Socially Engaged Art after Socialism: Art and Civil Society in Central and Eastern Europe 9781350988064, 9781786732224

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Izabel Galliera is Assistant Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History and Theory, and Curator of the Rice Gallery, at McDaniel College in Westminster, Maryland. Her research has been published in the Journal of Curatorial Studies, ARTMargins, FIELD: A Journal of Socially Engaged Art Criticism, and anthologies such as Collaborative Now: Art in the Twenty First Century (2016) and Redefining Creativity: Multi-​Layered Collaborations in Art and Art Historical Practice (2017).

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‘Socially Engaged Art after Socialism is the first comprehensive scholarly treatment of the important new forms of socially engaged art that emerged in Central and Eastern Europe following the demise of the USSR. Its publication represents an important intervention in the emerging critical and theoretical debate around socially engaged art, and will allow us to further broaden the geopolitical scope of this important research.’ Grant Kester, Professor of Art History, University of California, San Diego; author of Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art and The One and the Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context

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Socially Engaged Art after Socialism Art and Civil Society in Central and Eastern Europe IZABEL GALLIERA

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Published in 2017 by I.B.Tauris & Co. Ltd London • New York www.ibtauris.com Copyright © 2017 Izabel Galliera The right of Izabel Galliera to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Every attempt has been made to gain permission for the use of the images in this book. Any omissions will be rectified in future editions. References to websites were correct at the time of writing. International Library of Modern and Contemporary Art 33 ISBN: 978 1 78453 713 5 eISBN: 978 1 78672 222 5 ePDF: 978 1 78673 222 4 A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library A full CIP record is available from the Library of Congress Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: available Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

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Contents List of Illustrations Acknowledgements

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Introduction Within and Beyond the Borders of Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania Subversive Potential in Social Capital Politics of Socially Engaged Art in CEE Research Methodologies and Significance

7 10 11 13

1 Points of Contention: Socially Engaged Art Practice in Contemporary Theory

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2 Civil Society, and Social, Cultural and Political Capital Civil Society Social, Cultural and Political Capital

24 24 27

3 Historical Antecedents: Participatory Art under Socialism, 1956–​89 Socially Engaged Art in Socialist Hungary Participatory Art in Socialist Romania Unconventional Art in Socialist Bulgaria

33 35 53 64

PART I 

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FROM SECOND SOCIETY TO CIVIL SOCIETY

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Civil Society in a Period of Post-​Socialist Transition

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5 Antipolitics: Exhibitions at the Soros Centres for Contemporary Art Reclaiming Public Life through Interventionist Public Art v

81 83

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Contents Curatorial Visions: Framing Community-​Oriented Art Projects Soros Centres for Contemporary Arts: Constraint and Self-​Determination 6 Sofia: Participatory Public Art and Emerging Contemporary Art Institutions Friendship Networks in Post-​1989 Emerging Art Institutions for Contemporary Art PART II 

 ROM LOCALIZED PUBLIC SITES TO EU F TRANSNATIONAL PUBLIC SPHERES

7 Place-​Making: Framing Art in Public Spaces Curatorially Moszkva Tér (Gravitacio) / Moscow Square (Gravitation) Visual Seminar Spațiul Public București / Public Art Bucharest Catching Up to Europe with Culture 8 Representing Counterpublics in Bucharest, Budapest and Sofia h.arta: Undermining Curatorial Protocols in Self-​Organizing Collaborative Projects János Sugár: Staging Confrontation in Participatory Public Art Luchezar Boyadjiev: Roma Counterpublic Art Monuments in Sofia Ivan Moudov: Performing a Museum of Contemporary Art through Collective Participation 9 Contesting the Politics of Belonging in the Post-​1989 EU Community About the Artists: Bejenaru and Big Hope ‘Mental Maps’ in ‘Fortress Europe’ The Power of the Gaze Constructing Differential Spaces through Social Capital and Political Capital vi

92 108 112 118

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133 134 141 147 150 154 154 160 165 171 180 182 184 191 198

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Contents PART III  INSTITUTIONALIZED AND INSTITUTIONALIZING

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10 Institutionalized Community Arts Programmes Art for Social Change: Bypassing Systemic Causes cARTier: Cultivating Self-​Help through Art in Marginalized Communities Participation and Collaboration as Apolitical Strategies of Engagement

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11 Big Hope: Reviving Leftist Activism in Budapest Hungarian Cultural Institutions: Stage for Populist Right-​Wing Narratives Big Hope and Homelessness Disobbedienti In and Out of Institutions

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12 Self-​Institutionalizing as Political Agency From DINAMO to IMPEX: Expanding Institutional Framing Department of Art in Public Space: Challenging the Left’s Official Condemnation 0GMS’s Self-​Institutionalization

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Self-​Institutionalizing as Platforms for Self-​Determination Conclusion

208 220 229

233 235 245 253

260 265 271 279 283

Notes Bibliography Index

289 331 349

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List of Illustrations 3.1 Book cover for Törvénytelen avantgárd: Galántai György balatonboglári kápolnaműterme 1970–​1973 (Illegal Avant-​ garde: The Chapel Studio of György Galántai in Balatonboglár 1970–​1973). Photo courtesy of Artpool Art Research Center.

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3.2 Tamás Szentjóby, Expulsion Exercise: Punishment-​Preventive Auto-​Therapy. Photograph documenting performance at Chapel Studio in Balatonboglár, 1972. Photo copyright György Galántai. Courtesy of Artpool Art Research Center.

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3.3 László Beke, The Meeting of Czechoslovakian and Hungarian Artists, 1972, Chapel Studio in Balatonboglár. Outdoor Action. Photo copyright György Galántai. Courtesy of Artpool Art Research Center.

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3.4 László Beke, The Meeting of Czechoslovakian and Hungarian Artists, 1972, Chapel Studio in Balatonboglár. Photo work documenting the ‘Handshaking Action’. Photo courtesy of Artpool Art Research Center.

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3.5 Image of Galántai painting a tourist sign on the rooftop of the Chapel Studio, 1971. Photo courtesy of Artpool Art Research Center.

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3.6 Image of group of people, showing the T-​shirt printed on the spot using the stencil made by Galántai, 1971. Photo copyright György Galántai. Courtesy of Artpool Art Research Center.

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5.1 Aerial map of downtown Budapest showing the location of the artists’ projects in the Polyphony: Social Commentary in Contemporary Hungarian Art exhibition, 1993. Photo courtesy of C3 Center for Culture & Communication Foundation, Budapest, Hungary.

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List of Illustrations 5.2 Zsolt Koroknai, Telephone Booth Gallery, 1993. Indirect audio-​ mail-​art action. Public telephone booths in different locations in Budapest. Queue outside the Telephone Booth Gallery at Deak Ferenc Street. Photo courtesy of C3 Center for Culture & Communication Foundation, Budapest, Hungary.

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5.3 Gyula Varnai, Agitator, 1993. Acoustic installation at the corner of Rottenbiller and Damjanich Streets, Budapest. Photo courtesy of C3 Center for Culture & Communication Foundation, Budapest, Hungary.

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5.4 Alexandru Chira, Reminding, for Suggesting the Rain and the Rainbow, 1994, site-​specific installation in the village of Tauseni, Romania. Photo courtesy of the International Center for Contemporary Art, Bucharest, Romania.

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5.5 Marcel Bunea, Exodus Traces, 1994, detail of the collaboratively built decorative throne by the artist and a Roma community near the city of Lapusi, Romania. Photo by Jannine Huzinga, courtesy of the International Center for Contemporary Art (ICCA), Bucharest, Romania.

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5.6 Adrian Timar, The Transylvanian Gazette, 1994, silk-​printed onto newspaper, Brasov, Romania. Photo by Jannine Huzinga, courtesy of the International Center for Contemporary Art (ICCA), Bucharest, Romania.

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5.7 Exhibition 01010101…, 1994, installation view at the Romanian Peasant Museum, Bucharest, design by Marius Marcu. Photo by Irina Cios, Courtesy of the International Center for Contemporary Art (ICCA), Bucharest, Romania.

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6.1 The City Group, Chameleon, 1990, public action and sculpture, Sofia, Bulgaria. Courtesy of Philip Zidarov.

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6.2 Kalin Serapionov, The Hot Soup and My Home Community, 1998. Single channel video projection, SVHS, Pal, no sound, 9’15’ (loop). Digitally re-​mastered in 2002. Installation view in the Bulgariaavantgarde exhibition, Künstlerwerkstatt Lothringerstrasse 13, Munich 1998. Photo: author archive. Courtesy of Kalin Serapionov.

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List of Illustrations 6.3A–​B Unmaking Dan, performance, filmed and edited by Kalin Serapionov after the idea of Luchezar Boyadjiev, 2010, DVD, Pal, 16:9, Institute for Contemporary Art-​Sofia. Images courtesy of ICA-​Sofia. 7.1A

7.1B

7.2

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View of Széll Kálmán Square (formerly Moszkva Tér), the site for Moszkva Tér (Gravitacio) / Moscow Square (Gravitation) exhibition, Budapest, Hungary, 2012. Photo by Izabel Galliera.

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View of Moszkva Tér Bistro, a site for Moszkva Tér (Gravitacio) / Moscow Square (Gravitation) exhibition, Budapest, Hungary, 2012. Photo by Izabel Galliera.

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Daniel Knorr, Trams and Institutions, 2007, in the frame of the exhibition project Public Art Bucharest, 2007. Photo courtesy of Timotei Nadasan.

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8.1 h.arta, Project Space, in the frame of Spațiul Public Bucureşti / Public Art Bucharest 2007, Poliphonic Orchestra, performance by Reni Hofmüller. Image courtesy of h.arta.

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8.2 h.arta, Project Space, in the frame of Spațiul Public Bucureşti / Public Art Bucharest 2007. Image courtesy of h.arta.

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8.3

János Sugár, Time Patrol, 2003, as part of the exhibition project Moszkva Tér (Gravitacio) / Moscow Square (Gravitation). Photo by Zoltán Kerekes, courtesy of János Sugár.

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8.4 János Sugár, Time Patrol, 2003, detail, as part of the exhibition project Moszkva Tér (Gravitacio) / Moscow Square (Gravitation). Photo by Zoltán Kerekes, courtesy of János Sugár.

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8.5

Luchezar Boyadjiev, Hot City Visual, 2003. Detail: Poster from the advertisement campaign for ‘Stefan’s Brigade (and Sons-​in-​Law)’, 70 x 100 cm. Image courtesy of Luchezar Boyadjiev.

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166

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List of Illustrations 8.6

Luchezar Boyadjiev, Hot City Visual, 2003. Detail: ‘Super! Super!’ video clip, 4:26 min. Stills from the video clip for the advertisement campaign for ‘Stefan’s Brigade (and Sons-​in-​Law)’. Image courtesy of Luchezar Boyadjiev. 167

8.7

Luchezar Boyadjiev, Hot City Visual, 2003. Detail: Billboard from the advertisement campaign for ‘Stefan’s Brigade (and Sons-​in-​Law)’. Digital print on vinyl, 375 x 750 cm. Installed on the façade of the former Tsar’s palace (now National Art Gallery) in the centre of Sofia just prior to the mayoral elections in October 2003. Image courtesy of Luchezar Boyadjiev. 168

8.8

Ivan Moudov, MUSIZ, 2005. Billboard, advertising for the opening of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sofia. Image courtesy of Ivan Moudov. 172

8.9A–​D Ivan Moudov, MUSIZ opening, 2005. Sofia, 26 April 2005. Images courtesy of Ivan Moudov.

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8.10

Ivan Moudov, MUSIZ, 2005. Postcard, advertising for the opening of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sofia. Image courtesy of Ivan Moudov. 175

9.1

Miklós Erhardt and Dominic Hislop (Big Hope), Re:route, web archive detail: Mahmoud’s mental map, 2002, Turin, Italy. Image copyright and courtesy of the artists.

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Matei Bejenaru, Impreuna / Together, photograph documenting performance outside Tate Modern, London, 2007. Photo by Ioana Marinescu. Image courtesy of the artist.

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9.3

Matei Bejenaru, Travel Guide, detail from the leaflet, Romanian version, 2005–​7. Image courtesy of the artist.

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9.4

Miklós Erhardt and Dominic Hislop (Big Hope), Re:route, installation view, Turin Biennale, 2002. Image courtesy of the artists.

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Taka Visual Art Company, Project 10, Summer 2003. Rose drawings near Shipka Village, part of the Art for Social Change programme. Courtesy of Irina Karakehayova.

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9.2

10.1

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List of Illustrations 10.2 Taka Visual Art Company, Project 10, Summer 2003. Rose picking near Shipka Village, part of the Art for Social Change programme. Courtesy of Irina Karakehayova.

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10.3 Taka Visual Art Company, Project 10, Fall 2003. Exhibition at the Red House for Culture and Debate. Building before renovation. Courtesy of Irina Karakehayova.

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10.4 Aerial view of the Esplanada Oancea in Tatarasi district, Iasi, Romania. The location for the cARTier project, 2004–​7. Photo courtesy Matei Bejenaru.

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10.5 cARTier, 2004–​7, detail of mural. Iasi, Romania. Photo courtesy Matei Bejenaru.

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10.6 cARTier, 2004–​7, detail of group discussion with members of community, March 2004, Iasi, Romania. Photo courtesy Matei Bejenaru.

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11.1 Big Hope, Saját Szemmel / Inside Out, 1998. Big Hope interviewing Inside Out participants (from left to right) Zoltán Sárközi, Zoltán Rácz, Ferenc Budai, and Tibor Novák in the ‘homeless train’ operated by the Hungarian Charity Service of the Order of Malta, Budapest, summer 1997. Image courtesy of Big Hope.

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11.2 Big Hope, Saját Szemmel / Inside Out, 1998. Dominic Hislop (Big Hope) recording an interview with Inside Out participant Ilona Gáspár, Budapest City Homeless Shelter (FSZKI), 1997. Photo by Miklós Erhardt. Image courtesy of Big Hope.

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11.3 Big Hope, Saját Szemmel / Inside Out, 1998. Poster for the exhibition at the Budapest Galéria. Photo courtesy of Big Hope.

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11.4 Big Hope, Klímaszervíz / Climate-Service, 2001. Installation shot, Climate-​Service by Tibor Várnagy, Miklós Erhardt, Andreas Fogarasi and others, in the Service exhibition, Műcsarnok-​Kunsthalle Budapest. Photo by Tibor Várnagy. Image courtesy of Big Hope.

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List of Illustrations 11.5

Miklós Erhardt (Big Hope) leading a discussion with representatives of Hungarian civil organizations in the framework of Disobbedienti by Big Hope, Liget Galéria, Budapest, September 2002. Photo by Tibor Várnagy.

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Miklós Erhardt (Big Hope) leading a discussion with representatives of Hungarian civil organizations in the framework of Disobbedienti by Big Hope, Liget Galéria, Budapest, September 2002. Photo by Tibor Várnagy.

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11.7

Opening of Disobbedienti by Big Hope, Liget Galéria, Budapest, September 2002. Photo by Tibor Várnagy.

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11.8

Installation shot, Manamana, a collaborative zine-​project by Tibor Várnagy and Miklós Erhardt at the Budapest Box exhibition in Ludwig Museum Budapest, 2002. Photo by Tibor Várnagy.

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12.1

DINAMO event, Budapest, 2003. Image courtesy of Katarina Šević.

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12.2

IMPEX event, Budapest, 2006. Image courtesy of Katarina Šević.

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12.3

Spread from the book We Are Not Ducks on a Pond at Sea: Independent Art Initiatives, Budapest 1989–​2009, edited by Rita Kálmán and Katarina Šević. Image courtesy of Katarina Šević.

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11.6

12.4A–​F Posters for six ‘Café-​Bar Manifest’ events, organized as part of the Department of Art in Public Space. Graphic design by Eduard Constantin. Image courtesy of E-​cart.ro. 12.5

12.6

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Poster for ‘Communism Hasn’t Happened … Yet!’, the first ‘Café-​Bar Manifest’, of the Department of Art in Public Space, initiated by E-​cart.ro, 2009. Graphic design by Eduard Constantin. Image courtesy of E-​cart.ro.

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Mariela Gemisheva, Guns and Roses Oil, 2011, 0gms Drawer, Sofia. Photo by Dimitar Dilkoff. Image courtesy of Ivan Moudov.

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List of Illustrations 12.7 Esther Kempf, L’Adultera / Adulteress, 2010. Image courtesy of Ivan Moudov.

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12.8 Ivan Moudov, 0gms Cabinet 3, 2011, Installation View, W139 Amsterdam. Image courtesy of Ivan Moudov.

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12.9 Ivan Moudov, 0gms Cabinet 1, 2011. Top: Peter Fritzenwallner, Do They Know Something We Don’t? Lower: Esther Kempf, Notvorrat, 2010.

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Acknowledgements This book is the result of many years of research, reflections, writing, international travels, conversations, and encounters with many individuals. My research on contemporary art from Central and Eastern Europe began while I was a graduate student at the University of South Florida and greatly expanded while I was a doctoral candidate in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at the University of Pittsburgh. Foremost, I want to thank my PhD adviser, Professor Terry Smith, whose unwavering guidance and belief in my work throughout my graduate studies has given me the confidence to engage in the long process of writing this manuscript. His consistently attentive feedback on the countless drafts, the numerous conversations, and critical questions, greatly shaped the direction and overall structure of the book. I want to express my gratitude to all my PhD committee members, Professor Barbara McCloskey for posing critically stimulating questions on a myriad of my manuscript drafts and to Professor Kirk Savage for his always perceptive comments and suggestions on my ongoing research and manuscript. Special thanks goes to Professor Grant Kester, from the University of San Diego, for provoking me to think about how to articulate the multi-​ layered interconnections inherent in socially engaged art, while carefully crafting a contextualized approach to such practices. Grant’s belief that my research project would result in a book has given me the confidence in pursuing and sticking to the long path that it entails. As this project began as my PhD dissertation, it has received considerable funding over the years. My PhD studies at the University of Pittsburgh were generously funded by two Arts and Sciences Fellowships in 2008–​9 and 2010–​11 respectively, and a Dissertation Development Grant in 2010. Two Foreign Language Area Studies Fellowships (FLAS) during the summers of 2009 and 2010 allowed me to spend several months in Budapest, xvii

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Acknowledgements Hungary to conduct initial research and pursue Hungarian language studies. The seminar Writing in the Humanities after the Fall of Communism that I attended at the Central European Summer University in 2009, with seminar leaders Edit András, Magdalena Radomska, Piotr Piotrowski and Marina Gržinić, has been formative and key in my early inquiries into the region. The dual-​country Fulbright Fellowship that I was awarded during the 2011–​12 academic year has given me the wonderful opportunity to reside for four months in Sofia, Bulgaria and five months in Bucharest, Romania. The Andrew Mellon Predoctoral Fellowship that I received during the 2012–​13 academic year provided me with the support and time I needed to complete the writing of my dissertation. I am very appreciative to McDaniel College, my current academic home, for giving me the support and time that I  needed to finalize the editing of my manuscript following the peer-​review process. I  want to thank Provost Julia Jasken, and the chair of the Art History Department, Gretchen McKay, for their understanding and for re-​arranging my teaching schedule so that I could meet the publisher’s deadlines. Moreover, I am grateful to the Faculty Development Committee at McDaniel College for the grant I was awarded to help cover the copy-​editing of the manuscript. I am deeply grateful to curators and artists at art institutions and collections in Central and Eastern Europe that provided significant resources for my research. In Bucharest, Romania these are: Irina Cios at the International Center for Contemporary Art; Raluca Voinea at tranzit.ro; and The National Museum of Contemporary Art in Bucharest. In Budapest, Hungary: Eva Kozma at the C3 Center for Culture and Communication Foundation; Júlia Klaniczay, György Galántai and Dora Halasi at the Artpool Art Research; Katalin Timar at the Ludwig Museum of Contemporary Art; Dóra Hegyi at tranzit.hu; László Beke; and Judit Angel, then curator at the Műcsarnok-​ Kunsthalle Budapest. In Sofia, Bulgaria: Iara Boubnova and Diana Popova at the Institute for Contemporary Art, Sofia; Vladiya Mihaylova at the Vaska Emanouilova; and the Red House for Culture and Debate. I extend my warmest appreciation to the artists who met with me, answered my questions about their works and generously provided images:  in Hungary:  Miklós Erhardt and Dominic Hislop, János Sugár, Katarina Šević, Hajnalka Somogyi and Tibor Várnagy; in Romania: Matei Bejenaru, Marcel Bunea, h.arta, Calin Dan, Eduard Constantin, Adrian xviii

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Acknowledgements Timar and Raluca Voinea; and in Bulgaria:  Luchezar Boyadjiev, Andrej Daniel, Irina Karakehayova and the Taka Visual Art Company group, as well as Kiril Prashkov, Ivan Moudov, Kalin Serapioniv, and Philip Zhidarov. I want to thank Baillie Card, until recently my editor at I.B.Tauris, for her interest in my manuscript, and for her valuable feedback during the revision process. I  also want to thank editor Lisa Goodrum for guiding me though the final stages of the pre-​production editorial process, and senior production editor Sara Magness for her help during the production process. I am indebted to friends and colleagues for their moral support, encouragement and scholarly advice on numerous occasions during the long process of completing this manuscript. I  especially want to thank Cristina Albu, my former graduate school colleague, for her friendship and unwavering support throughout the last nine years. I  will always fondly remember our long conversations on contemporary art and art from Eastern Europe into the wee hours and Cristina’s always-​thoughtful comments on the numerous drafts and early versions of this manuscript. I am also grateful for the intellectually stimulating conversations with former colleagues at the University of Pittsburgh: Robert Bailey, Brianne Cohen, Heidi Cook, Jessica Glasser, Sheri Lullo, Irina Livezeanu, and Madalina Veres, and for the opportunities that I had to speak about my research project with my current colleagues: Christianna Leahy, Mary Bendel-​Simso, and Jim Kuntz, at McDaniel College through the Faculty Showcase initiative. I also want to extend my appreciation to my colleague and friend Steven Pearson for his enthusiastic support in the process of organizing two cross-​disciplinary conferences on socially engaged art, Engaging Locally, Connecting Globally:  Cross Disciplinary Dialogues on Art and Social Justice (2014) and Art Now: Addressing Systematic Causes, Fighting for Social Justice (2016) on McDaniel campus. These events provided me with the opportunity to engage in scholarly dialogues with practitioners in the field, and to introduce McDaniel students to socially engaged art practice and discourse. Their warm welcome gave me the motivation to offer a course on socially engaged art practice during spring semesters. Over the years, conference presentations both in the US and in Central and Eastern Europe offered valuable platforms to share segments of my ongoing research project and engage in academic dialogues on the topic. I want to xix

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Acknowledgements thank all those who have invited me to present on academic conference panels, including Anthony Gardner and Klara Kemp-​Welch (AAH, 2011), Natalie Musteata (CAA, 2014), and Michelle Maydanchik (SECAC, 2016). I am thankful for my time as Assistant Curator at the University of South Florida Contemporary Art Museum and my colleagues and friends there:  Margaret Miller, Noel Smith, Kristin DuFrain, Kristin Soderqvist, Sarah Howard, Don Fuller, Alexa Favata, Megan Voeller, Shannon Annis, and Tony Palms. I especially want to thank Joe Galliera, until recently my partner in life, for his unwavering support and for putting up with me throughout this long process, when I often spent months away from home immersed in research and writing. He has been my family and I will always remain grateful for his encouragement and presence in my life. My daughter Ella Rodica Galliera has been part of my life and this process for the last four years. Her coming into my life gave me the strength and motivation to push through and inspired me to become a better human being and a role model for her. I  also want to thank my brother Stefan Szakal, my father Istvan Szakal, Mary Grace Galliera and Joe Galliera Jr. I dedicate this book to my mother, who, even though she passed away when I was a teenager, instilled in me the significance of independent thinking and determination.

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1

Introduction

In 1998, the artist collective Big Hope created the art project Inside Out by distributing disposable cameras to homeless people in overnight shelters and subway stations all across Budapest for them to photograph their surroundings. In Sofia, Bulgaria, in 2005, Bulgarian artist Ivan Moudov, working anonymously, appropriated advertising techniques to simulate the opening of a contemporary art museum, which he called MUSIZ, where at the time there was no such institution. In 2007, as part of the Public Art Bucharest exhibition in Bucharest, Romania, the feminist artist collective h.arta undermined conventional curatorial protocols by inviting other people and artists to participate in their Project Space display. These art works developed after 1989 by artists from Central Eastern Europe (CEE) were local instances of a worldwide contemporary tendency of socially engaged art. The global penchant towards art as social practice has encompassed modes of art making theorized and discussed internationally since the early 1990s, as participatory, relational, collaborative, dialogic, community-​based and socio-​politically conscious forms of public art. This book is a critical history of socially engaged art and curatorial and institutionalizing practices since the fall of socialist regimes by artists and curators from a specific CEE sub-​region comprising Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania. It explores a number of these significant, yet underexamined, 1

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Socially Engaged Art after Socialism initiatives as critical and interrogatory responses to a complex and tension-​ filled post-​socialist transition period. I use the notion of ‘socially engaged art’ as an umbrella term to include self-​ organizing institutions, site-​ specific contemporary forms of art and exhibition making that unfold in public spaces, primarily urban and, in few instances, rural, over longer or shorter periods of time. Some art forms are participatory, meaning that they can ultimately be realized only through the physical involvement (albeit temporary) of people. Other projects are collaborative, meaning that they emerge from specific ways of working together among diverse individuals. Others combine both participatory and collaborative strategies. The participants and/or collaborators in these artistic, curatorial and institutionalizing practices vary from fellow artists, curators and critics, to audience members, anonymous passers-​by in public squares and members of specific marginalized communities, such as immigrants and Roma in cities primarily in Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania, but also in Italy and England. These projects are the result of complex negotiations and contentious dynamics unfolding among artists, curators and funding institutions. Despite their varied modes of critique and strategies of engagement, they all share a desire to reclaim public life from both the recent socialist past and current neoliberal ideologies in order to build inclusive public spheres as democratic forms within emerging civil societies. An ideological orthodoxy that equated socialism with authoritarianism and democracy with neoliberal capitalism became prevalent in the region in the first two post-​1989 decades. In virtually all former Soviet satellite nations in the region (excluding the countries of former Yugoslavia), the transitional period meant achieving democracy and a market economy. Art historian and critic Anthony Gardner has observed that, in the 1990s, democratization often equated to privatization. This was made evident in the introduction and implementation of structural adjustment reforms, including the economic policy known as Shock Therapy, by institutions of international development such as the UN Development Program, World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) in all former socialist CEE countries: ‘It was the single biggest influence on the rapid socio-​political and economic restructuring of decommunising countries into neoliberal markets.’1 Democracy functioned as a rhetoric of legitimation for the devastating effects on the numerous human lives faced with inflation, low 2

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Introduction wages and high unemployment rates: ‘If neoliberalism stood for destructive socio-​economic shock, then democracy provided the therapy in the bitter 1990s.’2 Moreover, democracy was understood primarily in formal terms, such as establishing parliamentary representation, the writing of new national constitutions based on models found in Western democracies, and free elections. Until 2004 and 2007, when most former CEE nations were admitted into the European Union (EU), belonging to the EU meant achieving democracy and completing ‘transition’. The EU represented a community of European nations that championed human rights and transnational cooperation within the CEE region, creating opportunities for business investments in prospective and new EU member countries. At least initially, then, democracy was also understood as individual freedoms and unrestrained liberties to compete in the region’s embryonic neoliberal capitalist market. Neoliberalism as both political ideology and economic policies dominated the national restructuring of former socialist countries. Almost by default, democracy implied access to the neoliberal market manoeuvres, such as price liberalization (the elimination of government protection and controls on prices), state deregulation (the distancing of government from guarding the interests of citizens to shielding the interests of big businesses) and privatization (the selling-​off of state-​ owned enterprises and public services to private corporations).3 In such a context of increasing privatization of public space and resources, and complex political, cultural, and economic relationships and levels of negotiations between the EU and the CEE candidate states, civil society emerges as a key focus for socially engaged art practitioners locally, and also globally. For a number of local practitioners, it has been critical to pursue and enact public spheres within a politicized civil society at once independent of and in negotiations with market forces and the state. Here publics not only bond socially but act politically to challenge system-​wide inequities. And it is both in the working towards and the acting within civil society that a number of socially engaged artists, curators and institutions examined in this book should be retrospectively understood. As one might expect, in developing a socially engaged art project there are great degrees of intercommunication and reciprocal action between artists, curators, commissioning institutions and funding sources. The multi-​layered negotiations result in a wide range of art practices and 3

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Socially Engaged Art after Socialism actions, some overtly critical of systemic inequities while others are more ambiguous in intent and outcome. Instead of an either/or evaluation based on levels of critique towards dominant institutional frameworks and policies, my discussions of specific art projects aim to reveal the engagement of practitioners with civil society as a perpetually contested process within the post-​1989 transitional period. Pursuing a contextual or situational analysis of art, curatorial and institutionalizing projects, my discussion focuses on participants directly involved within a project, including commissioning institutions and funding entities. The broader questions that this book is concerned with are: What do democratic notions of civil society mean within post-​socialist transitional contexts? How are these achieved and made visible? What can be and is the role of contemporary socially engaged art in such broad yet vital societal processes? Far from a comprehensive history, my discussion includes analysis of specific post-​1989 practices that unfolded within public space, employed participatory and collaborative strategies of engagement and, in most instances, benefited from international funding. The three main parts of the book, each with three chapters, aim to convey what I identify as three major tendencies within the discourse of socially engaged art in the specific CEE sub-​region. These tendencies are best understood if we see them occurring both chronologically and synchronically. The first tendency emerged in the early 1990s, when liberal democracy and the space of civil society were conceptualized in strict opposition to socialism, a widespread view at this time not only among the society at large but also in political and cultural discourses. Significant, yet largely ignored in scholarly literature, are the early 1990s exhibitions Polyphony:  Social Commentary in Contemporary Hungarian Art (1993, Budapest) and Exhibition 01010101… (1994, Bucharest). These were organized within the framework of the former Soros Centres for Contemporary Art (SCCA) funded by the Hungarian-​born and USA-​based financier and philanthropist George Soros. These exhibitions represented the first curatorial initiatives of socially engaged art in these contexts. Specific art works, both realized and unrealized within the context of these curatorial projects, drew attention to and engaged with the conflicted nature of the post-​ socialist transitional period. Such early exhibitions began a slow process of change in the traditional understanding of art, in particular of public art. 4

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Introduction Generally, society perceived public art as a propaganda tool for spreading the socialist ideology of the party-​state, often in the form of monumental sculptures of socialist leaders in public space. A second tendency in socially engaged art in the region became apparent in the early to mid-​2000s as notions of civil society in CEE increasingly became equated with values put forward by the EU in the acquis communautaire, which outlined accession principles for prospective members. During this period, the idea of ‘returning to Europe’ played a significant role in the CEE region and informed a number of cultural, art historical and curatorial projects. Before the entrance of Hungary (2004), Bulgaria and Romania (2007) into the EU, a number of artists and curators from these countries benefited from Western European funding that encouraged socially conscious forms of public art. Three significant yet largely unknown exhibitions and curatorial programmes during this time were the Visual Seminar programme (2002–​5) in Bulgaria, the Spațiul Public București / Public Art Bucharest exhibition (2007) in Romania and the Moszkva Tér (Gravitacio) / Moscow Square (Gravitation) exhibition (2003) in Hungary. Examined in light of the emerging local discourse of belonging to Europe and the notion of a transnational public sphere at the EU level, these curatorial programmes reveal complex points of contention. Specific participatory and collaborative artist projects developed for these exhibitions, such as János Sugár’s Idöjárör / Time Patrol (2003) in Budapest, Ivan Moudov’s MUSIZ (2005) in Sofia and h.arta’s Project Space (2007) in Bucharest, engaged with the specificity of a particular public site. Moreover, they used the curatorial programme as a platform to symbolically draw attention to specific counterpublics and challenge existing political, cultural and economic inequities at the local level. Concomitantly, Hungary-​ based artist collective Big Hope created Re:route in 2002 in Turin, Italy, and Romanian artist Matei Bejenaru initiated Impreuna / Together in 2007 London, UK, where they engaged members of immigrant communities. Developed for specific institutions in the EU, these artists’ works, in different ways, critiqued the pan-​European notions of belonging to a European community, highlighting exclusionary politics at the EU level. A third tendency has been unfolding in parallel with the previous two, and it is ongoing. In recent years, a number of curators, artists and critics began to group together to form quasi-​independent art institutions 5

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Socially Engaged Art after Socialism and organizations as alternatives to those developed by rightist, nationalist and corporatist local governments, in a process that I call ‘self-​institutionalizing’. For example, IMPEX (2006–​9) as a continuation of DINAMO (2003–​6) in Budapest revealed a symbiotic form of self-​institutionalizing art practice that organized art exhibitions, lectures, screenings, conversations, one-​night events and publications in experimental, laboratory-​like spaces. E-​cart’s Department for Art in Public Space (2009–​11) in Bucharest organized nomadic and thematically structured meetings on diverse topics –​such as the condemnation of the entire socialist past as a criminal regime by the Romanian president Traian Băsescu –​for the general public in different cafes and clubs throughout the capital city. 0GMS (2010–​present) in Sofia, a drawer-​sized gallery space, inhabits other art institutions both locally and internationally as a form of critical institutional interrogation enacted from inside the institution. Likewise, Big Hope, in their works Saját Szemmel / Inside Out (1998) and Disobbedienti (2002) in Budapest, made use of museum and gallery spaces to provoke public discussions on what the ‘left’ might mean in post-​1989 Hungary. Moreover, in contrast with these rather institutionally contentious art initiatives, two multi-​year programmes and community-​based art projects funded by the EU, Art for Social Change (2000–​4) in Bulgaria and cARTier (2004–​7) in Romania, conveyed the paradoxes of institutionalized forms of community arts, which often act as moral legitimation for neoliberal capitalism. Based on the presence of particular initiatives at specific moments in time during the post-​socialist transition, this three-​part periodization conveys that the impact of foreign funding was significant in the development of socially engaged art practices. This fact raises relevant questions that resonate not only locally and regionally but also globally. What are the wider implications of local art projects and major exhibitions of socially engaged art that have been both encouraged and funded by foreign foundations and organizations? How does this significant aspect, for instance, impact the politically emancipatory and critical potential of networked social relations that provide expressive media and tools for agency within a number of local artistic and curatorial projects? Commissioned by specific institutional programmes, do art practitioners challenge existing neoliberal and nationalist policies and their exclusionary effects or rather reinforce them? What forms of art historical knowledge, understanding and 6

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Introduction genealogies of contemporary art have resulted from such art, curatorial and self-​institutionalizing initiatives?

Within and Beyond the Borders of Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania The projects in Bucharest, Budapest and Sofia examined in this book are by art practitioners from Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania, three nations that share not only borders but also specific political trajectories.4 In spite of the varied political, cultural and economic experiences with both the socialist and post-​socialist periods, which highlight the diversity of the CEE region and the locally specific issues addressed by the artists and curators in their work, the three countries have a number of characteristics in common. Geographically, the largest of the three, Romania, shares borders with Bulgaria in the south-​east, and Hungary in the north-​west. Historically, Hungary and, before achieving their independence in 1878, Romania and Bulgaria were part of the Ottoman Empire from the late fourteenth and mid-​ sixteenth centuries to the mid-​ to-​ late-​ nineteenth century respectively. This period, which greatly shaped their cultural traditions, is officially remembered and referred to by the local populations as ‘domination’ and even Turkish ‘slavery’.5 Between 1867 and 1918, Hungary, along with Austria, was part of a Dual Monarchy, the Austro-​Hungarian Empire, which disintegrated after World War I. Ethnically, the north-​western region of Romania, known in Hungarian as Erdély and in Romanian as Transylvania or Ardeal, has been a contested territory between these two nations. Originally part of Hungary, Erdély/Transylvania ultimately became part of Romania after World War I, as a result of the 1920 Treaty of Trianon. In 1940, with the Second Vienna Award, Hungary temporarily gained back part of Transylvania, but in 1947 the Treaty of Paris re-­​ ­established the initial national borders. This makes Romania the country with the largest minority population in Europe, with close to 9 per cent ethnic Hungarians living in Romania. Politically, this ethnically diverse region fuelled disputes, both during and after the socialist period. Before 1989, the xenophobic Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu implemented drastic measures that attempted to erase minority cultures in order to achieve the myth of the ‘Greater Romanian’ nation. In the 1990s, the anti-​minority 7

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Socially Engaged Art after Socialism nationalist parties, such as the Party of National Unity of Romania, formed a parliamentary majority and appointed their members to mayoral offices in cities, such as Cluj with a large ethnic Hungarian population. During the same period in Hungary, the rights of Hungarians in Transylvania were a key issue for the government. For example, in the 1990 election campaign, ‘Prime Minister Antall set off alarm bells in Romania by declaring himself prime minister of “fifteen million Hungarians” (Hungary’s population is ten million).’6 And yet, as historian Roland Linden discussed in an article in 2000, despite their disagreements Romania and Hungary had never engaged in armed conflict. The same can be said of Bulgaria and Romania, which also share the coastal area of the Black Sea, an important touristic and industrial area. During the Cold War, the populations of Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania had similar experiences of limited freedom of expression even if they each had very different relations with the Soviet Union. For example, under Party Chairman Todor Zhivkov (1954–​89) Bulgaria was the closest ally of the Soviets, which ensured a rapid industrialization of the country and higher living standards for the population compared to other nations in the region during socialism. At the same time, the rather prosperous economic situation, at least until the 1980s, was coupled with a lack of freedom and the absence of mass and unified dissent on the part of the population when we consider them in relation to other East bloc countries, such as Hungary, which revolted against the Soviet occupation as early as 1956. While János Kádár (1956–​88), as the leader of the Hungarian Socialist Workers Party, followed the Soviet directives on foreign policy, he had relative freedom in domestic economic policy and even in politics. He implemented an economic reform, referred to as ‘goulash-​communism’, that comprised market elements and decentralized planning. Despite this relative economic freedom, which placed Hungary in a socially and economically better situation than any of the other Soviet bloc countries, the political stranglehold of the Kádár’s regime was not diminished, limiting the creative freedom of artists and intellectuals. Romania, on the other, under Nicolae Ceaușescu (1965–​89), the leader of the Romanian Communist Party, was the only nation that severed political ties with the Soviets and it implemented one of the strictest centralized governmental regimes in the former Soviet bloc. These significant societal, political and 8

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Introduction economic differences in state–​society relations had greatly determined both the nature of experimental artistic activities and how they varied in frequency and intensity across these different contexts. Below I offer a brief overview of some of the experimental participatory contemporary art practices in the second society during socialism in Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania. However cursory, this overview is necessary in order to provide historical context and a genealogy for socially engaged art and curatorial practices that emerged after 1989, which are the main focus of this book. Although the different socialist legacies had shaped the nature of the transitional period in these three countries in distinct ways, Romania and Bulgaria shared similar political faiths during post-​socialism, particularly in their negotiations with the EU. For example, in 2007 they both became EU members, and this came with specific travel and working restrictions in the EU for a period of five years. The effects and nature of these restrictions at the EU level are among some of the issues addressed, for example by Romanian artist Matei Bejenaru in his participatory projects developed in London in 2007, as I will discuss below. While Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary do not stand in for the entire CEE, they present an opportunity to examine specific factors common across this region that played key roles in the emergence of socially engaged art and curatorial practices in post-​socialist contexts. Specifically, these ­factors include the role of informal local social networks in building civil society, the presence of foreign funding for contemporary art and exhibitions, rapid and drastic national economic restructuring to enter the regional and international neoliberal market, and political ambitions to become part of the EU. Examining specific case studies from these neighbouring countries, with diverse cultural and linguistic traditions but also sharing political and economic faiths, offers a platform to identify broader trends that transverse these nations. It is for this very reason that the title of the book reads ‘in Central and Eastern Europe’ instead of ‘in Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania’. Departing from a country-​based structure that might discuss and frame artists and curators on the basis of their country of origin, the book takes a thematic approach, which reveals implications that are not limited to enclosed national boundaries. Moreover, while focused on thematic discussions of art, exhibitions and institutions in specific localities, this book is not intended solely for a Bulgarian, Hungarian 9

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Socially Engaged Art after Socialism and Romanian or CEE audience. Rather, it is meant as a contribution to the understanding of international and trans-​local developments in contemporary art, specifically as it concerns participatory and collaborative art, and curatorial and self-​institutionalizing practices.

Subversive Potential in Social Capital In the book, I employ the sociological concept of ‘social capital’ in conjunction with those of ‘cultural capital’, ‘symbolic capital’ and ‘political capital’ in order to account for the process-​centred, participatory and collaborative as well as contentious nature of a number of socially engaged art forms that I analyse. More specifically, I am concerned with deciphering the ways in which the mechanics of social capital can become expressive media and tools for certain artists, curators and institutions to engender discussions and action towards viable forms of civil society. Social capital can be defined as the accumulation of a multiplicity of informal collaborative modes of production, organization and exchange among networks of individuals within a group and among groups of individuals. Of course, social capital, with all its operational mechanics of interpersonal trust, solidarity and reciprocity, has both positive and negative connotations. Its subversive potential can be immediately countered by its capacity for abuse when employed to serve, for instance, the speculative interests of authoritarian socialists, neoliberal economists, conservative nationalists, or terrorist cells. We should not automatically assume social capital to be an always-​emancipatory form and the medium for a functioning democracy and an efficient capitalist economy  –​the way it is theorized, for example, by American sociologist Robert Putnam.7 Rather, it is more realistic to acknowledge its inherently shifting possibilities. In fact, social capital’s dual nature, or rather its double-​ edged-​sword quality, requires that we perpetually articulate and rearticulate its politically subversive potential within the dominant yet shifting spaces of power, such as institutions. Art historian Grant Kester points to a similar duplicity that exists within ‘collaboration’, a concept that can involve both unity and betrayal. Ultimately, Kester considers collaboration’s inherent ‘ethical undecidability’ a productive attribute that needs to be continuously asserted and negotiated, just ‘as there is no art practice that avoids all forms of co-​option, compromise, or complicity’.8 10

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Introduction Terminologically, the word ‘capital’ connects social capital to economics, where capital is a resource that is owned and invested in order to generate profit at a future point in time. As such, sociologists Margaret Somers and Pierre Bourdieu, in different ways, have compared social capital to a list of useful contacts. Accordingly, social relations are nurtured solely for cultural and economic gain or to achieve economic and cultural capital. For example, Somers argued in 2004 that, in the contemporary period, social capital had lost its politically subversive quality manifested within the embryonic forms of civil society during the socialist regimes in CEE, and had become a mere ‘social auxiliary’ to the market.9 However, as I will show below, a number of art practitioners, such as Big Hope, Matei Bejenaru and Ivan Moudov, and self-​organizing art institutions, such as DINAMO/IMPEX and the Department of Art in Public Space, suggest that social capital has the potential to be more than solely an auxiliary to the market. Social capital contains a politically subversive possibility even after the fall of socialist regimes. This is made visible in those instances in which the private space of social capital –​manifested, for instance, in friendships and social relations nurtured in social networks –​is harnessed to the kinds of political agency exemplified in self-​organizing initiatives, both symbolic and actual, by a number of art practitioners. Temporarily occupying key physical spaces is symbolically powerful in the processes of shaping institutional sites of power. The ‘capital’ in social capital can thus be conceptualized as a collective asset employed by its participants to bring forward a dissenting yet inclusive civil society. The range of post-​1989 artistic, curatorial and institutionalizing practices presented in this book involve often contentious and complex levels of negotiations between social, political and cultural capital, as art practitioners interact with funding and organizational factors and actors in realizing their works.

Politics of Socially Engaged Art in CEE While I use the umbrella term ‘socially engaged’ to refer to participatory and collaborative arts that engage people and unfold in public spaces, central to my discussion is practitioners’ understanding of the ‘political’ and of ‘being politically engaged’. Especially (but not only) for the generation of artists trained under socialism and actively working and exhibiting 11

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Socially Engaged Art after Socialism after 1989, being politically engaged meant supporting political parties, their ideologies and policies. Rather than the practice of politics as group actions and direct forms of critique challenging the effects of exclusionary power relations,10 politics meant party politics. Artists, generally, have avoided directly addressing political issues in their art. Reactions such as these make sense when considering the populations’ direct experience of all levels of control –​especially self-​control and self-​censorship –​enacted by the socialist single-​party state for almost four decades. Mechanisms of surveillance were so pervasive that the regime did not require physically violent acts to maintain its authority. In Antipolitics in Central European Art 1956–​1989, art historian Klara Kemp-​Welch referenced the Czech writer Václav Havel’s dissident work to highlight the nature and processes of the politicization of human lives in socialist contexts. In his 1987 ‘Stories and Totalitarianism’, Havel noted:  ‘The advanced totalitarian system depends on manipulatory devices so refined, complex, and powerful that it no longer needs murderers and victims.’11 Moreover, Havel eloquently described people’s day-​to-​day experience under socialism by noting, for instance, how language such as ‘peace’, ‘homeland’ and ‘socialism’ ‘awakens distrust, scepticism, ridicule and revulsion’ among the people. This, he says, is because: ‘For thirty seven years the open space […] has been decorated with slogans such as “Building up our homeland strengthens peace”, “The Soviet Union, guarantor of world peace”, […] for thirty seven years our citizens have been required to carry the same old peace placards in the mandatory parades.’12 In light of Havel’s comments, it is not surprising that ‘politics’ too triggers ‘distrust, scepticism, ridicule and revulsion’ for both the society and the artists living and working during socialist regimes and the 1990s. As such, the artists’ various strategies of audience engagement, within the second society and the public space, adopted what Hungarian writer George Konrád called a politics of ‘antipolitics’. He defined ‘antipolitics’ as ‘the emergence of independent forums that can be appealed to against political power’.13 Naturally, this consciously pursued attitude of ‘antipolitics’ against politics is critically political in nature. For instance, several artists, such as the City Group in Sofia, Tamás Szentjóby and Gyula Várnai in Budapest, and Adrian Timar in Cluj-​ Napoca, conceptualized and realized participatory projects in the context of the early 1990s. In different ways, they sought to reclaim public life, 12

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Introduction which until very recently had been dominated by the political ideology of socialist regimes, and to challenge the effects of exclusionary power relations emergent with neoliberal restructuring of national economies. It is here, both in their scope and in the very process of engaging people in politicizing public places, that such socially engaged works by artists and curators become political.

Research Methodologies and Significance Given the time and site-​specific nature of such art, curatorial and institutionalizing practices, in my research I relied on direct interviews and electronic communication with artists, exhibition curators, assistants and members of funding institutions, as well as on archival documents and material included in grant proposals. My research involved consultation of both primary and secondary source materials in Hungarian, Romanian and English languages at local institutions such as the artists-​ led Artpool Research Centre; the non-​governmental Centre for Culture and Communication Foundation (C3) in Budapest; the International Centre for Contemporary Art in Bucharest; the Institute of Contemporary Art,​Sofia; and the Red House,​Centre for Culture and Debate in Sofia, Bulgaria. For example, on art practices from the 1970s to the 1990s, I examined archival material that included documentary photographs and video recordings, press clippings and reviews, curatorial statements, calls for projects and art project proposals, as well as written exchanges between curators, artists and funders. In particular, exhibition catalogues provided a vital secondary source of information. It is rather telling that major local state institutions in CEE lack any substantial archival holdings on the case studies that I discuss here. The complex interdependence between socially engaged artists and their funding institutions, which is one of the key themes of this book, emerged from research material that included grant proposals submitted by artists and curators to various grant-​giving EU and American foundations. For example, in multi-​year programmes, such as Art for Social Change in Sofia and cARTier in Iași, the yearly written project proposals form a valuable narrative for understanding the scope of such projects. However schematic or detailed, they reveal the shifting goals and outcomes of these 13

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Socially Engaged Art after Socialism community-​oriented practices under the demands listed by grant agencies. They communicate the reciprocal relationship between curators and artists, on the one hand, and funding institutions on the other. Practitioners re-​formulate, re-​focus or emphasize, from year to year, particular aspects of their projects so as to align most effectively with the directives of funding institutions, as exemplified by the EU-​funded programmes. On-​site and first-​hand experience of the projects becomes essential. But most often the primary audiences, comprising the participants, members and staff of various organizations, curators, assistants and volunteers, are in the unique position of direct observers. Moreover, they can greatly influence the nature of the artistic project through their later recollections, discussions and presentations. As a result, the initially absent art historian becomes a secondary audience. Grant Kester outlined three major ways in which the particular nature of collaborative and participatory socially engaged art challenges the conventional methods and questions explored in the field of (contemporary) art history. First, such site-​specific and process-​oriented art works raise ontological aspects, centred on questions of what constitutes ‘art’. Second, there are epistemological concerns as reflected, for example, in the search for critical evaluative criteria of such art practices that fundamentally depart from object-​based art production. And finally, such practices have hermeneutical implications that require art historians to employ research methodologies, such as field research and interviews, most commonly found in the social sciences.14 The multi-​layered nature of research conducted by the art historian on socially engaged art and curatorial practice deeply challenges and unsettles traditional art historical conventions of making and receiving art as well as the claims of the disciple for an almost scientific objectivity based on visual analysis and arguments anchored in the actual art objects and related documents. In particular, the discursive site-​and time-​specific nature of contemporary socially engaged practice allows for a multitude of interpretative possibilities. It highlights, for instance, the role of living artists and curators in influencing the critical reception of their work. The nature of such art, curatorial and self-​institutionalizing practices triggers the contemporary art historian to combine methodologies from both the humanities and the social sciences fields. The aim is not only to reconstruct the initial narrative but also to offer a critical perspective on the nature, scope 14

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Introduction and methodology of such participatory and interventionist art practices in public spaces. Taking a socio-​historical approach, I examine art, curatorial and institutionalizing practices from within the locality and context in which they were created and/or continue to operate. As an interdisciplinary study, my analysis of specific case studies is informed by sociological theories of social, cultural, symbolic and political capital and theories of civil society and the public sphere in order to examine the intersection of art, civil society and neoliberalism. This book contributes to the contemporary discourse around exhibitions and art as social practice in three important ways. First, it brings together and critically addresses art and art historical material from a specific sub-​region in CEE that has been neglected by existing scholarship. For instance, Part One includes a critical analysis of the Soros Centres for Contemporary Art (SCCAs), a network of arts spaces initiated and funded by millionaire George Soros through the 1990s across CEE. This topic has received very little critical attention. One relevant and recent example is the 2012 article ‘What was Contemporary Art?’ by Octavian Esanu.15 Although the author offers a historically grounded discussion by comparing the SCCA to the local Artists’ Unions, he does so in rather general terms across the region. Moreover, Esanu omits in-​depth discussions of specific artistic and curatorial projects within public space developed by the SCCAs, as well as the roles of the latter in the emergence of socially engaged art practice in the region. Second, the book sheds new light on the concept of social capital and its politically subversive potential in the discipline of art history and contemporary art and curatorial practice, where, as a theoretical approach on the subject, it has been overlooked or, at best, dismissed. Most recently, curator Nato Thompson, in his book Seeing Power: Art and Activism in the Twenty-first Century (2015), offered a discussion of social capital as key to financial and personal legitimation for cultural producers, especially visual artists, in the twenty-​first century international –​that is, American and Western European –​art scene. Following Bourdieu, Thompson defined social capital as ‘the estimated financial benefits associated with someone’s power inside a specific milieu’.16 Illustrated by the work of artists such as Thomas Hirschhorn, Thompson pointed to the negative outcomes of the presence of social capital that only contributes to 15

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Socially Engaged Art after Socialism exploiting a particular community to benefit or advance one’s artistic career.17 Essentially, Thompson dismissed any subversive potential inherent in social capital. And yet, to examine the multiple ways in which a number of art practitioners make use of both informal networks and mechanics of social capital (interpersonal trust, reciprocity, solidarity, participation) as medium and tool for action is to develop a useful mode for analysing not only the participatory and collaborative nature of various socially engaged art practices, but also the possibilities for resistance and transformation that can emerge from neoliberal capitalist forms of power. Third, by discussing social capital in relation to art as social practice in socialist and post-​socialist contexts, the book contributes new understandings to the theoretical dimensions and practical consequences of the concept in the field of social sciences. While a highly popular concept among social scientists and policy makers due to its emphasis on activities of ordinary people, it is critical that social capital is analysed from within the specificity of the local context. As Kathleen M. Dowley and Brian D. Silver concluded in a 2002 article: Social capital theory cannot be easily transported from the established democracies to ethnically plural societies in transition. In the post-​communist countries the transition unleashed the potential not only for a liberation of minorities but also for their suppression, not only for minority groups to proclaim and seek to protect their interests by endorsing a strong civil rights regime or cultural and political autonomy, but also for majority groups to want to deny or limit those claims and aspirations in the interest of preserving the physical boundaries of the state or their own newly dominant position in the system.18

And so, in socialist and post-​socialist contexts, social capital has been providing vital means of survival and communication for both artists and society at large, including minority and majority groups. Under state socialism, the fear of surveillance by the communist secret police pervaded people’s lives. In the post-​1989 period, national restructuring towards a neoliberal capitalism resulted in drastic economic disparities among the population. Both before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall, informal social relations based on trust, reciprocity and solidarity take on a renewed meaning. 16

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Introduction Therefore, in a context with a non-​existent, or at best minimal, (art) market economy during socialism and an incipient and developing one during the post-​socialist transition, social capital is not limited to exclusionary social networks that facilitate, for instance, a closed circuit of assistance among the already empowered, as often seen (following Bourdieu) in Western democracies. Embodied in various forms of participations and a multiplicity of social relations among individuals and groups connected by a common experience of domination and exclusions, social capital can empower specific (art) practitioners, their collaborators and participants to advocate for a dissenting civil society.

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1 Points of Contention: Socially Engaged Art Practice in Contemporary Theory

Art historians and critics in CEE have not considered the growing ­number of local artists and curators engaged in art as a social practice to amount to an emerging art tendency in the broader field of contemporary art. This is despite the fact that several socially engaged art practitioners have been included in important art historical studies on the region. For example, the late, internationally known Polish art historian Piotr Piotrowski, in his book Art and Democracy in Post-​ Communist Europe (2012), offered a survey of contemporary art production in post-​communist Europe. He identified a shift from ‘the politics of autonomy’ during socialism to the ‘autonomy of politics’ in the post-​1989 period. While his study was far reaching geographically and culturally, Piotrowski neglected to identify socially engaged art as an emerging artistic tendency with its specific methodological characteristics. For instance, he schematically addressed art works by Big Hope as an interventionist practice responding to current political and societal circumstances. However, the author omitted discussion, for example, on who the participants in the project were and how the artists had come to engage with them; the collaborative and participatory strategies of engagement that Big Hope used; and the importance of funding (or the lack of it) in shaping the projects. As I  will demonstrate below, these 18

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Points of Contention aspects are important in grasping the meaning and broader implications of the socially engaged work by Big Hope. Studies dedicated exclusively to the relationship between participatory socially engaged art, social capital and civil society are lacking in current scholarship. However, in the last decade a growing number of important art historians have addressed, from various perspectives, the connection between experimental forms of contemporary art and politics in CEE both during and after the socialist periods. For example, in his most recent book, Politically Unbecoming: Postsocialist Art against Democracy (2014), Anthony Gardner examined a number of artists active since the 1980s and 1990s in both Eastern Europe and Western Europe, such as Lia and Dan Perjovschi, Ilya Kabakov, Thomas Hirschhorn and Gianni Motti. His insightful discussion focused on the different artistic responses to the paradox of democracy, ‘as both an ideological hangover from the Cold War and a utopian ambition for the future’.1 In her book Antipolitics in Central European Art 1956–​1989:  Reticence as Dissidence under Post-​Totalitarian Rule (2013), art historian Klara Kemp-​Welch examined the works of six artists working during the period of socialism in Hungary, Poland and Czechoslovakia. She investigated George Konrád’s concept of ‘antipolitics’ as a ‘strategy for the reinvigoration of civil society among members of the nascent oppositional intelligentsia’.2 Art historian Amy Bryzgel’s book Performing the East:  Performance Art in Russia, Latvia and Poland since 1980 (2013) critically evaluated ‘the function of performance art in the transition from communism to capitalism in Russia and Eastern Europe’. Through a socio-​historical approach to the work of six contemporary performance artists from Russia, Latvia and Poland, Bryzgel demonstrated how performance art in the East did not evolve from painting and as a reaction to the marketable art object as it did in the West. Rather, performance art in the East was not only a strategy ‘but a necessity of existence’.3 Two important pioneering anthologies represented significant and early milestones in the scholarly literature on CEE art, politics and antipolitical dissent. The first, Primary Documents: A Sourcebook for Eastern and Central European Art since the 1950s (2002), continues to be a valuable collection of primary source texts selected by the editors because ‘they labelled movements, challenged received ideas, and changed the way art was made and thought about by influential writers respected in their communities 19

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Socially Engaged Art after Socialism and nationally’.4 The second, East Art Map: Contemporary Art and Eastern Europe (2006) edited by the artist group IRWIN, is an artist project and one that, implicitly, provides an ambitious study of contemporary art from Russia and Eastern Europe based on contributions from art historians, critics, curators and artists from different countries. Its aim was to combat the ‘no-​man’s-​land’ mentality that culturally divided the Eastern and Western parts of Europe and the world.5 If studies specifically dedicated to socially engaged art and curatorial practice in post-​1989 CEE are lacking, in the past three decades Euro-​ American art criticism, theory and art historical research have identified socially engaged art as a key global tendency within contemporary art. Leading authors – such as Suzanne Lacy, Suzy Gablik, Grant Kester, Shannon Jackson and Claire Bishop in the US, and Nicolas Bourriaud and Maria Lind in Western Europe – have each articulated a particular set of terms, frameworks and evaluative criteria to approach art as social practice, contributing to a growing discursive vocabulary. I will briefly highlight a few of them here. In 1998, French curator and art critic Nicolas Bourriaud coined the term ‘relational aesthetics’ in order to account for an increasing number of socially engaged art practices emergent in the 1990s. These were based on participatory forms of audience engagement and on convivial interactions among visitors within a museum context or gallery space. For example, some of the early 1990s art works by the Argentinian-​born and US-​based artist Rikrit Tiravanija consisted of setting up social situations as art installations and performances where the artist cooked pad thai for people visiting the gallery. In other instances, Tiravanija installed boxes of instant soup containers next to a large bowl of boiling water, inviting museum and gallery visitors to use the ingredients to prepare and consume soup. People’s conversations and dialogic exchanges while eating and/or cooking food within the gallery space were both provoked by and became part of the content of the art.6 In response to Bourriaud’s conception of a harmonious community at the core of his ‘relational aesthetic’, British-​born and US-​based art historian Claire Bishop, in her article ‘Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics’ (2004), proposed the concept of ‘relational antagonism’. She further developed and exemplified this concept in her subsequent publications Participation, 20

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Points of Contention Documents of Contemporary Art (2006) and Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (2012).7 For Bishop, ‘relational antagonism’ designated a space where differences between participants and contexts were not collapsed into harmonious interactions but rather sustained. She examined the work of artists such as Swiss native Thomas Hirschhorn and Spanish artist Santiago Sierra, suggesting that their work provoked tensions that were sustained to a point of discomfort in order to bring public awareness to pertinent, yet neglected, socio-​political issues. For example, Sierra’s installation titled Workers who cannot be paid, remunerated to remain inside cardboard boxes (2000) at Kunst-​Werke, Berlin, consisted of paying six individual asylum seekers, who were not allowed to work legally in Germany, to sit for four hours a day, each underneath a cardboard box installed in the gallery space for the duration of the exhibition. Upon entering the exhibition space, visitors would see only what resembled a minimalist installation: a row of boxes, equally spaced, in the institution’s main hall. Aside from a label on the wall and a cough or slight noise made by the paid participants, their presence was rendered invisible to the viewer. Contrary to Tiravanija’s work, according to Bishop, Sierra’s provocative installation employed silences rather than convivial dialogue among strangers. Sierra sought to reveal the complex socio-​economic and political conditions governing the value of human beings within the global era of neoliberalism. American art historian and critic Grant Kester took to task the lack of political and ethical responsibility evident in both Bishop’s ‘relational antagonist’ practices based on destabilizing the presumed harmonious fabric of a community and Bourriaud’s concept of ‘relational aesthetics’. In contrast, Kester articulated the notion of ‘politically coherent communities’, which he developed in response to the forms of negation that can occur when artists view their collaborators as raw and inert material to be utilized as artistic media, and transformed or improved in some ways. Moreover, he proposed the concept of ‘dialogic exchange’ based on the mandatory presence of ‘empathetic identification’.8 The latter facilitated reciprocal exchanges among members of different, and often socio-​politically marginalized, groups through both conversations and active listening. Empathetic identification, Kester believed, should exist between artists and collaborators and between collaborators themselves. 21

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Socially Engaged Art after Socialism This was evident in Suzanne Lacy’s 1999 collaborative project Code 33: Emergency, Clear the Air,9 which took its name from the code used by the police to keep radio channels open in an emergency. Its format was based on conversation and dialogue between two specific communities, local (Oakland, CA) police and young people of colour, whose relation to the police is often marked by fear and violence. The work of art created and served as a platform for empathetic identification between the two groups with the goal of challenging their dominant stereotypical views of each other. Kester developed his approach first in his book Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art (2004),10 and further expanded it in The One and The Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in A Global Context (2011).11 Several recent major symposia, conferences and exhibitions  –​such as The Art of Participation: 1950 to Now at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2008–​9; Creative Time’s annual Summits, under the leadership of curator Nato Thomson, staged between 2009 and 2015, on topics related to art and social justice; Creative Time’s online database of over 350 socially engaged art projects initiated in conjunction with the Living as Form exhibition in 2011; and the now ever popular itinerant conference Open Engagement initiated by artist Jen Delos Reyes in 2007 to name just a few –​attest to the widespread interest in socially engaged art practice and discourse. Surprisingly, contemporary scholarship by authors in Western democracies, as I  outlined above, rarely documents or minimally refers to similar developments in CEE shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Although not numerous by any means, a relevant number of curatorial initiatives and artistic projects that engage art as social practice did emerge in CEE, as I will illustrate below through several case studies from Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania. Since American and Western European authors have elaborated useful theoretical approaches for socially engaged art practices, my selection and categorization of what constitutes participatory and collaborative forms of art relies on the already established criteria for such practice. This is not to render practices and theories in the West as main points of reference or models to follow for practitioners in CEE. Rather, this book seeks to bypass an east–​west dichotomy, which most often leads to essentializing differences between regions and cultures and suppressing 22

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Points of Contention points of connections and affinities between theoretical frameworks, methodologies and evaluative criteria in contemporary art, and curatorial and institutional practice. This is all the more important since the focus of the book is on practices in a specific CEE sub-​region after 1989, when (compared to the period during socialism) there has been an increasing opening up of and interest in scholarship and information of all kinds from other countries. In fact, the long-​term, transnational research, education, publishing and exhibition project Former West (2008–​16), based within BAK (basis voor actuele kunst) in the Netherlands, has sought to challenge ‘the hegemonic conjuncture that is “the West” ’, which, it argues, had not come to terms with the impact of the political, cultural and economic changes and events of 1989 upon itself. Former West asks: ‘One wonders precisely why then, when there is a “former East”, there is no “former West”?’12 As such, this book includes comparative analysis of specific projects from both east and west, grounded in their specific localities, which offers the possibility to re-​evaluate the meaning of concepts such as ‘social and political engagement’, ‘social capital’, ‘the left’, ‘public space’ and ‘civil society’, notions that certainly resonate beyond specific national contexts. At the same time, this study takes into account the specificity of the post-​socialist contexts that conveys a broader and growing trend of socially engaged art and curatorial practices developed with foreign funding sources in the last three decades.

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2 Civil Society, and Social, Cultural and Political Capital

Civil Society Contemporary ideas of politicized and oppositional civil society were revived in CEE under socialism in the context of the well-​known revolutionary social movements of Solidarity and Charter 77.1 In the 1980s CEE intellectual dissidents conceptualized civil society as an independent sphere where activity was entirely divorced from and directed against the socialist government. For example, in his book essay Antipolitics (1982) Hungarian author George Konrád described the democratic opposition as ‘antipolitics’ or ‘anti-​political politics’: Antipolitics is the emergence of independent forums that can be appealed to against political power; it is a counter-​power that cannot take power and does not wish to. Power it has already, here and now, by reason of its moral and cultural weight.2

Similarly, Czech author Václav Havel referred to ‘living in truth’ and an ‘independent life of society’ under the socialist regime as a site for the ‘power of the powerless’, ‘communities bound together by thousands of shared tribulations […] give rise to some of those special humanly meaningful political relationships and ties’.3 Moreover, this ‘independent’ sphere was a social sphere, which according to Havel was not limited to a small 24

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Civil Society, and Social, Cultural and Political Capital community of intellectual dissidents but included everyone ‘living within the truth’, that is: Anything from a letter by intellectuals to a workers’ strike, from a rock concert to a student demonstration, from refusing to vote in the farcical elections to making an open speech at some official congress, or even a hunger strike.4

These oppositional gestures were not meant as political actions aiming to restructure the current political system. Rather, social initiatives sought to improve the conditions of everyday life and to assert basic human rights. Such gestures become political by adopting a politics of antipolitics. As Havel expressed it, ‘It is political because it does not play politics.’5 Evidently, these calls for the depoliticization of lives and a conception of civil society based on morality emerged as reactions to socialist regimes. Dissident intellectuals of the 1980s believed these single-​party states, which attempted to control every aspect of social life, could no longer be reformed. On the other hand, political scientist Petr Kopecký highlighted the ‘zero-​sum logic’ and the ‘monolithic’ nature of dissidents’ conception of civil society seen as an antithesis to the totalitarian state, which ‘stressed the unity of opposition of “us” (the people) against “them” (the corrupt elite of the state)’.6 While implicitly based on a critique of political power, their emphasis on moral attributes envisioned a sphere of civil society above politics.7 Nevertheless, a clear distinction between the space of civil society and that of the state makes a particular kind of sense under socialism. During that time, the regime did not allow any political representation for opposition groups or independent activities outside its officially mandated party-​state’s directives. Civil society advocates aimed to achieve a sphere that would feature, for example, the rule of law, protection of civil rights, freedom of expression and private property. In the 1980s and early 1990s, both neoliberals and the political left in Western democracies eagerly embraced civil society as it emerged in CEE. For neoliberal economists, civil society was attractive since it was conceptualized as a sphere in opposition to a state that interfered with the free and deregulated (and unregulated) expansion of the market. For the political left, civil society promised a potential for political revolutions 25

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Socially Engaged Art after Socialism against neoliberal market forces that were corroding public spheres and state-​funded public services. A  contested concept, civil society has been variously interpreted and employed to serve competing goals.8 In the field of sociology, intellectuals in Western democracies defined civil society as ‘the third sector’, ‘third realm’, or the ‘non-​profit sector’.9 This included mostly apolitical non-​governmental organizations (NGOs), foundations and philanthropies initiating community-​building ­programmes. Although such organizations that aid the poor and marginalized communities were seen as legally protected and officially autonomous spaces, separated from both the state and the market, they often also functioned as complementary arms to the same institutions. The ‘new pluralists’, with roots in the 1970s Western European Second Left,10 defined civil society as a plural realm, where a multitude of forms of autonomous associations co-​exist, ultimately acting as a counterforce to both the state and corporate powers. Social scientist Michael Walzer pointed to the paradox of civil society where the state both frames civil society and occupies space within it. Arguing for a pluralist approach to associational life exemplified through political, cultural and social organizations, he considered a democratic civil society as ‘a project of projects’ or ‘a setting of settings’ and one controlled by its members through numerous, different and uncoordinated processes.11 The state is an integral component in producing and reproducing civil society, no matter how many forces within civil society aim to resist the state directives. This is because ‘civil society requires political agency’.12 In my discussions of art, curatorial and institutionalizing practices after the socialist periods, civil society is at once independent of and in perpetual negotiation with both the state and neoliberal forces. It is a space where a critical public sphere can emerge and where citizens express their interests and needs, and seek to challenge and influence political processes so as to take into account their varied claims. My understanding of a critical public sphere is similar to what writers Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge called a ‘proletarian public sphere’, which they perceived more as a process than as a site. As such, it is characterized by ‘discursive contestation for and among multiple, diverse and unequal constituencies’ and one that ‘offers forms of solidarity and reciprocity that are grounded in a collective experience of marginalization and expropriation’.13 Negt and Kluge distinguished 26

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Civil Society, and Social, Cultural and Political Capital this ‘proletarian public sphere’ from the ‘classical bourgeois public sphere’ represented by the institutions of the state that, theoretically, are there to serve people’s interests. It is also different from ‘the industrial–​commercial public sphere’, manifested in the institutions that serve the interests of the market. Being a process-​oriented concept, the proletarian public sphere’s potential for oppositional action against the dominant public lies in its ability to accommodate dissenting publics with diverse interests. Certainly, as Miriam Hansen warns, the challenge is how to avoid ‘the oppositional energy of individual groups and subcultures’ to be ‘neutralized in the marketplace of multicultural pluralism or polarized in a reductive competition of victimization’.14 As an integral feature of any functioning democratic civil society, public spheres are perpetually contested spaces. Here, a number of publics, especially counterpublics, manifest their interests alongside, or rather in opposition to, dominant publics. According to Michael Warner: Counterpublics are ‘counter’ to the extent that they try to supply different ways of imagining stranger sociability and its reflexivity; as publics, they remain oriented to stranger circulation in a way that is not just strategic but constitutive of membership and its effects.15

Counterpublics have the potential to emerge from within informal networks of social relations among groups of individuals that share a common experience of domination and marginalization. In the book, I inquire into the ways in which specific artists and curators have made use of social capital, in order to provoke ‘stranger sociability and its reflexivity’ within critical public spheres.

Social, Cultural and Political Capital In his article ‘Forms of Capital’ (1986), French sociologist and theorist Pierre Bourdieu distinguished between three forms of capital:  economic (that is, convertible into money and property rights), cultural (convertible, on certain conditions, into economic capital and institutionalized in educational qualification) and social, composed of social relations and obligations (connections).16 Influenced by Marxist thought, Bourdieu argued that ‘economic capital is at the root of all the other types of capital’,17 and 27

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Socially Engaged Art after Socialism social capital often functions to disguise the individuals’ interests in accumulating economic capital. He defined social capital as: The aggregate of actual or potential resources which are linked to possession of a durable network of more of less institutionalized relationships of mutual acquaintance and recognition –​or in other words, to membership in a group  –​which provides each of its members with the backing of the collectively-​owned capital, a ‘credential’ which entitles them to credit, in the various sense of the word.18

For Bourdieu, the benefits of social capital that require time and energy to build were closely connected to power relations among individuals privileged to have access to them. For instance, lawyers or doctors exploited ‘a capital of social connections, honourability and respectability’ to gain clientele or advance their careers.19 Considering social capital exclusively as a product of networks of connections nurtured by individuals to maintain their economic, cultural, and social superiority, Bourdieu did not directly acknowledge its emancipatory potential for marginalized or suppressed groups of people. However, social capital’s emancipatory potential emerged as a theoretical concept in CEE during the authoritarian socialist period within the realm of what Hungarian sociologist Elemer Hankiss called the ‘second society’. Rather than as a binary opposite to the official first (socialist) society, this was a sphere that emerged and existed as complementary to it.20 Coalesced into an unofficial structure, the multi-​layered networks of social capital in practice provided the hidden reality of a tacit unity among citizens and a means of resistance from below. In various former socialist countries, social capital accumulated in informal networks and expanded into broader and more or less organized social, albeit apolitical, movements. One such example in Czechoslovakia was Charter 77, a petition written in 1977 by writers and intellectuals demanding recognition of human rights by the socialist regime. In Poland, the trade union Solidarność emerged in 1980 outside of the control of the socialist regime and advocated for workers’ rights and social change. The Danube Circle environmental movement grew in Hungary during the 1980s and functioned as a platform for critiquing the centrally organized socialist government. In various ways, each 28

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Civil Society, and Social, Cultural and Political Capital of these organizations symbolically contributed to bringing about the collapse of the associated communist regime and influenced changes within the early years of transition. It is important to point out here that while the above-​mentioned well-​known social movements occurred in Central European countries, less organized and less visible forms of resistance also emerged within the second societies of other nations, such as Romania and Bulgaria. Such movements emerged from within privately accumulated social capital in networks that created a sense of togetherness, solidarity, and reciprocity. For theorist Manuel Castells, such networks emphasize that ‘[t]‌ogetherness is a fundamental psychological mechanism to overcome fear. And overcoming fear is the fundamental threshold for individuals to cross in order to engage in a social movement.’21 Since the claim for a subversive potential inherent in social capital is anchored in the CEE context, it is important to emphasize that the presence and nature of social capital in the post-​socialist context was most often the result of factors that were opposite to developments identified in Western democracies, described, for example, by well-​known sociologists such as Americans James Coleman and Robert Putnam. Coleman was concerned with social capital’s impact on the development of human capital in American public schools, Catholic private schools and non-​religious private schools.22 Unlike physical capital represented by material forms, and human capital captured in the skills and knowledge acquired by an individual, social capital exists in the relations between and among persons through ‘obligations, expectations and trustworthiness of structure’, ‘information channels’ and ‘appropriable social organizations’.23 He argued that the existence of social capital, defined as a set of relations at the family and community level, offset some of the social and economic disadvantages of a child. For Coleman social capital was useful to individuals to advance their own goals. Putnam followed and built upon Coleman’s functionalist view of social capital, regarding it as a particular resource available to an individual or organization to meet its needs and interests. In Making Democracy Work (2000), he outlined its mechanics: ‘generalized social trust’ (trust in people in general), ‘generalized forms of reciprocity’ (a continuing relationship of exchange that is at any given time unrequired, but that involves mutual expectations that a benefit granted now should 29

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Socially Engaged Art after Socialism be repaid in the future) and ‘networks of civic engagement’. These networks can be horizontal, ‘bringing together agents of equivalent status and power’, like neighbourhood associations, choral societies, cooperatives, sports clubs, etc., which are one essential form of social capital, or vertical, ‘linking unequal agents in asymmetric relations of hierarchy and dependence’.24 Putnam considered that a ‘vigorous’ civil society within the era of neoliberalism was achieved through social capital that was generated through civic and voluntary participation in associations. Illustrating a civic republican tradition, he saw these associations as non-​oppositional to the dominant political order but rather consensual in character. Emphasizing their role in socializing members, for Putnam these associations produced moral commitment and generalized social trust, and ultimately contributed to the health and stability of a democratic capitalist society.25 In Western democracies, social capital has been visibly accumulated in the participation of the public in various voluntary and, most often, apolitical associations. In contrast, in the post-​socialist context, social capital had been accumulated in private networks and forms of associations, not regulated publicly in official organizations such as choral societies and bowling leagues. It is here in the widespread and privately nurtured informal networks that social capital has an emancipatory potential for marginalized groups. This potential is materialized as social capital enters the public domain and morphs into political capital. Sociologist Pari Bauman defined political capital as ‘an asset that links an individual or a group to power structures and policy outside the locality’. Conceptualized in terms of power and politics, political capital emerges ‘in a direct tangible sense in that rights give way to claims and assets, and in an indirect way, in that institutions determine access to these claims and assets’.26 When viewed in the art field, on the one hand, political capital materializes at the level of the art project when participants enact, even if symbolically, their socio-​ political rights. On the other hand, it becomes visible in the artistic process and scope of the work of art, which aims to reveal and/or call attention to systemic inequities conducive of exclusionary and depoliticized kinds of communities. The politically subversive potential of social capital gains a deeper meaning in light of Bourdieu’s notion of the habitus, which he defined as 30

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Civil Society, and Social, Cultural and Political Capital systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, […] objectively adapted to their goals without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery of the operation necessary to attain them and, being all this, collectively orchestrated without being the product of the orchestrating action of a conductor.27

In this view, individual agents or groups of agents, most often unconsciously, both produced and reproduced the structures of the habitus. The habitus comprised a dialectical relationship between an objective structure and dispositions. The latter were described as particular world and cultural outlooks ingrained in agents since their earliest upbringing. Certainly, the interpersonal social relations and interactions that characterize social capital are part of Bourdieu’s dispositions and, implicitly, are both determined by and determine the broader ‘objective structure’ of the habitus. It is here in the processes of interaction and reciprocal relationships between agents and structure, where agents are both producing and reproducing the structure, that the political potential of accumulated social capital can emerge. In light of Bourdieu’s concept of the habitus, social capital in CEE is making up dispositions through which the ‘objective structures’ (e.g. of language, economy) were appropriated by a ‘group of people with common cultural traditions and history.’ According to Bourdieu, ‘the truth of the interaction is never entirely contained in the interaction’. In fact, ‘it is their present and past positions in the social structure that biological individuals carry with them, at all times and in all places, in the form of dispositions’.28 Social capital could thus be understood as an active component of this structural entity that is both determining and determined by the actions and interactions within the networked web of social relations. In the contemporary era ruled by neoliberal capitalism, a critical and alternative sphere of action has to both inhabit and employ strategies and capital resources inherent in the dominant power structure in order to have any chance to emerge and to ignite change. The the ‘capital’ in social capital can thus be conceptualized as a collective asset used to pursue social justice. Thematically structured in discussions of specific socially engaged 31

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Socially Engaged Art after Socialism art, curatorial and institutionalizing projects, this book traces the shifting notions and functions of social capital and civil society from the pre-​1989 communist contexts and the early 1990s to the flourishing of neoliberalism in the mid to late 2000s. If one is to grasp social capital’s emancipatory and oppositional potential, its capital component cannot be divorced from politics, and it must be approached from within the specificity of the local contexts.

