Socially Engaged Art after Socialism

Art and Civil Society in Central and Eastern Europe

Izabel Galliera

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781784537135
• eBook ISBN: 9781786722225
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Contemporary Art

Reclaiming public life from the ideologies of both communist regimes and neoliberalism, their projects have harnessed the politically subversive potential of social relations based on trust, reciprocity and solidarity. Drawing on archival material and exclusive interviews, in this book Izabel Galliera traces the development of socially engaged art from the early 1990s to the present in Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania. She demonstrates that, in the early 1990s, projects were primarily created for exhibitions organized and funded by the Soros Centers for Contemporary Art. In the early 2000s, prior to Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania entering into the European Union, EU institutions likewise funded socially-conscious public art in the region. Today, socially engaged art is characterised by the proliferation of independent and often self-funded artists' initiatives in cities such as Sofia, Bucharest and Budapest.Focusing on the relationships between art, social capital and civil society, Galliera employs sociological and political theories to reveal that, while social capital is generally considered a mechanism of exclusion in the West, in post-socialist contexts it has been leveraged by artists and curators as a vital means of communication and action.

1

Points of Contention: Socially Engaged Art Practice in Contemporary Theory

Art historians and critics in CEE have not considered the growing number of local artists and curators engaged in art as a social practice to amount to an emerging art tendency in the broader field of contemporary art. This is despite the fact that several socially engaged art practitioners have been included in important art historical studies on the region. For example, the late, internationally known Polish art historian Piotr Piotrowski, in his book Art and Democracy in Post-Communist Europe (2012), offered a survey of contemporary art production in post-communist Europe. He identified a shift from ‘the politics of autonomy’ during socialism to the ‘autonomy of politics’ in the post-1989 period. While his study was far reaching geographically and culturally, Piotrowski neglected to identify socially engaged art as an emerging artistic tendency with its specific methodological characteristics. For instance, he schematically addressed art works by Big Hope as an interventionist practice responding to current political and societal circumstances. However, the author omitted discussion, for example, on who the participants in the project were and how the artists had come to engage with them; the collaborative and participatory strategies of engagement that Big Hope used; and the importance of funding (or the lack of it) in shaping the projects. As I will demonstrate below, these aspects are important in grasping the meaning and broader implications of the socially engaged work by Big Hope.

Studies dedicated exclusively to the relationship between participatory socially engaged art, social capital and civil society are lacking in current scholarship. However, in the last decade a growing number of important art historians have addressed, from various perspectives, the connection between experimental forms of contemporary art and politics in CEE both during and after the socialist periods. For example, in his most recent book, Politically Unbecoming: Postsocialist Art against Democracy (2014), Anthony Gardner examined a number of artists active since the 1980s and 1990s in both Eastern Europe and Western Europe, such as Lia and Dan Perjovschi, Ilya Kabakov, Thomas Hirschhorn and Gianni Motti. His insightful discussion focused on the different artistic responses to the paradox of democracy, ‘as both an ideological hangover from the Cold War and a utopian ambition for the future’.¹ In her book Antipolitics in Central European Art 1956–1989: Reticence as Dissidence under Post-Totalitarian Rule (2013), art historian Klara Kemp-Welch examined the works of six artists working during the period of socialism in Hungary, Poland and Czechoslovakia. She investigated George Konrád’s concept of ‘antipolitics’ as a ‘strategy for the reinvigoration of civil society among members of the nascent oppositional intelligentsia’.² Art historian Amy Bryzgel’s book Performing the East: Performance Art in Russia, Latvia and Poland since 1980 (2013) critically evaluated ‘the function of performance art in the transition from communism to capitalism in Russia and Eastern Europe’. Through a socio-historical approach to the work of six contemporary performance artists from Russia, Latvia and Poland, Bryzgel demonstrated how performance art in the East did not evolve from painting and as a reaction to the marketable art object as it did in the West. Rather, performance art in the East was not only a strategy ‘but a necessity of existence’.³

Two important pioneering anthologies represented significant and early milestones in the scholarly literature on CEE art, politics and antipolitical dissent. The first, Primary Documents: A Sourcebook for Eastern and Central European Art since the 1950s (2002), continues to be a valuable collection of primary source texts selected by the editors because ‘they labelled movements, challenged received ideas, and changed the way art was made and thought about by influential writers respected in their communities and nationally’.⁴ The second, East Art Map: Contemporary Art and Eastern Europe (2006) edited by the artist group IRWIN, is an artist project and one that, implicitly, provides an ambitious study of contemporary art from Russia and Eastern Europe based on contributions from art historians, critics, curators and artists from different countries. Its aim was to combat the ‘no-man’s-land’ mentality that culturally divided the Eastern and Western parts of Europe and the world.⁵

If studies specifically dedicated to socially engaged art and curatorial practice in post-1989 CEE are lacking, in the past three decades Euro-American art criticism, theory and art historical research have identified socially engaged art as a key global tendency within contemporary art. Leading authors – such as Suzanne Lacy, Suzy Gablik, Grant Kester, Shannon Jackson and Claire Bishop in the US, and Nicolas Bourriaud and Maria Lind in Western Europe – have each articulated a particular set of terms, frameworks and evaluative criteria to approach art as social practice, contributing to a growing discursive vocabulary. I will briefly highlight a few of them here.

