Creating eternities or The shape of art to come (original) (raw)

Remains of Utopia: Neo-Marxist Affinities of the East European Neo-avant-garde

This paper examines the cross-pollination of the neo-Marxist critique of real existing socialism with the critical practices of the radical stream of the East European neo-avant-garde, and examines the extent to which the imprint of debates over the radical overhaul of the socialist system can be detected in the practices of artists and curators. Artistic affinities with the neo-Marxist debates that flared across the Eastern Bloc can be identified in a shared willingness to question authority, a subversive attitude to canonical thinking and a new interest in the role of an individual in socialist society. Considered also is the shift over the course of the 1970s from a belief in the possibility of a reformed socialism, to one of resignation, cynicism and frustration towards party bureaucracy, in which even the bureaucrats had stopped believing in the official ideology. This change in attitudes towards socialism is detected both in the change in tone in the writings of dissident theorists and in the approach of artists who could no longer muster the neo-avant-garde enthusiasm for the utopian desire to transform the world. The difficult paths taken by those, who sought to recover the radicalism in Marxist thought from under the blanket of state bureaucracy may also be viewed as a valuable source for contemporary social criticism of the post-communist order by a new generation of theorists and artists.

TransStates: Conceptual Art in Eastern Europe and the Limits of Utopia

2011

Milovzorova was first a wonderful colleague and then a deeply appreciated friend. Yelena Kalinsky has been a gift in terms of both shared intellectual interests and great personal kindness. And even though I met Josh Saxe towards the end of my work on the dissertation, his unflagging support, interest, patience, and willingness to engage me in intelligent conversation about my work, as well as help edit it, were things that I deeply appreciated and that made the final push less of an ordeal. Finally, I have to express my deepest gratitude to my parents, Olga Vorobieva and Alex Gurshtein, to whom I have also dedicated the dissertation. They have supported me over the years in innumerable practical ways as I pursued the study of art history, doing everything from making it financially possible to take on unpaid museum internships to e-mailing me hundreds of scanned pages while I was living abroad. More importantly, they gave me the capacity for inquisitiveness and persistence, along with their blessing to pursue my dreams and hunches. For this, as much else, I will always be in their debt.

A Socialist Neo-Avant-Garde? The Case of Postwar Yugoslavia

New Narratives of Russian and East European Art, 2019

The post-1945 resurgence of radical art forms such as the readymade and the monochrome in Western art is often interpreted as a superficial repetition of the historic avant-garde, devoid of its original political content. Still, this well-established narrative of the neo-avant-garde only accounts for art in Western liberal-democratic contexts. In socialist Yugoslavia, a distinct strand of neo-constructivism emerged in the 1950s, which sought to recapture not only prewar constructivism’s experimental aesthetics, but also its utopian politics. It was fueled by the revolutionary aspirations of socialist Yugoslavia, which strove to articulate a brand of socialism independent from Moscow, as well as an awareness of prewar constructivism that was unmatched in Western Europe. Represented by figures such as Vjenceslav Richter and the collective EXAT-51, this socialist neo-avant-garde challenged both the traditional historiography of postwar abstraction, and the assumption that experimental aesthetics have not existed under non-democratic conditions since the Soviet 1920s.

“Utopian” and “Dystopian” in the Context of Visual Arts

Život umjetnosti

The paper explores the interdisciplinary trajectory of the terms "utopian" and "dystopian". It acknowledges the fact that "utopia" and "dystopia" are originally terms from literary theory that refer to specific literary genres. In the light of a recent crossover of the term "dystopian" into the vocabulary of art criticism (exhibition reviews and catalogues), as well as a current curatorial fashion of devising exhibitions on the basis of binary opposites of "utopian" and "dystopian", the paper aims to define the range of meanings, connotations and denotations of the terms "utopian" and "dystopian" in visual arts, by means of discussing the particular contexts in which they are used. The use of the term "dystopian" is discussed in the context of the following artists: Alexis Rockman, Michael Kerbow, Fabrice Monteiro, Kushal Tikle, Alice Tye, Jon Rafman, as well as in the context of Croa...

Aesthetic Marxism: Yugoslavia and after

As in other socialisms, artistic culture was very important political issue in Yugoslavia, and Marxism was at the same time its official ideology in hands of the League of Communists and a field of expression for critical voices. In transition from Yugoslavia to new nation-states and from socialism to capitalism, cultural field lost its ideological weight and Marxism nearly disappeared from public use. Its place, now much less important, was taken by post-structuralist and post-modernist theories. Then, the Crisis gave marginalized Marxism another chance to appear as persuasive and productive way of thought with a possible practical impact. While in the period of socialism aesthetic Marxism was developed as an utopian critique of official cultural ideology competing with it for the position of Marxist orthodoxy, in period of the Crisis elements of Marxist approach are engaged together with post-structuralist and post-modern (anti-)aesthetics mostly by artist themselves. They do not look for orthodoxy but for practical answers: what can art do in transition from late capitalism to post-capitalism, and can it embrace some kind of aesthetic utopian vision again? Instead of getting the answer, these attempts produce a situation of " squaring the circle ". What they produce in aesthetics and in art is so-called real utopia-an oxymoron of contemporaneity. To present these transitions in the field of aesthetic Marxism and its utopian perspective, this paper will proceed through four steps: