Art and Democracy in Post-Communist Europe - Piotr Piotrowski PDF

ART AND
DEMOCRACY
IN POST- COMMUNIST
EUROPE
Piotr Piotrowski
art and democracy in post - communist europe
art and
democracy
in post - communist
europe
Piotr Piotrowski
translated by Anna Brzyski
reaktion books
Published by Reaktion Books Ltd
33 Great Sutton Street
London ec1v 0dx
www.reaktionbooks.co.uk
First published as Agoraphilia in Poznań, Poland, by rebis Publishing House Ltd in 2010
Translation of this book was funded by the erste Foundation
English-language translation by Anna Brzyski
Copyright © Reaktion Books 2012
All rights reserved

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or
transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.
Printed and bound in China
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Piotrowski, Piotr, 1952–
Art and democracy in post-communist Europe.
1. Democracy and the arts – Europe, Eastern.
2. Art and state – Europe, Eastern.
3. Art, East European – 20th century.
4. Art, East European – 21st century.
5. Post-communism – Europe, Eastern.
I. Title
ISBN: 978 1 86189 895 1

Contents
introduction
Agoraphilia After Communism 7
one
1989: The Spatial Turn 15
part one
History and Contemporaneity

two
From Geography to Topography 55
three
From the Politics of Autonomy to the
Autonomy of Politics 80
four
Anarchy, Critique, Utopia 125
part two
Memory
five
Between Real Socialism and Nationalism 155
six
New Museums in New Europe 202
part three
Democracy after Communism

seven
Art and Biopolitics: Ilya Kabakov and Krzysztof Wodiczko 225
eight
Gender after the Fall of the Wall 243
nine
Unfulfilled Democracy 262
References 289
Photo Acknowledgements 307
Index 308
introduction
Agoraphilia after Communism
Although the term agoraphilia most commonly refers to the pursuit of sexual
satisfaction in public places, the concept’s Greek etymology suggests a much
broader meaning, one that is only minimally suggested by sexology. In this
broader context, agoraphilia describes the drive to enter the public space,
the desire to participate in that space, to shape public life, to perform criti-
cal and design functions for the sake of and within the social space. When
applied to the analysis of art produced in the countries of post-communist
Central and Eastern Europe after 1989, this word provides a key to the
description of at least a portion of the region’s artistic culture, a part that
responded to the call emanating on the one hand from the new map of
Europe taking shape in the wake of the Cold War and, on the other, from
the earlier geopolitical division of the continent. Of course, a negative point
of reference is provided here by suppression of public life in the countries
of the former Eastern Bloc. The strategies of limiting political and social
participation and of restricting culture and cultural production constituted,
irrespective of the degree of actual restrictions, an important part of com-
munist rule and served as an instrument of the cultural policies carried out
by the state apparatus. The state possessed various methods for enacting
those policies, but its main goal was to render individual and collective
initiatives of its citizens, members of the particular societies, more or less
dependent on the monopoly of the political apparatus and to subordinate
the public sphere to the ideological doctrine. One could describe this type
of practice as agoraphobic. Its opposite is agoraphilic, a practice predicated
on transgression of barriers separating cultural sphere and civil initiative,
one grounded in the critique of the status quo undertaken with the goal of
reshaping the social organism.
The fall of communism in Central and Eastern Europe does not mean
that agoraphobic tendencies have disappeared entirely from public life.
This book will provide many examples of such attitudes. Post-communist
agoraphobia can be distinguished from agoraphobia of the pre-1989 period
by its more dispersed, less substantial character. Its methods are sometimes
7
art and democracy in post-communist europe
more subtle than the clear-cut (if one could describe in such terms), the
prophylactic censorship of the communist regimes. Naturally, contemporary
manifestations of agoraphobia are at times equally brutal and include polit-
ical as well as legal repression, instances of hooliganism, vandalism and so on.
I will address them here. However, more often agoraphobic techniques are
more refined. In general, references to ‘censorship’ are avoided. Instead,
one speaks of societal interests, respect for religious feelings, traditions, the
good name of institutions and public figures, and also of the interests of tax-
payers. In this sense agoraphilia represents both a critical attitude directed
against those types of efforts aimed at limiting free speech, as well as a call
for realization of the creative and civic freedoms.
Manifestations of agoraphobia are in part symptomatic of the society’s
and the ‘new’ regime’s level of comfort with the mechanisms of the old system
of power, often the only system of law and order familiar to the new establish-
ment. But they function in reverse and are enacted by the formerly negatively
defined institutions and areas of public life, such as the church or market
institutions, corporations and so on. In turn, the power of those institutions,
which finds new popular and political support, is measured by the pressure,
real and implied, directed against the governing structures. For example, the
Volkswagen Corporation, which has a factory producing cars near Poznań,
forced the local government to postpone the exhibition of a young Polish
artist, Rafał Jakubowicz, entitled ‘Arbeitsdisciplin’ (Work Discipline), which
was scheduled to open at the municipal art gallery. The work consisted of a
short video and accompanying photograph that showed the factory tower
with a visible vw emblem seen through the barbwire fence surrounding the
plant. The resemblance of the vw tower to a watchtower provoked the corpo-
ration to launch a complaint with the office of the mayor and, in effect, to stop
the show. This type of intervention reveals the relationship of agoraphobia
to neoliberalism and demonstrates how it has become a function of the
neoliberal politics recently embraced throughout Eastern Europe. Within the
neoliberal ideology freedom to maximize profit constitutes an unproblematic
priority that does not always coincide with the freedom of expression. In fact,
as demonstrated by the experience of countries with much more extensively
developed neoliberal practices, such as the United States, those two freedoms
almost never coincide.
However, the neoliberal market economy and the interests of the corpo-
rations do not constitute the main source of the agoraphobic attitudes in
post-communist Europe. They are equally promoted by religion, especially in
Poland and also in Russia, as well as nationalism, in particular in the Balkans.
8
agoraphilia after communism
In the first instance, the court case of a Polish artist, Dorota Nieznalska, is
highly revealing. The artist, who used in her show a photograph of male geni-
talia superimposed on a cross, was charged with blasphemy and sentenced by
a court in Gdańsk to six months of unpaid public work. The decision was
overturned on appeal. The most extreme example of the second is the process
that prevented the opening of the exhibition of art from Kosovo in Belgrade.
Both of those episodes are described in this book.
However, it appears that the most frequent targets of agoraphobia are
members of sexual minorities. Those attitudes as so strong, at least in some
countries of post-communist Europe, that they have managed to block almost
entirely public presentation of this type of work. But, the situation is dynamic.
A great deal is changing in this part of the continent, even in Romania, which
until recently had some of the most restrictive laws, as well as Latvia, where
powerful conservative tendencies have made a particularly strong show of
force during efforts to organize gay pride parades. In Poland, where radical
conservative and nationalist groups have put up strong opposition to similar
efforts and where governments of some cities (Poznań and Warsaw) had
banned such parades, the situation has changed significantly. Not only have
such bans passed into the infamous history of those cities, but in 2010, for
the first time, the first Euro Pride Parade organized in Eastern Europe took
place in Warsaw. The institutions of the cultural establishment, such as the
National Museum in Warsaw, have participated by presenting an exhibition
curated by Paweł Leszkowicz dealing with the problematic of homoeroticism.
The show reinstated into the public view this historic and artistic tradition,
only relatively recently excluded from the mainstream. It included not only
works of contemporary art produced in post-communist Europe, but also
historic paintings and sculptures beginning with Greek antiquity.
Undeniably this is a sign of the changing times and without a doubt it is a
symptom of the growing strength, not only in art, or rather not just in art,
of the agoraphilic attitudes. The demand for recognition of the civil rights of
those who, to different degrees, have been deprived of those rights, the claim
for the right to those rights, as Hannah Arendt has observed, constitutes one
of the territories of post-communist agoraphilia.
The concept of agoraphilia is not reserved, therefore, for artistic attitudes
and activities, or perhaps it is not the most apparent within that sphere. As a
matter of fact, it can be seen much more readily operating within civic and
political initiatives, specifically in the formation and activities of various polit-
ical associations and groups. This is a much more common phenomenon, one
that on the one hand responds to the years during which such activities were
9
1 Rafał Jakubowicz, Arbeitsdisciplin, 2002.
restricted, and on the other not just to a desire, but rather the necessity of
creating a civil society. By defining for itself similar goals art has participated
in this movement. However, it operates with a different set of methods, even
though some of those resemble actions of the political and social advocates.
Moreover, considerable numbers of artists have adopted the methods of the
political activists. Some of them will be discussed here. However, their actions,
employing similar methods and aiming at analogous goals, constitute some-
thing different and, consequently, have to be read on an artistic level, since art
creates its own spheres of reference and it is perceived primarily through them.
This happens sometimes contrary to the wishes of the artists themselves.
The concept of post-communist Europe also requires definition. It has
a much more political than geographic character. Although the terms Eastern
Europe or the former Eastern Europe, East-Central or simply Central Europe
appear in the text as its synonyms from time to time, the book deals with
the eclipse of Eastern and especially Central Europe in the post 1989 period.
Naturally, those geographic designations also had political character under
Soviet domination, even though, especially in Central Europe, they were in-
scribed within a much longer historic tradition (one that also had political
dimensions). They signalled a desire to distinguish the area from the Soviet
10
Union and its cultural policies. In contrast, the concept of post-communist

Europe has par excellence political references, or more precisely, historically
political ones. It refers to the countries that to different degrees, though more
or less simultaneously, rejected the communist construction of the state and
communist ideology. It seems that with the acceptance of such terminological
perspective it should be easier for us to comprehend the departure from the
traditional ways of thinking about this part of Europe, above all those operating
within such categories as Central Europe. I think that this concept still used to
describe contemporary artistic phenomena has lost its appeal. On the other hand,
the concept of post-communist Europe, which may not be very attractive either,
brings with it certain neutrality. It has a descriptive character both in the politi-
cal and historic sense. What makes it potentially problematic and less than com-
fortable for the inhabitants of this part of the continent is the fact that it carries
with it the stigma of the old regime. This is intentional on my part. Irrespective
of the fact that in some countries the legacy of the former system is still clearly
visible, I assume that its traces can be found throughout the region. Those traces
are often very subtle; they appear in behaviours, in the ways of thinking, in
2 Pride Parade, Poznań, 28 November 2005.
11
customs, and so on. Often they affect only part of the society; sometimes,
however, they can be observed in the functioning of the institutions, in the habits
of their officials, in the societal expectations concerning order and discipline,
in lack of tolerance, and so forth.
By contrast, the concept of democracy requires less extensive definition,
though this does not mean that I am not partial to particular theories of democ-
racy. Throughout this book I refer to the concept of agonistic democracy
defined by Chantal Mouffe, which is built on the basis of a belief in the
necessity of conflict in a democratic society and on the critique of consensus.
I do not aim to develop this theory since I am not a political theorist. And,
as a citizen, rather than a theorist, I realize the need for certain concessions in
the name of pragmatic consensus. I am not going to deal with those either. It
does seem to me, however, that this theory is very useful for the understanding
of contemporary agoraphilia, especially within the sphere of artistic experience.
Because it engages in a critique of the status quo, or liberal democracy, it is
sometimes able to identify clear instances of wrongs committed against specific
social groups, as well address a peculiar form of utopia of tolerance and
coexistence (that always has a hierarchical and enabling character), as well as
equality of rights.
Finally, a few words about the book itself. While it certainly grew out
of the experiences I gained working on In the Shadow of Yalta: Art and the
Avant-Garde in Eastern Europe, 1945–1989, it is an autonomous project guided
by a different research programme. Above all, my research and presentation
methods are different. No matter how far Yalta may actually be from a historic
survey of art in East Central Europe after 1945, it represented an effort on my
part to systematize an enormous amount of historic material. By contrast, Art
and Democracy in Post-Communist Europe problematizes living contemporary
culture. In other words, the project of Yalta was historic in character: the book’s
scope was defined by the dates designating the beginning and the end of
communism in Eastern Europe between the years 1945 and 1989. This project
is focused on contemporaneity, on the world that surrounds us, often changing
in dynamic ways. Therefore, Art and Democracy signals existence of particular
issues in contemporary artistic culture, without any effort at their proportional
presentation in their substantive as well as geographic dimension. It functions
as a map of problems that can be observed within the artistic culture of post-
communist Europe, but a map that includes barely a dozen artists who have
engaged this problematic.
Dealing with this problematic in greater detail, I begin with a general dis-
cussion of the significance of the events of 1989 for the culture of the eastern
12
part of Europe and beyond. Next, I examine changes in the structure within
which culture has been perceived since then and the shift from a geographic
to a topographic perspective, from the sphere of cultural analysis focused on
individual countries towards regional analysis focused on metropolitan areas,
which have changed their character during this period, becoming – still with-
in a regional perspective – far more cosmopolitan. This shift in the analytic
perspective from artistic geography to artistic topography, from a national and
transnational character to a cosmopolitan one, is significant from a broader, not
just local, point of view. This process appears to be a product of the cultural
globalization that began to pull in the countries of the former Eastern Bloc in
the wake of the Cold War and the collapse of the binary geopolitical world
structure. The third chapter investigates changes in attitudes towards the status
of artworks. It traces the shift in emphasis from the politics of the work’s
autonomy (highly characteristic of the modernist conception of painting,
sculpture, installation and so on) that responded to the cultural policies of the
communist state and its efforts to pull art into the gears of the party propa-
ganda machine, in the direction of political autonomy, or instigation of
activist and political actions within the work itself. The fourth chapter deals
with anarchistic traditions of critical art, or its anarchical attitude, as well as a
new utopian vision emerging on its horizon. The following chapter analyses
the function of memory and critiques of nationalism in artistic actions, closing
with a discussion of several projects by Marina Abramović, which address the
specifics of the Balkan situation. Following this discussion of art and com-
plexities of communist memory, I move to an analysis of several museums of
contemporary art recently founded in post-communist Europe, in Bucharest,
Tallinn, Warsaw and Vilnius. I address the question of the role of historic
experience of trauma in contemporary museology. In the seventh chapter I use
the example of two artists, Ilya Kabakov and Krzysztof Wodiczko, to examine
the issue of biopolitics, and in the eighth I explore the problematic of gender
after the fall of the wall. The final chapter addresses the functioning of art in
post-communist Europe, above all its restrictions and more or less (frequently
more than less) hidden censorship mechanisms.
The research that led to the writing of this book could not have been com-
pleted without the generous support of the Collegium Budapest, the Ministry
of Science and Higher Education in Warsaw, and the Sterling and Francine
Clark Art Institute. I am extremely grateful for their encouragement and
financial assistance. I am also thankful to the Erste Foundation in Vienna
for providing a grant for this English translation of the book, which was
13
published originally in Polish by Rebis Publishers as Agoraphilia, Poznań,

2010, as well as institutions and artists who have permitted me to publish
their works free of charge.
14
one
1989: The Spatial Turn
In his book Art History after Modernism, Hans Belting, one of the leading
European art historians, writes about the ‘two voices of art history’, the
Western and the Eastern. For him, one of the main tasks facing art history
today is to ensure ‘the coexistence of very different and sometimes contra-
dictory [art historic] narratives’.1 Belting believes that art produced in
Eastern Europe, especially after 1945, is fundamentally different from art
produced in Western Europe. That difference rests, according to the author,
on the ‘[Eastern European] conviction in the power of art, something that
had vanished long before in the West’. Citing Ilya Kabakov, he observes
that for Eastern European artists ‘art was formerly “a necessity of life, not a
professional activity”’.2
Hans Belting is not alone in showing interest in this issue. Christoph
Tannert, former East German art critic and currently director of the Künstler-
haus Bethanien in Berlin, observed in 1991 that
After the political changes brought about by perestroika in the ussr, the
West expected an inrush of beneficial, exotic powers from the East. A
‘crisis of meaning’ in the West – the result of speechlessness and surplus
– had nourished hopes for a mythographic renewal from the East.3
His answer to the question of what exactly could bring about such a
cultural renewal of the West was Eastern European dissident art. According
to Tannert, the main task facing contemporary culture is not how to main-
tain Eastern European institutions, but rather how ‘to protect and stabilize
[its] moral attitudes’, in other words, how to preserve the Eastern European
culture of nonconformism.4
It seems that the response to this challenge came early on, at the time
when Eastern Europe, in particular Russia, opened its borders to Western
capital as well as to Western artistic cultural industry. This was the context
for Joseph Bakstein’s 1995 statement about the changes affecting the Russian
art scene:
15
In just a few years life in Russia has changed so much that we have
found ourselves in an almost wholly different society, living a different
life. For nonconformist artists of the 1970s generation, this is especially
true: after having risked everything to challenge Soviet official culture,
they now find themselves celebrated in the international art world.
Strange to say, this sort of success is the most difficult thing for a non-
conformist to handle.5
Let us note that at the time when Belting was wishing for a harmonious
coexistence of the two voices of art history, another art historian and curator,
Ryszard Stanisławski, was attempting to speak with one voice in his monumen-
tal exhibition ‘Europa, Europa’. I do not intend to engage here in a critical
analysis of this landmark show, which took place in Bonn in 1994, since I
have already done so elsewhere.6 I only would like to observe that Stanis-
ławski’s approach, which focused exclusively on Eastern European art, but
in a context established by universal, or rather Western, art history, is very
typical of Eastern European art critics. It is a form of compensation for a long
period of isolation and closed or, under the best circumstances, barely opened
borders. Of course, this is an understandable reaction to the historic process.
However, it does not allow for recognition of either the historic, pre-1989 or
contemporary cultural identity of the region. Yet this type of discourse is
embraced by a significant number of Eastern European art critics, curators,
artists and art historians, who wish to see themselves as participating in the
Universal (or rather Western) culture. By trying to wilfully forget historic
sources of their own cultures, they attempt to locate their positions on a global
and universal plane, rather than within a regional (understood as provincial)
frame of references. In his exhibition catalogue After the Wall, Bojana Pejić
quotes Lithuanian artist Deimentas Narkevičius from Vilnius, who told her:
‘I am a little bit tired of being a “Lithuanian artist”. I would like to be just
an artist.’7
In her interesting book Dvojhlasne dejiny umenia (Two Voices of Art
History) Slovak art historian Maria Oriškova attempts to resolve this tension.8
Although the book’s title is inspired by Hans Belting, the work functions as a
critique not just of Belting’s text, but also of the larger issue, namely the exclu-
sion of Eastern European art from art history textbooks written after 1945. By
analysing work produced in Eastern, or rather Central Europe, as well as its
reception within the Western art discourse, Oriškova attempts to uncover the
complex network of factors that have led to this state of affairs. In her opinion,
both sides are to a certain extent responsible. Eastern European art critics
16
1989: The Spatial turn
provided their Western counterparts with a simplified view of the local art
scene, based primarily on the so-called ‘dissident paradigm’ of art making,
which valorized resistance against the state. Western critics simply reproduced
this paradigmatic understanding of Eastern European art, while assigning the
art itself peripheral position.
The most radical response to the methodological approach represented
by the exhibition ‘Europa, Europa’ appeared in Ljubljana, where the local
museum of modern art (Moderna Galerija) began programmatically collecting
Eastern European art,9 and where the Slovene art collective irwin began a
long-term art historic project to create a map of Eastern European art.10 The
first example, namely the curatorial project under way at the Moderna Galerija
entitled ‘2000+ ArtEast Collection’, aims to provide an alternative to the preva-
lent West-centric museum practice by establishing a collection of art produced
in Eastern Europe, a region informed by particular and quite different set
of artistic experiences from those of the West during the period from 1960 to
2000. The collection project began in 2000 as a result of an international
collaboration among art critics from the region. The second project, the map
of Eastern European art undertaken by artists associated with irwin, who
from the beginning were highly sensitive to the issue of macro-regional identity
– if one could characterize Eastern Europe in this way – was also initiated in
cooperation with an international team of art critics from the region. In con-
trast to the museological project, the artists went a step further by trying to
actually create a type of map of Eastern European art, a map that included
not only specific works and artists but also, more problematically, their links
3 2000 +ArtEast
Collection, exhibition
poster, Museum of
Modern Art,
Ljubljana, 2000.
17
4 irwin (group), East Art Map, 2002.
and artistic relationships. Although these two projects are quite different,
they have something in common. Both aim to produce a visual or art historic
landscape of Eastern Europe or, to borrow Hans Belting’s terms, the second,
idiosyncratic voice of art history, one that can function as an alternative to
the first.
The 1990s revealed a need for confronting such different experiences
in reflections on art as well as in art practice itself. One of the most significant
manifestations of this tendency was the exhibition ‘Interpol’ (Stockholm, 1996),
which attempted to provoke an art dialogue between the East and the West. It
is worthwhile to try to analyse the history of this exhibition in order to demon-
strate how complex that problem could be. The initial idea for the show,
developed by the curatorial team of Ian Åman from Stockholm and Viktor
Misiano from Moscow, envisioned inviting a number of artists from the East
and the West to select partners from the opposite side of the Iron Curtain for
work on collaborative projects. Unfortunately this plan was never implemented.
If the planning of the show was riddled with tensions, the exhibition itself ended
with a scandal. It is notable that Viktor Misiano, one of the organizers, referred
to the entire undertaking as the exhibition ‘that divided the East and the West’.11
One of the sources of the greatest disagreement or even conflict was the violent
reaction of the ‘Western contingent’ to the performances by Alexander Brener,
18
a Russian artists known for his attacks against the art establishment, who
destroyed the work of Wenda Gu, a Chinese artist living in New York, and by
Oleg Kulik, who while playing a dog (a piece that he had already performed
at other locations throughout Europe) bit several guests who came to the
opening and was arrested by the police. Kulik later explained that this was not
his fault: the organizers were to blame for tying him to a chain that was simply
too long, as were those members of the public who ignored the warning ‘beware
of the dog’. Unlike them, Kulik approached this performance, just like all
those he has ever engaged in, with the utmost seriousness.
I do not intend to track here the motivations of those two artists that led them
to such acts of aggression. Neither am I interested in analysing the grievances
of Wenda Gu, whose work was completely destroyed, or the complaints of
those bitten by Kulik. The negative reactions of the Chinese artist and of the
guests are completely understandable from a purely human and emotional
standpoint; no one wants to be bitten and no one wants their work to be
destroyed. Instead, my main objective is to analyse the significance of the
violent protest by all the Western artists who participated in the exhibition
and their accusation that all Eastern European participants were engaging in
‘Eastern European barbarism’. Kulik’s performance appears particularly signi-
ficant in this context. As noted by Renata Salecl:
Kulik was invited as a peculiarity – as a Russian dog. I am certain that

if an American artist played a dog, he would be of much less interest
to the international art scene than the Russian artist. We all know that
the majority of people in today’s Russia live a dog’s life. And the first
association with Kulik’s performance is that he represents this reality of
contemporary Russia. Kulik the dog thus interests the Western art
world because he is the Russian dog.
Referring to the Interpol exhibition itself, Salecl added,
The trauma of the West in regard to Russia in recent years is that the
West regards Russia as a superpower, but only on the condition that it
does not act as one. And, in regard to Kulik’s performance, the West finds
aesthetic pleasure in observing the Russian dog, but only on condition
that he does not behave in a truly dog like manner. When Kulik ceased
to be a decorative art-object – the Eastern neighbor who represents the
misery of the Russian dog-like life – and started to act in a way that
19
5 Oleg Kulik, Dog House, Stockholm (Interpol), 1996.
surprised his admirers, he was quickly designated the enemy. His perform-
ance . . . was described as a ‘direct attack against art, democracy and the
freedom of expression’, and as ‘classical model of imperialistic behavior’
. . . The Other has to be passive, submissive victim-like Other; but, when
the Other does not act in this way, he or she is quickly designated as
imperialistic, fundamentalist, totalitarian, etc.12
In this case it was not important that Kulik did not intend to be perceived
as a Russian dog. His goal was to pose a much more general and universal
question of the relationship between a man and an animal, a problem that
has been taken up with some regularity in the context of the humanist critique
of anthropocentrism. For the Stockholm public, however, as for the Western
artists participating in the exhibition, this problematic was largely irrelevant.
They were interested in identifying Kulik’s ‘bad behaviour’ with the core of
his identity as a Russian – the Other but also the Stranger, if not the Enemy.
Looking at Brener’s action, we must consider the fact that destruction
of art constitutes a highly significant element of the Western cultural tradition,
as do performers’ attacks on the public.13 Approched from such art historic
perspective, what happened in Stockholm was nothing new: one could even
say it was rather banal. What was new, and what became the focus of the out-
rage, was the fact that the agent of the artwork’s destruction was an Eastern
European artist and that the destroyed object was a work by a Western Euro -
pean artist (though of Chinese background) and the target of the aggression
was the Western public. Igor Zabel, the author of an outstanding essay dealing
with the Interpol exhibition, invokes the words of another Russian artist, Ilya
Kabakov, in his analysis of this event:
[Kabakov] was describing his experience of a cultural relocated person.

One of the aspects of Western culture [Kabakov] was interested in, was
the permanent tendency to criticize, provoke and even destroy within this
culture. He compared his experience of this tendency to the experience
of an orphan living in a children’s home who is visiting the family of
his friend. This friend is sick of his home and his behavior is aggres-
sive and insulting, while the visitor himself sees a totally different pic-
ture: a nice home, and kind and intelligent parents. But there is another
thing that is essential, the friend’s family is strong enough that it is not
in danger because of the boy’s outburst. The same is true of Western
culture, says Kabakov, and continues: Western culture is so vital, its roots
are so deep and so alive, it is so productive that it, speaking in the language
21
of the parable above, absorbs, recasts and dissolves in itself all destruc-
tive actions by its own ‘children’, and as many believe, it sees in these
actions its very own development – what is elegantly referred to here as
‘permanent criticism’. But I would like to add a footnote here [Zabel
continues quoting Kabakov]: this criticism, like the destruction itself,
is permitted . . . only from its own children. That same mom described
above would have behaved quite differently if I had started to act up
at the table the same way as her son. Most likely she would have called
the police.14
According to Zabel, something like this happened in Stockholm. He

writes that, despite the end of the Cold War, the West continues to play the
role of a master, and any dialogue with a master cannot be a dialogue of equals.
The East, sometimes referred to as the former East, is the Other of the West.
One could even say that the West needs that Other to define itself. During
the Cold War the East functioned for the West within a different ideological
framework. It was an object of modernist universalism, which functioned as
an instrument of Western expansionism, or even a manifestation of its imperi-
alism. After all, it was the West that was universal. Art that was understood as
universal art was in reality produced in the West and Western art was under-
stood in reference to universal categories. Eastern European artists, critics and
cultural workers sanctioned this situation because its acceptance gave them
the illusion of belonging to the ‘Western family’ instead of the culture of the
Eastern Bloc, as communist propaganda attempted to convince them. This was
the real reason why the exchange between the East and the West took place only
in one direction. Although the West does not need any longer the modernist
ideology of cultural universalism, it does need the Other to preserve its identity
and its system of values by referring to its otherness. This strategy has not been
received well in the East, as the history of the ‘Interpol’ illustrates. Eastern
European artists do not wish to be instrumentalized as the Others for and by
their potential Western partners. I should add here that this is nothing new.
Western culture has a long tradition of ‘orientalizing’ Eastern Europe, a tradition
that can be traced to eighteenth-century travel accounts of journeys to Poland
and Russia.15
Let me consider one more interesting example, that of Alexander Brener’s
act of artistic vandalism. In 1997 Brener destroyed Kazimir Malevich’s painting
Suprematism (White Cross), 1922–7, at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam by
spray-painting on its white surface a large dollar sign. Interpreting this gesture
of doubtless destruction exclusively within categories of hooliganism, more-
22
over from a ‘national’ perspective, in other words seeking its source in the
artist’s Russian identity, constitutes not only an abuse, but also, and above all,
a complete misunderstanding of the situation. Such frame of reference makes
it impossible to explain Brener’s action. Any effort to find a link between
Brener and Malevich will likely yield little useful information. Malevich, who
was also a Russian artist (or Russian-Ukrainian of a Polish background),16 was
keenly aware of the fact that his art represented a rejection of Western cultural
values. He was also conscious of the cultural differences between Eastern and
Western Europe. It is also impossible to reduce Brener’s gesture to a protest
against or critique of the Western ownership of Malevich’s art and its fetishiza-
tion within the commercial politics of the Western art establishment. On the
other hand, it is important to point out its specific historic context, namely
the changes that took place in the 1990s: the fall of the Berlin Wall, collapse
of the Soviet empire, and the growing commercialization of the old Russian
nonconformist culture, a process mentioned earlier by Joseph Bakstein. It
appears that Brener wanted to assert through his action (contradicting Tannert’s
assessment of the situation) that indeed everything has changed. He wished
to maintain cultural difference not so much between the East and the West,
but between the official culture (earlier communist, now commercial) and the
nonconformist culture. He wanted to convince the art world, in the East and
in the West, that the nonconformist attitude survived and continued as a living
tradition that posited itself as an alternative to the attitudes described by Tannert.
Such interpretation of his action does not participate in the mystification of
Eastern Europe (in this case of the Russian culture) carried out within the
context of the ‘Interpol’ exhibition by the Western art critics and artists.
Rather, it is an effort to reconstruct the relations taking place between the
subject, place and time. It also is not an apologetic for the aggression and
vandalism, concepts functioning within a very different interpretative order
and referring to a completely different problematic. Instead, this is an attempt
to reach for a new tool, that of relational geography in order to come to an
understanding of a particular gesture – destruction of an artwork.17
I would like to bring up one more issue, addressed earlier in a very differ -
ent context by Igor Zabel, by interpreting the meaning of the act of applying
a dollar sign to Malevich’s painting. If we assume that in the wake of the
Cold War the art world (at least in Europe) remains divided into the East and
the West, and that the West still dictates the terms and still directs the infra-
structure that makes possible such control, if, in other words, we assume that
the West has won the Cold War in a cultural as well as political sense, then
given this situation what attitude should the Eastern European artists adopt?
23
Attempting to answer this question, Zabel advocates a regional strategy of

internal deconstruction of the artistic field, in other words a strategy of active
resistance that takes place within the art system and that seeks within that
arena its political identity.18 Zabel does not provide any concrete examples,
however I think it is possible to see Brener’s action in precisely those terms, as
an extreme form of such strategic thinking. The quest for identity would be in
this context similar to guerrilla warfare carried out by an Eastern European
artist against the Western art system with the aid of instruments, such as
destruction, immediate attack and aggression, that have been legitimized by
Western culture through its mythology of cultural rebellion. In order to validate
my claim of such legitimization let us recall, for instance, Mary Richardson’s
attack on Velázquez’s Toilet of Venus (the Rokeby Venus) in 1914. Richardson’s
action has been treated by feminist historiography as a paradigmatic feminist
gesture,19 and since feminist perspective has long been incorporated into the
mainstream of Western art history, one could say that this act has been also
viewed as such within that mainstream. In effect then, one could find in
Brener’s action a close resonance with Zabel’s argument concerning the need for
an alternative, or rather oppositional attitude, based in the cultural difference
(the Western institutional culture of the spectacle versus the Eastern ‘private’
and anarchical attitude of nonconformism), an attitude that is, however, entirely
compatible with the cultural tradition of rebellion embraced by the culture
that is being attacked.
Let us return now to Hans Belting and his appeal for a harmonious coex-
istence of different and sometimes opposing narratives of art history, or at least for
‘the two voices of art history’. Of course, one could ask if such an appeal makes
any sense in the context of the collapse of the Eastern Bloc and the fall of the
Berlin Wall. There are those who have argued against such ‘pluralism’, favouring
instead the notion of a ‘singular art history’. Others contest this view, mainly with
reference to the past, but also, more controversially, with reference to the present
and the future. Those voices can be heard in the East and in the West, for example
in an issue of the Moscow Art Magazine entitled ‘The East is looking at the East;
The East is looking at the West’,20 and a touring exhibition accompanied by a
book edited by Maria Hlavajova and Jill Winder, Who if not we should at least try
to imagine the future of all this? 21 Neither project provided a solution to this
dilemma; they merely revealed a need for further discussion.
Before I start addressing this issue from a much broader perspective,
which I am referring to as ‘the spatial turn’, I would like to note that not every-
one agrees that such discussion is needed. Above all, this is the position of
mainstream art history.
24
Art since 1900, a book published a few years ago by several authors asso-
ciated with the quarterly October, stands out among other synthetic surveys of
twentieth-century art.22 Arranged into chapters focusing on the artistic events
taking place within each decade, the book covers an enormous volume of
material. Individual artworks are analysed in the book from the perspective
of historic intellectual processes, rather than as autonomous phenomena.
The historic narration is interrupted in several places by the co-authors’
round-table discussions. The analysis is grounded in contemporary method-
ology, in part developed by the authors themselves. Moreover, each part of
the book provides indices and cross-references to other parts, allowing the
reader to track particular artistic movements and follow events or the devel-
opment of particular artists by skipping over certain portions of the text.
The book includes a glossary of the art historic terms pertaining to twentieth-
century art, an index and an enormous bibliography. In short, Art since
1900 is an excellent textbook. The text is clearly structured and uses contem-
porary language.
However, there is a problem with the book’s artistic geography. While
it is clear that Art since 1900 functions as a textbook of Western art, namely
art produced in the cultural and political centres of the West – Paris, Berlin,
Vienna, London, New York and others – this does not mean that artworks
produced outside or on the margins of the West are entirely excluded. The
reader will find a discussion of Russia and of Moscow and St Petersburg, as
well as mention of select artistic phenomena from Brazil, Mexico, Japan or
Central Europe. This is perhaps the first time that a textbook has expanded
to such an extent the art geography of the twentieth century. The problem is
that the text does nothing to revise the unspoken assumptions of modernist
art geography, nor does it make any effort to reach for what Thomas
DaCosta Kaufmann has referred to as ‘geohistory’.23 In other words, it does
not reveal the historic significance of spaces and locations within which given
art was created, nor does ir deconstruct the relationship between the centre
and the margins of the global art history of modern art.
This is rather curious, if one considers the fact that the authors belong
to a circle of art historians who have made great contributions to the revision
of the art historic paradigm. Drawing inspiration from such disciplines as
social science, psychoanalysis, feminism and queer studies, this group was a
source of numerous efforts to produce critical art history. However, it did
not take up the task of critiquing the modernist art geography, nor did it
attempt its revision in the spirit of critical methodology. As a result, art from
areas other than Western Europe and America is presented in Art since 1900
25
from the perspective of the Western geographic paradigm. The only excep-
tion is the attention given to Russia, which simply cannot be ignored because
of its great influence on the development of the world (Western) avant-garde.
However, this does not constitute a departure from the norm, much less a
significant innovation, since the history of the first or the Great Russian avant
garde has been an integral part of the Western twentieth-century art canon
ever since Alfred H. Barr Jr became its great admirer. In contrast, the art
history of other areas is presented as a fragment of the global or universal
art history. The assumption that the models for those art histories were pro-
duced in the West reveals the book’s essentially West-centric perspective on
art history and clearly reveals the modernist premises of its art geography.
This is an instance of a vertical art historic narration. This type of art his-
tory is primarily characterized by a hierarchical approach. The city or cities
where the paradigms of specific artistic tendencies are created constitute its
heart. Those are generally the great cities of the West: Berlin, Paris, New York.
It is assumed that from there models of artistic practice spread throughout the
world, eventually reaching the peripheries. Therefore, art of the centre sets up
the paradigm; art of the peripheries adopts models developed in the artistic
metropolitan centres. The art canons, hierarchies of value and stylistic norms
are all created in the centre; on the peripheries those canons, norms and values
are at best received and assimilated. It can happen, of course, that significant
artists appear within the margins of the artistic geography, but their recognition
and art historic consecration must happen within the centre, through Western
exhibitions and publications. This happened to the great Polish constructivists
Katarzyna Kobro and Władysław Strzemiński, as well as contemporary artists
such as Mirosław Bałka, or earlier to Krzysztof Wodiczko, who still lives in New
York. The same could be said about the outstanding Czech surrealists such as
Toyen or Jindřich Štyrský.
Naturally their Western contemporaries recognized them as equal
partners. For example, André Breton noted in his speech presented in Prague
on 29 March 1935 that surrealism developed simultaneously in Prague and
in Paris.24 Earlier, artists of the international avant garde did not perceive the
art scene from a vertical perspective. For the Dadaists, Bucharest or Tokyo
were no less important than Berlin or Zurich. The vertical, hierarchical dis-
course ordering the artistic geography according to the notions of the centre
and the periphery was created by art historians. Staying with the example of
Dada, I will only mention the extremely valuable multi-volume history of
that movement edited by Stephen Foster. The fourth volume in the series, The
Eastern Dada Orbit, dedicated to the area beyond the (Western) centre, includes
26
descriptions of Dadaism in Central and Eastern Europe as well as Japan.25 It

is significant that those areas beyond the centre are located in the East, and
that this East is defined rather broadly: it reaches from Prague to Tokyo. This
form of art historic construction, which I am identifying as vertical art history,
is unmistakably implicated in cultural ‘orientalizing’ of the Others, in a way
described by Edward Said.26
However, a critique of the vertical paradigm is not easy. Although there
have been many publications dedicated to art produced outside the Western
art centres, in Central Europe, South America or Asia, and dealing, with
varying degrees of success, with the methodological issues stemming from
the East–West or the North–South divide, the problem itself is much more
deeply rooted. It goes to the question of whether there is such a thing as non-
Western modern art. Modernism and its mutations – antimodernism and
postmodernism – have been inherently Western phenomena and hence, from
a modernist perspective, have had universal significance. According to Igor
Zabel, modern forms and art values are Western and as such universal.27
Nevertheless they functioned in the East and the South as well as the West
and the North. That is why when we address the issue of ‘world’ art history
we have to repeat the question recently asked by Suzana Milevska: can world
art history come into being outside such geographic dichotomies?28 Of
course not. In this context Gerardo Mosquera’s critique of cultural asymmetry
presented in his essay ‘The Marco Polo Syndrome’, which assumes that the
West provides models and the rest of the world either adopts them or
becomes ‘traditionalized’ and ‘exoticized’ in ethnographic museums, not only
oversimplifies the issue, but also functions virtually as an instrument of dom-
inance in the hands of the cultural centres.29 Although modern art produced
within peripheral regions clearly developed by taking up models provided by
the centre, for those with experience working on such areas it is also clear that
the significance of art produced there goes well beyond mere adoption and
imitation, or functioning as a ‘supplement’ to art seen from the perspective
of the modernist centres.
John Clark’s book Modern Asian Art is one of the most successful efforts
to address the full complexity of this problem on a much broader scale. It deals
not so much with a single case study as with a synthetic survey of a consider-
able non-Western area, in this instance Asia.30
Clark constructs the history of modern art in Asia in relation to Western
culture or, to use his term, Euramerica. He produces, however, a highly com-
plex and varied image of that history, suggesting that nuanced knowledge of
Asia is fundamentally lacking in the West. The diversity he describes does not
27
result exclusively from the differences in cultural policies of the various Asian
countries that adopted Western models of modernism, but rather, and per-
haps foremost, from much deeper cultural processes taking place in given
locations. Clark observes that, in reality, the Euramerican influence and its
specific artistic models constitute only one element among many that any art
historian of the region must take into consideration. The internal dynamics of
a given culture, its selective need for adaption and absorption of particular
models, as well as the role played by such transfers in specific locations con-
stitute the other. In other words, Clark is as much interested in the reception
of Western art in Asia as in its function and the functioning of art institutions
in particular locations. This approach represents a much more dynamic under-
standing of contemporary art’s reception in Asia than the model generally
presented in the (Western) contemporary art textbooks. The artist, the artwork,
or the culture of a given country function within Clark’s text as engaged actors,
rather than passive fields that merely receive Western influences.31 Paradoxi-
cally, Western art styles are often used in the local context as an instrument of
resistance against cultural colonialism and imperial dominance of the West
within various forms of neo-traditionalist art, a fact that further complicates
the local situation. The same applies to the diversity of the art scene and creation
of the local schools working within the ‘Western style’.
Every art historian working on art from the marginal regions of the world
has to struggle with the problems addressed by Clark. This is also true for the
post-war art history of East Central Europe. The difference between work done
on Asia and on Eastern and Central Europe rests in the fact that the latter areas
remained part of Europe, even when they fell under the control of the Soviet
Union. Although it was difficult for artists to maintain contact with the West-
ern art scene, the art produced in the region remained unmistakably European.
The artists were Europeans even though they faced considerable difficulties
travelling through Europe. Yet if one were to apply the vertical perspective to
the culture of East Central Europe, it would be impossible to discern specific
meanings of art produced there. This is because art in Eastern Europe developed
under completely different historic conditions, though from a strictly geographic
perspective, as for instance in East Berlin, it was created a stone’s throw away
from the West. It is clear, therefore, that in order to produce a historic account
of the region’s art one has to pay close attention to the political context of the
reception of particular Western artistic trends. This context frequently changes
in a dramatic way the meaning of artworks. That is why art informel signified
something entirely different in Poland than it did in France, happening meant
something else entirely in Czechoslovakia than it did in the us, and conceptual
28
art functioned in a very different way in Hungary than it did in Great Britain.
Any art historian from this part of Europe has to reconstruct the context and
to construct a local analytic ‘frame’, to use Norman Bryson’s terms.32 Such
historic particularity of the region and the strong political pressure on art
(which, paradoxically, often led to its radical depolitization), irrespective of
the direct artistic influences, could tempt one to postulate the ‘two voices of
European art history’ thesis cited by Hans Belting.33 However, too single-
minded pursuit of such a thesis could lead to a fundamental misreading of
the historic record.34 Art from East Central Europe may have had different
meaning than art produced in the West, but it was produced within the sphere
of Western influence. Moreover, the aspiration of the artists in the region
functioned, to a certain extent, as political compensation vis-à-vis the official
cultural policies of the communist states. That is why instead of writing about
the ‘second voice of art history’, it is much more productive to formulate a
different paradigm of art history.
It is true that there is considerable difference between Asian art and
art from Eastern and Central Europe, especially when we approach the issue
from the perspective of the Other. I am not addressing here the considerable
diversity of Asian art. After all, the history of Indian art, which also includes
assimilation of Western modernist influences, is completely different from
the history of Japanese modern art. However, even if one assumes that the
Other and the art of the Other are exoticized within vertical art history, the
relative positions of Asia and of Central or Eastern Europe within that dis-
course are completely different. The Asian Other functions as the ‘true’ Other,
whereas the Central or Eastern European Other is the ‘not quite’ Other or
the ‘close’ Other.35 This was not always the case. According to Larry Wolff, the
eighteenth-century Western Europeans perceived the inhabitants of Eastern
Europe (Lithuania, Poland or Russia) as the ‘true’ Others.36 This understand-
ing changed in modern and contemporary culture. Within them, the place of
the ‘close’ Other is located on the margins of European culture, beyond the
centre, in the provinces but still within the same sphere of European civiliza-
tion. That of the ‘true’ Other is not a consequence of marginality, but rather
of colonialism. The ‘true’ Other’s identity is constructed through a tension that
exists between the colonializing agency of the metropole and the local tradition.
This difference in position and definition is reflected in the difference of
perception. The Eastern and Western European share the orientalizing gaze
when it is cast on the ‘true’ Other, but the Eastern European perceives the
existence of a scale of otherness. The Asian, irrespective of where he or she may
come from, perceives Europe as a rather small and culturally homogenous
29
continent. From that perspective, German, French, Hungarian and Polish

cultures are all European, though they differ in their degree of continental
and global influence. Moreover, Czechs, Hungarians or Poles want to be seen
as Europeans and want their art to be seen as European. They especially
wanted this during the years of communist control. Their desire to be Euro-
pean provided them with a certain degree of psychological compensation
for the attempts that were made to impose Soviet cultural models in their
countries. By contrast, Asian cultures do not manifest any such desire to
identify with a shared Asian cultural core. On the contrary, they have a
deeply rooted sense of difference, also when it comes to their reception of the
Euramerican modernity.37
The problem of modern art looks slightly different from the South American
perspective. First of all, the area is comprised of culturally similar countries and
at least different parts of this continent are ‘comparable’ and characterized by
much less dramatic differences than in Asia. As a result, it is much easier to
speak here of a relatively unified region than in the Asian context. Even such a
popular art history text as Art in Latin America, edited by Dawn Ades, oper-
ates only in a very limited way (in a few chapters) within national categories.38
The linguistic uniformity is reinforced by the fact that ethnic diversity is much
less significant than in other regions. This does not mean, however, that this
area is homogenous in either a cultural sense or in terms of visual culture.
Nevertheless, different external geohistoric conditions have created a very
different frame for the art of the region than those that inform art in Asia or
Eastern Europe. Above all, there is a view that modern art in South America is
much more closely implicated in revolutionary politics than in either Europe
or Asia. Also there is a strong link between modernism and attempts to con-
struct local identity based on locally ethnic cultural traditions.39 Of course, as
in other areas located outside the Western centres of modern art, here also one
can see hybridization of artistic styles and their superimposition, which dis-
rupts the Western or the chronological order of art history. Such mutations
and the locally specific reception of Western art gave rise to highly original art
phenomena, such as South American surrealism, especially in its Mexican
beginnings. In reality, despite close personal contacts between André Breton
and artists from the region, it is difficult to speak here of surrealism; it is rather
a completely original form of art. Such phenomena certainly should give art
historians impetus to question and revise the traditional Western framework
of art historic terms and to establish the distinct character of South American
artistic culture not only in reference to the West but also to other regions.
30
World art history, were it to be written according to the expectations

of geohistory,40 in other words, taking into consideration specific meanings
of art produced in the marginal regions, must function as a critique of the
hierarchical art historic narration produced within the context of vertical art
history, and therefore must be written from a different paradigmatic per-
spective, one based on the horizontal model.41 It is clear that such world art
history must use the methods of relational geography or geography of cultural
differences described by Irit Rogoff.42 This conception of cultural geography
attempts to analyse the relationship between the subject and its location,
with the understanding that both the location and the subject – in our case
the artistic region and the art produced there – are neither stable not fully
formed. On the contrary, both are produced through a dynamic process and
in relation to other regions and subjects, local traditions and external influences.
Relational geography is therefore critical by definition and as such rejects the
essentializing attitude of the traditional Kunstgeographie.
The paradigm of horizontal art history provides an alternative to the
vertical art history.43 A point of departure in constructing such a paradigm
should be a deconstruction of vertical or Western art history. Such a critical
analysis should reveal the speaking subject, the one that makes pronounce-
ments, as well as allow us to determine in whose name and for whom those
pronouncements are made. The goal is not to diminish the contribution of
Western art history, but rather to identify and name its narration as ‘Western’.
In other words, the goal is to separate the two terms so often used together:
Western modern art and universal art, by relativizing and locating Western
narration – in accordance with the principles of horizontal art history – in
relation to other art historic narrations. One of the consequences of such a
move would be, or rather should be, a rejection of a traditional view of the
relationship between ‘our’ (Western) art history and art history of the Others.
Although it appears self-evident that modern art of the Others developed
under the influence of the West, the opposite, namely the question of the
influence of non-Western art on the history of Western art, or, to be more pre-
cise, on the perception of Western art, seems much less obvious. One must
ask, how does the art of the margins change the perception of the art in the
centre? Going a step further, one should inquire how is the centre perceived
not just from the position of the centre, or a location traditionally occupied by
contemporary art, but also from the position of the margins, namely places
that have, in a number of ways and for different reasons, better visibility.
A view from the margins reveals, above all, fractures within the centre. If
the centre perceives itself within categories of homogeneity, then the margins
31
receive those categories, transform them for their own use, and note their
internal tensions. There are two such basic categories, which homogenize art
history written from the position of the centre: the canon and the style (here
understood as a particular art tendency, such as Cubism and Futurism). The
history of art from the margins, understood in terms of art historic events, their
description and analysis develops within the context of the Western art canon
and of the Western stylistic categories. Artist and art historians relativize their
own artistic and analytic experiences in order to fit them into those categories.
The Western canon of particular art movements serves as a point of reference
for their reception and transformation within particular locations beyond
the centre.
However, the canon does not provide a criterion of value, but rather a
historic frame, within which more or less autonomous operations take place.
Those operations, in turn because of local mechanisms, create their own hier-
archies and relations – in other words, their own canons. The local canons,
however, cannot be coordinated since there is no single art history of the
margins. There are as many canons as there are margins, even though they may
be negotiated from a primarily critical perspective towards the centre. Because
the canon seen from the perspective of the margins undergoes relativization,
it appears that one should also relativize it within the centre itself, to accept,
in other words, that it is a product of analytic construction and as such has a
particular historic character – historic in reference to the art historian rather
than the art under consideration.44
This process is also clearly visible from the perspective of stylistic categories.
Neither the art of the margins nor its history ever accepted the Western ideal
of stylistic ‘purity’. The conclusion one must draw is clear if one considers such
examples as Russian Cubo-Futurism (the very name of this phenomenon reflects
its heterogeneity), Hungarian Activism, Polish Formism, South American
Indigenism (created by the Uruguayan artist Rafael Barradas), Vibrationism,
global Surrealism (which appeared in many parts of the world and took on very
locally specific forms), Japanese Dadaism, South American Concretism and
global conceptualism, which routinely departed from the Western (Anglo)
linguistic model.
The work on conceptual art provides an interesting material for the dis-
cussion of horizontal art history. Recent analyses of the movement produced
in the West, among them those by Benjamin Buchloh,45 leave no doubt that
the dominant paradigm of conceptual art has an Anglo-American character
and that the genesis, development, problematic, theories and attitudes of
global conceptualism have their roots in the Anglo-American experience.
32
However, research produced outside the West dealing with other forms of
global conceptualism has persuasively demonstrated that this is not the case.
No one questions the role of the leading American and English conceptualists,
but it is clear in light of this research that the Anglo-American paradigm cannot
explain conceptual art produced in non-Western countries. Luis Camnitzer’s
book, which provides an excellent discussion of conceptual art in South
America, reveals for instance entirely different artistic experiences, different
genealogy, development, attitudes and so on. The author stresses the consid-
erable influence of local, South American contemporary as well as historic
literature. He also argues that political movements, in particular the Uruguayan
urban guerrilla group Tupamoros, played a crucial role in shaping South
American conceptualism, as did liberation theology, which was extremely
influential within the local political-religious context. Moreover, South Amer-
ican reception of French theory (such as structuralism, post-structuralism and
semiotics) differed significantly from its reception in the United States, since
it came earlier due to close contact between local and French intellectuals.
Because of this context, it is impossible to produce a purely ‘formal’ history
of the movement’s development (from minimalism to conceptualism) as one
could for the United States. Above all, conceptual art in South America was
not only implicated in politics, but had a real political function. In other
words, it was not just ‘politically engaged’ in the Western sense, but political
in its essence. Especially during the 1960s, its strategies and concrete forms
were understood as fundamentally political. Camnitzer also describes its peda-
gogical and didactic significance.46 In effect, he provides a rather interesting
comparative definition of the South American phenomenon. He characterizes
artistic production taking place within the orbit of Western art history (to
which he refers as history of the mainstream) as ‘conceptual art’, while defining
the South American phenomenon as ‘conceptualism’. His choice of this term
suggests that South American work functioned as something other than
just a form of art (as it did in the West) and that it was perceived as a broadly
understood response to the specific conditions of the local and regional
historic reality.47
The exhibition and catalogue ‘Global Conceptualism: Points of Origins’
provides another excellent example of such horizontal art historic approach
to conceptual art.48 It combines two perspectives: geographic and historic. In
other words, temporal narration is inscribed into the spatial system that con-
tains global manifestations of conceptual art. Moreover, the history of Western
conceptual art is divided into two components: Western European and North
American, with neither functioning as the paradigm for the rest of the world.
33
On the contrary, they are both treated as any other area. The first section of
the catalogue, which deals with the period 1950 to 1973, includes such
regions as Japan, Western and Eastern Europe (treated separately), South and
North America (treated separately), and Australia and New Zealand (treated as
one region). The second section deals with the period from 1973 to the late
1980s and focuses on the work produced in the Soviet Union, Africa, South
Korea, and China, Taiwan and Hong Kong (treated as a single region). The
third and final section of the catalogue addresses conceptual art in Southern
and Southeastern Asia during the 1990s. Of course, one could disagree with
this particular model of the geohistory of conceptual art, or with the specific
claims published in the catalogue, which includes essays by a number of
authors representing diverse methodological perspectives. However, it is clear
that this project represents a worthwhile effort aimed at breaking down the
dominance of the Western paradigm in analysis of conceptual art worldwide
and revealing differences in experience, meaning, as well as political and ideo-
logical attitudes of this work in different parts of the globe. This constitutes a
very interesting step in the direction of a horizontal description of one of
the most common forms of art practice in the post-war era and a rejection of
the dogma of the dominance of the Western model of art practice (based on
the art centres of Western Europe and the United States) and its supposed
‘imitation’ by the artistic peripheries.
Such methodological attitude allows for recovery of the historic, polit-
ical and contextual specificity of the work produced in each area by addressing
particular local resonance of its meanings, its diachronic character and function
within given societies. This type of analysis has given us much more informa-
tion about art in Japan and China, in South America and in Africa, regions
that disappear entirely from the historic world map of conceptual art produced
from a West-centric analytic perspective. This also could be said of Eastern
Europe. László Beke wrote about conceptual art from this area:
In comparison to this Western notion of conceptual art, the Eastern

European variant was never so rigorous. Rather, it was flexible and elastic,
ironic, humorous, nonprofessional, communicable, always ready to become
a social activity of a group of young people or even an alternative move-
ment . . . On the other hand, the ‘immaterial’ nature of conceptualist
works, and the ‘poorness’ of the media employed – ‘just an idea’, words
and concepts, paper and pencil, typewriter, postcards, a telephone call,
ephemeral actions – made communication easier and censorship more
difficult. This is why conceptual art had to be invented in Eastern Europe,
34
and its function as a strategy for evading authority should be considered

a feature specific to its development in the region.49
I think that Beke, who was not just an observer but also a participant in this
movement, captured the essence of the issue. In Eastern Europe, conceptual
art afforded an opportunity for development of instruments of resistance
against the state. It is a different matter whether and to what extent that
opportunity was realized. The answer to that question would require much
more detailed comparative analysis of the region.
When, after such a horizontal methodological venture, enriched by the
experience of the margins and simultaneously of the world, we return to the
analysis of art produced in the centre, we realize that conceptual art in the West,
and therefore in the centre, was not nearly as orthodox and homogenous as
some of those who have written about it suggest. Moreover, the linguistic
model and institutional critique, both understood as analytic categories
developed on the basis of work created by the movement’s leading English and
American protagonists, cannot account for the whole range of works produced
in the West. What I am claiming is that we have an opportunity to revise both
the history of art produced within the centre and the world history of modern
art written from that perspective by drawing on the studies of the art margins
by construction of horizontal art histories.
Any effort to relativize the history of Western art, by deconstructing,
among others, analytic and geographic categories as well as ‘locating’ the
centre, must include analogous efforts aimed at ‘other’ art histories. In other
words, the Other must look at himself, define his own position and location
from which he speaks. Truth be told, there is no more privileged position than
that of a narrator located within the centre. The latter, often unconsciously,
precisely because of the ideology that universalizes modern art, does not ack -
nowledge the importance of location. The Other, much more conscious of the
context and much more aware of the consequences of ‘relational geography’,
is able to make us sensitive to the fact that we never speak from ‘nowhere’
but always do so from a particular place. The centre is also such a place; it is a
particular location that has concrete legal, national, cultural and other param-
eters. Because he is located in the centre, however, the subject forgets that he is
in the centre, at a location well marked on the world map. The Other, who is
never allowed to forget, may be able to make him aware of this reality. After
all, a historian of modern Argentinian, Czech or Indian art knows very well
from where he speaks, whereas a historian of French or American modern art
often ignores that knowledge in order to universalize the subject of his study.
35
We have arrived at a key problem of horizontal art history, namely the

problem of location. If one examines production of books dealing with the
history of modern art one can easily see a bifurcation. On one side there are
books on ‘the history of modern art’, which do not identity the location, on
the other we encounter a profusion of different adjectives referring to partic-
ular places, both regional (‘South American art’, ‘Eastern European art’) and,
at least in part, national (histories of ‘Polish’, ‘Korean’ or ‘Mexican’ art, for
example) The problem of national art historic narratives appears very charac-
teristic of art from outside the centre, even though, as Thomas DaCosta
Kaufmann argues, their genesis lies elsewhere and is much older than the
history of modern art.50 One could say, then, that we have on the one hand
histories of modern art in particular countries, and on the other international
history of modern art. This type of art historic narration reveals the actual
dynamics of modern art history. On the one hand, there are ‘international’
artists, even though they come from particular countries and one can see
influences of their native culture within their work (as for instance in the case
of Pablo Picasso). On the other hand, there are ‘national’ artists, some of whom
may have even won international recognition (for example, Władysław
Strzemiński, ‘the Polish constructivist’). Certainly this bifurcation reveals
geographic tensions: on one side Paris and later New York as international
cultural centres, on the other regional ones located within a national context,
such as Prague, Tokyo or Buenos Aires. Within the hierarchy of art historic
narrations, the former constitute the focus of attention, while the latter
always play a subordinate role.
This form of localization, which is based on a modernist understanding
of nationalism and which assumes the existence of a system of nation states,51
is currently undergoing transformation under the influence of the processes
of globalization, which are linked to the postmodern perception of reality
and the changing character of the state, from a national into a cosmopolitan
model.52 Globalization as such does not have a single dimension. Homi Bhabha
identifies its two forms: cosmopolitan and vernacular.53 Arjun Appadurai writes
that within the regime of globalization, the concept of the location becomes
detached from a physical place and becomes transnational,54 a phenomenon
that can be identified with Bhabha’s vernacular globalization. Although this
is an accurate observation, I would add that the place, as marker of identity,
never disappears. On the contrary, it acquires new significance. Opening of
the borders and, above all, globalization of the art institutions (for example
proliferation of biennales) on the one hand weakens artists’ links to particular
locations, and on the other, paradoxically, often made them stronger by
36
creating particular local identities for sale. The globalized world needs this
type of strategy. One could even say that it creates it for commercial and
political reasons. Mari Carmen Ramirez provides an excellent description of
this phenomenon based on a case study of South American art, by identify-
ing the role played by cultural brokers, art historians and especially curators
in this process.55
It is worthwhile to develop further this line of argument by inquiring
into the relationship between the postmodern and the postcolonial concep-
tion of the ‘nation’, and hence world and national art history. Without delving
into various discussions of this problem, which have occupied many scholars
working in this area, let us note that the main issue within this problematic
has to do with the definition of the subject. In general, postmodernism
supports the notion of a decentred subject, whereas postcolonialism tends
to be much more invested in defence of centred subjectivity.56 Seen from a
postmodern perspective, a nation is devoid of any essential qualities. By con-
trast, within the practice of postcolonial studies certain forms of national
essentialism seem necessary for identification of strategies of resistance and
critique of the centre. Perhaps the greatest paradox of postcolonial studies
rests in the fact that they investigate national essentialism imposed on the
colonized by the colonizers. In order to defend decolonized nations, they must
once again engage in the construction of the national subject. Similarly, in
horizontal art history, which also operates with the concept of a nation, some
way of stabilizing and defending the subject also seems necessary. In this
approach such a project would be more closely linked with the postcolonial or
post-totalitarian, rather than postmodern perspective. On the other hand,
shifting the discussion from the general to a more particular level, or from
a global to a national, one has to scrutinize such essentialization in a highly
critical way. Art produced within particular countries can never be ‘national’
either in ethnic or political sense. Adoption of such a perspective would be
synonymous with the repression of other groups functioning within a partic-
ular country dominated by a particular ‘nation’. From this methodological
perspective it seems necessary to adopt a critical strategy towards the issue of
national subjectivity and to develop a levelled playing field for all those art
subjects active on the scene. In other words, if horizontal art history written
from the macro perspective cannot ignore the national subjects and, in a way,
must defend them by engaging in the critique of the centre, then from the
micro perspective it must also critique the notion of national subjectivity, to
deconstruct the nation-subject, in order to defend marginalized culture of the
national minorities against the claims of the majorities.
37
However, before we can fully develop this argument, we must raise

another question: what were the material (in addition to ideological) factors
that influenced constructions of national histories of modern art? One of
those was certainly the lack of communication among those cultures. If they
did communicate, the contacts were usually mediated by the centre. This
phenomenon can be observed on the macro and the micro scales. The cultures
of different regions (Asia, South America or Eastern Europe) looked to the
West, rather than to each other. They drew inspiration from there, rather than
from other marginal areas. The same could be said about individual national
art historic narratives produced within a particular region, such as Eastern
Europe. For instance, Poles still know very little about the history of Romanian
art; what’s more they wilfully ignore it, prompted by a false sense of cultural
superiority that motivates them to align their own culture with that of the
West. Similarly the Czechs are generally ignorant on the subject of Ukrainian
art history, and so on. The Other looks to the Master and not to the other
Other, adopting, often unconsciously, the hierarchies of the centre that have
victimized him. If there are any exchanges of values, experiences or knowl-
edge, they happen exclusively through the mediation of the Master, or the
West, which alone has the power to validate the Other in the eyes of the
other Others.
The relationship between the centre and various nationally defined
localities is changing. Whereas modernist culture was characterized by the
tension between national and international identifications, contemporary,
postmodern and globalized culture, which functions within the context of the
doctrine of multiculturalism, has to reach for other points of reference. As I
mentioned earlier, the issue of identity is gaining recognition globally. Mod-
ernism avoided individual identification – one could even say any identification:
ethnic, local, gender, sexual and so on – in the name of a universalizing utopia
of unity. The adjective ‘international’ means ‘among’ nations, or ‘beyond’ and
‘outside’ national characteristics and identities (as in ‘international style’ or
‘international art scene’). Of course such rhetoric conceals Western imperial-
ism, which appears even on the most basic level of the language used by the
‘international’ coterie, first French, then English.
The new situation requires adoption of new strategies, while the collapse
of the universalist utopia, among others as a result of global conflicts, forces
acceptance of the same marks of identity, at least as a starting point. The latter
attitude can be seen in the work of such artists as Marina Abramović or Ilya
Kabakov. While they acknowledge that national or local references are essential
for their work’s proper understanding, both, unlike earlier artists, neither
38
frame their work in the context of ‘exoticizing’ discourse (as did Diego Rivera),
nor annihilate its sources (as did Marcel Duchamp). Moreover, this tendency
favours reconstruction of the national sources of avant garde art, which were
suppressed within the internationalist modernist paradigm, as is demonstrated
by the recent reconsiderations of Marcel Duchamp’s work in the context of
the French tradition and that of Kazimir Malevich in the context of Russian.
This is not an entirely new approach. If we look at the work done on those
two artists in the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s, we will fail to find any significant traces
of the national context. But such references began to appear later, within a
context defined through the notion of transnationalism, a term that functions
in a very different way from that of internationalism.
The concept of transnationalism should be employed in the construction
of horizontal art history – art history that is polyphonic, multi-dimensional,
devoid of geographic hierarchies. Of course, this open model of world art
history should also rely on concepts borrowed from fields other than critical
geography, namely based on gendered, ethnic or subcultural perspectives.
But such revision of art history, for instance from a feminist perspective, which
has been going on for a number of years, often leaves in place the geograph-
ically hierarchical paradigm of modern art history. By contrast, transnational art
history, which is currently being written (as is demonstrated by the emerging
regional art historic narrations I described earlier), defines values and concepts
in terms of a very different axis from the national-international one. The
attractiveness and potential of the transnational discourse gives us an oppor-
tunity to open art history to a much more interesting perspective, which
negotiates not only transnational relations within a regional context, but also
takes up negotiation of the local art historic narratives on the transregional
level. This would not, and in fact should not, lead once again to production
of a unitary, this time horizontal, world art history. Rather it should engender
pluralism of narrative transregional options, which would function as a critique
of the West-centric art historic narration. That is the great challenge facing art
disciplines, or at least those parts dedicated to work on modern art. Just as
horizontal modern art history – or rather horizontal modern art histories –
have to engage in a critique of the vertical, centralized art history, so world art
history should function as a critique of the universal or imperial art history in
the literal sense of that word, an art history that imposes its own hierarchy,
epistemological categories and metropolitan system of value onto various
localities. In other words, world art history must be horizontal, not vertical.
But, as Hans Belting has observed, it does not have to be global. The issue
here is not whether global art history is the history of global art, but rather
39
what the term ‘global’ means in this context. Belting responds that it signifies
globalization of Western art history and, as such, is a form of intellectual
imperialism and neocolonialism. However, he adds, this does not have to be
the case. He provides a number of examples of art historic counter-narratives
based primarily on the museological practice of the great cultures of China
and India, adding also examples of Western institutions that have drawn posi-
tive lessons from those practices, as for instance in the case of Goldsmiths
College and its transdisciplinary curatorial programme.57
Here then is my thesis: the fall of communism in Europe in 1989 was
one of the factors that supported the development of the horizontal approach
to art history. It is not my intention to argue that we need to break up the global
artistic culture through an approach such as that suggested by Alexander
Alberro, who bases his efforts to ‘periodize contemporaneity’ mainly on the
observation of global culture, including art engaged in global problems,
exhibitions with a global reach, technology that enables global communication,
as well as changes in the perception of what constitutes an ‘artwork’ (shifts in
the understanding of the avant garde tradition, return of ‘aesthetics’, affective
conceptualism).58 My thesis addresses a different issue, which is related to a
broader perspective on the periodization of contemporaneity. We need to
construct a horizontal cultural plane that includes art history, understood as
a discourse on past and contemporary art practice. In other words, Belting’s
call for ‘the two voices of art history’ should be read only as a first step in a much
broader project aimed at refashioning art history as a discipline. 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 4 April 1989, which led to the first (partly) democratic elections in
Eastern Europe, the tearing down of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the
Soviet Union, coincided with the collapse of apartheid in South Africa (insti-
tuted 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 initi-
ated 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-widening audiences, soon becom-
ing a global phenomenon. However, this growth was not accompanied by a
sustained art critical discourse within China. Rather, Chinese contemporary
40
art attracted attention mainly in the West, but also in Eastern Europe, as
demonstrated by the work of Polish art historian Monika Szmyt.59 Of course,
one cannot describe contemporary China using the (Eastern) European post-
communist categories. The contemporary Chinese single-party, totalitarian
political system differs significantly from European pre-1989 communism and
the system in place in Cuba, which could be described as a political museolog-
ical artefact. The Chinese hybrid, which combines communist ideological
and power system with neo-liberal capitalism, provides a very interesting
comparison with the old Eastern Europe. After all, pre-1989 Eastern Europe
believed that capitalism would liberate it from the communist oppression. To
a significant extent the concept of the ‘free market’ was identified with that
of ‘free speech’. Capitalism for Eastern Europe embodied mystified hope for
freedom; China has no such hopes.
If we add to that horizontal historic plane established by the year 1989
earlier events that culminated in the rejection of the totalitarian regimes by
various South American countries (Argentina, Brazil, Chile), as well as discus-
sions 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.
The debate surrounding the post-communist condition has become
multifaceted and extremely abundant. Any effort to do it justice would require
a substantial monograph. I will only mention that this discussion includes,
among others, voices that emphasize the rootedness of contemporary cultural
‘shortcomings’ in this region in the history of the totalitarian system and, in
particular, certain aspects of communist thought that cannot be eliminated
within the recently developed and still relatively new post-communist democ-
racies. Such voices stress the impact of the historic memory of the former
political system, which can be found in habits of thought and behaviour,
cultural models and, paradoxically, in ‘nouveau riche’ attitudes that range from
wilful forgetting to self-conscious adoption (mimicry) of Western models.
This type of analysis dominates studies on the post-Wall Europe. However,
there are also efforts to articulate a position that considers the problem of the
year 1989 from a much broader perspective. 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 a recently published
41
short text, Susan Buck-Morss noted, for instance, that the post-communist
condition is not only affecting Eastern Europe. In other words, it does not have
a spatial, but a temporal character and therefore describes a historic moment
in which we are still situated. In other words, the post-communist condition
described the historic and universal condition of present.60
Boris Groys presents a much more detailed and multifaceted attempt
to define this phenomenon.61 He also discusses the post-communist condition
from the perspective of universal categories. Groys defines it as a particular
current vision and description of the world, its parameters and points of
reference. However, he moves well beyond Buck-Morss. He tries to reanalyse
the historic significance of the post-communist condition in the context of
the evolution/fall of communism as well as postmodernism. He argues that the
historic process, which shaped contemporaneity, began with premodernism
and has continued through modernism and postmodernism. The last phase,
which discovered, once again, difference and returned to the idea of individ-
ual expression, did not rejecting modernity; on the contrary, it intensified its
experience. Groys associates modernity with ‘artificiality’, which functions as
the opposite of the pre-modern notion of ‘natural’. However, it is artificiality
with universal ambitions. In reality, this shift from modernist uniformity
(artificiality) to postmodern diversity constitutes a move towards the market.
It is this postmodern market that generates purely aesthetic intensification of
artificiality and stands behind the idea that difference sells. At any rate, this
shift towards diversity, which has aesthetic-commercial character, leads to
ever-greater artificiality.
On the other hand, the evolution from pre-communism, through com-
munism and post-communism, has a somewhat different trajectory, or at least
its trajectory initially appears to be different. Communism created the first
model of a post-national society. According to Groys, this model, associated
with the processes of modernization, constituted an ideological effort to
embody the notion of modernity and social progress. Therefore the shift from
communism to post-communism cannot be seen as a shift ‘towards’ modern
diversity or artificiality (as in the postmodern project), but rather away from
the notion of utopia and towards a pre-modern or ‘natural’ pre-communist
state. Those differences can be easily tracked within the concept of the nation.
Postmodernism provides a further stage in the development of the model of
a post-national society. On the other hand, post-communism, as in the case
of the break-up of the ussr (or for that matter of other federal states, in par-
ticular Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, and the explosive appearance of
nationalism in many post-communist countries) signalled the return of
42
national rhetoric. The most interesting questions here are what is the signifi-
cance of the Western interest in Russia (the texts that I am referring to here
were all written in the 1990s), and finally to where exactly are we ‘returning’?
The answer to the first question is fairly obvious. Eastern Europe, Russia
and Central Europe were of interest because they were marked with difference.
In other words, the interest was motivated by commercial considerations. We
should recall the great market boom in Russian art after perestroika, auctions
held in Moscow by the great auction houses, as well as, somewhat later and
on a more modest scale, an interest by the international art market in Polish
art. The answer to the second question, namely what is it that hides below
the surface of the turn away from communist modernism, seem much more
surprising. Groys arrives at it by analysing architecture, more precisely by
examining the project of rebuilding the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in
Moscow, which was destroyed in the early 1930s to make way for the new
monumental Palace of the Soviets (a project that was never realized; in the late
1950s the government constructed an open-air public swimming pool on
the site). Groys sees in the project a desire for a return to a ‘folkloric’ pre-
revolutionary Russian identity, which fulfils expectations of the postmodern
aesthetic and market diversity. However, that is only the surface. Groys argues
that below it, hidden from view, one finds another dimension, that of Stalin-
ist aesthetics, or more precisely of a Stalinist conception of aesthetics.62 After
all, it was Stalin who, after the initial period of avant garde radicalism, went
against Russian ideologues of the avant garde – Constructivists, Futurists and
Modernists – turning away from the future and towards the past. He was
aided by a peculiar dialectic that combined opposites and which Groys sees
still functioning today. Contemporary Russian historicism and rejection of
the models provided by modernist architecture recall as an aesthetic attitude
that earlier turn away from the future and towards the past. However, the
author notes, this shift is not dogmatic, as neither was the Stalinist aesthetic
doctrine. The ‘invisible hand’ of the ruler steered the former Soviet artistic
culture; it controlled censorship, the handing out of permissions and their
withdrawal, the implementation of legal provisions and prohibitions. The
contemporary mechanism of control is also hidden. It can also be compared
to an ‘invisible hand’, but it is no longer the hand of a ruler, but that of the
market. On that plane, despite many differences, post-communism meets
postmodernism. They are both, in different ways and in different contexts,
interested in aesthetic diversity and the market controls both.
Irrespective of how problematic some of Groys’s claims may be, in par-
ticular his tendency to apply the notion of the ‘retro-shift’, which conceals
43
the Stalinist model, to the analysis of the culture of the entire region of
Eastern and Central Europe, it worth noting the complexity of his discussion
of the prefix ‘post’. Of course, it describes what happened ‘after’ communism,
but it also, simultaneously, problematizes the historic point of reference, or
the permanence of the communist models. Contrary to what one would
expect, the post-communist condition does not require a rejection of commu-
nism and a return to the ‘former’ state. In fact, it can signal a certain type of
continuity, if not of symbols, then certainly of the modes of thought, customs
and habits, as well as ways of wielding power by the former adversaries of the
fallen system, now mainly identified with the political right.
At the fifth Prague Biennale in 2007, Romanian artist Ciprian Mureşan
presented a work that consisted of a statement in English: Communism never
happened (the work was originally created in 2006). By fate or the organizers’
technical incompetence, which in and of itself can be seen as a manifestation
of the post-communist condition, sometime during the exhibition the word
‘never’ lost the letter ‘n’, changing the slogan into Communism ever happened.
This quid pro quo was not just humorous. I think it was meaningful because
it functioned not only as a literal suggestion, but also because its effect was
unintentional. Perhaps that is how communist traditions have persisted
during the post-communist period, by being an unconscious presence.
While discussions of the post-communist condition have been wide-
ranging and have achieved certain visibility, those applying the postcolonial
perspective to the analysis of the post-communist Europe have encountered
certain difficulties. Such discussions, when they occur on a more sophisticated
level, tend to take place within the context of cultural anthropology63 and
literary studies,64 more rarely within art criticism and art history.65 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 such authors as Rasheed Araeen, Okwui
Enwezor, Saloni Mathur and Partha Mitter, to mention just a few, has mainly
focused on the colonial diaspora in Europe, and on historical studies of the
modernist culture of European colonies and postcolonial countries.66 However,
art historians who have embraced this type of perspective have by and large
avoided the ‘intra-European’ problematic, even as they have tried to generalize
their critical analysis. One could use here as an example an interesting exchange
published in the Art Bulletin, which consisted of responses to the earlier
mentioned article by Partha Mitter, ‘Decentering Modernism: Art History
and Avant-Garde Art from the Periphery’.67 Mitter’s conclusions concern
the so-called new art history, which was supposed to have a heterogeneous
44
6 Ciprian Mureşan, Communism Never Happened, 2006.
character, break down the monolith of Western modernism, reveal through

