Alongside ARTMargins Online, there is now a new publication: ARTMargins Print (published by the MIT Press). ARTMargins is a new journal on global art practice published by the MIT Press. ARTMargins Print will foster awareness and conversation about contemporary art in an expanded field of practices that engage current global socio-political transformations. Within the fabric of a present moment characterized by different, and often incompatible, temporalities and agendas, ARTMargins wants to locate transnational commonalities and trajectories that connect, or divide, different regions of the world, bringing together artistic practices from (post-) transitional zones, while at the same time questioning the logic of transition itself.

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In connection with the exhibition Vision and Communism at the Smart Museum of Art, Chicago, the films of Aleksandr Medvedkin and Chris Marker were shown at the Film Studies Center at the University of Chicago. Both the exhibition and the films are a part of the Soviet Arts Experience, an extensive series of 100 programs and events devoted to Soviet art and culture in twenty-six venues across Chicago. The massive nature of this experience demands attention to how Soviet art is perceived today. Although it is beyond the range of this discussion to offer a wholesale overview of Soviet or Communist art, this essay will focus on the relevance of Medvedkin and Marker as representatives of active, political filmmaking.

The Films of Aleksandr Medvedkin and Chris Marker, The Film Studies Center, University of Chicago, October 12, October 19, November 2, 2011

In connection with the exhibition Vision and Communism at the Smart Museum of Art, Chicago, the films of Aleksandr Medvedkin and Chris Marker were shown at the Film Studies Center at the University of Chicago. Both the exhibition and the films are a part of the Soviet Arts Experience, an extensive series of 100 programs and events devoted to Soviet art and culture in twenty-six venues across Chicago. The massive nature of this experience demands attention to how Soviet art is perceived today. Although it is beyond the range of this discussion to offer a wholesale overview of Soviet or Communist art, this essay will focus on the relevance of Medvedkin and Marker as representatives of active, political filmmaking.

Presented thematically and over the course of three nights, this series spanned several decades of filmmaking and political developments, and included films ranging in time and place from the Soviet Union in the early 1930s to Washington, DC, in 1967 to Paris in 1968, and beyond. Thus, the spectator is required to make sense of these distinct historical moments and their representations. Since these films appeal for spectators to be critical viewers, one must consider the origin of these filmmakers' concerns, for both Medvedkin, who is Russian, and Marker, a French Leftist director and filmmaker, share a mutual interest in audience reception.

Medvedkin and Marker met at the Leipzig Film Festival in 1967. Marker was drawn to the Russian director after he came across Medvedkin's Happiness (Schast'e, 1934). Four years later, in 1971, Medvedkin came to Paris. He helped Marker and his collaborators organize a release of Happiness in France. Projections of the film were accompanied by Marker's documentary The Train Rolls (Train en marche, 1971), which introduced Medvedkin’s Happiness, and also featured an interview with the Russian director. The Train Rolls begins with a montage sequence showing the impact of the Russian Revolution on film and other arts, after which Marker describes the organization of the film train and the crew’s activities in addressing social problems. The notion of film as fact, which is implicit in the notion that documentary filmmaking can provide proof of fact that will lead to social change, is emphasized by Marker's direct, hand-held footage of Medvedkin (Catherine Lupton, Chris Marker: Memories of the Future (London: Reaktion Books Ltd, 2005), 128.). Marker’s film links the two men formally through choices that consciously acknowledge the filmmaking process and also intimately, on a personal and collaborative level. Unfortunately both The Train Rolls and The Last Bolshevik (Le Tombeau d'Alexandre, 1992), Marker's ode to his departed friend, are noticeably absent from the Vision and Communism film series. While these films would have further informed viewers, their exclusion compels spectators to generate their own links between the films and filmmakers.

The thematic organization of the film series excludes biographic connections in favor of conceptual ones. The Film Train, the first installment of the series, included eight films that Medvedkin and a collective of other Russian filmmakers made aboard a specially equipped train in the 1930s, as well as one of Marker's documentaries Class of Conflict (Classe de Lutte, 1968). Among other things, these films show involvement of the audience in the process of filmmaking. International, Intimate, the second set of films, including three films by Medvedkin and two by Marker, brought together varying approaches to political rhetoric and different appeals to the spectator. The film series concluded with Marker's A Grin Without A Cat (Le Fond de l'air est rouge, 1977), which eulogized the Left that lay ruined in the wake of May 1968. The film incorporates a host of competing voices into a mosaic structure of images and narrative (Lupton, 143.). Reality is fragmented into different particles, moments, and images and the spectator is challenged to recognize some level of narrative substance.

The focus on audience reception on the part of Medvedkin belongs to a wider movement in Soviet Cinema of the 1920s that sought to “destroy” the passivity of spectators and to shape their perception. Early in his career, Medvedkin turned to what Nikolai Izvolov calls "man's rough elegance," a turn that produced a symbiosis between art and life. (Nikolai Izvolov, "Aleksandr Medvedkin i traditsii russkovo kino: Zametki o stanovlenii poetiki," Kinovedcheskie zapiski, Number 49, Winter 2000, 25.) Medvedkin developed his approach to communicating with spectators during his time as a frontline cinematographer and theater worker during the Russian Civil War. His search for effective means of communicating with the ordinary citizens, workers and peasants who made up the Red Army led Medvedkin to combine various techniques and devices, including comedic turns and borrowings from folklore. The specially equipped “film train” actualized Medvedkin's goal of direct engagement with the ordinary citizen. With the capability to process, edit, and screen films, the train brought cinema to the peasant masses and included the ordinary citizen in the filmmaking process. In these films, "every potential subject of the (camera’s) gaze could also be a potential viewer." (Izvolov, 27.) For this reason, Izvolov defines Medvekin's train films as belonging to a lived history, actively functioning in their viewing environment.

The short film pamphlets made aboard the film train addressed viewers directly and encouraged participation and self-awareness. These films were thought of as weapons, meant to give rise to debate. The crew organized small screenings in hostels, waiting rooms, and outdoor camps. Medvedkin's ideal size for a screening was between seventy to 100 spectators (Emma Widdis, Alexander Medvedkin (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2005) p. 29.). According to Medvedkin, a group this size would allow spectators to undergo a shared experience while facilitating the organization of a targeted discussion. Medvekin's film Mind Your Health (Beregi zdorov’e, 1929), for example, utilizes the combination of humor and medical facts to convey the necessity of personal hygiene on the part of the Red Army soldiers. The film is divided into mini-episodes that feature anecdotes related to health that rely on humor to communicate with the viewer. It features a bald private who grins and grimaces for the camera, usually framed in a close-up shot. In a more ominous scene, a squad of Red Army soldiers is cynically substituted for crosses, which represents the cost of bad hygiene.

Marker's participation and organization of the work of the Société pour le Lancement des Oeuvres Nouvelles or SLON group also evinces attention to audience reception and collaborative filmmaking. The collective initially came together to make the omnibus film Far From Vietnam (Loin du Vietnam, 1967), which included segments from Jean-Luc Godard, Alain Resnais, Agnes Varda, Claude Leloch, William Klein, Michele Ray, and Joris Ivens. From this initial collection of filmmakers, Marker organized a collective of mainly technical workers along cooperative and nonhierarchical lines. The collective regarded itself as a tool "to help in the production of films made from a Left political perspective that would not otherwise exist." (Lupton, 118.) In 1967, Marker was invited to the town of Besançon to observe the workers strike at the Rhodia textile factory. Marker recorded a three-hour interview with the striking workers and later, with members of SLON, made a film entitled Hope to See You Soon (A Bientôt, j'espère, 1968) about the strikers. (Lupton, 115.)

When the film was screened for the Rhodia workers some resented being represented as victims and thought that the film "gave a wholly pessimistic impression of their existence." (Lupton, 117.) Others argued that the film depicted the workers as romantics by focusing on those seized by revolutionary fervor rather than depicting their daily struggle. Marker's second film about striking workers, Class of Conflict, addresses the earlier criticisms of the Rhodia workers by focusing on a young union leader, Suzanne Zedet, who struggles for workers' rights. The woman is first presented in 1967, isolated in her attempts to politically organize workers, and then again in 1968, as a more confident union leader ready to confront the management. Zedet's transformation, represented through interviews and shots of her in action, suggests that Class of Conflict presents a particular focus on the intimate life of a political worker. The difference between the two factory films can be understood as a direct response to audience perception.

While Medvedkin’s train films and Marker's films about the striking factory workers emphasize local and national concerns, the second series of films show their expanded interests in global issues. Medvedkin's Law of Baseness (Zakon podlosti, 1962) positions the subjugated people of Congo in a history of capitalist exploitation. The film calls on the Soviet viewer to sympathize with the plight of the people of Congo. In this manner, Medvedkin's documentary bears a resemblance to the posters of Viktor Koretsky on view at the Smart Museum of Art. Like Koretsky, Medvedkin also sought to construct an “Empathy Machine” that would pull viewers out of their daily existence as they identify with the pain and suffering of others. (Robert Bird, et al. Vision and Communism: Viktor Koretsky and dissident public visual culture, Exhibition Catalogue (Chicago: The New Press, 2011), 88.) Medvedkin's documentary calls on the viewer to buy into the idea of shared sacrifice and humanist ambition, which is reliant upon the belief that this pursuit of world communism will ultimately be more invigorating, more life affirming, and more personally satisfying than a capitalist system of consumerism and desire for objects (Bird, 90.).

In The Sixth Side of the Pentagon (La Sixième face du Pentagone, 1967) and Embassy (L’Ambassade, 1971), Marker confronts the spectator with extensive handheld camerawork. The would-be occupation of the Pentagon by anti-war protestors in 1967 was filmed in the midst of the event and the handheld camerawork has a visceral and participatory effect. The spectator is pulled into these events by the camera's proximity and intimacy. Marker further exploited this effect in Embassy, masking a fictional film as a documentary. The film mainly consists of cramped close-ups of a group of dissidents who seek refuge in an embassy after a coup d’état. It ends with an unmistakable shot of the Eiffel Tower, which alters the perception of the film but not the way spectators are asked to identify with the refugees in the embassy. Together these two Marker films remove the distance between the viewer and the object, utilizing the intimacy of the close handheld camerawork to involve the spectator in the event.

Looking back on the defeat of the Left in May 1968 on the streets of Paris and around the world, Marker's A Grin Without A Cat also relies on his film's ability to motivate the spectator to engage with the amalgam of voices and images his film represents. Marker claimed: "Each step of this imaginary dialogue aims to create a third voice out of the meeting of the first two, which is distinct from them." (Quoted in Lupton, 143.) The film assembles a vast array of competing perspectives and events, which pushes the spectator to make sense of it all. But whereas Medvedkin takes up the position of earnest condemnation, Marker takes up "the very texture of received opinions." (Lupton, 20.) Marker's self-awareness is reflected in his sensitivity for the theater of political protest, which raises the dilemma of distinguishing between authentic revolutionary impulses and empty rhetoric. This sensitivity contributes to the effect of the film, which invites the spectator to recognize something sensible in the film's assortment of narrative and visual segments, that is, to configure a historical plot line. In this manner, Marker leaves open the possibility of alternate endings and of history repeating itself.

Through Marker's and Medvedkin's varied approaches to the idea of Communism, their films raise questions regarding the relevancy of both the idea of Communism and Communist art today. In this regard, it is necessary to note that both the film series and the monumental Soviet Arts Experience coincide with a recent resurgence of the Communist idea, substantially represented by the volume of collected essays entitled The Idea of Communism, edited by Costas Douzinas and Slavoj Žižek. Alain Badiou's contribution to this collection ends with a review of the current weak and dispersed state of political organization on the Left. In his introductory text, Badiou lays out the process by which an individual becomes incorporated in an ideological system. He emphasizes that a person first needs to be attracted to an idea before they make the decision to quit or commit, which is why reality must be exposed through fiction. ''Allegorical facts must ideologize and historicize the fragility of truth.'' (Alain Badiou, "The Idea of Communism," in The Idea of Communism, Costas Douzinas and Slavoj Žižek, eds. (London and New York: Verso, 2010), 12.) Thus for Badiou, works of art have the important function of circulating ideas. The Communism and Vision film series circulates the ideas of Marker's and Medevdkin's films and, following Badiou, they can be understood as attempts to deploy new possibilities. If their films are considered as presenting the still-active possibilities of failed ideas, then I argue one should view these films along the lines of what Žižek's invites the Left to do in response to the 2008 financial meltdown and the massive bailout of banks, that is, ''to think - to think things through in a really radical way." (Slavoj Žižek, First as Tragedy, Then As Farce (London and New York: Verso, 2009), 17.)

Žižek's asserts that today's Left needs a collective public hearing, where criticism can be voiced and faults admitted. Clearly the kind of event Žižek describes resembles the type of audience participation that Marker and Medvedkin sought to engender. In this regard, spectators should interrogate the feasibility of the kind of collective and active filmmaking represented in the early films of Medvedkin and Marker and the effectiveness of their later reliance on affect to motivate the spectator. The model of political action represented in these films, one of involvement, collaboration, and dialogue, and, most importantly, the communities they foster suggest an alternative to social relations mediated by images and dominated by commodities.
 

For a complete list of films and synopses, visit filmstudiescenter.uchicago.edu.

For more information on the Soviet Arts Experience see http://www.sovietartsexperience.org/.

Zdenko Mandušić is pursuing a joint Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and Literatures and Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago. His areas of study are Russian/Soviet and Yugoslav cinema, film theory, and Russian and Southeast European Literature. He plans to write a dissertation based around the question of how the desire for innovation has inspired technological developments which has led to changes in film style and technique.

The following video series documents the panel Revolution, Transformation and Identity: Central European Artists Reflect upon Post-Communist Art, Urbanism, and Culture that took place on October 30, 2011, at the Graham Foundation, Chicago. The panel was held in conjunction with the exhibition Voices from the Center on view at threewalls gallery, Chicago, October 28-December 10, 2011. The series includes introductory remarks by Shannon Stratton, Executive and Creative Director of threewalls and Janeil Engelstad, curator of the exhibition, and individual presentations by artists Matej Vakula, Miklos Suranyi, Oto Hudec, Magda Stanova, and Jan Worpus of Grafixipol.

Also see the related podcast interview Voices from the Center.

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ARTMargins publishes  two new interviews with formers members of OHO, David Nez and Milenko Matanović. The Slovene OHO group, which formed in the late 1960’s, consisted of Milenko Matanović, David Nez, Marko Pogačnik, and Andraž Šalamun. It belonged to the wider Slovene OHO movement and regularly collaborated with this wider circle of intellectuals and artists. After very intense three years of working together, the members of OHO decided no longer to pursue success in the art world, trying instead to live closer to nature and to explore spirituality. Today OHO’s legacy represents one of the crucial references for Slovene contemporary art. A major Slovene prize for young artists has been named after the group.

ARTMargins publishes  two new interviews with formers members of OHO, David Nez and Milenko Matanović. The Slovene OHO group, which formed in the late 1960’s, consisted of Milenko Matanović, David Nez, Marko Pogačnik, and Andraž Šalamun. It belonged to the wider Slovene OHO movement and regularly collaborated with this wider circle of intellectuals and artists. After very intense three years of working together, the members of OHO decided no longer to pursue success in the art world, trying instead to live closer to nature and to explore spirituality. Today OHO’s legacy represents one of the crucial references for Slovene contemporary art. A major Slovene prize for young artists has been named after the group. {loadposition oho}

"Even the automobiles have an air of antiquity here". -- Guillaume Apollinaire

"Only here", Chirico once said, "is it possible to paint. The streets have such gradation of gray."  -- Walter Benjamin

Building Bonanza

Skopje, the capital of the Republic of Macedonia at the moment undergoes one of Europe’s biggest urban and art upheavals - the project is dubbed Skopje 2014. Labeled as a "building bonanza",(Smith, Helena. "Macedonian statue: Alexander the Great or a Warrior on a Horse?", Guardian, 14 August 2011, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/aug/14/alexander-great-macedonia-warrior-horse) by the British Guardian, Skopje 2014 project was planned by the Government for several years under relative lack of transparency, until it was officially presented in February 2010. The plan seeks to transform the city center of Skopje into a rich concentrate, with a wide range of interventions and numerous new buildings: a triumphal arch, fountains, memorials, new Macedonian Orthodox church, museums, footbridges, a new theater, the national archives, the foreign ministry, the constitutional court, the electronic communications agency, etc. The central part of Skopje 2014 is the Sculpture Project with over 50 sculptures, all of them to be placed within a 1.5 km radius in the city center, of which centrally located is a 22 meters-high monument of Alexander the Great.

Other items on the agenda are: the reconstruction of buildings (including the Parliament) with domes and new facades; erecting 60 three meters-high sculptures of the historical world politicians, among them of Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill, in concrete, stone and bronze imprinted on the new facade of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs; a Museum of National Struggle with a hundred life-size wax models of historical figures; a big panoramic wheel, artificial summer beaches on both banks of the Vardar river; parking-lot structures, etc. Since its first presentation, the plan has been changed several time; additional objects and buildings popped up, while others were moved or changed their utility.For more details about the content of Skopje 2014 project also see the book by Mijalkovic, Milan and Urbanek, Katharina. Skopje, the World Bastard (Klagenfurt: Wieser Verlag, 2011), 76.

The main creator and investor is the Government of the Republic of Macedonia (i.e. its ruling conservative party VMRO-DPMNE, which took power in 2006 and was re-elected in 2008 and 2011) with estimated 80 to 200 million euros. In 2006, the Ministry of Culture announced a public competition, but no international competitor won the bid, and instead the design and execution have been entrusted to local architects and artists, most of them previously unknown to the public. (In the past decade, Skopje had a history of unfortunate architectural competitions; most notable case is from 2006 when the city made an international call for a memorial house to Mother Teresa. The Portuguese architect Jorge Marum was declared the winner; however, the Government and the committee bizarrely decided to ignore expert opinion and staged a new competition, where a local architect Vangel Božinovski won the bid. When finished, the memorial received several negative critiques, one being that: “If it wasn't for the Christian cross, it could be a disco or a casino.” For more on this topic read the article: Pencic, Divna "A tactless and tasteless homage to Mother Teresa". Architectural Review, 2009. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m3575/is_1350_226/ai_n32441180/)

The project commemorates all sorts of historical characters, from the Antique period: Alexander the Great, his father Philip II and his mother Olimpias of Epirus; figures of early Christianity: Saint Cyril, Saint Methodius, Saint Clement, Saint Naum; notable historical figures who were born or ruled in or around Skopje: the Byzantine Emperor Justinian I, the Byzantine Tzar Samuel, Mother Theresa, etc., as well as a league of freedom fighters that fought for the Macedonian independence. The critics labeled the project as Antiquisation, referring to the term coined by the historians to explain the Renaissant practice of giving a city the appearance of ancient Rome or Athens (a phenomenon visible in and after the 15th century in Italy and all over Europe). (Tzonis, Alexander and Lefaivre, Liane. Classical architecture: The Poetics of Order (Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 1986), 263.) However, the Antiquisation, as a label, was meant to be more than an explanation of a sudden love of the country for the classical poetics, rather, it was meant as a pointer to the nationalistic myth-building. Many analysts accused that the project included aspects of social engineering, and its purpose being an attempt to construct a nationalistic superstate. However, the term Antiqusation does not fully explain the project, also because it is intended to engulf a whole lineage of history, from Ancient, to Medieval to modern Macedonia, plus to commemorate different world artifacts, styles, leaders and phenomena, not necessarily connected to the territory or the nation.

Diachrony and Synchrony of Skopje 2014

Skopje 2014 is a peculiar example of the exact opposite of today’s regular laments about the architecture becoming Americanized, postmodernized, globalized, etc., in which the glittering metropolitan centers of glass and steel are reaching its aesthetic climax in the meaningless "zero-buildings" (such as enormous shopping malls boxed in glass), etc. When the history is used in today’s contemporary architecture, it is used mainly to neutralize the shock-potential of history, its dangerous Chauvinism. The new postmodern historicism (a combination of retro styles and genres, of "everything goes", of pastiche) is meant to weaken the national borders, to claim "the end of history"; "historicity" today celebrates the nomadic dynamism, world without local myths, and cultivates cynical distance away from any history. Skopje 2014 is the strict opposite of this. The buildings and figurative sculptures of the project are quite serious when imitating the old styles in architecture (neo-romanticism, neo-classicism, neo-baroque), the imitation is not meant to play mockingly with the obsolete, or used ironically to portend an increasing cynical gap, but are used to send a "serious" note to the world that Macedonia is on the map of the bourgeois societies. The artistic tendencies of the project are based on the 19th century self-centered megalomania, and the return to pre-modern glorification of styles. According to Slavoj Žižek the difference between the modernism and the postmodernism in the architecture(The terms modernism and postmodernism in architecture are used differently than to denominate broader cultural tendencies as Žižek uses them. However, his distinction is helpful in understanding the nature of Skopje 2014 project.) is that in modernism, a building was supposed to obey one all-encompassing great Code, while in postmodernism there are multiplicity of codes.(Žižek, Slavoj. Architectural Parallax. Spandrels and Other Phenomena of Class Struggle. Lecture presented on the "Lacanian Ink 33 Event", Jack Tilton Gallery, New York City, April 23, 2009. The talk was posted on line on April 28, 2009 http://www.lacan.com/essays/?page_id=218) Although consisted of everything historical, from Alexander the Great to Winston Churchill, Skopje 2014 is not here to serve the multiplicity of codes, but one great Code: an old-fashioned pride and dignity of a bourgeois capital of a superstate.

Skopje 2014 project commemorates different historical artifacts precisely because that was the 19th century bourgeois premise of the eclecticism in architecture - a city as a world in miniature. As Walter Benjamin wrote in his book "The Arcades Project," a city wanted: "to seize the essence of history".(Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Harvard University Press, 1999), 14.) The Government seemingly treated the main square as if it is within the four walls of its apartment; the city center as a huge living room of the nation: with its baroque buildings and classicistic sculptures ("what does the Government think is the best for our living room?"), yet to serve but one purpose: to build a superstar nation, worthy or pride and prestige. "[To] disclose a church, a train station, an equestrian statue, or some other symbol of civilization"(Ibid., 24.) - these were the ideals common in the 19th century, according to Walter Benjamin. His elaboration of the 19th century tendency "to ennoble technological necessities through spurious artistic ends."(Ibid., 24.) to some extent explains Skopje 2014 project. It explains the wax museum (Benjamin wrote: "No immortalizing [is] so unsettling as that of the ephemera and the fashionable forms preserved for us in the wax museum"(Ibid., 69.)); it explains the mandatory domes above the building, as well as decorative facades ("Ornament is to this house what the signature is to a painting"(Ibid., 20.)); it explains the political celebrities glued to the buildings, the monuments of everybody from Justinian I to Abraham Lincoln ("The impression of the old-fashioned can arise only where, in a certain way, reference is made to the most topical." (Ibid., 69.)); it explains the building of lions on the bridges (the lions convey an image of a rich country); it explains the returning to baroque and rococo ("Every stone bears the mark of despotic power, and all the ostentation makes the atmosphere, in the literal sense of the words, heavy and close..." (Ibid., 125.)). The idea behind Skopje 2014 is to repeat the old motifs, "as they once were", without the cynical distance, which arguably makes the Project a scary and totalitarian display of power.

Should Skopje 2014 be labeled as the 19th century pre-modern eclecticism or as postmodernism? If we are to understand the idea of a national city becoming historical (a museal approach to urban life) by means of attracting money, tourists, new residents, and to satisfy the desire of the local elites, than Skopje 2014 belongs to the widely understood 19th century eclecticism in architecture. But, with its intense admiration for the old-style ornaments (which serve no functionality) put on the buildings with pure utilitarian function (such as the electronic communications agency, or the constitutional court, or the foreign ministry), then the project could also be explained with the terms "decorated sheds" and "neo-Brutalism",(Venturi, Robert and Izenour, Steven. Learning from Las Vegas. The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form, (Cambridge and London: The MIT Press, 1977), 6.) used by Venturi, Scott Brown and Izenour in their book "Learning from Las Vegas".(I would like to thank the architects Nikola Strezovski and Filip Josifovski from Skopje for their careful reading of the first draft of this paper. I hugely benefited from their editorial interventions in the parts dedicated to architecture, from their generous help in making a clear distinction between the modernism and the postmodernism in architecture, and from their suggestion to reference the book "Learning from Las Vegas" by Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour.) Skopje 2014 largely consists of ritzy and extravagant facades on buildings where the citizens will go to perform their most daily activities; the buildings are merely supposed to look better, but not to be better, therefore the term "decorated sheds" explains Skopje 2014 phenomenon of mandatory building of the "rhetorical front" on the "conventional behind".(Venturi, Robert, Scott Brown, Denise, and Izenour, Steven. Learning from Las Vegas. The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form, 90.) Although because of its historicity, Skopje 2014 is close to a definition of pre-modern eclecticism, paradoxically, it is also a showcase of the "decorated sheds", due to the cacophony of useless and inadequate architectural symbolism.

One predominant feature which fuses two seemingly paradoxical paradigms of the Skopje 2014 project (the 19th century eclecticism and the postmodern “decorated sheds”), is of the ideal of miniaturization of history, a concept which explains why besides the need to glorify the past via various monuments, the project also inclines towards "decorated sheds" - altogether an important stylistic phenomenon rooted all around the Eastern European architecture in the past two decades, most notably after the fall of the Iron Curtain and the end of modernism in architecture. One explanation about this Eastern European appeal to build both historical monuments and "decorated sheds" lies in the desire to send two opposed messages at the same time: by glorify the past they are on the map of the "serious" nations of the world, yet by building cacophonic, inadequate symbolisms, they are "at leisure"; they are playful and relaxed about their own past, just as "the rest of the world".

To dwell deeper into congruity of these two different architectural codes we are using the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s complex reading of society’s need to simultaneously place itself on the two opposed paradigms: diachrony and synchrony (among others, via the concept of miniaturization) from his book "Infancy and History" (1978). Agamben developed a theory about the complex relations between infancy and history - a society needs to both dismantle and distort the past and expand the present, but at the same time to “reduce” the present and zoom-in on the past, as two opposite tendencies.

Building on Levi-Strauss’s fundamental distinction between cold and hot societies, Agamben developed a critical reading of the society’s relation to its history to either enlarge the sphere or rituals and historical fixations (in Levi-Strauss terminology the so-called: cold societies) at the expense of play, or vice versa (the hot societies). (Agamben, Giorgio. Infancy and Play. On the Destruction of Experience (London, New York: Verso, 2007), 85.) The cold society is operating on the level of diachrony, the human time is measured according to the number of monuments, archaeological objects, archived documents or worshiping of antiquity as ‘material content’ that guarantees one’s existence in history. In such a society, time needs to be preserved in its documentary character, because it values its place in the world according to its place in the chronology of the events.(Ibid, 80.) The Agamben’s reading of Levi-Strauss’s theory, however, offers a rather paradoxical insight into the results of this modeling on the level of diachrony, the paradox being that the obsession with history (as a guarantor of one’s certainty as a nation) eventually results with such societies having frozen history,(Ibid, 76.) not able to move along the lines of diachrony.

The second type of society (the hot society) is operating on the level of synchrony, such that the play is increased on the account of suspension of the mania for historical hoarding. According to Agamben, this suspension of historical (the refusal to collect monuments and preserve ethnographic content, cessation of worshiping antiquity, etc), paradoxically does not result in historical time being erased, but on the contrary, the history is being saved and transformed into "human time". Agamben writes: "In play, man frees himself from sacred time and ‘forgets’ it in human time",(Ibid, 79.) meaning that only play possesses the quality of transforming synchrony into diachrony. In proving this paradoxical thesis Agamben builds two toposes: that of a "playland" as an ultimate historyland, (Ibid, 93.) and that of a toy as "the cipher of history".(Ibid, 81.) The nature of a toy in Agamben’s writing is that it possesses a deeply rooted historicity in itself. He writes: "the essence of the toy… is then, an eminently historical thing: indeed, it is, so to speak, the Historical in its pure state."(Ibid, 80.) Of course, there cannot exists a society in which all diachrony is transformed into synchrony and the play totally replacing the historical rituals, yet the differential margin between diachrony and synchrony is what identifies the human time, in other words, history itself. According to Agamben, that is the reason why only societies that can regularly get rid of the mania to build monuments to the national and historical myths, can really live on the level of diachrony, i.e. in the human history.

How is one to translate Agamben’s concepts of diachrony and synchrony in reading Skopje 2014 architectural and political project? Craving to situate themselves along the lines of pride democratic nations of the world after the fall of communism, the Macedonian government introduced Skopje 2014 as a need to be perceived as a "normal" society, relaying on the idea that every culture is first and foremost a particular experience of time. By pushing an agenda to erect monuments to everything historical in order to have a guarantor of the nation’s existence in history, they erased precisely the diachronic intervals between past and present, as is a case with every society insisting on a diachrony (thus turning it into a cold society). As a consequence, that operation helped freeze the historic time, by suspending the playfulness as a quality of synchrony and of the existence of oneself in the historic time. And since the play was suspended, the melodramatic sentiment was installed. Since one may note that as kitschy and as laughable Alexander the Great on a horse in the 2011 Macedonia might be to a critic’s eye, we need to bear in mind that it serves a purpose for the political elites: people will always experience monuments like this one as authentic and deeply emotional. When building the nationalistic superstate symbols, there is no place for ironic distance. Benjamin wrote: Kitsch is always sincere. In Macedonia in recent years, images of Alexander the Great have been used to advertise everything from traveler’s books to various wines, and it is not an ironic playfulness on part of the marketers, but a targeting of the deeply held emotions of people. While a substantial part of the Macedonian civil society protested about the project, for an ordinary Macedonian, the project is perceived as something "authentic". Ask a young educated Macedonian cosmopolite, s/he will tell you it’s ironic, but ask a more representative sample and they’ll tell you Alexander the Great makes them feel good, makes them feel strong.(This elaboration is based on the comment posted by the user Killian on September 8, 2009 on the article Žižek, Slavoj. Architectural Parallax. Spandrels and Other Phenomena of Class Struggle
http://www.lacan.com/essays/?page_id=218 )

Agamben’s concept of the marginal difference between diachrony and synchrony further helps us understand the sizable split that Skopje 2014 produced in the Macedonian identity. An opinion poll conducted in March 2010 showed that 54 per cent of the citizens do not support Skopje 2014 project, and 46 per cent do. This means that the project "forced" Macedonians to choose between being Slavs or being descendants of Ancient Macedonians, by making them choose between those who support the diachronic paradigm, and those who refuse it. Even though the nationalistic images of Skopje 2014 drift away from the regular complaints about the "(architectural) imperialism under the signs of Disney and McDonald’s",(Huyssen, Andreas. "World Cultures, World Cities". Other Cities, Other Worlds, Urban Imaginaries in a Globalizing Age. Edited by Andreas Huyssen. (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2008), 4.) it is interesting that when the project was first introduced, most of the opponents to the project referred to it as a Disneyland, or a Legoland, or Las Vegas. What we see here is not only the stubbornness of "the Disney fatwa" (Koolhaas’s term) in architecture, and also how strong a denominator the Western mass culture is when explaining the urban developments around the globe, but also to what extent the extravagant combination of the 19th century eclecticism and the 20th century "decorated sheds" of the project puzzle its critics, and Disneyfication comes to label even projects which are highly nationalistic. But, even more complex, although when the Disney metaphor is used in today’s architecture, it is meant mostly as an insult or an offense to architecture, yet Agamben’s theory offers the material to understand that the Disney metaphor is paradoxically something historical in its essence, as a contradiction that resides within the structural tension between diachrony and synchrony. Namely, as was already mentioned, the project introduced considerable split in the Macedonian national identification with people self-identifying as either belonging to the societies obsessed with history (the government proposal), or to ones inclined towards the “play”, as explained in Agamben. This split, not by an accident, is situated along the generational lines. Since the historical Skopje 2014 is the exact opposite of the playfulness of today’s architecture (of Agamben’s synchronic society), and as such is not designed to appeal to younger generations, when the first monuments materialized, the "Disney metaphor" was actually not only used as an offence to the project, but was paradoxically at the same time, used as a shield on the part of the younger citizens who disliked the conservative facelift of the city. For example, when in June 2011, Alexander the Great monument arrived from Florence, it arrived apiece in several trucks. The comments in the online social networks were that Alexander arrived as a gigantic Kinder Surprise egg (Kinder Surprise egg is one of the most popular chocolate products in Central and Eastern Europe: it is an egg shell made of chocolate, and wrapped up in lively-colored paper; after one unwraps the egg and cracks the chocolate shell open, one finds in it parts to assemble the toy) - so after the parts of Alexander’s monument were put together, the commenters asked who ate the chocolate shell.

The comments were directed towards the possible financial corruption behind the project, which costs enormous amounts of money, for a country where one third of the population is reported to be unemployed. This reaction proves Agamben’s concept of a toy as an architectural relict, as exceedingly historical thing ("the Historical in its pure state"), with half of the citizens intuitively preferring the toy-ish aspect of the monument as something worth dealing with (the synchrony of life), instead of being impressed by the grandeur historical figure, which not only intimidates but freezes historicity.

However, apart from this structural identity division, on a concrete cultural level, Skopje 2014 furthermore produced a line of ethnic, gender and class divisions. Namely, the bronze mania serves only to build up the dominant Macedonian identity and the demographic exclusivity, while the ethnic minorities (Albanians, Turks, Vlachs, Serbs, Roma, etc.) are not being adequately represented. The biggest Roma settlement in Europe, the district Šuto Orizari situated near Skopje, remains a modernity noir in form of a slam, or a ghetto, unaffected by the grandiose Skopje 2014 project. Furthermore, Skopje 2014 translates history to an archaic family drama, as a way of scaling down the great nation to domestic size. The project is consisted of monuments to the Son (Alexander), to his Father (Philip II), and to his Mother (Olimpias), as in every patriarchal daddy-mommy-me triad, yet the travesty already resides within the desired model. While, Alexander is imagined to be the ideal Son from the nationalistic dreams (the greatest military and political leader of all times), his suspected bisexuality is a slap in the face of the nationalists, and one could jokingly conclude that: "Skopje has the largest statue of a gay man in the world erected by a homophobic political leadership".(Vangeli, Anastas "Bad news: Croatia appropriates Marco Polo. Good news: he might have not even been to China." 9 August 2011. http://vuna.info/home/2011/08/09/marco-polo/) Besides the ethnic and patriarchal antagonisms (the inferior status of women represented, the father-son axis, etc.) the monuments also reflect the class antagonisms in the society - for example, Alexander the Great monument is 22 meters high, while the sculpture called "Cleaner of Shoes" placed near the Alexander’s sculpture is only a meter high, so we could say that the form is not a "mere" form, but it involves dynamics and materiality of social life (and reading Žižek, one could say that this was precisely the articulation of the Governmental fantasy of "longing for inequality",(Žižek, Slavoj. Architectural Parallax. Spandrels and Other Phenomena of Class Struggle, unpaginated.) of clear hierarchy and class distinctions which to a certain degree falls in line with the rightist Macedonian Government known for holding strict hierarchical order, with the Prime Minister acting as a micro manager of the country).

Since no public discussions or debates took place before the presentation of Skopje 2014 project, soon after the plan was presented by the Government, a grass-root protest movement called the Archibrigadiers was established, the first of a kind in independent Macedonia. The protesters actualizing the famous 1960s Henri Lefebvre motto of the "right to the city" and the movement rallied against the forceful and ethnocratic reordering of the public space, using new social media to communicate their views (some of their creative slogans include: "Skopje - best before: 2014", or "Skopje 1963 Earthquake - Skopje 2014 Mindquake"). The tensions reached its heights in March 2009, when a group of students from the Architectural Faculty in Skopje tried to protest peacefully against the project, and were beaten by religious and rightists counter-protestants, in the presence of the police and media. Maybe the biggest paradox is that, oddly enough, with Skopje fighting over its identity, it is the leftists who, in their struggle against the nationalistic-style rebuild, find themselves defending the status quo!

Architecture as Politics

While the Antique roots of the Macedonian nation were generally struck out from the vocabulary of politicians, writers, journalists and social scientists for the past two centuries, the fuzzy idea about Alexander as an ancestor of the Macedonian nation indeed existed in different, marginalized segments of the society: mainly in folk songs, in writings from the 19th century national Enlightenment, in the 20th century’s resistance towards the Yugoslav communist identity, and in the opinionated pieces in the Macedonian press after the country’s independence. But, the Antique roots were never elevated to a state ideology, due to two main constraints: the obvious Slavic roots of today’s Macedonians, evident in the language, religion, and the cultural traits of the Macedonian people; and because of the county’s history of statelessness, so no political elite could use Alexander as a platform for a national cohesion. But, in the middle of the past decade, the huge symbolic capital of Alexander the Great has been rediscovered by Macedonians, and soon the process of Antiquisation begun: at first, by putting ancient labels on the airport, the city stadium and the highway, and renaming them after Alexander or his father, Philip II, and finally, by the start of the Skopje 2014 project. The Bulgarian theoretician Ivaylo Ditchev writes: "In a way, antiquity is like oil: A western company discovers it, then young nation-states nationalize it and start selling it back to the West."(Ditchev, Ivaylo. "The Eros of Identity", Balkan as Metaphor. Between Globalization and Fragmentation. Edited by Dušan I. Bjelić and Obrad Savić (Cambridge and London: The MIT Press, 2002), 240.) The first to use the huge symbolic potential of Alexander the Great in the Eastern and Southern Europe were the Greeks during their 19th century revival of Hellenism,(Ibid, 238.) although already in the 19th century, some Western historians objected this revival. In Macedonia, when the rightist party gained political power in 2006, the country appeared as yet another Balkan candidate to ask for its part of the Alexander’s heritage (Alexander the Great was born in the Balkans). In the 21st century, the Macedonians couldn’t go for the concept of Hellenism (it would have been a direct negation of the Slavic language and culture of the nation, also Alexander was used as the embodiment of the boundary that separates the (neo)Hellenes from the Slavs(Gourgoúris, Státhis. Dream nation: Enlightenment, Colonization, and the Institution of Modern Greece (Stanford University Press, 1996), 151.) ), so instead the Macedonians went for a fuzzy idea of the union of all the Macedons (the Antique) and the Macedonians (the Slavic ones). If we push this idea to the extremes, it will mean that while the rest of the Balkan Peninsula was being Hellenized, Latinized, Slavofied, or Turkeytrotted, only Macedonians stayed Macedonians (despite being Slavofied, Turkeytrotted, Latinized, or even Hellenized).(This point is a rework from the similar sentence attributed to modern Albanians in P.J.O’Rourke’s book "Eat the Rich". See: O’Rourke , P.J. Eat the Rich. A Treatise on Economics. (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1998), 51.)

The evident problem of the present Macedonian Antiquisation was first displayed via its most notable paradox: When in October 2010 in an interview with the British Guardian, the Macedonian former foreign minister Antonio Milošoski said: "Alexander the Great, in fact, had no passport or birth certificate",(Smith, Helena. "Macedonian statue: Alexander the Great or a Warrior on a Horse?" http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/aug/14/alexander-great-macedonia-warrior-horse) he literally acknowledged that Alexander cannot be part of any modern concept of a nation. Even more interesting answer was provided by the President of the Culture Union of the Vlachs in the Republic of Macedonia in August 2011, when he said: "We, Vlachs, consider ourselves to be direct descendents of Alexander the Great. Unfortunately, Alexander the Great did not speak the Vlach’s language, and he was not a Vlach!"(R.F. "Alexander the Great was Vlach". Macedonian Daily Vest¸ 28 August 2011. http://www.vest.com.mk/?ItemID=B84FE8ABF0E5634B8AF9B75BC11EB847&arc=1) And is this bizarre answer not the best indicator of unmasking the shadow-theater functioning behind the national-historic appropriations? ("I don’t even pretend that I believe my ancestor is indeed my ancestor, however, my ancestor does not need to comply with my nationality, the reciprocity is not even expected, since my ancestor is by no means obliged to return my identity back to me!"). What one may acknowledge in this case is that the free exchange of identities was done one way, and that it stands on its own - most of the national countries which emerged out of the Yugoslav federation, for the past two decades, also tried to relate to some famous ancestor, both for the national homogenization, and for the international prestige: two most recent bizarre conflicts were from 2011 - one was a feud between Croatia and Italy over the nationality of Marco Polo, and the other between Croatia and Britain over the nationality of King Arthur.

Another sign of the troubled Antiquisation is the monument of Alexander itself, from which his name virtually disappeared. Although the Skopje’s sculpture bears a great resemblance to the ancient hero, the Macedonian official name of the monument is "Warrior on a Horse". By separating the subject of art (the actual historical figure depicted) and its appearance (a mask of an unnamed warrior), the Macedonian Government wanted to externalized the enemy (here, the Greeks), but the perversity is that it acted in the exact manner as their rival Greece, who after the break-up of Yugoslavia and creation of the independent Macedonian state, forced the international community to create a provisional name for Macedonia - the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, or FYROM in short form – altogether a name which highly humiliates Macedonians, not only because the name Yugoslavia remained in the reference to the country that claims the Yugoslav heritage was a negation to its longing for independence, but also because the identity of the country was rendered descriptive and masked under a cucumbered name. In a strange, almost masochistic twist, the Government copied the very solution it otherwise despised, masking the identity of the monument under the provisional name the "Warrior on a Horse" (this mask-frame further produced a line of jokes in the new social media, and the newly renamed city’s stadium "Philip II" was again mockingly re-named by the cynics into "The Father of the Warrior on a Horse", the hotel "Alexander Palace" renamed into "The Warrior on a Horse’s Palace", etc).

In a carnivalesque sense, Skopje 2014 could be interpreted along the lines of Slavoj Žižek’s "In defense of Lost Causes": When Macedonians appeared unable to resolve the name dispute, they pushed their position to the extreme, and they did not reject the rejection, but they reinvented the rejection, providing even more material to be rejected by their northern neighbor. And the timing of Skopje 2014 proves it. After Greece blocked Macedonia to join the NATO alliance at the Bucharest summit in 2008, the Skopje 2014 project was initiated, so the Government actually acted according to the strategy which Žižek explained with quoting Beckett’s line: "After one fails, one can go on and fail better".(Žižek, Slavoj. In Defense of Lost Causes. (London, New York: Verso, 2009), 7.)

When in the above-mentioned interview for the Guardian, the former minister was asked to comment on the plans to erect a 22 meters bronze monument of Alexander, having in mind the 20-year long name dispute between the Republic of Macedonia and Greece over the name Macedonia, and the right to claim Alexander as a national hero, he replied: "This is our way of saying [up yours] to them!"(Smith, Helena. "Macedonian statue: Alexander the Great or a Warrior on a Horse?", Guardian, 14 August 2011.) Known otherwise for his reserved and rigid overall attitude in public, the minister’s alleged outburst immediately produced a line of hilarious comments in parts of the Macedonian press: "The Warrior on a Horse" monument was ironically renamed into "A Finger on a Horse", with journalists writing that instead of a giant monument of Alexander, it would have been much cheaper for the country "to simply erect the minister’s middle finger in its natural size".(Georgievski, Zvezdan. "Finger". Okno, 17 August, 2011. http://okno.mk/node/13251) The "digitus impudicus" (impudent finger) already mentioned in the Ancient Roman writings,(Žižek, Slavoj and Milbank, John. The Monstrosity of Christ. Paradox or Dialectic? (Cambridge and London: The MIT Press, 2009), 278.) was immediately denied by the minister; however Guardian refused to correct its statement.(Dimeska, Kristina. "Milošoski: We have displayed impertinence, not a middle finger". Nova Makedonija, No. 22357, 16 August 2011.) But, regardless of whether the minister used his body language or not, the international community already considers the monument of Alexander to be an irrational political "digitus impudicus" intended towards the neighbor. Probably the same logic of irrationality functions in explaining most of the Eastern European emerging national myths after the fall of the Iron Curtain – if, after the fall of communism "we failed" with the reasonable means of joining the developing world: dialogue, negotiations, and solutions (the parliamentary democracy was very young, the countries were lacking the know-how of talking with their political enemies, etc.), we (these countries) went into the opposite direction, and in spite of the horror with which such endeavors will be welcomed by the liberal world, they perversely actualized the worst enemy of today’s democracy: the extremist national myths. And this is exactly the case where we see Agamben’s theory of transforming the political events into architectural structures and architectural structures into political events.

Skopje’s Changing Ideologies

The top-down approach in reconstructing Skopje is not a new idea for the city. When architect Antonio Petrov from the Harvard University was visiting Skopje in 2010, he pointed out that "Skopje 1963" lead to "Skopje 2014".(Bogoeva, Katerina. "Forum Skopje 2010 Tonight with PRO-tests." Macedonian Daily Dnevnik, No. 3291, 27 May 2010, Skopje.) He was referring to the devastating earthquake which hit Skopje in 1963, when sixty per cent of the city was destroyed. The rebuilding was conducted by the politicians and architects who decided about the future outlook of Skopje, and the citizens were forced to accept the concept of the city which was offered to them. The rebuilding team under the patronage of the UN included the most renown architects of the time: Cibrowski (best known for his reconstruction of Warsaw after the Second World War), the Japanese architect Kenzo Tange (who planned the restoration of Hiroshima), Luigi Piccinato (who worked on restoration of Rome), J.H. van den Broek and Bakema (the planners of new Rotterdam), etc.(Foell, Earl W. Skopje - the Phoenix City. (Boston: Monitor, March 1968), 31.) The idea about the top-down approach during reconstructing of Skopje was also pointed out by Robert Home, who in his study of Skopje’s Master Plan adopted after the Skopje’s earthquake, says: "The Master Plan left a legacy of submissive public attitudes, possibly linked to centuries of Ottoman subjugation - an expectation that the state and its technocrats would dictate solutions."(Home, Robert. "Reconstructing Skopje, Macedonia, after the 1963 earthquake: The Master Plan forty years on". Papers in Land Management No. 7, (Cambridge and Chelmford, Anglia Ruskin University, 2003), 20. http://www.anglia.ac.uk/ruskin/en/home/faculties/alss/deps/law/staff0/home.Maincontent.0014.file.tmp/No7-Skopje.pdf )

Surely, Skopje 2014 cannot be compared to Skopje 1963: the 2014 plan was launched on a state level only, and the execution was handed to the artists previously anonymous to the public, while Skopje 1963 was built by the world’ top architectural elite, and although the full implementation of the master plan adopted in 1965 never materialized due to lack of resources, Skopje in the 1980s (when the reconstruction was over) was considered a successful story. On the other hand, today, all of the reconstructions are handled by artists without any substantial portfolio. Furthermore, Macedonia never had a strong school of classicism, baroque, or rococo, which means that basically the artists were delivering their art while learning their craftsmanship. The result is that most of the objects of Skopje 2014 appear unpolished. In his book "Rape Skopje" the art historian Nebojša Vilić analyzed 27 smaller sculptures placed in Skopje by November 2009 within four merits: the theme, the shape, the location and the aesthetic value, and on the one to five scale, he gave an overall grade of 3.27 for all the smaller monuments, concluding that: "From the point of view of the sociology of art, we indeed got art that we deserve, art which is mirroring the society as it is."(Vilić , Nebojša. Rape Skopje. (Skopje: 359 ⁰, 2009), 38.) And to return to Kenzo Tange’s master plan from 1965: the Viennese architect Luchsinger, during a 2010 debate about Skopje 2014, said that the best part of Tange’s Skopje was that Tange imagined Skopje as a fragmentary city, which left it open for further development of the urbanism - therefore, Skopje 2014 could be treated only as a small fragment in the Tange’s overall concept.(Angelovska, Biljana. "Skopje 2014 is not a Product of Democracy." Utrinski vesnik, No. 3265, 23 April 2010. http://utrinski.com.mk/?ItemID=ECFBECC62B0A924DB788AA51E88EC6C6)

Although Skopje 2014 in itself caries all sorts of assemblages of past times and styles, one style is however clearly absent: the soc-realistic style. Before Skopje 2014, two most distinctive characteristics of the city were: the Old Turkish Bazaar and the modern socialist buildings from the 1950s to 1970s. This project is intended to cut off both of these traditions, but not to the same extend. While the Ottoman heritage is somewhat shunned, it is still reflected in parts of the project: domes were not just part of the Renaissance architecture, but also of the Ottoman and the Byzantine traditions; the preservation of objects from the Ottoman past are on the agenda of the Government, etc. Therefore, one could say that the main goal of Skopje 2014 is to rework Skopje in such a way that it will finally break up with the communist heritage in architecture and is intended to make a final cut with the ugly, communist image of the city. That explains the proliferation of figurative monuments in Skopje 2014 (only 6 of the 27 sculptures placed so far are abstract).

In Yugoslavia during communism a huge body of modern abstract architecture has been produced especially during the 1960s and 1970s. The monuments were financed by the state and were used to shape the identity of the new, modern communist country. Most of those propaganda monuments were abstract because the ideals of the industrial society were to be embedded in them. The communist buildings and monuments were either resembling the mimetic animal and floral symbolism (buildings like huge turtles, or birds, or bugs, or flowers, for example the Macedonian Telecommunications and Post Office, 1974-1989, in Skopje looks like a giant flower), or the monuments had futuristic angular geometries, in the shape of a macro-view of a viral cell, or a crystal (such as the "Macedonian Opera and Ballet" on the left bank of the river Vardar). While today mostly neglected and considered tasteless locally, these communist propaganda monuments regained their worldwide fame after the books "Spomeniks" (a Slavic word for monuments) by the Belgian photographer Jan Kempenaers, and "Architecture in Socialist Yugoslavia" by the Austrian photographer Wolfgang Thalera were published and the monuments of ex-Yugoslavia immediately provoked significant interest on the part of the foreign architects and designers. What we see here is a paradoxical connection between the art and the ideology: when the communist monuments were built in the last century, for the Western observer they were treated as a mere kitsch, and as a totalitarian art. Half a century later, when the countries of Eastern Europe finally managed to get rid of their totalitarian traits and to join the democratic community, their previous art tradition is being reconsidered as a genuine art.

Today, when the Western analysts summarize the art created in communism, they are amazed by the presence of abstract themes and by the Yugoslav avant-garde ("wasn’t this a proof of the artistic freedom under the communist regime?"), but the point is that the avant-garde in ex-Yugoslavia was not merely tolerated, it was advocated on the level of the official doctrine (only after the bohemian status was taken away from the avant-garde). The communist National Liberation Movement monuments were scattered across the landscape of former Yugoslavia, and they fascinate with their futuristic bravery, but that is exactly the point - the futurism was preferred. A Western visitor left a comment on the internet page attributed to the Yugoslav communist monuments: "I wonder when a gigantic robot will throw itself in the picture to fight the monument."(Frauenfelder, Mark. "Communist Monuments of Yugoslavia". Boing Boing. 28 December, 2007. See at: http://www.boingboing.net/2007/12/28/communist-monuments.html) And this comment is well-placed, communism liked science fiction, the jets of concrete were there to challenge the Universe; the "humanoid" absence from the monuments was desired: The monuments offered escape from the themes of poverty and political misfortune. If something was periodically forbidden in art, it was the works of naturalism or realism, which dealt with social problems (for example, and one of the rare works Tito attacked and formally prohibited during his 35 years rule in Yugoslavia was a Serbian play "When the Pumpkins Blossomed" by Dragoslav Mihailović, a naturalistic picture of the tragic effect of the repression on the common people living in the suburbs of Belgrade.)

The pending question ever since the fall of Iron Curtain is: What to do with the communist propaganda monuments all over Eastern Europe? The old architectural heritage was generally neglected, and erased from the memory, and only occasionally it was being reshaped to serve a new purpose. In a case extensive covered in media, in June 2011, an anonymous artist (immediately dubbed by the media as Banksy of Bulgaria) overnight transformed a cast-iron sculptural group of the Russian Red Army soldiers in Sofia into popular superheroes and cartoon characters: Supermen, Santa Claus, Ronald McDonald, and the Joker (Batman’s foe). Although the artistic intervention was washed away already the next day, this solution was immediately commented as the most effective way to get rid of the communist past: better than physically smashing or removing the monuments from the past, it was a way to effectively decompose the past and spring new elements serving as touristic attractions. This is precisely a case where the synchronicity and the Disneyfication, previously discussed, come to mind: it is not by destroying one’s tradition, that the tradition is being erased, but by reworking it into a more playful model. Paradoxically, the tradition is best preserved when one strengthens both the values of the country ("we have joined the progressive world "), and at the same time overlaps it with the values of the national pride ("we have modified our national tradition to best serve tourism, while still preserving our very tradition"), the paradox being that the emancipation from the nationalism goes hand in hand with the fight against the same nationalism, but more importantly, this operation situates the differential margin between diachrony and synchrony closer to the later, thus opening a possibility for transformation of the frozen history into "human time".

In his canonic text "Future City" Frederic Jameson, explaining the logic of the Western future urban developments, he writes: "In the end, there will be little else for us to do but shop".(Jameson, Fredric. "Future City". New Left Review, No. 21, May-June 2003. http://www.newleftreview.org/?view=2449) If we transfer his motto to Macedonia’s present situation, the line would read: "In the end, there will be little else for us to do but remember". Mainly consisted of symbolic and not habitual buildings, Skopje 2014 is the world not trapped in a shopping mall, but in a museum, displaying the Eastern European tendency to periodically jumpstart the sense of history and to open up the "great repository of ghosts". As much as a paradigm of the Eastern European urban developments entrapped in history, at the same time, this project is also a showcase that the world remains much less global than the globalized discourse suggests today. 

The narrative of nostalgia defines the exhibition Ostalgia, an unconventional survey of more than 50 artists from various countries in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Republics, whose "main protagonist," states curator Massmilano Gioni, is "the overarching ideology of Soviet Socialism." The show's title is taken from the German word Ostalgie or "nostalgia for the East" that emerged in the early 1990s to describe a longing for Germany pre-unification, and later elsewhere in Eastern and Western Europe as a collective mourning for the communist past...

Ostalgia, The New Museum, New York, July 14-October 2, 2011

Nostalgia has many guises – homesickness, yearning, desire, melancholia. Susan Stewart defines nostalgia as a "social disease," a "sadness without an object," a narrative that is fundamentally ideological. "Hostile to history and its invisible origins . . . ," she argues, "nostalgia wears a distinctly utopian face, a face that turns toward a future-past, a past which has only ideological reality."(Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press, 1984), 23.) Walter Benjamin wrote about Leftist Melancholia as a kind of nostalgia that opposes true revolutionary thinking. But more recently, Viktor Misiano and others have proclaimed a progressive or radical nostalgia that sees the positive effects of memory in understanding the traumas of history.

The narrative of nostalgia defines the exhibition Ostalgia, an unconventional survey of more than 50 artists from various countries in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Republics, whose "main protagonist," states curator Massmilano Gioni, is "the overarching ideology of Soviet Socialism." The show's title is taken from the German word Ostalgie or "nostalgia for the East" that emerged in the early 1990s to describe a longing for Germany pre-unification, and later elsewhere in Eastern and Western Europe as a collective mourning for the communist past. Shunning distinct geographical, temporal, even thematic delineations, Ostalgia presents viewers with an idiosyncratic and intentionally fragmentary portrait, or rather series of portraits, of life under socialist domination. At its heart is the role of the artist – and art –within and in response to this political condition, a position of both resistance and preservation.

Within the context of the New Museum, Ostalgia is very much intended for Western audiences, although artists such as Miroslaw Bałka, Anri Sala, and Roman Ondák are well known internationally, as are the handful of West European artists also included (Thomas Schutte, Simon Starling, Susan Philipsz, Phil Collins), whose individual works connect to the exhibition's theme. Filling the entire fifth-floor gallery is a graphic timeline by the Petersburg-based collaborative Chto Delat? (What is to Be Done?), a kind of history lesson that marks the rise and fall of Cold War era socialism, beginning with the Yalta Conference in 1945 and ending with the dissolution of the Soviet Union on December 26, 1991.  Placed within this timeline are three video projects: the Learning Film Group's Vysocany Congress (2008), a re-enactment of the infamous congress that took place in 1968 in a factory in Prague two days after the Soviets invaded, and Dmitry Vilensky's Perestroika Chronicles (2008), a montage of documentary films chronicling political reforms of the 1980s. Also included is Chto Delat?'s own Partisan Songspiel: A Belgrade Story (2009), a Greek tragedy of sorts that comments on the politics of present-day Serbia.

Chto Delat?, which takes its name from Lenin's famous quote, is known for its projects that combine art and activism with aspects of Soviet history under the guise of "art soviets." Its declaration in the timeline's introduction, "Our relation to history remains retrospective, but also anticipatory," points to the use of nostalgia as a subversive tool, a theme that subtly reverberates throughout the exhibition but is explored more overtly in the show's catalog. For instance, Misiano's essay points, again, to a "progressive nostalgia" (also the title of an exhibition he organized in 2007), or the "return of memory" experienced in the 2000s after a period of "historical amnesia" that occurred in the wake of 1989. (Viktor Misiano, untitled essay in Ostalgia, catalog of the exhibition (New York: New Museum, 2011), 74.) Contributions by Joanna Mytkowska and Boris Groys look to the emancipatory possibilities of nostalgia. Rejecting today's globalized art market and disillusioned with the cultural present, they argue for a return to the alternative models of the past as a means to art's re-politicalization.

While the essays provide a lens through which to view the works in Ostalgia, the artworks themselves are representative of the historical moment in which they were created (both during and after the Soviet era) and the political conditions each moment dictated. Thus, the establishment of alternative models of art production was a strategy of survival. Some of the exhibition's most interesting moments belong to those artists who worked outside of the Soviet system by staging subtle interventions in public spaces. Several text and photo-based works (dating 1976-79) document the performances of Czech-artist Jiří Kovanda, whose actions on the streets of Prague would often solicit unsuspecting passersby, as in his Attempted Acquaintance. I invited some friends to watch me trying to make friends with a girl. . ., or XXX, On a escalator. . .turning around, I look into the eyes of the person standing behind me. . . (both 1977). For Self Fashion Show (1976), a black-and-white film transferred to video, the Hungarian performance and body artist Tibor Hajas stopped ordinary people on the streets of Budapest and asked them to model in front of the camera for one minute while the artist directed them on how to pose.

Slovakians Stanislav Filko and Julius Koller each invented their own brand of performance that often alluded to unearthly worlds. According to the show's didactics, Filko created what he called "Happsoc" (the words happening and society combined), and "defined the reality of the city to be a kind of readymade." On view were works from his Reality of Cosmos and Associations series (prints on cardboard, 1968-69) based on the Cold War space race. Koller, on the other hand, created "anti-happenings," ongoing projects versus discrete actions, such as his U.F.O.-NAUT J.K. (U.F.O), (silver gelatin prints ranging from 1987 to 1997), in which he casts himself as an alien by obscuring his face with a plate, for example, and other ordinary objects.

Other artists negotiated the realms of both the official and the unofficial. The Ukrainian Boris Mikhailov, for example, made films and photographs for the factory where he worked as an engineer. During the 1960s and ‘70s, he began taking nude photographs and was fired from his position when he used the factory's darkroom to develop his images. On view were 84 chromogenic color prints from his Suzi Et Cetera series, comprised of erotica and other candid images of everyday life. Nikolay Bakharev similarly took photographs for an official arm of the factory where he worked in southern Russia. In order to earn some extra money and challenge himself artistically, he covertly solicited portraits on public beaches, one of the few places where one could expose one's body openly. Bakharev began his project in the 1970s and continued over the course of several decades, eventually creating nude portraits as well. Fifteen gelatin silver prints from his Relationship and Type series were included here, and reveal an honesty and eros seldom witnessed.

The body as a subjective rather than an objective entity, free from political control, is unveiled in Evgenij Kozlov (E-E)'s The Leningrad Album (1967-73), 150 erotic drawings of male adolescent fantasy created when the artist was a teenager living within the close confines of a St. Petersburg communal housing complex.  Feminist counterparts (and perspectives in general) are few in this exhibition, although Aneta Grzeszykowska offers a photo album of some 200 photographs taken while growing up in Warsaw during the 1970s and ‘80s. At first, images of childhood milestones and holiday celebrations appear indistinguishable from those found elsewhere, but when one discovers that the artist has digitally erased her image from each picture, a more complex narrative about the role of memory (and nostalgia) materializes.

More evocative are those works that look to the quotidian aspects of everyday existence, in which the rituals of private life reveal either psychological states of duress or subtle acts of resistance. In Armenian Hamlet Hovsepian's silent, black-and-white video works from the 1970s, one witnesses anonymous figures engaged in the most mundane activities – a man scratching his back, another man yawning, a woman biting her nails –each performed within an empty, private world of tedium and entrapment rather than freedom from the politics of public life.

Vladimir Arkhipov's Contemporary Russian Folk Artifacts (1960s/2011) is a photographic archive of tools and domestic items handmade by ordinary people that the artist collected while traveling throughout Russia. A radio receiver is reconstructed from scraps of metal, for example, and a TV antenna from bent forks; a shovel handle is cobbled from a wooden crutch. While the work speaks to the scarcity of basic household and consumer objects under socialist rule, it also pays homage to the utility and ingenuity employed for human survival, a handicraft of necessity Arkhipov likens to folk art. Conversely, Slovakian Roman Ondák's ironical performance Good Feelings in Good Times (2003) underlines the hardship and, often, futility of waiting in line for food and other goods. Re-enacted for Ostalgia, various "actors" posing as common citizens would cue throughout the spaces of the New Museum, although what they were waiting for remained unknown.

These existential meditations contrast with the many works that directly appropriate the icons of Soviet ideology, including several compelling collages by artists working in the late 1960s and ‘70s who manipulated the words and symbols of official propaganda as a form of political opposition. However, the inclusion of contemporary artists whose practice similarly uses the images and monuments of the Soviet past suggests something less oppositional, but rather a "nostalgia for the belief [once held] that change is possible and necessary." (Joanna Mytkowska, untitled essay in Ostalgia, 76.) For example, Scottish-artist Susan Philipsz performs a haunting eulogy for the utopia socialism promised in her sound piece The Internationale (1999), a lilting rendition of this well-known anthem of international socialism.

In Lithuanian Deimantas Narkevicius's video Once in the XXth Century (2004), a toppled sculpture of Lenin appears to be re-installed in a public square in present-day Vilnius. In actuality, the artist reversed footage of independence protests from Lithuanian national television. Both works intimate the loss of purpose and unity that defined different revolutionary movements, or, as Charity Scribner suggests in her Requiem for Communism, the "lost object mourned by many Europeans is the collective itself – collective labor, collective memory." (Charity Scribner, Requiem for Communism (Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 2003), 98.)

The role of the media in documenting the political changes of 1989 and in shaping the collective imagination is explored in other works, including a video installation by Jonas Mekas, a pioneering figure of American avant-garde cinema. An émigré from Lithuania, Mekas culled over four hours of American news coverage of Lithuania's declaration of independence from the USSR in 1990, which is streamed across four large monitors. One witnesses this historic event from both the perspectives of the drones of the nightly news and through the distant eye of an artist in exile. Auditions for a Revolution (2006), a film by the Romanian-born, Chicago-based Irina Botea, is a re-enactment of the 1989 revolution in Romania based on television coverage, as well as video projects by Harun Farocki and Andrei Ujica. Botea enlisted students from the University of Chicago to impersonate various players involved in the events (members of the media, protesters, government officials). None of the actors knew Romanian, thus they read their lines phonetically, underscoring the disconnect between what is presented as reality by the media and what is actually remembered or understood.

This tension between reality and memory, between regressive and recuperative forms of nostalgia echoes throughout the exhibition, but one wonders if Ostalgia isn't sometimes guilty of trafficking in the mental state it seeks to uncover. Missing is any critique of nostalgia and the dangers it portends, as evidenced by the return of conservative politics in many countries of the region. That said, there are a few works that address the rise of ethnic nationalism, such as Jasmila Zbanic's video After, After (1997) that documents the effects of the Bosnian war on school children. The unresolved conflicts of the Chechen Wars are addressed by Romanian Andra Ursuta in her ink drawings of dead Chechen rebel soldiers based on images taken from the Internet. Russian David Ter-Oganyan's makeshift bombs sited throughout the New Museum comment on continued acts of violence and terrorism.

One wonders why contemporary artists such as Israeli Yael Bartana and German Neo Rauch, whose videos and paintings, respectively, appropriate the aesthetic but not the politics of socialist realism as a new form of social critique, were not included in the exhibition. Especially given Bojana Pejic's brief but poignant contribution to the catalog that seems to reject the idea of nostalgia altogether in favor of these kinds of critical practices. "I have focused my professional interests primarily on artistic positions that are critical of society, particularly the post-1989 democracies that embraced neoliberal concepts," she states. "I strongly believe that political art, and feminist art in particular, offers the best possible social critique."(Bojana Pejic, untitled essay in Ostalgia, 87.)

To that end, Anri Sala's Dammi I Colori (2003) is well rooted in the social landscape of the present, and, thus, a bit at odds with the show's overall premise. Mixing the best of political commentary and artistic intervention, the video profiles positive urban redevelopment in his native Tirana implemented under then mayor Edi Rama, a friend of Sala's and an artist himself. The work tours Tirana's transformation through the repainting of the facades of its worn buildings in a palette of vibrant colors. The entire city becomes a Mondrian-like painting, a monumental modernist grid, and an emblem of progressive artistic ideals.

Ostalgia's defining moment belongs to Phil Collins's video projection marxism today (prologue) (2010), a series of interviews with women who taught Marxist-Leninist economics at universities and vocational schools throughout the former GDR.  Each woman offers a candid account of her professional and personal life before and after socialism, sharing what was gained and what was lost. Interspersed throughout are archival segments centered mainly on pedagogy, as well as images from a contemporary university economics class. And while the challenges of the present seem to outweigh those of the past, the subjects' reflections seem less nostalgic than simply honest. A similar dissatisfaction with the present post-communist condition is felt on both sides of the former Wall; Ostalgia offers a fascinating look back, whether or not one wears rose-colored glasses.

The Journey to the East opened on August 5 (until September 30) at the Galeria Arsenal in Białystok, Poland. Curated by Monika Szewczyk, along with a team of local curators from the countries featured in the exhibition – Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova, Ukraine and Poland – the comprehensive show featured artworks filling two gallery spaces, objects in the public space of Białystok, performances and a day-long conference. The project is being realized within the Cultural Program of the Polish EU Presidency in 2011, and will travel later in the year to Mystetskyi Arsenal in Kyiv (October 30-November 11) and to MOCAK in Krakow (December 1, 2011-January 29, 2012).

Journey to the East, Galeria Arsenal in Białystok, August 5-September 30, 2011

The Journey to the East opened on August 5 (until September 30) at the Galeria Arsenal in Białystok, Poland. Curated by Monika Szewczyk, along with a team of local curators from the countries featured in the exhibition – Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova, Ukraine and Poland – the comprehensive show featured artworks filling two gallery spaces, objects in the public space of Białystok, performances and a day-long conference. The project is being realized within the Cultural Program of the Polish EU Presidency in 2011, and will travel later in the year to Mystetskyi Arsenal in Kyiv (October 30-November 11) and to MOCAK in Krakow (December 1, 2011-January 29, 2012).

The Journey to the East deals with "communication, understanding, and love – a strong feeling dictating a positive reaction to the other, even if it is not in line with one’s interests," as articulated by Anna Lazar, co-author of the exhibition  concept. While the project aims to create a "new communication community" based on love rather than competition, the artworks in the galleries include a surprising abundance of imagery from Soviet everyday life – from images of Lenin to photographs of dilapidated Soviet architecture, to an installation resembling a flea market with typical household wares from the 1990s. This looks like an attempt to call up collective nostalgia for a community of interpersonal relationships that seemingly existed in the latter decades of the USSR, when people were bound by a common lack of material goods and opportunities for personal advancement (in contrast to the competition that structures life in neoliberal capitalist societies).

Here, East and West are considered by catalogue contributor Maria Anna Potocka as contrasting conceptual conditions experienced by Poland (and other countries represented in the exhibition) during various stages of the transformation from socialism to capitalism. "East" here represents artistic freedom from the temptations of the market, while "West" symbolizes the opportunity for international contact, economic development, and political freedom.  Potocka’s analysis points us to read the works of artists from the geographic East in light of this transition from one conceptual condition to another as an investigation of difference in relation to oneself. How do the artists, many of whom are practicing without an official contemporary art context, perform this communication with themselves? Some reflect on their Soviet past while others, such as Alevtina Kakhidze (Ukraine) in her documentary project I’m late for a plane that’s impossible to be late for, reflect on the conditions and context in which they are working today. While this practice of self-reflection is imperative for beginning communication with an other – be it person, discourse or context, simply showcasing the diverse points of view and experiences of various Eastern artists in one exhibition  is not enough to form a "communication community."

However, The Journey to the East did reveal some new strategies for artistic activity – adequate for the present global conditions – emerging from art practitioners from the East that subtly manifested themselves during the opening weekend. Conference participant Jahangir Selimkhanov (Azerbaijan) introduced the concept of nazira, an Arabic word that denotes "a method of borrowing form, rhyming pattern, verse measure, plot or metaphor from a peer and making your own poem a sort of homage, emulation or mockery." Nazira was used in classical Eastern poetry. In Selimkhanov’s view nazira can be considered a labor of love (or "selfless creativity") whereby an artist responds to the work of another with empathy, through a process of subjective creative transformation. Selimkhanov elaborated a possible practice-oriented model according to which "each artist is asked to submit a ’nazira,’ a ‘montage’ of deconstructed elements, a commentary, a paraphrase of works by fellow artists, which are also exhibited within the shared space – in the same room or in an adjacent one."

Meanwhile, performance group TanzLaboratorium (Ukraine) proposed an analogous concept for their LOVE-scape, which they presented during the opening weekend of the exhibition. The artists performed a structured improvisation based on their personal impressions from the exhibition, incorporating elements of the artworks they had seen. There was one other key element in the work: as audience members were admitted into the space before the start of the performance, they were asked to sign a contract binding them to keep in mind the question "Why am I looking at this?" while watching. The other party, the artist-performers, were also bearing this question in mind while working. This gesture extended the work of nazira to the viewers, giving them their own creative-interpretive tool for  being active during the performance rather than remaining passive spectators.

The model of nazira distributes responsibility to all engaged with a work of art. No longer is the artist--the producer, the viewer--merely a consumer. As part of the exhibition, a number of artworks in Białystok’s  public space communicated directly with local visitors. These objects, embodying the thoughts of their respective producers, were allowed to lead a life of their own, provoking curiosity and processes of exploration in the viewers/users/players. Stefan Rusu’s (Moldova) Open Flat--a structure resembling a small apartment, but without enclosing walls--came alive through the thoughtful play of passersby. Veaceslav Druta (Moldova) built a Swing for two persons–two swings, one behind the other, which demanded that the two persons swinging find some relationship, either negotiating a way to be in sync or through collision and conflict. One person could also lie down on both swings and experience a similar mode of negotiation between two parts of his/her own body. Here the artwork is less of an expression than an invitation to another to build his/her own experience, be it physical or in the realm of thought.

Nazira becomes not only an artistic strategy, but also a state of mind. The nature of its "selfless creativity" first demands intense scrutiny of the initial object. It need not be judged as good or bad, but must be very carefully examined in order to transform it. The next step requires an articulation of the responding artist’s (or viewer’s) own interest in the object, a revelation of his/her subjective relationship to the object of interpretation. Such love demands self-sacrifice, both on the part of the responder (who takes as a starting point for his/her own work the expression of another artist rather than his/her own personal experience) and on the part of the "giving" artist who cannot control the reading, interpretation, understanding of his/her work, and who certainly cannot foresee or influence the subsequent transformations engendered by his/her initial gesture. Imagine this as an infinite chain of reciprocal perceptions and articulations, in a dispersed manner, where each individual is continuously looking, reflecting, transforming, and expressing.

In the models proposed by Selimkhanov – as, for example, an artistic dialogue between two incongruous practices; or a linear progression of artworks, each one interpreting the previous one – what becomes visible is how the artist thinks. Also, new information may be revealed in the dialogic space between works: interpretation, misinterpretation, empathy and antagonism can elucidate new meanings or thoughts. It is always necessary that there be a third element – an observer,  event, etc. – in order to determine the relationship between "original" work and the responding interpretative work. Selimkhanov writes, "the process of perception and comprehension might then become more intriguing as commentary by other artists would possibly be of assistance in grasping hidden layers of meaning or in seeing constructive threads hitherto remaining ‘invisible,’ or conversely, in making the process of understanding the artwork even more puzzling and confounding." 

The understanding of "quality" also changes. There is no basis to judge whether the responding artist has read or interpreted accurately. The means used to respond produce the form of expression. For example, Ukrainian artist Anatoly Belov’s opening night performance demonstrated the reciprocal interpretation-communication of diverse artists in the immediate moment. Belov arrived in Białystok with a selection of his own songs, which he presented to a local brass band an hour before they were to give a concert together. He asked the musicians to select melodies which they already knew from memory to accompany his compositions. The resulting collision of lively brass tunes with Belov’s mystical shrieking and comic lyrics produced a new reality energized by the risk of not knowing what to expect.

We could extend the idea of nazira to the scale of curators and critics, whose work today is not dissimilar from that of artists. If the value of art workers lies in their ability to creatively transform their own subjective experience, then we begin to see art processes like the exhibition The Journey to the East as a means to create an extended dialogue and discussion based on empathy and love. For the three-day opening ceremonies, which included a day-long conference addressing the project’s themes from the perspective of art practitioners from the featured countries, many of the participating artists were invited to Białystok; and in the evenings, all the guests were fed and entertained, which led to conversation and interaction even at  the hotel. Thus a community of people who may have seen each other’s work online or in other exhibitions came to life in the "neutral" territory of Poland (EU) for a few days, exchanging ideas, networking, and establishing lines of communication for future interaction. Each individual is shaped by the territory in which s/he lives and by unique historical experiences, but from the point of view of nazira, this "identity" becomes a collection of qualities that affect the individual’s contribution to the dialogue, rather than an endpoint for categorization, classification or grouping. We move out of the horizontal plane of social, political, economic differences and into the space of subjective human gestures and reactions. Certain issues that were earlier pertinent –borders; East and West as political and geographical constructs; the Other as political or ethnic subject, etc. – become less relevant.

To return to the question "Why am I looking at this?" employed during TanzLaboratorium’s performance – this strategy unites artists and viewers in a common labor of looking and self-reflection (one in which they choose to participate as a "labor of love"), thus forming a temporary community around this shared conceptual practice. Perhaps the value of The Journey to the East is not in prescribing new models for interaction based on love rather than of capitalist competition, but in producing a space where in some instances (though not at all levels) these models can be performed, articulated, and made visible. But I believe that this can be recognized only by one who also makes the effort to take part in the chain of perception, interpretation, subjective examination and transformation of the material presented. 

This review was published in Ukrainian in Korydor (korydor.in.ua).

Identificatory scenarios abound in Rearview Mirror: New Art from Central and Eastern Europe, which is co-produced by The Power Plant Art Gallery in Toronto and the Art Gallery of Alberta in Edmonton. As the site of a subject’s first encounter with their own image as Other, the mirror appears in both literal and figurative guise in a number of the works on display here. And yet the subjectivities invoked in Rearview Mirror resist familiar calls to identification.

REARVIEW MIRROR: NEW ART FROM CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPE, THE POWER PLANT, TORONTO, JULY 1, 2011 - SEPTEMBER 5, 2011; THE ART GALLERY OF ALBERTA, EDMONTON, JANUARY 28, 2012 - APRIL 29, 2012

Identificatory scenarios abound in Rearview Mirror: New Art from Central and Eastern Europe, which is co-produced by The Power Plant Art Gallery in Toronto and the Art Gallery of Alberta in Edmonton. As the site of a subject’s first encounter with their own image as Other, the mirror appears in both literal and figurative guise in a number of the works on display here. And yet the subjectivities invoked in Rearview Mirror resist familiar calls to identification. While the two Canadian venues will undoubtedly introduce well-established artists from the region to new audiences, visitors may not realize to what extent such work comes preloaded with ideological baggage. Historically, neo-avant-garde gestures under socialism were more resistant to being absorbed by market forces than those in the West for the simple reason that an art market did not exist there in the first place. The very different support structures available to artists meant that outwardly similar actions were potentially met with different political consequences and were thus dislocated from their more universalizing counterparts. In an analogous way, every artistic gesture was already politicized because of the context it appeared in.

Canadian-born and US-based curator Christopher Eamon brings together works by 23 younger artists in way that simultaneously utilizes and underplays the legacies of political repression and the realities of economic transition and the attendant problems of exclusion. Rearview Mirror is not about Eastern European art per se, but a vaguely triumphal “new” art whose practitioners have largely overcome the marginality that plagued their predecessors. Thematically dispersed, this fascinating exhibition has no completist ambitions: Eamon makes it clear in the wall text that only some of the relevant countries are being represented. The catalogue contains two excellent specially commissioned essays by Zoran Erić and Andrzej Szczerski that provide much needed contextualization. Of the five framing categories, the most broadly conceived is “stealing, appropriating or claiming space,”( Christopher Eamon, "Rearview Mirror," in Rearview Mirror: New Art from Central & Eastern Europe, ed. Christopher Eamon (Toronto: Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery and Edmonton: Art Gallery of Alberta, 2011), p.11.) which is here done literally or semiotically, often at the same time. Upstairs, Dušica Dražić (with Sam Hopkins) makes use of an overlooked tract of highway to stage an impromptu dance while also laying claim to David Bowie’s song Young Americans for her video Young Serbians (2006). Downstairs, Igor Eškinja’s geometrical mapping of a gallery wall with adhesive tape in Liberare le Menti Occupare Gli Spazi [Liberate the Mind, Occupy the Spaces] (2008) is cleverly paired with Roman Ondák’s Shared Floor (1996), an installation that transports and reassembles the parquet floor, complete with electrical sockets, from the artist’s Bratislava apartment. Nearby is Ondák’s Freed Doorway (1998), which, together with Shared Floor, poetically recalls the forced togetherness so emblematic of private life under socialism. Other artists steal more overtly: in the tripartite Fragments (2002-07), Ivan Moudov fills boxes with stolen art in an idiom that calls to mind Duchamp’s famous figure of exile, the Boîte-en-valise.(See T.J. Demos, The Exiles of Marcel Duchamp (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007). Coincidentally, a more modest figure of exile can be found in Anna Kołodziejska’s sculpture Untitled (Suitcase with Undershirt) (2008).) Whereas Moudov steals art, Anetta Mona Chişa and Lucia Tkáčová appropriate functional objects from galleries around the world and then archive them under glass in Private Collection (2005).

Eamon’s second tendency is “an attraction to popular culture as expressed in some of the globally dominant entertainment industries.”(Eamon, p. 11. ) For example, Ciprian Mureşan’s Un Chien Andalou (2004) has characters from Shrek appropriate the eye-cutting scene from the Surrealist film, swapping grainy live action for slick 3D animation. Again in single-channel video, Alex Mirutziu’s Pop (2006-2007) re-imagines historical body art through the comparatively sedate act of a hand flipping through a fashion magazine. Both works create a sense of distance from the source material in ways that allow for extended contemplation not of typical Central and Eastern European concerns, but of the wider neoliberal context to which all such images belong. More productively perhaps, Eamon’s third category fixes on the legacies of modernity and modernism. In Work by an Artist Inspired by a Theory about Modernity (2007), Anna Ostoya places an ordinary plastic bag, blown constantly by a small fan, on a sculptural pedestal, creating an obvious anti-monument. In Saturday Afternoon, 1st of December, Leeds (2007-8), she props up a triangular (constructivist?) table top with antique columns, and paints it all a dull beige, including the battered-looking CD player that plays a recording of sociologist Zygmunt Bauman reading from Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. Just as they layer media and distinct temporal moments, the artists here memorialize everything and anything while treating actual monuments without the reverence usually reserved for them. The third and fourth categories move into the realm of “pranksters” and “mythologists” as well as artists who return to conceptualism and “[take] it to street—to other imagined publics.”(Eamon, p. 11. ) On the one hand, a work like Roman Ondák’s The Stray Man (2006) seemingly belongs to a genealogy of historical street “actions,” some of which had very real consequences for the artists involved. On the other, Ondák’s street action, exhibited as both an occasional performance and as video documentation of past performances, has more affinity with the legacy of nominally dematerialized conceptual art in the international vein.

Here two different myths of origin, both equally possible, are productively mixed. The apparent exclusion of an individual peering through the window of a gallery calls to mind the historical exclusion of the “Eastern” artist who subsists by default outside of the dominant art historical narratives. However, to read the action in this way would be to misunderstand its matter-of-factness. Along with Freed Doorway and Shared Floor, The Stray Man alludes in a subtle way to the totalitarian backdrop against which historical body art from Eastern and Central Europe took place. However, the work also appears to be dismissing any such reading as overwrought and over-determined. Citing the need among curators in the 1990s to achieve a balance between aspirations to universality on the one hand and the reality of marginality on the other, Eamon eschews the anxiety of this apparent contradiction by choosing a third path: he charts a number of trajectories that resist being determined by any one political or art world narrative. More specifically, the exhibition answers the perceived local “need for both marginalizing and universalizing discourses”(Eamon, p. 11. ) with a series of investigations that allude to a rich range of historical precedents despite being ambivalent about these precedents at times. Just as the rearview mirror is a figure of simultaneous vision—looking back while looking forward—so the young artist from this heterogeneous region never occupies a singular vantage point. The past is close, closer than it may appear, but it is sometimes inscrutable, much like the face of Evgeny Terentiev, the former Russian officer who enacts the procedures of an imagined launch and detonation of an intercontinental ballistic missile in Deimantas Narkevičius’s mesmerizing video The Dud Effect (2008).

In fact, artists are arguing constantly against obsolescence, whether the discarded thing is a medium (painting, 16 mm film) or an idea (modernity with all its ideological wreckage). David Maljković’s Out of Projection (2009) memorializes Peugeot’s “cars of the future” in a two-channel video installation composed of footage filmed at the company’s headquarters in France. On the bigger screen, the now-elderly designers and company workers move and dance melancholically around the test track and prototypes; the smaller screen features interviews with these individuals, only with muted sound. This is a past whose vestiges may still yield something of use, Maljković seems to be claiming; aided by the eerie soundtrack, the content of these interviews is further subsumed under a sense of oncoming oblivion, but it is also minable, not yet lost. Two other works that pick up the same thread vis-à-vis medium are Wilhelm Sasnal’s Untitled (Elvis) (2007) and Taras Polataiko’s four paintings of Malevich reproductions (1993-2002). Filmed in grainy 16 mm, complete with a whirring projector, the opening sequence of Untitled (Elvis) shows a laptop spinning around a microphone while a YouTube video of an early performance by Elvis plays on it (the scene looks a lot like one of Sasnal’s paintings). Unlike Sasnal, Polataiko foregrounds a specifically “Eastern” legacy by doubly distorting Malevich’s suprematist compositions. In Kazimir Malevich, Cross (2002), the medium is once again proclaiming its own obsolescence while simultaneously overcoming it. Marring the photograph but making the painting, the camera’s flash cannot help but catch on folded pages that might have been ripped from a book.

Errors in reproduction, translation and transmission, which Polataiko’s paintings render ironic, are crucial elsewhere too: installed outside of the gallery and visible through a window, Promises/Average Salary (2006) by Johnson & Johnson (Indrek Köster and Taavi Talve) may look like a minimalist sculpture at first, but closer inspection reveals the economic discrepancy it is actually mapping. Katarina Zdjelar’s video work The Perfect Sound (2009), in which a young student practices forming “English” sounds with a speech therapist from Birmingham, stages mishearing and misspeaking: the arduous process of de-accenting speech becomes a mimetic exercise whose outcome is here an open question. Will the student purge his speech of its native inflections in order to, presumably, better assimilate? Or will the exercise fail as perfect copying proves impossible? On occasion, Zdjelar’s screen flashes to black, leading us to imagine the exercise as a modernist piece of music or an atonal duet—a misreading that is implicitly encouraged. These built-in intervals create a sense of distance from linguistic regimes, as if the student and speech therapist were seeking to return to something pre-verbal, something in excess of what is being said in everyday language.

In a similar way, Chişa and Tkáčová, whose stolen gallery objects are exhibited elsewhere in the show, eschew overt political content in their video Manifesto of the Futurist Woman (Let’s Conclude) (2008), depicting brightly dressed majorettes whose routine on an urban bridge actually transmits a message in Semaphore: the concluding fragment of a Futurist text calling for the destruction of “woman.” Like Zdjelar, Chişa and Tkáčová draw attention to the problematic patterns of identification running across multiple overlapping contexts, pointing out just how easily modernist discourse slips into its totalitarian counterpart and how readily “woman” is re-appropriated by masculinist discourse. This is Rearview Window at its best and least mythologizing.

In fact, the curator’s position as an outsider looking in occasionally makes the show feel a bit disconnected from the politically charged character of other dominant art narratives being generated in the region. For example, one tendency that seems to be missing is the video idiom that plays with documentary conventions and charts concrete political plights in transitional communities. Compared to, for example, Richard Appignanesi’s more internationally minded Raising Dust: Encounters in Relational Geography—a recent show at Calvert22, London’s only not-for-profit space for Eastern European art, also curated by an “outsider”—Rearview Mirror might have benefitted from more concrete attention to life in transitional Europe in the context of larger global shifts. His pranks aside, Eamon generally avoids casting the “Eastern” artist as marginal to dominant narratives, markets, and centers. And yet there is another trope here that disturbs the show’s occasional gloss. With classic works of literature such as Mikhail Bulgakov’s A Dog’s Heart supplying the precedent, the idea of the artist or political subject as dog-like connects works as disparate as Mureşan’s Dov Luv (2009)—where a troupe of black plush dog puppets re-enact torture’s greatest hits—and Ondák’s cooly conceptual The Stray Man. The motif of dog life also extends to Paweł Althamer’s Guma (2009), a sculpture that memorializes a disappeared local shifter in rubber, or guma in Polish, which was also the individual’s nickname. To identify oneself or others in this manner calls to mind the sometimes extreme and always politically risky body art of the 1970s and its replay in the 1990s: Oleg Kulik’s biting attacks on exhibition visitors is a famous example of the latter trend. The memory of such work persists here, even if many of the younger artists no longer identify with the underdog.

Milena Tomic is a PhD candidate in art history at University College London where she is writing on re-enactment in contemporary art.

 

Both have an art deco touch: the chunky gold-plated Oscar and the elegant brass statue of a female figure holding a glass globe. The Chrystal Globe, the Karlovy Vary Film Festival award, in its current shape was created only 11 years ago, but harks back to the decorative style of the first decades of the 20th century.

The Beginnings in 1946

Both have an art deco touch: the chunky gold-plated Oscar and the elegant brass statue of a female figure holding a glass globe. The Chrystal Globe, the Karlovy Vary Film Festival award, in its current shape was created only 11 years ago, but harks back to the decorative style of the first decades of the 20th century.(According to the festival dossier in the Czech monthly euro 27/6/2011, 77. The globe is produced by the traditional Moser glass factory (Karlovy Vary).) The festival is among the oldest in Europe.(It is the third oldest film festival after Venice (1932) and Moscow (first edition 1935, second in 1959).) It officially started out in the summer of 1946 in connection with the recent nationalization of the Czechoslovak film industry. Jindriška Bláhová, in her groundbreaking history of the festival, decribes its early "nationalistic" period dissolving into a "(pan)slavic" one in 1947.(J. Bláhová, “National, Transnational, Global: The Changing Roles of the Film Festival in Karlovy Vary, 1946–1956,” in: P. Skopal / K. Lars (eds), Film Industry and Cultural Policy in GDR and Czechoslovakia, 1945–1960, 2012 (in print).) After World War II, the Western Bohemian spa region which had a predominantly German-speaking population until 1945, needed an economical boost. A distinctly Czechoslovak event should claim back the area; no doubt, a film festival based on a nationalized cinematography was ideally suited for marking a "symbolically" new era with sympathy for socialist ideas and a strong orientation toward the USSR.

In the first years, the films were shown in two towns: Karlovy Vary (aka Karlsbad) and Mariánské lazně, the former Marienbad("In addition to the films presented by the nationalized film industry, films from countries with a strong movie making tradition like England, Sweden, the USA, and France were included. The number of films in the modest program (each day one film was screened three times at the Festival Theater in Mariánské Lázně and was then shown the next day at the new Open Air Cinema in Karlovy Vary) was compensated for by the quality of the movies selected and by the accompanying program of social events.” (http://www.kviff.com/en/about-festival/festival-history/)) – a name which in 1961 would become well-known in cinephile circles through Resnais’ L'Année dernière à Marienbad / Last Year at Marienbad. From 1949 on, the festival only happened in Karlovy Vary. The first competition took place in 1948; this was also the year when the Grand Hotel Pupp (which was subsequently renamed "Moskva") became the festival center. In 1978, the festival moved to the "Thermal" hotel.

1948: The "Alternative" Festival Becomes "International"

In 1948, the still rather local (that is: national respectively "Slavic") festival metamorphosed into an arena of transnational political strategies. Bláhová shows how the Soviets’ lack of interest, still evident in 1947, (Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Alexandrov, Orlova, and film minister Bolšakov did not follow the Czechoslovak invitation and went to Venice instead (Bláhova 2012). In 1948 this situation turned around: in the wake of the Cold War the USSR started boycotting Venice and Cannes for allegedly “discriminating” against Soviet film production.) was transformed into a heightened interest in the Czechoslovak festival a year later. Suddenly the festival was called "international," and in the following years, it was loaded with ideologemes like "peace" and "people" which went nicely with the pre-1948 stress on the aspect of "presentation of work" ("pracovní festival"). The Czechoslovak festival was now competing with Cannes and Venice on an ideologically level as well, showing the best film "work" made in the "peaceful" countries of the Socialist People’s Republics.

The "Brief Festival History" on the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (KVIFF) website states that "the Communist takeover in February 1948 gave a new direction to the organization of the Karlovy Vary festival that lasted for several decades [.…] The program was put together with an awareness of the propagandistic strength of film and the importance of this medium as a tool in the ideological struggle against the West. Films included in the program had to reflect the new ‘film map of the world:’ space was given to film industries that were young and either just starting out or in revival." http://www.kviff.com/en/about-festival/festival-history/

Interestingly, the festival tried from the very beginning to develop a profile that would set it apart from its Western peers. Bláhová describes how this "alternative model" increasingly became part of the Soviet strategy to contain American film business in Europe. From 1948 until the 1990’s the full-fledged Karlovy Vary Festival tried to find its identity somewhere between a niche in Soviet geo-political strategies and a "national" festival reaching out internationally.

Some of the "alternative" traits dating back to the early postwar period described by Bláhová still persist: a special attention to small film countries (mainly but not only in Eastern Europe); less "festival-like" ("festiválení") (Bláhová quotes 1948 articles from the Czech press where parties and the presence of film stars and celebrities are considered a negative model which should be absent in this festival, which concentrates, in her words. on "work" and the social impact of film.) than other comparable festivals; and the lack of a film market. Compared to Berlin and Cannes, the festival today still does not see itself as a major player in international film business.

From Cinematic Staliniana to the First "Free" Festival in 1990

From 1959 to the early 1990’s, the Karlovy Vary Film Festival alternated with the then-revived Moscow International Film Festival.(The second edition of the Moscow festival was held after a long pause, in 1959. At that time the „International Federation of Film Producers' Associations” granted only to Moscow. The Moscow Festival now precedes KVIFF by a couple of weeks.) To the great dismay of the Karlovy Vary Festival, the Kremlin in the late 1950s decided to have only one "A" festival for all the socialist countries. Effectively, this meant a downgrading of Karlovy Vary accompanied by a suspension of the coveted "A-Status". Nevertheless Karlovy Vary, which was close to the West German border, remained an excellent venue for presenting film productions from Eastern Europe. The relatively large spa town not only could accomodate a high number of visitors, but the location also made it easier to attract guests from the West than was the case with the Moscow Festival.(Among the guests of the first five years were directors Abel Gance, Luis Buňuel, Andrzej Munk, Giuseppe De Santis, Anthony Asquith, Sergei Gerasimov, Paul Strand, Joris Ivens, Mikhail Romm, Slatan Dudow, Jerzy Kawalerowicz or Alberto Cavalcanti. Film critics such as
Georges Sadoul and
Jerzy Toeplitz attended, and other guests included the actor Horst Buchholz and the poet Pablo Neruda. http://www.kviff.com/cz/o-festivalu/historie-rocniky/1948/hoste/#menu)

In its first decades, the Karlovy Vary festival had a clear geo-political task: it was a showroom mainly for ideologically sound films from the Eastern Bloc. After prizes for Wanda Jakubowska’s WW II drama Ostatni etap/The Last Stage (Poland) and Wiliam Wyler’s The Best Years of our Lives in 1948, the winners of the Crystal Globe in the subsequent years until 1956 were all from the USSR, starting in 1949 with V. Petrov’s Stalingradskaia bitva/The Stalingrad Battle. Mikhail Tchiaureli Was twice received a prize in Karlovy Vary. One prize, in 1950, went to his notorious docu-fiction epos Padenie Berlina/The Battle of Berlin 1&2 (this film, shot partly on trophy Agfacolor stock, was a present for Stalin’s 70th birthday).(http://www.kviff.com/cz/o-festivalu/historie-rocniky/1949/. In 1951 it was Yu. Raizman’s Kavaler zolotoi zvezdy/Knight of the Golden Star; in 1958 Tikhii Don by S. Gerasimov; in 1960 Seriozha/Splendid Days/A Summer to Remember by G. Daneliia and I. Talankin (for a clip from the ceremony, see http://www.youtube.com/user/HawkeyeMacLeod#p/search/18/UO7utc5_LXE)) The first prizes for domestic feature films came rather late. They were for Obžalovaný/The Accused (1964) by Ján Kádár, and Jiří Menzel’s Rozmarné léto/Capricious Summer in 1968. Films like Pasolini´s Accattone and Tony Richardson´s A Taste of Honey were among the winners of 1962. In 1964, Elia Kazan came, and Karel Reisz was a member of the jury. In the second half of the 1960s, the festival started changing: "In a year of political regeneration peaking with the so-called Prague Spring, the organization of the festival fundamentally changed. Festival regulations were reworked: the traditional competition was not held and in place of the international jury three independent juries were set up (creative, acting, and technical)." (http://www.kviff.com/en/about-festival/festival-history/)

In the period of "normalization," the festival suffered from the stifling atmosphere in a country where the experiment of "socialism with a human face" ended in August 1968 with a military intervention. "At the time, standards were only maintained in the informative section where viewers still had the opportunity to see key movies from world-renowned filmmakers, as well as films awarded at other festivals." (http://www.kviff.com/en/about-festival/festival-history/).

After 1989, the audiences of the Karlovy Vary Festival were eager to see Czechoslovak films from the archives. In the 1990’s, the festival started shaping its future independently from outside influences; the first year when it stopped alternating with Moscow was 1995.

KVIFF and The Barrandov Studios

The ties between Soviet film production and post-war Czechoslovakia were not only political ones; a significant part of the prime production of the second half of the 1940's was produced in the Barrandov studios in Prague. These are canonical examples of cult-of-personality films,(Oksana Bulgakova: Herr der Bilder – Stalin und der Film, Stalin im Film, in: Agitation zum Glück. Sowjetische Kunst der Stalinzeit. Bremen 1994, 65-69, N. Drubek-Meyer: Obszöne Rüschen russischer Giganten. Zum Kino des Spätstalinismus, n: P. Choroschilow, J. Harten, J. Sartorius, P.-K. Schuster (eds): Berlin - Moskau / Moskau - Berlin 1950-2000, Kunst aus fünf Jahrzehnten. Heidelberg 2003, 47-8.) like the mentioned The Fall of Berlin, the comedy Vesna/Spring with Soviet mega-stars Liubov Orlova and Nikolai Cherkasov, or Tchiaureli’s pseudo-religious Kliatva/The Vow (1946).

The Barrandov studio is a fascinating topic, although it is not very well researched in film studies. The studio south of Prague was created in the early 1930‘s by Miloš Havel, the uncle of ex-president Václav Havel. In its time, it was among the best European sound studios, and as such it became a coveted object. First, it was used after 1938 by the German UFA, with Havel struggling to keep up the number of Czech productions. Right after the war, it housed Soviet cinema productions.

Great expectations were created by the advertisements of the exhibition of 80 Years of the Barrandov Studios, which opened during the festival in the local art gallery (http://www.barrandov.cz/en/aktualita/barrandov-studios-80-years-exhibition). The show – displaying some of the pretty Cinderella costumes – was not only very small, but disappointing concerning the history of the studio. The curators of the exhibition obviously did not think it necessary to shed light either on the Nazi years or the Soviet use of the studio.

Serious Czech film historians, although they are generally enthralled by an empirical approach, to this day have hardly started to delve into the history of Czechoslovak film studios following the war. This history is yet to be written. It would also need to explore the connections between Soviet and Czechoslovak film production and exhibition, which appear still to be a taboo. The animosity towards the Soviet era has left this area under-researched.

The Festival in 2011

The main prize of the Karlovy Vary Festival is called the Grand-Prix Crystal Globe, and this year it went to an Israeli debut (Restoration, dir. by Joseph Madmony, 2010), based on a script which had won the Sundance Screenwriting Award 2011. More prizes in the main competition went to actor David Morse in another debut, Collaborator (Canada/USA 2010), by Canadian Martin Donovan, and to actress Stine Fischer Christensen in Die Unsichtbare / The Invisible (D 2011, dir. Christian Schwochow).

Although approximately 30 films are produced in the Czech Republic each year, no Czech film made it into the full-length feature film competition this time. Czech commentators saw in this outcome a weakness of Czech film producers to "profit from the glamour" of "Vary"(Marcela Alföldi Šperkerová and Adam Junek from the Czech journal euro were wondering why this is the case („Promarněný lesk,” in: euro 27/6/2011, 3).) (as Czechs call the town as well as the festival). Jiří Bartoška, the Festival`s president, hints at another problem of this Western Bohemian spa town. Karlovy Vary finds it hard to attract other similarly high powered events during the rest of the year. Probably the low-key exploitation of the potential grandeur of the location is exactly one of Karlovy Vary’s, and also the festival’s, attractions. Although it is an excellently programmed and highly diversified festival and better organized than most other European counterparts, it still retains a comfortingly human face. By keeping the ticket prices low (the ratio to other festivals is between 1/5 – 1/3), KVIFF in even its 46th edition managed to be both a major international event and a festival accessible to regional audiences. "Region" here means cinephiles and young film fans from Central Europe who form a considerable part of the audience and who are able to share the spa water colonnades with John Turturro or chat with John Malkovich after his "Technobohemian" (http://www.technobohemian.it/) fashion show. Budgetwise, it is, of course, a small festival ($ 7,6 Mill.), which seems only logical as the Czech Republic is not a big country (it has as many inhabitants as the urban area of Paris, that is 10.5 million).

Turning back to the "regional" films in the competition, a Slovak-Czech co-production about the Roma living in Slovakia (Cigán; directed by arthouse veteran Martin Šulík, this time choosing a no-frills style) was awarded the special jury prize, its young lead amateur actor, Ján Mižigár, receiving a special mention. One of the recently finished Czech films, which due to its national topic might have stood a chance,(Ibidem. Lidice is the name of the village which was totally destroyed by the Nazis as revenge for the Czech-British attack on leading SS man Heydrich. The burning of Lidice was carried on 10 June 1942.) Lidice (dir. by Petr Nikolaev), was released a month before the start of KVIFF, disqualifying it from participation. The pressing question is: why do some of the Czech films not have their premiere in Karlovy Vary? If one asks the programmers, there are two answers to be found. In an interview given to A. Junek and M. Alföldi Šperkerová, it seems that some film makers indeed „have a different festival in mind."(Alföldi Šperkerová / Junek: "Hvězdy si neplatíme," in: euro 27/6/2011, p. 69.) Here, what does come into play is the fact that KVIFF does not have a regular film market, an important feature of its big regional competitor, Berlin’s Berlinale where a lot of Central and East European Films are screened.

Addressing this unpopular question, one could take into account the Czech mentality, which displays strong patriotism and self-deprecation at the same time. Some Czech filmmakers and their producers seem not to think very highly of their own local(Alföldi Šperkerová/Junek ("Promarněný lesk," in: euro 27/6/2011, p. 3) use the word "provincial in the best sense of the word” by differentiating it from the "yearly merry-go-round of film business in Cannes or Berlin".) festival, although their particular films might not succeed in any other cultural environment,(The reason for local (or: national) boundaries of many recent good films is often being explained with the most popular genre of Czech film, comedy. And comedies – especially if they are based on cultural specificity or puns untranslatable into other languages – allegedly do not travel very well. Especially if that culture does not belong to one of the English speaking ones…) and even though the KVIFF belongs to the so-called "A" festival category, making it part of the club of the big names like Cannes, Venice, or Berlin.

In 2011 this circumstance led to the fact that the audience was confronted with a surprisingly high number of very solid regional productions, such as Viditel’ný svet (The Visible World, 2011, dir. Peter Krištúfek) or Dom/The House by Zuzana Liovás (2011). However, both of these films are from Slovakia and both ironically feature first class Czech actors (Ivan Trojan and Miroslav Krobot). Whereas The Visible World had its world premiere in the Karlovy Vary City Theatre and competed in the highly observed section "East of the West," The House had been shown already at the Berlinale in February. This film by a young Slovak director was chosen for "Variety’s Ten European Filmmakers to Watch."

The competition "East of the West" has turned into a rather influential showcase of talent from Eastern and Central Europe,(This is why Eastern Europe delegates from other festivals (e.g. Nikolai Nikitin, the selector for Eastern Europe at the Berlinale), curators from the US and cinematheques prefer to come to Karlovy Vary to enjoy the preselection of films from the Eastern European, Post-Soviet (including the Baltic states and Central Asia) and Balkan areas.) which can be explained by its clear outline and branding, compared to popular, but „foggy" section titles like "Horizons" or "Forum." Some of the "East of the West" films are cutting-edge and more deserving of attention than the films in the main competition. This was the case with last year’s „Special Mention" by the "East of the West" Jury, The Temptation of St. Tony (Püha Tõnu kiusamine, 2009) by Estonian director Veiko Õunpuu. This self-taught film-maker managed to add an Estonian flag to the European map of film countries. The dark Temptation of St. Tony seems to drive all Lynchean nightmares home in a (Post-)European country governed by rampant capitalism, incarnated in a severely hopeless black-and-white Estonia. The story of an odd couple (an Estonian business man and his randomly acquired Russian girlfriend) ends in a lethal club called Das Goldene Zeitalter (sic!). The film is an excellent example of a film with a truly global concern displaying a highly local feel. One could say the same about the two mentioned Slovak contributions in 2011 by Krištúfek and by Liová, only that they are less acutely interested in economical/national catastrophes but rather in the breakdown of Central Europe’s shrine of intimacy, the family.

Many recent Czech films are set in the 1970's: Ivan Trojan’s Identity Card and Pouta/Walking Too Fast by Radim Špaček. Osmdesát dopisů /Eighty Letters by Václav Kadrnka is set in 1987 (http://www.artmargins.com/index.php/podcast/119-interviews/647-vaclav-kadrnka-in-conversation-with-natascha-drubek). This year in "East of the West," we find a Czech film that is not set in the past, Nic proti ničemu/Nothing against Nothing (CZ, 2011). The debut of Petr Marek deals with the topic of adoption and NGOs. Here it should be mentioned that a third of all full-length features come from first directors, but in the section "East of the West" it rises to half. The prize in this section went to the road movie Pankot ne e mrtov (Punk´s Not Dead, Macedonia/ Serbia 2011, R: Vladimir Blaževski).

33 Women Directors and Judi Dench at the 46th Edition

Although venerated Eva Zaoralová stepped down from her post as artistic director, replaced by her colleague Karel Och, women directors stayed strong in KVIFF this year. Films by 33 women directors were shown (this makes 20%), among them Urszuła Antoniak’s unsettling Code Blue (Netherlands/Denmark 2011, coproduced by Zentropa) which seems to be in dialogue with Temptation of St. Tony from last year. Antoniak’s figure is a fragile killer nurse; however, in the end, her lethal arts of intimacy have to succumb to the rather violent tastes of a man who shares her fondness of Doctor Zhivago. Both films chose scenes of sexual massacres as a representation of the state of the individual in (post-) European and Post-Soviet societies.

Most of these women directors are in their thirties and early forties, some even younger, including Ziska Riemann from Germany (her film Lollipop Monster, 2011, has been compared with the 1966 film Daisies by Věra Chytilová, a female take on the Czech New Wave); Andrea Blaugrund Nevins with her documentary The Other F Word (USA 2010) about fathers in American underground music, which was a hit with the audience; young Lisa Aschan from Sweden with a film about malicious teenage girls Apflickorna/She Monkeys (Sweden 2011); Alex Stapleton with her enjoyable documentary on Roger Corman; Željka Suková with a semidocumentary hommage to her granny: Marijne/Marija’s Own)(This film was awarded the FEDEORA-Preis (Federation of Film Critics of Europe and the Mediterranean).), Alice Rohrwacher from Italy (Corpo celeste / Heavenly Body, 2011); Keti Machavariani from Georgia (Marilivit tetri / Salt White, 2011), and Zuzana Liová.

There are very few Czech women directors and they work mostly in the documentary genre, such as Erika Hníková who presented her film Nesvatbov / Matchmaking Mayor, CZ, SK 2010). The "matchmaking mayor" tries to improve the demographic situation in his village by cajoling its singles to choose a partner during Formanesque ballroom dances. A different type of matchmaker was film and theatre actress Judi Dench who said that now she found a "a wife" for her Oscar. She was talking about the female figure holding the Crystal Globe for Contribution to World Cinema, which was bestowed to her in Karlovy Vary in 2011.

The challenge for the festival is to keep the successful balance of local and international audiences, national and international cinema, and East and West. The 46th edition seemed to be fully aware of this role.

Eyes Looking For a Head to Inhabit, curated by Aleksandra Jach, Joanna Sokołowska, Katarzyna Słoboda and Magdalena Ziółkowska, Museum of Art Łódź, 30 September, 2011-11 December, 2011.

The exhibition at the Museum of Art in Łódź celebrates the 80th anniversary of the International Collection of Modern Art, which was created by members of the Polish constructivist avantgarde: Katarzyna Kobro and Władysław Strzemiński, with the effective help of Jan Brzękowski and Henryk Stażewski, who together constituted the "a.r." (revolutionary artists) group. This historical collection, encompassing a variety of contemporary artists' works ranging from van Doesburg, through Leger, to Arp and Ernst, from cubism to surrealism, was the symbolic beginning of the presently existing Museum.

Eyes Looking For a Head to Inhabit, curated by Aleksandra Jach, Joanna Sokołowska, Katarzyna Słoboda and Magdalena Ziółkowska, Museum of Art Łódź, 30 September, 2011-11 December, 2011.

The exhibition at the Museum of Art in Łódź celebrates the 80th anniversary of the International Collection of Modern Art, which was created by members of the Polish constructivist avantgarde: Katarzyna Kobro and Władysław Strzemiński, with the effective help of Jan Brzękowski and Henryk Stażewski, who together constituted the "a.r." (revolutionary artists) group. This historical collection, encompassing a variety of contemporary artists' works ranging from van Doesburg, through Leger, to Arp and Ernst, from cubism to surrealism, was the symbolic beginning of the presently existing Museum. In the 1930s it was one of the first modern art museums in the world, established mainly as a result of exchanges between artists as well as donations. Today the original collection is not only part of a much larger collection of exhibits, but a symbol of its significant legacy, marking its identity as the "institution of the avantgarde."(For a broader historical reflection on this institutional identity, see: Andrzej Turowski, “Muzeum – instytucja awangardy”, Awangardowe marginesy, Warszawa 1998.)

Opening a collection of modern abstract art in 1931 in Łódź, an industrial city in the center of Poland, meant finding a temporary home for the utopian endeavours that fed on avantgarde cosmopolitism and visions of modernization. Strzemiński, who was the main inspirer of this collection, had previously been acquainted with the new kind of art museums that avantgarde artists in Russia had organized after the Revolution. After 1922, the year he left Russia for his native Poland, among his many artistic, organizational and educational activities, Strzemiński dreamed of creating a similar collection of contemporary art, which would become a live embodiment of artists' ideas, a tool for changing minds and constructing the future. This dream appeared to have come to fulfillment in 1931, when the municipality of Łódź formally welcomed the "a.r." group's gift and the International Collection of Modern Art was exposed to public viewing in the Municipal Museum of History and Art in Łódź. This happy event was both the effect of artists' generosity and the openness of administrating leftist officials. However, this did not mean an immediate acceptance of Strzemiński's ideas – for the majority of the public at the time, modern art still remained completely "outlandish", burdened with the unfavorable associations of "bolshevism" and communism. The new museum exhibition was barely mentioned in the local press. Despite their wider recognition in international avantgarde circles, Strzemiński and Kobro remained isolated in their efforts and marginalized on the local artistic scene.

This sense of "isolation", which became bitterly apparent in the history of the Łódź Avantgarde, is to some extent still a worry for art institutions. Eyes Looking for a Head to Inhabit approaches this fact openly, but in a way that is also humorous and inviting. The show's title may be read as a punning metaphor of the modern artist's social and cultural position as an outsider and visionary, searching for a new community and trying to find a ground for his ideas. More specifically, the lonely "eyes" may be a cunning reference to Strzemiński's Theory of Vision and his concept of "visual consciousness," which implied that developing possibilities of seeing and conceiving steadily open humanity's way to the future. Besides this reference to the avantgarde's leadership, the title strikingly signalizes a quasi-surreal disorientation resulting from a gap between our physical, bodily understanding and new counterintuitive interpretations of the world as supplied by the modern sciences. Modern physics and new technologies changed the conditions we live in to such an extent that "»true reality,« the physical world, has receded entirely from the range of human senses."(Hannah Arendt, “The Conquest of Space and the Stature of Man” (1963), Between Past and Future. Eight Exercises in Political Thought, New York, 1968. [http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-conquest-of-space-and-the-stature-of-man; date of entry: 23-11-2011].) Modern art also had its part in turning the world upside down and putting it in reverse. By placing avantgarde projects and experiments within a broader frame of reference, the exhibition goes beyond questioning their specific artistic traditions, and focuses instead on the twentieth-century futurist imagination – the artistic expressions and reflexes of "the age of man's detachment from the world" (Odo Marquard). Bold cosmic phantasies that were a part of the avantgarde frame of mind, visions of modern architecture and design go side by side with "an-architectural" and performative practices, which offer more contemporary revisions and re-workings of modern projects. In Eyes Looking for a Head to Inhabit they come together as various proposals for modern cosmopolitics – all related to the question of how to inhabit modern space – mentally, physically and socially.

The tripartite structure of the exhibition traces the collection's historical migration from one place to another: from the classicist town hall (the Municipal Museum of History and Art, where the "a.r." collection was primarily held) to the Poznański Palace (where it was placed after the war) and finally, in 2005, to the newly adapted building at Ogrodowa Street. In each site one may find some interwoven references to the patronal figures of Strzemiński and Kobro and their work, but by no means did the curators attempt to reconstruct the past. By going back to the original place – the former Municipal Museum, which is now the State Archive – they exposed viewers to the site where the collection was housed at the beginning. At the same time, people who visit this place for other professional or bureaucratic reasons may be surprised to find a visual narrative there, commenting on Strzemiński's theories and other art pieces installed in the hall. These small interventions remind us of the building's changing historical functions and the visible tension between the world it represented, on the one hand, and the radical modernity that arrived here in 1931 with avantgarde art, on the other. The intertwining issue of migration and modernization – which is strongly inscribed into the multinational past of the city – is also evoked in the works presented: in Josef Dabernig's film Jogging (2000) we see a man in his car driving on a highway without aim, passing empty spaces and overly large modern constructions that clash with equally unreal remnants of rural life. In Ruth Oppenheim's Three Suitcase Stories (2006) the meeting of East and West is metaphorically rendered in a dreamlike, fairytale atmosphere, though not without some bitter accents. In her second video-fantasy, Going Home, we are reminded of a feeling of strangeness that finding one's original homeland may bring.

The topic of migration finds a more specific continuation in Jadwiga Sawicka's work dedicated to Katarzyna Kobro. In her ms² installation Sawicka uses Kobro's 1937 manifesto, a fervent polemic against the popular trends in national Polish sculpture. The text can be seen and heard in two languages – Polish and Russian, which are repeated, collaged together and partially eclipsed by one another.

This interference of voices and words reminds us that Kobro's first language was Russian; in Poland, being able to assimilate in a milieu that was culturally alien and often inhospitable was a great endeavor. In Sawicka's rewriting, Kobro's motto: VICTORY of the intellect's active forces over the state of irrationalism and CHAOS, applied to her unistic conception of "spatial composition," assumes new emotional meanings and suggests an inner struggle behind the perceptible layer of rational control. Beyond the usual unitary identification of Katarzyna Kobro as a member of the Polish, or international, avantgarde, looms an identity that seems much more compounded and fractured.

In the main exhibition space by the entrance, together with Łukasz Skąpski's Glasses for Looking Into the Sky and a 1982 reconstruction of the 1913 Futurist opera Victory over the Sun, our eyes and minds are lifted out of the gravitational field of the earth into cosmic space. The famous work by Kruchenykh, Matiushin, and Malevich opens up a narrative of the twentieth-century conquest of space and future technological improvements that could replace the natural environment. With all their utopian overtones, however, those visions appear to be far from simple pragmatic optimism: in Victory's grotesque performance, the Futurist pathos already mingles with the anxiety of catastrophe. In the 1960s and ‘70s, for artists coming from the Eastern Bloc – Julius Koller with his conceptual project U.F.O. (Universal Futuristic Operation); or Stano Filko's Future Exploration of the Universe — the turn towards other possible worlds expressed, above all the artists' subjective detachment from the hardening, oppressive reality in which they lived. Dreaming of other, extraterrestrial spaces – which seemed already to be within man's reach – offered a point of view from which the existent political barriers could be virtually suspended and made relative. The new cosmic explorations were enthusiastically welcomed; in the background, however, we are reminded of the political circumstances around those triumphant conquests as a part of the global battle for power during the cold war.

On the other side of the iron curtain, in the context of the technological revolution that came in the decades after the war, one may observe a rising perception of the world as a totalized plastic organism. The new sense of cosmic forces, which –contrary to what Walter Benjamin had predicted(Walter Benjamin, “One-Way Street”, Selected Writings, vol. 1, ed. by Michael Jennings and Marcus Bullock, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., London, 1996, p. 486-487.) – did not vanish in modern times, but was revived again with the findings of modern physics and new powerful technologies. This new global vision is relevant in Le Corbusier's manifesto of architectonic "humanism" (Poème électronique, 1958) presented as a universal antidote against the barbarism of war. Even more strikingly, this sense of omnipresent vitalism is expressed in subversive urban and architectural visions of the 1960s, as well as in the biomorphic forms of Frederic Kiesler's Unfinished House. Fantastic constructions of Haus-Rucker-Co's new homes, and technical apparatuses for regulating and transforming one's perception of the environment appear today both as a record of extreme technological optimism and an echo of the fears of the atomic age. In series of works, such as Gustav Metzger's Mobil or Matta-Clark's Dancing in the Threes, the viewer may find the early manifestations of a new ecological consciousness, which demanded to renounce the traditional anthropocentric point of view. The harmonious reconciliation of elementary natural forces and human technologies finds a playful manifestation in Vadim Fiškin's Kaplegaf (2005). Computer technologies and natural processes are meticulously orchestrated here to create a "multimedia" spectacle - a combination of spatial drawing and a musical concerto - in which the central role is played by falling and splashing water drops. Technical appliances become here a part of the "natural" multiplicity of free, active forces, much like in Cage and Cunningham's choreographic Variations (1965) where the entire space comes to resonate with the sounds produced by the dancers' movements, amplified by electroacoustic appliances.

The curators of the exhibition and the artists rightly recognize the potentially oppressive side of modern utopian projects and the way in which comprehensive systems structure the world they once proposed. Since the rise of postmodern critique, we have realized that the modern longing for rational order is ambiguously close to totalitarian control. In the final section of the exhibition this ominous association may be fully experienced in Nikita Kagan's Procedure Room, a series of decorated plates that make a double reference to the constructivist tradition and to the disciplinary methods applied by the communist state. In Anna Orlikowska's architectonic models, bearing a mimetic resemblance to Kobro's spatial constructions, one can observe how spatial openness may be unnoticeably transformed into threatening closure. Nevertheless, in the exhibition's polyphonic narrative there is also another, more optimistic vision of the avantgarde legacy, one which is closer to the body and to John Cage's principles. Ultimately, it is by no means utterly unthinkable to see Strzemiński's and Kobro's visions of structuring space – based on their principles of unity and equality – enter into logical proximity with the structuring rhythms of dance and music. Dancing can unite people and give them, as Adrian Piper argues in Funk Lessons, "an exhilarating experience of going beyond one's self," it offers a form of concord without subordination, a provisional community that allows for differences. The utopian aspirations of the avantgarde may seem minimized by suggesting this kind of connection, but they are still kept as an authentic proposition for the future (cosmic) community. In the meantime, this exhibition – without even a hint of didacticism – offers us samples of utopia, with the artists' works supplying us with sensitive "eyes" that may be helpful for finding a new sense of our position in space.