Walker Publishing Filed to Visual Arts · Part of Solidarity in Unraveling Worlds

Tomáš Ruller, 8.8.88, 1988,
performance view, Opatov, Prague, black-and-white photograph

Multiple Realities: Navigating Experimental Art in Central Eastern Europe, 1960s–1980s

by Pavel S. Pyś

On May 9, 1987—coinciding with the anniversary designated by Josef Stalin as the Soviet Union’s annual World War II Victory Day—Slovak artist Ľubomír Ďurček photographed himself standing on a street corner in Bratislava.

Above him we see the meeting point of two squares: “American” and “Soviet.” As he stares deadpan at the camera with his hands in his pockets, we can read the image in several different ways. On the one hand, we might see Ďurček as the hapless citizen whose fate is inextricably tied to two warring superpowers. On the other, we might recognize a sly nonchalance in his stance, perhaps even an indifference toward the metaphorical crossroads he occupies. Drawing on the rich and layered history of art made in East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Yugoslavia between the 1960s and 1980s, this exhibition and publication, explore how nuanced, adventurous, ironic, and absurd art may be, especially in the face of hegemonic structures of authority and power.

Art history never follows a cleanly linear chronology, particularly not in Central Eastern Europe at this time when artistic experimentation flourished in varying places at different speeds and with different levels of vigor. Polish writer Bruno Schulz’s reflection on his childhood in the story “The Age of Genius” (1937) captures this complexity. Schulz asked: “Could it be that time is too narrow for all events? ... Have you ever heard of parallel streams of time within a two-track time? Yes, there are such branch lines of time, somewhat illegal and suspect. ... Let us try to find at some point of history such a branch line, a blind track onto which to shunt these illegal events.”¹ Schulz made the case for a radical subversion of time and its linearity, and offered a contestation of the powers that control chronology (who decides which events register within time’s narrow confines?). For him, time could be spooled and unwound; it should be splintered and capacious enough to hold conflicting narratives and events, even those that might be deemed “illegal.”

Crisscrossing time and place, the thematic organization and generous temporal scope of Multiple Realities point to the many parallel tracks of time within which to engage with art made in Central Eastern Europe, while problematizing those positions once deemed “suspect” (and even, on occasion, “illegal”). A careful look at this fractured period reveals just how complex, contradictory, and paradoxical everyday life could be, informing unique conditions for art’s production, dissemination, and, subsequently, understanding. The region’s art history suffers from lingering assumptions about Central Eastern Europe under communism, namely the impression of the region as a homogeneous and isolated singular entity, where artistic languages were merely catching up to possibilities set out by Western peers. Associations abound to images of cold, gray, and poor cityscapes, oppressive authoritarian measures, and artists who had no choice but to explicitly orient their work politically. Yet a closer look at Central Eastern Europe forces a different story to come into view: one full of artists pursuing material and conceptual adventurousness and experimentation, and seeking ingenious and cunning negotiations of structures of power and authority.

“All Artwork Was Political”

The reality of art’s production and distribution within the region at this time is markedly different from that of the West. Art made in socialist contexts was not (or rarely) distributed through commercial galleries, and private collectors played little to no role in elevating an artist’s visibility or renown. With economies unlike Western capitalist ones, there was little to no danger that experimental art would become commodified and subsumed by the “culture industry,” in Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s conception. ²

State powers exerted control with varying degrees of intensity via state-run galleries, artist unions, and committees that organized official commissions, which in turn informed the opportunities artists could pursue. These conditions—always oscillating depending on time and place—were compounded by a common bias, succinctly put by artist Georg Baselitz: “There was abstraction in the West and realism in the East.” ³

US organizations such as New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Congress for Cultural Freedom as a Cold War tool of soft power. ⁴ Abstraction came to embody free-spiritedness, a personal perspective, and, ultimately, Western individualism and capitalism (ironically, often in diametrical opposition to abstract artists’ own socialist leanings), as opposed to socialist realism, which institutionalized control. ⁵ This simplified binary denies the possibility of politicized abstraction, while also calcifying the agency of artists within the realm of socialist realism.⁶

Artists oriented politically clearly locate their subject matter: consider the visual languages employed by North American artists such as General Idea, the Guerrilla Girls, Keith Haring, Jenny Holzer, and Barbara Kruger, whose activities teeter on the line between art and activism. The expectation that an artwork clearly communicates an artist’s political position has informed the common misunderstanding that Central Eastern European artists making work outside of official state systems necessarily must be understood as “nonconformist,” “dissident,” or “oppositional.” These mightily loaded terms—saturated with binary thinking—are not useful when we consider Central Eastern Europe, where the implementation of cultural politics differed depending on context. It is worth here recalling Algerian French philosopher Jacques Derrida’s use of lowercase, rather than uppercase, designations for his concept of différance.⁷ The deflation of a concept to its lowercase encourages us, in Derrida’s words, to understand its meaning not as a “unique word, a master name.” ⁸ Derrida’s move is anti-essentialist; it emphasizes the context- dependent nature of language as “verbal, open, and transient.”⁹ With Derrida in mind, let us consider some artists whose lives might shed light on the nuanced ways in which their work can be read in relation to politics with a lowercase “p.”

Dual Positions

Consider the image of Slovak artist Július Koller: staring deadpan at the camera, he holds one of his paintings. Rendered in flat brushstrokes is an unspectacular panorama of the vast Danube flowing underneath Bratislava’s recently completed New Bridge with its characteristic flying saucer–shaped observation deck. The work—as dull as Koller’s expression—is from a series of “academic paintings” that the artist would supply to the state-run Slovak Fund of Visual Arts, which would then, in turn, sell them through the Dielo chain stores that offered trinkets and souvenirs made by Slovak artists and craftspeople.10 Koller benefited from the income the mechanism offers, while also slyly feeding the drab system with paintings pulsating with irony. While painting in this style, he simultaneously produced the conceptually rich anti-Happenings and ephemeral actions for which he is better known, such as the fictional U.F.O. Galéria Ganek (U.F.O. Ganek Gallery), located on a remote mountain range in the High Tatras. Describing his approach, Koller explained his commitment to “cultural situations” in which everyday life was transformed, where “as an individual [I] turn in a ‘non-studio way’ into an objective reality through a subjective intervention.”11 Koller, like many artists, straddled the official and unofficial worlds, and as we look at Central Eastern Europe, it is necessary to bear in mind the positionality that artists assumed—positions that were rarely clear, and often muddled or even conflicting. Artists, such as Koller, became experts at playing the system, accepting official commissions while continuing their unclassifiable work on the side.

