2012 MUAC Mexico.pdf

europa_001_050_final_Layout 2 11/6/12 12:56 PM Page 2 andando hacia adelante, contando hacia atrás moving forwards, counting backwards curadoras/curators ivana bago antonia majaca vojin bakić walter benjamin collective actions chto delat? / what is to be done? & vladan jeremić gorgona igor grubić tibor hajas irwin sanja iveković július koller andreja kulunčić kazimir malévich david maljković ahmet öğüt dan perjovschi anri sala mladen stilinović nicoline van harskamp želimir žilnik artur żmijewski muac/2012 europa_001_050_final_Layout 2 11/6/12 12:56 PM Page 4 6 Diseño Design Mónica Zacarías Najjar Coordinación editorial Editorial Coordination Ana Laura Cué Vega Traducción Translation Pilar Villela Mascaró D.R. © 2012 de la edición Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo Ciudad Universitaria, Delegación Coyoacán, C.P. 04510 México, Distrito Federal www.muac.unam.mx © por las fotos, los fotógrafos the photographers for the photos ISBN xxx-xxxx-xxxx Prohibida la reproducción total o parcial por cualquier medio, sin la autorización escrita del titular de los derechos patrimoniales. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, except where permitted by the law, without the previous consent of the intellectual property rights holders and the publishers. Primera edición / First Edition México, 2012. 21 de mayo de 2012 Impreso y hecho en México Printed and made in Mexico andando hacia adelante, contando hacia atrás moving forwards, counting backwards ivana bago y antonia majaca 101 bibliografía/bibliography 103 artistas/artists 144 catálogo de obra/works 149 agradecimientos/acknowledgements 152 créditos/credits europa_051_102_final_Layout 2 11/6/12 12:59 PM Page 51 The exhibition Moving Forwards, Counting Backwards, developed as a new configuration of the project Where Everything Is Yet to Happen by the Institute for Duration, Location and Variables (DeLVe), revolves around the legacy of the emancipatory political projects of socalled Eastern Europe and their dissolution into the post-political void of Fortress Europe and Western neoliberal democracies. It opens with a juxtaposition of a “universal futurological question mark” by Julius Koller from 1970s and the impossible attempt of a future resurrection of the countless ruins of the 1990s by Ahmet Öğüt; and ends with newly commissioned wall drawings by Dan Perjovschi, which bring together a multiplicity of fragmentary narratives, question marks and “puzzles” that constitute our common present. The exhibition’s narrative is constructed around several layers of the relationship between the Universalism and internationalist premises of the historical art avantgardes, ideas of international communism, collectivity and solidarity. The project traces the re-articulations of these ideals and their potential “rescue” in practice (in the works of Collective Actions, Gorgona, Nicoline van Harskamp); their erasure from individual and collective memory (Sanja Iveković, Anri Sala); the survival and bastardization of their forms (Walter Benjamin, Kazimir Malevich, Mladen Stilinović, IRWIN, David Maljković, Igor Grubić); matters of state control and individual freedom (Tibor Hajas), while, on the other hand – it points to the cacophonic neo-liberal democratic paradox in which positions of “identity”, “adversary” and “victim” play a central role (Artur Żmijewski, Andreja Kulunčić, Chto Delat? Vladan Jeremić & Želimir Žilnik). Facing the worst crisis of democracy and neoliberalism since the inception of the European project, we once again encounter the specters of internationalism and 51 europa_051_102_final_Layout 2 11/6/12 12:59 PM Page 52 solidarity among the future and past ruins on both imaginary sides of Europe. The questions are: What exactly can emerge on the horizon of this new Europe, confronted with the precarious present and the gloomy prospects of the future? What kind of common future can be imagined and shaped today? The exhibition at MUAC opens a number of possible paths across–and perhaps beyond–the social, political and ideological ruins of the short 20th century–that of the failed socialist states and that of the failing neoliberal democracies. MOVING FORWARDS, COUNTING BACKWARDS It seems as if the new century, this gigantic newcomer, was bent at the very moment of its appearance to drive the optimist into absolute pessimism and civic nirvana. —Death to Utopia! Death to faith! Death to love! Death to hope!, thunders the twentieth century in salvos of fire and in the rumbling of guns. —Surrender, you pathetic dreamer. Here I am, your long awaited twentieth Century, your “future”. —No, replies the unhumbled optimist: You – you are only the present.1 placed and united to form a new land. This city from the future is haunted by the past of worldwide destruction that is also its destiny. It seems to prophesize that the only predictable thing about the world future is the perpetuation of terror and destruction. Here, the human life goes on not because of a hope for a better tomorrow, but exactly despite the lack of it. The family of a young man knows that a house in which their son’s wedding is to take place will in fact soon be destroyed but they still go about decorating it. A group of inhabitants decide to hijack a car from which another building is to be bombed, but the car never seems to come and the ambush is doomed to eternal deferral of the action that is to reverse history. This crushed tower of Babel, posthumously bringing together different languages of its citizens and its architecture, as well as their different histories, represents not only “the irreducible multiplicity of tongues; it exhibits incompletion, the impossibility of finishing, of totalizing, of saturating, of completing something on the order of edification, architectural construction, system and architectonics.”2 Exploded City is where cars and buildings go when they die, but it is hard to say whether this place is heaven or hell. It is precisely the lack of both bliss and horror that characterize it; it is neither utopian nor dystopian, but it’s certainly cursed. Its curse is in knowing the future, and the future being at the same time its past. Structures from all over the world that have been violently destroyed are here resurrected, dis- But what exactly is this project doomed to incompletion, with perpetuated divisions and mutual opacity between its individual fragments? As the Biblical text suggests, it is universality, the joint project of building the tower whose “head” would reach the very heavens, and whose realization would be coordinated by a single language, understandable to all. It is indicative that another famous tower, Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International, resembled popular depictions of the Tower of Babel and was, likewise, never constructed. It was left unfinished just like the universalist revolutionary L.D. Bronstein, In Optimism and Pessimism: On the Twentieth Century and on Many Other Issues, 1901. 2 Jacques Derrida, “Des Tours de Babel” on Psyche: Interventions of the Other, vol. I, Stanford University Press, 2007, p. 191. DES TOURS 1 DE BABEL 53 europa_051_102_final_Layout 2 11/6/12 12:59 PM Page 54 project that it was to embody, appearing however throughout the twentieth century as the specter of modernity. Ahmet Öğüt's Exploded City is a reach for the ruins of the 1990s not in order to use them to build new hybrid forms but to reconstruct and juxtapose separate wholes, as if to additionally highlight their difference and mutual non-belonging. This imaginary landscape of reconstructed ruins, it seems, can only result in the repetition of the past, the perpetuation of destruction. The visitor to this fictional city will not reach dystopia as its citizens seem to–despite all odds–go on about their business as usual, sometimes even in an outright cheerful manner. They act as if they accept the inevitability of becoming victims of their own creation. This future graveyard has been created by the revengeful spirits of the 20th century, jealous of the human project of universality. What remains after the ruins have covered the surface of the earth is a continuous state of present-future ruin. The multiplicity of voices inhabiting the broken towers of universality has created a cacophony in which no common vocality can again emerge. Solidarity, equality and freedom seem to have become empty signifiers, unpleasant reminders of the story once collectively imagined and now long forgotten. Invoking any of these words today–and the different potential worlds they connote–causes merely another tremble of the earth's surface while a true tectonic shift is yet to happen.N { p . 1 3 0 } Once the tower of universality collapsed, the surface of the earth got covered in debris. After a while, the thick layer of dust became a part of everyday “normalcy” and, turning into a ubiquitous landscape, started causing severe respiratory problems in large parts of the world population. It seems that humans cannot imagine breath- ing together any longer. Inhabiting the molecular units of the continuous present-future terror they wander through a world in which violence and fear have become structural and systemic. It has become the driving force behind the “progression” of the perverted reality they condemned themselves to. Violence has become the prevailing economic force in the neo-liberal age. Violence in Italian, Mexican, Russian organizations that command the market of narcotics, weapons, prostitution, and that invest in the financial market. Call it mafia or whatever. In Mexico as in Italy as in Russia, financial markets, mediascapes, and political power are in the hands of people who gained power through lawlessness and violence.3 The particles of the “old and forgotten belief” in the “universal future of mankind” are now traceable only in the tiny reflecting surfaces of glass in the scattered debris. The only vision, disenfranchised and weakened, now resides in the individual destiny of each citizen, in each alienated, paranoid individual. There seems to be no common. Impotence prevailed, energy dissolved, and people were forced to accept the blackmail of war, competition and precarity.4 Exile and the figure of the refugee and immigrant have become the epitome of new forms of subjectivity. Some of us, lost and exhausted in this lonely and frightened universe, have been without a home for decades, forced to 3 Franco Berardi “Bifo”, After the Future, Gary Genosko & Nicholas Thoburn (eds.), Edinburgh, Oakland, CA. Baltimore, MD: Ak Press, 2011, p. 102. 4 Ibid., p. 123. 55 europa_051_102_final_Layout 2 11/6/12 12:59 PM Page 56 move because of exploitation, violence, war and terror. The words coming out of our mouths are not heard. Alternatively, some of us became tired cosmopolitan citizens/pilgrims, with tired and jaded faces. Not wanting to belong to any territory or nation we become victims of complicated forms of (a)politicality. Our loyalties are “in the invisible political community of hopes and dreams”.5 Not being part of any particular demos, nor of any “specific” democracy, we are, again, deprived of speech. To gain it we would need to desert the migratory cosmopolitan spirit, leave behind the idea of the “citizenpilgrim” and join the nationalists or some other movement; become part of a public body on the stage of exploded democracy. But the people of good will prevail, and I do believe they will save this world. It won’t disappear! No! No! (From Artur Żmijewski’s Democracies) THE OLD SCHOOL OF CAPITALISM Another fragile formation of a social body, another futile staging of democracy: the workers protest in front of the Belgrade parliament building. A mass of disillusioned, impoverished workers scammed by the new post-socialist corrupted elite march the streets of the Serbian capital. They wave their flags and slogans with the old, well known song in the background, sung in their local language. Debout, les damnés de la terre Debout, les forçats de la faim La raison tonne en son cratère C'est l'éruption de la fin ..... In reference to Richard Falk’s concept of the “citizen pilgrim” on Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, Verso Books, 2000, p. 37. 5 [Stand up, damned of the Earth/Stand up, prisoners of starvation/Reason thunders in its volcano/This is the eruption of the end]. There tors: other model is a heated discussion between two of the protesone opts for the return of communism while the sees the way out in developing a “proper” Western of Capitalism: —I was born to illiterate parents. My mother gave birth to eight of us. I graduated from the military academy. I taught my mother how to read and write. But all of us had a free education. Today, you can’t have your tooth pulled out for free. I graduated from the military academy, went to university and law school, got an MA degree. I took English courses. Tell me where, under capitalism, can a child of illiterates get such education and achieve all this? —Don’t start with Tito and this shit about communists! They’re all shit-heads, as soon as they win their positions. Then they steal you blind... What outdated views you have! Those days are gone. Let’s fight to feed our children! We shouldn’t go back to what was once! —And what was once? Communism and free education. It can’t get better than that. What else do we need? There’s nothing better! —We need capitalism. It’s a proven success. —Really? Where? Simultaneously, two young intellectual activists seem to differ in their views on the protest and the current workers' struggle as much as the involved workers themselves: —You repeat the word “workers”, but that eludes them. For the last 15 years they took part in wars, robberies and massacres. 57 europa_051_102_final_Layout 2 11/6/12 12:59 PM Page 58 —You can’t blame miserable people struggling for their families. The ruling class deceived them. You can manipulate people’s consciousness easily. You can’t accuse them all. Not all took part in wars, in crimes. at the anarchists, betraying them only to return to their exploiters in hope of a better future that, this time around, is expected to arrive with the foreign capital.N { p . 1 4 1 } Dialogues are from Želimir Žilnik’s Old School of Capitalism. —Why didn’t they fight in their factories for their status as workers when they had the chance in 1987? ... What are they fighting for? Dividends! They want to join in ownership and don’t give a shit about the status of blue-collars. At the same time a group of agriculture workers from a small village, desperate for not having received their wages for 2 years, decide to tear down the factory building and use the rubble to build their own houses. A group of local “anarcho-syndicalists” decides to join the workers in their struggle but are at first met with suspicion: the workers decide not trust them unless they capture the oligarchs, which —following a series of more or less violent acts— the anarchists finally manage to do. In a symptomatic reversal of powers, the oligarchs convince the workers that they are the ones who possess a solution for the crisis: with the help of Putin and the “Russian brothers” they would save the economy. Additionally, they manage to raise suspicion among the workers regarding the background of the anarchists. Who are they actually? Who is funding them? Why do they talk of “revolution”? It certainly sounds like the old regime! It’s all very fishy here! And while the anarchists keep cheering: Factories to the workers! the workers respond: But we cannot manage factories, we just know how to work!. The tycoons keep ridiculing the anarchists: Oh c’mon! That’s been tried before, that’s history! When the police barge in looking for the perpetrators of the kidnappings, the workers readily point their fingers THE REVOLUTIONARY ROLE THE YUGOSLAV SONGSPIEL OF THE TIRED OLD WORKER. The sound of a choir comes from a nearby building –a rather unusual thing to experience in this part of Belgrade. The place is a deserted factory from which the workers have long been expelled by the wild new forms of “transitional capitalism”. People in costumes are gathered inside, occupying a stage divided across three horizontal levels. The lowest one is populated by a gallery of different oppressed individuals, representatives of different disempowered social groups. They appear one after the other and perform individual acts and dances: the Worker, the Roma Woman, the Lesbian Activist and the War Veteran. Each of them speaks for the other one; however, they do not seem to hear or recognize each other properly. Above are the new oligarchs, nationalists and politicians who all together rule the lives of the ones bellow. Floating above both groups is the choir of “dead Yugoslav partisans”. These are the specters of their fathers, the ones who, many decades ago won the revolutionary struggle against fascism and created a new country consisting of a number of nationalities and ethnicities. Only half a century later “the tower” collapsed, and the sons and daughters of those who fought for universal values of freedom, equality and solidarity, ended up in a brutal and violent war against each other, covering the lands of Yugoslavia with ruins, violence, robbery, rape, murder and genocide. 59 europa_051_102_final_Layout 2 11/6/12 12:59 PM Page 60 The Partisan Choir: Our children killed each other in a bloody war! In an unjust war! Our children! In a bloody war! SREBRENICA! SREBRENICA! Brother fought against brother! Don’t let them make our death meaningless— We died so you could live in peace... To whom do the partisans then sing today? To the war profiteers, to the oligarchs, to the church, to the reality TV kids, to the lesbians, to war veterans, to the workers? None of the multiplicity of groups is interested; they all seem to just want to “move ahead”. Lesbian Activist (pointing toward Worker): This is the Worker. His dance is called the “Dance of the Severed Finger.” He and his fellow workers are on hunger strike. Someone bought their factory and closed it without paying anyone anything. He says that he is fighting for people who have it even worse, the ones incapable of fighting for themselves. He cut off his finger because he had no other choice —no one pays attention to his struggle. He believes that soon we will all be feeding on our body parts, the only things left to us. Because all people are slaves under capitalism. The partisans turn to the worker for hope. But is he capable to be the bearer of the revolutionary struggle? Will he be the one to bring about the unification of “all the slaves of capitalism”? The worker seems weak, disillusioned, and demoralized and preoccupied with his individual problems and self-interest. As do all the rest among the oppressed. The partisans do not give up, and, once again, encourage them to unite and search for a new force: Close your ranks, comrades! Look for the new partisans! Quotes are from Partisan Songspiel: A Belgrade Story by Chto Delat? Their words bounce off the walls, moving in spirals: solidarity, freedom, equality... They sound like fragments of a secret combination that opens the door to a radically different world, long lost in the ruins. N { p . 