Postmodernism and the Postsocialist Condition
Ales Erjavec
Farairan Art Quarterly, No. 11
One
One of the fundamental artistic categories of the twentieth century was avant-garde art. Although it was not necessarily linked to the political avant-gardes (and social theories, philosophies of history, and ideologies on which they relied) it shared with them its belief and orientation towards the future.
In 1979 Jean-François Lyotard launched the thesis of the end of master narratives.1 This observation applies well to all the major ideologies of the previous century, be they of political or other kinds. It is generally agreed that the postmodern or the postindustrial age, or the epoch of multinational capital, to follow Ernst Mandel and Fredric Jameson,2 is also (although not exclusively) an age of pluralism. Numerous authors, ranging from Zygmunt Bauman3 to Wolfgang Welsch4 have in the eighties praised the historic potentials of this new age, on the verge of which at least we stand today.
The historical or classical artistic avant-gardes aimed at the social totality and as a matter of principle attempted to transcend the realm of pure art they viewed as academic, bourgeois, and passéist activity, to use an expression favored by the Italian futurists. The same observation applies to essential segments of the so-called “Russian experiment in art,” especially to constructivism, suprematism and productivism. The desire to bridge the abyss between art and “life” caused new artistic forms to emerge, forms which appear today no less authoritarian and dogmatic than those carried out in the name of political revolutionary aims.5 It was exactly this revolutionary fervor, this desire for exclusiveness, that made the historical artistic avant-gardes what they were and what they remained: an original, creative and unconditional art form, which often late, but no less thoroughly, determined or influenced much of the twentieth century art and culture. In this respect the artistic avant-gardes of the First World War period fully belonged to, and shared, the principles and norms of the master narratives of that century: they were equally exclusive, adamant and uncompromising in their self-promotion. Even some of the neoavant-garde activities from the sixties and early seventies fit into this scenario; the performances of the Austrian “actionist” artist Hermann Nitsch for example, or those of the German performance artist Günther Brus, revealed not only extreme violence but a similar uncompromising fervor as well.
Lyotard diagnosed well a segment of the massive social and historical upheaval represented by the emergence of postmodernity and postmodernism, on the one hand, and, on the other, the end of the global political polarization, the visible ending of which was the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Was it, under such conditions, still possible to carry out “total” artistic activities which would promote and implement the same rigorous and uncompromising standards as did the historical avant-gardes and perhaps some of the neoavant-gardes after the Second World War? I wish to argue that although such ideas were present (also possibly because the previous artistic avant-gardes represented a familiar and acceptable ideal) and although their authors promoted a similar uncompromising rigor, they neither were nor could they be implemented.
What I shall speak about is art of the transitional period from socialism (especially its late stage) into postsocialism in various European and other countries, i.e. countries which were in the past designated as communist, be they in Europe, America or Asia. From the early seventies on, in some of these countries a specific art emerged, which often followed the traditions of the historical avant-gardes (and often explicitly referred to, or quoted from them) and which, like its “Western” counterpart, furthermore fulfilled most of the preconditions which the Polish aesthetician Stefan Morawski, for example, lists as those typical for historical (or what he calls “classical”) avant-gardes: “The first: […] The principle of mimesis is toppled, categories and kinds of art [are] mixed, the category of beauty [is] rejected;” […]
The second: official outlooks are questioned. […]
The fourth: there is no avant-garde without intentional underscored self-reflection, without theoretical statements. […]
The fifth: the avant-garde operates in a group fashion. […]
The sixth: the avant-garde is marked with a style of life filled with blasphemy and scandal which extends its real attitudes and contestation drives into the domain of manners.”6
From among the six essential distinguishing traits of the classical avant-gardes there is but one which contemporary “avant-garde” art lacks. It is the third on Morawski’s list, i.e. the rejection of “artistic and non-artistic tradition, i.e. fascination with the present and orientation on the future.”7 It is exactly the lack of this trait which distinguishes art discussed here from all previous artistic avant-gardes of the twentieth century. This art is no longer oriented toward the future nor is it fascinated with the present: it gazes toward the past instead, borrows and appropriates, quotes and alludes to. It comments upon, not sanctions, nor does it attempt to assist in changing the world (which, I should add, does not prevent it occasionally to assist in changing it nonetheless). It, moreover, while in most cases possessing all five distinguishing characteristics noted above, “does not require and does not strive to attain exclusivity. Even more: the very desire to attain such a status would make such avant-garde art obsolete.”8 While many authors called such contemporary art simply “postmodern,” surprisingly few attempted to be more precise and to point out the distinguishing characteristics of these contemporary similes of the traditional avant-gardes. Art critics who were attentive to these differences have included such art within the “trans-avant-garde”9 and “post-avant-garde”10 art, although such designations point mainly to the transgressive character of this type of postmodern art and not to the art possessing accentuated politicized features which for the most part distinguish this socialist variant from its Western counterparts. In my view such specific art occurred in various socialist countries between 1972 and the beginning of the nineties and hence represents a distinct form of
postmodernism. I shall call such art postsocialist art.11
Two
In his analysis of recent and contemporary Russian culture Mikhail Epstein observes that the “‘communist future” has become a thing of the past, while the feudal and bourgeois “past” approaches us from the direction where we had expected to meet the future.”12 Such an understanding of the past and present strongly separates the cultural ambiance of twentieth century Russia from that of other “communist” countries: in Europe the majority of them experienced the Enlightenment and predominantly perceived themselves as a part of the West, accepting its belief in historical progress and the possibility of infinite development often identified with modernity: “In the vision of modernity, only the starting-point was more or less firmly fixed. The rest, precisely because of its undetermined character, appeared as a field of design, action and struggle.”13
Postmodernism, although today already somewhat out of fashion, is a key term in my discussion of specific art forms and trends in postsocialist countries. In practically all instances postmodernism in postsocialist countries was apprehended as a positive phenomenon. It was met with some hesitancy in the case of Cuba for it was identified with the culture of the United States; in China too, postmodernism carried a somewhat ambiguous meaning, because of its complicated relation to modernism and modernity.
