SUMMARY
he publication Performative Gestures Political Moves evolved from the eponymous symposium held in Ljubljana (at the Scientiic Research Centre of the
Slovene Academy of Sciences and Arts, June 2010) and organised by the City
of Women – Association for the Promotion of Women in Culture Ljubljana.
While acknowledging the “problem of performativity”, the present volume,
however, (still) lingers on the term, exploring its echoing in the research focused on what should thus also be considered as an efect of the performance
of power – on the art and theory production in so-called “Eastern Europe”.
A huge body of critical texts has been written in the last decade, emphasising
the inscribed geopolitical and (neo)colonial power in the terms “Eastern
Europe”, “Former East”, “Post-Socialist” and similar denotations, which have
let their footprint (at least partly) on many exhibitions and art projects as
well, and collections devoted to the art production from the variably named
region. However, as also presented in the following contributions, the region
shares, since the dissolution of state socialism(s), (ethno)nationalistic,
neoliberal and neoclerical as well as patriarchal, homophobic and racist
reversals – most of which are, however, a Pan-European, if not global even,
“continental Post-Socialist reality” with regional speciicity and intensity.
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In this sense, this book does not (only) represent the research on performance art and performativity in a region denoted as “East European”,
but also produces positions that go beyond the representation(s) of what
performance art, performativity in/and “Post-Socialist Europe” are.
However, as already suggested before, going beyond the representational is
not always an easy task – especially when one is confronted with (ideologically) overdetermined (Post) Socialism and gender. In this sense, the
following publication is as heteroglossic as the terms performance and
performance art are. he book therefore also raises questions of
historisation(s) and their ideological positioning. Especially within feminist
art history but also in feminist curating, the question of labelling art
production as feminist has been till today a burning subject. How, what,
when, why, where, by whom and for whom is (performance) art feminist,
obviously does not have an unambiguous answer. he same is true for art
and feminism as such. herefore, the present publication has aimed not only
to foster a relection on performative and performance forms by women
artists but also to relect upon current research positions and theoretical
considerations of performativity, performance art, feminism, historisation
and, above all, their political implications in/and/for the “continental
Post-Socialist” condition.
Analyzing the four-word title of the publication
Performa- tive Gestures Political Moves, which is the
outcome of the [… eponymous] symposium, we
can place this into the context of the title of Jon
McKenzie’s book Perform or Else: From Discipline
to Performance. Jon McKenzie detects that, in the
20th and 21st centuries, performance will be that what
discipline was in the 18th and 19th centuries: that is,
the onto-historical formation of power and knowledge.
[…] [I]t can be said that the heteroglossic collection
[…] consolidates contradictory perspectives (e.g.,
I am referring here to Angela Dimitrakaki’s opinion
and Marina Gržinić’s polemics on the exhibition
Gender Check), and in these contradictions, I found
the backing to Maxine Greene’s saying “Art cannot
change the world, but it can change the people who
can change the world.”
Dr. Sc. Suzana Marjanić, Institute of Ethnology and
Folklore Research (IEF), Zagreb
IMPRESSUM
Publishers
City of Women – Association for the Promotion of Women in Culture
Kersnikova 4, 1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia
www.cityofwomen.org
For the publisher Mara Vujić
Red Athena University Press
Centre for Women’s Studies
Dolac 8, 10000 Zagreb, Croatia
www.zenstud.hr
For the publisher Rada Borić
Editors
Katja Kobolt and Lana Zdravković
Authors
Angela Dimitrakaki, Ana Peraica, Barbara Orel, Dunja Kukovec, Grupa Spomenik/Monument Group
and DeLVe | Institute for Duration, Location, and Variables, Marija Ratković, Marina Gržinić, Martina
Pachmanová, Milijana Babić, Suzana Milevska, Tea Hvala and Waldemar Tatarczuk
Copy Editing
Sandra Prlenda, Katja Kobolt, Lana Zdravković
Reviewers
Vesna Leskošek
Suzana Marjanić
Proofreading
Eric Dean Scott
Visual Identity and Layout
Saša Kerkoš
Typeface
Minion Pro
Paper
Munken Polar (FSC™ – The mark of responsible forestry.
www.fsc.org. FSC-C022692 and PEFC certified.)
Coordinator of the Project
Katja Kobolt
Administration
Amela Meštrovac
Printed by
Intergrafika ttž d.o.o., Zagreb
Print Run
300
© 2014 Authors, Editors, Artists, City of Women and Red Athena University Press
ISBN: 978-953-6955-48-0
Printed in Zagreb, June 2014
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the National and
University Library in Zagreb under 879597.
