Books

The Hidden Decade: Polish Video Art 1985-1995 (Book Review)

2011-07-16T12:26:29Z

Ukryta dekada. Polska sztuka wideo 1985-1995 / The Hidden Decade: Polish Video Art 1985-1995, eds. Piotr Krajewski, Violetta Kutlubasis-Krajewska, WRO Art Center, Wroclaw 2010, 336 p.

Given the contributions of feminism or New Historicism, the statement that there is no such thing as complete and cohesive ‘”great narrative” appears to be a cliché. When writing a history, especially the first historical outline of an art field, one will inevitably get involved in the politics of inclusion and exclusion (the canon), and one will have to answer questions such as: who is speaking? and from where? Such questions evidently beset the authors of The Hidden Decade, a collection of eight texts on Polish video art spanning from the mid-1980s--when video became more accessible (replacing 16 mm films) to its rising popularization and commercialization after 1995. The editors call this decade “hidden” both because of the widespread unfamiliarity with that period, and because of its reputation as an “alternative” art form).

Ukryta dekada. Polska sztuka wideo 1985-1995 / The Hidden Decade: Polish Video Art 1985-1995, eds. Piotr Krajewski, Violetta Kutlubasis-Krajewska, WRO Art Center, Wroclaw 2010, 336 p.

If one expected complete coverage from this book, then doubts would soon set in concerning more than one of its editorial decisions, including the make-up of its sections. First and foremost, it is unclear why Ryszard Kluszczynski is absent from the list of contributors. There are only a handful of researchers of video art in Poland, and he has arguably become the most prominent academic writer on the subject. Second, it is one wonders why two of the eight articles in this collection are devoted to Zbigniew Libera, an artist who after all has already been canonized by a solo show at Zachęta National Gallery in Warsaw. One also wonders if instead of adhering to this canon it might not have been more effective to bring in Jerzy Truszkowski, Libera’s friend in Łódż during the 1980s , or the dispersed and ephemeral work of another radical artist from that time, Zbyszko Trzeciakowski,

Despite all these questions it should be pointed out that the volume is presented as work in progress rather than as a completed investigation. The Hidden Decade also needs to be evaluated within the framework of the research projects conducted d by WRO Art Center, the only Polish contemporary art center dedicated exclusively to video art. However, this institutional framework does not yet offer a clue to the publication’s relevance. What is more important is the fact that its dynamic status as a work in progress has been translated successfully from the institutional to the epistemological level. As a result, the reader is confronted with a (sometimes blurry) polyphony of voices that is more or less unconstrained and free from set definitions.

The Hidden Decade embraces at least three approaches toward the past decade of Polish video art. Piotr Krajewski delivers an instructive insight into a wide panorama of contexts, including the independent position of video art between the State and the oppositional movement orbiting around the Catholic church; Polish artists’ fluid attitude toward visual representation (from a strictly analytical posture to a more casual use of the camera); or the circulation of VHS tapes within local urban centers. Krajewski’s essay takes the form of a diachronic narrative and reads like an academic lecture. Yet it is also, to some degree, a testimony. The discerning reader will note that the author’s authority is established not so much by professional knowledge than by personal experience. Therefore, within Krajewski’s rather academic style one can find intriguing continuities between Krajewski the academic, on the one hand, and Krajewski the co-organizer of, for instance, the first WRO festival (Wrocław. 1989), on the other.

In their essays, Łukasz Ronduda and Maria Anna Potocka adopt different discourses and strategies. Omitting diachronic narrative, Ronduda’s interpretation views the “hidden decade” as a synchrony within which different tendencies can be divided into four sharply divided movements. Since for Ronduda the period under consideration is decidedly the historical past, the author inscribed into his text is the modernist, objective, and disembodied observer.

Though she is from the same generation as Krajewski, Potocka brackets the extensive socio-historical context much like Ronduda does. Her starting point is the video material itself, viewed here as an archeological residue. However, in contrast to Ronduda, Potocka’s style brings to mind the lively evaluative language of art criticism. Indeed, what Potocka does is mainly a close reading of single frames which in her mind must periodically be re-assessed regardless of one’s memories and former judgments.

These three essays unquestionably shape the intellectual scope of the volume. Other included texts offer a variety of different approaches, from a focus on historical sources (the reprint of an archival article by Jolanta Ciesielska) to oral history (an interview with Libera); a methodologically advanced exegesis of a single artwork (Zygmunt Rytko’s Momentary Objects); or the meticulous reconstruction of historical facts (Dorota Monkiewicz on Libera’s youth), a process that Hans Sedlmayr called “the first art history.” In this way The Hidden Decade advances complementary models of investigation for the study of video artin Poland at a specific point in time.
The Hidden Decade reminds us that the production of knowledge is a domain in which negotiations are indispensable. It places us in the midst of long-term research efforts to understand Polish video art during the period in question.

Edit András (ed.), "Transitland. Video Art from Central and Eastern Europe 1989-2009" (Book Review)

2011-06-01T08:00:00Z

Transitland. Video Art from Central and Eastern Europe 1989-2009, Edit András (ed.), Budapest: Ludwig Museum – Museum of Contemporary Art / ACAX, 2009

“Video,” writes the editor of the volume, Edit András, “was pretty much the medium of transition (…) it was the first liberal media of the period (…) the strand of visual arts that through its inherent characteristic, kept and reflected recent history to the utmost.”(Transitland. Video Art from Central and Eastern Europe 1989-2009, Edit András (ed.), Budapest: Ludwig Museum – Museum of Contemporary Art / ACAX, 2009, p. 226.) András’s volume Transitland. Video Art from Central and Eastern Europe 1989-2009 accompanies the collaborative archiving project of the same name, which was organized by InterSpace Association (Sofia); the Transmediale Festival for Digital Art and Culture (Berlin); ACAX Agency for Contemporary Art Exchange; and the Ludwig Museum – Museum of Contemporary Art in Budapest in 2009. The archive contains 100 single-channel video works (five of them new commissions) selected by an international jury from 350 works nominated by regional experts. The selection process was designed so as to include work from all the countries designated by the EU to be Central and Eastern European (“not only the larger more sophisticated centers of video production, but also those from the newly emerging countries, with artists whose voices are rarely heard”) and to focus on videos whose content reflected critically upon the “social and cultural events, ideas and responses” that took place in Central and Eastern Europe in the two decades since 1989.”(Ibid. p. 233-234.) The accompanying reader is valuable but of mixed quality. Among the eighteen texts (six of them especially commissioned) most are by well-known artists, curators or art historians from the region. Among them there are a number of excellent polemical contributions, but also several that do little more than summarize a series of videos without offering a substantial analysis of them.

The volume opens with an introduction by Marina Gržinić entitled “Video in the Time of a Double Political and Technological Transition in the Former Eastern European Context” in which the author characterizes her artistic and curatorial engagement with video and media art as a way to “de-link” herself “from a certain ghetto situation that establishes a simple geography as the only specificity of the medium from Eastern Europe.”(Gržinić, p. 17.) Gržinić proposes that in the former East, video served as a “vanishing mediator between history and the spectator in front of the television screen,” like a “third eye” for “perceiving the future.”(Ibid. pp. 29-30.) She goes on to argue that new media remain a vital weapon in today’s struggle against “the dehumanizing logic of capital and its processes of deregulation, privatization and expropriation.”(Ibid. p. 29-30.) The author attacks the amnesiac hypocrisy of the West’s re-discovery of “Communism as a concept for the future” and states that projects such as Former West backhandedly serve to reinforce rather than to genuinely rethink the West’s “historical and present hegemonic power.”(Ibid. p. 18-19.) Re-politicizing video, Gržinić argues, is central to the ongoing project of reforming and transforming art history post-1989, and she proposes that this new history should locate former-Eastern European experimental film “as its center.”(Ibid. p. 20.) Gržinić’s Eastern Euro-Centrism highlights fresh tensions between different globalized, post-colonial revisions of art history. The forthcoming conference at the Clark Institute entitled “In the Wake of the “Global Turn:” Practices for an Exploded Art History without Borders,” for example, proposes that we now need to “pursue a radically de-centered or polycentric art history or one re-centered around a different locus, such as Africa rather than Europe.” From the perspective of the European former East, of course, the Euro-phobia of the ongoing disciplinary “global turn” threatens to extend and even repeat the Cold War ideological erasure of the East European experience from the historical map, even if it does so for new, more politically correct reasons. Gržinić’s proposal to make the former East a new global historical center offers a deliberately antagonistic refusal of this double erasure.

Gržinić’s sense of an ongoing ghetto-like situation of the former East is echoed in the tone of most of the other texts in the volume. These tend to be inward looking (some in more sophisticated ways than others). In this sense, the volume offers a fascinating survey of the state of writing about Central and East European art from within. Still, Transitland’s recourse to the geographical framework of “Central and Eastern Europe” does little to explode the walls of what Gržinić calls the “ghetto.” As the editor is all too well aware, a Central and Eastern European framework that brings together post-Soviet, Yugoslav and Romanian experiences risks homogenizing and potentially reinforcing rather than deconstructing the regional specificity of the historical “Eastern Europe.” The comparative strategy adopted by the Transitland project may have the merits of placing national art histories alongside one another, but it does not address the place of the former East in a global context. And although the former Eastern Europe is increasingly a focus of interest for researchers, curators and institutions outside of the region, the present volume does not engage the presence of these outsiders from beyond the “ghetto” as discursive partners. Whether investment in a Central and Eastern European regional discourse will further isolate the former-East from the all-too-Western “global” scene, or whether this will be a staging post en route towards participation in a new “world art” with or without further sub-regionalization remains to be seen.