Postsocialism, in the sense in which I employ the term, is the equivalent of the “first transition, away from communism,”14 of the period defined more by a lack of description than by a firm conceptual designation. This postsocialism is highly reminiscent of the notion of postmodernity as suggested by the Polish-British sociologist Zygmunt Bauman: “[T]he only solid and indubitable accomplishment of the post-modernist debate has been thus far the proclamation of the end of modernism. […] What has happened in recent years could be articulated as the appearance of a vantage point which allows the view of modernity itself as an enclosed object, an essentially complete product, an episode of history, with an end as much as a beginning.”15
What happened in European socialist countries was a slow and initially almost imperceptible crack in their social and political fabric. In the huge, vast and centrally controlled Soviet Union it began in the early seventies and continued in the eighties under Gorbachev. It ended in the late eighties when social changes were not only experienced in everyday life, but also officially and politically sanctioned. Such a process, although much accelerated, occurred in the eighties in countries ranging from Czechoslovakia and Poland, to Hungary and Bulgaria, with the few still existing exceptions relevant for the topic of this lecture (Cuba, the remnant of the former Yugoslavia and, with reservations, China) tackling the problem of “leaving socialism behind without really leaving it behind.”
I am mentioning these well-known facts and issues to highlight that countries such as the Soviet Union, the former Soviet bloc countries of Europe, Yugoslavia, and even Cuba and China, in spite of existing on three different continents, possessing different histories, cultures, and mutual relations (or, rather, in the period of late socialism an increasing lack thereof), nonetheless possessed certain common features, one of them often also being the art that emerged at the time of the disintegration of their previous political and social systems. This art strongly resembled that of traditional twentieth century avant-gardes and was frequently also designated by that name. If in the recent years many of these countries shared very similar problems such as a crisis of values, a loss of identity, commercialisation, nationalistic ideas and a resurgence of sympathy for the former political system, it may also be valid to claim something else: since at that historical point which in these countries marks the beginning of their “transition” into capitalism these countries also possessed a similar cultural and ideological legacy, from it emerged similar kinds of post-utopian artistic endeavours that were not limited to socialist realism which until then in most of them was the official artistic doctrine. During the late socialist period such endeavours emanated spontaneously and often with no visible mutual connection. During this relatively short period, which in some countries was limited to a decade and more, in others to a few years, artists and their works, a little like at the time of the October Revolution, Paris of 1968, or the late sixties in the United States, sometimes played a crucial and visible social and political role.
There were, of course, exceptions: in East Germany the only artists who developed postmodern art were those who emigrated to West Germany, starting there the “Neue Wilde” movement. In Poland the political and economic crisis in the eighties was so severe that postmodernism was only a vague idea, more potent among philosophers and writers than among visual artists. The result was that there the legacy of the non-politicised conceptual art from the sixties remained almost intact well into the late eighties and even into the early nineties. In Czechoslovakia after the Prague Spring of 1968 the regime was so oppressive that very few visual artists dared to invest their works with overt political views. The Czech artist Milan Knízák was jailed almost three hundred times, while the other prime Czech exception, Milan Kunc, lived in the West since 1969. It was instead up to the writers, such as Milan Kundera, and playwrights, such as Václav Havel, to criticise old political ideas and promote new ones.
“The most sublime image that emerged in the political upheavals of the last years—and the term “sublime” is to be conceived here in the strictest Kantian sense—was undoubtedly the unique picture from the time of the violent overthrow of Ceausescu in Romania: the rebels waving the national flag with the red star, the Communist symbol, cut out, so that instead of the symbol standing for the organising principle of the national life, there was nothing but a hole in its center. It is difficult to imagine a more salient index of the “open” character of a historical situation “in its becoming,” as Kierkegaard would have put it, of that intermediate phase when the former Master-Signifier, although it has already lost its hegemonic power, has not yet been replaced by the new one. [… T]he masses who poured into the streets of Bucharest “experienced” the situation as “open,” […] they participated in the unique intermediate state of passage from one discourse (social link) to another, when, for a brief, passing moment, the hole in the big Other, the symbolic order, became visible. The enthusiasm which carried them was literally the enthusiasm over this hole, not yet hegemonized by any positive ideological project; all ideological appropriations (from the nationalistic to the liberal-democratic) entered the stage afterwards and endeavoured to “kidnap” the process which originally was not their own.”16
This is an essential part of the “postsocialist condition”: the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, the subsequent fall of the regimes of various European state socialist countries and their communist parties—all being caused by an ideological, political and social vacuity of the ruling utopian political doctrine, a doctrine which exceeded plain political ideology, for it held in its grasp the whole of the social field.
