does not have any colonial experience; rather, it was a victim of colonial strategies of its neighbor Great Britain. The example of Greece (Western country?) is even more complicated: it was facing Asian colonization; that is, the Other was the colonizer, and the Self colonized. There are also countries like Germany and Austria – particularly important for us, East Europeans – whose colonial experience is completely different to the imperial countries in the West (it should be also differentiated to each other). The difference lies in the fact that their main colonial strategies, with only a few overseas exceptions, were directed toward their neighbors, other Europeans. This is definitely a different colonization. We can say the same about Russia, and later the USSR. For Eastern Europe, or Central Eastern Europe to be precise, particularly in terms of the Cold War, this point is crucial.

Thus, to summarize the above, what do we, Croats, Czechs, Hungarians, Poles, Serbs and Slovaks, have in common with colonial history (talking of course about the post-1945 period)? Do our nations bear a sort of responsibility for socalled European colonialism, and finally, shall we share the postcolonial social and political experience? Were we ever in the center, or Euro-Center? What does “Eurocentrism” mean in such a situation? It simply means ignoring European history, geography, politic,s and culture. This vocabulary has to be changed. Thus the problem is not a critique of Eurocentrism, but Westcentrism instead. We have to name those who are responsible for colonization.

The final questions in terms of the relation between post-communist and postcolonial studies are: Who was the colonizer, and who the colonized, when did colonization take place and in what ways? These questions are posed, of course, in terms of the post-World War II period, and not others, since we are talking about “post-communist.” A commonsensical answer seems clear: after 1945 East-Central Europe was colonized by the Soviet Union. But was this really the case? Beyond any doubt, one attempt at colonization was the introduction of Socialist realism as an obligatory artistic and ideological doctrine in most countries of Central and South-Eastern Europe, as well as in those Soviet republics which before World War II had been independent states, such as Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. Still, in some of the Eastern Bloc countries Socialist realism either did not appear at all (as in Yugoslavia), while in others it was merely an episode (Poland). In most of them it remained just an ideological facade. Modern art, which was definitely more important for East Europeans than Socialist realism, and which came from the West, not from the East, was developing independently of its tenets, determining the genuine cultural identity of Eastern Europe in the period 1945– 1989. Finally, I presume that the word “occupation” would be better in this context than “colonization,” and this is another major problem for the adaptation of postcolonial studies to the study of East European art.

Postcolonial studies developed out of an entirely different range of historical and geo- historical experiences. In general, postcolonial studies scholars’ aim has been to critique the center from the position of a “far-off” Other, or to put it in different terms, to critique the cultural hegemony of Europe. For Dipesh Chakrabarty, such a critique “provincializes Europe.” He is not referring to a form of “postcolonial revenge” (shift of power from the center to a periphery), but rather to a “renewal” of European thought from a marginal position through its “translation.” Chakrabarty writes that European thought (he focuses mainly on the analysis of two authors, Marx and Heidegger) is at once “necessary” and “insufficient” for the needs of the postcolonial world14. One could say that the fundamental difficulty in adapting postcolonial studies to the work on European margins has to do with the very different status of the not-European Other vis à vis the Eastern European Other. The former occupies the position of the “far-off” Other while the latter has that of the “close” Other; one is not European by definition, while the other is certainly European, but marginalized, which is not the same. What (East) European art history can learn from postcolonial studies, however, is its critical, decentralizing view in which he or she can see the West, as above mentioned Partha Mitter shows. The Post-authoritarian and Provincializing the West. Instead of the postcolonial framework, discussed above, the still problematic, post-apartheid and post-authoritarian conditions in South Africa and South America could perhaps provide more promising prospects for post-communist studies. As I mentioned before, chronological coincidences are certainly intriguing. In South Africa, 1989 marked the fall of the apartheid system and the election of Nelson Mandela as the country’s first black president. In South America, the first half of the 1980s witnessed the collapse of a series of military dictatorships and the return of democracy. In Argentina and Brazil the military gave up power in 1983. In Chile, a national referendum lead to the departure of Augusto Pinochet in 1988, and a year later a return of democratic elections. In Paraguay, the long-lived military dictatorship was abolished in 1989. In Uruguay, the process of erosion of the dictatorship and return of democracy took place in the second half of the 1980s, and was finalized by the end of the decade.

It is true that such comparisons are not unproblematic, especially if we consider the art world. John Peffer observes in his wonderful book on the art of the apartheid period that the work produced under such conditions reacted to the politics of racial segregation, and continued to do so even after 1994, when such policies ceased to function legally and politically15. Of course in the case of South Africa, we are dealing with a single country and therefore with a much more homogeneous environment, even though South African society is far from homogeneous linguistically. In the case of Eastern Europe, we have to consider many different and distinct administrative and political systems, pursuing different, sometimes diametrically opposed cultural policies, even though until 1989 they were all officially embracing the ideology of Marxism-Leninism. We will also notice considerable differences if we consider art itself, its institutional apparatus, symbolism, and reception. There are significant differences, for instance, between Polish and Hungarian art. What matters is that in both instances, in South Africa and in Eastern Europe before 1989, artistic cultures functioned under conditions of confinement that limited their development, but also provided a challenge. Moreover, the fact that the societies of South Africa and Eastern Europe defeated totalitarian regimes at virtually the same time creates a possibility for a comparative perspective encompassing not only artistic production, but also, and primarily, culture released from the authoritarian straitjacket. Such analysis still awaits us, mainly because these processes have not yet been fully digested by art criticism.

The same could be said with regard to South America. The post-dictatorial systems there are quite different from the post-communist ones in Europe in terms of access to consumer culture, economic development, free market structures, art institutions, and so on. But, it is precisely those differences that are important. This type of comparative, inter-regional art history must aim to establish such diversity. What connects contemporary art produced in the regions emerging from the totalitarian systems with the postcolonial countries, such as India and Pakistan, is its marginalization vis à vis mainstream art culture, and its neglect within and omission from the Western art discourse in art historical narratives produced from the perspective of the center or the position of symbolic power. The centers and their power are still identified for many reasons (economic, political, cultural, etc.) with the West. That is why the new world art history, or global art history (and not universal art history) should not consist of the history of Western art appended with other art histories; it should be the history of both – the West and the Others, on equal terms, and the socalled West (some call it the “former West”) should be seen as the Other, too. To borrow Dipesh Chakrabarty’s term, such world art history should “provincialize” the West; it must identify it as one of its regions. By locating the West within a historic and cultural context as one of the regions of the art world, admittedly a very influential one, it will make it possible to analyze its influence from a historic perspective, to deconstruct it, and to approach it axiologically in the way that we have been approaching the art of South America, Asia, Africa, or Eastern Europe. This horizontal approach will have the effect of provincializing the West. I am not arguing that we should deny or negate the existence of the West, since its continuity is assured on many levels as an artistic tradition, system of values, institutional infrastructure, art market, etc. What I am arguing for is a need to see Western culture not in terms of its hegemony, but its geographic specificity: as a culture of one of the regions of the world.

The great challenge coming from the perspective of provincializing the West as a result of the 1989 changes, would not necessarily be to write on contemporary art, but also to rewrite art history instead, at least (but not only) socalled recent art history; that is, post-war art history, along with the horizontal, comparative art studies. I particularly mean something called the trans-regional approach to art history (instead of trans-national), where by comparing different regions such as Eastern Europe, Latin America, Asia, and Africa, would finally show the West as another province among the others. The problem of comparative, trans- regional art history, however, is the platform of mediation. If we talk about inter-regional relations, we should identify some fields where such relations would meet each other. I argue that such a level is global politics. After World War II and during the Cold War, obviously, politics was global, as I have mentioned before. East–West confrontation, and the emergence of the Third World in the light of such competition is the core of post-war history. Thus, we can find out some key dates of that history, and relate them to the art. It is not an issue of neglecting Western influences on art around the world; on the contrary – the issue here is to deconstruct them and reconstruct their meanings in particular, local contexts, and to compare them. Let me just mention two possible examples. The first date would be the end of the 1940s. which is the beginning of cultural Stalinism in Eastern Europe dominated by the Soviets, at the same time the Yugoslavian breakout from the Soviet world, and the beginning of the non-aligned states movement. There is also a moment when India and Pakistan declared their independence (1947), apartheid was officially introduced in South Africa (1947), and Israel emerged as a new state in Palestine (1948), changing the map of the Middle East radically up till today. These are many dates like this in the West, East, North, and South. The general approach to the art world from this perspective, is a sort of dialectical bounds between Socialist realism, on the one hand, and Modernism on the other; two myths of universalism created on either side of the “Iron Curtin.” Both of them had a global dimension as competitive art and political strategies, and this is a crucial issue in terms of comparative global art history for that time. Another date, or a sort of horizontal cut, would be 1968. Many things were happening at that time, both in the West (“Euramerica,” in John Clark’s terms) and in the East, including the Prague Spring and Polish March. At the same time there was the Vietnam war, the Middle East conflict, harsh military regimes in South America, cultural revolution in China, and so on and so forth. In terms of art it was the time of a rigorous critique of modernism, on the one hand, and the appearance of critical and rebellious art (called sometimes neo-avant-garde), on the other.

To illustrate this method let me compare two experiences: East European and Latin American in terms of 1968, or more precisely: Polish and Argentine. Both countries started to “modernize” art in the mid-1950s, in similar geographically oriented points of origin, namely French, and at a somewhat comparable historical moment – the collapse of authoritarian systems: Peronism in Argentina and Stalinism (but not Communism) in Poland. Art modernization in Argentina after Juan Domingo Perón’s removal from power resulted in reinforcing and reopening (1957) the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes (MNBA) in Buenos Aires under new directorship, namely, under famous Jorge Romero Brest (appointed in 1956); founding the new museum of modern art, Museo de Arte Moderno (MAM) in 1956; and two years later the Instituto Torcuato Di Tella (ITDT). This represented a strong institutionalization and internationalization of modernism, as Andrea Giunta argues 16. In Poland no museums were founded, but a similar institutionalization of modernism can be observed. For example, in 1957 there was the Second Exhibition of Modern Art at one of the most notable and prestigious art institutions in Poland, the Zachęta National Gallery in Warsaw, which was followed by a very important contribution of Polish modern art to the most important official exhibition of the art of socialist countries in Moscow in 1958/1959, where – as the only delegation – Polish curators decided to show modern (abstract) art, instead of socialist realism, as all other delegations did17. Of course, Peronism was not the same as Stalinism; nevertheless, the broad acceptance of modernism almost at the same time after the fall of authoritarian regimes as a reply to them, is quite striking. In both cases modernism (the French, not the American version) was perceived as the right attitude towards freedom and free and modern culture. What is more, contrary to the US conceptual art trend, art in both Argentina and Poland derived somehow from modernism, that is, informel and especially geometric abstraction art, rather than from minimal art. In additional, object art, that is, art that operates with real things, developed a comparable historical dynamic at the beginning of the 1960s, and was submerged in existential issues, rather than in an ironic attitude to low culture, as in North America.

However, the Argentine artists of 1968 discredited the modernist mythology and abandoned it as a tool of power (at that time under the military regime after the coup in 1966), whereas their Polish counterparts still believed in that myth; to be frank, until the end of the 1970s. In both cases modernism was the mainstream of national culture. In Argentina, however, the artists rejected all of it and took the radical position of questioning art as such, and responded with direct, political action (the most striking example was a collective project called Tucuman Is Burning, Rosario and Buenos Aires, 1968). In East-Central Europe such radicalism was unknown. Even Hungarians, the most political artists in the entire Eastern Bloc, created their critical positions through metaphors rather than direct actions, and did not question the value of art. Although some of their events looked purely political (e.g., Tamas Szentjóby’s Sit Out, 1972), they were recognized primary as art. In Poland the neo-avant- garde artists discarded modernist visuality (abstract painting), somehow the mainstream institution, but not the value system with autonomy of art and its self-referentiality at the top. Instead of political action, like that mentioned above, Polish artists were involved in analyzing art language and visual media. The grounds for this were, on the one hand, the persisting trauma of socialist realism understood as the only art doctrine accepted by the authorities in the public sphere during the first half of the 1950s and political confusion concerning global US politics,and on the other hand a kind of conformism. This conformism stemmed from the pseudo-liberal cultural policy that granted artists the pseudo-freedom to do anything he or she wanted to in art (abstract art, conceptual art, performance, body art etc.), quite unusual at that time in the Soviet Bloc, except political engagement. That was of course banned, and anything connected with critique of the political system was censored. It looks as though the artists did not want to lose such a “velvet prison,” and it was the reason why the modernist value system was maintained so long. When these artists looked at the 1968 movements elsewhere, whether in Western Europe, the US, or South America they mostly depoliticized it, especially in Poland (Hungary was different), precisely because of the infamous and traumatic tradition of cultural Stalinization in the first half of the 1950s. Politics (once more: particularly in Poland) was more the negative point of departure of art at that time than the welcome message. This situation was just the opposite in Latin America, including Argentina, where politics and art went together, even though the first had priority.

As I mentioned above Tucuman is Burning was just the tip of the iceberg in the process of politicization of Argentine art in the 1960s. In Poland probably the only response to March ’68 in terms of visual art was a ball in Zalesie near Warsaw titled “Farewell to Spring,” in which many people from the art scene, especially connected with the Warsaw Foksal Gallery, participated, and had actually organized18. Seen from this perspective, the event was intended to function as a gesture of protest against politicization (sic) of intellectual life and the pressure to be political in the Polish reality of 1968, and not vice versa. I must say that at first glance this looks strange; however. if we consider the modernist background of the Polish neo-avant-garde, discussed above, it does have a sort of logic. Even in Czechoslovakia in the course of normalization after 1968, after suppression of the Prague Spring by Warsaw Pact troops where repression and persecution were definitely much stronger, the artists also responded in a comparable way: they just congregated in bars, drank beer, or organized outdoor trips, simply in order to spend some time together. From Geography to Topography. The outcomes of 1989 challenge the situation from a different perspective as well, especially by affecting the manner in which geography is perceived. This includes, more or less actual but certainly experienced on both collective and individual levels, the opening of borders, above all in former Eastern Europe, but at the same time the closing of borders in other parts of the world, or to people from other parts of the world, building new walls and installing border controls. This also involves a certain problematization (though not elimination) of national identity and the rise of competing potential identities: gender, sexual, subcultural, local, regional, and so on. In general, it is clear that after 1989 we see rejection of geographical terms such as Eastern Europe, Eastern Bloc, or even the much more politically neutral Central Europe (understood as a geopolitical or geocultural construct). In other words, we are observing a certain deregionalization of Central Europe and hence rejection of the geographic perspective. In reality, contemporary artistic initiatives are shifting the emphasis from geography (of a region) to topography (of a place), and this – the shift from geography to topography – is another challenge which occurred in 1989, connected with cultural globalization. We prefer to speak of cities (Bratislava, Budapest, Bucharest, Prague, Warsaw, Vilnius), rather than regions such as Central or Eastern Europe. The latter way of describing the artistic region (one that was fairly unproblematic before 1989) is today particularly burdened by political associations. This does not mean that efforts to construct a regional identity have been completely abandoned. If we ignore ineffective political initiatives, such as the Visegrad Group, the notion of regional cultural identity appears most appropriate for consideration of the Balkans, where we see extremely dynamic development and cultivation of a distinct regional identity through various art initiatives and publishing projects 19, and in the Baltic countries, where such efforts are much more modest in scale and certainly far less spectacular20. When compared to these two highly dynamic regional constructions, especially that of the Balkans, similar efforts in Central Europe seems very modest indeed. As I mentioned earlier, efforts tend to be focused on its metropolitan areas, rather than transregional initiatives.For these reasons it is difficult to construe efforts aimed at legitimization of artistic identity of post-communist Central Europe in geographic terms. Instead, they appear topographic. This signals a shift from geography to topography in the historic as well as methodological sense.

With such a shift, the concept “transnational,” so useful (despite its ahistorical character) for studies dealing with the communist period, must necessarily undergo a certain erosion. At first sight, one might assume that transnational could be replaced by the term “international,” which would signal a certain return to modernist language. After all, it was modernism that made internationalism into a virtual cult or a fetish of the new culture that was supposed to eliminate all contending identities: ethnic, gender, or geographic. Deconstruction of the modernist language and value system demonstrated the mythologizing function of such terms and its historic analysis revealed hidden political agendas21. Of course, if we were less careful and more colloquial, we could say that cultural exchange approached from a topographic perspective appears much more international than transnational in character. However, such a formulation reflects a fundamental lack of precision. In reality, we are talking about something else, a third term as it were: cosmopolitan. I understand this concept literally, in terms of its original Greek meaning, which combines the notion of a city (polis) with the world (cosmos). Cosmo-polis is a world city, city-world, city as a cosmos; its inhabitants are citizens of the world, for whom debate takes place not just in the local agora, but also in the universal space. The new culture, which began to emerge before 1989 within the context of globalization, is cosmopolitan by definition. Therefore, the interactions between individual cities or metropolitan areas should be referred to as trans-cosmopolitan. If the art geography and comparative methodology used to study art of the communist period entail transnational relations, then the art topography and methodological perspective used to study post- communist culture, considered as part of the global structure of artistic exchanges, suggest trans-cosmopolitan ones.

In other words, after 1989 cities gained at the expense of countries in former Eastern Europe. Of course, cities always had their own identities and these did not always coincide with the national ones. This was also true during the communist period. However, cities, especially capitals but also competing provincial centers, such as Brno in Czechoslovakia, Ljubljana and Zagreb in Yugoslavia, Leipzig in the GDR, Łódź, Kraków, and Wrocław in Poland, Leningrad in Russia, or Cluj and Timişoara in Romania, functioned to a significant extent as signifiers of national identity. It appears, however, that at the present moment, following a general trend towards increasing urbanization of culture on the global scale, large cities of former Eastern Europe are achieving a more and more independent character, gaining ever greater autonomy, and distancing themselves from national identity. This tendency can be readily perceived within contemporary art discourse, as exemplified by a book edited by Katrin Klingan and Ines Kappert, Leap into the City, which contains chapters dedicated to different post- communist cities (not always of a metropolitan scale), such as Prishtina, Warsaw, and Zagreb22.

There are a number of factors that have influenced this situation. One factor is the development of significant art institutions of European standing in the region. They include museums, as well as contemporary art centers, such as the Center for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw, which is the largest and the most active of such state- sponsored public institutions in the post-communist Europe (with the exception of the former GDR, which, due to its incorporation into West Germany, must be treated as a special case), or the private DOX Center for Contemporary Art in Prague. These institutions are actively engaged in organizing large exhibitions of a cosmopolitan character.

Another factor that has been favorable to the development of cosmopolitan attitudes is migration, in this instance, the migration of artists. It has frequently been noted that artists often choose as their place of residence a different city to the one in which they were born. Communist Europe was unaffected by this phenomenon, or rather experienced it only rarely. Instead of influx, it was the source of the outbound migration of artists, intellectuals, cultural organizers, and curators, mainly to Western Europe and the United States. Since 1989, many of those cultural migrants have returned, but have also begun to move between Eastern European cities. Moreover, there is also a still relatively small migratory trickle of Western artists eastward, which may in time assume more significant dimensions. This applies not only to artists, but also curators and art critics who have lived and worked for years in Western Europe. The newly cosmopolitan cities now also host significant large art exhibitions, which help to create a new image for the metropolis. Sometimes, as in the case of the October Salon in Belgrade, local events are transformed into “cosmopolitan” ones. Generally speaking, we are observing changes in the social, and particular ethnic structure of the post-1989 (former) East European cities. In Warsaw, for example, we have a large number of Vietnamese people, Belarusians, Ukrainians, and others. The same is true of Budapest, Prague, and of course Moscow, the real metropolis in post-communist Europe. This the new audience, the new social surroundings, and the new society creating new points of reference.

Perhaps the most significant phenomenon that has given cities their cosmopolitan character is the ever growing numbers of biennials, which is a challenge to write art history in terms of its global character. The biennial phenomenon is interesting in and of itself. Although the biennials have a long history (Biennale di Venezia has been staged now for over one hundred years), rapid proliferation of this form of exhibition seems to typify the period of globalization. Biennials have taken over the world. They are held in Australia, China (mainland as well as Taiwan), but mostly in Europe. Often, they are organized by curators of international standing (a fact that gives them a certain visibility) and include top-ranking artists within global art culture. Frequently enormous sums of private as well as public funds (from local governments) are invested in such projects, with the hope of promoting the area as a cultural and tourist destination. For the local public, such exhibitions provide an opportunity to survey global art trends; for the international audience, they afford an excuse for a bit of cultural tourism, and they also attract the attention of the world press and media, including art publications. There are biennials with a very open organizational structure and others that focus on a particular region or problematic. Former Eastern Europe has also become the site of several biennials, in Bucharest, Iaşi, Moscow, Prague, etc. In fact, Prague used to host two competing biennials, one organized by Flash Art (Giancarlo Politi, Helena Kontova), and the other by the National Gallery (Milan Knižak). Of the biennials in the region, Moscow Biennale is certainly the most visible and probably the best financed; it is, of course, organized in the only true (measured by global standards) metropolis east of Berlin. By contrast, the Mediations Biennial organized since 2008 in Poznan by Tomasz Wendland, though significant in its aspirations and scope, is certainly conceived on a much modest scale. It originated from the exhibition Asia-Europe Mediation organized by Wendland in 2007, which had the ambition of mediating between those two continents. This goal has been maintained by the event. Although initially the emphasis was on Asia, the exhibition has now extended its scope to a global reach. What is interesting is the fact that Central Europe has been inscribed into this global perspective as a plane of mediation among different cultures.

The shift from art geography, which focused on countries and as a result on regions, to art topography, which focuses on cities, constitutes in and of itself a very interesting feature of contemporary culture. Since 1989, the cities in post-communist Europe, which are still rather modest in scale by global standards (except Moscow), are gaining a metropolitan character and becoming cosmopolitan in the Greek sense of the word. Because of this, contacts between urban areas lose transnational and often acquire trans-cosmopolitan character. This process poses a significant challenge for art and culture, as well as art history as an academic discipline, which includes, after all, art geography. Moreover, our discipline is not unaffected by art topography. The processes of globalization and cosmopolitanization on world scale point to a need for rethinking art history and art criticism.

This essay was originally given as a lecture on the occasion of receiving the Igor Zabel Award in Theory and Culture, Barcelona 2010, and included later in my book Art and Democracy in Post-communist Europe, translated by Anna Brzyski, London: Reaktion, 2012. This version contains revisions and new sections.

