Art and Theory After Socialism
103 pages
English

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103 pages
English

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Description


Art, theory, and criticism faced radical new challenges after the end of the cold war. Art and Theory After Socialism investigates what happens when theories of art from the former East and the former West collide, parsing the work of former Soviet bloc artists alongside that of their western counterparts. Mel Jordan and Malcolm Miles conclude that the dreams promised by capitalism have not been delivered in Eastern Europe, and likewise, the democratic liberation of the West has fallen prey to global conflict and high-risk situations. This volume is a revolutionary take on the overlap of art and everyday life in a post–cold war world.

 


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Publié par
Date de parution 01 janvier 2008
Nombre de lectures 0
EAN13 9781841502656
Langue English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,1600€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

Art and Theory After Socialism
Art and Theory After Socialism
Edited by Mel Jordan and Malcolm Miles
Editorial Assistant Karen Roulstone
First Published in the UK in 2008 by Intellect Books, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2008 by Intellect Books, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright 2008 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Cover Design: Gabriel Solomons Copy Editor: Holly Spradling Typesetting: Mac Style, Beverley, E. Yorkshire
ISBN 978-1-84150-211-3 EISBN 978-1-84150-265-6
Printed and bound by Gutenberg Press, Malta.
C ONTENTS
Introduction
Chapter 1 From Shamed to Famed - The Transition of a Former Eastern German Arts Academy to the Talent Hotbed of a Contemporary Painters School. The Hochschule f r Grafik und Buchkunst, Leipzig
Sophie A. Gerlach
Chapter 2 Attacking Objectification: Jerzy Bere in Dialogue with Marcel Duchamp
Klara Kemp-Welch
Chapter 3 On the Ruins of a Utopia: Armenian Avant-Garde and the Group Act
Angela Harutyunyan
Chapter 4 Art Communities, Public Spaces and Collective Actions in Armenian Contemporary Art
Vardan Azatyan
Chapter 5 Appropriating the Ex-Cold War
Malcolm Miles
Chapter 6 The End of an Idea: On Art, Horizons and the Post-Socialist Condition
Simon Sheikh
Chapter 7 Exploring Critical and Political Art in the United Kingdom and Serbia
Sophie Hope Marko Stamenkovic
Chapter 8 Other Landscapes (for Weimar, Goethe and Schiller)
Daniela Brasil
Chapter 9 The Ecology of Post-Socialism and the Implications of Sustainability for Contemporary Art
Maja Fowkes and Reuben Fowkes
Chapter 10 Functions, Functionalism and Functionlessness: On the Social Function of Public Art after Modernism
Freee Art Collective
I NTRODUCTION
The papers collected in this book concern recent and contemporary European art and theory in context of the end of the Cold War, dismantling of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991. They range from theoretical reflection to accounts of art practice and curating, from Armenia (an ex-constituent republic of the Soviet Union), Germany and the United Kingdom. For want of a better term, the condition of post-socialism indicates the conceptual arena opened by the demise of the East bloc (and, hence, of a West bloc defined in opposition to it). More accurately, it indicates European culture after the demise of state socialist regimes in the East bloc while, I would argue, socialism as an ideology is not erased by the failure of state socialist regimes. The book offers a series of specific windows on this field, and does not aim to be comprehensive or to offer a definitive critique of a still shifting cultural, social and political re-alignment. The chapters are more like snapshots of a partly disappearing and a partly emerging terrain.
This book and its companion volume, Public Spheres , originated in collaboration between the Critical Spaces Research Group at the University of Plymouth and the National Association of Art Critics, Armenia. In June 2005, a seminar was held at University of Plymouth. In October 2005, a group of UK-based academics took part in a major conference on the public sphere at the American University, Yerevan, organized by the National Association of Art Critics. Other speakers were from Armenia, Austria, France, Germany and Turkey. The debate was robust. There were interesting overlaps and edges between readings of modernist art theory in Armenia and re-readings of the same material in the West. Meanwhile, much of the city s centre was under reconstruction. Several nineteenth-century buildings in a characteristic dark grey volcanic stone were prepared for removal to storage and eventual reconstruction elsewhere by the numbering of each stone. Yet the eventual reconstruction remains as unlikely in popular estimate as the re-erection of a statue of Lenin currently in storage in the basement of the National Museum, replaced after 1991 by a large public video screen.
