Eastern Europe Can Be Yours! Alternative Art of
the Eighties
Maja Fowkes, Reuben Fowkes
Recent excursions to the decade of the
1ř80s across Eastern Europe bear telling
titles that strikingly express the
remoteness, nostalgic appeal and
exoticism that are now associated with the
last days of socialism. Whether
antagonistic (‘Rejected Heritage’) or
escapist (‘I Could Live in Africa’), wistful
(‘Sweet Decadence of the Postmodern’) or
ambiguous (‘Islands of Positive
1
Deviation’), recent exhibitions and
publications have delivered vivid
impressions of an ‘ungraspable
2
diffuseness’ – a chaotic period in which
creative expression found a way out
through the alternative channels of
erupting subcultures. Art ‘returned to
expression, to primitive forms and
inspirations’, thriving on ‘pop-cultural
junk and rubbish’, with ‘improvised
happenings complete with revelry and
concerts’, springing up in ‘exhibition
openings organised in private apartments
3
or reclaimed spaces.’
Decadence, deviation and exoticism are
notions that now stand as mythical
constructs of East European art of the
1ř80s, comparable to those of heroism,
dissidence and originality that are
regularly applied to the neo-avant-garde
generation that preceded it. In attempting
to account for the diffuseness of that
decade, a number of common threads and
Sándor Pinczehelyi, Makó Sketches, 1980. Courtesy the artist
questions arise. What impact did the
different political circumstances in various
countries of the region have? How did
individual states appropriate, seize on or
ignore the new art of the time? And how did the new generation of artists deal with the legacy of the
socially-engaged and politically critical neo-avant-garde art of the previous decade?
Against Social Engagement
In Poland an unlikely critique of the neo-avant-garde was voiced via the uncovering of the suppressed
memory of socialist realism that came into vogue in the early 1ř80s, when the short period of dominance
of the Stalinist artistic model in the early 1ř50s became a ‘hot topic’ for art historical inquiry. It was
addressed in conference proceedings and became the theme of numerous dissertations, while exhibitions
of socialist realist painting were held and a series of articles devoted to the genre appeared in the art
journal Sztuka. The most influential product of this trend was a book on ‘Socialist RealismŚ Polish Art in
the Years 1ř50-1ř54’ by Wojciech Włodarczyk published in 1ř86, which revealed that at least part of the
motive for confronting the forgotten era of socialist realism was to bring about a reckoning with the
Contexts / 25.0ř.2017
Print
project of modernism and the avant-garde. For the author it was the avant-garde with its ‘ethos of
participation, social and political change, as well as historical determinism’ that turned out to be
instrumental in ‘the success of socialist realism’, while in the post-Stalin era it was the neo-avant-garde
4
that contributed to ‘wiping socialist realism from memory.’ There are clear parallels here with Boris
Groys’s much better known essay on The Total Art of Stalinism, which was first published in German in
1ř88, with the caveat that Groys goes further than Włodarczyk in attributing to the avant-garde, with its
radical desire for social transformation, not just the rise of socialist realism, but also the origins of the
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totalitarian excesses of Stalinism.
When in 1ř76 Croatian artist Željko Jerman, one of the Group of Six Authors, publicly declared ‘This is
not my world’ by writing these words in capital letters on a banner and unravelling it in the centre of
Zagreb, he not only rejected the reality of the socialist everyday of Tito’s Yugoslavia, but equally distanced
himself from the programmatic artistic practice of the previous years that had put its faith into social
engagement. Mladen Stilinović, his colleague from the group, illustrated this attitude when he statedŚ ‘I
have never believed that art has any social function whatsoever…. I have never shared this kind of
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optimism.’ In a work from 1ř80 entitled ‘Submit to Public Debate,’ which consisted of a series of
paintings with inscriptions of empty socialist phraseology, Stilinović chose the pale shades of pink for the
background, as a statement of detachment from the ideologically loaded colour red. A similar sense of
disillusionment in Hungary was expressed by Sándor Pinczehelyi, who in the early seventies famously
posed with hammer and sickle, questioning the personal consequences of communist ideology. A different
tone could be detected in his series of photographs from 1ř80, in which the socialist icon of five pointed
star found itself next to a can of Coca Cola – the ultimate symbol of Western desire, fished out in a net as if
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they were just waste floating on polluted water.