When the “state” or “actually existing” socialism finally transpired, an openness characterized mostly by an indeterminacy set in, marking “the unique intermediate state of passage from one discourse (social link) to another,” as Slavoj Zizek defines this break from the previous symbolic order into a new one. In this intermediate period, what the same author calls, borrowing the term from Fredric Jameson, the “vanishing mediator,” enables the change from one political system into another to take place, but is itself lost, transmogrified and marginalized in this very same dialectical process. Such a fate was destined for the majority of artists under discussion and also for much of the art they created during this intermediate period: whether we are talking of Apt-Art of the 1982-84 period in the Soviet Union, the works from 1980-82 by the Slovenian music group Laibach, or the conceptual and politicized work from the early sixties by Milan Knízák in Czechoslovakia, none was ever capable of reinstituting the aura of its original appearance of a unique “event” in Lyotard’s sense of the word.
Three
The five main features of the art under discussion are: (a) conceptualism; (b) use of postmodernist techniques and procedures; (c) profuse use of socialist and communist imagery; (d) use of national heritage and of folk, traditional and mass culture; and (e) frequent use of what I designate as the “binary” artistic approach. This list is neither exhaustive, nor do we find all the listed features manifested in all the art under consideration. It is worth adding that in many cases, such as the NSK organization in Slovenia, the Sots-Art in Russia, the subREAL group in Romania, the Generation of the Eighties in Cuba and so on, we witness organized activities somewhat resembling those of classical avant-gardes.
From the further examples it will become clear that most of the art discussed herein appertains to the visual arts in the broadest sense of the word (painting, installations, photography, design and video), but that it can also be found in other areas: in Russia in poetry, fiction and music (the group Pop Mekhanika), in Slovenia in the music of the group Laibach which forms the core of the Neue Slowenische Kunst organization, segments of which also work in theater and the cinema, or in Hungary in the music of the BP group. In most cases different genres are combined; in the case of painting very often image is supplemented by words, a combination that supports the designation of much of this art as conceptual art.
(a) Historically speaking, the majority of artists under consideration started as conceptual artists and many have remained that until today: Sándor Pinczehelyi from Pécs in Hungary (born 1939) or Mladen Stilinovic (born 1947) from Zagreb (Croatia), for example. Others, such as the Slovenian group Irwin or the Romanian group subREAL have exhibited works and carried out performances which could legitimately be called conceptual. The same holds true of post-1979 Chinese artists. Much of the Russian art under consideration has also often been called conceptual especially in the eighties.17 This art is practically the only one that has so far been extensively theoretically analyzed and grouped under a relatively uniform designation.
A perceptive argument for the designation of the art that I discuss here as conceptual, illuminating at the same time the reasons for ascribing such a weight to this notion and difficulties when attempting to delimit it, is offered by Mikhail Epstein: “Conceptualists readily elaborate such general themes as “the communist conquers his inner hesitations and boldly leads his comrades to increased labor productivity.” Since no self-respecting Soviet writer would limit himself or herself to such truisms, he or she would try very hard to describe this communist and his comrades as real people, with many plausible details, including their foibles and personal weaknesses. Nevertheless, this character essentially remains only a vehicle for some predetermined idea or ideological tenet. Conceptualists grasped and unmasked the artificial nature, not only of Soviet literature, but of Soviet reality itself. Their works cannot be reduced to concepts, only because they are willfully and fundamentally deduced from them. […] They create excellent works of bad art that purposely and often masterfully imitate the typical Soviet range of ideas.”18
What is typical for most of these groups, individuals and works is precisely the feature described above by Epstein: the literal use of socialist imagery and of its ideological discourse. These artists and authors don’t utilize the common “dissident” procedure of poetically or metaphorically criticizing the extant social and ideological reality, they don’t utilize “Aesopian” language to express in a veiled form their personal views, political opinions and criticisms that cannot be enunciated in the political realm, since therein such an articulation is prohibited or heavily sanctioned by the state. The conceptualist author whose work is described by Epstein uses a completely different artistic device and it is in this respect that he differs from previous Russian authors and artists, be they from pre-Soviet or Soviet times. Curiously enough we find the very same procedure used in many different late socialist countries, these ranging from Hungary, Romania and Slovenia to Cuba, with these authors or artists often having little or no knowledge of the works of the others.19 A good and early example of an artist employing the procedure of articulating a secondary discourse on the basis of the primary ideological discourse—but in the realm of painting—is the Hungarian artist Sándor Pinczehelyi. (Fig. 1 – Sándor Pinczehelyi, Hammer and Sickle, 1973.) In a simple black and white photograph “the artist keeps real objects, a real hammer and a real sickle in his hands, and strains the known political symbols to his body. His two hands are strictly crossed in front of his chest like in Egyptian representations; his face is framed by the sickle and the hammer. […] Pinczehelyi abolishes the symbol—by means of tautology—as he makes the abstract concept a concrete object. […]
Tautology completes the process of defetishization: the sickle is nothing else than an ordinary sickle, the hammer is nothing else than an ordinary hammer.”20 In other words, what the Hungarian artist here carries out is “show the object itself,” reveal the meaningless materiality of the object which in the seventies representationally still functioned only in its symbolical emanation. By doing this Pinczehelyi engendered one of the early postmodern works, for postmodernism “consists not in demonstrating that the game works without an object, that the play is set in motion by a central absence, but rather in displaying the object directly, allowing it to make visible its own indifferent and arbitrary character. The same object can function successively as a disgusting reject and as a sublime, charismatic appartion: the difference, strictly structural, does not pertain to the “effective properties” of the object, but only to its place in the symbolic order.”21 Exactly the same procedure is that of Dmitri Prigov who in his Signature-Can (Fig. 2 – Dmitri Prigov, Signature Can, 1977-78) presents a metal can covered with signatures with a little sign on top reading “A can of signatures for the complete and unconditional disarmament of America.” It is again a political gesture which is being revealed in its materiality: a can of signatures is but a harmless and pitiful can which in its artistic emanation reveals its total ideological finality.