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3 Historical Antecedents: Participatory Art under Socialism, 1956–​89

Meant as a cursory historical overview and introduction to post-​1989 art practices, this chapter offers a discussion of specific neo-​avant-​garde art projects during the socialist periods in Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria, selected because of their participatory, collaborative and experimental nature, unfolding, often unofficially, within the public space. As symbolic enactments of an embryonic civil society during socialism, these projects reveal the role of informal networks of social relations in the creative process, and the rather ambiguous relation between official and unofficial forms of art and life. Following the Yalta conference in 1945, the US, UK and Soviet Union leaders divided the geopolitical world map, with all CEE countries falling under Soviet influence. By 1948 a communist leadership instructed by Soviet advisers was installed in each of the CEE nations, placing them in a relationship of economic, political and military dependence on Moscow.1 Although satellite states within the Soviet Union’s orbit functioned under officially similar and especially strict homogenizing directives during Joseph Stalin’s era, each nation nevertheless manifested specific variations in the implementation of the socialist regime. During and after the destalinization period of the 1950s and early 1960s, following Stalin’s death in 1953, most Soviet bloc countries saw a 33

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Socially Engaged Art after Socialism period of cultural, political and economic relaxation. Despite a relative period of thaw, the totalitarian system was, as Havel noted, ‘thoroughly permeated by a dense network of regulations, proclamations, directives, norms, orders, and rules’.2 This official web of control was bound together by the communist ideology premised on a socialist present that would eventually lead to a utopian communist future. Nevertheless, corollary to the official nexus, a second sphere of existence was taking shape –​a web of informal and alternative activities enacted by various individuals and groups. Looking specifically at Hungary, Hankiss called this unofficial web of existence ‘the second society’. It comprised various areas: ‘the second economy’ (in Hungary this included, for example, household farming plots alongside collectivized agriculture); ‘the second public’ (the body of samizdat literature that represented an alternative public sphere); ‘the second culture’ (the youth subcultures, hippies, pop, folk and punk music); ‘the second consciousness’ (the ‘split’ mind where people lived an official life and another life in the second society or in their family environment); and ‘the second sphere of sociopolitical interactions’ (social networks associated, for example, with peace and environmental organizations).3 Samizdat means the distribution of one’s own writing without the intervention of a publishing house or the official permission of authorities. Coined by a Russian poet in the 1950s, the term evolved to include typewritten publications not sanctioned by the socialist party as well as imported and circulated copies of books published abroad by emigrants that circulated within the second society.4 Neo-​avant-​garde art practices, along with samizdat publications and oppositional groups, comprised a significant part of the ‘second culture’ realm. At the core of such initiatives within the second society were informal social networks. The second society was not conceptualized in a relation of binary opposition to the first society, which was characterized by ‘vertical organization, downward flow of power, state ownership, centralisation, political dominance, saturation with official ideology, visibility and legitimacy’.5 Rather, the second society arguably represented a ‘no-​man’s land’, ‘a zero degree’6 that emerged as a complement to the official first society, in fact helping the system by acting as a release valve. As Hankiss noted, the socialist elites ‘needed the human and material resources generated in this second sphere, they needed the people’s goodwill and readiness to consent’.7 Thus, 34

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Historical Antecedents activities within the various areas of the second society were neither in complete opposition nor outside the legality of the officially centralized party-​state. The plurality of non-​official actions varied from country to country and in terms of challenges they posed to the socialist regime. Some pursued ‘antipolitics’ as described by Konrád and ‘living in truth’ as noted by Havel. Although not overtly political in nature, they had political implications and greatly defied the regime’s directives. Others had goals of political reform, such as Solidarity in Poland and Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia.8 The existence of the ‘second culture’ was not limited to Hungary.9 To varying degrees similar spheres of activities were present in other national contexts. State–​society relations varied greatly across the CEE nations in both place and time, forming a constantly changing set of interactions and actions. As Gordon Skilling rightfully observed, some socialist states, totalitarian in nature, such as socialist Romania, sought ‘to maintain complete authority over society and to destroy all forms of autonomy’, in which case ‘independent action remained highly individualistic in character’. Other socialist regimes, authoritarian in form, such as Hungary, ‘permitted or were forced to recognize some degree of independence and autonomy’, in which case a small independent society existed but one which could rarely ‘rival or challenge the official state power’.10 Exploring specific avant-​garde artists’ participatory projects in Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria offers an opportunity to emphasize the context-​specific nature of experimental artistic activities across different localities.

Socially Engaged Art in Socialist Hungary Hungary saw its first oppositional actions against the socialist regime during the 1956 revolution, which became a full-​scale revolt after the Hungarian Secret Security Police (AVO) fired at a mass demonstration of students, intellectuals and workers in Budapest on 23 October. Inspired by Khrushchev’s speech in 1956 denouncing Stalin’s policies, the demonstrators voiced their disapproval of Hungary’s Stalinist leader Mátyás Rákosi, who was reluctant to lessen party control over all aspects of social life and to address the desire of the great majority to restore democracy. Despite the intention of Imre Nagy (a reformist communist elected prime minister 35

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Socially Engaged Art after Socialism in October 1956) to restrain the Soviet influence, the revolution ignited. The first Soviet intervention in October that aimed to dissipate the revolt was not successful, as the Hungarian army began to fight alongside the demonstrators against the Soviet occupation. Their collective demands, going beyond those of the reformist communists, included ‘full political pluralism, civil liberties, free elections, independent labour unions and worker’s councils, the abolition of security police and collective farms and the restoration of parliamentary democracy and a mixed economy’11. After the momentary withdrawal of the Soviet army, Nagy announced the abolition of the party-​state.12 However, the Soviet army returned in full force on 4 November 1956 and crushed the incipient move towards democratization. A pro-​Soviet central party of Hungarian Communists was reinstalled under the leadership of János Kádár. Örizetlen pénz / Unguarded Money, the participatory public action on Budapest’s streets in October 1956, initiated by Hungarian conceptual neo-​ avant-​garde artist Miklós Erdély (1928–​1986), emerged from within this context. It unfolded in the interim period between the first failed and second successful intervention of the Soviet Red Army. It was a collaborative public action by Erdély, his artist and writer friends and members of the Hungarian Writers Union. Örizetlen pénz / Unguarded Money consisted of unguarded military and Red Cross collection boxes placed in six central locations around Budapest. Each box was accompanied by a poster, an interlaced hundred-​forint bill that read: ‘The purity of our revolution makes it possible for us to collect money in this way for the families of our fallen martyrs. Signed by The Writers Union of Hungary.’13 In a 1983 interview Erdély stated: we organized a group and decided to throw the money into unguarded collection boxes at six different locations in Budapest and from then on my task was driving around in the car of the Writer’s Union and 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.14

The reference to the official guards eager to ‘protect’ the collection boxes from an unidentified enemy reveals the action’s liminal position between 36

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Historical Antecedents the official and unofficial realms, between the first and second societies and, most importantly, between art and life. The action functioned as a platform for participations and interactions between the small group of writers and artists who played an active part in the revolution, and the broader Budapest public. In both its scope and its process, Örizetlen pénz / Unguarded Money revealed that the effects of informal social relations were closely intertwined with political power structures. First, the action was an open and unambiguous gesture in support of the 1956 revolution. It acknowledged the position of the initiators against the current socialist regime. Most significantly, the collaborative nature of the project emerged from a social capital that had been accumulated and established through conversations and social relations among networks of friends, where all sorts of information could be obtained and transformed into ‘the means of communicating spontaneous public sentiment’.15 Materialized in this public action, the networks of informal communications sustained the physical presence of the revolution in the public spaces of the city. Second, Örizetlen pénz / Unguarded Money also functioned as a platform for collective action, activating a broader public and soliciting contributions from passers-​by who might only indirectly have participated in the revolution. The collaborative intervention within the city’s streets carved out a temporary public sphere where open and equal relations among autonomous yet anonymous individuals were fostered. The collapse of the boundary between art and life was further emphasized by the fact that it was not until 1965, when Erdély became aware of ‘happenings’, that he referred to this action as an art event and gave it the title Örizetlen pénz / Unguarded Money.16 Yet in 1956, when the action took place, it defied the contemporary artistic doctrine of socialist realism, which was an aesthetic directive aimed to celebrate and depict a not yet realized future communist utopia of the proletariat. Initiated by a socio-​ politically engaged conceptualist artist, Erdély’s collaborative public action became an interstice of people, objects, activities and spaces held and brought together.17 Albeit temporary and small scale, this action was significant particularly in the post-​1956 context. Following the suppression of the 1956 revolution, and the imposition of drastic measures such as the declaration of 37

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Socially Engaged Art after Socialism martial law on 9 December 1956, and the reappointment of communist leadership in all public posts, the Kádár regime transformed the Stalinist slogan ‘those who are not with us, are against us’ into ‘those who are not against us, are with us’.18 This gesture entailed an unwritten ‘social contract’ with the population. In exchange for an improved economic situation and living conditions, the people had to demonstrate political passivity and acceptance. As part of Hungary’s process of reform, the New Economic Mechanism was initiated in 1968. It established an economy that combined market elements, decentralized planning and a greater enterprise economy with regard to production and investment.19 While this economic reform, also referred to as ‘goulash-​communism’, placed Hungary in a socially and economically better situation than any of the other Soviet bloc countries, it did not diminish the political stranglehold of Kádár’s regime. It did, however, open Hungary up to the West. In the field of visual arts, post-​war international art trends in the US and Western Europe became known to the local artists, whose practice diversified beyond the realist and figurative styles to include abstraction, minimalism and Pop Art. The legal boundaries of culture and intellectual debate were established in 1966, under the leadership of György Aczél as the Minister of Culture, with the introduction of the cultural policy based on the 3T’s:  Tiltás (Prohibition), Türés (Tolerance), Támogatás (Support). These guidelines, which extended to visual art and publications of all types, were meant as forms of co-​optation of the groups of intellectuals into the system. At the same time, they also gave rise to manifestations that were highly critical but disguised in the official jargon so that they were allowed to appear. George Schopflin used the term ‘para-​opposition’ to describe activities that ‘do not overtly question the ideological bases of the system, but do accept the leeway for a semi-​autonomous political role permitted by the system’.20 The existence and activities of the Balatonboglár Chapel Studio art space –​considered as one of the most important centres of the Hungarian neo-​avant-​garde21 –​active during the summers between 1970 and 1973 on Lake Balaton (about 60 miles from Budapest), could be seen as an example of ‘para-​opposition’ in its one-​time negotiation with the official regime (Figures  3.1, 3.2 and 3.3). The young Hungarian artist György Galántai initiated the Studio in 1968 when he signed a 15-​year lease on a deserted chapel that he intended to use for various art activities. Inaugurated in the 38

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Figure 3.1  Book cover for Törvénytelen avantgárd:  Galántai György balatonboglári kápolnaműterme 1970–​1973 (Illegal Avant-​garde: The Chapel Studio of György Galántai in Balatonboglár 1970–​1973). Photo courtesy of Artpool Art Research Center.

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Figure 3.2 Tamás Szentjóby, Expulsion Exercise:  Punishment-​ Preventive Auto-​ Therapy. Photograph documenting performance at Chapel Studio in Balatonboglár, 1972. Photo copyright György Galántai. Courtesy of Artpool Art Research Center.

Figure 3.3  László Beke, The Meeting of Czechoslovakian and Hungarian Artists, 1972, Chapel Studio in Balatonboglár. Outdoor Action. Photo copyright György Galántai. Courtesy of Artpool Art Research Center.

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Figure 3.4  László Beke, The Meeting of Czechoslovakian and Hungarian Artists, 1972, Chapel Studio in Balatonboglár. Photo work documenting the ‘Handshaking Action’. Photo courtesy of Artpool Art Research Center.

summer of 1970 under the name ‘Chapel Exhibitions’, it included six different exhibitions, performances, music concerts and lectures.22 The following summer, the programmes increased in number and diversity and as a result had the close attention of the county authorities, which requested 41

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Socially Engaged Art after Socialism that artworks be juried prior to being exhibited. The officials’ interest in the Chapel’s activities was ignited in the summer of 1971 following the publication of an article that translated into English as ‘Some avant-​gardists moving on the lawless path, illegal art exhibitions and programmes at the rented chapel’ in the local official paper. Galántai, along with a couple of other artists, made an attempt to negotiate with the local cultural officials in a face-​to-​face meeting in 1971. Failed negotiations with the socialist officials led Galántai in 1972 to change the name to Chapel Studio, designating a private studio rather than a public space for exhibitions that required approval from the authorities. Even though the chapel, as a private art studio, was theoretically allowed to organize art exhibitions, the authorities often paid visits to the space, arbitrarily removing works that they considered provocative. Galántai recalls a specific example from the summer of 1973. It was the poster design for the international exhibition Szövegek / Texts by Dóra Maurer: ‘they found the 56 names (which was just a coincidence) an obvious reference to 1956, and they “noticed” the word alliance hidden in the text: Szö-​ve-​ts-​gek = Szövegek (alliance); hence a secret alliance … and it’s being international only made the event even more dangerous!!’23 As the authorities had already decided that the Chapel Studio would be shut down, they looked for reasons to publicly legitimatize its closure, such as the absence of a toilet. Aware of this fact, and in order to extend the life of the studio and its activities, Galántai was in continuous correspondence with various local authorities (the public health office, the fire marshal’s office, in order to get permits) knowing all too well the vagaries of the bureaucratic system. The time it took to process his requests was also the time the Chapel Studio could remain open, as the authorities needed a legitimate reason to close it.24 Although the final summer of the Chapel Studio saw the participation of international artists (from Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia), the space was forcibly shut down in late August 1973 and people evicted. The authorities changed the name to Chapel Exhibition (Kápolnatárlat) and used the space, starting in 1974, for state-​sanctioned art exhibitions. The Chapel Studio activities were part of the Türés (Tolerance) category, which included cultural activities happening out of sight, most often in the countryside. Although required to disclose their location, the participants were given minimal or no state support. Networks of friends served 42

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Historical Antecedents as the primary funders as well as information channels, spreading the word among unofficial artists across the country to gather in Balatonboglár. For instance, generalized forms of reciprocity based on obligations and expectations represented the engines of the neo-​avant-​garde activities at the Chapel Studio. Effects of existing forms of social capital were manifested, for example, in the collective cleaning of the abandoned chapel and collective curating and installation of exhibitions. Other examples include the sustained group negotiation with the authorities, as well as the collaborative staging of exhibitions showcasing competing aesthetic tendencies. In fact, the Chapel Studio became a public platform where divergent artistic groups were able to exhibit together. Most important, as art historian Kemp-​Welch observed, ‘The Chapel Studio elevated friendship to the level of the sacred.’25 It was a dynamic art space where close to 200 artists, both local and international, exhibited their work over the course of three years. At the same time the activities at the Studio emphasized the intricately ambiguous relationship between the first society represented by the regime and the second society containing unofficial, or rather semi-​official, activities. Rather than sharing a common art practice, these neo-​avant-​garde tendencies  –​either socio-​politically motivated or interested in experiments of the aesthetic form –​stayed united against a common political enemy, defying and critiquing current conditions.26 During the last two years of its existence, the Balatonboglár Chapel Studio also became a platform for body art performances, actions, happenings, conceptual art, land art and site-​specific art. Documents of these varied artistic activities at Balatonboglár Chapel Studio and the friendship networks forged through this platform formed the basis for the Artpool Art Research Centre, which Galántai and his partner Júlia Klaniczay established in 1979. Until it was officially recognized in 1992, when it opened to the public with funding from the Budapest Municipal Council, the Centre benefited for five years (1985–​90) from financial support from the Soros Foundation of the Hungarian-​born and US-​based billionaire George Soros, who will play an important role, as we will see, in fostering contemporary art in the early 1990s in several CEE nations. Such support gained an existential meaning in a context where state authorities had Galántai under constant surveillance in the late 1970s 43

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Socially Engaged Art after Socialism and 1980s. Functioning at once as an archive, educational centre and exhibition space, Artpool Art Research Centre continues to be an important international centre for material on contemporary international media arts, such as mail art, sound poetry, conceptual art, fluxus, installation, performance art, video art and Hungarian non-​authorized art of the 1960s to 1970s.27 The participatory and collaborative nature evident at the Balatonboglár Chapel Studio at the organizational level was also at the core of specific art projects developed within its framework. For example, in 1972 the poet, conceptual and fluxus artist Tamás Szentjóby, who in 1975 was forced to leave the country, not to return until 1991, created his work Expulsion Exercise:  Punishment-​Preventive Auto-​Therapy. In the late 1960s, before creating Expulsion Exercise, Szentjóby had experimented with various artistic styles and approaches, expanding upon his already experimental poetry. For instance, along with Gábor Altorjay, Szentjóby created the first Hungarian Happening, The Lunch (In Memoriam Batu Khan), which was held on 25 June 1966 for 90 minutes in István Szenes’s wine cellar in front of 40 to 50 guests. An absurd, anarchic event with masochist elements, the happening was in the spirit of the Viennese Actionism. The authorities felt threatened by happenings, which they saw as nurturing subversive behaviour. As one might expect, this sort of artistic activity placed Szentjóby on the radar of the authorities that followed him. In her recent book Antipolitics in Central European Art (2014), art historian Klara Kemp-​Welch offers a detailed discussion of The Lunch and the level of surveillance during this time, which suggests a blurred boundary and ambiguous relationship between the official and unofficial realms, between ‘the first’ and ‘second’ societies. Another similar participatory action from the  late  1960s, Action-​Reading (1968), presented Szentjóby tied to a rope, the end of which was controlled and manipulated by the audience, while the writer Nicolaus Urban was holding a book for the artist to read. As Kemp-​Welch observed, ‘His access to the book was thus contingent on multiple external agents, and the chosen participants became co-​responsible for his restricted actions.’28 It is from within the history of such Dada-​inspired happenings and performances that Szentjóby’s participatory socially engaged art Expulsion Exercise: Punishment-​Preventive Auto-​Therapy (1972) action at Balatonboglár Chapel Studio emerges (Figure 3.2). It was part of what he and artist Gyula Pauer 44

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Historical Antecedents called ‘Direct Week’, a week-​long series of ‘presentations, concepts evolved on site, happenings, events, body, agitation, other actions’ in various media: ‘film, slide, tape recorder, projects, concept sheets, messages, correspondence, environments, etc.’. Not a conventional exhibition of artworks, most importantly Direct Week was participatory in both concept and practice. As Szentjóby and Pauer stated in their 1972 call for proposals, ‘Our program makes use of means through which we can obtain direct feedback. In other words the audience comes into contact with us not through contemplation but through activity.’29 Szentjóby’s contribution to Direct Week was his Expulsion Exercise action. For seven days –​1–​8 July 1972 –​he sat for eight hours inside the Chapel with a bucket over his head. On the wall was posted a list of questions that viewers could ask him: Can one form a community with another person without being free oneself? Is it the most important thing to discover and realize what is needed by life? Can he stand without us or is everything hopeless? Can the blockade of the present be broken only by new attitude? Is the realization of the future in the present an acceleration of our lives? Does your action include the punishment? Does your punishment include the action? Do you feel particularly exposed because you cannot see whom you are talking to?30

On the one hand, the process of asking those simple questions created a situation that resembled a police interrogation, a constant threat and source of trauma for the artists as well as for the population. Also, in its time and site-​specificity, the action undermined the communist jury system, which was designed for traditional forms of art, such as painting and sculpture. On the other hand, Szentjóby engaged the public dialogically in the creation of the work. He triggered a form of collective protest, provoking self-​reflexivity and self-​awareness in the participants that included fellow artists, local residents, and Hungarian and international tourists, as reflected in visitors’ comments left in the guestbook. There were also some rather bold (in a socialist context) techniques to advertise the Chapel 45

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Socially Engaged Art after Socialism Studio: stencilled T-​shirts were sold, and a sign strategically placed to be visible from the village below was placed on the building, which indicates the presence of a diverse public in the summer programmes at the Chapel (Figures 3.5 and 3.6). Within a relatively strict socio-​ political context, Szentjóby’s public action aimed at carving an inclusive public sphere where the basic human right of free expression would be possible. This was also communicated in his action Sit Out –​Be Forbidden! (1972), which took place in public space in front of the Hotel Intercontinental in central Budapest. The artist sat for 20 minutes with his mount strapped shut by a leather belt, ‘re-​enacting Black Panther co-​founder Bobby Seale’s binding and gagging at his trial in Chicago in 1968’: not only making reference to the three T’s ‘but summarizing his wider attitude to like, and to authority in general’.31 As Polish art historian Piotr Piotrowski noted, ‘when considered in purely “stylistic” or “formal” terms, one could see East European neo-​avant-​garde practices as being to a certain extent, derivative. However […] … their performance often involved deeply held existential and political convictions.’32 Szentjóby’s participatory Expulsion Exercise action, based on dialogic exchanges with members of the public, both emerged from and fuelled horizontal networks of trust and solidarity, or what Konrád called a ‘network of spiritual authority’, which he compared to ‘the intimacy of travellers on a slow train […] where passengers start talking with one another as if they were old friends’.33 This sense of ‘moral opposition’ was also conveyed in the collaborative art project The Meeting of Czechoslovakian and Hungarian Artists (Figures 3.3 and 3.4). Initiated by Hungarian artist, art historian and (later) curator László Beke at Balatonboglár in the same summer of 1972, the project was the outcome of a friendly meeting between Czechoslovak and Hungarian artists. Beke’s intention was to document and transform into an art project a friendly meeting between 15 Hungarian (including Erdély, Galántai, Pauer, and Szentjóby) and 11 Czechoslovakian artists visiting Balatonboglár. Even though it lasted only for two days, the three-​part project was significant in attempting to break a well-​known stereotype, which held that the Hungarian and Czech and Slovak people do not get along. As Beke said: ‘I had always been irritated by the fact that while Slovaks and Hungarians have seemed to hate one another for 150 years, whenever we take a closer look at things, we can cooperate in really productive ways.’34 46

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Historical Antecedents The first component of the collaborative project, which, according to Beke, resembled a ‘tableau vivant’, was also inspired by a photograph Beke saw in an art magazine that captured Hungarian troops playing tug-​of-​ war before invading Czechoslovakia in 1968 (Figure 3.3).35 At the Chapel Studio, the game consisted in the assembled artists lining up outside and pulling at the magazine with the historical photograph. The second component consisted in the artists collectively discovering over 100 words from Hungarian and Czech or Slovak languages that are similar in both meaning and form (Figure 3.4). The words were then printed on paper and installed in a vertical column on one of the Chapel Studio’s exhibition walls. The third and final phase of the project consisted in all the artists shaking hands. Each of the handshakes was photographed and all the photographs were then placed on the wall. As Gyula Pauer recalled, ‘In the end, all those who were shaking hands signed the photos. By this action, we symbolically made peace with each other, at a time when our political system was still in conflict with Czechoslovakia. We made peace, and that’s what was important.’36 Artistically and conceptually integrating different modes of communication, the art project juxtaposed three representational registers: textual, gestural and body-​centred. In broader terms, in its focus on various conceptual forms of (mis)communications the project mocked national boundaries dividing neo-​avant-​garde artist communities. While motivated by an antipolitical outlook, the project simultaneously became politically symbolic. It communicated the Hungarian artists’ solidarity with the (failed) aspiration of the 1968 Prague Spring, realizing that socialism, as a system, was impossible to reform. Retrospectively, socially engaged participatory art practices, such as those developed at the Chapel Studio, could be seen as attempts to create public spheres where various publics –​ not limited to the artist and intellectual groups –​could come together. By channelling social relations, accumulated through informal channels into visible actions, such neo-​avant-​garde art implicitly functioned as latent, semi-​official resistance to the regime. In 1973 Beke initiated a samizdat magazine called Ahogy azt Móricka elképzeli (the title refers to the main character of several Hungarian jokes, who confuses or misunderstands words and situations). Guided by the conceptual art notion that ‘a work of art is identical with its notion 47

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Figure 3.5  Image of Galántai painting a tourist sign on the rooftop of the Chapel Studio, 1971. Photo courtesy of Artpool Art Research Center.

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Figure 3.6  Image of group of people, showing the T-​shirt printed on the spot using the stencil made by Galántai, 1971. Photo copyright György Galántai. Courtesy of Artpool Art Research Center.

documented’, Beke collected various artists’ proposals and ideas for unrealized (or unrealizable) art projects and presented them in a manuscript. Published in seven copies, it was distributed only to those who promised to make another seven copies.37 Beke’s notion was similar to what American conceptual artist Sol LeWitt expressed in his 1967 ‘Paragraphs on Conceptual art’, namely that ‘the idea becomes a machine that makes the art’.38 Sol LeWitt’s conception emerged as a critique of the Modernist paradigm and of the market based on the original art object created by the artist’s hand. Beke’s initiative, on the other hand, aimed to bypass the restrictive possibilities of his local context, making an existential difference between, for example, the Western notion of conceptual art and the Eastern European variant: On the other hand the ‘immaterial’ nature of conceptualist works, and the ‘poorness’ of the media employed made communication easier and censorship more difficult. This is why conceptual art had to be invented in Eastern Europe, and its function as a strategy for evading authority should be considered a feature specific to its development in the region.39

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Socially Engaged Art after Socialism Beke’s focus on the existential character of these art practices and the participatory form of distribution of his samizdat manuscript further emphasized the vital role of privately nurtured social relations in people’s everyday lives, which functioned ‘as a strategy for evading authority’. The informal networks of friends and acquaintances required a generalized form of trust among its participants. This was vital for the relating and/or obtaining of uncensored information that most often travelled by word of mouth and various social relations. If the Chapel Studio’s participatory actions took place away from the capital city, Gábor Tóth’s anonymous and participatory actions in the early 1980s unfolded within Budapest’s urban public space. His interventions, despite their ephemerality, were suggestive examples for the role of the artist as participant observer and catalyst for collective actions. Engaging directly with the locality of a particular social space, the importance of Tóth’s public actions was in raising questions about the active role of art within the contemporary Hungarian ‘goulash communism’. For example, his early 1980s Food Vending Machine, a one-​hour action in Moscow Square, consisted in directly engaging the public. He appropriated one of the four existing vending machines in the square, purchased all of the items in it –​sweets, cakes and sandwiches –​and began giving them away to passers-​by. In exchange for a desired food item from the vending machine, he asked for a personal object. The public actively engaged in the action and creatively offered not only various personal items, such as photographs, handkerchiefs, small clothing items, newspapers, or a small drawing, but also food was exchanged for food or money was exchanged for food. Tóth placed the objects he received in the exact location of the item extracted. As such, the food vending machine gradually transformed into a portable people’s museum made of personal yet anonymous items. After approximately an hour, the action ended when the artist left the square, leaving all the items behind in the vending machine.40 The verbal and physical processes of exchange between Tóth and the public in the square represented the content of his work. In my email correspondence with the artist, he emphasized how important anonymity is for his art practice. He did not advertise his public action as art prior to its occurrence and he also avoided any documentation of the project as it unfolded. Obviously, this raises a rather difficult dilemma for the art 50

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Historical Antecedents historian. How might one account for and classify such practices when the absence of documentation and the ephemeral nature of the work is part of the artist’s intention? Tóth saw in the concept of anonymity a powerful way to undermine the institutionalized canon of art history, particularly its Modernist myth, which values the Artist as sole creator of an Artwork. With his ephemeral actions within the social fabric of the city, Tóth aimed at engendering dialogic interactions as a way to overcome the divide between artists and the public. Such attempts build upon earlier avant-​ garde movements such as Dada, and more recent practices in the US and Western Europe such as the Situationist International and Fluxus. These artists aimed to dissolve traditional methods of evaluating art by conceptualizing ways of uniting art and life and paradoxically challenging the concept of art by making art. By the mid to late 1980s a series of artists groups had emerged, who continued their activities into the early 1990s. They adopted a rather satiric approach to the neo-​avant-​garde forms of the previous two decades. Groups emerged spontaneously devoid of a clearly defined agenda or the leadership of an individual artist. For instance, in the manifesto of the seven-​member Helyetes Szomjazók (Substitute Thirsters) Group it was specified that the Group was ‘Heterogeneous, not permanent and does not endeavour to permanency, it is not an institute and not self-​consistent, has no profile and is built upon occasional actions (exhibitions, installations, lectures, competitions, concerts, depression-​evenings)’.41 Using humorous reproductions and reconstructions, their collective work was based on re-​ adapting well-​known historical events and art works from the past, as a way to undermine the quest of Modern Art for the new. A similarly anti-​establishment drive was at the core of the eight-​ member Újlak Group (meaning New Dwelling). It emerged in 1989 as a group of artists staging various one-​night exhibitions, initially in the derelict buildings of Budapest Public Baths and then in an abandoned movie theatre. Refusing any sort of a priori organized programme, their organically emerging process-​ based and Dada-​ like activities combined performances, happenings, mixed media installation, and music and dance performances. Rather than be guided by a particular artistic tendency, for Újlak ‘individual and joint work becomes an insignificant problem since the importance of creating dwarfs the question of who creates’.42 The work 51

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Socially Engaged Art after Socialism of these young artist groups only indirectly involved the public.43 However, in the eclectic and haphazard nature of their activities, these groups, in various forms, aimed to stand against any form of institutionalized art practice. Such activities must be understood within the emergent notions of civil society articulated by dissident intellectuals as an independent and anti-​state sphere of action. Participatory and engaged forms of art paralleled the emergence of social movements within second cultures. Although most visible and developed in Poland, which had an organized opposition in Solidarity, and in Czechoslovakia, where a human rights movement emerged in Charter 77, in Hungary the existence of solidarity among networks of friends gave rise to various initiatives with a more or less political and oppositional character. For instance, the Danube Circle, an environmental group founded in May 1983, protested against the construction of a hydroelectric power station and dam (Gabčíkovo-​Nagymaros) on the Danube, which was agreed upon by both the Hungarian and the Czechoslovak governments. The dam would displace a large number of Hungarian villages as well as endanger the drinking water supplies and destroy valuable plant and animal habitat. The Danube Circle protested through several marches on the Danube. A petition for a referendum was signed by close to 6,000 people. While it did not consider itself as a political opposition, the Circle’s activities were viewed as such by the Hungarian authorities.44 Moreover, the dissident opposition in the late 1980s also led to the formation of political parties. Later, these played an important role in 1990s politics, such as the democratic opposition or the Free Democrats (SZDSZ), the nationally oriented dissidents that formed the Hungarian Democratic Forum (MDF), and FIDESZ (Association of Young Democrats), the anti-​system youth party whose membership was initially restricted to individuals under 35.45 Even if these various initiatives are considered more as (semi)opposition or ‘para-​opposition’, they were integral to the continued development towards a more open society. Informal networks of communications were continuously formed through people’s social relations and contacts. News heard in the workplace, someone’s account of his or her trips abroad or knowledge of someone’s possession of foreign language books, magazines or records: each contributed to the closely knit yet widely spread web of social relations. As Tibor Várnagy recounted, ‘there was nothing strange 52

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Historical Antecedents about someone you had never seen before turning up at your home just because he was told that you had a collection of, say, recordings of concrete music’.46 As vital forms of communication, participatory art practices and oppositional activities represented complex networks of engagement. These formed unofficial platforms for discussing and sharing thoughts and opinions that were not allowed public expression in a relatively closed regime. Based on various forms of trust, reciprocity and informally agreed-​upon conventions and norms, such semi-​official participatory activities functioned as social channels of opposition, independent thinking and friendship. Emphasizing the importance and real benefits of these networks of engagement, Konrád noted: The network of friends has become very important indeed, more permanent than the family […] today I help, tomorrow you help, and the helping hand is never translated into the language of money […]. People here have more friends than people in other countries; friendship is security.47

At the same time, it is expected that networks of friends and relations also generated forms of conflict within the second society itself. Inevitable tensions emerged as some individuals or groups were better able to use informal channels than others. Moreover, in light of scarce resources, people used their energies to maximize their own private or household strategies, and in this process they competed not only with the state, but with the informal networks of others as well.48 While acknowledging the exclusionary quality of social capital, my argument here is based on the possibilities of the broader political implications inherent within the informally generated and sustained social networks. As we shall see, a number of neo-​ avant-​garde practices existed not only in Hungary but also in Romania and Bulgaria (although to a lesser extent in the last two), where they become transitory expressions and incipient attempts at civil society.

Participatory Art in Socialist Romania If the relatively relaxed socio-​political situation in Hungary permitted the flourishing of diverse forms of artistic activities within its second 53

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Socially Engaged Art after Socialism society, the neighbouring country of Romania experienced a considerably shorter period of ‘liberalization’ and a harsher socio-​political and cultural situation, especially under Nicolae Ceaușescu’s regime from the mid-​1970s to 1989. Following World War II and the defeat of the fascist Antonescu government, the Romanian Communist Party secured its leadership in most local positions and, with the falsified elections of 1946, officially sealed its victory. In 1948, the Communist Party with Gheorghe Gheorghiu-​Dej as its Secretary General was transformed into the Romanian Workers Party (Partidul Muncitoresc Roman), by combining with the left wing of the dismembered Social Democratic Party. During the political period from 1945 until the early 1950s, the country saw the strict consolidation and centralization of the Communist Party, which included forced and rapid industrialization and complete collectivization of agriculture. As Katherine Verdery discussed, textbooks were rewritten, and ‘a special school to train the Party cadres was founded in 1948 and was generously endowed’.49 Moreover, starting with the mid-​1940s and through the early 1950s, the doctrine of socialist realism was forcibly introduced into the contemporary arts, not only in Romania but also uniformly across all Soviet satellite states.50 In April 1964 the Romanian party declared the nation’s independence from Moscow, initiating Romania’s nationalist Communism, while maintaining international ‘neutrality’. However, despite its proclaimed independence, the country remained in an economic and political relationship of dependence upon the Soviet Union. As Janusz Bugajski and Maxine Pollack point out, ‘despite his more independent stance toward Moscow, in comparison to other Soviet bloc heads, Gheorghe-​Dej was a doctrinaire Stalinist intent on rapidly Communizing Romania’.51 After Gheorghiu-​Dej’s death in 1965, the Party’s name was changed back to the Romanian Communist Party (Partidul Communist Roman), with Nicolae Ceaușescu becoming Party chief. In 1974 the country’s constitution was altered and Ceaușescu was ‘elected’ President. Ceaușescu continued most of the directives initiated by his predecessor, most clearly demonstrating, for example, Romania’s independence from the Soviet Union when he declared in August 1968 his adversity towards the Red Army’s intervention in the Czechoslovakian Prague Spring.52 54

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Historical Antecedents Between 1953 and 1958 in Romania, one can speak of a period of ‘de-​ satellization’ or a ‘de-​Sovietised Stalinism’ rather than of a period of de-​ Stalinisation, which was rather minimal compared to other CEE nations.53 While there was nothing close to the Hungarian revolution of 1956, there were small worker protests expressing dissatisfaction with the economic situation during 1956 in the cities of Cluj-​Napoca, Târgu Mures, Timișoara and Bucharest, which were rapidly crushed. From the early 1960s through to the early 1970s Romania saw a second period of ‘normalization’, with the regime adopting a moderate political reformism that also permitted some artistic reforms. Just as we observed under Kádár’s regime in Hungary, the Romanian Communist Party during these few years was satisfied with an unwritten social contract with the population, as long as it was not challenged politically. This relative political and cultural thaw was characterized by a softening of police and ideological control, an improved economic situation, an opening towards Western countries, the freedom of Romanians to travel, the staging of contemporary art exhibitions by American and European artists in Bucharest, and the participation of Romanian artists in biennials in Venice, São Paulo and France. Moreover, as pointed out by the Romanian art historian Magda Carneci, there was a gradual replacement of the mandatory aesthetic doctrine of celebratory socialist realism (which had already begun to fade in the late 1950s) with a diversification of styles that included even abstract tendencies under the generic title of ‘diversely enriched realism’.54 However, this cultural liberalization did not mean the complete disappearance of official culture celebrating the Party. Somewhat similar to the cultural policy based on the 3Ts in Hungary under Kádár’s regime, three categories for artists during this period (1965–​74) were identified: ‘the engaged or conformist artists’ following openly and directly the Party’s directives; ‘the neutral or the fake non-​conformist artists’, who were navigating both official and unofficial cultures, living a double life in the first and second societies; and the ‘oppositionists or the non-​conformist artists’, who aimed at total refusal to engage with any of the party-​state directives.55 All artists were formally required to participate in Party celebrations and anniversaries as well as to produce propaganda works. Also, most artists’ relationships with the power structures as well as with most of the viewing public went through the Party’s organs, such as the Union of the Fine Artists, 55

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Socially Engaged Art after Socialism and the Ministry of Culture, through which artists received salaries and supplies, as well as selling and exhibiting their works in State-​funded national and regional exhibitions. This situation characterized other CEE nations, such as Bulgaria and Hungary. In the latter, for example, artists graduating from the Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest had to join the Studio of Young Artists for a number of years to prove their loyalty in order to be admitted to the Association of Hungarian Fine and Applied Artists, which ensured their livelihood.56 During the early 1960s and early 1970s in Romania, besides a few mandatory appearances, artists, critics and art historians were able to create and debate in a relatively open society, generating a richly textured second society where artistic practices, to some extent, corresponded with developments in international neo-​avant-​garde art practices. However, this second thaw was cut rather short when two speeches by Ceaușescu on 6 and 9 July 1971, referred to as the ‘July theses’, ‘announced an intensified campaign to raise the people’s consciousness toward forming the “new man” ’. Moreover, the speeches ‘condemned the liberalization of 1965, re-​ established an Index of prohibited books and authors, and reemphasized the necessary sociopolitical role of intellectual production’.57 During the late 1960s and early 1970s, the younger generation of Romanian non-​conformist artists experimented with a variety of neo-​ avant-​garde practices, including op-​art, fluxus, minimalism, conceptualism, happenings, environmental art and land art.58 Experimental artists were self-​taught, mostly via magazines, journals, art catalogues and books that crossed the border to Romania. Since a number of artists often combined and explored a multitude of neo-​avant-​garde styles from project to project or from exhibition to exhibition, their individual oeuvres reflect a diverse body of work in different artistic styles. For instance, in the early 1970s, Ana Lupaș (b. 1940) and Mihai Oloș (b. 1940) created participatory art projects with members of specific working-​class communities. However, when speaking of ‘participatory practices’ one should be mindful of the term’s vernacular meaning within the broader socialist context: expected participation in cultural events such as national parades and festivals was at the core of the Romanian Communist Party under Ceaușescu, who understood culture as a mass phenomenon. In their experimental actions, in different ways, both Lupaș and Oloș made use of participatory strategies while combining elements from the Romanian rural and peasant 56

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Historical Antecedents world with contemporary international art trends such as installations, minimalism, happenings and actions. In their work the art object functioned both as an instrument and a product of a participatory intervention. Inspired by the peasant wood architectural elements of his native region of Maramureș (in the north-​west part of Romania) as well as by Brancusi’s sculptures, Oloș explored the continuously self-​regenerative power of the traditional shape of a spindle, creating various sculptures of uniform modules, such as the Universal Town (1970). Geometrically regular wood sculptures held together using traditional joints instead of nails or glue, his constructions were called ‘the universal town’ to indicate a belief in a planned and mathematically measured planetary and utopian urban space –​not unlike what the modernizing communist project aimed to achieve, as illustrated in the building of ordered blocks of flats all across CEE. While emerging from the spiritualism of local folk traditions, Oloș’s constructivist and minimalist sculptures developed in geometrical progression recall Frank Stella’s mid-​1960s sculptures based on serial repetitions. Yet in contrast to the minimalists, whose recourse to industrially neutral and serial forms were aimed as critical attacks against the dominance of Abstract Expressionism, Oloș’s use of the endlessly repeating wooden shape connected with the spiritual core of archaic and universal traditions. The principle of the repeated module even shaped the artist’s encounter with the internationally known German artist Joseph Beuys. At Documenta 6 in 1977, Oloș transformed his meeting with Beuys into a performance titled Nodul Gordian / The Gordian Knot, in which Oloș offered Beuys one of his sculptures created in geometrical progression using his ‘universal town’ module. Beuys had to cut ‘The Gordian Knot’ and selected a small-​sized module like a knot. [W]‌hile Beuys wanted to keep the little module he had cut off from the assemblage, Olos kept on offering him the big module. In the end the German artist accepted his offer but only in return for the payment of a symbolic sum. The two banknotes given by Beuys for the sculpture bear the German artist’s signature and are objects resulting from that action.59

Both conceptually and formally, the module that he visualized in the ‘universal town’ has guided all of his works, including his participatory actions, 57

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Socially Engaged Art after Socialism such as Aur, grâu și oameni (Gold, Wheat and People), which took place on 14 November 1972 in the Herja Mine in Maramureș. The artist descended 500 metres into the mine with several gold ingots in hand to build his ‘universal town’ of geometrical sculptures on a table in the ‘muster chamber’ that was used as a base between mine shifts. He directly engaged the miners to activate his sculpture by inviting them to throw wheat grains over it, a traditional folk custom signifying prosperity and fertility.60 While obliquely Oloș’s action appeared to pay tribute to the communist utopian dream of equality and the prosperity of the proletarian class, the artist brought to light a community of individuals, emphasizing the presence of each of the miners in their everyday working conditions. Although in an a priori-​prescribed role, they became active participants (rather than mere parts of an anonymous workforce), without whom neither the communist dream nor the artist’s work could be realized. An interest in folk traditions also drove Lupaș’s work in decorative textile art. In the 1960s, her tapestries were composed of carefully shaped geometrical patterns that gave a sense of three-​dimensionality to the flat surface of the textile. Emerging from both her preoccupations with the rituals of the rural world and the contemporary international currents of land art was Lupaș’s interest in what she called ‘process’ or ‘process-​actions’. It consisted of ‘a large space […] usually variable, which can be extended infinitely –​amplification of the time element suggesting an indefinite prolongation of the “process” ’.61 Lupaș’s participatory and ephemeral project that first explored the nature of the ‘process’ in 1966 was Instalație umedă (Humid Installation) in Mărgău Village, near Cluj-​Napoca in Transylvania (central part of Romania). The action lasted 24 hours and involved over 100 women from the village. Lupaș asked the participants to hang up white linen cloths on clotheslines installed on a three-​hectare field overlooking the village in rows, under which a ditch was created to collect the drained water. Expanding upon her main practice with textile art, itself a traditional form of art practised mostly by peasant women, her socially engaged work was based on direct participation of village people, whom she engaged through visits and face-​to-​face dialogic interactions. In a 1994 statement for an exhibition in Bonn, Germany, when Instalație umedă was reconstructed, Lupaș described her work: 58

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Historical Antecedents To achieve Instalație umedă, I worked both with a participatory model (over 100 persons were involved) and the principle of ‘re-​contextualization’: the domestic gesture of hanging out the laundry was invested with new functions and meanings. The installation was predicated on the idea that based on two stable coordinates  –​space and time  –​it could keep on developing, virtually to infinity. […] Humid Installation rallied an entire community together in one action in a particular place, focusing on aspects that acquired a unique value, both historically and socially.62

As these statements indicate, the artist embraced a participatory approach to explore her ‘process-​actions’ as forms of art making, aiming to render a banal and domestic gesture into a universal and timeless symbol for the community. As Romanian art historian Ileana Pintilie observed, ‘collaboration with the villagers in the ‘process-​action’ […] has as its basis the village system of voluntary collective work, the autochthonous system of cooperation and mutual assistance’.63 In subsequent years, versions of this action were staged in different contexts: as Covorul zburător –​simbol al păcii / The Flying Carpet, a Symbol of Peace at the Youth Biennial in Paris in 1973; as Proces de determinare / Process of Determination, at Angers, France in 1977; and as Monument de cărpa / Rag Monument, a mourning installation in University Square, in Bucharest, Romania in 1991. Another of her large-​scale and process-​based installations is entitled Proces solemn –​Cununile lui August / Solemn Process or The Wreaths of August, which took place first in 1964 in Sălişte village and again in 1966 in Mărgău, followed by further and later installations in 1980–​5 and 1985–​2008. It consisted of life-​sized cylindrical and geometrical structures created from plaited ears of wheat, arranged and placed around various architectural elements found in three peasants’ courtyards, re-​arranging and morphing their function in the process. Lupaș’s work combined the medium of installation and action with traditional materials to engage peasant families directly in enacting a ritual celebration of crop harvesting. In a 1972 interview Lupaș said: I think art does not exist outside the questions of ‘why?’ and ‘For whom?’ […] My actions have a clear social message. That is why I prefer that my works, with all the risk of being destroyed,

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Socially Engaged Art after Socialism be placed in places where people work and play, in places where they are not given full attention (as art objects) but are rather continuously touched in people’s everyday interaction with them.64

In utilizing the object as a pretext for dialogic exchanges and interactions among members of communities and by bringing together people who may or may not have directly known each other beforehand, Lupaș’s works, especially Instalație umedă / Humid Installation, recall Bulgarian artist Christo and French artist Jeanne-​Claude’s land-​art projects, such as their Curtain Valley, successfully installed for two weeks in August 1972 in the Colorado Valley, or their Running Fence in the Sonoma Valley, California. Crossing over several miles of land, cutting through farmland and courtyards, the latter project, for instance, provoked various community members to open a dialogue on the myriad of power technologies dividing and controlling the earth’s resources. Through their large-​scale public gestures, Christo and Jeanne-​Claude altered the social space of the site. Their work functioned as a trigger for an inclusive public sphere characterized by direct and open exchanges among various people on the politics of space and land ownership. Informed by contemporary international art tendencies, both Lupaș and Oloș were artists officially recognized during the late 1960s and early 1970s in local and international exhibitions and press. It may be recalled that this was also the time when Romania embarked on its unique road towards a nationalist communism, when focus on national traditions, exemplified in the field of visual art through the use of textile as an applied form of art making, was positively received by state authorities. The only country in the Soviet block to ‘declare its independence’ from the Soviets to pursue its own policies, Romania, particularly under Ceaușescu’s leadership saw what Katherine Verdery called a ‘symbolic-​ideological’ mode of control, in which values of the Nation and ‘national ideology gained pride of place’. Cultural producers played an important role in furthering a nationalist ideology that included norms such as an ethic of hard work and notions of progress. As Verdery observed, ‘the role of humanist intellectuals would be to disseminate such notions through their novels, research, and philosophical speculation. For those who found it distasteful, suitable avenues for professional fulfilment would being to 60

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Historical Antecedents disappear.’65 Like other disciplines such as history, which was essential in the rewriting of the nationalist past, public art, exemplified through monumental sculptures of national and working-​class heroes, was critical in visualizing the ­nationalist principles espoused by the Communist Party ­leadership (which e­ stablished a Commission on Ideology within the Central Committee in 1967). In such a political context, the ephemeral art ­practices of Lupaș and Oloș that took place in rural and working-​class ­contexts and combined experimental forms of art making with participatory and ­collaborative elements reveal the ambiguous position of these artists. Both nonconformists and fake-​nonconformists, navigating the official and the unofficial realms of society, their position signals the importance of ­maintaining a cautious public presence in a highly surveilled and ­censored society. Romanian critics and art historians such as Alexandra Titu referred to the socially engaged projects of Lupaș and Oloș as ‘sociological art’ mainly because of these artists’ engagements with the real world, specifically the rural world.66 While acknowledging the complex juxtapositions of local traditional folklore elements with international contemporary art orientations, Titu neglected to address the significance of the participatory aspect  –​that is, the presence of members of particular communities in both Lupaș’s and Oloș’s works. In a somewhat similar fashion, Romanian critic and art historian Ileana Pintilie included the two artists’ works in what she called ‘actionism’ of the 1960s and 1970s. She defined it as a broad art tendency that encompassed numerous experimental art forms that were ephemeral and focused on the subject rather than the object and took place unofficially during the period of socialism. Moreover, Romanian actionism was unlike Viennese Actionism, performance art or happenings, in which the public is an integral component of the work. Romanian actionism, according to Pintilie, was closely determined by the socio-​political context and occurred primarily in private spaces or with limited art audiences.67 As we have seen, however, in Lupaș’s and Oloș’s art, which took place in public spaces, members of specific communities –​ broader than a limited art audience –​were at the core of their art work. While working in different localities, the two Romanian artists displayed strategies of engagement similar to the ones we have seen in the Hungarian artists’ works. They directly engaged members of different 61

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Socially Engaged Art after Socialism communities and addressed locally specific socio-​political themes. Most importantly, they gave visibility to and contributed to a highly textured and constantly changing network of social relations, which holds the potential to create enclaves of open public space. For instance, Oloș’s participatory work with the miners metaphorically and momentarily underlined the underground existence of vital social interpersonal relationships, which sustain one’s community both at work and at home. At the same time, it also called attention to the effects of forced industrialization to fulfil the obsession of the socialist regime with steel production (the emblem of Communism). Likewise, Lupaș’s participatory initiatives intervened in the existing network at the communal level of the village. As Lupaș said, ‘the ultimate goal of linen washing is achieved, for each individual, through an aesthetic act, enabling these subjects to identify themselves, through this symbol, as members of the community’.68 Instalație umedă thus emphasized collaborative unity as the locus of strength and power of the rural world within a socio-​politically oppressive socialist system. Under the leadership of Gheorghiu-​Dej, beginning in the mid-​1940s, Romania began an aggressive nationalization and centralization of its entire industry and the collectivization of its agriculture. The latter was undertaken through Agricultural State Cooperatives and Peasant Associations in which in common ownership peasants worked their land, which ultimately was actually owned by the state. If verbal persuasion was not successful, violence was used against those peasants who refused collectivization. The disappearance of all private property was officially declared in 1962, marking the complete collectivization of the nation’s farmlands. As Sampson has pointed out, the Cooperative Farm system essentially operated by allocating a plot of land to individual farmers who had to weed, harvest and deliver the final crop to the state cooperative. Payment was made according to the amount delivered rather than the actual labour time. Who worked the land or how was not important to the authorities.69 It is noteworthy that Romania’s nationalized industries and collectivized agriculture were in stark contrast to those in Hungary (or Poland), where, as we have seen, agriculture continued to have a strong private sector that allowed households to own private plots of land and the national ‘goulash economy’ was opened to Western imports. Lupaș’s participatory actions in the life of the village indirectly called attention to the interpersonal relations that were driving the second society 62

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Historical Antecedents or ‘informal sector’. For instance, several collective farmers relied on family ties and networks of friendship to work their allotted land and distribute their crops to the state. Like Hankiss’s concept of ‘second society’ discussed above, Sampson’s notion of the ‘informal sector’ was used to refer to alternative ways to allocate resources in CEE under socialism. He identified as types of informal organization family and kin group; common ethnic or territorial origin; ties of friendship representing horizontal networks where the friendship ties tend to be equal; or personal networks that are unequal or vertical where patrons, brokers and clients interact. At the same time, Sampson cautioned against an overall-​positive understanding of the relationships within the informal sector: ‘There is no need to revert to nostalgia: informal relations can be just as conflictual and exploitative as the most repressive bureaucratic apparatus.’70 While this observation may certainly be true, the same informal face-​to-​face modes of interactions within networks of friends accumulated a diverse web of social relations based on general trust and norms of reciprocity. These were integral to the appearance of both alternative and oppositional groups, as we have seen in the participatory forms of art, samizdat and oppositional activities. As such, these manifestations, however indirect, symbolic, subtle, small scale and short-​lived, nevertheless questioned the regime’s politics and directives, carving public spheres that were at once open and hidden. During the 1980s, Ceaușescu’s personality cult, and disastrous economic policies motivated by the aim of the dictator to pay off the entire foreign debt of the country, kept the general public in literal hunger. Moreover, his xenophobic insecurity, which was at the base of his nationalistic communism, became so acute that international opinion recognized serious abuses of human rights in Romania. All minority cultures felt the brutality of a steady, institutionalized discrimination. In his effort to erase minority culture and homogenize the mythical ‘Greater Romanian’ nation, Ceaușescu bulldozed entire villages and forced the populations into concrete ‘agro-​industrial complexes’. The second half of the 1980s was one of the most devastating periods in socialist Romania. Poverty, fear, the irreversible demolition of Bucharest’s historical centre, the daily fight against political oppression and international isolation dominated the nation’s conscience. Despite such a restrictive socio-​political context, an unofficial local art scene flourished with exhibitions staged in private apartments, such 63

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Socially Engaged Art after Socialism as the basement shows in Bucharest and Sibiu (between 1986 and 1989), the ‘pocket shows’ in Oradea (1988) and house pARTY I (1987) and house pARTY II (1988), the last two staged in the house of the main organizer, Decebal Scriba, in Bucharest. By making use of irony, eclectic quotations and withdrawal, artists such as Teodor Graur, Lia and Dan Perjovschi, Adrian Timar, Marcel Bunea, Călin Dan and Iosif Kiraly, who later formed the group subREAL, ignored authorities, retreating within private spaces away from the public eye.71

Unconventional Art in Socialist Bulgaria In a fashion somewhat similar to that in Romania, organized dissent in socialist Bulgaria was for the most part subdued. And yet a number of unconventional and participatory forms of art did emerge in this context, especially in the 1980s. Bulgaria became a People’s Republic in 1946, with Georgi Dimitrov as the leader of the Bulgarian Communist Party (BCP). Just as we have seen in Hungary and Romania, the Stalinization period in Bulgaria was particularly aggressive, with many ‘native’ members of the BCP replaced by entrenched ‘Moscovites’. After his death in 1949, Dimitrov was embalmed and laid to rest in a mausoleum in Sofia’s centrally located Red Square for public display, until 1990 when he was cremated. Following Dimitrov’s death Vulvo Chervenkov became the Secretary General of the Party, and under his six-​year leadership Bulgaria went through ‘full-​scale nationalization, heavy industrialization, and comprehensive agricultural collectivization’.72 The de-​Stalinization period saw minimal transformations in the country, except for some personnel change within the political ranks. Between 1954 and 1989, Todor Zhivkov was the Party Chairman and, as Minister of Culture, Chervenkov continued his aggressive policies against dissident intellectuals –​and somewhat improved working conditions for the workers, as was also the situation in Romania.73 Historically, Bulgarians feel gratitude towards the Russians who helped Bulgarians gain their independence from the Ottomans during the Russo-​ Turkish War (1877–​8), when thousands of Russian soldiers died. Even today Bulgaria is home to numerous public sculptures honouring Russian soldiers. During the Cold War, Zhivkov ensured that Bulgaria was the Soviet Union’s closest ally in the Eastern bloc. Historian Michael Kelleher observed 64

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Historical Antecedents how ‘the communist period in Bulgaria witnessed perhaps the most rapid and drastic change of any Eastern European nation from a rural to an urban, industrialized society’.74 However, in exchange for increased living standards, the population had to experience a lack of freedom of expression. In comparison to neo-​ avant-​ garde art activities in Hungary and Romania, in Bulgaria during the 1960s and 1970s such manifestations were minimal and rarely documented. Some artists, while belonging to the official Union of Bulgarian Artists (UBA), experimented unofficially with assemblage. However, these activities were carried out in secluded circles and private spaces away from the public eye. As in other CEE countries, by the late 1950s the strict directives of socialist realism were no longer officially pursued by Bulgarian artists. The movement was replaced by the concept of ‘multiple realisms’ (not unlike the notion of ‘diversely enriched realism’ in the Romanian context) that included modern styles ranging from expressionism to abstraction. While open in appearance, in fact the UBA continued its wide-​ranging control over local artists, being the only venue for contemporary artists to show publicly, sell work and earn a living. As no artist was able to survive outside the Union, an implicit self-​censorship guided local artists whose will to revolt against the state was suppressed by the economic benefits and their relative stable situation as UBA members.75 As such, most artists ­associated with the Union overtly gained cultural and economic capital as individual needs and interests were met through the available resources of the organization. Implicitly, the positive effects of mass association had led to a consensual sense of community, not overtly critical of the Party leadership. A centralized, socialist model was the rule in Bulgaria up to 1989. As a party-​state funded institution, the UBA organized various juried national and regional exhibitions. Through them, it implicitly showcased and established criteria for state-​sanctioned artworks. For instance, national exhibitions staged every three, four or five years had themes such as ‘Labour and Man’, ‘People and Land’ or ‘People and the Sea’.76 Paradoxically, the state simultaneously encouraged an opening up of the country, especially during Ljudmila Zhivkova’s initiatives beginning in the mid-​1970s in her role as the country’s Minister of Culture (as the Party leader’s daughter). With advice from Party art experts and state funds, she compiled an eclectic 65

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Socially Engaged Art after Socialism collection of foreign art works centred on early twentieth-​century figurative painting, to be housed in 1985 in what today is Bulgaria’s National Gallery of Foreign Art.77 Russian-​born and Bulgaria-​based curator and art critic Iara Boubnova notes: ‘The uniqueness of this project consists in that for more than a decade it oriented and defined the concept that Bulgaria had of foreign art.’78 Despite the state-​controlled cultural context, public oppositional art activities began to manifest themselves, particularly from the mid-​1980s, after Gorbachev’s perestroika. A  number of young contemporary artists were working in (short-​lived) groups, such as the City Group (1986–​91), the Dobrudzha Group (1986–​91), the Turgovishte Group (1986–​91), the Cuckovden Group (founded 1981), the DE Group (founded 1984), the Edge Group and the MA Group (1986–​90).79 They aimed to break away from the official directives of the UBA through their actions, happenings and performances, outdoor and indoor installations, assemblages and sculptural objects. Many of these adopted the formal characteristics of the 1980s New British Sculpture or Nouveau Realisme tendencies. Referred to as ‘non-​conventional’, collectively such experimental art forms constituted contemporary Bulgarian art. These activities took place outside state-​sanctioned galleries, in public space and natural environments. Artists’ activities erupted organically from within established and trusted social networks within the second society. As Boubnova observed: ‘These events originated almost spontaneously and were based on relations of friendship’.80 Similarly to groups in Hungary and Romania, a number of Bulgarian artist groups emerged during the 1980s. While official members of the UBA, several artists redirected their previously passive association into collective and experimental goals. They opposed State-​mandated interests and directives that limited free creative experiments outside the traditional artistic genres. Artists made use of social capital created though the Union’s official networking channels to re-​group, organize and express their non-​ conventional approaches to art. Group activities were not limited to Sofia, Bulgaria’s capital city but happened independently and simultaneously in various locations in Bulgaria, such as the happenings and actions in 1986 with the same name by different groups: The Road by the Turgosvishte Group, the Group MA and the Dobrudzha Group. Art critic Diana Popova, a former UBA journalist who travelled throughout the country during this 66

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Historical Antecedents period to report on artistic activities, related to me that in Turgosvishte The Road was performed in courtyards, on dirt roads and on the outskirts of the city by artists dressed in self-​made and mixed media costumes. In other locations it unfolded on the city’s public streets, with artists crossing city roads as a unit held together by their clasped hands.81 Artists were reluctant to use the term ‘avant-​garde’ to designate their work, mainly because their practice was based on 1960s and 1970s international neo-​avant-​garde forms no longer current within the Western scene. However, considering the Bulgarian oppressive socio-​political and cultural context, where traditional forms of art dominated, the presence and work of these young artists, the majority under 35, were cutting edge and avant-​garde. It is noteworthy that in contrast to the Romanian contemporary art scene of the 1980s (under the draconic Ceaușescu regime), which unfolded in private studios and apartments, Bulgarian artists during this time worked collectively; several individual artists belonging to more than one group. During this time, as in Hungary and Romania, there was not a clear or conscious distinction made between the concepts of ‘modern’ and ‘contemporary’. Nevertheless, in Bulgaria, the emphasis of the art on viewer participation was seen as a distinct feature of the locally emerging non-​conventional art. Bulgarian art critic and curator Maria Vassileva specifically pointed out the ‘provocation of direct contact and the direct participation of the viewer’.82 The participatory happenings concomitantly and spontaneously occurring across the country were considered as distinct marks of contemporary art. Mixed media installations both indoors and outdoors were composed of natural and non-​durable materials found on site, such as pine, rope, plastic, wood and twigs. Such works of art encouraged viewers’ direct touch; they often ‘swing on them, touch and spin some parts and cause them to give forth different sounds’.83 Implicitly, they also challenged the locally powerful emphasis on traditional modes of art making, such as painting and sculpture (practised as separate media) championed by the UBA and generated through the curriculum of the National Academy of Fine Arts in Sofia. Thus, a public presence and a participatory dimension within the content and form of art works were considered core features of the newly emerging ‘non-​conventional’ contemporary forms of art. 67

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Socially Engaged Art after Socialism An early example of participatory collective work among artists and audience was the educational programme in the exhibition and action ‘E/A’ (Artist Proof or Author’s Print) in 1987, organized by artist and curator Kiril Prashkov and art critic and curator Philip Zhidarov. Artists demonstrated various graphic techniques to the audience. Initially, they marked their experiments onto one large sheet of canvas. The action concluded with a ‘public creation and printing of a collective work (with more than 20 participants) which turned into a symbolic gesture, the shaping of new artistic community’.84 In 1988 The City? exhibition by the artist collective City Group was a significant and representative event for an entire generation active in the mid-​1980s. Boubnova said: Though not the first, this exhibition is one of the early significant curatorial projects of the Bulgarian art scene. […] The show also functioned as an artistic platform for instigating change in the way works are produced, exhibitions are curated and art in general is presented to the public. […] The show generated a lot of attention attracting the unofficial collaboration of many other artists and curators in the exhibition space, thus becoming a symbol for an entire generation to identify with. By acting as a declaration of independence from institutional structures, worn-​out traditions and the need of official approval, the show was interpreted as a direct challenge to the establishment.85

Zhidarov initiated the exhibition by extending an invitation to six young and well-​regarded (by the UBA) painters: Andrei Daniel, Bozhidar Boy­ adzhiev, Vihrony Ponedelev, Gredi Assa, Nedko Solakov and Svilen Blazhev (the latter, while he took part in the 1988 exhibition, was no longer associated with the group).86 Taking almost two years to define through numerous conversations with both the artists and the UBA officials, Zhidarov’s presentation was an exhibition with no paintings. It transformed the conventional UBA art gallery space on Rakovski Street into a mixed media installation. As documented in a photograph of the installation, it combined junk-​art, ready-​mades, objects placed on the floor, drapes hanging on a corner wall, and individual framed paintings displayed at an angle on the wall, floor or on abstract wooden sculptures. Both in the ways in which it was organized and during its public reception, the exhibition 68

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Historical Antecedents embodied a communal space. At the opening a band was playing, while artists, critics and the general public engaged openly in conversation. It was a locally revolutionary event that challenged the expectations of local authorities accustomed to medium-​specific art works. Numerous articles and reviews in local newspapers, such as Kultura and Pulse, attest to the visible impact and importance of the exhibition within and outside the art scene.87 Another emblematic exhibition of local contemporary art of this period was Earth and Sky, organized by Diana Popova and Georgi Todorov in October 1989. Only a few short weeks before the fall of socialism, it was staged on the rooftop of Shipka 6 Gallery, standing literally on top of the building of the official UBA. The exhibition was the first official public display of ‘non-​conventional forms’, with artist performances, happenings and installations continuously changing over the one-​month duration of the show. During the course of the exhibition, the first official meeting of the Club of the (eternally) Young Artists (C(e)YA) took place. With its leader Nedko Solakov, and formed by members under 35, it stood openly against the official UBA during the country’s early transitional period.88 Certainly, the state-​sanctioned UBA made several unsuccessful attempts to shut down the exhibition, refusing, for instance, to advertise the show. The tightly knit social networks among people in the second society proved to be essential in making the exhibition known to a wider public. As the curator put it, ‘There was a rumour’ and news travelled through word of mouth.89 While ‘rumour’ in and of itself does not carry an oppositional meaning, within the politicized Bulgarian context spreading the word about unofficial experimental artistic actions gains an existential quality. Two months later, in December 1989, Lyuben Kostov staged Downfall of the Article 1, one of the first public political art actions on the Bulgarian art scene. It occurred in a busy central square in Sofia and consisted in the artist setting up a winding arrangement made of dominos directly on the ground, with passers-​by observing the creation of the work, the ways in which Kostov carefully arranged and positioned each domino according to a specifically outlined design. The action of the artist was part of the heated societal discussions during that time regarding the dissolution of Article 1 of the Socialist Constitution, which stated that ‘the Bulgarian Communist Party has the sole ruling authority in the country’.90 As such, the work of 69

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Socially Engaged Art after Socialism the artist became a platform for debate among a divided public experiencing and advocating both the continuation of and the dismantling of the socialist political regime with all its pervasive modes of surveillance. At the same time, Kostov’s gesture was poetic. The slow and meticulous process of positioning each domino piece, and then their quick collapse, symbolized the rise and fall of the socialist system. At the same time, it visualized a network of social relations. The individual pieces, while each was clearly defined, had the desired visual effect only as an ensemble, in the same way that networked individuals can only collectively trigger a visible change. As we have seen, unlike in Hungary where there was organized opposition under socialism, a small number of dissident manifestations occurred in Bulgaria and in Romania as well.91 Informal channels and social networks provided essential resources in people’s everyday lives. Through the themes addressed in their art works and the participatory and collaborative processes of creation among various individuals and groups of people, a number of the socially engaged artists presented here had, in different ways, attempted to embody or symbolically suggest temporary open public spheres within highly controlled local contexts. In the following chapters I will examine specific curatorial programmes, socially engaged art works and self-​institutionalizing initiatives in Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania that built upon these attempts and made use of social networks to engender democratic forms of civil society within the transitional period after 1989.

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Part I

From Second Society to Civil Society

In order to understand what it meant for ordinary people to stand in those vast crowds in the city squares of Central Europe, chanting their own, spontaneous slogans, you have to first make the imaginative effort to understand what it feels like to live a double life, to pay this daily toll of public hypocrisy. As they stood and shouted together, these ordinary men and women were not merely healing divisions in their society; they were healing divisions in themselves.1 Timothy Garton Ash

Writing about the joyful crowds of people celebrating the collapse of the socialist regimes across most former Soviet bloc countries in 1989, Timothy Garton Ash placed emphasis on people’s lived experiences under the recent socialist past. Here, he felt, lay the true meaning of these historical revolutions. The official Communist party-​states employed a vast network of faithful members, who ranged from political officials and workers’ leaders to secret police agents, and whose role was to survey the population. Surveillance kept the system functioning. At the same time, the rest of the population had nurtured a tightly knit network of social bonds that amounted to an unofficial, parallel and ‘split’ form of existence. These

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Socially Engaged Art after Socialism social bonds were embodied in informal, collaborative modes of production, organization and exchange among networks of individuals and groups. As we have seen in the previous chapter, these networks provided the vital means to create an alternative existence within both the society at large and contemporary artists during socialist rule and, as I will show, after socialist rule. The historical moment that began on 10 November 1989 with the East German population’s collective action hammering down the Berlin Wall,2 initiated the fall of the socialist regimes throughout CEE between 1989 and 1992: Albania in 1991, Belarus in 1991, Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1992, Bulgaria in 1989, Croatia in 1991, Czech Republic in 1993, Estonia in 1989, East Berlin, Germany in 1989, Hungary in 1989, Poland in 1989, Romania in 1989, Slovakia in 1993 and Slovenia in 1989.3 In a regional domino-​like effect, within each country the party-​states’ successive collapses put an end to the over four decades of Cold War (1945–​89) that had neatly frozen and divided the world map into communists to the east and capitalists to the west. Masses of people, radiant and full of hope, celebrated the collapse of the oppressive socialist regimes and championed the triumph of Western capitalism, individual freedoms, democracy and civil society ideals. Yet the euphoria was short-​lived. With the newly gained freedoms, nations, cultures and people on both sides of the former Iron Curtain began to define and redefine their identities. A series of more or less invisible borders began to rapidly resurface. These manifested themselves in a number of ways: on the freshly re-​drawn European geopolitical map,4 within the cultural and political discourses associated with the EU integration,5 and, no less significant, on its register, through the curatorial frameworks of contemporary art exhibitions in Western cities showing art from former socialist nations. Beyond Belief (Chicago, 1995), After the Wall: Art and Culture in Post-​ Communist Europe (Stockholm, 1999), Body and the East: From the 1960s to the Present (Ljubljana, 1998), Aspects / Positions: 50 Years of Art in Central Europe (Vienna, 1999); Blood and Honey (Vienna, 2002) and In the Gorges of the Balkans (Kassel, 2003) represented some of the many exhibitions of contemporary art from former CEE communist nations. These could be grouped into two fluid categories. The first included exhibitions such 72

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From Second Society to Civil Society as Beyond Belief, After the Wall, Blood and Honey and In the Gorges of the Balkans, which featured contemporary works produced only in the post-​ socialist period. The second category included exhibitions such as Body and the East and Aspects / Positions that featured artistic practices from both ‘pre’ and ‘post’ socialist periods. The goal of the latter was to combat the widespread public reaction of voluntary collective amnesia characteristic of the 1990s, invoked as a way of coping with the painful impact of the recent past.6 Staged in North America and Western European countries, these exhibitions revealed what I  metaphorically call ‘the battle of the names’ that was characteristic of the early 1990s politics of identity. This was made evident by the titles of the exhibitions as well as the format and structure of the catalogues for the exhibitions. For example, the catalogue for Beyond Belief presented the works of each artist as showcasing his or her country of origin. As such, the exhibitions’ curatorial framework was concerned with the representational role of the artist as communicator of a specific country’s (national) identity and cultural history. Taken collectively, the numerous exhibitions of art from former Soviet Union satellite states in the first 15 years of transition communicated a broader concern with naming and renaming the geopolitical map of post-​socialist Europe. Prominent in such processes of categorizing and renaming were the following ideological constructs: Central Europe, Eastern Europe and/or Balkanism. These were evident in both the titles of the exhibitions and the artists who were selected to show their works. In a 2007 interview, reflecting on the 1990s and the early 2000s, Romanian political cartoonist artist, Dan Perjovschi poignantly captured the times: You see, in 1995, I  was exhibiting in East Central European shows, at the end of 1990s in East European shows, at the beginning of 2000 in South East European shows, and subsequently in Balkan shows.7

Without a doubt such exhibitions and publications provided an important and much-​needed platform for artists from the former socialist bloc countries not only to communicate with one another but also to become known to a Western audience. However, such initiatives failed to address the impact on and the role of specific contemporary forms of art, exhibition 73

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Socially Engaged Art after Socialism making and institutions within their own localities aspiring towards democratic civil societies. It is the aim of this section of the book to offer a contextualized discussion of particular case studies of art, curatorial and institutionalizing practices that engage with specific social and political issues in the first post-​socialist decade.