Boris Buden’s text “Getting Out of Here” thinks beyond the confines of the sub-regional box and reflects on the problem of Europe as “sort of social and political work-in-progress.”(Buden, p. 74.) Illustrating his argument with references to Goran Dević’s video Imported Crows and Chto Delat’s Builders, he argues that the former-East must break with fear if it is to deal with what he describes as the problem of the “empty place of society,” caused by the fact that “it is not only Socialism that has collapsed. The society as such has gone, as well.”(Ibid. p. 76.) Mihnea Mircan’s text addresses similar problems, although from a different angle. “Monuments to Nothing” analyzes the use of monuments in films by Deimantas Narkevičius and Gintaras Dzidziapetris. Mircan’s conclusions about post-wall European cultural dialogue are also far from upbeat. He describes the discursive “drive to reunite Europe” as “disoriented yet well-meaning,” arguing that international initiatives designed to “bridge the gap” and “explore the divide” between East and West or “analyze or invent common problems,” while being “excellent opportunities to appraise each other’s insecurities or perplexities” have so far only “strengthened the separation, maintained as a focal point of the difficulty, the awkwardness even, of talking to each other.”(Mircan, p. 206.)

Nevertheless, some of the contributors to the volume cannot resist taking a swipe at the “West” by way of setting up the specificity of the “East”. Thus, in her essay entitled “Modernities out of Sync. The Tactful Art of Anri Sala,” Svetlana Boym claims that “in the case of artists from traditions other than those of Western Europe or the United States, where historical violence is not an armchair fantasy, tactfulness is less about abstinence than about a conscious reticence, […] than about a deliberate choice not to violate further that which has been violated by history.”(Boym, p. 85.) In Sala’s “tactfulness,” Boym sees a way to eschew “both the media-driven sensationalism of the new and of nostalgia and ostalgia alike.”(Ibid. p. 90.) East-West difference, for Boym, remains a useful rhetorical strategy.

If, as Mircan says, projects designed to “promote dialogue” are ultimately doomed to reinforce rather than break down cultural differences, is the former-East doomed to eternal self-analysis? Mircan reasons that “the post-Communist condition is a personal or collective archaeology of everything at the infra-political level, below the threshold of sensitivity of power, where displacements or distortions are stronger and harder to visualize than revolutions or reforms. This is perhaps the place from which to rethink Communism – starting from a multitude of low resolution images of history and inconclusive data.”(Mircan, p. 206.) For Mircan, video is the place from which to “rethink Communism.” Gržinić, however, goes further: for her, Eastern European video is the place to rethink the world as a whole.

Interestingly, Boris Groys’ text makes no reference to politics or to the post-communist condition. Instead, his essay “From the Image to the Image File – And Back” contains two arguments. First, that the significance of the video-installation as a form lies in its thematization of “incomprehensibility, uncertainty and the viewers’ lack of control over the duration of his own attention in museum spaces,” which forces individuals to confront what Groys calls an “uneasy compromise with time.”(Groys, p. 37.) Second, that the video image destroys the “illusion of the self-identity of the image,” making it impossible to conceal the traditionally invisible “curatorial practice of presentation.”(Ibid. p. 37.) This, Groys argues, is testimony to the paradigm shift caused by the radical transformations in reproduction technology that have occurred since Walter Benjamin first formulated his argument concerning the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. Today, Groys concludes, “we are not dealing with copies, but exclusively with originals, including the original presentation of the same image files, because the space of the circulation of images is not homogeneous, but heterogeneous, and so each new contextualization of the image is its originalization its reinvention.”(Ibid. p. 42.) Groys adopts the subject-position of a formalist theorist, speaking of space and time in the disinterested language of philosophy. One cannot help but notice that his concerns are something of an anomaly in this volume and wonder how this is relates to the fact that Groys is one of the few former Eastern intellectuals who has successfully entered the “global” discursive field. Is the prioritization of philosophical and formal concerns over socio-political and historical considerations a pre-requisite for entry into the globalized mainstream?

Călin Dan’s essay “Media Arts Get Media Free: a Small Anthology of Older views” provides a series of witty reflections on the experience of Romanian culture’s initiation into “transition.” Dan recalls, among other things, the setbacks he encountered while organizing the first Romanian video event Ex Oriente Lux in 1993 at the Soros Centre for Contemporary Arts in Bucharest. Despite never having owned a VCR or having processed a text on a computer, he was convinced “that since the old media were exhausted, at least the new media promised some entertainment,” imagining “that the promotion of media would be kind of healing operation in a country tormented by the role media played in its destiny.”(Dan, p. 38.) Dan recalls that his illusions were soon shattered: “After spending a month in the darkness of the show, I felt like an Eskimo lost in the Northern night, where nothing happens.”(Ibid. p. 131.) The billionaire George Soros had been skeptical about the project from the outset of course. In the end Dan came to agree: “The social arguments in which I wrapped the whole event were wishful thinking […]. At best, video art is a (pious?) lie meant to prove that, even in the context of new media, art continues to play a role in our civilization. I will not waste my computer time writing about the distribution crisis confronting video art […]. In Romania, the media environment turned from an ideological desert (ante-December 1989) into a complete jungle (post-).”(Ibid. pp. 131-2.) But Dan did not give up of course, particularly not when he heard that ““George” (Soros) was very keen on the internet!”(Ibid. p. 133.)

I was disappointed that no analysis or explanation for the troublingly neutral term “transitland” was offered in the volume. It seems to me to weld together time, space and economics in interesting, if problematic, ways. The term “transition” carries with it the desire to neutralize itself into a period, normalizing the often violent social changes that the politico-economic process it designates entailed. The transition of the so-called “transition economies” from centrally planned economies to the “free market” understood liberalization as the dismantling/privatization of State enterprises and the lowering of trade barriers, with far-reaching social consequences. The risk implicit in the adoption of the term transition, even in altered form, for a research project such as Transitland is that the term and the process it describes may become naturalized instead of without accomplishing any sort of détournement. In order to make the possibility of a more critical relationship explicit, I would therefore be tempted to ironically re-name the project tranzitland, thereby drawing attention to the new role played by corporate sponsors such as the Viennese Erste Bank group in promoting and funding cultural initiatives such as the transnational organization tranzit. Such a title might better reflect the shared economic realities of “tranzitland” and Disneyland in a globalized economy firmly controlled by multinationals.

Transitland charts a disjunctive and a discontinuous history. The volume contains a videography of the archive that was compiled by the project director, Margarita Doravska. This is an extremely valuable resource for further viewing and research. I also recommend a visit to the transitland.eu website where a good number of the selected films can be viewed in full. Although Transitland emphasizes the pluralism of the emerging discourses in post-socialist video, its lack of structure makes the book more appealing for dipping in and out of than for cover-to-cover reading. The volume’s editor seems at ease with this chaos, calling the selection of texts “wild.” An uninitiated reader might do well to read the volume backwards, first browsing the videography, and then reading the Gržinić piece for its conclusions.

James Westcott, "When Marina Abramović Dies" (Book Review)

2010-09-30T06:37:33Z

When Marina Abramović Dies : A Biography. James Westcott. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010. 326pp.

James Westcott, an art critic and former assistant to Marina Abramović, released his first book, When Marina Abramović Dies, earlier this year. Subtitled, A Biography, Westcott draws heavily on interviews with the Serbian performance artist and her extensive archives to pen a biography of Abramović, from her childhood to her sixties. The publisher of the book, the MIT press, a prominent publisher of modernist, art-historical literature, very carefully qualified Westcott’s project by labeling it a biography rather than a monograph. Interestingly, some of the strongest and weakest areas of the book originate with this distinction and Westcott’s status as a non-academic.

At just over three-hundred pages, Westcott’s biography is a lucid, enjoyable narrative that traces the birth, growth, and maturation of Marina Abramović, the self-proclaimed “grandmother of performance art.” Westcott admits in his introductory remarks that a great deal of the the material he uses in the book came from interviews with the artist and her family, who recounted various familial anecdotes. His book is not a monographic discourse on Abramović, at least in the academic sense of the term. Westcott puts forth no argument, nor does he make any attempt at positing some sort of thesis. Rather the book is structured as a chronological narrative that traces the artist’s life from the earliest moments of her career through every major moment and project. While it is richly erudite and written in a playful, comfortable style which constantly lauds the artist without sounding too sycophantic, When Marina Abramović Dies is far from a critical, academic inquiry into the artist or her work. Yet it should not be criticized too much for this shortcoming. After all, the author clearly recognizes the limitations of his work when he explicitly characterizes the project as a biography, and not as something more.

Because of the absence of a sustained argument When Marina Abramović Dies often devolves into little more than a thoroughly researched litany of Abramović’s artworks. At times, the author’s heavy reliance on interviews with Abramović and her relaying of anecdotes makes the book read like a memoir written by a third party. Additionally, when one considers that Marina Abramović has been very actively involved in managing her own legacy, her own heavy involvement in this project becomes a little suspect. Westcott, however, glosses over any potential ulterior motives his former employer may have had in helping him.

Abramović has a well-publicized interest in preserving the medium of performance art, and in 2006 she established the Marina Abramović Institute—a museum intended to do just this. Unfortunately, Westcott’s unrelenting biographical approach did not allow for any probing questions to be asked concerning the conceptual and theoretical implications of this undertaking. He similarly avoids any critical inquiry into the related issue of “re-performance,” the idea that performance functions like a musical score whose repetition never ceases to produce originals. The issue of re-performance, which is crucial for Abramović, fills several chapters at the end of Westcott’s biography. However, instead of analyzing or critiquing the issue, Westcott gives the reader a lengthy history of what pieces Abramović performed and when she performed them. This is clearly one of the most disappointing sections in the book. Additionally, the author decided to bookend his biography with an opening and a concluding chapter which focus on his personal involvement with the artist as her assistant and his memories of their time together. This only reinforces the casual and anecdotal nature of his book.

