Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960 9781526115607

Citation preview

As the first comprehensive survey of the subject, this text is essential for those in the field of performance studies, or those researching contemporary Eastern European art. It will also be of interest to those in Slavic studies, art history and visual culture. Amy Bryzgel is Senior Lecturer in Film and Visual Culture at the University of Aberdeen

Bryzgel

Cover image: KwieKulik, Activities for the Head: Three Acts, 1978, Lublin. Courtesy of Zofia Kulik

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

The first chapter casts a wide net over the beginning and development of performative practices in the East since the 1960s, citing seminal actions and happenings and early performances. The next four chapters address common themes undertaken by artists in the region: the body, gender, politics and identity and institutional critique. The author’s method is comparative, employing Piotr Piotrowski’s ‘horizontal art history’ to examine the centre from the perspective of the periphery. Bryzgel also examines performance art practices from a socio-historical and socio-political perspective, demonstrating how experimental art can serve as a litmus test for the limits of tolerance and prohibition in post-totalitarian communist Eastern Europe.

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

This volume presents the first comprehensive academic study of the history and development of performance art in the former communist countries of Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe since the 1960s. Covering twentyone countries and more than 250 artists, in addition to filling a lamentable gap in the literature on performance art and highlighting the diversity of practice across this very large and varied region of Europe, this text offers the following thesis: that artists from Eastern Europe were both connected to and independent of developments in the West, developing their performative and experimental work concurrently with artists in Western Europe and North America. 

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960 Amy Bryzgel

ISBN 978-1-7849-9422-8

9 781784 994228 www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

BRYZ000_PB.indd 1

17/01/2017 16:54

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

series editors

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Amelia G. Jones, Marsha Meskimmon Rethinking Art’s Histories aims to open out art history from its most basic­structures by series editors work that challenges the conventional periodisation and geographical foregrounding subfields traditional art Meskimmon history, and addressing a wide range of visual cultural forms Amelia G.ofJones, Marsha from the early modern period to the present.

Rethinking Histories aimsthe to impact open out art history from itson our understanding These booksArt’s will acknowledge of recent scholarship of the basic complex temporalities and cartographies emerged through centuries most structures by foregrounding work that have challenges of trade, political colonisation and the diasporic movement of people and theworld-wide conventional periodisation and geographical subfields of ideas acrossart national continental borders. traditional history,and and addressing a wide range of visual cultural forms from the early modern period to the present.

Also available in the series Art, museums and touch  Fiona Candlin These books willartwork: acknowledge the impact of recent scholarship on Anna Dezeuze (ed.) The ‘do-it-yourself’ Participation from fluxus to relational aesthetics  our understanding the and cartographies Fleshing out surfaces: of Skin in complex French arttemporalities and medicine, 1650–1850  Mechthild Fend The aestheticsthrough of the Armenian avant-garde: The journey the ‘painterly real’, thatpolitical have emerged centuries of world-wide trade, of political 1987–2004  Harutyunyan colonisationAngela and the diasporic movement of people and ideas The matter of miracles: Neapolitan baroque across national and continental borders.sanctity and architecture  Helen Hills The face of medicine: Visualising medical masculinities in late nineteenth-century Paris Mary Hunter Glorious catastrophe: Jack Smith, performance and visual culture  Dominic Johnson Otherwise: Imagining queer feminist art histories  Amelia Jones and Erin Silver (eds) After the event: New perspectives in art history  Charles Merewether and John Potts (eds) Photography and documentary film in the making of modern Brazil  Luciana Martins Women, the arts and globalization: Eccentric experience  Marsha Meskimmon and Dorothy Rowe (eds) Flesh cinema: The corporeal turn in American avant-garde film  Ara Osterweil After-affects|after-images: Trauma and aesthetic transformation in the virtual feminist museum  Griselda Pollock Vertiginous mirrors: The animation of the visual image and early modern travel Rose Marie San Juan The paradox of body, building and motion in seventeenth-century England  Kimberley Skelton The newspaper clipping: A modern paper object  Anke Te Heesen, translated by Lori Lantz Screen/space: The projected image in contemporary art  Tamara Trodd (ed.) Art and human rights: Contemporary Asian contexts  Caroline Turner and Jen Webb Timed out: Art and the transnational Caribbean  Leon Wainwright Performative monuments: Performance, photography, and the rematerialisation of public art Mechtild Widrich

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

Amy Bryzgel

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Amy Bryzgel 2017

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

The right of Amy Bryzgel to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester m1 7ja www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for isbn 978 1 7849 9421 1 hardback isbn 978 1 7849 9422 8 paperback First published 2017 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Typeset in Minion with Myriad display by Koinonia, Manchester

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document For Matt

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Contents

List of figures

page ix

Introduction

1

1 Sources and origins 2 The body 3 Gender 4 Politics and identity 5 Institutional critique Epilogue Select bibliography Index

10 103 165 223 298 338 340 346

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Figures

Milan Knížák, Short-Term Exhibition, 1962, Prague. Courtesy: page 15 Milan Knížák 1.2 Aktual Group, A Walk Around Novy Svet: A Demonstration for All 16 the Senses, 13 December 1964, Prague. Courtesy: Milan Knížák 1.3 Milan Knížák, Demonstration for One, 16 December 1964, Prague. 17 Courtesy: Milan Knížák 1.4 Tomislav Gotovac, Showing Elle, 1962, Zagreb. Courtesy: Zora and 20 Sarah Gotovac and the Tomislav Gotovac Institute 1.5 Tadeusz Kantor, in a performance of The Water Hen, 1972, The Poorhouse, Edinburgh. Courtesy: Richard Demarco and the 21 Richard Demarco Art Archive 1.6 Alex Mlynárčik, Eva’s Wedding, 1972, Žilina (Czechoslovakia/ 22 Slovakia). Courtesy: Alex Mlynárčik 1.7 Paul Neagu, Collecting Merits, 1968, Bucharest. Still from b/w film with sound, 10:04 min. © The Estate of Paul Neagu, All Rights 24 Reserved, DACS. Courtesy: Ivan Gallery, Bucharest 1.8 Tamás Szentjóby, Gábor Altorjay and Miklós Erdély, The Lunch: In Memoriam Batu Khan, 25 June 1966, Budapest. Courtesy: Tamás 25 St.Auby (Tamás Szentjóby) 1.9 Tomislav Gotovac, Happ: Naš-Happening, restaged version of a happening in 1968. Still from film An Accidental Life. Courtesy: 27 Zora and Sarah Gotovac and the Tomislav Gotovac Institute 1.10 Zvono, Sport and Art, 1986, Sarajevo. Courtesy: Sarajevo Centre 30 for Contemporary Art 1.11 Bálint Szombathy, The Trails, 1970 (reconstructed in 1974), Novi 31 Sad. Courtesy: Bálint Szombathy 1.12 Bálint Szombathy, Lenin in Budapest, 1972, Budapest. Photographic 32 performance. Courtesy: Bálint Szombathy 1.13 Milenko Matanović, Happening with a Vacuum Cleaner and a Plastic Tube in Zvezda Park, 1968, Ljubljana. Courtesy: Moderna 33 galerija, Ljubljana 1.1

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

x

Figures

1.14 OHO, Mount Triglav, 30 December 1968, Ljubljana. Courtesy: Moderna galerija, Ljubljana 1.15 IRWIN, Like to Like/Mount Triglav, 2004, Ljubljana. Color photograph, 199.5 x 168 x 7 cm. Photographic reconstruction of the group action Mount Triglav. Photo: Tomaž Gregorič. Courtesy: Galerija Gregor Podnar. A Cornerhouse Commission 1.16 Janez Janša, Janez Janša and Janez Janša, Mount Triglav on Mount Triglav, 2007, Mount Triglav, Slovenia. Triptych (detail). Photo: Gaja Repe. Courtesy: Janez Janša 1.17 OHO Group with Walter De Maria, 1970, Slovenia. Courtesy: Moderna galerija, Ljubljana 1.18 Dimitar Grozdanov, The Road, 1986, Turgovishte. Courtesy: ICA (Institute of Contemporary Art), Sofia 1.19 Collective Actions, Appearance, 1976, Izmailovsky Field, Moscow. Courtesy: Andrei Monastyrsky 1.20 TOTART, Golden Voluntary Sunday, 1985, Moscow. Courtesy: Natalia Abalakova and Anatoly Zhigalov 1.21 Mart Lille, Arvo Pärt and Toomas Velmet, Roundel of Cremona, 1968, Tallinn Writers’ House. Photo: Jüri Tenson. Courtesy: Archives of the Art Museum of Estonia 1.22 Jüri Okas, documentation of Birthday, 16 February 1971, Tallinn. Film still. Courtesy: Archives of the Art Museum of Estonia 1.23 Žalias Lapas, The Way, 10 December 1990, Vilnius. Courtesy: Džiugas Katinas 1.24 Post Ars, Zatyšiai, 1990, Kaunas. Courtesy: Česlovas Lukenskas 1.25 The artist Fripulia. Courtesy: Yuriy Zmorovich 1.26 Tamás Szentjóby performing Tomas Schmit’s Zyklus für Wasser­ eimer (Oder Flaschen), 24 February 1969, Budapest. Courtesy: Tamás Szentjóby 1.27 Neša Paripović, Examples of Analytical Sculpture, 1978. ­Photographic performance. Courtesy: Neša Paripović 1.28 Miroslav Miša Savić, Twenty-Four Hours, 1976, Belgrade. Courtesy: Miroslav Miša Savić 1.29 Raša Todosijević, Drinking Water – Inversions, Imitations and Contrasts, 19 April 1974, Belgrade. Courtesy: Raša Todosijević 1.30 Members of Student Culture Centre, Belgrade, 1971. Courtesy: Student Culture Centre Belgrade 1.31 Tomaž Hostnik performing with Laibach at the Novi Rock Festival, 1982, Ljubljana. Photo: Jane Štravs. Courtesy: Jane Štravs 1.32 Ilija Šoškić, Milk and Silk: Maximum Energy – Minimum Time, 1975. Performance in four acts, Galleria Attico, Via del Paradiso 41, Rome, as part of Fabio Satgentini’s ‘24 x 24’. Courtesy: Ilija Šoškić

35

36 37 38 40 42 43 45 47 48 49 50 54 58 59 60 61 63 65

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Figures

1.33 Milija Pavičević, Father, 2004, Podgorica. Courtesy: Milija Pavičević 1.34 David Černý, Action Painting, 1987, Prague. Courtesy: David Černý 1.35 Jaan Toomik, My Dick Is Clean, 1989, Prague. Photo: Vanu Allsalu. Courtesy: Archives of the Art Museum of Estonia 1.36 Dan Perjovschi, Action Tree, 1989, Oradea. Five gelatin silver prints, each 11 x 17 cm, framed 71.7 x 29.2 x 4.2 cm. Courtesy: Art Collection Telekom  1.37 Dan Perjovschi, Red Apples, 1989, Oradea. Courtesy: Dan Perjovschi 1.38 Lia Perjovschi, The Test of Sleep, 1988, Oradea. Photo: Dan Perjovschi. Courtesy: Lia Perjovschi 1.39 Autoperforatsionsartisten, Die Spitze des Fleischbergs, 1986, Dresden. Courtesy: Micha Brendel 1.40 Autoperforatsionsartisten, Herz Horn Haut Schrei, 1987, Dresden. Courtesy: Micha Brendel 1.41 Cornelia Schleime, Unter weissen Tüchern (Under White Fabrics), 1983. Courtesy: Cornelia Schleime 1.42 Marina Abramović, Raša Todosijević and Gera Urkom performing at Melville College, Edinburgh, 1973. Courtesy: Richard Demarco and the Richard Demarco Art Archive 1.43 E.T.I. (Expropriation of the Territory of Art), E.T.I. Text, 18 April 1991, Moscow. Courtesy: Anatoly Osmolovsky 1.44 Siim Tanel-Annus, Untitled (Performance at Mooni Street 46A), 5  December 1987, Tallinn. Courtesy: Siim Tanel-Annus 1.45 Raoul Kurvitz, documentation of performance, c. 1990s. Photo: Arno Saar. Courtesy: Archives of the Art Museum of Estonia 1.46 Lilia Dragneva and Lucia Macari, Aphros, 1996, Chişinău. Courtesy: Lilia Dragneva 1.47 The Two Gullivers, The Place Where Gullivers Sleep, 1998, view of installation with portraits printed on pillows. National Art Gallery, Tirana, Albania. Photo: The Two Gullivers. Courtesy: The Two Gullivers 2.1 Sanja Iveković, Triangle, 1979, Zagreb. Courtesy: Sanja Iveković 2.2 Karel Miler, Either/Or, 1972. Courtesy: Karel Miler 2.3 Karel Miler, Identification, 1973. Courtesy: Karel Miler 2.4 Peter Meluzin, Attempt at a Working Analysis of My Own Shadow, 1982, Bratislava. Courtesy: Peter Meluzin 2.5 Jiří Kovanda, xxx 19 November 1976, Prague, Václavské náměstí, 19 November 1976, Prague. Courtesy: Jiří Kovanda 2.6 Jiří Kovanda, Contact, 3 September 1977, Prague. Courtesy: Jiří Kovanda

66 72 72 74 75 76 80 80 81 82 84 86 87 90

92 104 111 112 113 118 119

xi

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

xii

Figures

2.7 Ion Grigorescu, Box-Yoga, 1980, Bucharest. Photographic ­performance. Courtesy: Ion Grigorescu 2.8 Ion Grigorescu, Washing with Light, 1979, Bucharest. Photographic performance. Courtesy: Ion Grigorescu 2.9 Tomislav Gotovac, Haircutting and Shaving in a Public Space: Homage to Carl Theodor Dreyer and the Film Jeanne d’Arc and Maria Falconetti, 1981, Zagreb. Courtesy: Zora and Sarah Gotovac and the Tomislav Gotovac Institute 2.10 Zoran Popović, Axioms, 1972, Belgrade. Courtesy: Zoran Popović 2.11 Česlovas Lukenskas, Thrown-Out Man, 20 November 1989, banks of Nemunas river, near Kaunas. Courtesy: Česlovas Lukenskas 2.12 Pasko Burđelez, Write-Off, 2007, Dubrovnik. Courtesy: Pasko Burđelez 2.13 Tomislav Gotovac, Streaking, 1971, Belgrade. Still from Plastic Jesus. Courtesy: Zora and Sarah Gotovac and the Tomislav Gotovac Institute 2.14 Tomislav Gotovac, Lying Naked on the Asphalt, Kissing the Asphalt (Zagreb, I Love You!), 1981, Zagreb. Courtesy: Zora and Sarah Gotovac and the Tomislav Gotovac Institute 2.15 Vlasta Delimar, Taking a Stroll as Lady Godiva, 2001, Zagreb. Courtesy: Vlasta Delimar 2.16 Miervaldis Polis, The Bronze Man, 1987, Riga. Courtesy: The Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art 2.17 Krištof Kintera, Plumbuman (Lead Man), 1995–98, Prague. Video still. Courtesy: Krištof Kintera 2.18 Enisa Cenaliaj, Welcome, Dear Workers!, 2005, Tirana. Courtesy: Enisa Cenaliaj 2.19 Veda Popovici, Dear Money, I Know, 2013, Bucharest. Courtesy: Veda Popovici 2.20 Oleg Kulik, Mad Dog, or, The Last Taboo Guarded by the Lone Cerberus, documentation of performance, 1994, Moscow. Courtesy: Oleg Kulik 2.21 Branko Milisković, The Song of a Soldier on Watch (WW3 Lili Marlene), February 2015, Reims. Production by Frac ChampagneArdenne, Reims, France. Photo: Martin Argyroglo. Courtesy: Branko Milisković and Martin Argyroglo 2.22 NON GRATA, Beauty of the Car Accident, 2011, Iceland. Photo: NON GRATA. Courtesy: NON GRATA 2.23 Ventsislav Zankov, Steak and Chips, 11 December 1992, Sofia. Courtesy: Ventsislav Zankov 2.24 Petr Štembera, Grafting, 1975, Prague. Courtesy: Petr Štembera 2.25 Petr Štembera, Archer, 1977. Courtesy: Petr Štembera

120 121

123 124 125 125 128 128 129 132 132 133 134 135

136 140 141 146 147

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Figures

2.26 Jan Mlčoch, 20 Minutes, 1975, Prague. Courtesy: Jan Mlčoch 2.27 Jan Mlčoch, Suspension – Great Sleep, 1974, Prague. Courtesy: Jan Mlčoch 2.28 Pasko Burđelez, Untitled, 2005, Dubrovnik. Courtesy: Pasko Burđelez 2.29 Vlasta Žanić, Closing, 2002, Zagreb. Courtesy: Vlasta Žanić 2.30 Micha Brendel, Der Mutterseelenalleinering, 1989, West Berlin. Courtesy: Micha Brendel 2.31 Via Lewandowsky, Trichinae on a Crusade, 1989, West Berlin. Courtesy: Via Lewandowsky 2.32 Else Gabriel, ALIAS/The Art of the Fugue, 1989, West Berlin. Courtesy: Else Gabriel 2.33 Zoran Todorović, Agalma, 2003–05. Courtesy: Zoran Todorović 2.34 Jusuf Hadžifejzović, From Kitsch to Blood Is Only One Step, 1991, Cetinje. Courtesy: Jusuf Hadžifejzović and Cetinje Biennale 3.1 Sanja Iveković, Make-Up – Make-Down, 1976. Still of video ­performance. Courtesy: Sanja Iveković 3.2 Sanja Iveković, Un Jour Violente, 1976, Bologna. Courtesy: Sanja Iveković 3.3 Borjana Mrdja, Enthroning, 2009. Still of video performance. Courtesy: Borjana Mrdja 3.4 Borjana Mrdja, Almost-Perfect Work, 2009. Still of video ­performance. Courtesy: Borjana Mrdja 3.5 Vlasta Žanić, The Three of Us, 2012, Zagreb. Still of video ­performance. Courtesy: Vlasta Žanić 3.6 Mare Tralla, Kiss, 1996, Tallinn. Courtesy: Mare Tralla 3.7 Eglė Rakauskaitė, Trap: Expulsion from Paradise, 1995, Vilnius. Courtesy: Eglė Rakauskaitė 3.8 Nela Hasanbegović, Under the Veil …, 2010, Sarajevo. Courtesy: Nela Hasanbegović 3.9 Natalia LL, Consumer Art, 1972, 1974, 1975. Photographic ­performance. Courtesy: Natalia LL and lokal_30 Gallery 3.10 Katalin Ladik, The Screaming Hole, 1979, Tribina mladih, Novi Sad. Photo: Gabor Ifju. Courtesy: Katalin Ladik 3.11 Vlasta Delimar, Visual Orgasm, 1981. Photographic performance. Courtesy: Vlasta Delimar 3.12 Tanja Ostojić, Looking for a Husband with EU Passport, 2000–04. Photograph of installation and documentation of a performance. Courtesy: Tanja Ostojić 3.13 Ion Grigorescu, Delivery, 1977. Photographic performance, ­Bucharest. Courtesy: Ion Grigorescu

148 148 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 173 174 178 178 179 180 183 184 186 187 189 191 195

xiii

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

xiv

Figures

3.14 Tomislav Gotovac, Foxy Mister, 2002, Zagreb. Photographic performance. Courtesy: Zora and Sarah Gotovac and the Tomislav Gotovac Institute 3.15 Dina Rončević, Car Deconstructions, 2012. Photo (top): Pekka Makinen, ANTI Festival, Kupio, Finland, 2012; photo (bottom): Dina Rončević, Fierce Festival, 2014. Courtesy: Dina Rončević 3.16 Sandra Sterle, Nausea, 2008, Split. Photo: Toni Meštrović. Courtesy: Sandra Sterle 3.17 Sanja Iveković, Women’s House, 1998–2003, Utrecht, 2009. Courtesy: Sanja Iveković 3.18 Orshi Drozdik, NudeModel, 1977, Budapest. Courtesy: Orshi Drozdik 3.19 Boryana Rossa, Blood Revenge 2, 2007. Photo: Pravdoliub Ivanov. Courtesy: Boryana Rossa 3.20 Katarzyna Kozyra, The Men’s Bathhouse, 1999, Budapest. Courtesy: Katarzyna Kozyra 3.21 Ljubomir Armutiev, Portrait of a Man Wearing a T-Shirt, 2007. Photograph for the project All About Him. Courtesy: Ventsislav Zankov 3.22 RASSIM®, Corrections, 1996–98. Five video projections: films, DVD, sound (each 35–45 min.) and two posters: Before and After, each 210 x 90 cm. Photo: Angel Tsvetanov. Courtesy: RASSIM® 3.23 Natalia LL, Points of Support, Gwiazdozbiór Wolarz / Boötes Constellation, 1978. Performance. Colour prints, unique pieces, 50 x 100 cm. Courtesy: Natalia LL and lokal_30 Gallery. 3.24 Geta Brătescu, Self-Portrait: Toward White, 1975. Seven b/w ­photographs, each 31 x 82 cm. Photos: Mihai Brătescu. Courtesy:  Geta Brătescu and Ivan Gallery, Bucharest 3.25 Geta Brătescu, Toward White, 1975, Bucharest. Nine b/w ­photographs, each 27 x 27 cm. Photos: Mihai Brătescu. Courtesy: Geta Brătescu and Ivan Gallery Bucharest 4.1 László Beke, Meeting of Czech, Slovak and Hungarian Artists: Tug-of-War Action, 26–27 August 1972, Chapel Studio of György Galántai, Balatonboglár. Photo: György Galántai. Courtesy: Artpool Art Research Center, Budapest 4.2 Ion Grigorescu, Dialogue with Ceauşescu, 1978, Bucharest. Still from video performance. Courtesy: Ion Grigorescu 4.3 Jan Mlčoch, Bianco, 1977, Prague. Courtesy: Jan Mlčoch 4.4 Tomáš Ruller, 8.8.88, 1988, Prague. Photo: Hana Hamplova. Courtesy: Tomáš Ruller 4.5 Tamás Szentjóby (now Tamás St.Auby), Expulsion Exercise –

196 198 200 202 204 207 208 210

211 214 215 215

225 226 228 229

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Figures

Punishment-Preventative Autotherapy, 1972, Balatonboglár. Photo: László Beke. Courtesy: Tamás St.Auby 233 4.6 KwieKulik, Monument without a Passport, 1978, Lublin. Courtesy: Zofia Kulik 236 4.7 KwieKulik, Activities for the Head: Three Acts, 1978, Lublin. Courtesy: Zofia Kulik 237 4.8 Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid, The Essence of Truth (Grinding ‘Pravda’), Moscow, 1975. Three gelatin silver prints and object made of compressed newspaper. Collection Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University, Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection of Nonconformist Art from the Soviet Union. 1991.0885.001– 004. Photo: Jack Abraham 239 4.9 Constantin Flondor, Iosif Király and Doru Tulcan, Mail Art: Big Envelope, 1982. Mail art performance. Courtesy: Constantin Flondor, Iosif Király, Doru Tulcan 242 4.10 Marina Naprushkina, Patriot, 2007, Minsk. Video still. Courtesy: 243 Marina Naprushkina 4.11 Zoran Naskovski, Apollo 9, 7 September 1999, Belgrade. Courtesy: 247 Zoran Naskovski 249 4.12 Igor Grubić, Black Peristyle, 1998, Split. Courtesy: Igor Grubić 4.13 Marko Marković, Self-Eater: The Thirst, 2009, Zagreb. Courtesy: 250 Marko Marković 4.14 Marko Marković, Self-Eater: The Hunger, 2008, Zagreb. Courtesy: 251 Marko Marković 4.15 Anca Benera and Arnold Estefan, Pacta sunt servanda (Agreements Must be Kept), 2011–12. Video documentation of performance (HD video, sound, 16:37 min., in Romanian and Hungarian with English subtitles). Courtesy: Anca Benera and 254 Arnold Estefan 4.16 Yane Calovski and Hristina Ivanovska, Nature and Social Studies: Spiral Trip, 2001, Macedonia. Courtesy: Yane Calovski and Hristina Ivanovska 255 4.17 Ghenadie Popescu, MM, 2008, Chişinău–Iaşi. Video still. Courtesy: 256 Ghenadie Popescu 4.18 Aleksandar Stankovski, Penetration Into the EU, 2005, Skopje. 259 Courtesy: Aleksandar Stankovski 4.19 Gjorgje Jovanovik, The Depression of New Year’s Eve?, 30 December 2005, Ramstor shopping mall, Skopje. Performance in collaboration with the jazz band Letecki pekinezeri (Flying Pekinese). Courtesy: Gjorgje Jovanovik 260 4.20 Dyzerotre Collective, HISTOERI REMOVING, 2012, Tirana. Courtesy: DZTcollective 263

xv

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

xvi

Figures

4.21 Dalibor Martinis, JBT 27.12.2004, 27 December 2004, Kumrovec. Courtesy: Dalibor Martinis 4.22 Anri Sala, Intervista, 1998. Video still. © DACS 2016. Courtesy: Anri Sala and DACS 4.23 Flo Kasearu, Estonian Sculpture, 2005, Tallinn. Courtesy: Flo Kasearu 4.24 Vladimir Nikolić, Death Anniversary, 2004, Rouen. Courtesy: Vladimir Nikolić 4.25 Ghenadie Popescu, Bag, 2006, Chişinău. Video still. Courtesy: Ghenadie Popescu 4.26 Veda Popovici, The Wretched in the Sand, 2013, Curonian Spit. Courtesy: Veda Popovici 4.27 Božidar Jurjević, O-Circling, 1994, Dubrovnik. Courtesy: Božidar Jurjević 4.28 Maja Bajević, Dressed Up, 1999, seven-hour performance / video (1:55 min) / dress. ‘MINIMUM’, City Gallery Collegium Artisticum, Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina (Curator Dunja Blazević), 1999. Photo documentation: Danica Dakić, SCCA. Courtesy: Maja Bajević 4.29 Petr Pavlensky, Fixation, 2013, Moscow. Courtesy: Petr Pavlensky 5.1 Raša Todosijević, Was ist Kunst, Marinela Koželj?, 1976, Belgrade. Courtesy: Raša Todosijević 5.2 Raša Todosijević, Art and Memory, 1975. Courtesy: Raša Todosijević 5.3 Dalibor Martinis, Art Guard, 1976, Zagreb. Courtesy: Dalibor Martinis 5.4 Dalibor Martinis, Work for Pumps Gallery, 1978, Vancouver. Courtesy: Dalibor Martinis 5.5 Dalibor Martinis, If Yes, Light a Candle (Art Is …), 1977, Zagreb. Courtesy: Dalibor Martinis 5.6 Luchezar Boyadjiev, Schadenfreude Guided Tours, Singapore, 2006. Courtesy: Luchezar Boyadjiev 5.7 János Sugár, Ferenc Gerlóczy and Talán Sebeő, Fast-Culture Evening, 1984–88, Budapest. Courtesy: János Sugár 5.8 Artūras Raila, Once You Pop, You Can’t Stop, 1997, Vilnius. Performance featuring the bikers’ club Crazy in the Dark. Photo: Audrius Kemežys. Courtesy: Artūras Raila and Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius (CAC) 5.9 Neša Paripović, Untitled, 1975. Photographic performance. Courtesy: Neša Paripović 5.10 Mladen Miljanović, The Pressure of Wishes, 2013, 55th Venice Biennale. Photo: Drago Vejnović. Courtesy: Mladen Miljanović

264 266 267 272 273 275 278

280 288 306 307 309 309 310 312 313

314 316 318

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Figures

5.11 Siniša Labrović, Leisure, 2012, Brussels. Photo: Boris Cvjetanović. Courtesy: Siniša Labrović 5.12 Siniša Labrović, Perpetuum Mobile, 2008. Courtesy: Siniša Labrović 5.13 Marina Abramović, Art Must Be Beautiful, 1975. © Marina ­Abramović. Courtesy: Marina Abramović and Sean Kelly Gallery, New York. DACS 2016 5.14 Tatiana Fiodorova, The World Is Dirty, the Artist Must Be Dirty, 2012. Courtesy: Tatiana Fiodorova 5.15 Mladen Stilinović, Foot-Bread Relationship, 1977. Photographic performance. Courtesy: Mladen Stilinović 5.16 Sislej Xhafa, Clandestine Pavillion, 1997, Venice. Lambda print (photograph of performance) 160 x 110 cm. Courtesy: GALLERIA CONTINUA, San Gimignano / Beijing / Les Moulins 5.17 Ivan Moudov, Wine for Openings, 2007. 1,764 bottles of Cabernet Sauvignon distributed to the national pavilions at the 52nd Venice Biennale. Courtesy: Ivan Moudov 5.18 Tanja Ostojić, I’ll Be Your Angel, 2001. Four-day performance with Harald Szeemann at the 49th Venice Biennale. Photo: Borut Krajnc. Courtesy: Tanja Ostojić 5.19 Dimitar Shopov, Vera Mlechevska and Vassil Tchitanov, Gavazov, May 2012, Vlaykova Cinema. Lecture-performance. Photo: Pravdoliub Ivanov. Courtesy: Vera Mlechevska and Dimitar Shopov

320 321 322 323 324 326 327 329 332

xvii

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Introduction

This book represents the first attempt to write a comprehensive account of performance art in Eastern Europe – the former communist, socialist and Soviet countries of Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe – since the 1960s. It is indebted to groundbreaking studies on the subject such as Zdenka B ­ adovinac’s Body and the East: From the 1960s to the Present (1998), the first exhibition to examine body art practices in the region, which was accompanied by a catalogue that serves as a precursor to the present volume. As this book will demonstrate, performance art – which encompasses a range of genres, among them body art, happenings, actions and performance – developed in Eastern Europe in parallel and in dialogue with practices in Western Europe and North America, despite its exclusion from the canon of that history. There were several ways in which this occurred. Artists from Eastern Europe were creating their own forms of performance art, but they also travelled to the West and, conversely, artists from the West travelled to the East; at times, artists from East and West encountered one another and their works at major venues such as the exhibition Works and Words at the Foundation De Appel, Amsterdam, or the Edinburgh Arts Festival, Scotland. In her recent reassessment of the communist period, Agata Pyzik commented on this interconnectivity: ‘artistic creation on both sides reveals how much the two Blocs were intimately dependent on each other and closely tied up together’.1 In short, although the Iron Curtain divided artists in the communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe from their counterparts in the West, artistic activity in the region indicates that that curtain was decidedly porous. It was often artists who, working in a grey area between culture and politics, were among those who managed to transgress political boundaries through their work. Artists in Eastern Europe considered their work as part of an array of artistic practices being explored throughout the globe from the 1960s through the 1980s, and my research reveals that this was surely the case. While Eastern European artists developed their own manifestations of genres such as performance, Land Art and Conceptual Art, they did so not in a vacuum. As I try to

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

2

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

show in my text, artists in the East were inspired by artists they encountered from elsewhere (both East and West), yet also created their own distinct forms of creative expression, which emerged from their unique cultural surroundings. They used the art they encountered from the West as a resource, not a source. Indeed, the manner in which performance art developed in the East varied not only from region to region, but also country to country, and even within the different areas of each country, stemming from local histories, traditions and the different ways state-sponsored socialism was enacted in a given locale. This book has several aims. For one, it seeks to fill a regrettable gap in the literature of art history and performance studies in providing the first in-depth academic analysis of performance art practices as they evolved since the 1960s, in the following countries: the former Soviet nations of Russia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine and Moldova; the Central European satellite nations, specifically, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic and Slovakia), Romania and Bulgaria; the former Yugoslav nations of Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, FYR Macedonia (henceforth referred to as Macedonia), Montenegro and Kosovo; and the former German Democratic Republic (East Germany) and non-aligned Albania. While this list admittedly comprises a vast range of locales and traditions, I have selected (and limited my study to) these twenty-one countries, as the performance art practices in these places all emerged from, and are connected to, European traditions, especially those of the avant-garde. Despite their marginalisation as Eastern European, these artists primarily thought of themselves as European artists.2 Yet this volume does not focus on the impact of Western European performance art on that of Eastern Europe; it attempts to outline the paths of reciprocal cultural exchange between East and West as well as across the East, examining the varied meanings of practices in these varied contexts. For example, while artists in the West, such as Allan Kaprow (1927–2006), staged happenings in the countryside in the 1960s as a possible means of escaping the commercial zone of the gallery and the city, artists in Czechoslovakia and Russia did so in the following decade out of necessity – while artistic activity was often heavily monitored in urban locales, rural areas were, by contrast, relatively free and unsurveilled. Secondly, in exploring the various manifestations and meanings of performance art across Eastern Europe, I highlight the diversity of artistic practice, including the different moments and ways in which performance emerged, along with its relationship to each country’s sociopolitical climate. In places such as Moldova, the artistic environment remained somewhat conservative until the 1980s and 1990s, with experimental practices taking place in the realm of painting, as opposed to expanding beyond that medium. In Albania, however, where experimental practices also did not emerge until the 1990s,

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Introduction

this delay was due not to the conservatism of the art world, but to a far more restrictive political environment, which did not even tolerate expressionism in painting. The first edition of Roselee Goldberg’s pioneering study of performance art, which was published as Performance Art: Live Art, from 1909 to the Present, contains no references to artists from Eastern Europe, with the exception of the Russian Futurists. In revised editions, entitled Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present (2001, 2011), the author devotes two pages to the topic of performance art from ‘the former Communist countries,’ mentioning a limited number of figures and movements: Marina Abramović (Serbian/Yugoslavian, b. 1946), Vlasta Delimar (Croatian/Yugoslavian, b. 1956), Katarzyna Kozyra (Polish, b. 1963), Oleg Kulik (Russian, b. 1961), the New Academy (Russian, 1990s) and Tomáš Ruller (Czech, b. 1957). Goldberg characterises performance in the region rather myopically, as a form of political protest, stating that ‘performance art had functioned almost exclusively in the East as a form of political opposition in the years of repression’.3 While there were artists who made overt political statements in their work, a topic addressed in chapter 4, numerous other manifestations of performance, action art and body art indicate that these instances are far more limited than Goldberg asserts. In fact, more often than not, performance offered artists in Central and Eastern Europe an arena of freedom in which to experiment, rather than comprising a vehicle of dissident political activity. Even in the post-communist period, performance became a preferred genre among many artists both because of its open-endedness and its conduciveness to experimentation; many artists felt that it enabled more direct and visceral acts of expression that were not possible through other art forms. Aside from those individuals mentioned across the two-page spread of the 2001 and 2011 editions of her book, Goldberg offers no further discussion of the range of performative activity practiced by artists working in the region. This is truly remarkable, given that Goldberg met Marina Abramović following the latter’s participation in the 1973 Edinburgh Arts Festival.4 Although Goldberg discusses Abramović’s work several times in those later editions, no mention is made of the seminal performative activity of Abramović and her colleagues at the Student Culture Centre in Belgrade in the 1970s, let alone throughout the rest of Yugoslavia or the region. Furthermore, Goldberg characterises the significance of performance in the East rather reductively, describing the genre’s immateriality as its central allure for artists working under communism. In her words, ‘with the constant threat of police surveillance, censorship and arrest, it was not surprising that most protest art related to the body. An artist could perform anywhere, without materials or studio, and the work left no traces’.5 While to some extent it is true that performance art appealed because of the ability to perform ‘anywhere’

3

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

4

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

and ‘without materials’, in fact performance art in Eastern Europe (as in the West) did leave significant traces: photographic, textual and (in rare cases) video documentation. Indeed, in the absence of a body of critical discourse surrounding performance art in the region, these records make it possible to trace and assess the evolution of this genre in Eastern Europe. Finally, Goldberg notes the focus on the ‘individual’ inherent in body art, which she contrasts with the collectivist impulse in communism. For example, she interprets Kozyra’s Olympia (1996) as emphasizing ‘the autonomy of the artist, a significant achievement in countries that had for more than half-a-century rejected individualism outright’.6 While communism undeniably emphasises the collective at the expense of the individual, this research demonstrates that, more often than not, artists opposed state control not with individualism but with selforganisation. Following an introductory section (chapter 1), in which I outline the chronological development of performance art in the region, I explore the practices that comprise performance in Eastern Europe through a range of recurrent themes: the body (chapter 2), gender (chapter 3), politics and identity (chapter 4) and institutional critique (chapter 5).7 It is important to note that these categories emerged from the research, as opposed to preceding or being applied to it. Over the course of two years of extensive research in the field, I met with and interviewed more than 250 artists, art historians, art critics and art practitioners in the region, following which I grouped their work in a way that formed a coherent structure for presentation. The fact that these categories bear similarities to those often used to discuss performance and body art in the West further supports my contention that these artists are in fact part of the European tradition of experimental and avant-garde art practices. At the same time, in examining these performative works through familiar lenses, I reveal the manner in which these artists used the genre to create their own unique statements, expressions and manifestations. It is only through such juxtaposition that we can shed light on both the continuities and the distinctions, thus illuminating these figures’ singular contributions to performance art. In preparing this text, I fully acknowledge the position from which I am writing. As an American art historian, I received my undergraduate training in the United States in the 1990s, at a time when none of these artists were included in standard art history courses, at least not at Boston University. That said, from 1997 to 2000, I lived in Poland, where I learned the language; and from 2004 to 2009, I lived in Riga, Latvia, where I learned Latvian, and from which I made frequent trips to Russia and Poland, conducting research for my dissertation. For this book, from 2013 to 2015, I conducted extensive field research, travelling to every country mentioned in this text with the exception of Ukraine, owing to the political circumstances at the time of writing, and

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Introduction

meeting with the vast majority of artists discussed here.8 Consequently, one of the contributions I make with this study is in presenting the voices of the artists. It is for that reason that many direct quotations from these individuals, taken from my interviews with them, are included here. My aim was to produce a study that is at once based on rigorous research and historical contextualisation, but is also infused with the voices and perspectives of the artists, lest those impressions perish with the artists themselves. Finally, in presenting the contributions of contemporary artists working in the region since 1989, I also aim to illustrate both these practices’ continuities as well as ruptures with the past. The year 1989 is a convenient marker for comparative analysis across the region. Of course, other significant moments and their respective dates dot the landscape of the communist era, among the most notable being Joseph Stalin’s death in 1953, the start of the Thaw and the Hungarian uprising in 1956 and the Prague Spring in 1968. On a local level, additional pivotal moments come to mind, such as the mass demonstrations against price hikes in Poland in 1970, or the declaration of Martial Law in that country in 1981. In the field of visual culture, turning points abound. They include the 1962 Manezh exhibition, the first-ever showing of nonconformist works of art in an official art exhibition, followed by Nikita Khrushchev’s public smackdown of the featured artists; and the 1974 Bulldozer Exhibition, in which a group of unofficial artists staged an outdoor showing without permission from the authorities, and the KGB was brought in to stop the event. It seems, then, that there are a number of points from which we can position ourselves to examine the conditions of ‘before’ and ‘after’. Thus, one wonders whether the focus on 1989 – the year of the fall of the Berlin Wall – remains the most productive, because perhaps in perpetuating the focus on this divide we continue to resign ourselves to the Cold War binaries that we in the field claim to want to shake off. At the same time, one cannot deny the significant developments that ensued as the result of the flood of East Germans crossing into West Berlin in the early hours of 9 November of that year.9 While I do not mean to diminish the indisputable impact of the events that took place in the aftermath of the fall of the Wall and the Soviet collapse that followed two years later, I propose that we perhaps expand the inquiry, moving beyond the normative binaries of East and West toward what the late Piotr Piotrowski referred to as a ‘horizontal art history’. As opposed to the Western ‘vertical’ paradigm, Piotrowski sets forth the notion of a shift in perspective, looking not from the centre to the periphery but the reverse, to see how such an approach might not only challenge but also overturn perceptions regarding art history, artistic styles and the canon. This book aims to do just that, by viewing the genre of performance art through the lens of the East. But, in addition, I suggest that this could also be achieved by looking at the so-called peripheral dates and turning points as a way of moving on

5

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

6

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

from the ‘before and after’ binary paradigm, which will effectively disrupt the East-West model. In this way, I propose to rethink art’s histories with this volume, which raises a number of significant questions that have recently been, and continue to be, discussed in the field: Why and how is the discipline of art history divided into East and West? How can we move beyond the East-West binary into a truly global art history? How do we position artists from the region? It is my hope that this research, and this publication, will answer this last question, through examining performance art practices and making the following overarching claim: that artists from Eastern Europe were both connected to and independent of developments in the West, developing their performative and experimental work concurrently with artists in Western Europe and North America. Questions of influence are interesting, but secondary. Although this volume is decidedly ambitious in its goals, it cannot cover everything pertaining to the topic. The knowledge that this would be the first comprehensive academic text to appear on performance art in Eastern Europe has created a significant intellectual burden. While in writing the study I have tried to include as many artists and artworks as I can, I am also aware of the possible pitfalls of doing so, and have attempted as much as possible to avoid producing a mere catalogue of artists working in performance. And it is important to note that much of what has been included is influenced by the nature of the research, dependent at least in part on which artists I was able to meet and whether secondary source material was available. While I utilised a similarly comparative approach in my first book, Performing the East: Performance Art in Russia, Latvia and Poland Since 1980 (2013), the style and method used here are also indebted to Piotrowski, which he employed most effectively in his In the Shadow of Yalta: Art and the AvantGarde in Eastern Europe, 1945–1989 (2009) and Art and Democracy in PostCommunist Europe (2012). While my first book took a case-study approach to six artists in three countries of the former Soviet sphere of influence, it provided the foundation and starting point for the more comprehensive history presented in this text. It is my hope that Performance Art in Eastern Europe does for performative practices in the region what In the Shadow of Yalta did for avant-garde and contemporary art traditions. As for terminology, I use the labels ‘East’ and ‘performance’ deliberately. Because of the legacy of the Cold War, much of the region covered in this book, with the exception of East Germany (which is now part of Germany), is still referred to as ‘the East’, including the former Yugoslavia, although the latter enjoyed a rather liminal status during its existence. Consequently, the term ‘Eastern Europe’ is necessary to articulate the distinct sociopolitical conditions under which these artists were working. It does not, however, indicate a distinction in terms of artistic practice. Furthermore, ‘Eastern Europe’ remains

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Introduction

a label used by artists and arts practitioners in the region, which consequently informs my own use of the term. The designations ‘Central Europe’ and ‘EastCentral Europe’ are perhaps more applicable when discussing Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary, and I do employ the former term as well. However, I rely on the East-West binary insofar as it demarcates a social and political distinction among European countries in the wake of the Second World War. The choice of the phrasing ‘performance art’ for the title of the book was likewise calculated. Like my chapter themes, this term, as an all-encompassing label to describe practices in the region, emerged directly from the research and relates to the particular conditions in which various types of live art forms entered the creative discourse in Eastern Europe. While the term ‘action art’, adopted by several art historians of the region (Andrea Euringer-Bátorová, Pavlína Morganová, Ileana Pintilie), is relevant to historical Central European, as well as some Russian, examples, ‘performance’ is the only label used with relative consistency across the region.10 Although one might argue that the designation ‘performance art’ is here applied to a context in which no definitive category existed to describe such practices, this is only partly true. Indeed, in my interviews with artists, many mentioned not initially having a name for this type of work. In some instances, they referred to their work as ‘actions’, ‘events’ or ‘happenings’, but in other cases there was no terminology at all. When the vocabulary did enter the discourse, however, it did so through several well-circulated texts, among them, Goldberg’s Performance Art. For example, Bulgarian curator Diana Popova translated the Goldberg volume and circulated it as samizdat, while Czech artist Tomáš Ruller used it as evidence in a case against him, when he was taken to court for an artistic performance that was interpreted as a criminal act (both in the early 1980s).11 By titling the study Performance Art in Eastern Europe, I deliberately anchor it to Goldberg’s seminal work, underscoring the manner in which many artists from the region considered their work in relation to the Western tradition. Moreover, several artists from Czechoslovakia and Poland organised and participated in ‘performance art’ festivals in Central Europe in the 1970s, and the Polish art duo KwieKulik (1971–87) used the term ‘performance’ very pointedly, in relation to certain aspects of their work. For them, ‘performance’ denotes a work of art that is commissioned and presented at a venue such as a festival, whereas they refer to the majority of their artistic practice as ‘activities’. In places such as Moldova, Estonia and Albania, performance developed much later than in other areas of Eastern Europe, only after the regime change in the 1990s, and is now the default term for this type of art. In my text, I employ the labels that were historically used by the artists – for example, when referring to Czech art from the 1970s I refer to ‘actions’ where relevant, but by the 1980s, artists began to use the term ‘performance’. However, ‘performance’ is also utilised in the title of the book for the sake of clarity and brevity. I examine performance

7

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

8

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

not as a category designating stylistic purity, but as one consisting of a range of practices, including actions, happenings, body art and performance.12 As noted earlier, this book is the result of several years of in-depth field research, none of which would have been possible without generous funding from the following organisations: The Arts and Humanities Research Council, The Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland, The Leverhulme Trust and The Royal Society of Edinburgh. It likewise would not have been possible without the support and cooperation of all of the artists, art historians, curators, critics and arts practitioners whose names appear throughout the book, but who are too numerous to list here. I have vetted aspects of this research at various conferences and events throughout the United States, Europe and the United Kingdom, and for all of the insightful responses I received from colleagues in the field, I am grateful.13 I am also grateful to my colleagues at the University of Aberdeen likewise engaged in the study of performance; their collaboration and kindred spirits have been a guiding force throughout this process. This volume would not have seen the light of day without the eternal encouragement of my parents, Ronald and Patricia Bryzgel. Most of all, I am thankful to Matt Zagrodny, my partner in love and in life, whose support makes all the difference. Notes 1 Agata Pyzik, Poor But Sexy: Culture Clashes in Europe East and West (Winchester: Zero Books, 2014), p. 10. 2 See for example Éva Forgács, ‘How the new left invented East-European art’, Centropa: A Journal of Central European Architecture and Related Arts, 3:2 (May 2003), 93. 3 Roselee Goldberg, Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present, 3rd ed. (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2011), p. 214. 4 James Westcott, When Marina Abramović Dies: A Biography (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2010), p. 64. The fact that Goldberg excluded Abramović from the first edition of her text could possibly be explained by the fact that the artists working with Abramović in Belgrade in the 1970s were students at the time. 5 Goldberg, Performance Art, p. 214. 6 Ibid. 7 I have chosen not to include participatory art in this volume both because of space limitations and because participatory and socially engaged art invokes a different theoretical framework. 8 On 21 November 2013, a wave of protests began in Ukraine, centred around Maidan Square in Kiev. Known as Euro Maidan, demonstrators were demanding closer ties with Europe, and calling for the resignation of President Yanukovych and his government. This led to the Ukrainian Revolution of 2014, which was met with violence by the authorities. At the end of February 2014, Yanukovych and several high government officials fled the country. In March 2014, following a referendum that many declared invalid, Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine. At the time of

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Introduction

publication (2017), the country is still in armed conflict with Russia, particularly in the Donbass and Donetsk regions of eastern Ukraine. 9 It is also important to note that for East German artists such as Micha Brendel (b. 1959), Else Gabriel (b. 1962) and Via Lewandowsky (b. 1963), this border opening came much sooner, in the summer of 1989, when they started travelling to and exhibiting in West Berlin. Micha Brendel, in an interview with the author in Germany, 5 May 2014, mentioned the fact that when the artists received their passports to attend shows in the West, he recognised this as a sign that things were changing. 10 See Andrea Euringer-Bátorová, Akčné umenie na Slovensku v 60: Rokoch 20. storočia; Akcie Alexa Mlynárčika (Bratislava, Slovakia: Slovart, 2012), Pavlína Morganová, Akční umění (Olomouc, Czechoslovakia: Votobia, p. 1999) and Ileana Pintilie, Actionism in Romania during the Communist Era (Cluj, Romania: Idea Design & Print, 2002). 11 Of course, this was not the only text that artists referenced; Romanian artist Iosif Király (b. 1957) cites Allan Kaprow’s Assemblage, Environments and Happenings (1966), and Ruller mentions Adrian Henri’s Total Art: Environments, Happenings and Performance (1974), which he purchased in 1977 while travelling abroad with his father in Western Europe. But in most cases, artists who encountered these publications had already been experimenting with performance art; thus, the discovery of such texts and precedents for this type of activity lent credence to their work, prompting them to develop it further. 12 It should also be noted that ‘performance art’ is the term used in a major study funded by the European Research Council, ‘Performance Art in Eastern Europe, 1950–1990’, led by the Zurich scholar Sylvia Sasse. Furthermore, the label ‘live art’, a British term for performative practices, is not widely used in the region. 13 A portion of chapter 5 was featured in the paper ‘The Adoption and Adaptation of Institutional Critique in Eastern Europe’, presented at the conference Shared Practices: The Intertwinement of the Arts in the Culture of Socialist Eastern Europe, Kumu Art Museum, Tallinn, Estonia, 24 October 2015; and in the paper ‘Role Reversal: Performance Art in Yugoslavia Before and After the Breakup’, presented in the panel Conceptual Art in Eastern Europe Before and After the Wall II: EastCentral Europe and Yugoslavia at the annual conference for the Association of Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES), San Antonio, Texas, 23 November 2014. Portions of chapter 3 were workshopped in my talk ‘Performing Gender Across Eastern Europe’, at the Sofia Queer Forum, Bulgaria, 27 May 2014 (which was also published as a catalogue essay for the Forum); and in ‘Performance and Gender, East and West: Then and Now’, presented at the conference Performing Arts in the Second Public Sphere, Berlin, 10 May 2014. I presented an outline of this book in the paper ‘Performance Art in Eastern Europe’, at the conference The Paradigm of the Marxist Critique of Modernism and the Context of Current Approaches of Contemporary Art, Moldova State University, Chișinău, Moldova, 3 April 2014; and in ‘Performing the East: Research as Performance’, at the Centre for Contemporary Art, Tallinn, Estonia, 7 October 2013.

9

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

1

Sources and origins

Thank god for the so-called Iron Curtain … this perfect isolation meant that we did not degenerate as swiftly or as tragically as the rest of Europe. There, art became titillation, a delicacy, a topic of conversation. Our activities are not experimental art, but necessary activity. – Milan Knížák, 1966

Pre-history In Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present, Roselee Goldberg outlines the development of performance in Western Europe and North America, pointing to its origins in Futurism and Dada in the early years of the twentieth century. From there, she traces a neat trajectory through Surrealist games such as the Exquisite Corpse and automatist drawings, to Jackson Pollock’s action painting and, ultimately, to the happenings and performances staged by Allan Kaprow in the 1950s and 1960s. While Goldberg identifies these earlier traditions as inspiration for the development of performance art in the latter half of the twentieth century – a reiteration of the historical avant-garde then occurring across North America and Western Europe – throughout much of Eastern Europe, these avant-garde traditions were quite varied. A range of local and international developments served as precursors to the performance art that emerged in Eastern Europe in the 1960s and 1970s, although in some cases these practices occurred independently of any identifiable local pre-history, arising from the aims and needs of artists as well as the local context. Across much of the East, Constructivism was a dominant trend in the early part of the twentieth century rather than the destructive and nihilistic forces of Futurism or Dada, despite the fact that it was two Romanian artists, Tristan Tzara (1896–1963) and Marcel Janco (1895–1984), who were prominent contributors to the Dada activity at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich. While Dada’s Eastern European origins have long been at least nominally acknowledged, only in recent years have those origins been the subject of more in-depth research, most notably by Tom Sandqvist in his 2006 publication,

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

11

Dada East: The Romanians of Cabaret Voltaire, as well as in the 2008 exhibition at Warsaw’s Zachęta National Gallery of Art, Dada East: Romanian Contexts of Dadaism. In the catalogue that accompanied Dada East, Sandqvist discusses not only local Romanian cultural and folkloric sources for the movement that emerged in February 1916 at the Cabaret Voltaire, but also Jewish ones.1 For example, Sandqvist begins his book with a discussion of the Moldavian tradition of the New Year’s Eve festival Colinde, which involves dressing up in grotesque and absurd masks and costumes. The author argues that this festival may have helped inspire similar presentations at the Cabaret Voltaire, along with comparable masks and costumes used in the travelling Yiddish as well as French vaudeville and German Expressionist theatres. Sandqvist also cites the significance of the process of Jewish assimilation in Romania, commenting that it resulted in a type of ‘doubling’, whereby individuals sought to both integrate themselves into the local culture, while also maintaining some of their individuality and ‘otherness’. The result, he writes, was ‘a kind of collage of mutually conflicting signals, messages, narratives, ideas, and thoughts held together by the understanding of the fact that the paradox is in fact the quintessence of life’.2 This description could equally apply to the multifarious displays that occurred on the stage of the Cabaret Voltaire. Sandqvist argues that Dada arrived in Zurich, together with Tzara and Janco, in 1915, already a fully formed movement, one that only needed the proper context in which to flourish. As do Andrzej Turowski and Steven Mansbach, he cites as a source for the Romanian avant-garde the writer Demetru Demetrescu-Buzău (1883–1923), who went by the name of Urmuz and penned his pages bizarres – a collection of absurdist, black-comedy short stories – in the early twentieth century; the first two were published in 1922. In 1912, Tzara, Janco and Ion Vinea published the satirical journal Simbolul, which was followed by the more radical Chemarea in 1915. Tzara encouraged readers of Chemarea to ‘replace pencils with knives and substitute for the customary editorial conventions a collection of weapons with which to bomb bourgeois chimneys (hearths)’, echoing Futurist and Dadaist calls to arms on behalf of the overturning of convention.3 While avant-garde movements did develop throughout Eastern Europe in the early twentieth century, Dada and Futurist expressions across the East often manifested in literature or painting, as opposed to performance. For example, when asked about Dadaist precursors to performance in Latvia, painter and performance artist Miervaldis Polis (b. 1948) mentioned the absurdist writer Janis Steiks (1855–1932). It is rare that one encounters local manifestations similar to the Futurist serata (evenings) or the activity at the Cabaret Voltaire as a form of pre-history of the performative activity that emerged in the East following the Second World War. One exception can be found in Croatia; Suzana Marjanić has identified several instances of perform-

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

12

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

ative Dada events, such as Dragan Aleksić’s (1901–58) ‘aesthetic provocations’ or the Dada matinee at the Royal Cinema in Osijek in 1922, which involved presentations of dramatic productions by Dada artists. Later that same year, the group Traveleri (Travellers) staged a show entitled ‘They Are Coming’ at their high school in Zagreb, which resembled a Dada cabaret and involved bringing a live donkey on stage. As a consequence of the action, the students were advised to complete their studies elsewhere. Finally, there were also the Zenitist evenings organised by Marijan Mikac (1903–72) in 1923, in which he introduced guests to the principles of the avant-garde movement of Zenitism (1921–26), which Marjanić considers theoretical performances.4 Aside from these instances, in Yugoslavia, artists utilised Dadaist strategies and techniques mainly in the realms of literature and typography. For example, writers in the journal Zenit, the literary organ for Zenitism, founded by Ljubomir Micić (1904–71), first published in Zagreb and later in Belgrade, utilised free verse, neologisms, collage and montage. Dragan Aleksić, who had collaborated with Micić on Zenit, went on to develop Yugo Dada, after having been exposed to Dada in Prague in 1920. He later published the journals Dada Tank and Dada Jazz. Interestingly, Micić developed the concept of the ‘barbarogenius’, which involved not only the Europeanisation of the Balkans but also, conversely, the Balkanisation of Western Europe, an indication that the East-West division of Europe was on the minds of artists long before the Second World War.5 While F. T. Marinetti’s ‘Manifesto of Futurism’ was published in Romania in 1909 on the same day it appeared in France in Le Figaro, the movement did not take hold there. This can be attributed at least in part to the particular social and political circumstances in the region at that time. Marinetti’s movement was focused on destroying the past and creating a new and modern Europe. Rather than destruction, many countries in Eastern Europe were focused on building – most notably, nation building – with various countries having emerged as newly independent or reunified in the wake of the First World War.6 Such was the case with Poland, for example, which was only reunified as a country following more than one hundred years of being partitioned among the Russian, Prussian and Austro-Hungarian empires. Similarly, the Baltic states, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, achieved their independence in 1918, after centuries of incorporation in the Russian Empire. As such, many of the artists in the East were focused on creating a new art for a new nation. Ion Pop discusses the significance of the Swiss context for the development of Dadaism, as imported by the Romanians. In his words, Romanian society and culture of the Cabaret-Voltaire era were in the process of modern construction aimed at accomplishing the ideal of national unity… and consolidating the achievements resulting from the cultural synchronisation with Western Europe … A revolution of the kind that began in Zurich would have been impossible there.7

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

13

He also mentions how in 1909, the translator of Marinetti’s ‘Manifesto of Futurism’ emphasised that at that time, there were no museums or libraries in Romania that could be burned or flooded, as the Italian writer had urged. The same can be said of other nations across Eastern Europe. Likewise, the fact that Dada had as its basis the critique of bourgeois culture, which had resulted in world war, did not resonate in the same way across the East, where war had brought about independence and the birth (or rebirth) of nations. For these reasons, Constructivism had a stronger resonance in the East than either Dada or Futurism. The programme of Lajos Kassák, founder and leader of the Hungarian avant-garde, for example, has been described as ‘validating Constructivism at the expense of Dada’.8 Thus, Turowski describes the attention given to Dada in Czechoslovakia as having quickly shifted to Constructivism in the 1920s.9 As evidenced by the swift publication of Marinetti’s ‘Futurist Manifesto’ in Romania in 1909, Futurist and Dada impulses were not foreign to artists in the East. In fact, in 1920, German artists Johannes Baader, Raoul Hausmann and Richard Huelsenbeck visited Prague on their Dada tour; they returned with other artists in 1921, the same year that Prague witnessed the production of Marinetti’s play The Fiery Drum, along with a visit from the man himself. Although Tzara remained abroad, Janco returned to Bucharest in 1922, bringing back with him knowledge of the Cabaret Voltaire activity. As an international trend, Dada remained a pervasive force, and source, for artists in the region, but unlike in Western Europe and North America, the performance art that developed in the 1960s and 1970s did not necessarily originate from those impulses. The most notable example of performative activity in the East acting as a precursor to that which emerged in the 1960s, referenced by Goldberg and others, is that of the Russian Futurist artists, for example, David Burliuk (1882– 1967), Natalia Goncharova (1881–1962) and Mikhail Larionov (1881–1964). These figures created actions and interventions on the streets of St. Petersburg, walking around the city with their faces adorned with abstract and geometric symbols. In their 1913 essay ‘Why We Paint Ourselves – A Futurist Manifesto’, Larionov and Ilya Zdanevich explain that this is their way of merging art and life, stating that ‘we … join contemplation with action and fling ourselves into the crowd’.10 During the 1910s, Estonian artist Ado Vabbe (1892–1961) travelled to Russia. There, he encountered the Jack of Diamonds group, which was associated with the Futurists, bringing back news of their radical artistic activities on his return to Estonia in 1917. One can cite examples of events in Central and Eastern Europe akin to the Dada cabaret in Zurich, which attest to the interconnectedness of avant-garde movements, countering notions of a lack of awareness concerning Dadaist and Futurist approaches. For example, the opening of a 1924 Bucharest exhibition organised by the avant-garde journal Contimporanul was accompanied by a black jazz band, which included the sounds of sirens in

14

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

their music.11 At the time, aesthetician Tudor Vianu described the event as a ‘ritual of Dadaist manifestation’.12 In addition, the 1923 exhibition of the Czech avant-garde group Devětsil, the Bazaar of Modern Art, was compared by critics at the time to the 1920 Berlin Dada Fair, although the resemblance derived more from the fact that the exhibition comprised displays of found objects, as opposed to any performative works. Historical context The earliest performative activities witnessed in Eastern Europe occurred in the 1950s and 1960s, concurrent with those in Western Europe and North America, and arising from a range of practices. In 1962, the same year as Allan Kaprow’s Courtyard happening in New York City and Otto Muehl and Hermann Nitsch’s Blood Organ, which took place in a Vienna basement, Milan Knížák (b. 1940) hosted his Short Term Exhibitions (figure 1.1) in Prague on the street in front of the building.13 These exhibitions took place out of necessity, as the artist’s apartment was quite small, but also because they embodied Knížák’s concept of transforming art into life. They involved not only a display or ‘demonstration of things’,14 but also a manifestation of the act of painting, as the artist would paint outdoors. Two years later, on 18 October 1964, Knížák and his Aktual group (consisting of Jan and Vit Mach, Soňa Švecová and Jan Trtílek) organised the First Manifestation of Aktual Art – one of the group’s first organised public happenings in the streets of Prague – accompanied by its manifesto. This was followed by happenings such as A Walk Around Novy Svet: A Demonstration for All the Senses (figure 1.2), on 13 December 1964, featuring installations around the city, such as a ‘sculpture’ of dresses hanging on a lamppost, and actions, for example, a bassist playing while lying on his back in the street. Knížák also staged a solo performance in Prague on 16 December 1964, ­Demonstration for One (figure 1.3). Prior to this, in the 1950s, Vladimír Boudník (1924–68) had created over a hundred impromptu and informal actions in the city. His method was to stand in front of his easel or a wall and explain to passersby the principles of ­‘Explosionalism’, effectively creating a spontaneous happening, wherein individuals could respond and interact with the artist. The artist defined ‘­Explosionalism’ as aiming to ‘remove barriers to the visual artist, actively involv[ing] a person in the creative process’.15 Boudník was certainly a known figure in Prague, invoked several years later by Czech art critic Jindřich Chalupecký (1910–90) as an example of performance and action art in his lectures to the Czech public. In a 1970 text, reprinted in Lucy Lippard’s Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972, the action artist Petr Štembera (b. 1945) expresses fascination with Boudník’s work, lamenting the fact that he was ‘purposely misunderstood by the cultural institutions and was even proclaimed mentally retarded’.16 Nonetheless, among

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

15

Milan Knížák, Short-Term Exhibition, 1962, Prague. Courtesy: Milan Knížák 

the artistic ­community, Boudník’s oeuvre was regarded as a relevant precursor to the actions that appeared in the 1960s and 1970s. In Eastern Europe of the 1960s, the time was ripe for this type of experiment. In the aftermath of the Second World War, Stalin’s hold on the region lasted for a relatively brief period, ending around the time of his death in 1953. Yugoslavia broke ties with the Soviet Union as early as 1948, in order to follow its own path toward socialism, which partly involved workers’ self-management instead of centralised planning. Such was viewed as a more advanced form of socialism than in the rest of the Eastern Bloc, one that, it was hoped, would eventually lead to a proper communist state. The Thaw ensued several years after Stalin’s death,

1.1

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document 1.2

Aktual Group, A Walk Around Novy Svet: A Demonstration for All the Senses, 13  December 1964, Prague. Courtesy: Milan Knížák

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

17

Milan Knížák, Demonstration for One, 16 December 1964, Prague. Courtesy: Milan Knížák

spreading throughout the rest of the bloc. Following a 1956 uprising of workers in Poznan, Poland, the reformist communist Władysław Gomułka, First Secretary of the Polish United Workers’ Party, convinced Moscow to accede to their demands. Although Hungary’s violent uprising of that same year was quashed

1.3

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

18

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

and Soviet control tightened, the moderate János Kádár took over leadership of the country in the aftermath. By the 1960s, Hungary pursued a relatively liberal cultural and economic course termed the ‘New Economic Mechanism’, which led to relative prosperity and freedom of movement, although this period of liberalisation ended in 1972. The Kádár era was nicknamed ‘Goulash communism’, stemming from the regime’s adoption of an eclectic mix of approaches, some of which diverged from orthodox Marxism. In Hungary, artists operated under the policy outlined by cultural director György Aczél, known as the ‘three T’s’ – ‘Tiltas, Tűres, Támogatas’ (Prohibited, Tolerated, Supported).17 The physical destruction of the massive monument to Stalin in Prague in 1962 was accompanied by a gradual liberalisation in Czech society. This culminated in April 1968, when Alexander Dubček, First Secretary of the Communist Party, famously introduced the policy of ‘socialism with a human face’, his attempt to reform communism via the implementation of capitalism and curbing of censorship. The Prague Spring was brought to a grinding halt soon after, on 21 August 1968, when Warsaw Pact troops invaded the country to stop these developments. What followed was the era of ‘Normalisation’, during which Soviet political leaders sought to bring Czechoslovakia back in step with the Soviet party line. These developments reverberated in artistic culture. For example, in 1972, following the Second Congress of the Association of Slovak Fine Artists, all experimental artists were expelled from the union, so as to conform creative production to the dictates of Socialist Realism. The situation worsened in 1977 with that year’s publication of Charter 77, a petition signed by many artists, among others, criticising the government for human rights abuses. Charter 77 was initiated just one year after the arrest of the members of the rock band Plastic People of the Universe. The Plastics, along with other underground figures, were put on trial to make an example, and convicted for ‘disturbance of the peace’. Sentences ranged from eight to eighteen months in prison. Developments in Poland essentially took the opposite course. After the protests of 1970, Gomułka was replaced by the seemingly more liberal Edward Gierek, who brought with him hope and promises of economic reform. The decade that followed was a relatively liberal period for artists, until the drive for progress was briefly suspended by the institution of Martial Law on 13 December 1981. Although lasting until 22 July 1983, Martial Law did not completely halt artistic experiment but rather displaced it, either to the streets (Orange Alternative, Łódź Kaliska), or to alternative venues (exhibitions in churches that supported the opposition movement). In Nicolae Ceauşescu’s Romania, the situation was drastically different from in Hungary, Czechoslovakia or Poland. Although when Ceauşescu came to power in 1965, he distanced himself from the Soviet Union and appeared open to the West, even to the extent of publicly denouncing the Warsaw Pact invasion in a speech on 21 August 1968, his rule became increasingly repres-

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

19

sive throughout the 1970s, culminating in his paranoid delirium of the 1980s. Ileana Pintilie has argued that the label ‘underground art’ should be used in connection with experimental and performative artistic activity in Romania during the period of Ceauşescu’s rule because of its lack of visibility, in terms of both viewership and the art-historical discourse. In her words, this term ‘suggests that these performances were unknown in the public space, which is defined not only by the audience and a number of participants who are spectators, but also by the presentation of art in literature, especially in art history and in art criticism’.18 Although Yugoslavia, like Poland (and, to a certain extent, Hungary) is usually touted as a bastion of liberalism in the Eastern Bloc for artists, there existed certain conditions that also limited self-expression. Following the 1968 protests in Belgrade, Ljubljana, Sarajevo and Zagreb, with students demanding what the government had promised – greater autonomy, in the form of self-management – the regime established spaces that would allow for just that: the Student Culture Centres. These centres gave rise to the New Art Practice, a label denoting the work produced by the generation of Yugoslav artists coming of age in the 1960s and 1970s, and operating in the Student Culture Centres, among other alternative and semialternative venues such as artist-run spaces and in the streets. For example, seeking to promote their engagement with audiences, the Croatia-based Group of Six Artists staged ‘exhibition-actions’ in courtyards, city squares and beaches, while the artists Goran Trbuljak (b. 1948) and Braco Dimitrijević (b. 1948) formed the group Pensioner Tihomir Simčić, involving everyday passersby in their artworks and staging exhibitions in alternative venues, such as the entranceway to an apartment building. While across the Eastern Bloc experimental artists were granted varying degrees of freedom, it goes without saying that any criticism of the government or leadership would have serious repercussions – even if this criticism were merely suspected, as opposed to real. Throughout Eastern Europe, including Yugoslavia, there are cases of artists being detained, questioned, arrested and even forced into exile for their experimental activity – instances of which will be detailed throughout this book. Early actions and happenings In 1962, when Knížák was organising his Short-Term Exhibitions in Prague, Croatian artist Tomislav Gotovac (1937–2010) created his first semipublic happening, Showing Elle (figure 1.4). This was a photographic performance on Mount Sljeme outside of Zagreb. On the snow-covered mountain, he removed his shirt and thumbed through a copy of Elle magazine, showing some of the layouts to the camera. In one image from the performance, the artist shows an underwear advertisement, the female model as partially nude as Gotovac.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

20

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

1.4

Tomislav Gotovac, Showing Elle, 1962, Zagreb. Courtesy: Zora and Sarah Gotovac and the Tomislav Gotovac Institute

In making himself the object of the photograph in the same manner that the woman in the advertisement has been reified, the artist created a doubling of objectification. Two years earlier, the artist had staged a series of five photographic performances that seem to anticipate Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills of the late 1970s, in which he dressed up and pretended to be an actor in a French film. Although not categorised as a performance, the piece, entitled Heads, comprises an early instantiation of performativity, not to mention a surprising precursor to the American photographer’s work of nearly twenty years later. In neighbouring Poland, Tadeusz Kantor (1915–90) staged his first happening, Cricotage, in Warsaw on 10 December 1965. The artist had just returned from a six-month Ford Foundation-sponsored trip to the United States, where he visited New York City and met Allan Kaprow, among other artists. Kantor’s experimental activity had begun long before this trip, however, and the name of this happening was a nod to the Cricot 2 experimental theatre he had founded in Krakow in 1955, suggesting a theatrical source for his performative work. Much like Knížák, his experiments also emerged from the exhibition format. In the Galeria Krzysztofory in Krakow in 1963, he mounted Popular Exhibition, involving an unconventional display of various objects, such as drawings hung across the ceiling as if on a clothesline, along with letters, notes, newspapers and other ephemera.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

21

Tadeusz Kantor, in a performance of The Water Hen, 1972, The Poorhouse, Edinburgh. Courtesy: Richard Demarco and the Richard Demarco Art Archive

Kantor’s Cricotage was a similar pastiche, this time of actions. Like Kaprow, the artist scored his happenings – although Kantor did so after the fact, with his notes serving more as documentation of the events than a programme thereof. Also in the manner of Kaprow, the artist gave his performers some autonomy within the performance, much of which consisted of everyday activities, such as shaving, sitting down, making a phone call, eating spaghetti. All of these events

1.5

22

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

took place simultaneously. Yet the artists differed in the context in which they were each working. For Kantor, this type of experimental art stood in sharp contrast with the more traditional media in which the state wanted artists to work (painting and sculpture), whereas for Kaprow, his actions constituted a challenge to the commercial institutions of art. As Klara Kemp-Welch writes, ‘if Kaprow advocated embracing the bustle of street life in order to reject the inherited conventions of high art and its institutional framework … Kantor clung to the possibility of carving out a form of autonomy in the artistic sphere in Poland’.19 For Kantor, performative activity created a space of freedom within an otherwise restrictive setting (figure 1.5).20 The same year as Cricotage, in nearby Bratislava, Alex Mlynárčik (b. 1951), Stano Filko (b. 1938) (both artists) and Zita Kostrová (an art historian) created Happsoc. In Happsoc – whose name combines the words ‘happening’, ‘happy’, ‘socialism’, and ‘society’, the entire city was declared a work of art from 1 May (Labour Day) to 9 May 1965 (when the nation’s victory over fascism in the Second World War is celebrated).21 Mlynárčik returned from Paris the previous year, where he had met internationally renowned French art critic and cultural philosopher Pierre Restany, after brazenly knocking on the latter’s door. The two kept in touch after Mlynárčik returned to Czechoslovakia, providing the artists there with a connection to the French art scene. In 1966 Restany was instrumental in bringing the Association of International Art Critics (AICA) congress to Bratislava.22 On the one hand, Happsoc can be seen as a happening à la Marcel Duchamp; on the other, it merged art and life, turning all Bratislavians into performers or participants in the manner of Joseph Beuys. Happsoc had three significant components: a manifesto, a list of twenty-three people and inanimate objects as participants (for example, 138,936 women, 4,735 apartments) and a collection of documentary photographs from the May Day march and military parade, which served as documentation of what its three creators deemed the ‘event’, although nothing actually happened, other than the normal activities of everyday life. Despite its name, the organisers distinguished Happsoc from happenings: ‘In contrast to happenings, it [Happsoc]

1.6

Alex Mlynárčik, Eva’s Wedding, 1972, Žilina (Czechoslovakia/Slovakia). Courtesy: Alex Mlynárčik

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

23

manifests itself as a singular, unvarnished reality, which remains unaffected by any immediate encroachment upon its primordial form’.23 As the three artists simply appropriated the city and its inhabitants, the participants were unaware of their involvement in Happsoc. Later, Mlynárčik went on to realise participatory projects fusing art and life, such as Eva’s Wedding (figure 1.6) in Žilina in 1972, which was in some ways a restaging of Slovak modernist painter L’udovit Fulla’s Village Wedding (1958–59, Slovak National Gallery). Instead of simply creating a tableau vivant, however, Mlynárčik found a couple who were going to be married and offered to stage the entire wedding, with Restany as the master of ceremonies and presents from the French artists César and Niki de Sainte Phalle. Although planned as an artistic happening, the work’s proximity to real-life events meant that the authorities could have no objection, given its resemblance to nothing other than a traditional marriage ceremony. An interesting contrast with Happsoc can be seen in the 1973 happening ­organised by Dalibor Zupančič (b. 1949) in the town of Celje, Slovenia (Yugo­­ slavia). Entitled The Town of Celje, the happening was announced by wantedstyle posters, and on the day of the action, a Saturday, Zupančič went to the town park with his friends and announced, by firing a gun at noon, that the city of Celje was on view, as an artwork in an exhibition.24 Unlike Happsoc, the action did occur with the awareness of some of the city’s inhabitants – at least those who had seen the signs or heard the announcement. Because nothing actually took place, the piece was conceptual, upending the notion of what constituted art. In particular, the artists challenged the modernist conception of the work of art, which usually involved creating a painting or sculpture, by shifting the focus to the viewer, whose job was now to observe and interpret the ‘work of art,’ which was the town itself. This piece would have been especially radical for a public that was, at that point, likely not yet used to considering a phenomenon such as a town a work of art, or to the act of viewing as part of the artwork. In Romania, instances of happenings were rarer, although they did occur. In the 1970s, several outdoor actions and happenings were organised by artists associated with the Sigma group in Timişoara. Located in northwest Romania, Timişoara enjoyed a more relaxed attitude toward censorship due to its remoteness from the capital; perhaps for this reason, its public was, according to Pintilie, ‘accustomed to non-conformist artworks that promoted new types of expression, such as installations, environmental interventions, experimental films, and even performances’.25 Sigma was a group of artists and teachers from Timişoara Fine Arts High School whose performative activity combined their interests in the exploration of physical space and in engagement with nature. A member of the group, Constantin Flondor (b. 1936), referred to their early actions as ‘plein-air installations’ within the genre of Land Art.26 Between 1976 and 1978, they created several actions together on the banks of the Timiş river, after which

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

24

1.7

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

they disbanded. Individual members also organised actions, such as Ştefan Bertalan’s (b. 1930) Leonardo: A Show for the Public (1978), which took place in Timişoara’s Central Park. In this piece, the participants created geometric shapes on the grass or hung in trees, in order to examine the way these elements were perceived in space, and passersby were encouraged to join in. A rare example of public actions and street art in Bucharest is the series of 1968 performances by Paul Neagu (1938–2004) entitled Collecting Merits (figure 1.7). In these performances, Neagu exhibited a mixed-media box that was the height of an adult, so that passersby could potentially interact with it. Collecting Merits is considered the first public performance in Romania. It is part of a cycle of works utilising Neagu’s Boxes, works that the artist created to eschew traditional art making and create items of a tactile nature with which viewers could interact in the public space. Neagu emigrated to the United Kingdom in 1970 as by this time, given the repressiveness of Ceauşescu’s rule, this type of public display in the capital was already impossible.27 On 25 June 1966, Tamás Szentjóby (b. 1944), Gábor Altorjay (b. 1946) and Miklós Erdély (1928–86) organised the first happening in Hungary.28 Entitled The Lunch: In Memoriam Batu Khan (figure 1.8), the event took place in a garden and in a fifteenth- and sixteenth-century cellar that had, according to Altorjay, once been used as a torture chamber. There were several sources for

Paul Neagu, Collecting Merits, 1968, Bucharest. Still from b/w film with sound, 10:04 min. © The Estate of Paul Neagu, All Rights Reserved, DACS. Courtesy: Ivan Gallery, Bucharest

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

25

this event, including the Warsaw Autumn Music Festivals that Szentjóby visited during his frequent travels to Poland, often featuring experimental music and performance by, among others, John Cage and Merce Cunningham. Szentjóby recalls that, in 1965, he started making objects that could be classified as Pop or Conceptual Art. In the May 1966 issue of the journal Film, Theatre and Music, he read an article that mentioned some U.S. and Western European happenings, as well as artists such as Joseph Beuys and Allan Kaprow. Szentjóby observed an affinity between the objects he had fashioned and the performative work of these artists, and said he felt validated and energised by this,29 which prompted him to stage the happening. A few weeks after The Lunch, the artists received a copy of Jürgen Becker and Wolf Vostell’s book Happenings, Fluxus, Pop Art, Nouveau réalisme (1965), and realised that they were not working in isolation, but were in fact part of an international creative trend. Attended by about sixty people, The Lunch was a literal cacophony of events. Visitors were greeted by the sight of Szentjóby half-emerging from the ground in the garden, typing on a typewriter, a baby carriage on fire behind him. Once inside the basement, Krzysztof Penderecki’s composition for fifty-two string instruments, the shrill ‘Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima’ (1960), was being blasted on loudspeakers, and a vase of roses was set on fire, mainly for light. Although the sound system worked fine, the performance suffered from

Tamás Szentjóby, Gábor Altorjay, Miklós Erdély, The Lunch: In Memoriam Batu Khan, 25 June 1966, Budapest. Courtesy: Tamás St.Auby (Tamás Szentjóby)

1.8

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

26

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

a lack of light. After the music, the two artists dined on cold paprika potatoes; this they also tried to feed to a live chicken, which they held in front of the microphone so that it produced a disruptive sound when its beak came into contact with it. After they ate, they vomited into a bag, smashed the table settings, smeared one artist with toothpaste, and set loose some white mice. Later, they blared Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’ over the loudspeakers, and attempted to tie all of the attendees together with string. At the end, everyone emerged from the cellar, looking like ‘dazed, burnt out soldiers coming back from the front’, according to a later recollection by Altorjay.30 Szentjóby has described the happening as both a ‘direct-democratic series of events’ and ‘a network of the participants’.31 In a contemporaneous statement, from 1966, he recounts the liberating effects of the work: ‘at the edge of convention, the individual recognises his own position between the absurdity of the historical past and the possible happening-future. He recognises, in other words, the autonomy of the individual. His will that he himself can determine: his own Free Will’.32 It is clear that Szentjóby, who was jailed in 1974 after a copy of György Konrád and Iván Szelényi’s Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power (1973–74) was discovered in his apartment following a raid, and who ­eventually went into exile in Switzerland in 1975, saw happenings and performance as providing opportunities for things that were otherwise difficult to come by in socialist Hungary: free expression and autonomy. He called parti­ cipation in a happening ‘a parallel situation’, suggesting that the genre offered a free space outside of the everyday, a site of potential self-realisation and selfactualisation.33 It was also in 1966 that fellow artist György Galántai (b. 1941) discovered an actual space for that potential, in the form of a chapel in the town of Balatonboglár, near the popular tourist destination of Lake Balaton, that had fallen into disuse. Over the course of the next four years, he worked to make this space habitable as a summer studio and alternative art institute. In the summer of 1970, six exhibitions and eight performances, concerts and lectures were held there, and each summer until that of 1973, the Chapel Exhibitions, as they were called, grew in size and popularity. After the summer of 1973, the Chapel Studio of György Galántai, as it was known, was closed by the state, and the Balatonboglár group continued its programme at the Young Artists’ Club in Budapest.34 A happening comparable in cacophony to The Lunch took place on 10 April 1967 in Yugoslav Croatia and in comparable surroundings. Organised by Gotovac, together with Hrvoje Sercar (1936–2014) and Ivo Lukas, Happ: Naš-Happening (Happ: Our-Happening) (figure 1.9) was staged in one room of an alternative theatre called the Poetry Cellar, in the Pavao Markovac Culture Society on Ilica Street, one of the main roads in Zagreb. Only a few photographs from the event remain, although it was restaged the following year for Ante Peterlić’s film An Accidental Life. Gotovac describes the events as follows:

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

27

Tomislav Gotovac, Happ: Naš-Happening, restaged version of a happening in 1968. Still from film An Accidental Life. Courtesy: Zora and Sarah Gotovac and the Tomislav Gotovac Institute

working from a prepared scenario that the artists had scripted, they filled the room with incense and placed an empty snail shell on every chair as well as on the floors, so that the attendees created crunching sounds when they arrived. There was a slide projection from Playboy, and a recording of the sad but mellow ‘Spring Is Here’, by Chris Connor, an American, was playing in the background. Like The Lunch, there were live chickens in the gallery, as well as food – milk and bread on the table onstage. The chickens were supposed to be killed onstage, with the artists leaving the blood to drain and enabling the artists (and potentially participants) to make handprints on the walls with the blood, but the electricity went out at the moment they were supposed to carry out the slaughter. When the lights came back on fifteen minutes later, the performers started to throw balls made of newspaper at the audience, which, in turn, threw them back at the performers. Then, the latter started throwing the chickens. According to Gotovac, the audience, which numbered around one hundred, took most of the chickens home with them. The artists also ate the bread and drank the milk in front of the audience, with whom they spoke and interacted, and then proceeded to smash a cabinet that they had put on stage.35 The event lasted close to an hour, and Darko Šimičić recalls that many in the audience were angry at the chaos and commotion, especially that caused by having chickens tossed at them.36

1.9

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

28

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

The following year, in nearby Split, a group of artists known as Red Peristyle (Pavao Dulčić, Toma Čaleta, Božidar Jelinić, Koča Popović, Filip Roje, Neven Šegvić and V.D. Trokut) created a similarly disruptive event with their first performative intervention in the cityscape, by painting the peristyle of Diocletian’s Palace with a water-soluble red paint on 11 January 1968. Because of the use of red, it was assumed that their action was somehow political and anticommunist in nature, and so the action was denounced in the local newspaper; it was also reduced to an act of vandalism. According to Branka Prša, speaking on behalf of Trokut, the only member of Red Peristyle still living at the time of writing, this was indeed conceived as a political act and not as art; it was meant to shock and provoke.37 According to her, there were many ideas for the action, including ‘colouring the Peristyle orange, the colour of death and resistance in the West, and the colour of student movements’.38 The artists did not speak out about the event, but Suzana Marjanić describes the action as a ‘protest against the general state of culture in the country’.39 The artists’ intervention in the public space echoed similar actions by the International Situationists, while parallelling the protests and other such manifestations taking place in the public space in Europe and the United States around that same time. Prior to these somewhat organised happenings, the performative spirit in Zagreb could also be found in the work, life and activities of Gorgona, an artistic group active there in the 1960s. Formed in 1959, in the painter Josip Vaništa’s (b. 1924) studio at 11 Križanićeva Street, the group began as an informal weekly gathering of artists: painters Vaništa, Marijan Jevšovar (1922–98), Julije Knifer (1924–2000) and Đuro Seder (b. 1927); sculptor Ivan Kožarić (b. 1921); architect Miljenko Horvat (1935–2012); the art historiancritics Matko Meštrović (b. 1933) and Radoslav Putar (1929–94); and Dimitrije Bašičević (1921–87), the artist known as Mangelos.40 From 1961 to 1963, when it ran out of money, the group staged exhibitions in an alternative setting – Studio G, which was actually the M. Šira frame shop at 13 Preradovićeva Street, in the centre of Zagreb. The group was financially independent, paying dues, which then financed its exhibitions, effectively self-managing, and thus avoiding institutional bureaucracy. From 1961 until 1966 the group published what it referred to as an ‘anti-magazine’, Gorgona, which it labelled as such to distinguish the publication from conventional journals, and was more of an artwork presented in the form of a book. The group considered the members’ everyday lives part of their artistic practice, along with the informal meetings they had while walking around Zagreb or in the mountains, often with the task of observing nature or the change of seasons, in the manner of Situationist dérive.41 Vaništa recalls that the group started to codify its activity around 1961: ‘when Communism was strong, the Gorgona began a retreat into the irrational, the incomprehensible. Their refusal to act was obvious’.42 As early as 1977, curator Nena Dmitrijević identified the Dadaist

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

29

spirit of Gorgona: its ‘recognition of the absurd, of emptiness and monotony as esthetic categories, a tendency towards nihilism, metaphysical irony’.43 The group engaged in a prolonged debate concerning the possibility of collective work, and clearly its embrace of art into life had at its root an anti-institutional stance, one that also rejected the notion of individual authorship. While commenting on Kaprow’s dubbing of a 1957 picnic at George Segal’s farm a ‘happening’, Vaništa’s ‘Thought for June’ (1964) quotes from Alain Joffroy and J.J. Leveque’s article ‘The Crisis of the Content of Art’ in the French journal Aujourd’hui (April 1964): ‘there is no better performance than the moment in which one lives, no better dialogue than conversation with friends’.44 As art historian Branka Stipančić has suggested, given that Gorgona did not see art as a separate sphere, the merging of art and life in its practice took place e­ ffortlessly.45 From 1969 to 1970, Braco Dimitrijević and Goran Trbuljak formed the group Pensioner Tihomir Simčić, which involved enabling random passersby to become authors of works of art.46 The group was named after a man that the two artists met randomly in the doorway of an apartment on Ilica Street in Zagreb; after placing a piece of clay behind the door, they asked the first person who entered the doorway and opened the door, thereby making an impression in the clay, to sign the piece of clay as a work of art. They later asked to use the man’s name in conjunction with this artistic project, the purpose of which was to place the nonartist ‘in the position of the creator’.47 The two went on to create a number of similar collaborative works with random passersby. Likewise, from 1975 to 1981, the Group of Six artists organised what they called ‘exhibition-actions’ across Croatia, in which they would display their two- and three-dimensional work and stage actions or happenings in the public space, with the aim of engaging a different type of viewer than one that normally frequents museums.48 This type of work exemplifies the instrumentalisation of performativity in institutional critique in Eastern Europe. In Sarajevo, the 1980s witnessed the beginnings of performative activity in Bosnia, primarily out of necessity: artists turned to performance and interventions because of a lack of exhibition space for experimental art. The Zvono group, for example, named after the café where the artists gathered, was active from 1982 until 1992, creating and exhibiting their work on the streets, in shop windows, and even on a football field. Unlike in Zagreb, where exhibitions, actions and happenings in nontraditional spaces may have functioned as a vehicle of institutional critique, artists in Sarajevo simply craved the availability of exhibition space, institutional or otherwise. As Nermina Zildžo puts it, ‘Zvono artists were looking for ways to attract attention to themselves as a means of finding a way into the institutions of the art system’ (italics mine).49 In their happening Sport and Art (1986; figure 1.10), they crashed a soccer match during the intermission of a regular game in the Koševo Stadium, by running

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

30

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

1.10

Zvono, Sport and Art, 1986, Sarajevo. Courtesy: Sarajevo Centre for  Contemporary  Art

onto the field. Dressed in the colours of the visiting team, they brought their easels out and painted on the field, and then ran around with their paintings held high above their heads – a mobile exhibition. During the Yugoslav period, the Socialist Autonomous Province of Vojvodina, which today remains part of Serbia, had a strong tradition of performance and Conceptual Art dating to the 1970s in both its capital, Novi Sad, and Subotica, which lies on the border with Hungary.50 On 29 August 1969, Bálint Szombathy (b. 1950) and Slavko Matković (1948–94) formed the group Bosch+Bosch. The following year, in Novi Sad, there emerged KÔD, which later became (Ǝ and, subsequently, (Ǝ – KÔD – the ‘Ǝ’ referring to ‘intertextualism’. Although Bosch+Bosch functioned as an umbrella organisation for bringing local experimental artists together, there was no cohesion to the group. In fact, this was one of the points of contention between the founders; for Szombathy, Bosch+Bosch comprised a collective of individuals, whereas Matković preferred collaboration and consensus. One of Szombathy’s earliest performances was The Trails (1970; figure 1.11), performed on the main street of Subotica. The artist placed sheets of paper he called ‘footprint platforms’ at the end of a scaffolded walkway in front of a construction site, and ‘registered’ the footprints of the passersby.51 While formally similar to Trbuljak’s and Dimitrijević’s aforementioned initial Pensioner Tihomir Simčić action, Szombathy’s aim was different: with the paper intended to simply record the traces of everyday life on the streets, rather than

Bálint Szombathy, The Trails, 1970 (reconstructed in 1974), Novi Sad. Courtesy: Bálint Szombathy

1.11

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document 1.12

Bálint Szombathy, Lenin in Budapest, 1972, Budapest. Photographic performance. Courtesy: Bálint Szombathy

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

33

turn those pedestrians into artists. Perhaps because of Subotica’s proximity to Hungary, both artists maintained close contacts with the experimental art scene in Budapest. In fact, Szombathy performed Lenin in Budapest (figure 1.12) there in 1972, a photographic performance in which he carried around a signboard, similar to those that could be seen at May Day celebrations, with a portrait of the leader on it. The artist took a collective celebration and turned it into an individual one, as he walked through the streets alone with this sign. Given the action’s ambiguity, and the fact that it could equally be construed as supportive or derisive of the regime, Lenin in Budapest functions as an early example of overidentification, the strategy that would be utilised by the Slovenian group Laibach in the 1980s. In Yugoslav Slovenia, among the earliest happenings were those staged by OHO, active from 1966 to 1971.52 This group of artists – Milenko Matanović (b. 1947), David Nez (b. 1949), Marko Pogačnik (b. 1944) and Andraž Šalamun (b. 1947) were core members, who were at times joined by several other artists – created works spanning the genres of Land Art, installation, performance and Conceptual Art.53 Several of their actions and happenings were staged in Zvezda

Milenko Matanović, Happening with a Vacuum Cleaner and a Plastic Tube in Zvezda Park, 1968, Ljubljana. Courtesy: Moderna galerija, Ljubljana

1.13

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

34

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

Park in the centre of Ljubljana. These include Action in Zvezda Park (1968), in which Nez spread rolls of blank newspaper across the park and then crumpled them into small mountains, and Matanović’s Happening with a Vacuum Cleaner and a Plastic Tube in Zvezda Park (1968; figure 1.13), in which he filled hollow plastic tubes with air, using a vacuum cleaner. Also that year in Zvezda Park, OHO members organised Happening: Drawing on the Pavement, whose title explains the action, and Exhibition and Happening in Zvezda Park, in which Nez outlined Šalamun’s shadow in chalk on the ground; paintings by Matanović and Šalamun were also featured. The most iconic of the Zvezda Park happenings was perhaps Mount Triglav (figure 1.14), which took place on 30 December 1968, when Matanović, Nez and Drago Dellabernardina (b. 1948) positioned themselves in the middle of the park, cloaked in a black cloth that enveloped the three of them, leaving only their heads visible. Together, they formed a mountain of three heads – a literalisation of the name Triglav. The selection of this mountain was not arbitrary – Triglav is the highest peak in Slovenia and is also the symbol of the Slovene nation; a stylisation of it appears on the nation’s coat of arms and its flag. As both a symbol and a geographic feature, the mountain is very much embedded in the national identity. It is even said that to be a true Slovenian one has to have climbed Mount Triglav at least once in one’s life. As such, it was rather significant for these three artists, one of whom was in fact American (Nez), to embody this mountain themselves.54 The performance has since been reenacted and adapted by several other Slovenian artists. In 2004, the artistic collective IRWIN (1984–present) restaged the performance in Zvezda Park (figure 1.15), and in 2007 the artist trio of Janez Janša (b. 1964), Janez Janša (b. 1970) and Janez Janša (b. 1973) re-created it atop Mount Triglav itself (figure 1.16).55 Returning to the 1960s and OHO, which underwent various transformations throughout its existence, the group had its origins in the newspaper created by Iztok Geister (b. 1945) and Marko Pogačnik, while in high school in Kranj, entitled Plamenica. In their first publication, the writers ambitiously called for a ‘violation of the suffocating peace commanding our society’, a ‘ripping up the membranes inflicted by our environment and upbringing’, and a ‘revelation of the sources of truth’.56 According to the Slovenian curator and theorist Igor Zabel, this was not a traditional social or political protest, but, rather, a summons to transform consciousness. In his words, they ‘had no intention to destroy museums, they just wanted to change the museum’s context so that it would break the established conventions and throw light onto things as they are’. Moreover, ‘the point is not in changing the world, it is only necessary to see it’.57 Reism, ludism and hooliganism are useful concepts for approaching the work of OHO. The term ‘reism’ was first coined by the Slovenian critic and philosopher Taras Kermauner to describe the poetry of Tomaž Šalamun (the brother of the OHO member Andraž Šalamun). Recognising objects as objects in their own