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4 Civil Society in a Period of Post-​Socialist Transition

In 2005, political scientist Milada Anna Vachudova classified the CEE transitional period politically in terms of ‘liberal’ and ‘illiberal’ nations. Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic were categorized as ‘liberal states’. As such, the collapse of their respective authoritarian regimes was immediately followed by the creation of a competitive democratic political system due to the presence of a strong opposition to the socialist state. The call for reform and negotiations for political pluralism had already began in 1986–​7, followed in 1989 by immediate personnel change within the ranks of the socialist party. Hungary entered the post-​1989 transition period with the experience of ‘goulash communism’ (a communist-​ type consumerism fuelled by Western loans and credits), and József Antall, a former intellectual dissident, became the leader of the Hungarian Democratic Forum (MDF), the right-​wing party that led the coalition government after the first free election in 1990. On the other hand, Vachudova considered countries such as Romania, Bulgaria and Slovakia as ‘illiberal states’. They lacked a strong opposition party that could take power immediately following the collapse of socialism. Moreover, they maintained a non-​competitive political system. Romania, for example, under the dictatorship of Ceaușescu, had no organized opposition to socialism as it had been almost entirely silenced by the oppressive measures of the regime.1 Even though the first 75

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Socially Engaged Art after Socialism elections in 1990 were mainly free and fair, former socialists won most seats, and Ion Iliescu, a former high-​ranking and active member of the former Communist party, became the president and leader in the National Salvation Front (FSN). While the different socialist legacies had shaped the nature of the transitional period in these countries in distinct ways, Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania shared similar cultural and political understandings of the emerging function of civil society. These were deeply rooted in the former intellectual dissidents’ conceptualization of civil society as a sphere of activity entirely divorced from the state or government. As seen, it often meant a retreat from the totalitarian state into forms of self-​organized enclaves held together by an informal network of social relations. Varying concepts of civil society were articulated by a number of dissident intellectuals such as Konrád in Hungary, Havel in Czechoslovakia and poet Micea Dinescu in Romania.2 For example, Konrád’s democratic opposition or ‘antipolitics’ was meant to exist not only under state socialism but also after its collapse: If the political opposition comes to power, antipolitics keeps the same distance from, and shows the same independence of, the new government. It will do so even if the new government is made up of sympathetic individuals, friends perhaps; indeed, in such cases it will have the greatest need for independence and distance.3

This, nevertheless political, call for a de-​politicization of lives and an understanding of civil society, based on morality, truth and avid hostility towards political parties, emerged as reactions to the socialist regimes whose politics controlled every aspect of society. During the period of socialism the state was seen, theoretically, as sole provider, shaper and guarantor of public life and civil rights.4 After 1989, to invoke notions of civil society in CEE meant an opposition to and a departure from the former collectivist regime. It also implied a desired identification with Western democratic and neoliberal values, such as individual human rights, a competitive market economy and the state’s minimal role in public life. In spite of these aspirations, citizens, generally, maintained mistrust towards participation in associations and programmes organized by foreign (Western) NGOs. Although these were premised on voluntary involvement, they evoked in 76

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Civil Society in a Period of Post-Socialist Transition the population recent memories and experiences of carrying ‘for thirty seven years, the same old peace placards in the mandatory parades’.5 Moreover, Bulgarian sociologist Galina Koleva observed how, for instance, most NGOs in former socialist countries since the 1990s developed programmes following the directives of their foreign donors. These focused on issues such as minority rights for Roma people and women, environmental protection6 and political corruption. Paradoxically, such topics had been of greater concern for the donors in the West than for the local population. These organizations had their funders’ interests primarily in mind, which had contributed to a lack of engagement on the part of the local population. Most revealing is that since most NGOs had also developed programmes to address poverty, disadvantaged groups and education, they often took the role of the state, towards which the population had a strong mistrust because of their recent socialist experiences. As a result, citizens tended to view NGOs either as fulfilling their donors’ interests or as agents of a state that until recently defined their lives, rather than as organizations meant to empower them to fight for their rights.7 In light of Koleva’s observations, it is surprising to note, in the last two decades, the method used to assess the presence or absence of civil society in the region. In political science literature and in sociological studies of civil society in the post-​socialist transitional nations, a predominant practice had been to use criteria established in Western societies by well-​ known sociologists such as Robert Putnam. Specifically, this had consisted in observing the actual number of voluntary associations and NGOs, the number of members and the population’s trust in them. These numbers are understood to indicate the level of a functioning democracy. For instance, the New Europe Barometer 10-​Nation Survey (NEBS), conducted in 1995, used a questionnaire to measure the levels of trust in civil and political institutions. It concluded that despite some variations between the CEE nations, there was a low level of trust throughout the region.8 The World Values Survey (WVS), conducted between 1995 and 1997 in more than 50 countries around the world, looked at the number of members in a multitude of civil society associations, ranging from religious and political to cultural and educational organizations. Among all the countries surveyed, the post-​socialist nations showed the lowest level of participation.9 77

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Socially Engaged Art after Socialism As a critical reading of these studies suggests, if one defines civil society in terms of public participation in voluntary organizations, democracy in post-​1989 CEE occurs, at best, at only a formal level. Political scientist Marc Howard identified three factors underlying what he called a ‘pattern of nonparticipation’ throughout post-​socialist Europe. First is ‘the legacy of mistrust of communist organizations’ because of the mandatory and forced participation in state-​controlled organizations, such as the Union of Artists in the field of arts. Second is ‘the persistence of friendship networks’ in a context where the public sphere was highly politicized and people relied on a trusted private sphere of friends for both emotional and economic support. After 1989 people continued to invest ‘in their own private circles, and they simply feel no need, much less desire, to join and participate in civil society organizations’. The third reason is ‘the post-​communist disappointment’, observed in the population’s disillusionment in failed expectations of new democratic and market institutions.10 Instead of viewing civil society in terms of membership numbers, or trust in public voluntary organizations, what if we view the same phenomena brought forward in these studies as indicative of the emergence of an incipient form of democratic civil society? Contrary to the belief that ‘the persistence of friendship networks’ is a detriment to the emergence of civil society, it is precisely the informal social connections that can become generators of public independent associations; some, with direct political potential at the societal level. For example, in Romania the Independent Group for Social Dialogue, composed of former intellectual dissidents with backgrounds in such disciplines as sociology, literature, history and law, issued the weekly journal 22. It was named after the date –​22 December 1989 –​on which the Ceaușescu regime collapsed. In their first edition in September 1990, the authors of 22 discussed the nature and constitution of civil society in the country: Romanian civil society is beginning to be configured. We have begun to talk with a firmer voice, and the themes of our discussions are: pluralism, political parties, free elections, independent unions, parliament. There are signs of democracy, which, if we do not guard it actively and with circumspection, we can lose. To be whole […] this democracy must have real economic resources, institutions of a legal state, a social life in which the

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Civil Society in a Period of Post-Socialist Transition interests of all socio-​professional categories are correctly represented. Tolerance must correspond with a diversity of interests freely expressed […] The group is an independent and strictly informal group, not subordinated to any political party […] The group does not wish to be a centre of power, but a centre of influence.11

Emphasizing individual freedom of association and expression, along with parliamentary democracy, these basic principles further underline the conceptualization of civil society as parallel to yet separate from party politics. Paradoxically, such a popular approach accommodates both leftist and rightist and neoliberal interests. On the one hand, the autonomous sphere of civil society held the potential for change, as exemplified by the social movements adding, even if symbolically, to the gradual collapse of the socialist regimes. On the other hand, the direct experience of enforced collectivist principles led the former intellectual dissidents and artists (as well as the broader society) to embrace neoliberal principles, such as individualism and the free market. Reuniting with Western Europe by becoming members of the EU community symbolized the path of the CEE nations towards achieving such goals of democratic forms of civil society. The presence of numerous NGOs, philanthropic organizations and civic associations, for instance, despite the mistrust of the population towards them, indicated, at least initially, the first steps of transition from totalitarian and centrally governed systems to democratic and self-​governed forms of state institutions. However, by cultivating, for example, the tolerance of the larger population towards minority groups, such as the Roma people, such foreign-​funded organizations and associations have a scope similar to Putnam’s bowling leagues:  that is, they cultivate social relations that nurture moral rather than political acceptance of difference, often divorced from the local cultural dynamics and context. This leads to a consensual multicultural pluralism easily rendered politically vacuous by and within the marketplace. For Putnam, such a functionalist and moral view of social capital is integral not only to a functioning democracy, but also, and most important, to a functioning neoliberal economy. British political economist David Harvey talked about the need of neoliberalism for ‘the construction of consent’ in order to be swiftly implemented and embraced, while securing profit in the hands of the very few 79

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Socially Engaged Art after Socialism and eliminating social programmes that would benefit the many. Capturing the rhetoric of individual freedom, highly valued by citizens from post-​ socialist CEE, neoliberalism could appeal to a mass base, since it required a ‘market-​based populist culture of differentiated consumerism and individual libertarianism’.12 According to neoliberal theory: Human well-​being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong property rights, free markets, and free trade. The role of the state is to create and preserve an institutional framework appropriate to such practices.13

After the official regime change, state officials, such as Ion Iliescu in Romania and József Antall in Hungary,14 welcomed foreign investments and encouraged international trade and commerce in their respective national contexts. Attempts at constructing a ‘market-​based populist culture’ became visible in the visual urban aesthetics of Bucharest, Budapest and Sofia. Large-​scale corporate logos such as those of McDonald’s replaced the ideological slogans and symbols of the former socialist regime. Emphasis on freedom of consumer choice rather than political change also permeated modes of expression, behaviour and cultural practices, spread, for instance, through popular media and mainstream TV programmes imported from the USA and Western European countries. Serbian curator and art critic Bojana Pejic wrote about the 1990s post-​ socialist transitional period as a ‘process of normalization’, which, according to her, will eventually lead to a ‘state of normality’.15 She exemplified the former by the political processes at the governmental level where post-​ socialist nations learn and implement the rules of Western democracy, culminating in their acceptance into the EU. If the ‘process of normalization’, according to Pejic, could be measured, with a beginning and an end, ‘a state of normality’ as exemplified by civil society was much more difficult to achieve, especially since it had competing and conflicting ideas. It is within this context, working towards and acting within civil society, that exhibitions organized in the 1990s by the Soros Centres for Contemporary Art (SCCA) in Budapest and Bucharest should be retrospectively understood.

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5 Antipolitics: Exhibitions at the Soros Centres for Contemporary Art

Two major, yet under examined, exhibitions organized and funded by the local SCCAs shortly after the fall of the Berlin wall in CEE were Polyphony: Social Commentary in Contemporary Hungarian Art (Budapest, 1993) and Exhibition 01010101… (Bucharest, 1994). These exhibitions occurred almost simultaneously, with similar international curatorial projects that commissioned and displayed community-​oriented, socially engaged forms of public art, such as Mary Jane Jacob’s Culture in Action (Chicago, 1992–​3) and Creative Time’s 42nd Street Art Project (New York, 1994) in the US, and Yves Aupetitallot’s Project Unite (France, 1993) and Valerie Smith’s Sonsbeck 93 (Netherlands, 1993) in Europe. Articulating a new direction in site-​specificity within the discourse of socially engaged art, artists and curators aimed to create new audiences for art beyond the art world, by situating their work in public spaces. Polyphony and Exhibition 01010101… showcased two distinct yet concurrent approaches to socially engaged art. These included commissioned forms of participatory public art that were short-​lived temporary public interventions and forms of community-​oriented art that unfolded over longer periods of time, engaging various members of specific communities. Staged in the early 1990s, the exhibitions represented an interface between hybrid temporalities localized within the post-​socialist transitional period. 81

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Socially Engaged Art after Socialism The latter was characterized by a perpetual fluidity, swinging between collapsing socialist structures and institutions, not yet fully reformed democratic political, social, cultural and economic infrastructures, and desires of becoming part of the international contemporary art scene. Moreover, as annual exhibitions organized by the local Soros Centres, they reveal disconnections between the aim of the curatorial frameworks and the commissioned artists working in a particular post-​socialist context. While artists were encouraged to develop local participatory interventions in a context that rejected any politically leftist and socially collective approaches, the exhibition makers engaged in a process of internationalization of the local art scene by referring to socially and politically engaged projects developed at the time in the US and Western Europe. The local SCCAs, initiated by Soros, were the first independent and most influential institutions in the region to support local contemporary art, throughout the 1990s. Like other NGOs emerging in the 1990s in the region, the SCCAs exemplified an institutional structure within a civil society understood as divorced from the state. They were guided by the concept of ‘open society’, as developed by the philosopher Karl Popper.1 Each centre received funding directly from the local Soros Foundations. The first Foundation in the region was founded in Budapest in 1985 when it had Miklós Vasarhelyi as its local representative. As the former press representative of Imre Nagy’s 1956 government, Vasarhelyi’s involvement signalled the foundation’s oppositional stance towards the socialist state under the Soviet orbit. In the late 1980s, in addition to providing support for arts programmes, the foundation funded what Soros called ‘self-​governing student colleges’, which were housed in faculty dormitories where students initiated their own study programmes. These colleges generated members of what became FIDESZ, a right-​wing party, which, as I will show below, played a significant part in the post-​1989 governmental structuring of public space in Budapest.2 From the end of 1991 to 1999, 18 Soros Centres for Contemporary Art were opened in 18 CEE countries, each functioning under the foundation’s direct funding for approximately five years, after which each centre was expected to become self-​sustainable. The SCCAs were branches of local Soros Foundations connected to the Soros Foundation New York. As demonstrated in their annual reports and internal correspondence,3 the SCCAs were set up as centres to promote emerging democratic forms of civil society 82

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Antipolitics according to the Western values of individualism and entrepreneurship within a free-​market neoliberal economy and culture industry. In the field of culture, the SCCAs were early examples of conflating neoliberalization with democratization in the 1990s in CEE, which conferred upon Western investors like Soros what Anthony Gardner called, ‘a Godlike sense of civic duty’,4 providing a humanitarian veil to self-​interested economic investment. Both Polyphony and Exhibition 01010101… included a generation of artists born in the 1950s and 1960s who were active during the 1980s. Their practices bridged the experience of the recent socialist past with the newly emerging art tendencies within the transitional period. Each of these exhibitions, focused on art as social practice, represented important platforms for local artists and curators to explore and articulate their role in the locally emerging civil society. Furthermore, considering them as critically productive spaces of negotiation among artists, curators and funders, these exhibitions became both the products and active producers of specific forms of civil society in Hungary and Romania.

Reclaiming Public Life through Interventionist Public Art Some of the first series of socially engaged art projects in public spaces to be developed in the Hungarian capital after the fall of the Iron Curtain were realized as part of Polyphony:  Social Commentary in Contemporary Hungarian Art (1993). Organized in Budapest and curated by Suzanne Mészöly, the exhibition aimed to encourage and support contemporary socially conscious artworks, harking back to the leftist tradition of the early twentieth-​century Russian avant-​garde and its goals of closing the gap between art and life. Polyphony, however, intended to provide contemporary Hungarian artists with ‘a forum to express their broadest social commentaries’, and so distanced itself from contemporary political ideologies by inviting works that did not engage with ‘current political issues, specific persons, institutions, lobbies, ideological trends or interests of the state’.5 This stated distance was understandable since the left-​oriented practice of socially engaged art did not correspond, for example, to the nationalist tendencies promoted by the contemporary right-​wing conservative government of 1990–​4 led by the first post-​socialist prime minister, Antall of 83

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Socially Engaged Art after Socialism MDF, with its emphasis on nationhood and, of course, market-​based neoliberal economy. Moreover, as political scientist Emilia Palonen observed, the Antall government, through its particular political rhetoric, aimed to establish sharp delineations between political identities and coalitions within the Hungarian political scene, which represented a strategy from the socialist past when dissidents opposed the former regime along the clear-​cut lines of ‘us’ versus ‘them’.6 Initially planned to take place in Mücsarnok, a state-​funded art space, the exhibition was rejected by its then director Katalin Keserü on the premise that it featured political art too closely connected to the ideology of the recent socialist past. The museum director objected most directly to the 1980s dictionary definition of the word ‘art’, which reads ‘ART = One of the forms of social consciousness: a creative activity’,7 opening the call for proposals: I was outraged by the text of the advertisement that began with a crazy epigraph; a text, which I later found out had been written in New  York, by some guy, called András Szántó […] a proto-​Marxist.8

Keserü thus considered that the concept of the exhibition promoted Marxist ideals, which were considered contrary to the locally emerging forms promoted by the nation’s newly elected government, whose representative was a former dissident opposing socialist ideals. Even though Mészöly called the incident a ‘bleak echo of censorship from the not so distant past’,9 both the stated goals of Polyphony’s curator and Keserü’s reaction actually manifested a similar understanding of the locally emerging civil society as divorced from politics, suggesting a strong continuation of Konrád’s ‘antipolitics’ into the early 1990s. It also reflected one of the founding goals of the Soros Foundation, which he first opened in Budapest as an institution of civil society, initially understood to stand in opposition to and help bring about the dismantling of the totalitarian state.10 The Foundation accomplished this, for instance, by providing funding for non-​ governmental creative initiatives and the training of Hungarian economists and intellectuals in neoliberal theory and practice in Western countries.11 The curatorial framework was ambivalent due to its plural allegiances. It juxtaposed an antipolitical temporality shaped by the socialist legacy with a simultaneous desire to participate in the contemporary international 84

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Antipolitics (socio-​politically charged) art scene. An important goal of the SCCAs was the promotion of local visual arts nationally and internationally via comprehensive documentation, such as exhibitions, catalogue publications and international conferences. Towards this end, each local centre was contractually required to organize annual exhibitions on an artistic ‘medium rarely explored within the country’; introduce new ideas and artists; and publish a bilingual catalogue in both English and the local language. Participation was open to competition and publicized nationally. An international jury invited and financed by the SCCA awarded prizes.12 Polyphony identified and adopted one of the early 1990s international trends of issue-​based, site-​specific art practice as its theme to provoke and motivate Hungarian artists to formulate their own distinctive approach. Well-​known Western curatorial projects were taken as inspirational models for the exhibition. At the symposium marking the exhibition’s closing on 4 December 1993 at the Budapest French Institute, Mészöly directly acknowledged Polyphony’s precedents:  ‘I was greatly influenced by the 42nd Street Art Project, which I had seen before and I was very aware of a lot of issue-​based work happening in the US and Great Britain especially.’13 Such a statement appears somewhat contradictory when we understoand that Polyphony became an exhibition of site-​specific works only as a result of Mücsarnok’s refusal to house it in its galleries, and the two calls for proposals (CFP) illustrate the change in the curatorial premise. In the CFP final version, it invited art projects for ‘any public or private space’ that were intentionally minimally advertised to confront viewers unexpectedly in a number of public spaces in Budapest, thus further blurring the lines between art and life. In the exhibition catalogue the works were referred to as site-​specific, yet there was no explanation of what was actually meant by site-​specificity in the exhibition or local context. Nonetheless, as recorded in her direct reference to 42nd Street Art Project, the curator had in mind contemporary site-​oriented artworks, as practised, for example, in the US, where site was conceptualized in both physical and discursive terms, art addressed socio-​political issues and artists often engaged the participation of an audience in the production of the work. In a manner similar to Creative Time’s 42nd Street Art Project in 1993 that included temporary art installations in the storefronts, windows and public areas between New York’s Broadway and 8th Avenue, the 85

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Socially Engaged Art after Socialism Polyphony exhibition in Budapest featured art on city streets, telephone booths, bridges, buses, grocery stores, electronic billboards, local newspapers, an artist’s flat and a private gallery. Yet, instead of highly charged socio-​political themes such as racism, AIDS, violence and feminism, which had been directly approached by the artists in New York, their Hungarian contemporaries used the city of Budapest’s various urban sites as their artistic medium (Figure 5.1).

Figure 5.1  Aerial map of downtown Budapest showing the location of the artists’ projects in the Polyphony:  Social Commentary in Contemporary Hungarian Art exhibition, 1993. Photo courtesy of C3 Center for Culture & Communication Foundation, Budapest, Hungary.

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Antipolitics While the focus of my discussion here is on the overall curatorial framework, a brief look at three artists, who continue to be active in their local and regional art scenes and whose projects in the exhibition vary from realized, small-​scale to unrealized, large-​scale urban interventions, illustrates the exhibition as an important early 1990s platform for practitioners to navigate experiences from both the recent socialist past and the rapidly shifting post-​ socialist transition. Among the 29 projects in the Polyphony exhibition, Zsolt Koroknai’s Fülke Galéria / Telephone Booth Gallery was a small-​scale intervention into the urban public space (Figure 5.2). It consisted of public telephone booths in seven different locations across Budapest, each connected to the artist’s Audio Studio.14 Upon dialling the indicated number, the caller could enter into an open dialogue with the artist on various topics including the role of art in contemporary society. The street-​level, open-​ended dialogic project extended agency to the passer-​by, who actively participated in the creation of the work. Moreover, it gave visibility and audibility to the silent yet active social relationships of reciprocity that formed the multi-​ layered web of second society, so vital in the daily existence of citizens under socialism.

Figure 5.2  Zsolt Koroknai, Telephone Booth Gallery, 1993. Indirect audio-​mail-​art action. Public telephone booths in different locations in Budapest. Queue outside the Telephone Booth Gallery at Deak Ferenc Street. Photo courtesy of C3 Center for Culture & Communication Foundation, Budapest, Hungary.

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Socially Engaged Art after Socialism Receiving a doctorate in Liberal Arts from the Hungarian University of Fine Arts in 2015, Koroknai has continued to work in diverse artistic media, including painting, writing, performance art and video art. Most recently, he published a book, Portrait Drawing (2012), which is both a historical overview of portraiture in Western art history and a tutorial for non-​ artists, offering step-​by-​step instructions for how to draw a portrait. Based on the book, he had staged performative workshops to gallery visitors. For example, in 2012 at Nomade Galéria, in Budapest, his participatory ‘portrait drawing activity’ included a musician and a dancer, who performed in the gallery amid the participants seated in front of their easels. Koroknai has aimed to expand upon the notion of the artist, the model and the typically intimate relationship between artist and model in the process of creating a work of art. And it is this participatory thread, which he explored in Fülke Galéria, that runs through his diverse body of work since the early 1990s. Gyula Várnai’s two-​and-​a-​half-​hour acoustic installation Agitator consisted of a tape-​recorder on a stand positioned next to a tree and two microphones placed at a busy Budapest intersection,15 recording street noises and sounds (Figure 5.3). The artist looped the tape of the recorder

Figure 5.3 Gyula Varnai, Agitator, 1993. Acoustic installation at the corner of Rottenbiller and Damjanich Streets, Budapest. Photo courtesy of C3 Center for Culture & Communication Foundation, Budapest, Hungary.

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Antipolitics so that it encircled the tree trunk, and covered the delete button of the recorder with aluminium foil. The title of the work could allude to the ‘agitators’ who were the ‘people’s educators’ during the Stalin era of the early 1950s, who would visit door to door for the purpose of controlling and spreading the Socialist Party ideology in direct face-​to-​face conversations. By ultimately eliminating any intelligible sounds from Agitator, Várnai established this specific connection with the past –​one could see the role of the tree as a silent yet rooted witness to this legacy –​ and erased it through the noise of the shifting spatial-​temporal dimension of the present. In its infinite possibility of capturing transient yet incoherent moments, openly absorbing the random sounds of the street, voices of passers-​by and physical landmarks, Agitator coalesced the perpetually fluid relations between the simultaneously existing present, past and future temporalities. In 2015, Várnai had his first solo exhibition abroad in Maribor, Slovenia, at Kibla Portal. Curated by Barnabás Bencsik, who has also participated in the organization of Polyphony, Gyula Várnai –​Blind World –​an Overview presented old and new site-​specific works, light boxes, sound works, and neon and video installations. In the context of this 2015 exhibition, Várnai’s works are described as posing questions about ‘the perception of space and intangible realities, the process of sensual experiences, and the relations between the sense, notion and physical appearance of time’.16 While the artist’s later works are not overt social interventions into public spaces, exploring instead the metaphysical and the poetic, Várnai has continued to investigate the concept of site-​specificity that he initially approached in his public interventions within the context of Polyphony. The Polyphony catalogue includes documents on several proposals by artists for projects that remained, for various reasons, unrealized. The written proposals illuminate another facet of participatory practices that were envisioned at a large scale within the context of the exhibition. One such unrealized project, Szép sötétség (variáció 2) / Beautiful Darkness Variation 2, was by Tamás Szentjóby, one of the key figures of the Hungarian neo-​avant-​ garde of the late 1960s and early 1970s (discussed in chapter three), who returned to Budapest in 1991, after being forced to leave the country in 1975. Even while he was away, Szentjóby continued his projects that he started before leaving Hungary, such as the ‘Subsistence-​Level-​Standard-​Project’, 89

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Socially Engaged Art after Socialism which advocates for minimum living wages to be taken from the military budget, and the A Telekommunikáció Nemzetközi Paralel Uniója (International Parallel Union of Telecommunications) or TNPU / IPUT, which he founded in 1968.17 In addition, he has initiated a ‘Portable Intelligence Increase Museum’ in order to collect and preserve art historical material on Hungarian unofficial art practices obtained from his social networks; and the ‘Neo-​Socialist Realist.’, IPUT’s ‘Global Counter-​ Arthist.ory-​Falsifiers Front’ (NETRAF) organization under which he digitized works of art from 1956 to 1976 that were censored at the time by the authorities. For the Polyphony exhibition, Szentjóby, as the TNPU / IPUT dispatcher, proposed a large-​scale project Beautiful Darkness Variation 2,18 which was intended to involve the entire population of Budapest. His work of art would have been 24 seconds of darkness. For this duration, TNPU / IPUT proposed to decrease by 24 units all of the city’s public electric consumption at 10 p.m. In the proposal, the artist made sure to specify: ‘The decrease of luminous intensity will not affect traffic lights and the supplied electricity to buildings.’19 The idea was that half of the money saved by switching off the power would be given to the National Society of the Blind and Visually Impaired, and the other half the artist intended to divide among the artists in the exhibition, since the Soros Foundation did not offer honoraria for the artists’ participation.20 The Foundation did not approve the proposal  –​most likely due to the irreversible negative outcomes that an electric outage would cause, for instance, in the hospitals and for the security networks. However, the project might have been rejected because of its particular aesthetic qualities. In his remarks published in the Polyphony exhibition catalogue, Beke noted: ‘It must have escaped the attention of the Person In Charge at the Soros Foundation that this “nothing” would have realized Szentjóby’s concept even more clearly.’21 Obviously, in part the work consisted in this ‘nothing’ or ‘darkness’, and the Soros Foundation failed to recognize the conceptual nature of the project: a symbolic gesture, suggesting unity in darkness among the various publics of an entire city. Critics reviewing the exhibition for the local press, such as Sherri Hay in her 1993 article ‘The Aesthetics of Art and Politics’, and participants in the symposium, such as András Szántó and László Beke, objected to the 90

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Antipolitics lack of politically and socially charged art forms in the Hungarian context when compared with the artistic, activist and dissident public interventions in New York. Hungarian-​born and US-​based critic Szántó argued that in contrast to the calculated silence towards the socialist regime, after 1989 the same ‘politics of silence’ carried no meaning, as there was no longer a Big Brother to fight against. According to Beke, the early 1990s vacuum of politically and socially engaged contemporary art was due to the fact that ‘we’ve used up all our gun power’ following the 1960s and 1970s neo-​avant-​ garde’s activities, which prepared the way for political changes.22 In a 1997 essay, Hungarian art historian Edit András remarked that in the Hungarian context, politics were equated with governmental politics. According to András, the social consciousness that drove international art currents in the 1990s had not triggered any local response because such initiatives in Hungary still carried the memory of state control and manipulation.23 However, rather than positioning themselves in relation to the contemporary American socio-​politically engaged art practices emerging in reaction to the conservative climate of the Republican government, several artists in the Polyphony exhibition nevertheless developed locally specific socially engaged projects. Moreover, aiming to reclaim public life and reactivate local public spaces as forums for open dialogue, which until very recently had been dominated by the political ideology of socialist regimes, their works were political. They adopted a politics of ‘antipolitics’, or as Havel noted: ‘It is political because it does not play politics.’24 Hungarian artists were not political in the sense that artists working at the time in America were or in terms of the expectations of local critics. Rather, their works become political as reactions to highly politicized local public sites. And so, rather than passive social commentary, Hungarian artists attempted to formulate different strategies to directly interact and establish participatory platforms for communication with and among local publics. In fact, it is worth noting that the English translation changed the original meaning of the exhibition title, which in Hungarian read ‘social context as a medium’ for art, reflecting what most artists actually accomplished, while the English title read ‘social commentary in contemporary Hungarian art’. Hungarian artists in the exhibition responded to their immediate context and sought to build upon local art historical precedents, particularly unofficial pre-​1989 art practices that emphasized participatory forms of 91

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Socially Engaged Art after Socialism engagement as open models of social communication. For example, the interventionist street actions of Miklós Erdély in 1956 and Gábor Tóth in the early 1980s, which I discussed in detail earlier in the text, despite their ephemerality, were examples for the role of the artist as participant observer and catalyst for collective actions.25 Although the curator vaguely acknowledged this legacy, it was not explored in the curatorial statement published in the exhibition catalogue. Instead, Mészöly articulated Polyphony’s aim in contradictory terms by arguing that it was meant to ‘introduce even the understanding of issue-​ based work; and it is not an introduction; this work has existed here for a very long time. Issue-​based work has always been made here.’26 Thus, Polyphony acted as both curatorial provocation, in one way, and a public platform for the individual artists’ interventions in another way. Taken together, such manifestations, however small and temporary, contributed to the opening up of public life. Moreover, within the broader history of such emancipatory curatorial initiatives, Polyphony became an important point of reference for subsequent exhibitions of participatory and socially engaged public art, such as Moszkva Tér (Gravitacio) / Moscow Square (Gravitation) (2003) in Hungary, which I will discuss in part two of this book, as well as other exhibitions in the CEE region that have included diverse modes of interventionist art as strategies for public participation and political agency.

Curatorial Visions: Framing Community-​Oriented Art Projects The Soros Centre for Contemporary Art in Romania funded the organization of Exhibition 01010101… (1994), which, like the SCCA in Budapest, encouraged at this time forms of socially engaged art practice. Curated by Călin Dan in Bucharest, the exhibition represented an analogously ambivalent curatorial framework that aimed to promote local contemporary art that was socially engaged in a context that avoided any socialist and collectivist ideals, while showing its synchronization with the international discourse of art as social practice. According to the curator, the exhibition was meant to ‘force the artistic discourse’ in a new direction by provoking Romanian artists to engage with their immediate social context. In the 92

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Antipolitics interview published in the exhibition catalogue, Dan stated: ‘For me the artistic result of an exhibition is less important than the opportunity to install an alternative.’27 Such a curatorial goal was partly motivated by the stagnant local socio-​political context of the early 1990s. Compared with Hungary’s relatively clear rupture with the political past, Romania’s political changes had not been nearly so substantial. The country’s leading post-​socialist party, Frontul Salvării Nationale (FSN), represented by Ion Iliescu, ‘a communist with liberal views’,28 had the backing of the National Army and former Communist Secret Police or Securitate forces in 1990 to silence any critics. The local opposition was represented, on the one hand, by a small group of intellectual dissidents with no organized political agenda, who formed under the socialist regime and contested its legacy. On the other hand, there were the members of parties that had survived the Gulag (the Soviet forced labour camp systems during the 1930s and until the 1950s) and maintained the pre-​1938 conservative and traditional view of Romania as a monarchy. Such weak and fractionalized opposition made it possible for Iliescu’s party to occupy the majority of seats in the 1990 Parliament.29 In the first few years after the 1989 revolution, the FSN, or the so-​called nomenklatura, built upon the continuing strength of personal networks of administrators of the socialist regime and actively worked to maintain the former ideological and institutional structures. The party appointed members of the previous political elite to key national positions, thus delaying the replacement of a centrally governed infrastructure with democratically oriented forms of leadership. As theorized by Bourdieu, social capital requires time and energy to build, and is closely connected to power relations that lead to economic gain among individuals privileged to have access to it. This was exemplified by the fact that members of Iliescu’s political elite were able to exploit a capital of social connections, which, combined with the general Romanian population’s passive acceptance of authority (a legacy from the past), allowed them not only to stay in power but to advance their economic situation as well. On the other hand, there is evidence that informal social connections accumulated at the grass-​roots level had the potential to inspire collective action and generate political participation in order to achieve often contentious yet inclusive public spheres, thus acting as a counter force to the 93

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Socially Engaged Art after Socialism institutional power structure with its vertical networks of social capital. This was illustrated, for instance, in what became known as the University Square Phenomenon, a mass protest in Bucharest by students, intellectuals and workers beginning on 22 April 1990 and lasting six weeks. The protest occurred exactly four months after the 22 December 1989 Revolution, which claimed more than 1,000 lives. The protesters opposed the self-​ proclaimed provisional government of FSN led by Iliescu, and aimed to ‘adopt legal measures preventing corrupt former communist elites and members of the Securitate from running for office and from holding public functions’.30 Within the first few days, the protesters increased in number and diversity and continued their anti-​communist and anti-​neo-​ communist opposition while maintaining a moral stance towards politics, since they never intended to form a political party and run for office. The openly stated, moral character of the protest was similar to the ‘antipolitics’ of Konrád, whose politics of ‘antipolitics’, as we have seen, continued in the early 1990s in the Hungarian socio-​cultural and artistic discourses. Signboards reading ‘PCR=FSN’ (Romanian Communist Party  =  the National Salvation Front), or ‘Down with the Communists’, communicated a direct link between the 1989 revolution and the protest in the University Square. Iliescu refused to enter into dialogue with them and openly called the protesters ‘golani’ (thugs). The latter adopted this label as a badge of honour separating them from the neo-​communists and even named the University Square Golania (Thug Land). Moreover, the golani/protesters renamed the Square as a ‘zone free of neo-​communism’31 and ‘the kilometre zero’ of freedom and democracy.32 As such, the protesters sought an open public space within the capital city, chanting and expressing openly their demands and opposition. They aimed to ignite the freedom of assembly and the power of independent collective action among the population, whose minds and bodies were aggressively controlled only a few months earlier by the Ceaușescu regime. Their voluntary gathering and public presence and face-​to-​face interactions were not mere symbolic gestures but a clear demand for legislation that would eliminate former socialists from public office. The University Square Phenomenon was all the more important, as Romania had not seen a well-​organized mass protest movement under socialism. Thus the contentious presence of the protesters within the city streets was the first 94

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Antipolitics societal attempt to establish public life, itself entirely absent from the political propaganda activities of the former party-​state. It is in light of this specific locality that I approach the curatorial framework and three specific participatory projects developed for the Exhibition 01010101…, which I selected for the different ways in which they engaged with a minority group, and attempted to reclaim public space and to participate, however symbolically, in the construction of democratic civil society. In the highly volatile context of the 1990s, Dan’s overarching curatorial aim –​to offer an alternative to stagnant and conservative local art practices and to participate in building emerging forms of civil society inspired by contemporary Western democratic values –​gained almost a revolutionary aura. The Exhibition 01010101… was anchored by the theme ‘The Artistic Discourse as a Reflection of the Community’, and it had two main components. The first, and most extensive, included 19 newly commissioned site-​specific projects by artists selected by a SCCA-​appointed international jury.33 Dan, as the curator of the exhibition, asked each selected artist to develop projects involving direct engagement with a marginalized community over the course of the summer of 1994. The artists created their works simultaneously in different localities across Romania where they lived and worked. The second component of Exhibition 01010101… was the exhibition’s elaborate installation on the opening day, which aimed to show at least a portion of the artists’ working processes and outcomes. A point of contention underlying the entire exhibition project was the unresolved tension between the overall curatorial intent and actual outcomes of each of the artists’ site-​specific, socially engaged art works. At its core yet not directly stated, the goal of this Soros-​funded curatorial project was to articulate a local understanding of the internationally emerging current of new-​genre public art practice. Identified by American artist and critic Suzanne Lacy, new-​genre public art addressed public and social issues, engaged marginalized groups and took place mainly outside the art institution. New-​genre public art emphasized the process of production and communication, where collaborative strategies of engagement became its artistic and aesthetic features.34 This was illustrated, for example, by the now seminal Culture in Action exhibition curated by Mary Jane Jacob in Chicago from 1992 to 1993. It aimed to promote organically emerging, fluid and open collaborative projects between artists and 95

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Socially Engaged Art after Socialism specific communities guided by mutual interests. However, in their active roles as mediators between artists (who for the most part did not reside in Chicago) and local groups, the curator and institution, in fact, predetermined the nature of several of the community projects. As Kwon observed, ‘The contribution of the community partners was limited to the realization of projects that fully prescribed the nature of their participation in advance.’35 Thus, rather than creating fully collaborative works, many of the artists excluded members of the community from the initial conceptualization of their projects so that the community provided instead only assistant help in the works’ material construction. A comparable curatorial premise was also problematically evident in Exhibition 01010101…, which explicitly intended to provoke artists to engage with real people and real situations, as exemplified in the contemporary international art scene. However, concepts such as ‘community’, ‘site-​specificity’, ‘collaboration’ and ‘participation’ were not explicitly defined within the framework of the exhibition and the catalogue. Several artists, such as the late Alexandru Chira (Figure 5.4) –​who was also a professor at the time at the National Fine Arts Academy in Bucharest –​and artist Marcel Bunea, conceptualized ‘site’ in terms of the location of a particular social group or community in a specific space and time. Chira’s Instalația pentru Reamintirea, pentru Sugerarea Ploii și a Curcubeului / Installation for Reminding, for Suggesting the Rain and the Rainbow (Figure 5.4) most successfully represented the exhibition’s stated curatorial aims, winning the jury’s first prize. His project was the creation of a large-​scale installation in the heart of the Romanian village Tăușeni (where he was born) with the help of the local villagers and various metal-​ manufacturing companies, which constructed different components of the mixed media structure.36 The curator was instrumental in shaping the project by strategically refusing to fully fund Chira’s proposal, so that the artist would engage and involve the local community, although what was meant by ‘engagement’ was not specified. The artist received the enthusiastic approval and support of the members of the village. The chairman of the village board Cheta Emil, the village priests, the teacher Ilisie Tuluc, the Mureșan family who donated the land to the artist and many other villagers were all eager to facilitate the construction of the work through their labour and various –​including monetary –​donations.37 On 14 September 96

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Figure 5.4  Alexandru Chira, Reminding, for Suggesting the Rain and the Rainbow, 1994, site-​specific installation in the village of Tauseni, Romania. Photo courtesy of the International Center for Contemporary Art, Bucharest, Romania.

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Socially Engaged Art after Socialism 1994, following the Sunday Mass, the site of the installation was even consecrated during an official religious ceremony, clearly showing the villagers’ embrace of the artist and his project. An elaborate work in the form of a hexagon, the shape of a living cell, Chira’s structure was meant to connect the realms of the sacred and the profane. Situated on top of a hill, it connected the village’s school, cultural centre and the church.38 In the artist’s words: I have chosen this hill because it is set in the middle of the village, which is almost divided in two equal parts by it and also because this hill is near the church, the school and the cultural centre. […] On the south-​north axis of the hill is the ‘House of the Shepherd’ who looks after this land. […] ‘The Mirror for the Sower, Rain and Rainbow’ is built and designed for all those who consider themselves sowers. […] the Rainbow inside contains all the sower’s gestures. […] On the east-​west axis is a sectioned pyramid where there will be an ‘Icon for Rain and Rainbow’. On the other side, on a dome of earth, will be installed a ‘Spinning Icon for Messages’ for receiving and sending messages, for announcements, forecasting and storytelling. Both icons are in the shape of a living cell.39

Even though the installation was interactive by inviting, for instance, villagers to communicate via the work of art, the community was not engaged in an open collaborative process with the artist in the creation of the installation. The villagers performed only physical labour, executing a large-​scale public art project that was entirely a priori conceptualized by the artist in his studio. As the artist wrote on 26 May 1994, ‘I submit my project, a “poetical installation” that implies the collaboration of a small rural community […] at the execution level […].’40 Even though Chira and his family were from the village, a fact that instantaneously established a sense of trust and openness towards him, the artist’s project was not based on sustained forms of collaboration. Illustrating a particular understanding of socially engaged art, both artist and curator from the outset considered the physical assistance of the community, rather than their involvement in the conceptualization of the work, to be of paramount importance. Despite an apparent lack of agency for the community involved, Chira’s project in his native village is inherently more complex. The work 98

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Antipolitics rearticulated the deeply held spiritual beliefs of peasants, becoming a site for collective healing from the recent past. As quoted in a local newspaper article, Chira said: ‘By this work I intend to draw attention to the Romanian rural culture and especially to the Transylvanian village cell which, in my opinion, dwells in the collective subconsciousness.’41 In another interview with a local journalist, the artist confessed: ‘this work is intended to be a project of healing, of redemption and of hope for everyone. The work is meant for all, no matter what their religion is.’42 Chira is invoking here the political marginalization and persecution of ethnic Hungarians (who are Catholic, in contrast to the majority of Orthodox Romanians) in the region of Transylvania during Ceaușescu’s nationalist-​socialist regime. During the 1980s, as part of the country’s urbanization and the communization of the entire population, Ceaușescu planned to replace each village with a small urban centre composed of blocks of flats. This way the agricultural terrain would be extended while Romania’s urbanization would be total. Fortunately, Ceaușescu ran out of time, destroying only a few villages and replacing them with bad-​quality flats with no running water.43 With a still fresh memory of this recent political system, Chira’s work aimed to confront the negative effects of the previous dictatorship by visibly articulating and amplifying existing social relations in the village community. This is indicated, for example, in the artist’s suggestion that the installation was a message board and a platform for story telling for everyone regardless of religion. Another project that conceptualized site in terms of the location of a particular social group in a specific time and space was Marcel Bunea’s Urmele Exodului / Exodus Traces, which was a two-​week collaborative action with a 200-​plus-​member Roma community of traditional brick makers. This group settled in Ponorata, in what is also known as the ‘Death Valley’ region, near the Târgu Lăpuș city located in the north-​western part of Romania. Their settlement originated after 18 of their houses were destroyed in a fire set by the nearby villagers in 1991 following the rape of a pregnant non-​Roma female villager by one of the Roma. As Bunea wrote in the exhibition catalogue, the Roma are fed with the help of charitable organizations. They live in improvised tents made of plastic sheets. […] with the help of

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Socially Engaged Art after Socialism the Prefecture, the local Police and City Hall by August 1994, eleven houses out of the eighteen that burnt are built. In several instances the government promises financial support but until now nothing has been done.44

The Roma saw the artist’s presence in their community as part of this broader reconstruction effort by local authorities. Bunea’s community art project resulted in the building of three decorative thrones stacked one on top of each other (an iconic allusion to the fact that the community had a king, an emperor and perhaps a pharoh) and an inhabitable structure, which were collectively conceptualized and executed (Figure 5.5). An article by Dan Perjovschi in Revista 22, a national magazine of politics and culture, described Bunea’s project: For two weeks the artist and the Roma worked on a two-​meter tall object, which they decorated with specific elements meaningful to the community, such as mirrors and plastic flowers. Their throne. Here the process is the most important aspect, not the final object. The artist had integrated in a community, which is not integrated within the broader society.45

The artist’s understanding of ‘engagement’ was based on artistic collaboration and emphasized the process of creation, which was contrary to Chira’s unilateral mode of working. Following an initial resistance from the member of the community, the everyday interactions and various modes of collaboration, which had gradually built the community’s sense of trust in the artist, became the content of Bunea’s action. A small brochure that accompanied Exhibition 01010101… showcased each of the artist’s projects developed for the exhibition on a separate page with a brief paragraph and an image. Bunea’s Exodus Traces was represented by a black-​ and-​white portrait-​format photograph of two Roma individuals next to a quote by Simion, a member of the Roma community, which read: ‘Art is life. Any kind of work means art. This is beauty for everyone. It is the artisan. I used to make churches, small houses, lamps.’46 By closely engaging with and representing individuals from this community, Bunea’s aim was to destroy the Romanians’ negative stereotype of the Roma as thieves and uncivilized people and to assist in the social integration of these groups 100

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Figure 5.5  Marcel Bunea, Exodus Traces, 1994, detail of the collaboratively built decorative throne by the artist and a Roma community near the city of Lapusi, Romania. Photo by Jannine Huzinga, courtesy of the International Center for Contemporary Art (ICCA), Bucharest, Romania.

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Socially Engaged Art after Socialism within the broader Romanian society.47 Bunea’s intent was further exemplified by the artist’s description of the project included in the exhibition catalogue, which concludes: ‘Projects for the Nearest Future: the founding of a commercial society, a brickyard and a workshop for producing boxes, and the children’s education, alphabetizing children over the school age.’48 Bunea’s project, aimed to bring into public discussion Roma’s position in the larger society, was all the more significant when considering that under Ceaușescu’s xenophobic polices, which were at the core of its nationalist socialism, Roma, in particular, were marginalized both politically and physically to the outskirts of cities and towns. This was similar to the treatment of other minority cultures such as Hungarians, who were to be eradicated through their forced Romanization. A set of site-​specific projects in Exhibition 01010101… built upon previous social initiatives in public spaces, such as the University Square Phenomenon, which I presented above, to endanger public life seen as a prerequisite for democratic civil society. For example, Adrian Timar’s Gazeta de Transilvania / Transylvanian Gazette, which won the jury’s third prize, consisted of silk-​printing four different, large images depicting the Black Church, the most significant church in Braşov –​a double-​faced portrait, a cat and a mask of an idol –​within the pages of his city’s local Gazeta de Transilvania newspaper, a pro-​government paper (Figure 5.6). The artist collaborated with the local printing press and printed the four images directly onto the already printed newspaper in a limited number for four consecutive days –​Wednesday to Saturday. According to the artist’s observations, people reacted positively towards the image of the Black Church and the double-​faced portrait, but the image of the cat received some scandalous responses: ‘what does it want to do with its claws? To pull all of us down?’ One person even returned the paper, yet when a reporter standing by (informed of the artist’s action) asked the man what he saw in the paper, he reconsidered and asked for his paper back: ‘Give me back the one with the cat, it’s mine.’49 By making it difficult to read the printed text, Timar aimed to provoke the local newspaper readers of Braşov, his hometown city, to question the reception of mediated information, which, as illustrated by the documented responses of the public, they did. Moreover, despite Timar’s stated goal of triggering his readers to rethink or question what they read, which 102

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Figure 5.6  Adrian Timar, The Transylvanian Gazette, 1994, silk-​printed onto newspaper, Brasov, Romania. Photo by Jannine Huzinga, courtesy of the International Center for Contemporary Art (ICCA), Bucharest, Romania.

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Socially Engaged Art after Socialism implicitly cast a negative light on the written material, the newspaper editors, while eagerly agreeing to collaborate with the artist, officially avoided communicating the intention of the project. For example, in a short article in the Gazeta de Transilvania about the work, the emphasis was on the symbolic connotation of the images and on what was perceived to be the unconventionality of the artist’s work as it unfolded on the street directly involving the public, unlike the traditional studio-​based forms of art.50 Although the artist’s action lasted only four days, the collaboration he initiated with the director and editors of the newspaper took on a life of its own. The artist’s action culminated after several weeks in an invitation to all the newspaper owners to gather at the office of the newspaper where they engaged in conversation and were offered prizes. As a result of the artist’s initiative his readers experienced the inner workings of the newspaper business, one of the most significant ideological tools of the recently oppressive Ceaușescu regime. Timar’s interventionist work provoked readers to exercise their personal freedom of expression in a still fragile state of civil society, when, as noted above, Romania’s newly elected government aimed essentially to preserve the pre-​1989 ideological and institutional structures. Similar in scope yet different in method from projects in Polyphony, Timar’s subtly disruptive public interventions functioned as temporary platforms for dialogic interactions and voluntary participation. Timar, like other Romanian artists, built upon local antecedents while being inspired by international figures. Timar was a student at the Ion Andreescu Fine Art Academy in Cluj-​Napoca, Romania, at the time when Ana Lupaș was professor there. During my conversation with Timar, he expressed the importance of local artistic figures like Lupaș, especially when outside information was difficult to access. After being exposed to international artistic currents, Timar specifically cites Joseph Beuys’s influence: At the time when in Romania you did not have access to outside information, her (Lupaș) works appeared to us students as a miracle. Then when we saw that there were others out there, the enthusiasm for Romanian art diminished. I discovered Joseph Beuys’ works.51

Beuys, the German Fluxus and performance artist with whom another Romanian artist, Mihai Oloș, collaborated on a performance piece in 1977 104

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Antipolitics (as discussed in the previous chapter), has become famous for his phrase ‘Everyone is an artist’, in the sense that creativity belongs to everyone, not only to professionally trained artists. Timar’s insight clearly indicates that Romanian artists were familiar with seminal international artists, known for their socially engaged art practices prior to SCCA’s presence in the country. And so, the curatorial intent of Exhibition 01010101 … was to provide a creative platform for artists to explore art as social practice in their own work, in an attempt to connect the local art scene with art tendencies happening simultaneously internationally. Initially, an exhibition was planned to showcase the processes and outcomes of the projects the artists developed over the summer months. Yet the exhibition, which represented the second major component of the overall Exhibition 01010101… curatorial project (the artists’ projects made up the first and most extensive component), became a site for a large-​ scale curatorial experiment, bypassing a clear focus on the artists’ socially engaged art projects. While Polyphony featured a small-​scale, one-​day exhibition documenting the artists’ works that coincided with an organized symposium, Exhibition 01010101… was a carefully choreographed interactive installation. It was strategically installed in the Romanian Peasant Museum in order to exhibit contemporary Romania’s conflicting features that reflected both modern and traditional values (Figure 5.7). The exhibition title 01010101… referred to a computer binary code representing data processing. It aimed to introduce and stress the important role of new technologies such as email, computers and video devices in establishing and maintaining free and alternative networks of communication: ‘We cannot afford to maintain the 50 or so years distance from what is still supposed to be the Western model.’52 The design of the exhibition installation aimed to demonstrate the applicability of the new technology. The participating artists were only virtually present via the interface of computers connected to the internet, which were meant to function as communicative devices between the museum audience and artists physically located in their different hometowns across the country. Yet this new mode of communication became a closed circuit, failing to engage the public, who were unprepared to use computer technology. Although at an early date for internet connectivity even for Western users, it underscored the increasingly growing socio-​economic divide between those who do 105

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Figure 5.7  Exhibition 01010101…, 1994, installation view at the Romanian Peasant Museum, Bucharest, design by Marius Marcu. Photo by Irina Cios, Courtesy of the International Center for Contemporary Art (ICCA), Bucharest, Romania.

not have the opportunity to acquire (digital) literacy and those who have access to the technological networks of communication. If we think of participation as any kind of social interaction then the computer installation created, perhaps as an accidental consequence, a social encounter and a sense of communal gathering among individuals and groups of people present in the museum space. In an article on participatory art, Russian-​born and US-​based art critic Boris Groys argued that exhibitions of computer installations composed of several computers with varied information provokes viewers to wander from one computer screen to the next, thus undermining the traditional solitary experience of the single user in front of the computer screen.53 In such a context the movements and social interactions among members of the public take precedence over the installation itself; therefore, even if unplanned by the curator, the exhibition display, albeit in a very limited way, might have fulfilled the intended curatorial scope that sought to encourage different kinds of community participation and audience engagement. Despite the curator’s declared socially transformative goals for the exhibition, the overpowering curatorial framework created a problematic 106

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Antipolitics translation between the time-​and-​space-​specific participatory artists’ projects and the gallery space and audience. Rather than involving the artists in the representation of their own works, the curator worked closely with the architect Marius Marcu to construct an elaborate exhibition installation that featured sound, projections, flickering screens and even a disco ball. Short movies made and edited by the curator based on his summer travels across the country to the sites of each of the artists’ projects were projected in a loop on the walls of the exhibition space. Images and texts documenting the artists’ projects were also presented by means of projections lined up, one after the other, along a gallery wall. At the centre of the gallery on an elevated wooden structure, seven computers displayed the documentation of all the projects. The installation remained structurally bound, performing a self-​contained virtual monologue, even though the public were meant openly to browse the computer files and spontaneously communicate with one another and with the artists via email. The disconnect between intent and outcome was emphasized in articles and reviews in the local press, which pointed to the discrepancy between the exhibition’s stated democratic goals and its highly mediated installation. For instance, Alexandra Titu referred to the museum display as a ‘form without a content’, indicating how the complexities of sustained modes of engagement and forms of communication at the core of most of the artists’ projects were reduced to the visual special effects of high-​tech arrangements.54 Erwin Kessler called it a mega-​installation that swallowed all of the individual projects, forming a ‘noisy and glittering organism that just entered into an aesthetic coma’.55 The disjunction between premise and outcome was conditioned by the exhibition’s ambitious but opposing goals. While it aimed to be an interactive event featuring the latest communicative technology, most importantly the exhibition sought to reinvent the transformative potential of locally anchored, socially engaged art as separate from its former socialist connotation as rhetorically unifying propaganda. To say the least, this was not an easy task when taking into account the artists’ and society’s recent experiences of the pervasive power of political control and forced collective participation in state-​mandated public events. It is noteworthy that 31 per cent of Romanian citizens (three times the percentage of Hungarians) were members of the socialist party, which implicitly involved mandatory participation in party propaganda 107

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Socially Engaged Art after Socialism activities.56 Under Ceaușescu, for example, beginning in 1977, large numbers of Romanians ranging from factory workers and peasants to teachers and students were obliged to participate and organize cultural events in their local communities, and to perform patriotic song and dance recitals in conjunction with the national cultural festival Cantarea Romaniei (The Singing of Romania).57 Like Polyphony in Budapest, Exhibition 01010101… in Bucharest sought to recover the emancipatory potentials of socially engaged art from the tainted memory of the recent collectivist past by provoking and acting as a trigger for artists and audiences alike to actively engage with the multi-​layered changes occurring in the country. While in part poetic and symbolic gestures, artists addressed locally pertinent themes, such as the social integration of Roma in Bunea’s Urmele Exodului, the re-​ appropriation of confiscated land in Chira’s Instalația pentru Reamintirea, pentru Sugerarea Ploii și a Curcubeului, and freedom of speech in Timar’s Gazeta de Transilvania. Collectively, each of the individual artist’s projects worked towards re-​activating a critical public sphere in which a civil society bypasses hegemonic silencing principles, and instead becomes a space for the expression and negotiation of diverse and dissenting interests.

Soros Centres for Contemporary Arts: Constraint and Self-​Determination Emerging from particular localities shaped by a continued strong socialist legacy, unstable governments and a desire to participate within the international art scene, the two exhibitions became platforms for exploring different approaches to the role of art in society. Under the auspices of the Soros Centres, Polyphony and Exhibition 01010101… were shaped by a mandate to promote emerging democratic forms of civil society according to Western neoliberal values of individualism and entrepreneurship within a free-​market economy and culture industry. Yet some contradictions exist between the Centres’ openly stated rhetoric of inclusive democracy and their actual outcomes, within their respective local contexts. As curator Călin Dan has asserted, the philanthropy of these SCCAs in fact operated in ways similar to the market forces of supply and demand: ‘the rich […] provide jobs, goods, control, and the poor […] provide work, profit, recognition’; Soros 108

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Antipolitics Foundation’s programmes ‘are gambling maybe on the elites of tomorrow and rely on the local societies for accepting or rejecting them in the long term’.58 Rather than attempting to negotiate with national state institutions as a way to establish a governmental framework that would support, for instance, the local contemporary art scene, SCCA implemented and funded their centres for a period of only five to seven years, ‘gambling’ that their board of directors would find ways to sustain them. After the initial funding period, local centres were expected to become self-​sustaining by securing their own funding as individual competitors within the neoliberal international market, employing the training the SCCA had provided for the staff. In fact, the SCCA in Budapest morphed into and continued its activities within the framework of the C3: Centre for Culture and Communication;59 the Soros Centre for Contemporary Art in Bucharest transformed into the International Centre for Contemporary Art in 1999,60 headed by a former Soros employee; and the Soros Centre for the Arts in Sofia dissolved, and most of its staff formed the Red House for Culture and Debate in 2002.61 All these centres have operated with funds received mostly from Western European and American funding sources, with minimal or non-​existent local support. Several of the artists associated with the Centres became aware of what was expected of them in order to be included in subsequent international exhibitions, such as Beyond Belief (Chicago, 1995), After the Wall (Stockholm, 1999) and In the Gorges of the Balkans (Kassel, 2003), staged for various Western audiences.62 The important role the SCCAs played within the local art scenes during the 1990s must be emphasized. Their financial support and institutionalized programmes represented vital resources for contemporary curators, artists and art critics. This support was essential in a context where the centralized Unions of the Artists continued to monopolize the local scene with pre-​ 1989 conservative forms of art, even immediately after the collapse of the socialist regimes when state funds were almost non-​existent. While alternative activities had emerged previously, as I noted earlier, especially with the formation of several artist groups, these were short-​lived. The SCCAs, through their annual exhibitions and grants to individual artists and curators, were an important presence in providing infrastructure, training and assistance to implement exhibitions and programmes to benefit the local experimental contemporary art scene. 109

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Socially Engaged Art after Socialism And yet, the curatorial frameworks of Polyphony and Exhibition 01010101…, while aiming broadly to open up communication and participation, remained within the confines of the Soros Centres as sponsoring institutions. Curators and directors were expected to implement directives issued and approved by the Soros Foundation in New  York. One could speak of a somewhat wholesale import of specific art media, as exemplified, for instance, in the staging of contemporary video art exhibitions in virtually all countries within the span of a few years by SCCAs.63 The curators of these two exhibitions, Suzanne Mészöly in Hungary and Călin Dan in Romania, did not make curatorial decisions autonomously, but entered into complex processes of negotiation between the SCCAs’ institutional demands and the needs and desires of local artists. In their position as negotiators, it is significant that both curators were also active as artists: Mészöly was a former member of the artist group Helyettes Szomjazók (Substitute Thirsters), which lacked any defined artistic aims, and Călin Dan was a current member of the artist group subREAL. Before 1989 they were both active within the local art networks of communication and exchange. In their new roles as curators, they simultaneously made use of and expanded upon this existing web of friendships and varied social relations among both local and regional artists, former dissident intellectuals, critics and art historians. Mészöly and Dan provided important platforms for their fellow artists in a local context lacking support for contemporary art, despite their mandate as directors and curators of SCCA to synchronize their activities with international contemporary trends through the organization of specifically themed exhibitions. And so, despite all of the problematics that emerged in the staging of exhibitions, the curators acted as mediators, animators and organizers of competing interests. This was in contrast to the rather uncomplicated hierarchy between curator and artists that was emerging in the 1990s in the North American and Western European art scene. With international debates associated with the ‘curatorial turn’, the curator was rapidly emerging as an agenda-​setting figure in the staging of contemporary art exhibitions and determining the fate of artists’ careers in unprecedented ways.64 As seen, a number of the artists developed within the curatorial frameworks of Polyphony and Exhibition 01010101… proposed new communicative social interfaces in the form of temporary participations and 110

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Antipolitics interactions with various groups of people from rural and urban areas. And so, these socially engaged, community-​oriented art projects articulated the already existing yet officially unacknowledged informal network of social relations, while simultaneously serving as symbolic and momentary platforms for recalibrating space and building democratic civil society. Such attempts were also made in Sofia, Bulgaria’s capital city, to which I will turn my attention in the next chapter. In this way, the Soros Centres were both enabling and constraining structures, yet Polyphony and Exhibition 01010101… set crucial precedents for institutionally sponsored and socially engaged artistic practices in the transitional period of post-​socialism that would more fully materialize in the subsequent decade.

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6 Sofia: Participatory Public Art and Emerging Contemporary Art Institutions

In contrast to Romania’s violent regime change that culminated with the media spectacle of the dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu’s and his wife Elena’s bloody assassination on Christmas Eve 1989, Bulgaria’s Communist Party and its leader Todor Hristov Zhivkov fell from power on 10 November 1989 in a rather smooth and calm process. As in other CEE nations, during the months that preceded Bulgaria’s first free elections in June 1990 a series of roundtables, meetings and public protests for the removal of the temporary government unfolded regularly throughout the city, manifesting the newly gained democratic freedom of expression. The general public gathered in city squares to voice opinions on current events, anticipating the first free elections or openly conversing with one another. Bulgarian cultural historian Alexander Kiossev described the actions of the crowds as ‘playful performances’: The spontaneous, colourful crowds of different people who not only protested but also rejoiced, sang and celebrated their own boldness, who behaved (moved, jumped, danced, shouted) any way they wanted, staging their own freedom and ‘lack of restraint’ […] the demonstrators would block traffic, march with lit candles though places that used to be venues of tank and missiles parades, surround and symbolically desecrate official public buildings.1

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Sofia These collective gatherings were among the first attempts to openly reclaim public life in public spaces that until very recently were monopolized by the visual, political and social presence and control of the socialist party-​ state. Kiossev emphasized the heterogeneity in the crowds during these early months of the transition period:  ‘Unlike the previous parades, the individuals no longer merged in a uniform focus […] they consisted of chaotic individuals with heterogeneous styles and behaviours, who were not susceptible to unification and discipline.’2 At the same time, the crowd’s public and festive presence chanting ‘we are the people’ in public squares had a temporary character, dispersing and dividing within the following years into different socio-​political, economic and cultural trajectories. The first free elections after the fall of the communist party in Bulgaria were held in June 1990 when the Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP; formerly the Bulgarian Communist Party, BCP) won an absolute majority in the multi-​party parliamentary elections, dominating the National Assembly. The election results ‘revealed a profound urban-​rural, professional-​worker schism in Bulgarian society’.3 Rural Bulgaria wanted the continuity and the security of the slightly reformed socialist power as reflected in the election of Prime Minister Andrei Lukanov, conservative leader of the BSP and a reformed Socialist, while the cities’ intellectuals, students and professionals formed the opposition, voting in support for the Union of Democratic Forces (UDF) led by Zheliu Zhelev. Dominated by predominately centre-​left figures, the UDF was a coalition of several major and minor parties and groups with diverse interests, such as the Social Democrats, the Bulgarian Agrarian National Union (BANU-​NP) and the ‘Group of Thirty-​ Nine’, which would fracture and split in the next few years into different and opposing parties, some moving to the far right.4 Yet, during the early months of 1990 they formed a united front against the BSP, reformed former socialists, whom the UDF blamed for Bulgaria’s weak economy. The UDF advocated that the national government adopt a radical, ‘shock-​therapy’ economic reform (sudden release of price controls, withdrawal of state subsidies and large-​scale privatizations of public properties) similar to that of Poland. It was in this early 1990s context characterized by the national rural–​ urban oppositions that the five-​member Bulgarian artist collective City Group realized their one-​day, self-​funded public action Chameleon, one of 113

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Socially Engaged Art after Socialism

Figure 6.1  The City Group, Chameleon, 1990, public action and sculpture, Sofia, Bulgaria. Courtesy of Philip Zidarov.

the earliest participatory contemporary art projects in Sofia’s urban public spaces. It took place in a central square in front of the National Palace of Culture (NPC), on a cold February day in 1990 (Figure 6.1). It was timed to take place simultaneously with the last Congress of the Union of Young Communists (UYC or DKMC in Bulgarian) held inside the NPC. During the period of socialism, such congresses were typically held every four or five years to elect new leaders in the union. In what was to be its last meeting, the UYC attempted a complete refashioning of its organization’s image based on the idea of relinquishing any visual and symbolic connection with the communist party while, at the same time, it was unable to clearly define its new direction.5 City Group’s Chameleon was a participatory public action that sought to take part in the society’s claim of a public life, a prerequisite for achieving a 114

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Sofia critical civil society. The work was anchored within a large-​scale installation that functioned as a basis for artists to involve the participation of various publics. Chameleon consisted of a larger-​than-​life structure that resembled the skeleton of a chameleon made from found materials –​wrought iron and scraps of metal used for anchor and sheets of wood used for the body. Assembled in a courtyard in the vicinity of the National Academy of Arts in Sofia, it was then moved by the artists to the square.6 The artists directly engaged passers-​by in conversation, asking them to relinquish their Communist Party membership cards, which were bright red on the outside and light blue on the inside. Willing members of the public either placed them directly on the wooden structure or gave them to the artists, who, using a stapler, fastened each card to the wooden boards face up, as vividly portrayed in a 1990 documentary video by Jordan Sotirof. The structure gradually began to resemble the body of a chameleon. Activated by slight wind currents, the red membership cards opened and revealed their inner blue-​coloured pages. The entire structure continuously shifted colour from red, symbolizing the communist regime or the reformed socialists, to blue, representing the newly organized opposition UDF. Hence, the title of the work –​Chameleon –​referred to the changing political climate while simultaneously alluding to the possibility that the same people would stay in power after altering their political orientations to adapt to the times. Obliquely, City Group’s gesture visualized the rural–​urban national debate, as we have seen, between the BSP and UDF. In preparation for the public appearance of Chameleon, Philip Zhidarov, in his role as the organizer of the group, had contacted several schools from around the city, calling them to participate in the action by donating their membership cards. He also made public announcements on national TV and radio asking people to participate. Moreover, Zhidarov urged participants at the UYC Congress to donate their membership cards, which in fact they did, in a symbolic gesture renouncing their communist identity.7 On one level, the City Group’s one-​day action had short-​term participation as its core strategy of engagement, the voluntary donations of the public making their project possible and also grounding it within a specific time and place. On another level, Chameleon both emerged from and contributed to an articulation of a broader form of community composed of a mosaic of groups and individuals, held together under socialism through 115

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Socially Engaged Art after Socialism unofficial social networks. That this was not a homogenous community of like-​minded individuals was also evident in the destruction of the installation during the night. In my interview with Andrei Daniel, one of the members of the group, he said the structure was set on fire, burning all of the membership cards, while according to Philip Zhidarov the cards were simply removed, stripping the chameleon of its camouflage. Regardless of how exactly the destruction occurred, the responses of the public indicate that Chameleon acted as a platform for dissenting views, implicitly symbolizing the politically and socially divided climate of the country.8 Only a few months after the politically charged Chameleon that clearly manifested its stand on the side of the urban opposition, a mass protest against the newly elected BSP unfolded over the course of several weeks, outside the National Assembly, in the public square next to the office of the Bulgarian president. The mass protest came to be known as the City of Truth –​composed of approximately 100 tents that were pitched on 7 July 1990. This was preceded, shortly after the election, by several student strikes at the University of Sofia that demanded both an investigation into the nature of elections and the removal of the newly elected socialist president Petar Mladenov.9 Shortly after the election, Mladenov resigned and the UDF leader Zheliu Zhelev was elected president, with a BSP member as the prime minister. In its sheer number of participants and clear oppositional stand, the City of Truth public demonstration was unparalleled in Bulgaria during the previous four decades. Although limited to the urban population of the city, it became nationally and internationally known. It comprised intellectuals, students, writers, philosophers, poets and artists who shared an oppositional stance against the former communist party and its leaders. Some made their temporary homes in tents; others joined in at various times. Contemporary Bulgarian artists, in particular, joined the mass protest, which in part informed their art practice at the time. According to the exhibition curator, Diana Popova, artists participating in the Beach Exhibition, held 9–​30 July 1990 –​that is, during the same time as the City of Truth –​on the rooftop of the UBA (Union of Bulgarian Artists) gallery, divided their time between the rooftop beach events and the City of Truth.10 The Beach Exhibition included art works that ranged from ready-​made sculptures placed in sand, swings and blow-​up plastic kiddy pools, to a wooden raft based on Theodore Gericault’s The Raft of 116

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Sofia the Medusa (1819), among many others. In their ironical approach, most art works in this exhibition served primarily as generators and triggers for a communal and participatory gathering that seemed to poke fun at the conservative directives of the UBA, which emphasized traditional forms of art making. Rather than a limited or close-​knit arts community, exhibition organizers and artists swiftly coalesced into and actively engaged in the collective activities of the City of Truth happening only a few city blocks away. The masses of people gathered in the public square became visual embodiments of the informal and diverse, yet officially invisible, networks of social relations fermenting within second societies under socialist regimes. One journalist referred to the City of Truth as the ‘Balkan Woodstock scene’, with John Lennon’s song ‘Give Peace a Chance’ (1969) playing in the square. In fact, the mass protest was inspired by regional movements, such as the Polish Orange Alternative, a series of happenings staged collectively in the public space in the 1989, whose aim was ‘to socialize people to the situation of protest’.11 The similarity of the City of Truth to the Orange Alternative lay in its lack of organized opposition or participation in a major political force, and in its visually dynamic presence as a fun-​filled collective mass of people, which was not unlike the satirical tone of the artists exhibiting and gathering on the rooftop of the UBA. Moreover, a closely related public mass manifestation that happened only a few months earlier was the student protests in Bucharest’s University Square, as discussed earlier in text. City of Truth demanded the resignation of Mladenov and the head of Bulgarian television as well as the removal of the mummified body of Georgi Dimitrov –​the first leader of the Communist Party in Bulgaria –​ from its still standing mausoleum (built in 1949) in central Sofia. While the popular slogans since the 10 November ‘velvet revolution’ were ‘openness’, ‘truth’, ‘we are the people’, suggesting the stand of protesters against the rulers of the former communist regime, they did not have a clear political directive. Opposition, as such, defined their credo and activities. Such loosely defined social protest movements, were motivated by the ‘antipolitical politics’ (Konrád) and the ‘living in truth’ (Havel) moral values and beliefs, which, as discussed earlier, developed in the late 1980s and continued into the 1990s in Hungary and Romania as well as other CEE nations, such as Bulgaria. Its core represented claims of universal human 117

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Socially Engaged Art after Socialism rights, freedom, social justice and an understanding of democracy perceived solely in terms of a strict opposition to the communist state, and an embrace of individualism. Kiossev observed how the simplicity of such claims provoked some Western commentators to refer to the 1989 regime change events in CEE as ‘conservative revolutions’. Moreover, it has also been argued that in fact the regime change maintained socialist collectivism in the very fact of opposing ‘one total modern Subject (the People) against another (the Police State)’.12 In nations where human rights have been consistently violated for several decades, the public presence of the people was part of what Bulgarian sociologist Galina Koleva called ‘mass forms of protest of civic participation’. This was illustrated by voting in the newly introduced multi-​ party system, which was eagerly and enthusiastically embraced by a population who had not had free elections in nearly 40 years.13

Friendship Networks in Post-​1989 Emerging Art Institutions for Contemporary Art During the euphoria that immediately followed the fall of the regime and the restructuring processes of the UBA with its satellite organizations, a number of private galleries –​150 by one account, most opened by individual artists as small private studios –​mushroomed throughout Sofia in what came to be known as the ‘private galleries boom’.14 Although for the most part very short-​lived, ranging from one to two years, such private initiatives demonstrated not only the rather naïve expectations and beliefs in a rapidly bourgeoning private local art scene stimulated by the state, but also, as artist Kiril Prashkov noted, the continuing influence of the UBA on local artists. During the period of socialism, the UBA conferred upon artists (especially those held in particular esteem by the Union) a prosperous economic and respected social status, implicitly contributing to the artists’ self-​confidence in their ability to engage in private initiatives after 1989. It may be recalled that Bulgaria, under Todor Zhivkov, was the closest ally of the Soviet Union. It was one of the few nations in the block that went through a rapid transformation towards an industrialized society with the population experiencing improved economic living conditions. In the early years of transition, a number of Bulgarian artists believed that 118

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Sofia the newly emerging private system would offer them status and conditions better than they had prior to 1989, or at least similar.15 ATA-​Ray Gallery was established in 1991 within this initial wave of private galleries. It was among the very few that survived the short-​lived boom into the twenty-​first century, changing its name in the early 2000s to ATA Centre for Contemporary Art. Directed and owned by Raymonda Moudova, and self-​funded with the support of her family, it functioned in several concurrently existing locations. Although primarily focused on painting, the gallery was also one of the few that displayed photographs and video installations (at the time not considered as an art medium by the local National Academy of Fine Arts). It had a unique mission to show artists working in traditional media such as painting, sculpture and graphic design, promoted by the National Academy of Fine Arts, as well as artists working in what was then considered experimental art, such as mixed media installation, happenings, collage and assemblage. It was not only a commercial gallery but also a platform for established artists as well as for young graduates from the National Academy for Fine Arts.16 Artists such as Luchezar Boyadjiev, Kiril Prashkov, Kalin Serapionov and Nedko Solakov as well as curator Iara Boubnova, who were already emerging as leading figures in the local contemporary art scene, were actively featured in the gallery’s exhibitions and as project collaborators. As an open space for a wide range of artists and artistic directions, Ata-​Ray Gallery both benefited from and bolstered existing forms of social capital, generating further informal reciprocal relationships among artists, collectors and curators. In its initial years, Ata-​Ray Gallery was among the first private initiatives to offer an independent form of public institution. If the success of Ata-​Ray Gallery was due in part to its access to a number of networks among groups of artists, the emergence and continued survival of the Institute for Contemporary Art, Sofia (ICA), is an eloquent local example of the vital role of friendship networks in independent and collective self-​organizing in a post-​socialist context, with minimal or non-​existent public and private funds for contemporary arts. Officially established in 1995 as an NGO, ICA was both a practical and a logical outcome of a group of artists and curators that had already closely known each other and had been collaborating on a number of international exhibition projects, such as the first Bulgarian participation in the third Istanbul biennale.17 119

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Socially Engaged Art after Socialism While each individual was an established and independently working artist and curator, within ICA each member had a particular role, bringing his/her singular contribution to the overall functioning of the collective initiative. Personal and professional contacts of its internationally recognized members, such as Luchezar Boyadjiev and Nedko Solakov, became important resources for ICA. For instance, the exhibition Locally Interested (1999) organized by ICA and featuring international names such as Rikrit Tiravanija, Oleg Kulik, Douglas Gordon and Nedko Solakov was made possible by Solakov’s personal contacts. As Iara Boubnova said in her essay published in the exhibition catalogue, ‘It (the idea) belongs to Nedko Solakov after his numerous shows in various countries […].’18 Moreover, the contributions of individual members extended, for instance, to solving practical aspects involved in the organization of exhibitions, as each of ICA’s members divided among themselves the various tasks. These included preparing the gallery space, installing artworks, solving technical problems, designing exhibition invitations and catalogues, writing texts, photographing artwork for advertising materials, and maintaining a public library and archive. In Boubnova’s words, they were ‘wonderful friends and excellent professionals, who worked day and night both during installation and afterwards as carpenters and interpreters, wall painters and video-​technicians, strong hands and tour guides, car drivers and publicity agents’.19 It is significant that a wide Bulgarian audience, especially the younger generation of artists and art practitioners, enthusiastically received the Locally Interested exhibition, which emphasized process-​oriented participatory forms of contemporary art. ‘We were convinced that the audience’s reaction will not be just going to the opening but will also take other forms that are closer to co-​participation.’20 Bulgarian artist Kalin Serapionov captured the sense of communal activity among the ICA individual members in his video installation Hot Soup and My Home Community (1998) (Figure 6.2). It featured a screen divided into six separate squares, each showing an ICA member eating a meal. While each manifested his or her particular approach to consuming the meal, they formed a community that was not only held together by professional interests but, most importantly, represented bonds between friends that often share a meal together. ICA has been a nomadic institution since its inception in 1995, changing locations several times until 2009, when it found a home as a public 120

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Figure 6.2  Kalin Serapionov, The Hot Soup and My Home Community, 1998. Single channel video projection, SVHS, Pal, no sound, 9’15’ (loop). Digitally re-​mastered in 2002. Installation view in the Bulgariaavantgarde exhibition, Künstlerwerkstatt Lothringerstrasse 13, Munich 1998. Photo: author archive. Courtesy of Kalin Serapionov.

gallery in a private apartment owned by Solakov. Despite its lack of a permanent space for more than a decade, ICA has been one of the most active local institutions promoting Bulgarian contemporary artists on the international art scene since the mid-​1990s. It has organized exhibitions of local Bulgarian artists abroad, for example in Bulgariaavantgade in Munich in 1999. Its artist members have been featured in well-​known international exhibitions, such as Beyond Belief (1995), After the Wall (1999), Manifesta 3 and 4, Venice Biennale in 1999 and 2007, and Documenta X (1997), making ICA an internationally reputable institution. Although Boubnova is its officially declared director and curator, the role of the curator has most often been absorbed within ICA’s collective responsibility as different members act as curators for different projects. Exhibition themes and the selection of artists is often the result of a joint decision-​making process among the members.21 At the same time, through its various exhibition programmes and, since 2003, the Baza Award for young and emerging artists under 35, ICA also provides a platform for local artists of all 121

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Socially Engaged Art after Socialism generations whose work critically engages with contemporary themes and innovative formal approaches. Moreover, after the appointment of Maria Vassileva, one of ICA’s former members, as chief curator at the Sofia Art Gallery, the only art gallery funded by the city government, the institution developed programmes such as Meeting Point,22 a platform for contemporary art and young artists, and the Sculpture Program,23 for contemporary sculpture, as an initiative of the Vaska Emanouilova Gallery. The latter is a branch of the Sofia Art Gallery, solely dedicated to supporting contemporary art. Through the activities of its members, ICA is actively working indirectly towards broadening and supporting a local platform for contemporary art. On one level, ICA demonstrates through its activities and programmes an effective example of the potential of social capital in generating strong publics and independent initiatives that implicitly also take the role of a public institution. Furthermore, ICA represents an instance of institutionalizing, where existing friendships are not limited to the private sphere, but gain strategic and political value for both its individual members and the collectively organized institution. As a 12-​member artist community, ICA could be seen as what Russian and Italian art critic Viktor Missiano called a ‘confidential project’ –​an artistic project that emerges from the strategies that employ resources of friendly relationships (Figure 6.3). Because friendship is the result of personal rather than a politically or socially motivated choice, according to Missiano, a ‘confidential project’ eliminates the ethical pitfalls of selection, inclusion and representation to the outside world. It is also void of internal hierarchies that are implicit, for instance, in a curated exhibition most often staged to communicate the authoritarian vision of the curator. At the same time, these friendship networks exemplify bonds and norms of trust, reciprocity and empathy among individuals of a group. Such social networks have led to forms of self-​determination as exemplified by the self-​institutionalizing of ICA. As such, ICA has been an active player in the locally developing civil society, not only in the 1990s but also in the early 2000s through its collaborative public initiatives such as the Visual Seminar project (2003–​6), which I will discuss in the following chapter. At another level, exactly because of its tightly knit community based on friendship networks, ICA is implicitly exclusionary, limiting access to 122

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Figure 6.3A–​B  Unmaking Dan, performance, filmed and edited by Kalin Serapionov after the idea of Luchezar Boyadjiev, 2010, DVD, Pal, 16:9, Institute for Contemporary Art-​Sofia. Images courtesy of ICA-​Sofia.