Notes: 1 Susan Buck-Morss, “The Post-Soviet Condition,” in IRWIN (eds.), East Art Map. Contemporary Art and Eastern Europe, London: Afterall Book, 2006, p. 498. 2 Boris Groys has written repeatedly on this subject. In particular see: Boris Groys, Art Power, Cambridge MA: The MIT Press, 2008 pp. 149–163, pp. 165–172; “Back from the Future,” in Zdenka Badovinac and Peter Weibel (eds.), 2000+ Art East Collection. The Art of Eastern Europe, Folio Verlag, Vienna, Bozen, 2001, pp. 9-14. 3 See: Groys 2008, pp. 149–163. 4 Of the vast bibliography on this subject especially see: Jonathan Harris (ed.) Globalization and Contemporary Art, Wiley-Blackwell, Chichester et al., 2011; Silvia von Benningsen et al., Global Art, Hatje Canz, Ostfildern, 2009; Chartlotte Bydler T_he Global ArtWorld Inc. On the Globalization of Contemporary Art_, Uppsala University Press, Uppsala, 2004. Julian Stallabrass Art Incorporated. The Story of Contemporary Art, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2004 5 See: Hans Belting “Contemporary Art and the Museum in the Global Age”, in: Peter Weibel and Andrea Buddensieg (eds.) Contemporary Art and the Museum. A Global Perspective, Hatje Cantz, Ostfildern, 2007, pp. 16-38; and Hans Belting, “Contemporary Art as Global Art: a Critical Estimate” in: Hans Belting, Andrea Buddensieg (eds.) The Global Art World: Audiences, Markets, and Museums, Hatje Cantz, Ostfildern, 2009, pp. 38–73. Hans Belting’s concept of the museum as elaborated in these essays was the main inspiration for developing my strategy of the critical museum as director of the National Museum in Warsaw. See: Piotr Piotrowski, “Museum: From the Critique of Institution to a Critical Institution,” in: Tone Hansen (ed.) Staging the Art Museum, Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Høvikodden, Revolver Publishing, Berlin, 2011, pp.77-90. 6 See: Alexander Alberro, “Periodising Contemporary Art,” in: Jaynie Anderson (ed.), Crossing Cultures. Conflict, Migration, and Convergence, The Miegunyah Press, Carlton, Victoria, 2009, pp. 935–939. 7 Boris Groys, „From Medium to Message. The Art Exhibition as Model of a New World Order,” in Open. Cahier on Art and the Public Domain, no. 16, 2009, pp. 56-65. 8 See: Charles Esche, „Making Art Global: A Good Place or a No Place?”, in: Rachel Weiss et al.Making Art Global (Part 1). The Third Havana Biennial, 1989, Afterall Books, London, 2011, pp. 8–13. 9 Quoted from: Monica Juneja, „Global Art History and the ‘Burden of Representation’”, in: Jacob Birken, Andrea Buddensieg, and Peter Weibel (eds.), Global Studies. Mapping Contemporary Art and Culture, Hatje Cantz, Ostfildern, 2011, p. 293. 10 See: Rasheed Araeen (ed.) The Other Story: Afro-Asian Artists in Post-War Britain, Hayward Publishing, London, 1989; Olu Oguibe and Okwui Enwezor (eds.) Reading the Contemporary: African Art from Theory to the Marketplace, The MIT Press, Cambridge (MA), 1999; Saloni Mathur, India by Design: Colonial History and Cultural Display, University of California Press, Berkeley (CA), 2007; Partha Mitter, The Triumph of Modernism. Indian Artists and the Avant-Garde, 1922-1947, Reaktion Books, London, 2007. 11 See: Partha Mitter, “Intervention. Decentering Modernism: Art History and Avant-Garde Art from the Periphery,” in: The Art Bulletin, Vol. 90, No. 4, December 2008, pp. 543-548. 12 See: Rebecca M. Brown, “Response: Provincializing Modernity: from Derivative to Foundational,” in: The Art Bulletin, Vol. 90, No. 4, December 2008, pp. 555-557; Saloni Mathur, “Response. Belonging to Modernism,” in: The Art Bulletin, Vol. 90, No. 4, December 2008, pp. 558-560. 13 Piotr Piotrowski, “On the Spatial Turn, or Horizontal Art History”, Umeni/ Art, No. 5, 2008, pp. 378-383 14 See: Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, Princeton University Press, Princeton (NJ), 2000. 15 See: John Peffer, Art and the End of Apartheid, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis (MN), 2009. 16 See: Andrea Giunta, Avant-garde, Internationalism, and Politics – Argentinian Art in the Sixties, Duke University Press, Durham (NC), 2007. 17 See: Susan E. Reid “The Exhibition ‘Art of Socialist Countries,’ Moscow 1958-9, and the Contemporary Style of Painting,” in: Susan E. Reid and David Crowley (eds.) Style and Socialism. Modernity and Material Culture in Post-war Eastern Europe, Berg Publishers, London et al., 2000, pp. 101-132. 18 See: Anka Ptaszkowska, Paweł Polit et al., “Remarks and Comments: Discussion on the Zalesie Ball and Participation,” in: Clair Bishop and Marta Dziewańska (eds) 1968-989. Political Upheaval and Artistic Change, Muzeum Sztuki Nowoczesnej (Museum of Modern Art), Warsaw, 2009, pp. 106-111. 19 See: Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1997, Dušan I. Bjelić and Obrad Savić (eds.), Balkan as Metaphor. Between Globalization and Fragmentation, The MIT Press, Cambridge (MA), 2002; “Balkans & Balkanness, Pros & Cons,” Special Issue, Artelier – Contemporary Art Magazine no. 8, 2003; See also the exhibitions: In Search for Balkania, curators: Peter Weibel, Roger Conover and Eda Čufer, Neue Galerie, Graz, 2002; In der schluchten des Balkan/ In the Gorges of the Balkans, curator: René Block, Kunsthalle Friericianum, Kassel, 2003; Blut & Honig: Zukunft ist am Balkans/ Blood & Honey: Future’s in the Balkans, curator: Harald Szeemann (ed.), Essl Museum Contemporary Art, Klosterneuburg, 2003; as well as the International Istanbul Biennial and the Centinje Biennal. 20 See: Anda Rottenberg (ed.), Czas osobisty: sztuka Estonii, Litwy i Łotwy, 1945-1996, Galeria Sztuki Współczesnej Zachęta, Warsaw, 1996; Helena Demakova (ed.), 2 Show. Young Art from Latvia and Lithuania, Contemporary Art. Center, Vilnius, 2003; Jari-Pekka Vanhala (ed.), Faster than History. Contemporary Perspectives on the Future of Art in the Baltic Countries, Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Helsinki, 2004; Inke Arns und Kurt Wettengl (eds.), Mit Allem Rechnen. Medienkunst aus Estland Lettland und Litauen/ Face the Unexpected. Media Art from Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, exhib. cat., Hartware MedienKunstVerein, Museum am Ostwall, Dortmund, Revolver Publishing, Berlin, 2006. 21 See also: Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art. Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War, Chicago University Press, Chicago, 1983. 22 Katrin Klingan and Ines Kappert (eds.), Leap into the City, DuMont, Cologne, 2006.

Beyond Diversity: Cultural Studies and Its Post-Communist Other

One can safely say that the cultural situation in the countries of post- Communist Eastern Europe is still a blind spot for contemporary cultural studies. Cultural studies has, that is, some fundamental diffi culties in describ- ing and theorizing the post-Communist condition. And, frankly, I do not believe that a simple adjustment of the theoretical framework and vocabu- lary of cultural studies to the realities of Eastern Europe—without reconsid- eration of some of the discipline’s fundamental presuppositions—would be suffi cient to enable its discourse to describe and discuss the post-Communist reality. I will now try to explain why such an adjustment seems to be so diffi cult. The currently dominant theoretical discourse in the fi eld of cultural studies has a tendency to see historical development as a road that brings the subject from the particular to the universal, from premodern closed commu- nities, orders, hierarchies, traditions, and cultural identities toward the open space of universality, free communication, and citizenship in a democratic modern state. Contemporary cultural studies shares this image with the vener- able tradition of the European Enlightenment—even if the former looks at this image in a different way and, accordingly, draws different conclusions from the analysis of this image. The central question that arises under these presuppositions is namely the following: How are we to deal with an indi- vidual person traveling along this road—here and now? The traditional answer of liberal political theory, which has its origins in French Enlighten- ment thought, is well known: the person on this road has to move forward as quickly as possible. And if we see that a certain person is not going fast enough—and maybe even takes a rest before moving ahead—then appropri- ate measures must be taken against this person, because such a person is holding up not only his or her own transition but also the transition of the whole of humankind to the state of universal freedom. And humankind cannot tolerate such slow movement because it wants to be free and demo- cratic as soon as possible. Beyond Diversity

This is the origin of the liberal mode of coercion and violence in the name of democracy and freedom. And it is very much understandable that today’s cultural studies wants to reject this kind of coercion and to defend the right of the individual subject to be slow, to be different, to bring his or her premodern cultural identity into the future as legitimate luggage that may not be confi scated. And, indeed, if the perfect, absolute democracy is not only unrealized, but also unrealizable, then the way that leads to it is an infi nite one—and it makes no sense to force the homogeneity and universality of such an infi nite future on the heterogeneous cultural identities here and now. Rather, it is better to appreciate diversity and difference, to be more interested in where the subject is coming from than in where he or she is going to. So we can say that the present strong interest in diversity and difference is dic- tated in the fi rst place by certain moral and political considerations—namely, by the defense of the so-called underdeveloped cultures against their margin- alization and suppression by the dominating modern states in the name of progress. The ideal of progress is not completely rejected by contemporary cultural thought. This thought, rather, strives to fi nd a compromise between the requirements of modern uniform democratic order and the rights of pre- modern cultural identities situated within this general order. But there is also one aspect in all this which I would like to stress. The discourse of diversity and difference presupposes a certain aesthetic choice—I mean here a purely aesthetic preference for the heterogeneous, for the mix, for the crossover. This aesthetic taste is, in fact, very much characteristic of the postmodern art of the late 1970s and ’80s—that is, during the time that the discipline of cultural studies emerged and developed to its present form. This aesthetic taste is ostensibly very open, very inclusive—and in this sense also genuinely democratic. But, as we know, postmodern taste is by no means as tolerant as it seems to be at fi rst glance. The postmodern aesthetic sensibil- ity in fact rejects everything universal, uniform, repetitive, geometrical, mini- malist, ascetic, monotonous, boring—everything gray, homogeneous, and reductionist. It dislikes Bauhaus, it dislikes the bureaucratic and the technical; the classical avant-garde is accepted now only on the condition that its uni- versalist claims are rejected and it becomes a part of a general heterogeneous picture. And, of course, the postmodern sensibility strongly dislikes—and must dislike—the gray, monotonous, uninspiring look of Communism. I believe Beyond Diversity that this is, in fact, why the post-Communist world today remains a blind spot. Western spectators trained in certain aesthetics and conditioned by a certain artistic sensibility just do not want to look at the post-Communist world because they do not like what they see. The only things that contemporary Western spectators like about the post-Communist—or still Communist— East are things like Chinese pagodas, or old Russian churches, or Eastern European cities that look like direct throwbacks to the nineteenth century—all things that are non-Communist or pre-Communist, that look diverse and dif- ferent in the generally accepted sense of these words and that fi t well within the framework of the contemporary Western taste for heterogeneity. On the contrary, Communist aesthetics seems to be not different, not diverse, not regional, not colorful enough—and, therefore, confronts the dominating pluralist, postmodern Western taste with its universalist, uniform Other. But if we now ask ourselves: What is the origin of this dominating postmodern taste for colorful diversity?—there is only one possible answer: the market. It is the taste formed by the contemporary market, and it is the taste for the market. In this respect, it must be recalled that the emergence of the taste for the diverse and the different was directly related to the emergence of globalized information, media, and entertainment markets in the 1970s and the expansion of these markets in the ’80s and ’90s. Every expanding market, as we know, produces diversifi cation and differentiation of the com- modities that are offered on this market. Therefore, I believe that the dis- course and the politics of cultural diversity and difference cannot be seen and interpreted correctly without being related to the market-driven practice of cultural diversifi cation and differentiation in the last decades of the twentieth century. This practice opened a third option for dealing with one’s own cul- tural identity—beyond suppressing it or fi nding a representation for it in the context of existing political and cultural institutions. This third option is to sell, to commodify, to commercialize this cultural identity on the interna- tional media and touristic markets. It is this complicity between the discourse of cultural diversity and the diversifi cation of cultural markets that makes a certain contemporary postmodern critical discourse so immediately plausible and, at the same time, so deeply ambiguous. Although extremely critical of the homogeneous space of the modern state and its institutions, it tends to be uncritical of contemporary heterogeneous market practices—at least, by not taking them seriously enough into consideration.

150 151 Beyond Diversity

Listening to postmodern critical discourse, one has the impression of being confronted with a choice between a certain universal order incorporated by the modern state, on the one hand, and fragmented, disconnected, diverse “social realities” on the other. But, in fact, such diverse realities simply do not exist—and the choice is a completely illusory one. The apparently frag- mented cultural realities are, in fact, implicitly connected by the globalized markets. There is no real choice between universality and diversity. Rather, there is a choice between two different types of universality: between the universal validity of a certain political idea and the universal accessibility obtained through the contemporary market. Both—the modern state and the contemporary market—are equally universal. But the universality of a politi- cal idea is an openly manifested, articulated, visualized universality that dem- onstrates itself immediately by the uniformity and repetitiveness of its external image. On the other hand, the universality of the market is a hidden, nonex- plicit, nonvisualized universality that is obscured by commodifi ed diversity and difference. So we can say that postmodern cultural diversity is merely a pseudonym for the universality of capitalist markets. The universal accessibility of hetero- geneous cultural products which is guaranteed by the globalization of con- temporary information markets has replaced the universal and homogeneous political projects of the European past—from the Enlightenment to Communism. In the past, to be universal was to invent an idea or an artistic project that could unite people of different backgrounds, that could transcend the diversity of their already existing cultural identities, that could be joined by everybody—if he or she would decide to join them. This notion of uni- versality was linked to the concept of inner change, of inner rupture, of rejecting the past and embracing the future, to the notion of metanoia—of transition from an old identity to a new one. Today, however, to be universal means to be able to aetheticize one’s identity as it is—without any attempt to change it. Accordingly, this already existing identity is treated as a kind of readymade in the universal context of diversity. Under this condition, becom- ing universal, abstract, uniform makes you aesthetically unattractive and commercially inoperative. As I have already said, for contemporary tastes, the universal looks too gray, boring, unspectacular, unentertaining, uncool to be aesthetically seductive. Beyond Diversity

And that is why the postmodern taste is fundamentally an antiradical taste. Radical political aesthetics situates itself always at the “degree zero” (degré zéro) of literary and visual rhetoric, as Roland Barthes defi ned it1—and that means also at the degree zero of diversity and difference. And this is also why the artistic avant-garde—Bauhaus, and so on—seem to be so outmoded today: These artistic movements embody an aesthetic sensibility for the politi- cal, not for the commercial market. There can be no doubt about it: every utopian, radical taste is a taste for the ascetic, uniform, monotonous, gray, and boring. From Plato to the utopias of the Renaissance to the modern, avant-garde utopias—all radical political and aesthetic projects presented themselves always at the degree zero of diversity. And that means: One needs to have a certain aesthetic preference for the uniform—as opposed to the diverse—to be ready to accept and to endorse radical political and artistic projects. This kind of taste must be, obviously, very unpopular, very unap- pealing to the masses. And that is one of the sources of the paradox that is well known to the historians of modern utopias and radical politics. On the one hand, these politics are truly democratic because they are truly universal, truly open to all—they are by no means elitist or exclusive. But, on the other hand, they appeal, as I said, to an aesthetic taste that is relatively rare. That is why radical democratic politics presents itself often enough as exclusive, as elitist. One must be committed to radical aesthetics to accept radical politics—and this sense of commitment produces relatively closed communi- ties united by an identical project, by an identical vision, by an identical his- torical goal. The way of radical art and politics does not take us from closed premodern communities to open societies and markets. Rather, it takes us from relatively open societies to closed communities based on common commitments. We know from the history of literature that all past utopias were situ- ated on remote islands or inaccessible mountains. And we know how isolated, how closed the avant-garde movements were—even if their artistic programs were genuinely open. Thus we have here a paradox of a universalist but closed community or movement—a paradox which is truly modern. And that means, in the case of radical political and artistic programs, we have to travel a different historical road than the one described by standard cultural studies: It is not a road from a premodern community to an open society of universal

152 153 Beyond Diversity communication. Rather, it is a road from open and diverse markets toward utopian communities based on a common commitment to a certain radical project. These artifi cial, utopian communities are not based on the historical past; they are not interested in preserving its traces, in continuing a tradition. On the contrary, these universalist communities are based on historical rupture, on the rejection of diversity and difference in the name of a common cause. On the political and economic level, the October Revolution effectu- ated precisely such a complete break with the past, such an absolute destruc- tion of every individual’s heritage. This break with every kind of heritage was introduced by the Soviet power on the practical level by abolishing private property and transferring every individual’s inheritance into the collective property. Finding a trace of one’s own heritage in this undifferentiated mass of collective property has become as impossible as tracing the individual incinerated objects in the collective mass of ashes. This complete break with the past constitutes the political as well as the artistic avant-garde. The notion of the avant-garde is often associated with the notion of progress. In fact, the term “avant-garde” suggests such an interpretation because of its military connotations—initially, it referred to the troops advancing at the head of an army. But to Russian revolutionary art, this notion began to be applied habitually since the 1960s. The Russian artists themselves never used the term avant-garde. Instead, they used names like Futurism, Suprematism, or Constructivism—meaning not moving progressively toward the future but being already situated in the future because the radical break with the past had already taken place, being at the end—or even beyond the end—of history, understood in Marxist terms as a history of class struggle, or as a history of different art forms, different art styles, different art movements. Malevich’s famous Black Square, in par- ticular, was understood as the degree zero both of art and of life—and because of that, as the point of identity between life and art, between artist and artwork, between spectator and art object, and so on. The end of history is understood here not in the same way as Francis Fukuyama understands it.2 The end of history is brought about not by the fi nal victory of the market over every possible universal political project but, on the contrary, by the ultimate victory of a political project, which means an ultimate rejection of the past, a fi nal rupture with the history of diversity. Beyond Diversity

It is the radical, the apocalyptic end of history—not the kind of end-of-history as is described by contemporary liberal theory. That is why the only real heritage of today’s post-Communist subject—its real place of origin—is the complete destruction of every kind of heritage, a radical, absolute break with the historical past and with any kind of distinct cultural identity. Even the name of the country “Russia” was erased and substituted by a neutral name lacking any cultural tradition: Soviet Union. The contemporary Russian, post-Soviet citizen thus comes from nowhere, from the degree zero at the end of every possible history. Now it becomes clear why it is so diffi cult for cultural studies to describe the way that post-Communist countries and populations evolved after the demise of Communism. On the one hand, this path of evolution seems to be the familiar, well-worn path from a closed society to an open society, from the community to a civil society. But the Communist community was in many ways much more radically modern in its rejection of the past than the countries of the West. And this community was closed not because of the stability of its traditions but because of the radicality of its projects. And that means: the post-Communist subject travels the same route as described by the dominating discourse of cultural studies—but he or she travels this route in the opposite direction, not from the past to the future, but from the future to the past; from the end of history, from posthistorical, postapocalyptic time, back to historical time. Post-Communist life is life lived backward, a move- ment against the fl ow of time. It is, of course, not a completely unique his- torical experience. We know of many modern apocalyptic, prophetic, religious communities which were subjected to the necessity of going back in historical time. The same can be said of some artistic avant-garde movements, and also of some politically motivated communities that arose in the 1960s. The chief difference is the magnitude of a country like Russia, which must now make its way back—from the future to the past. But it is an important difference. Many apocalyptic sects have committed collective suicide because they were incapable of going back in time. But such a huge country as Russia does not have the option of suicide—it has to proceed backward whatever collective feelings it has about it. It goes without saying that the opening of the Communist countries has meant for their populations, in the fi rst place, not democratization in political terms but the sudden necessity of surviving under new economic

154 155 Beyond Diversity pressures dictated by international markets. And this also means a return to the past, because all Communist countries of Eastern Europe, includ - ing Russia, had their capitalist past. But until very recently, the only acquain- tance most of the Russian population had with capitalism was mainly via pre-revolutionary, nineteenth-century Russian literature. The sum of what people knew about banks, loans, insurance policies, or privately owned com- panies was gleaned from reading Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and Chekhov at school—leaving impressions not unlike what people often feel when they read about ancient Egypt. Of course, everyone was aware that the West was still a capitalist system; yet they were equally aware that they themselves were not living in the West, but in the Soviet Union. Then suddenly all these banks, loans, and insurance policies began to sprout up from their literary graves and become reality; so for ordinary Russians it feels now as if the ancient Egyptian mummies had risen from their tombs and were now reinstituting all their old laws. Beyond that—and this is, probably, the worst part of the story—the contemporary Western cultural markets, as well as contemporary cultural studies, require that the Russians, Ukrainians, and so on rediscover, redefi ne, and manifest their alleged cultural identity. They are required to demonstrate, for example, their specifi c Russianness or Ukrainness, which, as I have tried to show, these post-Communist subjects do not have and cannot have because even if such cultural identities ever really existed they were completely erased by the universalist Soviet social experiment. The uniqueness of Communism lies in the fact that it is the fi rst modern civilization that has historically per- ished—with the exception, perhaps, of the short-lived Fascist regimes of the 1930s and ’40s. Until that time, all other civilizations that had perished were premodern; therefore they still had fi xed identities that could be documented by a few outstanding monuments like the Egyptian pyramids. But the Com- munist civilization used only those things that are modern and used by everyone—and, in fact, non-Russian in origin. The typical Soviet emblem was Soviet Marxism. But it makes no sense to present Marxism to the West as a sign of Russian cultural identity because Marxism has, obviously, Western and not Russian origins. The specifi c Soviet meaning and use of Marxism could function and be demonstrated only in the specifi c context of the Soviet state. Now that this specifi c context has dissolved, Marxism has returned to the West—and the traces of its Soviet use have simply disappeared. The post- Beyond Diversity

Communist subject must feel like a Warhol Coca-Cola bottle brought back from the museum into the supermarket. In the museum, this Coca-Cola bottle was an artwork and had an identity—but back in the supermarket the same Coca-Cola bottle looks just like every other Coca-Cola bottle. Unfor- tunately, this complete break with the historical past and the resultant erasure of cultural identity are as diffi cult to explain to the outside world as it is to describe the experience of war or prison to someone who has never been at war or in prison. And that is why, instead of trying to explain his or her lack of cultural identity, the post-Communist subject tries to invent one—acting like Zelig in the famous Woody Allen movie. This post-Communist quest for a cultural identity that seems to be so violent, authentic, and internally driven is, actually, a hysterical reaction to the requirements of international cultural markets. Eastern Europeans want now to be as nationalistic, as traditional, as culturally identifi able as all the others—but they still do not know how to do this. Therefore, their apparent nationalism is primarily a refl ection of and an accommodation to the quest for otherness that is characteristic of the cultural taste of the contemporary West. Ironically, this accommodation to the present international market requirements and dominating cultural taste is mostly interpreted by Western public opinion as a “rebirth” of nationalism, a “return of the repressed,” as additional proof corroborating the current belief in otherness and diversity. A good example of this mirror effect—the East refl ecting Western expecta- tions of “otherness” and confi rming them by artifi cially simulating its cultural identity—is the reshaping of Moscow’s architecture that took place almost immediately after the demise of the Soviet Union. In the relatively brief period since the Soviet Union was disbanded, Moscow—once the Soviet, now the Russian capital—has already undergone an astonishingly rapid and thorough architectural transformation. A lot has been built in this short time, and the newly constructed buildings and monu- ments have redefi ned the face of the city. The question surely is, in what manner? The answer most frequently advanced in texts by Western observers and in some quarters of today’s more earnest Russian architectural criticism is that Moscow’s architecture is kitschy, restorative, and above all eager to appeal to regressive Russian nationalist sentiments. In the same breath, these commentators claim to make out a certain discrepancy between Russia’s embrace of capitalism and the regressive, restorative aesthetics now evident

156 157 Beyond Diversity in the Russian capital. The reason most often provided for this alleged con- tradiction is that, in view of the current wave of modernization and the host of economic and social pressures brought in its wake, these restorative aesthet- ics are intended as a compensatory measure through their evocation of Russia’s past glory. Without question, the aesthetic profi le of contemporary Moscow is unambiguously restorative; although one encounters a few borrowings from contemporary Western architecture, these references are always situated in a historicist, eclectic context. In particular, the most representative buildings of Moscow’s new architecture are those that signal a programmatic rejection of the contemporary international idiom. Yet in Russia, as was already men- tioned, capitalism is already experienced as restorative, that is, as the return from the country’s socialist future back to its pre-revolutionary, capitalist past. This in turn means that, rather than contradicting it, restorative architecture is actually complicit with the spirit of Russian capitalism. According to Russian chronology, modernism is a feature of the Socialist future, which now belongs to the past, rather than being part of the capitalist past, which is now the future. In Russia, modernism is associated with Socialism—and not, as it is in the West, with progressive capitalism. This is not merely because modernist artists often voiced Socialist views, but also a result of modernism’s concurrence with a period when Socialism prevailed in Russia— which means, in fact, with the entire twentieth century. That is why the new Moscow architecture wants to signal the return of the country to pre-revolu- tionary times, for example, to the nineteenth century, by abandoning the modernism of the twentieth century. Furthermore, Russians associate modernism above all with Soviet architecture of the 1960s and ’70s, which by and large they utterly detested. During these decades, vast urban zones sprung up all over the Soviet Union, stocked with enormous, highly geometrical, standardized residential buildings of a gray and monotonous appearance and entirely bereft of artistic fl air. This was architecture at the bottom line. Modernism in this guise is now spurned since it is felt to combine monotony and standardization and embody Socialism’s characteristic disregard for personal taste. As it happens, similar arguments can be heard today in a like-minded rejection of the oppositional and modernistically inclined dissident culture of the 1960s and ’70s, whose proponents nowadays fi nd approval for the most part Beyond Diversity only in the West. In Russia, the former dissident culture is dismissed for still being “too Soviet”—in other words, for being too arrogant, intolerant, doc- trinaire, and modernist. Instead, the current cause célèbre in Russia is post- modernism. Thus, the postmodernist return of nineteenth-century eclecticism and historicism is currently celebrated in Russia as signaling the advent of true pluralism, openness, democracy, and the right to personal taste—as the immediate visual confi rmation that the Russian people feel liberated at last from the moralistic sermons of Communist ideology and the aesthetic terror of modernism. But, contrary to this rhetoric of diversity, inclusiveness, and liberation of personal taste, the new Moscow style is, in fact, wholly the product of centralized planning. Today’s most representative and stylistically infl uential buildings have come about on the initiative of the post-Soviet mayor of Moscow, Yuri Luzhkov, and his preferred sculptor, Zurab Tsereteli. As was also the case with Stalinist architecture, which likewise was the result of close cooperation between Stalin and a small coterie of carefully appointed archi- tects, this is an example of a most typically Russian phenomenon—a case, namely, of planned and centralized pluralism. The current Moscow style has distanced itself from the modernist monotony of the 1960s and ’70s to the same degree as Stalinist architecture was divesting itself of the rigorism of the Russian avant-garde. The Moscow style is a revival of a revival. But most importantly, this return to popular taste and aesthetic pluralism in both cases ultimately proved to be a state-sponsored mise-en-scène. The way this kind of controlled pluralism functions is well illustrated by a concrete example, the reconstruction of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in the center of Moscow, a project which was just recently completed. This rebuilt cathedral is already counted as the most important post-Soviet architectural monument in Moscow today. More than anyone else, Luzhkov has prioritized the reconstruction of the cathedral as the city’s most presti- gious project. A few historical details should shed light on the implications of this restoration project. The original Cathedral of Christ the Savior was built by the architect Konstantin Ton between 1838 and 1860 as a symbol of Russia’s victory over the Napoleonic army; it was demolished on Stalin’s orders in 1931. Imme- diately after its completion, the disproportionately huge cathedral was roundly criticized and ridiculed as monumental kitsch. This original view was shared