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

35

OHO, Mount Triglav, 30 December 1968, Ljubljana. Courtesy: Moderna galerija, Ljubljana

right, and not only in reference to the individual’s perception of them, reism functioned as a critique of humanism, existentialism and the integrated Cartesian subject. Also introduced by Kermauner in reference to their work, ludism, with its principles of games and play, offered a mode of existence as an alternative to violent protest. Finally, hooliganism may be seen as manifested by the artists’ long hair and unconventional dress, further embodying their dissatisfaction with the bureaucracy and the consumerist society that resulted from Tito’s self-management socialism.58 OHO’s recognition as subversive by the authorities was anticipated by Pogačnik’s expulsion from school following the launch of Plamenica. It was later determined that his art arose from mental illness, and he was sent to compulsory check-ups at the psychiatric clinic in Polje in 1966.59 A number of the group’s works suggest parallels with contemporaneous trends in art. For example, Milenko Matanović walked the same distance of several metres one thousand times in a field of grass in Barje, Serbia, in 1968–69, creating a line as his feet moved across the earth. About this piece, entitled

1.14

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

36

1.15

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

IRWIN, Like to Like/Mount Triglav, 2004, Ljubljana. Color photo, 199.5 x 168 x 7 cm. Photographic reconstruction of the group action Mount Triglav. Photo: Tomaž Gregorič. Courtesy: Galerija Gregor Podnar. A Cornerhouse Commission

Milenko Matanović Makes a Path, he has stated, ‘I was intrigued by the idea of making my own path (I also liked the poetry of that act) by tramping down a line in the grass that didn’t exist before’.60 In 1965, the British Land artist Richard Long performed a similar act in his Line Made by Walking. Likewise, Matanović’s Chair, Cathedral, Passersby (1968) is an interesting expansion of American Conceptual artist Joseph Kosuth’s seminal One and Three Chairs (1965). In Matanović’s work, the artist creates a play on two Slovenian words: ‘chair’ (stol) and ‘cathedral’ (stolnica), by presenting a series of photograph, alternating between images of a single figure and more than one person, together with a single chair and more than one chair, all in front of a cathedral. While Kosuth (who is of Hungarian origins) examined the link between the word, the signifier and the signified, Matanović explored the appearance of the same phoneme in different words. Indeed, much of the work by OHO artists originated from an interest in concrete poetry. Such parallels are not surprising, considering that OHO and the Slovenian art world were well connected with contem­ porary trends; OHO participated in the Museum of Modern Art’s Information

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

37

Janez Janša, Janez Janša and Janez Janša, Mount Triglav on Mount Triglav, 2007, Mount Triglav, Slovenia. Triptych (detail). Photo: Gaja Repe. Courtesy: Janez Janša

­exhibition of 1970, and Matanović’s Land Art action Wheat and Rope, along with a description of OHO’s collective work, was included in Lucy Lippard’s Six Years. Finally, Nez’s work with mirrors, in which he places them in nature, recalls this aspect of American Land artist Robert Smithson’s practice. The ties between OHO and American Land Art were cemented in 1970, when Walter De Maria (figure 1.17) visited the group in Ljubljana and even participated in some of their projects. In 1971, some of the members of OHO founded a commune in the village of Šempas. By this point, their collective activity had shifted its focus from artistic work to spiritual energy and living in harmony with nature.61 Elsewhere in Yugoslavia, performative impulses seem to have arisen somewhat later. In Macedonia, for example, performative activity emerged from the activity of the Zero Group, an informal collective of artists, art ­historians, critics, theorists and philosophers who would meet at Gallery 7, a Turkish teahouse in the Old Town of Skopje, in the 1970s and 1980s. This venue became their default meeting space due to its proximity to the Academy of Arts, where many of them studied. Aleksandar Stankovski (b. 1959) recalls that ‘thousands of

1.16

38

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

performances’ took place in this space, which functioned like a Yugoslav Cabaret Voltaire. The group’s name deliberately evokes Zen Buddhism as well as the Japanese Zero jets used in the Second World War. Mainly, however, the members chose the word ‘zero’ to reflect the fact that they were modest, unpretentious and open to any influence, starting from ground zero. This was one of the most significant underground artistic groupings in Macedonia in the socialist era. In fact, Zero Group’s legacy was so strong that it represented Macedonia at the

1.17

OHO Group with Walter De Maria, 1970, Slovenia. Courtesy: Moderna galerija, Ljubljana

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

39

Venice Biennale in 2011, in lieu of a new or contemporaneously working artist or artist group. Happenings and performative activity came even later to neighbouring Bulgaria, appearing only in the 1980s. However, the seeds had been planted as early as the 1970s, when the group Poetic Circle was formed (1975), which two years later became Polemic Circle. Piotr Piotrowski attributes this delay to the absence of a tradition of independent art. According to him, the communist government simply usurped the system of state patronage of the arts that had been in place since the establishment of the modern Bulgarian state in the late nineteenth century.62 Furthermore, the communist party placed significant limits on creative freedom in order to preempt any possible rebellion, such as that which occurred in Hungary and Poland in 1956. According to the curators of N-Forms, an exhibition organised by the Institute of Contemporary Art in Sofia in 1994, the first documented work of contemporary art in Bulgaria was realised in 1983 in Kostil, in the context of a sculpture workshop: Vesselin Dimov’s installation in a river, entitled Water Dragon; while the first documented public happening in Bulgaria took place in 1985, staged by a group of artists in Vama in the courtyard of the Art Historical Museum. The following year, a number of happenings occurred across the country, as the performative activity in Bulgaria (like experimental art in general there) was very much dispersed, not just concentrated in the capital. In 1986, two happenings took place simultaneously and independently: The Road (figure 1.18), initiated by Dimitar Grozdanov (b. 1951) in Turgovishte (northern Bulgaria), and The Snake, by Chavdar Petrov, Iva Vladimirova and Stefan Zarkov in Dospat (southern Bulgaria). The Road consisted of parallel actions by the groups Dobrudzha (formed by a number of students from the town of Dobrich), Turgovishte (made up of artists from that town) and Ma (Dimitar Grozdanov and Alvena Michailova (b. 1959)), in the towns of General Toshevo, Kraishte, Turgovishte and Sopot. There is little description of the events, but based on photographs, they appear to have involved body painting; eclectic, handmade costumes (made of paper and other unconventional clothing materials); pleinair activities; and installations in the landscape (for example, a tree wrapped in plastic paper and covered with balloons). A number of other actions took place in the remote Bulgarian countryside, with ritualistic connotations. In 1989, Georgi Todorov (b. 1944) staged the action The Burning of 1,000 White Sheets of Paper by the seashore in Bourgas. The action followed the exhibition 1,000 White Sheets of Paper, also in Bourgas, in which the artist exhibited those numerous pieces of paper, in frames, each with a significant name or title, such as Portrait of Tao or John Lucas Tabula Rasa – most sheets were dedicated to artists or philosophers, and some to political developments or repressive measures by the communist party. After the exhibition, the papers were removed from the gallery and ceremonially burned.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document 1.18

Dimitar Grozdanov, The Road, 1986, Turgovishte. Courtesy: ICA (Institute of Contemporary Art) Sofia

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

41

In 1981, members of Polemic Circle came together to form the Cuckovden group (in Bulgarian, the word cuckovden means ‘tomorrow never comes’), which in 1984 became the DE (Dynamic Aesthetisation) group, centred on the figure of Orlin Dvorianov (b. 1951). There were three elements to Cuckovden’s work: the individual art projects of its members; carnival and festival actions and happenings; and documentation, in the form of photographs, videos and poetry. In 1991, Cuckovden dissolved, but two years earlier, some of its members had come together to form Art in Action, a collective oriented toward supporting the development of unconventional artistic forms in Bulgaria and establishing a centre for avant-garde and modern art. In 1991, the group held a happening in the former building of the Sofia Brewery, in hopes of creating a contemporary art centre there. The City Group, which formed in 1986–87 following the initiative of art critic Filip Zidarov (b. 1953), aimed to develop an alternative to the ‘stylistic stagnation in Bulgarian art during the 1980s’.63 The artists associated with the group staged an inaugural eponymous exhibition in 1988, and the following year, orchestrated a large-scale public happening in Gabrovo entitled The Tower of Babylon. In January 1990, the group’s action Chameleon took place in front of the Palace of Culture in Sofia. It was described as a ‘political happening’, as the chameleon’s skin was made from Communist Party membership cards. Throughout the late 1980s and the early 1990s, the roof of the Artists’ Union Gallery building, located at 6 Shipka Street (the gallery was named Shipka 6), became a nexus for experimental artistic activity in the form of happenings and installations, which often took the guise of parties and gatherings. Visitors to the exhibitions on the roof terrace understood the location as a ‘“free space”, and saw the exhibits as symptomatic of the breakdown of canons and dogmas of all kinds’.64 In October 1989, the exhibition Earth and Sky was organised by Diana Popova and Georgi Todorov on the roof of Shipka 6. It was the first display in Bulgaria of what the curators later termed ‘unconventional art’, by which they meant genres that were not necessarily unconventional for the global or Western art world at the time, but that were relatively new to Bulgaria. Earth and Sky brought together artists who had until that point been working in relative isolation across the country. Even the form of the exhibition itself was unusual, as it was a ‘developing exhibition’, with new artists, performances and actions being added to the roster as it progressed. The USSR In the former USSR and its republics, where Stalinism and its control over the arts had a much farther reach than in other parts of Eastern Europe, both geographically and temporally, the experimental practices that began to develop after the Thaw in the mid-to-late 1960s were initially confined to painting and

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

42

1.19

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

sculpture. In the 1970s, examples of performative practices began to surface, most notably in Russia and the Baltic states. In 1976, the Moscow-based group Collective Actions staged its first action. Entitled Appearance (figure 1.19), it involved around thirty participants travelling to Izmailovsky Field in Moscow upon invitation by the organisers. Following their arrival, the participants were given certificates confirming their presence at the action. Octavian Eşanu characterises the first thirteen years of Collective Actions’ work, from 1976 to 1989, as a form of artistic experiment – an effort to discover ‘unique ways to investigate the nature of art’.65 The group’s performances adhered to a common formula: a journey to the countryside, a predetermined action taking place there, and a discussion involving all present. Its work hinged on the concept of ‘empty action’, in which the participants were held in a state of suspense by the anticipation of the action, which was facilitated by the process of travelling to the event and waiting for it to take place. Eşanu describes this as akin to ‘a meditation practice, where the subject is focused for a long period of time on a certain object, idea or psychological state’.66 In other words, it was the process of travelling to and participating in the action that took precedence, over and above any fixed meaning inherent to the action itself. This focus on process, as opposed to the production of an object, resembles the impetus underlying the emergence of Western performance art, wherein artists produced ephemeral

Collective Actions, Appearance, 1976, Izmailovsky Field, Moscow. Courtesy: Andrei Monastyrsky

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

43

works that could (at least theoretically) avoid commodification.67 Furthermore, the action served as a vehicle through which the participants could engage with one another in an artistic act, in a temporary space of freedom. In 1979, Russian artists Natalia Abalakova (b. 1941) and Anatoly Zhigalov (b. 1941) embarked on a long-term, ongoing project entitled Explorations into the Essence of Art as Applied to Life and Art (known as TOTART since 1983). The project aims to merge art and life, break down the distance between the artwork and the audience, and communicate with and respond to its local surroundings. Abalakova and Zhigalov use actions, performances, situations, interventions, objects and installations to discover the ‘irreducible and uncorruptible’ aspects of art, as well as revive the ‘art-into-life’ spirit of the historical Russian avant-garde, which ultimately failed in its attempt to merge art and daily existence.68 The pair’s early projects blurred the lines between art and life so much so that their actions appeared indistinguishable from everyday activities. For example, from 1981 to 1985, Zhigalov worked as a janitor in a cooperative building, even describing the employment itself as a work of art. Zhigalov’s job enabled him to organise such happenings as Avant-Garde Alley Foundation Subbotnik (1982), wherein he advertised a subbotnik, a voluntary work party, at which the participants cleaned up the area surrounding the building. In Golden Voluntary Sunday (1985; figure 1.20), the work advertised turned out

TOTART, Golden Voluntary Sunday, 1985, Moscow. Courtesy: Natalia Abalakova and Anatoly Zhigalov

1.20

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

44

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

to be painting the fences, benches and garbage bins around the building gold. In this way, a necessary activity (building maintenance) was transformed into something superfluous, as those items do not necessarily need to be painted a flashy gold colour. For organising this action, the artist was arrested and sent to a psychiatric hospital. The group Champions of the World, formed in 1986, created similar actions as part of a series entitled Preventative Geography. For example, in Hygiene on the Shore (1987) the group cleaned two kilometres of the coastline of the resort town of Koktebel, in Crimea, by shampooing and wiping down the rocks on the beach. Sylvia Sasse and Inke Arns, using a term coined by Moscow Conceptualists in regard to the work of postmodern Russian writer Vladimir Sorokin, whose novels use an exaggerated style of Socialist Realism, identify these projects by Zhigalov and Champions of the World, among others, as employing the strategy of ‘subversive affirmation’, which they define as an artistic/political tactic that allows artists/activists to take part in certain social, political or economic discourses and to affirm, appropriate or consume them while simultaneously undermining them. It is characterized precisely by the fact that with affirmation there is simultaneously taking place a distancing from, or revelation of what is being affirmed. In subversive affirmation there is always a surplus which destabilizes affirmation and turns it into its opposite.69

By repeating the required gesture (of voluntary work, for example), the action was neither critical nor supportive; it simply exposed the action for what it was, leaving the observer to decide for him- or herself on which side to stand. Scholars of Estonian contemporary art seem to agree that the sources for performance and happenings in Estonia are myriad. As in Hungary, happenings developed from engagements with Pop Art. They were also connected with the theatre of the absurd, and among the participants in the first happenings and performances were students in the areas of music, visual art, design and architecture. Much of the experimental work from this time came out of Bruno Tomberg’s studio. In 1966, Tomberg introduced a new course of study on industrial art within the Faculty of Architecture at the State Art Institute in Tallinn. An innovative instructor, Tomberg required students to broaden their knowledge by taking courses in information theory, bionics70 and sociology.71 The earliest Estonian happenings were staged by musicians and visual artists working in collaboration. Musician Toomas Velmet (b. 1942) recalls that one of the first took place in 1965 at the State Art Institute, and involved both art and music students; it was based on the Samuel Beckett play Acts Without Words, and inspired by the improvisational theatre of Heino Mikiver.72 The following year, a happening was organised in the Assembly Hall of Tallinn Secondary School no. 21. One of the most notorious happenings in Estonia occurred in 1968; it was an official event at the Tallinn Writers’ House and entitled Roundel

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

45

of Cremona (figure 1.21). The name evokes game playing and improvisation, and the happening featured improvised action and noise music, with pieces by Franz Schubert and Antonio Vivaldi being played, to satisfy its promotion as a musical event.73 The action involved sparklers, which caused a violin to catch fire. There was nothing subversive about the action, but because of the fire, Arvo Pärt (b. 1935), one of the organisers, had to write a letter to the Composers’ Union explaining what had happened. The following year, two events were organised during the summer camp Noorus at Kabli on the Estonian coast. Kaljo Põllu (b. 1934), an artist and leader of the Tartu-based Visarid group, installed several windmills in the sea, an installation he termed ‘wind art’. To accompany the work, Enn Tegova (b. 1946) created ‘air art’ by having two inflated latex gloves float in the water. At the same camp, Ando Keskküla (1950–2008), Leonard Lapin (b. 1947) and Andres Tolts (1949–2014) staged a planned happening; the night before, they had buried a female mannequin in the sand, and during the event they unearthed it, tore it apart and burned it. In September 1969, another happening was staged at Pirita Beach on the outskirts of Tallinn, this time with more serious consequences. Entitled Papers in the Air, the happening was organised by Keskküla, Vilen Künnapu (an architecture student), Lapin, Tolts and Toomas Pakri, who released pages of the newspaper Pravda into the air.74 The organisers were arrested and charged with creating a public disturbance; Keskküla, Künnapu and Tolts were imprisoned for ten days, and their heads were punitively shaved – a common practice during the Soviet period.

Mart Lille, Arvo Pärt and Toomas Velmet, Roundel of Cremona, 1968, Tallinn Writers’ House. Photo: Jüri Tenson. Courtesy: Archives of the Art Museum of Estonia

1.21

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

46

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

Künnapu’s aunt, an important figure in Estonian politics, helped secure their release. Utilising the object of the militia’s performative intervention, Keskküla later incorporated the hair that had been shorn in prison into a piece entitled Head in the Basin, which he showed at a later Pop Art exhibition, SOUP’69. Although Lapin has identified The Painting of an Elephant (1971), in which artists painted playground equipment in bright colours, as the end of the wave of 1960s happenings in Estonia, such actions and performances continued throughout the 1970s and 1980s. In 1975, Lapin organised an exhibition at the Institute of Experimental Microbiology in Harku, outside of Tallinn, which was advertised as the Harku Happening and involved musical performances by the band Mess, kinetic sculptures and installations. Art historian Andres Kurg has noted how, during the symposium following the event, Lapin read a passage from Pierre Restany’s White Book, which begins with the statement ‘Art descends to the streets’.75 The writing of Restany, cited above in connection with Slovak happenings, is another source for the development of happenings in Estonia, insofar as his text identifies the need for a new type of art, one that activated the viewer, involving play and drawing on a combination of approaches from a range of genres, including the happening. Artists in Estonia were also aware of developments in the West – as in other countries across Europe, Allan Kaprow’s Assemblage, Environments and Happenings was circulated, having been brought into Estonia from Canada by émigré art historian Eda Sepp.76 In addition, although Artforum was not widely available, there were artists who knew how to get their hands on issues of the journal, while a copy of Michael Kirby’s book Happenings (1965) was reportedly also passed around.77 In addition, Anu Allas has identified the theatre of the absurd, the ideas of Jerzy Grotowski and even the ‘games’ that one had to play in order to survive in Soviet society as potential sources for the introduction of happenings and play into the Estonian context.78 In fact, Lapin substituted the English word ‘happening’ for the Estonian mang, which means ‘game’ or ‘play’. In combining various disciplines and techniques, and experimenting through play, artists clearly utilised the happening as a means of developing new art forms. In the process, they sought to change the relationship between the artwork and the viewer. This is confirmed by Lapin, who regards the development of such forms as vital to that period, and seeing in the happening a genre that could bring about the public’s closer engagement with art.79 Architecture student Jüri Okas (b. 1950) also created filmed performances and happenings with his friends and colleagues. Okas’s father was a wellrespected academic artist in the Soviet Union; thus, the family had access to Western art magazines, and he was among the privileged few to possess a movie camera. Okas’s work derived from both local and international sources. The first happening he staged and filmed was Birthday (figure 1.22), on 16 February 1971. Birthday is typical of Okas’s films in that it is simply a recording of ­activities,

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

47

with no editing or montage. Here, a group of the artist’s friends carries a giant, three-metre-long phallus (made of blue plastic filled with balloons) across the city of Tallinn, placing it in different strange contexts along the way (on a phone box, for example).80 That year, Okas also filmed the action The Painting of an Elephant as well as Waterman, which took place on the beach and involved digging a ditch from the beach to the sea. As with the earlier examples, the beach and the sea played an important role in Estonian happenings. During the Soviet era, much of the Baltic Sea coast was considered a ‘forbidden zone’, because of its potential for escape – making it at once a symbol of restriction and freedom. Following this brief period of creating filmed happenings, Okas went on to use the photographs and film stills of happenings in his graphic work, making geometric and architectural drawings on top of the images. Latvia’s first happening occurred in 1972, when artist and fashion designer Andris Grīnbergs (b. 1946) married his partner, Inta Jaunzeme (b. 1955), in an action entitled The Wedding of Jesus Christ. Staged both in the Latvian countryside and at the seaside, the action featured the participation of a dozen artists, poets and musicians in Grīnbergs’s social circle.81 Grīnbergs was a member of Latvia’s small group of hippies, and the happenings he organised bore similarities with hippie culture in the West as well as indigenous pagan culture, such as the traditional midsummer celebrations, which also take place in the countryside and involve a celebration of and commingling with nature. Grīnbergs, who was often under police surveillance for his eccentric style of dress, described these happenings as pure escapism, rather than any attempt at artistic experiment or activity.82 As in many areas of the former Soviet sphere of influence, it was the possibility of free expression combined with the relatively safe haven of the countryside (away from police surveillance) that gave rise to small pockets of freedom throughout the East.83

Jüri Okas, documentation of Birthday, 16 February 1971, Tallinn. Film still. Courtesy: Archives of the Art Museum of Estonia

1.22

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

48

1.23

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

Žalias Lapas, The Way, 10 December 1990, Vilnius. Courtesy: Džiugas Katinas

Lithuania saw its first performances and actions only toward the end of the Soviet era. Two groups emerged in the waning days of the Soviet Union: Žalias Lapas (Green Leaf) in Vilnius in 1988 and Post Ars in Kaunas in 1989. Both created their first large-scale public performances in 1990, a time when, according to Žalias Lapas member Džiugas Katinas (b. 1965), ‘anything was possible’,84 as the old regime was on its way out but the new one had not yet taken hold. As a result, everything was in chaos, but at the same time, the rules were relaxed, or at least not fully enforced. On 10 December 1990, Žalias Lapas organised an action entitled The Way (figure 1.23), to coincide with International Human Rights Day. The performance took place on the main city square in the centre of Vilnius, right in front of the old Town Hall. There, the artists set up some metal sculptures, and, dressed in white protective suits, spread sand and coal in lines on the road. As the cars drove along the road that passes between the square and the Town Hall, their wheels picked up the sand and

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

49

Post Ars, Zatyšiai, 1990, Kaunas. Courtesy: Česlovas Lukenskas

coal and ‘distributed’ it throughout the city. Quite by accident, after the performance, Vilnius witnessed the first snowfall of that season. This meant that not only was the coal dispersed throughout the city, but that it splashed on buildings and walls, making it more difficult to clean up than the artists had anticipated. Also in 1990, Post Ars created a massive and intricate outdoor performance in the Zatyšiai Quarry (figure 1.24). Each individual was responsible for organising his or her own aspect of the event, and all the actions took place separately, beside one another. The piece involved the unrolling of sheets of paper in the landscape, lifting the sheets to reveal bodies lying underneath and the wrapping of figures like mummies. At the end, when the participants left the field, they left behind a mound of paper next to a series of burning paper bodies. While some elements of the action were symbolic in nature, others were purely visual – for example, some of the pieces of cloth were lain on the ground simply for aesthetic purposes; they were violet and green, colours chosen to provide contrast, not for any symbolic meaning.85 The entire event was filmed, with the artists keeping in mind how the piece would look from above, where it was being filmed. In both actions by Žalias Lapas and Post Ars, the artists were experimenting with new art forms, methods of documentation and engagement with their viewers. One of the earliest actions witnessed in Ukraine took place in Odessa in 1967, when a pair of artists known as Sychil and Khrushchik staged the outdoor Fence Exhibition, in which works of art were hung on a fence. The show not only anticipated the 1974 Moscow Bulldozer Exhibition, insofar as it was an

1.24

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

50

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

Photograph of the artist Fripulia. Courtesy: Yuriy Zmorovich

1.25

independent exhibition staged outdoors (although unlike the latter, the Fence Exhibition was not interrupted by KGB agents bulldozing the works), but also the AptArt (apartment art) exhibitions in Russia in the 1980s, wherein nonconformist artists, lacking any alternative (much less official) space in which to show their work, would stage unofficial showings in their apartments.86 Although the conceptual and performance art group Inspection Medical Hermeneutics was formed in Moscow in 1987, two of its founders, Sergei Anufriev (b. 1964) and Yuri Leiderman (b. 1963), were originally from Odessa; Pavel Pepperstein (b. 1966), the third founder of the group, was from Moscow. Perhaps the most striking figure in the Ukrainian performance art scene was Fripulia (Fedor Tetyanich; 1942–2007) (figure 1.25), who was a professional painter and member of the Artists’ Union, but staged performances and actions. For example, he wandered the streets of Kiev in the 1980s dressed in strange costumes, in which he appeared at the openings of exhibitions, singing and dancing but without any permission to do so. The Rays of Juche group was founded in 1988 in Kiev; its name refers to the ideology of former North Korean leader Kim Il-Sung.87 The artists staged ironic performances, such as a symbolic funeral of Mikhail Gorbachev’s books, dancing in front of the Lenin monument, and placing a black flag in front of the Kiev City Council building.88 Fluxus east A significant point of contact between East and West was Fluxus. Founded in the 1960s by George Maciunas (1931–78), Fluxus was an international network of artists dedicated to experimental art and a synthesis of different media, including poetry, visual art and performance.89 Maciunas was originally from Lithuania, and it was because of his connections to the East that Vilnius, in the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic, hosted a Fluxus concert in spring 1966. The concert was organised by the musicologist Vytautas Landbergis (who later

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

51

became a prominent Lithuanian politician) at the Vilnius Pedagogical Institute, and involved a ‘chaos concert’, featuring a range of activities and experimental music. This was largely a private event, with teachers and students present and, according to Petra Stegmann, ‘no large audience, no press, no scandal’.90 Indeed, it can be surmised that the concert did not make a big impression on the artistic scene at the time. When asked about their awareness of the Fluxus event when they were beginning their careers in the 1980s, artists Česlovas Lukenskas (b. 1959), a member of Post Ars, and Džiugas Katinas, a member of Žalias Lapas, both responded that they might have been vaguely aware that something of the sort had taken place, but were not clear on the details.91 Katinas indicated a different source of inspiration for his performance work in the late 1980s: a recitation of abstract sound poetry by Lithuanian poet Sigitas Geda (1943–2008) that was broadcast on television around that time. Gediminas Urbonas (b. 1966), who also belonged to Žalias Lapas, pointed to another possible influence: a book on Viennese Actionism that was brought into the country by art historian Raminta Jurėnaitė, whose father was a prominent member of the Communist Party, and thus able to travel abroad. In neighbouring Estonia, artists became aware of Fluxus through connections in Poland. Velmet recalled that artists were inspired to create the first happenings in Estonia after witnessing Fluxus-type events at the Warsaw Autumn Music Festival in 1964. Commenting on the early happenings that occurred in Estonia in 1965 and 1966, he stated, this was not musical experimentation; there was very little music in it, and it was more like a happening. We called these things ‘the theatre of the absurd’ or ‘instrumental theatre’, in which the musical instruments played their part. The ideology of the performance was affected by that and by the performances of John Cage and Merce Cunningham, which we managed to see in 1964 in Warsaw, during the Warsaw Autumn [Music] Festival.92

Yet he also stated that at that point, they ‘did not even know what Fluxus was’,93 although the artists were aware of similar approaches to artistic experiment and performance through the works of Cage and Cunningham. In 1964, Cage and Cunningham also performed in Prague. In addition, Fluxus materials made their way to that city, albeit circuitously – via Leningrad. In 1964–65, Fluxus members and brothers Eric and Tony Andersen visited Prague, staging a private performance in Herberta Masaryková’s apartment. As Pavlína Morganová writes, due to its ‘private nature’, the visit, like the Fluxus concert in Vilnius, ‘left almost no trace’.94 However, the Andersens later travelled to Leningrad, where they met Jindřich Chalupecký, who brought information about Fluxus back to Prague on his return to Czechoslovakia. Noting similarities between Knížák’s Aktual Art and the aims of Fluxus, Chalupecký sent information on Knížák’s actions to the United States. When

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

52

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

Maciunas learned of this activity, he named Knížák the ‘director of Fluxus East’.95 By that time, Knížák’s Aktual Group had already organised its first action and published its manifesto as samizdat. Eric Andersen later recalled that he and his brother conceived of their trip as an agitprop tour of the East starting in Poland; and Velmet remembered attending the Warsaw Autumn Music Festival that same year. From there, the brothers travelled to Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Ukraine and Russia. Also that year, the two had opened a bookshop in Denmark that specialised in experimental literature, art and music, so they filled Tony Andersen’s newly purchased Renault 4 with books and disseminated this literature on the road. As in Prague, they gave private performances in Bratislava, Brno, Budapest, Krakow and Lviv for select audiences of five to fifteen people, organising larger performances in Warsaw and Kiev. A number of larger and more public Fluxus events took place in Prague in 1966. From 5–7 April an event was organised at Club Reduta, with performances by three Fluxus members from Scandinavia: Eric Andersen, Arthur Køpcke and Tomas Schmit. They included Andersen’s Opera 25, which involved assigning different tasks to different groups in the audience, and Schmit’s Zyklus für Wassereimer (Oder Flaschen) (Cycle for Water Pails (or Bottles)), from 1962, which had earlier been presented in numerous Fluxus concerts. The latter consisted of pouring water from one pail (or bottle) into another, arranged in a circle, until all the water was gone. The events were met with lukewarm reception. One of those in attendance, Bohumila Grögerová, noted in her diary that ‘it strikes us as absurd to present happenings in Czechoslovakia in which some kind of disorder is artificially created, something stops working or a mess is made, it seems ridiculous to us, for whom this is an everyday reality’.96 Nevertheless, a number of articles appeared in the local press following the event, attempting to inform the public about the new artistic genre of happenings.97 Even Knížák regarded these activities with scepticism, contrasting the performative impulse in the Czech context with manifestations of it in the West: ‘Thank god for the so-called Iron Curtain … this perfect isolation meant that we did not degenerate as swiftly or as tragically as the rest of Europe. There, art became titillation, a delicacy, a topic of conversation. Our activities are not experimental art, but necessary activity’.98 For Knížák, this ‘necessary activity’ denoted the creation of an art form that was closer to life, as opposed to spectacle for its own sake – an authentic mode of creativity in the face of an otherwise overwhelming sociopolitical reality. Later that year, in October, a Fluxus festival took place in Prague that consisted of an exhibition and three Fluxus concerts. Chalupecký had invited Dick Higgins and Alison Knowles for an exhibition of their work at the Museum of Czech Literature, and, coincidentally, at the same time, Knížák had invited Jeff Brener, Serge Oldenbourg and Ben Vautier to take part in a Fluxus concert based on Maciunas’s instructions. Taken together, the events constituted what

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

53

was perhaps the first Fluxus festival in Eastern Europe. Of all the guests, only Vautier was still an ‘official’ member of Fluxus, the rest having been excommunicated by Maciunas. Nevertheless, the first ‘Koncert Fluxu’ occurred before an audience of around 150 to 200 people, on 13 October 1966 at Manes Hall; ‘Games’ took place on 14 October at the Museum of Czech Literature; and a second Koncert Fluxu was held at the Galerie Platýz on 17 October. Among the works performed were Vautier’s Tying-Up Piece for Christo, which involved a seated Brener being tied up by Vautier with white string, which was also tied to objects, creating a net (13 October); Knowles’s Colour Music #1 for Dick Higgins (1963), in which the performer writes down his or her problems and then lists the best solutions as well as a colour to accompany each problem (14 October); and Benjamin Patterson’s Paper Piece, featuring a gallery full of torn paper that was also used to decorate the clothing of the audience members (17 October). This last event of the festival was remembered more for the events that followed: Oldenbourg was the only Fluxus performer remaining in Prague for this final concert, after which, in his inebriated state, he gave his passport to a Slovak soldier, who, in turn, used it to cross the border and flee to the West. Both Oldenbourg and Knížák were arrested; as Knížák was only arrested for his connection to Oldenbourg, he was quickly released, but Oldenbourg remained in prison in Prague for fourteen months. Prague was not the only Central European city to have contact with Fluxus; Budapest did as well. In 1969, Budapest hosted its first Fluxus concert, which was organised by Tamás Szentjóby. According to Petra Stegmann, both he and Miklos Erdély first learned of Fluxus in 1966, when they read about it in Becker and Vostell’s Happenings, Fluxus, Pop Art, Nouveau réalisme.99 The concert took place using Fluxus scores (most likely sent to Szentjóby by Gábor Altorjay, who had fled Hungary in 1967), and involved Szentjóby performing all of the actions, such as throwing a cake in his own face and crashing into a piano.100 He also performed Schmit’s Zyklus (figure 1.26). What distinguished this event from the Prague Fluxus festival was that these performances comprised Szentjóby’s interpretations of Fluxus works, as he had not been in any direct contact with Fluxus artists internationally.101 That same year, in Bratislava, Milan Adamčiak (b. 1946) organised the First Evening of New Music in Ružomberok. Adamčiak was a trained cellist who wrote music in the style of John Cage. For this 1969 concert, he created a three-dimensional score based on the form of a cylinder and performed it with Robert Cyprich (1951–96). The following year, the two organised Water Music, a modernised version of Georg Friedrich Händel’s original composition. Staged in the swimming pool of a student dormitory in Bratislava, this happening involved the playing of music underwater and in the changing rooms, with all participants dressed in black-tie attire.102 Andrea Euringer-Bátorová has contrasted these events with those organised by Fluxus, describing them as ‘characterized by an ironic tone, and [featuring] … neither

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

54

1.26

Tamás Szentjóby performing Tomas Schmit’s Zyklus für Wassereimer (Oder  Flaschen), 24 February 1969, Budapest. Courtesy: Tamás Szentjóby

an anti-institutional attitude nor a destructive tendency here’, thereby lacking in qualities often associated with Fluxus.103 In 1977, Jarosław Kozłowski (b. 1945), one of the founders of the anti­­­ authoritarian artistic network SIEC (NET), wrote to Maciunas proposing a joint

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

55

exhibition. Maciunas’s response was that the artists create the event themselves, since the nature of Fluxus is that no professional experience is required to enact the performances.104 The event took place at the Galeria Akumulatory 2 in Poznan, and lasted for four days; it consisted of Maciunas’s FLUXVERSION I, FLUXVERSION II, Flux Sports, a Flux Clinic and a presentation of Flux Films and Slides on the last day. Akumulatory 2 occupies a unique place in the annals of Eastern European art, as it straddled the line between official and experimental institution. The gallery was opened in 1973 by Kozłowski and students of the Adam Mickiewicz University’s Institute of Art History (Andrzej Jur, Tadeusz Maturszczak and Piotr Piotrowski) under the aegis of the Polish Students’ Union; as such, it was a state institution, but a nonartistic as well as student-run one, which allowed for some degree of additional creative freedom.105 Despite the fact that Fluxus artists travelled to and performed in West Germany in the 1960s, including in West Berlin, these performances rarely penetrated into East Germany. According to Claudia Mesch, Cage and Fluxus remained unknown there until the 1980s, and developments in performance art were delayed; it was not until 1981 that some of Beuys’s art objects were shown there.106 Allan Kaprow called attention to this divide between East and West Germany in his 1977 happening Sweet Wall, staged in an empty lot not far from the Berlin Wall itself. During the performance, the small group of participants took turns layering bricks to build a wall, but topping them with bread and jam instead of cement. In this way, it created an alternative to the real Berlin Wall, one that brought individuals together instead of dividing them, and was shortlived – destroyed at the end of the performance. Toward performance We can locate the origins of performance art in the region in the happenings and actions that were staged from the 1950s through the 1970s. Much like in the West, performance art as a genre, encompassing not only actions but also more theatrical, staged events, developed from these initial forays into action and body art. Across East-Central Europe, however, these new art forms were not usually supported by official venues. Although there were alternative and student-led spaces in the former Yugoslavia, even in that liberal environment the New Art Practice, as it was termed in the nation at that time, was often not understood or accepted by the institutions, meaning the art academies and the established artists teaching there as professors. Although exhibitions of their work did occasionally take place in official institutions, such as the Gallery of Contemporary Art in Zagreb, many artists had to – and did – organise their own alternative venues in which experimental art practices such as ­performance could develop.

56

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Yugoslavia The Student Culture Centres that were established by Tito in Belgrade, Ljubljana and Zagreb following the 1968 student protests provided a neutral space in which youthful rebellion could be contained, and thus prevented from coming into contact with the public sphere. Tito understood that youth were prone to agitation, and since this could not be stopped, it could at least be circumscribed. Miško Šuvaković has also observed in Yugoslavia a further strategy of the ‘neutralization of effects of the cultural and social transgression’,107 which was achieved by dissuading artists from manifesting their experimental activity in their home environment, but, instead, encouraging them to do so in other regions of the Yugoslav Republic. Therefore, the status quo in each region would be maintained, and transgressive activity would be displaced. The Student Culture Centre (SKC) in Belgrade was crucial to the development of Yugoslav experimental art.108 Founded in 1971, SKC’s heyday lasted until around 1977, although it is still in existence today. Seminal performances by an informal group of six artists associated with SKC – Marina Abramović (b. 1946), Era Milivojević (b. 1944), Neša Paripović (b. 1942), Zoran Popović (b. 1944), Raša Todosijević (b. 1945) and Gergelj Urkom (b. 1940) – took place here, as did the April Meetings, an annual festival of expanded media and new art held from 1973 to 1978, during which artists from abroad, such as Joseph Beuys and Gina Pane, came to present their work and give lectures. Todosijević described SKC as a marginal, closed space, where artists were given free rein to experiment.109 When asked in an interview how they were allowed to produce alternative work, he stated that they were not taken seriously, since they were only students.110 Nevertheless, Todosijević recalled that the artists believed themselves to be working at a significant moment, and felt certain they were ‘going to create a new kind of art’.111 SKC had close ties to the Arte Povera artists from Italy through Ješa Denegri, art historian, and Biljana Tomić, who was director of the visual arts programme of the SKC Gallery from 1976 to 1999, and who had studied in Rome. Links were also established among the independent art scenes in Belgrade, Ljubljana and Zagreb by artists who travelled between the cities. For example, Zagreb-based artist Tomislav Gotovac studied film directing at the Belgrade Academy of Performing Arts in 1967–75, the most active years of the Student Culture Centre.112 Later, Abramović went on to study in Zagreb in 1971, together with her husband at the time, Paripović. Mladen Stilinović, of the Group of Six Artists, functioned as a link between Zagreb and Ljubljana, and the OHO artists travelled and performed across Yugoslavia, including in Belgrade and Zagreb. Abramović is probably the most recognisable figure to emerge from the group at SKC. In 1974, she performed her Rhythm 5, a ninety-minute performance in which she constructed a five-pointed star from wood soaked in

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Sources and origins

gasoline, after which she lit the star, walked around it, cut her hair, fingernails and toenails, threw them all into the star, then entered the empty space to lie down. Eventually, she lost consciousness, and was pulled from the star when a flame touched her leg and she failed to react. This piece is emblematic of much of Abramović’s performative oeuvre, in that it pushed her body to its absolute physical and mental limits. Paripović presented Examples of Analytical Sculpture (figure 1.27) at SKC during the Performance Meeting ’78, which involved the artist touching his lips to a nude female model in a spiral pattern, from her head to her toe, effectively outlining the model with his lips and his body, as opposed to forming it with a conventional artistic material such as marble or clay. The piece addresses the notion of the tactile nature of art and particularly sculpture, as well as the means by a work of art can be created. SKC attracted not only visual artists, but musicians as well. Miroslav Miša Savić’s (b. 1954) performance at the 1976 April Meetings was entitled Twenty-Four Hours (figure 1.28), and lasted as long as the title indicates. While Abramović explored the limits of her own body, Savić turned the tables and placed the burden on the audience to endure the performance, which consisted of a single chord repeated every second for an entire day. The artist recalls that about five hundred people were in attendance by the end of the performance, at which point the audience jokingly asked for just one more minute.113 Like the artists from Czechoslovakia and Poland, Savić was influenced by John Cage;

Image unavailable for use in electronic editions: Marina Abramović, Rhythm 5, 1974, Belgrade.

57

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

58

1.27

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

Neša Paripović, Examples of Analytical Sculpture, 1978. Photographic performance. Courtesy: Neša Paripović

SKC published a book of Cage’s texts in Serbian in the late 1970s. Philip Glass also had a presence through the staging of his opera Einstein on the Beach as part of the Belgrade International Theatre Festival (BITEF) in 1976. Like Abramović’s, Raša Todosijević’s performances involved pushing the boundaries of the artist’s physical limits. This was the case of his 19 April 1974 performance (staged in cooperation with his partner, Marinela Koželj) at the April Meetings: Drinking Water – Inversions, Imitations and Contrasts (figure 1.29). The thirtyfive-minute performance involved the artist drinking twenty-six glasses of tap water, during which he tried to synchronise his rhythm of swallowing with the rhythm of the breathing of a fish that he had thrown on the floor in front of the audience. Todosijević used a physical prop to impose a limit on the performance’s duration: he put purple dust on the table and covered it with a white sheet, stopping the performance when the sheet became completely saturated with the purple colour as a result of his vomiting. Era Milivojević was also part of this informal group of SKC artists; one iconic photograph from the 1970s captures him taping Abramović to a low table. Gera Urkom describes that performance as an impromptu event: Abramović had fallen back in an exaggerated posture, expressing exhaustion.114 Milivojević started taping her, and a photographer happened to be there to capture the moment. The action bears resemblance to Milivojević’s solo performances in which he wrapped his body with rubber bands and gradually removed them, as if peeling off a second skin to reveal the new one. The work of the SKC artists (figure 1.30), along with that of the artists associ ated with the New Art Practice in Zagreb, exemplifies institutional critique in

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

59

Miroslav Miša Savić, Twenty-Four Hours, 1976, Belgrade. Courtesy: Miroslav Miša Savić

Yugoslavia and Eastern Europe. The 1960s and 1970s were a time when artists across the globe began to question the notion of the art object as well as the institutions of art, exposing their fraught economic and, at times, political underpinnings. While the term ‘institutional critique’ was initially applied to Minimalist artists in North America and Western Europe, the artists at SKC also participated in this discourse. Although Yugoslavia did not have an art market to speak of, many of the artists engaged in experimental practices, such as those at the Student Culture Centres through the country, were well connected with and travelled to the West, and thus were sympathetic to the debates surrounding the commercialisation and institutionalisation of art. Furthermore, their brand of institutional critique involved a protest against bureaucratic governments in general, specifically against the latters’ role in limiting artistic production so as to perpetuate existing sociopolitical conditions.

1.28

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

60

1.29

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

Raša Todosijević, Drinking Water – Inversions, Imitations and Contrasts, 19 April 1974, Belgrade. Courtesy: Raša Todosijević

The work of Zagreb-based artists such as Trbuljak and Dimitrijević, mentioned above, are also symptomatic of strategies employed as part of ­institutional critique. They were part of the younger generation of artists that had yet to be established; as far as the local context, they were reacting against the socialist modernism that predominated in art institutions at the time – the abstract and nonobjective art that was tolerated and thus tacitly endorsed by the government, insofar as it appeared apolitical.115 Seeking to be socially and politically engaged, these artists aimed to create a new type of work more in alignment with the sociopolitical context in which they were operating, where there would be less of a disjuncture between artist and audience, artwork and viewer. Many of the younger artists felt that the work of art’s traditional relationship with the viewer had to be altered, transformed into one that was more inclusive and participatory. The abstract and apolitical painting and sculpture supported

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

61

Members of Student Culture Centre, Belgrade, 1971. Courtesy: Student Culture Centre Belgrade

by the government, as well as by the art departments of the fine arts academies, would no longer suffice. The decade that followed Tito’s death on 4 May 1980 was one of economic crisis and uncertainty about Yugoslavia’s future, marked by food shortages, the imposition of travel restrictions and the rise of interethnic tensions. As a result, a number of venues that had catered to students and provided them with creative gathering space were closed, leaving Yugoslav youth with diminished access to public spaces. Students were forced to carve out their own creative niches, and to develop alternatives to those opportunities once offered by the state. They also explored new forms of expression, merging mass culture and high culture. In this, their efforts parallelled developments in other parts of the globe, most notably the launch of MTV on 1 August 1981.

1.30

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

62

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

In Slovenia, the performative impulse that arose amid the OHO happenings of the 1960s and 1970s soon developed into elaborate stage performances by two artistic and multimedia groups in the 1980s: Laibach and Borghesia. Laibach was formed on 1 June 1980, a month after Tito’s death, in the industrial town of Trbovlje; it comprised the music branch of New Slovenian Art (Neue Slovenische Kunst), a collective that also included visual art (IRWIN), theatre (Scipion Nasice Sisters) and philosophy (Peter Mlakar).116 Laibach’s music ranges from industrial to neoclassical, experimental to avant-garde, but it is the group’s stage shows and overall aesthetic approach that captured audiences’ attention and made Laibach one of the most significant artistic groups in Slovenia’s history. Its live performances in the 1980s often embraced the iconography of military rituals and regimes. For example, its groundbreaking concert at Ljubljana’s New Rock [Novi Rock] festival in September 1982 featured the lead singer at the time, Tomaž Hostnik (1961–82), bedecked in the costume and persona of Benito Mussolini. The group gave a powerful performance to a backdrop of films of military parades and speeches by Mussolini, Tito and Wojciech Jaruzelski.117 When Hostnik was hit in the head with a bottle by an overzealous audience member, he continued to play with his face bleeding (an image immortalised in what is now an iconic photograph; figure 1.31), contributing to the intensity of the performance. In June 1983, members of the group participated in a televised interview by Jure Pengov on the Ljubljana programme ‘TV Weekly’. Their participation, however, was completely stylised – a performance in itself – as they read from a prepared script. When asked about their connections with Nazi ideology, the artists’ response sounded similarly scripted, replete with drily analytic language: Laibach analyses the relationship between ideology and culture in a late era, shown through art. It discovers and expresses the conjunction of politics and ideology with industrial production and the unbridgeable divisions between this conjunction and the spirit. In designating this imbalance, Laibach uses all expressions of history. In its work, it practises provocation of the revolt of alienated consciousness and unifies warriors and opponents into an expression of the scream of static totalitarianism.118

Their statement underscores the theoretical underpinnings of the group’s work, exploring the performance of ideology in the public space. In line with this ethos, the group used its performances to interrogate recent political history and the contemporaneous political environment. Borrowing from Jacques Lacan, Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek characterises Laibach’s project as adopting a strategy of ‘overidentification’ – taking ‘the system more seriously than it takes itself seriously’ – a tactic similar to that identified by Sylvia Sasse and Inke Arns as ‘subversive ­affirmation’.119 In the case of Laibach, this means an exaggerated adoption of the aesthetics,

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

63

Tomaž Hostnik performing with Laibach at the Novi Rock Festival, 1982, Ljubljana. Photo: Jane Štravs. Courtesy: Jane Štravs

­choreography, militarism and intensity of totalitarianism. Žižek’s analysis helps us understand the approach in this way: think of a private ritual or nickname that is only known to one’s closest friends. If and when this sobriquet is revealed in public, the result is embarrassment and shame – such is the case with Laibach’s exposure of totalitarian aesthetics to the crowd. Recognising the limits of only choosing between ‘for’ and ‘against’, the group’s attitude toward fascism is deliberately ambiguous. Therefore, rather than taking a purely oppositional stance, which would only reinforce the regime by acknowledging and lending it credence, it presents the fascist symbols and behaviours as they are, unvarnished and without commentary, allowing them to be interpreted either as supportive of or opposed to totalitarianism. It is up to the audience to decide which side it is on. In Žižek’s words, Laibach ‘does not function as an answer but a question’ (italics his).120

1.31

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

64

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

When Laibach appeared in Slovenia in the early 1980s, there were many who still remembered the Second World War, the Nazi occupation and annexation of parts of Slovenia and the attempt to annihilate the Slovene national identity, through the destruction of books and monuments and the Germanisation of names, including the city of Ljubljana, which was renamed Laibach. After the war, the partisan movement that helped liberate Yugoslavia from the Nazis was not only celebrated, but became central to the official narratives of the country. In the 1980s, Yugoslav partisan veteran organisations voiced their disapproval of the Laibach group through a public letter-writing campaign. Many of their letters were published in the popular press, expressing their ‘shame’ at the group’s flagrant use of the Nazi-era appellation, thus supporting Žižek’s statements on overidentification (see above). Following the group’s above-cited 1983 TV interview, in which the members of the band characterised their relationship to Nazi ideology, the Ljubljana City Council, citing the group’s ‘abuse’ of the name of the city, banned the group from performing in public while operating under the name Laibach. Consequently, Laibach essentially existed underground until around 1987, and posters of its illicit concerts were advertised simply with a black cross, which became a paradigmatic element of the group’s visual imagery. The form was a deliberately multivalent reference to Malevich’s Suprematist black cross and the Wehrmacht’s Balkenkreutz. It was not just that Laibach staged performances, but that its entire approach was performative, fully embodying the role of fascists and the Hitler Youth. Some of the group’s performances took place at Disco FV, a significant venue for the development of alternative culture as well as performance in Slovenia and Yugoslavia. In 1981, the group FV 112/15 Theatre was formed; the name captured the group’s subversive nature, as it came from Franc Verbinc’s Dictionary of Foreign Loan Words, page 112, 15th heading: ‘C’est la guerre’ (This is war). That same year, FV 112/15 launched Disco FV, a disco club for its theatre, which emerged out of impulses that originated in Ljubljana in the 1970s, beginning with Disco Študent and Radio Študent – among the earliest alternative radio stations in Europe. Both were attempts for students to find a space and a voice of their own. During the first year of Disco FV, in 1981, FV 112/15 Theatre would perform one night each week at Disco Študent, in the basement of Building IV in the Rožna Dolina student dormitory. These artists created a space where actors and audience would interact; in effect, the entire club was the stage, with the members of the audience becoming actors in the event. In addition, the space and its attendees would be photographed, and those photographs would be displayed at the disco the following week, enabling the attendees to recognise themselves as performers.121 In September 1982, the FV 112/15 Theatre made its first video recordings, and thus FV Video was born. Its aim was threefold: ‘Our own video production. Documenting the scene. Keeping up with the video scene worldwide, with an

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

65

emphasis on music videos’.122 Several members of FV Video went on to form Borghesia, which had its first performance at the New Rock festival in Ljubljana in 1983. The band performed in a range of venues, from dance clubs and theatres to art galleries and concert halls. Its performances involved a combination of live actors and mediated images, in the form of slides, videos, films and televisions. Neven Korda (b. 1956), one of the members of Borghesia, describes its performances as ‘concerts, but based on theatre and theatrical experience’ and citing a range of influences, including Dada, Italian Futurists such as Luigi Russolo and the Russian and Soviet theatre director, actor and producer Vsevolod Meyerhold.123 Borghesia’s work, like that of Laibach, was controversial: Naked City, its 1985 performance at the Cankarjev Dom cultural centre, was banned because it featured pornographic images and film interspersed with photographs and film of political figures, including Tito, among other visuals. The latter was intended as commentary on the way in which pornography, as one of the most lucrative industries in the mass media, pervades the contemporary landscape. One of Montenegro’s best-known performance artists, Ilija Šoškić (b. 1935) studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Belgrade before emigrating to Rome in 1969.124 An example of his work is the four-part performance Milk and Silk, staged during the ‘24 × 24’ event at L’Attico Gallery in Rome in 1975, and

Ilija Šoškić, Milk and Silk: Maximum Energy – Minimum Time, 1975. Performance in four acts, Galleria Attico, Via del Paradiso 41, Rome, as part of Fabio Satgentini’s ‘24 x 24’. Courtesy: Ilija Šoškić

1.32

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

66

1.33

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

lasting for seven full days and nights. Šoškić’s four performances, Conversation, Controversy, Armwrestling and Milk and Silk: Maximum Energy – Minimum Time, involved a range of approaches, including the participatory (in Conversation, the artist spoke with the audience, and in Armwrestling, Šoškić engaged in an arm-wrestling competition with the American artist John Ratner) and extreme actions, visible in Maximum Energy – Minimum Time (figure 1.32). As the piece was devoted to the larger-than-life Russian poet and playwright Vladimir Mayakovsky and his likely suicide in 1930, the artist fired a bullet into the wall of the gallery. However, it is unlikely that the performance was known in Montenegro at that time.125 While Šoškić was developing his performative work in Italy, his Montenegrin colleague Milija Pavičević (b. 1950) was attempting to become an artist back in Yugoslavia. In 1972 and 1973, he failed the entrance exam for the Arts Department of the Teacher Training College in Nikšić (Montenegro), and the work that he sent to Belgrade’s Academy of Fine Arts did not even qualify him to take the entrance exam.126 Nevertheless, he persisted at his art making, and perhaps the absence of a formal education allowed him the creative freedom that gave rise to his performative oeuvre. Pavičević’s early work was more in the vein of Conceptual Art than action, as in Exit (1976), wherein he ‘performed’ his own cancellation of himself by writing the word ‘EXIT’ in large, uppercase letters across the front of his birth certificate. Pavičević continued to produce two-dimensional performative works, such as Self-Portrait (1979), in which he

Milija Pavičević, Father, 2004, Podgorica. Courtesy: Milija Pavičević

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

67

pasted a photograph of himself onto a page from a book dedicated to Diego Velázquez, effectively appropriating the Spanish painter’s biography – an audacious move for someone who could not even get into art school. In 1991, Pavičević’s work expanded to the three-dimensional with his contribution to the First Cetinje Biennale, comprising the artist’s installation of a large black frame on a public path in the city, an intervention that enabled the viewer to create his or her own painting by passing through the frame. Subsequently, he moved into staged photographic performances that, like his 1979 Self-Portrait, invoked the history of art, including one in which he photographed himself as the subject of Édouard Manet’s Fifer (1866), with the original Manet figure cropped and superimposed on the photograph. Finally, in his performative work the artist also changed gender, posing naked, with his penis tucked between his legs, in the manner of a reclining Venus in S-Portrait (2005).127 Svetlana Racanović reads the latter not as a feminisation of the artist’s body or a parody of masculinity, but a representation of the lack of male ‘mobility, agency, [the] power to lead and signify’.128 Pavičević did create one public performance, in the Bogdanov Kraj prison in Cetinje, where his father had been held as a political prisoner during the socialist period. Entitled Father (2004; figure 1.33), the artist and his friend Aleksandar Čilikov dressed as prisoners, and invited friends and relatives to visit them there; visitors brought presents, and were treated to a banquet table full of food. As in Kaprow’s Sweet Wall, the artist turned a sombre space into a festive one. Prior to this, in 2001, Pavičević had created a performative photograph with Čilikov and displayed it in Cetinje. The images features the faces of the two men, with the phrase ‘BIG ALCOHOLICS’ superimposed below their heads. In works such as this, the artist subverts the role of advertising, not only by imitating advertisements for alcohol that often appeared on those billboards, but by presenting a factual admission to his friends and colleagues. The installation and performance artist Jusuf Hadžifejzović (b. 1956) was also a seminal figure in the Yugoslav performance art scene, not only in Sarajevo, but also in neighbouring Dubrovnik, on the Croatian coast. Hadžifejzović studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Belgrade from 1976 to 1980, during the heyday of SKC; he then went on to study in Düsseldorf with Klaus Rinke and in 1984 returned to Sarajevo, where he lived until 1992; since then he has divided his time between Antwerp, Belgium and Sarajevo. From 1982 to 1987, the Dubrovnikbased Slaven Tolj (b. 1964) studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Sarajevo, along with Božidar Jurjević (b. 1963), who completed his studies in graphic arts in 1988. It was there that they came into contact with, and under the influence of, Hadžifejzović, and when they returned to Dubrovnik after the completion of their studies, they brought those techniques and approaches to the peripheral Croatian city. Tolj established the Art Workshop Lazareti, influencing another generation of artists in the art of performance.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

68

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

In Kosovo, which during the Yugoslav period was an autonomous province but is now an independent nation, the contemporary art scene developed much later. Sezgin Boynik has commented on the fact that Marcel Duchamp was a more significant figure for young artists in Kosovo than Joseph Beuys, despite Beuys’s visit to Belgrade in 1974, the year that Kosovo was granted greater autonomy in Yugoslavia. Beuys’s visit became notable for other reasons, most notably the critique of the artist published by the philosopher Shkelzen Maliqi (b. 1947), who was studying in Belgrade and attended Beuys’s lecture on performance and socially engaged art at SKC in 1974. In Maliqi’s view, Beuys understood neither the fundamentals of Hegel’s utopian philosophy nor the revolutionary ideas of Lenin. Maliqi accused Beuys of creating ‘plastic art philosophy’ and not being as radical and socially engaged as he claimed.129 Despite its diminutive size, Kosovo now has a burgeoning performance art scene, not only in Prishtina, but in other cities as well, such as Peja and Prizren. Maliqi maintains that contemporary art arrived in Kosovo in the early 1990s, after two artists, Sokol Beqiri (b. 1964) and Mehmet Behluli (b. 1962), returned to the country after completing their studies in Ljubljana and Sarajevo, respectively. Both were visual artists, working in graphics and painting. In 1991, the Serbian regime shut down the University of Prishtina along with the majority of cultural institutions. Soon after, Maliqi explains, ‘the entire art scene, the educational system and other vital segments of life began operating in alternative ways’.130 Alternative spaces such as apartments and cafés were used for artistic and cultural activity. It was not until the late 1990s that these activities became institutionalised, with the support of, among others, the Open Society Foundation/Soros Foundation, which opened the Dodona Gallery and Cultural Centre in 1997; the latter remained in existence until 1999. Of course, the war, which began in 1998, meant that there would be diminished resources for funding cultural pursuits. Nevertheless, in 2002, a course on contemporary art entitled ‘The Duchamp Effect’ was organised as part of the Prishtina summer school, and led by Kosovar-Albanian artist Sislej Xhafa (b. 1970), together with Behluli, as was a course jointly taught by Maliqi and Behluli in conjunction with the Centre for Humanistic Studies and the Contemporary Arts Centre in Prishtina. These were two-to-three month courses that introduced students to ‘new’ art practices, such as Conceptual Art, installation and performance – which, although actually not new, were still rarely taught at the art academies across the region; as such, these courses were attended by students in visual arts at the University of Prishtina. This was perhaps their only possible institutional exposure to these types of ideas in the classroom.

69

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Central Europe Performance art in Poland was perhaps most thoroughly codified by the artistic pair and couple Zofia Kulik (b. 1947) and Przemysław Kwiek (b. 1951). The two, who worked together as KwieKulik from 1971 to 1987, saw performance as akin to an applied art, a genre that was useful insofar as it could be prepared for presentation at a festival. The artists feel that the Polish word działania (activities) well encapsulates their work, including planning, execution and documentation, the last of which they preserved in a massive archive. Seeing in their practice a new and different approach to art making, in its inclusion of preparation and documentation as part of the artwork, they attempted to gain official support (as well as funding) from the Ministry of Culture for what they termed the ‘Studio of Activities, Documentation and Dissemination [Pracownia Działań, Dokumentacji i Upowszechniania]. The archive was located in a private space – the artists’ home – but the duo endeavoured to secure official institutional status (and with it a budget) by the Ministry of Culture, administered by the either the Institute of Culture or the City Bureau of Art Exhibitions. Although the official support for the project was stalled indefinitely due to bureaucratic red tape, the artists did succeed in establishing the studio, along with distinctive methods for documenting ephemeral art.131 The studio functioned as both an alternative exhibition space for their work (when artists and art historians visited them, they were given a slide-show presentation), and a meeting point for artists across Eastern Europe. KwieKulik’s performative work originated in the design studio of architect Oskar Hansen (1922–2005) and the studio of sculptor Jerzy Jarnuszkiewicz (1919–2005), both at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts. Hansen and Jarnuszkiewicz encouraged their students to experiment with space and action, focusing on process rather than product; such elements are visible in KwieKulik’s performative oeuvre.132 The activities in Hansen’s and Jarnuszkiewicz’s studios, which KwieKulik also ultimately embraced, involved collective acts of creation among participants, most notably, the collaborative realisation of actions, installations and environments. Just as the Student Culture Centre in Belgrade was a seminal locus for the development of performance art in Yugoslavia, Poland had its own network of student galleries as well as galleries that were supportive of experimental work, and from which performance and action art were able to emerge. One of these spaces was the Galeria Repassage in Warsaw, which was run by Elżbieta (b. 1934) and Emil Cieślar (b. 1931) from 1973 to 1978, after which they emigrated to France.133 According to Grzegorz Kowalski, who had also studied under Hansen and Jarnuszkiewicz, and who eventually took over the latter’s studio, the events of 1968 convinced him that, rather than

70

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

think about making pieces for people, for the large audience or society … we – at the Repassage Gallery … should focus on interpersonal relations, much deeper and in closed circles. And it was quite a good idea, because with the oppressive situation that surrounded us, we could practice other freedoms in the gallery, with closed doors or windows.134

The Akumulatory 2 gallery in Poznan, mentioned above, and Ewa Partum’s Adres (Address) gallery in Łódź were other such alternative venues. Located in the space beneath a staircase at the Polish Artists’ Union building, Adres measured just four square metres, and thus could only house a small number of guests. All of these spaces functioned as refuges for artists who, within the confines of the galleries, were more or less free to create the type of art they desired. In Czechoslovakia, the openness of the 1960s gave way to a more repressive atmosphere the following decade. Thus, artists retreated to underground spaces or even the countryside, which was less policed and surveilled than the public spaces of the city. As Maja Fowkes argues, the departure to the countryside for many artists in the late socialist period was also connected with growing environmental concerns and the global environmental movement taking shape throughout the world at the time.135 One particular site that was important for the development of performance art was the basement of the Applied Arts Museum in Prague, where Petr Štembera (b. 1945) worked as a night watchman. Although an official venue, the museum housed unofficial exhibitions and meetings in the evenings, when artists would gather clandestinely to witness performances by, among others, the Czech Troika of body artists – Štembera, Karel Miler (b. 1940) and Jan Mlčoch (b. 1953) – all of whom created visceral and engaging body actions at that time. In neighbouring Slovakia, artists also sought to carve out alternative niches and venues.136 One of these was the 1st Open Studio, which, located in the Bratislava home of Rudolf Sikora (b. 1946), presented artworks, installations and performances in November 1970. A decade later, this impulse continued when Robert Cyprich, Ľubomír Ďurček (b. 1948), Július Koller (1939–2007), Vladimír Kordoš (b. 1945), Matej Krén (b. 1958), Peter Meluzin (b. 1947) and the POP Trio (artists Dezider Tóth (b. 1947) and Jana Želibská (b. 1941) and theorist Radislav Matuštík) organised TERÉN (TERRAIN), a series of four exhibitions held in various abandoned locales outside of Bratislava from 1982 to 1985. They did so in order to have a space in which to create and display their work outside of state-controlled institutions. According to Zora Rusinová, ‘they came together because of a need to react authentically to constant ideological pressure and its systematic commands and proscriptions that shaped one’s daily life.’137 Together with other artists, Jan Budaj (b. 1952) also created performances and interventions into the public space under the umbrella known as Temporary Society of Intense Living (DSIP), and, in 1987, a group of artists formed Studio Erté as a platform from which to organise art events and performances.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

71

Two performances on the Charles Bridge in Prague evoke the transformative period that characterised the late 1980s and early 1990s. One of the most popular tourist destinations in the city, both during the communist period but especially after, the bridge is often crowded with Sunday artists selling paintings or folk art. In 1987, David Černý (b. 1967), together with some of his friends, including art historian Tomáš Pospiszyl, created Action Painting (figure 1.34), wherein they placed large canvases on easels and proceeded to fling paint at them in the manner of Jackson Pollock. Instead of quaint images of the Prague Castle, passersby were greeted with large nonobjective paintings of the type that likely would rarely have been seen in any of the city’s museums at that time. The title is a play on words, because, in this instance, the action itself was foregrounded, as opposed to the end result. It was because of perestroika that acts such as this in the public space were becoming more and more possible. Two years after Černý’s Action Painting, Estonian artist Jaan Toomik (b. 1961) travelled to Prague and stood on the Charles Bridge with a sign that read, in Estonian, ‘My dick is clean’ (figure 1.35). Of course, most would have walked by oblivious to the vulgar message, and the artist commented that many people there thought he was Russian (despite the fact that Estonian is written with Latin, not Cyrillic, letters). The phrase is a political reference, meaning that he was politically clean – in the sense of ‘My hands are clean’. In the Soviet context, however, this would refer to being apolitical or not compromising oneself by, for example, joining the party. Such a gesture would only have been possible in Prague a few months prior to the Velvet Revolution – and in a place where no one spoke Estonian. Hungarian art historian László Beke has divided the history of Hungarian performance art into ‘before and after Tibor Hajas (1946–80)’, singling out this artist, who died a tragically early death, as the fulcrum of performative activity in that country.138 In Beke’s words, ‘all that happened before the commencement of his career can only be considered performance in a restricted sense. To discuss Hungarian performance art after his death can only be continued in reference to his work’.139 Although somewhat hyperbolic, this statement captures the differences between Hungarian performance art of the 1970s and 1980s. Although performance and happenings are evident in the earlier work of Gábor Altorjay, Miklós Erdély and Tamás Szentjóby, Hajas was the first to fully realise performance and body art. His staged actions, which were often only for the camera, pushed his body to extreme limits, with the artist often endangering his own life in his works, much like the performances Marina Abramović staged in Belgrade and throughout Europe at that same time. It should be noted that in Hungary, performances quite often took place in conjunction with exhibition openings. Since all exhibitions required permission from the authorities, any censorship would occur prior to the actual opening of the show. The openings themselves were more relaxed, with less

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

1.34

David Černý, Action Painting, 1987, Prague. Courtesy: David Černý

1.35

Jaan Toomik, My Dick is Clean, 1989, Prague. Photo: Vanu Allsalu. Courtesy: Archives of the Art Museum of Estonia

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

73

attention being paid to what was said or done there. Consequently, as Beke has remarked, ‘the opening speech or event at an exhibition soon became an art form itself and moreover a great part of Hungarian performances were produced specifically for exhibitions’.140 Despite restrictions, these artists found ways to exploit the system and the mechanisms in place for controlling creative production. In the 1970s in Ceauşescu’s Romania, public actions and performances in the capital had become nearly impossible, forcing artists such as Ion ­Grigorescu (b. 1945) and Geta Brătescu (b. 1926) to withdraw to their studios, creating performances ‘for the camera’. These staged and filmed or photographed actions can be considered performances, insofar as the camera lens can be regarded as an audience. As Ileana Pintilie has written in reference to one of Grigorescu’s performative films, Masculin/Feminin (1976), if this film was not necessarily conceived for public presentation – which seems obvious – then the artist must have ascribed such a role to the video camera, to the lens which should record the image and which becomes a ‘partner’ of his explorations, a sort of ‘accomplice’ of his most intimate thoughts and states of excitement, mental and physical.141

The same could be said for the actions Brătescu staged in her studio around this time, one of which was filmed by Grigorescu. Confined to the interior world of their studios, these artists often focused on the banality of everyday life and elements of their immediate surroundings, such as the artist’s hands (Brătescu) or his body (Grigorescu). Grigorescu also retreated to the free space of the countryside to stage solo performances, once again for the camera. In 1979, a rare and unique occurrence of a public performance in a gallery space took place in Bucharest, in the Kalinderu exhibition hall. For a period of over four months, Ştefan Bertalan, the Timişoara artist associated with Sigma, lived in the gallery space while a sunflower grew beside him. Entitled I’ve Been Living for 130 Days with a Sunflower Plant, the action involved observing the growth of the flower through photography, drawing and a written journal, documenting each change on a daily basis, down to the smallest detail. Performance developed in a range of alternative spaces across Romania in the 1980s. Among the most significant performances from that decade was one staged by Alexandru Antik (b. 1950) in 1986 at the Young Art Colloquium, in the basement of a medieval pharmacy in Sibiu. Entitled The Dream Has Not Died, it took place by candlelight, and involved the artist removing all his clothes and having a female ‘character’ cut his hair short. The space was filled with objects belonging to the artist, all similarly labelled: ‘The Blue Overcoat Resembling Antik’s Overcoat’, ‘School Leaving Certificate Resembling Antik’s Certificate’ and the like, the use of the word ‘resembling’ distancing the objects from their owner. The artist read from a neo-Dada text by the Hungarian artist

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

74

1.36

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

László Lugossy, meanwhile, assistants created sculptures by pouring plaster over animal organs covered in blood, which dotted the floor. The performance ended when another ‘character’ entered the room and yelled for the assistants to clean up the room and have everything return to normal. The piece addressed both the artist’s individual and personal life, as well as the greater context in which he was working, with the authoritarian voice coming in to shut down his creation at the end. Oradea was a significant city for the development of experimental art in Romania during the communist period. Dan Perjovschi (b. 1961) went there after completing art school; such was typical at that time for art-school graduates, who could be sent virtually anywhere in the country for work. Perjovschi ended up in Oradea with a number of young artists in the 1980s, all of whom belonged to Studio 35, an alternative to the Artists’ Union. Instead of being accepted as full members of the Union, young artists such as Perjovschi were placed in Studio 35; they could remain there until the age of thirty-five, at which time they could apply to be full members of the Union. The artists associated with Studio 35 were very prolific in Oradea, and Perjovschi maintained that they managed to create so much experimental work because they ‘tricked the censors by being so active’, as the censors tired of attending these exhibitions.142 According to Iosif Király, if in the course of observing a person, the secret police did not understand something that person was doing, they would simply order him or her to cease that action, whether it was intended to be subversive or not.143

Dan Perjovschi, Action Tree, 1989, Oradea. Five gelatin silver prints, each 11 cm x 17 cm, framed 71.7 cm x 29.2 cm x 4.2 cm. Courtesy: Art Collection Telekom 

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

75

In Oradea, Perjovschi created his first two performances: Action Tree and Red Apples (both 1988). For Action Tree (figure 1.36), he had a friend wrap him to a tree with large white sheets of paper, after which the friend photographed him both in that state and emerging from the tree, as in a rebirth. For Red Apples (figure 1.37), an interactive installation, Perjovschi wrapped the entire living area of the apartment that he shared with his wife, Lia Perjovschi (b. 1961); for two weeks, they resided in that ‘wrapped’ environment, which was ever-changing, as Perjovschi would continually draw on the paper and add to the work. While this no doubt calls to mind the wrapped works by Bulgarian-born artist Christo and his partner, Jeanne-Claude, from that same time, the connection is merely incidental. Dan and Lia Perjovschi are important figures in the development of ­contemporary Romanian art, not only in performance. Lia Perjovschi created photographic performances in Oradea, such as The Test of Sleep (1988) and

Dan Perjovschi, Red Apples, 1989, Oradea. Courtesy: Dan Perjovschi

1.37

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

76

1.38

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

Annulment (1989). The Test of Sleep (figure 1.38) was staged for a mail art exhibition in Mexico, using the genre’s network to facilitate the display of her performative work abroad. The artist covered her body with drawings and then photographed them, making her body the surface of the canvas or screen onto which images were projected. In Annulment, she was bandaged with white crepe paper and tied up with the assistance of her husband, who then photographed her. In this piece, she was both victim and patient, her body constituting the artwork and the action. The Perjovschis’ studio became a meeting place and centre for the study of contemporary art in Romania, in the absence of any public or institutional support for this art. The couple began opening their studio to fellow and younger artists as early as 1996. The following year, Lia Perjovschi amassed an archive of materials on contemporary art, entitled the Contemporary Art Archive, which in 2001 was expanded to the Centre for Art Analysis. Visitors to the studio would gain access to books and texts on art that were unavailable elsewhere in Romania at the time (and perhaps even to this day), including materials on performance art, and would also be able to attend public lectures and participate in discussions on art and theory led by the artists. The archive is currently still open and active, but has been relocated to Sibiu. Finally, the House pARTy group and the performance art festivals that took place in Romania in the late 1980s and early 1990s must be mentioned. House

Lia Perjovschi, The Test of Sleep, 1988, Oradea. Photo: Dan Perjovschi Courtesy: Lia Perjovschi

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

77

pARTy was a collective of artists who came together in the private home of Nadina and Decebal Scriba in Bucharest. These meetings often resulted in actions and happenings, which were filmed. According to Iosif Király, the video camera that was used was purchased by an individual who had travelled to the Himalayas as a medical expert; at that time, it was very rare for private citizens in Romania or elsewhere in the East to have a video camera. Since the House pARTy’s actions occurred in a private home and assumed the guise of an ordinary party, they were known only to invited guests, and thus were not usually disrupted by the authorities. Király recalled one instance when a car was set on fire in the courtyard. The participants were questioned about their actions by a passerby; the latter called the police, who, in turn, came and told all the participants to leave. From 1990, the AnnART International Living Art festival was organised by the BAÁSZ Art Foundation, the ETNA Alternative Art group and the ETNA Foundation at St. Ann Lake, north of Braşov in Transylvania. Some events were also held at the nearby town of Sfântu Gheorghe. These would usually take place outdoors, often depending on the weather. It is interesting that after the revolution of 1989 performance art in Romania continued to develop in nature – the place where it had largely begun. In 1993, Ileana Pintilie and Sorin Vreme organised the first Zone Festival of Performance Art in Eastern Europe, followed by its second, third and fourth editions (1996, 1999, 2003), all in Timişoara. Finally, Matei Bejenaru organised the Periferic performance art festival in Iaşi in 1997, 1998 and 1999. In what had been one of the most closed societies in the East, these festivals provided a new platform, to create, develop and present experiments in performance art. In this regard, it is worth mentioning André Cadere (1934–78), a figure who is marginalised in accounts of performance art in Romania and the West, perhaps because of his precarious existence as a foreigner in Paris and his early death there. Cadere grew up in Romania as a persona non grata, the son of a diplomat who had had close ties with the former king. Consequently, he was unable to study fine art at the university, although he did maintain ties to the art world by working as a live model in the painting studio of the official artist Corneliu Babu, along with other artists favoured by the regime. One of the Babu paintings for which he posed, Steel Workers (1960), depicts Cadere in that guise, holding what appears to be a metal rod. In 1967, Cadere emigrated to Paris, and in 1971 he began appearing on the city’s streets and at exhibition openings with his signature wooden rod, which was painted with coloured lines. Much like the French Conceptual artist Daniel Buren’s signature strips, this wooden stick became iconically linked with Cadere, who was rarely seen without it, until his final days. The artist embodied the principle of art into life by constantly carrying his artwork with him – a painted pole containing a portable abstract painting, observable in the closed space of the gallery, when

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

78

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

he attended openings with it, or from afar on the streets of Paris. Although the Babu painting is perhaps an incidental coincidence that connects Cadere’s Romanian years with the wooden rod that he developed in Paris, the artist did cite a local source for the work: the processions with multicoloured staffs he witnessed on certain holidays.144 In the closed socialist state of the German Democratic Republic, experimental art was also slow to develop amid tight restrictions on creative activity. Although the German-born Joseph Beuys was a pivotal figure in contemporary performance art worldwide, little was known of his work just a few hundred miles east of his hometown of Krefeld, across the border in East Germany. Despite efforts to disparage Beuys and diminish the role of Fluxus and performance art in contemporary art practices, information on his work penetrated the Berlin Wall in various ways. In publicly denigrating his work, art critics and artists such as Hermann Raul and Willi Sitte brought attention to it and thus interest. Moreover, art historians who did not agree with these negative assessments, for example, Klaus Werner and Eugen Blume, actively promoted Beuys’s work through publications and public lectures.145 Claudia Mesch has outlined three separate strains of performance activity in East Germany, one of which takes as its main point of reference the example of Beuys; however, this strain was largely promulgated by Blume, who worked with the artist Erhard Monden (b. 1947) to plan a number of collaborative performances with Beuys, following the latter’s visit to East Germany in 1981. (These performances ultimately did not take place with Beuys’s actual participation, as the artist never returned to East Germany, having been forbidden by the authorities.)146 One of the performances that Monden did realise (without Beuys), Stand and Run (1981), involved the artist walking between his studio and an installation located in another studio. The second and third strains highlighted by Mesch are represented by the Clara Mosch group, which had its first exhibition in 1977 and officially disbanded in 1982, but continued some of its activity until 1983, and the Dresden-based Autoperforatsionsartisten.147 While the works of Clara Mosch can mainly be characterised as outdoor happenings, the performances of the Autoperforatsionsartisten bear similarity to the extravagant, visceral staged performances of the Viennese Actionists, although the Autoperforatsionsartisten were not entirely aware of the latters’ work. The actions of both groups have their origins in the annual, usually wintertime, parties or carnivals organised by art institutions.148 The members of Clara Mosch came together while students in Leipzig in 1977, and moved to Karl-Marx Stadt (now Chemnitz) to work in the relatively more liberal atmosphere fostered by art collector Georg Brühl. The group’s name is an amalgam of the artists’ surnames – Carl Friedrich Claus, Thomas Ranft, Michael Morgner and Gregor-Torsten Schade – with the letters of the name of the only female member, Dagmar Schinke, excluded from the appella-

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

79

tion.149 Although its work was primarily in painting and graphics, Clara Mosch started participating in the Galerie Oben’s ‘plein-air’ weekend outings in 1977, a tradition launched two years earlier. According to Mesch, the group’s performance actions developed from the festival and pagan atmosphere of the plein airs. During a 1977 outing to Leussow, in an area of trees that had been struck by lightning, the artists climbed the dead trees naked, creating a connection between the natural forms and their bodies. Clara Mosch’s Stasi mole, RalfRainer Wasse, who joined the group later, documented these performances in photographs. Following Clara Mosch’s disbanding in 1982, a subcommittee was formed within the East German Visual Artists’ League to ‘investigate’ performance, urging ‘caution and a new vigilance toward this unruly development’.150 Further debates took place between Eugen Blume and other East German art historians, with Blume defending performance on behalf of its origins in Dada and the work of Beuys, and arguing for new artistic criteria, with those opposed to the genre referring to it as a form of elitist Western art ‘for the snob layer’.151 Although the lines for and against performance and action art were clearly demarcated, with one side holding little sway over the other, the enacting of performance art did lead to an open debate regarding the future role of art in the GDR. Unlike those of Clara Mosch, most of the Autoperforatsionsartisten’s performances were staged in venues such as theatres, galleries or in the context of a carnival, as with their first performance, Die Spitze des Fleischbergs (The Tip of the Meat Mountain (figure 1.39)), in 1986. The following year, they presented Herz Horn Haut Schrein (Heart Horn Skin Shrine (figure 1.40)) in Dresden as part of their diploma work, the final piece necessary for completing their studies in stage design. To Mesch’s grouping, I would add the artists Holger Stark (b.  1960), Christine Schlegel (b. 1950) and Cornelia Schleime (b. 1953). Originally from Rostock, Stark was involved in staging performances and actions in the 1980s, utilising a combination of dance, action painting and Fluxus activities. While he did not know a great deal about performance art in the 1980s, he nonetheless employed the genre to embrace a confrontational stance toward the political system, describing it as ‘fighting without any weapons’.152 Schlegel studied in Dresden and moved to West Berlin in 1986. Since 1977, she has been creating performances combining painting, film, music and actions, including collaborating with dancer Fine Kwiatkowski starting in 1984. Her video performance Structure I and II (1984–85), for example, involved the artist moving and dancing before a wall with nonobjective images projected onto it, which were, in turn, projected onto her body. Kwiatkowski painted over and scratched the video footage, creating a work reminiscent of Fluxus films. Finally, Schleime (figure 1.41), who was born in East Berlin, studied makeup design and painting in Dresden, emigrating to West Berlin in 1984.153 Because of her experimental installations and performances, such as the Room of the Poet, installed in

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

1.39

Autoperforatsionsartisten, Die Spitze des Fleischbergs, 1986, Dresden. Courtesy: Micha Brendel

1.40

Autoperforatsionsartisten, Herz Horn Haut Schrein, 1987, Dresden. Courtesy: Micha Brendel

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

81

Cornelia Schleime, Unter weissen Tüchern (Under White Fabrics), 1983. Courtesy: Cornelia Schleime

autumn 1979 at the Exhibition of Doors, she was banned from working as an artist in 1981. In the Saxonian County library, Schleime discovered artists such as Francis Bacon, Arnulf Rainer and Cy Twombly – figures her professors at the Dresden Academy of Art had never heard of. In her 1981 series of photographic performances, Self-Promotion [Selbstinszenierun], the artist appears with her body covered, wrapped or painted, and in some cases the photographs are overpainted as well. Richard Demarco and the Edinburgh connection Far from Eastern Europe, another venue functioned as a gathering place for artists across the East: the Demarco Art Gallery in Edinburgh. As early as 1968, Richard Demarco (b. 1930), a Scot of Italian heritage, began travelling to Eastern Europe on cultural tours to meet with artists, and subsequently invited them to Edinburgh to exhibit in his gallery on Melville Crescent or perform in the Edinburgh International Festival. His interest in Eastern Europe dated back to his time as a teacher in the years following the Second World War; a number of his students were of Eastern European descent – children born to Scottish women who married foreign servicemen who had migrated to Scotland after the war. Recognising the contributions of Eastern European

1.41

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

82

1.42

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

immigrants to Scottish and English society, Demarco set out to promote the lesser-known, but pioneering contemporary artists from the region. In 1968, Demarco travelled to Poland and Romania on official tours organised by each country’s ministry of culture. In Romania, he visited the studios of Paul Neagu and Ion Bitzen (1924–97), who were later featured in his 1969 exhibition Four Rumanian Painters – the first showing of contemporary Romanian art in the United Kingdom. The exhibition was presented at the Demarco Art Gallery and later travelled to the Aberdeen Art Gallery. In 1970, Demarco organised the festival Strategy Get Arts (whose title is, not coincidentally, a palindrome), at which Joseph Beuys performed his ‘Scottish Symphony’, and which Marina Abramović attended. As part of Atelier ’72, an event dedicated to showcasing Polish artists in Edinburgh, Kantor created a sensation with the performance of The Water Hen at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Interestingly, Atelier ’72 was funded by the Scottish International Education Trust, an organisation that had been founded by Sean Connery, and Connery himself was present at several of the events. In 1973, following his trip to Yugoslavia, Demarco invited the artists associated with SKC in Belgrade to perform at the Edinburgh Arts Festival. The artists staged a performance entitled Art Event, 19 August 1973 in the gym of Melville College; Abramović performed Rhythm 10, Gera Urkom upholstered a

Marina Abramović, Raša Todosijević and Gera Urkom performing at Melville College, Edinburgh, 1973. Courtesy: Richard Demarco and the Richard Demarco Art Archive

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

83

chair with his shirt and Raša Todosijević performed Decision as Art, in which he lay on the floor with a live fish on his stomach; Zoran Popović filmed the event (figure 1.42). All of the performances took place simultaneously (much like Post Ars’ happening at the Zatyšiai Quarry) and side by side, with no one artist given preference over or upstaged by another. Although the performances were not connected, all the artists acted together as part of a collective performance. Popović recalls that although Joseph Beuys attended the performance by the Yugoslav artists, Roselee Goldberg was only present in Edinburgh the following day for a performance by Tadeusz Kantor. Beuys was invited to the April Meetings at SKC the following year. Demarco was of course not the only Western artist or arts promoter to travel through Eastern Europe at this time. The San Francisco–based artist Tom Marioni, who had an exhibition and performance at the Demarco Art Gallery in 1972, journeyed to the region in 1974 and 1975. In 1974, he performed at SKC and the Gallery of Contemporary Art in Zagreb, and the following year in Prague (with Petr Štembera) and at Warsaw’s Galeria Foksal. He also travelled to Hungary. His 1976 publication, Vision, is a chronicle of that trip and the artists he encountered. Like Demarco, he took diligent notes of his travels, although Demarco’s remain largely unpublished or published only in digital form. The artists Chris Burden and Terry Fox also travelled to Prague in the 1970s, and, as mentioned, numerous artists from the West appeared in Yugoslavia around this time, including Beuys, Walter De Maria and Gina Pane. The USSR In the 1990s, the semiprivate performances of Collective Actions and the AptArt exhibitions morphed into full-fledged actions in the public space of the newly democratic Russia, subsumed under the category of ‘Moscow Actionism’. Artists such as Alexander Brener (b. 1957), Oleg Kulik (b. 1961), Anton Litvin (b. 1967), Petr Pavlensky (b. 1984) and groups such as E.T.I. (Expropriation of the Territory of Art), Chto Delat? (What Is to be Done?), Voina (War) and Pussy Riot emerged over the decades following the Soviet collapse. The origins of the Moscow Actionism of the 1990s can be found in E.T.I.’s 18 April 1991 performance, E.T.I. Text (figure 1.43), in which the members of the group, led by Anatoly Osmolovsky (b. 1957), lay down on Red Square to form the word xhuy (dick, fuck) with their bodies. Artists associated with this new genre of Moscow Actionism staged visceral, public actions as a contrast to the private, hermetic conceptual actions associated with Collective Actions and the Moscow Conceptualists of the 1970s and 1980s. For example, Oleg Kulik appeared in a series of performances as the ‘Russian Dog’, barking at and jumping on people. In doing so, he was acting out the role of the ‘wild Other’ – attempting to embrace pure animal instincts as a means of coming to terms with the new state of affairs in

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

84

1.43

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

E.T.I. (Expropriation of the Territory of Art), E.T.I. Text, 18 April 1991, Moscow. Courtesy: Anatoly Osmolovsky

which Russians found themselves following their nation’s newfound openness to the West. Although such actions have been associated with the trauma of the Soviet collapse, Michelle Maydanchik has offered another interpretation: that in creating mediagenic work, these artists found a way to transmit their work to as wide an audience as possible, problematising the notion of performance art as an anti-institutional refusal of objectification.154 In 1979, the Estonian graphic artist Siim Tanel-Annus (b. 1960) started creating happenings and performances in the garden of his family home in the suburbs of Tallinn. He began by hosting exhibitions in his house, an idea that came from Ilya Kabakov and the Moscow Conceptualists, with whom he and many Estonian artists were well connected. While they started out as smallscale interventions with the audience, Tanel-Annus’s performances expanded in complexity, culminating in the most elaborate one, which took place in 1987 and was filmed by Finnish TV. When he first started staging these garden ‘events’, the artist referred to them as ‘rituals’. In a recent interview, he recalled that the first time he encountered the word ‘performance’, it was in a Finnish magazine in 1982. He remembered happenings that occurred in Tallinn around that time, and was aware of the genres of performance art and happenings through a variety of sources, but the main reason he began holding these events in his garden was as a way of asserting his independence from art institutions and the art establishment. The

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

85

use of performance and action enabled him to express himself and engage with his audience in a way that he was not able to in his graphic work, which often consisted of mystical and fantastical architectural creations. He even stated that he ‘needed something physical’ in order to truly express what he was trying to convey with ink on paper.155 The performances at Tanel-Annus’s house on Mooni Street always took place in the autumn; at first they were held in October and November, but later they were moved to December, to coincide with the winter solstice. The garden itself is significant for the artist – he has said that it is connected with everything he does. For example, during the Soviet period he made money by selling vegetables grown there, but in the winter, it was empty or covered in leaves, and thereby provided the perfect backdrop for his large-scale events. Like others discussed thus far, Tanel-Annus’s actions are closely linked with pagan rituals associated with nature, and often feature fire, smoke and leaves. In the first performance, in 1980, the artist appeared dressed in blue with his face painted the same colour; he announced his presence by the blast of a trumpet, and then proceeded to throw blue-coloured leaves at his guests. He had around twenty or thirty visitors, all of whom had been invited personally, either by word of mouth or by post. In 1981, the artist elaborated on the performance, creating a costume, complete with a golden crown, and introducing the use of fire, which attracted the attention of his neighbours, who were concerned about the hazard and notified the authorities. The latter called him in for questioning, but at the time, there was little they could do. Tanel-Annus and his family were harassed, and he was prohibited from going abroad, but was never actually arrested for staging these events. His 1982 performance was entitled Tower to the Heavens and followed from his graphic series of the same name. The artist stated that he created the performance in order to ‘finish’ the series. After smashing a mirror, he climbed his version of the eponymous tower and threw tinsel from the top, describing the structure as his own ‘Babel’. TanelAnnus explained that, as the borders were closed, it was through this tower that one could escape.156 In addition to the local authorities, these actions also attracted the attention of Estonia’s neighbouring Finns, who published an article on his garden happenings in 1984 in the art journal Taide. Several representatives from a Finnish TV station managed to get hold of the artist in 1987, and inquired about the next performance, which the station wanted to film. The artist told them that there would be a performance on 5 December of that year, and that they could try to obtain permission, but that such would not probably be forthcoming (figure 1.44). Surprisingly, however, Moscow agreed. Because the television representatives told him that they needed at least thirty minutes of footage, he had to extend the performance. This time, he had at his disposal the resources of the television station, and its crew helped him with lights and a dolly that he

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

86

1.44

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

employed to ride through the scene. He also had a special pyrotechnician on hand, as the use of fire had become more intricate. The audience had likewise expanded, with about 150 people in attendance that night. He spent most of the performance riding on the dolly and attempting to crash through a wall that he had built for the occasion. As the artist himself recounted, he destroyed his own wall two years before the Germans destroyed theirs. By the end of the performance, the artist succeeded – he crashed through the wall with a loud explosion, at which time the authorities came crashing in themselves.  Tanel-Annus was immediately taken to the local police station and questioned, along with the Finnish television crew. As he sat there, the police made a number of phone calls until finally contacting the KGB. While the artist does not know what was said on the other end, the officer was likely reprimanded for interrupting the filming of a foreign TV crew, filming that had been approved by the Soviet authorities. After the phone call, the artist and his cohort were released, and the KGB later even apologised. These garden performances were not political, but, as the artist has emphasised, being apolitical during the Soviet period was a political stance, and for that reason, among others – namely, the idiosyncratic nature of his work – the authorities took issue with it. Part of the problem, for them, was that it

Siim Tanel-Annus, Untitled (Performance at Mooni Street 46A), 5 December 1987, Tallinn. Courtesy: Siim Tanel-Annus

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

87

was difficult to categorise, and those who investigated almost certainly had no idea what to make of these elaborate garden scenes. Aside from the neighbours complaining that Tanel-Annus was ‘disturbing the peace’, in fact he really was not doing anything wrong, and given the location of his house – far from the city centre on an isolated suburban road – these events should not have drawn much public attention. The 1987 performance was the last one to occur on Mooni Street for some time. It was also in the 1980s that T-Group [T-Rühm] was formed in Estonia, consisting of painter Raoul Kurvitz (b. 1961), architects Urmas Muru (b. 1961) and Peeter Pere (b. 1957), essayist and philosopher Hasso Krull (b. 1964), photographer Tarvo Hanno Varres (b. 1970), musician Raul Saaremets (b. 1967) and stage designer Ene-Liis Semper (b. 1969).157 The group wrote its manifesto in 1985 and staged its first performance in 1986, in the yard of the AdamsonEric Museum. T-Group utilised the genre of performance to ‘add spice’ to its ­exhibition openings, and the performances ultimately began to overshadow all other activities. While the performances started out simply, they evolved into elaborate staged events, involving destruction and danger, violence and transgression ­ (figure 1.45). The idea was a complete letting go – of conventions, of emotions. For example, Wolf and Seven Little Goats, performed in

Raoul Kurvitz, documentation of performance, c. 1990s. Photo: Arno Saar. Courtesy: Archives of the Art Museum of Estonia

