- Are you talking to me?

- To you?

Mirroring the Critique of Representation

Jelena VesiC
Prelom Kolektiv

[The version of this text is published in (an)Other Publication, artistic project by Renée Ridgway and Katarina Zdjelar, Piet Zwart Institute and Revolver Books, Rotterdam, 2006.
According to the artistic concept, the writers are invited to conceive the introductory chapter for the imaginary book, discussing the notion of  'Otherness' in the theory, art and life.]

In recent art criticism there were lot of attempts aimed at discovering subtle differences hidden under the umbrella-notion of the 'Other'; from 'completely Other' to 'near Other', from 'radical Other' to 'apparently the same', and many others... For the beginning, we can separate three distinctive categories around which this term circulates, and which may be significant for the later analysis. The first would be a philosophical category of identity which points to the relational character of the term – as there is no identity without 'the other', the existence of 'other' is the precondition for creating the identity. The second would be a geo-political category, in which the term 'Other' appears as the reflection of European identity, Eurocentric gaze, or Europe as the perceived center of political power. 'The other' manifests itself here either as 'orientalism' in the broader sense, or as not-being-the-member-state-yet. The third category would be multiculturalism as the dominant form of representation in the field of culture (e.g. big artistic gatherings such are biennials or various film and performance festivals often function trough the principles of representation of 'the nations of the world'). 'Other' here most often appears as 'folklorism', which feeds the understanding of culture as a 'national matter', and consequently the nationalism itself.

In the following text, the imaginative notion of 'Otherness' would be discussed within the concrete analysis – as a way to point to the mechanisms of the cultural-political hegemony of the capitalist West in the (post-socialist) discourse of contemporary art from the 'Other' Europe (the term 'Other Europe' is used here to encompass the bureaucratic repertoire of the terms like East, South East or Central Europe).

If we accept the concept of hegemony in Gramscian terms, then we should agree that it goes beyond the narrowly defined 'culture' or the 'world of art', and relates to the 'whole' of social process. In that sense, our basic question should be: What are the links between the forms of representation and the circumstances of production? Or, in other words, how the institutional field is organized?
 
The art production of the 'Other Europe' is not governed by the all-encompassing apparatus of national art museums and global art market economy, as it is the case with most Western countries. While traditional state institutions of art, once being a part of the collapsed communist state, are trying to recover and gain new power through cooperation with the private-capital-in-transition and the new-coming global corporations, the contemporary art production is predominantly supported by Western foundations and represented through the cultural policies, mirroring the EU-ropean political trends.

The end of 90's and the first few years of this century were accompanied by unusual production of blockbuster art exhibitions from the East, South East and Central Europe that took place in significant art institutions in various Western cities. All of the shows were ambitious in terms of research, interpretation and scale of artists and artworks presented. All were conceived as grand promotions of art that has never been displayed with such comprehensiveness and power of visibility. And all were significant contributions to the global knowledge on art, bringing to daylight the new contemporary art histories that had not been the part of the European mainstream, and had never before been the part of promotional mechanisms of art systems from Europe.

But, the concept of representation we are interested in here expands beyond a narrow question of the promotion of art and tries to discuss the ideological ground of this new and upcoming power and influence. The shows that were collecting, displaying and interpreting the art from Eastern Europe (such are After the Wall, Aspects/Positions, Europa, Europa etc.) were, at the same time, the summarized and systematic presentations of the activities of art departments of Soros Centers, operating in the entire region during 1990s. Also, the following three grand Balkan Shows (Blood and Honey, In The Gorges of the Balkans and Searching For Balcania ...) organized almost at the same time and by significant Western curators, followed the course of European integrations and the activities of minor and fragmented NGOs in the South East Europe. If the first three exhibitions marked the fall of socialist system, seeking the stronghold in the myth about the end of ideology, economy of wealth and uninterrupted development of 'global trends', the latter three exhibitions 'crowned' the end of national conflicts in the Balkans and established the new concept of culture as the tool for pacification, for overcoming the existed conflicts and traumas. (As an example of it, I'm quoting from the guidelines of the leading European foundations active in this region: "While political talks and diplomatic activities are going to reduce the tension between the two countries, exchange of artists including painters, musicians, film makers and others are on to bring about cordiality and amity".) Interestingly enough, the end of 'balkanization' coincided with the alteration in naming of this region to 'South East Europe'.