158 159 Beyond Diversity by all subsequent architectural opinion, which was probably a further reason for the later decision to blow it up—it simply was deemed to be of little artistic value. At the same time, this demolition amounted to an intensely symbolic political act, since in spite of—or rather precisely due to—its kitschy character, the cathedral was immensely popular with the people, as well as being the most vivid expression of the power held by the Russian Orthodox Church in pre-revolutionary Russia. Hence its demolition came as the climax of the anticlerical campaign being waged in the late 1920s and ’30s, which is why it has left such an indelible trace on popular memory. Given its symbolic status, Stalin designed the square that had been cleared by the cathedral’s demolition to be a site for the construction of the Palace of the Soviets, which was envisaged as the paramount monument to Soviet Communism. The Palace of the Soviets was never built—just as the Communist future that it was meant to commemorate was never realized. Yet the design of the palace, drafted by Boris Iofan in the mid-1930s and, only after numerous revisions, approved by Stalin, is still regarded—justly— as the most notable architectural project of the Stalin era. For although the Palace of the Soviets was never actually erected, the project itself served as a prototype for all Stalinist architecture thereafter. This is particularly conspicu- ous in the notorious Stalinist skyscrapers built in the postwar years that even now largely dominate Moscow’s skyline. Just as offi cial ideology at that time claimed that Communism was being prepared and prefi gured by Stalinist culture, Stalin’s skyscrapers were assembled around the nonexistent Palace of the Soviets in order to herald its advent. However, in the course of de- Stalinization during the 1960s, this locale was given over to build a gigantic open-air swimming pool, the Moskva, in lieu of the palace; and, like the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, it subsequently enjoyed enormous popularity. The pool was kept open even in the winter; and for several months each year vast clouds of steam could be seen from all around, lending the entire prospect the air of a subterranean hell. But this pool can also be viewed as a place where Moscow’s population could cleanse themselves of the sins of their Stalinist past. One way or another, it is precisely its memorable location that makes this swimming pool the most dramatic embodiment of the “modern- ist” cultural consciousness of the 1960s and ’70s: It represents a radical renunciation of any type of architectural style, it is like swimming free beneath a clear sky, the “degree zero” of architecture. Beyond Diversity

Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the swimming pool was emptied and replaced by an exact replica of the demolished Cathedral of Christ the Savior. Just how true to the original this copy in fact is has become a highly debated and contentious issue in Russia. But ultimately, all that counts is the underlying intention, which unquestionably is to construct the nearest possible replica of the demolished church—which functions symboli- cally as an exact copy of the historical past, of Russian cultural identity. Far from being a monument to the new Russian nationalism or a symptom of the resurrection of anti-Western sentiment, the rebuilding of the cathedral was designed to celebrate the defeat of the Soviet universalist, modernist, avant-garde past and the return to the folkloristic Russian identity, an identity that can be easily inscribed in the new capitalist international order. And at fi rst glance, such a symbolic return to national identity seems to be especially smooth in this case: during the entire Soviet period, the site of the cathedral remained, as I said, a void, a blank space—like a white sheet of paper that could be fi lled with every kind of writing. Accordingly, to reconstruct the old cathedral on its former site, there was no need to remove, to destroy any existing buildings. The Soviet time manifests itself here as an ecstatic inter- ruption of historical time, as a pure absence, as materialized nothingness, as a void, a blank space. So it seems that if this void disappears, nothing will be changed: the deletion will be deleted, and a copy will become identical with the original—without any additional historical losses. But in fact, this reconstruction demonstrates that the movement to the past—as, earlier, the movement to the future—only brings the country again and again to the same spot. And this spot, this point from which the pan- orama of Russian history can be seen in its entirety has a name: Stalinism. The culture at the time of Stalin was already an attempt to reappropriate the past after a complete revolutionary break with it—to fi nd in the historical garbage pit left behind by the Revolution certain things that could be useful for the construction of the new world after the end of history. The key prin- ciple of Stalinist dialectical materialism, which was developed and sealed in the mid-1930s, is embodied in the so-called law of the unity and the struggle of opposites. According to this principle, two contradictory statements can be simultaneously valid. Far from being mutually exclusive, “A” and “not A” must be engaged in a dynamic relationship: in its inner structure, a logical contradiction refl ects the real confl ict between antagonistic historical forces,

160 161 Beyond Diversity which is what constitutes the vitally dynamic core of life. Thus, only state- ments that harbor inner contradictions are deemed “vital” and hence true. That is why Stalin-era thinking automatically championed contradiction to the detriment of the consistent statement. Such great emphasis on contradictoriness was of course a legacy dialecti- cal materialism had inherited from Hegel’s dialectic. Yet in the Leninist- Stalinist model, as opposed to Hegel’s postulates, this contradiction could never be historically transcended and retrospectively examined. All contradic- tions were constantly at play, remained constantly at variance with one another, and constantly made up a unifi ed whole. Rigid insistence on a single chosen assertion was counted as a crime, as a perfi dious assault on this unity of opposites. The doctrine of the unity and the struggle of opposites consti- tutes the underlying motif and the inner mystery of Stalinist totalitarian- ism—for this variant of totalitarianism lays claim to unifying absolutely all conceivable contradictions. Stalinism rejects nothing: it takes everything into its embrace and assigns to everything the position it deserves. The only issue that the Stalinist mindset fi nds utterly intolerable is an intransigent adherence to the logical consistency of one’s own argument to the exclusion of any contrary position. In such an attitude, Stalinist ideology sees a refusal of responsibility toward life and the collective, an attitude that could only be dictated by malicious intentions. The basic strategy of this ideology can be said to operate in the following manner: If Stalinism has already managed to unite all contradictions under the sheltering roof of its own thinking, what could be the point of partisanly advocating just one of these various contrary positions? There can ultimately be no rational explanation for such behavior, since the position in question is already well looked after within the totality of Stalinist ideology. The sole reason for such a stubborn act of defi ance must consequently lie in an irrational hatred of the Soviet Union and a personal resentment of Stalin. Since it is impossible to reason with someone so full of hatred, regrettably the only remedy available is reeducation or elimination. This brief detour into the doctrine of Stalinist dialectical materialism allows us to formulate the criterion that intrinsically determined all artistic creativity during the Stalin era: Namely, each work of art endeavored to incorporate a maximum of inner aesthetic contradictions. This same criterion also informed the strategies of art criticism in that period, which always Beyond Diversity reacted allergically whenever a work of art was found to be expressing a clearly defi ned, consistently articulated, and unambiguously identifi able aesthetic position—the actual nature of this position was considered secondary. Con- trary to the explicit and aggressive aesthetics of the artistic avant-garde, the aesthetic of the Stalin era never defi ned itself in positive terms. Neither Stalin- ist ideology nor Stalinist art politics is in any sense “dogmatic.” Rather, Stalinist state power acts as an invisible hand behind the heterogeneity, diver- sity, and plurality of individual artistic projects—censoring, editing, and combining these projects according to its own vision of the ideologically appropriate mix. This means that the symbolic void on which the new-old cathedral was built is not such a blank space after all. It is an invisible, internal space of power hidden behind the diversity of artistic forms. That is why, in the present context, it became so easy to coordinate—if not to identify—this invisible hand of Stalinist state power with the invisible hand of the market. Both operate in the same space behind the diverse, heterogeneous, pluralistic surface. Far from signifying a rebirth of Russian cultural identity, the cathe- dral’s copy in the center of Moscow symbolizes a revival of Stalinist cultural practices under the new market conditions. This example of the revival of Soviet Stalinist aesthetics as an effect of postmodern taste, which I have tried to elaborate at some length, illustrates a certain point on the relationship between art and politics. Art is, of course, political. All attempts to defi ne art as autonomous and to situate it above or beyond the political fi eld are utterly naive. But having said that, we should not forget that art cannot be reduced to a specifi c fi eld among many other fi elds that function as arenas for political decisions. It is not enough to say that art is dependent on politics; it is more important to thematicize the dependence of political discourses, strategies, and decisions on aesthetic atti- tudes, tastes, preferences, and predispositions. As I have tried to show, radical politics cannot be dissociated from a certain aesthetic taste—the taste for the universal, for the degree zero of diversity. On the other hand, liberal, market- oriented politics is correlated with the preference for diversity, difference, openness, and heterogeneity. Today, the postmodern taste still prevails. Radical political projects have almost no chance today of being accepted by the public because they do not correlate with the dominant aesthetic sensibil- ity. But the times are changing. And it is very possible that in the near future a new sensibility for radical art and politics will emerge again.

162 163 Privatizations, or Artifi cial Paradises of Post-Communism

The term that without a doubt best characterizes the processes that have been taking place since the abdication of the Communist regime in Russia, and in Eastern Europe generally, is privatization. The complete abolition of private ownership of the means of production was seen by the theoreticians and practitioners of Russian Bolshevism as the crucial prerequisite to building fi rst a Socialist and later a Communist society. Total nationalization of all private property was the only thing that could achieve the total social plasticity that the Communist Party needed to obtain a completely new, unprecedented power to form society. Above all, however, this meant that art was given primacy over nature—over human nature and over nature generally. Only when the “natural rights” of humanity, including the right to private prop- erty, were abolished, and the “natural” connections to origin, heritage, and one’s “own” cultural tradition severed, could people invent themselves in a completely free and new way. Only someone who no longer has property is free and available for every social experiment. The abolition of private prop- erty thus represents the transition from the natural to the artifi cial, from the realm of necessity to the realm of (political and artistic) freedom, from the traditional state to the Gesamtkunstwerk. The great utopians of history, such as Plato, More, and Campanella, had viewed the abolition of private property and associated private interests as a necessary prerequisite for the uncon- strained pursuit of a collective political project. The reintroduction of private property thus represents an equally crucial prerequisite for putting an end to the Communist experiment. The disap- pearance of a Communist-run state is thus not merely a political event. We know from history that governments, political systems, and power relations have often changed without having substantial effects on private ownership rights. In such cases, social and economic life continued to be structured according to civil law even as political life was being radically transformed. With the fall of the Soviet Union, by contrast, there was no longer a valid social contract. Enormous territories became abandoned wildernesses as far Privatizations as rights were concerned—as in the Wild West era in the United States— and had to be restructured. That is to say, they had to be parceled, distributed, and opened up to privatization, following rules that neither existed nor could exist. The process of de-Communization of the formerly Communist Eastern European countries may thus be seen as a drama of privatization that naturally played out beyond all the usual conventions of civilization. It is well known that this drama kindled many passions and produced many victims. Human nature, which had previously been suppressed, manifested itself as raw violence in the struggle over the private acquisition of collective assets. This struggle should not, however, be understood as simply a transition that leads (back) from a society without private property to a society with private property. Ultimately, privatization proves to be just as much an artifi cial political construct as nationalization had been. The same state that had once nationalized in order to build up Communism is now privatiz- ing in order to build up capitalism. In both cases private property is subor- dinated to the raison d’état to the same degree—and in this way it manifests itself as an artifact, as a product of state planning. Privatization as a (re)introduction of private property does not, therefore, lead back to nature— to natural law. The post-Communist state is, like its Communist predecessor, a kind of artistic installation. Hence the post-Communist situation is one that reveals the artifi ciality of capitalism by presenting the emergence of capitalism as a purely political project of social restructuring (in Russian: perestroika) and not as the result of a “natural” process of economic devel- opment. The establishment of capitalism in Eastern Europe, including Russia, was indeed neither a consequence of economic necessity nor one of gradual and “organic” historical transition. Rather, a political decision was made to switch from building up Communism to building up capitalism, and to that end (in complete harmony with classical Marxism) to produce artifi cially a class of private property owners who would become the principal protagonists of this process. Thus there was no return to the market as a “state of nature” but rather a revelation of the highly artifi cial character of the market itself. For that reason, too, privatization is not a transition but a permanent state, since it is precisely through the process of privatization that the private discovers its fatal dependence on the state: private spaces are necessarily Privatizations formed from the remnants of the state monster. It is a violent dismemberment and private appropriation of the dead body of the Socialist state, both of which recall sacred feasts of the past in which members of a tribe would consume a totem animal together. On the one hand, such a feast represents a privatization of the totem animal, since everyone received a small, private piece of it; on the other, however, the justifi cation for the feast was precisely a creation of the supraindividual identity of the tribe. This common identity that makes it possible to experience privatization as a collective project is manifested particularly clearly in the art that is being produced in post-Communist countries today. First of all, every artist in any area once under Communism still fi nds him- or herself under the shadow of the state art that has just gone under. It is not easy for an artist today to compete with Stalin, Ceausescu, or Tito—just as it is probably diffi cult for Egyptian artists, now as much as ever, to compete with the pyramids. More- over, collective property under the conditions of “real Socialism” went along with a large reservoir of collective experiences. This is because the numerous political measures undertaken by the Socialist state to shape the population into a new Communist humanity affected this population as a whole. The result was a collective mental territory whose sovereign was the state. Under the rule of the Communist Party every private psyche was subordinated to and nationalized by the offi cial ideology. Just as the Socialist state at its demise made an immense economic area available to private appropriation, so did the simultaneous abolition of offi cial Soviet ideology leave as its legacy the enormous empire of collective emotions that was made available for private appropriation for the purposes of producing an individualist, capitalist soul. For artists today this represents a great opportunity, for when they enter this territory of collective experiences, they are immediately understood by their public. But it also conceals a great risk, since the artistic privatization proves to be as incomplete and as dependent on commonality now as much as ever. Be that as it may, however, today’s post-Communist art is produced largely by means of the privatization of the mental and symbolic territory that has been left behind by the Soviet ideology. Admittedly, it is not unlike the Western art of postmodernism in this respect; for appropriation or, if you will, privatization, continues to function as the leading artistic method in the context of international contemporary art. Most artists today appropriate

166 167 Privatizations various historical styles, religious or ideological symbols, mass-produced com- modities, widespread advertising, but also the works of certain famous artists. The art of appropriation sees itself as art after the end of history: It is no longer about the individual production of the new but about the struggles of distribution, about the debate over property rights, about the individual’s opportunity to accumulate private symbolic capital. All of the images, objects, symbols, and styles appropriated by Western art today originally circulated as commodities on a market that has always been dominated by private inter- ests. Hence in this context appropriative art seems aggressive and subver- sive—a kind of symbolic piracy that moves along the border between the permitted and the prohibited and explores the redistribution of capital—at least of symbolic capital, if not real capital. Post-Communist art, by contrast, appropriates from the enormous store of images, symbols, and texts that no longer belong to anyone, and that no longer circulate but merely lie quietly on the garbage heap of history as a shared legacy from the days of Communism. Post-Communist art has passed through its own end of history: not the free-market and capitalist end of history but the Socialist and Stalinist end of history. The true impudence of real Socialism in its Stalinist form, after all, was its assertion that the Soviet Union marked the historical end of the class struggle, of the revolution, and even of all forms of social criticism—that the salvation from the hell of exploitation and war had already occurred. The real circumstances in the Soviet Union were proclaimed to be identical with the ideal circumstances after the fi nal victory of good over evil. The real location in which the Socialist camp had established itself was decreed the site of utopia realized. It requires— and even then it required—no great effort or insight to demonstrate that this was a counterfactual assertion, that the offi cial idyll was manipulated by the state, that the struggle continued, whether it was a struggle for one’s own survival, a struggle against repression and manipulation, or the struggle of permanent revolution. And nevertheless, it would be just as impossible to banish the famous assertion “It is fulfi lled” from the world simply by pointing to world’s actual injustices and inadequacies. One speaks of the end of history, that is, of the identity between anti-utopia and utopia, of hell and paradise, of damnation and salvation, when one chooses the present over the future because one believes that the future will no longer bring anything new beyond what one Privatizations has already seen in the past. Above all, one believes it when one witnesses an image or an event that one assumes is of such incomparable radicalness that it can at most be repeated but never surpassed. This may be an image of Christ on the cross, of Buddha beneath the tree, or, in Hegel’s case, Napoleon on a horse. However, it could also be the experience of the Stalinist state—of the state that created the most radical form of expropriation, of terror, of total equality, because it was directed against everyone equally. This was precisely the argument of Alexandre Kojève’s famous Parisian lectures in the 1930s on Hegel’s philosophy of history, as he explicitly declared Stalinism to be the end of history. In the postwar period Kojève’s successors began to speak again of the end of history, or post-histoire and postmodernism. This time, however, it was no longer Stalinism but the victory of free-market capitalism in the Second World War and later in the cold war that would usher in the fi nal stage of history. And once again the attempt was made to refute the discourse about the end of history by pointing to the continuing progress of history in actuality. But the choice of the present over the future cannot be refuted by factual arguments, since that choice takes both the factual and all arguments that refer to the factual to be merely the eternal recurrence of the same—and hence of that which has been already overcome historically. There is nothing easier than to say that the struggle goes on, since this is obviously the truth of healthy human reason. It is more diffi cult to recognize that those involved in the struggle are in fact not struggling at all but have simply ossifi ed in battle position. Thus post-Communist art is an art that passed from one state after the end of history into the other state after the end of history: from real Socialism into postmodern capitalism; or, from the idyll of universal expropriation fol- lowing the end of the class struggle into the ultimate resignation with respect to the depressing infi nity in which the same struggles for distribution, appro- priation, and privatization are permanently repeated. Western postmodern art, which refl ects on this infi nity and at the same time savors it, sometimes wants to appear combative, sometimes cynical, but in any case it wants to be critical. Post-Communist art, by contrast, proves to be deeply anchored in the Communist idyll—it privatizes and expands this idyll rather than renounc- ing it. That is why post-Communist art frequently seems too harmless, that is, not critical or radical enough. And indeed it pursues the utopian logic of inclusion, not the realist logic of exclusion, struggle, and criticism. It

168 169 Privatizations amounts to an extension of the logic of Communist ideology, which sought to be universalist and strove toward dialectical unity of all oppositions but ultimately remained stuck in the confrontations of the cold war because it resisted all symbols of Western capitalism. The independent, unoffi cial art of late Socialism wanted to think through the end of history more rigorously and to expand the utopia of the peaceful coexistence of all nations, cultures, and ideologies both to the capitalist West and to the pre-Communist history of the past. Russians artists from the 1960s and 1970s, such as Vitali Komar and Alexander Melamid, and later the Slovenian artists’ group Irwin or the Czech artist Milan Kunc, pursued this strategy of rigorous inclusion. They created spaces of an artistic idyll in which symbols, images, and texts perceived as irreconcilable in the political reality of the cold war could live in peaceful coexistence. Also as early as the 1960s and 1970s other artists, such as Ilya Kabakov or Erik Bulatov, mixed gloomy images of daily life in the Soviet Union with the cheerful images of offi cial propaganda. The artistic strategies of ideological reconciliation beyond the trenches of the cold war announced at that time an extended and radicalized utopia that was intended to include their enemies as well. This politics of inclusion was pursued by many Russian and Eastern European artists even after the break up of the Communist regime. One might say that it is the extension of the paradise of real Socialism in which everything is accepted that had previously been excluded, and hence it is a utopian radicalization of the Communist demand for the total inclusion of one and all, including those who are generally considered dictators, tyrants, and terrorists but also capitalists, militarists, and the profi teers of globaliza- tion. This kind of radicalized utopian inclusivity was often misunderstood as irony, but it is rather a posthistorical idyll that sought analogies instead of differences. Even post-Communist poverty is depicted as utopian by today’s Russian artists, because poverty unites whereas wealth divides. Boris Mikhailov in particular depicts everyday life in Russia and the Ukraine in a way that is both unsparing and loving. The same idyllic note is perceived clearly in the videos of Olga Chernyshova, Dmitri Gutov, and Lyudmila Gorlova; for these artists, utopia lives on in the daily routine of post-Communism, even if offi - cially it has been replaced by capitalist competition. The gesture of collective Privatizations political protest, by contrast, is presented as an artistic theatricalization that no longer has a place in the indifferent, utterly privatized daily life of post- Communism. For example, in a performance by the group Radek, a crowd of people crossing the street at an intersection in Moscow’s lively downtown is interpreted as a political demonstration by placing the artists, like the revo- lutionary leaders of the past, in front of this passive crowd with their posters. Once the street has been crossed, however, everyone goes his own way. And Anatoly Ozmolovsky designed his political action in Moscow as a direct citation from the events of 1968 in Paris. The political imagination presents itself here as the storeroom of historical (pre)images that are available for appropriation. This characterization does not, of course, apply to all the art made in the countries of the former Soviet Union. The reaction to the universalist, internationalist, Communist utopia does not always, or even primarily, consist in the attempt to think through this utopia more radically than was done under the conditions of real Socialism. Rather, people frequently reacted to this utopia with a demand for national isolationism, for the creation of a fi xed national and cultural identity. This reaction could also be clearly noted already in the late Socialist phase, but it was intensifi ed sharply after the new national states were created on the territory of the former Soviet Union, former Yugoslavia, and the former Eastern Bloc—and the search for national cultural identities became the main activity of those states. Admittedly, these national cultural identities were themselves cobbled together from appropri- ated remnants of the Communist empire, but as a rule this fact is not openly acknowledged. Rather, the Communist period is interpreted as a traumatic interruption of an organic historical growth of the national identity in question. Communism is thus externalized, deinternationalized, and portrayed as the sum of the traumas to which a foreign power subjected one’s own identity, which now requires therapy so that said identity can become intact again. For the non-Russian peoples of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, the time of the dominance of the Communist parties is consequently presented as a time of Russian military occupation, under which the peoples in question merely suffered passively. For the theoreticians of Russian nationalism, in turn, Communism was initially the work of foreigners ( Jews, Germans,

170 171 Privatizations

Latvians, etc.), but it had already been largely overcome during Stalinism and replaced by a glorious Russian empire. Thus the nationalists of all these countries are in complete agreement in their historical diagnosis, and they are prepared for further struggle, even though they repeatedly fi nd themselves on different sides of this struggle. The only thing that falls out of this fortuitous consensus is post-Communist art, or better, postdissident art, which clings to peaceful universalism as an idyllic utopia beyond any struggle. Is There a New Basis for a "Dialogue" between East and West?

Text: Zoran Erić

"Interpol scandal"

In the publication that launched the 2000+ Arteast Collection of Moderna galerija, Ljubljana, Igor Zabel published a text under the title Dialogue, questioning the (im)possibility of the dialogue between (former) East and West. He analyzed the case of the scandal at the exhibition ‘Interpol’ in Stockholm, where Russian artist Alexander Brener deliberately destroyed a work of his "fellow artist" Wenda Gu from the USA. The reaction to this act of destruction was the "Open Letter to the Art Word” signed by a group of artists and other participants of the show whose initial idea was to establish a global network between Stockholm and Moscow. All the artists that signed this letter came from Western countries. The letter was aimed at the political pretext for this act of destruction by Brener which was described as "a new form of totalitarian ideology," "hooliganism and skinhead ideology," and as a "direct attack against art, democracy and the freedom of expression."1# While trying to give some other examples of art actions involving destruction (Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning, or Rainer’s intervention over the work of Helga Pape), Igor Zabel has rightly pointed out that the quintessence of the "Open Letter" was encapsulated in the following two sentences: "This attitude denies every possibility of a dialogue between (former) East and West. It is a speculative and populist attitude that cannot be accepted as the basis of a dialogue."2# Brener and Oleg Kulik (the latter assuming the role of a dog in a performance at the same show) were seen as the epitome of the Eastern European artist and his attitude.

Zabel’s conclusion was that the West-East division still existed, that it was not erased with the fall of the communist regimes. The East remained the East, although now, in a more politically correct manner, it was called the "former" East. While interpreting Brener’s act as embedded in the tradition of radical art practices, Zabel also pointed out that the Interpol scandal demonstrated that the division was not restricted to the realm of art. On the contrary, it touched all levels of society, and it is this insight which provides the starting point for my analysis in this text.3#

If we are all agreed that the East has changed after 1989, what, then, has happened to the West? The West, after all, has remained the same. But has it really? Is the West still seen in the same monolithic political economical and

1 social category as it was in the period of the Cold War? What kinds of change have been brought about by the rise of supra-national constellations like the EU and its enlargement? Consequently, what are the new divisions in a "post- ideological" Europe as was the desired projection of the project Interpol? What new tensions and frictions between East and West have come to the fore now that there is no longer a bipolar world order and no more communist regimes? And what are the reasons for possible new conDicts?

My focus will be to analyze the actual state of capitalism in order to End out what has changed in the East-West relations. If we would agree that a new, “mutated” form of disorganized, disjunctive, predatory (or whatever you might want to call it) capitalism has prevailed globally as a driving force and that all societies both in the East and West could be reDected through the prism of how the global capital Dow and economy are affecting them, we could take as a basic symptom of new possible divisions the role of labour (and leisure) and the different ways it is being regulated in different countries and particularly at the level of European Union. For this reason I would like to address at Erst the tendencies in today’s global capitalism. I will try to show how they give rise to new polarizations and what the new points are for a dialogue between the East and West.

Shift in the Global Economy

The change in global social and economic processes is best exempliEed by the rise of the service economy that has affected many aspects of social life. The sharp division and dichotomy of service and product(ion) has been replaced by a more complex interrelation in which getting service is of utmost importance in relation to the placement of any product. The global capitalism of today is not just marked by an expansion of the service sector, but even more so, by relations of service. The relation of production and consumption has been changed in such a way that the consumer is now actively participating in the composition of the product. Maurizio Lazzarato has argued that these processes reDect the shift from a Taylorist organization of services to a situation where the product "service" becomes a social construction and a social process of "conception" and "innovation."4# This shift also had repercussions in human resources management where the "front ofEce", which is about the relationship with the clients, has been rapidly growing in importance. The result is that the predominantly immaterial product the service sector is dealing with is getting distanced from the model of an industrial organization of the relationship between production and consumption.

2 We could argue further that the main aspect of post-Fordist economy is immaterial labour, theorized by authors such as Maurizio Lazzarato, Paulo Virno, Michael Hardt, and Antonio Negri. The Italian word operaismo has been used to describe the shift from Fordist production to the new face of today’s capitalism (lean production or Toyotism), where the product must be sold prior to its manufacturing. The term "immaterial labour" could be thus used to summarize many of the changes taking place in the Eeld of labour. It is seen as the one that produces immaterial goods like services, cultural products, or relationships. What makes this kind of labour so important is that it dominates all other forms of labour in the capitalism of today. Such dominance has a series of important effects.