Funded by
ERSTE Stiftung
Thanks to
Mara Vujić, Jelena Petrović
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PERFORMATIVE
GESTURES
POLITICAL
MOVES
―
Edited by Katja Kobolt
and Lana Zdravkov ić
With contr ibutions by
Angela Dimitrakaki
Ana Peraica
Barbara Orel
Dunja Kukovec
Gr upa Spomenik and D eLVe
Mar ija Ratkov ić
Mar ina Gržinić
Mar tina Pachmanová
Milijana Babić
Suzana Milevska
Tea Hvala
Waldemar Tatarczuk
CONTENTS
9 – 26 Performative Gestures Political Moves – An Introduction
by Katja Kobolt and Lana Zdravković
27 – 46 Master-Slave Dialectics in the Feminine
by Suzana Milevska
47 Djedica / Santa
by Milijana Babić
47 – 56 “Using Myself to Show What Matters Most for Everyone”:
An Interview With Video Performance Artist Adela Jušić
by Dunja Kukovec
57 – 64 Laying Diapers, Loving Nature: Maternity as a Private Act
and Political Gesture
by Martina Pachmanová
65 – 78 Polish Women Performance Artists Between the 1960s
and the 1990s: The Polish Feminist Avant-Garde
by Waldemar Tatarczuk
79 – 96 Women’s Perspective: The Contribution of the Ljubljana
Alternative Arts Scene in the 1980s
by Barbara Orel
97 – 122 Working on Gender: New Burlesque and Cabaret in Ljubljana
by Tea Hvala
123 – 138 The Biopolitical Character of Performativity in Private Space
by Marija Ratković
139 – 148 Censored Images: Women In the Army
by Ana Peraica
149 – 184 “The Gender Issue”: Lessons from Post-Socialist Europe.
What and Where is Post-Socialism?
by Angela Dimitrakaki
185 – 210 The Performative and the Political in Global Capitalism
by Marina Gržinić
211 – 238 Matheme
by Grupa Spomenik and DeLVe
239 – 242 Index
243 – 248 Contributors
An Introduction
09
PERFORMATIVE GESTURES
POLITICAL MOVES
– AN INTRODUCTION
By Katja Kobolt and Lana Zdravković
1 For a genealogy of
the term performative
in and from linguistics, cf. the text by
Marija Ratković in the
present publication.
2 Cf. Wolff, 1994;
Buden, 2005; Močnik,
2006; Dimitrakaki,
2012; Komelj, 2012;
Tlostanova, 2012;
Gržinić, 2004, as well
as the texts by Gržinić
and Dimitrakaki in the
present publication.
Performative (carry into effect, fulfil, discharge; from Old French
parfornir, parfurnir – to do, carry out, finish, accomplish) – a
heteroglossic term that has by departing from linguistics,1 where it
was originally forged (Austin, [1962] 1976), promised to revolutionize the broader field of the humanities and social sciences. In that
sense, performative belongs to one of the notions, or better, research
positions that have continuously marked the epistemologies of the
humanities since the last half of the 20th century. “When the term
‘performative’ jumped from linguistics into literary theory, it promised to break down the boundary between doing, on the one hand,
and saying, writing or representing on the other. When it developed
in feminist and queer theory to describe the often compulsory and
normative character of gender performance, it promised to break
down the boundary separating self-conscious and specialised cultural performance from the often unconscious and overdetermined
social and psychological aspects of gender performance,” writes
Andrea Fraser, who also notes “the rise of the term ‘performative’
in art discourse, where it has come to describe any kind of artistically framed and conceptualised activity, recorded or witnessed,
as a regressive re-inscription of these very boundaries” (Fraser,
2014:123). Thus, Fraser suggests a move away from the term, which,
as it’s generally used, is in her eyes “a failure of the promise of […]
freeing our conception of doing from the constraints of motility…”
(ibid.). Instead, Fraser advocates for enactment, which enables us to
go beyond the “opposition between doing, acting, or performing…”
and “saying or representing” (ibid.).
While acknowledging the “problem of performativity”, this volume,
however, (still) lingers on the term, exploring its echoing in the
research focused on what should thus also be considered as an effect
of the performance of power – on the art and theory production in
so-called “Eastern Europe”. A huge body of critical texts has been
written in the last decade, emphasising the inscribed geopolitical
and (neo)colonial power2 in the terms “Eastern Europe”, “Former
East”, “Post-Socialist” and similar denotations, which have left their
10
footprint (at least partly) on many exhibitions and art projects and
collections devoted to the art production from the variably named
region as well. However, as also presented in the following contributions, the region shares, since the dissolution of state socialism(s),
(ethno)nationalistic, neoliberal and neoclerical as well as patriarchal, homophobic and racist reversals – most of which are, however,
a Pan-European, if not global even, “continental Post-Socialist reality” (Dimitrakaki, 2012) with regional specificity and intensity.
In order to describe the “ontological” status of the performative in
the present publication, we might reach over to a relation described
by Ana Vujanović (2004), the relation between representational performance and performative performance, which Marija Ratković also
makes use of in her article in the present volume. Whereas representational performance “represents” a meaning, the performative
performance “generates”, produces a meaning, a position.3 In this
sense, this book does not (only) represent the research on performance art and performativity in a region denoted as “East European”,
but also produces (subject) positions that go beyond the representation(s) of what performance art, performativity in/and “Post-Socialist Europe” are. However, as already suggested by Fraser (2014)
and many others, going beyond the representational is not always an
easy task – especially when one is confronted with (ideologically)
overdetermined (post) socialism and gender. In this sense, the
following publication is as heteroglossic as the terms performance
and performance art are.
3 Cf. the text by Marija
Ratković in the present
publication.