art historic studies the resistance of the colonial world to the dominance of
the metropole, be contextual and transnational, and, finally, deal with such
regions as Asia, Africa, South America and Australia. However, the author
does not mention the tensions internal to the metropole, or the ‘Old World’,
which has its own centres and peripheries, and where development of
modernism should also be decentred. The other respondents did not mention
them either, though they did make some very interesting observations con-
cerning ‘provincializing of modernity’ (Rebecca M. Brown) and ‘comparative
modernism’ (Saloni Mathur),68 which suggest their consistency with the
conception of horizontal art history.
The problematic of the ‘other’ Europe is also completely ignored by
another important publication, Cosmopolitan Modernism, edited by Kobena
Mercer, even though its bibliography included Steven Mansbach’s Modern Art
in Eastern Europe: From the Baltic to the Balkans, 1890–1939.69 This attitude is
worth noting because it clearly demonstrates that, contrary to the explicit
assertions, Europe is still perceived in broadly generalized terms, without
regard for its internal complexity, divisions and so forth. Because those authors
45
see the postcolonial world as located outside Europe, their work does not have
the character of a universal critique of the analytic apparatus of the West.
Instead it must be seen as a particular instance of identity politics practised
by a postcolonial society. Seen from that perspective, the ‘old’ Eastern Europe
does not belong to the postcolonial world (at least not within the sphere of
art history). And perhaps they are correct. It is rather difficult to use the post-
colonial perspective as a political methodology and cultural critique within
work addressing art produced in the Eastern part of the continent. At most,
one can look for overlapping frames of reference.
Postcolonial studies developed out of an entirely different range of
historic and geohistoric experiences. In general, their aim has been to critique
the centre from the position of a ‘far’ Other or, in other terms, to critique
the cultural hegemony of Europe. For Dipech Chakrabarty, such a critique
‘provincializes Europe’. He is not referring to a form of ‘postcolonial revenge’
(a shift of power from the centre to the 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 simultaneously ‘necessary’ and
‘insufficient’ for the needs of the postcolonial world.70
One could say that the fundamental difficulty in adopting postcolonial
studies to work on the European margins has to do with the very different
status of the not-European Other vis-à-vis the Eastern or Central European
Other. The former occupies the position of the ‘far’ Other, while the latter
has that of the ‘close’ Other; one is not European by definition, while the
other is certainly European, but marginalized. The question one has to ask in
this context is who has been colonized by whom, when and in what way?
The answer based on common sense would certainly have to point to
the Soviet Union, which colonized Central Europe after 1945. But is that the
correct answer? Certainly in many ways it is, but perhaps not with regards
to art. Although one could point to the introduction of Socialist Realism
as the official art doctrine in most of the Eastern Bloc countries as well as in
the newly added Baltic Soviet republics, which functioned as independent
countries before the war, its penetration was never complete. Even if it func-
tioned as the official ideological facade in the majority of the countries, it never
appeared in some (Yugoslavia), while it had only a brief duration in others
(Poland). In fact, one could say that it was modern art, not Socialist Realism,
that defined the cultural identity of Central Europe between 1945 and 1989.
Juxtaposition of post-communist and postcolonial studies is also prob-
lematic from a historic point of view. At the time when the so-called Third
46
World was engaged in its struggles for independence from Europe, Stalinism
gripped East Central Europe. India gained its independence in 1947. A year
later the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia took over full control of the
country’s public life. This was also the year when ‘hard-line’ cultural policies
were introduced in Poland. However, the problem rests not just in chronolog-
ical differences, but also in the non-compatibility of the art historic process-
es, since we are still operating within the field of art history. The art historic
work does not have to be rigid: there is no single, ‘universal’ method for
studying art’s history that should be applied irrespective of the character of
the work under investigation. To a large extent it is the work that determines
the methodology. In this context, the art of the postcolonial and post-
communist periods constitute two very different objects of study.
It also makes sense to mention in the context of this discussion, even
as an aside, the problem of self-colonization (more contemporary than hist -
oric), addressed so brilliantly and problematically by Alexander Kiossev.71 To
be precise, what matters are answers to two questions: in the first place,
whether the embrace of Western art in East Central Europe should be seen
as a symptom of such self-colonization, and secondly, whether the current
interest in postcolonial studies and the ‘forced’ adoption of fashionable theor-
etical approaches could also be seen in similar terms? The answer to the first
question is simple and negative. The spread of Western art movements, in
particular modern ones, had very little to do with colonialism (at least in the
way colonialism has been understood within postcolonial studies), because
those movements were not aspects of the official colonial doctrine. In fact, they
were often subversive and directed against Western culture, for example in
Cubism, surrealism, conceptual art and body art. The official cultural insti-
tutions in the countries where those movements originated often viewed
them with suspicion, seeing in them embers of rebellion and anarchy. If that
were the case, what was the identity of the purported colonizer? Moreover, at
least some of the modern art movements, in particular constructivism but
also to a certain extent Dadaism, originated in Eastern Europe.72 In other
cases, one simply cannot speak of a single point of origin. To borrow László
Beke’s humorous description of the genesis of conceptual art: if conceptual
art did not appear in the West, it would have been invented in the East.73
It also happened that modern art, for instance Cubism in its Czech or the
‘Eastern’ edition, was used as a tool directed against the conservative West
(Vienna), which functioned in the political sense as a colonizer. Finally, we
should note that Western artists, before and after the war, did not treat their
Eastern colleagues in a paternalistic way and often openly acknowledged
47
the parallel or even pioneering character of their work. Because geographic

cultural hierarchy was introduced later by art history, it is difficult to see
modern art as a colonial instrument used by Western Europe against Eastern
and Central Europe, in the way that one could perhaps see it in the context
of Mexican or contemporary Chinese art.
The answer to the second question concerning self-colonization is
rather more complex. It is true that Central European intellectuals avidly
consume academic fashions current in the West. Slovak artist Roman Ondák
comments on this phenomenon in a work that consists of boxes and pack-
ages labelled with names of famous theorists such as Gilles Deleuze, Michel
Foucault, Martin Heidegger or Ludwig Wittgenstein, which are arranged on
tables, in closets or cupboards, sometimes in spaces reminiscent of pantries.
In such a kitchen, Central European intellectuals use Western products to
make local meals. This ironic view of the Central European intellectual diet
reveals complete dependence on foreign, mainly Western provisions. But there
is also the opposite tendency, which manifests as a fear of the so-called new
paradigms. Edit András observes that Central European intellectual elites, in
particular art critics and art historians, approach contemporary critical theory
with a great deal of apprehension and distrust, which can be attributed to a
certain phobia of Marxism.74 The legacy of communism and the function of
Marxism as the official state ideology provoked negative reaction against
the left-leaning theoretical and methodological tendencies (the New Critical
Theory) that emerged from the experience of 1968. This could also be said
about sociologically and politically based art historic studies, as well as feminism,
gender, cultural, queer or postcolonial studies. András observes that as a result
the majority of work produced within the region tends to operate within the
modernist paradigm. Similar observations were made in Poland within art
history in the early 1980s in the wake of numerous experiments and discus-
sions that took place in the 1970s. Andrzej Turowski addressed this issue in an
essay dealing with the applicability of Marxist methodology to work on art of
the interwar period.75 Although in general András is correct, the reality is much
more complex and the situation depends completely on the local context. In
Poland, for example, in contrast to Hungary, which András uses as her case study,
critical theory and in particular feminism remain highly popular, irrespective
of statements made by conservative and right-wing intellectuals. Based on current
publishing volume, it is also highly likely that postcolonial studies will soon
become equally trendy.
Leaving aside ironic commentary, one could say that the efforts of Eastern
and Central European intellectuals resemble the strategy of mimicry described
48
by Homi Bhabha, in which the colonized emulates the colonizers, and even
exceeds them in their ‘metropolitan behaviour’. It is impossible to ignore such
behaviour. On the other hand, we only have one, namely the Western paradigm
of academic practice, and one could certainly say that we – Europeans from
the margins – are as ‘European’ as our Western colleagues and consequently
so are our methodologies. One could also add that Western Europe and the
United States have equally embraced ‘fashionable’ academic trends. Moreover,
both here and there one can easily distinguish superficial fascination from
serious engagement and application. Each new method provides an opportu-
nity for a new approach to the subject, for finding answers to questions that
have not yet been asked, for revealing unexplored dimensions of reality.
Certainly we should pursue such opportunities. Whether postcolonial studies
will provide them, and whether their theoretical apparatus can be used within
work on the post-communist countries, remains to be seen. But I would cer-
tainly caution against describing their popularity in terms of self-colonization,
even though I am aware of the difficulties involved in their adoption within
studies dealing with Eastern European visual culture.
Without rejecting the need for comparative art history or questioning
the desirability of ‘decentred’ or ‘provincialized’ modernism, there are several
fundamental problems in adopting the postcolonial perspective to work on
contemporary art of the (former) Eastern Europe. Instead of the postcolonial
framework, post-apartheid and post-authoritarian conditions in South Africa
7 Roman Ondak, Sated Table, 1997.
49
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 presi-
dent. 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
resulted in the departure of Augusto Pinochet in 1988 and, a year later, the
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 the 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 they ceased to function illegally and politically.76 Of course in the case
of South Africa we are dealing with a single country and therefore with a
much more homogenous environment, even though South African society is
far from homogenous 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. But that is not the main
issue. There are also significant differences 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 per-
spective 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 criti-
cism. The same could be said with regards to South America. One can observe
here certain similarities in the development of art, in particular neo avant
garde of the late 1960s and the 1970s. However, South American art, and
especially conceptual art, was much more profoundly engaged in politics.
According to Luis Camnitzer, it could even be described as a form of political
50
strategy or activism, especially in the late 1960s.77 That was generally not the
case in Eastern Europe, perhaps with the exception of Hungary, though even
there one cannot speak of political artistic activism of the type found in South
America. After the fall of military regimes (in different countries at different
times) there was a reaction against such intense political engagement and
political activism gave way to ‘art business as usual’. In post-communist
Europe, the situation is neither as simple nor as uniform. But the greater
degree of heterogeneity does not constitute the most significant difference.
Much more important are different historic, political or ideological frames
that conditioned discussions of artworks and art culture – differences in the
development of art criticism, curatorial and museological practice, as well as
academic art history, in other words those frames that also structured processes
of political and social liberalization. Our inquiry has to deal with the post-
totalitarian condition in the countries or rather regions that experienced
totalitarian systems at approximately the same time and at approximately the
same historic moment returned to democratic freedom. We have to ask what
attitudes were adopted by art in such post-totalitarian space, what problems
did it take up, how has it functioned and signified? It is clear that such com-
parison will yield highly varied results. The post-dictatorial systems in South
America 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 impor-
tant. This type of comparative, pan-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 the mainstream art culture,
and its neglect and omission within the Western art discourse, in art historic
narratives produced from the perspective of the centre or the position of
symbolic power, such as the earlier mentioned Art since 1900. The centre and
its power are still identified for many reasons (including economic, political
and cultural) with the West. That is why the new world 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 Other, on equal terms. To
borrow Dipesh Chakrabarty’s term, such world art history should ‘provin-
cialize’ 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 analyse its
influence from a historic perspective, to deconstruct it and to approach it axio-
logically in a way that we have been approaching art of South America, Asia,
51
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, for example
as an artistic tradition, system of values, institutional infrastructure and an art
market. 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. This is the key to any horizontal approach. The revision of our
discipline represented by Hans Belting’s call for ‘the two voices of art history’,
cited at the beginning of this chapter, represents, therefore, just an initial step
in a much more ambitious project of horizontal art history, a project that will
lead to a geographic localization of the West.
52
part one
History and
Contemporaneity
two
From Geography to Topography
Let’s begin with two seemingly naive questions: does Central Europe (still)
exist and does it (still) have anything significant to say? These questions
posed in such a way already contain their answers. If we are asking whether
Central Europe has anything to say, we have to assume that it (still) exists.
This is not the place for tracking historic processes that shaped modern
Central Europe. However, it is important to note that even if this term was
not widely used during the period of Soviet domination, at least not within
art criticism, nonetheless a sense of distinctness was felt in this part of the
European continent. When communism collapsed, the question of whether
Central Europe exists began to be raised, or more precisely, a considerable
number of artists, critics and curators began to question the usefulness of
such geographic framing of art. If the old system was gone and a number of
the post-communist countries has been incorporated into the (Western)
European structures, while others, to a greater or lesser extent, aspired to do
so in the future, if in the new post-1989 reality the world (or at least Europe)
became more free, if the borders have been opened (including the new ones
that were just created), then why should we maintain such an anachronistic
geographic frame? These are not isolated voices. Maria Hlavajova, a Dutch
curator with a Slovak background, is certainly one of them. Hlavajova does
not see any need for maintaining such a geographic construction after the
collapse of the Iron Curtain. On the contrary, she believes that there is a real
opportunity for free competition among artists working across borders and
creating artistic culture without boundaries. Moreover, she notes that there
are quite a few ‘really good’ artists and curators from the former Eastern Bloc
who have done very well for themselves in the West and for whom the old
divisions are meaningless. Also, there is a movement in the opposite direction.
Increasingly, Western artists and curators are showing interested in the post-
communist countries, not as exotic localities, but as potential partners.1 As
mentioned earlier, this is not an isolated reaction. However, it can certainly be
seen as a reaction against the old atmosphere of communist claustrophobia,
closed borders, control of the artistic culture and repression. It can also be
55
seen as a response to being condemned to provincialism and to being de facto

seen as a second-class European culture. This was a response to the calls for
a return to ‘normal’ existence, whatever that was supposed to mean, after the
fall of the Berlin Wall.2
There are also, of course, other opinions. Marina Gržnić provides one
of the most interesting. Reaching for psychoanalytic terminology, she defines
Central (or rather Eastern) Europe, in the wake of fulfilment of its historic
mission, as Europe’s ‘surplus’ and, simultaneously, as ‘insufficient’ Europe.
This formulation echoes Jacques Lacan’s Oedipal definition of the human
being as someone who has already fulfilled his destiny. To diagnose this con-
dition, Lacan uses the term ‘plus d’homme’, which simultaneously signifies
excess and lack of humanity. This part of Europe can be compared, therefore,
to excrement, which has, however, a crucial function. The subject (Europe)
cannot construct its own identity without such excrement, just as a human
subject needs its own ‘waste’ to create his own identity.3
Igor Zabel approaches the problem of the East-West from a different
perspective, using different vocabulary. In his essay ‘The (Former) East
and its Identity’, the author argues that while the fall of communism, and
hence the end of the world’s division into two opposed blocks, certainly
opened the (former) Eastern Europe, it did not eliminate differences that
have divided the continent.4 They are still visible within the cultural infra-
structure and can be seen in the characteristic underdevelopment of the
institutional system, critical discourse and analytic vocabulary that allows the
West to (still) function as the guarantor of values. It is (still), but not exclu-
sively, the West that creates and controls the system of concepts and the
hierarchy of institutions. However, the issue of the difference between the
West and the (former) East, or post-communist Europe, has much deeper
roots. One could say that it has its origins in the desire for diversity that is
a feature of the postmodern worldview. If modernism strove for unification
and universalization of culture, then postmodernism feeds on diversity. It is
difference that functions as the foundation of identity. In effect, it is the West
that is interested in maintaining the tension between itself and the East,
or between the Self (the West) and the Other (the former East), since this
tension allows it to identify its own position and to construct its own iden-
tity. It appears, therefore, that Zabel’s conclusions, arrived at by the use of a
very different analytic apparatus, are rather similar to those of Marina Gržnić:
it is the West that needs the East (including those parts of Central Europe
that belonged to the former Eastern Europe) in order to define itself, and
not the other way around.
56
from geography to topography
Irrespective of the ongoing discussions about the existence or non-

existence of Central Europe after the fall of communism, the bonds that hold
contemporary Central Europe together have been forged by history or, to
be more precise, by political history. Although this history is rather varied,
nevertheless it creates a point of reference for contemporaneity. That is, of
course, if one assumes that history could perform such a function for the
present, which is far from certain. The concept of ‘post-communist’ Europe as
such contains a chronological element; it describes a temporal sequence, some-
thing that followed a particular historic experience (of communism). I think
that even though communism ended more than twenty years ago, history and
historic or art historic memory can still provide effective frames of reference
for the analysis of contemporary political and historic processes.
Such an interpretative frame for art historic analysis has two mutually
attracting poles that mark the common denominator or a shared point of
reference for the post-1989 culture in Eastern Europe. One is the idea of the
autonomy of art, the other a critique of the system. The first concept, com-
patible with the modernist system of values, was not at all apolitical. On the
contrary, if official art, or more precisely Socialist Realism, which endured in
many countries of the region for a long time, was perceived as political prop-
aganda, even when it did not carry explicit political messages, then the
search for artistic autonomy and rejection of ‘political engagement’, or more
precisely of political propaganda, could not be apolitical. That is how artists
and dissident intellectuals perceived the notion of artistic autonomy. One of
the most common attitudes of the post-Stalinist artistic culture was the
flight from the official aesthetic doctrines in the direction of autonomy, the
embrace of personal expression and individual creative freedom. On the
other hand, the number of those who were engaging in a more or less direct
critique of the political system was much smaller. Their critique did not nec-
essarily challenge the system of power itself, but rather was directed against
its supporting machinery, institutions and discourses. This type of art, mainly
growing out of the neo-avant garde practice, developed at different pace in
different countries. In the 1960s in Czechoslovakia there were Prague-based
‘actionists’, such as Milan Knižak and Eugen Brikcius. The ‘happsoc’ group
(Stano Filko, Alex Mlynarčik and for a short period the art historian Zita
Kostrová) and Július Koller were active at approximately the same time in
Slovakia. In Poland there were artists associated with the Gallery Repassage in
Warsaw and later grouped around Józef Robakowski in Łódź. Hungary pro-
duced the most political artists in the Eastern Bloc, who engaged in a direct
critique of the system, especially around 1968 in response to the invasion of
57
Czechoslovakia by the armies of the Warsaw Pact. They included László Lakner,
Tamás Szentjóby, and somewhat later Gyula Pauer and Endre Tót. In East
Germany there was Robert Rehfeldt. Those neo-avant garde critics of the
system and the modernist proponents of artistic autonomy shared a subver-
sive attitude. It was this variously expressed opposition to the communist
system that functioned as the basis of the artistic culture of Central Europe
and represented its most significant contribution to the culture of those times.
Today, however, one must inquire whether such an attitude could provide
a sufficient basis for the production of art in the post-communist era? In
other words, can such art revise its own subversive tradition under the post-
communist conditions?
It is tempting to answer in the affirmative, but unfortunately such a
response could not be unequivocal. As we know from experience, the fall of
communism ushered in a period of vigorous growth of the art market. And
market-based subversion of the type one could see in post-perestroika Russia
had very little to do with actual critique. The Soviet symbols, which were
used critically by the art of the 1980s, turned in the following decade into
mere commercial devices produced to satisfy growing market demand. Such
commercialization of the perestroika culture characterized the collapse of
the critical attitude most closely associated with Moscow conceptualism
and the Soc-Art movement. According to Joseph Bakshtein, the nonconform-
ist tradition provided contemporary Russian art with a significant historic point
of reference. It remains an open question how younger Russian artists will
use that tradition.5 In Central Europe similar processes took on different
forms, mainly based in late neo-expressionism. But it is clear, that the power and
attraction of the art market significantly diminished any interest in critical and
political art in the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary. Jana and Jiři Ševčik
christened this phenomenon ‘new conservatism’ in the Czech context.6 In
Poland, wrenched by ideological conflicts surrounding the role of religion
and the authoritarian position of the Catholic Church in Polish society, there
was a different situation. However, it is important to note that despite such
negative influences of market capitalism on the art scene, there have been many
artists interested in commenting on the transformation of the system and
later on the entrenchment of the new system of power.
Three different artworks, each with a different critical and metaphoric
resonance, all providing commentary on the historic date of 1989, serve as good
examples of such ongoing interest. They are Krzysztof Wodiczko’s Leninplatz-
Projection, 1990, David Černý’s Pink Tank, 1991, and Tamás Szentjóby’s The
Spirit of the Monument to Freedom, 1992. Each work took the form of an
58
intervention in a public space and each referred to the transition from the
just concluded past to the just beginning future. The embrace of the public
space is extremely important in this context, since the access to public space
was until recently strictly limited, controlled and for the most part com-
pletely unavailable to artists. The change in the political system brought a
fundamental change in the status of public space. After all, democracy requires
and is supposed to guarantee everyone free access to public space. Of course,
this provision has been a subject of wide-ranging theoretical debate. From
the perspective of ‘deliberalizing democracy’ (Jürgen Habermas), public space
is subject to consensus, whereas critics of liberalism and proponents of radi-
cal or ‘agonistic’ democracy (Chantal Mouffe) see public space as the place of
continual, endless resistance that guarantees democracy. Its preservation
prevents the possibility of exclusion from the agora. Rosalyn Deutsche, draw-
ing to a significant extent on the work of critics of liberalism (Chantal Mouffe,
Ernesto Laclau, Claude Lefort and Étienne Balibar), believes that continual
problematizing of the public space is necessary for democracy.7 Of course,
before 1989, and even now, the development of democracy has encountered
many difficulties in post-communist countries. This precisely makes artists’
participation in the debate concerning public space so important. After all,
their frequently controversial projects provoke public debate without which
democracy withers. It is such debate, which reveals deeply seated conflicts and
allows for the airing of opposing views, rather than the building of consensus,
that by definition eliminates and excludes radical voices from the public
sphere; it is debate that creates the necessary conditions for the development
of a democratic society. The art projects I mentioned earlier were some of the
first manifestations of such a use of public space in post-communist Europe,
and constituted, therefore, some of the first steps towards democracy.
The earliest of those works, Krzysztof Wodiczko’s Leninplatz-Projection,
1990, created in conjunction with the exhibition ‘Die Endlichkeit der Freiheit’,
which took place at various sites throughout Berlin, used the monument to
Lenin located on Lenin Square in the former East Berlin.8 The artist projected
onto Lenin’s figure an image of an Eastern European consumer, dressed in a
striped shirt and holding a cart filled with different consumer goods. It is clear
that this image was referring to the invasion of the West by the citizens of
the former Eastern Bloc, who came to buy such as electronic goods, Western
groceries and clothes. The fall of the Berlin Wall and opening of the borders
was initially associated primarily with access to such consumer goods and it
was precisely this association that drew Wodiczko’s attention. This was one of
the most characteristic aspects of the ‘autumn of nations’. This phenomenon,
59
8 Krzysztof Wodiczko,
Leninplatz-Projection,
Berlin, 1990.
so often ignored and concealed by politicians and intellectuals, in fact defined

the character of the first contact between the East and the West right after the
fall of the Berlin Wall.
The next project, David Černý’s Pink Tank, 1991, referred to completely
different values. The Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia did not inspire
iconoclastic gestures, at least not at the time. A tank used as a monument
symbolized (not only in Czechoslovakia) the Soviet Union’s ‘liberation’ of the
region from Nazi occupation. During the ‘liberation’ of 1989 and for some
time afterwards, the tank, which in this context signified the oppression of
the Soviet Union, remained as if nothing much happened. Černý decided to
domesticate, tame and adopt it, thereby stripping it of its former symbolic
function and giving it a new one, much more appropriate to the mood of the
moment. In the spirit of Dadaism, the artist aided by a group of accomplices
tested the nature of the transformations taking place by painting the tank pink,
60
9 David Černy, Pink Tank, Prague, 1991.
a colour that had nothing to do with militarism, and adding an appendage

to its cupola in a shape of a finger, which allowed the tank to make a rather
rude gesture. Those actions were certainly successful in provoking a response.
The conflict they engendered, so necessary for the emergence of the public
space and the development of democracy, revealed interesting tensions with-
in contemporary Czechoslovak society. In addition to being applauded and
supported, Černý’s action was also criticized and condemned as an act of
vandalism, revealing that mental and cultural transformations did not neces-
sarily follow political ones. A considerable part of society, despite the traumatic
experience of 1968 when tanks with Soviet stars were associated with aggres-
sion, was simply unwilling to accept the symbolic annihilation of its own
history. This negative response demonstrated that the official history of the
cssr was not just an ideological discourse of power, but was in fact accepted
as true by a large numbers of Czechs.
The third work, Támas Szentjóby’s The Spirit of the Monument to
Freedom, 1992, likewise involved subversive appropriation of the existing com-
munist-era monument. Szentjóby covered the figure overlooking Budapest
from Gellért Hill with a massive tarpaulin with two cut openings for eyes,
which recalled popular representations of ghosts. In contrast to the reaction
in Prague to Černý’s guerrilla action, the transformation of the Soviet era
monument into a ghost, which took place in conjunction with an official
‘Festival of Farewell’ organized by the city’s government to commemorate the
first anniversary of the departure of the Red Army, did not provoke contro-
versy and was greeted with general approval. The artist certainly fulfilled
the expectations of Hungarian society by transforming a historic symbol of
the former Hungarian People’s Republic, a country marred by horror, terror,
repression and functioning under the watchful eye of the Soviet Red Army,
into a ghost of history, a phantom that can provoke fear, but, like every ghost,
more in nightmares then in reality.
All three of those projects used existing monuments linked with the old
regime to inscribe them with social and political changes taking place. As
such they were engaging in the discourse of historic revisionism; they looked
at the past from the post-communist position, but also directed their gaze at
the future. Addressed to the local viewer, they confronted experienced and
known contemporary reality with historic memory provoking critical reflec-
tion on the relationship between the past and the future. Slovak artist Roman
Ondák produced a similar work in 2001 in Vienna, this time, however, situat-
ing his intervention in the international public space, that is in the sphere of
contacts among neighbouring nations: those from the East (often perceived
62
as economically less advanced and not quite equal partners) and those from
the West. In the work entitled SK Parking, 2001, Ondák parked several Škodas
with Slovak licence plates for two months on the car park of the Vienna
Secession. Although the cars were not identified as a ‘work of art’, they eventu -
ally began attracting the attention of passers-by and especially of the gallery’s
visitors.9 Škodas with Slovak licence plates were not uncommon in Vienna
after 1989. On the contrary, since Slovakia was within easy driving distance,
they became a common sight. Whether they were welcomed, that’s a different
question. Leaving aside the issue of air pollution by these much less environ-
mentally friendly Eastern European cars, their presence on the well-ordered
streets of Vienna functioned as a symbol of the not always welcomed presence
of the ‘close’ Other and drew attention to the proximity of the East, as well
as to the open border and the influx of a cheap, mostly illegal workforce.
Parking several such cars for a prolonged period in front of an architecturally
distinguished art gallery constituted an all too visible intervention, not so
much into the city’s traffic (since the cars did not move), as into its public
space. This symbolic intervention raised questions concerning the status of
the Other in this space, the limits of democracy and, above all, its cosmopol-
itan, transnational character. It also simultaneously subjected to a critique
the notion of ethnic or national democracy commonly practised in Western
Europe, though perhaps more often in the political arena than the discursive
one. By introducing Slovak Škodas into the streets of Vienna, Ondák problem-
atized the public space of the city. He stripped it of its neutrality and at the
same time created a potential for conflict, which was not supposed to resolve
into consensus, but invoke permanent competition. In that sense his SK Parking
participated in the work of agonistic democracy.
In order to create a democratic system, it is absolutely necessary to
define the agonistic character of the public space by removing its ‘deliberat-
ing’ neutrality and maintaining its potential as a site of conflict. This cannot
be accomplished by introducing into such space various visual forms of
communication, such as posters or billboards, in the manner of the Billboard
Gallery eu active in the Czech Republic and Slovakia or Outdoor Gallery
ams, operating in a different manner and for different reasons in Poland.10
Art that approaches public space as a neutral ‘empty’ space that should be
filled, even if it aims to saturate this space with the most subversive content,
will not do. What is necessary is a much more performative approach that
shapes the public space though subversive and critical projects. The particular
history of Central Europe, the history of the totalitarian system, also creates
specific ideological and politic context for public art or art in the public space.
63
Artists of international rank, such as Krzysztof Wodiczko (who now lives in

New York), have come out of this context. One could argue that his works,
which use the architecture of the city (in Poland Kraków, Poznań and Warsaw)
to give public status to those who are marginalized and excluded, have con-
tributed much more to the development of democracy than the work of
many politicians. To do justice to the artist’s role in this process and fully
acknowledge his art would require a separate monograph. Instead, keeping
to a Polish theme, I will look at the work of another Polish artist, Joanna
Rajkowska, who is shaping the political discourse through interventions into
the public space. Although she has produced numerous public works, I will
10 Tamás Szentjóby, The Soul of the Statue to Liberty, Budapest, 1992.
64
discuss only one, her 2006–7 piece Oxygenator (Dotleniacz).11 The work was
installed in Warsaw on Grzybowski Square, located in the rather neglected
area of the former Warsaw Ghetto. The square houses a large Catholic church,
a synagogue and the Jewish Theatre as well as many small shops and apart-
ment buildings. The green space in the middle of the square attracts a diverse
group of people. There are men who spend their entire days in the vicinity,
mainly drinking beer, retirees out for a walk, often with dogs or grand-
children, workers from nearby banks and other businesses, a few local Jews
going to the synagogue or the Jewish Theatre and more numerous Israeli
tourists, whose itineraries invariably include a mandatory visit to the Warsaw
Ghetto. In the middle of the green lawn at the centre of the square, Rajkowska
installed a pond with an apparatus that produced oxygen, which appeared as
bubbles on the surface and created a delicate mist over the pond. Around the
pond, the artist installed several benches. The work’s meaning functions on
a number of levels. One certainly has a temporal character. On the one hand
it refers to the history and memory of the place, of the old Jewish quarter,
then the Warsaw Ghetto and its tragedy, on the other, to the contemporary
rather neglected and unattractive Warsaw neighbourhood. The second level,
which has a social character, draws attention to the various groups that popu-
late the square and which have had no contact with each other. The third
level is created by the urban nature of the site, shaped both by its somewhat
11 Roman Ondák, SK Parking, Vienna, 2001.
65
accidental character and by the artist’s intervention. However, the work is not
supposed to ‘improve’ the square, introduce the past into the present, or
encourage interactions among people. It only creates possibilities for such
temporal and social encounters; its only aim is to create a potential for such
interactions. The project does not impose any social or political solutions; it
only engenders the possibility of transforming the impersonal square into an
agora, a site of dialogue as well as conflict. It is not the work, but the different
people and social groups, who generally avoid one another, that can activate
history here and begin a conversation with it and with each other.
I would also like to mention the Hungarian group Hints (Monika
Bálint, Aniko Szővényi, Tamás Ilauszky, Ester Szabo and Rebeka Pál) and their
project ScriptCity, 2004. The work consisted of placing numerous commem-
orative plaques throughout Budapest. The signs were similar to those installed
on the streets, squares and buildings by the city’s government to inform
tourists about important individuals, events and locations that should be
commemorated, remembered and visited. The signs installed by the group,
however, were entirely fictitious, describing such as individuals who never
existed and events that never took place. They not only cast doubt on the
discourse saturating the city, but also directed attention to its dominant ideo-
logical and political functions. The problem of the ideological and political
function of information becomes particularly urgent when a city undergoes
political transformation, when some places disappear from its map, while
others appear, and when streets change names. This happened with regularity
in post-communist cities, where certain events were wilfully forgotten, while
others were wilfully remembered. As a matter of fact, every city is saturated with
the discourse of power and its ideology, which undergoes change according to
the political system in effect; the buildings in general do not disappear, streets,
parks and squares remain the same, yet their meanings and designations often
alter. Introduction of a fictional discourse on the streets of Budapest caused
certain confusion, but it also, and most importantly, problematized the official
discourse of historic information, subjected it to doubt or at least provoked
reflection. It is also significant that five signs remained after the project’s
conclusion at the express request of the owners of the buildings where they
were installed.12
It is clear that there is no such thing as full democracy: there is liberal
democracy, its leftist critics demand radical democracy, there was people’s
democracy, and so on. The current political system in Central Europe could
be described as post-communist democracy, or democracy that formally res-
embles liberal democracy, but which is governed by different mechanisms of
66
ownership and exclusion. Also, to borrow Rosalyn Deutsche’s terminology, it

exhibits different forms of privatization of the public space, different relations
between critique and affirmation, what is public and what is private, differently
constituted publics. Moreover, the situation varies from country to country. It
is a different system in the Czech Republic, the most atheistic state in the
world, and in Poland, a country dominated by a rather conservative form of
Catholicism. Those local characteristics inform different countries’ democratic
constitutions. However, in all Central European countries the current political
system has as its point of reference the communist system, which ended twenty
years ago. It is that failed system that defines the historic horizon of the contem-
porary democracy or rather contemporary democracies in the region. Although
communism took different forms in different countries, it shared certain
characteristics. One of them was the greater or lesser degree of constraint on
freedom, civil and creative liberties, human rights and access to the public
space. Artists reacted in different ways to this situation; they are also reacting in
different ways to the current one.
I think we can state with a degree of certainty that history, irrespective
of the scope of this concept, functions as a key point of reference for contem-
porary art in post-communist Europe. However, the question that I posed at
the beginning of this chapter is more concerned with geography, or more
precisely, geopolitics than with history.
It is also clear that artistic culture in post-war Central Europe, between
the years 1945 and 1989, despite similarities in the ideological context, was
far from monolithic. In fact it was highly varied. Moreover, the region’s politi-
cal history, which functioned as its frame of reference, was also heterogeneous.
The year 1945 seems a logical place to start. It marked the end of the Second
World War and the beginning of Soviet domination of the region, though
some countries, in particular Czechoslovakia, were able to maintain some more
or less illusory features of parliamentary democracy for a time. The situation
facing the arts also varied across the region. In the Baltic states, East Germany,
Romania and Yugoslavia, the year marked the beginning of a systematic effort
aimed at restricting independence of the art community. By contrast, in Czech -
oslovakia and Poland, similar efforts in the late 1940s were rather anaemic. In
Czechoslovakia, where the communists did not yet have complete power, they
were simply not in a position to implement Stalinist cultural policies. In
Poland, where they had such power (despite the facade of political pluralism),
they did not yet wish to fully demonstrate it. Hence artistic life and dis-
course developed here without much restraint. Three years later, the situation
changed radically.
67
In 1948 hard-line Stalinist cultural policies were introduced in almost

every country of the Eastern Bloc. As a result of a coup d’état, communists gain
full power in Czechoslovakia. Although this dramatic shift in the country’s
political power structure did not yet mark the end of an alternative artistic
culture, it did lead to its almost complete marginalization and restriction.
There was no need for a coup d’état in Poland, since the communists already
had full control of the government. However, they decided to place the art
scene under their full control, introducing Socialist Realism as the only offi-
cial form of art. The so-called ‘First’ Exhibition of Modern Art, which opened
in December 1948 in Kraków and provided an overview of the art produced
during the turbulent post-war years, was closed in January 1949. Con -
siderable restrictions were also placed on the artistic culture in Hungary.
They were aimed among others at the artists associated with the European
School. Only Yugoslavia escaped this enforcement of Stalinist cultural
controls. Its rejection of Soviet domination in 1948 provided the impetus
for a gradual process of cultural liberalization, which led by 1951 to the
formation of the group exat 51. The outcomes of this process were rather
unique in the context of Eastern and Central European art history. They
signalled the beginning of the development of Yugoslav post-war mod-
ernism, which was soon accepted as the official style and as such subjected
to a critique by the emerging neo-avant garde. This critical reassessment
and reaction began as early as 1959 with the formation in Zagreb of the
group Gorgona.
The year 1956 is the next significant date for the region, especially for
Poland and the Soviet Union. It marked in those countries the end of Stalinism
and the beginning of the ‘thaw’, which led to liberalization of cultural poli-
cies. However, in other countries, for example Bulgaria and Romania, there
were no significant changes. It should also be noted that the Polish ‘thaw’
bore little resemblance to the Soviet one, especially with regards to culture.
It created a veritable explosion of modern art, which, paradoxically, began to
occupy the same institutional infrastructure and therefore function within
the context of the same state ideological apparatus that was previously reserved
for Socialist Realism. The opening of the so-called ‘Second’ Exhibition of
Modern Art in Warsaw at the National Gallery ‘Zachęta’ in 1957 attracted
some of the country’s most important political figures, including top Party
leaders and government ministers, even though it featured almost exclusively
abstract art. In Czechoslovakia similar efforts to return to modernism took
place somewhat later, and most significantly in private apartments and artists’
studios, rather than official venues. This was true in Prague as well as Bratislava
68
(the exhibition ‘Confrontations’ was held in Prague in 1960 and in Bratislava

in 1961). Moreover, at the Moscow Exhibition of Art from Socialist Countries
in 1958, everyone showed Socialist Realist works – everyone that is except for
the Poles, who brought modernist art and provoked a furore of protests
from the Soviet comrades and a great deal of interest from the public. In
the Soviet Union itself, art ‘thaw’ took place along the margins, not in the
centre of the cultural establishment as it did in Poland, and did not begin
until 1962, the year when, in a strategic move, Nikita Khrushchev was taken
to see a show of ‘abstract art’ on the fifth floor of the Moscow Manezh State
Exhibition Hall, in rooms very rarely seen by visiting dignitaries. As expected,
Khrushchev was outraged. His negative response saved the jobs of the lead-
ership of the Artists’ Union, who were being internally challenged by the
reformers, and led to renewed restrictions on the limited artistic freedom.
This began a period of repression, reaction and stagnation in the official
artistic culture of the ussr and the development of the artistic underground,
mainly in Moscow, and to a lesser extent in Leningrad and Estonia.
The years 1968 to 1970 provide the next turning point. In some coun-
tries they mark the beginning of the so-called ‘normalization’, which turned
back liberal cultural policies and even signalled a return of repressive meas-
ures. This happened in Romania and, above all, in Czechoslovakia after the
suppression of the Prague Spring. In other countries, those years witnessed a
return of a (limited) artistic freedom. This was the situation in Poland after
1970; by contrast, during the same period, Slovak and Czech artists had to go
underground and leave the public sphere. The same was true in Romania,
where Ceauşescu (at first a liberal, later a dictator) proclaimed the so-called
‘July Theses’ in 1971, which announced ‘a return’ to the values of the socialist
culture. During the same period Polish artists had complete freedom, as long
as they stayed away from politics. The only other country in the Eastern Bloc
where this was true was Yugoslavia.
Finally the early 1980s revealed equally diverse cultural landscapes.
In Poland they marked introduction of martial law. In Hungary the 1980s
witnessed rapid development of the so-called ‘goulash socialism’, which rede-
fined the socialist state in terms of consumption, economic engagement with
the West and cultural liberalism.
The diverse political or rather geopolitical situation in Eastern Europe
led to a certain isolation of the art historic narrative, development of art and
its critical assessment. Art, art criticism and art history in Eastern Europe
developed mainly within national (or state) borders and, simultaneously, in
comparative analogy with the centre, or Western culture. This dual orientation
69
engendered regional incompatibility of local art historic narratives, artistic

canons and hierarchies. In a manner typical of isolated cultures, local hierar-
chies of value were very often determined by social considerations reinforced
by institutional hierarchies. It was difficult for an outsider coming to Romania
from Czechoslovakia, to Hungary from Poland, or to East Germany from
Bulgaria to grasp those local systems of value. However, despite this reality,
there were efforts aimed at breaking the national isolation and creating trans-
national relationships and networks. The communist regimes did not support
them; on the contrary, they tried to stop them, as was the case with Jarosław
Kozłowski’s net project, which created an international (including Eastern
Europe) network of artistic exchange. The local regimes, precisely because of
differences in the implementation of ‘real’ socialism in different countries,
did not favour transnational artistic exchanges, especially, but not exclusively,
within the sphere of independent art practice. The official international poli-
cies that governed and were supposed to encourage cultural exchange were a
facade that masked mutual hostility among leaders of different countries. They
did not have any real impact and, at most, served a political function. They
often afforded officials of various ranks opportunities to engage in regional
tourism, but certainly did nothing to encourage artistic exchanges or trans-
mission of values and ideas. Even so, artists were able to bypass such controls by
smuggling their works abroad and showing them in venues that were accessible
to them. This was the case with the exhibition Arguments, which featured works
by artists from Czechoslovakia, at the Crooked Wheel (Krzywe Koło) Gallery
in Warsaw in 1962. The show’s curator, František Šmejkal, had to smuggle into
Poland works by his Czech and Slovak colleagues.13 It is important to note
that this exhibition played a key role in the development of transnational
artistic exchanges and the breaking of inter-national barriers put in place by
the communists, who were interested in maintaining the isolation of local
artistic cultures. It not only gave Polish viewers a unique opportunity to see
independent or unofficial art by their southern neighbours, but also allowed
Czech and Slovak artists, who separately were showing abstract art through
independently organized ‘Confrontations’ exhibitions (twice in Prague in
1960 and once in Bratislava in 1961), to encounter each other. Moreover, this
transnational ‘confrontation’ or meta-transnational artistic encounter, which
took place outside the borders of the country shared by Czechs and Slovaks,
resulted in the first effort to define the identity and character of art informel
in Czechoslovakia.14
Let me list, a bit more systematically, other similar examples of such
transnational, independent artistic exchanges, which broke through state efforts
70
to isolate artistic cultures of the communist countries. One of them was the
previously mentioned net project developed in 1971 by Polish art historian
Andrzej Kostołowski and Polish artist Jarosław Kozłowski, both from Poznań.
Briger Jesch describes it as ‘the first noncommercial, free, international
artistic exchange [of information]’.15 The Poznań Gallery Akumulatory 2,
founded and directed by Jarosław Kozłowski, allowed concrete implementa-
tion of the net principles and also functioned as a truly international venue.
It not only crossed borders, but also tried to counteract geographic hierar-
chies by showing Western as well as Eastern European artists, including
Carlfriedrich Claus, László Lakner and Jiři Valoch. Both net and Gallery
Akumulatory 2 functioned as regional transnational projects. With a fair
amount of farsightedness, both regularly crossed the Iron Curtain and
moved across geopolitical regions in order to counter ghettoization of East-
ern European art. To a significant extent they were able to break the historic
isolation in which artists and intellectuals of the region have been kept as a
result of the Yalta Agreement. At the beginning, both initiatives encountered
a certain amount of resistance from local officials: one of the first net shows
in Poznań in 1971, for example, was interrupted by police who began to
search Kozłowski’s apartment. Later, with the gradual limited liberalization of
cultural life in Poland – literature did not benefit to the same degree as art
from the change in the political climate – such police harassments generally
ceased. Also it should be noted that, owing to the efforts of János Brendel, a
Hungarian art historian living at this time in Poznań, the city’s Office of Art
Exhibitions (bwa), which runs its main art gallery, organized one of the first
(if not the first) exhibition of Hungarian modern (and therefore alternative)
art outside of Hungary. This could be seen as the second show, after the Czech -
oslovak ‘Arguments’ exhibition in Warsaw of 1962, that allowed a particular
art movement developing in a particular Eastern Bloc country to ‘see itself ’
through an exhibition organized as a result of unofficial transnational artistic
contacts in another Eastern Bloc country. In Warsaw the Gallery Foksal, much
more visible due to its central location, became actively involved in the inter-
national neo-avant garde movement, organizing, among others, an exhibition
of the Hungarian neo-avant garde, including works by Miklós Erdély. Another
Warsaw gallery, Remont, was also very active during this period, hosting,
among others, a show in 1976 that featured three Czech performance artists:
Jan Mlčoch, Karel Miler and Petr Štembera. On the Polish map of interna-
tional and Central European contacts we should also point out Wrocław with
its active art scene and museum as well as Lublin, in particular Gallery
Labirynt, and Łódź.
71
In the 1970s Polish venues were in a unique position to show neo-

avant garde art and to facilitate transnational artistic exchanges. Therefore
it is not surprising that Poland became an important destination for artists
and intellectuals from other Central European countries. László Beke re-
calls his hitchhiking trips through Poland as one of the key components in
his education as a Hungarian intellectual.16 Jiří Valoch also mentions Poland
as one of the favourite destinations of such intellectual tourism during the
period when the Czechoslovak regime made travel to the West virtually
impossible. Valoch also mentions Hungary and, significantly, East Germany.17
Poland and other Central European countries functioned in this context as
a substitute for access to the international art scene. Artists and intellec-
tuals from the former gdr, who travelled east to Poland in order to have
access to Western culture, confirm this. Paul Kaiser and Claudia Petzold,
curators and authors of the exhibition catalogue Boheme und Diktatur in
der DDR, write that East German artists went there to find Western books,
records by popular Western groups, to attend jazz and film festivals, inter-
national art exhibitions (some of international rank such as the Krakow
Graphic Biennale), to visit bookstores and libraries that stocked books that
were banned in the gdr, or to participate in informal screenings of Western
films at the Łódź Film School. It was also often here, in this neighbouring
communist state, that they had their first taste of marijuana.18 Sometimes
Central European artists saw their participation in Polish exhibitions as a
substitute for participation in the international (that is Western) art scene.
The regional Eastern European transnational exchanges had to function, for
the time being, as a surrogate for the ‘real’ trans- or rather international
contacts. It is notable that Robert Rehfeldt, one of the initiators of mail
art (which was very popular at the time in the gdr), who actively sought
Western European contacts from the late 1960s, organized the first show of
mail art in Poland at the Gallery Studio in 1975. The exhibition, entitled
‘Art in Contact’, featured works by 50 international (and not just Eastern
Bloc) artists. The first exhibition of mail art in the gdr took place in East
Berlin at the Arkade Galerie in November 1978. Rehfeldt developed con-
tacts with Polish artists in the early 1970s.19 His choice of Poland was dic-
tated by the political situation. Jürgen Weichardt writes that Rehfeldt,
who wanted to function as a mediator between East and West, chose Poland
because the situation there in the mid-1970s seemed so different from other
communist countries in the region. Let us recall that 1974 witnessed the
demolition of the so-called ‘bulldozer exhibition’ of unofficial art in the Mos -
cow suburbs (the name comes from the tools used by the police to ‘close’
72
the show; the exhibition provided impetus for considerable growth of the
local underground art scene in the late 1970s). At the same time, Czecho-
slovakia was being ‘normalized’ in the wake of the Prague Spring, and in
Hungary the neo-avant garde was just beginning to function and overcome
administrative barriers.20
Compared to Poland, artists in the other countries of the Eastern Bloc
faced much more difficult political, economic and administrative situation.
The art scene in Czechoslovakia was in a state of crisis due to repression
directed against the country’s intellectual elites that followed the suppression
of the Prague Spring. Cultural life in Romania had to contend with the new
hard-line course. In the gdr, which was still perceived as the ‘frontier’ and as
such subjected to special local and Soviet controls, a few changes were taking
place, however, especially within the sphere of international contacts. Here
too exchanges among artists of East Central Europe continued to develop and
grow. Some artists from the region began to show in East Germany, mainly
due to the heroic efforts of the unofficial, and in reality illegal, entirely or
partially private institutions, such as ep Galerie operated by Jürgen Schweine-
braden in his Berlin apartment at Prenzlauer Berg. Schweinebraden recalled
that such ‘countries as Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary were interesting,
because [their] art traditions were not interrupted to the same extent as in the
gdr’.21 Be that as it may, of those three countries, Poland was certainly the
most attractive for East German artists, because the art scene in the other
two was subjected to much stricter control due to political circumstances.
In Hungary, where in the early years of the decade the situation was rather
dire, a gradual improvement led not only to rapid development of the local
neo-avant garde, but also to burgeoning international contacts. László Beke,
perhaps the best-informed art critic in the region, played a huge role in this
process. He provided the initial link between the Polish organizers of the net
(Andrzej Kostołowski and Jarosław Kozłowski) and Hungarian artists.22 He
also organized the exhibition ‘Tükör/Mirror’ in 1973 in an alternative gallery
located in a chapel rented from the Catholic Church in Balatonboglár (after
the exhibition, the gallery was closed by the authorities). The idea for creating
such a venue came from György Galántai, a very active artist, organizer and
collector of neo-avant garde documentation, who later founded in Budapest
(with Julia Klaniczay) the Artpool Research Centre dedicated to the neo-avant
garde.23 The ‘Tükör/Mirror’ project, undertaken under very difficult political
circumstances that cannot be compared to those in either Yugoslavia or Poland,
included works by Hungarian and also foreign artists working on both sides
of the Iron Curtain.
73
The situation in Yugoslavia was even more favourable than in Poland

from the perspective of trans- and international exchanges and contacts. The
art scene more closely resembled that of a Western European country than
any Eastern or Central European one. That was one reason why any contacts
with Yugoslavia were treated with a great deal of suspicion by the authorities
of the other Eastern European countries, whose distrust was amplified by
Yugoslavia’s independence from the Soviet Union. Economic considerations
also affected contacts. As a ‘semi-Western’ country, Yugoslavia was simply much
more expensive than any other country in the region. Also local artists were
less interested in transnational exchanges with Eastern Bloc countries than in
international ones with the West.
In general those Eastern European contacts and trips, with few notable
exceptions, focused on efforts to follow Western culture, understood here as
the universal contemporary culture. They involved to a much lesser extent
direct interest in the culture of the other Eastern Bloc countries. As mentioned
earlier, the transnational contacts within the region functioned as a substitute
for international contacts. The juxtaposition of those two concepts had signi-
ficant implications. The category ‘international’ was much more positive and
carried a higher value than ‘transnational’. It signified the crossing of not just
internal but, above all, external borders. The term ‘transnational’ itself was
introduced much later by comparative art history. It signifies local presence,
national (but not necessarily ethnic) identity that is not lost in an exchange
with another locality, but which instead gains value. In this context ‘trans-
national’ functions as the opposite of ‘international’. We can certainly see
the value of such a methodological approach. Examples of reflection or self-
reflection on Czech and Slovak art of the early 1960s shown abroad in Poland,
amply demonstrate the advantages offered by such a theoretical perspective.
However, from the perspective of art history, this is a fundamentally ahistoric
concept. If one takes into consideration contemporary statements, it is clear that
artists of that period would in fact have rejected the transnational perspective,
since it would have meant valorization of what was national and simultaneous
depreciation of what was global or international. That would have been unac-
ceptable, since the international sphere provided compensatory values to the
policies of the communist regimes aimed at the region’s isolation from the
West, control and regulation of contacts, and, contrary to the official ideological
statements, its support of national particularism within the implementation of
‘real’ socialism.
However, such historicization of the concepts should not prevent us
from finding in them potential value. The fact remains that any designation
74
of something as ‘international’, ‘universal’ or ‘world’ contains within itself a

certain strategy of Western domination. The understanding of modernism or
modernity as an international phenomenon reflects, in its genesis and func-
tion, a Western perspective. The transnational perspective (even if adopted at
the cost of the international one) allows for simultaneous contextualization
(localization or nationalization) of the West and its culture, and its perception
through the transnational lens. From that perspective it could be seen as part
of the project described by Chakrabarty as the ‘provincialization of Europe’,
though perhaps not exactly and not entirely. The goal is to deconstruct the
concept of the ‘universal’ (and therefore ‘modernist’ and ‘international’) and
to situate it in its proper historic context.
The outcomes of 1989 complicate this approach to a significant extent
by affecting the manner in which geography is perceived. They include the
opening of borders, more or less actual but certainly experienced on both col-
lective and individual levels, above all in the former Eastern Bloc. They also
involve certain problematizing (though not elimination) of national identity
and the engendering of competing potential identities: gender, sexual, subcul-
tural, locally regional and so on. In general, it is clear that after 1989 we see
rejection of such terms 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 de-regionalization of
Central Europe and hence rejection of the geographic perspective. In reality,
besides history, which I mentioned earlier, contemporary artistic initiatives are
shifting their emphasis from geography (of a region) to topography (of a
place). 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,24 and in the Baltic states, where such efforts are much
more modest in scale and certainly are far less spectacular.25 When compared
to those two highly dynamic regional constructions, especially that of the
Balkans, similar efforts in Central Europe seem very modest indeed. As I
mentioned earlier, they tend to focus on its metropolitan areas, rather than
transregional initiatives. Because of this it is difficult to see efforts aimed at
75
legitimization of artistic identity of the 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 of ‘transnational,’ so useful (despite its
ahistoric character) for studies dealing with the communist period, must
undergo certain erosion. At first sight one could assume that its place may
be taken 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 elimi-
nate all contending identities: ethnic, gender or geographic. Deconstruction
of the modernist language and value system demonstrated the mythologiz-
ing function of such terms and its historic analysis revealed hidden political
agendas.26 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. But such a formu-
lation 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 that of the world (cosmos). Cosmopolis 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 con-
text of globalization, is cosmopolitan by definition. Therefore the interactions
between individual cities or metropolitan areas should be referred to as
trans-cosmopolitan. If art geography and comparative methodology used to
study art of the communist period entail transnational relations, then art
topography and methodological perspective used to study post-communist
culture, considered as part of the global structure of artistic exchanges, require
trans-cosmopolitan ones.
In other words, after 1989 cities have gained at the expense of coun-
tries in the former Eastern Europe. Of course, cities always had their own
identities that did not always coincide with the national ones. This was
also true during the communist period. Cities, especially capitals, but also
competing provincial centres, 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 the former Eastern
76
Europe are achieving a more and more independent character, gaining ever
greater autonomy and distancing themselves from national identity. This tend -
ency 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 Zagreb.27
There are a number of factors that have influenced this situation. One
of them is the development of significant art institutions of a European, if
not world, rank in the region. They include museums, which I will describe
later, as well as contemporary art centres, such as the Centre for Contempo-
rary Art at Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw, which is the largest and the most
active of such state-sponsored public institutions in 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 among private ones, the
dox Centre for Contemporary Art in Prague. Those institutions have been
actively engaged in organizing large exhibitions with cosmopolitan charac-
ter. Another factor that has been favourable to development of cosmopolitan
attitudes is migration, in this instance migrations of artists. It has often been
observed that artists frequently choose to live in a different city from where
they were born. Communist Europe was unaffected by this phenomenon, or
rather experienced it on rare occasions. Instead of influx, it was the source of
outward migration of artists, intellectuals, cultural organizers, gallerists 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, one can also observe a still relatively small
migratory trickle of Western artists eastward, which may in time assume more
significant dimensions. This could be said not only about artists, but also
curators and art critics who have lived and worked for years in Western
Europe. Those 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 ‘international’ ones.
Perhaps the most significant phenomenon that has given cities their
cosmopolitan character is the ever-growing numbers of biennales. The biennale
problem is interesting in and of itself. Although the biennale phenomenon
has a long history (the Venice Biennale has now been staged for more than
100 years), rapid development of this form of exhibition seems to typify
the period of globalization. Biennales have taken over the world. They are held
in Australia, China (mainland as well as Taiwan), Europe and elsewhere.
77
Often they are organized by curators of an international rank (a fact that

gives them a certain visibility) and include artists who occupy the highest
levels within the global art culture. Frequently enormous sums of private as
well as public funds (from local governments) are invested in those 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 biennales with a very open
organizational structure as well as those that focus on a particular region or
problematic. The former Eastern Europe has also become a site of several,
including Bucharest, Iaşi, Moscow and Prague. In fact, Prague hosts two
competing biennales, one organized by Flash Art (Giancarlo Politi, Helena
Kontova), the other by the National Gallery (Milan Knižak). Of those in
the region, the Moscow Biennale is certainly the most visible and probably
the best financed; it is also, of course, organized in the only true metropolis
(measured by global standards) east of Berlin. By contrast, the biennale
‘Mediations’ organized since 2008 in Poznań by Tomasz Wendland, although
significant in its aspirations and scope, is certainly conceived on a much more
modest scale. It originated in the exhibition ‘Asia-Europe Mediation’ organ-
ized by Wendland in 2007, which had the ambition of mediating between
those two continents. This goal has been maintained by the biennale.
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, in and of itself
constitutes a very interesting characteristic of contemporary culture. Its most
significant feature is the increasingly cosmopolitan character of the cities, in
particular cities of the former Eastern Bloc, which have been perceived as
‘provincial’ both from the perspective of Moscow and the West and as such
‘closed’ or self-centred, at most capable of bilateral exchanges. Since 1989 those
cities, which are still rather modest in scale by global standards, are gaining
metropolitan character and becoming cosmopolitan in the Greek sense of the
word. Because of that, contacts between urban areas have lost a transnational
and have often acquired a 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
78
is not unaffected by art topography. The processes of globalization and cosmo-

politanization on the world-scale point to a growing need for horizontal
rethinking of art history (see chapter One).
79
three
From the Politics of Autonomy
to the Autonomy of Politics
As a result of ongoing efforts and the gradual development of Eastern

European Studies, a perception (quite common before 1989) that art across
Eastern Europe is marked by a certain sameness or at least similarity is finally
vanishing. This pervasive view was grounded, on the one hand, in a simple
lack of knowledge among art historians and art critics, not to mention the
public in general, and, on the other, in inaccurate and politically influenced
views shared by the experts in the field, in particular American Sovietologists.
For many years those scholars applied their knowledge of the Soviet Union
to the other countries in the region, seeing the Eastern Bloc as a whole through
this lens. In particular they perceived the culture of the Bloc through the
prism of ideological discourse. Ideology constituted for them one of the
most important, if not the most important, point of reference. Of course, on
the level of realpolitik they noticed tensions or even conflicts within the
Bloc, which provided fodder for some of their most fascinating discussions.
But on the cultural level, which in general did not attract their attention, they
tended to see the Eastern Bloc not only as an ideological monolith, but also
almost exclusively in terms of the so-called ‘official art’, which most believed
was synonymous with Socialist Realism. The general level of knowledge among
their successors, that is Eastern European specialists dealing with visual arts,
still leaves a great deal to be desired, though their familiarity with the regional
art scene and art criticism has improved considerably. Nevertheless, many
conferences dedicated to this subject are still mired in the conviction that
ideology must play the dominant role in the newest history of the art pro-
duced in the region. There can be nothing more misleading. Ideology, espe-
cially during the post-1968 period, did not play a significant role in shaping
the artistic culture of Eastern Europe; it was replaced by politics or, to be more
precise, by the Ideological State Apparatus, to borrow Louis Althusser’s term.1
Althusser distinguishes between two different concepts, that of the
Repressive State Apparatus and the Ideological State Apparatus. While the
former resorts to brute force and violence (working through police, courts,
prisons and so on), the latter employs ideology. Of course, because those two
80
from the politics of autonomy to the autonomy of politics
structures not only complement but also reinforce each other, they exist in their
‘pure’ form only within theory. In reality the Repressive State Apparatus can be
and is ideological, and the Ideological State Apparatus can be and is repressive.
The difference rests in the institutions that comprise each structure. After all,
the Police is not a Ministry of Culture, and the Church is not a prison. The
value of this theoretical approach rests on the fact that it considers concrete
institutions and concrete functions of those institutions that comprise each
apparatus. This unique sense of reality, which mediates between theoretical
abstractions and concrete social critique, is based in Althusser’s definition of
ideology, which departs from the classic Marxist understanding of this concept.
According to the latter, ideology functions as an illusion, false consciousness,
‘pure dream’, or a system entirely outside of reality. By contrast, for Althusser
ideology has real, material status; it exists in reality as a representation of per-
ceived relationship of a given individual to real circumstances of existence.
According to Marx, ideology has no history; for Althusser, it is historic par
excellence and appears among other places within the context of the historically
specific and concrete Ideological State Apparatus.
The latter has certain subcategories. There is Religious Ideological State
Apparatus, comprised of churches and other religious institutions, Educational
Ideological State Apparatus, comprised of schools, universities, academies and
such, Communication Ideological State Apparatus constituted by the press
and mass media, and Cultural Ideological State Apparatus, which includes
museums, theatres, galleries and other institutions through which the state
implements its cultural agendas. The more democratic the state, the more
refined are its methods; the more autocratic, the more primitive. When ideology
is historicized and therefore rendered concrete, one is led to a single conclusion,
especially within historic studies: we must consider not only diachronic but
also synchronic differences in state strategies and cultural politics. Applying
this idea to art historic studies of Eastern Europe, in particular during the
period from 1945 to 1989, we could say that although individual communist
countries professed allegiance to Marxist ideology or Marxist-Leninism, they
relied on different Ideological State Apparatus and therefore varied in the
practical implementation of particular cultural policies. Those local differences,
which provided concrete, historic context for the official as well as unofficial
art, established the distinct historic significance of seemingly similar artistic
phenomena, such as geometric abstraction or conceptual art. Of course, for
many art historians, critics and, in particular, the artists themselves, such analytic
perspective is unacceptable. Many believe that art has much more universal
than contextual value. And perhaps, on some abstract level, it does. However,
81
the question I have been struggling with for more than 30 years is how can we
historicize the attitude of artistic autonomy or, in other words, what political
significance can we ascribe to it within a concrete historic situation defined
by a particular Ideological State Apparatus.
Under communist dictatorship, the problem of art’s autonomy gained
considerable significance. Independent artists, in particular during the period
dominated by Socialist Realism, demanded artistic autonomy. Such voices
could be heard at different times in different places throughout the region –
from the gdr to the ussr, from Romania to Poland – with starkly different
results. While in Poland after 1956 the regime not only allowed such auton-
omy, but was also able to use it for its own benefit, in the gdr the regime
attempted to ‘pacify’ the cultural sphere by allowing limited autonomy only
within controlled social niches. Elsewhere, for instance in the ussr, the regime
fought against autonomy, attempting with different degrees of success to
prevent realization of all independent projects. Autonomy functioned in this
context as a political slogan, even though it meant freedom from politics. It
was also understood as a reaction against politicization of the culture by the
state, or more precisely its instrumentalization by the communist party prop-
aganda machine. As such it was seen as a necessary condition of artistic freedom,
the basis of art’s right to be concerned solely with itself and, as an existential
problematic, to be intimately concerned with the artist’s inner life, rather than
the public sphere. Be that as it may, from a strictly historic perspective, the
conflicts surrounding the issue of art’s autonomy and the calls for such auton-
omy should be seen as a political campaign. Similarly, art engaging the issue
of autonomy acquires through such historic contexts political significance.
Considered from this perspective, one could say that close collaboration
between the Ideological State Apparatus and the Repressive State Apparatus
in communist countries revealed the schizophrenic nature of the system.
Althusser never analysed this phenomenon and in general did not consider
the politics of the Soviet Bloc in his critique. This omission was rather typical
of the leftist intellectuals of the period.
On the one hand the ideological coercion to create socialist art compelled
artists, especially during the Stalinist years, to respect the system, on the other
it created conditions for more or less (usually less) legalized opposition. But
such rebellion took place within the context of the Ideological State Apparatus,
or more precisely its significance can be gauged only within this context,
unless of course someone were to insist on an ahistoric interpretation.
The problem of artistic autonomy as a political position took on differ-
ent forms in different countries because of differences in the functioning of
82
the Ideological State Apparatus. It appeared everywhere as a reaction to

Stalinist cultural policies, though at different times, with different intensity and
different results. In the majority of the countries it adopted an oppositional
character in relation to the post-Stalinist regimes, which replaced repression
with manipulation and politics of punishment with politics of surveillance.
In all countries this attitude was connected with a more or less critical recep-
tion of modernism, in particular French art informel, and recovery of a local
Eastern European modernist tradition, which became identified after the war
with geometric painting. To a certain extent this response, which suited the
historic needs, agreed with the original programmes of those assimilated
movements, which to a significant extent under the influence of American
art history and art criticism were, in turn, identified as modernism. Modern-
ism understood this way stressed art’s autonomy and artwork’s independence
and neutrality. Such an attitude was very attractive for artists from communist
Europe, who were forced to create propaganda by the Stalinist Ideological
and Repressive State Apparatus.
In the post-Stalinist system, when the straightjacket of control was
somewhat loosened, the modernist artistic programme provided a very attractive
arena for processing the trauma of the Stalinist years. It was implemented in
different countries with different results. Only in Yugoslavia and Poland did
it gain official acceptance. In Yugoslavia this happened in the early 1950s, in
Poland a bit later, around 1956, with a change in political climate and the
ascendency of politicians who took a critical attitude towards Stalinism. The
difference between Yugoslavia and Poland rested in the fact that the former
did not have to take into consideration Soviet opinions, while the latter simply
did not have the option of completely ignoring them. It had to play games
that involved culture. While Poland under Władysław Gomułka (the First
Secretary of the Polish Communist Party from 1956 to 1970) could not afford
autonomy within foreign policy or economics, it did manifest its independence
within the cultural sphere. This created an encouraging climate for the devel-
opment of modernist art. The most spectacular example of this independence
was provide at the 1958 Moscow exhibition of art from the twelve socialist
countries, where all participants showed Socialist Realism – all that is except
for Poland, which staged a show of modern art.2 Yugoslavia did not partici-
pate because the Russians and their communist allies from Central Europe
did not consider it a socialist state. It should also be noted that in both coun-
tries during those years there was no alternative to modernism and that
exhibitions of abstract art were held at official venues and were attended by
party and government officials. This was impossible during the 1950s in
83
Czechoslovakia, where post-‘thaw’ modern art shows in Bratislava and Prague

took place in private apartments, and it would have been completely unthink-
able in Romania.
If the position based on artistic autonomy and grounded in the reception
of modernism was self-evident from an aesthetic point of view, the reception
of the neo-avant garde, which was supposed to (at least in the West) subject
the notion of such autonomy to a critique seemed much more problematic.
While the Western neo-avant garde wanted to be critical and it directed its
criticism mainly against the modernist paradigm, in its Eastern European
form it often discarded this critical edge and did not appear to provide a
complete alternative to modernism. Just the opposite, it seemed to continue
its programmatic investment in autonomy. Of course, this ‘autonomization’
of the neo-avant garde had political basis. It also should be seen as a response
to the trauma of Stalinist cultural politics, the politics of art in the service of
the Party. Therefore it should not be surprising that its meanings responded to
a diverse range of practices of the Ideological State Apparatus, a fact that could
be responsible for the considerable diversity of its forms.
To illustrate this point I will deal with four concrete examples of neo-
avant garde practice: in the gdr, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary. In
order to achieve historically coherent analysis, I will only deal with the art
produced during the 1970s.
In the history of artistic culture of the gdr, there were three moments
when independent or autonomous culture had a chance to develop and
even to become institutionalized. The first occurred in the late 1950s, when
the political ‘thaw’ of the early Khrushchev years caused a certain loosening
of the cultural policies. Martin Damus referred to that process as ‘Stalinist
destalinization’.3 But this moment of liberalization did not last. In 1959,
during the Party conference held in Bitterfeld, the communist regime of
the gdr adopted a rather uncompromising set of new directives that were
to guide cultural policies in the country from that point onward. Their aim
was to return the gdr’s culture to its ‘socialist principles’. The second
attempt took place towards the end of Walter Ulbricht’s and the beginning
of Erich Honecker’s tenure as the Party’s General Secretary, in May 1971.
During this time, Honecker briefly appeared (as did Nicolae Ceauşescu a few
years earlier) to be a ‘liberal’ supporting the policy of Weite und Vielfalt
(Openness and Diversity). This period is of particular interest for us here. I
should also mention the third moment, which happened in the late 1980s,
in the context of the growing political opposition towards a much changed
Erich Honecker.
84
German sources state that in the 1970s there were approximately 40

private and unofficial galleries in the gdr.4 They had different characteristics
and their longevity was highly variable. I will mention only one, the Clara
Mosch Gallery in Karl-Marx-Stadt (currently Chemnitz). Carlfriedrich Claus,
one of the most interesting East German artists, was associated with this venue.
The gallery was founded in 1977, relatively late for the period under
consideration, and closed in 1982. It opened at an important moment in the
gdr’s history, when political tensions were growing and many local intellec-
tuals began to voice their opposition to the oppressive and repressive practices
of the regime. It is important to stress that they were not opposing the regime
as such, but only its behaviour. This was a paradox for East Germany, a coun-
try where intellectuals criticized specific decisions of the regime but never
attacked the system as such. This paradox had its roots in the aftermath of the
Second World War, the healing of the Fascist trauma, national (to a large extent
unspeakable) sense of guilt, anti-imperialist and anti-fascist discourse, and
communist ideology. On that level the small circle of dissident intellectuals
(as well as independent artists) agreed with the discourse of the political estab-
lishment. Tensions, which began to appear in the mid-1970s, were touched off
in 1977 by the regime’s efforts to strip Wolf Biermann, a popular East German
songwriter and singer, of his citizenship. The Repressive State Apparatus used
the occasion of the singer’s officially authorized tour of West Germany to get
rid of him. What seemed to have caught the regime off guard was the scale
of protests by East German intellectuals who rose to defend Biermann. The
Ideological State Apparatus had to neutralize this movement. Incidentally, it
is interesting to note here the chronological correlation in the development
of Central European oppositional movements. At approximately the same
time, the Workers Defence Committee, which gave rise to a series of groups
that would eventually develop into Solidarity, was formed in Poland. In Czech -
oslovakia the year produced Charter ’77, perhaps less significant in terms in
its direct impact on the self-organization of the society, but indeed crucially
important from a moral and intellectual perspective as a counterweight to the
so-called ‘normalization’. I will address this subject later. The Clara Mosch
Gallery opened at this pregnant moment, when opposition to Biermann’s
‘denationalization’ was at its height, and when the Ideological State Apparatus
may have been experiencing certain doubts on how to best to deal with this
sudden and unexpected reaction. Artists took advantage of this uncertainty
by submitting a request and receiving permission to open a gallery. When the
government regained its balance and began once again to consolidate its
power it withdrew permission, closing the Clara Mosch Gallery.
85
Eugene Blume, who has written a monograph on gdr art as seen

through the prism of the activities of the Clara Mosch Gallery, has pointed out
the derivative character of the work produced within its circle, the less than
original character of its art field trips and how the gallery-sponsored initia-
tives created an illusion of freedom and merely repeated Western models.5
Although this may be true, such criticism is largely besides the point. The art
actions sponsored by the Clara Mosch Gallery took place under completely
different circumstances than similar, often earlier, Western art initiatives.
Western art was not banned; agents of the secret service did not infiltrate the
art scene, or at least the art scene in the West was not subjected to such inten-
sive surveillance. In other words, those actions were defined by an entirely
different Ideological State Apparatus. The so-called universal criteria of artistic
value, which reflect the Western perspective, fail to capture the significance of
processes and works when they are applied to Eastern Europe. This is partic-
ularly true in a historic context. However, even if we were to accept Blume’s
conclusions, the importance of at least one artist from this circle is beyond
doubt. Carlfriedrich Claus is certainly one of the most fascinating figures of
post-war German art history. In other words, if we consider the Clara Mosch
Gallery through the lens of the gdr Ideological State Apparatus, it appears as
a product of certain tensions and hesitations within that structure, which the
artists were able to use to their advantage in their efforts to reach the public
sphere. The gallery functioned quite openly and legally as a result of official
permits the Apparatus was willing to grant artists during this brief interval.
However, when the political climate shifted and it became clear that the
gallery’s activities could not be controlled, the decision to close the venue was
quickly reached.
The situation in Poland in the 1970s was quite different. The right to
autonomy was virtually guaranteed by the Ideological State Apparatus. Already
in the mid-1950s the regime relinquished its desire to control works of art,
which of course did not mean that it gave up entirely its control of the art
scene. In some ways just the opposite was true. Of course, this shift in attitudes
did not come from nowhere. The significant artistic freedom of the 1970s was
a result of decisions made in the mid-1950s, which eliminated Socialist Realism
from cultural life and gave artists freedom to produce whatever they wished.
One could say that almost anything was allowed. One could do whatever one
wanted and there was no need to look for quasi-hidden niche venues.
A significant number of the so-called independent galleries, including
artist-run exhibition spaces, received financial subventions from the state and
therefore functioned within the context of the Ideological State Apparatus.
86
In other words, those venues were not only tolerated but actively supported.
Earlier, in the 1960s, there were some conflicts. The Repressive State Apparatus
reacted to them by closing galleries, placing artists and activists under surveil-
lance and censoring exhibitions. Although similar repressions still appeared
occasionally in the 1970s, they were limited and haphazard in character.
There was almost complete freedom in Poland, virtually complete because
there was a single, clearly defined area of restrictions. The regime would not
tolerate any political criticism. This was the one condition of the surreptitious
agreement between the artists and the communist party. The party officials
appeared to be saying: you can do whatever you want as long as you stay away
from politics. And the artists respected this unspoken agreement. After all, they
had a lot to lose: they could have lost their ‘autonomy’. They simply did not
ask themselves whether and to what extent their freedom was controlled
and limited. They were quite comfortable in their golden cage, or to use a
Hungarian art critic’s metaphor, their ‘velvet prison’,6 where they relied on
the modernist principle of art’s autonomy to provide theoretical justification
for their work. Conveniently, modernist autonomous art was not supposed to
be politically engaged; political disengagement constituted its essence.
One could say that in Poland, modernist art theory supported such
opportunism. Although much of the art popular during this period (including
conceptual art, happening, body art and media analysis) developed in the West
as a reaction to modernism, and often involved political and social critique,
in Poland, paradoxically (from the Western art historic perspective), it was
fully inscribed into modernist conception of the work and of the creative
process. Of course, there were also opportunities for political engagement
and a few instances of politically engaged work. The foremost opportunity
appeared in the mid-1970s, or to be precise after 1976, when growing polit-
ical tensions led to the development of an open and even to a certain extent
tolerated, although still illegal political opposition comprised of the Workers’
Defence Committee (kor), the Movement for Defence of Human and Civic
Rights (ropcio), the Confederation of Independent Poland (kpn) and the
free labour unions movement. There were Polish artists who with more or
less conviction took advantage of this opening. Some of them, including
Elżbieta and Emil Cieślar as well as Zofia Kulik and Przemysław Kwiek, were
associated with the Gallery Repassage in Warsaw. There were also those who
rebelled through ridicule, such as Anastazy Wiśniewski, and those, like Józef
Robakowski, who analysed the language of totalitarian manipulation. They
all deserve our esteem and respect since they were a commendable exception
to the national norm.
87
If in the gdr artistic autonomy was an expression of a hard-won, limited

independence, signified resistance against the party’s efforts to instrumental-
ize art, and, ultimately, was an outcome of the struggle against the Ideological
State Apparatus, then in Poland it favoured opportunistic attitudes, supported
inscription into the pseudo-liberal strategy of the Ideological State Apparatus
and, in effect, supported the latter. To back up those claims, we need go no
further than the history of the most prominent Polish gallery active during this
period, the Gallery Foksal in Warsaw. The gallery, which developed interna-
tional fame, was established in 1966 as part of a widespread reaction against
the so-called official art or the mainstream current of the Ideological State
Apparatus. It was created, as in the case of the Clara Mosch Gallery, in a situ-
ation when that apparatus had lost its coherence and power (in stark contrast
to the gdr, in Poland it would never regain them). Certainly the gallery’s
organizers must be given credit for this success. However, we should keep in
mind that Socialist Realism did not define official art in Poland as it did in
the gdr. Here official art, though sterile and shoddy, was neither political nor
involved in propaganda. Instead, it was mainly opportunistic, ready to satisfy
bourgeois tastes of the petty elite of the time. Also we must remember that
Gallery Foksal was not alone. A considerable number of similar venues created
in the 1960s prefigured mass movement in this direction in the following
decade. Art actions hosted and encouraged by those galleries in the late 1960s
and the early 1970s, though certainly critical of the establishment culture, were
by no means politically subversive. Moreover, despite their critical character,
they were firmly inscribed into the discourse of autonomy developed in
the 1950s. While they rejected the modernist construction of the image, its
visuality and abstraction, they did not dispense with its self-contained inde-
pendence vis-à-vis the external reality.
Gallery Foksal thrived in the 1970s. During this period of pseudo-
liberalization of cultural life, it became involved in a series of notable inter-
national projects by inviting interesting and sometimes already prominent
Western artists, and also, although much less frequently, Central European
ones. The gallery was not a struggling alternative space. On the contrary, despite
modest quarters, it was a significant venue that received considerable, though
certainly not lavish, financial support from the government. It also had virtual
autonomy. Although it would be difficult to classify Gallery Foksal as an official
institution on a par with the state-run network of exhibitions spaces, referred
to in Poland as the Offices of Art Exhibitions, it would be equally impossible
to see it as an unofficial, alternative venue similar to the Clara Mosch Gallery in
the gdr. In reality, Foksal was firmly situated within the pragmatic programme
88
of the Ideological State Apparatus. This is clearly demonstrated by its quarters

