Piotr Piotrowski

Towards a New Geography of Art.

Some time ago I have travelled on the Inter-City train from Budapest to PΘcs with Katalin Keserⁿ, a Hungarian historian of modern art, who suddenly asked me what I thought about Donald Kuspit's book New Subjectivism. I shrugged. We were talking about the study of East Central European art history, in which both of us had been involved, and Kuspit's considerations seemed to me totally useless as regards attempts at the revision of the methodology of such studies. Quite on the contrary, one might say that the method of the American scholar and his interpretation of the art of the eighties, which are the subject matter of New Subjectivism, as well as his categories of description stemmed from those tendencies in the methodology of art history which not only ignore the need for the revision of the artistic geography, but in fact petrify the so-called universal perspective. If we translate this perspective into the language of geography, it entails a hierarchical model of analysis formulated in terms of the opposition of center and periphery. Of course, it is perfectly possible to ignore the need to revise the artistic geography and to develop a non-hierarchical frame of reference, however, if we make an attempt to reconstruct the paradigm of center vs periphery - and only under such circumstances we will be able to understand better the local artistic processes - it should turn out that Kuspit's book which seemed so interesting to my Hungarian colleague is of no use.

Actually, Kuspit's study has been discussed from a number of viewpoints. The adherents of the revision of art history in feminist, ethnic, social, political, and suchlike terms highlighted its weak points, in the first place criticizing the concept of "new subjectivism" referring to the artistic culture of the eighties for eliminating the tensions characteristic of that specific period. Kuspit's approach makes art subject to a market strategy of a modernist category of "newness" or a "new artistic trend" ("-ism"), while the very concept of subjectivity, unless it is related in diverse ways to gender, race or the social context, becomes repressive with respect to various "Others."

In reference to this discussion it should be noted that the revision of art history which has been undertaken in connection with the problem of the "Other" has been thus far limited to a specific territory. As a rule, a feminist or multiculturally oriented ethnic critique of the artistic canon focuses on the long-established paradigm of artistic geography, and even the so-called "non-Western studies," so popular these days in North American universities, in fact do not challenge the traditional geographical categories. Approaching the culture of the Far East as an equivalent of the Western canon, they oppose one center to another within the same space quite distinctly determined by the economic interest of the West, since Japan or China are now crucial targets of the economic and political activity of Western countries, and particularly of the United States. Hence, both new art history and non-Western studies for the most part derive from one and the same line of reasoning which has defined the hierarchical artistic geography.

Coming back to our own field of interest, as artistic geographers aiming at a revision of traditional concepts, we can easily prove that Kuspit's book is not only useless for our purposes, but also that it conceals under the surface of the author's vast erudition a premise of imperialism. If Kuspit's intention was to account for the artistic culture of the eighties, which in East Central Europe was marked with such phenomena as a wave of neo-expressionism rising in a very specific political atmosphere of the fall of communism, there is no doubt that he missed the point. Using his terminology, we have no chance to grasp the art of the Czech "Hardheads" ["Tvrdohlavy"] or the significance of the "Forum '88"; the Hungarian exhibitions from the series called "New Sensibility" and "Eklektika"; Polish groups such as Luxus, Gruppa, L≤dY Kaliska or Neue Bieremiennost; the Rumanian debate on postmodernism; the unique artistic revival in Bulgaria; the alternative developments in Leipzig and East Berlin; and finally, the highly original Russian art of the "perestroika" - all these artistic facts will vanish from our sight or rather dissolve in the enigmatic "new subjectivism." Therefore, it is not difficult to demonstrate that Kuspit's study is not relevant for the objectives of the new artistic geography. On the contrary, it is a typical example of the discourse of art history dealing with various periods in the art of our region.

To give an example of a specific postulate of the universalization of language as a strategy of the appropriation of geographically "other" cultures, I will refer to a text by a very influential American critic associated with the "correct" magazine of the New York bohemia, The Village Voice. Peter Schjeldahl, whom I mean here, writes: "The world of the American [or Western - P. P.] art has been and is expecting from the former Soviet empire something new. On the one hand, this expectation stems from sound interest and good will, on the other, it boils down to the admission that our exhausted artistic resources need exotic transfusion. So far, however, the achievements seem rather modest, and the best instances - such as those of Ilya Kabakov and Miros3aw Ba3ka - show us why it is so. Besides, they teach us how to adjust our expectations to what we will probably obtain. The "Eastern" artist must first acquire the artistic idiom of the West, since even the most sophisticated local art did not outlive the long era of darkness. Then the artist must try to speak this idiom and call painful things by their names; they must tell us, stuttering, about the truths so long untold that now they are covered with layers of mud like a river bottom. Only after uncovering all the layers of silence we will see the new face to face in our crazy Western sense." Indeed, I don't know why the American critic believes that Ilya Kabakov has learned to speak the "Western artistic idiom." Perhaps he has never been to Russia and he does not know that the Russian "komunalka" is. Besides, I have no idea what the "long era of darkness" would mean in reference to the art in Russia (to stick to just this one area). Anyway, let's put these specific questions aside. A fundamental issue, which, I suppose, has been put forward in good faith, is the problem of the "translatability" or "compatibility" of language - a genuine trap, as it were. Language is the most sensitive instrument with which we can perceive the genius loci; which best expresses the artist's identity, and which may become the best starting point for the reconstruction of the artistic geography. Thus, it is not the recognition of similarities but of differences that may invalidate the hierarchical approach to geography. Contrary to the demand of the American critic, developing his or her analysis, a revisionist geographer of East Central Europe should reveal what is different or "other" from the "Western idiom," instead of coming up with the requirement of learning it as a necessary condition of being marked on the artistic map of the world.