Performance art, and especially its politicality, has been addressed
in critical literature with prolific voices. According to Jayne Wark
(2006), the theoretical focus ranges from the performance’s
ephemerality and its transgression of the relation to object-based
art, over the living element versus documentation (e.g. Phelan, 1993
and Jones, 1998) to “bodies as metaphors for psychic, cultural and
institutional codes and signifiers” (Wark, 2006: 9). In addition,
prominent positions within performance studies also hold feminist
historisations, or as Marina Gržinić makes the point in her chapter:
“The relationship between performance art and feminist activism
is, according to Eleanor Antin, constitutive for performance art:
‘practically, it was the women of Southern California who invented
performance.’ The Western genealogy of performance, as an effect of
feminism, according to Antin, has its roots in guerrilla theatre and
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An Introduction
4 E.g. Body and the
East, Moderna galerija, Ljubljana, 1998,
curated by Zdenka
Badovinac and the
Arteast 2000+ and
Kontakt collections;
Art Has Its Consequences, Zagreb, Łódź,
Novi Sad, curated by
WHW, Muzeum Sztuki
et. al.; Political Practices of (Post)Yugoslav
Art: Retrospective 01,
Museum 25th of May,
Belgrade, 2009, curatorially co-ordinated
by Jelena Vesić, and
many others.
11
in the university and street riots of the American women’s movements of the 1960s and 1970s” (Antin, quoted in Preciado, 2004:
20–22; cf. Gržinić’s contribution in the present publication). If the
art of performance was formed in the West during the 1960s and
1970s in a dialogue with student demonstrations, civil rights movements as well as feminist, peace, gay and lesbian activism, and if the
majority of East European countries lacked these movements at the
time – how is the history of the performance of the East positioned
in relation to the political? Selected curatorial and research projects
as well as collections have in the last two decades shed light also on
the performance tradition in the named region.4 Here, especially
important are both editions of the Re.Act.Feminism. A Performing
Archive curated by Bettina Knaup and Beatrice Ellen Stemmer (#1:
2008–2009; #2: 2011–2013, shown in various European cities) and
the momentous albeit also contested (in this publication) exhibition
Gender Check, based on an (inter)national research by “embedded”
curators, and curatorially co-ordinated by Bojana Pejić (at Vienna’s MUMOK in 2009 and Warsaw’s Zachęta Gallery in 2010). In
this volume, the contributions by Martina Pachmanová, Waldemar
Tatarczuk, Barbara Orel and Marina Gržinić especially underline,
in regard to the “Eastern” genealogy of performance, the “socialist”
specific: the central role of artistic practices and the art context in
general in the emergence of political agendas such as feminism,
alternative public spaces and, with that, underground or regime-critical movements. (Over)simplified: whereas in the “West” political
movements gave rise to performance art, in the “East”, art (especially conceptual and postconceptual) gave rise to alternative political
movements and the emergence of public spaces.
The book therefore also raises questions of historisation(s) and their
ideological positioning. Especially within feminist art history but
also in feminist curating, the question of labelling art production as
feminist without this art representing an already established feminist agenda (e.g. care work, sex work, violence, LGBTI, etc.), or clear
biographical references (e.g. feminist political “coming-out” by artists and their concrete liaisons to a feminist movement) have been
till today a burning subject. How, what, when, why, where, by whom
and for whom is (performance) art feminist obviously does not have
an unambiguous answer (Red Mined, 2014). The same is true for art
and feminism as such. Therefore, the present publication has aimed
not only to foster a reflection on performative and performance
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12
forms by women artists, but also to reflect upon current research
positions and theoretical considerations of performativity, performance art, feminism, historisation and, above all, their political
implications in/and/for the “continental Post-Socialist” condition.
Gesture(s) (a bodily movement, a communication form, something
said or done to show a particular feeling or attitude: from Latin gestus - gesture, carriage, posture). Within the theory of performativity,
the term gestus is most known from the Brechtian legacy: “voice and
gesture, discursive and visible, is in Brechtian rhetoric merged into
a unified notion of gestus, researching and performing the social
conditions in which these practices are performed, repeated, that is,
re-produced” (Milohnić, 2009: 82 [translated by KK]). In a similar
manner, the present volume has not emerged from a contingent
idea or a curatorial and research “trend”, but is rather a gestus of the
context in, for and from which it evolved.
The publication Performative Gestures Political Moves evolved from
the eponymous symposium held in Ljubljana (at the Scientific
Research Centre of the Slovene Academy of Sciences and Arts, June
2010) and organised by the City of Women – Association for the
Promotion of Women in Culture Ljubljana. “City of Women aims to
raise the visibility of high-quality innovative creations by women
artists, theoreticians and activists from all over the world. Since
1995, it has presented the artistic and cultural production of women
in the performing arts, music, visual arts, film and video, literature and theory, and thereby aimed to provoke a debate and raise
awareness as to the currently disproportionate participation and
representation of women in arts and culture, as well as in society
as a whole. City of Women simultaneously provides a platform that
focuses upon and considers pertinent critical contemporary issues.