But are these shortcomings indicative of an unsuccessful project? The book, while it does have a few weak spots, is still informative. Westcott’s expositions on the personal life of Abramović are without equal within current art historical literature, and his writing style is clear and comprehensible. While this lucidity may come at the cost of a more complex analysis of some the theoretical and conceptual issues at play in Abramović’s work, the lack of academic jargon is nevertheless refreshing. The book does not contain any prolix footnotes the reader has to brave, nor is it rife with gratuitous references to en vogue theorists. This more casual approach made the work not only easily digestible but also a pleasure to read.

My own disappointment with the lack of critical discussion of works such as Imponderablia is tempered by the simultaneous, indulgent glee I experienced when I read one of the richest anecdotes uncovered by Westcott. It involves Ulay, Abramović’s partner, storming naked into the curator’s office demanding their money. The sight of this naked man arguing with him about money was too much for the curator, and Ulay was paid. Having no pockets to stow away the cash, Ulay hid the money in a bathroom above the toilet until after the performance. Taken with a grain of salt, this and other anecdotes help create a remarkable and original portrait of Abramović. When the book is taken for the straight-forward biography that it really is, then When Marina Abramović Dies emerges as a rich, stimulating text. Despite its defects, it remains a useful story about one of the most important artists of the second half of the twentieth century.

Sheila Skaff, "The Law of the Looking Glass" (Book Review)

2010-07-10T03:54:46Z

The Law of the Looking Glass. Cinema in Poland, 1896–1939. Sheila Skaff. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2008. 245 pp.

The intriguing title of Sheila Skaff’s survey of history of cinema in Poland before World War II is taken from a book written by an eye-witness, the critic and film theoretician Karol Irzykowski: “For only half of the world is ruled by the principle of action; the other half is subject to the laws of reflection.”(Karol Irzykowski, Dziesiąta muza: Zagadnienia estetyczne kina (Warsaw: Filmowa Agencja Wydawnicza, 1957), 51. Skaff, Shelia, trans.) Irzykowski’s understanding of cinema as a visual medium that both reflects and distorts reality, without forcing the audience to interact with it, remains an overarching metaphor throughout Skaff’s work. While this is definitely a very good choice in terms of popularizing Irzykowski’s original and unfortunately little-known theory (his book still needs to be translated into English), it does not always seem relevant to what is in the first place a meticulous historical study.

Skaff examines cinema in Poland from the late 19th century, a period that saw the projection of motion pictures in Poland; the development of early domestic film productions; the establishment of the first movie theaters, and the emergence of the film industry. It also covers the passage from early efforts to create a national Polish cinema to the distribution of foreign films in Poland; Polish silent films in the 1920s; and the transition to "talkies” in the 1930s. The book is full of information on this historical process but it is more sketchy when it comes to the interpretation of specific movies.

Skaff keeps in mind the diversity of factors which shaped the early history of cinema and consequently reexamines the political, social, and economic situation in partitioned and then independent Poland, along with the changing functions of film and its audience’s expectations. To give just a few examples, she discusses the consequences of tax regulations as insightfully and knowledgeably as she describes the impact of censorship; cinema’s relation to broader cultural movements such as Futurism, and the effects which Hitler’s rise to power had on the distribution of German movies in Poland in the 1930s. Skaff approaches cinema as an industry, a new art form, a medium creating the national identity and a mirror of social change.

But such a broad scope in a relatively short study (the body of the book is 187 pages) would require choosing one guiding thread less intangible than Irzykowski’s appealing metaphor, a main topic which would help the author select and present the material in a more consistent manner. Instead the book only seems to exhaust its subject while in fact it omits a lot of historical data, as well as creating a discrepancy between the author’s archival research and her book's theoretical ambitions. Her critical and aesthetical analysis is also sketchy at times. For instance, it would be worthwhile to include in such a study a separate section on specialized film magazines published between 1896 and 1939. Instead, Skaff discusses them only in the context of the transition from silent to sound film, emphasizing the role of the contemporary press in this difficult process. Generally speaking such media appear in the book as a neutral source material rather than as documentary evidence that, if analytically approached, may tell us a lot about the development of early film criticism and its language.

The book by Skaff undoubtedly demonstrates her profound knowledge and understanding of the complexities of Polish history, as well as of the social, political, and cultural transformations which took place in the turbulent time between 1896 and 1939. The introductory chapter can indeed serve as a model for how to write an informative, brief, and yet not oversimplified account of historical events. A key to Skaff’s success in this respect seems to be her decision to look at the described processes from the perspective of their relevance for the cinema. Still, this strength of The Law of the Looking Glass is occasionally lost in the later discussion of specific films; a lot of information provided by Skaff will remain unclear for a reader unfamiliar with Polish culture and some information may even appear unnecessary.

For instance, in Chapter Three, devoted to the national cinema in the first years of independence, Skaff gives several examples of contemporaneous productions such as Nie damy ziemi, skąd nasz ród [We Won’t Give up the Land from Which Our Nation Came] and does not mention that its title is a first verse of a highly popular national song written in the early 20th century, proposed to be the Polish national anthem at the time when the film was made. Similarly, a summary of the plot of Cud nad Wisłą [Miracle on the Vistula], a story of a famous battle with the Bolsheviks in 1920, is not accompanied by information about the fact that this particular way of naming the event – more commonly known as The Battle of Warsaw – was coined by members of the conservative National Democracy party and by political opponents of general Józef Piłsudski in order to diminish his authority. In all these cases footnotes might have been useful, all the more so in that all the cited examples are part of the discussion of Poland's “national cinema” and contribute to Skaff’s main argument that “film in Poland in the immediate postwar period reflected the general state of the country.” The film titles she mentions do indeed refer to this “general state” and to the social and political tensions of the period. Unfortunately, without any explanation that dimension remains hidden for the uninitiated reader.

The above-indicated weakness of the monograph is, however, of secondary importance. What remains much more disturbing is the lack of a deeper analysis of any of the films. Skaff repeatedly offers only randomly selected and unrepresentative case studies, provides brief synopses of the plots and some information on the production process and reception of a film (usually limiting it to the number of weeks for which it was shown, and sometimes citing an excerpt from a press review). Again, choosing one leading thought would probably have enabled Skaff to discuss them more broadly and yet keep the entire study consistent.

Despite these deficiencies, The Law of the Looking Glass is undoubtedly an important and timely survey of the early history of cinema in Poland, its dissemination, institutions, and public reception. Skaff’s extensive archival research has allowed her to include a lot of unpublished and unknown factual material, thus making the book a good starting point for further investigation of more specific phenomena. The study also offers an interesting insight into Polish culture and society at the turn of the 20th century and during the interwar period, seen through the lens of a medium different from those usually chosen — namely, literature and visual arts.

This perspective is particularly useful in the discussion of Jewish participation in the cultural life of the Polish territories throughout the period. the homogeneity of a Post World War II Polish society often overshadows the ethnic and religious diversity that characterized it before 1939. Sheila Skaff takes this diversity for granted, and rightly so, consequently managing to present it as a natural component of the Polish cultural landscape, even if this component was not always an unproblematic one.

Gender and Transgression in Visual Cultures (Book Review)

2010-05-21T00:47:46Z

Gender i transgressiya v vizualnykh iskusstvakh [Gender and Transgression in Visual Cultures]. Almira Ustanova, Editor. Vilnius: European Humanities University, 2007. 217 pp.

This collection of essays, the second in a series entitled Visual and Cultural Explorations (Vizualnye i kulturnye issledovanie), is the product of a conference held at the European Humanities University in Vilnius during April 2003. The forum gathered scholars from Belarus, Lithuania, and England to theorize the terra incognita left uncovered in Russian language scholarly publications on gender representations in visual culture. In particular these authors, according to the introduction by Almira Ousmanova, set out to analyze how gender negotiates borders in visual culture and what this means in the age of a post-modern, post-feminist, post-Soviet world.

The thinkers featured in this edited volume come from a variety of disciplinary fields including art theory, philosophy, gender studies, and film studies. Their task was to probe interdisciplinary discourses of gender, transgression, and visual culture “in a few of its borderlands, to denote the most interesting or actual problems in a comparative perspective.”(Almira Ousmanova, “Introduction,” in Gender and Transgression in Visual Cultures, ed. Almira Ousmanova (Vilnius: European Humanities University, 2007), 7.) Overall, the most successful articles in this collection are the ones that speak to the theme of gender transgression as being commonplace slippages and subversions of artistic and cultural norms. Additionally, many of the articles use films, literature, activism, and philosophy selected from a wide spectrum of genres and mediums to demonstrate how through the concept of transgression one can invariably see how unjust and inane are the norms.

Anastasya Denishchik’s piece, entitled “‘A Universal Taboo’ or Why the Limits of the Law on Pornography Aim Towards the Absolute,” challenges definitions of the nature of pornography, and those who are given the power to make determinations of what is pornography and what is erotica. She argues that the differentiation between legitimate and illegitimate forms of sexuality is one of the main controls that the hegemony of hetero-normativity--or to borrow Adrienne Rich’s term “compulsory heterosexuality”--possesses. Denishchek states that “the unchangeable underlines the excessive subjectivity of moral-ethical and aesthetic categories, that serve in the formation of judgment about sexuality and partly about its representations as erotica and pornography.”(Anastasya Denishchik, “’A Universal Taboo’ or Why the Limits of the Law on Pornography Aim Towards the Absolute,” in Gender and Transgression in Visual Cultures, ed. Almira Ousmanova (Vilnius: European Humanities University, 2007), 41.) This, she suggests, is partly the result of the absence of a precise vocabulary to distinguish between aesthetic and political discourses leading to black and white definitions of sexuality, where an overly subjective criterion determines what is perverse or permissible.