Schjeldahl's postulate stems from the belief that language is a transparent means of communication. It is grounded in a specific modernist utopia of language, best epitomized by various kinds of abstraction allegedly referring to the universals common to all people, that is, to reason with is geometrical order and to intuition with its emotional particularity. The utopia of the universal language claimed that if we used one tongue, we would understand one another better, yet the problem is that there is no language which is neutral. The universal or global language of our everyday use is English - its variety that is quite distant both from the idiom of Shakespeare and from the living speech of the Brooklyn street. The same relates to art. In fact, Schjeldahl is honest enough to call a spade a spade, by the same token revealing the mechanisms of the market of artistic culture.

Nowadays is it easy to illustrate the way of thinking described by Schjeldahl. A good example is the exhibition Beyond Belief, moving all over the United States as a kind of mobile "discovery-kit" for the American public interested in the developments in the post-communist Europe. The selection of artists (let alone the express inquiry made by the exhibition curator, Laura J. Hoptman) is rather symptomatic, for all the contributors use a "comprehensible" language which should be (and indeed is) marketable, simultaneously exemplifying specific permeability of exotic regionalism into the universal (that is, Western) idiom (Joana Batrinu, Luchezar Boyadjiev, David Eerny, R≤za El-Hassan, Zuzanna Janin, Josif Kiraly, Matej Kren, Zbigniew Libera, Martin Mainer, Dan Perjovschi, Nedko Solakov, Simona Bubßnovß-Tauchmannova, ┌jlak group).

Most probably, each Central European culture is now experiencing a sort of clash with the expectations of the Western curators and public, at the same time suffering from the deficit of understanding. When in 1983 Paris became the site of an immense exhibition PrΘsences polonaises, prepared by Ryszard Stanis3awski and in fact originally intended to be another "binary" exposition of the French artistic culture (after Paris-New York, Paris-Berlin, and Paris-Moscou), Mieczys3aw Porebski published an article called "Absences polonaises." This confrontation offers some food for thought, first of all demonstrating that the external and internal point of view on the culture of the region are different, using different languages, knowledge, and - above all - different historical frames of reference so that the history of the regional art looks quite different when seen from the "periphery" and from the "center." Here in the "periphery" we also see the "center" in a different way; first of all, we see various "centers" or, to be precise, the tensions among them which are not visible in any single "central" perspective. Each "center" has a tendency to totalize, each sees itself as a radiating focus. Hence, demanding the presence of the absent, Porebski challenged the franco-centric perspective of Paris, pointing to Vienna as an alternative center of the Central European culture or - more precisely again - to the tension between Vienna and Paris as seen from the "periphery" of Cracow. It is quite likely that the Cracow perspective turned out not only closer to the complicated local artistic situation, but that it proved more seminal, allowing the critic to behold the whole continent in its multidimensional plurality - in contrast with the viewpoint of Dominique Bozo, the director of the Paris Centre Pompidou where PrΘsences polonaises was put on display. This demonstrates that the revision of the artistic geography and attempts at formulating its "other" paradigm may begin here, in Budapest, Bucharest, Cracow or Sofia, and not in Paris or New York City. To put it simply, one can see more from here than from there. What's more, the rhetorical question asked once by Antoine Baudin, "Who is afraid of the periphery?," is addressed to the center rather than to any place else. If, then, the center is paralyzed with fear of the periphery, the latter may have a chance to revise the paradigms of thinking. At least such is the implication of the Swiss critic's appeal.

The problem lies not just in the internal strategy of adjusting the "other" cultures to the universal, that is, Western standards. My Hungarian friend, to whom I have mentioned at the beginning of this essay, is certainly not the only Central or Eastern European intellectual to be interested in the universalist view of art. One might even take the risk and claim that right here, in this "peripheral," as it were, region of the continent, the interest in universalism as an interpretive approach to art history is directly proportional to the absence of East Central European art from the European art history textbooks. A striking example in this respect is the Europa, Europa exhibition set in 1994 by Ryszard Stanis3awski and Christoph Brockhaus in the Bonn Kunst- und Ausstesslungshalle as a comprehensive manifestation of the art from the eastern part of the continent. The task that the makers of the exposition faced was extremely difficult not only in the organizational, but also theoretical and psychological sense. The fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of the "iron curtain" allowed them to ask a question about the identity of the "other" Europe - the Europe shaped by the Yalta Agreement - whose ambition, however, is also the change of the Yalta order. The political context of the exhibition was quite obvious, but somewhat less obvious were its artistic premises: the eastern part of the continent was defined as the "other" in a retrospective manner, since it was distinguished not just in reference to the aftermath of the Yalta conference, but also to the pre-Yalta times. Moreover, the typical Central European trends, such as the Czech cubism which developed among local historical tensions referred to the far metropolis (Paris) and simultaneously to the closer one (Vienna), was combined within one and the same geographical area with the art of the Russian avant-garde. The art of Austria and Germany, no doubt the historical points of reference (at least in the first half of the century) for Central European artists, was not included. If the geographical division of Europe into two parts was justified by the threshold of World War II, there were indeed few convincing arguments to apply it retrospectively to all of the twentieth century. Before World War II, because of the role of such centers as Berlin and Vienna, the internal divisions were much more complicated.