According to Maurizio Lazzarato, the term immaterial labour refers to two different aspects of labour. The Erst is related to the ‘informational content’ of the commodity and refers explicitly to the labour process of the workers in big companies, where the most desired skills of the workers are the ones of cybernetics and computer control. The second concerns the activity that produces the "cultural content" of the commodity, where immaterial labour is involving a series of activities that are commonly not perceived as "work." These activities are fundamental in the setting up of cultural and artistic standards, fashions, tastes, and consumer norms, thus generating a public opinion.5#

If we analyse this second aspect of labour, we will notice that knowledge or information has today become the most precious asset in economy and a source of enormous wealth. The notion of "immaterial labour" challenges the old economic division between production and reproduction. If we take for example the context of communication and production of affects, this binary opposition of production and reproduction totally collapses. Hardt has therefore rightly noted that what is at stake is actually the production of social relationships or, even more broadly, the production of social life itself. The bottom-line is that these "products" are not objects that are created forever, but exactly the opposite, they are being produced and reproduced in a continuous Dow of activity.6#

Outsourcing as the new capitalist doctrine

One of the key economic strategies of contemporary capitalism is "outsourcing"—handing the dirty work and processes of material production

3 over to other companies by way of subcontracts. In this way, a Western company can evade legal regulations pertaining to environmental protection and high-level security measures by shifting the work in question to Erms in non-EU countries.

The services that are mostly outsourced encompass information technology, human resources, facilities, real estate management, accounting, customer support and call center functions like telemarketing, customer service, market research, manufacturing, designing, web development, content writing, ghostwriting, and engineering.

One of the negative aspects of outsourcing is that it damages the local labour market. Outsourcing is the transfer of the delivery of services, which affects both jobs and individuals. It is difEcult to dispute that outsourcing has a detrimental effect on individuals who face job disruption and employment insecurity; however, its supporters believe that outsourcing should bring down prices, providing greater economic beneEt to all. Unlike the United States where labour is not so well protected by the law and outsourcing is allowed in many Eelds of economy and business, in the EU regulations there is some sort of legal protection called the Transfer of Undertakings (Protection of Employment).

Slavoj Žižek pointed out that a similar logic could be discerned when it comes to ‘outsourcing’ the torture of prisoners to camps or "black spots." American government agencies engaged in "the war on terror" increasingly resort to this practice referred to as ‘extraordinary rendition’: a euphemism used for the policy of arresting suspects at home or abroad and sending them to "allied regimes" for interrogation.7#

Apart from the widely known Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib prison camps, over the last several years there has been a debate in the media concerning the question of whether the CIA maintains secret prison camps outside the reach of the law, situated in bases in two East European countries. Such places, referred to as "black sites" in conEdential reports by the American administration, exist in Romania and Poland, according to numerous media reports, which have of course been denied by the local ofEcials. Which goes to show that while outsourcing as a model can be used to refer to the distribution of labour globally (even without the Dow of workers from East to West), it can also mean a Dow of prisoners in the other direction from West to East.

4 Western Consultants go East, Eastern Workers go West

If we want to track down the labour Dow from the Eastern to the Western half of the EU and vice versa, there are a few examples that show this general tendency. One is the move of Western PR, consulting, marketing etc. agencies (such as Saatchi and Saatchi, Deloitte etc.) to Eastern countries to foster the processes of privatization and introduction of neo-liberal capitalism. The global shift towards immaterial labour has started spreading East from the more advanced capitalist countries. On the other hand, the move of cheap labour forces, workers, and craftsmen has increased in the opposite direction, from East to West, with the “Polish plumber” working in France or the UK as the prototypical representative of this trend.

The term "Polish plumber" was coined by Philippe de Villiers to symbolize cheap labour forces coming from Central and Eastern Europe following the regulations of the Directive on services in the internal market during the referendum about the EU Constitution in France in 2005.8# This phrase became infamous when the creator of the Directive, Frits Bolkestein, expressed a wish to hire a Polish plumber as it was difEcult to End a good handyman for his cottage in the north of France. The statement caused a strong reaction among the residents of the village where his estate was located and even the mayor sent him the list of available plumbers from the phonebook. A more serious aspect of the same "problem" was discussed in the French parliament during a debate regarding the EU constitution, where the “Polish plumber” was seen as a major threat to the indigenous work force: by invading France, it was argued, they would cause a decrease in wages on the labour market.9#

However, the plumbers’ union in France provided Egures showing that the country actually needed 6000 more plumbers and Poland could offer more than just the 150 of them already working in France. This was the case not just with plumbers, but also with electricians, masons, carpenters, etc. and Poland was a country whose major export could be seen exactly in this kind of labour. When Poland and nine other countries joined the European Union in 2004, it was agreed by the treaty that older EU members could make restrictions to their labour market for the following seven years. The only countries that opened their borders to workers from the newly accepted members right away were Britain, Ireland, and Sweden.10#

The "dialogue" on this matter changed tone when this rather negative rhetoric against Poland was deDated in a media campaign launched by Polish tourist agencies which featured posters of a young fashion model, Piotr Adamski, who

5 invites French tourists to come to Poland with the phrase "I am staying in Poland, do come over in numbers," thus reassuring them that he doesn’t have any intention to steal their jobs.11#

New gladiators

Huge proEts and publicity have for a long time now been associated with sports, particularly the football industry, where players can become global celebrities and icons. However, everything changed with the Bosman Case, when the European Court of Justice in 1995 decided in favour of Belgium player Jean-Marc Bosman against his club RFC Liege, the Belgium Football Association, and the European Football Association (UEFA). Two issues were crucial in The Bosman Case. The Erst one was the rule that football players could be transferred to another club only through the agreement of both clubs. The players' "transfer fee" would be settled with the clubs only, regardless of the fact that the contract the player had was still ongoing or had ended. The second aspect was what was called the "quota systems" both in National leagues and UEFA competitions where only a limited number of foreign players were allowed to play in a match. The famous case arose when Bosman’s contract with Belgium club RFC Liege had run out and he wanted to move to the club Dunkerque in France. His club, however, refused to let him go without payment of a transfer fee by his new club Dunkerque, a demand that Dunkerque eventually refused to comply with. Bosman argued that as a citizen of the European Union, he had the right to "freedom of movement" within the EU in order to exercise his right to work and End a job. The transfer system was an obstacle to this right, so Bosman argued that the system should be changed. The up-shot was that the court declared both the transfer fee for out-of-contract players and the quota systems to be illegal. However, it was not speciEed and left to be determined what should be done about other "foreign" players, i.e. what limits should be imposed on the ones coming from non-EU countries.12#

Ever since the implementation of the EU law that protects the free Dow of labour and equal opportunities, major international clubs have been competing in acquisitions and vertiginiously expensive contracts with football stars that can go up to a 100 million euros. One result of this regulation was that the capital was increasingly concentrated in the handful of major EU clubs able to purchase big international stars while the role of smaller clubs was diminishing. It also created a situation where some clubs like Arsenal had as many as 11 foreign players on the pitch, which caused a strong public reaction in England. The answer that followed from the UEFA ofEcials was to ask for legal exception in

6 this domain of sports and limit the number of "foreign players" to less than half in the team in favour of local players. FIFA and its president Sepp Blatter have opted for the "six-plus-Eve" rule where the clubs will be limited to Eve foreign players. Even though this rule is globally considered a fair option, the EU ofEcials protested by claiming that "a nationality-based player quota system would be unlawful within the European Union," as it contravenes European law.13#

UEFA has come up with another proposal, which is based on the idea of "home- grown-players," meaning team members who, regardless of age or nationality, have been trained by their club or by another club in the national association for at least three years between the ages of 15 and 21. Europe's commissioner for equal opportunities, Vladimir Spidla, has approved the UEFA arrangement because it contains no conditions based on the players’ nationality. Spidla said: "Compared with the intentions announced by FIFA to impose the so-called “six- plus-Eve” rule, which is directly discriminatory and therefore incompatible with the EU law, the 'home-grown-players' rule proposed by UEFA seems to me to be proportionate and to comply with the principle of free movement of workers."14#

Here, this commitment to the "free movement of workers" was taken more seriously than in cases of different kinds of labour that don’t bring big proEts and publicity to rich investors, like the football stars do, as we have seen in the story of "Polish plumbers."

"Insieme—Unite, Unite, Europe"15#

The Eurovision Song Contest is one of the longest-running TV programs in the world, inaugurated already in 1956. The number of participating countries has grown over the years from 7 to over 40 and the main criterion for entering the show is that they are members of the European Broadcasting Union (EBU). From the mid-1990s and with the break-down of communist regimes and the dissolution of Yugoslavia and the USSR, most of the countries from the former East have joined the competition with great enthusiasm. The growing number of countries has made the rules of the contest more complex as now there has to be a qualiEcation process, or "semi-Enal," and then the Enal show. Only the four biggest Enancial contributors to the EBU are exempt from this pre-selection process and the so-called automatic qualiEers or "Big Four" include Germany, UK, Spain, and France. The popularity of the show also led to new voting rules, and after test trials in several countries with televoting in 1997 had proved this method to be popular, it replaced the old voting system of the internal jury of the respective countries. The most recent trend is audience voting via SMS.

7 This change in voting methods has also changed the angle for critical voices. The Contest has often been perceived as politically biased because the members of national juries were allocating points based on their nation's political liaisons with mostly neighbouring countries, rather than on the quality of the songs. One example was the frequent exchange of maximum points between Greece and Cyprus. This argument was used in support of televoting of the public, but now there is a new dilemma: countries with huge expatriate populations, notably Turkey, Greece, or the former Yugoslav republics Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia, are getting big support from their Gastarbeiters in Germany, Switzerland, or Austria. Thus we have a situation where the labour Dow from East (or South-East) to West affects the Contest and the "Big Four" countries don’t stand a chance of winning as long as the system of bloc voting is still in place. An even more drastic case is the problem of former Soviet republics sharing their votes among themselves. This situation has provoked new bases for the "dialogue" between East and West, and the debates have reached even the parliaments of many EU countries. MPs in Britain, for example, issued a request for a change of the voting system as it was "damaging the relations between peoples in Europe."16#

Due to this situation certain countries like Italy have stopped taking part in the Contest, while others like Britain, Ireland, and Germany are seriously considering doing the same after the "humiliating" results of their representatives at the two last Contests where Serbia and Russia respectively won. The famous BBC commentator of the Eurovision Song Contest, Terry Wogan, went as far as to threaten to resign from his job due to the "unfair" bloc voting patterns, even suggesting that Britain and other Western European countries should consider pulling out of the Contest.17#

It is interesting to observe how this camp and even kitschy show has triggered off such heated debates, and how a new (old) vocabulary is being created (or coming back) regarding the division between East and West. Terry Wogan doesn’t even shy away from claiming that the Eastern European countries have established a kind of Warsaw Pact in the music industry in order to overpower their Western rivals.18#

The presenter from British Radio 2 argues that "Western European participants have to decide whether they want to take part from here on in, because their prospects are poor… At least the voting used to be on the songs. Now it is really about national prejudice. As far as the Eastern bloc countries are concerned they are voting for each other."19# Succumbing to a Et of nostalgia

8 for a more glorious past, the British media invited former winners as well as singers who were successful at the Eurovision Song Contest to comment on this matter. Lee Sheridan from Brotherhood of Man, who won in 1976, said: "Some people have suggested an East contest and a West contest but this would go against the object of Eurovision which is to bring countries together."20# Ronnie Carroll, who came fourth in 1962 and 1963, went even further, saying: "It is absolutely potty. It looks like there’s some sort of mad dictatorship going on where the Iron Curtain countries work together."21#

Let’s not forget here the conclusion Igor Zabel arrived at regarding the (im)possibility of a dialogue between East and West as exempliEed by the case of the Interpol exhibition, whose purported aim was to "bring countries together." Zabel believed that a dialogue was only possible on a certain basis, which both parties in the dialogue accept: "If I want to discuss something with somebody, the meaning of the words we use has to be established and clear to both of us."22# So what has happened to the ideal of the common European values and to the "new" politically correct vocabulary that was meant to erase the tensions between the "former East" and the Western countries? Has anything changed in our understanding of the meaning of the words "East" and "West"? Where, then, do we have to look for a new basis for the dialogue between East and West?

Footnotes:

1 Igor Zabel, "Dialogue, questioning the (im)possibility of the dialogue between (former) East and West," in the catalogue of the exhibition 2000+ Arteast Collection, The Art of Eastern Europe, A Selection of Works for the International and National Collections of Moderna galerija Ljubljana, Folio Verlag, Vienna-Bozen 2001, p. 28–34. 2 Ibid. 3 Zabel has introduced Samuel Huntington's idea of a "clash of civilizations" as one possible theoretical reference for perceiving the conDict between East and West. 4 Maurizio Lazzarato, Immaterial Labour http://www.generation- online.org/c/fcimmateriallabour3.htm. 5 Ibid. 6 Michael Hardt, Common Property, http://www.k3000.ch/becreative/texts/text_4.html.

9 7 Slavoj Žižek, "Biopolitics: Between Abu Ghraib and Terri Schiavo," Arftorum XLIV, No. 4, December 2005, p. 270. 8 Elaine Sciolino, "Unlikely Hero in Europe's Spat: The Polish Plumber," in The New York Times, June 26, 2005 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid. 12 http://www.liv.ac.uk/footballindustry/bosman.html- 13 http://www.independent.co.uk/sport/football/news-and-comment/fa- backs-further-exploration-of-sixplusEve-rule-836966.html. 14 Ibid. 15 Title of the winning song at the Eurovision Song Contest in 1990 by Italian representative Toto Cutugno. 16 Tom Peterkin, "Eurovision Song Contest: Sir Terry Wogan may resign over bloc voting row," http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/2028839/Eurovision-Song- Contest-Sir-Terry-Wogan-may-resign-over-bloc-voting-row.html. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid. 22 Igor Zabel, Ibid.

10 The Ready-Made And The Question Of The Fabrication Of Objects And Subjects - Critical Essay Afterimage, Jan, 2001 by Suzana Milevska

Whether Mr. Mutt with his own hands made the fountain or not has no importance. He CHOSE it.

Marcel Duchamp [1]

I want to be a machine.

Andy Warhol [2]

The phenomenon of the ready-made and its usage as an art object (and possibly later as an installation) is proximal to the abandonment of the art craft. If painting signifies art, skill and craftsmanship, then, with the onset of industrialism, craftsmanship was rendered useless, and thereby, so was painting. Nevertheless, new technical achievements have continued to emerge from within the realm of painting.

Today, the international art scene is moving dramatically in a new direction. When it comes to participation in large international exhibitions, the growing tendency has been to rely on the use of new technologies and new and serious obstacles have been placed in front of artists coming from the East. The possible frustration of such artists is derived from the usage of objects that are completely industrially produced or even ordered to be produced. In the case of exhibiting ready-made objects, the painter has been replaced by a machine. This proves that the motivation for ready-made objects was closely related to production and fabrication, [3] although, Marcel Duchamp, for one, did not have in mind any obsession or glorification of the perfection and beauty of the ready-made "When I discovered the ready-mades I thought to discourage aesthetics." [4]

Differing visual and conceptual results are a consequence of the acceptance and presentation of the readymade object as part of artistic activity, specifically in the context of the Balkan region--a region in which industrial production, following World War II, has never been applied in a complete capitalist free market economy. [5] In fact, in all socialist countries, there existed a kind of "simulation of production" in which ideological emphasis was put on the fulfillment of a social policy of full employment and on the quantity of production, while the quality of the manufactured objects were of secondary importance. Of course, this was possible only under special circumstances wherein industrialization and the market functioned under state supervision and control--a system that survived until the period of transition following the break-up of the Yugoslav federation and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. From this point a series of complex political and economic transitions began that continue to evol ve today. According to Adorno's aesthetic theory, there is a relationship between the level of development in a given society and the art produced in that society. [6] If we accept this, then there must be a difference between the art produced by these societies and their production development. The nature of the situation today can only be explained by the ongoing process of globalization and the will to simulate that they are equal participants in it. During the transition from one mode of production to another, and from one model of ownership to another, a whole range of relationships have changed. The invisible patterns that rule western society (long suppressed in the East), have started emerging as "desiring machines," [7]--unconscious mechanisms latent in the individual but also in social and historical structures.

The usage of high technology for art purposes poses a question about development in the arts--an unsolvable problem that creates many paradoxes, not only in countries with underdeveloped technological capacities. Although this article aims to give an overview of some of the different applications of ready- made objects by artists living in unstable political and economic regions in times of transition, another aim is to examine the limits of the ready-made object as a medium. Artists using ready-made objects usually exhibit perfectly produced and iterated forms in order to give installations a look of unification and repetition, with no difference among the repeated objects--an effect possible only if the objects in question are industrially produced. As mentioned before, the problem here is that different visual effects and meanings are produced when the ready- made object is faulty in its original production or montage. Furthermore, the term "perfection," as used in its high-technological context, is problem atic when used in the context of art. Issues of technicality, materiality, tools and media have always been important, although not the only consideration in art-making; the discovery of certain rules has always been connected with certain technical means. Therefore, an artist today who avoids the latest high-tech wonders must still confront the question of means.

What, then, makes the ready-made different when it is made and represented as artwork in the region of the Balkans--a region where socialism has been intermixed with inefficient productive means? It never looks as perfect as the objects made in western countries since the tools and means of production are not perfect themselves (similarly, this argument can also be taken into account when it comes to the installations presented in the wider Eastern European context). How the management context, the free market economy or strong competition effects the perfection of products is not more important than ready- made objects being beautiful or imperfect. Should the form of the readymade object not be essential to its own existence as a way of revolting against the act of skillful artmaking?

The examination of the ready-made object in the context of Eastern European art, and the question of its difference in meaning between eastern and western art communities, are particularly called to mind by one very unique project, "Dossier '96" (1996) by the artist Igor Tosevski from Macedonia, one of the former Yugoslav republics. [8] The project refers to one of the most talked-about issues in the formerly socialist countries of Eastern Europe. It specifically questions the necessity of the perfect ready-made object in the context of the widespread bankruptcy of non-competitive factories and their subsequent privatization. "Dossier '96" derived from a one-year research project by the artist, along with four exhibitions, that placed the artist in a new role as he discovered new paradoxes. Tosevski re-examined the problem of the extensive "production" of faulty objects by bankrupt factories as well as the process of privatization in various stages. First, he visited the factories that were declared insolvent, and with permission (not always easily obtained) he took photos of the buildings and the piles of rejected objects. He observed tons of decaying material on the premises of factories awaiting privatization. Some managers declined to assist in the export and use of this material because they hoped instead that they would be able to purchase the firms more cheaply if these firms appeared to be less productive. [9]

It is worth noting the "desiring machines" concept, in which there is no distinction between the product and the production--the desiring production has become the continuum. Machines are connected to other machines in an endless chain, and in such a context, "Dossier '96" could be treated in a way similar to that in which desiring machines function--with ruptures, cracks and fissures. Distances and fragmentations, in this schema, function best when they produce nothing at all except the art itself. [10] To adopt the terms of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the invisible power of capital is that it forces the system of managers and politicians to abuse their positions and act as "wild beings?" [11]

The conversations with the workers and managers presented real adventures. Tosevski needed to explain readymade and conceptual art to them, a challenge in itself, especially when the workers were reluctant to talk for fear of losing their jobs and the managers were reticent because they suspected their work was being investigated for purposes beyond art. During 1996 the artist realized three exhibitions in different cities where he found similar factories and received permission to relocate a certain amount of waste material, although he was obliged to pay for some of it. Galleries that usually display local artists were now being used to expose local factory installations. For example, in Titov Veles, while Tosevski was exhibiting broken plates from the local ceramics and porcelain factory, he projected a slide made of the original enormous pile of abandoned material over the small pile of objects in the gallery and thus simulated the actual situation in the factory yard. In addition, the destiny of the gal lery itself furthered the concept since it was otherwise vacant.

In March 1997, Tosevski opened his large exhibition at the Museum of the City of Skopje, displaying faulty textiles, granite blocks and porcelain from the three previous exhibitions and adding a fourth--irregular bottles from a glass factory in Skopje. In addition to the rejected factory material he projected slides of words taken from an economics dictionary, defining terms such as "transition," "transformation," "privatization," "solvency" and "bankruptcy." The paradoxes that Tosevski dealt with may be interpreted by applying a theory of linguistic discourse to the given aesthetic context. To be sure, the polemics surrounding the issue of whether performative artistic acts still fall within the realm of the aesthetic can reach radical extremes, from Duchamp's assertion that art is separate from aesthetics to Greenberg's claim that the aesthetic is identical with the artistic. Regardless of one's critical stance, it is obvious that the performative work of art re-examines the relationship between the artist ic, the aesthetic and the real. The approach underlying the entire "Dossier '96" project can be called a performative act, since it exemplifies J. L. Austin's definition that performative exhibits produce meaning even when they are themselves rhetorically empty. [12] That is, the very demonstration, articulation and proclamation of the performative utterance carries out the act. The separation of rejected objects from their original real context and their transposition into gallery spaces is in fact similar to Duchamp's first performative artistic act: the displaying of the urinal with the signature "R. Mutt," in conjunction with its proclamation as a work of art. [13] If a work of art is a work of art because the artist designates and proclaims it to be such, then what becomes of the original manufacturer of the object that has now become art? In this case, Tosevski takes heaps of rejects from bankrupt factories and exhibits them as works of art; are not the producers of these objects--the workers and the managers--deprived of their origi nal function? Do they now become artists themselves?

According to the theory of speech acts, there are certain criteria by which to judge the success of a performative act. These utterances/acts are outside the consideration of truth or falsehood; they are semantically empty--they can produce only meanings. These are, above all, the intention, and the awareness of the intention of the performance, the competence and legitimacy of the performer and the institutional setting in which the act is performed. According to these criteria, the "producers," whose "products" have been proclaimed as works of art, can by no means be considered the artists. However, because of their metaphorical association with unusable objects, once they are labeled "technological surplus"--the term used in Macedonia for workers dismissed from their work--their status approaches that of the art objects in question, and not subjects with control over their products. [14]

If we pursue the analysis of this paradox further, starting from the same premise, we can pose a question as to the status of the insolvency official. If the manager, rather then trying to use discarded material by recycling or modifying, proclaims the material unusable for no obvious reason, has the official become an artist? Is not this act similar to that of an artist carrying out a performative act? Of course, the answer is no. If we take into account the circumstances of this official's involvement then the criteria of the institutional theory prevents us from regarding these two acts as identical. That is, the manager's motivation is not artistic. He is concerned more with rendering production sites insolvent so that they can be purchased more cheaply.

In contrast, the artist's awareness throughout the process--the relocation of the rejects to the gallery, the organization of exhibitions, the preparation of a catalog, and the intention itself--has met the necessary preconditions for the illocutionary power and success of the performative act. By fully exercising his right to judge and confirm the universal validity of his act, he remains subjective. In this way, according to institutional theory, theories of taste and aesthetic views are surmounted and the skeptical observer who believes that something has been deemed artistic merely because it has been placed in a museum cannot develop alternative criteria, as even the act of naming is validation.

In linguistics there has always been a dichotomy between speech and action, language and body, and their association has been in place since the appearance of the first ready-made in the case of Duchamp, through the conceptual art of the 1960s and 1970s, to postconceptualism and the most recent media: installation, electronic art and the reemergence of body and performance art. The current practice of exhibiting accumulations of ready-made objects and material leads us to another paradox arising from the "Dossier '96" project--its ambivalence on the plane of visual perception. Sometimes the appearance and form of Tosevski's installations are highly reminiscent of some works by Man Ray (e.g., the hangers displayed in Kumanovo, the third of four exhibitions that complete the series of the "Dossier '96" project), Tony Craig or Richard Wentworth (e.g., the installation with broken plates in Titov Veles, the first exhibition in the series) or Richard Long (e.g., the granite blocks in Prilep, the second exhibition) or other internationally known artists. Even though the material--being readymade--is identical (this is not surprising, simply because they are ready-made objects and therefore can be produced anywhere with the same quality) Tosevski's works are utterly different in content, precisely due to their performative character and production of meaning. [15]

Tosevski uses a medium much in vogue in western art today (installation and ready-made) but manages to create a project originating from his everyday life. Not only does it offer information or knowledge of reality; it also touches upon that reality, carrying out its performative act within it, so that the very act itself becomes a part of the reality within which it is performed. And so we come to the most sensitive question posed by Tosevski: the possibilities of engagement in art and whether art can change reality. According to Adorno, art is always both inside and outside reality, and its status and autonomy are dependent on the level of social freedom in a given society. Taking into account institutional theoreticians such as Arthur Danto and George Dickie, the institution dictates the conditions and decides what art is and what it is not. [16] Tosevski questions the problem of the appropriate position of the artist in relation to art institutions and the adequate medium in these circumstances. For this purpose he has also deemed it necessary to re-examine the social, economic and political context within which he creates. The marginal role assigned to art and artistic institutions, in a society preoccupied with a myriad of more important problems, is another significant point illustrated in this project. The first three exhibitions in particular, which were held in galleries or cultural centers in provincial Macedonian cities, emphasized the similarity of these spaces to the factories themselves: the spaces were dirty, almost abandoned, turned into storage rooms.

Therefore, the artist's personal engagement takes place in the realms of reality and its portrayal as art. The art is a study of reality itself, as well as a part of everyday life, thereby blurring the lines of an artistic act and a real life case study. The relationship between reality and art is usually set up in a hierarchical sense--reality having the dominant role, one expecting an engaged artist to pursue his baffles on the barricades instead of through artistic and conceptual means.