The Association’s primary objective is to produce and organise affirmative action projects in order to draw attention to the disproportionately low participation and representation of women in the field
of arts and culture, and its largest endeavour is the organisation of
the annual International Festival of Contemporary Arts – City of
Women.” Thus claims the mission statement of the organisation,
which one of the editors of this book was affiliated with for nearly a
decade.5 The Symposium was a part of a two-part project that was
initiated by Katja Kobolt and Dunja Kukovec, one part of which (the
present volume) is being financed by ERSTE Stiftung. The other part
of the project, which was taking place within the “hub” A Space For
gestures_Blok_Final Print SEND.indd 12
5 Manifesto accessed
at www.wunrn.com
07/06/14 12:33
An Introduction
6 www.aspaceforliveart.org
7 Cf. wording of the
current City of Women manifesto: “International Festival of
Contemporary Arts –
City of Women is one
of the most prominent
festivals which maintains a strong focus on
performing arts with
aims to raise the visibility of high-quality
innovative creations
by women artists. The
story of internationally well-known
festival that is actually
becoming a role model
for similar festivals
around the world has
started in 1995... when
the first International
Festival of Contemporary Art – City of
Women was carried
out.” Accessed at www.
cityofwomen.org/en/
content/content, May
2014.
8 Since the first
edition of the City of
Women in 1995,
acting curators of
the Festival have been
as follows: Uršula
Cetinski, Koen Van
Daele, Sabina Potočki,
Bettina Knaup,
Katja Kobolt, Dunja
Kukovec, and, since
2009, Mara Vujić, all
of whom have collaborated curatorially with
many other individuals and organisations.
gestures_Blok_Final Print SEND.indd 13
13
Live Art,6 a European culture programme (2007–2013) for developing and reinforcing live art, was the earlier-mentioned exhibition
Re.Act.Feminism, which was presented in Ljubljana in March 2009
at Gallery Vžigalica and was co-curated by Mara Vujić. All of the
programme activities by the City of Women evolved not out of the
“revival” that the living element – the body and the event actualised
by means of performance arts (live art, body art, happenings,
performance interventions and/or actions) – has been undoubtedly
experiencing during the last decade, but also bore evidence of
(one of ) the curatorial focus(es) of the City of Women since its beginnings in the mid 1990s, followed by the City of Women curators
and, maybe most exclusively, by the current one.7 But could this
focus only be explained away as a contingent taste by the different
curators who forged the programme of this unique art and cultural
manifestation (the Festival) and institution (the Association) with
(for a feminist or a “women only”, unfortunately quite unusual)
continuity since 1995? 8
This year – in 2014 – the City of Women Festival celebrates its 20th
anniversary! Or can, or even should, performance in an art historical as well as a contemporary perspective and as a material practice
be thought of and in a gender(ed) perspective? Does this particular
focus of the City of Women – namely, on performance art – have
a material “grounding” in art production by women? Or to articulate the question even more directly: Could we bluntly say that the
gender of performance art is “female”? Bettina Knaup argues that
as the performance “searches for entanglement between art and life,
between private and political”, and focuses on the body, it has been
a “paradigmatic” form of feminist and gender critical art production
(Knaup, 2011: 302; cf. Kreivytė et al., 2014). In addition, she emphasises the material condition of performance, which makes it literally
“arte povera”, enabling artists to produce with little means (their
body), anywhere (in a private or public space, etc., instead of in a
gallery, museum or theatre) and whenever (ibid.). In a similar manner and as a gestus, the described gendered and political dimension
of the medium “performance”, discussed here from different angles,
echoes throughout Performative Gestures Political Moves, which is
coming out as the third publication of the newly established Red
Athena University Press – a collaboration of trans-Yugoslav feminist
scholars and women’s studies institutes, co-ordinated by the Zagreb
Centre for Women’s Studies.
07/06/14 12:33
14
Political (Old Greek politiká, Πολιτικά, Latin politica, politicus –
subjects, matters and activities, which concern “common”, at that
time polis. Cf. res publica.)
After World War II and especially since the 1970s, it has been
known that the most progressive artists from “the East” were precisely those who were critical towards totalitarianism, hierarchy,
oppression, which was mostly interpreted (either with or without
the help of those authors) as being critical towards the state regime.
Since their criticisms were directed (or were presented as such by
them or their interpreters) towards the single-party, patriarchal,
non-liberal system, it was (more or less) openly welcomed in “the
West”, for this was the ideal way to easily and effectively (and above
all “culturally”) fortify the capitalistic system, which is proverbially
based on the principles of personal freedom (liberalism), democracy
(parliamentarism or the multiparty system) and plurality (of products or offer on the market). “The West”, therefore, has also gladly
used critical artists from the “Eastern Bloc” for propaganda, to
additionally encourage the paranoia towards “Monster Socialism”. In
addition, the presentation of such regime-critical art in the “West”
might have also had the additional effect of fortifying the capitalistic model, as the critical engagement of the “Eastern” art has been
interpreted as its differentia specifica in opposition to the “Western”
l’art pour l’art, where there has supposedly been nothing to be criticised at all, the best of all possible worlds.
This observation might be put too bluntly, yet nevertheless, the fact
is that the contra-revolutionary project has succeeded to the largest
degree possible: after and simultaneously with ideological shifts,
also important have been financial mechanisms, especially credit
policies (Kirn, 2013), structural reforms carried out “in the name of
democracy”, ranging from bombarding to encouraging and financing
wars, to systematic thefts of the commons supported by laws and
regulations. Ever since the dissolution of state socialism (which
started long before 1989) and the introduction of the liberal-democratic transition of the Eastern Bloc we have been observing in
art production the implementation of the so-called professionalisation, commercialisation and managerialisation. Subsequently, art
has become a profitable business for a few (which like every other
business, presupposes competition where only “the best” prevail),
where the establishing of the “art market” is a necessary condition.