(provided by the state), financial support, paid staff positions and ability to
engage in extensive international contacts. It must be also noted that the on-
going efforts to establish a theoretical distance from that apparatus (for
example in Andrzej Turowski’s projects such as Gallery Against Gallery and
Live Archive) clearly demonstrate that the gallery’s staff was fully aware of this
paradox. In reality, such actions did not alter the gallery’s position within the
political and social framework because they were in the end unable to trans-
form theory into politics.
In the mid-1970s another problem appeared. During this period Foksal
began a campaign against the ‘pseudo-avant garde’ within the art market com-
prised of other galleries and programmatically similar cultural circles and,
therefore, within the competitive context of the Ideological State Apparatus.
The campaign began with a famous article written by the gallery’s director
Wiesław Borowski in 1975, which to this day causes considerable consterna-
tion among the self-described defenders of ‘true avant garde values’.7 Borowski
argued in the essay that the gallery struggled against the opportunism of the
‘pseudo-avant garde’. He wrote that this phenomenon of mass culture may
have referred to the poetics of the neo-avant garde, but it essentially lacked
any artistic qualities precisely due to its popular character. And in this respect,
the author was correct. The popular appeal of opportunistic and conformist
conceptualism, body art and such in Poland during this period was all too
visible. This was certainly a paradox of historic proportions for Central
Europe. While in countries such as the gdr artists dreamed of freedom, here
in Poland, where such freedom was granted, it very often produced pathetic
results. The problem rests in the fact that while Borowski was writing his
famous article, Foksal remained politically neutral. Moreover, it took no polit-
ical steps during the period when actual political opposition appeared on the
scene in response to the growing social and economic crisis, which reached
its climax in 1980 with the birth of Solidarity. Gallery Foksal and the artists
who were associated with it, in particular its spiritual leader Tadeusz Kantor,
were completely indifferent to what was happening outside, or at least seemed
so in their public appearances. In fact, one could go much further. One
would expect in the mid-1970s some kind of gesture of solidarity with the
nascent protest movement from such a prominent, theoretically aware gallery,
which played a leading role within the Eastern European art world and in
reality had no counterpart in the whole region. Instead of a polemic against the
‘pseudo-avant garde’, one would expect some real action challenging the Ideo -
ogical State Apparatus, real engagement, actual denunciation of conformism
89
and opportunism, actual rejection of the culture of pseudo values and pseudo-
liberal rhetoric of the Ideological State Apparatus, which promoted limited
freedom of the ‘velvet prison’. Many Polish writers and intellectuals provided
such gestures of protest against the establishment and the regime in solidarity
with the nascent political opposition. Why were such declarations missing
from those associated with Gallery Foksal, even though they were willing to
take up the struggle against pseudo art values? The absence of such gestures,
and above all the absence in the gallery of work that engaged in a critique of
the oppressive system of power, raises a question concerning the gallery’s
place and function within the context of the Ideological State Apparatus. It
forces one to enquire whether the gallery itself conceded to obeying the rules
of the game, which guaranteed artistic pseudo-freedom through the principle
of artistic autonomy.
Such questions have not been raised, or at least have not been raised
directly. Andrzej Turowski, who was associated with Foksal for a number of
years, wrote in a much discussed, though rarely understood, article published
in 1987 that the main axis of conflict was the defence of cultural values. The
essay essentially repeated, in much more sophisticated language, Borowski’s
arguments from 1975. That argument may have been correct, but it did not
go far enough. Turowski writes: ‘the demand for autonomy (seen as a social
weapon of art) within the cultural sphere functioned as a warning beacon,
since the officials in charge during this period were precisely interested in
eliminating such freedom’.8 My perspective on this issue, which I freely admit
is based in materialist analysis, leads me to the opposite conclusion. The
‘officials in charge’, or, to use my term, the Ideological State Apparatus, were
interested in maintaining, not restricting, art’s autonomy; they wished to do
so in order to delegitimize political critique, which was the legacy of the avant
garde. Ironically, Andrzej Turowski himself experienced this practice when
his publisher refused to release his book about Soviet constructivism under
its original title Constructivist Revolution and insisted on changing it to In the
Circle of Constructivism.9 Of course, the classical avant garde was politically
engaged, even if sometimes it made troubling choices, especially in the Soviet
Union. In those instances when it was tempted to support the power structure,
as for instance during the Weimar Republic, it remained resolutely critical and
understood criticality (sometimes directly, other times indirectly) in political
terms. The original avant garde was not interested in autonomy; on the
contrary, it often subjected this idea to criticism, seeing autonomy as a bour-
geois value. I am not sure to what extent this is a paradox, but the Ideological
State Apparatus in Poland willingly used the notion of artistic autonomy to
90
support its agenda. In this respect its strategy resembled much more that of
the Yugoslav communists than of the Bulgarian or East German ones.
Instead of such discussions, there has appeared a completely different
tendency to mythologize contesting gestures, such as a ‘Farewell to Spring’
ball held in Zalesie near Warsaw in 1968, even though in reality they signalled
rather unambiguous rejection of politics. Such mythologizing appeared in
this particular event’s reconstruction at the Centre of Contemporary Art
Zamek Ujazdowski in Warsaw in 2006 and in the commentary provided by
Anka Ptaszkowska, one of the event’s organizers.10 Seen from this perspective,
the event was supposed to function as a gesture of protest against ‘politiciza-
tion’ of the situation and the ‘pressure’ to be political in the Polish reality of
1968. Is that what happened? Did the ball really have such a deep significance?
If that is the case, then this raises much more serious questions about such
attitudes in the context of the Warsaw spring of 1968, a period of consider-
able repression directed against intellectuals, especially of a Jewish background.
Of course, this is difficult to establish. However, it is clear that the organiza-
tion of balls and other such entertainments in the context of a traumatic reality
constitutes a rather banal reaction, one that has appeared ever since antiquity
and has a psychoanalytic, rather than political explanation.
It is worthwhile, however, raising other questions reflecting different
methodological approaches. The first question, which draws on a comparative
perspective, enquires into whether and how the art scenes in other parts of
communist Europe reacted to the events of 1968. We know that there were
very interesting instances of mainly Hungarian artists engaging in a critical
political discourse in response to the Prague Spring, an event with much
broader resonance than the Polish ‘March ’68’. They clearly demonstrated
that even under much more difficult totalitarian conditions it was nevertheless
possible to critique the system of power. The second perspective is suggested
by the consciously cultivated elitist identity of Gallery Foksal, an identity rein-
forced through its ‘critical’ gestures. Tadeusz Kantor, the gallery’s main protag-
onist, was also its key spokesman for political disengagement. The Zalesie ball
of 1968, known as the ‘Farewell to Spring’ – one could say farewell to ‘that’
political spring – was an example of such a gesture, a fact that raises serious
questions about the gallery’s later, ostensibly critical actions aimed at the system
of Polish art institutions. Doubly troubling is the fact that those critical inter-
ventions took place in a country that was largely spared political intervention
into the cultural sphere and did not suffer the repression that was quite
common in other countries, such as Czechoslovakia. One could even say that,
contrary to the intention of those who organized the ball’s re-enactment, the
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ball could be seen as a paradigm of the politically and ethically ambivalent

attitude of the Foksal coterie, not only in 1968, but also later during 1976 and
1977. In the context of those years, which gave rise to organized political
opposition in Poland, their position of political indifference and decision to
remain ‘neutral bystanders’ seems rather problematic.
While it is true that Foksal failed to produce deeper and systematic
critical analysis of its own position within the structure of the Ideological State
Apparatus during the 1970s, its current and subsequent adversaries, despite
numerous and often emotional declarations, also failed to do so. They were
nurtured by myths and rather naive and sometimes even comical accusations
directed at Borowski. His text was blamed for repressive measures, such as
withdrawal of funding and permission to travel abroad, aimed by the State
Apparatus at the artists accused by the author of ‘pseudo-avant garde’ activi-
ties. It seems pointless to even address such accusations. The officials in
charge of passports did not need Borowski to tell them what to do. If a
decision was made to refuse someone permission to travel abroad, there was
no need for any justification. Even if justifications were given, any excuse
could be used, no matter whether it was factual or fictitious. The same applied
to funding decisions.
It is beyond doubt that Borowski’s article was a tactical move within
Foksal’s strategy for not just functioning, but winning the competition within
the Polish art scene. That strategy ultimately aimed at delegitimizing and
excluding others. Moreover, as Louis Nader has demonstrated, Foksal prac-
tised what Rosalyn Deutsche has termed the politics of inadequate art history,
by eliminating or rather marginalizing certain tendencies associated with
Henryk Stażewski, Anka Ptaszkowska and Mariusz Thorek, and showcasing
others, primarily associated with Tadeusz Kantor.11 Kantor played a key role
within the Foksal circle. It is not unlikely that Borowski discussed with him
the texts of his article and that Kantor himself perceived it in tactical terms.
Kantor was certainly an artist who continued to engage and play games with
the communist regime. He did this from the moment of his founding of the
Gallery Krzysztofory in Kraków and revival of the Kraków Group from 1958
until 1982, when he was awarded and infamously accepted the highest state
honour for ‘exceptional cultural achievement’ at the height of martial law.
Under these conditions, when the majority of artists were boycotting the
regime, Kantor’s willingness to cooperate clearly legitimized it.
Returning to the issue of autonomy and its function within the strategy
of the Ideological State Apparatus, one could say that the Polish theory of
artistic autonomy, which initially developed as a politically motivated reaction
92
against Socialist Realism and propaganda art, turned with time into a mask
concealing opportunism and support for the pseudo-liberal cultural policies of
the Ideological State Apparatus. The art informel and neoconstructivism of
the 1950s had political character not despite but because of their autonomy.
By the late 1970s, however, autonomous works produced by the majority of
Polish conceptualists were only opportunistic. In other words, they had polit-
ical character, but their politics supported rather than contested the cultural
policies of the country’s communist regime. Stefan Morawski summed up this
view in the early 1980s:
It is sufficient to read a collection of documents from this decade, such

as Art-Text by Jan Wojciechowski. During the early 1970s, the author
stressed that his generation experienced profound turmoil and felt a need
to protest the status quo. But this was a strange revolt that advocated
above all study of cybernetics and Wittgenstein, and saw salvation in
semiotics. Given this, there is nothing surprising in the fact that a
certain acceptance of reality gradually appeared. Finally, in 1978, in the
article ‘Repressive Stereotype of Innovation’ Wojciechowski simply out-
lined the conception of prudent conformism as the most appropriate
attitude. He wrote, among others, that conformism is a proper antidote
to the frivolous conception that advocates destruction of reality, that
one must think and not be led by emotions. To achieve self-realization
here and now, in this country, under the existing conditions, one has
to respect specified rules against utopian thinking. And if one embraces
an ideology, it should be one that can be actually realized.12
It should be noted that in the mid-1970s Jan Wojciechowski was one of

Borowski’s adversaries.13
The year 1968 constitutes a critical moment in the history of Eastern
and Western Europe (and not only Europe): the Polish March, the Paris May,
an August that ended hopes for political reforms in Czechoslovakia. The year
also witnessed one of the most dynamic and fascinating periods in Czech and
Slovak cultures, which were quite different, contrary to a common assump-
tion. The impact on art of the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact
troops became apparent only two to three years later. When the new regime
gained full control of the political situation, it began to ‘pacify’ culture. In
other words, when the Repressive State Apparatus achieved success, it was the
turn of the Ideological State Apparatus. A period of so-called ‘normalization’
followed. The pacification measures were mainly aimed at the public sphere,
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which became generally inaccessible to artists who were perceived as alternative

or experimental. They were not necessarily dissidents, though they were per-
ceived and treated as such by the Apparatus. What is interesting is that the
artists withdrew from the public sphere into the much safer sphere of nature,
a move that had no precedent in Central Europe, although it had certain
analogies with the situation in the Soviet Union during the same time (for
instance in the work of the Collective Actions Group). Among others, the
group Křižovnická Škola organized field trips to the countryside or simply
engaged in art actions that consisted of beer drinking at a pub (Beer in Art,
1970). Also some conceptual projects were realized outdoors. Some of the most
prominent Czechoslovak artists who produced such works included J. H.
Kocman, who attached tablets to trees with information that the ‘object’ was
‘reserved’ for aesthetic contemplation (Natural Aesthetic Reservation, 1971), Jiři
Valoch, who inscribed the word ‘love’ on found stones (Stone, 1972), while
Karel Adamus made photographs of his footsteps left in drying mud and
Ladislav Novák painted various zoomorphic shapes on stones and rocky out-
crops. One should also see Jiři Kovanda’s ‘minimal’ interventions into the
public sphere in such terms: the artist’s actions interrupted pedestrian traffic
only slightly when he stood with his arms spread out in the middle of a
pavement (19 November 1976, Prague, Václavské námè sti). It seemed that no
one besides those in the immediate vicinity and his artist-friends discreetly
observing his actions noticed those interventions. But this perception was
misleading; all such discreet actions were not only observed, but methodically
and scrupulously recorded by the Czechoslovak secret police.14 It is worth
noting in this context that some artists who were very active during the initial
years of ‘normalization’, such as Petr Štembera, ceased all art activity when
confronted with repression. They did not do so out of fear, but rather due to a
growing feeling that such seemingly political actions were pointless, especially
when compared with those of the intellectuals, who in 1977 chose open con-
frontation with the communist system by signing and publishing the Charter
’77. Those artists felt that such actions became meaningless at the moment
when people began to suffer serious consequences, such as loss of jobs or
freedom, for participating in ‘real’ political opposition. It should be noted that
Petr Štembera never returned to art making.
The closing of the public space by the Ideological State Apparatus to
alternative and independent artistic culture in Czechoslovakia did not result
in confrontations or critique of the system of power. Rather, it led to a search
for autonomy outside the public sphere. While it may be difficult to see
attaching tablets to trees in political terms, paradoxically, precisely because
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such actions were pushed out into a seemingly neutral space of nature, this
autonomous and ‘innocent’ work attained political character.
The division of culture into official and unofficial in 1970s Czecho -
slovakia was perhaps most conspicuous for anywhere in the Eastern Bloc (here
again the ussr provides a notable exception) and certainly in Central Europe.
The attempt to defend culture’s autonomy through seemingly inconsequential
gestures made outside the agora – during a walk in a forest, by painting stones
in the middle of nowhere, and so on – was also the most visible in the region.
Irrespective of such apparent withdrawal from the public sphere, these
autonomous actions acquired political significance. However, they did so
without producing a direct critique of the power system. Jinřich Chalupecký,
one of the most interesting art critics from Central Europe and a keen observer
of the Czech art scene, compared the restrictions imposed on art in Czecho-
slovakia during the period of normalization to those imposed on the Western
art world by the straitjacket of the art market. Here the Eastern European (in
this context Czech) bureaucratization of art functions as a counterpart to its
Western commercialization.15 According to the Czech critic, both reveal
manipulation of art. However, besides negative aspects of this situation, he
also finds in the bureaucratization of culture something rather ‘positive’. Such
drastic division of culture gave artists who did not wish to inscribe themselves
into the structures and strategies of the Ideological State Apparatus freedom
from bureaucratic pressure. By rejecting temptations that are generally associ-
ated with any form of power, they could feel completely liberated and free to
create art without compromising themselves. Chalupecký claims that the
‘spiritual’ quality of art, which has a local tradition in Czechoslovakia, has its
source in such attitudes. The artist created exclusively according to an inner
impulse. Because his works could not be shown within official venues, he
did not feel any reason to restrain his imagination. But such work was neither
hermetic nor antisocial. In certain ways it was just the opposite; it was com-
municative in nature and therefore inviting an exchange. It was therefore
‘political’, though in a different sense of that word. The Czech critic introduced
here the Greek term politikon (that which relates to politeia or society), which
associates the notion of politics with engaged citizenship, rather than political
activism as such.16
Chalupecký’s description is certainly tinged with idealism, which could
be seen as a therapeutic reaction to the strategy of normalization pursued by
the Ideological State Apparatus. Nonetheless, the underground of ‘grEy sphere’
art should be given a great deal of credit not only for defending values of
sensitivity and imagination against the ‘normalizers’ and allowing the culture
95
of Czechoslovakia to survive the period of repression, but also for defending it

against the temptations of opportunism and conformism that plague subju-
gated societies. Recalling the argument offered by another perceptive observer
of Czechoslovak society, Václav Havel, we could say that it is precisely within
the art sphere that ‘the power of the powerless’ becomes most visible.17 Let’s
not forget that the artists together with other dissident cultural and political
activists formed in 1977 the independent association Charter ’77, demonstrat-
ing where and how the power of the Repressive as well as Ideological State
Apparatus ended. They also demonstrated the political effectiveness of artistic
autonomy and the potential reach of the agora.
Intellectuals throughout the world protested at the invasion of Czecho-
slovakia by the armies of the Warsaw Pact. In Poland some writers and
academics participated in those protests, but I am unaware of any artists or
people involved with the Polish art scene who did so. The right to artistic
autonomy guaranteed by the Polish Ideological Apparatus, which functioned
like a licence that could be suspended at any moment (something that every-
one was aware of ) simply paralysed them. The situation was quite different
in Hungary, where nothing was guaranteed. There the Ideological State Appa-
ratus functioned according to the famous ‘3 × T’ rule: Türni, Tiltani, Támogatni
(Tolerate, Prohibit, Support). This metaphoric dictum of the cultural politics
in Hungary introduced far-reaching instability, which undermined any temp-
tation to respect or desire to engage the Ideological State Apparatus. The artists
simply had nothing to lose and nothing to gain by doing so. That is why their
reaction to the events of 1968 in Czechoslovakia was the most vocal. More-
over, the Hungarian neo-avant garde of the late 1960s and the early 1970s was
the most politicized in Eastern Europe. Several Hungarian artists engaged in a
critique of the system of power, something that was unique in the art history
of the region.
Just to recall a few reactions by Hungarian artists to the suppression
of the Prague Spring, let me mention three works produced in 1968: Tamás
Szentjóby’s Portable Trench for Three People, comprised of a piece of cloth
attached to two poles, and Czechoslovak Radio, consisting a simple brick, as
well as László Lakner’s Wounded Knife, in which a simple piece of paper
included two hand-written inscriptions in English: ‘Sept. 1968’ on the top
and ‘wounded knife’ below. Those few examples are just the tip of a proverbial
iceberg of widespread political engagement among Hungarian artists. Of course,
one can find more or less explicit political references among neo-avant garde
artists everywhere else. Here, however, we are dealing with a common reac-
tion to a political situation and production of works engaged in an explicitly
96
political critique. Besides Szentjóby, who was perhaps the most political, we
find political references in works by Gyula Konkoly, Gyula Pauer, Gábor
Attalei, Sándor Pinczehelyi and Endre Tót. In one of his pieces, Tót placed a
photo of himself besides that of Lenin, writing underneath ‘you are the one
who made me glad [sic]’. In another piece, he presented a photograph of
himself reading Moscow Pravda, a newspaper that functioned as a symbol of
communist propaganda. Through a hole in the newspaper one can see the
artist’s smiling face and an inscription ‘I am glad if I can read newspaper [sic]’.
One could say that, unlike the politics of autonomy typical of the
Eastern Bloc countries, where the notion of artistic independence functioned
as a relief from the pressure to engage in propaganda or provided an illusion
of freedom, Hungarian artists used a different strategy. Their approach, more
typical of contemporary art than of works produced during the period of
communist dictatorship, was a strategy of political autonomy. In the gdr
the doctrine of autonomous culture allowed artists to compromise with the
Ideological State Apparatus in order to defend artistic values, in Poland to
inscribe themselves into its strategy, and in Czechoslovakia it led to a search for
an alternative arena outside the public sphere where the Apparatus (Ideolog-
ical as well as Repressive) did not function. In Hungary, artists adopted a
completely different strategy of virtually open critique of the Apparatus aimed
at both its politics and ideology.
These examples demonstrate the existence of significant differences
between the art scenes in different Eastern European countries during the
communist period. They also reveal that although all those countries embraced
analogous ideological doctrines, in each the Ideological State Apparatus imple-
mented them in different ways, sometimes using conflicting strategies that
provoked different responses among artists. This diversity of conditions and
responses determined significant differences in meanings of art created in dif-
ferent places. The current situation framed by the politics of post-communism
is quite similar, though the functioning of the Ideological State Apparatus in a
post-communist country is of course much more subtle. However, it is quite
clear that the majority of countries of the former Eastern Europe, or at least
all those that have become members of the European Union, have accepted
analogous ideological frameworks, namely those provided by liberal democracy
and the principles of the free market. Because of the processes of globalization,
which are perhaps most advanced in art and economy, this could signal sig-
nificant synchronization of the strategies of the Ideological State Apparatus
and hence development and implementation of analogous cultural policies
throughout the region. That this is only partly true could be demonstrated by
97
comparing the Czech Republic and Poland, in particular in terms of attitudes

towards artworks engaging the subjects of religion and the body. While in Poland
there is far-reaching freedom of expression, there have also been instances of
censorship, repression and a series of successful efforts to interfere with the art
scene. All those comprise a strategy of the Ideological State Apparatus aimed
at creating a socially conservative, national-Catholic country. Independently
of this, the framework within which art is currently functioning in post-
communist Europe has undergone profound change. Art no longer has to resort
to the politics of autonomy in order to express its opposition to the system.
Basic freedoms have become part of life and post-communist society has at its
disposal legal instruments that can be used if they are violated. Those self-defence
tools include appeals to the European Court of Human Rights. As a result,
work that cultivates autonomy is free to focus on itself; that which seeks to
express opposition to the system can do so directly, irrespective of the actual
limits imposed on artistic freedom by the Apparatus of individual countries.
In other words, after 1989 the politics of autonomy were replaced by political
autonomy. Naturally, artists took up this challenge. They began to comment
on and engage in public issues, adopting the roles of critics, agitators, citizens
and so on. From the perspective of art strategy, it appears that local differences
in the practical functioning of the Ideological State Apparatus have had much
less impact now than during the preceding period.
Every State Apparatus in the region, perhaps with the exception of
Belarus, functions within the framework of liberal democracy. Even Russia,
which is difficult to consider a democratic country, adopted liberal principles.
Paradoxically, their implementation has encountered much more significant
problems within the economic than the artistic sphere. Of course, liberal
democracy is far from the ideal of democracy and has been criticized for its
hidden practices of exclusion. This is a topic I have written about a number of
times and will address again. In particular, liberal democracy has been criti-
cized for its conception of consensus, which according to Jürgen Habermas
forms the basis of the ‘deliberalizing’ democracy and which, in practice,
eliminates minorities from the public sphere. By contrast, radical democracy,
seen here as an alternative to liberal democracy, expands the public sphere by
supporting conflict rather than consensus. It does not seek to resolve conflicts
or find complete agreement; instead it acknowledges them as an ineradicable
component of any social system. Within this context, ‘agonistic’ democracy
(Chantal Mouffe) provides an alternative. Although this is not the place for
examining those theoretical issues more closely, they do raise a relevant question,
namely, what role should be played by art, in particular art engaged directly in
98
politics using the strategy I have identified as political autonomy, in imple-

mentation of radical democracy.
I would like to discuss several examples of such work before attempting
to answer this question. I will begin with a theoretical manifesto published by
Artur Żmijewski, one of a few artists who have formulated an explicit theory
of political engagement in art. Żmijewski has been associated with one of
the most interesting groups of politically engaged young intellectuals in post-
communist Poland connected with the quarterly Political Critique (Krytyka
Polityczna). This publication has become much more than a journal. It is a
fully fledged organization, which publishes books and organizes discussions that
are picked up by the mainstream media and therefore represent a real political
position. Certainly this group should be credited with a certain expansion of
the political discourse in Poland and, in particular, with the introduction into
political theory of leftist, sometimes radical ideas. This is something that is
crucially important in Poland, a country that has consistently been leaning to
the right and has been suffering from a chronic conservatism. Even if the
publishing enterprise of the Political Critique has no real impact on main-
stream views, its value rests in the fact that it has introduced the ideas of
the contemporary left into Polish political discourse. This has restored the
Polish leftist tradition, which has been marginalized by conservative and
clerical politicians, and has provided the society with an opportunity to
develop ideological and political alternatives. Within post-communist Europe,
Political Critique can be compared with the Romanian quarterly Idea, pub-
lished in Cluj. In both instances, the journals and the intellectuals associated
with them are interested in promoting contemporary thought; in both instances
the project goes well beyond publication of the journal; in both we are faced
with multi-functional environments. While the Poles seem to have much
greater ambition to play a political role and participate in the political main-
stream, the Romanians have maintained their distance by primarily cultivating
their intellectual identity. On the other hand, the Romanians have been much
more visible internationally. The Idea is published in Romanian and English,
whereas the editors of Political Critique do not place much weight on the
linguistic accessibility of their texts outside Poland. As a result, Idea is read
throughout the world (of course by a very narrow readership), whereas Political
Critique is available exclusively to Polish readers. Also, in both cases the groups
formed around the periodicals include artists and art constitutes a crucial
component of their programmatic identity.
It would be difficult to do justice here to a comparative analysis of the
function and attitudes towards art expressed by Idea and Political Critique. The
99
latter sometimes includes works that are highly problematic not only from
the perspective of the quarterly’s leftist identity. I am referring to the period-
ical’s sustained interest in the paintings of Wilhelm Sasnal. Although Sasnal
has been unequivocal in voicing his leftist views, they do not seem to have
had any significant impact on his paintings, as interesting as those may be. If
the artist’s views can be discerned in his work, they appear as citations and
more or less subtle references, rather than any consistent artistic programme.
Such a programme has been articulated, however, by Artur Żmijewski in his
manifesto Applied Social Arts.18
In defining his programme, Żmijewski starts with several negative
assumptions. One of them is art’s ‘shameful adventure’ with propaganda,
namely its involvement in the party politics of fascist as well as communist
totalitarian states. This ‘adventure’ has engendered a lack of enthusiasm for
political engagement in art and has given rise to the dominance of autonomy
as the ‘ideology of art’s purity’. The second negative point of reference is
provided by a dialectic relationship between ‘rebellion’ and ‘responsibility’,
two concepts that describe art’s alienation. ‘Responsibility’ provides a ration-
ale for art’s engagement or its use in many spheres of social life, though such
use does not undermine its autonomy. By contrast, ‘rebellion’ provides a safety
valve that prevents art’s use by various power structures and grants artists a
degree of independence. But such a dual role does not overcome an artist’s
alienation. On the contrary, it reinforces it by branding him as ‘ignorant’ and
‘illiterate’. An artist is someone who cannot be taken seriously within many
areas of social life. He may produce knowledge and politics, but does not
control his own products, which consequently are not taken seriously by
society. Moreover, the experts in particular fields do not find art language
persuasive and hence they do not respect it; it is too ‘artistic’, which means
that its meanings are related to something other than knowledge or politics.
That is why politicians and academics treat the artist as ‘ignorant’ and ‘illiter-
ate’. The next negative reference is provided by the understanding of art as a
form of a ‘viral infection’. This understanding conceives art as something that
interrupts the normal functioning of a society. It is something that creates
infections that often cannot be controlled. But Żmijewski argues that this does
not have to be and should not be the case. He proposes replacing the metaphor
of a virus with that of an algorithm, or a function that calculates means and
methods of work in order to achieve a desired effect. Art that uses science as
a model will produce knowledge in a controlled manner. How could such a
thing be accomplished? Żmijewski provided several concrete theoretical per-
spectives. Above all, he claims that art’s autonomy should be instrumentalized
100
and should no longer function as a guarantee of ‘ideological purity’. It should

become one of the tools available to the artist. The next step must involve the
artist’s entry into other fields, especially science and politics, as an equal partner.
This would mean that criteria used to evaluate art would have to be adjusted
to fit the requirements of science (explanation) or politics (effectiveness). Their
frame of reference would not be provided by art history but by knowledge.
This would also mean that some concepts traditionally used to evaluate art
practice would have to change their function. For example, autonomy would
not signify extreme individualism, but freedom of choice; originality would
provide evidence of innovation, rather than complete novelty; obscurity would
announce difficulty in communication, rather than a lack of legibility; risk,
which is associated in art history with uselessness, would become useful. As a
result, art could become useful and effective in explaining and transforming
reality without losing its distinct identity. Żmijewski points here to film as a
medium that has a special predisposition to take on the role of an applied
social art.
Before demonstrating how this theoretical position can be implemented
in practice using Żmijewski’s films, I would like to historicize his manifesto. It
appeared during the 1990s, when critical art seemed to dominate the Polish
art scene. This type of work set as its goals analysis of social systems, systems
of thought and representation, as well as destruction of our habits and auto-
matically formulated judgments. It was supposed to wake us up from our
‘automatic’ stupor. It was supposed to function like a ‘virus’ by interrupting
normal functioning of a society and as such it was supposed to have political
significance. But according to Żmijewski this approach missed its target and
did not achieve its political goals, such as expansion of artistic freedom. It
failed because it was perceived as an artistic rather than political action and
interpreted in terms typical of artistic culture and art history, namely within
categories of scandal. Żmijewski’s manifesto was a response to this fundamen-
tal weakness of Polish critical art in the 1990s. His statement signals, therefore,
a new stage in thinking about publicly engaged art. It is an expression of
disillusionment with the critical art scene, of which the author was one of
the main protagonists, but it also offers a concrete solution to the problem.
What is interesting is the fact that this solution comes from the political left,
from an artist associated with Political Critique and therefore perceived as
politically radical. But is this in fact a ‘radical’ solution? Certainly not. How-
ever, for art critics and reviewers, whom the artist attacks in several places and
who were used to looking at art through the lens of aesthetic (use-less) values,
his statements may have sounded radical, especially since they appeared within
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the context of a clearly defined political opposition, which was critical of

the political right and of the conservatism then dominant in Poland. In any
event, I am not at all certain that radicalism is still possible within art theory
or a concept of art practice. It is easy to hear in Żmijewski’s text echoes of
discussions that took place within the Soviet avant garde in the 1920s or those
from around 1968 that appealed for the social engagement of art. I do not think
that those similarities constitute a problem when the historic significance of
his text is assessed. Żmijewski does not claim to have invented this perspective.
Something else is important here. It is the fact that this statement was formu-
lated in a particular place and time and because of that it acquired a particular
significance. It reflected a very different understanding of the relationship
between art and politics than that defined by Jinřich Chalupecký (see above).
Artur Żmijewski has produced a number of projects. I will focus here on
only one, his piece Repetition created for the Venice Biennale in 2005. Although
this work does not contain any explicitly political references (though such refer-
ences do appear in other projects, such as They, which he created for ‘Documenta
12’ in 2007), it does provide a good example of the artist’s approach and
methods. In the piece, Żmijewski repeats Philip Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison
Experiment from 1971, which divided a group of people into prisoners and
guards. In the original experiment, conflict escalated. The ‘guards’ strongly
identified with their roles and demonstrated such aggression towards their
‘prisoners’ that the experiment had to be stopped. Zimbardo’s conclusions were
bleak. According to his thesis, when presented with favourable circumstances, an
individual will express aggression and brutality. The researcher claimed that such
behaviour depends on social circumstances, rather than any system of beliefs,
universal norms or other conditions. Perhaps this was not a revolutionary thesis;
what was terrifying was how easy it was to confirm it using the experimental
method. Żmijewski began with an assumption expressed by the German title
of his book published on the occasion of the Venice Biennale, Einmal ist Keinmal,
namely that performing the experiment only once does not validate such a
thesis.19 In short, his version of the experiment ended in a completely different
way. It did not lead to an escalation of violence. On the contrary, the ‘guards’
began demonstrating solidarity with the ‘prisoners’ and together they made a
decision to rebel and stop the experiment. One could say that Żmijewski not
only challenged Zimbardo, but also created a completely different vision of
human nature. But the artist is not a naive humanist. His interests are aimed at
a completely different target, largely unacknowledged by art critics who have
written about the piece. His work examines the ‘poverty of methodology’. It
engages Zimbardo and the world of science in a debate by subjecting science to
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a critique, or more precisely, by criticizing its methods. It is irrelevant whether

or not his position is original, since we know that it is not; what matters is that
the artist’s methods, or his production of a film, are completely different from
those used by professional scientists. They are different because they ‘instru-
mentalize’ art’s autonomy, turning the artwork into a polemical tool. The goal
of the project is not production of a film for film’s sake. Instead the work aims
to enter a discussion concerning the methodology of experimental science,
especially within the field of social psychology. Moreover, if the German
proverb ‘einmal ist keinmal’ (once is never) describes the initial rationale of
the experiment, Żmijewski’s critical assessment of the experimental process
seems to suggest another conclusion: ‘zweimal ist noch nicht’ (twice is still
not enough). In other words, the artwork makes a claim that there is no experi-
mental methodology that could be used to prove decisively any conclusions
within the field of social psychology. At this point a very serious dialogue with
the scientific field emerges since the work challenges its most basic assumptions.
This clearly demonstrates the quality of Żmijewski’s project and that is the reason
why scientists should not ignore it. They should engage with the artist in a debate
and try to convince us (the audience following the exchange) that Żmijewski is
wrong. On this plane, an encounter between scientific and artistic methods
12 Artur Żmijewski, Repetition, 2005 (detail).
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could yield significant results. That is how I think we should understand the
notion of ‘socially applied art’.
It is clear that Artur Żmijewski is not alone in post-communist Europe
in using film to create and document social experiments. Artūras Raila from
Lithuania is another artist who works in a similar vein. One of his projects,
Under the Flag, 2000, investigated the reaction of members of a Lithuanian
neo-Nazi group to a film produced by the extreme right-wing Austrian Free-
dom Party for the Austrian electoral campaign, in which the party achieved
considerable success. The Lithuanian neo-Nazis, who commented on what
they saw, produced a form of ideological racist discourse. A significant num-
ber of similar works and artists interested in similar issues appeared in Central
Europe after 1989. Żmijewski, however, has gone much further: by theorizing
his artistic approach he has articulated a radical and ambitious programme for
artistic practice.
A more literal demonstration of the tension between the politics of
autonomy and autonomous politics is provided by projects of a Polish anony-
mous art collective rat (Radykalna Akcja Twórcza/Radical Creative Action),
which gets directly involved in politics. The group’s projects generally take the
form of typical street art interventions, commenting on current events as well
as social and political processes taking place at a local or international level.
Those commentaries express a radical, unambiguous and critical position. For
instance, when in 2003 the Polish President Aleksander Kwaśniewski, with
the support of the significant majority Polish political establishment, including
his conservative opponents and a majority of public opinion, decided to send
Polish troops to Iraq, thereby joining the ‘coalition of the willing’ and so
expressing his support for a de facto imperialist military intervention by the
us in the Middle East, rat displayed ironic anti-war posters on the streets.
Their text, which read ‘hey Pole, send your kid to Iraq’, exposed not only the
hypocrisy of those who supported the war, but also pointed out the fact that
‘our children’ could also die in this conflict. And of course they did. In the end,
it was the deaths of Polish soldiers, not the actions of radical artists marginal-
ized by politicians or the liberal intellectual establishment, that led to Poland’s
withdrawal of its troops from Iraq. Another project by the group commented
on Russia’s joining the ‘coalition of the willing’ in order to silence American
(and Polish) criticism of the atrocities committed in Chechnya. rat created
a poster that included two heads: Adolf Hitler’s on one side and Vladimir
Putin’s on the other. From Hitler’s mouth emerged the text ‘Warsaw insur-
gents are terrorists’, referring to the Warsaw Uprising during the Second World
War; from Putin’s came ‘Chechnya is an internal Russian matter’. The most
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13 Arturas Raila,
Under the Flag, 2000
(detail).
interesting rat action was connected with the group’s acceptance of an

invitation to participate in the exhibition ‘Posters’, May 2006, organized by
the Poster Museum in Wilanów, near Warsaw. They submitted a poster that
showed Tadeusz Rydzyk, a Catholic priest in charge of the radical, xenophobic,
nationalist-Catholic radio station Radio Maria in Toruń, accompanied by a
pair of the most famous identical twins in the world, Jarosław and Lech
Kaczyński, who at the time were occupying the posts of Prime Minister and
President of Poland. The poster depicted them dressed in Nazi uniforms. The
accompanying text read: ‘One nation, one church, two leaders’. Of course,
the exhibition’s organizers rejected the work, a fact that clearly revealed the
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limits of political freedom in art. In an e-mail sent to the group (which was
promptly posted on the web), one of the curators admitted with disarming
honesty that acceptance of the work would have resulted in the withdrawal of
funding to the museum by the government, then dominated by the Law and
Justice Party (pis) of the Kaczyński twin brothers. What is at issue here is not
the fact that the artists attempted to expose the true character of the new right-
wing regime (the Law and Justice Party won full control of the Polish
government in 2005 by securing a parliamentary majority and winning the
presidency). Although this was a radical thesis, it did not depart to a signifi-
cant degree from the political rhetoric of the Law and Justice Party itself,
which accused almost all its opponents of communism. What is significant is
the fact that this gesture of protest was rejected by the ‘liberal intellectual’ cir-
cles associated with the newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza, which stated on 4 March
2006 that rat ‘has crossed the line’. This was a typical reaction for this milieu,
which tended to be averse to politically or artistically radical art and much
more inclined to support the subdued slogans and posters of another Polish art
collective, the group Tworzywo.20
The Ukrainian group r.e.p. (Revolutionary Experimental Space; Olesia
Chomenko, Ksenia Hnyłycka, Mykyta Kadan, Żanna Kadyrowa, Wołodymir
Kuznecow and Łada Nakoneczna) also engages in street actions, but not
exclusively. Unlike rat, it is not anonymous and has a much broader spectrum
of interests. This collective of young artists is associated with the history of
the Orange Revolution in Ukraine. In fact, it was directly involved in that polit-
ical event and that is why it is of interest in the context of our discussion of
political autonomy. The group has produced a variety of projects, including
creating installations, objects and images. But I think its most interesting
actions are those that take place in the public sphere. Some have been quite
simple, playful and, at the same time, symbolic. For instance, in one project
the artists put ropes around a column and invited passers-by to participate in
the action. One part of the crowd tried to pull the column east, the other west.
However, their most critically significant action took place on the Majdan
Square in 2005 on the anniversary of the October Revolution (We will R.E.P.
you). This central square in Kiev has been the location of all the protests,
including those connected with the ‘orange’ days of the revolution. On this
particular day two large groups gathered on the square: a group of communists,
who came to mark the anniversary of the October Revolution, and a group
of Ukrainian nationalists, who came to protest against not only the abolished
communism, but also the presence of ‘reds’ in the newly independent state.
The r.e.p. artists entered this potentially explosive situation beating drums,
106
chanting slogans and waving signs (absurd in this situation) that promoted
art and beauty and supported Andy Warhol, their leader, for the presidency.
They were dressed in an unusual manner. If the communist group was
dominated by the colour red and the nationalists by blue and yellow, the
artists dressed exclusively in black and white. Their clothing, consisting of
jumpsuits, capes, pointed hats, facemasks and goggles, drew the attention of
passers-by as well as the participants of the other demonstrations. The result
was an immediate development of various forms of communication. Some
discussions with disorientated members of the public, who identified the
artists as an unfamiliar political faction, were more or less friendly, but there
were also threats and acts of aggression from observers and those participating
in the other two demonstrations, who showed considerable lack of tolerance
towards the artists, seeing them as both potential rivals and as enemies, degen-
erates and losers. Of course, this was an absurd situation, since the artists were
not promoting any political programme, speaking from a particular political
perspective, or attempting to secure a place within the political system. But
the mere fact that they appeared on Majdan Square, this Ukrainian agora
saturated with symbolic capital, gave their actions political significance.
The absurd action was transformed into a political reality. The reactions of
14 r.e.p. (Revolutionary Experimental Space), We will R.E.P. you, Kiev, 2005.
107
the public and of the ‘real’ political groups gave the r.e.p. demonstration a
social meaning. The action achieved its critical objective: it revealed conflict,
even if that conflict was based on the absurd premise of the r.e.p.’s ‘political’
slogans. Although ‘art’ functioned as a nominal focus of the demonstration,
the action, which created a potentially explosive situation in the public sphere,
played a different function. It exposed a spectrum of negative emotions and
the absurdity of politics, in particular public political demonstrations. The
autonomy of art, which was so important under a totalitarian system where it
functioned as a defensive shield against political manipulation, was in this
instance completely eliminated.
Artists who give up art’s autonomy often do so in the name of very
concrete civic actions. This was certainly the case with the project Pro-Test
Laboratory started by a pair of Lithuanian artists, Nomeda and Gediminas
Urbanos, in the spring of 2005. The project began as an attempt to stop the
destruction of a building that housed an independent cinema, the Lietuva.
A private developer who planned to acquire and develop the site was given
permission by the city to demolish the building. In a short period of time, the
artists were able to collect several thousand signatures for a petition protesting
against the city’s plans. They raised public awareness of the issue and provoked
a political discussion on the future of independent cultural institutions in
Lithuania, a country facing the process of the privatization of public property.
Unfortunately the action did not have the desired outcome. Artists in Budapest,
including members of the international group Big Hope (the Hungarian artist
Miklós Erhardt, Dominic Hislop, a Scot, and, from 2004 the German artist Elske
Rosenfeld), organized similar civic actions. In the project Talking about Economy
(2003), for example, Big Hope tried to overcome the professionalization and
isolation of economics by asking several workers from the industrial town of
Dunaújváros in Hungary and from Berlin about the state of the economy.
Dunaújváros is a typical socialist town built around enormous industrial
complexes, which during the period of economic transformation were expe-
riencing considerable financial difficulties. The workers in Berlin had just gone
though the process of German unification. The results of this project were
shown in a gallery as electronic transcripts and texts published in the form
of a newspaper. Earlier, in 1997 to 1998, the artists worked with a group of
homeless people, giving them video cameras and asking them to make a record
of their daily lives. Through these projects, the artists chose to participate in
the political transformations that engulfed post-communist societies by work-
ing with the homeless and jobless, or with workers from the degraded former
108
socialist industrial conglomerates, who suffered the most during the process
of economic transformation. Those people often lost not only their sources
of income, but also their dignity and homes. The artists’ conversations about
economics with those very real people exposed the inherent inhumanity of
the hermetic language used by specialists, whose neo-liberal pronouncements
characterize not only individuals, but entire social groups as ‘factors’ or ‘means’
to particular economic ends. Those projects do not constitute a ‘rebellion’.
But they do provide sociologists and psychologists with an alternative approach
to social work with marginalized populations. Above all, they question the
post-political consensus formed around the neo-liberal understanding of
the post-communist condition, which holds that there were no alternatives
to privatization, which liberated the financial elites to the detriment of the
workers employed by the failing post-socialist industries. The dominant dis-
course in the post-communist countries, including Hungary, portrayed those
processes as ‘necessary’ and consequently their victims as an ‘unavoidable’ price
of progress. Behind the objective economic principles and the discourse of
post-political consensus, which fabricated general support for the process of
systemic transformation, lay the hidden but obvious interests of the hegemonic
political class, which comprised an astonishing coalition of post-communist
political factions, now redefined as social democrats and the right-wing parties.
This coalition ensured that no alternatives to neo-liberal economic policies
were considered, a situation described by the theorists as post-political. Big
Hope exposed this reality.
The Czech art group Rafani (Jiři Franta, Marek Meduna, Petr Motejzik
and Luděk Rathouský) is another collective that has been active in this field in
a way that is clearly directed against the notion of art’s autonomy. In 2002
they organized an action, Demonstration for Democracy, on one of Prague’s
main streets, Václavské Náměstí. The action was announced in advance and it
was supposed to receive ‘protection’ from the police. The artists, dressed in
grey uniforms of their own making, took out a flag resembling the flag of the
Czech Republic, except that theirs was made in shades of grey, and set it on
fire. The police reacted immediately, interrupted the action and arrested its
participants. The action simulated demonstrations by political extremists,
mainly associated with the right wing, who announce their identity by wear-
ing identical uniforms. However, unlike members of those groups, the artists
set ablaze their own colouristically muted national flag, rather than flags of
any vaguely defined enemies. The implications of this action were relatively
straightforward: it raised questions about the limits of political demonstrations
and, in effect, about the limits of democracy. On a deeper level, the artists
109
were enquiring into their own place within the structures of the democratic
political system and their own role within a society of citizens. They saw
themselves not as ‘decorators’ or providers of entertainment, but rather as
participants in political processes who raised difficult questions concerning
participation of various groups in the public sphere, the function of their
behaviours and symbols, as well as the reactions of those in power who set the
limits of tolerance.
I could cite hundreds of examples of works that comment on current
politics. They have become a common phenomenon in post-communist
Europe. Many art groups engage in actions that resemble street campaigns of
radical political groups functioning within the public space. Dan Perjovschi’s
drawings accompanied by short texts provide a more nuanced commentary
on current political events. His rich body of works, which have been shown
throughout the world, is witty, refined and often embodies a philosophical
perspective. If it were to be collected in its entirety and published, it would take
up several large volumes. I would like to draw attention now to a different
phenomenon, one associated with political autonomy in the art of post-
communist Europe, namely an indirect understanding of politics shown in
the critiques of consumer culture. It is clear that consumerism functions as an
efficient instrument of manipulation used to control social behavior and one
that smuggles in scores of political values and messages.
The current power system, or the hegemonic system of political power,
is attempting to depoliticize a number of areas within social life or, considering
this phenomenon from a different perspective, it is attempting to prevent
political understanding of those areas by maintaining perception of this sup-
posed neutrality. This has been the case with regards to culture as well as
economy. One often hears that culture is free of politics, because on the one
hand it creates opportunities for satisfaction of the individual need for
expression, and on the other satisfies individual need for spiritual develop-
ment and metaphysical experience. The economy is neutral because there are
no alternatives to the neo-liberal perspective on economic development, which
was adopted after the fall of communism. We could refer to this system, which
excludes culture and economy from the political sphere, limits understanding
of politics to strictly administrative tasks, and announces the elimination of
ideological tensions and the atrophy of political divisions into the right and the
left as post-politics.
The post-communist condition encourages development of post-politics
because it creates an illusion of the world at ‘the end of ideology’. The develop-
ment of consumption and the culture of consumerism in the post-communist
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15 Rafani, Demonstration for Democracy, 2002.
countries appears on the one hand as a reaction to the poverty of the communist
period, when most countries in the region experienced widespread shortages
of consumer goods, sometimes very basic ones, and on the other as a neutral
arena for development of post-political attitudes. The first reaction has sup-
ported the second since the ‘starved’ societies of Eastern Europe have been
especially susceptible to consumerism and the associated dangers of manip-
ulation. However, it is clear that conflicts of interest, ideological tensions
and disputes, and especially the struggle to maintain hegemony have taken
place across many areas of social life. Moreover, any effort aimed at destabiliza-
tion of the current hegemonic system must include a critique of those hidden
areas. Those areas must be politicized or identified as political spheres since
the official mainstream discourse obscures their political character. This is
especially true of consumer culture.
There are many artists who have understood this dynamic and begun
treating critique of consumerism as political critique and civic action. One of
them is Zbigniew Libera, who created Correcting Devices in the mid-1990s
and also Lego. Concentration Camp (1996). The artist sees in the common-
place patterns of consumer culture mechanisms that tame and control behav-
iour and ways of thinking, as well as oppressive models of education and
111
socialization. Other artists, such as the Latvian Gints Gabrans, the Bulgarian
Luchezar Boyadjiev and the Czech group Pode Bal (Petr Motyčka, Michal
Šiml and Antonin Kopp) have engaged similar problematic. In his project How
to get on TV (2003), Gabrans transformed a homeless man living on the margins
of society into a media star appearing under the pseudonym Starix. The artist
provided Starix with new clothes, gave him a haircut and prepared him for
tv appearances with the help of a professional pr agency, in effect creating a
new persona for the use of media and consumer culture. The project was very
successful. Starix began to make appearances on numerous tv talk shows as
a celebrity making statements on various social, cultural and political topics.
Through the project the artist revealed the mechanism of contemporary
media celebrity, a phenomenon in which an individual who does not neces-
sarily have anything important to say, but who readily makes pronouncements
on all possible topics, is listened to, or even quoted and imitated. In the project
Gabrans exposed something that everybody knows, but he also demonstrated
something else. We know this, but this knowledge has no real impact. Various
types of more or less brilliant celebrities, stage and film stars, as well as politi-
cians, continue to attract media attention. Those individuals not only shape
our tastes and our views, but also have power over us. Is it their doing? Is
that power in their hands? The artist provided evidence that power rests with
the media, which are able to transform anyone, even a randomly chosen but
adequately prepared individual, into a star. Moreover, the entertainment pro-
grammes only appear to be apolitical; the views of celebrities on sex, sport
or family life only appear to have nothing to do with politics. In order to
demonstrate how politics are shaped by the mechanisms of power, Gabrans
‘ordered’ his hero to participate in a political demonstration while being
filmed by the media. A higher level of absurdity is achieved when a celebrity
appears on talk shows supporting an absurd political position. But this is not
at all unusual: it is normal practice for the contemporary media culture.
Luchezar Boyadjiev deals with a different issue related to consumer
culture: advertising. In addition to developing advertising campaigns for
non-existent products, the artist also created advertising for a Roma small
contracting business (Stefan and his brothers-in-law), offering roof repairs,
apartment renovations and other services, as part of his project Hot City Visual
(2003). Billboards advertising the company appeared throughout Sofia at a very
specific moment in the run-up to an election, when certain political parties
were resorting to a political discourse that targeted the Roma population.
Although the Roma constitute a significant ethnic minority in Bulgaria, they
are completely ignored by the mainstream politicians and are virtually absent
112
from the city’s iconosphere. Within this context, posters advertising Stefan
and his crew created a break in the visual fabric of the city and simultaneously
revealed its exclusivity and ethnic homogeneity. Boyadjiev’s action had a civic
character because it drew attention to the excluding function of advertising. As
such it was dangerous because it was at odds with the official pronouncements
of equality. The project not only revealed ethnic tensions between the Bulgarian
majority and the Roma minority, but also did so using economic categories.
Because the Roma have no means of advertising their poorly remunerated
services, they are in effect pushed outside the market and as a result become
more and more marginalized as an ethnic minority. Their faces and images
that appeared in the artist’s advertising campaign did not fit the norm of the
idealized bodies of attractive models used to advertise luxury products. The
advertising of luxury goods and services, and the beauty and sexual appeal of
the female models used in such campaigns, push others out of the public space
and, in reality, function as instruments of exclusion.
The projects of the Czech group Pode Bal are more semantically complex.
Their extensive body of work includes the project Converse (2005), shown at
the second Prague Biennale, which deserves particular attention.21 The group
showed several objects associated with Arab culture marked with the famil-
iar logos of famous Western brands: a burka with an eye slit in a shape of a
Nike logo, a characteristic Palestinian scarf with the emblem of Hermè s (the
French firm known for its elegant accessories), a turban made with Gore-Tex
bearing the firm’s logo, a jambia with the characteristic red handle and mark
of Victorinox, the producer of the world-famous Swiss army knife. The art
group that created those associations left the local iconosphere by reaching not
only for global motifs, but also by provoking discussion on global economy
and politics. Such juxtaposition of two worlds whose coexistence has a rather
ambivalent effect on both the economic and political level – the Western
world of consumer culture and the symbols of Middle Eastern civilization
– could be interpreted as a diagnosis of globalization. Within this process,
Western brands adapt themselves to customs of other civilizations in order to
sell more goods, but those other civilizations, not always friendly towards the
West, also penetrate Western consumer culture. The latter is defined here as
something more than a mere export of the West to the former East; it is
understood as a global frame within which we all live and from which there is
no escape. Moreover, noticed contradictions or even political tensions and
differences in economic interests may be revealed as no more than a game
played by civilizations that only seem to be on a collision course. In reality,
what is at stake is power exercised with the help of economic instruments
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16 Luchezar Boyadjiev, Hot City Visual, Sofia, 2003.
17 Luchezar Boyadjiev, Hot City Visual, Sofia, 2003.

and consumption patterns. This form of diagnosis formulated by Eastern

European artists, who have focused until recently on the local political scene,
should be noted because it reveals that the old Cold War divisions of the world
are beginning to give way to new global references. Those references demon-
strate that the post-communist condition defines something more than a state
after communism, when the borders between East and West were erased. It
18 Pode Bal, Converse, 2005.
115
also signifies something other than the import of Western consumer culture
into Eastern Europe. It identifies engagement of imagination and thought
with a very different, global dimension. This also applies to a development of
critical attitudes. At first the group’s critiques focused on local issues affecting
the newly formed Czech Republic. Their intervention Malik urvi (2000), a
pun on the phrase ‘mali kurwi’ (small whores), for example, denounced the
former ties of current Czech politicians to the former secret police of the
communist regime. Another project, Stars (2003), involved production of a
pseudo-tabloid that, instead of gossip from the world of entertainment,
included authentic stories of sick people locked up in psychiatric institutions,
rejected by society and pushed beyond its margins, people in whom nobody
– much less the mass media – showed any interest. Seen in the context of those
earlier initiatives, the project Converse clearly directs critical attention towards
other, much broader functions of the consumer culture in its global dimension.
Art’s engagement with social and political issues is gaining greater accept-
ance in post-communist Europe. More significant actions involving larger
areas of the public space are being organized. For instance, in the summer of
2007 two curators, Marius Babias and Sabine Hentzsch, organized the public
action Spaţiul Public Bucureşti / Public Art Bucharest, 2007. They even included
leading Romanian artists with international reputations, such as Mircea Cantor,
a partnership of Anetta Mona Chisa and Lucia Tkáčová, Nicoleta Esinescu, a
group of women artists exhibiting as h.arta (Marta Crista, Anca Gyemant and
Rodica Tache), Daniel Knorr, and Lia and Dan Perjovschi. IDEA art+society
magazine from Cluj, one of the most interesting publishing ventures in East-
ern Europe, produced a catalogue and video documentation of the event.22
The organizers wished to make the city’s public space available for democratic
action, to create a public forum where citizens, in this case artists, could make
statements. The initiative, which returned the urban space to public debate,
transformed it once again into an agora. This function, lost during the com-
munist period, has not been regained during the period of transformation,
when rampant and aggressive capitalism commercialized and privatized almost
completely the urban public space. This was, and in part still is, a typical situ-
ation in post-communist Europe. The artists wanted to return this space to
the citizens of Bucharest though their actions.
Another event, ‘49 October Salon’, organized by Bojana Pejić in Belgrade
in 2008 under the heading ‘Artist-Citizen’, also deserves our attention. This
annual exhibition, which started as a very local event organized by the artists’
union, was transformed just a few years earlier into a major international
exhibition. Under the curatorial leadership of Bojana Pejić, the exhibition
116
addressed the problem of artists’ civic responsibilities and art’s entanglement

with contextual meanings, both issues particularly significant for the Balkan
art scene. By doing so it exposed tensions that began to appear between art
and politics within the framework of the post-communist condition. As
always, the ‘Salon’ awarded prizes. This time, one of the three awards went to a
Russian group Chto delat? (Olga Egorova, Dimitry Vilensky, Natalia Pershina-
Yakimanskaya and Nikolai Olejnikov) for their video work Perestroika Opera.
The Victory over the Coup (2008). The video has several protagonists. There is
an idealistic democrat, resembling a typical Russian intellectual nourished by
a utopia of democratic harmony, free speech and other ideals. A ‘respectable’
businessman, or rather a man in a red jacket with a sloppily open shirt and
cheap shoes, tries to appear ‘respectable’ and is completely saturated with the
Russian version of neo-liberal ideology: he understands the word ‘freedom’
to mean ‘free market’ and ‘free hand to do business’. There is also a heroic revo -
lutionary, who wants power returned to the working class, who believes in the
system of workers’ committees and wants to nationalize factories and other
services. Finally there is an embittered nationalist dreaming of the Great
Russia, who constantly refers to great imperial history and whose icons por-
tray the Tsar and Stalin. He envisions the future glory of the Orthodox Church,
believes in ethnic purity, sees the liberal government, society structures and
international or cosmopolitan ideologies as enemies, and believes in the inter-
national Jewish conspiracy. The action of the film takes place among those
four figures. The chorus, modelled on the chorus of ancient Greek tragedies,
provides the narration that comments on the action, which takes place on 21
August 1991, a very significant moment in recent Russian history, when Boris
Yeltsin prevented a communist coup. (His portrait accompanies one of the
speeches made by the democrat.) Some believed then that the bright democratic
future of Russia was just around the corner and that the powers of the old
regime were gone. In the film, the democrat tries to create a consensus among
different political actors. He encounters conflicts but, undeterred, tries to
‘negotiate’ some form of agreement around what he thinks are shared values.
He seems completely unaware of the agonistic theoretical perspective that
sees such conflicts as a necessary and potentially positive aspect of social and
political interactions. There are significant conflicts of interest, but the demo-
crat does not lose hope. He believes in consensus. At a certain moment a fifth
character enters, a woman who wants to address the crowd from the podium.
The men allow her to speak, but soon their bewilderment turns into open
hostility. When the woman calls for female solidarity, demands equal rights
and women’s presence in public life, defines freedom and democracy from a
117
gendered perspective and urges her ‘sisters’ to fight phallocentric social struc-
tures, the men boil over with rage. One shouts, ‘She needs a man!’ Another adds,
‘Women belong in the kitchen!’ and ‘Women belong in the church!’ This is
the only (brief ) moment when the arguing men, who cannot agree on any
ideological or political grounds, are united. But the woman does not give up
and remains on the podium. She argues that democracy has a female reference.
It is not only gendered female in a grammatical sense (Russian as a language
genders nouns), it is female, since it can be guaranteed only when women are
allowed to function as fully empowered subjects in public life. This feminist
element is very interesting not only because it creates consensus among former
antagonists (men who represent different models of the state), but also because
the woman does not allow herself to be removed from the podium. At this
19 Pode Bal,
Converse, 2005.
118
20 Chto Delat?, Victory over the Coup. Perestroika Opera, 2008.
moment children dressed as bears, who have timidly crossed the stage earlier,
reappear and remove all the actors who believe they are creating a future Russia.
What do the bears represent? Clearly they symbolize the end of the Russian
dream of democracy, irrespective of who did the dreaming. They are the new
regime; they stand for the power of the new bureaucracy, new authoritarianism
and the government of Vladimir Putin.
What concerns me is not a debate over this or that conception of history,
this or that diagnosis of the Russian political system, social and political divisions,
chances for and threats to Russian democracy, or the virtues of a feminist per-
spective on Russian social and political problems. What interests me here is
a remarkable conception of an artwork developed by the Chto delat? group.
This conception combines two traditions: ancient Greek drama, both in terms
of its formal construction as well as a certain topos, and amateur theatrical
performances organized by Soviet organizations such as Proletkult. The Greek
drama, or rather tragedy, demonstrates that everyone has to play a certain role
and, at the same time, cannot influence reality. The format allows for one of
the most spectacular forms of performance and is also one of the most para-
digmatic and highly conventionalized European theatrical forms. The chorus
parts are sung and the whole is produced in a very appealing way. At the same
time, the work exemplifies the notion of social engagement; it provides a
commentary on the current political situation, and even advances certain
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political claims, thereby referring to the tradition of political theatre. In other

words, in the context of our discussion of art’s autonomy, one could say that
the Russian artists respect it by maintaining the conventions of a theatrical
spectacle, including its ‘artistic’ character, but they also engage in a commentary
on reality in a journalistic, didactic manner.
The politics of art’s autonomy had local significance par excellence. It
grew out of particular artistic processes that responded to a geographically
defined political situation. The transition from the politics of autonomy to
autonomy of politics also responded to very concrete historic needs. The Czech
group Pode Bal (see above) demonstrated that residents of Eastern Europe
do not live on an isolated island. They buy products made by corporations
such as Hermès, Nike or Gore-Tex. Those products are not simply part of
Western economic colonialism, but are symptoms of a global phenomenon.
Critical art, such as the work produced by Pode Bal, can make viewers aware
of this fact.
I would like to end by drawing attention to a form of media critique
practised by the Polish artist Jarosław Kozłowski, whose art traces the path
from the politics of autonomy to autonomous politics. Kozłowski is one of
the leading conceptual artists from Eastern Europe. His works from the 1970s
provide classic examples of this approach and as such are often included in
historical surveys of conceptualism and in anthologies dedicated to this
movement.23 I will mention only a few examples of his classic earlier works
based in a tautological conception of art. In 1971 the artist showed a piece
entitled Apparatus at the Gallery Foksal, which questioned whether the
photographic camera could in fact capture reality. In another work, Język/
Language, 1972, Kozłowski began with a normal alphabet and then began
grouping letters according to the following system: i = one letter, ii = two
letters, iii = three letters, iv = four letters and so on in every possible combi-
nation. The artist’s other works from this period, Metaphysics-Physics-Ics,
1974, Exercises in Aesthetics, 1976, and Time, Weight and Quantity Drawings,
1979 were based on similar tautological linguistic constructions. The first of
those, also shown at the Gallery Foksal, consisted of three ‘images’ of the
same room. The first image (Metaphysics) was a photograph showing a normal
‘naturalistic’ image of the room with simple, commonplace furnishings identi -
fied by numbers. It was accompanied by a soundtrack that asked questions
and provided answers: ‘What is this?’ – ‘This is a table’ or ‘This is a chair’. In
the second (Physics), the photo of the room was rendered completely illegible;
it showed pure, abstract play of light. The accompanying soundtrack
described the situation in the subjunctive mode: ‘for instance, if a stool stands
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next to a bad, then pictures hang on walls’. The final section of the work (Ics)
consisted of numbers attached directly to the wall in places corresponding
to the placement of the furniture in the first photo. The soundtrack listed
adjectives in alphabetical order: ‘absolute, absorbing, abstract, absurd . . .’. In
Exercises in Aesthetics, Kozłowski subjected a field of colour to analysis by
annotating it with the statement: ‘neither beautiful, nor ugly’. This founda-
tion provided the basis for a demonstration of a general law of logic based
on tautological reasoning and aimed at defining aesthetic neutrality, or the
so-called zero-value. In his Drawings series, the artist defined the ‘theme’ of
the drawings by the weight of the used graphite or the time required to finish
the work.
During this period Kozłowski definitely practised the politics of auton-
omy and was an opponent of art’s engagement in politics. And he was not
alone. On the contrary, this attitude was rather typical. However, this does not
mean that his work was uncritical or that it was not understood in political
or rather ideological terms, although in this case in a much broader applica-
tion than a commentary on a current political situation or a critique of a
concrete system of power. Luiza Nader observes that the artist’s references to
philosophy demonstrate that, ‘philosophically engaged conceptualism became
for Jarosław Kozłowski the only possible and strictly defined form of social
engagement: it was a territory where aesthetic choices equal ethical decisions,
a space of permanent negotiation of meanings and ongoing efforts to describe
reality, and finally a strategy for reaching freedom.’24 However, with time
Kozłowski left behind purist interest in the work’s autonomy and its self-
referentiality, and began to raise political questions.
One of the projects that demonstrates this evolution is his cycle Recycled
News, 2003–7, in which Kozłowski painted over newspapers, leaving uncovered
only titles, sometimes dates or, it seemed, random fragments of the text.
Bożena Czubak writes that this procedure continued the artist’s enquiry into the
nature of artworks, or more precisely, it enquired into the status of painting at
the moment marked by freedom and plurality of media. She argues that the
artist questioned whether and how painting could provide answers to specific
problems facing contemporary world and how the ontology of painting was
shaped within this context. Was it productive to use painting as a means of
searching for the ontology of art?25 I am interested in a different issue, namely
how his work engaged in a media critique and therefore how it it entered the
sphere of politics.
In 1968 Polish students shouted, ‘The press lies!’ And it certainly did.
However, if we exclude the communist territories where newspapers and
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media were kept on a short leash by the party’s lackeys, who cared nothing for
such values as ‘truth’ or ‘journalist integrity’, the late 1960s were not so bad for
the press or, for that matter, for the media as a whole. It is worth remembering
that the media played a major role in ending the Vietnam War by informing
the public about, or rather showing them, vivid evidence of American cruelty.
The media, including the press, also played a role in restraining police brutality
and state reprisals against young protesters in the late 1960s by exposing
massacres, instances of violence and governments’ manipulative schemes. The
American writer Paul Auster said that at some point everyone had his favourite
paper; today everyone has a paper he loves to hate. Much has changed since
the 1960s. The press, in particular the electronic media, have taken on the
functions of entertainment and, in an unprecedented way, of advertising. News
broadcasts are arranged in such a way that, in addition to a few sensational
bits of local and world news, there is always a good dose of amusing and enter-
taining items to keep the viewer from becoming tired out by depressing
information or complex analysis. The newspapers, the intellectuals’ mainstays,
21 Jarosław Kozłowski, Recycled News, 2003–2007.
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have unfortunately followed this lead. I am not referring to the tabloids pro-
duced for financial gain, which have never had a serious character and are
consumed mainly as a source of sensational entertainment, but to serious
newspapers. The intellectuals may be irritated by this state of affairs, but they
continue buying them. Jarosław Kozłowski also buys newspapers wherever
he happens to be in many different languages, including those he cannot read.
In the project Recycled News, the artist has painted over the newspapers leaving
only their titles legible: The Guardian, El Pais, Le Monde, Die Zeit, Interna-
tional Herald Tribune, Izvestia and hundreds of others. What is the meaning of
this gesture? In simplest terms, it signifies annihilation of the contents and
defacement of information, the reliability of which is problematic to begin
with. But I think that the significance of this gesture goes much deeper. The
painted-over newspapers are then framed like paintings and hung on the wall.
Moreover, they are arranged in decorative patterns. One could say that the artist
gives them an aesthetic function by moving them into a gallery. But, in reality,
he does not; he only reveals the true nature of our current newspapers: we can
find in them anecdotes from the lives of celebrities or neighbours, horoscopes,
see photos of beautiful people, we can even find out about the birth of a giraffe
at some zoological garden. Of course, the newspapers contain news about
wars, but one can never be sure how accurate the information is, since it is
always filtered through official military briefings, opinions of politicians, and
simulations that raise the question whether the war is indeed real. Finally, there
are the financial interests of the newspapers themselves. Newspapers are a big
business; they are enormous corporations that make a great deal of money,
not only (or rather not mainly) in their print form. In other words, the news-
paper has been transformed into an aesthetic object. And there is more. As
I noted earlier, the newspaper has been an attribute of intellectuals; we all
had our favourite papers. The aestheticization of the media, in particular news-
papers, is in a certain way a tragedy for intellectuals; it is a tragedy for culture
where information has become not just a commodity, but an aesthetic pack-
aging for commodities.
Media critique is political by definition; critique of media in art consti-
tutes political autonomy par excellence. This critique raises one more question
of whether and how we can live without information. Of course, there are
those who never watch television or read newspapers; sometimes they do
not even use the Internet, which has been commercializing at a frightening
rate. But can we live without information? Are we going to be freer without
it? Of course not. Here then is the question facing us: how are we supposed
to separate information from manipulation? Naturally Kozłowski does not
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provide us with an answer, but he does problematize the status of the media
by suggesting such questions. These questions are key to negotiating life in
a reality saturated and ruled by the media. Perhaps that is how he sees not
only the role of politics in art, but also and, actually above all, the role of art
in politics.
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four
Anarchy, Critique, Utopia
If we identify anarchism as a historically defined system of thought, then

anarchy should be viewed more as an attitude than a system. Despite common,
mainly negative associations with chaos, the main component of this concept
is the notion of revolt. Therefore an anarchist, or someone engaged in anarchy,
is in rebellion. The term itself derives from the Greek word anarkhos, which
means ungoverned, independent and without government. It has a Latin
equivalent, nullius imperio subjectus (not willing to submit), and a French one
of a later date, ni dieu, ni maî tre (neither god, nor master). We could enquire
into why the anarchist rejects government and control. What provokes him to
rebel? Or to use more typical understanding of the term, what motivates him
to spread disorder and cause disarray? We know the answer to those questions
fairly well from the history of anarchism since there have been numerous
statements providing theoretical justification for anarchy. Mikhail Bakunin
did not oppose his fellow rebel Karl Marx in order to disrupt the proletarian
movement. He did it because he saw with considerable foresight that the
Communist Manifesto contained the kernels of socialism’s degeneration,
suggesting the dangers of absolute power hidden within the rhetoric of eman-
cipation. He simply rejected this potential temptation of power or, to be more
precise, he rejected the rule of the party, the self-professed revolutionary avant
garde. This revolt against the rebellion arose in the name of freedom. And
because of that, freedom has remained one of the key values of anarchy. In
other words, the anarchist’s rejection of the ‘masters’ takes place in the name
of freedom.
The colloquial understanding of the relationship between anarchy and
freedom suggests a descent into chaos, disorder and suspension of the rule of
law. It does not, however, deal with the ethics of anarchy, the ethics of revolt
in the name of freedom. We know from classic anarchist texts that the free-
dom of anarchy is understood in terms of responsibility for the Other. As
such, it is understood as engaged freedom that entails responsibility. Although
this may be seen as a radical or even extreme thesis, it does not represent a
nihilist attitude.
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It is important to link anarchy with freedom, rejection of authority,

engagement and responsibility. Such conceptualization of this term will
motivate us to search for other points of reference. It is clear that anarchy is
fundamentally opposed to totalitarianism. If democracy is the opposite of a
totalitarian system, could democracy be linked with anarchy? Moreover, could
anarchy work on the behalf of democracy?
The Other is not a protagonist of the classically understood democracy,
which assumes the majority rule, since he functions on the margins of the
political and social system. Although he has a theoretical ‘right to rights’, to use
Hannah Arendt’s phrase, he has few opportunities to exercise those preroga-
tives. For the ‘right to rights’ to be more than an empty phrase or a rhetorical
expression, in order for it to function as a real engine of social practice, the
notion of democracy must be reconceived. The terror of the majority and the
law of consensus, which in general exclude the margins, must be rejected and
the Other must be given a special right to speech. The anarchist could appear
in this context. He or she, who has no respect for power, nullius imperio sub-
jectus, does not abide any masters, or any forms of authority that define classic
and liberal democracy and who rejects consensus, is in a position to spread
disorder by questioning ideology that conceals the interests of the majority
and mechanisms of exclusion. This rebel may use clever ruses and scream
loudly enough to shake the foundations of the power system. Anarchy’s role
is to question social reality, create strategies of resistance against the status
quo, and therefore against the order that takes the name of democracy while
tolerating mechanisms of exclusion and subjugation. In other words, the
anarchist’s spread of disorder and rebellion against the power has a critical
character, irrespective of whether the power is totalitarian or democratic, espe-
cially if the latter is supported by the terror of the majority and involves
coercion of minorities.
If freedom and the full extent of the ‘right to rights’ are basic values of
anarchy, then its goal cannot be a denial of democracy, but its opposite – the
extension or, one could say, certain democratization of democracy. That is
why if we look for links between anarchy and democracy, we must modify its
colloquial and classic understanding as the majority rule. We would also have
to reject the modernist or Enlightenment definition of democracy, which
Jürgen Habermas has described as ‘deliberating’. It must be replaced with a
much more radical conception of democracy, one based not on consensus
but on conflict and competition, processes that can never be eliminated from
the public sphere. We have to reach for what Chantal Mouffe has termed
‘agonistic’ democracy, one that recognizes irreducibility of conflict as a basic
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anarchy, critique, utopia
structure of political order. It is worth noting that the contemporary concept

of democracy, which everyone (the left, the right and the populists) uses as a
slogan and which, in general, has positive connotations, developed simulta-
neously with the concepts of anarchism and socialism. Before 1848 the epithet
‘democrat’ meant ‘revolutionary’ and ‘extremist’.1 The modern anarchist
movement also developed in the 1840s, although the word itself appeared in
the European political lexicon much earlier. Later on, when anarchism began
to attract more public attention, it became generally associated with negative
values. That is one reason why this term has had a rather different historical
trajectory than the word ‘democracy’, or for that matter ‘socialism’, which at
times appears in conjunction with ‘democracy’, as in ‘social democracy’.
I am not referring in this context to anarchism understood either as a
political movement, with its own widely varied goals, values and methods, or
as a philosophical or social theory, but to anarchy defined as an attitude towards
reality. It is clear that anarchism both as a movement and a doctrine has influ-
enced art. The classic anarchism, which appeared in the 1840s and lasted
through the interwar period, had a profound impact on the classic avant garde.
Neo-anarchism became a frame of reference for the rebellions of the 1960s and
’70s as well as neo-avant garde movements. The Situationists played a signifi-
cant role during this period by providing a theoretical basis for the critique of
the power system and capitalism. The contemporary movements, often referred
to as new anarchism, that appeared after the collapse of communism in Eastern
Europe and the end of the Cold War, during the period of accelerating econ-
omic globalization, function as a frame of reference for alter- and anti-globalism
movements and the accompanying new culture of rebellion. On the political
level, all those incarnations of anarchism have contested the state and the
institutions that support it and that can become oppressive, such as political
parties. This latter aspect of anarchism has taken on a particular urgency as
local political parties began to function as elements reinforcing the system of
nation states, while the problems facing the critics of globalization have taken
on a transnational character. However, such theoretical details do not affect
contemporary art to a significant extent. What is important is the general atmos-
phere that favours rejection of authority, establishment values, mainstream
culture and broadly conceived political, economic and symbolic power, rather
than concrete methods of struggle with the political establishment.
Let me also say a few words about the term ‘critique’. Although this word
also comes from Greek, where it means ‘art of thought and analysis’, those are
not its only meanings. A critique also involves evaluation and judgment. The
term ‘kritikos’ identifies one who evaluates, decides, passes judgments; it refers
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to a judge. That is why to a certain degree the concepts of an ‘anarchist’ and

a ‘critic’ are at odds; the former rebels, while the latter judges. However, the
anarchist must evaluate and judge before he or she can rebel. Although the
critic does not have to stage a revolt, he should not exclude the possibility of
rebellion. His evaluation could be affirmative. But if a critic is to be understood
as a judge, then his evaluation should be objective or at least unbiased. In prac-
tice, his judgments are based in a complex system of values and criteria, a fact
that makes achievement of the ideal of objectivity impossible. The question then
is what should be seen as an instrument and method and what as an attitude
or strategy? It seems that in this pairing of associated concepts, critique functions
as an instrument and anarchy as a system of values that define a paradigm,
which provides a frame of reference for evaluation.
At the end of this introductory presentation of two of the three terms
appearing in this chapter’s title (I will deal with the third later), we must enquire
what role art should play in this process. I think it is a key role. Art understood
as political and social practice has certain characteristics that other practices
do not have. Art can rebel, but it does not have to; it can take a form of crit-
ique and analysis, it could pass judgments, but, of course, it is not compelled
to do so. However, if it does take such a form, its unconventional rebellion and
critique are generally expressed in a much more attractive way than the rebel-
lious practice of the ideologues and revolutionaries. Because of that, art can not
only function as a catalyst, but also as a provocateur with a significant range
of influence, something that fathers of anarchism have missed. Moreover, the
artist-provocateur does not have to be solely a rebel; he or she could also take
on the role of a critic.
The history of art is full of rebels. As I mentioned earlier, art movements
with a critical-anarchical character gained popularity with the growth of the
anarcho-revolutionary political movements and intensification of the social
critique.2 Let us turn our attention to two such moments in cultural history:
the first one being the period around the First World War, when the old world
of the empires lay in ruins and was being supplanted, at least in Eastern and
Central Europe, by a radically new order of parliamentary democracies, and
the second that took place in the late 1960s when mass movements of rebel-
lious young people were toppling the bourgeois system of values and social
order based on historic consensus. The history of art in the region is full of
examples of anarcho-critical artworks from this later period that rebelled
against the communist system.
There are many examples of art engaged in social and political processes.
The artistic commentaries on those processes and the actions that result have
128
been shown in galleries and on the city streets. It is art advocating a resistance.
Many artist-rebels have rejected the mainstream and occupied an alternative
position vis-à-vis the political and social establishment. By rebelling, and
rejecting the authority of power, they have demonstrated a civic attitude based
in defined social and political critique. On could even say that any artist who
comments on reality and rejects the status quo could be included within the
concept of anarcho-critic. I would like to begin this chapter by taking a closer
look at the work of Zbigniew Libera, a Polish artist whose practice escapes
both straightforward models of rebellion as well as those associated with the
notion of an artist-citizen. Instead, Libera functions as an artist-critic who
analyses certain aspects of post-communist society from a perspective decidedly
grounded in anarchist attitudes. His critique of power is never direct because
it does not critique the institutions of power. Instead it is aimed at its mech-
anisms; it analyses methods of control and coercion. The following analysis
of Libera’s work will demonstrate its dual anarchical and critical dimensions.
Libera developed as an artist within the alternative art scene of 1980s
Łódź, an environment highly sympathetic to anarchist thinking. The local
‘Culture of Collection’ (a name derived from the activity of collecting money
for such things as beer) grew out of an environment of the so-called ‘attic’.
This was in fact an actual attic, but not just a place where alternative culture
found its home and where the group Łódź Kaliska held its court and established
its unique ethos. The attic also functioned as a quasi institution, invoking the
artistic topos of the attic, but also treating the location in a highly pragmatic
way. It was a location for exhibitions, performances, social gatherings and
other events. Libera was part of this scene and clearly its anarchist atmosphere
provided a key frame of reference for his early work. I also think that this envi-
ronment functions in his artistic biography as a certain paradigm.3
The anarchist initiatives of the group Łódź Kaliska must be seen in the
historic context of the 1980s. The introduction of martial law in Poland on
13 December 1981 polarized the political scene in a decisive way, with the
communist party and the army set against Solidarity and the other groups
involved in political opposition. Culture was also similarly polarized, but
with a significant difference. The official culture was rather anaemic and did
not have any authority. By contrast, the oppositional culture associated with
the underground political opposition had a mass appeal and was supported
by the Catholic Church. It developed around national, often nationalist and
religious values. Here the notion of freedom was understood in terms of
national independence, not emancipation of imagination or free speech. In
fact, sometimes the opposite was true. In the name of ‘common national and
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political interests’ critique and artistic freedom were suppressed. As a result, a

different form of oppositional culture soon appeared, one I have described else-
where in terms of ‘the chromatic of the third place’. It was ‘third’ because it
provided an alternative to the ‘first’ official and the ‘second’ oppositional cultures.
It was ‘chromatic’ because the official and the oppositional cultures mirrored
each other as perfect opposites, black and white, and as result were completely
colourless. The ‘third’ culture introduced colour; it rebelled against the binds
that confined both the official and the oppositional cultural scenes.4 The
concept of anarchism was key for this particular formation since the artists
involved were mainly interested in rejecting any form of authority: political
(opposition), ideological (nationalism and religion), as well as cultural (institu-
tions and grand art historic narratives). Łódź Kaliska was not the only participant
in this anarchist culture but it was a very active and dynamic. There are many
examples of this attitude in the group’s art practice. I will only mention here
the group’s films documenting short happenings that commented humorously
on the great masterpieces of European painting. One of them, appropriating
the composition of Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People, was entitled Freiheit
– nein danke, 1987. The film’s German title is highly suggestive. The word ‘free-
dom’ was the main slogan of the underground Solidarity, but in that context
it referred to something very different from what the members of the Culture
of Collection understood as ‘freedom’. Seen from this perspective, the anarchist
position constituted during the 1980s a real alternative to the black and white
system of power-opposition that formed in Poland under martial law.
A direct reference to anarchy and in a certain sense to anarchism also
appeared in Ewa Mikina’s retrospective exhibition ‘Bakunin in Dresden’
(Düsseldorf, 1990; Warsaw, 1991). The exhibition’s title referred to Bakunin’s
participation in the revolution in Dresden in 1848 (during this period
Bakunin was not yet involved with anarchism). According to the legend sur-
rounding this event, Bakunin advised the revolutionaries to take Raphael’s
Sistine Madonna from the local museum and bring it to the barricades. As a
religious image and a cultural icon, the famous work was supposed to function
as a shield and prevent the soldiers from firing, since it embodied the symbolic
values of the regime that the revolutionaries wanted to use against that regime.
This legend is closely related to the filmic parodies produced by Łódź Kaliska,
where famous paintings, constituting symbolic capital of the mainstream
culture, were pastiched and used against the system identified with canonical
art history. The reference to Bakunin, one of the leading figures of anarchism,
says a great deal about the whole alternative movement of the 1980s and about
‘the chromatic of the third place’.
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However, if we compare the work produced by Łódź Kaliska with Libera’s

early projects, we will see a significant difference. Throughout their affiliation,
members of the group have consistently contested not so much the establish-
ment culture (although this also took place) as, above all, the values associated
with mainstream art. By relying on humour, pastiche, parody and coarse eroti-
cism, their performances and short films were supposed to strip art of its pathos,
knock it off its pedestal and tear it out of the frame provided by the historical
discourse.5 From the beginning, Libera introduced into this anarchist culture
critical motifs. His early film How to Train Little Girls, 1987, which examines
the process by which little girls learn to use such attributes of femininity as lip-
stick, is considered today a classic example of an early project that deconstructed
gender socialization and engaged in a critique of cultural processes involved in
shaping the perception and performance of gender.
The artists from Łódź left the attic after the fall of communism. They
began to exhibit in galleries and museums. They also shifted their focus from
art historic iconography (though they did not abandon it completely) to that
of mass culture and advertising, a new, attractive phenomenon that the post-
communist society was recklessly consuming, often with exceeding trust. The
artists used similar methods (humour, parody and pastiche) to deal with this
new post-communist iconosphere.6 Libera also quickly turned his attention to
consumer culture, but once again did so in a different way. He did not eliminate
the anarchist dimension from his art, but in a move similar to his earlier work,
gave it a critical edge. One of his best-known works produced during this
period dealt with the iconic Barbie doll. In 1994 Libera made Ken’s Aunt. Ken
is Barbie’s handsome partner, whose good looks rival those of Barbie. Libera
provided Ken with an aunt, whose face still resembled that of her nephew’s
famous girlfriend, but whose body no longer conformed to her slender, ideal
shape. It was clear that the aunt’s proportions altered with age. In addition, she
was dressed in girdle-like underwear that young Barbie would never wear and
which in its design resembled garments advertised in Burda, a German magazine
for older women that was popular under communism.7
It is clear that this work includes a critique of consumer culture and of
cultural ideals of a female body understood as a commodity. It also raises ques-
tions about bodies that do not fit those parameters. Łódź Kaliska did not venture
in this direction. The group also used bodies in its art, but its bodies were rather
attractive, though they did not repeat the aesthetic stereotypes of the Barbie
doll. Their strategy involved contextual displacement, or introduction of dis-
tance, an external element, into the arena of quasi-commercial advertising.
They were more interested in creating an absurd situation than in developing
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a critical attitude towards aesthetic models provided by mass culture. Libera

moved in a different direction. He continued developing the critical dimension
of his work, while maintaining its anarchist foundation. To do this, he reached
for traditions where those motifs intersected, for example in the neo-anarchist
critique of capitalism practised by the Situationists and theorized by Guy Debord
in Society of the Spectacle. The works that followed, especially his ‘correcting
devices’, such as Body Master, 1994, Universal Penis Expander, 1995, and in par-
ticular LEGo Concentration Camp, 1996, clearly pushed the critical commentary
pointed at the consumer culture, especially the new cult of the male body. The
work addressed the new obsession with the male body, its training to achieve
a particular aesthetic effect, promotion of certain body ideals by magazines
and media, the cult of physical fitness and other means. The third work, LEGo
Concentration Camp, his best-known piece, attracted considerable critical
attention and went even further.8 Among the subjects it addressed are the
multi-dimensional function of toys, the role of force in culture and pedagogy,
and the training of imagination through representation and habituation to
terror. The anarchist quality was reduced here to a provocation, but the critical
dimension was greatly expanded. While the idea of representing a concen-
tration camp with lego blocks is clearly shocking, this is not the work’s
most interesting aspect. Neither is its rebellion against the official visual dis-
course on violence, critique of mainstream pedagogical trends, or revolt against
the terror hidden within ‘innocent’ toys. The worldwide reputation of this
work is based on its analytic and critical functions, rather than its complex
acts of rebellion.
If Libera ended his career with this piece, one could have described his
artistic biography as a journey from anarchy to criticism. But of course he did
not. The anarchist element returned together with a certain ‘historic turn’, which
drew attention to the past and its representations. Although this historic con-
sciousness was already evident in Libera’s LEGo Concentration Camp, it was
fully developed in his series Positives, 2002–3.
The title Positives describes a series of photographs that rework other
very familiar images that have entered the canon of journalistic and historic
photography as important visual memory markers, sometimes even describing
turning points in recent history. One could find here the semantic relation-
ship between the positive and the negative. While the original image functions
as a negative (like a film taken out of a camera that has to be processed), the
new image resulting from the artist’s intervention functions as a positive. It is
clear that Libera’s photographs are staged. But historians have told us that
some of the originals, which have acquired the status of documents, were also
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‘arranged’. The original images are dramatic; in general they show individual
and collective human tragedies. In Libera’s versions people smile and appear
happy. For instance, in his positive Residents, 2002, based on a famous photo
of Auschwitz prisoners liberated by the Red Army in 1945, we see a group of
smiling people. They are dressed in pyjamas, wrapped in quilts and sleeping
bags, and stand in a tight group separated from the photographer by rows of
parallel clothes lines. Those lines substitute for the barbed wire of the original
image. The smiling faces appear in the place of emaciated and scarred prisoners
dressed in striped prison clothing and covered with blankets. In another posi-
tive entitled Nepal, 2003, Libera altered Nick Ut’s famous photo from 1972 of
Vietnamese children fleeing American napalm attack on their village. In the
middle of the original image a naked little girl is seen running and crying.
American soldiers surround a group of children. In Libera’s image, parachutists
have replaced the soldiers and the naked little girl is laughing. The play of words
in the title is also significant: ‘Nepal’ vs ‘napalm’.
It is possible to see the semantic meaning of the relationship between
the positive and the negative in those comparisons. Here the ‘negatives’ depict
negative dimensions of history; they show tragedies, crimes against humanity,
crying victims. The ‘positives’ rewrite history and give it a positive character;
the tragedy is replaced by comedy. The third axis of the positive-negative rela-
tionship has to do with memory. The ‘positive’ created by Libera quite literally
22 Zbigniew Libera, Positives: Residents, 2002.
133
reminds us about the existence of the original; it recalls the photographic

negative. This reveals the mechanism of our remembering and the position
of those images in our collective visual memory. We remember those images;
we carry them in our heads. But often when the image is turned into a stereo-
type through repeated reproduction we treat it as an empty cultural icon, rather
than a concrete document of tragic events. Libera makes here an ethical move.
By giving those images absurd character, he attempts to give back to the orig-
inals their historic status, meaning and weight. He returns to them their
historic dimension.
Ewa Domańska, who is neither an art historian nor an art critic, is the
only author to have written about Libera’s Positives from the perspective of
their competition with institutionalized and professional practice of those
engaged in studying the past.9 Domańska sees the artist’s work as an example
of counter-history, or history that rebels against the mainstream academic
practice. She not only discerns the artist’s rebellious, anarchist gesture, but also
repeats it herself. Domańska does not stop with analysis of the work’s essential
meanings, but also considers its position and ideological function within
humanist discourse in terms of Louis Althusser’s concept of ‘interpellation’.
This is a rare example of a historian (at least rare in Poland), someone who
belongs to the professional academic field but who nonetheless has taken seri-
ously an artist’s interest in the past, in memory and its representation, and who,
simultaneously, has issued a challenge to her own discipline on the principle
of ‘ni dieu, ni maître’. In reality, if in Libera’s series Corrective Devices we can
see the anarchist motif being pushed into the background and the critical
character being foregrounded, then here, in his Positives, the importance of
the anarchist element cannot be underestimated. Domańska’s text confirms
this. Both dimensions coexist and complement each other. Although Libera’s
anarchism reminds me of Łódź Kaliska’s projects, it has much greater resonance.
The former functioned as a pastiche, whereas Libera’s Positives are iconoclastic.
The invoked photographs-negatives are treated as cultural icons (paradoxically,
they originally had completely different functions as documents, propaganda
and so on), images sanctified through museological sacralization and art history
(or rather the history of photography). They signify themselves rather than
what they represent. The anarchistic and, in this instance, ethical gesture of
the artist is necessary to return them to their proper place; here the anarchist
perspective is an extension of the critical perspective.
The challenge posed to historians is even more evident in another piece
by Libera, his book published with Dariusz Foks, What is the Messenger Girl
Doing (Co robi łączniczka), 2005. The book combines short texts by Foks
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about ‘what the messenger girl is doing when the boys do something else’ with
photographs of female movie stars from the 1950s and ’60s (Anita Ekberg,
Gina Lollobrigida, Sophia Loren, Monica Vitti). The figure of the female
courier is an iconic image of the Second World War in Poland, as are ‘the
boys’ who fight in the Resistance. The book has 63 mini chapters, a number
that corresponds to the number of days of the Warsaw Uprising, to which the
book refers. It deals with the issue of memory and as such engages in compe-
tition with professional, academic historians, who, with the exception of
Ewa Domańska, generally ignore those types of statements. This memory is
a memory of the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, one of two uprisings that took
place in Warsaw (the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943 was the first), an event
that was instigated in order to be remembered. This could be its only ‘justifi-
cation’, since it is difficult to find any other political or military rationale that
its leaders may have had. The uprising was launched at tremendous cost.
Hundreds of thousands were killed, wounded and driven out, it led to the
almost complete destruction of Warsaw, and it had no impact whatsoever on
the political and military situation either in Poland or abroad. That is why
memory is its only discernible effect. As noted by Szymon Wróbel in his eru-
dite study of the Warsaw Uprising, this ‘memory work’ was performed by the
female couriers, the legendary heroes of the Uprising, who ensured that differ-
ent divisions of fighters (the ‘boys’) remained in communication. The female
couriers also relayed memory of those events to us, while the ‘boys’ did ‘some-
thing else’.10 Libera stresses that what interests him is precisely the ‘memory
work’, the process of memory’s formation. What I find interesting is how this
memory is ‘reworked’ by the succeeding generations, in this case of the ‘boys’
belonging to the post-war generation, who did not have personal contact with
the events of the war years. The Warsaw Uprising is in and of itself a form of
a legend about the city. The question that appears here has to do with the
way in which that legend and that memory have been constructed. Of course,
they could be institutionalized and presented in the form of a multi-media
exhibition. That is what we see at the Museum of the Warsaw Uprising in
Warsaw, which emulates the techniques of blockbuster exhibitions. Its presen-
tation is full of high-tech contraptions that create an attractive spectacle,
clearly inscribed with an anti-communist view of history. But it could also
be another memory, more ‘private’, such as that presented by Libera. This
memory reaches into the boy’s imagination, connecting to the moment when
he was finding out about the Uprising for the first time, and when this knowl-
edge, especially that about the legendary female couriers, was combined in his
erotic imagination with images of famous film stars, who embodied sexual
135
appeal. I am not aware of any work by a historian that approaches the problem
of the memory of the Warsaw Uprising from this perspective. It is clear that
Libera suggests here a very interesting issue. What is the Messenger Girl Doing
is a critical work par excellence because it provokes analysis of complex mech-
anisms of memory, which are implicated in historic narration (in this case
constituting part of the Polish historiographic canon) as well as imagination,
which is formed (not only during adolescence) by eroticism, popular culture
and its icons.
In another series entitled Masters, 2003, Libera poses a challenge to art
historians. In the piece the artist created altered copies of newspapers that
included articles on those he considers to be leading Polish artists, individuals
who had significant influence on his work, and those who have been, according
to Libera, completely ignored by mainstream Polish art history. For example,
on the front page of the Gazeta Wyborcza, the largest daily published in Cen-
tral Europe (not counting the tabloids), or rather its Warsaw edition (Gazeta
Stołeczna, 4 March 2002) we can see a headline ‘Partum Dead’, referring to the
recently deceased Andrzej Partum. Underneath, as well as inside the newspaper,
we can read an article discussing the deceased artist’s work. Another newspaper,
this time the weekend magazine of Gazeta Wyborcza (no. 9, 1996) is almost
completely dedicated to another, largely forgotten and marginalized ‘master’,
Jan Świdziński. The issue also includes a fictitious ‘interview’ with Zofia Kulik,
an artist who is not only well regarded in Poland and has an international
reputation, but whose work is highly respected by mainstream critics and art
historians. The falsified issue of the largest Polish weekly, Polityka, includes
material on Anastazy Wiśniewski, one of the leading rebels of the Polish art
scene in the 1970s.11
One could analyse Libera’s work on several levels. One has to do with the
validity of Libera’s art historic claims and the possible reasons for Partum’s,
Świdziński’s and, to a certain extent, Wiśniewski’s marginalization. This enquiry
does not concern Zofia Kulik. We have to note that Partum and Świdziński
are completely different artists, whose work has hardly anything in common.
Świdziński is portrayed (and has portrayed himself) as a socially engaged artist-
theorist. His most famous theoretical programme was presented in his text
Art as Contextual Art, published for the first time in 1976 in English in Lund,
Sweden. Later that same year, he presented it at a conference in Toronto, which
brought together leading conceptual artists, including Joseph Kosuth and the
members of the group Art & Language. Świdziński’s manifesto of contextual
art, which advocated production of meaning through context, declared that
the meaning of an artwork must be found in the relationship it has to its
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23 Zbigniew Libera, Masters, 2003.
surroundings. It urged artists to open themselves to the external reality and

was aimed at conceptual art that Świdziński and his supporters perceived as
too self-reflexive (autonomous) and preoccupied with examination of its own
formal structures. It is worth mentioning that a year earlier, in the pages of
the journal The Fox, Kosuth and Art & Language came to similar conclusions,
137
revising their earlier insistence on ‘autonomy’ and opening their own artistic
thinking to external reality. They continued in a similar vein the following year.12
Hence Świdziński’s attacks accompanied their own self-criticism. Therefore
his manifesto constituted a polemic with an attitude that was already revised
or, under the best circumstances, was in the process of revision. Under those
circumstances, it is not surprising that his supposed adversaries and the authors
of later monographs simply ignored it. The program itself, especially when
compared with the sophisticated texts produced by Kosuth and the British
group, was extremely naive and its main claim, that artwork’s meaning should
depend on the context, though certainly correct, was by no means original.
The remaining artists mentioned by Libera were not interested in staking
out theoretical positions and did not publish artistic programmes. Although
Andrzej Partum wrote manifestos (for example, Manifesto of Insolent Art), his
texts had an entirely different function from Świdziński’s theoretical tracts.
What they shared was an authentic ethos of opposition and rebellion. This
opposition was authentic whether or not it was undermining the communist
system; in fact, it was authentic even when the system ignored it or absorbed
it. In other words, Libera’s art historic revisionism is rather problematic and I
doubt it could be defended. However, this does not mean that in the history
of Polish artistic culture there have been no instances of exclusion: on the
contrary, but the question that brings this issue to a personal level, namely
why Andrzej Partum has been excluded and Tadeusz Kantor has not, is not
the most important here. There is another, much more critical issue, namely
what type of work has not attracted the attention of mainstream critics and
art historians and why? In this context, we should place less weight on the role
played by Wiesław Borowski’s famous article ‘Pseudo Avant Garde’,13 which
was extraordinarily mystified by the next generation of his adversaries and has
been seen as a paradigm of exclusion of the groups that competed with Gallery
Foksal, then under Borowski’s leadership (see page 89 above). It is much more
important to pay attention to what type of art was excluded, also within the
context of Gallery Foksal, an institution which has had significant impact on
the subsequent writing of art history. Here I think Libera touches on a key
problem that provides another level of analysis for his work. All the ‘masters’
mentioned by Libera were drawn to a conception of art based in social reality.
They all sought contact with that reality. And they, in particular Partum and
Wiśniewski, were drawn to the anarchist tradition.
It is clear that in Polish art history there is a mechanism of exclusion
of artists who show interest in social issues, who contest the status quo and
critique reality, but unfortunately no one so far has carefully studied this issue.
138
This bias is visible on the level of art historic narration of the period of the
classic avant garde. This can be seen, for example, in the relative neglect of
Stanisław Kubicki, who had international affiliations and was simultaneously
linked with the leftist tradition and closely associated with the artists affiliated
with the group Formists, who were for a time involved in nationalist discourse.
It can also be seen during the post-war period, in particular in the role played
by Tadeusz Kantor in the history of Polish culture, an artist who explicitly
rejected all projects that would engage art directly in the critique of the system
of power. Gallery Foksal, where Kantor played a leading role in the 1970s and
to a large extent shaped the gallery’s programme, followed his lead. Of course,
this did not mean that artists associated with the gallery did not discuss the
issue of art’s political involvement. They did, but socially and especially polit-
ically engaged art did not appear in the context of Foksal’s activities, either
theoretical or involving art practice. The dominant paradigm embraced by the
artists associated with the gallery was the primacy of artistic values perceived
from the perspective of artistic autonomy. Here the notion of ‘high’ quality
rather than direct engagement was seen as a possible source of resistance against
the system that strategically eroded those values. The art historic discourse, with
a few exceptions, adopted this view. As a result, artists such as Andrzej Partum
or Anastazy Wiśniewski could not be recognized as leading figures. Moreover,
the poorly developed but existing anarchist or anarcho-critical tradition, seen
in the work of Zofia Kulik and Przemysław Kwiek, Łódź artists associated with
Józef Robakowski, and others who deserve recognition as Libera’s ‘masters’, has
been marginalized. In this context, Libera’s demand to include this anarchist
tradition in Polish art history seems very important.
The third level of analysis of Libera’s Masters follows from the previous
one. If we identify Libera’s art with the anarcho-critical attitude, then the work
analysed here must not only involve a revision of art history and restitution
of a marginalized tradition, but also define the proper context for the artist’s
own work. Seen from this perspective, Masters performs the function of art
historic self-definition, or self-conscious inscription into specific historic con-
text that simultaneously reinforces its value. In Libera’s gesture it is easy to
find anarchist elements, an attitude that rejects authority and the power of
a ‘master’, in this case that of an art historian. Moreover, one can also see
anarchy in his tactical decision to appropriate the image of a leading Polish
newspaper and to produce its falsified versions in order to get the excluded
artists into the art historic canon through the back door. The very act of print-
ing a falsified version of a newspaper constitutes a breach of law, the highest
authority in a liberal democracy. I would go even further and argue that by
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making use of the newspaper’s authority and doing so tongue in cheek (after all,
no one believed and was never supposed to believe that the newspapers pre-
sented by Libera were authentic), the artist exposes the newspaper’s complicity
in shaping the establishment culture. Therefore anarchy and criticism are not
only aimed at revision of art history, but also against contemporary power
of symbolic capital. In an interview published in the real Gazeta Wyborcza,
Libera observed: ‘I made a copy of Magazine [a weekly supplement to Gazeta]
from 1996, because I felt that this was the last time when you [Gazeta Wyborcza]
would be willing to print more difficult, intellectually courageous texts on
art.’14 The artist is clearly suggesting that until this moment the paper still
inspired a certain amount of trust, at least in what it published about art; later,
however, it lost even this small measure of credibility.
Artists searching for their own anarcho-critical tradition were not un-
common in post-communist Europe. In general, it is worth noting that this type
of attitude was not particularly rare in this part of Europe under communism:
we can find it in the gdr (Robert Rehfeldt), Czechoslovakia (Milan Knižak,
Július Koller) and Hungary (Tamás Szentjóby). The difference rests in the fact
that those artists are some of the most highly regarded figures of the historic
neo-avant garde in their respective countries, whereas Partum and Wiśniewski
in Poland are not.
Following the references made by contemporary artists in post-communist
Europe to their own anarcho-critical tradition, I would like to draw attention
to Tamás Kaszás’s work addressing the artistic legacy of Tamás Szentjóby. This
young Hungarian artist connected with the alternative art scene in Budapest
and social, political and artistic movements involved in establishment critique,
has sometimes directly referred to Szentjóby, certainly one of the most interest-
ing and important Central European figures of the 1960s and ’70s, who
combined in his work anarchist and critical motifs. Kaszás’s work Barricade,
2003, resembles, despite all the obvious differences, Szentjóby’s Portable Trench
for Three People, 1968. Of course, the latter work was created under entirely
different circumstances, providing an ironic commentary on the invasion of
Czechoslovakia by the Warsaw Pact troops. It functioned more as an allusion
or a metaphor, rather than a metonymic example of the propaganda arsenal
brandished by activists of the alternative movements, and unlike Kaszás’s work
did not resemble agitprop vehicles of the Soviet productivists made during the
early years of the October Revolution. Kaszás’s work uses entirely different
poetics than Szentjóby’s humble but eloquent Trench. Flags, photographs,
brochures, political propaganda books, even crude weapons such as sickles,
are placed on a cart resembling an improvised podium rather than a protective
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barricade. This is a reflection of different times and of different enemies; global

capitalism has replaced the Soviet army. The poetics are also different. What has
remained is a need for anarchist confrontation that also involves a critique and
resistance against the system, no matter what that system may be.
One can see similar though not identical tensions in another work by a
different group of artists that ‘recreated’ another work by Szentjóby, who has
24 Tamás Kaszás, Propaganda Barricade, 2003.
141
become something of an ‘old master’ for the younger generation. I am referring

to the group Little Warsaw and their idiosyncratic re-enactment of Szentjóby’s
famous 1972 piece Expulsion Exercise. Little Warsaw’s recreation, Punishment-
Preventive Auto-Therapy, in which Szentjóby participated, took place in 2005.
In Romania, members of the group H.Arta (Maria Crista, Anca Geymant and
Rodica Tache) were involved in another notably political reenactment of a
work by Ion Grigorescu, a leading figure of the Romanian neo-avant garde. In
1975 Grigorescu surreptitiously took photographs of a crowd gathered at an
election – or rather a pseudo-election – rally in Bucharest, capturing on film
undercover agents of the Romanian Securitate secret police mingling with the
crowd. The artists of H.Arta, whose bags and electronic gadgets were filled with
slogans critical of the abuse of power, capitalism and militarism, referred to this
famous work by photographing themselves on the streets of Bucharest during
the nato summit in April 2008, and capturing in their photos ‘by chance’
agents of the security forces who were discreetly observing them (NATo Meeting
(d’aprè s Ion Grigorescu), Bucharest, 2008).
The need felt by contemporary artists to continue the attitudes developed
in the 1960s and ’70s by artists opposed to the communist system sometimes
finds an institutional dimension. ‘60/90: iv Výročná výstava scca Slovensko’
(4th Annual Exhibition of scca Slovakia), which took place in 1997, provides
a good example of this.15 The exhibition was conceived around the idea of
pairing younger artists with well-established ones who belonged to the gener-
ation active in the 1960s. This initiative grew out of a strongly felt need for
restoration of a local, Slovak artistic tradition, independent in the political sense
from both the communist regime and, in the context of the former federal
state, from Czech art. Those experiences and the 1993 split that created the
Czech Republic and Slovakia (an outcome opposed by the majority of artists
and intellectuals who, correctly, saw it as a political victory for the right-wing,
authoritarian regime, playing to the nationalist mood) motivated Slovak artists
to seek their own artistic identity within modern art. This need was satisfied by
exhibitions of Slovak art from the 1960s organized by the nation’s leading art
museum, the Slovak National Gallery.16 The younger generation of artists also
felt the need to reference their own tradition, not just the universal history of
modern art. This was the climate that gave birth to the exhibition ‘60/90’.
The works presented were produced for the exhibition, which meant
that the pieces made by the artists representing the Slovak neo-avant garde
were neither historic nor museological, but new and contemporary. The show
allowed the artists of the 1990s to engage in a unique dialogue with the artists
of the 1960s, one that occurred within the context of contemporary art. The
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25, 26 H. Arta, NATo Meeting (d’après Ion Grigorescu), Bucharest, 2008.
exhibition, which was held in various venues throughout the city, included a
number of very interesting works. I will mention only two pairings, each for
a different reason. The first consisted of Jana Želibská and Ellena Pätoprstá,
the second of Stano Filko and Boris Ondreička. In the first example, what is
important is that a young female Slovak artist engaged in a dialogue with an
artist who not only played a key role in the development of the Slovak neo-
avant garde, but also produced pioneering feminist work that addressed
representation of the female body in the work of female artists and defined
the problem of female identity within a male-centric culture. The second is
interesting because they created a single, joined work consisting of numerous
components of unclear authorship.
The first exhibition of the two female artists interested in the problematic
of the female body addressed the transformation of the body. Želibská’s ideas
were clear and direct. Her work consisted of a video showing an attractive woman,
dressed in her underwear, who is suffering from bulimia (on Diet, 1997). She is
shown eating and then throwing up what she has consumed. The actual remains
of food placed in front of the screen completed the work. It is important to note
that as socio-psychological problems, bulimia and anorexia are grounded in the
aesthetic terror experienced by women subjected to contemporary consump-
tion patterns, which train them and shape their body image to conform to
supposedly ideal erotic objects of the male gaze. Pätoprstá focused on the trans-
formation of the female body by the electronic media, which often transformed
it into a decorative motif (Untitled, 1997). In other words, whereas Želibská was
interested in the concrete, physical body subjected to training, Pätoprstá focused
to a greater extent on its image.
The second exhibition featured Stano Filko and Boris Ondreička, artists
who have emerged as representative figures of their respective generations.
Stano Filko, a legendary figure of the 1960s, is one of the leading artists of the
Slovak neo-avant garde; Boris Ondreička, who played a key role in shaping
the 1990s art scene, has become one of the best-known contemporary Slovak
artists. By choosing to create a collaborative work Spolocnekazdysam/Together.
and.each.alone, 1997, they stood out within the ‘60/90’ project, which sought
to encourage inter-generational dialogue. The artists chose an abandoned café
as a venue for their collaborative work. There they installed various elements
connected with their respective artistic biographies and with personal associ-
ations, including images of rockets and bombs, which appeared in Filko’s work
from the 1960s, as well as expressions such as ‘psychofilkozofia’ or ‘gemini’.
Ondreička also contributed altered and made-up terms such as ‘object+iv’,
‘an-agonia’ and ‘tatanik’. Using the method of bricollage, the artists filled the
144
space with pieces of objects and refuse creating an impression of ‘total instal-
lation’, typical of the works produced by the younger artist.
In these two pairings, and in others I have not discussed, the desire to
signal a continuity of tradition was not the only motivation. Equally if not
more important was the demonstration of a clearly defined attitude, which I
have referred to as anarcho-critical, that could provide a context for contem-
porary art practice. This tradition has been highly valorized by artists working
in the free countries of Central Europe. One can see this in Poland, where art
historic work on the neo-avant garde has been well developed in contrast to
other countries in the region. This work has not been free of what Rosalyn
Deutsche has referred to as ‘inadequacies’ or exclusions, but the same could
be said of other countries in the region, such as Slovakia and Hungary, the
Czech Republic and Romania. Although those attitudes necessarily differ in
historic detail due to the high degree of variability in the art history of the
region during the post-war period, especially in the 1960s and ’70s, nonethe-
less they have a great deal in common. What they shared during this period was,
above all, a search for forms of resistance and revolt against claustrophobic
regimes, seeking areas free of totalitarian control. This was true irrespective of
whether or not this sense of freedom was in a more or less discrete and effective
way controlled by the regime. Today, after 1989, those who invoke the anarchist
tradition and connect it with the tradition of criticality also wish to escape the
control of the new and seemingly much more refined system. The difference
rests in the expectation that independence and (relative) freedom are supposed
to encourage critical work and analysis of coercive mechanisms. They are not
supposed to provoke demonstrations of rebellion against ‘the god and the
master’. Will this provide a ‘fix’ for what is wrong with the world? Will it
guarantee us access to a space where we can freely pursue life and work?
Let’s return to Zbigniew Libera. One of his recent projects involved pro-
ducing a book entitled The Gay, Innocent, and Heartless. It is only the gay, and
innocent, and heartless who can fly (2008). This work is of interest here because
anarchist motifs appear in it as an object of reflection, rather than a method
for action. The piece encompasses several different levels of narration and
literary points of reference. One of them consists of the book itself, which
includes quotations and, above all, photographs of young men and boys, often
wearing incomplete army uniforms and posing with guns in a landscape that
is supposed to be exotic, but appears to be (with the exception of a few photo -
montages) Polish; in one photo, for example, we can see an Audi with Polish
licence plates and a man drinking local mineral water. The second level is
provided by the inclusion of an essay in English, entitled ‘Troubles on a Wild
145
Frontier’, that was supposedly originally published in National Geographic

(October 2006, pp. 56–68). In this the author relates his adventures during a
trip to the exotic island of Neverland, on which he was accompanied by a pho-
tographer named Zbigniew Libera. The team of explorers also included the
archaeologist David Gorgos, who was already familiar with the island, Gorgos’s
son Ira, a scientific field assistant, Mariola, and a team of Polish-Hindu aides.
During the trip they encountered guerrillas whose political affiliation was not
entirely clear but who were fighting, in the broadest terms, for freedom. The
text includes several bibliographic references, among others to the Scottish
writer J. M. Barrie, who first visited the island in 1898. Barrie is the author of
the famous stage play Peter Pan, 1904, and the later series of children’s stories,
again featuring Peter Pan and Wendy. Their hero, a boy who can fly and never
grows up, takes Wendy and her brothers for adventures in Neverland. In
27 Zbigniew Libera, The Gay, Innocent, and Heartless. It is only the gay, and innocent, and
heartless who can fly, 2008.
146
Barrie’s play Neverland is not completely safe owing to the presence of the
evil Captain Hook, who kidnaps the children when Peter Pan is not paying
attention, but in the end is defeated by our hero.
The next level of narration is provided by a hand-written journal (the
handwriting is rather hesitant, resembling that of a school-age child) that des -
cribes a journey of the guerrilla fighters mentioned in the National Geographic
article, covering a period from 5 March to 13 April (the year is not provided).
This notebook was most likely given as a gift to the author of the article or his
photographer Zbigniew Libera, and clearly supports the information published
in the essay. Into those superimposed narrations are inserted quotations from
William S. Burroughs’s prose texts and Che Guevara’s book My Revolution. In
the first instance, the quotations describe a utopia, a country without limits,
without religion, without restrictions, a country of free love and free access
to stimulants – in other words, a place where everything that is controlled and
forbidden in our bourgeois society is freely available. In the second instance,
quotations mythologize guerrilla warfare and revolution identified with Che
Guevara. The concrete goals of his Bolivian expedition are not important here.
From a political or military perspective, they were completely irrational. What
is important is the myth of revolution, adventure, the romance of the fight for
freedom, and the legend. Ewa Majewska, who has written about Libera’s book,
further supplements the literary and mythological references:
Somewhere north-east of Madagascar, during the remote eighteenth

century, there was supposed to have existed Libertatia, the legendary pirate
island. It is mentioned by Captain Charles Johnson in his work entitled
A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the most Notorious Pirates
published in the year 1724. It is assumed that this two-volume pirate
encyclopedia was written by Daniel Defoe.
But the pirates were not associated with murders and robberies, but with
noble deeds (and therefore they were not ‘bad guys’ like Captain Hook).
Majewska adds: ‘As noted by the American utopian writer Hakim Bey, the
main occupation of the inhabitants of Libertatia . . . consisted of freeing slaves
carried onboard ships.’17 Krzysztof Gutfrański explains that this refers to ‘a
Provencal pirate, who in the early eighteenth century settled with his sailors on
Madagascar’. His name was Captain Mission (he is also mentioned by the
author of the National Geographic article). Gutfrański mentions that Captain
Mission ‘founded there a colony called Libertatia, a state where there was
order, justice, freedom of religion and customs’.18
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It is worth noting that Libertatia, the name of this utopian country,

derives from ‘liberty’ and ‘liberation’. In Polish this term also originally referred
to the legal act of freeing someone from fiscal responsibility. We can assume
that freedom constituted the basis of Libertatia’s political system. At the same
time, the name seems to compete with democracy (in Polish ‘democracja’).
Irrespective of my earlier remarks on the role of anarchy in the shaping of
radical democracy, or, to be more precise, on its role in creating more demo-
cratic democracy, the use of the name ‘Libertatia’ for a utopian country contains
a critique of what is understood as democracy. In other words, it is a critique
of a system based on consensus, which in order to function must be based on
exclusion and marginalization of extremism; a system based on the rule of
law, which by definition defines the limits of freedom; a system based on the
notion of order, which regulates the mechanism of social functioning but also
simultaneously represses behaviours that break the accepted norms of the
common good. In an obvious way Libertatia brings to mind libertarianism,
a political system based on a utopian notion of absolute freedom that opposes
democracy in its classical as well as modern liberal forms. This is a utopia of a
country without limits, without religion, without restrictions, a country of free
love and free access to stimulants (to quote William S. Burroughs again). It
should also be noted that Libertatia, a country whose name derives from the
Latin terms ‘libertas’ (freedom) and ‘liber’ (free), also (coincidentally?) resem-
bles the name of the ‘expedition’s photographer’ travelling through this exotic
country: Zbigniew Libera.
Just as there are numerous levels of narration in Libera’s work, so there are
many possibilities for its interpretation. One of them consists of sexual politics.
The word ‘gay’ used by the artist in the title has long lost its original meaning
(‘happy’) and no one using English today would describe a happy man as
‘gay’. Here ‘gay’ obviously suggests sexual orientation. This dimension of the
work can easily be seen in the photographs of attractive, half-dressed or half-
undressed youths included in the book. Burroughs’s reputation also suggests
such an interpretation. What interests me here, however, in the context of my
discussion of anarchy and critique, is something else. It is the map of Libertatia,
a rhetorically very interesting country. The map shows the Mission River and
a city named Captain Mission, both of which refer to the noble pirate. Other
settlements also have interesting names: Black Flag, New Freedom, Liberty,
Kropotkino, Aphrodite, Eternal Youth. In short the names refer to everything
that a human being needs to be happy and therefore to be completely free. This
rhetoric has anarchist roots and some of the terms explicitly refer to the history
of anarchism (Peter Kropotkin) or its symbolism (black flag). Therefore one
148
could say that the artist comes full circle in his work or, using a spatial metaphor,
he makes a single turn on a spiral. The fact that this work is somewhat auto-
biographical is suggested by the proximity of the country’s name to that of the
artist. However, this is not a return to boyhood dreams of adventure and
make-believe battles with toy machine guns in the forest. Neither is it a return
to adolescent dreams of revolution, or a mature man’s desire for ‘eternal youth’
and everything that goes with it. Instead the work reflects on such desires
and on this type of thinking. It problematizes anarchist tradition with a sense
of humour, a wink and a nod. Libera approaches the anarchist utopia of
Libertatia as a problem. He questions what happens when experiences from
the old ‘attic’ are transferred into the sphere of geographic and literary imagi-
nation. This question deals not so much with the meaning of this type of
practice but its place. Anarchy and criticality are brought together in Libera’s
work, providing anarchists as well as critics with new material to ponder.
Not so long ago artists avoided projects that aimed to ‘improve the world’,
having drawn negative conclusions from the lessons of the 1960s. They observed
how the anarchist movements and that colourful and rebellious decade were
co-opted by the mainstream system and culture. They saw how the slogan of
freedom has been turned into advertising used to sell brand name clothing,
luxury cosmetics and fast cars. Having lost any illusion that the world could be
improved, they responded with a critique of those mechanisms. But it seems
that this approach leads to a dead end. The knowledge we gain from critical
work appears too powerful and terrifying for us to simply accept the status quo.
It is contrary to the motivations that guide our analysis of the mechanisms
that rule the world. Moreover, if anarchy and critique are to be combined with
the project of ‘democratization of democracy’, as described earlier, then those
practices must lead to certain conclusions and produce positive claims. They
must result in projects that aim to restructure a society with whose mecha-
nisms and functioning the authors of those projects do not agree and which
they subject to a critique. Utopia may once again emerge as a consequence of
anarchy, rebellion and critique, of knowledge gained as their result, and as a
conclusion dictated by an ethical position that motivates our rejection of the
status quo reality.
Before I sketch out this last perspective, let us consider the final definition.
The term utopia, similarly to the two concepts mentioned earlier, combines
two Greek words: ‘ou’ or nothing, and ‘topos’ or place. Utopia, as we all know,
is an unreal place, a country that does not exist and yet, at least since Thomas
More’s Utopia, 1516, it is a desired location of harmony and justice. Krzysztof
Wodiczko, one of the most constant and insightful artists working today, has
149
formulated a critical reading of the concept of ‘utopia’. He observes that utopia

does not have to refer to a ‘no-place’, or pertain to a project of ideal social con-
struction, but can also be read in terms of a refusal to accept what is, in other
words, a critical category of ‘not! place’.19 The artist has demonstrated through
his rich body of works how such a concept could function in practice and how
precisely it could reveal mechanisms of exclusion and coercion.20 Since I have
written about this work elsewhere, I will not discuss it here. Instead I would like
to mention a different, recently revealed aspect of Wodiczko’s attitude, which
charts a new direction for anarcho-critical art.
In a text dealing with his Proposal for Transforming of New York into ‘City of
Refugee), Wodiczko diagnoses the ‘[intellectual] poverty of university professors’.
He issues an appeal for removal of academic barriers and critical engagement
by academics as well as all intellectuals, including artists, in what he refers to
as ‘politicality’. At the conclusion of his text the artist writes:
If since the 1990s our goal has been to participate in what is political
and not in politics; to support the polis, not the police, that which is still
in potentia, and not potentates, revolt rather than revolution, agonism and
dissent against consensus, democratic parrhesia and public questioning,
and not ‘patriotic’ or a ‘citizen’s’ responsibility, nomadology and not the
state apparatus, then let us create ‘art for the sake of that which is politi-
cal’. Let’s contribute to the development of ‘politicality’ by interrupting
the ‘police’ and ‘distributive’ practices of the administrative powers and
corporations. Using the words of Jacques Rancière, let the project of
‘that which is political’ be transformed into an emancipation project that
‘interrupts the defined system of social inequalities’ by giving voice to
those who have been excluded or subjected to segregation by an estab-
lished ‘hierarchy of knowledge’ and culture. Contributing to the flowering
of ‘politicality’ means giving up the role of ‘Masters’ of others’ emancipa-
tion. We should act as if we ourselves were students drawing conclusions
from emancipatory processes. Invoking Jacques Rancière once again,
let’s consider ourselves ‘Ignorant Masters’, who create conditions for the
development of self-awareness, autoexpression and self-representation
of others – in short, for their self-emancipation. There are many different
methods developed towards that goal by individual artists, art groups,
networks of collaboration and coalitions.21
This text functions as a powerful but also classic call for a critical cul-
ture. The last sentence of the appeal seems particularly significant: ‘After
150
post-structuralism came time for self-reconstruction – a road towards new

visions and political, social and cultural constructions. Imagining and plan-
ning new energizing, open and agonistic projects . . . must become part of this
emancipation programme.’22
How should we read this? This is no longer a call for a critical attitude
(something that has been part of the post-structuralist discourse), but for utopia,
which has been pushed aside by this discourse and by critical art that appeared
when the anarchist potential was finally exhausted. Does this appeal not
announce a new anarcho-critical-utopian position? Does it not return to the
avant garde utopias, which never broke away from anarchy and critique and
instead used them, embracing the principles of discord, analysis and destruc-
tion of the old to create the new? If that is the case, then we are witnessing the
awakening of a new artistic sensibility that is charting new paths for art. Perhaps
this is also the birth of new art, art that is making a historic turn not so much
in the direction of the classic avant garde, since the classic avant garde had no
interest in democratizing democracy (on the contrary), but rather towards its
sources that envisioned utopian social and political projects.
151
part two
Memory
five
Between Real Socialism and
Nationalism
In an exhibition catalogue to which I will return later, Magdalena Saryusz-

Wolska, drawing on the work of Aleida Assmann, makes the following
distinction between memory and history:
History always clearly separates the present from the past, whereas for
memory there is no such clear-cut division. For history what is most im -
portant is the object of research. The memory has a clearly defined subject
and he or she plays the most important role. History seeks the truth;
memory mainly conveys values and norms as well as selects facts.1
Long ago Maurice Halbwachs observed that memory does not have an
exclusively individual character, but is collective and social. At least from the
perspective of the history of culture, it is this collective, rather than the indi-
vidual character of memory that has attracted the greatest interest of scholars.
Memory, according to Halbwachs, is not so much about ‘remembering’ as
about ‘reminding’ or ‘representing’ the past. By drawing on those classic ideas
we could say that art, which demonstrates an interest in memory, does not
offer us an opportunity to experience once again that which we remember or
that which our culture remembers, but rather, referring to the social context,
it invokes the past and sometimes even provokes its reconsideration. Iara
Boubnova, the co-curator of the second Moscow Biennale, has noted that
memory is always ‘history in the present tense’.2 Contemporary art is the art
of the present; the artist is our contemporary. She/he invokes history, which
we as a collective remember. Contemporary art not only makes it impossible
to forget, but also, and perhaps above all, gives the past a contemporary form.
In other words, art creates circumstances under which the past becomes part
of our present.
In her writings on memory, and alluding to Michel Foucault, Ewa
Domańska has observed that memory is anti-historic.3 It has a rebellious char-
acter because one of its basic functions involves a critique of power. If history,
understood as an ‘official’ and institutional discourse on the past, is supposed
155
to support power, memory engages in its critique. Of course Domańska

realizes that in social practice this distinction is not so simple: the discourse
of memory is often as ideological as the discourse of history. As we all know,
memory can be subjected to profound and devious manipulation by a regime,
which is often as significant as its intervention into the official academic dis-
course. On the other hand, the official discourse of history can take on
rebellious forms, resembling in those instances the discourse of memory. The
differences cited by Domańska refer much more to the sources of the practices
dealing with the past, than to concrete projects. Naturally art can be found
on both sides of the barricade. We know and remember art that served those
in power, that operated according to the official state doctrines governing
construction of the past, and that exploited knowledge as well as memory.
This type of art has a much longer history within the European cultural trad-
ition than rebellious art, which stands at the side of counter-history and rejects
the official version of the past. We also know and remember that art born
from rebellion, just as counter-history, has been often co-opted by the power
structures and has taken on propaganda functions. In this chapter I am not
going to deal with this type of work, but instead shall focus on art that func-
tions as a critical practice and is, at least to a certain degree, anti-historic in so
far as it problematizes the language of the official historic doctrine.
In addition to Maurice Halbwachs’s classic texts, and those by contem-
porary authors who have written about memory, such as Aleida Assmann,
Jan Assmann and Ewa Domańska, we must also keep in mind Pierre Nora,
in particular his multi-volume work Les lieux de mémoire, which has had a
profound impact on memory studies in the humanities. To summarize, Nora
sees memory as a living process, a permanent state of tension between remem-
bering and forgetting. Memory links the past with the present through the
ties that create an impression of eternity, a state of stasis and being. Memory
is symbolic, affective, magical, cumulative, particular and concrete; it is con-
nected with a place, gesture, object, image and so on. Nora writes that history
refers to memory with suspicion. It is engaged in reconstruction of the past; it
is enquiring, analytic, critical, universal and intellectual; its real mission is to
eliminate memory. Memory and history are therefore fundamentally opposed.4
What is significant is the fact that the present, the moment we live in, is char-
acterized by obliteration of memory by history, dominance of critical discourse
over symbolic and imagistic remembering. Even when our contemporaries
speak about memory, they are really talking about history. Memory has been
appropriated, subdued, made discursive and turned into a critical system. At
the same time, this is the time when we have begun to perceive the need for
156
between real socialism and nationalism
a return to memory. That is why there are ‘places of memory’. Those must
be ‘places’ occupying three dimensions: material, symbolic and functional.
Above all, they must be connected with the will to remember. Without that,
they will be turned into ‘places of history’. Such ‘places of memory’ must stop
time and, simultaneously, impede the process of forgetting and historicizing
the past.5
What sort of role could art play in this process? I think it would be
significant, if art refers to places with which memory is directly connected.
Art by nature operates through symbols and images, which often escape
straightforward translation into language. It has considerable margins of
ambivalence and much greater impact on emotions than rational perception
of the world. Therefore art is nearer to affect than rational consideration and
logic. This does not mean, however, that art should cease to be analytic and
critical when it refers to memory and when it brings into existence ‘places of
memory’ by tearing them away from history and forgetting. As Domańska
notes, this does not mean that art should cease to operate as counter-history,
be rebellious or insurgent. It is not enough that this possibility exists. This is
the basis of art’s strength and polemic power vis-à-vis the official academic
and political systems. It appears that the real value of art initiatives in the post-
communist countries that make references to memory rests in their fulfilment
of this critical function towards the official historic discourse, in this case
shaped by the new political system.
I will begin by analysing the exhibition Strażnicy Doków/Dock Watchers,
which was held at the Gdańsk Shipyards in 2005. This coincided with the
twentieth anniversary of the founding of Solidarity, the independent Polish
labour union that initiated the first mass anti-communist movement in the
Eastern Bloc. The exhibition was organized at the birthplace of Solidarity in an
industrial complex that by 1980 already had its own tradition of rebellion against
communism. The so-called Polish August, which gave birth to Solidarity,
appeared almost on the tenth anniversary of the Polish December of 1970,
when the workers of the shipyards took to the streets. Unlike those demonstra-
tions, which were brutally suppressed by the regime, the rebellion in 1980 proved
successful. It is quite clear that without December 1970, however, August 1980
would have been impossible, or at least would not have happened the way it
did. On the other hand, without August 1980, the events of 1989, if they
were to happen at all, would have taken a very different form. That is why the
Gdańsk Shipyards are a symbolic place of resistance against communism. Their
significance extends beyond Poland’s borders. It is a place where Eastern Europe
took a huge step towards the rejection of communism.
157
When we speak in general of 1989, we tend to use the symbolism of

the Berlin Wall. Certainly the Wall has greater symbolic power, perhaps
because it functioned as a barrier that palpably divided Europe into two
parts. As a symbol of the Cold War, its destruction signalled the end of that
conflict. Of course, the Wall had many victims. Its construction in 1961was
unambiguously motivated by murderous intentions. It was built to prevent
people from crossing the border, which from then on was supposed to be com-
pletely closed. For the East Germans, at least, it really was almost completely
sealed until 1989. Then the Wall disappeared. In the urban structure of
Berlin, the formerly divided city, the old border is being gradually erased. The
city and the state governments have made significant efforts to render it
invisible, just as the regime of the gdr did all that it could to make it visible.
Only here and there can one see certain tokens or traces that remind one of
the Wall. The Wall is not and cannot be a ‘place of memory’ for one simple
reason: it is supposed to be forgotten. Lieux de mémoire appear only when
there is a will to memory. Therefore the Wall, whose destruction entered the
global imagination as the end of communism, does not possess a physical and
functional dimension; it only operates as a symbol inscribed more into history
than memory.
By contrast, the Gdańsk Shipyards, unlike the Berlin Wall, do exist. As
I write this, they still produce ships, though their economic survival is signifi-
cantly threatened. As a place, an actual site, they are being transformed into
a ‘place of memory’ because all interested parties are working towards that
goal. At least that is the impression right now, but the future of this place is
still in question. The possibility of a complete closure of the shipyards, an end
to the production of ships, the dismissal of the workers and the simultaneous
sale of this commercially desirable site for redevelopment would throw into
jeopardy those efforts to maintain it as a ‘place of memory’. The shipyards will
not be saved by the nearby monument commemorating the beginning of the
rebellion in December 1970. Neither will they be saved as a ‘place of memory’
by the plan to build in their vicinity the Solidarity Centre, which will function
as a ‘place of history’, not memory. As an official historic institution, housing
a research centre and a museum, it will be inscribed into historic discourse
and not that of counter-history.
The exhibition Strażnicy Doków/Dock Watchers was not the first effort by
the curator Aneta Szyłak and the artist Grzegorz Klaman to give the shipyards
the status of a ‘place of memory’. Five years earlier, they were commissioned
by the city government and Solidarity, which has become both in physical
and symbolic sense the main successor of that great mass social movement,
158
to organize the exhibition ‘Roads to Freedom’, 2000. The show, which provoked
considerable controversy, caused certain tensions to appear. It also left visible
traces in the form of the sculptural project Gates created by Grzegorz Klaman.
The Gates (there are two versions, Gates i and ii) were conceived, as was the
entire exhibition, as a response to the triumphalist official discourse on the
history of Solidarity. They have never been anti-monuments in the sense given
by the history of public art to certain objects over the past several decades.
They are essentially ‘monumental’ objects, possessing concrete form, materi-
ality and symbolism. Moreover Gate ii clearly alludes to Vladimir Tatlin’s
unrealized Monument to the Third international, which it would be difficult
to see as an anti-monument, even though it never went beyond the project
phase, or to compare with the paradigmatic work of Jochen Gerz, one of the
best-known creators of anti-monuments. It is clear that Klaman’s Gates grew
out of counter-history and critique of the official state discourse that took
control of the history of the anti-communist movement. The official history
of Solidarity is not only triumphalist, but also and above all Christian. It is
filled with religious symbolism, such as crosses, images of the Virgin Mary
and papal iconography. It is true that this does not constitute a departure from
the official iconography of the historic labour union Solidarity, whose iconos-
phere was deeply saturated with religious iconography: the ‘real’ main gates
of the shipyards in 1980 were decorated with flowers and an image of Pope
John Paul ii, there was an image of the Virgin in the lapel of Lech Wałęsa’s
coat, striking workers carried crosses and masses were celebrated at the ship-
yards. Certainly those references are missing from Klaman’s work. On the other
hand, the artist’s allusion to Tatlin (a reference that was clearly missed by those
commissioning the work for Roads to Freedom) provides eloquent evidence of
the artist’s subversive intentions. It is quite clear that the ideologues of the
political right employed by the state do not associate the iii International with
the history of ‘their’ Solidarity. Gate i also does not have any relationship with
official Solidarity symbolism. It takes the form of a sinking ship’s hull. In
its interior, we can see ideological slogans projected onto tablets. Both Gate i
and Gate ii are critical, rather than apologist projects that provoke reflection
and thought. They are analytic, rather than celebratory or commemorative,
and as such they clearly do not participate in the rightist discourse of the heirs
of the Polish August 1980.
The paradox of the 2000 exhibition ‘Roads to Freedom’, and to a certain
extent its failure, rests in the fact that Aneta Szyłak, its curator, was forced to
resign from her position as director of the Centre for Contemporary Art
‘Łaźnia’, which was formally responsible for organizing the exhibition. As a
159
result she took on another institutional initiative, founding the Institute of

Art ‘Wyspa’ at the shipyards. It was this new institution that was responsible
for the 2005 exhibition ‘Strażników Doków/Dock Watchers’, which visibly
invoked the atmosphere of ‘Roads to Freedom’, most clearly through Klaman’s
Gates. The other paradox stems from the fact that the Art Institute ‘Wyspa’,
as an unofficial and private institution, took on the task of transforming the
Gdańsk Shipyards into a ‘place of memory’ in the sense given to this term by
Pierre Nora.
The shipyards began to function as a symbolic location in 1980 (not in
1970, the year of the first rebellion of the workers against communism). Szyłak
observed in her introduction to the catalogue Strażnicy Doków/Dock Watchers,
that Andrzej Wajda’s film Man of iron, 1981, contributed significantly to this
process.6 The director’s decision to combine footage shot on location with
documentary footage shot during the Gdańsk strikes constituted one of the
first steps towards mythologization of this location. It embedded the image
of the shipyards in the Poles’ collective imagination. But this was true only in
Poland. Those images did not enter the collective imagination of Europe
and the world, even though Wajda’s film won the Grand Prix at the Cannes
Festival in 1981. Szyłak’s exhibition, even though it was international in charac-
ter, also did not have a significant impact on the shipyards’ status as a European
‘place of memory’. Quite simply, the shipyards cannot win the competition
with the images of the destruction of the Berlin Wall and its symbolic role in
revealing the process of the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe. Perhaps
this does not have great significance. What is important is the fact that through
its association with the shipyards the Art Institute ‘Wyspa’ has demonstrated
special sensitivity to the problematic of memory of this place and of the
anti-communist movement that was born there. As such, it has been involved
with memory rather than history, insurgent rather than consecrating prac-
tices, critical rather than apologetic, and alternative rather than official
discourse. According to Szyłak:
Dock Watchers is an exhibition about a scar which has undergone an

aesthetic operation. The question it poses, in the face of official repre-
sentations of history connected with the 25th anniversary of the birth of
‘Solidarity’, is a question about the role of culture in relation to the past,
about the authorization of marginalized and displaced voices, about the
individualization, subjectivity and subversiveness of memory . . . Dock
Watchers through this personal dimension is an intentionally marginal
tale, because only a marginalized voice can be a voice in this significant
160
28 Grzegorz Klaman, Gates 11, 2000.
sphere. Because the official space of commemoration is a space of

selection and displacement. Hence the intention of the project was to
turn away from collective narrations in favour of individual ones and
of the dispersal of the languages in which the past is talked about . . . The
quarter-century of the most famous union and social movement is here
a kind of excuse for considerations of a wider problem, which is the role
of culture in the shaping of the image of the past in human memory.
What is remembered and what is expelled from it? What acquires first-
rank status and what disappears into the diplomatic language of political
consensus? The control exerted by the public sphere over personal memory
is to an ever greater degree control over what kind of collective identities
will be possible and what will bring people closer to or further from each
other in the public sphere. The symbolic guardians of memory, the oper-
ators of the national blemish, covered with the scars of old wounds, can
ask these questions and can also open some of the gates leading to the
docks. What is not certain, however, is whether the space opened by
them will be a space of liberation.7
Those quotes give a good impression of the exhibition’s programme and

its intention to create at the shipyards quite literally a ‘place of memory’ as
conceived by Pierre Nora. The organizers were interested in memory that
challenged official history or, more precisely, in symbolic memory transmitted
through images. They were interested in liberating memories and provoking
experiences in this magical place of the past. In short, memory was supposed
to protect this place, which has become so important for the Poles’ collective
identity, against its takeover by history and, therefore, forgetting.
The exhibition was international in scope. It included Polish artists for
whom the issue of remembrance of this place has special significance, such as
Jerzy Janiszewski, who designed Solidarity’s famous logo and Solidaris, the
characteristic font that was often used under martial law in the 1980s and since
then by contemporary artists in important projects, for example by Marek
Sobczyk. It also included several foreign artists, who played a very different
role as outsiders. Cécile Paris, for example, noticed a stand with memorabilia
in front of the shipyards’ historic gates. This was not unusual; the phenomenon
of commercialization of history is, after all, quite common. Every historically
significant site, every event, anything connected with the past is eventually
subjected to commercialization and turned into products, memorabilia or
merchandise. What attracted the artist’s attention, however, was the misspelled
sign over the stand: ‘Souvenire’. The spelling error introduced a dissonance
162
and lexical tension between the word and the contents of the stand. She used
this error to create a work consisting of a single word ‘souvenire’, constructed
out of flashing lights and resembling a theatre or casino marquee. The spelling
mistake increased the distance between the original text and the artist’s version.
Transferred into the territory of art, the word was identified with the shipyards,
but it also resisted identification. It rendered Solidarity merchandise found
at the stand even more exotic, particular yet at the same time inaccessible,
separated by language that only seemed to resemble everyday speech.
I would like to take a closer look at one other work from the show,
Klaman’s Lech Wałęsa’s Memorial Room. This depicts Lech Wałęsa kneeling in
front of a tripartite model of his former workplace, the workshop where he
spent many years repairing battery-powered carts. The kneeling figure recalls
religious images, in particular those produced in Northern Europe during the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, depicting patrons adoring similar small-scale
versions of churches, altars and shrines. In Klaman’s work, the impression of
religious adoration is reinforced by the tripartite structure of the model, which
resembles that of a triptych altarpiece. Such reading is suggested by the image
of Wałęsa returning to his beginnings at the shipyards and to the old work-
shop that he left behind, shedding the identity of a humble worker and taking
on that of the leader of a mass social movement, and later statesman. At the
same time, the figure’s religious gesture of kneeling and adoring seems highly
significant. Wałęsa is known for being extremely religious. As the leader of
Solidarity he stressed his reliance on the Catholic Church, certainly providing
evidence for the movement’s clerical dimension. During this period, that is
in the 1980s, this was nothing unusual: the entire movement used Christian
iconography, in particular under martial law. Although not all members of
the opposition shared this attitude, it did not lead to serious conflicts. The
problems appeared later, after 1989, when the Catholic Church began to lobby
for a special place within public life, including economic privileges (restitution
and privatization of various types of property from land and buildings to
works of art), ideological influence (saturation of the law with references to a
religious system of values) and symbolic presence (saturation of the official
iconosphere with Christian emblems). Although Wałęsa’s religious beliefs
did not cause controversy as long as he remained a private person, they did
become problematic when he assumed the leadership of Solidarity and, in
particular, when he became the country’s President. They provided evidence of
the breach of the principle of separation of Church and State. It appeared that
Wałęsa was not particularly concerned that he was supposed to be President
of all the Poles, including those who belonged to other faiths or who were not
163
religious. Quite simply, Wałęsa broke the principle of neutrality required of

the state office. Klaman’s work dealt to a significant degree with this subject,
depicting Wałęsa’s return to his roots and paying his respects to the place from
which he came, but also demonstrating his devout religiosity.
Klaman’s kneeling Wałęsa recalls another kneeling figure: Maurizio Cat-
telan’s kneeling figure of Adolf Hitler entitled Him, 2001. In Cattelan’s work,
Hitler is portrayed as a small boy, kneeling to take his first communion. The
image functions as a certain type of provocation; it operates through (rather
mild) shock as well as irony or even derision. The Italian artist seems to be
saying: here is one of the greatest criminals the world has ever known, kneel-
ing humbly as an innocent boy. The contrast between our knowledge about
Hitler and what we see is supposed to lead us to reflect on false impressions
and delusions. By bringing up Cattelan’s work in the context of a discussion of
Klaman’s piece, I do not intend to suggest a comparison between the kneeling
figures. Rather, what interests me is a choice of a similar method aimed at un-
masking certain illusions and the simultaneous disarming of historic figures by
depriving them of their demonic character. Hitler was certainly a criminal,
even though he appears innocent in Cattelan’s work; Wałęsa is a hero, even
though Klaman portrays him as a humble electrician at prayer.
But Klaman went much further than Cattelan. During the first few days
after the opening of the exhibition, Klaman installed Wałęsa’s lookalike in the
29 Grzegorz Klaman, Lecha Wałęsa’s Memorial Room, Gdansk, 2005.
164
actual space of the former workshop where Wałęsa used to work, now unused
and abandoned. The impersonator did not kneel like the mannequin in the
Memorial Room, but rather sat in a chair and greeted arriving guests, shaking
hands with some who today would not shake the hand of the ‘real’ Wałęsa,
such as Andrzej Gwiazda and his wife, who were once close associates of the
legendary leader. This seeming living presence of Wałęsa in the place where
he began his public career, and his symbolic reconciliation with former friends
who later became his enemies, took on a truly surreal character. But it did not
point to a naive belief in forgiveness, reconciliation, and a return to human and
workers’ solidarity. Rather it suggested a bitter historic irony, which does not
turn full circle. It sent a message that returning to one’s roots is impossible;
one can only remember those mythical times of brotherly solidarity and a
magical coming together of society in the fight against evil. Klaman seemed
to be suggesting that this was the role of memory, which mythologizes reality
and, in particular, the past.
But we could push the reading of Lech Wałęsa’s Memorial Room much
further. Wałęsa is not only a hero, or at least not everyone views him as a
hero. He is a figure who provokes considerable political controversy, indeed
one’s attitude towards Wałęsa constitutes a litmus test of political divisions
in early twenty first-century Poland. The myth of a leader uniting the anti-
communist movement disappeared with the fall of communism when Solidarity
was torn apart by prosaic power struggles. The so-called ‘war at the top’ declared
by Wałęsa in the mid-1990s, which removed from power the government
formed by Tadeusz Mazowiecki (at one time championed by Wałęsa), and
brought Wałęsa to power as the country’s President, left him with many
enemies, mainly on the liberal side of the former anti-communist camp. When
Wałęsa became President, some called him a dictator, some accused him of
being unprepared to fulfill this function. He was criticized for being petty
and unstatesmanlike. From the other side, the radical right wing began to
accuse him of surrounding himself with ‘suspicious individuals’ who had affili -
ations with the former communist secret police. Moreover, he too was
eventually accused of collaboration with the former Security Service. When
Wałęsa lost the presidency in the next election, the former communists, now
reinvented as Social Democrats and led by President Aleksander Kwaśniewski,
came to power. After a few years the extreme right, led by the Kaczyński brothers
and supported by such exotic figures as Roman Giertych, the leader of the
fervently clerical and nationalist League of Polish Families, and Andrzej Lepper,
a radical populist, took control of the government. The roles were now reversed.
Wałęsa was once again, and with renewed energy, accused of being an agent of
165
the Security Service, even though he was completely cleared of such charges
by the Lustration Court. But it seems this did not matter. For the right-wing
coalition led by the Kaczyński brothers, Wałęsa was the symbol of what they
referred to as the Third Republic, a state created on the ruins of communism,
but which they believed was insufficiently anti-communist. Moreover, Wałęsa
and those associated with the former opposition who created the Polish state
after 1989 were a constant reminder that the Kaczyński brothers played second -
ary roles in the 1980s, and that no one treated them as heroes during the
1990s. Under those circumstances, Solidarity’s liberal wing identified with
the newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza began to defend Wałęsa and his good name,
transforming him from the dictator and dubious statesmen of the 1990s into
a hero slandered by the extremist and nationalist right wing, which was
Eurosceptic, xenophobic and had adopted an anti-communist stance much
too late.
Irrespective of those discussions and turmoil, accusations and animosities,
the historic position of Lech Wałęsa is certainly unshakable. The loathing that
some former comrades, in particular the Kaczyński brothers, expressed towards
him will not alter that reality. However, Klaman is not contributing to the
immediate political conflict over Wałęsa. He is searching for a more human
dimension of the former leader of Solidarity, dealing with his comically ostenta-
tious religiosity and the anxieties of an electrician. He is not looking for Wałęsa’s
historic role, but rather for a memory of a worker who became a world leader.
That is a different Wałęsa, as unreal as the historical one, but somehow closer,
more palpable. He is someone we can touch, fix his hair so that he looks good
in a commemorative photograph. That is the difference between memory and
history, a historic place and a ‘place of memory’, a mythological dimension
of the leader of a great movement and a political one.
The Gdańsk Shipyards are a very special place. As a matter of fact, they
hold a unique place in the entire post-communist Europe. But they were also
a workplace where people worked, matured and grew old, earned their daily
bread and formed friendships. There were thousands of such workplaces in
communist Europe. Many of them failed after 1989 and were closed because
they were economically inefficient, but they have survived in the individual
and collective memory of their former workers. They have become part of
their often nostalgic memories. In general, those nostalgic memories of com-
munist times do not have a political character, but rather they are memories
of youth and health. Often they idealize the past, sometimes unfortunately,
as a reaction to current economic difficulties: lack of work, exclusion and
marginalization caused by neo-liberal economic policies.8
166
Gintaras Makarevičius’s multi-dimensional film Hot, 1999, demonstrates

a similarly politically incorrect attitude towards the past from the perspective
of the official political history. It deals with the memory of Makarevičius’s own
former workplace, a factory where he was employed during communist times.
But here, unlike in Gdańsk, there are no great historic events, no great indi-
viduals with worldwide reputations like Lech Wałęsa. What we are confronted
with are humble, intimate recollections of a group of former workers from
one of Lithuania’s many workplaces.
The film functions as a psychodrama. The location is the Factory of
Gas Meters, which under communism was one of the more important work-
places in the Lithuanian Socialist Soviet Republic. The artist invited former
factory workers to a party, which he then filmed. The resulting footage is
interwoven in the final film with old Soviet film chronicles that show the
factory from a propaganda perspective. The psychodrama is a result of the
setup: the guests were offered dishes that remind them of the old times and
the party took place in the old factory cafeteria. This curious banquet, organ-
ized after many years, activated their memories. Under the influence of the
place, nostalgic food and alcohol, they began not only to reminisce about the
old communist times, sometimes with a certain warmth, but also to behave as
if those times had returned, as if they found themselves once again in the old
Soviet Union. They began making toasts and using the language of those times.
At least some are retired, which in the post-communist countries generally
means a less than economically comfortable existence. This was the place
where they spent their youth. It was the place and the arrangement in which
those people, no longer young, found themselves that activated their memory
and also their nostalgia.
This whole situation, a nostalgic remembrance of the times when Lithu-
ania was part of the Soviet Union and its society was subjected to communist
indoctrination, as was the case in Poland and the other countries of East
Central Europe, is contrary to the official doctrine of the new reborn Lithuanian
state. Especially during the 1990s the creation of contemporary Lithuania, a
country with membership of the European Union, required stringently anti-
communist discourse that expressed the official attitude towards the Soviet
past: the need for radical rejection of that past and a return to the interwar
years when Lithuania was an independent country. In the Lithuanian official
political discourse there is no place for nostalgia for the Soviet times. Instead
there is a tendency to express hostility towards the former aggressors. This is
particularly visible within the management of foreign affairs, both in Lithu-
ania and the other Baltic States, which together constitute the most overtly
167
30 Gintaraz Makarevicius, Hot, 1999 (detail).
anti-Russian bloc within the European Union. However, people’s memory,

especially individual memory, does not submit to the official discourse and
works in different ways. The people who accepted the artist’s invitation and
came to the party at the former factory had and have their own lives, which
cannot and should not be reduced to an official discourse. They are neither
breaching the requirements of patriotism, nor contesting the politics of history
in the new Lithuania by singing communist songs, using Soviet language, and
reminiscing about the ‘good old days’. The film does not address this, but it is
easy to imagine that on the level of political declarations at least some of them
could support their country’s official political stance. This, however, does not
contradict their individual memories, or their attitude towards the past
revealed through their very personal relationship with former co-workers and
friends as well as the place where they spent their youth.
Makarevičius’s film reveals an entirely different dimension of the attitude
towards the past, one that is very personal and individual and is certainly shared
by a larger group of those who lived in the Eastern Bloc before 1989. It reveals
a conflict and a tension between memory and history. However, the presented
situation cannot be interpreted in terms of counter-history, since it does not
168
compete with the official Lithuanian politics of history, or at least one could
not conclude this after seeing the film. These are not theses or generalizations,
nor even critical suggestions directed against the official Lithuanian political
discourse. This demonstrates that memory cannot always be identified with
counter-history. It could also function as a discourse parallel to history, reveal-
ing individual as well as collective experiences, but from a private, rather than
public perspective. Memory, no matter how much it contradicts the official
discourse of power, does not constitute a political alternative; it belongs to a
different dimension – that of human experience.
The conclusions one must draw from this experience and are suggested
zwith the past than the one wished for by the government. Human lives, feel-
ings, experiences and memories cannot be contained by the official system of
political doctrines. If the President, a minister, party and state ideologues tell
you that you have lived through traumatic times when your personal freedom
was violated and your national identity and cultural heritage defiled, you
could agree. You could share their ideological views and therefore politics
of history, but at the same time you know that you have only one life, and
that you were young back then. You know that your memory suggests a dif-
ferent narrative, one that is personal and no less ‘true’ than the official one.
Makarevičius’s film reveals this tension. It shows personal, individual as well
as collective dimensions of the past. It demonstrates that memory cannot be
subjected to indoctrination by the official historic doctrine; certainly it is a
form of mythological and idealized past, but that is its character and that is
the source of its value.
The Hungarian duo Little Warsaw (Bálint Havas and András Gálik)
explored the problem of memory in a completely different way in the work
instauratio, 2004. Their art intervention consisted of transporting a monument
that stood in the centre of a Hungarian town, Hódmezővásárhely, to the Stedelijk
Museum in Amsterdam. The monument, created in 1965 by the sculptor József
Somogyi, depicted János Szántó Kovács, the leader of a Hungarian peasant
rebellion. The sculpture was transported for the exhibition ‘Time and Again’,
which was the second ‘episode’ of a larger project, Who if not We Should at Least
Try to imagine the Future of All This.9 It should be noted that the monument’s
pedestal, which did not fit in the exhibition space, was left outside. Only
Somogyi’s figure was shown at the museum. Little Warsaw’s action provoked
unexpectedly vigorous discussion in Hungary. 10 A number of prominent
critics, art historians and artists spoke out against the duo. The Academy of
Art condemned their work in a signed petition. Edid András, the author of one
of the most interesting texts on this controversy, observed its schizophrenic
169
31 Little Warsaw, instauratio, 2004.
character. It recalled ‘the good old times’, when artists came together to oppose
the official cultural policies of the communists.11 Now, she noted, the situation
was reversed and artists turned against other artists, specifically those who were
violating the integrity of the old socialist art. The official reason for criticism
was that the group infringed the author’s copyright to the sculpture-monument
by failing to ask those who controlled those rights (namely the sculptor’s
daughter, who is also an art critic) for permission to move the sculpture to
Amsterdam. Of course, the group obtained permission from the city govern-
ment where the monument stood, seemingly in perpetuity. In and of itself,
this is interesting. While it is obvious that public sculptures are protected by
the author’s rights in the same way as works displayed in museums or included
in private collections, it is also obvious that such works, including public
monuments, are governed by different rules precisely because they are exhib-
ited in the public space. After all, no one asked the authors of the monumental
sculpture of Joseph Stalin that stood in Budapest for permission to destroy it
in 1965. The demonstrators simply rejected it as a despised symbol of the
regime. One could assume that those who signed the petition denouncing
Little Warsaw’s action would not have opposed the destruction of Stalin’s
monument if it were still standing. Moreover, in Hungary and other post-
communist countries, such as Lithuania, some monuments associated with the
old regime were unceremoniously removed or, under the best circumstances,
removed to special ‘monument parks’. The authors of the petition did not
protest at such ‘cleansing’ of the public space.
Of course, one could say that Somogyi’s sculpture has somewhat differ-
ent status. It is not a monument to one of the leaders of communism, but to
a hero celebrated by the communists as a precursor of the later revolution.
Moreover, the monument’s style is not that of Socialist Realism, a style generally
associated with the communist past, though not always and not everywhere.12
Nevertheless, this sculpture has a secure place within the public art of commu-
nist Hungary and is rather unambiguously associated with socialism. These
associations are there, despite the fact that when the monument was erected
in 1965 the inadequately ‘socialist’ appearance of the figure provoked a certain
amount of controversy. Quite simply, the figure was insufficiently heroic,
though it would be difficult to see in this sculpture any opposition to the
communist system. However, this does not explain the vehement reaction on
the part of the art establishment of contemporary, post-communist Hungary
towards the artists of Little Warsaw. In order to reveal deeper the basis of that
reaction, we must first take a look how the inhabitants of Hódmezővásárhely
reacted to the work.
171
The city’s citizens were not particularly interested in József Somogyi’s

monument to János Szántó Kovács. It simply stood in Kossuth tér, the town
square. There it seemed almost invisible, a fact that confirms the claim that
monuments serve the function of forgetting rather than remembering. Para-
doxically, when the sculpture disappeared they began to notice its absence.
Its temporary removal was seen as an attack on the town’s identity and, above
all, as an intervention into the memory of its inhabitants. It appears that even
though no one protests when ‘openly’ communist monuments are removed
and placed in ‘monument parks’ or simply destroyed, when it comes to public
sculptures with less clearly indicated communist status (depicting other lead-
ers, using other styles) the issue of identity of a place created within structures
of memory appears. It would be difficult to think of the monument to János
Szántó Kovács in Hódmezővásárhely as a ‘memory place’. It became apparent
after its removal, however, that it had a great deal to do with the memory of
a place, paradoxically revealed though its violation. The monument functions
as its manifestation and symbolic expression.
However, what do members of the Art Academy denouncing the trans-
port of the monument from Hódmezővásárhely to Amsterdam have to do with
this relationship? Certainly they are not concerned with the memory of the
town’s inhabitants. They are much more invested in their own memories. Using
the rhetoric of authors’ rights, they protested against the violation of memory
and integrity of the past, which belonged to them. They complained against
removal and degradation of art, which was theirs, or at least belonged to their
generation. They protested against calling this art ‘socialist’ and treating it in the
same way as figures of Stalin, Dzerzhinsky, Lenin and other heroes of the former
times. In their opinion, the artists of Little Warsaw violated their memory of
the past. Because it was impossible to defend this memory as ‘socialist’ due to
anti-communist discourse, it was defended using new, typically capitalist lan-
guage of the ownership rights to the work. Certainly this protest in defence of
the memory of the former period remained in certain tension with the official
discourse, which in Hungary as in other post-communist countries is firmly
anti-communist. Some of the signatories of the petition, who share rightist
views, support this discourse. Nonetheless, by defending individual memory,
they entered into conflict with it. Little Warsaw’s action revealed the complex
relationship between history and memory as well as identity and politics.
In creating instauratio, Little Warsaw also exposed the complicated issue
of monuments in the new post-communist reality. Although the destruction
of communist-era monuments was greeted with applause by right-wing politi-
cians, the inhabitants of cities and small towns who had lived with them and
172
become accustomed to their presence approached it with a certain reservation.

For them, the monuments were not symbols of an oppressive communist
regime, but parts of their own individual memory. This pervasive ambivalence
towards the old monuments provided inspiration for the project ‘Pantheon:
Heroes and Anti-Monuments’ organized by Daniel Grúň at the Gallery
Medium in Bratislava.13 Grúň defines a monument through the concept
of ‘cult’. According to the curator, cult of an individual or place motivates the
erection of a monument; such cult is supposed to survive and endure forever.
Grúň’s exhibition was supposed to disarm this idea through various material
and conceptual interventions into the public space and in the gallery using
differently conceived anti-monuments or, more precisely, critiques of monu-
ments. Despite its name, the exhibition did not actually present works that
functioned as anti-monuments, along the lines of projects executed by Jochen
Gerz. Instead it proposed a critique of monuments as such. After all, an anti-
monument is still a monument; the only difference is that it undermines basic
principles that allow a monument to function as a monument, such as its form,
symbolism and authority. The artists invited by Grúň to participate in the
show problematized the very idea of a monument, and therefore of memory.
I would like to draw attention to one project in particular, because of the
way in which it was involved in the process of post-communist iconoclasm,
eloquently described within a much broader context by Dario Gamboni.14 In
1980, in the midst of ‘normalization’, a process that began with the suppression
of the Prague Spring by the armies of the Warsaw Pact and reinstatement of
hard-line, neo-Stalinist policies, the Czechoslovak regime erected a monstrous
monument in Bratislava to Klement Gottwald, a communist hard-liner who
served as President of Czechoslovakia during the darkest years of Stalinism
between 1948 and 1953. The fact that the monument honouring this notori-
ous figure was erected in 1980 is rather significant. The new reactionary regime
was searching for a point of reference in the darkest times of Czechoslovak
Stalinism. But the monument did not remain in place for long. Soon after the
Velvet Revolution it was attacked. First the figure of Gottwald was covered in
red paint. Then in April 1991 the monument was demolished. The pragmatic
Slovaks saved its fragments and handed them over to the Academy of Fine
Arts in Bratislava, where sculpture students used them as study material. That
is where young Slovak artist Richard Seneši found them. He transported the
remains to the square in front of the Academy, close to the entrance of the
Gallery Medium. By this action, the Gottwald Monument returned in a certain
sense to the public sphere, but on a completely different basis that revealed
its absurdity. Some of the fragments sill carried traces of the red paint poured
173
over the figure when it was intact. What seems significant is the fact that neither
the monument’s destruction, nor its fragmentary (short-lived) return to the
public space, was able to provoke nostalgia or activate any mechanism serving
the protection of memory.
In essence, the official history of this part of Czechoslovakia, now Slova-
kia, was left undisturbed in this instance by the alternative relationship to the
past afforded by memory. The artist only revealed the absurdity of processes
that led to the monument’s erection and destruction. The work dealt with the
absurdity of the very notion of a monument-based iconophilia and iconoclasm,
without provoking, as far as I know, greater public interest. We have to ask why
the action of Little Warsaw provoked such a passionate reaction among the
artists and inhabitants of Hódmezővásárhely, whereas that of Richard Seneši
in Bratislava seemed to have no resonance whatsoever. There are still people who
own the rights to the Gottwald Monument; there are many who remember it.
Certainly the lack of protest is connected with the relatively short temporal
distance between the monument’s erection and its destruction, the fact that it
did not have sufficient time to become overgrown with memory. But it can also
be attributed to the fact that the monument was from the beginning lifeless.
Although the process of ‘normalization’ involved many people, including as
informants for the secret police, from the beginning it operated as nothing
more than naked repression, similar to the martial law in Poland a decade later.
It was never backed by any utopia, any social project, or even any ideology.
The reference to Stalinism was absurd in that context, if not comical. It could
not engender any positive reaction or create any memories with which anyone
would be likely to identify. The situation in Hódmezővásárhely was different.
Here the idea of social enfranchisement was still potent in the 1960s and as a
result the monument fused with its environment. Although for years it was
barely noticed, when it disappeared it appeared as a durable element in the
memory of the local population. Besides, it was not openly repressive like the
Gottwald Monument, and so József Somogyi’s heirs and Academy members
could make claims on its behalf. The creators of the monument from Bratislava
simply could not.
I will mention one more example of a work calling for remembrance
and unmasking the process of forgetting. In 2007, as part of the widely ranging
project Public Art Bucharest, organized by Marius Babias and Sabine Hentzsch,
Dan Perjovschi staged a simple but extremely eloquent action (Monument
[History / Hysteria 2], 2008). The action took place on University Square, one
of the most centrally located public spaces in Bucharest, which witnessed not
only the 1989 revolution and the fall of the communist regime, but also a
174
32 Richard Seneši, Personal Archaeology, 2006.
type of counter-revolution that took place a year later, in 1990, when the new
government used coalminers, who supposedly came to the city spontaneously,
to suppress pro-democracy student protests. The artist sent an actor dressed as
a coalminer and carrying a rubber baton, similar to those used against the
demonstrating students) to University Square. Other actors playing the victims
(students), including the artist himself, surrounded the coalminer. Nobody,
however, noticed their presence in a public space so strongly linked with
recent history. Perjovschi demonstrated the impermanence of memory, how
quickly traumatic historic events filled with consequences are forgotten, how
the city eliminates from its memory those moments, how everyday reality
pushes out the memory of the past, and how the paradigm of public space is
more conducive to forgetting than remembering. In the documentary footage
one can see a car being parked right next to the actor-coalminer. The driver
pays absolutely no attention to what is going on.
The problem of remembrance and forgetting appears quite differently
in the countries of the former Yugoslavia. Here it is not the trauma of com-
munism that functions as a point of reference, since its Yugoslav variant was
the least traumatic due to the status, policies and economic strategies adopted
by the regime. Instead it is the trauma of the war or more precisely the series of
wars that erupted in the 1990s. Serbia occupies a special place on the memory
175
33 Dan Perjovschi, Monument (History / Hysteria 2), 2008.
map of those wars. It is perceived, and to a certain degree sees itself, as both
the heir of the former Yugoslavia and as its negation because of the strong
nationalist tone of the official political discourse. The problem of the Belgrade
Monument and the formation of the Monument Group, who included
Damir Arsenijević, Svebor Midžić, Nebojša Milikić, Darinka Pop-Mitić,
Branimir Stojanović and Milica Tomić, provides a good lens for examining
this situation.
The Monument Group was not an art initiative, even though it included
artists, but a civil one. As such it proved surprisingly influential and effective.
It brought together people representing many different professions who were
interested in discussing the proposed monument. The group was created in
2002 in order to analyse an enigmatic proposal by the Belgrade City Council
to erect a monument commemorating the victims of the wars that took place
on the territories of the disintegrating Yugoslavia in the 1990s. But it was not
clear to whom specifically such a monument would be dedicated: should it
be to all victims, including those on the Bosnian and Croatian sides, or, as
one would expect, only to Serbs, in particular to soldiers fighting for Greater
Serbia, for the ‘fatherland’, as one of the versions of the competition stated? Such
questions, a series of competitions and the failure to select a winning design
176
provided fodder for very interesting discussion within the Monument

Group.15 Its members were less concerned with reaching specific conclu-
sions and more with questioning the initiative of the City Council as well as
the entire official ‘politics of memory’, which are particularly complicated
in Serbia.
Let’s first review the facts concerning the initiative of the Belgrade City
Council. The first competition was announced in 2002 and led to the for-
mation of the Monument Group. The City Council wanted a monument
commemorating soldiers and civilian victims who died during the wars
from 1990 to 1999 on the territories of the former Yugoslavia, including the
victims of the nato bombardment. This competition was recalled. A second
competition was announced in 2003, this time with a shorter dedication to
victims of the wars that took place on the territories of the former Yugoslavia,
who died between 1990 and 1999. This time the competition took place but
a winner was never selected. A third competition, announced in 2006, called
for a monument understood not so much in sculptural as urban and architec-
tural terms. The dedication was once again altered. This time the monument
was supposed to commemorate the victims of the war and the defenders of
the fatherland. The Monument Group was from the beginning very critical of
this idea. Its members pointed out the hidden ideological and above all
nationalist character of the dedication (not only of the first, but of the subse-
quent ones) concealed under general references to ‘war victims’ or reference to
the victims on the Serbian side. The later additions to the dedication – ‘fallen
soldiers’ and in particular ‘defence of the fatherland’ – also had such a charac-
ter. In other words, the City Council was not concerned with Albanian, Bosnian
or Croatian victims, only with Serbian ones. Of course, such nationalistically
motivated construction of memory had an indirectly political character. What
was directly expressed by Branimir Stojanović in the brochure was the fact
that the project was supposed to be post-historic, or rather post-political. In
reality the apolitical rhetoric hid notably political goals, or to be more precise,
it attempted to manipulate memory. The Monument Group responded with
a political discourse or rather analysis revealing not only the politics of the
City Council, understood in terms of pragmatic actions that in this particular
case were aimed at usurping the memory for particular goals, but also creating
or revealing the political dimension of the entire situation, which unmasked
the conflict surrounding the issue of memory. This is a virtually classic example
of the definition of ‘political’ used by Chantal Mouffe in her analysis. In this
context, ‘political’ is understood as ontology of public life based in conflict
(see pages 98, 126–7 above).16 In reality, the difficulties with the monument’s
177
commission could be seen as a successful outcome of the Group’s critiques

and of the public debate that it initiated. In fact, it was this debate, which
brought to light the divergence of views critical of the government within
independent public opinion, that functioned as the real monument. Although
its members varied widely in their opinions, a fact that contributed to its
eventual demise, the Monument Group became identified with this debate.
Their critique was directed against the official Serbian politics of history,
rather than standing as opposition to the monument as such. It constituted an
attempt to politicize the discussion and expose the supposed post-political
humanitarianism of this idea for what it really was.
It is worth remembering, however, that the problem of Serbia is far
from simple. The responsibility borne by the former Serbian government and,
personally, by Slobodan Milošević for atrocities committed by the Serbian
(then called the New Yugoslav) army are beyond doubt. On the other hand,
it is also beyond doubt that Serbian civilians were subjected to atrocities com-
mitted by other armies. Independent international observers, such as Tadeusz
Mazowiecki, the Polish un representative stationed in the region, expressed this
view from the very beginning of the conflict. However, this view was suppressed
by Western politicians and was not widely reported in the Western media.
Mazowiecki noted that he felt completely helpless as an impartial observer.
From the political and humanitarian perspective, the later problem of Kosovo
is also far from the clear-cut situation presented in the Western press. But that
was not the goal of the group, which did not engage in its own ‘politics of
memory’. Its members were interested in revealing the mechanism of the post-
political discourse, which obscured very well-defined ideological and political
goals and which manipulated memory.
Just how much memory in Serbia has been manipulated can be seen in
the complete absence of Srebrenica, which has functioned worldwide as a sym-
bol of the war atrocities, from the official as well as common discourse. The
official historic discourse has made every effort to portray Serbians as (virtually
the only) war victims, minimizing the atrocities committed by the Serbian
army and paramilitary units directed by Milošević’s government. Perhaps that
is why Srebrenica became the subject of the group’s next project, Mathemes of
Re-Association. Lecture Room No. 2, which was shown at the October Salon in
Belgrade in 2008.17 The group organized a reading room of sorts dedicated
to the complicated and highly advanced methods used by the International
Commission on Missing Persons to identify human remains. Those methods
assign complex mathematical markers of identity to unidentified bodies,
including taking into consideration each missing person’s dna. Individual
178
bodies exhumed from mass graves are then described using mathematical
formulae. As a result, the identity and hence memory of a person gains a very
‘strange’ new visual formula, one that does not correspond with the memory of
those close to him or her. The most interesting outcome of the group’s project
is not the description of those methods, or even more so their effectiveness,
but precisely this visual transformation of memory from an image into the
language of mathematics.
Remaining with the Belgrade Salon, and to a certain extent with the
Monument Group and Srebrenica, I would like to draw attention to a work
that was singled out by the international jury: an installation by Darinka
Pop-Mitić, a member of the group, entitled Landscape, 2004–8. Her point of
departure is provided by a well-known painting by Nicolas Poussin, ‘Et in
Arcadia Ego’, c. 1638 (Paris, Musée du Louvre), which depicts an Arcadian
landscape with a group of shepherds who have stopped at a tomb bearing the
text cited in the work’s title. The image suggests that the seemingly carefree
Arcadian landscape contains concealed graves. In Pop-Mitić’s installation,
a reproduction of Poussin’s painting is accompanied by other landscapes
presented in elaborate frames. Although they do not depict graves, they are
identified with name plates (titles) that refer to towns identified with mass
murder, such as Srebrenica. We are led to the inescapable conclusion that those
pastoral landscapes also contain mass graves. The paintings are hung in a room
that resembles a middle-class living room, suggesting that a comfortable middle-
class life also conceals memory of great atrocities. If we relate this work to the
discursive practice in Serbia and to a politics of memory, or rather no-memory,
forgetfulness and the elimination of atrocities such as Srebrenica from the
collective social consciousness, we are faced with an indictment as well as a
warning that Arcadian surroundings are never innocent and that politics of
no-memory conceal the deaths of many people.
During the 2008 October Salon the problem of atrocities, this time
committed against the Kosovan population, was raised by another member of
the Monument Group, Milica Tomić, in a video work xy ungelöst – Recon -
struction of the Crime, 1996–7. The piece was shown for the first time in 1997
at the second annual exhibition held at the former George Soros Center for
Contemporary Art. The show entitled ‘Murder’, 1997, was curated by Branis -
lava Andelković and Branislav Dimitrijević. The film is presented at a faster
than normal speed with a constant, dynamic background music that gives it
an emphatic and distinct rhythm. It operated through a single motif repeated
by a series of performers, including the artist and her friends. In the first
sequence, the artist is shown with her eyes closed and pupils painted on her
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eyelids. She simultaneously cannot see, and yet seems to be able to see.
Tomić performs a rather simple action in front of the camera; she takes off a
layer of clothing (a coat, sweater, shirt), revealing yet another layer (a coat,
sweater, shirt) underneath. Next, she turns her back to the camera, which
makes a close-up. In the next cut, we see a person falling down on the snow
and disappearing in the blink of an eye. All that remains is an outline. The whole
sequence is repeated by a series of performers, who are the artist’s friends.
Despite repeating sequences, the film is extremely lively. The speeded-up pace
and the rhythmic music give it a quasi-disco dynamic. At the same time, the
viewer senses a tremendous tension in the juxtaposition of rapidly changing
cuts showing someone undressing with images of disappearing figures, which
leave behind only an outline in the snow. This presentation does not allow
one to stop viewing and leave the room. This is not the first time Tomić has
demonstrated her tremendous skill as a video artist. Through technical precision
she is able to create a powerful visual, one could even say sensual, experience
that provokes the viewer to a deep reflection. This work uses an idea taken from
Aktenzeichen xy . . . ungelöst, a long-running German television programme
dedicated to the reconstruction of unsolved crimes.18 The work refers to two
related historic events: the declaration of the new Serbian state on 28 March
1989 and the demonstration against that decision in Kosovo, which ended in
a bloody massacre with 33 Albanians killed by the Yugoslav army. The context
that prompted the artist to create the work is also very interesting. Tomić writes
that she conceived the work when she participated in a series of demonstra-
tions over several days by the inhabitants of Belgrade against the regime of
the New Yugoslavia or rather Serbia. When the crowd of demonstrators
encountered a police cordon, they began to chant ‘Go to Kosovo’.19 Suddenly
the atmosphere was broken and Tomić no longer identified with the crowd’s
purpose. It became apparent that the shared goal of opposing the regime was
in fact motivated by two completely different ideologies: emancipatory and
nationalist. Therefore the work appears to have two different levels of signifi-
cance. On the one hand it attempts to revive the memory of an atrocity
committed against some Albanians, on the other it comments on a certain
societal acquiescence among Serbs that allows the event to be forgotten or even
justifies it through a reference to nationalist ideology that, paradoxically, was
shared by the regime and the demonstrators. The film not only demonstrates
the rather complicated political position of the artist and intellectuals who
shared her views, but also the problem of selective memory. The reconstruc-
tion of the crime has profound political significance not because it speaks on
behalf of the victims of the massacre or attempts to ‘solve the crime’, but
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above all because it reveals the social background, which enables the practice
of memory-forgetting to function.
The issue of gender provides a very interesting perspective on the mem-
ory problematic during this period. Sanja Iveković, one of the best-known
artists in the region, has dealt throughout her career with the problematic of
sexual identity and social construction of gender. In the late 1990s she became
interested in inscribing this perspective into the problem of memory and
forgetting. I am mainly referring to three works, Gen xx, 1998–2001, S.o.S.
Nada Dimić, 2000–, and Lost & Found, 2003–4. The first piece seems relatively
straightforward. Iveković presented photographs of well-known female models,
whose faces were readily recognizable in Croatia and who would have been
familiar to the younger people. Those images of attractive and well-groomed
women were combined with the names and biographies of different young
women, heroes of the underground Resistance who were tortured and murdered
by the Nazis during the Second World War. In the new Croatian state, which
emerged out of the former Yugoslavia, society is forgetting those names. With
the end of socialism, its heroes, individuals who commanded respect under the
old regime, have been forgotten. The act of forgetting is perceived by the artist
34 Milica Tomić, xy ungelöst – Reconstruction of the Crime, 1996–97.
181
not only from the perspective of a confrontation between the new state and
the old regime, but also between former ideology and actual biographies. This
presentation of the female Resistance heroes under the guise of attractive con-
temporary models is not just supposed to remind the viewers of their existence
by giving them an attractive new form, more appropriate for contemporary
consumption-driven visual culture. Above all, it aims to expose the complex
process that involves memory, ideology, history and biography and to reveal
the real biography of actual women, which exists in the cracks between those
reference points. The artist emphasizes this existential dimension of the work
by invoking one biography in particular, that of her mother, Nera Šafarić, who,
unlike the other heroes, is represented by her own photo, taken before the war
and consequently before her arrest and transport to Auschwitz.
The second project, S.o.S. Nada Dimić, deals with a similar problematic,
though it emphasizes social rather than the political aspects of memory. Nada
Dimić was another Resistance hero executed by the Nazis and as such part
of the pantheon of female heroines celebrated by Tito’s regime. A textile factory
located in the centre of Zagreb was named in her honour, a common practice
under communism. After 1989, when the factory was among many that began
to experience financial difficulties, it was sold to a western firm, Endi Interna-
tional. By the mid-1990s the factory was failing again. In 2000, the year in
which Iveković created the first version of the work, the factory’s bankruptcy
case was in the courts. Since clothing factories employed mainly women, in
this case they were the ones bearing the brunt of the shift to capitalism and
the free market. During the period of reorganization and after the factory
closed, its female workers began to join the ranks of the unemployed. There-
fore the work has a dual gendered dimension. Firstly, just as in the other piece,
we are confronted with a ‘socialist heroine’, a trope that obscures a concrete
biography of a particular individual. Secondly, there is the failing factory, which
employed mainly women who identified with their place of work and, to cer-
tain extent, with Nada Dimić. The piece itself was in three parts. The first was
an intervention at the site of the now abandoned factory: the artist restored
the neon sign with the factory’s name ‘Nada Dimić’ and turned it on. The
second part consisted of an installation that combined various objects con-
nected with the factory, including an architectural model of the building,
examples of clothing produced there, publications and employee id cards used
to keep track of workers’ hours. The third part also included an intervention,
this time into women’s lives. During the exhibition, the artist opened a legal
aid office, which offered free legal advice to women who were or were about
to face unemployment.
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Bojana Pejić described Iveković’s works as ‘site-specific’ as well as ‘time-

specific’.20 The first term seems self-evident: the works are situated in a specific
location, namely Croatia, and the last piece in a specific factory. The second
term introduced the historic dimension of a dialectic between remembering
and forgetting. This process takes place at a specific time in Croatia, which was
part of post-communist Yugoslavia, a country that no longer exists and is
being erased by the contemporary economic and political processes. To a
certain extent Iveković’s art has always been ‘time-specific’, even when it does
not deal with gender, as in Lost & Found. In this work the artist shows two
images of the same place, usually a shop, the first showing what it was called
and how it looked under communism, the second revealing how it looks
now, in capitalist Croatia. What is interesting is not just the appearance, but
the rhetoric of the names. Under communism the shops bore names such as
‘Freedom’, ‘Pride’ or ‘Solidarity’; now the names refer to particular Western
brands. The old names exposed the ideological vocabulary of the old regime,
but they also showed that, even though that language was manipulated, it did
refer to certain values. Now the language points to the free market and to a
completely different set of references. For instance, one of the cinemas in the
centre of Zagreb that used to be called the Balkan has become the Europe.
The works are therefore not only ‘site-specific’, but also in particular ‘time-
specific’ because they depict a concrete historic moment, a concrete palace
and time within the dialectic of remembrance and forgetting, which is often,
as in the works cited here, implicated in the gender problematic.
Analysing the problem of national memory we are bound to encounter
the issue of nationalism, which became highly visible after the fall of commu-
nism. This problem can be seen in all countries of the former Eastern Bloc,
from the Baltic States through Central Europe, to the southern countries of
the former Soviet empire and the territories of the former Yugoslavia, which
escape its geo-political definition. The rejection of communism and Soviet
domination throughout the former Eastern Bloc and, in Yugoslavia, the earlier
death of Marshal Tito, whose personality undoubtedly played a significant role
in holding the country together, released considerable nationalist energies. The
result was not only the escalation of inter-ethnic tensions and the develop-
ment of nationalist and populist political parties, but also the rise of new
states. This process took different forms, from the calm ‘velvet divorce’ of the
former Czechoslovakia, which produced two independent republics, the Czech
and the Slovak, to bloody conflicts in the territories of the former Yugoslavia.
Serbia faced a rather unique situation. Although Serbians seemed to domi-
nate the former Yugoslavia through factual and political centralization of the
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35, 36 Sanja Iveković, Lost & Found, 2003–04.
old federation, nationalist language, which had a long tradition in Serbia,

paradoxically was largely eliminated from the official state discourse. In the
1990s the republics that revolted against the Yugoslav federation, the national
groups that demanded independent statehood (Albanians from Kosovo,
Bosnians, Croatians, Slovenians), and the newly formed countries that fought
the Yugoslav army, first de facto, then de jure, entered into a war with Serbia.
This also complicated perception of Serbians in the international arena. They
were primarily seen as aggressors and subjugators of other nations, even though
the Serbian civilians were also subjected to bloody persecutions, as Tadeusz
Mazowiecki, who served as an official un-appointed war observer, noted.
However, this fact does not diminish the responsibility of the Milošević
regime for the ethnic cleansing and war atrocities committed in the name of
Serbian nationalism.
Experts have been arguing for years about the theory and meaning of
nationalism. The positions within this debate are highly polarized. Even
efforts to come up with shared definitions have encountered considerable, one
could even say insurmountable, difficulties.21 On the one side we have very
attractive constructivist theoretical conceptions, which see nationalism as a
product of modernity and approach it from the perspective of the political
practice of the new states formed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
On the other, theoretical models are much more essentializing, ethnic and
focused on prehistoric analytic of a much longer process of the nations’ emer-
gence. Under the most radical formulation of the first position provided by
Ernst Gellner, it is nationalism that creates nations, not the other way around.
Gellner sees nationalism as a political doctrine that governs identity between
the political and ethnic boundaries defined during the process of moderniza-
tion. Within this theoretical formation one can also find more subtle views that
stress the primacy of cultural imagination over political utility in the devel-
opment of modern nationalists (Benedict Anderson), as well as less theoretical
and more historically grounded opinions, such as Rogers Brubaker’s well-known
analysis of the emergence of New Europe during the period surrounding the
First World War, which also created the tradition of the ‘new’ New Europe.22
The other theoretical position includes more ethnocentric conceptions, among
which those by Anthony Smith deserve particular attention. Smith approaches
constructivist theories linking nationalism with modernism with considerable
scepticism and grants the historic circumstances much greater respect.23 For
us, those discussions concerning the nature and history of nationalism are
less significant. To stay with the Serbian example, it is not important whether
Serbian nationalism has a more essentialist or constructivist character, whether
185
its sources lay in a symbolic regime and culture or politics and ideology. It
is quite clear that in this particular case, the history of nationalism is much
more complex than the history of the so-called great nations.24 It is also clear
that contemporary Serbian nationalism is performing a political function
and politics provides a key point of reference for this ideology. In fact, we can
understand the role and the meaning of Serbian nationalism on the European,
Balkan and internal scenes only through politics.
Without entering into historical and political meditations, I would like
to draw attention to another language, namely the language of postcolonial
analysis. The Serbian case seems particularly interesting as well as complex, if
one examines it using Homi Bhabha’s concept of ‘dissemiNation’.25 According
to this analysis, the process of the emergence of a contemporary, postcolonial
nation appears as the opposite of the modernist history of the formation of
the ‘great nations’, which were active colonial agents. Although by necessity I
am simplifying and summarizing Bhabha’s argument, one could say that small
nations subjected to the colonial process were also subjected to essentializing
procedures that imprisoned the given nation within itself. Their emancipation,
or more precisely subjectivization, should have taken place through a reverse
process that shattered the objective and essentializing narration imposed on
them by the colonizers. Homi Bhabha refers to the movement in this direction
as ‘dissemiNation’. This process consists of scattering of the national ‘oneness’,
breaking up its (imposed) signifying essence and, simultaneously, building
pluralistic, dispersed narrations or ‘counter-narrations’. Of course, those
observations can be also applied to colonizing nations, which first had to form
their own national substance and essence in order to develop the essentializing
vision of the Other. This holistic paradigm of colonial thinking and colonial
national narration is shattered within the critical postcolonial view. Unfortu-
nately, politicians and nationalists do not respect this critical perspective: instead
of deconstructing, they solidify national essentialism.
This postcolonial analytic perspective is very attractive for post-commu-
nist intellectuals, who enthusiastically consume intellectual novelties produced
by American universities. However, its adoption is not as easy as it seems. If
we focus on the historical processes that have taken place in the 1990s and in
the first decade of the twenty-first century, it is not obvious who was the colo-
nialist and who the colonized. As I noted earlier, if we consider Yugoslavia as
the colonized territory and the Serbs as the politically dominant nation within
the colonial process (they were also culturally dominant in relation to Bosni-
ans and Kosovo Albanians), then it is impossible to treat Serbian nationalism as
a form of emancipation or liberation from the colonial yoke and externally
186
imposed narration. If we now approach this issue from an ideological per-

spective or, to be more precise, from the point of view of communist ideology,
which played here the role of a conceptual rather than national or cultural
colonizer, then this process may appear more understandable, but also much
less compatible with a postcolonial paradigm. The idea of a post-national state
was imposed on the nations of the former Yugoslavia. Their violent reaction
against this ideology or, one could say, the appearance of attitudes that could
be defined as post-communist nationalism was turned against other, ideolog-
ically colonized nations in accordance with a political understanding of
nationalism (Gellner), which states that political borders should coincide with
ethnic ones. Within this context, any ‘decolonization’ would have been seen
as a ‘step back’, in a way similar to Boris Groys’s understanding of this term
in reference to Russia’s emergence out of the Soviet Union.26 This means that
decolonization would have been considered as a colonial manoeuvre vis-à-vis
the neighbouring nations (one that essentialized their narrations) and a self-
colonizing one in terms of the national self-narration. Under no circumstances
could it be seen as counter-narration of ‘dissimiNation’ in Bhabha’s sense of
those terms. That is why the post-communist condition constitutes the oppo-
site of the post-colonial condition, at least according to Bhabha’s definition
of the latter.
Of course, we are dealing here with the level of official discourse. Our
inquiry must also deal with the critical, unofficial practices directed against state
policy, at least within the realm of art. One of the works that clearly addresses
the problem of the Serbian territory is Raša Todosijević’s Gott liebt die Serben
produced in different incarnations between 1993 and 2002. Next to the artist’s
well-known performance Was ist Kunst, 1977, this is probably his most widely
recognized project. It attracts viewers’ attention (in its best-known incarnations)
through a large, red swastika hanging on the wall. Commentaries on the work
tend to focus on its undermining of Serbian nationalism though its use of
absurdism and simultaneous de-essentialization.27 The powerful symbolism
of the provocative swastika together with the work’s German title referring to
the God who supposedly loves the Serbs (it should be noted that Serbian
nationalism is strongly linked with the authority of the Eastern Orthodox
Church) make it difficult to identify the work’s references. The piece does not
simply expose nationalism as a totalitarian and criminal ideology. It should be
noted that in different versions of the work this Germanization, or one could
even say Nazification, of references is accompanied by much gentler symbols
associated with everyday life, for example food, furniture and everyday objects
such as buckets, which create a completely different impression. Everything is
187
arranged according to a decorative pattern, a fact that comments on aestheti-

cization of ideology and therefore its appeal. This contrast between everyday
existence and oppressive symbolism enhances the menace of nationalism. In
the most familiar versions of the work, the wall installation also includes a
German text written in Gothic script, which is generally ignored in the com-
mentaries on the work. The text states that the ‘good God’ brutally punished
the artist’s mother without regard for love, mercy or goodness. She is described
as someone who is sensitive, beloved and beautiful, but has been severely tested
by fate and hard work, and as a result has lost her health and youth. She is poor
and ill, and can afford only simple meals; she curses God in heaven, socialism
on earth, and her own endless gullibility.
This somewhat sentimental inscription suggests a meaning for Todosi-
jević’s work, which thereby acquires dramatic character, though in a rather
ironic, if not sarcastic form. If socialism refers to the ideological past, then the
God who supposedly ‘loves the Serbs’ must refer to contemporary nationalism
supported by the Orthodox Church. The mother, whom the artist reproaches
for gullibility, attests to the fact that neither God nor socialism can be blamed
for our ideological manipulation, it is only the fault of our naiveté. People are
easily taken in by symbols, rhetoric and aesthetics, and then, as a result of
obvious misfortune, they blame the ideology, once again becoming victims
of other symbols, rhetoric and aesthetics. In reality, their lack of criticality is
responsible for this process. Todosijević’s great, attractive symbol of a swastika
used as an aesthetic form of ideological message should be read as a warning
against giving in to temptations of ideology. But in the end, it is difficult to
see Gott liebt die Serben as a counter-narrative piece. It is a work firmly situated
within the neo-avant garde tradition of the 1960s and early 1970s and as such
it explores oppositional moralizing motifs rather than postcolonial ones
related to the processes of ‘dissemiNation’.
I think it is possible to arrive at general conclusions based on the analysis
of Todosijević’s Gott liebt die Serben. It seems clear that in the majority of artistic
critiques of nationalism we are dealing mainly with the tradition of the neo-
avant garde, rather than postcolonial ‘dissemiNation’. I will examine two other
examples of works from different countries, Romania (Dan Perjovschi) and
Slovakia (Michal Moravčik), to develop this point further.
Dan Perjovschi is known worldwide for his thousands of witty and
amusing little drawings, which use humour to comment bluntly on social and
political reality. They are shown in galleries, drawn on walls and sometimes
floors; they can be found on pavements and in public places, and later they
are published. For a time the artist worked as a cartoonist for the daily press.
188
37 Raša Todosijević, Gott liebt die Serben, 1993–2002.
His extensive output includes drawings that refer to nationalism and comment
on nationalist tendencies in post-communist Europe. However, I would like
to draw attention to a completely different work. In 1993 the artist had his
arm tattooed with the word ‘Romania’ (Romania, 1993). One could certainly
see this performance as a response to the changes taking place in Eastern Europe
in general and Romania in particular. As we all know, the transition to a new
system in this country took a violent course. The year 1989 witnessed an armed
revolution that resulted in the communist regime being forced to give up
power. The country’s leaders, Nicolae and Elena Ceauşescu, were brought before
a revolutionary court and sentenced to death by firing squad. Romania entered
the path to democracy. The process that accompanied the return or, for the
younger generation, the arrival of freedom was greeted with euphoria. Perjov -
schi’s action was certainly a sign of that euphoria. However, ten years later, when
emotions were no longer running high and the political reality appeared quite
different from that expected, Perjovschi staged another performance during
which he had his tattoo removed (Romania, 2003). This was an equally spectac-
ular and telling gesture by the artist and it is difficult not to see it as a critique
of nationalism. Both gestures, however, had powerful moral components and
as such fit comfortably within the oppositional neo-avant garde tradition of
the 1960s and ’70s.
189
The second artist, Michal Moravčik, entitled one of his works internal
Affairs (2003). In it, he placed sentences consisting of cut-out letters taken
from various texts by Noam Chomsky on pieces of furniture. The sentences,
taken out of context, functioned as quasi-slogans that seemed to have an
inquiring character, rather than a declarative one. They were questions in-
voking or provoking reflection, rather than statements solidifying meaning.
One of the pieces consisted of an open wardrobe with three shelves, which
contained a cut-out text reading, in English, ‘Which nationalism is better?’
This question, in and of itself significant, points to the existence of competi-
tion among nationalisms, rather than their solidarity; to their conflict with one
another, rather than the possibility of consensus. It suggests oppression, rather
than freedom. On the other hand, it also provokes reflection, in particular in
a country such as Slovakia, where nationalism became the main engine that
motivated the society to support the division of Czechoslovakia. Nonetheless,
even here the work does not create a counter-narrative; it does not even de-
construct the official narration, and hence has nothing in common with the
postcolonial discourse.
The common strategy of using flags and other national symbols also
belongs within this oppositional tradition. Vlad Nanca replaces the colours and
emblems of the flag of the Soviet Union with those of the European Union;
Grzegorz Klaman adds a vertical black band to the white and red Polish flag
to signal the clerical character of the New Poland; Martin Zet creates variations
on the theme of national flags, altering their colours and symbols. There are
many more examples. They all demonstrate that, at least within the sphere of the
visual arts, the post-communist condition, on the level of critiques of nation-
alism as well as memory and history, which I analysed earlier, cannot be easily
reconciled with the discourse of the postcolonial condition.
Just as with the problematic of memory (see above), so the problem of
the critique of nationalism and national identity is often seen from a gendered
perspective. In 1998 the Serbian artist Milica Tomić created i’m Milica Tomić,
a video in which we see the artist turning round and round, and saying in var-
ious languages, ‘I am Milica Tomić’, then adding ‘I am Dutch’, ‘I am Italian’,
‘I am Slovak’, ‘I am Czech’, ‘I am Catalan’ and so on. The work activates the
mechanism of presentation of national identity, but it also simultaneously
undermines it. The viewer is presented with contradictory information. The
artist herself on numerous occasions has stressed the ‘imaginary’ character of
national identification, referring, presumably, to the work of Benedict Ander-
son. She adds: ‘Every community is imagined, but only imagined communities
are real.’28 At the same time, as the video progresses the artist becomes more and
190
more bloodied. As her body becomes covered with growing number of

wounds, blood begins to fill the entire image. It is as if each new presentation
or declaration of national identity is connected with new pain, repression and
violence. National identity is therefore shown to be not only conventional
and imaginary, since the artist can declare a different national identity in
almost all the major world languages during the course of ten minutes or so,
but also problematic because it appears to be linked with violence. Coupled
with the violence there is also a gendered declaration, since the artist uses
whenever possible the female form of the noun defining national identity. The
wounds covering her body and the violence that she experiences are therefore
presented as an effect of not only the national but also the gendered declara-
tion, or rather of both simultaneously. Of course, because we know the artist’s
‘real’ national background and, because we are aware of the historic events
that took place during the 1990s, we immediately associate gender, national
identity and violence with the Balkan Wars. Perhaps the artist, who is more
interested in attracting attention to a more general problem of violence com-
mitted within national and gendered context, did not intend this outcome.
But the mechanisms of perception are relentless and, more or less intuitively,
we contextualize the artist’s statement, linking it with particular experience of
the Balkan Wars in the 1990s. Although it is possible that the national commu-
nities are ‘artificial’ or ‘imagined’, at the level of historic experience they gain
a certain existential and historic dimension. Moreover, irrespective of their
conventional character, the violence committed in their name is very real.
Tomić demonstrates this dialectic, revealing both sides of a national identity:
the conventional or ‘imagined’ and the ‘real’, experienced through the acts of
rape and violence. Although Tomić tries to address those issues on a more
general or universal level, our awareness of not only where she lives and what
country issues her passport, but also of her other works suggests a historically
contextualizing interpretation. Such perspective functions to a certain extent
as a trap that can be escaped only by accepting the status quo. It represents,
therefore, a dialectic between the universal and the local, and supports Ernesto
Laclau’s thesis that something becomes more universal, the more particular
it is.29
The gender problematic in the context of critiques of Balkan national
identity and nationalism deserves a separate study. However, it is worth mention -
ing in this context a few works dealing with those problems. One example is
provided by an ironic piece Bosnian Girl, 2003, by an artist from Bosnia-
Herzegovina, Šeila Kamerić. The work consists of a photograph showing
an attractive young woman (the work’s protagonist), with a scribbled text in
191
broken English: ‘no teeth . . . ? a mustache . . . ? Smel like a shit . . .? Bosnian

girl!’ [sic]. Using the trope of a flag, mentioned above, the Kosovan artist
Nurhan Qehaja, in a video piece entitled Flag, 2006, stands naked holding an
Albanian flag and singing the national anthem. She does this at night, avoiding
the gaze of her countrymen and women. The act of singing the anthem and
holding the flag, two clearly phallocentric national symbols, clearly breaks a
taboo that is particularly strict in this region of Europe.
The Balkans represent a much broader geographic and historic problem
than Yugoslavia.30 Nevertheless, twentieth-century history, in particular the
history of post-communism, to a significant extent identifies the Balkans with
the former Yugoslavia. Yugoslavia was a twentieth-century invention, just like
Czechoslovakia. Unlike the latter, however, the end of Yugoslavia at the close
of the century was painful, not only because of the war and violence, but also
because of the issue of identity. Kendell Geers opens his modest exhibition
catalogue published for Milica Tomić’s exhibition in the Yugoslav Pavilion at
the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003 by suggesting an imaginary scenario. Let’s
assume, he writes, that we wake up in a different country from the one we
38 Michal Moravčik, internal Affair ii, 2003.
192
fell asleep in. Our bed seems the same, but the neighbourhood seems slightly
altered, the neighbours seem to have changed somehow. The city seems dif-
ferent, yet we have not left our bed. We do not recognize the television
announcer; he presents an unfamiliar flag and anthem, stating that those are
the insignia of our country. The Surrealists could not have dreamt up such
a situation, the author adds.31 Perhaps Surrealists could not have imagined
such a scenario, but, looked at from a historical perspective, it was not that
unusual for those living in Central Europe and the Balkans. Here over the
centuries, right through to the twentieth century, one could change one’s
country, citizenship, even religion without leaving one’s home. However,
Geers is right: the disintegration of Yugoslavia led to a very interesting and
dramatic questioning of identity. Tomić’s exhibition problematized those
changes. On the facade of the Yugoslav Pavilion, built in 1932 according to
the then fashionable style shared with the other national pavilions in the
immediate vicinity (Greece, Poland, Sweden and Romania), a pavilion of a
country that no longer exists, the artist placed hundreds of light bulbs that
were turned on at intervals, blinding the visitors and making it impossible to
see the facade. Just when the eye became accustomed to the light they were
turned off, once again making it impossible to see the facade. On the stairs
leading to the pavilion, Tomić placed the text of the 1943 declaration by the
Anti-Fascist Council of the People’s Liberation of Yugoslavia and Anti-Fascist
Movement for the Liberation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which stated a
commitment to a shared struggle against the aggressor waging war against all
Yugoslav nationalities and the unity of the future state. The other text she
used was the ‘Not in our Name’ declaration issued by a group of Americans
opposed to the invasion of Iraq and denying President George W. Bush’s right
to speak on behalf of all us citizens. This second text was supposed to func-
tion as a paradigm of citizens’ opposition to their country’s takeover by an
authoritarian regime. The first pointed to the tradition of unity in Yugoslavia
and its historic identity violated by the nationalist Serbian government, which
still controls Serbia and Montenegro. The hundreds of blinding light bulbs
functioned as a symbol of nationalist blindness and the loss of Yugoslav identity.
The country ceased to exist and its collapse released demons that contributed
to the violence and resulted in the Balkan wars of the 1990s. Those demons
included the explosion of nationalism, which has been consistently critiqued
by artists from the former Yugoslavia.
Marina Abramović’s Balkan Erotic Epic, 2006, presents the most fully
developed narrative of the national, ethnic, political and historical problem-
atic approached from the perspective of gender, additionally complicated
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39, 40 Milica Tomić, i’m Milica Tomić, 1998.
by the Balkan context. Abramović is certainly one of the best-known and

most interesting contemporary female artists. This is not the place for dis-
cussion of her body of work, especially since it has been included in many
publications. However, it is worth noting a certain modification of the artist’s
interests, or rather their shift, since one cannot speak here of a dramatic
change. In general, Abramović’s work, both while she still lived in Yugoslavia
and after she left, tracked the limits of her own body by associating (her own)
experience of pain with (the viewers’) perception of visuality and, somewhat
later, exploring universal dimensions of spiritual experience. In the mid-1990s,
influenced by the disintegration of her country and the Balkan wars, she
turned towards the problematic of the region.32 In this context she produced
several works that do not always depart from her earlier interests, but rather
shift the emphasis. In the video The Hero, 2001, for example, which is dedi-
cated to her recently deceased father, who was a hero of the Second World War
and fought together with the artist’s mother in Tito’s partisan army, Abramović
sits on a white horse and holds a white flag as long as she can. The whiteness
of the horse and the white flag billowing in a gentle breeze refer to qualities
such as nobility, purity and dedication, but those symbols have bodily limits,
which the artist attempts to reach, just as she tried to do so in a completely
different context in her work from the 1970s. Her work Nude with Skeleton,
2005, appears particularly intriguing. It also takes a form of a video and is
also based on a single motif: the artist lying nude with a skeleton placed on
top of her own body. Her breathing causes the only movement in the film.
Although this presentation, just as that of The Hero, is very economical, one
could even say minimal, private, quiet, focused, moving in the direction of
universalizing meditation on death and bodily limits, it also functions as a
type of memento mori. Of course, one could try to find historical references
here, but I think that these meditations relate much more closely to the
body problematic seen from the metaphysical perspective, rather than that of
political geography.
It is possible to see in this context one of the artist’s most spectacular
works, The Balkan Baroque, 1997, which was awarded the Golden Lion for
the best work presented at the 1997 Venice Biennale. I would like to con-
sider it in greater detail since it deals directly with the problematic of political
geography as well as the political dimension of biography. Moreover, the
history of this project appears particularly interesting in the context of the
Balkan version of the post-communist condition. Abramović was invited to
participate in the 1997 Venice Biennale as part of the Yugoslav national exhi-
bition by Petar Čuković, the director of the Montenegro National Museum in
195
Cetinje. Because the Minister of Culture of the former New Yugoslavia

(Montenegro and Serbia) did not support this proposal, it eventually failed.
Bojana Pejić, who brilliantly described the work’s history, situating it in
broader historical, political, biographic and cultural contexts, concluded that
a situation in which a minister publicly expresses ‘his opinion’ on a given art
project, and this then becomes a binding decision, represents a characteristic
trait of the post-communist condition.33 Abramović did appear at the Biennale
with her Balkan Baroque, but she did not show it at the Yugoslav pavilion:
the work, which was awarded the Biennale’s highest honour, was part of an
independent exhibition.
According to the artist, the project’s title comes from David Elliott’s
essay ‘Balkan Baroque’, which was published in the catalogue for Abramović’s
exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford in 1995.34 The installa-
tion itself consists of several parts. Pejić writes that even though it has more
than three elements, it takes the format of a triptych.35 This fact impacts the
work’s interpretation, since it suggests that the artist’s use of the religious
format sacralizes the subject and even provides it with metaphysical pathos.
Pejić goes so far as to compare the work to an iconostasis, an interpretation
that has certain biographic grounds, but which, above all, reinforces the idea
of pathos and, of course, holiness. There are three screens on which we see
video of three individuals: the artist’s mother, her father and, in the middle,
the artist herself in a dual role. In her first incarnation, wearing the white coat
of a scientist, the artist presents a lecture on the breeding of ‘wolf-rats’ in
the Balkans. She explains that such breeding requires locking a number of rats
in a cage under difficult conditions. By withholding food, the animals are
forced to kill and eat one another. The strongest survive. The goal of this pro-
cedure is to train rat-killers that can be then used to exterminate free rats. In
the second incarnation, the artist appears as a singer whose behaviour recalls
that of female performers who sing local folk songs in Balkan taverns. During
the performance, which lasted four days, each day the artist sang a different
fragment of a song, between two and four verses long, repeatedly for six hours
to create an impression of monotony. On either side of the main screen there
are others that show the artist’s parents, both of whom came from wealthy,
influential, traditional and religious families. Abramović’s maternal grandfather
was a priest from Montenegro who became Patriarch of the Serbian Orthodox
Church in 1930. The artist’s parents disavowed their social backgrounds by
joining Tito’s communist partisan band, where they met. Later, in the social-
ist Yugoslavia, they continued their more or less political careers. In addition
to the screens, the work also includes three copper water containers (one larger
196
than the other two), which repeat the tripartite (triptych) composition of
the installation. Naturally, water here has symbolic significance, including
purification and new life. The central place in the installation was occupied by
the artist herself, who was cleaning the remains of meat from a pile of bones.
This extensive installation, which included objects, projections and live
performance, referred to the Balkans, or more precisely to Yugoslavia and its
highly complicated situation. It dealt with history, biography and war. It also
addressed the current situation, the country’s disintegration and the resulting
armed conflicts. By cleaning the bones, the artist symbolically attempted to
‘purify the situation’ by turning towards the victims as well as pointing out
the danger (the lecture on ‘wolf-rats’) hidden in Balkan ethnic politics. The
work provides an unequivocal indictment of nationalism, an ideology respon-
sible for conflict in the Balkans, for terror as well as ethnic hatred, for lack of
dialogue and aggression.
One could say, following Steven Henry Madoff ’s analysis that Balkan
Baroque and Balkan Erotic Epic stand at the opposite extremes of Abramović’s
work. By polarizing tragedy and satire they function as the opposite poles for
the artist’s remaining ‘Balkan’ works.36 But one could also arrive at a completely
different and contrary conclusion, or at least modify this claim by noting that
although these works take different forms, they both provide ‘a Balkan lesson
for beginners’, to paraphrase Pejić’s earlier cited text. Adopting this pedagog-
ical rhetoric, let us begin with the history of Balkan Erotic Epic as related by
the artist herself.37 It all began with a proposal to film a video using porno
actors. The project evolved towards contextualization of an erotic tale about
Balkan culture. The artist realized that Balkan culture is highly saturated
with erotic motifs that reach back to pagan traditions. This erotic dimension
of everyday life was to a large extent cultivated in the former Yugoslavia. Eroti-
cism was reinforced by imported Western consumer culture. Abramović
engaged in serious study of history and ethnography in preparation for the
project. This historic and anthropological material, which to a significant
extent referred to pre-Christian culture and local Balkan mythology, provided
several narratives, which are read from a contemporary perspective. The artist
noticed that a penis, for example, is generally associated with action. Her film
includes a scene of a group of men dressed in folk costumes with exposed
erect penises (the state of erection is not constant; it changes over time with
the penises becoming more and less erect), who simply stand, ‘doing nothing’,
with their erections. Consequently those erections are of no use; they perform
only a decorative function as a background to a sentimental and wistful
Balkan or Slav song performed by Olivera Katarina. In a commentary on the
197
piece, Abramović states that this ‘senseless erection’ provides a symbolic image
of the new Balkan heroes.38
The film’s narration consists of several sequences that describe how male
and female sexual organs (penises and vaginas) and various sexual acts were
used to cure disease, oppose the destructive forces of nature, avert bad luck and
so on. Visual narration is accompanied by an ‘academic’ lecture by the artist,
dressed in black in the guise of a professor, describing various beliefs and
showing short film sequences dealing with issues affecting every individual and
community, such as health, love, abundance of crops and protection against
enemies. One sequence, for example, deals with the problem of keeping one’s
lover or husband faithful. In order to do so, a woman should place a small
fish overnight in her vagina. In the morning, she should dry it, grind it into
powder, and put the powder in her lover’s coffee. If he drinks his morning
coffee with this special additive, he will never leave her. There is also advice on
how a man could avoid impotence with his new bride. He should visit a
nearby bridge, drill three holes in it and then penetrate them. If he does this
on his wedding day, he will never experience impotence. In order to protect
198
a child against evil, a mother should rub her vagina with her hand before
the child leaves home and then touch the child’s face. If a child falls sick, one
should call a beekeeper to take the child to the apiary, take off his pants and
rub his naked buttocks against all the beehives. Abramović also described a
number of remedies that are sexual in character for preventing various calami-
ties that could affect the harvest or weaken farm animals. For instance, in order
to bring about a good harvest, the men should copulate with the ground; their
injected ‘seed’ is certain to enhance the productivity of the fields. When the
‘professor’ describes this custom, we see on the screen a group of naked men
making movements that simulate copulation with the ground. Cultivation
of cabbage was particularly important. If the cabbage harvest is attacked by
41, 42 Marina
Abramović, Balkan
Erotic Epic (detail),
2006.
199
caterpillars, one should be tied with black thread to a small boy’s penis and
kept there until it dies. It was believed that this method would kill all the
pests. Abramović also discussed and suggestively demonstrated in her lecture
a remedy against the serious threat that the harvest could be destroyed by
torrential downpours. In order to prevent such a calamity, women would go
into the fields and expose their genitalia. This was supposed to stop the rain.
If a horse or oxen became weak, a man should touch his genitalia and then
pet the ailing animal with the same hand. This would make it stronger. The
simplest method of demoralizing the enemy before a battle was to send women
who would undress and perform obscene movements in front of the troops.
It was believed that this would distract the enemy soldiers. Not all the customs
described are accompanied by a visual demonstration and not every visual
sequence has a discursive referent. The video begins with a sequence that
shows a woman massaging her uncovered breasts while gazing at the sky. The
artist explained in the interview that she did not discover this motif in any
historical or ethnographic work. No explanation is provided for why the
woman gazes at the sky: her behaviour could be motivated by religious belief,
she could be waiting for planes dropping bombs, or performing a rain ritual.39
Later this motif returns in a scene showing a group of women of different ages
massaging their breasts. The image is accompanied by a song about a girl who
mourns the death of her lover.
Although Abramović created other ‘Balkan’ or post-Yugoslavian works,
this ‘erotic epic’ seems the most multilayered and multivalent. The work does
not provoke unequivocal reaction; instead it activates and undermines the
mechanisms of perception. It touches on many different levels at the strange-
ness of the Balkans, a place exoticized by the Western discourse, mythologized
and mystified, a process described by Maria Todorova in her wonderful book
imagining the Balkans.40 Eroticism generally plays a significant role in any
process that exoticizes faraway, non-western regions. It belongs within the
sphere of orientalism, interest in the East and ‘Balkanism’. In Abramović‘s
version, it is more ironic than exotic, or more precisely self-ironic, since the
artist herself, despite her academic persona, does not distance herself from the
region. These amusing stories, superstitions and myths with erotic subtext
also have a more profound dimension. After all, eroticism often becomes an
instrument of humour, ridicule and mockery. Here, however, one cannot
discern any contempt for Balkan culture. Rather, the mockery is directed
against its use. Folk costumes, folktales, wistful Slavic songs – in other words
the national tradition – have often been invoked by nationalist politicians
and parties, of which there are many in the Balkans. The demonstration of
200
the national tradition’s erotic dimension disarms, to a certain extent, the

nationalist discourse. By dealing with that tradition in the less than serious
context of coarse folk tales, rather than patriotic earnestness, the work
deprives the politicians of one of the most important instruments of nation-
alist mobilization.
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six
New Museums in New Europe
This text has two points of reference. The first is an assumption that the past
always has a traumatic character, although I am using the concept of ‘trauma’
more in a colloquial and functional, rather than a strictly psychoanalytic sense.
Of course, there are different degrees of such trauma; at points the past is more
traumatic than at others. We know that it is difficult to measure the degree of
trauma, however it is clear that the past almost always appears in some way
as traumatic. The only exception is the myth of a ‘golden age’, which idealizes
a remote, mythological past. The second point of reference has to do with
the question of art’s role in the traumatic past, its participation in ‘traumatic
processing’ of historical reality, and its position within historical memory.
Using those two references, I will examine the meaning of several museums
of modern and contemporary art in post-communist Europe.
Every Eastern European knows that there was never a single model of
communism that functioned in the same way throughout the former Eastern
Bloc after 1945. On the contrary, the generation that has survived communism
is fully conscious of the fact that Eastern European communism appeared in
various guises and that the experiences of different countries were sometimes
quite dissimilar. For example in Romania, especially after the mid-1970s, the
regime led by Nicolae Ceauşescu was extremely reactionary, while in Poland
it was much more liberal. Estonia and Lithuania fell somewhere between
those two extremes. Even though both countries lost their independence and
were incorporated into the structure of the Soviet Union (unlike Romania,
which conducted its own politics of forgetting, independently of the ussr),
their situations were significantly different, in particular with regards to the
presence of an independent culture. It should also be noted that independence
was not necessarily conducive to artistic freedom, as the comparison of Estonia
and Romania amply demonstrates. Nonetheless, in each of those four instances
we are dealing with a somewhat different degree of traumatic past. This means
that in looking backwards we are addressing a recollection of a trauma or
approaching the issue from a somewhat different perspective, a traumatiza-
tion of memory. Therefore one could say that we are living in post-traumatic
202
new museums in new europe
times. Paraphrasing Roger Luckhurst’s definition of traumatic culture, we could

call the post-communist culture post-traumatic.1 Luckhurst, following Walter
Benjamin, sees traumatic culture as a syndrome of traumaphilia. Certainly
historical museums such as the House of Terror in Budapest or the Museum
of the Warsaw Uprising in Warsaw could be seen as examples of traumaphilic
institutions. But we could also see an opposite syndrome in the post-traumatic
culture, namely that of traumaphobia. In this chapter I will examine a group of
museums in post-communist Europe through a prism of the tension between
traumaphilia and traumaphobia. I will be referring to the basis of both as a
negative legacy.2 The question that I will address is how traumaphilia and
traumaphobia, seen as specific responses to a negative, traumatic legacy, have
appeared and have been functioning within the museological context and
practice after 1989 in this part of Europe, often referred to as the New Europe
or the Second New Europe, to distinguish it from the Central Europe that
emerged after 1918.
As we all know, a museum is a text. It functions as a special form of
narration constructed and based within its own organizational structure, col-
lections, exhibitions and so on. Mieke Bal describes a museum as a discourse,3
Richard Kendall as a text created through the use of walls and spaces.4 Of
course, architecture plays a significant role in this discourse. There have been
numerous publications dealing with architecture’s role in shaping the museum’s
text. Some have addressed the relationship between that text and the archi-
tecture, which bears and creates particular ideological meanings of specific
museological institutions, and as such functions as its symbolic expression.
Most often, those studying museum architecture have written about how
architecture expressed the meaning of the old museums and how it supported
(or even shaped) their discourse. My goal is to follow a different path and to
ask different questions. I am less interested in a museum’s identity as a text, and
more in its subtext and context created by its not always well-received archi-
tecture or urban location, both of which, for obvious reasons, cannot be without
significance. Therefore I will deal with meanings of particular texts, particular
museological programmes read in the context of the buildings’ location and
their relationship with the past.
Before addressing those issues, I will describe the general situation of
the new museums in Eastern Europe. Hundreds of new museums have been
constructed in Western Europe in recent years. One can find in almost every
country scores of new museums of modern and contemporary art. Spain, where
one could speak of the Bilbao effect, has had particularly extensive experience
in this matter. Almost every city has a new museum of contemporary art: Musac
203
in Leon, macba in Barcelona, cac in Malaga, and many others. Sometimes

those institutions do not have a permanent collection. As a result, the viewer
encounters grand empty spaces, which in an obvious way confer on the museum’s
architecture a certain autonomy. These buildings, often architecturally appeal-
ing, provide the city with significant symbolic capital. A similar situation can
be observed in other Western European countries, as well as in America, Japan
and, most recently, China. One of the latest and most spectacular examples of
museological imperialism is provided by the museum project or rather museum
complex in Abu Dhabi. The plans for the complex include a Performing Arts
Centre (Zaha Hadid), as well as branches of the Guggenheim Museum (Frank
Gehry) and the Louvre (Jean Nouvel). It is easy to agree with Walter Grass-
kamp’s observation that museums as institutions thrive in the globalized world.5
This mass development of museums throughout the world unfortunately has
largely bypassed Eastern Europe. Russia, perhaps, constitutes a special case
since it has a number of collectors, some of whom, for example Igor Markin,
plan to create their own private museums in order to show their art collections.
It must be noted that we are dealing with a certain kind of art museum, namely
a museum of contemporary art (moca), connected with the global status of
contemporary art, which is supported by a museum of modern art (moma),6
implicated in an entirely different ideology, not of global and postmodern
art, but rather of universal modernism ideology linked with the agenda of
imperial universalization of Western modernity. This is not the place to develop
any further the discussion of to what extent ‘global contemporary art’ is an
expression of post-modern neo-imperialism. In the name of terminological
precision, I will only note that some of the institutions I will be examining
use the name ‘museum of modern art’, but in reality their identity is closer
to that of a ‘museum of contemporary art’.
While noting the low interest in post-communist countries in art
museums – history museums are a different matter all together – I do not
intend to argue that the Bilbao effect is entirely absent in the post-communist
countries of Central Europe that recently entered the European Union. I am
only making an observation, which is not exactly original, that this effect is
much less prominent here than in the rest of the world. There are a number of
reasons for this, but one seems particularly important. In this part of Europe,
after 1989, governments at both the local and state levels have paid little
attention to art museums dedicated to either modern or contemporary art;
they do not see them as sources of symbolic capital. In those countries, neo-
liberal politicians have generally presided over economic and social issues.
Leszek Balcerowicz, the two-term Minister of Finance and Deputy Prime
204
Minister of Poland in the 1990s, and later President of the National Bank of
Poland (2001–7), is representative of this group. Within his strategy of econ -
omic restructuring of Poland, Balcerowicz implemented the recommendations
of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, institutions whose
economic doctrines were less than sympathetic to the public sector, including
educational and cultural institutions. Eastern European cultural policies are
quite different from those in the West. In her essay on the Guggenheim
museum in Bilbao, Andrea Fraser writes that in the West art institutions as
well as vacant, post-industrial areas converted into entertainment and cultural
centres function for their own benefit.7 Sometimes support for museums
from politicians and the private sector leads to what Mari Carmen Ramirez
has identified as ‘brokering of identity’, a strategy of financial expansion that
utilizes national culture.8 In Eastern Europe the neo-liberal cult of money
and faith in self-regulation of the markets has created barriers for support
of cultural projects, especially public ones. There has also been insufficient
private capital and an absence of great art collections and of the art market,
both of which tend to put pressure on public institutions and impact their
development. Even neo-liberal businessmen who wanted to utilize culture as
an economic instrument within their market games did not have a coherent
strategy for doing so. The majority of them simply do not believe that cultural
or symbolic capital supports economic capital. Of course, the art market
needs public art museums in order to legitimize its own interests. Other than
in Russia, particularly Moscow – with the exception of Victor Pinchuk in
Kiev, who financed the city’s Art Centre – there is no ‘big money’ invested in
art and the local art market. In particular with regards to contemporary art,
interest is simply too weak to mobilize public art museums and encourage
them to become more active.
This does not mean that Central Europe lacks museums of modern or
contemporary art. On the contrary, it is worth remembering that the first such
museum in this part of the world was created in Poland in 1932, when a group
of Polish Constructivists presented the city museum in Łódź with an ‘interna-
tional collection’ of modern art. The resulting museum became the third
museum of modern art in the world, after New York and Hanover. This historic
collection still constitutes the core of the collection at the Art Museum (Muzeum
Sztuki) in Łódź, an institution that has recently acquired a very attractive new
post-industrial space in the former textile factory complex known today as
‘Manufacture’. After the war two museums of contemporary art were created
in Yugoslavia: in 1954 in Zagreb (the museum’s new building was opened to
the public in late 2009) and in 1958 in Belgrade. In the same year, a museum
205
of contemporary art opened in Yerevan in Armenia, then a republic in the ussr.