The latest project that Tosevski exhibited was during the group exhibition "Words, Objects, Acts" in 2000 at the Museum of the City of Skopje. In this piece, titled Perfect Balance or 23 Kilos Human Rights, Tosevski used 23 kilos of original documents from the UNO (United Nations Organization) Committee for Human Rights. [17] Many old files full of typed or printed declarations, conference resumes and letters were placed on seven scales suspended from the ceiling. Tosevski was targeting the bureaucracy and hypocrisy of the international institution for human rights, questioning its efficacy and commitment. By turning these official human rights documents into art, the artist created art out of human tragedies depicting ironies even in the highest political establishments and art institutions, while declaring these documents of numbers and names "art."

The usage of ready-made art by Zaneta Vangeli, another young artist from Macedonia, relates the problem of the ready-made to the problems of subjectivization and national identity and other unresolved political problems in the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. In particular, her project "Social Plastic of Macedonia" (1996)--created for the group exhibition "Liquor Amnii I" that was held in a fifteenth-century Turkish Bath in Skopje--exemplifies the metaphorical way in which the artist juxtaposes objects that are either industrial ready-mades or objects found in nature. Although the exhibition itself was imagined and based on the theme of amniotic fluid as the border between the body of the mother and child, Vangeli focused on the problems of national identity in Macedonia.

The project consisted of three installations in different rooms of the main venue. In the first room, Vangeli placed six black and white photographs; three on one wall and three identical, blurred ones on the opposing wall. These were life-sized photographs of the Minister of Foreign Affairs, the Archbishop of the Macedonian Orthodox Church and Baskim Ademi, a well-known local underground figure. The composition of the three standing, blurred figures in the photographs was an ironic reference to the Holy Trinity and was meant to emphasize a major problem of the government, namely its alleged involvement in illegal drug activity. While one would have expected to see the Archbishop at the center of the composition, as it is the usual position reserved for the omnipotent figure of God, it was in fact the drug addict, Ademi, who was placed in that position, alluding to a more contemporary "religion."

The exhibit in the second room displayed an even greater reference to the connection between the local government and the drug underworld. This part of the installation titled "Spiritual Macedonia, or Anything Goes," included 10 Macedonian flags, two plates of gold and lead and framed objects with poppies, the source of most drug use in Macedonia, an obvious reference to the chaotic situation in the country where neither the state nor the church are recognized in the wider international context. The well-known problem with the recognition of the constitutional name of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia--it was replaced by the acronym FYROM--went so far that even the design of the flag was changed due to the intervention of the Greek Government. Thus, the placement of the new flags opposite the opium poppies was a deliberate metaphor referencing the state and government not being organized and completely legitimate (another kind of imperfect ready-made) and its blurred, uncertain future. The third part of the project included a video installation showing a drugged Ademi watching the Fluxus artist Al Hanson recite a poem so that the whole scene signified a hallucination, even though each of the two video scenes were documentary and realistic--ordinary ready-made images from everyday life. In "Culturalism or About the Ontological Failure of Tragedy" (1999), Vangeli deepens her interest for the relationship between local and global cultural problems with national and religious identity. Vangeli's exhibit was part of the group project, "Always Already Apocalypse" which was held in both Skopje and Istanbul. The work itself consisted of a large ink-jet printout of a photograph of the interior of the Hagia Sofia Church in Istanbul, the title of the work inscribed over it while a slide projection of the inverted image acted as its own reflection; the Byzantine frescoes and the Islamic calligraphy written over them were seen both as real and ghostly transparent hallucination--false presence of the religious object with lost function as either a church or a mosque. There were also four separate glass cases that contained small objects (Macedonian bank notes of 1000 and 500 denars and four neckties put in the shape of a cross), and photographs of the small models of objects tested for seismological resi stance found in the venue of the exhibition in Skopje--The Institute for Earthquake Engineering and Engineering Seismology.

The investing of the Hagia Sofia's Christian interior with frescoes and Islamic writings became a metaphor for cultural misunderstanding in this piece. A similar unexpected conclusion about the absurd relationship between the important institutions of the state and church can be seen in the display of denar notes. While the government tries to simulate historic continuation with the cultural and religious heritage, it insists on using the religious symbols. On the surface of the 1000 denars note there is a reproduction of an icon of the Mother of God. From the religious point of view this is an act of blasphemy. Inscribing the most sacred symbol on something profane and worldly, such as money, works against the religious canons. The icon is taken as an object symbolizing the presence of God; the money thus gains the significance of a sacral object as well. On the other hand, the engraving of a poppy flower on the surface of the 500 denar note was intended to be a symbol of the natural resources of the country , although its association with opium is inevitable.

Such clashes of meaning place strong emphasis on the many absurdities in social, cultural and political life in Macedonia. According to Vangeli, the only way to find meaning is through the mystical belief in redemption that does not depend on ephemeral or profane concepts of tragedy. While criticizing the social and cultural conflicts (the example of turning the church first into a mosque and then into a tourist attraction), Vangeli negates the relevance of tragedy even when caused by postcolonial cultural domination. In this context, Vangeli's artistic concepts are influenced by Orthodox Christian theology. Tragedy and suffering in earthly life are not recognized as relevant due to the sacral concepts of redemption and salvation obtained only through the Apocalypse.

The money fetish is embraced as strongly as the image of the Mother of God, an icon that is a phantasm--immaterial and powerful although still as vulnerable as any other material object. [18] On the other hand, the fetish of the poppy is also a very old and strong phantasmatic image that can serve for manipulation with the fragile national consciousness, and by taking into account Lenin's famous quote that "religion is the opium of the masses," religion and drugs are already closing the vicious circle. Vangeli's usage of Macedonian flags and money should be understood metaphorically. Instead of questioning the possibility of a perfect ready-made within the Balkan context, Vangeli has posed the question of fabricating. In establishing legitimate state, church, money and subject-identities as widely recognizable symbols, she posed questions of identity rather than fabricating perfect objects.

Interestingly enough, for the second phase of the "Liquor Amnii 2" (a project that took place during the 1997 Convergence X Summer Festival in Providence, Rhode Island) Vangeli created another site-specific installation also dealing with issues of identity, this time using the latest model of life vests--produced in the United States--as ready-made objects. She floated the bright orange objects on the dark surface of the Providence River in order to represent the optimistic concept proclaimed by the title of the work itself: "The Constant Desire for Eternity." Thus, she also avoided any kind of possible national exoticism that could be taken as an argument against the imperfect ready-made. They can be replaced with perfect ready-mades that can be ordered and found even in the Balkans under special conditions, however, then the question arises of context and content becoming underestimated and neglected in favor of formal appearance.

In terms of the proliferation and consumption of images and the continuous flourishing of new media, one project by Yugoslav artist Zoran Naskovski gives a strange and tragic example. His project "War Frames" (1999) is a radical example of using TV programming as ready-made images in extraordinary circumstances. After he was selected as a participant in "Always Already Apocalypse," he found himself imprisoned in his home during the NATO bombardment over Belgrade. Not having access to any other materials, nor the freedom to produce any other work, he made the only possible choice--he recorded the images from the local TV stations including the strong media campaign of Slobodan Milosevic, the leader of the ruling government at that time.

The question of the perfection of the medium and the living standard became unexpectedly intertwined; the barest life styles were followed by a perfect political and blinding usage of the medium of television. By using this medium, the everyday suspense of the sirens announcing the war mingled with the suspense of Hollywood movies. The TV programs recorded for the project included everything from the local news to music entertainment to religious documentaries to cockfights. In the top left of the screen the words "war danger" were written, reminding us of the absurdity of the animal and human fights appearing in miniature on the television. The presentation of the work, with an interactive CD-ROM, can be interpreted as a simulation of what an average TV viewer was watching during the bombardment. The viewer in the exhibition space could also represent the experience by clicking the mouse in order to change the channel.

The consequential outcome of the war, the tide of about 200,000 refugees who emigrated to Macedonia during the NATO intervention, provoked the artist Ismet Ramicevic to create the work "Pain + Food = Souvenir" (1999). Ramicevic's work was shown in the context of the group exhibition "Artists and Refugees," that was organized by the Center for Contemporary Arts (appearing at the Museum of the City of Skopje). Ramicevic displayed the plates of several refugee families that he had previously photographed. These objects were their only belongings after they left the refugee camps--signifying their short, yet tragic, experience. The destiny of those subjects was strongly connected with the simple aluminum plates--the only remaining evidence of the harshness of life during that period. On each empty plate's inner surface the artist had placed a photograph of some of the refugees just before they left the camps.

The ready-made might be not the most appropriate medium for the art activities in the Balkans in the technological sense, but it is appropriate in terms of the content. It can express the specific reality of countries affected by continuous economic and political instability; especially if the industrial shapes and their difference from perfection are used within profoundly conceptualized artistic projects. Focusing on the ready-made as an artistic mode of expression was expressed in Tosevski's "Dossier '96." Its method of investigating the possibilities for a perfect mode of production, along with other problems initiated by the switch to a market economy implies there are other ways of using and interpreting the ready-made: e.g., the treating of state symbols as "unready" ready-made products. Or, in the conditions of establishing a new state with unclear strategies, as in the case of Vangeli's projects. Naskovski used theses images as a strong critical context of the bombardment of Serbia, emphasizing the possibilities for manipulation via television--the most powerful ready-made of all--during a time when the whole population was forced into a "home TV prison." The absurdities and paradoxes of life and art in the Balkans are emphasized by the medium of ready-made. The tendency toward a society of high-tech objects and the not-so-perfect everyday life of their consumers are inevitably in conflict so that partial information about globalization and its technological advantages often sounds unconvincing and hollow in such social, economical and political conditions.

SUZANA MILEVSKA, art theorist and curator, lives in Skopje, Macedonia and works for the Museum of the City of Skopje.

NOTES

(1.) Marcel Duchamp, "The Richard Mutt Case," in The Blind Man (No. 1), April 10, 1917. (The Blind Man was a magazine published on the occasion of the first exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists, Inc. at the Grand Central Palace in New York City.)

(2.) Gene Swenson, "What is Pop Art," in Art News 62 (November 1963), p. 26, quoted according to Hal Foster, The Return of the Real (Cambridge: MIT Press. 1996), p. 130.

(3.) Thierry De Duve, Kant after Duchamp (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999), p.413.

(4.) Ibid., p. 295. The statement," I threw a bottle rack and urinal in their faces as a challenge and now they admire them for their beauty" once attributed to Duchamp, now, according to De Duve, is re-attributed to Hans Richter.

(5.) Trajko Slavevski, Makedonska ekonomija vs tranzicija (Eko Press: Skopje, 1955), pp. 83.87. In this book, a professor from the Faculty of Economics at Skopje University investigates different models of privatization in western and eastern countries, arguing with the local government and solvency officials that the fast model of privatization employed in the Czech Republic would be more appropriate than the slower approach already employed in Macedonia.

(6.) Of course, Adorno's thesis should be applied from the appropriate distance, taking into account his theory of negative dialectics and eternal tension between art and society.

(7.) Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, The Anti-Oedipus (New York: Viking, 1977), p. 19.

(8.) The last presentation of a new version of this project took place within the "After the Wall" exhibition in 1999 that Bojana Pejic, curated for Moderna Museet in Stockholm. (It also traveled to Budapest and Berlin.)

(9.) This situation inevitably reminds us of the desiring machine concept from Brian Massumi, trans., Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 161.

(10.) Ibid., pp. 100 and 501-514.

(11.) Wilhelm S. Wurzer, "wild being/ecart/capital" in M. C. Dillon, ed., Ecart & Differance: Merlcau-Ponty and Derrida on Seeing and Writing (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1997), p. 235.

(12.) J. L. Austin, How to do Things with Words (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975), pp. 106-108.

(13.) De Duve, pp. 89-142.

(14.) This relationship calls to mind the Dialectic of Enlightenment by Adorno and Horkheimer: "the single relation between the subject who bestows meaning and the meaningless object."

(15.) Argument given during a round table discussion at the European Biennial Manifests 2 in Luxembourg in 1998 as an answer to Joseph Bakhstein, art theorist from Moskow.

(16.) George Dickie, Art and Aesthetic (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974), p.34.

(17.) The documents belong to the personal collection of Ivan Tosevski, the artist's father, who was employed for many years as an expert in the UNO Committee for Human Rights.

(18.) Slavoj Zizek. "How Did Marx Invented the Symptom," in Mapping Ideology (London: Verso, 1999), p,314. COPYRIGHT 2001 Visual Studies Workshop COPYRIGHT 2001 Gale Group Suzana Milevska

THE PORTRAIT OF AN ARTIST AS A YOUNG

‘STRATEGIC ESSENTIALIST’

Whenever a woman artist employs her body and femininity within the framework of her art activities the term ‘essentialism’ comes forward, as if it is impossible to deal with reality of being a woman without activating the biological aspects of that phenomenon. It is a kind of inevitable paradox that regardless to the initial motivation of the artists is difficult to be circumvented so that even the most critically intended projects easily succumb in by essentialism limited agendas.

Since Judith Butler’s pledge for understanding of gender as a cultural construct it has become impossible to accept any flirting with the biological predispositions or using the privileges of the female body without a severe criticism.

The question that arises as a result of most of the projects from the exhibition

‘Strategies for Success’ by Tanja Ostojić is what are the options for different

‘strategies’ available to a woman artist in order to question the essentialist attitude and not to be accused for ‘essentialism’ at the same time. Can it be true that there is no way out of this paradox similar to the body of oroboris with the head and tale being the same obsession for claiming the natural and biological determination of the relations between men and women?

In order to rehears some possible implications of the attempt to overcome such paradox with a different approach towards the essentialist formula in Ostojić’s work

1 we may need to evoke the phrase ‘strategic essentialism’ coined by Gayatri

Chakravorti Spivak. In comparison to the regular type of essentialism the ‘strategic essentialism’ would be different in two key ways: ‘first, the "essential attributes" are defined by the group itself, not by outsiders trying to oppress the group. Second, in strategic essentialism, the "essential attributes" are acknowledged to be a construct.

That is, the group rather paradoxically acknowledges that such attributes are not natural (or intrinsically essential), but are merely invoked when it is politically useful to do so. Moreover, members of the group maintain the power to decide when the attributes are "essential" and when they are not. In this way, strategic essentialism can be a powerful political tool.’ 1

It is necessary to point to the fact that since Spivak first used this phrase she has been highly criticised for its meaning, but it is also worth of mentioning that most of the criticism overlooked the emphasis put on the word ‘strategic’.2 Mainly it was related to the Spivak’s opinion that in different parts of the world where feminist movements did not have the same historic and cultural impact the strategies for its development should differ and therefore if one group or individual estimates that even essentialism can be fruitful as a strategy against the essentialism itself there is no reason not to accept the possible agency entailed in such a paradoxical method of feminist action.

Even though Tanja Ostojic acts as a singular artist not claiming to any particular group’s attitudes or agendas the exhibition Strategies of Success obviously deals with a kind of ironic take on feminism while miming of the ‘strategies of success’. She appropriates the expected suspicions and accusations that surround most of the women artists’ s success, often implied not necessarily only by men. Far from trying to justify such strategies but also away from stigmatising women who decided

2 that need to use them Ostojić is using these strategies of an essentialist exactly in order to criticise the essentialism itself.

Master/slave dialectics

In order to circumvent the vicious circle of being accused for something aimed to be criticized the artist is looking into the professional relations between the artists and curators as a kind of ‘master/slave’ dialectical relationship that even though is not strictly biologically inherited, it is also not understood as a mere result of the two fold professional and cultural struggle for self-certainty and recognition. The strategy to prevent the defeat in this struggle seemingly comes from the secret feminine repertoire of arms: erotic plays of seduction, lures of lust, desire and all other available phantasms and thus here I am using Spivak’s ‘strategic essentialism’ in a kind of ironic and humorous way, the same way as I like to believe is suggested by the artist herself.

Having said that I need to clarify immediately that this Hegelian formula in

Ostojic’s work can be followed with a similar set of arguments that was applied in

Hegel’s interpretation of the struggle for mutual recognition in-between the slave and the aster but only that the final conclusion here differs significantly simply because the telos of this struggle does not end with the realisation of the slave that he/she is independent. In fact the ‘absolute fear’, ‘the discipline service and obedience’, and all other requirements of ‘master/slave dialectics’ do exist within the artist/curator relationship but ‘the real power of self-consciousness, the ‘absolute negativity’ that is able to transform things’ 3 does not belong neither to the master nor to the slave. In

3 contrary it is the ‘truth’ about the necessity of the mutual recognition that although announced from the very beginning never actually takes place.

Most of Ostojic’s projects included within this exhibition refer to very particular newly emerged relations between artists and curators (male or female), often based on power games and overemphasised hierarchies in the art world. Such power games are mainly possible because of the existent phantasms and ruthless struggles for becoming celebrity rather than because they are based on greed and desire for a concrete financial success. In that sense the ‘strategic essentialist’ tool in the projects of Ostojic is not only ironic but can also be interpreted as the only

‘powerful political tool’ available for questioning of these social and professional

‘diseases’. 4

The myth of the stereotypically imagined ‘event’ of seduction or even copulation that eventually precedes the successful career of a young woman artist can be easily overlooked if treated as an apparently obsolete and forgotten phenomenon.

Unfortunately it is still omnipresent topic of interest even in the most contemporary art ‘saloons’: the international art biennials, art fairs, conferences etc. Whoever thought that such rituals of rumour distribution are not in fashion anymore is easily proved to be wrong. Wives, mistresses, girlfriends, lovers, beloved, friends, secretaries, assistant curators, PR officers, students, etc., all of the women surrounding the famous curators make a ‘delicious’ starters at art business dinners, much more often than the concepts of the exhibitions.

By the same token it has to be emphasised that the women curators even though are also not saved from being centre of such ‘discussions’’ in their case those discussions are often spiced up with accusations of other ‘essentialist’ attitude – they

4 are often being blamed for overprotection of mother-like type that is imposed to the artists.

Tanja Ostojić is thoroughly aware of the danger of getting into the trap of essentialism when taking on the role of a young female artist quenched for success and following/miming all the presupposed techniques and technologies for ascending its stairs. However she bravely interrogates the limits of this role-playing inhabiting the mind and body of a non-feminist artist in order to understand the way the system functions. Of course by entering the system of ‘strategies of success’ the artist becomes vulnerably exposed to its lures and temptations and it is not excluded that thus she can easily become its victim. Ostojić’s main aim is exactly to explore the intrinsic structural tissues of the art system from a gender perspective, all its perverted and primitive formulations, its fetishisms and rituals of abandonment and thus she is as close to a failure as to a success.

Each of the projects/events that Tanja Ostojic puts together within the context of the Startegies of Success exhibition questions both the tools of the ‘strategic essentialists’ and the strategies of constructivists. If the constructivists are right when stating that the gender differences are result of the societal and cultural framing of the subjects the question posed by this exhibition is whether in the context where the dominance of the male power rules the professional relations the awareness that there is no biological basis for preserving such hierarchies solve the vicious circle of artist/curator dialectics.

5 Revelation of truth or objects/events

“To become a ‘subject’ is thus to have been presumed guilty. Then tried and declared innocent. Because this declaration is not a single act but a status incessantly reproduced, to become a ‘subject’ is to be continuously in the process of acquitting oneself of the accusation of guilt... Yet because this guilt conditions the subject, it constitutes the prehistory of the subjection to the law by which the subject is produced”. 5

The pile of 2150 condoms in the corner of the main space of the installation titled the same as the exhibition “Strategies of Success” and the handwritten text on the wall behind “This is exact amount of condoms that I used during my carrier in order to serve curators who helped me becoming famous” …deserve some attention and more careful elaboration being also a “backdrop” for the performance at the opening night of the exhibition.

The scarlet environment immediately resonates with erotic assumptions that some ‘event’ of copulation happened. The exhibiting of the accumulation of condoms inevitably underlines this expectation. The boudoir environment and its erotically charged atmosphere leads to a pre-mature conclusion that nothing should have contradicted the stereotypical idea of the rituals of seduction and the sexual intercourse used as a tool for flourishing of the young artist’s career. Yet it is the blunt

‘confession’ written on the wall that seems not to fit there.

Instead of trying to acquit herself of the imagined and presupposed guilt and accusations the artist subverts this expectation and turns it into a farce with exactly confessing the opposite: yes, I’ve done it. The revelation of truth is obviously not

6 what is on stake here. The number of condoms and their presence in general are not enough to convince the viewer that what is stated with the sentence is the truth. In contrary, the rumours eavesdropped over an official dinner might have been much more persuasive in effect. The ironic and ambiguous effect of the graffiti is a result of the fact that the sentence was written by the artist herself.

The dominance of the objects themselves obviously is an excessive claim to reality that simultaneously enforces and questions the complex relation between an assumption and the truth itself. To put it in the terms of Hegel’s ‘master/slave’ relation, the slave/artist works positively with the objects, puts a specific form to them, so that while working on them he/she becomes aware of his/her independence.

6 Hegel doesn’t speak of the gender neither of the slave, nor of the master, though.

When Ostojić uses the condoms as objects - proofs of the presupposed guilt she changes them into the opposite, the proofs of her independence and strength. It is a bold act to deal with this issue with using the same ‘language of objects’ that is somehow preserved for the ‘boys’ club’ of curators. Or to put the relation between truth and objects by evoking Alain Badiu’s words: ’the form of the object cannot in any way sustain the enterprise of truth’. 7

The irony of the sentence on the wall complements the tone of the Venice

Diary (2002) - the longer text written and published by the artist about the two projects that were commissioned on the occasion of 49th Venice Biennial exhibition

“Plateau of Humankind” by its curator Harald Szeemann. This parallel is not accidental, though. The opening performance actually consisted of the artist reading the text of Venice Diary (after going through an extensive ‘going out’ ritual). So what is so important about the content and implications of the diary that makes this text a pivot for understanding the whole project “Strategies of Success”?

7 In fact the text full of details about the Venice projects was written to accompany the video (already presented in Tanja Ostojić’s solo exhibition at Zagreb’s

Contemporary Art Museum in 2002) that documented various events that derived from the project I Will be Your Angel (2001), at 49th Venice Biennial, Venice, and her commitment to accompany the main selector and curator of the most prestigious international exhibition in the world all during the four days of its official preview.

When Harald Szeemann, aged but still appreciated and famous curator, had accepted the ‘rules of the game', those entailing that the young female artist dressed as a celebrity in a fashion designer clothes was to accompany him as his ‘guard’ during his everyday obligatory meetings, press-conferences, dinner-parties, interviews etc., it was already clear, even to him, that the agreement entailed many ‘blind spots’ - open possibilities for unexpected events to take place and to trigger his stabile curatorial position gained through many years of international professional career.

The posh opening was imagined as a spectacular background event for another event, a kind of social and cultural critique prompted by the artist herself with her simulation of an automaton, ‘an art dummy’, while smiling artificially and weaving ironically to the audience and art snobs. The issues of glamour and success were therefore put side by side to the issues of cultural and social power. Thus, by exposing herself: her body constrained by the not so comfortable tight corsets and shoes, and her personality constrained by the strict social rituals, she created a site for deconstruction of the institutional frameworks that she deliberately entered.

At the same time, she put in movement the wheel of many paradoxes and absurd interpretations as well as the instrumentalization and surveillance of her own body. The later development of events, the fell-out between the artist and the curator, the threats and ignoring of her work only proved that the usual ‘object of seduction’

8 can easily become the subject and that the power games are always two fold and the roles are completely reversible.

The artist accepted the ambiguous situation of ‘belonging without belonging’ to the class of national ministers, international dealers, gallerists, or curators, on purpose, in order to enter, but also to mock from inside the ‘untouchable’ position of the world created for the artists and still so far away from them. With such in-between position of the artist, the binary oppositions as female/male, artist/curator, artist/art institution, young/old, still on work within the professional art circuits, were to be questioned as pivotal concepts around which gravitate the power game structures.

The complex and intriguing meaning of this performance was inevitably echoed and emphasised by the other project of Tanja Ostojić involving Harald

Szeemann, the strange “Black Square on White” (2001, “Plateau of Humankind”, 49th

Venice Biennial, Venice) consisting of her Mount of Venus shaved in a form of square instead of the natural triangle, imagined as an ironic homage to Malevic’s well-known painting that was supposed to be accomplished at the moment when the ‘chosen’ curator would have actually seen the hidden bodily intervention. That was conceived as an apocalyptic moment of ‘revelation of truth’, unveiling of what was ‘veiled’ in the most intimate place, a kind of quick gaze at the hidden critique of the modernistic appropriation of the Russian ‘icon’ of avant-garde and turning its mysticism into geometric or optic forms.

The symbolic of the ‘event’ of showing to a man the ‘mythic bauba’- the place of the horrifying ‘lack’ that causes the men’s fear from feminine powers and castration, but at the same time stiffens his body and thus transforms it in a phallus (in certain Slavic languages the first syllable of the word ‘curator’ – kur means ‘prick’), in the case of Ostojić’s performance was deliberately and ironically supplemented by

9 the ‘geometric abstraction’ – the modernistic privileged position to abstracting the content from the form.

The unanswered questions as when, where and under what circumstances this spectacular, but private ‘event’ of revealing the ‘shaved truth’ took place, and whether the work existed at all, are less important than the gender overwriting and re-shaping,

‘shaving’ the history of art with such courageous performative concept: to show to the famous art curator that in the most ‘hidden’ place of femininity there is nothing terrifying, there is only this abstract ‘black square on white’ that he has been accustomed to during his long career. We will never be sure whether this ‘interactive’ performance was really carried on, but the fact that it created certain discomfort and tension between the artist and the curator, the curator and his family, the artist and organizers, speaks for itself.

Desires/Events

“Social change and individual change are inevitable, but the form they will take is unpredictable because desire is unpredictable”.