Of course, it is perfectly possible to explain such a decision by the strategy of the exhibition. Had Stanis3awski and Brockhaus limited its scope for the sake of descriptive precision to the second half of the century only, then, most likely, it would have been more coherent in the historical sense, but commercially less attractive. Unlike scholars and critics, curators cannot totally disregard this aspect, as they are inevitably involved in the dilemmas of promotion and financing. Still, in my opinion that was not the main problem of the Bonn exposition, particularly in the context of the artistic geography. At this point, the crucial question does not refer to the historical divisions, but to the identity or rather to historical significance of the art produced in this region. Of course, the makers of the exhibition were quite aware of this issue. According to Andrzej Turowski, a critic who was also its co-organizer, the question was formulated in a universal perspective or, more precisely, in the perspective of the "coexistence of many universal traditions on various levels of generalization, among which as the most important, even though directly incomparable, were two: the constructivist-avant-garde and the narrative-Judaic." In fact, Stanis3awski admitted that his basic intention was to show the universal character of the art of the eastern part of the continent. Reading between the lines, and sometimes even listening to the curator himself, one could realize that the primary objective of the undertaking was to valorize the art of the "other Europe" in the context of its absence from art history textbooks. The same intent was expressed by the exhibition itself as well as by its monumental catalogue, and I don't think that there was something wrong about it. Moreover, I believe that the Bonn event showed the dimensions of the Eastern European art on an unprecedented scale. Regardless of all the particular objections raised in various countries of (mostly Eastern) Europe, its effects remain beyond dispute, but actually the problem lies elsewhere: as a matter of fact, Europa, Europa did not put forward any new aesthetic categories applicable to the discussion of the European art in the twentieth century. Expanding the range of material, it did not modify the paradigm of the artistic geography, and what's even worse, did not even articulate such possibilities. On the contrary, the question of European art was formulated on its occasion in terms of universalism, that is, of the common experience and repertoire of meanings.

However, history has undermined such an assumption. The experience of various Europes were by no means common, nor the meanings of their cultures analogical. The art of Czechoslovakia, Rumania, and Hungary was developing in different semiotic and ideological spaces than the art of Italy or France, while the universal perspective understood as a methodological instrument prevents the discovery of the particular meanings of cultures and disrupts all attempts at defining their regional, ethnic, and local identities. One can easily understand the psychological background of the frustrations of art historians from Eastern and - in particular - Central Europe, caused by the absence of our cultural production in the canon of the artistic culture of the continent (with a few exceptions) and by its "peripheral" location. Yet, the point is not to reproduce the imperialist and hierarchical interpretive models, but to revise the paradigms, to change the analytical tools so that they would allow us to discover the meanings of cultures of "other" geographical regions.

What may perhaps facilitate a reconstruction of the hierarchical paradigms of art history by artistic geographers is, to borrow a term of Jonathan Culler cited by Norman Bryson, the "frame." Replacing in Culler's/Bryson's conception the idea of context, the "frame" (which, of course, can be traced back to the Derridaean "parergon") is structurally an element of the text, although - and this is very important for our considerations - it is not given, but derives from the adopted interpretive strategy. Referring to the frame/context, writes Bryson, is then a "step back" from the work of art; from the "uncertainty" of the text (work) towards its anchoring foundation. However, once such a step has been made, it becomes irrevocable. The context is a text or, as Bryson puts it, "it is just more text," an active instance which we activate by our interpretive practice. The "frame" - to refer to Derrida's metaphor again - established by an interpretive gesture and not emerging by itself, discovers, as it were, a genius loci which turns out to be a research strategy rather than a kind of the metaphysics of place. Consequently, regardless of the scope of the visual field, its meaning is determined by the "frame" or, in other words, it is us who create "more text" in the process of "framing." Thus, visiting Budapest, Bucharest, Moscow, Prague, Sofia or Warsaw, we can find in these cities the art articulated in the "idiom of Western artistic culture," but since we are visiting them neither as tourists (no matter if eastern or western), nor as representatives of some major artistic institution having just one week to collect material from the whole region, we can also realize differences and the profusion of meanings. We can see all this thanks to our experience and sensitivity, due to the interpretive strategy which we work out. Even though sometimes the perceived forms resemble one another, they acquire their meaning because of our "framing" so that we ought to pay more attention to the "frame" than to the "idiom." It may be that art all over the world, or at least in the East and West, speaks similar languages, but in fact it communicates diverse meanings dictated by the "frame" which we activate.

Referring to the achievements of Miros3aw Ba3ka and Ilya Kabakov who, according to Schjeldahl, have been exploiting the poetics of contemporary artistic culture as it is fabricated in Dⁿsseldorf, London, New York or Rome, we should not let ourselves be seduced by the illusions of the Western curators of great international expositions. Developing our interpretations, we ought to be more penetrating and more active, taking into account the "frame" of the work. The language of Ba3ka and Kabakov only seemingly resembles that which is being used in the center. If we approach it within our own "frame," if we grasp the text/con-text relation, then we will see its proper meaning, completely different from that what is implied by the "Western artistic idiom." One might say even more - without a reference to the Russian social practice of living in the communal apartments of big Soviet cities, Kabakov's installations are actually incomprehensible, and so are the sculptures of Ba3ka without the artist's individual mythology set in the local contexts in which it is involved: the house at Otwock, the material for tombstones, and grey soap.

Defining or drawing the "frame," one may refer to many areas and levels of the East Central European culture, from those more and more often experienced by tourists who take taxis in our cities or fall prey of the dishonest restaurant owners (incidentally, the number of the latter rises in direct proportion to the number of visitors), to the most refined and sophisticated elements of our artistic tradition - both that preserved for centuries and that related to the recent traumatic period of the Soviet domination. Our heritage is a distinct element of the context, a definite point of reference from which we can start "framing" a given geographical area. The tradition, and particularly its deeper levels, has been playing an active role in the development of the artistic identity: suffice to mention the impact of the Czech surrealism on the local art after the "thaw," the Hungarian "European school," or the influence of the Polish and Russian constructivism on many artists seeking a remedy for the communist indoctrination. On the other hand, wherever the local tradition of the avant-garde or, broadly speaking, of the autonomy of art both in an aesthetic and institutional sense was absent, whenever the local artists were deprived of historical support, any alternative forms of resistance to the official aesthetics appeared very late. For instance, in Bulgaria an attempt at establishing an alternative artistic system by the art of the so-called April generation in the early sixties did not bring about any significant "modernization" of the artistic culture, as it belonged to the official institutional system and proclaimed an aesthetics which to a startling extent resembled that of the socialist realism (perhaps with some freedom of color and an extended thematic repertoire including the landscape and portrait.) In that Balkan stronghold of communism, a sort of "modernization" or, in the formal terms of the process, "post-modernization" of art took place as late as in the eighties, the art of such artists as Lytschesar Bojadshiev and Nedko Solakov, to mention only the most known names.