With his “can” Prigov carries out the procedure described above in two ways. First, the can desymbolizes the otherwise potentially political signification of such an object by exhibiting it in its materiality and by showing its arbitrary character. In this respect the artistic procedure is just the opposite of that theoretically elaborated six decades earlier by the Russian formalists: their intent (and that of the Russian futurists) then being to show the poetic nature of everyday words, sounds and objects, to make us conscious of the originary poetic nature of words. In the case of postmodern art under discussion the procedure is just the reverse: contrary to Victor Shklovski and other Russian formalists the postmodern conceptual artists reveal the sheer material nature of objects devoured by ideological symbolization.
A procedure very similar to that of Pinczehelyi can be discerned in the paintings of Carlos Rodríguez Cárdenas (born 1962), who belongs to the “Second” or postmodern generation of Cuban artists. In his work To Build the Sky (Fig. 3 – Carlos Rodríguez Cárdenas, To Build the Sky, 1989) we see exactly what its title denotes: a wall of blue bricks, rising above the green rolling hills, thus visually depicting an ideological phrase or slogan. We are confronted with a materialization of the enunciated words. The metaphor is here, as in the case of Pinczehelyi’s hammer and sickle, taken seriously—literally. As Gerardo Mosquera observes, the artist “concentrates on appropriating the stereotyped slogans that inundate Cuban life, and placing them in new semantic settings by means of a process of ironic deconstruction.”22
Another feature of conceptual art from socialist countries is its preoccupation with words, captions and slogans. Words become real material objects in the paintings of Erik Bulatov, Aleksandr Kosolapov, Ilya Kabakov or Komar & Melamid, in accordance with the political slogan that ideas are a material force. In this respect too this postmodern or post-utopian art differs from its modernist and avant-garde predecessors: “In the formal respect, the Soviet post-utopian art of the 1970s is characterized above all by a renewed narrativity that runs counter to the avant-garde rejection of literariness and instead continues the narrativity of socialist realism.”23
In Bulatov’s case slogans intrude upon the inner subjective reality which is, in the artist’s view, the authentic reality. (Fig. 4 – Erik Bulatov, Not To Be Leaned On, 1987.) They represent the unavoidable reality of political ideology which permeates all socialist existence. As when Lenin claims in his essay “What Is To Be Done?” that there is no space without ideology, i.e. ideology is either socialist or bourgeois, similarly Kabakov’s paintings, those of Wang Guangyi (Fig. 5 – Wang Guangyi, “Great Castigation Series: Coca Cola,” 1993) or Milan Kunc’s (Fig. 6 – Milan Kunc, Consumerists of the World, Unite! 1978) imply that the symbolic universes of capitalism and socialism function according to a similar economy of the sign.
(b) In its most easily recognizable in late socialist countries as a simple transposition and appropriation of Western or First World postmodernism. It, furthermore, also existed in its more local or specific form—and it is this which is my main concern here. What we therefore unquestionably encounter in socialist countries is the profuse use of postmodernist techniques and procedures; quite often artists or critics designate art which results from them by the name of postmodernism as well.
One of the features typical of postmodernism is the use of intertextuality and remake. Although the first term is mostly applied to fiction, it is also useful in the realm of visual arts and other artistic genres. In the major part of the art under discussion works from various periods are profusely employed and in certain cases whole works are remade. The latter is true of the Belgrade artist Goran Djordjevic who copied not only individual works, but a whole series of them or whole exhibitions.
Djordjevic was also an artist who strongly influenced the Slovenian group Irwin and the music group Laibach, which was in a habit of adapting not only songs by other musicians, but whole albums, Let it be by the Beatles, for example.24
Copying the works of other artists was a common practice in many countries: not only Goran Djordjevic, but the Slovenian group of painters Irwin (which was founded in 1984) practiced this procedure as well. Irwin not only used works by Marcel Duchamp, René Magritte, or Slovenian artists and copied their works or introduced them as motifs within their own paintings and installations, it also consciously revealed the problematic relationship between the original and the copy and between art and its broader political context or background. The group of designers New Collectivism, another member group of the Neue Slowenische Kunst organization, made remakes of posters, the best known among them being the one to honor the 1987 Youth Festival in Belgrade: when it had already been selected by the federal jury as the official poster of this all-Yugoslav celebration of the birthday of the Yugoslav president Tito, a member of the jury discovered that the chosen work was a remake of a Nazi work from 1937 by Richard Klein entitled “The Third Reich.” (Fig. 7 – New Collectivism, The Day of Youth poster, 1987.)