At other times, surprising iconographies were smuggled into officially commissioned art, as was the case with East German artist Jürgen Wittdorf’s series Jugend und Sport (Youth and Sport) (1964), commissioned by the Academy of Sports in Leipzig. At first glance, the linocuts appear to echo the style of socialist realism, yet upon closer inspection the content reveals undoubtedly homoerotic overtones: in Unter der Dusche (Under the Shower), naked men are seen washing in a communal shower room, while in Baubrigade der Sportstudenten (Sports Students’ Builders Brigade), the stereotypical socialist heroes— the bricklaying builder—are, again, semi-clothed, sharing moments of intimacy. Although homosexuality was decriminalized in East Germany in 1968, LGBTQIA+ communities nonetheless experienced continued repression, and Wittdorf didn’t publicly embrace his sexuality until the early 1990s, after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The prints were displayed for years at the Leipzig school, and enjoyed wide distribution in the Junge Welt (Youth World) daily newspaper published by the Communist Youth Organization.

Other artists in the region embraced official commissions in applied arts, which were not subject to as intense scrutiny as the visual arts. Many were able to pursue opportunities by working with textiles and tapestries, often reaching international renown through participation in the Lausanne Tapestry Biennials in Switzerland, which featured artists such as Magdalena Abakanowicz, Janina Tworek-Pierzgalska, Jolanta Owidzka, Wojciech Sadley, and Barbara Levittoux-Świderska (Poland); Geta Brătescu, Ritzi Jacobi, and Peter Jacobi (Romania); and Jagoda Buić (Yugoslavia). In 1969 in Lausanne, when Abakanowicz first exhibited her Abakan series—large-scale pieces incorporating fiber and weaving—the works famously confounded expectations of the textile tradition by moving off the wall to be exhibited in space, as sculpture. Textiles provided a fertile ground for experimentation, where artists explored scale, tactility, color, and form, developing in turn abstract languages unencumbered by the same politicized ideologies imposed on painters and sculptors. While seldom engaged with political issues, textiles offered a space to innovate more freely and push the boundaries of the art/craft divide.

Artists Embedded in Institutions

Many artists working at this time embraced institutional affiliations, ingeniously playing the system by surreptitiously disrupting its mechanisms from within. As curator of the state- supported Brno House of Arts, Czech art historian, artist, and poet Jiří Valoch had access to the printing workroom, which offered him the opportunity to produce countless examples of artists’ books and ephemera, often collaborating with foreign artists through mail art networks. Established in 1971, in the wake of the Prague Spring, Jazzová sekce (Jazz Section) was an affiliate to the Association of Musicians of the Czech Socialist Republic. Officially, the organization was focused on promoting jazz music, yet in reality it galvanized exchanges between artists, curators, and musicians; staged progressive events in cities including Prague, Brno, and Olomouc; and is survived by a trove of vivid, bespoke printed matter.

Artists frequently capitalized on their vocational positions to take risks. Between 1977 and 1995, Czech artist Jiří Kovanda worked as a library depository administrator at the National Gallery in Prague. There, without permission, in 1985, he organized a one-day exhibition in the spaces of the Prague City Library, which were typically used for exhibitions of modern and contemporary art from the city’s collection. Approximately twenty individuals saw the show, accessing the spaces on the pretense of having an appointment with Kovanda.¹⁰ Clandestine efforts like these demonstrate the forging of alterity through community and “parallel cultures,” as defined by Václav Havel as those “which for various reasons will not, cannot or may
not reach out to the public through the media which fall
under state control.”¹¹

For many, the infrastructure of state-run institutions offered access to resources that were simply unavailable to the wider public, especially newly emerging technologies. By 1963, all Eastern Bloc nations developed their own digital computers, and while their chief purpose was to support the needs of the military-industrial complex, artists, electrical engineers, architects, and industrial designers soon discovered their aesthetic capacities.¹² Experimental works—animations, computer graphics, holography, multimedia events, drum plotter drawings—were created by individuals employed at TV stations (Slovene Miha Vipotnik at RTV Slovenia, Croat Tomislav Mikulić at TV Zagreb) as well as at leading scientific research centers (Czech artist Zdeňka Čechová worked in state-run engineering, industrial design, and research departments, where she learned computer programming and algorithmization; Croat Vladimir Bonačić created his “dynamic objects” while at the Laboratory of Cybernetics at the Croatian National Research Ruđer Bošković Institute between 1969 and 1973).

Some of the most cutting-edge experimentation often took place in state-funded organizations—the Polish Radio Experimental Studio (PRES) and the Hungarian Balázs Béla Studio (BBS) are prime examples. Established in 1957 in Warsaw, a time of increased liberalization following the October 1956 thaw, the chief purpose of PRES was to support state radio, theater, and television needs. However, its founder, Józef Patkowski, immediately recognized the studio’s capacity in supporting artists experimenting beyond the types of content they were expected to provide. Full of state-of-the-art equipment adapted into a total environment designed by architect Oskar Hansen, PRES catalyzed a wealth of experimental music, graphic scores, animation, and film, leaving a legacy as significant as comparable centers in the West established in the decade prior, such as Pierre Schaeffer’s Studio d’Essai in Paris, Cologne’s Studio für elektronische Musik, and Milan’s Studio di Fonologia Musicale. Founded in 1959, two years after PRES, BBS was funded by the Ministry of Culture and produced feature-length films by key voices of the emerging New Hungarian Cinema generation, such as Miklós Jancsó, István Szabó, and Béla Tarr.

Aside from producing films aimed at broad distribution, the BBS also embraced collaboration with emerging filmmakers, as well as sociologists, writers, and artists, who were encouraged to collaboratively conceptualize and direct shorts that spanned socially engaged documentaries and animations by members of the experimental visual arts scene, such as Miklós Erdély, Dóra Maurer, Tibor Hajas, and Tamás Szentjóby. Films could be made without the expectation of distribution or commercial success, and whether they were seen by the broader public was ultimately the decision of the censors. Remarkably, even ambitious works that didn’t fully toe the party line were occasionally released for a narrow group of professionals, and even international film critics.¹³

As ever, the degrees of artistic autonomy and experimentation were contingent on the times. During martial law in Poland (December 1981 to July 1983), the PRES team was forced to go on leave; Patkowski was fired; and reflecting on the studio’s activities, its state-appointed commissioner complained that PRES was “overly concerned on elitarian culture, at the expense of its more practical social and institutional obligations.”¹⁴ Artists who produced work via BBS faced similar repressive measures: Szentjóby’s film Centaur (1973–1975), offering a searing critique of the communist system veiled by its own propagandistic visual language (imagery of “socialist progress” captured in workshops, a collective farm, and a factory; upbeat narration), was censored and remained unreleased until 2009.

Artists at Risk

The term “nonconformist” reads most legibly in the realm of “Soviet nonconformist art,” which refers to artists living in the USSR and Soviet republics whose works defied the conventions of state-imposed socialist realism. The term doesn’t apply to Central Eastern Europe, where artists didn’t experience the same pressures as peers in the USSR. However, the lived experience of East German artists—including Lutz Dammbeck, Cornelia Schleime, Gino Hahnemann, AG. Geige, Jürgen Wittdorf, and Autoperforationsartisten (the Auto-Perforation Artists, whose members included Micha Brendel, Else Gabriel, Rainer Görß, and Via Lewandowsky)—comes closest, with their activities monitored with intense scrutiny and persecution by the Stasi forces. This can be seen in the work of artist Gabriele Stötzer, for example, whose series Trans sitzend (Trans Sitting) (1983–1984) offers fascinating insights into the dangers, precarity, and ambiguity of creating work outside of the official East German art systems.

