Communist’ Ghosts

ARTISTIC RUPTURES AND THEIR ‘COMMUNIST’ GHOSTS On the post-communist condition as threshold experience in art from and in Eastern Europe Magda Schmukalla PhD in Psychosocial Studies 2017 Birkbeck, University of London 1 To my parents 2 I hereby declare that this thesis is entirely my own work and contributions from other persons are fully cited and referenced. 3 ABSTRACT This thesis theorizes and explores the post-communist condition as a threshold experience. While scholars in the social sciences and humanities have often criticized the notion of post-communism for reproducing discursively the East/West divide, this study argues that it is precisely from within the post-communist threshold that the current hegemonic role of the West can be effectively challenged. I begin by showing how the post-communist condition captures an intense experience of being undone and how, with the abrupt breakdown of a communist order and a gradual return to a capitalist structure, the main pillars of modern subjectivities in Eastern European countries have been fundamentally disturbed. As a consequence ‘post-communist sites’ have turned into places or relations in which ghostly relics of past experiences suddenly crop up with no ideological structure being strong enough to control their haunting. The ghosts returning in this state of collective uncertainty do, however, not only disturb today’s Eastern European site but also, I argue, make the Western subject feel haunted by its ‘post-communist Eastern European other’. My aim is further to explore this particular threshold experience on its own terms. In this study the entry point to its transitory realm is therefore neither theory, nor quantitative or qualitative data but the elusive, contradictory, and often very personal realm of contemporary art. By drawing on Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory I discuss how artworks can be understood as mediators of threshold experiences and how an artistic form of reading particular artworks can allow us to ‘speak’ and think from within such liminal states. I then explore the phenomenological and relational reality of the post-communist threshold through selected artworks, all of which engage in one way or the other with the post-communist site. These readings of ‘post-communist artworks’ lead me through an array of contemporary critical and psychoanalytic theory and make me discuss questions about better worlds, alternative ethics and the politics of art in ways that evade common forms of theoretical and empirical analysis. For although the post-communist condition is a state of extreme disarray, it is also a state of being that contains the potential for an alternative epistemology and equally the potential for transformation. The post- communist threshold, I argue, is thus an opportunity to start thinking about ‘communism’ and radical politics again – and differently. 4 TABLE OF CONTENTS 7 Acknowledgements 8 Trying to speak from a place that never was … 11 Introduction 14 Three parts and two beginnings 19 Transdisciplinarity and psychosocial studies PART I - A beginning 23 Chapter One – Art and thought from beyond the frame 24 Benjamin and Adorno: Two spotlights on the dialectics of cultural production in advanced capitalism 27 Subjectivity, knowledge and the capitalist structure 30 Other ways of knowing 33 Art’s linguistic quality 38 Contemporary art – a departure from Adorno 41 Autonomy understood differently – a return to Adorno 46 In the spotlight – art today PART II - The threshold 50 Chapter Two – The post-communist condition as threshold experience 51 A hopeful beginning 52 The notion of post-communism: its global and regional meaning 56 Eastern Europe as the ‘close other’ 59 Eastern Europe and nationalism 61 The ‘other’ Eastern Europe as temporary threshold 64 Walter Benjamin’s messianic time and the post-communist rupture 71 Post-communist thresholds and artistic epistemology 73 Chapter Three – Post-communist art from the threshold 74 The ends of art history and the beginnings of post-communist art 78 The same but different – the presence of the communist experience in post- communinst art 5 82 Artistic production in communist times 86 Post-communist art: ‘Third Way’ or ‘No Way’? 91 Site-specific art in and from Eastern Europe as post-communist PART III - The sites and a second beginning 96 Chapter Four – Avant-gardistic demands for pragmatic change 97 Post-communist art in Poland after 1989 101 The return of the avant-garde: Peter Bürger and Hal Foster 105 Artistic practice in Poland during communist times 109 Today’s velvet prison and the difficult return of the ‘pragmatic demand’ 113 Chapter Five – Warsaw’s unthought places 114 Constructed collectivity and its public outdoors 116 Yael Bartana - … And Europe will be stunned (2011) 134 Joanna Rajkowska – Oxygenator (2007) 144 The ephemeral character of post-communist places 149 Chapter Six – Failing in Berlin 151 7th Berlin Biennial (2012) and curatorial art 158 Populist subjectivity and the avant-garde artist: political experiences return 160 Freud’s uncanny encounter with the double 162 Born in Berlin (2012) and after 171 The unruliness of ‘failures’ 174 Chapter Seven – Missed awakenings and their returns 175 Die Traumdeutung 75,32m AMSL (2011) and the Freud Museum in London 180 Mirosław Bałka and the post-communist site 183 ‘Let the dream go on’ - such was his motive - ‘or I shall have to wake up’: Freud and Lacan on awakenings 190 Deferred Awakenings? 