Hence, an element of the "frame" may be both a tradition or its lack. Besides, it may be the will to have a heritage; the search for it, particularly among the universal discourses indicated above. Therefore, one can say that one of the crucial elements determining our East Central European context and "framing" the local artistic processes is the very effort to revalorize our culture in universal terms, which in practice probably means "under Western eyes." It is not only a specific strategy of assent to the imperialism of the "Western idiom," but a more general attitude - an endeavor to inscribe our culture in the universal perspective. The best exemple is the strategy of the Europa, Europa exhibition.

There are many reasons for such a state of affairs, and one of them is an economic handicap of this part of the continent, which has always been significant to become even more significant now, in the age of dynamic global economy. To put it simply, in the West there is more dough. Those who have it can not only dictate their own conditions, but also exert the pressure on artists to adjust to them. The prestige and comfort guaranteed by affluence are effective instruments of coercion enforcing the adjustment strategies sanctioning the ways of thinking which are prevalent in the center. We can see it not only in the work of our colleagues, but also in the strategies of contemporary artists. Of course, the problem of models has always been important and often related to the economic background, but nowadays, when the world has shrunk to the dimensions of the TV and computer monitor, while its physical space can be covered in short time thanks to the network of passenger airlines, the pressure has definitely become greater than ever. If the artist (especially a young one) can feel on his or her back the breath of the Western dealer or art critic, and soon becomes aware that his or her living standard can easily improve, particularly in comparison with the surrounding poverty, it should be no wonder that he or she is open to any suggestions. In fact, such suggestions may not even be explicitly articulated, since the artist can accurately recognize all the market-controlling mechanisms just by the examples of his or her "successful" colleagues which stimulate the strategies of adjustment to the "Western idiom" in an effective way.

Another reason, which is also related to the economic background, is the sense of the political degradation. The world order is not determined here in the "periphery," but there, in the "center." For many reasons Central European nations consider themselves handicapped by history, especially that the consequences of the Soviet political system imposed on them not only by Stalin, but also, in a sense, by the West, provide convincing evidence that this area has been considered backwoods, and it still is now, after the Soviet domination has ended. This gives rise to a natural need for compensation and proving to oneself and to others that at least as far as culture is concerned our part of Europe is no worse than more fortunate ones. Hence the neutralization of the context and absolutization of universalism in the practice of scholars and curators.

Finally, there are also psychological reasons which naturally stem from the ones already discussed, although they cannot be reduced to them. These reasons have deeper roots, just as deeper is the sense of the economic and political handicap caused by penury and slight influence on the political construction of the world. Psychological conditioning is the most significant motivation of the universalist strategies, often rooted in personal traumatic memories and as such extremely difficult to neutralize. All this does not mean, however, that East Central European complexes cannot be removed. One might say that in order to treat such cases a geographer must change - at least for a while - into a psychoanalyst and make the patient (that is, himself or herself) aware of the sources of his (her) ailment.

Such a geographical psychoanalyst is perhaps Magda CΓrneci. In her opinion there are many Eastern Europes; there is a geographical, a historical, a political, but also a cultural one. This last one generates a very specific mechanism of self-defense against the "evil of history" or the "evil of politics." In this part of the continent, CΓrneci writes, culture could function as a strategy of resistance against the totalitarian oppression, because acquiring the qualities of the absolute, it became an ahistorical construction. To the local intellectuals it gave a chance to form their identity by the affiliation to the European universe of values. This is the background of the universalism supposedly rooted in the genius loci of East Central Europe, containing an inherent mechanism producing local mythologies of culture in order to compensate for the traumatic historical experience. In nearly each country of the region we may find convictions about its unique importance for the future of Europe, its local messianism, and the vision of preserving the "genuine" European values - more genuine than those produced in the West, because free of the commercial conditioning. Another typical feature is the sense of being an "antemurale" or - conversely - a bridge between East and West, a borderline separating civilization from barbarism.

One might say that one of the patients subject to such a therapy has been Milan Kundera, the author of a famous essay, "The Captured West or, the Tragedy of Central Europe," a nostalgic yet beautiful text highlighting the myth of the "true" European culture created in the multi-ethnic Austro-Hungarian Empire. This idealization of history, and particularly of the rule of Franz Joseph I, is contrasted with the nationalisms of the early twentieth century and the contemporary barbarism coming, needless to say, from the East. But not only. According to the Czech writer, the West did not understand the message sent by the director of the Budapest news agency in 1956 in which he wrote that "Hungarians were dying for Europe." In the West, the idea of "Europe," that is, of "culture" understood as a shrine and a domain of identification has become incomprehensible. Thus, Kundera concludes, the real tragedy of Central Europe is not Russia, or at that time the USSR, but Europe itself which not only let a part of its territory come under the rule of barbarians, but also renounced the values which had constituted its identity.

Let us, then, realize that the mechanism of identity building of Eastern European intellectuals is mythologization. The mythological function of culture deprives it of its critical capacity, especially with respect to geographical relations. In other words, trying to develop his or her identity against the background of the universal culture, the East Central European artist would actually petrify the classic center-periphery order. Paradoxically, a similar function was performed by the opposite strategies, that is, those which connected the search for identity with the archaization of art and the folk tradition. Often controlled by the authorities, they aimed at reversing the dominant perspective and turning the periphery into a new center. Artistically ineffective, at best they could be acknowledged as efforts to discover crucial archetypes constituting the domain of the universal, thus bringing the debate back to its starting point. Both the strategies of modernization and archaization would employ mythologies - modernist as well as folklore-based - without attempting at any critique of the artistic geography.