A rare voice of open dissent, Stötzer emerged among the alternative spheres of Dresden and East Berlin in the 1980s. She paid a high price for her activities and was imprisoned for a year at the Hoheneck women’s prison for signing a petition protesting the decision by the Socialist Unity Party of Germany to strip songwriter Wolf Biermann of his citizenship in 1976. Often befriending punks, musicians, and members of the LGBTQIA+ community, Stötzer created experimental Super 8 films and often included her own naked body in her work, breaking taboos and hierarchies to create alternatives to the officially sanctioned and state-permitted gender roles. The grids of vintage photographs that constitute Trans Sitting portray a man in drag, alternating poses for Stötzer’s camera. What is astounding is that the individual seen here—a man who assumed the alias “Winfried”—was actually a Stasi security force informant tasked with observing Stötzer, who only learned of his true identity years later. The series encapsulates a fascinating moment, begging the question: Who is watching whom? Our assumptions as to who is the subject of the work— Winfried, or Stötzer herself—unravel. One never really knew who was a friend or who was a foe, yet after the fall of the Berlin Wall, many artists gained access in the 1990s to declassified information that shed light on spies and informants in their midst.¹⁵. Some were outed dramatically: in 1991, Biermann referred to artist and writer Sascha Anderson as the “babbler Sascha Arschloch” (“babbler Sascha asshole”), forcing Anderson to publicly contend with his record as an informant.18 In the case of others, peers accepted that they had little choice but to cooperate (as was the case with Czech curator Jiří Valoch, who was forced to collaborate with the authorities in 1973).¹⁶

A series of photographs from the Chapel Studio in Balatonboglár is a testament to just how ambiguous and uncertain the times were. Between 1970 and 1973, Hungarian artist György Galántai organized events, concerts, and exhibitions at a rented chapel building in the Hungarian countryside, providing a space for meeting and exchange between the most exciting experimental Hungarian, Czech, and Slovak artists of the time. In these images, we see a long-haired man, known to the group as László Algol, staging a performance he titled A vegyészmérnök és az építésvezető. A háromság személyisége (approximációs gyakorlat) (The Chemistry Engineer and the Construction Manager. The Person[ality] of the Three [An Approximation Exercise]) (1973). During the event, Algol read a text ruminating on the possibility of holding three identities, while also encircling a space between trees with a net of threads. When Galántai made his archive public in 2000, it transpired that Algol was in reality Gusztáv Hábermann, a Hungarian state security officer with the codename “Pécsi Zoltán.” As in the case of Stötzer’s Trans Sitting, we are faced with an astounding image: not only does the informant pose as an artist, but he also realizes an artwork that indirectly reflects his own triple identity as a spy.

Politics with a Lowercase “p”

Artworks that registered an outright, clear, and immediately legible commentary on the political situation of the time were rare. An exception is found among the Hungarian artists included in the IPARTERV exhibitions held in 1968 and 1969, whose works offered a pointed critique and meditation on the thaw following the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. Multiple Realities presents for the first time in North America one such iconic work: Gyula Konoly’s Bleeding Monument, originally created in 1969. The installation consists of a torso-size block of ice smothered in potassium permanganate (a purple-black crystalline salt typically used for cleaning wounds) and wrapped in gauze. As the ice melts, the solution dyes the liquid red, the shape now appearing as if an abstracted wounded body. The tumultuous events of the Hungarian Revolution were also directly referred to in Tamás Szentjóby’s Portable Trench for Three (1969), a DIY stretcher that poignantly conjured the not-so-distant reality of ordinary citizens coming together in the face of the brutal Soviet-led invasion. These works are uncharacteristic outliers, given their direct references. Even the more tongue-in-cheek and sly works of Endre Tót—such as Very Special Gladnesses – I am glad if I can stand next to you (1971–1976), in which we see Tót casually posing next to Lenin’s monumental statue, then located in Budapest’s Felvonulási Square—might seem unabashedly brazen.

When considering this period in Central Eastern Europe, we are hard-pressed to identify artworks engaged with the Political Zeitgeist (capital “P”). Wary of instrumentalizing their voices to serve a social or political purpose, and always aware of the specter of censorship that hovered over their daily lives, artists sought to be political in the most unpolitical ways. Subversive meaning was smuggled through strategies of deflection, ambivalence, satire, humor, irony, absurdity, doubt, or disinterest, while the autonomy of artistic practice was often negotiated by embracing conflicting and dual positions.¹⁷

“Artists Were Isolated and Unable to Travel”

Picture this: it’s 1965, and the thirty-nine-year-old American Beat poet Allen Ginsberg wears a crown and sits on a makeshift throne atop a parade float that glides through the streets of Prague before 150,000 revelers. Above him, a banner reads: “Ginsberg, the King of May / An Expression of Proletarian Internationalism.” Such was the scene of the May Day
parade, a bacchanal celebrating the arrival of spring. These
were exciting times in Prague: the following year, two
Fluxus festivals took place with appearances by Ben
Vautier, Jeffer Berner, Serge Oldenbourg, Dick Higgins, and Alison Knowles; in 1967 and 1968, Beat festivals were headlined by Czech progressive music bands, many of which played cover songs of Western bands, such as “Then He Kissed Me,” popularized by the Crystals. These energetic moments of the thaw, marked by autonomy and joy, came to an end with the normalization that would follow the 1968 military invasion, which brought about a dour reality of restriction and control. Yet despite the dark times, lessons learned in the 1960s would feed the following decade when artists were forced to turn inward, seeking safety and privacy by finding community among friends.

The Iron Curtain was never monolithic but was alternately impassable and porous: at times it allowed travel, at other times it enforced isolation and immobility. Between these two polarities, artists negotiated the limits of their autonomy, generating nodes of national and international exchange and collaboration—some of which were aligned with the party, others much more rogue and independent. For those artists willing to abide by the expectations of the authorities, travel to “brotherly nations” deemed ideologically aligned was, at times, possible. In 1953/1954, Polish painter Aleksander Kobzdej traveled to China and then Vietnam, where he created a series of works on paper resulting from his experience accompanying the Viet Minh forces in the battle at Dien Bien Phu, a decisive event that ended the First Indochina War in 1954. Realist portraits of heroic fighters dominated his output, and when shown the following year at Warsaw’s Zachęta – National Gallery of Art, these sketches neatly played into the Cold War rhetoric aimed at exposing the West’s imperial violence perpetuated against countries in the Far East.