196 The historical force of ‘Jewish beginnings’ - a ‘Denkbild’ 206 … about storks and other migrating people 208 Conclusion 215 Bibliography 6 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS My heartfelt thanks to my supervisors, Stephen Frosh and Esther Leslie, who took me and this project on in a moment when it almost would have disintegrated. Their guidance and inspiration as supervisors, teachers, and intellectuals has been beyond what words can say for they unleashed, in their very different ways, abilities in me of which I did not know that they existed. I also want to thank Stephen particularly for his calmness, for his faith in me, for having made me speak and write about thoughts I avoided, and for providing me with the protected environment of regular and supportive supervisions which I needed to be able to produce this work. I am also highly indebted to Ruth Sheldon who suddenly became part of this project and in a way also part of my life. I thank her for the encouraging messages, her extremely competent and thought-provoking feedback, the coffees we drunk and all the other coffees I have been offered. I thank Erol Saglam for having stood on my side and for having given me hope when others were doing the opposite – and for all the teas, cakes and conversations we shared at the British Library on so many days. Sam Dolbear has been away for most of the time while I was working on this thesis but he has always been an important figure, friend and helper on this journey. Carla Cruz helped me staying sane and feel confident within the field of the fine arts, while Daniel Edelstyn and Sally Ryall sacrificed their precious holiday and evening time to make this text sound more English. And Jessica Paez, my longest friendship, has given many impulses, intellectual and emotional, that I have tried to process in this work. I thank my father for having talked to me so often about his life and the world we live in as well as my mother for her very particular interventions into these conversations, without which this thesis would have not been written in the way it was. And I thank all the artists who have provided me with such complex, fascinating, and deep material and who have shared so much of themselves in artworks that tell us so much more. And finally, I want to thank Alecs Geuder who witnessed and was affected by the strenuous effort this work required from me on a day to day basis. His patience that got lost at times but that always returned, his love that was constant although sometimes hidden behind his anger over my work load and self-doubts, his artistic and particular relation to music that I lack, and finally his belief in my ability to master this task made me finish this thesis! … And finally, finally, I thank my daughter, Theodora, for making me laugh and cry and think about so many beautiful things in her fascinating way. 7 Trying to speak from a place that never was … At some point at the very beginning of this project my father visited me in London. I took advantage of this occasion and asked him to tell me about life under communism. It felt odd. While he would usually just start talking about it, this time, maybe for the first time ever, it was me who called him into the role of the eye witness, trying to archive an image of what communism meant to him. We both sensed the unusual formality of this moment but were each of us determined to take up our roles; me to comply with my father's inner desire to make me understand the inhuman and grotesque conditions that had made him decide to leave communist Poland; him to tell the whole story properly and not in casual fragments. We tried, but the aura of this family-historical moment disappeared quickly. Instead of his usual anecdotes about himself as anti-authoritarian character, who would constantly clash with the structure of a brutal communist system – stories that were sometimes tragic, sometimes funny or grotesque and told of his creative ideas how to circumvent regulations and the state apparatus – this time the experience of communism was reduced to generalized statements only: ‘Communism was something one cannot imagine, a catastrophe, etc. … .’ I realized how I drifted away.

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