In 1998, French curator and art critic Nicolas Bourriaud coined the term ‘relational aesthetics’ in order to account for an increasing number of socially engaged art practices emergent in the 1990s. These were based on participatory forms of audience engagement and on convivial interactions among visitors within a museum context or gallery space. For example, some of the early 1990s art works by the Argentinian-born and US-based artist Rikrit Tiravanija consisted of setting up social situations as art installations and performances where the artist cooked pad thai for people visiting the gallery. In other instances, Tiravanija installed boxes of instant soup containers next to a large bowl of boiling water, inviting museum and gallery visitors to use the ingredients to prepare and consume soup. People’s conversations and dialogic exchanges while eating and/or cooking food within the gallery space were both provoked by and became part of the content of the art.⁶

In response to Bourriaud’s conception of a harmonious community at the core of his ‘relational aesthetic’, British-born and US-based art historian Claire Bishop, in her article ‘Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics’ (2004), proposed the concept of ‘relational antagonism’. She further developed and exemplified this concept in her subsequent publications Participation, Documents of Contemporary Art (2006) and Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (2012).⁷ For Bishop, ‘relational antagonism’ designated a space where differences between participants and contexts were not collapsed into harmonious interactions but rather sustained. She examined the work of artists such as Swiss native Thomas Hirschhorn and Spanish artist Santiago Sierra, suggesting that their work provoked tensions that were sustained to a point of discomfort in order to bring public awareness to pertinent, yet neglected, socio-political issues. For example, Sierra’s installation titled Workers who cannot be paid, remunerated to remain inside cardboard boxes (2000) at Kunst-Werke, Berlin, consisted of paying six individual asylum seekers, who were not allowed to work legally in Germany, to sit for four hours a day, each underneath a cardboard box installed in the gallery space for the duration of the exhibition. Upon entering the exhibition space, visitors would see only what resembled a minimalist installation: a row of boxes, equally spaced, in the institution’s main hall. Aside from a label on the wall and a cough or slight noise made by the paid participants, their presence was rendered invisible to the viewer. Contrary to Tiravanija’s work, according to Bishop, Sierra’s provocative installation employed silences rather than convivial dialogue among strangers. Sierra sought to reveal the complex socio-economic and political conditions governing the value of human beings within the global era of neoliberalism.

American art historian and critic Grant Kester took to task the lack of political and ethical responsibility evident in both Bishop’s ‘relational antagonist’ practices based on destabilizing the presumed harmonious fabric of a community and Bourriaud’s concept of ‘relational aesthetics’. In contrast, Kester articulated the notion of ‘politically coherent communities’, which he developed in response to the forms of negation that can occur when artists view their collaborators as raw and inert material to be utilized as artistic media, and transformed or improved in some ways. Moreover, he proposed the concept of ‘dialogic exchange’ based on the mandatory presence of ‘empathetic identification’.⁸ The latter facilitated reciprocal exchanges among members of different, and often socio-politically marginalized, groups through both conversations and active listening. Empathetic identification, Kester believed, should exist between artists and collaborators and between collaborators themselves. This was evident in Suzanne Lacy’s 1999 collaborative project Code 33: Emergency, Clear the Air,⁹ which took its name from the code used by the police to keep radio channels open in an emergency. Its format was based on conversation and dialogue between two specific communities, local (Oakland, CA) police and young people of colour, whose relation to the police is often marked by fear and violence. The work of art created and served as a platform for empathetic identification between the two groups with the goal of challenging their dominant stereotypical views of each other. Kester developed his approach first in his book Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art (2004),¹⁰ and further expanded it in The One and The Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in A Global Context (2011).¹¹

Several recent major symposia, conferences and exhibitions – such as The Art of Participation: 1950 to Now at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2008–9; Creative Time’s annual Summits, under the leadership of curator Nato Thomson, staged between 2009 and 2015, on topics related to art and social justice; Creative Time’s online database of over 350 socially engaged art projects initiated in conjunction with the Living as Form exhibition in 2011; and the now ever popular itinerant conference Open Engagement initiated by artist Jen Delos Reyes in 2007 to name just a few – attest to the widespread interest in socially engaged art practice and discourse. Surprisingly, contemporary scholarship by authors in Western democracies, as I outlined above, rarely documents or minimally refers to similar developments in CEE shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