Mladen Stilinović, Subject to Public Debate, 1980. Installation view, Ludwig Museum, Budapest, 2011. Photograph:
Boris Cvjetanović. Courtesy Branka Stipančić
In Czechoslovakia, where in the aftermath of the suppression of the dissident civic initiative Charter 77 the
harsh political situation sharpened even more, Petr Štembera, Karel Miler and Jan Mlčoch, three artists
who significantly influenced artistic events in Prague over the preceding decade through radical
performances and actions conducted in private and secluded spaces, were prompted to collectively give up
art practice for good in 1ř80. Rather than expressing the disillusionment of the time by depicting it or
dealing with it in their work, these Czech artists were so disheartened about the potential of art to compete
with political reality that the only rightful solution seemed to be to withdraw their participation. In short,
the neo-avant-garde project across Eastern Europe had run out of steam.
The clash of approaches between the neo-avant-garde and representatives of the new artistic paradigm at
the beginning of the eighties, most stridently associated with the call for a return to painting, is strongly
visible in polemics conducted in the Croatian art journal Život umjetnost, which devoted a special issue to
the analysis of the art of the decade already in 1ř82. In the opening essay Zvonko Maković, art historian
and curator of a 1ř81 group show that programmatically dealt with the phenomenon of the ‘New Painting’,
presented a polarised view of the art scene as divided between those who are ‘entering into painting’ and
those who ‘still feel the pull of various derivatives of conceptualism,’ but that actually represent a kind of
‘pseudo-alternative, superficially unconventional art.’ For the new generation, this ‘perverted ideology of
the late 60s’ was emblematic of a ‘false democracy,’ and reflected the desire of a clique of ‘supported and
academicised “alternative” artists’ to maintain their power and privileges by resorting to ‘empty
8
sloganeering’.
The suspicion expressed towards the neo-avant-garde for having found in some cases an accommodation
with the communist authorities that was prevalent throughout Eastern Europe was particularly vocal in
Yugoslavia, which had adopted modernism as a semi-official art form as early as the 1ř50s. Maković’s
criticism was notably also directed at the Zagreb Gallery of Contemporary Art for incorporating artists
from the ‘New Painting’ show as an addendum to their exhibition on ‘Innovation in Croatian Art in the
1ř70s’, while failing to understand the significance of the movement by presenting it as a continuity rather
than a break from the practices of the neo-avant-garde. At the same time, the more liberal cultural
atmosphere in nonaligned Yugoslavia made it possible for the Gallery to invite already in 1ř81 art critic
ř
Achille Bonito Oliva to Zagreb to curate an of the moment exhibition of the ‘Italian Transavantgarde.’
Official art institutions in other East European countries could not move so quickly in responding to new
international trends and discussion of the movement was at first confined to off-spaces and independent
reviews.
The situation in Czechoslovakia contrasted strongly, where the artistic and political climate was not
propitious for the flourishing of the new artistic movement. Jana and Ji í Ševčik, art historians associated
with the popularisation of postmodernist art theory, articulated the predicament of the country’s art scene
in the 1ř80s in stark termsŚ ‘Our reality is in truth not radically different from the rest of the world, yet the
moral prejudices of the modern art that preceded it continue to operate with great persistence because
here in the 1ř60s such art was not pursued to the end so that new art could be born out of its crisis and
10
complete exhaustion.’ In other words, the reason neo-avant-garde art could not be fully expressed in
Czechoslovakia, and as a result lingered on into the new decade, was due to the consequences of the Soviet
suppression of the Prague Spring of 1ř68 and the ruthless period ‘normalisation’ that followed.
Indicatively, even during the late 1ř80s when the text was first published it is noticeable that it was not
possible to refer to these traumatic events directly. According to the Ševčiks, the ‘new creative language
arrived mainly from outside,’ while the stylistic effervescence of the period was more evident in fields such
as ‘mass media, film, music, design and fashion, where the punk wave, the decorative tendency and the
11
new iconography was absorbed without any problem.’