It is too easy for a westerner such as myself - whose student years were those of the boom economy and expansion of contemporary art of the 1960s - to be nostalgic about a political system under which I never lived. In fact, I never even went to an East bloc country until 1986 (although I was one of a peace movement delegation to the Russian Embassy in London in about 1967 - we were well received, but disappointed to be offered American cigarettes). Ian McEwan writes, in the voice of Florence, the female protagonist of On Chesil Beach , this part of the narrative set in the early 1960s, that she knew in her heart that the Soviet Union, for all its mistakes - clumsiness, inefficiency, defensiveness surely, rather than evil design - was essentially a beneficial force in the world. (McEwan 2008: 53). I would have shared that view. Of course, I realize that to hold such views seriously today is a luxury, and that to lament the passing of the East bloc is enabled by temporal and cultural distance. Still, however, I remember a conversation in an eco-village in the ex-German Democratic Republic, in 2004, when a member of the community recounted the sense of loss among local people when a previously widespread non-money economy in which skills were freely shared was replaced by consumerism and prices on everything. He and I are not alone in this feeling.
In Requiem for Communism , Charity Scribner notes a performance artwork in Berlin in 1996 in which a mock funeral procession crossed the city from west to east. She comments: This collective sorrow [for the collapse of the workers state] has motivated a proliferation of literary texts and artworks, as well as a boom of museum exhibits that survey the wreckage of socialism and its industrial remains. (Scribner 2005: 3). Later in the book she writes of the Ostalgie as this nostalgia for a socialist past is known in Germany. Perhaps my own paper in this volume is an example of such nostalgic reverie, or, and more, it is necessary to differentiate the history that took place, with its industrial pollution and abuses of human rights, from the ethos of solidarity and value of public welfare that remain key to a vision of socialism. As Scribner states, The strongest accounts of the second world sound out the potentials sedimented into the most obstinately inaccessible moments of history. (Scribner 2005: 87). Art does not reproduce such moments but is a route by which cultural memory takes form to offer a basis for continuing critical, dialogic encounter.
Malcolm Miles
References
McEwan, I. (2008), On Chesil Beach , London, Vintage Books.
Scribner, C. (2005), Requiem for Communism , Cambridge (MA), MIT.
1
F ROM S HAMED TO F AMED - T HE T RANSITION OF A F ORMER E ASTERN G ERMAN A RTS A CADEMY TO THE T ALENT H OTBED OF A C ONTEMPORARY P AINTERS SCHOOL . T HE H OCHSCHULE F R G RAFIK UND B UCHKUNST , L EIPZIG
Sophie A. Gerlach
A decade and a half after the fall of the Berlin Wall the output of cultural heritage and theoretical production in the two former German states needs to be critically revised. During the early times of governmental and societal change and reorganization, Eastern German frameworks were generally regarded as politically unacceptable and immoral whilst Western German cultural politics a priori claimed to be just and politically correct having been created within an essentially liberal and democratic system.
While there are no doubts about the totalitarian nature of the former GDR per se , the developments of the past years have proven that such polarized dichotomies are not tenable. Some of the attitudes and modes of artistic production, specifically in the East, turned out to be nonetheless valid, adding a surplus value to contemporary debates and developments. As a result, western theoreticians, critics and artists alike needed to accept that their belief system had to be critically re-examined. In addition, the tasks that governments, cities, districts, schools and individuals had to face were so manifold that theoretical blueprint planning was simply impossible. Many changes happened organically or were brought about by individuals who exposed specific situations and set about the process of change by refusing to work under conditions which were not yet clarified or reorganized, or by proposing different and new approaches.
The developments within the cultural scene are evident when considering the art academies, as the institutional setting allows an analysis of the kinds of changes being made including their purpose and timing. The former Eastern German state only maintained four main centres for artistic training: Berlin, Dresden, Halle and Leipzig. The latter proves a useful example as it is the one academy which is currently well discussed within Germany and abroad, due to the success of the New Leipzig School of Painting, a heterogeneous painters group closely tied to the Hochschule f r Grafik und Buchkunst (HGB), Academy of Visual Arts Leipzig. The prominence the artists are currently receiving can partially be attributed to the traditional painter s training at the HGB which follows curricula different from the majority of other art academies in unified Germany. Although this study will take into account the situation of the entire HGB, it must be clarified that changes happened in very different ways for the four different departments: namely photography, book art and graphic design, media art (founded in 1993) and painting and graphics. I will be focusing attention on the developments in the latter department. In the following chapter, I will discuss

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