1 1 0 } “HISTORY” HAS FAILED US. FINANCIAL FASCISM UNDER THE GUISE OF LIBERALISM AND DEMOCRACY “History” has failed us. No new chronology will erase that fact. History's betrayal is so profound that it cannot be forgiven simply by taking on a "post–" era to it (post-modernism, post-Marxism). There is real tragedy in the shattering of the dreams of modernity —of social utopia, historical progress, and material plenty for all. But to submit to melancholy at this point would be to confer on the past a wholeness that never did exist, confusing the loss of the dream with the loss of the dream's realization. The alternative of political cynicism is equally problematic, however, because in denying possibilities for change it prevents them; anticipating defeat, it brings defeat into being. Rather than taking a self-ironizing distance from history's failure, we —the "we" who may have nothing more nor less in common than sharing this time— would do well to bring the ruins up close and work our way through the rubble in order to rescue the utopian hopes that modernity engendered, because we cannot afford to let them disappear. There is no reason to believe that those utopian hopes caused history to go wrong, and every reason, based 61 europa_051_102_final_Layout 2 11/6/12 12:59 PM Page 62 on evidence of the abuses of power that propelled history forward, to believe the opposite.6 This seems to be the message coming from the Choir of Dead Partisans in Chto Delat?’s Partisan Songspiel. Just like the ghost of Hamlet’s father, the partisans' ghosts appear to warn their children about the truth of their double murder and erasure from history. Because we are not only standing among the ruins but also among the dead –the unidentified bones scattered underneath them. The war in which the partisans' children killed each other murdered at the same time the very ideas for which the partisans sacrificed their lives in the previous war: brotherhood, equality and emancipation of the oppressed. These ideas were annihilated in the name of restoring the oligarchy of capitalist elites, and under the pretense of liberation from the “Yugoslav prison of nations”. The delusional character of this project of liberation is best represented by the figure of war veteran in Partisan Songspiel. Once his role was performed, he became yet another particle of human waste generated through the neoliberal expansion into the territories “freed” from the evils of communism now embracing “democracy” and the politics of human rights. The ghosts of the partisans warn that the sealing off under the shield of identity politics only serves to dissipate a united struggle against new forms of oligarchy, thus making space for constant improvements of individual rights based on difference and identity. At the same time, a depoliticization of economic life and relations allows for the free and unquestioned flow of capital, creating an ever-increasing gap between the ruling minority of financial and political elites and the vast majority of the poor and oppressed. The intervention of Chto Delat? into Susan Buck-Morss, The Dreamworld and Catastrophe. The Passing of Mass Utopia in the East and West, The MIT Press, 2002, p. 68. 6 the equation is not to deny specific forms of oppression witnessed by various social groups, in this case workers, homosexuals, Roma people and war veterans, but to invest their fight with the “forbidden” substance —solidarity—, not in relation to those with whom they share the same concerns, but precisely in relation to the sufferings of the other. Thus, here the stories of oppression are not told in the first, but in the third person: the worker tells the story–or, rightly said, interprets the “dance”–of the Roma woman, the lesbian activist, the war veteran, etc. Only this kind of solidarity, in which one is able to recognize and narrate/interpret/witness/translate the dance/struggle of his or her neighbor, if not fully identify with it, creates space for redeeming the ideas of universal struggle and liberation. Otherwise, we seem to be left to the curse of the Tower of Babel, Ahmet Öğüt’s Exploded City or Artur Żmijewski’s Democracies. In 2009, Żmijewski traveled around the world to mark and study the manifestations and the global life of democracy so to speak. He interprets democracy not as a form of government –the rule of the people– but as a series of manifestations of free speech and public gathering, promoted as one of democracy's key tenets. The growing collection of specimens of democratic life, joined and lined up on a set of monitors, creates a claustrophobic cacophony of voices: the feminists protesting against the announced plan of the Polish government to ban abortion, the opponents of abortion protesting against the feminists, the Polish catholic priests equating the pro-choice arguments with Nazism etc. We also encounter the documentation of a government-organized re-enactment of historical events that celebrate Polish victory over the Russians; the funeral of Jörg Haider in Vienna; the anti-NATO rally in Strasbourg; the cheering of German football fans; the antiwar protests in Israel and Palestine, etc. All these 63 europa_051_102_final_Layout 2 11/6/12 12:59 PM Page 64 voices, which sometimes counter-act and sometimes complement each other, seem to present “democracy” as merely a rite of exercising free speech, exhausting itself in this very exercise and to no actual effect. The fine threads of power seem to be untouched and their working mechanisms undisclosed. N { p . 1 4 2 } Under the conditions of democratic freedom of opinion, opinions cannot actually be classified into “coherent” or true opinions and “incoherent” or “untrue” opinions. Such a division would be blatantly discriminatory and anti-democratic... It would undermine the equal opportunities of opinions and encroach upon their free and fair competition in the open marketplace of ideas.7 The suggestion that what we are witnessing/living is merely a masquerade of democracy has also been recently confirmed by the events in the European Union, revealing that democracy is, as Jacques Rancière shows, not where we live or the system governing our life, but a “scandal”, an “excess” that threatens exactly the legitimacy of the existing ruling oligarchies. The scandal of democracy consists entirely in the crushing of every “natural” source of legitimacy for ruling, be it drawn from supremacy or stemming from God, birth, wealth, or knowledge: Democracy is first this paradoxical condition of politics, the point where every legitimization is confronted with its ultimate lack of legitimacy, confronted with the