The particularities of the Hungarian art of the 1ř80s also derived from a specific local situation and the
internal dynamics of the art scene. The end of the road for the neo-avant-garde resulted here from a
systematic policy of intimidation that led to the emigration of several leading artists and the confinement
of the remnants of a previously vibrant scene to a marginal role in cultural life. As artist Ákos Birkás put it
in a lecture held at the Rabinec apartment gallery in December 1ř82, which was entitled ‘Who’s the
victim? Who’s the perpetrator? What is to be done?’, the ‘death of the avant-garde’ in Hungary was not
caused as in the West by institutionalisation, but by the brutal attitude of the state which had left the neoavant-garde ‘isolated and paralysed.’ The answer to his third rhetorical question was for the survivors to
12
abandon the avant-garde and turn to ‘new painting.’ The preponderance of former neo-avant-garde
artists in the new wave of Hungarian painting of the eighties was readily acknowledged by Loránd Hegyi,
curator of a series of exhibitions ‘New Sensibility’ from 1ř81 to 1ř87, who saw it as ‘a characteristic
13
element in the development of Hungarian art.’ Indeed, he noted that ‘the leading exponents of this great
change in outlook of the eighties were the very same artists who had created way back in the seventies a
14
definitely avant-gardist art.’ When in 1ř86 four of them were selected to represent socialist Hungary at
the Venice Biennial, it was both a belated attempt by the state to adopt the new movement and the
15
acknowledgement that the era of the ideological control of the art world was over.
Outside the Institutions
Although graduating from the Painting Department of Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts in 1ř81, András
Böröcz and László L. Révész developed a distinctive performative practice that delighted in absurd
narratives and excessive stage sets. These typically consisted of a series of actions involving a colourful
cast of singers, musicians and dancers appearing on stage crowded with props and visual effects including
slides, film projections or paintings and sculptures, with the artist protagonists dressed in oversized
costumes taking the leading role. In Jubilee from 1ř82, for instance, the artists appeared dressed as
knights in armour, made coffee and smoked cigars, to the accompaniment of songs performed in
Esperanto, while a theorist friend also took part discoursing on their earlier performances and analysing
the connections between Frankenstein and Einstein through mythological reinterpretations. In the
performance Max and Moritz from 1ř83 the artists took as their starting point the classic German
children’s tale about two mischievous boys, and turned it into a series of bizarre acts, which involved the
artists dressed as chimney sweeps setting a table by piercing plates and sewing them like buttons to the
tablecloth, interrupted by ballet sequences, film inserts and speeches. In another appearance entitled The
Love of the Watermelon Vendor Boys in 1ř84 the stage was set with two-metre-tall watermelon slices and
scenes of everyday family life around the dining table, when the artists entered as watermelon murderers
and started to ‘stab everybody around the table with the slice of watermelon.’ The theorist appearing again
warned that their performance was ‘not about turning imitation into realisation’ but instead ‘we are
talking about dissolving both in a realised fiction, where the emphasis is not on the realisation but on the
16
fantasy.’
In their absurdist, ironic and surreal
stage appearances full of excesses,
Böröcz and Révész strayed into the
world of fantasy and did not bridge
the gap into the real world of political
reality. Their preference for eclectic
literary reference, pop-cultural
sources and invoking Dadaist
cabarets was in order to make a sharp
distinction from the seriousness of
the slightly earlier art. It is also
noteworthy that these early
performances were held in the
favoured alternative venues of the
1ř80s generation, such as the
András Böröcz and László László Révész, Othello, 1983. Young Artists
Club, Budapest. Courtesy of the artists
University Theatre, the longstanding
literary-musical Kossuth Club, the
Young Artists Club, which was the
setting for Othello (1ř83), as well as
the Lajos Vajda Studio in nearby Szentendre. The latter was a meeting place for artists interested in new
painting and artistic forms that drew on the surrealist traditions of the local art scene as well as liveliness
of its musical subculture, while the core members of the art studio also formed a rock band. Although
these were not private venues, but existing community centres, the choice of these spaces also reflected
the tendency of alternative art in Hungary in the eighties to ‘remain outside the institutions of the art
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scene in the first half of the decade.’
In Poland, a similar phenomenon of avoidance of established art spaces in the early 1ř80s both reflected
aesthetic inclinations and was a response to the specific political conditions at the time. The declaration of
Martial Law in December 1ř81 brought about the paralysis of existing art institutions, symbolised by the
immediate suspension of the Polish Association of Artists and Designers (ZPAP), which as the first official
18
organisation to declare its support for the shipyard strikes had been closely aligned with Solidarity. As a
result, a ‘tripartite system’ emerged with artists having to decide whether to affiliate themselves with the
official art world, take part in Church-organised exhibitions or develop their own informal infrastructure
1ř
through apartments, private galleries and unofficial spaces. The appeal of the marginal venues of the
‘third circuit’ was not just their independence from structures of power, but also their appropriateness as
physical spaces for the artworks themselves. As was noted by an art critic at the time, it was the ‘poorness’
of the built environment of alternative galleries that enabled them to ‘accommodate the irrational, anti20
programmatic and messy language of neo-expressionism.’