We should also mention, among others, the Ludwig Museum in Budapest,
created in the late 1980s, the Moderna Galerija in Ljubljana, one of the most
active museums of modern art in post-communist Europe, and Veletržni Palác
in Prague (a branch of the Czech National Gallery), which operates one of the
largest exhibition spaces in the region next to the Eesti Kunstimuuseum
(kumu) in Tallinn.
Using the theoretical frame mentioned at the beginning of this chapter,
I will focus on four new museums of contemporary/modern art that have been
created in recent years. They are the National Museum of Contemporary Art
(mnac) in Bucharest, which opened in 2004, the kumu art museum in
Tallinn, Estonia (strictly speaking a general museum of art with an emphasis
on modern and contemporary art), which opened in 2006, the National Art
Gallery in Vilnius (an institution that emerged from the Lithuanian Museum
of Art and is dedicated to collecting and exhibition of modern art), which
opened in new quarters in mid-2009, and the Warsaw Museum of Modern Art
(at present functioning in temporary quarters, with the permanent building
still under construction).
I would also like to mention an issue crucial for our discussion, namely
that of the location of those institutions. The Bucharest mnac occupies part
of the gigantic People’s Palace, which was built by the regime of Nicolae
Ceauşescu in the 1980s and currently also houses the Romanian Parliament.
It is the third largest building in the world (in terms of square footage) after
the Pentagon and the headquarters of Chinese State Television in Beijing. The
Lithuanian National Art Gallery occupies the former Museum of the Revolu-
tion, one of the ideologically most important Soviet institutions. The building
43 People’s Palace housing the National Museum of Contemporary Art (mnac), Bucharest.
206
44 Entrance to the National Museum of Contemporary Art (mnac), Bucharest.
dates from the period when Lithuania was a Soviet republic and to a certain
extent is associated with this period. The Warsaw Museum of Modern Art
will be built in close proximity to the Palace of Culture and Science, a potent
symbol of Soviet domination constructed in the 1950s according to a Russian
design. It is still the tallest building in Warsaw, standing at the intersection of
Świętokrzyska and Marszałkowska Avenues in a part of the city characterized
by the prevalence of the architectural style referred to as ‘socialist modernism’.
Only the location of the Estonian kumu has nothing to do with the commu-
nist past. The museum’s new and stylistically contemporary building, designed
by Pekka Vapaavuori, is situated outside Tallinn and surrounded by a large
park. The question I wish to pose concerning those art institutions has to do
with the significance of their locations and the meaning of hidden relations
between the present, symbolized by contemporary art, and the past of the
former communist regimes invoked by the museums’ locations. This question
interrogates whether such locations have a deeper significance beyond prag-
matic considerations concerning the need to situate a museological institution
within an urban space and the context of existing architecture. Could we arrive
at any conclusions using this proposition regarding the location of art within
history as well as our relationship to it?
207
The National Museum of Contemporary Art in Bucharest opened in

the People’s Palace in 2004. Mihai Oroveanu, its director, wrote in the intro-
duction to the book published on the occasion of its inauguration that the
word ‘museum’ is usually associated with retrospection, maintenance of the
past and of the values sanctioned by that past. Announcing the museum’s
future projects, he stressed that here that would not be the case. On the con-
trary, the future rather than the past would serve as the museum’s focus. The
new museum would become a ‘laboratory’ of new values, open to an interna-
tional dialogue, new media, a synthesis of contemporary means of expression
and so on. For our discussion it is important to note that, according to the
director, the mission of this particular museum was to provide means for reject-
ing the negative legacy identified with the People’s Palace. The museum should,
in other words, facilitate the process of forgetting the communist regime in
Romania and opening the country to the world and the future.9 Ruxandra
Balaci, the chief curator of mnac and the organizer of the opening exhibition
‘Romanian artists (and not only) love the Palace?!’, added that the exhibition
revealed that the iconography and symbolism of the ‘monstrous palace’ had
changed since the times when it was used in the official art of the Ceauşescu
regime. The path leads from its function as a symbol of totalitarianism, to its
critical use in the art of the 1990s by the key Romanian contemporary artists,
such as Ion Grigorescu, Subreal and Călin Dan, to those of the youngest
generation, who treat the Palace with an irony that mixes absurdity with sym-
pathy. It is those youngest artists, who do not feel any connection with the
times of their parents, who are driving the negative legacy of the Palace
towards oblivion. They look to the future rather than the past, trying to create
something positive out of the frustrations experienced by those who have lived
through communism. Balaci reaffirms the director’s vision of the museum as
a new institution that must function, above all, as a laboratory of new art,
open to the international art scene, contemporary innovations and ‘ultra-
contemporary challenges’.10
Those statements leave little doubt concerning the ambitions of the
mnac to be an institution open to contemporary international culture, show-
casing the newest art, rather than being a museological one turned towards
the past. The latter must be pushed away and forgotten; the negative legacy
must be removed, rather than analysed or, much less, celebrated. mnac is sup-
posed to create a space for the future; it is supposed to function as a type of salon
for contemporary art, a Kunsthalle, rather than a museum in the traditional
sense. In fact, its mission consists of organizing exhibitions, not collecting.
Although the museum has a collection of post-war art, which was transferred
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from the modern art department of the National Gallery of Art of Romania
and mainly, if not exclusively, comprises socialist realist paintings, in particular
portraits of Ceauşescu and his wife Elena, it has no intention of exhibiting
them. Its institutional identity is not supposed to be based on those works,
but on contemporary global art practice.
The exhibition programme confirms mnac’s traumaphobic attitude
towards the past.11 Over the last few years, the museum has staged many shows.
The first one, ‘Romanian artists (and not only) love the Palace?!’, seemed very
promising. It had nothing in common with the traumaphobic attitude. On
the contrary, it attempted to work through the past and the communist trauma.
The invited artists, both from Romania and elsewhere, were proposing a type
of playful engagement, sometimes ironic, sometimes completely absurd, with
this spectacular symbol of the Ceauşescu era. The exhibition collected not
only works of art but also statements by artists, cultural activists and academics
concerning the social, ethical and architectural aspects of the building that
houses the new museum. Discussions concerning its history and symbolism,
which provided the framework for the exhibition, engaged the viewer in a dia-
logue on the post-communist condition.12 The exhibition fulfilled the
expectations raised by the location and the institution sited within it. It could
have been a sign of things to come, but it was not. Although the museum’s sub-
sequent exhibitions sometimes featured works that took up the analysis of
the post-communist condition, in particular those produced by leading artists
of the Romanian neo-avant garde, such as Horia Bernea, Geta Brătescu,
Roman Cotosman, Ion Grigorescu and Paul Neagu, most of the shows had
the traumaphobic character forecast by Oroveanu and Balaci. The exhibition
programme has featured many shows of international contemporary art that
shared nothing in common with the critical analysis of the post-communist
condition showcased in the inaugural exhibition. These included ‘Digital Video
Art’, 2005, ‘Europe in Art – Project of the hgb group’, 2005, which presented
the collection of contemporary art amassed by this bank, ‘German Art Space’,
2005, ‘Deposit’, 2005, which gathered a diverse and seemingly haphazard
collection of contemporary art, a show of photographic experiments from the
collection of the Valencia Institute of Contemporary Art, 2006, ‘Dutch Instal-
lation Art’, 2006, ‘Through Popular Culture’, 2006, an exhibition of Chinese
contemporary art, a show of Scandinavian video art, 2006, contemporary Japan-
ese architecture, 2006, French frac collections, 2007, Brazilian video art, 2007,
works from the collection of the Paris Société Generale, 2007, and many
others that seem to be a result of the curators’ art tourism. Of course, it is easy
to understand why the museum organizes those types of exhibitions. What
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seems problematic is its abandonment of the critical perspective demonstrated

in such a promising way by the inaugural exhibition. Be that as it may, it is
clear that forgetting and displacement of the trauma associated with the past,
combined with a refusal to address the problematic of the post-traumatic
(post-communist) condition of contemporaneity, constitutes one of the symp-
toms of traumaphobia.
The exhibitions organized by the mnac demonstrate that the museum’s
attention is focused on the international mainstream culture. Some of the
exhibitions were sourced from the corporate world, which plays a very active
role in the Western art market and has sponsored major art collections in
accordance with the (Western) neo-liberal strategy. I realize that for such an
impoverished (by international standards) exhibition venue the opportunity to
attract ready-made exhibitions featuring works of generally good artistic quality
could be very attractive or, at the very least, economically feasible. Corporations
often cover the costs associated with the staging of exhibitions featuring their
collections, because they see them as an investment in symbolic capital, or a
form of economically affordable advertising. For the Bucharest public thirsting
for the great world of contemporary art, such exhibitions also seem attractive.
In effect, they seem to benefit all concerned: the corporations, the museum
and the public. However, such an exhibition programme implemented at the
site of the People’s Palace, perhaps the most important lieu de mémoire in
Romania, to use Pierre Nora’s phrase, makes apparent not only economic
problems facing the country and its cultural institutions, but also, and above all,
exposes the museum’s flight from history and its trauma; it reveals its abnega-
tion of a critical attitude towards the past. The mnac programme has been
decisively focused on contemporary global artistic culture. And perhaps there
is nothing surprising in this fact. Imitation of the practices of the globalized
art world is common, and as I mentioned earlier citing Walter Grasskamp,
museums provide the most fully realized example of global institutions.13
However, if a museum such as mnac chooses to focus exclusively on the
global art scene and to ignore the country’s past, then this must be a significant
gesture. Clearly it should be seen as a compensation for and a reaction to a
traumatic past.
Following Homi Bhabha, we could call this type of practice mimicry,
since within it the colonized imitates the colonizer, thereby participating in
his own colonization. His appearance resembles that of the colonizer; he or
she is even more like the colonizer than the colonizer himself/herself and
this difference, a particular form of excess, reveals that he is being colonized.
Therefore such mimicry is a self-colonizing practice. When approached from
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the perspective of power relations, it is a manifestation of the colonizer’s

dominance. If we translate this into local terms, one could say that mnac
wants to be even more international, worldly, cosmopolitan and global than
the contemporary world. If all those adjectives really are of Western prov-
enance, and indeed they are (internationalism, globalism, cosmopolitanism
and so on are strategies of Western hegemony), then in attempting to be more
western than the West, and even more global, mnac is turning itself into a
colonized province.
The strategy used by mnac denies one of the basic traits of a museum as
an institution, namely its local character. According to Hans Belting, museums
are local by definition. Their functioning inscribes expectations of the local
public. They are instruments that allow us to understand local societies. In
effect, they represent more a pluralistic world than the singularism of the art
world.14 In this particular instance the strategy of the Bucharest museum –
the one announced by its leadership as well as the one pursued in practice –
provides us, whether we like it or not, with a testimony on the local public.
This does not mean that there are only those expectations I described earlier.
The situation is much more complicated. Some Romanian artists and members
of the public have criticized the museum’s policy of adopting a certain attitude
of mimicry and its uncritical desire to inscribe itself into a more imagined than
real art world. As a matter of fact, such criticism deals with a broader issue,
also addressed by Belting in his writings that pose questions regarding the
local character of contemporary art. It seems that contemporary art also has
local character produced by the historical contexts that create interpretative
frames, which, by definition, refer to local culture and local public, even when
artists seem to be escaping them. Therefore a museum of contemporary art in
the era of globalization may be seen primarily through the lens of locality.
However, such ‘locality’ does not suggest links with ‘national heritage’. some-
thing that characterizes the attitude promoted by right-wing politicians.
Belting discusses this in terms of a dynamic tension between a concrete place,
specific topography and processes of globalization.15 It is a confrontation of
two reference points, local and global, and a collision of two perspectives,
also in terms of an audience. The local audience is the audience that defines
the museum at its sources and creates its context; the global audience is the
audience that above all appears though the agency of the powerful art tourism
industry. Of course, not all museums experience the latter phenomenon to the
same extent. mnac is only in a minor way affected by contemporary tourism,
which focuses on the great comprehensive, mainly Western European and
American museums, such as the Louvre, British Museum, Metropolitan
211
Museum and Prado, or museums of modern and contemporary art, such as

the New York Moma or London Tate Modern. Every one of those institutions
has its very local, historically situated roots; each, at the same time, plays a major
role in global art culture and, above all, in global consumer culture through
its collections and ‘blockbuster’ exhibitions. The various biennales, typical
products of the artistic globalization, are their most important competition.
But this juxtaposition also reveals the status of the museum. Although bien-
nales are organized in particular locations, seemingly in response to the notion
of regional character of global artistic culture, they are in reality deprived of
locality. They are often organized by foreign curators, a fact that is supposed
to raise their prestige and significance within the art world. Their public is
to a significant extent international; it comes specifically for the biennale
and does not demonstrate significant interest in the local culture. If they have
any significance for the local public, it is as a kind of party or window onto the
world; they have no rootedness in the local history or social structures. That
is why a museum of contemporary art always has a dual identity. Even when
it wants to be entirely global, it is in reality local. It was created here, in a con-
crete place; here is its history and public. Therefore it possesses certain
characteristics that biennales do not have. Understood in this way, museums,
in particular (though not exclusively) museums of modern/contemporary art,
could potentially function as political forums, places where the contemporary
condition, whether defined as global, postcolonial or post-communist, could
be debated. They could play this role precisely because they span the distance
between locality and globality.
But let’s return to our main subject. If mnac appears here as a typical
example of a traumaphobic response by a museum to the past, such response is
perfectly understandable in a local context. Nevertheless, the museum’s trauma-
phobic character prevents it from functioning as a political forum. By contrast,
two other institutions mentioned earlier, the Art Museum kumu in Tallinn and
the National Art Gallery in Vilnius, come closer to embracing the traumaphilic
attitude. In different ways, unlike the Romanian mnac, those institutions are
attempting to work through rather than exclude the past trauma.
Neither the location nor the architecture of kumu relates in any way to
the communist past. Therefore it is impossible to use those features of the
Tallinn museum to identify its relationship to any of the attitudes towards the
historic trauma discussed earlier. This new museological institution occupies
a brand new, custom-designed building located in a large park situated outside
the city. More important for our discussion is the permanent installation of
its collection of twentieth-century art. The museum’s curator, Eha Komissarov,
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45 Museum of Art (kumu), Tallinn.
made a decision to include as part of the permanent exhibition socialist realist

paintings, which are understood in Estonia as art of the colonizers and there-
fore as Soviet art. This decision provoked heated discussion among artists
and, more generally, cultural producers. The detractors accused the curator
of promoting the art of the occupiers, something she definitely did not intend
to do. Komissarov, however, did feel that this type of work provides a neces-
sary historic reference for the independent Estonian art of the communist
period, especially of the 1970s (when Estonia was after Moscow the second
place in the ussr where one could see relatively dynamic development of such
art), but also for Estonian contemporary art.16 The curator maintained that
without such context one could not understand any of those phenomena, or
at least could not understand them as historical phenomena. This decision, in
addition to suggesting a number of other references, reminds me of a classic
form of psychoanalytic therapy, which heals by repeating or reminding the
patient of the experienced trauma. In other words, Komissarov was quite
conscious of the fact that repression of trauma (something that was being
suggested by her critics) and therefore certain forms of traumaphobia could
engender, to use Dominick LaCapra’s terms, a ‘discourse of absence’ that could
produce a state of disorientation or even confusion.17 That is why this effort
to work though the traumatic past, here symbolized by the exhibition of
213
socialist realist paintings, seems to function as an important step towards a

recovery of the historic location of Estonian culture as well as discovery of its
proper location within the contemporary world or, in other words, construc-
tion of its local identity.
The next example is provided by the National Art Gallery in Vilnius,
which is located in the restored building formerly occupied by the Museum
of the Revolution, founded during the period when Lithuania was one of the
Soviet republics. The National Art Gallery, which functions as a museum of
twentieth and twenty-first century art, was created in 2002 when the Depart-
ment of Modern Art, which absorbed the Contemporary Art Information
Center (part of the network of institutions created throughout Eastern Europe
in the 1990s by George Soros), separated from the main collection of the
Lithuanian Museum of Art. The museum’s still developing programme is
very ambitious and includes collecting modern art, its permanent exhibition,
and temporary exhibitions of local as well as international contemporary
art.18 The mainly local permanent collection, acquired from the Lithuanian
Museum of Art, will continue to develop. It currently contains Lithuanian art
produced after 1945 during the period of Soviet occupation, including ‘social-
ist’ art, also understood here in Estonia as art of the occupiers. According to
this programme, the independent as well as official post-war art will function
as a historic reference point for contemporary art, which certainly appears to be
the main focus of the National Art Gallery, as it is at the kumu in Tallinn. In
contrast to the mnac in Bucharest, however, which appears to want to function
as an exhibition hall rather than a traditional museum, the National Art Gallery
in Vilnius wants to play the role of a national institutional collector of modern
art. Of course its most interesting feature for our discussion is its location in
the former Museum of the Revolution. The gallery opened in mid-2009 after
46 National Art
Gallery, Vilnius.
214
necessary renovations and modification of the existing building. The project

was accompanied by a certain amount of apprehension. During this period
the Lithuanian government decided to rebuild or rather build (due to lack
of iconographic records that could guide historically accurate reconstruction)
the Lower Castle of the Lithuanian Royal Palace in Vilnius, which functioned
as the seat of the dynasties that ruled historical Lithuania. Because this proj-
ect required a major financial commitment, there was a real possibility that
this would delay the opening of the National Art Gallery.19 Luckily, that did
not occur. During this period, there also appeared a plan based on a collabora-
tive initiative by the Guggenheim Museum and the Hermitage, St Petersburg,
to open a new museum of modern art, designed by Zaha Hadid, in Vilnius.
This project, which does not appear to have progressed beyond an initial stage,
never posed a real threat to the development of the National Art Gallery. Had
it been realized, though, it would certainly have created an interesting oppor-
tunity for discussion of the Russian re-colonization of this territory with the
use of symbolic capital accumulated, in this instance, by one of the greatest
museological institutions of the former (but still powerful and active) empire
undertaken in cooperation with another empire.
Of course, we could approach this history from a much more pragmatic,
rather than semantic perspective and say that the National Art Gallery in Vilnius
does not have to assign great significance to its location. Lolita Jablonskiene,
the gallery’s chief curator, worries much more about the limits imposed on
the functioning of the gallery than on the dialectic of traumaphobia and
traumaphilia. That is a typically pragmatic rather than ideological concern. But
for a historian, the museum’s spatial context, its location as well as its architec-
ture, cannot be ignored irrespective of the pragmatic concerns of the gallery’s
administration. That context cannot be neutral on the deeper semantic level.
In other words, someone working on the history of museums cannot ignore
the spatial context, especially since in this instance one can find interesting
relations between that context and the collecting as well as exhibition plans
of this institution. If those plans deal with works produced in Lithuania after
1945, under Soviet occupation, and include official as well as semi-official art,
since unlike in Estonia there was a significant artistic underground in Lithu -
ania during this period, we could conclude that the gallery is much closer to
the traumaphilic than traumaphobic attitude.
The case of the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw is much more com-
plicated. That museum is still under construction. Currently it has neither a
building nor a collection, but it does have an architectural design. This fact is
significant in this particular context, because the plan to create a museum of
215
contemporary art has been under discussion in Poland, with interruptions,

since 1945. Actually the Warsaw museum is already operating in a temporary
building, but it is impossible to see this space as anything resembling a proper
museological context. However, this is not the source of the complication.
What makes the situation in Warsaw so much more complex than that in the
other cities mentioned is the nature of dialectic relationship between trauma-
phobia and traumaphilia, which in Poland simply is not as obvious as in the
other countries. My decision to discuss the Warsaw Museum of Modern Art in
this chapter creates a certain paradox, but also gets to the heart of the matter.
The argument behind such a thesis seems fairly obvious. Polish post-war art,
with the exception of a short episode in the early 1950s regarded today as an
exotic experience understood more in terms of post-memory than memory as
such, is not associated with communist trauma in the way that it is in Estonia,
Lithuania or Romania. I am willing to risk oversimplifying the issue by sug-
gesting that for many years, beginning in 1956 and ending with the fall of
communism in 1989, art was (and continues to be) understood in Poland more
within categories of ‘joy’ than of trauma, with a few notable exceptions. Of
course, this does not mean that the tension between traumaphilia and trauma-
phobia cannot be used here to analyse the history of art or of the museums.
On the contrary, it can, but it requires a more complicated frame of reference.
The museum will be erected on a site that faces one side the Soviet-
era Palace of Science and Culture and is in close proximity to the ‘socialist
modernist’ architecture of Świętokrzyska and Marszałkowska Avenues. When
the architectural competition (or rather two competitions) for the building
was announced, it was initially expected that the museum would function a
counterweight to its architectural surroundings, especially the massive Palace
of Science and Culture. The expectation was that the architectural design of
the new museum would challenge the privileged position of the Palace within
the city’s centre. At one point during the ceremonial signing of the contract
between representatives of the city and national governments, the project’s
two main backers, which took place on the future site of the museum, the
lights in the nearby Palace of Science and Culture were temporarily turned off.
This was supposed to symbolize the fact that the new international and modern
culture represented by the museum and its architectural design would con-
front the Stalinist architecture of the Palace and the historical memory it
embodied. However, the international jury of the architectural competition
selected Christian Kerez’s project, which challenged neither the Palace nor the
‘soc-modernist’ environment, and instead inscribed the museum’s structure
into the latter. It harmonized the new building with the urban environment
216
of the Palace by visually extending the line of its side wings. After strident
public debate surrounding the jury’s verdict, and under pressure from the press
(mainly the newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza, which took a very partisan position
on the issue), as well as state (Ministry of Culture) and local (city government)
officials, the museum’s director, Tadeusz Zielniewicz, who wanted to reject the
jury’s verdict, resigned. The museum’s Programming Board and some of the
members of its Board of Governors also resigned. In reality many, though not
all, of the board members as well as Zielniewicz favoured a ‘typical’ architec-
tural design submitted by Jarosław Kozakiewicz, working with the design
company Grupa 5 and Ala Architects, which won an honorable mention in
the competition.
In strictly architectural terms, the meaning of the winning design was
clear; it challenged neither the soc-realist Palace of Culture, nor the surrounding
soc-modernism. In historic terms, Kerez’s project represents neither disavowal,
nor an effort to address the trauma. It neither rejects nor wishes to repeat the
negative legacy. Instead it functions in terms of coexistence, as a certain corres-
pondence between the present and the past. This is particularly apparent if one
pays attention to the ‘L’ shape of the building, to a significant extent imposed
on the design by Warsaw City Council, which was trying to harmonize the
urban areas surrounding the Palace of Culture, to close off the plaza, and to
47 Project design for the new Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw, 2007.
217
establish the main axis of its spatial composition along Złota Street. It is worth
mentioning that another new building that is supposed to be built on the
other side of the Plac Defilad, and which is also using the ‘L’ plan, will function
as a pendant for the Museum of Modern Art. In short, the architecture of the
museum slips away from the tension between traumaphilia and traumaphobia,
and, precisely for that reason, zeros in on the problem of the Polish memory of
communism. In order to explain this paradox more fully, we have to examine
the plans for the future collection of the Museum of Modern Art, which were
developed before the architectural competition was decided.20
Unlike mnac, but similarly to kumu and National Art Gallery in Vilnius,
the Warsaw museum plans to create a collection of not only contemporary art,
namely art created after 1989, but also, as much as possible, of historic works
created before the fall of communism. According to the planning documents
and discussions taking place within the museum, the institution is supposed
to focus much more on contemporary than on modern art. In general ‘con-
temporaneity’, as conceived by the museum’s vision of history, begins in 1989
with the fall of communism. Everything before is ‘historic’, everything after
‘contemporary’. If the museum maintained this date as an absolute line of
historical demarcation of its programmatic activities, then we could see this
as a symptom of traumaphobia. But that is not the case. A decision was made
to extend the collection’s historical depth, including art of the 1960s, referred
to within Polish art history as post-thaw art and associated with the neo-avant
garde. Such understanding of contemporaneity is typical for museums of con-
temporary art in Europe and the us. And that is the heart of the problem. In
Poland, unlike in most of the other communist countries (with the exception
of Yugoslavia), neo-avant garde art cannot be seen as a victim of the communist
system. One could even say that Polish neo-avant garde art was created within
that system. It is true that to a certain extent this work took a polemic stance vis-
à-vis the system, but it is clear that in the majority of its manifestations it was
not (especially not openly) critical of the system. There were a few exceptions.
The vast majority of experiences within the sphere of the Polish neo-avant
garde were not traumatic but, as I have already mentioned, ‘joyful.’ There
was no painful oppression or repressions: rather one encountered a colourful
festival atmosphere. This constitutes a very different context for any discussion
of the museum’s historical references than one would find in Romania, for
example, where repression was severe, or Lithuania and Estonia, where artistic
freedom was significantly restricted compared to the situation in Poland. Social-
ist Realism, which as a rule functioned as a negative point of reference for
modernist and neo-avant garde art throughout Eastern Europe, did not play
218
such a role in Poland. Here, unlike in other Eastern Bloc countries (with the
exception of Yugoslavia), Socialist Realism disappeared in 1956, while in
Romania and the Baltic republics it continued to function as a state art doctrine
until the very end, namely until 1989. Therefore collecting art of the 1960s,
’70s and ’80s in Poland means something very different than it does in the
other Eastern Bloc countries (again with the exception of Yugoslavia). In short,
it is difficult to connect such collecting interests with any references to the his-
toric trauma.
Of course, I do not intend to claim that Poles and Polish artists were
free under communism. This country may have been a ‘velvet’ prison, but it
was still a prison. If Poles were satisfied with the system, they would not have
struggled against it for so many years. After all, the events of the year 1989 were
a result of their long-term resistance. This date not only has historic signifi-
cance, but also, however flexibly, it limits and defines the geographic interests
of the Warsaw Museum of Modern Art. It should also be noted that the year
1989 as a date is shared by the whole of Central Europe, unlike other politically
significant dates, such as 1956 or 1968–70, which had different, sometimes con-
trary artistic resonances in different areas. Therefore this date, which symbolizes
the fall of communism, has been functioning as a shared historic base for cre-
ation of regional programmatic strategies. It appears that the Warsaw museum
plans to take advantage of this opportunity in developing its programmatic
course, though naturally that is not its only, or rather not its main, focus in
the context of the shared historic interests in post-communist Europe. The
Warsaw Museum of Modern Art plans, among others, to draw on such experi-
ences in developing its permanent collection and exhibition programme to a
much greater (one could even say incomparable) degree than either mnac or
the museums in Tallinn and Vilnius. Already one can clearly see those interests
in the programme that the Warsaw institution is realizing in its makeshift, tem-
porary and rather modest quarters. This was apparent in three events that took
place in 2008: an exhibition of the Yugoslav neo-avant garde documentation,
the conference ‘1968, 1989’, and an exhibition of works by Ion Grigorescu, a
key figure of the Romanian neo-avant garde. All three events took place in the
temporary quarters occupied by the museum. This means that if this project
succeeds – if the museum maintains its commitment to those interests – then
its collection will be the third collection, after the Moderna Galerija in Ljubljana
(2000) and Erste Bank in Vienna (2006), to focus on Eastern European post-
war art, in particular the neo-avant garde. By stressing those geo-historic
interests, the museum is naturally inscribing itself into Poland’s desire to be
seen as a country that led political changes and caused the fall of communism,
219
something that the world appears to underestimate and that seems, perhaps,
to be overestimated in Poland.
As I have argued, the architecture of the Warsaw Museum of Modern
Art parallels the institution’s collecting programme in so far as it appears to be
neither traumaphobic nor traumaphilic. It reveals, however, the softness of the
transition from communism to post-communism in Poland. If the former was
not particularly traumatic for the Poles, or at least is not currently associated
with a major trauma within the collective memory along the same lines as it
is in the other countries of the former Eastern Bloc, then the history of art of
this period also cannot be associated with a traumatic past. If one can speak
of a Polish historical trauma, at least in reference to the recent past, then per-
haps one should relate it to the period of economic and political transition,
the increase in poverty and the enormous wave of unemployment (at times
reaching 20 per cent) caused by the neo-liberal policies of the 1990s, rather than
the preceding communist period.21 One could say that there is no clear basis in
Poland either for traumatophobic or radically traumatophilic cultural strategies
(despite repeated appeals for such by some right-wing politicians) because the
negative legacy is not fully, or at least not to an overwhelming degree, perceived
as negative.
However, it is clear that everywhere, including Poland, the communist
system was intensely claustrophobic. People could not travel, or could not travel
freely, which meant that they could not freely participate in the international
art world. The regime of Nicolae Ceauşescu created a particularly harsh prison
for all Romanians. Now, when Romania is a free country and a member of
the European Union, its interest in the global art scene seems completely
understandable as a reaction to the traumatic past. However, if those interests
fill almost the entire programme of the country’s largest museum dedicated
to contemporary art and, moreover, are not accompanied by the critical attitude
towards the past that one would expect given the particular specificity of the
museum’s location, then it is impossible not to see them as a symptom of trauma-
phobia. On the other side there are the former Soviet republics that today are
independent countries affiliated with the European Union. During the period
from 1940 to 1990 they lacked sovereignty and were fully integrated into the
Soviet organism. This prolonged absence of independence appears to have en-
gendered an attitude resembling traumaphilia within the ongoing project
aimed at defining national identity in relation to the past and confrontation
with the Russian aggressors. Such an attitude towards the past seems to provide
useful tools for dealing with the trap of the ‘discourse of absence’ and disorien-
tation described by Dominick LaCapra,22 and what follows, for constructing
220
national identity. Poland faces a unique situation. Because definition of the

past in terms of a trauma is not obvious to everyone, or even commonly
accepted, especially now, when twenty years have passed since the fall of
communism, the dialectic of traumaphilia/traumaphobia seems less useful
for historic analysis, at least in its clinical form. But as we have seen through
the example of the architecture as well as the programme of the Warsaw
Museum of Modern Art, it is precisely this lack of clarity surrounding those
concepts that reflects the idiosyncratic character of the country’s collective
memory as well as its ambition to be seen as a place that led the region in its
historic transformation.
221
part three
Democracy after Communism
seven
Art and Biopolitics: Ilya Kabakov
and Krzysztof Wodiczko
The term homo sacer identifies a man dedicated to a god, but also a man
who is an outcast or cursed, a man given over to the gods of the underworld,
who exists outside human law, who can be killed, but cannot be saved. This
concept was introduced into the lexicon of contemporary humanism by
Giorgio Agamben. In his book Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life,
Agamben extends Michel Foucault’s analysis of power by arguing that, in so far
as the mechanisms used to subordinate ‘naked life’ are concerned, the modern
conceptions of totalitarian and liberal power cannot be seen as opposites,
but rather should be considered in terms of their similarities.1 Moreover, the
modern conception of the state has succeeded in gradually gaining the power
or a particular type of freedom to shape the ‘biopolitical body’. According to
Agamben, the ancients distinguished the concept of biological life from that
of political life. The moderns, on the other hand, introduced biopolitics,
which links biological and political life, subjecting both to the rule of the
sovereign power. Agamben adds that the ‘naked life’ belongs to homo sacer, a
human being who ‘can be killed, but cannot be sacrificed’. Of course this
describes a concentration camp, which here functions not only as a metaphor
of Nazism and Sovietism, but also of the modern power. In fact, one could
say that it is a paradigm of such power. Following in Carl Schmitt’s footsteps,
Agamben adopts the following definition of sovereignty: ‘one is sovereign
when one can make decisions regarding the state of emergency’. This defini-
tion, which brings life itself to the level of ‘naked life’ and politics to the level
of biopolitics, means that in its very essence the modern state is sovereign.
In his short but extraordinarily significant book Agamben develops this
idea, creating, in my opinion, one of the most important twentieth-century
theories of power after those of Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault. The
author traces the development of biopolitics, or life’s subordination to power,
within historic context, noting the importance of the Declaration of the
Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789). This document unambiguously states
that with his birth a man acquires certain rights. But by acquiring them, he
also becomes a citizen, and as a citizen he becomes a subject of the state and,
225
therefore, part of the structure of power that politicizes ‘naked life’. Other
legal acts and political practices reinforce this convergence between life and
politics. Paradoxically, seen from this perspective, Alfred Rosenberg’s Blood
and Honour (Blut und Ehre, 1936) does not constitute a denial of the Decla-
ration but its extreme development. Similarly, the Nuremberg Laws do not
invalidate the liberal-democratic legal codes of citizenship introduced by
European countries at the beginning of the twentieth century, but merely
develop them into an extreme form. Agamben observes that as a consequence
of this logic, the concentration camp appears not so much as a historic anom-
aly but as a peculiar product of the modern legal system, and as such a
quintessence of modernity. It would be easy to find examples that clearly dem-
onstrate the propensity of the so-called democratic contemporary states to
rely on ‘camps’ as a method for exercising power; most do not necessarily do
so in as spectacular way as did the United States with Guantanamo Bay. But
that is beside the point. What is important is to realize that a camp does not
represent a negation, but the extreme of a system of jurisprudence based in
biopolitics; it is a system that kills on the one hand, while on the other pro-
tects health, prenatal life, and regulates genetic research and abortion. This
conception assumes that the state owns the body, or that it is in a position
to make decisions concerning ‘naked’ or biological life, a fact that has diverse,
sometimes extreme consequences.
Giorgio Agamben’s ideas have become well known though a series of
new editions of his books available in translation, and through commentaries,
summaries and as reprinted in anthologies. This frees me from the obligation
to provide a detailed account of his work. I am only interested in developing
a certain train of thought provoked by this author in order to situate it within
different aspects of the art of Ilya Kabakov and Krzysztof Wodiczko. Although
both coming from Eastern Europe but working mainly in the West, these artists
have addressed different aspects of the problematic of man’s entanglement in
the mechanisms of power in different ways. Both are interested in the issue
of biopolitics. However, they represent two aspects of this critical approach:
one more constrained, the other much more expansive. The first aspect, which
applies to Kabakov, associates ‘the state of emergency’ and biopolitics with
the omnipotence of the state or, to be more precise, with the totalitarian state
(in this instance the ussr), or rather its memory invoked as a reference point
in a post-Soviet discourse. The second, which applies to Wodiczko, takes the
opposite route. It represents an effort to expand Agamben’s observations and
relate them to a broader empirical context than that of a state. In this second
field it would be easy to surmise that the principle of biopolitics can be applied
226
Art and Biopolitics: Ilya Kabakov and Krzysztof Wodiczko
to a very broadly defined concept of power exercised by corporations, social

institutions and organizations, which binds human beings in many different
ways to political and economic structures. This constitutes the basic mecha-
nism that locates contemporary man within broadly understood social
order and, as such, has a fundamental significance for our understanding of
contemporaneity.
Housing is one of the basic human rights. A man should not only have
a right to a home, but should also have a right to adequate and decent housing.
He should have a right to privacy, safety and the ability to create his own space.
A home is a shelter and its defence should be guaranteed by the state through
laws. However, in the ussr, a state under a permanent ‘state of emergency’, those
human rights were violated by the totalitarian legislature and social apparatus
of power. Communal apartments, created after nationalization of apartment
buildings during the revolutionary period, were de facto turned into barracks.
Families and single individuals were assigned rooms according to strict criteria
that allowed a few square metres per person; under those conditions the apart-
ments ceased to function as homes. In addition to the administratively allocated
spaces, which the regime could give away and take back, the communal apart-
ments also had shared areas, including kitchens, bathrooms and corridors.
The state not only decided who would live with whom and therefore who
would share those common spaces, but also controlled the character of the
communal life by instigating tensions among tenants and creating circum-
stances under which they would control and police themselves, as well as
report on each other, often in revenge for unavoidable conflicts. Because the
private spaces assigned to families or individuals were both very modest and
very precious due to a general housing shortage, tenants guarded them against
any potential newcomers, ‘unofficial’ tenants, relatives or lovers, who through
personal connections could ‘squeeze’ themselves into a ‘valuable’ apartment in
Moscow or Leningrad. In this way the regime secured efficient control over
the movements of its citizens and oversight of the correspondence between the
official place of residence (the totalitarian system required its citizens to register)
and the actual one. Those multi-family societies also functioned according to
certain rules, in the context of certain hierarchies, which defined who and when
could use the bathroom, what one could store in the hallway or the cupboard.
All this in obvious ways provoked conflicts and divided tenants into warring
factions. Those disputes were arbitrated and resolved by administrative organs,
made up of bureaucratic party committees (often called ‘popular’ to underline
their supposedly self-governing character). To a certain extent they were nec-
essary, in so far as they prevented people from killing each other, but they were
227
also very convenient since they made it easier for the regime to control the
society. In short, the system of communal apartments was part of the bio-
political project of the Soviet state.
Victor Tupitsyn writes that in 1921 there were 865 housing communes
in Moscow, and their number grew through the end of the decade. At the begin-
ning of the 1930s, however, Stalin expressed dissatisfaction with this form of
societal self-organization. In 1932 the housing communes were eliminated and
replaced by a system of communal apartments under the administrative control
of the government. Tupitsyn compares this form of housing to Western urban
ghettos. There is, however, a significant difference. Whereas in the West the
government-administered public housing is filled with the poor who live on
society’s margins, in the ussr this was a widespread form of shelter, which even
gave rise to a certain type of person, homo communalis. This engendered very
interesting implications for the system of social communication by creating a
new form of language, ‘communal speech’, which had its own laws, vocabulary
and rules.2 The artists themselves experienced this system as citizens of the
Soviet state and people who lived in such communal apartments. They experi-
enced it not only as part of life, but also as part of art practice.
The communal apartments were spaced where art was practised in the
1970s. In the ussr independent art did not function in the open, as it did
during the same time in Yugoslavia or Poland, or earlier, in the mid-1960s, in
Czechoslovakia. It did not have its own public, it was not surrounded by jour-
nalists and art critics, curators and collectors. The artists associated with Moscow
conceptualism and intellectuals who befriended them functioned in a closed
social circuit. Everyone or almost everyone was simultaneously a producer and
a consumer, a critic and a member of the audience. They organized events in their
cramped apartments shared with other tenants and visited others where some-
one else was showing his work.3 This isolation from the external world and the
idiosyncratic nature of the environment produced a special form of communi-
cation used by the artists, which may have been rather hermetic but also very
specific and above all highly contextual. The most important thing for those
who used it was that it was clear and legible. It was only during the period of
perestroika, when the ussr began to open somewhat and its political and
ideological foundations began to lose their stability, that Russian independent
culture began to receive significant recognition. During this period it was noticed
not only for its exoticism, but above all for its value.
Ilya Kabakov belongs to the second Russian avant-garde,4 or, to follow
Western terminology, neo-avant garde. More specifically, he operated within
the orbit of Moscow conceptualism, which often addressed the problem of
228
communal housing. The artist returned to this problematic after the fall of
the ussr. Kabakov is one of the best-known contemporary artists to have
come from the former Eastern Bloc. Certainly his oeuvre has been subjected
to the most thorough examination: a two-volume catalogue raisonné covers his
paintings (1957–2008) and his installations (1983–2000), respectively.5 The
publication of a catalogue raisonné of a contemporary artist from Eastern
Europe is a noteworthy event and demonstrates a high regard for Kabakov’s
work. In addition to this monumental work, there are numerous monographs,
exhibition catalogues, essays, reviews and other publications. Many authors,
mainly in the West, but also in the East have been writing about his work.
Boris Groys, who has long been following Kabakov’s work, deserves particu-
lar mention. Among his extensive bibliography, there is a small book dedicated
to a single work, or rather a fragment of a larger work, The Man Who Flew
into Space from his Apartment (fragment of the installation Ten Characters,
Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York, 1988), published under the same title.
Despite its modest size and narrow focus, the book provides in-depth exam-
ination of Kabakov’s work and its historical context. In particular, it deals with
the social, cultural and political implications of Soviet space exploration.6
However, I am interested in another aspect of Kabakov’s art, namely the prob-
lem of communal housing, and will be looking at three of his installations: Ten
Characters, 1988, Communal Kitchen (Sezon Museum, Nagano, 1993; since
1995 at Musée Maillol, Paris [Dina Vierny Foundation collection]), and Toilet
(‘Documenta ix’, Kassel, 1992).
The installation Ten Characters developed Kabakov’s earlier Albums, which
the artist created in the first half of the 1970s. One could say that this partic-
ular piece realized that earlier idea through the means of an installation. 7
The entire gallery space was subdivided into seventeen rooms. Ten of these
were ‘occupied’ by different characters: ‘The Man Who Flew into his Picture’,
‘The Man Who Collected the Opinions of Others’, ‘The Man Who Flew into
Space from his Apartment’, ‘The Untalented Artist’, ‘The Short Man’, ‘The
Composer’, ‘The Collector’, ‘The Man Who Describes his Life through Person -
ages’, ‘The Man Who Saved Nikolai Viktorovich’ and ‘The Man Who Never
Threw Anything Away’. These identifications of the inhabitants of a commu-
nal apartment are interesting in and of themselves. The artist did not use proper
names (as before he had done in the Albums), but instead gives descriptions
that characterize each individual. This strategy created simultaneously an im-
pression of anonymity and renders them immediately recognizable by attributing
to them certain traits. This seems a typical response from a society in which
members maintain their anonymity, do not concern themselves with the lives
229
of other tenants who share their living space, may not even know each other’s
names, yet must identify each other. They do so by describing particular indi-
viduals using particular characteristics, often negative ones. Some of those
descriptions seem absurd, but the traits attributed to individuals by others do
not have to be logical; they are often mythical, based on something someone
may have said that has been remembered and become associated with that
person ‘forever’. Each of the characters in the exhibition had his own highly
detailed description, dealing, for instance, with who was interested in what
opinions, how he behaved or what he collected.
The next work, Communal Kitchen, 1993, focused on one of the shared
areas in the communal apartment, the kitchen. On a conceptual level it inscribed
itself into the perspective described above, but it took a completely different visual
form. The work consists of a tall, octagonal room. Hanging in the room’s upper
portion are paintings from the Kitchen Series, dark canvases with kitchen imple-
ments (such as a jug, pan or mug) fixed to them and attached catalogue-like
descriptions or an inventory of a kitchen, filled with personal, caustic commentary:
what the item is, who it belongs to, what state it is in (for example, dirty). On the
walls below are located the same objects. Near the ceiling smaller objects with
attached labels hang from about a dozen ropes. Below, at eye level, there is a text
consisting of various notes that can be read as an exchange of opinions among the
tenants of this communal apartment.
The third work, The Toilet, created for the Documenta ix in 1992, should
be seen from a different perspective. It consists of an unattached structure built
in one of the Fridericianum’s courtyards. It does not refer to a Soviet-era com-
munal apartment, but to a grimy public toilet, one with few comforts, open
stalls (never provided with doors), broken windows and a less than pleasant
atmosphere. Kabakov’s Toilet is divided into men’s and women’s sections. But
those spaces are furnished like two modest apartment rooms typical of the
Soviet era: the living room (in the men’s section of the toilet) and the bedroom
(in the women’s). The rooms are cluttered and messy, with items of clothing,
books, toys and everyday objects scattered around. The rooms also seem
inhabited, or at least they would have seemed inhabited if the installation were
shown in Russia. In Germany, a country with very high sanitation standards,
highly developed hygiene and a fondness for order and good quality furniture,
the work was more exotic than realistic.
If we set aside references to the artist’s background (mentioned by Kabakov
in his conversation with Groys, in particular information about his mother’s
employment at his school, as well as his apprehension at participating in the
Documenta, one of the most important contemporary art exhibitions in the
230
48 Ilya Kabakov, Toilet, Documenta ix, Kassel 1992.
world),8 it becomes clear that one of the key elements of the work is its prob-
lematization of the boundaries between the public and the private, or to put
it a different way, its engagement with the problem of violation of privacy.9
Of course, such violation, or the signalling that the right to privacy has been
violated, is symbolic. After all, communal apartments were introduced in order
to violate privacy. Privacy was treated by the biopolitical regime of the Soviet
Union as the enemy. It was associated with the individualism of bourgeois
culture, which the Soviets opposed to the collectivism of communist culture.
Victor Tupitsyn has noted that Kabakov’s attitude towards such ‘communal’
living, and more broadly towards living conditions within the Soviet Union, to
which the communal apartment had a metonymic relationship, is to a sig-
nificant extent paradoxical. On the one hand, the artist has undoubtedly been
one of the main chroniclers and deconstructionists of this ‘communal world
order’, and as such could be said to have been ‘crusading’ against it; on the
other, he has not freed himself of this system, and therefore could be considered
its ‘prisoner’.10 Perhaps he is kept captive by a sadomasochistic mechanism, a
prisoner’s fascination with the system that imprisons him. Approaching this
problem from a broader perspective, one could say that Kabakov is interested
231
in the dialectic of identity and non-identity, something that is mentioned by

Tupitsyn, who cites Theodor Adorno in reference to the broader issue of
‘communal language’.11
The concepts of ‘naked life’ and biopolitics traced by Giorgio Agamben
from Foucault’s and Arendt’s texts seem extremely useful for describing the
Soviet system. Naturally I am not referring here to direct inspirations, but
rather to the descriptive method and rhetoric that is capable of capturing the
essence of the ‘emergency state’. It is also irrelevant that Agamben’s book is
missing from the published ‘bookshelf ’ of Krzysztof Wodiczko, this chapter’s
other protagonist.12 That bookshelf contains many other very interesting texts,
from Althusser, Arendt, Benjamin and Brecht, to Tocqueville, Turowski and
Žižek. Agamben’s ostensible absence, however, does not mean that he is miss-
ing from interpretations of the artist’s work.13 It has been frequently noted that
a key place within Wodiczko’s library is occupied by texts on ethics by Emmanuel
Lévinas and by theorists of democracy (Claude Lefort), including those critical
of liberal democracy who have developed the concept of radical democracy
(Chantal Mouffe, Ernesto Laclau). Analysis of Wodiczko’s work has often
followed those paths. One could mention here one of the most significant inter-
pretations of the artist by Rosalyn Deutsche,14 or the catalogue of Wodiczko’s
2005 Warsaw exhibition, edited by Andrzej Turowski, which opens with a text by
Chantal Mouffe.15 I do not intend to undermine this interpretative approach,
negate the importance of ethics for Wodiczko’s art, or question the role of ethics
in the creation of radical democracy by mentioning Agamben. Just the oppo-
site, I am arguing that by revealing mechanisms of contemporary biopolitics
Wodiczko’s art engages in a profound critique of a broadly understood contem-
porary system of power (a conception based on Foucault’s model). This critique,
which prompts the viewer to question liberal politics, is guided by a deeply
ethical perspective based on the encounter with the Other and the equally
important conviction that such critique is furthering the development of
democracy. Agamben has provided me with a theoretical framework, no less
significant than those furnished by the often mentioned Lévinas and Mouffe,
which when applied to Krzysztof Wodiczko’s work will, I hope, reveal its
fundamental meanings.
However, we must remember that Krzysztof Wodiczko’s art does not
originate in thinking about biopolitics. If one considers as significant Vehicle,
1973, one of the artist’s early works, then the genesis of his oeuvre must be
sought within a certain type of avant garde tradition. Andrzej Turowski writes
the following about Vehicle:
232
Although built with an almost engineer-like precision, it was not char-

acterized by technological perfection. In fact, it bore greater kinship to
Vladimir Tatlin’s fantastic Letatlin (1929–32) – the impractical, human-
powered ‘air-bicycle’ Tatlin hoped would become an object of daily use
by the masses – than the shiny surfaces and aerodynamic shapes of pres-
ent-day high-speed vehicles. Tested on the streets of Warsaw – ‘perfectly
functional’, one might say – it fulfilled its function in that the ‘stationary
movement’ of its author, who walked up and down in the vehicle, pro-
duced the ‘forward movement’ of the entire vehicle. Through its allusion
to function and progress, Vehicle was a caricatured version of both the
grounded Icarus of Tatlin’s utopia and the socially useful machines pro-
duced by the Bauhaus. One may well see in this work the origin of what
was to become Wodiczko’s primary ongoing focus: the critical project as
artistic creation.16
Although Wodiczko approaches the engineering artistic utopias associated

with Tatlin and the Russian Constructivists from an ironic perspective, this
is not his only concern. His Vehicle moves in only one direction, forward. The
direction of the artist’s movement on the Vehicle does not impact its course.
There is only one condition – the artist must move. And perhaps this is the
ironic metaphor for the Constructivist utopias as well as historical dialectic:
the direction of one’s movement is irrelevant, since one always moves forward.
This was the leading principle of the official ideological doctrine of dialectic
materialism as well as of the historical Russian avant garde.
Wodiczko’s later projects and conceptual vehicles, such as Café-Vehicle,
Platform-Vehicle or Podium-Vehicle, which preceded the well-known Homeless
Vehicles and Poliscars, should be viewed from a somewhat different perspec-
tive, suggested already by the 1972 Vehicle, namely that of an ironic political
metaphor. They relate to a certain aspect of European culture by moving in
response to spoken words, or more precisely in response to a certain type of
political ‘chatter’. Café-Vehicle, as the name suggests, invokes the topos of a
European café, which functioned as a quasi-political institution. This was a
place where arguing intellectuals met to comment on current events and spin
political projects. This was also the case under communism, though such dis-
cussions were conducted in lowered voices. This made it more difficult for
secret police agents at the neighbouring tables to conduct their surveillance. The
latter often sat around cafes, ‘just in case’, to catch circulating opinions, usually
critical of the regime. What this meant was that the communist regimes did not
ignore the café as an oppositional institution, which continued the European
233
custom of political debate over a cup of coffee reaching into the nineteenth
century. The other vehicles, Platform-Vehicle and Podium-Vehicle, referred to a
different form of ‘chatter’: seemingly endless official political speeches. This
unbearable practice, which currently survives only in China, North Korea and
Cuba, forced thousands of inhabitants of the communist countries to listen
to tirades that attempted to hide impoverished reality behind discourse filled
with clichés. Six-hour speeches were not uncommon. Some of us still remember
the outpourings of Władysław Gomułka, the First Secretary of the Polish Com-
munist Party in the 1960s. As in the original Vehicle, here too, irrespective of what
was being said, the vehicle moved forward in accordance with the principles of
materialist dialectic. Wodiczko seemed to be suggesting, with a dose of irony,
that the vehicle was moved not only by speeches made from the ‘podium’, but
also by ‘café gossip’ and ‘café opposition’.
Although those metaphors were created using the language of engineering
utopia, Wodiczko’s vehicles were not supposed to serve as models of the future
world, as was the case with the classic avant garde, but as commentaries on a
certain type of caricature of such a utopia. One could say that this ‘engineering’
dimension of Wodiczko’s art was here driven not so much by practical consid-
erations as by metaphoric and, above all, semantic ones, and as such has never
left his sphere of interests. Homeless Vehicles, Alien Staff and Porte-Parole Mouth-
piece also fit this tradition, although they are enriched with other levels of
signification linked to biopolitics.
The biopolitical dimension of Wodiczko’s art appears almost incidentally,
sneaking in by the back door, in the work References shown at the Gallery Foksal
in Warsaw and at Akumulatory 2 in Poznań in 1977. This was the first instance
of a direct political statement in Wodiczko’s work. From a technical standpoint
the piece was rather modest; from a standpoint of meaning it was incredibly
rich. The artist’s intention, to a certain extent ironic, was to order the world
ideologically with the aid of a line, which appeared earlier in his work. On this
occasion he actually used three lines: horizontal (for social reality), vertical (for
reality of power) and diagonal (for reality of art). The artist projected a series of
slides showing images associated with the discourses describing and referring
to each reality onto three different types of lines. For example, one of the slides
projected on a horizontal line showed a line to a supermarket, an image that
provoked general glee among those present. Long lines in front of stores sell-
ing basic groceries and consumer goods were a common sight during this
period in Poland. They indicated shortages of food, the distribution of which
was under the control of politicians. As we know from the history of the ussr,
the Stalinist regime limited availability of food as a calculated and perfidious
234
strategy in subjugating Ukraine in the 1930s. Although the post-Stalinist

administrations in Russia and other countries of Eastern Europe did not rely
on such drastic biopolitical methods, through structural manoeuvring they
did gain control over production and distribution of food, turning it into an
instrument of power and hence an element of political strategy. The image of
a line in front of a supermarket, which was greeted with smiles and even laughs,
represented in a more or less intuitive way something more than a familiar image
of a commonplace phenomenon found in any Polish city. It revealed the bio-
political mechanism of power.
Wodiczko’s later works, or at least a significant portion of them, clearly
moved in this direction. Homeless Vehicles broached those issues, since the prob-
lem of homelessness is by definition a problem of a ‘naked life’. Those Vehicles
revealed the consequences of the contemporary biopolitics’ entanglement with
the economy; they functioned as a metaphor for ‘naked life’ and simultaneously
as a critique of exclusion. Wodiczko formulated the problem of ‘naked life’, or
at least of one of the incarnations of the contemporary homo sacer, much more
forcefully and directly in Alien Staff and Porte-Parole Mouthpiece. Those pieces
represent more than a critique of immigration policies or the state’s policy
towards aliens; they address the condition of an alien in a broader, much more
universal sense.
An immigrant in a contemporary world that only appears open, but is
in fact defined by closely guarded borders, is treated a priori as homo sacer and
as such faces enormous challenges. He is often held in refugee camps. In order
to stay in a foreign country, he must go through a series of unpleasant interrog-
ations, medical examinations to prove that he is healthy, and subject himself
to various legal procedures. In reality, the officials only care about his ‘naked
life’, which their measures and procedures politicize and hence incorporate
into governing mechanisms. After all, the immigration rules that sort foreigners
according to their country of origin, wealth, qualifications and other criteria
are essentially political. It is the politics of immigration, which every country
has, that determine who receives asylum, citizenship, temporary residence
status or even a tourist visa, that define who and to what degree an individual
is alien in a given society. Every immigrant is therefore treated as homo sacer.
The immigration agencies are not interested in his history, identity, culture
or anything that he brings with himself. They only pay attention to the likes
of vaccination records, hiv tests, skin colour and criminal records. By creat-
ing Alien Staff and later Porte-Parole Mouthpiece, Wodiczko has attempted to
reverse this bureaucratic process of alienation, to give back to the immigrants
their identity, history and emotions. The artist often stresses that he is trying to
235
give immigrants a voice though his instruments. Porte-Parole Mouthpiece seems

to be a machine that speaks on behalf of an immigrant, who often does not
know the language of a given country. It answers standard questions posed by
officials (who do not ask any other). But the language is not the only issue here;
the main problem is how to give back to an immigrant his human status, in other
words how to prevent him from being perceived within categories of ‘naked
life’. Of course, neither Alien Staff nor Porte-Parole Mouthpiece can change the
fate of immigrants. They can, however, reveal their presence and societal status.
Thanks to such instruments, which appear within symbolic circulation, we may
find out about the fact that refugee camps exist; by listening to immigrants,
we may find out how they have been treated by their country, which is also
our country, whose government we elect and fund with our taxes. In reality
those devices, which function as metaphors for one of the categories of contem-
porary homo sacer, are directed at us. They remind us about our responsibility
towards the other. Because of this the potential of this art is enormous and its
value significant.
It is worth saying a few words about one of the first projections created
by Wodiczko in Poland, shown in Kraków in 1996. The artist used the tower
of the old Town Hall in the Market Square (Rynek Główny), which ‘spoke’
with the voices of those who have been deprived of their ability to speak within
the public space, such as victims of family violence, generally women, drug
addicts, homosexuals, the homeless and those suffering from aids. In 1990s
Poland, a country where virtually all the post-communist parties, not to men-
tion those (most numerous) with right-wing, nationalist and clerical sympathies,
had to pay attention to a conservative majority, the representatives of the
groups speaking from the tower functioned on the margins of the society, and
in many instances beyond them. They were excluded from the official discourse
filled with references to so-called traditional family values. The tower gave
them an opportunity to speak up and remind others of their existence. The
selection of the location and the structure was also highly significant. The town
or market square is the centre of any European city; it is a plaza where merchants
used to gather to sell their goods, but which was also a meeting place for citizens.
It is a traditional European space of the agora. On the other hand, the Town Hall
represents the city government: not that of a prince or a king, but a government
that represented the citizens before the monarchs. A tower, which is a traditional
European symbol of power (marking a church or a castle), here identified the
power of the city and of a form of self-government that represented the inhab-
itants’ interests to the sovereign, prince or bishop. It was from this place, in one
of the oldest Polish cites, the country’s medieval capital, that those citizens
236
49 Krzysztof
Wodiczko, Cracow
Projection, Cracow,
1996.
excluded by the contemporary power discourse spoke. They were excluded by

the discourse created by the highly influential Catholic Church and the polit-
ical establishment. Those gathered at the market square heard the voice of
their co-citizens, who were never mentioned in the media, Sunday sermons
or political speeches delivered during electoral rallies. They heard their voice
and saw their hands, in a similar way to Wodiczko’s later Hiroshima project.
They did not see the faces of the actors/participants, a fact that, together with
the atmosphere of the night, enhanced the expression and impact of the pro-
jection. Above all, here for the first time the artist used video. Because the
projection of moving images onto architecture proved so much more suggestive
and effective than static images,17 from this point Wodiczko began to use this
format in his other projects.
Commenting on another project created in Tijuana, Mexico, in 2001,
whose protagonists were maltreated and terrorized women, the artist noted:
their chance for survival rests with their ability to transform themselves
into a political subject, into someone who plays a key role within the city’s
scene. The political mission creates a new perspective on their experience
and gives hope. A person detaches herself from her own tragedy and sees
it from a societal perspective.18
Returning to Agamben’s terms, one could say that through the act of
speech revealed in Kraków, within this particular, uncanny architectonic agora,
‘naked life’ was transformed into political life, or the life of a citizen.
Writing about this transformation, about art’s role in the birth of politi-
cal consciousness, we touch on an interesting paradox. Agamben argues that
the birth of biopolitics coincides with the birth of Western democracy, with
the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. Its opposite are the
literal and metaphorical concentration camps, places, whether in China or in
Tijuana, that provide a concentration of cheap labour. On the other hand,
Wodiczko reveals in his fascinating project that politicization of the ‘naked life’,
its transformation into political subject or citizen, becomes the condition for
emancipation and the method for defence of human rights, an opportunity
for ending persecution, humiliation and violence. This paradox defines the path
for the conception or rather utopia of art that Wodiczko embraces, utopia under -
stood as a refusal to accept a particular ‘place’. As the artist has stated: utopia
is not a ‘no place’, but rather ‘no! place’.19
Such an approach to artistic practice defines it as political; it is the work
of a citizen on behalf of democracy. Here, as I mentioned earlier, meet two
238
different understandings of reality: Agamben’s ‘biopolitical’ perspective and

Mouffe’s conception of radial democracy (see the Introduction above). The
latter, which is very often invoked by Wodiczko, operates within the frame-
work of ‘agonistic democracy’.
Chantal Mouffe argues that radical democracy, or democracy expanded
and built on the theoretical bases that give everyone opportunity to parti-
cipate in the political process, has to have agonistic character; it is, therefore,
agonistic democracy.20 The term agon referred in ancient Greece to a contest,
completion or rivalry. In the spirit of that source, the project of agonistic
democracy is based on two premises, both critical of liberal democracy: firstly
that such a project undermines the principle of consensus not only because
this principle functions as the quasi basis of the system, but also because it
neutralizes or attempts to eliminate conflict (antagonism), which in effect
leads to suppression of pluralism; secondly, and both simultaneously and
paradoxically, liberalism, which contrary to its declarations cannot manage
antagonism, engenders tension between ‘us’ and ‘them’. Mouffe argues that
such antagonism, hidden within consensus, ruptures liberalism. In its place
she proposes acceptance of conflict, disagreement or conceptual rivalry as a
necessary feature of constituted democracy. She argues against suppression of
conflict in the name of ‘common good’ and for its maintenance on the sur-
face as something that cannot be eliminated. However, the participants in a
conflict should not treat each other as enemies who should be destroyed, but
as ‘opponents’ against whom one must compete. This way ‘antagonism’ will be
transformed into ‘agonism’ and a relationship of hostility into one of rivalry.
In his art, Wodiczko follows this path. He clearly articulates this idea:
aliens . . . want to become citizens, democratic subjects; they do not

want to be exclusively objects of political manipulation. They want to be
integrated into society and to contribute to the dynamics of democracy,
which rely on disagreement. Basically, that’s the only thing that matters.
This comes together with hope . . . for agonistic democracy, derived
from the word agon as a point of competition in speaking of truth, or
even shouting down one another.
Further, the artist connects this perspective with an ethical position.

He states:
democracy . . . arises when Lévinas’s ethical theories are connected with

political theories of Chantal Mouffe, agonistic democracy with ethical,
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asymmetry of ethics myself-for-others (other as someone who is more

important than I), which is in constant conflict, with the symmetry of
egalitarian [read: liberal – PP] politics of myself-as-an equal-of-the-
others. In order for the rights to be equitable, they have to grant the other
greater rights, they must treat him as someone more important . . . This
is similar from the agonistic perspective: in the first place, that which is
most bitter and difficult to hear and say should be spoken. This does not
mean that there should only be constant disagreement, constant discus-
sions, but rather passionate competition in protest, in demands, fearless
critical speech and giving witness to truth.21
This ‘truth’ refers to the ‘naked life’ of the others, to the biopolitics of the
liberal world. Wodiczko gives it witness though his highly precise art practice,
which is based in the tradition of the avant garde and in contemporary technol-
ogy. Collision of those two areas creates notable outcomes. Here, and especially
in the artist’s later works, technology is an essential tool without which there
would be no art; there would be only an idea, no artwork. Technology is a
necessary component of this art practice. However, the artist’s attitude towards
technology is more complex than its use as a mere tool. Wodiczko not only rejects
the conservative critique of technology with its murky philosophy of ‘nature’
and even more questionable metaphysics of a ‘true experience of craftsman-
ship’ (Heidegger).22 He maintains that only technology provides opportunities
for communication, breaking through alienation, forming contacts; only tech-
nology can transform an alien into a political subject in our society. It is clear
that the artist is close here to the utopia of the Russian avant garde, towards
which he initially seemed to have had an ironic attitude. Moreover, it is he who
is realizing, to a certain extent, the dreams of the avant garde. With the aid of
his ‘fantastic’ technology, the artist creates spectacles that have performative
character. He creates a work-performance though technology, which is not
only a symbol, but also an instrument of modernity. After all, his projects have
none of the ‘humour’ of Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International,
which was supposed to be a massive construction of steel, but remained a
small-scale wooden model. They are quite literally monumental. The avant
garde of the October Revolution could only dream about that which is real-
ized here in his art. It could not join the critical and the utopian impulses, since
in its practice it was moving more and more in the direction first of Leninist,
then of Stalinist propaganda. Wodiczko reveals that this tradition can still live
on and can still be effective, provided that it engages in a critique of power,
rather than serves as its instrument. This constitutes honest art, whereas the
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work of Alexander Rodchenko, especially from the period of his collaboration

with the magazine uSSR under Construction, where he published propaganda
‘photo reportages’ from the construction of the White Sea Canal, compromised
the utopia of the ‘brave new world’. The White Sea Canal, later referred to as
the Gulag Archipelago, was a place where ‘workers’ were supposed to have
laboured to the accompaniment of an orchestra for the glory of Joseph Stalin.
Using the tradition of the avant garde, Wodiczko shifts its meaning from
propaganda for the victorious Bolshevik regime towards ethics and solidarity
with the victims.
On the other hand, from an ethical rather than political perspective, the
tradition of the avant garde in Wodiczko’s work seems problematic, since ethics
(rather than morality) play in it a key role. A number of authors have written
on this subject;23 the artist himself has addressed this issue on numerous occa-
sions. We know, therefore, beyond any doubt that Emmanuel Lévinas’s
philosophy, which is critical towards Kant’s universalism, defines an ethical
perspective close to the artist’s own position. Lévinas describes an encounter of
the ‘self ’ with the ‘other’ and a view of him (‘his face’) as someone who is more
important than ‘I’, as someone whose presence challenges me and also makes
me realize my own ‘otherness’. This is ethics of the primacy of otherness over
‘selfsameness’, ethics devoid of egoism and moralizing, and, above all, ethics of
humility. Avant garde, or to be more precise Russian avant garde, which in
other ways is close to Wodiczko, was far removed from such humility. On the
contrary, it was a formation defined by arrogance and confidence stemming
from certainty that it owned the ‘truth’ of revolution and history. The man,
or Lévinas’s ‘other – face’, represented for the Russian artists value only in so
far as he was not other, but similar to them, and acted within the historic
Leninist project of żiznostroitelstwo (‘life-building’). If he did not, the other
was ‘nobody’, someone on the historic margins, a type of homo sacer. The
political powers, with which the avant garde wanted to identify, and to which,
in the end, it fell prey, left no doubt as to what were their ethics. This type
of gaze at the ‘face’ has nothing in common with the ethics of Krzysztof
Wodiczko, based in Lévinas’s philosophy, and the role that those ethics play in
his art.
It appears that Wodiczko’s art has a very complex relationship to the
avant-garde tradition. Its utopia recalls only to a certain extent his utopia. While
he conceives it in critical (‘not! place’) terms, the avant garde understood it
within absolutist ones. His fascination with technology and its role in shaping
social relations also serves something else. It is grounded in ethics, rather than
historicism conceived as an objective process of social development, in which
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the avant garde wanted to participate. Finally, Wodiczko is close to Benjamin’s

history of victims, while the avant garde was part (contrary, as we now know,
to its own survival interests) of the history of the victors. Wodiczko proclaims
his solidarity with the victim, whereas the Russian avant garde proclaimed its
solidarity with the regime.
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eight
Gender after the Fall of the Wall
‘Hello, my name is Kai Kaljo, I’m an Estonian artist’: so Kai Kaljo introduces
herself in English in a short video entitled A Loser, 1997. We then hear a
laugh from an invisible audience, in accordance with conventions established
by television sitcoms. Unperturbed, the artist adds: ‘I weigh 92 kilos’ (it seems
from the film that she weighs much less) and again we hear laughter; ‘I am
37 years old and still live with my mother’ – again laughter; ‘I look married’
– laugh; ‘I am studying at the Academy of Fine Arts and I earn 90 dollars per
month’ – longer laughter; ‘I think’, she adds, ‘that freedom is one of the most
important things for an artist’ – loud laughter; ‘I am happy’, she concludes
– again laughter, but this time she also smiles, suggesting that the idea of
‘being an Estonian artist’ and at the same time ‘being happy’ seems somehow
rather funny.
A year later, in 1998, Hungarian artist Kriszta Nagy put up on a bill-
board a photograph of herself in black underwear, resembling an advertisement
tinged with a large dose of eroticism. The image was accompanied by a text
that was rather surprising in this context: ‘I am a contemporary painter’. The
Hungarian language, unlike English, allows for identification of gender in
nouns. The artist could have written ‘I am a contemporary (female) painter’,
but she did not. Instead, she chose the male form of the word ‘painter’ (in
the original: ‘Kortárs festőművész vagyok’). I think that by avoiding identi -
fication of gender, she wanted to stress the significance of this statement.
The word ‘painter’ seems much more ‘serious’ than ‘female painter’. Grounded
in everyday linguistic practice, the masculine form identifies the speaking
subject much more powerfully with a social position, profession and cultural
tradition. Moreover, the juxtaposition of such a statement with a stereotype of
advertising eroticism emphasized the rhetoric contrast. This simple presentation
has rather complicated significance. It was certainly provocative in a way, but
not because of the erotic content, or because this erotic content was presented in
an apparent advertisement, a undoubtedly commercial medium. It was provoc -
ative because the image, associated with outdoor advertisements and erotically
attractive models, was juxtaposed with a personal declaration, associated with
243
50 Kai Kaljo, Loser (detail), 1997.
the tradition of high culture. The words ‘I am a painter’ are being spoken by
an attractive model, dressed in black underwear and photographed in a some-
what suggestive pose. The juxtaposition of those two orders, moreover within
a public medium (a billboard) not only breaks conventions of rhetoric narra-
tion, but also – and perhaps above all – juggles gender stereotypes. On the one
hand, there is nothing strange in presentation of an attractive model in an
underwear advertisement. The statement ‘I am a contemporary painter’ is
also not that unusual of itself. However, the linking of those two stereotypes
breaches not only common identification of gender, but also cultural identity
of painting as a profession and its social status.
A somewhat later work, Super Mother from the series Domestic Games,
2002, by the Polish artist Elżbieta Jabłońska, was shown on billboards in Polish
cities as part of the Outdoor Gallery organized by the advertising firm ams.
This project seemed to promote the artist through a wide distribution of her
works throughout the city. The image depicts a young woman holding a small
boy on her lap, in a pose that recalls the motif of the Virgin and Child. In
different places on the poster appear the words ‘washing, cleaning, cooking’.
The woman is dressed in a Superman costume, a comic hero blessed with
great strength and physical prowess, who uses his uncommon attributes to aid
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those who need help. The connection of goodness with strength, of using
physical prowess in the (effective) struggle against evil, inflames the imagina-
tion of the young, especially boys. Certainly a mother dressed in a Superman
costume would cause a certain amount of confusion in a child sitting on her
lap; here is a mother, not only associated with ‘domestic games’, but also with
warmth and safety, dressed as an indestructible male hero, whom all small boys
want to imitate. However, boys do not want to emulate mothers; they want to
follow models provided by men, their strong and attractive heroes. That is
why they are drawn in their imagination to professions such as policeman or
firefighter, which are identified with integrity and strength. A mother dressed
as Superman could succeed in entering a boy’s ‘male’ imagination, but not with
her female attributes, towards which he has, one could say, an external rela-
tionship, but instead with the male ones that impress him.
Jabłońska’s poster goes beyond those meanings. If the game of ‘dressing
up’ was directed towards the child, it would have had a private character.
Displayed on billboards in the street and in art galleries (a different context
that affects its meaning), the work acquires completely different signifi-
cance. It becomes a cultural commentary not so much on ‘domestic’ but on
‘gender’ games. A woman dressed as Superman, smuggled into the public
sphere, becomes the Super Mother of the work’s title and at the same time
51 Kriszta Nagy, I am a Contemporary Painter, 1998.
245
52 Elżbieta Jabłońska, Home Games – Supermother, 2002.
undermines a number of stereotypes. One of them is of course the stereotype

of masculinity, as well as (by implication) of femininity; another is the stereo-
type of representation, that of the ‘Virgin and Child’, a sacred image; yet
another is the stereotype of a mother, no longer holy, like the Mother of God,
but ‘ordinary,’ preoccupied with raising children, cooking, washing, cleaning
and other domestic chores assigned to her by traditional, socially defined
gender roles; finally, there is the stereotype of Superman himself, associated
with qualities such as masculinity and power. However, it is worth keeping in
mind something that those who saw Jabłońska’s poster on the Polish streets
did not know, or at least most of them did not know, namely that the poster
featured the artist herself.1 In addition to all those functions, the poster dealt
with the issue of identity. It was saying: ‘It is I, the artist, dressed as Superman,
who is a Super Mother.’ That is why I am raising this work in this context,
together with the others. In all of them, we are dealing with a particular
manifestation of female identity confronting a masculine world. In all three
instances, we are addressing identifying strategies of women artists living in
post-communist Europe, where, as noted by Ewa Grigar, the problem of
female identity has became not only one of the most basic, but also the most
popular, and perhaps even the most common element of art orientated
towards feminism.2
It is abundantly clear that we live in a world of male culture, irrespective
of the considerable success achieved in many fields by feminism. The problem
of post-communist societies rests in the fact that they seem to be much more
phallocentric than developed Western societies. This structure is determined,
among others, by the pre-1989 tradition of anti-communist opposition, which
246
ignored the feminist problematic and was thoroughly masculine in character.