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Socially Engaged Art after Socialism specific artists, as seen in the appearance of the same names in most of its international participations. Also, the voice of one member may overpower the collective when his contribution is materially substantial, as in the case of Solakov’s personal purchase of the apartment used for ICA-​Gallery and his subsequent individual power to influence the selection of artists for solo exhibitions in the gallery. Nevertheless, in a context both lacking financial support for contemporary art and imbued by conservative artistic trends that champion national and traditional forms of art, through its small membership and selective programmes ICA is in fact able to maintain a critical distance. Acting both as a collective (of artists, curators and critics) and as an institution, ICA has become a powerful alternative to a provincial local scene and to an increasing recentralization of the local art scene by the state organs. Moreover, and equally significant, the mode of operation and activities of ICA in the 1990s were quite different from those of the local Soros Centre for the Arts –​Sofia (SCA), despite the fact that both institutions shared similar goals to promote Bulgarian contemporary art locally and internationally. Like other SCCAs in the CEE region, SCA  –​Sofia was funded in affiliation with the local Open Society Foundation –​Sofia, which was a branch of the New York Open Society Institute. As an NGO, SCA was founded in 1994 to support the development of contemporary arts in Bulgaria, promoting visual arts, performing arts, cultural heritage and literature, each with a different programme coordinator. With the 1990 partial dissolution of the state funds for the UBA that represented the sole lifeline for the local arts scene, SCA was an important financial and communicative resource for local artists and writers. Its visual art programme was led by Kamen Baltanski, who collaborated with a different curator for each of their total of six annual exhibitions that were staged in various venues throughout the country between 1994 and 1999.24 SCA’s first exhibition, N-​Forms? Reconstructions and Interpretations (1994), curated by Diana Popova, Boris Klimentiev, Svilen Stefanov and Nikolai Bostev, set the stage for the nature of contemporary art that SCA was going to support, and thus implicitly gave contour to its institutional image. In its oppositional stance towards traditional forms of art, it aimed to promote ‘projects that fall in with the notions of avant-​garde, wider horizons, non-​conservatism, alternative’.25 Moreover, as we have seen with the 124

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Sofia other SCCAs in Hungary and Romania, it had as its scope the documentation and archiving of ‘modern Bulgarian plastic arts’ as well as providing financial support for contemporary artists’ projects; more than half of its activities were grant funding for individual artists and projects. The N-​Forms catalogue included photo documentations of art practices since the mid-​1980s, the moment that marked the emergence of local contemporary art in Bulgaria. Most of SCA’s annual exhibitions – including N-​ Forms, Ars ex Nation: Made in Bulgaria (1997)26 and Culture and Subculture (1999) – proposed critical discussion on notions typically viewed as binary opposites so as to explore common grounds: traditional and experimental, national and international or ‘the national substance’ in contemporary art, east and west, or centre and periphery. Artists and art works showcased in exhibitions and topics proposed for discussion symbolically aimed to communicate SCA’s oppositional stance against the traditional and conservative currents in the local culture and were oriented towards international art developments. While not entirely inscribed within the politics of antipolitics or the politics of opposition that dominated the CEE regional discourse as we have seen in the early 1990s, the institutional presence of SCA nevertheless promoted civil society as an independent sphere of activity. In some instances, such as N-​Forms and Ars ex Nation, SCA engaged in collaboration with ICA members who participated as artists or served as curators. However, SCA’s annual exhibitions also featured artists working in traditional art making practised by the National Academy of Fine Arts alongside artists working in ‘non-​conventional’ directions. One might argue that this was a symbolic way to emphasize its institutional mission defined as working towards an open society, separated from state organizations, which accommodates divergent views and practices. At the same time, by funding artists and exhibitions of progressive forms of contemporary art,27 SCA implicitly gained symbolic capital as an NGO promoting a particular form of civil society. This was characteristic of a liberal democratic orientation that championed not only ideas of individual liberties, autonomy and protection of human rights but also free-​market competition and private property. Providing infrastructure and financial resources for what were locally viewed as ‘unconventional’ art activities, SCA defined its image as a local yet internationally connected centre aimed to build upon grass-​roots arts practices. 125

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Socially Engaged Art after Socialism Moreover, SCA tapped into existing circles of artists and critics that, as we have seen, had been working together, in group initiatives since the mid-​1980s. Illustrating norms of reciprocity characteristic of social capital –​where a favour now would be repaid later –​curators, artists and critics who directly engaged in SCA’s activities by curating exhibitions and/ or applying for funds gained a platform to further their experimental approaches, and connect and communicate with international art institutions, curators and critics. Moreover, affiliation with SCA provided ‘the know-​how’ of the inner workings of a private institution and procedures of grant applications. All of these aspects were deeply lacking in post-​socialist Bulgaria of the early and mid-​1990s and necessary in a market-​determined competitive context. Pierre Bourdieu argues that, especially in societies with limited economic resources and possibilities, symbolic capital, which is seen in ‘the form of the prestige and renown attached to a family and a name’, is easily transformed back into economic capital and therefore represents ‘the most valuable form of accumulation’.28 Although Bourdieu looked at the family unit to exemplify his point, we can apply his central argument –​that symbolic capital is closely interrelated with economic capital –​to SCCA as an institution. And so, despite their beneficial initial presence in the post-​ socialist CEE region, the SCCAs were greatly concerned with fostering an international image as an organization supporting cutting-​edge and experimental forms of creativity. Rather than working towards long-​term inclusive public spheres within democratic forms of civil society by assisting in negotiating local and national policies benefiting contemporary art practitioners, SCCAs, not only in Bulgaria but also in Romania and Hungary, were short-​term public platforms limited to a particular arts community. Jonathan Peizer, who created the Network Internet Program for the Open Society Institute New  York (OSI-​NY), described the Soros Foundation’s ‘lead-​by-​example’ and short-​term experimental activities in the region: We [Soros Foundation] do not start out mandated to resolving problems to the benefit of the entire society, but simply in creating approaches to the development of civil society that work.29

The focus of the Soros Centres on individual projects and initiatives assumes a particularly liberal understanding of civil society, exemplified 126

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Sofia through NGOs or voluntary associations, entirely separated from the state. American political scientist Nancy Fraser labels ‘weak publics’ those that practice in the public sphere that ‘consists exclusively in opinion-​formation and does not encompass decision-​making’;30 that is, does not enter negotiations at the state-​level in influencing governmental policies. SCCAs’ short-​ lived activities, and their unsustainability following the donor-​ funded initial period, render these Centres as platforms for fostering weak publics. In contrast, for example, in Bulgaria, the continued presence of ICA in both the local and international contemporary art scene has been due in great part to its use of grass-​roots networks of social capital. This is concentrated at the level of small community groups, leading to strong publics willing and able to question and influence directions and decisions within the local context.

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Part II

From Localized Public Sites To EU Transnational Public Spheres

Emancipation begins when we challenge the opposition between viewing and acting; when we understand that the self-​ evident facts that structure relations between saying, seeing and doing themselves belong to the structure of domination and subjection.1 Jacques Rancière

In the previous section, I discussed Soros-​funded exhibitions of contemporary socially engaged art and their institutional role in building civil society in the context of the early 1990s, a decade dominated by a widespread anti-​ socialist attitude and a full embrace of neoliberal democracy. After the collapse of the socialist regimes, the region of the former Soviet bloc offered a crucial opportunity for Western Europe to stabilize and fortify its position as one of the economic superpowers in globalized world politics. This was achieved through access to new economic markets within geographical proximity, new sites for low production costs and cheap labour.2 In return, the EU Agreements introduced in the newly emerging nations ‘political dialogue, free trade and freedom of movement, economic, cultural, and financial cooperation, and immediate economic assistance for associated countries’.3 Initially, ‘Shock Therapy’ was seen as a necessary policy for the

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Socially Engaged Art after Socialism CEE countries eager to open their economies to foreign investments and enter the neoliberal global market. The mass population had to experience the precarious realities and the immediate demands for subsistence provoked by drastic economic policies, the effects of collapsing centralized socialist institutions and the not yet fully reformed democratic political, social, cultural and economic structures and infrastructures.4 In such a tension-​filled context, civil society denoted a rather ambiguous sphere of action that was at once politicized in its antipolitical resistance against the state (which was informed by the 1980s dissident thinking), and depoliticized in its embrace of democratic values and apolitical principles of individual libertarianism. In this section, I  continue my discussion of specific exhibitions of ­contemporary art in public spaces and collaborative projects in the early 2000s that become important sites of negotiations between ideas promoting civic values of Western-​style liberal democracies manifested in the ‘return’ of Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania to Europe by becoming part of the EU; the exclusionary effects of specific EU policies towards non-​EU or recent EU members; and ideas championing a national belonging. If, in the 1990s, financial and infrastructural support for contemporary art from the George Soros-​funded SCCAs played a pivotal role especially in advancing the first local tendency of art as social practice according to international models, support from the EU was crucial in the early 2000s. During this time, a number of local institutions, curators and artists benefited from available EU funds, marking a second tendency in socially engaged art. This second part of the book includes an analysis of three significant yet critically underexamined curatorial initiatives, Moszkva Tér (Gravitacio) / Moscow Square (Gravitation) (2003) in Budapest, the Visual Seminar project (2002–​5) in Sofia, and Spațiul Public București / Public Art Bucharest (2007) in Bucharest. In light of the desires of CEE nations for EU membership, the exhibitions and programmes become interstices of multiple cultural, political and curatorial tensions. Chapter eight examines the projects by Luchezar Boyadjiev, Ivan Moudov, János Sugár and h.arta specifically developed for these exhibitions. These art works unfolded in the public space, were participatory and collaborative in nature, and engaged with and symbolically represented various counterpublics as attempts at envisioning 130

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From Localized Public Sites To EU Transnational Public Spheres democratic civil societies. Chapter nine presents an analysis of one collaborative work by the Hungarian artist Miklós Erhardt and Scottish artist Dominic Hislop (also known as the artist collective Big Hope) and one by Romanian artist Matei Bejenaru. Identifying with and involving the collaboration and participation of particular immigrant groups in two EU member states, Italy and England respectively, their works of art complicate the broader cultural and political debates at the time on the eastern expansion of the EU to include states from CEE. However small and temporary, a number of art practitioners made use of social capital to intervene in and reclaim public spaces from the ideologies of the past socialist regimes and emerging neoliberal capitalism, while benefiting from EU funds. Both actual actions and symbolic gestures in the public space were especially important in post-​1989 transitional contexts, when as American historian Gail Kligman eloquently said, ‘an open public life is a prerequisite for the formation of a public sphere in which civil society functions’.5

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7 Place-​Making: Framing Art in Public Spaces Curatorially

In varied ways and in different contexts, the exhibitions Moszkva Tér (Gravitacio) / Moscow Square (Gravitation) (2003) in Budapest, the Visual Seminar project (2002–​5) in Sofia and Spațiul Public București / Public Art Bucharest (2007) in Bucharest represented important manifestations within the local development of socially engaged art practices. These curatorial initiatives claimed open public spaces in a transitional period of rapid, and often chaotic, transformations fuelled by a free-​market economy and local forms of (ethnic) nationalism. While anchored within its respective locality, each exhibition sought to activate a sense of belonging to a European transnational public sphere. Conceptually, the transnational public sphere enacts a broader desire for community through culture at the EU level and, practically, it materializes in the public art projects developed for a particular space and time and their engagement with specific publics. According to critic Boris Buden, ‘the transnational public space cannot be appropriated in terms of an old universalistic concept, and the only way to describe it is by saying that there is a sort of translation that takes place among different public spaces’.1 And it was a set of complex translations and negotiations between the local and the regional that these exhibitions reveal in their programmes, commissioned artist projects, international funding and local presence. 133

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Moszkva Tér (Gravitacio) / Moscow Square (Gravitation) In May 2003, Hungarian curator Dóra Hegyi curated the Moszkva Tér (Gravitacio) / Moscow Square (Gravitation) exhibition in Budapest. The exhibition was preceded by a two-​day interdisciplinary seminar in November 2002, titled Public Space and Representation, which was meant as a public forum for debate among a specialist public and as a preparatory phase for Moszkva Tér (Gravitacio). The seminar was initiated at the Ludwig Museum Budapest –​Museum of Contemporary Art by freelance critic Emese Süvecz and included artists, curators, sociologists, anthropologists and architects. Discussions centred on the meaning of public and private space and sphere in both Hungary and Western contexts. Among the seminar participants was Barnabás Bencsik, former assistant curator of Polyphony: Social Commentary in Hungarian Contemporary Art (1993), which I discussed earlier in the text. He presented an overview of the art projects included in that earlier exhibition. Like other contemporary critics at the time, such as László Beke, Bencsik lamented the lack of Hungarian artists in Polyphony who were able to create socially and politically engaged art interventions of the calibre initiated and developed contemporaneously in the USA and Western Europe. However, as discussed in chapter five, in light of a society emerging from a political regime with a collectivist ideology, contemporary artists such as Gyula Várnai, Zsolt Koroknai and Tamás Szentjóby developed and proposed socially and politically engaged projects that were locally contingent and sought to reclaim public life. Ultimately, Bencsik’s discussion in the seminar functioned as a point of both reference and departure for Moszkva Tér (Gravitacio), which, in contrast to Polyphony, positioned itself as a critical platform for debates on the conceptual meanings of the terms ‘private’ and ‘public’ spaces. Rather than engage the entire city of Budapest as Polyphony did, Moszkva Tér (Gravitacio) sought to offer a temporary framework for artists in their transitory engagement with a particular urban site and its diverse inhabitants.2 Participating Hungarian artist Roza El-​Hassan suggested to Hegyi Moszkva Tér (Moscow Square) as the public site for artistic interventions in the context of the exhibition.3 The square has existed since the thirteenth 134

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Place-Making century as an important crossroad intersection, a market and a transportation hub in the city of Budapest. However, it was only in 1929 that it acquired a name:  Széll Kálmán, after the then prime minister. In 1951, under the newly installed socialist regime, the square was renovated into the architectural structure it is today and its name was changed to Moszkva Tér to reflect the political link between Hungary and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. In 2011, under the right-​wing party leader Viktor Orbán, the square’s name was changed again, back to Széll Kálmán (Figures 7.1A and 7.1B). The late modernist-​style architecture of the square embodies its fragmented history, layered underneath its present condition and use. The visually arresting fan-​like rooftops of the subway station and the beehive-​ like formation of its market stalls symbolically suggest a utopian vision of the recent socialist past. In the last two decades, layers of haphazard advertisements and signage for small businesses have accumulated on the site. The eclectic quality of the structure has now become a backdrop

Figure 7.1A  View of Széll Kálmán Square (formerly Moszkva Tér), the site for Moszkva Tér (Gravitacio) / Moscow Square (Gravitation) exhibition, Budapest, Hungary, 2012. Photo by Izabel Galliera.

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Figure 7.1B  View of Moszkva Tér Bistro, a site for Moszkva Tér (Gravitacio) / Moscow Square (Gravitation) exhibition, Budapest, Hungary, 2012. Photo by Izabel Galliera.

to the contemporary use of the square as one of the city’s most popular transportation hubs, which include the red metro line and bus and tram terminals. At the same time, as Hegyi pointed out, Moszkva Tér has been neglected and marginalized in the urban planning programmes of the 136

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Place-Making city: first, economically, by the private interests that developed the nearby upscale Mammut shopping mall; second, politically, by the initiatives of the national government that built Millenáris Park, a well-​groomed park and architectural complex in the vicinity of Moszkva Tér.4 The choice of Moszkva Tér as the public venue for the exhibition became highly politicized as a site literally caught between the neoliberal and nationalist forces visible in the structures surrounding the square. The Millenáris Park was built by the right-​wing and conservative national government led by FIDESZ and its prime minister, Orbán (1998–​2002).5 Political scientist Emilia Palonen pointed out that FIDESZ was initially a liberal party but in 1998 moved to the conservative right when it formed a coalition with the Hungarian Democratic Forum (MDF) and the Independent Small Holders party. These parties were united by a search for nationhood anchored in local rural traditions and an opposition towards the cosmopolitan city of Budapest led by a leftist government at the time. It should also be noted that in most of the post-​socialist transitional nations, such as Hungary, political designations of ‘right’, ‘left’ and ‘centre’ are elastic concepts and cannot or should not be compared to their meanings in Western contexts. As Romanian-​born and US-​based cultural theorist Vladimir Tismăneanu explained: The abuses committed in the name of the Marxist faith in the former Soviet Union and East-​ Central Europe engendered apprehensions toward any explicitly socialist program. This explains why post-​communist leftist leaders have gone out of their way to emphasize their commitment to the free market, private property, and political pluralism.6

FIDESZ emphasized the countryside –​metropolitan (népi-​urbánus) divide and promoted the vision of a ‘new Hungary’ based on notions of progress and nationhood. These principles materialized in Budapest’s urban landscape, specifically in architectural constructions, such as the Millenáris Park, inaugurated in 2001.7 This includes a park, a multi-​use building with a theatre (Teátrum) and an exhibition hall (Fogadó) fitted with displays of art and artefacts from the fields of sports, science and technology. Showcased as part of a national canon, such expositions highlighted the focus of the party on Hungarian national culture. Moreover, situated in 137

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Socially Engaged Art after Socialism the middle of the busy capital city, Millenáris Park was also conceived as a peaceful rural island. On my visit there in 2010, it included a small farm with land used to grow vegetables and grape vines, where visitors could stroll along rolling pathways and around a lily-​filled pond, while children could play in playgrounds. Millenáris Park is literally ‘a closed world’ away from the noise and smells of the nearby eclectic Moszkva Tér. The Moszkva Tér (Gravitacio) exhibition embraced the eclectic and politicized nature of the square in order to articulate the meaning of a public sphere as a discursive space characterized by diverging interests and continuous claims for inclusiveness. Funded in part by the city’s leftist government, Moszkva Tér (Gravitacio) suggested Budapest as a progressive European city that stood in contrast to the nationalist discourse of FIDESZ. At the same time, the curator of the exhibition implied the possibility of the square’s urban renewal, invoking the artistic interventions as possible triggers for private investors to improve this ‘forgotten’ place. Hegyi said:  ‘By virtue of its asymmetric development, however, it [the square] shows the contradictory phenomena typical of these areas: the rising value of real estate in its surroundings as well as urban gentrification.’8 It is at this intersection between these competing forces –​neoliberal, nationalist and transnational –​that the complex meanings of this curatorial initiative and the socially engaged art projects developed in its framework are retrospectively best understood. Several of the participatory and interventionist projects developed for the exhibition brought awareness to the social, political and cultural marginalization of the square’s regular inhabitants such as the poor, the homeless, the Roma and immigrant workers. For example, in Idöjárör / Time Patrol Hungarian artist János Sugár set up a mobile caravan fitted with an office and offered 4,000 Hungarian forints for anyone who dictated uninterruptedly for ten minutes to a typist sitting behind a desk. The line that formed outside the caravan was composed of the homeless, the elderly, day-​ wage men and students. As I will discuss in more detail in the following chapter, the artist rendered both visible and invisible the people who made their homes or looked for temporary employment in the square, visualizing the dialectics of exclusion and inclusion inherent in a public sphere. Similar to Sugár’s work that communicated the precarious condition of the population of the square, the project Everyone is a Guest, 138

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Place-Making Everyone is a Host by the Hungarian collective Hints, composed of artists and sociologists, revealed the contentious nature of the location of the exhibition. During the opening reception of the exhibition, the artists distributed and offered packages of food to everyone in the square: ‘we would have liked artists, art critics and all those who came to the opening to eat together with the locals, the “inhabitants of Moscow square” ’.9 However, the sense of community the artists hoped to achieve remained unfulfilled. Hegyi observed that ‘many of them [art audience] did not even descend from the rooftop terrace, where the official opening reception took place’.10 Such artistic projects highlighted the framework of the exhibition that maintained a divide between the public of the square and the art public. The latter gathered and watched the square below literally from an elevated level. As seen in the archived materials and videotaped documentaries of the exhibition, conversations and presentations held in the Moszkva Tér Bistro throughout the duration of the exhibition were conducted by and directed to Hungarian and international curators, artists and critics. The art public did not mingle with the regular inhabitants of the square. Hegyi, the curator of the exhibition, concluded her curatorial essay by noting the long-​term contribution of the Moszkva Tér (Gravitacio) exhibition to the ‘revitalization’ of the site. This was manifested by the Bistro that remained open and in business after the closing of the official exhibition. At the same time, the terrace continued to embody the division between different social classes: The stairs leading up to the terrace function as a line of demarcation: while the downstairs pub is a shelter for the illegal sellers escaping from the occasional police raids, security guards protect the Bistro’s young, well-​to-​do, middle-​class customers from the reality of the square.11

If contention-​ridden works by Sugár and Hints revealed sustained tensions within their locality, cultural and artistic initiatives served as consensus builders and triggers for harmonious communities at the EU level. Moszkva Tér (Gravitacio) positioned itself, and by extension the city of Budapest, within a transnational European public sphere, which was further emphasized by the institutional support for the exhibition from the 139

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Socially Engaged Art after Socialism Ludwig Museum of Contemporary Art as a recipient of funds from the EU’s Culture 2000 Program (2000–​6).12 According to its official mission statement, the EU Culture 2000 Program promoted culture as an important tool in meeting major challenges:  ‘the acceleration of European integration, globalization, the information society, employment and social cohesion’.13 Moreover, while focused on the transnational dissemination of culture at the European level, the programme primarily highlighted ‘the role of culture as an economic factor’ and cooperation among EU member states and prospective members that was meant to help ‘increase the sense of belonging to the same community’.14 Ultimately, the broad field of culture was considered as a lubricant for the ever-​expanding engines of the neoliberal market forces, and the advancement of a neoliberal ideology across most of the European continent. In a 2001 article commenting on the 1990s, social anthropologist Chris Shore retrospectively examined key sites where EU policy makers have attempted to invent Europe at the level of public opinion.15 Culture has become increasingly politicized by EU elites in their attempt to mobilize support for further European integration. The goal was to create a new kind of political subject: one who identifies with and is loyal to the EU’s institutions of European government. The European Man was first envisioned as a ‘transnational, post-​national political actor who would rise above attachments to locality or nations’.16 As a beneficiary of the EU Culture 2000 Program –​which still continues today, its name changing annually –​ Moszkva Tér (Gravitacio) can be seen as part of this broader cultural pursuit to create ‘the European man’ loyal to the EU above the nation state. Yet, while the primary emphasis on building a transnational space is part of the official rhetoric of such EU-​wide programmes, local specificity remains crucial –​one may argue, implicitly contributing cultural freshness to the neoliberal market sphere in a continuous process of reinventing itself. Indirectly, the curatorial initiative also becomes one of the translation mechanisms among different and locally specific public spaces, which Buden considers crucial in holding together a transnational public sphere (we may add, at the EU level). For instance, attempts at translation are imbedded in the EU’s Culture 2000 programme’s multi-​annual cultural cooperation agreements that are established 140

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Place-Making between cultural operators from at least five participating countries and their aim is to create, within a period of up to three years, structured cultural actions which help to achieve an objective of cultural interest which has been set in advance. The cooperation agreements relate either to enhancing a cultural field or to integrating several cultural sectors.17

It was through its politicized choice of the venue, specific EU funding and inclusion of artists from various countries that the curatorial framework of Moszkva Tér (Gravitacio) was anchored within a local specificity that sought to envision and belong to an EU transnational public sphere.

Visual Seminar Although not directly a participant in the EU Culture 2000 Program, yet also symbolically acting as a translation mechanism within the EU transnational public sphere, the multi-​year programme titled Visual Seminar, which occurred between 2002 and 2005 in Sofia, Bulgaria was part of a multi-​year collaborative initiative at the EU level. Specifically, it was funded and organized within the framework of relations initiated by the Cultural Foundation in Germany. From its inception in 2002 by the German Federal Government, the German Cultural Foundation funded ‘contemporary cultural projects devoted to socially relevant themes and international in orientation’. It also initiated projects that responded to the transformations taking place after the end of the ‘Eastern bloc’ and ‘as part of its engagement for European integration’.18 The relations initiative spearheaded long-​ term projects that developed simultaneously in several Eastern European countries that were not yet EU members, such as Bulgaria before its 2007 official acceptance into the EU. According to the website of the Federal Cultural Foundation, relations allows the projects to pursue their work intensively and independently, unhindered by the interests of national governments in representative showpiece projects, gives ample time to evolve, and is furnished with a license to experiment.19

Most significantly, the aim of the Foundation had been to help create a ‘genuine European identity’ and contribute to the development of a ‘European 141

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Socially Engaged Art after Socialism public sphere’ composed of a multiplicity of cultures and characterized by ‘trust in one another and respect for cultural differences’.20 Visual Seminar was developed within the framework of relation and was a three-​year interdisciplinary and collaborative project between the Institute for Contemporary Art –​Sofia (ICA) and the Centre for Advanced Study –​Sofia (CAS) designed to ‘investigate the urban environment and its visual language’.21 The goals of the programme were multifold. First, it aimed to interrogate the uncontrolled avalanche of advertisements assailing the city of Sofia following the collapse of the socialist regime in 1989. Second, it sought to create a bridge of communication between artists and theoreticians associated with CAS and ICA. And finally it wanted to provide a platform for the city’s inhabitants, artists, media outlets and members of the Sofia Municipal Council to exchange views and influence policy change that would provide control on commercial advertising.22 Unlike the short-​ term Moszkva Tér (Gravitacio) exhibition (May–​ June, 2003)  developed under the auspices of the Ludwig Museum of Contemporary Art Budapest with funds from the EU’s Culture 2000 Program, Visual Seminar unfolded over the course of three years. It included four modules on different themes and topics. For example, Forum for Visual Culture featured public discussions and debates between art professionals, city officials and members of the public. The Resident Fellows Module included paid six-​month collaborative residencies between local artists and theoreticians that resulted in a total of eight projects. The Guest Module organized and funded visits and on-​site projects by several foreign artists. And the Publication Module developed a series of newsletters and publications that also serve as an archive for the Visual Seminar’s multiple initiatives. The four differently themed debates with titles such as ‘Sofia as a Sight’, ‘Can You See Sofia?’, ‘Images of the City, Images of Capital’, organized under the module Forum for Visual Culture, revealed the intention of the Visual Seminar to politicize Sofia’s urban landscape. A main issue in the public discussions centred on the absolute need to regulate the onslaught of foreign advertisements deforming the city by means of competing private interests. Until 2004 there was no official national or city regulation against public advertisements since during the period of socialism the party-​state controlled the use of public space. Initially, after the 1989 fall of 142

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Place-Making the socialist regimes in Bulgaria (as well as other CEE nations), the inhabitants of grey and decaying blocks of flats welcomed the colourful advertisements as temporary cosmetic architectural uplifts. Although often installed over apartment windows and blocking direct natural light, these billboards advertising products and dream vacations provided locals with windows into the lifestyles of an economically rich Western world, which was unattainable and unimaginable during the 40 years of socialism. However, in the early 2000s, as illustrated in the public debates of the Visual Seminar, local urban sociologists, architectural historians, art critics and cultural theorists critically questioned the aggressive presence of corporate advertisements in the public spaces of the city. For instance, the Visual Seminar’s second public debate ‘Can You See Sofia?’ was a panel discussion with the four major candidates –​Liuben Dilov Jr, Nadejda Michailova, Stephan Sofianski and Stoyan Alexandrov –​running at that time for the mayoral office. The panellists were shown images of various sites throughout the city and were asked to address the rights of citizens in the decision-​making process, and the responsibilities of the City Council in regulating what appeared to be unstoppable privatization forces.23 The various debates revealed a division among participants and organizers. On the one hand, the initiators of the Visual Seminar placed emphasis on the critical need to reclaim public space through government-​ implemented regulation. On the other hand, there were the supporters of neoliberal transformations, considered as vital for the progress of the city and its European character. Some of the invited architects expressed this latter view, as did the mayoral candidates in their refusal to discuss the privatization processes that regulated the visual landscape of the city.24 For instance, the Visual Seminar’s public discussion titled ‘Images of the City, Images of Capital’ included the participation of Bulgarian architects Boyko Kadinov and Atanas Panov along with Ventsislav Kissiov, chairman of Sofia’s City Council. According to Boubnova, the architects considered the arguments against the neoliberal transformation of the city as ‘the conservatism, backwardness and clichéd notions of those frowning at the city’s progress’.25 Most important, the public discussions signalled the weakness of the municipal officials in taking control of the city’s urban ecology, as they were ‘threatened by merciless pressure from all sorts of private, legal, semi-​legal 143

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Socially Engaged Art after Socialism and criminal mechanisms of utilizing the city’.26 Alexander Kiossev further pointed to Sofia’s and Bulgaria’s ‘inadequate regulatory framework, lack of administrative capacity, unprofitable but already signed contracts, weak judicial control and lack of court sanctions’.27 For example, under three consecutive terms in office as Sofia’s mayor, the leader of the Union of Free Democrats (UFD) and former leader of the Union of Democratic Forces (UDF) Stefan Sofiyanski (1995–​2005) was retrospectively accused of corruption and of self-​interested contracts with the real estate company Sofiiski Imoti that consisted of selling important public property in downtown Sofia for a fraction of its actual worth.28 Thus, in a context where private economic interests have absorbed the public spaces and the regulatory organs of the state, Visual Seminar raised awareness of the legal and civil rights of citizens. Moreover, supported and guided by the principles of an EU member state’s Federal Foundation, Visual Seminar functioned as a platform for inspiring a sense of belonging in a transnational public sphere at the EU level. Notions such as mutual trust and respect for regulations among culturally diverse members stood in contrast to the corruption and distrust towards the local political government. While Moszkva Tér (Gravitacio) focused its attention on a specific urban site, Visual Seminar, with its public debates and socially engaged projects, addressed the city in its entirety. For instance, the Hot City Visual two-​part project by Bulgarian artist Luchezar Boyadjiev consisted of a series of digitally manipulated photographs of various urban sites across Sofia. One such image shows the government’s building in Sofia with a clothesline hung between two of its windows, ironically suggesting a link between politicians and their dirty laundry. Using an anonymous email account, the artist emailed his photographs accompanied by the question ‘Do you see Sofia?’ to over 200 individuals from several mass media companies. The artist provided a telephone number, by which he received responses. Boyadjiev sought to provoke critical responses and inquiries from representatives of local and national TV stations and newspapers, which the artist perceived to be vital organizations in articulating and sustaining a democratic and inclusive civil society. Such symbolic gestures were all the more significant in light of the clash between remnants of a welfare state left in ruin and neoliberal 144

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Place-Making market forces avidly encroaching on both private and public spaces. For instance, in exchange for a sum of money that covered utilities for one month, residents of uniform apartment blocks gave up on natural daylight by renting out their windows to advertising companies to install large-​scale billboards. These manoeuvres exposed economically struggling societies that lacked politically competent government organs able to enforce minimal control and regulations. Implicitly, these were indicators of the increasing gap between those whose precarious lives became the backbone for the neoliberal economy, and those very few active agents in the market able to consume the publicly advertised products and lifestyles. Although neither Moszkva Tér (Gravitacio) nor Visual Seminar had a clear political mandate, the choices of the organizers for venues, types of funding and topics of programmes inevitably politicized public space in their locality as a way to reclaim public spheres within which democratic civil societies could emerge. For instance, the public debate ‘Communal and Private (and/or Public and Personal)’, part of the Forum for Visual Culture module, addressed the actual implications of the terms ‘private’ and ‘public’ in the Bulgarian language (and other Slavic languages), where they do not have a clear meaning. As Boyadjiev said: the use of ‘public’ often refers to either ‘state-​owned’ or ‘urban’, but rarely to ‘communal’ especially when used with regard to the city. At the same time, there is serious hesitation about ‘private’ –​does it mean ‘privately owned’ or ‘personal’?29

Such cultural understandings are in stark contrast to the general meaning of these concepts in Western nations. For instance, referring to the American context, political scientist Nancy Fraser defined the public space as: state-​related, accessible to everyone, of concern to everyone and pertaining to a common good of shared interest and the private as exactly the opposite of the public’s in addition to pertaining to private property in a market economy and pertaining to intimate domestic or personal life, including sexual life.30

In the post-​socialist context, the ambiguous meanings of ‘public’ and ‘private’ were a consequence of more than 40  years of enforced collective 145

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Socially Engaged Art after Socialism experience under the socialist regime, when both public and private spheres collapsed within the reality of the party-​state. It is therefore not surprising that after 1989, for instance, collective action and protest movements by a young generation of students initially had a negative connotation for a population that lived under socialism and understood communal living and collective political unity as party rhetoric and propaganda. Moreover, if under socialism images of the proletariat and labour dominated public spaces, under neoliberal ideology, images of products and services groomed the next generation of consumers. In both cases, the public becomes estranged and collective solidarity is looked upon with suspicion and confusion. At another level, in cities such as Sofia and Bucharest, the very lack of regulation could provide an entry point for art interventions and disruptions of the neoliberal spaces of power. And yet, debates and programmes fostered by the Visual Seminar curatorial and institutional initiative suggested the need for regulations. Contrary to a Western democratic context, where the space of the neoliberal power, or what French urban theorist Henri Lefebvre called ‘abstract space’, is produced and reproduced through, most often, invisible global financial networks, in CEE cities like Sofia, especially in the 1990s and the early 2000s, market forces visibly compete for consumer attention. Not only have advertisements of all types aggressively spread throughout urban public spaces; neoliberal economic interests have increasingly diminished the political power of the municipality of the city to protect publicly owned spaces and institutions. Iara Bobnova, one of the organizers of the Visual Seminar, said: ‘We are not against the regulated city, but we are against the privatized city.’31 In a context where civil rights are defined in terms of one’s access to economic capital and market, Visual Seminar acted as an autonomous yet public institution. While it aimed to provoke critical responses from the inhabitants of the city and bring awareness to their individual and collective rights, debates and programmes initiated within the Visual Seminar paradoxically suggest policy change that would reinforce regulations according to EU standards, which are, in great part, guided by an interest of economic neoliberal expansion into the CEE region. 146

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Spațiul Public București / Public Art Bucharest The lack of spaces for public discussions was one of the major triggers for organizing the Spațiul Public București / Public Art Bucharest exhibition (2007), curated by Romanian-​born and Germany-​based Marius Babias and the German curator Sabine Hentzsch (Figure 7.2). According to the curators, the project aimed to explore ‘how public art encourages a critical engagement with the power structures that are dominant in the public sphere’.32 Moreover, like Moszkva Tér (Gravitacio) and Visual Seminar, Spațiul Public București meant to ‘confront the inhabitants of Bucharest with the city they live in, harnessing their determination to assume an active role in defining the public sphere’.33 Spațiul Public București was a pilot project of an international partnership between the Goethe-​Institute Bucharest, Romanian Cultural Institute and Alianz Kulturstifung. In its choice of foreign rather than local curators, the exhibition functioned as an important vehicle to fashion Bucharest into

Figure 7.2  Daniel Knorr, Trams and Institutions, 2007, in the frame of the exhibition project Public Art Bucharest, 2007. Photo courtesy of Timotei Nadasan.

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Socially Engaged Art after Socialism what the curators referred to as a ‘European cultural metropolis’. For former socialist CEE nations, such as Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania, returning to and being part of Europe meant democratic institutional structures and respect for regulations. Spațiul Public București unfolded over the course of six months, from April to October, and included works by seven artists. Like Moszkva Tér (Gravitacio) in Budapest, Spațiul Public București was preceded by a one-​ day interdisciplinary conference that brought together artists, curators, local politicians and directors of institutions funding the exhibition project. As stated on the project’s website, the debates were meant to open dialogue on the notion of the public sphere and ‘the way this is reflecting the state of the city and of society in general’.34 Moreover, the public event emphasized the importance of public dialogue between art professionals and city officials that could potentially lead to ‘an independent institution for public art’.35 It should be noted that although Adrian Videanu, the mayor of Bucharest at the time, was also invited, he did not attend. The curatorial project also included two collaborative magazine projects with the local newspapers Suplimentul de Cultura and the Observatorul Cultural, which comprised written contributions by artists, curators and critics on themes such as publicity, public space and public sphere. It is revealing that the title of the exhibition in Romanian reads Public Space Bucharest while in English it is Public Art Bucharest. The language discrepancy in translation was intentional. It indicated that the overall aim of the exhibition was to illustrate and inquire about the meaning of the public space in Bucharest. The curatorial project positioned itself as a critical initiative and platform for the inhabitants of the city to reclaim public spaces and insist on their individual and collective rights for inclusive civil society. Coincidently, on 19 April 2007, one day before the official opening of the exhibition, for the first time in the history of the country the Romanian president, the democrat Traian Băsescu, was suspended from office. The parliament accused him of ‘political partisanship’ and of ‘instigating public opinion against state institutions’, such as the government. Following the dismissal by the Romanian court of the alleged charges of constitutional breach and a public referendum, 74 per cent of the Romanian population voted against the president’s suspension, returning him to office after four weeks. Only a few months after the official entrance of Romania into the EU 148

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Place-Making on 1 January 2007, this incident illustrated the continuing political instability of the country. It essentially gave visibility to the conflict between two forms of nationalism. One was civic, pro-​Western liberal and advocating for neoliberal economy, as represented by Traian Băsescu and his Democratic Party. The other was an ethnic form of nationalism grounded in anti-​liberal ideals promoted by a refurbished network of former socialist leaders and hierarchies, and represented by political parties such as the Party of Social Democrats (PSD, led by reformed socialist and former president Ion Iliescu) and the extreme nationalist Greater Romanian Party. A corollary to the contemporary political conflict in the early 2000s between the pro-​Western liberals and the ethnic nationalists, the Romanian art scene and discourse was, likewise, split between two broadly opposing directions. On the one hand, there were forms of art in traditional media, such as painting, sculpture, ceramics and textile, with content often inspired by national traditions and folklore spirituality, which were supported and encouraged by state-​funded art schools, exhibition venues and the Union of Artists. On the other hand, there were curatorial initiatives, such Spațiul Public București, promoting interventionist public art practices, which were funded by Western European foundations and institutions. For instance, the Romanian female artist group h.arta (which I will discuss in more depth in the following chapter) undermined conventional curatorial protocols by inviting other people and artists to participate in their Project Space display, which they initiated in the context of Spațiul Public București. h.arta envisioned their project as a platform for communication and interaction among various political activist groups from both the national and the international scenes, seeking to form a global collaborative network of groups and individuals. Claiming and working towards a discursive public sphere responsive to politically marginalized publics was all the more significant in the Romanian context when an ethnic form of nationalism advocated minority groups as major threats to national security. This was most vividly illustrated by the actions of Gheorghe Funar, the ultra-​nationalist Romanian politician, as mayor of Cluj-​Napoca, historically a city with a large ethnic Hungarian minority. In 2001, Funar had all the park benches, traffic lights and pavements in the centre of the city ‘painted in the colours of the national flag –​red, yellow and blue’.36 This public gesture clearly communicated the anti-​Hungarian rhetoric and 149

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Socially Engaged Art after Socialism sentiments of the mayor, evoking the cultural and political suppression and persecution of ethnic Hungarians in Transylvanian cities by Nicolae Ceaușescu, the former socialist dictator, in his quest for a homogeneous, mythical ‘Greater Romanian’ nation. In contemporary Romania, and other CEE nations in transition such as Bulgaria and Hungary, a public sphere in which a democratic civil society can emerge must be continuously articulated and protected against both the encroaching private interests of the market and ethnic forms of nationalism. And this has been precisely the scope of the art, curatorial and institutionalizing practices that I present here. Although not a multi-​year project such as the Visual Seminar in Sofia, Spațiul Public București likewise was developed outside the framework of a national or city institution and within a transitional context suspended at the interstices between socialism, post-​socialism and neoliberalism. As a project that ‘produces its own autonomous institution’,37 the exhibition acted as an independent initiative taking up the critical role of a (public) institution advocating for the right of inhabitants of the city through platforms activated by contemporary artists working collaboratively in the public space. At the same time, as an initiative curated by foreign curators and supported by funds from Western European cultural institutions, Spațiul Public București communicated a sense of belonging to a transnational public sphere at the level of the EU community.

Catching Up to Europe with Culture Dutch sociologists Willem Schinkel and Friso van Houdt coined the term ‘neo-​liberal communitarianism’ to refer to ‘the underlying rationale of a population management’ that operates in both an individualizing and a de-​individualizing way. The individualizing process is illustrated by the ways in which neoliberalism governs through an emphasis on citizenship based on individual participation or responsibility for one’s own financial status to achieve membership of a community of like-​minded and, we may add, financially accomplished individuals. De-​individualizing refers, for example, to the ways in which community integration  –​national or economic community, for instance –​is emphasized above the individual rights of citizens at various localized levels.38 Although Schinkel and Houdt 150

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Place-Making exemplified their concept as the new forms of governmentality arising in the managing of immigrant populations in the Netherlands, the concept of ‘neo-​liberal communitarianism’ is a productive conceptual framework for the understanding of community formation through cultural initiatives at the level of the EU, especially since the early 2000s. During this time, as indicated by the three exhibitions –​Spațiul Public București, Visual Seminar and Moszkva Tér (Gravitacio) –​both the EU as a political body and individual EU member states generated multi-​national collaborative cultural projects primarily in prospective EU states. These initiatives were geared towards forging a transnational public sphere based on the dual processes of individualization –​prompted by an emphasis on a local identity or specificity and a sense of financial self-​sustainability –​and de-​ individualization  –​marked by a cultural self-​identification with the EU beyond the national borders. Complicating the discussion on the idea of the collective at the European level were the attempts of the EU to forge a sense of belonging using strategies similar to nationalism. Most commonly, nationalism is understood as an ideology that inspires in a people social trust and civic obligations towards a cultural, political and historically constructed imagined community. The EU invoked what Polish political scientist Ireneusz Pawel Karolewski referred to as ‘a national sense of belonging in a non-​nation-​state environment’.39 In his text, Karolewski noted that instead of the clear nationalist tendencies visible in the EU’s individual member states, a light form of nationalism was activated at the EU level. Here, it functioned in a much more subtle way by using specific identity technologies of European nationalism. Among such strategies were cultural and symbolic region-​wide initiatives. Examples include the programmes under the ‘European Cities of Culture’ that were funded by the EU and generally included arts and crafts festivals and music concerts in various European cities. While preserving a symbolic ambiguity, such cultural initiatives aimed to raise ‘visibility and identifiability of the EU’40 within the everyday lives of various national citizens. Certainly, the three curatorial initiatives in Bucharest, Budapest and Sofia exemplified contemporary art as another realm where the EU cultivated a collective form of identity through regionally funded cultural programmes. The other side of the European integration story was told from within the context of aspiring and recent EU states. Each candidate nation was 151

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Socially Engaged Art after Socialism individually responsible for implementing and following the acquis communautaire –​the body of EU laws and policies –​in order to be accepted into the EU. The process of submitting to these detailed regulations inevitably positioned candidate states in an inferior and dependent position towards developed states. Bulgarian cultural theorist Vassil Prodanov referred to Balkan and Eastern European countries as being caught in a perpetual process of ‘implementing catching up development’.41 After 1989 the previous economic, political and cultural dependencies on the Soviet Union, especially in the case of Bulgaria, were replaced with ‘a strategy of openness and dependent development related to the EU integration’.42 This sense of ‘catching up’ to Europe and the socio-​economic and political dependency created a sense of inferiority in the populations of these nations. The argument put forward by Prodanov was similar to the ‘self-​ colonizing cultures’ approach developed by Bulgarian cultural theorist Alexander Kiossev. According to Kiossev, the cultures of prospective and recent CEE nations in the EU were ‘not central enough, not timely and big enough […] insufficiently alien, insufficiently distant, and insufficiently backward’.43 Since they were required to articulate their Europeanness in order to belong, these cultures ‘import alien values and models of civilization by themselves and they lovingly colonize their own authenticity through these foreign models’.44 Although imported values and models were wilfully adopted, they inherently remained perpetually alien, igniting a continuous process of adjustment and re-​affirmation. Moreover, one could see such ‘self-​colonizing’ processes as fuelling the conflict between pro-​Western liberal ideals and forms of illiberal nationalisms. In such a context, the cultural dimension of the integration of CEE represented a key element within an efficiently functioning socio-​economic EU order. Cultural initiatives funded by the EU in CEE functioned as symbols of democracy, of creative self-​expression intended to assist the emerging neoliberal market economy in the region. According to Anthony Gardner, guaranteeing democracy and abiding by a privatized market economy were ‘self-​interested’ categories:  ‘Western Europe’s aims were to maintain –​and, where possible, increase –​its politico-​economic competitiveness within global markets.’45 And yet, the cross-​national cultural initiatives encouraged by the EU also offered, as we have seen, significant 152

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Place-Making critical platforms for art practitioners to challenge the effects of aggressive privatizations within their local contexts. In different ways, each of the three curatorial initiatives, while benefiting from EU funds, provoked a re-​politicization of public space in contexts dominated by nationalist and neoliberal political and economic forces. Either overtly as Spațiul Public București, or obliquely as Moszkva Tér (Gravitacio) and Visual Seminar, these cultural projects fashioned their respective cities as European metropolises. They were part of EU-​initiated, multi-​national projects that advocated harmonious modes of collaboration geared towards convivial forms of European belonging and an unrestricted market economy. On the other hand, because they were supported by EU funds, each of the programmes gained an autonomous and critical position within its national context. As cultural initiatives, the exhibitions became platforms for interdisciplinary dialogue seen as prerequisite for future productive collaborations with local state officials. They emphasized the active role that contemporary forms of public art and art practitioners should play in the decision-​making processes of the city government, especially in regard to the privatization of public space. This was seen, for instance, in the Visual Seminar that included the participation of political figures in their public debates, and in the politicized choice of venue in Moszkva Tér (Gravitacio), as a way to bring awareness to the exclusionary tendencies of the national government. At the same time, a number of the participatory socially engaged projects by artists in the exhibitions, such as János Sugár in Budapest, Luchezar Boyadjiev in Sofia and h.arta in Bucharest, made use of contentious forms of participation and communication in order to address and challenge the politics of marginalization inherent in the sites in which they worked. And it is to their specific art practices that I turn my attention next.

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8 Representing Counterpublics in Bucharest, Budapest and Sofia

In 2005, literary critic and social theorist Michael Warner defined counterpublics ‘by their tension with a larger public’, ‘structured by alternative dispositions or protocols, making different assumptions about what can be said or what goes without saying’, and ones that ‘maintain(s) at some level, conscious or not, an awareness of its subordinate status’.1 Combining participatory and collaborative strategies of engagement, h.arta (in Bucharest), János Sugár (in Budapest), and Luchezar Boyadjiev and Ivan Moudov (in Sofia) conceptualized and developed projects as symbolic platforms for representing various counterpublics within their local contexts. Specifically realized for the Spațiul Public București, Moszkva Tér (Gravitacio) and Visual Seminar curatorial initiatives, these artists involved the participation of various publics, and their practice represented significant discursive sites for advocating and enacting a democratic civil society within a critical public sphere.

h.arta: Undermining Curatorial Protocols in Self-​Organizing Collaborative Projects The younger generation, three-​member female Romanian artist collective h.arta (Maria Crista, Anca Gyemant, Rodica Tache), educated and active 154

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Representing Counterpublics in Bucharest, Budapest and Sofia as artists after 1989, initiated Project Space as what I call a ‘self-​organizing’ collaborative project. It was developed for the Spațiul Public București exhibition (2007) and consisted of a physical and discursive space housed in the building of the Ordinul Architectilor din Romania (Romanian Architects Order). The space doubled as the information point for the exhibition and an art project where h.arta invited several artists and speakers to talk, work and present their projects for the duration of the exhibition, 16 September to 15 October. In what could be perceived as an act of generosity, h.arta diffused the invitation extended to them by the curators of the exhibition to other participants (Figure 8.1). The collective attempted to create an alternative and democratic platform for activities and discussions among generally marginalized publics. The artists organized their discursive space conceptually by identifying four topics. First was ‘post-​communism’, which implied not only discussions on the meaning of communism in Romania but also an awareness of how ‘communism is used to validate [contemporary]

Figure 8.1 h.arta, Project Space, in the frame of Spațiul Public Bucureşti / Public Art Bucharest 2007, Poliphonic Orchestra, performance by Reni Hofmüller. Image courtesy of h.arta.

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Socially Engaged Art after Socialism conservative, nationalist and sexist positions’. The second topic was ‘feminism’, which comprised inquiries and feminist positions that challenged the broader society’s dominant heterosexual male view. The third was ‘education’, which included the creation of horizontal models of knowledge production. The fourth topic was ‘display’, with activities that revealed both ideologically dominating public spaces as well as places of resistance.2 The activities of h.arta’s collaborators contributed to at least one of these four themes. Among the participants was Ofensiva Generositatii, a group of artists and theatre actors, writers, directors and volunteers. Since 2006 the group had engaged members of the Roma community living in the Uranus-​ Rahova neighbourhood in Bucharest. They initiated various long-​term projects and participatory theatre activities that were inspired by local stories and real-​life experiences and performed by members of the community. As a participant in Project Space, Ofensiva Generositatii displayed posters on the wall, presented video screenings of theatre plays and activities performed within the Roma community, and offered a public workshop on creating personal maps. Another contributor to h.arta’s democratically self-​ organized project was Joanne Richardson, a Romanian-​American activist and founder of D-​Media, an NGO in Cluj-​Napoca, Romania, supporting activist film production. For Project Space, Richardson screened various activist films that were followed by discussions on topics such as borders, activism, transition, post-​ communism, woman’s work and precarious lives. Cultural theorist Cristian Carcel contributed a public presentation to Project Space that addressed the manipulated and constructed history in textbooks during Nicolae Ceaușescu’s nationalist-​socialist period. A total of 14 participants contributed their activities to h.arta’s Project Space. Rather than implementing a top-​down curatorial vision, the conversations, presentations and programmes emerged organically and horizontally. Each group or artist left traces of their projects on the perpetually morphing walls of the space, which served as a physical backdrop to the dialogical interactions among various publics. Project Space took shape as a temporary, informal and participatory archive. Poster-​filled walls surrounded tables with samizdat publications and DIY objects (Figure 8.2). Conversations occurred both in the actual space and virtually, facilitated by the several computers in use. Cumulatively, these elements transformed 156

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Figure 8.2 h.arta, Project Space, in the frame of Spațiul Public Bucureşti / Public Art Bucharest 2007. Image courtesy of h.arta.

Project Space into a multi-​layered self-​reflexive space for and by an active and self-​determinant public. h.arta’s Project Space was based on multi-​layered collaborations. Activist, artistic and curatorial activities unfolded horizontally, with a number of participants contributing to the discursive platform of the project. Likewise, the physical space of the exhibition was temporarily taken over by activist groups, who used it to organize themselves for the following year’s 2008 anti-​G8 summit demonstration in Bucharest. Such horizontally discursive initiatives were particularly significant in post-​1989 Romania, a country marked by conservative and traditional art academies and political ideologies and a lack of infrastructure for contemporary experimental art. As Romanian curator Raluca Voinea commented: It [Project Space] was for the first time that such a platform was created in Bucharest, offering the chance of expression to groups normally excluded from the public sphere, which in Romania is still largely dominated by the discourse representative for the white, heterosexual and Christian orthodox male.3

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Socially Engaged Art after Socialism In such context, h.arta brought people together to envision common modes to ‘struggle against authority’ and to ‘create the conditions necessary to think differently’.4 By democratically self-​organizing, the artists sought to formulate an alternative to existing local conditions. h.arta collaboratively produced parallel platforms and spaces for critical knowledge production as separate from both state-​driven initiatives and capital-​determined programmes and activities. These goals also constituted their initial motivation to come together as a group in 2001 in a space located on the second floor of an industrial building in Timișoara, a city in the north-​western part of Romania: We wanted to have h.arta as a meeting place, a place where we could talk about art not as something abstract, general and distant but as something that has a real connection to our lives. […] We were trying to redefine art from this perspective, in opposition to the discourses of art as ‘High Art’, that were taught to us in the entire course of our education. This was the political content behind this simple operation of declaring the private, the emotional, the trivial and the everyday as a rightful part of a public discourse, as something worthy of being the content of art.5

Within the context of the Spațiul Public București exhibition that sought a ‘critical engagement with the local power structures’ while advocating a transnational European public sphere, h.arta embodied a public space where multiple people could come together. They did this by extending invitations to others to be part of both the exhibition and their project. In a 2008 interview, h.arta recalled the communal atmosphere of their space: It was very encouraging for us to talk to people who entered the space to attend events, to browse through the archive or just to talk and who told us how necessary the existence of such a space (physical or not) seems, where one could talk about the fact that the reality we live in, based on an ideology of profit, is not unavoidable and that there are alternatives.6

A self-​organizing public sphere emerged within the physical boundaries of Project Space, which became a forum for public debates and social interactions among a network of people working both locally and internationally. 158

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Representing Counterpublics in Bucharest, Budapest and Sofia Such a conceptual and participatory artistic strategy was not unique to h.arta. Other local artists (not featured in the exhibition), such as Matei Bejenaru, had employed a similar model: in his Communication Project and Installation (2002–​6), he used his entire artistic production budget to sponsor a week-​long-​visit to Vienna for ‘five artists from Iași with whom I was working within the Vector Association’.7 These approaches not only challenged the hierarchical framework of curated exhibitions defined by the leading position of the curator, but also, and most importantly, illustrated the empowering potential of social capital nurtured through participative and collaborative processes of art making. For example, following the conclusion of Project Space, h.arta –​originally from Timișoara –​returned to Bucharest to join the activist peaceful protests against the NATO summit held on 2 April 2008 in the capital city of Romania, which included a week filled with workshops, film screenings and presentations. The connections forged through Project Space provided the members of h.arta with a vital social network to continue their advocacy work: Our decision to go to Bucharest, exactly when the authorities advised citizens to leave the city, was closely related to the fact that we had met a part of the activists involved in organizing this ‘anti-​NATO week’ during Project Space, which helped us detect immediately the huge contrast between the way media has built the image of the anti-​NATO militants and what we knew from direct discussions with them and the way we saw them trying to solve various social problems.

Moreover, h.arta pursued ‘feminism’ –​one of the four topics first articulated in their 2007 Project Space –​in further depth through a nine-​month initiative called Feminisms, in Timișoara, from September 2008 to May 2009. It allowed the artists to elaborate the complex implications of ‘state feminism’ under the socialist regime and the implementation of a new series of gender laws as part of the integration of Romania into the EU. Among the questions h.arta posed were: ‘How could one talk about feminism and gender-​related issues [while] avoiding copying a “Western paradigm” and, at the same time, talk about local problems without imprinting exoticism onto oneself?’8 In their work, h.arta members have continued to combine art and activist practice, relying on dialogic interaction, public 159

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Socially Engaged Art after Socialism participation and collaboration as artistic strategies of engagement. Their initiatives Project Space (2007) and Feminisms (2008–​9) became temporary physical spaces where various publics gathered, debated and built a social network. The accumulated social relations morphed into political capital as artists continued to sustain their collaborations in long-​term and self-​ organizing initiatives. h.arta was clearly aware of the politically empowering potential of social networks: The fact that there are still people and groups with whom we have a continuous bond in time, which materializes in various other discussions, encounters, projects, friendships is a great source of energy and inspiration for us.9

János Sugár: Staging Confrontation in Participatory Public Art A similar goal of providing a platform to make visible economically and politically marginalized groups of people yet taking a rather confrontational approach guided Hungarian artist János Sugár when he conceptualized his project Idöjárör / Time Patrol (Figure 8.3). Part of Moszkva Tér (Gravitacio), Idöjárör / Time Patrol (2003) was a caravan installed in the centre of Moscow Square. During ‘opening hours’, a sign invited the public to enter. Anyone who wanted to could dictate to the typist placed behind a desk for ten minutes without interruption, and would receive 4,000 Hungarian forints (or 20 euro) –​the hourly wage in Hungary at that time was between 500 and 1,000 HUF. Considering the relatively high pay for only ten minutes’ work, it was not surprising that Sugár’s caravan was a popular spot with the inhabitants of the square. The caravan was open and functional once a week, for three hours at a time, for a period of six weeks. Moscow Square (since 2011 Széll Kálmán) is a well-​known site for anyone living in or familiar with Budapest. It is an eclectic square coloured by the presence of a mixed economy comprised of street vendors selling clothes, flowers and flea-​market items, along with newspapers kiosks. It is a transportation hub and a transit point for many of the rich who pass through the square to reach their residences in the nearby Rózsadomb upper-​middle-​class neighbourhood. Most importantly, it is also an urban location where many of the city’s poor and homeless, the elderly, the Roma 160

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Figure 8.3 János Sugár, Time Patrol, 2003, as part of the exhibition project Moszkva Tér (Gravitacio) / Moscow Square (Gravitation). Photo by Zoltán Kerekes, courtesy of János Sugár.

and the illegal immigrants –​the majority from the Transylvania region of Romania –​gather and look for work. And it is these people on the margins of society who waited several hours in line to enter Sugár’s Idöjárör / Time Patrol (Figure 8.4). As mentioned by Hungarian art historians Judit Bodor and Bea Hock, who both wrote about the work in the exhibition catalogue, some participants told devastating personal stories of struggle, suggesting ‘the lack of communicational opportunities and the experiences of not being listened to’.10 Avoiding any criteria of selection, the numbered yet unauthored and unedited stories and texts were collected into a black-​and-​white publication called Idöjárör / Time Patrol, which was sold for 400 forints (or about 2 euro) at the nearby newspaper stalls during the exhibition period. According to the artist: My aim is to produce a documentary whose future value is incalculable  –​exactly because it does not seem to be of any significance in the present. What we wouldn’t give to have an

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Figure 8.4 János Sugár, Time Patrol, 2003, detail, as part of the exhibition project Moszkva Tér (Gravitacio) / Moscow Square (Gravitation). Photo by Zoltán Kerekes, courtesy of János Sugár.

accurate transcription of a random conversation in a mail-​ coach at the beginning of the 19th century!11

Looking at the participatory strategy of public engagement employed by the artist and the role of participants in the work, Sugár’s archival project revealed an ethically ambiguous process. The inhabitants of the square presented and sold their stories as exotic displays of the society’s poor. Rather than emerging from or cultivating relations of trust and reciprocity, the participants in Sugár’s project remained anonymous, objectified and documented for some ‘future value’. While the direct participation of the public was at the core of Idöjárör / Time Patrol, the project reiterated rather than disturbed or challenged the dialectics of exclusion and inclusion inherent in the fabric of virtually any public sphere. In projects that engage members of a specific group or community, one must always address the problematic inherent in the relationships between participants and artists that are representatives for a particular group. Kester developed his concept of a ‘politically coherent community’ 162

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Representing Counterpublics in Bucharest, Budapest and Sofia in response to forms of negation that can occur when artists view their collaborators as raw and inert material to be transformed or improved in some ways.12 According to Kester, the strength of a project lies in its ability to create a space of dialogical exchange, where both the artist and the collaborator are transformed and where the artist no longer occupies the superior position of creative master. However, Idöjárör / Time Patrol conferred upon the artist precisely the superior position of a creative master, who made use of the participants and their stories as raw material and content for the work. As Hungarian critic and art historian Hedvik Turai, reviewing the exhibition, said, ‘it is a purely abstract relationship between the parties: Someone enters the caravan, dictates, receives the money…’.13 On another level, one could view Sugár’s gesture and action as intentionally confrontational. His scope was to bring awareness to the exploitative effects of the global neoliberal market forces on human lives and labour by publicly staging the economic exploitation of the poor and marginalized. Idöjárör / Time Patrol was also presented in 2004 in Zagreb and in 2007 in Belgrade, and the amount allocated as payment reflected the economic standards of living in each country. A similar antagonistic approach has been utilized by other international practitioners, such as Spanish artist Santiago Sierra in works like Workers who cannot be paid, remunerated to remain inside cardboard boxes (at the Kunst-​Werke Gallery in Berlin, 2000), a title that described the actual project, and 250 CM line tattooed on 6 paid people (in Havana, Cuba, 1999), in which the artist paid six unemployed young men 30 dollars each to stand in a row and permit a horizontal line to be tattooed on their backs. In such art works, participants were utilized as simple props in the artist’s essentially autonomous artistic practice, perpetuating the same exploitative processes that the artists aimed to critique. According to the project description by Bodor and Hock, Sugár’s Idöjárör / Time Patrol ‘gives voice to those who remain unassimilated, invisible and mute in the narratives of power’; it communicates a history ‘from below’, and by faithfully transcribing the participants’ stories into a publication, the project ‘realized an instance of the unmediated and unreformed self-​representation of the subaltern’.14 Furthermore, the authors pointed to the impact of the texts by participants that were collected in the unedited publication. 163

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Socially Engaged Art after Socialism The strangeness of this deviant textuality often hinders understanding, but at the same time, its surprises and immediacy render meaning production an extraordinarily active process, for the effect produced violates both the reader’s linguistic and social conventions.15

However, the ‘unmediated self-​representation’ through ‘deviant textuality’ was purely rhetorical. It was achieved through the misappropriation of actual human beings who participated in the work not because of their understanding of the aims of the artist, but rather because they had no other means of earning a living than to sell their last possession:​their poverty. Most important, the project maintained the status quo undisturbed, with the artist in his privileged position and his participants in their subaltern position. Bishop called ‘relational antagonism’ the artistic strategy used by artists to bring forth sustained tensions inherent within our complex contemporary conditions. Sugár (like Sierra) used a confrontational approach to bring awareness to the already well-​known realities while implicitly denying any possibility of the participants’ self-​determination.16 An older-​generation artist, Sugár was active as an artist before the fall of the socialist regime. In the 1980s he was as a member of the Indigó Group, led by Miklós Erdély, and then one of the leaders of the Béla Balázs film studio. After 1989, he was one of the founders of the Intermedia Department of the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts, and in 1992 he participated in Documenta IX. While his body of work in various media includes video, installations, sculpture, photography and drawing, Sugár has also engaged in political activism. In 2008, the police prosecuted him for his stencil art Wash your dirty money with my art (which he exhibited, legally, in an exhibition at the Kunsthalle, Budapest) that he spray-​painted onto the walls of two private institutions, which sued the artist for property damage.17 Moreover, he continues to create projects that involve public participation. Most recently, for the 2015 OFF-​Biennale-​Budapest, his work Tűz a Múzeumban / Fire in the Museum consisted of an open-​air fire pit made of leftover construction material on the terrace of the Rombusz beer garden located on the Ráday street in Budapest. The project was initially conceived in 2007 and planned to take place in 2011 in the Kiscelli Museum in Budapest, where it was accepted at first only to be ultimately rejected by a member of the museum for unspecified reasons. The group of 164

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Representing Counterpublics in Bucharest, Budapest and Sofia curatorial studies students who assisted Sugár with the exhibition preparations in 2011 made a proposal to the 2015 OFF-​Biennale-​Budapest to realize and display the project. The fire was lit on the opening day of the biennale and had to be kept burning by volunteers for the entire four weeks of the exhibition. The fire was extinguished on the twenty-​first day, before the biennale officially ended. This was due to a number of complaints from neighbours to the owner of the beer garden, and not to the lack of volunteers (approximately 150 in number) who signed up to ‘guard’ the fire. A poetic and participatory gesture, Sugár’s work was seen as a symbol for a community forged through horizontal social networks, which ensured that the fire continued to burn. In a 2015 interview Sugár recalled: ‘There were usually more people around the fire at the same time, and some of the guards organized their programmes there. The other thing which was interesting for me, is that people, who were not part of the art scene, reacted more positively and we had more applicants from them.’18 In a May 2015 article, art critic and curator Călin Dan recalled his visit to Sugár’s site, especially highlighting the presence of ‘everyday people’, rather than an art audience, who guarded the fire, day and night, sitting and conversing over a beer on the terrace with ‘friends, loved ones, and dogs, which are a frequent site in Budapest’.19 It is was precisely this communal space created through horizontal social networks that rendered Tűz a Múzeumban a temporary and symbolic site for enacting a public sphere inclusive of counterpublics.

Luchezar Boyadjiev: Roma Counterpublic Art Monuments in Sofia If Sugár conceptualized Idöjárör / Time Patrol as an alternative exchange system that used a rather confrontational approach in engaging with economically and politically marginalized groups of people, older-​generation Bulgarian artist Luchezar Boyadjiev, in his Hot City Visual –​‘Stefan’s Brigade (and Sons-​in-​Law)’, re-​appropriated the language of advertisement in order to confront the generally negative attitude towards an ethnic minority group. Boyadjiev created his collaborative socially engaged work in 2003, as a resident fellow in the interdisciplinary Visual Seminar project in Sofia. The work of art took the form of a public ‘advertisement campaign’ 165

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Socially Engaged Art after Socialism for a family-​owned small business. It comprised a large-​scale billboard that featured a full portrait of four radiantly smiling Roma men, a four-​minute ‘promotional’ video, Super! Super!, and a series of posters distributed throughout the city streets (Figures 8.5 and 8.6). The central figure on the billboard was Stefan Metodiev, a Roma man in his fifties. The artist had known Metodiev for 15 years, as a handyman at the Union of Bulgarian Artists and at the National Gallery of Foreign Art, both in Sofia, helping with the installation of various art exhibitions.20 The other three figures on the poster surrounding Stefan against a bright red backdrop were his three sons-​in-​law, who worked together in their family business. Boyadjiev produced a short documentary video in which the four Roma men repaired a residential roof –​one of their specialties –​while One Bulgarian Rose, a patriotic song from the 1970s easily recognized by any Bulgarian, plays as the soundtrack. For two weeks, beginning on 13 October, the billboard was strategically placed in the central square of the city, on the façade of the National Art Gallery (the former Tsar’s palace) and across from the former Georgi

Figure 8.5 Luchezar Boyadjiev, Hot City Visual, 2003. Detail:  Poster from the advertisement campaign for ‘Stefan’s Brigade (and Sons-​in-​Law)’, 70 x 100  cm. Image courtesy of Luchezar Boyadjiev.

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Figure 8.6  Luchezar Boyadjiev, Hot City Visual, 2003. Detail: ‘Super! Super!’ video clip, 4:26 min. Stills from the video clip for the advertisement campaign for ‘Stefan’s Brigade (and Sons-​in-​Law)’. Image courtesy of Luchezar Boyadjiev.

Dimitrov Mausoleum (demolished in 1999), which until August 1990 housed the former communist leader’s embalmed body (Figure 8.7). The inscription on the billboard announced Stefan’s well-​known yet unofficial address in Sofia, namely Macedonia Square-​north, where most Roma day labourers, like Stefan’s family, look for employment between 8.30 and 10.30 a.m. The placement of the billboard was timed to coincide with the local mayoral elections in 2003. Stefan Sofianski, one of the political candidates, considered the billboard a personal insult since he had the same first name and also three daughters. Although this was a mere coincidence, the politician’s angry 167

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Figure 8.7  Luchezar Boyadjiev, Hot City Visual, 2003. Detail: Billboard from the advertisement campaign for ‘Stefan’s Brigade (and Sons-​in-​Law)’. Digital print on vinyl, 375 x 750 cm. Installed on the façade of the former Tsar’s palace (now National Art Gallery) in the centre of Sofia just prior to the mayoral elections in October 2003. Image courtesy of Luchezar Boyadjiev.

campaign staff demanded explanations from the artist. Local press published articles profiling other Roma individuals. The artist wanted to provoke a politicized dialogue on the situation of the Roma minority in the country: The point though is that the substance of the project was received by the political elite ‘according to plan’, as a political rather than economic message, as an expression of public and political rather than private and economic interest.21

At the same time, the choice of the artist to publicly represent the Roma ethnic minority was, in part, influenced by the ongoing ‘normalization’ or accession process that his country was going through. As a candidate state, Bulgaria had to address the EU’s acquis communautaire, which included the implementation of democratic laws and respect for minority rights. As the artist said, ‘there is no integration of Bulgaria in the EU without integration of the Roma people in Bulgaria’.22 168

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Representing Counterpublics in Bucharest, Budapest and Sofia Boyajiev’s Hot City Visual –​‘Stefan’s Brigade (and Sons-​in-​Law)’ emerged from his research and meticulous analysis of what he called Sofia’s ‘visual irregularities’,23 or the haphazard character of advertisements in the city. In his extensive field research conducted in the early 2000s, the artist identified three forms of advertisement evident in Sofia: the ‘corporate logo’, which was bright and shiny and positioned high above a person’s eye level, the ‘neighbourhood logo’, which featured crude personal handwriting and was positioned on poles and surfaces at a person’s eye level, and the ‘Bulgarian billboard’, which combined the form of the first and the content of the second.24 Representing the Roma in a positive light, the Hot City Visual –​‘Stefan’s Brigade (and Sons-​in-​Law)’ aimed to subvert the typically vulgar content promoted on ‘Bulgarian billboards’. The project is supposed to be like a flash from a photographic camera, a momentary lightening that is pouring light on some invisible aspects and niches of life or on some concrete people. In a long-​term perspective it should work towards a change of attitudes.25

In a contentiously subversive approach, Boyajiev appropriated the visual language of advertisement to bring attention to the political and socio-​ economic marginalization of both local family business and minority ethnic groups. The artist politicized public space by displaying a positive image of a Roma family during the mayoral elections. Moreover, Boyajiev’s short ‘promotional’ video Super! Super! featured four hard-​working individuals rather than the stereotypical image of Roma seen as thieves and burglars both locally and at the broader European level. Through the artist’s work, an under-​ the-​ counter local business was advertised on an equal footing with international corporations. Aside from specifying Stefan’s name and the address of Macedonia Square-​north, the artist neither signed nor identified the billboard as a work of art. Boyajiev offered Hot City Visual –​‘Stefan’s Brigade (and Sons-​in-​Law)’ as a gift to his participants. Ironically, the media attention and public reception of the billboard caused Stefan some difficulties. A clerk at the local social security office initially refused Stefan his monthly unemployment benefits, questioning his financial need. For the local public, being able to afford a large billboard in the city centre meant a successful family business. Stefan eventually 169

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Socially Engaged Art after Socialism received his cheque after ‘starting a counter-​scandal with the argument that the clerk did not get the point of the artistic action at all, which was expected from somebody who has no experience of working with artists’.26 Hot City Visual –​‘Stefan’s Brigade (and Sons-​in-​Law)’ was a participatory project. At the most obvious level, in its public presentation and reception, the art project triggered the participation of various publics, such as the city’s everyday inhabitants, the art world, media channels and local politicians. At a deeper level, the project emerged from intimate collaborations and continued communications among the artist and participants. Over the years, the artist maintained contact with Stefan: ‘I just know him and when I can find some job for him –​to repair somebody’s roof, to rearrange the parquet floor, paint some walls –​I tell him. That’s the real type of service offered in Bulgaria, people are helping each other for minimal pay.’27 Such informal networks of exchange –​during and after the fall of socialism –​engendered a sense of trust and reciprocity between the artist and Stefan. These already present relations facilitated the creation of a collaborative work of art equally meaningful for all of its collaborators. Boyajiev’s public gesture activated a public sphere and gave visibility to what Warner called counterpublics, or groups of people in a more or less conscious awareness of their subordinate status in society. Through Hot City Visual –​‘Stefan’s Brigade (and Sons-​in-Law)’, a Roma counterpublic temporarily entered a politicized public space and symbolically claimed their rights as citizens of the nation. It brought into public debate the social and political discrimination and marginalization of the Roma ethnic minority in Bulgaria, a situation common to most CEE nations during the post-​1989 transitional period. However short-​lived and symbolic, such a gesture was all the more important in a local urban context changing rapidly under aggressive privatizations of formerly publicly owned properties. As in other post-​Soviet bloc countries, transitional cities such as Sofia and Bucharest were characterized by ‘a capitalism without bourgeois; a consumer society without consumers, and a society where public space is anything that one can sell and/or buy’.28 An internationally known artist, Luchezar has been very active in the local art scene as a member of the Institute for Contemporary Art –​Sofia (which I discussed in chapter six) since its inception in the 1990s. His body of work in various media, including installation, video, photography and actions, consider the multi-​layered changes that occurred after the collapse 170

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Representing Counterpublics in Bucharest, Budapest and Sofia of socialist societies. Participatory strategies have been at the basis of some of his other works of art, specifically in Schadenfreude Guided Tour conducted in the context of the exhibition In the Gorges of the Balkans (2003) at the Kunsthalle Fridericianum in Kassel. Wanting to fill the gap in the space between art work and audience during an art exhibition displayed in a museum space, Luchezar transformed himself into a ‘living, talking and walking sculpture’. He stayed in the museum during opening hours for a period of close to five weeks, taking visitors through the exhibition of 120 works by 88 artists. Luchezar described his project: I worked 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 layers of reference to the Balkan context that only an informed insider could provide.29

And it is this interest in participatory and dialogic strategies to create works of art as conceptual and actual bridges between works of art and everyday viewers that has guided Luchezar’s art practice, as seen also in Hot City Visual –​‘Stefan’s Brigade (and Sons-​in-​Law)’ developed for the Visual Seminar in 2003.

Ivan Moudov: Performing a Museum of Contemporary Art through Collective Participation The place was swarming with individuals in constant motion: rushing, stopping within little groups, gesticulating, finding their ways in a business-​like manner around others hanging out or manoeuvering around TV cars on the car park democratically-​ chaotically mixed with diplomatic limousines –​each with a little flag […] ‘the ambassadors support the action for the museum’, ‘the journalists don’t care about him, they want Christo’, ‘Svelin Roussev made a joke about it and said that Christo got off at the Central Station by mistake’, ‘some of them left in a rage, it’s interesting what they will write’ –​these are some of the comments I heard in the mayhem.30

This is how Bulgarian art critic and journalist Diana Popova, who was among the participants and observers, described the public gathering 171

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Socially Engaged Art after Socialism triggered by the participatory art project MUSIZ (abbreviation in Bulgarian meaning Museum of Contemporary Art) by Bulgarian artist Ivan Moudov. Conceived for Visual Seminar in 2005, the work was the result of his participation in the programme’s fourth and final artist residency on the theme of ‘The City through the Window of the Museum’. MUSIZ consisted of an advertising campaign that included four large billboards placed in the centre of Sofia and hundreds of posters plastered all around the city four days before the project’s interactive aspects with the public materialized (Figure  8.8). Flyers were distributed in coffee shops, universities, art galleries and museums. Following the design of party invitations by the local American Embassy, Nadya Lyahova designed official invitation cards with the MUSIZ abbreviation in golden relief. The invitations, which highlighted the presence of the internationally known Bulgarian artist Christo (born Christo Vladimirov Javacheff and partner of Jeanne-​Claude) at the opening, were mailed to press agencies, embassies, city officials and international contacts. A website and an email address for RSVP were set up as well and provided a record of those who attended. All announced the opening

Figure 8.8  Ivan Moudov, MUSIZ, 2005. Billboard, advertising for the opening of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sofia. Image courtesy of Ivan Moudov.

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Representing Counterpublics in Bucharest, Budapest and Sofia of the Museum for Contemporary Art –​Sofia on 26 April 2005 at 7 p.m. at the Podujane railway station in Sofia. Over 300 people appeared at the location and time indicated, only to find an empty railway station (Figure 8.9).31 A documentary video on the MUSIZ opening and published articles revealed a plethora of reactions from the public who gathered at the

Figure 8.9A–​D  Ivan Moudov, MUSIZ opening, 2005. Sofia, 26 April 2005. Images courtesy of Ivan Moudov.

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Figure 8.9A–​D  (cont.)

train station. Some people were confused, some felt manipulated by the artist, others were disappointed by the actual lack of a Contemporary Art Museum in Bulgaria, and still others were amused or applauded the artist’s intervention. Such mixed reactions revealed the conflicted attitudes of the public, which arose from conflating the absence of an actual 174

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Representing Counterpublics in Bucharest, Budapest and Sofia museum that was advertised with the artist’s participatory project that many considered to be a manipulative gesture (Figure 8.10). Blurring the line between the art and social life was at the core of Moudov’s work. In

Figure 8.10  Ivan Moudov, MUSIZ, 2005. Postcard, advertising for the opening of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sofia. Image courtesy of Ivan Moudov.