It was just such a venue that provided the setting for the first exhibition in January 1ř83 of the group of
six painting graduates from the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw who later took on the common mantle of
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Gruppa. The relative independence of Pracownia Dziekenka derived from its ambiguous status between
a studio and a gallery and the fact that, since it was located in the dormitory of the Academy, it benefited
from a degree of official protection. For their debut exhibition entitled ‘A Forest, a Mountain, and over the
Mountain a Cloud’, the artists were able, even at the height of Martial Law, to transform the exhibition
space into a dark and threatening total environment for their Neue Wilde-inspired canvases that were
hung on the wall three high and periodically illuminated by a single floodlight placed at the centre of a
room filled with the deafening noise of Polish-Norwegian new wave music. Despite the clear references to
the general atmosphere of intimidation, their work was equally conceived as an anarchic response to what
they perceived as the ‘absurd’, ‘grotesque’ and ‘valueless’ character of contemporary reality. Refusing to
either function in the ‘art parlours of communist Poland’ or conform to the ‘Neo-Romantic Martyrology’ of
Solidarity and the Church-based opposition, they chose instead a ‘countercultural life based on being and
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working together.’
Creating their installations from appropriated objects and rubbish, the Poznán-based group Koło Klipsa,
which also first came together in 1ř83, found in the post-industrial setting of Wielka 1ř, a gallery in a
formerly student-occupied building with no official ties, an ideal place to realise their site-specific
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collective projects.
Later restaged to critical acclaim in more prominent galleries in Krákow and Lublin,
as well as at the Group-Art-Work exhibition in Kassel in 1ř87, their ‘Exhibition 5’ was originally realised
at Wielka 1ř in 1ř85. Based on individual responses to the theme of the ‘fairytale’, the installation entailed
the creation of a sensory environment consisting of ‘a hanging chair, a gnome made out of dirt, a
slithering snake-like domestic object, an over-sized grinning moon and stuffed flower, and animal figures
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made out of mesh.’
The gallery itself had only recently reopened after being forced to close during
Martial Law and was one of the ‘non-official galleries’ invited to take part in the ‘Second Biennial of New
Art’ held in Zielona Góra in 1ř87, which celebrated the resilience of the Polish independent art scene in
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the freer atmosphere of the Perestroika era.
In Czechoslovakia, a ‘major change in the climate of Czech art’ only became noticeable in the second half
of the decade, in the wake of moves towards renewed liberalisation that paved the way for the revolution
26
of 1ř8ř.
A first step was taken in 1ř84 with the release of the imprisoned signatories of the Charter 77
civic movement, while in the art world the lifting of the ban on the formation of artistic groups was a
significant milestone. As elsewhere in Eastern Europe, it was community centres, university clubs and
alternative music venues, in addition to private apartments, that provided the best opportunities to stage
more or less uncensored exhibitions, discussions and art actions, rather than galleries and museums in
the established art system. The most active art groups included the circle formed in 1ř84 around Revolver
Revue, a samizdat journal featuring articles on both international and Czech art, which organised
exhibitions and actions in private apartments that bridged the fields of poetry and visual arts. More
programmatic were the Tvrdohlavi (the stubborn ones), made up of young artists with an interest in
postmodernism and a critical attitude to the middle and older generation, that like the ironically-named
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Zaostalí (the backward ones), was founded only a year before the Velvet Revolution.
In Bratislava artists sought out exhibition opportunities in spaces that were under the radar of the
authorities, such as district cultural and community centres. As the curator of the major Slovak
retrospective of the eighties notes, ‘vestibules, corridors of institutions, research sites and schools’ were
used to create ‘a relatively stable network of unofficial exhibition spaces in non-gallery institutions,’ while
at the same time professional curators employed in art institutions in the period ‘did not possess even
8
28
relative autonomy’, and were largely confined to ‘accomplishing ideological goals’.