1.45

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

88

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

both Stockholm and Tallinn in 1990, took on the characteristics of a religious ceremony, with chanting in the background and a person lying down with fire being lit all around him. More contemporary elements were also present, in the form of television sets hanging from the ceiling and individuals bouncing on trampolines. Although the performances had an air of seriousness, Kurvitz maintained that this ‘wasn’t really serious art making; these were just friends I hung around with … the only meaning was to make us happy’.158 He has contrasted their activity with that of Tanel-Annus, stating that whereas the latter was ‘doing more serious things [around that time] … ours was for fun and joy’.159 In some ways, T-Group’s performances continued the escapist and free spirit of the happenings of the 1960s and 1970s. It is interesting to observe that of the three Baltic nations, Lithuania was the only one featured in the 1998 exhibition Body and the East. It is truly surprising that Estonia was omitted, considering the vibrant performance art scene present there since the 1970s. As in Estonia, performance has had various manifestations in Latvia and Lithuania. Perhaps the most prominent Latvian example is the painter Miervaldis Polis (b. 1948), who created a series of performances from 1987 to 1991 in which he dressed in a bronze suit and hat, painted his hands and face bronze – as if he were a living statue – and appeared in the public space. He repeated this performance, with variations, in Riga, Latvia; Bremen, Germany; Moscow; and Helsinki. Post-communist Eastern Europe The seeds of the fall of communism were planted in 1989, following the defeat of the Communist Party in the first free elections in Poland since the consolidation of communist power following the Second World War, on 4 June, and the fall of the Berlin Wall, which commenced on 9 November, when the GDR began permitting East German citizens to travel across the border to West Germany. On 11 March 1990, the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic declared its independence from the Soviet Union, with Latvia and Estonia doing the same on 3 and 8 May, respectively. What followed was a series of retaliations by Moscow, including attacks by Soviet OMON (Special Purpose Mobility Unit) forces in Riga and Vilnius in 1991. On 25 December 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev resigned as President of the USSR, which by that point had already ceased to exist, with eleven of the former republics having previously withdrawn and formed the Commonwealth of Independent States. While Gorbachev’s policies of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring) had opened the floodgates for free speech and free expression, the newly established post-Soviet and post-communist states found themselves largely without an established infrastructure for the creation, development and exhibition of contemporary art. From 1992 to 1995, this gap was filled by the Centres for Contemporary Art,

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

89

established by the Hungarian-born business magnate George Soros. While the first Soros Foundation Fine Art Documentation Centre was launched as early as 1985 in Budapest, in the 1990s similar organisations were established in capitals across Eastern Europe, in order to document, support and disseminate contemporary art throughout the region. These centres aimed not only to support artists, but also to promote research and the creation of an audience for contemporary and experimental art practices, as alternatives to the official museums and galleries. In the Soviet republics of Moldova, Ukraine and Belarus as well as isolated Albania, which had broken with the USSR in the 1960s, actions, body art and performance came onto the scene much later. Aside from the groups Ten and Phantom, which were established in the final years of the Soviet Union, around 1989–90, and experimented with nontraditional art forms, in Moldova, a space for experimental art really only emerged after the country announced its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. This space was created by the Soros Centre for Contemporary Art (SCCA), which was founded in the country’s capital, Chişinău, in 1993. The SCCA in Chişinău established a creative camp, CarbonART, providing a forum in which young artists learned new techniques and were given the freedom to experiment with Conceptual, performance and Land Art. Artists such as Pavel Braila (b. 1971), Lilia Dragneva (b. 1975), Lucia Macari (b. 1974) and Mark Verlan (b. 1963) all began their performative work through contact with the SCCA and CarbonART. As Dragneva explains in her text for East Art Map, ‘the fall of the Berlin Wall, which chronologically coincided with Moldova becoming a sovereign Republic [independence came in 1992], didn’t in itself bring about structural changes in the sphere of art. Purposeful efforts were needed in order to synchronize creative quests with the mainstream searching of contemporary art’.160 Those ‘purposeful efforts’ were made by the arts practitioners associated with the SCCA. Pavel Braila’s first performance took place in the context of CarbonART. In Unde. Unde? Undeva (Where. Where? Somewhere (1997)), he suspended large pieces of paper between tree trunks in a forest and then ran through them, breaking the paper and thus breaking free. The following year, he staged Pioneer, in which, wrapped from head to toe in white paper, he unrolled a spool of paper through a field and into a forest until the spool ran out. Finally, in Work (1999), he spread sheets of paper over a small garden plot and used a large corkscrew to dig holes, which first went through the paper, then the soil. In a recent interview, he explained that he often worked with paper in these early performances, because he was interested in the ‘sound of the paper being written, torn or destroyed’; indeed, these works attest to the artist’s interest in experimenting with action and sound.161 Igor Scerbina (b. 1966) created actions such as bowling using bedframes to ‘frame’ the pins, and painting the inside of a plastic bag while sitting inside it. Dragneva and Macari organised some of

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

90

1.46

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

Lilia Dragneva and Lucia Macari, Aphros, 1996, Chişinău. Courtesy: Lilia Dragneva

Moldova’s earliest performances, along with its first happening. Aphros (figure 1.46) occurred at km6, the first annual exhibition of the Chişinău Centre for Contemporary Art (KSA:K), the successor to the SCCA, in 1996. The artists used live, naked models, covering – and thus clothing – them, in shaving cream. Here, the myth of Aphrodite, her birth from sea foam, was re-created in a modern context. The audience participated in the event, carrying and spraying the shaving cream throughout the exhibition space, turning the performance into a massive happening. In Graphics of Sound (1998), presented at the KSA:K festival Giocanda’s Smile – From the Mythic to the Techno Ritual, Dragneva and Macari used an old and broken Spirograph ‘Metatest 2’, designed to measure lung capacity, and made different sounds into it; those sounds then appeared as graphics on paper, the artists having effectively translated sound into visual imagery. It is difficult to speak of a performance art ‘scene’ in Belarus, which, despite the Soviet collapse, still maintains a totalitarian state, with strict control not only over artistic expression, but also the public space. In 1987, Viktar Piatrou (b. 1957) founded the contemporary art group Forma, the first to be established outside the Artists’ Union. The group then became M-Art, operating from 1990 to 1992, after which Piatrou founded the independent art gallery the 6th Line,

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

91

the latter showcasing work by experimental artists such as Ludmila Rusova (1954–2010), a clothing designer who also created performances.162 Since 1999, Piatrou has organised the Navinki Performance Art Festival, which takes place every autumn in Minsk. Since the late 1990s, the performance artist, dissident and monumental painter Alexander Pushkin has staged political exhibitions and actions in Vitebsk – a city with a vital avant-garde legacy, Marc Chagall and Kazimir Malevich having famously taught there in the late 1910s and early 1920s. Following a three-year stint in performance, Pushkin took a hiatus and began restoring church murals and staging exhibitions in his apartment. Following Alexander Lukashenko’s election in 1994, he was evicted from his apartment and thus forced to close his gallery. Later in the decade, the political repressions of Lukashenko’s government inspired Pushkin to resurrect his performative activities, some of which have landed him in jail.163 As in Moldova, performance art practices did not appear in Albania until the 1990s. Prior to the conclusion of Enver Hoxha’s regime in 1985 and the end of communist rule in 1992, there was little artistic experimentation other than subtle attempts to depart from the strict canon of Socialist Realism through such means as the use of nonrepresentational colour and abstraction in painting. These attempts, however, were quickly quashed, when the author of one such work, Edison Gjergo, was imprisoned for his Chagallian painting The Epic of Morning Stars (1972) and the painting was confined to storage.164 Thus, it was not until the 1990s that artists began to branch out from painting and use action and the body in their work. One of the first performances to take place in Albania was by an artist duo, Flutura (b. 1970) and Besnik Haxhillari (b. 1960), who go by the name The Two Gullivers. In 1998, a year after they immigrated to Berlin, they returned to Tirana to perform The Place Where Gullivers Sleep (figure 1.47) in the National Gallery of Tirana. The two mounted their bed on the wall and slept in the gallery, merging the space of the artists’ private life with the public space of the museum. Flutura and Besnik recall going to the French and American Embassies in Tirana in the early 1990s to read the books on art in their libraries. They even learned foreign languages to be able to read these texts. Soon, the artists began experimenting with and working in these new art practices, which were new to Albania, although not really new in the West. The artists saw this new genre as an opportunity to experiment and create. As they recall, when they started traveling outside of Albania in the 1990s, they realised that they were missing a lot of information regarding recent developments in contemporary art. So, they decided to work in an art form that they knew nothing about – this helped them to be fresh in terms of their artistic creation. That said, their practice also represents a continuity, as well as a rupture, with Albanian artistic traditions, insofar as drawing is very much a part of their practice. The two maintain that drawing functions as a dialogue between them, as they come up with ideas for

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document 1.47

The Two Gullivers, The Place Where Gullivers Sleep, 1998, view of the installation with portraits printed on pillows. National Art Gallery, Tirana, Albania. Photo: The Two Gullivers. Courtesy: The Two Gullivers

93

­ erformances; it is also a document of the performance that enables reenactp ment by others later; finally, it is a performance itself, being active in nature; and the drawing gets re-activated in performance.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Conclusion This sketch of the origins and beginnings of performance art in the former communist countries of Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe demonstrates both continuity with, as well as divergence from, the Western model. While, on the one hand, artists in the 1960s on both sides of the East-West divide were experimenting with and creating time-based works of art that privileged process over object production – in the form of actions, happenings and body art – artists in the East utilised a range of approaches to arrive at their own manifestations of the genre. These diverse practices arose from a range of factors, among them the sociopolitical situation. While in some cases artists were forced to confine their work to the studio or escape to the countryside, making the best of their situation by working within those limitations rather than halting their development in reaction to them (for example, in Romania or Czechoslovakia during the Normalisation period), in other instances (most notably, Poland and Yugoslavia), artists drew from and developed local avant-garde traditions. Fluxus was instrumental in introducing and spreading ideas related to contemporary art, although it was decidedly not the only source for artists in Eastern Europe, nor were other examples from the West. The various forms and meanings of the performances discussed in this chapter clearly indicate that performance art practices in the East developed concurrently with those in the West, rather than deriving from them. Notes 1 The Cabaret Voltaire was held in the restaurant Meierei on Spielgasse Street in Zurich. 2 Tom Sandqvist, in conversation with Zofia Machnicka, ‘Ex Oriente Dada,’ in Zofia Machnicka (ed.), Dada East? Romanian Contexts of Dada, exh. cat. (Warsaw: Zachęta National Gallery of Art, 2008), p. 33. 3 Steven Mansbach, Modern Art in Eastern Europe: From the Baltic to the Balkans, ca. 1890–1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 248. 4 Suzana Marjanić, ‘The beginnings of performance Art in Croatia, or from the high school group Traveleri to Gotovac lying nude on the asphalt’, Slavic and East European Performance, 31:2 (Autumn 2011), 37–9. For a comprehensive examination of performative art practices in Croatia since the early twentieth century, see Suzana Marjanić, Kronotop hrvatskoga performansa: Od Travelera do danas (Zagreb, Croatia: Institut za etnologiju i folkloristiku, Udruga Bijeli val, Školska knjiga, 2014). 5 Mansbach, Modern Art in Eastern Europe, p. 230.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

94

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

6 Drawing on Andrzej Turowski, Piotr Piotrowski has gone so far as to state that ‘there were no Dadaists in Poland, only their sympathisers’. Piotr Piotrowski, ‘Modernity and Nationalism: Avant-Garde Art and Polish Independence’, in Timothy O. Benson (ed.), Central European Avant-Gardes: Exchange and Transformation, 1910–1930 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002), p. 317. 7 Ion Pop, ‘Towards the Romanian Sources of Dadaism’, in Machnicka (ed.), Dada East?, p. 46. 8 Éva Forgács, ‘Between Cultures: Hungarian Concepts of Constructivism’, in Benson (ed.), Central European Avant-Gardes, p. 159. 9 Andrzej Turowski, ‘The Phenomenon of Blurring’, in Benson (ed.), Central European Avant-Gardes, p. 370. 10 Ilya Zdanevich and Mikhail Larionov, ‘Why We Paint Ourselves: A Futurist Manifesto’ (1913), in Mary Ann Caws (ed.), Manifesto: A Century of Isms (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001), p. 245. 11 Tidor Vianu, as quoted in Ioana Vlasiu, ‘Bucharest’, in Benson (ed.), Central European Avant-Gardes, p. 251. 12 Ibid. 13 Pavlína Morganová, Czech Action Art: Happenings, Actions, Events, Land Art, Body Art and Performance Art behind the Iron Curtain (Prague: Karolinum Press, 2014), p. 50. This book was first published as Akční umĕní (Olomouc, Czechoslovakia: Votobia, p. 1999). See also her recent publication Prochazka akční Prahou: Akce, performance, happeningy, 1949–1989 (Prague: VVP AVU, 2014), a ‘guidebook’ of sorts, in which the author revisited sites where performances took place in Czechoslovakia in the 1960s and 1970s, together with the artists. For Milan Knižák’s writing on art, see Knižák, 1995–1964 (Prague: Vetus Via, 1996); and Milan Knižák, Vedle umeni, 1996–2001 (Prague: Narodni galerie v Praze, 2002); see also the monograph on his work, Václav Budinský and Tat’jana Štemberová, Génius Milana Knižáka (Prague: Agentura Lucie, 2010). 14 Morganová cleverly used this term to draw a connection between these early exhibitions by Knížák and the demonstrations or happenings that he would organise just two years later. 15 Vladimír Boudník, as quoted in Morganová, Czech Action Art, p. 41 n. 46. 16 Petr Štembera, ‘Events, Happenings, Land-Art, etc., in Czechoslovakia’ (May–June 1970), in Lucy Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 ([1973]; repr., Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), p. 169. 17 Péter György, ‘Hungarian Marginal Art in the Late Period of State Socialism’, in Aleš Erjavec (ed.), Postmodernism and the Post-Socialist Condition: Politicized Art under State Socialism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), p. 179. 18 Ileana Pintilie, ‘Action art in Romania before and after 1989’, Centropa: A Journal of Central European Architecture and Related Arts, 14:1 (January 2014), 86–7. 19 Klara Kemp-Welch, Antipolitics in Central European Art: Reticence as Dissidence under Post-Totalitarian Rule, 1956–1989 (London: I.B. Tauris, 2014), p. 23. 20 For more on art in Poland under communism, see Anda Rottenberg, Sztuka w Polsce, 1945–2005 (Warsaw: STENTOR, 2005). 21 Happsoc was both a manifesto and an association composed of two artists, Alex Mlynárčik and Stano Filko, and the theorist Zita Kostrová.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

95

22 Kemp-Welch, Antipolitics in Central European Art, p. 60. 23 Stano Filko, Alex Mlynárčik and Zita Kostrová, ‘Manifest “Happsoc”’ (trans. Eric Dluhosch), in Laura Hoptman and Tomáš Pospiszyl (eds), Primary Documents: A Sourcebook for Eastern and Central European Art since the 1950s (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002), p. 87. 24 Nevenka Šivavec, ‘Elitism on the Margins’, in Irina Cercnik (ed.), The Town of Celje: The Alternative of the Seventies (Celje, Slovenia: Likovni salon Celje, 2000), p. 24. I am grateful to Jasmina Založnik for bringing this catalogue, and thus this action, to my attention. 25 Pintilie, ‘Action art in Romania before and after 1989’, p. 92. 26 Ileana Pintilie, Actionism in Romania during the Communist Era (Cluj, Romania: Idea Design & Print, 2002), p. 41; see also Ileana Pintilie, Acționismul în România în timpul comunismului (Cluj, Romania: Idea Design & Print, 2000). 27 For more on Romanian art under communism, see Magda Cârneci, Art et pouvoir en Roumanie, 1945–1989 (Paris: L’Hartmann, 2007). 28 Erdély later denied participating in the happening, stating that he only contributed a few ideas to it. He appeared before participants in the second happening, Golden Sunday, with a megaphone, telling them to ‘Go away!’ when they arrived. The artist, whose mother was a well-known spiritist medium, was interested in the formal connections between happenings and spiritist séances. See Annamária Szöke (ed.), Miklós Erdély (Budapest: Tranzit, 2008), pp. 6–8. 29 ‘Interview with Tamás St.Auby’, T. St.Auby in conversation with Dóra Hegyi and L. Zsusza (2009), in László Zsusza and Tamás St.Turba (eds), The Lunch: In Memorian Batu Khan (Budapest: Tranzit, 2011), p. 52. 30 Gabor Altorjay, ‘The Lunch (In Memoriam Batu Khan): The Recollection of Gabor Altorjay’, in Zsusza and St.Turba (eds), The Lunch, p. 44. 31 ‘Interview with Tamás St.Auby’, p. 52. The artist’s birth name is Tamás Szentjóby; in 1969, he changed the spelling of his surname to Sentjoby; later, he was known as Tamás St.Auby, and in 2011 he made another change to Tamás St.Turba. 32 Tamás Szentjóby, ‘On the Happening’ (1966; 2010), in Zsusza and St.Turba (eds), The Lunch, p. 47. 33 Ibid., p. 46. 34 ‘The Short Story of Balatonboglár’, www.artpool.hu/boglar/short.html, accessed 4 August 2015. 35 This is based on Gotovac’s description of the action in an interview with Goran Trbuljak and Hrvoje Turkovic, Magazine FILM, 10:11 (1977), 39–66. Reprinted in Aleksandar Battista Ilić and Diana Nenadić (eds), Tomislav Gotovac (Zagreb, Croatia: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2003), p. 296. 36 Darko Šimičić, in an interview with the author in Zagreb, 21 August 2013. 37 Branka Prša, in an email to the author, 26 May 2016. 38 Ibid. 39 Ješa Denegri, ‘Gorgona Group – Now and Then’, post (Museum of Modern Art), http://post.at.moma.org/content_items/176-gorgona-group-now-and-then, acces­ sed 1 July 2014; see also Marjanić, ‘The beginnings of performance art in Croatia’, 43. 40 The group was mainly active from 1959 to 1966. 41 Dérive is a term that originated in psychogeography. It was developed by the Lettrist

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

96

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

International in France in the 1940s and further explored and utilised by Guy Debord and the Situationist International. It involves the notion of an unplanned journey through a city, in which the travellers allow the architecture and surroundings to direct their travel. 42 Josip Vaništa, ‘The Gorgona’ (2000), in Marija Gattin (ed.), Gorgona; Protocol of Submitting Thoughts (Zagreb, Croatia: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2002), p. 159. 43 Nena Dimitrijević, ‘Gorgona – Art as a Way of Existence’ (1977), in Gattin (ed.), Gorgona, p. 54. 44 The members of the group had a practice of mailing one another monthly quotations from artists, philosophers and writers that reflected the spirit of Gorgona. As quoted in Branka Stipančić, ‘To Attempt an “Experiment” of Living’, in Nada Beroš (ed.), Josip Vaništa: Abolition of Retrospective (Zagreb, Croatia: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2013), p. 127. 45 Ibid., p. 126. 46 Dimitrijević later disputed the coauthorship of this project and claimed it as his own. 47 Nena Baljković, ‘Braco Dimitrijević – Goran Trbuljak’, in Marijan Susovski (ed.), The New Art Practice in Yugoslavia, 1966–1978 (Zagreb, Croatia: Gallery of Contemporary Art, 1978), p. 29. 48 The Group of Six Artists consisted of Boris Demur (b. 1951), Željko Jerman (1949– 2006), Vlado Martek (b. 1951), Mladen Stilinović (1947–2016), Sven Stilinović (b.  1958) and Fedor Vučemilović (b. 1956). Mladen Stilinović, in an interview with the author in Zagreb, 19 August 2013. 49 Nermina Zildžo, ‘Burying the Past and Exhuming Mass Graves’, in IRWIN (ed.), East Art Map: Contemporary Art and Eastern Europe (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006), p. 148. 50 Another artist from Vojvodina active in performance and body art, along with concrete poetry, is Csernik Attila (b. 1951), who used his body as both subject and object, superimposing words, letters and phonemes onto it, by means of paper or slide projections. He also collaborated with Bosch+Bosch as well as Katalin Ladik, whose work is discussed in chapter 3. 51 Nebojša Milenković (ed.), Szombathy Art (Novi Sad, Serbia: Museum of Contemporary Art: 2005), pp. 12–13. 52 The name ‘OHO’ is an amalgam of the words for ‘eye’ (oko) and ‘ear’ (uho) in Slovenian. For more on the group, see Braco Rotar, ‘Pogovor s člani skupine OHO’, Sinteza: Revija za likovno kulturo, 17 (June 1970), 46–8; and Tomaž Brejc, OHO, 1966–1971 (Ljubljana, Slovenia: Študentski kulturni center, 1978). 53 The group was consolidated in 1969 to these four members. Miško Šuvaković has also distinguished between the OHO group (1966–71) and OHO-Katalog (1966–70), the latter being an expanded collective that intended to create a journal devoted to contemporary art and theory; due to lack of funding, the journal never came to light, so the group published in Problemi magazine. 54 After the major earthquake in Skopje, Macedonia (1963), David Nez’s family moved there to help with the reconstruction; his father was a city planner. At that time, Nez travelled to Slovenia to meet family members. After graduating from high school in 1967, he moved to Ljubljana to study at the art academy there, then joined OHO;

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

97

he remained for several years, before eventually returning to the United States. 55 These three artists changed their names to Janez Janša in 2007 as part of an artistic project that will be discussed in chapter 4. Prior to this, the artists were known as Davide Grassi (b. 1970), Emil Hrvatin (b. 1964) and Žiga Kariž (b. 1973). In 2012, Janez Janša (b. 1973) changed his name to Žiga Kariž. 56 As quoted in Miško Šuvaković, The Clandestine Histories of the OHO Group (Ljubljana, Slovenia: Zavod P.A.R.A.S.I.T.E., 2010), p. 51. 57 Igor Zabel, ‘OHO – From Reism to Conceptual Art’, in Igor Zabel (ed.), OHO: A Retrospective, exh. cat. (Ljubljana, Slovenia: Moderna Galerija, 1994), p. 13. 58 The social and economic policies of self-management socialism facilitated and encouraged a consumerist lifestyle of shopping and spending. This will be discussed in greater detail in chapters 3 and 5. 59 Šuvaković, The Clandestine Histories of the OHO Group, p. 53. 60 Mileko Matanović, in an interview with Beti Žerovc, ARTMargins Online (24 August 2011), www.artmargins.com/index.php/interview-with-milenko-matanovi, accessed 4 August 2015. 61 For more on art from this period in Slovenia, see Tamara Soban, Igor Španjol, and Igor Zabel (eds), Razširjeni prostori umetnosti: Slovenska umetnost, 1985–1995 (Ljubljana, Slovenia: Moderna Galerija, 2004); Vladimir P. Štefanec,  Do roba in naprej: Slovenska umetnost, 1975–85 (Ljubljana, Slovenia: Moderna Galerija, 2003); and Miško Šuvaković, Anatomija angelov: Razprave o umetnosti in teoriji v Sloveniji po letu 1960 (Ljubljana, Slovenia: Znanstveno in publicistično središče, 2001). 62 Piotr Piotrowski, In the Shadow of Yalta: Art and the Avant-Garde in Eastern Europe, 1945–1989 (London: Reaktion Books, 2009), p. 98. 63 Diana Popova and Svilen Stefanov (eds), N-Forms? Reconstructions and Interpretations, exh. cat. (Sofia, Bulgaria: Soros Centre for the Arts, 1994), p. 23. 64 Ibid., p. 3. 65 Octavian Eşanu, Transition in Post-Soviet Art: Collective Actions Before and After 1989 (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2012), p. 89. For more on art in Soviet Russia in the 1970s, see Georgy Kizewalter, Eti strannye semidesiatye, ili poteria nevinnosti (Moscow: NLO, 2010); see also Leonid P. Talochkin and Irina G. Alpatova, ‘Drugoe iskusstvo’: Moskva, 1956–76 (Moscow: Interbuk, 1991). 66 Eşanu, Transition in Post-Soviet Art, p. 101. 67 For further discussion of the development of ephemeral art forms as opposition to commodification, see chapter 5 of this volume. 68 Natalija Abalakova and Anatoly Zhigalov, ‘TOTART: the total presence in a total situation’, Maska: Performing Arts Journal, 21/3:4 (98–9) (Spring 2006), 23. 69 Inke Arns and Sylvia Sasse, ‘Subversive Affirmation: On Mimesis as a Strategy of Resistance’, in IRWIN (ed.), East Art Map, p. 445. 70 Bionics is the study of mechanical systems that function like living organisms. 71 Andres Kurg, ‘Feedback environment: rethinking art and design practices in Tallinn during the early 1970s’, Studies on Art and Architecture, 20:1–2 (2011), 29. 72 Sirje Helme, PopKunst Forever: Estonian Pop Art at the Turn of the 1960s and 1970s (Tallinn: Art Museum of Estonia–Kumu Art Museum, 2010), p. 145. 73 Noise music is a type of music that uses noise and other unconventional sounds expressively, as music.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

98

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

74 According to a 2002 essay by Juta Kivimae, Tolts, Keskküla, Lapin and Künnapu organised the action; a 2010 essay by Sirje Helme names only Tolts, Keskküla, Künnapu and Toomas Pakri but not Lapin as participants. 75 Kurg, ‘Feedback environment’, 48. 76 Andres Kurg, ‘Noise environment: Jüri Okas’s Reconstructions and its public reception’, Studies on Art and Architecture, 21:1–2 (2012), 158. 77 Sirje Helme, ‘The times of Artforum’, Idealism of the Cultural Space of the 1970s: Addenda to Estonian Art History (Tallinn, Estonia: Centre for Contemporary Arts, n.d.), p. 80. Anu Allas, ‘Concept of Play’, unpublished text from KUMU, n.pag. 78 In order to survive in the oppressive environment of Soviet rule, individuals often had to live double lives, showing one face to their peers and only sharing their true feelings with their most trusted and close friends and family. Speaking in Aesopian language, to express dissatisfaction with the regime, was also a common tactic to confuse the censors and spies and avoid persecution. 79 That being said, Ando Keskküla maintained that these happenings did not really enter the public sphere, and thus could not have had such an effect. While that may be true for the happenings mentioned in this chapter, perhaps Lapin felt that creating this art could lead to developments whereby happenings and actions would take place in the public sphere. See Kurg, ‘Feedback environment’, p. 41. 80 Sirje Helme and Tamara Luuk (eds), Okas (Tallinn, Estonia: As Pakett, 2000), p. 13. 81 See Mark Allen Svede, ‘Many Easels, Some Abandoned’, in Alla Rosenfeld and Norton C. Dodge (eds), Art of the Baltics: The Struggle for Freedom of Artistic Expression under the Soviets, 1945–1991 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2001), p. 207. 82 Andris Grīnbergs, in an interview with the author in Riga, February 2009. 83 For more on alternative culture in Latvia in the Soviet period, see Eižens Valpēters, Nenocenzētie: Alternatīvā kultūra Latvijā; XX gs. 60-tie un 70-tie gadi (Riga, Latvia: Latvijas Vēstnesis, 2010). 84 Dziugas Katinas, in an interview with the author in Vilnius, 3 October 2013. 85 Česlovas Lukenskas, in an interview with the author in Vilnius, 30 September 2013. 86 For a discussion of the Bulldozer Exhibition, see ‘The Bulldozer and Izmailovsky Park Exhibition, Moscow, 1974: Chronology of Events, Letters and Interviews’, in Hoptman and Pospiszyl (eds), Primary Documents, pp. 65–77. 87 Juche is the philosophy underpinning the North Korean regime, a combination of Confucianism and Stalinist Soviet socialism. The word ‘juche’ translates as ‘selfreliance,’ and the philosophy maintains that the North Korean masses can be the masters of their own destiny. 88 According to Alisa Lozhkina, in an email correspondence with the author, ‘Brief Notes on the History of Performance Art in Ukraine’, 22 April 2015. 89 Maciunas’s family left Lithuania in 1944, when he was thirteen, and settled in New York in 1948. 90 Petra Stegmann, ‘Fluxus and the east’, Centropa: A Journal of Central European Architecture and Related Arts, 14:1 (January 2014), 42. 91 As mentioned by Česlovas Lukenskas, in an interview with the author in Vilnius, 30 September 2013; and also by Džiugas Katinas, in an interview with the author in Vilnius, 3 October 2013.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

99

92 As quoted in Helme, PopKunst Forever, p. 145. 93 As quoted in ibid., 146. 94 Pavlína Morganová, ‘Action! Czech performance art in the 1960s and 1970s’, Centropa: A Journal of Central European Architecture and Related Arts, 14:1 (January 2014), 25. 95 See ibid. 96 As quoted in Pavlína Morganová, ‘Fluxus in the Czech Period Press’, in Petra Steg­­ mann (ed.), Fluxus East: Fluxus Networks in Central Eastern European Art (Berlin: Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, 2007), p. 181. 97 Ibid., p. 182. 98 Milan Knížák, as quoted in ibid., p. 183. 99 Stegmann, ‘Fluxus and the east’, 48. 100 Ibid. 101 Ibid., 50. 102 See Andrea Bátorová, ‘Alternative Trends in Slovakia During the 1960s and Parallels to Fluxus’, in Stegmann (ed.), Fluxus East, p. 166. 103 Ibid. 104 See Stegmann, ‘Fluxus and the east’, 51. 105 See Luiza Nader, ‘Heterotopy: The NET and Galeria Akumulatory 2’, in Stegmann (ed.), Fluxus East, p. 114. 106 Claudia Mesch, Modern Art at the Berlin Wall: Demarcating Culture in the Cold War Germanys (London: I.B. Tauris, 2009), p. 164. 107 Šuvaković, The Clandestine Histories of the OHO Group, p. 45. 108 For more on contemporary art in Serbia, see Miško Šuvaković, Ješa Denegri and Nikola Dedić, Trijumf savremene umetnosti: Mapiranja diskontiniuteta opsesija, uživanja, posedovanja, fantazija i subverzija unutar materijalnih umetnićkih praksi u Srbiji tokom dvadesetog veka (Novi Sad, Serbia: Muzej savremene umetnosti Vojvodine, 2010); see also Miško Šuvaković, Konceptualna umetnost (Novi Sad, Serbia: Muzej savremene umetnosti Vojvodine, 2007). 109 Raša Todosijević, in an interview with the author in Belgrade, 3 August 2013. 110 Ibid. 111 Ibid. 112 See the artist’s biography in Ilić and Nenadić (eds), Tomislav Gotovac, p. 300. 113 Miroslav Miša Savić, in an interview with the author in Belgrade, 6 August 2013. 114 Gera Urkom, in an interview with the author in London, 28 February 2015. This scene is similarly described in James Westcott, When Marina Abramović Dies: A Biography (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2010), p. 55. 115 For an insightful discussion of painting and sculpture in Yugoslavia in the postwar era, see Ljiljana Kolešnik, ‘Conflicting Visions of Modernity and the Post-War Modern Art’, in Ljiljana Kolešnik (ed.), Socialism and Modernity: Art, Culture, Politics, 1950–1974 (Zagreb, Croatia: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2012), pp. 107–79. 116 The group’s name was intentionally subversive: ‘Laibach’ was the German name for Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia, used both when Slovenia was part of the Habsburg Empire and during the Nazi occupation of the nation in the Second World War; thus, the appellation had fascist connotations. 117 Jaruzelski was first secretary of the Polish United Workers’ Party from 1981 to 1989,

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

100

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

chiefly responsible for the implementation of Martial Law on 13 December 1981. 118 Laibach, in an interview with Jure Pengov, 23 June 1983 (TV Tednik, Ljubljana); transcript printed in N. Hennig and W. Skok (eds), Ausstellung Laibach Kunst Recapitulation, exh. cat. (Łódź, Poland: Muzeum Sztuki w Łódźi, 2009), p. 34. 119 Slavoj Žižek, speaking about New Slovenian Art in Michael Benson’s film Predictions of Fire (1996). 120 Slavoj Žižek, ‘Why are Laibach and NSK Not Fascists?’, reprinted in Hoptman and Pospiszyl (eds), Primary Documents, p. 287. 121 See Neven Korda, ‘Alternative Dawns’, and Nikolai Jeffs, ‘FV and the “Third Scene”’, in Breda Škrjanec (ed.), FV: Alternative Scene of the 80s (Ljubljana, Slovenia: International Centre of Graphic Arts, 2008), pp. 324, 355. 122 Korda, ‘Alternative Dawns’, p. 331. 123 Neven Korda, in an interview with the author in Ljubljana, 29 August 2013. 124 It should be noted that Marina Abramović’s parents were both born in Monte­­ negro. In recent years, she has begun to emphasise that connection, for example, in founding the Marina Abramović Community Centre Obod Cetinje (MACCOC) in Cetinje, Montenegro, which the artist announced in 2011. At the time of writing (2016), the centre has still not gotten off the ground, although Russian art curator Marat Guelman, who relocated to Montenegro, is currently working to develop it. 125 Petar Cuković, ‘Methexis in Darkness’, in Petar Cuković (ed.), Milja Pavičević (Podgorica: Contemporary Art Centre of Montenegro, 2013), p. 17. 126 Ibid., p. 13. 127 It should be noted that Estonian artist Leonard Lapin also restaged this image in the 1980 photographic performance Self-Portrait as a Venus. 128 Svetlana Racanović, ‘M.P. – A Time Odyssey’, in Cuković (ed.), Milja Pavičević, p.  133. 129 Sezgin Boynik, ‘Cultural Roots of Contemporary Art in Kosovo’, in Shkelzen Maliqi (ed.), Leftover Is for Real (no publication data available), p. 44. 130 Shkelzen Maliqi, ‘Contemporary Arts in Kosova’, in Maliqi (ed.), Leftover Is for Real, p. 23. 131 See Klara Kemp-Welch, ‘Art Documentation and Bureaucratic Life: The “Case” of the Studio of Activities, Documentation and Propagation’, in Jacek Dobrowolski et al. (eds), Zofia Kulik/Przemysław Kwiek: KwieKulik (Zurich: JRP/Ringier, 2012), pp. 518–20. 132 For more on the influence of Hansen’s and Jarnuszkiewicz’s pedagogies on Polish performance art, see my article ‘Games played by different rules: performance art in Poland, 1970–2000’, Centropa: A Journal of Central European Architecture and Related Arts, 14:1 (January 2014), 8–22. A similar approach to that of KwieKulik can be seen in the Creativity Exercises initiated by Miklós Erdély from Hungary, which were seen as the precursor to the activity of the Indigo Group. These activities have been compared to those of Fluxus and Joseph Beuys. 133 For more on the Repassage Gallery, see Maryla Sitkowska (ed.), Sigma, Galeria Repassage, Repassage 2, Repassage (Warsaw: National Gallery Zachęta, 1993). Incidentally, the two are also graduates of the Sculpture Department at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts. 134 Grzegorz Kowalski, in an interview with the author in Warsaw, 18 May 2012.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

101

135 Maja Fowkes, The Green Bloc: Neo-Avant-Garde Art and Ecology under Socialism (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2015), p. 18. 136 Andrea Euringer-Bátorová and Zora Rusinová have written extensively on Slovakian performance art. See Andrea Euringer-Bátorová, Akčné umenie na Slovensku v 60: Rokoch 20. storočia; Akcie Alexa Mlynárčika (Bratislava: Slovart, 2011); Zora Rusinová (ed.), Umenie akcie / Action Art, 1965–1989 (Bratislava: Slovenská Národná Galéria, 2001). 137 Zora Rusinová, ‘Solidarity born of despair: action art in Slovakia during the totalitarian regime, 1970–1989’, Centropa: A Journal of Central European Architecture and Related Arts, 14:1 (January 2014), 110. 138 László Beke, ‘Performance Art before and after Tibor Hajas’, in Zdenka Badovinac (ed.), Body and the East: From the 1960s to the Present (Ljubljana, Slovenia: Moderna Galerija, 1998), p. 103. 139 Ibid. 140 Ibid., p. 105. 141 Ileana Pintilie, ‘Between Modernism and Postmodernism’, in Alina Şerban (ed.), Ion Grigorescu: The Man with a Single Camera (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2013), p. 33. 142 Dan Perjovschi, in an interview with the author in Bucharest, 24 March 2014. 143 Iosif Király, in an interview with the author in Bucharest, 26 March 2014. 144 Bernard Borgeaud, in ‘Portrait of a Wooden Bar’ (a collective interview), in Magdalena Radu (ed.), Andrei Cadere (Bucharest, Romania: National Museum of Contemporary Art, 2011), p. 417. 145 Fabiola Bierhoff, ‘Appropriation in East German Performance Art – the Legacy of Joseph Beuys’, paper given in the panel Performance Art in Central and Eastern Europe, College Art Association annual conference in Chicago, 15 February 2014. 146 See Mesch, Modern Art at the Berlin Wall, p. 192. 147 The group initially consisted of three artists: Micha Brendel (b. 1959), Else Gabriel (b. 1962) and Via Lewandowsky (b. 1963); Rainer Görss (b. 1960) joined the group later. 148 See Mesch, Modern Art at the Berlin Wall, p. 193. 149 Ibid. 150 Ibid., p. 197. 151 Ibid., p. 199. 152 Holger Stark, in an interview with the author in Berlin, 8 May 2014. 153 Schleime was another artist who was closely watched by the Stasi; she later discovered that Sacha Anderson, her bandmate in their punk band Zwitschermaschine, was a civilian informant. I am grateful to Angelika Richter for bringing her work, along with that of Schlegel, to my attention. 154 Michelle Maydanchik, ‘Creative Disruption: Performance Art in Post-Soviet Moscow’ (PhD dissertation, University of Chicago, 2014). 155 Siim Tanel-Annus, in an interview with the author in Tallinn, 8 October 2013. 156 The theme of escape is also present in Russian artist Ilya Kabakov’s work, most notably, The Man Who Flew into Space from His Apartment, from the Ten Characters installation, 1988, Roland Feldman Gallery, New York. 157 According to Kurvitz, the moniker has no meaning. The artists knew that they were going to call themselves a group, and wanted to have a letter at the beginning

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

102

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

of the name, and that it had to be a consonant, so they decided on ‘T’. According to Raul Kurvitz, in an interview in a film produced in conjunction with the exhibition Kurvitz, in Kati Ilves (ed.), Kurvitz (Tallinn: Art Museum of Estonia – KUMU Art Museum, 2013). 158 Ibid. 159 Ibid. 160 Lilia Dragneva, ‘Ten Years of Moldovan Contemporary Art’, in IRWIN (ed.), East Art Map, p. 240. 161 Pavel Braila, in an interview with the author in Chişinău, 1 April 2014. 162 Ekaterina Kenigsberg, ‘Viktor Piatrou’s “Time Phenomena” at Pavilion of the Republic of Belarus at the 54th Venice Biennale’ (2011), http://artkurator.com/en/ articles/petrov.html, accessed 4 August 2015. 163 See Andrzej Fidyk’s documentary film on the artist, Belarusian Waltz (2009, 74 min.). 164 See Edi Muka, ‘Albanian Socialist Realism, or the Theology of Power’, in IRWIN (ed.), East Art Map, p. 133.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

The body

The body was radical – people died on the streets in Romania … there were bodies in the street, so it was something real. – Dan Perjovschi, speaking about the 1989 Romanian Revolution, 2014 Our sole treasure is our bodies and our ideas. – Raša Todosijević

In the socialist spaces of Eastern Europe, the body had a unique resonance. Since public (and to a certain extent, private) space was controlled by the state, the individual was constantly subject to the power and discipline that derives from living in the panopticon.1 Surveillance took varying forms and existed to varying degrees across the East. In East Germany, either the Stasi infiltrated artist groups (Clara Mosch) or artists feared that they had (Autoperforatsions­ artisten) but never really knew. In places such as Romania or Normalisationera Czechoslovakia, public space was monitored to a similar extent. While in Czechoslovakia in the 1960s Milan Knížák was able to enact public exhibitions and performances on the streets, during the following decade, the next generation of Czech artists retreated to the private spaces of apartments, basements or to the countryside. At that time, even semiprivate spaces were not immune to scrutiny, as seen in Sanja Iveković’s (b. 1949) performance Triangle (1979; figure 2.1), held on her balcony during one of Tito’s official visits to Zagreb. As Iveković drank whiskey and pretended to masturbate, the security officers stationed atop a high-rise hotel across the street noticed her and summoned their colleagues on the street below to knock on her door and ask her to vacate the balcony (along with her things). Thus, even in socialist Yugoslavia – the most ‘relaxed’ of the Eastern European nations throughout much of the Cold War period – the body found itself in the crosshairs of state surveillance.2 In utilising the body as artistic material, body art, action art, and performance from the region illuminate the manner in which the body is always already located within a system – be it political, artistic or otherwise. The distinct nature of these different systems is brought into sharp focus when juxtaposing examples not only from East and West, but also from across Eastern

2

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Sanja Iveković TROKUT (TRIANGLE) 1979 Performance / photographs Time: 18 min The action takes place on the day of the President Tito’s visit to the city, and it develops as intercommunication between three persons: 1. a person on the roof of a tall building across the street of my apartment; 2. myself, on the balcony; 3. a policeman in the street in front of the house. Due to the cement construction of the balcony, only the person on the roof can actually see me and follow the action. My assumption is that this person has binoculars and a walkie – talkie apparatus. I notice that the policman in the street also has a walkie – talkie. The action begins when I walk out onto the balcony and sit on a chair. I sip whiskey, read a book, and make gestures as if I perform masturbation. After a period of time the policeman rings my doorbell and orders that «the persons and objects are to be removed from the balcony» Savska 1 Zagreb, 10 May 1979

2.1

Sanja Iveković, Triangle, 1979, Zagreb. Courtesy: Sanja Iveković

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

The body

Europe. In addition to a geographic distinction, there is also a temporal one, when one considers the changes that occurred both within the communist period and from the communist to the post-communist era. Piotr Piotrowski characterises the post-communist era as ‘agoraphilic’, manifesting a ‘drive to enter the public space, the desire to participate in that space, to shape public life, to perform critical and design functions for the sake of and within social space’.3 These artists entered and occupied public space with their corporeal presence, in many cases being able to do so for the first time only after the regime change. Conversely, during the communist period, this ‘participation’ and ‘design’ took place largely within an alternative, closed or second public sphere, with a limited audience and viewership, which meant that the artist’s body often could not be present in the public space.4 In this way, the body became a site that enabled the artists to act or express themselves in a manner not possible in the public space nor through traditional art forms, such as painting and sculpture, which were regulated by the state. And insofar as they were not usually known by the state, actions created by artists in private or semiprivate settings were not considered works of art, and therefore not subject to governmental regulation. Many artists were attracted to body art for the freedom it gave them to create and experiment. The use of the body as material also had a straightforward practicality to it, given that it was readily available. As Serbian artist Raša Todosijević commented, ‘Our sole treasure is our bodies and our ideas’, meaning that the body was a form of cultural capital that artists could use regardless of one’s economic circumstances.5 Commenting on the significance of performance and body art in Romania in the 1980s and 1990s, Dan Perjovschi stated that first and foremost it was ‘cheap’ – a quality of particular appeal during a time of material scarcity. Resources for artistic projects were particularly limited, and usually only allocated to official commissions. Perjovschi recalled the difficulty he experienced in procuring a large quantity of white paper to create his performative installation Red Apples, which he realised in the living room of his apartment. Perjovschi observed that in postrevolutionary Romania, the body was also considered ‘radical’ because of the fact that people had died on the streets; the body was not just visceral, but real. Consequently, in the post-communist period, especially in places that endured violent revolutions or war such as the former Yugoslav countries, the body’s use in performance had a profound significance due to the loss of life witnessed in those environments. Roselee Goldberg argues that artists in Eastern Europe utilised body art because it left little trace of the unofficial and experimental creative activity that it engendered. However, most of their performances were documented – and those documents had the potential to implicate not only the artists, but also the bystanders witnessing or otherwise drawn in to the events. In an

105

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

106

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

essay on the photographs of Czech action art from the 1970s, Tomáš Pospiszyl contrasts the relatively public nature of performances from the 1960s with performances from the 1970s, which took place in private, before a small audience of close friends. The latter imbued the recording of performances with heightened significance, especially because it enabled the work to be seen by other audiences – either immediately thereafter, through circulation of photographs, or by a future, ‘delayed’ audience, which may or may not have included the state apparatus.6 As Pospiszyl writes, the audience captured in the photographs ‘knows very well that they are taking part in an art action. They also know that the photographs will be seen by a large secondary audience and maybe by the police, who can decode them as a disturbance of the peace. They take that risk. Their presence and willingness to be photographed means that they become part of the event’.7 The documentation of these performances, when it occurred, is thus a crucial element to the longevity of the work of art, while also speaking to the risky nature of experimental activity in the region, for both artist and viewer. Zdenka Badovinac chose the body as the focus of her landmark 1998 exhibition, Body and the East, precisely because of its unique resonance in the context of Eastern Europe. In the catalogue, she notes that the body is a social construct, inherently intersubjective, and able to function as ‘another representational economy’, meaning that its signification depends on historical and social circumstances surrounding it.8 Her analysis of performance art in Eastern Europe echoes arguments made by Amelia Jones around that same time: that body art ‘insistently pose[s] the subject as intersubjective (contingent on the other) rather than complete within itself (the Cartesian subject who is centered and fully self-knowing in his cognition)’.9 Consequently, interpreting these performing bodies in their context yields insights into the sociopolitical factors underlying their actions. In other words, by examining the various uses and expressions of the body in different locations throughout Eastern Europe, we may gain a better understanding not only of the particular significance of the body in each environment, but also of the differing ways in which statesponsored socialism was adopted in each, as well as the significance of the body and performance in the East versus in the West. Although Jones does not write specifically about artists from Eastern Europe, her appraisal of performance art can be instructive when looking at artists from the region, as she herself emphasises the necessity of contextual analysis. In her words, the ‘social, political and cultural context is crucial to this analysis of what body art … can tell us about our current experiences of subjectivity’.10 In this chapter, I examine the manner in which artists from the East used their bodies in performance to navigate the varying degrees of state control over artistic production and cultivate their own forms of individual integration and self-expression. In the process, I expose the unique resonance of the body both in the East and across the region.

The body

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

The present body Jones cites a significant shift that arose in art history and art criticism with the appearance of Hans Namuth’s photographs of Jackson Pollock at work, published in Robert Goodnough’s 1951 Art News article, ‘Pollock Paints a Picture’. For Jones, Pollock’s action painting, which was revealed in these photographs, and which she terms the ‘Pollockian performative’, effectively reveal the artist to the viewer. His action, and thus the action of body artists, ‘unveils the hidden body that secured the authority of modernism’.11 As such, it reveals the act of interpretation as ‘interested’, as opposed to the Kantian ‘disinterested’ approach, ‘whereby the interpreter presumably determined the inherent meaning and value of the work of art through objective criteria’.12 In revealing the body of the author, body art gives voice to the social space in which the artist is located and from which s/he creates. In fact, Jones argues that body art attests to the overturning of the unified, closed and independent Cartesian subject, ‘confirm[ing] what phenomenology and psychoanalysis have taught us: that the subject “means” always in relationship to others and the locus of identity is always elsewhere’.13 Consequently, it is through body art that the artist makes him- or herself present, be it in the social space of the public or private sphere. In many instances, it was difficult for the body, in the context of performance art, to be truly ‘present’ in the East, given the limited nature of the audience for experimental art. Ivana Bago and Antonia Majaca thus characterise the audience for this work as ‘delayed’, primarily consisting of subsequent viewers, rather than the general public present at the time of the work’s creation. With regard to artists in Croatia in the 1970s, Bago explains that they ‘found themselves in an empty space … where the products of their work were neither destined for the market nor desired by socialist society, and could only be stored for a delayed audience, for future use’.14 Indeed, this echoes ­statements by artists as to why they documented their work at the time of creation, given that in many cases they would not be able to exhibit it contemporaneously, in either East or West. For example, Romanian artist Iosif Király (b. 1957) states that he photographed his actions for a ‘future audience’,15 uncertain as to whether or not these documents would ever be seen. In a recent interview with the author, Slovak artist Peter Meluzin addressed the need to document his performances, as that enabled the possibility of showing the work to later generations. In his words, ‘without the photographs, these works would be unverified’.16 Likewise, Perjovschi documented his work and that of his colleagues in order to have a ‘witness’ to it, stating that in many instances, he ‘never thought it would be seen’.17 When asked why artists documented an early work of Latvian performance art in which he was involved, painter Raimonds Līcītis (b. 1948) explained that they ‘decided that it was an important

107

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

108

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

moment, and it needed to be captured and preserved in that way’.18 Given the improbability that many of these works of art would be publicly exhibited in official or conventional venues, the documentation thereof served the purpose of recording and eventually displaying that work to an audience that could not be physically present at the performance. It also often served a practical function, as in many instances the documentation of a work or performance was (or could be) sent abroad for exhibition, even if the artists themselves were not able to or allowed to travel with it.19 Thus, when examining works of performance featuring the use of the body, the documentation of the action or event should be regarded as a substitute for presence, in this particular context of Eastern Europe. Peggy Phelan has argued for the ontology of performance art, stating that ‘performance’s only life is in the present. Performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representations: once it does so, it becomes something other than performance’.20 Yet Phelan was writing primarily about Western performance art. It is my contention that the specific sociopolitical circumstances in Eastern Europe require a different view with regard to documentation. For such a view, we may look to Philip Auslander, who argues against ‘liveness’ as a requisite of performance art: ‘the word “live” is not used to define intrinsic, ontological properties of performance that set it apart from mediatised forms, but rather is a historically contingent term’.21 Indeed, he argues that the idea of ‘live’ only came about following the advent of radio, in which the distinction between recorded and live sound was not immediately apparent to the listener.22 For Auslander, the camera plays a crucial role in performance, insofar as ‘the act of documenting an event as a performance is what constitutes it as such’.23 Sometimes the records of actions become more than records, acquiring their own artistic significance, as seen in Czech artist Jiří Kovanda’s (b. 1953) photographic and textual documentation of his action art. Kovanda, who began working in performance in Prague in the 1970s, dedicated one sheet of paper to record each action, titling and dating it and sometimes including a short description, photograph or series of photographs. As Pavlína Morganová writes, ‘today these sheets of paper, which he once carried around in well-worn folders to show those interested, are viewed as artifacts. Indeed, they possess a certain aesthetic quality since Kovanda conceived of them as a kind of collage … Yet they were only records and documents, proof that the action took place and the methods used’.24 She further notes that in the post-communist period, when artists became aware of the commercial value of these documents, artists ‘changed their perception’ of this documentation, coming to regard it more as a work of art than a mere record of events.25 Just as the documentation of performance art in the West became commodified through the circulation, exhibition and selling of these visual records, artists

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

The body

in Eastern Europe faced a similar situation upon entering the art market in the 1990s. The photographic camera played a significant role in regard to body and action art across Eastern Europe from the 1960s until the system change in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In Hungary, the work of Tibor Hajas stands as a compelling example of the symbiotic relationship between performance and photography. Hajas, an artist as well as a poet, created dramatic performances with his body both before an audience and in private, but almost always with a camera present. His 1978 performance Dark Flash, which took place at the Galeria Remont in Warsaw, is seen as the first work of Hungarian performance art, outside the tradition of happenings discussed in the previous chapter.26 The piece involved the artist hanging from the ceiling with his hands bound and his eyes blindfolded, while a flash was used to take photographs in the dark room. As with many of the artist’s performances, Dark Flash pushed his physical body to the extreme, and in fact the artist lost consciousness and had to be taken down and revived by the viewers present.27 According to Maja Fowkes, his work tested the limits of his body, but remained ‘firmly bound to the world of fantasy, nightmare and the mystery of death’.28 Because of their visceral quality, Hajas’s performances have been compared with those of the Viennese Actionists as well as Marina Abramović, although his concerns were largely aesthetic rather than political. Dark Flash contained several themes that the artist would revisit in subsequent performances: darkness and blindness, and their integration with photography. The artist previously explored similar ideas in what László Beke terms a ‘pre-performance’ for Hajas’s later, more extreme actions. At the opening of the 1976 exhibition Photo/Art, the artist sat blindfolded in the middle of a chalk circle, holding a camera and listening to instructions from his assistants, who tried to help him take a photograph of another camera that was hanging from a rope and on autoexposure.29 While the photo camera and flash featured prominently in Hajas’s performances, in some instances he replaced the camera flash with an explosion of magnesium. The artist reportedly used a flash in darkened rooms because of the physiological impact on the viewer’s eyes, producing a momentary visual imprint of his work, and thus his body, on the retina. In this way, Hajas involved the viewer physically in the piece, ‘requir[ing] the audience participants to take home the image, burnt into their eyes’.30 Fowkes ascribes the artist’s interest in photography to its role as a mediator between that which we see and that which actually exists in the world – a ‘metaphor for the relation between existing reality and its appearance’.31 For Hajas, arrested in 1965 and imprisoned for one year following his participation in a street demonstration, photography also offered the possibility of constructing a different reality, and thus a means of liberation. This is the view of Edit András, who writes that Hajas believed that ‘the photograph was a medium of freedom and the inverse

109

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

110

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

of reality, instead of being a mere documentation of it’.32 When observing the photographic documentation of Hajas’s work, there can be no doubt that his focus is on the body as an active subject, a material to be manipulated and pushed to its physical limits. The corporeality of his work notwithstanding, the camera and photograph are of equal concern and interest to the artist. In some ways, these performances raise essential questions regarding the ontology of performance art and the role of liveness in the genre. In Normalisation-era Czechoslovakia of the 1970s, the Body Art Troika (Karel Miler, Jan Mlčoch and Petr Štembera) produced this type of work for a relatively short period of time, with much of the group’s work focused on the body’s relationship to its surroundings as well as its physical limits. For example, in Either/Or (1972; figure 2.2), Miler is photographed in two positions: lying on the road and lying on the curb next to it. In this way, he demarcates the road’s existence in relation to, and dependent on, his body. Several of his actions feature a similar theme, as in Identification (1973; figure 2.3), a photographic performance in which Miler tries to capture on film the precise instant when gravity takes effect. In this work, he falls to the ground from a pile of concrete slabs on which he had been squatting – the moment when his corporeality becomes evident. The effect produced is an image similar to that of Yves Klein’s photomontage Leap into the Void (1960), which depicts the artist appearing to leap from a window to his death, although the net below that was used to catch him was later edited out. In Perpendicular (1973), Miler leans his body back so as to make himself perpendicular to the hill on which he is standing. Significantly, many of these actions take place out-of-doors and in the countryside. When not working in the concealed spaces of the basement of Prague’s Applied Arts Museum – a source of employment for many experimental Czech artists – these artists often took to the countryside as a rare arena of freedom during the 1970s. In fact, many of the actions that Czech artists created during this time can be said to form a hybrid with Land Art, such as those by Miler discussed above. Their manifestations, however, are closer to British Land Art, with its focus on the individual in the landscape, as opposed to the American version, which concentrates on the vastness of the nation’s terrain. In fact, one of the distinctive aspects of Czech action art, as Morganová points out, is that very few actions are devoid of a reference to or contact with nature.33 She cites several reasons for this, not all of them political. In some instances, artists sought to connect with the thousand-year history embedded in the land or to connect earthly forms with the body. Thus, in the Czech context it is often difficult to definitively classify such artworks as installations, actions, or monumental sculptures since they generally involve multiple approaches.34 The land-and-body-art hybrid created by Czech artists in the 1970s at once distinguishes it from practices in the West while representing a

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

The body

Karel Miler, Either/Or, 1972. Courtesy: Karel Miler 111

2.2

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

112

2.3

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

Karel Miler, Identification, 1973. Courtesy: Karel Miler

point of continuity between artists in the East and in the West engaging with the environment in both Land Art and body art. An analogue to this type of activity in Czechoslovakia can be found in the work of Polish artist Teresa Murak (b. 1949), who created land interventions and installations, often working with pepper grass, or cress, with which she created clothing and objects. One of her performances went on to become a local religious ritual, as it was repeated annually by the inhabitants of her

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document Peter Meluzin, Attempt at a Working Analysis of my Own Shadow, 1982, Bratislava. Courtesy: Peter Meluzin (and following two pages)

2.4

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

114

hometown of Kiełczewice, near Lublin. In The Easter Carpet (1974), the artist sowed cress onto a seventy-metre piece of fabric. After a week, the carpet was brought to the local monastery and used in the parochial church during the Holy Saturday mass, after which it was ‘launched’ down the nearby river. The artist later learned that the locals carried on the tradition each year, at least into the 1980s.35 In Poland, cress is often associated with Easter; since it grows very

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

The body

quickly in poor conditions, it is associated with revival, offering a parallel to the resurrection of Jesus Christ that is enacted every Easter. In her art, Murak often combined elements of nature, the body and religious faith, making another unique contribution to the genres of performance and Land Art. In neighbouring Bratislava, Peter Meluzin staged actions and interventions in the landscape with his body, providing a measure for the relationship

115

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

116

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

between the individual and the world. In Attempt at a Working Analysis of My Own Shadow (1982; figure 2.4), the artist dug up the earth in the outline of his body as it cast a shadow on the ground. Because of the earth’s rotation, the shadow continued to shift, and the final result of the artist’s digging was the shape of a rosette, which served as evidence of the artist’s presence not only physically but also temporally on earth. During the action Shifts (1981), he incorporated a reference to art history, reinterpreting Dennis Oppenheim’s Reading Position for Second Degree Burn (1970), wherein the artist lay on Jones Beach in New York for five hours with a book on his chest, resulting in a burn on his body except for the area that was covered by the book. Meluzin chose this work because it was reproduced in Edward Lucie-Smith’s book Art Today (first published in 1977), which had made its way into Slovakia. In Meluzin’s action, the artist sat in a basement next to a space heater, which represented the sun, with a book on Western art open to the photograph of Oppenheim’s performance on his chest. The book was Art Today, but in Slovak, this would be pronounced Art Tady – creating a play on words, in that tady sounds like the English ‘today’ but is the Slovak word for ‘here’, thus effectively shifting the focus of Art Today from the West to a contemporary artist in East-Central Europe. The artist commented that the action embodied his aim in studying the work presented in the book: ‘to take information, filtering it sceptically through black protective glasses, meditation – a reinterpretation, no mere mindless intake and rote-learning avoidance of fashion excesses, but an effort at producing one’s own look’ (emphasis mine).36 In this way, the artist turned his appropriation of Oppenheim’s work into a statement on the situation for artists in the East, insofar as many of them were attempting to process the information from the West so that they, too, could remain current. Jiří Kovanda, who was slightly younger than the three artists of the Czech Body Art Troika, eventually became part of their circle, stemming from their shared acquaintance with the Polish artistic duo KwieKulik. Miler, Mlčoch and Štembera had visited KwieKulik’s Studio of Activities, Documentation and Dissemination [Pracownia Działań, Dokumentacji i Upowszechniania] in May 1976, when they were in Warsaw for an exhibition at the Galeria Remont (the site of Tibor Hajas’s 1978 performance, Dark Flash). During Kovanda’s visits to Poland in August and October of that year, KwieKulik passed on Štembera’s number. While perhaps surprising that artists from the same city would have to meet through an intermediary in another country, Štembera commented that this was ‘symptomatic of our situation’ at the time.37 Because many of the experimental artists worked within their own circles and showed their work only among one another rather than in a formal gallery setting, there was virtually no open or official network where they could get to know each other or exchange ideas – likewise with the general public, which was also unaware of these artists’ work. Most of what was known became so through word of mouth,

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

The body

and if one were not tied in to these circles, one would miss out on learning about certain artists or events. Kovanda is a unique figure in the Czech cultural scene, posing psychological challenges for himself in the form of performative artworks. Much of his work derives from the artist’s desire to overcome his innate shyness, seeking contact with others. That said, his actions from the 1970s are also indicative of the sociohistorical moment in which they were created, Normalisation-period Czechoslovakia, when artists were under increasing pressure to follow the party line. While artists such as Miler, Mlčoch and Štembera retreated underground or to the countryside, Kovanda created his own response to the situation by staging actions on the streets of Prague that were barely perceptible as works of art. In fact, in most cases, only he and his photographer, Pavel Tuc, were aware of the artistic work taking place. Although they signal the presence of the artist’s body, the actions were so subtle that the body’s ‘presence [seemed] incidental’.38 For example, one of Kovanda’s first public actions, which is now widely known through reproductions, was xxx 19 November 1976, Prague, Václavské náměstí (Wenceslas Square) (figure 2.5), in which the artist stood immobile on the sidewalk, facing the oncoming pedestrians, arms outstretched as if he were being crucified. When asked how he managed to realise such an action, Kovanda commented that it lasted only for a few brief seconds, long enough for Tuc to take the photograph.39 Of course, one cannot ignore the significance of the site of the action – less than a decade prior, in January 1969, Jan Palach had self-immolated a few hundred metres from where Kovanda stood.40 The photograph of Kovanda’s action captures a slice of life from Normalisationera Czechoslovakia. Most of the passersby, even those facing him, completely ignored the action, regardless of how unconventional it may have appeared. As fellow artist Vladimír Havlík (b. 1959) recalled, peoples’ reactions to the performance at the time could be summarised as ‘What’s going on there? Can it endanger me? The police are going to come’ – a thought process manifested in the onlookers’ blank faces.41 Among Kovanda’s subsequent actions was Theatre (1976), described by the artist as follows: ‘I followed a previously written script to the letter. Gestures and movements were selected so that passers-by would not suspect that they were watching a “performance”’.42 The gestures he performed included brushing his hair and wiping his nose – such everyday activities enacted in a completely nonartistic space that they erased any distinction between art and life. Only the artist’s photographic documentation enframes the actions and designates them as art. Tomasz Sikorski views these as conceptual works of art rather than docu­­ mented performances, since the ‘pictorial element here turns out to be just a helpful factor in the reception of the textual record’.43 While these works do have a strong conceptual element, the human element is an equally strong component

117

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

118

2.5

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

of the works, as is the fact that they were created in the public space, where the artist would not only be potentially noticed by bystanders but also possibly have contact – physical or otherwise – with them. Take, for example, two works realised on 3 September 1977: Contact and an untitled piece (xxx). In Contact (figure 2.6), the artist walked down Spálená and Vodičkova streets in the centre of Prague, casually bumping into passersby as he went; his photographer was placed strategically across the street to capture the physical exchanges. Of course, to the unaware bystander, these actions appeared to be nothing more than a clumsy individual stumbling into those passing him on the street, an everyday occurrence that would not warrant anything other than a discreet apology. In the untitled piece, the artist stood backward on the escalator that led out of the Prague metro, creating a potentially awkward situation regardless of whether it took place in Normalisation-era Prague or the New York City subway in 2016. Klara Kemp-Welch describes Kovanda’s work from this period as ‘reticent’. It is not only that the actions themselves are reticent in their quiet minimalism, but that the environment in which he was acting was also quite reserved; with individuals suspicious of one another, not wanting to stand out from the crowd and draw attention, it was almost a given that they would not react. Interest-

Jiří Kovanda, xxx 19 November 1976, Prague, Václavské náměstí, 19 November 1976, Prague. Courtesy: Jiří Kovanda

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

The body

119

ingly, in 2006 artist Barbora Klímová restaged Kovanda’s An Attempt at Meeting a Girl (1977), wherein he invited his friends to witness his (ultimately unsuccessful) effort to meet someone of the opposite sex.44 When asked at that time about the difference between the public sphere of the communist and postcommunist periods, Kovanda stated that he felt ‘the extent of public space was exactly the same, what was different was the threshold determining what a person was allowed to do’, commenting that ‘even today, it’s still bizarre to stand on an escalator and turn to face the person behind you’.45 Kemp-Welch contends that Kovanda’s actions functioned as a ‘litmus test of the openness of the Czechoslovak public sphere in the late 1970s’.46 And yet while I would agree with her assessment of the quiet nature of Kovanda’s gestures, I do not see them as reticent but, rather, as an assertion of the presence of the individual in the public sphere at a time when such acts of individuality were not welcomed. In refusing to be silent, and even creating exercises to embolden himself – bearing his shyness for the world to see – Kovanda stood present, and perhaps defiant, in the only way possible at that time in his country. Moreover, his gestures echo a phenomenon already taking place with great regularity on the streets of Czechoslovakia – the State Security’s (Státní bezpečnost or StB) photographing of everyday life. In his performances, he placed himself in the position of the

Jiří Kovanda, Contact, 3 September 1977, Prague. Courtesy: Jiří Kovanda

2.6

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

120

2.7

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

surveilled while his photographer-friend played the role of the secret police, a simulation that made the actions possibly even more subversive had they been discovered. For Kovanda, the act of doing something is more important than producing a result: ‘something is done, but in the end nothing comes out of it’.47 In this sense, he embodies what Vaclav Havel has defined as ‘living in truth’ at a time when it was most difficult for individuals to do so. The political climate in Bucharest under Ceauşescu was not dissimilar to that in Prague around that time. The Bucharest-based artist Ion Grigorescu is a painter who also created performances for the photo and video cameras. Much like the work of the Czech artists mentioned above, his experiments took place either in his studio or in the countryside, and were shared only with a small group of friends. Grigorescu’s approach to the body has been described as a ‘ready-made’, using it as a material or tool like any other available for the artist to explore and manipulate.48 The artist has examined his body doing boxing (Boxing, 1977) as well as doing yoga in a confined space (Box-Yoga, 1980; figure 2.7), in relation to a chair (Chairs, 1977), and through a fish-eye lens in the context of his apartment (Our Home, 1976). As Ileana Pintilie writes, he was also interested in the everyday regardless of how ‘mundane, repetitive and ordinary’,49 capturing himself cutting bread in The Kitchen (1975), sleeping (The Sleep, 2007) and washing himself in a number of different ways. In Bathing (1975), he observed himself in his apartment, from the waist up, washing himself with water in a basin; in Washing Gestures (1978), we see a full-body view of Grigorescu before a blank backdrop, demonstrating the different gestures he uses to clean himself, presumably in the shower; Washing with Light (1979; figure 2.8) shows similar gestures, but this time the motion is captured as streaks of light using a long shutter opening on the camera; finally, in The Ritual Bath (1979), the artist, seated, performs the process of bathing, but using blue paint instead of water and soap so that the viewer sees the trace of his motions on the body.50 Writing in 2004, Grigorescu described his experiments with body art as follows:

Ion Grigorescu, Box-Yoga, 1980, Bucharest. Photographic performance. Courtesy: Ion Grigorescu

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document Ion Grigorescu, Washing with Light, 1979, Bucharest. Photographic performance. Courtesy: Ion Grigorescu

2.8

122

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

my works evolved on a formal, visual path, in search of faire vrai [to be true], an attempt to get out of the picture surface. Writing scenarios, doing theatre in the mirror, voyeurism, illusion, excitement, manipulating optical apparatus, allowing optical apparatuses to produce art, allowing work to replace the works. This leads to conceptualism. The body gradually disappeared to make room for writing and criticism.51

The focus on the body derived from Grigorescu’s interest in reality and authenticity, prompting him to use the most visceral and real material possible. That for Grigorescu the body, and more specifically, his body, is the measure of all things, is evident in his super 8 film Man, Centre of the Universe (1978), in which the artist re-creates Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man; the film was made in the countryside, with the artist’s lone figure representing the eponymous centre. Grigorescu’s use of the body to get at ‘the real’ calls to mind the strategy of the Slovenian group OHO, which employed the concept of reism, acknow­ ledging the existence of the object outside of human thought by focusing on the object and its literal representation. The group’s most iconic and exemplary work from this approach is Mount Triglav (1969; figure 1.14), which ­literalises the name of the national symbol of Slovenia. The artists maintain that the words used to express different concepts are just as real as the concepts themselves, and worthy of being articulated. In their artistic manifesto, they state, ‘objects are real. We approach the reality of an object by accepting it as it is … . The word registers or pronounces such voice of an object. Speech articulates that voice signified by words. This is where speech meets music, which is the voice of the object captured as sound’.52 Thus, in Mount Triglav, the name and the physical land mass it denotes have equal weight for the artists, an idea that is expressed in their action through the physical presence of their bodies both in the public space in which the action occurs and in its photographic (and filmic) documentation. Grigorescu’s capturing of everyday life also bears echoes with Yugoslav/ Croatian artist Tomislav Gotovac, who demarcated different times of his life as performative periods, as in Letting All Hairs on Head Grow (1976–81). After he let them grow, he had his wife completely strip him of all of his facial and head hair, cutting, shaving and removing it in a very precise way, according to his design, in a public performance that occurred at Flower Market Square [Cvjetni trg] in Zagreb: Haircutting and Shaving in a Public Space: Homage to Carl Theodor Dreyer and the Film Jeanne d’Arc and Maria Falconetti (1981; figure 2.9).53 The hair was then saved and preserved in special envelopes, marked by the artist with the section from his head from which it was removed. This was actually Gotovac’s third performance entitled Haircutting and Shaving (the first two took place in Belgrade in 1970 and 1971), and

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

The body

Tomislav Gotovac, Haircutting and Shaving in a Public Space: Homage to Carl Theodor Dreyer and the Film Jeanne d’Arc and Maria Falconetti, 1981, Zagreb. Courtesy: Zora and Sarah Gotovac and the Tomislav Gotovac Institute

the first time he did so in the centre of Zagreb. Echoing Pintilie’s description of Grigorescu’s body art, Ješa Denegri characterises Gotovac’s use of his body as a readymade, ‘treating his own body, that is, as both the subject and object of the artistic event’.54 Indeed, throughout his oeuvre, it is the artist’s body that is present both in his work and among his viewers, as many of his actions took place in the public space of downtown Zagreb, on the main thoroughfare of Ilica Street and in the popularly frequented Flower Market Square. Zoran Popović, one of the six Belgrade artists from the informal group at SKC in the 1970s, used his body to instantiate a mental concept and two-dimensional phenomenon in his performance Axioms (1972; figure 2.10). On a regular coordinate system, or graph, the artist identified eight basic elements, among them a line, square, circle, cross, diagonal and dot. He then enacted these geometric elements, creating the shapes with his body. He did so by attaching a system of lights to his fingertips, with the cords running through his clothing and out to a nearby outlet. In a dark room, he moved his arms to form these figures; his own body and self disappeared into the darkness and receded into the background, with the motion he created reified and standing on its own as a visual element. The performance was accompanied by Pink Floyd’s ‘One of These Days’, an element that turned it into a multimedia presentation. Popović also later made a slide show of the work, which he would then project immediately following the performance – and

123

2.9

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

124

2.10

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

which served as both a documentation of that performance and a work of art in itself. But the performative element of the piece means that the body’s presence is undeniable, even if it is merely ghostly, as it is the movement of the body that engenders the images. The artist may have removed his hand, but his energy and expression still remain. Similarly, in 1983, Slovenian artist Marko Kovačič (b. 1956) performed Cassus Belli, which was initially a performance and later a video work. In this multimedia piece, the artist projected abstract shapes and designs, reminiscent of artists such as El Lissitzky and Kazimir Malevich, onto a screen, behind which Kovačič adopted poses from typical Socialist Realist iconography, for example, the forward and energetic motion of a labourer or a man proudly bearing a pole (representing the axis of the earth), imagery resembling that in Gustav Klucis’s famous photomontage poster Shock Brigade of the World Proletariat (1931). Through the use of such iconography, Kovačič invokes the avant-garde spirit of the early twentieth century. Like Popović’s, the ­performance examines the relation between these geometric shapes and the human figure. Later in the performance, Kovačič added an expressive element

Zoran Popović, Axioms, 1972, Belgrade. Courtesy: Zoran Popović

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

The body

Česlovas Lukenskas, Thrown-Out Man, 1989. Courtesy: Česlovas Lukenskas

125

2.11

when he wound Scotch tape around his head. As he described it, the work was ‘about a kind of self-destruction, perhaps also about helplessness in the face of the institution, the art system which you can’t or won’t accept and integrate with’.55 Here, Kovačič is acknowledging the fact that the artist’s body is caught in the crosshairs of the artistic institution, perhaps similar to the manner in which the avant-garde became co-opted by the Soviet regime, which brought its experimental activity to an end.56 Lithuanian artist Česlovas Lukenskas’s (b. 1959) series of Thrown-Out Man (figure 2.11) performances took up a similar theme, namely, the complete

Pasko Burđelez, Write-Off, 2007, Dubrovnik. Courtesy: Pasko Burđelez

2.12

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

126

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

annihilation of the self. The first Thrown-Out Man appeared on 20 November 1989 and was a photographic performance featuring a naked, bandaged man lying among bits of rubbish and waste on the banks of the Nemunas river near Kaunas. The man is the artist himself; he is covered with a loincloth in the manner of Christ, and his body appears somewhat mangled. With this piece, the artist explores the notions of waste and excess, and the human being that becomes unnecessary, discarded and ignored in everyday society. Similarly, in Write-Off (2007; figure 2.12), Croatian artist Pasko Burđelez (b.  1969) presented himself as useless, because he was an artist. Using a stamp from the Dubrovnik hotel whose garden he tended, Burđelez marked his back with the word ‘write-off ’ (rashod), phrasing used by the hotel when a bedsheet or towel was too damaged to be used for guests and was thus identified and then repurposed as a cleaning rag or the like. In appropriating this notion, Burđelez marks himself as ‘damaged’ and only marginally useful to society. The exposed body While declaring the presence and substance of the human body was a significant creative act in the communist landscape, one of the most declamatory statements the artist could make was to expose his body to the public. As Zdenka Badovinac has observed, the exposure of the naked body was limited in both the Eastern and Western contexts, but with an important difference: in the West this was usually due to morals and public decency, whereas in the East, the appearance of nakedness in public could take on more political dimensions.57 Across the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, for example, there was a prohibition against pornography (although this was not the case in Yugoslavia), and constant surveillance of public spaces meant that the exposure of one’s body, male or female, could have serious repercussions. Still, the exposure of one’s naked body in the public sphere may be seen as the ultimate form of freedom of expression, regardless of the context. Tomislav Gotovac had his first taste of this freedom in Belgrade in 1971, when he ran through a busy street completely unclothed, as part of a scene in the film Plastic Jesus (1971; figure 2.13). Though the action lasted just a few seconds – with Gotovac running from the safety of one car to another, parked farther down the street, screaming, ‘I am innocent’ – it is considered to be the first instance of streaking in Eastern Europe. Streaking became a phenomenon in U.S. popular culture in the 1970s, in response to the sexual revolution and hippie movement. For Gotovac, however, operating in a country that did not undergo a sexual revolution, baring one’s skin in the public sphere equated to the avant-garde tactic of ‘shocking the bourgeoisie’. The fact that he counted on his actions to shock can be seen in the manner in which he constructed them. Ten years after his run in Belgrade, the artist created his first public

The body

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

performance involving streaking, entitled Lying Naked on the Asphalt, Kissing the Asphalt (Zagreb, I Love You!) (figure 2.14), where he did all of the things mentioned in the title, screaming the titular statement as he walked along Ilica Street, one of Zagreb’s main thoroughfares. The performance, like most of his involving public nudity or other indiscretions, ended with his arrest by the police. In fact, the artist embarks on these actions knowing full well that they will almost certainly be interrupted by what Ješa Denegri has called the ‘guardians of morality’.58 For Denegri, Gotovac literally bares himself to expose all those who in their own everyday lives resist and are afraid of the risks of any kind of change. Exposing his own naked body in a public place is for Gotovac a direct gesture, and a symbolic deed of freedom of behaviour; he allows himself a large measure of freedom … calling on other people … to fight for their right to their personal freedom, irrespective in which area of human existence this freedom of action needs to be won.59

While those living in Yugoslavia may have experienced a greater degree of personal freedom than the inhabitants of neighbouring socialist nations, as in any country there were limits to that freedom, as witnessed with Iveković’s performance Triangle, mentioned above. Lazar Stojanović, the director of Plastic Jesus, was sentenced to a year and a half in prison because of the film (which in fact was his graduation project from film school), because he used footage in a way that seemed to equate fascism and socialism (Gotovac, however, was not arrested for his part in the film).60 Gotovac continued his public actions using both his naked and clothed body throughout his career, which lasted well into the post-socialist period.61 Interestingly, the consequences for such actions during and after the socialist period were similar, as most of the public performances in which the artist appeared naked ended with his arrest. Yet the judges usually imposed the minimum punishment allowable by law, taking into account Gotovac’s assertion that these were artistic performances. The continuity of this theme in his work supports Denegri’s assertion that Gotovac used it as an expression of freedom, regardless of the particular human rights issues being faced at any particular time. Gotovac clarifies his thoughts and intentions with regard to nudity in a speech featured in Darko Bavoljak’s documentary on the artist, Stupid Antonio Presents (2006). The artist recalls moving from the small town of Sombor to Zagreb in 1941, at the age of four, and remembers that there was nothing to do in the city, especially during the war, since there was a curfew and blockades. He also describes being captivated by Ivan Meštrović’s group sculpture Well of Life (1905), which still sits in its same position in the middle of a fountain in front of the National Theatre in Zagreb. As a child, Gotovac found it ‘really striking’ that all of the figures, both children and old people, were naked.62 He also notes seeing a nude depiction of Jesus on the cross in a nearby

127

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

2.13

Tomislav Gotovac, Streaking, 1971, Belgrade. Still from Plastic Jesus. Courtesy: Zora and Sarah Gotovac and the Tomislav Gotovac Institute

2.14

Tomislav Gotovac, Lying Naked on the Asphalt, Kissing the Asphalt (Zagreb, I Love You!), 1981, Zagreb. Courtesy: Zora and Sarah Gotovac and the Tomislav Gotovac Institute

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

The body

Vlasta Delimar, Taking a Stroll as Lady Godiva, 2001, Zagreb. Courtesy: Vlasta Delimar

church. Later, as an artist, he stated that these early events, including childhood memories of bath time with his parents (at that time, the family would bathe together), confirmed his ‘artistic belief that nudity is one of the pillars of art’.63 He realised, he said, ‘that in order to be noticed’ he would ‘have to do something in relation to the body, especially in covering or uncovering the genitals’.64 For Gotovac, being an artist is already a form of exhibitionism, so for him there is little difference between an artistic creation that functions as exhibitionism (insofar as the artist attracts attention to himself), and exposing the body. In response to the question posed by his interviewer, ‘Why is the fact that you are naked art?’, he replied: Because I want it to be so, I am 70 and when I say it is art, then it is art. The fact that they now spit on it, I don’t give a fuck. I also think that my whole life is not just a stupid jerk-off, but a systematic observation, of art, above all, but then also of life around me. But it’s always been a problem with those who see it and think, ‘What is this idiot’s fucking message?’65

For Gotovac there is nothing exceptional about being naked in public; it is simply the artist being himself, laying himself bare before his audience – both literally and metaphorically. But his statements, although made late in his life, indicate that there may also have been some subversive intent as well. Vlasta Delimar (b. 1956) was a close friend and colleague of Gotovac whose work represents an interesting female counterpart to his exhibitionism. She

129

2.15

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

130

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

appeared naked on the streets of downtown Zagreb in her 2001 performance Taking a Stroll as Lady Godiva (figure 2.15). Although completely nude and riding horseback, the artist was neither arrested nor detained – due to the fortuitous fact that there were other events transpiring in Zagreb that day with which the police were occupied. In 2009, along with Gotovac (who by this time was known as Antonio G. Lauer, having changed his name in 2005 in honour of his mother, Elizabeta Beška Lauer, who died in 1987) and Milan Božić, she re-created Zagreb, I Love You! in the action entitled Two Men and a Woman. In the performance, the three characters emerge from an alley and proceed to walk down Ilica Street together, naked. They drift apart from one another, each following his or her own path down the street, only to meet up again at the end. Their love for the city is expressed through their naked bodies, which is echoed in the relationship between the three friends, uniting at the conclusion in work and camaraderie. The body transformed While performance offers a vehicle for the body to be present as well as exposed (as in the performances by Gotovac), the use of costume, disguise and other forms of physical transformation enable the possibility of adopting a new and different identity simply by changing one’s appearance. In some instances, this can be a form of escapism; in others, a chance to step outside oneself and obtain a fresh perspective. Take, for example, several instances of painted bodies in the region. In the performance The Bronze Man (1987), Latvian artist Miervaldis Polis put on a bronze suit and bronze hat and painted his face and hands bronze. He took the bus from his apartment on the outskirts of the city centre and proceeded to walk around downtown Riga, silently observing others’ reactions. Polis had prearranged with a café owner to enter his establishment, drink a bronze drink (orange juice) and smoke a bronze-painted cigarette. By the end of Polis’s stroll he had attracted a large group of followers, ducking down a side street to escape the attention before returning home (figure 2.16).66 Some onlookers thought that the artist was imitating Lenin – a large statue of the Bolshevik leader was situated in downtown Riga, as in every other Soviet city – and the KGB therefore suspected the artist of mockery. Although the artist was not questioned about the matter, the bus driver who took him to the city centre was, and although the driver knew nothing about the performance, he disagreed with the suggestion that the artist was ridiculing Lenin. As for Polis, he claimed that his performance was a reference to the tendency to glorify all leaders in bronze, which humankind has been doing since the time of the ancient Greeks. Much of Polis’s oeuvre references this idea of immortalising individuals through art, such as monumental sculpture, portraiture or a memorial exhibition.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

The body

Ten years later, after the regime change, Czech artist Krištof Kintera’s (b.  1973) Plumbuman (Lead Man) (1995–98; figure 2.17) appeared on the streets of Prague. Similar to the Bronze Man, the artist was dressed from head to toe in a lead suit, painted silver – but, unlike his Riga predecessor, he was encased in poisonous garb. The artist described this being as resembling an ‘alien’, in wonderment at all that surrounded him in the new, post-communist landscape in which all Czechs found themselves. The following decade, in a performance entitled Welcome, Dear Workers! (2005; figure 2.18), Albanian artist Enisa Cenaliaj transformed herself into a Soviet-era statue of a worker in the new millennium. Cenaliaj stood on a high pedestal in the Kombinat neighbourhood of Tirana – a pedestal upon which a figure of Joseph Stalin once resided – outfitted all in white and posed as a Socialist Realist-style proletarian. Her image greeted labourers as they left work at 3:30 p.m. at what had formerly been the Kombinat Stalin Textiles Factory and is now a commercial building occupied by a number of different businesses; a nearby banner displayed the eponymous message, ‘Welcome, dear workers!’ The workers, however, did not feel welcomed by Cenaliaj’s performance. Their reaction was strongly negative: twenty years after the fall of the communist government, they retorted, ‘We don’t need any more statues’. Some children threw stones. The locals, the intended audience, did not understand the context, and were likely not familiar with the genre of performance art. The artist had been inspired to stage the performance following the changes she observed in this working-class section of Tirana after the fall of communism, an area that had once been designated for workers and was now becoming a new commercial centre; although the plant no longer produced textiles, it was still known as a textile factory. Also striking was the disconnect between the business owners and the workers. The performance called attention to, and demanded recognition of, the working people who not only depended on this area for their livelihood, but in fact made it what it is. It also drew a parallel between the treatment of workers under the communist system, where the worker was valued, and the current neoliberal capitalist one, where commerce is valued, highlighting one area where workers perhaps fared worse rather than better under the new system. Capitalism was the target of Romanian artist Veda Popovici’s (b. 1986) Dear Money, I Know (2013; figure 2.19), involving a photographic performance and conceptual installation. The work addressed the nation’s new market economy, along with the ‘corporate rush for Gold’ and the controversy surrounding Roșia Montană, a commune in the Apuseni mountains in western Tran­sylvania, rich in mineral resources. The state-run gold mine there was closed in 2006, just prior to Romania’s accession to the European Union. The Canada-based firm Gabriel Resources planned to open a new mine, and citizens have been protesting ever since, because of the potential damage to

131

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

2.16

Miervaldis Polis, The Bronze Man, 1987, Riga. Courtesy: The Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art

2.17

Krištof Kintera, Plumbuman (Lead Man), 1995–98, Prague. Video still. Courtesy: Krištof Kintera

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

The body

133

archaeological sites there as well as the possibility of cyanide poisoning in this poor area of the country. Popovici’s work was commissioned for the Dear Money group show at the Salonul de Projecte in Bucharest, and included a photographic performance of the artist’s face and upper body covered in gold paint, with a pink ten lei note in her mouth. The caption on the photograph reads, ‘Dear Money, I know Art is the new Gold’ – a reference not only to the influx of capital in Romania and the potential export of gold, but also to the exchange of artworks on the market, an issue that had concerned artists in the West since the 1960s. A statement by the artist urges, ‘Destroy Financialisation. Reappropriate Gold. Save Roșia Montană. The four performative works just discussed bespeak the dramatic shifts in the sociopolitical landscape in Eastern Europe since the 1980s. The reception of Polis’s perestroika-era performance reveals one of the last moments that an artwork could be read as dissident in the face of the regime. Although the artist put forth a different interpretation of the Bronze Man, this interest in monumentality and immortalisation appeared at a time when statues of communist figures were about to topple. Kintera’s Plumbuman attests to the uncertainty that pervaded the new post-communist climate; dressed in what appeared to be a poisonous suit had it really been made from lead, the artist gave voice to concerns regarding the toxicity of capitalism that were surely

Enisa Cenaliaj, Welcome, Dear Workers!, 2005, Tirana. Courtesy: Enisa Cenaliaj

2.18

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

134

2.19

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

Veda Popovici, Dear Money, I Know, 2013, Bucharest. Courtesy: Veda Popovici

not unfounded, as demonstrated in the work of Cenaliaj and Popovici. While Cenaliaj laments what was lost in the post-communist era – a concern for workers and family – Popovici overtly criticises market capitalism for its prioritising of profit over human or environmental factors. In the communist era, the transformation of the self, be it physical, visual or simply nominal, offered the possibility of escape. On 10 October 1972, Slovak artist Július Koller (1939–2007), together with his fellow experimental artists, was expelled from the Association of Fine Artists following a purge. In response to the suffocating environment of this period, that of the Normalisation era, Koller adopted an extraterrestrial alter ego – UFO-naut J.K. – which enabled him to redefine himself, ‘rewrit[ing] his relationship to the universe, relativising his position on earth’.67 As a ‘UFO-naut’, the artist sought to carry out what he called ‘Universally Cultural-Futurological Operations – UFOs’ on earth. The artist described this as his commitment to a ‘non-anthropocentric principle of understanding man in nature, in the cosmos’.68 This statement bears striking similarities to Russian artist Oleg Kulik’s explanation of his Mad Dog (figure 2.20) performances in the 1990s, in which he metamorphosed into a canine – barking, jumping on people and relieving himself in public – doing so in the buff: ‘my standing on hands and knees is a conscious falling out of a human horizon, connected with a feeling of the end of anthropocentrism, with a crisis of not just contemporary art but contemporary culture on the whole’.69 With these now-legendary perfor-

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

The body

135

mances, Kulik was responding to the crisis that ensued following the East’s opening up to the West, and the concomitant lack of communication and understanding between individuals from East and West. For Kulik, the only way forward was to move beyond language, back to a more primal form of communication. That these two artists, one in communist Czechoslovakia and the other in post-Soviet Russia, adopted similar strategies to address the current political climate in their respective systems ­demonstrates the continuity between the two time periods, as well as the unique use of performativity to create an alternative reality as a means of escape. While for Koller, the atmosphere in Normalisation-era Czechoslovakia was nearly intolerable, in that he lost his official status as an artist because of his experimental work, Kulik found the opening up of the East equally oppressive. While one chose to escape through outer space, the other sought a return to nature. Perhaps no other artist in Eastern Europe embraced costume and disguise to transform the self more than Serbian artist Branko Milisković (b. 1982). In The Song of a Soldier on Watch (WW3 Lili Marlene) (figure 2.21), the artist sang ‘Lili Marlene’, a ditty that was written by the German soldier Hans Leip during the First World War, but became popular during the Second World War. In the performance, Milisković plays the roles of both Lili and Hans, becoming

Oleg Kulik, Mad Dog, or, The Last Taboo Guarded by the Lone Cerberus, documentation of performance, 1994, Moscow. Courtesy: Oleg Kulik

2.20

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

136

2.21

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

Branko Milisković, The Song of a Soldier on Watch (WW3 Lili Marlene), February 2015, Reims. Production by Frac Champagne-Ardenne, Reims, France. Photo: Martin Argyroglo. Courtesy: Branko Miliskovic and Martin Argyroglo

an androgynous, and therefore ambiguous, character. When he performs the piece, he sings the song nonstop for several hours, bringing both himself and the viewers – should they remain in the audience long enough – to a virtually catatonic state. For the artist, performance is not simply a genre in which he works, but an experience that he undergoes. Another prolonged performance in which the artist adopts the guise of another is Ceci n’est pas un garçon a la pipe (This Is Not a Boy with a Pipe). In this, the artist assumes the role of the eponymous subject of Pablo Picasso’s painting Boy with a Pipe (1905), holding a smoking pipe in his mouth for the duration of the performance, which usually causes him to be sick from the smoke and tobacco. In these works, Milisković transforms himself into an androgynous character who uses both the extravagance of costume and the span of the performance to stir something within the viewer, pushing both the latter and his own body to its limits. In addition to using costume and disguise, the artist also capitalises on the element of time, embracing the format of a long-durational performance to push his own body to its limits, alongside that of his audience, with the aim of an ultimate transformation or catharsis on the part of both. Although we have seen similar strategies enacted, for example, in Miroslav Miša Savić’s Twenty-Four Hours (see chapter 1), long-durational performance has gained currency in recent years, particularly through the work of Marina Abramović.