Dorothea Olkowski 8

The projects: Be My Guest (2001), (a video from the performance/installation realised during the exhibition “Gravita 0” at the Pallazo delle Espozicioni in Roma in collaboration with Bartolomeo Pietromarchi, the chef curator from Fondazione

Adriano Olivetti in Roma with whom Ostojić had a posh dinner within the space of the exhibition followed by erotic Jacuzzi bath with Lodovico Pratesi, the art critic and independent curator from Roma), Sofa for Curator (2002), a video from the

10 performance from the exhibition “Balkan Konzulat”, Graz, Austria, October 2002, that was the act of hosting and washing feet to Stevan Vukovic, curator from

Belgrade, the Vacation with curator (2003) – series of simulated paparazzi photographs with Edi Muka, curator from Tirana, and finally the staged photograph with Marina Grzinić, curator from Ljubljana, are all part of this exhibition as a continuation to the Ostojić’s attempt to deal openly and boldly with ‘desires/events’ that are so often entailed even though there has been no single hint that they have ever happened.

If we accept that desire rests underneath the visible conflicts in society as an invisible pattern that anticipates the human behaviour, as it was suggested by Deluze and Guattari, than it is no accident that the events of seduction and the events of becoming are possible and intertwined. 9 Desires are difficult to be controlled and therefore they are used by each side of the pair in order to manipulate the other one and the rules of master/slave game in general in order to swap the roles throughout the whole travesty of becoming an artist when the art itself is not taken into account as an important agency for this process to take place.

The art of Tanja Ostojić engages in a very profound elaboration of this endless chain of shifts and swaps that are inevitably results of entering the art system and its power games. If the ‘strategic essentialism’ can help during this commitment to reveal the structures of the art system and its hierarchies she does not hesitate to apply its models. Often entering the same labyrinths of bio-power that she wants to subvert and criticise she childishly indulges into the continuous flows of ‘desiring machines’ while deconstructing their powerful engines.

11 NOTES:

1. Sara Danius and Stefan Jonsson, “An Interview with Gayatri Chakravorti Spivak”, Boundary 2 20:2 (1993): 24-50 2. Suzana Milevska, “Resistance that Cannot Be Recognised as Such – interview with Gayatri C. Spivak”. Identity. Nu. 5. Skopje, 2003. (in print) In the interview Spivak claims that even though she had given up this phrase she could not give up the concept itself, in particularly because it entered the language and found its applications. 3. Eric Steinhart. The Master/Slave Dialectic. 1998 http://www.wpunj.edu/cohss/philosophy/courses/hegel/MASLAVE.HTM 4. On the one hand, it is difficult to understand how the very abstract intellectual argument about the gender difference as a cultural construct in the tradition of Judith Butler’s interpretation of Althusser’s ‘interpellation’ and Foucaultian understanding of disciplining of the body is to be activated as a powerful political tool. On the other hand, even though Gayatri C. Spivak aims to very concrete political fights with her latest work, it is not easy to prove that they can be fought with references to her very hermetic book A Critique of the Postcolonial Reason 5. Judith Butler. The Psychic Life of Power. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press. 1997. p.118. 6. Shou-Bang Jian. Hegel’s account of master/slave relation in Phenomenology of Spirit, http://www.geocites.com/shoubang/files/Hegel-master-slave.htm, p.9 7. Alain Badiou. On a Finally Objectless Subject. Who Comes After the Subject? Ed. by Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor, and Jean-Luc Nancy. New York and London: Routledge.1991. p.24 8. Dorothea Olkowski. Flows of Desire and Body-Becoming. Becomings – Explorations in Time, Memory, and Futures. Ed by Elizabeth Grosz. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. 1999. p.116 9. Here I refer to G. Deleuse and F. Guattari’s concept desiring machine developed already in the book Anti-Oedipus, and the concept war machine introduced later in A Thousand Plateaus. The both concepts deal with the concept of hidden patterns – apparatuses that are not simple natural determinations but are mutually intertwined and assembled. See: Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press.1987. p.399

12 Op: Raj Ed: Anjana Art No. ppl_fr_9400243 1^7

objects and bodies:

objectification and over-

identification in Tanja

Ostojic´’s art projects

Suzana Milevska

The complex issues of representation of female body in contemporary art are still intertwined with the phenomenon of objectification. Regardless to the original concept of the art work and the initial intention of the female artists using their bodies, there is still this danger of objectification whenever the female body is exposed to the gaze of the viewer (either male or female), even when it is obvious that this operation of objectification was the main target of the artist’s critique.

In this context, the questions that Slavojˇ Zizˇek asked while tackling the phenomenon of over-identification and the regimes of representation of power relations are still relevant. When discussing the Slovenian NSK artists’ group and the band Laibach, he was concerned with the problem of miming the regimes of power:

This uneasy feeling is fed on the assumption that ironic distance is automatically a subversive attitude. What if, on the contrary, the dominant attitude of the contemporary ‘postideological’ universe is precisely the cynical distance toward public values? What if this distance, far from posing any threat to the system, designates the supreme form of conformism, since the normal function of the system requires cynical distance? In this sense the strategy of Laibach appears in a new light: it ‘frustrates’ the system (the ruling ideology) precisely insofar as it is not its ironic imitation, but over-identification with it – by bringing to light the obscene superego underside of the system, over-identification suspends its efficiency. (Zˇizˇek) UNCORRECTEDWhat I want to do here is to take on this notion PROOF of over-identification, and to discuss its mechanisms in particularly in the context of several gender projects by the artist Tanja Ostojic´ (1972, Uzice, Yugoslavia). Moreover, I want to show that with miming a certain regime, an artist can retain her/his distance from the mimed regime and, as claimed byˇ Zizˇek, can frustrate that very regime of power.

feminist review 78 2005 1

(00–00) c 2005 Feminist Review. 0141-7789/05 $30 www.feminist-review.com

Since Judith Butler’s pledge for understanding of gender as a cultural construct, it has become impossible to accept any dealing with the biological predispositions or using the image of the female body without a severe criticism. The question that arises as a result of most of the Ostojic´’s art projects is what are the options for different ‘strategies’ available to a woman artist in order to question the essentialist attitude, and not to be accused for ‘essentialism’ at the same time. Can it be true that there is no way out of this paradox similar to the body of oroboris with the head and tale being the same obsession for claiming the natural and biological determination of the relations between men and women?

In order to rehear some possible implications of the attempt to overcome such paradox with a different approach towards the essentialist formula in Ostojic´’s work, we may need to evoke the phrase ‘strategic essentialism’ coined by Gayatri Chakravorti Spivak. In comparison to the regular type of essentialism, the ‘strategic essentialism’ would be different in two key ways: first, the ‘essential attributes’ are defined by the group itself, not by outsiders trying to oppress the group. Second, in strategic essentialism, the ‘essential attributes’ are acknowl- edged to be a construct. That is, the group rather paradoxically acknowledges that such attributes are not natural (or intrinsically essential), but are merely invoked when it is politically useful to do so. Moreover, members of the group maintain the power to decide when the attributes are ‘essential’ and when they are not. In this way, strategic essentialism can be a powerful political tool (Danius and Jonsson, 1993).

It is necessary to point to the fact that since Spivak first used this phrase she has been highly criticized for its meaning, but it is also worth mentioning that most of the criticism overlooked the emphasis put on the word ‘strategic’. (Milevska, 2003; In the interview Spivak claims that even though she had given up this phrase, she could not give up the concept itself, particularly because it entered the language and found its applications.) Mainly, it was related to Spivak’s opinion that in different parts of the world where feminist movements did not have the same historic and cultural impact, the strategies for its development should differ and, therefore, if one group or individual estimates that even essentialism can be fruitful as a strategy against the essentialism itself, there is no reason not to accept the possible agency entailed in such a paradoxical method of feminist action.

ToUNCORRECTED become a ‘subject’ is thus to have been presumed guilty. Then PROOF tried and declared innocent. Because this declaration is not a single act but a status incessantly reproduced, to become a ‘subject’ is to be continuously in the process of acquitting oneself of the accusation of guilt... Yet because this guilt conditions the subject, it constitutes the prehistory of the subjection to the law by which the subject is produced. (Butler, 1997)

2 feminist review 78 2005 objectification and over-identification in Tanja Ostojic´’s art projects The work consisting of a pile of 2,150 condoms in the corner of the main space of the installation titled the same as the exhibition ‘Strategies of Success’ and the handwritten text on the wall behind ‘This is exact amount of condoms that I used during my carrier in order to serve curators who helped me becoming famous’ ydeserve some attention and more careful elaboration being also a ‘backdrop’ for the performance at the opening night of Ostojic´’s exhibition Strategies of Success (2003, Gallery La Box, Bourges France). The scarlet environment immediately resonated with erotic assumptions that some ‘event’ of copulation happened. The exhibiting of the accumulation of condoms inevitably underlines this expectation. The boudoir environment and its erotically charged atmosphere leads to a premature conclusion that nothing should have contradicted the stereotypical idea of the rituals of seduction and the sexual intercourse used as a tool for flourishing of the young artist’s career. Yet, it is the blunt ‘confession’ written on the wall that seems not to fit there.

The irony of the sentence on the wall complements the tone of the Venice Diary (2002) – the longer text read by the artist during the opening. The opening performance actually consisted of the artist reading the text of Venice Diary (after going through an extensive ‘going out’ ritual). The diary was written and published by the artist after the two projects that were commissioned for the Venice Biennial exhibition ‘Plateau of Humankind’ by its curator Harald Szeemann, and is full of details about Ostojic´’s Venice project I Will be Your Angel (2001, 49th Venice Biennial, Venice) and about her commitment to accompany the main selector and curator of the most prestigious international exhibition in the world, all during the four days of its official preview (Figure 1).

UNCORRECTED PROOF

Figure 1 I Will be Your Angel, 2001, Four-day performance with Harald Szeemann, 49th Venice Biennial, Venice Courtesy of Tanja Ostojic´.

Suzana Milevska feminist review 78 2005 3 When Harald Szeemann, aged but still appreciated and famous curator, had accepted the ‘rules of the game’, those entailing that the young female artist dressed as a celebrity in a fashion designer clothes was to accompany him as his ‘guard’ during his everyday obligatory meetings, press conferences, dinner parties, interviews, etc., it was already clear to him that the agreement also entailed many ‘blind spots’ – open possibilities for unexpected events to take place and to trigger his stabile curatorial position gained through many years of international professional career.

The posh opening was imagined as a spectacular background event for another event, a kind of social and cultural critique prompted by the artist herself with her simulation of an automaton, ‘an art dummy’, while smiling artificially and weaving ironically to the audience and art snobs. The issues of glamour and success were therefore put side by side to the issues of cultural and social power. By exposing herself: her body constrained by the not so comfortable tight corsets and shoes, and her personality constrained by the strict social rituals, she created a site for deconstruction of the institutional frameworks that she deliberately entered.

Tanja Ostojic´ obviously used the opportunity to work with Szeemann as an opportunity to subject him to an experiment: she picked the famous curator, still attractive man in his 70s, communicative, and not a single, in order to question the most of the cultural stereotypes of the international art scene. The rituals of seducing, jealousy, exoticism, age difference, and man/wife/mistress triangle were the main ‘blind spots’ to be tempted. Most of these themes are still taboos and preserved only for the gossiping se´ances, but not for public discussion and interpretation.

The everyday lascive scene of Tanja Ostojic´ dressed glamorously in the Lacroix models, especially chosen and ordered by the artist for this occasion, walking side by side to Harald Szeemann on his daily duties during the preview for critics (press conferences, interviews, business meetings, openings, cocktails, concerts), put in movement the wheel of many paradoxes and absurd interpretations as well as the instrumentalization and surveillance of her own body. The later development of events, the fall-out between the artist and the curator, the threats and ignoring of her work only proved that the usual ‘object of seduction’ can easily become the subject and that the power games are always two-fold and the roles are completely reversible.

Therefore, instead of trying to acquit herself of the imagined and presupposed guilt andUNCORRECTED accusations, the artist subverts this expectation and turnsPROOF it into a farce with exactly confessing the opposite: yes, I’ve done it. The revelation of truth is obviously not what is on stake here. The number of condoms and their presence in general are not enough to convince the viewer that what is stated with the sentence is the truth. On the contrary, the rumours eavesdropped over an official dinner might have been much more persuasive in effect. The ironic and ambiguous

4 feminist review 78 2005 objectification and over-identification in Tanja Ostojic´’s art projects effect of the graffiti is a result of the fact that the sentence was written by the artist herself.

The dominance of the objects in the installation Strategies of Success obviously is an excessive claim to reality that simultaneously enforces and questions the complex relation between an assumption and the truth itself. To put it in the terms of Hegel’s ‘master/slave’ relation, the slave/artist works positively with the objects, puts a specific form to them, so that while working on them he/she 1 Shou-Bang Jian. becomes aware of his/her independence.1 Hegel does not speak of the gender of ‘Hegel’s account of master/slave rela- the slave or of the master, though. tion in Phenomenol- ogy of Spirit’. When Ostojic´ used the condoms as objects – proofs of the presupposed guilt she http://www.geoci- tes.com/shoubang/ changed them into the opposite, the proofs of her independence and strength. It is files/Hegel-master- a bold act to deal with this issue with using the same ‘language of objects’ that is slave.htm, p 9. somehow preserved for the ‘boys’ club of curators. Having said that, I need to clarify immediately that this Hegelian formula in Ostojic´’s work can be followed with a similar set of arguments that was applied in Hegel’s interpretation of the struggle for mutual recognition in-between the slave and the master, but only that the final conclusion here differs significantly simply because the telos of this struggle does not end with the realization of the slave that he/she is independent.

In fact, the ‘absolute fear’, ‘the discipline service and obedience’, and all other requirements of ‘master/slave dialectics’ do exist within the artist/curator relationship but ‘the real power of self-consciousness, the ‘absolute negativity’ 2 Eric Steinhart. that is able to transform things’2 does not belong to the master or to the slave. On Q1 ‘The Master/Slave Dialectic’. 1998, the contrary, it is the ‘truth’ about the necessity of the mutual recognition that http://www.wpun- although announced from the very beginning never actually takes place. Or to put j.edu/cohss/philoso- phy/courses/hegel/ the relation between truth and objects by evoking Alain Badiu’s words: ‘the form of MASLAVE.HTM the object cannot in any way sustain the enterprise of truth’ (Badiou, 1991).

The complex and intriguing meaning of this project is also linked with the other project by Tanja Ostojic´ involving now late curator Harald Szeemann, the strange ‘Black Square on White’ (2001, ‘Plateau of Humankind’, 49th Venice Biennial, Venice). It consisted of her pubic hair shaved in a form of square instead of the natural triangle that took place at the same time as the performance I’ll be Your Angel. This play with geometry imagined as an ironic homage to Malevic’s well- known painting was supposed to be accomplished at the very moment when the ‘chosen’ curator would have actually seen the hidden bodily intervention. That was conceived as an apocalyptic moment of ‘revelation of truth’, unveiling of what was UNCORRECTED‘veiled’ in the most intimate place, aPROOF kind of quick gaze at the hidden critique of the modernistic appropriation of the Russian ‘icon’ of avant-garde and turning its mysticism into geometric or optic forms. The symbolic of the act of showing to a man the ‘mythic bauba’ – the place of the horrifying ‘lack’ that causes the men’s fear from feminine powers and castration, but at the same time stiffens his body and thus transforms it in a phallus (in certain Slavic languages the first syllable of

Suzana Milevska feminist review 78 2005 5 the word ‘curator’ – cur means ‘prick’), in the case of Ostojic´, performance was deliberately and ironically supplemented by the ‘geometric abstraction’ – the modernistic privileged position to abstracting the content from the form.

The unanswered questions as when and under what circumstances this spectacular, but private event of revealing the ‘shaved truth’ took place, and whether the work existed at all, are less important than the gender overwriting and reshaping, ‘shaving’ the history of art with such courageous performative concept: to show to the famous art curator that in the most ‘hidden’ place of femininity there is nothing terrifying, there is only this abstract ‘black square on white’ that he has been accustomed to during his long career. We will never be sure whether this ‘interactive’ performance was really carried on, but the fact that it created certain discomfort and tension between the artist and the curator, the curator and his family, and the artist and organizers speaks for itself.

Nevertheless, the social, political, and economic structures, and particularly the gender roles issues are much more underlined in Ostojic´’s inter-medial projects such as the complex ongoing ‘Looking for a Husband with EU Passport’ that started already in 2000 and is still running. The first phase consisting of a simple Internet advert with an image of the artist’s shaved body and the title was followed by the distribution of leaflets and posters in a shopping mall in Skopje (2001, ‘Capital and Gender’, Skopje), and with a website that enabled the correspondence between the artist and her ‘suitors’. The project had gradually transferred from the realm of ‘imaginary’ to the realm of ‘real’ when the artist met and married one of the ‘virtual’ suitors (the German artist Clemens Golf who deliberately delved into the ‘art-marriage’ adventure), but it is still not accomplished. The final stage of this long-term art and life commitment started in the realm of a complex intertwining between the ‘imaginary’, ‘real’, and ‘symbolic’: when the artist started facing the German state authorities in order to acquire the long-awaited Schengen visa and started going through seemingly endless procedure for long-term residency. At this point, the artist herself did not anymore control the ‘rules of the game’ – it is the moment when the ‘Law of the Father’ enters and creates many surprising turns, but yet so de´ja` vu. Namely, after three years of ‘fictive’ marriage, the couple split and filled for a ‘real’ divorce. Obviously, it is very difficult to make the borderline between the ‘fictive’ and ‘real’ in this context.

The ambiguity of this project is contained in the intentional play with the aesthetics of the artist’s usage of her own image for the Internet advertisement: her skinny shaved body, without any traces of sensuality or the seductive gaze or gesture,UNCORRECTED conveys a completely opposite visual message than the PROOF usual aesthetics of the adverts. From out of this conflict between textual invitation and visual repulsion was born the gap of ambiguity between attraction and abjection.

The body and the social freedom offered in exchange for a Shengen passport yet subvert what seems a classic case of marriage of convenience. The contract signed

6 feminist review 78 2005 objectification and over-identification in Tanja Ostojic´’s art projects by two artists transforms and utilizes the power of the social and cultural institution of marriage in other direction than its original. In spite of its social and political commitment, the process of over-identification also makes this project humorous, but simultaneously to the long battle through the German bureaucracy, the artist started another series of projects, much more delved in the realm of the political aspects of her own actions. Namely, she started the Integration Project dealing with immigration that consists of series of workshops, free language courses, dinners, and other social activities such as the Office for Integration (2002, ‘Uncertain Signs/True Stories’, Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe) that take place in parallel to her own integration within the German society, culture, and art scene.

All these intertwined relations between the realms of ‘imaginary’, ‘real’, and ‘symbolic’, to use the Lacan’s triad, are challenged in the context of Tanja Ostojic´’s art works through the everyday problems such as the globalization, market, virtual presence, stock exchange, gender roles, etc. She uses the procedures and material used in advertising campaigns: posters, flyers, and Internet advertisements in order to contrast the multiplication and proliferation of images to the uniqueness of her ‘real’ body, and also in order to interrupt the flickering ‘symbolic chain of signifiers’ with controlled interjection of her own image within it. The main target of Tanja Ostojic´’s work is the over-identification with the established regimes of power and representation through which the objectification of the female body usually takes place. Her body is only one of her media that she uses in order to stress the urgency for questioning these issues. author biography Suzana Milevska is a curator from Skopje, Macedonia, currently a Ph.D. Candidate at the Visual Cultures Department, Goldsmiths College – University of London.

references

Zˇizˇek, S. ‘Why are Laibach and NSK not fascists?’ Originally published in M’ARS (Ljubljana: Moderna Galerija), Vol. 3/4 http://www.nskstate.com/appendix/articles/whyarelaibach.php. Danius, S. and Jonsson, S. (1993) ‘An Interview with Gayatri Chakravorti Spivak’ Boundary, 20(2): Q2 24–50. Milevska, S. (2003) ‘Resistance that Cannot Be Recognised as Such – Interview with Gayatri C. Spivak’ Identity, No. 5. Skopje (in print). Q3 Butler, J. (1997) The Psychic Life of Power, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 118. Badiou, A. (1991) ‘On a finally objectless subject’ in E. Cadava, P. Connor and J.-L. Nancy, (1991) UNCORRECTEDeditors. Who Comes After the Subject?, NewPROOF York and London: Routledge, 24.

doi:10.1057/palgrave.fr.9400243

Suzana Milevska feminist review 78 2005 7 ISSUE 28 BONES WINTER 2007/08 Tatlin, or, Ruinophilia

SVETLANA BOYM HTTP://WWW.CABINETMAGAZINE.ORG/ISSUES/28/BOYM2.PHP

The early twenty-first century exhibits a strange ruinophilia, a fascination with ruins that goes beyond postmodern quotation marks. In our increasingly digital age, ruins appear as an endangered species, as physical embodiments of modern paradoxes reminding us of the blunders of modern teleologies and technologies alike, and of the riddles of human freedom.1

Ruin literally means “collapse” but actually, ruins are more about remainders and reminders. A tour of ruins leads you into a labyrinth of ambivalent prepositions—“no longer” and “not yet,” “nevertheless” and “albeit”—that play tricks with causality. Ruins make us think of the past that could have been and the future that never took place, tantalizing us with utopian dreams of escaping the irreversibility of time. Walter Benjamin saw in ruins “allegories of thinking itself,” a meditation on ambivalence.2 At the same time, the fascination with ruins is not merely intellectual but also sensual. Ruins give us a shock of vanishing materiality. Suddenly our critical lens changes and instead of marveling at grand projects and utopian designs we begin to notice weeds and dandelions in the crevices of the stones, cracks on modern transparencies, and rust on the discarded Blackberries in our ever more crowded closets.

While half-destroyed buildings and architectural fragments might have existed since the beginning of human culture, ruinophilia did not. There is a historic distinctiveness to the “ruin gaze” that can be understood as the particular optics that frames our relationship to ruins. The ruin gaze is colored by nostalgia, but nostalgia, too, is not what it used to be. Its object is forever elusive, and our way of making sense of this longing for home is also in constant flux.

In my understanding, nostalgia is not merely anti-modern, but coeval with the modern project itself.3 Like modernity, nostalgia has a utopian element, but it is no longer directed toward the future. Sometimes it is not directed toward the past either, but rather sideways. The nostalgic feels stifled within the conventional confines of time and space. The ruins of twentieth-century modernity, as seen through the contemporary prism, both undercut and stimulate the utopian imagination, constantly shifting and deterritorializing our dreamscape.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Georg Simmel formulated a theory of ruins that resonates with contemporary preoccupations. According to Simmel, ruins are the opposite of the perfect moment pregnant with potentialities; they reveal in “retrospect” what this epiphanic moment had in “prospect.”4 Yet they do not merely signal decay but also a certain imaginative perspectivism in its hopeful and tragic dimension. Simmel saw in the fascination with ruins a peculiar form of “collaboration” between human and natural creation. The contemporary ruin-gaze is the gaze reconciled to perspectivism, to conjectural history and spatial discontinuity. The contemporary ruin-gaze requires an acceptance of disharmony and of the contrapuntal relationship of human, historical, and natural temporality. Rather than post-modern, we can call it “off-modern”: it involves exploration of the side-alleys of twentieth-century history at the “margins of error” of major theoretical and historical narrative, tracing alternative genealogies of modernity from Viktor Shklovksy’s diagonal “knight’s move” to Tatlin’s spirals. Looking back at the ruins of the twentieth century, we see more paradoxical mergers: between suprahuman state models and human practices, between individual aspirations and collective pressure, between ascending dreams and down-to-earth everyday survivals. The ruin-gaze challenges the notion of the “originality of the avant-garde” (Rosalind Krauss) and of the continuity of the utopian vision between the artistic avant-garde and the socialist state (Boris Groys).5 Instead, it reveals the internal diversity of the avant-garde, its singularities and eccentricities that proved to be as historically relevant and persistent as its visionary elements and collective utopianism.

Tatlin standing in front of the model of the Monument to the Third International, 1920. Courtesy David King Collection. The model of Tatlin’s tower, being used in demonstration, 1 May 1925. Courtesy David King Collection.

RUINED CONSTRUCTION SITE Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International (1919–1925) was meant to be radically anti- monumental. As a manifesto of the architectural revolution, the Tatlin tower challenged both the “bourgeois” Eiffel Tower and the Statue of Liberty at once. Moreover, it aspired to outdo Peter the Great’s urban ambitions with a new attempt to score a victory over unruly nature. This tower of iron and glass consisted of three rotating glass volumes: a cube, a pyramid, and a cylinder. The cube was supposed to house the “Soviet of the People’s Commissars” (Sovnarkom) and turn at the rate of one revolution a year; the pyramid, intended for the executive and administrative committees of the Third International, would rotate once a month; and the cylinder, a center for information and propaganda, would complete one revolution daily. Radio waves would extend the tower into the sky. Oriented towards the cosmos, the monument did not merely defy the hierarchy of traditional architectural and sculptural styles, but the force of gravity itself. The dramatically open spiral shape of the tower represented the “movement of the liberation of humanity,” challenging the old-fashioned figurative allegory of the Statue of Liberty.

In fact, the tower embodied many explicit and implicit meanings of the word revolution. The word came from scientific discourse and originally meant repetition and rotation. Only in the seventeenth century did it begin to signify its opposite: a breakthrough, an unrepeatable event. The history of the tower reflects upon the ambivalent relationship between art and science, revolution and repetition. Shaped as a spiral, a favorite Marxist-Hegelian form, the tower culminated in a radical opening on top, suggesting unfinalizability, not synthesis. In fact, the tower commemorated the short-lived utopia of the permanent artistic revolution, of which Tatlin was one of the leaders. He declared that the revolution did not begin in 1917 but in 1914 with an artistic transformation; political revolutions followed in the steps of the artistic one, mostly unfaithfully.