This notion implies that there is an anxiety of circulation surrounding images, as only some are determined to be worthy of transmission while others are not. In his piece “Transgression, Regression and Permanent Auto-Perestroika: Dorothea Olkowski on Gilles Deleuze and Feminism,” Benjamin Cope similarly argues that it is movement and plurality that define the world, and therefore transgression should be viewed as a component of the mainstream circulations of everyday life. Together these two chapters suggest that there will always be competing forms in motion. Correspondingly, Olga Pirozhenko and Aleksandr Pershai's pieces focus on the fluidity of movement across gender borders.

Audrone Zukauskaite’s chapter “Transgression in a Sentimental Style” examines sexual transgressions through the films of Spanish auteur Pedro Almodóvar. Citing Foucault’s idea that there is nothing negative in transgression, Zukauskaite argues that through the extreme examples of the impossibility of sexual relationships shown in Almodóvar’s films we can understand how “transgression can be understood as the only possibility to reconstruct the sacral experience.”(Audrone Zukauskaite, “Transgression in a Sentimental Style,” in Gender and Transgression in Visual Cultures, ed. Almira Ousmanova (Vilnius: European Humanities University, 2007), 35.) Zukauskaite suggests that the characters in his films often cannot achieve ordinary outcomes, whereas transgression from what could be predicted occurs more frequently. In such a way transgression in the films of Almodóvar is normalized.

Alla Pigalskaya’s chapter “Revolt as a Symptom: The Guerilla Girls and Iconoclasm” argues that rebellion is “a discontinuity of the symbolic fabrics of culture.”(Alla Pigalskaya, “Revolt as a Symptom: The Guerilla Girls and Iconoclasm,” in Gender and Transgression in Visual Cultures, ed. Almira Ousmanova (Vilnius: European Humanities University, 2007), 54.) The Guerilla Girls were an anonymous group of feminist artists that began launching demonstrations protesting the paucity of female participation in exhibitions throughout prominent art galleries. Pigalskaya shows that under the guise of anonymous guerilla masks the group has been able to dispute the invisibility experienced by women in the art world by calling for solidarity with their project and not with any individual. From a different angle, Laima Kreyvite links women’s increased visibility in the post-Soviet Lithuania art world to their rejection of feminist interpretations of their works. Kreyvite argues this is a result of post-feminist ideology and the post-Soviet experience that informed these artists’ works.(Laima Kreyvite, “’Post-Feminist’ Pleasures in Contemporary Lithuanian Art,” in Gender and Transgression in Visual Cultures, ed. Almira Ousmanova (Vilnius: European Humanities University, 2007), 103.)

While all chapters discuss the common theme of transgression, the volume occasionally suffers from a lack of focus. I do not think that it has anything to do with a lack of a disciplinary focus, as in my opinion the transdisciplinarity of the various sections is one of this collection's strengths. However, I would argue that focusing on a region or on a specific medium would have enabled the separate chapters in the book to be more in sync with each other. In particular, I was disappointed that so few of the authors addressed the topic of gender and transgression in the visual culture of the post-Soviet space. Of the twelve contributions, only Jankauskaite, Kreyvite, Gussakovskaya, and Pirozhenko address artists and art works from the region with any depth. While the goal of the collection was to introduce primarily western discourses on gender and transgression into Russian language publications, I was especially curious to learn how such discourses are taking shape in the visual culture of a post-Soviet world. Although it is apparent that the region is rife with rich material and contestation, I still remain dissatisfied on that point.

In conclusion, it is not surprising that the extraordinarily varied art forms and traditions in this book, in addition to the methods of analysis, feel occasionally disconnected from each other. Almira Ousanova’s overly general introduction does not tie the disparate parts together, and the absence of any conclusion seems to damage the cohesiveness of the book. While a number of the individual chapters are engaging and provocative as a whole the work is sprawling. That said, however, the volume ultimately serves as a welcome addition to the limited-but growing-Russian language literature on gender, sexuality and visual culture.

Vladimir Paperny, "Mos-Angeles Two" (Book Review)

2010-04-12T02:30:53Z

Mos-Angeles Two. Vladimir Paperny. Moscow: NLO, 2009. 216 pp.

Vladimir Paperny’s new book Mos-Angeles Two is a retrospective, nostalgic compilation of writings from the author’s recent and distant past. Revealing personal and professional motivations, describing spaces and feelings both imaginary and real, the introspective approach of his book makes for a highly personal project. Paperny was raised and educated in Moscow and then settled in the U.S. with the “third wave.” A skilled art historian and designer, he emigrated during the political epoch ironically called “the flourishing of the sundown” (rastsvet zakata), with its closed artistic dissident circles in Moscow and Leningrad who were eventually either forced out of the country or willingly left their socialist motherland to live abroad.

This second volume of previously published essays by the author reflects on the tradition of Soviet “kitchen conversations” during the late 1970’s and early 1990’s. It is designed as a postmodern monologue directed at an introverted circle of cosmopolitan Russian intellectuals. The book represents an eclectic collage of writings in various genres, from Paperny’s early art and architecture critiques (published in Russian magazines, newspapers and catalogs), to unpublished, personal sketches.

Part one opens with the essay “Searching for the Vanished,” a reflective and romantic emanation of Paperny’s youth, his parents and friends. “The End of the Co-Reign” and “How to Save the Rotten Iron,” written in a charismatic key, contain the author’s reminiscences of the period of sots art and his encounters with Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid, including poems and details of their friendship.

Later on in the book, the essays “Kosolapov Before and After,” “Asarkan,” and “Kabakov: Personalities in Search for an Author,” delve into a world of artistic egos, concepts and conflicting visions. “An American Design” and “The Soviet Interior” resemble sots art games and assess the formation of aesthetic trends in the U.S. and the Soviet Union. Other themes include reflections on liberal individualism; eclecticism; and kitsch in architecture and design.

“Memories of Futurology” carves into the terrain of Soviet institutionalized futurology of the 1960s-70s. With forays into its historical beginnings and the captivating (and rather cynical) context of the time, the reconstructed spirit of the place provides the foundation for Paperny’s reading.

“Architecture and Power,” “It Was Fun Till the Money Ran Out,” and “Megastructures” inquire into topics that continue to shape architecture and politics, as well as the environment. The articles stretch through time, from ancient Egypt to the Aztecs, to Italy, Israel, Japan, and modern Russia. Through the eyes of an architectural historian with a special interest in Russia’s relationship with the West, Paperny sees contemporary Russian architecture through the lens of its capital cities, which on occasion can come off as a bit snobbish. The rest of the articles in the first part are arranged as a bridge to the second half, which contains free-hand literary exercises.

The reader is encouraged to make conceptual links amongst fragmented subjects discussed in the book, and to see consistent preoccupations in its different chapters. Paperny shifts his focus from a play between the personal and the public, or art and power, to the continuities of thought and the shelled streams of ideas. Paperny is at his best where his often dramatic rhetoric overlaps with his nostalgic flight over the faint panorama of the past.

Polish Conceptualism: Expanded, Politicized, Contested (Book Review)

2010-03-02T04:07:02Z

Luiza Nader, Konceptualizm W Prl. Warsaw: Foksal Gallery Foundation, University of Warsaw Press, 2009. 429 PP.
Łukasz Ronduda, Polish Art of the 1970s. Jelenia Góra: Polski Western; Warsaw: Centre for Contemporary Art, Ujazdowski Castle, 2009. 379 PP.

The recent publication of Luiza Nader’s Konceptualizm w PRL and Łukasz Ronduda’s Polish Art of the 1970s has served to reinvigorate a debate that has been ongoing in Poland since the 1970s. This debate centers around what it meant to be a radical artist in the 1960s and 70s. The cultural policy of the Polish authorities was among the most lenient in the Soviet “bloc”, allowing artists to pursue conceptualism and experimental action art. But there was a trade-off for this freedom: artists were to steer clear of politics. Thus the pursuit of artistic ‘autonomy’, if only as a traumatic response to the brief imposition of Socialist Realism, became highly politicized. What constituted radicalism in such circumstances remains far from clear cut, and the question of complicity continues to haunt critical engagement with Polish conceptualism.

The official status of a gallery like Galeria Foksal PSP in Warsaw might be read as a necessarily paradoxical tactical measure designed to secure autonomy from State intervention, thereby making it possible to engage in critical artistic activity. But was the relative autonomy of the institutions that came under the aegis of the Fine Arts Workshops (PSP) bought at too high a price? There is also the problematic status of other artists, not associated with state funded galleries, who relied on PSP commissions for their survival: artists such as the duo Kwiekulik. Far from aiming towards artistic autonomy, they hoped to implement reform by becoming Party members (without success), carrying out their unofficial artistic activities as an unremunerated parallel pursuit, alongside official commissions, and were continually frustrated that their radical ambitions could not be fulfilled through the types of official engraving work they had to take on.

