Linternationale Post War Avant Gardes Between 1957 and 1986
Linternationale Post War Avant Gardes Between 1957 and 1986
Linternationale Post War Avant Gardes Between 1957 and 1986
LInternationale
Post-War
Avant-Gardes
Between
1957 and 1986
Edited by Christian Hller
Table of contents
13
63
162
Open
Bart de Baere
14
Viktor Misiano
85
An Exercise in Affects
177
Bojana Pikur
Zdenka Badovinac
31
Museum of Affects,
Moderna galerija, Ljubljana (2011/12)
Bart de Baere, Bartomeu Mar,
with Leen De Backer,
Teresa Grandas and Bojana Pikur
Teresa Grandas
192
106
203
Age of Change
Case studies
Christian Hller
204
37
Prologue: LInternationale
119
Zdenka Badovinac,
Bart De Baere, Charles Esche,
Bartomeu Mar and
Georg Schllhammer
Circumscribing
the period
42
Methodology
120
Bartomeu Mar
205
43
A. ARTISTS
Georg Schllhamer
215
Jlius Koller/Dialectics
of Self-Identification
Daniel Grn
134
Boris Buden
Branka Stipancic
224
52
Histories and
Their Different
Narrators
145
230
Art as Mousetrap:
The Case of Laibach
Zdenka Badovinac
Eda ufer
Ksenya Gurshtein
Table of contents
239
306
365
Close
Vitaly Komar
250
316
257
324
266
A European
Institutional Effort/
Art in Europe
after 68 (1980) and
Chambres dAmis (1986)
Retroavantgarde
Jan Hoet
Teresa Grandas
366
Spirits of Internationalism,
Van Abbemuseum,
Eindhoven/Museum
van Hedendaagse Kunst
Antwerpen, Antwerpen
Charles Esche, Steven
ten Thije, Bart De Baere,
Jan De Vree and Anders
Kreuger
403
CONTRIBUTORS
Inke Arns
330
273
B. Monuments
Arrays of
Internationalism
274
331
A HugeAmusement-Park
Exhibition/Vision in Motion (1959)
SouthernEastern
Contact Zones
Jan Ceuleers
Cristina Freire
285
342
Overcoming Alienation/
New Tendencies (19611973)
From the
International
to the Cosmopolitan
Armin Medosch
Piotr Piotrowski
297
Global Art
Nancy Adajania
351
Open
Open
Museum of
Parallel Narratives,
Museu dArt
Contemporani
de Barcelona (MACBA),
Barcelona (2011)
Zdenka Badovinac
The exhibition Museum of Parallel Narratives presents a selection of works from the Arteast 2000+
Collection of the Moderna galerija in Ljubljana, the
first-ever collection of postwar avant-garde Eastern
European art, and seeks to discover what sort of art
system, if any, accompanied the production, presentation and musealization of these artworks. Museum
of Parallel Narratives speaks of artists who worked on
the edges of a well-ordered world and its art system,
and, indeed, addresses its own position at the edge
of an era that has seen an acceleration in the establishment of an art system in the space that can still
be justifiably called Eastern Europe. The exhibition
is also connected with the principal idea behind the
wide-ranging project, LInternationale, of which it
forms a part.
With all of these elements, the exhibition goes
beyond the usual attempts to present Eastern
European art, which in the main have sought only to
offer a condensed version of the art of the region,
without engaging with the complexities of its context. While providing a comprehensive overview of
other artists, broader artistic movements or the conditions of producing such art.
A number of significant Eastern European artists, such as Artpool (Gyrgy Galntai, Jlia Klaniczay),
Zofia Kulik, Jlius Koller and Lia Perjovschi and CAA,
devoted a large part of their activities to creating archives that today serve as extremely valuable
resources concerning the unofficial art in the various
socialist countries as well as its conditions of production. Especially in the 1980s, artists felt a strong
need to self-contextualise their own art production.
This interest has undergone a resurgence in the past
decade, with artists of different generations conceptualising their work as, among other things, a tool of
historicization. For the Museum of Parallel Narratives
exhibition, Alexander Dorner, the IRWIN group and
Mladen Stilinovi have developed special projects,
categorized here as fictive histories. In these projects,
the artistswho have often dealt with the processes
of historicization in their workdraw particular
attention to the ideology of art collections and, at the
same time, to the communicative power of art. Their
works present fictive mini-collections, as it were, in
which connections that not so long ago would have
been impossible between Eastern and Western artists are now realizable. These artists were given the
task of selecting works from the Van Abbemuseum in
Post-War Avant-Gardes between 1957 and 1986 19
Artpool
Active Archive 19792003
The idea behind the Artpool project is to create an
Active Archive built from specific artistic activities.
Post-War Avant-Gardes between 1957 and 1986 22
Between 1971 and 1987 we were the so called artistic couple; we jointly signed all of our works. Yet, we
had met earlier, in 1961, when we were both attending the evening classes of sculpture at the House of
Culture of the Youth. Later, we studied at the Academy
of Fine Arts in Warsaw, so we have studied sculpture
for 10 years altogether. Having finished our studies
we were expectedaccording to the then dominant
ideologyto design tombstones, build monuments,
decorate venues for rallies, meetings, manifestations... However, as early as 1967/68 Kwiek ceased
to sculpt normally. He started to transform his
sculptures, recording each stage of this activity with
a camera. A year later he even added a live model to
a clay composition. What interested me was a projection as such. At the time I was living with the camera
at my eye.
The materials presented here illustrate how far
our interests and practice drifted away from what
the establishment/authorities/state/family had
CAA/CAA
Contemporary Art
Archive/Centre
for Art Analysis
Frame for contemporary art/culture
A database (international) focusing on art theory,
cultural studies, critical theory
ciplinary meetings with professionals from various fields. The studio as a public space;
1997today: In the general context of overproduction. The international archive of contemporary artthematic and chronologic selection,
acapsule of knowledge;
1999today: Center for Art Analysis: preserving
a space for criticism and intellectual attitudes.
Detective: permanent research from the perspective of an Eastern artist with international
career. Being too late in the common historya
detective searching for sense, hidden and lost
ideas, works and artist from local, regional,
international cultural/art histories;
2001today, Dizzydent with critical attitude for a
professional articulate context.
IRWIN
Encounters, 2011
In this work, the IRWIN group sets pairs of artworks in
dialogue, where one of the paired works is from the
East and the other from the West. The Western works
come from the collections of the Van Abbemuseum
and MuHKA, while the works from Eastern Europe
are predominantly from the collection of the
Moderna galerija; all three museums are part of the
LInternationale network.
The works are set in dialogue on the basis of both
similarities and differences. In terms of form and subject matter, the paired works resemble one another,
while the differences in their contexts remain invisible. Similar juxtapositions can be found today in
many museums that include art which until recently
was excluded from Western museums. What we see,
then, are relationships that exist more on a formal
level, while the context is still too little visible and
may even seem unimportant. In Encounters, however,
this invisibility becomes what is most important. Or to
put it another way, what seems most important in this
work are the various processes that brought about
the apparent similarities.
Post-War Avant-Gardes between 1957 and 1986 26
A work by Ivan Koari from 1963 presents a textual description of casts of the interiors of objects;
Rachel Whiteread (born, coincidentally, in 1963) later
made similar casts of interiors in a physical form. In
works by the OHO movement and Guy Mees, three
young people display their playful youthin the
OHO work, they do this in the form of an equilateral
triangle; in Meess work, this happens in the form
of a right triangle. On the visual level alone, such an
encounter of similar presences tells us nothing about
the fact that the first group did this in order to disrupt the drabness of socialist life, while the second
group were playing at a kind of democratic hierarchy.
The pairing of works by Gerhard Richter and Bogoslav
Kala shows us most directly that the couplings are
primarily about a difference in causes and methods.
While Richters offset print was created from his
famous painting Kerze (Candle) on the basis of a photograph, Kalas picture of a candle was made with
a prototype of the painting machine Kala himself
invented in 19711972.
IRWINs Encounters tells us that artworks can
encounter each other in very different ways; in
museum collections we often overplan such encounters and do not allow for coincidences or collisions
that could result from parallel processes. These
Encounters are, in essence, a kind of Duchampian
Mladen Stilinovi
Hysteria Makes History/
After Paul De Vree,
2011
My concept is perfectly simple. I selected works
by Belgian and Dutch artists (with the exception of
Robert Filliou) from the 1960s and 1970s. Because
the exhibition is large and complicated, I wanted to
present works that were simple, legible, and witty. Of
course, this is a very personal selection and does not
represent any whole. Each work is what it is. Fig. 6
Alexander Dorner
Sol LeWittOriginal and
Facsimile, diptych,
2011
Sol LeWittOriginal and Facsimile belongs among
such works as Salon de Fleurus (New York), Museum
of American Art (MoAA) (Berlin), Kunsthistorisches
Mausoleum (Belgrade), and a few other projects,
which contemplate the history of art as the history of
museum collections. Their aim is to assume an external view on art history through the re-enactment of
certain famous art collections that contributed to the
creation of its canon. What interests these meta-collections is not only the manner in which the dominant
history was constructed but also the main postulates
of this history, including, for instance, the concept
oforiginality.
Sol LeWittOriginal and Facsimile questions not
only identity and tradition, but also the notions of
the originality of the artwork and the uniqueness of
the author, which are among the basic categories for
constructing the historical narrative. It opens up the
possibility of establishing a completely different kind
destroyed in 1936, during the Third Reich. By exhibiting abstract art, Dorners museum represented an
important part of the history prior to the founding of
Museum of Modern Art in New York and its formation
of the dominant canon of original art.
In the context of the exhibition Parallel Narratives,
Fictive Histories can be understood as one of the possible external points of view. A similar logic could be
transferred to other parallel histories, including that
of Eastern European art, which was often characterised as unoriginal and seen as lagging behind the art
of the West. Fig. 7
Open
Museum of Affects,
Moderna galerija,
Ljubljana (2011/12)
Bart de Baere, Bartomeu Mar,
with Leen De Backer, Teresa Grandas and Bojana Pikur
2. Desire for
Symbolic Social Change
Creation of Alternative
Systems
An approach to the art-versus-politics dilemma that
may lead to a credible although not necessarily pragmatic stance is the creation of alternative
or parallel systems potentially capable of improving
society. Artists invest much of their credibility in creating systems that make sense at least within their
own practice.
Robert Filliou
Jef Geys
Grupo de Artistas de Vanguardia
Andrej Monastirski/Andrei Monastirsky
Muntadas
Skupina OHO/OHO Group, Milenko Matanovi
Skupina OHO/OHO Group, Marko Poganik
VideoNou/Servei de Vdeo Comunitari
Dan Flavin
Julije Knifer
Guy Mees
Josep Ponsat
Ilija oki
5. Enhancing
Perception
Enhancing and refining perception as a buildingblock for art and a pro-active stance for relating to
the world is at the same time a strategy (an approach
particularly well-suited to visual formats) and a fundamental, almost ontological, attitude to the possibilities offered by art. The resulting works usually
demand perceptual precision also of their viewers,
whether they are focused on the immediacy of an
event or on meaning as it is mediated by various languages available to artists.
a. Articulating the World as Immediacy
John Baldessari
Stanley Brouwn
James Lee Byars
Richard Hamilton
Ren Heyvaert
Jii Kovanda
On Kawara
Ed Ruscha
Josip Vanita
Marina Abramovi
Eugnia Balcells
Esther Ferrer
Ion Grigorescu
Tibor Hajas
Jacques Lizne
Jan Mloch
Carlos Pazos
Petr tembera
Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven
6. Enhancing Intensity
Articulating
the Self in the World
as Experience
Intensity may be both perceptual (on the level of
input) and expressive (gestural or otherwise, on the
level of output), but it is usually just as strategically
applied to art-making as are other methods such as
reflection or building systems. Yet intensity, also of
the physical kind, does not preclude criticality. The
artists Self is articulated in the world, as an image
of the world, and can be used as an instrument for
understanding and changing it.
Post-War Avant-Gardes between 1957 and 1986 36
Open
Prologue:
LInternationale
Zdenka Badovinac, Bart De Baere, Charles Esche,
Bartomeu Mar and Georg Schllhammer
publications, seminars and the sharing of our collections. Through coming together, we can discover
more about our individual strengths and weaknesses,
we can exchange information and experiences that
can enrich our activities in the public domain, and
we can cease the pointless competition for cultural
capital that reduces art institutions to tools of economic development. We also want to offer an alternative to the bigger is better or franchise model of
museums based in core northern European capitals,
with their apparent desire to deliver a centralized
narrative covering European and world art over the
last fifty to sixty years. We would claim that the narrative of the last years is still a contested one, and it
is our ambition to offer different interpretations from
the mainstream as well as to understand how artistic
practices are contextual and located. These cannot
be simply displaced as objects to construct a single
institutional vision of the significance of modern,
post-modern and contemporary art today. Neither
can they be marginalized as of only local concern
when set against the art produced in the urban powerhouses of the continent. If we are to build a genuine vision of a European culture in just dialogue
with the world, then constructing the conditions to
respect locality while striving for the richest transnational dialogue are an absolute imperative.
Parallel Histories/
Affective Museums/
Spirits of
Internationalism
The first project that the Internationale group has
undertaken is to unite our collections virtually and
draw on the total inheritance that we represent to
suggest new ways of understanding the period 1957
1986, or the high point of the Cold War between the
US and the USSR. The period is marked on the one
side by the Hungarian uprising at the end of 1956 and
the subsequent invasion by the Red Army that effectively registered the end of any potential for political
reform in post-war East Central Europe. At the other
end, 1986 represents the year of the financial Big
Bang that reduced the effective power of political
parties within Western Europe to one of economic
management. In between these dates, a vision for a
post-Holocaust, post-ethnically divided Europe was
slowly constructed on both sides of the ideological
divide. This Europe of the imagination was built not
least by artists and academics that played a significant role in speculating on a new kind of continental
Methodology
Methodology
Writing
History Without
a Prior Canon
Bartomeu Mar
One of the characteristics that unites cultural contexts as geographically disparate as the Iberian
Peninsula, the countries of Eastern Europe and a
handful of Latin American nations is the absence
of canons as a basis for writing recent art history.
Dictatorial regimes have always put more effort into
denying than affirming, and culture is one of those
areas in which denial, censorship and the lack of
freedom have been exercised more thoroughly in
these contexts. Ironically, those very absolutist governments and dictatorships are the ones who pretend to be in possession of The Canon.
Artistic creation has confronted situations of
censorship and the lack of freedom with similar
languages. In present-day China, artists such as Ai
Weiwei have ended up borrowing strategies for representation and subject matter that were taken up
earlier in the 1960s and 1970s. In spite of all efforts
to block, control or censor, there is never a total stagnation of information, and artists have always found
alternative circuits through which to gain visibility
for their work. The presentation and distribution of
Peninsula has not taken place 9.Nstor Garcain conditions similar to those in Canclini, Culturas
Hbridas. Estrategias
Central Europe and the Anglo- para entrar y salir de
Saxon world. The Latin American la modernidad, Grijalbo,
continent has had access to Mexico 1998.
forms and degrees of modernity that were very specific and unique, although different from the canonical forms. Both Africa and Asia have also come into
the present by way of varying degrees of access to
modernity, in its different political, economic, social
and aesthetic aspects and implications. While writers such as Nstor Garca-Canclini in Latin America
have taken up the uniqueness of those entrances
and exits in modernity,9 those countries on the
periphery of the European continent are now beginning to deal specifically with their own particular
contributions to the History of Art in capital letters. In
Eastern Europe authors such as Boris Groys and Piotr
Piotrowski, among others, have together produced a
substantial bibliography to stand alongside the solid
foundations of the contemporary heritage being
established on the part of museums and private initiatives. A countrys material heritage and historical
narrative are two symbiotic entities: one cannot exist
without the other. Logically, the acquisition of a material legacy, a collection of works, objects and documents precedes the establishment of the narratives
Post-War Avant-Gardes between 1957 and 1986 50
Methodology
Histories and
Their Different
Narrators
Zdenka Badovinac
The question I find crucial in my work related to historicizing Eastern European art is who does the historicizing. Who is the narrator? What is his or her
position? These questions immediately place historicizing with its related issues in the context of politics,
which over the last two decades has been, in my view,
the only appropriate way of setting about historicizing Eastern European art; that is, the art of a territory
that is decidedly geopolitical.
Let me start by explaining what historicizing
means to me. For me, the emphasis in historicizing is
on the process that yields not a single objective history, but a plurality of heterogeneous stories. Unlike
history, which presents itself as an objective and
impersonal result of study, historicization keeps the
various narrators and their voices in the foreground.
It is not possible to produce a single story from a multitude of different narratives, no matter how complex the analysis of the various positions; instead,
the variety of these positions should be preserved,
as should their narrators. This approach to history
gained prominence as new regions began to open up,
aroused interest in Eastern European art that retroactively stimulated the awareness of regional belonging
and of the urgent need to define shared characteristics. Thus the East itself increasingly began to use
the term Eastern European art, which had not been
widely used before. The problematic aspect of this
designation, which essentially puts the region in a
subordinate position, was seldom observed. A few
critics did, nonetheless, point out that the West had
in effect usurped universal art, labeling all other art
with regional epithets, thus placing non-Western art
in pre-modern time, which classified art according to
national schools.
Eastern European art is a term used by the
external narrator. During the time the world was
divided into the Eastern and Western blocs, this term
referred to some generalized notions of art being produced under ideological pressure in the unfree world.
According to the oral accounts of some people such
as Harald Szeemann, who were particularly influential
on the international art scene during the time of the
Cold War, many art professionals thought it somehow
best to simply ignore countries under communist dictatorships. Few renowned curators established longterm collaborations with Eastern artists. One such
curator was Pierre Restany, whose surviving archive
is among the most valuable sources of information on
Post-War Avant-Gardes between 1957 and 1986 54
even during the time the eastern 2.Between 1963 and 1992
parts of it were under socialist the Neue Galerie in Graz
staged biennial exhibiorder. One of the longest running tions entitled Trigon.
projects of this type was the Graz The first Trigon show
biennial Trigon.2 Covering prin- presented works from
Austria, Italy and former
cipally art produced in Italy, Yugoslavia. These counYugoslavia, and Austria, the aim tries were later joined
of the biennial was to revive the by guest countries
like Germany,
historical cultural space of Inner France, Great Britain,
Austria, that is to say, the core of Spain, Czechoslovakia,
the former Habsburg Monarchy. and Hungary.
Immediately after the collapse of Yugoslavia, an
extensive show was staged at the Neue Galerie in
Graz, entitled Identity : Difference. Platform Trigon
19401990. A Topography of Modernity, and curated
by Christa Steinle and Peter Weibel. Essentially a
retrospective of the Trigon series of exhibitions,
it aimed to investigate the artistic contributions
of these countries to the construction of modernity. Thus, primarily thanks to Peter Weibel, the tradition of Trigon continued in Graz also under the
new, changed circumstances. In the early 1990s,
Vienna, too in particular the Museum of Modern Art
(MUMOK) under its Hungarian director Lorand Hegy
stepped its activities up a notch to revive the common Central European cultural space. In 1993, Hegy
organized a special exhibition in the framework of
Post-War Avant-Gardes between 1957 and 1986 55
video interviews with certain key artists from the territory of Eastern European; these artists testimonies
are given prominence as one of the key narratives in
our collection. At the same time, oral histories trigger
reflection about an exhibition model that would not
be based solely on representation. With the opening
of the new territories and their histories, there has
emerged the need for an exhibition model that would
preserve as much as possible the space of unique
narratives that cannot be controlled or transformed.
Oral sources therefore are a necessary (if not sufficient) condition for a history of the non-hegemonic
classes, while they are less necessary for the history
of the ruling class who have had control over writing and therefore entrusted most of their collective
memory to written records.13
How to preserve the collective history of a space
that is in a subordinate position to the dominant
spaces with well-developed museum and discursive
systems and thus in a position to control also the history of those weaker than themselves? The kind of
historicizing I advocate should, in addition to providing a variety of narratives, draw attention to various
narrating positions, geopolitical, 13.Alessandro Portelli,
institutional, and individual. The The Peculiarities of
Oral History, History
question of the identity of the art Workshop Journal, No. 12,
of a region has now been replaced fall 1981, p.104.
Post-War Avant-Gardes between 1957 and 1986 61
Methodology
Approaching Art
through Ensembles
Bart de Baere
1. The Ensemble:
A Retrospective
An approach based on modes of existence might
lead to a situation in which museums acquire not
only works (sculptures, paintings, drawings, instal
lations) but also ensembles. Relations between con
stituent parts of ensembles might be specified, as well
as the possibilities of exhibiting fragments, separate
elements or one single element, the possibilities of
including an ensemble in a more extended context or
the possibilities of concentrating and dissolving it. We
would no longer be thinking of a standard framework
with permissible deviations, but
1.Bart De Baere,
instead of a network of relation
Joining the Present to
ships that might be realized but
Now, preparative text
does not have to be. Small periph
toThis is the Show ,
published in Kunst &
eral elements, which for instance
museumjournaal, 1994
often appear in works by Mark
1995, Volume 6, double
Manders, would be considered
new year issue, p.70.
This Is the Show itself arose from the observation during Documenta IX that there was no public
space for some of the relevant young artists of the
time. Gabriel Orozco, who at that time still worked in
the street, Mona Hatoum, whose work seemed to be
more about process than slides of her work were able
to show, the fascinating oeuvre of Honor dO that
had not yet surfaced in the art world but already flourished in his studio and in various alternative locations,
the dancing proposals of the Austrian ManfreDu
Schu: all these were ultimately left out, although a
young Documenta curator would have desired otherwise. The work of one of their peers, Eran Schaerf,
which was there, slotted between two Aue-Pavilions,
remained practically unseen at this Documenta. The
specific complexity in the approach of artists like
Jimmie Durham or Cildo Meireles was barely noticed
as such within the well-constructed exhibition that
Documenta IX nonetheless was. A construction that,
moreover, consciously sought to attain diversity in
terms of the artworks presented and thereby a more
intense composition of the exhibition. Fig. 1
This Is the Show is now seen as one of the first
process-based exhibitions, but was actually derived
from the intuitive notion that the space for art could
be addressed in a radically different way, i.e. as a
modulated time-space where a sense of eternity
on young artists who appeared to be offering something urgent, with a raison dtre that had not yet
found its visibility. The project tried to create this
visibility, scantily or not at all justified in terms of
philosophy and art history and even less supported
by the interest in process and the relational aesthetic that were still to come. This visibility was
instead negatively determinedby the unacceptable reduction of art to products of a Bonfire-ofthe-Vanities-style yuppie-ism, with its new money,
its applied technologies and short attention span.
We are now far away from the moment of This
Is the Show and the initial use of the ensemble
notion. We can now seeor hopethat the surge
of object-based art, from the Neue Wilde to the neominimal sculpture that was to oppose them, marked
at the same time the beginning of a new phase and
the end of an era.
That era of Americanism had extended art history to beyond the bourgeois period in which it was
created. It had already appropriated the early avantgarde and stripped it of its intractability. It had
reduced Malevich to painting and Rodchenko to
sculpture. The early avant-garde was celebrated after
the Second World War, but it was as if its body and
soul had become separated. The body of the classical early avant-garde, its study of form, had delivered
Post-War Avant-Gardes between 1957 and 1986 66
2. The Broadening
of Art
The bourgeoisie likes counter positions to its vested
interests, but (only) in moderation. For a long period
of time, art museums have dedicated themselves
exclusively to artworks but hardly to any other activities that artists have been engaged in. This has much
to do with a tendency to excoriate the uncontrollable
passions that avant-garde artists have developed for
reigniting the art tradition. The opening up of the area
for activity in visual art could be seen as three major
movements:
Post-War Avant-Gardes between 1957 and 1986 67
B. The Neo-Avant-Garde
Cultivating the Art Space
The neo-avant-garde will have more limited ambitions from the late 1950s onwards. They will try, in
different ways, to create an autonomous space
for art and thereby articulate a number of alternative possibilities to make art visible for the public.
New categories of form are established as genres
in their own right with their own distribution channels: performance, video, artists books, mail
art Socio-political engagement is one possibilitywith Joseph Beuyss commitment to the Green
Party as the most visible expressionbut no longer
an inherent, integrated ambition for all art. Jimmie
Durham becomes disappointed, despite the rapidly
growing appreciation for his work, when he makes
art again in New York in the 1980s after his years of
political activism. His works do not provoke serious
discussion but are only seen as representation of
engagement. Art strives to become a field of values unto itself, which in some segments enters into
critical alliances with the market and elsewhere
forms alternative networks, such as the Situationist
International and Fluxus. In some cases, like that of
visual poetry in Western Europe, it even remains
outside the art world.
C. Freedom as an Element of
Commercialization in Recent Decades
When the post-war structure of the world begins to
fall apart in the 1980s, the entire range of possibilities
for artistic expression pass into common property and
artists are no longer compelled to work in niches but
can create their own mix of broad exhibition platforms
and marketing operations, with or without the initial
stakes that lay behind these 20th century traditions.
The way of painting of the transavanguardia is an
expression of this space that was suddenly open, but
this is just as true of the new formatting of photography to match the scale and scope of painting, and of
the countless hybrid forms that artists are using.
3. The Inevitability
of Particular
Topographies, Trajectories
and Finalities
These three movements of the 20th centurytaking
on the world, creating a space for art, playing with a
mix of possible expressionscorrespond with three
major areas in which we may now formulate a notion
of art that leads on to ensembles. From this renewed
focus of the present, we may approach the historical avant-garde differently and realize that the challenges that have become explicit today were actually
(already) on the agenda throughout the 20th century.
Artists help decide the exhibition title and campaign image, which function as a summary of the project. The title and the basic image are inevitably just
as much a part of the art as the works they announce,
and not only in a project such as the collaborative
work realized at MHKA in 2011 by Lawrence Weiner
and Liam Gillick, two artists who explicitly position
themselves at the edge of this limit.
Today it is in fact expected of artists that they
manage the intellectual circumstances around their
work. This too they have already been doing for long,
at least to some extent, and now it has become an
everyday practice that is often also consciously
formalized. Artists govern initial information and
reflection on their work, commissioning writers and
providing them with input. Such interventions do
not amount to the gathering of laudatory speeches
to serve as glorified sales pitches. It initiates points
of views, modes of approaching the work When an
artist like Luc Tuymans masterminds the content of
his catalogues and even makes available detailed
access to his visual sources, it is something he considers himself obliged to do as a countermeasure.
With this excessive openness he seeks to disarm
the anecdotal and content-orientated approach and
make it a harmless, liberating measure for conveying
anything that concerns him, rather than offering it to
their documentation, none of these exist in themselves but rather as phenomena in the field of media
traditions where recognition continually reverberates. The decision to sign up for one of the many
versions of the neo-avant-garde, which developed
into genres, is motivated by convention but inevitably also plays with it. Artists may now oscillate back
and forth between media that previously seemed
irreconcilable, between various manifestations that
used to be seen as either avant-garde or reactionary. Sculptures morph into installations that invade
space and are subsequently reformatted to become
sculptures again. Performance artists may also make
paintings; painters may produce videos.
M HKA, just like many Flemish private collectors, possesses three paintings by Wilhelm Sasnal,
in addition to a video work that he himself considers important and a long series of drawings. Each of
these is a work unto itself and could have been sold
as such, but at the Gwangju Biennale Sasnal showed
them as a single coherent work with four interlaced
storylines. The MHKA also has a comic book and a
board game by this artist. The passage inside traditions is a role that artists choose for themselves, a
casting of themselves that becomes part of their proposal. It lends sharpness to a scene in which interdisciplinarity has become the standard. The same
material can simultaneously lead to a giveaway publication for Agns B and to costly photographs in low
quantities for the market. Whereas multiples were
long considered derivative material and the uniqueness of the work still remained an implicit basic condition, the basic condition is now the multiple, even
in painting, where seriality has become commonplace. The edition is determined as much by practical
circumstanceswhat works best in the market, how
much time the maker wants to spend on something
as by the fact that it has become a decision in itself
for artists. One still remains a valid option, because
this number meets the viewer on an equal footing
that of uniquenessbut five is also almost one in our
overpopulated world.
4. A Respectful Relationship
with Contemporary Art
A. Its about insights
When art claimed its independence from the avantgarde by breaking away from the social consensus
it also made itself homeless, displaced. Art is no
Post-War Avant-Gardes between 1957 and 1986 75
longer about something that is, but about something that might be. The 19th century salon painters
were promptly incorporated into the museums. With
avant-garde art came a disconnection between the
production of art and its societal acceptance, which
we might call museumization. For a long time the
best cases were exceptions, from artist-driven early
modern art museums such as MoMA in New York
and Museum Sztuki in Ldz up to that moment in the
1960s when the museums dams were temporarily
broken by now legendary exhibitions.
In the last two decades it has finally become
common for artists not only to receive a place but
also to be able to make their own space in museums. Collecting practice still does not always know
how to deal with this. The tendency is still to identify a collection with artworks. If collecting practice wants to retain the context of those artworks, it
will normally expand its acquisition from traditionally formatted work towards whole installations,
thereby petrifying variable ensemble situations
into monolithic, quasi-sculptural arrangements of
diverse elements, setting once and for all a correct and fixed context. At the same time, however,
artists use these same museums as an integral
mobile space. Can collecting practice accommodate not only the form but also the spirit of
exhibition with the artist in question is being organized that more thoroughly reveals the consistency
and setting of his or her work.
For such things, however, institutions increasingly rely on external specialists: they let external
writers write for publications put together by external publishers. Perhaps this seems more professional
and efficient, but in practice it means that afterwards
the institution itself may not even possess the final
digital version of the text. Indeed, final corrections
are made in the PDF that is filed with the publisher,
graphic designer and printer. The communication
with interested parties is not necessarily connected
with institutional intelligence. The mediation system
may sometimes be interactive and diversified, but it
is also a professionally structured instrument that is
self-reliant and, in addition, was often likewise created by external partners.
Since the 1970s museums have kept themselves obsessively busy with completing surveys
of their objects, a task they never seem to be able
to complete. They have coupled this survey with an
ever more perfectionist conservation and management apparatus. Additional information and insights
can be appended to the more sophisticated databases of this kind, but this is not the core task of the
inventories.
B. Ensemble thinking
The central ambition could also be to gain an understanding of the artists engaged by a museuma
purchase at least gives the impression of engagementthat is in-depth and based on the artists
specific qualities. It would seem natural that an
acquisition stimulates further engagement, but this
does not always happen. Among its various assets
artists books, books edited or designed by artists,
invitation cards, photographs for which the museum
may or may not hold the rights, fragments of stories
the museum could explore and find possibilities for
presenting an artists oeuvre more fully.
The essence of ensemble thinking is that it
addresses questions that are otherwise bubbling
away at the perimeter of what can be managed and
controlled. This is actually what good researchers
would do anyway: asking themselves in which setting the object of the research is to be found and to
what extent that setting is necessary for the research.
Ensemble thinking is a form of mindfulness and
self-criticism.
It really should be standard procedure to ask
questions about how artists give stature to their oeuvre, how they articulate their own space with the
many resources available today, or how they aspire to
Post-War Avant-Gardes between 1957 and 1986 77
these will be prioritized anew after all the meandering. Such a reflective glance, which constantly
searches for both focus and frame, will turn artists
into respected actors. Their actions continue to set
the tone, even if questions and discussions about
that tone will continue. The task is to always find new
connections with artists activities, a complexity that
remains uncertain but that can never be replaced by
the most eloquent opinion of the day.
5. Responsible Image-Making:
The Art Hypothesis
A. Intersubjectivity
public domain (to how we can fulfill our public function effectively). The museum is thus no longer a
place that has to have, or should have to have, a
representative amount of what is most important
(and thereby will fail ever more tragicomically in this
world of ever more multiplying and economizing); it
is a space that strives toward a respect for intensities and the complexity associated with them. For its
ensembles, this space will search for anchor points in
materiality, but it may also envisage memories or references as items. The ensembles may be a phantom
body, of which first a pinkie, then an elbow touches
the beholder, a fragment that as pars pro toto hints at
the whole.
In this way, the institution becomes a potential
partner for all the other actors, possibly also for those
that deal with property rights, and certainly for the
authors, who often benefit from the further insights
and memories developed around their items. It is
possible for the museum to do this without conflicts
of interest; it respects holders of rights and simply
looks at how and where its engagements can become
part of the public domain. It views its own insights,
and those of others who continue to contribute, as
much as possible from a Creative Commons perspective, whereby non-commercial use is automatically
allowed, provided that proper reference is made.
Post-War Avant-Gardes between 1957 and 1986 82
Methodology
An Exercise
in Affects
Bojana Pikur
13.Eve Kosofsky
Sedgwick,
Touching Feeling:
Affect, Pedagogy,
Performativity,
Duke University press,
Durham 2003, p.19.
14.All these artists
were part of the exhibition Museum of Affects
in the framework of
LInternationale, Museum
of Contemporary Art
Metelkova, Nov. 26, 2011
Jan. 29, 2012, see also
http://internacionala.
mg-lj.si/.
15.Gilles Deleuze,
Expressionism in
Philosophy: Spinoza,
ZoneBooks, New York
1990, p.242.
16.Clarice Lispector,
The Hour of the Star,
ANew Directions Book,
New York 1992, p.11.
***
Now to some examples, and to the Museum of
Affects19. The name of the exhibition is clearly an
oxymoron; and, for that matter, a paradox. Generating
paradox is, as in Massumi, a good way of breaking
the stratified signification and of integrating movement20 into the everyday and its every detail, to open
up the rigid and the stale by setting the systems in
motion. Museums cannot store affects the way
they store objects but their task remains, nevertheless, to preserve all that which makes art art. And art,
as we know, is made of affects. On the other hand, a
museum itself is an affective body too, which to some
extent defines and orchestrates
19.An exhibition
other bodies (things, objects,
in the framework of
ideas, other affects etc.) But the
LInternationale, Museum
museums power lies above all, in
of Contemporary Art
Metelkova (see note 14).
understanding its limits of being
20.Brian Masumi,
affected, however paradoxical
Parables for the
this might sound. In a strangely
Virtual: Movement,
Affect, Sensation, Duke
familiar way Ismail Kadare in his
University Press, Durham
novel The Palace of Dreams writes
2002, p.15. Spinoza
about the place where all the
defined body in terms of
relations: movement and
dreams of all the citizens of an
rest, and this capacity
empire are interpreted, classified,
of a body is its power to
and stored, and where dangerous,
affect and be affected.
Methodology
What if
the Universe
Started Here
and Elsewhere
Steven ten Thije
What if the Universe Started Here and Elsewhere Steven ten Thije
What if the Universe Started Here and Elsewhere Steven ten Thije
What if the Universe Started Here and Elsewhere Steven ten Thije
One: An Epistemology
of Experience
The interference of the curator in the domain of art is
arguably the late after-effect of a profound shift in the
understanding of art as an epistemological entity that
is vital to society. The shift occurs roughly at the end
of the 18th and in the early 19th century in Western
European societies and others close to it. This is
more commonly known as the shift from pre-modern
to modern society, with the French Revolution as the
spectacular kick-start and the philosophy of Kant
the intellectual fuel that has succeeded in keeping
the engine burning to the present day. In the field of
the visual arts it were innovators like Casper David
Friedrich, Philipp Otto Runge, John Constable, J. M. W.
Turner and others who were pioneers in practicing an
Post-War Avant-Gardes between 1957 and 1986 98
What if the Universe Started Here and Elsewhere Steven ten Thije
What if the Universe Started Here and Elsewhere Steven ten Thije
What if the Universe Started Here and Elsewhere Steven ten Thije
What if the Universe Started Here and Elsewhere Steven ten Thije
What if the Universe Started Here and Elsewhere Steven ten Thije
What if the Universe Started Here and Elsewhere Steven ten Thije
What if the Universe Started Here and Elsewhere Steven ten Thije
while at the same time recognizing that this universality is based on/in a specific locality. Such a universalism might come forth from a specific site and
context, its discourse opening doors to others, yet
resisting the colonial reflex to try and draw them in by
force.
Methodology
Age of
Change
Christian Hller
Major Shifts in
Thinking about Art from
the 1960s to the 1980s
Trying to recapitulate the period from the mid-1950s
to the mid-1980s in broader art-theoretical terms
appears a tremendous, complexly challenging and
far from easy task. Despite these odds, one can point
to several significant shifts that occurred in that
period that strongly influenced the way art from that
era came to be seen and has been viewed ever since.
One of those changesconfining myself to artistic
practices stemming from that timequite generally concerns the role played by theory within those
very practices. One might claim that this holds true
for art production on both sides of the historical EastWest divide, on both sides of the Atlantic, in places
remote from the classic art centers of that time, in
the global North as well as the South.
if its utilization (understood in a positive, non-instrumental sense) had been unswervingly pursued. In
this respect, activities carried out by collectives like
Grup de Treball in Barcelona in the mid-1970s very
much testify to a strengthened research- as well as
theory-based approach and at the same timeespecially via the brief momentum of its short-lived experimentalismpoint to the limits of such an approach.
It goes without saying that in order to elucidate
this particular usage of theory, a series of further
clarifications are necessary, concerning above all the
way in which concepts like power, critique and
ultimately politics are to be understood in such a
(art-theoretical) context. Such clarifications, viewed
retrospectively, often appear far simpler than the
point at which they were offered contemporaneously
with the practices they addressed; clarifications
which were sometimes just as vehemently advanced
in the artistic as well as in the theoretical field; clarifications, finally, which rather than promoting a onceand-for-all mandatory model, might contribute to the
avoidance of obvious entrapments that a unitary
model might imply.
The Academy
in Peril
The model, which, from the early 1970s onwards,
began to establish itself on the basis of the justelucidated conception of theory, initially proceeded
from a relatively clearly defined opponent, namely
institutional power in all its flavors and manifestations. In a narrower sense, this could be related to the
artistic field, as became obvious in the first wave of
so-called institutional critique, whose agenda was
primarily to subject the surrounding environmentor
the social background of art institutionsto critical, sometimes accusatory examination.6 Or it could
be extended more widely, from particular institutional apparatuses of the state (schools, the military,
the academy, bureaucracy, etc.) all the way to social,
gender-related or ethnic power 6.Cf. A. Alberro &
structures, all of which entered B. Stimson (ed.),
into arts sharpened field of vision Institutional Critique:
An Anthology of Artists
during that period. Common Writings, MIT Press,
to both variants, regardless of Cambridge/London 2009,
whether the focus lay primarily and J. C. Welchman (ed.),
Institutional Critique
on the artistic or a social institu- and After, JRP | Ringier,
tion, was a simple oppositional Zurich 2006.
Post-War Avant-Gardes between 1957 and 1986 110
The Art of
Not Being Governed
At around the same time critical artistic practice
found itself engaged in a crucial transition concerning the usage of theory, there occurred a comparable
shift with regard to the concept of power, or more
exactly, relationships of power. The offshoot ensuing
from the new tool-model of theory and Foucaults
notion of being multiply governed (or self-governed)
can thus more clearly be described as follows: What
was subsequently required for a sharpened formulation of critique was no longer the idea of a single,
grand opposition to state (or ideological) power, but
a focus on the numerous practices of (self-)discipline and governing, which are realized far and wide
among various social groups and individual persons,
even within individuals. Taking this type of decentralization as the starting point of critique this nearimpossible, dauntingly immense task has begun to
haunt art practices, which have become increasingly
confronted with the fact of their own, at times unconscious involvement in all sorts of non-state, extrainstitutional practices of governing.
Whereas the orthodox model of power or governance seemed designed to guarantee a kind of
closed loop, namely from the state through the lives
of individuals [ ] back to the state,13 the idea of
governmentality aimed at exploding this circularity
once and for all. And in fact, over the years a series of
attributesnational, ethnic, cultural, gender-related,
sexual, milieu-related, etc., and all of which constitute relevant points of intersection for power relationshave begun to inscribe themselves not only
into the proceeding of artistic critique but more and
more into the consciousness of the general public as
well. All these attributes are cross sections of various
sorts of governmental practices 13.Foucault,
and thereby corrupt the monoto- Vorlesungen zur Analyse
der Macht-Mechanism
nous song of the cold monstros- 1978, Der Staub und die
ity14 as Foucault once called Wolke, Impuls, Bremen
the irrational fixation on state 1982, p.39.
14.Foucault, Die
power. In an era when the repre- Gouvernementalitt,
sentative civic institutions still p.65.
Post-War Avant-Gardes between 1957 and 1986 114
demonstrated a predominantly
Society Under Siege,
repressive (or at least undeniably
Polity, Cambridge/Oxford
authoritarian) character, such a
2002, p.121 ff.
fixation was somewhat comprehensible. But in a period in which the diversity of
life politics15 acquires ever more significance, the
single vast, evil power tends to lose its monstrous
status, which in turn opens up a view onto the many
scattered arenas of everyday power relationships. It
is no longer schools, factories, the academy or the
military that constitute their principal stages but
instead, familial, group-specific, ethnic or even personal and intimate relationships, wherever they happen to be located. While Francesc Abads Tribute to
the Man in the Street (19761977) seems still fixated
on the excesses of state and/or police power, works
like Esther Ferrers Intimate and Personal (1977) Fig.2,
Eullia Graus Discrimination against Women (1977)
Fig.3 , or Tibor Hajass multiple experiments of selffashioning conducted throughout the 1960s, are
clear indicators of a crucial shift.
Mention should be made at this point of another
important transition in the field of art between the
mid-1970s and mid-1980s. To put it shortly, it was
no longer the art institutionthe primary target for
a first critical wave at the end of the 1960sthat
was deemed the carrier of predominantly negative
15.Cf. Zygmunt Bauman,
was it possible to maintain a distinct approach (in marked disMay 27, 1978), Merve,
tinction, for instance, from social
Berlin 1992, p.12.
theory)?
18.Ibid.
19.Ibid.
All of these questions culminated in the problem of what understanding of
critique, if any, was appropriate in view of this new,
reformulated conception of power. What could serve
as the main driver behind critical procedures, inasmuch as their counterpartformerly conceived as a
closed monolithseems to have all but vanished?
A key to this nexus of questions may lie in finding
a counter-piece to the arts of governancesomething that is simultaneously their partner and their
opponent, as a manner of distrusting them, rejecting
them, limiting them and reducing them to their proper
measure, transforming them, escaping them or at
least seeking to shift them.17 What this amounts to is
the crucial insight that there cannot be a single, accusatory or debunking position in relation to the various
forms of governance but instead, that there has to be
an entire arsenal of possible forms. This arsenal, historically specific as it may be, can generally be characterized as a type of mentality which Foucault, again,
delineates in genealogical terms, namely as the art
of not being governed or [ ] not being governed in
this manner and at this price.18 Critique designates
17.Michel Foucault,
Circumscribing
the period
Connect Whom?
Connect What?
Why Connect?
The World System
after 1945
Immanuel Wallerstein
Connect Whom? Connect What? Why Connect? The World System after 1945 Immanuel Wallerstein
In the project outline of LInternationale, the writers state that they wish to challenge common canons and master narratives of art and to investigate
local-to-local comparisons and differences. The
reason they wish to do this, they say, is to build a
new, plural narrative and to keep the processes that
built it transparent. They say they want to look at
avant-gardes from the decline of modernism to the
rise of globalization, 19571986. It is not clear to me
whether these dates were chosen according to turning-points in the art world or turning-points in the
global political arenaperhaps both.
The background text lays emphasis on the large
number of authoritarian regimes that existed in
various parts of the world at the beginning of that
period and presumably fewer towards the end. The
text also mentions the rise of globalization, presumably towards the end of that period. The shift that
is intended to be discussed is very real, but I would
like to offer a slightly different set of temporal cutting-points to illuminate this story: 1945, 1956, 1968,
19791980, 19891991, 20012003, 20082010.
Connect Whom? Connect What? Why Connect? The World System after 1945 Immanuel Wallerstein
Connect Whom? Connect What? Why Connect? The World System after 1945 Immanuel Wallerstein
Connect Whom? Connect What? Why Connect? The World System after 1945 Immanuel Wallerstein
Connect Whom? Connect What? Why Connect? The World System after 1945 Immanuel Wallerstein
particularly draining, both economically and geopolitically. Soon to follow were the moral and political
fiasco of Watergate, Nixons fall from office and let us
not forget, the exposure by the U.S. Senates Church
Committee of the nefarious exploits of the CIA.
The key turning point was the world revolution of
1968, which pulled all of these pieces together. First
of all, it should be underlined that this was a world
revolution, in the elementary sense that between
1966 and 1970, uprisings of various kinds played out
in all three of the dominant geopolitical arenas of the
timein the pan-European sphere, the so-called
socialist bloc, and the so-called Third World. Every
regional, national and local event or development
had, to be sure, its own particular explanation and
story. But two underlying themes were common to all
of the events in all three zones, and it is these commonalities that are relevant to our discussion here.
Everywhere protestors denounced the many
various expressions of U.S. hegemony and the
Soviet Unions collusion in these expressions as a
result of the unwritten Yalta accords. After 1968, neither the United States nor the Soviet Union would
ever again be able to regain the unquestioned loyalty of their presumed allies nor the unchallenged
belief in the bright futures each was guaranteeing
to everyone.
Connect Whom? Connect What? Why Connect? The World System after 1945 Immanuel Wallerstein
process, they began to question the epistemological assumptions of modernity, which they saw as
the hidden (and not so hidden) legitimations of dominance by a small, often unrepresentative segment of
humanitythat which had dominated the traditional
antisystemic movements.
The end of modernity, the search for the postmodern, involved the rejection of the assumptions of inevitable progress as embodied in
Enlightenment thought. This meant not only a different way of thinking about the world, but also a different politics and a different geopolitics; a different
approach. And it meant the liberation of the world
left from the tacitly centrist presumptions of the
traditional antisystemic movements.
What, however, also emerged out of this (coming essentially from the left) attack on modernity
and what I would call centrist liberalismwas
a certain liberating of the world right as well, from
what had been its equally tacit acceptance of the
ameliorative principles of this same centrist liberalism. Some, in their eagerness to assert the primacy of culture, failed to realize that as long as we
lived in a capitalist world-economy, the economic
and political underpinnings of our lives continued to
exert enormous influence. The new post-1968 political scene would be one in which not only radicals but
Post-War Avant-Gardes between 1957 and 1986 126
Connect Whom? Connect What? Why Connect? The World System after 1945 Immanuel Wallerstein
also conservatives came to feel freed from the constraints of the formerly dominant centrist liberalism.
This dual-liberation was crucially important
because the overall structure of the world-system
was entering a cyclical shift. The years 19671973
proved a turning point in two crucial ways. It marked
not only the end of the unquestioned U.S. hegemony
in the world-system, but also the end of the greatest expansion in the global economy the system
had ever known. What the French called les trentes glorieusesa typical Kondratieff A-cycle except
for the fact that it involved a far larger expansion of
the global economy than any previous cyclesoon
reached a point of exhaustion. The quasi-monopolies that had sustained the expansion had been sufficiently undermined that the world-system entered
a Kondratieff B-cycle of stagnation, one that has
remained in place ever since.
What we call today the global financial and economic crisis is simply the culmination point of this
long Kondratieff B-phase. The worlds Left lived and
left the 1970s in search of new organizational forms
that would replace those that the Old Left, the traditional antisystemic movements (now in semi-disgrace), had institutionalized.
The world Right exhibited a far more practical approach. They launched a coherent program
Connect Whom? Connect What? Why Connect? The World System after 1945 Immanuel Wallerstein
Connect Whom? Connect What? Why Connect? The World System after 1945 Immanuel Wallerstein
Connect Whom? Connect What? Why Connect? The World System after 1945 Immanuel Wallerstein
Connect Whom? Connect What? Why Connect? The World System after 1945 Immanuel Wallerstein
Connect Whom? Connect What? Why Connect? The World System after 1945 Immanuel Wallerstein
Connect Whom? Connect What? Why Connect? The World System after 1945 Immanuel Wallerstein
Recycling
the R-waste
(R is for Revolution)
Boris Buden
all the trauma of the communist past that is still accessible only in the cultural retrospective of theEast.
On the ideological level the Western exclusion
of the communist past is carried out through the signifier of totalitarianism. It retroactively totalizes a
politically, ideologically and culturally heterogeneous
experience of historical communism, unifies the
space of the East, renders it transparent and finally
essentializes its cultural identity.
Now the East, after having been defeated politically and appropriated economically, can be also conquered epistemically and colonized culturally. The
first task is assumed by the Western academy, particularly disciplines like the so-called area studies.
Not only does the academy produce the knowledge
on the East, it also establishes the West as the exclusive subject of this knowledge. In this way the West
acquires the ultimate epistemic competence over an
historic experience it has allegedly never shared. At
the same time, the cultural difference between the
West and the East becomes a chasm between theory
and praxis in terms of both space and time: theoretical knowledge is here and now (in the West) while
the historical praxis is there and then (in the East).
Needles to say, the Western theoretical knowledge is
always already universal; the Eastern historical praxis,
however, is merely particular.
of cultural history and historical praxis with the latter being irrevocably lost in translation. Or, to put it
more precisely, it is heterogeneity, contingency and
opacity of the historical praxis that is, in this mode of
inter-cultural translation, rendered untranslatable. In
order to be culturally recognized, the East must leave
the truth of its historical praxis to oblivion. This is the
price it pays for having a unique cultural identity
identity that necessarily implies the transparency
of a common historical experience, a homogeneous
cultural space, a shared ideological totality, one is
even tempted to say, a common destiny.
If the rules of this game are generally accepted,
we get a sort of hermeneutic narrativea relatively
coherent (hi)story of art related out of a transparent
historical context, concretely the history of East Art in
the context of communist totalitarianism.
Capitalism:
An East Side Story
The case of the former Yugoslavia is of particular interest here, for it usually serves as the perfect
exception that proves the rule: socialism but with a
more or less human face, a closed society but with
open borders, a communist rule but not within the
Eastern bloc, a one-party system but without a command economy, a Marxist ideology but a respectable
cultural production thoroughly comparable to the
Western one; and yet, nothing but a communist totalitarian system that collapsed in 1989/90.
Let us try to avoid this hermeneutic trap of providing a specific (Yugoslav) historical context for
a general narrative of Art in the Communist East
and so helping the West to culturally translate the
East. The first step in this direction is to shake the
entire conceptual horizon that is structured by
binary divisions like West/East, capitalism/communism, democracy/totalitarianism, autonomy of
art/its ideological subjection and propagandistic
misuse,etc.
What follows are a few simple facts of Yugoslav
political and cultural history that necessarily get lost
Post-War Avant-Gardes between 1957 and 1986 138
organized in free associations of film workers, comprised of screenwriters, directors, actors, composers,
cameramen, set designers and more. They were given
the status of freelance professionals, freed from direct
employment in technical and production companies
and were granted the right to negotiate contractual
arrangements with the film studios in order to realize
various scenarios and film projects. Productions were
not financed by the state budget but rather through
fundraising from banks, companies, TV and media
centers, communal or republic cultural funds, cooperation with foreign film and TV companies and similar.
This doesnt sound like a typically socialist approach to filmmaking, does it? Moreover, this
example applies to the broader cultural production in
former Yugoslavia, including publishing, theatre, literary and art production.
Altogether, market socialism provided a reasonably friendly environment for the flourishing of
all sorts of modernist cultural expression, including
contemporary art. It also allowed for a constant and
essentially problem-free contact with the international cultural scene and market.
However, there is no market economysay,
capitalismwithout crisis. In Yugoslavia such crisis
emerged, with all of its political consequences, in the
late 1960s.
Post-War Avant-Gardes between 1957 and 1986 140
movement of 1968, the films and authors of the socalled Black Wave of Yugoslav cinema, the Marxist
and humanist intelligentsia, like philosophers such as
the Praxis group and more. However, it is highly significant that this unfolded at the precise moment the
warm current of the old revolutionary elite was being
replaced by the cold current of the new technocratic
apparatchiks, who personified the growing dominance of the market, a return to bourgeois consumerism, and the rise of free-flowing capital together with
the banks and other powerful institutions.
Finally there is a well-known image that, in a
way, well serves to symbolize the historical failure of
communisma photograph, essentially black and
white, of people desperately queuing for basic goods.
If this photograph had really been taken in the former Yugoslavia it would have depicted the reality of
the 1980s; more precisely, the social consequences
of the so-called austerity measures implemented by
the IMF and other international financial institutions.
After having entered the international market, the
Yugoslav economy was also exposed to both new crises and complex power relations. In the 1970s these
took the form of the energy/oil crises with oil prices
increasing fourfold in 19731974, the global recession of 19741975, the crisis of classical Fordism, the
implementation of neoliberal economic policies and
Im afraid
it doesnt make any sense
What does this last act of Yugoslav history bring to
minda communist past that has disappeared from
our historical horizon with the so-called democratic revolutions of 1989/90? Or the incalculable
Post-War Avant-Gardes between 1957 and 1986 142
Art as Mousetrap:
The Case of Laibach
Eda ufer
PART I
The Kings Conscience
sensing beings perception of the surrounding reality, the mousetrap fulfills its function by producing
an uncanny effect of discomfort and uncertainty in
those who get jammed in its machinery.
3. Lights! Lights!
The mousetrap was constructed as an artistic (compensatory) solution produced out of the necessity
to resist conflicting commands: a fathers spectral authority on the one hand and the authority of
plays are not just words but also things-miniature counter-apparatuses reflecting the larger social
and political apparatuses. In the case of Hamlet, the
Kings guilty conscience proliferated into modern
state apparatuses-reaching and inhabiting every
individual social subject regardless of his or her relation and involvement in the incriminating governmental affairs.
an inability to show the enigmatic thing that compels action or grounds representation. (The other
name of this thing is Ghost, but it may also be
called language or unconscious.)6
Post-War Avant-Gardes between 1957 and 1986 149
PART II
Hamlet-Machine
1. I was Hamlet (family album)
H e i n e r M l l e r s l i f e l o n g o b s e s s i o n w i t h
Shakespeares Hamlet began when he first read the
play at the age of thirteen. Indeed, as Lacan argued,
this play functions as a net for
7.Mllers most frethe birds, a trap that reveals
quently quoted statement
about Hamlet is that he
more about the reader and his or
is much more a German
her time than about the plays procharacter than English
tagonist, who is considered un[] the intellectual
in conflict with
interpretable.7 Over the course of
history. Heiner Mller,
modernity, many geniuses that
Hamlet-Machine. Transl.
desired to be free like a bird and
& ed. by Carl Weber, John
Hopkins University Press
to live in a perfectly organized
& PAJ Books, Baltimore
world recognized their own pre& New York 1984.
dicaments in Hamlets. As much
8.To name just a few:
Henry Mackenzie (1780),
as it was a story about a character
J. W. von Goethe (1795),
in a play written by Shakespeare, it
S. T. Coleridge (1808).
was a story about them.8 By map9.In his lecture Shakespeare a
ping the enigmatic thing withDifference Mller
out ever being able to fully grasp
articulated an idea simiit in a form of enunciation, Hamlet
lar to Lacans metaphor
Fe b r u a r y 1 9 5 6 K h r u s h c h ev
Becketts end-plays
revealed the full scope of Stalins
represent two different
reign of terror. Berthold Brecht,
sides of the Janus face:
who most elaborately employed
one facing the frontiers
of modernism, the other
the mousetrap stratagem in
dissolving in an openhis dramaturgy, died on August
ended post-modernist vir14th, 1956. Three days later, the
tuality. The most significant difference between
Communist Party of Germany was
Becketts and Mllers
banned in the Federal Republic
ends of drama and theof Germany. In October, efforts
atre is their different
treatment of the relation
to reform the Communist sysbetween literature and
tem in Hungary escalated into a
theatre. Beckett insisted
revolution that was crushed by
on staging his text
strictly according to
Soviet forces after a weeklong
his instructions (didascivil war.) He spent more than
kalia). He authorized
twenty years working on this
his agents to prosecute
directors and theatres
text of just a few pages, which,
along with his other plays, represents the ending
point of drama and theatre, as we knew it (but also
the beginning of something else).10 In his writings,
Mller frequently evoked tropes of the end. In the
poem Theaterdeath (1994), he portrayed theatre as a
dying man who now resembles none but himself.11
Elsewhere, Mller announced that he was looking
for a new approach to writing because the historical substance has been used up for me from the vantage point I tried to employ while writing about it []
10.Mllers and
14.Referring to titles
of two separate productions: Theatre Without
Theatre, MACBA (exhibition), Barcelona, 2007;
Hamlet Without Hamlet,
4. I want to be a machine.
(Theatre-Without-Theatre)
book by Magareta de
Grazia, 2007).
15.http://www.bop
secrets.org/SI/debord/1.
htm
Writing on the decline of literature in the 1960s and 1970s, Heiner Mller argued
that writers could no longer come to grips with the
macro-structures (of society); therefore from now on
the problem is the micro-structure. His comments
found an epochal equivalent in the theory and practice of the Situationists and their most reverberated
chargethat contemporary society was becoming
a society of the spectacle where life is presented
as an immense accumulation of spectacles and
everything that was directly lived has receded into a
representation.15 Or in Andy Warhols Factory, which
inspired the final words of Hamletmachine: I want to
be a machine.16 Mller understood that within spectacularized post-industrial society, theatre (separated in its own social, spatial and temporal frames)
lost its power to produce meaning (and consequently
access to hearts and minds of audiences). Yet most
of Mllers plays were and still are staged in the
Post-War Avant-Gardes between 1957 and 1986 155
machine is a statement
5. Over-identification
(iek saw it in a word)
Slavoj iek was a genuine spectator of early Laibach.
A skilled trapper himself, he managed to catch in a
concept exactly those levels of the Laibach phenomenon that were commonly experienced at Laibach
events, although few people knew how to articulate,
let alone theorize, the uncanny and discomforting
collision of feelings that put most Laibach spectators
in a virtual state of trance during their performances.
Laibach unraveled, according to iek, the fact
that ideology, any ideology, does not engage its subjects through the power of argument so much as
through unconscious automatisms. An open revolt
used by political dissidents of the early Cold War
periodor the era when it was still meaningful to
deconstruct the subject on the stagebecame, as
Mller also announced, utterly ineffective by the late
21.Ibid.
22.The mechanics of
over-identification
as explained by iek
resemble explanations of
de-alienating effects
that art could perform
on the audiences in
Should
Ilya Kabakov
Be Awakened?
Viktor Misiano
on the territory of the so-called WINZAVOD gallery cluster. His installation, From the Life of Flies
[Iz zhizni Mukh] was also exhibited there, various
forms of which the artist has been developing since
the 1980s. Finally, in the Pushkin State Museum of
Fine Art, the most respected academic museum in
Moscow, a new exhibition called Gates [Vorota],
featured a series of objects and painted canvases
created especially for the Moscow retrospective.
Kabakovs chosen genre of a monographic retrospective, i.e. of showing works created over an
extended period of time (and in this case, in the
twenty-year period of the artists time outside Russia),
was duplicated and thematically enhanced by the
central work of this entire undertakingan exhibition-installation, the Alternative History of Art. In
substance, this work was made similar in style to a
chronological retrospective of the art of three, obviously fictional, artists of different generations, whose
work was meticulously reconstructed and displayed
in the Garage in twenty-three separate rooms he
constructed inside the hangar. The first hero of the
Post-War Avant-Gardes between 1957 and 1986 163
How is it possible to bring together these seemingly contradictory actions? On the one hand, the
dramatization of a triumphant return to the city and
to the country that he had consistently avoided for
twenty years, and on the other, a demonstratively a
priori disgust with what he supposedly encountered
there? Is there consistency in Kabakovs chosen line
of behavior if, on one hand, being present in Moscow,
he dramatized his absence (a dream), and on the
other, invited himself to a reception with the head
of state? What did Kabakov want to say by selecting
precisely these (art)works from his extensive legacy?
And why did the alternative history at the center
of the exhibit bring together two seemingly incompatible poles of 20th century art? And if the Moscow
retrospective was a summation of his many years of
creative work, as well as the experience of his entire
generationand, it seems, that it was precisely this
that the artist invested into his grandiose retrospectivehow can one understand and formulate the
meaning of his message? And generally, what worlds
did the sleeping Ilya Kabakov inhabit? And should
he not, all the same, be awakened?
Kabakov belongs to a generation born out of the culmination of Stalins modernization, which matured
during its test of strength and final triumphthe
period of war and victory. However, 2.About conservawhen the eruption into moder- tive modernization
in the USSR see A. G.
nity was effected through public Vishnevsky, Serp I rubl.
violence and disciplinary excess, Konservativnaya modern
it is common to call the result an izatsiya v SSSR [Sickle
and Ruble. Conservative
archaic or conservative model of Modernization in the
modernization.2 Sociality born USSR], Odintsovkiy State
of this type of social develop- Institute, Moscow 1998.
3.In the Slovar
ment has the form of a deperson- Moskovskogo
alized, convulsively aggressive Konseptualizma
collectivity, which Kabakov, along [Dictionary of Moscow
Conceptualism]
with his companions in Moscow www.conceptualismconceptualism, called the com- moscow.org/files/
munal body.3 The metaphor Esanu_Dictionary_Web.
pdf, Kommunalniye tela
for this communal heteroto- [Communal Bodies] refers
pia is Kabakovs famous piece, to collective bodies
the Toilet, which he included in their early stage of
urbanization, when their
in the Moscow retrospective. aggression is intensified
Because from Kabakovs point under the influence of
of view, alongside the (regimes) unfavorable environmental conditions.
permanent and spontaneous
aggression, the second psychological regime of a
communal society was a state of permanent euphoria.
That was precisely how the communal body reacted
to the constant victories of modernizationthe
launch of new factories or electric power plants, a
good harvest, or triumphs in the spheres of science
Post-War Avant-Gardes between 1957 and 1986 165
alternative, but with a real academic museum where the specVorota [Gates] in The
tator has to proceed through
Pushkin State Museum of
the entire space of the exposiFine Art, the organizers and the patrons of
tion, passing through halls rich
Kabakovs retrospective
with Rodin, the impressionists,
had to work to convince
the postimpressionists, Matisse,
the director of the
museum, who demonstrably
Picasso, Derain, and so on, in order
missed the exhibition
to reach Kabakovs Gates. What
opening.
is at stake is a museum that enjoys
the reputation of the most respectable museum
institution in Moscowand for Kabakov, exhibiting
there has long been an ide fixe (he even created
several compositions based on this idea). It seems
that accomplishing this goal was rivaled only by the
idea of being received by President Medvedev.7
Thus, the exhibition of the Gates in the Pushkin
Museum could be understood as part of a performative dramatization of Kabakovs triumphant return
to his native homelandone which had previously
exiled him and now accepts him as a grand master, on the same level as a head of state. From here
stems the performative element of sleep enacted
at the opening of the retrospective: it is impossible
to anticipate in reality, the presence of the one who
returns from the gates of eternity, from the timeless
future that does not accept everyone. Fig. 2
7.It is known that in
Fig. 2 Ilya & Emilia Kabakov, The Gates, Moscow 2008, photo
by Igoris Markovas.
However, Kabakovs transcendental, and in substance, traditional understanding of culture is characteristic of many artists of his generationand
on the whole, for the majority of critically-oriented
Soviet intellectuals, who in their criticism of conservative modernization resisted not only the conservative, but a modernizing beginning; and moreover,
resisted it from a conservative position. Thus, for
Kabakov, the sacral and the transcendental remained
the generative creative substance, at least as a
Russian artist: I think that Russia is like cabbage: its
outer layers are splitting, secularizing, but the dark,
Post-War Avant-Gardes between 1957 and 1986 168
Forgotten
in the Folds
of History
Wim Van Mulders
So much information,
and why do we know so little?
Noam Chomsky, from a lecture in Brussels, March 17, 2011.
of power over the canon. By holding onto fixed diagrams it is at first difficult to grasp what, for example, happened in the Benelux region in the 1970s
and1980s.
2. It is natural to assume that New York in the
1960s and 1970s is the most efficient art production machine. The art metropolis possesses a clearly
structured distribution of tasks between gallery and
museum, artist and collector, art and business, public and private, production and promotion, myth and
mystification. The role New York appropriates for
itself is the making of a history by means of a customtailored authoritative voice backed (and furthered)
by commercial success. And spoken in such a loud
voice, talking about the construction of an artistic
highway of masterpieces with the metropolis as
final destination. Thus the tendency arises to glorify a specific cultural history and to accept the corresponding dominant social order as benchmark. In
1975, in On Practice, Mel Ramsden lashes out at
the idea of the hegemony and dominance of New
Post-War Avant-Gardes between 1957 and 1986 178
infrastructure is consistent with the lack of an intelligentsia who saw no good in a professional relationship with contemporary art. There was painfully little
prospect of a successful career as an artist. Moreover,
artists were not given grants or subsidies with which
they could hope to compete in international markets.
Obviously there is an enormous difference between the art worlds of Belgium and the
Netherlands during this period. The exhibition Op
Losse Schroeven, situaties en cryptostructuren (On
Loose Screws, situations and crypto-structures) at
the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 1969 received
major international attention. It guaranteed a paradigm shift in art. Amsterdam and Eindhoven, Cologne
and Dusseldorf, Antwerp and Brussels play a decisive
role in the discovery of the new art because many
constructive contacts are made and maintained. Jan
Dibbets, Ger Van Elk, Marinus Boezem, Bas Jan Ader
and Stanley Brouwn enjoy international recognition, immediately or in due course. In his search for
the identity of the Belgian province, Broodthaers
placed question marks on art under a national flag.
What did a flag and artwork have to do with each
other? In an action in the MuHKA (Museum van
Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen) of 2009, Jacques
Lizne responded to Broodthaers by equipping banner wavers with flags depicting a symbiosis of half
Post-War Avant-Gardes between 1957 and 1986 179
5.Johan Pas,
Beeldenstorm in een
spiegel
zaal. Het ICC en
de actuele kunst 1970
1990, Lannoocampus, 2005.
6.Wim Van Mulders,
Daniel Dewaele, +-0,
Revue dArt Contemporain,
no. 28, November 1979,
Anno VII (Genval),
p.3335. The artist was
given the opportunity to
realize an artists page.
This work also exists
as business cards that
Dewaele handed out during
openings.
Collection MHKA.
Collection MHKA.
9. In an inimitable mixture of
includes a special conattitudes, Jacques Lizne crititribution inspired by the
cizes great men, great works,
encyclopedia Larrousse
great moments, great styles, great
Illustr entitled Le
Petit Lizne Illustr.
books and great art.7 In response
Une tentative inacheve
to a reading by Pierre Restany
dabcdaire autour de
about Daniel Spoerri, in which
luvre du Petit Matre.
the guru of Nouveau Ralisme
asserts that Spoerri is no petit matre, Lizne
claims the qualification of Le petit matre Ligeois
de la seconde moti du XXe sicle and Artiste de
la mdiocrit et de la sans importance. There is a
pseudo-identity with the negatively connoted terms
sans talent, mdiocrit, sans intrt, petit matre,
mysogynie, une uvre emmerdante. In reversing
the dream of fame and fortune, Lizne punctured, in a
provocative manner, irrational, mythical illusions.
There is a real biological center to be found in the
work of Lizne. In 1965 he approaches the cycle of life
with a radical materialism. He decides not to reproduce and undergoes a vasectomy, which becomes
thick book (488 pages)
Is Spain Really
Different?
Teresa Grandas
Art
and Francoism
The second half of the 20th century in Spain was
marked by the dictatorship of General Franco from
1939after three years of Civil War that did away with
the Second Republicuntil his death in 1975, which
signaled the beginning of the demo1.Suddenly Matesa
ceased to be the
cratic reconstruction of the country.
project that, accordIn 1969 one of the biggest busiing to Vil Reyes,
ness scandals in Spain at the time
summed up the human
virtues of sacrifice,
broke. It was significant not only
effort, risk and ambifor its widespread economic contionan example that
sequences but also for its politiwe wished to convey,
to turn into a scancal implications. The company in
dal. Bernat Muniesa,
question, Matesa, had swindled the
Dictadura y
Spanish government out of thoumonarqua en Espaa.
De 1939 hasta la
sands of millions of pesetas through
actualidad, Editorial
the fraudulent use of credits for the
Ariel, Barcelona 1996,
export of textile machinery. The
p.124.
Catalan businessman, Juan Vil Reyes,1 a member of the ultraconservative Catholic Opus Dei and
with close ties to several of Francos ministers, was
Post-War Avant-Gardes between 1957 and 1986 193
Fig. 3 Joan
Rabascall,
Culture (from the
series Spain is
Different),1975,
MACBA Collection,
MACBA Foundation.
Joan Rabascall,
VEGAP, Barcelona,
2012, photo by
Rocco Ricci.
Fig. 4 Joan
Rabascall,
Automatic
Revolver (from the
series Spain is
Different), 1975,
MACBA Collection,
MACBA Foundation.
Joan Rabascall,
VEGAP, Barcelona,
2012, photo by
Rocco Ricci.
the Seville-based artist Manolo Quejido. The uncomfortable climate created by Spains political situation
and its changes is clearly revealed in these works in
which Quejido uses a traditional pictorial medium but
overlays it with both a biting critical component, and
a background personifying the social reality of the
day. On September 27, 1975, barely two months before
the death of the dictator on November 20, and in the
last, dying moments of the regime, the execution of
two ETA militants and three members of the FRAP
(Frente Revolucionario Antifascista y Patriota) was
orderedthe last of those to be condemned to death
in the Franco era.
Translated from the Spanish by Selma Margaretten.
Case studies
A. ARTISTS
KwieKulik/
Form is a Fact
of Society
Georg Schllhamer
of a thing and a change of methodology could transform the aesthetic value and social constellation of a
situation.
Unlike in Western conceptual art of the same
period (which continues to dominate the international canon and heavily influenced the young Polish
generation), and in contrast to the first generation of
Polish Conceptualism, KwieKuliks work was, from the
outset, less focused on the question of the absence
of material and the primacy of the immaterial concept.
Instead it focused more on a movement towards new
materials and media (which included performative
strategies, gesture, fragments, found objects from
nature, games, methods from other disciplines, and
more) appropriated by the artists within a specific
range of formal means of expression. In these years,
a grammar and typology of actions developed a certain register that was constitutive for the later development of KwieKuliks visual narrative. Their work
traced the paths of transportation and the changes
in the requisites of form apparatuses. It described
these in terms of a social model and in relation to a
specific situation or reality, and tried to make comprehensible their ossification in conventions, or the
modulations of their meaning, when it shifted from
one mode of usage to another.
Open Form
and Beyond
Already with their first collaborative works, like the
Hansen-influenced film Open Form, or Excursion,
a drive through Warsaw where the artists were
equipped with devices for the mechanical recording
of images, KwieKulik charted their actions in real time
and interpreted them through a game theory lens,
transcribing them into a symbolic space, abstractly
interpreting the subject/object relationship of the
constellations. In Excursion they were interested in
the clash of different spatial-urban situations, the
provocation of interpersonal interaction, and the
possibility of linking particular photographic shots
through similar formal elements. Later, in a group of
works they entitled Visual Games, scored events
were unified by a generative scheme in which participants were invited to revaluate a specific situation or
reality in relation to a social model. One of the most
striking examples of these formalist manoeuvres of
the designation of everyday life in abstract relations
between objects is Activities with Dobromierz. From
1973 onwards, immediately after the birth of their son,
KwieKulik began incorporating their child into their
These new ideas had, superficially considered, similarities to Western conceptual thought and practices
which looked to expand their contexts to the analysis
of social spaces. The fact that KwieKulik established
their practice in models of a missing public sphere
was both an element and an expression of this logic
of informatization on which KwieKuliks work in the
mid- to late-1970s was baseda linking of physical
localities, practice and forms of documentation. Fig. 1
Art
Expanded
Media
Jlius Koller/
Dialectics of
Self-Identification
Daniel Grn
noticestext cards with stamped letters, manifestoes and conceptual statements proliferated via
mail. His frequently mailed post-communication
replaces the gallery space and effectively reaches
a wide spectrum of addressees. The use of anagrams and word games makes room for the linguistic
expression of repressed phantasms. The games of
verbal mechanisms of denial and identification use a
tautological shift of positional demarcation and selfidentification. Dialectical linguistic operations confront the field of subjective activities with the field
of objective and real facts. Koller created them in the
spirit of dialectical materialism to debunk the false
consciousness and to demystify the social hypocrisy
in Socialist Czechoslovakia.
Now we return to the exhibition 1. Otvoren atel
ir/1st Open Studio to clarify the context for Kollers
declarative method. What was a collective exhibition
of avant-garde proponents held to express a stance
against restrictions imposed on exhibition making,
was also a reaction against the pressures which were
altering the cultural and social landscape in the country after the occupation of 1968. Several prominent
Czech and Slovak avant-garde artists of the 1960s
were invited to the venueAlex Mlynark, who had
already presented his works in the Paris Biennial and
was renowned for his contact with Pierre Restany and
Post-War Avant-Gardes between 1957 and 1986 219
13.Petr Fidelius, e
komunistick moci,
Gorgona/
Beyond Aesthetic
Reality
Branka Stipancic
his anti-aesthetics with his Gray Surfaces (19611962), where he degraded the canvas with repeated
coats of paint to achieve a lifeless, dirty gray surface.
Gorgona witnessed the first attempt to dematerialize a work of art that Josip Vanita pioneered. After
a series of monochrome surfaces crossed only by a
single line he realized, in 1964, a work in text only:
Landscape format canvas/width 180 cm/height
140 cm/the entire surface white/through the center
runs a silver line (width 180 cm, height 3 cm).
Mangelos also negated painting using various techniques, one of which was the anti-peinture
series. With the statements Negation de la peinture
written over scratched-out or blacked-out painted
reproductions, Mangelos continued a long line of
negation characteristic of 20th century art, from
Marcel Duchamp through Rene Magritte to Marcel
Broodthaers, rejecting painting as simply not stimulating enough. Characteristically, Mangelos never
negated painting using painting as the medium;
he intervened in reproductions and his negation
appears conceptual, negating the very idea of painting. The reproductions employed spanned various
styles and periods, from Thomas Gainsborough to
the Croatian painter Josip Rai. The last of them
Mangelos entitled anti-hommage Rai, as an
ironic aside about Croatian art whose most revered
Post-War Avant-Gardes between 1957 and 1986 226
protagonists of the early 20th century lagged considerably behind the practitioners and developments
seen in the larger international art-scape.
This tendency to negate the aesthetic properties of art (work), striving for a monochromatic
experience, this need for a ground zero, brought
the members of Gorgona together and close to artists from around the world: the Zero Group, Azimuth,
Fluxus, John Cage and others with whom Gorgona
enjoyed direct or indirect contact.
Like Fluxus, Gorgona opened the question of
what could be art. It promoted an open atmosphere,
a veritable cult of freedom, something its members
discussed with great enthusiasm even years later.
Gorgona was playful, funny; and it strove to redefine the term art, seeking art that would not result in
objects but rather in concepts and experiences.
In 1963, Ivan Koari proposed a collective
work, the project Cutting Sljeme, a semicircular incision into the mountain near Zagreb, as well as a set of
instructions for a project that involved making plaster casts of the interior of the heads of all Gorgona
members, the interiors of several cars, studio apartments, trees, even an entire parkin general, of all of
the citys important hollows.
Gorgona approached the concept of exhibition
as a separate and distinct phenomenon, something
that appeared less strict there, than in other communist countries where illegal publications led to prison
sentences. As a group and a force, they constituted
an oasis that realized and enabled unhindered work;
at the same time Gorgona was an isolated ghetto
whose members had no impact on other artists until
their exhibition in 1977 at the Gallery of Contemporary
Art in Zagreb (today the Museum of Contemporary
Art), after which many artists came to embrace them
as role models.
OHO/
An Experimental
Microcosm
on the Edge of East
and West
Ksenya Gurshtein
OHO / An Experimental Microcosm on the Edge of East and West Ksenya Gurshtein
An Experimental Microcosm
on the Edge of East and West
1.While the conceptual
framing of OHOs intellectual history offered
in this text is my own,
my work owes a great debt
to the research (including precise chronologies)
and analysis offered
in the histories of the
group written by Slovene
art historians Toma
Brejc and Igor Zabel.
For their most extensive texts, see Toma
Brejc, Oho: 19661971,
tudentski Kulturni
Center, Ljubljana 1978;
Igor Zabel and Moderna
Galerija Ljubljana,
Oho: Retrospektiva =
Eine Retrospektive = a
Retrospective, Revolver,
OHO / An Experimental Microcosm on the Edge of East and West Ksenya Gurshtein
OHO / An Experimental Microcosm on the Edge of East and West Ksenya Gurshtein
Fig.1 OHO Group,
Marko Poganik,
Item Book, 1966,
Courtesy of
Moderna galerija,
Ljubljan.
OHO / An Experimental Microcosm on the Edge of East and West Ksenya Gurshtein
OHO / An Experimental Microcosm on the Edge of East and West Ksenya Gurshtein
OHO / An Experimental Microcosm on the Edge of East and West Ksenya Gurshtein
OHO / An Experimental Microcosm on the Edge of East and West Ksenya Gurshtein
OHOs last incarnation, Marko Poganik led a commune in the village of empas for decades and is
now engaged with healing the Earth through lithopuncture; David Nez works as an art therapist while
also continuing to paint and create collages; Milenko
Matanovi founded The Pomegranate Center outside
of Seattle (U.S.A.), which helps communities design
and build common public spaces; and only Andra
alamun remained true to a traditional career in art as
a painterhis works can be found in major museum
collections in Slovenia. OHO, moreover, has been an
influence first on young artists in Serbia, including
the group of actionists from which Marina Abramovi
emerged in the early 1970s, then on the artists of the
IRWIN group in the 1980s, and on a whole generation of young Slovene artists since the 1990s, having
gained in the mid-1990s the status of the germinal
artistic development in post-war Slovene history.
What remains now is to add OHO to an expanded
map of global neo-avant-garde and conceptual tendencies and recognize the richness and unusual significance of its history. Despite its brief existence, the
group, living at the seam of Cold War East and West,
managed to make visible in a hybrid manner inner
tensions that characterized both systems. Like so
many artists in Eastern Europe, OHO opted for a collective practice to pursue a low-tech, intermedia
OHO / An Experimental Microcosm on the Edge of East and West Ksenya Gurshtein
Jef Geys and Marinus Boezem / Taking Care of the Frame Steven ten Thije
similarities, it is helpful to first discuss the work independently and then go on to describe the common
ground. As a starting point, I have chosen the works
presented in the last exhibition of LInternationales
collaborative project: ABC cole de Paris (1959
1961) by Jef Geys and the Soft-Table (1968) by
MarinusBoezem.
Jef Geyss work ABC cole de Paris exists in various different versions. One is a collection of A4-size
drawings, the second version consists of 15 large A1
size cheap brown paper sheets that each contain
one lesson from the ABC cole de Paris drawing
course. Geys signed up for this expensive drawing
course to learn the illusionist tricks used by the great
masters. The drawings are often reiterations of similar subjects in different forms on the same page, and
are testimonies to one or even several lessons. A
sheet might be filled with shoes, or with studies of
muscles or skeletons, or with animals, or an exercise on linear perspective. All in all, the drawings are
imbued with an air of study, and are sometimes even
graded. The cheap paper emphasizes the sketch-like
Post-War Avant-Gardes between 1957 and 1986 240
Jef Geys and Marinus Boezem / Taking Care of the Frame Steven ten Thije
Jef Geys and Marinus Boezem / Taking Care of the Frame Steven ten Thije
Not every page has a similar complexity or structure: some pages contain less variation, consisting,
for instance, only of womens shoed feet, or hands
and arms. The page described above, however, has
the quality of containing a variety of elements that
together expose something of the basic logic of the
ABC cole de Paris series. The first impression the
page imparts is a relatively random group of drawings that deal with the same subject: the depiction of
the human head. There is no clear storyline, but more
an order that places one thing next to or below the
other. The drawing even appears to be sandwiched
by two series of three heads, with the more scientifically (accurately) proportioned drawings at the bottom, together with the skull and two heads in red,
that blends somewhat into the brown background at
the top. It is clear that the page, as a whole, reflects
a moment in the process of studying. One sees the
attempt to understand the relationship between the
skull and the face, and from the face to a hat and clothing. In some sense the drawing evokes a kind of matter-of-fact-quality that suggests that what is learned
are merely correct proportions. But when reading
the captions it becomes clear that what appears neutral or objective is profoundly defined and infected by
norms and even judgments. The four skulls are neatly
divided into a classic Greek-side that is close to
Post-War Avant-Gardes between 1957 and 1986 242
Jef Geys and Marinus Boezem / Taking Care of the Frame Steven ten Thije
Jef Geys and Marinus Boezem / Taking Care of the Frame Steven ten Thije
Jef Geys and Marinus Boezem / Taking Care of the Frame Steven ten Thije
Jef Geys and Marinus Boezem / Taking Care of the Frame Steven ten Thije
Jef Geys and Marinus Boezem / Taking Care of the Frame Steven ten Thije
Jef Geys and Marinus Boezem / Taking Care of the Frame Steven ten Thije
Jef Geys and Marinus Boezem / Taking Care of the Frame Steven ten Thije
Paul De Vree
and Toon Tersas/
Hysteria
Makes History
Lars Bang Larsen
Paul De Vree and Toon Tersas / Hysteria Makes History Lars Bang Larsen
Paul De Vree (19091982) was not only internationally oriented: he was in himself, as Henri Chopin
put it, an international.1
One can approach De Vrees work through concrete poetry. Even if, according to him, this art form
was only one phase in his work, concretism offers a
genealogical perspectiveor represents at least
a bone of contention to De Vree himselfin a family tree of works and strategies that sits between
poetry and painting.2 He also talked about his work
in terms of visual poetry and phenomena of artistic
Vermischungen (amalgamations or fusions) between
literature, visual art and what we today call sound art.3
As over-used as the term is today, it seems apposite to call concretism a social artif only because in
the 1950s and 1960s, everybody did it, according
to the German artist Thomas Bayrle.4 It was an art that
promised new and transparent relations of production between signs and materials. It could be created
anywhere, typically with a piece of every(wo)mans
technologya typewriterand traditional, academic
parameters of skill and training were eradicated in
Post-War Avant-Gardes between 1957 and 1986 251
Paul De Vree and Toon Tersas / Hysteria Makes History Lars Bang Larsen
Paul De Vree and Toon Tersas / Hysteria Makes History Lars Bang Larsen
Paul De Vree and Toon Tersas / Hysteria Makes History Lars Bang Larsen
Paul De Vree and Toon Tersas / Hysteria Makes History Lars Bang Larsen
Paul De Vree and Toon Tersas / Hysteria Makes History Lars Bang Larsen
Grup de Treball
and Vdeo-Nou/
Two Collective
Projects
in 1970s Spain
Teresa Grandas
Grup de Treball and Vdeo-Nou / Two Collective Projects in 1970s Spain Teresa Grandas
This text will discuss two diachronic collective projects in the Spanish state that took place immediately
before and after a significant eventthe death of
Franco in 1975. A study of the Grup de Treball (1973
1975) and Video Nou/Servei de Video Comunitari
(19771983) will enable us to trace the complex relationship between artistic experimentation and the
socio-political situation of the time. These groups
cannot be understood as isolated cases. Instead,
they acted as transmitters for permeable action and
interacted as critical settings and stimuli for innovative attitudes, in which artistic activity goes beyond
the mere formal fact and is insolubly linked to sociopolitical practices. In this regard, it is important to
take into account that Grup de Treball evolved in the
last years of the dictatorship, against a background of
political repression and, in Catalonia, a reaffirmation
of its identity. In the case of Vdeo-Nou, the project
was born already immersed in the pre-institutional
democratic models of construction.
1.Anunciamos was a
series of 17 texts
inserted in the classified ads section of the
newspaper La Vanguardia
Espaola between June and
July 1973 by the Grup de
Treball. The text combined the printed word
Grup de Treball and Vdeo-Nou / Two Collective Projects in 1970s Spain Teresa Grandas
Grup de Treball and Vdeo-Nou / Two Collective Projects in 1970s Spain Teresa Grandas
Grup de Treball and Vdeo-Nou/Two Collective Projects in 1970s Spain Teresa Grandas
I n te r n a l d i s a g r e e m e n ts were interested
within the group, the sporadic in criticizing culture
and daily life. Parallel
commitments of various members to these magazines othand the new political situation that ers appeared, such as
was opening up after the death El Viejo Topo, which
were more theoreticalof Franco all played a part in their political oriented, even
dissolution, which happened in though they shared common
1975.8 It is important to place the concerns.
8.Antoni Mercader
Grup de Treball in context in rela- believes that the last
tion to other coetaneous artistic public appearance of the
projects. Traditional histories have group took place in 1977
when they presented their
tended to group them all under the work on the illegal press
same heading of Conceptual Art in at the Fundaci Mir
Catalonia. This, however, does not in Barcelona as a part of
the exhibition Vanguardia
allow for individual differences artstica y realidad
and limits creative activity to the social en el Estado
merely artistic, rather than tak- espaol, 19361976.
This work was shown a
ing into account the affiliations year before at the Venice
and networks of connections with Biennale. See Antoni
other circles and in relation to Mercader, Sobre el Grup
de Treball, in Grup de
clandestine projects and opposi- Treball, Museu dArt
tion to the regime.
Contemporani de Barcelona
Like Grup de Treball, Vdeo- 1999, p.8.
Nou (19771978), which later became Servei de Vdeo
Comunitari (19791983), grew out of the context of
the struggle for democracy. But this time it appeared
in the post-Franco era, precisely in the same year the
Post-War Avant-Gardes - Christian Hller 261
Grup de Treball and Vdeo-Nou / Two Collective Projects in 1970s Spain Teresa Grandas
anticipate the community video projects of VdeoNou. In 1976 he had already developed another similar project called Barcelona Distrito Uno (Barcelona
District One), where he gave the neighborhood association in that district a voice with which to speak
out, and utilized the space of the Galera Ciento as an
information centre. The journalist and cultural activist, Josep M. Mart i Font, underlined Muntadass contribution with an opportune reflection in relation to
Vdeo-Nou:
With his artistic activity Muntadas was filling a gap
that should have corresponded to the neighbours
themselves, that is, the unmasking of information by
proposing to the individual the inevitable comparison
with official television. When would there be a community television? Would it ever be possible for television to revert to the hands of society and free itself
from official power? Because an artists work can only
indicate a road to follow at a cer- 10.Josep M. Mart
tain point; it only sets down the i Font, Alternativa
guidelines for action, but it does a la TV, El Viejo Topo,
November 1976, p.66.
not actually carry them out.10
El Viejo Topo (19761982)
was a journal that dealt
Grup de Treball and Vdeo-Nou / Two Collective Projects in 1970s Spain Teresa Grandas
participants were former stu- articles with the pseuddents of film from the CIPLA of the onym Pau Malvido.
These chronicles, which
Institut del Teatre in Barcelona. were published under
Carlos Ametller had a degree the heading Nosotros
in Fine Arts and Graphic Arts; los malditos (We the
Damned or Cursed Ones)
Esteban Escobar was trained in in Star magazine, conanti-psychiatry; Albert Estibal tained a brief rundown
studied medicine and journalism; of the counter-culture
of the country. Vdeo
Xefo Guasch was an architect and Nou/Servei de Vdeo
photographer; Marga Latorre, a Comunitari also recorded
sociologist; Pau Maragall (Pau many of the activities of
people and venues, galMalvido), an economist; Maite leries and spaces within
Martnez, an urban planner; Luisa this counter-cultural
Ortnez, a lawyer; Llusa Roca, a context.
14.Examples of this type
school teacher; and Joan beda of video intervention are
an engineering student.12 What the films of the petrol
they all had in common was their station strike (1977)
and intervention in the
will to participate in social and Can Serra district in
political transformations of the LHospitalet de Llobregat
time and an interest in appropri- (1978) in which neighbourhood associations
ating the means of production of were closely involved.
audiovisual information. While the 15.Campaa por la Lliga
mass media was being manipu- de Catalunya (Campaign
for the Catalonian
lated and controlled according to
the interests of those in power, this group was interested in the possibilities for transformation offered
by the new technical resources. Fig. 2
Post-War Avant-Gardes between 1957 and 1986 263
Grup de Treball and Vdeo-Nou / Two Collective Projects in 1970s Spain Teresa Grandas
Grup de Treball and Vdeo-Nou / Two Collective Projects in 1970s Spain Teresa Grandas
the politics of social planning. They conducted workshops to train people in the use of video as a means
of communication in Barcelona and in other cities
around the country. As Pepe Ribas, one of the founders of the magazine Ajoblanco pointed out,21 Pau
Maragalls contacts with the Socialists enabled them
to establish relations with the new political leaders. An agreement was signed with the Barcelona
city council between 1980 and 1982 to finance their
activities in the different districts of the city in relation to everyday problems and topics of popular culture. Nevertheless, the agreement was not renewed
in 1983, because the Socialist municipal government
curtailed the autonomy of social initiatives in order to
centralize them. This marked a critical moment within
the associative movement and signaled the end of
SVC. At the same time, several members turned professional and some became incorporated into the
new autonomous television network of Catalonia. The
end of the activities of this collective coincided, to
a certain extent, with the institutionalization of the
experimental cultural projects initiated under the
democratic governments which, in turn, put an end to
the expectation of possibilities for change.
Translated from the Spanish by Selma Margaretten.
Retroavantgarde
Inke Arns
Fig. 2 Kazimir Malevi/Malevich, Zadnja futuristina razstava/The Last Futurist Exhibition, Beograd/Belgrade,
1985-1986, installation view of exhibition The Present and
Presence, Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova, Ljubljana,
2011-2012, photo by Dejan Habicht, courtesy of Moderna
galerija, Ljubljana.
exa m i n e s t h e r e l a t i o n s h i p
tiate an International
between original and copy, histoArtists Strike still
ricization and chronology, authorioccupies a special place
zation and anonymity, center and
in the dossier of the
Neoists Artists Strike
periphery, as well as painting and
history. (Eda ufer,
conceptual art. This approach difIn Search of Balkania,
fers from American appropriation
p.42)
14.The exhibition What
art through its radical anonymity
is Modern Art? (Group
and its conscious lack of authorShow) gathered a series
ship. While Sherrie Levine or Elaine
of art projects that
have contributed to the
Sturtevant may have made copies
development of a specific
of artworks, they still signed them
art practice based on
with their own names. In contrast,
anonymity and copying.
Some of them, with roots
The Last Futurist Exhibition 0.10 no
in the (South-Eastern)
longer allows such personal approEuropean art scene of the
priations. This connects The Last
1970s-1980s, became a
central point of inspiFuturist Exhibition 0.10 with other
ration for a younger
projects that are just as anonygeneration of artists in
mous and obscure, such as the
Yugoslavia (i.e. Laibach,
IRWIN) and elsewhere.
Salon de Fleurus in New York (since
What is Modern Art (Group
1993), the Kunsthistorisches
Show) was the first
Mausoleum in Belgrade (since
2002), Alfred Barrs Museum of Modern Art, New York,
1936, and the Museum of American Art, established in
Berlin in 2004.14
History transforms documents into monuments,
wrote Michel Foucault.15 Photography is not only a
His 1979 attempt to ini-
exhibition to gather
these projects in a comprehensive group exhibit
in Berlin in 2006. See
Inke Arns and Walter
Benjamin (ed.), What is
Modern Art? (Group Show),
2 Vols. Revolver Archiv
fr aktuelle Kunst,
Frankfurt am Main 2006;
Inke Arns, Les trous de
ver de lhistoire
de lart (Art Historys
Wormholes), Trouble,
Storytellers, Paris
2010, p.131149.
15.Michel Foucault,
Archeology of Knowledge,
Routledge, New
York/London 1972 [1969].
16.Kazimir Malevich,
A Letter from Kazimir
Malevich, Art in
America, September
(1986), p.9.
B. Monuments
A Huge
Amusement-Park
Exhibition/
Vision in Motion
(1959)
1
Jan Ceuleers
local artists. They have left Paris and now step into
the international scene. In the new dynamics of the
European art world circa 1960, they see the promotional opportunities quicker than most of their
colleagues and realize that collective action has
greatadvantages.
Apart from collaborations with artists in the margin, competition between dealers who clearly differ in their approach to new art also plays a role in
the background. With geometric abstraction on the
decline, Denise Ren must forfeit much territory to
new galleries, such as Iris Clert, which is the-placeto-be in Paris in the spring of 1959. She makes much
ado with unexpected presentations, exhibitions
that are works in themselves, such as Le Vide (1958),
when Yves Klein showed nothing but an empty gallery.
In 1956 Tinguely left Denise Ren for Iris Clert, whose
theatrical style better suited his work. In July 1958 he
exhibited Mes toilesconcert pour sept peintures
and in November, together with Klein, the collaborative installation Vitesse pure et stabilit monochrome.
Competition between Denise Ren and Iris Clert is
not limited to Paris. At the beginning of February1959,
Nicolas Schffer, the constructor of spatio-dynamic
works, let it be known to Van Hoeydonck that he
cannot participate because his pieces are too large
and difficult to transport, that during the upcoming
Post-War Avant-Gardes between 1957 and 1986 277
with constantly changing color effects. Piene presents white and yellow monochrome canvases. Roth
has realized two projects: a metal hoop with hooks
across which spectators can stretch a rope, and a
structure with vertically mounted, rotating metal
bands. Soto presents his latest work, metal wires and
rods in front of a background of parallel lines. Spoerri
exhibits in Antwerp for the first time as an artist:
Autotheater, a construction with a revolving cylinder with three types of typed instructions against
a background of vibrating metal plates mirroring the
readers, and Holzplastik, an assemblage of wooden
slats, including a saw, hammer and nails, that encourage the public to make changes. Three mobile reliefs
with percussion bars, by Tinguely, together produce
a concert. Here to be seen for the first time is the
work for which Uecker will become known, monochrome rectangular panels and a ball, covered with
rows of nails. Van Hoeydonck presents long narrow
panels, painted white-on-white with black or red
stripes. Fig.1
In the press release, Callewaert writes about
the fusion of art and science and the necessity of
new media in order to arrive at a more time-bound
creation, and concludes on artists concerned with
genuine renewal as follows: Autant par le caractre
spectaculaire de leurs uvres que par le cadre o
Fig. 3 Yves Klein, proposing for sale, for the first time,
Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility. Hessenhuis,
Antwerp, March 21, 1959, photo by Frank Philippi.
Overcoming
Alienation/
New Tendencies
(19611973)
Armin Medosch
Following the MOMA show in New York, NT artists were subsumed under the label Op Art, which
Post-War Avant-Gardes between 1957 and 1986 286
characteristic of environments shaped by automation and cybernation. For NT, the form their social
engagement took in that context was not the dissemination of political messages but to intervene in the
most common layer of the infrastructure of perception. NT artists believed that seeing was inextricably
linked with knowing, with memory and interpretation45. NTs intervention implied the possibility of the
creation of new relations and potentially new insights
on the cognitive-visual level.
Paolo Virno links the creativity of the multitude46
to the member of that multitudes capacity to partake
in the commons of language. NT was working on the
level of a visual commons, trying to establish, through
experiment, new visual relations and constellations.
Artists as visual researchers worked out proposals
for new ways of seeing and inter- 45.They would have had
acting with the world and the access to earlier editions of works such as
environment.
Richard L. Gregory, Eye
However, the notion of pro and Brain: The Psychology
grammed art suggested that of Seeing, 3rd ed.,
the artists role was to conceive Weidenfeld and Nicolson,
London 1977.
of new algorithms for artworks 46.Antonio Negri and
whose execution could be car- others, Umherschweifende
ried out by non-artists. The art- Produzenten:
Immaterielle Arbeit und
ist became part of the planning Subversion, ID Verlag,
depar tmentmetaphorically Berlin 1998.
Post-War Avant-Gardes between 1957 and 1986 294
The Furor
of the Festival/
Los Encuentros
de Pamplona (1972)
Jos Das Cuys
The Furor of the Festival / Los Encuentros de Pamplona (1972) Jos Daz Cuys
The Furor of the Festival / Los Encuentros de Pamplona (1972) Jos Daz Cuys
The Furor of the Festival / Los Encuentros de Pamplona (1972) Jos Daz Cuys
The Furor of the Festival / Los Encuentros de Pamplona (1972) Jos Daz Cuys
The Furor of the Festival / Los Encuentros de Pamplona (1972) Jos Daz Cuys
The Furor of the Festival / Los Encuentros de Pamplona (1972) Jos Daz Cuys
The Furor of the Festival / Los Encuentros de Pamplona (1972) Jos Daz Cuys
The Furor of the Festival / Los Encuentros de Pamplona (1972) Jos Daz Cuys
The Avant-Garde,
Sots-Art and
the Bulldozer
Exhibition of 1974
Vitaly Komar
The Avant-Garde, Sots-Art and the Bulldozer Exhibition of 1974 Vitaly Komar
1. The Avant-Garde
and the Roots of Unofficial Art
The Russian avant-gardes revolutionary struggle
with the traditions of the old culture led to the division of art into official and unofficial. Prior to
World War I, the first avant-garde opposed the academic salon art that was fashionable at the time. After
World War II and Stalins death, the second avantgarde opposed official Socialist Realism. However, by
that time Soviet Russias unofficial artists had shed
the nave nihilism of the early 20th century avantgarde. They were aware of the ancient Roman aphorism: The new is only what has been well forgotten.
They believed in the value of pluralism, in the gradual evolution of fashion, and certain traits of their art
were reminiscent of late modernism.
An eclectic crowd was unified under the banner of opposition to the Soviet regime: it ranged
from liberals and Trotskyites to religious nationalists
The Avant-Garde, Sots-Art and the Bulldozer Exhibition of 1974 Vitaly Komar
The Avant-Garde, Sots-Art and the Bulldozer Exhibition of 1974 Vitaly Komar
The Avant-Garde, Sots-Art and the Bulldozer Exhibition of 1974 Vitaly Komar
The Avant-Garde, Sots-Art and the Bulldozer Exhibition of 1974 Vitaly Komar
The Avant-Garde, Sots-Art and the Bulldozer Exhibition of 1974 Vitaly Komar
The Avant-Garde, Sots-Art and the Bulldozer Exhibition of 1974 Vitaly Komar
The Avant-Garde, Sots-Art and the Bulldozer Exhibition of 1974 Vitaly Komar
The Avant-Garde, Sots-Art and the Bulldozer Exhibition of 1974 Vitaly Komar
Works and Words (1979) in the Shadow of I AM (1978) Marga van Mechelen
Works and Words (1979) in the Shadow of I AM (1978) Marga van Mechelen
Works and Words (1979) in the Shadow of I AM (1978) Marga van Mechelen
Works and Words (1979) in the Shadow of I AM (1978) Marga van Mechelen
Works and Words (1979) in the Shadow of I AM (1978) Marga van Mechelen
Works and Words (1979) in the Shadow of I AM (1978) Marga van Mechelen
Works and Words (1979) in the Shadow of I AM (1978) Marga van Mechelen
A European
Institutional Effort/
Art in Europe
after 68 (1980) and
Chambres dAmis (1986)
Jan Hoet
A European Institutional Effort / Art in Europe after 68 (1980) and Chambres dAmis (1986) Jan Hoet
A European Institutional Effort / Art in Europe after 68 (1980) and Chambres dAmis (1986) Jan Hoet
A European Institutional Effort / Art in Europe after 68 (1980) and Chambres dAmis (1986) Jan Hoet
never be satisfied with itself. Ive always been connected with the museum and wanted to give it a
central place in society. Of course, you then have to
ignore the Futurists who associated the museum
with a grave, a mausoleum.
The museum has a symbolic value: there, the
whole of history is experienced as competitive. The
best stands out. I like a threshing floor. Thats where
one separates the wheat from the chaff. And Ive
often wondered: does this idea correspond with
what I realized in Chambres dAmis? In the mid1980s art imploded. It offered too little resistance to
the economy. The market managers forced their way
inside. The break-in seemed brutal. But Chambres
dAmis was once again the museums pedestal, but
then unfolded into society. I increasingly described
the museum as a laboratory from which you pave
routes to the outside world. And the museum where
I worked is known as the Museum of the Ghent bourgeoisie. Brussels bureaucracy did not create it; rather
the best collectors laid the foundations via an association bent on establishing a museum.
At the time Chambres dAmis took place, I
struggled with the feeling that there was something changing, you had to try to negotiate. And
on choosing the artists, I went on the experiences I
had accumulated during visits to their studios. There
Post-War Avant-Gardes between 1957 and 1986 327
A European Institutional Effort / Art in Europe after 68 (1980) and Chambres dAmis (1986) Jan Hoet
A European Institutional Effort / Art in Europe after 68 (1980) and Chambres dAmis (1986) Jan Hoet
reference. Ive always fought to merge art with society. Now there is a turnaround. Art is now central to
society. But the managers and collectors are seated
on the throne. A Belgian collector recently declared
on television: The era of Jan Hoet is over, now we
have the power. We, the collectors.
Translated from the Dutch by Jodie Hruby.
Arrays of
Internationalism
Arrays of internationalism
SouthernEastern
Contact Zones
Cristina Freire
Collective
Exhibitions
Some exhibitions in Brazil are relevant to this narrative,
particularly those organized by Walter Zanini during
the 1960s and 1970s at the Museum of Contemporary
Art of the University of So Paulo (MAC-USP). As a
vanguard scholar, Professor Zanini integrated a generation of Brazilian idealist intellectuals who intended
to see his country in close dialogue with the world,
leaving behind perceptions of geographic and economic isolation. He was nominated director of the
newly created Museum of Contemporary Art of the
University of So Paulo in1963.
Back then exhibitions were frequently organized through open calls, with invitations distributed
throughout the net. The mail proved a great partner
of MAC-USP, by enabling the participation of Brazilian
artists in international exhibitions and allowing the
museum to receive and show works from all over the
Post-War Avant-Gardes between 1957 and 1986 332
A catalogue or some minimal record of the exhibition, sometimes just a list of names and images,
would be sent back to every participant, fulfilling the
nets motto: no juries, no fees, no returns and cata
logues to all participants.
These exhibitions served as the meeting point of
an imaginary community that put together artists that
never met personally but shared projects in common.
This sort of exhibition marked an important moment
in the public visibility of the net.
The artistic practices of Latin Americans, as well
as Eastern Europeans (artists from countries such
as Poland, Yugoslavia, Hungary and Czechoslovakia)
kept in MAC-USPs collection today reveal the zones
of contact of the time. Here it is possible to identify
a common utopia launched in these points of connection, enabling, at least there, a society of free
flows, despite the repressive conditions and circumstances of the time.
Some strategies and tactics are both similar
and familiar. Use of the mail system to transmit or
flow artistic information produced by easily accessible reproduction means is for example well known.
New techniques and technologies of the time, like
the photocopier, as fast and cheap means of reproduction aligned well with the comprehensiveness
and universality of mail art which multiplied (itself)
Post-War Avant-Gardes between 1957 and 1986 333
Mail Art
and Exhibitions
Today, the ethics of mail art, which sought to integrate
each member into a larger group, ultimately transcending the individual, may sound odd if not highly
foreign to artists from younger, more recent generations. Fig. 1
The book Grammar (1973), by Jarosaw Kozowski,
for example, was sent by mail to Brazil for an exhibition in 1974, and is an interesting example of the
dynamics of this sort of exchange.2
The book is both testimony and a living example of the SIE/NET Manifesto, written in 1972 by
Andrzej Kostoowski and Jarosaw Kozowski, and
sent to hundreds of artists all over the world, proposing a more extensive and generous net of artistic
exchanges outside and beyond
the limitations imposed by politi- 2.Jarosaw Kozowski,
Grammar (Gramatyka),
cal and/or economic restrictions: Galeria Akumulatory,
NET has no central point, nor any Pozna 1973, 99 copies.
Post-War Avant-Gardes between 1957 and 1986 334
The action expresses, to the limit, the performative character of language. It becomes a gesture that
is expanded within the communication circuit of the
mail art net and is completed upon the reading of
itsaddresses. Fig. 2
By being sent by the postal service to Brazil, the
book strengthens the efficiency of other more open,
extra-institutional circulation channels for art, capable
of welcoming, from beyond the various economic or
political imperatives, other declensions ofsignificance.
In the same year Kozowski brought forth his
enunciative catalogue of the verb to be, Brazilian
artist ngelo de Aquino circulated his Declaration
through the mail art net. The postcard, signed by
Aquino, reads (in English) I am Jarosaw Kozowski,
together with the printed stamped that belies this
statementlie.
Naturally, when not in Polish or Portuguese, the
language of international exchange was English,
which also introduced or entailed a sort of false identity for the artist(s)a language that could make
possible some kind of communication, but not identification. The internationalism expressed here was not
ideological but had, instead, an instrumental function
or purpose.
Perhaps, inspired by his exhibition organized
by Kozowski that same year at the Akumulatory 2
Post-War Avant-Gardes between 1957 and 1986 336
Collaborative
Publications
Beyond the exhibitions, collective and collaborative publications like assembly magazines also
hold a central place in this sort of subterranean network. They functioned as open, mobile platforms of
The task of preserving these other works, frequently effected and produced with dubious, shortlived or short-term media involves the reconstruction
of the intricate symbolic mesh that engenders them
and in which they are inserted, and includes historical,
political, cultural and social context. Thus, preserving
means reconstructing these meanings, attributing
significance and, finally, providing intelligibility.
The current attention afforded alternative strategies and tactics of production and distribution in
the 1960s and 1970s compels us to consider what
feeds such an interest todaywhen the concept of
network is spread globally every day by technocratic
cultural premises, tactics of artistic resistance are
quickly assimilated by marketing strategies, and the
potential critical component of artistic propositions
is further neutralized by the market; and by cultural
institutions converted into businesses guided by
neoliberal policies.
This sort of mobilizing art that typifies those
decades, a critique running strictly contrary to economic interests and removed from the hegemonic
poles of exchange, may today bears witness to a utopia that throbbed; and might still throb, somewhere,
in the subterranean.
Arrays of internationalism
From the
International
to the
Cosmopolitan
Piotr Piotrowski
essentialist generalizations. It is a genuine achievement on the part of the volumes authors and editors,
since in this way the city can be rescued from the
fate of sweeping nationalization to reveal, instead, its
heterogeneous character.2
Most certainly, a very special city-place (cosmopolis), quite difficult to compare with the other
aforementioned cities, yet important for the debate
around the (former) Central or Eastern Europe, is
Berlin. We tend to take for granted the fact that East
Berlin, the capital of the GDR, has been incorporated by the Federal Republic and by the Western
part of the present-day capital. It may be worthwhile posing or addressing the question whether
this genuine metropolis holds any significance in
a discussion about the cosmopolitan character of
this part of Europe. In other words, we should perhaps look for Eastern European traces in the German
capital of today. One such trace was an exhibition
called Der Riss im Raum (1994/95), organized by
Matthias Flgge, showing the post-1945 art of the
Czech Republic, East and West Germany, Poland, and
Slovakia. Another was Exchange and Transformation.
Central-European Avant-Gardes
2.See Katrin Klingan,
Ines Kappert (ed.), Leap
(2002), a show brought to Berlin
into the City, DuMont
from Los Angeles, focusing on
Literatur und Kunst
the classic Central European
Verlag, Cologne 2006.
avant-garde or, more precisely, the classic avantgardes (in plural) of that part of the continent.
Perhaps there are more. In this respect, one should
also ask if such interests actually challenge the transnational model in favor of the trans-cosmopolitan one.
There are many examples that corroborate this intuitive claim, provided, among others, in the work of the
Knstlerhaus Bethanien, run by Christoph Tannert,
whose wide-ranging international program reveals
numerous references to Eastern Europe. Surely, however, the case of Berlin is not a typical illustration of
the cosmopolization of the former Eastern bloc. The
cities examined in the Klingan-Kappert book provide
better examples of this process. Certainly they are
far smaller than the capital of the reunified Germany,
and the local processes developing there are narrower in scope than those to be seen in Berlin. One
of those processes is the development of art institutions of European (and sometimes even more general, broader) significance, such as the Contemporary
Art Center Zamek Ujazdowski in Warsaw, currently
run by Italian director Fabio Cavallucci, likely the
largest and most active public institution of its kind
in post-communist Europe (excepting Berlin), and
the private DOXa in Prague. Both organize big exhibitions of a cosmopolitan character. Another important factor that contributes to growing or spreading
Post-War Avant-Gardes between 1957 and 1986 346
to be trans-national in character,
Medium to Message. The
instead becoming trans-cosmoArt Exhibition as a Model
politan. The biennalesand analof a New World Order,
ysis of themis a good starting
Open. Cahier on Art and
the Public Domain (The
point for thinking in specific terms,
Art Biennial as a Global
in particular those as formulated
Phenomenon. Strategies
by Boris Groys: that these events
in Neo-Political Times),
Vol. 8 (2009), No. 16,
represent not only tourist attracp.6465.
tions and opportunities for the
8.Hans Belting,
promotion of international, global
Contemporary Art and
the Museum in the Global
capital-driven interests, but also,
Age, Peter Weibel,
and perhaps first and foremost,
Andrea Buddensieg (ed.),
occasions to develop a global
Contemporary Art and
the Museum. A Global
political forum, global politeia.7 If
Perspective. Hatje
we choose to adopt such a point
Cantz, Ostfildern 2007,
of view, one could propose that
p.1638; Hans Belting,
Contemporary Art as
the cosmopolitan cities, includGlobal Art: A Critical
ing those in (the former) Eastern
Estimate, Hans Belting,
Europe, together with their cosAndrea Buddensieg (ed.),
The Global Art World.
mopolitan cultural activity (like
Audiences, Markets,
the biennales), will lead to the
and Museums, Hatje
creation of a network of cosmoCantz, Ostfildern 2009,
p.3873.
politan intellectual exchange and
trans-cosmopolitan relations, of which the topography of (the former) Eastern Europe will be a part.
The final problem that serves to reveal or demonstrate the cosmopolitan character of the particular
7.Boris Groys, From
Arrays of internationalism
Global Art:
Institutional
Anxiety
and the Politics
of Naming
Nancy Adajania
The Nth
Field
Since 2005, Ranjit Hoskote and I have been developing models that deal with the transcultural condition
in which we find ourselves today as cultural theorists and cultural practitioners. We have over the last
decade increasingly found post-colonial theory in
its classical form (the early and undoubtedly seminal work of Homi K. Bhabha, Gayatri C. Spivak and
Edward W. Said) to be no longer sufficient to the task
of attending to our experiential and epistemological
complexities. Classical post-colonial theory was tremendously liberating and even formative for us, during the 1980s and 1990s, but it is imperative for us to
go beyond it now, through the mode of sympathetic
critique. Indeed, the foundational figures of postcolonial theory have themselves explored further in the
meanwhile, with Bhabhas account of cultural citizenship in a post-national space, and Saids philosophy of engaged reconciliation in the Israel-Palestine
context. However, this still leaves us with the task of
theorising the domain of transcultural exchanges,
unbounded by prior historical confrontations, in a
post-postcolonial space.
One of the first of our models was that of critical transregionality. Our interest is to remap the
domains of global cultural experience by setting
aside what seem to us to be exhausted cartographies
variously born out of the Cold War, area studies, late
colonial demarcations, the war against terror or the
supposed clash of civilisations. In place of these
exhausted, even specious cartographies premised
on the paradigm of the West against the Rest, we
propose a new cartography based on the mapping of
continents of affinities, and a search for commonalties based on jointly faced crises and shared predicaments which produce intriguing entanglements
among regional histories staged in Asia, Africa Latin
America and Eastern Europe.
More recently, in refining this model, we have
framed the concept of the nth field.5 The nth field signifies, to us, the untagged and unnumbered zones of
cultural and political possibility that arise from the
unpredictable encounters among 5.This section is based
diverse actors in the transverse on Nancy Adajania and
spaces, which are opened up by Ranjit Hoskotes essay,
The Nth Field: Horizon
migration for dialogue and mutual Reloaded in Maria
curiosity. We draw this term from Hlavajova et al ed.,
the discipline of computer pro- On Horizons: A Critical
Reader In Contemporary
gramming, where the nth field Art (Utrecht: BAK, 2011)
stands for the as-yet-unspecified pp. 16- 32.
Post-War Avant-Gardes between 1957 and 1986 357
themes; except to indicate that certain generic features may be predicated of art that circulates around
the global production system of the biennale circuit
or the residency circuit (such as portability, readability, scale, tendency to address planetwide concerns
or multi-specialist cooperation). But this enumeration scarcely exhausts the potentialities of forms that
emerge in the nth field: forms that may not necessarily be portable or readily readable, and yet may exert a
compelling effect on the viewer.
This turns the question What is global art?
around on those who ask it. The real answers are:
Whos asking? And why? What is the optic through
which this question is being phrased and does it,
perhaps, signal a profound institutional anxiety in the
academy and the museum (as against the studio and
the biennale). Perhaps it points to a widening divide
between the practitioners of contemporary art and
those who would wish to bear testimony to it from
within the older institutions of art history.
There can no longer be a universalising art history in the sense of an epistemological and discursive
motor running the Euro-American centres and driving
ancillary activity in various outposts and provinces
of the empire. The demand that the artistic imagination situate itself in a universalising production
of meaning marks an unfortunate reversion to some
and finer understanding of the particularities of practice, and the entanglements among practices. That
is why the nth field, as the model of the future, not
only contains the promise of Benjaminian not-yet,
but also proposes a model of praxis that is achievable. The nth field is not produced out of institutional
or managerial desires, but from the desire of cultural
practitioners to map new continents of affinities.
Coda
At a symposium held in Salzburg in Summer 2011,
devoted to the ongoing discussion on the problem of
defining global art and the role performed by art history in this context, various resolutions were hinted
at. We heard, for instance, of a possible abnegation
of Eurocentric narcissism that has underwritten discursive control over art history, and a corresponding
receptivity to the perspectives of other societies. We
heard, also, of the need to go beyond classical postenlightenment aesthetics and to engage with aesthetic philosophies of various societies.
Such efforts, even when they seem laudable, are
susceptible to basic problems. This could lead us
either to arid comparatism or reinstate the kind of
Close
Close
Spirits of
Internationalism,
Van Abbemuseum,
Eindhoven/Museum van
Hedendaagse Kunst
Antwerpen, Antwerpen
Charles Esche, Steven ten Thije, Bart De Baere,
Jan De Vree and Anders Kreuger
Introduction
Spirits of Internationalism takes place simultaneously at MHKA in Antwerp and Van Abbemuseum in
Eindhoven. The exhibition covers the period 1956
1986, characterised by the bipolarity of the Cold War
and various reactions against it. The point of departure is the Benelux region, which like all of western
Europe actively celebrated US dominationin the
arts and otherwise. This has tended to obscure the
relations that did exist between artists in all continents. The exhibition offers a cross-section of art and
artist archives and shows some unexpected resemblances between artists working in the West, the East
and elsewhere.
The exhibition is sub-divided into eight spirits:
the Concrete, the Essential, the Transcendental,
the Subverted, the (Dis)located, the Universal,
the Positioned, and the Engaged. These tentative categories invite viewers to explore new
The Concrete
The Concrete brings together optical and kinetic
works created in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The
works are based on tangible materials and structures
and relate to our physical and sensorial existence.
But they differ from the more familiar abstract art of
Late Modernismnot least the American Abstract
Expressionist painters (Jackson Pollock, Barnett
Newman, Cy Twombly and others), for whom abstraction is often a form of representation of the unrepresentable. By contrast, the Concrete becomes
a tool for intervening in the real (material, social,
political) world by exposing and thereby changing
itsmateriality.
Lucio Fontana
Lucio Fontana (18991968, Argentina/Italy) regards
art as part of the evolution of nature and its laws. Not
surprisingly, perhaps, for him the whole of art history leads to his own concetto spaziale (spatial
concept). At first Fontana tries to variously transform and transcend his selected media (oil on canvas, copper plates, ceramics), but later his trademark
Gego
Gego (Gertrud Goldschmidt, 19121994, Germany/
Venezuela) studies architecture and engineering
before fleeing the Nazis in 1939. By the late 1950s
she has become a leading artist in Latin America. Her
drawings and small metal sculptures are reminiscent
of architectural studies, but they are autonomous artworks uniting the spatial and the organic. She calls
them drawings in space. The reticulreas or networked areas are room-sized versions of the earlier works. The lines are pieces of interlinked metal
wire articulating a mental space by physical means.
Gego said: Each module is organised individually
and breaks with the overall symmetry of the structure. (MHKA/Van Abbemuseum)
Yves Klein
Yves Klein (19281962, France) is the son of two
painters who works in many techniques, among them
Post-War Avant-Gardes between 1957 and 1986 368
Pierre Manzoni
Piero Manzoni (19331963, Italy) is a precocious
painter and writer of manifestos, notably Per una pit
tura organica (Towards Organic Painting) in 1957.
Inspired by Klein and Fontana, Manzoni produces his
first achrome (colourless painting) in 1957, underlining the purity of the material. Yet from around 1960,
when he exhibits with the Zero Group, his work
addresses the material mostly through the intellectual. Manzoni produces certificates of authenticity
declaring a person an authentic artwork, the artists
breath caught in a balloon and his most legendary
work, Merda dartista (Artists Shit): small metal
cans containing 30 grams of his own excrement.
(MHKA) Fig. 1
Franois Morellet
Franois Morellet (1926, France, lives in Paris) has
chosen to follow a formal objective grammar for his
paintings, installations, and architectural interventions, basing them on principles and systems established in advance of the execution rather than on a
moment of subjective creativity. Morellet joins the
French Groupe de recherche dart visuel (Visual Art
Research Group) in 1960. His systemic approach,
based on optical effect, yields visually attractive
and challenging artworks. Viewers are intended to
generate interpretations of their own, and Morellet
Post-War Avant-Gardes between 1957 and 1986 369
Henk Peeters
Henk Peeters (1925, the Netherlands, lives in Hall)
abandons a figurative, socially-engaged style of
painting for an informal, material-based approach
in the late 1950s, while remaining firmly anticapitalist. In 1958 he is one of the founders of the
Informal Group in the Netherlands, which maintains
contacts with Piero Manzoni, Yves Klein and Lucio
Fontana. In 1961 it transforms itself into the group
Nul, connected to the German Group Zero and the
French Groupe de Recherche dArt Visuel. Thanks
to these European connections Peeters is invited
to participate in the second of the international
Nove tendencije exhibitions in Zagreb in 1963. (Van
Abbemuseum)
Toma alamun
Toma alamun (1941, Slovenia, lives in Ljubljana)
is considered the leading contemporary poet in
Slovene, and he has been translated into many languages. He initiates the publishing of the first OHO
book, EVA (1966), an anthology of concrete, experimental and visual poetry. Trained as an art historian,
alamun works with OHO as a visual artist in 1968
1970, creating installations with natural materials.
Hay, Cornhusks, Bricks (1969), now recreated for the
Van Abbemuseum, is first created for the exhibition
Great-Grandfathers in Zagreb. In 1970 alamun participates in the legendary Information exhibition at
MoMA, as a member of OHO. (Van Abbemuseum)
Post-War Avant-Gardes between 1957 and 1986 370
Jan Schoonhoven
Jan Schoonhoven (19141994, the Netherlands)
starts as a draughtsman, inspired by Paul Klees
poetic expressionism. From the mid-1950s he
embarks on the project that will become associated with his name: the monochrome reliefs. These
are geometric figurations of non-hierarchical construction, usually colourless to focus all attention
on the tones of light falling on the white angular
grids. The rectilinear order is sometimes disturbed
by Schoonhovens own handwriting. Striving for an
impersonal and objective art, he becomes a member of the Informal Group and a founder, with Armando,
Jan Hendrikse and Henk Peeters, of the group Nul in
1960. (MHKA/Van Abbemuseum)
MHKA, Antwerp.
Victor Vasarely
Victor Vasarely (19081997, Hungary/France) moves
to Paris in 1930 to work as a graphic designer and
begins painting abstract geometric works after the
war, at first inspired by textures in nature. He is considered the founding father of Op Art, a movement in
Post-War Avant-Gardes between 1957 and 1986 371
art based on optically constructed patterns and illusions and the sometimes disruptive effect they have
on our senses. In the 1950s his work is black-andwhite; the gradual incorporation of colour takes place
in the 1960s. Vasarelys geometrically based work
helped formulates an international grammar for
perceiving the Concrete. He executes many public art
projects in various countries. (MHKA)
The Essential
The works selected for this category are clear and
strong, both in their idea and their form. They are
essential because they refuse to compromise their
self-evidence, their presence as man-made objects
in built space. They are sure of their value. This is it;
this is Art, seems to be their statement. The power
of this statement is linked to the context where
they were made, the US of the 1960s. The global
dominance of the movements to which these works
belongMinimal Art, Conceptual Artreflects the
power of the Western worlds dominant nation. Fig. 3
Carl Andre
Carl Andre (1935, US, lives in New York) is an iconic
representative of Minimal Art, a sculptor working with natural and industrially produced materials (timber, metal plates, bricks, hay bales). He
showcases them as they are, unadulterated and
merely arranged in strict visual formations on the
floor. Andre makes us experience the properties of
matter, form, structure and place. A direct sensation
of presence is the core value of his art. He says: My
Post-War Avant-Gardes between 1957 and 1986 372
John Baldessari
John Baldessari (1931, US, lives in Los Angeles) seeks
to reconcile his citys surf-and-sex aesthetic with
New York conceptualism. Joseph Kossuth famously
dismisses his work as conceptual cartoons of
actual conceptual art, and he answers with the
now-classic video John Baldessari Sings Sol LeWitt.
Baldessari typically tries out ideas in various permutations and makes them reappear at various stages
in his uvre. He has invested much energy into visualising the somehow self-evident but still inexplicable, almost mysterious mechanisms behind the
Duchampian notion of choosing: I love the idea of
doing just gratuitous things, in a world of things for
use. (MHKA)
Dan Flavin
Dan Flavin (19331996, US) is a fundamental figure
of Minimal Art, famous for constellations of standardissue neon lamps, usually Untitled (but dedicated
Donald Judd
Donald Judd (19281994, US) studies painting and
philosophy and makes a great impact on post-war
art as a sculptor, printmaker and critic as a front figure and chief ideologue of Minimal Art. In his essay
Specific Objects from 1965 Judd describes the art
of the 1960s as neither sculpture nor painting. His
later works, industrially manufactured box structures
of wood or metal, demonstrate the same tension
between the two art forms. He famously denies that
his own work is composed and analysable, claiming
that it came to him full-blown in the middle of the
night. A very essentialist position! (MHKA)
Robert Morris
Robert Morris (1931, US, lives in New York) starts as
a painter with a strong interest in dance and improvisational theatre. The performative and the participatory have remained of essence in his mature work
from the 1960s onwards, which largely happens in
the sphere of sculpture. Like many of his peers and
contemporaries, he takes inspiration from Duchamp.
Appearance and meaning, form and action are
pitched against each other in Morriss oeuvre, comprising minimalist large-scale structures (often outdoor pieces), conceptual undertakings such as Box
with the Sound of Its Own Making and staged encounters between human performers and sculptural
objects. (MHKA)
Frank Stella
Frank Stella (1936, US, lives in New York) studies
painting and art history. The paintings from the seven
years after his graduation in 1958 have become
canonical. They consist of patterns of regular lines
marked with unsteady penmanship, at first restricted
to white on black square canvases but gradually
becoming more colourful and exploring other geometrical forms. From the 1970s Stella makes reliefs in
Lawrence Weiner
Lawrence Weiner (1942, US, lives in New York) is a
very Transatlantic artist, who has lived in Amsterdam
and worked all over Europe. He exhibited at MHKA last
spring (with Liam Gillick). Unlike the visual poets, who
start with language, Weiner bases his tectonic text
pieces on sculpture and painting, as his most-quoted
piece indicates. 1. THE ARTIST MAY CONSTRUCT
THE PIECE; 2. THE PIECE MAY BE FABRICATED; 3. THE
PIECE NEED NOT BE BUILT. Weiners words are of
the world, as concrete as things. Perhaps his greatest contribution to the Essential is to make the flesh
become word. (MHKA)
Alighiero e Boetti
The Transcendental
Crossovers between various levels of realitydream,
vision, utopiafascinated many artists during the
1960s and 70s. Their work reveals an uneasiness
with the self-assured and universalist position of
what we choose to call the Essential. Instead
the artists of the Transcendentalmany of whom
belonged to the arte povera (poor art) movement
in Italycreated works open to interpretation and
doubt and critique. These artists address issues that
Marinus Boezem
Marinus Boezem (1934, the Netherlands, lives in
Middelburg) exhibits a stretch of polder as a readymade in 1960. This is not untypical of his monumental-but-modest uvre, largely based on gesture and
Post-War Avant-Gardes between 1957 and 1986 375
Marcel Broodthaers
Marcel Broodthaers (19241976, Belgium) produces
and composes his workobjects, images, texts and
installationsto challenge the power of language
over thinking. Since 1967, I have been using photosensitive fabric, film and slides to determine the relationship between the object and its image, as well
as the one that exists between the symbol and the
meaning of an object; the written document. In 1968
Broodthaers opens a museum in his Brussels home.
Muse dArt Moderne, Dpartement des Aigles, sec
tion XIXe sicle is an ironic and subversive mirroring
of the museum format, undermining the mental and
institutional organisation of meaning. (MHKA)
Jef Cornelis
Jef Cornelis (1941, Belgium, lives in Antwerp) worked
for BRT, Belgian Radio and Television, from 1963 until
1998. He first made documentaries about architecture and urban planning, but from the late 1960s he
produces many programmes about contemporary
art, offering artists direct access to the television
medium. His critical documentaries of large-scale
exhibitions such as Harald Szeemanns Documenta
V (1972) are both invaluable documentation and
Post-War Avant-Gardes between 1957 and 1986 376
subjectively authored statements. Cornelis also cofounds the A379089 art space in Antwerp, co-ordinated by German curator Kaspar Knig in 19691970,
where James Lee Byars, Marcel Broodthaers and
other internationally renowned artists stage significant projects. (MHKA)
Herman de Vries
Herman de Vries (1931, the Netherlands, lives in
Germany) studies horticulture before becoming an
artist in the early 1950s, starting with collages of
found objects and gradually becoming more informal and abstract. In the 1960s he is a co-publisher,
with Armando and Henk Peeters, of the Dutch journal nul = 0. He also produces paintings and drawings
with dots or stripes, some of them shown here. Later
de Vries reintegrates gardening in his art. His walled
gardens from the 1990s are at the same time physical installationswith real vegetation such as lavender or hopsand highly concentrated poetic images.
(MHKA) Fig. 4
Luciano Fabro
Luciano Fabro (19362007, Italy) is a sculptor who
reasons with his senses and one of the artists who
Ren Heyvaert
Ren Heyvaert (19291984, Belgium) trains as an
architect and practises architecture in Ghent and
the US before becoming an independent artist in the
late 1960s. His long-ignored work is restrained and
austere, but also subversive and unsettling. It can be
described as a fundamental formalism, or even a formal fundamentalism. Contrary to first appearances,
Heyvaerts imageobjects (drawings, small sculptures, everyday objects) are anything but a down- toearth and unassuming Kleinkunst. They respond to a
very concrete and personal need for meditation and
almost seek to dictate the viewers response, as if
they were theorems leaving no room for scepticism.
(MHKA)
Post-War Avant-Gardes between 1957 and 1986 377
Guy Mees
Guy Mees (19352003, Belgium) leaves behind a
small but dense uvre. His work is investigative, formally innovative and relentlessly precise. Mees has
what musicians call touchthe ability to make tangible what usually remains unnoticed or hidden. Lost
Space is a body of work from the 1960s, for which
he uses machine-made lace and fluorescent bluish
neon light. One of these pieces is shown here. Mees
later explores pastels, coloured paper and low-key
but intense painterly interventions in built space. He
produces videos and photographs, in which he also
works with variations on themes, as in musical composition. (MHKA)
Mario Merz
Mario Merz (19252003, Italy) is a central figure in
the arte povera movement of the 1960s. In the beginning of this decade Merz takes up sculpture, notably
producing the characteristic igloos. These images
of a nomadic, boundary-less condition are composed
of everyday materials: clay, stone, glass, jute, asphalt,
branches from trees, metal, wax. They often carry
neon inscriptions, such as this quote from the North
Vietnamese general V Ngyn Gip: If the enemy
Michelangelo Pistoletto
Michelangelo Pistoletto (1933, Italy, lives in Biella and
Turin) has been associated with arte povera, defining
a new kind of monumentality with his 1960s sculptures juxtaposing rags and other worthless materials with the forms of classical antiquity. From 1962
he has used mirrors and metals such as gold, silver
or copper as reflective backgrounds for cut-out
life-sized photographic human figures. These superimpositions fuse the present and the past into a
single image, challenging the very idea of representation. In recent years the mirrors have often been
shown without the added layer of figuration, and
sometimes they have been deliberately smashed.
(MHKA)
The Subverted
These different spirits of internationalism are rarely
encountered in pure form. In the art of the 1960s and
70s there was constant traffic between lofty, utopian
ambitions (for instance in Concretism, Minimalism
and Conceptualism) and a fascinationor even
obsessionwith political, social and economic reality such as it was (a driving force behind Pop Art
and politically-engaged art). Both these approaches,
the inward-looking and the outward-looking, were
used by artists to create distinctly personal, idiosyncratic agendas, which are almost by definition impure,
subverted versions of the more dogmatic beliefs that
fuel movements in art. Fig. 5
Anselm Kiefer
Anselm Kiefer (1945, Germany, lives in Paris) is a student of Joseph Beuys who becomes a painter and
sculptor and occasionally makes large-scale installations. His work is characterised by broad and dark
evocations of an unspecified mythologised past, with
images of scenery referring to the Bible, the Third
Reich or imaginary Germanic antiquity. Mrkische
Bruce Nauman
Bruce Nauman (1941, US, lives in New Mexico) studies mathematics and physics before becoming an
artist. From the mid-1960s he has experimented
Post-War Avant-Gardes between 1957 and 1986 380
Sigmar Polke
Sigmar Polke (19412010, Germany) befriends
Gerhard Richter in Dsseldorf in the early 1960s.
Together with Konrad Lueg they coin the term
Capitalist Realism. Polke critiques consumerist
society by incorporating images from popular culture
in his paintings, drawings and prints and then superimposing a pattern of white, black or colourful dots.
This device also problematizes the artists authentic stance as an engaged, critical observer. In the
series of paintings entitled Hhere Wesen befehlen...
(Higher Entities Command...) he redefines artistic
creativity again, but in a more anecdotic and sceptical way, subtly ridiculing the artists alleged connections with the powers that be. (MHKA)
Gerhard Richter
Gerhard Richter (1932, Germany, lives in Cologne)
is educated in East Germany as a mural painter in
the style of Socialist Realism. He leaves in 1961 and
co-organises actions in Dsseldorf under the provocative title Capitalist Realism. Influenced by the
banality of Pop Art, Richter bases his paintings on
photographs, blurring the still wet image to create
out-of-focus effects. Later he will make photo-realist
and abstract paintings in parallel. This has continued
until today. The content of the work may be political,
as in his famous series on the German RAF terrorists,
but it always also contains other, existential, dimensions. (MHKA)
Edward Ruscha
Edward Ruscha (1937, US, lives in Los Angeles) is
one of the leading painters of our times. He has
a Catholic upbringing in Oklahoma and moves to
California in the late 1950s. In his images, suspended between different modes of representation,
the literal appears to dominate over the metaphoric,
but you can never be sure. Ruschas painted words,
sometimes executed in the very substance signified
by the word, have been interpreted as instances of
Post-War Avant-Gardes between 1957 and 1986 381
Andy Warhol
Andy Warhol (19281987, US) is probably the most
famous 20th century artist. For him fame itself is an
art form. Starting as a commercial illustrator, Warhol
conquers the art world with consciously banal imagery, soon identified as Pop Art. Warhol is the antithesis of the Abstract Expressionists who dominated the
1950s. Playing with serial production and renaming
his studio the Factory, his art encapsulates postwar consumerism. In his words: If you want to know
all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my
paintings, my films and me, and there I am. There is
nothing behind it. (MHKA)
The (Dis)located
Physical and mental space is almost always an active
concern for artists. Place and location, closeness
and distance, belonging and alienationthese are
realities that individuals are still often unable to overcome, but during the Cold War period artists experienced them more directly and physically than in
todays globalized, inter-connected, networked
world. Distances, and the cost of overcoming them,
were greater. The (dis)located artists show a strong
awareness of their locatedness and let their direct
surrounding become a central element in their work,
which they then used often to address more general
and universal issues.
Stanley Brouwn
Stanley Brouwn (1935, Suriname, lives in Amsterdam)
moves to the Netherlands in 1957. A representative
earlier work is the now famous this way Brouwn, a
series of drawings made by passers-by asked for
directions. Brouwn dedicates himself to intense
explorations of measurement. The movement from
a to b and the distance between them is of central
Post-War Avant-Gardes between 1957 and 1986 382
importance in his art, which makes tangible the tension between abstract measures (the metric scale)
and embodied measures such as the step. Size is
essential to the work, and photographic reproductions are not allowed. Brouwn is exemplary in following his ideas logically and rigorously. (MHKA) Fig. 6
sticks in the exhibitions of other artists and is a recognisable silhouette at gallery openings, carrying a
barre de bois ronde over his shoulder. These sticks
consist of painted individual units whose length
equals their diameter. The individual segments are
arranged in a systematic logical order in the eight
colours of the light spectrum, black and white.
Cadere describes his works as endless paintings
allowing him to comment on exclusion and inclusion.
(MHKA)
Jef Geys
Andr Cadere
Andr Cadere (19341978, Romania/France) is a
strategically peripheral, and therefore influential,
presence in the Paris art scene of the 1970s. He
parasitically installs his round, painted wooden
On Kawara
On Kawara (1933, Japan, lives in New York) has made
the registration of passing time his primary artistic
form. His series of Date Paintings started on 4 January
1966, making one painting a day with the date in
white lettering on black background and storing them
in boxes lined with newsprint. There are more than
2000 such paintings. Kawaras three other series
(IWent, I Met, I Read) follow a similar logic, while other
works have a more monumental form. One Million
Years (Past) (1969) is a book in several volumes that
may also be read aloud in public. (MHKA)
Jlius Koller
Jlius Koller (19392007, Slovakia) is focused on
social urban space and how individuals position
themselves in it and act together. U.F.O.-naut J.K. is a
long series of photographic documentations showing
Koller in and around his house with various domestic equipment or sports gear. U.F.O. may be deciphered differently for different projects: as Universal
Futurological Orientation, for instance, or Universal
Cultural Fantastic Ornament. In the manifesto AntiHappening (System of Subjective Objectivity) Koller
describes his aesthetic interventions in everyday life
Zofia Kulik
Zofia Kulik (1947, Poland, lives in Warsaw) and
Przemysaw Kwiek (1945, Poland, lives in Warsaw)
works together 19711987. Their politically-engaged
collaboration as KwieKulik is now considered an
important chapter in post- war Polish art history.
It encompasses various public activities: performances, outdoor actions, slide shows for children,
students or other specially targeted audiences.
KwieKulik experiment with film and photography, of
which the series Activities with Dobromierz (1972
1974) is the prime example. Their little son is the central figure in these often surprising pictures taken in
and outside their home and reflecting the realities of
family life in Socialist Poland. (Van Abbemuseum)
Mladen Stilinovic
Mladen Stilinovic (1947, Yugoslavia, lives in Zagreb)
questions the deep structures of society that determine the role of the artist as an agent (and captive)
of language. He famously said: An artist who doesnt
Post-War Avant-Gardes between 1957 and 1986 384
speak English is not an artist. In collages and photographs based on the colours of the Croatian flag
he challenges the authority of national symbols. His
taxonomical installations use seemingly innocuous
objects and paintings to critique socialist and neoliberal ideology and expose the unequal and unstable
relation between the individual and society. By juxtaposing dislocated signs Stilinovic ironically visualises the constants of human powerlessness and
suffering. (Van Abbemuseum)
The Universal
Who has the right to assume the position of speaking
for all, of voicing universal concerns? In politics the
Universal always seems to be in danger of degenerating into imperialism. Yet this does not prevent artists
from productively using their longing for universality,
for solutions to problems that apply equally to all, in all
parts of the world. This tendency was stronger during
the Cold War period, when it also represented a utopian wish to unite the First, Second and Third Worlds
(capitalist, communist and developing countries) of
the unequal and violently imposed postwar order.
Luc Deleu
Luc Deleu (1944, Belgium, lives in Antwerp) works at
the intersection of art, architecture, urban thinking
and politics. A hybrid activism underpins his work,
from the conversion of the artist Panamarenkos
townhouse in Antwerp in 1986 to the triumphal arches
made from shipping containers in the 1990s. Deleus
outlandish proposals from the 1970s address
important societal needs: the environment (planting fruit trees and growing vegetables in the cities),
Post-War Avant-Gardes between 1957 and 1986 385
the social contract (introducing plastic money, completely de-regulating traffic and television) or public memory (recycling monuments as social housing,
making Belgium a fully agrarian country). Four of those
proposals are presented here. (Van Abbemuseum)
Fina Miralles
Fina Miralles (1950, Spain, lives in Cadaqus) has
created performances, installations, videos, paintings, and photographs focusing on landscapes and
human dimensions of space. In the video Petjades
(Footprints, 1976) she measures the city by making
footprints on the street. Her visualising of the bodys
relationship to urban space becomes an act of sociopolitical reflection. Mar de Hierba (Sea of Grass,
1973) also exemplifies this subjective approach to
land and politics. Miralles creates an island and pulls
it offshore as her personal territory. A suitcase carries
photographs of the island and the process of shaping
it from soil and dried grass. (Van Abbemuseum)
Pere Noguera
Pere Noguera (1941, Spain, lives in La Bisbal
dEmpord) has worked with sculpture, installation and performance since the 1970s, often
Panamarenko
Panamarenko (1940, Belgium, lives in West Flanders),
the artist name of Henri Van Herwegen, is an abbreviation of PAN AMerican AiRlines and COmpany.
Panamarenkos artistic universe is rooted in Cold War
obsessions. He emerges in the mid-1960s as a builder
of aircraft that dont fly and other utopian machines.
Panamarenko shows the impossibility of separating
art from non- artor from society. The inside-outside
divide ceases to exist in his art. The perfect demonstration of this is his townhouse in Antwerp, which he
donated with all its contents to MHKA after retiring as
an artist at the age of 65. (Van Abbemuseum)
The Positioned
Performance art was one of the new forces emerging in both the West, the East and the Third World (i.e.
both in New York and elsewhere) during the period
covered by the exhibition. The transition from the
practice of performance to the more generalised
and politicised notion of performativity began
before the end of the Cold War. Female artists often
led the way. They contradicted or made visible existing positions on how to communicate and present
oneself. They are positioned in that they pose something explicitly and through this very act disrupt what
is positioned.
Alain Arias-Misson
Alain Arias-Misson (1936, Belgium, lives in Brussels,
Paris, Venice and Panama City) is influenced by the
happenings of the early 1960s when he returns to
Brussels from the US in 1968. He is seen as the inventor of the public poem, an extension of visual poetry
but distinct from the happening in that it is performed
outside of any artistic or aesthetic context: in the
streets or on the beach. Arias-Missons public poems
Stuart Brisley
Stuart Brisley (1933, England, lives in London and
Istanbul) is very consciously invested in a direct
and democratic relationship with his audience. Best
known as a performance artist and community activist, he has also worked with painting, sculpture,
installation, photography, film and other media to
bring the marginalised, the useless and the excremental to the fore. In his performances from the
late 1960s and onwards Brisley accentuates the
perversity of consumerist society by letting things
go to waste, decay or be meaninglessly repeated,
degraded and debased in other ways. The film Being
and Doing is produced together with Ken McMullen.
(Van Abbemuseum)
Lili Dujourie
Lili Dujourie (1941, Belgium, lives in Lovendegem) is
an uncompromising, versatile artist who has been
producing objects and images in various materials
Post-War Avant-Gardes between 1957 and 1986 387
Esther Ferrer
Esther Ferrer (1937, Spain, lives in Paris) is a leading artist of her generation in Spain, whose conceptual performance practice dates back to the Franco
years. She is a member of the experimental music and
performance group Grupo Zaj from 1967 until its dissolution in 1996. Ferrer creates performances and
installations focusing on the human bodyher own
bodyand almost always including a measuring
device such as a chair. In ntimo y personal (Intimate
and Personal, 1977), a work restaged many times,
she covers her naked body with letters that spell out
the title, reinforcing the exposure through language.
(Van Abbemuseum)
Tomislav Gotovac
Tomislav Gotovac (19372010, Yugoslavia/Croatia)
emerges with Heads (1960), a series of close-up
photographic self-portraits. He continues to produce photographs of himself performing activities
that parody or problematize the desires of consumerist society or the manifestations of identity in mass
culture, such as the series Showing the Elle Magazine
(1962). Gotovac also produces collages, installations
and experimental films, and he is famous for introducing performance art and happenings in Yugoslavia. In
Zagreb I Love You (1981) he runs naked through the
Croatian capital and kisses the groundperhaps
the ultimate embodiment of the irrepressible quest
for artistic freedom that marked his career. (Van
Abbemuseum)
Tibor Hajas
Tibor Hajas (19461980, Hungary) explores the limits of the body, life and death in performances often
carried out without an audience, for the camera. He
will hang upside down, blindfolded or in ropes, submitting himself to beating, whipping or the insertion of syringes. Titles such as Flesh Painting, Coma,
Dark Flash and Extinction indicate the near-death
Post-War Avant-Gardes between 1957 and 1986 388
The Engaged
To some extent this is code for politically or socially
engaged art. Political art does not have to follow a
particular programmeit is usually recognisable
anyway. Activism in art sometimes involves physical
activity to promote an alternative view of the world,
but also the subversive questioning of prevailing systems without a goal-orientated agenda for political,
social or economic change. As a term, the Engaged
attempts to capture an art that addresses power relations by making visible what is truly invisibleor simply hidden in the surface of the images that occupy
the public sphere.
Victor Burgin
Victor Burgin (1941, UK, lives in London and Paris) has
critiqued the overt and covert ideology of contemporary western capitalist society in theoretically motivated works since the 1960s. Combining texts that
could be advertising copy or extracts from scientific
jargon with black and white documentary-style photographic images, Burgin visualises how everyday life
is dominated by mediatised information (even before
Post-War Avant-Gardes between 1957 and 1986 389
the Internet). The best-known example of this semiotic approach is the poster put up in Newcastle in
1976, showing an couple in an intimate situation and
stating: What does possession mean to you? 7% of
our population own 84% of our wealth. (MHKA)
Paul De Vree
Paul De Vree (19091982, Belgium) is a pioneer of
European concrete poetry and a visual artist. He
founds literary journals such as De Tafel Ronde in
Belgium (19531982) and Lotta poetica (19711975)
in collaboration with the Italian poet Sarenco. De
Vrees work successively covers typographic compositions, audiovisual events, critique of the mass
media and the poetic and political use of photographic images. With his Italian colleagues he elaborates Poesia visiva, a movement that activated
both the visual and the visionary. De Vrees
works from his later period reflect his characteristic entanglement of the political and the erotic. (Van
Abbemuseum)
Grup de Treball
Jenny Holzer
Jenny Holzer (1950, US, lives in New York) visualises
language as an instrument of political and psychological manipulation. Her use of language is inspired
by commercial advertising and political technology.
Yet instead of enhancing the visibility of products or
candidates for election, Holzer voices feminist concerns and addresses other moral or legal issues. Her
messages appear in public space: projected onto
walls, engraved on benches, printed on T-shirts.
Truisms (1983) is composed of short statements
truths that are both revelatory and banal, designed
to run on LED-displays in places like Times Square in
New York or Piccadilly Circus in London. (MHKA)
Jrg Immendorff
Jrg Immendorff (19452007, Germany) studies
under Joseph Beuys in Dsseldorf, where the social
and political relevance of professional art is under
scrutiny. In the late 1960s he stages several performances and political demonstrations based on the
meaningless utterance of a baby named Lidl. His
fame, however, is made with paintings such as the
Caf Deutschland series or Hrt auf zu malen that are
both painterly and didactic, articulating self-doubt
Robert Indiana
Robert Indiana (1928, US, lives in Maine) is a painter,
sculptor and printmaker, associated with Pop Art
because of his attention to the rhetoric of the
American dream as expressed, not least, through
the road signs leading travellers through to the
Open Frontier. Throughout his career Indiana creates assemblages of found objects entitled Herms,
in reference to the signposts of Roman antiquity
but actually commenting on the American Empire.
His best-known works, paintings and sculptures of
the word love, are good examples of this. The word
itself symbolises profound human emotion, but as an
image it becomes an empty signifier. (MHKA)
Cildo Meireles
Cildo Meireles (1948, Brazil, lives in Rio de Janeiro)
emerges early as artist, with a series of projects in
1969 that investigated the notion of lived physical
and social space through the colour and texture of
Post-War Avant-Gardes between 1957 and 1986 391
material, a theme that recurs in later three-dimensional works such as Inmensa (1982). The increasingly repressive military dictatorship in Brazil also
prompts him to create politically engaged works.
The insertion and circulation pieces are wellknown: the anti-imperialist text printed onto CocaCola Bottles in Inseroes em circuitos ideolgicos
(Insertions into Ideological Circuits, 1970) or the
Zero Cent, Zero Centavo and Zero Dollar pieces (1974
1984). (MHKA)
Antoni Muntadas
Antoni Muntadas (1942, Spain, lives in New York) has
devoted his career to conceptualising and visualising
the practice of communication, manifested as verbal,
textual and audiovisual systems of information and
representation. He is particularly interested in the
mass media and how they condition our perception
and understanding of the world. EmissionReception
(1976) consist of two parallel series of slides, juxtaposing images of television sets in bars and cafes
with images of attentive audiences. Muntadas offers
a visual behavioural analysis of collective spectatorship and how it might be manipulated. A later work
contains this unambiguous statement: Warning: perception requires involvement. (Van Abbemuseum)
Jzef Robakowski
Jzef Robakowski (1939, Poland, lives in dz) is
one of the pioneers of Polish independent filmmaking. A co-founder of Zero-61 and other groups in the
1960s experimenting with cinematic visuality, he
also films the everyday as an object of behavioural
analysis. From My Window (19781985) is composed
of shots of a public square collected over a number
of years, whereas Market (1970) compresses the
moving image into a miniature of lived experience.
Robakowski used only two frames every five seconds.
This condensed picture of reality was sufficient for
many spectators to get the impression of a complete
documentary registration. (Van Abbemuseum) Fig. 7
Martha Rosler
Martha Rosler (1943, US, lives in New York) combines conceptual art with social critique and political
activism. In her installations, collages, videos, performances and other projects, she addresses many
controversial topics: from equal rights for women
and other excluded groups in society, social housing and segregation in the city and the shaping of
male desire and womens role in the media to the
forced participation of consumerist US citizens in
Post-War Avant-Gardes between 1957 and 1986 392
Nancy Spero
Nancy Spero (19262009, US) is a leading pioneer
of feminist art and a member of the group Women
Artists Revolution. From the 1960s her mostly figurative work calls attention to the abuse of authority and
supremacy, by the male gender or the western world,
and seeks to identify alternatives. She finds inspiration in the writings of Antonin Artaud and his notion of
a theatre of cruelty. Spero creates numerous paintings, drawings and installations that speak to unfolding political events, such as the Vietnam War or the
plight of Nicaraguas women, and reclaim feminine
experience and thinking for high art. (MHKA)
Toon Tersas
Toon Tersas (19241995, Belgium) is the artist name
of the self-taught and non-professional Antoon
Keersmakers, who supports a large family by working as a clerk for an electricity company and is now
described as grossly underestimated during his
Post-War Avant-Gardes between 1957 and 1986 394
Close
CONTRIBUTORS
Contributors
Nancy Adajania
Nancy Adajania is a cultural theorist and independent
curator based in Bombay. She is co-artistic director of
the 9th Gwangju Biennale, 2012. She has written and
lectured extensively on transcultural art practices and
the relationship between art and the public sphere at
Documenta 11, Kassel; ZKM, Karlsruhe; Transmediale,
Berlin; Kuenstlerhaus Vienna; Gulbenkian Foundation,
Lisbon; and The Danish Contemporary Art Foundation,
Copenhagen, among others. Adajania was Editor-inChief of Art India magazine and also edited the monograph Shilpa Gupta (Prestel, 2010). She is co-author,
with Ranjit Hoskote, of The Dialogues Series, an
on-going series of conversations with contemporary
Indian artists (Popular Prakashan/foundation b&g,
2011). She was research scholar at BAK basis voor
aktuele kunst, Utrecht (20102011).
Inke Arns
Inke Arns is curator and artistic director of Hartware
MedienKunstVerein (www.hmkv.de) in Dortmund,
Germany, since 2005. She has worked internationally as an independent curator, writer and theorist
specializing in media art, net cultures, and Eastern
Europe since 1993. She studied Russian literature,
Zdenka Badovinac
Zdenka Badovinac is a curator and writer, who has
served since 1993 as Director of the Moderna galerija
in Ljubljana, comprised since 2011 of two locations: the Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of
Post-War Avant-Gardes between 1957 and 1986 404
Contributors
Boris Buden
Boris Buden is a writer and cultural critic living in
Berlin. He studied philosophy in Zagreb (Croatia) and
received his PhD in cultural theory from the Humboldt
University, Berlin. In the 1990s he was editor of Arkzin
magazine, Zagreb. His essays and articles cover topics related to philosophy, politics, and cultural and
art criticism. Among his translations into Croatian
are some of the most important works of Sigmund
Freud. He is co-editor of several books and author
of Barikade, Zagreb 1996/97, Kaptolski Kolodvor,
Beograd 2001, Der Schacht von Babel, Berlin 2004,
bersetzung: Das Versprechen eines Begriffs
(The Promise of a Concept), Vienna 2008, Zone des
bergangs, Frankfurt/Main 2009.
Jan Ceuleers
Jan Ceuleers (1952) spent his youth in Brussels, and
has lived and worked in Antwerp since 1970. He is
active as an antiquarian bookseller and an independent scholar in the field of the avant-garde. He
is the author of, among others, the monographs
Georges Vantongerloo (1996) and Ren Magritte, Rue
Esseghem 135, Jette-Brussels (1999), portraits of
George Wittenborn (2007) and Leo Dohmen (2009),
an essay on Grandville Un autre monde (2011), and
Paul Van Hoeydonck from abstract to white-onwhite (2011). He is the curator of new art in antwerp
19581962, a series of five exhibitions at M HKA,
Antwerp, 20122013, and author of the accompanying book and brochures.
Eda ufer
Eda ufer is a drama advisor, curator and writer. In
1984 she co-founded the Ljubljana-based art collective NSK. In addition to her work with the NSK group
she has also collaborated with the dance group
En-Knap and with Marko Peljhans Project Atol.
Recently, she co-authored a book on dance notation, Chronotopographies of Dance (Emanat, 2010).
With the support of a grant from the Andy Warhol
Post-War Avant-Gardes between 1957 and 1986 405
Contributors
Bart De Baere
Bart De Baere (b. 1960) is director of MHKA, the
Antwerp Contemporary Art Museum. Previously
he was curator of Documenta IX and at the Ghent
Museum of Contemporary Art. He has been active as
a writer and exhibition maker, realizing, among others,
This is the Show and the Show is many Things in 1994,
one of the exhibitions that initiated processual and
relational practices in exhibition making. He assisted
in the founding of the Johannesburg Biennial and is
a co-founder of the Brussels Kunsthalle Wiels. He
has also served as advisor to the Flemish Minister of
Culture.
Charles Esche
Charles Esche is a curator and writer. He is Director
of Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven and co-director
of Afterall Journal and Books based at Central Saint
Martins, London. In the last years, he has focused on
museum and exhibition histories and published on
experimental institutionalism. He has (co-)curated
international exhibitions including: It doesnt always
have to be beautiful, unless its beautiful, National Art
Gallery of Kosovo, Prishtin, 2012; Strange and Close,
CAPC, Bordeaux, 2011, both with Galit Eilat; 5th U3 triennial, Ljubljana, 2010; 2nd and 3rd Riwaq Biennale,
Ramallah, Palestine, 20072009 with Reem Fadda
and Khalil Rabah; 9th Istanbul Biennial 2005 with
Vasif Kortun, Esra Sarigedik ktem and November
Paynter; and 4th Gwangju Biennale, 2002 with Hou
Hanru.
Contributors
Cristina Freire
Teresa Grandas
Teresa Grandas studied History of Art, and is curator of temporary exhibitions at the Museu dArt
Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA). She has
curated a number of exhibitions, including: Utopia
is possible, ICSID. Eivissa, 1971, 2012 (co-curator);
ngels Rib. In the Labyrinth, 19691984, 2011;
Parallel Benet Rossell (co-curator), 2010; Palazuelo.
Working Process (co-curator), 20062008; and the
collaborative research project Desacuerdos. Sobre
arte, polticas y esfera pblica en el Estado espaol
(Disagreements. On art, politics and the public sphere
in Spain) (co-curator), 2005.
Daniel Gr
Daniel Gr (b. 1977, Pieany, Slovak Republic) is an
historian, curator and writer. He works as a lecturer
at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava
and as a researcher of the Jlius Koller Society. He is
author of Archeology of Art Criticism. Slovak Art of the
1960s and its Interpretations (Slovart, 2009). In 2010
he won a working grant from the Igor Zabel Award for
Culture and Theory. He was co-initiator of an exhibition and research platform dealing with non-institutionalized culture of the 1970s and 1980s in the
Post-War Avant-Gardes between 1957 and 1986 407
Contributors
Ksenya Gurshtein
Ksenya Gurshtein received her Ph.D. in the History
of Art from the University of Michigan in 2011 for her
dissertation entitled TransStates: Conceptual Art
in Eastern Europe and the Limits of Utopia. She has
published articles on the work of the OHO collective, as well as the Russian artists Vitaly Komar and
Alexander Melamid, in English, Russian, and German.
She is currently the Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral
Curatorial Fellow at the National Gallery of Art in
Washington, D.C., and has previously held a Getty
Research Institute Predoctoral Fellowship, as well as
internships at the Hirschorn and Hamburger Bahnhof
museums.
Jan Hoet
Jan Hoet (b. 1936) was the first director of the Ghent
Museum of Contemporary Art, MHK Gent, founded
in 1975 (later SMAK, in 1999), where he stayed until
2003. After that he founded the MARTa Museum in
Herford. Hoet is credited with changing the position of contemporary art in Belgium and giving it a
broader public appeal. His exhibition Art in Europe
after 68 in 1980, positioning the museum Chambres
dAmis in 1986 with art works in private houses linking them to the museum, became the model for many
route-exhibitions to follow. In 1992 he was director of
Documenta IX.
Christian Hller
Christian Hller is the editor of springerinHefte
fr Gegenwartskunst and has written extensively on
art and cultural theory. Between 2002 and 2007 he
was Visiting Professor at the cole suprieure des
beaux-arts in Geneva. He has curated the special
programs Pop Unlimited? (2000), and No Wave New
York 19761984 (2010) at the International Short Film
Festival Oberhausen; and in 2011 co-curated the
exhibition Hauntings Ghost Box Media (Medienturm
Graz) as well as the accompanying concert series
Sonic Spectres. In 2001, he edited the anthology Pop
Unlimited? (Turia + Kant, Vienna); in 2005, the volume Techno-Visionen (Folio, Vienna/Bolzano; coeditor) and the catalogue Hans Weigand (Walther
Knig, Cologne). His volume of interviews Time Action
Vision: Conversations in Cultural Studies, Theory, and
Post-War Avant-Gardes between 1957 and 1986 408
Contributors
Vitaly Komar
Vitaly Komar was born in 1943 in Moscow. In 1967
he graduated from Stroganov Art School in Moscow,
Russia (former U.S.S.R). In the early 1970s, together
with Alex Melamid, he founded the Sots-Art movementconceptual pop art based on Soviet visual
propaganda. Beginning in 1972 they began combining Sots-Art with conceptual eclecticism. In 1974 he
participated in the scandalously famous Bulldozer
outdoor art show where his works, together with
works of other unofficial artists, were destroyed by
the authorities. Since 1978 he resides and works
in New York. In 1982 he received the National
Endowment for the Arts award. Before 2003 he
worked in collaboration with Alex Melamid, as well as
with Fluxus member Charlotte Moorman (19751976),
with Andy Warhol (1979), with the elephant Renee
(1994), with the chimpanzee Mikki (1998), and with
the masses and public opinion polling companies.
Selected exhibitions: Fruitmarket Gallery (Edinburgh,
19851986); Documenta 8 (Kassel, 1987); Venice
Biennial (1997 and 1999); Moscow Biennale (2007);
Ronald Feldman gallery (New York, 2009).
Bartomeu Mar
Bartomeu Mar (b. 1966, Eivissa) holds a degree
in Philosophy from the Universitat de Barcelona
and worked as a curator at the Fondation pour
lArchitecture in Brussels (19891993). He was exhibition curator at IVAM-Centre Julio Gonzlez in Valencia
(19941995) and Director of Witte de With Centre
for contemporary art in Rotterdam (19962001). He
served as Chief Curator at MACBA from 2004 until
2008, when he was appointed Director of the Museum.
Bartomeu Mar has curated exhibitions by artists such
as Raoul Hausmann, Lawrence Weiner, Rita McBride,
Eullia Valldosera, Francis Picabia, Frederik Kiesler,
Marcel Broodthaers, Michel Franois, and Francis Als,
among others. He has written numerous articles about
Post-War Avant-Gardes between 1957 and 1986 409
Contributors
contemporary art and is currently working on a volume of essays about the art of our time.
Armin Medosch
Armin Medosch has been working in media art and
network culture as a practitioner, curator and writer
since the 1980s. Living in Austria, Germany and the
UK, he has been shaping the practice and discourse
on art and technology as editor, exhibition curator,
conference organizer, critic and theorist. He has initiated and co-curated the exhibitions Waves (Riga
2006, Dortmund 2008) and is currently preparing the follow-up project Fields (Riga 2014). In 2012
he was awarded a Ph.D. in Arts and Computational
Technology at Goldsmiths, University of London.
Viktor Misiano
Viktor Misiano (b. 1957, Moscow) was a curator of contemporary art at the Pushkin National Museum of Fine
Arts in Moscow, from 1980 to 1990. From 1992 to 1997
he served as director of the Center for Contemporary
Art (CAC) in Moscow. He curated the Russian participation at the Istanbul Biennale (1992), the Venice
Biennale (1995, 2003), the So Paulo Biennale
(2002, 2004), and the Valencia Biennale (2001).
He was on the curatorial team for the Manifesta I
in Rotterdam in 1996. In 1993 he co-founded the
Moscow Art Magazine (Moscow) and has served
as editor-in-chief since. In 2003 he was a founder
of the Manifesta Journal: Journal of Contemporary
Curatorship (Amsterdam) and has been an editor
there since 2011. In 2005 he founded and curated
the first Central Asia Pavilion at the Venice Biennale.
In 2007 he realized the large-scale exhibition project Progressive Nostalgia: Art from the Former USSR
Post-War Avant-Gardes between 1957 and 1986 410
Contributors
Piotr Piotrowski
Piotr Piotrowski is professor at the Art History
Department, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan,
and its former chair (19992000). He was also director of the National Museum in Warsaw (20092010),
and visiting professor at the Humboldt University
(20112012), Warsaw University (2011), Bard College,
USA (2001), Hebrew University in Jerusalem (2003),
as well as a fellow at CASVA, Washington D.C. (1989
1990), the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton
(2000), Collegium Budapest (20052006), and the
Clark Art Institute (2009). He is the author of a dozen
books including: In the Shadow of Yalta (2009), and
Art and Democracy in Post-Communist Europe (2012).
Bojana Pikur
Bojana Pikur is a writer and curator, and works in the
Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova (Museum
of Modern Art in Ljubljana). Her main research topics
deal with experimental art forms, concepts and context in relation to wider socio-political environments.
Related exhibitions and projects include Museum in
the Street (with Zdenka Badovinac), Moderna galerija
Ljubljana, 2008; This is All Film, Experimental Film in
Yugoslavia 19511991 (with Ana Janevski, Jurij Meden
and Stevan Vukovi), Moderna galerija Ljubljana,
2010; Museum of Affects (with Bartomeu Mari, Bart de
Baere, Teresa Grandas and Leen de Backer), Museum
of Contemporary Art Metelkova 2010. In 2006 she initiated Radical Education, a project whose aim was
to translate radical pedagogy into the sphere of
artistic production, with education being conceived
not merely as a model but also as a field of political
participation.
Georg Schllhammer
Georg Schllhammer is a writer, editor and curator
based in Vienna, Austria. He is the founder of the journal springerin Hefte fr Gegenwartskunst, is head of
tranzit.at and chairman of The Jlius Koller Society
Post-War Avant-Gardes between 1957 and 1986 411
Contributors
Branka Stipani
Branka Stipani is a writer, editor and freelance
curator living in Zagreb, Croatia, and graduated
in art history and literature, Faculty of Philosophy,
University of Zagreb. Former positions include curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb 1983
1993, and director of Soros Center for Contemporary
Art, Zagreb 19931996. Major shows include the
Mladen Stilinovi retrospective Sing!, Museum
Ludwig, Budapest, 2011, You are kindly invited to
attend, Kunstsaele, Berlin, 2010, and a Mangelos
retrospective at Museu Serralves, Porto, 2003. Her
Contributors
Immanuel Wallerstein
Immanuel Wallerstein is Senior Research Scholar at
Yale University. He is the author of The Modern WorldSystem, and most recently, European Universalism:
The Rhetoric of Power. He was the director of the
Post-War Avant-Gardes between 1957 and 1986 413
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