After the Wall, the first and the most significant exhibition with regard to its impact, was organized at the occasion of the 10th anniversary of dismantling of the Wall, and it took place in Moderna Museet in Stockholm in 1999. The involvement of Soros foundations in the public representation of art from East Europe in the case of After the Wall could be compared to the involvement of private galleries in international contemporary art biennials. This role is exemplified in the governing and funding of contemporary art in Eastern European countries and taking over the role of fading-out state institutions responsible for production and presentation of art. On the practical level, their activities on the local scenes can be seen as mediative in respect to the selection of the participating artists or, in other words, mediative in understanding of what is promoted as the value and the taste, what is recognized as contemporary art, how its historization would be approached ... Along with the artists and artworks exhibited, the system of cooperation of Soros Centers, its networking and successful leading through the process of transition, was part of the structure of After the Wall, which is epitomized by the second part of the title of the show: Art from Post-Communist Europe. It is interesting that the organization of major Eastern art exhibitions was more or less synchronized with the fading out of Soros fund donations and with the first mentioning of cultural industry as a primary goal for the local ministries of culture. This cultural-political process is guided under the term of 'normalization', frequently mentioned in the catalogue of After the Wall exhibition, as the umbrella-term for the other key-words of the transition to Capitalism. Idea of 'Open Society' that George Soros adopted from Karl Popper's philosophy and used as a programmatic concept for the activities of his foundation network became the catchphrase of the anti-Communist politics of the Soros Centers in Eastern Europe. Support for different kinds of dissident activities, from culture to politics, was developed together with the economical colonization of many countries of the East. All the texts in the catalogue of After the Wall exhibition reflect post-colonialism in the context of de-Sovietization of East European countries, but neglect the new forms of colonization accompanied by new ideologies and new hegemonies.

As Edward Said has argued, the colonial discourse always-already includes political, economical and cultural 'Orientalisms' which we can see applied in the Eastern European context as well, in the production of stereotypical cultural identity branded with the images of the egzotification of the socialist past: from 'socialist nostalgia' to 'socialist aesthetics', from dissident art to critical contemporary art. Together with the administrative concepts of 'civil society', 'human rights' and 'democratic culture', East European blockbuster exhibitions have promoted numerous post-socialist stereotypes like red stars, steel stars, all kinds of stars, retro-military iconography, Stalinist moustaches, dissident emotions of solitude and vulnerability... East European aesthetics is becoming a popular destination for many contemporary artists – the artist Paulina Olowska is using the repertoire of Russian avant-garde and socialist fashion of 1960’s, while the installations by Monika Sosnowska are based on the forms of Socialist modernism in East European countries. The examples are many, and the varieties of applications do explore the borderlines of creativity. These 'culturalized' forms of contemporary appropriations of the original 'socialist content' are losing the political meaning and become integrated into the global pop-iconography, or depoliticized concepts of aesthetics and formalism.

The discourse of contemporary art history will take the same course. In its overview of art before WW II, it will establish paradigms of totalitarian art (Socialistic Realism, Nazi Kunst and Fascist Art) and avant-garde-modernist practice (as a form of 'free art'). Rejecting the common ideological assumption of certain realist practices, avant-garde and modernism, already more consistently analyzed (e.g. through the Brecht – Lukacs polemics on the question of realism, or the argumentation of the clash on the Left with regard to Kharkow conference) it will base its episteme on conservative premises of language and form. That will, for example, make possible for important works of the historical and neo avant-garde to be exhibited at Aspects/Positions as the identitary forms of contemporary post-Socialist art. This gesture retroactively underlines the endurance of the tradition of specific East European contribution to the modern civilized world as well as the discontinuity with totalitarian Soviets, who never had the “feel” for contemporary art. In the discourse of contemporary art, historical avant-garde becomes the art of identity and looses its meaning of being a political project.

Today Eastern European origin functions as an identitary feature. Contemporary artists can hardly avoid this 'package' in the presentation and interpretation of their work. We often hear statements such as "I don't want to be Eastern European artist anymore. I would like to be just an artist" which can be read as the rejection of the system of the recognition inside the newly-created and widely accepted Eastern European code. Rastko Mo_nik in his text The East explains the meaning of this 'code': "Eastern means still Eastern ... It is specific, localized because it is enmeshed within its own past, not emancipated from the history, while what parades as general, canonic, as the measure against which the peripheral, the provincial is to be measured  – is what long ago was emancipated from its own history, from any history. This is why it can be imposed as 'general, canonic', as the measure of things."

Larrissa:

For the end, I will mention three artist’s stories, ironizing this forced identification through the liberal Western view. We can observe them as emancipatory attempts of the 'Other' to address the hegemonic discourse with its own racist-essentialist logic.

1. Representation against representation: Ethnographic objects or Self-portraits of Young Artist from Kosovo
Artist Jakup Ferri has been producing a series of video-vignettes. All of them are recorded in amateurish way in home-alike ambience. In one of them his parents and sisters are standing in a front of camera, as if ready for home photography, saying thanks to the curator for inviting Jakup to his first 'Western' show. Mother is also addressing her motherly care worries, while sisters are behaving childishly, giggling and not really participating in the performance. In the second one, the artist is sitting on the floor and listening to an audio recording of 'John&Yoko', a performance by Yoko Ono and John Lennon, who are calling each other names in tender whispers and loud screams. Jakup is holding two loudspeakers in his hands. He is a little bit bored, but anyway he tries to insert himself into the "show" by loudly pronouncing his name in the rhythm of the calls of the 'real' performers. The third one is carrying the title borrowed from the work of significant Yugoslav conceptual author Mladen Stilinovi_ "An Artist Who Speaks No English Is Not Artist". Jakup is speaking words (characteristic for the language of the project proposals and keywords of the current fashion-of-the-day among the institutions of culture) in his broken English, but in the moment one can get the feeling of slightly catching the point, he continues to speak nonsense, random phrases and disconnected sentences. With his completely serious and severe acting this situation is becoming hilarious.

If Dan Perjovschi in his review of the Balkans exhibitions points to presenting artists as 'documents' and producing a ghetto-type of show, then this object of criticism receives caricatural portrayal in Jakup's works. His video-series raise the issue of culturalisation, the politics that covers the absence of material forms of social inclusivity with the presence of symbolic ones.

2. How to become a great artist: Advices on how to manage an art career in the countries in transition
"Art does not tolerate sentimentality. An artist must always take an active attitude towards his own art, confront it, analyze it and be heartless towards it".

Video-sketch How to Become a Great Artist, a joint project of the artist couple Ve_anski/Nikoli_, consists of absurd trainings, statements and advice. It starts with a meeting between a student of fine arts in Belgrade ('starring' Vera Ve_anski), and the 'winner' of the global art scene, a person who introduces himself as "Very Important" ('starring' Vladimir Nikoli_). She is naive, sentimental and makes subtle drawings, he is undoubtedly excellent and ultimately resolved that his teachings in skills of 'Greatness' will yield positive results. It is obvious that she will become a great artist only if she abandons her loose contemplative work and when she finally realizes that communication, self-marketing and networking are the right formula of success. The video ironizes the obsession with management trainings in art in transitional societies and a series of peripheral prejudices about a successful carrier in art.

3. Art Addiction: Alienation of the process of production
In the video entitled Chose Life, by artists Nikoleta Markovi_ and Zsolt Kovacs, artist assumes the role of a socially problematic individual. The video follows the pattern of standard TV programs about intimate confessions of drug addicts, prostitutes, suicide survivors and similar, recorded in counter-light, and answering stereotypical questions about the situation in the family, getting through the difficult moments, and what the choice would be if life could be lived again. During the first half of the movie we can hardly get the details about the nature of the addiction: TV representation is typified and all the stories resemble each other. The uneasy situation turns into a comic one, when we suddenly hear about the seductive calls of the gallerists who would extract people from normal life, break their love relationships and destroy everything.

Story about art addiction refers to the broader context of unemployment, low price of labor and exploitation power of upcoming industries, with its demands on competition and permanent new production.

The video ends up showing the gallery spaces around Belgrade, with authoritative voiceover concluding the story with facts: “There are 1730 registered artists in Serbia. Per each registered artist, there are 11 not in evidence.” Stop Art. Choose Life. - is the text the typing machine leaves at the end of the program.