egalitarian contingency that underpins the inegalitarian contingency itself. That is why democracy shall never stop provoking 7 Boris Groys, The Communist Postcript, Verso Books, 2010, p. 7. hatred. It is also why this hatred is always present in disguise [although it actually] has a more serious aim. It aims at the intolerable egalitarian condition of inequality itself.8 Rancière shows that the “hatred of democracy”, along with the denunciation of the excess of in individual freedoms, often comes from reactionaries who, while rejecting democracy as terror under the guise of the rule of majority and the lack of any order, actually wish for nothing but the re-establishment of the old hierarchies, and the old “natural” rights to rule. Democracy for Rancière is by no means any kind of privatization but just the opposite; it concerns the struggle to expand the public realm to include everybody and it should work towards empowerment of equality. However, in modern forms of government democracy is nothing but a form of oligarchy where the power of participation is limited to but a few. What better shows this “scandal of democracy” is the recent panic of the EU and world financial oligarchy caused by the Greek prime-minister’s move to opt for the public referendum by which the Greek citizens would decide whether or not to accept the EU “aid package”. This (finally suppressed) recourse to the principle of direct democracy —in the very “cradle of democracy”— caused a response of panic comparable to that of a natural disaster, and showed that financial fascism and capitalist enclosure of the common–and not democracy or a common European identity–is the true principle behind the European Union and its relation to global financial oligarchies. Or, what better way to see this than the referendum through which the Croatian citizens should decide whether or not to join the EU, while the preparations for this referendum amount to state propaganda of 8 Jacques Rancière, Hatred of Democracy, London, Verso Books, 2006, p. 94. 65 europa_051_102_final_Layout 2 11/6/12 12:59 PM Page 66 brainwashing its citizens with the “yes” option. If the answer should be “no”, the referendum would be repeated until the final result is “yes" —a method comparable to extracting confession from a prisoner by repeated acts of terror. The case of the majority of post-Yugoslav countries is specific in that the promise of “returning to the European family where we truly belong” —which constitutes the basic principle and content of local state politics— is already a broken promise. It comes to fruition now, at the moment when the EU itself loses the legitimacy of sustaining the “European promise”. After the hard work on constructing a specific European identity —also formed through coercion and financial support to cultural projects that are to shine with the glow of an “added European value”— it is now obvious that this identity, as well as its exercising of “democracy”, is merely a euphemism for a financial fascism that has created an inferior race of outcast EU citizens and nations unworthy of inhabiting the “Euro-zone”. THE COMMUNITY BECOMES A ZONE, AND EUROPE THE EURO The project which shows this marriage between the performance of democracy and financial fascism is Andreja Kulunčić’s 1 CHF = 1 VOICE, that took place in Switzerland. Even though this small and rich country has never formally been part of the EU, it embodies all its basic principles: several nations joined into a single family under a single surname, the primacy of the banking system and capital which ties them together, and the exploitative relation towards “lesser” nations and communities —immigrants who form the crucial part of its work-force, often without formal citizen status. Switzerland, a country that didn’t have colonies and didn’t participate in the 20th century wars, can be thought of as the blueprint for new forms of colonialism managed by Europe after its major nations lost their colonial empires and finished engaging in warfare against each other (but did not stop fighting against “non-democratic” nations of the world). Revealing the true nature of the system of representative democracy, Andreja Kulunčić invites the immigrant workers that do not have the right to vote in Switzerland (sans-papiers) to join her project with the following statement: “In the country of money, money is a voice.” (This also reminds us that, in the history of democracy, it was not always “all” who had the right to participate —in one period after the French Revolution, for example, the vote was literally bought and only those who could pay the “census” could participate). In a reversal that deeply disturbed even some of the activist groups fighting for the rights of the hundreds of thousands of sans-papiers in Switzerland, the artist proposed that the sans-papier donate money for the renovation of the Swiss Parliament building in Bern. This intervention revealed the hypocrisy of a system that does not recognize a significant part of its labor force as citizens, but still widely employs their services on the grey market. At the same time, the sans-papiers are not constituted as an economically endangered group seeking charity, but as people who earn their wages just like any “regular” Swiss citizen, but do so in a grey zone where they don’t have the right to participate in representative democracy. The project points precisely to the vulnerability and the intrinsic inability to prove legitimacy of any democratic government. It is not surprising that, after a process of negotiations, the Swiss Parliament ultimately rejected this donation and ignored the radically disturbing proposal of how to truly “rebuild” the Parliament, i.e. democracy. When refusing to recognize the existence of its “shadow citizens”, it once again showed the power of the “scandal of democracy”. N { p . 