The art historian Nikolai Punin described the monument as the anti-ruin par excellence. In his view, Tatlin’s revolutionary architecture reduced to ashes the Classical and Renaissance tradition, and the “charred ruins of Europe are now being cleared.”6 The writer Ilya Ehrenburg believed that the tower was an answer to all those figurative official monuments that he called “plaster idiots,” including Marx’s “which as a tribute to contemporary thought has been trimmed by an Assyrian barber.”7 Tatlin’s tower sabotaged the perfect verticality of the Eiffel Tower by choosing the form of a spiral and leaning to one side.

Yet uncannily, Tatlin’s monument was not free from the “ruin’s charm” despised by revolutionary thinkers and artists from Malevich to Guy Debord. Lissitsky praised Tatlin’s tower for its synthesis of technical and artistic knowledge, old and new forms: ”Here the Sargon Pyramid at Khorsabad was actually recreated in a new material with a new content.”8 The edifice in Khorsabad was actually a ziggurat, a pyramidal structure with a flat top that most likely corresponded to the mythical shape of the Tower of Babel, which in turn resembled the ziggurat at Babylon called Etemenenanki.9 So in its attempt to be the anti-Eiffel Tower, Tatlin’s tower started to resemble the Tower of Babel, which was in itself an unfinished utopian monument turned mythical ruin. Moreover, in the case of the Tower of Babel, the tale of architectural utopia and its ruination is mirrored by the parable about language. The Tower of Babel, we recall, was built to ensure perfect communication with God. Its failure ensured the survival of art. Since then, every builder of a tower has dreamed of touching the sky, though, of course, the gesture remained forever asymptotic.

Every “functional” modern tower evokes this mythic malfunctioning of the original communication. Roland Barthes’s poetic commemoration of the uselessness of the Eiffel Tower could easily apply to its Soviet rival as well. Barthes wrote that while Eiffel himself saw his tower “in the form of a serious object, rational, useful, men return it to him in the form of a great baroque dream which quite naturally touches on the borders of the irrational.”10 Much of visionary architecture, in Barthes’s view, embodies a profound double movement; it is always “a dream and a function, an expression of a utopia and instrument of a convenience.” Barthes’s Eiffel Tower was an “empty” memorial that contained nothing, but from the top of it you could see the world. It became an optical device for a vision of modernity. Tatlin’s tower played a similar role as an observatory for the palimpsest of revolutionary panoramas that included ruins and construction sites alike. Athanasius Kircher, The Tower of Babel, 1679.

Unlike the Eiffel Tower, Tatlin’s was never built. The failure of its realization is not due merely to engineering problems and concerns about feasibility. The tower was both behind and ahead of its time, clashing with the architectural trends of the Soviet regime. It appeared as an incomplete theatrical set, not gigantic but human-scale, a testimony to revolutionary transience. Leon Trotsky wrote that Tatlin’s project gave “an impression of scaffolding which someone has forgotten to take away.”11 In fact, it remained “a scaffolding” for future architecture. Tatlin, faithful to avant-garde “technique,” left no professional architectural drawings of the tower, offering space for unpredictability and imagination. Even the original model of the tower has not been preserved. Most of the few remaining photographs are from November 1920 and May 1925 when the model of the tower was paraded during Soviet demonstrations.12 In 1920, articles about the tower appeared in the Munich art magazine Der Ararat and caught the attention of the emerging Dadaists. “Art is dead,” declared the Dadaists. “Long live the Machine Art of Tatlin!”13 Yet to some extent, the Dadaists’ celebration of the death of art via Tatlin’s spiral guillotine was an act of cultural mistranslation and a common Western misconception about the Russian avant-garde. By no means was Tatlin a proponent of machine-assisted artistic suicide, especially not at the time of the revolution when “the death of art” was more than a metaphor. Instead, Tatlin argued against the “tyranny of forms born by technology without the participation of artists.” His own slogans, “Art into Life” and “Art into Technology!”, do not merely suggest putting art in the service of life or technology, or putting life in the service of political or social revolution.14 Rather, they propose to revolutionize technology and society by opening horizons of imagination and moving beyond mechanistic clichés and what Tatlin dubbed “constructivism in quotation marks.”15 The Stalinist dream-tower. Artist’s impression of Boris Iofan’s winning proposal for the Palace of the Soviets. Though some preliminary construction began in the late 1930s, the Palace was never built. Courtesy David King Collection.

From the very beginning, the Tatlin tower engendered its double—a discursive monument almost as prominent as its architectural original. The writer and literary theorist Victor Shklovsky was one of the few contemporaries who appreciated the unconventional architecture of the tower. For him, this was an architecture of estrangement: its temporal vectors pointed toward the past and the future, toward “the iron age of Ovid” and the “age of construction cranes, beautiful like wise Martians.”16 To cite Walter Benjamin, in this case “modernity quotes prehistory.” The air of the revolution functions as the project’s immaterial glue. Thus, at the origins of modern functionalism in architecture is the poetic function as well as engineering inventions. Describing the “semantics” of the tower, Shklovsky speaks of poetry: “The word in poetry is not merely a word, it drags with it dozens of associations. This work is filled with them like the Petersburg air in the winter whirlwind.”17 Tatlin’s tower appears as a monument to the poetic function itself. In its foundation, the two meanings of the word techne—that of art and of technical craft—continuously duel with one another.

Hence the tower is not merely an engineering failure but an exemplary case study of constructivist architecture. Architecture was imagined as archi-art, as a framework for a worldview and a carcass for futurist dreams. This made it both more and less than architecture in the sense of a built environment. Revolutionary architecture offered a scenography for future experimentation and embodied allegories of the revolution. The most interesting examples of this “archi-architecture” were not built monuments but rather dreamed environments, models, or unintentional memorials. Shklovsky describes his own ludic ruin/construction site that lays a foundation for the subversive practice of estrangement.

It is little known that Shklovsky was the first to describe the Soviet Statue of Liberty in the same collection of essays in which he reviews the Tatlin tower. In The Knight’s Move (1919–21) written in Petrograd, Moscow, and Berlin, Shklovsky offers us a parable about the metamorphoses of historical monuments that functions as a strange alibi for not telling “the whole truth” or even “a quarter of the truth” about the situation in post-revolutionary Russia. In 1918 in Petrograd, a monument to Tsar Alexander III was covered up with a cardboard stall on which were written all kinds of slogans celebrating liberty, art, and revolution.18 The “Monument to Liberty” was one of those transient, non-objective monuments that exemplified early post-revolutionary “visual propaganda” before the granite megalomania of the Stalinist period:

There is a tombstone by the Nicholas Station. A clay horse stands with its feet planted apart, supporting the clay backside of a clay boss ... They are covered by the wooden stall of the “Monument to Liberty” with four tall masts jutting from the corners. Street kids peddle cigarettes, and when militia men with guns come to catch them and take them away to the juvenile detention home, where their souls can be saved, the boys shout “scram!” and whistle professionally, scatter, run toward the “Monument to Liberty.” Then they take shelter and wait in that strange place—in the emptiness beneath the boards between the tsar and the revolution.19

In Shklovsky’s description, the monument to the tsar is not yet destroyed and the monument to liberty is not entirely completed. A dual political symbol turns into a lively and ambivalent urban site inhabited by insubordinate Petrograd street kids in an unpredictable manner. In this description, the monument acquires an interior; a public site becomes a hiding place. Identifying his viewpoint with the dangerous game of the street kids hiding “between the tsar and the revolution,” Shklovsky is looking for the third way—the transitory and playful architecture of freedom. He performs a double estrangement, defamiliarizing both the authority of the tsar and the liberation theology of the revolution. The “third way” here suggests a spatial and a temporal paradox. The monument caught in the moment of historical transformation embodies what Walter Benjamin called the “dialectic at a standstill.” The first Soviet statue of liberty is at once a ruin and a construction site; it occupies the gap between the past and the future in which various versions of Russian history coexist and clash.

In Shklovsky’s view, Tatlin’s tower and other transitional monuments to liberty become monuments to estrangement, not to utopia. Estrangement is an exercise of wonder, of thinking of the world as a question, not as a staging of a grand answer. Thus, estrangement lays bare the boundaries between art and life but never pretends to abolish or blur them. It does not allow for a seamless translation of life into art, nor for the wholesale aestheticization of politics. Art is only meaningful when it is not entirely in the service of real life or realpolitik, and when its strangeness and distinctiveness are preserved. So the device of estrangement can both define and defy the autonomy of art.

Hence, such an understanding of estrangement is different from both Hegelian and Marxist notions of alienation. Artistic estrangement is not to be cured by incorporation, synthesis, or belonging. In contrast to the Marxist notion of freedom that consists in overcoming alienation, Shklovskian estrangement is in itself a form of limited freedom endangered by all kinds of modern teleologies.

By the mid-1920s, the artistic climate in Soviet Russia had changed significantly. In her diary of 1927, Lidiia Ginzburg, the literary critic and younger disciple of Tynianov and Shklovsky, observed: “The merry times of laying bare the device have passed (leaving us a real writer—Shklovsky). Now is the time when one has to hide the device as far as one can.”20 The practice of aesthetic estrangement had become politically suspect already by the late 1920s; by 1930, it had turned into an intellectual crime. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Tatlin worked on another monument of avant-garde technology, the artist’s namesake—Letatlin (a neologism that combines the Russian verb “to fly”—letat’—and the name of the author). If the tower represented a dream of the perfect collective, the new agora for the Third International, Letatlin was an individual flying vehicle. A biomorphic structure, somewhere between a costume and a vehicle, it resembled the firebird from Russian fairy tales stripped to its bare bones. Today, it looks like a vestige of a modern Icarus, a tribute to the dream birds and nonfunctional machines imagined by artists since the Renaissance. Since Tatlin hoped to have his projects sponsored by the aviation industry, his essay on art and technology was introduced by an epigraph quoting Stalin: “Technology decides everything.” Only in Tatlin’s case, technology did not function according to the program. Neither a celebration of Soviet engineering nor a solemn statement of Russian cosmism, Letatlin was an intimate artistic vehicle, a graceful monument to a dream, not a journey into another world. There was nothing otherworldly or technological about Letatlin. Most likely it could not fly. Not in a literal sense, at least.

Letatlin and the tower belong to a very different history of technology, an enchanted technology founded on charisma as much as calculus, linked to pre-modern myths as well as to modern science. What remains of Letatlin are the vertebrae of the wings, the drawings that resemble those of Leonardo da Vinci. What remains of the Monument to the Third International is an architectural skeleton in an old photograph. Both unrealized monuments appear in retrospect poignantly anthropomorphic and interconnected. The tower resembles the ruin of a mythical space station from which Letatlins could soar into the sky.

Tatlin’s artistic life from mid-1920s to the mid-1930s is rich in contradictions refracting its time. He designed the coffin of Russia’s revolutionary poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, who committed suicide in 1930. In 1931, Tatlin received the honor of “distinguished artistic worker” and in 1932 opened a solo exhibition, the only one in his lifetime, where the critics observed—erroneously, it seems—that Tatlin had moved from “art to technology.” In 1934, the OGPU invited him together with other artists to observe the construction of the White Sea Canal, one of the early sites of Stalin’s slave labor. After a few other failed attempts at designing public architecture, Tatlin gradually retreated from the artistic public sphere; he did illustrations for Kharms and other children’s writers (before some of them disappeared during the purges) and worked on theater design. At the official “Artists of Russia” exhibit (1933), Tatlin’s works were shown in a small hall dedicated to “formalist excesses” (a successful predecessor of the “Degenerate Art” exhibition in Germany). Soviet critics proclaimed that Tatlin’s works demonstrated “the natural death of formal experiments in art” and declared Tatlin to be “no artist whatsoever.”

What do artists do when they outlive their cultural relevance? In the Soviet case, we know very little about the last fifteen years of work of the founders of the visual avant-garde, including Vertov and Tatlin who died in 1954 and 1953, respectively. What can an avant-garde artist make after his officially declared death?

Tatlin’s “postmortem” work consists—literally—of nature mortes, in a brown and gray palette painted on the thinly concealed surfaces of the old canvas or icons and of desolate rural landscapes on the backdrops of Socialist Realist theater productions. At first glance, these works seem untimely and in their technique resemble some of Tatlin’s earliest experiments with figurative painting before 1914. In my view, the belated untimeliness of Tatlin’s still lives and landscapes speaks obliquely of their time—the time of purges and war. Still lives are reminders of the other, non-revolutionary rhythms of everyday life. They preserve the dream of home, of domesticated nature, and of a long-standing artistic tradition. Tatlin’s still lives are devoid of visual sensuality; they represent endless variations on the same themes: wild onions and radishes, nondescript garden flowers, knives stuck into the browning flesh of not-so-fresh meat, a skull with an open book. These look like memento mori, foregrounding the fragility of even the most frugal domesticity.21 There is a subtle tension between the ahistorical still lives and the dates on the minimal caption: 1937, 1944, etc. Still life was not politically suspect and was one of the few remaining genres on the margins of Socialist Realism that survived extreme censorship. Strangely, this was one of the favorite genres of prison art promising a temporary escape into a quieter plane of human existence. The maker of still lives excels in the art of minor variations, performing a manual labor of cultural memory.

Moreover, the closer we look at Tatlin’s still lives, the more they appear to be exercises in double vision, but not in a conventional sense of political double-speak. Rather, there is a tension between the figurative flowers and the abstract background. In the foreground are the sparse still lives, and in the background the thickly painted planes from which the counter-reliefs once sprung. These unspectacular and belated stage sets were abandoned by the biomorphic revolutionary Icaruses. No Letatlin would land here anymore; no foundation of a revolutionary tower can be laid on this swampy soil of fear. Tatlin’s late works resemble a desolate “natural setting” in which the projects of the avant-garde have turned into the ruins of the revolution.

* * *

And yet, nevertheless, still … artistic works have their own paradoxical lives.22 The tower remained a phantom limb of the nonconformist tradition of twentieth-century art, in paper architecture, conceptual installations, and new design, opening up another conjectural off-modern history. Talin’s tower was not destined to exist in the open space of the city. Instead, it acquired a second life in many models built around the world since the 1960s. One could distinguish between faithful reconstructions and reflective appropriations. One of the most faithful replicas was reconstructed on the floor of the mosaic factory where Tatlin worked in the last years of his life. And the most recent Russian reconstruction of the tower took place between 1986 and 1991 by a group of young architects and designers who performed a meticulous analysis of Tatlin’s sketches and few photographs.23 Never realized as a radical revolutionary monument, the tower came into material existence as “artistic heritage.” In the post-Soviet remake of the tower, reconstruction and ruination of the revolutionary ideals coincided.

Vladimir Tatlin, A Skull on the Open Book, ca. 1950.

On the other hand, creative if unfaithful appropriations of Tatlin’s project lead to a fascinating intersection between architecture and installation. Ilya Kabakov used the spiral shape of the tower for his House of Projects, returning utopia back to its origins—not in life but in art. Jane and Louise Wilson’s Free and Anonymous Monument, a project based on decaying post-war modern architecture, produces flickering shapes of Tatlin’s tower through a cinematic perspective. Similarly, in some of Gordon Matta-Clark’s “cuts” through buildings slated for demolition, Tatlin’s tower, the model of future architecture, appears via negativa—in the shapes of the cut itself, which echoes the tower’s Babelian spiral. It continues to haunt contemporary art like a specter of lost opportunities.

In these architectural and artistic projects, the off-modern reveals itself in a form of a paradoxical ruinophilia, and in the recycling of industrial forms and materials. New buildings or installations neither destroy the past nor rebuild it; rather, the architect or the artist co-creates with the remainders of history and collaborates with modern ruins, redefining their functions—both utilitarian and poetic. The resulting eclectic, transitional architecture reveals a spatial and temporal extension into the past and the future, into different “existential topographies” of cultural forms. The off-modern gaze acknowledges the disharmony and the contrapuntal relationship between human, historical, and natural temporalities. It is reconciled to perspectivism and conjectural history. Thus, the off-modern perspective allows us to frame utopian projects as dialectical ruins— not to discard or demolish them, but rather to confront them and to incorporate them into our own fleeing present. The portions of this text on Tatlin’s tower are a revised excerpt from Svetlana Boym’s forthcoming book Architecture of the Off-Modern, a FORuM Project Publication of the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture at Columbia University.

1. For more on the theory of ruinophilia, see my forthcoming article “The Ruins of the Avant-Garde” in Andreas Schonle and Julia Hell, eds., The Ruins of Modernity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008).

2. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama (London: NLB, 1977), pp. 177–178.

3. See Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001).

4. Georg Simmel, “The Ruin,” in Kurt H. Wolff, ed., Essays on Sociology, Philosophy and Aesthetics (NY: Harper and Row, 1965), 262. “This is as it were a counterpart of that fruitful moment for which those riches which the ruin has in retrospect are still in prospect.”

5. I refer here to Rosalind Krauss, The Originality of the Avant Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1985) and to Boris Groys, The Total Art of Stalinism: Avant-Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond, trans. Charles Rougle (Princeton University Press, 1992) whose ideas shaped contradictory attitudes towards the avant-garde.

6. Nikolai Punin, Pamiatnik Tret’emu Internatsionalu, Proekt xudozhnika V.E. Tatlina (Petrograd: Otdel IZO Narkomprossa, 1921), p. 1.

7. Ilya Ehrenburg, E pur se muove (Berlin: Gelicon, 1922), p. 18.

8. El Lissitsky, “Basic Premises, Interrelationships between the Arts, the New City, and Ideological Superstructure” in William G. Rosenberg, ed., Bolshevik Visions, Part II (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan,1990), p. 188.

9. John Elderfield, “The Line of Free Men: Tatlin’s ‘Towers’ and the Age of Invention,” Studio International, vol. 178, no. 916, November 1969. Siegfried Giedion has compared Tatlin’s tower to the spiral lantern of Borromini’s S. Ivo della Sapienza and to the figura serpentina in the mannerist and baroque architecture.

10. Roland Barthes, “The Eiffel Tower,” in The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies (New York: Noonday Press, 1979).

11. Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution [1924]. Quoted in Troels Andersen, Vladimir Tatlin, (Stockholm, Moderna Museet, 1968), p. 62.

12. The model shown in November 1920 is discussed in the Club Cézanne where Lunacharsky, Meyerhold, and Mayakovsky debated Tatlin’s projects.

13. These slogans were proposed at the First Dadaist Fair in the summer of 1920 by Grosz, Hausmann, and Heartfield.

14. Vladimir Tatlin, “Iskusstvo v texniku,” in Vystavka rabot zasluzhennogo deiatelia iskusstv V. E Tatlina (Moscow-Leningrad: Ogiz-Izogis, 1932), p. 5.

15. Anatolij Strigalev & Jurgen Harten, Vladimir Tatlin, Retrospektive (Köln: Du Monte Buchverlag, 1993), p. 37.

16. Victor Shklovsky, “Pamiatnik tret’emu internatsionalu,” in Khod konia (Moscow-Berlin: Gelikon: 1923), pp. 108–111.

17. Ibid., 110.

18. The statue was erected by the sculptor Paolo Trubetskoi in 1909 on Znamensky Square near the Nicholas Station, now Vosstaniia Square near the Moscow Railway Station. This is how Shklovsky introduces the story: “No, not the truth. Not the whole truth. Not even a quarter of the truth. I do not dare to speak and awaken my soul. I put it to sleep and covered it with a book, so that it would not hear anything.” Ibid., pp. 196-197.

19. Shklovsky, Khod konia, op. cit., pp. 196–97. For a comparative analysis of Shklovsky’s theory of estrangement, see Svetlana Boym, “Politics of Estrangement: Victor Shklovsky and Hannah Arendt” in Poetics Today, vol. 26, no. 4, Winter 2005, pp. 581–611. 20. Lidiia Ginzburg, Chelovek za pis’mennym stolom (Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1989), p. 59.

21. Contemporary artist Leonid Sokov recalls that in the 1970s during the first Tatlin exhibit since the artist’s death, various elderly women who worked in the mosaic factory or in the local theaters brought with them small pictures of Tatlin’s forgotten still lives that the artist apparently gave them in exchange for money and food.

22. Tatlin’s tower found echoes in another unbuilt monument of the twentieth century: The Palace of Soviets (architect Boris Iofan), which was supposed to have been built on the site of the destroyed Cathedral of Christ the Savior. In the Palace of Soviets, the dynamic and open spiral is made static, turned into a terraced colonnade and decorated with a gigantic statue of Lenin. War interrupted Stalin’s architectural ambitions, relegating the Palace of Soviets to the realm of “paper architecture.” A replica of the cathedral in concrete was built in 1998.

23. The group included D. Dimakov, N. Debrin, I. Fedotov and E. Lapshina. Previous reconstructions of the tower were made in Sweden (1968), England (1971), France (1979), and USA (1980, 1983). There was another reconstruction in Russia made by T. Shapiro, once Tatlin’s collaborator, in 1975 and 1980. Svetlana Boym is a theorist and media artist. She is the author of The Future of Nostalgia (Basic Books, 2001), the novel Ninochka (SUNY Press, 2003), and the forthcoming Architecture of the Off-Modern (Columbia University Press, 2008). She is currently working on an art project, “Nostalgic Technologies,” and finishing a book on freedom. Boym teaches in the Department of Comparative Literature at Harvard University and is an Associate of the Graduate School of Design. For more information, see www.svetlanaboym.com Suzana Milevska

FOUR PATCHES FOR THE WORLD GAME: Game Theory and Art Practice in the Balkans

In the present text, which continues some of my previous explorations of specific applications of different media in the Balkans, I would like to propose a kind of preliminary mapping of artworks created by Balkan artists that mime various games. By copying the appearance, rules or even the entire structure of certain conventional board games (for instance, MonApoly by Tadej Pogačar), interactive electronic games (Match Maker Game by Ana Stojković and There are no Earthquakes in Manhattan by Luchezar Boyadjiev) or video games (Go West by Gentian Shkurti), a number of Balkan artists have applied the metaphor of the game to the cultural, social and political circumstances in which they live and work. One of the main aims of this essay is to present an attempt for a critique of the fetishization of the electronic art and of the new technologies in general as a result and means of the post-colonial process of globalization of the marginal or subaltern societies and art structures. Such a critique is based on the comparison of electronic art works and objects (video tapes, CD-Roms, video, CD-Rom and Internet installations, etc.) with the concepts of fetish and gift. If it seems that the electronic art projects are inevitable in the society of technoculture and that the artists working with high technology can simultaneously criticize it, the question posed here is can the electronic artists really avoid the fetishization of their medium and the turning of the electronic art objects in commodities, or, moreover, can the artists coming from technologically undeveloped countries avoid the acceptance of high-tech art as a gift – in real and phenomenological sense of this term. In the context of the cultural translation of different media I would like to examine how some of these artists stretch the ‘rules of the game’ to suit their needs and how the game metaphor functions in such a complex political situation. While game theory is not always and entirely applicable when analysing social, economic, or political ‘games’ in reality and may even fall short when the analysed ‘games’ are art projects, nevertheless I found some of its assumptions helpful for making comparisons between reality, ‘real games’ and the ‘art games’. As the Web Dictionary of Cybernetics and Systems defines it: ‘Game theory is a branch of mathematical analysis developed to study decision making in conflict situations. Such a situation exists when two or more decision makers who have different objectives act on the same system or share the same resources.’ 1 The definition goes on to state that five initial assumptions are essential in order to select the best decision or set of decisions for finding the ‘optimum strategy’ for winning the game. Certain obvious parallels may be drawn between this theory and the kind of daily decisions we all make. The first two assumptions presented in the definition sound very close to what usually happens on the playing field of life — and especially to what has been taking place in the Balkans over the past fifteen years:

‘1. Each decision maker [‘PLAYER’] has available to him two or more well- specified choices or sequences of choices (called ‘PLAYS’).’ 2

(Consider, for example, the decision faced by each of the former Yugoslav Republics as to whether or not they would remain part of Yugoslav federation.)