The consequence of that “transition” has also been that “East art”,
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An Introduction
15
or better, a few representatives of it, now represent a certain market
niche. Paradoxically, it has been the so-called critical, engaged and
political art, which experienced its peak period in the “Eastern
Bloc” from the 1980s to the mid 1990s, that has not only become a
relative market success but has also influenced the normalisation of
the understanding of contemporary artwork as a market good (as
a product, an item, but also as a speculation on symbolic capital:
brand, name, stardom). By now, “politically engaged art” has become
mainstream also in the “West”. The trends of criticism, engagement
and politicality have spread and become a kind of “fashion” or trend
of contemporary art on the global scale, thereby taming the art of its
criticality.
In the global imperative (Dimitrakaki, 2013), critical contemporary
art (and in a certain sense especially performance art) has been
moving from representation towards “relation”, “participation”,
“collaboration”; the artist has become a thinker, teacher, writer and
activist, as well as terrorist and militant. As such, (some) art has
aspired to become a part of the community, patching up social ties,
filling the deficiency created by the retreat of the political and the
public – which is, however, in the global imperative, exactly what it
should be, culture instead of art. Today, (some) contemporary artists
thus employ themselves in the mission to uncover what has been
hidden behind exhibited images (e.g. work) with the desire to put on
display something that the recipient may not be aware of, and that
will even evoke shame, guilt and move him/her to action. The waytoo-commonly-used platitude that “art only asks questions and does
not give answers” only leads towards the belief that the processes of
consideration, criticality and action are to be (automatically) initiated on the part of the recipient. However, the very fact by itself that
an artist is a conscious being and that an artwork speaks critically,
engaged and politically does not mean that it will have on the side of
the recipient – really – a political effect, such that the recipient will
change his or her opinion about a certain issue or start a political
action.
Art is critical, political, engaged only when it is in the position of
rethinking its own production conditions, and not only on the basis
of the rhetoric associated to it. It is more about the ability to be
radical in the processes of “the redistribution of the sensible” which
is a part of Rancière’s conceptualisation of the politics of aesthetics
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16
and the political character of art (Rancière, 2009). In this collection,
there are several ways of dealing with the political – in most cases,
of course, in connection with gender, women’s position in the
neoliberal patriarchal society and the essentialisation of the gender
relations.
Moves (from Latin movere – move, set in motion, remove, disturb;
in Old French movoir also introduce)
The starting point for rethinking the politicisation of the “gender
issue” through art practices in “the Former East” for many of the
authors in this publication is based on an understanding of the
official ideology of socialist states that solving of the class tensions
would also automatically solve the gender relations issue and bring
the patriarchal conditions to an end. Therefore, bringing “the women’s issue” on the public agenda was politically and ideologically
stigmatised and labelled as a flirtation with bourgeois traditions and
Western influences. We can follow the moves of the critical reflection of that ideology through the art practices developed in different
countries of “the East” presented in several chapters.
Gender Transgression
Starting with World War II, the emancipation of women was established in relation to the idea of building the new society. In the first
post-war years, a prominent emancipated female character was that
of the heroic woman – a fighter in the National Liberation Front,
and that of a woman-constructor active at factories and fields, in
work brigades as well as in sports disciplines. Women were
assimilated into male activities, so their emancipation took place
through their showing abilities in traditionally male work spheres.
Ana Peraica’s article is problematising exactly on that point. Building her analysis on the precious photographic and filmic material
she found in the archive of her grandfather, who was a Commissar of Film and Photography of the 1st Proletarian Brigade during
World War II, she thematises a process of the artificial construction
of a woman in the public sphere, rather as an object or as a subject
and as a product of “machification”, meaning: symbolically
becoming a man. The found photos show images of women partisans,
which is usually neglected in a historical narrative, fabricated and
promoted by historiography, textbooks and (historical, national)
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An Introduction
17
museums. As exposed also in the work by Sanja Iveković (Gen XX:
Anka Butorac, Nada Dimić, Ljubica Gerovac, Dragica Končar, Sestre
Baković, Nera Šafarić), images of women warriors were prohibited
or at least very unusual in the aftermath of the war. What is even
more curious, women in the photos in question are shown in two
roles: one is the role of women, while the other indicates machismo,
thus transgendering. Pointing at the difference between machismo
and chauvinism, Peraica is exposing that the images are deeply erotic, in a way an ordinary society would be, a society out of war, and
that there is none of the discrimination or showing off that we have
been used to from other images of an army. Connecting militaristic
and sexual sadism (George Bataille), i.e. sadistic homosexuality as
performed by institutionalised military power and chauvinism, as
the violation of gender via transgressions of gender roles, Peraica
contrasts a set of completely different photographs from the war that
are non-chauvinistic and in which there is an obvious transgressing
of gender roles, however not based on homophobia nor chauvinism
but on equality.
Starting from the 1960s, the image of women in public space became
more and more close to that of mothers and housewives due to the
resurfacing of patriarchal values. Although the maternal iconography – images of ideologically obedient, loyal, nuclear-family-oriented
mothers – was often used for the glorification of the socialist regime
in the so called totalitarian era, in contrast to the capitalist regime
and so-called democracy, “the Eastern” mothers were never tied only
to the private zone (Kinder-Kirche-Küche/Children-Church-Kitchen).