1 2 4 } 67 europa_051_102_final_Layout 2 11/6/12 12:59 PM Page 68 A recent work by Dan Perjovschi, exhibited in Lausanne, Switzerland, is a wall-drawing of a white Swiss cross made of swords, daggers and other hostile tools and weapons protruding from it, accompanied by the words STAY OUT! As we can guess, and as the newspaper cutouts exhibited in the show illustrate, it is another way of addressing the problem of the sans-papiers, albeit in a completely different way. During the last decade, the practice of Dan Perjovschi has based itself predominantly on the medium of humorous wall drawings, initially tracing the processes of transition in Romania, and other post-socialist countries, towards the Western model of democracy and capitalism and at present focusing itself on the overall democratic cacophony, the multiplicity of voices emerging from “talks, sightseeing, rumors, newspaper articles, gossip, television, jokes, major stories, insignificant stories, global news, local events, everything”.9 The repository of these drawings (essentially political cartoons) turns into a transient living memory, always with new additions joining the already existing ones. In these representations, images reappear and get into new equations as mountable elements entering negotiations with each new situation. The drawings are reactions to current political, cultural or media events that offer a pun or a laconic observation that tries to make sense of world events and realities. The strategy used is in fact rare and precious in the context of present day contemporary art. It relies on unpretentious humor employed both as artistic and everyday survival strategy to confront the disturbing, tragic, absurd and cynical world developments that we all encounter daily through the mass media. When it seems that all forms of resistance are 9 Interview of Roxana Marcocci to Dan Perjovschi in 2007. doomed to fail, the humble wall doodles stand out as the last line of defense. It is perhaps the immediacy and ease with which they are executed that is most appealing and convincing in getting the message across. Although some have attained famous status and although, as with any good pun, their simplicity and reduction requires effort and calculation, there is still a ludic spontaneity and lightness about them as they grow one out of the other over the walls, passages and entrances, their content always shaped by the context in which they are made and presented. Often compared to graffiti and newspaper cartoons, they are however probably most akin to scribbles and doodles in public toilets (symptomatically more typical of the pre-Web 2.0 times). Seemingly unimportant and marginal, these doodles are located in the places where the civilized peoples are repeatedly reminded of the link with their waste-producing bodies and where these lowly notes and drawings suddenly gain the power to impose themselves with their often “indecent”, banal, but often also politically provocative content. In a similar fashion, Perjovschi’s drawings appear to be simple and benign, but often point to the most painful political contradictions and realities of our time: “My drawing looks simple, but it isn’t. I make people laugh and frown immediately afterwards. I criticize the world, its manners, its beliefs, its stupidity and greed. But I criticize it in an empathic way. My humor is not dark. I draw in white and black but my humor comes in many colors”. (Dan Perjovschi) N { p . 1 3 2 } LONELY ON THE STAGE OF DEMOCRACY So, how is one to act on the “stage of democracy” in the face of contemporary forms of violence, capitalist forms of exploitation and inequality? Standing as an “I” and not as a “We” seems to be everything but in line with the tradition of collective emancipatory political projects of the past. Once the neo-liberal existence prevailed, 69 europa_051_102_final_Layout 2 11/6/12 12:59 PM Page 70 new forms of individual attempts of economical, political and spiritual ‘self-help’ emerged. Here we could recall a depiction from popular imagination and recall that desperate office worker from Fight Club, who, in the final stage of social isolation and capitalist self-exploitation, jaded by the optics of the deviated imagination of the 21st-century post-political consumer, gives in to endless purchases of IKEA furniture, joins different support groups and finally resorts to brutal underground boxing matches of extreme physical violence, all in order to finally encounter “the real”. A different attempt of self-activation in the times of post-political apathy is what drives 366 Liberation Rituals —a series of “mantras”, micro–political actions and interventions that Igor Grubić repeatedly carried out during the course of a year, employing the tactics of quotation, language of pop culture, and a kinship with historical conceptualism, but also a specific version of a shamanistic approach to art combined with guerilla/illegal actions, the direct encounter with the street, performativity, civil disobedience and poetic terrorism. The rituals function as a group of “oppositional signals” provoking and confronting the contemporary neutralized social and political condition of civil (and artistic) passivity. The actions range from small, unpretentious interventions in public space, such as “correcting” street graffiti, applying agitation stickers in public spaces, ritually writing the sentence “Resist the epidemic of greed” on bills and releasing them into the circulation of money; to much more visible, confrontational, illegal actions, such as placing banners with political-poetic content on monuments in public space, pasting over billboards, coloring the water in the fountain in front of the National Bank red in the context of extreme security measures imposed on citizens during George Bush’s visit to Zagreb. Dressed in a recognizable blue working overall, Grubić sets diverse warning signs pointing to certain “urgencies”, acting as a messenger, an enlightener, a revelator, or a “yurodivy” —naive, quixotic figure, but also a healer, a guru. It is, of course, a process of catharsis in which the “liberation rituals” deliver one from, among other things, the learned or acceptable conception of oneself as an artistic subject, as well as from models of art approved by dominant critical discourses. N { p . 1 1 4 } In Tibor Hajas´s Self-Fashion Show (1976) there is a contrast to such affirmation of the potential of individual action and transformation. The film portrays individualism as an illusion, always already a product of ideological and cultural conditioning or bio-political maneuvering. A gallery of passers-by is invited to become the images of themselves, their own “best copies”. Here, they are supposed to be creators of their own fate, even though in communist Hungary at that time the film was made, “fate”, i.e. future, was constructed as a collective endeavor, leaving little space for individualism. Their posture is their statement; what they wear, how they stand, how they move —everything could become a statement, but the context of the piece introduces instability in the assumed “strategies of the Self”. Think that you are looking into a mirror. Correct your look. Decide whom you would like to please. Try to make a nice impression. Be charming. Be a pleasure to the eyes. Smile. Put a shade of challenge into your smile. Be irresistible. Be memorable. Imagine you are beautiful. Imagine you are rich. Imagine you are healthy... Make an event out of your appearance. Represent a lifestyle, an age group, a town, a personality... Become our pleasure... Not good!... You are not enough of a character. You are not unique and not typical. 