Despite the incredibly uneven hold of socialist realism on Central Eastern European artists (it swiftly became marginal in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Yugoslavia at the start of de-Stalinization and maintained a firmer grip in East Germany and Romania), the communist authorities saw an opportunity in artistic exchange as a soft power tool, a means to “incorporate independence struggles into a formal internationalist ideology.”¹⁸ This rhetoric was bolstered by events such as the emergence of the Non-Aligned Movement, the Bandung Conference in 1955, and gatherings such as World Festivals of Youth and Students, which promoted alliances between Eastern Bloc and developing nations under the aegis of the common struggle for peace, solidarity, and national liberation. As a result, while Paris or New York might not have been accessible, capitals of the Global South occasionally were, and there is a rich history of Central Eastern European “official” artists traveling as far as India, Central Asia, China, Cuba, and the Soviet Union. Many of the works created during these voyages fit within the broad parameters of socialist realism of art that was “national in its form, socialist in its content”— portrayals of families, workers, industrial landscapes, national celebrations, and public demonstrations of party loyalty.¹⁹Some regarded their roles as artist/agents of transnational solidarity. Consider, for example, East German painter Lea Grundig’s reflection on a drawing of a Cuban child she made while visiting the country in 1961, in which she refers to her subject as the “child of the new, free Cuba.”²⁰

Beyond travel opportunities, artists were exposed to international peers (particularly during the 1950s and 1960s) through touring exhibitions that showcased art made in brotherly nations: Soviet art was shown to mixed reception in Central Eastern Europe, while large-scale exhibitions presented works by artists from the Global South. During this period, it was also possible to experience paintings by Western communist artists such as André Fougeron, Renato Guttuso, and Gabriele Mucchi. However, a dogmatic socialist realism failed to emerge and even travel opportunities could occasionally spur artists to move in undesired directions (for example, Kobzdej’s time in China and Vietnam prompted his turn away from realism toward abstraction). This lesser-known story of transnational socialist realism and the mobility of official artists has, until recently, been marginalized among curators and art historians. Several recent conferences and readers have shed light on how these networks of exchange produced a fractured, rather than monolithic, socialist realism inflected by local iconographies, such as folk traditions, and often rooted in a new search for national identity. ²¹

Friends from Brotherly Nations Among Us Varsovie la nuit (Warsaw by Night) (1961) is a fascinating painting. Hovering between abstraction and figuration, its surface is marked by affixed pieces of painted jute. Rendered in deep hues, its iconography draws on traditional Berber imagery, Arabic calligraphy, and North African folk art. The painting was made by Moroccan artist Ahmed Cherkaoui during the year he spent at Warsaw’s Academy of Fine Arts in 1960/1961. He quickly came into contact with avant-garde pioneer Henryk Stażewski, through whom he met many leading Polish artists who happened to be passing through the capital. While indeed Central Eastern European artists traveled, often less recognized are the stories of those who came to live and work among them. Art academies—where students could be shaped both artistically and ideologically—became connective nodes, modeled on the Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow, which was established in 1960.

The routes of officially encouraged transnationalism chart a fascinating picture. Lessons learned from travels or through exchanging ideas with international students would impact even official commissions. During her university studies, East German mural painter Sigrid Noack was in dialogue with fellow mural painting students, including Iraqi artist Sami Hakki and Israeli Palestinian artist Abed Abdi; while East German Erich Enge’s large-scale mural in Erfurt-Rieth, Die Idee wird zur materiellen Gewalt, wenn sie die Massen ergreift (The Idea Becomes a Material Force, When It Grips the Masses) (1976), bears the influence of his travels to Vietnam in the prior decade. Many artists from South America (such as Hernando León, Guillermo Deisler, and César Olhagaray from Chile; Teresa Casanueva from Cuba) and the Middle East (Abdi, Mona Ragy Enayat from Egypt, Emmanuel Guiragossian from Lebanon) moved to East Germany, some staying for years, others indefinitely.

In Czechoslovakia and Poland, film schools became important nodes. In Prague, the Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts (FAMU) attracted approximately one hundred students between 1950 and 1989, from Syria (Nabil Maleh), Algeria (Mohammed Lakhdar-Hamima), Iran (Nosratollah), India (Pramod Pati, Krishna Viswanath), Colombia (Juan Carlos Delgado), and Cuba (Octavio Cortazár).²² Similarly, the Łódź Film School in Poland hosted nearly two hundred foreign students between 1948 and 1989, with most attending in the 1960s.²³In both countries, a new wave of auteur cinema was flourishing, and students arrived on scholarships with the purpose of acquiring and then implementing specialist knowledge by establishing film infrastructures in their home countries.²⁴ Students realized films broadly guided by the universalist values of fraternity and solidarity under the banner of a new “socialist cinema.”²⁵ Their films were subject to a censor’s approval, and they tackled a variety of subjects ranging from youth and coming of age to family relations and romance, while also giving insight into the postcolonial and racialized lived experiences of students temporarily residing in Central Eastern Europe.

Although few filmmakers outright criticized their host nations, some of their works countered the fantasy of socialist brotherhood, shedding light instead on the reality of race relations. A taboo subject throughout the region, racism was largely denied on the grounds that, ideologically, it was incompatible with socialist values of a classless and equal society. Racism was equated with the colonial oppression perpetuated by the West, and particularly the denial of civil rights in the United States. Made in Prague, Indian filmmaker Krishna Viswanath’s Black and White (1968) offers a window into a Czechoslovak society confronted by otherness. [Fig. 9] Focusing on two mixed-race couples, the film explores how they negotiate the prejudices and fears of the white women’s families. In the voiceover, we hear from the African students and the women as well as young and old Czech men, whose unease and ignorance at the prospect of a mixed-race relationship expose the failings of the socialist ideal of egalitarianism and progressiveness. At one point, a young African doctor says, “People look at me as if I were a ghost,” begging the question of whether a socialist internationalism across national, racial, religious, and gender lines is even possible.

Mail Art Networks of Exchange

Where did this leave those artists who weren’t interested in perpetuating the party’s logic? What happened to those who couldn’t count on an invitation and letter of support to travel? Let’s start with those who had the most opportunities to travel, particularly to the West.²⁶ The Yugoslav artists faced few obstacles in leaving (though, again, it must be emphasized: depending on time and place) and artists such as Marina Abramović, Sanja Iveković, and Tomislav Gotovac exhibited in the West (Canada, Italy, and the Netherlands, respectively) as early as the mid-1970s. Polish artists similarly had relatively more opportunities via grants and fellowships sponsored by the Ford, Rockefeller, and Kościuszko Foundations, allowing artists to spend time in, and occasionally emigrating to, New York and Paris. Yet for those unable to travel to the West, other forms of connectivity emerged—chief among them were networks of mail art exchange. Looking at Central Eastern Europe at this time, there is a rich constellation of key protagonists whose mail art activities map a global network of exchanges within the bloc and well beyond to the West and Global South.

In 1971 Polish artists Jarosław Kozłowski and Andrzej Kostołowski generated NET, a single sheet with a nine-point manifesto that outlined their vision for a decentralized, open, self-proliferating, and noncommercial network of artistic activity that encouraged exchange and communication outside institutions and across borders. Rubber stamped with a large “NET” that mimicked (and by extension, satirized) the visual language of an official organization, more than 300 copies were distributed to recipients internationally, largely evading the scrutiny of censors. Writing about NET, art historian Klara Kemp-Welch emphasized: “Kozłowski and Kostołowski offered a pioneering theorization of the alternative network. But they were also describing a system that was already in operation. ... Their statement declared that all such activities were now connected; that all independent initiatives were significant and that everyone acting autonomously in some way was also doing so within the framework of a new, powerful, solidarity.”²⁷

Mail art captured the imaginations of artists for many reasons: it promised the expansion and democratization of an artwork’s production, distribution, and reception, while elevating connectivity and exchange to a creative act in itself— East German mail art propagator Robert Rehfeldt dubbed its connective capacity “CONT-ART.”²⁸ Crisscrossing international borders with complete disregard to however nonpermeable the authorities wished for the Iron Curtain to appear, mail art was, in Polish curator and artist Piotr Rypson’s words: “stateless, it needs neither visas nor passports. Mail Art promotes collective activities. Mail Art is common fun.”²⁹

These networks of exchange conjured a sense of common belonging and solidarity that were impervious to the immobility imposed by the Cold War West/East conflict. Correspondence was, naturally, monitored and surveyed, and artists came up with ingenious methods of subverting official channels of communication, while, at times, poking fun at the authorities—picture the Stasi agent opening Rehfeldt’s card with the caption “Please don’t think of me now.”³⁰ Inventiveness was key in the bid to subvert the power of the authorities: East German artist Birger Jesch frequently used envelopes associated with condolence letters, and Paweł Petasz would sew his letters shut to prevent them from being opened by steam, while Endre Tót posted his items from different cities to avoid being detected.

For some, mail art even provided the possibility of escape: reflecting on the period, Soviet-born Romanian American poet Valery Oisteanu recalled that he managed to leave for Rome thanks to mail art, which at the time would contain “illegal visa rubber stamps, false official stamps, and even fake passports page by page.”³¹ Mail art artists would also travel within Central Eastern Europe, paying visits to their correspondents. Canadian artist Anna Banana and American artist Ginny Lloyd, for example, traveled to East Germany, Poland, and Hungary in 1978 and 1981/1982, respectively; Brazilian artist Paulo Bruscky visited East Germany in 1982; and Japanese artist Shozo Shimamoto would visit Iosif Király in Romania in 1985.

However subversive, mail art could not replace an artist’s freedom to go where they pleased, and one performance offers a poignant reflection on mail art’s promise of traveling and, specifically, leaving. In 1982, Király, together with fellow artists Constantin Flondor and Doru Tulcan, staged a performance, in which the three artists enclosed themselves in a giant envelope, stamped with the slogan “Contact – Trans Idea” and addressed to “Tu, El, Ei / You, He, They / West, Est, Nord, Sud.”³² Reflecting on this time, Kiràly recalled the joy of an object’s arrival when you would open “the mail box (in the context of the ’80s when nothing was really going on in Romania) and all sorts of objects and colorful envelopes fell out, bringing with them the fresh air of freedom.”³³

“The Artwork Is Derivative of Western Styles”

Consider two works made within a couple of years, on either side of the Iron Curtain, that only superficially appear to have much in common. Beginning in 1963 in New York, Hans Haacke began producing plexiglass sculptures that were partially filled with water trapped in a cycle of evaporation and liquefication. These Condensation Cubes, as he titled them, integrated environmental events as a means to breathe life into a Minimalist form; they became, in the artist’s words, “comparable to a living organism which reacts in a flexible manner to its surroundings.”³⁴Two years later, in Budapest, Tamás Szentjóby created Hűlő víz (Water Cooling Down) (1965), in which a glass vessel was filled with water that was reheated every so often and left to cool, evaporating gradually.

Reflecting on the piece in 2012, Szentjóby, perhaps somewhat facetiously, claimed that it was about the “the wonderful, miraculous, invisible, gentle process of the cooling towards entropy,” yet the work has long been seen as a metaphor of the cycles of political freezes and thaws that Central Eastern Europeans were experiencing before and after the Prague Spring in 1968.³⁵. Neither Haacke nor Szentjóby knew each other or of their respective practices. To frame both works within a shared history of Minimalism, or Haacke’s then-conception of “systems art,” would create a range of problems.³⁶ Tidily inscribing both within a common aesthetic style denies their local specificity, which is particularly nuanced and subtle in the case of Water Cooling Down. The conventional approach of the art historical canon as a chronological and linear perspective would benefit Haacke (reaffirming a Western hegemonic hold over art history) and disadvantage Szentjóby. By contrasting these two artists, it becomes apparent that a passive mapping of Western art historical models onto Central Eastern Europe doesn’t make for rich and meaningful discourse.

Against Belatedness

In When Was Modernism: Essays on Contemporary Cultural Practice in India (2000), Indian art historian Geeta Kapur challenges the idea of modernism as monolithic, instead seeking its permutations along multiple tracks, rejecting the notion that modernism developed in a linear fashion “in the manner of the stations of the cross, to a logical end.”³⁷ Rejecting the center/periphery model, Kapur emphasizes disalignment with the Western mainstream, instead seeking an understanding of modernism as “not an identical narrative in reckonings across nations: it has to be held in place in India by a contextualized and increasingly more critical stance.”³⁸ It is possible to replace “India” with the name of any of the six nations whose artists are featured in Multiple Realities.

Underscoring Polish art historian Piotr Piotrowski’s notion of a “horizontal art history” are many values that also characterize Kapur’s approach. For Piotrowski, horizontality is a means to counter the “verticality” of art history, which represents the hierarchy of Western artistic centers from which artistic experimentation would radiate to the periphery, where it was relegated to be merely adopted and received. In Piotrowski’s eyes, the answer lies in localizing art history and relativizing Western art history’s styles and canons: “Art historians should realize that a canon is always an effect of an analytical and historical construction—more dependent on the historian than on the art accounted for.”³⁹ By acutely paying attention to time and place, it becomes possible to challenge and disavow the fantasy of Western modernism—its universalist ideology.

The application of Western vocabularies onto the work of Central Eastern European artists can bring about simplification and confusion, and risk the judgment that these regional practices were somehow derivative of or inferior to their Western peers. Exhibitions, readers, and conferences have localized discourses in relation to local identities, whether national, regional, ethnic, racial, religious, or sexual, situating terms such as “feminism” and “queer” within specific locales, understanding their resonance and meanings as contingent on time and place.⁴⁰

A consequence of a dominant canon is the relegation
of anything beyond it to merely being backward, untimely,
and belated. There are many examples that counter this arrogance, including, for example, the work of many East German artists. In the late 1980s, before the fall of the Berlin Wall, radical experimentation flourished, attesting to a vibrant sphere of alternative subcultures. Interdisciplinary collaboration between

visual, performing, and moving image artists gave way to multimedia events that took place in both independent and unofficial spaces. Lutz Dammbeck’s installation Revisiting of Herakles (Heracles Concept) (1982/2023) finds its origins in mediacollages that the artist has realized in various manifestations since 1979.⁴¹ He presented one such mediacollage at the first Intermedia Festival at Coswig in 1985, where dancer Fine Kwiatkowski negotiated a complex and layered space of paintings (one marked with the word “obstinacy,” another with “punishment”), sculptures, and mounds of earth, while Dammbeck projected slide images and film to a cacophony of sound and music. The thematic scope of the Heracles project is vast: Dammbeck draws on references to Nazi-favored sculptor Arno Breker as well as the writings of the Grimm Brothers and Heiner Müller. A multimedia, layered, and complex gesamtkunstwerk, Heracles is a meditation on myth and reality, the legacy of Nazism, and modern nationhood, memory, and trauma.

Decidedly more visceral are the performances by the Dresden-based group Autoperforationsartisten (Auto- Perforation Artists). In ALIAS / Die Kunst der Fuge (ALIAS / The Art of the Fugue) (1989), we see Else Gabriel’s head emerging from a bucket of pig’s blood, while in Der Mutterseelenalleinering (The Utterly Alone Circle) (1989), Micha Brendel is masked and uses knives to cut into his body, suggesting its manipulation and deformation. Rife with absurd and grotesque events, the group’s performances saw the artists wearing animal costumes, appearing naked, using animal parts as props (in one action, Via Lewandowsky spoke through a cow’s esophagus), all set to recitations of incomprehensible dialogue. Raw and provocative, the Auto-Perforation Artists were knowingly confronting the existential conditions of constraint, entrapment, and captivity experienced within East Germany at the time. Speaking of the works, Gabriel said: “It was like a zoo. ... You were already trapped in the GDR.”⁴²

The interdisciplinary methods and visual iconographies of the aforementioned performances might evoke a range of precedents in Western Europe and the United States dating as far back as the early 1960s. Dammbeck’s immersive mediacollages might bring to mind the atmospheric environments of figures such as Joan Jonas and Meredith Monk. In art history’s rear-view mirror, the frenetic, violent, and free-flowing associative nature of the Auto-Perforation Artists’ performances conjures works such as Fluxus concerts; Claes Oldenburg and Patty Mucha’s Snapshots from the City (1960) at New York’s Judson Church, in which Oldenburg, writhing and wrapped in rags, eventually mimicked suicide with a cardboard gun; Happenings by Allan Kaprow and Jim Dine; or even Yoko Ono’s Sky Piece to Jesus Christ (1965), in which an orchestra plays Antonín Dvořák’s Serenade for Wind Instruments (1878) as its members are bandaged in white gauze. The use of bloody viscera by the Auto-Perforation Artists brings them close to the early 1980s performances of Colombian artist María Evelia Marmolejo or the morbid trouxas ensangüentadas (bloody bundles) of gauze-wrapped parcels of seeping cow meat that Brazilian artist Artur Barrio would leave on the streets of Belo Horizonte, a commentary on the “disappeared” at the hands of the military regime. We might even be reminded of various other performances from Central Eastern Europe, such as Polish artist Tadeusz Kantor’s notion of emballages (or “packing”), and particularly his 1968 Happening Die Grande Emballage, staged on the former grounds of the Nazi propaganda rallies in Nuremberg, Germany, in which he wrapped his wife, Maria Stangret, with toilet paper; Croat Sven Stilinović’s early photographs from the 1970s and 1980s, in which he appears wrapped in gauze and gagged; or Poland’s Teresa Tyszkiewicz’s sensuous Wata series (1981), in which the artist captures images of her body enveloped in cotton wool. While these references suggest a similarity of material and formal approaches, they constitute only superficial comparisons, as none of the East German artists had any awareness of these practices, rendering any suggestion of belatedness completely irrelevant.

Christoph Tannert and Sara Blaylock, art historians specializing in the story of the East German experimental scene, draw links between the Auto-Perforation Artists and the activities of the Dresden-based Die Lücke group, headed by A. R. Penck, which created collaborative paintings that were fused with music and performance.⁴³ Tannert reminds us that the name of Die Lücke references the prewar avant-garde group of Expressionist painters called Die Brücke, and argues that the artists behind the interdisciplinary experimentations of the late 1980s trace their artistic family tree back to the prewar avant- garde tradition.⁴⁴ The only figures who might have tangentially influenced the Auto-Perforation Artists are the Viennese Actionists, such as Hermann Nitsch and Rudolf Schwarzkogler. Speaking to performance specialist Amy Bryzgel, Brendel was keen to clarify that while the group was aware of them, the Viennese Actionists “were not a direct inspiration or influence.”⁴⁵

From Today’s Perspective

Although of the not-so-distant past, the region and time considered in Multiple Realities remains underexplored in a mainstream museum context. How can artworks created under such circumstances as those chronicled in this volume resonate in the current moment? In the United States, recent years have seen the persistent erosion of democratic processes (false accusations of election fraud, active voter suppression, and so forth), as well as the stalling or reversal of civil liberties (systemic racism and police brutality, school resegregation, escalating child poverty, the reversal of Roe v. Wade, the weaponizing of abortion, and the restricting of trans rights, to name a few). Across the world, there has been a steep rise in autocratic nationalist discourses set ablaze by escalating refugee and migrant crises, among other factors. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which has stirred fears of nuclear warfare, has demonstrated the West’s dependency on nonrenewable energy supplied by nations incompatible with social- democratic values, conjuring the specter of the Cold War. In the face of increasingly repressive forms of authoritarianism, control, and surveillance, the work of the artists discussed here reminds us of art’s powerful capacity, even in its quietest of forms, to challenge and subvert hegemonic powers.

Through the most unpolitical of politics, these artists remind us—often with a sly wink to the viewer—of the force of disobedience and the pivotal importance of agency. Their works demonstrate art’s relevance, autonomy, and capacity to evade and escape. Working in the most expansive and, at times, ephemeral of means, they found the capacity to create artworks unconfined by traditional networks of production, presentation, and distribution, challenging traditional notions of what institutions do and whom they serve. With wistfulness and awe, we are reminded of the imaginative zeal of projects such as Kozłowski and Kostołowski’s NET, Koller’s “cultural situations,” or the surviving documentation of secret performances that didn’t at all posit on the material but instead traded in human connectivity, rooted in the here and now. From the vantage point of a capitalist society, in which an artwork often becomes tantamount to a luxury good, it is humbling to consider how much can be achieved with so little. Ultimately, Multiple Realities is a story of friendship, alliance, and solidarity. The artists we encounter in the exhibition and in these pages speak directly to the value of finding community among the disempowered, among friends, and making it your own.