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Socially Engaged Art after Socialism fact, he removed his name from any form of advertisement and eliminated any association of himself with MUSIZ. Only the few whose assistance he needed were aware of his identity. At one level, the artist’s ‘simulation of the opening of a Museum of Contemporary Art’ was anchored in a specific national site as ‘the Poduyane station is the first railway station in Sofia and a symbol of modern Bulgaria’. At another level, Moudov’s strategies of communication with various publics between February and April 2005, and during the opening event, suggested the function of an actual (future) museum.32 Moudov’s project revealed a participatory model of art practice based on anonymity and accidental involvement of a broad audience that became both participant in and observer of the work. In MUSIZ two forms of participation can be distinguished. First, there were the individuals directly involved by the artist in his advertising campaign and the only ones aware of his fictitious museum opening. In fact, in his published ‘Chronicle of Manipulation’, Moudov listed the names of both individuals and institutions and acknowledged each of their roles in the project. Rather than mere documentation, this post-​event written and published text appeared more like the acknowledgements and introduction of a museum director at the inaugural event of his or her institution. And so, the project’s documentation extended the short-​lived performance of Moudov’s museum simulation into textual form. Second, MUSIZ could not have occurred without the presence of the hundreds of people gathered at the railway station. There was an eclectic mix of people, including members of the Bulgarian art scene, officials from several local embassies who came to fulfil their Public Relations duty and media representatives thirsty for shock-​filled reporting. The line between those who were being watched and those doing the watching was continuously blurred. Those who made their home at the station also observed the scene. The homeless, the regulars at the small café at the end of the train station’s main platform, drinking their beer, watched with curiosity, suspicion and some amusement the absurd presence of the growing crowd. Thus, in a subtle inversion and perhaps unintended by the artist, members of the visible society, who took part in a site-​specific art project, involuntarily also became a spectacle watched by the site’s locals –​a socially, economically and politically marginalized public. 176

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Representing Counterpublics in Bucharest, Budapest and Sofia Eluding the boundary between participants and spectators, MUSIZ embodied a temporary public sphere where a dominant public co-​existed with a counterpublic. To reiterate, according to Warner, counterpublics are defined ‘by their tension with a larger public’, ‘structured by alternative dispositions or protocols, making different assumptions about what can be said or what goes without saying’, and ‘maintain[ing] at some level, conscious or not, an awareness of its subordinate status’.33 MUSIZ enacted a public sphere that incorporated counterpublics of two kinds. On one level, there were the marginalized homeless and the poor, also called ‘subaltern counterpublics’,34 residing at the railway station. While accidentally present, this public became temporarily empowered through their position as spectators of the ‘manipulated’ crowd. On another level, Moudov’s project aimed to bring visibility to and give voice to another counterpublic composed of all those involved in creating and supporting the local Bulgarian scene of contemporary art. Moreover, the terms used by Warner to outline the formation of a public are particularly helpful here to further understand Moudov’s project.35 A  public is one that is ‘self-​organized through discourse’  –​people attending the fictitious museum opening were all invited by the artist yet their collective presence formed a public by the very fact of them being addressed/invited –​formed not only among friends but also ‘among strangers’ (Moudov’s invitees were an eclectic mix of individuals with different backgrounds and unknown to one another) and creates a social space through the very reflexive circulation of discourse (exemplified in the case of MUSIZ first through the interactive relations and dialogue among the participants, but also at a textual level through the discourses ignited by close to 50 articles and editorials in both the online and printed press that extended the life of the project by expanding its public). MUSIZ ignited a national debate on the need for a museum of contemporary art and implicitly on the meaning and value of what constitutes contemporary art. Since their emergence in the late 1980s, political and cultural institutions in Bulgaria have consistently ignored contemporary artists and their art practices. Contemporary art continues to remain outside of any institutional interest for collection, preservation, documentation and presentation, for example in academically researched publications and museum exhibitions. The general lack of attention to experiential contemporary art 177

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Socially Engaged Art after Socialism practice has also been fuelled by the art academies, the Ministry of Culture and the Unions of the Artists. These institutions promoted traditional forms of art rooted in medium specificity, craftsmanship, folklore and national elements. As Alexander Kiossev pointed out, in the absence of substantial private collections or foundations that would support and promote a public understanding of contemporary art, it has been assumed that this role should fall on the state, the only body ‘possessing the institutional and financial means necessary for such a costly and ambitious project’.36 One could argue that Moudov’s call for a contemporary art museum was answered in 2011 with the official opening of the Sofia Arsenal Museum of Contemporary Art in Sofia. The museum was initiated by Bulgaria’s Ministry of Culture with structural funds provided by a Norwegian foundation. However, its inception was motivated by what we might call a PR neoliberal strategy meant to bring symbolic and cultural capital to the country through a positive image internationally. Prime Minister Boyko Borrissov has been known as a political figure who fully supports directives and policies issued by the EU, most recently ‘the mandatory quotas for the allocation of refugees throughout Europe’.37 As one of the few countries benefiting from EU funding, Bulgaria was only recently the last country in the EU with no museum for contemporary art, an institution seen as an integral component within any civilized nation. The belated attention of the Bulgarian state to such a museum was determined by this ‘civilizational’ need of the country that would help brand and secure the nation as a true (not only cultural but also, of course, economic) member of the European community. Even more disturbing was the inclusion of a Museum of Contemporary Art within the renewed attempts of the state to recentralize culture through museums that are expected to fulfil a state-​imposed cultural policy. This was evident in the state’s control of all major local museums, such as the National Art Gallery  –​Sofia, the National Gallery of Foreign Art, the newly formed Museum for Contemporary Art and also the newly formed Museum for Socialist Art. Thus, the recently opened Museum for Contemporary Art in Bulgaria is in the hands of those that Kiossev already warned about a year earlier: The position of a museum-​builder is claimed now by ministers and proud inheritors of the purely national kind of art; by

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Representing Counterpublics in Bucharest, Budapest and Sofia officials from the Union of Bulgarian Artists and by groups of young enthusiasts and social climbers who are eager to get rid of the older generation; by market oriented life-​style stewards of taste and shadowy businessman who have a clear idea about how much money one can make from such a venture.38

Within such a locally divisive context, Moudov’s large-​scale participatory project gained an even more significant role by challenging the status quo. Just as the dominant power requires perpetual repetitions and reformulations in order to preserve its authoritarian position, so do contemporary interventionist art practices. However symbolic and short term, projects such as MUSIZ have the potential to disrupt the dominant political fabric through acts of subversion, denaturalization and recontextualization. In all four projects by h.arta, János Sugár, Luchezar Boyadjiev and Ivan Moudov, communication was central. Direct dialogic exchanges and various forms of participation and collaboration represented core strategies of engagement and artistic creation. Even if short-​lived, each project, whether participatory or collaborative, became a platform for representing various counterpublics. For example, h.arta made use of social networks forged through its democratically self-​organizing and multi-​dimensional project, in which a number of cultural practitioners such as leftist activists gathered, debated and planned their advocacy work in future initiatives. János Sugár took a contention-​based approach while Luchezar Boyadjiev and Ivan Moudov, in different ways, satirically subverted the language of commercial advertisement in order to open critical and public discussion about the political, cultural and economic marginalization of specific groups of individuals in Budapest and Sofia, respectively. The public initiatives by these artists represented critical gestures within contexts where capitalist forces increasingly threaten the existence of politicized public spheres that question and confront neoliberal ideology.

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9 Contesting the Politics of Belonging in the Post-​1989 EU Community

Provoking a re-​politicization of the public sphere by questioning the effects of exclusionary politics on individual human lives, but this time at the EU rather than at the national level, motivated Hungarian artist Miklós Erhardt and Scottish artist Dominic Hislop (also known as the artist collective Big Hope)1 and Romanian artist Matei Bejenaru to create collaborative projects in two different EU states. In 2002, Erhardt and Hislop –​who was based in Budapest at the time –​developed Re:route in Turin, Italy, as part of their participation in the Turin Biennial. In 2007 Bejenaru conceived of the Impreuna / Together project (as a follow-​up to his 2005–​7 Travel Guide) in London, England, as part of his participation in an exhibition at Tate Modern. Identifying with and involving the participation of members of specific immigrant groups in these two European cities, their art projects probed the broader European discourse on belonging and not belonging. The artists proposed alternative views to notions of community and citizenship generally posited as positive attributes of a pan-​European community space. The discourse on who was and was not part of the EU was evident in the debates associated with the eastward expansion of the Union from the early to late 2000s and the notion of European citizenship. In 1993, the Treaty on the EU –​also called the Maastricht Treaty, which gave the EU its current name –​legalized the category of European citizenship. 180

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Contesting the Politics of Belonging It conferred the status of citizen of the European community on every legal citizen of any EU member nation.2 Demonstrating a free-​market notion of citizenship, the principal rights enjoyed by the citizens of the European community, referred to as the Four Fundamental Freedoms, include the freedom of goods, persons, services and capital. It is significant that European citizenship is seen as supplementary to and contingent upon the rights and obligations attached to every national member state, which in effect retains the power to define and decide who is or is not a European citizen. Reducing citizenship to a mere legal right, European citizenship limited the access of non-​EU residents to political and social opportunities at the pan-​European level, transforming them into second-​class citizens, an economic underclass of unwanted yet needed foreigners. While aiming to facilitate a borderless territory of free economic transactions, European citizenship contradicted the ideological claims of an inclusive and multicultural European community.3 The term ‘citizenship’ is similar to the term ‘community’, in that it has varying meanings depending upon the context in which it is used. Political scientist Andrew Mason distinguished between an ordinary community and a notion of community in the moralized sense. The latter includes solidarity between its members and excludes exploitation most commonly associated with an ordinary community. The ordinary community, which is similar to the idea of citizenship, most commonly indicates a group of people who have common interests and goals, share a way of life generated through cooperative activities, identify with the group, and have some means of deciding who is or is not part of the community. This is exemplified by the notion of imagined community theorized by Benedict Anderson, where people can belong to the same community without ever meeting one another.4 Moreover, the ordinary notion of community is flexible and/or ambiguous enough to accommodate users from the entire political spectrum.5 And it was this notion of community, which does not exclude injustice and exploitation between its members interested in pursuing their individual goals, that vividly described the EU community and its European citizenship concept and policy. In 2000, Etienne Balibar spoke of a ‘European apartheid’ that he argued exists simultaneously with the notion of European citizenship. The term referred to the way immigrant populations in the EU territory, which come 181

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Socially Engaged Art after Socialism most often from the African nations (that were historically tied to Europe through the labour circuits of recruitment) and from Eastern Europe (societies that underwent a selective admission process into the EU community), were constituted ‘as “inferior” in rights and dignity, subject to violent forms of security control and forced to live on the border, neither absolutely inside nor totally outside’.6 To combat this situation, Balibar called for the democratization of borders as one of his proposed ‘worksites of democracy’. He suggested the notion of ‘a citizenship in Europe’ rather than a ‘European citizenship’, a shared construction of citizenship by the diverse inhabitants of Europe.7 Such a relational notion of citizenship relied on spatial and temporal belonging to a certain place, where political and social rights are negotiated collectively yet guaranteed individually. As such, it emphasized contingency and constant recontextualization and reformulation as essential components of an inclusive form of democratic belonging. It is this contingent and participatory understanding of citizenship and community anchored within the specificity of a place that Erhardt & Hislop, and Bejenaru envisioned both through their process and the scope of their projects, which engaged specific individuals from larger immigrant groups. Their art practices can be viewed as important nodal points where macro societal transformations are responded to, manifested and interfered with at the micro, everyday level.

About the Artists: Bejenaru and Big Hope Big Hope (formed by Hungarian artist Miklós Erhardt and Scottish artist Dominic Hislop) and Matei Bejenaru are among the few artists in Hungary and Romania, respectively, who have, over the years, developed a number of participatory socially engaged art and social documentary initiatives addressing various social, political and institutional issues. And it is especially for this reason that my discussion focusses on some of their projects developed in different national contexts, which I discuss in this and a later chapter of the book. Bejenaru attended the Fine Arts Academy in Iași, Romania, after the fall of socialism (1990–​6) and has been well known locally, regionally and internationally as both an active organizer and an artist. As an organizer, in 182

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Contesting the Politics of Belonging the Romanian city of Iași, he initiated and led the Periferic Festival (1997–​ 2000), the Periferic Biennial for Contemporary Art (2001–​8), the Vector Gallery, the Vector Association and, since 2005, the art magazine Vector: Art and Culture in Context. Cumulatively, these initiatives were vital in introducing and teaching a new generation of art practitioners in the field of contemporary art. At the same time, since the mid-​1990s, Bejenaru has created a number of socially engaged artworks that functioned as temporary micro-​ interventions within increasingly privatized public spaces. For example, in 1994 he created Alexandru Cel Bun, a temporal and functional intervention into the residential district of the same name in Iași, the artist’s hometown. The artist used discarded materials, such as rusted oil barrels and bars made of wood and iron, as skewers for grilling, to build three meat smokers that were made available for use by the residents of the district free of charge. Smoking meat is a Romanian tradition practised in the rural communities just before Christmas. A similar utilitarian and interventionist scope motivated Cezme, a project Bejenaru developed for the 2003 Tirana Biennial in Albania, a former socialist country in south-​eastern Europe. For Cezme, which means ‘fountain’ in English, the artist worked with the mayoral office of Edi Rama –​when he was prime minister –​to install a series of taps connected to the city’s main underground water pipe in order to create a water-​ distribution site for the local residents. Bejenaru chose to locate Cezme right in front of the monumental structure built by Albania’s former socialist dictator Enver Hoxha. A number of Bejenaru’s works had called attention to the conditions of Romanian immigrant workers in EU countries. For example, his 2001 project Strawberry Fields Forever focused on a group of female legal immigrant seasonal workers on a strawberry farm in Lleida in Catalonia, Spain, who were paid minimum wages for picking strawberries. While diverse in form and content, cumulatively they offer poignant time capsules of the post-​1989 transitional period in Romania and the Romanian diaspora. The 2007 Impreuna / Together project (as a follow-​up to his 2005–​ 7 Travel Guide) in London, discussed in this chapter, is part of Bejenearu’s long-​term interest in social and political issues affecting marginalized communities. Currently, Bejenaru teaches photography and video at the George Enescu Arts University in Iași, Romania. Working together as the artist group Big Hope (1998–​2006), Erhardt and Hislop have developed a number of participatory and collaborative 183

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Socially Engaged Art after Socialism projects that addressed important social and political issues in various local contexts. For example, in their 1998 Saját Szemmel / Inside Out project in Budapest, which I will discuss in detail in chapter eleven, Big Hope used the interview format to engage the participation of several homeless individuals in order to draw attention and open discussion on the systemic causes of homelessness in Hungary during the decades following the regime change. In 2003, in the project Talking About Economy, Big Hope inquired into the economic changes of the post-​1989 transitional period in the Hungarian town of Dunaújváros and the German capital city of Berlin. Big Hope asked ten participants in each of the two cities, holding various jobs, a series of specific questions: What is economy’s role in society? How would they describe a good economy? How would they describe a bad economy? What is your personal relationship to work? In Protest Songbook (2003), Big Hope compiled an archive of protest songs submitted by the public as well as recorded phone interviews with the artists Martha Rosler and Ross Birrell, political activist Elio Gilardi and musician Geoff Farina on the relationship between art, music and political activism. Miklós Erhardt attended the University of Fine Arts in Budapest after the fall of socialism and has been well known locally for translating books by Noam Chomsky, Guy Debord and Jacques Rancière into the Hungarian language for the first time. Since 2008, Erhardt has been an associate professor at the Moholy Nagy University of Art and Design in Budapest. Dominic Hislop was born in Scotland and lived in Budapest for two years from 1996 to 1998, when he initiated Big Hope together with Erhardt. Hislop’s individual work includes video installations, autobiographic texts, and digitally manipulated collages with various musical references.8

‘Mental Maps’ in ‘Fortress Europe’ when a black man is involved in a dirty deed the belief of the Italians is that every black man is involved in a dirty deed […] the Police can come into the market and ask your document or passport and you can be deported9

In his 2002 interview with Erhardt and Hislop, this was how James, in Italy as an immigrant from Nigeria, described his experiences with practices of 184

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Contesting the Politics of Belonging racial profiling that associate race with criminality, performed by the Turin police who consider the open market in the Porta Palazzo one of the most ‘difficult’ zones in the city from a security standpoint. Particularly in the Italian context, markers of differential ordering of immigrant groups had been based on a person’s national affiliation, physical appearance or popular stereotypical notions produced and reproduced in the media or in discussions among Italians rather than based on actual interaction with immigrant groups and individuals. As a result, Bangladeshi immigrants are seen as street vendors, African groups sell handbags, and Romanian and Albanian men are viewed as untrustworthy and part of the mafia.10 Writing in 2008, Flavia Stanley argued that the differential treatment of immigrant groups by Italian citizens was motivated by a desire to protect their own European status from and against non-​EU citizens.11 Such informal patterns of everyday interactions have been regulated by Italy’s institutionalized restrictive national legislation on immigration, most vividly represented by the 2002 Bossi-​Fini law (two different right-​wing political party members, Umberto Bossi and Gianfranco Fini), Italy’s ‘most highly restrictive reform since the fascist period’.12 In stark contrast with the inclusive community rhetoric officially promoted at the EU institutional level, such exclusionary measures as those in Italy clearly support the notion of ‘Fortress Europe’, a term Cris Shore used to indicate the tightening of EU borders against immigrants in the early 2000s. And it was this ‘Fortress Europe’ that Erhardt & Hislop wanted to challenge and subvert in their socially engaged work Re:route. Invited to participate in the 2002 BIG Torino International Biennial of Young Artists titled ‘Big Social Game’, which was initiated under the artistic directorship of artist Michelangelo Pistoletto, Erhardt and Hislop conceived Re:route between December 2001 and May 2002.13 Their project was part of the biennale section called Guestland, curated by the artist group CALC formed by Thomas Sheidebauer and Teresa Alonso, whose guest country was the internet. Artists were invited based on their previous work that explored specific strategies of social transformation. Along with developing a web-​based component, all of the artists in the biennale were asked to create projects ‘with a socio-​cultural link to the city of Turin’ that would also have a physical presence.14 Re:route represented the engagement of Erhardt and Hislop with 28 recent immigrants in the city of Turin. It developed through a collaborative 185

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Socially Engaged Art after Socialism process that included several meetings and extended over a period of several months, only in part funded by the biennale organizing institution. First, the artists identified participants by contacting a number of local organizations. Then, beginning in December 2001, they met with participants who were invited to trace their own version of the city, ‘a mental map’, based on their routes and effective responses to specific urban places (Figure 9.1). Erhardt and Hislop gave each participant a blank sheet of white paper with only a dot in the centre that symbolized Torino’s Porta Nuova train station, the main entry point in Turin for all immigrants. An interview based on their hand-​drawn mental maps immediately followed, and the artists gave each participant a camera in order for them to photograph and ‘illustrate the map with photos of the places’. This initial, often hour-​long meeting conducted by Erhardt and Hislop was unscripted and unfolded organically, shaped through the insights of each participant. In one of my interviews, Erhardt explained the process: we asked them to trace their mental map of the city, with their routes, nodes, places they like and they hate. […] When they were done we started recording an interview in which they explained the map, we would ask further questions whenever

Figure 9.1  Miklós Erhardt and Dominic Hislop (Big Hope), Re:route, web archive detail: Mahmoud’s mental map, 2002, Turin, Italy. Image copyright and courtesy of the artists.

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Contesting the Politics of Belonging some interesting detail popped up, so often the map got further detail during the interview, too.15

A second meeting was set up in order for the artists to receive the cameras, and in a third and final meeting Erhardt and Hislop returned the printed photographs to the participants.16 The Re:route web archive features several of the individually hand-​ drawn maps, photographs and accompanying text based on the interviews, such as those of James from Nigeria. Each participant is identified by name (though fictitious), age, origin and current legal status in Italy.17 The artists undermined the apparently classificatory criteria for managing immigrant population, based for instance on ethnicity and legal status, with the alternative yet simultaneously existing views of the city offered by each of the ‘mental maps’ created by the participants. The alternative cartographies revealed spatially subversive attempts, reminiscent of the ‘psychogeography’ approach pioneered by Guy Debord and the Situationist International in the late 1950s in France. Engaging in a self-​reflexive production of space, Re:route became a platform for articulating an inclusive form of citizenship based on complex relational processes, where temporal and spatial differences were continually negotiated between individuals. Through the collection of individual views where each of the self-​narrated oral histories became part of a community of singular voices, Erhardt & Hislop disrupted the exclusionary and essentialist approach to immigrant populations. They proposed a pluralist form of belonging that not only advocated interactions between equal social agents, but at the same time recognized the ambiguity of social relations forged at the street level. While informed by the broader framework of the biennale anchored in the potential of art as a social catalyst, Re:route evolved from the independent working and decision-​ making process of the artists, which included various ground-​level collaborations with different institutions that offered support for immigrant populations. The Northern Italian city of Turin, with a legacy of labour activism and being one of the few cities in Italy at the time with a leftist local government, was home to numerous non-​governmental agencies and social organizations offering services for ­immigrants, with an aim to empower them as active social agents in shaping the local political culture of the city. 187

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Socially Engaged Art after Socialism Following initial research and a visit and tour of the city with the biennale curators, Erhardt and Hislop identified the conflicted relationship between local and immigrant populations, a situation that has been characteristic of most EU countries. Once in Turin, the Biennale office connected the artists with a public school where immigrants learned Italian. Following this initial contact, in a rather organic way Erhardt and Hislop continued to established contacts with social workers, teachers, political activists, cultural organizations and support groups for immigrants that were willing to recommend the artists to potential participants. Erhardt related to me in an email interview: Due to their knowledge of English and my knowledge of Italian, we were quite autonomous of making all sorts of contacts […] some organizations directed us to specific people […] others just invited us to meetings where we could approach people on our own. We made friends with young social workers who organized huge public dinners, which were also a good place to work in. Later on we had to be more conscious in selecting people, as we didn’t want to discriminate any of the bigger ethnic groups in Torino.18

Among the almost 20 organizations that the artists contacted was Associ­ ation Diafa Al Maghreb, which was the most involved in the artists’ project. Founded in 1997 by Sued Benkindim, it offered educational, legal and welfare support to immigrant groups from Maghreb countries, Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia, in order to facilitate their integration into Italian society and promote cooperation between immigrant and Italian population.19 The staff of such organizations function as cultural, political and social mediators both between the immigrant community and Italian society and among the different migrant groups. Just as in their other collaborative projects, Erhardt and Hislop worked with a multitude of groups and organizations. In an email interview, Hislop recalled how working with diverse institutions gave them ‘an insight into the broad spectrum of contexts, conditions and concerns of different immigrant groups in the city’.20 Conversely, the participating associations considered the art project as a platform to promote their goals to a broader public 188

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Contesting the Politics of Belonging A contingent and relational form of community belonging was further revealed in the horizontal modes of participation that the artists encouraged and provoked. They used a role reversal strategy. This meant that Erhardt and Hislop relinquished their authoritarian and privileged positions as sole creators of a work of art. Instead, different members of the immigrant community became the photographers and artistic producers of the work. Furthermore, the artists’ project evolved through concomitant collaborations among various individuals even though, initially, they began with scheduled production meetings. From March to May 2002, anyone who was interested could become part of the project at different stages of its development. The artists avoided a rigid participatory structure and instead took on the roles of facilitators and maintained an open and fluid premise of participation. Typically, in institutionally commissioned community-​based socially engaged art projects during the 1990s, the standardized formula had been to choreograph the artist, whether familiar with the local context or not, to engage with a previously selected local community and to address an a priori identified social issue. Such an arrangement most often exploited the concept of community-​based, which should prioritize the needs of a specific community, to advance an institutional and curatorial goal. I discussed this aspect in more detail in chapter five in the context of commissioned works for the Soros sponsored exhibitions of socially engaged art in the 1990s, which looked for inspiration at curatorial projects, such as Culture in Action initiated concurrently in the US. In contrast to an institutionalized formula, Erhardt & Hislop’s collaborative process was based on organically emerging relational processes and interactions relatively independent of the art biennale institution. The artists made use of the institutional invitation as a tool, first, to engage with what Grant Kester called ‘politically coherent groups’ or groups that struggled to define their political identity and interests prior to the process of collaborative production.21 This was illustrated by the various social organizations whose already defined goals were advanced through their participation in the art project. For example, the Boa Urban Mobile was a mobile van that distributed medical and food supplies to homeless people and immigrants. Centro Franz Fano provided immigrants with psychological 189

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Socially Engaged Art after Socialism counselling. CICSENE, Cooperativa Senza Frontiere / Disobbedienti, was a political activist group that campaigned and advocated for immigrant rights. CTP  –​Via Bologna was a school where immigrants could receive free Italian language lessons. The Nile Culture Club was a cultural association that provided contact for immigrants from Kenya. The names of these organizations and several others with whom the artists collaborated were publicized through the artists’ project that unfolded within the citywide biennale. As the roles of these organizations were to facilitate communication and understanding between local and immigrant populations, their goals were advanced and made public to Turin’s Italian population. Most important, the social capital built within horizontally forged social relations and through repeated interactions with a network of such local organizations allowed Erhardt and Hislop to gain the trust of their participants and avoid the ethical pitfalls of their misappropriation and misrepresentation. The artists worked with willing participants identified and recommended by the organizations. On another level, the artists triggered a form of temporary yet intensely engaged form of community composed of a plurality of individually distinctive voices. Contrary to the popularized images of immigrants as homogeneous groups in need and living in poor conditions, the artists encountered people who ‘did not think of themselves as failures […] they were trying to break out of their given condition, they had activated themselves, and pride comes with that’.22 Moreover, the artists were new to the city, which proved to be an advantage in their collaborations. Erhardt said, ‘What brought us virtually to the same level of communication was that we were new to Turin, too, so it was more like a mutual exploration of a given setting, a town.’23 The multitude of individuals shared a sense of solidarity in confronting the exploitative effects of political legislation. And it is here, in the creative working process of the artists who both advanced the goals of their collaborators and embodied a contingent form of community grounded in a political and local specificity, that social connections gained agency and became politicized. Rather than serving the interests of those already in power, social networks emerged as a tool of empowerment for the politically and economically marginalized. Nevertheless, the authority of the institution impacted both the process and the final shape of the art project. First, the artists were not able to pay participants for their time due to a lack of funds from the biennale. To 190

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Contesting the Politics of Belonging compensate for this situation, Erhardt and Hislop turned part of the artist fee they received from the biennale into food vouchers and gave them ‘as a retribution for the participants in obvious need. A part of them (people with jobs and with pride), though did not want it.’24 Lack of financial support from the biennale also limited the artists’ creative process. Invited artists were only funded for a two-​week stay in Turin –​one week for research (in early December 2001) and one week for installation (in May 2002). Despite these constrains, the artists were able to extend their stay in Turin in order to continue to meet with current and prospective participants. Erhardt recalled: ‘I stayed with people we had made friends during our first visit’; and from March until the opening of the Biennale in May they resided ‘in a flat (owned by Pistoletto) where sometimes up to 30 artists stayed in friendly but somewhat difficult conditions’.25 Second, the artists had initially intended to create an official foldable map of Turin that would have featured the participants’ mental maps and their interviews with the artists. The Turin Biennial, in partnership with the city government, did not support the production and distribution of the proposed map. Symbolically, the lack of institutional support highlighted the political division between those who belonged and those who did not belong to the European Union community.26 And it was this political division that Erhardt & Hislop aimed to challenge and change. Ultimately, Re:route was a call for an egalitarian and heterogeneous form of citizenship. Based on field research into the local context, hybrid collaborations with a number of diverse organizations and a role reversal mode of production that resulted in the participants’ self-​determination, Erhardt & Hislop’s project aimed to disrupt the divisive notions of managed diversity within the Italian and European context.

The Power of the Gaze The aim to transgress essentialist approaches to immigrant groups based on stereotypical views also motivated Matei Bejenaru in his 2007 work Impreuna / Together, a one-​minute performance that was video documented and resulted from a two-​month-​long collaboration with various organizations and individuals from the Romanian immigrant community in London. In the photographs documenting the preparatory stages of the performance, 191

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Socially Engaged Art after Socialism which was choreographed in front of Tate Modern, we see Bejenaru with a bullhorn in hand, next to the video camera set on a tripod that was placed on an elevated and mobile platform, directing the mass of Romanian people gathered in the open square in front of the museum. Although the artist considers the video simply as documentary evidence of the live art performance, the attention he paid to the angles of the camera and the positions of the participants in the shot indicates that both the performance and the video documenting it are equally significant elements of the art work Impreuna / Together. The black-​and-​white video footage of the performance shows two separate groups of people coming slowly together from different sides of the square to form a unified mass of approximately 250 people. Slowly, the camera gradually closes in on the faces of specific individuals, who stare directly at the viewer. In a podcast on the website of the museum, Bejenaru referred to the performance as a space where the Romanian immigrant community could communicate self-​esteem through ‘the power of a gaze’ (Figure 9.2).27 This gesture was aimed to break through the public stereotypical perception of their identity held by the UK population, who generally see Romanian immigrants as ethnically and culturally divisive.

Figure 9.2  Matei Bejenaru, Impreuna / Together, photograph documenting performance outside Tate Modern, London, 2007. Photo by Ioana Marinescu. Image courtesy of the artist.

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Contesting the Politics of Belonging Similar to that of Erhardt and Hislop but employing different collaborative strategies, the work of art by Bejenaru participated in the socio-​ political debate on immigration that unfolded at the European level in the first two decades following the fall of the Berlin Wall. Impreuna / Together was a site-​and time-​specific performance created to accompany Bejenaru’s Travel Guide (2005–​7) featured in the 2007 Irresistible Force exhibition at Tate Modern. Installed in the Level 2 Gallery (this space is dedicated to emerging international artists), the exhibition was part of a series of four related shows that aimed to ‘explore ideas of citizenship through themes of economy, belief, the state and the individual’.28 While Bejenaru was invited by Tate Modern to participate in the exhibition, he created Impreuna / Together during a two-​month residence at the Romanian Cultural Institute (ICR), which provided organizational and financial support for the project. A non-​profit institution, the ICR is Romania’s official organization overseas. Effectively working in London since 2006, through its diverse programming focused on promoting the country’s cultural heritage, the ICR’s stated goals are to reverse the ‘negative stereotype of orphaned-​children, stray dogs and too-​eager migrants’,29 which tend to inform the way Romania is seen in the UK. Both the ICR and the artist considered Impreuna / Together as an important vehicle to influence positively the public perception of the Romanian immigrant community. Bejenaru’s project was especially timely when we consider the European political climate then regarding Romania and Bulgaria as the newly joined EU states. Nationals of these countries were subjected to restricted regulations, although both countries were members of the EU. This was due to the law instated in 2001 regarding accession negotiations with several CEE countries. It stated that citizens of new EU members did not have legal permission to work in any of the existing 15 member states for a period of seven years following their nation’s official entrance into the EU.30 As I mentioned earlier, one of the fundamental rights of being a European citizen (a status that is conferred automatically on nationals of any EU member state) is mobility of labour or services. Thus, the EU’s policy discriminated not only against non-​EU state citizens but also against specific EU nations by going against one of its core ideas –​the four freedoms that theoretically should be open to any EU state and its citizens. As Heather 193

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Socially Engaged Art after Socialism Grabbe observed, even though aware of the EU’s hypocrisy, candidate states agreed to the condition since the overall gains of membership outweighed the costs of the restriction. For instance, Romania and Bulgaria wanted to join the EU because it would mean the elimination of visa requirements for legal travel across EU territory.31 Although it has been an official EU member since 2007, Romania is not part of the Schengen zone, or the European passport-​free zone. This restriction further indicates the highly negative impact that the presence, for example, of Romanian immigrants in EU nations, has on the overall tightening of European borders as a way to politically manage the presence and future intake of foreigners. It was against this political and cultural context that Bejenaru initiated Impreuna / Together. The artist and the ICR, as his main institutional collaborator, sought to offer a positive alternative to the negative perceptions of Romanian immigrants in London and in other Western European cities. The potential of the project for great impact in this regard was clearly stated in the artist’s call for participation, which was sent by the ICR to the members of various organizations, including the Romanian Cultural Centre, Romanca Society, Romani in UK, Romani-​ Online UK and Diaspora Romaneasca. A central aspect of the project consisted in the multi-​layered collaborative processes of the artist that led to the one-​minute public performance. The creative process unfolded over the course of several weeks following the distribution of the call for participation, when Bejenaru entered in numerous dialogic interactions with several individual members of the Romanian immigrant community. According to the artist, ‘30 to 40 people responded to my call and I personally met with them. Several discussions happened in a Romanian restaurant in London.’32 In order to gain the trust of prospective participants, with the help of the ICR Bejenaru contacted the priest of the Romanian Orthodox Church of London and introduced his project. During his masses the priest spoke about Bejenaru’s initiative and invited Romanian parishioners to participate in the project.33 Inevitably, being a Romanian citizen and speaking the language, the artist identified with the Romanian immigrant community and was also able to gain support for his project from both individual members, whom he engaged directly in a Romanian restaurant or by email, and from official organizations. For example, Bejenaru entered into contact (mainly communicating by email) with members of the Romanca Society, whose 194

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Contesting the Politics of Belonging mission was to support the integration of Romanians into British society. In 2008 the Romanca Society filed a petition signed by 208 individuals addressed to the British prime minister, Gordon Brown, asking for legislation that would give Romanians in the UK an unrestricted right to work.34 Despite the rather personalized modes of interactions between Bejenaru and his participants, if we consider only the carefully filmed video of the performance, Impreuna / Together suggested a constructed, albeit poetic, notion of belonging. In the way the different groups of people came together into a unified whole, it symbolically communicated an all-​encompassing and generalized view of the Romanian community. On another level, however, the project acted as a symbolic anchor for sustained tensions that emerge at the city level as global economic forces became localized. It visualized what sociologist Saskia Sassen called a ‘new geography of marginality’.35 This was captured in the way in which individual bodies gradually came together into a nearly 250-​member group against the background of the architectural structures of a ‘new geography of centrality’36 represented by London’s financial and corporate institutions. Moreover, in the work Bejenaru proposed an alternative to the geography of marginality. He envisioned a form of shared construction of citizenship based on what Balibar considered ‘the universal right of circulation and residency, including reciprocity of cultural contributions’.37 This was most evident in the working process of the artist that led to the performance. The individuals who took part in the performance were willing participants. With the help of the ICR, the artist accessed social networks of different Romanian organizations in the UK. Several of these organizations, such as the Romanaca Society and the Romanian Orthodox Church of London, as we have seen, introduced Bejenaru’s project to their members and encouraged them to participate. In his work with politically and socially diverse institutions, Bejenaru sought to challenge the cultural and economic discrimination towards a specific immigrant community in the UK. Impreuna / Together became a platform of communication and representation for both individuals and organizations. Moreover, through the staging of the performance, Bejenaru helped build further horizontally forged social networks as many of the people who participated in his project met each other for the first time here, in front of Tate Modern. And so, the spontaneous interactions with 195

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Socially Engaged Art after Socialism and among various members of the local Romanian immigrant community both emerged from and broadened existing social networks. In a similar way to Erhardt and Hislop’s Re:route, the different organizations in Bejenaru’s art project were guided by a sense of reciprocity and considered that their participation would benefit them at a future date rather than offer them an immediate advantage. To offer a positive image of the Romanian diaspora in England was the goal that all of the participating institutions and individuals in Impreuna / Together shared. Exhibited at Tate Modern, one of the world’s major art institutions, the project provided an internationally visible outlet for participants to make their individual and institutional missions publicly known. Just as we have seen in Turin, the implicit roles of these organizations were to facilitate public communication and understanding between local and immigrant populations. Impreuna / Together was a follow-​up to Bejenaru’s Travel Guide (2005–​7) on view in the Irresistibly Force group exhibition at Tate Modern. Conceived in 2005, before Romania joined the EU and its citizens could not travel to the UK without a visa, Travel Guide vividly articulated the exclusionary effects of political legislation instated to prevent the migration of Romanian people. It also commented on the widely spread belief that migrants would become financial ‘burdens’ on the social assistance programmes of European nations.38 Travel Guide detailed several ways in which Romanian citizens could travel illegally, yet safely, to England. The work of art, an acidic and insightful satire, took the form of an actual travel guide that unfolded into a large schematic map of different routes across Europe (Figure 9.3). It featured photographs of various modes of transportation, such as shipping containers, border crossing sites and a colour-​coded statistical chart illustrating with rather bitter irony the risk conditions for crossing the frontiers through different European airports such as Le Havre (ranked as the toughest for travelling conditions) and Heathrow (with the least severe travelling conditions and minimal ‘vigilance of border control’.) In one of my interviews with Bejenaru, the artist stated that the text was inspired by and based on his conversations with three Romanian citizens and their friends who illegally crossed the border into the UK. They shared their stories and experiences with the artist.39 As such, Bejenaru created Travel Guide from the perspective of illegal immigrants, both documenting and identifying with their experiences. 196

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Figure 9.3  Matei Bejenaru, Travel Guide, detail from the leaflet, Romanian version, 2005–​7. Image courtesy of the artist.

Whether the information Bejenaru listed was accurate or not is much less important than what it indicated about the officially hidden conditions that sustained the ideal of a European community. Its real effects were captured, for example, when Travel Guide warned future immigrants of the danger of 197

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Socially Engaged Art after Socialism hiding in shipping containers. It told of an incident from 1995 when three Romanians ‘ended up drowned or eaten by sharks’ in the Atlantic Ocean after having been caught by the shipmaster of the Maersk Dubai company. Subverting the language and scope of generic travel guides designed for well-​ off tourists exploring new sites, Bejenaru’s Travel Guide was about the worldwide contemporary liminal condition of immigrants and foreigners as such. In my interview with Bejenaru, the artist specified that he conceptualized Travel Guide as a work of art that problematized a political issue and was meant solely for an art context.40 Also, it was no coincidence that the artist’s two-​part project, which included the participatory work Impreuna / Together, was created and displayed at a major European art institution in 2007, the same year that Romania became an official member of the EU. Travel Guide was installed on the gallery floor and made available for free to museum visitors, who were not charged an entrance fee for the Irresistible Force exhibition. While Travel Guide directly confronted the precarious reality and conditions of (Romanian) immigrants in the EU, the one-​ minute Impreuna / Together performance symbolically brought together in public space an active collective of bodies into a form of community where its members were in control of enacting its own self-​presence.

Constructing Differential Spaces through Social Capital and Political Capital Motivated by a shared cause, the process of creating the ‘mental maps’ of Turin by participants in Re:route and Impreuna / Together and Travel Guide in London by Bejenaru wove an empowered social network that connected various organizations, legal immigrants and illegal workers across European cities. Contingent upon their localities and in different ways, each of these art projects created a temporary ‘differential space’. Urban sociologist and philosopher Henri Lefebvre called ‘differential space’ a type of space which users appropriate to undo the domination of global capitalist forces that have imposed their regulatory spatial organization. Lefebvre spoke about ‘an explosion of spaces’ which emerge most visibly at the outskirts of the city (though not only), such as in shantytowns, favelas and barrios as ‘abstract space’ –​or as what he called, ‘the capitalist space’ –​ imposes itself on the social space of everyday life. This is possible because 198

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Contesting the Politics of Belonging of the contradictions inherent within the abstract space, which is hierarchical, divided into centres and peripheries, and is at once homogeneous so that it can be controlled and exchanged and fragmented into parts and sold as commodities. So a differential space emerges from within the contradiction of abstract space. This activity, ‘the right to the city’, included the struggle of expelled groups to occupy and control space.41 The works of art of both Bejenaru and Erhardt and Hislop invoked temporary differential spaces by engaging the direct participation of counterpublics comprised of a multitude of individuals. For example, the basis for selection used by Erhardt and Hislop underlined their concern for visualizing a differential space through the experiences of their participants. Erhardt said: The basic criterion was that we wanted to work with people who had something to tell concerning the town and their life in it. Concretely, we wanted to meet recent immigrants (arrived no longer than two years earlier) with a relatively fresh experience, not a topical life dominated by routines.42

And it was here in the process of enacting differential spaces that the artists politicized informal social networks, seeking to provide a platform for their participants to challenge power structures. In different ways and from different cultural and national contexts, Bejenaru and Erhardt and Hislop used their institutional invitation to challenge the effects of exclusionary politics on the lives of immigrant populations. As we have seen, Bejenaru, along with the ICR, his main institutional collaborator, made strategic use of his participation in an exhibition at Tate Modern. Likewise, through the public and citywide presence of the Turin International Biennial, Erhardt and Hislop helped advance the goals of the multiple organizations that they engaged. Later in the text, I return to the work of Big Hope, the artist collective that Erhardt and Hislop was also known for, in order to address activist art projects such as Disobbedienti, initiated by these artists in Budapest –​projects that emerged from the social capital developed by practitioners during their stay and work for the Turin Biennial. Considering the institutional affiliations as assets in their collaborative works, Bejenaru and Erhardt and Hislop also sought to expand the framework of the institution –​if not to change it, then at least to reflect critically 199

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Socially Engaged Art after Socialism on its own institutional role in the local discourse on immigration and the European community, and perhaps to support and enable practices that could help redress existing political and cultural exclusions. That this was a utopian goal, far from reality, became clear, for example, to Erhardt and Hislop in several instances. First, the institution of the art biennale offered limited financial support to the invited artists, who were asked to create actual social interventions into the city that required extended time on the site beyond the biennale’s allotted and paid two weeks. Second, the Turin Biennale in partnership with the city government neither approved nor supported the production and distribution of the mental maps proposed by Erhardt and Hislop. In part as a response to this decision, the artists devised an installation that they finalized only three days after the official opening of the Biennale. Unlike an orderly and contained display that one might expect in a pristine gallery setting, their deliberately overwhelming installation of 600 images with text and hand-​drawn mental maps, encouraged informed and sustained interaction from an audience familiar with the issues addressed in the work (Figure 9.4).43 Upon entering the

Figure 9.4  Miklós Erhardt and Dominic Hislop (Big Hope), Re:route, installation view, Turin Biennale, 2002. Image courtesy of the artists.

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Contesting the Politics of Belonging exhibition space, viewers would literally touch and mingle amid the material suspended on strings from the ceiling. Despite (or because of) the institutional constraints, the two socially engaged art projects shared an emphasis on the shifting conditions of both national and transnational belonging that were continuously negotiated through relational processes. Their works of art became temporary public platforms to address and contest existing conditions of specific immigrant groups in particular contexts, and the exclusionary effects of normative conceptions of community. They offered a terrain on which to symbolically articulate different modes of democratic participation. Moreover, they proposed to reconceive citizenship politically, legally and as a form of belonging that was contingent upon the local specificities affecting human lives in a particular space and time. However short-​lived and symbolic, such initiatives were particularly significant in the broader European cultural context. Bejenaru and Erhardt and Hislop spotlighted the exclusionary effects of EU legislation, which was contrary to the EU consensual approach to community. The latter, as we have seen, in the region-​wide cultural initiatives especially in prospective and recent CEE member states, were guided by a rhetoric of transnational union, which in fact aimed to foster the interests of unregulated neoliberal market forces. The projects in Turin and London, similarly to those of János Sugár in Sofia, h.arta in Romania and Luchezar Boyadjiev and Ivan Moudov in Bulgaria, envisioned and symbolically enacted a public sphere inclusive of counterpublics that exist in tension to the dominant public.

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Part III

Institutionalized and Institutionalizing

It’s not a question of being against the institution: We are the institution. It’s a question of what kind of institution we are, what kind of values we institutionalize, what forms of practice we reward, and what kinds of rewards we aspire to. Because the institution of art is internalized, embodied, and performed by individuals […].1 Andrea Fraser It is important to acknowledge that while spaces made available by the powerful may be discursively bounded to permit only limited citizen influence, colonizing interaction and stifling dissent, the contingency of participatory processes and the expected effects that they can have lends even the most instrumental of interventions the potential for transformation.2 Andrea Cornwall

Until 2007, the year Romania and Bulgaria became official EU members, European cultural foundations and organizations such as Pro Helvetia, the German Cultural Foundation, Alliance Françoise, American Embassies, the Goethe Centres and the British Council eagerly funded art initiatives

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Socially Engaged Art after Socialism in EU-​prospective CEE countries, especially community-​based art programmes. While this final part of the book continues the discussion on the role of specific socially engaged art in and as institutionally funded programmes that foster a self-​reflexive form of civil society, it also considers the varied complications that arise from the use of a shared rhetoric of participation and collaboration by international development organizations and community art initiatives in Bulgaria and Romania. Instead of the rather overtly subversive potential of informal social networks for agency discussed thus far in a number of projects, managerially developed community art programmes often create the ambiguous conditions in which cultural and social capital function as the semblances of economic interests and power. As the title ‘Institutionalized and Institutionalizing’ used for this section indicates, the discussion will now centre on institutionalized long-​ term programmes of community-​ based art and institutionalizing art practices in the 2000s. The difference in meaning between ‘institutionalizing’ and ‘institutionalized’ is important. As a present participle, ‘institutionalizing’ stands in explicit contrast to ‘institutionalized’ practices, which as a past tense attribute connotes something made static by completion and a lack of agency to effect changes in those institutions. Institutionalizing and self-​institutionalizing practices emerge from a belief in organizing new programmes and activities to combat constraining political, social and economic, and cultural conditions. Chapter ten begins with a discussion of two institutionalized and managerially implemented community-​ based art projects, the Art for Social Change (2000–​4) programme in Bulgaria and cARTier (2004–​7) in Romania. Each of these initiatives made use of participatory forms of engagement in ways similar to those of non-​governmental organizations (NGOs) in order to enact depoliticized forms of belonging. In contrast, in the simultaneously occurring institutionalizing projects Saját Szemmel / Inside Out in 1998 and Disobbedienti in 2002, which will be the focus of chapter eleven, Budapest-​based artist collective Big Hope attempted to revive local discussion on leftist politics and thinking. Such goals were particularly significant in a context characterized by some of most polarizing politics that have emerged in the region through attempts to come to terms with the socialist past. 204

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Institutionalized and Institutionalizing Building onto and continuing the work of Big Hope, a younger generation of artists and curators in Budapest came together in a process that I call self-​institutionalizing. For example, the artist group DINAMO, which later morphed into IMPEX, was active from 2003 to 2009 and was an institutional response to the exclusionary effects of local and regional politics. Moreover, similar self-​institutionalizing practices emerged in Bucharest, where E-​cart.ro developed the Department for Art in Public Space, as well as in Sofia, with 0GMS as an illustrative example. In both form and scope, all three initiatives, which are discussed in chapter twelve; emerged from diverse forms of social networking among a younger generation of artists who challenged local right-​wing governmental programmes that condemned socialism and socialist governments as criminal regimes, while promoting a national recentralization of local art museums and institutions. A critical discussion of self-​institutionalizing practices in these CEE national contexts complicates the official and institutionalized narrative of institutional critique rooted in a North American and Western European context. For instance, in contrast to overtly critical or deconstructive approaches employed by artists in Western democracies towards art institutions, self-​institutionalizing initiatives in Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria appear to display rather constructive approaches to the notion of the institution as such. In a context that lacks support and institutional platforms dedicated to experimental forms of contemporary art, self-​ organizing and temporary institutional initiatives gain renewed meanings. Rather than solely an auxiliary to the neoliberal market forces, informal social networks continue to fuel generalized forms of trust, reciprocity and solidarity, all key to the forms of self-​institutionalizing as socially engaged art practice that I present here.

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10 Institutionalized Community Arts Programmes

Since the 1990s, international development organizations such as Western NGOs and foundations active in second and third world countries have, in their initiatives, increasingly emphasized participation and close collaborations with local individuals and groups as their main on-​site working methodology. An example can be found in the Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA) strategy, which was implemented in rural India in the 1980s and early 1990s and since then has been used by a number of NGOs worldwide. PRA encompassed a series of approaches and methods to ‘enable local (rural and urban) people to express, enhance, share and analyse knowledge of life and conditions, to plan and to act’.1 PRA put emphasis on the role of the outsiders –​the representatives of the development agencies –​as ‘facilitators’, and catalysts who ‘watch, listen and learn’ in order to ‘allow people to dominate, to determine much of the agenda, to gather, express and analyse information, and to plan’.2 Different in method but similar in scope, the World Bank’s World Development Report 2000/2001: Attacking Poverty emphasized strategies that contributed to the empowerment of poor people by including ‘economic opportunities’, ‘better access to markets and expanded assets’.3 Integration and inclusion of the marginalized groups of individuals based on self-​help and participation in the neoliberal market economy underlined both PRI and the initiatives of World Bank. 207

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Socially Engaged Art after Socialism Such emphasis on participation and collaboration with local people which were considered to lead to their own empowerment and self-​ improvement arguably acted to legitimize the existing power relations by obscuring, for example, the systematic causes that provoked the condition of global poverty in the first place. Moreover, by anticipating the self-​transformation of individuals (who often appear in annual studies and reports as ethnographic representatives underscoring the narratives of experts), agency was perversely shifted from larger political and economic interests of the development organizations and their agents to the local people themselves. Following the interventions of the organizations, the poor were seen as (empowered) authors responsible for their own condition. As social and political theorist Glyn Williams poignantly observed: The ways in which participation is located within the wider operation of development projects and programs usually means that, while sensitively conducted PRA activities can ‘uncover’ aspects of local power relations, seldom if ever are the marginalized able to turn the focus of attention on to the development process itself.4

A similar trend that underscored participation and collaboration with local marginalized communities as means of self-​empowerment had also characterized several contemporary socially engaged art projects, such as the Art for Social Change (2000–​4) programme in Bulgaria and cARTier (2004–​7) in Romania in post-​socialist countries supported by European and American international organizations and foundations.

Art for Social Change: Bypassing Systemic Causes The four-​year programme Art for Social Change was initiated in 2000 in Sofia, Bulgaria. In its first two years it was coordinated by the local Soros Centre for the Arts and after April 2002 was implemented by the Red House Centre for Culture and Debate, an outgrowth of the former as the majority of its staff moved to the latter. As stated on its website, the mission of the Red House defines the institution as: 208

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Institutionalized Community Arts Programmes A multifunctional socio-​political centre in Sofia, which provides an opportunity for the youngest generation to participate in public life, brings together young artists who are ready to question the prevailing perceptions and offers them a place to realize and present their projects.5

Art for Social Change was a collaborative initiative that brought together various people who otherwise might not have engaged with one another. For example, visual and performing artists, psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers and art managers were grouped together into interdisciplinary teams. The project aimed to use art to engage with institutionalized children and young people at risk. The goal was to ‘enable them to overcome the social and cultural isolation, marginalization and disorientation resulting from their separation from society and to prepare them for active participation in community life and civic society’.6 Over the course of four years, the programme involved over 50 interdisciplinary artist teams ­working with 500 children from 21 institutions in 13 different locations, such as homes for children deprived of parental care, vocational boarding schools and homes for mentally challenged children and adolescents throughout Bulgaria. As described in detail in several grant proposals, the four target groups of the programme included professional and non-​professional artists from different fields, such as performing arts, visual arts and literature; children and youth at risk, with criminal records, living in state institutions and schools, street children, and victims of violence in the family or in their social environment; the staff from the state specialized institutions for children, such as educators, school psychologists, social workers and medical staff; the local community –​such as civic organizations, the population of the village or town, representatives of the local councils –​and Bulgarian society at large. The presence of such a long-​term initiative was particularly significant if one considers that as of 2004, 2 per cent or approximately 31,000 children in Bulgaria lived in special-​care state institutions that were mostly situated on the outskirts of towns and cities –​a remnant of the former socialist regime that eliminated from public view society’s problematic families and children. Moreover, these institutions were below the international standards 209

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Socially Engaged Art after Socialism for both physical care and educational programmes. According to the initiators of the art programme, the staff lacked specialized educational and psychological training, which greatly contributed to the further marginalization of children. The Art for Social Change programme used ‘community-​ arts’ (a term and concept never defined by its users or organizers) to define its role as introducing a model for training both social care workers in state institutions and for local contemporary artists, for whom socially engaged and participatory art was still seen as unorthodox art practice. As part of the overall structure of the Art for Social Change programme, the interdisciplinary artist teams were systematically trained by medical professionals to use various techniques such as reflecting and enhancing group dynamics through interactive games, socio-​drama techniques exemplified through role-​playing, doubling of a character, sculpting a character, and using theatrical scenery and props, among other techniques. There were monthly and weekly training sessions on various themes and topics that were, most often, proposed by the artist teams based upon concerns that arose in their process of working with children. While it is beyond my scope to present details of all the activities that unfolded within the programme (which would easily require an additional book chapter), I am interested here in the activities of the only visual artist team in the overall Art for Social Change initiative. In contrast to the other teams that were comprised mainly of performing artists who engaged the participation of 30 to 90 children, Taka, the three-​artist team (Irina Karakehayova, Dessislawa Morosowa and Daniela Tzvetkova), worked with a small number of children, between 4 and 12 at a time. Moreover, children came from state middle and high schools rather than from state subsidized homes for children deprived of parental care, as was the case for the other practitioners in the programme. Similar to the goals of most of the other teams in Art For Social Change, Taka projects were developed throughout the four years of the programme. Within the first two years, 2000–​2, the artist group worked with eight children aged 11 and 13 from the 39th Comprehensive High School Petar Dinekov in Sofia. During the school year, Taka met the children once a week for three hours after regular school time, followed by weekly meetings with two social care professionals who supervised and trained the artists. 210

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Institutionalized Community Arts Programmes Taka developed their activities progressively with the goal of involviung the children in a gradual process of sharing their personal space, their problems and their art works, as well as ‘communicating their ideas and acquiring confidence that their problems matter and their input is valued’.7 As such, during their first encounter with the children Taka set up individual and intimate cabins  –​the size of stand-​alone fitting rooms  –​ where children could enter and draw. Following initial use of these sheltered environments, the artists designed activities around both sides of a large screen that they set up in the room. In my interview with Irina Karakehayova she described the activities:  ‘The children were working either squeezed behind the screen, individually on one side, set far apart or divided in couples at the opposite sides of the screen.’8 Rather than the creation of specific art objects, in these process-​oriented activities the artistic media, such as drawing, sculpture and installation, were employed as aids to the self-​expression of the children. The spring and summer of 2003, and their Project 10, represented Taka’s most active and productive months. The activities took place in the Budnina Community Space (Chitalishte) in the district of Mladost 4 in Sofia as well as in other locations in and around Sofia. Taka worked with ten children, aged 9 to 14, from several public schools in the district. In their activities, they employed various visual art media such as drawing, painting, clay, photography and collage to design interactive projects for and with the children. In previous years, the artists had met with the children only once a week, but during this time the group met up to 16 times a month for at least three hours. The team also organized various trips to places such as Shipka, famous for the largest rose farm in the country, the Vitosha mountain resort in the vicinity of Sofia and the historic town of Plovdiv. In each of these locations, children were engaged in a particular activity and explored an artistic medium (Figures 10.1, 10.2 and 10.3). For instance, while in Shipka they joined local farmers in picking rose petals, and this was followed by art sessions in which they drew the petals. The artists saw these open-​air activities and field trips as ways of facilitating informal group solidarity based on mutual dialogue and communication among the children. The children worked willingly. They could spend more time together, which strengthened the links between them. More

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Figure 10.1  Taka Visual Art Company, Project 10, Summer 2003. Rose drawings near Shipka Village, part of the Art for Social Change programme. Courtesy of Irina Karakehayova.

and more often they shared personal stories and problems. During the trips they showed solidarity to the common actions whatever they were.9

The gradual change in the activities of the artists from initially creating sheltered environments for children to organizing day-​long field trips with them illustrated a carefully orchestrated series of engagements that progressively fostered dialogue between children and artists. At the same time, the artists encountered several obstacles that revealed the problematic, or rather ambiguous, aspects of such large-​scale and long-​ term forms of institutionalized community arts programmes. The groups of children changed from year to year and even from month to month. In a 2004 report submitted by Taka to the Red House for Culture and Debate on the composition of their group, the artists listed the children as follows: ‘Dimitar Filchev –​since the very beginning, Martin Popov, Ilian Kamenov –​since April 2003, Hristo Dimitrov, Dimitar Kamenov, Fikrie 212

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Figure 10.2  Taka Visual Art Company, Project 10, Summer 2003. Rose picking near Shipka Village, part of the Art for Social Change programme. Courtesy of Irina Karakehayova.

Ismailova –​in the last phase. We expect three new children to join the group.’ Moreover, at the last moment, some children declined to join the artists on their field trips, and after their first year of working in School 39’s sports hall, they were asked by the school administrators to leave. It was 213

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Figure 10.3  Taka Visual Art Company, Project 10, Fall 2003. Exhibition at the Red House for Culture and Debate. Building before renovation. Courtesy of Irina Karakehayova.

this situation that propelled the artists to seek assistance from a representative of the local government. While such obstacles and shifts in behaviour may be inevitable when working with children, the overall structure of the programme arguably played a leading role in sculpting the process of Taka’s activities. First, the children were not selected organically by the artists, but rather by school psychologists. The latter were contacted beforehand to choose from their schools children who experienced difficulties in communication to participate in after-​school activities with the artists. Second, the artists were under constant supervision by ‘experts’ such as psychologists, social workers and psychiatrists, who either met weekly with the artists, in the case of social care professionals assigned to each team, or organized training meetings, thematic seminars and workshops, all aimed at identifying techniques for the artists to use in their work with children. In such a context, artists were deployed as instruments for implementing the targeted goals of the 214

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Institutionalized Community Arts Programmes programme rather than engaged as partners in an equitable collaborative relationship with social workers. This highly controlled creative process betrayed the rhetoric of the programme, whose stated long-​term goal was ‘to try to define the role of the artist as an agent of social and cultural transformation […] [and of] art-​making as a means for personal enrichment and growth’.10 Third, the detail-​oriented and close managerial supervision of all the activities in the programme catered to the funders’ requests, which further undermined a reciprocal relationship between the collaborators. For example, financial support from the European Community’s Phare 2000 Access Programme was contingent upon the Art for Social Change programme monitoring, tracking and measuring otherwise process-​oriented and shifting objects such as ‘the influence of the artistic activities upon the children’ and ‘the attitudes of the society towards the young people at risk’, which obviously were impossible to measure. Moreover, not only in the activities of Taka but also throughout the programme, emphasis was placed on enhancing children’s ‘self-​esteem as citizens and their consciousness as part of the community’. The creative means of visual arts were considered aids in helping them ‘learn new patterns of communication and feedback, teamwork and decision making’.11 Prerequisites for inclusion into the larger society, such as ‘personal growth’, ‘self-​esteem’ and also ‘teamwork’, underscore the inequality in power relations inherent in such terms. In its long-​term structure, the Art for Social Change programme was a suggestive example of a participatory development initiative that used forms of art to engage members of various communities in what cultural theorist Andrea Cornwall called an ‘invited space’. These were usually spaces created by organizations or programmes that bring together people who might otherwise not associate or assemble and who have different interests, accountabilities and responsibilities, thereby creating differences in power relations within the spaces. Invited spaces were the opposite of ‘popular spaces’, which typically emerged spontaneously as people, mostly with similar interests, gathered together in collective action.12 In contrast to sites where, for example, marginalized groups voluntarily further their rights, the goal of community arts, such as those initiated by Art for Social Change, was rather to bring the dysfunctional and asocial members into the prevailing order by educating them and finding them a 215

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Socially Engaged Art after Socialism place within the already existing societal patterns. Significantly, the overall programme made use of community-​based art, participation and collaboration as vehicles to shift the focus away from the structural and systemic causes of the growing problem of poverty in Bulgaria. This led to the deprivation of parental care for the numerous children who reside in state institutions. The attention was on the moral and cultural reintegration of the marginalized children, and by extension their families, into the mainstream of society. If certain children were not reintegrated, the programme saw the cause not in its structure but rather in a number of obstacles or ‘risk factors’, such as an adverse social climate formed by ‘acts of violence and violation’ of the rights of children by both their families and the staff in state institutions. If it were indeed true to its stated aims, Art for Social Change could have, for instance, organized creative forums for competing critical views to be expressed in rather than solely paying attention to the cultural and social reintegration of individual children. Like the regular sessions of the interdisciplinary teams, programmes could have brought together teachers and care takers in state institutions, psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers, artists and art managers as well as local and state representatives. Participants could have been given an open platform to debate the multi-​layered marginalization of poor families, and to begin to articulate the political and economic causes and identify locally contingent mechanisms for improvement. Instead, as Taka noted in a final report on their activities: By the end of the process, the team felt in a state of ‘idyllic isolation’, having no feedback for their work except from the children, and having no real interest in the opinions of psychologists, parents, and teachers.13

Furthermore, the stated political impact of the programme was limited to managerial and administrative aspects rather than aimed at provoking systemic changes. According to the Red House for Culture and Debate’s Action Plan 2004 for the Art for Social Change programme, the House ‘established contacts’ with representatives of the Ministry of Labour and Social Policy, and the State Agency for Child Protection and Ministry of Education, in order to communicate ‘the impact and results of the different projects’ of the programme. Yet no formal or consistent follow-​up occurred. 216

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Institutionalized Community Arts Programmes Such aspects suggest the paradoxes and ambiguities inherent in institutionalized and foundation-​funded forms of community arts that superficially and naively adopted the rhetoric of participation and collaboration. At one level, the relationships between artists, collaborators and participants formed over its four-​year period cumulatively led to a depoliticized social practice. The language of ‘community-​art’ and ‘social change’ served as moral legitimation for the global neoliberal capitalism aimed at forming entrepreneurial individuals responsible for their own –​personal and socio-​economic –​condition. At another level, however, the social bonds forged through weekly meetings and trips surely had a transformative impact on all participants, even if such impact is rather impossible to quantify. Moreover, while the empathetic exchanges remain often invisible and unquantifiable, they indicate the complex levels of intercommunications and negotiations that unfold in such community-​oriented projects. At an institutional level, as an organization that initiated community arts programmes, the Red House for Culture and Debate, in fact, functioned as an ideological bastion of what Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello called ‘the new spirit of capitalism’. Here ‘spirit’ represented ideology –​ understood as ‘a set of beliefs inscribed in institutions, bound up with actions, and hence anchored in reality’14 –​that justified engagement with capitalism. Since its inception in the nineteenth century, capitalism has managed to expand because it continues to argue and emphasize that individual profits and interests automatically serve the greater good of society. One of the most powerful modes through which such justification and legitimation of the economic accumulation process takes root is the projection of civic life by capitalism, understood in terms of ‘institutional solidarity, the socialization of production, distribution and consumption, and collaboration between large firms and the state in pursuit of social justice’.15 Clearly, as we have seen, the Art for Social Change programme represented a successful initiative of the legitimization of neoliberalism (the latest reincarnation of capitalism), wherein it rhetorically portrayed itself as a site for civic engagement and social justice. Also, such achievements served to fend off anti-​capitalist critique (or make it more challenging for opponents) as well as providing moral motivation for people to engage in its order, as economic accumulation is quintessential to the functioning of the system. 217

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Socially Engaged Art after Socialism Another illustrative example of the Red House for Culture and Debate as a haven for the justifications of neoliberalism in terms of civic engagement was the November 2001 seminar titled ‘Culture and Civil Society: A Promising Relationship or a Missed Opportunity?’ co-​organized by the Council of Europe, Bulgaria’s Ministry of Culture, the Soros Centre for the Arts –​Sofia and the Red House for Culture and Debate. The stated goal of the seminar was to find new ways to ‘empower civil society and increase its participation in the democratic life of the country’ by encouraging closer interaction between arts and business, and arts and the state and regional governments, and the role of the arts in tackling social exclusion. In particular, the contemporary artist was understood as a ‘unique agent of social and economic change’ in that he or she would contribute to the empowerment of the individual living in a group or community.16 Certainly, a mission that emphasized a fruitful collaboration between arts and businesses wonderfully fulfilled the quintessential tenets of capital accumulation at the core of capitalism that advocates individual prosperity as leading to the well-​being of the larger society. At the same time, however, precisely a temporary consensus and negotiations between market forces and the local state organs might be needed to successfully address the deteriorating conditions of children living in state institutions. After the conclusion of the Art for Social Change programme, the Red House of Culture and Debate applied for funds to implement a new programme, Civil Partnership in Support of Children in Institutions, that aimed to create a network of communication among the more than 30 NGOs (in 2004) in Bulgaria working towards the improvement of care for children in state institutions. It remains open for debate whether or not the role of a cultural organization such as the Red House, in addressing this social issue, should be limited to creating platforms for communication within, and to being part of civil society and providing the results and outcomes from its Art for Social Change programme to the state’s various ministries and child protection agencies. Nevertheless, the appropriation of the arts, particularly community-​ based art, to serve neoliberal interests is a relatively recent development. Sociologist Caroline W.  Lee eloquently points out how, in professional forums and workshops on facilitating public engagement and dialogue, the arts are used and understood as and in reductive terms and practices: 218

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Institutionalized Community Arts Programmes The uses of art in public engagement draw on a particular idea of art as playful and fun, which releases participants from competitive, anxious mind-​sets and enables them to achieve higher levels of performance, collaboration, and expressive potential as individuals. These elements of individual participation and action are increasingly documented as key to economic accountability and efficiency […].17

In the discipline of art history, the historical antecedent of contemporary community-​based art originated in the 1970s as a genre of politicized art practice in Western European nations and, in a different form, in CEE as well. In chapter three, I discussed the anti-​authoritarian aims of particular participatory forms of unofficial art in socialist Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania. In contrast to Western democracies, in a highly politicized context of state socialism, experimental art practitioners in the 1970s and 1980s sought to foster open, albeit depoliticized, spaces for civil society to emerge in. Although each community-​based art project is contingent upon its local specificity, historically all share an empowerment through participation, a dislike of institutional hierarchies, and a belief in co-​authorship of work and the creative potential of all sections of society. Reflecting on the politicized 1970s community arts in the UK, Sally Morgan observed: Some went further and believed that community arts provided a powerful medium for social and political change; that through accessing existing artistic media, acknowledging previously ‘low-​status’ forms such as carnival, women’s crafts and non-​ European art, and working in the area of social and political issues, community arts could provide the blueprint for a truly participatory and egalitarian democracy.18

In its focus on the dematerialization of the art object into social processes and the effective transformations of all participants through a collaborative process, Taka’s educational projects with children, developed within the Art for Social Change programme, belongs to the international art historical genealogy of early community arts. However, there is a significant difference. In contrast to an activist-​inspired community-​based art that arguably functioned as a platform for critique of the dominant order, most 219

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Socially Engaged Art after Socialism institutionalized contemporary community-​oriented art practices have rather ambiguous outcomes. The activities of a growing number of contemporary community-​ oriented artists have increasingly been institutionalized. Culturally incorporated and assimilated within the ‘new spirit of capitalism’, their practices now function to strengthen the moral justifications of the capitalist system, and satisfy, at least partially, its detractors. While at first glance an increasing number of contemporary practitioners had morphed into obedient employees of government organizations and international development agencies, the shifting tensions and negotiations embedded in the relation between artists, participants, local sites and funding institutions reveal a much more complex and ambiguous picture. We have seen such processes of both provisional consensus and conflict among participants and funding and organizing institutions unfold with Taka in the context of the durational programme Art for Social Change in Bulgaria, and we will see it again in a different form, in Romania, in the long-​term community-​based art project cARTier, to which I turn next.

cARTier: Cultivating Self-​Help through Art in Marginalized Communities A similar strategy based on participation and collaboration with members of marginalized communities can be seen in the three-​year programme cARTier (2004–​7), undertaken in the working-​class housing district of Tătărași in the north-​eastern Romanian city of Iași, and also seen as an urban renewal and social regeneration project (Figure  10.4). Organized with funds from the Swiss cultural programme in Romania, Pro Helvetia / SDC, it was initiated by the local Vector Cultural Association,19 directed by Matei Bejenaru –​whose work I discussed in chapter nine and who lives and works in the city of Iași –​in collaboration with Iași’s City Hall, the local Pro Women Foundation and the Athenaeum Culture House. Communicating an educational intention similar to that of the Art For Social Change programme, the cARTier community-​based project saw the role of art ‘as a place for establishing social connections and of reinventing a public space’.20 In 2003, during the months of July and August, the Pro Women Foundation conducted an initial sociological study titled ‘Culture 220

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Figure 10.4  Aerial view of the Esplanada Oancea in Tatarasi district, Iasi, Roma­ nia. The location for the cARTier project, 2004–​7. Photo courtesy Matei Bejenaru.

and Education’. The study implemented both qualitative methods, such as interviews with focus groups and quantitative methods, such as the use of a questionnaire format. ‘Culture and Education’ had identified the desires of local inhabitants for particular cultural activities to take place on the Oancea Esplanade in their district: 39 per cent expressed interest in open-​air 221

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Socially Engaged Art after Socialism concerts, 37.75 per cent in youth activities, 27.75 per cent in theatre plays, 16.5 per cent in film projections and 17.25 per cent in children’s activities.21 The nature and diversity of cARTier’s cultural activities were conceptualized by Bejenaru based on the results of the sociological study, a training session by a specialist on social and cultural problems from Pro Helvetia Zurich, and close consultation with the funders  –​the representatives of the local office of Swiss Cultural Program Pro Helvetia. Once conceptually designed and approved (at the top), ‘cultural animators’, a group that included paid sociologists, sociology students, local art teachers, artists and student volunteers, organized, coordinated and carried out the designated cultural activities. Their target groups included children (25 students from the elementary school no. 10), youth (10 teenagers from the LI Cuza High School), middle-​aged working people (about 15) and senior citizens (approximately 20, although in the last two years of the project their number decreased and women became the majority). Each group met weekly with their respective cultural animator to engage in discussions and activities. As described by Bejenaru: The children’s group has organized exhibitions, has taken part in creative workshops, the young people have published the district magazine Linia 1/3, have organized artistic events in the Tătărași Athenaeum, while the senior citizens have tried, through photo exhibitions to reconstitute the memory of Tătărași from their personal memories.22

Professional and local visual artists such as Bogdan Teodorescu, Dan Acostioaei, Dragos Alexandrescu and Cristian Ungureanu, who were members of the Vector Association, painted the façades of several apartment blocks with murals showing diverse figurative representations, such as sunflower fields, cacti, birds, swimming scuba divers and parachute jumpers, all depicted on deep blue backgrounds and covering the grey and dilapidated socialist housing (Figure  10.5). Other visible activities included annual cultural festivals, such as cARTfest, which featured theatre plays, dance and music shows on an open-​air stage placed in the Oancea Esplanade (considered the centre of the Tătărași District) as well as in the local cultural house. An annual film festival, cARTfilm, featured documentary films on various social topics as well as a film contest for young local 222

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Figure 10.5  cARTier, 2004–​7, detail of mural. Iasi, Romania. Photo courtesy Matei Bejenaru.

artists and workshops on the role and representation of social issues in documentary film. Visual art media such as drawing, painting and photography were among the most commonly employed by the cultural animators in their work with children, who were also engaged in staging theatre plays, fashion shows and painting workshops.23 223

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Figure 10.6  cARTier, 2004–​7, detail of group discussion with members of community, March 2004, Iasi, Romania. Photo courtesy Matei Bejenaru.

As in the Art for Social Change programme, direct participation of and collaboration with the local residents were seen as fundamental strategies in carrying out the activities organized within the cARTier framework (Figure  10.6). Recalling the jargon used by the PRA strategy of international developmental foundations and agencies, cultural animators perceived their role to be as ‘fine sensors, very receptive to the needs of the Tătărași community’.24 The initiators and organizers of the project saw their responsibility as animating the creation of a cultural platform that was expected to ignite ‘civic spirit’ –​to empower locals to organize themselves in order to ‘effectively solve their problems and depend on their own competence and resources’, instead of waiting for the City Hall to handle their concerns.25 This emphasis on self-​reliance and self-​administration was the goal of participatory and collaborative practices; they would lead to citizens being individually responsible for their own everyday lives. The working-​class housing district of Tătărași was built in the early 1970s during the heyday of socialism after the regime had demolished two thirds of the locally existing historical houses. Currently the district houses 224

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Institutionalized Community Arts Programmes 80 per cent of the residents of the city. Despite this staggering concentration, the main cultural centres, such as the opera, major museums,and theatres, are all located in the centre of town, away from the housing district. Bejenaru saw the cARTier programme as aiding in the social regeneration of the population of the district by staging cultural activities in the local Cultural House Athenaeum, an architectural site that had symbolic meaning for the local residents. Rebuilt in 2003 by the City Hall, the new building rested on the memory of the historic Athenaeum that was active before World War II but closed down during the socialist period following a fire incident. As it stands today, the renovated Athenaeum houses a theatre stage, a library, an internet room, and a movie theatre that seats up to 300 people. At first glance, the motivation for the community-​based arts project could be seen to empower the periphery by building upon local resources and by bringing the cultural activities typically held in the city centre to its margins. However, social inclusion and community regeneration through fun and playful art activities such as dance and music shows, children’s exhibitions, theatre plays and colourful murals of sunflowers and scuba divers were rather moralizing in their attention to rectifying behaviour. They were intended to ignite a ‘civic spirit’ in submissive citizens, who were taught to assume responsibility for their local parks and benches, rather than addressing the structural differences that continue to force district residents to struggle economically. The result was, for example, that most elderly were still unable to afford an entrance ticket to a play at the newly renovated and opened local Athenaeum.26 Such community-​based art activities formed a veil over the existing inequalities between the economically marginalized district and the rest of residents in the city. The latter, although only 20 per cent of the city’s inhabitants, reside in the centre and are economically and socially privileged. In retrospect, the structure and programmes of the Vector Cultural Association as the organizing institution, and visual artists involved in the initiative appear to have maintained a rather equivocal division between community-​based art, considered as after-​school and voluntary work, void of critical or political meaning, and contemporary art, understood as object-​based, displayed in art galleries and part of a critical discourse. With financial support from the Swiss Culture Program Romania  –​Pro 225

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Socially Engaged Art after Socialism Helvetia / SDC, the Vector Cultural Association not only initiated cARTier, but also opened the Vector Gallery, an art gallery that was active for a four-​ year period, between 2003 and 2007, just as cARTier was. The art gallery organized workshops and exhibitions of contemporary art by local and international artists. Yet, instead of ongoing and consistent crossover initiatives and multi-​layered engagement between community-​based activities in the district and art manifestations in the Vector Gallery, an unstated but implied separation was visible between the two spaces and modes of art making. For example, in its four years of existence the art gallery dedicated only a few short weeks, in October 2006, to the organization of a series of contemporary art events titled ‘Personal Settings, Young People in Context’ for young people in the Tătărași district, as part of cARTier. This apparent qualitative separation between two forms of art practice also had a spatial component as Vector Gallery was located in the city centre, away from the Tătărași district, the location where the participatory interactions and community-​based art activities with the residents occurred. cARTier eventually appeared in the last edition of the Periferic 8 Biennial of Contemporary art guest-​curated by Dóra Hegyi and organized in 2008 by the Vector Association. Moreover, cARTier was considered primarily as an indirect funding source and publicity opportunity for the contemporary art exhibitions at the Vector Gallery and the concurrently happening Periferic: International Biennial for Contemporary Art, also developed under the leadership of Bejenaru.27 Bejenaru had stated that cARTier was a way to ‘strengthen the image of the Vector Cultural Association’.28 In particular, the Biennial, with specifically invited international artists and guest curators, was meant to ‘gain and allow international visibility’29 to the local and peripheral scene of contemporary art in Iași and Romania. The presence or absence of international financial support greatly influenced the nature and length of most local programmes and organizations whether for community-​based art or contemporary art. Once CEE countries became part of the EU, international support decreased considerably, affecting the existence of many local art initiatives. For instance, the Vector Gallery for contemporary art closed its doors when the cARTier project concluded in 2007. Also, Vector Association’s Periferic: International Biennial for Contemporary Art ended in 2008, due 226

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Institutionalized Community Arts Programmes to lack of financial support. It was assumed that, following the multi-​year training in administrative procedures and grant writing offered by the funders to the representatives of local initiatives, the latter would have acquired the skills to compete for funding in the global neoliberal order, along with their European and/or American peers. In such a context, the intention of Bejenaru to make use of the cARTier programme as a channel for strengthening the Vector Association’s institutional image at both local and international levels is arguably understandable or perhaps expected. The significant presence and impact of Vector Association and its programmes organized to foster the local contemporary art scene, in the city of Iași in particular and in Romania in general, should be emphasized. Since 1997, with the vision and leadership of visual artist Matei Bejenaru, Vector Association (though officially formed as an organization only four years later in 2001) had organized major events that nurtured not only the local and regional art scenes but also began to form and inform a local public for contemporary art. The Periferic Festival (1997–​ 2000) that showcased annual exhibitions of performance art became a biennial for contemporary art in 2001 and lasted until 2008. A central goal of the festival and biennale was to open critical dialogue on the conceptual and actual relationships between centre and periphery and to position the artistic scene of the city of Iași and of Romania on the map of the international art world. While Bejenaru was the artistic director of each edition, after 2003 he invited foreign curators to curate sections or separate exhibitions within the framework of the biennial. By including a number of artists from CEE, it forged, however temporarily, regional networks of contemporary art practitioners, many of whom also feature in this book, such as Big Hope, Luchezar Boyadjiev, Marius Babias and Dóra Hegyi. Considering Bejenaru’s own socially engaged art practice, it is perhaps not surprising to see artists and invited curators whose work includes an interest in art as social practice displayed prominently in the different editions of the biennale. For example, Babias was co-​curator of the section titled ‘Social Processes’ that was part of the Periferic 7 Biennial of Contemporary Art (2006), and Hegyi was the curator of Periferic 8, subtitled ‘Art as Gift’ (2008). Over a decade of exhibitions accompanied by workshops, lectures and roundtables staged across different sites in Iași, Romania’s third largest city, 227

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Socially Engaged Art after Socialism the biennale created a much-​needed institutional presence that not only showcased but also introduced and began to educate a younger generation of artists and art students who were otherwise deprived of instruction in contemporary art, theory and history by the Romanian educational system. Besides the Periferic biennale with its rich catalogues, and the Vector Gallery with its multiple exhibitions, in 2005 Vector Association also initiated Vector Publication: Art and Culture in Context, which regularly features critical texts by leading writers and theorists in the international discourse of contemporary art practice. In a city located in the most north-​eastern part of Romania, far away from the nation’s capital –​a city that lacks institutions dedicated to teaching, debating, preserving and recording contemporary art practice  –​the various initiatives stemming from the Vector Association and the leadership of Bejenaru in collaboration with other local practitioners had been important archives and vital resources. Although, institutionally, the Vector Association can be seen as a form of self-​organizing, with its members organically deciding on its programmes and exhibitions, such initiatives were not sustainable in the long run, in part because the funding received from international sources, such as Pro Helvetia and the Embassy of Holland, was only allocated on a temporary basis. Despite the integral role that the Vector Association played in sustaining local platforms for contemporary art, the scope of the social cultural project cARTier developed under its auspices remained ambiguous. cARTier was considered a success by both its funders and its organizers in that it helped transform the working-​class housing district of Tătărași into a ‘Romanian creative district’ by involving participatory activities between local artists and residents,30 and employing arts in the community to beautify and temporarily improve the site. cARTier’s cultural activities, based on direct participation and collaboration with the local residents, were meant to provide public spaces for lesisure and entertainment that would become vehicles for instilling in residents a civic responsibility for the physical aspect of their district. In promoting a sense of ‘community’ through cultural activities held within a locality, cARTier neutralized the role of the government in addressing the inherent marginalization of citizens in the district. The project remained vague in its intentions, bypassing structural causes such as impoverished and dilapidated housing conditions, lack of 228

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Institutionalized Community Arts Programmes employment opportunities for the younger generation and inadequate pension funds for the elderly, whose lives unfolded under the socialist regime. Both the funders and local governmental officials considered the three-​year cARTier programme a positive initiative, especially because of its politically neutralizing effect and emphasis on playful cultural activities. Refurbishing small playgrounds for children (though when I visited one in 2010 the renovations were barely visible), setting up an information centre where residents could pay their local taxes and get information on cultural events happening in their district, and preserving the open-​air stage for outdoor cultural activities by the office of the mayor after the conclusion of cARTier were cited by the organizers as specific outcomes that illustrate the long-​term and positive impact of the initiative in the district.31 In this sense, social relations built overtime between local residents and the groups of ‘cultural animators’ were not sustained or cultivated to establish long-​term networks that could, for example, empower members of a group or entire communities to engage in dialogue with local power structures to challenge systemic exclusionary measures. Instead, social relations at the community level had momentary and, most importantly, playful and utilitarian functions within the overall structure of the community-​based art initiative.