Artists graduating
from the Bratislava Academy of the Arts in the more liberal atmosphere of the mid-1ř80s were also able to
take part in the exhibition opportunities afforded by alternative cultural events, such as the Čertovo kolo
(Devil’s Wheel) and the music festival Rockfest, both of which took place in 1ř87 and 1ř88. During the
same time exhibitions of neo-expressionist paintings were held in the unfinished house of artist Jozef
Šramka in Čunove near Bratislava, in which large scale pictures were hung against bare brick walls. The
symbolic ‘last’ exhibition of the cultural underground of the normalisation era, focusing on site specific
installations, took place in a cellar in the centre of Bratislava in 1ř8ř and was appropriately entitled
2ř
‘Suterén’ (‘Subterranean’).
Political Alternatives
As the 1ř80s generation was wary of the social engagement of the
neo-avant-garde, yet the political circumstances demanded a
response, the artists resorted to typically absurd and
unconventional means. In Poland, the first protest action of the
art-activist group Orange Alternative was a guerrilla intervention
in the public space of Wroclaw in 1ř82, when they chose to combat
the repressive atmosphere of the Martial Law era through the
surreal act of stencilling pictures of dwarfs onto the walls of
residential buildings. Four years later in the more permissive
Perestroika era, they lured their fellow citizens to demonstrate by
distributing flyers announcing spurious national celebrations,
such as ‘Revolution of the Dwarfs’, ‘Day of the Militia’ or ‘Secret
Service Guy’s Day’. At their protest actions props such as orange
caps and banners with satirical slogans were distributed amongst
30
participants, who by 1ř88 numbered in the tens of thousands.
While avoiding direct commentary on actual political events, the
group’s strategy was to publically ridicule the regime and its
Call for Commonpress 51 ‘Hungary’ issue,
designed by György Galántai. Courtesy
Artpool Art Research Center
bankrupt ideology. In parallel, the artists who withdrew from the compromised official art system and
established a self-reliant network of alternative spaces also created opportunities to express their
independent views. A case in point could be the activity of Łódź Kaliska, an artist group that operated
within the Łódź scene’s so-called ‘Whip Round Culture’ in the mid-1ř80s. They ran their own attic gallery
Strych, which enabled them to relentlessly mock in equal measure the ‘socialist structures of the state of
war’, the painting of the ‘New Wilds’, as well as ‘patriotic Church art’ by invoking Dadaist actions and
31
frivolously appropriating cultural history.
In Budapest, György Galántai and Júlia Klaniczay founded the Artpool Archive in 1ř7ř, which was
conceived as an ‘uncensorable apartment-institution’ that along with documenting and archiving the
32
activities of the unofficial art scene also organised actions and events.
One such occasion was an
international exhibition entitled ‘Hungary can be Yours! International Hungary’ that was installed in the
Young Artist Club in January 1ř84 but instantly banned by the authorities. Although mainly dealing with
East-West artistic relations, the show also featured directly oppositional works by the Inconnu Group,
including a crumpled map of Hungary pierced with nails that dripped blood symbolizing a ‘humiliated
33
and tormented homeland’ under Soviet rule.
Two years later the group, which had connections to the
opposition circles and had been in existence since 1ř78, announced an international competition for an
exhibition celebrating the 30th anniversary of the Hungarian Revolution of 1ř56. As could have been
expected in view of its taboo theme, five hours before the opening of ‘The Fighting City’ in the Inconnu
34
Group’s apartment gallery Artéria in January 1ř87 the police arrived and removed all 3ř artworks.
The
changed atmosphere of the latter half of the decade was however demonstrated by the fact that the artists
decided to go ahead with the opening anyway and ridicule the regime by exhibiting instead the official
police receipt for the confiscated artworks.
A different approach to politics took hold in Slovenia,
where the vogue for totalitarian aesthetics was epitomised
by Neue Slovenische Kunst (NSK), whose co-founders in
1ř84 were the rock band Laibach, the Scipion Nasice
35
Sisters Theatre and the artist group IRWIN.
As the most
western of the Yugoslav republics, Slovenia also had the
reputation of being the most liberal, with a thriving
subcultural scene in Ljubljana that did not hesitate to
enter into political and media activism. Originating in this
context, the NSK tactics was to turn to subversion, which
in the case of Laibach for instance involved undermining
totalitarian ideological ritual simply by, as artisttheoretician Marina Gržinić noted, ‘repeating it in its
36
literal form’.
When IRWIN addressed the issue of
painting in their project ‘Was ist Kunst?’ they notably did
not choose to create large scale neo-expressionist
canvases, but rather a series of small format oil paintings
on which they repeated the forms and techniques of both
IRWIN, Was ist Kunst, 1984. Installation view,
Studio Vipotnik, Ljubljana. Courtesy the artists
socialist realism and the modernism of the 1ř60s,
referring to the periods of Slovenian art that had been
deliberately overlooked in the official art historical
narrative. Responding to the banning of Laibach from
public performance by the authorities at the time, IRWIN chose in protest to first show the project in the
closed, invitation-only setting of a Ljubljana apartment. In effect, through their rigorous application of the
‘retro-principle’ to the tropes of East European art, which pushed the aesthetic concerns of postmodernist art to their logical conclusion, IRWIN exhausted the repertoire of eighties painting just as late
socialism burned out.
In spite of its reputation as the decade of the ‘return of painting’, the overriding characteristic of the art of
the East European eighties was its pluralism, which also accounts for its resistance to strict definition.
While there was a tendency to play down the social and political role of art, the context in which the new
generation worked was unavoidably influenced by the ideological chill at the beginning of the decade and
the unstoppable liberalisation of its latter half. And although they continued to work in relatively marketfree conditions, their dislike of state art institutions that imposed limits on artistic expression prompted
them to appropriate minor spaces, from community centres to university corridors, as well as private
apartments and studios, to create optimal conditions for their art practice. Despite the distrust of the
ethos of collectivism, they often gravitated towards the formation of artistic groups that provided a means
to express their divergence from the dissipation of the late socialist system. Demonstrating their openness
towards the world in their willingness to cross genre boundaries, receptivity to inter-cultural and
historical borrowings, as well as immersion in sub-cultures of music, fashion and poetry, the alternative
artists of the eighties in Eastern Europe were eagerly poised for the imminent fall of the political frontiers
too.
Footnotes
1. Karol Sienkiewicz (ed.), Rejected Heritage: Polish Art of the 80s
[e-publication], WarsawŚ Museum of Modern Art, 2011; ‘I Could
Live in Africa’, Museum of Modern Art Warsaw,24 July–1ř
September 2010; ‘Osam-de-se-te – slatka dekadencija
postmoderne’ (‘EightiesŚ Sweet Decadence of the Postmodern’),
HDLU, Zagreb, 11 April–10 May 2015; Beata Jablonska, ‘Alchemy
of the Eighties, or “Islands of Positive Deviation”’ in Beata
Jablonska (ed.), Osemdesiate: Postmoderna vSlovenskom
vytvarnom umeni 1985–1992 (exh. cat.), BratislavaŚ Slovak
National Gallery, 200ř. ↑
2. Ibid., p.278. ↑
3. Press release for ‘I Could Live in Africa,’ available atŚ
httpŚ//artmuseum.pl/en/wystawy/moglbym-zyc-w-afryce-icould-live-in-africa ↑
Comments
17
4. See Luiza Nader, ‘Shame Socialist Realist Historiography in the
1ř80’s (case study),’ in Rejected Heritage, op. cit., n.p. ↑
5. See Boris Groys, The Total Art of Stalinism: Avant-garde,
Aesthetic Dictatorship and Beyond, PrincetonŚ Princeton
University Press, 1řř2. ↑
6. Quoted in Lutz Becker, ‘Art for an Avant-garde SocietyŚ Belgrade
in the 1ř70s’, in IRWIN (ed.), East Art Map:Contemporary Art
and Eastern Europe, LondonŚ Afterall, 2006, p.400. ↑
7. See Maja Fowkes, The Green Bloc: Neo-avant-garde Art and
Ecology under Socialism, New York and BudapestŚ CEU Press,
2015, pp.25ř–60. ↑
8. Zvonko Maković, ‘Nova slikaŚ hrvatsko slikarstvo osamdesetih
godina,’ Život umjetnost (1ř82), p.8. ↑
ř. See Talijanska transavangarda (exh. cat.), ZagrebŚ Gallery of
Contemporary Art, 1ř81. ↑
10. Jana Ševčiková and Ji í Ševčik, ‘Umĕní 80. Let’, in Ji í Ševčík
(ed.), České umění 1938–1989 programy, kritické texty,
dokumenty, PragueŚ Academia, 2001, p.3ř8. ↑
11. Ibid. ↑
12. Annamária Gosztola, ‘Rabinec Galéria’, in 80: A Modern poszt-jai,
BudapestŚ ELTE Humanities Faculty, 1řř4, p.255. ↑
13. Lórand Hegyi, ‘Foreword to the Exhibition “New Sensibility IV”’,
New Sensibility IV (exh. cat.), PécsŚ Pécs Gallery, 1ř87, p.26. ↑
14. Ibid. ↑
15. Along with Ákos Birkás, the artists representing Hungary at the
Venice Biennial in 1ř86 were István Nádler, Imre Bak and Károly
Kelemen. ↑
16. Gábor Bora and Lóránt Hegyi (ed.), András Böröcz, László
Révész, János Szirtes, BudapestŚ 1ř87, n.p. ↑
17. Katalin Keserű, ‘Hungarian Art of the Eighties,’ in Hungarian Art
of the Eighties (exh. cat.), BudapestŚ Ernst Museum, 1řř4, p.156. ↑
18. See Karol Sienkiewicz, ‘“Without the Proverbial Pomp and
Circumstance”. The Beginnings of the Centre for Contemporary
Art and the Cultural Policy of the State’, in Rejected Heritage, op.
