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.