Participation and Collaboration as Apolitical Strategies of Engagement Despite the inherent problematics, we can, nevertheless, safely assume that the on-​site social interactions between the various individuals from the district of Tătărași and the designated group of community animators in Iași, and those between the children and Taka in Sofia, however fleeting, momentary, imperceptible or unquantifiable, had not only informative but also transformative effects, whether positive or not, on all participants involved. And yet, the top-​down structure and implementation of the programmes indicate that at the core of both cARTier and Art for Social Change lay a generalizing and homogenizing understanding of community and the marginalized. Both projects brushed over the power dynamics inherent in any community, and over differences between social groups and existing divisions in the city through the promotion of participatory 229

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Socially Engaged Art after Socialism development and community arts, understood as fun and playful activities. For instance, the majority of children living in Bulgarian state institutions with whom the artist group Taka worked as part of Art for Social Change were of Roma ethnic origin, which implicitly created conflict situations both between Roma and non-​Roma parents (and sometimes children) and between Roma children and non-​Roma institutional staff caring for them. Likewise, in Romania and specifically in the district of Tătărași, where the project cARTier unfolded, the community retained divisions and conflicts among its inhabitants that remained unacknowledged in the activities of the programme, despite its explicitly stated socially interventionist nature. These conflicts and/or tensions became evident in a sociological study conducted in 2004 by sociologist Dan Lungu, Matei Bejenaru and sociology student Gentiana Baciu. In interviews with close to 20 participants, most defined the problems arising in the district as related to the presence of Roma individuals, who were seen as trouble-​causing youth gangs harassing passers-​by or as thieves on public buses. One 62-​year-​old retired biology teacher stated: They should do something with these gypsies […] they are people too, but God, they should build them housing projects somewhere on the outskirts of the city and leave them all there. They don’t have a place among people! They can’t become like them. They destroy. In our district they destroy everything, including houses […].32

Such negative reactions to the Roma were widely spread and deeply held among residents not only in this Romanian district, but also across most of post-​socialist CEE and, increasingly, in Western European countries. These attitudes are rooted in the nationally ingrained prejudices of the dominant population regarding this minority ethnic group. The Roma were perceived as inherently socially deviant and uncivilized, unwilling to change or integrate, and only contributing to a negative image of the nation internationally. To begin to break through and challenge these prejudices held by the majority of the population towards this particular ethnic group, both cARTier and Art for Social Change could have, for example, organized activities, workshops and events that focused on specific issues that addressed such conflicts critically and directly. 230

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Institutionalized Community Arts Programmes In keeping with the directives and objectives of their foreign funders, both cARTier and Art for Social Change espoused an understanding of civil society in terms of moral commitments and, to a certain extent, practical outcomes. In different ways, over the course of several years, cARTier and Art for Social Change engaged members of various local communities in diverse art programmes and activities meant to cultivate civic engagement. However, concepts such as ‘empowerment’, ‘solidarity’, ‘community’, ‘collaboration’ and ‘participation’ had been emptied of their radical potential for challenging systemic causes and achieving collectively identified political goals. Appropriated by foundations and organizations, the rhetoric of participation and collaboration became both a moral justification and a practical vehicle for empowering individuals to become self-​sustaining and competitive entrepreneurs in the neoliberal market economy. This sense of self-​help suggests that simply creating opportunities for temporary and voluntary associations through art to enable diverse individuals and groups to socialize will lead, over time, to self-​sufficient communities able to care for their own needs. No longer harnessed for their politically subversive potential, social networks become vehicles to spread the rhetoric of participation and friendship aimed to achieve the safe and smooth sailing of global capital. Such community-​based art projects are but two illustrative examples; one can easily discern similar initiatives in cities across the world. And so, especially because participatory and collaborative strategies have been increasingly subsumed by capitalist forces embedded within financially powerful institutions and organizations, it is all the more critical to highlight those art and activist practices and their strategies that have continued to avow the critical and empowering potential of the same modes of engagement. It is in this context that, in the next chapter, I return to the work of Miklós Erhardt and Dominic Hislop, known as the artist collective Big Hope, this time to projects they created in Budapest.

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11 Big Hope: Reviving Leftist Activism in Budapest

Big Hope, active as an artist collective between 1998 and 2006, was among the first to develop socially engaged art projects and to open discussion on the relationship between the social role of art and political activism in an art institutional setting in post-​socialist Hungary. The collective was composed of Dominic Hislop, a Scottish artist residing at the time in Hungary, and Miklós Erhardt, a younger-​generation Hungarian artist active after the fall of socialism. Their collaborative work Re:route (2002), with members of immigrant communities in Italy, was discussed in chapter nine. Saját Szemmel / Inside Out (1998) was the first project the artists created together as a collective, and one in which they developed specific strategies of engagement that would reappear in some of their later projects. Most importantly, Saját Szemmel inquired into the causes of homelessness in Budapest, a key issue of the transitional period during the first decade after the fall of socialism. In other projects that they initiated in Budapest, such as Klímaszervíz and their participation in Manamana (2001, Műcsarnok/Kunsthalle, Buda­ pest), and Disobbedienti (2002, Liget Galéria / Liget Gallery, Budapest), Big Hope addressed and questioned the scope of activism existing locally at the time. Combining the medium of installation art, print news media and diverse modes of participation among local activists, contemporary artists 232

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Big Hope and audience, Big Hope made use of specific museum and gallery spaces to provoke public discussions on leftist thinking. Their actions were significant within a local nationalist context politically governed by Prime Minister Viktor Orbán (1998–​2002 and again, 2010–​14), who actively harnessed memories of the society’s negative experiences during the recent socialist past to aid in the popular acceptance of the neoliberal market economy and ideology. Culture and cultural institutions, in particular, played key roles in advancing Orbán’s goals.

Hungarian Cultural Institutions: Stage for Populist Right-​Wing Narratives Cultural policies enacted in Hungary under the FIDESZ government, with Orbán as its leader, gradually led, first, to aggressive de-​communizing through the condemnation of all left-​oriented post-​socialist manifestations and parties as regressive, abusive and totalitarian. Second, they initiated a recentralization and renationalization of major art museums in the country. Such political directives materialized, in the early 2000s, in Budapest’s urban landscape, with the strategic opening of key cultural institutions, such as the Terror Háza Múzeum (The House of Terror Museum) and the new Nemzeti Színház (National Theatre) as part of the Palace of the Arts complex, which also includes the new location of the Ludwig Múzeum – Kortárs Művészeti Múzeum Budapest (Ludwig Museum –​Museum of Con­temporary Art), on the banks of the Danube and visible from most major bridges in the city. The Terror Háza Múzeum, whose director Maria Schmidt was an adviser to Orbán, opened on 24 February 2002, shortly before Orbán’s first term in office was concluded. The museum was intended to write the official national history and to act as a memorial for the victims of the Hungarian National Socialist Arrow Cross Party and the Communist Secret Police, which shared the same building that now houses the museum. It includes numerous exhibition rooms with theatrical stage-​ sets, spectacle-​like scenes, loud music, vibrant colours and strong spot-​ lighting  –​a Halloween version of a Disney park. The rooms illustrate various themes, such as ‘Hungarian Nazis’, ‘Double Occupation’, ‘Gulag’, ‘The Fifties’, ‘Life Under Communism’, ‘Peasants’, ‘Hall of the 1956 233

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Socially Engaged Art after Socialism Revolution’ and ‘Reconstructed Prison Cells’.1 Political scientist Emilia Palonen poignantly observed: The political logic of the exhibition […] was to make a distinction, which had been influential for the Hungarian post-​ communist right, between the Nazi years and the Interwar period, and to highlight the terror of the Communists. […] what is not described in the exhibition but implied in the way in which it is closely associated with FIDESZ and the Hungar­ian right, is that the [contemporary version] Hungarian Socialist Party is an inheritor of the Stalinist and the Nazi legacy.2

Through its strongly didactic series of displays and exhibitions, the Terror Háza Múzeum clearly communicated the condemnation of the recent socialist past by the ruling political party. While an anti-​socialist attitude, as we have seen, had been at the core of claims by intellectual dissidents in the late 1980s and early 1990s, by the early 2000s anti-​socialism had lost its oppositional force, becoming a tool for political image making. The Nemzeti Színház was another example from the early 2000s that illustrated the use of cultural institutions by the right-​wing political party in a process of nation building. The theatre features an eclectic and awkward mix of organic elements and post-​modern and historicist-​style architecture. The building resembles a ship at the front of which a neo-​classical façade is submerged under water, while a fire flame burns on top of it. On the building’s walls and in the small surrounding garden numerous figurative plaques commemorate national authors, actors and actresses. Through such kitsch-​imbued historicist-​style architecture, this cultural building communicates a nationalist vision of a new Hungary and a new Hungarian identity promoted by FIDESZ. It is significant that the Nemzeti Színház is part of the Palace of the Arts, which also includes the Ludwig Múzeum. Founded in 1991 as Hungary’s first institution concerned with international contemporary art, the museum moved to its new location in 2005. As mentioned on its website, the museum is a ‘central government-​funded body’ under the supervision of the Ministry of the National Cultural Heritage. While its collection is centred on post-​1960s international and Hungarian art with a particular focus on new media, the core mission of the museum is the ‘protection 234

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Big Hope of cultural heritage’, with the collection of contemporary art officially inscribed under the nationalist directives of governing political parties. Moreover, while in its former location the museum had carved out a small experimental space called Kis.terem / Project Room under the curatorial initiative of Dóra Hegyi, showcasing young and emerging contemporary artists, in its new location the museum eliminated this initiative. In a context when major cultural institutions functioned to promote populist and nationalist narratives supported by the political leadership of the country, the presence of artistic platforms for debate and inquiry on the meaning of the left in contemporary art and institutions were all the more vital. The art projects of Big Hope were among the few to offer alternatives to the official political rhetoric in Hungary in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

Big Hope and Homelessness Saját Szemmel / Inside Out (the literal translation into English from Hungarian is ‘with one’s own eyes’) in 1998 consisted in Big Hope distributing disposable cameras to homeless people in women’s and adolescent’s overnight shelters and in subway stations all across Budapest for them to photograph their surroundings. The artists asked the recipients to capture what was important in their everyday lives, making them aware that their photographs would be publicly exhibited. Big Hope arranged to meet each participant within a week to collect the camera. An additional meeting was arranged to return copies of the photographs, and to interview the photographers about their images (Figure 11.1). The project website identifies each individual participant by his or her name and several images and texts, which collectively create informal connections between the viewer and each of these individuals as well as between the participants themselves.3 Instead of directly and symbolically representing the homeless through their authored photographs, the artists surrendered their creative autonomy and authority in the process of creation. The final result is almost 100 photographs and texts, authored by homeless photographers. The images communicate various aspects and fractions of time and range from intimate to everyday scenes and portraits of specific individuals. For example, among Ilona Gáspár’s ten photographs, which feature in the online archive of Big Hope, one is of a car that 235

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Figure 11.1  Big Hope, Saját Szemmel / Inside Out, 1998. Big Hope interviewing Inside Out participants (from left to right) Zoltán Sárközi, Zoltán Rácz, Ferenc Budai and Tibor Novák in the ‘homeless train’ operated by the Hungarian Charity Service of the Order of Malta, Budapest, summer 1997. Image courtesy of Big Hope.

she said she had previously owned and driven at high speed (Figures 11.2 and 11.3). Her comments and photographs reconstruct moments in her life before she became homeless, compelling one to ask about the causes that led to that homelessness. Officially, until the early 1990s, homelessness in Hungary was a rare sight. Under the planned economic system of the former regime, the socialist housing model ensured a place to live for virtually all of its citizens. Moreover, while the one-​party state strictly controlled the income of its citizens, it also provided them with free housing, education and health care. At the same time, the party-​state closely monitored the building of new housing, and private forms of housing construction were controlled by restrictions on building supplies and house loans. Nevertheless, under the protective wing of the socialist state, most citizens in socialist nations were employed, had a place to live and had no difficulties in paying rents, mortgages and utility bills.4 With the collapse of the socialist state, many people lost their jobs and their homes. Workers’ hostels, which until 1989 housed potentially 236

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Figure 11.2  Big Hope, Saját Szemmel / Inside Out, 1998. Dominic Hislop (Big Hope) recording an interview with Inside Out participant Ilona Gáspár, Budapest City Homeless Shelter (FSZKI), 1997. Photo by Miklós Erhardt. Image courtesy of Big Hope.

homeless people, also closed down and local governments were no longer able or obliged to provide housing. Between 1998 and 2002, under Prime Minister Viktor Orbán (the leader of the rightist party Alliance of Free Democrats (FIDESZ), which governed the country in coalition with the Hungarian Democratic Forum and the Independent Small Holders Party), Hungary saw the acceleration of market-​oriented reforms. While this orientation was opposed by the Hungarian Socialist Party, whose members were interested in maintaining and expanding the political and economic connections among the former members of the former Council of Mutual Economic Assistance of the Eastern bloc,5 neoliberalism as a political ideology and specific economic policies dominated the national restructuring. In 2005, activist filmmaker Joanne Richardson, who worked for a number of years in Romania, bluntly pointed out: what is hidden behind capitalism and the language of normalization is the assumption that everything that is going wrong today is purely the product of hangovers from the communist past. The visible defects of the transition to capitalism are

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Figure 11.3  Big Hope, Saját Szemmel / Inside Out, 1998. Poster for the exhibition at the Budapest Galéria. Photo courtesy of Big Hope.

attributed to the defects of communism; they are not viewed as flaws of capitalism but as flaws of not having enough capitalism and of not having it quickly enough.6

The rapid privatization of state-​owned social housing units, the influx of foreign capital into the city and the lack of governmentally implemented 238

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Big Hope social and political mechanisms to protect the poor led to an increased number of homeless people in Hungary and, to varying degrees, across all of the former socialist countries in CEE. Stereotypical views of the homeless typically include images of socially delinquent and irresponsible individuals and function to separate the condition of homelessness from the larger socio-​economic causes and acute societal transformations of the post-​1989 transitional period. Specifically in the Hungarian capital city, local urban renewal projects greatly affected the rise of homelessness following the collapse of the socialist regime. In contrast to cities in Western Europe and America, urban redevelopment initiatives in Budapest have been undertaken by state organizations in partnership with private investors rather than solely by corporate institutions. In the 1990s, following more than 40  years of centralized government, Budapest embraced a highly decentralized form of administration. Each of the districts in the city is now administered by a local governmental body, which has greater authority and autonomy in the management of its particular district than the city government as each district’s local government is solely responsible for providing social services for its residents. Hungarian sociologist Csaba Jelinek pointed out that local districts, often faced with insufficient financial resources, ‘implement some kind of “urban rehabilitation” policies to attract private capital by “beautifying”their districts and to decrease their social expenditure by changing the inhabitants’ social composition’.7 The official rhetoric promoted by local leaders portrayed urban renewal projects and the relocation of residents as the only answers to social and urban decay. For example, residents of subsidized social housing (which are typically poorly constructed, small, one-​bedroom, one kitchen apartments with no bathrooms) were given the choice of either relocation to a different yet same-​ size (slightly renovated) flat, usually on the outskirts of the city, or taking a sum of money for the value of their apartment. In most instances the promised flat was provided only after a long waiting period but also in a less desirable location, away from the city centre, whereas in their original district the opportunities for jobs were greater. In actuality, the rhetoric of urban renewal translated into a mass displacement of residents that contributed to increased social inequalities and personal traumas. Jelinek closely analysed Budapest’s 9th district, concluding that approximately 239

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Socially Engaged Art after Socialism 2,600 families ‘were relocated by the local government and numerous others were displaced  –​either directly or indirectly  –​because of the rising rents and real estate prices’.8 Although manifesting different mechanisms appropriate for specific sites, such local versions of forced urban renewal projects indexed a broader gentrification phenomenon unfolding worldwide over the last few decades. It was the drastic impact of such neoliberal economic forces and urban gentrification processes on human lives that Big Hope addressed and challenged. Specifically, the artists aimed to show that homelessness was not a personal choice but rather, in most cases, the local effect of global entrepreneurial interests. In order to identify participants for the project, Big Hope worked with staff at a number of local homeless shelters and social workers from the Hungarian Maltese Charity Services, which in 2001 estimated the number of homeless in Budapest to be approximately 15,000 to 20,000, and the Hungarian National Association of Homelessness, members of which became the artists’ collaborators in challenging simplified and homogenized representations of the homeless. It is revealing that exact statistical numbers of homeless people, not only in Hungary but throughout the world, had been difficult to calculate.9 In his description of the project in 2001, Hislop said that Saját Szemmel ‘played a positive role in breaking down some public misconceptions of who homeless people are and helped forge a better understanding that their situation is not so much a case of the failure of the individual to adapt to a changing society but rather the failure of a changing society to accommodate all its individuals’.10 The artists accomplished this goal by conceiving their artwork as a platform for each of their collaborators to share their own experiences and views of the city. Rather than ‘the stereotypical homeless images of old men sad and begging’,11 the voices of the photographers remained central and unaltered in the work. Some people chose to take it upon themselves to document homelessness as a journalist might, going round, sneaking up to people sleeping on benches and taking their photo. Others doing something similar were more aware of the ethics of taking a stranger’s photograph and mentioned in their comments that they asked permission, gave some money or a sandwich

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Big Hope before taking their picture. Some took the opportunity to take pictures of their children, friends, girlfriends, boyriends, fooling around. Some used the camera more seriously, taking pictures only of objects that had some poetic, metaphorical meaning for them or of places that suggested memories from childhood.12

In one of my email conversations with the artists in 2009, they singled out the socially engaged art practice of American artist Martha Rosler as an inspiration for Saját Szemmel. In fact, in a later project, Protest Songbook (2003), Big Hope conducted a phone interview with Martha Rosler on the relationship between music, art and political engagement. Moreover, Big Hope saw a similarity between the Hungarian and American contexts during the 1990s and 1980s, respectively, in the way in which socio-​political and economic changes had effects on homelessness. Like post-​socialist Hungary, the US of the 1980s under Ronald Reagan –​the decade of both the emergence and the expansion of neoliberalism from the US to the rest of the world –​saw homelessness as a moral evil.13 Its causes were presented as being divorced from the effects of economic forces and urban gentrification under the power of corporate class. However, the ‘new urbanism’, then the latest American architectural trend directly communicating the ideology of neoliberalism, converted working-​class neighbourhoods into luxurious condominiums, forcing large numbers of people out of their homes. As alternative housing was not provided, many of the evicted residents found themselves on the streets. In such a context, Rosler’s If You Lived Here (1989) aimed to raise consciousness and dislocate the normative political image of homelessness as a moral issue. Exhibited at the Dia Art Foundation, in Soho, New York, Rosler’s project was multi-​layered and consisted of museum exhibitions, panel discussions, poetry readings, film screenings, workshops and forums on homelessness that occurred over the course of several weeks.14 For example, Rosler aimed to question the role of the newly formed contemporary art galleries in the broader urban redevelopment and gentrification process that contribute to the displacement of residents and subsequently to the causes of homelessness. Additionally, Rosler invited well-​ known artists such as Krysztof Wodiczko, whose Homeless Vehicle Project emphasized the nomadic existence of the homeless, and the architect group Mad Housers from Atlanta, who erected huts 241

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Socially Engaged Art after Socialism in Brooklyn and Manhattan during the exhibition period as prototypes designed to provide minimal space and temporary stability for the homeless. Bypassing her role as artist or curator, Rosler became the organizer of informative and communicative situations. A similar aim to be context providers activating the socio-​political function of art motivated Big Hope in their Saját Szemmel project. By distributing cameras to the homeless to capture images of themselves and their surroundings, the artists offered the participants both tools to control their own self-​representation and a platform of communication, through which they continuously re-​formulated their identities. In order to identify participants, Big Hope made contact with social workers and representatives of several homeless shelters in the city, who initially acted as mediators between prospective participants and the artists. In the gradual process through which artists identified their participants, both accessing and contributing to the existing social networks between homeless shelters and homeless individuals, Big Hope avoided the forms of negation that can often occur in the relationships between the artists as unstated yet implied representatives for a specific community. Big Hope became what Suzanne Lacy called ‘artist as experiencer’, who is ‘like a subjective anthropologist’ acting as ‘a conduit for the experience of others, and the work a metaphor for relationship’.15 Saját Szemmel existed within and through a discursive form of collaboration that involved dialogue and interviews with their participants. So, if institutionalized and managerially produced forms of community arts, such as Art for Social Change and cARTier, nurtured cultural capital and depoliticized social relations through art understood as fun and entertaining activities, Saját Szemmel, although short term, small scale and minimally funded, contextualized and politicized the condition of homelessness within a broader socio-​economic context. The use of the disposable photo camera, repeated and individualized sit-​down meetings, conversations between artists and their participants, and the particular display used to both archive and exhibit the collected photographs and texts represent artistic strategies of engagement that Big Hope originated in this early project in Budapest. While these modes of working appear in their later works, such as Re:route (2002), discussed earlier in the book, Saját Szemmel was not a commission for a themed 242

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Big Hope exhibition within an art institution. With help from various local organizations such as C3-​Center for Culture and Communication, the Cultural Committee of the Municipality of Budapest and Agfa, a retail store that provided the disposable cameras, Big Hope secured sufficient sponsorship to the pay photographers a fee, at a rate slightly higher than the minimum wage at the time. Big Hope selected two specific venues to exhibit the work authored by their participants in order to suggest the inherent exclusions within dominant cultural and political systems, such as the art institution. At one of the locations, Budapest Galéria, an art gallery, the artists displayed three or four enlarged colour images, with accompanying text authored by each participant, totalling 100 photographs. In conjunction with the exhibition, which was on view between March and April 1998, Big Hope also created a 20-​page black-​and-​white catalogue that included at least one photograph and text by each of the 40 participants. The artists presented the work in the exhibition as authored by the homeless individuals, and as art objects to be interpreted within an art context. For example, the name of Big Hope did not appear in any of the gallery labels. Likewise, the publication highlights the photographers, while the names of artists, as the organizers and initiators of the project, appear only on the last page. Hislop said about the exhibition: Although it was our status as artists that got the show in the gallery in the first place, we tried to deflect attention away from us so that on the posters and invitations, the main focus of attention was on the photographers’ names and when radio and television stations sent reporters to the opening, we duly passed them on to speak to the creators of the work.16

On one level, in showing the homeless as the creators of the art project, Big Hope sought to challenge the authority of the art institution (with its historically ingrained criteria of evaluation based on individual authorship) in determining the value of a work of art. On another level, and most importantly, the artists extended the agency of the participants beyond the rather private and invisible creative process that happens behind the scene to the public reception of their work in a centrally located art space. According to Big Hope, more than half of the participants attended the exhibition; ‘the show was a big 243

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Socially Engaged Art after Socialism success, gaining a lot of media attention, pulling in more crowds than normally come to the gallery in a year and was subsequently extended to allow more people to see it’.17 As such, the trust and solidarity forged throughout the collaborative process among the artists, the homeless individuals and social workers prompted participants to enact a public sphere inclusive of counterpublics. Even if only temporarily, occupying key physical spaces is symbolically powerful in the processes of shaping institutional sites of power. In their choice of exhibition venue and mode of display, Big Hope, indirectly, provoked the (art) institution to take account of, if not symbolically to advance, the rights and claims of the homeless as both citizens and creators. The other venue of the exhibition was FSZKI Dózsa György út homeless shelter, the largest homeless hostel in Budapest. For three days in April 1998, in the main lobby, the photographs (about ten for each photographer) were displayed on cardboard mats and accompanied by each participant’s entire interview, which Big Hope conducted separately with each individual. Both the location and the display conveyed to other people in the shelter a sense of togetherness within the broader community of the homeless. At the same time, the exhibition provoked people within the art context who had never entered a homeless shelter to step into unfamiliar space and begin a process of acknowledgement of the social and political realities affecting homelessness. Hislop recalled: ‘A lot of the participants attended and contributed towards a lively discussion with us, each other, residents from the hostel, social workers and people from outside about the project and homelessness in general.’18 It is here, in the use of social relations to achieve cultural and economic capital on the one hand and as vehicles used to challenge the institutionalized political marginalization on the other, that the crucial differences in scope and the creative process among socially engaged art practices are most directly revealed. For instance, such differences in the use of social networks forged through, and in part becoming, the creative face-​to-​face process set apart the interventionist socially engaged projects by artist groups such as Big Hope and Martha Rosler from the institutionalized forms of community arts exemplified by Art for Social Change and cARTier that were focused on socializing individuals into self-​sufficient communities with an entrepreneurial spirit to compete in, rather than question, the neoliberal market economy. 244

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Disobbedienti In 2001, the collaborative project Klímaszervíz (which can be translated as Climate Repair, the artists alluding to their intention to challenge the Hungarian political climate through their work with local environment groups) by Big Hope was part of the exhibition Szerviz, curated by Romanian-​ born, and at that time Budapest-​based, curator Judit Angel, at the Műcsarnok (Kunsthalle) in Budapest. Through projects by local artists that offered various ‘services’ to museum visitors, such as providing insight into an actual exhibition-​making process, the curatorial project was part of a worldwide contemporary art trend emerging in the 1990s that centred on viewer participation. In their installation, Big Hope involved the collaboration of several contemporary artists including Viola Ferjentsik, Andreas Fogarasi and Tibor Várnagy, who initiated Manamana. Representing an integral component of Big Hope’s installation, Manamana consisted in a Hungarian-​only, 8 ×10 inch format, 20-​page newspaper, published in four issues of 400 copies each. Visually, Klímaszerviz was comprised of large boards leaning against the gallery wall onto which newspapers, articles, flyers and manifestos were posted daily (Figure 11.4). In both form and scope, it recalled Hans Haacke’s 1969 News installation (repeated several times in different exhibitions) with

Figure 11.4 Big Hope, Klímaszervíz / Climate-Service, 2001. Installation shot, Climate-​Service by Tibor Várnagy, Miklós Erhardt, Andreas Fogarasi and others, in the Service exhibition, Műcsarnok-​Kunsthalle Budapest. Photo by Tibor Várnagy. Image courtesy of Big Hope.

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Socially Engaged Art after Socialism a teletype machine connected to Germany’s wire service (DPA). It provided visitors with breaking news headlines from around the world, which were then posted onto the gallery walls. In a similar fashion, Klímaszerviz offered viewers a constant stream of current news from both the local and the international press. Yet in contrast to Haacke, who intentionally did not intervene in the public’s reception of the material he presented, Big Hope included in the project direct engagement with the audience. Complementing the daily postings in the gallery space, the artists also led weekly discussions on various social and political issues addressed in the news, which the museum visitors could join without paying an entrance fee. While these open-​to-​all, artist-​initiated discussions in the museum space were poorly attended, the Manamana series of self-​produced newspapers had a broader reach, extending beyond the museum space into the public sphere. Its published articles were on topics such as corporate globalization, neoliberalism, the impact of the increasing number of NGOs in Hungary, unedited translations from the international dissident press writing on the G8 summit in Genoa, and the September 11 terrorist attack in New York in 2001. In addition to connecting international issues with local concerns, the newspaper functioned as a communicative platform among various local and international social groups and contemporary artists. Moreover, through regularly staged discussions, editorials and meetings, the artists established important social relationships among diverse practitioners –​relations that led, a year later, to their project Disobbedienti. Installed in the Liget Galéria, in Budapest, Disobbedienti was a life-​ sized gallery recreation of the meeting room of the Torino Disobbedienti (the disobedients), a local arm of the nationwide network of leftist activists (Figures 11.5, 11.6 and 11.7). Evoking the atmosphere of an activists’ club, the installation comprised stencilled wall drawings of the Disobbedienti’s different logos, posters, pamphlets, wall paintings, and ‘4 × 6 inch’ colour snapshot photographs reproducing sections of the their meeting room. The Disobbedienti emerged in 1998 as a continuation of the former Italian activist group Tute Bianche, who were known for wearing white overalls and black masks and were seen in the public space for the first time in 1994.19 Significantly, the change from Tute Bianche into the Disobbedienti marked a change also within the broader global social protest movement from civil disobedience to social disobedience. As Luca Casarini, the 246

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Big Hope

Figure 11.5  Miklós Erhardt (Big Hope) leading a discussion with representatives of Hungarian civil organizations in the framework of Disobbedienti by Big Hope, Liget Galéria, Budapest, September 2002. Photo by Tibor Várnagy.

spokesperson for the Disobbedienti, said, ‘The Tute Bianche were a subjective experience, a little army. For us, the Disobbedienti is a multitude, a movement.’20 No longer limited to a symbolic march in public space by 247

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Figure 11.6  Miklós Erhardt (Big Hope) leading a discussion with representatives of Hungarian civil organizations in the framework of Disobbedienti by Big Hope, Liget Galéria, Budapest, September 2002. Photo by Tibor Várnagy.

Figure 11.7 Opening of Disobbedienti by Big Hope, Liget Galéria, Budapest, September 2002. Photo by Tibor Várnagy.

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Big Hope a few dressed in white, the Disobbedienti’s large-​scale social disobedience typically involved both self-​proclaimed members of the activist group and individuals from the larger society. For instance, in January 2002 the protest action organized and led by the Dissobbedienti that ended in the dismantling of an immigrant detention camp in Bologna was joined, in the long run, by lawyers defending the rights of individual immigrants and local nurses offering their care to injured protesters and resisting the police force with their bodies. Such actions were triggered by the local right-​wing national legislation on immigration, most vividly represented by the Bossi-​ Fini Act (two different right-​wing political party members, Umberto Bossi and Gianfranco Fini) passed in 2002, which allows the detention of individuals –​mostly immigrants –​for up to 60 days. This is despite the fact that the Italian constitution forbids the imprisonment of an individual for more than 48 hours if the person has not committed a crime.21 A similar nationalist and corporatist context also characterized Hungary during this time. In line with the increasing trend worldwide, the Hungarian government led by Orbán (1998–​2002, and again 2010–​14) enthusiastically promoted market-​oriented policies while distancing itself from the interests of the people by accelerating the elimination of social services so vital in a period of transition from a socialist regime towards a full-​fledged neoliberal economy. That the society at large supported the rightist government, which also advocated measures for the country’s entrance into the EU, is not surprising. The government actively promoted the rhetoric of the left as an abusive and oppressive political orientation, implicitly discrediting the left en masse. Big Hope’s gallery recreation of the Disobbedienti’s meeting room aimed to both introduce to and provoke in the Hungarian public an awareness of leftist activism in Western Europe. The artists saw this as a way to recover the meaning of the left with its 1960s legacy of Western social activism, such as anarchism, feminism, the student movement and the creation of anti-​universities from the personal experience of socialism of the people. In an interview by Keiko Sei in 2002, Erhardt and Hislop recalled their first encounter with the Disobbedienti in Turin: We first went to Corso Brescia 14, Torino, the meeting place of the Torino Disobbedienti around six months ago while we were working on the previous project. Immediately we were

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Socially Engaged Art after Socialism impressed with this colourful space with its rich variety of objects, paintings, posters and stencils covering its walls that hosted the activities of a group of people composed of adult women and men who as well as having jobs doing various kinds of social work, offer long hours of unpaid labour to give assistance to and organize protests on behalf of migrants.22

Two interviews, one with local Hungarian activists and the other with members of the Disobbedienti group in Torino, structured the participatory components in the gallery installation by Big Hope. Both the Hungarian and the Italian participants were asked the same questions about the scope and composition of their activist groups, their different strategies of protest and their connection with other activist groups both nationally and internationally. The taped interviews were then exchanged and played in Budapest and Turin as a way to establish a connection, or at least an awareness of activist initiatives, between the two different contexts. Even on a small scale, the project ignited, as Hislop observed, ‘a kind of communication that can be a key to exposing some historical baggage and understanding of how to move forward’.23 Big Hope’s project highlighted the depoliticized Hungarian context, where activists groups were both disunited and apolitical. For instance, Gábor Csillag, a cultural anthropology professor and member of the Eötvös Loránd University-​ based environmental ELTE Klub, bluntly stated: ‘My personal and our group’s goals are neither left nor right oriented, but rather forward oriented since our concerns are strictly with the protection of the natural environment’, which in his view, has nothing to do with politics. Similarly, another participant, Balázs Horváth, an Indymedia network local activist and editor, talked about the activities of his group as being beyond politics, in its aim to ‘raise public consciousness about the moral impact of corporate businesses upon its workers’. If in Hungary, at the time, local activists considered their self-​organized public sphere of Indymedia to be above or ‘beyond politics’, internationally Indymedia or Independent Media Centre, as movement-​based media, played a crucial political role in the preparations leading to the Battle of Seattle, the well-​known, activist action in 1999 to protest against the World Trade Organization summit in that city. Author Yates McKee said about the Battle of Seattle that it ‘highlighted the friction underlying contemporary capitalism, not only at the 250

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Big Hope level of trade policy, but also in terms of undemocratic organization of the global economy as a whole’.24 In Hungary, as in most post-​socialist Central Eastern European countries, at least in the first decades of transition, a great majority of art practitioners and activists understood politics solely in terms of party politics, of belonging to or championing a political party. The concept and practice of politics or being politically engaged as forms of critique challenging the effects of exclusionary power relations was rather absent. Such an overt lack of political engagement coupled with moral and ethical concerns must be understood within the legacy of ‘antipolitics’, a term coined in 1982 by Konrád, as I discussed in chapter three. To reiterate, antipolitics (or the politics of antipolitics) was conceptualized as an independent sphere where activity was entirely divorced from and directed against the socialist government. For instance, guided by a sense of antipolitics, the oppositional activities of the Hungarian environmental activists of the Duna Kör (Danube Circle) in the early 1980s, which I  mentioned earlier in the text, were in fact retrospectively seen as contributing to the dismantling of socialism and then, after 1989, to the triumph of the right.25 Initially, the small activist movement coalesced around the journalist János Varga, who led a small group composed of journalists, social scientists, artists and natural scientists, that published articles opposing the damming of the Danube River at Nagymaros, 50 kilometres north of Budapest. It gathered a wider following, culminating in the public demonstrations in Budapest in 1988 –​first in May of nearly 2000 people, and then in October with a torchlight protest procession of over 5,000  –​with the single and unified cause of stopping the construction of a hydroelectric power system on the Danube River that would endanger the drinking water supplies of 5 million to 8 million people.26 Although a strictly environmental cause (that nevertheless succeeded in stopping the construction of the dam), the importance of the Danube-​ inspired environmental activism was that it extended into a platform for the critique of the centrally governing socialist party-​state on cultural and ecological grounds, while calling for access and participation in decision-​ making processes at the political level. As Krista Harper observed: Underground newspapers, discussion circles, and demonstrations against the dam system created a space for debate and criticism of the government. Looking back, many participants

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Socially Engaged Art after Socialism in the Danube movement characterize their 1980s activism as their introduction to ‘civil society’.27

If one can speak of a dissident (albeit guided by a politics of antipolitics) and unified environmental activist movement in the 1980s, after the collapse of socialism, the Hungarian environmentalist movement, just like activism in general, became increasingly fragmented. There were different factions and groups, such as the Zöld Nôk (Green Women), Hungary’s only eco-​feminist group focused on health problems and feminist issues; the Levegõ Munkacsoport (Clean Air Group),28 advocating, for example, public transportation; the ELTE Klub, ZÖFI and the Green Circle of the Budapest Technical University. While diverse in their locally specific causes, these groups identified, at least in broad or rather formal terms, with global social protest movements. For instance, to show solidarity with the Battle of Seattle, in May 2000 members of the ELTE Klub, the Green Circle and the Clean Air group in Hungary gathered on the banks of the Danube in the vicinity of Budapest’s Vigado concert hall to protest against the convention of the International Chamber of Commerce by singing ‘Remember Seattle!’.29 And yet, despite the chanted slogans of solidarity with international protest movements, Big Hope’s interview in 2002 with members of some these Budapest-​based activists revealed their fragmented and apolitical nature when compared, for instance, with the Disobbedienti, who had more defined goals and plans of actions. In one of my conversations with Erhardt, he said: The basic difference was clear from the outset that while the Italian group was a real unit, people working together on a regular basis, with a focused activity while the Hungarian, although all knew each other and worked together on issues, was far from being a real group.30

At the same time, there is a deeply problematic aspect in the implied categorization of activist groups and social protest movements in terms of unity against a common enemy, such as neoliberalism. Unlike a unity based on common principles, a solidarity forged against a common adversary implicitly incorporates overtly discriminatory and xenophobic protests groups, such as the neofascists, who likewise oppose neoliberalism, 252

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Big Hope albeit for different reasons (for example, championing nationalist purity). As Richardson poignantly said: There is an important difference between being united by common principles, even though ideas about practices and goals differ profoundly, and being united through an opposition to the WTO, which creates a superficial sense of commonality among groups (like church activists, anarchists, and communists) whose principles are otherwise in fundamental contradiction.31

While the importance of qualifying the goals of activist groups in relation to both local and international concerns cannot be neglected, the aims of Big Hope were different. They wanted to introduce and revive local discussion on what leftist activism and political thinking might mean in the Hungarian context a decade after the fall of the socialist regime. Hislop of Big Hope recalled the scope of their project in the Hungarian context: In presenting the environment and activity of an Italian activist group in Hungary, one aspect of the exhibition at the Liget Gallery was to try to demonstrate through an example in western Europe, that leftist rhetoric and action can be differentiated from that of the Hungarian experience to have some real connection to its stated meaning and have some relevancy and urgent need of application at a grass roots level in contemporary politics.32

Part of the significance of such collectively produced art projects lies in their early (2001–​2) and active role in forging a network of individuals and groups engaged in experimental and independent activities, at a time when later well-​known networks –​such as Indymedia, for ­example –​were just emerging.

In and Out of Institutions The various projects that Big Hope created in the late 1990s and in early 2000 in Hungary provoked a politicized understanding of the public sphere by transforming their gallery-​based works into informal club-​like environments conducive of discursive spaces for debate on specific social and political concerns, such as the legacy of the socialist past for contemporary 253

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Socially Engaged Art after Socialism forms of local activism. Conversation, participation and interactions among artists, activists and viewers featured as key elements in not only Klímaszerviz and Disobedienti but also Saját Szemmel becoming part of the artistic media employed by the artists. As such, the work of Big Hope evoked Maria Lind’s definition of ‘social practice’ as encompassing works ‘turned in different directions  –​toward specific groups of people, political questions, policy problems, or artistic concerns; there is an aesthetic to organization, a composition to meetings, and choreography to events’.33 At another level, however, rather than being concerned only with an ‘aesthetic to organization’, or maintaining ‘a choreography to events’, such works were at once gestures as well as physical objects, combining artistic and activist strategies. The projects morphed the traditional white cube gallery space into durational and process-​based art installations, converging the roles of the artist and curator, and conflating the art institution with an everyday meeting room for a diverse group of art practitioners. As Tibor Varnágy, initiator of Manamana, said in 2002: Manamana functions inside art institutions. Its primary audience is the artists, and those who come to a contemporary art museum. […] On the other hand through the newspaper format we are able to reach out, to leave the walls of the art museum or art institutions and go beyond them.34

This imbrication of individual artworks and institutions transformed the exhibition space into a locus of diverse interests, people and practices. This was also evident in Big Hope’s active collaboration in Manamana, which although initiated by another artist –​Tibor Varnágy –​was nevertheless part of the artists’ Klímaszerviz installation (Figure 11.8). Implicitly, it undermined or rather morphed the traditionally powerful position of the curator –​as the leading creative agent of an exhibition –​into a participant and a facilitator of discursive platforms. The socialized and relational dimension of their exhibition process, in which Big Hope were both curators and artists, mirrored an international curatorial trend emerging in the 1990s that fused the traditionally distinct roles of the artist and the curator. According to writer and theorist Paul O’Neill, ‘the curator resists the exhibition as a closed-​off event-​oriented experience by evolving an exhibition-​making process through conversations between works, artists, and viewers’.35 254

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Figure 11.8  Installation shot, Manamana, a collaborative zine-​project by Tibor Várnagy and Miklós Erhardt at the Budapest Box exhibition in Ludwig Museum Budapest, 2002. Photo by Tibor Várnagy.

The intentionally simultaneous positioning of Big Hope inside and outside institutions transformed their works into statements within the larger socio-​political locality and their specific exhibiting contexts. Klímaszerviz, and Manamana as an integral component within it, was shown in the Műcsarnok/Kunsthalle in Budapest.36 Dedicated to contemporary art, Műcsarnok proclaims itself to be a ‘key art institution in canon-​formation’. As a national institution in the capital city, Műcsarnok must be understood in the local context of polarizing politics at the time between the right-​ wing and conservative national government led by Orbán on the one hand, and the left-​wing city government on the other. Under the tutelage of the city, Műcsarnok reflected its position of supporting experimental works by staging exhibitions, such as Szerviz, which aimed to ‘bring the local art scene and society closer together’ and to ‘fulfil the need for works of art based on direct connection between art/artist and audience’.37 Similarly, Big Hope’s Disobbedienti was installed at the Liget Galéria, a city-​funded gallery space with a long tradition of supporting experimental forms of art. As a space opened during the socialist regime, the gallery has continued to act and function as ‘a bridge for neo-​avant-​garde artists to the international 255

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Socially Engaged Art after Socialism art world’.38 With Tibor Varnágy at its director, Liget Galéria continues to be an important local institution supporting experimental contemporary artists and leftist practitioners. Big Hope’s hybrid art installation of the Dissobedienti’s Torino-​based activist club finds an adequate place within the gallery’s history of exhibitions. The existence of such a history of experimental exhibitions at both Műcsarnok and Liget Galéria is all the more significant to reiterate in light of a number of undemocratic measures taken by Orbán, who has sought to clean the country’s major cultural institutions of left-​leaning or liberal intellectuals by controlling and centralizing funds allocation for the arts. He made changes to the nation’s Constitution that took effect on 1 January 2012, appointing the Hungarian Academy of Arts (MMA), which was founded in 1992 by 22 Hungarian right-​wing artists, as the only institution with the authority to decide on and administer public funds for the arts in Hungary.39 Situated within this politically and culturally limiting context, both Klímaszerviz and Dissobedienti made use of the institution as a platform for communication among contemporary experimental artists, activists and viewers in an attempt to politicize the public sphere. For example, the use of the newspaper format by the artists, which included unedited current reports from the international dissident press, became both an object within an art installation and a medium for participation that extended the art institution beyond its physical walls. The use of the interview format to connect locals with Italian activists placed the Hungarian gallery in dialogue with other international institutions, implicitly contributing to a social network of activists and artists. It was in this symbiotic relationship between artist and art institution on the one hand, and the durational nature of their actions on the other, that Big Hope’s hybrid works articulated the meaning of a public sphere as a communicative process to express and pursue the interests of counterpublics. A multiplicity of informal collaborative and participatory modes of production, organization and exchange among individuals within a group and groups of individuals formed both the media and the tools for Big Hope to advance and advocate for a politicized public sphere. The social networks forged and accessed by the artists through and as part of their creative processes in Re:route in Turin as well as Klímaszervíz and their participation in Manama in 256

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Big Hope Budapest culminated in the Disobbedienti project. Their practice symbolically embodied what Negt and Kluge called a ‘proletarian public sphere’ characterized by ‘forms of solidarity and reciprocity grounded in a collective experience of marginalization’.40 However small and short-​lived, the art and activist initiatives of Big Hope not only represented important platforms for opening debate on the legacy of the socialist past for contemporary forms of local activism, but also feature as key early examples in a regional history of socially engaged art practice that makes use of and returns to the (art) institution to advance its aims. This book concludes with a discussion of three self-​institutionalizing art initiatives from the early 2000s in Bucharest, Budapest and Sofia that continue the legacy of Big Hope, as they probe the limits and potentials of the multi-​dimensional relationships between art, institution, audience and politics.

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12 Self-​Institutionalizing as Political Agency

Since the fall of the socialist regimes in CEE, some of the most polarizing politics in the region have emerged through attempts to come to terms with the socialist past. Among these has been the use of cultural initiatives to rewrite the official history of the socialist decades by Hungarian political leaders, most notably by the current prime minister, Viktor Orbán. As we have seen, his nationalist and conservative FIDESZ political party initiated and financed the Terror Háza Múzeum, which opened in 2002 as a populist vehicle to equate socialism with fascism. A similar circumstance has developed in Romania, where Traian Băsescu, elected president in 2004 and re-​elected in 2009, commissioned the 2008 Presidential Commission Report for the Analysis of the Romanian Communist Dictatorship, which publicly condemned the former socialist government as a criminal regime. In Bulgaria, the largest right-​oriented political party, GERB (acronym for Citizens for European Development of Bulgaria), led by current prime minister, Boyko Borissov, has likewise engaged in anti-​socialist and anti-​ communist rhetoric while fully supporting all EU sanctions. Its cultural policies led to the formation of cultural institutions, such as the Sofia Arsenal Museum of Contemporary Art, which opened in 2011 as the first museum of contemporary art in Bulgaria, used primarily as a PR vehicle for the political leadership. 258

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Self-Institutionalizing as Political Agency By contrast, a number of self-​institutionalizing initiatives have developed in opposition to these public efforts by the right-​oriented political class in Romania, Hungary and Bulgaria to discredit leftist thinking en masse. Most notable among these are the Department for Art in Public Space (2009–​11) in Bucharest; DINAMO (2003–​6) and IMPEX (2006–​ 9) in Budapest; and OGMS (2009–​present). Initiated by a younger generation of artists and curators educated after the fall of socialism, often in Western European contexts, these initiatives were examples of what I call ‘self-​institutionalizing’ art practices. I employ the term ‘self-​institutionalizing’ to describe process-​oriented and activist-​inspired creative practices that depart from or challenge conventional institutional affiliations. Self-​ institutionalizing initiatives are not only legal entities, registered as not-​ for-​profits or as non-​governmental agencies (NGOs), which they may or may not be, but also, and most importantly, include self-​organized meetings, art programmes and internal operations that become regularized and systematized over a period of time. Conceptually, ‘self-​institutionalizing’ implies consciously collective and, most often, horizontal modes of organization, involving collective decision-​making processes and participant-​led programmes that are visible and powerful enough to enact and pursue their own goals within the space of civil society, together or in parallel with official institutions. This process-​based means of becoming an institution, of developing discursive platforms for debate and action, is implicit in the very term ‘self-​institutionalizing’. As a present participle, it stands in explicit contrast to practices decribed as ‘institutionalized’, which as a past tense attribute connotes something made static by completion and a lack of agency to effect changes in those institutions. Self-​institutionalizing practices, then, emerge from a belief in organizing new programmes and activities to combat constraining political, social, economic and cultural conditions. Although different in scale, duration and strategies of engagement, the practitioners of the three initiatives shared a similar goal: to understand art as an active agent in shaping public institutions and civil society. Each was informed by a complex history of both regional and international institutional critique, as practitioners built on and greatly departed from this legacy. The emergence and presence of these initiatives in Romania, Hungary and Bulgaria was closely related to the locally shifting understandings of democratic civil 259

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Socially Engaged Art after Socialism society after 1989. In struggling democracies such as those found in post-​ socialist CEE, experimental forms of contemporary art have fought vigorously against constraining cultural directives. Self-​institutionalizing practices have, under these conditions, played pivotal roles in reviving a leftist-​inspired critique against the dominant neoliberal economic and political order and in questioning politically and institutionally constraining conditions. CEE has a diverse history of self-​historicizing strategies. As Slovenian critic Nataša Petrešin-​ Bachelez has shown, projects such as IRWIN’s anthology of modern and contemporary art histories in CEE, called the East Art Map (published in 2006), Tamás St Auby’s Portable Intelligence Increase Museum (initiated in 2003), and György Galántai and Júlia Klaniczay’s Artpool Art Research Centre in Hungary (formed in the early 1980s) all engaged in new archival strategies to develop different modes of self-​historicization in response to the absence of local art institutions dedicated to documenting, preserving, and presenting experimental forms of contemporary art.1 In each case, the informal social relations nurtured in unofficial social networks during socialism drove these artists’ initiatives of self-​historicization. More recent initiatives, such as DINAMO, IMPEX, OGMS and the Department of Art in Public Space, built on and continued the work of their predecessors, similarly relying on social relationships forged in informal social networks. However, the activities and motivations of these later initiatives were different. The latter made use of horizontal forms of self-​organization in an attempt to shape the content and function of existing institutions and to publicly debate the rewriting of the recent past by political officials. As such, these self-​institutionalizing initiatives, whether temporary or long term, engaged in self-​reflexive and sustained forms of critical discussion on the recent socialist past, on what ‘leftist’ thinking could mean in a post-​socialist context and on the role of local institutions dedicated to contemporary art.

From DINAMO to IMPEX: Expanding Institutional Framing DINAMO and IMPEX comprised a two-​part self-​institutionalizing artistic initiative led by an interdisciplinary group of Hungarian artists from 2003 to 2009. In its first phase, as ‘DINAMO–​Independent Art Studio’, the 260

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Self-Institutionalizing as Political Agency institution functioned as an informal platform for various artistic activities, such as exhibitions, workshops and discussions. In its second phase, as ‘IMPEX–​Contemporary Art Provider’, in addition to a gallery and studio space it focused on archiving and historicizing the local alternative art scene through a book-​length publication. Founded in Budapest in 2003 in a former car repair shop by artist Katarina Šević and Hajnalka Somogyi, the curator, at the time, at Trafó –​House of Contemporary Arts, DINAMO was active until 2006 (when Somogyi left Trafó) as a perpetually changing space. Its rather unusual and paradoxical status, facilitated in part by Somogyi, emerged from its functional symbiosis with the Trafó, a venue equipped with galleries, production studios, and stages for theatre, dance and art performances that were funded by the city of Budapest.2 Within the Hungarian art scene, Trafó (established by the Municipality of Budapest in 1998) was the successor to the Young Artists’ Club (Fiatal Művészek Klubja, FMK). FMK was an important artist-​run space that existed between 1960 and 1998 during the political leadership of János Kádár (1956–​88), when it was renowned for showcasing important art happenings and unofficial art forms, while providing a gathering space for alternative music bands and some of Hungary’s most provocative artists, such as Tamás Szentjóby, György Galántai, Miklós Erdély and Tibor Hajas. While Trafó covered DINAMO’s overhead costs and technical requirements, DINAMO was free to implement its own programmes and devise its own activities. DINAMO functioned as an organically evolving multi-​dimensional project akin to a community centre that incorporated art exhibitions, lectures, screenings, conversations, and one-​night events on a wide range of experimental, leftist activist and environmental topics (Figure  12.1). During its first year, programmes were based on proposals submitted by local artists in response to open calls for entries. In later years, activities emerged spontaneously as various people frequented and met in the space.3 The participants and events included discussions about photography organized by photographer Gergely László under the auspices of the Budapest-​based Lumen Photography Gallery and Foundation; the Hungary-​based Hints Foundation, a collective of female artists and sociologists engaged in participatory projects; local green activist groups such as Green Youth, Recyclemission Hungary and Fair Trade Bufe; and regional and international artists such as Michael Rakowitz and Rozalinda Borcila. 261

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Figure 12.1  DINAMO event, Budapest, 2003. Image courtesy of Katarina Šević.

In its atypical position as a state-​funded cultural institution that was nevertheless free to develop its own contemporary art programming, DINAMO developed a self-​generating approach to institutionalization by expanding the notion of what an institution can be. Through its ad-​hoc and communal activities involving young and experimental contemporary artists, architects, curators and sociologists, DINAMO intervened within the function of the very institution in which it was housed. The initiative gained political agency both because of and despite its location, becoming a platform for enacting civil society as a contingent space for the expression and negotiation of diverse interests. More than a physical exhibition space, DINAMO functioned as a discursive space continuously activatedby its participants, who were most often both the producers of the studio’s activities and their audience. As Romanian-​born, US-​based artist Rozalinda Borcila, whose ‘common_​places’ travelling archive on collectives and collaborative art practices was presented at DINAMO in 2005, said about her visit: DINAMO is occasionally referred to (by its keepers, participants and friends) as a studio, workshop, laboratory, autonomous

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Self-Institutionalizing as Political Agency cultural zone, think-​tank, hub, attitude, hang-​out, while its official mission is ‘a space for work, presentation, experiments in the field of art, culture and communication, outside the established realm of art practice’.4

As Borcila’s observations suggest, DINAMO’s independent and experimental nature hinged on its engagement with the many different kinds of cultural production emerging in Budapest at the time. In October 2006, Šević and Somogyi, along with four new members,5 reshaped DINAMO’s structure and established ‘IMPEX–​Contemporary Art Provider’, consisting of a gallery and workshop space for ‘studio practice, lectures and creative, interdisciplinary initiatives’.6 Its mission was to ‘aid cooperation and permeability between different areas of art, and through its open and receptive structure, [to] creat[e]‌a living connection with various social groups and civilian initiatives’.7 Away from Trafó’s institutional shelter, in its new location on Futó Street, IMPEX shared a building with the alternative pub / night club West Balkan, which covered its operating expenses. As an autonomous space that was physically and conceptually separate from Hungary’s state institutions, IMPEX filled a gap within a local context that was offering little support to young experimental contemporary artists (Figure 12.2). It became a non-​discriminatory platform hosting numerous and varied artists’ projects and programmes, while the seven co-​founders gradually emerged as the space’s gatekeepers and administrators, accommodating gallery shows, projects and workshops led by diverse art practitioners. As Rita Kálmán, one of the co-​founders, observed, ‘For me the Futó Street period [2006–​8] was indeed like a treadmill, like a centrifuge. One project after another.’8 The discursive and open networks informally created at DINAMO and IMPEX, which included an eclectic group of participants, gave both spaces their alternative character. In large part, their independence was due to their sustained and informal modes of collaborative production, organization and exchange among (official and unofficial) networks of individuals and groups, nurturing reciprocity and solidarity. Moreover, as Kálmán suggested in a 2007 interview, the initiators of the organizations became curators of ephemeral exhibitions, workshops, debates in public places and alternative spaces for artists to present their work.9 263

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Figure 12.2  IMPEX event, Budapest, 2006. Image courtesy of Katarina Šević.

When IMPEX lost its temporary space in January 2008 (when the building was demolished) and began to focus on ‘a topic-​centred operational strategy’,10 its practitioners engaged in a self-​institutionalizing practice anchored within a text-​based framework, at the centre of which lay the institution’s attempts at self-​historicization. Instead of hosting outside events, the initiators were eager to generate projects themselves, including a book produced in 2010 called We Are Not Ducks on a Pond but Ships at Sea: Independent Art Initiatives, Budapest 1989–​2009. The book provided a much-​needed compendium of the several autonomous and alternative art spaces in Budapest over the previous two decades, including Artpool Art Research Centre, Bercsényi Club, INDIGO, Ipartev, Újlak Group and others (Figure 12.3). Information was gathered through informal conversations among local artists and former participants in the DINAMO and IMPEX programmes, further suggesting a subversive potential of the informal social connections developed in the processes of self-​determination and modes of self-​ historicization. These initiatives were generated as counterforces to the revisionist attempts of the national government, 264

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Figure 12.3  Spread from the book We Are Not Ducks on a Pond at Sea: Independent Art Initiatives, Budapest 1989–​2009, edited by Rita Kálmán and Katarina Šević. Image courtesy of Katarina Šević.

seen in Orbán’s 2005 recentralization of the nation’s major art museums in the so-​called Palace of the Arts complex, which, as discussed earlier in the text, includes the Terror Háza Múzeum and the Ludwig Múzeum of Contemporary Art.

Department of Art in Public Space: Challenging the Left’s Official Condemnation While the socio-​political context in Romania was different from that in Hungary, the country’s leading political party nonetheless made a similar attempt at monopolizing historical discourse and rewriting the socialist past. One of the foremost artistic initiatives to emerge within this context was the Department of Art in Public Space, which developed from 2009 to 2011 within the framework of E-​cart.ro, an independent, non-​profit organization founded in 2006 as the continuation of a contemporary art magazine with the same name. Composed of a loosely organized and ever-​ changing group of seven artists and curators,11 the Department set up a 265

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Socially Engaged Art after Socialism series of discursive and participatory events, collectively titled ‘Café-​Bar Manifest’, held in cafes and other public spaces throughout Bucharest. The events typically involved a moderator and three or four participants –​local or foreign writers, artists, curators, filmmakers and journalists –​in conversation with members of the public. The events were advertised through posters that indicated a specific theme, such as ‘Public Image’ (2009), ‘Critical Art and Its Spectators’ (2009), ‘Capitalizing Poverty’ (2010), and ‘The Art of Popular Mobilization’ (2010); these posters were distributed at universities, libraries, clubs, and cafes in the city centre. Making use of stylized graphics reminiscent of early twentieth-​century avant-​garde aesthetics and revolutionary slogans, these posters functioned as backdrops for the ‘Café-​Bar Manifest’ events, obliquely aiming to resurrect art’s socio-​political role during the post-​socialist transition (Figures 12.4A–​F and 12.5). The poster for the first discussion  –​‘Communism Hasn’t Happened … Yet!’  –​was inspired by a work by the Romanian visual artist Ciprian Mureșan titled ‘Communism Never Happened’ and depicts former President of the United States Richard Nixon and former Romanian president Nicolae Ceaușescu as black-​and-​white silhouette figures, smiling and toasting with full glasses against a vivid red backdrop. The poster set the visual and historical context for the discursive event, which took place on 18 March 2009 in Bucharest’s centrally located Control Club and foregrounded two opposing interpretations of Romania’s recent socialist past. The official version was articulated both online and in print in the so-​called Tismăneanu Report of 2006 (or, to give it its full title, the Final Report of the Presidential Commission for the Analysis of the Communist Dictatorship in Romania), commissioned by the current Romanian president, Traian Băsescu, and led by the Romanian-​born and US-​based political science professor Vladimir Tismăneanu.12 It is noteworthy, and perhaps no mere coincidence, that in January 2006, based on the Swedish parliamentarian Goran Lindblad’s report, the Council of Europe adopted the ‘1481 Resolution’, which essentially called for an international condemnation of all crimes committed by totalitarian communist regimes.13 The presidential initiative to officially condemn the Romanian communist past as a criminal regime was clearly in line with the European directive and was seen 266

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Figure 12.4A–​F  Posters for six ‘Café-​Bar Manifest’ events, organized as part of the Department of Art in Public Space. Graphic design by Eduard Constantin. Image courtesy of E-​cart.ro.

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Figure 12.5  Poster for ‘Communism Hasn’t Happened … Yet!’, the first ‘Café-​Bar Manifest’, of the Department of Art in Public Space, initiated by E-​cart.ro, 2009. Graphic design by Eduard Constantin. Image courtesy of E-​cart.ro.

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Self-Institutionalizing as Political Agency as an oblique gesture of upholding the accession process of the country, which became an EU member in 2007. The report was meant as a moral, cultural, and political condemnation of the communist past as an ‘illegitimate and criminal regime’ in terms of the violation of human rights and crimes committed by the totalitarian power. In effect, the report functioned purely on a symbolic level, with no concrete political outcomes. One of its central recommendations, for instance, was the development of a lustration law, which would provide a mechanism for investigating all individuals suspected of collaborating with the socialist regime’s secret police and other oppressive state measures, but which was never put into law. Essentially, the report was a tool for political image making, a two-​fold action of giving the impression of reform while resisting actual substantive change, a strategy that has been painfully familiar in the Romanian political context since the late 1990s. Central to this context is the fact that anti-​communism had lost the revolutionary power it had in the 1980s and early 1990s, when it signified a meaningful political stance against Nicolae Ceaușescu’s dictatorial regime. Significantly, a number of the contributors to the Tismăneanu Report were members of the Group of Social Dialogue (GDS),14 which, as I discussed earlier in the text, was among the first post-​1989 initiatives championing an apolitical form of civil society based on a critical anti-​communist position. Although the anti-​socialist and anti-​communist rhetoric continues to proliferate, it now serves mostly as a strategy for political advancement. By having at one time self-​declared anti-​communists to be among the contributors to the Report, Romanian president Băsescu sought to strengthen his political image as a devoted anti-​communist who was sympathetic to both a local public and the EU’s anchoring in neoliberal ideology and the market economy. The persistence of such official manipulations of the collective past in the public discourse is what the Department’s ‘Café-​Bar Manifest’ events aimed to unravel and confront. ‘Communism Hasn’t Happened … Yet!’ included writers who had contributed to the anthology Anti­communist Illusions, a limited-​edition publication of 2008 that critically questioned the validity of the Tismăneanu Report. The authors of Anticommunist Illusions severely criticized the report’s condemnation of leftist thinking in recent Romanian history. According to Ovidiu Tichindeleanu, one of the anthology’s contributors, socialist ideology was simplistically reduced 269

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Socially Engaged Art after Socialism in the report to inconsistent lists of names and numbers of victims and ­perpetrators. He also pointed out the report’s numerous discrepancies between the themes presented in various chapters, as well as the misuse of terms and concepts, such as ‘dictatorship’, ‘totalitarianism’ and ‘Marxist–​ Leninist dogmas’, which the report never defined but rather used as symbols for a ‘biological pathology’ that represented the cause of all evils.15 More than two decades after the Romanian revolution, ‘communism’ continued to be blamed for the country’s high levels of corruption, the super-​ rich oligarchs, and the widening gap between rich and poor. The discursive spaces that provoked such critical attitudes towards the Romanian government’s official discourse were organized as part of a local contemporary art initiative. By creating a public space in which to debate the ideas raised in Anticommunist Illusions, the Department for Art in Public Space built upon the discussion opened up locally by the 2007 exhibition Spațiul Public București / Public Art Bucharest, which I discussed in chapter seven. Curated in the autumn of 2007 by Romanian-​born and Germany-​based Marius Babias and German curator Sabine Hentzsch, the exhibition aimed ‘to confront the inhabitants of Bucharest with the city they live in, harnessing their determination to assume an active role in defining the public sphere’. Sharing similar goals to Project Space developed by the Romanian artist collective h.arta for that exhibition, the Department was envisioned as a multi-​dimensional platform where art was conceptualized as a discursive space for public debate on specific social and political concerns, such as the rewriting of the recent socialist past. Correspondingly to the self-​institutionalizing initiatives in Budapest, the Department for Art in Public Space and its ‘Café-​Bar Manifest’ events were temporary and process oriented, and functioned as discursive platforms designed to engage art in fostering local political resistance. They did not aim to emulate or debunk existing conventional institutions, but rather to challenge the latter’s constraining visions by exemplifying through their own self-​reflexive practice the possibilities of spaces for critical debate and experimentation. As a self-​institutionalizing initiative, paradoxically undoing its own stability as an institution through its perpetually shifting framework and immanent practices, the Department, as part of E-​cart.ro, became itself a gesture that redirected attention to the exclusionary effects of officially institutionalized discourses. 270

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0GMS’s Self-​Institutionalization Similar to the Department for Art in Public Space in its interventionist scope yet adopting a more subversively playful approach, the three-​artist team (Steven Geurmeur, Ivan Moudov and Kamen Stoyanov, who has been living in Austria since 2005) initiated 0GMS in Sofia. A still evolving project, 0GMS has been employing satire as a strategy of institutional critique in order to both challenge and reform the institution from within through their self-​institutionalizing process and space. The collective project was conceptually initiated in 2009 through a video created by Stoyanov and presented in an exhibition at the Salzburger Kunstverein and at the Vienna Art Week, in which the artists feature 0GMS (the letters are the initials of the artists’ last names) as an initiative ridiculing the art market.16 Since its first inception, 0GMS functioned on multiple levels operating in different institutional contexts at the same time. In its most prominent and ongoing role, 0GMS materialized as a nomad art gallery space the size of a drawer. At the Institute of Contemporary Art – Sofia (ICA) in Bulgaria, where it now has an almost permanent home, 0GMS was inaugurated in May 2010 in the top drawer of the kitchen cabinet of the Institute, leaving the rest of the cabinet drawers for the original kitchen use of storing utensils. The drawer exhibition was a video by the young Belgian artist Adrien Tirtiaux about his interventions in the public space. The video played on a small monitor visible once the viewer pulled out the drawer. Until the spring of 2012, when the 0GMS gallery-​drawer staged its first group show curated by Vladiya Mihaylova and Ivan Moudov (the artist whose work I discussed in chapter eight), the space showcased solo exhibitions by young Bulgarian and international artists, such as Vikenti Komitski, Stela Vasileva and Kiril Kuzmanov. The majority of exhibitions displayed new works or site-​specific projects designed by artists specifically for the space of the gallery-​drawer. In its ten solo exhibitions in ICA’s kitchen drawer, 0GMS exhibited artists working in a wide range of media, such as drawing, painting, sculpture, mixed media installation and video. For instance, the young Bulgarian artist Kuzmanov’s solo exhibition in May 2011, (Dis)appearance of Content, consisted of a conceptual gesture. The artist removed the bottom of the 0GMS gallery-​drawer so that 271

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Socially Engaged Art after Socialism the apparent void was filled with a richly textured content that incorporated the gallery kitchen floor along with the viewer’s physical presence, where one could see one’s own feet and shoes. The solo exhibition Guns and Roses Oil (October–​November, 2011) of the young Bulgarian artist Mariela Gemisheva featured a drawer filled with Kalashnikov 47 cartridges emanating the scent of rose oil mixed with a small quantity of explosive (Figure 12.6). Within seconds of pulling open the drawer the viewer’s nostrils were inundated by the pungent perfume of guns and roses while taking in the sight of scattered cartridges rolling around as the drawer was pulled open. While, under Moudov’s initiative, the collectively conceptualized 0GMS gallery-​drawer space was also temporarily presented at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich and Galerie Skuc in Ljubljana, at ICA it continues to exist in a kitchen drawer on an ongoing basis (Figure 12.7). The existing institutional framework into which the 0GMS gallery-​drawer inserted itself was vital for the latter’s existence as a self-​institutionalizing gallery. Both the 0GMS artist collective and the artists featured within its gallery became amassed and appropriated by the larger institutional framework, benefiting from representation and exposure through the Institute’s local

Figure 12.6  Mariela Gemisheva, Guns and Roses Oil, 2011, 0gms Drawer, Sofia. Photo by Dimitar Dilkoff. Image courtesy of Ivan Moudov.

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Figure 12.7  Esther Kempf, L’Adultera / Adulteress, 2010. Image courtesy of Ivan Moudov.

and international network. For instance, the host institution extended its resources to promote and include 0GMS in its programming, and 0GMS’ artists were featured within its space. Each artist’s solo show had a press release, was featured on the website and was included in any of the educational guided tours offered by the Institute on its current exhibitions. 273

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Socially Engaged Art after Socialism As such, one may argue that the potential for critique enacted by a self-​ initiated and artist-​run institution was neutralized through its absorption into the hosting institution. On another level, however, 0GMS had its own identity as an institutionalizing space, which, in this context, functioned in similar way to a protective shield against exterior forces. It resisted a fully institutionalized appropriation by the very fact that it was in a perpetual self-​institutionalizing process. Its central goal was to offer a platform for young artists and recent graduates, both local and international, to meet and to exhibit their work in a local context that drastically lacks spaces supportive of emerging artists. At the same time, at ICA and other locations, 0GMS functioned as an art object, further blurring the boundaries between the space of the host institution and the individual gallery space within its framework. As such, it acted as a parasitic intervention that made use of its hosting institution not only to promote itself but also to reform the host institution from within, ultimately complicating and, in part, making ambiguous the very self-​institutionalizing process itself. The rather ambiguous role of 0GMS as a fleeting parasite was most directly communicated in its participation in commercial art fairs. For example, at the Vienna Art Fair or viennacontemporary, in May 2010, it took over a desk drawer in the booth of the Skuc Gallery, where its conceptual core hovered visibly between presence and absence, between subversively critical gesture and playfully tangible art object for sale. Moreover, in 2011, 0GMS’s gallery-​drawer transformed into a physical gallery space at the initiative of Geurmeur and Stoyanov, who jointly took out a bank loan to purchase an apartment in central Sofia to use as a gallery. This phase marked a turning point in 0GMS’s initial conceptualization. As a commercial art gallery participating in art fairs where it rented and set up a booth displaying art for sale, 0GMS gallery entered the circuit and spectacle of the neoliberal art market. Kamen Stoyanov, the one 0GMS member living in Vienna since 2005, has facilitated the orientation of 0GMS towards the commercial art circuit in the region, a move that implicitly benefited not only his own artistic trajectory both at home and abroad but has also benefited other contemporary Bulgarian artists. In a recent 2015 New York Times article, Stoyanov commented on his time living as an artist in Bulgaria: ‘It’s totally different if you produce a piece of art and don’t have 274

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Self-Institutionalizing as Political Agency the pressure of the market.’17 Viennacontemporary, in particular, is the one art fair in the region oriented towards showing galleries from Central and Eastern Europe, and one that also provides an important look, however cursory, at the number of internationally active commercial art galleries in Bulgaria as well as in Hungary and Romania over the last few years. For instance, at the 2015 edition of the viennacontemporary art fair, Sariev Contemporary from Plovdiv (founded by Vasselina Saieva and Katrin Sarieva, who also founded Open Arts Foundation) was the only commercial art gallery to participate in the fair, while Hungary had four Budapest-​ based commercial art galleries (abc Gallery, Ani Molnar Gallery, Chimera –​Project Gallery and Erika Deak Gallery) and Romania had six galleries (:Baril from Cluj, 418 Contemporary Art Gallery from Bucharest, Anca Poterasu Gallery from Bucharest, Eastwards Prospectus from Bucharest, Ivan from Bucharest and Jecza Gallery from Timișoara). In the 2016 edition of the Viennacontemporary art fair, Bulgaria is not listed, while Romania has the same galleries listed (except :Baril from Cluj and Anca Poterasu Gallery from Bucharest) and Hungary has five Budapest galleries (abc Gallery, Ani Molnar Gallery, Chimera –​Project Gallery, Inda Gallery and Trapez Gallery). In one of our conversations, Moudov said 0GMS was among the very few (two, by one account) contemporary galleries in Bulgaria at that time to participate in art fairs. In a local context that lacks a history of market traditions and private collecting and one that continues to be characterized by a minimal art market, 0GMS represents an important platform for local, young Bulgarians to be exposed to the international commercial art scene. In parallel with 0GMS as a commercial gallery and 0GMS gallery-​ drawer interventions at ICA-​Sofia, Moudov, one of the members of the collective, devised a cabinet with four drawers, which he titled the 0GMS-​ cabinet as part of his own individual artistic practice (Figures 12.8 and 12.9). In the context of the artist’s solo exhibitions (such as at the Sariev Contemporary Gallery, 2011 in Plovdiv, Bulgaria; at the W139 Gallery, 2011, in Amsterdam; and at the Prometeo Gallery, 2012, in Milan), the 0GMS-​cabinet functioned as an art object and part of Moudov’s artistic oeuvre, as well as a gallery space featuring the work of other artists within its cabinet drawers. These artists were mostly young Bulgarians who willingly took part as a way to gain exposure through Moudov’s international 275

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Figure 12.8  Ivan Moudov, 0gms Cabinet 3, 2011, Installation View, W139 Amster­ dam. Image courtesy of Ivan Moudov.

participations and network. The artist provided an exhibition venue for other artists to show their projects and simultaneously made use of them to create his own conceptual artwork. The minimalist aesthetic of the cabinet standing in an almost empty gallery space, as seen in a photograph at the W139 gallery in Amsterdam, easily conveyed the image of a well-​ crafted, ready-​made art object. It remained an authored art object until 276

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Figure 12.9  Ivan Moudov, 0gms Cabinet 1, 2011. Top: Peter Fritzenwallner, Do They Know Something We Don’t? Lower: Esther Kempf, Notvorrat, 2010.

its contents were activated by the presence of the viewers, who decide whether or not to open the drawers. Once the content was exposed, the 0GMS-​cabinet inverted the viewer’s expectation of art objects authored by Moudov through an ironic strategy of confusion, as the names of the other artists both emerged and submerged within the collective initiative 0GMS. 277

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Socially Engaged Art after Socialism As Bulgarian curator Dessislava Dimova observed, ‘The question about the show’s author –​whether it is Moudov himself, the three artists behind 0GMS or the four artists presented in the drawers –​remains open.’18 It was through the social capital forged among all of the exhibiting artists (who were most often friends) in both the 0GMS gallery-​drawer and the 0GMS-​ cabinet that the work challenged authorship expected by and within an established art institution. Collectively, 0GMS’s parallel and multiple manifestations were part of a self-​institutionalizing artist-​run initiative that has offered a vital platform for contemporary art practitioners. 0GMS emerged from within a post-​socialist context in which contemporary art is, as Vessela Nozharova said, ‘outside the interests of private collectors in Bulgaria and is considered more an expression of artistic eccentricity than a true art form’.19 It is significant that one of the 0GMS initiatives is housed within ICA, an institution which, as I discussed in chapter six, has continued to play a critical role in supporting and exhibiting contemporary art by Bulgarian artists. With its gallery-​drawer interventions, 0GMS as a self-​institutionalizing initiative provided visibility to young and unknown artists within the ICA framework, a process which has nurtured not only the interests of the exhibiting artists but also those of the hosting institution and its members. As we have seen, internationally known Bulgarian artist Nedko Solakov has provided ICA with its permanent location in an apartment that he purchased for the institute. Together with his wife Slava Nakovska, Solakov is also the individual with the largest collection of contemporary art –​more than 1,000 works by more than 200 artists –​inside Bulgaria, which they started building in 1987. It can be assumed that the work of some the young-​generation artists exhibiting in the 0GMS drawer-​ gallery at ICA has also entered Solakov’s private collection. This is all the more significant when one considers the insignificant number of collectors in Bulgaria specializing in contemporary art. Belgian art collector Hugo Voeten, Swiss art collector Gaudenz B. Ruff and Bulgarian-​born, London-​ based art collector Spas Roussev are among the very few collectors of contemporary art by Bulgarian artists. It is also significant that over the last two decades, since the fall of the socialist regime, state-​supported art galleries and museums lacked funds to add to their collections.20 Moreover, small and symbolic initiatives such as 0GMS had been significant in a local context where cultural policies, devised by the nation’s 278

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Self-Institutionalizing as Political Agency right-​wing leading governing party, are meant to serve neoliberal market-​ oriented measures. For instance, the opening of a Contemporary Art Museum in Bulgaria in 2011 by the Ministry of Culture functioned primarily as a symbolic gesture for the national image of the country at the European level, since Bulgaria was the last country in the EU without a museum for contemporary art. However, the museum essentially consisted of a renovated building with no permanent collection and with no connection to the local contemporary art scene, however small. The museum is part of the most recent attempt by the Bulgarian state to recentralize the major cultural institutions of the country under its direct control and management. The museum conglomerate includes the National Art Gallery –​ Sofia, the National Gallery of Foreign Art, the newly formed Museum for Contemporary Art and also the newly formed Museum for Socialist Art. The latter represents the officially sanctioned vision of the recent communist regime as a homogenously oppressive past presented in displays that, for example, collapse differences and transformations among the various socialist decades. Similar national recentralization trends have been visible in various countries in the region, such as Hungary, where they also included changes to the nation’s constitution and non-​transparent hiring processes for appointing museum directors to ensure loyalty to the ruling party. And so, paradoxically, artist-​run, self-​institutionalizing initiatives that enter the private commercial art market provide in such contexts critical alternatives to the hegemony of aggressively re-​centralized local cultural institutions.