Yet another series of postmodern remakes are some of Milan Kunc’s works from the period of 1974-79 which he calls “Embarassing” or “Painful” Realism in which he employs everything from the old masters to Pop Art and communist imagery.
(c) The most obvious feature of art under discussion is the exuberant use of communist and socialist imagery. In modernism, culture and art in the European socialist countries were divided into the official ones and those called the unofficial, dissident, critical, etc. Within this modernist framework the ideological symbols or slogans, for example, would either occur only in a satirical context or their presence would be perceived as proof that the artist who employed them in his work himself succumbed to political propaganda. As the well-known Hungarian modernist painter Imre Bak said to me in 1995, “art, if it is to remain art, should never have a political function.”
The art I am discussing here carries out a different agenda: it uses political slogans and statements, the visual depiction thereof included, official portraits, symbols and icons in an infinite number of ways, and eclectically mixes them. Aleksandr Kosolapov for example in his painting A Malevich Page (1986), creates a copy of the well-known socialist realist picture Stalin and Voroshilov in the Kremlin (1938) by Aleksandr Gerasimov, with the word “Malevich” executed in the manner of the Marlboro logotype, superimposed on the three-dimensional painting. The same device is employed in numerous Chinese works from the early nineties on, or in those of the group Irwin, in its 1987 painting The Red Districts, for example: the work is a remake of one of the few Slovenian works of socialist realism which was, although made by the Irwin group, afterwards signed by its original author, the painter Janez Knez. (Fig. 8 – Irwin, Red Districts, 1987.)
What is at stake in the Red Districts painting is just as much a relation to the past as the issue of the original and the copy. In the paintings and installations by Kosolapov, in many works by Komar & Melamid, in certain works by Sándor Pinczehelyi, those of Cuban artists such as Flavio Garciandía or René Francisco, or in Chinese Political Pop and Rouge Cynicism, the aim is more playful. Russian Sots Art especially, inaugurated by Komar & Melamid in 1972 and overtly related to Soviet socialist realism and American Pop Art, aims at amusing, not spiritually heightening our awareness as is the case with Erik Bulatov, Ilya Kabakov or Oleg Vasilev.
The hammer and sickle are to be found in the works of the various artists already mentioned. To be more exact, in most of these instances the hammer and the sickle are the works themselves. Further such cases are those of Leonid Sokov who in 1988 created his own pair made out of fur, of Milan Kunc who in 1979 made loaves of bread in their shape (and titled them “The Food of Tomorrow”), or Andrei Filippov who in 1989 exhibited them on a table as eating utensils.
Innumerable Lenins, Stalins, and red stars employed in installations, paintings or sculptures are applied in the same manner as the Pop Art icons and objects of mass consumption in the West. In the socialist countries Pop Art presented a huge creative impetus for it introduced simultaneously the critical and the un-authoritarian treatment of political ideology. The abundance of works with these motifs can also be explained by commercial aspirations and expectations, although this predominantly applies to art of the two biggest countries under discussion: the Soviet Union (or, to be more precise, Russia) and later China.
(d) In 1981 Sándor Pinczehelyi painted three chilies (for which Hungary is famous in Europe) red, white and green—in the Hungarian national colors. Two years later he did the same with three sickles, exhibiting them on a floor covered with straw, then painted three chicken eggs in a straw nest and then even the grass and the trees, naming these works consecutively Sickles from the Great RWG Farm, A Nest with RWG Eggs and The Trees of the Great RWG Farm. The “RWG” stood for “red, white and green,” the artist imposing over them, by the act of painting the Hungarian tricolor on all these objects, a symbolic national ownership. The gesture was, of course, ironical, but it nonetheless expressed the perceptive observation that the national components of the lived world were becoming increasingly important and were replacing the previous universal and transnational symbols of the hammer and sickle which, in Pinczehelyi’s photograph from 1973, were devoid of any national appropriation. Similar gestures are those of Russian or Chinese artists using their national alphabets, appropriating in such a narrative manner the motifs and at the same time exhibiting their “Russian” or “Chinese” nationality.
An idea similar to Pinczehelyi’s is evident from the work of Flavio Garciandía in which “the phallic anthropologization of the hammer and sickle, aside from being an allusion to perestroika as a revitalization of the USSR, also represents a “third world” appropriation of a communist emblem.”25 (Fig. 9 – Flavio Garciandía, untitled, 1989.)
A similar, albeit less playful gesture, was that of the members of the Laibach group who in 1989, in a video clip for their music album, displayed themselves in front of the Aljaz Tower, a metal shelter on top of Mt. Triglav, the highest mountain in Slovenia and its national symbol. The Aljaz Tower was shown wrapped in a black flag with a cogwheel and Malevich’s cross in the middle—the trademark of the Laibach group. In this manner the group symbolically appropriated the Slovenian national icon.