71 europa_051_102_final_Layout 2 11/6/12 12:59 PM Page 72 The film exposes the media-manipulated image addressed to the typically Western individual/consumer, who is ironically required to be both unique and typical, i.e. fall into a specific target group for advertising. Such conception of the individual, seemingly free to invent himself and become unique, is merged with the paranoid individual of the communist society, always worried not to stand out from the crowd and not to cause suspicion and attention from the secret services and fellow-citizens: Be aware of being watched, but do not be disturbed by it anyhow. Neither are we disturbed by your presence. You control the image that is being made of you. There are no hidden obstacles... You are not forced to say anything you would feel sorry for later on. We will not fake your sentences. We will not put your gestures into a new context... We are not investigating you or directing your thoughts to meet our interests. You do not need to make us believe in anything... You are free. Free do to whatever you want... We do not want to find the truth about you. We do not check on your story. We do not expose you... You are the model of your own fate... Quotes are from Tibor Hajas’ Self-Fashion Show. The removal of the actual context of the street at the end of the film and its replacement with the empty editing “blue-screen” explicitly points, however, at the camera image as one of the ways in which the manipulation of both the constructed personality/action and its interpretation takes place. Both in capitalist and communist society, the individual is shown to be an illusion and precisely the opposite of one who governs his/her destiny. N { p . 1 1 6 } At the first time of writing, Jochem is an isolated teenager who is frustrated with school and family life. He reads up on all things alternative, including anarchism, and he writes a letter to Karl Kreuger at the age of 18. The next letter comes from Amsterdam, where Jochem is studying philosophy. Again disappointed with his new reality, Jochem seeks out new groups and ideas, occult ones this time, not political ones. Jochem is one of docu-fictional characters of Yours in Solidarity, a project developed by Nicoline van Harskamp on the basis of the archive consisting of over 1000 letters received and distributed by the Dutch anarchist Karl Max Kreuger from 1987 until his death in 1999. The letters, sent by anarchists from all over the world, give a picture of a whole decade of “global anarchist practices” and the specific histories and geographies within which they evolved. Van Harskamp, however, is interested primarily in individual agency, in the subjectivities that formed these networks. Through a hermeneutic process of reading the letters and deciphering different handwriting styles, the artist creates a series of characters as well as their histories, seen from the present perspective. This means that the bases for their biographies are often located in the letters themselves and the recounting of actual events their future development is fictionalized by the artist in collaboration with the actors who embody the characters whose stories are finally captured on video. Yours in Solidarity thus becomes a project precisely on individual agency; the individual beliefs and their transformations; the (im)possibility of persistence in radical intellectual and political action and the various shapes and combinations the life of this struggle takes, that are not always predictable or uncomplicated-from anarchism to nationalism, or to the occult. It reveals all the complexities of emancipatory action based on common ideals and ideology, the fragility of individual beliefs and, 73 europa_051_102_final_Layout 2 11/6/12 12:59 PM Page 74 therefore, solidarity itself and the multiplicity of solidarities it is made of. I’ve been an anarchist for about 15 years. In that time I have seen many groups come and go. We lack aims. We lack leadership —a dirty word to many anarchists... There is also a great distrust of the rest of the Left. Not all Marxists are Leninists and Stalinists. Quite a few are close to anarchism. In short, we need to get organized and break out of the Anarchist Ghetto. ... Today we held a public meeting about the elections and voting. It was a failure. Nobody turned out. Apathy rules! ... I think that we need some kind of authority in an anarchist society, such as workers or community councils and citizens militia. Also I think that communism won’t work because if everything is free, nobody will work. ... I support the European Union. ... I’ve applied to join the Welsh Nationalist Party. It is quite libertarian in some ways. Another idea of mine is to stand as an independent in the local elections... I realize that all this may not be strict by anarchist doctrine but I don’t consider our ideas to be fixed or gospel according to St Kropotkin. N { p . 