by Pyzik, Agata
Even before the dissolution of the Cold War order, post-communist studies within post-colonial discourse were mapping the problem of the way our dependency influences our psyche. This is even often called post-dependency studies. Yet another dependency was less direct, yet as influential - that is, upon Western, capitalist imperialism. Such groundbreaking books as Maria Todorova’s Imagining the Balkans or Ivan Colovic’s Balkans – terror of culture analyse the idea of balkanization and the influence of self-colonization as one of the responses to westernization since the ninteenth century. At a recent series of events in Warsaw, Panslavisms, scholars and artists from the former republics debated over how they might save the idea of the East without it becoming chauvinistic. They proposed among other things the rethinking of Polish ninteenth-century nationalism, with its slogan For Our Freedom and Yours, which meant that one nation’s liberatory fight would liberate the others, in this case other eastern countries from the Tsarist, Hapsburg and Ottoman Empires; the group Slavs and Tatars contributed a poster translating the slogan into Russian and Farsi. Today, that may mean liberation from a westernizing neoliberalism, which is experienced acutely in Eastern Europe. They also seem inspired by the idea of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth as a multi-racial, ‘Sarmatian’ eastern empire of Poles, Lithuanians, Jews, Ukrainians, Armenians and Tatars, while criticizing the actual reality of it, in the colonial relations Poles had towards the Kresy. I was surprised though, that throughout the many discussions over how this new eastern international association could look like nobody even mentioned the most obvious one, that actually existed for decades: the Soviet Union. The answer to that is obvious – it’s too discredited in the intellectuals eyes to seriously consider it. But the USSR at first wanted to be the most accomplished realization of eastern internationalism. Even in its name, it refused to use any national territory, proposing instead a perfectly abstract association of territories run by workers councils. In reality, it eventually became just another realization of Russian Empire. The next chapters will discuss more at length the communist culture of this Empire, and the reality of communist ideals.
Socialist Realism On Trial
Post-post-modernism, avant-garde, realism and socialist realism in our time
It is not a way back. It is not linked to the good old days but to the bad new ones. It does not involve undoing techniques but developing them. Man does not become man by stepping out of the masses but by stepping back to them. The masses shed their dehumanisation and thereby men become men again – but not the same men as before.
Bertolt Brecht, Against Georg Lukács
A considerable part of the leading German intelligentsia, including Adorno, have taken up residence in the ‘Grand Hotel Abyss’ which I described in connection with my critique of Schopenhauer as ‘a beautiful hotel, equipped with every comfort, on the edge of an abyss, of nothingness, of absurdity. And the daily contemplation of the abyss between excellent meals or artistic entertainments, can only heighten the enjoyment of the subtle comforts offered.’
György Lukács, Introduction to Theory of the Novel
Culture is continuation of politics by other means.
Socialist slogan
Here we are now, entertain us!
Nirvana, Smells Like Teen Spirit
The real in the new reality
If by chance you’d had gone back in time to 1990s Poland, you’d have been struck how ‘reality’ had been suddenly changed into an augmented cardboard maquette made up of commercial products. Buildings become mere canvases for gigantic bottles of Coca-Cola, Snickers or West cigarettes, old neon signs were taken down for the sake of big logos of McDonalds and Burger King, the familiar grey newspapers started to have tons of very bright colors applied to them, and the marble of Stalinist buildings was covered by big stickers, where somebody’s teeth were bigger than people’s heads. It was like that in the whole Bloc. “Advertisements have conquered civilisation,” Russian writer Arina Kholina said in 2011 in a Russian literary journal, where she compared bannered promotions to “knickers drying on a balcony”. Public space was swamped: Turn left after Toyota, there you will see L’Oreal, and after Pepsi turn right – for the house where Sony is, sounded the typical directions. Many of the new ads were illegal, contributing to the general image of the former East as an easily conquerable no-man’s land. To this day not much has changed. Yet, today not only the East, but the whole neoliberal capitalist part of the world finds itself in a great crisis of representation, sitting somewhere between the big Virgin Media signposts and the “tasteful” retro of Keep Calm and Carry On. Despite it touching both political sides, the aesthetic crisis doesn’t bother the ruling class nearly enough. More worryingly, this also concerns the progressive side, whose political paralysis paralyzed its aesthetics too. Between gifs, the hideous layout of social networks and tumblr, rots the corpse of reality. As this book is interested in looking back at the reality of socialism, this chapter wants to go back – as you do these days - against what Brecht and others wished for, and ask archaeological questions about Realism as the lost model for involvement in reality. What was the realistic solution in the state controlled art and later, in democracy?
‘Socialist realism’ was a style that transcended both Russia and the 1930s. The first Western reactions to sotsrealism were hostile. America before the Cold War was a country in transit where socialism was popular, and the two empires were watching each other closely. As English art historian Herbert Read justly pointed out in the 1950s, sotsrealism was not simply kitsch, but derived from the general nature of the popular arts in various epochs - art which “had never been of any great cultural or aesthetic significance, and the reason for this we ascribed to its realistic nature – the very quality which is in Russia extolled as the supreme aim in arts”. An example of this is Mexican muralism and its great influence on American art of the New Deal era, which was a contemporary to Soviet sotsrealism and was made overwhelmingly by Mexican communist artists. It’s a rare example of art’s influence going from a poorer country to the more powerful one, bottom-up, and not top-down. There was also an uncanny similarity between the mass culture in the States and Soviet Russia, where in both cases, grand scale realism was a low, popular art. Simultaneously with the invention of the New Person in USSR – a sporty, cultivated, harmoniously built man - you had the emergence of comic Superheroes, equally unreal in their fitness. Both were ‘men of steel’.
4.1 Human species, man and woman - crude Sotsrealist gendering. Peasant Man and Woman on the Green Bridge, Vilnius
Yet avant-garde and realism were constantly opposed to each other. It mostly derives from the reading of post-war (sometimes even pre-war, like Clement Greenberg) critics, who were to quick in interpreting the new realism of the 1930s as necessarily complicit in totalitarianism, ignoring the political nuances of certain forms of realism. In this chapter I’ll seek a theoretical redemption of realism, that at the same time could serve for a better interpretation and historicization of ‘real socialism’ and the current difficulty in which militant art has found itself. It will be necessarily a tough task, but realism needs no redemption – it still happens in arts, only popular arts, like TV shows and still sometimes happens in its critical, Brechtian, form. It goes largely unnoticed by the critics, with the prominent exception of Fredric Jameson, who has promised to devote a still unpublished book to the question of realism, and wrote extensively on the contemporary historical novel and ‘realist’ TV serials like The Wire. Realism seems an unfashionable position to take, which necessarily re-emerges within the post 9/11 world, and especially, in the post-2008 financial crisis world. If 2011 started what can be interpreted as the gradual rejection of the 1980s order, both factors – financial and political - seek their expression via the most available channels – internet, youtube, social networks. Cell-phone films pose the question of reality vs. simulacrum, in which we have to believe in reality again, a reality for so long smashed to pieces by the mediation of T
V news and computer simulation. The greatest success of postmodernism is that we still behave as if we don’t believe what was going on. The mass of depictions of current wars, revolutions, riots, protests, show trials doesn’t seem to make them real enough.
The years 2012 and 2013 will write themselves in the memory of posterity not only as an explosive year of double dip recession, but also as a year of necessary disappointment in the outcome of the revolutions of 2011, that spread across the so far silent or silenced areas of post-communist Eastern Europe, with the anti-Putin protests and jailing of anarcho-punks Pussy Riot (alongside with dozens of unsung others), and similar anti-austerity protests in Bulgaria, Romania and Slovenia. But is there anyone who still remembers the fact that leftist art was given the biggest official power and exposure in 2012, at the Berlin Bienniale, turned by Polish artist and curator Artur Żmijewski into a showcase for radical art collectives and Occupy protesters. The Berlin Biennale was as intensely commented on in the months succeeding it as quickly it was later forgotten. It was the year of massive exposure for so-called engaged art: with the big exposition by Jeremy Deller in Hayward Gallery, Joy in People, coinciding with the publication of Claire Bishop’s Artificial Hells, a summa on socially engaged arts and relational aesthetics, working with and through communities/groups and the delegation of others. Yet, there are very specific reasons why ‘socially engaged’ arts started getting prominence and an increasing interest in the artworld, perhaps the most important being that after 1989 a lot was done so that the notions of history and politicization were dismissed and put in the museum. Everything solid should melt to air now: old battles should be forgotten and we cheerfully gave ourselves to the post-communist transition-induced consumption. Everywhere, not only in the Eastern Europe, this transition was felt, as the 1980s especially were a process which touched us all.
But from then on, as the world of politics was undergoing the increased post-modernization and spectacularization, culture was similarly focused on not even celebrating the surface as depth, as in the 80s, but celebrating the surface as surface. “Here we are now, entertain us” – this lyric by Nirvana best sums up the time, when the prolific production of the most insipid entertainment and pleasure-making went together with the biggest possible deflation of pleasure, experienced now as passive-aggressive, endless reproduction of nothingness. The “disappearance” of history from the everyday made its arrival into the most unexpected place, visual arts. The influx of money, made on financial speculation, made it necessary to invest especially in the areas of the immediate social prestige, yet strangely enough, despite its particularly spectacular monetization, art still remained a critical space.
With this success story came the remorses of conscience, not so much on the part of the galleries, but of the artists, still holding to the traditional romantic notion of an artist. There appeared new forms of specifically “user-friendly” art, which were now denying that “it’s not about the object, but more about the relation between the artist and the public” (or artists and other artists, more like). That was ‘relational art’ – a rather unhappy pop-theory term coined by Nicolas Bourriaud, which helped to cover a lot of crap touchy-feely, meaningless, ingratiating middle class art and smuggling it into the museums as avant-garde for the large part of late 90s/2000s. But while it claimed its “openness” and welcomeness, it was rather set up to obscure the really existing divisions and inequalities. It was a perfect post-post-modern theory, where the differences first obfuscated in the transition from modernism to postmodernism were now further obliterated, for the sake of the ideas of fun, false togetherness and a fetishized ‘relation’ which at best lasted five minutes in the gallery.