The body

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

The ritualistic body The Viennese Actionists, a group of artists active in that city in the 1960s, known for very visceral performances involving animal sacrifice as well as elements of pagan and Christian observances, comprise the touchstone for artistic actions relying on ritual. Invariably, any artist or artistic group that engages in ritualistic actions in their aftermath is compared to them, although these comparisons are usually superficial. While many artists throughout the East were aware of the work of the Viennese Actionists, even those who were familiar and engaged in similar actions usually did so without any specific reference to the Austrian group. The works of the Autoperforationsartisten, who were active for a brief period in the final years of the German Democratic Republic, from 1987 to 1991, are among those who have been compared with the Viennese Actionists.70 However, their work is more usefully understood as symptomatic of the climate in East Germany at that time, and, indeed, several of the artists from the group have described their work in precisely this way. Its name is a compound term of the artists’ own invention, and derives from three components: ‘auto’, referring to the ‘self ’ or ‘ego’; ‘perforation’, denoting ‘destruction’ or, in this case, ‘selfdestruction’; and ‘artistic’, an allusion to the humorous, comic or absurd aspect of their work, as the German artistik refers more to circus performers than to visual artists in the traditional sense. The group formed when its members were students. It initially consisted of Micha Brendel, Else Gabriel and Via Lewandowsky; later, they were joined by artist and student Rainer Gorss (two years behind the others in his studies). While much of Eastern Europe experienced a somewhat more relaxed political climate in the mid-to-late 1980s in the wake of perestroika and glasnost, such was not the case in the German Democratic Republic, where daily life was under the constant scrutiny and control of the Stasi (Staatssicherheit or State Security). Indeed, the atmosphere there was quite oppressive, rife with suspicion and insecurity on a daily basis. Brendel has described how he and his friends were constantly devising plans for escape – through Hungary, in a hot air balloon or by marriage to someone from West Berlin.71 Gabriel, the only woman in the group, characterised the circumstances in which East German artists found themselves as very tense, confrontational and harsh. Essentially, she stated, ‘no one could hurt us more than we did in our inner circle’,72 which is why they stayed and worked together – as a sort of selfdestructive self-defence mechanism. The aim of their work, according to her, was neither to push back against the state nor necessarily be overtly political or subversive, but, rather, to ‘create [a type of] art that didn’t exist in the GDR’. Because of the situation in which they were living, and the fact that they were working so closely with one another, their art ended up being, in Gabriel’s

137

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

138

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

words, ‘rolled into their own existence’, such that it was no longer possible to distinguish between the two. The group’s first performance took place in 1986 against the backdrop of the annual student carnival at the Academy of Fine Arts in Dresden (figure 1.40). This was a typical student event, and as an informal evening that was more of a party than an official artistic exhibition or presentation, the rules were more relaxed, and experimental work was tolerated. Furthermore, this was a student production, and the authorities tended to give a bit more leeway to amateur productions being presented outside of an official capacity (such as a carnival). The group (Brendel, Gabriel and Lewandowsky), together with other students, put on a presentation, which they referred to more as a type of theatre than performance art per se. Entitled The Top of the Meat Mountain [Die Spitze des Fleischbergs], the piece consisted of absurd actions. For example, Brendel appeared disguised as an animal, naked, with spots all over his body. At one point he was captured in a net, struggling to escape, a stream of green excrement emanating from his body. Gabriel wore a cow’s lungs on her chest as a costume, and took a dead chicken and dried it with a hair dryer. Lewandowsky was dressed in drag and spoke through a cow’s oesophagus. Brendel described the artists as staging these actions as a way of expressing their own private, individual situations – which could not be conveyed otherwise in art, and certainly not adequately enough in painting – through theatrical forms. The performances were confusing, challenging mélanges of imagery and activity, and had two discrete aims. The first was to convey emotions and sentiments, both individually and in a greater sociopolitical sense in a way that the audience could relate to on a visceral level, after which the artists would alter the scene and engage in more humorous, grotesque acts. The second aim was not clear, direct communication with the audience, but, instead, the development of a completely pure and free form of expression. The feelings expressed mainly derived from the experience of living in the challenging and suffocating atmosphere of the GDR. Lewandowsky described the performance as ‘a sudden explosion of freedom’ in an otherwise ‘grey reality’. The carnival itself was both serious and radical, and a significant amount of effort went into its preparation. The artists wished to create an ‘absolute show’ that would transcend the experience one encountered on a daily basis. Lewandowsky explained that the piece was ‘punk, but wrapped in a beautiful narrative poetic coating’.73 The three artists spent the entirety of the 1986–87 academic year preparing for their diploma project. Since they were students in the theatre department of the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts focusing on stage design, as per tradition their diploma project would consist of a theoretical component – a thesis concerning a theatrical problem – and a practical component, which usually involved the students building a model. However, these artists had a different idea – to present a ‘form of theatre’ – and their teacher allowed it, giving them

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

The body

a space to develop their ideas. The process involved lengthy discussions and planning sessions, an intense period of time spent together, and the result was the ninety-minute piece Herz Horn Haut Schrein (Heart Horn Shrine Skin) (figure 1.41), performed on 3 July 1987. The artists wore costumes that each had made him- or herself. Brendel recalled that every artist represented a different element in the title – he was the skin, wearing a costume with a reptilian exterior made of scales; Gabriel was the heart, dressed in red; and Lewandowsky was the horn, outfitted as a hospital patient and sowing his seeds in the performance.74 Lewandowsky described his ‘character’ as an invalid, a sick person who was disabled and needed artificial support. He arrived on the scene by climbing down from the ceiling like a monkey in a painful and slow movement, gradually becoming a being. He carried a pouch around his waist, a ‘sperm bag’, and sowed his seeds, which were in the form of small paper trees, by scattering them across the stage. Later, both he and Brendel entered an igloo that sat on the stage, in an act of penetration, after which Gabriel emerged from it, representing the egg produced as a result of the action. The shrine was the igloo-like structure that they had built for the performance. The performance was photographed for documentation, and they also recorded a later version of it as well. According to Brendel, this and their other performances were extensively planned out ahead of time and little was improvised, giving them more of a theatrical cast. He has distinguished the Autoperforatsionsartisten’s work from that of the Viennese Actionists, of which he was aware, but which he does not regard as a direct inspiration or influence.75 Whereas the Viennese Actionists would use animals for ritual sacrifice, the Autoperforatsionsartisten employed them for different reasons. The blood, bones and remains of animals used, for example, in Die Spitze des Fleischbergs represented an earlier, simpler form of life, removed from the modern world. It also signified the detritus of modern society, which they recuperated and used as a form of primal expression in their work. As for the academic merit of Herz Horn Haut Schrein, it earned the artists a failing grade for their diploma project. They had submitted other work toward the diploma, however, which did pass, enabling the artists to receive their degrees. As a sign of the changing times, though, two years later, in 1989, when their new fellow member Rainer Gorss presented a similar type of performative piece for his diploma work, in which some of the (already graduated) Autoperforatsionsartisten took part, he received the highest mark. Around ten years later, in post-Soviet Estonia, the group NON GRATA appeared on the scene. The performances that the group creates are virtually impossible to grasp without experiencing them in person; it often even refuses to assign a title in the first few instantiations of a performance, so as to avoid unnecessary and limiting associations. In this way, NON GRATA’s work constitutes the ultimate performance, in that one or more forms of documen-

139

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

140

2.22

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

tation cannot convey it in its entirety. While the performances appear chaotic – featuring an array of costumes in addition to smoke, loud music, bullhorns and sometimes fire – it is a controlled chaos. Everything is carefully planned – including the embrace of spontaneity. It is never known beforehand how the crowd will react, and the performers must be ready to respond to that, as well. For example, a performance entitled Beauty of the Car Accident (figure 2.22) involves burning and destroying a car. At the same time, when the group engages in its long-durational collective performances, there are very strict rules, such as no romantic relationships, no alcohol or drug use and no mental or physical violence among the artists. These parameters are necessary in order to create a free and open atmosphere that will allow for complete and pure creativity. In its wild, unabashed and visceral approach to performance, NON GRATA may perhaps be usefully compared with the Viennese Actionists, although the group’s unofficial leader, Al Paldrok (b. 1969), believes such an affinity may have been the case only in NON GRATA’s early days, when some of its members discovered books on the Actionists and perhaps copied some of their motifs. Indeed, NON GRATA takes the types of visceral performances developed by the Actionists to a whole new level, using a wide array

NON GRATA, Beauty of the Car Accident, 2011, Iceland. Photo: NON GRATA. Courtesy: NON GRATA

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

The body

141

of different props, actions and events and appearing before large crowds. The performances are meant to engage the audience so intensely that the viewers do not know whether they are spectators or part of the performance. Ventsislav Zankov (b. 1962) was one of the first body artists to appear in Bulgaria. In the 1990s, he created highly visceral performances using blood and animal parts. Having also been compared to the Actionists, the artist maintains that when he first started out he was not completely aware of their oeuvre but ‘worked after rumours’ about it. He has, however, cited some local influences for his art, among them, Orlin Dvorianov, with whom he studied and who was responsible for some of the first happenings in the nation (see chapter 1). He also points to a Bulgarian artist named Simichev, who had immigrated to Sweden but returned to Bulgaria with some of his students in 1990. Most importantly, however, the artist mentioned that he explored such visceral materials and themes because ‘the times were dramatic’ and called for actions befitting them.76 In the aftermath of the Soviet collapse, Zankov staged a series of performances entitled The Limits of Agony (1991–92). In the first of these, he visited a slaughterhouse, where he dripped the blood from slaughtered cows onto white sheets, creating his own version of action painting with the blood. In the second part, the blood paintings were exhibited at Shipka 6 – the gallery of the Artist’s Union – and Zankov staged a performance in front of them,

Ventsislav Zankov, Steak and Chips, 11 December 1992, Sofia. Courtesy: Ventsislav Zankov.

2.23

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

142

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

entitled Steak and Chips (11 February 1992; figure 2.23). In it, Zankov faced a ‘mirror’, which was in fact a TV monitor bearing his image. He sat with his back to the audience, while he had his hair cut. Next, he ate a steak with his newly shorn hair mixed in with it, while a voice overhead read from Roland Barthes’s text ‘Steak and Chips’ (Mythologies, 1975). Later, the audience was served steaks as well. The artist characterises the event as a ‘ritual’, and at the time he was ­interested in different types of rites, including those related to blood and haircutting. These include a tribal practice in which an individual cuts his or her hair when a loved one dies, so that the loved one’s ghost does not recognise that person when returning from the dead. Describing this practice as a way of coping with the death of communism, Zankov recounts how the challenges of that era propelled him to his visceral approach to performance: Time was confusing and people were confused. The past was proclaimed irrelevant, there was no future, the present was void, a vacuumed society without rules, a vacuum pierced with relict rays … a vacuum in which I might have blown up out of my own pressures, yet a vacuum that I could set free, or maybe set myself free, free of my past self … I reached out for blood.77

For Zankov, blood is a way of purging and breaking free from the past. This is evident as well in his three Red performances from 1991. Red I took place in the middle of winter, outdoors, in temperatures averaging zero-degrees Celsius. Appearing in a white gown in front of a table covered with a white tablecloth, the artist proceeded to pour blood into cups and glasses, soiling his white gown and the tablecloth, and spattering the surrounding snow. He then undressed, and bathed himself in this blood. Red II followed the next month, in March, indoors. The artist performed a ritual with blood and red wine in front of a crucifix made from white sheets. Resembling a fertility rite, the final instantiation of Red involved a female body and a human embryo, possibly suggesting the emergence of new life from the carnage. The performance also explored the symbolic versus ritualistic meaning of the blood and the manner in which it becomes aestheticised once it enters the gallery space. Similar to Zankov’s blood-soaked performances is Sven Stilinović’s (b.  1958) Geometry of Bloodthirstiness (1998–2002), which he has now performed around eight or nine times. Each instantiation is different, although all of the ­performances involve ritualistic sacrifice and the killing of an animal – usually a lamb. On a few occasions, the artist cooks and eats the sacrificed animal, sharing it with the audience. In other performances, he includes projections on the wall as he is making the sacrifice – for example, a recording of Jack Welch, the former CEO of General Electric, giving an angry speech. Stilinović sees the contemporary world as aggressive, and regards neoliberal capitalism as destroying industry and causing death in

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

The body

a different way, through alienation and exploitation. The artist says that he does not know whether the sacrifices in his performances will help, but he sees them as the only possible means of cleansing contemporary society. A parallel can be drawn with the work of Slovenian/Yugoslav artist Franc Purg (b. 1955), who in his 1998 performance Where Is the Line? had a calf slaughtered outside at the ŠKUC Gallery of Contemporary Art in Ljubljana, while viewers and other artists ate and drank merrily inside the gallery. The revellers were initially unaware of the calf being slaughtered outside, but slowly caught on. Oleg Kulik’s 1992 action at the Regina Gallery in Moscow, Piggly Wiggly Making Presents, also involved the artist slaughtering a pig, while the video documenting the making of a portion of Katarzyna Kozyra’s (b. 1963) sculpture Pyramid of Animals (1993) features the artist visiting the slaughterhouse where a horse, which ended up taxidermied and forming the base of the sculpture, was killed. Atop the horse sat a dog, cat and hen, which had also been taxidermied. While all the performances discussed involve the killing of animals, only Stilinović’s Geometry of Bloodthirstiness dramatises the event in a manner similar to the ritualistic sacrifice embraced by the Viennese Actionists. However, all four of the works address similar issues related to animal rights, hyperconsumption in the context of market capitalism and the hypocrisy manifested by those who hold inconsistent views concerning animal rights and capital punishment. The limits of the body The artist’s body can undergo its most significant transformation by being pushed to its physical limits, sometimes to the point of significant harm or near-destruction. Examples of extreme body art can be seen throughout the history of performance art in East and West. For example, in Shoot (1974), American artist Chris Burden famously had himself shot in the arm by a friend in an attempt to experience firsthand the violence occurring on a daily basis in the Vietnam War. Zdenka Badovinac rebuts claims that the restrictive atmosphere in Eastern Europe led to a ‘greater aggression of Eastern European artists toward their bodies’ in performance art, by citing examples such as Shoot. However, she does recognise that the considerable difference between works of art realised in these two distinct geopolitical spaces is something ‘invisible and unsignified’.78 That is, that the meaning and significance changes with the context – or, ‘similar gestures are read differently in different spaces’.79 Because of the body’s particular resonance in the East, having been subject to surveillance and, at times, violence and repression, the act of subjecting the body to torturous conditions takes on heightened meaning in the Eastern European context, as underscored by Perjovschi’s description of the body as ‘radical’ at the start of this chapter.

143

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

144

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

The artists associated with the Student Culture Centre in Belgrade often engaged in performative activity that stretched their bodies to their physical limits. Marina Abramović is perhaps best known for this approach, but she is certainly not the only Belgrade artist representative of this tendency. In the performance Rhythm 10, which took place in Scotland in 1973 in the context of the Edinburgh Arts Festival (figure 1.43), she involved herself in a game of selfharm by stabbing a knife in between her fingers, splayed out on the floor. Each time she stabbed herself, she switched knives, until she used all ten. Having recorded the performance, she then replayed the tape, attempting to copy her previous gestures, including the ones that brought her harm. In other performances, such as Rhythm 5 (1974), the artist lost consciousness due to smoke inhalation (see introduction), while in Rhythm 2 (1974), the artist experienced seizures and then lost control of her body arising from medication that she took to induce these physical states. First, she had taken a pill for patients with catatonia, which brought on the seizures, although her mind remained clear. After the effects of the drug wore off, she took an antidepressant, which left her body physically intact, but her mind foggy. While Abramović utilised her body and mind as materials, manipulating and contorting them to their absolute limits in order to bring herself as close to death as possible, her colleague Raša Todosijević also engaged in extreme body art that often exhausted his body. In 1974, he performed Drinking Water – Inversions, Imitations and Contrasts (figure 1.30) at the Student Culture Centre, in which he drank twenty-six glasses of water in an attempt to synchronise his swallowing with the rhythm of the breathing of a fish that he had removed from water. Because of the large quantity of water he had consumed in such a short amount of time, he vomited periodically throughout the thirty-five-minute performance. For Todosijević, this type of performance was about moving beyond the simple two- and threedimensional forms of expression that were possible in painting and sculpture, and creating a new, more engaging and visceral type of artistic expression. Branislav Jakovljević has written about the performances that took place at the Student Culture Centre in the context of the protests in Belgrade, among other places across the world, in 1968. In his view, the protests comprised a true challenge to the system, in that the student bodies appearing in the streets were disorderly and destructive, and they refused to be homogenised in the way that one witnesses in socialist spectacles such as mass rallies or the Youth Day Relay Races [Štafeta] and Youth Work Actions organised in Yugoslavia.80 For Jakovljević, such mass actions are the epitome of allegory, insofar as those present are not seen as individuals, but as emblematic of the purported unity of the socialist state. Drawing a parallel between the 1968 student protests and the performances organised several years later at SKC, he writes, ‘the works of the Belgrade performance artists from the early ‘70s are the sole legitimate continuation of the aesthetic intervention of 2 and 3 June 2 1968 [the dates of

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

The body

the student protests – AB]’.81 Whereas the bodies of rallies and other spectacles are allegorical, the SKC bodies, as represented by works of Abramović and Todosijević, are examples of de-allegorisation in their turn toward ‘the instantaneous, the perishable, the ephemeral’.82 Jakovljević contrasts Todosijević’s ‘ascetic body’ in Drinking Water with the ‘athletic bodies that exercise in the stadium’, noting that it was the protests that ‘made visible the bodies that were vulnerable and wounded; emaciated, unregimented bodies that don’t march and don’t exercise in union’.83 Like Todosijević, Abramović deliberately made herself vulnerable, not only before her viewers, as in Rhythm 2, but also among them. In Rhythm 0 (1974), first performed in Morra Arte Studio, Naples, Italy, she gave the members of the audience seventy-two objects to use on her as they wished, including some that caused pleasure and others that caused pain. In one terrifying moment, a participant held a loaded gun to the artist’s head; Abramović was spared possible death when another audience member grabbed it away. In this performance, she forced the audience to be accountable for its actions, in the same way that individuals are responsible for their actions in everyday society. Just as the students protesting were asking the government to stand by its words and take responsibility for its behaviour, so, too, does Abramović confront her viewers with this task. Czech body artists Petr Štembera and Jan Mlčoch created works of art that pushed the body to its limits of endurance. For example, in Grafting (1975; figure 2.24), Štembera undertook a gruelling attempt to unite his body with nature by implanting a tree in his arm, which resulted in his contracting blood poisoning.84 That same year, he performed Sleeping in a Tree, whereby he slept in the branches of a tree after going without sleep for three nights – a risky proposition if he happened to roll over. In Morganová’s view, Štembera used his body in these works as ‘a means for exploring and testing an undetermined situation’, an uncertainty that mirrored the fraught nature of the Normalisation era in which the artist was living.85 In Archer (1977; figure 2.25), Štembera confronted his viewers with that sense of indeterminacy and danger by shooting an arrow at a wall, then dipping it in poison and directing it toward the audience. In all of these performances, the artist explores the physical components and limits of the body through very visceral, invasive and perilous acts. Like Štembera, Mlčoch creates situations that would pose danger or harm to himself, and wilfully accepts the challenge. In Mlčoch’s 20 Minutes (1975; figure 2.26), he sat against a wall, while a long rod with a knife at the end was pointed at his stomach. Setting an alarm clock for twenty minutes, he asked an assistant to move the rod closer to him, thus pressing the knife into his stomach, if he lost concentration at any point. Because of a malfunction with the clock, the performance lasted forty-four minutes, although the artist wasn’t seriously injured. In Suspension – Great Sleep (1974; figure 2.27), the artist had himself suspended by his hands and feet in a large attic, with his eyes covered and his

145

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

146

2.24

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

Petr Štembera, Grafting, 1975, Prague. Courtesy: Petr Štembera

ears plugged. Upping the ante from John Cage’s 1951 experience in the anechoic chamber at Harvard University, the experience that inspired him to create 4’33” (in which a musician, usually a pianist, sits at a piano for the titular time period in ‘silence’, allowing the sounds of the concert hall to act as the music), here Mlčoch not only deprives himself of the ability to hear, but also to see and to be affected by gravity. Finally, in View of the Valley (1976), the artist had himself buried in the landscape, with the spot marked by a metal pole; he was exhumed after forty-five minutes. The risk of suffocation was also present in the action Plastic Sack (1974), in which Mlčoch sealed himself in a plastic bag, remaining for thirty-four minutes, until he began to have trouble breathing and cut the bag open. Jindřich Chalupecký has interpreted these extreme body actions by Štembera and Mlčoch as being about control. In his words, ‘they want to handle these extreme situations, not succumb to them’.86 The artists utilised the body as their strongest material to weather any challenge, whether real or contrived.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

The body

Petr Štembera, Archer, 1977. Courtesy: Petr Štembera

Perjovschi’s statement about the body being both ‘radical’ and ‘real’ can equally be applied to the situation for artists working in a period when the body was frequently surveilled and imprisoned. They created hazardous situations for their own bodies that evoked the extreme situation they were in as artists and individuals following the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia. An interesting parallel with the work of these Prague-based artists can be seen in a performance by the trio of artists whose name is taken from the first letters of their last names: P.O.P. (Viktor Oravec (b. 1960), Ladislav Pagáč (b.  1949) and Milan Pagáč (b. 1960)). The performance, Daring (1981), took place during one of their symposia. In it, Milan Pagáč hung naked from strips of material suspended from tree branches, so that they formed a hammocklike structure for his body, positioned about twenty-five feet above the ground. Smoke rose up from under his body, while others performed a pantomime on the ground below. Zora Rusinová sees this performance as representing a pagan ritual, including a sacrificial offering of the body.87 Regardless, it was a physically arduous task for Pagáč that was repeated in other P.O.P. performances, although in other instances the group members’ bodies were bound to objects in the ground, emphasising the connection with the earth. While in the communist period the body was utilised by artists as a symbol of freedom and a vehicle of self-expression, it remained a relevant and valid material for artists in the post-socialist era as well. Although limits on artistic freedom may have shifted following the system change, the body is still seen by many as the ultimate expressive element, among the most powerful ways of

147

2.25

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

2.26

Jan Mlčoch, 20 Minutes, 1975, Prague. Courtesy: Jan Mlčoch

2.27

Jan Mlčoch, Suspension – Great Sleep, 1974, Prague. Courtesy: Jan Mlčoch

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

The body

connecting with or having an impact on one’s viewers, especially in the context of the tumultuous, at times violent transitions taking place across Eastern Europe. Like Mlčoch, Pasko Burđelez placed himself near death on more than one occasion. At the Venice Biennale of 2005 (figure 2.28), at which he was one of several artists representing Croatia, he submerged his head in a pile of dirt installed on the gallery floor in the manner of an ostrich, but still attempting to continue breathing.88 The artist explained that this experience changed his way of thinking. Firstly, it was calming, as he tried to communicate with the earth in a way other than the rational. But then, as he struggled to inhale, he became aware of the limits and borders of his body, as it encountered the line between earth and man. The artist did not remain with his head in the dirt for longer than fifteen minutes, which is, according to him, about the maximum amount of time one can survive in that position. Fellow Croatian artist Vlasta Žanić (b. 1966) brought herself to a similar state in Closing (2002; figure 2.29), in which she attempted to close herself off completely from any outside entity by donning a specially constructed suit that had openings on it in the form of jar and container lids. One by one, she screwed the lids onto the openings and sealed herself in the suit. The piece addressed the danger of shutting oneself off from the rest of the world – and in this case, it was literally dangerous, as doing so cut off the artist’s air circulation. Marijan Crtalić’s (b. 1968) more primitive approach addressed the suffocating nature of the current political situation in Croatia. In Political Breathing (2012), he placed a plastic bag over his head and began discussing his work. As his talk continued, he gradually began to choke, illustrating the nominal degree of free speech permitted in contemporary Croatian society. Drawing from his own personal experiences, the artist is aware that if a person says the wrong thing publicly, that person can lose his or her job, or much worse.89 These three Croatian artists have engaged in formally similar actions all around the same time, albeit for very different reasons. For Burđelez, his act of suffocation is about confronting one’s limits; for Žanić and Crtalić, their actions are metaphorical – the former focused on the risk of being stifled by one’s own ego, and the latter with regard to the political atmosphere surrounding the artist and his contemporaries in Croatia. The year 1989 was a landmark one throughout Eastern Europe, but it was likely experienced most poignantly in Berlin, the city that epitomised the EastWest divide, and the location of the first cracks in the geopolitical (and actual) wall between the two. Artists responded to these changes in their work accordingly. The Autoperforatsionsartisten had consistently staged visceral, destructive and absurdist performances and actions throughout the 1980s in Dresden. In 1989, they were each invited to perform individually in East Berlin at the White Elephant Gallery [Galerie Weisser Elefant], among the few experimental galleries there. Micha Brendel performed Der Mutterseelenalleinering (figure

149

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

150

2.28

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

Pasko Burđelez, Untitled, 2005, Dubrovnik. Courtesy: Pasko Burđelez

2.30); arriving at the gallery in a Trabant (a popular car during the communist period, produced in the former East Germany) wearing a mask over his face, he was led into the gallery by a child, representing innocence. When the artist entered the gallery space, he opened up a briefcase and took out two knives, and started cutting into his body. Eventually, he stuck the knives into the place where his eyes were, but they only pierced the pieces of bloody, raw meat that he had hidden behind his mask and that he proceeded to pull out from the holes in the mask. The artist then began to sing a Dieter Rot song, ‘My Eye Is a Mouth,’ while a fan blew the smell of rotten meat into the gallery, providing the viewers with a complete (and by no means pleasant) visual, aural and olfactory experience. Finally, the artist drew a square on the wall, a reference to Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square, and proceeded to smear it with animal brains, smoothing them out with a trowel. While the artist conceded that the work was likely shocking to the audience and that shock was indeed part of the intention, he said that there were other important elements as well. Most notably, there was the sense of liberation to be achieved through such pure expression along with the idea of transformation, which the artist was to experience during the performance and which East German society was undergoing at the time. Another member of the group, Via Lewandowsky, also performed at the White Elephant that same year. His piece was entitled Trichinae on a Crusade

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

The body

Vlasta Žanić, Closing, 2002, Zagreb. Courtesy: Vlasta Žanić

(figure 2.31), and in it he appeared, as he often did, in drag, to represent a drastic change in his persona. He wore a ballet tutu, a preferred costume for the artist in many of his performances, and his head was bandaged.90 In front of him was a pile of animal parts, including intestines and excrement. The artist began the performance by groaning, making sounds and expressions as if he were trying to speak, but something was holding him back. When he adjusted the bandages on his head, pus and parts of his brain, represented also by animal parts, seemed to come out, which he then began to feed to himself through a rubber hose that he stuck down his throat. Lewandowsky describes the performance as a ‘body lecture’, the content of which was devoted to an anatomy of the self. For him, the work is rife with ‘simple metaphors’, and largely comprised a ‘mobile version of expression’. He explains that because of the ephemeral nature of the performance genre, this type of work was tolerated, but that if the artists had created more permanent objects such as paintings or sculptures, those would have been more difficult to exhibit at the time. Entitled ALIAS/The Art of the Fugue (figure 2.32), Else Gabriel’s solo piece at the White Elephant involved the artist dunking her head into a bucket of pig’s blood, which had been sitting out for forty-eight hours. With the fumes wafting through the gallery, one of the viewers became physically ill. All these

151

2.29

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

2.30

Micha Brendel, Der Mutterseelenalleinering, 1989, West Berlin. Courtesy: Micha Brendel

­ erformances moved beyond the group’s earlier visceral work to embrace the p abject, literally turning the inside out, revealing the internal in the external world – the fluids and internal substances that make us human and our fellow members of the animal kingdom living beings. Like Gabriel, Serbian artist Zoran Todorović (b. 1965) does not see the physical limits of the body’s exterior as a limit to creation. Rather, he moves beyond the epidermis to access the body’s interior, commandeering it in his work. In Agalma (2003–05; figure 2.33), the artist had fat removed from his stomach, which he then used to make soap. The presentation of the piece included a performative element, as visitors were able to wash their hands with the soap; they also had the opportunity to be bathed by the curators off-site, in a private bathroom in a rented hotel room. The piece constitutes a token of affection for the audience, as the title refers to the Greek word meaning ‘a gift to the gods’. It is a gesture of intimacy, as viewers are invited to benefit from the artist’s pain by washing their hands or body with the soap. Artist and viewer could not be any closer following the latter’s experience of Agalma. In Assimilation (1997–2006), Todorović prepared aspic (a dish consisting of meat and vegetables suspended in gelatine) from human tissue that had been discarded after different cosmetic surgeries, including rhinoplasty or liposuction. He served the dish to viewers at the opening of his exhibition, which took place in a number of different cities.91 Attendees were aware of the contents of the food being offered them; some tasted it, while others did not. The recycling

Via Lewandowsky, Trichinae on a Crusade, 1989, West Berlin. Courtesy: Via Lewandowsky

2.31

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

2.32

Else Gabriel, ALIAS/The Art of the Fugue, 1989, West Berlin. Courtesy: Else Gabriel

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

155

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

The body

Zoran Todorović, Agalma, 2003–05. Courtesy: Zoran Todorović

of these scraps of human flesh raised questions concerning contemporary notions of beauty; by inviting viewers to feast on that which is jettisoned from the human body in order to beautify, the artist asked them to consume for nourishment what another saw as waste and excess. In the context of the gallery

2.33

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document 2.34

Jusuf Hadžifejzović, From Kitsch to Blood is Only One Step, 1991, Cetinje. Courtesy: Jusuf Hadžifejzović and Cetinje Biennale (and opposite)

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

158

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

opening, it also prompted questions regarding one of the most extreme forms of bodily mutilation – cannibalism – as some visitors wondered whether it was legal, or even safe, to eat human flesh. For the artist, the main point of these works was to question taboos and confront his viewers with a particular, albeit highly unusual situation. In fact, the artist has termed himself a ‘designer of situations’ and designated the audience as his ‘real material’. While Todorović’s work does not explicitly refer to the conflicts of the 1990s, he is well aware that people in the region are affected by the trauma of war, and views his role as one of creating challenging situations for viewers in order to provoke dialogue among them. As his country was on the brink of war, Bosnian artist Jusuf Hadžifejzović (b. 1956) explored his fate and that of his Balkan compatriots in the visceral performance From Kitsch to Blood Is Only One Step (1991; figure 2.34), the title capturing Yugoslavia’s precarious state at that time. The artist began the performance by shaving his head, after which he drank a concoction of ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ hard liquor and mixed the newly shorn hair with flour and water, which he then used to cover his head completely. Hanging on the wall were a series of bras, symbolising maternity, which he removed to reveal the title of the performance on the wall. Next, he stuck twelve homemade Montenegrin knives into twelve fish that were interspersed among objects reminiscent of war. By the end of the performance he was drunk and bleeding from a knife wound, fading in and out of consciousness, with the flour mixture covering his eyes and blinding him. Although the artist had meant to attempt to ‘stop the war’ with this performance, he ended up being taken to the hospital instead. By the time the war had erupted, Hadžifejzović was living abroad, in Belgium, only hearing the news reports about Sarajevo on the radio. Counting the days of the siege, he performed B/H War Day No. 556 Le Mans Depot, in which he sat at a table and drank wine, while an assistant drilled a hole in a block of stone that he held on his head. The artist put himself close to danger, attempting to bring himself nearer to the situation that his Sarajevan compatriots found themselves in every day during the conflict. At the opening of Body and the East at the Exit Art Gallery, New York, in 2001, Croatian artist Slaven Tolj performed Globalization, in which he attempted to embody the meeting point of East and West by consuming one litre of vodka (from the East) and one litre of whiskey (from the West). He did so in a matter of minutes – literally, as the performance only took fifteen. The artist recalls that he felt fine immediately thereafter, got up from the table where he was seated, and, after taking a few steps, he collapsed and remembers nothing further. He spent the next three days in a coma in a New York City hospital. This short performance that sought to bring East and West together nearly ended up dividing them, especially if the performance had turned fatal.

The body

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

In some ways, it evokes Petr Štembera’s performance Lecture (1976) in Pécs, Hungary, in which a similar chain of events transpired: Kneeling on peas and next to a small improvised table I read from Heidegger’s Being and Truth (in original) the same paragraph again and again. Each time I finished it I took a large swig from a bottle of vodka. A bowl with leavening dough was on the table surrounded by candles. The dough slowly spilled out over the bowl and extinguished the candles … I regained consciousness 20 hours later.92

Unlike Tolj’s later performance, Štembera’s was more akin to the work of Abramović, who used substances to push her body to different, alternate and extreme states, to see how she could handle them. Conclusion Although Perjovschi stated that it was both ‘radical’ and ‘real’ for artists in postrevolutionary Romania, the body, as used by artists in action and performance art in East and West since the 1960s, has always had this radical potential. The body can never be neutral material, as it is always connected not only with everyday life and actions, an individual’s personal and intimate life, but it is through the body that life itself both begins and ends. All of this is clearly explored by the artists in this chapter, many of whom experienced various extremes of everyday life, due to sociopolitical or personal circumstances or a combination thereof. Just as in the West, the body remains an important vehicle and theme for artists experimenting with action and performance art. Notes 1 The reference is to the panopticon as a metaphor for the manner in which modern ‘disciplinary’ societies are policed, monitored and regulated by constant surveillance. The metaphor is famously employed by Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, first published in France 1975. 2 However, as Mechtild Widrich has noted, all that remains of the performance are the photographs, and we are forced to take the artist at her word that the actions occurred as she described, and that the police interrupted her in the manner that has been captured as the narrative of the piece. Mechtild Widrich, Performative Monuments: The Rematerialisation of Public Art (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014), p. 103. 3 Piotr Piotrowski, Art and Democracy in Post-Communist Europe (London: Reaktion Books, 2012), p. 7. 4 This notion of the ‘second public sphere’, or alternative/unofficial public sphere, was explored in the conference Performing Arts in the Second Public Sphere, organised by Katalin Cseh and Adam Czirak in Berlin, 9–11 May 2014. It will be further examined in a forthcoming edited volume of essays presented at the conference.

159

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

160

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

Of course, there were exceptions to the body’s frequent lack of presence in performance art, as many of the examples in this book demonstrate. However, given the scrutiny of public space and the possible consequences to be faced when enacting performances in the public sphere, most artists staged their performances in private and closed spaces. 5 Raša Todosijević, as quoted in ‘Art as Social Practice’, in Raša Todosijević and Dejan Sretenović (eds), Raša Todosijević: Was ist Kunst? (Belgrade: Geopoetika, 2002), p.  27. 6 See Ivana Bago and Antonia Majaca, ‘Dissociative Association, Dionysian Socialism, Non-Action and Delayed Audience: Between Action and Exodus in the Art of the 1960s and 1970s in Yugoslavia’, in Ivana Bago and Antonia Majaca (eds), in collaboration with Vesna Vuković, Removed from the Crowd: Unexpected Encounters I (Zagreb, Croatia: BLOK, 2011), pp. 280–2. 7 Tomáš Pospiszyl, ‘Look Who’s Watching: Photographic Documentation of Happenings and Performances in Czechoslovakia’, in Claire Bishop and Marta Dziewanska (eds), 1968–1989: Political Upheaval and Artistic Change (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), p. 85. 8 Zdenka Badovinac, ‘Body and the East’, in Zdenka Badovinac (ed.), Body and the East: From the 1960s to the Present, exh. cat. (Ljubljana, Slovenia: Moderna Galerija, 1998), p. 10. 9 Amelia Jones, Body Art: Performing the Subject (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), p. 11. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid., pp. 13–14. 12 Ibid., p. 3. 13 Ibid., p. 14. 14 Ivana Bago, ‘A window and a basement: negotiating hospitality at la galerie des locataires and podroom – the working community of artists’, ARTMargins, 1:2–3 (2012), 136. 15 Iosif Király, in an interview with the author in Bucharest, 26 March 2014. 16 Peter Meluzin, in an interview with the author in Bratislava, 17 October 2012. 17 Dan Perjovschi, in an interview with the author in Bucharest, 24 March 2014. 18 Raimonds Līcītis, in an interview with the author in Riga, 7 July 2009. 19 Such was the case with the Polish artistic duo KwieKulik, which will be discussed in chapter 4. 20 Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 146. 21 In his words, ‘the concept of the live was brought into being not just when it became possible to think in those terms … but only when it became urgent to do so’. Philip Auslander, Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture (New York: Routledge, 2008), p. 60. 22 Ibid., p. 59. 23 Philip Auslander, ‘On the Performativity of Performance Documentation’, in Barbara Clausen (ed.), After the Act: The (Re)Presentation of Performance Art (Vienna: MUMOK Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung, 2005), p. 26. 24 Pavlína Morganová, Czech Action Art: Happenings, Actions, Events, Land Art, Body Art and Performance Art behind the Iron Curtain (Prague: Karolinum Press, 2014), p.  33.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

The body

25 Ibid. 26 Maja Fowkes, ‘Off the record: performative practices in the hungarian neo avantgarde and their resonance in contemporary art’, Centropa: A Journal of Central European Architecture and Related Arts, 14:1 (January 2014), 58. 27 László Beke, ‘The Hungarian Performance – Before and after Tibor Hajas’, in Badovinac, Body and the East, p. 103. 28 Fowkes, ‘Off the record’, p. 66. In Vigil, performed on 18 May 1980, at the Bercsényi Kollégium in Budapest, the artist risked electrocution when he smashed a pluggedin lightbulb into a pool of water and then crawled to the edge to stare at his reflection in the manner of Narcissus, literally staring death in the face. He was then injected with an anaesthetic and had breathing tubes inserted into his mouth, which left him unconscious. His assistants dragged him across the floor and left. Hajas died in a car crash several months later, leading to the mythologising of his contribution and persona in the Hungarian art world. 29 See Fowkes, ‘Off the record’, p. 65. 30 Beke, ‘The Hungarian Performance’, p. 105. 31 Fowkes, ‘Off the record’, p. 65. 32 Edit András, ‘Do I Dream Freely or on Command?’, in Bojana Pejić (ed.), Gender Check: Femininity and Masculinity in the Art of Eastern Europe, exh. cat. (Cologne: Buchhandlung Walther König, 2009), p. 121. According to her, ‘the only sites of freedom that remain for Hajas are his own body and the medium of the photograph’. Ibid., p. 123. 33 Morganová, Czech Action Art, p. 103. 34 Ibid., pp. 103, 104. 35 Sebastian Cichocki, ‘Earthworks: Teresa Murak and the Spiritualisation of Slime’, in Sebastian Cichocki (ed.), Teresa Murak (Lublin, Poland: Galeria Labirynt, 2012), p. 11. 36 Zora Rusinová, ‘Solidarity born of despair: action art in Slovakia during the totalitarian regime, 1970–1989’, Centropa: A Journal of Central European Architecture and Related Arts, 14:1 (January 2014), 112. 37 Petr Štembera, as quoted in Klara Kemp-Welch, Antipolitics in Central European Art: Reticence as Dissidence under Post-Totalitarian Rule, 1956–1989 (London: I.B. Tauris, 2014), p. 192. 38 Morganová, Czech Action Art, p. 183. 39 Jiří Kovanda, in an interview with the author in Prague, 27 June 2011. 40 Jan Palach was a student of history and politics at Charles University in Prague who set himself on fire in an act of protest against the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. 41 In Kemp-Welch, Antipolitics in Central European Art, p. 198. 42 Jiří Kovanda’s description of the performance, typewritten on the documentation sheet for the performance, published in Vit Havránek (ed.), Jiří Kovanda, 2005–1976: Actions and Installations (Zurich: Tranzit and JRP/Ringier, 2006), p. 47. 43 In Kemp-Welch, Antipolitics in Central European Art, p. 198. 44 Klímová also restaged performances by other Czech artists: Vladimír Havlík, Karel Miler, Jan Mlčoch and Petr Štembera. See www.perfomap.de/map2/transf/ klimova, accessed 20 July 2016.

161

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

162

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

45 Jiří Kovanda, in an interview with Barbora Klímová in Prague, 15 August 2006. Published in Barbora Klímová, Barbora Klímová: Replaced – Brno 2006, exh. cat. (Prague: Czech Ministry of Culture, n.d.), p. 32. 46 Kemp-Welch, Antipolitics in Central European Art, p. 198. 47 Jiří Kovanda, in an interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist, ‘Conversation I: I Always Felt that I Didn’t Need a Studio’, in Havránek (ed.), Jiří Kovanda, p. 107. 48 Ileana Pintilie, ‘Action art in Romania before and after 1989’, Centropa: A Journal of Central European Architecture and Related Arts, 14:1 (January 2014), 89. 49 Ileana Pintilie, ‘Between Modernism and Postmodernism’, in Alina Şerban (ed.), Ion Grigorescu: The Man with a Single Camera (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2013), p.  23. 50 A similar gesture can be seen in Slovak artist Juraj Bartúsz’s (b. 1933) Official Verification (1971), a photographic performance in which the artist asked photographer Alexander Jiroušek to record his activities throughout the day, capturing similar activities as Grigorescu: washing, bathing, eating and the like. The artist had the collection of photographs notarised with a seal, as a record of that one day of his life. See Rusinová, ‘Solidarity born of despair’, p. 109. 51 Ion Grigorescu, ‘Diaries’, in Marta Dziewanska (ed.), Ion Grigorescu: In the Body of the Victim (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), p. 68. 52 I.G. Plamen and Marko Pogačnik, in ‘Manifest OHO-a’, as quoted in Miško Šuvaković, The Clandestine Histories of the OHO Group (Ljubljana, Slovenia: Zavod P.A.R.A.S.I.T.E., 2010), p. 29. 53 As is often the case with the titles of Gotovac’s performances, the title is a film reference. Since the artist cut and shaved his head, the allusion is to the shaving of Joan of Arc’s head in the film directed by Dreyer, in which Falconetti played Joan of Arc. 54 Ješa Denegri, ‘The Individual Mythology of Tomislav Gotovac’, in Aleksandar B. Ilić and Diana Nenadić (eds), Tomislav Gotovac (Zagreb, Croatia: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2003), p. 273. 55 Marko Kovačić, in an interview with Barbara Borčić (1992), as quoted in Badovinac, Body and the East, p. 174. 56 The notion of institutional critique will be taken up in greater detail in chapter 5. 57 Badovinac, ‘Body and the East’, p. 16. 58 Denegri, ‘The Individual Mythology of Tomislav Gotovac’, p. 273. 59 Ibid., pp. 273–4. 60 See Jasna Dragović-Soso, Saviours of the Nation: Serbia’s Intellectual Opposition and the Revival of Nationalism (London: C. Hurst & Co., 2002), p. 48. 61 According to Darko Šimičić, curator of the Tomislav Gotovac archive, in an interview with the author in Zagreb, 21 August 2013. 62 Tomislav Gotovac, ‘Nudity’, speech given in Darko Bavoljak’s documentary film on the artist, Stupid Antonio Presents (2006); published in Vlasta Delimar and Zvonimir Doborvić (eds), Absolute Artist: Antonio Gotovac Lauer (Zagreb, Croatia: Perforations Publisher, n.d.), p. 11. 63 Ibid., p. 12. 64 Ibid. 65 Ibid., p. 14.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

The body

66 I provide a thorough study of Polis’s Bronze Man performances in chapter 2 of my monograph Performing the East: Performance Art in Russia, Latvia and Poland Since 1980 (London: I.B. Tauris, 2013). 67 Kemp-Welch, Antipolitics in Central European Art, p. 84. 68 Július Koller, in conversation with Roman Odnak, in Július Koller, Július Koller: Univerzalne futurologicke operacie (Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 1999), p. 136. 69 Oleg Kulik, ‘Why Have I Bitten a Man?’, in Laura Hoptman and Tomáš Pospiszyl (eds), Primary Documents: A Sourcebook for Eastern and Central European Art since the 1950s (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002), p. 349. 70 For more on the Autoperforatsionsartisten, see the exhibition catalogue edited by C. v. Marlin, Ordnung durch Störung: Auto-Perforations-Artistik (Nuremberg, Germany: Verlag für Moderne Kunst, 2006). 71 Micha Brendel, in an interview with the author in his home near Golssen, Germany, 6 May 2014. 72 Else Gabriel, in an interview with the author in Berlin, 7 May 2014. 73 Lewandowsky, in an interview with the author in Berlin, 8 May 2014. 74 Lewandowsky, however, does not recall that their characters were meant to be taken so literally. Via Lewandowsky, in an interview with the author in Berlin, 8 May 2014. 75 Lewandowsky, for example, notes that they had seen books on contemporary art in the Dresden library, and catalogues at the university from the so-called Giftshrank, or ‘poisonous   bookshelf ’, which kept such ‘subversive’ tomes as the catalogues from various editions of Manifesta. Via Lewandowsky, in a roundtable discussion at the Performing Arts in the Second Public Sphere conference, Berlin, 11 May 2014. 76 Ventsislav Zankov, in an interview with the author in Sofia, 1 June 2014. 77 Ventsislav Zankov, as stated in his description of Steak and Chips on his website, http://zankov.info/performances/steack_and_chips/steak_chips.htm, accessed 17 September 2015. 78 Badovinac, Body and the East, p. 16. 79 Ibid. 80 See Branislav Jakovljević, ‘Handworks: Yugoslav Gestural Cultural and Performance Art’, in Bishop and Dziewanska, 1968–1989, pp. 40–1. The Youth Relay races had been held in Yugoslavia since 1945, and starting from 1957 they occurred annually, on Tito’s birthday, 25 May. The Youth Work Actions were launched after the Second World War to meet the needs of reconstruction and industrialisation. 81 Jakovljević, in Bishop and Dziewanska, 1968–1989, p. 48. 82 Ibid., p. 47. 83 Ibid., p. 42. 84 A parallel to Štembera’s performances involving nature can be found in the work of his contemporary from neighbouring Slovakia, Michal Kern (1938–92). 85 Morganová, Czech Action Art, p. 167. 86 Jindřich Chalupecký, as quoted in ibid., p. 175. 87 Rusinová, ‘Solidarity born of despair’, p. 116. 88 The image included shows a repetition of this performance, which took place in Dubrovnik. 89 Crtalić, for example, was involved in a controversy with the wife of the mayor of

163

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

164

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

his hometown of Sisek, whom he criticised publicly on Facebook for misuse of public funds; the artist was, in turn, accused of slander by the mayor of Sisek. 90 Lewandowsky comments that this exploration of changing gender through dress started with the birth of his daughter in 1987, when he began to contemplate the notion of gender from a more personal perspective. Via Lewandowsky, in an interview with the author in Berlin, 8 May 2014. 91 Todorović obtained these materials from various doctors and surgeons who provided the biomedical waste for him on request. 92 Petr Štembera, as quoted in Morganová, Czech Action Art, p. 169.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Gender

Artists from the West should constantly thank God that they were spared the experience that artists from former socialist countries had. — Natalia LL, 2015

The issue of gender, not to mention feminism, in Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe remains complicated and fraught. Prior to 1989, the ‘woman question’ was largely considered to have been resolved throughout the region on an official level, with gender equality a stated priority of socialist governments.1 Across the East, women benefited from equal access to jobs, childcare and often equal pay. Women’s reproductive health was also on the agenda, and in many countries, abortion was legal.2 In addition, quota systems were in place to ensure that women advanced in their positions and were represented at all levels. However, much of this was superficial, as women were often placed in positions before they were ready, in order to maintain the appearance of gender equality, and it was really the men who maintained the power. As Piotr Piotrowski has stated, the practice of selecting the delegates to the Party Congress from among various seamstresses, the practice of holding meetings between the First Secretary of the Communist Party and the representatives of the Polish League of Women … could not fully obscure the reality of the situation for women during this period.3

The reality of the situation was, that while some things had changed for women in the socialist period, gender equality in fact had not been achieved, especially in the domestic sphere, where traditional gender roles persisted. While Piotrowski was referring specifically to life in the People’s Republic of Poland, the situation was much the same throughout the East. Speaking about conditions in the Soviet Republic of Latvia, Mark Allen Svede commented, one risks accusations of sophistry to propose that gender parity existed in a society in which washing machines were luxury items and food shopping required standing in queues, yet women were expected to perform these

3

166

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

domestic chores even after working all day as a gallery director, all-Union legislator, or Artist Laureate of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. At best, a pyrrhic victory might be claimed.4

While Western feminist artists may have looked to the socialist countries of Eastern Europe as a model of an egalitarian society, women artists in the East knew better. Following her correspondence with feminist art critic Lucy Lippard in 1971, Polish artist Natalia LL (Lach-Lachowicz, b. 1937) was invited by Lippard to be the Polish or Eastern European representative of the international feminist movement. Lippard also sent her a feminist manifesto by Gisela Kaplan, which, Natalia LL recalls, was banal and not very innovative. It postulated that the woman should achieve what the women of the real socialist 1970s Poland had already achieved. Apart from the hardships of maternity, women in our reality had already received the right of suffering, hard work and superhuman responsibility. So these feminists were a bit funny for me. I was irritated by the faith of feminists who wanted to create their own feminist theory and history of art. But since they chose me as their representative, I restrained from criticizing their ideals.5

Natalia LL is among a handful of artists working in Eastern Europe during the socialist period whose work addresses issues concerning the representation of women and female sexuality in society. Others include Orshi Drozdik, Sanja Iveković, Ewa Partum, Maria Pinińska-Bereś and Jana Želibská, some of whom claim not to identify with feminism, although their work can be seen as sympathetic to its ideals, and their attitude toward it not completely dismissive.6 For example, Natalia LL distanced herself from the feminist movement, although she was responsible for introducing many ideas of feminist art into Poland, and even organised and participated in feminist art exhibitions. The Oxford English Dictionary defines feminism as both the ‘advocacy of equality of the sexes and the establishment of the political, social, and economic rights of the female sex’ and ‘the movement associated with this’.7 However, in this chapter I shall nuance this definition slightly to account for the fact that in socialist Eastern Europe, there was no active feminist movement, for the reasons outlined above. Given that equality of the sexes was already being ‘advocated’ as the official party line, a feminist movement was deemed superfluous. However, the perception and recognition of the disparity between reality and rhetoric can be discerned in works of art from the period, thus constituting a form of feminist art without the label. As posited by Merriam-Webster’s 11th edition, feminism constitutes ‘organized activity on behalf of women’s rights and interests’. In the case of the artists discussed in this chapter, what they are precisely not is organised, but acting discretely, in distinct contexts, and not as a codified movement. A definition of feminism perhaps more applicable to the Eastern European context is the

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Gender

one articulated by Kumari Jayawardena, a feminist whose work forms part of the canon of third-world feminism: ‘a consciousness of injustices based on gender hierarchy’ (italics mine) and the ‘commitment to change’.8 While the latter element is not necessarily present in the examples outlined below, my analysis will demonstrate how these works, whether conceived as feminist or not, advocate on behalf of women’s rights. Thanks to Roland Barthes’s Death of the Author (1976), a work of art may be regarded as feminist even if it is not intended as such by its creator. One reason a work may not have been designated as feminist at the time of creation was because of the awareness that there would not be a receptive audience. In this sense, Ivana Bago and Antonio Majaca’s notion of the ‘delayed audience’, discussed in the previous chapter, provides a potential answer to the question of what to call this art. It may have been feminist art for a delayed audience. Given the contradictions between the proclaimed and the lived reality, one might wonder why there were not more artists, particularly more women artists, engaging with and creating feminist art in the East during the communist period. This may be attributed to several factors. Firstly, political activism was largely focused on human rights in general, as opposed to gender-specific issues. In places where the state exercised a significant amount of control over much of everyday life, the ‘common enemy’ for all was the totalitarian regime, which, as Martina Pachmanová explains, ‘women and men in the counterculture fought against’.9 Edit András claims that the structure of the dissident movement did not differ substantially from that of the state, with gender- and other identity-related concerns placed on the back burner in the name of a perceived greater good. In her words, political opposition and the counterculture mirrored the way official power worked; they were equally militant, arrogant and intolerant. Their soldiers stood in close formation on this side of the trench and soldiers were obliged to surrender gender, racial and ethnic identity. Deviation and difference were tolerated neither by the opposition, nor by the state ideology.10

Furthermore, given that feminism was considered unnecessary in the East, it was often viewed as an ‘import’ from the West by activists and artists, especially amid the close alignment with the feminist and feminist art movements in the West. Finally, because of their associations with official propaganda, political statements of any stripe were avoided by many artists, in the hope of preserving the sanctity of the autonomy of art. Beata Hock offers another reason for the purported absence of feminist art in Eastern Europe. The author’s research into gendered artistic practices in communist-era Hungary reveals that the issue was not what socialism promised and did or did not deliver in terms of gender equality, but, rather, the manner in which women were represented – that is, as equals. According

167

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

168

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

to her, women in Hungary did experience social change, noting what she describes as ‘appealing differences between their own lives and that of their mothers’ generation’,11 differences that made it difficult for them to sympathise with Western feminism. Moreover, because of its emancipatory policies, the socialist state ‘created expectations for bringing about gender equality. The expectations thus created – and the life trajectories that thereby became thinkable’ – are, in Hock’s view, among the ‘salient achievements of state-socialist “emancipation”’.12 This notion of the perceived but not experienced, then, becomes significant as it determines the course of action for the individual. According to Susan Gal and Gail Kligman, ‘people in the region reacted as much to the representations of themselves in official communication as to the often unforeseen and unintended consequences of state policies about reproduction, sexuality and family life’.13 Insofar as gender inequality did exist in socialist Eastern Europe, it is fitting to examine work that deals with representations of women, female sexuality, the reification of woman and gender roles in the context of feminism. Various terms have been used to characterise the approach of artists engaged with gender-related issues in the region, outside of a feminist framework. Referring to Slovak artist Jana Želibská’s work, Zora Rusinová characterises it as ‘latent feminism’, suggesting an unconscious use of feminist strategies on the part of Želibská. Romanian artist Lia Perjovschi describes herself as an unofficial feminist, working intuitively rather than in relation to feminist theory or examples of feminist art. In her words, ‘I was a feminist without knowing the history of the movement. Information on feminism came too late for me, this is why I am a feminist with a small “f ”’.14 Writing about the work of Croatian/Yugoslav artist Vlasta Delimar, Ljiljana Kolešnik uses the term ‘intuitive feminism’, although the artist would no doubt have been aware of feminist strategies and debates as these had been circulated in Yugoslavia since the 1970s. Svede terms Latvian painter Ilze Zemzare’s work ‘protofeminist’, as she was working in the 1960s in an environment that would have had little exposure to feminist art and debates, while Bulgarian artist Adelina ­Popnedeleva portrays herself as a ‘soft feminist’.15 Hungarian artist Orshi Drozdik speaks about her interest in the ‘political programme of emancipation’.16 What I believe all of these different labels indicate is a general and genuine concern with the principles of what is understood to be feminism – the awareness of the lack of women’s equality both in the region and globally, and a desire to change that state of affairs. Finally, given that many artists in the region were exploring gender-related issues during the socialist period independently of one another, Jana Gerzova describes their work as ‘islands of interest in feminism’.17 One of the aims of this chapter, then, is to connect these islands using performance art as a bridge. While all the artists in this chapter were working in different sociopolitical contexts within the overall

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Gender

context of state-sponsored socialism in Eastern Europe and its presumption of gender equality, what they share is the use of performance art – not necessarily as their primary practice, but certainly in individual works – to address such issues as gender inequality, the objectification of women and the rigidity of traditional gender roles. Performance art was a preferred genre among feminist artists in North America during the 1960s and 1970s – a time of political activism, when such work was embraced as a platform by both male and female artists. One of the reasons that performance was adopted by many feminist artists was that performance itself was seen to embody their activist stance. Jayne Wark states, ‘as women artists became politicised by feminism … the potential of performance as an “art of action” coincided with their growing sense of themselves as agents of social and political change’.18 Amelia Jones similarly points to the subversive potential of feminist performance art. She suggests that in ­soliciting, or ‘literalizing desire’, body art implicates the viewer ‘in its dispersal and particularization of the subject (as body/self) and open[s] … the art-making and viewing processes to intersubjective desires and identifications’.19 This, consequently, serves to threaten the phallocentrism of ‘Western subjectivity, which insists upon the oppositional staging of an other (who lacks) to legitimate the self (who ostensibly has)’.20 Of course, this type of phallocentrism was not the exclusive province of the West, as Piotr Piotrowski observes. As he argues, the socialist and communist regimes in Eastern Europe depended on the strict maintenance of traditional gender roles. In his words, ‘any authority system, including the totalitarian system that is its extreme version, can function safely only under conditions that ensure the stability of the hierarchically defined social structure based in phallocentrism’.21 Although women had equal access to jobs and equal pay, it was the male who remained privileged in these societies. As such, many artists whose work dealt with gender utilised the visceral nature of performance art for its radical potential, in order to disrupt these phallocentric norms. This characterisation of the radical potential of feminist performance and body art coincides with Lucy Lippard’s notion of feminist art as ‘a value system, a revolutionary strategy, a way of life’.22 Furthermore, Wark emphasises the plurality of feminist art practice: rather than adhering to polarised essentialist interpretations of feminist art, she proposes that artists were capable of pursuing various strategies and techniques emanating from different traditions in feminist discourse.23 This is also an important point to remember when considering art from the East that addresses gender issues. Katy Deepwell, among others, puts forth the notion that there is not one ‘feminism’, but, rather, numerous feminisms, which comprise different approaches throughout the world.24 This is also a point that Beata Hock emphasises in her discussion of gendered artistic practices in Hungary during the socialist

169

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

170

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

period, articulating a situated feminist perspective that does not use Western feminism as a ‘yardstick’ by which to gauge feminist activity. Although she, among others, notes the fact that the label ‘feminist’ seems ‘more a social and political liability’ for non-Western examples, I feel that this term is relevant and useful in the context of Eastern Europe, given that artists in the region were aware of, connected with and often responding to Western feminist artists in their work.25 Furthermore, since gender inequality and hierarchy was an issue under communist rule despite the public reticence with regard to it, then these actions and works that draw attention to this issue can be seen as feminist, in the same way that the suffragette movement of the first wave of feminism was also not necessarily labelled as such. That said, I agree with Hock’s point that ‘the articulation of feminist concerns in cultural work or in social activism is not always and necessarily tied to a conscious feminist identification’, as well as the assertion that ‘ambiguity towards feminism and reluctance towards feminist identification are not always results of a clear refusal or informed non-choice of feminism’.26 Indeed, as this discussion indicates, the decision to take such a definitive political stance under communist rule was complicated. During the communist period, artists in Eastern Europe often used performance art to explore, expose and challenge traditional gender roles, frequently doing so by focusing on representations of masculinity, femininity and notions of female beauty from within their particular ‘islands’. Because of the limited audiences for experimental art in general during the 1960s and 1970s, performance art that addressed gender during the communist period, much like performance art as a whole, rarely attracted much public attention or discussion. Iveković’s Triangle, addressed in the previous chapter, is a notable exception, insofar as it captured the attention of the security guards on detail that day (who almost certainly did not recognise it as an example of performance art). It is my contention that, despite a lack of visibility, these artistic explorations of gender nevertheless exist as ruptures in the grand narrative of traditional gender roles tacitly supported by the state. Following from Piotrowski’s assertion that any challenge posed to those principles also posed a challenge to the regime, the work of the artists addressed in this chapter may be seen as representing a distinct challenge to the stability of the hierarchically defined social structure in Eastern Europe.27 Gender issues in the post-socialist period The fall of the Berlin Wall, the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the violent dismantling of Yugoslavia, along with a host of other, related events in the late 1980s–early 1990s, gave rise to the post-socialist space and with it, a new set of gender-related circumstances with which to contend. The regions of the former Yugoslavia that experienced war underwent a process of ‘radical

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Gender

masculinization’ in the years that followed.28 With the drive to build socialism underpinning governmental policies guaranteeing jobs for women now gone, compounded by an economic crisis in the time of transition, many women across Eastern Europe found themselves unemployed in the 1990s.29 Throughout the East, including Poland, numerous social policies regarding women’s reproductive health, such as legalised abortion, were reversed.30 In various countries, a nationalist platform replaced the communist agenda, as was the case in Serbia, Croatia and Hungary, while in those and other locales, the Church replaced the state as the moral authority, as occurred in Poland and Slovenia. In some areas, nationalism was even seen as a ‘precondition’ for democracy.31 Although the transition period was prolonged and turbulent in many countries, Bojana Pejić sees gender concerns and their visual representations as an element common to, and thus connecting, the communist and post-communist periods. In her words: ‘it points out the shifting order of patriarchy, which conditions thinking, legitimises gender inequality, and shapes women and men’s identities in society, whether communist or postcommunist’.32 Yet she identifies a shift in the visual representations of the postcommunist period in becoming more critical of the existing gender hierarchy. In her words, ‘while in the former regimes patriarchy was rarely – if at all – exposed to criticism, in the latter [post-socialist setting], feminist critique is targeting post-communist democracies’.33 Adding to Pejić’s analysis of the contrast between feminist art before and after the system change, I would also argue that these representations became more visible in the post-socialist space. Another point of continuity between the socialist past and the post-socialist present is women’s reluctance to identify with feminism. Pejić suggests that, at least in Yugoslavia, the aversion to feminism in the post-socialist period stems from a desire to forget the nation’s past following the bitter wars of the 1990s, when gender equality was present, at least in theory.34 Across Eastern Europe, the new ‘freedom’ experienced after the fall meant something quite different for women who had been forced to work during the communist period. For them, freedom entailed the occupying of new roles, such as ‘mother’, or even the initial embrace of one’s femininity, owing to an influx in new consumer goods.35 In the socialist period, people distanced themselves from feminism for various reasons, including the fact that it was regarded as a Western import or because the model of Western feminism was seen as having little to offer those who had already ‘received the right of suffering, hard work and superhuman responsibility’ (see n. 5) under socialism. By contrast, in the postsocialist era, the aversion to feminism was widespread both in the East and in the West, crossing regional as well as national borders. Susan Faludi famously described the situation as it occurred in the West as a ‘backlash’ against women arising from feminism’s distortion by the mass media – which deems

171

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

172

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

feminism unnecessary, akin to the way it was characterised by its opponents under communism.36 While Pejić sees the visual representations of gender as a point of continuity between past and present, one significant difference resides in the visibility experienced by artists. Because prior to the system change most experimental art developed unofficially, among private, closed circles, in many cases the work lacked the exposure, and thus the audiences, that more public forms of body and performance art would have enjoyed had they been showcased in the public sphere. Consequently, this work also lacked the potential to develop audiences outside of these small circles. In the post-communist period, with the opening up of public space, these actions often become much more visible, interacting with and impacting the non-art-going public, thereby creating the potential for social change. In many cases, the encounters between the public and these works of art has been highly disruptive, sparking discussion. The question of whether these artworks comprise a catalyst for change still remains to be seen. In her extensive writing on feminism, gender, art, economy and labour, Angela Dimitrakaki suggests that perhaps a new type of feminism is needed in the first half of the twenty-first century.37 Her book Gender, Artwork and the Global Imperative contributes a new materialist feminism, which she sees as a relevant approach for the current situation, drawing parallels between the exploitation of women under globalisation and the exploitation of man under capitalism.38 Furthermore, she queries whether the ‘global imperative’, that is, the shared and interrelated problems of mankind in the current global context, has ‘transformed the social role of the artist as a gendered individual’.39 According to her, the post-socialist space is something that we all share, as she identifies ‘Eastern Europe as merely another site that demonstrates the failure of capitalism to organise sustainable forms of social existence’.40 Consequently, while concerns regarding gender differed considerably during the communist period owing to the differences between experience and official rhetoric in East and West, in the post-communist period these have the possibility to become shared concerns. While I would agree with that notion to a certain extent, there still remains a significant economic divide between the two regions, one that will be explored in greater depth in chapter 4. The aim of this chapter is to provide a comparative analysis of examples of performance art addressing gender-related issues from across the socialist and post-socialist East without sacrificing the specificity of each local context. Rather than provide a summary of the various issues at stake in each location – which I believe are well covered in the individual country-based essays in Gender Check, among other country-specific texts – my focus here is on themes addressed by the artists of various generations, providing local cultural and historical references in the discussion of works addressing gender, beauty,

Gender

173

women’s sexuality and the challenging of traditional notions of gender. What connects all of the artists is that they are working in a context that did not experience a sexual and feminist revolution in the 1960s and 1970s, yet offered a promise of equality under communism.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Representations of women and notions of female beauty In socialist Yugoslavia, which witnessed a unique blend of consumer culture and political ideology, the situation was ripe for critique of the culture of the spectacle, the reification of the female body and the male gaze. Sanja Iveković (b. 1949) scrutinised these mechanisms at work in the mass media, exposing not only the manner in which femininity and notions of beauty are constructed, but also the way in which patriarchal power structures in both the political and social realms are created and sustained. In her photomontage Diary, created in 1975–76, the artist juxtaposes the makeup removal pads and cotton balls that she used over the course of a week with glossy images from a women’s magazine depicting a woman fully made-up. In her 1976 video performance, Make-Up – Make-Down (figure 3.1), she fetishises the application of cosmetics by displaying it as a sensual act. The camera focuses on the female subject’s cleavage and hands (her face is not visible), which slowly manipulate and caress various objects containing beauty products: tubes of lipstick and mascara, a bottle of lotion. She followed this piece with the performance Un Jour Violente (figure 3.2), in which she applied makeup and dressed according to photographs and descriptions in an advertisement in the magazine Marie Claire, which instructs women how to live glamorous lives through their style: ‘One day, violent: today you are dazzling, you don’t yourself know why, you feel irresistible joy, you want sparkling drinks, intensive light, unusual hairstyles,

Sanja Iveković, Make-Up – Make-Down, 1976. Still of video performance. Courtesy: Sanja Iveković

3.1

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

174

3.2

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

Sanja Iveković, Un Jour Violente, 1976, Bologna. Courtesy: Sanja Iveković

provoking dresses’. In the course of the performance, in three different spaces, she applied three different ‘looks’ pictured and described by the magazine – tender, violent and secret – attempting to become or align with the representation of woman as depicted in the glossy photos. Iveković is among the artists in Zagreb associated with the New Art Practice, and perhaps the only one explicitly engaged with the issue of gender roles and gender identity. She explains her approach as follows: I tried to reflect my own position as a woman in a patriarchal culture, which was, in spite of the officially egalitarian policy, always alive and present in socialism. A recurrent theme in these early works was the politics of the representation of femininity in the mass media. I publicly declared myself as a feminist artist and in this sense my position was really specific.41

She further states that because of the absence of the feminist context or feminist criticism, her work was usually only interpreted as self-referential. That said, she acknowledges deriving inspiration from the international feminist conference in Belgrade that took place in 1978, along with lectures on feminist theory that she attended at the Women’s Section of the Sociological Society of the University of Zagreb, which was established around that time. However, since their research did not encompass visual art, this context did not help with the interpretation of her work along those lines. Makeup also figures prominently in the work of Polish artist Ewa Partum (b. 1945), but is utilised toward different ends. In her 1974 performance Change, she had a professional makeup artist paint half her face to make it look aged and wrinkled; in her 1978–79 Emphatic Portrait, posters of a photograph of the artist’s face made up that way were posted all over Warsaw with the caption below reading, ‘My problem is the problem of a woman’. In 1979, she reused that phrase as the title of another performance (Change – My Problem

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Gender

Is the Problem of a Woman), in which she appeared to age half her body. In both pieces, she performed the act of becoming invisible through the use of makeup, highlighting the fact that the body and appearance of the youthful female nude is celebrated in society, while the elderly and aged are ignored. Partum was one of the only female Polish artists at the time creating genderbased work to articulate her position in expressly feminist terms, although she was not necessarily familiar with Western feminist theory. She utilised her work to critique the patriarchal society in which she found herself. In her words, ‘Feminism became present in my practice later … When I saw that, despite my earlier works, men don’t appreciate me as a conceptual artist. It was an impulse for me to go beyond the art that I had been making so far. To start speaking about something that had to do not only with art but with reality’.42 Partum began writing feminist manifestoes in the 1970s. She would read them aloud at exhibitions, standing before her audience naked – a manner of presentation that, she maintains, comprised a form of protest against female discrimination. Through her nakedness, she protested against the makeup, high heels and other beautifying elements that women are forced to apply to be recognised in society. She articulates her definition of feminist art as such: A woman can function in a social structure that is alien to her if she masters the discipline of camouflage and omits her own personality … At the moment of discovering her own awareness, possibly having little in common with the realities of her current life, a social and cultural problem arises. Not fitting in the social structure created for her, she will create a new one. The possibility of discovering the self and the authenticity of her own experiences, work on her own problems and awareness through the very specific experience of being a woman in a patriarchal society in a world that is alien to the self, is the problem of what is called ‘feminist art.’ It is the motivation for creating art for a woman artist. The phenomenon of a feminist art reveals to a woman her new role, the possibility of self-realisation.43

The artist found in her work the possibility of emancipation not offered to her by the state or official legislation. She used her art as a platform to express these ideas, although they have reached admittedly somewhat limited audiences. One could draw parallels between these works by Iveković and Partum with those of North American artists such as Eleanor Antin and Martha Wilson, both of whom interrogate the glorification of beauty and its perpetuation by the mass media. Throughout her career, Wilson has used cosmetics to alter her appearance in extreme ways. For example, two photographic documents of her 1974 performance I Make Up the Image of My Perfection/I Make Up the Image of My Deformity show the artist as feminine and made-up in one, and with bags under her eyes and bad skin in the other, the juxtaposition of the two underscoring the superficial nature of appearance. While Partum

175

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

176

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

arrived at her feminist views independently, as the 1970s progressed, Poland became more connected with the Western feminist movement through the work of Natalia LL, who travelled to the United States in 1977, meeting with artists such as Carolee Schneemann. Iveković journeyed outside Yugoslavia often, to places such as Italy and Canada, and was aware of developments in contem­porary performance and feminist art elsewhere. While among general audiences in Poland, the feminist context of Partum’s work was not widely understood, Yugoslavia presented a slightly more receptive context for Iveković’s art, as perhaps the only locale in the Eastern Bloc where the ‘woman question’ was even on the agenda; for example, the first international feminist conference to be held in a socialist country was organised by and held at the Student Culture Centre (SKC) in Belgrade in 1978. Entitled Comrade Woman: The Women’s Question – A New Approach?, the conference was criticised by the official Yugoslav women’s organisations, which deemed the event unnecessary. According to Pejić, ‘their criticism was based on their claim that a feminist stance was superfluous in our society, which had already “overcome” gender difference in the Revolution. Moreover, they saw the “new approach” as an “import” from the (capitalist) West’.44 Pejić would take issue with that claim, arguing that pornography had made its way to Yugoslavia by the late 1970s, and that women were depicted in only one of two ways: as ‘“liberated” or whores’.45 Iveković’s and Partum’s works constitute singular examples of the use of performance during the socialist period to examine female depictions in the mass media. In 2009, Bosnian artist Borjana Mrdja created a video performance entitled Enthroning (figure 3.3), consisting of a series of self-portraits featuring the imprints of her face on the cosmetic pads that she had used to remove her makeup at the end of the day. When asked whether this had been a deliberate reference to Iveković’s earlier work, most notably, Diary, Mrdja responded that she had not been aware of it at the time, indicating the disconnect between artists of the current generation and those of the previous one in Eastern Europe – a situation not unique to feminist art but symptomatic of the region in general.46 This largely stemmed from the fact that in most cases artists such as Iveković – whose work would otherwise be categorised as ‘contemporary’, but which in the Eastern European context is designated as ‘experimental’, outside the more traditional work being encouraged in academies and official institutions – did not become instructors, and thus did not pass on their legacy to the next generation. Sandra Sterle (b. 1965), an artist of the generation after Iveković, commented on this lacuna in an interview, stating that artists such as herself ‘missed something’ by not having direct access to the work of their predecessors in art school.47 Feminist art in the West was cultivated across several generations, through critique and revision, as the second generation of feminist artists built on and revised the

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Gender

c­ ontributions of the first. Such continuity was not present in the East, where, in many instances, artists learned about the work of their precursors haphazardly, and often after they had embarked on their careers, which subsequently led to repetitions of previous work. Such was the case with Mrdja. In Enthroning, Mrdja constructs her self-portrait through a series of masks that she applies and removes every day – the same kind of mask that many women use when applying makeup. Much like Iveković’s three ‘looks’ in Un Jour Violente, Mrdja’s portraits differ from day to day. The artist explains that the title of the piece refers to the action of establishing one’s position through the crystallisation of identity. For the artist, this ‘enthronement’ ritual, as it were, took place over the course of one hundred days, resulting in that number of these ‘self-portraits’. Here, her identity is solidified not from the interior or core, but from the fleeting and ephemeral mask that she wears on a daily basis. For the artist, identity is not fixed or stable, but is connected to the magazineready look that she constructs through a daily application of wax, pigment and powder. Whereas Iveković’s work problematised the representations of women in the mass media, Mrdja’s piece of more than thirty years later appears like an act of resignation in the face of the constructed notions of femininity offered by the fashion and makeup industries. In other words, the standards of beauty set by the fashion industry and mass media may have changed over time, but the pressure to conform remains the same. This supports the notion put forth by Pejić that the visual representations of femininity, both in the mass media and by artists, comprises a point of continuity between the socialist and postsocialist periods. In the video performance Almost-Perfect Work (2009; figure 3.4), Mrdja applies lipstick using a specially designed glove, the tips of which contain tubes of the substance. In this piece, the artist’s face becomes the work surface, an impression conveyed by the sounds of a construction site heard in the background. Here, Mrdja turns Iveković’s sensual act of manipulating phallic tubes of makeup in Make-Up – Make-Down into an awkward one, as the glove is difficult to use gracefully as a lipstick applicator. Instead of cleavage and gentle movements, the viewer witnesses the hard work and toil that it takes to beautify oneself. In some ways, this performance represents Mrdja’s Jour Violente; she rebels against the ideal of perfection promoted by the mass media just as Iveković did, marking the struggle against the image as a point of continuity with the socialist period. The reconstitution of these gestures demonstrates the continued relevance of their examination in the post-socialist sphere. In the artist’s words, this work is ‘connected with the female body because I am a woman’,48 although it speaks to a much broader interest in body image and identity. In her video performance The Three of Us (2012; figure 3.5), made with her two daughters, the contemporary Croatian artist Vlasta Žanić (b. 1966)

177

178

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

3.3

3.4

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

Borjana Mrdja, Enthroning, 2009. Still of video performance. Courtesy: Borjana Mrdja

also turns her attention to the ritualistic aspect of applying makeup. Together, all three appear in front of a mirror, putting makeup on individually. When each one finishes applying her lipstick, eye shadow and mascara, and decides that she is fully ‘made-up’, she removes the makeup and starts this process all over again. The performance emphasises that the act of beautification is forever ongoing, because the ideal beauty proclaimed by fashion magazines is impossible to achieve. Because of the ‘need’ for this beautification process in contemporary society as perpetuated by such publications as well as the cosmetics industry, this ritual continues to be passed down from generation to generation. A similar sentiment pervades an earlier video performance entitled Baring (2002), in which the artist plucks her eyebrows before the camera. Instead of stopping when she achieves the desired shape, however, Žanić continues until her eyebrows are completely gone, suggesting that the process of beautification is both painful and never-ending. Estonian artist Mare Tralla (b. 1967) subverted traditional notions of beauty with her 1990s persona as ‘Disgusting Girl’, in which she fashioned herself as the voluptuous and loud ‘mad feminist artist’ who refused to uphold gender stereotypes, presenting both herself and other women in ways that do not align with media images of female beauty. The artist did not initially wish to be identified as a feminist artist, but is now considered integral to the development of Estonian feminist art. According to her, the word ‘feminism’ had

Borjana Mrdja, AlmostPerfect Work, 2009. Still of video performance. Courtesy: Borjana Mrdja

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Gender

Vlasta Žanić, The Three of Us, 2012, Zagreb. Still of video performance. Courtesy: Vlasta Žanić

negative connotations that carried over from the Soviet era.49 Tralla describes the transition from communism to capitalism as involving the sexualisation of society, both in the media as well as in the job market, in which ‘looks became important in that area, too’.50 Indeed, in some places in Eastern Europe in the 1990s, it was still possible for a company to advertise that it was looking for an ‘attractive, blonde secretary’. In 1995, Tralla was invited to participate in the Est.Fem show curated by Eha Komissarov, the first programmatic feminist art exhibition in Estonia. She comments that most of the artists involved in the show used it as a ‘testing ground; it really opened a door for them because it was a completely unused area. It wasn’t like we all really believed in feminism, but it was a combative way of expressing different ideas, as well as finding an unoccupied niche.’51 Tralla exhibited the video installation So We Gave Birth to Estonian Feminism, a critique of the state of feminism, or lack thereof, in Estonia. The installation combined video imagery of German pornography that she had accidentally recorded when trying to tape a Finnish TV programme montaged together with depictions of women from Soviet times, such as her mother as a flower girl, over which she superimposed text from her diary entries as a Young Pioneer. The juxtaposition points to the shifting roles of women from the Soviet to the post-Soviet era through the introduction of pornography, which had been banned in the Soviet Union, as a ‘new freedom’ enabled by capitalism. It also suggests that the Soviet past has affected the reception and development of feminism in post-Soviet Estonia.

179

3.5

180

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

3.6

Mare Tralla, Kiss, 1996, Tallinn. Courtesy: Mare Tralla

The following year, Tralla took on her critics in the performance Kiss (figure 3.6). Sitting in front of a television screen that played various clips of presenters discussing her work, the artist would kiss the ones who praised her, and smear with lipstick the faces of those who criticised her. Following Est. Fem, and stemming from her appearances in a 1994 TV series on art entitled Yes/No, Tralla had already been labelled the ‘Disgusting Girl’ for the nature of her appearance, as well as her public actions.52 By turning the tables on her critics, the artist removed their agency and transferred it to the female, enabling her to be and act as she wished, whether or not it was seen as ‘disgusting’ or beautiful by others. Female sexuality As early as 1966, Slovakian artist (at that time, Czechoslovakian) Jana Želibská (b. 1941) was creating objects, images, installations and performances that referred overtly to female sexuality. The latter was just beginning to be a focus of feminist artists in the West, but only rarely addressed by artists in Eastern Europe during the communist era. This makes Želibská’s work all the more exceptional when one considers that Carolee Schneemann’s orgiastic performance Meat Joy, in which the artist, together with other individuals, male and female, danced erotically on stage playing with substances such as paint, sausages, fish and paper, had only taken place in 1964 in Paris. At the time, the

Gender

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Slovak art scene was not only progressive, but well connected with the Western art world, particularly Paris, through Alex Mlynárčik’s friendship with French art critic Pierre Restany (see chapter 1).53 Vladimíra Büngerová feels that despite its content, which focuses on the female body, female sexuality, female virginity and the passage from girlhood into womanhood, Želibská’s work cannot be classified as part of the radical wave of feminism; it rather carries traces of influences of psychoanalysis and a wave of liberal feminism and eco-feminism – a so-called second wave which sounded in our milieu [Czecho­­ slovakia] only through this author’s voice, where Marxists and the socialist feminism wave based on political ideology ruled.

She also states that Želibská remained a singular figure in that context because the paradigm with which she was working was ‘understood as alien in our environment, as “an import from the West”’.54 Whereas 1967 was ­design­­ated the ‘Summer of Love’ throughout North America and Western Europe following events in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighbourhood, no such sexual revolution occurred in Eastern Europe, where the hippie counter­ culture was frowned upon by the government, seen as merely another example of dissident activity. Thus, Želibská’s explorations of female sexuality cannot be connected to these external developments. In Rusinová’s words, her work ‘had no support in Slovak theory’ let alone the Slovak social context, and ‘was created rather intuitively, and yet ultimately was aligned with the feminist discourse of the era’.55 As discussed in chapter 1, Czechoslovakia witnessed a number of happenings and actions in the countryside in the 1970s, in part a consequence of the Normalisation period following the failed Prague Spring. Rusinová points out that this was also a time when artists (not only female) throughout the world sought a return to nature, stating that ‘apart from ecological motifs, performance and ritual became a favourite form of a search for the “new sensibility” for its ability to deny secular time, duration and history in an exemplary attempt to transfer into mythical, archetypal space, “out of time”’.56 In Želibská’s collective action Betrothal of Spring (1970), the sexual act was depicted metaphorically through the passage from spring into summer, from virgin to woman. A group of artists met in the village of Dolné Orešany. There, guests were given flowers; then, white ribbons, symbolising innocence, were dropped from an airplane (an aspect of the performance organised by Alex Mlynárčik) on the crowd, which subsequently tied them to the trees; finally, girls wove wreaths and wore them on their heads. This exploration of the transformation from virgin to bride can also be seen in Želibská’s 1982 event, Metamorphosis II (Girls), in which a group of girls of varying ages, all dressed in flowing white gowns, enter a peaceful countryside setting, where they spend the afternoon laughing, running, dancing, collecting flowers and making wreaths that they

181

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

182

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

use to adorn themselves; they make their gradual departure at the end of the day, when the sun begins to set.57 Betrothal of Spring and Metamorphosis II were both documented in series of photographs. The passage from virgin to bride, from innocent girl to woman in patriarchal society, is a subject that continues to be explored in the post-communist and post-Soviet era throughout the East. Lithuanian artist Eglė Rakauskaitė (b. 1967) takes up the subject in her piece Trap: Expulsion from Paradise (figure 3.7), which was performed as a ‘live sculpture’ for the first time in front of the Centre for Contemporary Art in Vilnius in the autumn of 1995, and later recorded as a video performance. In this action, thirteen girls dressed in long white dresses stand in a group, connected to each other by their braids, which are interwoven with one another, forming a net. After a while, the girls cut their braids and are released to go off into the world on their own. The work suggests several important themes: the relative protection offered to these girls prior to their entry into the phallocentric world of adulthood, and their vulnerability once they are released from this world. As young girls, they are tied not only to one another, but also to their roles as female subjects, with the braids suggesting that they are locked into these roles from the start. Unexpected weather conditions on the night of the performance added another element. While the girls were meant to appear in their white dresses, the cool weather meant that they needed to wear dark men’s coats over their costumes, an image suggesting the inevitability of being cloaked in the male-dominated world that they would ultimately enter.58 The idea of being fettered by one’s gender is also explored by Bosnian artist Nela Hasanbegović (b. 1984) in her 2010 performance and multimedia work Under the Veil … (figure 3.8). In this piece eight women stand in a circle, facing outward, each wearing a white wedding dress, while a pattern of chains is projected onto their bodies. As with Rakauskaitė’s young girls, these women are locked into their roles. In the context of post-conflict Bosnia, this iconography refers to the unwritten rule regarding marriage and family, proscribing men or women from marrying outside of their ethnicity or religion. The artist describes the piece in more general terms, as referring to ‘the position of woman in a social context, human trafficking, white slavery, captivity and denial of woman’s right to choice and freedom’.59 Ewa Partum’s performance Women, Marriage Is Against You! (1980) similarly addresses the confiningly oppressive nature of this institution. During the performance, she cut open a plastic envelope with a card that read, ‘for the man’, and then sliced into fragments the wedding dress that she was wearing, following which she stood naked before the audience and spoke to them about female oppression. In the performance Wedding Attire, from the following year, she appeared on a pedestal wearing a wedding gown and veil, with her mouth taped shut and her groom standing beside her. A text written on a chalkboard beside them stated,

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Gender

183

Wedding Attire. A sacramental relic of patriarchal culture and male civilisation a trap, a symbol of the only moment binding the imagination. The inequality between the place of the man and of the woman In the world of male civilization A woman created in this tradition bound by obedience in the face of her own false desires shaped in the process of alienation.60

Although working in different sociohistorical contexts, Partum, Rakauskaitė and Hasanbegović thus all address the notion of being bound, trapped or constrained by one’s role as a woman, a confinement created by social and cultural expectations outside of her own making. Returning to Želibská’s work, her 1977 action Something Happened at the Lake Shore, staged in Čunovo, a small town on the Danube near the border with Hungary, is perhaps her most overt reference to the sex act, albeit with far more subtlety than that seen in the work of Western feminist artists such as

Eglė Rakauskaitė, Trap: Expulsion from Paradise, 1995, Vilnius. Courtesy: Eglė Rakauskaitė

3.7

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

184

3.8

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

Nela Hasanbegović, Under the Veil …, 2010, Sarajevo. Courtesy: Nela Hasanbegović

Carolee Schneemann. As with her other actions discussed above, the performance was documented in photographs, and currently exists as a series of five images. In the first, we see a female silhouette drawn in the sand on the beach, next to the water’s edge; her body is outlined, and two small circles and a larger rhombus outline breasts and genitalia. In the second image, a male figure appears beside the female in the form of a shadow cast on the sand, and holds her hand. In the third image, the man himself appears to be lying next to the figure, looking at her, and, again, holding her hand. In the fourth, we see a different figure inscribed in the sand: the yoni, the symbol of the Hindu goddess Shakti, which is an abstract representation of the vagina or womb. Here, it is represented in larger proportions, so that it has completely engulfed and swallowed up the (real) man, who lies inside it. The first three images use the same female figure to depict the act of courtship, but in the fourth, the female figure is represented only by her sex, which is now larger than life-size. Although it is the male who appears to play the dominant role by penetrating the female, she can be seen as dominant because of her size and because she is pictured swallowing and consuming the man. The final image shows a third female figure inscribed in the sand, yet only half of her is visible – the other half has been erased or swallowed up by the river, as the woman returns to nature completely, becoming one with it. This image of the woman is far more detailed than the previous ones: she has curly hair, full lips,

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Gender

her breast has a nipple, her genitals are rendered in greater detail and she is much more animated than the stick figure that preceded her. In addition, she reclines with one leg bent and in the air, suggesting a more relaxed position, and appears to be smiling (a post-coital reference?). In some ways, this piece recalls Cuban-American artist Ana Mendieta’s Land Art, for example, her Silueta series, where she would make imprints of her body in the land and let them be eroded by natural forces, such as the sea. However, Mendieta’s work was focused on the connection between the female body and nature; Želibská’s work explores that same connection, but also addresses the biological forces underlying both sexes in human life. A contemporary of Želibská’s in neighbouring Poland, Natalia LL’s series of photographic performances and video performances Consumer Art (figure 3.9; 1972, 1974, 1975) foregrounds female sexuality quite overtly while linking it to the act of consumption, a delicate issue in a socialist society that opposed itself to the consumer-oriented West. In the photographs and videos, the artist captured models eating sexually suggestive foods: bananas, sausages and breadsticks, as well as pudding, cream and jelly. The models do not simply consume these items, but explore them with their mouths and tongues as if for the first time, licking and thrusting the phallic-shaped items into their mouths, and putting the jelly and cream in their mouths so that they bubble over and stream out in the manner of ejaculate. Although the artist is not present here, in directing the models, she creates performative photographs that highlight the consumption of the reified female. Consumer Art appeared at a time of great food shortages in Poland. Items like sausages and bananas could only be found in the shops on holidays or special occasions such as May Day. The piece enjoys a different reading than one might expect in the context of late-socialist Poland, with Western feminists interpreting it as a critique of material scarcity in socialist Poland. However, Piotr Piotrowski highlights the problems of seeing the work as solely feminist or critical of consumerism. In his words, ‘consumption was only expected and hoped for by society and the authorities’.61 Unlike her colleague Ewa Partum, Natalia LL distanced herself from feminism, not to mention a feminist reading of her work, and she has a fraught relationship with both Western feminism and Western feminist art. Nevertheless, at an exhibition at the Współczesna Gallery in Warsaw in 1971, the artist asserted her independence from patriarchal structures when she disconnected herself from both her father’s and her husband’s surnames (Lach and Lachowitz, respectively), by exhibiting for the first time under the name ‘Natalia LL,’ which she goes by to this day. Furthermore, because of her subject matter and unique approach to it, the Western feminist Lucy Lippard hailed the artist as the Polish or even Eastern European representative of the movement. Natalia LL herself, however, does not consider herself a feminist.

185

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

186

3.9

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

Natalia LL, Consumer Art, 1972, 1974, 1975. Photographic performance. Courtesy: Natalia LL and lokal_30 Gallery

An image from Consumer Art appeared as a poster for the Women – Art – New Tendencies exhibition in Innsbruck in 1975, invoked as an icon of feminism, although the artist discourages such a reading: ‘For me, [the work] was rather a manifestation of the meaningfulness of life, of vitality’.62 Indeed, an examination of her more recent oeuvre, which again uses the phallic banana as well as the wang peony, a motif suggesting fertility, could support that argument. Living in a country that was idolised by Western feminists as having achieved women’s equality yet not experiencing that herself, the artist found herself in a perplexing situation. In a recent interview, when asked whether she believed Western feminists might have anything to learn from women artists in the East, she responded, ‘Artists from the West should constantly thank God that

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Katalin Ladik, The Screaming Hole, 1979, Tribina mladih, Novi Sad. Photo: Gabor Ifju. Courtesy: Katalin Ladik

3.10

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

188

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

they were spared the experience that artists from former socialist countries had’.63 Also in the 1970s, Katalin Ladik (b. 1942), a Hungarian artist from Novi Sad, Serbia, staged a series of performances that subverted the conventional notion of female sexuality. In Black Shave Poem (1978/79), the artist, who was not trained as a visual artist but is a poet and an actress, dressed in a black sweater and trousers, then proceeded to undermine the notion of striptease. Using the black clothing to symbolise the naked body, she proceeded to put on lace underwear and a bra over it, followed by a folk costume, and then disrobed. She then put shaving cream on her face, and shaved her armpits, which were covered in the black fabric of her shirt. In a similar work, The Screaming Hole (1979; figure 3.10), she is again dressed in black and performs her ‘striptease’, putting on lacy underwear over her clothes, as well as shaving and performing various other rituals of getting dressed. The artist is visible only through holes in pieces of paper that cover a frame in which she enacts her performance. The holes evoke forms of voyeurism, such as peep shows, but by remaining clothed, and performing gestures typically seen as male rather than female (shaving the face), the artist does not provide viewers with an object of desire, but instead, throws the male gaze back on them as they witness themselves in her mirror. If there is one artist who overtly foregrounded female sexuality in her work, it is Yugoslav/Croatian artist Vlasta Delimar (b. 1956). In both her two-dimensional and performative work, her body is almost always the central feature and she utilises it provocatively, to challenge and question long-standing taboos concerning sex and female sexuality, and the freedom of that sexuality. Irina Bekić contends that Delimar has created the concept of what she terms the ‘elementary body … It is her medium: the existential, naked body she uses to transpose erotica and sexuality as the strongest physical sensation which she considers the strongest form of existence paving the way for a liberated, confidential individual’.64 Even her two-dimensional work from the 1980s performs sexuality: first, by reducing the body to its reproductive functions, focusing on the genitalia and sexual acts in collages composed of a range of materials – photographs, lace, ribbons, fabric and writing – and instructing the viewer to perform a number of actions: touch, smell or engage in sexual intercourse. The collages include Smell My Cunt (1980), including a photograph of the artist’s genitalia, and Smell This (1981), featuring a photograph of a penis on a red piece of fabric, surrounded by black lace. Fuck Female Dignity (1982) contains a photograph of Delimar’s crotch with a slit cut down the middle, revealing a piece of bright pink fabric behind it, inviting the viewer to place his or her fingers in the opening, as Doubting Thomas did in the gash at Christ’s side. The artist has also bared herself to the viewer, as in Visual Orgasm (1981; figure 3.11), a performance exhibited as a series of photographs that show the

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Gender

Vlasta Delimar, Visual Orgasm, 1981. Photographic performance. Courtesy: Vlasta Delimar

artist’s face in various stages of ecstasy as she pleasures herself. While many of her early performances, such as Tactile Communication, which she staged with Željko Jerman in 1981, focused on touch and involved the artists communicating with the audience through that sense, it was not until 2001 that she engaged in the sex act as part of a public performance (Little Prince), together with her collaborator, Milan Božić. Despite the content of her work, Delimar denies any association with feminism – or any other political stance, for that matter. Rejecting labels, she celebrates her body and her sexuality, as well as the male body and male sexuality, and emphasises pleasure: that deriving from sex as well as from other sources, such as food or nonsexual human contact. But her blatant and overt display of female sexuality did cause a stir and have professional repercussions. In 1982, her application to the Croatian Association of Artists was rejected for the ‘offending [of] female dignity’ manifested in her work. (However, two years later she was accepted, a shift that she possibly attributes to the presence of fewer women on the membership committee.) Some of her works have also been censored. For example, the poster and invitation for her exhibition at the Happy Gallery in Belgrade in 1984 included an image of Cock I Love, a two-dimensional collage featuring a black-and-white photograph of the artist’s face with her lips painted red and the words of the title written beneath; in the censored version, the phrase was crossed out.

189

3.11

190

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Female sexuality and its intersection with state power structures Sanja Iveković’s well-known performance Triangle (figure 2.1; 1979) takes to task governmental structures of power and surveillance, exposing the repressive mechanisms to which the female body and its desires are exposed when they intersect with the state apparatus. In the context of a performance staged during Tito’s arrival in Zagreb, in which the artist sat on her balcony, reading a book, drinking whiskey and pretending to masturbate, one of the security guards from the street below knocked on her door and asked her to remove ‘all persons and objects’ from the balcony. In Piotrowski’s words, with this performance, Iveković revealed the ‘visually based discipline to which the body, above all the female’s body and her sexual desires, is subjected’.65 In other words, so long as she remained demure and did not read or engage in lascivious behaviour, woman was equal in socialist Yugoslavia. The following year, in communist Hungary, Judit Kele placed a newspaper advertisement in the French daily newspaper Libération, announcing an auction in which she would sell herself to the highest bidder.66 The auction was to be held in the context of the Paris Biennale of 1980, to which she had been invited to participate. The year before, she staged the performance I Am A Work of Art at the Hungarian Museum of Fine Arts, wherein she sat behind a museum cordon in front of a blank spot from which a painting on loan had been removed. In the performance, she substituted the work of art as an object with an objectified body of female beauty. The following year, she conceived of the idea of holding an auction as a way for her to ‘learn what she was worth’ as an artist.67 At the event, she offered herself for ‘purchase’ for a period of time relative to the amount that would be paid, which resulted in an actual marriage to a French man who was a gay dancer. Kele and the man agreed that they would proceed with the marriage in a way that would not compromise their personal lives. Not only did the man participate in a work of art that would be accepted among his friends, but he also enabled an artist from the East to migrate West and received a tax benefit. By making her body available for public consumption as well as for purchase, the artist was able to use the state-sponsored mechanism of control over the body – marriage – to her own advantage. After the marriage, the artist remained based in Paris, and did not return to live in Hungary. Two decades later, in 2000, the Yugoslavian-born Serbian artist Tanja Ostojić (b. 1972) embarked on a similar journey, but the reasons for her ‘desire to migrate’ were different. Based in France from 1998 to 1999 and in Slovenia from 1999 to 2001, and performing and exhibiting internationally since 1996, Ostojić had begun to feel the effects of life as an artist of Serbian origin in post-conflict Serbia, following the wars, sanctions and NATO bombing of the 1990s. This occurred as she gained notoriety for her work, and started receiving

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Gender

191

more invitations to participate in international exhibitions. Frustrated by the complicated and humiliating procedures that she had to undergo to obtain visas to travel, live and work abroad, she decided to take matters into her own hands, developing an artistic project that would simultaneously benefit her (if successful) by giving her the status of ‘a Westerner’ with free right of movement through the Schengen Zone – yet also implicate the bureaucratic structures and mechanisms that prevent people from having access to these ‘affluent geographies’.68 Entitled Looking for a Husband with EU Passport (2000–05; figure 3.12), the project started with an Internet campaign, whereby the artist advertised herself, completely naked and even completely shaved, from head to toe, and asking prospective suitors to contact her at the email address hottanja@ hotmail.com. Ostojić received a number of responses, exchanging over five hundred letters with people from around the world, and finally settling on a mate, a German man, Klemens G. As with Kele’s auction, this project led to a marriage, but was then followed by an ‘Integration Project’ and ended with a ‘Divorce Party’. She followed this piece with an ongoing delegated performance enacted by others according to her instructions. Begun in 2009 and entitled Misplaced Women?, the project continues her interrogation of the issue of migration, identity and border crossing by inviting p ­ articipants to unpack their bags (suitcases, handbags and so forth) in a public space.