The Gierek regime’s stated ambition to build a modernized, richer, more tolerant society (after 1970), even allowing for intellectual independence, has been called nothing but a charade: “intellectual freedom… was limited by highly developed censorship, and political freedom – by the policemen’s stick; in a word: economic and political quasi-liberalization were matched by cultural quasi-liberalization,”(Piotr Piotrowski, Dekada. O syndromie lat siedemdziesiątych, kulturze artystycznej, krytyce, sztuce – wybiórczo i subiektywnie (The Decade: On the Syndrome of the Seventies, Artistic and Critical Culture, and Art –Selectively and Subjectively), (Poznań: Obserwator, 1991), p. 10.) How did this situation impact the values formulated by the Polish neo-avant-garde?

Wiesław Borowski was vociferous in his opinion on the matter, publishing, in 1975, a controversial text in which he condemned a host of contemporary practices as “pseudo-avant-garde.” These practices, he maintained, represented “a fundamental misunderstanding in grasping the radicalism of artistic activity.”(Wiesław Borowski, "W odpowiedzi odpowiedziom" ("A Response to the Responses"), Kultura no. 25 (627), June 22. 1975. p. 14.) To the outrage of those involved, he named in person and attacked artists whose “pretentious practices” seemed to him to be without genuine value and “cloaked in pseudo scientific theoretical jargon.”(Wiesław Borowski, "Pseudoawangarda" ("The Pseudo-avant-garde"), Kultura, no.12 (614), March 23, 1975. p. 12.) In the early 1990s, the leading art historian Piotr Piotrowski still seemed inclined to agree, writing that “we had an avant-garde (…) but the values it formulated were often a sham,” likening the 1970s avant-garde to a Fiat car: “the point was that it existed at all, never mind whether or not it actually did what it was supposed to do.”(Piotrowski, Dekada, p.11.)

Today, however, the artists whom Borowski condemned in 1975 have been critically rehabilitated, and his arguments have been largely rejected, and Piotrowski has also retracted many of the views expressed in his book Dekada. But the historical debate about radical legacies, if conducted on a more nuanced level, remains very much alive. Nader and Ronduda’s publications reflect the continuation into the present of the antagonistic positions adopted by artists and critics in the 1970s. But both books also offer fresh insights into a wide spectrum of artistic practices and institutional contexts, enriching the methodological and theoretical framework for this debate.

They look very different. Nader’s is an elegant, monochromatic academic brick. Ronduda’s is a big, sexy, coffee table affair, illustrated by the artist Piotr Uklański. Such visual differences are matched by disparities in written style. Nader begins politely, with a thorough survey of the literature in the field, going on to construct a nuanced and complex argument for Polish conceptualism as a critical ‘discursive formation’ whose key institutions she subjects to a serious scholarly revision. By contrast, Ronduda’s opening is dominated by with his own distinctive voice, offering his own definitions and proposing a new philosophical framework for categorizing 1970s practices. However, the chapters that follow are largely purged of theoretical framing, making way for primary source material and for artists’ statements about their work. This relative freedom from secondary sources and from the usual theoretical voices is in many respects very refreshing, making the text a pleasurable read.

The two publications propose very different approaches to the use of critical theory in art historical writing. Ronduda works from the premise that there is altogether too much stale theory within the field, and what are needed are new conceptual categories. He argues that the success of certain contemporary Polish artists on the globalized art scene has been a motor for rethinking the theoretical and artistic atmosphere of the 1970s – a process that he aptly terms “reverse pioneering.” One of the ambitions of his book, then, is to show how the impact of the most original Polish art of the 1970s may yet prove sufficiently explosive to prompt an international categorical shift.

Nader, by contrast, deploys a wealth of international theory, past and present, re-reading the art of the past in relation to its contemporary texts. She scrutinises the discursive lives of works and texts to construct a fine web of inter-textual connections. This strategy illustrates how a more profound engagement with theory, deployed in tandem with close attention to concrete works, is one way to rescue Polish art from its provincial situation. Her frame of reference includes key work by Foucault, Barthes, Derrida, Rorty, Žižek, and Agamben. In relation to these thinkers, Nader demonstrates how Polish examples are more than adequate to the task of examining the relationship between conceptualism, structuralism, and post-structuralism.

An appraisal of two books together can easily serve to diminish their separate accomplishments, producing unproductive polarization and negative debates structured around what each one lacks. Perhaps surprisingly though, one can also identify certain shared aims. Above all, Nader and Ronduda both seek to insert what has, thus far, been essentially a Polish debate into the international arena. Ronduda plays his part by publishing the book in two editions, one Polish, one English, and securing its effective promotion on the international English language market, drawing attention in his text to emigration to the West of many of the artists he discusses. Nader pulls Polish art into the more mainstream fold through her consistent cross-referencing and comparisons of Polish artists to Western artists and theorists. When her book is translated into English, these links will prove invaluable in rendering often unfamiliar Polish practices accessible to a Western audience.

Nader analyzes the role of key institutions and state sponsored events in defining Polish conceptualism. Her engagement with the Galeria Mona Lisa, Galeria Akumulatory 2, Galeria Foksal, the 1970 Impossible Symposium in Wrocław, and the 8th meeting of artists and theorists at Osieki reveals an extraordinarily playful heterogeneity of artistic examples. Neat distinctions between official and unofficial registers collapse under Nader’s analysis. She paints a portrait of conceptualism as a sophisticated philosophical enterprise, contaminated and confused, and wrestling with various traumas. Konceptualizm w PRL elucidates, with considerable sensitivity, the complex machinations of artists and institutions to pursue radically critical ends from within the PSP controlled system.

Ronduda is not interested in the potential radicalism of the institutions at the heart of Nader’s narrative, but seeks to redress the historical balance. He focuses on individuals whose work can lay claim to varying degrees of art historical neglect or marginalization: Marek Konieczny, Andrzej Lachowicz, Natalia LL, Jan Świdzińki, Kwiekulik, the Film Form workshop, Zdzisław Sosnowski and Akademia Ruchu, among others. “Pure conceptualism,” in this account, serves as a sort of straw man - rational, tautological, institutional. It provides a backdrop against which to display a set of practices that are more open to the ‘mystical’, the social, and the political. His ambition is to deconstruct the neo-avant-garde by re-organizing artists’ approaches according to new conceptual categories. In doing so, he seeks to trace the movement from what he calls post-essentialism (“trying to purge the conceptual essence of the work of art [as well as the existential essence of experience] of outside influences”), to what he calls “pragmatism” (the approach of those artists who “focused on an activist involvement in the nonartistic world”). The movement from essentialism to pragmatism corresponds to the movement from “art’s isolation” towards “art’s opening to reality,” and Ronduda seeks to articulate the variety of “postessentialist” practices located at the interstice. Both groups of artists worked, Ronduda writes “at the interface of art and life (…) combining artistic and existential issues”, but whereas the “postessentialists persisted in asking basic questions (Is there pure essence of art? Are we capable of grasping the nature of being?), the pragmatists did not concern themselves with these matters”. They were more interested in purging “materiality” and in pursuing a “better life”.(Łukasz Ronduda, Polish Art of the 1970s, (Jelenia Gora: Polski Western; Warsaw: Centre for Contemporary Art – Ujazdowski Castle, 2009), pp. 8-9.) Pragmatic thinking involved “a bitter sense that there was nothing except materiality (the physical finitude of our body, psyche, and reality itself)”. There is considerable slippage between such distinctions of course, and conceptual categories of this sort are rather difficult to police. But whether or not we agree with the new terms introduced into the field, Ronduda’s decision to restructure the fictional monolith of the so called neo-avant-garde is a provocative move that promises to reignite critical passion.

Uklański’s close ups of photographed body-parts interrupt the textual field so as to form a counter-narrative, giving the publication its creative clout, and drawing attention to the central role of the visual in the construction of subjectivity. Nader approaches the question of subjectivity primarily through textual analysis, referring to the performativity of language, deconstructing modes of agency as designed to ask: what is freedom? In her discussion of Jerzy Ludwiński’s writings, she defines the conceptualist subject as “a subject who doubts, who searches, and in the end acts.”(Luiza Nader, Konceptualizm w PRL, (Warsaw: Foksal Gallery Foundation; University of Warsaw Press, 2009), p. 111.) Both authors declare their investment in privileging subjectivity, acknowledging the many respects in which the desiring subject has been historically repressed in conceptualist discourse. These differences of focus produce very different accounts of the same material, as becomes clear in their readings of the work of Krzysztof Wodziczko or Jarosław Kozlowski, which offer points of friction.

Nader’s account of the author’s failure to die is particularly instructive. She writes: “Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault never claimed that the author completely disappears. (…) Foucault concentrates on analyzing the function of the author as a function of discourse: on the modes of existence, circulation and the functioning of utterances. Conceptual art also appears not so much as the scene of a crime as of the return of the author.”(Nader, Konceptualizm. p. 136.)

Some of the most fascinating parts of the book are those where Nader offers close readings of particular artistic propositions, for example Włodzimierz Borowski’s extraordinary Gift of the Oven at the Art in a Changing World Symposium of Artists and Scientists at the Puławy Nitrate Works in 1966, during which the artist scandalously sang ‘urea’ to the tune of the National Anthem, making a mockery of the State’s promotion of a harmonious unity between artistic and industrial aims.

One of the highlights of Ronduda’s text is the lively chapter based on original archival research from the Institute of National Memory (IPN), which provides insight into the culture of spying and the paranoid conspiracy theories revolving around the Secret Police and artistic activities. Reports show that conceptualism was read as ‘pro-Western’, and therefore threatening, in the light of which investigations sometimes acquired an absurdist dimension. Ronduda recounts, for example, how a postcard ending ‘see you in New York’ sent to an address in Katowice by Janusz Haka became the pretext for an investigation (albeit a short-lived one) into possible links between the artist and a planned terrorist attack on a plane to New York.