Epilogue

One of the most compelling aspects of artworks made in Central Eastern Europe in the 1960s to 1980s is their capacity to operate through cunning, specifically by eluding meaning, or simply keeping it left unsaid. Made in 1972, a time of a renewed freeze in Hungary, István Haraszty’s Madárkalitka (Birdcage) is a home for a small parakeet, fitted with a swing, feeder, and electronic monitoring system. When the bird sits on the swing, the cage doors remain open, yet the moment it flies up, they snap shut. Only when the doors are closed can it access food and water. In a short film by János Gulyás, we see Haraszty operating the sculpture and explaining its logic as an automated living space complete with a monitoring system invisible to its inhabitant.⁴⁶. The artist discusses the work in terms of its technical capacities and explains in detail the system’s complex mechanism. To the viewer watching at the time, I wager Birdcage would have registered with both a smirk and a sigh.▪︎

A Note on the Exhibition Structure

Featuring nearly 100 artists and some 250 artworks, Multiple Realities: Experimental Art in the Eastern Bloc, 1960s–1980s is the largest survey of Central Eastern European art presented in North America to date.⁴⁷ The exhibition is organized in a twinned manner, with the aim of delving into both the artwork and the multilayered context of its making. Its four thematic chapters bring together works made in different times and places, yet bound by shared concerns with (1) issues of control and surveillance in public and private spaces; (2) negotiations of embodiment in relation to sexuality, gender, joy, eroticism, stress, and duress; (3) finding community among alternative spheres; and (4) employing newly emergent technologies to reach beyond the immediately perceptible. These thematic lenses are then contrasted with four interpretive rooms, which offer not an encounter with artworks but information in the form of texts, timelines, newsreels, and photographic documentation. These spaces provide historical anchoring, bringing together a range of perspectives and resources while exploring complex, and at times conflicting, terminologies.

The decision to eschew organizing the exhibition by country was made early on in favor of thematic lenses. Whereas a nation-based approach would offer the advantage of inscribing an artwork within a highly specific set of social, political, and cultural references, it nonetheless generates a deterministic link between the work and its historical context, risking over-politicizing its content.⁴⁸ This is problematic in regard to art made in Central Eastern Europe, where the dates of a work’s creation and exhibition were often not the same. Artists, especially those facing highly repressive circumstances, often knowingly held back their work with the intention to show it at a later date, while some had few or limited opportunities to exhibit. Others created highly ephemeral works out of public view, in rural landscapes or basements and attics, which were witnessed only by friends and eventually entered art history via documentation.

Though photographed in 1962, Croatian artist Tomislav Gotovac’s Showing Elle—one of the first examples of the (partially) nude male body in contemporary art made in Yugoslavia—wasn’t exhibited until the 1970s, when Gotovac first started realizing his streaking performances in the streets of Belgrade. At other times, an artwork might invoke a historical event decades later, seeking its then-contemporary resonance. A few days shy of the twentieth anniversary of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact troops, Czech artist Tomáš Ruller staged the performance 8.8.88 (1988), in which he set himself on fire, a nod to Czech student activist Jan Palach’s self-immolation in Prague’s Wenceslas Square on January 16, 1969 (an act of protest still commemorated as a symbol of defiance today). Though inevitably some artists who had never met nor exhibited together are brought into dialogue in this exhibition, the thematic approach invites comparisons of how artists contended with shared concerns even while experiencing highly localized and specific everyday conditions.

The term “multiple realities” offers as much specificity as it subjects itself to contestation and interpretation—a sign of just how complex, diverse, and multilayered the stories of Central Eastern Europe and its artists were in the past and continue to be today. Multiple realities signals the kaleidoscopic and changing, rather than the fixed and whole.⁴⁹ Among the key features of this period are highly asynchronous cycles of political and cultural liberalization and restriction, each unique to a nation, despite their often close geographic proximity. Take the years 1968 to 1970, as an example: the period marks the Prague Spring and its aftermath, which resulted in a freeze in the Czechoslovak artistic scene, with many artists forced to make work outside of the gallery and museum systems. This dire time of the state’s tightening grip on arts spaces is evidenced by maneuvers such as the forced removal of experimental exhibition-maker Jindřich Chalupecký as director of Prague’s Václav Špála Gallery. His final show, before the gallery’s program was taken over by the state-run Association of Czechoslovak Fine Artists, was Eva Kmentová’s Stopy (Footprints) (1970).

In this one-evening exhibition, Kmentová offered plaster casts of her feet to gathered viewers—a radical gesture of the work’s dispersal as well as, ultimately, its destruction. As part of the Happening, the objects were arranged in a line leading from the gallery to the street, offering a meditation on the then-pervasive feeling of suffocation of artistic freedom and a poignant suggestion of the artist leaving behind the state-run arts system, of literally “walking out” of official spaces.

Contemporaneously, in Budapest, 1968 and 1969 saw the legendary IPARTERV exhibitions, organized by Hungarian curator and art historian Péter Sinkovits, presented on the premises of the state-run Enterprise for Industrial Architecture Design.⁵⁰ In choosing to occupy a non-art space, and without permission, the IPARTERV exhibitions encompassed an array of groundbreaking visual languages. They were accompanied by improvised events and Happenings, capturing the vigor of new progressive practices with an outburst of energy unimaginable in Prague at the time. Nonetheless, IPARTERV’s activities did not unfold without serious consequences: both editions were swiftly shut down by the authorities, and exhibition artists János Major, Miklós Erdély, and Tamás Hencze were issued three-year travel bans.⁵¹ In the following years, the sustained monitoring by the authorities forced artist Tamás Szentjóby into exile in 1975.⁵²

Where Is Central Eastern Europe?

This exhibition and publication consider art made in six Central Eastern European nations: East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Yugoslavia. There are few hard and fast rules that neatly divide this part of the world, unsurprising given how frequently national contours here have been drawn and redrawn, with borders crisscrossing contested lands and communities divided along political, ideological, national, cultural, religious, and linguistic lines.⁵³. In its geographic scope, Multiple Realities most closely aligns with the German Ostmitteleuropa, or “East Central Europe,” a term commonly associated with the Polish historian Oskar Halecki, who, having eventually settled in the United States, led the popularization of the designation among English-language discourses.⁵⁴ The title of Halecki’s book Borderlands of Western Civilization (1952) clearly identifies the region’s cultural orientation, one famously lamented almost thirty years later by Czech writer Milan Kundera, for whom Central Europe was literally “kidnapped” by the USSR in 1945.⁵⁵

In his work, Halecki defends the ethnocultural diversity, integrity, and distinctness of Central Eastern Europe, citing common historical features, namely the embrace of Christianity, the impact of the Jagiellonian and Habsburg dynasties, and the opposition to imperial forces that sought to divide their territories, as well as individual linguistic and national traditions. In starkly distinguishing the area’s peoples from the Germans on one side and the Russians on the other, Halecki emphasized the sense of captivity experienced by Central Eastern Europeans under Soviet rule. The title of Piotr Piotrowski’s landmark study—In the Shadow of Yalta: Art and the Avant-garde in Eastern Europe, 1945–1989 (2005)—implies a similar existential condition. Piotrowski problematizes the region’s art history vis-à-vis the longue durée of the 1945 Yalta agreement, exploring how the Soviet sphere of influence impacted the possibilities of art in this part of the world.