Women were always active in the public sphere as well: they were,
also due to economic reasons, forced to enter the waged labour,
while at the same time more or less exclusively responsible for the
care work (family and child care, house work and care for the elderly
and ill).
Analysing the happening Kladení plín u Sudoměře [Laying Diapers
at Sudoměře] performed by Zorka Ságlová – one of the first and
most active women performance artists of former Czechoslovakia
– Martina Pachmanová discusses in her article exactly that problem. Shaping the giant diaper triangle in the public space (nature)
– in a time when performances and happenings were considered
by the state apparatchiks a potential source of civil disobedience
and, as such, belonged to the sphere of “unofficial art” – was the
brave start of a symbolical process of crossing borders between the
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private and the public, between the familial and the political. What
Pachmanová wants to point out is that “the Eastern” maternity was
a more political and politicised subject than it was in “the Western”
feminist agenda, where images of mothers (especially when related
to nature) were seen as a manifestation of essentialism. She thereby
also implicates “Eastern” art practices in the establishment of the
relation between motherhood and erotic desire, sexuality and political potential, and the introduction of femininity as a diverse and
multifaceted phenomenon.
Rethinking the position of women in a patriarchal society and
actively intervening into the situation with the clear aim of deconstructing power relations was significant for Polish artists Maria
Pinińska-Bereś, Natalia LL, Teresa Murak and Ewa Partum, whose
art practices are presented in Waldemar Tatarczuk’s article. Experimenting with forms of presentation and ways of expression, introducing the performance, happening, body art, video art as opposed
to “official art”, and especially exposing their own bodies as the
political body, liberated from the stereotypes of the dominant ideology, these artists were real pioneers of the contemporary politically
engaged art, so popular in today’s globalised art-system.
In the 1970s and 1980s, however, emancipatory practices began to
develop in relation to the ideology of desire, which drove the newly
emerging consumer society. Images of women no longer arose from
the sphere of work or maternity but that of leisure. The focus shifted
to the attractive female body, which has been perceived as a sexual
object. These became the themes problematised by the women’s artists and groups mostly in the spheres of theatre and the performing
arts especially in former Yugoslavia.9
Barbara Orel’s article sheds light on some of the overlooked chapters from the – still famous – 1980s Ljubljana alternative arts scene,
which created a space for social and political critique in the entire
former Yugoslavia. This space was not only symbolic, this process
included the creation of a variety of “alternative places”, a network
of clubs and venues that began to generate a space of provocative
difference and introduce both new aesthetic as well as new production forms, which importantly contributed to the transformation of
the dominant culture, as well as generated the emancipatory potential that co-shaped the women’s perspective (in the art scene) to an
important extent. Presenting the work of women artists Ema Kugler
gestures_Blok_Final Print SEND.indd 18
9 Of course, we need
to keep in mind that
the state socialism in
former Yugoslavia differed, as is many times
emphasised, from the
state socialisms of
the rest of “Eastern
Europe”. Due to its
more liberal character
(travelling and
immigration policy,
inner market competition, international
trading relations, etc.),
discussed art practices
were also more radical,
conflictual and direct
(especially in terms
of aesthetic regime).
However, at the same
time, they were flirting
with the more liberal
(to become neoliberal)
ideas, which went
hand in hand with the
ideology and structural reforms, leading
to the disintegration
of socialist Yugoslavia
in favour of a market
economy, which has
deeply affected the
transformation of the
art practices as well.
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An Introduction
19
and Zemira Alajbegović and the first Slovenian groups consisting of
exclusively female authors, which were the first groups of this kind
in Yugoslavia, such as PPF – Podjetje za proizvodnjo fikcije [The
Fiction Production Company] and Linije sile [Lines of Force], Orel
is aiming to describe the rearticulations of women’s identities on the
Ljubljana alternative scene, defining them in relation to the traditional patriarchal relationships supported by Yugoslav socialism.
Tea Hvala’s article is in a way continuing this research in contemporary times, as she discusses a selection of burlesque and cabaret
shows made in Ljubljana between 2011 and 2014: Cirkus Kabare
(Circus Cabaret), Fem TV, Rdeči kabaret (Red Cabaret), Cabaret
Lounge Rouge, Tatovi podob (Image Snatchers) and Somrak bleščečih
sprevržencev (Twilight of the Glittery Perverts) among others.
However, Hvala is not focusing on women artists or women-only
artistic groups and collectives but rather on queer, not only in terms
of their content but also in terms of production mode and ways of
expression. She presents those performance troupes whose production mode positions them either in the alternative or the independent culture and places (as opposed to institutionalised culture and
places). She does not focus on whole performances but rather on
individual acts by performers enacting a specific feminine, masculine or queer identity. Her view on the issue is especially precious
and non-dogmatic as the author herself participated in some of the
shows as an organiser, performer or both and with her article starts
a certain “real time” or “embedded” historisation of the contemporary especially queer burlesque scene in Ljubljana, Slovenia.
Fortress Europe and “The Former East”:
From Gender To Class, From Class To Gender
After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the world “triumphed”
in the total defeat of socialism. The way for marching democracy
was open. The attacks on the twin towers in New York on September 11, 2001, symbolically marked the shift to a new paradigm of
governmentality, exploitation, domination and, at the same time,
subjectivity production, which has been empowered by normalising and hybridising life of individuals with technologies of control,
mechanisms of power and violence. As Marina Gržinić claims in
her profound analysis, we have obviously moved from the biopolitics
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regime (as defined by Michel Foucault and re-elaborated by Giorgio Agamben) to the regime of necropolitics (developed by Achille
Mbembe). This social, political, economic and cultural change influences both: contemporary art with its representational formats and
aesthetic regimes, as well as feminist struggles and insurgencies.
The outcome of globalisation is the growing precarisation of life and
work, and struggling (just) for gender equality is no longer an emancipatory action since the global domination is genderless. That’s why
Gržinić is critical towards feminist practices that expose and analyse
patriarchal structures and relations, but did not substantially tackle
the issue of heterosexuality. She is especially keen to show that the
only emancipatory female performances and performative art works
in the “former Eastern European space” are those who went from
heterosexual feminist to lesbian and gay art performative interventions towards queer and masculinity critique projects. In order to
understand these shifts, which are conceptual and political at once,
it is necessary to understand the changes in the passage of the whole
space from a paradigm of Eastern Europe to that of “former Eastern
Europe” to the present condition of “former West”. In that context,
she is criticising those practices and strategies that are reproducing
the colonial matrix of power in the name of feminism, women or
equality.
At the same time, art institutions as well as universities are taking
an active role in the evacuation of critical knowledge, de-linking art
from political and social questions, producing only one history (of
arts) and dismissing any possibilities for an understanding of new
alternative histories and new platforms of knowledge. By appropriating the arts and performative practices of “Eastern Europe” mainly
through a restrictive gender normative perspective, argues Gržinić,
heavily queer positions and the multiplicity of demands for dismantling binaries of gender roles are banally overlooked. These lesbian, gay and transgender demands in art and culture in “the East”,
specifically their political and social demands for rights in every
sector of life, are connected with counter positions that question the
turbo capitalist reshaping of “the East”, socialism and Post-Socialist
realities.
With her art insert the multitalented artist Milijana Babić is continuing (with means of documentation) her Djedica (Santa) performance, where she is opening the question of biopolitics turning
into necropolitics regime of our global “democratic” realities. Being
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An Introduction
21
dressed as Santa Claus – this universal symbol of “the Western”
ideology of liberty, freedom and abundance – begging on the streets,
at shopping miles and malls (mainly in the Christmas shop till you
drop time), by this very simple but very well-rethought and conceptualised gesture, she reveals the whole misery of today’s global paradigm of nightmares come true in a post Coca-Cola society. In the
art insert, she re-enacts the individual acts’, contexts’ and public’s
(a)political (un)awareness.
As Gržinić in her text reminds us, 2014 represents 30 years since
Donna Haraway’s seminal text “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science,
Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century” – performance and performativity could not be thought without
new media technologies. Suzana Milevska in the opening chapter
is rethinking exactly the question as to whether new media art has
contributed in any substantial way to the deconstruction of inherited gender roles and hierarchies within the hegemonic art system,
culture and society in “the East”. She is especially curious about
if, and how, new media enable and bring forth new answers to the
“old” questions, such as how national identity interferes with gender
difference, whether modernism and state socialism merged through
a technologically advanced society, whether social inclusiveness
and other social changes in transitional states quickened the leap
towards a more democratised society with the use of new technology-based art, taking a closer look at the works of several women artists who have worked with new media, such as Tanja Ostojić, Sandra
Sterle and Danica Dakić, Andreja Kulunčić, Milica Tomić, Marina
Gržinić and Verica Kovačevska. Milevska is specifically interested
in the connection between new media technology and exploitation,
which she explains from a gender perspective through the concept of
G.W.F. Hegel’s master-slave dialectics. She is presenting
the above-mentioned artists practices which deconstruct pure
exploitation, domination and hierarchisation through hyperbolic
rendering of concepts such as gift, friendship and hospitality and
argues that it is only within art that such a hyperbolic rendering
becomes possible without being sanctioned by state authorities and
mechanisms of power and violence. The perversion of hospitality,
being in the hands of the “master of the house, the host, the king,
the lord, the authorities, the nation, the State, the father, etc.” is
possible only through such “hyperbolisation”, she claims together
with Jacques Derrida.
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With Dunja Kukovec interviewing the video performance artist
Adela Jušić, for whom precarious conditions are one rule she has
never obeyed, the question of medium of performance is tackled
from another perspective. In her works – predominantly video
performances – Adela Jušić thematises intimate elements of her life
profiled through the “objective” socio-political situations and narratives. Her and Lana Čmajčanin’s I Will Never Talk About The War
Again exposes the contemporary situation in Bosnia and Herzegovina, where war still remains the central topos, or Artist’s Statement,
which rethinks the position of peripheral artists within the contemporary globalised art world. Although working mostly in the domain
of video performance – usually exposing herself, understanding
that as being the only truthful option – Adela Jušić is also co-author
of the performance Bujrum – Izvolite (Bujrum – Help Yourselves),
which she developed together with Danijela Dugandžić Živanović,
Lana Čmajčanin, Leila Čmajčanin and Alma Suljević in the form of
catering where the menu consists of Bosnian-Herzegovinian traditional dishes, exclusively prepared on the basis of ingredients that
were available in Sarajevo under the siege. With her statements, Jušić
reveals a clear and inexorable position on inherent links between art
presentations and ways of production: “At the beginning, I didn’t
think about it like that, but soon I realised it was all actually a direct
result of socio-economic realities. Since I didn’t have any substantial
means for production, I used one bad camera. I had no cameraperson
or video editor, so I did everything myself. So at the beginning the
camera and video editing were very simple, and it’s been like that till
today, in spite of having better cameras today and a good knowledge
of video editing. I like it that way. It’s not that I don’t ever want to
try out a bit more expensive production – it just doesn’t make real
sense for me. It is hard enough to earn money as an artist, even
harder as a Bosnian artist and even more so as a Bosnian video
artist, the hardest being a Bosnian female video artist.” She does
this as well on the issue of gender equality: “It is true women need
to take over that part of world wealth belonging to them, but this
will not happen if we have thousands of rich female artists. We need
to rethink our system of values and beliefs in order to achieve the
better world of economically equal individuals, and not just be stuck
in a world of equal economic opportunities.”