‘2. Every possible combination of plays available to the players leads to a well- defined end-state (win, loss, or draw) that terminates the game.’ 3

Although this assumption also sounds as if it might be applicable to the Balkan context, it is far more difficult for us to judge who won and who lost in the making of certain decisions. Still, the game theory assumption that decision-makers have full knowledge of the rules of the game but no knowledge about their opponents’ moves (according to the Web Dictionary of Cybernetics and Systems) can be discussed in the context Yugoslav conflicts of the 1990s. In this regard, in fact, it is much more interesting to observe how game theory differs from what happens in real life and, indeed, how the general assumptions of this sophisticated theory may even contradict life experience:

‘4. Each decision maker has perfect knowledge of the game and of his opposition; that is, he knows in full detail the rules of the game as well as the payoffs of all other players. 5. All decision makers are rational; that is, each player, given two alternatives, will select the one that yields him the greater payoff.’ 4

These last two assumptions can hardly be applied to everyday life situations and are, in particular, of little use when it comes to explaining the events that took place during the wars in the former Yugoslavia. None of the ‘players’ had ‘perfect knowledge’ of what was going on, nor there were ‘rules’, while the decisions that were made were in no way ‘rational’ and the ‘payoff’ was impossible to estimate. To a certain degree, this essay also questions the processes behind the fetishisation of the electronic arts and, more generally, advanced technologies. I am interested in stimulating a debate about the dangers of fetishising the electronic arts in the Balkan region and asking whether the increase in the use of new technologies in art (which have only rarely been accompanied by serious critical and theoretical discussion) may be conceived as a result of such postcolonial processes as globalisation and the subordination of marginal societies and their art systems. To this end, my inquiry into the nature of the relationship between art and advanced technologies will be based on a comparison of electronic artworks (including videotapes, CD-ROMs, video projectors, computers and other technical equipment, all of which may become art objects within the framework of certain installations) using the notions of fetish and gift. If it seems that electronic art projects are today inevitable and have already been widely embraced by techno-cultural society, we should remember that in many cases high- tech artists were among the first regular practitioners of these more advanced technologies who not only used them but also subjected them to serious critique. Conceptual electronic artists have managed to avoid fetishising the medium inasmuch as they have refused to turn their electronic art objects into commodities, just as they try to avoid turning any art object into a commodity. Nevertheless, the inevitable question arises as to whether artists from technologically underdeveloped countries are in a position to avoid accepting the ‘gift’ (in both the practical and a phenomenological sense of the word) of unequal exchange that is involved and affects their use of new technologies and new media. In order to contextualise our discussion within a wider theoretical framework, we might refer to Heidegger’s well-known description of technology as ‘a means and human activity’5 or Habermas’s understanding that the great problem of technological modernisation has little to do with technology per se but rather with its influencing life by its tendency to authorise ‘instrumental’ and strategic notions of rationality so as to de- legitimise genuine practical or political issues (as subjective).6 Myths of technology and development are inevitably linked in a firm and inseparable relationship, but they are also intertwined with the ‘epistemology of democracy’.7 The power of cultural strategies enforced by democratic civil epistemology and technology has imposed itself and has already started to create new social and political realities.8 Thus, it can hardly be expected that many scientists would be willing to participate in any debate about ‘usable systems’ that posed such questions as, ‘Could we gain a better understanding of usability if we collected our data within the context of the users’ real work?’ or ‘How do we people find computer systems usable?’9 The real concerns here are not whether machines are like people in their thoughts and actions, but whether they constitute tools that can be used objectively. Terry Winograd finds the gap between the theory and practice of technology to be very large indeed. In his view, although ‘there is highly developed and successful body of practice in making usable systems, the theoretical discussion about usability is dominated by a background based on a narrow hint of cognitivism.’10 On the other hand, for the contextualists, usability has its basis in the experience of the users, ‘the phenomenology of usability’: ‘Only users know their own experience of the product, how they are using tools to do their work and their perceived requirements of their work.’11 Critiques of the grand narratives of development and globalisation, such as those recently proposed by Edward Said, Homi K. Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak and others, have shown these processes to be extremely demanding in regard to the acceptance by underdeveloped countries of new technological means, especially when this has been followed by unequal development and democratisation in the system of application. The continuous rise of electronic art objects and installations to the top of the art-world hierarchy is only one symptom of such paradoxes. In other words, high technology, on the one hand, serves as a tool for unequal exchange in the so-called ‘globalised’ market, while, on the other hand, artists from Eastern Europe (and other underdeveloped regions) use high technology to demonstrate that there is little difference between the artworks they produce and the work of artists from more developed countries. Questions about standardising the use of new technologies and media in art and whether or not they make a difference in the work itself will not be treated here, since my main concern has more to do with the mechanisms involved in choosing to use new media rather than with the content and quality of the art they help to create.

I would now like to clarify the distinction between the notions of fetish and gift as they relate to the electronic art object. In order to understand this distinction we can turn to Slavoj Žižek’s account of the Marxian notion of commodity fetishism, which he discusses with reference to the work of Lacan. Commodity fetishism can be understood as being ‘a definite social relation between men that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things’.12 The value of a certain commodity assumes the quasi-‘natural’ property of another commodity, namely, money. The essential feature of commodity fetishism, consequently, does not imply the famous replacement of man with things (‘a relation between men assumes the form of a relation between things’); ‘rather, it consists of a certain misrecognition which concerns the relations between a structured network and one of its elements’.13 In this regard, we should also consider Žižek’s radical interpretation of Marx as an anticipator of Lacan’s theory of reflection and identification in the mirror phase. According to Žižek, the identification of the king solely through his subjects sounds very much like Lacan’s description of subjectification and identification with the Other. When it comes to identifying with things, Žižek makes the paradoxical observation that commodity fetishism appears in capitalist societies where there is exchange between free people but does not exist in societies where there is a relation of fetishism between men themselves, that is, in pre-capitalist societies. In such societies commodity fetishism has not developed because the production there is ‘natural’, that is, products are not produced for the market.14 On the contrary, in a society where relations between men are not ‘relations of domination and servitude’, where people see in each other only other subjects who share similar concerns, and where these other people are of interest to you only if they possess something — a commodity that can satisfy your needs — then in such a society commodity fetishism, that is, the social relation between things, serves as a cover for real social relations between individuals, which can be treated as a ‘hysteria of conversion’.15 Taking account, then, of the complex paradoxical nature of the notion of fetish/commodity, I would propose another way of approaching the issues of unequal exchange and the use of new technologies, in art and in general, in underdeveloped countries. The notion of gift, which has been so extensively discussed by Marcel Mauss and other anthropologists, is usually considered within the framework of primitive societies as one of the agents of cultural difference. Jacques Derrida, too, later introduced it as a subject for deconstruction when he stated that such a concept as gift is always aporetic: it cannot exist inasmuch as it always already implies a favour in return.16 Here the deconstruction of the concept ‘free gift’ may help us understand what happens when a country in the process of development accepts unquestioningly the offer of a technological paradise and so becomes a prisoner of the strategic situation dictated by its own ‘desire to be agents of the developed society’.17 Of course, the development offered by technologisation means ‘creating jobs’, but because this is a ‘free gift’, the workers who fill these jobs usually have to give up certain forms of social welfare and at the end of the day must be satisfied with less. The drawbacks of enlightenment for its own sake alone — a development in which the only thing developed is a condition of dependence in an eternal vicious circle — are not so obvious when it comes to the use of high technology in art. The illusion of equal access18 is reinforced by numerous calls for entry, open Internet competitions and projects especially designed for artists from the Balkans and Eastern Europe. What I would like to argue here is that the concept of multiculturalism in art is to some extent inimical to electronic art. The fetishisation of electronic art objects has contributed to the unequal distribution of wealth and power within the art scene in a way that resembles the stock market. On first sight, there is nothing wrong with facilitating and promoting high-tech art. But alongside the issue of whether artists from underdeveloped countries will ever be true competitors, there are other, not so obvious, questions that point to no less important problems inherent in such ‘cultural’ policies. *** I would now like to discuss four separate projects created by Balkan artists who sought to overcome the inner contradictions of the medium of the game as they adapted it from various economic, cultural or political contexts to suit their own intents. Tadej Pogačar, in his board game MonApoly (2004), proposes a ‘new cartography’ of global sex work and trafficking in humans. ‘Instead of accumulating capital, [the game] explains the geopolitics of sex work in the period of global capitalism and new economy,’ Pogačar says. From the artist’s description of the project, it is clear that although MonApoly is inspired by the famous Monopoly game both visually and in its basic rules, the artist’s aim extends beyond a simple pun. For him, it is important to provide players with relevant information about global sex work, activist organisations, crime groups and the organised slave trade in general (recall the fourth assumption from the Web Dictionary’s definition of game theory). The fact that players can finance and construct a safe house, or support the activities of organisations that fight for the rights of sex workers, gives the audience a limited but nevertheless important chance to enter into the ‘real’ game of human trafficking. MonApoly is part of Pogačar’s long-term project CODE:RED, in which the artist explores various aspects of prostitution and sex work as a kind of parallel economy. The first public presentation of this bigger project took place at the Venice Biennale in 2001, when Pogačar, as Slovenia’s official representative at the Biennale (with the financial support of the Slovenian Ministry of Culture and in collaboration with the Committee for the Civil Rights of Prostitutes from Pordenone, Italy) organised the First World Congress of Sex Workers and the New Parasitism. In a tent at the entrance to Venice’s Giardini park he brought together sex worker organisations from Europe, Asia, America, and Australia. Such a ‘patch’ to the well-known Monopoly game, while perhaps not very functional, nevertheless targets in its critique both the capitalist ‘game’, which teaches even the youngest children the strict social distinction between winners and losers, and the globalising tendencies of world trade, which do not circumvent even the world’s ‘oldest profession’. The game Go West, created by the Albanian artist Gentian Shkurti, presents an even more explicit example of how the medium of a commercial video game may be transferred into the art field using the game structure to critique its own consequences. Shkurti’s game is centred on the phenomenon of illegal refugees from Albania who travel by night in tiny boats across the Adriatic to Italy. They become the main targets to be shot and killed by the Italian police, the carabinieri. The consumerist society, where among other products there is abundance of entertaining but violent games, is seen as an ideal that is often worth the risk of dangerous and forbidden journeys to ‘the other side’. But for those who undertake such journeys, even if they complete their ‘adventures’ in the most successful way, there is only a very low-tech simulation of an award.

While the typical hi-tech shoot-’em-up drags the player into a full immersion battle (and into the subsequent withdrawal symptoms), a game like Go West challenges the user to find his/her own role not within the game narrative and roles structure, but rather outside the game itself.19 In this sense, the whole game Go West may be interpreted as a ‘patch’ — a term that refers to the recently developed technical capacity that allows players to modify their favourite games by adding programme variables. Only here the programme is actually the entire world of the digital communication:

Not only does Go West mix fun with a certain degree of ambiguity, but it shows that low tech interventions may well become tactical tools to deliver radical ideas even in the over-crowded world of digital communication, which means that the game of modifications can be part of a wider communication strategy that expands outside the gamers’ on-line communities.20

Another project that deals with a kind of cultural translation of power games is the interactive Internet-based Match Maker Game (2001) created by the Macedonian artist Ana Stojković (in collaboration with the electronic engineer Danko Ilić).21 In her description of the project, Stojković claims that the Japanese language has no exact translation for the word ‘love’, or more precisely, the Western concept behind this word. In her view (and she quotes a passage from James Clavell’s novel Shogun to support it), love is a ‘differentia specifica’ of the Christian religious and cultural conceptualisation of human behaviour and has no exact match in Japanese culture. We are told that in the older language of neighbouring China love exists as a character, but it is not recommended to utter the word personally and directly. This is the basic information behind the Match Maker Game, which is intended to challenge the Western obsession with the ‘games’ surrounding love — something that, in the artist’s opinion, is not always essential for the perfect couple.22 One could say that the artist sees the concept of love as inevitably limited by societal structures even as she takes account of the fact that love games are always predestined and embedded in the gendered and patriarchal society. While playing the game it becomes obvious that its structure was conceived as copying the marketing campaigns for tourist agencies; the game presents itself as a simple competition: ‘Win a trip to Japan’. All you have to do to play the game and win the trip, one that will presumably offer you a holiday away from love, is to match the pairs of hidden images — all of which, except for two hearts, are symbols associated with Japan. Like other simple board game models, this game is based on the player’s memory, ability to make associations and quick thinking. While the structure of Stojković’s game mimes that of many successful competitions, it is used in a very ironic way: we might say it adheres to the assumption of such marketing competitions that by playing the game you will begin to consider taking a vacation from love so that, even if you don’t ‘win’ the game, you will go ahead and book a holiday. Through these two different movements — introducing a discussion on the cultural limitations of the concept of love and critiquing its commercialisation by miming a marketing campaign — it becomes obvious that the game is conceived as a critique of the West’s marketing of even the most abstract concepts. At first glance, the cultural critique of the catachrestic concept of love sounds as if this was in contradiction to embracing an advertising campaign that mimes capitalistic strategies of consumerism. But when we juxtapose the rules of love games and the rules of consumer games (neither set of rules is explained by the artist, who presumes there is no need for this), it becomes obvious that both are similarly driven by obsessions: the one to win, the other to gain the ‘object of desire’. Of course, the rule that there is no ‘free gift’ in the wider societal context is unwritten; it becomes obvious only after you win/lose the game. For example, in real competitions of this sort you learn very soon that, if you win, you have to pay very expensive taxes, the trip is on basis of two people sharing, meals are not included, etc., while the way you ‘pay’ for the gift in the vicious circle of the love game is even more complex and clandestine. Luchezar Boyadjiev’s ironic project No Earthquakes in Manhattan (2001) presents the most radical departure from any belief in the possibility of winning. The artist has invented a computer game where the characters/objects to be shot and killed are isolated riders from the famous Albrecht Dürer etching The Four Riders of Apocalypse. The player is supposed to exterminate the ‘bad guys’ and so save us from the ultimate disaster. The text ‘Apocalypse No More’, which appears on the screen after you have killed the ‘bearers’ of the Apocalypse, represents the artistic deconstruction of any belief that Apocalypse can be averted. This ironic text, which plays on the usual good/evil structures of most such games, is juxtaposed with printed texts: newspaper clippings about various end-of-the- world prophecies prompted by a solar eclipse or some big catastrophe. In a way, these clippings underscore the fact that for many people the struggle with moral and material calamities is something more than a computer game. Computer games might seem like ‘free gifts’ to spoiled children, but every once in a while they become dangerous ‘patches’ for the world game. Artists who develop works that follow game structures are probably more aware of this danger than most ordinary ‘users’ of games or even the world-game industries.23 An older work by the Polish artist Zbigniew Libera, which takes the form of Lego block kits for making ‘concentration camps’ — Correcting Device: Lego Concentration Camp (1996), composed of original Lego™ plastic blocks and boxes made by the artist (for example, box no. 6773 is titled ‘Crematorium and Guard Tower’) — offers perhaps the best proof how such ‘patches’ can transcend the rules of the game and enter the world of adults, how the boundary lines between reality, ‘real games’ and ‘art games’ can easily be blurred and even erased. The curators of the group project The Making of Balkan Wars: The Game (2004), which included a few art game projects (such as Shkurti’s Go West), emphasise this phenomenon on their web site:

Both geopolitical war games and epic strategy video games are interrelated in this multi-media project. While virtual battle scenes are celebrated as the ‘most realistic ever,’ contemporary warfare has begun to resemble science fiction.24

In conclusion, I would like to note that it is very difficult to estimate the emotional and psychological impact art games might have if they are produced and played to the same extent as ‘real games’. If that ever happens, I suggest the phenomenon be explored by experts. For the time being, however, these kinds of art projects/games are produced only in limited editions and remain only conceptual experiments or, if you like, ‘conceptual fetishes’ for adults.

NOTES:

1. Web Dictionary of Cybernetics and Systems http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/ASC/GAME_THEOR.html 2. Ibid., http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/ASC/GAME_THEOR.html 3. Ibid., http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/ASC/GAME_THEOR.html 4. Ibid., http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/ASC/GAME_THEOR.html 5. Hubert L. Dreyfus, "Heidegger on Gaining a Free Relation to Technology", in Technology & the Politics of Knowledge, ed. by Andrew Freenberg and Alaistair Hannay, Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indiapolis, 1995, p. 100 6. Robert B Pippin, "On the Notion of Technology as Ideology", in Technology & the Politics of Knowledge, ed. by Andrew Freenberg and Alaistair Hannay, Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indiapolis, 1995, p.55 7. Yaron Ezrahi, "Technology and the Civil Epistemology of Democracy", in Technology & the Politics of Knowledge, ed. by Andrew Freenberg and Alaistair Hannay, Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indiapolis, 1995, p.159 8. Ibid., p.168 9. Terry Winograd, "Heidegger and the Design of Computer Systems", in Technology & the Politics of Knowledge, ed. by Andrew Freenberg and Alaistair Hannay, Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indiapolis, 1995, p. 115 10. Ibid., p. 116 11. Ibid., p. 117 12. Slavoj Žižek, "How did Marx Invent the System", in Mapping of Ideology, ed. by S. Žižek, Verso, London, New York, 1999, p. 308 13. Ibid., p. 310 14. Ibid., p. 310 15. Ibid., p. 314 16. John D. Caputo, "Apostles of Impossible", in God, the Gift and Postmodernism, ed. by John D. Caputo and Michael J. Scanlon, Indiana University Press, Bloomingtom and Indianopolis, 1999, p. 204 17. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason - Toward a History of the Vanishing Present, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, England, 1999, p. 357 18. For a more precise argumentation on the importance of the problem of unequal accessibility to the medium of ready-made between artists from different cultural contexts see: Suzana Milevska, "The Ready-made and the Question of Fabrication of Objects and Subjects", Afterimage, Rochester, Vol. 28, No.4 pp.27-29 19. Vanni Brusadin. No Cheats for the Unplayable Games. http://www.ram- net.net/articles/text2_b.htm 20. Ibid. http://www.ram-net.net/articles/text2_b.htm 21. http://www.cac.org.mk/capital/project/matchmaker/index.html 22. Ana Stojković. ‘Match Maker Game’. In Capital and Gender – International Project for Art and Theory. (Catalogue) Ed. By Suzana Milevska. Museum of the City of Skopje, 2001, p. 145 23. Making the Balkan Wars: The Game. www.personalcinema.org/wargame 1 IIASA [International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis], “Game Theory,” in Web Dictionary of Cybernetics and Systems, (retrieved 24 February 2005). 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid. 5 Hubert L. Dreyfus, ‘Heidegger on Gaining a Free Relation to Technology’, in Andrew Freenberg and Alaistair Hannay, eds., Technology and the Politics of Knowledge (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1995), 100. 6 Robert B. Pippin, ‘On the Notion of Technology as Ideology’, in Freenberg and Hannay, eds., 55. 7 Yaron Ezrahi, ‘Technology and the Civil Epistemology of Democracy‘, in Freenberg and Hannay, eds., 159. 8 Ibid., 168. 9 Terry Winograd, ‘Heidegger and the Design of Computer Systems’, in Freenberg and Hannay, eds., p. 115. 10 Ibid., 116. 11 Ibid., 117. 12 Slavoj Žižek, ‘How did Marx Invent the System’, in Slavoj Žižek, ed., Mapping of Ideology (London: Verso, 1999), 308. 13 Ibid., 310. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid., 314. 16 John D. Caputo, ‘Apostles of Impossible’, in John D. Caputo and Michael J. Scanlon, eds., God, the Gift and Postmodernism (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1999), 204. 17 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1999), 357. 18 For a more precise argument concerning the importance of the problem of unequal access to the medium of the ready- made among artists from different cultural contexts, see Suzana Milevska, ‘The Ready-made and the Question of Fabrication of Objects and Subjects‘, Afterimage 28 (no. 4): 27-29. 19 Vanni Brusadin, ‘No Cheats for the Unplayable Games’, (retrieved 24 February 2005). 20 Ibid. 21 See (retrieved 24 February 2005). 22 Ana Stojković, ‘Match Maker Game’, in Suzana Milevska, ed., Capital and Gender — International Project for Art and Theory, exhibition catalogue (Skopje: Museum of the City of Skopje, 2001), 145. 23 See nn. 9 and 11. 24 ‘The Making the Balkan Wars: The Game’, (retrieved 24 February 2005). Central and South Eastern European Art Histories Course Literature Required Reading Howard, Jeremy. East European Art: 1650-1950 (Oxford History of Art).Oxford, USA: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Mansbach, Steven, A. Modern Art in Eastern Europe: From the Baltic to the Balkans, ca. 1890-1939, Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Gender Check. Edited by Bojana Pejic, MUMOK Vienna and Erste Foundation, Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther Konig, 2009-2010, 230-6. Dubravka Djuri and Misko Šuvakovic. Impossible Histories. Boston, MA.: MIT Press, 2003, XII In Search of Balkania A User’s Mannual. Edited by Roger Conover, Eda Cufer and Peter Weibel, Graz, Austria: Neue Galerie Graz am Landesmuseum Joanneum, 2002, 121 East Art Map. Edited by IRWIN, London: MIT Press/Afterall, 2006, 252-260. Body and the East - From the 1960s to the Present (Catalogue). Edited by Zdenka Badovinac. Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1999. After the Wall, I-II, (Catalogue), Edited by Bojana Pejic and David Elliott, Stockholm: Moderna Museet, 16. 10. 1999 Milevska, Suzana. ‘The Eternal Return of Race: Reflections on East European Racism’ (with Arun Saldanha). Deleuze and Race. Edited by Arun Saldanha and Jason Michael Adams, Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press, 2013, 225-247. ---. Gender Difference in the Balkans. Archives of representations of gender difference and agency in visual culture and contemporary arts in the Balkans. Saarbrucken, Germany: VDM Verlag, 2010. ---. The Renaming Machine-the book. Ed. By Suzana Milevska (texts by Suzana Milevska, Gayatri Chakraworty Spivak, Kristine Stiles, Jean-Paul Martinon, Zhivka Valiavicharska, et. al.). Ljubljana, Slovenia: P.A.R.A.S.I.T.E. Institute, 2010. ---.‘The Hope and Potentiality of the Paradigm of Regional Identity.’ ManifestaCompanion. Ed. by Adam Budak and Nina Montmann, Milano: Silvana Editoriale, 2008, 330-337. ---.‘Is Balkan Art History Global.’ Is Art History Global? Edited by James Elkins. New York: Routledge, 2006, 214-222. Soja, Edward W. Postmodern Geographies: the reassertion of space in critical social theory. London: Verso, 1989. Žižek, Slavoj. ‘The Spectre of Balkan.’ The Journal of the International Institute. 6. 2. (Winter 1999), 15 May 2002 ‘Why are Laibach and NSK not Fascists?’ Originally published in M'ARS (Ljubljana: Moderna Galerija), 3/4. 22 March 2002

General Bibliography and Optional Reading Ahmed, Leila. ‘The Discourse of the Veil.’ Veil: Veiling, Representation and Contemporary Art., ed. David A. Bailey and Gilane Tawadros. London: inIVA, 2003. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. London: Verso, 1988. Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: cultural dimensions of globalization. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. Balkan as a Metaphor - Between Globalization and Fragmentation. Eds. Dušan I. Bjeli and Obrad Savi . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002.

Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Derrida, Jacques. Rogues – Two Essays of Reason. Trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005. Djajic Horváth, Aleksandra . ‘A tangle of multiple transgressions: The western gaze and the Tobelija (Balkan sworn-virgin-cross-dressers) in the 19th and 20th centuries.’ Anthropology Matters Journal, 2003, 2, 10 July, 2005 Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge. Trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith. London: Routledge, 2003.

Glenny, Misha. The Balkans Nationalism, Wars, and the Great Powers, 1804-1999. Penguin Books, 1999.

Goldstein, Joshua S. War and Gender – How Gender Shapes the War System and Vice Versa. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001

Goldsworthy, Vesna. Inventing Ruritania. New Heven: Yale University Press, 1998.

Grémaux, René. ‘Woman Becomes Man in the Balkans.’ The Third Sex., ed. Gilbert Herdt. New York: Zone Books, 1996.

Hallward, Peter, Absolutely Postcolonial – Writing between the Singular and the Specific. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001.

Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000.

Kristeva, Julia. ‘Which Language?’ Crisis of the European Subject. Trans. Susan Fairfield., ed. Samir Dayal. New York: Other Press, 2000.

Lewis, Reina. Gendering Orientalism: race, femininity, and representation. London: Routledge, 1996. Milevska, Suzana. ‘Curating as an Agency of Cultural and Geopolitical Change.’ Continuing Dialogues. Edited by Christa Benzer, Christine Bohler, Christiane Erkharter, Vienna: JRP/Ringier, 2008, 183-191. ------‘With Special Thanks To: A Balkan Curator in First Person Feminine’. Working with Feminism: Curating and Exhibitions in Eastern Europe’. Ed. By Katrin Kivimaa, Tallin, Estonia: TLU/Acta Universitatis Press, 2012, 153-165. ------‘CODE: Red-The Political and Art Economy of Sex Work’. CODE: Red. Edited and preface: Tadej Poga ar, Ljubljana: P.A.R.A.S.I.T.E. Institute, 2011, 185-197. ------‘The Reciprocal Relationship between Art and Visual Culture in the Balkans’. Space (Re)solutions Intervention and Research In Visual Culture. Edited by Peter Mörtenböck and Helge Mooshammer, New Brunswick, USA/London, UK: [transcript] 2011, 101-114. ‘Femina Sacra: Bipower and Paradoxes of Humanity in the Art of Tanja Ostoji ’. Integration Impossible? The Politics of Migration in the Art Work of Tanja Ostoji , Berlin: Argo Books, 2009, 223-9 ------‘The Readymade and the Question of Fabrication of Objects and Subjects’ in Primary Documents - A Sourcebook for Eastern and Central European Art since the 1950s, The MOMA, New York, 2002, 182-191. ------‘Electronic Art: Fetish or Gift.’ The Absolute, The Desperate, The Real. Ed. by Marina Grzini , Gallery of Contemporary Art, Celje, Slovenia, 2001, 47-54. ------‘Cinderella Syndrome’. Future Perspective, Ed. by Marina Grzini , Gallery Cettina, Umag, 2001, 116-9. ------‘Capital and Gender: Wild Being and Tamed Being’ in Capital and Gender. Ed. by Suzana Milevska, Skopje, 2001,16-20. Nochlin, Linda. ‘The Imaginary Orient.’ The Politics of Vision. London: Themes and Hudson, 1989. ---. Representing Women. London: Thames and Hudson, 1999. Pachmanová, Martina. ‘The Double Life of Art in Eastern Europe’. Art Margins. Contemporary Central and East European Art and Visual Culture, 2 November 2009.

Šar evi , Predrag. ‘Sex and Identity of “Sworn Virgins” in the Balkans,’ 10 June 2005 Todorova, Maria. Imagining the Balkans. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. ---. ‘Learning Memory, Remembering Identity.’ Balkan Identities – Nation and Memory. London: Hurst & Company, 2004. Turner, Bryan S. (Bryan Stanley). Orientalism, Postmodernism and Globalism. London: Routledge, 1994. Yegenoglu, Meyda. Colonial Fantasies: towards a feminist reading of Orientalism. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Young, J. C. Robert Colonial Desire Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race. London: Routledge, 1995. Various issues of the journals n-paradoxa, Prelom, ArtMargins