Tanja Ostojić, Looking for a Husband with EU Passport, 2000–04. Photograph of installation and documentation of a performance. Courtesy: Tanja Ostojić

3.12

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

192

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

Throughout the entirety of Looking for a Husband with EU Passport, Ostojić received a number of temporary visas for Germany. She chose Klemens, a fellow artist, as the most suitable candidate because he was well aware of the logistical elements of the project and understood the conditions of the arrangement; thus, he held no romantic notions that the marriage would be anything other than one of convenience.69 The artist emphasises that they did everything according to the law – like Kele’s, it was in fact a legal marriage, enabling Ostojić to obtain a family unification visa to come and live in Germany. By utilising the system to her own ends, the artist demonstrated its absurdity and unsuitability on a human level.70 Kele’s and Ostojić’s performances, from the socialist past and the capitalist present, expose the power structures that govern behaviour and legitimise relationships, often determining where we can live and for what purpose. The works also expose a flawed system that women use, both to their advantage and detriment, to gain access and entry to the West, often entering into loveless and at times abusive marriages in order to have a ‘better life’. Ostojić’s performance, however, takes a deliberately feminist approach, as the artist conducted extensive research into the strategies employed by migrants to cross borders; she also created rules for the performance and maintained control over how her body was used.71 Angela Dimitrakaki notes how Ostojić’s project demonstrates a shift from body and performance art to biopolitics, meaning, from the discourse of the body to the discourse of the artist’s life.72 Comparing the works of Kele and Ostojić, Hock observes that the responses Kele received from her ad were mainly from men offering her their help ‘out of what might be called leftist com­radeship and that, rather than requesting a photo of the future bride inquiring about her looks or any other personal details, the respondents communicated their political affiliation and views on the project of socialism’.73 By contrast, the responses Ostojić received, despite her shaved head and sober demeanour, often made reference to the artist’s appearance and offered romantic exclamations of support, missing the political aspect of the work entirely. Some viewers of the work following its completion were even critical of the manner in which Ostojić ‘took advantage’ of Klemens G.74 In organising her future through a complex and extensive project that blurred the boundaries between her art and her life, Ostojić effectively had to become part of the system in order to thwart it. As Sefik Tatlić explains, ‘this is what happens to bare life: the more it suffers, the more it wants to become integrated into the work processes of neo-liberal capitalism … It has a tendency not to resist the oppression, but to become an oppressor’.75 Dimitrakaki pushes this argument one step further, pointing out that Looking for a Husband with EU Passport exists as a work of art, with all of the ambiguity that that entails, precisely because it enables the artist to occupy both positions at once. In her words: ‘art becomes thus a framework where the artist can gain control over her self-exploitation’.76

Gender

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Challenging gender roles Throughout his oeuvre, Romanian artist Ion Grigorescu has employed his body as an instrument of artistic creation, and in 1970s communist Romania, many of these activities took place in the privacy of his apartment or studio, or in the less strictly monitored open space of the countryside. While the exploration and examination of his body through the camera lens comprises a leitmotif of his work, several examples stand out as presenting a distinct exploration of the gendered body, among them, the film Masculin/Feminin (1976) and the photographic performance Delivery (1977). In Masculin/Feminin, the artist uses the cinematic lens to explore the facets of his own body, with the first half of the film doing so through the inter­ mediary of the mirror. Following a brief interlude in which the camera is held above his head and the artist performs some exercises, Grigorescu turns the camera onto the interior of his apartment and nearby exterior architectural forms (seen through the window) that evoke femininity – such as a curved arch or a round oculus (or hole) in a pediment. In a text written about the piece, he compares the penis to a paintbrush – a comparison that brings to mind New York-based Japanese artist Shigeko Kubota’s 1965 performance Vagina Painting, in which she attached to her underpants a paintbrush dipped in red paint and proceeded to paint with it, on a canvas placed on the floor – a reference to both Jackson Pollock’s masculine action painting as well as Yves Klein’s Anthropometries, wherein he used the female body as his paintbrush. Indeed in his text, Grigorescu goes on to describe the various aspects of his personality, in which he sees both masculine and feminine traits. A further exploration of the feminine can be seen in the artist’s photographic performance Delivery (figure 3.13). In a series of fourteen photographs, Grigorescu is captured going through the motions of childbirth, his naked body accompanied by baked rolls to symbolise ovaries, then an umbilical cord, and, finally, a newborn child. Blood is also present in the form of red paint. Contemporary art critic Jan Verwoert ascribes a highly symbolic meaning to the performance, suggesting that it parallels Ceaușescu’s megalomania: ‘as the attempt to give birth to a nation to compensate for the fact that he (Ceaușescu) cannot give birth to a child’.77 Piotrowski also attributes great metaphorical importance to the work, for its complete subversion of the normative notion of gender in Romanian society at that time. In his words, in the context of 1970s Romania, where the state exercised almost total control over social life as part of its imposition of a conservative moral code, Grigorescu’s work in ‘revealing and exploring gender, its function and significance … acquires a decidedly political character. The artist’s effort to blur the boundaries between phallic and vaginal representation questioned the very basis of social order’.78 Piotrowski acknowledges that Grigorescu’s art is devoid of a public character,

193

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

194

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

and that these explorations of the body and gender did not take place in the public space but in the private sphere. Therefore, he qualifies his analysis by stating that, when considering this piece ‘from the perspective of the artist’s decision to produce the work, rather than the reception of his work, Grigorescu’s photography and films have to be seen as having a subversive character, especially because they questioned traditional gender differences’.79 That said, one wonders how these works can truly be considered subversive, disruptive or revolutionary given that they were not observed by a public that would be disrupted, disturbed or challenged by them. Rather, the works can be seen as pioneering and innovative in 1970s Romania much like Želibská’s in the context of postwar Slovakia. Grigorescu himself describes Delivery as a statement on the biological limitations of his gender. ‘I cannot conceive; in fact I can only create ‘relationships’ by suggesting to myself that I am experiencing a line, i.e., a descent from father and mother to son and daughter’.80 Verwoert recognises this lamentation on an inability to conceive as troublesome for a male artist: ‘this work could be read as a provocative existential meditation on birth as an act of creation that a male artist is incapable of and will therefore always envy’.81 While this may sound like a highly forward-thinking attitude for a man in the 1970s, Grigorescu also speaks of his ‘disgust for families, hatred of lateral ties, i.e. of alliance’.82 Although remarkable in terms of gender exploration, this piece is actually not representative of Grigorescu’s oeuvre in its focus on gender; instead, it complements other examinations of the body in space and time by this artist. As evoked in the work of Ewa Partum, the media-created notions of beauty and the acceptable body are restrictive with regard not only to gender, but also age. Tomislav Gotovac also makes that apparent in his Foxy Mister (2002; figure 3.14) photo series, in which his aged body adopts the poses and positions of models seen in porn magazines. The series title is taken from the name of the magazine on which the images were based: Foxy Lady. Placing the naked male body in the submissive role of the female object ready to be penetrated, Gotovac challenges traditional gender roles, while also confronting ageist attitudes toward sexuality and beauty, suggesting that the elderly, wrinkled and distorted body can be beautiful and sensual. A performative work by Dina Rončević (b. 1984) mounted a sustained challenge to traditional gender roles in contemporary Croatia. From 2007 to 2010, while completing her studies at the Art Academy in Zagreb in Animation and New Media, the artist also trained to become an auto mechanic. The training was part of a conscious effort to see if she could ‘make a living’ as an artist, by completing a practical training in parallel to her visual arts studies. Rončević’s graduation work for her certification in electromechanics also served as the final project for her concurrent studies at the Centre for

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Gender

Ion Grigorescu, Delivery, 1977. Photographic performance, Bucharest. Courtesy: Ion Grigorescu

Women’s Studies in Zagreb, which she completed in 2009.83 What comprised an exploration of the workings of an engine for the former was a sociological examination of the workings of society in relation to gender for the latter. The entire project, consisting both of her studies and what resulted, was entitled Suck Squeeze Bang Blow (a reference to the motions of an engine), of which Rončević served as the main subject. The artist considers the training to have been largely a failure because she did not manage to actually become a mechanic. The reason for this has less to do with her skills or talent than with the social context in which she found herself at the time of the project. After she finished her coursework, she was

195

3.13

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document 3.14

Tomislav Gotovac, Foxy Mister, 2002, Zagreb. Photographic performance. Courtesy: Zora and Sarah Gotovac and the Tomislav Gotovac Institute

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Gender

obliged to complete an apprenticeship, which she did at a Volvo service shop. She describes the environment as hostile. As the only woman in the shop, she was not seen by the male mechanics as capable of working there; thus, they entrusted her only with menial tasks, such as cleaning up or going to get parts. She was ridiculed and laughed at for suggesting that she might be able to fix a car. As a result, she gained little practical experience. In many ways, Suck Squeeze Bang Blow vividly reflects the situation regarding women and gender equality in contemporary Croatia. For example, when the artist received the documentation to prove that she had completed her training in 2007, she was awarded the classification of mechanic in the male gender; the law on gender equality in Croatia was only changed in 2008, so that all legal documents now have to refer to the gender of the person who is receiving them. These documents form a component of the artwork. While legislation concerning gender equality and discrimination in the workplace would also have protected Rončević from discrimination and bullying on the job, she understood that taking any legal action would have added a political component to her work, which she did not want, while further alienating her from the male-dominated world that she was trying to enter. Instead, she was forced to devise alternate solutions, and the upshot was Car Deconstructions (figure 3.15), a project, documented in photographs, in which she and a group of young women dismantle an automobile. Instead of trying to grasp the workings of an engine by putting one together, she had the girls discover the engine’s secrets by taking it apart, thereby removing the pressure of having to produce something. As part of the project, the artist made a number of sociological observations on her collaborators, noting that the younger girls, who had not yet been indoctrinated into their conventional feminine roles, were not afraid to bend over, spread their legs apart and move their bodies in ways necessary to work with these machines. The older ones, by contrast, found this physical work challenging because of the social and cultural meaning of such ‘poses’. But little by little, as the girls immersed themselves in the realisation of this practical task, they began to learn about different parts of the car, the tools used to fix them and how they worked. For Rončević, this deconstruction gave rise to a reconstruction – of minds and attitudes, as the young women started to develop an interest in the mechanical world, to which they are largely denied access due to persisting notions of segregated gender roles in contemporary society. It also had the added benefit of building the girls’ confidence, so perhaps in this small microcosm of Rončević’s world, these performative and participatory pieces did generate a shift in consciousness, at least among the participants. Rončević’s desire to engage in social art – or art that could, in her words, ‘make a difference’ – rather than the commercial pursuit of selling artworks,

197

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document 3.15

Dina Rončević, Car Deconstructions, 2012. Photo (top): Pekka Makinen, ANTI Festival, Kupio, Finland, 2012; photo (bottom): Dina Rončević, Fierce Festival, 2014. Courtesy: Dina Rončević

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Gender

echoes Western contemporary artists’ move toward performance in the 1970s as a means of escaping the commodified realm of the gallery. In Rončević’s case, this approach was successful, because, instead of fighting the system, the artist created her own system – one in which young women can grow up to become mechanics, and where people work together to create new objects that are functional and can better society. (In her Vehicle performances, two females and one male work together to construct a car that can be used.) Insofar as her work creates a sense of community through mutual collaboration and shared experiences, it represents a grassroots, almost utopic effort, outside the sphere of the market, to which artists, especially performance artists, have often aspired, as well as the building of an egalitarian space where all participants are on equal footing and can mutually benefit from working with one another toward a common goal. The world in which Rončević found herself during the first decade of the twenty-first century was enough to make fellow Croatian artist Sandra Sterle physically ill. In Nausea (2008; figure 3.16), which she first performed in Split, the artist vomited, or attempted to vomit, while the song ‘A Dalmatian Man Wears a Chain Around His Neck’ by Mišo Kovač, a cult icon of Croatian folk music, plays in the background. Sterle describes this singer as the type that would be well-liked by ‘football fans’, and has also characterised Split itself as a sports-oriented city, as opposed to a cultural one – something she observed when she moved there in the early 2000s. For the artist, the song embodies the patriarchal culture of Dalmatia, which Rončević’s project demonstrates extends to the nation’s capital. In the words of Ivana Bago: ‘By publicly inducing vomiting and displaying her own position of powerlessness in the face of the norms of the social majority, the artist constitutes herself as a subject in rebellion’.84 The performance attracted a great deal of attention in the mass media and on social media. Perhaps surprisingly, the talk generated was not about the patriarchal culture to which Sterle drew attention, but about the nature of art. This particular manifestation of performance was apparently something new for the community of Split, despite the rich tradition of performance in that city, as well as for Croatia as a whole, further attesting to the relative lack of visibility of earlier performance pieces from the 1970s and 1980s, which were known to or acknowledged only by a smaller and closed circle.85 Sterle is currently an assistant professor of performance and video at the Art Academy in Split, which was also the site of further ‘rebellion’: the first feminist art programme in Croatia, initiated by Natasha Kadin and supported by the ERSTE Foundation. The one-year programme, entitled Feminisms and Social Changes in Contemporary Art Practices, occurred in 2012–13, and Iveković, Rončević and Sterle all took part. In the catalogue produced for the programme’s final exhibition, Kadin addresses the impulse behind the

199

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

200

3.16

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

Sandra Sterle, Nausea, 2008, Split. Photo: Toni Meštrović. Courtesy: Sandra Sterle

creation of the programme: ‘due to a very personal story entangling violence in a relationship, the state apparatus penetrated my intimate space. The harshness, callousness and sheer unfairness of the “standard procedure” shocked me deeply’. Much like how Rončević regarded the discrimination she faced at the Volvo service shop as a chance to make a difference in society by challenging and reshaping attitudes toward women’s roles, Kadin saw the episode as an opportunity, writing that she wanted to take this traumatic experience, which ‘they’ only made worse, and to make something creative out of it. By turning the story around, I knew, I would not only help myself, but would also make sure that all the injustice with which the system, society and the state manipulate us daily comes to light, especially when our standpoint defies the normative frames that should govern our most intimate choices, from partnership and marriage to having/rearing children etc.86

This statement echoes those by Iveković and Rončević, perhaps bespeaking the burgeoning of a feminist movement in post-socialist Yugoslavia.

Gender

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

(Re-)claiming agency Kadin’s description of the state’s intrusion into her personal space invariably provokes comparison with Iveković’s Triangle. Iveković’s more recent work manifests the continuity and evolution of explorations of gender initiated by herself and others in the 1970s. In the post-socialist period, she has expanded her feminist agenda to enter into the public sphere. For example, in 1998, Iveković launched the artistic project Women’s House (1998–2003; figure 3.17) to call attention to violence against women, a topic in which she became interested after starting to teach in the Centre for Women’s Studies in Zagreb in 1995. This piece was prompted by her visit to the Autonomous Women’s House, the first shelter for female victims of domestic violence in Eastern Europe, an experience that she describes as ‘eye-opening’, and that inspired her to make this issue ‘visible to the general public’. She also wished to create a ‘new type of work’, one in which these women would not be passive subjects, but rather its ‘active participants’.87 Here, her strategy of scrutinising gender and power structures has shifted from an individualised examination to a participatory event or situation. The idea of affording agency to women echoes the s­ trategies of the first generation of feminist artists from North America, as does the mission statement of the Centre for Women’s Studies, whose aim is to provide education on the theme of Women, to work on raising awareness of women in Croatia and promote research and publishing related to women’s studies topics. [It is a]lso … to empower women in the political and civil initiatives through education at multiple levels and reaffirm constructive values of peace and solidarity, especially through international networking and exchange programs in the field of women’s studies, common cultural and civil projects and direct support to women.88

Iveković’s Women’s House had various manifestations and involved participants from numerous countries. At first, it consisted of the action of creating a plaster cast of a woman’s face, which was then displayed along with her biography, written by the woman herself and including an account of the history and nature of the domestic or other abuse that she endured. The casts were displayed both in museums and galleries, for example, Manifesta 2 in Luxembourg in 1998, as well as highly frequented public locales, such as Ban Jelačić Square, the main square in Zagreb, in 2002. In the context of this new public sphere of the post-socialist space, Iveković’s work begins to take on a more deliberately activist role. One of the significant elements of the piece is visibility – in bringing the issues related to women, together with the women themselves, into the public domain. Whereas much of Iveković’s earlier work had a narrower viewership, her current work is now strategically positioned in the public realm. Because artists associated with the New Art Practice such as herself largely operated

201

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

202

3.17

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

Sanja Iveković, Women’s House, 1998–2003, Utrecht, 2009. Courtesy: Sanja Iveković

on the margins and against the grain, their work was not publicly or widely consumed. As Ivana Bago describes it, Podroom, the self-managed gallery created by Iveković and her partner at the time, Dalibor Martinis, ‘played in the minor league, in the game of unpleasing the crowd … they “removed themselves from the crowd”’.89 She even suggests that ‘at the time when they evolved there was no audience, just the negotiation of a community’.90 In the post-socialist era, however, this art was able to enter the public realm and engage with members of the general public, both within and outside the context of art. The piece also uses performance to provide agency to the women involved, inviting them to tell their stories and create masks of their faces. Here, the performance is about the social aspect of bringing the women together, providing a platform for their voices and enabling them to take control over the narrative of their lives. The issue of visibility is one on which feminist artists in the West in the 1970s also focused, bringing formerly taboo topics such as menstruation (Womanhouse) and the trials of motherhood (Mary Kelly) into the public light and discourse. It is also a question that Linda Nochlin raised in her seminal 1971 essay, ‘Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?’ The efforts of the first generation of feminist artists in North America were mainly directed toward the revelation of the untold story of women’s contributions

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Gender

to history (Judy Chicago) and art history (Nochlin). In socialist Yugoslavia, however – at least in its early days – women’s contributions were recognised, for example, in the tradition of naming factories after female partisans; in the late and post-socialist periods, as the postwar fervour of the revolution waned, these names gradually disappeared, eventually being replaced, in the capitalist environment, by brand names. Bojana Pejić comments on the fact that this erasure took place as early as the 1970s, when women partisans no longer played leading roles in Yugoslav war films.91 In SOS Nada Dimić (2000) and Gen XX (1997–2001), Iveković recuperates these names and restores their visibility through advertising and mass media. These pieces renovate and relight the sign on the facade of the former Nada Dimić factory (SOS Nada Dimić) or re-create fashion magazine advertisements (Gen XX), restoring the names of the female antifascist heroes that had been replaced by the names of famous brands such as Armani or Dior. This strategy of commandeering the mass media recalls work by second-generation feminist artists such as Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger, and this element of visibility provides a platform for the development of a more cohesive social movement that can help raise or change consciousness among the general public. An interesting parallel to this recuperative strategy can be seen in a work by the Slovenian artist duo Eclipse, an art collective made up of two female artists, who are known simply as ‘the blonde’, and ‘the redhead’, as described on their website (b. 1975 and 1976). Their 1999 performance Venus Test sought to bring recognition to female artists who are still not acknowledged in the canon of Slovenian art history. Stroking the penis of a blindfolded man (who actually worked as an escort), one half of the duo spoke the names of female artists from the history of Slovenian art, yet none provoked an arousal in the man. The performance highlights the fact that Slovenian art history has been slow to recognise these women’s contribution to Slovenian visual culture. Commenting on Venus Test more recently, however, the two members of Eclipse lament the fact that not much has changed, and that the figures invoked in the performance still await the art-historical recognition they deserve.92 Orsolya (Orshi) Drozdik (b. 1946) began making work exploring gender and the female body in Hungary in the 1970s. One of her earlier performances also took art history to task for exclusionary treatment. In NudeModel (4–10 January 1977; figure 3.18), a performance in the form of a week-long exhibition at the Young Artist’s Club, Drozdik sat in front of an easel and proceeded to draw a live female model over the course of the five days. The exhibition was opened by a different person each day: four male artists and one male art historian, respectively. Viewers could not enter the room where the performance took place, but could only witness it from the doorway; from this vantage point, they saw only the back of the model and the artist at work, but not the front of her easel. The doorway was also covered with a sheer gauze curtain,

203

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

204

3.18

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

which further hindered viewing. While the artist played the traditionally male role of the active artist, casting the gaze on the nude model, the viewers were only able to see the artist working, yet could not reify the nude model through their gaze. In this way, Drozdik had turned the tables on the art system, while also commenting on its absurdity. NudeModel was the culmination of a body of work that the artist began in 1975, which started with the series of performances entitled Individual Mythology (1975–77), in which she used a slide projector to project images on her moving or dancing body. Dance, in particular the Free Dance movement, was very much connected with her feminist point of view. Free dance was popular in Central and Eastern Europe, and in Hungary it was taught at the Orkesztika School. For her research on this project, Drozdik visited Hungarian choreographer and dancer Valéria Dienes several times. She also developed her critical approach through ‘the patriarchal political power propaganda and its own limitations, simply using its method of dialectical materialism that I learned at the academy’.93 Finally, she researched and rephotographed images of women from the library in the Fine Arts Academy, appropriating them, in her words, from her own point of view.94 During the exhibition-performance NudeModel, Drozdik exhibited these photographs, along with photos taken from the exhibition the previous day. Interestingly, this was around the time that the New York artist Sherrie Levine was appropriating works by

Orshi Drozdik, NudeModel, 1977, Budapest. Courtesy: Orshi Drozdik

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Gender

­ hotographers such as Walker Evans and Aleksander Rodchenko and signing p them as her own. In 2007, several decades after the event, Emese Süvecz interviewed some of the participants to gather their recollections. Drozdik explained, ‘The intention was to show the grotesque nature of the situation – that a woman artist has to draw a naked woman’.95 The model was well-known, employed at the art academy, drawn by many and had even been the lover of some. Therefore, she was not only the object of desire in the eyes of art history, which dictates that women be depicted as nudes in paintings and not paint themselves, but she was also literally the object of desire of many of the men in the academy, and in attendance at the exhibition. However, the audience was denied the opportunity to cast its desiring gaze on her nude body. Instead, that gaze was usurped by the artist, but it was not the same type of gaze. Drozdik states, ‘I did not look at the nude model with desire’, commenting that the model had been a mistress of some of her male friends and colleagues. ‘She was the object of their sexual desire. And I inherited an academic method, which is totally ambiguous: for women to depict naked women is an ambiguous procedure. It was a normative condition that women painted female nude models, and no one had changed this’.96 Indeed, women on both sides of the Atlantic were attempting to alter this state of affairs, but Drozdik was one of a few lone voices in her native Hungary to do so at the time. She left the country in 1978, settling in the United States two years later by way of Canada, where she performed I Try to Be Transparent in 1980. In a gallery filled with traditional art-historical depictions of women, such as reclining nudes, she lay naked on a glass slab hung above the exhibition space; a mirror above her enabled the audience down below to see a full, 360-degree-view of her body. It would be another nine years until the Guerrilla Girls’ iconic poster asking whether women have to be naked to get into the Metropolitan Museum, stating that less than 5 percent of the artists in the museum’s modern art sections are women, but that 85 percent of the nudes are female. However, in this piece, Drozdik posed this question with her body. Although the title indicates that she aims to be visible, what she really is, as a female artist in the gallery, is invisible – both because of her gender and because of the height at which she has placed herself. It is as if she literally situated herself in the metaphorical position that had eluded and continues to elude many women artists – a room of her own in a gallery. According to Hock, Drozdik began working on pieces that interrogated female subjectivity and corporeality without an awareness of feminist discourse or feminist art practices in the West. The source of her ‘“inspiration” was rather the masculinist atmosphere of the neo-avant-garde in which she started her creative practice’.97 However, her work was received with indifference, prompting her to immigrate to the West. Since 1989, she has divided her time between New York and Budapest. Following her emigration, she began

205

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

206

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

treating consciously feminist themes, and since then, she has sought to introduce feminism into the discourse in Hungary by such means as compiling a feminist reader in 1998.98 Like Eclipse and Iveković, the Lithuanian artistic duo of Gediminas Urbonas (b. 1966) and Nomeda Urboniene (b. 1968), who work individually as artists and together as Urbonas Studio, created a work aimed at r­ ecognising women’s contribution to history and visual culture. This is the central theme of Ruta Remake (2002–04), which draws on the artists’ compilation of an extensive archive of women’s voices from Soviet and post-Soviet Lithuania. The piece consists of two main parts: the recorded voices of notable women from recent Lithuanian history, taken from radio, television and film, which are then analysed in interviews by female scholars in the field of oral culture – writers, linguists, musicologists – and those interviews are recorded as well. The work was a performative and interactive installation, insofar as the visitors could alter the sound quality of the recorded files, and choose those they wanted to hear. The impulse to create the work came from an awareness of an ‘absence of women’s voices’ in contemporary Lithuania.99 Ruta Remake, which the artists term a ‘subjective archive’, can be accessed through a technological device of their own making.100 The recordings of the women’s voices are saved in the archive as MIDI files. Light is beamed onto a surface, and when the viewer moves his or her hand through the light, it is translated into a signal that accesses and plays the sound files. This way, viewers engage with the sounds in their own manner, and thereby receive a discordant yet customised impression of the various voices instead of a single sound file. The artists characterise archives as ‘structures organised by regimes of governmentality’, and the motivation behind this work was to ‘hijack those power structures and subvert them’.101 In creating an installation replete with a mélange of voices, what the viewer or listener gets, then, is not only a cross section of women’s voices from society, but also an abstract of women’s voices in general, as opposed to a single, authoritative voice, which one usually gets with an archive.102 In this way, their piece fills the absence of women’s voices in contemporary Lithuania with a literal cacophony of them. Another ‘remake’ of sorts can be seen in the work of Bulgarian artist Boryana Rossa. In 2007, the artist created the performance Blood Revenge 2 (figure 3.19), in which she stitched a dildo to her abdomen and then proceeded to cut it off. The performance revisited the mythicised death of the Viennese Actionist Rudolph Schwarzkogler, reportedly the result of a 1972 performance in which he harmed himself and supposedly cut off his penis.103 Prior to the amputation, Rossa addressed the audience. She discussed the likely apocryphal nature of the account of his death, explaining that the iconic photographs of that performance were not of him, and that the person in the photos did not die from the procedure. With this performance, the artist claimed agency

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Gender

207

where it had previously been denied. She stated, ‘As a woman who works with her body, I had to “compete” with this “heroic” action during my whole art career. I was often told there is no stronger gesture than an amputation of a penis. Since I couldn’t amputate my penis (I don’t have one), I decided to reenact the performance considering the anatomy of my body’.104 In doing so, Rossa both created a new myth for art history and levelled the playing field. Rossa considers herself a feminist, and rejects the notion that feminism was absent from Bulgaria. Although feminism was not a word that was used at the art academy, and it was not until the late 1990s that feminist texts began to appear in popular publications, the artist herself experienced an emancipated household, in which her parents, both engineers, shared in the housework. Growing up, she was surprised to learn that not all families were like this. Consequently, she sought to change the anti-feminist environment in Bulgaria and forged her own path.105 Like Sandra Sterle, Polish artist Katarzyna Kozyra (b. 1963) became a subject ‘in rebellion’ when she put on a fake phallus and entered the men’s section of the Gellert Bathhouse in Budapest in the 1999 video performance The Men’s Bathhouse (figure 3.20).106 While Kozyra’s piece demonstrates Judith Butler’s idea of gender as performed as opposed to biological, this concept

Boryana Rossa, Blood Revenge 2, 2007. Photo: Pravdoliub Ivanov. Courtesy: Boryana Rossa

3.19

3.20

Katarzyna Kozyra, The Men’s Bathhouse, 1999, Budapest. Courtesy: Katarzyna Kozyra

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Gender

was foreign to most of the general public in Poland at the time, which, when surveyed, stated its belief that gender was an inherent biological trait.107 The Men’s Bathhouse represented Poland at that year’s Venice Biennale, provoking a controversy in the media surrounding the phallus and its cost to the taxpayers. In challenging the male-female binary that had long been upheld, first by the communist government and later by the Catholic Church, the controversy affirms the accuracy of Piotrowski’s claim that such authority systems depend on a culture based on phallocentrism, and that any challenge to this principle threatens the status quo. In the case of Poland, this is the status quo preserved by the Catholic Church, deemed sacred and untouchable by the nation’s population for its role in sustaining the country over one hundred years of partitions and a half-century of communist rule. Kozyra’s work was controversial for another reason as well, stemming from the general lack of knowledge of contemporary art that had until the 1990s been shared among small circles of artists. Poland witnessed a series of controversies and media scandals over artworks that touched on religion, gender and other issues in the immediate post-communist period.108 Thus, Kozyra’s Men’s Bathhouse was not the only artwork to raise questions as to the nature of contemporary art, much like Sterle’s 2008 performance Nausea. In The Men’s Bathhouse and Nausea, the visceral nature of performance enabled these works, along with the gender issues they addressed, to reach a non-art public, perhaps also giving rise to a change of consciousness along the way. Both cases demonstrate the manner in which this discourse – on gender, sexuality and the body – entered the public sphere: not, as in Western culture, through academic discourse or activism, but via the cultural domain.109 This phenomenon, which I believe is specific to post-communist Eastern Europe, speaks not only to the power, potential and efficacy of art, but also the great responsibility that contemporary artists currently bear. The Men’s Bathhouse was preceded two years earlier by The Women’s Bath­­ house (1997), in which Kozyra filmed the female visitors acting naturally in their side of the bathhouse, outside the confines of the male gaze. What the artist learned, in comparing these two situations, was that there is an equal or at least comparable pressure on men to conform to a certain standard. In her words, there is something in our society that says that men have to look good, earn a good living. They have to in order to support their family … They also have to be sexually ready … The only thing is that men don’t really have anything to protect themselves with, because women have started to protect themselves with feminism … but I think that men should start to protect themselves as well.110

This statement echoes the ideas behind Bulgarian artist Ventsislav Zankov’s project All About Him (2004–08), which aimed to provoke discussion

209

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

210

3.21

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

Ljubomir Armutiev, Portrait of a Man Wearing a T-Shirt, 2007. Photograph for the project All About Him. Courtesy: Ventsislav Zankov

regarding men’s changing roles in society following the political trans­­ formations of 1989. The project invited artists from twelve countries to create images inter­rogating the notion of masculinity in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Fourteen of the fifty works were displayed on billboards around the city of Sofia. They included Ljubomir Armutiev’s Portrait of a Man Wearing a T-Shirt (figure 3.21), which captures Zankov grinning at the camera with his long, flowing, feminine-looking hair and full masculine beard, wearing a t-shirt that reads, ‘I can’t cook and I don’t iron’. Zankov describes the purpose of the project as ‘self-reflection with a focus on the intimate and the personal in an environment of clichés and commercial “messages”, and thus questioning the authenticity of the convenient commercial image in the process’.111 The topic of men’s position in society following the sociopolitical changes of 1989 has rarely been broached. The artist comments that most discussions concerning gender and gender roles occur in the context of feminism, and that thus ‘[m]en need feminism, too’.112 The project Corrections (figure 3.22), by the Bulgarian artist RASSIM (Rassim Krastev; b. 1972), further attests to Kozyra’s observations in the male bathhouse. Over the course of two years, from 1996 to 1998, the artist made ‘corrections’ to his own body by following a rigorous body-building programme

®

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Gender

®

211

3.22

RASSIM , Corrections, 1996–98. Five video projections: films, DVD, sound each 35–45 min.) and two posters: Before and After, each 210 x 90 cm. Photo: Angel Tsvetanov. Courtesy: RASSIM

®

and diet. The artist explains that this project rejects ‘the romantic model of the artist still prevalent in Bulgaria, thin, with long hair and face marked by the sleepless nights’, seeking instead to transform the artist’s body into a work of art.113 While the piece could be considered a long-durational performance, RASSIM prefers to regard it as a sculpture of his own body, which took a long time to carve into a work of art. The project was financed by the FRAC Languedoc Roussillion Fund for Contemporary Art in Montpellier and ended when the funding did, as it required significant resources to afford the artist’s protein supplements and training. Following the project, the artist remarked that his body ‘carried the marks of the beauty of the show industry’,114 meaning the culture of beautification promoted by the mass media. As with Iveković, Mrdja and Žanić, RASSIM ’s project reveals the hard work that it takes for a body (in this case, male) to conform to the mass-media ideal. Indeed, despite his arduous efforts, the artist’s physique was not of the necessary proportions for him to actually become a

®

®

212

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

body builder; since he is tall, he would never be able to acquire the requisite bulk in muscle mass. When the artist ceased the training and supplements, his body reverted to its previous proportions. His performance calls to mind American artist Eleanor Antin’s 1972 work Carving – a Traditional Sculpture, wherein she subjected herself to a strict diet for three weeks, photographing her body each day. Like RASSIM , Antin uses her body as material, sculpting it to conform to the socially accepted notion of female beauty, with a slender figure. What both projects illustrate is the near-impossibility for either gender to adapt itself and live up to the standards of beauty and image defined and sustained by the mass media.115

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

®

A room of one’s own Virginia Woolf ’s 1929 essay ‘A Room of One’s Own’ argues for a literal and figurative space for woman: a physical space in which to create and be rebellious, in order to create a metaphorical space for herself, her work and womankind in a patriarchal society. In the male-dominated art world, both concepts of space are relevant. For example, American Abstract Expressionist painter Lee Krasner is known to have initially created smaller works of art because she confined herself to a smaller room of the house she shared with her husband, Jackson Pollock, who occupied the larger studio space. In communist Eastern Europe, where private space was at a premium due to urban planning that allocated minimal space for shared living areas, a woman’s effort to find a space of her own was that much more challenging. Maria Pinińska-Bereś (1931–99) was a sculptor who also worked in performance and installation, whose art was often overshadowed by that of her husband – the sculptor and performance artist Jerzy Bereś. While their home was equipped with a studio, it was filled with Bereś’s large wooden sculptures. When visitors would come to the studio, they would look away if they spotted her work, which included pink and white soft sculptural pillows. They expected her to make tea while the men spoke about art, and some even referred to her as ‘Bereś’s wife’.116 Consequently, instead of ascribing to a strong political platform in her work, the artist often addressed her subjective experience in relation to gender and oppression. According to Ewa Małgorzata Tatar, Pinińska-Bereś analysed the patriarchal order, ‘deconstructing it and trying to revitalise the feminine in the space assigned to it’.117 She often utilised humour and irony to address these issues, creating objects composed of soft, usually pink forms that referred to a feminine sensibility, but were not self-referential. In the view of Agata Jakubowska, ‘she adopted a “feminine” position but did not identify with it, if only because in this dichotomous pair the woman is silent, a fact that she did not accept’.118 The artist also often focused on space, as in her 1980 performance Annexation of the Landscape, in which she created a

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Gender

private and female space outdoors in the landscape by fencing off an area with white stakes and rope, complete with a pink flag and a sign in curly, “feminine” script that read, ‘(temporarily) annexed area’. The artist also hung sheets of cloth from the rope as if hanging out the laundry, further designating this as a domestic space. The message is clear: a woman can only have a space that is temporary, makeshift, improvised. But in utilising the genres of performance and Land Art, the artist is able to shape the space according to her own design, accessing an area of land with a much larger architectural footprint than that of her own apartment – the earth. Dóra Maurer (b. 1937) is primarily a painter and graphic designer, although she is also known for having created pioneering works that can be situated in the context of female body art in Hungary in the 1970s and 1980s. In 1967, she moved to Vienna on a scholarship, and the following year she married Tibor Gayor, an Austrian citizen, which enabled her to obtain an Austrian passport and freely travel between Hungary and Austria. She describes her time in Austria as ‘energizing’, and she has utilised her dual citizenship to disseminate knowledge of contemporary art and the avant-garde. She organised exhibitions on Constructivism both in Hungary and abroad, and even invited the Austrian artist Peter Weibel to Budapest; he had his first video exhibition there in 1977.119 She began creating photographs in 1968–69, and in the 1970s she made a number of experimental films with the assistance of a film student who acted as her cameraman. One of these films was entitled Proportions (1979), for which Maurer drew lines on the surface of a piece of paper to create a grid – one based on the dimensions of her own body. She then performed minimalist actions in the squares, such as placing her hands next to one another, stepping in the squares, lying on the paper – comparing the proportions of her hands, arms, feet and legs. In this piece, she upended Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, making woman the measure of all things and placing her at the centre of the universe. Just one year prior, in neighbouring Romania, Grigorescu had enacted the Vitruvian Man in his super 8 film Man, Centre of the Universe. Interestingly, a similar gesture can be seen in a photographic performance by Natalia LL, Points of Support (1978; figure 3.23), in which the artist positions herself, naked, in the landscape, in the shape of various constellations, placing her feet and hands on the ground at the points where the stars are positioned in the constellations. Like Natalia LL, Maurer does not identify herself as a feminist or feminist artist, and while Natalia LL sees herself as a conceptual artist, most of Maurer’s work comprises geometric abstract paintings in bold colours, reminiscent of Frank Stella. While Proportions can no doubt be understood in the context of her two-dimensional work as a study of form and geometry, it is also usefully considered in relation to female body art. Maurer was not unaware of the feminist discourse or developments in feminist art transpiring at that time,

213

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

214

3.23

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

Natalia LL, Points of Support, Gwiazdozbiór Wolarz / Boötes Constellation, 1978. Performance. Colour prints, unique pieces, 50 x 100 cm. Courtesy: Natalia LL and lokal_30 Gallery.

such as the 1975 exhibition Women – Art – New Tendencies, which was held at the Krinzinger Gallery, Innsbruck, Austria, and in which Natalia LL and Marina Abramović took part. In addition to serving as a conduit of information on the art world between Budapest and Vienna, Maurer also transmitted information on feminism and feminist art to Hungary. In 1979, she initiated and moderated a radio broadcast on women’s status in the visual arts, ‘F’: Women in the Arts, in which Judit Kele also participated. Retrospectively, however, Maurer characterised her interest in feminism as more intellectual curiosity than motivating force; according to Hock, the feminist discourse did not really speak to the artist, who did not feel discriminated against because of her gender. The same can be said about Romanian artist Geta Brătescu, who has devoted most of her work to drawing and abstract collages. The artist likewise does not identify as a feminist or feel disadvantaged by having worked as a woman in the male-dominated art world in Romania in the communist period. In the 1980s, she and Ion Grigorescu collaborated on two films, which, much like Maurer’s Proportions, explore the dynamics of space. In the repressive atmosphere of Ceauşescu’s Romania, Brătescu’s studio was her sanctuary and through which she defined herself. Consequently, it features as a ‘character’ in some of her performances. The 1978 film The Studio, filmed by Grigorescu and scripted by Brătescu, consists of three parts: The Sleep, The Awakening and The Game. Playing the role of the ‘Eye’, according to the written scenario, the camera enters the studio and surveys the space, taking in all of the objects and tools in the artist’s studio.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Geta Brătescu, Self-Portrait: Toward White, 1975. Seven b/w photographs,  each 31 x 82 cm. Photos: Mihai Brătescu. Courtesy: Geta Brătescu and Ivan Gallery Bucharest

3.24

Geta Brătescu, Toward White, 1975, Bucharest. Nine b/w photographs,  each 27 x 27 cm. Photos: Mihai Brătescu. Courtesy: Geta Brătescu and Ivan Gallery Bucharest

3.25

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

216

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

The artist is filmed sleeping, then gradually awakening. The Eye then films her at work: she draws a vertical and a horizontal line on a white panel, based on the coordinates of her own body, but does not succeed at drawing a diagonal within those coordinates, reinforcing the idea that one can only live and work within one’s limits. In the final portion of the video, The Game, the artist is transformed into a puppet. Regarded in the context of two of her photographic performances, Self-Portrait: Toward White and Toward White (both 1975; figs. 3.24, 3.25), one can observe a desire on the part of the artist to define the self, to create a self-portrait that encompasses all aspects of her artistic creation. Self-Portrait consists of seven close-up photographs of the artist’s face. Brătescu gradually covers her face with cellophane, so that by the final image the viewer sees only a blank, wrinkled square, a blank canvas – the artist has literally disappeared into and merged with her work. The next piece, Toward White, involves nine photographs, each documenting the gradual papering over of her studio in which, by the end of the series, the artist is similarly covered in a costume of white paper, with white paint on her hands and face. This time, she becomes one with her studio, the space of her creation. Of her studio, she has said, ‘Whenever I try to make philosophical speculations I experience embarrassment, the wince of the amateur. I save myself by repeating to myself that everything I say originates in my studio, the artist’s studio’.120 Much like that of Pinińska-Bereś, Brătescu’s art was the room of her own. Conclusion The subject of gender was fraught in the socialist East and continues to be so in the post-socialist East, a quality that makes itself visible in the feminist gestures enacted throughout the region. Amid the absence of a codified feminist art movement in Eastern Europe, various and disparate acts, by both male and female artists, arose to expose, explore and challenge traditional and received notions of gender identity and sexuality. In doing so, they offer the opportunity for the discourse on gender and gender identity to develop in the cultural sphere as opposed to the academic one. In many cases, by utilising performance and performative gestures these artists have raised and changed consciousness in the public and private spheres alike. While these works’ lack of visibility during the socialist period may have limited their impact and efficacy, new public spaces and audiences have opened up in the post-socialist climate, where the need to address gender – both femininity and masculinity – persists. Notes 1 See Bojana Pejić, ‘Eppur su muove – Introduction’, in Bojana Pejić (ed.), Gender Check: A Reader (Cologne: Buchhandlung Walter König, 2010), p. 21. 2 Of course, this was not the case throughout the East; for example, in an effort

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Gender

to increase the birthrate to build the socialist state, abortion was made illegal in Romania, while contraception was difficult to come by. 3 Piotr Piotrowski, In the Shadow of Yalta: Art and the Avant-Garde in Eastern Europe, 1945–1989 (London: Reaktion Books, 2009), p. 253. 4 Mark Allen Svede, ‘Many Easels, Some Abandoned’, in Alla Rosenfeld and Norton C. Dodge (eds), Art of the Baltics: The Struggle for Freedom of Artistic Expression Under the Soviets, 1945–1991 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2001), p. 241. 5 Natalia LL, in an interview with Krzysztof Jurecki, published in Natalia LL – Texty (Bielsko-Biała, Poland: Galerie Bielska BWA, 2004), p. 484. 6 Although I have not been able to address the contributions of women artists from East Germany in this chapter, I am grateful for the work of scholars studying these artists. See in particular Angelika Richter, ‘Performing Women Artists and Their Networks in the East German Second Public Sphere: Social and Artistic Practices’, in Katalin Cseh-Varga and Adam Czirak (eds), Performance Art in the Second Public Sphere (London: Routledge, forthcoming in 2017); Angelika Richter, ‘Self Directing: Women Artists from the GDR and the Expansion of Their Art in Performance and Actions’, in Bettina Knaup and Beatrice Stammer (eds), Re.Act.Feminism: A Performing Archive (Nuremberg, Germany: Verlag für Moderne Kunst, 2014): pp.  48–56; Angelika Richter, Beatrice E. Stammer and Bettina Knaup (eds), Und jetzt: Künstlerinnen aus der DDR (Nuremberg, Germany: Verlag für Moderne Kunst, 2009). 7 ‘Feminism, n.’, OED Online, Oxford University Press, June 2016, www.oed.com/ view/Entry/69192?redirectedFrom=feminism, accessed 25 July 2016. 8 Kumari Jayawardena, The White Woman’s Other Burden: Western Women and South Asia during British Rule (New York: Routledge, 1995), p. 9. Third-world feminism recognises the feminism of non-Western societies as unique and not simply an offshoot. 9 Martina Pachmanová, ‘In? Out? In Between?’, in Pejić, Gender Check (ed.), p. 39. 10 Edit András, ‘Gender minefield: the heritage of the past; attitudes to feminism in Eastern Europe’, n.paradoxa: international feminist art journal, 11 (October 1999), 4–5. 11 Beata Hock, Gendered Artistic Positions and Social Voices: Politics, Cinema and the Visual Arts in State-Socialist and Post-Socialist Hungary (Stuttgart, Germany: Franz Steiner Verlag Wiesbaden GmbH, 2013), p. 100. 12 Ibid., p. 74. 13 Susan Gal and Gail Kligman, The Politics of Gender after Socialism: A Comparative Socio-Historical Essay (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 5. 14 Lia Perjovschi, in an interview with Amy Bryzgel and Corina L. Apostol, ‘Reflections on artistic practice in Romania, then and now’, Idea, 45 (Autumn 2014), 97. 15 Adelina Popnedeleva, in an interview with the author in Sofia, 22 May 2014. 16 Orshi Drozdik, in an email to the author, 14 June 2016. 17 Jana Geržová, ‘Art and the Question of Gender in Slovak Art’, in Pejić (ed.), Gender Check, p. 309. 18 Jayne Wark, Radical Gestures: Feminism and Performance Art in North America (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006), p. 32. Contrary views, however, were voiced by theorists such as Mary Kelly, Lucy Lippard and Griselda Pollock, questioning whether women’s bodies can function in a political context without being reified.

217

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

218

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

19 Amelia Jones, Body Art: Performing the Subject (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), p. 26. 20 Ibid., p. 180. 21 Piotrowski, In the Shadow of Yalta, p. 385. 22 Lucy Lippard, ‘Sweeping exchanges: the contribution of feminism to the art of the 1970s’, Art Journal 40/1 (Autumn/Winter 1980), 362. 23 Wark, Radical Gestures, p. 181. 24 Katy Deepwell, ‘Questioning stereotypes of feminist art practice’, n.paradoxa: international feminist art journal, 2 (1997), 62. 25 Gal and Kligman, The Politics of Gender after Socialism, p. 103. 26 Hock, Gendered Artistic Positions and Social Voices, p. 34. 27 Piotrowski, In the Shadow of Yalta, p. 385. 28 Pejić, ‘Eppur su muove,’ p. 30. 29 Ibid., p. 31. 30 See Gal and Kligman, The Politics of Gender after Socialism, chapter 2 (‘Reproduction as Politics’), pp. 15–36. 31 Pejić, ‘Eppur su muove’, p. 26. 32 Ibid., p. 24. Interestingly, Angela Dimitrakaki also aims to use feminist scholarship as a lens to ‘see through and act across (or despite) differences’. See Angela Dimitrakaki, Gender, Artwork and the Global Imperative: A Materialist Feminist Critique (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 2013), p. 72. 33 Pejić, ‘Eppur su muove’, p. 24. 34 Bojana Pejić, ‘The Morning After’, in Pejić (ed.), Gender Check, p. 109. 35 See Pat Simpson, ‘Peripheralising patriarchy? Gender and identity in postSoviet art: A view from the west’, Oxford Art Journal, 27:3 (2004), 408. 36 Susan Faludi, Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women (New York: Vintage, 1993). 37 Dimitrakaki, Gender, Artwork and the Global Imperative, p. 5. 38 Ibid., p. 1. 39 Ibid., p. 11. 40 Ibid., p. 73. 41 Sanja Iveković and Antonia Majaca in conversation, ‘Feminism, Activism and Historicisation’, n.paradoxa: international feminist art journal, 23 (2009), 9. 42 Ewa Partum, as quoted in Aneta Szylak, Berenika Partum and Ewa Małgorzata Tatar (eds), Ewa Partum (Gdańsk, Poland: Institut Sztuki Wyspa, 2013), p. 5. 43 Text read by Ewa Partum to attendees of Change: My Problem Is the Problem of a Woman in 1979, published in ibid., pp. 136, 140 (translation slightly modified by the author). 44 Pejić, ‘The Morning After’, p. 107. 45 Ibid., p. 108. 46 Borjana Mrdja, in an interview with the author in Banja Luka, Bosnia, 29 July 2013. 47 Sandra Sterle, in a Skype interview with the author, 24 April 2014. 48 Mrdja, in an interview with the author in Banja Luka, Bosnia, 29 July 2013. 49 Mare Tralla, in an interview with Pauline van Mourik Broekman, ‘State of Play’, in Angela Dimitrakaki, Pam Skelton and Mare Tralla (eds), Private Views: Spaces and Gender in

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Gender

Contemporary Art from Britain and Estonia (London: Women’s Art Library, 2000), p. 20. 50 Tralla, as quoted in ibid., p. 82. 51 Tralla, as quoted in ibid., p. 18. 52 Tralla created Yes/No together with Marko Laimre and Mari Sobolev. 53 While it is not known whether Želibská was aware of Schneemann’s performance, Restany was knowledgeable about Schneemann’s work, and he curated a solo showing of Želibská’s in Paris in 1974 (her third solo show and her first outside of Czechoslovakia), entitled Le Goût de paradis. See Jana Želibská and Vladimíra Büngerová (eds), Jana Želibská: No Touching, exh. cat. (Bratislava: Slovenská národná galéria, 2012), p. 232. 54 Vladimíra Büngerová, ‘Sex, Nature and Video’, in Jana Želibská, p. 27. 55 Zora Rusinová, ‘Through the Eyes of a Woman or “Eternal Bride of Spring”’, in Jana Želibská, p. 6. 56 Ibid., p. 11. 57 This event was part of the series of actions entitled Terrain I. 58 As described by Birutė Pankūnaitė in ‘A Tender Revolt’, in Linara Dovydaitytė (ed.), emisija 2004 – ŠMC (Vilnius, Latvia: Contemporary Art Centre, 2004), p. 115. 59 Nela Hasanbegović, as stated on her website, www.nelahasanbegovic.com/?wbf_ id=14; accessed 24 September 2015. 60 Text by Ewa Partum, published in Szylak, Partum and Tatar (eds), Ewa Partum, p.  270. 61 Piotrowski, In the Shadow of Yalta, p. 352. 62 Natalia LL, in an interview with Jurecki, p. 485. 63 Natalia LL, in an email interview with the author, January 2015. 64 Irina Bekić, ‘On Photography or (Some) Faces of Vlasta Delimar’, in Martina Munivrana (ed.), Vlasta Delimar: This is I (Zagreb, Croatia: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2014), p. 146. 65 Piotrowski, In the Shadow of Yalta, p. 358. 66 In correspondence with the artist, she requested that I list her birthdate as 1926, stating that she ‘hate[s] categorizing people according to a date that has nothing to do with anything’. Insofar as I have provided the factual birth and death dates of the artists to provide context, I have not included her birthdate here (fictional or factual), although I include this note in an effort to comply with the artist’s request. Judit Kele, in an email to the author, 28 June 2016. 67 Hock, Gendered Artistic Positions and Social Voices, p. 194. 68 The artist emphasises that she did not want to become a Westerner, but rather to interrogate both the identity politics surrounding one’s geopolitical place of birth, as well as the politics of inclusion and exclusion, and the methods by which those inclusions and exclusions occur. Email to the author, 24 May 2016. That said, it is important to note that it was specifically an EU passport, as opposed to one of any other region, that she sought. 69 Tanja Ostojić, in an interview with the author in Berlin, 8 May 2014. 70 An interesting parallel with this project can be seen in Estonian artist Marko Raat’s 1999 film, For Aesthetic Reasons, which charts the fictitious journey of art historian Andres Kurg, who travels to Denmark and attempts to migrate there ‘for aesthetic reasons’, stating that he really likes Danish architecture and design, and expressing

219

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

220

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

the notion that one should not only be permitted to migrate because of family or war. The project, like Ostojić’s, questions the rules we have in place about who can live where and why. 71 As mentioned in an email correspondence with the author, 24 May 2016. 72 While the term ‘biopolitics’ gained currency in the 1970s with Michel Foucault’s theories on social and political policies in relation to the body, more recently it has been used in discussions of art projects, such as this one, where the line between the artist’s life and the artwork is decisively blurred. See, for example, Boris Groys, Art Power (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008), chapter 4 (‘Art in the Age of Biopolitics: From Artwork to Documentation’), pp. 53–66. 73 Hock, Gendered Artistic Positions and Social Voices, p. 48. 74 See Pamela Allara, ‘Geo-Bodies: Feminist Activists Crossing Borders’, in Marina Gržinić and Tanja Ostojić (eds), Integration Impossible? The Politics of Migration in the Artwork of Tanja Ostojić (Berlin: Argo Books, 2009), p. 178. 75 Sefik Tatlić, ‘The Truth Machine: The Relationship between Life and Sovereign Power’, in Gržinić and Ostojić (eds), Integration Impossible?, p. 233. 76 Angela Dimitrakaki, ‘Women’s Lives, Labour, Contracts, Documents: The Biopolitical Tactics of Feminist Art, Act Two and a Half ’, in Angela Dimitrakaki and Kristen Lloyd (eds), Economy: Art, Production and the Subject in the 21st Century (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015), p. 93. 77 Jan Verwoert, ‘Life as It Is Lived: Art, Ethics, and the Politics of Sharing All of Life’s Aspects’, in Marta Dziewanska (ed.), Ion Grigorescu: In the Body of the Victim (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), p. 47. 78 Piotrowski, In the Shadow of Yalta, p. 384. 79 Ibid., p. 385. 80 Ion Grigorescu, ‘Diaries’, in Dziewanska (ed.), Ion Grigorescu, p. 63. 81 Verwoert, ‘Life as It Is Lived’, p. 47. 82 Grigorescu, ‘Diaries’, p. 63. 83 Croatian artist Sanja Iveković was involved in the creation of this programme. 84 Ivana Bago, as quoted in the discussion of Nausea on the artist’s website, http:// sandrasterle.com/Nausea, accessed 25 July 2016. 85 In January 1968, a group of artists who eventually became known as the Red Peristyle group painted a red square on the main court of Diocletian’s Palace in Split (see chapter 1). This public action was repeated by Croatian artist Igor Grubić (b. 1969) in the same location in 1998, although this time the artist painted a black circle in the square. Both actions were widely known, having been discussed in the news media and elsewhere. 86 Natasha Kadin, ‘One night stand s državom’ / ‘One Night Stand with the State’, in Natasha Kadin (ed.), State Abed (Split, Croatia: Gallery of Fine Arts, 2014), p. 17. 87 Sanja Iveković, in an interview with Katarzyna Pabijanek, ‘Women’s house: Sanja discusses recent projects’, ARTMargins, 20 (December 2009), www.artmargins. com/ index.php/5-interviews/541-qwomens-houseq-sanja-ivekovic-discuses-recentprojects-interview, accessed 21 January 2015. 88 See the mission statement (misja) of the Centre for Women’s Studies Zagreb on its official website: www.zenstud.hr/o-nama-2/o-nama/, accessed 25 September 2015 (translation mine).

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Gender

89 Ivana Bago, ‘A window and a basement: negotiating hospitality at la galerie des locataires and podroom – The working community of artists’, ARTMargins, 12–3 (January 2012), 131. 90 Ibid. 91 Pejić, ‘The Morning After’, p. 108. 92 Eclipse, in an interview with the author in Ljubljana, 1 September 2013. 93 Orshi Drozdik, in an email to the author, 14 June 2016. 94 Ibid. 95 See Emese Süvecz’s interview with the participants of NudeModel in Tranzit.org’s Parallel Chronologies: An Archive of East European Exhibitions (2007), http:// tranzit.org/exhibitionarchive/texts/emese-suvecz/, accessed 24 September 2015. 96 Ibid. 97 Hock, Gendered Artistic Positions and Social Voices, p. 190. 98 Ibid., p. 207. 99 As stated on the artists’ website, www.nugu.lt/ (see Ruta Remake), accessed 24 September 2015. 100 Gediminas Urbonas, speaking about Ruta Remake in a video recording by Kunststiftung NRW (2012), http://vimeo.com/53668422, accessed 24 September 2015. 101 Ibid. 102 Nomeda Urbonas, in ibid. 103 Boryana Rossa, as stated on the artist’s website: http://boryanarossa.com/bloodrevenge-2/, accessed 11 November 2016 104 For a deconstruction of this myth, utilising in-depth formal analysis of the photographic documentation of Schwarzkogler’s performance, see Susan Jarosi, ‘The image of the artist in performance art: the case of Rudolf Schwarzkogler’, Sztuka i dokumentacja 8 (2013), 65–77. (Published in Polish as ‘Wierunek artysty w sztuce performance: Przypadek Rudolfa Schwarzkoglera’.) 105 The reference is to an exhibition at the XXL Gallery in Sofia, Bulgaria, in 2000, entitled Antifeminism Antimachismo, curated by Diana Popova. The exhibition was organised in order to explore the attitudes of artists who did not grow up under the so-called emancipation of communism. The title emerged from the rejection of feminism in Bulgaria by women who viewed the conditions of that emancipation, such as guaranteed employment, as an obligation, rather than a privilege. See Kirsten Godsee, ‘Red Nostalgia: Communism, Women’s Emancipation, and Economic Transformation in Bulgaria’, in Edith Saurer, Margareth Lanzinger and Elisabeth Frysak (eds), Women’s Movements: Networks and Debates in PostCommunist Countries in the 19th and 20th Centuries (Cologne: Böhlau, 2006), p.  41. 106 For a thorough discussion of The Men’s Bathhouse and The Women’s Bathhouse, see my study Performing the East: Performance Art in Russia, Latvia and Poland since 1980 (London: I.B. Tauris, 2013), chapter 3 (‘Filming Young Girls and Older Men: Performing Gender in Poland’), pp. 147–221. 107 See Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990). Mira Marody and Anna Giza-Poleszczuk, ‘Changing Images of Identity in Poland’, in Susan Gal and Gail Kligman (eds), Reproducing Gender: Politics, Publics, and Everyday Life after Socialism (Princeton, N.J.: Prince-

221

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

222

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

ton University Press, 2000), p. 151. 108 Kozyra was lambasted by the mass media for the use of taxidermied animals as material in her 1993 Pyramid of Animals (mentioned in chapter 2); Anda Rottenberg lost her job as Director of Warsaw’s Zachęta National Gallery following the installation of Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan’s sculpture Ninth Hour (1999), depicting Pope John Paul II lying on the floor after being struck by a meteorite; and Dorota Nieznalska was arrested, and eventually convicted, for offending religious sentiment, for her 2002 work Passion, a photographic installation that contained a close-up image of a penis in the frame of a cross. See, for example, Bożena Grochala (ed.), Sztuka Dzisiaj (Warsaw: Stowarzyszenie Historyków Sztuki, 2002). For an excellent analysis of feminist art in Poland, see Izabela Kowalczyk, MatkiPolki, Chłopcy i Cyborgi … Sztuka i feminism w Polsce (Poznan, Poland: Galerija Miejska ‘Arsenał’, 2010), along with her book on critical art in Poland in the 1990s involving gender and the body: Izabela Kowalczyk, Ciało i władza: Polska sztuka krytyczna lat 90. (Warsaw: Wydawnctwo Sic!, 2002). See also Jolanta Ciesielska and Agata Smalcerz (eds), Sztuka Kobiet, exh. cat. (Bielsko-Biała, Poland: Galeria Bielska BWA, 2000). 109 This is the argument that I also made in Performing the East and provide further support for here, with additional examples from the region. 110 Katarzyna Kozyra, in an interview with the author in Berlin, 22 September 2007. 111 See ‘The Final Selection of 14 Artists for Billboard Action All About Him 2008 22.09–06.10 Sofia Center’, 12 September 2008, on the All About Him website, http://a-a-h.info/index_en.html, accessed 25 September 2015. 112 As stated on the artist’s website, www.rassim.com/atareview2.html, accessed 6 June 2014. 113 Ventsislav Zankov, in an interview with the author in Sofia, 1 June 2014. 114 Ibid. 115 Corrections recalls a series of objects created by Polish artist Zbigniew Libera (b.  1959) in the immediate post-communist period. Similarly titled Corrective Devices, the work comprises a series of child-sized toys to be displayed in a gallery and whose manufacture suggested that they could be mass-produced. One of these performative objects was a weightlifting machine, Body Master for Children up to the Age of 9 (1995), perfectly sized for a nine-year-old boy, but instead of weights there were cardboard boxes to lift. For the artist, it was not the actual weightlifting that was important, but going through the motions of doing so. By repeating the gestures, the child would learn how to act in the adult world. 116 See Ewa Małgorzata Tatar, ‘On Producing Space’, in Maria Pinińska-Bereś, Natalia LL and Ewa Partum, 3 Women: Maria Pinińska-Bereś, Natalia LL, Ewa Partum (Warsaw: Zachęta National Gallery of Art, 2011), p. 15. 117 Ibid., p. 16. 118 Agata Jakubowska, ‘Lips Wide Shut’, in 3 Women, p. 27. 119 Dóra Maurer, in conversation with Barbara Willert, ‘Just a Moment Please …’, in Barbara Willert (ed.), Dóra Maurer: Snapshots (Waldenbuch, Germany: Museum Ritter, 2014), p. 47. 120 Geta Brătescu, as quoted in Alina Şerban, ‘Strategies of Self-Representation’, in Alina Şerban (ed.), Geta Brătescu: The Studio (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2013), p. 160. Emphasis in the original.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Politics and identity

They (art catalogue text writers, curators, journalists, etc.) always read my work in the geopolitical context of the country I represent. So no matter what my work was about – it was seen only in the light of this Balkan communism – post-communism, war-post-war, anti-modern tradition, weird local habits, and described in terms of cultural, social and political references related to the place I come from. – Vladimir Nikolić, 2007

Roselee Goldberg reductively characterises performance art from the former communist countries in Eastern Europe prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall as almost ‘exclusively’ political.1 As I have already shown through numerous examples of performative work that did not engage with politics, these instances are far more limited than Goldberg asserts. In fact, more often than not, performance and Conceptual Art offered artists an arena in which to experiment, rather than providing a vehicle for dissident political activity. There were artists who made overt or deliberately political statements in their work, but this is only part of the story of performance art in the region. That part of the story is the focus of this chapter. Eastern European artists’ tendency to avoid expressing a political position stems from the association of such content with both political propaganda and what is sometimes seen as its ultimate artistic realisation – Socialist Realism, which infused all art forms with the goal of conveying a clear ideological message in support of the state. In some regions of the East, specifically Poland and Yugoslavia, the state tolerated, or even implicitly supported, abstract and nonobjective art; such work was designated in the Yugoslav context as ‘socialist modernism’ or ‘moderate modernism’ by Serbian art historian Ješa Denegri because it did not and could not support a political message.2 Piotr Piotrowski has cautioned against interpreting Poland’s tolerance of modernism as an indication that its artists enjoyed creative freedom; instead, he writes, this acceptance should be seen for what it was – an effort to mask the fact that in allowing artists to create nonobjective or expressionist work, the government was implicitly dissuading them from conveying political engagement in

4

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

224

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

their work.3 That said, as this chapter will demonstrate, performance offered a means by which artists could make a political statement without having to navigate official channels of approval or – more likely, rejection – of their work. Michel Feher has described the body as an ‘actualiser of power relations’ in contemporary society. At the same time, he says, it ‘resists power’.4 Thus, for him, the body encompasses the tension ‘between mechanisms of power and techniques of resistance’.5 Nowhere is this truer than in the socialist spaces of Eastern Europe, where the body, in both public and private space, was constantly policed. Compliance and conformity comprised one survival strategy. Another strategy was complete disengagement in order to avoid the repercussions that almost inevitably came with activism. A third option, one that has been addressed by Klara Kemp-Welch, invoking Hungarian writer and dissident György Konrad’s 1982 noted text of that title, is ‘antipolitics’, whereby artists pursue their authentic selves but avoid direct engagement in politics.6 Amelia Jones has observed that it was Jackson Pollock’s ‘active body’ that was promoted worldwide as a symbol of freedom (artistic and otherwise) during the Cold War.7 Furthermore, she describes the development of performance art involving the body, both that of the artist and that of the viewer, as a proverbial wake-up call for passive audiences in the consumer age. In her words, artists created these works to ‘solicit rage, compassion and other emotions which would presumably break down the apathy and passivity promoted by corporate bureaucracy’.8 But what the East lacked in corporate bureaucracy, it more than made up for in governmental bureaucracy, and, one could argue, artists in Eastern Europe also utilised body art as a means of countering passivity and apathy in the face of it. In fact, contemporary Russian artist Petr Pavlensky, discussed at the end of this chapter, has explicitly referenced this apathy as a motivating factor for his visceral performances. During the communist period, active engagement with the cultural sphere offered a sense of empowerment that was largely unavailable in other areas of life. Pavlína Morganová describes creative experiment as a method of endurance for artists. She writes, ‘during the dark years of normalisation, it was a world that they created for themselves to survive’.9 The examples discussed throughout this book sufficiently demonstrate that not all performance art from the communist period was or should be viewed as political. But the positioning of Eastern European art within the matrix of totalitarian control was not completely ignored by cultural workers. Both during and after the collapse of communism, artists used performance to negotiate their positions as active subjects within often-difficult sociopolitical situations. This chapter traces artists’ efforts to cope with the communist environment, the period of transition and the complexities of life in the post-communist era that ensued. The challenges they have faced since the collapse of communism

Politics and identity

225

are wide-ranging and intense, including adapting to their new status as ‘Eastern European artists’, contending with the rise of nationalism, witnessing their nations’ entry (or attempts at entry) into the European Union and experiencing increasing limitations on human rights (especially in Vladimir Putin’s Russia) as well as the horrors of war and its aftermath (most notably in Yugoslavia).

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Performing politics under communism At the collective exhibition 1st Open Studio, held in the private house of Rudolf Sikora on Tehelná 32 in Bratislava in 1970, Marián Mudroch (b. 1945) created a performative piece entitled Observe the House’s Chimneys. Attendees were urged to look up at the sky as they entered the house, only to see two coloured streams of smoke against the grey sky, one red, one blue, invoking the Czech tricolour that was often displayed after the Warsaw Pact troop invasion of 1968 in protest against the Soviet occupation. Also at that event, Mudroch, together with Vladimír Kordoš (b. 1945) and Viliam Jakubík (b. 1945), created the collective performance Czechoslovakia, in which the name of the country was spelled in English, with the use of mechanical toy frogs to form the letters.

László Beke, Meeting of Czech, Slovak and Hungarian Artists: Tug-of-War Action, 26–27 August 1972, Chapel Studio of György Galántai, Balatonboglár. Photo: György Galántai. Courtesy: Artpool Art Research Center, Budapest

4.1

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

226

4.2

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

After winding up the frogs, the toys all moved in separate directions, e­ ssentially destroying the country – as the artists and their fellow Czechs must have felt the Soviet occupiers did.10 A further interrogation of the 1968 invasion was staged in Balatonboglár in 1972, when a group of Czech artists travelled to Hungary on the invitation of László Beke as an act of reconciliation. Beke restaged a scene from the invasion whereby Warsaw Pact troops, enjoying a respite from their duties, engaged in a tug of war, a moment recorded in a photograph that was subsequently published in a Western magazine. In this performance, entitled Meeting of Czech, Slovak and Hungarian Artists: Tug-ofWar Action (figure 4.1), the artists engaged in this contest of strength, with the magazine at the centre of the rope; their actions tore the magazine apart. If for Freud, the mind repeats or revisits a traumatic past event as a way of mastering it, in the case of this action, the artists both reenacted the event and added a violent element in the destruction of the periodical.11 In this way, they represented both a coming together (of the artists at this central meeting point), as well as an erasure (through destruction) of the original coming together of the invading troops. Enabling the artist not only to express opposition or dissent but actually embody it, performance art offered unique opportunities for resistance in a

Ion Grigorescu, Dialogue with Ceauşescu, 1978, Bucharest. Still from video performance. Courtesy: Ion Grigorescu

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Politics and identity

time of great political control. This is exemplified in Ion Grigorescu’s video performance Dialogue with Ceauşescu (1978; figure 4.2), where the artist, playing himself as well as Nicolae Ceauşescu (by wearing a mask), proceeds to interview the man who effectively shut down public dialogue in communist Romania. The artist’s remarks on the piece indicate the liberation it afforded him: ‘I tried to … imagine how he would answer tough questions that in real life nobody would have dared to ask him’.12 He also commented on the risk involved, stating that when his colleague Geta Brătescu saw the masks that he used for the performance in his studio, she rebuked him, claiming that she did not even wish to know what he was doing with them.13 In treating such subject matter, this performance potentially endangered not only the artist but also those in his social circle, who could have been implicated by association should the material have been discovered. In Normalisation-era Czechoslovakia, artists also utilised the medium of performance to express their views on events transpiring in the sociopolitical sphere. In Bianco (1977; figure 4.3), Jan Mlčoch lay on the floor for half an hour, spitting into his own face. He then sat at a table where he spent another thirty minutes unsuccessfully attempting to sign his name on a piece of paper. Bianco was a reference to Charter 77, a text prepared in 1976 and published by dissidents in 1977 calling on the Czech government to address human rights violations in the country following the invasion of 1968. The decision to sign the document was in no way clear-cut; while on the one hand the signatories did so to remain true to their ethical beliefs, on the other they faced persecution and possible loss of employment, both for themselves as well as for their families. Mlčoch’s hesitance to sign represents the concerns shared by many Czech citizens at the time. Štembera, Mlčoch and Miler, the Czech body art Troika, whose extreme body art performances were also discussed in chapter 2, all stopped creating performances around the same time, in the late 1970s. They also almost categorically refuse to speak about their performance work, except in certain circumstances.14 For example, I was unable to interview any of them for this book, and it is for this reason that I rely on other publications on the group for my research. In addition to their frustration with the institutionalisation of performance art, which will be addressed in the next chapter, Pavlína Morganová has also suggested that the reason the artists stopped producing these dangerous works was because of the strong contrast between these artistic works and the very real threat posed by the climate in which they were working. In her words, ‘the awkwardness of artificially risky actions in connection with the real threat faced by Charter 77 signatories also contributed to this’.15 Ultimately, no work of art, even the most visceral performance art, could compare with the reality of life in Normalisation-era Czechoslovakia. The artists abandoned their performative practice for authenticity.

227

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

228

4.3

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

Jan Mlčoch, Bianco, 1977, Prague. Courtesy: Jan Mlčoch

One decade later, artists in communist Czechoslovakia still felt the pressure of the state apparatus, as witnessed in the career trajectory of Tomáš Ruller (b.  1957). Prior to 1984, his work encompassed sculpture, theatre, p ­ erformance and intermedia. After that point, his art began to be censored; deemed unexhibitable for ideological reasons, it gradually started to be rejected from exhibitions.16 In 1985, he was taken to court for some of his actions that were interpreted not as political protests, but as criminal acts. The artist maintains that the trial was simply a game that arose after he met Vaclav Havel, and the government learned of the former’s connections with Charter 77. Ruller was told that the state would drop the charges if he agreed to collaborate with the secret police. Using Roselee Goldberg’s book as evidence, however, Ruller’s lawyer declared Ruller a performance artist, on which grounds his work could not be understood as criminal. The government eventually dropped the case because the political aspect was officially not the issue, plus it was also around this time that Mikhail Gorbachev ushered in perestroika. In 1986, the artist was allowed to travel abroad for the Black Market International European tour, because the authorities expected him to emigrate.17 On his return, his passport was seized. The following year, he was invited to perform at the opening of Documenta 8 by Elisabeth Jappe, who was responsible for the working group on performance art presented at the exhibition; he purchased

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Politics and identity

his ticket, arranged through the official Art Centre agency, and was prepared to go, when he was again pressured by the State Security (Státní bezpečnost, or StB) to become an informant.18 Deciding not to ‘sign the deal’ as he ‘knew how the system worked’, the artist was prohibited from going to Documenta. From this point on, he instead tried to forge a path as an independent artist.19 Ruller was among the few performance artists in the East to document his work with a video camera. For some of his works, he used a camera from the audiovisual centre that was connected with the television studio of the Technical University of Brno (now Brno University of Technology) – which was an illegal act. He notes that documentation had a different significance for Czech performance artists of the 1970s compared with those of the 1980s. While the former used documentation as a way of capturing the event, perhaps to send abroad but not necessarily as part of the artwork, the latter (at least Ruller and his cohort) saw documentation as integral, seeking different ways of capturing their actions and performances and even incorporating that documentation, or the act of documenting, into the work itself. In 1988, Ruller was asked to take part in a rock festival at the Palace of Culture in Prague. He was invited as a fine artist, but when he presented his performance he was stopped by guards – an incident he recorded in what is rare video footage from the time. The police recorded another of his performances, using it as evidence against him in court in addition to showing it in party meetings as an example of ‘Degenerate Art’. Also in 1988, Ruller planned to create a ritualistic performance based on the number 8, which he deems of historical significance given the peasant uprisings of 1848 and 1918, the communist takeover of Czechoslovakia of 1948 and the Warsaw Pact invasion of 1968. Entitled 8.8.88 (figure 4.4), the performance was intended as part of a new independent video journal, Original Videojournal, that was being developed by those involved with Charter 77. Comprising the first Czech independent media activity and intended to be showcased in the new cultural section of the journal’s programme, the performance consists of videos that were to be circulated in the manner of samizdat. Ruller’s proposal for a performance in a gallery, however, was forbidden, so in response the artist created an alternative action, a walk around the Opatov housing district. He led viewers to a concrete mixing plant, climbed up a pile of gravel and fell into a pile of plaster that he brought with him. Then, he set his jacket on fire and fell again, this time into a muddy pond. (This moment was featured as the introduction to the August 1988 edition of the Original Videojournal.) Covered in mud, he climbed a nearby hill; at the end, he offered the viewers bread and wine while Leoš Janáček’s ‘Glagolitic Mass’ played in the background. While the references to Jan Palach’s self-immolation (see chapter 2) were obvious, the artist maintains that the piece also alluded to the Tibetan monks that practice the same type of martyrdom, also noting that

229

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

230

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

fire contains within itself the main processes of life – breathing and oxidation. Morganová has remarked on the ‘therapeutic effects’ of the performance for both the artist and the viewer. The performance may also be seen in terms of Ruller’s method of coping with the difficulties in which he found himself simply for creating experimental actions and installations; rather than giving up by self-immolating, he instead chose to openly express his dissatisfaction with the regime. Hungary was one of the first Eastern Bloc nations to revolt against Soviet control, when in 1956, students led a spontaneous uprising against the government. What followed was a pushback by the authorities and a newly installed Soviet-backed government the following year. During this tumultuous time, one of the first actions in the nation, also considered among the first works of Hungarian Conceptual Art, arose on the streets of Budapest. Entitled Unguarded Money (1956), it comprised a humanitarian act that was later claimed as an action or a work of art by Miklós Erdély. When the Association of Writers placed various Red Cross boxes around the city to collect money for the families of the several thousand killed or wounded during the uprising, Erdély intervened in the act, driving around ‘in the car of the Writers’ Union … chasing away the national guardsmen standing guard next to the collection boxes because they were unable to conceive of the fact that these no longer needed guarding’.20 Erdély later reclaimed and reinterpreted this as an artistic action.21 While Erdély appropriated an action of another ‘author’, reframing it as art through his intervention, a Yugoslav artist of Hungarian origin, Bálint Szombathy, hijacked a 1st May parade with his photographic performance Lenin in Budapest (figure 1.12). After the parade had gone by, he entered the crowd of people in the streets carrying a placard with a portrait of the Bolshevik leader. Miško Šuvaković reads this as signifying the ‘slippage from state control’, insofar as the artist made an unsanctioned intrusion into everyday society. He terms Szombathy’s performances ‘situational subversions’ – a clear reference to the program of the International Situationists, who likewise believed in taking to the streets and turning conventional activities on their head.22 Szombathy’s action also assumes the characteristics of two related concepts discussed earlier in the book, overidentification and subversive affirmation, insofar as the carrying of a Lenin banner on the streets of a socialist country would be perfectly acceptable as a sanctioned activity. Parallel actions can be found in the work of Hungarian artist Endre Tót (b. 1937), who staged a series of street events in West Germany in 1979. Two years earlier, Tót had been awarded a German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) scholarship to travel to West Berlin. It took him some time to receive permission and a passport to leave, and when he did, he was banned from returning to Hungary for five years – exiled from his homeland for his artistic

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Politics and identity

231

pursuits. Tót had been creating conceptual works of art and photographic actions throughout the 1970s, but it was not until he arrived in the West that he said he felt brave enough to create a public action, which he had imagined for years while in Hungary.23 Some of the Very Special Actions that he created in West Berlin were captured on video. In them, he walks alone through the city, carrying a placard featuring such statements as ‘I am glad to be able to carry a placard’ or ‘I am glad that I can advertise on posters’. These actions revisit his earlier, private photographic performances in Hungary, in which he expressed his pleasure at engaging in such simple actions as lifting one leg, taking one step (1973–75) or standing beside a statue of Lenin (1973–75). Now, the acts he celebrated spoke directly to the newfound freedom of individual expression afforded him by his host country. His ‘demonstrations of one’ attracted some attention, mostly the amusement of passersby. Later, Tót was joined by the Slovak artist Thomas Strauss, also living in exile in West Germany, and the two created collective performances in Bonn, again hailing their joy over various actions. In one, Gladness Demonstration (1979), they carried a sign that stated, ‘We are glad if we can demonstrate’. These public performances manifested the contradictions and absurdity inherent to democracy – for example, Strauss recalls that the collective demonstrations had to be officially sanctioned in order to occur, meaning that they had to be accompanied by a police cordon so that the authorities could keep order. In the case of Gladness Demonstration, there were usually ten to twenty times

Tomáš Ruller, 8.8.88, 1988, Prague. Photo: Hana Hamplová. Courtesy: Tomáš Ruller

4.4

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

232

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

as many police officers as the number of ‘demonstrators’.24 Furthermore, in utilising other forms of communication in the public sphere, such as posters featuring an image of the artist smiling, alongside the text ‘I am glad that I can advertise on posters’ and even the data display board on the Kurfurstendamm, the main commercial thoroughfare of West Berlin, which read, ‘I am glad if I can advertise on the media-screen’ (4 April 1979), the artist exchanged the critique of the socialist system for a critique of the capitalist one. In the words of Kemp-Welch, Tót’s move to the West ‘pushed him into an equally ironic, but arguably less powerful, position – that of overidentification with the capitalist market framework’.25 His public actions in the West reveal a contrast with the circumstances in the East, both in the form of artistic expression enabled in the West and the fact that the so-called ‘freedom’ of expression in the West came with a price: co-optation by and competition with or in the market. In Hungary, Tamás Szentjóby created experimental art in genres such as performance, but it was his contact with dissidents that landed him in prison, after which he went into exile in Switzerland in 1975.26 In 1972, at the Balatonboglár Chapel, he performed Expulsion Exercise – Punishment-Preventative Autotherapy (figure 4.5) during the ‘Direct Week’ festival, organised by Szentjóby and Gyula Pauer (1941–2012).27 The aim of the festival was to engage with attendees through direct contact via performance, action or environments, much like the exhibition-actions in Yugoslav Croatia that facilitated direct communication between artists and viewers. Szentjóby’s performance invited visitors to pose questions to the artist, who remained seated in the gallery for eight hours per day for the entire week, with a bucket over his head. A sign placed next to him read, ‘I. You can ask anything from the selfsentenced; and II. You can ask the following:’ Item II was followed by a list of profound questions, such as, ‘Can one form a community with another person without being completely free oneself? Is the realisation of the future in the present an acceleration of our lives? Is action a sin? Is punishment a sin? What is a sin?’28 All were yes–no questions, except for the last one, which called for a more substantial response. The viewer was thus presented with the appearance of an open dialogue, but the suggested questions implied curt, monosyllabic answers. Yet visitors always had the option of following the first instruction and ‘ask[ing] anything’, although the bucket prevented them from seeing the face of the ‘authority figure’ who seemingly possessed the answers to these queries. What ensued was a one-way, dead-end conversation, echoing the limits of public dialogue in Hungary at the time, or, alternatively, the answers of the nameless, faceless authority figure deciding what is what for the nation’s citizens. That same year, Szentjóby created a public performance in front of the Hotel Intercontinental in downtown Budapest, entitled Sit Out – Be Forbidden! In the piece, the artist reenacted an element of Black Panther co-founder

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Politics and identity

233

Tamás Szentjóby (now Tamás St.Auby), Expulsion Exercise – Punishment-Preventive Autotherapy, 1972, Balatonboglár. Photo: László Beke. Courtesy: Tamás St.Auby

4.5

[IPUT (International Parallel Union of Telecommunications) organized the «Exclusion Exercise – Punishment-Preemptive Autotherapy» in a Roman Catholic chapel, in Hungary, in 1972. The dispatcher of IPUT was sitting eight hours a day for one week with a pail on his head. On the wall he displayed questions which visitors could put to him:] Exclusion Exercise – Punishment-Preemptive Autotherapy I. You may ask anything from the self-sentenced and II. You may ask the following: – Are all human life-schemes immoral that exclude from the scheme even just one other human being? – Can one form a community with another person without being totally free oneself? – Is culture’s real purpose to make one conscious of the fact that one’s fate is identical to history? – Is it the most important to discover and realise what is needed by life? – Those who bear the unbearable, do they know nothing about life? – know nothing about that interdependence that is known to life: without us it is unbearable, without us everything is hopeless? – Can the blockade of the present only be breached by new attitude? – Is the realization of the future in the present an acceleration of our lives? – Since historical time applies not to the individual but to the totality, would you try now to live the facts of the present and your own future desolation simultaneously? – Is this all to manifest otherness and therefore to activate the potential otherness?