No doubt, one of the most popular artistic trends in East Central Europe, which was also a strategy of resistance against the indoctrination by the socialist realism, was neo-constructivism. Particularly after Stalin's death, it was practiced everywhere except for Bulgaria, for the reasons which I have mentioned above. In Bulgaria there were no historical points of reference, not to mention biographical continuity which was observable in Hungary and in Poland. A Hungarian constructivist Lajos Kasak was not very active after World War II, but he was still extremely influential, while a Polish artist, Henryk Sta?ewski, before the war a member of many international groups, was not only influential, but creative almost till end of his very long life (he died in 1988 at the age of 94). In the GDR lived Hermann Gl÷ckner, a very activ artist almost till the end of his very long live, i.e. till the eighties (he died in 1987 at the age of 98), however, his influences amoung young East-German artists were not very significant;Also in Czechoslovakia and in Rumania, where the ties with the prewar traditions were not so distinct, in the sixties and seventies the neo-constructivist tendencies were developing as well, represented by such artists as Hugo Demartini, Stanislav Kolibal, Jan Kubieek, and Zdenek Sykora, or the Rumanian groups "111" and "Sigma." All those artists were dedicated to the mythology of freedom expressed in the languages of geometry. However, the question, repeated after Rosalind Krauss, is: how was it possible to cultivate the sense of freedom by means of the "grid," a system of intersecting lines which is one of the most conventional visual devices allegedly discovered anew every now and then? What's more, claims the American scholar, the artists who started using the "grid" as their "own" means of expression brought their creative development to a halt, since in many respects (structural, logical as well as, simply, commonsensical) this figure may only be reproduced again and again. What was, then, the justification of the discourse of freedom or, in fact, of its mythologization in the artistic practice of the Central European neo-constructivists? Most likely - and that was precisely the effect of "framing," of its negative function - the decisive factor was that under the specific circumstances, in a given historical context, neo-constructivism was directed against the socialist realism. It is the "frame," the context which determines the historical dimension of such a discourse. Yet, if we draw it somewhat more precisely, we will see differences: the Hungarian authorities practiced the local principle of the three "T" (Tⁿrni, Tiltani, Tamogatni - Tolerate, Forbid, Support); in the most liberal period of political "thaw," that is, in the late sixties and early seventies (between Nicolae Ceausescu's coming to power in 1965 and his "July Theses" from the early seventies, and the "election" of the dictator for president of the Republic) the policy of the Rumanian communist party at best oscillated between tolerance and forbiddance; whereas the strategy of the Polish communist regime since 1956 till its end in 1989 was the most permissive - not only was modern art tolerated, but sometimes it was even accepted as official. In such a situation, the "frame" of a relationship between the "grid" and the discourse of freedom turns out changeable: in some cases, as for example in Rumania, it was rooted in the genuine practice of resistance, in others, for instance in Poland, it belonged in the first place to the domain of mythology.

The significance of neo-constructivism in Central Europe, particularly when the socialist realism entered the phase of its decline, that is, depending on a specific country, from the late fifties till the early sixties or even later, is connected with a more general problem, namely that of the autonomy of the work of art. One can say that at that time the discussions on the autonomy of art started in all Central European countries, signifying mainly the resistance against the Soviet model of art understood primarily as propaganda. In the context of the official politicization of the artistic culture, autonomous art was perceived as an expression of freedom. Hence, freedom in art was associated with the right to remain non-committed, to practice art as an independent activity. The freedom to choose one's own means of expression, which at that time meant referring to all kinds of abstraction, or at least to a non-realistic poetics opposing the official realism, was connected with the right to create an autonomous work of art. The autonomy of art was supposed to be a domain of universal meanings, of the true sense of European culture opposed to the Soviet one associated with art as political propaganda.

The problem of the autonomy of the work of art has its own historical dynamic. In Central Europe, it surfaced quite distinctly at the moment of the decline of the socialist realism, and - next to neo-constructivism discussed above - it was associated with a more or less direct reception of the French informelle. At first, that process began as early as around 1955 in Poland. Tadeusz Kantor, one of the most prominent practitioners of that kind of art, would bring from Paris the models of the painting of gesture, then to show his pictures in Cracow and Warsaw. What seems rather interesting, shedding also some light on the reception of the informelle in the whole region, Kantor was not interested in the contemporary subversive trends, such as the painting of Jean Dubuffet, the COBRA group or the situationists. Instead, he would rather focus on the "museum" version of the informelle, quickly evolving towards the painting of the matter (la peinture de matiere), that is, towards a par excellence aestheticized conception of representation. This means that what the artists in Central Europe really needed was not the subversion of culture but its defense - the defense against the involvement of art in politics. Aestheticization and the autonomy of the act of creation were considered the remedies for the damaged prestige and status of the work of art defiled by the politics of the socialist realism. Later on, to keep to the Polish example, along with the political changes and the seizure of power by an anti-Stalinist faction of the Polish communists, such tendencies would distinctly increase so that in the late fifties certain forms of abstraction permeated into the official artistic culture. A good example in this respect was a 1958 Exhibition of the Countries of Peoples' Democracy in Moscow, where the Polish pavilion proved quite different from all the others (being almost exclusively filled with the works of the socialist realism), and as such it provoked a genuine interest of the public as well as a critique of the official delegations of other socialist countries. In Czechoslovakia the interest in the informelle began not much later, but little of it could be seen in the official manifestations of the local art. In Hungary, mainly due to the repressions after the Budapest insurrection, the art of that kind appeared only in the mid-sixties, almost simultaneously with the reception of the "new figuration" connected with different variants of pop-art. In Hungarian art, these two currents would sometimes overlap, as for instance in the works of Endre T≤t, which once again confirmed the idea of the autonomy of art. It was not only the socialist realism (art as propaganda) which was rejected, but also critical art understood as subversion (pop-art and neo-dadaism), followed almost exclusively its aesthetic conventions.

In the remaining countries of the region - Bulgaria, the GDR, and Romania - a similar reception of the informelle painting is difficult to detect. Nevertheless, in Romania the debate on the autonomy of art also began in the early sixties, bringing, however, visible artistic results only after Nicolae Ceauoescu came to power in the middle of the decade. A direct catalyst of change was a 1965 exhibition of Ion ?uculescu, a classic of the modern Rumanian art.

In as much as the fifties and early sixties were a period of a strong interest in various forms of non-figurative art, the late sixties and early seventies brought a more and more widespread reception of the neo-avant-garde: conceptual art, happening, object art, etc. Even though the problematic of the autonomy of art was still relevant, somehow it started to differentiate. In Czechoslovakia before 1968 there appeared various forms of engaged art making comments on reality, exemplified, for instance, by the works of the "Aktual" group, and particularly of its best known member, Milan Kni₧ßk. In fact, the year 1968 itself was uniquely recorded as an amalgam of personal and historical facts in Jioi Kolao's "Newsreel". Then, as a result of the so-called normalization which included police repression, the military intervention of the Warsaw Pact, and the end of the Prague Spring, all the manifestations of neo-avant-garde, which by definition could not be tolerated by the authorities, were interpreted in a political context. Since all forms of independent artistic activity were prohibited, all art - by the very fact of its appearance - had political significance, even if it did not happen to refer directly to politics, such as, for example, picnics and trips into the countryside organized by the School of the Knights of the Cross [Koi₧ovnickß Ükola], or the performances of such artists as Jan Mleoch, TomßÜ Ruller, and the most influential of them, Petr ètembera. Of course, at that time there was in Czechoslovakia some artistic activity which openly criticized various aspects of social life; for instance, the work of Jioi Sozansk_, nevertheless, the problem lies more in the contextualization of the Czech and Slovak art of the times of "normalization," than in any kind of overt critique of the power system. Even the apparently neutral work of the conceptualist Jioi Valoch from Brno could not escape the context of the "forbidden art."
On the contrary, in Poland, which after the 1970 revolt of the Gdansk shipyard workers and the ensuing change of the power elite was in a completely different situation, critical art turned out extremely rare. The Polish artists of the neo-avant-garde, enjoying almost total freedom of choice as far as their means of expression were concerned, were quite reluctant to use the idiom of political critique, since that would have violated the agreement between them and the authorities. The message of the party was clearly the following: "use any forms you like, but don't get involved in politics." Paradoxically, then, Polish artistic practice combined the models of the neo-avant-garde or, in other words, of critical postmodernism, with the modernist values such as, particularly, the autonomy of the work of art. There was no political reception of the neo-avant-garde determined by the context, since in fact almost everything was allowed, with the single exception of a direct critique of the regime. Of course, there were some attempts at such a critique, for instance at the Repassage Gallery in Warsaw, yet they did not affect the general artistic atmosphere of the seventies, unfavorable to any form of political commitment and primarily concentrated on the principle of ars gratia artis.

In Hungary, together with the slow but steady liberalization of social life and the advent of "goulash communism," some artists - most notably Sandor Piczehelyi and Tamas Szentj╙by - levelled an open critique against the Eastern European totalitarian system. Szentj≤by was sometimes very specific in this respect, as in the case of the "Portable Trench for Three Persons" from 1968 made after the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Warsaw Pact troops. However, such attempts were not frequent; on the contrary, they were quite rare in all Central European countries, and, for example in the GDR even very unique: Robert Rehfeldt's "Ou est le diable" (1969) was a quite unusual case.

In Bulgaria, the avant-garde tendencies appeared much later than in Czechoslovakia, Hungary or Poland (in fact only in the late eighties) to be adopted in uniquely syncretic forms, since the tradition of the neo-avant-garde overlapped with the reception of neo-expressionism. Romania resembled Czechoslovakia, although on a much smaller scale: in the early seventies, the political situation was becoming tenser and tenser after Ceauoescu had proclaimed in 1971 his so-called "July theses" anticipating a more strict control over culture. His declarations were put into practice in the mid-seventies when he was "elected" President of the Republic and combined the positions of the party leader and the nominal head of state (practically every party leader was the head of state, but in order to maintain the appearance of the division of power and democracy some countries of the Soviet bloc, including the USSR, would separate the two posts). From that moment on, just like in Czechoslovakia, all the manifestations of the neo-avant-garde were not approved by the authorities, i.e. the work of such artists as Ion Grigorescu, Geta Bratescu, Paul Neagu (who in the early seventies emigrated to the UK) which had nothing to do with the critique of the regime was recognized as critical. No doubt, it was the context that determined the political significance of art explicitly endorsing the autonomy of the artifact. In the German Democratic Republic, the early seventies, marked by the replacement of the hard-liner Walter Ulbricht by Erich Honecker, brought a promise of some liberalization of the state cultural policy which, although it was never fulfilled, provoked the aspirations to artistic freedom that with time became difficult to muffle. Later on, alternative artistic groups, such as those in Berlin Prenzlauer Berg, Dresden-Neustadt or Leipziger Osten, came into being in various East German cities, but that would happen already in the eighties with their characteristic atmosphere of the "new expression."

The eighties, witnessing the decline of communism taking place in various ways in all Central European countries (in Poland it was the political confrontation of the martial law, in Hungary growing economic and political liberalization) were the next - in fact the last - "turning point" in the artistic culture of the region under the communist rule. The common convention of the "new expression" or neo-expressionism in painting, sculpture, and installations acquired a numner of different meanings. In Poland it functioned in the domain of the culture which opposed the system, both in direct contact with the political centers of opposition (the underground institutions of Solidarity and the Catholic Church), and somewhat detached from them in the so-called "third circuit" trying to find some independent space free from the pressure of the politicians of the regime and the opposition alike, but by no means apolitical in itself.

For sure, an artistic alternative to the dwindling communist power system, additionally undermined by Gorbachev's perestroika in the USSR, was the "new expression" in Romania (holding its own lively debate on postmodernism) and in the GDR. On the other hand, the situation in Czechoslovakia and Hungary was somewhat different. In Czechoslovakia, the first official (that is, permitted by the authorities) display of the "new art" was probably an exhibition of a group ironically calling themselves "Tvrdohlavy" ["Hard Liners"] organized in Prague in 1987. That act of coming out of the underground into the open seems quite symptomatic, for in fact it meant the end of resistance against the "normalization," which was becoming much less strict anyway, and the acceptance of the political situation as it was. Such an attitude was completely different from the one characteristic of the Czechoslovakia of the seventies, immediately after the suppression of the Prague Spring, when various forms of the neo-avant-garde had subversive political significance. Of course, in the eighties the Czech underground also generated some variants of the "new expression," but the decision of the young artists from the "Tvrdohlavy" group indicated a turning point - the epoch of resistance was over to give way to a new perspective of consent, and - contrary to what was going on at the same time in the GDR and Romania - neo-expressionism was a sign of that process. In Hungary, where the seventies were not, like in Czechoslovakia, a decade of a strong political tension and resistance against the official culture, since the authorities started introducing more liberal cultural and economic policies, neo-expressionism, which appeared already in the early eighties, quite swiftly entered the domain of the official. Represented by such artists as Imre Bak, ┴kos Birkßs, Kßroly Keleman, and Istvßn Nßdler, it was shown at the 1986 Biennale in Venice in the Hungarian pavilion organized by Katalin NΘray, the director of Mⁿcsarnok, one of the most prestigious exhibition centers of the country, which most definitely indicated its officially recognized status. Incidentally, in Hungary, in contrast to both Poland and Czechoslovakia, the "new expression" was not only an object of interest of the young generation beginning their careers in the eighties, but also of the older artists rooted in the art that was criticized and superseded by neo-expressionism, that is, in neo-constructivism and neo-avant-garde (this refers, for instance, to the aforementioned participants of the 42nd Venetian Biennale). The new art was also interpreted in the context of Kadar's "new economic policy" introduced at the end of his rule, including an adjustment of the Hungarian economy to the free market and the rise of the private sector. Parallel to the new developments, it accompanied not just the process of the economic transformation, but also the emergence of new social strata of Hungarian society involved in business and of new social mores - the rhetoric of individualism in economy corresponded to the mythology of artistic individualism conveyed in the language of the "new expression." One of the most outstanding artists of the Hungarian neo-avant-garde, Mikl≤s ErdΘly, has even made a comparison between the social status of the "new painter" and that of another new figure - a private cabdriver.

Thus, looking at the postwar art of Central Europe, we are likely to realize that together with the dismantling of the Stalinist cultural policy dating back to the mid-fifties, which finally coincided with the decline and fall of communism in the eighties, the idea of the autonomy of art was gradually becoming less and less compelling and influential. That process was directly proportional to the pressure of the socialist realism understood as the party doctrine of art as propaganda. When the ideological pressure happened to be strong, or at least as long as it was well remembered, the autonomy of art as a key to independent artistic creation was respectively stressed as well. However, as time passed, communists would attach less and less significance to art as an instrument of propaganda, which brought about a less and less dogmatic endorsement of the autonomy of art that in various ways became involved in political and social processes. A good example in this respect may be provided by the history of Polish art. The reception of the informelle which took place in Poland in the mid-fifties was directly connected with the problem of the artistic independence. On the contrary, in the eighties, when the political situation was very tense under the martial law, the communists not only did not make any attempts to use art for the purposes of propaganda or, for that matter, to impose some ideologically motivated artistic doctrine, but even tempted artists with a kind of liberalism, encouraging them to remain on the institutionalized state-controlled artistic scene, e.g. the Arsenal '88 exhibition. The point was, however, that Polish artists would for a long time unanimously boycott official institutions, getting involved in unofficial artistic enterprises and criticizing the system in their art in various ways. Hence, under such circumstances, the conception of the autonomy of art was questioned, and what is more, it was questioned quite deliberately, if not programmatically. Of course, that was possible only because the regime ceased to have the ambition to impose any obligatory artistic doctrine. However, in those countries where such an ambition of the authority was still vivid, and the administration tried to continue the "hard," in the matter of fact the Stalinist cultural policy, i.e. in the GDR and in Romania, an alternative culture stressed the notion of the autonomy of art, as a main oppositional strategy. In East Germany many alternative artistic groups and circles came into being in various cities: Berlin, Dresden, Halle, Leipzig, and Karl-Marx-Stadt, but almost all of them built their theoretical approach around the problem of the autonomy of art. In Romania, in turn, a widespread discussion on post-modernism among artists and intellectuals was mostly associated with an understanding the right to express the autonomous values in art and culture, free from political pressure. Here, both in the GDR and Romania, in the countries ruled by the strongest "hard liners", the autonomy of art still meant freedom from the communist oppression.

Still, no matter how advanced the process of the de-autonomization of art in some Central European countries became in the eighties, it was hardly comparable to the critical art in the West, and particularly in the USA, but also in Russia, where soc-art and conceptualism were largely involved in the critique of the social condition of the country.

Then, let us come back once more to the question on the meaning of such a strategy. If the stress on the autonomy of the work of art was a kind of reaction to the doctrine of art as an official communist propaganda, imposed by the authorities, it was - for them - at the same time a sort of a "safty valve;" if the strategy of the autonomy of art was more and more popular among the artists and intellectuals, the authorities were, in the matter of fact, in a more and more comfortable situation. The artists instead of making a critique of a power system, they used to defend their "niche" of freedom. Coming back again to the example of neo-constructivism and to repeat after Rosalind Krauss, let us say: how was the expression of freedom possible in that way, if the "grid," a system of intersecting lines, allegedly discovered anew again and again, is one of the most stereotypical visual devices? Of course it was possible, let us answer to an American scholar; even more - it was recognized as a free art in this particular context, in the context of communist regimes, however, it was not critical to those regimes, or - to say more precisely - it was not directly critical to the regime. The awareness of the mythologizing of freedom and, at the same time, the non-critical function of the cultural alternative practices in East Central Europe may be the most important conclusion to be drawn by the geographer of art from the diagnosis provided by the history of this part of the continent.

This demythologizing and critical perspective appears to be a result of the recent changes, of a growing historical distance from the artistic practices of the so-called "bygone period," of the access to materials, but also - evidently - of our more and more critical and self-critical attitude towards the past. Not so long ago, almost immediately after the Berlin Wall had been torn down, a former East German critic, Christoph Tannert, wrote on the occasion of a huge Metropolis exhibition shown in the Martin Gropius Bau, exactly where the two parts of the divided Berlin were coming close together, that what the East (by which he meant the culture of the GDR) might contribute to the Western "crisis of meaning" (please note a sort of reversal of the center/periphery perspective) was the tradition of a non-conformist culture, of the moral attitude of resistance against the structures and institutions of the Eastern European regimes. Only a few years later, on the occasion of another exhibition shown in the same place, Der Riss im Raum, he was much more skeptical, putting into doubt the non-conformity of the artists from the Berlin Prenzlauer Berg, Dresden-Neustadt or Leipziger Osten. Tannert doubted whether the so-called alternative movement had indeed been authentic, but above all, whether it had been subversive and critical with respect to the official cultural policy. In fact, the critic suggested that the reverse might have been the case, namely that the secret police might have created a "rubber cell for the formalists." After opening the STASI archives and revealing the actual scope of its power such a suggestion seems perfectly well justified.

The case of the German Democratic Republic may perhaps be unique, comparable only to Rumania and the omnipotence of the Rumanian Securitate. Still, we must not surrender to illusions. In terms of the cultural policy tactics and the practice of surveillance, there were some differences among particular countries of the region, however, in terms of the power system and structures the differences were minor. Shouldn't we, then, have a more critical look at the considerable permissiveness of the Polish authorities and only slightly more restrictive approach of the Hungarian communists to the modernist and postmodernist developments in these two countries? Shouldn't we be more penetrating and more self-critical, accounting for the supposed artistic liberties, particularly in Poland, allegedly the most liberal "compartment" of the Eastern Bloc? Unfortunately, such criticism is not common. Quite on the contrary, the process of mythologization is going on without much counteraction and in the atmosphere of total self-indulgence, which has been recently confirmed by the ùywa galeria exhibition at the Warsaw Zacheta Gallery, and more precisely, by the companion text by J≤zef Robakowski. To borrow a metaphor of a Hungarian writer, the "velvet prison" was everywhere, only the cells differed in size. Of course, there were examples of art which was critical towards the regime; for instance, to refer just to the two countries mentioned before, in Poland it was the Repassage Gallery, and in Hungary the works of such artists as Sandor Pinczehelyi and Tamas Szentjoby, but they do not provide enough material for generalization.

The awareness of the mythologizing and non-critical function of the cultural practices in East Central Europe may be the most important conclusion to be drawn by the geographer from the diagnosis provided by the history of this part of the continent. As a result, the treated patient may look at his or her place somewhat more soberly and without being afraid of relapses of the disease, asking about the context of the contemporary artistic culture of the region. Then, he or she may start looking for more tangible and material premises to construct the interpretive "frame" than the vague and metaphysical category of the genius loci, the mythologization of culture, and the idealization of history.

Finally, what are the conclusions for the artistic geographer intending to "frame" in one way or another the practice or practices of the East Central European art? Arguably, such conclusions should be arranged to form a triangle of problems: first, the strategies of the local cultural policies of the authorities; second, the local artistic traditions and varieties of the mythologization of culture or, more precisely, of the autonomy of the work of art isolated from "evil history" and located somewhere beyond it, in the sphere of variously defined absolute values (from the modernist form to the metaphysical revival); and third, the universalist ambitions of the local cultures attempting to find compensation for the traumatic reality experience. Adopting such a perspective, which is actually a strategy of interpreting artistic production, the art critic can change into the revisionist geographer, disrupting the traditional paradigms of the field and creating new ones, free of the concepts of hierarchy and domination. The point is not to turn the old model upside down, as it has been suggested by Antoine Baudin, but to introduce another frame of reference, a "frame" which will shed on the art of the "other" regions of Europe the light of diverse contexts replacing the dominant influence of the center. Under such circumstances, the informelle painting of the late fifties and early sixties, the neo-avant-garde movements around 1970, the poetics of the Neue Wilde from the eighties, and the most recent interest in the multimedia will not be just fashionable results of the influence of the center, but they will acquire new specific meanings. Moreover, the very mechanism of the adaptation of formal models will acquire a historical meaning as well so that it will be possible to explain it not only as formal reception of the art of the "center" in the countries of the European "periphery."

Translated by Marek Wilczynski.