Writing Central European Art History

PATTERNS_Travelling Lecture Set 2008/2009

A project initiated by ERSTE Foundation organised by World University Service (WUS) Austria

ERSTE Stiftung Reader # 01

PATTERNS_Travelling Lecture Set 2008/2009 Writing Central European Art History Writing Central European Art Historyet 2008/09
The lectures will focus on theoretical and methodological questions in order to confront very different approaches proposed by scholars coming from different experiences, with the central focus remaining on Central and South Eastern European art. The main and common point of departure will be a relationship between East and West in which the East would not be recognized as the (real) Other (as for example Asian culture), but rather as the close-Other or not-the-real- Other. It applies both to the art production (ie. The subject of art historical analysis)since Central and Southern East European art has been done in the light of the Western oneas well as analytical language, considering our methods have also been borrowed from the Western theories. For scholars who are working on Central and Southern East European art history, particularly that of modern and contemporary, it is quite obvious that this sort of writing should differ from art history of other regions, particularly from a Western art historical narrative. On the other hand, to construct Central and South Eastern European art history without Western references seems to be impossible. Thus, this sort of scholarship is somehow hanging between Western models, understood both as historical influences over regional art and as methods coming from the master narrative, which is of course Western by origins. Piotr Piotrowski

PATTERNS_Researching and understanding recent cultural history PATTERNS is a transnational programme that aims to research and understand recent cultural history. PATTERNS initiates, commissions and supports contemporary culture projects in a variety of formats and media. The programme focuses on the visual arts and culture of the 1960s until today. PATTERNS_Travelling Lecture Set: Writing Central European Art History The series of lectures aims at bringing and connecting eminent authors to the Universities in Central and South Eastern Europe. Noteworthy research and methods will be brought to the universities and innovative approaches with regard to content and methodology will be applied to existing courses. PATTERNS_Travelling Lecture Set is an initiative by ERSTE Foundation. The theme and list of participants has been compiled by Piotr Piotrowski in agreement with the culture programme of ERSTE Foundation and the PATTERNS Advisory Panel. PATTERNS_Advisory Panel: Cosmin Costinas (author and curator, Bucharest/Vienna), Veronica Kaup-Hasler (director of steirischer herbst, Graz), Piotr Piotrowski (art historian, Poznan) and Georg Schllhammer (editor of springerin and documenta 12 magazines, Vienna). ERSTE Foundation: Christine Bhler, Christiane Erharter

PARTICIPATING UNIVERSITIES 2008/2009

Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan, Poland Art History Department Host: Prof. Piotr Piotrowski (Chair) Scheduled for Sat, 5th and Sun, 6th of April 2008, 11:30 am and Sat, 19th of April 2008, 10:00 am Adam Mickiewicz University, Collegium Novum, Al. Niepodleglosci 4, Poznan, Room C 3 www.staff.amu.edu.pl/~arthist/ihs_uam.html University of Belgrade, Serbia Faculty of Philosophy, Art History Department Host: Associate Prof. Lidija Merenik, Head of Department Scheduled for Fri, 7th to Sun, 9th of November 2008 www.f.bg.ac.yu Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna, Austria Institute for Fine Arts, Department for Conceptual Art Host: Prof. Dr. Marina Gr!ini" Assistants organization and readings: Ivan Jurica and Ivana Marjanovi" Scheduled for Mon, 24th November 2008, 3:30 pm and Tue, 25th November 2008, 9:30 am and Thu, 8th January 2009, 3:30pm www.akbild.ac.at Babe!-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania Faculty of History and Philosophy, Chair of Art History Host: Dr. Vlad Toca, Teaching Assistant Scheduled for Fri, 5th, Sat, 6th, Sun, 7th and Fri, 12th, Sat, 13th, and Sun, 14th of December 2008 http://hiphi.ubbcluj.ro/hiphi/index.htm

CONTENT
Piotr Piotrowski: Towards A Horizontal History of Modern Art... Edit Andrs: An Agent that is still at Work. The Trauma of Collective Memory of the Socialist Past ...5 Jn Bako": Vienna School Methodological Doctrine: Visions and Revisions. Summary or a Foreshadowing Revision of Orthodoxy.................................................................................22 Ljiljana Blagojevi#: Postsocialist Cities: Contested Modernism............................................37 Mart Kalm: What is Estonian Architecture?...........................................................................44 Vojtech Lahoda: Regional Cubism? How to Write on Cubism in Central and Eastern Europe...52 Mi"ko $uvakovi#: Politics and Art: A Controversy After the Fall of the Berlin Wall............63 Authors......................................................................................................................................73 Imprint.......................................................................................................................................77 4

TOWARDS A HORIZONTAL HISTORY OF MODERN ART Piotr Piotrowski

The fundamental assumptions of the so-called universal (i.e. Western) history of modern art are the following: (1) the hierarchically defined art geography (center-periphery relations); (2) the canon of works (exclusive empirical material); (3) the model of historical description in terms of the succession of styles (historical narration). The persistence of this paradigm has been confirmed by the latest studies written in the so-called revisionist perspective, such as Art History since 1900. Modernism Antimodernism Postmodernism (2004) by prominent scholars associated with the October quarterly. The application of this model to the art produced beyond the Western art centers (e.g., in South America, Japan, China or Eastern Europe) typically results in oversimplification and above all fails to recognize the historically real significance of the local art production. In fact, such an art-historical paradigm resembles more what Edward Said called orientalism than a reliable program of the analysis of art anywhere in the world. Thus, a scholar attempting an analysis of specific developments, who wants to realize historically determined meanings of art produced outside the Western centers of modern culture, must face the challenge of proposing an alternative model of interpretation. A crucial problem in this context, however, is the double reference of modern art: on the one hand, it belongs to global modernism and then postmodernism, while on the other, to local cultural frames of reference, and the latter very often happen to be state/ nation-specific (Argentina, Russia, Japan, etc.). Adopting state perspective it would be very useful to take into account Louis Althussers notion of the State Ideological Apparatus in order to create a context of a particular meaning of art production in every country, differs from the universal one. Adopting a national perspective, though, does not have to imply a nationalist, essentialist, and limited point of view. According to Arjun Appadurais definition, locality should be approached in open terms crossing mono-ethnic identity; as a theoretical construction open to exchange with other (e.g., neighboring) localities, as well as cultural centers. Hence, an alternative model of interpreting art-historical processes should be rooted in a belief that the local modern art has been inspired by the Western centers of modern culture, but on the other hand, its meanings must not be reduced to the range available in the West. In consequence, one should apply the following procedures: 1. deconstruction of the Western inspirations, i.e. their analysis not in hierarchical (center-periphery influence), but in functional terms aiming to determine what a given influence meant in a specific local context.; 2. rejection of the idea of stylistic homogeneity in favor of heterogeneity combining styles into local, unique stylistic mutations; 3. recognition of the local canons and value systems, often contradicting those of the Western art centers. The next step would be to negotiate such different local images of modern art, however, not in order to produce one, single meta-narrative, rather to compare them. As a result, then, in contrast to the Westcentric, universal, and, as it were, vertical model of art history, one ought to move toward a horizontal, polyphonic, and dynamic paradigm of critical art-historical analysis. A question that should be asked in conclusion is to what extent taking such a perspective would modify the analyses of Western art produced in the center.

AN AGENT THAT IS STILL AT WORK THE TRAUMA OF COLLECTIVE MEMORY OF THE SOCIALIST PAST Edit Andrs
I. Theorizing the transition Among the cutting edge theories at hand for theorizing the transition in the ex-Socialist countries, we have to take into consideration the ideas, such as the construction of identities, post-colonialism, Balkanism, memory discourse, trauma discourse, etc. Some of them were successfully applied to the new conditions of the region, but others were blindly ignored or hatefully rejected. I have chosen one concept with respect to transition for elaboration, namely the theory of trauma which I intend to apply to Post-Socialist conditions, and especially to some phenomena of Post-Socialist art. My paper considers the uses of cultural trauma as a concept for understanding art and its reception. The term trauma, as well as cultural trauma, usually bears negative connotations, but for certain artists and critics, such as myself, it is a very effective tool for accessing and examining what are the mental difficulties of the period of transition in the ex-Socialist countries, and shedding light upon the shifts between the Western and Eastern positions. I believe that the artworks discussed in my paper offer us a field for the projection of our troubled feelings and a healing methods to overcome the negative and painful affects of trauma. I/1. Post-communist Trauma of Victory. Western Concept of the Cultural Trauma The Western concept of the trauma we can rely on is outlined in Piotr Sztompka's essay entitled "The Trauma of Social Change. A Case of Postcommunist Societies", which applies the concept of cultural trauma to the post-socialist countries. Sztompka's starting point is the change "which brings shocks and wounds to the social and cultural tissue" (Sztompka 2004, 157), and as he argues, even those changes that are beneficial, welcomed and dreamed about, may turn out to be painful. Considering that social life is a constant change, he defines a change tramatogenic only if it is sudden, comprehensive (that is, touches many aspects of life), fundamental (that is, radical and deep) and unexpected, (shocking). Within the domains touched by the traumatogenic change he enlists culture, the "axionormative and symbolic belief-system of society". (Sztompka 2004, 161) According to him, the shocks of change may affect "the areas of affirmed values, patterns, and rules, expectation, roles, accepted ideas, and beliefs, narrative forms, symbolic meanings, definitions and frames of discourse." Emphasizing the significance of cultural trauma, he adds that the wounds inflicted to culture are most difficult to heal and that the cultural traumas may last over several generations. Sztompka constructs typography of sources of cultural trauma naming intercultural contact in the first place, that is, the confrontation of diverse cultures: in our case, Socialism and

Capitalism. From our viewpoint of art and art theory, we could name as a traumatizing source the clash of opposing paradigms and discourses also, as I will illustrate it later. According to Sztompka, "The most traumatising situations occur when the imposition and domination of one culture are secured by force." That would apply perfectly to the trauma of the Eastern Block of the Socialist period, as its culture was imposed more or less successfully on the satellite countries by the host-country, the Soviet Union. However, Sztompka ignores that earlier trauma and concentrates exclusively on the very moment of the political change, and on the clash of the two different cultures. He further admits, that "even when the spreading of alien culture is more peaceful, by virtue of economic strength, technological superiority or the psychological attractiveness of cultural products, flowing from the core toward the periphery, the result is often the break of cultural stability, continuity, and identity of indigenous groups, a milder and yet resented form of cultural trauma." Regarding our region, that kind of trauma could be relevant also, as the process of western type globalization runs parallel to de-globalization, namely desovietization of the Eastern Bloc. The reflections on that kind of trauma coming from art are still quite rare and pale and able to attract wilder attention still only occasionally. The reason for this phenomenon could have been found in the "belatedness" of the impact of the traumatic event, which lies in the very heart of the trauma. Caruth's theory suggests us a sufficient explanation, that the pathology consists "in the structure of its experience or reception: the event is not assimilated, or experienced fully at the time, but only belatedly...". (Caruth 1995, 4) In the eyes of a sociologist, contrary to the notion of psychological trauma, cultural trauma affects a society and not an individual, and is not a cause, not a result, but a process, a kind of process of constant negotiation. "The carriers of cultural legacy and traditions that clash with the new cultural imperatives imposed by traumatogenic change are generations who were socialized, indoctrinated, or habituated in an earlier cultural milieu". As he draws the consequences, "the powerful impact of a culture derived from earlier history, and internalized by the generations ... may become much weaker as the new generations emerge raised under different conditions. ... This process running parallel to the trauma sequence becomes very helpful at the stage of overcoming trauma and achieving final reconciliation of a culture". (Sztompka 2004, 169) However, from the standpoint of post-socialist experiences,one can not share this neat vision of the linear and smooth relay of generations, as it is not justified by the much more complicated local context. The obvious presupposition of this idea is that the trauma of that earlier generation fades away with the help of a coping mechanism, which is not the case in Hungary. Furthermore, this overly idealistic view does not count on the secondary trauma of the next generation which does not have a blank page for starting over either. "There cannot be any doubt that the collapse of Communism was a traumatogenic change par excellence." states Sztompka in the introduction of his topic, which he names post-communist "trauma of victory". In this case, we have to consider the historically inherited repertoire of cultural roles, and habitus, which were regarded obsolete after the political changes, and was created either as an affect of prolonged indoctrination (which means the official culture) or as a defensive reaction against indoctrination and autocratic control (which means the counterculture, or unofficial culture). (Sztompka 2004, 172) It is very helpful for understanding the quite specific post-socialist condition that he counts equally on official and

unofficial culture, as the two sides of the same coin. However, in his further analyses, he assumes a clear cut vision of a clash of two incompatible cultures, the old Socialist and the new Capitalist culture, as if they would constitute binary opposition. Maybe it is true in principal, or from a sociological point of view, but this opposing position, and the incompatibility is definitely not relevant regarding art and its institution in Hungary. The discrete charm of the Post-Socialist condition is precisely that it nurtures hybrid phenomenon, hardly known and recognizable from the outside, that is the post-communist hangovers could greatly have been interwoven with the elements of predatory capitalism. So, instead of clash, we do find fusion in a lot of cases, providing strange mixtures of elements of both cultures, whether we speak about the art institutions, or whether we speak about the theory and art practice and even reception of art. For him the proof of existence of trauma lies in the scope and intensity of the debate over how to remember the past, a clear indication of the existence of a trauma of collective memory. This statement, regarding the artistic legacy of the Socialist past fits Hungary also, and could be good starting point for us. In his case study focusing on Poland, he has a clear-cut view of the perspective of total recovery from the trauma by countering its narrative with successful coping strategies. Finally, he envisions the disappearance of the cultural split, characteristic of the traumatic stage, the key of which is the generational turnover. "Only if this legacy fades away or disappears may we expect healing of the post-communist trauma." I am hesitant to accept this linear view to apply it to Hungary as it hardly fits to the local situation, where the legacy of Socialism (the attitude, the discourse, the habitus, people in authority etc.) are interwoven with the new entrepreneur culture from top to bottom. I/2. Home-made, Local Theory: a Reflection on the Theory-invasion after the Fall of the Wall. Eastern Concept of Trauma Alexander Kiossev's infamous theory of self-colonization was published ten years after the collapse of the Eastern Block and well before the heyday of Western cultural trauma discourse. As he explains the metaphor in use: "...self-colonizing cultures import alien values and models of civilization by themselves and that they lovingly colonize their own authenticity through these foreign models". He defines the regions to which the theory could be applied. "From the point of view of the modern globalization of the world, there are cultures which are not central enough, not timely and big enough in comparison to the 'Great Nations'. At the same time they are insufficiently distant, and insufficiently backward, in contrast to the African tribes, for example. That's why, in their own troubled embryo, somewhere in the periphery of Civilization, they arise in the space of a generative doubt: We are Europeans, although perhaps not to a real extent". (Kiossev 1999, 114) He outlines a region which doesn't fit properly in the framework of the postcolonial discourse, being neither colonizer, nor colonized in the strict meaning of the words, but navigating somewhere in between. The theory of "self-colonization," emerging from the framework of post colonial theory, soon became quite popular as a catchphrase, especially among those few for whom the new theory was not alien. This theory is frequently attributed to symptoms of postcolonial nationalism, which claims to be "good nationalism". (Imre 2001) I myself wouldn't simplify the phenomenon to be a mere new appearance of nationalism, claiming that the position and implication of it is much trickier.

The theory is home-made and is a self-exposure, it clearly was not forced from the outside, but however, some hidden traps are built into it. Kiossev sees the origins of the symptoms of self-colonization in a trauma. "This is the precondition for a quite peculiar identity and a quite peculiar modernization. They arise through the constitutive trauma that: We are not Others (seeing in the Others the representatives of the Universal), and this trauma is also connected with the awareness that they have appeared too late and that their life is a reservoir of the shortcomings of civilization". (Kiossev 1999, 114) With this self-identification of the evaluation of the region as full of shortcomings and backwardness he takes for granted the packaged, ready made view provided by the dominant, so-called "universal" narrative about us. As the result, the oft-repeated vision has been internalized by the population of that culture. The process is followed by a lowering of self-esteem and the development of a cultural inferiority complex. And, as is the nature of trauma, one must pay twice for the suffering, first with the traumatic event and then second with the equally painful symptoms of post-traumatic disorder. In our case, with respect to the cultural trauma, one can detect some side effects related to the interpretation and theoretization of the trauma. In post-colonial studies and even in every day psychology, it is a basic tenet that people who experience colonization or violence suffer from what is known as "mental colonization." When an ideology or behavior is used to oppress or weaken an ethnic or national group or a family member, the behavior is internalized by the victims of that ideology or behavior, and is accepted as valid. The transfer of the aggression could be even turned backwards, becoming a tool of further self-torturing. Clinical evidence reveals, and victimology and rape-studies demonstrate through different statistical polls, that one can encounter the "blame the victim" attitude even if the victim is male, let alone if the victim is a woman. As a further consequence of psychological and even cultural trauma, this attitude shakes the very trusting foundations of the subject, including trust in the self and trust in others. The shadow of suspicion transcends all relations afterwards. In the early phase of the predatory capitalism after the political changes in Hungary, there was a great willingness to attribute blame to the losers of the financial and positional restructuring of the scene. Much of this blame came from those who were able to fish successfully in troubled water and became nouveau rich and powerful overnight. Appetite comes with eating, so, they eagerly wanted to possess even moral superiority. The effective psychological tool of "blame the victim" served well for covering moral dilemmas and guilty feelings. If the system blames the victim, there is no need for further questioning or analyses. And this is not even the end. Self-blaming strategy as a coping process for sexual assault victims in the aftermath of rapes is well known by psychologists. In my view, precisely this process is imitating itself in the theory of self-colonization. The victim of trauma cannot shake the limits of self-blame and goes so far as to accept responsibility for the situation. Colonialism, or any kind of control position, consciously or not, depends structurally and politically on the assertion of clear differences between the controller and the controlled. The theory of self-colonialism serves exactly this differentiation on a silver platter, and could be the best-fit fantasy of dominant theory-makers of today. This theoretical framework offers a policy of burying one's head in the sand, and cuts off any possibility for entering into the global discourse and subverting it. Self-colonization theory actually doubles and deepens the trauma by essentialising and fixing the binary opposition, closing the door to the more nuanced critique and analyses. At the same time, it reinforces the old stereotypes of the

region, cultures being self-destructive and masochistic in getting pleasure from pain and sufferings. What I propose is that this essentialising dual system should be altered along with elimination of old stereotypes based on close readings of the context of transition in the Ex-Eastern Block. I/3. The Haunting Memory of Socialism. The Trauma of Collective Memory of Socialist Past As opposed to the theory of a western observer, "trauma of victory", and as opposed to the self-colonization theory, I would propose the phenomenon of accumulated traumas, as a more appropriate term to define the post-socialist condition, that is, a kind of turbulence of unassimilated, unmourned earlier traumas of the Socialist past, buried under new traumas of changes, originating in the odd, hybrid transition of the region. Smelser's adaptation of the psychological trauma into the cultural trauma, as a theoretical framework is a much closer fit to the art scene of the post-socialist reality. His proposition of "acute stress" seems to be more appropriate to describe the leftover trauma of the local situation, then the sudden change as an exclusive trigger. His definition of trauma as a negotiated process, which could be blocked by repression and expressed in symptoms, seems to quite relevant to the situation of our region. He is very inclusive regarding the sources of potential traumas, also. As he states "No discrete historical event or situation automatically or necessarily qualifies itself as a cultural trauma, and the range of events or situation that may become traumas is enormous." (Smelser 2004, 35) The trauma could even be context, in his classification. His observations apply perfectly to the post-socialist condition in that the traumatizing memory must be culturally relevant, represented as threatening, it must be remembered, it should be damaging, problematic, or sacred, and it has to have a strong, negative affect, or a feeling of shame or guilt which comes with it. (Smelser 2004, 36) According to Smelser, "It is possible to describe social dislocations and catastrophes as social trauma if they massively disrupt organized social life." (Smelser 2004, 37) No doubt, that the imposition of Soviet dominated communist rule and culture could be regarded as such, and that the socialist rewriting of national cultures, and restructuring of institutions would be a perfect fit to the more nuanced category. His presupposition of the existence of a general consensus about culture, about the values, norms, beliefs, and ideologies, including subcultures and countercultures, applies also to the region with its inherited divided cultural structure. In his concept, "a cultural trauma refers to an invasive and overwhelming event that is believed to undermine or overwhelm one or several essential ingredients of a culture or the culture as a whole." (Smelser 2004, 38) It has to be assumed as a fundamental threat posed to the integrity and dominance of different elements of the society. In our case it could have posed to a generation being indoctrinated and habituated in the time of Socialism, to a cultural institution associated with a group's identity, or to an attitude, to a way of thinking, or even to an operating art paradigm. We are speaking about a threat, which violates cultural presuppositions, generates negative effects, leaves behind wounds, and is represented as indelible. As Smelser puts it: "A cultural trauma is, above all, a threat to a culture with which individuals in that society presumably have identification." (Smelser 2004, 40)

In his comparison, and in culture, it is generally a social agent who stirs up troubling memories. They are, in many cases, artists with subversive ideas and social awareness, those who go against the grain and are ready to interrupt the collective denial and collective amnesia regarding Socialist history and art. As a quite effective coping method, they may reverse the trauma into its opposite, providing healing potential, or they may insulate the trauma from its associative negative connection. The art works I will analyse could be easily interpreted as "acting out of trauma", or they function as a call for collective memory work, which is, following Smelser's argument, a constant negotiation, an argument over the meaning of memories, and over the question of what to remember, and how to remember it. According to his adaptation of psychological trauma on the cultural level, the major manifestation of an existing trauma is "a conflict among different groups, some oriented toward playing down the trauma, and others in keeping it alive". In respect to post-socialist conditions the presence of "the trauma of the collective memory" is justified by scandalous art projects targeting the lost memory of the past on one hand, and the very emotional receptions, and loud protest flared up by such projects on the other hand. Those are the cases on which I intend to focus. Furthermore, I wish to shed light upon the discrepancies, shifts between the memory discourses in the Ex-East and Ex-West regarding the Socialist past. For the diagnoses of the very existence of the trauma related to the Socialist past in the exEastern Block, we can greatly utilize Cathy Caruth's attempt to expand the notion of individual trauma to communities and to historical events. She puts an emphasis on the temporal delay of the apparences of the symptoms of the trauma, suggesting that "the impact of the traumatic event lies precisely in its belatedness". (Caruth 1995, 9) Her interpretation provides us with a convincing explanation for the phenomenon of the total amnesia regarding the Socialist past occuring in the first 15 years after the political changes in the region. "The historical power of the trauma is not just that the experience is repeated after its forgetting, but that it is only in and through its inherent forgetting that is first experienced at all." (Caruth 1995, 8) II. Coping with the Trauma through Art II/1. Coping with the Trauma of the Collective Memory of the Socialist Past Cultural globalization, which became world-wide in the nineties, reached the Central-Eastern European region right after the collapse of the Soviet satellite system, that is, the globalization coincided with a counter-process in this part of Europe, namely with the de-globalization of the former dominant cultural force, a process of de-sovietization. In the period of transition, this double process resulted in cultural turbulence in the disintegrated region, that is, a special mixture of the remnants of the Socialist era combined with a lot of new phenomena of the newly globalized, that is, westernized world. The only similarity still remaining among the countries of the Ex-Eastern block was the more or less mutual past and being squeezed between two expansive globalizing paradigms, the Westerntype liberal and the anti-liberal, Socialist Soviet-type. In the beginning of the nineties the satellite countries became free from the colonizing foreign power, the Soviet-type Socialism. The new democratic countries tried to clean up the ideologically polluted public sphere of the powerful images, by demolishing statues, removing icons of the former Socialist culture and renaming streets and squares, that is,

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giving them back their old names after a half-century period, during which they were named after the events of Soviet history. In Hungary, most of the Socialist statues were placed into the Statue Park outside of Budapest, which became a strange memorial park of the Socialist past, an Eastern variation of the Madame Tussauds wax museums, attracting a lot of Western tourists wishing to experience the chilling feeling of the once so scary Socialism. In the same way, Soviet memorials, monuments and statues of cult figures were collected into an isolated field, Grutas Park in Vilnius, Lithuania, in a very nice natural area. Meanwhile, memorial museums, the official sites of memory, were established in several countries of the region, long before the related trauma would have been healed. In Budapest, it was named the House of Terror, dedicated to the victims of Nazism and Communism. In Prague, the Museum of Communism functions as a special commemorative space. In general, elements of the Socialist past were collected, put together in isolated statue parks or memorial museums in the Ex-Soviet-block countries, fueled by the illusion that it would be possible to wipe off the dust of the Socialist past and put it aside in quarantine. This illusion, or better, desire, was usually accompanied by the intention of repressing the trauma of being oppressed for a long time, namely with amnesia. In reality, as it usually happens after a trauma, the memory of the Soviet-type globalization is still with us, haunting us with flashbacks and nightmares, even if to a different extent in the affected countries. In Russia, the ex-colonizer of the region, the situation is a bit different. Only the statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky was removed in 1991, and was relegated to land behind the New Tretyakov Gallery. While one can not find statues of extremists of Socialist ideology, like Stalin, even in Russia, Lenin is still in places in Moscow: in squares, in the decoration of the metro system, and other public spaces. All the symbols of Socialist ideology, like the red star, the sickle and the hammer, kept their places also in Moscow in public spheres. So, in Russia, the remnants of Socialism are much more visible than in the satellite countries and are much more a part of everyday life. In Russia there is a rather strange mixture of the old Socialism and the new aggressive capitalism. One can find a strong desire for consumption and material culture, since it was repressed in the time of collectivist asceticism. Even Lenin and all the Socialist symbols became consumerist products, mixed together with the icons of consumerist capitalism, like Cola Cola. In a way, this phenomenon could be regarded as part of the psychological working-through-process. This friendly symbiosis is not at all characteristic of the satellite countries, which felt that the Soviet-type Socialism was imposed on them and wasnt their own product. Therefore, the exorcism of Socialism, at least in the first years of the transition, was much more characteristic of their attitude, in which art played a crucial role. It could take the form of the domestication of the frightening symbols of the repressing powers, as in the work of the Czech artist David Cerny (Pink tank, 1991). Reading the art work from the trauma discourse, it uses the strategy of reversing the frightening, dangerous threat into its opposite, insulating it from its negative associations as a coping mechanism of the trauma. A closely related defense against the trauma is to convert a negative message or image into a positive one. That coping method was utilized by a Hungarian artist, Tams Szentjbi, who changed the message of the Liberation monuments in Budapest by covering the statue with white clothes leaving holes for the eyes. So, the statue went through metamorphoses and became the Spirit of Freedom, as the meaning of the statue was reversed. Another Hungarian artist's, gnes Szabs neon variation of the statue, named Silhouette of

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the Statue of Freedom (2000), mimicking a woman doing gymnastics, mocked not only the political message embodied by the original monument, but also the dead-serious male culture which created the allegory, and the heroic male obsession with politics and power. In the case of the other artwork of the David Cerny, entitled ironically Hanging out (1996), the resemblance of the Socialist statues was played out. Anri Salas famous and highly acknowledged work Intervista about recovering her mothers memory about her involvement in "building Socialism" has provided a wonderful and honest way to cope with the trauma, but his work has remained isolated for a long time. After a few years, the Socialist past was forgotten in the Central-Eastern European region, at least in Hungary, supported by the notion that the half-century period under the Soviet reign was just a minor accident that could easily be ignored. So, the coping mechanism of the trauma came to a deadlock in the earliest phase of denial and rejection, and consequently the trauma process could not move further into a healing phase, which is the last sequence of overcoming of trauma, being able to integrate it to the collective identity. As an aftermath of the inability to carry through the "trauma process", the culture of the Socialist past became a taboo issue. Leaving the past as it is, and not bothering it with excavations and analyses, became a kind of unwritten agreement. In the region, and surely in Hungary, only a few young artists felt it necessary to analyze the past in the shadow of a new kind of globalization and of a new political formation, the deeply desired integration into the European Union. Tams Kaszs, who is a citizen of one of the most representative Socialist cities in Hungary, Dunajvros, formerly named Stalingrad, bumps into the traces of the past every step of the way in the city, which was once a window-city, a model, with its iron factories, huge housing developments and Socialist realist statues and monuments all around the city, overwhelmed with the symbols and images of the communist ideology. For example, the Water tower, built in 1952, had a red star on its faade until the very last moment, but, as the red star is a forbidden symbol in capitalist Hungary, the star is gone and there is a lighter patch in its place. The artist would have a lot of suggestions for the city concerning the transformation of the prohibited image, but as the Socialist period is too close, and there is a strong desire to get rid of even the memory of it, so he offers some images, more appropriate for the time of transition, some global trademarks. His other unrealized project is also connected to his home-town. The city is near the Danube, which divides Hungary into two economically and socially different regions: the hilly, industrial westbank is more developed and richer than the plain eastbank, which is mainly agrarian, poor and has a high rate of unemployement. The artist wished to plant wheat onto the heightened pedestal of the group-sculpture of Harvesters, made by a Hungarian sculptor, Jzsef Somogyi in 1979. The idea behind the project of Kaszas was to give work to the seasonal workers, to the unemployed harvesters and at the same time to provide a virtual bridge between different and separated regions of Hungary. As there is a big difference in level between the two banks of the river, if one would see the group of statues surrounded by the chunk of wheat field, they would have the illusion of continuation to the wheat field on the other bank. In this way the spectator would feel as if he were standing on a great plain with the harvesters. Ilona Nmeth, a Hungarian woman artist living in Slovakia, deals with personal memories, the mental traces of the Socialist past, in her sound-installation entitled 27 meters (20042007). She asked six people of her home-town to walk with her 27 meters from the towns landmark and meeting point, the BonBon Hotel, and to speak about their feelings and

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memories in relation to the site. The collaborators were of different ages, and thus of different memory spans and relations to the site and the town. They had very personal stories, indicating that personal memories and personal histories are equally important and true as the canonized history written by professionals. A personal narrative is another element which was repressed in the time of Socialism, as it was regarded as subjective and as such, irrelevant for history-writing and art making practices, and therefore should be kept in private. Public and private, greatly divided in the old Socialist times, were re-connected in this work. The visitor could walk along the tracks, while listening and being involved in the personal stories. While one becomes a voyager, she/he is provoked to think about public space to which it is possible to relate personally.

Ilona Nmeth, 27 metres, 2004-2007, Interactive Sound Installation, Sound engineer: Roman Lasciak, City Art Museum, Gyr, Photo: Tibor Somogyi

Little Warsaw, a Hungarian artist-duo (Blint Havas and Andrs Glik) is also interested in our public spaces, in our visual environment with its leftovers from different historical periods. They started their studies right after the political changes, facing the insignificance of art and culture as active agents of the social sphere and the ineffectiveness of the rigid institutional structure, and were unable to reflect on the changes. They felt a strong need to extend their activity into the public realm and to communicate with a much wider audience than that of Bohemia. As they found themselves in an art scene which was fascinated by the Western world, the global discourse, and the art market, they were interested in all of the opposites, in the Eastern countries, once united in brotherhood (so they traveled extensively in Romania, and in Poland) in local and particular discourse, and in public spaces with heavy loaded context. In 1996 they had an exhibition entitled Little Warsaw in the Polish Cultural Institute in Budapest. They made models from painted plaster of the reconstructed part of the city. For them, the Palace of Culture represented utopia, but for their teachers it was the icon of Communist terror. They kept the name due to it layered meanings, as it could mean a Central European city, or could be the name of an ethnic community outside of the home country, like Little Italy. They kept it also because two of them worked, and still work in collaboration.

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Their Deserted memorial (2004) project draw attention on the abandoned, forgotten, neglected memorials losing their specific context. They wanted to collect abandoned memorials, or pedestals, and to build a collage from them, a kind of memorial dedicated to memorials. They could not realize this idea, but developed it further considering the public memorial as a ready made object. (Fowkes 2005) They took the damaged memorial dedicated to the son of Horthy, the governor of Hungary in the thirties and forties. His young heir died in the Second World War, shot down as a pilot. In Socialism, Horthy was a regrettable figure, and his memory was erased. The damaged memorial was forgotten and left on its place with its purpose obscured. The shadow, the ghost, if you like, of the memorial was taken to Holland, where it was exhibited alongside of Pavel Althammer's bench, which was his signature art-piece. His artwork was converted back into a functional object, while the leftover of the public memorial entered into contemporary art context commemorating the lost memory and of the forgotten, rewritten history. In this subversive project, everything was taken upside down: the political public memorial appeared in private artistic context, while the museum, being historically distinct from the public art arena, became host to a public art work. And, finally, a memory discourse was launched from the position of art.

Left: Little Warsaw (Blint Havas and Andrs Glik), Deserted Memorial, 2004. Right: Deserted Memorial exhibited in Arsenal Gallery, Poland. Photos: Courtesy of the artists.

In 2004 they took another, much bigger and more significant public monument, Jnos Sznt Kovcs, made in 1965 by Jzsef Somogyi, a Hungarian sculptor, from a small Hungarian town to Amsterdam, to the exhibition "Time and Again". They took a public statue from a Socialist public space, the context of which had evaporated, to a highly prestigious artistic space. One of the aims of their operation was to test how the two totally distinctive contexts would come along, or, to put it otherwise, how the particular Eastern European art making practice of the public space of Socialism, with its heavy ideological agenda, would relate to the ideas and environment of a trendsetting museum in a Western democracy. In other words, they wanted to test their compatibility.

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Left: Moving the public monumnet of Jnos Sznt Kovcs from Hdmezvsrhely to Amsterdam; Right: Jnos Sznt Kovcs at the exhibition of Time and Again, 2004, Amsterdam. Photos: Courtesy of the artists

The project could be understood as taking the issue of competing ideologies to the international scene. The question for them was how the competition ended, and whether it had ended at all, and, if so, what happened with Eastern European art and with its distinct utopia. Was it simply left out, or in terms of art, was it melted into global art, without generating special interest? Concerning the different art making traditions, the question was whether all of them are viable, or do some of them have to be driven out from the collective memory of humanity? Further questions arise; what about postmodern culture, so hungry for selection and diversity; would it embrace the socialist reality, or strongly dislike the gray, monotonous, uninspiring look of Communism, as Boris Groys believes in his newest book. (Groys 2008, 150) In respect to the local context, the project targeted the artistic heritage of the Socialist past, whether it is a valid or invalid tool for socially committed contemporary artists. A lot of key issues came to play in Little Warsaw's very clever and complex project. Within the international context it became obvious, that Socialist Realism, the region's cultural heritage is in an "out of context" position, and that it lost its relevance. It is not part of the discussion of Western intellectuals anymore, and it is not marketable either on the otherwise colorful, diverse cultural market. As for the local discourse of modernism, which has greatly outlived itself in the region, the project opposed its still valid illusion, that art is something out of space, out of time, or better to say, above it all. In relation to the reception of the project, a hidden controversy of the local scene of the transition came to light, namely that Socialist Realism did get into a critical position in the hands of socially concerned young artists, while the avant-garde masters, heroes of the counterculture of Socialism, acted as the controlling establishment. The virtual and literal dislocation of the statue proved to be scandalous in the eyes of the local art community. The vehement local reflection clearly showed that the issue of the art of the Socialist past was still untouchable in 2004. Leading artists signed a petition against the art project. Strangely enough, the petition was signed by the representatives of political wings,

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the rightist, national one, and the leftist liberal one, which does not otherwise happen nowadays. So, as it seems, the common enemy, a politically conscious, question-raising art project could reunite the otherwise oppositional intellectuals. The rhetoric of the open letter was quite authoritarian, speaking in the name of the professional field, the art life as such and the audience. The signers stood up as the saviours of "good taste and cultural values", for which categories Little Warsaw's project, clearly does not qualify (Er#ss 2004). Until this point one could say that the modernist set of values did not match with the post-conceptualist project, and the petitioners expressed freely their artistic opinion. But this is not the end! They asked for investigation of the case, and for the appointment of someone who would be held responsible by those authorities, who were not specified, but with our background one can make a good guess. At the time of the original unveiling of the statue, it stirred a harsh debate. At that time the nature of Socialist realism was at stake, and the artist should have defended his statue publicly at the time of the veiling ceremony, as it did not fulfill the rigid obligations of Socialist realism, but stood for freedom of artistic expression, at least in the terms of the time. The very negotiation of power of different artistic ideas between the state dictated art conception and the artist's ideas could be detected in that very moment when artists tried to push the envelope, among them Somogyi, but the space within which they were allowed to navigate was defined by the state's cultural policy. In the turbulence of political changes, the stormy story of the monument sunk into oblivion, and the statue itself also became almost invisible. This sensitive position of the statue was totally obscured in the international scene, where its presentation and interpretation demonstrated that the region was treated by the use of the good old stereotypes and clichs resembling Cold War rhetoric. Sznt Kovcs was labeled a worker figure instead of a peasant leader, who he really was, while Hdmez#vsrhely, the original place of the statue, was named small village instead of a town, which it really was, for the sake of giving to it more dramatic overtone. Looking for an explanation for such harsh and rude reactions coming from both sides, one suspects that the message of Socialist Realism and even its conceptual recycling is that the avant-garde and modernist tradition is handicapped in the Eastern part of Europe, namely that its lineage is discontinuous, as it was rudely disrupted. When the West applies old stereotypes on Eastern art making practices, it is a kind of reminder of its own privileged position, having a smooth artistic lineage without breakages and interruptions. The lack of Socialist Realism in Post-Socialist art museum is a correction of this defect, or pathology, a kind of face-lifting. Little Warsaw went against the unwritten law of the region which force their compromised public statues into exile, into quarantine, named Statue Parks. Behind the unified hysterical outcry from the left and right wing of the former opposition and the former official state critic, is a symptom of the anxiety disorder, the repressed social fear and shame of being exposed. In the ex-official press organ of the state party, named Npszabadsg, the ex-official critic wrote a review of the project sharing the indignation of the former enemies, the present petitioners (Er#ss 2005). In his rhetoric the main accusation of the project is its being uncivilized and barbaric. The use of these categories does not take into consideration that the dichotomy of civilization versus barbarism was constructed for the sake of colonizers originating back in the time of the enlightenment. In this concept the barbarian savage is measured differently than the civilized human, and is not subject to the same law as the others, and their suppression is justified in the name of civilization. As 19th century

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ethnography and anthropology were byproducts of colonialism, and the political and military oppression of colonies went hand in hand with, put nicely, intense acquisitions of famous Western museums. Today, in the time of hot debates of art restitution, it is quite unreflective and obsolete to refer to the concept of civilization. One of the bizarre counter positions of the transition is that while the main trend after the political changes was to demolish Socialist statues without qualifying the process as vandalism, those artists, who relied on the denied and forgotten tradition and pulled one statue out of oblivion by taking it into a contemporary exhibition, were accused of vandalism. (Gamboni 2007, Andrs 2006) Although Little Warsaw was further accused of humiliating the statue, the statue remained unharmed and got back to its place fully intact. The gesture, of course, was not against the art object or the artist. On the contrary, it lifted up the veil of ignorance covering the statue. Little Warsaw had dug it up from the past, and along with it, the wounds and scars of the past, which had never healed properly, and have not even been discussed or negotiated. Rather, they could be regarded as social agents opening up the repressed trauma discourse, as they initiated a defense mechanism for overcoming the suffocating effects of the trauma. Their project went against the grain of the collective amnesia in respect to the Socialist art making practice, as they mobilized an effective coping method, converting the forgotten public statue into a contemporary art project. By the recontextualization of the statue they intended to untie it from its negative connotation and to give to the Socialist public statue, stepchild of the time of transition, a second chance to live, being revitalized and to be seen in a different perspective. From the side of the petitioners, the issue at stake was: Who has the right to dig up the past, and break apart the well preserved ideas of Socialism and the related art practice? Furthermore, how should we remember the Socialist past, or should we remember it at all? In the case of the petitioners, mostly ex-representatives of counterculture in the time of Socialism, one can diagnose the repetition of trauma, the transfer of aggression, as a wellknown after-effect of trauma, which means that they tried to police and control fellow artists in the same way as they themselves had been controlled by the state's cultural policy. So, for them, the issue at stake was indeed gate-keeping regarding the dominance of the art discourse, represented by themselves. II/ 2. The Secondary Trauma of the West and Coping with it through Art The trauma of the West connected to the collapse of the Socialist Block is a blank spot in the memory and trauma discourse, as if the West had been immune to its malaise, or as if it had been constantly in the position of a therapist, not taking into consideration the clinical evidence of the "therapist's secondary trauma". Andreas Fogarasi, who was born and raised in Vienna but of Hungarian origin, made a poetic video about the decay and fading glamour of the Hungarian Socialist, so called Houses of Culture, or Fun Palaces, the idea of which was originated in the Worker's Club. He represented Hungary in the 2007 Venice Biennial (Tmr 2007) where the Pavilion and his work won the Golden Lion Award. The Hungarian reception and the international one were greatly divided.

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As the Hungarian public is still in the condition of deep repression of the painful and troubling memories of the Socialist past and its institutions and culture, that is, still suffering from amnesia, the art piece was not really loved and valued by the public, including artists and art historians, for flaring up hateful memories. Its gut was resisted. The reaction shows that the trauma is still in its "incubation period", using Freud's and Caruth's term (Caruth 1995, 7). On the local scene the rejection of the trauma, which is the first phase in the trauma process, overshadows the desire of some artists of acting out and working through. The project was rejected on account of its "quality" which was interpreted as "uninteresting and boring", not being able to call the attention of the Western curators and audiences. This dismissive attitude shows that it was stuffed into the modernist discourse, instead of utilizing the discourse from which it could have been interpreted, namely the memory and trauma discourse. The lack of the discourses goes hand in hand with avoiding the memory of the past. Caruth's explanation of this phenomenon could have been applied to the traumatic relation to the Socialist past as well. She proposes that " trauma is not experienced as a mere repression or defense, but as a temporal delay, that carries the individual beyond the shock of the first movement." (Caruth 1995, 10) The oddly reversed positions regarding the Western and Post-Socialist conditions could be uncovered in the totally opposite attitude of the local and international scene. As opposed to the local scene, the international one was starving for a memory discourse coming from the region, as if not being able to find "food" to satisfy its craving, which means an art-piece in our case for curing its own trauma. The West had had its own loss as well, namely its referential point by which it could measure itself. Socialism and the Cold War were part of the identification and socialization process of the Western baby-boomers, also, even if from the other side. The existential threat coming from the Socialist Camp led by the Soviet Union was mediated by the rhetoric of the clash of civilization (capitalism versus socialism at that time) with the vision of a total nuclear war for which the Western societies should be prepared. Even if this threat was imaginary, and artificially generated, it was part of the mental experiences of the Westerners of the fifties and early sixties, with the side effects of fear and anxiety. So, the existence in the shadow of Socialism was mildly traumatic for the Western world as well. The collapse of Socialism and the Eastern Block buried under itself the very paradigm of modernism as well, with its utopian tenets and its beliefs in progress and a more beautiful, peaceful future, echoed by topic of the 2007 Documenta. Fogarasi offered therapeutic sessions regarding traumas, the loss of Socialism and the loss of the modernist utopia to Western audiences. The later one was invoked by the architectural installation. The installation and the video piece dealt both with the decay of Socialist culture and with the fading away of modernism. Both painful losses were served and awarded accordingly. Quite contrary, in Hungary, existing in a different phase of the trauma process, and suffering from the inability to carry through the trauma process, neither the work, nor the award got proper media attention, including the art world. Ilja Kabakov, one of the leading artists of the Russian unofficial art, was well aware of the existence of the secondary trauma of the West: his installation in the Russian Pavilion of the Venice Biennial in 1992 (Wallach 1996, 204$207) could be interpreted in the framework of trauma discourse. His work and attitude coincided with the immediate after-affect of trauma, namely the collective repression "acting as if the trauma did not even exist". Kabakov's work "collaborates" in this denial and serves as insulation against the traumatic condition. It reflects on the early phase of the "collective memory work", that is, on the ignorance of the traumatic experience.

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Fogarasi's double sided work, on the contrary, demonstrates the inability to carry through the "trauma process" in Hungary, from which the analyzed painful debates stemmed. On the other hand, it signals the end of the related trauma, the successful coping strategies of the West, and the overcoming of its own trauma. The West could greatly benefit from its better skill in coming to terms with the loss, and had greater tradition of lying on the couch, that is, of therapy, than the East having an inherited suspicion towards psychology and psychoanalyses. I suppose that Caruth's statement in terms of trauma on the individual level is relevant on the cultural level also. "Trauma is not locatable in the simple violent or original event in an individual's past, but rather in the way it's very unassimilative nature [...] returns to haunt the survivor later on". (Caruth 1995, 3-4) In conclusion, I believe, that art is one of the best tools for coming to terms with the haunting ghosts. It is the perfect tool for mourning, for expressing emotions of loss, regardless of whether the collective memory of Socialist past generates attraction or repulsion. Ignoring the grief work or coping mechanism of traumas is not an advisable strategy, accepting Sztompka's observation that "cultural traumas may last over several generations" (Sztompka 2004, 162) Caruth's observation, that "In a catastrophic age, that is, trauma itself may provide the very link between cultures" applies to those countries, that once were united in the Socialist camp, having shared historical past and common experiences, but disintegrated after the collapse of Socialism. I wish to express my gratitude to my good friend Barbara Dean for her generous help with the English version of the text.

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Bibliography Alexander, Jeffrey C. % Eyerman, Ron % Giesen, Bernhard % Sztompka, Piotr 2004. Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity. University of California Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London Andrs, Edit 2005. Blind Spot of the New Critical Theory. Notes on the Theory of Self Colonization. In Babias 2005. (ed.) 98-112 Andrs, Edit 2006. Transgressing Boundaries (Even those Marked out by the Predecessors) in the New Genre Conceptual Art. In Alberro, Alexander % Buchman, Sabeth (eds.) 2006. Art after Conceptual Art. The MIT Press % Generali Foundation, Cambridge, Massachusetts % Vienna, 163-178 Andrsi Gbor Pataki Gbor Szcs Gyrgy Zwickl Andrs 1999. Hungarian Art in the 20th century. Corvina, Budapest Babias, Marius (ed.) 2005. La Biennale di Venezia 51. Esposizione Internationale dArte. Romanian Pavilion. Bal, Mieke % Crewe, Jonathan % Spitzer, Leo (eds.) 1998. Acts of Memory. Cultural Recall in the Present. Dartmouth College Press, University Press of New England Bubnova, Iara 2000. From defects to effects. Self-colonization as an alternative concept to national isolationism. European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies. www.eipcp.net/diskurs/d01/text/ib01.htlm Caruth, Cathy 1995. Trauma. Explorations in memory. The John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore and London Erjavec, Ale& (ed.) 2003. Postmodernism and the Postsocialist Condition. Politized Art under Late Socialism. University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, California Er#ss, Nikolette (ed.) 2004. Much traveled monument: Little Warsaw: Instauration. http://www.exindex.hu/index.php?l=en&t=tema&tf=12_en.php Fowkes, Maya and Reuben 2005. Little Warsaw: Strategies of Removal and Deconstruction. Umelec: Contemporary Art and Culture (Prague), no. 3. Gamboni, Dario 2007. The Destruction of Art. Iconoclasm and Vandalism since the French Revolution. Reaktion Books, London Groys, Boris 2008. Art Power. MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, London Hughes, Henry Meyric 2005. When East was East and West was West: Art Attitudes in the Cold War. In Vanderlinden, Barbara Filipovic, Elena (eds.) 2005. 133%152. Imre, Anik 2001. Gender, Literature and Film in Contemporary East Central European Culture. Ch. 3. CLC Web: CLC Comparative Literature and Culture. http://www.clcwebjournal.lib.purdue.edu King, Elaine A. % Levin, Gail (eds.) 2006. Ethics and the Visual Arts. Allworth Press, New York Kiossev, Alexander 1999. Notes on Self-Colonizing Cultures. In Peji" % Elliott (eds.) 1999. 114%177 Michalski, Sergiusz 1998: Public Monuments. Art in Political Bondage 1870!1997. Reaction Books, London Neumann, Iver B. 1998. "The East" in European Identity Formation. University of Minnesota Press, Minnesota Nora, Pierre 2002. The reasons for the Current Upsurge in Memory. Transit Europaische Revue. Tr@nsitVirtuelles Forum, no. 22. Peji", Bojana % Elliott, David (eds.) 1999. After the Wall. Art and Culture in Post-Communist Europe. [katalgus] Moderna Museet, Stockholm

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Piotrowski, Piotr 2006. On Two Voices of Art History. In Bernhardt, Katja % Piotrowski, Piotr (eds.) 2006 Grenzen berwindend...-zu Ehren Adam S. Labudas. Lukas Verlag Smelser, Neil J. 2004. Psychological trauma and Cultural Trauma. In Alexander % Eyerman % Giesen % Sztompka 2004, 31%59. Sztompka, Piotr 2004. The Trauma of Social Change. A Case of Postcommunist Societies. In Alexander % Eyerman % Giesen % Sztompka 2004, 155%195. Tmr, Katalin (ed.) 2007. Andreas Fogarasi Kultur und Freizeit. Hungarian Pavilion. Giardini di Castello, Venice. 52nd International Art Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia. Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther Knig, Kln Vanderlinden, Barbara Filipovic, Elena (eds.) 2005. The Manifesta Decade. Debates on Contemporary Art Exhibitions and Biennials in Post-Wall Europe. MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, London Wallach, Amei 1996. Ilya Kabakov. The Man Who Never Trew Anything Away. Harry N. Abrams Inc., Publishers, New York Wolff, Larry 1994. Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment. Stanford University Press, Standford

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VIENNA SCHOOL METHODOLOGICAL DOCTRINE: VISIONS AND REVISIONS SUMMARY OR A FORESHADOWING REVISION OF ORTHODOXY ? Jn Bako"
Jede geschichtliche Bildung ist en Glied einer bestimmten geschichtlichen Entwicklungskette und bedingt durch die vorangehenden Bildungen derselben Materie. (Max Dvo'k, Das Rtsel der Kunst der Brder van Eyck, 1903.) Gruppierung in den genetischen Zusammenhang.../ist/ eine wissenschaftliche Rationalisierung. (H.Tietze, Methode der Kunstgeschichte, 1913.) Reduzierung ...auf eine immanente Entwicklung.../ist/ eine Abstraktion. (H.Tietze, Methode der Kunstgeschichte, 1913.)

Hans Tietze, in his Methode der Kunstgeschichte published in 1913, attempted to summarize basic principles of the evolutionist methodological project developed by Franz Wickhoff and Alois Riegl and articulated explicitly by Max Dvo'k. In Das Rtsel der Kunst der Bruder van Eyck (published in 1904) Dvo'k expressed the credo of genetic approach as follows:
die moderne Wissenschaft hat uns gelehrt...die Tatsachen in einzelne...Kausalverbindung zwingende Entwicklungsketten umzusetzen. Unter dem Einflusse der exakten Forschungsmethoden haben wir...gelernt...eine Tatsache nie als eine vereinzelte Erscheinung, sondern stets als ein Glied in einer bestimmten Aufeinanderfolge von Tatsachen derselben oder verwandten Art zu betrachten.

Nevertheless, within Tietzes reconstruction the first rifts in genetic doctrine occured. Contrary to the idea of a work of art as a part of an immanent evolution, and anticipating Schlossers nominalism, Tietze admitted that a work of art is something isolated. Moreover, inspired by neo-Kantian philosophy he even started to conceive of the evolution as a mere scientific construct. His characterization of the key idea of Viennese orthodoxy (i.e. the belief in the immanent evolution of art as a reduction and abstraction) can be regarded as a foreshadowing of the revision of the formalist-evolutionist model and the first step towards a new heteronomous and expressionist notion of art history. Despite that, the idea of art history as the history of ideas or world views called Kunstgeschichte als Geistesgeschichte not by Dvo'k but his pupils K.M.Swoboda and Johannes Wilde, had not been explicitly and fully articulated by Hans Tietze, but by Max Dvo'k.

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Unfolding Revision
Die Kunst besteht nicht nur in der Lsung und Entwicklung formaler Aufgaben und Probleme; sie ist auch immer und in erster Linie Ausdruck der die Menschheit beherrschenden Ideen...ein Teil der allgemeinen Geistesgeschichte. (M.Dvo 'k, ber Kunstbetrachtung, 1920.)

der Begriff des Kunstwerkes und des Knstlerischen hat im Laufe der historischen Entwicklung, und zwar bis auf die Grundlinien, die manningfaltigsten Wandlungen erfahren und war stets ein zeitlich und kulturell begrentzes und variables Ergebnis der allgemeinen Evolution der Menschheit. (M.Dvo 'k, Idealismus und Naturalismus in der gotischen Skulptur und Malerei, 1918.) man konnte jetzt von einer Kunstgeschichte ohne Kunstwerke reden, deren Inhalt nur mehr die Geschichte der knstlerischen Ideen ist. (O.Benesch, Max Dvo'k. Ein Versuch zur Geschichte der historischen Geisteswissenschaften, 1922.) Die geistesgeschichtliche Auffassung erbt aber auch von ihrer Vorgngerin die Gefahr, sich in eine blosse Abstraktion zu verlieren... das Kunstwerk luft Gefahr...zum blossen Trger von Ideen zu werden. (H.Tietze, Geistesgeschichtliche Kunstgeschichte,1924)

It is well known that the new approach as articulated in Dvo'ks Idealismus und Naturalismus in der gotischen Malerei und Plastik (1918) resulted in a fundamental revision of the orthodox genetic-autonomous model. The idea of art as a solution to formal problems was replaced by the idea of art as an expression of ideas, the notion of history as a continuous process with the idea of turns, ruptures or revolutionary breaks, and the notion of art historical research as a rational explanation (Erklrung) and unveiling causal connections with the concept of art history as an understanding and interpretation of unique and even irrational historical phenomena. Despite that, the notion of art history as the history of ideas represented no revolutionary rupture. As known, it was an organic result of the consistent development of late Riegls idea about the puzzling parallels between style history and the history of world views. The new paradigma still shared with the old orthodoxy not only the belief in historical relativism but also the conviction that the history of art had an impersonal nature, despite the independent and active (if not autonomous) role played by art. Riegls antinormativism implied the notion of ars una or at least the belief in a lasting essence of all art identified either as a lasting basic function of art defined as Wettschaffen mit der Natur or as a sensual common denominator i.e. Form und Farbe in Flche und Raum. He regarded historical changes in Kunstwollen as variations on the common core swinging between two alternative poles of human perception (resulting in haptic or optic artistic rendering). Dvo'k, in contrast to that, arrived at the radical historical relativism. He developed the idea of the history of art as the history of the concept of art. Consequently, the view of art history conceived of as changes in the identity of art itself opened the door to later sociological interpretation of art and inspired among others Walter Benjamins idea of the history of art as the process of losing aura. However, impersonal determinism and relativism of Dvo'ks history of world views inherited from Riegl provoked criticism. Even Dvo'ks close adherents Otto Bensch and 23

Hans Tietze realized, very early on, the dangers implied in Geistesgeschichte as follows: the danger of turning art history into history without works of art and neglecting active nature of art as a consequence of transforming works of art into mere documents of intellectual history. Anticipating Individuality Turn
Dvo 'k hat in letzter Zeit den tiefsten Grund alles geistigen Fortschrittes in den schpferischen Wirken einzelner grosser Geister gesehen. Geschichte ist ... das schpferische Resultat des Wirkens jener Grossen, die zum Schicksal ihrs Zeitalters geworden sind. (O.Benesch, Max Dvo'k, 1922.)

But Dvo'k himself escaped both perils mentioned above in his later lectures and papers. Leaning upon neo-Kantian belief in the unique nature of historical phenomena combined with the idea of the irrational nature of historical process Dvo'k abandoned his old belief in historical causality. Instead he replaced it with the idea of great artists as the initiators of the history of art and creators of the world views of their ages. As a consequence, radical historical relativism started to be transformed into transhistorism. Dvo'k articulated the belief that the history of art has produced eternal artistic values. Consequently, art historical research itself transformed its character: It was no longer mere reconstruction and interpretation of the past. It took on rather a new role of moralisation of the present and prophesying the future. Exempted from the retrospective and nostalgic nature of Dvo'ks modell (glorifying medieval or manierist spiritualism) Hans Tietze took over the idea and transformed it into an avant-gard project of art history as an active and socialy engaged activity (s.c. Lebendige Kunstwissenschaft). In harmony with the new avant-garde notion of art, Tietze reinterpreted geistesgeschichtliche Kunstgeschichte in terms of a sociological theory of art. The notion of the work of art as an automatic expression of an idea was conceived by Tietze as an active social function. Thus, Dvo'ks late essays about great masters like Tintoretto, el Greco, Durer or Pieter Brueghel d.A. can be regarded as an anticipation of the explicit critical revision of Vienna School orthodoxy carried out and declared by Julius Schlosser in 1924. Riegls and Dvo'ks realism was replaced with extreme nominalism by Schlosser. In the place of evolution or world view the singular work of art and the artist were put and regarded as the basic element of the history of art and the genuine object of art historical research. Insularist Turn
Jedes echte Kunstwerk trgt, wie die ideale Knstlerpersnlichkeit ... einen Massstab in, nicht ausser sich ... als Monade. (J.v.Schlosser, Ein Lebenskommentar, 1924.) Meine Bekanntschaft mit ihm /i.e.Benedetto Croce/ ist das eigentliche Ereignis meines Lebens geworden, mir eine vllige Erneuerung, eine zweite Jugend gebracht hat. (J.v.Schlosser, Ein Lebenskommentar, 1924.) Es gibt keine Kunst, nur Knstler... (J.v.Schlosser, Ein Lebenskommentar, 1924.)

24

Kunstgeschichte im eigentlichen Sinn kann niemals und nirgends Sprachgeschichte sein. Auch sind es die originale schpferischen Gestalten, um die es sich handelt, nicht die Nachahmer und Verwsserer, die keinen Ausdruck haben und ... nicht in die Kunstgeschichte gehren. (J.v.Schlosser, Ein Lebenskommentar, 1924.)

Even if Schlossers turn to insular theory conceiving of the work of art as a monade represented an open revolt against Riegls hegemony and had a character of the revolutionary break, it came into existence rather as a metamorphosis. His long museum practice was necessarily focused on singular works of art and his intensive study of the history of writings on art implied germs of nominalism on the one hand, and individualism on the other. Moreover, an indication of the implicit revolt against Riegls deductionist approach, against his abstract Grammar, his immanentist and impersonalist determinism, can be found in his open idea of artwork (i.e. his notion of the work of art as a culture historical phenomenon, and in his attempt to replace Riegls Kunstwollen with the notion of Kunstanschauung). Schlosser himself dated the implicit start of his nominalist turn as early as between 19011903. Nevertheless, the role of a catalyst for the insular and individualist theory of art was played by Schlossers friend Benedetto Croce. But Croce not only inspired Schlosser to conceive of art history as the history of great artists, but expelled history from art completely. As a consequence, Schlosser, a member of a historical school par excellence, fell into a dilemma. Extreme atomist historicism that regarded works of art as entirely unique phenomena (monads) threatened to lead into an ahistorical transcendentalism. Consequently, the history of art changed into a reconstruction of an eternal existence of masterworks or on Konrad Fiedlers terms into a transhistorical appurtenance of geniuses. In addition, Croce urged Schlosser not only to replace Riegls impersonal determinism with individualist activism, Kunstwollen with individual artist. He also substituted an aristocratic individualism appreciating only great artists and their masterworks for Riegls democratic idea of art that removed the gap betwen high and low art. Moreover, Croce stimulated him also to reject Riegls relativism. In order to overcome Riegls value neutral approach Schlosser synthesized Croces idea of the science of art regarded as critique with Vasaris idea of art history as value judgment. Despite that Schlosser anchored art historical research in value judgments without lapsing into the old historical normativism that had categorized the history of art in periods of peaks and declines. Thus, Vasaris diachronic normativism was replaced by a synchronic one. According to Schlosser, art history must be anchored in an axiology distinguishing between creative and not creative art: geniuses and epigones. In addition, following Croces belief in art as an expression, Schlosser contraposed expression to communication and style to language. Style was the product of individual artists and embodiment of their creative expression, according to Schlosser, and not, as Riegl claimed, the result of an anonymous artistic intention (will to form). As a consequence, the dilemma mentioned above that resulted from Croces antinomy art criticism versus history, was overcome by means of a dualist theory. In 1935, following Karl Vossler but contradicting Croces ahistorical model in a sense, Schlosser divided Stilgeschichte from Sprachgeschichte, the history of style from the history of language, individual expression from collective communication, and creation (by great artists) from imitation (by epigones). In this way Schlosser counterposed Croces belief in creative expression to Viennese idea of style and its history. The true history of art was regarded by Schlosser as production of styles, but styles were conceived of as individual expressions and as executed exclusively by great artists. Similarly to Vasaris model of the history of artists, great masters were regarded as 25

producers of styles and, consequently, the authors of history. At the same time, style was cotraposed to artistic language, to a mere communication performed by epigones. Small masters solely spread stylistic innovation executed by great masters, according to Schlosser. Consequently, neither Riegls history of grammar nor the history of language could be regarded as the true art history, according to him. They represented solely either an empty abstract construction or inferior culture historical part of the true art history. In that way Schlosser attempted to preserve the historicity of art without losing the unique, individual and trascendental nature of artistic creation and reconcile Vienna School historism with Croces expressionist transcendentalism. However, the critical revision of Riegls orthodox paradigm was materialized and its hegemony shattered by a new nominalist model. Counter-Paradigma In 1924, simultaneously with casting doubts upon Geistesgeschichte by Benesch and Tietze and the radical revision of Riegls orthodoxy by Schlosser, the most intransigent critic of Vienna School, Josef Strzygowski, equated the crisis of Geisteswissenschaften generally with Vienna School methodological doctrine. In contrast to Schlosser, Tietze or Benesch, Strzygowskis criticism was an external and destructive one. He condemned not only the diachronic and linear ideas of history, but also Eurocentric and humanist concept of the history of art as hegemonic, and immanent conception of art history as entirely mistaken. He suggested instead to replace it with the geography of art focusing on a pluralist notion of World art history. It was conceived of as consisting of plurality of simultaneous, constant and interacting artistic territoral circles anchored in different nations, peoples or races. In addition, Strzygowski insisted on replacing historic-philological and formalist monistic methods of inquiry (characteristic of Vienna School) with a systematic science of art (Kunstwissenschaft). It should consist of factual art history on the one hand and the study of art reception on the other. Due to its vicious and negative intention Strzygowskis project affected the development of the Vienna School only indirectly i.e. through the mediation by the students which had attended simultaneously Dvo'kss and Schlossers as well as Strzygowskis lectures despite interdiction by both being at war with the other. Inductionist Revolution
Dvo 'ks Hauptwerk Idealismus und Naturalismus...ist einen ausgesprochenen Rckschritt. Hier geht Dvo'k nicht mehr von den Denkmlern aus, sondern er versucht die ganze mittelalterliche Kunst aus ...konstruierten Weltanschauungstheorien zu erklren /.../ hier wurde ein Versuch gemacht, die Kunst zum blossen Ausdruk einer ... a priori gegebenen Weltanschauung zu machen. (Q.Kaschnitz-Weinberg, Alois Riegl, 1929.) Nichts ist im gegenwrtigen Stadium so wichtig wie eine verbesserte Erkenntnis des einzelnen Kunstwerks /.../ das einzelne Kunstwerk /wird/ als eine eigene, noch unbewltigte Aufgabe der Kunstwissenschaft. (H.Sedlmayr, Zu einer strengen Kunstwissenschaft, 1931.)

The group of art historians entering the scene in the second half of the 1920s known as Viennese structuralists also regarded the situation in post-war art history as the crisis of its scientific status. Due to that they launched the project of art history as a rigorous and exact science (strenge Kunstwissenschaft). Even if Riegls evolutionist version of style history was also targeted by the group that consisted symptomatically of Schlossers graduates before all, its criticism was directed primarily against Geistesgeschichte, its deductive procedure and 26

spiritualist character. In the footsteps of Schlossers criticism of abstractions, members of the group regarded deductive generalisations as unverifiable abstract constructions. Consequently, a strict inductive (bottom up) procedure focusing on analysis of a single work of art was introduced. In addition, the interpretations by means of analogies were consequently replaced with Sachforschung, an empirical analysis of the structure of the work of art based on its objective perception. This kind of analysis should uncover the inner organization and functioning of the work and grasp its aesthetic status and message. Representatives of this group, Hans Sedlmayr especially, held their initiative for a methodological revolution and characterized it as a new epoche of art history. Nevertheless, rather than an original innovation or a radical turn it was an attempt to synthesize diverse stimuli taken from their predecessors. Croces and Schlossers insular notion of artwork as a monad now characterized as an independent world or microcosm was combined with Riegls analysis of formal structure and the idea of a centrally organised functional whole taken over from Gestalt Psychology. Borrowing from a synthesis of Croce-Schlossers axiological dualism with Strzygowskis idea of a systematic science of art (Kunstwissenschaft) that strictly separated case study from the study of the reception (or immanent art history from social history of art) Sedlmayr attempted to bridge the gap between art history and aesthetic (or Kunstgeschichte and Kunstwissenschaft). His project resulted in a hierarchical theory of two art histories. The first art history regarded as a craft (concentrated on dating, attribution or identification of iconography) was delimited from the second and higher science of art regarded as investigation and observation of aesthetic nature and artistic quality. Moreover, following Gestalpsychology Sedlmayr developed the concept of gestaltetes Sehen, i.e. a correct sensual approach to the work of art enabling us to grasp simultaneously its organization, its aesthetic status and its inner content without any preconceptions and a priori knowledges. Due to that Sedlmayr implicitly reintroduced normativism into art history. Consequently, his notion of structural analysis assumed a contradictory nature: Paradoxicaly enough, an impartial, empirical and rational analysis if based on correct sensual approach - was supposed to identify aesthetic quality of a work of art. Moreover, an immanent and decontextualized analysis of an artworks structure was expected to discover inner spiritual content of a work of art. No wonder that Sedlmayrs companion Otto Pcht, in his paper Das Ende der Abbildtheorie (Kritische Berichte, 193031), warned against the danger of slipping from scientific analysis into poetry. Reverse of Rigorous Science
The authors /i.e. of Kunstwissenschaftliche Forschungen, II/ often tend to isolate forms from the historical conditions of their development, to propel them by mythical, racialpsychological constants, or to give them an independent self-evolving career. Entities like race, spirit, will, and idea, are substituted in an animistic manner for a real analysis of historical factors. (Meyer Schapiro, The New Viennese School, Art Bulletin 1936.) Diese dritte Forderung, historisch zu denken, hat ihre einfache Begrndung in der Tatsache, dass das Kunstwerk nicht als Projektion der Ideen seines Schpfers in den luftleehren geistigen Raum entsteht, sondern als eine Auseinandersetzung des geistigen Schaffens mit den verschiedensten Gegebenheiten der konkreten historischen Situation ... (H.Sedlmayr, Geschichte und Kunstgeschichte, 1936.) Das Kunstwerk ist eine Monade, in der die kunstwirkenden Krfte eines Volks und einer Epoche sich verdichten. (H.Sedlmayr, Julius Ritter von Schlosser, 1938.)

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In 1936, the year Sedlmayr took over the chair of art history at Vienna University from Schlosser, a fundamental criticism of The New Viennese School was published in The Art Bulletin. Its author Meyer Schapiro unmasked the metaphysical core of the structuralist project of rigorous science of art as articulated in two volumes of the journal Kunstwissenschaftliche Forschungen in 1931-1933. According to him, Viennese structuralists not only neglect the social, economic, political and ideological factors in art and isolate forms from the historical conditions of their development explaining art as an independent variable...which has an immanent goal. They also substitute in an animistic manner ...mythical, racial-psychological constants...entities like race, spirit, will, and idea...for a real analysis of historical factors...giving them an independent self-evolving career. As a consequence, theological deductions were prefered by Viennese art historians to an empirical study and a mysterious racial and animistic language was offered in the name of a higher science of art. There are no doubts that Schapiros criticism concerning the lack of methodological selfreflection was well-founded. As far as the reproach for mythical constants or mysterious entities was concerned the situation was a little more complicated. In his paper on Riegl Sedlmayr explicitly avoided an abstract racialist explanation of the history of art. According to him, Ebensowenig kommen als Trger des Kunstwolens die Volker in rasenmssogen Sinn in Betracht; die Verteilung der Stile und ihre Grenzen decken sich nicht mit Grenzen und Verteilung der Volkstumer and instead pleaded for a more concrete sociological approach: Der Trger des Kunstwollens ist vielmehr immer eine bestimmte Gruppe von Menschen, die sehr verschieden gross sein kann. Nevertheless, in the manifesto of Viennese structuralism i.e. in his Towards a Rigorous Study of Art published in 1931 Sedlmayr, referring explicitly to Otto Pcht, permitted already attempts to work out historical constants or invariants (of a national or regional type, for example) as legitimate objects of art history. In addition, in 1936 as Hans Aurenhammer has noticed Sedlmayr started to turn away from the immanentist structuralist conception of art. In the paper Geschichte und Kunstgeschichte already from the position of the head of the Institute of Art History at Vienna University, Sedlmayr dissociated himself from Pchts isolationist approach and pleaded for an equilibrium between autonomous and heteronomous art history, and for a synthesis of structural analysis of a single artwork and the wider historical interpretation. In no time then he adopted the racialist mythical theory conceiving of the work of art as eine Monade, in der die kunstwirkenden Krfte eines Volks und einer Epoche sich verdichten Despite that, he continued his attempt to reconcile his original belief in an individualist nature of art as a product of great masters with the collectivist metaphysical notion of art as an expression of anonymous collective subjects. As a result, he articulated a theory of a circulation or an exchange between high and low art, claiming that Die Geschichte der hohen Kunst wird ein Bundnis mit der Geschichte der Volkskunst eingehen. The Turn to Invariants or Biological Revision
An Stelle von schematischen Entwicklungsreihen ... soll eine Darstellung der realen historischen Zusammenhnge treten...die zu den anderen Kultursektoren hinber fhren, wie Wirtschaft, Gesellschaft, Religion. (K.M.Swoboda, Neue Aufgaben der Kunstgeschichte, 1934-35) die kunstgeschichtliche Einheit ... beruht ...auf der Annahme einer weitgehenden Abhngigkeit der Geschichte der Kunst von der politischen Geschichte. (K.M.Swoboda, Zum deutschen Anteil an der Kunst der Sudetenlnder, 1938).

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Erst die allerjngste Kunstgeschichte sucht nach Arbeitsverfahren, die imstande sind, das rtlich, landschaftlich usw. im historischen Wandel der Stile sich Gleichbleibende, die knstlerische Konstante eines Ortes, einer Landschaft zu erfahren und zu beschreiben. (K.M.Swoboda, Kunst und Nation, 1936). Die Fragestellung dazu lautet: Welches ist trotz allem geschichtlichen Wandel der sich gleichbleibende Charakter der Kunst eines Volkes, einer Landschaft, einer Stadt ? (K.M.Swoboda, Neue Aufgaben der Kunstgeschichte, 1934-35).

As it is known today, thanks to H.Aurenhammer above all, Sedlmayrs methodological turn was the consequence of the shift of his ideological conviction from Austrian catholic monarchism to Pan-German hegemonic nationalism. At the same time, in the middle of 1930s another pupil of Vienna School and a former Dvo'ks assistant K.M.Swoboda noted a similar methodological change regarded as a general trend of art history at that time. In his inaugural address at the German University in Prague in 1934 he drew up the new tasks of art history. Due to the deep changes in art after the First World War, aroused consciosness of nations, and a large extension of the research field of the history of art, art history was faced with new problems, according to Swoboda. As a consequence, new concepts and methods and a new theory of art history were urgently needed. Referring to Viennese structuralisms the first task of art history was specified by Swoboda as an exact analysis of a single work of art and its artistic structure. Implicitly criticizing Riegls and Dvo'ks evolutionist project Swoboda opposed it to the schematic constructions of genetic chains that dominated art history in the previous period. The second task was defined by him as the study of the real historical relations (reale historische Zusammenhnge) of art to all fields of culture,i.e. to economy and society or religion. As a consequence, art history should become a part of a new science on Man based on a close cooperation with history, ethnology, philology or anthropology. Needless to say the anthropological dimension of art was regarded by the adherents of Neue Aufgaben of art history as biological or racialist. Three years later (in: Zum deutschen Anteil an der Kunst der Sudetenlnder, 1937) the criticism of the othodox Vienna School had become more explicit and negative. Riegl and Dvo'k were directly blamed for immanent and idealistic approach to art history. In addition, the relationship of art to politics was emphasized. Swoboda spoke of the dependence of the history of art on the history of politics. Nevertheless, the third and new task of art history was the most topical, according to Swoboda. It was regarded as the second dimension of art history in addition to the first i.e. diachronic dimension. Swoboda characterized it as the investigation of art historical constants. It consisted in the search for a constant character of the art of a people, region, or a town that resisted historical changes. Due to that, the focus of art historical research should transfer from the first i.e. diachronic dimension to the second one. Despite the fact that the geography of art based on the belief in territorial constants and racial collective subjects was Strzygowskis domain, Swoboda mentioned Riegl, Wolfflin or Dvo'k and Pinder as the true initiators of that kind of research. Nevertheless, their more or less intuitive research devoid of any theoretical reflection had to be transformed into a systematic exploration of the constant and specific character of the art of particular nations. Swobodas papers publish at that time e.g. Kunst und Nation (1936) or Zum deutschen Anteil and der Kunst der Sudetenlnder (1938) displayed what the theoretical completion of Dvo'ks legacy de facto meant according to him: Dvo'ks spiritualism was transformed into a biological (or racial) interpretation, and his cosmopolitanism into nationalism. Art historical constants (kunstlerische Konstante) were conceived of as national and regional stylistic

29

constants. Thus, constant artistic style was regarded as an embodiment and expression of the lasting spiritual character of a collective subject a race, a tribe, a nation. Syncretic Justification
Die Kunst istan die schpferische Persnlichkeit gebunden. (D.Frey, Die Entwicklung nationaler Stile in der mittelalterlichen Kunst des Abendlandes, 1938.) das volkstmliche Schaffen/ist/ein Krftespeicherder allgemeinen Entwicklung ein entscheidender Faktor zur Ausbildung landschaftlicher, stammesmssiger und nationaler Eigenart. (D.Frey: Kunstwissenschaftliche Grundfragen, Wien 1946.) Die Kunst ist nicht Ausfluss der Nation, sondern Gestaltungsform der Nation, durch die erst die Nation mitbestimmt wird. (Dagobert Frey, Die Entwicklung nationaler Stile in der mittelalterlichen Kunst des Abendlandes, 1938.)

Another Dvo'ks disciple, Dagobert Frey, a professor at Wroclaw University since 1931, joined the project of the new tasks of art history and participated in its fascist turn. In order to reach that goal, Frey syntesized Dvo'ks legacy with Strzygowskis. In the essay Die Entwicklung nationaler Stile in der mittelalterlichen Kunst des Abendlandes published in 1938 he developed a syncretic theoretical system combining the diachronical conception of art history with a synchronic one, the idea of history as an universal linear process with the notion of plurality of constant terriorial wholes, or the notion of art as an expression of the world view of an age with the idea of expression of the psyche of a collective subject (Nation, Volk, Stamm). Similarly to Sedlmayr, he maintained that art is a product of individual artists, on the one hand but on the other, he adopted the idea of national art and conceded the existence of collective carriers of art history like Nation or Volk. At the same time he stressed the relative nature of constants, the changing character of nations, and their lack of homogeneity, their coming into existence in a concrete historical moment and their nonidentity with states. In addition, he emphasized the creative role of art as far as its relation to a nation is concerned. According to him Kunst ist nicht Ausfluss der Nation, sondern Gestaltungsform der Nation, durch die erst die Nation mitbestimmt wird. Consequently, he resolutly refused to assume collectivities (nations) a priori, insisting on the strict inductive way of searching for them. Thus, Frey on the one hand defended the independent scientific status of art historical research, while on the other he silently and deliberately adopted instrumental political commitments of art history. In a very sophisticated way he combined an impartial and unbiased theoretical writings with politicaly engaged and partial practice. It was just the nationalist theory of equating an artistic style (regarded as an expression of collective psych) with a nation (or a people and a tribe ) and a region (Kunstlandschaft) that was intended to justify the expansionist territorial demands and robberies from foreign art collections. In contrast to Swoboda, Frey provided invaluable support to Nazi regime. Swobodas racial and nationalist notion of art (as an expression of a constant mentality of a tribe e.g. Sudetenldischer Stamm) that, it is true, ideologically legitimized hegemonic annexation, nevertheless, it did not exclude an empathic relationship to Czech art historians and a protective approach to Czech cultural heritage in the practice. Thus the original Riegls project of art history as an objective and impartial research modified by Wickhoffs idea of art

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historical investigation as projecting contemporary art on the past (an opening eyes for a past by means of contemporary art), or Dvo'ks notion of prophesying the future by means of projecting past into the future, and transformed in the concept of art history as an engaged activity in favour of the present by Tietze, and resulted here in the conception of art history as a direct political instrument adopted by Swoboda and Frey. Marxist Revision
we can understand the origins and nature of co-existent styles only if we study the various sections of society... (F.Antal: Florentine Painting and Its Social Background, 1947.) Since the art of the period under discusion expresses mainly the outlook of the patrons of art ... rather then the views of the artists... (F.Antal: Florentine Painting and Its Social Background, 1947.) The severely historical spirit of the school of Vienna and the resolutly anti-art for arts sake attitude of Warburg together paved the way for a deeper, richer, and less nebulous study of art history. (F.Antal, Remarks on the Method of Art History, 1949.)

As we saw, Dvo'ks pupils, contrary to Schlossers, did not negatively revise Dvo'ks legacy but rather modified it in an affirmative way. Irrespective of how they transformed Dvo'ks spiritualism, they attempted to specify the carrier (Trger) of art history and shared his belief in anonymous collective subjects. This was confirmed by a Hungarian Dvo'ks disciple, Frederic Antal. In the second half of the 1940s while an emigree in London Antal transformed Geistesgeschichte into a Marxist social history of art. He even attempted to synthesize Marxist version of the history of ideas with Warburgs social and cultural history. On the one hand, Antal followed Dvo'k in regarding art as an expression of a world view. On the other, conceiving of society in Marxist terms as a class structure, he replaced the idea of art as the expression of an age with the idea of artistic style as the expression of a class outlook on life, or ideology. According to Antal, simultaneous existence of different social classes in one social organism resulted into diversity of artistic styles each expressing a world outlook particular to a class. It is true, adopting Dvo'ks impersonal concept of expression, Antal regarded an artistic style neither as an embodiment of the world view of the artist nor as the expression of the ideology of the artist class. Antal took on Warburgs idea of the active participation of patrons in the production of art and combined it with the idea of art as an intellectual expression. Due to that, he conceived of artistic style as the expression of its commissioners class ideology i.e., the mentality of the class of the patron. As a consequence, the metaphysical expression theory of Hegelian origin was relativized by Marxist as well as non Marxist sociological theories. Moreover, the idea of art as an expression of truth inherited from Romanticism clashed with the craft concept of art as the execution of a commission. Nevertheless, Antal was convinced that Dvo'ks legacy could be easily synthesized with Warburgs one and that the future of art history dependeds on that synthesis: The severely historical spirit of the school of Vienna and the resolutely anti-art for arts sake attitude of Warburg together paved the way for a deeper, richer, and less nebulous study of art history.

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Theophanic Revision
Denn es ist mglich und es ist heute an der Zeit, den Relativismus zu relativieren... (H.Sedlmayr, Kunstgeschichte als Geistesgeschichte, 1949.) Auf dieser hchsten denbkbaren Ebene wandelt sich Kunstgeschichte als Geistesgeschichte in Kunstgeschichte als Pneumatologie und Dmonologie. (H.Sedlmayr, Kunstgeschichte als Geistesgesschichte. 1949.) Wenn die Kunstgeschichte als Geistesgeschichte in ihrer ersten Phase fast immer zu einer Stilgeschichte als Geschichte der Weltanschauung geworden ist, whrend sie ...Kunstgeschichte als Geschichte der Epiphanie des absoluten Geistes in den Brechungen des zeitabhngigen menschlichen Geistes sein knnte und sollte... (H.Sedlmayr, Kunstgeschichte als Geistesgeschichte, 1949.)

If Schlossers revision of Riegls realist historical Grammar (by means of the nominalist model) can be regarded as the first immanent critique of Vienna School orthodoxy, and if the dismissal of Dvo'ks history of art without artworks by structuralists can be conceived of as the second one, then Sedlmayrs essay Kunstgeschichte als Geistesgeschichte published in 1949 represented the second revision of Dvo'ks history of ideas. Neverthless, Sedlmayrs criticism was not aimed at Dvo'ks spiritualism but at his historical dimension this time. In contrast to his paper Geschichte und Kunstgeschichte (1936) calling for the close study of the relation of art to history, Sedlmayr criticized Dvo'ks concentration on the relatonship of art to the real history of ideas. Dvo'ks interpretation of art as the expression and materialisation of a world view of an age was regarded as the limitation to a transient dimension of the history of art neglecting transcendental essence of art. According to Sedlmayr art history should be the history of eternal values created by art, the history of the epiphany of absolute spirit. Nevertheless, Sedlmayrs critique was not intended as a total dismissal of Dvo'ks model. On the contrary, relying on a late Dvo'ks statement calling for art history to pay attention to the correlation between human soul and God Sedlmayr regarded his critique of art history as the history of world views as the true development of Dvo'ks legacy. Consequently, also art history should be transformed from a documenting of the past into a kind of theology revealing hidden meanings of a work of art and vivifying arts eternal values by means of a re-creative interpretation. If Dvo'ks post-war promoting spiritualism can be regarded as a critique of materialism, the promotion of transcendentaism by Sedlmayr after 1945 functioned rather like an escape from the collapse of ideology he was deeply involved in. In contrast to K.M.Swobodas and D.Freys post-war recourse to an anthropological approach, and to their attempt to transform the former expansionist geography of art into the universal art history or world comparatistics, Sedlmayr responded to the ideological collapse by means of an aggresive counterattack. His transformation of art history into a theological iconology and his conservative attack against Modern art were both sides of the coin. Paradoxically in a sense, Sedlmayrs post-war transcendentalism can be regarded as a metaphysical variation of Schlossers humanist individualism. Intended as a radical revision of Vienna School historical relativism it aimed at the relativist nature of Modernism after all. Sedlmayrs indictment of Modernism for all the 19th and 20th century crises was a very sophisticated attempt at readdressing the responsibility for war cataclysm.

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Relativism in the Pillory

this reliance of art history on mythological explanations seems so dangerous to me. By inculcating the habit of talking in terms of collectives, of mankind, races, or ages, it weakens resistance to totalitarian habits of mind. (E.H.Gombrich: Art and Illusion, 1960.) In such judgements the style as a whole expressive system is set over against a hypostasized collective personality either of a people or a period of which it is held to be the expression. (E.H.Gombrich, Achievement in Medieval Art, German original 1937.) I happen to be a passionate believer in all thouse outmoded ideas which Sedlmayr... asked...to discard... the idea that only individual human beings are real, while groups and spiritual collectives are mere names...the belief in the unity and immutability of human nature and human reasonno less than the idea that nature remains the same and is only represented in different modes ...the causal analysis of history which conceives of historical changes merely as a resultant of blind and isolated chains of causation. (E.H.Gombrich, Art and Illusion, 1960.)

Vienna School relativism was severely criticised also by the last graduate from the archhumanist Schlosser i.e. by Ernst Hans Gombrich. In comparison with Sedlmayr his revision was conducted from an entirely opposite point of view this time, i.e., from the antimetaphysical position. Relativism and metaphysical determinism were held resposible for all the 20th Century anti-humanist totalitarianisms by Gombrich. According to him: By inculcating the habit of talking in terms of collectives, of mankind, races, or ages, it weakens resistance to totalitarian habit of mind. Gombrich had launched his fundamental critique of Vienna School orthodoxy from exile in London already in 1937. Reviewing Dvo'ks pupil Ernst Gargers attempt to overcome Riegls historical relativism Gombrich added the criticism the metaphysical expresionist idea of style. He resolutly rejected to conceive of the style as a whole expressive system...set over against a hypos tasized collective personality either of a people or a period of which it is held to be the expression. In his inaugural lecture Art and Scholarship at University College, London in 1957, doubting the Vienna School belief in art history as a science, Gomnrich formulated the idea of art history as a scholarship. In addition, he combined the role of art historian as scholar with an iconological idea of the guardian of memories:
The scholar is the guardian of memories, according to Gombrich. Despite the scepticism concerning scientific nature, Gombrich still insisted on a scientific ethic in art history, on art historys obligation to proceed self-reflexively and criticaly and resist to all kinds of irrational myths.

Irrespective whether it concerns myth of the life cycle of art and exaggerated emphasis on the belief in progress; style as an utterance of the collective, in which a nation or an age speaks to us; the physiognomic fallacy...the illusion that that mankind changed as dramatically and thoroughly a did art; or the pittfals of circular interpretations of images. In his opus magnum Art and Illusion. A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation. (1960) Gombrich adopted Schlossers idea of language but transformed his teachers axiological dualism into a monist theory of communication: according to Gombrich, art as a whole and not only production by minor artists, must be regarded as a language, a communication. Consequently, style cannot be conceived of as an expression and the product of great masters only but a system of conventions. Not only Kleinmeisters but also geniuses 33

are producing within the frames of the system of artistic tradition and social conventions. That is why masterworks can not be regarded as absolutely original products transcending all borders; but on the contrary, they are only as relatively innovative solutions, variations of previous schemes. Geniuses too were bound to the principle of scheme and correction, according to Gombrich. Thus, Gombrich abandoned Schlossers aristocratic individualism transforming Riegls and Dvo'ks evolutionist idea of the genius as a mere executor of a style or an evolutionary chain into the conventionalist idea of art as altering artistic conventions and adjusting them to a social function. Due to that, the Romantic notion of artistic production as a transcendental creation was replaced with the notion of art regarded as craft based on skill. It seems that Gombrich was inspired by Thomas Kuhns distinction between normal and revolutionary science in transforming Schlossers axiological dualism style versus language into a diachronic one, i.e. normal art history periods dominated by the principle of scheme and correction versus artistic revolutions deeply changing paradigm due to changes of the social function of art. Nevertheless, despite compiling and transforming Schlossers and Riegls ideas Gombrich dismissed Vienna School historical relativism and anonymous collectivist determinism or mythological explanations as he called it. He resolutely rejected surrendering the belief in the unity and immutability of human nature and human reason no less than the idea that nature remains the same and is only represented in deferent modes or to renounce causal analysis of history. Gombrich believed that in spite of all deep historical changes there has been not a single reason enabling scientific research, but also a common core of art rooted in an anthropological constant. According to him, historical relativism can be overcome by an anthropological humanism when synthesized with sociological conventionalism. Despite the contradictory nature of such a synthesis he assumed that historical changes of style can be explained by means of the notion of tradition, the idea of skill or the theory of alternatives i.e. without resorting to axiological and epistemological relativism. Nevertheless, the polemic against relativism and the relationship to Riegl can be regarded as leitmotiv or the burden of Gombrichs life work. In a sense Gombrichs critique of relativism rounded off the polemic of the humanists against anti-normativists launched by his teacher Schlosser. Gombrich as the faithful adherent of humanism repeatedly cast doubts upon Riegls and Dvo'ks idea of the history of art regarded as the changes of intentions or values replacing it by a revived classical idea of art history as the process of perfectioning skill motivated by social competition. According to him, a preference for the primitive neednt necessarily be a consequence of a new conception of art characteristic of the Middle Ages as Dvo'ks believed, but can refer to the factor of competition, because The idea of the primitive...implies the possibility of technical progress, and this in its turn may depend on the kind of competition we encountered in Plinys chapters on ancient art. Revived Orthodoxy in Counterattack
Die ikonologische Forschung .../ist/... die totale Intellektualisierung des Kunstwerks, die das Bild fr eine Bilderschrift nimmt. (O.Pcht: Methodisches zur kunsthistorischen Praxis, 1970-71) der Versuch, das Kunstschaffen der Genies von der Allgemeinentwicklung zu sondern ist zum Scheitern verurteilt ... die genialen Leistungen sind nicht minder ableitbar als die kleinen Vorwrtbewegungen der Durchschnittsknstler. (O.Pcht: Methodisches zur kunsthistorischen Praxis, 1970-71.)

34

Nach Gombrich...als Sprecher der Antievolutionisten...ein Knstler, und sei es auch der grosste,...gebunden ist sich ...der Formeln, Schablonen, Muster, Klischees zu bedienen, die ihm seine Zeit, sein Milieu, seine Tradition...anbietet /.../ beruht die Mglichkeit einer historischen Ableitung von Kunstwerken darauf, dass einer vom anderen abschreibt. /.../ Mssen wir als Historiker uns wirklich damit begngen, eine Geschichte des Kopierens zu erarbeiten... (O.Pcht: Methodisches zur kunsthistorischen Praxis, 1970-71.) Genealogieforschung, gewhnlich genetische Ableitung genannt, wird zu einem der dringendsten Anliegen unserer Disziplin. (O.Pcht: Methodisches zur kunsthistorischen Praxis, 1970-71.)

Thus, if Gombrich represents the most radical criticism of the historical relativism of Riegls Vienna School extended even to the rejection of epistemological and value relativism in general, Otto Pcht represents his antipode. In contrast to the majority of Schlossers pupils he became a consistent relativist. Despite fundamental critique from M. Schapiro or E.Gombrich, he not only insisted on national collective subjects regarded as being the carriers of the history of art from his early paper Gestaltungsprinzipien der westlichen Malerei des 15.Jahrhunbderts to his late methodological summary Methodisches zur kunsthistorischen Praxis, but followed and truely developed Riegls and Dvo'ks legacy. After twenty six years long exile in England he accepted the offer to take over the chair of art history at Vienna University from K.M.Swoboda in 1963. The next year he took a strong line over Panofskys iconology at the CIHA Congress in Bonn in 1964. Pcht reproached iconological method with missing the essence of art, i.e. its originality as a consequence of its focusing on iconography. In so doing he conceived of a modern art paradigma as absolutely valid. Pchts intention to revive Riegls orthodoxy was unequivocaly expressed already in editing Riegls lectures held at Vienna University in 1897-1899 called Historische Grammatik der bildenden Kunste. In 1971 while at the Vienna University Pcht summarized his methodological credo in the lecture course Methodisches zur kunsthistorischen Practice (held in 1970/71). Conceived as a summary of basic principles of art history in order to give practical instructions on research the paper coped with the main methodological trends of art history and drew a sophisticated even if not a very original methodological project. Accusing iconology of claiming methodological hegemony, Pcht held against it a neglecting the specific nature of visual art. According to him, iconological interpretation resulted into a total intellectualization of the work of art regarding it merely as a kind of hieroglyph (364) or a secret writing accessible exclusively to an elite. Simultaneously, Pcht rejected also Croces and Schlossers belief in creatio ex nihilo and the idea of geniuses regarded as absolutly unconditioned and free creators. In addition, Pcht resolutly rejected also Gombrichs idea of the power of tradition and formconventions determining the work of great masters too. According to him, such a theory also neglected the creative nature of art and transformed art history into a mere history of copying. Iconology, transhistoricism, and conventionalism were contraposed to othodox Vienna School evolutionism by Pcht. He reintroduces Riegls and Dvo'ks genetic theory regarded as the most reliable and effective methodological approach. According to Pcht, evolutionist methods and the idea of genetic connections between works of art allows to respect simultaneously the specific nature of visual art (its non discoursive visuality expressed by means of Pchts credo: Am Anfang war das Auge, nicht das Wort) the creative and unique nature of art production, the innovative and immanent character of its history and, at the same time, to regard the history of art as the causal, and thus rationally explicable, process.

35

Consequently, genetic approach can be regarded as the best verifiable art historical method despite the fact that it could be nothing more than a hypothetic explanation. Nevertheless, in order to develop a complex explanation of the history of art the genetic approach had to be combined with the structural analysis of the single work of art based on a central organizing form principle. Pcht was convinced that the combination of the evolutionist approach, focused on the reconstructing genetic chains with structural analysis concentrated on the single artwork, was possible and represented the best available art historical research model. Involution of Vienna School The revival of Riegls and Dvo'ks orthodoxy by Otto Pcht seems to conclude the story of Vienna School. Pchts return to the evolutionist project gives the story a cyclical nature. It started from Riegls and young Dvo'ks optimistic model of art historical research regarded as an impartial and rational scientific objectivity, transformed next with late Dvo'ks hermeneutic interpretation, revised by Sedlmayrs first optimistic model of rigorous science than replaced with his mystical, but still optimistic, interpretation conceived of as re-creation, that was followed by Gombrichs skeptical idea of art history as the scholarship, and resulted into Pchts revival of a modest version of Riegls epistemological model regarding art history as a relative and hypothetically objective research, and finally finished with Richters resignation at scientific status of art history at all. The story of Vienna School represented an immanent dialogue between two camps: between adherents of Riegls realism and followers of Schlossers nominalism. Moreover, it was also a dispute between anti-normativists and neo-normativists or a polemic humanists versus relativists. Dvo'ks followers concentrated on modifying or transforming their teachers model (mostly by means of synthesizing diverse impulses including Strzygowskis ones), while Schlosser and his pupils liked to attack and critically revise the orthodoxy of the opposite camp. Naturally, there were some exceptions from that rule: Namely, Sedlmayrs flirt with Riegl and Dvo'k, or Pchts passing to the Riegls and Dvo'ks camp and his counterattack against Schlosser and Gombrich. Nevertheless, the internal methodological discourse within Vienna School was no introverted or isolated dispute. On the contrary, it took place in the front line of 20th Century art historical research.

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POSTSOCIALIST CITIES: CONTESTED MODERNISM Ljiljana Blagojevi"

Abstract This lecture explores spatiality of processes of contemporary transformation of cities constructed in the second half of the twentieth century as new modern socialist cities, and focusing on the impact of socio-political and economic post-socialist/communist transition on architecture and urbanism. Presented specifically is the case study of New Belgrade (Serbia). INTRODUCTIONARY NOTES Is there such as city which can be categorized solely as socialist, or post-socialist, for that matter? Despite the growing number of research on this theme produced in the years since the fall of socialism/communism in Russia and Central and Eastern Europe, I would argue that numerous cities planned and constructed under socialism demonstrate diversity that cannot easily be homogenized under this category. Inherent in the first half of the title of this lecture, thus, is a contradiction. It is for certain, however, that there is a category of modernism, more precisely a modern city i.e., functional city. This urbanistic concept introduced by Le Corbusier, and CIAM (Congrs Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne, 1928-1959) resulted in numerous cities, socialist and non-socialist, which were planned, constructed, commented upon, interpreted, and bitterly criticized over the 20th century, worldwide. Why is, then, the word modernism, and not post-socialist city contested in the title? The thesis I will put forward is that the homogenizing categorization of current theory and practice to postsocialist condition of the city is what actually contests the of the modernist ethos of cities constructed in the socialist era, and its contemporary potentials. Also, it could be argued that the modern cities of the former socialist countries have been largely unexplored and, thus, very rarely included in the architectural and urban studies in general, and in the history and theory of modern city. This lecture, thus, explores spatiality of processes of transformation of modern cities constructed in the second half of the twentieth century as new socialist cities. It is specifically focused on the urban study of New Belgrade (Serbia), the modern city planned and constructed in the socialist Yugoslavia.1 The argument is constructed upon the contention that ideas, ideology and concepts of the modern movement were dominant in conceiving, planning, design, and construction of New Belgrade, but that they were significantly transformed and adapted following the changes of the historical, socio-political, and economic conditions in Yugoslavia throughout the 20th century, and in Serbia today. The current process of urban and architectural transformation reflects the conditions of globalization and its impact on socio-political and economic post-socialist/communist transition. The theoretical framework of the discussion is based on Henri Lefebvre's unitary theory of space, and his accent on the danger of reductionism and ideological understanding of space. In this sense, in contemporary interpretations, modern city realized under the conditions of socialism as a complex urban structure cannot be reduced to being seen as a mere physical
11

Generic term socialist Yugoslavia in this context referring to: Democratic Federal Yugoslavia 1945; Federal Peoples Republic of Yugoslavia 1945-1963; Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia 1963-1991 (formally dissolved in 1992).

37

residue of the deposed socio-economic and political system nor as its ideological monument. The issue stands still, as it did when Lefebvre wrote in 1974:
To phrase the question even more precisely, what is the relationship between, on the one hand, the entirety of that space which falls under the sway of 'socialist' relations of production and, on the other hand, the world market, generated by the capitalist mode of production, which weighs down so heavily upon the whole planet, imposing its division of labour on a worldwide scale and so governing the specific configuration of space, of the forces of production within that space, of sources of wealth and of economic fluctuations?2

Cities such as New Belgrade find themselves between the past marked by universality and hegemony of two dominant dogmas, that of Marxism and of CIAM's functional city, and the current processes of globalisation. The lecture, therefore, explores how the structure of the modern socialist city yields to current transnational processes and their spatial consequences. NEW BELGRADE, 1948-2008 New Belgrade is a modern city planned and constructed in the socialist Yugoslavia in the second half of the twentieth century, this year celebrating its 60th anniversary. Consistently planned and constructed as a functional city, it represents a unique example of a modern city which performed as an integrative structure to the two independently developed historical centers of Zemun and Belgrade. Located in the geometric centre on the map of Greater Belgrade (1,3 million inhabitants), the Municipality of New Belgrade today covers an area of around 4,000 hectares and is inhabited by some 250,000 people. The site of New Belgrade, on the opposite side of the historical city of Belgrade across the river Sava, served for centuries solely as a military territory, or rather a no-one's-land between the shifting borders of divided and conflicting empires. The river Sava marked a geographical and political border line from the 4th century division of the Roman Empire to the Eastern and Western Empires, until the mid-20th century Third Reich remapping of Europe. In modern history, and up until the Berlin Congress of 1878, this territory, between the Ottoman and the Habsburg empires, and, thereafter (until the First World War), between AustroHungary and Serbia, fulfilled the function of a cordon sanitaire. It was a zone observed and controlled as a disconnected breach between the Orient, with Belgrade marking its end point, and the Occident, of which Zemun was the first, even if modest and marginal, port of call. In the period of some thirty years between 1918 and 1946, the territory of future New Belgrade had gone through a substantial change from no-one's-land between borders of empires, to being a territory of contention, specifically, contention of sovereignty, and, finally to the central political space of a new, ambitious and modern socialist state. Forces engendering transformation of this place with no previous urban history and any other quality or function beyond the military one, were those of war, conquering, and violence. It is these forces which set the course for the initial planning concepts of New Belgrade to be based on the premise that the empty site represents, as Henri Lefebvre defined it, a homogenous abstract space, a tabula rasa, its use value being predominantly political.3 This analysis of

Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space [1974]. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1991), p. 54 3 Cf. Ibid., pp. 285-9.

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New Belgrade looks at spatial consequences and traces of these forces over the last 60 years, using a (military) term territory as its key word. 1918: Territory Lost / Territory Gained The marshland on the left bank of the river Sava, opposite historical Belgrade, was gained by the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes after the First World War. Its urban potential was, paradoxically, first seen by the eyes of the side which had lost this territory. In the proposal submitted to the International competition for the Belgrade Master Plan (1922), the Viennese architects Erwin Ilz, Rudolf Perco and Erwin Bck, integrated this territory with that of the radically remodeled historical centre.4 The ensuing new Master Plan of Belgrade (1923) fully acknowledged this potential by inclusion of the "Illustrative Plan of Belgrade on the Left Bank of the River Sava", showing the new state's ambitions and its desire for a capital fitting for its sovereign monarch. The actual planning, however, stayed put in the conditions of constant contention of sovereignty between the monarch and the opposing forces within the multinational state. It was only as a city of the Republic that New Belgrade had been brought into the post-war world. The territory provided ground for the notion of a capital of a new Republic to be distinctly set apart from the historical Serbia and historical Belgrade as the crown seat of the deposed Yugoslav monarchy. 1946: State Territory / Federal Extraterritory When the planning of New Belgrade was resumed in 1946, the new city was conceived as the administrative capital of the new Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia and, in that, it strongly reflected an ideological and political construct of a new beginning, that is, of building of socialism on a clean slate in a supra-historical time constellation. The founding of the new capital city represented not only the physical intervention in a tabula rasa site, but the intervention in historical time, whereby the traumatic history of war and violence had been suspended, and the beginning of a new history was re-established as a tabula rasa. The founding of the new city as a seat of new sovereignty, i.e., the administrative capital of the Federation, demonstrated the ambition of the new Republic for New Belgrade to take precedence over historical constellation of cities, and to became the capital of central state power belonging to no city centre of Yugoslav nations. In founding a new administrative capital city on the territory with no previous urban history, i.e. on the former no-man's-land between state borders, the grounding principle was that of extraterritoriality. It is this principle of extraterritoriality that represented a crucial emancipatory shift for New Belgrade, and one which was strongly opposed to the principle of nation and what Agamben calls "the trinity of state-nation-territory that is founded on this principle".5 The first post war plan of New Belgrade, titled "The sketch for the regularisation of Belgrade on the left bank of the river Sava", was drawn up in 1946, by Nikola Dobrovi", one of the most prominent Yugoslav modern architects who came to the liberated Belgrade in 1944.6
44

Source: Schriftleitung. "Wettbewerb: Belgrad", Der Stdtebau (Berlin), 19. Jahrgang (1922/23), S. 121, Tafel 48. 5 Giorgio Agamben, "Beyond Human Rights", in: E. Cadava and A. Levy, eds., Cities Without Citizens (Philadelphia: Slought Foundation), p. 9. 6 Source: Tehnika (Beograd), br. 11-12 (1946), p. 353

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The plan showed only the state and party buildings in the landscape of New Belgrade, which were set in an open block structure along the streets radiating out towards the rivers Sava and Danube. Marked on the plan are the three most prominent buildings, namely the railway station in the centre point of the scheme, and the buildings of the Presidency of the Federal Government and of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia. The radial plan itself aimed at modernity in an abstract way and, save one faint spot marking the site of the projected new Federal Parliament building on the otherwise blind map of the historical city centre of Belgrade, it represented an exclusively self-referential point of departure. One of the first architectural representations of this discourse, erected in the middle of the marshland covered by sand in 1948, was the structure of the Presidency of Government of Federal Peoples Republic of Yugoslavia. The building was designed by architectural team from Zagreb, namely Vladimir Poto(njak, Zlatko Neumann, Anton Urlich and Dragica Perak, who won the First Prize at the open Yugoslav competition in 1947. The building, albeit renamed the Federal Executive Council to mirror the concomitant institutional rearrangements of Yugoslav federative socialism, had been completed by Belgrade architect Mihailo Jankovi", only in 1961, for the occasion of the first Conference of Non-Aligned Heads of State or Government. Acting as the only fixed point of reference in the long period of indecision about the actual city planning, this structure proved paramount for the setting the main axis of the future physical structure of central zone of New Belgrade. With the break up of political relations of Yugoslavia with the Soviet Union and the Eastern Block in 1948, and the following course towards decentralization and self-government, the initial ideological notions were substituted by the political constructs of self-management socialism, as construct of internal politics, and of the nonalignment, as foreign politics construct. The planning of New Belgrade swiftly followed the change of political paradigm. The new plan, also by Nikola Dobrovi", from 1948, which proposed an urban landscape concept, clearly demonstrated this differentiation of a capital city becoming a modern socialist city. 1950 / 1960: Territory Integrated / Territory Appropriated Its capital status lost, even if it were only a brief episode of a symbolic character, New Belgrade was designated anew as territory integrated into Greater Belgrade, as shown in the Master Plan of 1950. When it was eventually, largely constructed, in the 1960s and 1970s, it was realized as city of housing. Furthermore, its territory being situated between two historical cities, it acted as an integrative urban structure for the Greater Belgrade, and thus fully reflecting the notion of a socialist city as Manfredo Tafuri and Francesco Dal Co put it, by succeeding in "inverting the logical manner in which a bourgeois city expands by introducing into the heart of the metropolis the residence as a decisive factor."7 In New Belgrade, the specificity of the housing function followed the ideological premise that a place of residence/apartment in socialism is not a commodity in the first place, but that it is its use value which defines it. It reflected another socio-political construct of the right to a residence as a universal right to the common public good, and related to the ideal of the just distribution, i.e. the ideal of free apartment, and free social services for all. As a consequence, New Belgrade was realized as a city in the societal i.e., public/common property, but it was planned according to the CIAM's concept of functional city, and primarily Le Corbusier's ideas of a city as an idealized image of a new social model.
7

Manfredo Tafuri ) Francesco Dal Co, Architettura Contemporanea (Venezia: Electa Editrice, 1976), p. 332.

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The massive housing blocks (6,000-10,000 inhabitants each) constructed in the 1960s, provided content and formed the core of the new city. The dogmatic rigorousness of CIAM's concept be as it may, on the level of the housing blocks themselves, the achieved standards of urban and architectural design have hardly been reached since, and from the mid 1980s to today, not at all. To questions posed by Henri Lefebvre, namely: "Has state socialism produced a space of its own?", and "How is the total space of a socialist society to be conceived of?",8 in terms of socialist architecture, answers in New Belgrade are in the lived space of the housing blocks. Planned to the highest of urbanistic standards and integrating educational and social services, the blocks became what can be termed as fully appropriated territory. Yet, on the more general level, the city lacked space of commerce and leisure, its grandly planned centre remaining an empty zone awaiting construction. The first contradiction that could be recognized clearly in New Belgrade was, to paraphrase Lefebvre, that between quantity and quality. While providing societal ownership of flats for tens of thousands of inhabitants, and thus satisfying their primary need, New Belgrade failed at simultaneous delivering the satisfaction of desire in the appropriate space of commercial leisure. 1990 / 2000 / 2008: Territory In Transition The most extreme critics of the so called "modern socialist city" saw the unfinished modern plan of New Belgrade as an economic, social and physical void, and an empty field of disjunction. Despite the lived space of fairly well rounded and integrated urban structure of the housing blocks, the 1980s proponents of a critical post-modern historicism, denied the modern city, and represented New Belgrade, again, as an aesthetic tabula rasa in urgent need of physical intervention romanticizing the territory under the neoconservative slogan "With Man in Mind" and following the "Lessons of the Past".9 Today, in the conditions of contemporary change of socio-political paradigms of the post-socialist transition, this approach serves as a theoretical underpinning to the forces which rapidly fill the unfinished open plan of New Belgrade by what is understood to have been lacking in the socialist epoch, namely, commercial and business development on the one side and orthodox churches on the other. Over the last twenty years the territory of New Belgrade has been gradually, depoliticised, desecularised, parceled, privatized, and put up for sale. Although the state still owns all of the urban land, by 2002, over 95% housing stock residential units had became private property. In the absence of the land market, whereby only rights of use are granted to various actors, and the city (local) government collects a fee for the use of land and distributes these rights, most often to the highest bidder, a transaction of "rights of use" market is flourishing beneath the surface. In parallel, there is a fast growing open and free residential units market, with over 500 real estate agencies in Belgrade.10

8 9

Lefebvre, Op. cit., p. 54 Cf. Milo& R. Perovi", Iskustva pro"losti (Beograd: Zavod za planiranje razvoja grada Beograda, 1985), and With Man in Mind. An Exhibition of Two Projects from the City Planning Institute, Belgrade, Yugoslavia (RIBA, London), 1986. 10 Sreten Vujovi" and Mina Petrovi", "Belgrade's post-socialist urban evolution: Reflections by the actors in the development process", in: Kiril Stanilov, ed. The Post-Socialist City: Urban Form and Space Transformations in Central and Eastern Europe after Socialism. Dordrecht: Springer, 2007, pp. 361-384

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The 21st started of with "A Chance for Belgrade in this Century",11 and a promise of foreign capital investment. Belgrade was the winner of the Financial Times specialised edition for foreign and direct investments FDI Magazine award as one of the Southern Europe/SouthEast Central Europe Cities of The Future 2006-07. In the award justification it is noted that "Serbias economy grew at 8.6% in 2004 and GDP growth is expected to exceed 6% in 2005. Total investment in Serbia in 2005 is estimated to be *1.65bn and significant recent investors include Italys Banca Intesa, US company Ball Packaging and Germanys Metro Cash & Carry. Metros facility in Belgrade was the largest greenfield investment in south-east Europe in 2004. In addition, Microsoft has established its first software development centre in southeast Europe in Belgrade."12 In 2007, New Belgrade had ca. 1,000,000 sq. m of varying commercial, residential and leisure space under construction, and 10,000 new jobs were created since 2002. The cost of business space rose to 2,000 EUR/sq. m (or 20-25 EUR/sq. m to rent per month), and the market cost of residential space including the flats in old socialist blocks was ranging 1,3002,000 EUR/sq. m. In this rapid and forceful development, New Belgrade is perceived yet again as a territory which needs to be conquered, with demarcation lines now being set by the (multinational) capital. The Belgrade Master Plan 2021 identifies New Belgrade as the main zone for commercial development, and the city's Urban Planning Bureau is providing regularisation plans for a radical reconstruction of the modern city. With extremely low level provision for protection of modern architecture heritage, the modern city is rapidly being filled-in and disfigured.13 Many a current research suggests there is an emancipatory potential for the post-socialist cities in the current transnational processes, one example being the analysis of cultural landscapes of post-socialist cities by Mariusz Czepczynsky who notes that "[e]mancipated landscape is a combination of reinterpreted old symbols of communism and new icons of free market, consumption and globalization".14 This bright vision of emancipatory potentials of the free market has to some extent resolved the contradictions of the socialist city in delivering the satisfaction of population's desire in the appropriate space of commercial leisure. Examples are numerous, such as the well known "Stary Browar" shopping centre in Poznan, or many an other more or less successful case all over the former socialist world. Pending still in the current research is, however, the critical discussion of existing and predictable future conflicts and understanding the role of the free-market not as a "universal panacea", but as one of the conflicting forces in the cities, post-socialist and non-post-socialist alike.

11 12

Cf. Thematic issue of the leading economist magazine: Ekonomist magazin (Belgrade), no. 305 (2006) http://www.fdimagazine.com/news/fullstory.php/aid/1543/EUROPEAN_CITIES_OF_THE_FUTURE_2006_0 7.html , visited on 20th June 2008 13 At present, protected as a monument of culture is only the building of the Museum of Contemporary Arts, and the Palace of Federation is currently undergoing the listing procedure. 14 http://www.rali.boku.ac.at/9795.html visited on 20th June 2008

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Mihailo Jankovi", Mirjana Marijanovi", and Du&an Milenkovi", Building of the Socio-Political Organizations/ Central Committee of the Communist League of Yugoslavia, 1965, New Belgrade

Reconstruction of the former Building of the SocioPolitical Organizations, development in progress

Leonid Lenar(i(, Mihailo +anak, Milosav Miti" and Ivan Petrovi", Housing Block no. 21, 1965, New Belgrade, photography published in #IP (Zagreb), no. 176/1967

Housing block no. 21, New Belgrade, current commercial development, photography published in StadtBauwelt (Berlin), no. 36/ 2004

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WHAT IS ESTONIAN ARCHITECTURE? Mart Kalm

The following lectures on the 20th century Estonian architecture form an attempt not to look at the buildings from the traditional modernist perspective. The scope extends from political meanings of major buildings to the almost anonymous humble housing in a provincial town. In Estonia where nation building slowed in comparison with other countries in Europe, its own professional culture of architecture was weaker, less articulated and more vulnerable, in some cases professional architecture happened to be only a wishful thinking. Still it is interesting to study the situation on the edge, where edge could be determined not only politically and culturally but also by professional and by geographical borders. The Beginnings of Estonian Professional Architecture In the early 20th century there were practically no architects of Estonian origin. The architectural scene was dominated by the Baltic Germans, who had studied in Riga Polytechnic, and by a few Russian engineers and technicians. The first Estonian building engineers also got started. Provincial and conservative, they all coped with practical tasks but were not up to participating in open competitions. The beginning of the 20th century saw an explosive growth of architectural competitions; in Estonia this was partly due to the scarcity of local resources. At the Estonian architectural competitions, where the entries even included projects from Germany, Austria, France, Sweden and Russia, the awards were won by architects from three major architectural centres in the region: Helsinki, St. Petersburg and Riga. In these centres different, and sometimes even opposing, architectural schools reigned, and the result was remarkably high-level and stylistically diverse architecture. Never in Estonian history has the general picture been so varied; later, it was local architects who designed most of the buildings. The architectural scene in Estonia in the early 20th century was shaped by three different groups of commissioners: the Russian state, Germans and Estonians. Their interests often clashed and each used architecture to realise their own ambition. The main and most aggressive force in furthering political aims was the Russian Empire, which, at the crest of the Russification wave of the 1880s, began building a cathedral on Toompea dedicated to Alexander Nevsky. The Russian Orthodox Cathedral (18921900), designed by the academic Mikhail Preobrazhensky, was derived from the 17th century Moscow style of architecture. The dedication of the Cathedral to Alexander Nevsky, who had checked the progress of Teutonic knights eastward in 1242, had political connotations, not to mention its iconographic programme: the mosaics depict the successful raids by Pskovian princes against the ancient Estonians. Historicism in Estonian architecture persisted for a relatively long period of time because it helped affirm the Baltic German national identity. With the central power seeking to strengthen its hold on the Baltic countries, the Germans were eager to emphasise their difference. The wide-spread Backstein Gothic and Neo-Mannerism was unrelated to the local context, but rather conveyed an idea of German uniqueness. At the turn of the century the Baltic-German interest in antiquities had been awakened, and, carried by Romantic ideals, a 44

need arose to prove the historical legitimacy of Germans in Estonia. While designing the faade of Scheel Bank, the well-known Riga architect, Wilhelm Neumann, linked it with the late-Gothic gable of the Bishops House opposite and used the portal (1498) and a Baroque door (1665) of a former medieval building in his new construction. With the advent of the new century, Estonians became the third largest group to commission buildings. During the late-19th-century national awakening, Estonians had established their own organisations, the first Estonian people prospered in the cities, and they did not want to take on a German identity, but were happy instead to be Estonians. With each ethnic community aspiring to affirm its own identity in architecture, the Estonians were reluctant to copy the ideals of the others, and moreover, German nostalgic historicism was alien to them. Traditionally, the beginning of Estonian architecture is dated to the Estonian Student Union (ESU) building in Tartu, designed by the young Georg Hellat in 190102. Although this is the first building commissioned by Estonians from an Estonian, there is nothing specifically Estonian about it; the task of creating an original style for a nation with relatively little architectural experience would have been too difficult for Hellat, who had trained as an engineer.

Georg Hellat. Estonian Student Union Building, Tartu, 1902

While the ESU building in Tartu was an intimate villa-style gentlemans club, numerous stone structures built to house Estonian organisations came to demonstrate the economic and cultural advancement of Estonian society: the Vanemuine Theatre and Music Society in Tartu, the Estonia Theatre and Music Society in Tallinn, the Endla Theatre and Music Society in Prnu, the Sde Theatre and Music Society in Valga, etc. all dominated the urban environments with their modern architecture and monumentality. In view of the lack of local expertise, Estonians sought help from Finnish architects. The Finnish, related to the Estonians linguistically and culturally, were also subject to Russian domination and chiefly ruled by the Swedes just as Estonians were by the Germans. But, being more numerous, more advanced and in a better situation, they served as an example to Estonians. The rumours of the international attention that Gesellius, Lindgren & Saarinen had attracted with the design for the Finnish Pavilion at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1900 had reached Estonia. However, the Estonian dream of National Romanticism was not realised as the Estonian commissions arrived late and most of the Finnish designs already reflected either the influences of Viennese tectonic Art Nouveau or Art Nouveau Classicism.

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Surprisingly enough, the Northern National Romantic style, created either by the Finnish or under the Finnish influence, is to be found in the architecture commissioned by the Germans. Although the Finnish designed a large number of buildings in Estonia, only one of them - the Luther Factory Workers Club (190405) was designed by the heroic Gesellius, Lindgren & Saarinen Partnership. Northern National Romanticism is represented by the largest German monument from the beginning of the century, the Tallinn German Theatre (now: the Estonian Drama Theatre) completed in 1910 and designed by the St. Petersburg architects Alexander Bubyr and Nikolai Vasilyev, winners of the 1906 competition. At the turn of the century Russians were also enthusiastic about National Romanticism, and to interpret it in the Finnish spirit was not difficult for them, as both the Finnish and the Russians drew upon one and the same source of inspiration, Karelian peasant architecture. In St. Petersburg architecture, the influences of Finnish National Romanticism grew into what was called by the Russians the Northern Moderne, characterised by the consistent use of natural rusticated stone. Rustication suited Germans as well, as for them it embodied the arch-Germanic spirit. And thus it is not surprising that although Estonians and Germans had contradictory ideals, the same style suited them both. Probably because of the German preference, the Estonians rejected the design of Bubyr and Vasilyev for their largest architectural project, the Estonia Theatre and Music Society in Tallinn, and selected the design of Armas Lindgren and Wivi Lnn, although both had been awarded the 2nd prize at the 1908 competition. The competition requirements favoured the Northern style, but the winning designs did not represent turn-of-the-century National Romanticism. Bubyr and Vasilyevs design was Art Nouveau along Mir Iskusstva lines, and Lindgren and Lnns design a slightly more advanced Art Nouveau Classicism. The next years round between the two best works was won by the Finnish, whose plan was more economical. These Estonian temples of culture were soon followed by the first palaces of commerce. The competition to design the Tallinn Credit Unions bank-cum-apartment building was won by Eliel Saarinen in 1911. The building erected at 10 Prnu Road within the following year is an austere-looking financial monument, which did not cater to national sentiments. The focal point of Tallinns growing commercial district was to be the new Town Hall building. At the competition of 1912, Saarinens design, which received a consolation prize, was attractive not so much because of its rationality as because of its potential for transforming the urban environment. After Saarinen had won the competition for the Tallinn master plan, the decision was made to commission him to design the new Town Hall in 1914. However, with the outbreak of the war, the plans were thwarted. Post-National-Romantic Finnish architecture developed under the German influence with slight historical undertones, although its main emphasis was on the modernity of the rapidly developing capitalist society. Simultaneously not so avant-garde retrospective tendencies were manifested in Estonia, and their reappearance in a new guise was welcomed more warmly. By 1910 the classical historical styles, such as Backstein Gothic or North-German Renaissance Revival, and Romanticised eclectic decor and turrets, had become outdated and gave way to the more rational and restrained architecture of Neoclassicism or NeoBiedermeier.

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The expressionist Houses of Parliament

Herbert Johanson & Eugen Habermann. Estonian Parliament Assembly Hall, Tallinn, 1922

The first state-funded building was for the Estonian Parliament (192022) erected between the Teutonic Castle and the Tsarist government building on Toompea to the design of the architects Herbert Johanson and Eugen Habermann. Setting the true tenor of the new era of the independent Republic of Estonia, it was also its most original achievement. The core of the medieval Castle (Konventshaus) had been converted to a prison in the 19th century and had burnt during the February 1917 Revolution. The ruins in the courtyard of the Tsarist government building were offensive to the eye, moreover, there was no suitable place in Tallinn where the Parliament could meet. The architecture of the Parliament building reflects two architectural tendencies: a 1920s Traditionalist approach and Expressionism. Both suited the original medieval Castle, whose western wall was restored and the new building fitted in so that it was not higher than the Castle walls. The Traditionalist approach was retrospective and Expressionist architecture drew its inspiration from the mystic nature of medieval castles. 1920s Traditionalism is manifested in the outward appearance of the new building: the heavy, unarticulated volume is capped by a high hipped roof of red tiles. The few openings on the facade are organised in a rhythm termed by critics as long-breathed. The black frames, which are in sharp contrast to the light plaster facade, are slightly suggestive of Expressionism. Inside, Expressionist elements dominate. Starting from the coffered ceiling in the lobby, the recurrent motif is the zigzag plastic decor. The most outstanding feature is an unusual Expressionist hall in which the ultramarine walls are highlighted by the lime-coloured concavity of the ceiling. All the openings are adorned with a rust-coloured zigzag pattern. Lighting is concealed behind a jagged moulding resting on the balls through which the hall is ventilated. The Expressionist approach harmonised with the nearby medieval Castle and it was free from any direct historical references, intentionally avoided in a building where the first ever Estonian national assembly gathered. It seemed right to draw upon the most fashionable trend in German architecture. Some of the delegates would have definitely preferred something more conventionally beautiful than the angular forms, but modelling the new structure on the late Baroque government building on the eastern side would not have resulted in anything as highly original. In addition, the Expressionist building was cost-effective, a factor to be considered by the newly established state. 47

Easing of Pressure in the Mid-1950s In the mid-1950s Stalinist architectural policy collapsed. Late in 1954 builders, architects and producers of building materials assembled in Moscow, and as a result of this meeting, the Communist Party issued a decree in 1955 which "abolished excesses in planning and building". Stalinist architecture was totally rejected and aesthetic architecture with its roots in the past was replaced by industrial building. Architecture as an art of urban construction which encouraged the generous spending of resources to create imposing ensembles and to apply a profusion of decoration to each building, ignoring functional and economic considerations, was condemned as "excessive". The new age emphasised learning from the Western experience about how to use modern building materials and technologies, and how to adopt the rational principles of Modernist architecture, without which it would be impossible to "overtake the USA"; this official slogan served as an imperative in the Cold War era. During the Stalin regime the West was totally condemned, but during the Khrushchev era Western advances in technology were recognised and, for example, the first issues of Ehitus ja Arhitektuur (Building and Architecture) carried many articles in translation from the Western magazines and journals. The architect was seen as an annoying person, who, by insisting on the appearance of the building, required non-standard solutions, non-available materials and quality in construction and was an impediment to fulfilling economic plans. Architects spent most of their energy by harmonising their projects with the builder, that is, by negotiating what the builder was able or willing to build, and by devising new solutions to replace non-existent materials with existing ones under conditions of total deficiency. By leafing through the periodicals of the time one gets the impression that designers of buildings and builders were like cats and dogs: one presented faulty documentation, which did not allow to proper construction, and the other built such low-quality structures, that it was not possible to inhabit them. There is consensus about the quality of building materials, which was so low that one cannot expect any satisfying results. Designers, who were unanimously opposed to builders, were in two camps. The previously suppressed engineer was equal to the architect under the new conditions; it was not possible to achieve Communism by embellishing buildings with plaster decor; it was possible to do it by using prefabricated details devised by the engineer. As the architect was officially pictured as an incomplete engineer, this was a boost to the engineers' self-awareness and creative energy. In the late 1950s and the 1960s building as a science developed and a strong body of scientists gathered in the Institute of Building Research and the Civil Engineering Department of the Tallinn Polytechnic Institute. The dramatic events after Stalin's death in Moscow were followed by the advent of new forces on the architectural scene. The 5th Congress of the ESSR Architects' Association in summer 1955 did not re-elect Otto Keppe, the Estonian Russian who had come to power during the earlier purges, but opted for the young and enthusiastic Mart Port. As a result of primitive methodology and the slow pace of construction in those days, many buildings were in an incomplete stage, and the new approach to architecture led to the loss of their applied decor. The best example of this stripped-down architecture is the Estonian Energy office in the centre of Tallinn: its bare massive walls, which were designed to carry the burden of ornament, look heavy now.

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After the standards of how a building should look were abolished, architects faced the problem of what to do next. They lacked any information about international developments. It is no wonder that it seemed right to continue from the point at which the development had broken off before the outbreak of the war. The revival of 1930s architecture was encouraged by the continued use of the same materials and construction technologies. Thus Paul Hrmson designed a residential building on the corner of Pronksi Street and Narva Road (1955-58) in the spirit of the Representative Traditionalism of the late 1930s. There are no reminiscences of the Stalinist palazzo-like apartment buildings; the showcase-windowed commercial ground floor is topped by an equal-sized residential unit as in the Credit Bank building in Vabaduse Square. Even more often than the heavy Representative Traditionalism the new architecture drew upon the large-windowed white-walled Functionalism of the 1930s. The rest home for collective farm members designed by Nikolai Kusmin and M. Noor in Narva-Jesuu (195461) resembles the beach resort architecture, the Prnu Beach Hotel in particular, with its strip of balconies in front and its round projecting section.

Nikolai Kusmin and Manivald Noor. Inter-collective-farm holiday complex at Narva-Jesuu, Estonia, 1954-61

The post-war generation of architects also learnt much from pre-war Functionalism. The cafe and restaurant at Phajrve designed by the young M. Roosna (1957-61) features a spacious balcony on the glazed first floor, which ends in a round volume as was the case in the Prnu Beach Pavilion. The pre-war Functionalist devices were especially frequent in the architecture of private housing in the late 1950s. The Striped Houses of Rakvere Post-Stalinist Folk Art-Deco in Estonia In every Estonian town one can find single-family houses from the Soviet era, which on the whole were built according to a standardised design and are generally considered a drab expression of a bourgeois lifestyle. These houses, while certainly being an expression of everyday life, might actually be, in the words of Henri Lefebvre, an example of the concept of everydayness which reveals the extraordinary in the ordinary.15 Since opportunities for
15

H. Lefebvre, The Everyday and Everydayness. Architecture of the Everyday. Eds. S. Harris, D. Berke. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1997, p. 35.

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self-realisation were severely limited, the home as a private and personal sphere became the main avenue for self-expression. In the individual house, the private and the communicating public facade, and the everyday and the festive, became interwoven. Cultural variations and differences in lifestyle, including the hidden hierarchies in the new society which officially proclaimed equality, became beautifully apparent in the individual house. Among the thousands of such houses built in Estonia belongs an unusual group of twenty or so houses in Rakvere designed in the mid 1950s, the design of which did not follow the architectural canons of the period. With their curved rendered corners decorated with projecting stripes, these two-storey flat-roofed houses recall pre-war radios and other early home appliances. In these, somewhat try hard houses, there is more of the streamline artdeco dream of a beautiful life than in any pre-war Estonia architecture that was genuinely influenced by art-deco.

H. Eichelmann. House Koidula 27, Rakvere, Estonia, 1954-56

It is surprising that in a regional town centre, such as Rakvere, in a completely regulated society, that a short lived blossoming of a local school of taste was able to achieve a victory for dilettantism over professionalism. I look here at the different and the other in respect to the dominating and rational discourse, which was professional architecture. Having said that, this is not the alternative architecture of outsiders and the world of romantics and mystics, but rather a widespread preference within the established norms. To what extent are we looking at professional architecture and how much of it is actually folk art? The empirical research material for the current study was collected in the summer of 2003 during the Estonian Academy of Arts summer course in Rakvere. The students filled out DOCOMOMO registration forms about this particular group of houses. Many original ownerbuilders were still alive and they talked about their houses and their reasons for building in this style. The house plans and other documents used in the study have come from the owners, the Rakvere town government and Museums of Virumaa. The striped houses of Rakvere create an exciting detour in the discussion of Estonian individual dwellings. A whole range of devices for acclimatising and adjusting to the new Soviet regime, which the post-war generation had to bear and who, as the situation settled down in the mid-1950s, wanted to start living a normal life, are on show here. These houses were built by people from the surrounding countryside. Some had been partisans and came to town to legalise their emergence from the forest, others came to escape from collectivisation, while others were returning from Siberia. Having managed to secure key positions in the you

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scratch my back Ill scratch yours economy as leaders of Soviet administrative bodies or truck drivers a privileged position at the time (many of their wives also worked as shop assistants in Rakvere, another advantageous position) they proceeded to establish impressive homes for themselves. These bourgeois homes, which promoted the private sphere, were in direct conflict with the aims of communism. And the people, being farmers and having missed out on learning about how to make a home because society had focused on work quotas and did not address such matters, had no idea how to live in such urban villa-type houses. The striped houses of Rakvere also form an interesting segment in the history of professionalization in Estonian society. In its ideals, the Soviet regime endeavoured to look after its people and wanted to solve their problems expertly and to this end a great many specialists were trained. The events of the 1940s destroyed the body of specialists that had developed in the county town towards the end of the 1930s, and there remained a shortage of specialists, including architects, in the 1950s. Young self-taught locals filled the available positions. Designing a family house is not an insurmountably difficult task and before the war only a few of the better quality houses were actually designed by architects. During the 20th century this was an area where folk tradition gave way increasingly to specialists. The small town of Rakvere in the 1950s was merely a detour in this trend. In the inventory office, surveying houses and drawing up plans, Otto Metsis, Hermann Eichelmann and Uno Langeproon, as well as Raul Vsaste and Arnold Hber learned the basic principles of building individual houses and were soon capable of designing houses which managed to remain vertical and were also inhabitable, but which professional architects considered to be dilettante-like. The designers of Rakveres striped houses and their clients were congenial. The layout of the rooms based on their functions and the connections between them were not fully unresolved, so we can speak of a syncretistic living environment. A hint of the old-Baltic vernacular concept of a proper house is also apparent. Generally the veranda was no more than a decorative feature, with no real function. Since neither the client nor the designer quite understood the concept behind this type of ideal house, these new try hard houses did not manage to achieve the new lifestyle and the extravagant structure was filled with ordinary everyday small-town life. The architecture of Rakveres striped houses endeavours to learn from pre-war Estonian architecture. The floor plan is heavily influenced by the last and also most striking Rakvere Functionalist villa at 7 Tammiku Street, which was designed by the engineer Villem Muda. From the point of view of professionalism, 7 Tammiku Street does not attain the standards of professional architecture of that time, but it is far superior to the post-war derivations. The neo-Estonian independence style of the Rakvere houses is an understandably postStalinist stance in a society which was endeavouring to normalise and where fresh inspiration was lacking, but the streamlined art-deco of these houses has little to do with pre-war Estonian culture. Or to be more precise perhaps it does, but only slightly, at the level of semiprofessional small-town commercial architecture. Its ideals of beauty are aimed, surprisingly, towards American values. What is apparent here is the common peoples concept of beauty, which is a characteristic of dilettantism. Like the folk art of Estonian peasants, which received inspiration from the manor, they were now learning from a wider visual world.

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Regional Cubism? How to write on Cubism in Central and Eastern Europe Vojtech Lahoda
Cubism and Cubisms Although sharply condemned and derided at the time of its emergence in Paris in 19091910, Cubism the invention of Picasso and Braque was very soon to become the cornerstone of modern art of the first half of the 20th century. In 1966, the American art historian Edward Fort Fry published an anthology of texts written during the period between Cubisms inception and the early 1920s, which to this day is a seminal reference book specializing in Cubism (Edward F. Fry, Cubism. London: Thames and Hudson 1966). Fry demonstrated that immediately upon the appearance of the first Cubist paintings, a discussion on the nature of Cubism began that initiated the endeavor in the fields of art criticism and, from the 1920s onward, also art history to incorporate Cubism within the art-historical context. Selected treatises in Frys anthology revealed one important fact: a number of authors used the term Cubism not in relation to the works of Picasso and Braque, but rather to those of Jean Metzinger, Albert Gleizes and other artists; in other words, to the creative efforts which were later termed Epic Cubism, or which Fry himself referred to as sub-Cubist in reference to Metzinger. According to Fry, Roger Allard, a French critic who wrote about the principles of Cubism in 1910, had not had the least inkling at the time about Picassos and Braques work. Allards understanding of Cubism was based on Jean Metzingers paintings. Therefore, from the very beginning, period interpretations of Cubism had drawn on disparate material initially, on the work of Metzinger and Gleizes, and various other so-called Salon Cubists, and only later on the works of Picasso and Braque. Yve-Alain Bois characterizes this disparity with the terms public/private: while Metzinger et al. were amply exhibited, Picassos and Braques art was shown far less during the initial years of Cubism. If this is to imply that no less than two types of Cubism had already existed at the time of its emergence, then it comes as no surprise that art history gradually discovered other areas of Cubism, other Cubist territories. It sufficed to turn to certain significant modernist trends outside France and it became clear that diverse variations of Cubism could be perceived in Holland (Mondrian), Germany (Marc, Macke, Feininger, and others), Italy (the Futurists), Russia (Cubo-Futurism) and even England (Vorticism) and the United States (as well as in the American artistic community in Paris). However, the purpose of this paper is to examine how the Cubisms in Central and Eastern Europe (with the exception of Germany), are, or are not, included in the canon of Western art history, and ways to approach this phenomenon. Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Alfred H. Barr, Jr., the founding director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, who organized an authoritative exhibition titled Cubism and Abstract Art in 1936, played a prominent role in Cubisms canonization. In his now-famous hand-drawn art chart that appeared on the dust jacket of the exhibitions catalogue, he illustrated the trajectories of modern art from the 1890s up to 1935. A mere glance at the network of arrows clearly indicates the importance Barr attached to Cubism. The period when the Cubism and Abstract Art exhibition was held, namely 1936, is a turning point in the institutional acceptance of 52

abstract art. For Alfred Barr and the development of modern art after 1910, Cubism represented an art movement of decisive, almost germinal, importance. Within the gamut of modernist isms shown in Barrs chart, the expression Cubism (from which a number of subsequent modern art trends stem) is written in the largest script. Beginning with Barrs catalogue, where Cubism was first incorporated into the context of international modernism, this art movement became firmly established in the art-historical canon. Irrespective of the fact that in the following years no-one attempted to draw up a similar chart that would capture the evolution and influences of individual tendencies in modern art, it is self-evident that the dominant position of Cubism, as determined by Barr, has not only remained unaltered, but in the course of time has gained further ground. In connection with the aforesaid exhibition and catalogue, the question should be posed as to what was Barrs understanding of the term Cubism and which of the artists he included in his exhibition. Barr recognized two principal currents leading toward abstract art: one was Apollonian, a rational current that led to geometric abstraction via Czanne and Cubism, while the second, Dionysian, Expressionist current began with the Fauvists and Matisse, and continued to Kandinsky and the abstract art of the Surrealists. In the catalogues section devoted to Cubist artists Barr also mentions other Cubists besides Picasso and Braque, namely Juan Gris, Fernand Lger, Jacques Villon and Louis Marcoussis. Barr named no further Cubists, in spite of his statement in the catalogues introduction that in a few years it will be time to hold an exhibition of abstract art of the 1930s to show the contemporary work done by groups in London, Barcelona, Prague, Warsaw, Milan, Paris, New York and other centers of activity. (Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Cubism and Abstract Art. Exh. cat. MOMA New York 1936, reprint MOMA New York 1986, p. 9 ) Barr must have therefore been aware of the fact that substantial modern art was also being created in, say, Warsaw and Prague. Nonetheless, in his publication Cubism and Abstract Art, he had not yet reckoned with it. Revisionist histories of Cubism? Less than twenty years after Barrs exhibition, further endeavors emerged to historically determine Cubism as a movement that played a key role in the arts of the 20th century. Incidentally, the year 1959 was decisive in this respect. That year, the first truly influential treatise on the history of Cubism was published by John Golding (Cubism: A History and an Analysis 19071914. London: Faber and Faber Ltd., 1959). In the books introduction, Golding expresses his indebtedness to Barr, among others, for his selfless assistance in the authors preparation of his doctoral thesis that formed the core of the publication. Under Kahnweilers influence, Golding added Juan Gris to the central Picasso-Braque dyad. He went on to explore Cubisms influence in the subsequent years, but remained exclusively in France between 1910 and 1914. In 1960, the first edition of a book entitled Cubism and Twentieth-Century Art was issued by a Yale University graduate, Robert Rosenblum. He, too, was much indebted to Alfred Barr and also to Douglas Cooper. Rosenblum perceived Cubism as both a source of and basis for many notable trends in modern art, including Futurism, the English Vorticist movement, abstract art and even Fantastic Art. All these interconnections expanded the possibilities for exploring Cubism further. The author, however, failed to expand the geographical map of Cubism. The most glaring geographical anomaly is his examination of Cubism in England and the United States. Rosenblum failed to venture into Eastern Europe. For him, Central Europe was represented in the works of Franz Marc and Lionel Feininger, which he included in the chapter dealing with the relationship between Cubism and the German Romantic tradition.

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Rosenblum acknowledged his books limitations in its third edition published in 1976. No doubt under the pressure of the current literature on the subject namely, the publications of Douglas Cooper (The Cubist Epoch, 1970, to be discussed later) and particularly of Nicholas Wadley (Cubism. Movements of Modern Art. London 1970) the author underscored Wadleys enlarged international view of Cubism, which includes the Czech material These remarks on an enlarged international view, however, were of marginal importance and had no bearing on Rosenblums own interpretation: he limited himself to a few lines at the end of the book that commented on its bibliography. Although John Golding and Robert Rosenblum presented their revisionist histories of cubism, this revision did not touch upon the new regions that ought to have been incorporated into the history of Cubism. Douglas Cooper and Cubism Outside France And so Rosenblum also failed to expand the discourse on Cubism to include the territory of Central and Eastern Europe. Yet there was Douglas Cooper, who strove to enlarge the international view of Cubism. As we have seen, even at the time of the early critical studies and debates on Cubism, a differentiation had been made between the Cubism of Picasso and Braque, later labeled true Cubism by Douglas Cooper, and Epic Cubism or sub-Cubism as represented by Metzinger, Gleizes and others. As early as 19031914, except for Picasso and Braque, all these latter painters were referred to as minor Cubists in the Czech art circles. In his book The Cubist Epoch published to accompany an exhibition held in Los Angeles in 1970 (Douglas Cooper, The Cubist Epoch. New York: Phaidon Press in association with The Los Angeles County Museum of Art and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1971), Cooper generally divided Cubism into three categories: he termed the foremost trend True or Instinctive Cubism, which, in his view, comprised not only Picasso and Braque, but also Juan Gris and Fernand Lger, artists closely related to them in intention and method. He labeled the second group Systematic Cubism, including in it artists who only flirted with Cubism, or, as the case may be, formed it into a system or a stylistic formula. In this category he placed such artists as Henri Le Fauconnier, Albert Gleizes, Jean Metzinger, as well as Louis Marcoussis, Francis Picabia and Diego Rivera. The further division the adoption of Apollinaires term Orphic Cubism and the actual expression Kinetic Cubism is inconsequential for the subject under discussion here. Coopers geographic mapping of Cubism is far more important to us. Alongside Picasso and Braque, he mentioned The Cubist Movement in Paris (and sometimes he also wrote about a school of Cubist painters). For our purposes, the section of Coopers book that examines the influence of Cubism Outside France is most interesting. In it, the author discusses Holland (Mondrian), Germany (Marc, Macke, Campendonck, Klee and Feininger), Italy (the Futurists), American artists (from Weber to Bruce), the English Vorticists, Rayonism and Cubo-Futurism in Russia, and ultimately also Cubism in Czechoslovakia. It would be more correct to speak of Bohemia, or Bohemia and Moravia, because the independent state of Czechoslovakia was established only in 1918 and Cooper discusses numerous examples preceding the First World War. Hence, Cooper was the first to incorporate a style of Cubism other than Western into the Cubist context Outside France. He did this in addition to the Russian Cubo-Futurism, which had become part of the ever-growing appreciation of Russian avant-garde art, launched through the publication of Camilla Grays book in 1962 and reflected afterwards in exhibitions and scholarly research. Russian Cubo-Futurism therefore embarked on its own course toward art-historical canonization, more or less independently of the ongoing discourse

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on Cubism. While in his book The Cubist Epoch he referred to several artists of Polish and Hungarian origin, Cooper exclusively focused on artists permanently settled in Paris (Louis Marcoussis, Henri Hayden, Joseph Csaky). The Czech connection thus remained the only one which extended the view of Cubism to the hitherto unexplored terra incognita of Central Europe, comprising such artists as Vincenc Bene&, Josef +apek, Emil Filla, Bohumil Kubi&ta, Antonn Prochzka and the sculptor Otto Gutfreund.

Emil Filla, Salome, 1911, Gallery of Modern Art, Hradec Krlov

According to Cooper, the Czech sculptor Otto Gutfreund to whom he devotes particular attention is of major and justified importance for Cubist sculpture. He stresses that Gutfreund created his first sculptural pieces in 1911. If he had seriously contemplated this date in relation to Paris-based Cubism, Cooper would have had to arrive at the conclusion that Gutfreund was one of the earliest, as well as the most outstanding Cubist sculptors of all. Cooper quite rightfully observes that Gutfreunds Cubist bust is one of the most serious and inventive attempts to transpose the synthetic Cubist technique into sculptural terms. He also takes note of Emil Fillas sculpture Head (19131914). While some of the concepts and interpretations used by Douglas Cooper may appear mechanical and outdated, his ability to expand the Cubist discussion to include, for example, the early works of Piet Mondrian, as well as Russian Cubo-Futurism and the Czech school of Cubism, were extremely progressive for their time. They were directed toward the other region of Cubism than the one prevalent in the art-historical debate. Although gradually reinforced, this trend in the literature on Cubism seldom ventured beyond the boundaries of the staked-out territory. In other words, no other mutations of Cubism were being taken into account than those in Bohemia. And yet there are such mutations and they are associated with the Cubist phenomenon.

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In the circle of Cubism: the other Europe The fact that there indeed are such mutations of Cubist art was confirmed by Serge Fauchereau in what was geographically the broadest revision of the Western understanding of Cubism, in the catalogue that accompanied the exhibition Europa. Europa. Das Jahrhundert der Avantgarde in Mittel- und Osteuropa held in Bonn in 1994. In this catalogue, Fauchereau closely examines the impact of Cubism in Central and Eastern Europe (Serge Fauchereau, Die Formen des Kubismus, in: Ryszard Stanislawski Christoph Brockhaus (eds.), Europa. Europa. Das Jahrhundert der Avantgarde in Mittel- und Osteuropa. Exh. cat., Kunst- und Austellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Bonn 1994, pp. 104-108). The focus of the Bonn exhibitions concept was that other Central and Eastern Europe, unknown to the West, in which Cubism was also taking hold. Fauchereau does not even hesitate to recall the solitary yet peculiar role of the Finnish artist Ilmari Aalto, who created a number of paintings in 1915, in which he came close to Picasso and Braque without ever having been to Paris or seen their works. Besides the generally acknowledged importance of Cubism for Russian avant-garde artists, the author makes reference to Czech Cubism nothing new by then, as we have seen earlier while also presenting the example of Poland. In this connection, he made legitimate mention of the sculptor August Zamoyski, who at the time resided in Munich. It should be added that Zamoyskis bust of the architect Adolf Loos, dating from 1917, is one of the most compelling, crystalline Cubist portraits ever made. In spite of this fact, this noteworthy Polish sculptor has been completely disregarded in Western art history. At first glance, Polish modernist art seems practically untouched by Cubism. However, some of the members of the Formisci/Formists group were greatly indebted to Cubism, namely Zbigniew and Andrzej Pronaszko. Although considering themselves Polish Expressionists, the acceptance of Cubism is clearly manifest in their works. In his landscape of 1921, Kazimierz Tomorowicz returns to the abstract planes of Picassos paintings dating to around 19101911. Cubist works were shown alongside Futurist and Expressionist creations in a large international exhibition in Lwov (Lemberg, in German) in 1913 (Elisabeth Clegg, Futurists, Cubists and the Like: Early Modernism and Late Imperialism, Zeitschrift fur Kunstgeschichte, 56 Bd., H. 2 (1993), pp. 249-277). Prior to his Unistic period, Wladyslaw Strzeminski had created particularly strong paintings, in which he specifically explored Cubism, as in his picture called Cubism Tensions of Material Structure (19191923, now in National Museum in Warsaw). In these paintings he examines the handling of texture (or facture) in painting and the role of script in the images fragmentary composition. In Fauchereaus view, it is the sculptor Xawery Dunikowski, during his brief creative period, who is der einzige wirkliche polnische kubist (the only genuine Polish Cubist). Apart from the Serbian artist Ljubomir Mici( and several Hungarian and Romanian modernists, the French art historians selection of forms of Cubism included the Lithuanian artist Vytautas Kairiuk&tis and Romans Suta of Latvia.

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Romans Suta, Still-Life with Saw, c. 1921-1922, State Museum of Art, Riga

Kairiuk&tis is a complex case. A Lithuanian who studied painting in Moscow and was therefore familiar with the Russian avant-garde and Cubo-Futurism, who was also a member of the Polish avant-garde groups Blok and Preasens, in the early 1920s in Vilnius Kairiuk&tis painted a series of Cubist compositions that were more avant-garde than anything then being painted in Lithuania. His oeuvre is discussed in connection with both the Russian avantgarde, as well as Polish and Lithuanian art. Romans Suta, the chief proponent of Latvian modernism, created paintings during the first half of the 1920s, in which the late, postwar Cubist style was amalgamated with Suprematist forms. These works were therefore labeled CuboSuprematist. At the time, this was a justified alignment. In the early 1920s, Sutas wife, the outstanding artist Alexandra Belcova, painted several pictures showing a clear Cubist influence; one of the works was a design for the decoration of the Sukubs restaurant, an establishment in Riga owned by Sutas mother that was a meeting place for the members of the Riga Artists Group. Sukubs was an acronym combining the words Suprematism and Cubism. In the catalogue to the 1994 Bonn exhibition, in the section entitled In the Circle of Cubism (Im Umkreis des Kubismus), Faucheareu devoted his attention to a number of artistic tendencies and artists from Central and Eastern Europe, not previously mentioned in arthistorical literature and therefore dead from art historys perspective.

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What is Cubist architecture? Roughly from the beginning of the 1970s to the end of the 20th century, Western art history gradually revised the geographical concept of Cubist activities by adding Czech regions to it. This is the only change that has occurred since Barrs catalogue was published. Neither Cubism in Latvia, nor Cubo-Constructivism in Estonia have so far made their way into the canon of Cubism outside France. This state of affairs is best attested to in Neil Coxs book Cubism that appeared in the London Phaidons Art and Ideas series in 2000, which devotes considerable space to Czech Cubism, including architecture (pp. 328337). Coxs recognition of Czech Cubism as a whole that is, sculpture (Gutfreund), painting, architecture and the decorative arts reflected the comprehensive exhibitions (and foreign-language catalogues) devoted to Czech Cubism; one exhibition opened in the Vitra Design Museum in Weill and the other event was presented in the Kunstverein in Dusseldorf (Ji' ,vestka Tom& Vl(ek (eds.), 1909-1925 Kubismus in Prag. Malerei, Skulptur, Kunstgewerbe, Architektur. Exh. Cat. Kunstverein Dusseldorf 1991; English translation: Ji' ,vestka Tom& Vl(ek Pavel Li&ka (eds.), Czech Cubism 19091925. Prague: Modernista - i3 CZ, 2006. Alexander von Vegesack, (ed.) Czech Cubism. Architecture, Furniture, and Decorative Arts, 1910-1925. Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press 1992). In the early 1990s, the exhibitions traveled through Europe, with one shown, in somewhat altered form, as far away as the United States. In spite of this fact, Coxs appreciation of Czech Cubist architecture was essentially a solitary act within Western art history. Yve-Alain Bois summed up the issue as follows: Is there a cubist architecture? Perhaps not. I see nothing cubist, for example, but nothing at all, in Duchamp-Villons celebrated Maison Cubiste. And though I have only a very limited knowledge of it, Id say the same of the socalled cubist architecture in Prague. It is all a matter of definition. My definition of cubism is resolutely narrow (Yve-Alain Bois, Cubistic, Cubic and Cubist, in: Eve Blau Nancy J. Troy (eds.), Architecture and Cubism, Centre Canadien dArchitecture, Montreal The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, London 1997, p. 188) Bois characterizes the paintings created by Picasso, Braque, Gris and Lger up to 1914 as cubist, but the work of the Salon Cubists (Gleizes, Metzinger, Le Fauconnier, DuchampVillon and others) as cubistic. Whereas in Bohemia, a differentiation was made between these two classes of Cubism as mentioned earlier, Cubist artists were customarily categorized into major Cubists (Picasso, Braque) and minor Cubists (Metzinger et al.) in Latvia, for example, many artists considered Cubism in the 1920s as a unified phenomenon, and they did not differentiate among its various historical phases. (Dace Lamberga, Cubism in Latvian Art. Exh. cat. State Museum of Art, Riga, Neptuns, Riga 2002, p. 47)

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Cubistic and Cubo-isms If Neil Cox includes the Czech problem in the part entitled New Forms. New Places. Cubism at the Worlds Stage, he has reasons for so doing. As soon as people begin to work with a new style phenomenon under different geographical, cultural and, of course, also socialpolitical conditions after the year 1910 usually with a delay of at least 2-3 years, but often also of ten years the resultant shape of the local Cubism must necessarily be other than that radiating from the Parisian centre, whether it be the form of Picasso or Braque or the Cubist version of Metzinger and co. Cox is well aware that it is necessary to seek not only new sites of Cubism, but also to trace how its form altered. With regard to the founder Cubism of Paris each such regional" Cubism may appear new, but more probably it will always be hybrid, a crossing of something original, often also misunderstood, with the local, frequently highly surprising. It is no coincidence that Vincenc Kram' liked to use the concept of crossing to characterise the development of modern art: Cubism in itself was for him a crossing of various paths and directions and similarly Cubism created - for instance, in Bohemia there was a tendency where the Parisian Cubism interbred with local experience, requirements and ideology of modernism. In the Czech environment the special trait of Cubism, especially around 1911, but also in the period of World War I and up to the beginning of the twenties, is written of as Cuboexpressionism. This term is frequently criticised by western researchers, such as Elisabeth Clegg (Elizabeth Clegg, Art, Design and Architecture in Central Europe 1890-1920. New Haven and London: Yale University Press 2006, p. 164) In his review of her publication Petr Wittlich pointed out that the concept of Cuboexpressionism was in fact created precisely as a way of expressing the distinctive character of Czech expressionism, which set great store by the formative character of art. (Petr Wittlich, review in Um-n LV, 2007, No. 3, p. 253). Also Steven Mansbach, in his well-known history of the modern art of Eastern Europe (Modern Art in Eastern Europe: From the Baltic to the Balkans, Ca. 1890-1939. Cambridge New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999) did not avoid similar conceptual strategy, emphasising the syncretisation and hybridisation of Cubism. In the case of Czech modernism he uses the already-mentioned term Cubo-expressionism. He also uses this term when he wants to characterise the work of the Poznan members of the Bunt group, such as Stanislav Kubicki. 115th Cubist or racial Cubism? Within the framework of the discussion on Central/Eastern European Cubism it must be said that in certain localities to the east of Berlin and Vienna Cubism was welcomed and accepted, but often by only a narrow group of artists. The importance of Cubism was understood to be of key significance for modern art, but nevertheless for many artists Cubism was fundamentally unacceptable: not only because it was against national traditions or identity, but also because the artists realised that if they accepted Cubism they would always be the others, as the Latvian painter Jazeps Grosvalds wrote, in fact the 115th: This excursion into the world of square forms and grey and brown colours has been of benefit to everyone. The insipid nature of old style has been washed away and we can begin to paint what we see with great joy... Nevertheless he did not personally wish to be the 115th star in the line of Cubists (Quoted in: Dace Lamberga, Cubism in Latvian Art. Exh. cat. State Museum of Art, Riga, Neptuns, Riga 2002, p. 14) and so he did not adopt the Cubist method.

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Similarly the Czech painter Franti&ek Folt.n wrote at the beginning of the twenties, at a time when his work was clearly passing through the influence of Cubism: How lovely it would be if the Cubism painted in this country were not only a Picasso French rehash and were our own racial Cubism. When racial art is presented to the world forum it will have an unusual effect due to its differences, the expression of its own countryside and race, it will bear the clear imprint of its race. This is also the only possible way to give a nation its own art tradition. (Franti&ek Folt.n, Nrodn um-ni a kosmopolitizmus, Slovensk. v.chod 3, 1921, No. 231, 9.19., p. 4, quoted in: Hana Rousov ed., Franti&ek Folt.n 1891-1976. Ko&ice-Pa'!-Brno. Catalogue of exhibition in the Moravian Gallery in Brno, Arbor Vitae 2007, p. 227) Folt.n wrote this idea in Slovakia, in Ko&ice, where the modernist and avant-garde currents of Czech, Slovak and Hungarian artists met with the strong genius loci of the city, described in his memoirs by the writer Sndor Mrai. Folt.n wanted something like Slovak Cubism, which would correspond to the atmosphere that he felt in East Slovakia and later in Subcarpathian Russia, where he also painted. Picasso Cubism was too much bound up with Paris, with the modernity of the city and the French/Spanish mentality. In Ko&ice everything was completely different, including the nationalities. Saar German met there with Hungarian and Slovak and formed a difficult-to-define mixture of bourgeoisie, Jewish ethnic, the primitive rustic element and the nomadic gypsies. Both quotations, that of Grosvalds and that of Folt.n, demonstrate both appreciation of and reserve with regard to Cubism: on the one hand Cubism is understood as the key trend of modern art, on the other hand the regret is emphasised that Cubism is a Parisian import and is not more encrypted in the racial disposition of the local ethnic. This comment only confirms the fact that if Cubism was adopted from Paris in distant localities it had necessarily to undergo mutations, which still permit us, however, to call these new forms Cubist. This is also why Dace Lamberga writes, when describing the Cubism of the Riga group of artists in Latvia, of a local version of Cubism( Laila Brem&a, The Episode of Cubism in the History of Latvian Sculpture, in: Dace Lamberga, Cubism in Latvian Art. Exh. cat. State Museum of Art, Riga, Neptuns: Riga 2002, p. 47).and elsewhere of Neo-Cubism. (Dace Lamberga, Cubism in Painting, in: Ibidem, p. 36) How to write about Cubism outside the canon? The American art historian James Elkins published an article in 2003 in the Slovak periodical ARS, published by the Slovak Academy of Sciences, an article entitled Ako je mo!n psa/ o svetovom umen (How can one write about world art , ARS (Bratislava), 2003, No. 2, pp. 7589). For us Elkins conjecture may become a suggestion on how to write about East European modern art, in our case Cubism. Elkins finds eight possibilities: 1. Embed it in western art history genealogy; 2. Trace strictly local historical traditions; create the appearance of the independence of creativity from the west, which is, of course, not realistic; 3. Describe the work with understanding, explain it from own creativity, somehow parenthesising both western and local context. This procedure is insufficient because it is not part of the extensive set of texts that are connected to one another, i.e. it cannot become part of the discourse in the wider (whether western or eastern) context as it comes from the work itself, from its apparent immanence. Such an explanation is necessarily in a vacuum. 4. The seeking of new avant-gardes, i.e. what is new and innovative with regard to the old, the necessarily western avant-gardes. This is a model, as in the first point, of the seeking of the new or the different on the basis of something set, in this case the "old" and necessarily western. 5. The writing of the history by an

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institution. It is not clear how this method may display the difference and originality of eastern art, when the modernist operative art institutions (schools, galleries, museums, etc.) or tendencies and movements (avant-garde groups, associations, etc.) mainly came into being after western patterns. 6. To define the work per negationem, i.e. to characterise a work (painter) by what it was not. 7. To adapt the emphasis: to lessen the problem of the prevalence of the influence of the West by focussing on the fringes, i.e. to increase the emphasis on the differences. Finally the eighth answer: let it be. James Elkins does not, of course, want this. Not one of the answers is satisfactory and some, especially the first and the last, are fundamentally unacceptable for Elkins. Probably the point 5, writing the art history as an history of art institutions, might be certain solution. No simple answer exists. If there were such an answer the differences between paintings created in various regions would be erased. This does not, of course, mean that there is no point continuing the work on uncovering the question of how to express the significance of art outside the centre and at the same time include it in the more complex world discourse on modern art. If we just let it be, then thousands millions of works of art created in small countries lose their international dialogue in art history. Their voices will become weaker and weaker, it will be increasingly difficult to hear them and the voices of Picasso and Pollock will become louder every year. (J. Elkins) The question of international resonance is the problem of so-called East European art. Questions of derivation, originality, eclecticism, crossing, mutation and hybridisation of modernistic isms, all these are topical for a number of areas of Central and Eastern Europe, and also for the Baltic states and Scandinavia, in other words regions where they did not create the canonical and universal model of modernist discourse, but intervened in it strongly with a personal dialect. Regional Cubisms? It is evident that the stated Cubist mutations and derivations outside the centre are scarcely linked by anything other than a more general inclination towards Cubism. A number of artists in Eastern Europe, of course, often did not distinguish the individual stages of Cubism and, apart from exceptions (Emil Filla), did not even accord greater value to concrete artists. In particular after 1920 the artists combined various Cubist procedures, analytical and synthetic Cubism, etc. All this complicates the credible inclusion of these Cubist tendencies outside the centre in the world context (or the Parisian one). That they are different is evident, but equally evident is the fact of the passionate and sometimes naive or brutal acceptance of the original Cubist form. What should be done, then, with those regions of Cubism such as the Czech Lands, partly Poland, Latvia and Estonia, even Finland (case of the painter Ilmari Aalto can a place become an artistic region when it is represented by only one artist?) and also Hungary and Romania. Perhaps I have omitted some areas through ignorance. Can they have some common denominator? Apart from the acceptance of Cubism, sometimes more strongly, at other times in connection with other stimuli, it is mainly a region outside the centre. The centre chiefly means Paris, Berlin, sometimes Munich. For a number of Latvian and Estonian artists the centres were Moscow and Petersburg.

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Perhaps we might write about Cubist regionalism. Here we would have to turn to the concept with which Kenneth Frampton tried to characterise a certain part of contemporary architectural production up to the beginning of the eighties of the 20 century (Kenneth Frampton, Architecture A Critical History. London New York: Thames and Hudson 1985, pp. 313-327) . He writes of critical regionalism and through this tries to identify new regional schools, the main intention of which was to reflect and utilise the specific basic givens in which they move. If we let ourselves be inspired by some of the points set out by Kenneth Frampton for critical regionalism, then we can also give certain characteristics for Cubist regionalisms. This is practice on the fringes and already from the nature of the matter it is based in many cases on the hybridisation of the originally accepted Cubism. The emphasis on place indicates important local tradition. Often the international is mingled with the local and frequently Cubism is a tendency packaged with others (Expressionism, Constructivism, and Suprematism). Although local identity and tradition are emphasised, the aim is not folklorisation. These values, on the contrary and paradoxically, are usually a means of strengthening the international status of the local style. Often they are late reactions to Cubism in the middle of the twenties and sometimes even in the thirties. The most fundamental thing, of course, is: with all the interest in the local and traditional there is still supreme interest here in being international. This is the main reason why the vocabulary of Cubism is used. It is understood by many authors as the synonym for new art, as the embodiment of the latest art. I have tried to demonstrate that 1. Cubism from its origin was not understood as a single direction; within its framework different varieties of Cubism were found and it is therefore better to speak of Cubisms, even in the framework of the Parisian territory. 2. If in the course of time it was ascertained in art history that in Paris itself there existed several Cubisms, then it was only a step from here to Cubism being activated elsewhere outside France. 3. The geography of the influence of Cubism was traditionally linked not only with France, but also with Russia, Holland (Mondrian), Italy (Futurism), England and possible the USA. Only from the seventies did the Czech lands appear on the map. 3. I am convinced, and in the catalogue of the exhibition Europa, Europa it was indicated, that this geography of the influence of Cubism is broader and it is necessary to count on it in the discussion of modernism. It is geography where there is the working designation of Cubism in Central/Eastern Europe. These are the territories where there was strong appearance of Cubism: apart from the Czech Lands there is Poland, Latvia, Estonia, there are Hungarian and Romanian artists, but it is also possible to mention marginal but interesting examples from Slovakia, etc. 4. I ask the question how should these eastern areas of Cubism be coined and interpreted. I propose the term regional Cubisms: in them there occurs a kind of transmutation or hybridisation of Cubism from the centre (Paris), linking up with local problems and traditions, but simultaneously there is an emphasis on the international and modernistic character of such a style.

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Politics and Art: A Controversy After the Fall of the Berlin Wall Mi&ko ,uvakovi"
1. Introduction: problem and method I will start from a relatively simple problem, and that is the problem of differentiation of (1) political art as a genre, and (2) political status of art as cultural and social practice. The method that I will employ is, on the one hand, based on Ludwig Wittgensteins premise that the goal of philosophy is to show a fly the way out of a bottle in which it has been caught.16 This means that one should, for a moment, ask oneself what kind of a bottle is it that the question is about, where is the bottle, and more importantly, whether we are talking about only one bottle or about many bottles with many flies in a big and, judging by all appearances, undefined space outside or within some bottle N. The method I will use, on the other hand, based on the assumption that each relationship, as well as my interpretative relation with the fly caught in a bottle and my effort to show the fly way out of the bottle, is a singularity, a singularity which is hard to connect with a generality concerning all the flies in all the bottles, i.e., with the universality of finding the ways that free that single fly and that take it out of precisely that single bottle. Concept of singularity is, therefore, derived from a standpoint derived from a debate between Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. In that debate they restituted philosophy to the corporeality of performance not only of the concept, but also of its intensity of performance. The following statement is thus appropriate and clear:
Each creation is singular, while a notion which is a genuine philosophical creation, is always a singularity. The first principle is that generalities do not explain anything, that they themselves should be explained. 17

Therefore, in this discussion, I have to be gradual in demonstrative conceptualizations of the complex relationship between art, politics, and philosophy. As if each of the concepts art, politics, and philosophy is a singular bottle with its own fly, but still as if all bottles and all flies are connected in a secretive way with a web of material possibilities. 2. Political art or politicization of matters about art I will start with a direct and unbiased question: are the following three art worksCourbets pornographic painting LOrigine du Monde, Duchamps transgressive ready made Fountain and Eduardo Kacs transgenetically modified rabbit with fluorescent fur GFP BunnyAlba political art works? French realist painter Gustave Courbet painted the painting LOrigine du monde (The Origin of the World) in oil on canvas measuring 46 x 55cm. This painting is a so called second painting, which means that it is a painting which existed under the painting visible within the frame. The painting shows a torsogenitals and abdomen of a woman lying on a bed with her
16 17

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2001. 284 ( 309). Deleuze, Gilles & Guattari, Flix. Introduction: The Question Then..., in What is Philosophy? New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. 7.

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legs spread apart. Genitals are shown immediately after the sexual act. It is assumed that the model for this painting was the American Joanna (Jo) Hiffernan who lived at that time with the American painter and Courbets student James McNeill Whistler. Courbet painted the painting as an order from the Turkish diplomat Khalil-Bey, the Ambassador of the Ottoman Empire in Athens and St. Petersburg who also spent some time in Paris. Khalil-Bey was a considerable collector who owned numerous works by French romanticists, for example Ingress painting Le Bain turc or Courbets painting Les Dormeuses (1866). There are different interpretations about the further history of exchange and ownership of Courbets painting. The painting had, according to some versions, been sold from Khalil-Beys collection to an art dealer Antoine de la Narde. There were some records that, at the beginning of the twentieth century, the painting was found in Hungary and that after the Second World War it appeared in the collection of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. Since 1955, the painting has been in the museum Muse dOrsay in Paris.18 Today, the painting is seen as a masterpiece and is included among the nineteenth century French modern art masterpieces.

Gustave Courbet, LOrigine du monde, 1866.

French-American artist Marcel Duchamp accomplished the art work Fountain (1917) as a ready made. 19 Ready made is a made or a produced object with a non-artistic origin. It is most often an industrial product which is taken over or re-signified, moved, and exposed as an art work with or without additional material or verbal interventions. The ready made entitled Fountain was made during the artists stay in New York. The work was imagined when Marcel Durchamp, together with the American painter Joseph Stella and collector Walter Arensberg, purchased a standard model of a urinal from the J.K. Mott Iron Works, Fifth Avenue. He put the purchased urinal in an unusual positionrotated it 90 degrees in space and wrote on it in a way of signature R. Mutt 1917. The ready made was rejected at the exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists in 1917. Immediately after the unsuccessful exposition the work Fountain was lost. Duchamps authorized reconstructions were exhibited in the following museums: Indiana University Art Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art and Tate Modern.20

18 19

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOrigine_du_monde. Cabanne, Pierre. Dialogues With Marcel Duchamp. London: Thames and Hudson, 1971. 20 de Duve Thierry (ed). The Definitively Unfinished Marcel Duchamp. Cambridge. Mass., The MIT Press, 1993. de Duve, Thierry. Kant After Duchamp. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1998.

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Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, 1917.

Brazilian-American artist Eduardo Kac has, in the year 2000, set up the art project for genetically produced rabbit. The bunny Alba was produced in laboratory using the GFP method developed by the French geneticist Louis-Marie Houdebine. Green fluorescent proteinGFPis a protein that consists of 238 amino acids (26.9 kDa) from the jellyfish Aequorea Victoria that fluoresces green when exposed to blue light. When the rabbit Alba is exposed to blue light it fluoresces green. Eduardo Kac described the rabbit Alba as an animal that does not exist in nature. Regarding the genetically constructed rabbit, Kac developed a whole post-production campaignby communicating numerous information and disinformation about rabbit Albas life, and by realizing a newspaper and a web site with data about Alba, posters exposed in public spaces (Le Lapin Unique from a GFP Bunny series 2003), electronic display with photos of Alba (Bunny in Rio, 2004). He also made a realist sculpture, showing artist with the rabbit in his arms (Featherless, 2006).21 Again, I will repeat the direct and unbiased question: are these three art worksCourbets pornographic painting LOrigine du monde, Duchamps transgressive ready made Fountain, and Eduardo Kacs transgenetically modelled rabbit with the fluorescent fur GFP BunnyAlbapolitical art works?

Eduardo Kac, GFP Bunny Alba, 2000-2006

At first glance, these works do not seem to be political art, not in a way in which we are used to see and recognize political art workssuch as, for example, the paintings by Eugne Delacroix Liberty Leading the People (1830), George Groszs The Pillars of Society (1926), Ernst Vollbehrs NSDAP Party Convention in Nremberg (1933), Boris Ionfans and Vera Mukhinas Soviet Pavilion (Paris, 1937), Pablo Picassos Guernica (1937) or Yayoi Kusames Naked Event (1968). Each of these art works is obviously political in the sense of genre, if under the genre we assume thematic and functional congeniality of art works. All the mentioned art works are congenial according to their visual thematization of politics or according to political function their subject has in a specific field of macro-political
21

http://www.ekac.org/; http://www.ekac.org/alba.headlinesupercollider.html; http://www.ekac.org/featherless. html.

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interests. This means that each of these art works belongs to a kind of art works (paintings, sculptures, architectural and graphic works, performatives, assemblages) which by using visual means thematize a political standpoint or a political platform, i.e., a political ideal or function, state politics, interests and standpoints of the party, and, also, an individual relation towards politics. In this context politics22 signifies a certain defined or undefined assemblage of standpoints, knowledge, and pragmatic expectations, social contracts, confrontations, or performed acts in the representation of public life in a modern, postmodern, or global society. For example, a painting by the French painter Eugne Delacroix, Liberty Leading the People, unambiguously and allegorically shows/tells about ideas of the French bourgeois revolution. In the European context nobody will by mistake believe that he/she sees on the painting a woman in topless during populist orgies in some ruined European town, but will know refer to the convictionthat it is about allegorical painting showing, i.e., representing, liberty as the symbol, as the concept and as the political platform. French flag in womans hands and her unclothed breasts are only an indexation of her as the symbol within allegorical-political scene by which the idea of the French nation as the bearer of the political in the singular sense, and the idea of the Western modern bourgeois and liberal individual liberty in universal sense is being represented.

Eugne Delacroix, Liberty Leading the People, 1830.

The painting by the German Dadaist and painter Georg Grosz The Pillars of Society uses expressive and parodical means of pictorial representation, i.e. malformed figurative forms, to demonstrate and suggest a critique of the capitalist order of social power in Weimar Germany of 1920s. Groszs painting is a critical-social expressionism or realism marked in the history of art known as new objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit). Critical realist paintings show themselves as the means of taking an engag attitude towards the capitalist societys dominant political discourse. In the painting by Ernst Vollbehr NSDAP Party Convention in Nremberg one can see indications of the political project by German national-party body as one or as a unity. What is deepand authentically-Nazi in this painting, is not the displayed scene of aligned squads of German National-Socialist Party at the Party meeting, but painters political grasp in annulling and de-individualizing the singular civic body. In a fascinating way this painting annuls the concept of liberal democratic idea about individuality as the bearer of the political, by making the scene of homogeneous bodiessquads in which the individual no longer exists as a singularity. Singularity becomes mass. The painting shows party squads in formations that transcend individuality into political-party collectivity.

22

Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1958.

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Ernst Vollbehrs, NSDAP Party Convention in Nrnberg, 1933

The architect Boris Iofan and sculptor Vera Mukhina realized The Soviet Pavillion at the world exposition in Paris as a monumental project of new Communist unity of the working class (the young man) and the peasantry (the girl), i.e., industrial world (worker) and nature (agriculturist girl). The work is about the typical optimal projection23 of socialist realism whereby the promise in revolutionary transformation of the new world is installed and performed. The optimal projection is not utopia, i.e. an ideally structured space of the future, but signifies movement as choosing the optimal version in the overcoming of reality. This architectural-sculptural monument is a monument to revolution that is transmitted from a class battlefield into an organization and the shaping of everyday socialist life. Synthesis of the architectural and the sculptural symbolizes and triggers questions about the new Communist unity that should happen in the very life of the Soviet citizen through the prevailing everyday reality. Picassos painting Guernica is dedicated to the victims of bombing of the town Guernica during the Spanish Civil War. The painting is realized as a post-cubist work that symbolizes a singular human tragedyinnocent victims of Nazi/Fascist bombingas universal victims of political terror. Picassos painting most explicitly depicts the liberal standpoint about a political singular topic such as the universal topic of painting that exceeds individual political conceptions and pictorially tells about the universal, i.e., the prevalent human suffering. In other words, Picassos work demonstratively shows how one singular event makes the universal representation of humanity possible. Yayoi Kusame performed the anti-war happening Naked Event during the Vietnam War. The happening was performed in the atmosphere of political activism of 1968, of student protests, the New Left, and sexual revolution.24 Her political work is no longer a representation of painting or sculpture, but a behavioral interventionan eventin concrete urban-political space, for example, in front of the U.S. Treasury Building in New York. Here, it is about a turnover from a presentation towards performing and performative intervention. Artistic practice takes over the media of political acting and traverses from a fictional space of presentation into the real-political space of human life. By such a performative act, actions of activist art are initiated. We are dealing with art that inscribes itself into the field of political actions and acts, i.e., into material practices, by means of the political realm itself, which it provokes. Barbara Kruger rendered the placard Untitled (Your body is a battleground) by visual-verbal means of commercial design as a provocation and thus a critique of the status and the place of a woman in late capitalist consumer society. Her artistic work is based on the transmission of
23 24

Flaker, Aleksandar. Optimalna projekcija. In Poetika osporavanja. Zagreb: ,kolska knjiga, 1984. 68. See Marcuse, Herbert. The New Left and the 1960s: Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse. London: Routledge, 2004.

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outer-institutional critical feminism of neo-avant-garde and conceptual art into the sphere of highly professionalized, institutionalized media practices of representation, i.e. use, of a female body in the realms of mass exchange and consumption of goods. Her work is about the neo-conceptualist grasp of mechanisms of alienated informational market in the middle of which an art work is displayed as the symptom or the derailment of expected productive exchange and consumption through which the ideological space of contemporary life is being shaped. The artist appropriates25 the languagesemiol from Khalil-Beys collection orgy of presentation within the advertising industry in order to say something different from what the advertising industry shows in relation to the role and function of the female body as the object of consumerist lust. Within the Sots Art, the Soviet painters Komar and Melamid developed cynical practice26 of transforming ideality and political commerciality of Soviet socialist realism. For example, their painting Double Self-Portrait as Young Pioneers indicates displacement within the socialist canon of presentation of serious, high, and politically controlled art. Art is no longer an optimal projection of topics possible or wished for within the Communist society, but, rather, an appropriation of potential politically positive or apologetic value by cynical ascription of academic discourse of figurative painting of socialist realism. In the so-called new British art of the nineties Mat Collishaw realizes the work Black Nazissus. Assemblage Black Nazissus is a political visual discourse of crisis and traumatic points of the British neo-liberal and post-capitalist society that, at the end of the twentieth century, faces contradictions of neo-Nazism and racial violence.27 The Black Nazissus is a paradoxical creature or figure which is possible only in an alienated world of crisis, of local confrontations and local clashes within the Western multicultural world. It is about contradictions within singularities of the multicultural society. This figurative assemblage is a contradiction of violence within the Third World that takes place within the First World and the First World which is structured by confrontations with the Third World. As one can see, political art is based on genre defined visual production of political meaning by which idealistic (Delacroix), critical-caricaturist (Grosz), apologetical-collectivist (Ernst Vollbehr), apologetic-utopian (Boris Iofan, Vera Mukhina), universalist-humanist (Pablo Picasso), activist-performative (Yayoi Kusame), critical-consumerist (Barbara Kruger), critical-cynical (Komar and Melamid), and critical-contradictory (Collishaw) approach to the public life as a field where the structuring micro- and macro-power is being explicitly expressed. Political art is therefore a specific art genre by which, through visual means, political concepts and standpoints, most often in an unambiguous, namely transparent way, are being mediated or shown. However, I will repeat once again my direct and unambiguous question: are art works such as Courbets pornographic painting LOrigine du Monde, Duchamps transgressive ready made Fountain and Eduardo Kacs transgenetically modeled rabbit with the fluorescent fur GFP BunnyAlbapolitical art works? Yes or no? If the criterion of identification of political art is the concept within political genre as the frame of transparent thematization of the performance or expression, these works are then not
25 26

Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. London: Verso, 1992. Wright, Elizabeth & Wright, Edmond (eds). The $i%ek Reader. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1999. Groys, Boris. The Total Art of Stalinism, Avant-Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992. 27 Hall, Stuart & du Gay, Paul. Questions of Cultural Identity. London: Sage Publications, 1996.

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political. For Courbets painting depicts womans genitals directed at males gaze, Duchamps ready made is the index of transmission of the object from one cultural context to the other, Kacs rabbit Alba is a live event within a complex artistic-scientific project of transgenetic engineering. These works, as the majority of art works from the history of modern art, are not the transparent works typical of political art. On the contrary, they are works that look and seem autonomous in relation to political pretensions and potentials. These works are obsessively dedicated to pornographic enjoyment, transfigurative combinatorics of parallel objects and to the potentiality of the re-creation of life itself. But, nonetheless, are these works not political in some way? If I answer now that these works are political and that they are really political, then I must face questions: What does it mean to be political? or In relation to what is something political? These two questions are questions that anybody who wants to show the fly the way out of the closed bottle must face. And, that is a political practice that I have to face in the writing itself that seeks an answer to the posed questions, i.e., the ways in which the fly will get out of the bottle. In order to come to the answer to the question What does it mean that these art woks are political? or In relation to what are these art works political? I have to execute a theoretical and a sensual politicization of these works or, at least, of some newer registers or regimes of appearance. The demand for politicization becomes relevant as a demand after post modernity, more precisely, with the completion of the actuality of postmodern theories of society, culture and art. Postmodern theory of politics, aesthetics, and art (Jean-Franois Lyotard,28 Achille Bonito Oliva29) depicts post modernity as the pragmatic turn from modernity as the master discourse about politics, aesthetics, and art, towards questions about the small or the soft30 decentering of the political. This means that it goes towards abolishing the space in which the dominant practice of ruling within society or life itself can be perceived as an emancipatory practice of social transformation. Without the master discourse of politics post modernity appears as a field without meta-politics, namely as a field without a discourse about politics as an independent sphere in which consensus and mediation between conflicting social efforts is being achieved. Politics is being demonstrated as a highly developed bureaucratic technology of life order in its specialized segments of everyday life. Postmodern politics exposes itself as the practice that organizes cultural platforms and procedures not only of living in a plural, eclectic, i.e., multiple, everyday life. It is for this reason that Jrgen Habermas has, for example, these and such processes defined as neo-conservative.31 Crisis of postmodern plurality after the fall of the Berlin Wall, that is, after the end of the Cold War, through maintenance of global politics provoked again the possibility for questioning the political as the relevant answer to the apparent absence of anything political within the neo-liberal purportedly apolitical or extra-political technological practices of the
28 29

See Lyotard, Jean-Franois. The Postmodern Condition. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984. See Bonito Oliva, Achille. Figure, Myth and Allegory. In IndividualsA Selected History of Contemporary Art 1945-1986. New York: Abbeville Press Publishers, 1986. 242-247. 30 See Vatimo, Gianni. The End of Modernity: Nihilism and Hermeneutics in Postmodern Culture. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991. 31 Habermas, Jrgen. ModernityAn Incomplete Project. In Foster, Hal (ed.). Postmodern Culture. London: Pluto Press, 1983. 3-15.

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organization of the everyday life. This evocation of politics happened in many different ways in entirely different and often mutually confronted philosophers and theorists (Jacques Derrida,32 Chantal Mouffe,33 Alain Badiou,34 Jacques Rancire,35 Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt,36 Giorgio Agamben,37 Paolo Virno,38 Brian Massumi,39 etc.). Evocation of the political, the return to the political or the politicization of non- or extra-political are not practices of the structuralization of reality by the party or the state, but theoretical constructions concerning the character, functions, and effects of actual performances of the social. I shall conceptualize politicization in such a way so as to interpret certain art works that do not belong to the genre of political art. For example, I will politicize a pornographic painting, a ready made and a live, fluorescent, rabbit. I will reveal these works as political art works, which means that I will lead our discussion toward the argument that each art work or any art work can be shown as political in an interventional interpretation of politicization. Walter Benjamin was correct when he stated that in big historical epochs with the change of modes of living of a human community, and we can add also with the character of human labor, modes of its sense perceptions change:
During long periods of history, the mode of human sense perception changes with humanity's entire mode of existence. The manner in which human sense perception is organized, the medium in which it is accomplished, is determined not only by nature but by historical circumstances as well.40

In other words, the materialist thesis that an art work is always the consequence of certain historical and geographical material social practice and social resistances to this practice, can be put forth. This practice does not have to be thematized in the art work itself, but can be revealed through interpretation, and demonstrated and explained as the cause41 of the specific thematic appearance, or the aesthetic-sensual autonomy of the art work. More than three decades ago, a group of Slovenian theorists of AlthusserianLacanian orientation published the following statement on the occasion of Ernest Hemigways way of writing the novel:
Hemingways writing does not reflect social content through its thematics, but directly, in the organization of the signifying economy itself, where only the secondary effect is thematic.42

32 33

Derrida, Jacques. Spectres de Marx. Paris: 0ditions Galile, 1993. Mouffe, Chantal. The Return of the Political. London: Verso, 1993 (2005). 34 Badiou, Alain. Metapolitics. London: Verso, 2006. 35 Rancire, Jacques. The Politics of AestheticsThe Distribution of the Sensible. London: Continuum, 2004. 36 Negri, Antonio & Hardt, Michael. Empire. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000. 37 Agamben, Giorgio. The Man Without Content. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999. 38 Virno, Paolo. A Grammar of the MultitudeFor an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life. New York: Semiotext(e), 2004. 39 Massumi, Brian. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Post-Contemporary Interventions). Durham: Duke University Press, 2002. 40 Benjamin, Walter. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. In Cazeaux, Clive (ed.). The Continental Aesthetics Reader. London: Routledge, 2000. 325. 41 Harrison, Charles & Orton, Fred (eds.), Modernism, Criticism, RealismAlternative Contexts For Art. London: Harper and Row, 1984. 42 Umetnost, dru!ba/tekst (Art, society/text), Problemi, no. 3-5 (no. 147-149), Ljubljana, 1975. 1-10.

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If this conception is applied to any art work, then we can say that Courbets painting, Duchamps ready made and Kacs fluorescent rabbit do not reflect social content through thematic or sensual indications of art works themselves, but in the organization of signifying practice whose only secondary effect is thematic. If this is correct, than we can say that signifying practice is a practice which is at the same time an expression of contradictions of conditions of production in which the art work occurs, exchanges, and disappears, and the resistance which the production faces with in each context or contextual conditions. In this sense, Goustave Courbet developed the primary manual labour on the painting as a bodily product. He created the picture of the visible worldthe female genitalsthat demonstrated literally, promising the reality of the pornographic scene. The painting of a longed-for human body is produced by direct physical/behaviorist labor of the humanthe paintersbody. Such a model of relations of production corresponds to early capitalist labor which emanates from manual production and which will soon be superseded by mechanical labor. Courbets painting is almost the last manual pornography. The pornographic scene will in the future become the product of mechanical labor, for example, of the photographic camera in the nineteenth century and of the film camera in the twentieth century. 43 Marcel Duchamp, contrariwise, intentionally avoided manual craft work in the name of establishing a production practice. His production practice was based on the chain of events which lead from the gaze and the visual appropriation of industrial product from its primary context of usage via trade exchange of industrially produced goods to alienated consumption and semiological transformation of mass industrial product into an art work. Duchamp applied the mass goods production and exchange in established and developed industrial capitalist world. Each of his ready made works demonstrated how in the visual arts, above all in painting and sculpture, the relationship between the art work and conditions of creation in the newly developed industrial production relations changes essentially. Duchamp substituted principles of shaping matter in visual arts with principles of observation, usage, displacement, naming, and signifying. Eduardo Kac performed his work in the field of relational institutional postproductions44 that enables the artist to construct the work project to be realized in the system of scientific and technical laboratories. Instead of an art work as a completed piece, Eduardo Kac developed a complex production-postproduction mode of labor in which the artist is the bearer of the project of complex media or multimedia work that functions as an information-phenomenological order of events. The artist does not produce work but designs the concept of the work, the projected task for the realization of the work and the conditions of postproduction informational distributions of the work in contemporary global culture. His work is the work of a postindustrial artist, which means of an artist who works with project systems of mass institutional organization of production, exchange, and consumption of art events/information.

43

Of course, different politicizations of such a painting are possible that which lead towards activation of local knowledge within culturefor example, feminist or psychoanalytical analysis of female genitals as the object of male or female viewing in the field of gender politics. Hereby I thank to Professor Hilde Hein for her critical remarks regarding my interpretation of Courbets painting during the XVII International Congress of Aesthetics( Ankara, July 10, 2007). 44 Bourriaud, Nicolas. Postproduction . New York: Lukas & Sternberg, 2002.

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In fact, each of these artistsCourbet, Duchamp, Kacis fundamentally a political artist since by his material art practice he raises questions and corporeally-sensually demonstrates singular answers about changes of functions in the appearance of human labor and human perception in the midst of the artistic historical, and geographical process. Each of these artists deals with the singularity of events of specific human labor in changed social conditions facing thus the horizons of public and secret, hidden or transparent, political horizons of time and space that he works in.

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Authors
Piotr Piotrowski is Professor Ordinarius and Chair of Art History Department at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, Poland, as well as the editor of the annual journal Artium Quaestiones. From 1992 till 1997, he was a Senior Curator of Contemporary Art at the National Museum in Poznan. He also was a Visiting Professor at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY in 2001, and Hebrew University in Jerusalem in 2003. He was a fellow - among others - at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, Washington D.C. (1989-1990), Columbia University (1994), Humboldt University in Berlin (1997), the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton NJ (2000), and Collegium Budapest (2005-2006). Piotrowski has advised and co-organized a number of major exhibitions and projects including: 2000+: The Art from Eastern Europe in Dialogue with the West (Ljubljana, 2000), and The Central European AvantGardes: Exchange and Transformation, 1910-1930 (LACMA, Los Angeles, 2001). Piotrowski has written extensively on Central European art and culture. His latest books include Meanings of Modernism. Towards a History of Polish Art after 1945, Rebis Publishers, 1999, Avant-Garde in the Shadow of Yalta. Art in Central-Eastern Europe, 1945-1989, Rebis Publishers, 2005, Grenzen berwinded. [co-edited with Katja Bernhardt] Lukas Verlag, 2006, and Art after Politics, forthcoming very soon. Currently Piotrowski is working on the new book project: New Art New Democracy in Post-communist Europe.

Edit Andrs studied art history and history at Etvs Lornd University, Budapest (1972 -77), and received PhD in art history in 1998. She worked as a curator in the Hungarian National Gallery (1977-79) and as an editor in the Corvina Publishing House (1979-86). Since 1987 she has been working at the Research Institute for Art History of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest, recently as a senior research fellow. 1996-2000 she was the chair of the board of the League of Non-Profit Art Spaces, Budapest. 1989-1992 and 1997-2002 she lived in New York, in the 1997-98 academic years having a Fulbright fellowship hosted by the Department of Fine Arts of New York University at New York. During this period she has contributed to Hungarian monthly art magazines and newspapers as their New York correspondent. (Her volume of collected essays on contemporary American art was published in Hungarian.) Her main interest concerns Eastern, Central European Art, gender issues, socially engaged art, public art, and art theory related to the transition in the post-socialist countries. She has published numerous essays in different languages on issues of contemporary art and theory. Her book entitled Cultural Crossdressing. Art on the Ruins of Socialism is in press. She teaches at different Hungarian Universities and regularly gives courses, entitled Art and Culture in Transition in Eastern and Central European region at the Education Abroad Program of University of California, Budapest Study Center.

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Jn Bako" is a member of Presidium of Slovak Academy of Sciences and ordinary Professor of Art History at Comenius University Bratislava. Specializing in the methodology of art history and the history of art historiography he has also published numerous studies on medieval painting and sculpture in Slovakia and on Slovak Modern art. His publications include Dejiny a koncepcie stredovekho umenia na Slovensku (The History and Conceptions of Medieval Art in Slovakia, 1984); Situcia dejepisu umenia na Slovensku (Situation of Art History in Slovakia), 1985; Umelec v klietke (Artist in the Cage),1999; &tyri trasy medotolgie dejn umenia: Viedensk "kola #esko-Slovensk' &trukturalizmus Rusk historiografia umenia Ikonolgia & Semiotika (Four Routes in Art History Methodology: Vienna School Czecho-Slovak Structuralism Russian Historiography of Art Iconology & Semiotics),2000; Perifria a symbolick' skok (Periphery and Symbolic Leap),2000; and Intelektul & Pamiatka (Intelectual & Historical Monument),2004. As recipient of a series of international grants he has researched at major centres for art history, among them the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, Wasington D.C., the Zentralinstitut fr Kunstgeschichte, Munich, the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study, Wassenaar, the Swiss Institute for Art Research, Zrich, Institute of Art History at the University Vienna, Peterhouse Cambridge, The British Academy London. Professor Bako& , a member of CIHA (till 2000), AICA, IAA and SCH ESF (Standing Committee for Humanities, European Science Fondation till 2006) has participated in several International Congresses of art historians (Vienna, Strasbourg, Berlin, London etc.) and was awarded the HerderPrize 2000. In 2005 Rudolf Arnheim visiting professorship at Humboldt University zu Berlin was conferred upon him. Dr. Ljiljana Blagojevi#, Architect Associate Professor University of Belgrade, Faculty of Architecture Architect and architectural historian and theorist engaged in research of the twentieth century architecture and urbanism, particularly regarding Belgrade/Serbia/Yugoslavia, and focusing on relations between sociopolitical conditions and related concepts of modernity. She teaches lecture courses on contemporary architecture and urbanism, graduate seminars on contemporary theory, M.Arch design studio, and Ph. D. courses in methodology of research in architecture, and history and theory of modernism in Serbia. Author of the books Novi Beograd: osporeni modernzam (New Belgrade: Contested Modernism, Belgrade, 2007), Modernism in Serbia: The Elusive Margins of Belgrade Architecture, 1919-1941 (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, in association with Harvard University Graduate School of Design, 2003), and Moderna ku(a u Beogradu, 1920-1941 (Modern House in Belgrade, 1920-1941, Belgrade, 2000). Coeditor (with Felix Zwoch), of StadtBauwelt (Berlin) no. 36/2004, a thematic issue on contemporary Belgrade. Publishes and lectures in the national and international framework. Prior to academic career, from 1989-1997, she lived in London and worked as an architect with Renton Howard Wood Levin Partnership, and Zaha Hadid. Awarded a number of prizes at architecture competitions. Elected into RIBA membership (1992), ARB registered architect in the UK, Chartered Architect in Serbia. Salzburg Seminar Alumna.

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Mart Kalm is Professor in history of architecture and Dean of the Faculty of Art and Culture at Estonian Academy of Arts in Tallinn. His main field of research has been Estonian 20th C architecture. In 1991 he was among the founders of Estonian Museum of Architecture, he has been active member of DOCOMOMO and chairs currently National Board of Antiquities. He has been a Paul Getty fellow in 1990 and a Fulbright visiting scholar at Columbia University 2005-2006. His books include "Arhitekt Alar Kotli" (1994), "Guide to Functionalism in Estonia"(1998), "Estonian 20th C Architecture" (2001), "Toompea castle" (with Rein Zobel and Juhan Maiste, 2008).

Dr. Vojt%ch Lahoda (born 1955) Art historian, Director of the Institute of Art History of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic(1993 2001). At present Deputy Director of the Institute of Art History of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic. He teaches at Charles University, Prague. His research is focused on Czech and Central European Modernism and Avant-Garde. He presented lectures, papers and posters in United Kingdom, Finland, Poland, Israel, Netherlands, USA, France, Belgium, Lithuania, Estonia, Slovakia, Germany and Switzerland. Author and co-author of books and exhibition catalogues: Emil Filla, Prague 2007 (in Czech); Local Strategies. International Ambitions. Modern Art in Central Europe 1918-1968 (main editor), Prague 2006 (in English); Czech Cubism 1909-1925, Prague 2006 (in Czech and English); Josef Sudek. The Commercial Photography for Dru%stevn prce. The Alvar Aalto Museum, Jyvskyl 2003 (in English); Vincenc Kram) un thoricien et collectionneur du cubisme a Prague. Paris 2002 (in French); Vincenc Kram). From Old Masters to Picasso, National Gallery in Prague, 2000 (in Czech and English); The History of Czech Fine Art 1890 1938, IV., in 2 vols.. (main editor) (In Czech), Prague 1998; Czech Cubism (in Czech), Prague 1996; The Cubist Prague, Prague 1996 (in Czech, English and German); 1909 1925 Kubismus in Prag, Dsseldorf 1990 (in German, in Czech 1991). Awards: 2000 2001 The Royal Society of Edinburgh, 1999 Czech Academy of Sciences Prize, 1996 1997 Open Society Institute Fellowship, 1994 1995 The Getty Grant Program, USA, 1992 Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences Prize, 1991 A.S.D.A. Prix, Paris, Soros Senior Fellowship, CASVA, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. He is currently lecturing at the Institute for Art History at Charles University in Prague on Modern Art and Avant-Garde in Central/Eastern Europe.

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Mi"ko (Miodrag) $uvakovi# was born in 1954 in Belgrade. He was cofounder and member of the conceptual artistic Group 143 (1975-1980), and was co-founder and member of the informal theoretic and artistic "Community for Space Investigation" (1982-1989). Since 1988 he is a member of the Slovenian Aesthetic Society. In March 1993, he got a PHD degree with the theme "Analytical philosophy and visual art" (Faculty of Visual Art, Belgrade). He teaches Aesthetics and Theory of Art, at the Faculty of Music, Belgrade (Professor). He teaches Theory of Art and Theory of Culture for interdisciplinary postgraduate studies at the University of Art, Belgrade. He was co-editor of the magazine Katalog 143 (Belgrade, 1975-78), Mentalni prostor (Belgrade, 1982.1987), Transkatalog (Novi Sad, 1995-1998), Teorija koja Hoda (Walking Theory, Belgrade, from 2001), Razlika (Differance, Tuzla, 2002), Anomalija (Novi Sad, 2004), Sarajevske sveske (Sarajevo, Zagreb, Ljubljana, Beograd, Skopje, 2006). He published 25 books in Serbian, Croatian, Slovenian and English language: PAS TOUT - Fragments on art, culture, politics, poetics and art theory 1994-1974, Meow Press, Buffalo, 1994; Impossible Histories, The MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 2003; Pojmovnik suvremene umjetnosti, Horetzky, Zagreb, 2005, Konceptualna umetnost, MSUV, Novi Sad, 2007, etc.

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Imprint
Published by ERSTE Stiftung, Graben 21, 1010 Vienna, Austria Compiled by Piotr Piotrowski and ERSTE Foundation Editing: Martina Handler, World University Service Austria, Heinrichstrae 39, 8010 Graz Cover Layout: Collettiva Design Photos & Illustrations: Sources see credits within the text Vienna, October 2008 All lectures are in English language and open to the public. For detailed information on locations and dates please contact: Martina Handler martina.handler@wus-austria.org

On the project website continuous updates about dates and places of the lectures will be published. www.erstestiftung.org/patterns-lectures

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The PATTERNS_Travelling Lecture Set is a project initiated by ERSTE Foundation. Founded in 2003, ERSTE Foundation started its work actively two years later in the entire Central and South Eastern European region. It is developing projects within the three programmes of Social Affairs, Culture and Europe. Through the interaction of these programmes, a platform develops which promotes dialogue and a transfer of knowledge. As part of the Culture programme, PATTERNS provides trans-national research to investigate, discover and understand cultural history. PATTERNS initiates and commissions contemporary cultural projects within an international context of varying educational and mediating formats as well as other public activities. Drawing from the tradition of saving banks founded as enterprises for the common good, today the main shareholder of Erste Group is one of the largest foundations rooted in the region. For further information see: www.erstestiftung.org

The PATTERNS_Travelling Lecture Set is organized by World University Service (WUS) Austria WUS Austria is an association committed to the promotion of the human right to education on the basis of academic freedom and university autonomy. Since its establishment as a non-profit organisaton in Graz in 1983, WUS Austria has been working on the promotion and support of higher education in various countries all over the world. Since 1994, following the conflict in former Yugoslavia, WUS Austria has developed a regional focus on South Eastern Europe. Therefore, WUS Austria has set up local office in Belgrade, Podgorica, Prishtina and Sarajevo. www.wus-austria.org