Socialist, Humanist and Well-Designed: The Polish Welfare State at the International Labour Exhibition in Turin, 1961 (original) (raw)
Related papers
Journal of Contemporary History, 47, no. 1 (January 2012): 185-212.
The socialist industrial designs displayed in Czechoslovakia’s EXPO ’58 pavilion spoke a visual language understood on both sides of the Iron Curtain, making the pavilion a site of common ground between East and West. The showcase was also a point of convergence between Czechoslovak visual artists and Communist Party authorities who engaged in complex political negotiations in the years after Stalin’s death. Visual artists vied for liberation from socialist realism’s constraints, although they kept their demands within limits to avoid risking Party backlash. Communist Party leaders wanted domestic stability and saw improving the living standard as a tactic for insuring popular support. They increasingly perceived industrial design to be a visual-arts activity with special promise. Well-designed furniture, textiles, glass, ceramics and other consumer goods could generate state income useful for raising the living standard at home and earning hard currency abroad. The Party needed the designers’ cooperation to achieve efficient, attractive production within the command economy. In the Brussels showcase communist authorities compromised with visual artists helping to insure the latter’s support and success, demonstrating that culture in postwar Czechoslovakia was not merely imposed ‘from above’ by omnipotent authorities but could be the outcome of multidirectional negotiations between various competing interests.
This article considers the making of simple and routine ethnographic displays in 1960s and early 1970s Romania, as part of the communist project to construct a new social and political order based on modest consumption and collectivized subjectivities. The opening of new cultural institutions employing working-class cultural workers, 'mass provision' of welfare, class emancipation and highly regulated production and consumption helped form new interior design in public cultural institutions. From 1964 onwards, a newly-established factory called Decorativa standardized both the form and content of displays. Composed of more than 7,000 artists, architects and manual workers, hired, trained and given responsibility for public displays in any location considered 'cultural', Decorativa was at the core of national aesthetics and design throughout its existence under communism. Analysis shows how Decorativa specialists, collaborating with museum curators, made visible the introduction of bureaucratic intelligentsia into the arts. This cooperation, taking the form of adaptation and improvization, allowed the dispersion of design knowledge outside museums among other technocrat workers. In the case of interior design in Romanian public cultural institutions under communism, regulations encouraging minimalism and neutrality did not impede innovation, but in fact fostered it. Speed, improvization and transparency were three characteristics of interior design.
Post-1945 Poland ‒ Modernities, Transformations and Evolving Identities. Working papers, 2016
Analysing the post-war situation in Polish art in the late 1980s Andrzej Turowski coined the term ideoza. This linguistic blend of words ideology and gnosis was used to describe an obsessive situation in which every decision both personal and institutional is conditioned and impelled by a currently dominated ideology. ‘Ideoza is an ideologically suffused space of beliefs and systems, which restricts the free manifestation of thoughts by preordained and omnipresent perspective,’ Turowski explained in his text. This title condition originally referred to culture, but but in the light of research into socialist Poland that emerged over the last three decades, the term could be easily applied to other spheres of peoples’ activity in a country oppressed by the Party-state. Not undermining the impact of the ideology on life in People’s Poland, could one think of a sphere excluded from that hegemony or of an alternative force that could influence to a comparable extent official actions of the Party-state? In this paper I would like to present a struggle against this ideology centred on the example of the 1st Exhibition of Polish Light Industry in Moscow in 1949. Similar to other international exhibitions and trade fairs organised during the Cold War, the Moscow exhibition became not only a site of convergence, allowing ideas originating from different countries to meet, but also an event where diverse national agendas clashed. Using unpublished archival materials related to the exhibition in Moscow, this paper identifies the issues that ideology was valued against and circumstances in which that took place. In order to address that, it examines the process of creating the exhibition – forming its rationale, narrative and visual side – as well as the final outcome of these efforts presented to the public.
P. Schorch , D. Habit (eds.): Curating (Post-)Socialist Environments, 2021
This paper summons the help of art exhibitions and the academic research field of exhibition history to recall and reimagine the socialist past from perspectives that gained ground with the emergence of studies into the 'cultural Cold War' and globalisation. Three types of exhibitions are considered. Firstly, a set of large-scale international art shows from the 1960s-80s will be evoked and the participation of protagonists from the 'Second' and 'Third World' gauged. Since most of these ventures went fairly unnoticed in mainstream historiography, the essay also reviews some 'remembering exhibitions', a genre meant to reinsert the relevance of (often forgotten) past events. The common denominator of the academic or curatorial interventions has been to produce transformative knowledge and underscore that, far from being hermetically isolated, the world behind the Iron Curtain participated in lively transcontinental cultural exchanges and currents of political activism. The third type of exhibition, a smaller-scale recent survey show, picks up this line of inquiry, while, simultaneously, throwing light on some hitherto and unacknowledged dimensions of the visual culture, the material, creative and intellectual environment of some Eastern European societies in the later decades of socialism.
The theatre of exhibitions: Czechoslovakia at the International Exhibition in Paris, 1937
Journal of Design History, 2021
How can an exhibition designer engage the visitor to a world's fair who has already spent hours walking around the grounds, visiting other attractions and countless national pavilions? This question drove many theoretical and practical considerations of exhibition design during the interwar period and preoccupied many designers and artists. As a very active participant in world's fairs at this time, Czechoslovakia established an intricate system of presenting its material production and cultural prowess which included careful design of the exterior of its pavilion as well as its interior. Using the Czechoslovak pavilion at the International Exhibition of Art and Technology in Modern Life in Paris, 1937, as a case study, this article examines how Czech designers developed their own original ideas about exhibition design informed by other disciplines. It offers a reading of exhibition design in parallel with stage design and claims that the two shared many techniques, aimed at attracting audiences. It stresses, on the one hand, the affiliation between the two design areas and on the other, the original contribution of designers from Czechoslovakia to the development of exhibition design as a self-sufficient field in the interwar period.