Reading these two books, I missed a sense of engagement with the ways in which local dissident theory and Marxist revisionism provided alternative definitions of what was meant by radicalism in 1960s and 70s East-Central Europe. However, both publications offer a strong sense of the degree to which art historical tropes such as ‘style’ and ‘movement’ are woefully ill-equipped to deal with what Dick Higgins once called the ‘great ground swell of intermedia’ and its political dimensions. From each of these books, the voice of its author emerges with its own agenda. And yet, however antagonistic the critical positions they adopt, these can and should be viewed as complementary publications – not simply because they make the case for the radicalism of different artists and institutions, but also because both author’s affirm, in their own way, the creative role of art historians and curators in reactivating the art of the past through discourse. As both authors prove, there remains considerable mileage in the “radicalism” debate.

Klara Kemp-Welch is Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at The Courtauld Institute of Art in London, where she is researching artistic sociability and the exchange of ideas between the countries of the Soviet “bloc” and former Yugoslavia. She has published articles, catalogue essays and reviews, and is completing a book titled Figures of Reticence. The Antipolitics of Happenings.

Jeremy Howard, “East European Art 1650-1950” (Book Review)

2010-01-15T00:55:52Z

East European Art 1650-1950. Jeremy Howard. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2006., 258 pp.

“The aim here,” states Jeremy Howard in his introduction, “is a redefinition of what may be considered the art of eastern Europe.” Ambitious enough, one might think, but he goes on to proclaim that the book should “at least partially, deconstruct some of the prevailing notions and myths of what comprises European art per se.”(Jeremy Howard, East European Art 1650-1950, (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 1. Original emphasis retained.) Clearly, the author has set out to write a work of some considerable scholarship. Yet he attempts a challenging task, to map out 300 years of art history across the varied geographical and cultural landscape called Eastern Europe.(Such breadth of enquiry is not unusual for the Oxford History of Art series: for example, their volume on art in China spans the Neolithic to the present day. Craig Clunas, Art in China, (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). 256 pp.) As Howard points out there is relatively little English language review on East European art from this period, and as such the volume’s publication is overdue.

The question perhaps for such a survey is to find an appropriate focus, a viewpoint from which to structure discussion. Howard takes as his starting point two of the dominant empires of the period in question - Austrian and Russian - and the influence of the Academies of Vienna and St Petersburg upon the development of art across their respective territories. This approach allows the author to explore interrelationships between the fortunes and political machinations of various states, as well as the artists practicing under their jurisdiction. Howard’s enquiry ranges across art forms: painting, sculpture, architecture, the applied arts, photography, and performance are all examined. He writes with some considerable skill, interweaving the endeavors of numerous artists and their patrons into a narrative which is genuinely informative, whilst retaining a lightness of touch in the telling which propels the reader forward into the text.

The other main aspect is Howard’s project to redress the balance in favor of under represented cultures of art and to fill gaps in existing knowledge on the subject. Thus the reader gains the impression that the author is putting the case for the overlooked, the forgotten, and ignored figures of art history. The principal expression of this approach is to devote two chapters to women artists, comprising nearly half the book. This in itself is an important and valuable contribution to the body of writing available on this subject. It also highlights Howard’s unconventional stance: not only has he largely eschewed traditional divisions along lines of nationality or artistic movements, but also attempted to unseat the forces of patriarchal hegemony along the way. That the author is quite explicit in these aims is admirable, and the end result is a richly complex history replete with discoveries, at least for this reviewer. Shifting the focus to women also allows the text to delve into areas beyond the purview of the aforementioned academies, a necessary step as until the early twentieth century women artists had little or no access to state academic training.

In addition to well known icons of the Soviet era such as Vera Mukhina’s Worker and Collective Farm Labourer (1937), Howard looks at artworks by women who are not so conspicuous, even when their works are just as recognizable: notable is the Bronze Horseman monument to Peter the Great in St Petersburg (1766-82), created by Marie-Anne Collot and Étienne-Maurice Falconet for Catherine the Great. Another is Nineteenth century Serbian painter Katarina Ivanovic, described as “eastern Europe’s first in situ woman history painter.”(Howard, 109.) Her role as an art collector was also significant: the donation of Ivanovic’s collection is credited with helping to establish Belgrade’s National Museum.

Howard’s emphasis on the under-examined also means that, for example, discussion veers away from Austria to look at Slovakia and Hungary. He also analyses key artists and works across history included in the St Petersburg orbit, seeking to demonstrate progression rather than disjuncture from the early days of the academy’s foundation to the avant-gardes of the fledgling Soviet Union.

The impact the of the academies, both in appointing distinguished academicians from Western Europe and developing diverse artistic talents, is demonstrated amply. Examples are the famous “mad” sculptor Franz Xaver Messerschmidt and his “character heads” (c.1770-83), produced in what is now Bratislava; the neoclassical St Petersburg Bourse, designed by Jean Thomas de Thomson (1810); Howard’s comparison of Mikhail Tikhanov’s seminal painting, The Execution of Russian Patriots by the French in 1812 (1813) with Goya’s The Executions of the Third of May, 1808 (1814); Alexander Rodchenko’s photomontage Comrades Stalin, Voroshilov and Kirov on the White Sea-Baltic Canal (1913). Such eloquent works convey the abundance of forms of expression that emerged throughout this period.

Much of the pleasure of reading this book is derived from the author’s continual discussion and analysis of specific artworks. His classic art historical approach leaves little room for theoretical speculations or generalizing. Indeed one is sometimes left with the impression that Howard would have liked to introduce more art to the reader, were it not for lack of space. Nevertheless the underlying thesis remains constant throughout: that through exploring the supposed margins of art history we can reevaluate the status and significance of European art as a whole, and, by extension, European civilization.

If there is one shortcoming, it is the relative lack of information on the influence on art of the third powerful imperial force which occupied much of South East Europe during this period, as well as immediately beforehand: the Ottomans. After all, nine years before the foundation of the Viennese academy Ottoman armies had laid siege to the city. Indeed, the author acknowledges that the cultures of lands newly ceded to Austria by the Ottomans were part of a dynamic that changed the conditions of art production. This point is expanded upon somewhat in the final chapter, an epilogue of sorts which covers the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, drawing together cultural threads which are not discussed at length elsewhere, including art in Bulgaria, Romania, Poland, and Greece. It can be said, of course, that the Ottoman Empire was in decline from the 1700s onwards, but then arguably by the 1900s so were those based in Vienna and Moscow: certainly all three disappeared in the aftermath of the First World War.

While Howard touches upon developments in Istanbul and art in the Balkan region, he acknowledges that his attention lies mostly elsewhere. The founding of an art academy in Istanbul was comparatively late, and the Ottoman Empire does not quite fit the scenario which Howard develops of art academies reflecting increasingly secular, rationalizing empires applying ideas from the Enlightenment. The author's aim is to describe an essentially modern arc of development in art across Eastern Europe, as the academies guide art away from its ecclesiastical and folkloric origins towards state and market led roles. Seen from this perspective, Ottoman art can be seen as pre-modern, literally epitomizing the Byzantinist and orientalist tendencies Howard explains as largely antithetical to the ideologies of the competing Christian empires.(Howard, 22, 53.). Ironically the iconography of Byzantium was reinstated in the late nineteenth century as Orthodox cathedrals were built in nations emerging from the diminished Ottoman zone of control.(Howard, 199-207.)

In fairness it should be said that the author shows awareness of Ottoman art,(See, for example, the author writing on Ottoman influences in Jeremy Howard, 'From Baghçesary Salsabil to Bakhchisarai Fountain: The Transference of Tatar Triumph to Tears', in Jeremy Howard (ed.) By Force or By Will: The Art of External Might and Internal Passion 177-190 (St Andrews: St Andrews University Press, 2002).) and he is sensitive to the processes which transform culture: the connectedness, confluences, and hybridity that effect change, create new languages, forms, and genres; what Howard terms morphology. (Howard, 2.) It may also be pertinent that a forthcoming volume in the same series on Islamic art could cover this area in some detail.(Irene Bierman, Art and Islam, (Oxford University Press, forthcoming).) So this relative absence can be seen as consistent with Howard's declared aim to steer away from ground already covered, or in this case being explored by a colleague.

As one might expect, the volume is blessed with plentiful high quality illustrations, mostly in color and interspersed throughout the text. Thus the reader may see the qualities of the works under discussion, and appraise them on their own merits. A detailed bibliographical essay is provided and is very useful, as it gathers together much of the English language writing in the field, in entries grouped according to geographical region. The author’s commentary laments the paucity of material in English on the topic, and questions the credentials of many earlier texts, which are frequently characterized as caught in the ideative currents of their respective eras. One could interject here that the author’s own views may be similarly colored, if it were not for the disarming humility with which Howard admits the inevitable omissions and gaps present in this volume. After all, East European Art is not intended as comprehensive, but rather as a particular viewpoint on a heterogeneous and complex organism.

With the recent translation of Piotrowski’s In The Shadow Of Yalta,(Piotr Piotrowski, In the Shadow of Yalta. Art and Avant-Garde in Eastern Europe 1945-1989, (London: Reaktion Books, 2009). 498 pp.) which looks at the period 1945-1989, and Irwin’s earlier East Art Map,(Irwin (eds.), East Art Map: Contemporary Art and Eastern Europe. (London: Afterall Publishing, 2006). 527pp.) which extends into the art of the post-Communist transition, East European Art 1650-1950 is a complementary representation of the art of the previous three centuries. The book is designed as an introduction and will no doubt find its way into libraries, art schools, and art history departments across the Anglophone world. One test of the effectiveness of such a text is whether or not a reader with some knowledge beyond that of the layman will learn something new from reading it. For this reviewer, Howard’s writing ably succeeds in passing that hurdle. I can only hope that others gain similarly from reading this book. It may yet fulfill the author’s ambition to shed light on areas of artistic activity hitherto neglected by Western art discourse.