(e) In the spring of 1968 Jean-François Lyotard held at Nanterre a seminar devoted to political posters. On June 26 he thus discussed a work which is of seminal importance for the interpretation of some of the art discussed here. Lyotard was especially interested in a poster by the Russian avant-garde artist El Lissitzky, the Street Poster (1919-20) which reads: “Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge.” (Fig. 10 – El Lissitzky, The Street Poster, 1919-20.) The work itself, which was intended for political propaganda (the Red Wedge being the Red Army and the Whites the counter-revolutionaries), was also one of El Lissitzky’s first abstract works. The poster represents a paramount example of the juxtaposition of the textual and the figurative, with each element retaining its individual significance as in a binary opposition. The poster as a whole, beside being a work of political propaganda, also exhibits an overt aesthetic function. Lyotard acutely notices that there is a plastic paradox in Lissitzky’s poster, for “the written becomes form, the figure appears to become the text of forms. There is a deconstruction of letters and words, on one side, which bears not only upon the signified (‘beat with the wedge’), but upon the graphism as well, dealt with in a plastic relation with the space: it is therefore a figural work.”26
It may be that one of the reasons for Lyotard’s preoccupation with political posters lay in the historical circumstances of his seminar, which could bear slightly upon my own topic, for in all these cases—Paris of 1968, late and postsocialism, as well as Lissitzky’s own time—some form of avant-garde art was significantly involved in social and political events. But why is it possible that El Lissitzky’s poster still carries such an impact? Why is it that its simple graphisms convey an excess of signification and why does this work allow us to view it as a pure ideological statement, on the one hand, and as a pure aesthetic object, on the other, with the two never meeting in a single space, for this would destroy the perception and reception of each of them? The effect produced by the poster resembles visual paradoxes where, by changing our inner perceptual vantage point, we see the same object in a different way or as a different one. In the case of the poster (and many other works by the same artist or by Malevich, for example) the aesthetic effect engendered by pure geometric forms augments the ideological effect of the written statement and vice versa. The image and the narrative exist in two distinct spaces, in the mentioned poster, for example, they intersect only, producing in our perception not a unified, but a double or parallel effect.
It is this effect which strongly resembles that achieved by numerous late socialist artists. Isn’t the procedure actually very similar to Erik Bulatov’s juxtaposition of a three-dimensional perspectival space of the picture and a two-dimensional political slogan superimposed on it (Fig. 11 – Erik Bulatov, Glory to the USSR, 1975), or, in a somewhat different manner, to that employed by conceptualism as described by Epstein and enacted not only in fiction but in the visual artworks of Pinczehelyi, Garciandía or the subREAL group in Romania: in March 1990 (a few months after the fall of the Ceausescu dictatorship) subREAL exhibited in Bucharest portraits of the newly elected President Iliescu which “raised a controversial scandal and a dispute between those who suspected a new adulatory attitude and those who condemned the irreverent gesture. As usual, subREAL was misunderstood by everybody, and that was paradoxically satisfactory for this group.”27 With this exhibition subREAL purposefuly attained a paradoxical reception: one side (the official one) accused the group of mocking President Iliescu (the immediate successor to Ceausescu), implying hence a modernist critical or typically dissident stance, while the other, the “dissident” side, comprehended the gesture as an accolade to the regime.
Both interpretations, as long they strive to attain exclusiveness, are erroneous, of course; simultaneously they cannot be conceptually grasped as a whole, for they are incompatible. It is this effect at which also the subREAL group aims, i.e. to achieve an aesthetico-artistic/political effect by employing such a “binary” approach. Just as in Fichtean dialectics, where thesis and anti-thesis never reach a synthesis, here too both interpretations exist side by side: never coexisting in a conceptual sublimation, never attaining a unity, creating by this very gesture an abyss between the visual and the conceptual, an unrepresentable whole. “[T]he impotence of the imagination attests a contrario to an imagination striving to figure even that which cannot be figured, and that imagination thus aims to harmonize its object with that of reason—and that furthermore the inadequacy of the images is a negative sign of the immense power of the ideas. This dislocation of the faculties among themselves gives rise to the extreme tension (Kant calls it agitation) that characterizes the pathos of the sublime, as opposed to the calm feeling of beauty.”28
Perhaps the ceaseless fascination with suprematism and constructivism that we find in many socialist postmodernist artists and their simultaneous use of purely aesthetic and purely symbolic or politically symbolic forms stems from the employment of a similar procedure, of what Lyotard called the “plastic paradox,” or what Margarita Tupitsyn designated as “the visualization of verbal concepts,”29 finding its first applications in the works of the Russian classical avant-garde and then in postsocialist conceptual art.
Related phenomena are the performances and statements of music groups: in the eighties the St. Petersburg group Pop Mekhanika, for example, staged its concerts dressed as a military band, often persuading the audience that they in fact were an official Soviet orchestra. Laibach group from Slovenia, purportedly “one of the cleverest cultural manipulations since the Trojan horse,”30 by incessantly repeating ideological statements and reenacting totalitarian ritual at its extreme surpassed the ideological effects of the political populism of the late period of self-management socialism in Yugoslavia. By presenting itself since its inception in 1980 as an excessive simulacrum of political ideology it created a paradox similar to that of subREAL. Consider the following statements by Laibach: “Every art is an object of political manipulation except that which speaks the language of that manipulation itself” (1984); “Politics is the highest and an all-embracing art and we, who create contemporary Slovenian art, consider ourselves to be politicians” (1985); “Our freedom is the freedom of those who think alike” (1985); “We believe in God, but unlike Americans we don’t trust him” (1987).