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

234

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960 – Is the changeable at the same time unfinished? Is the unfinished to be changed? Is stagnation: suffering? Is incompleteness: suffering? – Do you hope that you can make us conscious of interdependence by demonstrating that we are all at each other’s mercy? – Is the punishment there in your action? – Is there action in your punishment? – Is action sin? – Is punishment sin? – Is sin action? – Is punishment action? – What is sin? – Is sin that action that causes suffering? – Is sin that action that causes no change? – Can we in fact call something an action if it produces no change, if it doesn’t aim to decrease suffering? – Are you punishing yourself because by taking upon yourself the punishment for selfpunishment you release the punisher from a punishment that is not action: that is sin? – Do you feel exposed particularly because you can not see whom you are talking with? (1969–72)

Bobby Seale’s trial for inciting violence at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago: the gagging of Seale following his outbursts in the courtroom. In the Hungarian context, the significance of a man sitting with his mouth bound with a leather belt is an obvious reference to censorship encountered not only by artists, but all individuals. While the ambiguity of Szentjóby’s Expulsion Exercise may have fallen into the ‘tolerated’ category of the three T’s (Tiltas, Tűres, Támogatas / Prohibited, Tolerated, Supported (see chapter 1)), the more overtly political action Sit Out! veered into the classification of the forbidden, with the police appearing shortly after the conclusion of the twenty-minute performance.29 In the People’s Republic of Poland, artists for the most part enjoyed relative freedom from governmental interference, so long as they avoided direct provocation of the state by not addressing political issues in their work. When they did, or were perceived to have done, there could be consequences, as was the case with the duo KwieKulik (Zofia Kulik and Przemysław Kwiek). In 1975, the two participated in the exhibition 7 Young Poles in Malmö, Sweden, the catalogue for which featured two photographs that had not been approved by the censorship office. One of these was an example of what the artists term ‘hack work’, which they did on commission to help earn a living – a carving of the White Eagle, the national coat of arms of Poland. The other, entitled Man-Dick, was a documentary photograph of one stage of the carving of a nude by Kwiek, at which point it resembled a large phallus; the carving was made in 1967–68, with its title added in 1974. Although the sculptures were

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Politics and identity

not installed together in the exhibition, they were placed beside one another in the catalogue. Early in 1976, the two artists received notice that they would not be permitted to represent Poland abroad for the next few years. Indeed, when they applied for passports in 1978, to travel to Arnhem, Netherlands, for the ‘Behaviour Workshop’ festival, they were denied. In response, they created the Monument without a Passport (figure 4.6) performance at the All-Polish Biennale of Young Art in Sopot. The performance began with Kulik sticking her head through a tabletop; after squatting, she stood and leaned forward, whereby the table was perpendicular to the floor so that slides could be projected onto the blank surface (and her head). Next, she moved away from the table, and her feet and the chair on which she was seated were cemented into plaster. Kwiek then unveiled a sign on the wall that said, ‘Monument without a passport’, and sat down in the chair next to Kulik, who was at that point holding a folder labelled ‘Ideas for Arnhem’. Just as the artists were effectively ‘stuck’ in Poland, unable to travel without a passport, in the performance Kulik was made immobile by being cemented to the pedestal. It was only in 2009, when they were able to see the copies of the official documents from the National Remembrance Institute, that the pair saw the stated reason for the suspension of their passports. The documents indicate that the pair’s works from Malmö were deemed of ‘low ethical, ideological and artistic value’, and that the international display of such work could possibly result in ‘an inappropriate assessment of the overseas trends in Polish culture’.30 Seven days after Monument without a Passport, the artists carried out a second protest performance, this time at the ‘Performance and Body’ artists’ gathering at the Galeria Labyrint in Lublin. The performance was entitled Activities for the Head: Three Acts (figure 4.7). When the audience entered the gallery, it found Kwiek and Kulik seated on the floor, with their heads placed through the seats of two chairs. After the viewers took their seats, the pair moved behind a paper curtain, which several minutes later was torn down to reveal Kulik sitting on the floor with her head stuck through a washbasin. Kwiek filled the basin with water and proceeded to clean himself in it, then poured more water in so that Kulik could still breathe but not speak. He then stood behind her with a knife, screaming, ‘Come on! Say something, you bitch, speak … you can’t … can you?’31 The artists explained to the viewers that the performance was a response to being denied their freedom of speech, by being denied the possibility to travel and show their work abroad. The final segment of the performance – recorded in what is one of their most iconic photographs, published in numerous anthologies – involved Kwiek and Kulik sitting on chairs with buckets over their heads (cover image), an image that brings to mind Szentjóby’s Expulsion Exercise. Two other artists then proceeded to throw garbage at them, filling the pails with detritus. The piece literalises the

235

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

236

4.6

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

KwieKulik, Monument without a Passport, 1978, Lublin. Courtesy: Zofia Kulik The roll unfolded showing the inscription: MONUMENT WITHOUT A PASSPORT IN THE SALONS OF VISUAL ARTS Kwiek sat on a chair next to standing Kulik. The situation lasted circa twenty minutes. The end.

artists’ status in socialist Poland, where they were refused the right to speak if what they had to say was considered even vaguely political or offensive to the Polish state. The message was clear: in such a context, artists become dumb and mute, and life without free speech is literally rubbish. Piotrowski addresses the manner in which Polish artists used their creative autonomy as a ‘mask concealing opportunism and support for the pseudo-liberal cultural policies of the Ideological State Apparatus’.32 In his view, figures such as KwieKulik were the exception to the ‘national norm’ whereby artists remained

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Politics and identity

KwieKulik, Activities for the Head: Three Acts, 1978, Lublin. Courtesy: Zofia Kulik

apolitical, using ‘the modernist principle of art’s autonomy to provide theoretical justification for their work.’33 In Piotrowski’s view, the latter practice played right into the hands of the authorities, who were interested in ‘maintaining, not restricting, art’s autonomy; they wished to do so in order to delegitimise political critique, which was the legacy of the avant-garde’.34 Yet others, as Klara Kemp-Welch counters, were able to slyly skirt the system, articulating ­political content in the most subtle of ways. She uses as her example the Polish

237

4.7

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

238

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

theatre director and artist Tadeusz Kantor, who staged numerous happenings across Poland in the 1960s and 1970s. While Kantor consistently maintained that his work was apolitical, for Kemp-Welch the artist nevertheless ‘courted’ the ‘political undertones’ of his work, which were often ascribed to it by the censors.35 According to her, he would ‘tease’ the censors with his ‘insinuations, while being careful never to overstep the line to the extent that he would risk losing his relative freedom to work and travel abroad.36 Indeed, although there were instances of those who staged Kantor’s happenings being questioned, the artist himself never was, nor was he denied a passport and in fact visited other countries with great frequency. Kantor’s Panoramic Sea Happening (23 August 1967) was one work that could potentially be read as having a political message, yet could equally have been dismissed as ‘nonsense’. The piece was staged on a beach in Łazy, on the Baltic Sea coast near Koszalin – a politically resonant site, because the sea (as in the Baltic states) represented a potential means of escape from communist Poland, and there had even been an occurrence of such an attempt around that time in nearby Osieki. The performance is perhaps best known for its first event, immortalised in photographs by Eustachy Kossakowski and showing artist Edward Krasiński (1925–2004) conducting, and attempting to control, the waters, in a ‘Sea Concerto’. The second part of the performance involved a restaging of Théodore Géricault’s famous painting The Raft of the Medusa (1818–19), in which Jerzy Bereś (1930–2012) was invited to participate; Bereś turned the building of the raft into a metaphor of labour and enslavement.37 Once the raft was completed, images of the painting were distributed and the participants invited to reconstruct the scene depicted. The final event, ‘Agriculture on the Sand’, involved newspapers being disseminated among audience members, who were instructed to ‘plant’ them in the sand. This segment of the action targeted both the press, one of the main instruments of the state’s propaganda machine, as well as state-run agriculture, since, in Kantor’s action, the harvest was doomed from the start, the ‘farmers’ having sown their seeds in infertile sand. Kemp-Welch comments that the ‘deliberate non-productivity of this mass activity thus resonated with communist attempts to run a command economy according to bureaucratic principles’.38 Yet this interpretation of the performance could only be read ‘between the lines’, making it seem less threatening although perhaps in its nuanced approach ultimately more effective than KwieKulik’s overt use of Polish national symbols. The official state newspaper of the Soviet Union, Pravda, often found itself the object of scorn by artists who, like most living in the Soviet sphere of influence (and elsewhere as well), saw irony in the name of the publication – which means ‘Truth’. In 1975, shortly before the pair’s emigration from the Soviet Union, the two artists who made up the pair Komar and Melamid39 (Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid; b. 1942, b. 1945) staged a performance in their

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Politics and identity

Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid, The Essence of Truth (Grinding ‘Pravda’), Moscow, 1975. Three gelatin silver prints and object made of compressed newspaper. Collection Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University, Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection of Nonconformist Art from the Soviet Union. 1991.0885.001–004. Photo: Jack Abraham

Moscow apartment, entitled The Essence of Truth (Grinding ‘Pravda’) (figure 4.8), in which they ground up issues of the newspaper and shaped the shreddings into hamburger patties to make it easier to consume. A few years later, in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia, L’ubomir Ďurček (b. 1948) created the ongoing

239

4.8

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

240

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

performance, Visitor (1980). Over the course of several weeks, he would show up at his friends’ homes at night with a copy of Pravda in his mouth, with a headline concerning the Central Committee of the Communist Party visible through his parted lips. Just as Komar and Melamid found the ‘truth’ of the paper, and the party itself, unpalatable, Ďurček was rendered speechless, his mouth being crammed full of the ‘truth’. During each visit, after standing in the doorway for a few minutes, silent, he simply left, leaving his unsuspecting co-conspirators to wonder what had just happened. Of course, the performance conjured up images of unexpected arrivals by the secret police and late-night interrogations. The year 1980 marked the official beginning of the Solidarity period in Poland following the signing of the Gdańsk agreement on 31 August, giving the trade union the rights to strike as well as exist independently of the Communist Party. This was a landmark for peaceful dialogue between the Polish government and its citizenry. In autumn 1980, Polish artist Bereś reacted to these developments in Political Mass, staged at the All Polish PleinAir of Young Artists and Theorists in Świeszyno, Poland, which he describes as ‘an attempt to enter into the dialogue that had been shaking Poland since the strikes on the coast and the expansion of Solidarity’.40 Bereś, who is known for his deeply symbolic and very serious performances, created a political altar at which he offered himself by painting the word ofiara (offering, sacrifice, victim) in white lettering on his chest. Next, he lit a bonfire on the altar and painted the letter ‘V’ in red on his chest, over the white letters. For KempWelch, the piece intimated that following the formation of Solidarity, citizens should be able to freely and openly enter into politics, rather than approach the subject covertly or underground – which both artists and activists had had to do in previous years. Indeed, Bereś’s action seems to have been prophetic, as despite the implementation of Martial Law in Poland on 13 December 1981 – the regime’s last attempt to quell the political opposition – artists did not entirely retreat to the underground. After the lifting of cultural restrictions on 22 July 1983, a number of public performances took place that decade that directly responded to the socio­ political situation. Most notably were those by the Wrocław-based group Orange Alternative [Pomarańczowa Alternatywa], which staged massive happenings on the city’s main thoroughfare, which they themselves describe as an expression of ‘Socialist Surrealism’. For example, in their 1988 street action, Who’s Afraid of the Toilet Paper (1 October 1987), they invited the public to bring rolls of toilet tissue and share it with others during a time of great material scarcity. On 6 November of that same year, in Storming of the Winter Palace, they staged a parodic reenactment of the massive street spectacles that occurred across the socialist East on commemorative holidays, an action that concluded with several of the participants being arrested.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Politics and identity

While Orange Alternative utilised the happening to critique or draw attention to socialism’s shortcomings, Łódź Kaliska, based in that Polish industrial city, staged photographic and street or public actions that mocked not only the political sphere, but also those artists, such as Bereś, whom they felt took themselves too seriously. In First Gainful Action – Total Downfall (May 1981), the members of Łódź Kaliska lay down in the Market Square under the statue of Adam Mickiewicz, Poland’s national poet. Magdalena Ujma notes the potential political implications of artists lying around, lazily doing nothing in a worker’s state, but also describes this piece as ‘political toward the artistic establishment as well’, mocking the ‘committed performances of renowned artists such as Jerzy Bereś’.41 Whereas Bereś’s weighty, symbolic performances attest to a belief in the power of art to disseminate a message and bring about change, Łódź Kaliska took a more playful approach, attempting to create a carnivalesque atmosphere with its actions and work. An attempt to replicate life inside a closed state can be seen in the group performance of three Latvian artists, Sergejs Davidovs (b. 1959), Sarmīte Māliņa (b. 1960) and Oļegs Tillbergs (b. 1956), entitled People in Cages. Staged on Philharmonic Square, one of the main squares in the centre of Riga’s Old Town, in 1987, the action involved the artists remaining partially in rabbit cages, their legs hanging out of the small cages, in front of the onlooking public. The action took place as part of the ‘Days of Art’, an annual celebration held in Latvia since the 1950s involving open studios and public activities and marked by greater tolerance for experimental activity. Similar content was at the heart of Czech artist Lumir Hladík’s 1980 action The Mirrored Sea, in which the artist was led, blindfolded, to the shore of the Baltic Sea, with his back to the water. When the blindfold was removed he found himself facing a mirror, and proceeded to view the water only through that mirror. Much like Panoramic Sea Happening, The Mirrored Sea played on the Baltic Sea’s associations with escape and immigration, evoking the freedom potentially enabled by that body of water as something that could only be grasped through an intermediary source such as a mirror. That the artist emigrated to the West shortly thereafter imbues the work with even greater poignancy. Yet the sea was not the only possible means of escape. Aside from the mental and emotional internal migration that many individuals pursued, artists’ imaginations provided other channels. Active creators of mail art in the stifling atmosphere of 1980s Romania, the Timișoara-based Constantin Flondor, Iosif Király and Doru Tulcan staged the action Mail Art: Big Envelope (1982; figure 4.9), in which they constructed a giant envelope that they could climb into and metaphorically use to send themselves abroad. The action was documented in photographs and later distributed as mail art. Király’s actions Snails I and Snails II (1986), staged with Călin Beloescu (b. 1953), were meant as an illustration of life in communist Romania. The artists fabricated a plastic

241

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

242

4.9

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

Constantin Flondor, Iosif Király and Doru Tulcan, Mail Art: Big Envelope, 1982. Mail art performance. Courtesy: Constantin Flondor, Iosif Király, Doru Tulcan

cube in which they placed hundreds of snails. For Snails I, which took place in the basement of their studios, they projected an image of a landscape behind the cube, creating the illusion that the snails were in nature. The mollusks climbed up the walls, attempting to escape, only to realise that the landscape was fake – an obvious metaphor for the closed nature of the Romanian state at this time. In Snails II, the trio of artists moved the snails outdoors, to a natural environment, but placed them on an artificial surface – a mirror, on which they remained, rather than attempting to escape. According to Király, the snails ‘became used to the space, and didn’t move’.42 This interpretation, however, was only possible after the action, since it could not have been predicted how the snails would react to the mirrored surface. In this instantiation, the snails came to symbolise the apathy of the Romanian people in the face of the totalitarian regime. Of course, these actions were only seen by a small group of people, part of Király’s circle of friends and acquaintances. In my interview with Király, he discussed the feelings of isolation working in Romania in the 1970s and 1980s. Mail art afforded one of the few vehicles for connecting with the outside world. Although some examples were censored, and some that he sent did not reach their intended destination in the West, mail art from Japan usually

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Politics and identity

243

made it through, since the censors did not read Japanese. In 1985, the Gutai artist Shozo Shimamoto visited Király and his fellow artists on his way back to Japan following an event at New York’s Guggenheim Museum. Király’s contact with Shimamoto prompted new revelations concerning the possibilities of performance art. Until that point, he had only had minimal exposure to performance art and other such developments in the West; for example, he was familiar with Allan Kaprow’s monograph Assemblage, Environments and Happenings (1966), and as an architecture student in Timișoara, he had learned about Land Art in architectural journals, but for him, the body provided the easiest and most effective way of manifesting the ‘feeling of desperation’ that came from living in a closed state.43 The documentation of his performances, he said, functioned as a ‘message in a bottle’, one directed at a future public. State control and surveillance over everyday life continues to this day in contemporary Belarus, which has been ruled by the authoritarian president Alexander Lukashenko since 1994. As the public sphere is still highly regulated, any public artistic action or performance that does take place is quite remarkable. In Patriot (2007; figure 4.10), Belarusian artist Marina Naprushkina

Marina Naprushkina, Patriot, 2007, Minsk. Video still. Courtesy: Marina Naprushkina

4.10

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

244

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

(b. 1981) entered a bookshop and purchased a framed portrait of P ­ resident Lukashenko. She proceeded to carry the portrait under her arm on the subway, then through the main squares and streets of Minsk; the entire action was filmed on video. When she arrived home, she hung the portrait on the wall and stood by it while the national anthem was played in the background. The artist managed to enact the street performance without arousing suspicion, by walking very quickly and never looking back. While she did not do anything to disparage the ruler or his image, the ambiguity of the act meant that she could potentially have been found in violation of Article 368, Part 2 of the Criminal Code – insulting the President of the Republic of Belarus. The piece was so ambiguous that some people asked her, as she passed, whether she was for or against Lukashenko. Another person inquired whether he could take a picture, and queried the purpose of the action. She responded by asking him why he wanted to take a picture – an interchange that speaks to the high level of suspicion and fear surrounding people in a country that is tightly policed.44 Naprushkina has also involved Belarusian citizens in her work, in a participatory art project entitled Belarus Today (2008), using the official state newspaper of that same name.45 The artist recounts how all state workers are required to subscribe to this newspaper, and at least during the Soviet period, workers in factories had a ‘political hour’ during which they read and discussed it. In fact, this ‘tradition’ was reintroduced a few years after the performance in all schools and workplaces in Belarus. Naprushkina has workers read aloud from the newspaper much as they did during this political hour, readings she records on video. In doing so, she foregrounds and exposes the language used in the text, at once overidentifying with it and offering it up for critique. Yet the message conveyed by the work is again ambiguous, which the artist felt was all that was possible in Belarus at the time. In 2014, she stated that ‘people are scared of everything [nowadays]’.46 Even during the making of one of these videos, which she did in front of a school, the school’s caretaker came out to question what she was doing. The transition period of the late 1980s and early 1990s was also observed by artists through performance. In 1989, the Bulgarian artist Lyuben Kostov (b.  1952) staged a massive action in front of the National Archaeological Museum in Sofia, entitled Downfall of Article 1. The action involved him placing a row of dominoes on the sidewalk of the city’s busy central thoroughfare around the same time the nation’s parliament was debating that article, stating that the Bulgarian Communist Party was the sole ruling power in the country. The performance suggested the domino effect that would ensue if this law were overturned, which in fact is what occurred. Similarly, Latvian artist Miervaldis Polis, discussed in chapter 2 in relation to his Bronze Man performances, commemorated the Soviet collapse and the reinstatement of Latvian independence with his 1992 performance The Bronze Man Becomes the

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Politics and identity

White Man, wherein his friend and colleague Vilnis Zābers painted the alreadybronze Polis with a layer of white paint to symbolise their newfound freedom.47 In Romania, Dan and Lia Perjovschi were likewise absorbed in their nation’s uprising of 1989. Lia had just moved to Bucharest and begun studying at the city’s Academy of Art after several failed applications. From the start of her studies, she created performances with and for her peers, some of which can be interpreted in the context of the contemporaneous political situation. For example, in For My Becoming in Time (October 1989), she had her fellow students stand behind a panel through which they placed their hands, which had been painted in various colours. The artist ‘washed’ their hands in white paint, after which, with her hands still painted white, she shook the hands of the viewers. The performance has clear associations with cleansing and purification rituals, and Kristine Stiles has commented that the piece suggests that through ‘personal action one could purify the past and forgive one another’ – ‘the past’ in question being that of the country’s recent communist history.48 A similar performance involving group activity and coming together was Magic of Gesture/Laces (November 1989), in which Lia Perjovschi tied twelve students together with laces so that if anyone moved, that would tighten the strings. The participants had to decide whether to stay and work together or leave, realising that their movements would have consequences for the others. The action was emblematic of the situation at the time, wherein individuals had to choose whether to unite in an effort to overthrow the totalitarian regime, or let it remain unchanged. Nationalism: the stain on the soul Slavoj Žižek characterises the return to nationalism in the Balkans as symptomatic of the period of transition: ‘a kind of shock-absorber against the sudden exposure to the capitalist openness and imbalance’.49 While Žižek was writing primarily about the former Yugoslavia in 1993, the return of nationalist, rightwing movements across the globe indicates that this statement could have a wider relevance. Unlike in Germany, which in the 1960s underwent a Vergangenheitsbewältigung, or coming to terms with the (Nazi) past, in Eastern Europe this concept has not become ‘a household item’.50 This lack of reflection created a void that artists have often been the ones to fill, to assess historical and current ‘stains’ on the souls of their respective nations. While the mass media is often blamed for inciting ethnic prejudices in the region, developments in the cultural realm have also been a contributing factor. Drawing on Žižek, Miklavz Konelj, for example, cites the subversive activity of cultural groups such as Neue Slovenische Kunst (NSK) and Laibach as playing a role in the weakening of the Yugoslav state. Konelj feels that ‘the greatest responsibility for Yugoslavia’s catastrophe must be credited to anti-

245

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

246

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

socialist political movements that, within the context of the “democratisation processes” emerging during the second half of the 1980s, had launched a declared anti-totalitarian intrepretative matrix’.51 He credits NSK specifically with effectively ‘devaluating the social and moral keystones of the dissolving socialist system’, thereby enabling nationalist regimes to come in and replace the Yugoslav one.52 In her essay for the Documenta 10 catalogue, curator Catherine David makes a similar argument, suggesting that the French leftist movement was destroyed by Eastern European dissidents who caused a split in the Communist Party, as some remained faithful to the party line in socialist countries while others sided with the dissidents. As such, Konelj’s argument can hold true for other experimental art groups throughout the region that also aimed to create cracks in the system, regardless of the means – whether they were political because they did not play politics, as argued by Kemp-Welch, or whether they were more directly engaged in political activism.53 While Agata Pyzik notes how the lack of reflection on both the communist past and the post-communist present has led to a depoliticisation of the younger generation in Eastern Europe, the artists in the following section demonstrate how they have sought to come to terms with their nations’ past and address the ills of the present through performance art.54 Zoran Naskovski (b. 1960), one of the key artists of Serbia’s independent art scene of the 1990s, marked the end of that decade with two related works: Apollo 9 (1999) and Death in Dallas (2000). The former, perhaps the artist’s best-known work, was conceived, announced and scheduled as a delegated performance that includes two gusle players.55 Naskovski recognises the manner in which music, particularly Newly Composed Folk Music (NCFM) and turbofolk, speaks to issues of national cultural identity in the post-Yugoslav, Milošević and post-Milošević eras. Newly Composed Folk Music became popular in the 1970s as a ‘postmodern approach to folklore’, wherein artists experimented with the introduction of pop elements and with commentary on contemporary events.56 Turbo-folk developed out of NCFM and rose to prominence in the 1990s, when performers adopting this combination of local folk and electronic pop music began to garner commercial success. As authentically Balkan, this music was seen as a local form of resistance to globalisation; at the same time, it also came to be associated with nationalism through the nature of the lyrics. Naskovski’s delegated performance Apollo 9 (7 September 1999; figure 4.11) involved a public performance of the proto-turbo-folk song ‘Apollo 9’ by Mašinka Lukić in front of a McDonald’s in downtown Belgrade, while audiences were served a traditional Serbian meal of roasted pig, brandy and beer.57 When the song was first written and performed, in 1969, it expressed both the doubt and uncertainty of a future industrialised Yugoslavia, and the stark contrast between rural peasant life and the modern-day embracing of technology. Its performance thirty years later occurred amid a backdrop marked by the collapse

Zoran Naskovski, Apollo 9, 7 September 1999, Belgrade. Courtesy: Zoran Naskovski

4.11

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

248

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

of Yugoslavia, the ­transition from socialism to capitalism and the repressive Milošević regime. Uros Cvoro notes that shortly before the performance, from March to June 1999, the NATO-led airstrikes against Serbia took place, with citizens taking part in state-organised anti-NATO demonstrations, acting as human shields to protect bridges from being destroyed.58 Musical performances similar to Apollo 9 were fairly commonplace events at that time; such events countered the prevailing image of Serbia in the media: ‘while on the one hand, Serbia appeared as a country led by a dictator engaged in ethnic cleansing and unwilling to relinquish power, on the other hand, the performance of passionate Serb patriotism to the soundtrack of folk music symbolised defiance to the global militaristic hegemony of NATO’.59 Yet, as Cvoro notes, Naskovski’s staging of Apollo 9 in front of Belgrade’s McDonald’s may also be interpreted in the opposite way – as the ‘triumph of the West over Serbian values’.60 Other artists in the region have explored the notion of national identity in the wake of the rise of Balkan nationalism. Two years after Apollo 9, Serbian artist Milica Tomić (b. 1960) organised a delegated performance by Dragana Mirković, a recognised star of turbo-folk in the former Yugoslavia. The performance was staged in conjunction with the Vienna art exhibition This Is Contemporary Art, a context that served to exoticise Mirković as ‘Other’ to Viennese audiences, while also bringing to the museum members of the migrant community of more than 250,000 ex-Yugoslav citizens living and working in that city. In staging the performance, Tomić made the audience members visible to the Austrian public, as well as raising the issue of the invisibility of this minority population in the context of contemporary art. This strategy is similar to that employed in the performance Our Thing (2010), staged by Bosnian artist Mladen Miljanović together with two workers whom the artist had met in Vienna’s Museum Quarter. The trio covered the exterior of a Zastava 101 automobile with cement, turning it into a modernist sculpture and fixing it to the floor of the gallery.61 For the artist, ‘the participation of “other”, non-artistic subjects in the implementation of the project indicates the necessity to activate and involve members or elements of society in order to change social conscience on a broader scale by means of art’.62 Both Tomić and Miljanović use their work to raise awareness concerning issues related to migration, and to the identity and perception of post-Yugoslav citizens. Igor Grubić has also utilised his artistic practice to address the legacy of nationalism in his native Croatia. In 1989, Franjo Tuđman founded the Croatian Democratic Union, the nation’s leading right-wing political party, and from 1990 until his death in 1999, he was the President of Croatia. During his regime, the Croatian media were heavily controlled and infused with nationalist rhetoric, while the public sphere was tightly monitored as well. Prompted by the lack of civil mechanisms to respond to these developments, Grubić sought to fill that gap, embracing the role of the ‘anonymous, ­dissatisfied citizen-

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Politics and identity

249

artist’.63 In 1998, thirty years after the Red Peristyle group staged its intervention on the floor of Diocletian’s Palace in Split (see chapter 1), Grubić painted a black circle in that same spot, in a performance entitled Black Peristyle (figure 4.12), explaining the following day that it signified ‘a stain on the soul of every individual who could contribute to making reality different, but doesn’t do it’.64 In 2008, he embarked on a series of actions entitled 366 Liberation Rituals, in which he confronted his own ideological background of socialism, nationalism and capitalism. The ‘rituals’ included actions such as ‘correcting’ street graffiti containing nationalist or fascist motifs, placing five-pointed stars on Christmas trees as a reference to the socialist past, writing statements such as ‘resist the epidemics of greed’ on paper money and then putting the bills into circulation.65 Like the Black Peristyle intervention, 366 Liberation Rituals was meant to jolt citizens out of their passivity, causing them to consider the significance of these acts with regard to their own individual histories, experiences and actions, or lack thereof. Through this series of actions, which lasted throughout the year, Grubić hoped to give rise to a new civic consciousness in Croatia. A similar strategy can be seen in Marko Marković’s Self-Eater performances, in particular Self Eater: The Thirst (2009; figure 4.13), whereby he had an assistant place an intravenous needle in his arm, from which he proceeded to drink his own blood. The tourniquet used in the performance represents

Igor Grubić, Black Peristyle, 1998, Split. Courtesy: Igor Grubić

4.12

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

250

4.13

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

Marko Marković, Self-Eater: The Thirst, 2009. Courtesy: Marko Marković

the Croatian tricolour national flag. The artist explains that he created the piece as a call for ‘drastic changes’ in society. In his words, ‘changes are necessary to develop society and  correcting images of distorted human values. Because of vampire culture that is perceived by the system I am showing a revolt in the form of auto cannibalism’.66 Likewise, in Self-Eater: The Hunger (2008; figure 4.14), performed at the Eco festival in Zagreb, he had a nurse remove a piece of his skin that he then consumed, explaining that nowadays people are eating themselves, resulting in their ‘creat[ing] material and spiritual heritage doomed to disaster … sacrific[ing] themselves for the environment and the status that is being imposed over their freedom’.67 This statement calls to mind Grubić’s and Pyzik’s concerns regarding the lack of reflection in contemporary society, not only with regard to the pervasiveness of conservative right-wing views, but also their respective nations’ embrace of neoliberal capitalism. Such performances and statements also bespeak the insights of the International Situationists, who discerned that individuals have become victim to the Society of the Spectacle, in which authentic existence has been replaced by representation and mediatisation. During the 1990s, the conservative Slovenian Democratic Party rose to power with its nationalist, populist and xenophobic rhetoric. Although not a religious party, it was also supported by the Slovenian Catholic Church.

251

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Politics and identity

Marko Marković, Self-Eater: The Hunger, 2009, Zagreb. Courtesy: Marko Marković

Since 1993, its leader has been Janez (Ivan) Janša, who was Prime Minister of Slovenia from 2004 to 2008 and again from 2012 to 2013. In 2007, three ­Slovenian artists joined the Slovenian Democratic Party and changed their names to Janez Janša – an extreme act of their overidentification, to invoke the concept articulated by Slavoj Žižek (discussed in chapter 1).68 The trio

4.14

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

252

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

announced the project during the wedding ceremony of one of the three artists. Nothing was said prior to the wedding, but when the vows were taken, that artist’s new name was announced and the room was filled with gasps of surprise.69 Although the artists have made no overt political or explanatory statements regarding the work, the name change suggests a questioning of labels in general – be they national, ethnic or cultural. In choosing to each call themselves Janez Janša and joining the Slovenian Democratic Party, yet not necessarily appearing to adopt the conservative views of either, the artists not only pose a challenge to the integrity of the party, but also to the ideas it espouses. In not giving answers to their stance in relation to the party, they have positioned themselves much like Laibach did twenty-five years prior, when the group refused to make a definitive statement with regard to its associations with fascism. However, one could argue that the trio took Laibach’s project one step further by legally taking the name of the nationalist party leader and becoming card carrying members of the party. Two actions by the Czech art group Pode Bal, Zimmer Frei (2002) and Reaction Painting (2005), interrogate one of the more shameful episodes of their nation’s past: the deportation of ethnic Germans from Czechoslovakia in the aftermath of the Second World War.70 For Zimmer Frei, the group installed photographs in the gallery of the Prague Castle with information about how buildings from the border town of Liberec had been confiscated from the Sudeten Germans and are currently owned by the Czech state. Pode Bal printed these images on large balloons that they released into the courtyard of the castle, along with a large banner reading, ‘Zimmer Frei’ (room free) – the latter an ironic reference to the signs seen on guesthouses across Europe advertising vacancies for overnight visitors. This subtle gesture not only evoked the Czech government’s act of confiscating inhabitants’ homes based on their ethnicity, it was also meant to act as a clarion call to all Czech citizens, whom the artists feel have yet to comes to terms with and address this significant ‘stain’ on their nation’s history. For Reaction Painting, two members of the group stood on the Charles Bridge much like David Černý and Jan Toomik had done several years earlier, and painted a hammer and sickle and swastikas on canvas in public. By re-creating these symbols as works of art in the public space, the artists were summoning passersby to ponder the potential parallels between communism and fascism. Throughout its public projects addressing current and historical political issues, Pode Bal has effectively repoliticised the Czech public sphere by bringing attention to subjects largely unacknowledged in contemporary Czech society, such as the need to grapple with the nation’s postwar history and communist past. Zimmer Frei clearly touched on a sensitive issue, as castle guards were called in to remove the balloons, which, in turn, created a sort of impromptu performance of playful balloon bouncing when unsuspecting members of

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Politics and identity

the general public, visitors to the castle, joined in. The fun ended when one guard took out a knife and started popping the balloons, while other guards ripped down the Zimmer Frei sign. Reaction Painting was likewise halted by the authorities – the Czech police interrupted the performance and confiscated the canvases, informing the artists that they were going to consult a ‘legal expert’ to determine whether any laws had been violated. The paintings with the hammer and sickle were subsequently deemed acceptable and shortly returned, but those containing swastikas were returned to their creators only two years later, in 2007, when the police suspended the case and refused to provide any details about it to the artists. In both instances, viewers were confronted with symbols of the past – in the form of images of forcibly vacated buildings associated with a previous past crime or emblems of the Soviet and Nazi regimes, which also carried the weight of a moral and political burden. Also in both cases, these symbols’ potency became apparent when they entered the public sphere. It is interesting that it was the authority figures of the castle guards and the police who reacted most strongly in each instance, bringing the performances to an end. Similar strategies can be seen in the work of Anca Benera (b. 1977) and Arnold Estefan (b. 1978), two Romanian artists of different backgrounds; while Benera grew up in Bucharest speaking Romanian, Estefan is part of the Hungarian minority in the country, and grew up speaking only Hungarian. The two are partners in life and in art, and when they first met, they communicated with each other through mail art – exchanging artworks as letters – rather than through oral dialogue. Much of their work addresses the contentious issues underlying national identity. Their projects include Pacta sunt servanda (Agreements Must Be Kept) (2011–12; figure 4.15), in which the two artists, seated together, each read aloud from textbooks from their respective schools, one in Romanian, one in Hungarian. The texts present narratives of different historical events, and in the performance, the artists focused on three moments in particular: the Revolution of 1848, the Treaty of Trianon (1920) and the Vienna Dictate (1940). In these respective histories, each side will paint itself as the victor or victim when favourable; for example, the Treaty of Trianon divided the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the aftermath of the First World War, with Hungary losing Transylvania to Romania, so one artist would be the victor and the other the victim. Because the artists are reading simultaneously, it is not possible to listen to both stories at the same time; the viewer is thus compelled to choose only one – a neat metaphor for geopolitical conflict anywhere at any time. Similarly, the performance Jus soli (right of the soil) (2013), in which the artists literally unravel the flags of their native Romania, represents their attempt to unravel the complexity of national identity. The prolonged and painstaking process, which took several days, resulted in a ball of thread with no identifiable features according to national or ethnic

253

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

254

4.15

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

Anca Benera and Arnold Estefan, Pacta sunt servanda (Agreements Must Be Kept), 2011–12. Video documentation of performance (HD video, sound, 16:37 min., in Romanian and Hungarian with English subtitles). Courtesy: Anca Benera and Arnold Estefan

lines. Instead of placing national identity on a pedestal, as often occurs in interethnic or international conflicts, the two demystify the concept through the act of unspooling. In 2001, Macedonian artists Yane Calovski (b. 1973) and Hristina Ivanovska (b. 1974) set out to connect with their country by traversing the extent of their nation, beginning their travels at the geographical centre of Macedonia and ending up in Skopje, in a performative piece called Nature and Social Studies: Spiral Trip (figure 4.16). The timing of this piece was critical, as it was the same year in which the Macedonian government was engaged in a conflict with the nation’s ethnic Albanians. The insurgency, which had started in January, ended in November 2001 with NATO intervention and the signing of the Ohrid Agreement, which set forth a plan to improve the rights of the ethnic Albanians, including a provision to make Albanian a co-official language of Macedonia. In a clear reference to Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970), Ivanovska and Calovski circumnavigated their country by traveling in a spiral. They chose the form because they felt that it has ‘memory built into it’.71 When one travels in a straight line, for example, one can only retrace one’s steps by going backward; when moving in a spiral, there is always an opportunity to

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Politics and identity

Yane Calovski and Hristina Ivanovska, Nature and Social Studies: Spiral Trip, 2001, Macedonia. Courtesy: Yane Calovski and Hristina Ivanovska

consider the route, after making one rotation. Commenting on the project, artist and curator Richard Torchia states: ‘following the path of a helix, travellers are always leaving and returning at the same time’.72 In addition to these references, the work also called to mind local history, as the artists invoked their education in nature and social studies, a collective focus that was prevalent in the socialist period; this was also reflected in the title. During the trip, the pair planned for the presentation of the project in a gallery setting, designing a large-scale topographic representation of Macedonia that would fill the gallery in a manner reminiscent of Land artist Walter De Maria’s New York Earth Room (1977), in which he filled an entire gallery with dirt. The paper model of the country was interactive, as it was very durable and made of steps that the visitors could climb, which they did. The post-performance installation invites viewers to follow in the artists’ footsteps, re-creating their journey and pondering each individual’s relationship to his or her country. Along with music, flags and borders, food serves as another important signifier of national identity. Pavel Braila (b. 1971) has enacted a number of food-based performances promoting the culture and identity of his native

255

4.16

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

256

4.17

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

Ghenadie Popescu, MM, 2008, Chişinău–laşi. Video still. Courtesy: Ghenadie Popescu

land, Moldova. The impulse for this may have come from a map he saw on the cover of the newsletter for the fourth edition of Manifesta, the roving European biennale of contemporary art, which included a map of Europe without the borders of Moldova demarcated. Braila’s initial response was to create a poster, together with Manuel Raeder, entitled Probably Moldova Doesn’t Exist, consisting of the map, to which he affixed a Post-it with that phrase. Later, he utilised the concept of the map in a more proactive way: feeding his audiences in order to place his national culture on the international map, as it were. In his food performance in the Netherlands, for example, audiences were able to sample his mother’s homemade zeama (chicken soup), along with other examples of Moldovan national cuisine and Moldovan wine, imported by his father. In importing this food, he made use of the unofficial transportation channels in place to bridge Eastern and Western Europe; according to the artist, these networks are cheaper, faster and more reliable than DHL or FedEx, highlighting the grassroots communication systems established by Eastern Europeans as an alternative to the commercial and corporate methods.73 The food from his native Moldova with which Ghenadie Popescu (b. 1971) identifies is mămăligă, a national dish made of polenta, which he carries around with him not in the manner of a geopolitical burden, but more like a pet or a friend. In his 2008 performance MM (figure 4.17), he transported a gigantic sculpture of mămăligă on a cart from Chișinău to neighbouring Iași, in Romania, using his steps to bridge two areas that are connected by cultural identity but divided by a national border (the Republic of Moldova and the region of Moldavia, in Romania). In another series of performances, Mia I, II and III [My I, II and III], he walked across Moldova, including moving through the disputed territory of Transnistria, not with a mămăligă but with a yellow wheelbarrow filled with plastic raffia bags in blue and red, the colours of the Moldovan flag.74 Similar to Ivanovska and Calovski’s Spiral Trip, ­Popescu’s

Politics and identity

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

walks aimed to unite a country that is quite literally divided. Throughout the performances, the artist encountered a range of people, speaking with them and interacting without any overt political agenda. Despite the fact that he was effectively pushing a Moldovan tricolour around the country, his goal was not necessarily to spark a debate about the semi-independent Transnistria region.75 Rather, what was most important for him was the human element, the act of meeting and engaging with different people. I’d rather have a hole in my head At the time of writing, the status of the European Union remains decidedly uncertain across Eastern and Western Europe – especially amid the United Kingdom’s 23 June 2016 referendum in favour of seceding from the EU. In Eastern Europe, discussions surrounding the Union usually focus on the question of accession and on the potential benefits or risks in joining the EU. While prior to the financial crisis of 2008 many from the former communist countries of Eastern Europe were eager to join the EU, seeing it as a guarantor of safety and economic security, nowadays that argument is harder to sustain. In the post-communist period, a number of artists have utilised body art to create vivid statements concerning the EU’s relation to their individual d ­ estinies. Slovenian artist Ive Tabar (b. 1966) is among the more vocal figures on the subject of the EU and his country’s relation to it. Tabar, who has no formal artistic training but is in fact a medical professional (a background that figures largely in his works), staged a series of four performances in the period immediately before and after Slovenia’s accession to the EU in 2004. The first piece, Europa I (1999), dealt with Slovenia’s obsession with entry into the Union. The artist imbibed a blue liquid with gold stars in it, then placed tubes in his nose and pumped his stomach. The work plays on the Slovenian phrase ‘to have something in your stomach’, which is used when one cannot abide a thing or a person and it needs to be ejected. The next piece in the series, Europa II (2001), involved Tabar’s protest against EU membership, which he apparently found more discomforting than drilling a hole in his shin bone, which is precisely what he did in the gallery.76 The action literalised the Slovenian saying ‘It’s better to drill a hole in one’s knee than … ’, which closely parallels the English phrase ‘I’d rather have a hole in my head than … ’. In his way, Tabar dramatically conveyed his sentiments regarding EU accession. On the eve of Slovenia’s entrance into the EU, in Europa III (2003) Tabar removed his middle fingernail, which had been painted with the Slovenian coat of arms, affixed it to a plastic salamander – a species indigenous to the country – and then ‘conquered’ it (and thus Slovenia) by sticking an EU flag into the toy animal. Through this act, the artist visualised the notion that the

257

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

258

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

country would now be ruled by the European Union.77 Finally, in 2007, three years after Slovenia became a full EU member, the artist created a performance that expressed disenchantment over the unmet expectations that membership was supposed to fulfil. In Europa IV, he again drank a blue liquid, cut a hole into his stomach, stuck a catheter into it and transferred the blue liquid into a clear plastic container with goldfish inside. Reading this performance literally, the EU ‘pissed on’ the promises it made to Slovenia. Tabar began creating these performances after coming into contact with Jurij Krpan, Director of the Kapelica Gallery in Ljubljana, a venue known for hosting extreme body art performances by experimental artists such as Tabar, Art Orienté Objet (founded 1991), Ron Athey (b. 1961) and ORLAN (b. 1947), among others.78 Tabar began working with Krpan because he wished to use his medical knowledge along with his body to express himself.79 In doing so, he carries on the tradition (discussed in depth in chapter 2) of utilising the body as the fundamental tool for conveying the most intimate thoughts and feelings. Macedonian artist Alexandar Stankovski (b. 1959), whose country is cur­­­ rently a candidate for membership, expresses a similar view on the EU as Tabar. His vivid 2005 performance Penetration into the EU (figure 4.18), created a year after Macedonia applied for EU membership, was Stankovski’s first performance after a period of silence (the artist had earlier been part of the Zero Group, active in the 1980s; see chapter 1). The performance graphically depicted the process of Macedonia acting on its desire to become a part of the European Union. Seated at a table, with a large object in front of him, covered with a sheet (much like the Dada icon The Enigma of Isidore Ducasse), he eventually uncovered this mystery object to reveal a Macedonian flag with a dildo affixed to its centre – the largest dildo he could find, the artist explains.80 Leaning up on the wall behind him was the EU flag, into which he cut a makeshift ‘vagina’, or hole, in order to enable the penetration of its ringed stars. The artist then placed the two flags together so that Macedonia could finally realise its long-standing desire of ‘penetrating’ the EU. By presenting Macedonia’s desire in this overly graphic and vulgar way, he aimed to strip its citizens of their illusions about the presumed paradise that EU membership was to bring, and expose it for what it actually represented for the Macedonian people. While the performance represented a sexual act, Stankovski exacerbated the desire by lecturing throughout the performance, delaying the final penetration through prolonged ‘foreplay’, in the form of the artist’s lecture. These quite visceral performances by Tabar and Stankovski bring to life current discussions regarding the present and future of the EU. Their actions rehearse the sentiments of many of their compatriots, expressing feelings of animosity through visual means.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Politics and identity

Aleksandar Stankovski, Penetration Into the EU, 2005, Skopje. Courtesy: Aleksandar Stankovski

Data recovery: reassessing the communist past In Poor But Sexy: Culture Clashes in Europe East and West, the Polish writer and journalist Agata Pyzik sets out to shatter the commonly reiterated tropes regarding East and West, communism and post-communism. In her words, ‘we have to go beyond the ritual war between security of jobs and flats and lack of democracy in one system, or free speech and the uncontrolled free market, but also with a larger danger of poverty, unemployment, lack of education and a crippled welfare state on the other’.81 For her, there is much that can be learned from the achievements of the communist past, as well as the mistakes of the neoliberal present. Pyzik’s text aims to move beyond the aestheticisation of the communist past with a view toward its robust reassessment. The artists in this section adopt a similar stance, mining the communist past in order to both overturn the implicit taboos against speaking positively about that era, as well as examining the realities of the neoliberal capitalist system in the aftermath of the difficult transition period. What all of the artists in this section reveal is that neither the past nor the present is black and white; their projects attempt to reveal the nuances of both periods, offering perhaps their own Vergangenheitsbewältigung in the process.

259

4.18

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document 4.19

Gjorgje Jovanovik, The Depression of New Year’s Eve?, 30 December 2005, Ramstor shopping mall, Skopje. Performance in collaboration with the jazz band Letecki pekinezeri (Flying Pekinese). Courtesy: Gjorgje Jovanovik

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Politics and identity

Take, for example, the shift from a genuine celebration of holidays and an abundance of time to spend with family, which a society that was not economy-driven could afford, to the more commercialised celebrations that abound in the post-communist East (much like in the West). Macedonian artist Gjorgje Jovanovik’s (b. 1980) performance The Depression of New Year’s Eve? (2005; figure 4.19) poses the question ‘What do we celebrate, and how do we celebrate?’ The artist maintains that the original meaning of holidays ‘seems to be distorted and lost’ nowadays, ‘to a level of perversion’, and laments the fact that even New Year’s Eve has become a ‘festival of consumer fever and bad taste’.82 Jovanovik’s performance was staged on 30 December in the Ramstor shopping mall in Skopje, together with the band the Flying Pekinese, which started out playing bebop, and then gradually slowed its music down to a monotonous tempo in an effort to create a boring atmosphere, during which the artist read from his own text on the current meaning of holidays in society. Jovanovik wore a whimsical paper suit, resembling the sort that a paper doll would wear (and also bearing similarities to Dada costumes), suggesting the superficiality of the holidays nowadays. This performance was followed by The Recession of New Year’s Eve in 2008, examining the effects of the global recession on New Year’s celebrations, which, in his words, had become nothing more than a ritual of consumerism. Likewise, Albanian artist Enisa Cenaliaj explores a similar sense of loss of togetherness in the family unit in her photographic performance Family, which she created while participating in a residency at the Stiftung Künstlerhaus Boswil in Switzerland in 2003. Carrying a life-size cardboard cutout of a photograph of her family, the artist posed with the cutout in front of picturesque landscapes and tourist sites, effectively taking her family along with her on her travels. The artist explains that the meaning of family has changed since the end of the communist system; now, people need to work longer hours and have less time for family, not to mention the fact that many Albanians need to go abroad for work.83 Both Cenaliaj and Jovanovik draw attention to the positive aspects of life in socialist Yugoslavia and Albania, countering the popular rhetoric that life is better under capitalism. Often the impulse is to expunge those elements of the past that we would prefer to forget. A number of artistic projects bring this notion to the fore, among them HISTOERI REMOVING (figure 4.20), by the Tirana-based artistic group Dyzerotre Collective (formerly Studio203). In 2012, it staged a public action in downtown Tirana, placing a banner along the side of the Pyramid in the centre of the city. The Pyramid was built in the 1980s by Pranvera Hoxha, the daughter of the former communist dictator of Albania, and her husband, Klement Kolaneci, as a monument to the late leader. It opened as the Enver Hoxha Museum in 1988, three years after his death. After 1991, it became a conference centre and was then slated to house cultural events, but plans

261

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

262

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

were later made to raze the structure and erect the new Albanian Parliament building in its place. Alongside its associations with the country’s tyrannical ruler, the Pyramid is a presence in the Albanian capital, part of that city’s history, both a meeting place and a cultural icon, and many are arguing against its destruction. Because of its design, the building is often used by children as a slide, and the day of the artists’ performance was no different. After the artists explained what the action was about, the Roma children present helped them unveil the banner. Since the children agreed with the artists, and likewise did not want the structure to be destroyed, they agreed to participate. On the banner was written ‘HISTERI’ (hysteria), which is quite similar in spelling to the word histori (history) in Albanian. By placing the banner with this text across the facade of the Pyramid, the artists called attention to the hysterical reaction to history manifested by those who sought to erase that history from the landscape; with the placement of the banner, they hoped to remove the hysteria, but not the history. Romanian artist Dan Perjovschi also notes the similarities between history and the hysteria it can engender when the former becomes oversimplified. In 2007, as part of the project Public Art Bucharest, the artist restaged the confrontation that took place between miners and protesters in Bucharest’s University Square in 1990. Known as the mineriade, the clash is traditionally discussed in polarised terms, explained as either a confrontation manufactured by the government, which had the miners bussed in to the capital to silence those democratically protesting the current government, or a self-organised demonstration in support of the government.84 In his action, Perjovschi had participants, two at a time, stand opposite one another in University Square, one person representing a miner, and the other a demonstrator. At times, the pairs appeared confrontational; at other times, they were simply peaceful, but in all cases they remained frozen standing opposite one another, not fighting, reenacting the events not literally but symbolically, offering a chance for reflection on the part of those who passed by. Raluca Voinea comments on the novel ambiguity of the piece, which contrasts with the manner in which most artists of the period had been addressing political subjects – through irony or cynical commentary.85 The perspective from which we view history, or even the contemporary events surrounding us, greatly affects the manner in which we understand and interpret them. In Live! From the Ground (1998), Perjovschi demonstrates that the myopic view is just as dangerous as the Manichean one. Crawling along the main boulevard in Chișinău, the artist yelled statements such as, ‘Ground to centre, ground to centre! Come in! Do you hear me? I can’t hear you’, alluding to the peripheral status shared by artists and citizens of the East in post-communist Europe.86 The artist also describes what he saw from his low vantage point, referring to cracks in the sidewalk as ‘gorges’ and grass

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Politics and identity

Dyzerotre Collective, HISTOERI REMOVING, 2012, Tirana. Courtesy: DZTcollective

as a ‘forest’. In his words, ‘if you have no perspective, everything looks huge, every crack seems impossible to pass’.87 The artist speaks critically of the situation in Romania both during and after the system change: ‘the new invention after communism is to use technology as a façade … the laptop and the cellular phone became what Kent cigars and blue jeans had been some years ago … Labels. What’s the use of the Internet if we look at the World FROM THE HEIGHT OF A FROG’S KNEE!’88 Live! draws attention not only to the manner in which the transformation period was viewed from an official standpoint – with the implementation of radical economic reforms to introduce privatisation and open markets to quickly effect the transformation from planned economy to a neoliberal capitalist model as tantamount to the use of shock therapy – to the short-sightedness of individuals focusing on quick material gain at the expense of other aspects of everyday life. In addition to the risks associated with a coloured view of the past, there is also the danger of forgetting. Croatian artist Dalibor Martinis addresses this in his Data Recovery Project, which consists of various works. On 27 December 2004, a bronze statue of Josip Broz Tito was destroyed by explosives in the ruler’s birthplace of Kumrovec. Not only was the statue removed in the blast, but Tito’s head was broken off; effectively, he was decapitated. In the short performance JBT 27.12.2004 (figure 4.21), Martinis stood on the pedestal. Later,

263

4.20

4.21

Dalibor Martinis, JBT 27.12.2004, 27 December 2004, Kumrovec. Courtesy: Dalibor Martinis

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Politics and identity

Martinis cut off the head of a small replica of the Tito monument in a performance in Rijeka’s OK Gallery (2005). Bojana Pejić observes that Martinis did not occupy Tito’s position, but stood in as a representation of him; the artist’s performance highlights the absence of both Tito the man and his sculpture.89 One year later, Martinis’s video performance JBT/ZADAR/51 (2006), reanimated Tito’s words when the artist read a speech that the leader had originally given in Zadar in 1951. The video image of the speech was projected onto the façade of the buildings of the town’s main square, but the speech itself was played backward, so that the words were not intelligible (it would not have been permissible to play the video normally, broadcasting Tito’s speech with the words clearly understandable). The video documentation of the piece is then played in reverse when exhibited, so that the speech can be understood, but the people in the square appear to be walking backward. For the artist, ‘the work is about the past times which are erased by collective amnesia. Now, by this action, memory is brought forwards, but the citizens went backwards’.90 According to the artist, it is still not possible to talk about Tito, much like how discussion of the past is hampered in contemporary Romania. Martinis’s contribution is similar to Dan Perjovschi’s in that he does not offer commentary, but simply introduces the subject for contemplation. Of these works, he states, ‘it is important that they don’t historify forgotten events, but restore them to life, without an addition of context, just as data from a damaged hard disk can sometimes be restored without the appropriate context, the document or folder’.91 A similar data recovery project, although not billed as such, was created by Albanian video artist Anri Sala (b. 1974). In 1997, when going through some storage boxes in his Tirana apartment, he discovered a film reel from the Albanian Youth Congress in 1977, which had been attended by Enver Hohxa, as well as Sala’s mother, Valdet. The film, which has no sound, features his mother being interviewed by a journalist. When he showed the film to his mother, she found it amusing, but could not remember what she had said. Sala tracked down the interviewer, at that time a taxi driver who was also unable to remember. Finally, he went to a school for the deaf and had a lip reader transcribe the conversation. When his mother watched the film with the text subtitled, she became angry, realising that everything she said was scripted. The artist captured all of these events in his video work, Intervista (1998, 26 mins.; figure 4.22). At the end, he intersperses clips from French and Italian news channels reporting the military clashes in 1997 following the country’s economic collapse, which brought Albania to the brink of civil war. The final scene of the video shows Valdet saying that she is ‘frightened … The recent events have crushed a lot of hopes … I think we’ve passed on to you the ability to doubt. Because you must always question the truth’.92 While Valdet was incensed by the sound bites she spouted in her interview,

265

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

266

4.22

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

Anri Sala, Intervista, 1998. Video still. © DACS 2016 Courtesy: Anri Sala and DACS

she expressed a continued belief in the ideals that she held at the time: the dream of socialism. In this video piece, Sala interrogates the past and present through personal memories, demonstrating that neither situation is clear-cut – he neither completely denigrates the past nor wholly praises the present under the new system. Estonian artist Flo Kasearu (b. 1985) is also fearful of losing touch with the past, although her concern derives not from a lack of constructive dialogue about it, but rather from the homogenisation that will potentially (and is perhaps beginning to) arise from globalisation and multinational capitalism. In 2005, she became a living Estonian Sculpture (figure 4.23), when she appeared in the Living Sculptures exhibition in the Tallinn Art Hall dressed in national costume, raised on a pedestal and bearing a sign that read, ‘I am dead.’ Her work forecasted the potential loss of Estonian national identity in the wake of EU accession, a common fear among the smaller nations of Europe that have only recently shaken off the shackles of the previous (Soviet) ‘Union’ and are keen to assert their unique cultural heritage on the European and world stages. Later, when Flo was living in Germany as an Erasmus (exchange) student, she began to think about her homeland and what it means to be Estonian.93 While there, she created the short film Multi Travels (2007), which depicts a young Estonian woman in national dress walking around Berlin and promoting Estonia as a nation, brand or even religion. During the film, the actor walks up and down a public subway car, not begging for money, as one often witnesses in such situations, but providing information to the locals about her faraway homeland, Estonia. ‘In Estonia we have East European time zone’, she announces. The girl eventually stands on a pedestal in front of the Estonian Embassy, much like Flo did in her performance in Tallinn, a representative of her country abroad. While she tries to integrate and adapt, she ultimately escapes by running into the forest. After returning to Estonia, the artist created Keep in Touch (2008), a photographic performance where she

267

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Politics and identity

Flo Kasearu, Estonian Sculpture, 2005, Tallinn. Courtesy: Flo Kasearu

poses as a tourist in her own city, taking Polaroid snapshots of herself in front of the displays at the Estonian National Museum. While Flo, Martinis and the other artists discussed above are worried about forgetting their history, the Romanian collective Bureau of Melodramatic Research has other concerns: What to do when that history is already

4.23

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

268

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

erased, or, perhaps worse, inaccessible? While still master’s students in painting and photography at the Academy of Arts in Bucharest, the two artists, Irina Gheorghe (b. 1981) and Alina Popa (b. 1982), who founded the Bureau of Melodramatic Research in 2009, wished to research the history of melodrama in Romanian cinema; however, obtaining access to the film archives was challenging. Firstly, the organisation of the archives were problematic, as there were no real ways to search for this genre. Furthermore, in the Romanian National Film Archives, one has to pay to watch every film – something two students would not have been able to afford. Ironically, funding in education was usually only available for studies abroad, not for research into local or national history. As such, the two decided to turn a problem into an opportunity, and thus the Bureau of Melodramatic Research was born. The artists consider their work to be context-related, as they create interventions into reality or situations. In fact, what they have created with their first project, Ghirtoiu/Stanescu Archive, is a parallel reality. Where history did not exist or was inaccessible, they fabricated their own. According to the artists, the Archive was founded when Marian Ghirtoiu passed away. Ghirtoiu had worked for the Bureau for the Destruction of Forbidden Films, and it is because of him that the archive exists. According to their story, it contains film stills of the actresses Mona and Lisa Stanescu performing in the fictional melodramas to which the artists had wished to gain access in real life. The artists restaged these (nonexistent) stills in the manner of Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills (1977–80), but in apartments that were authentically decorated according to the pre-Second World War style. The artists did so using the homes of people who had returned to their previously nationalised apartments and redecorated them as they were at the time when they were vacated – with period decoration, furniture, accessories and the like. The description of the Ghirtoiu/Stanescu Archive suggests that Mona and Lisa were in fact ‘playing the masquerade of femininity’, which would make them part of an early feminist movement in Romania. And this is precisely the reason for the artists’ interest in melodrama: the performative aspect of gender and identity. The Ghirtoiu/Stanescu Archive is an interesting example of artistic innovation in the face of limitations. The artists cite the influence of Dan and Lia Perjovschi, whose studio they visited and whose workshops they attended. Of particular importance was a piece of advice offered by Lia: ‘If you don’t have a context, create your own’.94 The Perjovschis had done this themselves, often working without material resources but still finding a way to create. The artists are aware of the complexities in dealing with Romania’s past, a problem shared by many European nations during the post-Second World War period. There are many elements of the past that citizens would like to erase, and the attitude toward history changes from generation to generation. Evoking Lia Perjovschi’s words, Gheorghe and Popa told me, ‘If you can’t look

Politics and identity

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

at [this] history, then you have to invent it’. But inventing it was just the first step. For the Ghirtoiu/Stanescu Archive, the artists created a real ‘bureau’ that people could visit, and where they could interact with the materials collected. They also invited scholars and artists to comment on the topics relevant to the archive. Many of their other works take the form of lectures or presentations, which not only offer information but also stimulate discussion. In this way, they create history both through their work and interaction with viewers. Post-communist Eastern Europe and the notion of the ‘East’ Piotr Piotrowski characterises action and body art in Eastern Europe as a vehicle through which artists arrived at self-knowledge, and in many instances this occurred through an interrogation of the subject in light of local history and culture.95 Amelia Jones likewise sees body art as a tool to investigate the manner in which individual identity takes shape. In her words, ‘body art asks us to interrogate not only the politics of visuality but also the very structures through which the subject takes place’.96 She also reminds us of the contingency of that identity, that the self ‘cannot be known outside of its cultural representations’.97 Indeed, in many instances, the factors that came to mould the notion of individual identity and integration in the region were often political, connected to the geopolitical legacy of the Second World War. In the aftermath of the Cold War, artists had to begin to contend with their new designation as ‘Eastern European’ artists. The geographic indicators used to denote the region – ‘Eastern Europe’, ‘East-Central Europe’, ‘Central and Eastern Europe’ and even ‘Central Europe’ – point to the significance of these cardinal points. While we tend to think of the division of Europe into East and West as a product of the Cold War, a notion cemented in our minds by Winston Churchill’s Fulton, Missouri, speech, in which he famously remarked that ‘an iron curtain has descended across the continent’, this division may be tracked back further, to the Enlightenment.98 Prior to that, the division in Europe was between North and South. According to Larry Wolff, ‘It was Voltaire who led the way as the philosophers of the Enlightenment articulated and elaborated their own perspective on the continent, gazing from west to east, instead of from north to south’.99 It was through this bisection that the ‘backward, barbarous’ East was contrasted with the ‘civilised’ West. However, Éva Forgács contends that it was the New Left in the West that invented one of the manifestations of this divide – Eastern European art – contending that the term did not appear until 1968, when the left grew eager for a new revolution, pinning its hopes on the purportedly successful one that had been enacted in the East.100 At the time, economics did not play as great a role in the division between East and West as it may nowadays, although Immanuel Wallerstein discerns the emergence of a

269

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

270

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

capitalist ‘core’ in Western Europe, which exercised economic control over a ‘periphery’ in Eastern Europe.101 And although the concept of Mitteleuropa dates back to the First World War, when the German Empire identified parts of Eastern Europe it wished to annex into its empire, in the 1980s the term and concept of ‘Central Europe’ witnessed a resurgence as an answer to the Cold War’s hierarchical binary divisions. The idea of Eastern Europe or East-Central Europe has been difficult to leave behind. Even in the post-1991 period, the notion of the ‘former Eastern Europe’ continues to imply a hierarchy (as well as the counterpoint to that, the ‘former West’ project).102 As Francisco Bonami notes, ‘It’s clear that the adjective “former” implies not simply a geographical position, but a scale of values within economy and culture’.103 The third edition of the itinerant art biennial Manifesta, which was held in Ljubljana (the first time the exhibition took place in Eastern Europe), had as its theme ‘borderline syndrome’ as a metaphor for the state of present-day Europe, because ‘the end of the bipolar European post-war categorisations has led to an ideological fragmentation, to a collapse of traditional ideologies’.104 Manifesta 3 was predicated on the idea of Eastern Europe suffering from a borderline personality disorder resulting from a ‘weak ego’ and a ‘diffusion of identity’.105 In her catalogue essay for the exhibition After the Wall: Art and Culture in Postcommunist Europe (1999–2000, Moderna Museet, Stockholm), Bojana Pejić notes her conversation with Lithuanian artist Dainius Narkevičius (b. 1978), in which he laments the labels bestowed upon him by the (Western) art world: ‘I am a bit tired of being a “Lithuanian artist”. I would like to be just an artist’.106 Similarly, Bulgarian artist Luchezar Boyadjiev asserts that he ‘just want[s] to [sic] art’, regarding the ‘East/West discourse’ as ‘deeply outdated’.107 Boyadjiev developed the concept of ‘deep Europe’, with its ‘overlapping identities’ as a way to clarify the ambiguity of identity in the region. This ambiguity, according to Wolff, is what led to the perception of the region as ‘backward’, a bridge between the civilisation of Europe and the barbarism of Asia. Eastern Europe was seen as ‘within Europe but not fully European’, located ‘essentially in between’, which led to its hybrid identity.108 However, in the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Boyadjiev realised that it was because of these ‘overlapping identities’ that the Europeans from the ‘former’ East were no longer considered ‘exotic enough’ for Western curators. Commenting on his participation in Documenta 10, he states, ‘I, like some others, was simply out-casted by Catherine David [the director of Documenta 10] on the basis of being an Eastern European artist … And as everybody knows by now, for her Eastern Europe is not nearly as interesting /exotic/ as China, for instance … We, artists from Eastern Europe in general, turned out not to be different/ oppressed enough for her concept’.109 The reason for this, according to the artist, is that Eastern Europeans are essentially still part of Europe:

Politics and identity

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Whenever in the last several years I have communicated with Western European artists/curators and/or other intellectuals I have had the constant feeling that we are neither all that different nor all that similar. We will never be the same nor will we ever understand each other to the full possible extend [sic] either. At least not for some time to come. This is so because we just overlap.110

Whereas prior to 1989, Eastern Europe was perceived as not European enough, ironically it is now seen as too European to be of interest to the West. Artists in the former Yugoslavia experience a similar strain. As a Serbian artist, Vladimir Nikolić (b. 1974) describes himself as bearing a ‘geopolitical burden’, and feels that he cannot present his work in an international context as a ‘free man’ unencumbered by his ethnicity, since foreign curators and art historians expect his work to reflect his origins, specifically the post-conflict situation of Serbia.111 In his words, they (art catalogue text writers, curators, journalists, etc.) always read my work in the geopolitical context of the country I represent. So no matter what my work was about – it was seen only in the light of this Balkan communism – post-communism, war-post-war, anti-modern tradition, weird local habits, and described in terms of cultural, social and political references related to the place I come from.112

To deal with these concerns, he brought a Montenegrin dirge singer to sing at Marcel Duchamp’s grave as part of an artistic performance entitled Death Anniversary (2004; figure 4.24). In the artist’s experience, curators only expect art about war from a Serbian artist, yet this is precisely the opposite of what Duchamp had intended with the readymade: to remove an object from its context and infuse it with a new meaning. In the performance, the dirge singer is positioned between Nikolić and Duchamp, preventing the former from gaining access to the legacy of the latter, and thereby entering the international art context unencumbered. Piotrowski’s conclusion – that action and body artists utilised performance to interrogate the self and explore the notion of identity in all its multifarious meanings – is thus not surprising. If we draw a parallel between the ‘Eastern European’ and the gendered body, whose identity is confirmed based on its representation within visual culture, then, in Lacanian terms, the subject’s identity is created upon recognition of his or her reflection in the mirror stage, the reflection of this representation being a confirmation of self. So, too, with the Eastern European artist whose identity was shaped as early as the sixteenth century through sociohistorical and political circumstances beyond his or her control. It is also no wonder, then, that many artists in the postcommunist period seek to address these notions of identity that have been thrust upon them by external factors. As Zdenka Badovinac writes in her

271

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

272

4.24

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

Vladimir Nikolić, Death Anniversary, 2004, Rouen. Courtesy: Vladimir Nikolić

catalogue essay for Body and the East, ‘the body is also the location for the projection of viewers’ desires’.113 In the case of the artists discussed here, the body is interrogated as a site onto which the desires of the West are projected. Occupying the position of the ‘other’ in the post-communist world has proven challenging for many reasons. The political and economic situation in the region has had a direct impact on all aspects of one’s life. For this reason, Estonian artist Kai Kaljo’s (b. 1959) 1997 video performance, Loser, so poignantly expresses what the post-communist and post-Soviet situation has been like for many. In the video, the artist tells us how much she weighs, that she is thirty-seven years old and still lives with her mother, and that she earns $90 per month as a teacher at the Art Academy. Interspersed between these comments is a laugh track, common in Western sitcoms for decades by that point, but still a novelty in Eastern Europe. For most who grew up with laugh tracks on television, the sound of canned laughter in the middle of a show usually goes unnoticed. But to those hearing it for the first time, it seems ridiculous that one would need laughter to indicate where and when to laugh. This is just one of the cultural differences that the piece explores. The idea that a thirty-seven-year-old woman still lives with her mother is perhaps not

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Politics and identity

273

laughable, but certainly unusual – at least in the West in the 1990s (although due to the economic crisis of 2008, this has become more common in the West) – but in many Eastern European countries it is the norm that several generations live together in the same home. The idea that Kaljo would earn a mere $90 per month would also surprise the Western viewer, although at the end of the piece she puts that laughing viewer to shame by stating that ‘the most important thing for an artist is freedom’, and that she is happy. While the self-deprecating title of the piece is quite indicative of the time in which it was made, it still has relevance today, when economic disparity not only between East and West, but also among citizens of the East and the West, continues to divide the world into ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’, or the ‘99 percent’ as identified by the Occupy movement. Ghenadie Popescu reacted to the new market economy in Moldova by fashioning a new suit for himself, one that signified the time of transition for him, made of the plastic plaid raffia bags popular with migrants and refugees.114 He also felt that it identified him as an Eastern European, commenting that for

Ghenadie Popescu, Bag, 2006, Chişinău. Video still. Courtesy: Ghenadie Popescu

4.25

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

274

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

him the suit says, ‘I am from here. This is all that I can afford’.115 In 2006, the artist created a public performance simply entitled Bag (Torba), in which he walked around Chișinău Central Market wearing the suit (figure 4.25), looking at different items – including the very bags that his suit was made of, which were for sale there. These bags started appearing in the country in the 1990s; prior to that, shopping bags of any kind, even the plastic ones that are now customary in grocery stores, were nearly impossible to come by throughout the Eastern Bloc. In the new commodity culture, with a multitude of items to buy, one needs bags to carry the things home in. The bags are also associated with migration, as many migrants use them to transport their possessions abroad, as well as wares to trade on the open market. The concerns with the discrepancies and distance between East and West captivated Romanian artist Teodor Graur (b. 1953) in the immediate aftermath of the Romanian revolution and the end of communism. In a 1993 performance at the Zone Festival in Timișoara, Graur emphasised the disconnect between East and West by using a short-wave radio to attempt to make contact with the West, which had supposedly just opened up to countries such as Romania. Speaking in English, the artist asks whether anyone can hear him, but there is no response. The tension between East and West is vividly enacted in a car race orchestrated by the artist, together with the Euroartisti Group, at the AnnART Festival in Sfântu Gheorghe, Romania, in 1994. In the action, a Volkswagen Polo races a Romanian Dacia. Eventually, the cars have a head-on collision; the drivers come out and proceed to duel. In the end, the German driver is declared the winner – his vehicle is better and more powerful – and he is even awarded the ‘prize’ of a young Romanian girl who was a passenger in the Dacia. The fact that more than a decade separates this early work of Graur and that of Popescu indicates that the concerns of the ‘Eastern European’ citizen are still pertinent and present, even one decade after the system change and the opening up between East and West. Romanian artist Veda Popovici (b. 1986) addresses the question of what ‘East’ and ‘West’ really mean in The Wretched in the Sand (2013; figure 4.26), a performance she realised in Nida, Lithuania. Nida is a town on the Curonian Spit, a narrow strip of land that is actually a sand dune. It occupies a precarious position on the East-West divide, because it is literally divided between the EU-member state of Lithuania and the Kaliningrad region of Russia – the border between the two countries lies in the middle of it. JeanPaul Sartre visited the Curonian Spit in 1965 accompanied by an entourage of KGB officers, who were either protecting him from his surroundings or vice versa. Popovici reenacted this visit, but with notable differences: instead of a Westerner visiting the Curonian Spit, the visitor was now a Romanian, supposedly a fellow Easterner; instead of male, she is female. She read JeanPaul Sartre’s introduction to Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth (1961), an

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Politics and identity

275

anti-colonial text addressed to Sartre’s fellow Western Europeans concerning the decline of the West, calling for an end to the European continent whose growth was predicated on murder and looting. According to the artist, she selected the text in order to invoke a different aspect of Sartre, ‘not the Western intellectual taking a Soviet tour but the white male that struggles with the idea that he belongs to a civilisation that needs to be usurped for justice to be done.’116 In reading this text on the dunes, a desert atmosphere that could potentially be anywhere, even outside of Europe, the artist asked those present to consider the text in terms of its contemporary, post-Soviet setting, following the purported dissolution of terms such as ‘East’ and ‘West’, and to consider what it actually means to be ‘Western’ or European, especially amid the legacy of colonialism. The text is written in the first person and, according to the artist, asks the audience to question ‘who is “I” and “we”, it forces the audience to identify or dis-identify and thus question their taken-for-granted desire for Europeaness.’117 In an interview with the author, Popovici spoke about the dynamic of being in a country (Lithuania) that expressed a great desire for Europe but then realised that it was not in fact part of it. In this piece, as with works by many others discussed in this volume, the artist asks viewers to think critically about terms and situations that they accept without question, especially as far as what it really means to be Eastern European or Western. Whereas Tanja Ostojić took a personal approach to addressing the issue of borders and border crossings in Looking for a Husband with EU Passport,

Veda Popovici, The Wretched in the Sand, 2013, Curonian Spit. Courtesy: Veda Popovici

4.26

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

276

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

(discussed in chapter 3), the V2_East Syndicate, an Internet-based community of artists from Europe and the United States, provided the experience of border crossing for the attendees of Documenta 10 in Kassel with the participatory performance Deep Europe Visa Department.118 The artists announced an evening party in the Hybrid Workspace, a space reserved for new media projects at Documenta. A visa was required to attend. In order to enter the party, visitors had to apply for the visa using a form that was only in Albanian – one that was modelled after the German entry visa application, and the one that most Eastern European artists had to fill out when they travelled to the West prior to their countries joining the EU (or still have to, if they are not from EU member states). Luchezar Boyadjiev, among the members of V2 and a participant and organiser of Deep Europe Visa Department, describes the aim of the performance as follows: ‘the idea was to make the visitors feel with their own bodies what it actually means to live behind the Schengen Curtain … Visitors were meant to “suffer” all kinds of humiliations and arbitrary judgments based on absurd rules … And at the end, to experience the “depths of Europe” first hand’.119 Compounding these difficulties (as if a form in Albanian were not enough), all of the artists who were running the visa department and responsible for granting or denying visas only spoke their own, native language – be it Dutch, German, Bulgarian or Latvian and so on. Even the Artistic Director of that year’s Documenta, Catherine David, had to apply for a visa to get in. The ‘clerks’ performed the arbitrariness of the visa application and selection process by choosing people at random to enter the party; for example, a person wearing the colours of the Bulgarian, Serbian or Albanian national flag would be selected, or, further confusing the process, the person at the end of the line would be sent to the head of the queue. The clerks also enacted the indifference of the stereotypical civil servant, reading magazines instead of helping, randomly going on breaks and suddenly shutting down service windows. Yet unlike the reality of the actual visa process, in the end everyone obtained a visa to enter the party. What surprised the V2 artists most of all was the fact that even though after a while it became clear what was going on, people still flocked to the fake visa application office, voluntarily lining up to ‘be humiliated’, a situation that most of the artists had unhappily endured in real life. Mark Verlan (b. 1963) pursued a different path to confronting his identity as a Moldovan or Eastern European artist: fantasy. Specifically, he founded the ‘Kingdom of Moldova’ in 1995, crowning himself monarch, or ‘Marioka, Son of the Rain’, and creating passports for the realm. The kingdom may be a form of overcompensation for a country that ‘does not exist’ in the eyes of the West, or at least in the eyes of Manifesta, with its map of Europe omitting the country (see above). Like Ostojić, Verlan’s fellow Moldovan artist Pavel Braila discovered a solution to his lack of an EU passport through fantasy.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Politics and identity

In the performance Welcome to the EU, the artist created his own method of acquiring an EU passport: stencilling a circle of yellow stars onto his Moldovan passport so that it resembled the EU flag, creating the illusion that it might be an EU passport (although each EU nation has its own passport, sharing common design features, none bear the stars of the EU flag). Despite the passport being the property of the state that issues it, Braila had no problem travelling with his passport altered in that way, even though he never attempted to present it as an authentic EU passport by modifying the inside. (However, one ­participant in the performance encountered problems at the Ukrainian border.) Performing trauma, transformation and war in the former Yugoslavia In Yugoslavia, the dissolution of the socialist state did not occur in a peaceful manner. Following the 1980 death of Tito, the leader who had united several ethnically and religiously diverse groups, the political and economic situation in the region declined precipitously, and individual republics expressed a desire for independence from the Belgrade-based central government. Slovenia was the first republic to secede, doing so on 25 June 1991; two days later, the Yugoslav People’s Army invaded, leading to a ten-day conflict. That month, Croatia also declared autonomy, although the Croatian War of Independence would ultimately last four years, ending in August 1995. The coastal city of Dubrovnik endured a seven-month siege, from 1 October 1991 to 31 May 1992. With its three constituent ethnicities, Bosnia-Herzegovina was in a precarious state when Croatia declared independence, as most Serbs in the country wished to remain in the Yugoslav Federation, while the majority of Bosniaks and Croats favoured seeking independence. In October 1991, the Serb members of the Bosnian Parliament left the Central Parliament in Sarajevo to form the Assembly of the Serb People of Bosnia-Herzegovina, which eventually became Republika Srpska in 1992. In 1991, the Croatian Democratic Union had proclaimed the Croatian Community of HerzegBosnia; however, the Bosnian government did not recognise that entity. Although Bosnia-Herzegovina had declared independence in October 1991, most Serbs boycotted a referendum for independence the following year. Amid these tensions, the Bosnian War broke out on 7 March 1992. The siege of Sarajevo lasted from 5 April 1992 until 29 February 1996. Just two years later, on 28 February 1998, war broke out in Kosovo between the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). In March 1999, NATO entered the fray on the side of the KLA, with an eighty-eight-day bombing campaign of Yugoslavia. Numerous buildings, bridges and military installations were destroyed. The policies of Slobodan Milošević, President of Serbia and the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, were hated among his own people,

277

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

278

4.27

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

as he implemented restrictions on free speech and exercised control over the media. In 1996–97, students and the opposition in Serbia organised peaceful protests against Milošević, citing electoral fraud in the 1996 elections. How did Yugoslav artists respond to these tumultuous times? Although Nikolić had commented that after the new millennium, curators expected art about the war from artists in the region, that was not overwhelmingly the subject of performance art projects. However, a handful of interesting works addressing the local conflicts do stand out. The Dubrovnik-based artist Božidar Jurjević (b. 1963), for example, was directly affected by the siege of his city. In O-Circling (1994; figure 4.27), performed at OTOK Gallery, Art Workshop Lazareti, the artist placed a series of circular forms on the ground – objects that he found in the ruins of the city’s Imperial Hotel (now the Hilton) after it was bombed during the siege. While rummaging through the gutted building, which is located near his home, he came across a pile of towels that had been burnt and destroyed. The manner in which they burned left a circular or oval form, as if they had charred from the edges inward, and only the small circle from the centre of the towel remained. The artist describes this ‘white space’ (the white fabric remaining uncharred) as ‘the space of our survival’, as it represents that part of the towel that survived the siege.120 He laid out twelve of these pieces of cloth in a circle like the numbers on a clock, and then enacted a meditation on these spaces by moving around them as if they were stepping stones, constantly reversing directions and increasing speed until finally fainting from the disorientation.

Božidar Jurjević, O-Circling, 1994, Dubrovnik. Courtesy: Božidar Jurjević

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Politics and identity

Another Dubrovnik artist, Slaven Tolj (b. 1964), experienced the war firsthand as a soldier. In 1993, he participated in the Valencia Youth Biennale, arriving in the city straight from the war. He performed Valencia-DubrovnikValencia as a reflection on the death that he witnessed on the front lines. Wearing multiple layers of clothing, he sewed black buttons on each layer before removing them. When he reached the final layer – his own skin – he proceeded to sew a button onto his chest. Sewing a black button onto one’s clothes is a Dalmatian mourning ritual, and by appropriating that ritual the artist paid homage to his friends and colleagues who had died in the war; by doing so in a manner that inflicted pain on himself, the artist physically suffered for the loss of his loved ones. That year, Tolj staged another performance, this time in Helsinki and with his wife at the time, fellow artist Marija Grazio. Sarajevo, the city where Tolj had studied, was now under siege, just as Dubrovnik had been a few years earlier. During that time, aid would be dropped on those cities in the form of dehydrated food products that could be made into a soup by adding water; the packet read, ‘food for survival’ – the phrase Tolj used for the title of the piece. In Food for Survival, Tolj and Grazio mixed the soup and covered their bodies with it, eating it off one another; in this way, they combined an act of desperation (consuming to survive) and an act of love, with the stark contrast between the two highlighting the struggle for survival that the food represents. Bosnian artist Nela Hasanbegović (b. 1984) also created a food-based performance, one based on a childhood memory. She was ten, and she was hungry. It was during the war, Sarajevo was under siege and there were shortages throughout the city. The young girl wanted fish for lunch, but there was little likelihood of that happening. Instead, she drew a fish on a piece of paper, cut it out and served it with real potatoes for lunch for her mother and grandmother. Years later, she re-created this story as a video performance, Story about Fish (2013), by having a ten-year-old child draw a fish and put it together with her dinner. Also a soldier in the Croatian military, Boris Šincek (b. 1971) aimed to atone for his sins through performance. In 2002, he created a performance that had echoes of Chris Burden’s 1974 piece Shoot, but here the artist wore a bulletproof vest and was shot in the chest, with the gun being carefully arranged so that the curator who pointed the gun at Šincek, Jurij Krpan (Director of Kapelica Gallery in Ljubljana), would not miss the mark. Despite the danger, this performance was reenacted during the art collective Kontejner’s The Orange Dog and Other Tales (Even Better than the Real Thing) project in 2009, by Mario Kovač and Vili Matula, in the Student Centre Gallery in Zagreb. In the original performance, Šincek created a situation in which he could re-experience his trauma in order to master it and therefore heal. The reiteration of the performance in 2009 suggests the potential for collective healing on the part of local citizens who experienced the war.121

279

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document 4.28

Maja Bajević, Dressed Up, 1999, seven-hour performance / video (1:55 min) / dress. ‘MINIMUM’, City Gallery Collegium Artisticum, Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina (Curator Dunja Blazević), 1999. Photo documentation: Danica Dakić, SCCA. Courtesy: Maja Bajević

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Politics and identity

War leaves destruction in its wake, and it is often artists who attempt to pick up the pieces. Bosnian artist Maja Bajević (b. 1967) sought to do this with her seven-hour video performance Dressed Up (1999; figure 4.28) at the City Gallery Collegium Artisticum in Sarajevo. During the performance, the artist symbolically healed her nation that had just been torn asunder by war by taking a piece of material with the map of Yugoslavia printed on it and sewing a dress out of it. At the end of the performance, she put the dress on. Commenting on the piece, she states, ‘tragedies like war and the disintegration of a country are usually seen as political, general things. Actually they are personal, very intimate events in our lives that we carry, pasted on, like a dress’.122 While Bajević metaphorically reconstructed her country, Nebojša Šerić Šoba (b. 1968) gave voice to a nation’s isolation and emptiness in the aftermath of war in No Lyrics, No Music, No Country, Nothing … , a performance staged on the streets of Sarajevo and Ljubljana in 1997. The artist appeared on the streets of these cities with a stringless guitar wearing a blank sign around his neck, mouthing the words to something but producing no audible sound. Before him sat an empty tin marked, ‘USA not to be sold or exchanged’, a remnant of the relief that was offered to victims of the siege. The phrase clearly refers to the people of Yugoslavia, who were the victims of the shifting political and economic interests of the government. Fellow Bosnian artist Alma Suljević (b. 1963), who saw herself like the late Princess Diana, took the land mines left behind in her country as her personal cause in her artistic practice. Since 1997, she has been working to clear the mines in a project she calls 4 Entity, in reference to the three ‘entities’ that have comprised the nation of Bosnia-Herzegovina since the signing of the Dayton Accords: the Federation of Bosnia, Republika Srpska and Brčko District. As part of that project, Suljević created her own entity (the fourth one indicated in the title), which comprises all the minefields in the country. In the performance Annulling the Truth (1999), the artist put her own life at risk in her effort to deactivate actual land mines. To finance the cleaning of the minefields, she has been selling soil from them in small bags that she sews herself. She embarked on this endeavour at Sarajevo’s Markale fruit market in August 2000, on the anniversary of the massacre that occurred there five years earlier.123 Bosnian artist Adela Jušić (b. 1982) often invokes the memory of war in her work. In the video performance Who Needs DRNČ (2008), the artist cleans her father’s gun, just as he had taught her to do at the age of ten. (DRNČ stands for deterdžentni rastvarač naslaga čađi, or detergent solvent of soot layers, a solution for cleaning weapons.) Jušić’s father was a sniper in the Bosnian army, and in her video piece The Sniper (2007), the artist reads from her father’s diary, in which he recorded how many soldiers he had killed in combat. The video shows an image of her father with his sniper rifle, interspersed and layered over an image of the artist’s hand drawing a red circle on a piece of

281

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

282

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

white paper. The image of the artist’s father appears as she draws the red circle, perhaps suggesting the tragic (and tragically ironic) way in which he died – by a sniper bullet to his eye. In both works, the artist brings the personal to the usually impersonal, or historical, nature of war. A group performance Jušić carried out in Belgrade in 2008 with Lana Čmajčanin, Leila Čmajčanin, Ilvana Dizdarević, Danijela Dugandžić-Živanović and Alma Suljević highlights another dimension of war and its victims that recalls the work of Grazio and Tolj in its focus on food and the basic needs that become foregrounded during war. Titled Bujrum, Help Yourselves, this street action was staged in front of the Sebilj Fountain, which was a gift from the City of Sarajevo to Belgrade. The piece comprises two parts. The first part was private, and consisted of the participants preparing traditional Bosnian dishes using only the limited ingredients that were available during the siege of Sarajevo; the second part was a party on the opening night, in which the guests consumed the food. The piece honours the women who kept their families going during the crisis of war, using their resourcefulness to create ‘something out of nothing’. It also draws attention to the significance of the lack of food and the struggle for survival, which affects not only those fighting, but those left behind as well. Challenging heteronormativity Eastern Europe has a difficult relationship with LGBT issues and the recognition of LGBT rights. In the Soviet Union, homosexuality was criminalised under Joseph Stalin and remained so until 1993, when Yeltsin decriminalised it. In 1991, Bulgaria became the first country in Europe to ban same-sex marriage. Lithuania followed suit in 1992, Belarus and Moldova did so in 1994, Ukraine in 1996, Poland in 1997, Latvia and Serbia in 2006, Montenegro in 2007, Hungary in 2012, Croatia in 2013 and Slovakia in 2014. The ­situation was different in Yugoslavia, most notably, Ljubljana, which was home to the first gay club in Eastern Europe, MAGNUS, which opened in 1984. The­­Slovenian capital also witnessed the publication of Viks, an alternative magazine featuring imagery and discussion of LGBT-related matters. With the exception of Slovenia in the 1980s, reference to LGBT issues in performance art of the communist era was rare. Such issues were raised in other nations in the East in the post-communist period, albeit intermittently, because of the significant personal and professional repercussions that artists could face for either coming out or appearing to support LGBT rights. In 1972, Andris Grīnbergs (b. 1946), the Latvian artist, fashion designer and author of the first happening in Latvia, created the film Self-Portrait. Recording various actions and happenings in the artist’s apartment that he shared with his wife at the time, Inta Jaunzeme (b. 1955), the film contains a number of scenes that challenge heteronormativity, especially when c­ onsidered within

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Politics and identity

the context of conservative Soviet-era Latvia, where even dressing like a hippie on the streets could lead to trouble with the authorities or accusations of drug addiction. In one scene, the artist kisses a man in a public toilet; in another, he snuggles with another man in bed, both of them naked, while a party takes place around them. The film also features a scene of Grīnbergs and his wife (whom he had married in the performance The Wedding of Jesus Christ) having sex, with the camera focused only on their faces. Two weeks after the film was completed, Grīnbergs’s apartment was raided by the KGB. The artist had been watched by the authorities for his outlandish behaviour and unconventional manner of dress. The film was not found, and after the raid the artist divided it up into thirty-two parts, hiding it in various different locations around Riga.124 It was only restored in the post-Soviet period, and screened for the first time in 1996. Lithuanian-American filmmaker Jonas Mekas calls this film ‘one of the five most sexually transgressive films ever made’, a statement that carries even more weight in not only the Soviet Latvian context, but also the Eastern European one, where there remain few examples of artworks that confront heteronormative models.125 Vladislav Mamyshev (1969–2013) was a Russian artist who first assumed the persona of Marilyn Monroe in the 1980s. He drew inspiration from the celebrated 1959 American film Some Like It Hot, which he recalled seeing in theatres at that time, and which features not only Marilyn Monroe as Sugar Cane Kowalski – the lead singer in an all-female band – but also Tony Curtis and Jack Lemon in drag as her fellow band members. In 1986, Mamyshev was discharged from the army and committed to a psychiatric facility after dressing up as Monroe, using hair from dolls to fashion a wig and altering curtains for a dress. In 1989, the artist (who was by this time using Mamyshev-Monroe as his surname) appeared at the opening of the Leningrad exhibition Women in Art dressed as his heroine, which caused a scandal on television and in the mass media and resulted in death threats to the artist. Olesya Turkina terms the artist’s use of disguises a ‘therapy of possible multiple-personality disorder’; indeed, Mamyshev’s use of costume and disguise helped him orient himself on an axis that defies not only gender binaries, but also those separating East and West.126 As the artist describes it, his use of costume and alternate identities expresses his desire ‘to embody mankind in all its variety, experience all these destinies myself, take on myself all these countless sins, neutralise these countless good deeds, eliminate sexual, national, social and other differences and remain myself in this singular variety’.127 In 2010, Mamyshev was violently beaten in Russia in an act of gay bashing. He documented his injury and his recovery on Facebook: he became Marilyn Monroe once again, using his public prominence to serve as a spokesperson for gay rights. In Taming Beauty, which could be characterised as a Facebook performance, the artist poses for selfies featuring his bruised eye and assuming

283

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

284

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

poses reminiscent of Monroe. He annotated the images, creating a story line to go with them. First, he describes the appearance and progression of his battered eye into a black eye, followed by his channelling of Monroe’s spirit: ‘the next day, when the eye became black and blue, my Great Sacred Muse Marilyn Monroe appeared … and so I became Marilyn Monroe without the makeup’.128 In an eerie episode of art imitating life, the artist died in 2013 as tragically as his namesake and under equally suspicious circumstances, drowning in a few inches of water at his hotel in Bali. The issue of gay rights is addressed in a vivid delegated performance by Croatian artist Igor Grubić. Entitled East Side Story (2006), the video installation combines documentary footage from two gay pride parades, one in Belgrade in 2001 and the other one in Zagreb in 2002, with videos of dancers by the artist. Both pride events had been met with violence and protest. The dancers reenact the movements of the protesters as a dance, in the same locations where the protests occurred. The title is an obvious reference to the Leonard Bernstein musical West Side Story, in which rival street gangs – the Jets, a Puerto Rican gang, and the Sharks, a white gang – fight with one another. The musical, which is centred around a Romeo and Juliet-type love story between Tony, a member of the Jets, and Maria, whose brother is the leader of the Sharks, embodies the racial tensions of 1950s America. Similarly, Grubić’s video performance exemplifies the friction between rightwing nationalists and conservative members of the population and the LGBT community that had begun to emerge in the public sphere following the wars of the 1990s. The reenacted actions are meant to perform a healing function as they attempt to bandage the wounds of those sites of aggression. Bulgarian artist Boryana Rossa also challenged gender binaries in a very visceral piece from 2004, The Last Valve, when, in a private performance in her Sofia apartment, she sewed shut her vulva with surgical thread. In doing so, she denied the phallus access to her body by sealing it closed. By literalising the phrase ‘stitched up cunt’, referring to a woman who is frigid and does not always automatically make herself available for sex, she also confronts patriarchal attitudes toward gender. Her action suggests a future world that is free of gender distinctions, envisioning a society that will ‘accept more flexible notions of sex and gender, to embrace diversity and not to curse it’.129 Her gender ambiguity is akin to Mamyshev’s, insofar as the artist maintained his biological male gender, despite having the outward appearance of a female. In images of the artist dressed as Marilyn, he adopts the iconic scene from the 1955 film The Seven Year Itch in which Monroe stands on a subway vent, which causes her skirt to fly up. However, Mamyshev’s penis is visible under his skirt, suggesting the fluid nature of his gender identity, which accommodates the appearance and persona of the female film star alongside his male sexual organ.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Politics and identity

When Estonian artist Sandra Jõgeva (b. 1976) worked as a dominatrix from 2005 to 2006, she challenged audiences to confront their own hetero­ normative codes of behaviour. She became well known in Estonia for the project, and utilised the material from the year-long experience for a number of works. These include a 2007 exhibition, entitled The Year of the Dominatrix, which she created to communicate her sadomasochistic experiences through art. In the gallery, she presented chocolate bars with wrappers bearing scenes of typical S&M sessions featuring the usual stereotypical range of clients, from the shy, nervous guy unable to interact with women, to the stressedout middle-aged businessman who used the sessions as a release during his lunch break. The wrappers also contain extracts from Jõgeva’s diary about the experience. The artist chose chocolate bars because, in her words, they are both ‘sweet and sinful’.130 In some ways, the use of chocolate makes an awkward or potentially disturbing subject somehow more palatable to the uninitiated, both literally and figuratively, because it presents an intense situation in the form of a pleasant, everyday item. Speaking of her experience as a dominatrix, she explains that it ‘illuminated profoundly my understanding of human character, as well as the nature of a typical Estonian male’.131 The artist had studied with Jaan Toomik at the Estonian Academy of Arts, who taught his students to look to the marginal places of society for inspiration. Jõgeva’s dominatrix experience also informed the performance Born Free, Born Equal, staged in the Polymer Culture Factory in 2009. The piece featured ‘slaves’, three men wearing nothing but leather masks who cleaned the gallery spaces and cleaned up after the performers. She also involved the audience in a participatory performance called The Gauntlet (2007) for the exhibition Sex Market at Tallinn Art Hall. During the opening, the male visitors entering the gallery were whipped by females outfitted in full dominatrix gear. All of these works force the viewer to confront his or her own assumptions and attitudes toward a marginalised group in contemporary society. Romanian artist Mihai Lukacs (b. 1980) utilises Marxist theory as a lens through which to address LGBT issues. Drawing on different texts, he authored the ‘Queer Worker’ manifesto, devoted to the concept of the queer worker and explaining the rationale behind combining the categories of ‘queer’ and ‘worker’: ‘The exploitation of the working class goes hand in hand with the oppression of women and queers. Our struggles for sexual justice go hand in hand with those for social justice, the redistribution of goods and abolition of property goes hand in hand with changing the gendered/sexed/ racialised instruments of culture’. With this text, the artist blends communist ideology, which advocates the liberation of the worker, with contemporary queer theory, feminism and other civil rights issues. In some ways, his interest in the liberation of minorities emerged from the local situation in Romania, where official rhetoric blames homosexuality for the country’s declining birth

285

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

286

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

rate, and fears the ‘queer apocalypse’ will be the end of the Romanian nation. At the same time, Lukacs sees anti-gay discrimination as a global phenomenon, because Romania is certainly not the only place in the world where LGBT people are marginalised. But the artist’s ‘Queer Worker’ manifesto does more than simply criticise; it presents a solution: ‘Let’s mix working class leitmotifs with queer theory and political utopias and bake a genderless and classless society’. For Lukacs, the term ‘queer’ is an umbrella term for any individual that is marginalised on the basis of gender or sexuality. He sees the liberation of the LGBT community as helping promote the liberation of all oppressed groups, including the proletariat, Roma, religious minorities and so on. Lukacs also enacts a Queer Worker performance (2013–present), a lecture that he also describes as a ‘food performance’ as it involves a worker (the artist) on his lunch break, eating in front of the audience. He took the idea of a food performance from Bertolt Brecht, whose work attempted to transgress what he described as ‘culinary theatre’ – that is, an easily digestible form of art that confirms one’s way of living rather than challenges it. For Lukacs, the Queer Worker performance takes on an activist dimension, aiming to involve the members of the audience in discussion, thereby forcing them to confront their own views about capitalism, society, the worker and the oppressed.132 Straddling the line between art and politics in post-Soviet Russia While the public performances that emerged as part of the Moscow Actionism of the 1990s were primarily apolitical and artistic in nature, following Boris Yeltsin’s appointment of Vladimir Putin as Prime Minister of the Russian Federation in 1999, and the latter’s election as President in 2000, artists began to occupy the public space and utilise the creative sphere to voice concerns over the limitations being placed on civic society, the public space and free speech. These limitations were intensified during the 2007 Parliamentary elections as well as the final year of Putin’s second term as President; at this time, new legislation on elections was enacted to prevent the liberal opposition from gaining power, and the mass media came increasingly under government control, reporting what the state wanted it to.133 Since Putin’s election as head of state in 2000, the courts have more and more come to rely on Article 282 of the Russian Criminal Code – ‘Incitement of National, Racial or Religious Enmity’ – which was adopted in 1996 and states that ‘Actions aimed at the incitement of national, racial, or religious enmity, abasement of human dignity’ shall be punishable by a fine or imprisonment of up to five years. The year 2012 witnessed the passage of two laws furthering these developments: one requiring all NGOs to register as foreign agents, which would leave them subject to increased audits, and another imposing substantial fines on those who organise or take part in unsanctioned demonstrations, effectively closing

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Politics and identity

off the public space for peaceful protest. In the context of these curtailments of free speech, Russian artists utilised performances in public spaces to manifest their discontent and also implore others to emerge from their passivity in the wake of such restrictions. Russian artist Anton Litvin (b. 1967) has been creating political actions in the public space in Russia since the 1990s. Among his early actions is Crucify Him, performed on Nikol’skaya Ulitsa in Moscow, the street that connects the Lubyanka, the building used to interrogate and imprison political prisoners in the Soviet period, with Red Square. In this politically charged space in 1995, he wrapped himself in a banner that read ‘crucify him’, and, while a friend held one end, he spun the banner in and out, revealing and concealing the words of that phrase. While that performance attracted little attention, an actual crucifixion by Oleg Mavromati (b. 1965) entitled Do Not Believe Your Eyes (2000) did. With the background of the newly rebuilt Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in the background, the artist had himself nailed to a wooden cross.134 The performance was filmed by a TV crew and broadcast one week later, after which Mavromati received a complaint from the local Orthodox community. The artist was threatened with legal action, and although the matter was initially rejected by the Moscow City Court it was later put through, and the artist was accused of violating Article 282 for ‘inciting religious enmity’. The artist left Russia that same year and has not returned, as he faces three to five years in prison if convicted of the crime. Mavramoti’s performance comprised one scene from his film Oil on Canvas (2000–present) and was not intended as an indictment of the Church. Rather, the film in which it appears tells the story of the painter Oleg Golosiy, who was murdered by a friend in 1993 because of envy. In Mavramoti’s version of the story, the murderer repents, and decides to change from creating paintings to staging actions and performances to express his sincerity. Mavramoti’s reworking of the narrative speaks to artists’ belief at that time in the honesty and integrity of action and performance art. Despite Mavromati’s intentions with regard to the performance, the work’s co-opting of religious imagery and symbolism led to its interpretation as offensive by believers. Article 282 was used most stringently to imprison three members of the Russian feminist punk group Pussy Riot following their action in the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour on 21 February 2012. During the performance, five of the women in the group, whose membership fluctuates but usually totals around eleven, attempted to enter the sacred space of the altar. After one was quickly removed by a church guard, the four women who remained jumped around the altar, pretended to play guitar, punched their fists in the air and kicked in the air. The purpose of the action was to protest Russian President Vladimir Putin’s close ties to the Orthodox Church, citing the Patriarch Kirill’s open and vocal support of Putin in the presidential election of 2011. As is the

287

4.29

Petr Pavlensky, Fixation, 2013, Moscow. Courtesy: Petr Pavlensky

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Politics and identity

group’s usual practice, the action was filmed; the film was later turned into a music video using both this footage as well as that from an action staged in the Epiphany Cathedral at Yelokhovo in Moscow. Sound was also added – a song entitled ‘Mother of God, Drive Putin Away’, which was also the title of the video, and the video was transmitted to the rest of the world through the Internet. On 3 March 2012, two of the group’s members, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova (b. 1989) and Maria Alyokhina (b. 1988), were arrested; a third, Yekaterina Samutsevich (b. 1982) was arrested on 16 March. The other two members of Pussy Riot apparently fled the country to avoid being prosecuted. Because the performance took place in an area of the church reserved only for priests as well as because of their actions and inappropriate dress for that space, Tolokonnikova, Alyokhina and Samutsevich were charged with hooliganism motivated by religious hatred. On 17 August of that year, they were convicted of violating Article 282, and sentenced to two years in prison. The trio’s lawyers issued numerous appeals, all of which were denied by the court, although Samutsevich was released on 10 October 2012 after her lawyer argued that she had not actually entered the space of the altar, having been stopped by a guard before she could. Tolokonnikova and Alyokhina served over one year of their sentence before they were released on amnesty on 23 December 2013. Russian journalist and Putin opponent Masha Gessen’s chronicle of the events, Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot, describes the show trial that the women endured and the humiliating conditions they were forced to undergo in prison. Pussy Riot! A Punk Prayer for Freedom, assembled by the Feminist Press following the August 2012 verdict, also documents the group’s motivations and the transcripts of the trial. Similar to Mavramoti, the group did not seek to ‘offend religious sentiment’, but their actions were interpreted literally by believers, as opposed to critically, as they were intended. Regardless, what the transcript of the trial makes clear is that the outcome of the trial had been determined once the charges were set. The state made an example of the artists, perhaps as a warning to others who might attempt to infiltrate the public space with political messages. Following the passing of the 2012 legislation that raised the fines for unsanctioned demonstrations and Putin’s reelection as President of the Russian Federation, many citizens fell silent, and civic society effectively disappeared in Russia. The St. Petersburg-based Russian artist Petr Pavlensky (b. 1984) reacted to these developments by staging powerful, primal performances designed to incite his viewers to action. For example, his 2013 performance Carcass involved the artist lying naked, wrapped in barbed wire, in front of the Legislative Assembly in St. Petersburg, in protest of the regime’s human rights violations. That same year, in Fixation (figure 4.29), he nailed his scrotum to a cobblestone in Red Square to symbolise the apathy of contemporary Russian society, which prevents the

289

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

290

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

citizenry from acting and protesting against the government’s violations of their individual liberties. He expressed his support for Pussy Riot in 2012 in the action Seam, where he appeared in front of Kazan Cathedral in St. Petersburg with his mouth sewn shut, holding a banner that equated the actions of Pussy Riot in the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour with those of Jesus Christ, suggesting their martyrdom for civil society.135 In his 23 February 2014 action, Freedom, staged in support of Euromaidan, the wave of protests taking place in Ukraine that year, he and his colleagues built a barricade on the Tripartite Bridge in St. Petersburg, burned tires and shouted slogans. Freedom led to the arrest of the artist and his collaborators on charges of vandalism. Strikingly, during the course of the investigation in advance of the trial, the artist managed to persuade his interrogator, Pavel Yasman, to see his side. In the course of their conversations, Yasman agreed that the artist was ‘just a tool’ and that ‘the government simply makes tools out of people’.136 Yasman eventually quit his job in law enforcement as a result, and trained as a lawyer to defend the rights of individuals such as Pavlensky. Actions such as those staged by Mavramoti, Pussy Riot and Pavlensky demonstrate how artwork that enters the heavily monitored public sphere in Putin’s Russia faces strict scrutiny and even serious repercussions, both from the government and the Church, as well as the fact that artists have become pawns in the government’s game of political control. In the absence of public debate and discourse, artists seek to fill the void, and provoke discussion in a space that they hope is safely balanced between art and politics, artwork and activism. In the case of all three examples, the consequences for crossing these lines, even if done so unintentionally, were quite severe. Conclusion Despite Goldberg’s sweeping claims concerning the motivation and meaning of performance art in the region, artists in the communist period clearly were not solely focused on making political statements in their work. If anything, the richness of the creative discussion on history, politics, war and social change that emerged after the fall of the Berlin Wall suggests that artists responded to these changes in the post-communist period by becoming politicised. Amid the absence of public debate on topics such as the favourable aspects of the communist past, the challenges of the post-communist present, democracy and war, it is artists who rise to the challenge to enact these debates, often utilising the vehicle of performance for its directness and presumed sincerity.

