Untitled Document

HGCEA Historians of German & Central European Art & Architecture

2010 Chicago

Transformation Reconsidered: 'Utopias', Realities and National Traditions in post-1989 Central Europe

Chair: Andrzej Szczerski, Jagiellonian University, Cracow

Thursday, Feb. 11, 8:00-10:30 pm
Acapulco Room, Gold Level, West Tower, Hyatt Regency

Twenty years of post-Cold War transformation in the Central European region had been marked by recourse to lost identities and renewed interest in national histories and traditions. Concurrently, new questions have been posed regarding regional experience, including whether remnants of the communist system and the incoming capitalist globalization can provide a new socio-political and cultural model for contemporary Europe. In both instances, retro- and prospective ones, art, artists, and critical/historical discourse play a crucial role in forging new and questioning old identities. The session will analyze attempts to regain or reinvent national and individual histories, lost or destroyed during the Iron Curtain era. It will also look at the idea of remembrance about the communist ‘utopias’ and realities, their relevance, persistence and rejection within contemporary societies, as reflected in current art production as well as historiography. Since attitudes towards the recent past are highly politicized and often mutually exclusive, the question will be asked to what extent art, art history, and criticism can provide a platform for negotiations within the emerging civil society. The session will also consider the problem of how the post-communist transformation has been perceived as a lived reality, with its own cultural models and hierarchies.

Georg Schoellhammer, Springerin, Hefte fur Gegenwartskunst
Work with Drawers, Slide Trays, Files, and Boxes !

Twenty years after 1989 neo-avant garde and post conceptual art from the so called Former East is still confronted with a stereotypic reception elaborated in the early 1990s. Already by then the Western efforts of presenting a comprehensive reading of the avant gardes that had worked behind the Iron Curtain was palimpsested by its reception as a mere mirror of Western art practices. The paper will look at the histories of exhibitions of Eastern European art in Western institutions vis-à-vis materials that still hide away in private archives in Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary and Romania. Its aim is to show how these archives have enabled communication, and how their forms and formats have themselves influenced the macro-structure of some of the exhibitions. Question will be asked about the strategies available to counter hegemonic subordination to the rules of the Western canons.

Sigrid Hofer, Philipps-Universitat Marburg
Continuity of Art Informel and Artistic Self-Assertion in the GDR after the Cold War

Since the nineteen-fifties numerous artists gathered in Dresden to cultivate forms of abstraction and to developed Art Informel. While Informel Art in the West was considered to have degenerated into a fad only after a few years it maintained its actuality in the East for several decades and was not even abandoned after the Wall came down. In the years of state-ordered Socialist Realism the decision for Informel was at the same time an expression of latent resistance. Therefore it seems that this distinctive approach influenced the artist's self-image in a more crucial way than this appears to be the case in non-obstructive contexts. The presentation will investigate whether and to what extend new impulses brought change to Art Informel after 1989, and especially how adhering to tradition and continuation was a necessary condition for artists to affirm their own identity.

Edit Andras, Hungarian Academy of Sciences
"The Future Is Behind Us”

In the turbulent period of transition, in the ex-East Block, contemporary art faces utopias in two ways, artists revisit the past searching for the moment when utopias went wrong, or, they eagerly look for new utopias in the condition of global capitalism, analyzing and adapting the enormous heritage of utopian thinking of the region for a disillusioned time, obsessed with dystopias. The paper is to peel off the layers covering the origins of some basic utopias, the ruins and remnants of which are still in our midst. The paper focuses on works which redirect the attention to the need of a retrospective analytical work, a kind of therapy of wounds and failures of the past. Some artists are eager to take responsibility of conscience of the societies that tend to forget their dreams of a better future. The presentation concentrates on video and conceptual art.

Maja and Reuben Fowkes, Translocal.org and University College London
The Possibility of the Postnational in Contemporary East European Art

The art history of the countries of Eastern Europe before 1989 was written, according to Piotr Piotrowski, more on the basis of ‘state apparatuses’ than ‘ethnicity’. Immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the afterglow of the internationalist ideals of socialism could still be felt, while the desire for free and open communication across state, ideological and national borders was predominant. Subsequently, the first post-communist decade saw the rise of identity politics, during which a national prefix became an obligatory addition to survey exhibitions of contemporary art in the countries of the former Eastern Blok. This paper discusses the changing understanding of the national in contemporary art since the End of Communism and the shift of interest during the second post-communist decade away from issues of identity in both its national and regional formulations towards an exploration of the possibilities of a post-national sense of belonging.

Elizabeth M. Grady, Fashion Institute of Technology, State University of New York
The Situation: Contemporary Art Practice in the Post-Cold War Era

The contemporary moment is rife with “posts”: Post-Cold War, post-Communist, post 9-11, post-colonial, and even post-national. Blogs embody decentralized communities of identity-shifting “post-ers” who together determine the parameters of everything from what’s hip to the next revolution, often offering a faux-reality of democratic access and collectivist practice. But what is left when we’re offline? How do we come to terms with the reality of our decidedly non-ideal or falsely idealized cultural, social, political, and even material positions? And what role does art play in exposing or perpetuating this disjuncture between ideology and reality, virtual and real existence, mediated and actual experience? This paper will demonstrate the current efforts of artists to expose the disjuncture between the ideologically loaded virtual and media-driven models of reality that govern our collective cultural consciousness and the possibilities for individual agency and personal freedom of movement outside these powerful but ultimately hollow models for living.