Angela Dimitrakaki in her chapter focuses specifically on labour
and production relations and how they influence (women’s) life in
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An Introduction
23
Post-Socialist times in “the East”, concerning both women’s art and
debates around feminism in “Eastern Europe”, suggesting a complex
signification of gender in the given context. Her main point is that
Eastern Europe’s transition to capitalism should not be thought of as
a regional specific, but as a global imperative, a process of re-gendering women’s lives at the same time that it enables the spread,
and also contestation, of feminist politics. In addition, Dimitrakaki
re-thinks the (mis)understandings of “Western” and “Eastern” feminisms, “[u]nderstanding the encounter with Western feminism as
taking place after the ‘re-signification’ […] of feminist demands can
help refocus the dialogue between Eastern European and Western
feminisms in the arts on emergent commonalities rather than past
differences. More generally, elaborating on this knowledge can aid
a more constructive dialogue on the roots and direction of transnational feminism, as long as we bear in mind that transnational
feminism is also fraught with materially grounded and ideologically
expressed divisions,” states Dimitrakaki.
Troubles With Representation: Blurred Boundaries
Between Private And Public
Marija Ratković is opening one of the burning questions of critical
theory of our time: the question of representation. Having in mind
Alain Badiou’s understanding of politics as a non-representative
thought-practice, this article can be understood as an important
attempt to transform this understanding in the art theory as well,
considering artistic practices that engage the private space in terms
of the performative and to regard art as a performative practice
as opposed to art as a representative practice. Ratković is relying
on Foucault’s understanding of the representative not as a mere
representational or expressive practice but as an archaeological
practice. Her starting point is the biopolitical character of performativity, where biopolitics is seen as a way of contextualising those
performative activities through which social institutions influence
the individual and vice versa, as a process in which art practices
question or obstruct institutional practices, and then re-signify and
reconstruct the subject. Biopolitics produce completely de-personalised
and implicit social norms – abstract demands of the healthy, good
and beautiful – which we implement ourselves without institutions,
by the classification of each other and by determining the Same
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and the Other and thus establishing our own micro politics of
discipline and punishment. In such a situation, the possibility of
the constitution of the subject in society, that the possibility of his
political subjectivisation, as well as freedom in terms of biopower, is
somewhere between the two conflicted fields (private/public) with
blurred boundaries (which is the opposite of Hannah Arendt’s strict
division of the private and the public spheres), so that the emancipatory character of performative (artistic) practices lies in the infinite
potentiality of a singular action, which Ratković illustrates with the
works of Katarzyna Kozyra and Marina Marković – both are experimenting on the borders between the private and the public.
Last but not least, the art insert by Grupa Spomenik (Monument
Group) is a script entitled Mateme (Matheme), which they – in
their latest edition – together with Delve performed in the form of
a Pythagorean lecture at the Forensis exhibition (curated by Eyal
Weizman and Anselm Franke, HKW, Berlin, 2014). By removing
any visualisation of the axioms, the script is de-personalised in the
name of an attempt to excise any trace of representation from the
text, to bring the acousmatic voice, a pure record that erases that
ultimate object of the human world – the voice. Wanting to speak
without a voice but with the voice – “the acousmatic voice brings
to the fore exactly that remaining, irreducible surplus matter that
refuses to be forensified” – Mateme paradoxically speaks about the
unspeakable – the Srebrenica genocide, re-ethnicising through annihilation, bureaucratic violence, and about the “laboratorial” state of
Bosnia-Herzegovina, which has became a laboratory for the “global
imperative” and necropolitics. With obvious references to psychoanalysis (matheme is a concept introduced by Jacques Lacan) and
Alain Badiou’s understanding of the political) they are together with
readers, recipients, listeners searching for the answer on how do
we escape the prison of language and the horror of representation?
Being interested in the politics of truth and not in the question of
the rebuilding of the society, their ultimate demand is that genocide
is speakable! – even when there is no one speaking.
Grupa Spomenik started from the questions: is it possible, and if
so, how to transfer the knowledge about genocide into the medium of performative art? Can performative and visual arts exist
after genocide and, if so, in what context? Answering to this post
Theodor Adorno’s questions they came to the conclusion that the
genocide should be the very topos of art, questioning art institutions
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An Introduction
25
and their involvement in the ideologies that perpetuate violence and
genocide in actuality.
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