Laibach at the same time collapsed socialist, fascist and nationalsocialist ideologies, the result being music which in Great Britain, for example, was equally well received—because of its ostensible political message—by the political left and by the nationalist far-right National Front.
Four
One of the better known tenets of Marxism was the belief that capitalism produces commodity fetishism. The aim of socialism was just the opposite: not the consumerism with which Western capitalism purportedly “bought” the worker, persuading him that ever new cars, refrigerators, washing machines and TV sets were “better value” than world revolution, but classless society instead, devoid of alienation, reified intersubjective relations, social insecurity, etc. The way in which socialism attempted to persuade its people to accept such a view was ideology, but ideology understood as class consciousness, a notion already developed by Lenin in his essay “What Is To Be Done?” from 1902. Therein Lenin distinguished between bourgeois and socialist ideology. In his view, “[t]he working class spontaneously gravitates towards Socialism, but the more widespread (and continuously revived in the most diverse forms) bourgeois ideology nevertheless spontaneously imposes itself upon the working class still more.”31
In the decades to follow socialist ideology became omnipresent. Only in late socialism did it become interesting for non-propagandistic artistic endeavors with these, by this very choice, being political endeavors as well. The Western art that opened the artistic door for the representation of this ideology was Pop Art with its irreverent treatment of American consumerism—with Andy Warhol’s serialized portraits, cans of Campbell’s soup and Brillo boxes. In its early phase in the sixties Pop Art carried a critical and anti-authoritarian potential and it was also for this reason that it became so influential in so many parts of the world. In early and late works of many of the artists under discussion its influence is obvious: in the Russian Sots Art, in Sándor Pinczehelyi’s works from the seventies and eighties and in Milan Kunc’s East Pop art, the “Ost-Pop.” It is immediately recognizable in the Chinese “Political Pop,” which started with Yu Youhan’s “Mao” series in 1989, and became most widely known with Wang Guangyi’s series “Great Castigation” which the latter began in 1990. In it, like in Aleksandr Kosolapov’s, Milan Kunc’s or Komar & Melamid’s works capitalist and communist imagery are placed side by side or, rather, one upon the other: Marlboro, Cadbury’s and Kodak signs are superimposed on political propaganda images from the times of the Cultural Revolution, creating a two-dimensional space wherein two symbolic realities meet: the East, represented by petrified and desubjectivized figures of socialist workers depicted in the style of revolutionary realism, and the West, “where the taste of Coca-Cola and McDonald’s was nearly unknown [and where] such signs assumed a purely abstract ideological role as signs of the West.”32
The parallel between the ideological universe of the socialist world and the consumerist universe of the capitalist one was most forcibly developed in the Soviet Union: “The most banal language in the Soviet Union is the ideological one. In the West there are the commercials, television, the giant flood of images. Therein too it is a question of a language of banalities. This language of the western truisms can describe the social space equally well as the language of ideology in the Soviet Union.”33
Today practically all of the art I just discussed is a past phenomenon. This does not signify that the artists are no longer there or that they have ceased to make art. On the contrary, but the art they produce now is of a very different nature than it was in the seventies, eighties or perhaps the first few years of the nineties. It is more international or, if it remains “national,” it often exploits its own socialist past. What I have therefore presented is an episode in the career of some artists, or, in some cases, their whole career. It is also a presentation of the rather unique art and culture of a certain period of recent history, created within the confines of the postsocialist condition.
The art that I discuss in this lecture has frequently been written about and exhibited, but so far there has been little attempt to search for a possible common denominator of the art that I am presenting here. In the Russian case such art was often referred to as “post-utopian”—which is a term introduced by the Russian philosopher Boris Groys. While this term has many merits, it covers much more than just the art that I discussed in this lecture for it also applies to art that is still emerging today. My basic argument, on the contrary is, that the specific variant of postmodern art discussed in this talk is limited to the period of the disintegration of socialism, that is, to the period between the demise of socialism and the change of that political order into parliamentary democracy. In other words, this art, like that of the classical avant-gardes and even modernism as such, is today a past phenomenon. It thrives under conditions of increased ideological and political pressure and only under such circumstances it is possible that such art and the artists creating it attain politically such an important social position as they did in the periods of socialism and postsocialism.
To explain this we have to take into account political philosophy, especially Claude Lefort’s analysis of totalitarian society.34 Let me limit myself here to the observation that in a totalitarian society the locus of the single political party is simultaneously the locus of all the power within that society. Since culture and art are considered special social realms where freedom is allowed (Claude Lévi-Strauss once called culture a “natural reserve”) in a totalitarian society culture and art become a privileged social realm in which ideas which in a democratic society are enunciated in the parliament, the media, etc., are here enunciated in art and literature which thus become immensely significant. Once society becomes, so to say, “normal,” art and culture loose their special role and hence their privileged political position. This, then, is the reason why this type of art is no longer with us (while the post-utopian is) for it exists neither when there is no freedom of expression nor when there is a lot of it. In the first case we get no or very little art—except the official one—while in the second we get contemporary neoconceptual depoliticized art shaped by the big galleries and their curators.
1 Cf. Jean-Franois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. G. Bennington and B. Massuni (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984).