cit., n.p. ↑
1ř. See Anda Rottenberg, Sztuka w Polsce 1945–2005, WarsawŚ
Wydawn, 2005, p.2ř4. ↑
20. Krzysztof Stanisławski, ‘Spóźniona Transawangarda? Na
marginesie II Biennale Sztuki Nowej – Zielona Góra’, Sztuka, no.1,
1ř88, p.3ř. ↑
21. Founding group members wereŚ Ryszard Grzyb, Paweł
Kowalewski, Jarosław Modzelewski, Włodzimierz Pawlak, Marek
Sobczyk and Ryszard Woźniak. ↑
22. ‘Gruppa’, in Jolanta Ciesielska (ed.), The Banana Republic: Polish
Expression of the Eighties(exh. cat.), DebrecenŚ MODEM, 2010,
p.16. ↑
23. The core members of Koło Klipsa were Mariusz Kruk, Leszek
Knaflewski, Krzysztof Markowski and Wojciech Kujawski. ↑
24. Alexandra Alisauskas, ‘Communists like Them. Polish Artist
Groups at Künstergruppen zeigen Gruppenkunstwerke’, in
Rejected Heritage, op. cit., n.p. ↑
25. See Wojciech Kozłowski, ‘Zielona Góra 1ř7ř-81. The Unrecorded
Myth’, in Rejected Heritage, op. cit., n.p. ↑
26. Milena Slavická, ‘The Eighties and Nineties’, inJi í Ševčík and
Edith Je ábková (ed.), Between the First and Second Modernity
1985–2012, PragueŚ Academy of Fine Arts, 2012, p.88. ↑
27. Ibid., pp.88–ř3. ↑
28. B. Jablonska, ‘Alchemy of the Eighties’, op. cit., p.27ř. ↑
2ř. Ibid., pp.278–80. ↑
30. Piotr Stasiowski, ‘Independence Experience of the Wroclaw
Community in the 1ř80s’, in Rejected Heritage, op. cit., n.p. ↑
31. ‘Łodz Kaliska’ in J. Ciesielska, The Banana Republic, op. cit., p.42.
The members of the groups wereŚ Marek Janiak, Andrzej
Kwietniewski, Adam Repecki, Andrzej wietlik and Andrzej
Wielogórski. ↑
32. György Galántai, ‘Artpool 1ř7ř–1řř1’, in György Gálantai and
Júlia Klaniczay (ed.), Artpool: The Experimental Art Archive of
East-Central Europe, BudapestŚ Artpool, 2013, p.35. ↑
33. Ibid., p.26ř. ↑
34. The four members of the group wereŚ Péter Bokros, Tamás
Molnár, Tibor Philippi and Magdolna Serfőző. See László
Menyhért, ‘Inconnu Csoport’, in 80: A Modern poszt-jai, op. cit.,
pp.235–36. ↑
35. The group members were Dušan Mandič, Miran Mohar, Andrej
Savski, Roman Uranjek and Borut Vogelnik. ↑
36. Marina Gržinić, ‘Was ist Kunst’, in Zdenka Badovinac, Eda Čufer
and Anthony Gardner (ed.), NSK from Kapital to Capital: Neue
Slovenische Kunst – An Event in the Final Decade of Yugoslavia,
LjubljanaŚ Moderna Galeria, 2015, p.13ř. ↑