Politics and identity

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Notes 1 Roselee Goldberg, Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present, 3rd ed. (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2011), p. 214. 2 The term is a reference to a type of modernism found in these particular contexts of socialist Eastern Europe, ‘socialist’ referring to the geographic context for this type of art, rather than a political leaning. 3 Piotr Piotrowski, Art and Democracy in Post-Communist Europe (London: Reaktion Books, 2012), p. 93. 4 Michel Feher, ‘Of Bodies and Technologies’, in Hal Foster (ed.), Discussions in Contemporary Culture, 1 (Seattle: Bay Press, 1987), p. 161. 5 Ibid. 6 Konrad’s Antipolitics: Central European Meditations argued for Central Europe’s separation from the Soviet bloc in order to strengthen European identity. First issued in English in 1984 (San Diego: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich). 7 Amelia Jones, The Artist’s Body (London: Phaidon Press, 2012), p. 23. 8 Ibid., p. 27. 9 Pavlína Morganová, Czech Action Art: Happenings, Actions, Events, Land Art, Body Art and Performance Art Behind the Iron Curtain (Prague: Karolinum Press, 2014), p. 162. 10 Retrospectively, one can view this action as having also presaged the nation’s dissolution into the Czech Republic and Slovakia in 1993, in what came to be known as the Velvet Divorce. 11 Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle: Group Psychology and Other Works, trans. James Strachey (1920–22; repr., London: Hogarth Press, 1962), pp. 15–16. 12 Ion Grigorescu, in an interview with Anders Kreuger in New York, 29 August 2009, www.ludlow38.org/files/wyoming-transcript-ion-grigorescu-anders-kreuger.pdf, accessed 2 October 2014. 13 Ion Grigorescu, in an interview with Anders Kreuger in Bucharest, 14 July 2009, ‘Interview with Ion Grigorescu’, in Alina Şerban (ed.), Ion Grigorescu: The Man with a Single Camera (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2013), p. 283. 14 For example, I am aware that Maja Fowkes recently interviewed some of the artists for the research for her book The Green Bloc: Neo-Avant-Garde Art and Ecology under Socialism (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2015), but she mentioned that they would only discuss their work in the context of the environment and sustainability. 15 Morganová, Czech Action Art, p. 173. 16 Tomáš Ruller, in an interview with the author in Aberdeen, Scotland, 15 May 2014. 17 Black Market International is a performance artist collective founded in 1985 whose members come from nations around the world, all of whom have individual practices as performance artists. 18 Elisabeth Jappe is an art critic who has written widely on performance art, most notably in her Performance – Ritual – Prozess: Handbuch der Aktionskunst in Europa (Munich: Prestel, 1993). 19 Tomáš Ruller, in an email to the author, 18 March 2016. 20 Miklós Erdély (1983), as quoted in Colin Vernall, ‘No money no object: revolution and revaluation in the economics of place and the place of economics in art’, eSharp, 11 (Spring 2008), 3.

291

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

292

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

21 Dóra Hegyi and Zsuzsa László, ‘How Art Becomes Public’, in Dóra Hegyi, Sandor Hornyik and Zsuzsa László (eds), Parallel Chronologies (Budapest: transit.hu, 2011), p. 4. 22 Miško Šuvaković, ‘Performing of Politics in Art – Transitional Fluxes of Conflict’, in Nebojša Milenković (ed.), Szombathy Art (Novi Sad, Serbia: Museum of Contemporary Art: 2005), p. 178. 23 Klara Kemp-Welch, Antipolitics in Central European Art: Reticence as Dissidence under Post-Totalitarian Rule, 1956–1989 (London: I.B. Tauris, 2014), p. 182. 24 Ibid., p. 184. 25 Ibid. 26 The artist was jailed after a copy of György Konrád and Iván Szelényi’s manuscript, The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power (1973–74), was discovered in his apartment following a raid. Ibid., pp. 138–40. 27 In 2005, the Hungarian collective Little Warsaw (Andras Galik and Balint Havas) reenacted this performance; Szentjóby participated in it. 28 Reprinted in ‘Tamás Szentjóby: Exclusion Exercise – Punishment-Preventive Authotherapy’, in Hegyi, Hornyik and László (eds), Parallel Chronologies, p. 30. 29 Kemp-Welch, Antipolitics in Central European Art, p. 127. 30 KwieKulik, ‘The Eagle Affair’, in Jacek Dobrowolski et al. (eds), Zofia Kulik/ Przemysław Kwiek: KwieKulik (Zurich: JRP/Ringier, 2012), p. 220. 31 KwieKulik, ‘Activity for the Head: Three Acts’, in Dobrowolski et al. (eds), Zofia Kulik/Przemysław Kwiek: KwieKulik, p. 294. 32 Piotr Piotrowski, Art and Democracy in Post-Communist Europe (London: Reaktion Books, 2012), p. 93. 33 Ibid., p. 87. 34 Ibid., p. 90. 35 Kemp-Welch, Antipolitics in Central European Art, p. 40. 36 Ibid. 37 The Raft of the Medusa (1818–19) depicts a scene of chaos and despair following the shipwreck of the French naval ship Meduse in 1816. Of the 147 people on board, only 15 survived by resorting to cannibalism. Both the disaster, and Géricault’s painting of it, prompted a political scandal, as it intensified feelings of resentment toward the newly restored French monarchy. 38 Kemp-Welch, Antipolitics in Central European Art, p. 41. 39 The two worked together until 2003. 40 As quoted in Kemp-Welch, Antipolitics in Central European Art, p. 247. 41 Magdalena Ujma, ‘Guys, I Can’t Stand it Anymore … Łódź Kaliska and the Pursuit of Freedom’, in Jarosław Lubiak (ed.), Frankness and Blague: The Ethics of Łódź Kaliska’s Works, 1979–1989 (Łódź, Poland: Muzeum Sztuki, 2009), p. 118. 42 Iosif Király, in an interview with the author in Bucharest, 26 March 2014. 43 Ibid. 44 Marina Naprushkina, in an interview with the author in Berlin, 7 May 2014. 45 The newspaper was originally titled The Worker, and, later, Soviet Belarus (until 2007). 46 Naprushkina, in an interview with the author in Berlin, 7 May 2014.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Politics and identity

47 For the artist, the colour white symbolised a free man (in general), a reference to the time of slavery. 48 Kristine Stiles, States of Mind: Dan and Lia Perjovschi (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008), p. 56. 49 Slavoj Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel and the Critique of Ideology (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993), p. 210. 50 Maria Todorova, ‘Introduction: From Utopia to Propaganda and Back’, in Maria Todorova and Zsuzsa Gille (eds), Postcommunist Nostalgia (New York: Berghahn Books, 2012), p. 4. 51 Miklavz Konelj, ‘The Function of the Signifier “Totalitarianism” in the Constitution of the “East Art” Field’, in Daniel Suber and Slobodan Karamnic (eds), Retracing Images: Visual Culture after Yugoslavia (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2012), p. 72. The significance of cultural representations of identity in the Yugoslav collapse and subsequent wars is examined in a range of essays throughout this volume. 52 Ibid., p. 73. 53 Kemp-Welch, Antipolitics in Central and East European Art, p. 5. 54 Agata Pyzik, Poor but Sexy: Culture Clashes in Europe East and West (Winchester: Zero Books, 2014), p. 4. 55 A gusle is a single-stringed traditional instrument of Southeastern Europe. 56 Uro Cvoro, Turbo-Folk Music and Cultural Representations of National Identity in Former Yugoslavia (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014), p. 21. 57 The song was written by Obren Pjevović in 1969. Claire Bishop describes delegated performance as the art of hiring nonprofessional performance artists, or professionals in other spheres, to perform on behalf of the artist, following his or her instructions. See Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (London: Verso Books, 2012), chapter 8 (‘Delegated Performance’), pp. 219–40. 58 Cvoro, Turbo-Folk Music and Cultural Representations of National Identity in Former Yugoslavia, p. 21. 59 Ibid., pp. 114–15. 60 Ibid., p. 115. 61 The Zastava was a popular car manufactured in Yugoslavia (and later Serbia) by the Serbian car maker Zastava Automobili from 1971 to 2008. 62 As stated by the artist on his website, www.mladenmiljanovic.info/mladen%20 miljanovic%20museum%20service%201.htm, accessed 30 September 2015. 63 Ivana Bago and Antonia Majaca, ‘Disobedient’, in Ivana Bago and Antonia Majaca (eds), Igor Grubić: 366 Liberation Rituals (Zagreb, Croatia: KUD-INA/Galerija Miroslav Kraljević / DeLVe/Institute for Duration, Location and Variables, 2009), p. 22. 64 As quoted in ibid., p. 31 n. 7. 65 Ibid., p. 28. 66 As described by the artist on his website: http://markovichmarko.blogspot.co.uk/ 2012/02/selfeater-thirst-production-2009-dopust.html 67 Ibid. 68 As mentioned in chapter 1, prior to this the artists were known as Davide Grassi

293

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

294

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

(b. 1970), Emil Hrvatin (b. 1964) and Žiga Kariž (b. 1973). In 2012, Janez Janša (b. 1973) changed his name to Žiga Kariž. 69 The project was also documented in the 2012 film My Name Is Janez Janša (dir. Janez Janša). 70 The group’s name is a reference to the French artist Marcel Duchamp, who, in reply to an invitation to participate in the Salon Dada of 1921, responded, ‘Pode Bal – Duchamp’ (‘Nuts to you – Duchamp’); the telegram was exhibited in place of a work by him. 71 Richard Torchia, ‘Spiral Story’, in Hristina Ivanovska and Yane Calovski, Spiral Trip: Nature and Social Studies (Skopje: Contemporary Art Centre, 2003), p. 10. 72 Ibid. 73 Pavel Braila, in an interview with the author in Chişinău,1 April 2014. 74 Transnistria is a partly recognised state on the Moldovan border with Ukraine. Since 1992, it has been governed as the Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic and designated by the Republic of Moldova as the Transnistria autonomous territorial unit with special legal status. 75 The Transnistria region has its own flag, featuring a central green stripe surrounded by two red stripes. 76 Tomaž Krpič, ‘Medical performance: the politics of body-home’, PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, PAJ 94, 32:1 (January 2010), 39. 77 Ibid., pp. 39, 41. 78 Established in 1991, the artist duo consists of the French artists Marion LavalJeantet and Benoît Mangin. 79 Jurij Krpan, in an interview with the author in Ljubljana, 26 August 2013. 80 Alexandar Stankovski, in an interview with the author in Skopje, 22 June 2013. A 1920 readymade by Man Ray, consisting of a sewing machine wrapped in a blanket and tied with string. The idea came from a simile coined by the French writer Isidore Ducasse: ‘Beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table’. 81 Pyzik, Poor but Sexy, p. 5. 82 As stated by the artist on his website, www.gjorgjejovanovik.com/the%20depresion. htm, accessed 30 September 2015. 83 Enisa Cenaliaj, in an interview with the author in Tirana, 13 June 2013. 84 The mineriade was a protest against the National Salvation Front (Frontul Salvării Naționale, or FSN) party, which won a landslide victory in the May 1990 elections. Many members of the FSN were former members of the Romanian Communist Party; fearing a return of the communist dictatorship, among other things, the protesters wished the eighth demand of the Proclamation of Timișoara, prohibiting communists from holding office, to be voted into law. 85 See Raluca Voinea, ‘Public Space’, Atlas of Transformation, http://monumentto transformation.org/atlas-of-transformation/html/p/public-space/public-spaceraluca-voinea.html, accessed 30 September 2015. This performance also recalls British artist Jeremy Deller’s 2001 restaging of the Battle of Ogreave, a reenactment of a violent confrontation from the 1984 miners’ strike in the United Kingdom. 86 Stiles, States of Mind: Dan and Lia Perjovschi, p. 73. 87 Ibid.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Politics and identity

88 Ibid. 89 Bojana Pejić, as quoted in Nada Beroš, Dalibor Martinis: Public Secrets (Zagreb, Croatia: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2006), p. 213. 90 As stated by the artist on his website, www.dalibormartinis.com; see entry ‘JBT/ ZADAR/51, 2006’ under ‘2000–2007’, accessed 20 September 2015. 91 Dalibor Martinis, as quoted in Beroš, Dalibor Martinis, p. 215. 92 Valdet Sala, in ‘Intervista’, as quoted in Mark Godfrey, ‘Articulate Enigma: The Works of Anri Sala’, in Mark Godfrey, Hans Ulrich Obrist and Liam Gillick (eds), Anri Sala (London: Phaidon, 2006), p. 36. 93 The artist prefers to be referred to by her first name rather than her surname in texts. 94 Bureau of Melodramatic Research, in an interview with the author in Bucharest, 24 March 2014. 95 Piotrowski, In the Shadow of Yalta, p. 364. 96 Amelia Jones, Body Art: Performing the Subject (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), p. 23. 97 Ibid., p. 29. 98 Winston Churchill, ‘The Sinews of Peace’, delivered 5 March 1946, Fulton, Missouri. 99 Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996), p. 5. 100 Éva Forgács, ‘How the new left invented East-European art’, Centropa, 3:2 (May 2003), 93–104. 101 Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New York: Academic Press, 1974), p. 97. 102 See www.formerwest.org. 103 Francesco Bonami, ‘The Former Land’, in Igor Zabel (ed.), Borderline Syndrome: Energies of Defence (Ljubljana, Slovenia: Cankarjev dom, 2000), p. 11. 104 Kathrin Rhomberg, ‘Borderline Syndrome as a Metaphor for Present-Day Europe’, in Zabel (ed.), Borderline Syndrome, p. 21. 105 Ibid. 106 Bojana Pejić, quoting Dainius Narkevičius in ‘The Dialectics of Normality’, in Marija Hlavajova and Jill Winder (eds), Who if Not We Should at least Try to Imagine the Future of All This? (Amsterdam: Artimo, 2004), p. 254. 107 Luchezar Boyadjiev, ‘No More Exchange! Art, Please!’, published in www. transeuropicnic.org/e_event.htm, February 2004, last accessed 30 September 2015. 108 Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe, p. 9. 109 Luchezar Boyadjiev, ‘Overlapping Identities’, unpublished text by the artist (1998). 110 Ibid. Emphasis in original. 111 Vladimir Nikolić, ‘About Death Anniversary, 1968–2004’ (2007), text available on the artist’s website, www.vladimir-nikolic.com/foto/about%20death%20anniversary. pdf, accessed 3 October 2014. 112 Ibid. 113 Zdenka Badovinac, ‘Body and the East’, in Zdenka Badovinac (ed.), Body and the East: From the 1960s to the Present (Ljubljana, Slovenia: Moderna Galerija: 1998), p. 10. 114 It is interesting to compare this suit with Albanian artist Lume Blloshmi’s dress,

295

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

296

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

which was made out of telecom company AMC and Vodafone mobile phone top-up cards. 115 Ghenadie Popescu, in an interview with the author in Chișinău, 31 March 2014. 116 Veda Popovici, in an email to the author, 20 June 2016. 117 Ibid. 118 A similar performance was staged in 2007 and 2009 by the Bosnian artists Lana Čmajčanin, Leila Čmajčanin, Alma Suljević and Adela Jušić, entitled Dobrodošli/ Welcome/Willkommen. Visitors to the exhibition were asked numerous irrelevant and indiscreet questions so they could obtain a visa to visit the exhibition. See www.cityofwomen.org/en/content/2009/project/dobrodosliwelcomewillkommen, accessed 30 September 2015. 119 Luchezar Boyadjiev, description of Deep Europe Visa Department, unpublished text by the artist (n.d.). 120 Božidar Jurjević, in an interview with the author in Dubrovnik, 9 July 2013. 121 For a discussion of reenactment in relation to past traumas and war, see Rebecca Schneider, Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment (London: Routledge, 2011). Schneider suggests that remembering history’s mistakes can also facilitate the ability to grapple with those mistakes (42), and that we (re)find ourselves through repetition (103). 122 See Maja Bajević, catalogue entry for ‘Dressed Up’, in Angela Vettese (ed.), Maja Bajević (Milan: Charta, 2008), p. 45. 123 There were two attacks on the Markale Market; the first took place on 5 February 1994, and the second on 28 August 1995. 124 Mark Allen Svede, ‘Many Easels, Some Abandoned’, in Alla Rosenfeld and Norton C. Dodge (eds), Art of the Baltics: The Struggle for Freedom of Artistic Expression Under the Soviets, 1945–1991 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2001), p. 208. 125 Ibid., p. 208 n. 42. 126 Olesya Turkina, ‘Russia in Search of New Identity: Art Identities in Conflict’ (1998), www.klys.se/worldconference/papers/Oleysa_Turkina.htm, accessed 6 June 2014. 127 Vladislav Mamyshev-Monroe, ‘Where the Heck Am I? Where Are My Things?’, in Laura Hoptman and Tomáš Pospiszyl, Primary Documents: A Sourcebook for Eastern and Central European Art since the 1950s (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2004), pp. 234–5. 128 Vladislav Mamyshev-Monroe, Taming Beauty, 2010, artist’s Facebook page, www. facebook.com/vladislav.mamyshev/media_set?set=a.1075639629003.9872.1766607 519&type=3, accessed 6 August 2016. 129 Boryana Rossa, on her website, http://boryanarossa.com/the-last-valve/, accessed 6 June 2014. 130 Sandra Jõgeva, in an interview with the author in Tallinn, 11 October 2013. 131 Ibid. 132 In 2016, Polish artist Karol Radziszewski (b. 1980) opened his exhibition Queer Archives Institute in São Paulo, an ongoing research project that collects graphic materials related to the queer experience in Eastern Europe. He has also restaged and rephotographed photographic performances from Ryszard Kisiel’s archive of homoerotic imagery from communist-era Poland, in an ongoing project entitled Kisieland (2009–).

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Politics and identity

1 33 Lena Jonson, Art and Protest in Putin’s Russia (London: Routledge, 2015), p. 30. 134 Construction on the cathedral started in 1839, and it was consecrated in 1883. On Joseph Stalin’s orders, it was destroyed in 1931 to make way for the Palace of the Soviets, the envisioned future home of the Soviet government. Construction of the Palace was halted during the Second World War, and the building was never completed. In the 1960s, Nikita Khrushchev turned the flooded hole intended for the foundation into the world’s largest open-air swimming pool. In February 1990, the Russian Orthodox Church received permission from the Soviet government to rebuild the church, which was completed and reconsecrated in 2000. 135 The piece recalls the now-iconic image of David Wojnarowicz in a film still from Silence = Death, a documentary featuring artists’ reactions to the AIDS crisis in New York City, an action also associated with a political message. 136 As quoted in Ivan Nechupurenko, ‘How Russia’s “Most Controversial Artist” ­Persu­aded His Interrogator to Change Sides’, The Guardian, 28 July 2015, www. theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/28/petr-pavlensky-artist-scrotum-red-squareinterrogator, accessed 30 September 2015.

297

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

5

Institutional critique

We don’t even get the chance to hate the museum. – Ivan Moudov, 2012

The 1960s and 1970s in the West were a time of great civic protest and challenging of the status quo. The institution of art was not immune to these challenges, and as numerous received ideas such as gender and racial equality were questioned by activists in the social sphere, artists likewise began to contest the long-held assumptions concerning art itself and the institutions that developed and promoted art. As art historian Alexander Alberro writes, it was at this time that artists began to ‘expose the institution of art as a deeply problematic field, making apparent the intersections where political, economic and ideological interests directly intervened and interfered in the production of public culture’.1 In the 1960s, critics Lucy Lippard and John Chandler noted a shift in focus, from the creation of objects to the process of creation in Minimal, Conceptual and performance art.2 In foregrounding process and the experience of the artwork, artists aimed to circumvent the formal atmosphere of the museum, creating an ephemeral work of art that could not stagnate or be commodified by being hung on the wall. These genres, then, were among the vehicles that artists used to attempt to critique the institution of art, challenge the commercialisation of the art object and contest the gallery system that bestows a value upon it. Yet as early as 1973, in her ‘Postface’ to Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972, Lippard asserted that the hopes that ephemeral and Conceptual Art would be able to avoid commercialisation had been in vain. Nevertheless, given the status of performance as a malleable and experimental genre as well as a nontraditional art form with a significantly shorter history of institutionalisation than, say, painting and sculpture, it offered the possibility for artists to question the nature of art, the role of the artist and expand the definition of both. In a 1989 essay on Conceptual Art, Benjamin Buchloh describes this new focus on process and idea as the development of an ‘aesthetics of adminis-

Institutional critique

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

tration’. Artists’ efforts to purge the artwork of its conventionally recognisable characteristics created an increased reliance on the institutions of art to validate a work as such. In Buchloh’s words, In the absence of any specifically visual qualities and due to the manifest lack of any (artistic) manual competence as a criterion of distinction, all the traditional criteria of aesthetic judgment – of taste and of connoisseurship – have been programmatically voided. The result of this is that the definition of the aesthetic becomes on the one hand a matter of linguistic convention and on the other the function of both a legal contract and an institutional discourse (a discourse of power rather than taste).3

Artists, then, effectively became white-collar workers, manufacturing ‘pro­­ ducts’ in a manner that exposed the mechanisms by which art is awarded its status. Echoing Lippard, Buchloh maintains that this was achieved by miming the ‘operating logic of late capitalism’; thus, far from comprising a utopian escape from the market, Conceptual and other related forms such as Process Art were co-opted by them.4 For Craig Owens, who identifies the ‘impossible complicity’ of postmodern art as ‘the necessity of participating in the very activity that is being denounced in order to denounce it’, this co-opting was unavoidable.5 In other words, artists who engaged in institutional critique had no other option than to be conscripted into the capitalist machine, given that there would be no outside position from which to launch their critique. In Eastern Europe, there was generally no art market to speak of. In the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc, the main patron of the arts was the state. Some form of a market economy did exist in Yugoslavia, but still none comparable to that experienced by artists in Western Europe and North America. Ana Dević writes that in Croatia, ‘no examples can be found within the activities of the so-called New Artistic Practice of institutional critique similar to that in the West’, and Bojana Pejić similarly maintains that institutional critique of the type we are familiar with in the West is not usually associated with performance art in Eastern Europe.6 Likewise, Gregor Tomc states that ‘because of an absence of an art market, art in the East has referred to itself and has used its own language’.7 However, it is my belief that institutional critique was in fact present and comprises a significant point of continuity between performance artists in East and West, although there are important differences between the two. While artists in Eastern Europe did not have local art markets with which to contend, given that they considered themselves European artists and that they knew, interacted with and had exchanges with artists from the West, for whom the instrumentalisation of art by the market was a salient issue, the problematisation of the institution constituted a shared concern for artists across the Iron Curtain. Indeed, artists in the East developed their own unique brand of institutional critique that spoke to the particularities of their situation, addressing,

299

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

300

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

for example, the lack of institutional support for experimental art or, among those who had such support, the bureaucratic structure thereof; the Westernisation or commercialisation of culture; and the hegemony of the old order, be it Socialist Realism or socialist modernism, depending on the context.8 Ivana Bago thus characterises the Yugoslav brand of institutional critique as nuanced: both ‘antibourgeois and anti-capitalist’, because despite the fact that artists may have been distrustful of local governments, they were equally critical of Western capitalism as well.9 As such, artists were able to confront both communism and capitalism in their critique of power structures and bureaucracy. Moreover, Bago’s and Majaca’s notion of the ‘delayed audience’, discussed earlier in the volume, further indicates that artists saw the audience for their work as not necessarily the present one. Just as they envisioned that their art would someday be present and received among an audience prepared to interpret it, so, too, could that audience be one to potentially co-opt and commodify it. While artists in the West employed institutional critique to expose the hidden mechanisms at work in relation to art, in Eastern Europe, where all artistic production was subject to state control and scrutiny, these mechanisms were not hidden but overtly acknowledged. Artists were well aware that the work they produced needed to conform to certain standards and embody the dominant ideology, although the degree to which these mandates were enforced varied greatly from country to country. It should also be remembered that, being well connected and familiar with developments in the West, artists in Eastern Europe recognised not only the challenges faced by artists vis-à-vis the art market, but also examples of Western (both Euro-American and Latin American) Conceptualism, Minimalism and performance art that confronted that very market. While institutional critique, as a strategy, links artists working in East and West, those in the region responded to local as well as global circumstances affecting their work. If, as I maintain, the disconnect between artists in the East and West is more the result of long-standing political divisions and art-historical and critical neglect than any actual discrepancies in their respective practices, then it follows that the engagement with such techniques by artists in Eastern Europe manifests a further link with contemporary artistic activity in the West. In this chapter, I propose that the continuities between institutional critique as utilised by artists in East and West further supports the notion that these developments can be seen as concurrent rather than disparate, or as the result of a one-sided influence from the West on the East. In the post-communist period, this criticality has perhaps become more pronounced, as artists working under communism were suddenly forced to enter into the art market, and as those of the younger generation began working in an environment that had little support for contemporary art and experimental techniques. The latter is in contrast to the socialist period, where there was an infrastructure for the arts, albeit primarily for official or state-approved artists.

Institutional critique

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

In the absence of the old system, a new framework is only slowly emerging in its place – a situation that artists in the East are by necessity learning to navigate. Consequently, there are numerous examples of artists in the post-communist era addressing their critique to the mechanisms of the market and the creation of the artistic canon by the West. In some ways, these individuals can be seen as operating in the void left by Western artists of the 1960s–1980s who omitted the issue of Europe and its division into East and West in their institutional critiques.10 Yugoslavia One can observe numerous examples of Yugoslav artists engaging in institutional critique in performance art of the 1960s and 1970s. Often, artists were responding to the specific local situation that resulted from the particular brand of socialism implemented by Tito and his regime. In the early 1950s, following Tito’s break with Stalin, Yugoslavia distinguished itself from the rest of the Eastern Bloc by advocating workers’ self-management, as opposed to the centralised planning prevalent throughout the rest of the East. For Edvard Kardelj (1910–79), the architect of Yugoslavia’s self-management socialism, this was seen as the next step in the development of socialism, eventually leading toward communism and the dissolution of the state. Art historian Jelena Vesić draws an analogy between self-management and the practice of institutional critique in the latter’s pursuit of liberation from institutional bureaucracy and control, and full autonomy for artists.11 In 1968, a wave of student protests broke out in Belgrade. As in Paris, the protests were directed against the governmental bureaucracy and social and economic inequality, specifically the new class of ‘red bourgeoisie’ seen as reaping the benefits of the consumer capitalism introduced by Tito in the previous decade.12 The protests have been characterised as a critique from the left from a Marxist stance, with the slogan of fighting ‘socialism with socialism’. Essentially, students were demanding what the government had already promised – self-management and greater autonomy (not to mention jobs) – and what emerged at institutions of higher learning following the protests were government-supported spaces that would allow for such selfmanagement: the Student Culture Centres. These were effectively ‘hybrid institutions’: funded partly by the state and partly by the centres themselves; partly organised by professional workers and partly by student volunteers. The first director of Belgrade’s Student Culture Centre was Petar Ignjatović, an art historian who was the President of the Students’ League Committee of Belgrade in 1968, and who, together with other students, coordinated that year’s protests. Consequently, the artists involved occupied a liminal position between inside and outside, state-sponsored and independent.

301

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

302

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

There are a range of opinions regarding the Student Culture Centres and their relative autonomy. Miško Šuvaković sees them as spaces that enabled experiment and rebellion but at the same time contained that rebellion so that it did not spill out into the streets as it had in 1968. In other words, the Student Culture Centres were ‘reservations’, or ‘very controlled spaces’.13 In his words: ‘two processes coexisted in some kind of dialectics. On one hand, you were offered the possibility to act, and, on the other hand, a socio-political control was established through the system of institutions’.14 He recalls that the artists initially took great pride in having achieved such autonomy in a socialist state. This is a situation similar to that which Piotr Piotrowski identifies in communist Poland, whereby artists were offered the illusion of freedom so long as they stuck to the approved script of artistic choices. It was not until a Western curator, Achille Bonito Oliva, pointed out the opposite that they began to think d ­ ifferently. Bonito Oliva instead describes ‘a reservation which is completely closed and isolated from the culture in which it takes place, and the socialist bureaucracy shows by using you that it appreciates international art, but, actually, is keeping its moderate modernist or social modernist practice away from you’.15 Šuvaković characterises the Student Culture Centre (SKC) in Belgrade as being ‘outside’ the mainstream, which echoes artist Raša Todosijević’s insights into these spaces – that because they were students and operated on the margins, no one really cared what they did, and that much of their activity went unnoticed by the a­ uthorities.16 Dunja Blažević, who was Director of the SKC Art Gallery from 1971 to 1976 and later Head of Programming (1976–80), sees it otherwise. She regards SKC as a place where artists could work together to develop an art befitting the new society that was developing before them. If anything, artists did not have a problem with the fact that these centres were top-down creations, yet they did take issue with the predominance of what was later termed ‘socialist modernism’, that is, abstract painting and sculpture that carried no social message and was thus deemed ‘safe’ by the authorities (see chapter 4). Dejan Sretenović contends that the situation in Yugoslavia at the time was ripe for the emergence of the New Artistic Practice partially in response to the dominance of the ‘social aestheticism’ that had largely replaced Socialist Realism. Much like in Poland, this so-called socialist aestheticism served the same function as Socialist Realism: following the rebuilding of the immediate postwar period, this mode was ‘adopted for the purpose of effectuating the cultural policy of a regime which was at the time intensely opening up to cultural exchange with the rest of the world’.17 In other words, it fit perfectly with Tito’s agenda.18 Younger artists rebelled against the older generation of artists whose work fully espoused and promoted those ideals. As Blažević explains, ‘we didn’t feel that the party or state politics presented an obstacle to do what we were doing, but we clashed, in the domain of culture and art, with

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Institutional critique

the dominant tendency of modernism or socialist modernism which was in power’.19 Regardless of the Student Culture Centre’s status – either as an instrument of the state or an autonomous space – it helped give rise to new artistic practices, and the Belgrade SKC in particular saw the birth of distinctive performative and experimental activity. It was also a meeting place for artists between East and West through its annual series of April Meetings. Aside from the informal collective of six artists who were active in the 1970s (discussed in chapters 1 and 2), there were other groups associated with the SKC as well, such as the A3 group and Group 143, in which Miško Šuvaković was involved. Each in his or her own way, these artists engaged with questions surrounding the nature and meaning of art, the role of the artist and the relationship between the art object, art workers and the various institutions that govern, administer and present art. Artists associated with these tendencies in Yugoslavia are categorised under the umbrella term ‘New Artistic Practice’. These were artists who rejected both Western capitalism and Tito’s brand of communist consumerism. In confronting the nature and function of art and its relationship to the museum and gallery system, and attempting to democratise art and bring it closer to the public without the mediation of institutions, these artists manifested their commitment to the socialist project. Retrospectively, Sanja Iveković feels that those active in the countercultural scene at the time ‘took the socialist project far more seriously than the cynical governing political elite’.20 While they were aware of Western artists’ focus on the dematerialisation of the art object, artists in Yugoslavia saw this concept as paralleling the socialist vision of society.21 Regardless, the art they produced remained marginalised, either because of the specificity of the spaces in which it developed – often the Student Culture Centres – the lack of institutional support or the fact that their work was simply too far ahead of its time. In Iveković’s words, ‘the artistic language that we were using was so radically new that our audience was really limited’.22 While some artists chose to work within the system of institutional selfmanagement in the Student Culture Centres, a group of Zagreb artists aimed to push this initiative further to see if it was possible to create a purely nonhegemonic, autonomous space. For a brief period from 1978 to 1980, Dalibor Martinis and Sanja Iveković opened their studio to their colleagues and fellow artists as a collaborative artist-run space, called Podroom – the Working Community of Artists.23 By this time, the effects of self-management socialism could be seen across Yugoslavia, not only in its lavish consumer culture but also in the mass migration out of the country, as those unable to find work moved west to function as temporary workers, or Gastarbeiter. Ivana Bago sees Podroom as an attempt to rescue self-management socialism, ‘detaching it from the state and practicing it in a nonbureaucratised, anarchistic and

303

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

304

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

solidary way’.24 Contrary to Roselee Goldberg’s idea that artists under communism were seeking an individual approach, these figures demonstrate the desire for self-management and self-organisation outside of state entities. Although seemingly aligning themselves with self-management socialism, they were, as Bago and Majaca describe, ‘removed from the crowd’, with no significant viewership at the time outside of their circle, but rather a ‘delayed audience’, rejected by both the market and the socialist state. Eventually, the group dissolved over a disagreement as to what Podroom should be. Some of the artists preferred complete autonomy and independence from the state and market, while others felt that they should have more of a social role as artists. Although the project can be seen to have failed, and the gallery space was restored to its original function as the artists’ studio, Bago and Majaca ask whether the artists’ relative invisibility is perhaps symptomatic of their freedom from the system, and thus speaks to the endeavour as being a success rather than a failure. In their words: ‘could one emancipate herself precisely by being unacceptable, uninteresting and irrelevant to the hegemonic circulation of cultural commodities and “delay” the audience?’25 The debate over the function and role of art and the artist in a socialist society is one that was rehearsed throughout the socialist East. In Belgrade itself, there was a wide range of responses to this issue. While Dunja Blažević advocated a social function for art, the informal group of artists and cultural workers associated with Group 143, including Miško Šuvaković and Biljana Tomić, argued for the autonomy of art. Zoran Popović, who was active in the Belgrade SKC, and art historian Jasna Tijardović felt that art should play a critical role. In Poland, too, the debate raged in Warsaw among artists and critics associated with the Foksal Gallery. Łukasz Ronduda summarises these sides and their various manifestations, from ‘artistic postessentialism’ and ‘existentialist post­­­ essentialism’ to ‘pragmatism’ (his terms), all of which, just as in Yugoslavia, were opposed to traditional art or the socialist modernism that was being taught in the academies.26 Other artist attempts at self-organisation, such as Podroom, can be seen throughout the socialist East. All of these artists sought an alternative to official, mainstream cultural institutions for various reasons – some out of necessity, given the absence of other alternatives to exhibit and present one’s work, and others simply out of a desire to create a completely independent and artist-run or artist-led initiative as opposed to a state-run one. The Zagreb-based Gorgona group may be seen as a precursor to the independent spirit of the Podroom artists. Gorgona organised independent exhibitions in the Šira frame shop in Zagreb and walks through Medvednica mountain, which they called ‘footing’. Similarly, in 1970–71, Braco Dimitrijević and Goran Trbuljak staged five exhibitions in an alternative venue: the hallway of an apartment building at 2a Frankopanska Street in Zagreb. Instead of exhibiting in an official art insti-

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Institutional critique

tution, the artists co-opted a public, nonartistic space, in order to attract and engage a non-art-going public. They did so because they wished to ‘democratise art by leaving the circle of specialised, socially and educationally defined gallery spectators’, and also to ‘emancipate themselves from the gallery system in order to be able to show their works without depending on the annual programme and exhibition policies of galleries’.27 Likewise, and also in Zagreb, the Group of Six Artists began organising their ‘exhibition-actions’ in 1975 across Croatia, displaying their artwork on the streets, in courtyards, squares or on the beach and staging actions or happenings, all in the public sphere.28 The exhibitions themselves could be considered performative actions, insofar as they were interactive and the artists staged them to directly engage with the public. Similarly, in Sarajevo in the 1980s, the Zvono group utilised alternative venues, such as shop windows and a soccer field, because there literally were no places for them to show their experimental work (figure 1.10). Questioning Was ist Kunst? Jelena Vesić characterises the Student Culture Centre as performative in and of itself because it emerged from the protests of 1968 and continued that mode of criticality in the artistic sphere. She sees it as offering criticism from an inside position, much in line with Owens’s idea of the ‘impossible complicity’ of postmodernism. For example, the exhibition October ’75, aimed at ­interrogating the possibilities of self-management in art, was organised by a group of artists, art historians and curators (Dunja Blažević, Ješa Denegri, Goran Đorđević, Vladimir Gudac, Bojana Pejić, Zoran Popović, Jasna Tijardović, Slavko Timotijević, Raša Todosijević, Dragica Vukadinović) as a counter-exhibition at the SKC Gallery in Belgrade. According to Vesić, the exhibition at once performed self-management and critiqued it, from the ‘marginal social position of an alternative cultural institution for young people’.29 The entire exhibition consisted of a notebook in which the participants contributed short essays on the topic. For example, in ‘For Self-Managing Art’, Zoran Popović criticises art that claimed to be neutral as symptomatic of bourgeois consumer society, concluding that ‘a politicisation of art is necessary’.30 He is critical of the infrastructure that he feels prevents artistic creation from being truly free. In his words, ‘bureaucracy creates an inert artist and a passive consumer of art – it produces “merry robots.”’31 Just as Tito had advocated a program of socialist self-management, artists craved self-management in the artistic sphere, independent of state administration. From the inception of his career, Serbian/Yugoslav artist Raša Todosijević has explored the boundaries of art and the role of the artist. Dejan Sretenović distinguishes the artist from his contemporaries for his ‘persistent, uncompromising and radical political discourse’.32 In one of his earliest actions, for the

305

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

306

5.1

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

SKC exhibition Drangularium (Trinketarium), he presented his wife, Marinela Koželj, in a tableau vivant entitled Marinela, Blue Sideboard, and Calder (1971). This very early statement speaks to Todosijević’s expansive notion of art – for example, the art object can be living or dead, a finished product or a work in progress. In a series of performances entitled Was ist Kunst, Marinela Koželj? (1976–81; figure 5.1), he screamed until his voice went hoarse, ironising the titular question by addressing it to the victim of his torture, always female, always silent. In her reticence, she embodies what Sretenović describes as the ‘passively masochistic attitude of a citizen who in a totalitarian regime loses his will, thus contributing to maintaining the repressive apparatus’.33 By framing his interrogation in the context of art, Todosijević draws a parallel between artistic institutions and totalitarian discourse, but in this instance it is the artist who remains in control, directing his Artaudian theatre of brutality. But there is another way to read the victim’s silence: as maintaining a position of power. Perhaps the woman under attack is in full possession of the answer as to what art is. By keeping it to herself, and refusing to submit to the interrogation, she remains the gatekeeper to those ideas. In fact, perhaps it is the fact that she taunts the artist with her silence that causes him to continue his attack. The artist again attempts to control the discourse in Art and Memory (1975; figure 5.2), a performance in which Todosijević, dressed as a terrorist, recited the names of all the artists he could remember in one sitting. Instead

Raša Todosijević, Was ist Kunst, Marinela Koželj?, 1976, Belgrade. Courtesy: Raša Todosijević

Institutional critique

307

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

of submitting to the canon, he here creates it; rather than being relegated to its subject, art history becomes a trajectory that grows from within him, with this performance establishing the young Serbian artist as its master. Finally, in Not a Day without a Line (1976), Todosijević probed the act of creation, turning artistic production into a regimented exercise to be repeated daily by producing a drawing or line every day. Invoking line rather than drawing, the work calls to mind the production fetish of Tito’s Yugoslavia, in particular the notion of the assembly line.34

Raša Todosijević, Art and Memory, 1975. Courtesy: Raša Todosijević

5.2

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

308

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

Although artists in Yugoslavia remained relatively insulated from market demands, and experimental artists were often already excluded from the institutionalisation of the museum system, they were nevertheless connected with the so-called ‘Western’ art world where artists were deliberately probing those forces. Thus, while perhaps not subjected to that pressure themselves, these artists no doubt craved the acknowledgement that comes with it, as indicated by Todosijević’s statement that he failed to realise his dream of becoming a ‘rich and fat artist’.35 His ‘Edinburgh Statement’ presents an inventory of all those who ‘make a profit on art, and who gains from it honestly’.36 It enumerates hundreds of individuals who profit from the art industry, some obvious (galleries, gallery owners, publishers, critics, collectors) and others less so (‘all those who produce and sell, either wholesale or retail drugs, sanitary supplies, and alcohol, contraceptives, cigarettes and sporting goods to artists’, ‘the cleaning women’), some whom he feels perhaps should not (‘those who earn or hope to earn from additional publications (reprint), the DADA movement, Fluxus and so forth, though they didn’t even dream of doing this when it was truly necessary for the artist’) and of course those who either turn art into a commodity or otherwise benefit from its commodification (‘souvenir producers and their salespeople’, ‘those who print calendars with reproductions of art works’). Notably absent from this list, however, is the word ‘artist’. Thus, to claim that these artists in socialist Yugoslavia existed completely outside of the market system is not entirely accurate. The performances of Croatian/Yugoslav artist Dalibor Martinis also shed a critical light on the institution of art. In his 1976 performance Art Guard (figure 5.3), staged as part of the Confrontations exhibition, the artist played the role of a security guard in the Gallery of Contemporary Art in Zagreb, simultaneously proclaiming the value of certain paintings by guarding them, yet also preventing the public’s access to these works by sitting directly in front of them. By positioning himself in this manner, he raises questions concerning the art gallery system that bestows value on a work of art, and the effect that that has on the work’s visibility in the public sphere. Whereas value usually imbues works with visibility, in this piece it is this value that causes them to be obscured by the guard protecting them. Similarly, in Work for Pumps Gallery (1978; figure 5.4), staged in that Vancouver, Canada, venue, the artist addressed the concept of the white cube, the neutral space of the gallery that is supposed to provide the appropriate backdrop for the work of art. Instead of creating a painting for exhibition, he used the act of painting to cover the walls of the gallery, painting them white in preparation for a new exhibition. For the artist, this work not only challenged the notion of the neutrality of the white cube, but also offered a situation for reciprocity and artistic collaboration. In Martinis’s words, Work for Pumps Gallery expresses ‘the possibility for the work of one artist to be at the service of that of others. After my exhibition,

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Dalibor Martinis, Art Guard, 1976, Zagreb. Courtesy: Dalibor Martinis

5.3

Dalibor Martinis, Work for Pumps Gallery, 1978, Vancouver. Courtesy: Dalibor Martinis

5.4

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

310

5.5

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

the white painted gallery was used for the exhibition of the works of other artists’.37 Instead of competition among artists, which the institution instills, his piece promotes cooperation. In Artist on Strike (1977), Martinis further upends the notion of the gallery by exhibiting the unprimed backs of canvases in a Zagreb gallery; these were canvases with no fronts, but two backs. He also covered the other works in the exhibition for one day, blocking them from view without consulting the other artists. The original idea was for the artists to actually strike, but as this was difficult to organise in socialist Yugoslavia, he had the art itself go on strike. Instead of embodying labour, he subverts this value of the socialist state. That said, the so-called ‘strike’ also demonstrates its own futility, in that in putting the original artworks on strike, he created another, different artwork. Finally, the artist placed the power to decide what is art in the hands of the viewer in If Yes, Light a Candle (Art Is …) (1977; figure 5.5), in which the artist wrote the following statement on a box of candles: ‘Art is an absolute truth invented by the artist. If yes, light one candle, if no, quench one candle’. The collection of lit and unlit candles enabled viewers to posit their own response. Frustrated by the fact that performance art was rapidly becoming institutionalised in galleries and festivals, Jan Mlčoch created the performative work Hostel in 1980 at the De Appel Gallery in Amsterdam. When he was offered the exhibition space, he responded by expressing his desire to change it from a gallery to a hostel, a place where visitors to Amsterdam could stay, reasoning that ‘such a nice room in the middle of the city should be put to better use than for art’.38 With this gesture, the artist ended his career as a performance artist; Štembera and Miler did the same around this time. Just as Martinis and Mlčoch interrogated the institution of the museum and gallery, more than twenty years later, Bulgarian artist Luchezar Boyadjiev took to task both the museum exhibition and the most prominent form of the temporary exhibition – the biennale – in his Schadenfreude Guided Tours. The

Dalibor Martinis, If Yes, Light a Candle (Art is…), 1977, Zagreb. Courtesy: Dalibor Martinis

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Institutional critique

first of these took place at the exhibition In the Gorges of the Balkans, in which the artist was invited to participate and which was curated by the Berlin-based Rene Blok at the Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel, Germany, September– November 2003.39 The motivation behind these tours was severalfold: first, to provide the live presence of an artist in the show to explain the works of art on display; second, to bridge the gaps between the works of art in the exhibition as well as the gaps between the artworks in any exhibition and the rest of the world; and, third, to perform a living art history of contemporary art, whereby Boyadjiev (who was in fact trained as an art historian) elicited connections and parallels between the works and their sociohistorical context, supplying a rationale for the selection of works that, as the artist argues, could not be provided by the curator (Blok), as the latter was an outsider to the region. In these tours, Boyadjiev grapples with the entire physical space of the show, the building and its exterior, jumping from work to work, artist to artist and country to country, connecting them all within the layers of references to the Balkan context that only an informed insider could provide … I work with the inner space and logic of the show; I try to make it visible and almost physically perceptible for the visitors, to give flesh and blood to the lived reality, culture and history behind all the works.40

In his essay ‘Off the Record’, the artist muses on the arbitrary selection process for artists and artworks to be included in major exhibitions and biennales, resulting in a mix of artworks that are not necessarily in dialogue with one another – or at least in a dialogue that has not yet been clarified. According to him, this has resulted in the ‘identity crisis’ of the art world because of the fact that the latter’s articulation of the ‘spaces in between’ is lacking.41 If the art exhibition or the biennale is the place where the art, artists and curators come into contact with the general public, then Boyadjiev feels that the nature of that contact needs to be reevaluated and improved, and this is one function of the Schadenfreude Guided Tours. There is another element to the tours in that the artist, by virtue of his presence, can say ‘anything he likes’ about the objects on display, since the other artists are not there – hence the title Schadenfreude, a German word referring to the pleasure one experiences from witnessing others’ misfortunes. As Boyadjiev writes, ‘my poor fellow artists who will not be around when I will be giving the tours will have no control over what I will say to the audience about their works … Sorry, boys and girls’.42 In this way, the artist, like Todosijević, controls the discourse. But the artist is not malicious in his intent; in fact, in creating these tours he is seizing on an opportunity to not only be there at the show, but also to see and interact with those who attend. In his words: ‘after the opening, artists are usually no longer needed for the organiser of an art event. I have learned that the sooner I leave the

311

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

312

5.6

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

Luchezar Boyadjiev, Schadenfreude Guided Tours, Singapore, 2006. Courtesy: Luchezar Boyadjiev

‘site of the crime’, the better. But I have rarely been able to see who the hell is actually going to the shows I am participating in and why’.43 In this performance, Boyadjiev literalises the presence of the artist – the same presence that Amelia Jones observes with regard to Jackson Pollock’s action paintings. He also critiques the institution of the museum and its tradition of blockbuster shows, which claim to present new concepts and ideas to the viewers, but are perhaps not always successful in communicating them. Here, Boyadjiev bridges the gap between the artwork and the viewer by creating an artwork with a practical purpose, in that it was designed to explain the work of art. The artist also creates a dialogue with the viewers, as opposed to the unidirectional communication offered by a sedentary artwork. In performing art history at the exhibition and creating a live performance that weaves together all of the works contained within, Boyadjiev usurps the role of curator and narrates the exhibition on his terms. He also represents the artists, who are present through their work but absent in word and body. In effect, it is he who authors the story of art, much in the same way that Todosijević hijacked the artistic canon in order to create one that emerged from his voice. Boyadjiev eventually expanded these tours, turning them into a delegated performance by giving instructions to others to carry out the tours themselves, as in Singapore in 2006 (figure 5.6).44

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Institutional critique

313

Finally, a different approach to the art-making process can be seen in János Sugár (b. 1958), Ferenc Gerlóczy and Talán Sebeő’s Fast Culture performances (figure 5.7), held in Budapest’s Kossuth Club from 1984 to 1988. The three artists would engage in open discussion onstage, enacting a microcosm of a university or Platonic dialogue. Sugár comments that at the time he was interested in the concept of dialogue and the free flow of information and ideas that would come from an unstructured and informal conversation such as that which occurs among a group of friends at a party. Wishing to bring that type of discussion into the public sphere, the artist describes the significance of these events as follows: at the time it was important and liberating. To be able to talk freely, and I don’t mean politically but internally, you have to say it, spit out everything that is inside of you. I’m sure you’re familiar with the kind of situation at meetings when people just can’t connect to the situation and since they have no other opportunity to open up and really bare their souls.45

These actions, then, literally performed freedom while also establishing a form of art that is not only critical, but ephemeral. Sugár also explains that he deliberately halted these discussions in 1989; after that point, he saw no further need for them, since individuals could now speak freely in the public sphere

János Sugár, Ferenc Gerlóczy and Talán Sebeő, Fast-Culture Evening, 1984–88, Budapest. Courtesy: János Sugár

5.7

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

314

5.8

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

Artūras Raila, Once You Pop, You Can’t Stop, 1997, Vilnius. Performance featuring the bikers’ club Crazy in the Dark. Photo: Audrius Kemežys.  Courtesy: Artūras Raila and Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius (CAC)

amid the changes in the political situation. Held under the guise of an artistic event, these talks opened up a window of free space in the waning days of the communist era. The question as to what art is – Was ist Kunst? – remained unanswered in the post-socialist and post-communist period as well, but that did not prevent artists from continuing to pose that question and to push the limits of art. Throughout his work, Lithuanian artist Artūras Raila (b. 1962) has been rethinking the role of the art institution and of art in society, and attempting to expand the conventional modes of production, display and viewership. In Once You Pop, You Can’t Stop (1997; figure 5.8), which was part of ‘Dimension 0’, an international festival of performance art, Raila commissioned a group of bikers from the motorcycle club Crazy in the Dark to drive into and through the Contemporary Art Centre (CAC) in the centre of Vilnius – thereby literally opening the doors of the museum to different groups from outside the institution. At one point the artist suggested that the Unified Lithuanian National Workers’ Movement (VNLDS), a neo-Nazi group and an unofficial political party (insofar as it was not recognised by the Ministry of Justice) relocate its headquarters from Šiauliai to the CAC, although this did not come to pass. Nevertheless, Raila was insistent on introducing the art world to this group of people, and vice versa. He invited the members of VNLDS to Vilnius for the opening of the exhibition Cool Places, where he created a performance on the roof of the CAC, complete with drummers and go-go dancers. The members

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Institutional critique

of the group were impressed, especially since the exhibition had changed their preconceived notions about art. Whereas previously they had thought that art was just ‘monuments’ and ‘stupid abstract paintings’, they were pleased to see that the unconventional installations and performances presented in the context of the exhibition could be included under its rubric.46 Collaborating on a project entitled Weekend Art: Hallelujah the Hill, Aleksandar Battista Ilić (b. 1965), Tomislav Gotovac and Ivana Keser (b. 1967) managed to create a long-term artwork that existed for quite some time (and still does, in part) outside the confines of the art institution. In 1995, the three started taking walks up Sljeme, the highest peak of Medvednica, a mountain just outside Zagreb. The walks started out merely as walks, without any artistic or other intention. During the course of the ten-hour hikes, the trio would hike, wander, swim, picnic and, most importantly, talk. Once curators and art historians got wind of what they were doing, these weekly walks and conversations later became codified as an artwork. Although the official dates of the piece are 1996 to 2000, these are more suggestive than precise, as there is no fixed starting and ending point for the strolls. The title – Weekend Art – is part descriptive, referring to when the walks took place, and part a nod to Adolfas Mekas, whose 1963 film Hallelujah the Hills also took place in the hills – the mountains of New England.47 For Ilić, the significance of these walks and conversations resided in the gesture, in the shared experience of the three. By spending so much concentrated time together, the artists were each testing the limits of their own self-censorship – of the type that we all experience when communicating with another person; by pushing themselves toward their limits, they were moving toward the border between art and life. The entire project is about escape and return – the escape to the mountain, away from the politicisation of art and life during and after the war, as well as from an art world that in the 1980s and 1990s had moved away from the ephemeral and conceptual in order to ‘return to painting’. Ilić subscribes to a belief in activist art, and sees this piece as belonging to that spirit – not ‘the aestheticisation of the activist gesture’, which activist and social art often is, but, rather, an authenticity of being, which is an act in itself.48 He sees the piece as completely ‘ephemeral’, and notes that what is exhibited of these weekend walks – the photographs of the three artists – comprise only about 2 percent of the work’s actual content. Weekend Art is a work that takes the ‘art into life’ tenet to the extreme, and continues performance’s and Land Art’s aim of removing art from the commercialised and politicised space of the gallery. Questioning: Was ist Kunstler? If Raša Todosijević was focused on answering the question ‘What is art?’ with visceral gestures during his Student Culture Centre days, fellow artist Neša

315

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

316

5.9

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

Neša Paripović, Untitled, 1975. Photographic performance. Courtesy: Neša Paripović

Paripović’s work (also discussed in chapter 1) consists of minimal actions that test and circumscribe the role of the artist. In the photographic performance Untitled (1975; figure 5.9), Paripović sits before a blank page or work surface that is illuminated by a lamp at the side of the table. Several frames show the artist as he stares, makes brief movements and appears to agonise over the empty page before him. The piece shows the artist at work, not with his hands, but with his head.49 He takes this exploration further in one of the films he made around this time, N.P. 1975 (1975), which shows the artist from the waist up, occupied with his hands, which are sometimes out of view of the lens. The film ritualises the work of artists, suggesting that everything they do deliberately counts as art. Serbian art historian Ješa Denegri uses the term ‘artist behaviour’ to refer to Paripović’s action in relation to the artwork, and Dejan Sretenović describes his artistic strategy as ‘becoming art’, meaning that his artistic oeuvre encompasses all activity and action of the artist, regardless of whether it was created with the intention of being named and designated as such. This is evident in his next film, N.P. 1977, where the artist takes on the role of flâneur, meandering through Belgrade and encountering objects and obstacles along the way, all

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Institutional critique

of which is captured by the camera. This film not only inscribes the action of movement in the work of art, but delineates the space for creation within the confines of the city as the artist experiences it. In the post-socialist period, artists in the East continued their engagement with the idea of the role of the artist, whose position became complicated amid their entrance into the art market. Mladen Miljanović (b. 1981), from Banja Luka, Serbia, considers part of his role as an artist to be at the service of the viewer. While still a student, he staged the performance I Serve Art (2006), wherein he isolated himself inside the military base in Banja Luka, which, during his third year of studies, became the Academy of Arts. Before becoming an artist, Miljanović had been a soldier, and served his one year of mandatory army duty just after high school. Since the artist found himself once again in the same space where he had once trained soldiers, he decided to decontaminate the space by occupying it. In his words, he ‘mapped the space with [his] body’, beginning his service to his viewers in a manner similar to that of a soldier – through intense, dedicated training.50 The artist sees the replacement of the military base with an art academy as historically significant, signifying a shift in society from a militarised focus to an emphasis on education.51 While the artist had previously been trained to serve his country and also trained others to do so, now he would train himself to serve his fellow citizens in a different way – through his art. He developed this idea of service in some later pieces, such as Taxi to the Museum (2010). Here, the artist literally provided a service to his viewers by offering taxi rides that would shuttle them to and from Vienna’s Museum of Modern Art (MUMOK), where he had a solo exhibition at the time. For this seven-day performance, the artist was available by mobile phone to pick up and drop off any passenger who wished to visit the museum. The artist explains that he wanted to ‘fill the space’ from the moment when a person leaves his or her home to embark on a trip to the museum to when he or she actually enters it. In Miljanović’s view, if that space can be filled with art or an artistic experience, then that further bridges the gap between art and life, and between art and the everyday world. With this performance, Miljanović transformed the everyday experience of transporting oneself to the work of art into a work of art itself, while also providing a useful service to his viewers.52 Being in service to the public can also become a burden. In 2013, Mladen Miljanović was selected by two curators, one from the Federation of BosniaHerzegovina and one from Republika Srpska, to represent his nation at the Bosnia-Herzegovina Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Prior to the opening, he sent the following text message to five hundred people, most of whom were not associated with the art world: ‘Dear friend, what would you love or wish to see in the pavilion of Bosnia and Herzegovina in Venice?’ He then engraved all the responses on a marble tombstone (the artist had formerly been an

317

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document 5.10

Mladen Miljanović, The Pressure of Wishes, 2013, Venice. Performance at 55th Venice Biennale. Photo: Drago Vejnović. Courtesy: Mladen Miljanović

B-H, the way it’s complicated Aleksandar S

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

My dear friend, I’d be happy with some roast lamb, chicken, a pack of beer, and some good salad : -) give me a break with your installations and philosophy, you know I’m not into it, people don’t figure it out, anyway! Cheerio… Hasan H Beautiful landscapes of Bosnia, without crazy ethnic ideas to fuck themselves, like we did few last centuries. All the best. Slobodan B Only the works without politics! Zike Now, my friend, your question is not exactly clear, at least for us, the uninitiated, who would only like to basically take a stroll through Venice… :D Good luck! Bogdana I believe in you, my friend, whatever you put on it, you won’t make a mistake, lots of luck Seiz Mladen, I’d only be happy to help and answer your question, but art and I are worlds apart… B) Anyways, good luck with the exhibition Bye Sanja komšinica Many young people from BL 8-) Mirna Š. MUP Photographs, installations, performances, as long as they are not classic paintings, those ‘watercolours’ :) As for the ‘subject’, I leave that to you, but please without still lifes or naked, fat women! B) Vanja V My dear professor, just don’t jump off the wall Sukara I’d like to see something not remotely connected to war, something that shows the good, humane side of us, which we in the rugged Balkans still have. So long ;))) [name obscured]….Njemački

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

320

5.11

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

engraver of tombstones by trade). The artist held the tombstone in his hands during the opening of the pavilion until he could bear no longer the burden of holding such wishes; the performance lasted around ninety minutes. Entitled The Pressure of Wishes (figure 5.10), this piece underscores many of the ideas that recur throughout his work: that of service and responsibility to one’s audience as an artist, the burden that comes with it, the suffering artist who suffers not only for his art but also for his viewers and of course the trauma involved in the experience of doing all of this. The work is also a very poignant commentary on the current situation in Bosnia-Herzegovina, which was not represented at the Venice Biennale for several years after the war because of the difficulties in reaching an agreement as to how to select an artist representative and from which region the artist should come (the Federation or Republika Srpska). An opposite take on service is seen in Croatian artist Siniša Labrović’s (b. 1965) Leisure (2012; figure 5.11), which he performed at Vlasta Delimar’s My Land, Štaglinec festival that year.53 The artist asked his audience to support him as he rested and contemplated. (His next piece, perhaps?) Giving the two ends of a hammock to the members of the audience, he asked them to hold it up as he lay in it, drinking wine. Nevertheless, he did not abandon his viewers, encouraging them not to give up as they grew tired from the burden of supporting an artist. One year later, he re-created the performance

Siniša Labrović, Leisure, 2012, Brussels. Photo: Boris Cvjetanović. Courtesy: Siniša Labrović

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Institutional critique

321

in Brussels; he had the volunteers lie down on the floor next to one another, and then he lay on top of them, reading aloud from the Communist Manifesto. The performance lasted as long as the volunteers complied; once the revolutionary words of Marx and Engels incited them to rebel and stop propping up the artist, the performance was over. Leisure invites comparison with a work by Labrović’s fellow Croatian artists Igor Grubić and Tanja Dabo (b. 1970): Vacation (1998). Instead of creating an exhibition, the artists used their funding from the City Office for Culture of the City of Rijeka to go on a vacation. The action highlights the fact that a freelance and self-supporting artist does not get paid vacations; it also stands as a subversive act against the art institution, which limits or enables the possibilities of artistic creation by bestowing funding on projects deemed worthy. The determination of a project’s funding-worthiness often relates to a number of factors unrelated to the merit of the piece, for example, the broader agenda of an art institution, or, in the case of a public institution, the political or apolitical nature of the work. Labrović also called attention to the issue of funding in his performance Perpetuum Mobile (2008; figure 5.12), in which the artist first attempts to urinate into his mouth. When he ultimately fails, he uses his hand to cup the urine and drink it. The performance was created in response to several requests for him to perform for free.54 Since he had to

Siniša Labrović, Perpetuum Mobile, 2008. Courtesy: Siniša Labrović

5.12

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

322

5.13

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

Marina Abramović, Art Must Be Beautiful, 1975. © Marina Abramović. Courtesy: Marina Abramović and Sean Kelly Gallery, New York. DACS 2016

work without pay, he devised a performance that he could use to feed and sustain himself. Marina Abramović’s iconic 1975 performance Art Must Be Beautiful, Artist Must Be Beautiful (figure 5.13) featured the artist aggressively brushing her hair for fifty minutes, repeating the title of the piece over and over, like a mantra. Commenting on the work in 1999, she explained, ‘At that time, I thought that art should be disturbing rather than beautiful. But at my age now, I have started thinking that beauty is not so bad’.55 In 2012, Moldovan artist Tatiana Fiodorova (b. 1976) invoked her famous precursor with The World Is Dirty, the Artist Must Be Dirty (figure 5.14).56 Dressed in black, and seated in a small space covered with plaid raffia bags, the artist sat down, took a jar out of her shopping bag and proceeded to cover her exposed skin with black paint, chanting the words of the title just as Abramović did. Fiodorova comments that art should not simply be about creating beautiful images, but should deal with conceptual issues and problems in contemporary society much like the young Abramović thought. In some ways, this piece responds to the particular situation of the arts in contemporary Moldova, where painting and sculpture are still considered the only valid forms of art and the contemporary experimental art scene is just emerging.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Institutional critique

Tatiana Fiodorova, The World Is Dirty, the Artist Must Be Dirty, 2012. Courtesy: Tatiana Fiodorova

Contesting the canon and hijacking the biennale While in the West, institutional critique has often targeted the mechanisms by which value is bestowed on art, in Eastern Europe, artists often take as their focus the Western art world and its dominance over the canon. For example, in 1979, Yugoslav/Croatian artist Mladen Stilinović gave a lecture and what he terms an ‘anti-performance’ at the De Appel Gallery in Amsterdam on the occasion of the Works and Words exhibition being held there. According to the artist, this was one of the first manifestations of the East in the West. In honour of the occasion, Stilinović gave a lecture entirely in Croatian, without any translation, and with the request that the video recording of the speech also remain untranslated. By refusing to use English as a common language of communication and insisting on his own native one, the artist defiantly countered the hegemony of the Western art market and Western art canon – the lecture, incidentally, was entitled ‘The Discourse about Language and About Power’. The anti-performance was called Foot-Bread Relationship (figure 5.15). It illustrates the balance of power between the two eponymous entities, as the artist brought a loaf of bread onstage and then hung photographs of his 1977 photographic performance, also titled Foot-Bread Relationship, where he kicked a loaf of bread against a wall (there was no kicking involved in the

323

5.14

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document 5.15

Mladen Stilinović, Foot-Bread Relationship, 1977. Photographic performance. Courtesy: Mladen Stilinović

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Institutional critique

1979 performance).57 Stilinović’s critique of the Western dominance of the art world culminated in 1992, when he exhibited a declamatory banner stating, ‘An Artist Who Cannot Speak English Is No Artist’. This statement is now legendary, often repeated throughout the Eastern European art scene. The end of the Cold War ostensibly marked the end of the division between East and West in the art world. The art market and the international stage were, at least in theory, henceforth open for artists from Eastern Europe as restrictions on movement and exchange were now eliminated, or least lessened, for many citizens throughout the region. That said, what Piotrowski refers to as the ‘vertical, hierarchical discourse’ of art history persisted, meaning that the West was still widely acknowledged (or tacitly accepted) to be the centre of the art world, with all art being judged in relation to it. In Piotrowski’s view, the East tolerated this situation, because it gave the region ‘the illusion of belonging to the “Western family” instead of the culture of the Eastern Bloc’.58 Yet, their status in relation to the West remains an issue of concern among artists from the region. The institution that is perhaps most emblematic of the continued Western hegemony in the art world is the Venice Biennale. Following the regime change in the East, many countries had difficulty organising competitions, selecting artists or financing their exhibitions for the show, so that many Eastern European nations remained unrepresented. In 1997, Kosovar-Albanian artist Sislej Xhafa (b. 1970) co-opted that year’s Biennale, creating a mobile Clandestine Pavilion (figure 5.16) by walking around the city with an Albanian flag, dressed in the uniform of the Albanian national football team, kicking a football, with a tape recorder broadcasting an Albania-Italy football match. This performance proposed a ‘non pavilion’ in a world of ‘non people’, equating the lack of a national pavilion in Venice with the status of non-citizen (or non-person) in the art world.59 While Xhafa’s iconoclastic gesture enabled him to critique the Biennale’s politics of inclusion and exclusion, he did so by participating in the very institution he was critiquing. His itinerant, outsider position evokes the tension between presence and resistance inherent in his act. As a contemporary Kosovar-Albanian artist, he was a wanderer in search of his place. By contrast, Bulgarian artist Ivan Moudov (b. 1975) used a strategy of appeasement to subtly occupy sixty-five national pavilions at the Venice Biennale of 2007 (figure 5.17) by donating nearly two thousand bottles of Bulgarian wine to be served at the respective openings. Strategically using his positioning at the canonical gathering of global artists, notably located, at least symbolically, in the heart of Western Europe, he offered what he considered a fair exchange: free wine for a Bulgarian presence at the Biennale. Unlike most artists, though, his project enabled him to be present in more than just one pavilion. Eventually, he expanded his occupation by distributing the bottles for use in various exhibition openings across Europe. In this piece, Wine for

325

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document 5.16

Sislej Xhafa, Clandestine Pavillion, 1997, Venice. Lambda print (photograph of performance) 160 x 110 cm. Courtesy: GALLERIA CONTINUA, San Gimignano / Beijing / Les Moulins

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Institutional critique

327

Openings, Moudov literalises the idea of the circulation and flow of globalisation, creating an artwork that is simultaneously a commodity, being circulated throughout the globe via the microcosmic world of the representative Venice pavilions, but a commodity that works to the artist’s advantage. Moudov’s generosity stands in sharp contrast to other tactics he employs to conquer the art world – namely, theft. In this scenario, the artist accepts his stereotyped role – that of the Easterner as thief or the Eastern artist as derivative – and absconds with bits of artworks from museums. He arranges these Fragments in boxes, reminiscent of Marcel Duchamp’s Boîte-en-valise (1935– 40). The artist acknowledges that this feat is not original (even his theft is a copy), and one of these pieces actually consists of his stealing the photograph of German artist Timm Ulrichs’s attempted burglary of a work of art. Moudov’s pilfering, however, has a particular significance, as it provides a service to the Bulgarian nation: creating a makeshift contemporary art museum, evidence of a cultural history of avant-garde and neo-avant-garde art that it does not really have. The artist describes this project as enabling him to ‘participate in

Ivan Moudov, Wine for Openings, 2007. 1,764 bottles of Cabernet Sauvignon distributed to the national pavilions at the 52nd Venice Biennale. Courtesy: Ivan Moudov

5.17

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

328

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

colonial art history’, looting the treasures of one nation to enhance his own country’s patrimony.60 Like Xhafa, he exhibits no respect for borders, nor for the rules of these foreign institutions. Although at first he removes the objects from the institution, he then re-institutionalises them under a different name. Here, he is not being critical of the museum; quite the contrary, his theft performances express a desire to be part of that institutional system. While Fragments was exhibited in Palazzo Zorzi as part of Bulgaria’s official representation in the Venice Biennale of 2007, Moudov’s Wine for Openings managed to extend Bulgaria’s participation to the national pavilions in the Giardini, balancing on the boundary between official and unofficial representation. Instead of creating an institution, Moudov disperses it by distributing its various components – wine for openings here, fragments there. For decades, Bulgaria was absent from Venice, and has even been neglected in studies of contemporary Eastern European art. As a case in point, Piotr Piotrowski’s groundbreaking survey of modern and contemporary Eastern European art, In the Shadow of Yalta, includes discussions of art from all the Central European satellite nations, including Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Romania as well as the former Yugoslavia, yet only minimal attention is given to Bulgaria (and none to Albania).61 In Wine for Openings, Moudov uses a national export, and the genre of performance, to secure not only a place for his Bulgaria at the Biennale, but also a seat at the so-called national tables of the key players in contemporary art. Moudov addressed the lack of institutional support for contemporary art in Bulgaria in 2005, when he invited hundreds of people to the opening of ‘MUSIZ’, the new museum of contemporary art in Sofia. Upon arriving at a disused train station on the outskirts of the city, visitors realised that they were victims of a hoax, and that the only museum opening was that of a non-museum. Creating this context where none exists is the only way for artists such as Moudov to participate in institutional critique on a local level. In his words, ‘we don’t even get the chance to hate the museum’.62 Due to the lack of state support for contemporary art, artists are forced to be at once curators, archivists and art historians. Most of the artists in this text, in fact, maintain their own personal archives. Artists such as Lia Perjovschi (Contemporary Art Archive), György Galántai and Júlia Klaniczay (Artpool) have created archives not only of their work, but of contemporary art in general as a corrective to the lack of such resources in libraries and art institutions. Of course, Moudov did not establish a museum but a non-museum, to draw attention to the absence of a modern or contemporary art museum in Bulgaria. Like Moudov, Moldovan artist Tatiana Fiodorova arrived at a clever means of invading the Venice Biennale: designing a T-shirt to compensate for her nation’s lack of any contemporary art representation there in 2011, when a group of wealthy amateur artists financed their own Moldovan Pavilion at

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Institutional critique

329

Tanja Ostojić, I’ll Be Your Angel, 2001. Four-day performance with Harald Szeemann at the 49th Venice Biennale. Photo: Borut Krajnc. Courtesy: Tanja Ostojić

5.18

the exhibition. First, her ‘Artist Without Pavilion’ shirts were worn around Chișinău as part of an action, as there was no funding for the artist to travel to Italy. The T-shirts were, however, displayed in Venice in an exhibition that took place during the Biennale (4 June–27 November 2011). A number of Moldovan artists participated, creating what they referred to as a ‘Ghost

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

330

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

Pavilion’, similar to Xhafa’s earlier, clandestine one.63 All of these artists use the ephemeral mode of performance art to compensate for the lack of a fixed and stable presence in Venice. Tanja Ostojić’s 2001 performance at the 49th Venice Biennale, I’ll Be Your Angel (figure 5.18), adds another dimension to the issue of the East-West dynamic – the place of the female artist, especially the Eastern European female artist, in the Western art world. During the piece, she acted as an escort to Harald Szeemann, curator of that year’s Biennale, following him around the events of the opening days, dressed in haute couture. The performance addressed both the power structure of the Biennale as well as the relationship between artist and curator, in particular the dynamic between an Eastern European female artist and Western male curator. Although she acted primarily as an escort for Szeemann, Ostojić gained access to one of the most prestigious art events of the year – a feat not just for a woman artist but for an Eastern European one as well, given the continued male dominance of the contemporary art world as well as many Eastern European nations’ lack of representation at the Biennale in the immediate post-communist period. After seeing Ostojić perform in 1998, Szeemann invited the artist to propose a contribution for the 2001 Biennale.64 In response, she created I’ll Be Your Angel, together with Black Square on White65 – two performances that became part of a cycle of works by the artist entitled Strategies of Success: Curator’s Series, 2001–2003. The cycle includes public performances, happenings, actions and an exhibition, all critically addressing the relationship between artists and curators. Marina Gržinić sees the series as employing the strategy of overidentification to reveal these often unseen or ignored relationships. In her words, Ostojić ‘made visible in public precisely these libidinal relations between the artists and curator … within the obscene art institution’.66 Precisely because of the series’s use of this strategy, which can often be mistaken for uncritical identification, the artist, along with Gržinić as a critic in support of her work, came under fire for having placed herself in the role of an ‘object of transaction within the corrupted art market, the art institutions and the tyrannical vampire figures that run the Institution of Art’.67 As in Looking for a Husband with EU Passport, Ostojić penetrates the system to challenge it from within. The Romanian representation at the 2013 Venice Biennale, An ­Immaterial Retrospective of the Venice Biennale, was an ongoing live performance by performance artist and dancer Alexandra Pirici (b. 1982) and dancer Manuel Pelmuş (b.  1974). The work consisted of five performers enacting works from past biennales – not only paintings and sculptures, but also installations and performances – in the otherwise empty white gallery of the Romanian Pavilion. According to the artists, the performers were not reenacting history but embody­­­­ing it. Thus, the piece was simultaneously a living monument

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Institutional critique

and t­estament to the Biennale and a critique of it and the manner in which it designs, and ultimately owns, history. In An Immaterial Retrospective of the Venice Biennale, the performers created masterworks on a human and accessible scale, one that only exists in human memory (after the performance has finished). In this sense, the artists pursued goals similar to those of the performance artists working in the 1960s and 1970s, in wanting to move away from the art object in favour of the process. The artists use performance to shift from the monumental to the accessible, utilising moving, human bodies in place of fetishised objects. Furthermore, in embodying the history of the Biennale, they embodied not only the artworks and the history, but also the traditions from which many Romanian artists had been excluded throughout the Cold War, such as Pollock’s action painting (Enactment of ‘Number 12’), as well as reclaimed artists from Romania’s past, among them, Constantin Brancusi (Enactment of ‘Bird in Space’ ). Pirici does not consider the selling of objects from performative works or the payment for performance as an act of commodification, and believes that the artists of the 1960s and 1970s ‘romanticised’ the idea of using their own bodies.68 In her view, the body is not necessarily ‘cheap’, as an artist still needs to be paid for his or her time and work. In her view, there are different economies for different types of artworks; they are merely distributed differently. Objects, for example, need to be insured and shipped, although the same amount of money can cover the cost of a project that lasts a month if it involves the artists’ time. In her practice, the artist explores these issues of commodification, compensation and market forces. Keeping pace with the art world was challenging for artists in some areas of Eastern Europe. In Bulgaria, for example, an experimental contemporary art scene did not emerge until the end of the 1980s, which is somewhat late in comparison with the rest of the East. A project by art historian and curator Vera Mlechevska and writer Dimitar Shopov addresses this issue in Bulgarian art history, along with the national complex regarding the lack of an avantgarde tradition. Whereas most post-communist and post-socialist countries are eager to showcase those artists who continued the traditions of the avant-garde, Bulgaria carries the stigma of not having many of those traditions (at least not until the 1980s), for which historians often try to compensate by suggesting that there may have been artists working in this manner, but that those instances were not documented. Mlechevska and Shopov present an ironic spin on this situation (figure 5.19) through their creation of ‘Gavazov’, a fictional character of their invention that they present as Bulgaria’s notable avant-garde artist. In their lecture-performances, which they have been doing since 2011, they present Gavazov as the artist who has done everything and pioneered everything one could imagine; he is the father of Conceptualism, installation art and ­experimental film, among other accomplishments. The authors exaggerate his

331

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

332

5.19

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

Dimitar Shopov, Vera Mlechevska and Vassil Tchitanov, Gavazov, May 2012, Vlaykova Cinema. Lecture-performance. Photo: Pravdoliub Ivanov. Courtesy: Vera Mlechevska and Dimitar Shopov

achievements to mock this situation whereby artists or nations try to stake a claim in being the first to do or create something. All of Gavazov’s work exists only in the form of description, because to show them, visually, would be to destroy the myth.69 Without the physical evidence of his work, the myth can be perpetuated and even aggrandised, as the imagination runs wild with Gavazov’s innovations. Mlechevska and Shopov also challenge the Amerocentrism and Eurocentrism of the art world by claiming that Gavazov had influenced ‘African Minimalism’, juxtaposing his work with a non-Western (albeit fictional) art form. While most Eastern European artists try to demonstrate their success or influence in Western Europe or North America, Gavazov found his success in Africa. Conclusion Although artists in Eastern Europe during the communist period were removed from the constraints of the art market, their international connections meant that the institutionalisation and commercialisation of art was a

Institutional critique

concern shared by artists in East and West. In the post-communist era, the need for institutional critique has perhaps become more vital as artists work to navigate both the Western art market and the local art infrastructure. Institutional critique is just one method by which artists in Central and Eastern Europe have been closely tied to developments in the West.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Notes 1 Alexander Alberro, ‘Institutions, Critique and Institutional Critique’, in Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson (eds), Institutional Critique: An Anthology of Artists’ Writings (Cambridge: Mass.: MIT Press, 2009), p. 7. 2 Lucy Lippard and John Chandler, ‘The dematerialization of art’, Artforum International, 6:6 (1968), 31–6. 3 Benjamin Buchloh, ‘Conceptual art, 1962–1969: from the aesthetics of administration to the critique of institutions’, October 55 (1990), 118. 4 Ibid., p. 143. 5 Craig Owens, ‘Post’, in Brian Wallis (ed.), After Modernism: Rethinking Represen­ tation (Boston: David R. Godine: 1991), p. 235. Emphasis in original. 6 Ana Dević, ‘To Criticize, Charge for Services Rendered and Be Thanked’, in Boris Buden (ed.), The Post-Yugoslavian Condition of Institutional Critique (Vienna and Linz: European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies, 2008), http://eipcp.net/ transversal/0208/devic/en, accessed 18 September 2015. See Bojana Pejić, ‘The Dialectics of Normality’, in Jill Winder and Maria Hlavajova (eds), Who if Not We Should Imagine the Future of All This? (Amsterdam: Artimo, 2004), p. 268. 7 Gregor Tomc, as quoted in Nevenka Šivavec, ‘Elitism on the Margins’, in Irina Cercnik (ed.), The Town of Celje: The Alternative of the Seventies (Celje, Slovenia: Likovni salon Celje, 2000), p. 22. 8 While I acknowledge that the term ‘institutional critique’ can be problematic, insofar as it was neither used contemporaneously by artists in the East nor in the West, I maintain that the works discussed in this chapter nevertheless fall under the rubric of institutional critique and that introducing these examples from the Eastern Bloc can nuance our understanding of the term. 9 Ivana Bago, ‘A window and a basement: negotiating hospitality at la galerie des loca­­taires and podroom – the working community of artists’, Art Margins, 1:2–3 (2012), 117. 10 For additional, related discussions, see Suzana Milevska and Pascal Gielen, Spaces for Criticism: Shifts in Contemporary Art Discourses (Amsterdam: Valiz, 2015); Katarzyna Murawska-Muthesius and Piotr Piotrowski (eds), From Museum Criti­­ ue to the Critical Museum (New York: Routledge, 2015); Maria Orišková, Curating ‘Eastern Europe’ and Beyond: Art Histories Through the Exhibition (Bern: Peter Lang GmbH, 2014); Izabela Kowalczyk, Podróž do przeszłości: interpretacja najnowszej historii w polskiej sztuce krytycznej (Warsaw: SWPS Academica, 2010). 11 Jelena Vesić, ‘SKC (Student Cultural Centre) as a site of performative (self)production, October 75 – institution, self-organization, first-person speech, collectivization’, in Život umjetnosti / [Magazine for Contemporary Visual Arts], 91 (2012), 43.

333

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

334

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

12 Jelena Vesić, ‘“New Artistic Practice” in Former Yugoslavia: From Leftist Critique of Socialist Bureaucracy to the Post-Communist Artifact of Neo-Liberal Institution of Art’, in SKC and Political Practices of Art (Prelom Kolektiv and Škuc Gallery), exh. cat., www.prelomkolektiv.org/pdf/catalogue.pdf, p. 4, accessed 18 September 2015. 13 Miško Šuvaković, ‘Students’ Cultural Centers as Reservations’, in SKC and Political Practices of Art, p. 85. 14 Ibid. 15 Achille Bonito Oliva, as quoted in ibid. 16 Raša Todosijević, in an interview with the author in Belgrade, 3 August 2013. 17 Dejan Sretenović, ‘Art as Social Practice’, in Dejan Sretenović (ed.), Thank You, Raša Todosijević (Belgrade, Yugoslavia: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2002), p.  109. 18 Tito openly declared his distaste for abstract art, although he tolerated abstraction as it supported his agenda of presenting Yugoslavia as a free and open society. See Tvrtko Jakovina, ‘Historical Success of Schizophrenic State: Modernisation in Yugoslavia, 1945–1974’, in Ljiljana Kolešnik (ed.), Socialism and Modernity: Art, Culture, Politics, 1950–1974 (Zagreb, Croatia: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2012), pp. 7–43. 19 Dunja Blažević, ‘SKC and New Cultural Practices’, in SKC and Political Practices of Art, p. 83. 20 Sanja Iveković, as quoted in Ivana Bago and Antonia Majaca, ‘Dissociative Association, Dionysian Socialism, Non-Action and Delayed Audience: Between Action and Exodus in the Art of the 1960s and 1970s in Yugoslavia’, in Ivana Bago and Antonia Majaca (eds), in collaboration with Vesna Vuković, Removed from the Crowd: Unexpected Encounters I (Zagreb, Croatia: [BLOK], 2011), p. 301. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid. 23 The name is the Anglicised spelling of the Croatian word podrum (basement), which plays on the Croatian word pod (under) and the English ‘room’. 24 Bago, ‘A window and a basement’, p. 137. 25 Bago and Majaca, ‘Dissociative Association, Dionysian Socialism, Non-Action and Delayed Audience’, p. 280. 26 Łukasz Ronduda, ‘Polish Art of the 1970s: Between Postessentialism and Pragmatism’, in Polish Art of the 1970s (Warsaw: Centre for Contemporary Art, 2009), p. 9. For Ronduda, whereas artistic post-essentialists sought to ‘reactivate qualities such as mystery, the neutrality of pure idea, and aura, and rejected the complete transformation of art into discourse’, focusing primarily on the autonomy of the art object and its detachment from everyday life, existentialist postessentialism raised questions concerning the nature of art in the context of questions of individual human existence, advocating for art to play a social role. 27 Nena Baljković, ‘Braco Dimitrijević – Goran Trbuljak’, in Marijan Susovski (ed.), The New Art Practice in Yugoslavia, 1966–1978 (Zagreb, Croatia: Gallery of Contemporary Art, 1978), p. 30. 28 The Group of Six Artists consisted of Boris Demur (b. 1951), Željko Jerman (1949– 2006), Vlado Martek (b. 1951), Mladen Stilinović (1947–2016), Sven Stilinović (b. 1958) and Fedor Vučemilović (b. 1956).

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Institutional critique

29 Vesić, ‘SKC (Student Cultural Centre) as a site of performative (self)production’, p.  44. 30 Zoran Popović, ‘For Self-Managing Art’, reprinted in SKC and Political Practices of Art, p. 17. 31 Ibid. 32 Sretenović, ‘Art as Social Practice’, p. 112. 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid., p. 116. 35 Todosijević, as quoted in ibid. 36 Raša Todosijević, ‘Edinburgh Statement: Who Makes a Profit on Art, and Who Profits from It Honestly?’ (1975), reprinted in Sretenović (ed.), Thank You, Raša Todosijević, pp. 48–51. 37 Dalibor Martinis, as quoted in Nada Beroš, Dalibor Martinis: Public Secrets (Zagreb, Croatia: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2006), p. 61. 38 As quoted in Pavlína Morganová, Czech Action Art: Happenings, Actions, Events, Land Art, Body Art and Performance Art Behind the Iron Curtain (Prague: Karolinum Press, 2014), p. 181. 39 In the Gorges of the Balkans was the third of three important exhibitions on contemporary art from the Balkans following the wars of the 1990s. On view from August to November 2003, it featured eighty-eight artists from twelve different countries and regions (Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Greece, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, Romania, Serbia, Slovenia, Turkey). The first of these exhibitions, In Search of Balkania, was curated by Eda Čufer and Roger Conover and took place at the Neue Galerie am Landesmuseum Joanneum, Graz, Austria, in 2002. The second presentation, organised by Swiss curator Harald Szeemann, was entitled Blut & Honig: Zukunft ist im Balkan (Blood & Honey: the Future is in the Balkans) and presented in Vienna from May to September 2003. 40 Luchezar Boyadjiev, ‘The backfiring of the Schadenfreude guided tours’ / ‘Der Fehlschlag der “Schadenfreude Guided Tours”’, Ein und Alle Mag., Kunsthalle Fridericianum, 11 (Winter 2003/04), n.p. 41 Luchezar Boyadjiev, ‘Off the record’, Manifesta Journal, 2 (Winter 2003/Spring 2004), 36. 42 Boyadjiev, ‘The backfiring of the Schadenfreude guided tours’. 43 Ibid. 44 In 2013–14, in response to the protests taking place in Bulgaria against the coalition cabinet of Oresharski (which had the support of the ultra-right nationalist party Ataka), and the Gezi Park protests in Turkey, the artist created Eastern Walk in Western Park: Soft and Hard Bodies in Times of Protest, merging the artistic with the political, the politicised public space with the (usually) neutral free space of a public park. 45 János Sugár, in an interview with Csaba Polony, in Emesz Süvecz, ‘Fast culture – Kossuth club 1984–88 by János Sugár, Ferenc Gerlóczy and Talán Sebeő’, Curating and Educational Turn Seminar: Case Studies (June 2011), http://casestudiesforedu cationalturn.blog.hu/2011/05/25/fast_culture_kossuth_club_1984_88_by_janos_sugar _ferenc_gerloczy_and_talan_sebeo, accessed 18 September 2015. 46 As conveyed by Artūras Raila, in an interview with the author in Vilnius, 2 October 2013.

335

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

336

Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960

47 Adolfas Mekas (1925–2011) was a Lithuanian-born filmmaker, writer, director, editor and actor, and brother of filmmaker Jonas Mekas. He made several short films, and Hallelujah the Hills (1963) was his first feature film; it is now an American classic, featuring an unconventional love story that takes place in the woods of Vermont. 48 Aleksandar Battista Ilić, in conversation with the author in Zagreb, 17 August 2013. 49 Here, a comparison can be drawn with Dalibor Martinis’s installation Artist at Work (1978), which consists of a table and chair, with a piece of paper and lamp on the table. Suspended from the lamp is an ink pen, which just touches the piece of paper, causing the paper to draw the ink out of the pen, which bleeds all over the paper. The artist has managed to create a mark on the paper, a two-dimensional formal work, without actually touching the pen or paper to make the mark; he sets up the situation, and the mark is made by the materials themselves. 50 Mladen Miljanović, in an interview with the author in Banja Luka, Bosnia-Herzegovina, 28 July 2013. 51 Miljanović, in ibid. 52 As a counter to this position, Bosnian artist Nela Hasanbegović created an installation in 2013 based on her 2010 performance Under the Veil… . In the later work, entitled Slave, she executed a plaster cast of herself chained to the gallery space, representing her view of the role of the artist in society. 53 Delimar has dedicated her father’s estate, Štaglinec, which she inherited, to the development of contemporary and performance art. Every year, since 2005, she has hosted a three-day workshop in which artists work on their practice, both individually and collaboratively, and produce performances and artworks that are presented on the final day. 54 Sinisa Labrović, in an interview with the author in Zagreb, 18 August 2013. 55 Marina Abramović, in an interview with Janet A. Kaplan, ‘Deeper and deeper: interview with Marina Abramović’, Art Journal, 58:2 (Summer 1999), 7. 56 Another iteration of Abramović’s 1975 performance is worth mentioning: Bosnian artist Maja Bajević’s (mentioned in chapter 4) 2012 video performance, Art Has to be National, during which the artist also brushes her hair and repeats the titular phrase, changing it to reflect the situation for artists in the region, where their art is interpreted along national lines (and perhaps also used as a tool to support nationalist rhetoric), as discussed in chapter 4. 57 These photographs were originally displayed in an accordion-style book, and, when viewed in sequence, the artist’s action of kicking the bread appeared in motion. Instead of performing the piece in front of the audience, he simply exhibited the documentation, imitating the trend of recording performance, which obviates the need of actually performing it live. The anti-performance demonstrates Stilinović’s conviction that performance is in fact photography, that the only way to capture or show a performance is through its photographic documentation. 58 Piotr Piotrowski, Art and Democracy in Post-Communist Europe (London: Reaktion Books, 2012), p. 22. 59 Giacinto Di Pietrantonio, ‘Statements: Diffusion of Art and Life’, in Sislej Xhafa (Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Canz, 2005), p. 13. This was published for the Albanian Pavilion, 51st Venice Biennale.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Institutional critique

60 Ivan Moudov, in an interview with the author in Sofia, 30 May 2014. 61 Piotrowski acknowledges this ‘uneven’ treatment of the region, and states that because the focus of his text is modern art, he ‘spent more time on the art of those countries where the experience of modern art was richer and more dynamic.’ See Piotr Piotrowski, In the Shadow of Yalta: Art and the Avant-Garde in Eastern Europe, 1945–1989 (London: Reaktion Books, 2009), p. 9. 62 Steve Lyons, ‘Ivan Moudov’s museum in fragments’, C116 (Winter 2012), 5, http:// stevelyonsartist.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/c116_p04-09_lyons.pdf, accessed 26 March 2015. 63 Another solution worth mentioning, though not a performance, is Nela Hasan­­ begović’s Pavilion for Bosnia-Herzegovina, which provides an alternative venue to showcase contemporary art from Bosnia. The artist constructed her own pavilion in Počitelj, near Mostar. The town eventually turned this temporary structure into a permanent one, eliminating the need for artistic representation on the other side of the Adriatic. 64 Szeemann originally invited the artist to propose something for the 1999 Biennale, but the President of that year’s Biennale, Paolo Barata, did not want to include one-off performances, preferring works that would last for the duration of the Biennale. 65 For this performance, the artist shaved her pubic hair into the shape of a black square in reference to Kazimir Malevich, and Szeemann was the only viewer allowed to see it. 66 Marina Gržinić, ‘Tanja Ostojić: “Yes It’s Fucking Political” – Skunk Anansie’, in Tanja Ostojić (ed.), Strategies of Success: Curator’s Series, 2001–2003 (Belgrade, Yugoslavia: Student Culture Centre Belgrade, 2004), p. 16. 67 Ibid. 68 Alexandra Pirici, in an interview with the author in Bucharest, 27 March 2014. 69 Vera Mlechevska, in an interview with the author in Sofia, 31 May 2014.