Self-​Institutionalizing as Platforms for Self-​Determination DINAMO, IMPEX, 0GMS, the Department of Art in Public Space and 0GMS built upon the subversive potentials of informal social networks that unfolded under the socialist regimes within the realm of the second society. However, their practices departed from a late 1980s/early 1990s understanding of civil society as an antipolitical sphere or a sphere of action above politics. By contrast, this younger generation of artists aimed to enact a politicized space of civil society, inserting themselves into existing institutions (as we saw was the case with DINAMO and 0GMS) or 279

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Socially Engaged Art after Socialism functioning politically against state institutions’ initiatives (as we saw with the Department). The initiatives of these artists conveyed an understanding of civil society as a critical sphere challenging nationalist state directives and neoliberal market forces, while often acting from within these very structures. They conceptualized their initiatives as discursive platforms not only to produce new social bonds but also, most importantly, to take part in the making of their national histories. The latter purpose was illustrated by the publication of the compendium of alternative art spaces in Hungary by IMPEX, which archived practices otherwise marginalized by official narratives, by the discursive platforms organized by the Department to question the official rewriting of Romania’s socialist past and the archiving of young and emerging artists of the 0GMS-​gallery-​drawer by and within the ICA institutional history of exhibitions. However, one could argue that the public sphere enacted, for example, in the Department for Art in Public Space’s Café-​Bar Manifest events had a potential for being exclusionary. Participation, although publicly advertised as open to everyone, was limited to a few leftist intellectuals privileged enough to have access to education and information, as well as to be able to articulate critical positions. It may be illustrative in this sense that the event’s location, the Control Club (and other such venues, like the Uniter terrace for ‘Café-​Bar Manifest 4’), was a centrally located, trendy bar mostly frequented by students, artists, musicians, philosophers and young faculty from the nearby universities, thus implicitly addressing and contributing to a selective group of potential audience members. The ‘Café-​Bar Manifest’ did not envision itself as a speaker’s corner where people from all walks of life could come and participate: its physical location by default imposed a tacit distance between itself as a publicly open and free discursive event and the majority of the city’s population living in the vast seas of crumbling socialist apartment blocks on the city’s periphery. A similar case of acting within a relatively closed network arguably could be made for DINAMO and IMPEX as well as 0GMS, which most often represented the work of fellow artists or of those recommended by friends. At one level, the Department evoked the conception and implications of the public sphere theorized by Jürgen Habermas as both an actual space (such as a salon or coffee shop) and one that exists at the level of discourse, in social conversations embedded within specific economic and social 280

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Self-Institutionalizing as Political Agency conditions (pertaining to property owners, for instance, or to education and leisure time).21 At another level, the exclusive circle of individuals debating in clubs and cafes in Bucharest, did in fact represent an important critical presence, enacting a space for ‘counterpublics’. To reiterate, according to Michael Warner counterpublics are ‘defined by their tension with a larger public’, ‘structured by alternative dispositions or protocols, making different assumptions about what can be said or what goes without saying’, and they ‘maintain at some level, conscious or not, an awareness of [their] subordinate status’.22 Certainly, counterpublics have a paradoxical quality akin to the ‘ethical undecidability’ of collaboration and social capital:  as such, their politically emancipatory potential has to be continuously reasserted and negotiated. In different ways, the Department, 0GMS, IMPEX and DINAMO provided an alternative presence in a culturally and politically regressive and constraining local context. For the artists involved, informal friendships became a valuable strategy not only in their nomadic, contingent and immanent practices, but also in other self-​organizing initiatives. For instance, in late 2010, three of the participants in the March 2009 Café-​Bar Manifest  –​Vasile Ernu, Costi Rogozanu and Ciprian Siulea  –​ went on to form the leftist group CriticAtac, an online magazine and public forum that has continued many of the platform-​based programmes developed by the Department before it.23 Likewise, Hajnalka Somogyi, a member of DINAMO and IMPEX, was one of the key organizers of the OFF-​Biennale Budapest inaugurated in Hungary in 2015. As an independent, self-​institutionalizing and alternative platform for contemporary art, the OFF-​Biennale refused any support or affiliation with any governmental offices and relied on a local and regional social network of friends and practitioners for support and organization. The risk, of course, is that the pursuit of such processes and forms of self-​institutionalizing could calcify into new kinds of institutions that may ultimately share many characteristics with those they have struggled against. Filling a need within the local context for contemporary art, the Department was a project of E-​cart.ro, legally registered as an association (in 2006) dedicated to the promotion of ‘the independent art scene in Romania, to set off projects with a multi-​disciplinary approach and to engage a diverse public in the construction of the current artistic discourse’.24 Also initiated in 2006, IMPEX self-​identified as ‘a grassroots, 281

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Socially Engaged Art after Socialism self-​initiated, non-​profit institution’,25 aiming to reach a wider public and support the alternative and independent art scene in Hungary. 0GMS, as a commercial gallery, has run as a small business. Practitioners adopted a legal status, in part because of a need to secure funding from regional and international sources, thereby making them reliant on some of the same political and economic structures they were formed to intervene in. Yet we must also recognize a crucial difference between existing institutional structures and means of self-​institutionalization, for if the former have become increasingly dominated by conservative nationalisms, only the latter have provided local cultural and experimental practitioners with a legitimate platform for voicing different opinions and presenting alternative politics and practices. That difference can even be seen in the structure of these self-​institutionalizing practices. Rather than being grounded in a desire to become yet another bureaucratic entity, each of the (self-​)institutionalizing processes analysed here –​DINAMO, IMPEX, the Department and 0GMS –​suggests a perpetual drive to become and undo institutions at the same time. Indeed, their continuous transformations through aims and actions that paradoxically undermined their own stability as legalized entities are among their main distinctions from their more official counterparts within (and perhaps also outside) the region. This sustained tension reveals their potential to redirect attention to the structural causes of the institutional and infrastructural exclusions, whether cultural, economic or political, that have continued in Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria. In doing so, they show that even temporarily occupying actual spaces for experimentation, debate and self-​representation can be symbolically and politically meaningful as attempts to (re)shape institutional sites of power.

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Conclusion

The critical history of socially engaged art told in Socially Engaged Art after Socialism: Art and Civil Society in Central and Eastern Europe is not a linear narrative. Rather, it is the changing story of parallel art initiatives and of a complex battle between collective and individual interests fought within the curatorial frameworks of exhibitions, negotiations with funding institutions, and the multi-​layered collaborations of artists with various individuals, groups and organizations. It is the story of the cumulative struggle and hope for social justice and empowerment through social and political capital nurtured and cultivated by a number of art practitioners in specific localities. Far from a comprehensive collection of projects by artists and curators in the region, the book focuses on specific case studies from the 1990s and the 2000s in Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania, and the roles they played in shaping local forms of civil society. While these three neighbouring nations do not stand in for the entirety of Central Eastern Europe, the art, curatorial and institutionalizing practices analysed throughout these pages reveal and juxtapose a multitude of competing tendencies embedded within the broader post-​1989 transitional context of societal changes visible throughout the region. These included an embrace of liberal democracy, renewed forms of conservative nationalism, aggressive economic neoliberalism and 283

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Socially Engaged Art after Socialism regional belonging to a European community. Some of the key themes that transpire throughout the book are the tensions between provisional, singular or apparently disconnected artistic manifestations in various localities, and the envisioning of a broader and collective form of belonging in an era of neoliberalism; an interventionist drive to provoke change at the local level and a desire to become visible and participate within the international and global art circuit; and the artists’ continuous oscillations and negotiations in their art practices between a concern for socio-​political content, poetic form, and the ethical dimensions of the relationship with their participants and collaborators. A number of the art practitioners relied on varied social networks not only as media and tools for social and political action but also to convey the global possibility for resistance and transformation that can emerge from neoliberal dominant forms of power. One important outcome of my overall discussion reveals social capital as conceptual and empowering means that recalls theorist Judith Butler’s notion of the ‘performative act’. Butler defined it as ‘one which brings into being or enacts that which it names and so marks the constitutive or productive power of discourse’. The potential for agency lies in the discursive ‘power regimes which constitute us, and which we oppose’.1 As such, sites of power, with and through their fluidity and constant need for the (re)articulation of conventions, contain the potential for subversion, denaturalization and recontextualization. In a similar way, informal social connections have acquired a potential for agency because of their dual and performative nature. Not only a social network assisting those already in powerful positions, social capital accumulates at the grass-​roots level, in marginalized communities and within the artists’ collaborative and participatory processes with various individuals, groups and organizations. For instance, DINAMO, IMPEX and the Department of Art in Public Space channelled informal social networks of friendships into political capital, which materialized in their critical self-​ institutionalizing practices. Yet the scope of both nurturing and making use of existing social relations often also leads to critically ambiguous modes of art making. The managerially produced, multi-​year, community-​based art programmes Art for Social Change in Bulgaria and cARTier in Romania, funded by US organizations and Western European foundations, revealed community 284

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Conclusion engagement as rhetoric that shifted the focus away from the systemic causes and profit-​oriented contemporary neoliberal condition to facilitating localized self-​help. Although such community-​based art programmes were intended as platforms for communication where marginalized groups of people were allowed to speak and voice their concerns, they were not heard. As Andrea Cornwall observed: ‘The very act of soliciting the ‘voice of the poor’ can all too easily end up as an act of ventriloquism as ‘public transcripts’ are traded in open view’.2 As such, a number of charitable gestures of community self-​empowerment often functioned as forms of legitimation for neoliberal economic interests. During the period of socialism within the realm of the second society, informal social networks functioned both as embryonic forms of antipolitical civil society and as vital means of existence for artists, intellectuals and society at large. After 1989, paradoxically, funding institutions, such as the American Soros Foundations and various EU organizations, formally triggered and contributed to the emergence of socially engaged art practice in the region by commissioning local artists to develop projects in societies that rejected socialist and collectivist practices. In parallel with institutionally commissioned works for various exhibitions, alternative initiatives such as ICA in Sofia, and artists collectives such as h.arta in Timișoara and Bucharest and Big Hope in Budapest, combined activist and artistic strategies of engagement to facilitate the self-​determination of their collaborators and participants. In a similar way that recovered the transformative potential of art as a discursive and participatory political practice, a number of artists inserted themselves in existing state institutions (as we have seen with DINAMO in Budapest) or functioned politically against initiatives taken by state institutions (as we have seen with the Department in Bucharest). Instead of directly championing morality in politics, universal human rights and a complete rejection of politics, the self-​institutionalizing initiatives conveyed an understanding of civil society as a critical and perpetually shifting political process that requires us to continuously express and negotiate our individual and collective rights. While each of these art works is contingent upon the context in which it was created and exhibited, they share a number of features that connect them to the worldwide discourse of socially engaged art. First, practitioners are concerned with socio-​political interventions and social justice at 285

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Socially Engaged Art after Socialism local levels and share a multi-​level collaborative or participatory mode of production with organizations and members of specific communities. Second, through their discursive and process-​based work they symbolically embody a critical public sphere with heterogeneous social agents and counterpublics actively involved in self-​reflexive processes of recreating their immediate locality. And finally, they seek to expand the self-​critical potential of the art institution and of self-​institutionalizing practices by using the institutional framework as a public site for collective advocacy. Ultimately, their aim is to function as catalysts for change or as political platforms for collective representation. However small scale, symbolic and short-​lived, such initiatives have been significant in local contexts that continue to be politically, culturally and socially confining. For example, in a 2014 article, Hungarian art historian Edit András referred to FIDESZ, Hungary’s current ruling party, as deeply invested in the creation of ‘a retrograde, ethno-​nationalist state-​system with semi-​feudal, semi-​socialist features’.3 Such features also describe Jobbik, the Movement for a Better Hungary (Jobbik Magyarországért Mozgalom), a radical nationalist political party founded in 2003, which became the nation’s third largest party in the National Assembly after the April 2014 elections. FIDESZ had fulfilled a number of measures proposed by the Jobbik ‘in the name of the people’, such as the mention of the Christian roots of Hungary in the new constitution, the incorporation of private pensions into a state social security fund, its resistance to EU policies and many others.4 In fact, the popularity of leaders associated with FIDESZ and Jobbik in Hungary is part of the worldwide rise of new authoritarian governments. In a 2015 New York Times article, Sergei Guriev and Daniel Treisman referred to Alberto K.  Fujimori of Peru, Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, Viktor Orbán of Hungary and Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey as ‘ “soft” dictators [who] concentrate power, stifling opposition and eliminating checks and balances while using hardly any violence’.5 Such actions can be clearly observed in Hungary. Since 2010, under the leadership of Orbán, the national government had aggressively re-​branded, re-​structured, re-​centralized and downsized institutional staff in all of the country’s major theatres and art museums in an attempt to ‘clean’ the cultural institutions’ offices of liberal-​minded and left-​leaning intellectuals.6 The government’s aim to recentralize culture was evident in changing the Hungarian constitution. As a result, in the cultural sector, the 286

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Conclusion government designated the Hungarian Art Academy, an institution that promoted nationalist ideals, as some sort of ‘shadow ministry that has full power and authority to decide and administer public support for art and culture, including state subsidies’.7 Moreover, this process of national control through recentralization, which is apparent in other CEE nations, had also included non-​transparent hiring processes for appointing the Ludwig Museum’s new director in order to ensure his loyalty to the ruling party. Reacting to and acting against such non-​democratic measures, in recent years a number of Hungarian artists, curators, art historians and students began to self-​organize in groups to advocate for their democratic rights. In 2013, initiatives included the Free Artists by artists Szabolcs KissPál and Csaba Nemes; Outer Space by curators Márton Pacsika and Eszter Kozma, and professor and art critic József Mélyi; and United for Contemporary Art, initiated and organized by the Hungary branch of Tranzit’s international programme. Through such initiatives arts practitioners attempted to make their voices heard and demand participation in the decision-​making process.8 Most recently, the OFF-​Biennale Budapest was initiated in Hungary in 2015 at a grass-​roots level, from an existing network of local and international contemporary art practitioners. Its organization aimed to combat the stronghold of the Hungarian national conservative government by absolutely refusing any support or affiliations with governmental offices and organizations. One of the co-​founders of the OFF-​Biennale said: ‘It aimed to be a catalyst for change –​in financing, in communication, in working methods, in the mind-​sets of people. […] we built a frame within which people can start to self-​organize.’9 The OFF-​Biennale acted as a frame within which different local and international participants organized their own exhibitions and events. Unlike other biennales, the OFF-​Biennale did not have a curator or a curatorial team, a unifying theme or concept, or, most importantly, a clear political vision. Its aim was to build ‘the basis for a sustainable art scene’ and to show that ‘contemporary art is much more than mere luxury and a source of aesthetic pleasure’.10 But its organizers did not communicate what contemporary art might actually mean in the context of the OFF-​Biennale. The ‘OFF’ in its title simply indicated an alternative to the mainstream; ‘it is not “anti” […] it is not aimed against anyone or anything’.11 Instead of a clearly articulated political position, the 287

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Socially Engaged Art after Socialism OFF-​Biennale’s opposition was defined by a complete refusal of governmental funds and collaborations with state-​funded organizations. It saw itself as a ‘civil initiative’ that was alternative and apolitical. The use of terms such as ‘civil initiative’ and ‘sustainable art scene’ in the press release of the OFF-​Biennale is similar to the language used by the Hungarian NGO Fund of the EEA/Norway Grants, the biennale’s main funding institution. The aim of the latter is to ‘strengthen civil society development’ and support projects that fall under a number of specific themes, including ‘environment and sustainable development’.12 To a certain extent, the OFF-​Biennale exemplifies a civic non-​political association akin to the 1980s antipolitical dissident ideals. However ambiguous in defining its role in the broader society, in light of the increasingly authoritarian and monopolizing tendencies of Hungary’s current government, the OFF-​Biennale played a vital role in galvanizing the local contemporary art scene. It is one of the most recent and clear examples of a self-​institutionalizing collective initiative that emerged from horizontally accumulated networks of social capital. It is a promising initiative that could, in future Budapest biennales, continue to harness the power of social networks to advance social justice.

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Notes Introduction 1. The programme of Shock Therapy had three aspects:  the radical liberalization of formerly state-​controlled economies, the cheap privatization of those assets and the democratization of decommunizing polities. Anthony Gardner, Politically Unbecoming: Postsocialist Art against Democracy (Cambridge, MA and London, England: The MIT Press, 2015), p. 43. 2. Ibid., p. 44. 3. Joanne Richardson, ‘The radical left in the postcommunist epoch’. Available at http://commonplaces.org/blog/?p=56 (accessed 1 September 2012). 4. There is one exception:  Dominic Hislop, a member of the Hungary-​based artist collective Big Hope, is from Scotland but resided for several years in Budapest. 5. Michael Kelleher, ‘Bulgaria’s communist era landscape’, The Public Historian 31/3 (Summer 2009), pp. 39–​72. 6. Roland H. Linden, ‘Putting on their Sunday best:  Romania, Hungary, and the puzzle of Peace 44’, International Studies Quarterly 1 (March, 2000), pp. 121–​45. 7. Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone:  The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New  York:  Simon and Schuster, 2000). Also see Making Democracy Work:  Civic Tradition in Modern Italy (Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 1993). 8. Grant Kester, ‘Introduction: The semantics of collaboration’, in The One and the Many:  Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), p. 2. Kester’s theorization of ‘collaborative’ and ‘dialogic’ aesthetics is part of a wider discourse of socially engaged art that includes important contributions by Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (Dijon: Les Presses du Réel, 2002); Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (New York: Verso, 2012); and Maria Lind, ‘The collaborative turn’, in Johanna Billing, Maria Lind and Lars Nilsson (eds), Taking the Matter into Common Hands:  On Contemporary Art and Collaborative Practices (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2007). 9. Margaret R. Somers, ‘Beware Trojan horses bearing social capital: how privatization turned solidarity into a bowling team’, in George Steinmetz (ed.), The

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Notes to Pages 11–20 Politics of Method in the Human Sciences:  Positivism and Its Epistemological Others (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), p. 235. 10. Some internationally well-​known examples of politically engaged art include ACT UP (AIDS coalition to Unleash Power) that addressed the AIDS crisis in 1980s and 1990s America. The uneven effects of global capital accumulation in 2000–​10 has been the subject of a number of projects by the American group Yes Men. Such artists enter the realm of the political through their particular artistic practice by challenging governmental policies, dominant cultural perceptions and corporate measures. 11. Václav Havel, ‘Stories and totalitarianism’, quoted in Klara Kemp-​ Welch, Antipolitics in Central European Art: Resistance under Post-​Totaliatarian Rule 1956–​1989 (London and New York: I.B.Tauris, 2014), pp. 5–​8. 12. Václav Havel, ‘An anatomy of reticence’, in Václav Havel: or Living in Truth, ed. Jan Vladislav (London: Faber and Faber, 1987), p. 166. 13. George Konrád, Antipolitics:  An Essay, trans. Richard E. Allen (New  York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984), p. 230. 14. Kester, The One and The Many, p. 10. 15. Octavian Esanu, ‘What was contemporary art?’, ARTMargins 1/1 (2012), pp. 5–​28. 16. Nato Thompson, Seeing Power: Art and Activism in the 21st Century (Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2015), p. 85. 17. Ibid., p. 98. 18. Kathleen M. Dowley and Brian D. Silver, ‘Social capital, ethnicity and support for democracy in the post-​communist states’, Europe-​Asia Studies 54/4 (June, 2002), pp. 505–​27.

Chapter 1: Points of Contention: Socially Engaged Art Practice in Contemporary Theory 1. Anthony Gardner, Politically Unbecoming: Postsocialist Art against Democracy (Cambridge, MA and London, England: The MIT Press, 2014), p. 10. 2. Klara Kemp-​Welch, Antipolitics in Central European Art:  Resistance under Post-​Totalitarian Rule 1956–​1989 (New York: I.B.Tauris, 2014), p. 8. 3. Amy Bryzgel, Performing the East:  Performance Art in Russia, Latvia and Poland since 1980 (London and New York: I.B.Tauris, 2013), p. 27. 4. Primary Documents: A Sourcebook for Eastern and Central European Art since the 1950s, ed. Laura Hoptman and Tomas Pospiszl (New York: MOMA, 2002, distributed by the MIT Press). 5. East Art Map:  Contemporary Art and Eastern Europe, ed. IRWIN (Central Saint Martins’ College of Art and Design, University of the Arts London: An Afterall Book, 2006).

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Notes to Pages 20–25 6. Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (Dijon: Les Presses du Réel, 2002). 7. Claire Bishop, Participation:  Documents of Contemporary Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006); Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (New York: Verso, 2012). 8. Grant Kester, Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004). 9. The process of communication emphasized by Kester is also an important vehicle of artistic production in what Suzanne Lacy calls ‘new-​genre public art’. Her model of critical analysis for new-​genre public art projects is based on the process of interaction between artists and audience/participants. The strength of Lacy’s taxonomy lies within its systematic deconstruction of the closely interrelated collaborative exchanges taking place within a socially engaged, community-​based project. See Suzanne Lacy, Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art (Seattle, Washington: Bay Press, 1994). 10. Kester, Conversation Pieces. 11. Grant Kester, The One and The Many:  Contemporary Collaborative Art in A Global Context (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). 12. ‘Former West: About’. Available at http://www.formerwest.org/About (accessed 27 May 2016).

Chapter 2: Civil Society, and Social, Cultural and Political Capital 1. Romanian-​born and US-​based political scientist Vladimir Tismaneanu pointed out how, with their emphasis on individual rights and freedoms from state interventions, concepts such as ‘apolitical politics’ and ‘living in truth’ elaborated in CEE have greatly influenced the re-​emergence of social capital debates and the ‘revival of civic initiative and the restoration of substantive freedoms, especially the freedom of association and expression’ in Western democracies. See Vladimir Tismăneanu, Fantasies of Salvation: Democracy, Nationalism and Myth in Post-​ Communist Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), p. 150. 2. George Konrád, Antipolitics:  An Essay, trans. Richard E. Allen (New  York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984), p. 230. 3. Václav Havel, ‘The power of the powerless’, in Open Letters: Selected Writings, 1965–​1990 Václav Havel, ed. Paul Wilson (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), p. 212. 4. Ibid., p. 150. 5. Václav Havel, ‘An anatomy of reticence’, in Open Letters: Selected Writings, 1965–​ 1990 Václav Havel, ed. Paul Wilson (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), p. 321. 6. Petr Kopecký, ‘Civil society, uncivil society and contentious politics in post-​ communist Europe’, in Petr Kopecký and Cas Mudde (eds), Uncivil Society?

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Notes to Pages 25–26 Contentious Politics in Post-​Communist Europe (New York: Routledge, 2003), p. 5. 7. One could argue that there is, in this case, a similarity between ‘antipolitics’ and conservative or republican notions of civil society composed of like-​ minded individuals. This was, likewise, portrayed as functioning separately from state politics, albeit for different reasons –​safeguarding the interests of the market. In the conservatively republican approach, as American political scientists Michael Foley and Bob Edwards point out, ‘civil society itself is decidedly depoliticized, more focused on the substantive benefits to society than on struggles over state policy and direction’. See Bob Edwards and Michael W. Foley, ‘Beyond Tocqueville: civil society and social capital in comparative perspective’, American Behavioral Scientist 42/1 (1998), pp. 10–​11. 8. For a detailed discussion see Margaret Somers, ‘Beware Trojan horses bearing social capital: how privatization turned solidarity into a bowling team’, in George Steinmetz, ed., The Politics of Method in The Human Sciences (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005). 9. Political scientists James Cohen and Andrew Arato characterized civil society by (1) plurality: families, informal groups and voluntary associations whose plurality and autonomy allow for a variety of forms of life; (2) publicity: institutions of culture and communication; (3)  privacy:  a domain of individual self-​development and moral choice; and (4) legality: structures of general laws and basic rights needed to demarcate plurality, privacy, and publicity from at least the state and economy. Andrew Arato and Jean L. Cohen, Civil Society and Political Theory (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), p. 346. 10. As Foley and Edwards point out, proponents of the Western European new left in the 1970s and 1980s, while sympathizing with their contemporary Central Eastern Europeans’ reformist notions, conceptualized civil society in opposition to the status quo represented by the corporate market forces reorganizing European society at the time. Within civil society they created ‘action spaces’, where various organizations and institutions represented the interests of such groups as environmentalists, feminists and peace movements. Ultimately, by seeking to achieve collective good through collective action, they implicitly challenged conservative notions of civil and democratic societies. Bob Edwards and Michael Foley, ‘The paradox of civil society’, Journal of Democracy 7/3 (July 1996), pp. 38–​52. 11. Specifically, his recipe for achieving civil society includes the following measures:  (1)  a decentralized state, so that there are more opportunities for citizens to take responsibility for (some of) its activities; (2) a socialized economy so that there is a greater diversity of market agents, communal as well as private; and (3)  a pluralized and domesticated nationalism, on the religious model, so that there are different ways to realize and sustain historical identities. Michael Walzer, ‘The civil society argument’, in Chantal Mouffe

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Notes to Pages 26–30 (ed.), Dimensions of Radical Democracy:  Pluralism, Citizenship, Community (London: Verso, 1992), pp. 103–​7. 12. Ibid., p. 104. 13. Miriam Hansen, ‘Foreword’, in Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, Public Sphere and Experience: Towards an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere (Minneapolis and London:  University of Minnesota Press, 1993), pp. 29–​35. 14. Ibid., p. 37. 15. Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2005), pp. 121–​2. 16. Pierre Bourdieu, ‘The forms of capital’, in J. Richardson (ed.), Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education (New  York, Greenwood, 1986), pp. 241–​58. 17. Ibid., p. 252. 18. Ibid., pp. 248–​9. 19. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), p. 122. 20. Elemer Hankiss, ‘The second society:  is there an alternative social model emerging in contemporary Hungary?’ Social Research 55/1–​ 2 (Spring/ Summer, 1988), pp. 22–​32. 21. Manuel Castells, Networks of Outrage and Hope:  Social Movements in the Internet Age (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015), p. 10. 22. He defined social capital rather broadly as ‘a variety of different entities, with two elements in common: they all consist of some aspect of social structures, and they facilitate certain actions of actors  –​whether persons or corporate actors –​within the structure’. James S. Coleman, ‘Social capital in the creation of human capital’, American Journal of Sociology 94 (1988), S98. 23. Ibid., S100–​S108. The existence of social capital contributed, for example, to the accumulation of the student’s human capital, which subsequently aided in his/her future accumulation of economic capital. As John Field rightfully observed, Coleman adopted a rational choice sociology, which considers that individuals ultimately pursue their self-​interests, and if they choose to cooperate it is because it is in their interests to do so. See John Field, Social Capital (New  York:  Routledge, 2003), p.  24. Moreover, because of its public good quality (i.e. the benefits of individual investments in social capital are experienced collectively by a group of people rather than by the single individual who invested in it), most forms of social capital ‘are created or destroyed as by-​products of other activities’. See Coleman, ‘Social capital’, S118. 24. Robert D.  Putnam, Making Democracy Work (Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 171–​3. Similarly, in his later work Putnam defined social capital as ‘the connections among individuals –​social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them’ that ultimately

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Notes to Pages 30–36 ‘enable participants to act together more effectively to pursue shared objectives’. Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000), p. 19. 25. Putnam, Making Democracy Work, p. 176. Moreover, in Bowling Alone Putnam argued that since the 1960s the united American community has been coming apart, as seen in the rapidly declining membership numbers in civic associations. The culprits for this unfortunate decline of community-​mindedness are the spread of entertaining technologies, especially television, which take away the time and interest to engage in civic activities, two-​career families, the urban sprawl and generational change. Putnam, Bowling Alone, p. 19. See also Field, Social Capital, p. 32. 26. Pari Baumann, ‘Sustainable livelihoods and political capital:  arguments and evidence from decentralization and natural resource management in India’, paper prepared for Overseas Development Institute (London, 2000), p. 21. 27. Pierre Bourdieu, ‘Structures and the habitus’, in Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press), p. 72. 28. Ibid., pp. 81–​2.

Chapter 3: Historical Antecedents: Participatory Art under Socialism, 1956–​89 1. Janusz Bugajski and Maxine Pollack, East European Fault Lines:  Dissent, Opposition and Social Activism (San Francisco: Westview Press, 1989), p. 7. 2. Václav Havel, ‘The power of the powerless’, in Open Letters: Selected Writings, 1965–​1990 Václav Havel, ed. Paul Wilson (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), p. 186. 3. Elemer Hankiss, ‘The second society: is there an alternative social model emerg­ ing in contemporary Hungary?’ Social Research 55/1–​2 (Spring/Summer, 1988), pp. 22–​32. 4. H. Gordon Skilling, Samizdat and an Independent Society in Central and Eastern Europe (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1989), p. 6. 5. Ibid., p. 36. 6. Ibid., p. 37. 7. Ibid., pp. 39–​40. 8. Ibid., p. 163. 9. For a detailed discussion of neo-​avant-​garde art practices in Czechoslovakia, Poland and Hungary, see Klara Kemp-​Welch, Antipolitics in Central European Art: Resistance under Post-​Totalitarian Rule 1956–​1989 (London and New York: I.B.Tauris, 2014). 10. Skilling, Sammizdat, p. 164. 11. Bugajski and Pollack, East European Fault, pp. 18–​19.

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Notes to Pages 36–38 12. Bugajski and Pollack, East European Fault, pp. 18–​19. 13. Božidar Zrinski, introduction to The 29th Biennial of Graphic Arts, Ljubljana catalogue (Ljubljana: International Centre of Graphic Arts, 2011). 14. Miklós Peternák, ‘Conversation with Miklós Erdély, Spring 1983’, Argus 2/5 (1991), pp. 76–​7. 15. George Konrád, Antipolitics:  An Essay, trans. Richard E. Allen (New  York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984), p. 198. 16. Quoted from a text written by Božidar Zrinski to accompany the honorary award given by the 29th Ljubljana Biennial to Miklós Erdély, ‘Honorary award: The 29th Biennial of Graphic Arts, Ljubljana’, last modified 24 September 2011. Available at http://29gbljubljana.wordpress.com/2011/09/24/honorary-​award/ (accessed 22 June 2015). 17. As an artist, writer, theorist, poet and architect, Miklós Erdély is considered ‘the father of the Hungarian neo-​avant-​garde’ of the 1960s and 1970s. He was an especially influential figure through his experimental teaching studios and workshops that combined avant-​garde practices, new theories of creativity and educational methods influenced by Eastern philosophical traditions. From 1975 until his death in 1986, he led three conceptually and methodologically related courses in art: ‘Creativity Exercises’ (in 1975–​6), together with Dóra Mauer and György Galántai, ‘Fantasy Developing Exercises (FAFEJ)’ and ‘Inter-​Disciplinary-​Thinking (InDiGo)’. See the study compiled by Sándor Hornyik and Annamária Szőke, ‘Creativity Exercises, Fantasy Developing Exercises (FAFEJ) and Inter-​Disciplinary-​Thinking (InDiGo). Miklós Erdély’s art pedagogical activity, 1975–​86’, ed. Annamária Szőke, last modified 30 July 2009. Available at http://monoskop.org/images/1/1e/INDIGO_​summary.pdf (accessed 6 July 2015). 18. Emilia Palonen, ‘Political polarization and populism in contemporary Hungary’, Parliamentary Affairs 62/2 (2009), pp. 318–​34. 19. Bugajski and Pollack, East European Fault, p. 20. 20. George Schopflin, ‘Opposition and para-​ opposition: critical currents in Hungary, 1968–​1978’, in Opposition in Eastern Europe, ed. Rudolf L. Tokes (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), p. 142. 21. Most authors writing on the Hungarian neo-​avant-​garde of the late 1960s and early 1970s agree on three main artistic manifestations:  the Iparterv group, the Szürenon and the Balatonboglár Creative Studio. The Iparterv (industrial planning) group was the first unofficial manifestation of the neo-​avant-​garde in Hungary. It was organized in 1968 in the banquet hall of the inner-​city headquarters of a construction company. Subsequently Iparterv became the name of an entire generation of artists. The show was shut down within the first couple of days and a second exhibition was staged in 1969. In the introduction to the catalogue of the 1968 exhibition, Hungarian curator and art historian Péter Sinkovits stated that the goal was to link up with ‘the best in the international

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Notes to Pages 38–46 avant-​garde’ and that ‘this exhibition is an attempt to create an opportunity for the clarification of the newest experiments’. Led by Attila Csáji, Szürenon was a self-​organized group of artists who worked in a surrealist and organic non-​ figurative aesthetic, organically rooted in the domestic soil. Gábor Andrási, Gábor Pataki, György Szücs and András Zwickl, The History of Hungarian Art in the Twentieth Century, trans. John Bátki (Budapest: Corvina, 1999). 22. György Galántai, ‘Hogyan tudott a művészet az életben elkezdődni? [How was art able to begin its existence?’], in Júlia Klaniczay and Edit Sasvári (eds), Törvénytelen avantgárd:  Galántai György balatonboglári kápolnaműterme 1970–​1973 [Illegal Avant-​garde:  The Chapel Studio of György Galántai in Balatonboglár 1970–​1973] (Budapest: Artpool-​Balassi, 2003), pp. 43–​90. 23. ‘The pre-​story of Artpool, Chapel Studio of György Galántai, Balatonboglár, 1970–​ 1973’, in György Galántai and Júlia Klaniczay (eds), Artpool, The Experimental Art Archive of East-​Central Europe (Budapest, Hungary: Artpool, 2013), p. 31. 24. Klaniczay and Sasvári, Törvénytelen avantgárd, pp. 43–​90. 25. Kemp-​Welch, Antipolitics, p. 128. 26. For instance, the Szürenon group, led by Attila Csáji, comprised artists of different generations, such as Sándor Csutoros, László Haris and István Haraszty, who were concerned with articulating an art form emerging from the local Central European traditions and worked in a style that combined surrealist with organic, non-​figurative forms. At Balatonboglár in 1970 and 1971, they exhibited next to the Iparterv artists, such as István Nádler, Imre Bak and Tibor Csiky, who worked with highly abstract, geometric-​minimalist forms and were primarily concerned with aligning themselves with current Western developments. The fusion of these groups was already facilitated by the R-​exhibition (at the R-​building of the Technical University, Budapest) in December of 1971. Klaniczay and Sasvári, Törvénytelen avantgárd, pp. 43–​90. 27. László Tölgyes, ‘Artpool Art Research Centre, Budapest’ (1996). Available at http://v2.nl/archive/articles/artpool-​art-​research-​center-​budapest (accessed 31 May 2016). 28. Kemp-​Welch, Antipolitics, p. 119. 29. Direct Week was organized two months after the Avant-​Garde Festival, initiated by Szentjóby, but never actually took place. It was banned by the authorities on 30 April 1972. See Gyula Pauer and Tamás Szentjóby, ‘Call for the “Direct Week” dated 18 June 1972’, reproduced in Dóra Hegyi, Sándor Hornyik and Zsuzsa Laszló (eds), Parallel Chronologies: ‘Other’ Revolutionary Traditions:  How Art Becomes Public:  An Exhibition in Newspaper format (Budapest: Tranzit Hungary Benefit Association, 2011), p. 30. 30. Piotr Piotrowski, In the Shadow of Yalta: Art and the Avant-​Garde in Eastern Europe, 1945–​1989 (London: Reaktion Books, 2009), p. 276. 31. Kemp-​Welch, Antipolitics, p. 127.

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Notes to Pages 46–54 32. Piotrowski, In the Shadow, pp. 272–​3. 33. Konrád, Antipolitics, p. 119. 34. ‘Interview with Laszló Beke’, originally printed in Klaniczay and Sasvári, Törvénytelen avantgárd, p. 141, reproduced and translated in in Hegyi, Hornyik and Laszló, p. 33. 35. The photograph appeared in the English-​language art periodical Pages (No. 2, Winter 1970) on Czechoslovakia. Kemp-​Welch, Antipolitics, p. 128. 36. ‘Interview with Gyula Pauer’, 1998, originally printed in Klaniczay and Sasvári, Törvénytelen avantgárd, p.  141, reproduced and translated in Hegyi et  al., Parallel Chronologies, p. 33. 37. John P. Jacob and Tibor Várnagy, Hidden Story: Samizdat from Hungary and Elsewhere, exh. cat. (New York: Franklin Furnace Archive, 1990). 38. Sol LeWitt, ‘Paragraphs on conceptual art’, in Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (eds), Art in Theory 1900–​2000:  An Anthology of Changing Ideas (United Kingdom: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), p. 846. 39. László Beke, ‘Conceptual tendencies in Eastern European art’, in Luiz Camnitzer, Jane Farver and Rachel Weiss (eds), Global Conceptualism Points of Origin, 1950s–​1980s, exh. cat. (New York: Queens Museum of Art, 1999), p. 42. 40. Gábor Tóth, email correspondence with the author, June 2010. 41. József Ladanyi, A Helyettes Szomjazók Szenvedélyes Élete / The Passionate Life of Substitute Thirsters, exh. cat. (Székesfehervar, Hungary:  István Kiraly Múzeum [King Stephen Museum], 1990). 42. János Sugár, The Újlak Group as a Working Method, bilingual catalogue (Dunaújváros, Hungary: The Institute of Contemporary Art, 1992). 43. Other similar, collectively staged exhibitions in alternative spaces were Blue Steel (summer 1989), Blue Pencil (1989) and Blue-​Red (1990), which ‘were affiliated with three trends in the art of the eighties: underground art, avant-​garde parody and the Post-​C onceptual approach’. Gábor Andrási, Gábor Pataki, György Szücs and András Zwickl, The History of Hungarian Art in the Twentieth Century, trans. John Bátki (Budapest: Corvina, 1999), p. 251. 44. It even made connection with the Greens in Germany and was awarded the Swedish ‘alternate Nobel Prize’. Skilling, Samizdat, p. 184. 45. Emilia Palonen, ‘Political polarization and populism in contemporary Hungary’, Parliamentary Affairs 62/2 (2009), p. 323. 46. Jacob and Várnagy, Hidden Story. 47. Konrád, Antipolitics, p. 198. 48. Steven Sampson, ‘The informal sector in Eastern Europe’, Telos 66 (Winter 1985–​6), p. 52. 49. Katherine Verdery, National Ideology Under Socialism: Identity and Cultural Politics in Ceaușescu’s Romania (Berkeley CA: University of California Press, 1991), p. 111.

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Notes to Pages 54–64 50. The aesthetic of socialist realism, exemplified by bright portraits of factory workers and collectivized peasants, functioned as the party’s visual language meant to hide the surrounding reality with the ideological (non)reality of a utopian communist future. 51. Bugajski and Pollack, East European Fault, p. 14. Also, on the front page of its third issue in 1961, Arta Plastica, the only official Romanian contemporary art magazine during this time, featured a photograph of Gheorghiu-​Dej and his entourage visiting a contemporary art exhibition. Appearing in the place where usually a portrait of Lenin or Stalin would appear, the presence of local Party’s leadership symbolized Romania’s independent and nationalist road to socialism. Magda Carneci, Artele Plastice in Romania, 1945–​1989 [Plastic Arts in Romania, 1945–​1989] (Bucharest: Editura Meridiane, 2000), p. 54. 52. Bugajski and Pollack, East European Fault, p. 26. 53. Carneci, Artele Plastice, p. 52. 54. Ibid., pp. 85–​6. 55. Ibid., pp. 108–​9. 56. Kemp-​Welch, Antipolitics, p. 104. 57. Verdery, National Ideology, pp. 101–​13. 58. Certainly, this generation of young artists oriented towards international contemporary art trends was in conflict with the official artists creating a nationalist-​communist form of art. 59. Ileana Pintilie, Actionism in Romania During the Communist Era (Cluj-​ Napoca, Romania: Idea Design and Print, 2002), p. 39. 60. Ibid., p. 35. 61. Ibid., p. 39. 62. Ana Lupaș, ‘Press Release’ for the exhibition Europe, Europe: A Century of the Avant-​Garde in Central and Eastern Europe, in Bonn, Germany, 1994. 63. Pintilie, Actionism, p. 39. 64. Interview with the artist, ‘Ana Lupaș: In afara intrebarii De Ce și Pentru Cine nu exista arta’ [Ana Lupaș: Outside the Question ‘Why and For Whom], author’s translation from Romanian into English, Munca newspaper, Bucharest, Romania (22 August 1972), p. 24. 65. Verdery, National Ideology, p. 115. 66. Alexandra Titu, ‘Experimentalism in Romanian Art after 1960’, in Experiment in Romanian Art since 1960 (Bucharest: Soros Centre for Contemporary Art, 1997), pp. 10–​29. 67. Pintilie, Actionism, pp. 8–​9. 68. Lupaș, ‘Press release’, 1994. 69. Sampson, ‘The informal sector’. 70. Ibid., p. 50. 71. Neo-​Orthodox or Neo-​Byzantine art was another artistic trend that evolved during the 1980s as a spiritualization of the experimental drive initiated by

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Notes to Pages 64–66 artists such as Paul Gherasim, Constantin Flondor and Horia Bernea. Cirneci pointed out that at the time of its appearance the movement was seen on the international art scene as a regression and a stylistic backwardness because it employed an outdated religious iconography. However, within the Romanian local context the religious inclination of this artistic trend was felt as an alternative orientation and was considered as an act of moral courage against communist propaganda and ideological limitation. Carneci, Artele Plastice, pp. 58–​62. 72. Bugajski and Pollack, East European Fault, p. 8. 73. Ibid., pp. 22–​3. 74. Michael Kelleher, ‘Bulgaria’s communist era landscape’, Public Historian 31/3 (Summer 2009), pp. 39–​72. 75. The first big official break with the style of socialist realism occurred in 1961 with the first exhibition of Young Artists, whose works showcased a variety of modernist styles including abstract tendencies. Some of the artists of this generation became powerful leaders of the UBA, and the rest lived an isolated life while holding public jobs as graphic designers for local magazines and newspapers in order to make a living. Based on the author’s interview with Bulgarian art critic Diana Popova, November 2011, Sofia, Bulgaria. 76. The UBA kept lists of names of artists (that included professors of art in the National Academy of Fine Arts, their students and artists associated with the Ministry of Culture association) whose works in such exhibitions the State should purchase. Popova, interview with the author, November 2011, Sofia, Bulgaria. 77. According to the Gallery’s website, its collection includes ‘the art of distant lands, of exotic tribes and nations, of old and new ages coexisting with the modern European tendencies, with traditional and religious pictorial principles in the chronological span of a millennium’. ‘National Gallery for Foreign Art’. Available at http://www.foreignartmuseum.bg/en/about.html (accessed 11 November 2011). 78. Iara Boubnova, ‘In the local discourse, as in the international context’, in Bojana Pejic and David Elliot (eds), After the Wall: Art and Culture in Post-​ Communist Europe (Stockholm: Moderna Museet, 1999), pp. 56–​9. 79. The presence of a large number of artist groups and collectives in the late 1980s and early 1990s emphasizes the aim of the practitioners: that of developing a local scene of contemporary art capable of competing at an international level. By the mid-​1990s, however, artists groups began to disintegrate. Nikolay Boshev, Boris Klimentiev, Diana Popova and Svilen Stefanov (eds), N-​Forms: Reconstructions and Interpretations (Sofia: Soros Centre for the Arts, 1994), exh. cat.. 80. The courtyard and hallways of Sofia University, an abandoned brewery and the roof of the UBA were some of the alternative spaces in which artists staged their activities. See Boubnova, ‘Local discourse’, pp. 56–​9.

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Notes to Pages 67–70 81. She witnessed the happening of May 1986 in Turgovishte, staged by a young and middle generation of artists whose collective gesture materialized in an outdoor mixed media exhibition that included an eclectic installation of paintings and painted wood objects. While it was both a humorous and a serious gesture, the artists challenged the traditional dimension of a gallery space. Author’s interview with Popova, November 2011. Other works by the Turgovishte Group include the happening In the Studio (1987), the happening Ecology (1988), the exhibitions Big Photography and Labyrinth (1989), and the action Big Print (1990). Other works by the Dobrudzha Group include the happening in Albena The Dress (1988), and the installation and two performances of The Dress (1989). 82. Maria Vassileva, ‘The outset of the Bulgarian avant-​garde?’, in Art in Bulgaria: Magazine for the Visual Arts 17 (1994), pp. 6–​8. 83. Vassileva, ‘The outset’, p. 8. 84. Boubnova, ‘In the local discourse’, pp. 56–​9. 85. Iara Boubnova, in IRWIN (ed.), East Art Map: Contemporary Art and Eastern Europe, (London: Afterall, 2006), pp. 159–​60. 86. Collective activities of the City Group include:  The City? (1988) exhibition in Sofia, The Tower of Babylon (1989), a 9-​metre-​high and over 50-​ton metal sculpture in front of the House of Humour in Gabrovo, Bulgaria; the public action Chameleon (1990) in front of the National Palace of Culture; and the Attic Exhibition (1991) in a private studio, which was the last joint City Group exhibition. Boshev et al., N-​Forms. 87. Vladiya Mihaylova, ‘City Group: in the beginning of the 1990s they establish a boundary in Bulgarian art’. 88. From 1989 to 1991 the C(e)YA provided a framework of legitimacy for basically any artist working with ‘non-​conventional forms’ of art. Nikolay Boshev, Boris Klimentiev, Diana Popova and Svilen Stefanov (eds), N-​Forms: Reconstructions and Interpretations, exh. cat.. (Sofia: Soros Center for the Arts). The C(e)YA endorsed non-​conventional forms of art, initiated changes within the UBA, and promoted and supported the founding of groups, galleries, and organizations outside the UBA’s jurisdiction. Diana Popova, ‘Happy end’ (1991) in Art in Bulgaria: Magazine for the Visual Arts 17 (1994), p. 16. 89. Moreover, non-​artist supporters of the event, such as the editors at the Pulse newspaper, helped spread the word. Author’s interview with exhibition curator Diana Popova, November 2011. 90. IRWIN (ed.), East Art Map: Contemporary Art and Eastern Europe (London: Afterall, 2006). 91. The multiple art manifestations paralleled various yet isolated instances of oppositional activities. For instance, Yonko Yankov was sentenced to two years in prison in 1984 for visiting Western embassies to discuss human rights issues in Bulgaria and for allegedly being a member of a monitoring group. ‘In

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Notes to Pages 70–72 1987, six dissidents appealed to the Vienna CSCE conference and proposed that an international commission monitor the abuse and respect of human rights in Bulgaria. In 1985 oppositional leaflets created by workers in a locomotive factory and signed “Dimitrov” featured criticism of the government and appealed to the population to stage protests against the machinery of exploitation and oppression.’ The presence of dissident manifestations, however small, was possible because of an ambiguous political environment, where the local party-​state was restructuring the country on a national course initiated in 1986 by Gorbachev’s Perestroika. In 1988 a group of Bulgarian dissidents formed the Independent Association for the Defence of Human Rights to seek international support for civil rights. Radio Free Europe Research, Bulgarian Situation Report/6, 14 July 1988, item 4, and Radio Free Europe Research, Bulgarian Situation Report/5, 27 May 1986, item 1, cited in Bugajski and Pollack, East European Fault, pp. 139–​40.

Part I: From Second Society to Civil Society 1. Timothy Garton Ash, ‘Eastern Europe: the year of truth’, New York Review of Books 37/2 (15 February 1990), pp. 17–​22. 2. ‘The wall embodied the abstract border with a manifestly arbitrary physical barrier, cutting off traffic along what were busy streets. To the global metropolis it meant a shift of continents, a freezing of the compass.’ Sibelan Forrester, Elena Gapova and Magdalena J.  Zaborowska, ‘Introduction:  Mapping postsocialist cultural studies’, in Sibelan Forrester, Elena Gapova and Magdalena J. Zaborowska (eds), Over the Wall / After the Fall (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2004), p. 8. 3. David Elliot and Bojana Pejic (eds), After the Wall, Art and Culture in Post-​ Communist Europe, exh. cat. (Stockholm: Moderna Museet, 1999), pp. 159–​205. 4. Inconsistent attempts during the 1990s to define, for instance, which countries constitute the Balkans are illustrative of the problematic geopolitics and cultural dissonances during post-​communism. According to the 1993 French Le Petit Larousse Illustré, the Balkan states include Albania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Greece, Slovenia, Turkey (the European portion) and Yugoslavia. In the 1998 Encyclopedia Britannica CD, the Balkan Peninsula has a slightly different composition, comprising all the countries mentioned above except Turkey. The 1998 Compton’s Interactive Encyclopedia CD describes the Balkans as including Albania, Bulgaria, Greece, Turkey (the European portion), Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Yugoslavia, Macedonia and Romania. A country such as Romania becomes part of the Balkans in some instances but is outside the Balkans in others, depending on the interests or arguments pursued.

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Notes to Pages 72–73 5. Officially, the new discourse on Central Europe was not premised on a nationalist dimension, but rather rested on accentuating the region’s cultural essence, a concept with essentially political aspirations. Writing in 2001, political scientist and social anthropologist Iver Neumann identified three kinds of representation of Central Europe. The first was a politically successful self-​representation, which denoted the Czech Republic, Poland and Hungary as Central European and hence accepted into NATO and first in line for EU membership. Second was a politically aspiring representation of Central Europe invoked by the belt of states from Estonia to Bulgaria, a self-​representation that was not recognized by the Czechs, Poles and Hungarians and only by a few Western Europeans. The third was a politically successful representation of Central Europe known as Mitteleuropa, centred on Germany and usually not seen as comprising other nations. See Iver B. Neumann, ‘European identity, EU expansion, and the integration/ exclusion nexus’, in L. E. Cederman (ed.), Constructing Europe’s Identity, The External Dimension (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2001), p. 150. The essence of the politically successful self-​representation was captured by Milan Kundera. Kundera distinguished between Western Europe, Central Europe and Russia. Kundera’s depiction of a Central European identity centred on its culture –​tied to ancient Rome and the Catholic Church –​which sets it entirely apart from ‘totalitarian Russian civilization’ and Eastern Europe, its close neighbour, anchored in Byzantium and the Orthodox Church. As a result, after 1945 the countries in Central Europe considered the Russian occupation not only a political catastrophe but also an attack on their civilization. See Milan Kundera, ‘The tragedy of Central Europe’ (1984) in Gale Stokes (ed.), From Stalinism to Pluralism: A Documentary History of Eastern Europe since 1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 217–​23. 6. There is also a third category, which will not be addressed in this book, that includes exhibitions such as Europa, Europa: das Jahrhundert der Avantgarde in Mittel –​und Osteuropa (Kunst und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Bonn, 1994), Reduktivismus:  Abstraction in Poland, Czechoslo­ vakia and Hungary, 1950–​1980 (Museum Moderner Kunst Stifung Ludwig, Wien, 1992) and the 50 or so publications produced by ifa-​Galerie in Berlin that attempt to establish continuity with the pre-​communist past, specifically with the interwar avant-​garde period, in order to demonstrate the universal character of visual arts produced in the East while ultimately aiming at the construction of the ‘self-​as-​European’. 7. Roxana Marcoci, ‘ “What happened to us” ’, interview with Dan Perjovschi by Roxana Marcoci’, in Kristine Stiles (ed.), States of Mind: Dan and Lia Perjovschi, exh. cat. (Durham, NC:  Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, 2007), pp. 166–​7.

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Notes to Pages 75–77

Chapter 4: Civil Society in a Period of Post-​Socialist Transition 1. Milada Anna Vachudova, Europe Undivided:  Democracy, Leverage, and Inte­ gration After Communism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 11–​34. 2. Vladimir Tismăneanu, Fantasies of Salvation:  Democracy, Nationalism and Myth in Post-​Communist Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), pp. 145–​8. 3. George Konrád, Antipolitics:  An Essay, trans. Richard E. Allen (New  York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984), p. 231. 4. However, the gradual opening up of the former secret police files revealed a different story. Not only were public and private spaces highly controlled by the numerous party-​state informants, but large segments of the population were integrated into the functioning of the overall system. This topic has been discussed in recent conferences, such as ‘Arhibele Politiei Secrete. Abordari Interdisciplinare’ (The Secret Police Archives. Interdisciplinary Approaches) organized by the Platforma Art Space of the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Bucharest, Romania, 11 May 2012, which I attended. The conference was organized in conjunction with the exhibition Second Life in Communism: People, Attitudes and Places at the same space. See my review of this exhibition and summary of the conference, ‘Second life in communism: critical reflections’, in Long April, Texts about Art, online magazine in Romanian and English, Issue 3, August 2012. Available at http://www.e-​cart. ro/longapril/3/en/start_​page.php (accessed 28 June 2015). 5. Václav Havel, ‘An anatomy of reticence’, in Open Letters:  Selected Writings, 1965–​1990 Václav Havel, ed. Paul Wilson (New  York:  Vintage Books, 1992), pp. 293–​4. 6. The Danish Cooperation for Environment in Eastern Europe (DANCEE) lists 2,700 environmental NGOs in 15 CEE countries. For example, in Hungary there were 973 environmental organizations in 1998, out of which 141 had been founded before 1990. Cas Mudde, ‘Civil society’, in Judy Batt, Paul Lewis and Stephen White (eds), Developments in Central and East European Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), pp. 213–​28. 7. Galina Koleva, ‘Dominant approaches to civic participation’, in Galina Koleva, Siyka Kovacheva, Petar-​ Emil Mitev, Nikolai Tilkidjiev and Stefan Videv (eds), Civil Society, Citizenship and Civic Participation in Bulgaria (Plovdiv, Bulgaria: MAKROS Publishing), pp. 23–​8. She draws this information from the international non-​governmental organization CIVICUS: World Alliance for Citizen Participation, implemented in more than 50 countries. In Bulgaria, the Balkan Assist Association (BAA) implemented the project from December 2004 to March 2005. Incipient forms of civil society in the early 1990s could be seen in non-​political movements, such as the Committee for Environmental

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Notes to Pages 77–84 Protection to address the pollution in the city of Russe as well as the movement for the protection of human rights, especially as related to the ethnic Turkish minority and the reversal of the name change process that occurred in the 1980s as well as in the Roma minority. 8. It was conducted by Richard Rose and Christian Haerpfer in 1995; a total of 10,441 people were interviewed. 9. Cited in Marc Morje Howard, ‘The weakness of postcommunist civil society’, Journal of Democracy 13/1 (January 2002), pp. 158–​60. 10. Howard, ‘Weakness’, pp. 161–​3. 11. 22: publicaţie săptămînală editată de Grupul pentru Dialog Social 1/1 (1990), quoted in Gail Kligman, ‘Reclaiming the public: a reflection on creating civil society in Romania’, in East European Politics & Societies 4/3 (September 1990), pp. 395–​6, DOI: 10.1177/0888325490004003002. 12. David Harvey, ‘The construction of consent’, in A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 42. 13. David Harvey, ‘Introduction’, in A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 2. 14. It may be recalled here that since 1968 Hungary already had a ‘goulash’ type of communism that included free-​market features, so the full transition to a neoliberal economy was shorter than that of other CEE countries. 15. Bojana Pejic, ‘The dialectics of normality’, in David Elliott and Bojana Pejic (eds), After the Wall: Art and Culture in Post-​Communist Europe (Stockholm: Moderna Museet, 1999), p. 17.

Chapter 5: Antipolitics: Exhibitions at the Soros Centres for Contemporary Art 1. Karl Raimund Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, Vol. 1: The Spell of Plato (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1971). 2. Also several members of the Association were trained in Oxford on Foundation scholarships. George Soros, Underwriting Democracy (New  York:  The Free Press, 1991), p. 10. 3. SCCA:  Bulletin 1991–​1994, ed. Suzanne Mészöly and Andrea Szekeres (Budapest: Soros Centre for Contemporary Arts, 1994). 4. Anthony Gardner, Politically Unbecoming: Postsocialist Art against Democracy (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2015), p. 45. 5. Barnabás Bencsik and Suzanne Mészöly (eds), Polyphony: Social Commentary in Contemporary Hungarian Art, exh. cat. (Budapest:  Soros Centre for Contemporary Arts, 1994), pp. 14–​18. 6. Emilia Palonen, ‘Political polarization and populism in contemporary Hungary’, Parliamentary Affairs, 62/2 (2009), p. 323.

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Notes to Pages 84–93 7. The definition was from a dictionary of the Hungarian language, 1980, Vol. 5, p. 89. See Bencsik and Mészöly, Polyphony, p. 18. 8. Ibid., p. 301. 9. Ibid., p. 14. 10. Soros, Underwriting Democracy, p. 131. 11. Ibid., p. 10. 12. SCCA: Bulletin, 1994, p. 11. 13. Bencsik and Mészöly, Polyphony, p. 291. 14. Ibid., p. 164. 15. Ibid., p. 272. 16. Gyula Várnai –​Blind World –​an overview, 2015, ‘News’, Kibla Portal. Available at http://www.kibla.org/en/news/news/?no_​cache=1&tx_​ttnews[tt_​news]=2310& tx_​ttnews[backPid]=1&cHash=f7b63048f1 (accessed 6 June 2016). 17. Klara Kemp-​Welch, Antipolitics in Central European Art:  Resistance under Post-​Totaliatarian Rule 1956–​1989 (New York: I.B.Tauris, 2014), p. 265. 18. It was called ‘variation 2’, since the concept was based upon Hungarian artist Balázs Beöthy’s rejected proposal that was submitted to the same exhibition. Bencsik and Mészöly, Polyphony. 19. See IPUT’s project proposal published in ibid., p. 257. 20. IPUT’s proposal was shaped by one of their earlier works in 1970, which was ‘an audio-​tactilist visual-​poem for the blind’, and Balázs Beöthy’s rejected proposal to the same exhibition. Moreover, their participation in the exhibition was part of the Parallel Union’s Art Strike 1990–​3 for ‘the impossible economic and legal circumstances of artists working in the cultural sphere’. Ibid. 21. Laszlo Beke, ‘Polyphony:  the consonance of politics, society and art?’, in Bencsik and Mészöly, Polyphony, p. 94. 22. Bencsik and Mészöly, Polyphony, pp. 31–​6 and 317. 23. Edit András (1997), ‘High and low:  a painful farewell to modernism  –​difficulties in the period of transition’, in David Elliot and Bojana Pejic (eds), After the Wall, Art and Culture in Post-​Communist Europe, exh. cat. (Stockholm: Moderna Museet, 1999), p. 126. 24. Václav Havel, ‘An anatomy of reticence’, in Open Letters: Selected Writings, 1965–​ 1990 Václav Havel, ed. Paul Wilson (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), p. 321. 25. Moreover, the numerous artist groups such as the Újlak and the Hejettes Szomjazók, formed in the late 1980s and in the first couple of years of the 1990s, were another form of collaborative work in staging spontaneous art events and one-​night exhibitions in abandoned buildings for an eclectic public. 26. Bencsik and Mészöly, Polyphony, p. 291. 27. Calin Dan (ed.), Exhibition 01010101…, exh. cat. (Bucharest: Soros Centre for Contemporary Art, 1994), p. 10. 28. Alina Mungiu-​Pippidi, Politica Dupa Communism (Politics after Communism), author’s translation (Bucharest: Humanitas, 2002), pp. 34–​41.

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Notes to Pages 93–100 29. Ibid. 30. Although the National Peasant Party (NPP) – which organized a meeting of protest in order to block Iliescu and other former communist leaders from running in the May 1990 election – ignited the protest, the street protesters broke their alliance with NPP on the second day. Daniel Beland and Julia Brotea, ‘“Better dead than communist!” Contentious politics, identity formation, and the University Square phenomenon in Romania’, Spaces of Identity 7/2 (2007), p. 78. 31. Beland and Brotea, ‘Better dead’, p. 87. 32. Ibid. 33. The 1994 Annual Exhibition jury members were Katalyn Neray, director of the Ludwig Museum Budapest, Hungary; Christoph Doswald, curator and art critic from Switzerland; Nicolae Alexei, president of the Romanian Union of Artists; Mircea Chivu, sociologist; Mihai Cojocea, executive director of a computer publishing centre; Liviana Dan, curator, Brukenthal Museum; Corinne Fery Von Arx, SCCA managing director; and Călin Dan, SCCA artistic director. Archival file of SCCA Bucharest internal documentation. Accessed at the Institute for Contemporary Art Bucharest, Romania, Summer, June, 2010. 34. Suzanne Lacy, ‘Debated territory: toward a critical language for public art’, in S. Lacy (ed.), Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art (Seattle: Bay Press, 1995), pp. 171–​88. 35. Miwon Kwon, One Place After Another: Site-​Specific Art and Locational Identity (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004), p. 123. 36. The companies that produced the metal parts of the installation were SC Termorom SA, SC Fortur SA and SC Unimet SA. See newspaper article by Ilie Caleanu, ‘Ansamblu monumental la Tăușeni’ (A monumental structure in Tăușeni), Adevarul de Cluj, 14 September 1994. 37. Radu Santejudean, ‘Sfarsitul unui inceput’ (The end of a beginning), Adevarul de Cluj, 1 November 1994, p. 9. 38. Dan, Exhibition, pp. 13 and 66–​8. 39. Santejudean, ‘Sfarsitul unui inceput’, 1 November 1994, p. 9. 40. Alexandru Chira, ‘Installation for reminding, for suggesting the rain and the rainbow  –​project’, in Călin Dan (ed.) Exhibition 01010101…, exh. cat. (Bucharest: Soros Centre for Contemporary Art, 1994), p. 66. 41. Caleanu, ‘Ansamblu Monumental la Tăușeni’, 14 September 1994. 42. Artist quoted in Santejudean ‘Sfarsitul unui inceput’, 1 November 1994, p. 9. 43. Lucian Boia, Romania, Tara de Frontiera a Europei (Romania, Borderland of Europe), trans. by the author (Bucharest: Humanitas, 2002), p. 121. 44. Marcel Bunea in Călin Dan (ed.), Exhibition 01010101…, exh. cat. (Bucharest: Soros Centre for Contemporary Art, 1994). 45. ‘Traces of the Exodus, a project by Marcel Bunea’, in Revista 22, Culture section, V/44 (1994), p. 15.

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Notes to Pages 100–109 46. Exhibition brochure to accompany the opening of Exhibition 01010101… exhibition on 2 November 1994 at the Romanian Peasant Museum, Bucharest, Romania. 47. Local art historical precedents of such collective actions include the ephemeral Damp Installation (1970) in Mărgău Village created by the Romanian artist Ana Lupaș, which I discussed in detail in the previous section. 48. Marcel Bunea in Călin Dan (ed.), Exhibition 01010101…, exh. cat. (Bucharest: Soros Centre for Contemporary Art, 1994). 49. Each morning (for four days) at 2 a.m. the artist picked up 200 newspapers from the newspaper printing press and worked throughout the night with the help of his friends to imprint an image for each daily run. At 7 a.m. Timar distributed the papers at the most central newspaper stands in the city, waiting around for people to buy them. In addition to the artist, there was a reporter from the local TV channel PRO TV to observe the artist action, and representatives from the SCCA in Bucharest taking photographs and filming the action. Ibid. 50. Corneliu Popa, ‘The art that gets out in the streets’ (‘Arta care iese in Strada’), in Transylvanian Gazette / Gazeta de Transilvania (Braşov, Romania), 10–​11 September 1994. 51. Author’s email interview with Adrian Timar, September 2011. 52. Dan, Exhibition, p. 18. 53. Groys referenced Marshall McLuhan’s distinction between hot media (i.e. writing, print that requires a higher degree of concentration from the viewer) and cold media (i.e. television that does not require specialized knowledge or intense power of concentration), arguing that the aim of exhibitions of computer installations is in fact to cool hot media, such as the internet, by eliminating the possibility of full concentration on one computer screen, since the viewer moves from one screen to the next. Boris Groys, ‘A genealogy of participatory art’, in Rudolf Frieling (ed.), The Art of Participation, 1950 to Now (New York: San Francisco Museum of Art and Thames & Hudson, 2009), p. 31. 54. Alexandra Titu, ‘Cine mi-​a pus ridichea asta de luna in bocanc?’, Contra punct: săptămînal editat de Uniunea Scriitorilor din Romănia (Bucharest, RO), November 1994, p. 14. 55. Erwin Kessler, ‘Alandalarta:  A  doua Expozitie Anuala a Centrului de Arta SOROS’, Revista 22, no. 45, (November, 1994), p. 15. 56. Mungiu-​Pippidi, Politica Dupa Communism, p. 34. 57. Boia, Romania, p. 123. 58. Călin Dan, ‘Soros –​The Dictatorship of Goodwill’, last modified 10 May 1997 (2:58:29 pm). Available at http://amsterdam.nettime.org/Lists-​Archives/nettime​l-​9705/msg00050.html (accessed 10 February 2005). 59. ‘At the end of 1999, the members of the SCCA Network created ICAN: International Contemporary Art Network, registered in the Netherlands as a

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Notes to Pages 109–113 public benefit association. C3: Centre for Culture and Communication, which was registered as an independent foundation at about the same time, is a founding member of ICAN.’ See ‘SCCA’. Available at http://www.c3.hu/scca/index. html (accessed 11 November 2011). 60. ‘ICCA  –​The international centre for contemporary art’. Available at http:// www.icca.ro/home_​en.htm (accessed 11 November 2011). 61. ‘The Red House Centre for Culture and Debate  –​Sofia’. Available at http:// www.redhouse-​sofia.org/Content.aspx?id=1 (accessed 11 November 2011). 62. Irina Sandomirskaja pointed out ‘that words such as “identity”, “subjectivity”, “stereotype” and “critique” are part of an international language of critical representation in which the After the Wall exhibition, for example, chose to convey its own intentions’. ‘The Wall After the Wall’, ArtMarginsOnline, last modified 26 October 2000. Available at http://www.artmargins.com/index. php/2-​articles/437-​the-​wall-​after-​the-​wall (accessed 25 July 2016). The same words were picked up by Eastern European artists from the package of application materials to the Soros Foundation. It can be concluded, therefore, that in general the Eastern European artist, in order to enter the international art scene, would adopt a dominant international vocabulary, exemplified by North American contemporary exhibition practices. 63. In Bucharest the video art exhibition was titled Ex Oriente Lux (1993); in Sofia it was titled Video and Hart (1995) and in Budapest, SVB VOICE (1991). 64. Curator and writer Paul O’Neil observed that this entailed a shift in the primary or traditional role of curator from ‘a curator as a caretaker and administrator to a curator who has a more creative and active part to play within the production of art itself ’. See Paul O’Neill, ‘The curatorial turn: from practice to discourse’, in Judith Rugg and Michèle Sedgwick (eds), Issues in Curating Contemporary Art and Performance (Chicago:  Intellect Books, 2007), pp. 13–​28. Concepts such as ‘artist-​curator’, ‘meta artist’, ‘creator’ or, as Daniel Buren named the role, ‘organizer-​author’ presented the curator in a powerful position that used the artists’ works as raw material or as ‘useful fragments’ for the staging of his/ her vision of an ‘exhibition as a work of art’. See Daniel Buren, ‘Where are the artists?’, in Jens Hoffmann (ed.), The Next Documenta Should be Curated by an Artist (Frankfurt: Revolver, Archiv für aktuelle Kunst, 2004), p. 26.

Chapter 6: Sofia: Participatory Public Art and Emerging Contemporary Art Institutions 1. Alexander Kiossev, ‘The transition as a sight’, in Alexander Kiossev (ed.), Visual Seminar: Interface Sofia (Sofia: Institute of Contemporary Art Sofia and Centre for Advanced Study Sofia, 2009), p. 279. 2. Ibid., p. 283.

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Notes to Pages 113–118 3. Blaine Harden, ‘Bulgarian activists in tent city of the streets demonstrate power’, Washington Post (Washington DC), 21 July 1990. 4. John D. Bell, ‘The radical right in Bulgaria’, in Sabrina P. Ramet (ed.), The Radical Right in Central and Eastern Europe Since 1989 (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), pp. 233–​55. 5. Ibid. 6. Andrei Daniel, interview with the author, November 2011, Sofia, Bulgaria. 7. Philip Zhidarov, interview with the author, November 2011, Sofia, Bulgaria. 8. Similar actions in public spaces happened simultaneously in other cities across Bulgaria, such as the Turgovishte Group’s Big Print action in 1990 in the city’s public square, where the artists collectively etched plates, painted and printed prints. 9. These demonstrations spread throughout the country and the president was forced to resign, causing a deadlock in parliament over the election of a new president since no party had the necessary majority. The parties that have dominated Bulgarian politics since the 1990s are the Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP, formerly the Bulgarian Communist Party), the Union of Democratic Forces (UDF, a coalition formed in 1989 as opposition to the Communist government) and the Movement for Rights and Freedoms (MRF, representing the Turkish minority). The newest major party is the Simeon II National Movement (SNM), founded by former king and prime minister Simeon Saxe-​ Coburg-​Gotha in 2001. 10. Author interview with Diana Popova, Institute of Contemporary Art Sofia, December 2011, Sofia, Bulgaria. The exhibition was staged as a continuation of the earlier Earth and Sky exhibition, also on the rooftop terrace of the UBA gallery on the Shipka street number 6. The Beach Exhibition, organized by Diana Popova and Orlin Dvorianov, was part of the Club of the (eternally) Young Artists (C(e)YA) series of exhibitions organized on the ground floor, first floor and rooftop of the UBA building. The exhibition included various programmes, such as a seminar titled ‘ABC of the Avant-​Garde’, performances and casual conversations. Orlin Dvorianov and Diana Popova, ‘The signs of the times’, Art in Bulgaria: Magazine for the Visual Arts 17 (1994), p. 15. 11. In his study the Polish Orange Alternative, Polish sociologist Bronislaw Misztal emphasized the movement’s unpredictability and flexibility by bringing ‘fun into the street scenes’. Through the use of colourful clothing  –​orange and red –​as well as posters and banners, they provoked laughter and mockery of the entire system. Bronislaw Misztal, ‘One movement, two interpretations: the Orange Alternative movement in Poland’, British Journal of Sociology 43/1 (1992), pp. 55–​79. 12. Kiossev, ‘Transition’, p. 281. 13. Galina Koleva, ‘Dominant approaches to civic participation’, in Galina Koleva, Siyka Kovacheva, Petar-​ Emil Mitev, Nikolai Tilkidjiev and Stefan Videv

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Notes to Pages 118–125 (eds), Civil Society, Citizenship and Civic Participation in Bulgaria (Plovdiv, Bulgaria: MAKROS Publishing, 2006), pp. 23–​30. 14. Kiril Prashkov, interview with the author, January 2012, Sofia, Bulgaria. 15. Ibid. 16. The first location was a compact one-​room exhibition space on Milin Kamak Street; its other initial branches were a space in the Sheraton Hotel in central Sofia, a space at 3 Karnigradska Street and 25 Hristo Belchev Street. Iara Boubnova, 5 Years Ata-​ray Gallery, anniversary catalogue (Sofia: PolyTech Ltd, 1996). 17. Critic and author Alexander Kiossev, curator Iara Boubnova, artist Ivan Moudov, artist Kalin Serapionov, artist Kiril Prashkov, artist Krassimir Terziev, artist Luchezar Boyadjiev, curator and art historian Maria Vassileva, artist Mariela Gemisheva, artist Nedko Solakov, artist Pravdoliub Ivanov and artist Stefan Nikolaev. 18. The other artists in the exhibition were Peter Kogler, Pipilotti Rist and Uri Tzaig. The aim of the show was to invite several internationally known contemporary artists to showcase their works in Sofia, Bulgaria, and give public presentations and lectures. As Boubnova noted, ‘we wanted to find out why these artists, whose “context of operation” is the whole world art scene, and who for the local public are known to be cosmopolitan art “assets”, should be just as valid and important for one quite isolated context’. Iara Boubnova, ‘Process vs project’, in Locally Interested, exh. cat. (Sofia, Bulgaria: Institute of Contemporary Art, 1999), pp. 8, 22. 19. Ibid., p. 12. 20. Ibid., p. 13. 21. Iara Boubnova and Luchezar Boyadjiev, conversations with the author, November–​December, 2011. 22. ‘Meeting Point’ website, http://veg.sghg.bg (accessed 10 June 2015). 23. ‘Sculpture Program’ website, http://veg.sghg.bg (accessed 10 June 2015). 24. N-​Forms:  Reconstructions and Interpretations (1994), Raiko Alexiev Gallery (the UBA gallery), Sofia; Video and Hart (1995), National Museum of Archaeology –​ Sofia; Evidences. The Real Diversity (1996), Sofia City Gallery; Formal  –​ Informal (1998–​1999), Central Post Office  –​Sofia; and Culture  –​ Subculture (September 1999), Varna, Bulgaria. 25. Kamen Balkanski, Introduction, in Nikolay Boshev, Boris Klimentiev, Diana Popova and Svilen Stefanov (eds), N-​Forms: Reconstructions and Interpretations, exh. cat. (Sofia: Soros Centre for the Arts, 1994). 26. Iara Boubnova and Maria Vassileva curated the Soros Art Centre’s 1997 annual exhibition Ars Ex Natio. In line with the Centre’s quest for supporting local contemporary and experimental art, the exhibition underlined the dichotomy between the traditional and the modern, the national and the international, in local contemporary art, especially in the choice of the exhibition venues. The nineteenth-​century rival houses in the Bulgarian city of

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Notes to Pages 125–129 Plovdiv featured as the spaces of the exhibitions. Courtyards, interiors and exterior walls featured as exhibition spaces for the 32 artists of several generations in the exhibition. It was an opportune location to highlight not only the difference between the contemporary and the traditional forms of art but also the existing connection between national and internationally oriented elements in contemporary art. Although the several individual artworks in Ars Ex Natio were present in the public space, none was participatory in the sense that it involved direct participation from the passers-​by. Rather, public art projects such as the minimalist sign of 1997, the door and the wooden sculptures of Prashkov emphasized in their form and location their search for contemporaneity in the often ironic fusion of both international forms and national content. The 1997 sign not only spoke of the date of the exhibition but also became a symbol of the changes in the country when the UDF came to power. 27. SCA provided support for various local galleries initiated by artists such as Gallery XXL that began in 1996, the Process –​Space Festival of Modern Art in Balchik that began in 1992 as a festival of artistic experiments ‘oriented towards the new wave’ and the International meetings of photography in Plovdiv in 1994, especially important since, according to the local artistic genres, photography was not considered a form of visual art. See Art in Bulgaria, Magazine for the Visual Arts (Sofia: az Advertising Agency, 1994). 28. Pierre Bourdieu, ‘Structures, habitus, power:  basis for a theory of symbolic power’, in Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009, 24th printing). 29. In the same email exchange, Peizer expressed that the strategy of the Soros foundation was to ‘provide resources to people with vision and implementation skills who do not have them because the resources are so limited. Local institutions are loath to provide funding for projects with no track record (e.g. new ideas) that could fail. Once a project is a proven success though, we expect others to continue its funding.’ Jonathan Peizer, ‘The ins and outs of the Soros Internet Program in Former Eastern Europe’, in Geert Lovink, Uncanny Networks: Dialogues with the Virtual Intelligentsia (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004), pp. 148–​53. 30. Nancy Fraser, ‘Rethinking the public sphere: a contribution to the critique of actually existing democracy’, in Craig Calhoun (ed.), Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), p. 75.

Part II: From Localized Public Sites To EU Transnational Public Spheres 1. Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator (New York: Verso, 2009), p. 13.

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Notes to Pages 129–134 2. Most importantly, the EU’s economic interest overshadowed the European ­leaders’ moral obligations and the ‘Yalta guilt’ complex, when the West had ‘abandoned’ Central and Eastern Europe to the Soviet power. Iván Berend, From the Soviet Bloc to the European Union:  The Economic and Social Transformation of Central and Eastern Europe since 1973 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 84–​6. 3. Ibid., p. 86. 4. Writing in 1993, political scientists Valerie Bunce and Maria Csanadi pointed out that there were two factors influencing developments in Eastern Europe: ‘strong pressures in support of a “great leap forward” into capitalism and liberal democracy (or revolutionary change) and, second, pressures in the direction of continuing elements of the state socialist past and modifying these over time (an evolutionary approach to change)’. Valerie Bunce and Maria Csanadi, ‘Uncertainty in the transition:  post-​ communism in Hungary’, East European Politics and Societies 7/2 (Spring 1993), pp. 240–​75. 5. Gail Kligman, ‘Reclaiming the public: a reflection on creating civil society in Romania’, East European Politics & Societies 4/3 (September 1990), pp. 395–​6, DOI: 10.1177/0888325490004003002.

Chapter 7: Place-​Making: Framing Art in Public Spaces Curatorially 1. Boris Buden, ‘Public space as translation process’, buden | public space as translation process, last modified 12/4/2003 5:33:58 pm. Available at www.republi cart.net/disc/realpublicspaces/buden03_​en.pdf (accessed 12 August 2016). 2. It should be noted that, in addition to Polyphony, other local precursors to Moszkva Tér (Gravitacio) include the exhibition Szerviz curated by Judit Angel in 2001 at Műcsarnok, Budapest. It featured artists rendering various ‘services’ for the audience within the space of a museum or ‘services’ targeting the exhibition-​making process by proposing, for example, non-​ traditional ways of audience surveying. Taking place in the institutionalized space of a museum, Szerviz aimed to ‘bring the local art scene and society closer together’ and to ‘fulfil the need for works of art based on direct connection between art/artist and audience’. See Judit Angel, ‘Introduction’, in Szerviz, exh. cat. (Budapest: Műcsarnok, 2001). Another exhibition was Budapest Box: Hidden Scene of the 1990s, curated by Dóra Hegyi and Katalin Timar in 2002 at the Ludwig Museum for Contemporary art in Budapest. It featured a series of artist-​initiated projects from the alternative scene in Hungary since 1989, some primarily oriented towards direct audience participation.

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Notes to Pages 134–140 3. Dóra Hegyi, ‘Art as gift, public art versus art in the public realm’, in Moszkva Tér (Gravitacio) / Moscow Square (Gravitation), exh. cat. (Budapest:  Ludwig Museum of Contemporary Art, 2003), p. 2. 4. Ibid., p. 3. 5. At its inception in 1988, it was called the Association of Young Democrats (with membership restricted to those aged 16–​35). In 1990, after winning the first free elections, the party changed its name to FIDEZ. It opposed communism and defined its direction and political principles in terms of binary opposites between old and new, between communism and anti-​communism. Emilia Palonen, ‘Reading Budapest: political polarization in contemporary Hungary’ (PhD diss., Essex, AC, UK: University of Essex, Department of Government, 2006), p. 173. 6. Vladimir Tismăneanu, Fantasies of Salvation:  Democracy, Nationalism and Myth in Post-​Communist Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), p. 38. 7. Other architectural manifestations in Budapest include the following buildings: the House of Terror Museum and the New National Theatre. Moreover, Orbán instituted his own Mayoral Office, which basically functioned as a super-​ministry, and had a significant role in the city’s policies in order to articulate FIDESZ’s discourse of progress between 1998 and 2002. Ibid. 8. Hegyi, ‘Art as gift’, p. 3. 9. Hints, ‘Everyone is a guest, everyone is a host’, in Moszkva Tér (Gravitacio) / Moscow Square (Gravitation), exh. cat. (Budapest:  Ludwig Museum of Contemporary Art, 2003). 10. Hegyi, ‘Art as gift’, p. 16. 11. Ibid., p. 11. 12. In addition to financial support from EU’s Culture 2000 programme, the exhibition also received funds from the Hungarian Ministry of Cultural Heritage and the Cultural Committee of the City Municipality. 13. ‘Summaries of EU legislation’, Official website of the European Union, Europa: Summaries of EU Legislation, Culture, Available at http://europa.eu/ legislation_​summaries/index_​en.htm. 4 October 2009] 14. Ibid. 15. First, in the field of information policy the EU commission took up the idea of cultural branding, which featured EU as the guarantor of the well-​being and quality of life of the citizens of Europe. Second, in the attempt to Europeanize national educational systems, EU’s ERASMUS and SOCRATES, acronyms of two major educational exchange programmes, are examples of EU officials’ aim to invent Europe as a category of thought in the education sector. And the third site is the identification of women as a key target for EU cultural-​ binding activities, exemplified by the 1987-​ created ‘Women of Europe Award’ that aimed ‘to honour a woman from each Member State who, in

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Notes to Pages 140–147 the previous two years, has helped to increase European integration among citizens of the European Union’. Cris Shore, ‘Citizenship of the Union: the cultural construction of a European citizen’, in Building Europe: The Cultural Politics of European Integration (New York: Routledge, 2000), pp. 66–​86. 16. But at the same time the European Man evoked a darker conception of modernity, as a European identity historically only crystallized in opposition to a non-​European ‘other’ such as Africans, Asians, Americans and Muslims. Ibid., pp. 60–​7. 17. ‘Culture 2000 Programme’, Official website of the European Union, Europa: Summaries of EU Legislation, Culture. Available at http://europa.eu/ legislation_​summaries/culture/l29006_​en.htm [accessed 23 July, 2016]. 18. Hortensia Völckers, ‘Projekt Relations. Know relations. Initiator’, relations e.V., German Federal Cultural Foundation, last modified 1 June 2005 8:49:37 am. Available at www.projekt-​relations.de/en/know/initiator/start.php?menu open=5&lang=en​[accessed 23 July 2016]. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid. 21. Iara Boubnova, ‘The city and the visual seminar’, in Alexander Kiossev (ed.), Visual Seminar: Interface Sofia (Sofia: Institute of Contemporary Art Sofia and Centre for Advanced Study Sofia, 2009), p. 9. 22. Ibid., pp. 9–​31. 23. Ibid., p. 17. 24. For example, the mayoral candidates did not address the comments made by Antoanetta Tsoneva, Sofia’s ombudsman, on the lack of rules for privatizing public property. See Boubnova, ‘The city and the visual seminar’, p. 19. 25. Ibid., p. 23. 26. Alexander Kiossev, ‘The transition as a sight’, in Alexander Kiossev (ed.), Visual Seminar: Interface Sofia (Sofia: Institute of Contemporary Art Sofia and Centre for Advanced Study Sofia, 2009), p. 289. 27. Ibid. 28. Ibid., p. 291. 29. Luchezar Boyadjiev, ‘Communal and private (and/or public and personal)’, in Visual Seminar newsletter (Sofia: Institute of Contemporary Art Sofia and Centre for Advanced Study Sofia, August–​December 2004), p. 1. Available at http://ica-​sofia.org/en/archive/visual-​seminar/publishing-​programme/item/ 316-​vs-​newspaper-​4 (accessed 5 December 2011). 30. Fraser, ‘Rethinking’, p. 71. 31. Boubnova, ‘The city and the visual seminar’. 32. Marius Babias and Sabine Hentzsch, ‘Introduction’, in Marius Babias and Sabine Hentzsch (eds), Spațiul Public București / Public Art Bucharest, exh. cat. (Cluj-​Napoca, Romania: Idea Design and Print, 2008), pp. 7–​8.

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Notes to Pages 147–157 33. Ibid. 34. Raluca Voinea, ‘press –​Spațiul Public București’, e-​cart.ro. Available at ​www. spatiul-​public.ro/eng/press/press.html (accessed 9 December 2011). 35. Ibid. 36. ‘Mayor paints town red –​and yellow and blue’, BBC News Europe, last modified 9 November 2001 (6.38 p.m.). Available at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/ europe/1645077.stm (accessed 19 June 2015). 37. Marius Babias in conversation with Timotei Nadasan, ‘Gaining hegemony over the symbolic and the imaginary in central culture’, in Marius Babias and Sabine Hentzsch (eds), Spațiul Public București / Public Art Bucharest, exh. cat. (Cluj-​Napoca, Romania: Idea Design and Print, 2008), p. 14. 38. Willem Schinkel and Friso van Houdt, ‘The double helix of cultural assimilationism and neo-​ liberalism:  citizenship in contemporary governmentality’, British Journal of Sociology 61/4 (December 2010), pp.  696–​ 715, DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-​4446.2010.01337.x. 39. Ireneusz Pawel Karolewski, ‘European nationalism and European identity’, in Ireneusz Pawel Karolewski and Andrzej Marcin Suszycki (eds), Multiplicity of Nationalism in Contemporary Europe (Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2010), pp. 66–​7. 40. Ibid. 41. Vassil Prodanov, Bulgaria in Global Processes (New  York:  Global Scholarly Publications, 2004). 42. Ibid. 43. Alexander Kiossev, ‘Otherness, again: notes on self-​colonizing cultures (1998)’, in David Elliott and Bojana Pejic (eds), After the Wall: Art and Culture in Post-​ Communist Europe (Stockholm: Moderna Museet, 1999), p. 114. 44. Ibid. 45. Anthony Gardner, Politically Unbecoming: Postsocialist Art against Democracy (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: MIT Press, 2015), p. 45.

Chapter 8: Representing Counterpublics in Bucharest, Budapest and Sofia 1. See Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (Zones Books:  New  York, 2005), p. 56. 2. h.arta, project space:  a.concept (blog). Available at http://projectspacebucha rest.blogspot.com/ search/label/a.concept (accessed 04:39, 26 February 2004). 3. Raluca Voinea, ‘Art as methodology: interview with h.arta group about the project Feminism, Timișoara, September 2008–​May 2009’, in IDEA arts+society, No. 30–​1 (2008).

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Notes to Pages 158–165 4. h.arta space Timișoara, 2001–​6, ‘After h.arta’, last modified March 2012. Avail­ able at ​www.hartagroup.ro/index.php?/projectspaces/harta-​space/ [accessed 7 June, 2016]. 5. Ibid. 6. Voinea, ‘Art as methodology’. 7. Matei Bejenaru, Matei Bejenaru: Situatii/Situations (Suceava, Romania: Galéria Possibila, 2007), p. 37. 8. Voinea, ‘Art as methodology’. 9. Ibid. 10. Judit Bodor and Bea Hock, ‘Time patrol, the populist listener’, in Moszkva Tér (Gravitacio) / Moscow Square (Gravitation), exh. cat. (Budapest:  Ludwig Museum of Contemporary Art, 2003). 11. János Sugár, quoted in Hedvig Turai ‘Special section focus: public art in Hungary’, ArtMargins, last modified 10 August 2003. Available at ​www.artmargins.com/index.php/archive/250-​special-​section-​focus-​public-​art-​in-​hungary (accessed 18 July 2015). 12. Grant Kester, ‘Community and communicability’, in Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004), p. 161. 13. Turai, ‘Special section focus’. 14. Bodor and Hock, ‘Time patrol’. 15. Ibid. 16. Other similarly problematic local projects developed for Moszkva Tér (Gravitacio) and Spațiul Public București included Moldavian artist and dramatist Nicoleta Esinescu’s A(II)Rh+ (in the Spațiul Public București exhibition, 2007)  and Hungarian artist Balázs Beöthy’s Distributed Money (in Moszkva Tér (Gravitacio), 2003). Over the course of several weeks, Esinescu engaged several Roma individuals walking the streets of Bucharest in search of scrap iron. In an outsourced public performance, the artist asked them to recite fragments of her own writings on the socio-​political and racial discrimination of Romanian society towards the Roma minority. Beöthy paid several homeless people in Moscow Square to hand out money to passers-​by, who for the most part refused to accept. Ultimately, in their confrontational approaches, Sugár, Beöthy and Esinescu made use of individuals as expressive tools for their orchestrated public actions. Rather than a transformative experience, their projects maintained unchanged both the artists’ and their participants’ attitudes towards one another and the issues addressed in the work. 17. Hedvig Turai, ‘Watch your dirty money with my art’, Hedvig Turai in conversation with János Sugár (Artmargins online, 25 January 2009). 18. Kinga Lendeczki, ‘Interview with János Sugár, fire in the museum at OFF-​ Biennale, Budapest’ (31 May 2015).

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Notes to Pages 165–177 19. Călin Dan, ‘Trico. Focul Sacru de la Berarie’ (T-​Shirt. The Sacred Fire at the Beer Garden), Observatorul Cultural 772 (May 2015). 20. Luchezar Boyadjiev, ‘Billboard heaven’, in Alexander Kiossev (ed.), Visual Seminar: Interface Sofia (Sofia: Institute of Contemporary Art Sofia and Centre for Advanced Study Sofia, 2009), p. 157. 21. Ibid. 22. Luchezar Boyadjiev, ‘Hot City Visual, 2003’, in Sofia as a Sight. Visual Seminar:  Resident Fellows Program 1 (Sofia:  Institute of Contemporary Art Sofia and Centre for Advanced Study Sofia, 2004), pp. 9–​10. 23. Boyadjiev, ‘Billboard heaven’, p. 153. 24. Boyadjiev, ‘Hot City Visual, 2003’, pp. 9–​10. 25. Ljudmila Dimova, ‘I think with my eyes. An interview with Luchezar Boyadjiev’, in Sofia as a Sight. Visual Seminar: Resident Fellows Program 1 (Sofia: Institute of Contemporary Art Sofia and Centre for Advanced Study Sofia, 2004), p. 41. 26. Boyadjiev, ‘Billboard heaven’, p. 157. 27. Dimova, ‘I think with my eyes’, p. 39. 28. Boyadjiev, ‘Billboard heaven’, pp. 141–​2. 29. Luchezar Boyadjiev, ‘Off the record’, Manifesta Journal of Contemporary Curatorship 2 (Spring 2004), pp. 32–​9. 30. Diana Popova, ‘MUSIZ from inside and outside perspective’, in The City as Museum: Resident Fellows Program (Sofia: Institute of Contemporary Art Sofia and the Centre for Advanced Study Sofia, 2005), p. 25. 31. Among the guests present were ‘the director of the National Art Gallery, the director of the Art Gallery in Rousse, the chairperson of the Union of Bulgarian Artists, the rector of the National Arts Academy, the ambassadors of Belgium, Britain and Italy, the director of the British Council, representatives of Goethe Institute Sofia’. See section titled ‘A chronicle of manipulation’ in Ivan Moudov, The City as Museum: Resident Fellows Program (Sofia: Institute of Contemporary Art Sofia and the Centre for Advanced Study Sofia, 2005), p. 15. 32. See section titled ‘The city through the window of the museum’ in Moudov, The City as Museum, p. 9. As stated in his ‘A chronicle of manipulation’, the artist initially intended to transform the railway station to look like a museum but after speaking with the PR officer of the Ministry of Transport, who mentioned that the railway station would be refurbished during that time, the artist changed his project so as to actually become the advertisement for the opening of the museum. From ‘A chronicle of manipulation’, in Moudov, The City as Museum, pp. 11–​14. 33. See Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (Zones Books:  New  York, 2005), p. 56. 34. Nancy Fraser calls subaltern counterpublics the various discourses of competing publics that function as contestory forces and are engendered by

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Notes to Pages 177–181 subordinated and marginalized social groups, such as women, workers, people of colour, and gays and lesbians. She notes that in some cases these subaltern counterpublics are explicitly anti-​democratic and anti-​egalitarian –​one could point to the rise of extreme right-​wing organizations and parties in Eastern Europe. 35. Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, p. 56. 36. Alexander Kiossev, ‘Three explications and some problems: once again on the Museum for Contemporary Art in Bulgaria’, in Visual Seminar. Museum issue newsletter (Sofia: Institute of Contemporary Art Sofia and Centre for Advanced Study Sofia, March–​November 2010), p. 3. Available at http://ica-​sofia.org/en/ projects/item/180-​visual-​seminar-​museum-​issue (accessed 15 November 2011). 37. Deutsche Welle, ‘Bulgarian prime minister is Brussels’ “golden boy”.’ Sofia Globe (27 May 2016). Available at http://sofiaglobe.com/2016/05/27/bulgarian-​ prime-​minister-​is-​brussels-​golden-​boy/ (accessed 1 August 2016). 38. Kiossev, ‘Three explications’.

Chapter 9: Contesting The Politics of Belonging in the Post-​1989 EU Community 1. The artists prefer not to use the collective name of Big Hope for this particular project so as to keep with their use of individual names in the context of the 2002 Turin Biennale. 2. The term ‘community’ was earlier used to identify the European Coal and Steel Community or ECSC, established in 1951, that brought France, Germany, and Italy and the Benelux countries together with the aim of organizing free movement of coal and steel and free access to sources of production. In 1957, the EEC and the European Atomic Energy Community (EAEC) were merged with ECSC to form the European Communities. The etymological aspects and the social, political and cultural implications of the shift from the use of the term ‘Community’ immediately after World War II to the use of the term ‘Union’ in the early 1990s are certainly relevant to my discussion. However, my aim in this text is not to offer a history of this political and economic formation. ‘Treaty establishing the European Economic Community, EEC Treaty –​original text (non-​consolidated version)’, Official website of the European Union, Europa: Summaries of EU Legislation, Institutional affairs, Building Europe through the treaties, last modified 26 October 2010. Available at http://europa. eu/legislation_​summaries/institutional_​affairs/treaties/treaties_​eec_​en.htm​ (accessed 23 June 2015). 3. Cris Shore observes that the freedom to reside within any EU member state is subject to numerous exceptions, as in the case of pensioners, students or any others who might become a burden on the member state’s social assistance

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Notes to Pages 181–185 programme. Moreover, a citizen of an EU member state residing in another EU state does not have the right to vote in the national elections of the respective state, but only in municipal elections. Shore, ‘Citizenship of the Union: the cultural construction of a European citizen’, in Building Europe: The Cultural Politics of European Integration (New York: Routledge, 2000), pp. 66–​86. 4. Andrew Mason, Community, Solidarity and Belonging:  Levels of Community and Their Normative Significance (Cambridge, UK:  Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 27–​40. 5. Miwon Kwon observes that the notion of community carries weight in debates ranging from education and health care to housing policies and zoning regulations. ‘From site to community in the new genre public art: the case of ‘Culture in Action’, in One Place After Another: Site-​Specific Art and Locational Identity (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004), p. 112. 6. Etienne Balibar, We, the People of Europe: Reflections on Transnational Citizen­ ship (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), pp. 171–​2. 7. Ibid., p. 177. 8. Dominic Hislop biography. Available at ​www.bighope.hu/dominic/art/index. html (accessed 3 August 2016). 9. Big Hope, Re:route, ‘James (Nigeria)’. Available at http://reroute.c3.hu/james/ index_​e.html (accessed 10 December 2010). 10. Flavia Stanley illustrates this through ethnographic studies conducted at an immigrant service organization (Servizi per Immigrati) in Rome. She argues that the process of citizenship-​making in Italy and Europe is based on the active creation and protection of racial privilege on the part of Italian nationals. ‘On belonging in/to Italy and Europe:  citizenship, race, and the “immigration problem” ’, in Caroline Brettell and Deborah Reed-​Danahy (eds), Citizenship, Political Engagement and Belonging: Immigrants in Europe and the United States (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008), pp. 49–​50. 11. Ibid., pp. 56–​7. Moreover, considered as an instrument for instilling European consciousness among the masses, Cris Shore argues that citizenship in the context of the European Union at the time of his writing (2000) is more a cultural than a political project. Shore, ‘Citizenship of the Union’, p. 77. 12. Donald Carter and Heather Merrill, ‘Inside and outside Italian political culture:  immigrants and diasporic politics in Turin’, GeoJournal 58/2–​3 (2002), pp. 167–​75. 13. The biennale extended an invitation to artists under 35 to ‘play together at changing society’ through art in a citywide event that included art in various urban sites, performances staged by visual arts organizations and collaborations with numerous local organizations, both for profit and non-​profit. According to its artistic director Michelangelo Pistoletto, the event ‘is not about applied art; it is about implicated art’. BIG Torino 2002 Biennale Press Release. ‘BIG

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Notes to Pages 185–191 Torino 2002 –​b i g g u e s t. n e t –​about’. Available at ​www.comune.torino.it/ gioart/big/bigguest/info/bigsocial_​e.html (accessed 8 December 2011). 14. Thomas Sheidebauer (biennial curator), interview with the author, November 2011. It may also be noted that the idea of a borderless territory in the form of the internet that is locally anchored and activated through a ‘net-​of-​people’ in Italy in 2002 is particularly timely in light of the tightening of the EU’s actual borders to prevent mass immigration. 15. Miklós Erhardt of Big Hope, email correspondence with the author, January 2011. 16. The last series of meetings with the participants occurred between March and May 2002, when the biennale officially opened. Miklós Erhardt of Big Hope, email correspondence with the author, December 2010. 17. The participants’ real names have been intentionally omitted for protection of privacy. Only stand-​in names, chosen by the collaborators themselves, have been used. Big Hope website: ‘participant list’, last modified 10 December 2010. Available at http://reroute.c3.hu/participant_​list_​e.html (accessed 8 June 2015). 18. Miklós Erhardt of Big Hope, email correspondence with the author, December 2010. The following groups have offered assistance to the artists: Ass. Diafa Al Maghreb; Ass. La Tenda; a.titolo; Boa Urban Mobile –​a mobile van which ­distributed medical and food supplies to homeless people and immigrants; Casa del Mondo Unito; Centro Franz Fanon –​where immigrants could receive psychological counselling; Chinese Culture Club –​cultural association that ­provided contact to Chinese immigrants; CICSENE, Cooperativa Senza Frontiere / Disobbedienti –​political activist group campaigning for immigrant rights; CTP –​Via Bologna –​school where immigrants could receive free Italian ­language lessons, From the Nile Culture Club –​cultural association that provided contact to immigrants from Kenya; Centro Sociale Bligny 18 –​political activist group campaigning for political rights for immigrants; The Gate, ISI, Kirkuk kaffe –​cultural association that provided contact to Kurdistan immigrants, Parrocchia San Luca, Petra, Ufficio dei Nomadi, Ufficio Stranieri, Scuola Parini, Sermig. Dominic Hislop of Big Hope, email correspondence with the author, February, 2011. 19. ‘Associazione Diafa Al Maghreb’. Available at www.diafaalmaghreb.ideasolidale.org/ index.asp?IDCAT=12 (accessed 10 December 2010). 20. Dominic Hislop of Big Hope, email correspondence with the author, February 2011. 21. Kester, ‘Community and communicability’, p. 161. 22. Miklós Erhardt of Big Hope, email correspondence with the author, December 2010. 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid.

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Notes to Pages 191–200 25. Ibid. 26. Significantly, Erhardt and Hislop visibly changed Re:route’s installation when it was exhibited three years later at the Kunsthaus Baselland in Basel, Switzerland. Composed of carefully arranged photographs and hand-​drawn maps of the city on the white gallery walls, Re:route becomes an artwork that engages with the worldwide contemporary condition of migration, where in every first world city a third world exists. 27. ‘TateShots: Matei Bejenaru’, Tate Modern website, last modified December 2011. Available at www.tate.org.uk/context-​comment/video/tateshots-​matei-​ bejenaru (accessed 8 June 2015). 28. The exhibition curators were Ben Borthwick and Kerryn Greenberg, Assistant Curators. ‘Level 2 Gallery: The Irresistible Force | Tate’. Available at http://www. tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/theirresistibleforce/ (accessed 22 December 2010). 29. ‘About us –​Romanian Cultural Institute in London’. Available at ​www.icr-​london.co.uk/aboutus.php (accessed 22 December 2010). 30. Heather Grabbe, ‘Regulating the flow of people across Europe’, in Frank Schimmelfenning and Ulrich Sedelmeier (eds), The Europeanization of Central and Eastern Europe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), p. 113. 31. Ibid., pp. 112–​34. 32. Matei Bejenaru, email correspondence with the author, December 2010. 33. Ibid. 34. ‘Societatea Romanca –​patru ani de voluntariat in interesul communitatii’, in Diaspora Romaneasca 305, 3–​9 July 2009. 35. Saskia Sassen, A Sociology of Globalization (London: W.W. Norton & Co, 2007). 36. Ibid. 37. Balibar, We, the People, p. 177. 38. The last page of the Travel Guide mentions the increased security measures taken to prevent illegal immigration in the UK with the introduction of a Nationality Identity Scheme announced by the Queen in her 17 May 2005 speech. The Identity Cards Act became law in March 2006, with the first IDs being issued to British citizens in 2009. At the same time, biometric residence permits were introduced for foreign nationals in 2008. Matei Bejenaru, Travel Guide artwork, trans. Alex Moldovan (London: Tate Modern, 2007). 39. For confidentiality reasons their names have been withheld. Matei Bejenaru, interview with the author, May 2010. 40. Matei Bejenaru, email message to the author, December 2010. 41. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1991). 42. Miklós Erhardt of Big Hope, email correspondence with the author, December 2010. 43. Ibid.

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Part III: Institutionalized and Institutionalizing 1. Andrea Fraser, ‘From the critique of institutions to an institution of critique (2005)’, in Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson (eds), Institutional Critique: An Anthology of Artists’ Writing (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2009), p. 416. 2. Andrea Cornwall, ‘Spaces for transformation? Reflections on issues of power and difference in participation in development’, in Samuel Hickey and Giles Mohan (eds), Participation:  From Tyranny to Transformations? Exploring New Approaches to Participation in Development (New  York:  Zed Books, 2004), p. 85.

Chapter 10: Institutionalized Community Arts Programmes 1. Robert Chamber, ‘Participatory rural appraisal (PRA): analysis of experience’, World Development 22/9 (1994), p. 1253. 2. Ibid., p. 1255. 3. World Bank, ‘Attacking poverty: opportunity, empowerment, and security’, in World Development Report, 2000/2001: Attacking Poverty (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 1–​12. 4. Glyn Williams, ‘Evaluating participatory development:  tyranny, power and (re)politicisation’, Third World Quarterly 25/3 (2004), p. 563. 5. ‘Who are we?’, Red House for Culture and Debate, Sofia, Bulgaria website. Available at http://redhouse-​sofia.org/Content.aspx?id=1 (accessed 9 July 2015). 6. Quoted from the ‘Art for Social Change:  Training Program and Series of Artistic Events in the Community’, successful grant application to the Embassy of the United States of America, Sofia, Bulgaria  –​Democracy Commission Small Grants, 2003. 7. Quoted from the ‘Art for Social Change  –​Play Against Violence’, successful grant application to the European Community, Phare 2000 Access Programme, Project BG 0010, 2002. 8. Irina Karakehayova, interview with the author, November 2011, Sofia, Bulgaria. 9. Quoted from Taka’s project report submitted to the Red House for Culture and Debate, 2003. 10. Quoted from the ‘Art for Social Change’ programme’s Action Plan 2004, subsection ‘The Goals’. Compiled and archived at the Red House Resource Centre –​Sofia, Bulgaria. 11. Quoted from the ‘Art for Social Change  –​Play Against Violence’, successful grant application to the European Community, Phare 2000 Access Programme, Project BG 0010, 2002.

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Notes to Pages 215–225 12. Andrea Cornwall, ‘Spaces for transformation? Reflections on issues of power and difference in participation in development’, in Samuel Hickery and Giles Mohan (eds), Participation: From Tyranny to Transformations: Exploring New Approaches to Participation in Development (New York: Zed Books, 2004), pp. 75–​89. 13. Quoted from Taka’s activities report submitted to the Red House for Culture and Debate, 2004. 14. Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, ‘General introduction: On the spirit of capitalism and the role of critique’, in The New Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Gregory Elliott (New York: Verso, 2005), p. 3. 15. Ibid., p.18. 16. Report from the seminar ‘Culture & Civil Society: A Promising Relationship or a Missed Opportunity?’ co-​organized by the Council of Europe, the Ministry of Culture of Republic of Bulgaria, the Soros Centre for the Arts –​Sofia and the Red House for Culture and Debate –​Sofia. Sofia, Bulgaria, 2002. 17. Caroline W. Lee, ‘The arts and crafts of participatory reforms: how can socially engaged art and public deliberation inform each other?’, FIELD, A Journal of Socially Engaged Art Criticism 3 (Winter 2016). 18. Sally Morgan, ‘Looking back over 25 years’, in Malcolm Dickson (ed.), Artists Handbooks, Art with People (Sunderland: AN Publications, 1995), p. 18. 19. The Association emerged in 1997 as an artist-​run and self-​organized horizontal and collective structure, based primarily on voluntary work. In this formation, for four consecutive years, Bejenaru along with a small group of artists organized the Periferic Performance Art Festival. The Vector Association was legally formed as a non-​profit organization only in 2001 and since 2004 has employed five artists (one full-​time and four part-​time) to work within the pilot project cARTier. Livia Pancu, ‘Becoming an institution: Vector Association’, in Vector, 1997–​2010 (Suceava, Romania: S.C. Musatinii S.A. Suceava, 2010), pp. 21–​4. 20. Matei Bejenaru, ‘cARTier, a story about Tătărași’, in cARTier 2004–​2007 (Suceava, Romania: Grup Musatinii Suceava, 2007), p. 12. 21. See ‘Culture and education: a sociological study’, realized by the Pro Women Foundation and funded by the Pro Helvetia Foundation, July–​August, 2003. 22. Bejenaru, cARTier, p. 13. 23. ‘I have learned many things from the people that I worked with’, interview with Iulia Tencariu by Livia Pancu in cARTier 2004–​2007 (Suceava, Romania: Grup Musatinii Suceava, 2007), pp. 24–​6. 24. Livia Pancu, ‘On assuming responsibility’, in cARTier 2004–​2007 (Suceava, Romania: Grup Musatinii Suceava, 2007), p. 18. 25. Bejenaru, cARTier, pp. 14–​15. 26. Several elderly people who were interviewed mentioned that their tight pensions did not allow them to purchase tickets to local cultural events. See Gentiana Baciu, Matei Bejenaru and Dan Lungu (eds), Tătărași memoria

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Notes to Pages 225–240 unui cartier (Tătărași, the memory of a district), trans. by the author (Iași, Romania: Editura Universitatii AL. I. Cuza, 2007). 27. Named and transformed into The Periferic:  International Biennale for Con­ temporary Art in 2001, the biennale was an outgrowth of Periferic Festival of Performance Art, which was initiated by Matei Bejenaru in 1997 with voluntary help from fellow artists. 28. Matei Bejenaru, email correspondence with the author, October 2012. 29. Pancu, ‘Becoming an institution’, p. 25. 30. See Petra Bischof, ‘cARTier:  community development through arts and culture’, introductory essay in cARTier 2004–​2007 (Suceava, Romania:  Grup Musatinii Suceava, 2007). Bejenaru, cARTier, pp. 12–​15. 31. Matei Bejenaru, email correspondence with the author, October 2012. 32. Baciu, Tătărași, p. 62. Quoted text is author’s translation from Romanian into English.

Chapter 11: Big Hope: Reviving Leftist Activism in Budapest 1. Maria Schmidt (ed.), House of Terror, Budapest, 1062, Andrassy út 60, museum catalogue (Budapest:  Public Endowment for Research in Central and East-​ European History and Society, 2008). See also House of Terror visitor’s pamphlet. 2. Emilia Palonen, ‘Chapter 4, Reading the Fidesz Discourse in Budapest: creating the frontier, occupying space’, in ‘Reading Budapest: political polarization in contemporary Hungary’ (PhD diss., University of Essex, Department of Government, 2006). 3. Big Hope website. Available at www.bighope.hu/ (accessed 12 July 2016). 4. Sándor Erdősi, Eszter Somogyi and Iván Tosics, The Analysis of Homelessness in Hungary report (Budapest: Metropolitan Research Institute, 2003). 5. Laszlo Karsai, ‘The radical right in Hungary’, in Sabrina P. Ramet (ed.), The Radical Right in Central and Eastern Europe since 1989 (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University, 1998), p. 141. 6. Joanne Richardson, ‘The radical left in the postcommunist epoch’. Available at http://commonplaces.org/blog/?p=56 (accessed 1 September 2012). 7. Csaba Jelinek, ‘The phenomena of displacement and relocation during the process of gentrification in Budapest’, Studia Universitatis Babes-​Bolyai  –​ Sociologia 55/2 (July 2010), p. 108. 8. Ibid., p. 109. 9. Dorthe Abildgaard, ‘Down and out in Budapest and Vollsmose’, Art India Magazine, April 2001. Available at ​www.bighope.hu/insideout/homeless/artindia.html (accessed 6 July 2015).

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Notes to Pages 240–247 10. Dominic Hislop, ‘Why, When, Why’. Available at www.bighope.hu/insideout/ homeless/howandwhy.html (accessed 8 July 2015). 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid. 13. Reports in the media presented homelessness as the result of ignorance and even personal choice: for example, Steven V. Roberts, ‘Reagan on homelessness: many choose to live in the streets’, New York Times (New York), section A, p. 26, 23 December 1988. Moreover, Reagan himself believed that people sleep on grates because they liked it. Ronald Reagan speaking to David Brinkley in a sort of exit interview in December 1988. Martha Rosler, ‘Fragments of a metropolitan viewpoint’, in If You Lived Here: The City in Art, Theory and Social Activism (New York: Dia Art Foundation, 1991), p. 21. 14. The museum component of the project consisted of three exhibitions. The first was ‘Home Front’, conceived as a set of representations (which included statistical graphs, charts displayed above eye level in the gallery equivalent of ‘waste space’, juxtaposed with real estate ads for luxurious housing in Manhattan, the prose and the poetry of profit and loss) of contested neighbourhoods. The second exhibition, titled ‘Homeless: The Street and Other Venues’, along with its related events, focused entirely on homelessness in a format that aimed to avoid the usual dichotomies of ‘us’ and ‘them’. The third exhibition, ‘City: Visions and Revisions’, conceived the production of urban space as a product of economic and social decisions and a complex ‘metasignification’. Rosler, If You Lived Here. 15. Suzanne Lacy, ‘Debated territory: toward a critical language for public art’, in Suzanne Lacy (ed.), Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art (Seattle: Bay Press, 1995), p. 171. 16. Dominic Hislop, ‘Why, When, Why’. Available at www.bighope.hu/insideout/ homeless/howandwhy.html (accessed 11 July 2015). 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid. 19. Wearing white, ‘to refer to the diversity of production subjects and the conflict in post-​Fordist and post-​industrial society’, Tute Bianche was a public symbol protesting and fighting against the contemporary workers’ precarious labour conditions, and championing and advocating the freedom of movement of immigrants. Although neither Tute Bianche nor the Disobbedienti have had a clear political programme that one can join, both believed in challenging neoliberalism’s power structures through peaceful forms of disobedience, that range from people throwing balloons and flowers in the public space and painting walls with slogans to distributing pamphlets and marching in the public space. 20. Luca Casarini, Disobbedienti, digital video, 54 min., directed and produced by Dario Azzellini and Oliver Ressler, 2002.

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Notes to Pages 249–255 21. Federico Martelloni, Disobbedienti, digital video, 54 min., directed and produced by Dario Azzellini and Oliver Ressler, 2002. 22. Miklos Erhardt and Dominic Hislop, ‘Big Hope: “Disobbedienti”, Liget Galéria, Budapest, September–​October 2002’, interview by Keiko Sei, Umĕlec, Prague, no. 4 (November 2002). 23. Ibid. 24. Yates McKee, Strike Art:  Contemporary Art and the Post-​Occupy Condition (London and New York: Verso, 2016), p. 53. 25. Throughout the decade, it gathered a wide following, culminating in the 1988 public demonstrations in Budapest against the single and unified cause of stopping the construction of a hydroelectric power system on the River Danube that would endanger the drinking water supplies of 5 million to 8 million people. ‘Environmentalist groups prevent the construction of Danube River dam, Hungary, 1984–​1989 | Global Nonviolent Action Database’, Global Nonviolent Action Database. Available at http://nvdatabase.swarthmore.edu/content/ environmentalist-​groups-​prevent-​construction-​danube-​river-​dam-​hungary-​ 1984–​1989​(accessed 29 October 2012). 26. Ibid. 27. Krista Harper, ‘Wild capitalism:  environmental activism and postsocialist political ecology in Hungary’, ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst (Amherst, MA:  University of Massachusetts  –​Amherst, Anthropology Department Faculty Publication Series, 2006), p.  10. Available at http://scholarworks. umass.edu/ anthro_​faculty_​pubs/81 (accessed 29 October 2012). 28. The Group was initiated in November 1988 by the Green Circle of the Budapest Technical University, the Nature Conservation Club of the ‘Eötvös Loránd’ University and the Esperantists’ Nature Protection Organization. Today it is an umbrella organization of 45 NGO’s. ‘Clean Action Air Group’. Available at www.c3.hu/ ~levego/lmcs_​ang.htm (accessed 29 October 2012). 29. Harper, ‘Wild capitalism’, p. 17. 30. Miklós Erhardt, email correspondence with the author, 16 October 2012. 31. Richardson, ‘The radical left’. 32. Erhardt and Hislop, ‘Big Hope: “Disobbedienti” ’. 33. Maria Lind, ‘Returning on bikes: notes on social practice’, in Nato Thomson (ed.), Living as Form:  Socially Engaged Art from 1991–​2011 (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2012), p. 49. 34. Tibor Varnagy, video conference, 5.19, 2002. 35. Paul O’Neill, ‘Curating as a medium of artistic practice:  the convergence of art and curatorial practice since the 1990s’, in The Culture of Curating and the Curating of Culture(s) (Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 2012), p. 120. 36. Manamana’s later editions were developed within specific institutional frameworks that provide the funds for its production. As such, it was exhibited in subsequent years at Ludwig Museum in Budapest in the Budapest Box

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Notes to Pages 255–265 exhibition, at the rotor gallery in Graz in the Balkan Consulat Budapest and at the Würtembergische Kunstverein, Stuttgart in the On Difference 2 exhibition. 37. See Judit Angel, Szerviz, exh. cat. (Budapest: Műcsarnok, 2002). 38. Review article in Time Out Budapest. Reuben Fowkes, ‘Riding the cultural tsunami’, translocal.org (April 2012). Available at www.translocal.org/writings/ tsunami.html (accessed May 2012). 39. Edit András, ‘Hungary  –​a post-​socialist conflict zone’, The Brooklyn Rail, Critical Perspective on Arts, Politics and Culture, 16 May 2014. Available at www.brooklynrail.org/special/ART_​CRIT_​EUROPE/reports-​and-​interviews-​ from/hungarya-​post-​socialist-​conflict-​zone (accessed 18 June 2014). 40. Hansen, ‘Foreword’, pp. 29–​35.

Chapter 12: Self-​Institutionalizing as Political Agency 1. Nataša Petrešin-​Bachelez, ‘Self-​historicisation and self-​institutionalisation as strategies of institutional critique in Eastern Europe’, in Marina Gržinić and Alenka Domjan (eds), Conceptual Artists and the Power of Their Art Works for the Present (Ljubljana: Centre for Contemporary Arts, 2007), pp. 23–​7. 2. Rita Kálmán and Katarina Šević (eds), We Are Not Ducks on a Pond but Ships at Sea:  Independent Art Initiatives, Budapest 1989–​2009 (Budapest:  Impex–​ Contemporary Art Provider Foundation, 2010), p. 28. 3. ‘IMPEX–​Contemporary Art Provider’. Available at www.katarinasevic.com/ impex_​web/programok_​eng.html (accessed 10 July 2014). 4. Rozalinda Borcila, ‘Groups/Spaces in Budapest:  Trafó and Dinamo’, DINAMO. Available at http://www.katarinasevic.com/dinamo_​web/english/2005/­common_​ places_​02.html (accessed October 2012). 5. Bence Buczko, Rita Kálmán, Laszló Gergely, and Samu Szemerey, later joined by Monika Balint. 6. Interview with Rita Kálmán, as part of the ‘Independent Creative Art Spaces Leadership Training’, organized by Artfactories and Trans Europe Halles in December 2007 in Paris. Available at https://indepartspacestraining2007.word press.com/participants/rita-​kalman/​(accessed 25 January 2016). 7. Ibid. 8. Kálmán and Šević, We Are Not Ducks, p. 71. 9. Interview with Rita Kálmán, 2007. 10. Kálmán and Šević, We Are Not Ducks, p. 76. 11. Its constant participants were Raluca Voinea and Eduard Constantin. Other members included Doina Anghel, Mădălin Geană, Veronica Leca, Angelica Iacob, and Simona Nastac. E-​cart.ro, ‘about us’. Available at www.e-​cart.ro/asociatia/en/ about%20us/about%20us.html (accessed 30 June 2014).

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Notes to Pages 266–282 12. It consists of over 600 pages structured in three major chapters, with subsections such as ‘Workers’ protests in communist Romania’, ‘Dissidence in the communist regime’, ‘General considerations: dissidence, resistance, exile and cooptation’ and ‘The situation of the national minorities’. See Dorin Dobrincu, Vladimir Tismăneanu and Cristian Vasile (eds), Comisia Prezídențială pentru Analiza Dictaturii Comuniste din România:  Raport Final [Presidential Commission for the Analysis of the Communist Dictatorship in Romania: Final Report] (Bucharest: Humanitas, 2007). 13. Florin Abraham, ‘The Tismăneanu commission report:  a historiographical analysis’, in Vasile Ernu, Costi Rogozanu, Ciprian Siulea, Ovidiu Tichindeleanu (eds), The Illusion of Anticommunism:  Critical Writings on the Tismăneanu Report (Chişinău, Romania: Cartier, 2008), pp. 7–​41. 14. Radu Filipescu, the president of GDS, Sorin Illiesiu, Marius Oprea Horia-​ Roman Patapievici, Stelian Tanase members of the GDS. Ibid. 15. Ovidiu Tichindeleanu, ‘Condamnarea Comunismului ca folclor urban’ (‘The communist condemnation as an urban folklore’), in Vasile Ernu, Costi Rogozanu, Ciprian Siulea and Ovidiu Tichindeleanu (eds), The Illusion of Anticommunism:  Critical Writings on the Tismăneanu Report (Moldova and Romania: Cartier, 2008), pp. 243–​57. 16. Ivan Moudov, Skype interview with the author, December 2012. 17. Palko Karasz, ‘Vienna looks east for fine art’, New York Times, International Arts (13 October 2015). Available at http://nyti.ms/1jv0jAz (accessed 1 August 2016). 18. Press Release by Dessislava Dimova for Ivan Moudov’s Solo Show at the Sariev Contemporary Art gallery on view May–​June 2011. ‘Sariev Contemporary’. Available at http://sariev-​gallery.com/exhibitions/ view/ Solo_​Show/ (accessed November 2012). 19. Vessela Nozharova, ‘Art collecting in post-​communist Bulgaria: problems of the transition period’, in Eastern European Collectors. Available at www.knollgalerie.at/626.html?&L=1 (accessed 2 August 2016). 20. Ibid. 21. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere:  An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991). 22. Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2005), p. 56. 23. The group is concerned with ‘discrimination and privileges, inequality and equal opportunities, … relations between the society and the state, the state’s role, [and] recent history …’. See ‘Despre’, CriticAtac. Available at www.criticatac.ro/ despre-​noi/ (accessed 14 November 2012). 24. E-​ cart.ro, ‘About us’, 2006. Available at www.e-​ cart.ro/asociatia/en/ about%20us/about%20us.html (accessed 17 March 2016). 25. Ibid.

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Notes to Pages 284–288

Conclusion 1. Judith Butler, ‘For a careful reading’, in Sylvia Benhabib, Judith Butler, Drucilla Cornell and Nancy Fraser (eds), Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange (New York: Routledge, 1995), pp. 134–​6. 2. Andrea Cornwall, ‘Spaces for transformation? Reflections on issues of power and difference in participation in development’, in Samuel Hickey and Giles Mohan (eds), Participation: From Tyranny to Transformations: Exploring new approaches to participation in development (New York: Zed Books, 2004), p. 82. 3. Edit Andras, ‘Hungary –​a post-​socialist conflict zone’, in The Brooklyn Rail, Critical Perspective on Arts, Politics and Culture, 16 May 2014. 4. ‘FIDESZ versus JOBBIK: not much difference’, in Hungarian Spectrum: Reflection on politics, economics and culture, blog entry, May 2015 (accessed 24 September 2016). 5. Sergei Guriev and Daniel Treisman, ‘The new dictators rule by velvet fist’, New York Times, 24 May 2015 (accessed 24 September 2016). 6. Concomitantly, streets and square names, such as Moszkva Tér and the Budapest Ferihegy International Airport, were changed in 2010 to Széll Kálmán Square – the square’s initial name from 1929 until 1951, named after the then prime minister – and Budapest Ferenc Liszt International Airport, respectively. 7. Andras, ‘Hungary’. 8. Ibid. 9. Marisa Mazria Katz, ‘Editor’s letter, breaking “OFF”: an interview with the organizers of a New Grassroots Biennale in Budapest’, in Creative Time Reports, 2015. Available at http://creativetimereports.org/2015/06/22/off-​ biennale-​ breaking-​off-​an-​interview-​with-​the-​organizers-​of-​a-​new-​grassroots-​biennale-​in-​budapest/ (accessed 16 July 2015). 10. ‘What is OFF’, online press release about Off-​Biennale Budapest. Independent. Contemporary. Art, 24 April–​31 May 2015. Available at http://offbiennale.hu/ what-​is-​off/ (accessed 30 July 2015). 11. ‘What is OFF’. 12. ‘About the Fund’, online press releasPopovae of the EEA/Norway Grants. Available at https://norvegcivilalap.hu/en/about-​ the-​ fund (accessed 30 July 2015).

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Bibliography Voinea, Raluca, ‘Art as methodology: interview with h.arta group about the project Feminism, Timișoara, September 2008–​May 2009’, in IDEA arts+society, No. 30–​1 (2008). —​—​— ‘press –​Spațiul Public București’, e-​cart.ro. Available at www.spatiul-​public. ro/eng/press/press.html (accessed 9 December 2011). Völckers, Hortensia, ‘Projekt Relations. Know relations. Initiator.’ Last modified 1 June 2005 (8:49:37 am). Available at ​www.projekt-​relations.de/en/know/initiator/ start.php?menuopen=5&lang=en. Walzer, Michael, ‘The civil society argument’, in Chantal Mouffe (ed.), Dimensions of Radical Democracy: Pluralism, Citizenship, Community (London: Verso, 1992). Warner, Michael, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2005). Williams, Glyn, ‘Evaluating participatory development:  tyranny, power and (re) politicisation’, Third World Quarterly 25/3 (2004), pp. 557–​78. Wolff, Larry, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994). World Bank, ‘Attacking poverty:  opportunity, empowerment, and security’, in World Development Report, 2000/2001: Attacking Poverty (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 1–​12. Zrinski, Božidar, ‘Honorary award: The 29th Biennial of Graphic Arts, Ljubljana’, 24 September 2011. Available at http://29gbljubljana.wordpress.com/2011/09/ 24/honorary-​award/. —​—​—​ Introduction to The 29th Biennial of Graphic Arts, Ljubljana catalogue (Ljubljana: International Centre of Graphic Arts, 2011).

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Index 0GMS, 6, 205, 259, 271–​82 Academy of Fine Arts, Budapest, 56 Acostioaei, Dan, 222 Aczél, György, 38 Africa, 182, 185 Algeria, 188 Kenya, 190 Maghreb, 188 Morocco, 188 Nigeria, 184, 187 Tunisia, 188 Agricultural State Cooperatives and Peasant Associations, 62 AIDS, 86 Albania, 72, 183, 185 Alexandrescu, Dragos, 222 Alianz Kulturstifung, 147 Alliance Françoise, 203 Alonso, Teresa, 185 Altorjay, Gábor, 44 America see United States of America András, Edit, 91, 286 Angel, Judit, 245 Antall, József, 8, 75, 80, 83–​4 antipolitics, 12, 19, 24, 35, 84, 94, 117, 251 see also Konrád, George

Art for Social Change, 6, 13, 204, 208–​20, 212 fig. 10.1, 213 fig. 10.2, 224, 229–​31, 242, 244, 284 Article 1 of the Socialist Constitution, 69 Artpool Research Centre, 13, 43, 44, 260, 264 Assa, Gredi, 68 Association Diafa Al Maghreb, 188 Association of Hungarian Fine and Applied Artists, 56 ATA Centre for Contemporary Art (formerly ATA-​Ray Gallery), 119 Athenaeum Culture House, 220, 225 Atlanta, Georgia, 241–​2 Austria, 7, 271 Vienna, 72, 159, 271, 274, 275 Austro-​Hungarian Empire, 7 Babias, Marius, 147, 227, 270 BAK (basis voor actuele kunst), 23 Balatonboglár, 38, 39 fig. 3.1, 40 fig. 3.2, 40 fig. 3.3, 41 fig. 3.4, 43, 44, 46 Balibar, Etienne, 181–​2, 195 Balkans, 73, 152, 171, 263, 301n4 Baltanski, Kamen, 124 349

350

Index Băsescu, Traian, 6, 148, 149, 258, 266, 269 Bauman, Pari, 30 Baza Award, 121 Bejenaru, Matei, 5, 9, 11, 131, 159, 180, 182, 183, 191–​201, 220–​9, 230 Beke, László, 40 fig. 3.3, 41 fig. 3.4, 46–​7, 48–​9, 90, 91, 134 Béla Balázs film studio, 164 Belarus, 72 Belgrade, Serbia, 162 Bencsik, Barnabás, 89, 134 Berlin Wall, 16, 22, 72, 81, 193 Beuys, Joseph, 57, 104 Big Hope, 1, 6, 11, 18, 19, 131, 182–​5, 204–​5, 227, 231, 232–​57, 285 Turin, 5, 180, 186 fig. 9.1, 199, 200 fig. 9.4 BIG Torino International Biennial of Young Artists, 185 Birrell, Ross, 184 Bishop, Claire, 20, 21, 164 Black Panther, 46 Blazhev, Svilen, 68 Bodor, Judit, 161, 163 Borcila, Rozalinda, 261–​3 Borrissov, Boyko, 178, 258 Bosnia and Herzegovina, 72 Bossi, Umberto, 185, 249 Bossi-​Fini Act, 185, 249 Bostev, Nikolai, 124 Boubnova, Iara, 66, 68, 119, 120, 121, 143

Bourdieu, Pierre, 11, 15, 17, 27–​8, 30–​31, 93 Bourriaud, Nicolas, 20, 21 Boyadjiev, Luchezar, 119, 120, 123 fig. 6.3A–​B, 130, 144, 145, 153, 154, 165–​71, 167 fig. 8.6, 168 fig. 8.7, 179, 201, 227 Boyadzhiev, Bozhidar, 68 Brâncuși, Constantin, 57 Britain, 33, 85, 131, 191–​8 London, 5, 9, 180, 183, 191–​5, 198–​201, 278 British Council, 203 Brown, Gordon, 194 Bryzgel, Amy, 19 Budapest French Institute, 85 Budapest Public Baths, 51 Budapest Technical University, 252 Bugajski, Janusz, 54 Bulgaria Black Sea, 8 City of Truth, 116, 117 Ministry of Culture, 178, 218, 279 Museum of Contemporary Art, 173–​9, 279 Museum for Socialist Art, 279 National Academy of Fine Arts, 67, 115, 119, 125 National Art Gallery, 166, 178, 279 National Gallery of Foreign Art, 66, 166, 178, 279 National Palace of Culture (NPC), 114 350

351

Index Plovdiv, 275 Red Square, 64 Social Democrats, 113 Sofia, 1, 5, 13, 64, 66, 67, 69, 80, 111, 112–​27, 114 fig. 6.1, 130, 150, 151, 153, 154–​79, 229, 257, 271, 272 fig. 12.6, 274, 285 Sofia Arsenal Museum of Contemporary Art, 178 Sofia Municipal Council, 142 Union of Democratic Forces (UDF), 113, 115, 116, 144 Bulgarian Agrarian National Union (BANU-​NP), 113 Bulgarian Communist Party (BCP), 64, 69, 71, 112–​17 Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP), 113, 115, 116 Bunea, Marcel, 64, 96, 99–​102, 101 fig. 5.5, 108 Butler, Judith, 284 Café-​Bar Manifest, 266, 267 fig. 12.4A–​F, 268 fig. 12.5, 269, 270, 280, 281 CALC, 185 Cantarea Romaniei festival (The Singing of Romania), 108 Carcel, Cristian, 156 Carneci, Magda, 55 cARTier, 6, 13, 204, 208, 220–​31, 221 fig. 10.4, 223 fig. 10.5, 224 fig. 10.6, 242, 244, 284 Casarini, Luca, 246–​7

Castells, Manuel, 29 Catalonia, Spain, 183 Catholics, 99 Ceaușescu, Elena, 112 Ceaușescu, Nicolae, 7, 8, 54, 56, 60, 63, 67, 75–​6, 78, 94, 99, 102, 104, 108, 112, 150, 156, 266, 269 Central Eastern Europe (CEE), 1–​10, 13, 19, 20, 22–​5, 28, 29, 31, 55, 56, 65, 76–​83, 92, 124, 126, 146, 167, 170, 193, 201, 204, 205, 219, 226, 227, 230, 239, 258, 260, 287 Centre for Culture and Communication Foundation (C3), 13, 109, 243 Chapel Studio, 38, 39 fig. 3.1, 40 fig. 3.2, 40 fig. 3.3, 41 fig. 3.4, 42–​50 Charter 77, 24, 28, 35, 52 Chervenkov, Vulvo, 64 Chicago, 46, 72, 81, 95–​6, 109 Chira, Alexandru, 96, 97 fig. 5.4, 98, 99, 100, 108 Chomsky, Noam, 184 Christo, 60, 171, 172 City Group, 12, 66, 68, 113, 114 fig. 6.1, 115 Club of the (eternally) Young Artists (C(e)YA), 69 Cold War, 8, 19, 64–​5, 72, 135 Coleman, James, 29 Colorado Valley, 60

351

352

Index communism, 8, 19, 38, 50, 54, 60, 62, 63, 75, 155, 238, 270 Control Club, 266, 280 Cornwall, Andrea, 203, 215, 285 Council of Europe, 266 Creative Time, 22, 81, 85 Crista, Maria, 154 CriticAtac, 281 Croatia, 72, 162 Csillag, Gábor, 250 Czech language, 47 Czech Republic, 72, 75 Czechoslovakia, 19, 28, 35, 42, 46, 47, 52, 76, 117–​18 see also Prague Spring (1968) Dada, 44, 51 Dan, Călin, 64, 92–​3, 95, 108, 110, 165 Daniel, Andrei, 68, 116 Danube, River, 52, 233 Danube Circle, 28, 52, 251–​2 Debord, Guy, 184, 187 Decebal Scriba, 64 Department for Art in Public Space, 6, 11, 205, 259, 265–​70, 267 fig. 12.4A–​F, 268 fig. 12.5, 271, 280 Dia Art Foundation, 241 Diaspora Romaneasca, 194 Dimitrov, Georgi, 64, 117 Dimitrov Mausoleum, 167 Dimova, Dessislava, 278 DINAMO, 6, 11, 205, 259, 260–​5, 279, 280, 281, 282, 284, 285

Dinescu, Micea, 76 Disney, 233 Disobbedienti, 245–​53 D-​Media, 156 Documenta IX, 164 Dowley, Kathleen M., 16 Eastern bloc, 8, 64–​5, 73, 141 E-​cart.ro, 6, 205, 265, 268 fig. 12.5, 270, 281 Emil, Cheta, 97 English language, 13, 42, 85, 91, 148, 183, 188, 235 Eötvös Loránd University, 250 Erdély, Miklós, 36, 37, 46, 92, 164, 261 Erdogan, Recep Tayyip, 286 Erhardt, Miklós see Big Hope Ernu, Vasile, 281 Esanu, Octavian, 15 Estonia, 72 European Union (EU), 3, 6, 13, 14, 18, 72, 75, 79, 80, 130, 131, 140, 141, 150–​3, 159, 168, 170, 178, 180–​2, 185, 193, 194, 196, 198, 201 Schengen zone, 194 Farina, Geoff, 184 Ferjentsik, Viola, 245 FIDESZ (Association of Young Democrats), 52, 82, 137, 138, 233–​4, 237, 238, 258, 286 Fini, Gianfranco, 185, 249 Fluxus, 51, 104–​5 352

353

Index FMK (Fiatal Művészek Klubja), 261 Fogarasi, Andreas, 245, 245 fig. 11.4 France, 55, 81, 187 Angers, 59 Paris, 59 Fraser, Andrea, 203 Fraser, Nancy, 127, 145 Free Democrats (SZDSZ), 52 FSZKI Dózsa György út homeless shelter, 244 Fujimori, Alberto K., 286 Funar, Gheorghe, 149 G8 summit, 157, 246 Gablik, Suzy, 20 Galántai, György, 38, 39 fig. 3.1, 42, 43–​4, 46, 48 fig. 3.5, 49 fig. 3.6, 260, 261 Gardner, Anthony, 2, 19, 83, 152 Garton Ash, Timothy, 71 Gáspár, Ilona, 235–​6, 237 fig. 11.2 Gazeta de Transilvania (newspaper), 102, 103 fig. 5.6, 104 Gemisheva, Mariela, 272, 272 fig. 12.6 George Enescu Arts University, 183 GERB (Citizens for European Development of Bulgaria), 258 Gericault, Theodore, 116–​17 German Cultural Foundation, 141, 203

Germany, 21, 58, 72, 141, 147, 246 Berlin, 21, 163, 184 Berlin Wall, 16, 22, 72, 81, 193 Bonn, 58 East Berlin, 72 Kassel, 109, 171 Munich, 121 Geurmeur, Steven, 271, 274 Gheorghiu-​De, Gheorghe, 54, 62, 149 Gilardi, Elio, 184 Goethe Centre, 203 Goethe-​Institute Bucharest, 147 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 66 Gordon, Douglas, 120 Grabbe, Heather, 193–​4 Graur, Teodor, 64 Group of Social Dialogue (GDS), 267 Groys, Boris, 106 Guriev, Sergei, 286 Gyemant, Anca, 154 Haacke, Hans, 245, 246 Habermas, Jürgen, 280 Hajas, Tibor, 261 Hankiss, Elemer, 28, 34–​5, 63 Hansen, Miriam, 27 Harper, Krista, 251–​2 h.arta, 1, 5, 130, 149, 153, 154–​60, 155 fig. 8.1, 157 fig. 8.2, 179, 201, 270, 285 Harvey, David, 79–​80 Havana, Cuba, 163

353

354

Index Havel, Václav, 12, 24–​5, 34, 35, 76, 91, 117 Hay, Sherri, 90 Heathrow airport, 196 Hegyi, Dóra, 134, 136–​7, 139, 226, 227, 235 Helyetes Szomjazók (Substitute Thirsters) Group, 51, 110 Hentzsch, Sabine, 147, 270 Herja Mine, 58 Hirschhorn, Thomas, 15–​16,  19, 21 Hislop, Dominic see Big Hope Hock, Bea, 161, 163 Horváth, Balázs, 250 Hotel Intercontinental, 45 Houdt, Friso van, 150–​1 Howard, Marc, 78 Hoxha, Enver, 183 Hungarian Academy of Arts (MMA), 256 Hungarian Democratic Forum (MDF), 52, 75, 84, 137, 237 Hungarian language, 47, 184 Hungarian National Socialist Arrow Cross Party, 233 Hungarian Secret Security Police (AVO), 35, 233 Hungarian University of Fine Arts, 88 Hungary 3Ts, 38, 55 Balaton, Lake, 38 Budapest, 1–​7, 12–​13, 35–​8, 43–​56, 81–​92, 108, 109, 130–​9, 148, 151, 153, 154–​79,

180, 184, 199, 204, 205, 231, 232–​5, 239–​81, 285–​8 Budapest Municipal Council, 43 Danube, river 233 Dunaújváros, 184 New Economic Mechanism (1968), 38 revolution (1956), 35–​7, 55, 233–​4 Roma, 160–​1 Romania, 8, 99, 150, 161 Rózsadomb, 160 Socialist Workers Party, 8 Soviet occupation, 8, 36 Iliescu, Ion, 76, 80, 93, 94, 149 IMPEX, 6, 11, 205, 259, 260, 261, 263, 264, 264 fig. 12.2, 279–​82, 284 Indigó Group, 164 Indymedia, 250, 253 Institute of Contemporary Art, Sofia (ICA), 13, 119, 120–​7, 142, 170, 271–​8, 285 Intermedia Department of the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts, 164 International Centre for Contemporary Art, 13, 109 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 2 Ion Andreescu Fine Art Academy, 104 Iron Curtain, 72, 83 IRWIN, 20, 260 Istanbul biennale, 119 354

355

Index Italy, 131, 184–​91 Bologna, 249 Genoa, 246 Milan, 275 Turin (Torino), 5, 180, 185–​91, 196, 198–​201, 246, 249–​50, 256 Venice, 55 Jackson, Shannon, 20 Jacob, Mary Jane, 81, 95–​6 Jeanne-​Claude, 60, 172 Jelinek, Csaba, 239 Kabakov, Ilya, 19 Kádár, János, 8, 36, 38, 55, 261 Kálmán, Rita, 263 Kassel, 72 Kelleher, Michael, 64–​5 Kemp-​Welch, Klara, 12, 19, 43, 44 Antipolitics in Central European Art 1956–​1989 (Kemp-​Welch), 12, 19, 44 Keserü, Katalin, 84 Kessler, Erwin, 107 Kester, Grant, 10, 14, 20, 21, 22, 162–​3, 189 Khrushchev, Nikita, 35 Kiossev, Alexander, 112–​13, 118, 144, 152, 178 Kiraly, Iosif, 64 see also subREAL Kiscelli Museum, 164 KissPál, Szabolcs, 287 Kis.terem /​Project Room, 235 Klaniczay, Júlia, 43, 260 Kligman, Gail, 131 Klimentiev, Boris, 124

Kluge, Alexander, 26–​7, 257 Koleva, Galina, 77, 118 Komitski, Vikenti, 271 Konrád, George, 12, 19, 24, 35, 46, 53, 76, 84, 94, 117, 251 Antipolitics (Konrád), 24 Kopecký, Petr, 25 Koroknai, Zsolt, 87, 87 fig. 5.2, 88, 134 Kostov, Lyuben, 69, 70 Kozma, Eszter, 287 Kulik, Oleg, 120 Kultura (newspaper), 69 Kunstverein, Salzburger, 271 Kunst-​Werke, Berlin, 21, 163 Kuzmanov, Kiril, 271 Kwon, Miwon, 96 Lacy, Suzanne, 20, 22, 95, 242 László, Gergely, 261 Latvia, 19 Le Havre airport, 196 Lefebvre, Henri, 198 Lennon, John, 117 LeWitt, Sol, 49 LI Cuza High School, 222 Liget Galéria, 232, 246–​7, 247 fig. 11.5, 248 fig. 11.6, 248 fig. 11.7, 255, 256 Lind, Maria, 20, 254 Lindblad, Goran, 266 Linden, Roland, 8 Linia 1/​3 (magazine), 222 Ludwig Múzeum –​Kortárs Művészeti Múzeum Budapest, 233, 234, 265, 287

355

356

Index Lukanov, Andrei, 113 Lupaș, Ana, 56–​62, 104 Lyahova, Nadya, 172 Maastricht Treaty see Treaty on  the EU Mad Housers, 241–​2 Maersk Dubai company, 198 Marcu, Marius, 106 fig. 5.7, 107 Marxism, 27–​8, 84, 137, 270 Mason, Andrew, 181 McDonald’s, 80 McKee, Yates, 250–​1 Mélyi, József, 287 Mészöly, Suzanne, 83, 84, 85, 92, 110 Metodiev, Stefan, 166–​71 Mihaylova, Vladiya, 271 Missiano, Viktor, 122 Mladenov, Petar, 116, 117 Moscow Square, 50, 139, 160 Moscow Square (Gravitation), 5, 130, 133, 134–​41, 135 fig. 7.1A, 136 fig. 7.1B, 161 fig. 8.3, 162 fig. 8.4 Motti, Gianni, 19 Moudov, Ivan, 1, 5, 11, 130, 154, 171–​9, 201, 271, 275, 278 see also MUSIZ Moudova, Raymonda, 119 Műcsarnok-​Kunsthalle Budapest, 84, 85, 164, 232, 245, 255, 256 Mureșan, Ciprian, 266 MUSIZ, 1, 5, 172–​9, 172 fig. 8.8, 173–​4 fig. 8.9A–​D, 175 fig. 8.10

Nagy, Imre, 35–​6, 82 Nakovska, Slava, 278 National Society of the Blind and Visually Impaired, 90 NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization), 159 Nazis, 234 Negt, Oskar, 26–​7, 257 Nemes, Csaba, 287 Nemzeti Színház (National Theatre) Budapest, 233, 234 Netherlands, 23, 81, 151 Amsterdam, 275, 276, 276 fig. 12.8 New Europe Barometer 10-​Nation Survey (NEBS), 77 New York, 81, 82, 84, 85–​6, 91, 110, 124, 126, 241, 246 Brooklyn, 242 Manhattan, 242 September 11 terrorist attack, 246 New York Times (newspaper), 274, 286 Nixon, Richard, 266 Nozharova, Vessela, 278 Oakland, California, 22 Ofensiva Generositatii, 156 OFF-​Biennale-​Budapest, 164, 165, 281, 287–​8 Oloș, Mihai, 56–​62, 104–​5 O’Neill, Paul, 254 Open Society Foundation –​Sofia,  124 Open Society Institute (OSI–​NY), 124, 126

356

357

Index Orbán, Viktor, 135, 137, 233, 237, 249, 255, 256, 258, 265 Ordinul Architectilor din Romania (Romanian Architects Order), 155 Ottoman Empire, 7, 64 Pacsika, Márton, 287 Palonen, Emilia, 84, 137, 234 Pauer, Gyula, 44–​5, 46, 47 Peizer, Jonathan, 126 Pejic, Bojana, 80 Periferic Biennial for Contemporary Art (2001–​8), 183, 226–​8 Perjovschi, Dan, 19, 64, 73, 100 Perjovschi, Lia, 19, 64, 73, 100 Peru, 286 Petrešin-​Bachelez, Nataša, 260 Pintilie, Ileana, 59, 61 Piotrowski, Piotr, 18, 46 Pistoletto, Michelangelo, 185, 191 Poland, 19, 28, 35, 52, 62, 72, 75, 113 Orange Alternative, 117 Pollack, Maxine, 54 Ponedelev, Vihrony, 68 Popova, Diana, 66–​7, 69, 116, 124, 171–​2 Popper, Karl, 82 Prague Spring (1968), 47, 54 Prashkov, Kiril, 68, 118, 119 Pro Helvetia, 203, 220, 222, 228 Pro Women Foundation, 220 Prodanov, Vassil, 152

Pulse (newspaper), 69 Putin, Vladimir V., 286 Putnam, Robert, 10, 29, 30, 77, 79 Rákosi, Mátyás, 35 Rakovski Street, 68 Rakowitz, Michael, 261 Rama, Edi, 183 Rancière, Jacques, 129 Reagan, Ronald, 241 Red Cross, 36 Red House Centre for Culture and Debate, 13, 109, 208, 212, 214 fig. 10.3, 216–​18 Revista 22 (magazine), 100 Reyes, Jen Delos, 22 Richardson, Joanne, 156, 237–​8, 253 Rogozanu, Costi, 281 Roma, 2, 77, 79, 99, 100, 100 fig. 5.5, 102, 108, 138, 156, 160–​1, 165–​71, 194, 230 Romanca Society, 194–​5 Romania Ardeal, 7 Black Sea, 8 Braşov, 102, 103 fig. 5.6 Bucharest, 1, 6, 7, 13, 55, 59, 63–​4, 80, 81, 92, 94, 96, 108, 109, 130, 133, 146, 147–​51, 153, 154–​79, 205, 257, 259, 266, 275, 281, 285 Cluj-​Napoca, 8, 12, 55, 58, 104, 149, 156, 275 Erdély, 7 Fine Arts Academy in Iași, 182

357

358

Index Romania (cont.) Greater Romanian Party, 149 Hungarians, 8, 99, 150 Iași, 13, 159, 182–​3, 220, 221 fig. 10.4, 223 fig. 10.5, 224 fig. 10.6, 226, 227, 229 Independent Group for Social Dialogue, 78 Lapusi, 101 fig. 5.5 Maramureș, 57, 58 Mărgău Village, 58, 59 Ministry of Culture, 56 National Fine Arts Academy, 96 National Salvation Front (FSN), 76, 93, 94 Oancea Esplanade, 221 fig. 10.4, 222 Orthodox Romanians, 99 Party of National Unity of Romania, 8 Party of Social Democrats (PSD), 54, 149 Ponorata, 99 revolution (1989), 93, 94, 270 Sălişte, 59 Securitate, 93, 94 Sibiu, 64 Târgu Mures, 55, 99 Tătărași, 220, 221 fig. 10.4, 222, 224, 226, 228, 229, 230 Tăușeni, 96, 97 fig. 5.4 Timișoara, 55, 158, 159, 275, 285 Transylvania, 7, 8, 58, 99, 150, 161 Union of Artists, 55–​6, 78, 149 University Square, 59, 94, 117

Romanian Communist Party, 8, 54, 55, 56, 61, 71, 76, 94 Romanian Cultural Centre, 194 Romanian Cultural Institute (ICR), 147, 193–​4 Romanian Orthodox Church of London, 194, 195 Romanian Peasant Museum, 105, 106 fig. 5.7 Romanian Workers Party, 54 Rosler, Martha, 184, 241, 242, 244 Roussev, Spas, 278 Ruff, Gaudenz B., 278 Russia, 19, 20, 286 Russo-​Turkish War (1877–​8), 64 Saieva, Vasselina, 275 samizdat literature, 34, 47, 50, 63, 156 Sampson, Steven, 62, 63 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 22 São Paulo, Brazil, 55 Sarieva, Katrin, 275 Sassen, Saskia, 194 Schinkel, Willem, 150–​1 Schmidt, Maria, 233 Schopflin, George, 38 Seale, Bobby, 45 Seattle, Washington, 250, 252 Second Vienna Award (1940), 7 Sei, Keiko, 249 Serapionov, Kalin, 119, 120, 121 fig. 6.2, 123 fig. 6.3A–​B Šević, Katarina, 261, 263

358

359

Index Sheidebauer, Thomas, 185 Shipka 6 Gallery, 69 Shock Therapy, 2, 129–​30 Sierra, Santiago, 21, 163, 164 Siulea, Ciprian, 281 Silver, Brian D., 16 Situationist International, 51, 187 Skiling, Gordon, 35 Slovak language, 47 Slovakia, 72, 75 Slovenia, 72, 89 Ljubljana, 72, 272 Sofia Arsenal Museum of Contemporary Art, 258 Sofia Art Gallery, 122 Sofianski, Stefan, 143, 167 Solakov, Nedko, 68, 69, 119, 120, 121, 124, 278 Solidarity movement, 24, 35, 52 Solidarność, 28 Somers, Margaret, 11 Somogyi, Hajnalka, 261, 263, 281 Sonoma Valley, California, 60 Soros, George, 4, 15, 43, 83 Soros Centre for the Arts –​Sofia (SCA), 109, 124, 208, 218 Soros Centres for Contemporary Art (SCCA), 4, 15, 81–​111, 124–​7, 130 Soros Foundation, 43, 84, 90, 108–​9, 110, 126, 299 Sotirof, Jordan, 115 Soviet Bloc, 2, 8, 33–​4, 38, 54, 71, 73, 129, 170 Soviet Red Army, 35, 36, 54

Soviet Union, 8, 12, 33, 36, 38, 54, 60, 64–​5, 71, 73, 82, 118, 137, 152, 170 Gulag, 93 Moscow, 33, 54 Stalin, Joseph, 33, 35, 38, 89 Stalinism, 35, 38, 54, 55, 234 Stalinization, 55, 64 Stanley, Flavia, 185 Stefanov, Svilen, 124 Stella, Frank, 57 Stockholm, 72, 109 Stoyanov, Kamen, 271, 274 Studio of Young Artists, 56 subREAL, 64, 110 Sugár, János, 5, 130, 138–​9, 153, 154, 160–​5, 179, 201 Switzerland, 203, 220, 225–​6, 228 Zurich, 222, 272 Szántó, András, 84, 90–​91 Szenes, István, 44 Szentjóby, Tamás, 12, 40 fig. 3.2, 44–​6, 89, 90, 134, 261 Tache, Rodica, 154 Taka, 211–​16, 213 fig. 10.2, 214 fig. 10.3, 219, 220, 229, 230 Támogatás (Support), 38, 55 Tate Modern, 192, 192 fig. 9.2, 193, 194–​5, 199 Telekommunikáció Nemzetközi Paralel Uniója (TNPU /​ IPUT), 90 Teodorescu, Bogdan, 222 Terror Háza Múzeum, 233, 234, 258, 265 359

360

Index Thompson, Nato, 15, 22 Tichindeleanu, Ovidiu, 269–​70 Tiltás (Prohibition), 38, 55 Timar, Adrian, 12, 64, 102, 103 fig. 5.6 Tiravanija, Rikrit, 20, 21, 120 Tirtiaux, Adrien, 271 Tismăneanu, Vladimir, 266 Tismăneanu Report (2006), 266, 267 Titu, Alexandra, 61, 107 Todorov, Georgi, 69 Tóth, Gábor, 50–​1, 92 Trafó, 260, 261, 263 Treaty of Paris (1947), 7 Treaty of Trianon (1920), 7 Treaty on the EU (1993), 180–​1 Treisman, Daniel, 286 Turai, Hedvik, 162 Türés (Tolerance), 38, 42, 55 Turgosvishte group, 66, 67 Turin International Biennial, 199–​200 Turkey, 7, 286 Tute Bianche, 246

University of Fine Arts Budapest, 184 University of Sofia, 116 Urban, Nicolaus, 44 US see United States of America

Újlak Group, 51, 264 UK see Britain UN Development Program, 2 Ungureanu, Cristian, 222 Union of Bulgarian Artists (UBA), 65–​9, 116–​17, 118, 124, 166, 179 Unions of the Artists, 109, 178 United States of America, 13, 33, 38, 51, 80, 81, 82, 85, 91, 239, 241

Vachudova, Milada Anna, 75 Varga, János, 251 Várnagy, Tibor, 52–​3, 245, 245 fig. 11.4, 254, 255 fig. 11.8, 256 Várnai, Gyula, 12, 88, 88 fig. 5.3, 89, 134 Vasarhelyi, Miklós, 82 Vasileva, Stela, 271 Vaska Emanouilova Gallery, 122 Vassileva, Maria, 67, 122 Vector: Art and Culture in Context (magazine), 183 Vector Association, 159, 183, 222, 226–​8 Vector Gallery, 183, 226, 228 Verdery, Katherine, 54, 60 Vienna, 72, 159, 271, 274–​5 viennacontemporary, 274, 275 Viennese Actionism, 44, 61 Voeten, Hugo, 278 Voinea, Raluca, 157–​8 Walzer, Michael, 26 Warner, Michael, 27, 154, 170, 177, 281 Wodiczko, Krysztof, 241 World Bank, 2, 207 World Trade Organization summit, Seattle, 250, 253 World Values Survey (WVS), 77 World War I, 7

360

361

Index World War II, 54, 225 Writers Union of Hungary, 36 Yalta conference (1945), 33 Yugoslavia, 2, 42

Zhelev, Zheliu, 113, 116 Zhidarov, Philip, 68, 115, 116 Zhivkov, Todor, 8, 64–​5, 112, 118 Zhivkova, Ljudmila, 65

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