Relational aesthetics aside, in recent years something emerged that we can call the ‘third avant-garde’. These are artists or groups which subscribe to the ethos of the avant-garde, referring to their aesthetics (including open citation of their work), while not shying away from the contemporary political issues and Marxist theory, and often through their work discussing some of the problems of the contemporary, which by necessity also touch artistic production: from the financial crisis and precarity to the difficult, ambivalent relations art itself has in this equation. This went together with the risk of ‘recuperation’, haunting the arts since the end of the conceptual era. The endlessly rehearsed “aesthetics of” punk, Situationism, or old avant-gardes such as Soviet Constructivism, the well known phenomenon of radical chic, was always supposed to suggest or evoke rather what has been, hardly communicating with contemporary issues.
4.2 A middle finger to the state. Voina paints a penis in front of Petersburg’s FSB offices.
There’s suddenly a ‘demand’ for politicized aesthetics, which is hanging often in a political void, since political aesthetics is by necessity something which doesn’t just appear somewhere all of a sudden, but is and always was emerging and developing together with the social movements and events which were provoking it. Today we have a glimpse of a social movement, yet without the aesthetics, and massive amounts of art production, yet without any real movement or thought that it would result from. How to create art in the post-socialist world, in moment of social dejection and depression?
Community art was inadvertently embracing both aspects of its own impossibility: the one of short temporality of its effects and their actions, and the fact it was still selling pretty well. The works are often about working with a given community, and doing a collective project with them, usually as a kind of palliative therapy against the effects of a dysfunctional society. This “art through delegation” – as Claire Bishop described it in her essay “The Social Turn: Collaboration And Its Discontents” – is most notably made by artists like Jeremy Deller, Christoph Schlingensief and Artur Żmijewski. Here artists invite so-called ordinary people to take part in their work, seemingly to include them in the process of social sculpture, but with greatly varying ethical and aesthetic results. The danger is artists fetishizing certain old, well known aesthetics of protest (like May ’68) which when put into a gallery space become objectified and clichéd.
How to put history back into the frame, without necessarily falling into the traps of naivety, without repeating the same mistakes, without fetishizing politics and instead, practising it? One solution (as far as art works are concerned) to this problem may come from study and knowledge: as such, projects can become deep researches into long forgotten histories of dissent that can teach us something about the present, rather than just being objectified. Opportunities we missed, perhaps, that become valuable again, as after decades of silence, the old struggles reemerge.
Critical Art, Engaged Art
Meanwhile, in Eastern Europe, what the accession to the capitalist West did for Poland and many others was accession to the much desired art market. In the 2000s there was something of a boom in Polish art, with even attempts to label it Young Polish Art, after the British equivalent. This trend has now begun to fade, especially since numerous events during the long Polska! Year promoting Polish culture in the UK failed to attract as much publicity as might have been hoped. Mirosław Bałka got a prestigious Turbine Hall commission in 2009/10, which is as close as you can get to canonization in the modern art world, but it worked more as promotion for Bałka rather than for Poland.
What has shifted is the political impact of Polish critical art at home. Polish art, rather than being simply an entertainment for the rich, started to engage with politics on the levels many of the Western artists gave up a long time ago. In the Polish 90s it was much more unleashed – suddenly there was a freedom to speak, but there was no infrastructure. Soon enough it turned out that what could be said was very limited anyway. There emerged the “critical artists”, who were questioning Polish moralistic hypocrisy, and especially the treatment that “minorities” were getting: women, LGBT or handicapped people. In this, the visual arts challenged a society in a harsher and deeper way than film or literature. Practically immediately after �
��89 artists rushed to get at those elements of reality which went repressed or unrepresented under the old regime. Even before that date, after the Martial Law in the 80s, there emerged artistic groups, like Gruppa, whose especially obsessive painters were painting and reproducing the symbols of communist reality, as if they wanted to reappropropriate it, or via this pop art gesture, put them to the same level as Warhol put Mao and Marilyn all together.
The critical artists were reacting to the years of censorship and to the superficiality of democracy, revealing limits of the new democratic reality. It was our Viennese Actionism, but in place of the old fascists they fought pathologies of Catholic fanaticism and the far right. Artists such as Katarzyna Kozyra, Artur Żmijewski, Zbigniew Libera, Robert Rumas and Grzegorz Klaman were excavating Polish traumas, touching upon themes such as Polish religiosity, the too-soon forgotten memories of the Holocaust, intolerance and exclusions, various taboos, like non-normative sexuality, the body and its visceral aspects or ageing, and the way individuals are controlled in a purportedly free, but actually extremely oppressive, society. Unfortunately, the inequalities wrought by the transformation from communism to capitalism were present in the artworks much more rarely.