Elżbieta Matynia makes interesting observations concerning this issue. She
analysed an iconic Polish political poster, produced in 1989, that urged people
to vote for the Solidarity Citizens’ Electoral Committee in the first (only
partly) free elections in communist Europe. The elections were a result of the
so-called Round Table Agreement that reached a compromise between the
opposition and the communist regime. The poster used an image of Gary
Cooper from the famous western High Noon, 1952. The figure, dressed in a
manner typical of the genre, wears above his sheriff ’s star, on a lapel of his
waistcoat, a very characteristic ‘Solidarity’ pin. Below a text proclaims: ‘at high
noon – 4 June 1989’. This was supposed to mean that a decisive confrontation
between the opposition (identified with Solidarity) and the enemy, or the
communist system, was coming. And that is exactly what happened. Solidarity,
which constituted the core of the Citizens’ Electoral Committee, a coalition
that gathered almost the entire political opposition, won the ‘showdown’.
At the same time, as Matynia notes, the imagery of the poster suggests that
this defined the masculine character par excellence of the post-communist
transformation. This observation is confirmed by public opinion surveys cited
by the author, which revealed that among many possible identifications, gen-
der appeared in last place.3 The masculine basis of the democratic political
transformation is not only evident in Poland, but throughout the former
Eastern Europe and may very well be one of the main characteristics of the
post-communist societies.
As a matter of fact, when one surveys the intellectual landscape of the
former anti-communist opposition in the countries of the former Eastern
Bloc, it is difficult to find there any clear interest in the problem of gender.
Within the art context, the situation is significantly more complicated, since
there were female as well as male artists who dealt with the feminist problem-
atic, sometimes in a radical way.4 Examples of such attitudes are relatively
easy to find in the works of artists such as Marina Abramović, Geta Bratescu,
Sanja Iveković, Natalia LL [Lach-Lachowicz], Ewa Partum, Jana Želibská
and many others. But this art was not always accompanied by ideological and
political declarations inscribed into feminist theory and politics. Often what
was visible (for instance in Natalia LL’s Consumption Art of 1972) was associ-
ated with a general problematic of neo-avant garde art theory, rather than
with feminism. The reasons for this must be sought in the complexity of
Eastern European art of that period, in the lack of available theoretical instru-
ments, as well as an intellectual climate inhospitable to that problematic,
something I have already mentioned. Another basic cause of resistance to
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53 Tomasz Sarnecki, High Noon (election poster), 1989, Poster Museum, Wilanów.
those types of declarations was a widespread aversion to leftist discourse

within which Western feminism was formulated during this period and
which reminded inhabitants of communist Europe too much of the official
language of the local regimes. Yugoslavia, whose intellectual circles seemed
much more closely connected with the artistic culture of the West rather than
those of Russia or Central Europe, was to a certain extent an exception to this
norm. Moreover, for the same reasons political engagement and ideological
critique in art were also treated with a certain distrust. The oppositional charac-
ter was associated more closely with the notion of a work’s autonomy than its
political engagement. Nevertheless, irrespective of this discursive spectrum of
the artistic culture and a number of ideological and political barriers, it must
be emphasized that art and artists assumed a leading role in addressing gender
problematic in the former Eastern Bloc. In this respect, they not only distin-
guished themselves from the anti-communist dissident movements, but also
outpaced political thinkers, who showed themselves to be extraordinarily
conservative in this area. This was the main source of a significant impulse
driving a later revision of the attitude towards gender problematic, female
and male identity, as well as social mechanisms aimed at repression of sexu-
ality and, connected with it, identity politics. One could say that politicians,
including those who were quite liberal and critical, were ‘left for dust’ by the
artists. Unfortunately they were the ones defining the political, ideological
and intellectual post-Wall landscape and the key points of reference of the
transformation period, something that is also mentioned by Matynia. Therefore
they have been ultimately responsible for the lack of understanding and sym-
pathy within the society for the problematic of women’s emancipation, equal
status, repressive policies within the job market, and economic as well as
political disadvantaging of women, sexual minorities and the entire gamut of
issues linked to gender.
Such a state of affairs has inspired considerable interest in this problem-
atic within the new, critical opposition. Those circles include male and female
artists, female art critics and art historians engaged in revisions of history.
The strategy adopted after the fall of communism and the return of freedom
of speech was mainly oppositional in character and resembled the Western
feminist strategy of the 1970s. This opposition naturally appeared to have two
wings: one was developing essentializing attitudes and attempting to define
‘femininity’; the other was critical, confrontational and ready for a fight.
The works of Ilona Németh, such as for instance Polyfunctional Woman,
1996, provide one of the examples of the first attitude, despite certain critical
features directed mainly against male expectations concerning female sexuality.
249
In the piece, the viewer is asked to lie down on a large, red sofa and, in that
position, listen to a woman’s voice, taped in intimate situations. In reality, one
could say that the artist is more interested in defending women’s intimacy than
in analysing male expectations. A work produced by Németh a year later, Private
Gynaecological Surgery, 1997, pursues this trajectory even more directly. It con-
sists of three gynaecological examination chairs, each covered with a different
soft, partly organic material: rabbit fur, velvet and moss. Another example is
provided by the work of Egle Rakauskaite, who in her early and best-known
performance project, Expulsion from the Paradise, 1995, first realized as a
‘living sculpture’, then recorded as a video in 1997, touched on the problem
of femininity, or to be more precise ‘girlhood’, a state of virginity (the paradise
of the title) that precedes the encounter with reality marked by experience of
gender difference and phallocentric structures. The artist showed twelve young
girls dressed in white (the symbol of virginity), who were connected to each
other by their braids. This symbolized their solidarity in the encounter with
the world, defined, for obvious reasons, as male. In Poland, Izabella Gustowska,
who for many years has been making very subtle video projects, and who
once argued against their connection with feminist ideology, has developed
this type of reflection on the subject of femininity on a broad, one could even
say monumental scale, while maintaining delicacy or even intimacy of the
message, as in her 2007 project Live is a Story, which appropriated the exhi-
bition space of the National Museum in Poznań.
There are also many examples of the confrontational attitude. One
could mention here a work of the Czech artist Veronika Bromová, Views,
1996, which depicts a naked woman with spread legs revealing her vagina. The
piece refers to Courbet’s famous painting Origin of the World, 1866, painted
as a private commission and intended for private contemplation. Bromová
reveals the mechanism of the obscene male gaze by not showing the labia.
Instead, the image reveals the muscle hidden by the skin, in a way recalling
anatomical illustrations. In Poland, where the political context is to a large
extent defined by the Roman Catholic Church, Katarzyna Górna produced
a series of photographs referring to Christian iconography, and in particular,
the motif of the Virgin and Child (Madonnas, 1995–2001).
The confrontational strategy is sometimes inscribed into much lighter
forms and invokes the always effective method of relying on humour, espe-
cially when dealing with the subject of male sex appeal. A couple of artists,
Anetta Mona-Chisa and Lucia Tkáčová, have problematized heterosexual
relations and expectation associated with certain images and words in a
rather amusing way, unmasking in the process masculine culture. Although
250
the title of their work, Erotic Video, 2004, suggests that we will encounter
erotic content, all we see is a static image of a sex shop. After a few minutes,
the two artists exit the shop and the film ends. In another piece, Porn Video,
2004, we witness a series of erotic scenes, but in a very unexpected form. The
artists imitate heterosexual sex taken from a pornographic repertoire clearly
aimed at arousing male pleasure. They reproduce movements, gestures, close-
ups and sounds typical of such films, but do so while entirely clothed. A
completely different approach to male sexuality, likely problematic for
male viewers, is presented in several video projects in which the two artists
discuss the sexual attractiveness of various men. In Late Night Video, 2006,
they evaluate politicians (the most attractive appears to be Silvio Berlusconi);
in Seductive Verwertung, 2005, and Home Video, 2005, world-famous curators
and art critics; in Holiday Video, 2004, figures in the small, one could even
say intimate art scene of Bratislava. They are all evaluated and discussed
with respect to specific conditions – ‘in return for what?’, ‘for how much?’,
and ‘for what services?’ – under which the interlocutors would be willing to
go to bed with them, ignoring their numerous (also physical) faults. Of
course, one could assume that Tony Blair, George W. Bush, Jacques Chirac
54 Anetta Mona-Chisa and Lucia Tkáčova, Dialectics of Subjection # 4 (Late Night Video)
(detail), 2006.
251
55 Lenka Klodová,
Dolls, 2001.
and Gerhard Schröder are not familiar with the work of Anetta Mona-Chisa
and Lucia Tkáčova and therefore would not be concerned by the artists’
evaluation. The response of curators and critics, however, especially those
from Bratislava, could be quite different. Here male egos could be subjected
to a difficult test. After all, no man (or at least very few) would want to hear
themselves being described, especially in public, as unattractive, sexually off-
putting, as someone with whom sex could end in disaster, and that not even
a promise of a solo show or significant article on the front page of a major
newspaper would be sufficient to warrant going to bed with him.
Lenka Klodová also plays with erotic expectations. In her work
Folkwomen, 2001, we see female models whose faces suggest that they are
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experiencing sexual ecstasy at the moment when the photograph was taken.
We see only their faces and hands circling erotically sensitive body parts.
However, we do not see the bodies themselves, since the artist has ‘clothed’
them in colourful and richly decorated folk costumes. Klodová has painted
appliqués over pornographic images, thereby ‘covering’ their erotic meaning.
In another work, Dolls, 2001, she proposes a ‘do-it-yourself ’ approach for
achieving a similar result. Here we see photographs of naked, suggestively
posed models, whom we can dress using various cut-out ‘costumes’ provided
by the artist. In yet another piece, Locker, 2002, Klodová takes the opposite
approach. She realizes male fantasies by introducing into typical workers’
lockers, which are often decorated with photographs of naked women, life
models or (in another version) life-size mannequins. Moreover, at a certain
point Klodová completed a series of works dealing with pregnancy and
maternity, typically female states, by ascribing them to men. She photographed
men looking pregnant or assuming poses associated with breast feeding. One
of her works, linked closely with presentation of one’s identity, imitates a
Czech personal identity card. In the place where one would normally find a
face, however, there is an image of a female torso (from neck to upper thighs).
The artist suggests that the body, especially its erotically inscribed parts –
breasts and genitals – function as a substitute for female identity within male
culture. Men, and therefore culture, associate everything with sex and sexual
anatomy. In 2000 and 2001 Klodová published two pamphlets, Birch and
56 Lenka Klodová, Locker, 2002.
253
Chimneys: in the first we see photographs of the branches and trunk of birch
trees arranged to suggest vaginas; in the second, chimneys are in an obvious
way associated with phallic forms.
Both attitudes belong within the framework of oppositional strategy,
and as such are inscribed within a broader political project aiming at women’s
emancipation. Of course, this follows the historic tradition within which, accord-
ing to Griselda Pollock, feminism was and continues to be ideological in charac-
ter. It is a political movement engaged in the struggle against exclusion and
for emancipation and equality, and not an academic methodology confined to
the universities and museums.5 However, Pollock also notes a significant shift
in emphasis within feminist art of the last few years. The oppositional strategy
seems to have moved into the background and has been replaced by a different
one, deconstructive rather than confrontational in character. This new strategy
is concerned with destabilizing gender differences, rather than producing
‘dissimilarity’ or undermining phallocentric hierarchies. Pollock writes: ‘The
art made by women may in effect not be about Woman but about that space
of difference, dissidence, diversity, and rupture.’6 It seems that this attitude is
also visible in the art of the former Eastern Europe, something that in effect
points to another very contemporary aspect of the culture of this geo-political
area and simultaneously provides an opportunity for more extensive discussion
of the post-communist condition. In this context I would like to examine
several works by the Polish artist Katarzyna Kozyra. I will be dealing with two
versions of her Bathhouse project (‘women’s’ from 1997 and ‘men’s’ from 1999),
as well as a series of performances and videos produced since 2003 under the
shared title In Art Dreams Come True.
Hanna Wróblewska begins her essay on Katarzyna Kozyra with a
remarkably apt statement: ‘I am someone else.’7 The problem of Kozyra’s art
is, to paraphrase the title of Rosi Braidotti’s book, the problem of a ‘nomadic
subject’. Agata Jakubowska, writing about a different Polish artist, Alina Szapo -
cznikow, notes that a ‘homeless’, nomadic, itinerant subject reveals the basic
position of a woman in the world, which is by definition male-centric.8 There-
fore this is not a stable subject in any sense of that word, including, as we
will see later, gender; it is a ‘performative’ subject, to use Judith Butler’s terms.
Kozyra has been very successful in implementing the strategy of problematiz-
ing gender differences proposed by Pollock.
The two versions of the Bathhouse project were created separately, with
a certain time lag and in relation to one another: namely Men’s Bathhouse
functioned in a way as a complement and also an answer to the questions
posed by the earlier Women’s Bathhouse. The artist suggested a set of meanings,
254
above all related to the problem of gender in the context of undefined subject,
that emerged from the two works in a conversation with Christopher Blase
and Artur Żmijewski.9 In the first Bathhouse, Kozyra entered the women’s
bathhouse located at the Gellert Hotel in Budapest with a hidden camera.
She filmed the old and the young, the attractive and the unattractive women
she found there. Similar to her earlier work, Olympia, 1996, here too Kozyra
was making art historic references to paintings such as Ingres’ Turkish Bath
or Rembrandt’s Susanna and the Elders. In general, Kozyra notes that while
working at the women’s bathhouse she realized how much art history condi-
tioned our ‘looking’ at women’s bodies.10 It is also worth noting, as a number
of art historical studies have pointed out, that such seeing is phallocentric.
By entering the space of a women’s bathhouse, the artist took on a male role,
despite the fact that she herself is a woman; she was secretly looking at, observ-
ing, seeing bodies of (other) women from what could be identified as a male
perspective. However, the women in the video do not display themselves or
pose. They are entirely self-involved: they wash and dry themselves, move
around the bathhouse, rest, exercise and talk with one another. They behave
as if they were not observed (by a man). In general it seems that they are not
interested in the bodies of other women, just their own. It is the artist who
gives this scene the character of a performance. Equipped with a ‘male eye’,
the eye of an observer, she situates this seeing within the cultural frame of a
phallocentric structure. She not only mentions this but also refers what she sees
to well-known paintings. Of course, the bodies themselves break the canon of
art historic aesthetics; they are not nude (even though that is how they are
seen), but very obviously naked.
Kozyra is aware of this confusion and of paradoxes in which vision
is implicated, of what one could call certain type of dialectics of represen-
tation. That is because the hidden camera does not provide a solution to
the problem. The artist had to confront the fact that she could not reject the
culture of vision, its phallocentric regime, even though, in a biological sense,
she herself is a woman. In the other video, Men’s Bathhouse, she attempted to
approach the problem from a different perspective: as a woman ‘dressed’ as a
man. Wearing a fake penis, she entered the male bathhouse in order to make
another film with a hidden camera, and, one could say, thereby take a revenge
on culture. Of course, already in Women’s Bathhouse the question raised by
Hanna Wróblewska, ‘who am I?’, has already appeared. Am I a woman taking
on the male role of an observer, one inscribed into male culture of vision? Or
am I a man embodied in female biology? This ambivalence of ‘I am someone
else’ appeared even more emphatically in the video Male Bathhouse.
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Not only from the technical, but also the psychological and cultural
perspective, Kozyra’s decision to create this work was rather unusual and
produced interesting results. When comparing the two version of the Bath-
house (since the works themselves suggest such a comparison), we will notice
certain differences. First of all the character of the space is quite different; it
is much more decorative in the men’s bathhouse. While the space of the
women’s bathhouse is simple, the men’s is richly ornamental. Although this
detail is significant, it relates to a lesser extent to the issues discussed here,
and more to the gendered character of the architectural tradition of such
structures. As far as the behaviour of men is concerned, they certainly have
reasons for behaving differently than women. Irrespective of where they are,
in whatever social situation they find themselves, they are always observed
since they themselves create the culture of vision. One can see in the video
that many men observe, looking around, sitting ‘without any purpose’ as
they scan their surroundings. They are not preoccupied with themselves, in
the way that the women were in the women’s bathhouse, who were not aware
that they were being observed, since other women (conditioned by cultural
roles) are not supposed to look. There is another far-reaching observation,
made among others by Izabela Kowalczyk, that the men in the male bath-
house not only observe, but also make themselves available for observation,
or to be more precise, they present themselves, since being in male company
they know that they are being observed. The author identifies a trap that
ensnares the men. It is a trap of power. Kowalczyk writes that men ‘are the
observers as well as the observed. They pose, transform their bodies into
objects for looking to a much greater extent than the women shown at the
bathhouse. One could say that men are subjected to a much more normative
power than women.’11 In other words, men, irrespective of whether they find
themselves in an open or closed space, behave the same way, as if they were
being observed. This intuition and simultaneously a difference in the behav-
iour of men and women is confirmed by the artist who says: ‘with women
[in the bathhouse, in comparison to an open place] one sees a significant dif-
ference in behaviour; with men not.’12 However, what I noticed was the fact
that men, much more frequently than women, covered their genitals. Most
often the only male genitalia visible in Men’s Bathhouse is the fake penis worn by
Kozyra, who unlike the bathing men, wears the bathing apron in a way that
covers her rear but reveals her (fake) penis. This seems significant. The men
know that they are in a public place, and therefore, that they are observed,
since other men are present whose role is to observe. In general, it is not cus-
tomary to reveal one’s genitalia in public. On the other hand, women, who
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think that they are not being observed (there are no men), do not cover
themselves in the same way. In other words, they do not see the bathhouse
as a public space where they would be subjected to the gaze. Kowalczyk con-
cludes that they treat this place more like a ‘bathroom than a bathhouse’.13
Therefore Kozyra, biologically a woman but performatively a man,
since she is equipped with a penis, a male attribute, takes on a male role and
a phallic function. By this, the fake penis is transformed into a phallus. Is it,
however, a fake phallus? In my opinion the video avoids this question, and
by avoiding suggests that perhaps it has always been ‘fake’, dependent on a
culture that is, by definition, phallocentric. That is why the artist at the women’s
bathhouse, even though she did not have a ‘fake’ penis, de facto played a
phallic role.
The problem of ‘I am someone else’ appears in a much more complex
way in the last of the selected works, the series In Art Dreams Come True,
2003–. From the beginning it comprised a number of performances and videos
in which the artist assumed various roles, including a fairytale character,
opera singer, a cheerleader for a male sports team and a reincarnation of Lou
Salomé. Two pieces from the series are particularly important for us, since
they deal with gender transgression in a particularly spectacular way. One is
a striptease performance at a birthday party for the artist’s friend, the Berlin-
based drag queen Gloria Viagra (Tribute to Gloria Viagra, 2005), the other a
performance and a film (Il Castrato, 2006, 2007).
In the first instance, during the birthday celebration organized at the
Berlin club Big Eden, Kozyra, impersonating Gloria Viagra in dress and behav-
iour, begins to undress imitating a professional stripper. When she is finally
fully naked, a fact that provokes an enthusiastic response from a mostly gay
audience, she is revealed as a man with uncovered genitalia. In the next move,
she ‘takes off ’ her penis, revealing herself as a woman. The action of the film
Il Castrato is more dramatic. It also takes place in front of a gay audience. A
crowd enters the stage; among them are Gloria Viagra and Maestro, Kozyra’s
singing coach (Grzegorz Pitułej). At a certain moment, the artist is undressed
and in a rather theatrical fashion castrated. This act is greeted with expres-
sions of horror from the audience. After the castration, now as a ‘castrato’,
Kozyra sings Schubert’s Ave Maria and then, accompanied by the audience’s
applause, she is carried offstage triumphally. Harald Fricke has summed up
the entire project:
Unlike with drag shows, the aim of Katarzyna Kozyra’s In Art Dreams
Come True is not parody, but getting completely carried away in the
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drapes of the Other. The opera diva, the dominatrix, the cheerleader,
the castrate – every identity is negotiable. These opulent stagings bring
about what Judith Butler refers to vis-à-vis gender identities as ‘perform-
ative subversion’, as instituted through a stylized repetition of acts. In
Art Dreams Come True enables every person involved to take a position
in the twilight zone of mixed gender[s]. As an opera diva Katarzyna
Kozyra shares indeed a divine power: the deceptive equality between
male and female.14
Performative, rather than biological gender, to stay with Judith Butler’s

terminology, or negotiated gender, clearly provokes the statement ‘I am
someone else’. The problem, however, does not rest with what role the artist
adopts, but with whom she pulls into the sphere of reception-observation.
If looking is a male prerogative by definition, and if art is supposed to sub-
vert it, then art must redefine the viewer by noticing his/her uncertainty
and hesitation. Kozyra is trying to confront this head on, at least in the
performances described here, by staging her performances in front of a gay
audience, which is itself struggling with the problematic of gender identity.
57 Katarzyna Kozyra, Il Castrato (detail), 2006, 2007.
258
Moreover, the main figure in that audience is Gloria Viagra, a drag queen,
who functions as a point of reference for a deconstructed visual perception.
Gloria Viagra and the public of gay clubs and festivals, which serves as
another example of a performative strategy of gender identity and ‘nomadic
subjectivity’, seems to provide Kozyra with an opportunity to develop her
strategy of problematizing gender difference within a sphere of visual cul-
ture and to move beyond the enchanted circle of male vision with which she
struggled in her earlier works.
The question that must be posed now addresses the historicity of such a
strategy; it is a question concerning ‘gender after the Wall’. We should enquire
as to what extent the works cited here that problematize gender difference
respond to this issue. I am not concerned here with a simply juxtaposition of
this work with the frame of a post-communist condition, or discovering the
post-communist genesis of the performative strategy of gender identity and
nomadic subjectivity in the art of Kozyra and other female artists. Of course,
one could trace such elements in some examples of feminist art, in particular
from the 1990s. But in general, such an analytic project would likely prove
unproductive and would have no bearing on the heart of the matter. The his-
toric frame must be constructed in a different way.
We must assume that the post-communist condition does not refer
exclusively to the countries of the former Eastern Bloc, but to the entire ‘post-
Wall’ world. Susan Buck-Morss writes that the post-communist condition
(she calls it ‘post-Soviet’) refers primarily to the ontology of time, not to the
ontology of a specific society, in this case the society of the post-communist
countries. As such it has a historic, rather than spatial and geographic dimen-
sion. In short, it has a universal, not particular, character.15 However, we
should not look for the end of ‘the era of ideology’ in the fall of communism
in Eastern Europe. Instead, we should seek deeper conceptual structures
within the altered situation of global politics, a different philosophy of per-
ception of the world. Certainly the discussion that has been going on for
some time, not only about the ‘former East’ but also simultaneously about
the ‘former West’, gives us something to think about. If we approach the
post-communist condition from this perspective, as a universal frame of con-
temporary culture rather than a factor deterring a specific artistic strategy,
or even more specific works of art, including works created in the former
Eastern Europe, we could develop much broader reflection on culture ‘after
the Wall’.
During the period of communism, which affected not only Eastern
Europe but the entire modernist condition of the twentieth century, the
259
world was understood in terms of a binary structure. Since 1989 such a struc-
ture has seemed completely useless as an instrument for defining the world.
Modernism, which included the communist utopia, something that Boris
Gorys has written about,16 manifests itself in a binary, oppositional thinking.
Although this conception was being undermined much sooner, it is only
now that we can see the proper, global or universal critical frame of the
‘modernist subject,’ or, in a broader sense, of the subject as ‘nomadic’, ‘unstable’
and so on. In other words, even though the critique of the Cartesian subject
began a few decades earlier with a broadly conceived revision of humanism,
mainly within philosophy, the effects of those discussions, especially within
the widely conceived field of global culture, could be seen only in the last
years of the twentieth century. The aforementioned books by Judith Butler
and Rosi Braidotti, which undermined the stability of identity in a radical
way, appeared in the 1990s. As often happens, artists, including those from
Eastern Europe, were ahead of such cultural critiques. I will mention here
only Ion Grigorescu’s pioneering efforts.17 Of course, in Eastern Europe there
were fewer such projects due to the conditions indicated at the beginning of
this chapter. The oppositional understanding of culture and politics – us
(democratic opposition and dissidents) versus them (communists) – did not
encourage this way of thinking and as a result those processes developed
much more freely in Western than in Eastern Europe. Moreover, when the
former Eastern Europe freed itself from the Soviet/communist domination,
the activists and artists from this part of the continent joined the emancipa-
tion movement in large numbers. As a result, a form of deconstruction of
gender that was taking place during the last dozen years of the twentieth
century coincided with the erosion of communism and its eventual failure,
something that led to a fundamental reorientation of the worldview. I am not
claiming that one determines the other, that discussion of ‘nomadic subject’,
‘performative gender’ or ‘unstable identity’, for example, is directly connected
to the demise of the binary perception of the reality, and the failure of com-
munism as a political system and a worldview; I am only suggesting that
those phenomena are mutually illuminating.
The work of Katarzyna Kozyra represents for me an excellent example
of the ‘post-Wall’ attitude towards gender, among other reasons, paradoxically,
because it breaks away from the communist legacy with its intellectual and
cultural limitations. It breaks away from it physically because it transgresses
freely geographic borders of perception and reception; mentally because it
undermines binary and therefore stable understanding of identity; and hist-
orically, because it rejects the modernist tradition of feminist art. Therefore the
260
art of Katarzyna Kozyra provides an outstanding example of the new situation,

one that allows us on one hand to speak simultaneously about ‘the former
East’ and ‘the former West’, and on the other to see the conception of cul-
tural, performative and unstable gender as a trans-border phenomenon.
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nine
Unfulfilled Democracy
In the history of European culture art has been more closely associated with
undemocratic systems of power than with democratic. The reason is abundantly
clear; democracy is a recent phenomenon. Of course, I am referring here to
its modern form, the liberal democracy, and not Athenian or Sarmatian
democracies, which probably would not qualify as democratic systems under
modern standards. Art has been associated with authoritarian power, the rule
of aristocracy, nobility, the church and even totalitarian regimes. It is worth
remembering that art had very high status in both Nazi Germany and Stalin-
ist Russia. The mechanism that connected artists to the structures of power
was relatively simple. As we know, princes, kings, bishops, popes and wealthy
nobles, as well as commissars and dictators, looked to art to create an impres-
sion of splendour and to astonish through sheer luxury. Art confirmed their
privileged status and merits. It was also used as a means of forestalling death by
perpetuating their memory among future generations. Their power needed a
tool for creating propaganda. As Anatoly Lunaczarsky, with his unique subtlety,
observed, ‘Art as a branch of ideology is a powerful weapon of agitation’, and
the regime cannot forego its services.1 Artists who managed to fulfil the expec-
tations set before them could live quite well. Of course, those who had the
money and the power dealt the cards, but in the majority of cases this was not a
problem. The mythology of an independent, ostracized artist, one who rebelled
and was simultaneously rejected by society, appeared relatively late. Its devel-
opment coincided precisely with the rise of capitalism and modern democracy.
The mechanism by which this myth emerged has been well described and I
will not repeat this analysis. Let me just mention that democratic power has
adopted Lunaczarsky’s conclusions to a much lesser extent. Very often it has been
completely uninterested in art, or has shown interest only on the occasion of
public art commissions. On the other hand capitalism has concentrated on
purchase of ready-made products (this situation altered with the emergence
of late capitalism), shifting the risk for market fluctuations onto the artist. The
artist, accustomed to adulation, could feel abandoned and uncertain in the new
situation. He needed a myth to explain his new circumstances. In return, he
262
unfulfilled democracy
gained much more freedom. More willingly than before, he began to speak on
his own behalf. He became a visionary as well as a critic. Because of the latter
function, he sometimes entered (and still enters) into conflicts with society or
even the power structure, which, if it can, is more interested in suppressing
criticism than encouraging it. This model of the artist-critic appeared relatively
late, in the twentieth century, and at certain moments became rather popular,
for example during the 1960s. I think it is one of the most interesting paradigms
of the modern artist.
I will begin my detailed discussion of the functioning of art within the
post-communist context with the example of contemporary Poland, which is
treated here somewhat more extensively than other Eastern European countries
because the history of Polish art produced since 1989 provides an exception-
ally rich trove of material for the discussion of ‘unfulfilled democracy’. When
one reads the Polish constitution, it seems at first that it is a clear example of a
discourse on liberal democracy. Certainly its authors followed this model.
Yet even though the Polish constitution includes references to respect for
‘otherness’, it seems to me that this respect refers much more to tolerance than
equality. We know that those two concepts are not synonymous. Tolerance is
hierarchical and reveals existence of a hierarchy: the majority tolerates a minor-
ity, but does not treat it as its equal. Moreover, the liberal philosophy has not
been followed consistently in this document. Because of the ‘compromise’, the
authors have inscribed ‘Christian values’ into the constitution as one of its
foundations (they are the only ones explicitly named, other values are simply
glossed as ‘other’). This declaration, which certainly broke with the republican
tradition that serves as the basis of liberal democracy, has serious consequences
and suggests the ideological foundation of the potential consensus. In prac-
tice, this has encouraged various symbolic appropriations of the public space,
including the official state space. I will mention only the presence of a cross
in the hall of the Polish parliament, which has become a key element in the
symbolism of this most important Polish state institution. Although its presence
clearly violates the republican principle of the separation of church and state,
this violation is one of the consequences of the introduction of ideology into
the constitution. Perhaps there is no such thing as a realized radical democracy.
Radical or agonistic democracy, as I have discussed a number of times already
in this book, functions both as a conceptual horizon and as a critique of liberal
democracy. For such a project to succeed, it is not only necessary to challenge
the consensus, but also to eliminate all the ideological foundations on which
it is based. According to Claude Lefort, democracy, unlike the ancien régime,
was not supposed to have such foundations; it is supposed to be based in
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the ideologically ungrounded power of the ‘empty place’. Neither God, nor
History, nor anything else can serve as an ideological ‘justification’ of the
democratic system.2 Post-communist democracy, however, at least in Poland,
resorts in theory (the constitution) and in governing practice to such ideolog-
ical foundations, namely to the Christian tradition.
A rather interesting situation has arisen as a result. While it is difficult to
critique liberal democracy in Poland, since even the country’s constitution does
not fully commit to it, its proponents must defend themselves and its principles
against the ideological force of the consensus. In Western systems this consensus
is seemingly unideological and neutral. In Poland, however, it is openly ideo-
logical, supporting only one of the optional worldviews. At the same time, the
defence of liberal democracy seems intellectually rather dubious, given the current
state of historical knowledge and the level of theoretical discussions. It is difficult
to ignore its obvious faults. However, how can there be a discussion of radical
democracy in Poland, if even its opposite, liberal democracy, has not been fully
realized here. Moreover, conservative and right-wing groups have often attacked
the principles of liberal democracy. Risking an over-exaggeration, one could
almost say that it seems as if we have found ourselves at the end of the eighteenth
century, when the republican tradition, its principle of the separation of church
and state, and ideologically ‘groundless’ democracy were for the first time enter-
ing the minds of the public. However, we do not live in the eighteenth century
but at the beginning of the twenty-first, and I am not certain whether Poland
can afford the ‘luxury’ of anachronism.
It is worth remembering that the project of radical democracy does not
reject all the values of liberal democracy. On the contrary, it hones some of
them. Therefore, irrespective of which democracy we may champion (with
the exception of extremist forms that have nothing to do with democracy as
such: theocratic democracy or the people’s or communist democracy), it is
quite clear that its foundations must be based in respect for human rights,
including the right to free expression. There can be no democracy without
freedom. Lack of freedom reduces democracy to a mere name, as in the case
of the ‘people’s’ democracy. That is why when the struggle against communism
began in Poland there were two key demands: freedom and independence. The
second clearly has been achieved. The achievement of the first, as demonstrated
by the history of the ‘constitutional compromise’, could be more difficult. Its
problematic character suggests even greater need for examination of the situ-
ation of contemporary art in Poland.
Art constitutes a very specific form of speech. I do not want to suggest
that it should be privileged at the expense of other forms of speech. On the
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contrary, freedom as a human right is non-negotiable; one either has it or

not. If there is freedom, them everyone should be able to enjoy it, not only
artists, but also those whose statements could hardly be identified as ‘cultural’.
Freedom of speech should not have an aesthetic character. That is not what is
at stake here. What is worth noting is the fact that art to a much more signifi-
cant extent than other forms of communication relies on symbolic language and
routinely breaks widely accepted conventions. Although the use of symbolism
and the breaking of conventions are key art values, they are also sources of
conflict, especially in conservative, more closed and less educated societies.
On the other hand, art provides a society with an opportunity to examine its
environment in a more reflective way, and a means of penetrating into the
essence of reality. As a result, there is often a reversal of the traditional rela-
tionship between power and art. Contemporary art frequently does not support
the power system. On the contrary, it wants to reveal its oppressive techniques.
That is why art often enters into conflict with the power structure. In many
instances, the latter has its hands tied and the only weapon at its disposal is
ignorance. Unfortunately it also frequently resorts to the use of repressive
measures, sometimes drastic ones.
The degree of artistic freedom (or more broadly, freedom of expression)
is highly variable across the contemporary world. The situation in the United
States looks differently from that in France or Turkey; it is also different in Great
Britain and in China. However, we should not be guided by such far-flung
comparisons, since it is unlikely they will yield productive results. Because we
are interested in the situation in Poland, it is much more effective to limit the
comparative analysis to the framework provided by post-communist Europe,
or countries that began to develop their own political organisms in the early
1990s under similar, though by no means identical, historical conditions.
If we ask in which countries the state and its organs (the prosecutors,
police, courts, or what Louis Althusser, following Marx, has identified as the
Repressive State Apparatus) are engaged in the prosecution of artists, we will
arrive at a surprising, though rather symptomatic answer. In ‘our’ part of Europe
there are only two such countries: Poland and Russia. Only in those two
countries have there been court judgments against people associated with art.
In Poland in 2003 the first district court in Gdańsk sentenced the artist Dorota
Nieznalska to six months of limited freedom (in practice, six months of
unpaid community service). The Gdańsk appeals court reversed the judgment
in 2009. In Russia two individuals were sentenced to pay a fine of 100,000
roubles. One of them was Yuri Samodurov, the director of the Andrei Sakharov
Museum and Public Centre for Peace, Progress and Human Rights in Moscow,
265
and the other was Ludmila Vasilovskaya, the museum’s chief curator. The
Polish artist and the Russian art activists were sentenced for similar ‘crimes’.
Nieznalska’s ‘crime’ was to show a fragment of her work Passion at the Gallery
Wyspa in Gdańsk in 2001; this consisted of a Greek cross to which she
attached a photograph of male genitalia.3 The Russians were fined for organ-
izing the exhibition ‘Caution, Religion!’ in early 2003 at the Sakharov Center
Museum. One of the most controversial works in the show was Aleksander
Kosolapov’s piece Coca-Cola: This is my Blood, 2003; the artist himself was
beyond the prosecutor’s reach since he has been living in New York for many
years. The Moscow exhibition was vandalized by ‘hooligans’ shortly after it
opened. Rather than pursuing the alleged vandals, the prosecutor decided
instead to charge the show’s organizers with ‘incitement to religious and
ethnic hatred’.4
58 Dorota
Nieznalska, Passion
(detail), 2001.
266
59 Dorota Nieznalska, Passion (detail), 2001.
Parenthetically speaking, there was an analogous situation in Poland,

when the office of the prosecutor refused to pursue a clear case of vandalism
by Witold Tomczak and Halina Nowina-Konopczyna, two members of the
Polish parliament, who broke the statute protecting cultural products. In 2000
they destroyed Maurizio Cattelan’s sculpture exhibited at the National Gallery
‘Zacheta’ in Warsaw. Instead of pursuing a case against the vandals, the
Minister of Culture and National Heritage, Kazimierz Michał Ujazdowski,
forced the director of the National Gallery Anda Rottenberg to resign. It is
also worth comparing the hysterical reaction of the government, the church
and the right-wing press in Poland to the exhibition of Cattelan’s work to the
complete lack of any (including legal) reaction to a similar project in Romania
by Ciprian Mureşan (The End of the First Five-Year Plan, 2004). It is true that
in this instance the protagonist of the work was not the pope (whose presenta-
tion would quite naturally fail to provoke any reaction), but the local patriarch.
Although the patriarch is not the pope, he is clearly someone with special status
in Romania. The Polish hysteria can be explained by a particularly insightful
diagnosis made by Harald Szeemann upon his decision to show Cattelan’s
work at the Warsaw National Gallery. Organizing an exhibition of Polish art,
he wanted to show something that would touch and disturb ‘Polish visuality’.
267
60 Aleksander Kosolapov, Coca-Cola: This is my Blood, 2003.
Because he did not find anything appropriate to this task in the history of
Polish art, he reached for Cattelan’s The Ninth Hour, 1999. I am quite certain
that he was interested in Poles’ sensitivity to the image of the pope, who has
become a key cult figure in the Polish imagination. In the piece, John Paul ii
does not stand on a pedestal, does not gaze on us from up above, and is not
heroic; just the opposite, he lies on the ground and, in addition, appears to be
crushed by a meteor. This was visually shocking. One could walk very close to
the figure of the pope, virtually stumbling upon it. Szeemann reached his goal
to a certain extent; he succeeded in deconstructing our visual perception of
John Paul ii, but he also failed. The Poles (at least some of them) showed
themselves completely incapable of discussing and analysing their visual rela-
tionship to the pope, and some politicians demonstrated visceral aggression
instead of thoughtful reflection. It is worth remembering that Witold Tomczak
(then a member of the Polish parliament, later of the European parliament) not
only never expressed any regret for his role in the destruction of the sculpture,
but instead called aggressively for the removal of Anda Rottenberg (something
that in fact took place through the decision reached by the Minister of Culture
and National Heritage).
The exhibition of Mureşan’s work took place under completely different
circumstances. First of all, it was conceived as a direct citation of Cattelan’s
piece. This connection was obvious and basic for the viewers. The true pro -
tagonist of the piece was not the patriarch, but another artwork, Cattelan’s
The Ninth Hour. Therefore the reference to the patriarch was mediated by
another work and another religious figure. This mediation provoked completely
268
different interpretations. Above all the patriarch was likened to the pope not
only as the head of the church, but also as someone who struggles with the
burden of progressive secularization of the social life. In Europe and in
Romania this process is quite obvious. The Romanian Orthodox Church,
unlike the Polish Catholic Church, is not triumphalist as an institution. On
the contrary, it is compromised by its not entirely commendable past record
of collaboration with past regimes, beginning with the monarchical and
ending with the communist.5 This is irrespective of the fact that the regimes,
especially the latter, did not always treat the church as a partner. Because of
this the Romanian faithful and the clergy have a completely different attitude
towards faith and its social role. Mureşan’s work was seen more as an ironic
metaphor of concern, rather than a vehicle for an attack. But above all, efforts
were made to interpret the work.6 Those were published mainly in Roman-
ian cultural periodicals, since mainstream newspapers were not interested.
The opposite was true in Poland. I do not recall any deeper analyses of The
Ninth Hour or the curator’s decision to show the piece in the context of
Polish art. The coverage in the Polish press (mainly mainstream) was domi-
nated by sensationalism. Given the media coverage of the event, one cannot
give the Polish journalists writing about cultural matters and art critics very
high marks. It is clear that one of the basic factors defining the difference in
attitude towards the two exhibitions demonstrated by the Polish Roman
Catholic Church and conservative politics on one side and the Romanian
Orthodox Church on the other is related to the fact that art is not given much
weight in Romania and its critical potential is not treated very seriously. In
Poland, likewise, art has not been the most important concern of the right-wing
61 Maurizio Cattelan, The Ninth Hour after the removal of the meteor, Warsaw, Zacheta
National Gallery of Art, 2000.
269
62 Ciprian Mureşan, The End of the First Five Year Plan, 2004.
politicians and the church, but it turned out to be a convenient tool for their
political campaigns.
It is worth noting that Cattelan and Mureşan are not the only artists
who have used images of the heads of churches or the churches themselves
in their works. Another artist who has done so, this time using the image
of the patriarch of the Serbian Orthodox Church, is Živko Grozdanić. In
his work we see multiplied images of the patriarch, or more precisely we
see four figures of the patriarch adoring a painting created by another artist,
Raša Todosijević (Four Patriarch Pavles watching 200.000 lines made by Raša
Todosijević, 2007–8). The situation here is not as dramatic as in the pieces
by Cattelan and Mureşan, rather it is ironic. Although a work showing the
patriarch looking at an abstract painting by a contemporary artist may carry
certain critical weight (since the churches in this part of Europe are not that
interested in contemporary art), its criticism or rather ironic commentary
did not provoke significant reactions from either the Orthodox Church or
the faithful. The work was exhibited without any problems or controversy.
Returning to the comparison between Poland and Russia, or, more
precisely, between Nieznalska’s Passion and the exhibition ‘Caution, Religion!’,
it is clear that it raises a number of questions. Even though we are dealing with
270
two different countries (Poland, which considers itself a free and democratic
country and which is a member of the European Union; Russia, which is
essentially an autocratic country where human rights are sometimes openly
violated), the similarities in the engagement of the state authorities in the
prosecution of visual arts are rather interesting. Is it possible that Poland may
be closer to autocratic Russia than to liberal France? This may be a rhetorical
question, however the fact that only in those two post-communist countries
have the prosecutors and courts become involved in repression of art does not
give either Poland or Russia any reason to be particularly proud. The second
question is what type of art is being persecuted in Poland and Russia? Here
the answer is quite clear: it is art that deals with religious iconography. It is
also worth noting that in both countries the governments tend to react in a
dramatic way to political satire using religious motifs. The politics of religion
in Russia, especially during the presidency and then premiership of Vladimir
Putin, has been full of opportunism. The president/premier’s gestures towards
the Russian Orthodox Church appear to be calculated for immediate political
effect. In Poland the problem is deeper and seems connected with the ideolog-
ical character of the state. Because the principle of the separation of church and
state has been violated and the state has taken upon itself the responsibility
63 Živko Grozdanić, Four Patriarch Pavles watching 200,000 lines made by Raša Todosijević,
2007–08.
271
for representing Christian ideology, it feels called upon to repress those who do
not share that ideology and demonstrate their opposition. That is why repres-
sions carried out against art in Russia are essentially opportunistic, while those
in Poland have a much more structural character.
From the perspective of human rights, or the right to freedom of ex-
pression, this distinction is irrelevant, since in both instances freedom is being
violated. However, from the perspective of the legal framework, it is crucially
important. If the next president of the Russian Federation does not want to play
the religious card, the organs under his control will adopt a different strategy
towards blasphemous representations, which of course will not make them any
less culpable. In Poland, by contrast, there is still a consensus concerning
‘Christian values’, a fact that may not bode well for the freedom of expression,
though certainly one cannot predict the future. Dorota Nieznalska, Yurij Sam-
odurov and Ludmila Vasilovskaya were in fact all convicted of blasphemy.
Although the Polish artist was cleared of an ‘offence against religious feelings’
by the appeals court, the judge in his summing up stressed the priority of the
right to religious freedom over the right to freedom of artistic expression.7 He
suggested that, even though Nieznalska’s work could have offended religious
feelings, this was not the artist’s intention. That was the main argument behind
his decision to reverse the judgment against the artist. The train of thought
behind this conclusion seems too convoluted and rather unsatisfactory. The
defence should have rested on the artist’s right to blasphemy and desecration.
It is in the citizens’ interest to acknowledge this right, the exercise of which
may not always be elegant, but is much safer than any effort to limit the right
to free expression. As Giorgio Agamben has argued, it is in their interest to
recognize the right to political as well as religious desecration and therefore
dissent, since desecration allows for recovery of that which has been taken away,
for the return of that which belongs to us.8 Freedom of expression should not
be instrumentalized; it should be absolute and not relative. This simply makes
sense. Violation of freedom of expression in one case may create a dangerous
precedent for the undermining of the entire framework of civil freedoms. In
this particular case it also seems that the desire to see the work as blasphemous
is as much a result of bad faith as of political manipulation. After all, Nieznal-
ska’s Passion consists of two elements, the earlier mentioned cross and a video
showing a man exercising with weights. This important semantic context has
often been ignored or at least marginalized in the Polish media. It is important
because it points to the fact that the work deals with the cult of the male
body, which is a common phenomenon of the consumer culture. The practice
of working out, which is motivated more by a desire to achieve a muscular
272
appearance than a need for a healthier lifestyle, becomes many men’s passion,
both in a literal and metaphoric sense (in relation to suffering). The work’s
title only potentially refers to the Stations of the Cross and Christ’s Passion.
After all, Nieznalska used a Greek rather than Latin cross in her installation.
The prosecutor and the judge should have known that Christ was crucified on
a Latin cross. The Greek cross symbolizes the ideal; the genitalia symbolize
masculinity. Together, in the context of ‘passionately’ performed physical exer-
cise, they reveal the artist’s ironic attitude towards the cult of the male body.
Therefore discursive reference to the Passion here is completely ironic, and the
irony is directed against the cult of the male body, rather than Christianity
as such.
Let us now take a look at Aleksander Kosolapov’s work Coca-Cola: This
is my Blood. Unlike Nieznalska, Kosolapov is a famous Russian artist and the
author of many well-known works that use irony to reveal mechanisms
through which mass culture appropriates ideological, historical and religious
symbols. He has juxtaposed the image of Lenin with Coca-Cola’s advertising
slogan (It’s the Real Thing) and a pastiche of the McDonalds logo (McLenin).
He has also created a sculpture showing Disney’s Mickey and Minnie in the
iconic pose of Vera Mukhina’s famous Soviet sculpture from 1937 (Mickey and
Minnie, Worker and Farmgirl). The artist’s work Malevich Sold Here mimics a
Marlboro cigarette ad. The rhetoric and style of Kosolapov’s work is based in
Sots Art, or to be more precise, in the collision of Sots Art and the world of
Western consumer culture. Religion as such does not interest him as a subject.
Of course, for the Russian press, the hooligans who attacked the exhibition
Caution, Religion!, and finally for the prosecutor who charged the organizers,
this was completely irrelevant. For Putin’s regime it was simply a good excuse
to demonstrate to the Orthodox Church the government’s ‘concern’ for the
religious feelings of the nation.
Poland as a country is particularly sensitive to the use of religious iconog-
raphy, even more so than Russia or any other European country, although in
Russia the case of ‘Caution, Religion!’ was not entirely isolated. In February 2004,
a year later, the Gallery s.p.a.s. in St Petersburg was vandalized by hooligans
during an exhibition by Oleg Yanushevsky that featured portraits of famous
politicians in the form of traditional religious icons. The exhibition ‘Russia 2’,
organized at the Gallery Marat Gelman in January 2005, also caused consider-
able controversy. The organizers of these other shows, however, unlike those of
the exhibition at the Sakharov Centre and Museum, did not end up in the
courts. Polish sensitivity towards religious representations, which has been
shaped since 1989 by extremist and radical groups associated with Radio
273
Maria, a local branch of an international Catholic broadcasting system, has

simply been accepted by the Polish political establishment as a fact.
It is worth noting that if we ignore the particular comparison with
Russia, Polish sensitivity to the use of religious iconography constitutes a com-
pletely isolated and exceptional case on the map of post-communist Europe,
not to mention the other European countries. That is why it deserves particu-
lar attention in this chapter. Moreover, Poland is also exceptional in terms of the
prevalence and, one could even say, a certain acceptance of art’s censorship.
Not many people are surprised by mechanisms by which representatives of
the government at almost any level, even the lowest, can (if they have such
power) make arbitrary decisions censoring and repressing art; if they do not
have the opportunity to do so themselves, they run to the prosecutor’s office.
The latter is confronted with the aporia of choosing between constitutionally
guaranteed freedom of expression and ‘defence of religious feelings’. Just how
unique the situation in Poland is can be seen when it is compared with the
experience of almost any other post-communist country (with the exception
of Russia). I will demonstrate this by comparing it with the situation in the
Czech Republic, a comparison suggested by ‘Shadows of Humour’, 2006, an
exhibition of Czech art first shown in Wrocław and then in Bielsko-Biała.
The exhibition was organized by William Hollister, an American who
has lived in Prague for many years and who was very aware of the fact that
Poland has a problem with art censorship. The first version of the exhibition
took place without major problems, though it seems they were anticipated.
The Czech art group Kamera Skura presented in Wrocław the installation
SuperStart, which consisted of a life-size figure of a gymnast frozen in a pose
recalling the crucifixion. The League of Polish Families, an extreme right-wing
Christian-nationalist political party, which belonged during this period to the
governing coalition, expressed disapproval of the work. However, a serious con -
frontation did not take place. When the exhibition was taken down, the figure
fell and was damaged, eliminating the potential for conflict. The original Super-
Start was commissioned for the Venice Biennale in 2003 and was shown at
the Czecho-Slovak pavilion (Czechs and Slovaks continue to share the pavilion
formerly occupied by Czechoslovakia) as the official exhibit of the Czech
Republic. It is worth noting that neither the Czech nor the international pub-
lic expressed any reservations concerning the work during the Biennale.
The second version of the exhibition ‘Shadows of Humour’ did not
have any references (even obscure ones) to religious iconography. As a result
Hollister and the other organizers worked on its installation with considerable
relief. They were greatly surprised when David Černý’s piece Shark was singled
274
out and censored. The work consists of a naked, bound figure of Saddam
Hussein floating in a huge rectangular container filled with liquid (this was
before the dictator’s execution) and functions as a parody of Damien Hirst’s
famous piece by the same name (1991), formerly in the Saachi collection. Zbig-
niew Michniowski, the deputy mayor of Bielsko-Biała, did not like the work
and without any hesitation or shame ordered it removed from the exhibition.
In the name of historical accuracy, it must be noted that this was not the first
time Černý’s Shark encountered difficulties. When the work was going to be
exhibited in Middelkerke in Belgium (2006), the organizers were concerned
about the reaction of the city’s Muslim population, divided and conflicted
64 Kamera Skura,
SuperStart, 2003.
275
over the war in Iraq. The artist shared those concerns and withdrew the piece
from the exhibition. After the unsuccessful attempt to show the work in Bielsko-
Biała, Shark was transported to Cieszyń, where it was shown at the Szara Gallery.
In order to complete the account of Polish censorship of Czech art in
2006, one should also mention the removal after only one day of the piece
You are all Faggots, created by the group Guma Guar, from the exhibition ‘Bad
News’ organized at the Kronika Gallery in Bytom. The work consists of a
manipulated photographic image showing Pope Benedict xiv holding the
bloody severed head of the pop singer Elton John. The image draws on the
iconography of Judith with the head of Holofernes or the related theme of
David with the head of Goliath. Judith, a patriotic Jewish heroine, used her
female charm to gain access to the camp of the Assyrian invaders in order to
kill their leader Holofernes by cutting off his head, thereby saving her people.
The story of David and Goliath is also taken from the biblical history of the
Israelites’ struggle against foreign invaders, this time Philistines. The smaller
and weaker David defeats the larger and stronger Goliath and cuts off his
head. This act horrifies the invaders and contributes to the Israelites’ eventual
victory. However, what is more important in this instance is the fact that
David’s victory foreshadows the victory of Christ over Satan, a motif that is
65 David Černy, Shark, 2006.
276
66 Guma Guar, You are all Faggots, 2006.
closer in spirit to the Guma Guar’s work in which the pope triumphs over evil,
symbolized by the gay pop singer.
In both instances of the classic iconographic schemata we are dealing with
heroic acts that save the nation from foreign oppression and, within a broader
context, signify victory of good over evil. However the image of Benedict xiv,
the leader of the Roman Catholic Church well known for his homophobic atti-
tude (as well as not infrequent scandals involving instances of homosexual
molestation within the Church), showing off the severed head of Elton John is
also (and perhaps above all) addressing the triumph of power, oppression and
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politics of exclusion. The work’s title, You are all Faggots, reinforces that meaning.
This is the evil targeted by the church; here is its indictment and the threat of
punishment that awaits us (since we are all faggots) – all of us who do not agree
with the pope (this one or the former or any other). All of us who think differ-
ently than the Roman Catholic Church have been branded and are in danger
of meeting the fate of Holofernes or the strongman Goliath. The response that we
should give to Benedict xiv ought to be the same as that given by students to the
French government in May 1968. When the government accused some of their
leaders of being German Jews (a fact that was supposed to diminish their cred-
ibility in the eyes of French bourgeois public opinion), the students responded:
‘We are all German Jews.’ This was a powerful gesture of solidarity. Guma Guar
seems to be suggesting that in the name of democracy we should make such a
gesture of solidarity with the sexual minorities of gay men and women.
However, my discussion of this work is not so much concerned with its
meaning, as with something completely different, its censorship. Although
the work was controversial, this does not justify its censorship, especially under
pressure from the media. The piece was shown in the exhibition ‘Bad News’.
A day after the opening, due to the negative response from the right-wing press,
the curator of the show made the decision to remove it. The press, irrespective
of its political leanings, has the right to be critical. That is its function. It cer-
tainly reflects the opinions of some of its readers. However, this does not mean
that such criticism should provoke self-censorship. A viewer in a democratic
country has the right to determine independently whether the work is good or
bad, relevant or misguided. No one has the right to take away his or her ability
to formulate such opinions; no one should deprive him or her of this oppor-
tunity. The censor, whoever he or she may be (a politician, prosecutor, judge
or a curator), by making the decision on behalf of the viewer violates his or
her civil rights.
Although all these examples deal with censorship of art that uses religious
motifs, there have also been other instances involving sexual imagery. I would
like to mention briefly one example about which I have written elsewhere. It
concerns Zofia Kulik’s work A Home and a Museum, which was excluded
from the artist’s monographic exhibition ‘From Siberia to Cyberia’, held at
the National Museum in Poznań in 1999.9
The work’s full installation, put together before the opening, consisted of
two parts: an obelisk placed in the middle of the museum’s monumental main
hall and a series of photographic close-ups of male genitalia taken from fragments
of sculpture in the Hermitage collection in St Petersburg. The photographs were
highly aestheticized, one could even say aesthetically refined in character. To be
278
precise, these were mediated photographs extracted from a video filmed at

the Hermitage. Underneath each image was a photograph (produced using the
same technique) of the original museum label in three different languages.
The information in Russian was printed first and in a larger font. The strong
visual presence of the sensual and aestheticized photographs, which saturated
the space of the museum with the male element, hanging along the two side
walls of the monumental hall, functioned as an antithesis to the neutral archi-
tectural frieze running along the upper portion of the wall. The ‘masculinity’ of
the series of photographs was also relativized by the presence of an obelisk placed
in the middle of the hall. The obelisk itself was rather complicated structurally.
Every form of an obelisk is associated with the male element. However in this
case, its upper (one could say essentially male) portion was separated from the
lower one by a frieze that used the image of Hestia, the ancient goddess of
the domestic hearth, taken from an advertising campaign for an insurance
company. This strong female accent was enhanced by a fabric draped around
the lower part of the obelisk, which brought to mind an image of a skirt. Finally
the obelisk was surrounded by a balustrade made from balusters taken from the
artist’s home balcony, which echoed the form of the monumental staircase
located at the western end of the museum hall.
A Home and a Museum has a complicated structure of potential meanings,
which operate through a series of contrasts: gendered (male-female), functional
(public museum-private home), national (Russian-Polish) and architectural
(vertical-horizontal forms). At the centre of this structure is the artist herself,
or her personal position, her own inquiry into the problem of identity within
a complicated play of elements. Woman has been associated by the force of
tradition (Hestia) with home, part of which has been literally moved to the
museum, a public institution. Similarly, the profession of an artist taken up
by a woman imposes on her a male frame of reference. This is especially true
because art is a traditional domain of the (male) genius and involves very pub-
lic activity.
It should be noted that until 1987 the artist collaborated with her male
partner Przemysław Kwiek and her own artistic identity melted into their
collaborative actions and projects. Moreover, her melting away took place in
the context of gender tension that could not be symmetrical. It is also important
to add that Zofia Kulik is a sculptor by training. Sculpture constitutes the most
‘male’ of arts, next to architecture, a fact that was emphasized in the installation
by the fragments of sculpted figures. The tension among the national elements
– Hermitage, a Russian museum, and the National Museum in Poznań, a Polish
museum – constituted another personal and very important component of
279
the artist’s strategic search for identity. It is connected with the artist’s biography
and the tension between her father, who came from the east and served as an
officer in the Polish People’s Army, an ideological military formation implicated
in shoring up Soviet (Russian) communism, and the artist herself, who by sub-
jecting the communist system of power to a critique in her earlier works turned
into, according to Ewa Lajer-Burcharth’s psychoanalytic and historical analysis,
an artist-dissident.10
67, 68 Zofia Kulik, A Home and a Museum (fragment), The National Museum in Poznan, 1999.
280
The then director of the National Museum in Poznań did not approve
of the planned placement of Kulik’s installation. What seems particularly inter-
esting from the perspective of this analysis is the fact that he did not allow the
work to be exhibited in the main, ‘shared’ space of the museum, but had no
problem with its installation in a side room. This means that the special, central
position of the main hall within the museum also defines its special ideological
and political position. This place functions as the ‘scene’ and therefore must be
free of any ‘obscenities’. It is the core of the museum. Since the museum is at
the core of culture, it is itself located at the very centre of the ‘scene’. As has
frequently been noted in French feminist literature, since this ‘scene’ is supposed
to be gender neutral, any demonstration of gender identity politics within it
is identified as violation of its neutrality, or charged with ‘ob-scenity’.11 The
appropriate places for such demonstrations are outside the ‘scene’, or at least
beyond its most visible centre, for example in the side rooms of the museum.
This was the background of the gender censorship of Zofia Kulik’s work at
the National Museum in Poznań.
These examples of censorship of Polish art at the end of the twentieth
century and the beginning of the twenty-first century constitute the proverbial
tip of an iceberg. What has caused this phenomenon? We must keep in mind
that we are dealing with art or visual culture, which in Poland, with the excep-
tion of history painting at the end of the nineteenth century, has not been
considered of great importance. The defence of artistic freedom, unlike that of
literary freedom, does not have a tradition in Poland. Because art has been
perceived as a field dominated by the activities of rather eccentric individuals,
who like to operate through scandal and to shock ‘serious people’, it does not
deserve defence (with the exception of art that has taken up national themes).
Literature has been perceived in completely different terms; it has been seen as
a treasury of national thought and feelings, where utopias and spiritual pro-
grammes of national revival were formulated. Censorship of literature was a
violation of national independence. The history of censorship in Poland under
communism is very interesting from this perspective. The censors were almost
completely uninterested in visual culture, but they demonstrated considerable
sensitivity towards literature. It is interesting to note that currently there appear
to be no censoring interventions into literature; I have heard nothing about
the League of Polish Families intervening in the business of Polish publishers
or of prosecutors pursuing cases in this area, even though both have been quite
visible within the territory of the visual arts. Happily, it seems that censorship of
literature, after the experience of communism, for many still constitutes a taboo.
This ‘handicapping’ of art is connected with a typical educational profile of
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Polish intellectuals, within which visual arts have played a very minor role. As
a result, the ‘patriotic education’ and ‘social engagement’ that form the trad-
itional basis of this social group have generally been taking place outside the
realm of visual culture (with the exception, once again, of history painting).
Perhaps something else, much more profound, is here also at stake. It seems that
Polish intellectuals have been educated to defend collective rights, in particular
the national right to independence, rather than individual ones. They have been
capable of highly heroic deeds in defence of national sovereignty, but have not
attached particular significance to individual rights or individual freedom of
expression. Last but not least, the traditional struggle for independence has been
connected with religion due to well-known historical circumstances. Poland
has defined itself historically as a Catholic nation; its sacrifice had religious
character and that is why the hopes for independence were often formulated
using religious symbolism. In general, Polish culture does not have a strongly
developed tradition of individual identity permitting transgression, atheism
and therefore religious desecration. The years of the communist regime strength-
ened conservative tendencies in Polish culture and its traditions, both positive
and negative, were taken over by Solidarity, which was responsible to a signif-
icant extent for shaping the attitudes of the 1990s.
As a result, the most extensive censorship of art at the end of the twentieth
century and the beginning of the twenty-first took place in Poland. However,
Poland’s special status does not mean that there have been no instances of art
censorship in the other post-communist countries. Examples can be found even
in a country as liberal as the Czech Republic. I will only mention one example.
In 2002 the exhibition ‘Politik-um’ at Prague Castle coincided with the official
visit of the German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, who was being hosted by
the president of the Czech Republic, Václav Havel. The exhibition included a
project entitled Zimmer frei by the Czech group Pode Bal, which consisted of a
large number of balloons with images of abandoned houses, some of which were
in the Sudeten Mountains. Those homes belonged at one point to Germans,
or more precisely to citizens of Czechoslovakia of German descent who were
expelled from the country by the socialist regime. This was a substantial group of
people. The balloons were removed from the square by the security forces, which
were supposedly acting to ensure the safety of the official delegation. Pode Bal
responded by showing a video documenting the entire event in the gallery. Dur-
ing Schroeder and Havel’s visit to the exhibition, however, the monitor showing
the video mysteriously disappeared. When the official guests left the exhibition,
it reappeared. Václav Havel himself commented on what happened but did
so in a rather conventional way, without any significant reflection, adding
282
nothing new to the matter. He noted that every exhibition involves a selection,
and every act of selection requires rejection of some works. He also stressed that
as the Czech Republic’s president, he felt responsible for the country to a much
greater extent than an ordinary citizen. Concluding his brief remarks he added
that ‘perhaps a German would not understand the Czech sense of humour,
since it is well known that only a Czech is able to comprehend it’.12
Another example comes from a different post-communist country,
Hungary. In 2002 the Ludwig Museum in Budapest cancelled Rose El-Hassan’s
show ‘Blood Donation’. The project made reference to a famous media event,
when Yasser Arafat together with a group of five hundred Palestinians donated
blood for the Israeli victims of the Gaza pacification. The organizers of the
exhibition were terrified that El-Hassan’s project could be read as an expression
of pro-terrorist and simultaneously anti-Israeli, or even anti-American, sentiments.
The situation was complicated by the artist’s Hungarian-Syrian background.
Moreover, to this day Hungarians (and not only they) have not become fully
reconciled with the history of their own anti-Semitism during the Second
World War, in particular atrocities committed by the homegrown Nazi Arrow-
Cross militias. All this was happening during the period when Hungary was
already part of nato. It is well known that the new recruits were expressing their
faith in the American-led coalitions and their sympathy for the various ‘anti-
terrorist’ phobias plaguing the us government with the doubled enthusiasm of
the newly initiated. In the end the show did take place, but not at the Ludwig
Museum. It was staged first at the Budapest Blood Bank and then at many
different art venues beyond Hungary’s borders.
69 Pode Bal, Zimmer frei, 2002.
283
70 Csaba Nemes, Remake, 2007.
A more recent example from Hungary is provided by the rejection of

the exhibition project ‘Remake’ curated by Maja and Reuben Fowkes for the
Hungarian pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2007.13 The project consisted of
Csaba Nemes’s animated films reflecting media coverage of the anti-government
street demonstrations that took place in Hungary in October 2006. Although
the jury evaluating the submitted proposals awarded this the first prize, the
Ministry of Culture did not permit its presentation in Venice. It should be
mentioned that the Venice Biennale, as an event featuring official exhibitions of
the participating countries showcased in national pavilions, has often witnessed
conflicts between curators and governmental officials. We should remember that
at one point New Yugoslavia, a country consisting of Serbia and Montenegro
and which no longer exists, rejected an exhibition proposal featuring Marina
Abramovic’s Balkan Baroque (see chapter Five). The work was finally shown in
Venice but at an independent exhibition, rather than the official one held in
the national pavilion of New Yugoslavia.14 Jerzy Onuch, who was then the
director of the Centre for Contemporary Art in Kiev, encountered similar
problems when the Ukrainian government rejected his exhibition project.
A drastic and at the same time highly complicated example of inter-
vention in an art show can be found in Belgrade. It relates to the history of
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the travelling exhibition ‘Exception: Contemporary Art Scene from Prishtina’.

The first version of the show took place without any problems in Novi Sad.
The second was supposed to open at the Gallery Kontekst in Belgrade on 7
February 2008. This never happened or, more precisely, the show was closed
at its opening by the police, who explained that they could not guarantee the
71 Dren Maliqi, Face

to Face, 2003.
285
safety of the participants and artworks due to mounting and increasingly

aggressive protests by Serbian nationalists. The exhibition never reopened; it
was never made available to the public despite numerous protests and petitions
submitted to the local and state government, and also to international bodies.15
The very fact that the exhibition featured artists from Kosovo provoked serious
tensions. Street demonstrations organized by right-wing groups, leading up
to and during the show’s opening, culminated in a very sharp exchange during
which Face to Face, 2003, a work by Dren Maliqi portraying one of the lead-
ers of the Kosovo Liberation Army, Adem Jašari – unquestionably a hero for
Albanians and Kosovars, but a terrorist and criminal to the Serbian nationalists
– was damaged. Jašari, holding a Kalashnikov and nonchalantly draped in his
military coat, was shown in a double portrait resembling Andy Warhol’s double
portrait of Elvis Presley. The image suggested more a warlord than a soldier,
much less a leader of a regular army. The juxtaposition of this portrait with a
reproduction of Warhol’s painting was supposed to emphasize the iconic char-
acter of this figure and the ‘mass consumption’ of this very popular image in
Kosovo. However, in Belgrade it provoked an extremely aggressive reaction. All
this was taking place just a few days before the announcement by Kosovo of
its independence (17 February 2008), which provoked a wave of demonstra-
tions in Serbia, including attacks on the us and Slovenian embassies (during
this period Slovenia held the presidency of the European Union). From the legal
perspective the situation was rather interesting. The gallery was trying to
show works by artists who were still citizens of the country whose capital was
Belgrade. This provoked a nationalist reaction and the de facto (since it is diffi-
cult to speak here about de jure) closing or rather censorship of the exhibition.
This interpretation is supported by the fact that no one was able to reopen
the show. It is quite clear that the seeming helplessness of the government hid
its sympathy for nationalist groups and circles and that its supposed concern
for the safety of people and artworks was just an excuse, a rhetorical ploy. The
declaration of Kosovo’s independence just a few days after the opening/closing
of the exhibition and its acceptance by the United States and some members
of the European Union further incited such sentiments. Therefore this can be
seen as one of the rare instances when a non-existing exhibition provoked
heated discussion, and art that was not visible gave rise to political conflict and
repressive actions.
In this respect, it seems that Belgrade is an exceptional city. The strong
polarization of political positions, nationalist tensions and discussions about
art’s entanglement in historical processes taking place ‘here and now’ has given
rise to a very dynamic art scene, which often reacts in a radical way to social and
286
political processes occurring in Serbia. The 49th October Salon provides evidence
of such a high level of engagement. Although the Salon was initially organized
by the local artists’ union, over time it has gained an international reputation.
The 49th October Salon, held a few months after the events described above
(which were evoked during the exhibition by the showing of a documentary
by Eduard Freudmann and Jelena Radić, The State of Exception Proved to be
the Rule), was organized by Bojana Pejić, a curator particularly interested in
the political engagement of art. The Salon was entitled Artist/Citizen. Although
it featured an international selection of artists, it was dominated by the work
of artists from the former Yugoslavia, something particularly interesting given
the situation.
There isn’t and there will never be an ideal democracy. Democracy is a
real, not an ideal political system. It always has faults but there are also always
ideas for how it can be improved. What is important is that those ideas increase
democracy and do not replace it with an authoritarian system. Eastern Europe
has gone through an excruciating experience of the latter system of govern-
ment. That is why it is particularly painful to see democracy, which has been
formally adopted by all the countries in post-communist Europe, fail to meet
the expectations invested in it and realizing only in part the dreams of freedom.
Censorship of art, no matter in which country it takes place and for what-
ever reasons (religious, nationalist, cultural), always recalls the functioning of
the former regime. It is never consistent with the dreams of a new fair and free
system. However, the censorship practices in post-communist Europe cannot
be seen as isolated incidents. The problem rests in the fact that they are often
accepted by at least part of the local population. This acceptance is not solely
a result of a ‘habit’ or conviction that the ‘Others’ who threaten ‘Us’ must be
silenced to avert danger. The perception that this is the only way to defend
oneself is a result of the lack of a culture of public debate. One could say that
post-communist societies did not have an opportunity to learn those skills, and
that they need time to acquire them. However, this ‘simple’ wish is complicated
by the rise of populist movements throughout the former Eastern and also
in Western Europe. Populism is a widespread phenomenon of the contempo-
rary world, one that cannot be easily eliminated. It acquires broad support and
favours authoritarian forms of government that practise censorship of artistic
expression. We should denounce such practices, write about them, reveal and
analyse them, fight against them. Democracy cannot defend itself, neither will
it be defended by politicians inclined towards populism. Although strictly speak-
ing not all politicians can be classified within the politological nomenclature
as ‘populists’, the fact remains that they are all concerned with attracting votes,
287
something that certainly creates populist temptations. It is up to intellectuals and

artists, who cherish freedom as an ideal, who feel the discomfort of unfulfilled
expectations, the discomfort of unfulfilled democracy, to argue and agitate for
democracy. Intellectuals and artists who see their place in the agora, in the midst
of public debate, are guided in their behaviour by agorophilia. This book is
about some of them.
288
References
one 1989: The Spatial Turn
1 Hans Belting, Art History after Modernism (Chicago, il, 2003), p. 61.
2 Ibid., pp. 58, 57.
3 Christoph Tannert, ‘Reality in the Foreground’, Metropolis. International
Art Exhibition, Berlin 1991, exh. cat. ed. Christoph M. Joachimides and
Norman Rosenthal (New York, 1991), p. 32.
4 Ibid., p. 34.
5 Joseph Bakshtein, ‘Nonconformist Traditions and Contemporary Russian
Art: A View from Moscow’, Nonconformist Art: The Soviet Experience,
1956–1986, ed. Alla Rosenfeld and Norton T. Dodge (London, 1995),
p. 332.
6 Piotr Piotrowski, ‘Central Europe in the Face of Unification’, in Who if not
we should at least try to imagine the future of all this, ed. Maria Hlavajova
and Jill Winder (Amsterdam, 2004), pp. 271–81.
7 Bojana Bejić, ‘The Dialectics of Normality’, After the Wall: Art and Culture
in Post-Communist Europe, ed. Bojana Pejić and David Elliott (Stockholm,
1999), p. 19.
8 Mária Orišková, Dvojhlasné dejiny umenia (Bratislava, 2002).
9 Zdenka Badovinac, ed., 2000+ ArtEast Collection: The Art of Eastern Europe
in Dialog with the West, exh. cat., Moderna Galerija, Ljubljana (Ljubljana,
2000); Zdenka Badovinac and Peter Weibel, eds, 2000+ ArtEast Collection:
The Art of Eastern Europe (Innsbruck, Vienna and Bolzano, 2001).
10 irwin, eds, ‘East Art Map’, New Moment, no. 20 (Ljubljana, 2002). See
also Borut Vogelnik (irwin), ‘Total Recall’, in Who if not we should at least
try to imagine the future of all this, ed. Hlavajova and Winder, pp. 171–86.
11 Eda Čufer and Victor Missiano, eds, Interpol: The Art Exhibition which
Divided East and West (Ljubljana and Moscow, 2000). See also Laura
Hoptman and Tomaš Pospiszyl, eds, Primary Documents: A Sourcebook
for Eastern and Central European Art since the 1950s (New York, 2002),
pp. 345–61.
12 Renata Salecl, ‘Love me, Love my Dog: Psychoanalysis and the
Anima/Human Divide’, Interpol, p. 112.
13 See Dario Gamboni, Destruction of Art: Iconoclasm and Vandalism since the
French Revolution (London, 1997).
14 Igor Zabel, ‘Dialog’, Interpol, p. 122.
289
15 See Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe (Stanford, ca, 1994).