Piotr Piotrowski, "In the Shadow of Yalta" (Book Review)

2009-09-02T09:01:46Z

In the Shadow of Yalta. Art and Avant-Garde in Eastern Europe 1945-1989, the long-awaited English translation of Piotr Piotrowski’s 2004 book, boasts of a well-chosen title not only for its descriptive qualities, but also because it refers to the rather dark and indistinct history of a particular portion of Eastern Europe: the area falling under the Soviet regime following the Yalta Agreement in 1945.

PIOTR PIOTROWSKI, IN THE SHADOW OF YALTA. ART AND THE AVANT GARDE IN EASTERN EUROPE 1945-1989, LONDON: REAKTION BOOKS LTD., 2009. 498 PP.

In the Shadow of Yalta. Art and Avant-Garde in Eastern Europe 1945-1989, the long-awaited English translation of Piotr Piotrowski’s 2004 book, boasts of a well-chosen title not only for its descriptive qualities, but also because it refers to the rather dark and indistinct history of a particular portion of Eastern Europe: the area falling under the Soviet regime following the Yalta Agreement in 1945. Piotrowski begins his story in 1948, the year that Stalin tightened his grip on the territories in question and, with the stroke of a pen, brought all ongoing cultural developments and debates to a devastating halt.

Though a thorough examination of the output of artists facing political upheaval, Piotrowski's book must also deal with the issue of the geography of Eastern Europe, which constitutes one of the theoretical undercurrents of the book and frames his entire discussion. The challenge of creating a clear-cut definition of Eastern Europe is apparent throughout the book and, furthermore, is not so easily dispensed with; pure geography does not work adequately, as political realities rarely accorded with geographical boundaries. For instance, the former Yugoslavia is widely considered to be part of the region but was, in fact, politically-speaking, non-aligned and affiliated with India and Egypt rather than the Soviet Union. Piotrowski, however, correctly senses the importance of including Yugoslavia in any history of the region, either cultural or political. Austria, on the other hand, is not included in his book, even though it was under Soviet occupation until 1955, and held strong historical and cultural ties to the former territories of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

The book is organized chronologically while the various contemporaneous cultural trends are sorted out in different thematic sub-chapters. The transitional period between 1945 and 1948, what Piotrowski calls “the Surrealist interregnum,” constitutes the first part of the book and is followed by the second major unit “Modernism and Totalitarianism,” which takes the reader up to 1968. This section examines Art Informel geometric abstraction, “Un-Socialist Realism,” and the emergence of mixed media and conceptual works at the expense of the classical medium of oil painting. Part three, “The Neo-Avant-Garde and ‘Real Socialism’ in the 1970s” surveys the conceptual tendencies, art movements, and outstanding artists of the decade, walking the reader through the major artistic centers of the region. It focuses on political dissent and the rich varieties of artistic responses to oppression.

Telling a comprehensive narrative of the visual arts in post-World War II Eastern Europe is an enormous challenge that makes Piotrowski’s undertaking nothing short of heroic. Countries with different histories, languages, and cultural traditions were thrown into the same historical and political cauldron after 1945 and it seems unlikely that there was a single artist or cultural agent anywhere between the GDR and Bulgaria who could have claimed to possess an integrated “Eastern European” consciousness. The geographical ambiguities of the area had far-reaching effects. Indeed, the term “East European art” does not originate in Eastern Europe at all,(For this argument, see Éva Forgács, “How the New Left Invented East-European Art,” Centropa, v. 3, No. 2, May 2003, 93-104.) a fact that makes Piotrowski’s chapter on regional art history all the more admirable.

The heterogeneity of the region and the variety of developments and life stories bring about logistical dilemmas: Can artists who once lived in Eastern Europe but immigrated into a Western country still be counted as Eastern Europeans? Or does the term pertain only to that part of their careers that unfolded in their country of their origin? These questions arise as a result of the conflict between a geographically ambiguous experience and an overly-defined and homogeneous political context; artists who were even temporarily relieved from the pressure and threats faced by their colleagues at home could not be said to have had the same Eastern European experience. Physical presence in the region is an important factor because, as Piotrowski points out, one of the most crucial experiences within Eastern Europe was the array of limitations on self-expression, restrictions on the public exhibition of art, and the relative impossibility or difficulty of passage from Eastern Europe to other parts of the world.

While the structure of the book lends itself gracefully to Piotrowski's discussions of the theoretical and political undercurrents that he sensibly identifies in East European art, it nevertheless allows for certain distortions, for example in the treatment of Hungarian art., The author adopts the view that there existed a “Hungarian Pop Art” parallel to the English and American trends. There is, however, no consensus about the truth of this conclusion among Hungarian art historians. The claim that Pop Art existed in a society unfamiliar with consumerism and lacking in both consumption-driven popular culture and a commercial art market - in the absence of which no criticism of those trends could develop - might have alerted the author to be more critical of such an argument. “Hungarian Pop Art” referenced such international icons as Marilyn Monroe or Joseph Beuys rather than local household names or other neo-avant-garde artists reflecting on their isolation from the rest of the culture. How could such an open, all-inclusive, trivia-loving, and market-thrilled trend as Pop Art have developed in an oppressed and closed-off country? How could remote allusions to Western icons and methods be understood as a full-fledged local version of that trend?

A book like In the Shadow of Yalta inevitably causes disagreement among its readers as to what is left out; Piotrowski is one of the best-informed scholars in this field and yet his choices are not always balanced. It remains to be seen if a completely objective, even-handed overview of the East European art scene is even possible. Nonetheless, it cannot escape notice that while Polish, Hungarian and East German art are discussed in great detail, accounts on Yugoslavian, Romanian and Bulgarian art are comparatively superficial. Such an imbalance may well reflect the reality of artistic production in the region but does not completely fulfill the promise of the title. The quality of the publication itself leaves much to be desired; most particularly the book sorely suffers from the lack of an editor who might have caught misprints, and would have cut such clear errors as the phrase “the populist ideology of Béla Bartók”.

Furthermore, Piotrowski neglects to mention the stunning achievements in textile art of the 1960s and '70s as well as the fascinating history attached to these developments. Since textiles were not endorsed as representative high art by State authorities, artists received less attention from censors and, by the '70s, textile art had become one of the most inventive, innovative, and radical mediums in most East European countries. Their surge in popularity can be attributed not only to the lack of censorship, but also to the worldwide development of textile art and to the international exposure made possible by frequent biennials, triennials, workshops, and solo exhibitions. This international interest integrated the textile art of Eastern Europe into the fabric of Western art like no other movement in the region at that time. It was in the medium of textiles that the careers of artists like the Pole Magdalena Abakanowicz, the Romanian Ana Lupas, the Hungarian Margit Szilvitzky and Zsuzsa Szenes, to name but a few, were launched.

I sorely missed mention of some of the central figures of the 1960s and ‘70s Hungarian art world such as the painters Ilona Keserü, László Méhes, and the sculptor István Haraszty, all of whom seem to have been eliminated to make way for Endre Tót, an interesting but relatively minor figure of the period. While it is certainly necessary to put the fine arts into the broader context of the visual arts, if the great theater work of the Polish painter and theater artist Tadeusz Kantor is discussed in detail, then Hungarian alternative theater groups led by Péter Halász and István Bálint, László Najmányi and Tamás Fodor respectively, which played key roles in the Budapest neo-avant-garde in the late 1960s and early 1970s, also deserve to be mentioned. The same goes for the Lódź Workshop of Film and the exclusion of the Béla Balázs Studio, where Hungarian artists, including Tamás Szentjóby, Dóra Maurer, Miklós Erdély, Ágnes Háy, and Péter Donát made their experimental films.

While Piotrowski correctly identifies the artists and art groups of Eastern Europe, his use of the term “neo-avant-garde” as synonymous with “post-modern” is somewhat confusing. Given the wide variety of literature and sharp debates on this issue, it would be safe to say that use of the term “neo-avant-garde” differs in Western and Eastern contexts. In the West, the neo-avant-garde was the product of a paradoxical development - namely “that the story of art within the new politics of the 1960s [was] one of considerable ambivalence as artists attempted to reconcile their stance of opposition with increasing support for their activities in a new and aggressive global marketplace (…) and the ambivalent fascination felt by audiences for the work of dissident artists”, as Thomas Crow described it.(Thomas Crow, The Rise of the Sixties, New York: Abrams, 1996, 12-13.) The post-World War II generation accused the classic avant-garde of institutionalization and selling out, giving up its critical position for the power and status warranted by the museums and the market. The neo-avant-garde was critical of this position as well as of actual institutional power. In Eastern Europe, by contrast, the position of the historical avant-garde remained the same. As Hungarian art historian Géza Perneczky explained, in the absence of money, success, and institutional acclaim, the avant-garde remained in opposition with its symbolism remaining unfailingly relevant.(Géza Perneczky, “A fekete négyzettől a pszeudo kockáig. Kisérlet a kelet-európai avant-garde tipológiájának megalapozására” (“From the black square to the pseudo cube. An attempt to laying the groundwork for a typology of East European art”) Magyar Műhely, Vol. 16, No. 56/57, Dec. 1978, 27-45.) The new generation of the 1960s had the same revolutionary spirit and faith in the redemptive power of the classic avant-garde art while testing the political boundaries in the 1960s and '70s.

