The Post-Communist Condition. Art and Culture After the Fall of the Eastern Block
15/05/2004
INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE
The Post-Communist Condition. Art and Culture After the Fall of the Eastern Block
Thursday, June 10th, 2004 - Saturday, June 12th, 2004
Das Moskau
Karl-Marx-Allee 34
10178 Berlin
Further information and registration:
www.postcommunist.de
kongress@postcommunist.de
Even more than ten years after the end of the Cold War the cultural gap between the east and the west has not been completely bridged. This situation depends above all on the differing conditions in which the cultural discourse in the east and the west has developed, a situation which has led to numerous misunderstandings on both sides. In the west the relation between culture and the marketplace has for decades stood in the center of critical reflections, both on the part of the intellectual as well as on that of the artist, and their theoretical and artistic activities have chiefly aimed at curbing the influence of the marketplace and establishing the primacy of politics. But in the communist east the marketplace had long ago been eliminated and the primacy of politics was pervasive. Thus for the east the marketplace represented utopia. As a result eastern intellectuals and artists placed their faith in a marketplace of a western character – even, and especially, if their discourse and works of art shared the same emancipatory impulses as those of their western counterparts. Whimsically put, radical intellectuals and artists in the west embraced Marxism, while those in the east became card-carrying Reaganites. In the meantime the transformations in the model of modernization have taken place in the east, and there the question arises how the reality of the marketplace will be reflected in theory and art. In the framework of the project, "The Post-Communist Condition,” operating under the auspices of the Federal Cultural Foundation (die Kulturstiftung des Bundes), east-European artists and intellectuals will be endeavoring to answer this question. The project, under the direction of Boris Groys at the Center for Art and Media (ZKM l Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie) in Karlsruhe, includes a publication series in which important cultural and theoretical art texts from eastern Europe will be translated and for the first time made available to a German-speaking public. At the end of the project a large international conference will be held and an exhibition of films and video works will be organized.
Project Description
The goal of the initiatory project under the auspices of the Kulturstiftung des Bundes (the Federal Cultural Foundation, Germany) is to describe the current situation in which art and cultural activities operate in eastern Europe more than a decade after the end of the Cold War and to open a forum for a discussion that will promote the mutual exchange of ideas concerning the situation in post-communist societies. Even now the gulf between east and west that developed during the Cold War has not been overcome. This situation depends above all on the differing conditions in which the cultural discourse in the east and the west has developed, conditions which have led to numerous misunderstandings on both sides.
The temporal and substantive development of art in eastern Europe is based upon different models of history and the conceptions of the public sphere from those in the west. When, as in the east, the official sphere is dominated by state-controlled and bureaucratic conceptions of art that transform progressive tendencies of the utopian avant-garde into political action, then in the secret sphere a samizdat system develops in which the actual avant-garde – with partially conservative features – takes root. The role assigned to art of presenting and perfecting its own independent plan for modernization and globalization was in the meantime harnessed to the historical task of the avant-garde and the actual political discrediting and rejection of this avant-garde. In this spiral of contradictions a concept of modernism developed which, paradoxically, seemed more transparent than the western notion, because, caught up in the dilemma of contradictory demands, it allowed more activities and projects, methods and models, to become artistic subjects than was necessary for art in the west.
The fact that the art market in the western sense did not exist in the east created, in addition, completely differing conditions for the functioning of art. The institutions common in the west, galleries, art societies, museums, private collectors, did not exist in this way in the east and, for this reason, were not a part of the corresponding public sphere. The western difference between non-marketable and marketable artifacts did not apply in the east. In the west the relation between culture and the marketplace had stood for decades in the center of critical self-examination, among intellectuals as well as among artists, and their theoretical and artistic designs had chiefly aimed at curbing the influence of the marketplace and the establishing of the primacy of politics. In contrast, in the communist east the marketplace had long since been eliminated and the primacy of politics was pervasive. For the east the marketplace thus represented utopia. As a result eastern intellectuals and artists placed their faith in a marketplace of a western character – even, and especially, if their discourse and works of art shared the same emancipatory impulses as those of their western counterparts. Whimsically put, radical intellectuals and artists in the west embraced Marxism, while those in the east became card-carrying Reaganites – all this in the framework of the same emancipating projects.
Moreover, the question as to the national cultural identity in the west and the east also played differing roles. The communist ideology was international, globalizing, ultimately anti-national. The communist regime governed in the name of this internationalistic ideology that transcended the boundaries of the nation-state – this ideology was its claim to legitimacy. The present post-communistic nationalism in eastern Europe is, following the decline of communism, the result of the democratization of the east-European countries and the formation of new nation-states. The significance of nationalism in the east thus also clearly differs from its significance in the west, where nationalism is traditionally both state supported and controversial. Thus the question is posed how the culture of the east-European countries have reacted to the new situation in which they find themselves – this means, how do they react to the reality of the marketplace and the nation-state, about which for decades they only had a vague and perhaps utopian conception? In dealing with this question it must be taken into consideration that at issue here is not a modernization process that has often been described. Particularly in respect of the new definition of national cultural identity, the situation differs in the post-communist countries rather importantly from the situation in the post-colonial countries. The modernization- and history-model of post colonial countries can be understood most readily as the effect of western strategies of hegemony and globalization, that is, as the consequences of modernization processes of a western character. But in post-communist eastern Europe the process of modernization does not run in a simple continuum, as has often been claimed recently in cultural studies. For this reason, cultural studies as well as post-colonial studies have largely ignored the situation of the post-communist east-European countries as an object of study. This fact presents cultural studies with the task of formulating a new theoretical discourse which is faithful to the post-communist situation. This present project assumes this task by including intellectuals, writers, and artists from eastern Europe in a dialogue about the transformation of east-European communist models into a western, liberal-capitalistic model, and then asks about the consequences of this reorganization both for the culture and art in the east-European countries and also for the culture and political thinking in western Europe. The analysis of the situation is designed to contribute to the lancing of the one-sided western perspective of eastern Europe. The purpose is not to open a window through which western Europe sees eastern Europe, but rather to open a door through which intellectuals and artists in eastern Europe can approach us and express themselves in an open and uncensored discourse.
Some attempts by contemporary intellectuals (from Slavoj iek to Alain Badiou) to rethink Leninism and also, in its consequences, Stalinism are a sign that the problem here sketched has been taken on board and its importance understood by a critical public. Recent American publications on the history and topicality of the east-European avant-garde document the trend to approach east-European art. Nevertheless, the range of artistic and theoretical literature of eastern Europe in the last century is still by no means completely comprehended, and important positions, because of the lack of translations, are still not known.
Thus, in the framework of this project texts published exclusively in east-European languages that contribute importantly to the discussion of our topic are to be translated into German (Nikolaj Tarabukin: Le dernier tableau. Écrits sur l’art et l’histoire de l’art à l’époque du constructivisme russe, Paris 1972, first published in Russia under the title Ot mol’b k maschine, Moscow 1923; Aleksandr A. Bogdanov: Tektologie; writings of Kazimir Malevich und Nikolai Fedorov).
In addition to the new publication of already existing texts, east-European authors, scholars and artists will receive financial grants to pursue research and to formulate their results, which will likewise be translated and published. The project will present a wide range of voices (such as those of Ekaterina Degot, Mikhail Ryklin, Ale Erjavec, Ivaylo Ditchev, Pavel Pepperstein, and Augustin Ioan) a forum in which they can articulate, defend and further develop their philosophies and cultural and aesthetic theses on the post-communist east.
In a panel discussion on October 13, 2003, in Frankfurt Ekaterina Degot, Boris Groys, Peter Weibel, Martina Weinhart and Slavoj iek posed the question as to the present realities and the utopian potential in the post-communist societies of eastern Europe. At the end of October a workshop involving grant recipients was held in the ZKM that offered a stock-taking of the discussion and served to prepare additional debates.
Provisionally in May, 2004, a large conference composed of many lectures by international participants, accompanied by an exhibition that will showcase the works of the artists Dmitrij Gutov, Olga Chernysheva and Nedko Solakov, will be organized.
A project under the auspices of the
Federal Cultural Foundation, Germany
in cooperation with the
Center for Art and Media (ZKM)
International Congress
The Post-Communist Condition
June, 10-12, 2004
Venue: DAS MOSKAU - Karl-Marx-Allee 34 - BerlinThursday, June 10, 2004
Welcome and Opening Remarks
9.45 Peter Weibel Director of ZKM Karlsruhe
Boris Groys Director of the Project
Anne von der Heiden Academic Director of the Project
Art in Post-Communism
10.00 Igor Zabel Intimacy and Society. Post-Communist or Eastern Art?
11.00 Petya Kabakchieva / Iva Kuyumdhzieva Bulgarian Artist in Post-Communist Society / 1986-2003
12.00 coffee break
12.15 Valeria Ibraeva Kazakh Art as a Political Project
13.15 lunch
14.30 Andrey Fomenko Between Everyday Life and Avant-garde
15.30 Ale_ Erjavec The East, the West and the South
16.30 coffee break
Art and Consumption
17.00 Boris Groys Director of the Project The Post-Communist Condition
18.00 Branislav Dimitrijevic Consumer Socialism: Culture and Processes of Transition in Tito’s Yugoslavia
19.00 Ekaterina Degot Humanisation of Art in a Postcommunist Perspective
Friday, June 11, 2004
Literature and Film - Post-Communistic Visions
10.00 Olga Matich Edward Limonov: Making Love and War
11.00 Eliot Borenstein Trickle-Down Fascism: The Domestication of Conspiratorial Narrative after 1991
12.00 coffee break
12.30 Mikhail Berg Communistic Utopia: Life after Death
13.30 lunch
14.45 Igor Smirnov Time of Re-action
15.45 Mikhail Iampolski Beyond Historicity
16.45 coffee break
Literature und Theatre
17.15 Ingo Schulze The Search for the Lost Language - A Speculation
17.45 Carl Hegemann Living Without Faith. The Ost-Theatre in the Berlin Volksbühne
18.15 Boyan Manchev The Total Body of Pleasure. Postcommunist Hedonism
18.45 Victor Jerofejew Post-Communist Moral Crisis in Russia
Saturday, June 12, 2004
Culture, Power, Politics
10.00 Tomas Pospiszyl: Eastern and Western Cubes
11.00 Boris Kagarlitsky: Renewal of the Russian Left?
12.00 coffee break
12.15 Dragan Kujundzic: (V)Empire and the Specters of Marx
13.15 lunch
14.30 Boris Buden: In the Shoes of Communism
15.30 Mikhail Ryklin: Journey to the West. Intellectual Recontextualisations of Communist Experiences
16.30 coffee break
17.00 Svetlana Boym: Off-Modern or Anti-Modern? Paradox of Freedom in the Post-Communist Era
18.00 Chantal Mouffe: Bipolar World Order has ended. What comes after?
19.00 Slavoj Zizek: PROLEGOMENA. Zu einer Theorie der Kolkhoz-Musicals