Although not numerous by any means, a relevant number of curatorial initiatives and artistic projects that engage art as social practice did emerge in CEE, as I will illustrate below through several case studies from Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania. Since American and Western European authors have elaborated useful theoretical approaches for socially engaged art practices, my selection and categorization of what constitutes participatory and collaborative forms of art relies on the already established criteria for such practice. This is not to render practices and theories in the West as main points of reference or models to follow for practitioners in CEE. Rather, this book seeks to bypass an east–west dichotomy, which most often leads to essentializing differences between regions and cultures and suppressing points of connections and affinities between theoretical frameworks, methodologies and evaluative criteria in contemporary art, and curatorial and institutional practice. This is all the more important since the focus of the book is on practices in a specific CEE sub-region after 1989, when (compared to the period during socialism) there has been an increasing opening up of and interest in scholarship and information of all kinds from other countries. In fact, the long-term, transnational research, education, publishing and exhibition project Former West (2008–16), based within BAK (basis voor actuele kunst) in the Netherlands, has sought to challenge ‘the hegemonic conjuncture that is “the West”’, which, it argues, had not come to terms with the impact of the political, cultural and economic changes and events of 1989 upon itself. Former West asks: ‘One wonders precisely why then, when there is a “former East”, there is no “former West”?’¹²

As such, this book includes comparative analysis of specific projects from both east and west, grounded in their specific localities, which offers the possibility to re-evaluate the meaning of concepts such as ‘social and political engagement’, ‘social capital’, ‘the left’, ‘public space’ and ‘civil society’, notions that certainly resonate beyond specific national contexts. At the same time, this study takes into account the specificity of the post-socialist contexts that conveys a broader and growing trend of socially engaged art and curatorial practices developed with foreign funding sources in the last three decades.

2

Civil Society, and Social, Cultural and Political Capital

Civil Society

Contemporary ideas of politicized and oppositional civil society were revived in CEE under socialism in the context of the well-known revolutionary social movements of Solidarity and Charter 77.¹ In the 1980s CEE intellectual dissidents conceptualized civil society as an independent sphere where activity was entirely divorced from and directed against the socialist government. For example, in his book essay Antipolitics (1982) Hungarian author George Konrád described the democratic opposition as ‘antipolitics’ or ‘anti-political politics’:

Antipolitics is the emergence of independent forums that can be appealed to against political power; it is a counter-power that cannot take power and does not wish to. Power it has already, here and now, by reason of its moral and cultural weight.²

Similarly, Czech author Václav Havel referred to ‘living in truth’ and an ‘independent life of society’ under the socialist regime as a site for the ‘power of the powerless’, ‘communities bound together by thousands of shared tribulations […] give rise to some of those special humanly meaningful political relationships and ties’.³ Moreover, this ‘independent’ sphere was a social sphere, which according to Havel was not limited to a small community of intellectual dissidents but included everyone ‘living within the truth’, that is:

Anything from a letter by intellectuals to a workers’ strike, from a rock concert to a student demonstration, from refusing to vote in the farcical elections to making an open speech at some official congress, or even a hunger strike.⁴

These oppositional gestures were not meant as political actions aiming to restructure the current political system. Rather, social initiatives sought to improve the conditions of everyday life and to assert basic human rights. Such gestures become political by adopting a politics of antipolitics. As Havel expressed it, ‘It is political because it does not play politics.’⁵ Evidently, these calls for the depoliticization of lives and a conception of civil society based on morality emerged as reactions to socialist regimes. Dissident intellectuals of the 1980s believed these single-party states, which attempted to control every aspect of social life, could no longer be reformed.

On the other hand, political scientist Petr Kopecký highlighted the ‘zero-sum logic’ and the ‘monolithic’ nature of dissidents’ conception of civil society seen as an antithesis to the totalitarian state, which ‘stressed the unity of opposition of “us” (the people) against “them” (the corrupt elite of the state)’.⁶ While implicitly based on a critique of political power, their emphasis on moral attributes envisioned a sphere of civil society above politics.⁷ Nevertheless, a clear distinction between the space of civi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Author Bio
• Endorsements
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Points of Contention: Socially Engaged Art Practice in Contemporary Theory
• 2 Civil Society, and Social, Cultural and Political Capital
• 3 Historical Antecedents: Participatory Art under Socialism, 1956–89
• Part I From Second Society to Civil Society
• Part II From Localized Public Sites To EU Transnational Public Spheres
• Part III Institutionalized and Institutionalizing
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography