Overview of publications on contemporary art in Eastern Europe

Overview prepared by Valery Ledenyov and Anastasia Tishunina

In order to introduce those interested in contemporary art to Garage Museum Library’s most important publications and new acquisitions, Garage Museum Research Department presents a series of overviews of its collection. The first overview, following the opening of Grammar of Freedom/Five Lessons: Works from the Arteast 2000+ Collection, focuses on publications on contemporary art in Eastern Europe.

Igor Zabel, Contemporary Art Theory

Zurich, Dijon: JRP|Ringier & Les Presses Du Reel, 2012

One of the key Eastern European curators and art theorists, Slovenian Igor Zabel (1958–2005) was sceptical about the notion of “Eastern Europe.” According to Zabel, in the post-ideological post-war era, the separation of Europe into East and West is not a straightforward geographical division, but remains politically charged: opposing the East to the West is opposing us to them. For Western Europe, such an opposition serves to affirm the universality of its political and cultural model, while the East has to accept its status as a cultural periphery and its own “otherness.” “It may be true that western art is ‘other’ for us, but what really matters is that ‘we’ are ‘others’ for the West,” Zabel writes. “The perversity of such a situation is that ‘we’ in advance understand ourselves as being ‘others’ for the West, that ‘we’ look at ourselves through ‘the other's eyes’, so to speak. This is, of course, a phantasmatic view; but through it, ‘we’ understand ourselves as ‘the other's other’.”

Apart from this critical analysis of the latent confrontation between the East and the West, the collection includes Zabel’s articles on the peculiarities of modernist art in the former Soviet block, where it would sometimes become the official, state-promoted art, as well as texts on particular artistic phenomena in the region, such as Neue Slovenische Kunst, IRWIN group, and others.

A Russian translation of “‘We’ and Others,” one of the articles in the collection, was published in Khudozhestvenny Journal (Moscow Art Magazine), no. 22 (1998). This issue, dedicated to the art of Eastern Europe, is also available in Garage Library.

The Art of Eastern Europe. A Selection of Works from the International and National Collections of Moderna galerija Ljubljana

Vienna: Folio, 2001

All works exhibited in Grammar of Freedom/Five Lessons come from the Arteast 2000+ Collection of the Moderna Galerija, Ljubljana. The collection was founded in the 1990s and became available to the public in 2000, the year when Manifesta took place in the Slovenian capital. Garage Library holds a catalogue of selected works from the collection, also containing several essays that are interesting in their own right. As if engaging in a debate with Igor Zabel (a consultant for Arteast 2000+), Boris Groys in his essay “Back from the Future” states that the unique and particular nature of Eastern European art has yet to be explored by cultural studies. He further develops this idea in “Overcoming Variety,” featured in his Politics of Poetics collection published by Garage and also be available in the Library.

Polish art historian Piotr Piotrowski discusses the notion of frame as a hermeneutics tool in art analysis, allowing us to see beyond a superficial all-leveling perspective that ignores contextual details. “It may be that art all over the world … speaks similar languages, but in fact it communicates diverse meanings dictated by the ‘frame’,” Piotrowski writes. “The language of Balka and Kabakov only seemingly resembles that which is being used in the center. If we approach it within our own ‘frame’ … then we will see its proper meanings.”

East Art Map: Contemporary Art and Eastern Europe (edited by IRWIN)

London: Afterall, 2006

This publication is one of the first books in the series initiated by the influential UK Afterall magazine. Drawing a line under an ambitious survey started by IRWIN art group in 2001, this massive edition includes contributions by 24 curators and art critics, who were asked to compile a list of up to ten contemporary artists from their home countries. Images of their works make up the first part of the book, while critical comments and general overviews of art scenes in each of the countries follow in the second. The third part consists of critical essays, with authors including Charles Esche, Boris Groys, Igor Zabel, Slavoj Žižek, Jürgen Harten, and others. “We do not seek to establish some ultimate truth,” IRWIN write in the introduction. “On the contrary, our aims are much more modest and, we hope, more practical: to organise the fundamental relationship between Eastern European artists where these relations have not been organised, to draw a map and create a table.”

Primary Documents: A Sourcebook for Eastern and Central European Art Since the 1950s

 New York: Museum of Modern Art/London: MIT Press, 2002

This collection of essays and documents aims not at providing a comprehensive overview of contemporary art in Eastern Europe, but at showing the context and polyphony of voices in the regional art scenes throughout the last 50 or 60 years. This is why most of the essays provided are by artists – Braco Dimitrijević, Nedko Solakov, Sanja Iveković, Katarzyna Kozyra, Yuri Sobolev, and Andrey Monastyrsky – the immediate witnesses of the events and processes that are being discussed. Apart from the necessary exploration of the underground art scene, which one would expect to find here, the publication also focuses on the new developments in the “conflict between the East and the West,” such as were revealed by the controversy around the 1996 Interpol exhibition in Stockholm.

A more detailed account of the story behind Interpol can be found in “The Other” and the Different by one of the curators of the exhibition, Viktor Misiano. This book is also available at Garage Library. Another publication on the legendary event, INTEЯPOL: The Art Show Which Divided East and West, donated to the Library by IRWIN, brings together historical evidence and critical analyses of the exhibition.

Primary Documents contributors also include Milan Knížák, Geta Brătescu, Artur Żmijewski, Ekaterina Degot and Slavoj Žižek.

Contemporary Photography from Eastern Europe: History, Memory, Identity

 Milan: Skira, 2009

The editors of this album extend their definition of Eastern Europe further than one might expect, including in their selection works by artists from Georgia and Turkey. However, the album also includes works by Ivan Moudov, Milica Tomić and Mladen Stilinović, artists featured in Grammar of Freedom. Although the publication is dedicated specifically to photography, the medium is also understood quite broadly, with video works appearing amongst photographs. Most of the featured works reflect on certain political moments or the general historical context of Eastern European countries: the war in the Balkans, the traumatic break from the totalitarian past (Zbigniew Libera, Iosif Király), the violence of the state (Maja Bajevic), and the forming of a national identity accompanied by the rise of local nationalism (Alexandra Croitoru).

 

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