Invoking the “Eastern Bloc” in our exhibition title fulfills a similar purpose: it conjures a geographic and temporal picture while also pointing to a set of ideological constraints under which art was made. This is not to say that Piotrowski’s study or Multiple Realities are solely about the dimension of art’s relationship to politics or ideology but rather that by referencing historical events, they both signal the unavoidable impact of the USSR on the cultural landscape of Central Eastern Europe.

Inclusion and Exclusion

Large-scale group exhibitions are as much exercises in exclusion as they are about inclusion, and Multiple Realities is prone to this quandary. The specificity of the exhibition’s geographic scope is made more ambiguous by the inclusion of East Germany, which technically, in Halecki’s view, belongs to Mitteleuropa, though certainly its population, and by extension artists, were prey to some of the most repressive pressures within the region, perpetuated by the Staatssicherheit authorities. The presence of artists from Yugoslavia also might present objections given the 1948 Tito-Stalin split and the role that the country played in the Non-Aligned Movement. Yet despite its openness to the West, socialist authorities in Yugoslavia also traded in repressive measures against artists. A 2009 interview with artist Sanja Iveković describes her memories of Trokut (Triangle) (1979), a short performance in which she sat on her balcony, drank whiskey, and pretended to masturbate while Josip Broz Tito’s motorcade passed by on the street below, until security forces finally asked her to go inside. In the interview, she recalled its first presentation in Zagreb in 1980, when she discovered that the work’s photograph showing Tito was missing right before the show was to open. Suspecting the gallery director removed the image, Iveković said, “Self-censorship was the most powerful institution in our socialism. ... Those who were active
on the countercultural scene at the time took the socialist project far more seriously than the cynical governing political elite.”⁵⁶

Beside the inclusion of East Germany and Yugoslavia in Multiple Realities, there is then the matter of the exclusion of the Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, as well as the southern nations of Bulgaria, Belarus, Albania, Moldova, and Ukraine. Aside from the restrictions posed by the fiscal and planning reality of exhibition-making, the geographic focus ties to temporal clusters that feature in the exhibition, such as the period immediately before and after the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia, the late 1960s thaw in Hungary, and the 1970s artists’ engagements with the body in Yugoslavia, leading to the mid- to late 1980s interdisciplinary performances and mixed-media experimentations in East Germany. These various episodes are characterized by an intensity of activity by artists who shared proximity, which in turn allows the exhibition to bring to light common concerns and attitudes rather than forging a chronological narrative. Some of the artists featured in Multiple Realities, such as Geta Brătescu, Sanja Iveković, and Alina Szapocznikow, have at the writing of this essay seen more widespread exposure and recognition, though many lesser-known figures are privileged within the selection of works on view. Nonetheless, it must be acknowledged that though these geographic choices may raise awareness of some long-underappreciated artists, it may also contribute to an ongoing paucity in visibility for others.

What Is “Experimental”?

While presenting traditional media (such as painting, photography, sculpture), the exhibition names in its title a focus on “experimental art.”⁵⁷ Broadly, “experimental” is employed to signify practices that revive the avant-gardist spirit of experimentation and the pursuit of new vocabularies and platforms for artist practice. However, the exhibition title specifically strays away from the more academic “neo-avant- garde” for two key reasons. Firstly, the term is not immediately legible to museumgoers, bordering on jargon. Secondly, this descriptor, when applied to art made in Central Eastern Europe, is problematic as it carries potential pitfalls vis-à-vis politics, due to its Western (especially US) interpretations. Art historian Peter Bürger expanded upon the term in his book Theory of the Avant-Garde (1974), lamenting ways that “the neo-avant-gardes adopted the means by which the avant- gardists hoped to bring about the sublation of art. As these means had ... been accepted by the institution, ... they could no longer legitimately be linked to a claim to transcend the sphere of art.” ⁵⁸ Essentially, for Bürger, the neo-avant-gardists were politically toothless, unable to collapse art into everyday life. In his book In the Shadow of Yalta, Piotrowski challenged this Western definition by locating a clear distinction: while Western artists rebelled against modernism, Central Eastern Europeans turned to neo-avant-garde strategies as a form of rebelling against the exploitation of art in the name of politics and ideology. Socialist culture was a homogenizing force, and neo-avant- garde expression offered difference. For many Central Eastern European artists, outright political sentiment was equivalent to the instrumentalization of art by socialist realism.

Aside from the entrapments of applying a Western-centric term, “experimental” is a useful designation that captures many visual styles, particularly interdisciplinary practices that often slip through the cracks of art history. Multiple Realities presents artist-designed forms of material culture (posters, LPs, ephemera), and places significant emphasis on those figures working between the visual and performing arts. The exhibition features Dammbeck’s revisiting of the Heracles performances and mediacollages made in East Germany in the late 1980s, and there are many works on view that stem from highly ephemeral activities (such as public and private performances or intimate engagements by artists with the camera lens) that would subsequently materialize as artworks through documentation much later.

Despite its capacious geographic and temporal approach, Multiple Realities is nonetheless just a sliver of a much larger story. Art historical and postcolonial discourses have done much to decenter, de-Westernize, and internationalize the history of art. Exhibition-making plays an important part too, with each show an opportunity to further splinter what has become assumed as “canonical.” (I say splinter, rather than shatter, as the collection displays of most large-scale art museums in Western Europe and North America continue to present an established model of styles and directions of influence.)⁵⁹ However, exhibitions, with their limited real estate and resources, can in no way make the claim for all-inclusive comprehensiveness: they are always just a partial fragment. Despite this, exhibitions are pregnant with possibility as they have the capacity to explode assumptions, subvert expectations, and shock with surprise. They can also challenge areas of dominance. Piotrowski knew this, and he saw exhibitions of art from Central Eastern Europe presented in the West as akin to “appearing in the agora,” becoming “subject to evaluation” within an international forum.⁶⁰ Citing Michel Foucault, Piotrowski understood intimately that presenting art is in no way neutral but an act of occupying a space that is coded and complicit within an “essential plane for the relations of power.”⁶¹ Presented across three North American museums, we hope ⁶²encourages viewers to reflect on the mechanisms that have formed their impressions of art from the region, opening new readings that celebrate art histories as plural rather
than monolithic.

Experience Multiple Realities: Experimental Art in Central Eastern Europe, 1960s–1980s for yourself at the Walker Art Center Nov 11, 2023–Mar 10, 2024.

Want to learn more about the artists and ideas around this exhibition? Get the exhibition catalogue at shop.walkerart.org