337

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Epilogue

Artists working in Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe during the communist period adopted performance art as a free-form, open-ended means of expression to give voice to concepts, relationships and actions that otherwise would not have been possible in the official realm of art or in the public sphere. In the post-communist period, artists continued to embrace the experimental nature of performance. They have likewise utilised performance art to articulate issues of concern, including those related to national and other forms of identity that have urgently arisen amid the turbulence that has transpired in a number of these newly independent states, perhaps most notably the former Yugoslavia. Performance art created under the communist and post-communist systems manifests other points of continuity as well. Just as East European artists working under communism faced potentially severe repercussions for actions deemed politically or otherwise subversive, so, too, have their postcommunist successors, as the controversy surrounding Pussy Riot, among other examples, attests. By juxtaposing artists working under communism and after the system change, I hope to have demonstrated the common practices and interests that penetrate the temporal borders of ‘before’ and ‘after.’ While often working in their local environments, artists in the East during the communist period established connections with their counterparts across the region through such channels as arts festivals and other gathering places; while some of these channels were unofficial and self-funded, others were recognised and funded at least in part by the state, Yugoslavia’s Student Culture Centres being a case in point. Although many of the experimental artists did not become teachers or established artists in their own locales, younger artists eventually learned of their predecessors’ work, and artistic transfer did occur. In numerous instances in the post-communist period, once an artist began working in the genre of performance, he or she first encountered examples from the West via the Internet, but later discovered local sources, often by accident or through informal situations or conversations. Artists in the East also established connections with performance artists

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Epilogue

in the West, albeit in a somewhat haphazard manner. In many cases, artists in Eastern Europe working under communism learned about Western examples of performance art through publications such as Allan Kaprow’s Assemblage, Environments and Happenings, copies of which made their way to the region in the 1970s, and through events such as the Edinburgh International Festival in Scotland or the April Meetings at SKC in Belgrade. As Eastern European artists developed their own manifestations of performance art concurrently with their contemporaries in the West, the Western examples of the genre they learned about secondhand served to affirm the relevance of their own work, inspiring them to continue in that vein. While some of the artists discussed here have been featured in significant art-historical publications, such as Lucy Lippard’s Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972, or in exhibitions at major ­institutions in the West, among them the Museum of Modern Art’s Information show of 1970, their almost complete omission from Western accounts of performance art is an art-historical lacuna that this text hopes to rectify. This omission, alongside the perceived art-historical divisions between Eastern and Western performance art, have causes both political and art-historical: the binary of the Cold War, for one, alongside oversight on the part of scholars and critics. Compiling this history is thus the necessary first step toward a reassessment of the field of contemporary performance art and a move toward a global art history, where the main point of reference is not necessarily the West. The continuities I have highlighted between techniques and approaches utilised by artists in East and West demonstrate that the development of performance art in the East occurred contemporaneously with its development in the West; it was not the result of a one-sided influence from the West. It is my hope that in presenting this rich body of material together in this book, these two worlds of Eastern European performance art and Western (European and North American) performance art are not only bridged, but will come to be seen as emerging from similar impulses and traditions – all originating in the European context. If artists are able to cross borders, the same is true of art historians. The fact that performance art continues to be relevant in the region attests to its lingering efficacy in both the world of art and the public sphere. While the future of performance art remains to be seen, one thing is certain: the artists in this text are irrevocably part of the history of performance, action and body art in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

339

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Select bibliography

Anđelković, Branislava. Hvala Raši Todosijeviću. Belgrade, Serbia and Montenegro: Muzej savremene umetnosti, 2002. Auslander, Philip. Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture. New York: Routledge, 2008. ——. ‘On the Performativity of Performance Documentation’. In After the Act: The (Re)Presentation of Performance Art, edited by Barbara Clausen. Vienna: Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, 2005, 21–33. Badovinac, Zdenka (ed.). Body and the East: From the 1960s to the Present. Exhibition catalogue. Ljubljana, Slovenia: Moderna Galerija: 1998. Bago, Ivana. ‘A window and a basement: negotiating hospitality at la galerie des locataires and podroom – the working community of artists’. ARTMargins, 1:2–3 (2012), 116–46. —— and Antonia Majaca (eds), in collaboration with Vesna Vuković. Removed from the Crowd: Unexpected Encounters. Zagreb, Croatia: [BLOK], 2011. Bátorová, Andrea. Aktionskunst in der Slowakei in den 1960er Jahren: Aktionen von Alex Mlynárčik. Berlin: LIT, 2009. Bazin, Jerome (ed.). Art Beyond Borders: Artistic Exchange in Communist Europe (19451989). Budapest: Central European University Press, 2016. Beke, László. Image Whipping: Tibor Hajas’ Photo Works with Janos Veto. Budapest: Research Institute for Art History of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, 2004. Benson, Timothy O. (ed.). Central European Avant-Gardes: Exchange and Transformation, 1910–1930. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002. Beroš, Nada. Dalibor Martinis: Public Secrets. Zagreb, Croatia: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2006. —— (ed.). Josip Vaništa: Abolition of Retrospective. Zagreb, Croatia: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2013. Bishop, Claire. Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship. New York: Verso Books, 2012. —— and Marta Dziewanska (eds). 1968–1989: Political Upheaval and Artistic Change. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. Block, René. In the Gorges of the Balkans: A Report. Kassel, Germany: Kunsthalle Fridericianum, 2003. Bryzgel, Amy. Performing the East: Performance Art in Russia, Latvia and Poland since 1980. London: I.B. Tauris, 2013.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Select bibliography

Budínský, Václav and Milan Knížák (eds). Génius Milana Knížáka. Prague: Agentura Lucie, 2010. Cichocki, Sebastian and Marta Ryczkowska (eds). Teresa Murak. Lublin, Poland: Galeria Labirynt, 2012. Cuković, Petar (ed.). Milija Pavičević. Podgorica: Contemporary Art Centre of Montenegro, 2013. Denegri, Ješa. Monograph: Gera Urkom. Vienna: Vladimir Macura Publications, 2005. Dimitrijević, Braco and Antun Maračić (eds). Braco Dimitrijević. Zagreb, Croatia: Art Studio Azinović, 2004. Djurić, Dubravka and Miško Šuvaković (eds), Impossible Histories: Historical AvantGardes, Neo-Avant-Gardes and Post-Avant-Gardes in Yugoslavia, 1918–1991. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003. Dobrowolski, Jacek et al. (eds). Zofia Kulik/Przemysław Kwiek: KwieKulik. Zurich: JRP/Ringier, 2012. Dovydaitytė, Linara (ed.). emisija 2004 – ŠMC. Vilnius, Lithuania: Contemporary Art Centre, 2004. Dragović-Šoso, Jasna. Saviours of the Nation: Serbia’s Intellectual Opposition and the Revival of Nationalism. London: C. Hurst & Co., 2002. Drake, Adrienne and Marla Hurov (eds). Sislej Xhafa. Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Canz, 2005. Publication for the Albanian Pavilion, 51st Venice Biennale. Dziewanska, Marta (ed.). Ion Grigorescu: In the Body of the Victim. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. Elliot, David, Pier Luigi Tazzi and Teresa Hahr (eds.). Wounds: Between Democracy and Redemption in Contemporary Art. Stockholm: Moderna Museet, 1998. Erjavec, Aleš (ed.). Postmodernism and the Post-Socialist Condition: Politicized Art under State Socialism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. —— and Marina Gržinić (eds). Ljubljana, Ljubljana. Ljubljana, Slovenia: Mladinska, 1991. Eşanu, Octavian. Transition in Post-Soviet Art: Collective Actions Before and After 1989. Budapest: Central European University Press, 2012. Fitzpatrick, Michael and Noel Kelly et al. (eds). Art and Politics: The Imagination of Opposition in Europe. Dublin: R4 Publishing, 2004. Fowkes, Maja. The Green Bloc: Neo-Avant-Garde Art and Ecology under Socialism. Budapest: Central European University Press, 2015. ——. ‘Off the record: performative practices in the Hungarian neo avant-garde and their resonance in contemporary art’. Centropa: A Journal of Central European Architecture and Related Arts, 14:1 (January 2014), 57–71. Fydrych, Waldemar, Bronisław Misztal and Agnieszka Couderq. Pomarańczowa Alternatywa: Rewolucja Krasnoludków. Warsaw: Fundacja Pomarańczowa Alternatywa, 2008. Galántai, György, Júlia Klaniczay and Kristine Stiles (eds). Artpool: The Experimental Art Archive of East-Central Europe; History of an Active Archive for Producing, Networking, Curating and Researching Art since 1970. Budapest: Artpool, 2013. Gattin, Marija (ed.). Gorgona: Protocol of Submitting Thoughts. Zagreb, Croatia: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2002. Goldberg, Roselee. Performance Art from Futurism to the Present. 3rd edition. New York: Thames & Hudson, 2011.

341

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

342

Select bibliography

Groh, Klaus. Aktuelle Kunst in Osteuropa: CSSR, Jugoslavien, Polen, Rumänien, UDSSR, Ungarn. Cologne: DuMont-Schauberg, 1972. Gržinić, Marina. Situated Contemporary Art Practices: Art, Theory and Activism from (the East of) Europe. Frankfurt am Main: Revolver, 2004. Hegy, Lóránd. Aspects/Positions: 50 Years of Art in Central Europe, 1949–1999. Vienna: Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, 1999. Hegyi, Dóra et al. (eds). Art Always Has Its Consequences: Artists’ Texts from Croatia, Hungary, Poland, Serbia, 1947–2009. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2011. Helme, Sirje (ed.). Lost Eighties: Problems, Themes and Meanings in Estonian Art in the 1980s. Tallinn, Estonia: Centre for Contemporary Art, 2010. ——. Nosy Nineties: Problems, Themes and Meanings in Estonian Art in the 1990s. Tallinn: Soros Centre of Contemporary Art in Estonia, 2001. ——. PopKunst Forever: Estonian Pop Art at the Turn of the 1960s and 1970s. Tallinn: Art Museum of Estonia – Kumu Art Museum, 2010. Hennig, Naomi and Wiktor Skok (eds). Ausstellung Laibach Kunst Recapitulation. Exhibition catalogue. Łódź, Poland: Muzeum Sztuki w Łodzi, 2009. Hoptman, Laura and Tomáš Pospyszl (eds). Primary Documents: A Sourcebook for Eastern and Central European Art since the 1950s. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002. Hushegyi, Gábor (ed.). Umenie akcie, 1965–1989. Exhibition catalogue. Bratislava: Slovenská Národná Galéria, 2001. Ilić, Aleksandar Battista and Diana Nenadić, eds., Tomislav Gotovac. Zagreb, Croatia: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2003. IRWIN (eds). East Art Map: Contemporary Art and Eastern Europe. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006. Jablonská, Beata (ed.). Osemdesiate: Postmoderna v slovenskom výtvarnom umeni, 1985–1992. Exhibition catalogue. Bratislava: Slovenská Národná Galéria, 2009. Jackson, Matthew Jesse. The Experimental Group: Ilya Kabakov, Moscow Conceptualism, Soviet Avant-Gardes. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. Janevski, Ana. As Soon as I Open My Eyes, I See a Film: Experiments in Yugoslav Art in the ’60s and ’70s. Warsaw: Museum of Modern Art, 2011. Jappe, Elisabeth. Performance – Ritual – Prozess: Handbuch der Aktionskunst in Europa. Munich: Prestel, 1993. Jones, Amelia. Body Art: Performing the Subject. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998. Jordan, Melanie and Malcolm Miles (eds). Art and Theory after Socialism. Bristol: Intellect, 2008. Kemp-Welch, Klara. Antipolitics in Central European Art: Reticence as Dissidence under Post-Totalitarian Rule, 1956–1989. London: I.B. Tauris, 2014. Knížák, Milan. Actions for Which at Least Some Documentation Remains. Prague: National Gallery, 2002. Koller, Július. Július Koller: Univerzalne futurologicke operacie. Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 1999. Kosmala, Katarzyna (ed.). Sexing the Border: Gender, Art and New Media in Central and Eastern Europe. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014. Kovanda, Jiří et al. (eds). Jiří Kovanda, 1976–2005: Actions and Installations. Zurich: JRP/Ringier, 2006.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Select bibliography

Lahoda, Vojtěch and Matthew S. Witkovsky (eds). Local Strategies, International Ambitions: Modern Art and Central Europe, 1918–1968; Papers from the Inter­ national Conference, Prague, 11–14 June 2003. Prague: Artefactum, 2006. Lippard, Lucy R. Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972. [1973] Repr. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. New York: Praeger, 1973. Lukan, Blaž. Name: Readymade. Berlin: Revolver, 2008. Machnicka, Zofia (ed.). Dada East? Romanian Contexts of Dada. Exhibition catalogue. Warsaw: Zachęta National Gallery of Art, 2008. Mansbach, Steven. Modern Art in Eastern Europe: From the Baltic to the Balkans, ca. 1890–1939. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Marcoci, Roxana and Sanja Iveković (eds). Sanja Iveković: Sweet Violence. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2011. Marjanić, Suzana. Kronotop hrvatskoga performansa: Od Travelera do danas. Zagreb, Croatia: Udruga Bijeli val, Institut za etnologiju i folkloristiku, Školska knjiga, 2014. Martel, Richard. Art Action, 1958–1998: Happening, fluxus, intermédia, zaj, art corporel/ body art, poésie action/Action poetry, actionnisme viennois, viennese actionism, performance, art acción, sztuka performance, performans, akció művészet. Quebec: Éditions Intervention, 2001. Matković, Slavko and Nebojša Milenković (eds). Ich bin Künstler: Slavko Matković. Novi Sad, Serbia: Muzej savremene likovne umetnosti, 2005. Maurer, Dóra. Maurer Dóra. Budapest: Ludwig Múzeum, 2008. Medosch, Armin. New Tendencies: Art at the Threshold of the Information Revolution (1961–1978). Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2016. Mesch, Claudia. Modern Art at the Berlin Wall: Demarcating Culture in the Cold War Germanys. London: I.B. Tauris, 2009. Milenković, Nebojsa (ed.). Szombathy Art. Novi Sad, Serbia: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2005. Milivojević, Era and Jovan Cekić (eds). Era Milivojević: Art Session. Belgrade, Serbia and Montenegro: Geopoetika, 2001. Milevska, Suzana. Gender Difference in the Balkans: Archives of Representations of Gender Difference and Agency in Visual Culture and Contemporary Art in the Balkans. Saarbrücken, Germany: VDM Verlag Dr. Müller, 2010. Monroe, Alexei. The Interrogation Machine: Laibach and NSK. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005. Morganová, Pavlína. ‘Action! Czech performance art in the 1960s and 1970s’. Centropa: A Journal of Central European Architecture and Related Arts, 14:1 (January 2014), 23–38. ——. Czech Action Art: Happenings, Actions, Events, Land Art, Body Art and Performance Art Behind the Iron Curtain. Prague: Karolinum Press, 2014. Natalia LL, Adam Sobota and Dominika Kowalewska (eds). Natalia LL: Opera Omnia. Wrocław, Poland: Ośrodek Kultury i Sztuki, 2009. Okas, Jüri, Sirje Helme and Tamara Luuk (eds). Okas. Tallinn, Estonia: Repro, 2000. Ostojić, Tanja. Integration Impossible? Berlin: Argo Books, 2009. ——, Marina Gržinić, and Suzana Milevska (eds). Strategies of Success: Curators Series, 2001–2003. Bourges, France: Box, 2004.

343

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

344

Select bibliography

Paripović, Neša (ed.). Becoming Art: Works, 1970–2005. Belgrade, Serbia: Muzej savre­­ mene umetnosti, 2006. —— and Miško Šuvaković (eds). Autoportreti. Novi Sad, Serbia: Prometej, 1996. Pejić, Bojana (ed.). Gender Check: A Reader. Cologne: Buchhandlung Walter König, 2010. ——. Gender Check: Femininity and Masculinity in the Art of Eastern Europe. Exhibition catalogue. Cologne: Buchhandlung Walther König, 2009. Phelan, Peggy. Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. New York: Routledge, 1993. Pintilie, Ileana. ‘Action art in Romania before and after 1989’. Centropa: A Journal of Central European Architecture and Related Arts, 14:1 (January 2014), 86–99. ——. Actionism in Romania during the Communist Era. Cluj, Romania: Idea Design & Print, 2002. ——. Ştefan Bertalan – Drumuri la răscruce. Timişoara, Romania: Fundaţia TRIADE, 2010. Piotrowski, Piotr. Art and Democracy in Post-Communist Europe. London: Reaktion Books, 2012. ——. In the Shadow of Yalta: Art and the Avant-Garde in Eastern Europe, 1945–1989. London: Reaktion Books, 2009. Pogačnik, Marko, Zdenka Badovinac and Igor Španjol (eds). Marko Pogačnik: Umetnost življenja-življenje umetnosti. Ljubljana, Slovenia: Moderna Galerija, 2012. Popova, Diana and Svilen Stefanov (eds). N-Forms? Reconstructions and Interpretations. Sofia, Bulgaria: Soros Centre for the Arts, 1994. Purg, Franc. What is it That Moves Us? Celje, Slovenia: Centre for Contemporary Arts, 2012. Radu, Magdalena (ed.). Andrei Cadere. Bucharest, Romania: National Museum of Contemporary Art, 2011. Restany, Pierre. Ailleurs: Alex Mlynarcik. Paris: Galerie Lara Vincy, 1994. Rosenfeld, Alla (ed.). Moscow Conceptualism in Context. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2011. ——. and Norton C. Dodge (eds). Art of the Baltics: The Struggle for Freedom of Artistic Expression under the Soviets, 1945–1991. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2001. Rusinová, Zora. ‘Solidarity born of despair: action art in Slovakia during the totalitarian regime, 1970–1989’. Centropa: A Journal of Central European Architecture and Related Arts, 14:1 (January 2014), 100–18. Schimmel, Paul and Kristine Stiles. Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object, 1949–1979. New York: Thames & Hudson, 1998. Şerban, Alina (ed.). Geta Brătescu: The Studio. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2013. ——. Ion Grigorescu: The Man with a Single Camera. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2013. Škrjanec, Breda (ed.). FV: Alternative Scene of the 80s. Ljubljana, Slovenia: Inter­ national Centre of Graphic Arts, 2008. Stegmann, Petra. ‘Fluxus and the east’. Centropa: A Journal of Central European Architecture and Related Arts, 14:1 (January 2014), 39–56. —— (ed.), Fluxus East: Fluxus Networks in Central Eastern European Art. Berlin: Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, 2007.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Select bibliography

—— and Jennifer Burkard (eds). ‘The Lunatics Are on the Loose …’: European Fluxus Festivals, 1962–1977. Potsdam, Germany: Down with Art!, 2012. Stiles, Kristine. States of Mind: Dan and Lia Perjovschi. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008. Stilinović, Mladen and Branka Stipančić (eds). Mladen Stilinović: Zero for Conduct. Zagreb, Croatia: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2013. Susovski, Marijan (ed.). The New Art Practice in Yugoslavia, 1966–1978. Zagreb, Croatia: Gallery of Contemporary Art, 1978. Szeemann, Harald (ed.). Blood & Honey: Future’s in the Balkans. Klosterneuburg, Austria: Edition Sammlung Essl, 2003. Szylak, Aneta, Berenika Partum and Ewa Małgorzata Tatar (eds). Ewa Partum. Gdańsk, Poland: Institut Sztuki Wyspa, 2013. Šuvaković, Miško. The Clandestine Histories of the OHO Group. Ljubljana, Slovenia: Zavod P.A.R.A.S.I.T.E., 2010. ——, Dragomir Ugren and Gabrijela Šuler (eds). The Power of a Woman: Katalin Ladik. Novi Sad, Serbia: Museum of Contemporary Art Vojvodina, 2010. Todosijević, Raša and Dejan Sretenović (eds). Raša Todosijević: Was ist Kunst? Belgrade: Geopoetika, 2002. Unterkofler, Dietmar. Grupa 143: Kritičko mišljenje na granicama konceptualne umetnosti, 1975–1980. Belgrade, Serbia: Službeni Glasnik, 2013. van Droffelaar, Josine and Piotr Olszanski (eds). Works and Words: International Art Manifestation Amsterdam. Amsterdam: Foundation de Appel, 1980. Vesić, Jelena. ‘SKC (Student Cultural Centre) as a site of performative (self-) production, October 75 – institution, self-organization, first-person speech, collectivization’. Život umjetnosti [Magazine for Contemporary Visual Arts], 91 (2012), 30–52. Wark, Jayne. Radical Gestures: Feminism and Performance Art in North America. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006. Westcott, James. When Marina Abramović Dies: A Biography. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2010. What, How & for Whom/WHW (eds). Art Always Has Its Consequences. Zagreb, Croatia: What, How & for Whom/WHW, 2010. Winder, Jill and Maria Hlavajova (eds). Who if Not We Should Imagine the Future of All This? Brussels: Artimo, 2004. Zabel, Igor (ed.). OHO: A Retrospective. Exhibition catalogue. Ljubljana, Slovenia: Moderna Galerija, 1994. Zsusza, László and Tamás St.Turba (eds). The Lunch: In Memorian Batu Khan. Budapest: Tranzit, 2011. Želibská, Jana and Vladimíra Büngerová (eds). Jana Želibská: No Touching. Exhibition catalogue. Bratislava: Slovenská národná galéria, 2012.

345

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Index

Page numbers in italics indicate illustrations. 1st Open Studio 70, 225 4’33” (Cage) 146 4 Entity (Suljević) 281 8.8.88 (Ruller) 229–30, 231 Abalakova, Natalia see TOTART Abramović, Marina 3, 8n4, 56, 58, 82, 100n125, 109, 136, 159, 214 Art Must Be Beautiful, Artist Must Be Beautiful 322, 322, 336n56 body and 57, 58, 71, 144, 145, 159 Rhythm 0 145 Rhythm 2 144, 145 Rhythm 5 56–7, 144 Rhythm 10 82, 82, 144 abstraction, toleration of 60–1, 91, 223–4, 302, 334n18 action art 3, 7, 14, 69, 79, 103, 109 Czech 106, 108, 110–12 action painting 10, 71, 79, 107, 141, 193, 331 Action Painting (Černý and others) 71, 72, 252 Action Tree (Dan Perjovschi) 74, 75 Activities for the Head: Three Acts (KwieKulik) cover, 235–6, 237 Aczél, György 18, 234 Adamčiak, Milan 53 Adres gallery 70 Agalma (Todorović) 152, 155 Aktual Group 14, 16, 51, 52 Albania 2–3, 254, 261–2, 265, 276, 325, 328, 335n39, 336n59 performance(s) in, or by artists from 2–3, 7, 68, 89, 91, 131, 261, 265,

296n114, 325 Alberro, Alexander 298 Aleksić, Dragan 12 ALIAS/The Art of the Fugue (Gabriel) 151–2, 154 All About Him (Zankov) 209–10, 210 Allas, Anu 46 Almost-Perfect Work (Mrdja) 177, 178 Altorjay, Gábor 53, 71 Lunch, The: In Memoriam Batu Khan (with Erdély and Szentjóby) 24–6, 25, 27, 95n30 Alyokhina, Maria see Pussy Riot Amsterdam 1, 310, 311, 323 Andersen, Eric 51, 52 Andersen, Tony 51, 52 András, Edit 109, 167 animal(s) 83, 138, 152 killing/sacrifice of 137, 139, 142, 143, 222n108 parts 74, 139, 141, 150, 151 see also Kulik, Oleg AnnART International Living Art festival 77, 274 Annulling the Truth (Suljević) 281 Annulment (Lia Perjovschi) 76 Antik, Alexandru 73–4 Antin, Eleanor 75, 212 Anufriev, Sergei 50 apartments 68, 103 exhibitions in 14, 19, 50, 91, 304–5 performances in 51, 75, 105, 120, 193, 213, 239, 268, 282, 284 Aphros (Dragneva and Macari) 89–90, 90

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Index

Apollo 9 (Naskovski) 246–8, 247 Appearance (Collective Actions) 42, 42 Archer (Štembera) 145, 147 Armutiev, Ljubomir 210, 210 Arns, Inke 44, 62 Art and Memory (Todosijević) 306–7, 307 Arte Povera 56 Artforum 46 Art Guard (Martinis) 308, 309 Art Has to Be National (Bajević) 336n56 Art in Action 41 Artist at Work (Martinis) 336n49 Artist on Strike (Martinis) 310 artists arrest of 3, 19, 44, 45, 53, 85, 109, 127, 130, 222n108, 240, 289, 290 exile of 19, 26, 230–1, 232 imprisonment/jailing of 18, 26, 45, 53, 91, 109, 127, 147, 232, 287, 289, 292n26 see also surveillance art market 107, 133, 232, 304, 317, 323, 330 absence of 59, 299, 308, 332 artists’ entrance into 109, 300, 317, 325, 333 Art Must Be Beautiful, Artist Must Be Beautiful (Abramović) 322, 322, 336n56 Art News 107 Art Orienté Objet 258 Assimilation (Todorović) 152–8, 164n91 Athey, Ron 258 A3 303 Attempt at a Working Analysis of My Own Shadow (Meluzin) 113, 114, 115, 116 Attempt at Meeting a Girl, An (Kovanda) 119 Attila, Csernik 96n50 Auslander, Philip 108, 160n21 Austria 137, 213, 214, 248 Austro-Hungarian Empire 12, 253 Autoperforatsionsartisten 78, 79, 103, 137–9, 149–51 Die Spitze des Fleischbergs 79, 80, 138, 139, 140 Herz Horn Haut Schrein 79, 80, 139

avant-garde 11, 12, 13–14, 41, 125, 126 legacy/spirit/traditions of 2, 4, 6, 10, 43, 124, 213, 237, 327, 331 Baader, Johannes 13 Babu, Corneliu 77, 78 Badovinac, Zdenka 1, 106, 126, 143, 271–2 Bago, Ivana 107, 167, 199, 202, 300, 303–4 Bag (Popescu) 273–4, 273 Bajević, Maja 280, 281, 336n56 Balatonboglár 26, 226, 232 Balkans 12, 158, 223, 245, 246, 248, 271, 311, 319, 335n39 Baltic states 12, 42, 88 Baltic Sea coast 46, 238, 241 Baring (Žanić) 178 Barthes, Roland 142, 167 Bartúsz, Juraj 162n50 Bašičević, Dimitrije see Gorgona Bavoljak, Darko 127 Beauty of the Car Accident (NON GRATA) 140, 140 Becker, Jürgen 25, 53 Beckett, Samuel 44 Behluli, Mehmet 68 Bejenaru, Matei 77 Beke, László 71, 73, 109, 225, 226 Bekić, Irina 188 Belarus 2, 89, 90–1, 243–4, 282 Belarus Today (Naprushkina) 244 Belgium 67, 158 Belgrade 8n4, 12, 58, 68, 174, 189, 277, 284, 304 Academy of Fine Arts 65, 66, 67 performance(s) in 71, 122, 126, 144–5, 246, 247, 282 Student Culture Centre (SKC) in 3, 56, 69, 82, 123, 144–5, 176, 301, 302, 303, 304, 305, 339 student protests in 19, 144, 301 Beloescu, Călin 241–2 Benera, Anca 253–4, 254 Beqiri, Sokol 68 Bereś, Jerzy 212, 238, 240, 241 Berlin 14, 91, 149, 266, 311 Berlin Wall 5, 55, 78, 88, 89, 170, 223, 270, 290

347

348

Index

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document



West Berlin 5, 9n9, 55, 79, 137, 230, 231, 232 Bertalan, Ştefan 23–4, 73 Beuys, Joseph 22, 25, 55, 56, 68, 78, 79, 82, 83, 100n132 B/H War Day No. 56 Le Mans Depot (Hadžifejzović) 158 Bianco (Mlčoch) 227, 228 biennales 67, 156, 157, 190, 209, 235, 279, 311 Documenta 228–9, 246, 270, 276 Manifesta 163n75, 201, 256, 270, 276 Venice Biennale 39, 149, 209, 317–20, 318, 325–7, 326, 327, 328–31, 329, 337n64 Bitzen, Ion 82 Black Market International 228, 291n17 Black Peristyle (Grubić) 220n85, 249, 249 Black Shave Poem (Ladik) 188 Blažević, Dunja 302–3, 304, 305 Blok, Rene 311 blood 14, 27, 74, 139, 141–2, 145, 150, 151, 158, 193, 206, 249 Blood Revenge 2 (Rossa) 206–7, 207 Blume, Eugen 78, 79 body 103–64 limits of 57, 58, 71, 109, 110, 143–59 see also body art; costume/disguise; nakedness/nudity body art 4, 8, 71, 89, 93, 96n50, 120–2, 123, 141, 169, 213, 235, 271, 339 Czech 70, 110–12, 116, 145, 227 in Eastern Europe 1, 3, 55, 103, 105, 106, 224, 257, 269 extreme 143, 144, 258 Jones on 106, 107, 169, 269 Body Art Troika 70, 110, 116, 227 Body and the East: From the 1960s, to the Present 1, 88, 106, 158, 272 Bonami, Francesco 270 Bonito Oliva, Achille 302 Borghesia 62, 65 Born Free, Born Equal (Jõgeva) 285 Bosnia-Herzegovina 2, 29, 182, 277, 282, 335n39, 336n52, 336n56 Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 317– 20, 337n63



performance(s) in, or by artists from 158, 176, 182, 248, 279, 281, 296n116 Boudník, Vladimír 14–15 Boyadjiev, Luchezar 270–1, 276, 312, 311–12 Boynik, Sezgin 68 Božić, Milan 130, 189 Braila, Pavel 89, 255–6, 276–7 Brancusi, Constantin 331 Brătescu, Geta 73, 214–16, 215, 227 Bratislava 22, 52, 53, 70, 115, 225, 239–40 Brendel, Micha 149–50, 152 see also Autoperforatsionsartisten Brener, Alexander 83 Brener, Jeff 52, 53 Brno 52, 229 Bronze Man, The (Polis) 88, 130–1, 132, 133, 244 Bronze Man Becomes the White Man, The (Polis) 244–5 Brühl, Georg 78 Bucharest 13, 253, 268 performance(s) in 24, 73, 77, 120, 133, 245, 262 Buchloh, Benjamin 298–9 Budaj, Jan 70 Budapest 26, 33, 53, 89, 205, 213, 214 performances in 33, 52, 161n28, 207–9, 230, 232–4, 313 Bujrum, Help Yourselves (Jušić and others) 282 Bulgaria 7, 75, 168, 221n104, 270, 276, 282, 331, 335n39, 335n44 performance(s) in, or by artists from 2, 39–41, 141–2, 206–7, 209–12, 244, 284, 311–12, 325–8, 331–2 Bulldozer Exhibition 5, 49–50 Büngerová, Vladimíra 181 Burđelez, Pasko 125, 126, 149, 150 Burden, Chris 83, 143, 279 Bureau of Melodramatic Research 267–9 Buren, Daniel 77 Burliuk, David 13 Burning of 1,000 White Sheets of Paper, The (Todorov) 39 Butler, Judith 207

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Index

Cadere, André 77–8 Cage, John 25, 51, 53, 55, 57–8, 146 Čaleta, Toma see Red Peristyle Calovski, Yane 254–5, 255, 256 Carcass (Pavlensky) 289 Car Deconstructions (Rončević) 197, 198 Carving – a Traditional Sculpture (Antin) 212 Cassus Belli (Kovačič) 124–5 Ceauşescu, Nicolae 18–19, 24, 73, 120, 193, 214, 226, 227 Ceci n’est pas un garçon a la pipe (Milisković) 136 Cenaliaj, Enisa 131, 133, 134, 261 censorship 3, 18, 23, 71, 74, 98n78, 189, 228, 234, 238, 242–3, 315 Central Europe 2, 53, 116, 328 as a label 7, 269, 270 performance in 7, 55, 69–81 Černý, David 71, 72, 252 César 23 Cetinje 67, 100n124 Chagall, Marc 91 Chair, Cathedral, Passersby (Matanović) 36 Chalupecký, Jindřich 14, 51, 52, 146 Chameleon (City Group) 41 Champions of the World 44 Chandler, John 298 Change – My Problem Is the Problem of a Woman (Partum) 174–5 Change (Partum) 174 Chicago, Judy 203 Chişinău 89, 256, 262, 274, 329 Chişinău Centre for Contemporary Art (KSA:K) 90 Christo 53, 75 Chto Delat? 83 Churchill, Winston 269 Cieslar, Elżbieta 69 Cieslar, Emil 69 Čilikov, Aleksandar 67 City Group 41 Clandestine Pavilion (Xhafa) 325, 326, 328, 330 Clara Mosch 78–9, 103 Claus, Carl Friedrich see Clara Mosch

Čmajčanin, Lana 282, 296n118 Čmajčanin, Leila 282, 296n118 Cock I Love (Delimar) 189 Cold War 5, 6, 103, 224, 269, 270, 325, 331, 339 Collecting Merits (Neagu) 24, 24 Collective Actions 42, 42, 83 Conceptual Art 1, 25, 30, 33, 36, 66, 68, 77, 223, 230, 298–9 Constructivism 10, 13, 213 Consumer Art (Natalia LL) 185, 186, 186 consumerism 171, 185, 186, 186, 224, 261, 305 in Yugoslavia 35, 97n58, 173, 301, 303 Contact (Kovanda) 118, 119 Contemporary Art Archive (Lia Perjovschi) 76, 328 Corrections (RASSIM ) 210–12, 211, 222n115 Corrective Devices (Libera) 222n115 cosmetics/makeup 79, 173–5, 176, 177–8, 284 costume/disguise 11, 39, 50, 62, 85, 135–6, 138, 139, 140, 151, 182, 216, 261, 283 folk/national 188, 266 countryside 2, 39, 42, 47, 93 Czech performance(s) in 70, 103, 110, 117, 120, 181–2 Grigorescu’s performances in 73, 120, 122, 193 Courtyard (Kaprow) 14 Cricotage (Kantor) 20, 21, 22 Crimea 8n8, 44 Croatia 11–12, 67, 107, 168, 171, 199–200, 201, 220n83, 248, 277, 282, 299, 335n39 performances in, or by artists from 2, 3, 19–20, 26–9, 122–3, 126, 149, 158–9, 177–8, 188–90, 194–9, 220n85, 232, 248–50, 263–5, 279, 284, 305, 308–10, 320–2, 323–5 Crtalić, Marijan 149, 163n89 Crucify Him (Litvin) 287 Cuckovden 41 Cunningham, Merce 25, 51 Cvoro, Uros 248 Cyprich, Robert 53

®

349

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

350

Index

Czechoslovakia 7, 13, 14, 22, 51, 52–3, 181, 219n53, 328 action art in 106, 110–12 body art in 116, 145, 227 Charter 77 18, 227, 228, 229 deportation of Germans from 252 Normalisation-era 18, 70, 93, 103, 110, 117, 119, 135 performance(s) in, or by artists from 2, 3, 7, 57, 70–1, 94n13, 103, 106, 108, 110–12, 116, 117–20, 131, 135, 145–7, 161n44, 180–2, 225–6, 227–30, 239–40, 241, 252–3, 291n10 Prague Spring 5, 18, 181 Warsaw Pact invasion of 18, 147, 161n40, 225–6, 229 Czechoslovakia (Jakubík, Kordoš and Mudroch) 225–6 Czech Republic see Czechoslovakia Dabo, Tanja 321 Dada 10–14, 28–9, 65, 73, 79, 94n6, 258, 261, 294n70, 308 Daring (P.O.P.) 147 Dark Flash (Hajas) 109, 116 Data Recovery Project (Martinis) 263–5 Davidovs, Sergejs 241 David, Catherine 246 De Appel Gallery 1, 310, 323 Dear Money, I Know (Popovici) 131–3, 134, 134 Death Anniversary (Nikolić) 271, 272 Debord, Guy 95n41 Deep Europe Visa Department (V2_East Syndicate) 276 Deepwell, Katy 169 Delimar, Vlasta 3, 129, 168, 188, 189, 320, 336n53 Taking a Stroll as Lady Godiva 129–30, 129 Visual Orgasm 188–9, 189 Delivery (Grigorescu) 193, 194, 195 Dellabernadina, Drago 34 Demarco, Richard 81–3 Demarco Art Gallery 81, 82, 83 De Maria, Walter 37, 38, 83, 255 Demetrescu-Buzău, Demetru 11

Demonstration for One (Knížák) 14, 17 Denegri, Ješa 56, 123, 127, 223, 305, 316 Denmark 52, 220n70 Depression of New Year’s Eve?, The (Jovanovik) 260, 261 Devětsil 14 Dević, Ana 299 Dezider, Tóth see POP Trio Dialogue with Ceauşescu (Grigorescu) 226, 227 Diary (Iveković) 173, 176 Dienes, Valéria 204 Die Spitze des Fleischbergs (Autoperforatsionsartisten) 79, 80, 138, 139 Dimitrakaki, Angela 172, 192, 218n32 Dimitrijević, Braco 19, 29, 30, 60, 96n46, 304–5 Dimov, Vesselin 39 Disco FV 64 dissidents 91, 227, 232, 244, 246 Dizdarević, Ilvana 282 Dmitrijević, Nena 28–9 Dobrudzha 39 Documenta 228–9, 246, 270, 276 Dodona Gallery and Culture Centre 68 Do Not Believe Your Eyes (Mavromati) 287 Downfall of Article 1 (Kostov) 244 Dragneva, Lilia 89–90, 90 Dream Has Not Died, The (Antik) 73–4 Dresden 78, 79, 149, 163n75 Academy of Fine Arts 81, 138 Dressed Up (Bajević) 280, 281 Drinking Water – Inversions, Imitations and Contrasts (Todosijević) 58, 60, 144, 145 Drozdik, Orshi 166, 168, 203–6, 204 Dubček, Alexander 18 Dubrovnik 126, 163n88 artists from 67, 278, 279 siege of 277, 279 Duchamp, Marcel 22, 68, 271, 294n70, 327 Dugandžić-Živanović, Danijela 282 Dulčić, Pavao see Red Peristyle Ďurček, L’ubomir 70, 239–40 Dvorianov, Orlin 41, 141

Index

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Dyzerotre Collective 261–2, 263 E.T.I. (Expropriation of the Territory of Art) 83, 84 E.T.I. Text (E.T.I.) 83 East, the attitudes toward feminism in 165, 166, 167, 168–9, 170–2, 175, 178–9, 181, 185–8, 189, 199–200, 206, 207, 209, 210, 214, 221n105, 285 East­-West binary 6, 7, 12, 93, 149, 158, 248, 274, 330 opening up of 135, 274 post-socialist 172, 216 socialist 172, 216, 240, 304 East-Central Europe 7, 55, 116, 269, 270 Easter Carpet, The (Murak) 112–15 Eastern Bloc 15, 19, 176, 230, 274, 299, 301, 325, 333n8 Eastern Europe, post-Communist 88–93, 209, 269–77 East Germany (German Democratic Republic; GDR) 6, 9n9, 55, 78, 88, 137, 150, 328 performance(s) in 2, 78–81, 137–9 Stasi 79, 101n153, 103, 137 East Side Story (Grubić) 284 Eclipse 203, 206 Edinburgh 81–3, 308 Edinburgh Arts Festival 1, 3, 82, 144, 339 Either/Or (Miler) 100, 111 emigration/immigration 24, 65, 69, 77, 79, 91, 141, 205–6, 228, 238, 241 Emphatic Portrait (Partum) 174 Enthroning (Mrdja) 176, 177, 178 Erdély, Miklós 53, 71, 100n132 Lunch, The: In Memoriam Batu Khan (with Altorjay and Szentjóby) 24–6, 25, 27, 95n28 Unguarded Money 230 Eşanu, Octavian 42 escape 47, 85, 93, 102n1576, 134, 135, 137, 238, 241–2, 266, 315 Essence of Truth, The (Grinding ‘Pravda’) (Komar and Melamid) 238–9, 239, 240 Estefan, Arnold 253–4, 254

Est.Fem 179, 180 Estonia 12, 85, 88 performance(s) in 2, 7, 13, 44–7, 51, 71, 84, 87–8, 100n127, 139–40, 178–9, 219n70, 266–7, 272, 285 Estonian Sculpture (Kasearu) 266, 267 Euringer-Bátorová, Andrea 7, 53–4, 101n136 Euroartisti Group 274 Europa (Tabar) 257–8 European Union (EU) 131, 191–2, 219n70, 225, 257–8, 275, 276–7, 330 Schengen Zone 191, 276 Eva’s Wedding (Mlynárčik) 22, 23 Examples of Analytical Sculpture (Paripović) 57, 58 Exit Art Gallery, Body and the East: From the 1960s to the Present 158 Exit (Pavičević) 66 experimental art/practices 2–3, 10, 18, 19, 22, 29, 33, 39, 41–2, 50, 52, 55, 74, 78, 89, 91, 107, 116, 134, 170, 172, 232, 246, 258, 300, 322 in Yugoslavia 30, 56, 59, 308, 338 Facebook 163n89, 283 Faludi, Susan 171–2 Family (Cenaliaj) 261 fashion industry/magazines 177, 178, 203 Father (Pavičević) 66, 67 Feher, Michael 224 feminism 169, 172, 217n8 attitudes toward, in the East 165, 166, 167, 168–9, 170–2, 175, 178–9, 181, 185–8, 189, 199–200, 206, 207, 209, 210, 214, 221n105, 285 definitions of 166–7 in the West 168, 169, 170, 171, 185, 186 feminist art 166, 167, 169, 171, 174, 175, 176, 178, 179, 199–200, 213–14, 216 in North America 169, 201, 202–3, 205 in the West 166, 167, 168, 170, 176–7, 180, 183–4, 185, 202 Fence Exhibition (Sychil and Khrushchik) 49–50 Filko, Stano 22–3, 94n21 Finland 84, 85, 86, 179

351

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

352

Index

Fiodorova, Tatiana 322, 323, 328–30 First Evening of New Music in Ružomberok (Adamčiak) 53 First Gainful Action – Total Downfall (Łódź Kaliska) 241 First Manifestation of Aktual Art (Aktual Group) 14 First World War 12, 135, 253, 270 Fixation (Pavlensky) 288, 289–90 Flondor, Constantin 23, 241, 242 Flutura see Two Gullivers Fluxus 25, 50–5, 78, 79, 93, 100n132, 308 Foksal Gallery 304 food 27, 67, 152–8, 185, 189, 279, 282, 286 meat/steak 79, 138, 142, 150, 152, 180 national identity and 255–6 shortages 61, 185 Food for Survival (Grazio and Tolj) 279 Foot-Bread Relationship, The (Mladen Stilinović) 323–5, 324, 336n57 Forgács, Éva 269 Forma 90 For My Becoming in Time (Lia Perjovschi) 245 Foucault, Michel 159n1, 220n72 Fowkes, Maja 70, 109, 291n14 Fox, Terry 83 Foxy Mister (Gotovac) 194, 196 Fragments (Moudov) 327, 328 France 12, 69, 95n41, 159n1, 190 Freedom (Pavlensky) 290 free speech 88, 149, 235, 236, 259, 278, 286, 287 Fripulia 50, 50 From Kitsch to Blood Is Only One Step (Hadžifejzović) 156, 157, 158 Fuck Female Dignity (Delimar) 188 Fulla, L’udovit 23 Futurism 3, 10, 11, 12, 13, 65 FV 112/15 64–5 Gabriel, Else 9n9, 151–2, 154 see also Autoperforatsionsartisten Gal, Susan 168 Galántai, György 26, 225, 328 Galeria Akumulatory 2 55, 70 Galeria Foksal 83, 304

Galeria Krzysztofory 20 Galeria Labyrint 235 Galeria Remont 109, 116 Galeria Repassage 69, 70 Galerie Oben 79 Gallery of Contemporary Art, Ljubljana 143 Gallery of Contemporary Art, Zagreb 55, 83, 308 Gauntlet, The (Jõgeva) 285 Gavazov (Mlechevska and Shopov) 331–2, 332 Gdańsk 240 Geda, Sigitas 51 Geister, Iztok see OHO gender 165–222 equality/inequality 165–6, 167–8, 169, 170, 171, 197 identity/roles 165, 168, 169, 170, 174, 193–200, 210, 216, 268, 271, 283, 284 sexual revolution 126, 181 Gen XX (Iveković) 203 Geometry of Bloodthirstiness (Sven Stilinović) 142–3 Gerlóczy, Ferlenc 313–14, 313 Germany 6, 88, 192, 245, 266, 311 East Germany 2, 6, 55, 78, 103, 137, 150, 217n6, 328 West Germany 55, 88, 230, 231 Gerzova, Jana 168 Gessen, Masha 289 Gheorghe, Irina see Bureau of Melodramatic Research Gierek, Edward 18 Gjergo, Edison 91 Gladness Demonstration (Tót and Strauss) 231–2 glasnost 88, 137 Glass, Philip 58 global financial crisis/recession 257, 261 globalisation 158–9, 172, 246, 266, 327 Globalization (Tolj) 158–9 Goldberg, Roselee 3–4, 7, 8n4, 10, 13, 83, 105, 223, 228, 290, 304 Golden Voluntary Sunday, The (TOTART) 43–4, 43

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Index

Gomułka, Władysław 17, 18 Goncharova, Natalia 13 Goodnough, Robert 107 Gorbachev, Mikhail 50, 88, 228 Gorgona 28–9, 96n44, 304 Gorss, Rainer see Autoperforatsionsartisten Gotovac, Tomislav 56, 127–9, 130, 162n61 Foxy Mister 194, 196 Haircutting and Shaving in a Public Space 122–3, 123, 162n53 Happ: Naš-Happening (with Lukas and Sercar) 26–7, 27 Heads 20 Lying Naked on the Asphalt, Kissing the Asphalt (Zagreb, I Love You!) 126–7, 128, 130 Plastic Jesus 126, 127, 128 Showing Elle 19–20, 20 Weekend Art: Hallelujah the Hill (with Ilić and Keser) 315 Grafting (Štembera) 145, 146 Graphics of Sound (Dragneva and Macari) 90 Graur, Teodor 274 Grazio, Marija 279, 282 Grigorescu, Ion 73, 120–2, 123, 162n50, 193–4 Box-Yoga 120, 120 Delivery 193, 194, 195 Dialogue with Ceauşescu 226, 227 Man, Centre of the Universe 122, 213 Masculin/Feminin 73, 193 Studio, The (with Brătescu) 214–16 Washing with Light 120, 121 Grīnbergs, Andris 47, 282 Self-Portrait 282–3 Wedding of Jesus Christ, The 47, 283 Grögerová, Bohumila 52 Grotowski, Jerzy 46 Group 143 303, 304 Group of Six Artists 19, 29, 56, 96n48, 305, 334n28 Grozdanov, Dimitar 39, 40 Grubić, Igor 248–9, 250 Black Peristyle 220n85, 249, 249

East Side Story 284 366 Liberation Rituals 249 Vacation (with Dabo) 321 Gudac, Vladimir 305 Hadžifejzović, Jusuf B/H War Day No. 56 Le Mans Depot 158 From Kitsch to Blood Is Only One Step 156, 157, 158 Haircutting and Shaving in a Public Space (Gotovac) 122–3, 123 Hajas, Tibor 71, 109–10, 116, 161n28, 161n32 Hansen, Oskar 69 Happ: Naš-Happening (Gotovac, Lukas and Sercar) 26–7, 27 happenings 1, 7, 8, 9n11, 14, 19–41, 43, 44–6, 47, 51, 52, 53, 55, 62, 71, 77, 78, 84–7, 88, 93, 94n14, 95n28, 98n79, 109, 141, 181, 282, 305, 330 Kantor and 20–2, 238 Kaprow and 2, 10, 14, 21–2, 29, 46, 243, 339 OHO and 33–4, 62 Orange Alternative and 240–1 Happening with a Vacuum Cleaner and a Plastic Tube in Zvezda Park (Matanović) 33, 34 Happsoc (Filko, Kostrová and Mlynárčik) 22–3, 94n21 Happy Gallery 189 Hasanbegović, Nela 182, 183, 184, 279, 336n52, 337n63 Hausmann, Raoul 13 Havel, Vaclav 120, 228 Havlík, Vladimír 117, 161n44 Haxhillari, Besnik see Two Gullivers Heads (Gotovac) 20 Helsinki 88, 279 Henri, Adrian 9n11 Herz Horn Haut Schrein (Autoperforatsionsartisten) 79, 80, 139 Higgins, Dick 52, 53 hippies 47, 126, 181, 283 Hladík, Lumir 241

353

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

354

Index

Hock, Beata 167–8, 169–70, 192, 205, 214 Holzer, Jenny 203 homosexuality/LGBT issues 282, 283–4, 285–6 Horvat, Miljenko see Gorgona Hostel (Mlčoch) 310–11 Hostnik, Tomaž 62, 63 House pARTy 76–7 Hoxha, Enver 91, 261 Hoxha, Pranvera 261 Huelsenbeck, Richard 13 human rights 18, 48, 127, 167, 225, 227, 289 Hungary 2, 7, 12, 13, 18, 19, 30, 33, 52, 53, 83, 137, 171, 183, 226, 253, 282, 328 feminism/women’s status in 167–8, 169, 206, 214 performance(s) in 24–6, 44, 71–3, 100n132, 109–10, 159, 161n28, 188, 190, 203–4, 205, 213–14, 230–4, 292n27 uprising of 1956 5, 17–18, 39, 230 Identification (Miler) 110, 112 identity gender 174, 216, 284 national 34, 64, 248, 253–54, 255, 266 If Yes, Light a Candle (Art Is . . .) (Martinis) 310, 310 Ignjatovic, Petar 301 Ilić, Aleksandar Battista 315 I’ll Be Your Angel (Ostojić) 329, 330 Immaterial Retrospective of the Venice Biennale, An (Pelmuş and Pirici) 330–1 Inspection Medical Hermeneutics 50 Institute of Contemporary Art, Sofia, N-Forms 39 institutional critique 29, 58–9, 298–337 in Yugoslavia 58–9, 60, 300, 301–11, 323–5 Internet 191, 263, 276, 289, 338 Intervista (Sala) 265–6, 266 Iron Curtain 1, 10, 52, 269, 299 IRWIN 34, 36, 62 I Serve Art (Milijanović) 317 I Try to Be Transparent (Drozdik) 205

Ivanovska, Hristina 254–5, 255, 256 I’ve Been Living for 130 Days with a Sunflower Plant (Bertalan) 73 Iveković, Sanja 166, 173, 174, 175–6, 200, 201–2, 206, 211, 303 Diary 173, 176 Gen XX 203 Make-Up – Make-Down 173, 173, 177 SOS Nada Dimić 203 Triangle 103, 104, 127, 170, 190, 201 Un Jour Violente 173–4, 174, 177 Women’s House 201–2, 202 Jack of Diamonds 13 Jakovljević, Branislav 144–5 Jakubík, Viliam 225–6 Jakubowska, Agata 212 Janco, Marcel 10, 11, 13 Janša, Janez, Janez Janša, and Janez Janša 34, 37, 97n55, 251–2, 294n68, 294n69 Jappe, Elisabeth 228, 291n18 Jarnuszkiewicz, Jerzy 69 Jaruzelski, Wojciech 62, 99n117 Jaunzeme, Inta 47, 282 Jayawardena, Kumari 167 JBT 27.12.2004 (Martinis) 263, 264 JBT/ZADAR/51 (Martinis) 265 Jeanne-Claude 75 Jelinić, Božidar see Red Peristyle Jerman, Željko 96n48, 189, 334n28 Jevšovar, Marijan see Gorgona Jiroušek, Alexander 162n50 Jõgeva, Sandra 285 Jones, Amelia 106, 107, 169, 224, 269, 312 Jovanovik, Gjorgje 260, 261 Jur, Andrzej 55 Jurėnaitė, Raminta 51 Jurjević, Božidar 67, 278, 278 Jušić, Adela 281–2, 291n118 Kabakov, Ilya 84, 102n156 Kádár, János 18 Kadin, Natasha 199, 200–1 Kaljo, Kai 272–3 Kantor, Tadeusz 20–2, 83, 238 Cricotage 20, 21, 22

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Index

Panoramic Sea Happening 238, 241 Popular Exhibition 20 Water Hen, The 21, 82 Kapelica Gallery 258, 279 Kaplan, Gisela 166 Kaprow, Allan 2, 10, 20, 21–2, 25, 29 Assemblage, Environments and Happenings 9n11, 46, 243, 339 Courtyard 14 Sweet Wall 55, 67 Kardelj, Edvard 301 Kasearu, Flo 266–7, 267 Kassák, Lajos 13 Katinas, Džiugas 48, 51 Kaunas 48, 126 Keep in Touch (Kasearu) 266–7 Kele, Judit 214, 219n66 auction organized by 190, 191, 192 I Am a Work of Art 190 Kelly, Mary 202, 217n18 Kemp-Welch, Klara 22, 118, 119, 224, 232, 237–8, 240, 246 Kermauner, Taras 34–5 Keser, Ivana 315 Keskküla, Ando 45–6, 98n74, 98n79 Khrushchev, Nikita 5, 297n134 Kiev 8n8, 50, 52 Kintera, Krištof 131, 132, 133–4 Király, Iosif 9n11, 74, 77, 107, 242–3 Mail Art: Big Envelope (with Flondor and Tulcan) 241, 242 Snails (with Beloescu) 241–2 Kirby, Michael 46 Kiss (Tralla) 180, 180 Klaniczay, Júlia 328 Klein, Yves 110, 193 Kligman, Gail 168 Klímová, Barbora 119, 161n44 Klucis, Gustav 124 Knifer, Julije see Gorgona Knížák, Milan 10, 14, 20, 51–2, 53, 193 Aktual Group 14, 16, 51, 52 Demonstration for One 14, 17 Short-Term Exhibitions 14, 15, 19 Knowles, Alison 52, 53 KÔD 30 Kolaneci, Klement 261

Kolešnik, Ljiljana 168 Koller, Július 70, 134, 135 Komar, Vitaly see Komar and Melamid Komar and Melamid 238–9, 239, 240 Komissarov, Eha 179 Konelj, Miklavz 245–6 Konrád, György 26, 224, 291n6, 292n26 Kontejner 279 Køpcke, Arthur 52 Korda, Neven 65 Kordoš, Vladimír 70, 225 Kostov, Lyuben 244 Kosovo 2, 68, 277–8, 335n39 Kossakowski, Eustachy 238 Kostrová, Zita 22–3, 94n21 Kosuth, Joseph 36 Kovač, Mario see Kontejner Kovačič, Marko 124–5 Kovanda, Jiří 108, 116–17, 118–20, 118, 119 Kowalski, Grzegorz 69 Kožarić, Ivan see Gorgona Koželj, Marinela 58, 306, 306 Kozłowski, Jarosław 54–5 Kozyra, Katarzyna 3 Men’s Bathhouse, The 207–09, 208, 210 Olympia 4 Pyramid of Animals 143, 222n108 Women’s Bathhouse, The 209 Krakow 20, 52 Krasiński, Edward 238 Krasner, Lee 212 Krén, Matej 70 Krinzinger Gallery, Women – Art – New Tendencies 186, 214 Krpan, Jurij 258, 279 Kruger, Barbara 203 Krull, Hasso see T-Group Kubota, Shigeko 193 Kulik, Oleg 3, 83 Piggly Wiggly Making Presents 143 Russian Dog 83–4, 134–5, 135 Kulik, Zofia see KwieKulik Künnapu, Vilen 45–6, 98n74 Kunsthalle Fridericianum, In the Gorges of the Balkans 311, 335n39 Kurg, Andres 46, 219n70

355

356

Index

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Kurvitz, Raoul 87, 87–8, 102n157 Kwiatkowski, Fine 79 Kwiek, Przemysław see KwieKulik KwieKulik 7, 69, 116, 160n19, 234–5, 236–7, 238 Activities for the Head: Three Acts cover, 235–6, 237 Monument without a Passport 235, 236 Labrović, Siniša 320–2, 320, 321 Lacan, Jacques 62, 271 Ladik, Katalin 96n50, 187, 188 Laibach 33, 62–4, 63, 65, 245, 252 name of 64, 100n118, 252 Land Art 1, 23, 33, 36, 37, 89, 110, 112, 115, 185, 213, 243, 255, 315 Landbergis, Vytautas 50–1 Lapin, Leonard 45, 46, 98n74, 98n79, 100n127 Larionov, Mikhail 13 Last Valve, The (Rossa) 284 Latvia 165–6, 168, 282–3 independence of 12, 88, 244–5 performance(s) in 2, 11, 47, 88, 107, 130, 241, 244–5, 282 Lecture (Štembera) 159 Leiderman, Yuri 50 Leisure (Labrović) 320–1, 320 Lenin, Vladimir 32, 33, 68, 230 statues of 50, 130, 231 Leningrad 51, 283 Lenin in Budapest (Szombathy) 32, 33, 230 Leonardo: A Show for the Public (Bertalan) 23–4 Leonardo da Vinci 122, 213 Levine, Sherrie 204–5 Lewandowsky, Via 9n9, 150–1, 153 see also Autoperforatsionsartisten Libera, Zbigniew 222n113 366 Liberation Rituals (Grubić) 249 Līcītis, Raimonds 107–8 Lille, Mart 44–5, 45 Limits of Agony, The (Zankov) 141 Lippard, Lucy 166, 169, 185, 217n18, 298 Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 14, 37, 298, 299, 339

Lissitzky, El 124 Lithuania 50–1, 88, 98n89, 270, 282, 283, 336n47 independence of 12, 88 performance(s) in 48–9, 88, 125–6, 182, 206, 274–5, 314–15 Litvin, Anton 83, 287 Live! From the Ground (Dan Perjovschi) 262–3 Ljubljana 37, 62, 64, 68, 96n54, 143, 258, 270, 279, 281, 282 Laibach and 62, 64, 100n117 New Rock festival in 62, 63, 65 student protests/Student Culture Centres in 19, 56 Zvezda Park 33–4, 33 Łódź Kaliska 18, 241 Long, Richard 36 Looking for a Husband with EU Passport (Ostojić) 191–2, 191, 219n70, 220n72, 275, 276, 330 Loser (Kaljo) 272–3 Lucie-Smith, Edward 116 Lugossy, László 74 Lukacs, Mihai 285–6 Lukas, Ivo 26–7, 27 Lukashenko, Alexander 91, 243–4 Lukenskas, Česlovas 51, 125, 125–6 Lunch, The: In Memoriam Batu Khan (Altorjay, Erdély and Szentjóby) 24–6, 25, 27, 95n28 Lviv 52 Lying Naked on the Asphalt, Kissing the Asphalt (Zagreb, I Love You!) (Gotovac) 126–7, 128, 130 Ma 39 Macari, Lucia 89–90, 90 Macedonia 96n54, 335n39 performance(s) in 2, 37–9, 254–5, 258, 261 Mach, Jan see Aktual Group Mach, Vit see Aktual Group Maciunas, George 50, 52–3, 54–5, 98n89 Magic of Gesture/Laces (Lia Perjovschi) 245 mail art 76, 241, 242–3, 242, 253

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Index

Mail Art: Big Envelope (Flondor, Király and Tulcan) 241, 242 Majaca, Antonia 107, 167, 300, 304 Make-Up – Make-Down (Iveković) 173, 173, 177 Malevich, Kazimir 64, 91, 124, 150, 337n65 Māliņa, Sarmīte 241 Maliqi, Shkelzen 68 Mamyshev, Vladislav 283–4 Man, Centre of the Universe (Grigorescu) 122, 213 Manet, Édouard 67 Manezh exhibition 5 Manifesta 163n74, 201, 256, 270, 276 Mansbach, Steven 11 Marinela, Blue Sideboard and Calder (Todosijević) 305–6 Marinetti, F. T. 12, 13 Marioni, Tom 83 Marjanić, Suzana 11–12, 28 Marković, Marko 249–50, 250, 251 marriage/weddings 23, 47, 182–3, 190, 191, 192, 251–2, 283 M-Art 90 Martinis, Dalibor 202, 267, 303, 311 Art Guard 308, 309 Artist at Work 336n49 Artist on Strike 310 Data Recovery Project 264 JBT 27.12.2004 263, 264 JBT/ZADAR/51 265 If Yes, Light a Candle (Art Is . . .) 310, 312 Work for Pumps Gallery 308–10, 309 Masaryková, Herberta 51 Masculin/Feminin (Grigorescu) 73, 193 mass media 65, 171–2, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 199, 203, 211, 212, 222n108, 245, 283, 286 Matanović, Milenko 33, 34, 35–6 see also OHO Matković, Slavko see Bosch+Bosch Matula, Vili see Kontejner Maturszczak, Tadeusz 55 Matuštík, Radislav see POP Trio Maurer, Dóra 213–14

Mavromati, Oleg 287 Mayakovsky, Vladimir 66 Maydanchik, Michelle 84 Meat Joy (Schneemann) 180, 219n53 Meeting of Czech, Slovak and Hungarian Artists: Tug-of-War Action (Beke) 225, 226 Mekas, Adolfas 315, 336n47 Mekas, Jonas 283, 336n47 Melamid, Alexander see Komar and Melamid Meluzin, Peter 70, 107, 115–16 Attempt at a Working Analysis of My Own Shadow 113, 114, 115, 116 Shifts 116 Mendieta, Ana 185 Men’s Bathhouse, The (Kozyra) 207–09, 208 Mesch, Claudia 55, 78, 79 Meštrović, Ivan 127 Meštrović, Matko see Gorgona Meyerhold, Vsevolod 65 Mia (Popescu) 256 Michailova, Alvena see Ma Micić, Ljubomir 12 Mikac, Marijan 12 Mikiver, Heino 44 Milenko Matanović Makes a Path (Matanović) 35–6 Miler, Karel 70, 110, 116, 117, 161n44, 227, 311 Body Art Troika 70, 110, 116, 227 Either/Or 110, 111 Identification 110, 112 Perpendicular 110 Milisković, Branko 135–6, 136 Milivojević, Era 56, 58 Miljanović, Mladen 317 I Serve Art 317 Our Thing 248 Pressure of Wishes, The 317–20, 318–19 Taxi to the Museum 317 Milk-Silk: Maximum Energy – Minimum Time (Šoškić) 65, 66 Milošević, Slobodan 246, 248, 277–8 Minimalism 59, 300, 332 Minsk 91, 244

357

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

358

Index

Mirković, Dragana 248 Mirrored Sea, The (Hladík) 241 Misplaced Women? (Ostojić) 191 Mlčoch, Jan 117, 145, 149, 161n44, 311 Bianco 227, 228 Body Art Troika 70, 110, 116, 227 Hostel 310–11 Plastic Sack 146 Suspension – Great Sleep 145–6, 148 Twenty Minutes 145, 148 View of the Valley 146 Mlechevska, Vera 331–2, 332 Mlynárčik, Alex 22, 181 Eva’s Wedding 22, 23 Happsoc (with Filko and Kostrová) 22–3, 94n21 MM (Popescu) 256, 256 Moldova 2, 282, 294n74 Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 328–30 performance(s) in 2, 7, 89–90, 91, 255–7, 273–4, 276–7, 322 Monden, Erhard 78 Monroe, Marilyn 283–4 Montenegro 2, 65–6, 100n124, 271, 282, 335n39 monuments/statues 18, 64, 110, 130, 131, 133, 241, 261, 315 of Lenin 50, 130, 231 living 88, 330 of Tito 263, 265 Monument without a Passport (KwieKulik) 235, 236 Morganová, Pavlína 7, 51, 94n14, 108, 110, 145, 224, 227, 230 Morgner, Michael see Clara Mosch Moscow 17, 42, 49, 50, 85, 88, 143, 239, 287, 289 Cathedral of Christ the Saviour 287, 290, 297n134 Red Square 83, 287, 289 Moscow Actionism 83–4, 286 Moscow Conceptualism 44, 83, 84 Moudov, Ivan 298, 328 Fragments 327, 328 Wine for Openings 325–7, 327, 328 Mount Triglav (OHO) 34, 35, 122 re-creations of 34, 36, 37

Mrdja, Borjana 176, 177, 178, 211 Mudroch, Marián 225–6 Muehl, Otto 14 Multi Travels (Kasearu) 266 Murak, Teresa 112–15 Muru, Urmas see T-Group Museum of Modern Art, Information 36–7, 339 Mussolini, Benito 62 My Dick Is Clean (Toomik) 71, 72, 252 nakedness/nudity 65, 67, 79, 90, 126–30, 138, 147, 175, 182, 188, 191, 193, 194, 205, 213, 283, 289, 319 Namuth, Hans 107 Naprushkina, Marina 243–4, 243 Narkevičius, Dainius 270 Naskovski, Zoran 246–8, 247 Natalia LL 165, 166, 176, 185–8, 213, 214 Consumer Art 185, 186, 186 Points of Support 213, 214 nationalism 171, 225, 245–57 NATO 190, 248, 254, 277 Nature and Social Studies: Spiral Trip (Calovski and Ivanovska) 254–5, 255, 256 Nausea (Sterle) 199, 200, 209 Navinki Performance Art Festival 91 Nazism 62, 64, 100n118, 245, 253, 314 Neagu, Paul 24, 24, 82 New Academy 3 New Slovenian Art (Neue Slovenische Kunst) 62, 245 New York City 14, 20, 118, 158, 297n135 Nez, David see OHO Nikolić, Vladimir 223, 271, 272, 278 Nitsch, Hermann 14 Nochlin, Linda 202, 203 No Lyrics, No Music, No Country, Nothing . . . (Šoba) 281 nonconformist art 5, 50 NON GRATA 139–41, 140 North America 10, 59, 169, 181, 299, 332 feminist art in 169, 175, 201, 202–3 performance in 1, 6, 10, 13, 14, 339 Not a Day without a Line (Todosijević) 307

Index

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Novi Sad 30, 188 N.P. 1975 (Paripović) 316 N.P. 1977 (Paripović) 316–17 NudeModel (Drozdik) 203–5, 204 Observe the House’s Chimneys (Mudroch) 225 O-Circling (Jurjević) 278, 278 Odessa 49, 50 OHO 33–7, 38, 56, 62, 96nn52–54 Mount Triglav 34, 35, 122 Oil on Canvas (Mavromati) 287 Okas, Jüri 46–7, 47 OK Gallery 265 Oldenbourg, Serge 52, 53 Olympia (Kozyra) 4 Once You Pop, You Can’t Stop (Raila) 314–15, 314 Open Society 68 Oppenheim, Dennis 116 Oradea 74–6 Orange Alternative 18, 240, 241 Orange Dog and Other Tales, The (Even Better than the Real Thing) (Kontejner) 279 Oravec, Viktor see P.O.P. ORLAN 258 Osmolovsky, Anatoly see E.T.I. Ostojić, Tanja 190–1 I’ll Be Your Angel 329, 330 Looking for a Husband with EU Passport 191–2, 191, 219n70, 220n72, 275, 276, 330 Misplaced Women? 191 Our Thing (Milijanović) 248 overidentification 33, 62–3, 64, 230, 232, 244, 251, 330 Owens, Craig 299, 305 Pachmanová, Martina 167 Pacta sunt servada (Benera and Estefan) 253, 254 Pagáč, Ladislav see P.O.P. Pagáč, Milan see P.O.P. pagan ritual 47, 85, 137, 147 Painting of an Elephant, The 46, 47 Pakri, Toomas 45, 98n74

Palach, Jan 117, 161n40, 229 Paldrok, Al see NON GRATA Pane, Gina 56, 83 Panoramic Sea Happening (Kantor) 238, 241 Papers in the Air (Keskküla and others) 45–6, 98n74 Paripović, Neša 56, 315–16 Examples of Analytical Sculpture 57, 58 N.P. 1975 316 N.P. 1977 316–17 Untitled 316, 316 Paris 22, 77, 78, 95n22, 180, 181, 190, 219n53, 301 Pärt, Arvo 44–5, 45 Partum, Ewa 70, 166, 174, 175–6, 183, 185, 194 Change 174 Change – My Problem Is the Problem of a Woman 174–5 Emphatic Portrait 174 Wedding Attire 182–3 Women, Marriage Is Agaist You! 182 Patriot (Naprushkina) 243–4, 243 Patterson, Benjamin 53 Pauer, Gyula 232 Pavičević, Milija 66–7, 66 Pavilion for Bosnia-Herzegovina (Hasanbegović) 337n63 Pavlensky, Petr 83, 224, 290 Carcass 289 Fixation 288, 289–90 Freedom 290 Pejić, Bojana 171, 172, 176, 177, 203, 265, 270, 299, 305 Pelmuş, Manuel 330 Penderecki, Krzysztof 25 Penetration into the EU (Stankovski) 258, 259, 294n79 Pengov, Jure 62 Pensioner Tihomir Simčić 19, 29, 30–3 People in Cages (Davidovs, Māliņa and Tillbergs) 241 Pepperstein, Pavel 50 Pere, Peeter see T-Group perestroika 71, 88, 133, 137, 228

359

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

360

Index

performance/performance art in apartments 51, 75, 105, 120, 193, 213, 239, 268, 282, 284 commodification and 42–3, 108–9, 198, 298, 300, 331 in the countryside 2, 39, 42, 47, 70, 73, 103, 110, 117, 120, 122, 181–2, 193 delegated 191, 246, 248, 284, 293n57, 312 as dissidence 3, 133, 223 documentation of 4, 21, 22, 41, 49, 69, 106, 108–10, 117, 122, 123–4, 139, 140, 143, 229, 243, 265, 336n57 long-durational 136, 140, 211 as political protest/statement 3, 86, 223–97 visceral 70, 78, 83, 109, 137, 138, 140–1, 142, 145, 149–52, 158, 169, 209, 224, 227, 258, 284, 315 Perjovschi, Dan 74, 75, 76, 103, 105, 107, 143, 147, 159, 245, 265, 268 Action Tree 74, 75 Live! From the Ground 262–3 Public Art Bucharest 262 Red Apples 75, 75, 105 Perjovschi, Lia 75, 76, 168, 245, 268 Annulment 76 Contemporary Art Archive 76, 328 Magic of Gesture/Laces 245 For My Becoming in Time 245 Test of Sleep, The 75–6, 76 Perpendicular (Miler) 110 Perpetuum Mobile (Labrović) 321–2, 321 Peterlić, Ante 26–7 Petrov, Chavdar 39 Phantom 89 Phelan, Peggy 108 Piatrou, Viktor 90–1 Piggly Wiggly Making Presents (Kulik) 143 Pinińska-Bereś, Maria 166, 212–13, 216 Pintilie, Ileana 7, 19, 23, 73, 77, 120, 123 Piotrowski, Piotr 5, 6, 39, 55, 94n6, 105, 165, 169, 170, 185, 190, 193–4, 209, 223–4, 236–7, 269, 271, 302, 325, 328, 337n61 Pirici, Alexandra 330–1

Place Where Gullivers Sleep, The (The Two Gullivers) 91, 92 Plastic Jesus (Gotovac) 126, 127, 128 Plastic People of the Universe 18 Plastic Sack (Mlčoch) 146 Plumbuman (Lead Man) (Kintera) 131, 132, 133–4 Pode Bal 252–3, 294n70 Podroom 202, 303–4 poetry 34, 36, 41, 50, 51, 96n50 Pogačnik, Marko see OHO Points of Support (Natalia LL) 213, 214 Poland 7, 12, 18, 19, 25, 51, 52, 55, 82, 88, 94n6, 116, 236–38, 282, 296n132, 304, 328 feminism/feminist art/women’s rights in 165, 166, 171, 176, 185, 209 Martial Law 5, 18, 100n117, 240 performance(s) in, or by artists from 2, 3, 7, 20–2, 57, 69–70, 93, 112–15, 174–5, 185, 207–10, 222n115, 234–6, 238, 240–1, 296n132 protests of 1956 17, 39 protests of 1970 5, 18 Solidarity 240 toleration for modernism in 223–4, 234, 302 Polemic Circle 39, 41 Polis, Miervaldis 11 Bronze Man, The 88, 130–1, 132, 133, 244 Bronze Man Becomes the White Man, The 244–5 Political Breathing (Crtalić) 149, 163n89 Pollock, Griselda 217n18 Pollock, Jackson 10, 71, 107, 193, 212, 224, 312, 331 Põllu, Kaljo 45 Pop, Ion 12 P.O.P. 147 Popa, Alina see Bureau of Melodramatic Research Pop Art 25, 44, 46, 53 Popescu, Ghenadie 256–7, 256, 273–4, 273 Popnedeleva, Orshi 168 Popova, Diana 7, 41, 221n105 Popović, Koča see Red Peristyle

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Index

Popović, Zoran 56, 83, 123–4, 124, 304, 305 Popovici, Veda 131–3, 134, 134, 274–5, 275 POP Trio 70 Popular Exhibition (Kantor) 20 pornography 65, 126, 176, 179 Portrait of a Man Wearing a T-Shirt (Armutiev) 210, 210 Pospiszyl, Tomáš 71, 106 Post Ars 48, 49, 49, 51, 83 Poznan 17, 55, 70 Prague 12, 13, 18, 83 Applied Arts Museum 70, 110 Charles Bridge 71, 252 Fluxus in 51–3 performance(s) in 14–15, 19, 70, 71, 108, 117–20, 131, 147, 161n40, 229, 252–3 Prague Castle 71, 252 Pressure of Wishes, The (Milijanović) 317–20, 318–19 Preventative Geography (Champions of the World) 44 Prishtina 68 Probably Moldova Doesn’t Exist (Braila and Raeder) 256 Proportions (Maurer) 213–14 Prša, Branka see Red Peristyle Public Art Bucharest (Dan Perjovschi) 262 Purg, Franc 143 Pushkin, Alexander 91 Pussy Riot 83, 287–9, 290, 338 Putar, Radoslav see Gorgona Putin, Vladimir 225, 286, 287–9, 290 Pyramid of Animals (Kozyra) 143, 222n108 Pyzik, Agata 1, 246, 250, 259 Queer Worker (Lukacs) 286 Raeder, Manuel 256 Raila, Artūras 314–15, 314 Rakauskaitė, Eglė 182, 183 Ranft, Thomas see Clara Mosch RASSIM 210–12, 211, 222n115 Ratner, John 66 Raul, Hermann 78

®

Rays of Juche 50 Reaction Painting (Pode Bal) 252, 253 Recession of New Year’s Eve, The (Jovanovik) 261 Red Apples (Dan Perjovschi) 75, 75, 105 Red Peristyle 28, 220n85, 249 Red (Zankov) 142 Republika Srpska 277, 281, 317, 320 Restany, Pierre 22, 23, 46, 181, 219n53 Rhythm 0 (Abramović) 145 Rhythm 2 (Abramović) 144, 145 Rhythm 5 (Abramović) 56–7, 144 Riga 88, 130, 131, 241, 283 right of the soil (Benera and Estefan) 253–4 Rinke, Klaus 67 Road, The (Grozdanov) 39, 40 Roje, Filip. see Red Peristyle Romania 10, 11, 12–13, 82, 103, 168, 216n2, 328, 335n39 under Ceauşescu 18–19, 73, 227 Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 330–1 performance(s) in 2, 19, 23–4, 73–8, 93, 105, 107, 131–3, 159, 193–4, 213, 214–16, 227, 241–3, 245, 253–4, 256, 262–3, 265, 267–9, 274–5, 285–6, 294n84 uprising in 103, 245, 274 Rome 56, 65 Rončević, Dina 194–8, 198, 200 Ronduda, Łukasz 304, 334n26 Rossa, Boryana 206–7, 207, 284 Rottenberg, Anda 222n108 Roundel of Cremona (Lille, Pärt and Velmet) 44–5, 45 Ruller, Tomáš 3, 7, 9n11, 228–30, 231 Rusinová, Zora 70, 101n136, 147, 168, 181 Rusova, Ludmila 91 Russia 3, 8n8, 12, 13, 50, 52, 65, 66, 71, 91, 101n156, 274, 297n134 Article 282 286–7, 289 performance(s) in 2, 3, 7, 42, 43–4, 83–4, 134–5, 224, 283–4, 286–90 under Putin 225, 286, 287–9, 290 Russolo, Luigi 65

361

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

362

Index

Saaremets, Raul see T-Group Sainte Phalle, Niki de 23 Sala, Anri 265–6, 266 Sala, Valdet 265–6, 266 Šalamun, Andraž see OHO Šalamun, Tomaž 34 samizdat 7, 52, 229 Samutsevich, Yekaterina see Pussy Riot Sandqvist, Tom 10–11 Sarajevo 19, 68, 282 Academy of Fine Arts 67 Markale fruit market 281, 296n123 performance(s) in 29–30, 67, 281, 305 siege of 158, 277, 279, 282 Sartre, Jean-Paul 274–5 Sasse, Silvia 44, 62 Savić, Miroslav Miša 57–8, 59, 136 Scerbina, Igor 89 Schade, Gregor-Torsten see Clara Mosch Schadenfreude Guided Tours (Boyadjiev) 310–12, 311 Schinke, Dagmar see Clara Mosch Schlegel, Christine 79 Schleime, Cornelia 79–81, 81, 101n153 Schmit, Tomas 52, 53, 54 Schneemann, Carolee 176, 180, 184, 219n53 Screaming Hole, The (Ladik) 187, 188 Scriba, Decibal see House pARTy Scriba, Nadina see House pARTy Seale, Bobby 234 Sebeő, Talán 313–14, 313 Second World War 11, 22, 38, 64, 81, 135, 163n79, 252, 268, 297n134 geopolitical legacy of 7, 12, 15, 88, 269, 270 Seder, Đuro see Gorgona Segal, George 29 Šegvić, Neven see Red Peristyle Self-Eater: The Hunger (Marković) 250, 251 Self-Eater: The Thirst (Marković) 249–50, 250 Self-Portrait: Toward White (Brătescu) 215, 216 Self-Portrait (Grīnbergs) 282–3 Self-Portrait (Pavičević) 66–7

self-portraiture 66–7, 100n127, 176, 177, 216, 282–3 Semper, Ene-Liis see T-Group Sepp, Eda 46 Serbia 68, 105, 171, 223, 276, 282, 293n61, 316, 335n39 under Milošević 246, 248, 277–8 performance(s) in, or by artists from 2, 3, 30–4, 35–6, 135–6, 152, 188, 190–2, 246–7, 271, 305–7, 317–20 Sercar, Hrvoje 26–7, 27 Sherman, Cindy 20, 268 Shifts (Meluzin) 116 Shimamoto, Shozo 243 Shipka 6 41, 141–2 Shoot (Burden) 143, 279 Shopov, Dimitar 331–2, 332 Short-Term Exhibitions (Knížák) 14, 15, 19 Sigma 23, 73 Sikora, Rudolf 70, 225 Sikorski, Tomasz 117 Šimičić, Darko 27, 162n61 Šincek, Boris 279 Sitte, Willi 78 Situationist International 28, 95n41, 230, 250 Skopje 37–8, 96n54, 254, 261 ŠKUC Gallery of Contemporary Art 143 Sleeping in a Tree (Štembera) 145 Slovakia. see Czechoslovakia Slovenia 96n54, 171, 277, 282, 335n39 European Union and 257–8 Mount Triglav 34, 122 performance(s) in 2, 23, 33–7, 62–5, 122, 124–5, 143, 190–1, 203, 251–2, 257–8 Slovenian Democratic Party (SDS) 250–2 Smell My Cunt (Delimar) 188 Smithson, Robert 37, 254 Snails (Beloescu and Király) 241–2 Sniper, The (Jušić) 281–2 Šoba, Nebojša Šerić 281 Socialist Realism 18, 44, 91, 223, 300, 302 Sofia 39, 41, 210, 221n105, 244, 284, 328 Song of a Soldier on Watch, The (Milisković) 135–6, 136

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Index

Sorokin, Vladimir 44 Soros, George 68, 89 Šoškić, Ilija 65, 65–6 SOS Nada Dimić (Iveković) 203 Soviet Union 15, 18, 45, 46, 47, 88, 89, 126, 179, 238, 282, 299 collapse/dissolution of 5, 83, 84, 88, 89, 90, 141, 170, 244 final days/years of 48, 89 KGB 5, 50, 86, 130, 274, 283 occupation of Czechoslovakia 225, 226 performance(s) in 2, 41–50, 83–8 Thaw 5, 15–17, 41 So We Gave Birth to Estonian Feminism (Tralla) 179 Split 28, 198–200 Diocletian’s Palace 28, 220n85, 249 Sretenović, Dejan 302, 305, 306, 316 St. Petersburg 13, 289, 290 Stalin, Joseph 15, 18, 41, 98n87, 131, 282, 297n134, 301 death of 5, 15 Stankovski, Aleksandar 37–8, 258, 259, 294n80 Stark, Holger 79 Steak and Chips (Zankov) 141, 142 Stegmann, Petra 51, 53 Steiks, Janis 11 Štembera, Petr 14, 83, 116, 117, 145, 146, 163n84, 311 Archer 145, 147 Body Art Troika 70, 110, 116, 227 Grafting 145, 146 Lecture 159 Sleeping in a Tree 145 Sterle, Sandra 176, 199–200, 200, 207, 209 Stiles, Kristine 245 Stilinović, Mladen 56, 96n48, 323–5, 324, 334n28, 336n57 Stilinović, Sven 96n48, 142–3, 334n28 Stipančić, Branka 29 Stojanović, Lazar 127 Storming of the Winter Palace (Orange Alternative) 240 Story about Fish (Hasanbegović) 279

Strauss, Thomas 231 Structure I and II (Kwiatkowski) 79 Studio 35 74 Studio, The (with Brătescu and Grigorescu) 214–16 Studio Erté 70 Subotica 30, 33 Suck Squeeze Bang Blow (Rončević) 194–7 Sugár, János 313–14, 313 Suljević, Alma 281, 282, 296n118 surveillance 2, 3, 47, 70, 103, 120, 126, 143, 147, 159n1, 190, 243–4 Suspension – Great Sleep (Mlčoch) 145–6, 148 Šuvaković, Miško 56, 96n53, 230, 302, 303, 304 Süvecz, Emese 205 Švecová, Soňa see Aktual Group Svede, Mark Allen 165–6, 168 Sweet Wall (Kaprow) 55, 67 Szelényi, Iván 26, 292n26 Szentjóby, Tamás 26, 53, 54, 71, 95n32 Expulsion Exercise – Punishment Preventative Autotherapy 232, 234, 233–4, 235, 292n27 Lunch, The: In Memoriam Batu Khan (with Altorjay and Erdély) 24–6, 25, 27, 95n28 Sit Out – Be Forbidden! 232–4 Szombathy, Bálint 30, 230 Lenin in Budapest 32, 33, 230 Trails, The 30–3, 31 Tabar, Ive 257–8 Taking a Stroll as Lady Godiva (Delimar) 129–30, 129 Tallinn 44, 45, 46, 47, 84, 88, 266 Tallinn Art Hall 266, 285 Taming Beauty (Mamyshev) 283–4 Tanel-Annus, Siim 84–7, 86, 88 Tatar, Ewa Małgorzata 212 Tatlić, Sefik 192 Taxi to the Museum (Milijanović) 317 Tegova, Enn 45 Temporary Society of Intense Living (DSIP) 70

363

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

364

Index

Ten 89 TERÉN 70 Test of Sleep, The (Lia Perjovschi) 75–6, 76 T-Group 87–8, 87, 101n157 Theatre (Kovanda) 117 Three of Us, The (Žanić) 177–8, 179 Thrown-Out Man (Lukenskas) 125–6, 125 Tijardović, Jasna 304, 305 Tillbergs, Oļegs 241 Timişoara 23, 24, 73, 77, 241, 243, 274, 294n83 Timotijević, Slavko 305 Tirana 91, 181, 261, 265 Pyramid 261, 262 Tito, Josip Broz 56, 62, 65, 103, 104, 163n79, 190, 265, 301, 302, 303, 307, 334n18 death of 61, 62, 277 monuments/statues of 263, 265 and self-management socialism 35, 301, 305 Todorov, Georgi 39, 41 Todorović, Zoran 152–8, 155, 164n91 Todosijević, Raša 56, 58, 82, 83, 103, 105, 144, 145, 302, 305–6, 308 Art and Memory 306–7, 307 Drinking Water – Inversions, Imitations and Contrasts 58, 60, 144, 145 Marinela, Blue Sideboard and Calder 305–6 Not a Day without a Line 307 Was ist Kunst? Marinela Koželj 306, 306, 312, 314, 315 Tolj, Slaven 67, 158–9, 279, 282 Tolokonnikova, Nadezhda see Pussy Riot Tolts, Andres 45, 98n74 Tomberg, Bruno 44 Tomc, Gregor 299 Tomić, Biljana 56, 304 Tomić, Milica 248 Toomik, Jaan 71, 72, 252, 285 Torchia, Richard 255 Tót, Endre 230–2 TOTART 43–4, 43 Toward White (Brătescu) 215, 216

Tower of Babylon, The (City Group) 41 Tower to the Heavens (Tanel-Annus) 85 Town of Celje, The (Zupančič) 23 Trails, The (Szombathy) 30–3, 31 Tralla, Mare 178–9, 180 Transnistria 256, 257, 294nn74–75 Transylvania 77, 131, 253 Trap: Expulsion from Paradise (Rakauskaitė) 182, 183 Traveleri 12 Trbuljak, Goran 19, 29, 30, 60, 304–5 Triangle (Iveković) 103, 104, 127, 170, 190, 201 Trichinae on a Crusade (Lewandowsky) 150–1, 153 Trokut, V. D. see Red Peristyle Trtílek, Jan see Aktual Group Tuc, Pavel 117 Tuđman, Franjo 248 Tulcan, Doru 241, 242 turbo-folk 246, 248 Turkina, Olesya 283 Turowski, Andrzej 11, 13, 94n6 Twenty Minutes (Mlčoch) 145, 148 Two Gullivers, The 91, 92 Tzara, Tristan 10, 11, 13 Ujma, Magdalena 241 Ukraine 2, 8n8, 49–50, 52, 89, 277, 282, 290, 294n74 Ulrichs, Timm 327 Unde. Unde? Undeva (Braila) 89 Under the Veil . . . (Hasanbegović) 182, 183, 184, 336n52 United Kingdom 24, 82, 257, 294n85 United States 20, 28, 51, 96n54, 176, 205, 276 Un Jour Violente (Iveković) 173–4, 174, 177 Untitled (Burđelez) 149, 150 Untitled (Paripović) 316, 316 Untitled (Performance at Mooni Street 46A) (Tanel-Annus) 85–6, 86 Urbonas, Gediminas 51, 206 Urboniene, Nomeda 206 Urkom, Gera 58, 82–3 Urkom, Gergelj 56 USSR see Soviet Union

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Index

Vabbe, Ado 13 Vacation (Dabo and Grubić) 321 Valencia-Dubrovnik-Valencia (Tolj) 279 Vaništa, Josip see Gorgona Varres, Tarvo Hanno 87 Vautier, Ben 52, 53 V2_East Syndicate 276 Velmet, Toomas 44–5, 45, 51, 52 Venice Biennale 39, 149, 209, 317–20, 318, 325–7, 326, 327, 328–31, 329, 337n64 Verlan, Mark 89, 276 Very Special Actions (Tót) 231 Vesić, Jelena 301, 305 Vianu, Tudor 14 Vienna 14, 213, 214, 248, 253, 317 Viennese Actionism 51, 78, 109, 137, 139, 140, 143, 206 View of the Valley (Mlčoch) 146 Village Wedding (Fulla) 23 Vilnius 48–9, 88, 182, 314–15 Fluxus concert in 50–1 Vinea, Ion 11 Visarid 45 Visitor (Ďurček) 239–40 Visual Orgasm (Delimar) 188–9, 189 Vitebsk 91 Vladimirova, Iva 39 Voina 83 Voinea, Raluca 262 Vostell, Wolf 25, 53 Vreme, Sorin 77 Vukadinović, Dragica 305 Walk around Novy Svet, A: A Demonstration for All the Senses (Aktual Group) 14, 16 Wallerstein, Immanuel 269–70 Wark, Jayne 169 Warsaw 11, 20, 52, 69, 83, 109, 116, 174, 185, 222n108, 304 Academy of Fine Arts 69 Autumn Music Festival 25, 51, 52 Warsaw Pact invasion 18, 147, 161n40, 225, 226, 229 Washing with Light (Grigorescu) 120, 121 Was ist Kunst, Marinela Koželj? (Todosijević) 306, 306, 312, 314, 315

Wasse, Ralf-Rainer 79 Water Dragon (Dimov) 39 Water Hen, The (Kantor) 21, 82 Water Music (Adamčiak and Cyprich) 53 Way, The (Žalias Lapas) 48, 48–9 Wedding Attire (Partum) 182–3 Wedding of Jesus Christ, The (Grīnbergs) 47, 283 Weekend Art: Hallelujah the Hill (Gotovac, Ilić and Keser) 315 Weibel, Peter 213 Welcome, Dear Workers! (Cenaliaj) 131, 133 Welcome to the EU (Braila) 276–7 Werner, Klaus 78 West, the 8, 28, 47, 77, 83, 91, 116, 126, 133, 165, 169, 181, 192, 231, 242, 261, 269, 271, 272, 273, 274, 275, 300, 301, 323, 325, 330, 333, 339 artists’ immigration/travels to 1, 53, 59, 205–6, 232, 241, 276 East’s opening up to 84, 135 East-West binary/divide 6, 7, 12, 93, 149, 158, 248, 274, 330 feminism/feminist art in 167, 171–2, 176–7, 180, 185, 186–8, 202–3, 205 institutional critique in 298, 299, 300, 323, 333n8 performance in 1, 2, 4, 6, 7, 46, 52, 55, 93, 106, 108, 110–12, 159, 243, 338–9 Western Europe 9n11, 10, 12, 59, 181, 256, 257, 270, 271, 275, 299, 325, 332 performance in 1, 2, 6, 10, 13, 14, 25 Where Is the Line? (Purg) 143 White Elephant Gallery 149, 150, 151 Who Needs DRNČ (Jušić) 281 Who’s Afraid of the Toilet Paper (Orange Alternative) 240 Widrich, Mechtild 159n2 Wilson, Martha 175 Wine for Openings (Moudov) 325–7, 327, 328 Wolff, Larry 269, 270 women see cosmetics/makeup; feminism; feminist art; gender Women, Marriage Is Agaist You! (Partum) 182

365

366

Index

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Women’s Bathhouse, The (Kozyra) 209 Women’s House (Iveković) 201–2, 202 Woolf, Virginia 212 Work (Braila) 89 Work for Pumps Gallery (Martinis) 308–10, 309 Write-Off (Burđelez) 125, 126 Współczesna Gallery 185 Xhafa, Sislej 68, 325, 326, 328, 330 xxx 19 November 1976, Prague, Václav­ské náměstí (Kovanda) 117, 118 Yanukovych, Viktor 8n8 Yasman, Pavel 290 Year of the Dominatrix, The (Jõgeva) 285 Yeltsin, Boris 282, 286 Yugoslavia 6, 12, 15, 19, 126, 144, 163n80, 245–6, 261, 282, 293n61, 299, 328 collapse/dissolution of 170, 246, 277–8, 293n51 consumerism in 35, 97n58, 173, 301, 303 feminism/women’s status in 168, 171, 200, 203 institutional critique in 300, 301–5 New Art Practice 19, 55, 58–9, 174, 201–2 performance(s) in, or by artists from 2, 3, 23, 26–39, 55, 56–68, 69, 82, 83, 93, 103, 122–5, 127–30, 143, 144–5, 158–9, 173–4, 176, 188–92, 203, 230, 232, 246–52, 271, 278–82, 305–11, 323, 338 self-management socialism 15, 19, 28, 35, 97n58, 202, 301, 303–04, 305 socialist modernism 60, 223–4, 300, 302, 303, 304 Student Culture Centres (SKC) 3, 19, 56–9, 61, 67, 68, 69, 82, 83, 123,



144–5, 176, 301–3, 304, 305, 306, 315, 338, 339 wars in 105, 170–1, 225

Zabel, Igor 34 Zābers, Vilnis 245 Zachęta National Gallery of Art 11, 222n108 Zagreb 12, 83, 174, 284, 303 New Art Practice 55, 58–9, 174 performance(s) in 19–20, 26–7, 28–9, 55, 56, 60–1, 103, 122–3, 127, 130, 190, 194–9, 201–2, 250, 279, 304–5, 308, 310, 315 Student Culture Centre 19, 56, 58–9 Žalias Lapas 48–9, 48, 51 Žanić, Vlasta 149, 151, 177–8, 179, 211 Zankov, Ventsislav 141, 141, 142, 209–10, 210 Zarkov, Stefan 39 Zatyšiai (Post Ars) 49, 49, 83 Želibská, Jana 70, 94n21, 166, 168, 180–1, 185, 194, 219n53 Betrothal of Spring 181, 182 Metamorphosis II (Girls) 181–2 Something Happened at the Lake Shore 183–5 Zemzare, Ilze 168 Zenitism 12 Zero Group 37–9, 258 Zhigalov, Anatoly see TOTART Zidarov, Filip 41 Zildzo, Nermina 29 Zimmer Frei (Pode Bal) 252–3 Žižek, Slavoj 62–3, 64, 245, 251 Zone Festival of Performance Art 77, 274 Zupančič, Dalibor 23 Zvono 29–30, 30, 305 Zyklus für Wassereimer (Schmit) 52, 53, 54