Present throughout the book and most explicitly in the epilogue is Piotrowski's argument that globalization and the World Wide Web exist as agents of the power of the West that in fact colonizes the rest of the world. He suggests that the firm de facto presence of other regions, particularly Eastern Europe with its full geographic reality, might at least reveal the truth about this state of affairs: “Since the virtualization of space is becoming an instrument of the center’s dominance, the introduction of a geographic dimension deprives the center of its theoretical alibi and reveals the center-based character of globalization and multiculturalism.”(Piotr Piotrowsky, In the Shadow of Yalta. Art and the Avant-Garde in Eastern Europe 1945-1989, London: Reaktion Books, Ltd., 2009, 420.) While this point is often voiced in critical theory and in writings about Eastern Europe, it should be noted that East European art historians including Piotrowski consistently tell the history of classic modernism in Eastern Europe in terms of Western developments – Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Cubism, Futurism, Dada, Surreralism, and so on. The second section of Piotrowski’s book adopts precisely this method, using terms such as neo-avant-garde, pop art, gender, the body, the critique of consumerism, intertextuality, colonization, or globalization – and ultimately judging the culture of Eastern Europe according to these Western criteria. For better or for worse, Piotrowski's discussion of East European art has been adjusted to the ongoing mainstream discourse on Western art. Until a distinct East European critical vocabulary emerges, this strategy incorrectly affirms that the art and culture of Eastern Europe has been derivative of that of the West throughout its entire cultural history.

Perhaps in an effort to assert a non-Western identity, groups such as Neue Slowenische Kunst in Ljubljana (discussed in the epilogue) have come to use the language of totalitarian symbols in order to drive home a point about the East European experience. While not a subtle language, the message is clear. Culturally, there was nothing that the West could have done to help the political and economic reality of Eastern Europe. A glaring example is an episode I witnessed in Vienna during the 1987 exhibition Expressive: Central European Art since 1960, a show important enough to be mentioned by Piotrowski. At the time, the term “Central European” was new, a novel concept for the Austrians, so the hosts pronounced it gingerly as a proof of recognition instead of the more condescending “Eastern European.” Neat and tidy in three piece suits and seated behind a long table covered by a well-ironed cloth, they encouraged the artists to make requests: What kind of help could they use best? What could the hosts do for them? Grants, fellowships, organizational issues? Climate control in exhibition rooms? A solo show, anyone? After a long silence the Polish artist Jerzy Bereś, unshaven, wearing a stained polo and somewhat inebriated, stood up and started to speak in Polish. “Give him a mike – where is a mike? Pass it to him!” But once Bereś got started, he was no longer interested in the mike. Finally, the translator communicated the loud and angry monologue to those behind the table: “The Russians!” Bereś shouted. “Get the Russians out of here!” Political freedom was not on the list of assistances offered by the hosts, and the well-intentioned meeting came to an abrupt and hopeless end. Truth spelled scandal. The abyss between the East and the West was unbridgeable, even under the new name of Central Europe.

Piotrowski’s book is dense with information and, while reading it, one realizes that the history of post-World War II East European art simply cannot be squeezed into one volume. Ultimately, the book is an ambitious attempt at objectivity that nonetheless presents some of the key events and artworks of the period selectively. All things considered, Piotrowski’s book is a major contribution to scholarship on Eastern Europe and is a treasure trove of facts, organized and sorted out in a way that has not been done before. It is a groundwork that many later publications will build on.

Victor Tupitsyn, "The Museological Unconscious. Communal (Post)Modernism in Russia" (Book Review)

2009-09-02T01:34:49Z

Victor Tupitsyn’s new book, The Museological Unconscious. Communal (Post)Modernism in Russia, is a sweeping, expert treatment of Russian art from the late 1950s to the present day. Like Dr. Doolittle’s pushmi-pullyu, which Tupitsyn cites in one of his chapter headings, the author himself is a kind of hybrid being who is both inside and outside the Russian art scene he describes.

Victor Tupitsyn, The Museological Unconscious. Communal (Post)Modernism in Russia, Cambridge/Mass. (MIT Press, 2009), 339 pp.

Victor Tupitsyn’s new book, The Museological Unconscious. Communal (Post)Modernism in Russia, is a sweeping, expert treatment of Russian art from the late 1950s to the present day. Like Dr. Doolittle’s pushmi-pullyu, which Tupitsyn cites in one of his chapter headings, the author himself is a kind of hybrid being who is both inside and outside the Russian art scene he describes. Originally a critic closely involved in the unofficial Russian art scene, he left the Soviet Union shortly after the infamous Bulldozer Exhibition in 1974 and played an instrumental role in familiarizing Western audiences with contemporary Russian art. In the process, he appropriated a wide range of Western criticism (ranging from Adorno to Žižek) with particular emphasis on Lacan, whom he reworks to describe what he calls the Russian “communal unconscious,” of which he still feels himself a part. However, like the pushmi-pullyu, Tupitsyn’s discourse isn’t easy to get a handle on: he moves freely between Western academic theories and Russian conceptualist programs, and it is sometimes hard to tell which end is which.

This is already evident in the title of the book, which seems to be serving as bait for Western readers expecting a Russian version of Jameson’s The Political Unconscious. In fact, the topic of the “museological unconscious” doesn’t even crop up until Chapter 10 and is not developed in an especially compelling way. Tupitsyn, for examples, posits the existence of a “museological function” that “generates the illusion […] that every creative act is common property”; he locates the origins of this function in a murky, ahistorical realm that predates the institutional realm of the museum itself and suggests that critical artists devote themselves to its “renewal, upgrading, and re-creation.” (230) In truth, it would seem that the “insider” Tupitsyn is simply projecting Russian conceptualist practice back onto culture as a whole. By “egocentrically” turning their drab, everyday experience into art, the Russian conceptualists created a visual language expressing things that official institutional culture could not. Because there was never any danger of the official culture co-opting the unofficial one, Russian artists were able to maintain a kind of autonomy vis-à-vis official institutions that was not possible in the West. Indeed, as Tupitsyn himself points out elsewhere in the book, there is nothing that the Western “culture industry” cannot appropriate, not even a complete lack of individual creativity. (241-242) Here as elsewhere we encounter a typical lack of reciprocity between Russian and Western cultural experience that Russians gladly use to aggrandize their own ideological interests. As Boris Groys has pointed out, the result is that Russia takes the structural position of the unconscious in relation to the West; it is hence in an ideal position to articulate the shortcomings of the West while remaining essentially inscrutable itself. Tupitsyn is sophisticated enough not to fall into this trap, but his pushmi-pullyu status causes him to oscillate between these two positions in a way that is not always obvious.

Tupitsyn is at his best when he is explicating what he calls the Russian “communal unconscious.” By this he means the repressed quotidian experience of Soviet life unknown to the West and taboo for official Soviet culture; it was this cramped, squalid realm of the real that eventually became the stuff of Russian unofficial, postmodern art. Combining Ilja Kabakov’s conceptualist insights into the kommunalka, or communal apartment, and Lacan’s psychoanalysis, Tupitsyn shows how Russian unofficial artists represent this collective unconscious by articulating the infantile, egocentric structure of the communal unconscious, by visualizing the officially non-existent realm of the real (the body, sexuality, the kommunalka, etc.), by appropriating the iconography of official culture, and by acting out communal patterns of repression in “collective actions” (to name the most important strategies). Tupitsyn’s analysis also places this unofficial art in a historical dimension, tracing its rise from the late 1950s to the present day, and in general he does an excellent job of clarifying the communal mindset and its artistic representation for the Western reader.

It is ironic (and perhaps fitting) that Tupitsyn, who makes heavy use of psychoanalytical categories, himself rather crudely falls prey to what Harold Bloom calls the anxiety of influence. This is evident in Tupitsyn’s treatment—or, more precisely, repression—of Boris Groys, the émigré art critic who is Tupitsyn’s almost exact doppelganger. Both Groys and Tupitsyn were art critics intimately involved in the underground art movement until their emigration (in 1981 and 1975, respectively), both have been instrumental in acquainting Western audiences with Russian conceptualist art, and both mix Western theory with peculiarly Russian modes of thought. While one need not expect that Tupitsyn roll out the red carpet for Groys, there is really no excuse for the way in which he buries him under the rug. Groys is mentioned only three times and his controversial—and seminal—work The Total Art of Stalinism is dismissed as a “spectacularist project” (326) and as a “fiction” (316). Considering that Groys wrote the first conceptualist manifesto (in the journal A-Ja in 1979) and that his Total Art single-handedly restarted Russian cultural history, these snubs seems neither fair nor even true to the record. This review is not the place for a detailed comparison of Tupitsyn’s and Groys’s positions on archives, museums and the unconscious (a dandy topic for some future doctoral thesis). However, the fact that Tupitsyn deals with Groys by effectively shouldering him out of Russian art history suggests that we are dealing here less with an academic difference of opinion than with inner tensions in the kommunalka of Russian art criticism, which is apparently too small to hold two like-minded critics.

Although it is probably not intended as such, Tupitsyn’s book is the closest thing we now have to a comprehensive history of unofficial Russian art. At the same time, it manages to directly convey some of the ludic spirit of its subject matter through anecdotes, a rich supply of the author’s own photographic material, self-irony and a dazzling use of what Tupitsyn himself admits are “too many references, too many theories.” (4) The flip side of this approach is that not all ideas are developed as compellingly as one might like, and Tupitsyn is prone to generalizations and gnomic formulations. Also, readers unfamiliar with Lacan may find the main line of argumentation difficult to follow. All in all, though, Tupitsyn has written an important, lively book that will shape our image of postmodern Russian art for some time to come.