16 See Andrzej Turowski, Malewicz w Warszawie. Rekonstrukcje i symulacje
[Malevich in Warsaw. Reconstructions and Simulations] (Kraków, 2002).
17 See Irit Rogoff, ‘Engendering Terror’, in Geografie und Politik der
Mobilität/Geography and the Politics of Mobility, ed. Ursula Biemann
(Vienna and Cologne, 2003), pp. 29–47 and 48–63.
18 Igor Zabel, ‘The (Former) East and its Identity’, in Who if not we should
at least try to imagine the future of all this, ed. Hlavajova and Winder,
pp. 283–8.
19 See Linda Nead, The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity and Sexuality (London,
1992).
20 Moscow Art Magazine, no. 22 (1998).
21 Hlavajova and Winder, eds, Who if not we should at least try to imagine the
future of all this.
22 Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois and Benjamin H. D. Buchloh,
Art since 1900: Modernism. Antimodernism. Postmodernism (London, 2004).
23 Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Toward a Geography of Art (Chicago, 2004);
Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, ‘Time and Place: Essays in the Geohistory
of Art. An Introduction’, in Time and Place: Essays in the Geohistory of Art,
ed. Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann and Elizabeth Philiod (London, 2005).
24 André Breton, Position politique du surrealism (Paris, 1972), p. 123; cited
in František Šmejkal, ‘From Lyrical Metaphors to Symbols of Fate: Czech
Surrealism of the 1930s’, in Czech Modernism, 1900–1945, ed. Jaroslav
Anděl et al., exh. cat., Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (Boston, ma, 1989),
p. 65.
25 Gerald Janecek and Toshiharu Omuka, eds, The Eastern Dada Orbit:
Russia, Georgia, Ukraine, Central Europe, and Japan, vol. iv of Crisis and
the Arts. The History of Dada, series ed. Stephen C. Foster (New York,
1998). There are, of course, other studies that point to Eastern Europe
as the source of the Dada movement. See Tom Sandqvist, Dada East:
The Romanians of Cabaret Voltaire (Cambridge, ma, 2006).
26 Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York, 1978).
27 Igor Zabel, ‘“We” and “The Others”’, in Interpol, ed. Čufer and Misiano,
p. 132.
28 Suzana Milevska, ‘Is Balkan Art History Global?’, in Is Art History Global?,
ed. James Elkins (New York and London, 2007), p. 216.
29 Gerardo Mosquera, ‘The Marco Polo Syndrome: Some Problems around
Art and Eurocentrism’, in Theory in Contemporary Art since 1985, ed. Zoya
Kocur and Simon Leung (London, 2005), pp. 218–25.
30 John Clark, Modern Asian Art (Honolulu, 1998).
31 Ibid., p. 22.
32 Norman Bryson, ‘Art in Context’, in Studies in Historical Change, ed.
Ralph Cohen (Charlottesville, va, 1992), p. 21.
33 Belting, Art History after Modernism, p. 61.
34 See Orišková, Dvojhlasné dejiny umenia.
290
references
35 The concept of ‘the close Other’ was used by Bojana Pejić in ‘The
Dialectics of Normality’, in Art and Culture in post-Communist Europe,
ed. Pejić and Elliott, p. 20. She makes a reference to Boris Groys’s fremde
Nahe, but does not cite a specific bibliographic reference.
36 Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe.
37 Clark, Modern Asian Art.
38 Dawn Ades, Art in Latin America: The Modern Era, 1820–1980
(New Haven, ct, 1989).
39 Ibid., pp. 125–6, 195–213.
40 Kaufmann, Toward a Geography of Art.
41 Piotr Piotrowski, ‘On Two Voices of Art History’, in Grenzen über-
windend. Festschrift für Adam S. Labuda zum 60. Geburstag, ed. Katja
Bernhardt and Piotr Piotrowski (Berlin, 2006), p. 53. Polish version of
the essay, ‘O dwóch głosach historii sztuki’, Artium Quaestiones [Poznań],
xvii, p. 210.
42 Irit Rogoff, ‘Engendering Terror’, in Geografie und Politik der Mobilität /
Geography and the Politics of Mobility, ed. Biemann, p. 53.
43 See Piotr Piotrowski, ‘On the Spatial Turn, or Horizontal Art History’,
Umeni/Art [Prague], no. 5 (2008), pp. 378–83. Polish version of the essay,
‘O horyzontalnej historii sztuki’, Artium Quaestiones [Poznań], xx (2009),
pp. 59–73.
44 This topic is also discussed by Anna Brzyski in ‘Introduction: Canons and
Art History’, in Partisan Canons, ed. Anna Brzyski (Durham, nc, 2007),
pp. 1–25.
45 See Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, ‘De l’esthétique d’administration à la
critique institutionnelle’, in L’art conceptuel, une perspective, ed. Claude
Gintz, exh. cat., Musée d’Art Modern de la Ville de Paris (Paris, 1989),
pp. 25–53; trans. as ‘Conceptual Art 1962–1969: From the Aesthetic of
Administration to the Critique of Institutions’, October, no. 55
(Winter 1990), pp. 105–43.
46 Luis Camnitzer, Conceptualism in Latin American Art: Didactics of
Liberation (Austin, tx, 2007).
47 Ibid., pp. 29–36.
48 Luis Camnitzer, Jane Farver and Rachel Weiss, eds, Global Conceptualism:
Points of Origins, 1950–1980s, exh. cat., Queens Museum of Art, New York
(New York, 1999).
49 László Beke, ‘Conceptual Tendencies in Eastern European Art’, in ibid.,
p. 42.
50 Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, ‘National Stereotypes, Prejudice, and
Aesthetic Judgments’, in Art History, Aesthetics, Visual Studies, ed. Michael
Ann Holly and Keith Moxey (Williamstown, ma, 2002), pp. 71–84.
51 See Anthony D. Smith, Nationalism and Modernism: A Critical Survey of
Recent Theories of Nations and Nationalism (London and New York, 1998).
52 Ulrich Beck, Power in the Global Age: A New Global Political Economy
(Cambridge, 2006).
291
53 Homi Bhabha, ‘Preface to the Routledge Classics Edition’, The Location of

Culture (London and New York, 2007), pp. ix–xxv.
54 Arjum Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization
(Minneapolis, 1996).
55 Mari Carmen Ramirez, ‘Brokering Identities: Art Curators and the Politics
of Cultural Representation’, in Thinking about Exhibitions, ed. Reesa
Greenberg, Bruce W. Ferguson and Sandy Nairne (London and New
York, 1996), pp. 21–38.
56 See Dariusz Skórczewski, ‘Wobec eurocentryzmu, dekolonizacji i
postmodernizmu. O niektórych problemach teorii postkolonialnej i jej
polskich perspektywach’ [Confronting eurocentrism, decolonization and
postmodernism. Concerning some problems of the postcolonial theory
and its applicablility in the Polish context], Teksty Drugie, nos. 1–2 (2008),
pp. 33–5.
57 Hans Belting, ‘Contemporary Art as Global Art: A Critical Estimate’, in
The Global Art World: Audiences, Markets, and Museums, ed. Hans Belting
and Andrea Buddensieg (Ostfildern, 2009), pp. 45–8. See also the highly
heterogenous discussion of a similar subject in James Elkins, ed., Is Art
History Global? (London and New York, 2007).
58 Alexander Alberro, ‘Periodising Contemporary Art’, in Crossing Cultures:
Conflict, Migration, and Convergence, ed. Jaynie Anderson (Melbourne,
2009), pp. 935–9.
59 Monika Szmyt, Współczesna sztuka chińska: tradycja klasyczna, socrealizm,
estetyka zachodnia [Contemporary Chinese Art: Classical Tradition, Social
Realism, Western Aesthetics] (Kraków, 2007).
60 Susan Buck-Morss, ‘The Post-Soviet Condition’, in East Art Map.
Contemporary Art and Eastern Europe, ed. irwin (London, 2006), p. 498.
61 Boris Groys has written repeatedly on this subject. Some of his essays have
been republished a number of times. In particular see Boris Groys, Art
Power (Cambridge, ma, 2008): ‘Beyond Diversity: Cultural Studies and
Its Post-Communist Other’, pp. 149–63, and ‘Privatizations, or Artificial
Paradises of Post-Communism’, pp. 165–72, and his essay ‘Back from
the Future’, in 2000+ Art East Collection. The Art of Eastern Europe,
ed. Badovinac and Weibel, pp. 9–14.
62 Boris Groys, Art Power, p. 161.
63 Michał Buchowski, ‘The Specter of Orientalism in Europe: from
Exotic Other to Stigmatized Brother’, Anthropological Quarterly, lxxix/3
(2006), pp. 463–82; for a slightly different Polish version see Michał
Buchowski, ‘Widmo orientalizmu w Europie. Od egzotycznego Innego
do napiętnowanego swojego’, Recykling Idei, no. 10 (Spring/Summer
2008), pp. 98–107. Henry F. Carey and Rafal Raciborski, ‘Postcolonialism:
A Valid Paradigm for the Former Sovietized States and Yugoslavia’, East
European Politics & Societies, http://eep.sagepub.com (Stanford University,
8 September 2007); David Chioni Moore, ‘Is the Post- In Postcolonial the
Post- in Post-Soviet? Toward a Global Postcolonial Critique’, Publications
292
references
of the Modern Language Association of America, cxvi (January 2001),

pp. 111–28.
64 An interesting perspective on this research is presented by Dariusz
Skórczewski, ‘Wobec eurocentryzmu, dekolonizacji i postmodernizmu’.
See also a pioneering publication publication dealing with the subject of
Russian literature from the perspective of postcolonial studies, Ewa M.
Thompson, Imperial Knowledge: Russian Literature and Colonialism
(Westpoint, ct, and London, 2000).
65 See Andrzej Szczerski, ‘Colonial/Post-Colonial Central Europe – History
vs. Geography’, Anxiety of Influence: Bachelors, Brides, and Family Romance,
ed. Adam Budak, exh. cat., Stadtgalerie, Bern (Bern, 2004), pp. 64–72.
66 See Rasheed Araeen, ed., The Other Story: Afro-Asian Artists in Post-War
Britain, exh. cat., Hayward Gallery, London (London, 1989); Olu Oguibe
and Okwui Enwezor, eds, Reading the Contemporary: African Art from
Theory to the Marketplace (London and Cambridge, ma, 1999); Saloni
Mathur, India by Design: Colonial History and Cultural Display (Berkeley,
ca, 2007); Partha Mitter, The Triumph of Modernism: Indian Artists and
the Avant-Garde, 1922–1947 (London, 2007).
67 Partha Mitter, ‘Intervention. Decentreing Modernism: Art History and
Avant-Garde Art from the Periphery’, Art Bulletin, xc/4 (December 2008),
pp. 543–4.
68 See Rebecca M. Brown, ‘Response. Provincializing Modernity: from
Derivative to Foundational’, Art Bulletin, xc/4 (December 2008), pp. 555–7;
Saloni Mathur, ‘Response. Belonging to Modernism’, Art Bulletin, xc/4
(December 2008), pp. 558–60.
69 Kobena Mercer, ed., Cosmopolitan Modernisms (London and Cambridge,
ma, 2005), p. 203.
70 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and
Historical Difference (Princeton, nj, 2000).
71 Alexander Kiossev, ‘Otherness, Again: Notes on Self-Colonising Cultures
(1998)’, After the Wall, ed. Pejić and Elliott (Stockholm, 1999), pp. 114–17.
72 Tom Sandqvist, Dada East: The Romanians of Cabaret Voltaire
(Cambridge, ma, 2006).
73 László Beke, ‘Conceptual Tendencies in Eastern European Art’, p. 42.
74 Edit András, ‘The Old Practice of Art Criticism of the East versus the New
Critical Theory of the West’, Cruising Danubio: At the Cutting Edge of
Contemporary Hungarian Art, ed. Agustin Pérez Rubio, Zsolt Petrány et al.,
exh. cat., Consejeria de las Artes, Comunidad de Madrid (Madrid, 2003),
pp. 193–207.
75 Andrzej Turowski, ‘Ideologiczna czy socjologiczna? Stan i perspektywy
badawcze sztuki polskiej dwudziestolecia międzywojennego’ [Ideological
or sociological? The state and research methodologies of the Polish
art during the interwar period], in Tadeusz S. Jaroszewski, Sztuka
dwudziestolecia międzywojennego [Art of the Interwar Period] (Warsaw,
1982), pp. 9–27.
293
76 John Peffer, Art and the End of Apartheid (Minneapolis, mn 2009).

77 Camnitzer, Conceptualism in Latin American Art, p. 214.
two From Geography to Topography
1 Maria Hlavajova, ‘Only the small emerging initiative can be effective’

(2005), at www.exindex.hu, accessed 13 November 2005.
2 See Bojana Pejić, ‘The Dialectics of Normality’, in After the Wall: Art and
Culture in Post-Communist Europe, ed. Bojana Pejić and David Elliott
(Stockholm, 1999), pp. 16–28.
3 Marina Gržnić, Fiction Reconstructed: Eastern Europe, Post-socialism and the
Retro-Avant-Garde (Vienna, 2000), p. 19.
4 Igor Zabel, ‘The (Former) East and its Identity’, in Who if not we should
at least try to imagine the future of all this?, ed. Maria Hlavajova and Jill
Winder (Amsterdam, 2004), pp. 283–8. See also Igor Zabel, ‘We and the
Others’, Interpol. The Art Exhibition which Divided East and West, ed. Eda
Ćufer and Viktor Misiano (Ljubljana and Moscow, 2000), pp. 130–38.
5 Joseph Bakshtein, ‘Nonconformist Tradition and Contemporary Russian
Art’, in Nonconformist Art: The Soviet Experience, 1956–1986, ed. Alla
Rosenfeld and Norton T. Dodge (London and New York, 1995),
pp. 332–57.
6 Jana Ševčikova and Jiři Ševčik, ‘New Conservatism’, Umelec, no. 1 (2001),
at www.divus.cz
7 Rosalyn Deutsche, ‘Agoraphobia’, Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics
(Cambridge, ma, 1996), pp. 269–327.
8 Wulf Herzogenrath, Joachim Sartorius and Christph Tannert, eds, Die
Endlichkeit der Freiheit, Berlin 1990: Ein Ausstellungsprojekt in Ost und West
[Berliner Künstlerprogramm des daad] (Berlin, 1990), pp. 205–26.
9 Igor Zabel, ‘Time and its Copy’, in Roman Ondák, exh. cat., Kölnischer
Kunstverein (Cologne, 2005), pp. 15–16.
10 Richard Fajno and Mira Keratová, eds, An Occasional Worker / Prileżitostný
robotnik (Bratislava and Prague, 2006); Marek Krajewski, ed., Sztuka w
mieście: Zewnętrzna Galeria ams, 1998–2002, exh. cat., Galeria Sztuki
Zachęta, Warsaw (Warsaw, 2003).
11 See www.rajkowska.com/pl/projektyp/62, accessed 15 September 2011.
12 See www.hints.hu/portfolio.php?p_evszam=2004&p_id=35, accessed 15
September 2011.
13 Mahulena Nešlehova, Poselstvi jiného výrazu: Pojeti ‘informelu’ v českém
uměni 50. a pravni poloviny 60. Let (Prague, 1997), p. 239.
14 František Šmejkal, ‘Argumenty’, in ibid., pp. 239–40.
15 Briger Jesch, ‘Mißbrauch sakraler Räume für staatsfeindliche Zwecke’, in
Mail Art Szene ddr, 1975–1990, ed. F. Winners and L. Wohlrab (Berlin,
1994), p. 96.
16 László Beke, ‘The Hidden Dimensions of the Hungarian Art of the 1960s’,
294
references
in Hatvanas Évek. Új Törekvések a Magyar Képzõmûvészetben, ed. László

Beke et al., exh. cat., Magyar Nemzeti Galéria, Budapest (Budapest, 1991),
p. 316.
17 Jiři Valoch, ‘Brnnský okruh’, Výtvatné umni [Magazine for Contemporary
Art], nos. 3–4 (1995): ‘Zakázané umni’, vol. i, pp. 151–5.
18 Paul Kaiser and Claudia Petzold, Boheme und Dictatur in der ddr: Gruppen,
Konflikte, Quartiere, 1970–1989, exh. cat., Deutsches Historisches Museum,
Berlin (Berlin, 1997), p. 30.
19 [Ruta Wolf-Rehfeldt], ‘Gespräch/ Discussion’, in Osteuropa Mail Art im
internationalen Netzwerk, ed. K. von Berswordt-Wallrabe and László Beke,
exh. cat. Staatliches Museum, Schwerin (1996), p. 133.
20 Jürgen Weichardt, ‘Unsere Mann in Berlin’, in Robert Rehfeldt: Malerei,
Visuelle Poesie, Mail-Art, Graphik, Objekte, Video, ed. Eugen Blume, H.-J.
Schirmbeck, J. Zielke and A. Weiss, exh. cat., Galerie Vier, Galerie Zielke,
Berlin (Berlin, 1991), pp. 22–3.
21 Jürgen Schweinebraden, ‘Reflexionen und Beschreibungen einer
vergangenen Zeit: Erinnerungen, 1956–1980’, in Kunstdokumentation
sbz/ddr, 1945–1990: Aufsätze, Berichte, Materialen, ed. G. Feist, E. Gillen
and B. Viereneisel (Berlin, 1996), p. 704.
22 G. Perneczky, ‘Hungary: Long Live the Cultural Bungler’, in Osteuropa
Mail Art im internationalen Netzwerk, p. 37.
23 Ibid., p. 41.
24 See Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (Oxford, 1997); Peter Weibel,
Roger Conover and Eda Čufer, In Search for Balkania, exh. cat., Neue
Galerie, Graz (2002); Dušan I. Bjelić and Obrad Savić, eds, Balkan as
Metaphor: Between Globalization and Fragmentation (Cambridge, ma,
2002); Rene Block, ed., In der schluchten des Balkan, exh. cat., Kunsthalle
Fridericianum, Kassel (2003); ‘Balkans & Balkanness, Pros & Cons’,
Artelier, no. 8 (2003); Harald Szeemann, ed., Blut & Honig: Zukunft ist
am Balkans (Klosterneuburg and Vienna, 2004). In this context mention
should also be made of the Istanbul and Centinje Biennales.
25 Anda Rottenberg, ed., Czas osobisty: sztuka Estonii, Litwy i Łotwy,
1945–1996, exh cat., Galeria Sztuki Współczesnej Zachęta, Warsaw
(Warsaw, 1996); Helena Demakova et al., 2 Show: Young Art from Latvia
and Lithuania, exh. cat., Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius (Vilnius,
2004); Jari-Pekka Vanhala, ed., Faster than History: Contemporary
Perspectives on the Future of Art in the Baltic Countries, Finland, and Russia
(Helsinki, 2004); Inke Arns and Kurt Wettengl, eds, Mit allem Rechnen:
Medienkunst aus Estland, Lettland und Litauen, exh. cat., Museum Ostwall,
Dortmund (2006).
26 See also Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art:
Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War (Chicago, il 1983).
27 Katrin Klingan and Ines Kappert, eds, Leap into the City (Cologne, 2006).
295
three From the Politics of Autonomy to the Autonomy of Politics
1 Louis Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’ (1969), in

Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (London and New York, 1971),
pp. 127–86.
2 Susan E. Reid, ‘The Exhibition “Art of Socialist Countries”, Moscow
1958–9, and the Contemporary Style of Painting’, in Style and Socialism:
Modernity and Material Culture in Post-War Eastern Europe, ed. Susan E.
Reid and David Crowley (Oxford and New York, 2000), pp. 101–32.
3 Martin Damus, Malerei in der ddr: Funktionen der bildenden Kunst im
Realen Sozialismus (Reinbeck bei Hamburg, 1991), p. 123 and notes.
4 Paul Kaiser and Claudia Petzold, Boheme und Dictatur in der DDR:
Gruppen, Konflike, Quartiere, 1970–1989, exh. cat., Deutsches Historisches
Museum, Berlin (Berlin, 1997), pp. 42, 112.
5 Eugen Blume, ‘In freier Luft – Die Kunstlergruppe Clara Mosch und Ihre
Pleinairs’, in Kunstdokumentation SBZ/DDR, 1945–1990: Aufsätze, Berichte,
Materialen, ed. G. Feist, E. Gillen and B. Viereneisel (Berlin, 1996), p. 728 n.
6 Miklós Haraszti, The Velvet Prison: Artists under State Socialism (New York,
1987).
7 Wiesław Borowski, ‘Pseudoawangarda’, Kultura, no. 12 (1975).
8 Andrzej Turowski, ‘Polska ideoza’, Sztuka polska po 1945 roku (Warsaw,
1987), p. 36.
9 Andrzej Turowski, W kręgu konstruktywizmu (Warsaw, 1979).
10 [Anka Ptaszkowska], ‘Remarks and Comments: Discussion on the Zalesie
Ball and Participation’, in 1968, 1989. Political Upheaval and Artistic
Change, ed. Clair Bishop and Marta Dziewańska, exh. cat., Muzeum Sztuki
Nowoczesnej, Warsaw (Warsaw, 2009), pp. 106–11.
11 Luiza Nader, Konceptualizm w PRL. Język-postawa-strategia (Warsaw, 2007).
12 Discussion with Stefan Morawski, ‘Neo czy pseudo. Czy mamy awangardę’,
Sztuka, no. 3 (1981), p. 4.
13 Jan Stanisław Wojciechowski, ‘Uczestniczyć i rozumieć’, Kultura, no. 19
(1975).
14 Tomas Pospiszyl, ‘Look Who’s Watching: Photographic Documentation of
Happenings and Perfomances in Czechoslovakia’, in 1968, 1989. Political
Upheaval and Artistic Change, ed. Bishop and Dziewańska, pp. 74–87.
15 Jindřich Chalupecký, Nové Umni v Čechách (Prague, 1994), pp. 156–7;
part of the book appeared earlier in English as ‘Art in Bohemia: its
Merchants, Bureaucrats, and Creators’, Cross Currents, no. 9 (Ann Arbor,
mi, 1990).
16 Ibid., p. 163.
17 Václav Havel, ‘Power of the Powerless’, in Václav Havel et al., The Power
of the Powerless: Citizens against the State in Central-Eastern Europe, ed.
John Keane (Armonk, ny, 1985).
18 Artur Żmijewski, ‘Stosowane sztuki społeczne’, Krytyka Polityczna, nos
11/12 (2007), pp. 14–24. Żmijewski has had active engagement with the
296
references
quarterly. Among others, he edited an anthology of interviews with Polish

artists producing politically and socially critical art: Artur Żmijewski, ed.,
Drżące ciała: Rozmowy z artystami (Warsaw, Bytom and Kraków, 2006),
translated as Trembling Bodies: Conversations with Artists (Berlin and
Bytom, 2011).
19 Joanna Mytkowska, Artur Żmijewski: If it happened only once it’s as if it
never happened. Einmal ist keinmal, exh. cat., Zachęta National Gallery
of Art, Warsaw, and Kunsthalle Basel (Ostfildern, 2005).
20 See Ryszard Ziarkiewicz, ‘Sztuka musi przestać być sztuką, aby ponownie
stać się sztuką’, Magazyn Sztuki (12 May 2006), at www.magazynsztuki.pl.
21 See a substantial monograph on the group, Pode Bal, Pode Bal: 1998–2008
(Prague, 2008).
22 Marius Babias and Sabine Hentzsch, eds, Spaţiul Public Bucureşti / Public
Art Bucharest, 2007 (Cluj and Cologne, 2008).
23 See Alexander Alberro and Sabeth Buchmann, eds, Art after Conceptual Art
(Vienna and Cambridge, ma, 2006).
24 Nader, Konceptualizm w PRL, p. 166. See also Luiza Nader, ‘Language,
Reality, Irony: The Art Books of Jarosław Kozłowski’, in Art after
Conceptual Art, ed. Alberro and Buchmann, pp. 101–17.
25 Bożena Czubak, ‘Recycled News’, in Opowiedziane inaczej / A Story
Differently Told, ed. Bożena Czubak (Gdańsk, 2008), pp. 49–83.
four Anarchy, Critique, Utopia
1 Immanuel Wallerstein, ‘Democracy, Capitalism, and Transformation’,

Democracy Unrealized: Documenta 11_Platform 1, ed. Okwui Enwezor et al.
(Ostfildern-Ruit, 2002), p. 97.
2 For historic sources dealing with the relationship between modern art and
anarchism, see Stefan Morawski, ‘Sztuka i anarchism’, Teksty, no. 2 (1975),
pp. 59–83.
3 See Dorota Monkiewicz, ed., Zbigniew Libera: Prace z lat 1982–2008 /
Works from 1982–2008, exh. cat., Galeria Zachęta, Warsaw (Warsaw,
2009).
4 Piotr Piotrowski, Znaczenia modernizmu: W stronę historii sztuki polskiej po
1945 roku (Poznań, 1999), pp. 220–35.
5 Marek Janiak, Andrzej Kwietniewski, Adam Rapacki, Andrzej Świetlik and
Andrzej Wielogórski, Bóg zazdrości nam pomyłek exh. cat., Muzeum Sztuki,
Łódź (1999).
6 Marek Janiak, Andrzej Kwietniewski, Adam Rapacki, Andrzej Świetlik and
Andrzej Wielogórski, New Pop: Łódź Kaliska Muzeum (Łódź, 2004).
7 Izabela Kowalczyk, Ciało i władza. Polska sztuka krytyczna lat ’90
(Warsaw, 2002), p. 193.
8 The best-known texts were published in Norman Kleeblatt, ed., Mirroring
Evil: Nazi Imagery / Recent Art, exh. cat., The Jewish Museum, New York
297
(New Brunswick, nj, 2001). See especially Ernst van Alphen, ‘Playing the
Holocaust’, pp. 65–83. See also the artist’s commentary: Zbigniew Libera,
‘Lego. Obóz koncentracyjny’, in Przemysław Czapliński and Ewa
Domańska, Zagłada: współczesne problemy rozumienia i przedsatwiania
(Poznań, 2009), pp. 309–17.
9 Ewa Domańska, ‘Pamięć/przeciw-historia jako ideologia. Pozytywy
Zbigniewa Libery’, in Historie niekonwencjonalne (Poznań, 2006),
pp. 221–45.
10 Szymon Wróbel, ‘Praca łączniczki, praca pamięci, zabawa chłopców’,
Twórczość [Warsaw], no. 8 (2006), pp. 39–57.
11 Atlas Sztuki [Łodź], no. 3 (2004), n.p.
12 See the texts by the mentioned artists in Alexander Alberro and Blake
Stimson, eds, Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology (Cambridge, ma, 1999),
pp. 334–48 (Joseph Kosuth, ‘1975’), pp. 350–51 (Art & Language,
‘Having your Heart in the Right Place is not Making History’), pp. 354–7
(Art & Language, ‘The Timeless Lumpenness of the Radical Cultural
Life’).
13 Wiesław Borowski, ‘Pseudoawangarda’, Kultura, no. 12 (1975). Luiza
Nader provides an excellent analysis of the exclusions, or rather self-
exclusions, of certain artists and tendencies from the Foksal environment
in Luiza Nader, ‘Konceptualizm w prl. Język-postawa-strategia’, PhD
thesis, Institute of Historical Studies, University of Warsaw, 2007.
14 Katarzyna Bielas and Dorota Jarecka, Interview with Zbigniew Libera,
‘Przy artyście nikt nie jest bezpieczny’, Duży Format: Magazyn Gazety
Wyborczej, no. 6 (2004), p. 12.
15 Maria Hlavajova, ed., 60/90. IV Výročná výstava scca Slovensko / 4th Annual
Exhibition of SCCA Slovakia, exh. cat., Soros Center for Contemporary Art,
Bratislava (1997).
16 Zora Rusinova, ed., Šest’desiate roky v slovenskom výtvarnom umeni, exh.
cat., Slovenská Národna Galéria, Bratislava (1995).
17 Ewa Majewska, ‘Wesoły, niewinny i bez serca (bo tylko taki potrafi latać).
Zbyszek Libera powraca’, at www.laznia.pl.
18 Krzysztof Gutfrański, ‘Zbigniewa Libery marsz w stronę Nibylandii’, at
www.obieg.pl, accessed 21 September 2011.
19 Jarosław Lubiak, Interview with Krzysztof Wodiczko, ‘“Proteza Proroków”
i inne instrumenty demokracji’, Kresy [Lublin], nos 51–2/3–4 (2002),
p. 186.
20 Piotr Piotrowski, ‘Biopolityka i demokracja’, in Krzysztof Wodiczko: Doktor
honoris causa Akademii Sztuk Pięknych w Poznaniu (Poznań, 2007), pp.
13–26. See also Piotr Piotrowski, ‘Biopolityka i demokracja’, Czas Kultury,
nos 4–5 (2007), pp. 189–201.
21 Krzysztof Wodiczko, ‘Miejsce Pamięci Ofiar 11 Września (Propozycja
przekształcenia Nowego Jorku w “miejsce ucieczki”)’, Artium Quaestiones
[Poznań], xix (2008), pp. 279–80.
22 Ibid., p. 280.
298
references
five Between Real Socialism and Nationalism
1 Magdalena Saryusz-Wolska, ‘Pamiętać historię’ [Remembering History],

in Strażnicy Doków [Dock Watchers], ed. Aneta Szyłak (Gdańsk, 2005),
p. 17. See also Aleida Assmann, Erinnerungsräme: Formen und Wandlungen
des kulturellen Gedächtnisses (Munich, 1999).
2 Iara Boubnova, ‘History in Present Tense’, 2nd Moscow Biennale of
Contemporary Art (Moscow, 2007), pp. 64–5.
3 Ewa Domańska, Historie niekonwencjonalne (Poznań, 2006), pp. 221–6.
4 Pierre Nora, ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire’,
Representations, no. 26 (Spring 1989), pp. 8–9.
5 Ibid., pp. 18–19.
6 Aneta Szyłak, ‘Bliznowanie pamięci. [Za]pamiętan[i]e w historii’ [The
Scarring of Memory: Remembered and Remembering in History], in
Strażnicy Doków [Dock Watchers], ed. Szyłak, pp. 47–8.
7 Ibid., pp. 43–4, 71–4, 75.
8 See Filip Modrzejewski and Monika Sznajderman, ed., Nostalgia: Eseje o
tęsknocie za komunizmem (Wołowiec, 2002).
9 The book was published as a documentation of the entire project. It also
includes a selection of texts on art and culture after 1989, mainly in Eastern
Europe. This project by Little Warsaw is not discussed in the section
entitled ‘Time and Again. Episode 2’, but another work, Monument contra
Cathedral, is mentioned. The image depicts the outline of the recently
rebuilt Moscow Cathedral of Christ the Saviour superimposed on another
building, the gigantic Palace of the Soviets, topped with a monstrous figure
of Lenin. The Palace of the Soviets was supposed to have been erected on
the grounds of the church destroyed in the 1930s, but it was never built.
See Maria Hlavajova and Jill Winder, eds, Who if not We Should at Least
Try to Imagine the Future of All This (Amsterdam, 2004), p. 48.
10 The discussion took place in the context of a very popular Hungarian blog,
Exindex, and is available at www.exindex.hu, accessed 24 September 2011).
See also the artists’ website, www.littlewarsaw.com.
11 Edit András, ‘Little Warsaw in and out of Budapest: The Project of the
Hungarian artists duo Little Warsaw’, Springerin, no. 2 (2005), p. 40.
12 A good example of completely different stylistic relations is provided by
the fate of modernist monuments erected mainly in the former Yugoslavia
during the reign of Josip Broz Tito to commemorate the victory of the
socialist revolution. After Tito’s death, their status became highly
problematic since they functioned as relics of the old socialist regime.
In Poland the same could be said about Władysław Hasior’s monument
known as the ‘Organs’, which was erected in the mountains in 1960s to
commemorate those who fought against the anti-communist underground
and who supported the socialist regime in the late 1940s. While it is clear
that the artist used this opportunity to create a modernist sculpture, Polish
right-wing groups have lobbied for its destruction citing the law requiring
299
removal of structures glorifying the former communist regime. In its place,

they wanted to erect a cross.
13 Daniel Grúň, ed. Panteon. Hrdinovia a anti-pomniky [Pantheon. Heroes
and Anti-Monuments], Galeria Medium, Bratislava (2006).
14 Dario Gamboni, The Destruction of Art: Iconoclasm and Vandalism since the
French Revolution (London, 1997), pp. 51–90.
15 [Nebojša Milikić, Branimir Stojanović and Milica Tomić], Politcs of
Memory [Politika vzpomináni] (Belgrade, 2007). The group’s website is
currently under construction.
16 See primarily Chantal Mouffe, On the Political (New York and London,
2005).
17 The Salon, organized in 2008 by Bojana Pejić, had a highly suggestive title:
‘artist-citizen’ (in Serbian the phrase artist-citizen exists in two gendered
versions; the gender difference was not signalled in English). Bojana Pejić,
49th October Salon ‘Artist-Citizen: Contextual Artistic Practices’ (Belgrade,
2008).
18 Milica Tomić, in Bojana Pejić, 49th October Salon, pp. 188–9. See also
Milica Tomić, ‘xy ungelöst – Rekonstruktion eines Verbrechens’, in Focus
Belgrade, ed. Barbara Barsch (Berlin, 1998), p. 38.
19 Milica Tomić, in Bojana Pejić, 49th October Salon, pp. 188–9.
20 Bojana Pejić, ‘Public Cuts’, Sanja Iveković: Public Cuts, ed. Urška Jurman
(Ljubljana, 2006), p. 21.
21 A good discussion of this issue is provided in Anthony D. Smith,
Nationalism (Cambridge, 2003). The book includes an extensive
bibliography on the subject.
22 See Ernst Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca, ny, 1983); Benedict
Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism (London, 1983); Rogers Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed:
Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe (Cambridge,
1996).
23 Anthony D. Smith, Nationalism and Modernism: A Critical Survey of Recent
Theories of Nations and Nationalism (London, 1998).
24 Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (Oxford, 1997).
25 Homi Bhabha, ‘DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the
Modern Nation’, in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi Bhabha (London,
1990), pp. 291–321.
26 Boris Groys,‘Back from the Future’, in 2000+ ArtEast Collection: The Art
of Eastern Europe, ed. Zdenka Badovinac and Peter Weibel (Innsbruck and
Vienna, 2001), pp. 9–14.
27 See Erden Kosova, ‘Problems of National Identity and Social Engagement
in the Practice of Contemporary Art in the Balkans’, New Europe College
Yearbook, no. 10 (Bucharest, 2002–3), pp. 271–73 (also available through
the Central and Eastern European Online Library, www.ceeol.com); Miško
Šuvaković, ‘Art as Political Machine: Fragments on the Late Socialist and
Post-socialist Art of Mitteleuropa and the Balkans’, in Postmodernism and
300
references
Postsocialist Condition: Politicized Art under Late Socialism, ed. Aleš Erjevac
(Berkeley, ca, 2003), pp. 111–13.
28 Inside / Outside. Niezależni artyści z R. F. Jugosławii/ Independent Artists
from F. R. of Yugoslavia, exh. cat., Galeria Zachęta, Warsaw (2000), p. 22.
29 Ernesto Laclau, Emancipation(s) (London, 1996).
30 See mainly Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (Oxford, 1997).
31 Kendell Geers, ‘The Work of Art in the State of Exile’, in Milica Tomić:
National Pavilion. La Biennale di Venezia. 50th. International Art
Exhibition, ed. Branislava Andjelković, exh, cat., Museum of
Contemporary Art, Belgrade (2003), pp. 1–2.
32 Adelina von Fűrstenberg, ed., Marina Abramović: Balkan Epic (Milan,
2006), p. 10.
33 Bojana Pejić, ‘Balkan for Beginners’, New Moment, no. 7 (1997) [special
issue for the Venice Biennale, n.p.]. Also published in Laura Hoptman and
Tomáš Pospiszyl, Primary Documents: A Sourcebook for Eastern and Central
Art since the 1950s (New York, 2002), pp. 325–39.
34 Hans-Peter von Daniken and Beatrix Ruf, ‘Marina Abramović in
Conversation’, in New Moment, no. 7 (1997) [n.p.]. See also David Elliott,
‘Balkan Baroque’, in Marina Abramović. Objects, Performance, Video,
Sound, ed. Chrissie Iles (Oxford, 1995), pp. 55–73.
35 Pejić, ‘Balkan for Beginners’, in Hoptman and Pospiszyl, Primary
Documents, p. 337.
36 Steven Henry Madoff, ‘The Balkans Unbound’,” in Marina Abramović:
Balkan Epic, ed. Adelina von Fűrstenberg, p. 23.
37 Frederic Carlström and Marina Abramović, ‘A Conversation on Balkan
Erotic Epic’, in Marina Abramović: Balkan Epic, ed. Adelina von
Fűrstenberg , pp. 65–9.
38 Ibid., p. 67.
39 Ibid., p. 67.
40 Todorova, Imagining the Balkans.
six New Museums in New Europe
1 Roger Luckhurst, ‘Traumaculture’, New Formations, no. 50 (Autumn

2003), pp. 28–47.
2 See Lynn Meskell, ‘Negative Heritage’, Anthropological Quarterly, lxxv/3
(Summer 2002), pp. 557–74.
3 Mieke Bal, ‘The Discourse of the Museum’, in Thinking about Exhibitions,
ed. Reesa Greenberg, Bruce W. Ferguson and Sandy Nairne (London and
New York, 1996), pp. 201–18.
4 Richard Kendall, ‘Eloquent Walls and Argumentative Spaces: Displaying
Late Works of Degas’, in The Two Art Histories: The Museum and the
University, ed. Charles W. Haxthausen (Williamstown, ma, 2002), p. 63.
5 Walter Grasskamp, ‘The Museum and Other Success Stories in Cultural
301
Globalisation’, Museums: Intersections in a Global Scene: CIMAM 2005

Annual Conference, at www.cimam.org.
6 Hans Belting, ‘Contemporary Art as Global Art: A Critical Estimate’, in
The Global Art World: Audiences, Markets, and Museums, ed. Hans Belting
and Andrea Buddensieg (Ostfildern, 2009), pp. 38–73.
7 Andrea Fraser, ‘Isn’t This a Wonderful Place? A Tour of a Tour of the
Guggenheim Bilbao’, in Museum Frictions: Public Cultures/ Global
Transformations, ed. Ivan Karp, Corinne A. Kratz, Lyn Szwaja and Tomas
Ybarra-Frausto (Durham, nc, 2006), pp. 135–60.
8 Mari Carmen Ramirez, ‘Brokering Identities: Art Curators and the Politics
of Cultural Representation’, in Thinking about Exhibitions, ed. Greenberg,
Ferguson and Nairne, pp. 21–38.
9 Mihai Oroveanu, MNAC: The National Museum of Contemporary Art
(Bucharest, 2005), pp. 20–21.
10 Ruxandra Balaci, ‘Romanian Artists (and not only) love Ceauşescu
Palace?!’, ibid., pp. 36, 40, 41.
11 See the website: http://www.mnac.ro.
12 See MNAC: The National Museum of Contemporary Art.
13 Walter Grasskamp, ‘The Museum and Other Success Stories in Cultural
Globalisation’.
14 Hans Belting, ‘Contemporary Art and the Museum in the Global Age’, in
Contemporary Art and the Museum: A Global Perspective, ed. Peter Weibel
and Andrea Buddensieg (Ostfildern, 2007), pp. 30–32.
15 Ibid., p. 37.
16 Eha Komissarov, ‘The Era of Radical Changes: Estonian Art from the End
of the Second World War until the Restoration of Estonia’s
Independence’, Art Lives in KUMU: The Main Building of the Art Museum of
Estonia – KUMU Art Museum, ed. Anu Allas, Sirje Helms and Renita
Raudsepp (Tallinn, 2006), pp. 97–143.
17 Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore, md,
2001), p. 46.
18 Lolita Jablonskiene, ‘Lithuanian National Gallery of Art’, paper presented
at the conference Problems in Displaying Communist Second Half of the 20th
Century Art, State Art Museum and Goethe-Institute, Riga 2005. I would
like to thank the author for making the text of her presentation available.
19 Elona Lubyte, ‘Lithuanian Art Museum: Latest News from Building
Grounds’, ibid. I would like to thank the author for making the text of her
presentation available.
20 Archive of the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw.
21 See Piotr Sztompka, The Trauma of Social Change: A Case of Post-
communist Societies’, in Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity, ed.
Jeffrey C. Alexander, Ron Eyerman and Piotr Sztompka (Berkeley, ca,
2004), pp. 155–95; Edit András, ‘An Agent that is Still at Work: The
Trauma of Collective Memory of the Socialist Past’, unpublished essay.
22 LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma.
302
references
seven Art and Biopolitics: Ilya Kabakov and Krzysztof Wodiczko
1 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans.
Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, ca, 1998). Certain themes of this book
were developed further by the author in State of Exception, trans. Kelvin
Attell (Chicago, il, 2005).
2 Victor Tupitsyn, The Museological Unconscious: Communal
(Post)Modernism in Russia (Cambridge, ma, 2009), pp. 23–6.
3 Boris Groys, ‘The Theatre of Authorship’, in Ilya Kabakov, Catalogue
Raisonné, ii: Installations, 1983–2000, ed. Toni Stroos (Bern and
Düsseldorf, 2003), p. 38.
4 See Vitaly Patsiukov, ‘The Second Russian Avant-Garde’, Forbidden Art:
The Postwar Russian Avant-Garde (Los Angeles, 1998), pp. 201–31.
Patsiukov used this term following Hans-Peter Riess’s essay published in
the catalogue Wtorij ruskij awantgard (Wiennand, 1996).
5 Toni Stroos ed., Ilya Kabakov, Catalogue Raisonné, ii: Installations,
1983–2000 (Bern and Düsseldorf, 2003) p. 2; Renate Petzinger and Emilia
Kabakov, eds, Ilya Kabakov, Catalogue Raisonné, i: Painting / Gemälde,
1957–2008 (Wiesbaden and Bielefeld, 2008), p. 2.
6 Boris Groys, The Man Who Flew into Space from his Apartment
(London, 2006).
7 Boris Groys, ‘The Theatre of Authorship’, pp. 38–9. For a detailed
documentation of the work, see Toni Stroos ed., Ilya Kabakov, Catalogue
Raisonné, ii: Installations, 1983–2000, pp. 132–81.
8 Stroos, ed., Ilya Kabakov, Catalogue Raisonné, ii: Installations, 1983–2000,
pp. 389–93.
9 See Groys, ‘The Theatre of Authorship’, p. 41.
10 Victor Tupitsyn, ‘Nonidentity within Identity: Moscow Communal
Modernism, 1950s–1980s’, in Nonconformist Art: The Soviet Experience,
1956–1986, ed. Alla Rosenfeld and Norton T. Dodge (London and New
York, 1995), p. 90.
11 Ibid., p. 81.
12 Krzysztof Wodiczko, Critical Vehicles: Writings, Project, Interview
(Cambridge, ma, 1999), pp. 220–27. See also Andrzej Turowski,
‘Przemieszczenia i obrazy dialektyczne’, in Krzysztof Wodiczko:
Pomnikoterapia, ed. Andrzej Turowski, exh. cat., ‘Zachęta’ National Art
Gallery, Warsaw (Warsaw, 2005), fragment ‘Biblioteka wyobraźni’,
pp. 36–8.
13 See Rosalyn Deutsche, ‘Sztuka świadectwa: projekcja w Hiroszimie
Krzysztofa Wodiczki’, in ibid., p. 19.
14 Rosalyn Deutsche, Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics (Cambridge, ma,
1996), pp. 3–107.
15 Chantal Mouffe, ‘Agonistyczne przestrzenie publiczne i polityka
demokratyczna’, in Krzysztof Wodiczko: Pomnikoterapia, ed. Andrzej
Turowski, pp. 7–12.
303
16 Andrzej Turowski, ‘Krzysztof Wodiczko and Polish Art of the 1970s’,

in Primary Documents: A Sourcebook for Eastern and Central European Art
since the 1950s, ed. Laura Hoptman and Tomáš Pospiszyl (New York and
Cambridge, ma, 2002), p. 159.
17 Turowski, ed., Krzysztof Wodiczko: Pomnikoterapia, p. 103.
18 ‘“Proteza Proroków” i inne instrumenty demokracji. Z Krzysztofem
Wodiczko rozmawia Jarosław Lubiak’, Kresy [Lublin], li–lii/3–4 (2002),
p. 191.
19 Ibid., p. 186.
20 Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox (London, 2000). On the subject
of radical democracy, see Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony
and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London,
1985).
21 ‘“Proteza Proroków” i inne instrumenty demokracji’, pp. 186, 194.
22 Ibid., p. 193.
23 See, for instance, a very interesting essay by Rosalyn Deutsche juxtaposing
Lévinas’s ideas with the concept of ‘uncertainty’ of democracy developed
by Claude Lefort: ‘Sztuka świadectwa: projekcja w Hiroszimie Krzysztofa
Wodiczki’.
eight Gender after the Fall of the Wall
1 The presentations of the Outdoor Gallery created confusion among

passers-by. ams, an advertising company, made billboards available to firms
and organization promoting their products and services. The passers-by /
viewers expected such messages in this instance. The frustration of those
expectations was of course intentional. The project not only ‘promoted’
art, but also ams. The company wanted to present itself as an art patron
because, as is generally known, art is one of the most effective instruments
of self-promotion for those who invest in it and ‘protect’ it. The project of
showing billboard posters that did not have an advertising character had
as its goal the elimination of the semantic transparency of the billboards’
owner (ams); in other words, it was supposed to draw attention to the
medium and those who stood behind it. Therefore the confusion of the
passers-by/viewers did not benefit so much the artists as the company ams.
For more on the ams Outdoor Gallery, see Marek Krajewski et al., Sztuka
w mieście: Zewnętrzna Galeria ams (Warsaw, 2003).
2 Ewa Grigar, ‘The Gendered Body as Raw Material for Women Artists of
Central Eastern Europe after Communism’, in Living Gender after
Communism, ed. Janet E. Robinson and Jean C. Robinson (Bloomington,
in, 2007), pp. 80–102.
3 Elżbieta Matynia, Performative Democracy (Boulder, co, 2009).
4 See Bojana Pejić, ed., Gender Check: Femininity and Masculinity in the Art
of Eastern Europe (Vienna and Cologne, 2009), and Bojana Pejić, ed., Gender
304
references
Check: A Reader. Art and Theory on Eastern Europe (Cologne, 2010).

5 Griselda Pollock, ‘The Politics of Theory: Generations and Geographies
in Feminist Theory and the Histories of Art Histories’, in Generations and
Geographies in the Visual Arts: Feminist Readings, ed. Griselda Pollock
(London, 1996), pp. 3–21.
6 Griselda Pollock, ‘Inscriptions in the Feminine’, in Inside the Visible:
An Elliptical Traverse of 20th Century Art. In, of, and from the Feminine,
ed. M. Catherine de Zegher (Boston and Kortrijk, 1996), p. 82.
7 Hanna Wróblewska, ‘Ja, to ktoś inny’, in Katarzyna Kozyra: Łaźnia męska,
ed. Hanna Wróblewska (Warsaw, 1999), p. 6.
8 Agata Jakubowska, Portret wielokrotny dzieła Aliny Szapocznikow (Poznań,
2008), p. 33.
9 ‘W łaźni męskiej mężczyźni, dwie kamery i jedna kobieta’, Katarzyna
Kozyra in conversation with Christopher Blase, and ‘Paszport do męskiego
templum’, Katarzyna Kozyra in conversation with Artur Żmijewski, in
Katarzyna Kozyra: Łaźnia męska, ed. Hanna Wróblewska, pp. 71–8.
10 Ibid., p. 71.
11 Izabela Kowalczyk, Cialo i władza: Polska sztuka krytyczna lat 90
(Warsaw, 2002), p. 183.
12 ‘W łaźni męskiej mężczyźni, dwie kamery i jedna kobieta’, p. 74.
13 Kowalczyk, Ciało i władza, p. 183.
14 Harald Fricke, ‘Kwestia płci i bajki: o projekcie Katarzyny Kozyry
“W sztuce marzenia staja się rzeczywistością”’ / ‘Gender Trouble and
Fairytales: on Katarzyna Kozyra’s “In Art Dreams Come True”’, in
Katarzyna Kozyra: In Art Dreams Come True (Wrocław and Ostfildern,
2007), p. 66 (Polish), p. 41 (English).
15 Susan Buck-Morss, ‘The Post-Soviet Condition’, in East Art Map:
Contemporary Art and Eastern Europe, ed. irwin (London, 2006), p. 498.
16 Boris Groys, Art Power (Cambridge, ma, 2008), pp. 149–63.
17 Piotr Piotrowski, ‘Male Artist’s Body: National Identity vs. Identity
Politics’, in Primary Documents: A Sourcebook for Eastern and Central
European Art since the 1950s, ed. Laura Hoptman and Tomáš Pospiszyl
(New York, 2002), pp. 225–34; reprinted in Bojana Pejić, ed., Gender
Check: A Reader. Art and Theory on Eastern Europe (Cologne, 2010),
pp. 127–37.
nine Unfulfilled Democracy
1 Anatolij Łunaczarski, ‘Sztuka i rewolucja’, in Pisma wybrane, vol. 1

(Warsaw, 1963), p. 287.
2 Claude Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory (Minneapolis, mn, 1988),
pp. 9–20.
3 I address this topic more broadly in Piotr Piotrowski, ‘Agoraphobia after
Communism’, Uměni [Prague], no. 1 (2004), pp. 52–60.
305
4 See http://www.geocities.com/aakovalev/religia-en.htm?200618, accessed

18 April 2006.
5 The Romanian Orthodox Church’s entanglement with the totalitarian
past, to the extent that many of its priests were agents of the secret police,
does not mean that Romanian society has no respect for the Church as an
institution. On the contrary, the Church occupies the highest position
within the social hierarchy of Romanian society.
6 See Raymond Bobar, ‘People and Galleries’, Idea [Cluj], no. 19 (2004),
pp. 69–75.
7 This and many other examples of limits on the right to expression in
Poland after 1989 within the scope of two disciplines, law and art history,
are the subject of Jakub Dąbrowski’s PhD dissertation, ‘Swoboda
wypowiedzi artystycznej w Polsce po 1989 roku’, currently being written
at the Art History Institute at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań.
The violations of the right to free expression taking place in Poland are
documented by Index 73; see www.indeks73.pl, accessed 26 September
2011.
8 Giorgio Agamben, Profanazioni (Rome, 2005).
9 Piotr Piotrowski, Sztuka według polityki: Od ‘Melancholii’ do ‘Pasji’
(Kraków, 2007), pp. 204–7. See also, Piotr Piotrowski, ed., Zofia Kulik:
Od Syberii do Cyberii [From Siberia to Cyberia], exh. cat., Muzeum
Narodowe, Poznań (Poznań, 1999).
10 Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, ‘Old Histories: Zofia Kulik’s Ironic Recollections’, in
New Histories, ed. Milena Kalinovska, exh. cat., Institute of Contemporary
Art, Boston (1997), pp. 120–36.
11 See Linda Nead, The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity and Sexuality (London,
1992).
12 Václav Havel, ‘Někdo má nápady, někdo odpovědnost’, in Pode Bal
(group), Pode Bal: 1998–2008 (Prague, 2008), p. 205.
13 See www.translocal.org/remake, accessed 26 September 2011.
14 See New Moment, no. 7 (1997), n.p.
15 Eduard Freudmann and Jelena Radić’s documentary The State of Exception
Proved to be the Rule (2008) provides excellent coverage of the events and
the context.
306
Photo Acknowledgments
Courtesy Marina Abramović: pp. 198, 199; courtesy of H. Arta: p. 143; author’s
archive: pp. 10 (photo: Lukasz Cynalewski), 207, 208, 213; courtesy Pode Bal:
pp. 115, 116, 283; courtesy Luchezar Boyadjiev: pp. 113, 114; courtesy David
Černy: pp. 61, 276; courtesy Chto Dealat: p. 119; courtesy Živko Grozdanić: p. 271;
courtesy Guma Guar: p. 277; courtesy iwin: p. 18; courtesy Sanja Iveković: p. 184;
courtesy Elżbieta Jabłońska: p. 246; courtesy Rafał Jakubowicz: p. 9; courtesy Ilya
and Emilia Kabakov: p. 231; courtesy Kai Kaljo: p. 244; courtesy Tamás Kaszás:
p. 141; courtesy Grzegorz Klaman: pp. 160, 163; courtesy Lenka Klodová: pp. 252,
253; courtesy Aleksander Kosolapov: p. 268; courtesy Jarosław Kozłowski: p. 122;
courtesy Katarzyna Kozyra and “Zachęta” the National Art Gallery, Warsaw: p. 258;
courtesy Oleg Kulik: p. 20; courtesy Zofia Kulik: p. 280; courtesy Zbigniew Libera:
pp. 133, 137, 146; courtesy Little Warsaw: p. 170; courtesy Gintaraz Makarevicius:
p. 168; courtesy Dren Maliqi: p. 286; courtesy Medium Gallery, Bratislava: 175;
courtesy Michal Moravčik: p. 191; courtesy Ciprian Mureşan: pp. 45, 270; courtesy
Museum of Modern Art, Ljubljana: p. 17; courtesy Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw:
p. 217; courtesy Kriszta Nagy: p. 245; courtesy National Art Gallery, Vilnius: p. 214;
courtesy Csaba Nemes: p. 285; courtesy Dorota Nieznalska: pp. 226, 267; courtesy
Roman Ondák: p. 49; courtesy Dan Perjovschi: p. 176; courtesy Poster Museum,
Wilanow: p. 248; courtesy Rafani: p. 111; courtesy Arturas Raila: p. 105; courtesy
of rep: p. 108; courtesy Kamera Skura: p. 275; courtesy Tamás Szentjóby: p. 63;
courtesy Anetta Mona-Chisa and Lucia Tkáčova: p. 251; courtesy Raša Todosijević:
p. 189; courtesy Milica Tomić: pp. 181, 194; courtesy Krzysztof Wodiczko: pp. 60,
64, 237; courtesy ‘Zachęta’ the National Art Gallery, Warsaw: p. 269; courtesy
Artur Żmijewski: p. 103.
307
Index
Illustration numerals are in italics.
Abramović, Marina 13, 38, 193–201, 247, Berlusconi, Silvio 251

284, 41, 42 Bernea, Horia 209
Adamus, Karel 94 Bey, Hakim 147
Ades, Dawn 30 Bhabha, Homi 37, 49, 186, 187
Adorno, Theodor W. 232 Biermann, Wolf 85
Agamben, Giorgio 225–6, 232, 238, 239, 272 Blair, Tony 251
Alberro, Alexander 40 Blase, Christopher 255
Althusser, Louis 80–82, 134, 232, 265 Blume, Eugen 86
Åman, Ian 18 Borowski, Wiesław 89, 90, 92, 93, 138
Andelković, Branislava 179 Boubnova, Iara 155
Anderson, Benedict 185, 191 Boyadjiev, Luchezar 112, 113–14, 16, 17
András, Edit 48, 49, 169, 171 Braidotti, Rosi 254, 260
Andreas-Salomé, Lou 257 Brătescu, Geta 209, 247
Appadurai, Arjun 36 Brecht, Bertolt 232
Araeen, Rasheed 44 Brendel, János 71
Arafat, Yasser 283 Brener, Alexander 18, 21, 22, 23–4
Arendt, Hannah 9, 126, 225, 232 Breton, André 26, 31
Arsenijević, Damir 176 Brikcius, Eugen 57
Assmann, Aleida 155, 156 Bromova, Veronika 250
Assmann, Jan 156 Brown, Rebecca M. 45
Attalai, Gábor 97 Brubaker, Rogers 185
Auster, Paul 122 Bryson, Norman 29
Buchloh, Benjamin H. D. 32
Babias, Marius 116, 174 Buck-Morss, Susan 42, 259
Bakstein, Joseph 15, 23 Burroughs, William S. 147, 148
Bakunin, Michaił 125, 130–31 Bush, George W. 193, 251
Bal, Mieke 203 Butler, Judith 254, 258, 260
Balaci, Ruxundra 208, 209
Balcerowicz, Leszek 204 Camnitzer, Luis 33, 50
Balibar, Etienne 59 Cantor, Mircea 116
Bálint, Monika 66 Cattelan, Maurizio 164, 267–9, 270, 61
Bałka, Mirosław 26 Ceauşescu, Elena 189
Barr, Alfred 26 Ceauşescu, Nicolae 69, 84, 189, 202, 206,
Barradas, Rafael 32 208, 209, 220
Barrie, J. M. 147 Černý, David 58, 60–62, 274–6, 9, 65
Beke, László 34–5, 47, 72, 73 Chakrabarty, Dipesh 46, 51, 75
Belting, Hans 15–16, 18, 24, 29, 40, 52, 211 Chalupecký, Jindřich 95, 102
Benedict xvi, Pope 276, 277 Chirac, Jacques 251
Benjamin, Walter 203, 232, 242 Chomenko, Olesia 106
308
index
Chomsky, Noam 190 Gehry, Frank 204

Chto delat (group) 119, 20 Gellner, Ernest 185, 187
Cieślar, Elżbieta 87 Gelman, Marat 274
Cieślar, Emil 87 Gerz, Jochen 159, 173
Clark, John 27–8 Giertych, Roman 165
Claus, Carlfriedrich 71, 85, 86 Gomułka, Władysław 83, 234
Cooper, Gary 247 Gorgos, David 147
Cotosman, Roman 209 Górna, Katarzyna 250
Crista, Maria 116, 142 Gottwald, Klement 173–4, 175
Ćuković, Petar 195 Grasskamp, Walter 204, 210
Czubak, Bożena 121 Grigar, Ewa 246
Grigorescu, Ion 142, 143, 208, 209, 219, 260
Damus, Martin 84 Groys, Boris 42–4, 187, 229, 230
Dan, Călin 208 Grozdanić, Živko 270–71, 63
David (king of Israel) 276–8 Grúň, Daniel 173
Debord, Guy 132 Gržnić, Marina 56
Defoe, Daniel 148 Gu, Wenda 19
Delacroix, Eugène 130 Guar, Guma 277–8, 66
Deutsche, Rosalyn 59, 67, 92, 145, 232 Guevara, Ernesto ‘Che’ 147
Dimić, Nada 182 Gustowska, Izabella 250
Dimitrijević, Branislav 179 Gutfrański, Krzysztof 147
Domańska, Ewa 134, 135, 155–6, 157 Gwiazda, Andrzej 165
Duchamp, Marcel 39 Gyemant, Anca 116
Dzerzhinsky, Feliks 172
Habermas, Jürgen 59, 99, 126
Egorova, Olga 117 Hadid, Zaha 204, 215
Ekberg, Anita 135 Halbwachs, Maurice 155, 156
El-Hassan, Róza 283 Havas, Bálint 169
Elliott, David 196 Havel, Václav 96, 282–3
Erdély, Miklós 71 Heidegger, Martin 46, 48, 240
Erhardt, Miklós 108 Hentzsch, Sabine 116, 174
Esinescu, Nicoleta 116 Hirst, Damien 275
Hislop, Dominic 108
Filko, Stano 57, 144–5 Hitler, Adolf 105–6, 164
Foks, Dariusz 134–5 Hlavajova, Maria 24, 55
Foster, Stephen 26 Hnyłycka, Ksenia 106
Foucault, Michel 48, 155, 225, 232 Hollister, William 274
Fowkes, Maja 284 Holofernes (biblical figure) 277, 275
Fowkes, Reuben 284 Honecker, Erich 84
Franta, Jiří 109 Hussein, Saddam 275
Fraser, Andrea 205
Freudmann, Eduard 287 Ilauszky, Tamás 66
Fricke, Harald 257 Ingres, Jean Auguste Dominique 255
Iveković, Sanja 181–2, 183, 247, 35, 36
Gabrāns, Gints 112
Galántai, György 73 Jabłońska, Elżbieta 244–6, 52
Gálik, András 169 Jablonskienė, Lolita 215
Gamboni, Dario 173 Jakubowicz, Rafał 8, 10, 1
Geers, Kendell 192–3 Jakubowska, Agata 254
309
Janiszewski, Jerzy 162 Kubicki, Stanisław 139

Jashari (Jašari), Adem 286 Kulik, Oleg 19–21, 5
Jesch, Birger 71 Kulik, Zofia 87, 136, 139, 278–9, 281, 67, 68
John, Elton 276, 277 Kuznecow, Wołodymyr 106
John Paul ii, Pope 159, 268 Kwaśniewski, Aleksander 104, 165
Johnson, Charles 148 Kwiek, Przemysław 87, 139, 279
Judith (biblical figure) 277
Lacan, Jacques 56
Kabakov, Ilya 13, 15, 21–2, 38, 225, 226, LaCapra, Dominick 213, 220
228–32, 48 Laclau, Ernesto 59, 191, 232
Kaczyński, Jarosław 105, 165, 166 Lajer-Burcharth, Ewa 280
Kaczyński, Lech 105, 165, 166 Lakner, László 58, 71, 96
Kadan, Mykyta 106 Lefort, Claude 59, 232, 263
Kadyrowa, Żanna 106 Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich 59, 97, 172, 273
Kaiser, Paul 72 Lepper, Andrzej 165
Kaljo, Kai 243–4, 50 Leszkowicz, Paweł 9
Kamerić, Šejla 191 Levinas, Emmanuel 232, 239, 241
Kantor, Tadeusz 89, 91, 92–3, 138, 139 Libera, Zbigniew 111, 129, 130–40, 140–49,
Kappert, Ines 77 22, 23, 27
Kaszás, Tamás 140–41, 24 LL [Lach-Lachowicz], Natalia 247
Katarina, Olivera 197 Lollobrigida, Gina 135
Kaufmann, Thomas DaCosta 25, 36 Loren, Sophia 135
Kendall, Richard 203 Luckhurst, Roger 203
Kerez, Christian 216, 217, 47 Lunacharsky, Anatoly 262
Khrushchev, Nikita 69, 84
Kiossev, Alexander 47 Madoff, Steven Henry 197
Klaman, Grzegorz 158–61, 163–6, 191, 28, 29 Majewska, Ewa 147–8
Klaniczay, Julia 73 Makarevičius, Gintaras 167–9, 30
Klingan, Katrin 77 Malevich, Kazimir 22, 23, 39, 273
Klodová, Lenka 252–3, 55, 56 Maliqi, Dren 285, 286, 71
Knižák, Milan 57, 78, 140 Mandela, Nelson 50
Knorr, Daniel 116 Mansbach, Steven A. 45
Kobro, Katarzyna 26 Markin, Igor 204
Kocman, J. H. 94 Marx, Karl 46, 81, 125, 265
Koller, Július 57, 140 Mathur, Saloni 44, 45, 46
Komissarov, Eha 212–13 Matynia, Elżbieta 247, 249
Konkoly, Gyula 97 Mazowiecki, Tadeusz 165, 178, 185
Kontova, Helena 78 Meduna, Marek 109
Kopp, Antonín 112 Mercer, Kobena 45
Kosolapov, Aleksander 266, 268, 273, 60 Midžić, Svebor 176
Kostołowski, Andrzej 71, 73 Mikina, Ewa 130
Kostrová, Zita 57 Miler, Karel 71
Kosuth, Joseph 136–8 Milevska, Suzana 27
Kovanda, Jiří 94 Milikić, Nebojša 176
Kowalczyk, Izabela 256–7 Milošević, Slobodan 178, 179, 185
Kozakiewicz, Jarosław 217 Misiano, Victor 18
Kozłowski, Jarosław 70, 71, 73, 120–24, 21 Mitter, Partha 44
Kozyra, Katarzyna 254–61, 57 Mlčoch, Jan 71
Kropotkin, Piotr 148 Mlynarčik, Alex 57
310
index
Mona Chişa, Anetta 16, 250–52, 54 Pitułej, Grzegorz 257

Moravčik, Michal 188, 190, 192, 38 Politi, Giancarlo 78
Morawski, Stefan 93 Pollock, Griselda 254
More, Thomas 149 Pop-Mitić, Darinka 176, 179
Mosquera, Gerardo 27 Poussin, Nicolas 179
Motejzik, Petr 109 Presley, Elvis 286
Motyčka, Petr 112 Ptaszkowska, Anka 91, 92
Mouffe, Chantal 12, 59, 98, 126, 177, 232, Putin, Vladimir 106, 120, 271, 273
239
Mukhina, Vera 273 Qehaja, Nurhan 192
Mureşan, Ciprian 44–5, 267–70, 6, 62
Radić, Jelena 287
Nader, Luiza 92, 121 Raila, Artüras 104, 105, 13
Nagy, Kriszta 242, 243, 51 Rajkowska, Joanna 64–5
Nakoneczna, Łada 106 Rakauskaite, Egle 250
Nancă, Vlad 190 Ramírez, Mari Carmen 37, 205
Narkevičius, Deimantas 16 Rancière, Jacques 150
Neagu, Paul 209 Raphael 130
Nemes, Csaba 284, 285, 69 Rathouský, Luděk 109
Németh, Ilona 249–50 Rehfeldt, Robert 58, 72, 140
Nieznalska, Dorota 9, 265, 266, 267, 270, Rembrandt 255
272–3, 58, 59 Richardson, Mary 24
Nora, Pierre 156, 160, 162, 210 Rivera, Diego 39
Nouvel, Jean 204 Robakowski, Józef 57, 88, 139
Novák, Ladislav 94 Rodchenko, Alexander 241
Nowina-Konopczyna, Halina 267 Rogoff, Irit 31
Rosenberg, Alfred 226
Olejnikov, Nikolai 117 Rosenfeld, Elske 108
Ondák, Roman 48, 49, 62–3, 65, 7, 11 Rottenberg, Anda 267, 268
Ondreička, Boris 144, 145 Rydzyk, Tadeusz 105
Onuch, Jerzy 284
Oriškova, Maria 16 Šafarić, Nera 182
Oroveanu, Mihai 208, 209 Said, Edward 27
Salecl, Renata 19
Pál, Rebeka 66 Samodurov Yurij 265, 272
Paris, Cécile 162 Sarnecki, Tomasz 248, 53
Partum, Andrzej 136, 138, 139, 140 Saryusz-Wolska, Magdalena 155
Partum, Ewa 247 Sasnal, Wilhelm 100
Pätoprstá, Elena 144–5 Schmitt, Carl 225
Pauer, Gyula 58, 97 Schröder, Gerhard 252, 282
Peffer, John 50 Schubert, Franz 257
Pejić, Bojana 16, 116, 183, 196, 197, 287 Schweinebraden, Jürgen 73
Perjovschi, Dan 110, 116, 174–5, 188–9, 33 Seneši, Richard 173, 174, 32
Pershina-Yakimanskaya, Natalia 117 Ševčik, Jana 58
Petzold, Claudia 72 Ševčik, Jiří 58
Picasso, Pablo 36 Šiml, Michal 112
Pinchuk, Victor 205 Šmejkal, František 70
Pinczehelyi, Sándor 97 Smith, Anthony 186
Pinochet, Augusto 50 Sobczyk, Marek 162
311
Somogyi, József 169, 171, 172, 174 Urbanos, Gediminas 108

Soros, George 180, 214 Urbanos, Nomeda 108
Stalin, Joseph 43, 117, 171, 172, 228, 241
Stanisławski, Ryszard 16 Valoch, Jiří 71, 72, 94
Stażewski, Henryk 92 Vapaavuori, Pekka 207
Štembera, Petr 71, 94, 95 Vasilovskay, Ludmila 266, 272
Stojanović, Branimir 176, 177, 178 Velázquez, Diego 24
Strzemiński, Władysław 26, 36 Viagra, Gloria 257, 259
Štyrský, Jindřich 26 Viktorovich, Nikolai 229
Świdziński, Jan 136, 137, 138 Vilensky, Dmitry 117
Szabó, Eszter 66 Vitti, Monica 135
Szántó Kovács, János 169, 172
Szapocznikow, Alina 254 Wajda, Andrzej 160
Szeemann, Harald 267 Wałęsa, Lech 159, 163–7
Szentjóby, Tamás 58, 62, 64, 96, 140, 141–2, Warhol, Andy 107, 286
10 Weichardt, Jürgen 72
Szmyt, Monika 41 Wendland, Tomasz 78
Szövényi, Anikó 66 Wilson, Peter Lamborn see Hakim Bey
Szyłak, Aneta 158, 159–60 Winder, Jill 24
Wiśniewski, Anastazy B. 88, 136, 138, 139,
Tache, Rodica 116, 142 140
Tannert, Christoph 15, 23 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 48, 93
Tatlin, Vladimir 159, 233, 241 Wodiczko, Krzysztof 13, 26, 58, 59, 60, 64,
Tchorek, Mariusz 92 149–50, 226, 232–42, 8, 49
Tito, Marshal 182, 183, 195, 196 Wojciechowski, Jan Stanisław 93
Tkáčová, Lucia 116, 250–52, 54 Wolff, Larry 29
Tocqueville, Alexis de 232 Wróbel, Szymon 135
Todorova, Maria 200 Wróblewska, Hanna 254, 255
Todosijević, Raša 187–8, 270, 271, 37
Tomczak, Witold 267, 268 Yanuszewski, Oleg 273
Tomić, Milica 176, 179–80, 190–91, 192, Yeltsin, Boris 117
193, 34, 39, 40
Tót, Endre 58, 97 Zabel, Igor 21, 22, 23, 27, 56
Toyen (Marie Čermínová) 26 Želibská, Jana 144, 247
Tupitsyn, Victor 228, 231, 232 Zet, Martin 190
Turowski, Andrzej 48, 89, 90, 232–3 Zielniewicz, Tadeusz 217
Zimbardo, Philipe 102, 103
Ujazdowski, Kazimierz Michał 267 Žižek, Slavoj 232
Ulbricht, Walter 84 Żmijewski, Artur 99–104, 255, 12
312

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ART AND

translated by Anna Brzyski

English-language translation by Anna Brzyski

Copyright © Reaktion Books 2012

All rights reserved

Printed and bound in China

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

ISBN: 978 1 86189 895 1

History and Contemporaneity

Democracy after Communism

1 Rafał Jakubowicz, Arbeitsdisciplin, 2002.

Union and its cultural policies. In contrast, the concept of post-communist

2 Pride Parade, Poznań, 28 November 2005.

published originally in Polish by Rebis Publishers as Agoraphilia, Poznań,

4 irwin (group), East Art Map, 2002.

Kulik was invited as a peculiarity – as a Russian dog. I am certain that

Referring to the Interpol exhibition itself, Salecl added,

[Kabakov] was describing his experience of a cultural relocated person.

According to Zabel, something like this happened in Stockholm. He

Attempting to answer this question, Zabel advocates a regional strategy of

descriptions of Dadaism in Central and Eastern Europe as well as Japan.25 It

continent. From that perspective, German, French, Hungarian and Polish

World art history, were it to be written according to the expectations

In comparison to this Western notion of conceptual art, the Eastern

and its function as a strategy for evading authority should be considered

We have arrived at a key problem of horizontal art history, namely the

However, before we can fully develop this argument, we must raise

6 Ciprian Mureşan, Communism Never Happened, 2006.

character, break down the monolith of Western modernism, reveal through

the parallel or even pioneering character of their work. Because geographic

7 Roman Ondak, Sated Table, 1997.

seen as a response to being condemned to provincialism and to being de facto

Irrespective of the ongoing discussions about the existence or non-

so often ignored and concealed by politicians and intellectuals, in fact defined

a colour that had nothing to do with militarism, and adding an appendage

Artists of international rank, such as Krzysztof Wodiczko (who now lives in

10 Tamás Szentjóby, The Soul of the Statue to Liberty, Budapest, 1992.

11 Roman Ondák, SK Parking, Vienna, 2001.

ownership and exclusion. Also, to borrow Rosalyn Deutsche’s terminology, it

In 1948 hard-line Stalinist cultural policies were introduced in almost

(the exhibition ‘Confrontations’ was held in Prague in 1960 and in Bratislava

engendered regional incompatibility of local art historic narratives, artistic

In the 1970s Polish venues were in a unique position to show neo-

The situation in Yugoslavia was even more favourable than in Poland

of something as ‘international’, ‘universal’ or ‘world’ contains within itself a

legitimization of artistic identity of the post-communist Central Europe in

Often they are organized by curators of an international rank (a fact that

is not unaffected by art topography. The processes of globalization and cosmo-

As a result of ongoing efforts and the gradual development of Eastern

the Ideological State Apparatus. It appeared everywhere as a reaction to

Czechoslovakia, where post-‘thaw’ modern art shows in Bratislava and Prague

German sources state that in the 1970s there were approximately 40

Eugene Blume, who has written a monograph on gdr art as seen

If in the gdr artistic autonomy was an expression of a hard-won, limited

of the Ideological State Apparatus. This is clearly demonstrated by its quarters

ball could be seen as a paradigm of the politically and ethically ambivalent

It is sufficient to read a collection of documents from this decade, such

It should be noted that in the mid-1970s Jan Wojciechowski was one of

which became generally inaccessible to artists who were perceived as alternative

of Czechoslovakia to survive the period of repression, but also for defending it

comparing the Czech Republic and Poland, in particular in terms of attitudes

politics using the strategy I have identified as political autonomy, in imple-

and should no longer function as a guarantee of ‘ideological purity’. It should