_2 Cf. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991). On Jameson’s use of Mandel’s theory see esp. 35-6.
3 Zygmunt Bauman, Legislators and Interpreters (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987).
4 Cf. esp. Wolfgang Welsch, Unsere postmoderne Moderne (Weinheim: UCH Acta humaniora, 1987); “Modernité et postmodernité,” Les Cahiers de Philosophie, no. 6 (Automne 1988), 21-31.
5 See Boris Groys, The Total Art of Stalinism, trans. C. Rougle (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).
6 Stefan Morawski, “On the Avant-garde, Neo-avant-garde and the Case of Postmodernism,” Literary Studies in Poland, Vol. XXI, (1989), 85-7.
7 Ibid., 85.
8 Ales Erjavec, “Postmodernism and the Artistic Avant-Gardes,” La modernidad como estetica. XII congreso internacional de estética, (Madrid: Instituto de estetica y teoría de las artes, 1993), 166.
9 Cf. Achille Bonito Oliva, The International Trans-Avantgarde (Milano: Giancarlo Politi, 1982).
10 “All the avant-gardes of the past believed that humanity was going somewhere, and it was their joy and duty to discover the new land and see that people arrived there on time; the Post-Avant-Garde believes that humanity is going in several directions at once.” — Charles Jencks, “The Post-Avant-Garde,” Art and Design. The Post-Avant-Garde; Profile 4 (London: Academy Editions, 1987), 20.
11 Cf. Ales Erjavec, “Post-modernism and the Post-socialist Condition,” in Cultural Dilemmas of Post-Communist Societies, eds. Aldona Jawowska and Marian Kempny (Warsaw: IFiS Publishers, 1994), 101-104; “Avant-Garde and the Retro-Garde,” Issues in Contemporary Culture, no. 1 (Maastricht, April 1995), 21-8; “Postmodernism and the Postsocialist Condition,” M’ARS, Vol. VIII, no. 1-2 (Ljubljana, 1996), 52-8; “El Postmodernismo y la Condicion Postsocialista,” Estética e Historia del Arte (Santiago: Facultad de Artes, Universidad de Chile, 1999), 41-73; “Postsocialism in Art and Culture: The Visual Arts,” Proceedings of the 1999 Annual Meeting of the American Society for Aesthetics, Pacific Division (Pacific Grove, CA: ASA, 1999), 85-98; Postmodernism and the Postsocialist Condition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).
12 Mikhail N. Epstein, After the Future. The Paradoxes of Postmodernism & Contemporary Russian Culture, transl. with an intr. by Anesa Miller Pogacar (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1995), xi.
13 Bauman, op. cit., 116.
14 Leslie Holmes, Post-Communism: An Introduction (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997), 63.
15 Bauman, op. cit., 125 and 117.
16 Slavoj Zizek, Tarrying with the Negative (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 1-2.
17 Numerous authors use this notion interchangeably. One of the more important exhibitions of Soviet art also bore this title. —See the publication by the same title: Between Spring and Summer. Soviet Conceptual Art in the Era of Late Communism, ed. David A. Ross (Boston: MIT Press, 1990).
18 Epstein, op. cit., 202.
19 The paramount exception in this regard is China, where “Political Pop” occurred only in 1989, at a time when similar art from the Soviet Union was already well-known.
20 Lóránd Hegyi, “Sándor Pinczehelyi’s Emblematic Art,” in Imre Bukta, Sándor Pinczehelyi, Géza Samu. Ungheria (Venezia: XLIII La Biennale di Venezia, 1988), unpaginated.
21 Slavoj Zizek, Looking Awry. An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991), 143.
22 Gerardo Mosquera, in The Nearest Edge of the World. Art and Cuba Now (Brookline, MA: Polarities, 1990), 44.
23 Groys, op. cit., 94.
24 Laibach, Let it be (London: Mute Records, 1988).
25 Gerardo Mosquera, “The 14 Sons of William Tell,” in No Man is an Island (Pori, Finland: Pori Art Museum Publications, 1990), 47.
26 Jean-François Lyotard, Dérive à partir de Marx et Freud (Paris: U.G.E., 1973), 302.
27 Clin Dan, “Art + Politics = No Art / No Politics,” in New Observations, no. 91 (September/October 1992) 7.
28 Jean-François Lyotard, “The sublime and the avant-garde,” in The Lyotard Reader, ed. Andrew Benjamin (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 203-4.
29 Margarita Tupitsyn, “On some sources of Soviet Conceptualism,” in Nonconformist Art. The Soviet experience 1956-1986, eds. Alla Rosenfeld and Norton T. Dodge (London: Thames and Hudson, 1995), 304.
30 Performance Magasine, quoted on the cover of the Laibach LP, Opus dei (London: Mute Records, 1987).
31 V.I. Lenin, What Is To Be Done? (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1973), 51.
32 Boris Groys, “Milan Kunc. Cheerful Post-Modernism,” in Milan Kunc, ed. Pavel Li_ka (Köln: Edition Cantz, 1992), 25.
33 Erik Bulatov, “Ich bin überzeugt, daß der Raum der Kunst und der Raum unseres Lebens zwei verschiedene Räume sind. Ein Gespräch mit Heinz Schütz,” Kunstforum, Vol. 106, March-April 1990, 258.