1 3 8 } Quotes from Yours in Solidarity by Nicoline van Harskamp. SPECTRES AND FORGETTING In the late 1990s, Anri Sala found a video-tape showing his mother participating in a ceremony with the Albanian leader Enver Xoxha during the 1970s Communist Youth Annual Congress and giving a TV interview on the same occasion. However, the sound was missing, so the historical document remained a mute witness of the past, until the artist engaged a group of deaf collaborators to interpret it by reading the young communist’s lips. Confronted with her reconstructed words, the mother is at the same time shocked by their emptiness/likeness to well-known propagandist formulas and touched by the sudden memory of a true belief that stood behind those words, of building a better future: This meeting was held to clearly express the political situation of the country in terms of the struggle against imperialism, revisionism, and the two superpowers, which is only possible with the Marxist-Leninist Party. And “only if youth unites” its efforts under the guardianship of the Marxist-Leninist Party... Examining the current political situation, not only in certain countries but around the world as well, and by discussing problems, we can appreciate the importance of a people’s revolutionary movement”. —I don’t believe this! It’s absurd! It’s just spouting words, there is no sense to it. I know how to express myself. —Read your lips, mom! —Those aren’t my words! —When did you do this interview? —It was after a Communist Youth Meeting. —What about? —About the world revolution, so that all men would be equal, without oppression or exploitation. It still has a nice ring to it! —Did you believe in that ideal? —I often asked myself those questions... Where does 75 europa_051_102_final_Layout 2 11/6/12 12:59 PM Page 76 the compromise with power and oneself begin and rebellion end? —How do you feel about only deaf-mutes reading into your past? —It’s an irony of fate! —Do you see anything in common? —Yes, we were living in a deaf and dumb system where we only spoke with one mouth and one voice. It’s symbolic because in certain milieus things were less strict... We thought we’d change the world. Little by little, we lost everything. Our generation was the victim of past errors... The positive side is you can learn from our experience in order to do things differently. If I could go back, I wouldn’t act differently. I believed in what I was doing, that much I can say. I really believed. It was real, Anri, because we were building. N{p. 134} partisan from World War II is “attributed” to each model, bringing the “specters” to life. These epitaphs give only the factual information that we might encounter in a bureaucratic report: Nada Dimić. Charged with anti-fascist activities. Tortured and executed in Nova Gradiška in 1942. Age at the time of execution: 19. Nothing else, no other description or narrative was necessary to illuminate the universal values on which the actions of these women resided. In the perplexing juxtaposition of the texts with the speechless anonymity of the female models transformed by capitalist advertising machinery into nothing but a flashy commodity, the dry words speak the truth of the forgotten. The effect that is ultimately produced is indeed “haunting”, in precisely that “hauntological” sense signaled by Jacques Derrida in his Spectres of Marx, foregrounding the concept of the “ghost” in terms of its symbolic relevance in our experience of history. Excerpts are from Anri Sala’s Intervista. After the fall of the diverse forms of Eastern European socialist projects, each of the new nation states introduced tactics of collective forgetting through state institutions and the public sphere in general. Yugoslav Socialism, as a specific case of political self-determination of the Yugoslav people following the World War II anti-fascist struggle, went through a dramatic dissolution in the 1990s, resulting in the formation of more or less ethnically “clean” nation states and the eruption of violent ethnic wars. In such environment, encountering the “ghosts of the past” through Sanja Iveković’s media project Gen XX seemed like a moment of brief but powerful awakening. Through the artist’s intervention, the images of female fashion models taken from magazine advertisements are stripped of their original commercial content and juxtaposed with dramatic textual counterparts. A caption referring to a dead anti-fascist female The anti-fascist heroines conjured by the Gen XX resist being the object of symbolic killing performed by the anti-communist project of the new nation state, coupled with the simultaneous re-traditionalization of gender roles, whereby women are once again erased as subjects of history, and constituted merely as means of reproducing the nation. As specters however, they acquire a faculty of entering a body of any woman, becoming, once again, very much alive and reproducing the empowering “Gen XX” —the virus of female emancipatory agency. Iveković’s project asserts that the passing on of this “gene” cannot be stopped after all, because memory is not the property of the state, but also something personal that is transmitted from one generation to the next. Then, it is not surprising that one of the anti-fascist heroines (although without official status) was actually the artist’s own mother, portrayed, unlike the others, in an authentic photo from a family album. The work was per77 europa_051_102_final_Layout 2 11/6/12 12:59 PM Page 78 haps most strongly addressed to the first generation that was growing up in a transitional/capitalist state that had never heard of Nada Dimić, charged with anti-fascist activities, tortured and executed at the age of 19. Those words linger. For a brief moment a numbing commodity got replaced with a name and history that figured as a metaphor for the idea of universal female and human emancipation. N { p . 1 2 0 } MODERN PROPHECIES Having broken its relations with Stalin and the Eastern bloc in 1948, Tito’s Yugoslavia decidedly searched for the program of the “third way” introducing new economic forms of workers’ self-management, the international politics of non-alignment and getting culturally closer to the West. It embraced abstraction in art as an ideal way of distancing itself from Stalin’s backwater cultural policy of socialist realism and thus proving its progressive West-friendly ideals. Croatian artist Vojin Bakić’s work developed in the midst of the blooming Yugoslav socialist modernism of the 1950s and 1960s. His outstanding sculptural production, including a number of public sculptures and anti-fascist memorials, was remarkable in its ability to merge geometric abstraction with organic forms and light experiments, monumental sculpture with natural environment, and commemoration of actual past events with the universality of utopian visions. The neglect and destruction of his work in the new nation state of the 1990s is exemplary of the antagonistic relation towards the period of socialist modernism in Yugoslavia in general, whose universalist values were in complete opposition to the particular values of national culture and history that were now being foregrounded. Those artists were not modernists because they were communists following the Party line, but as modernists they were necessary leftist, anti-fascists, socialists and communists. The fact that Vojin Bakić used the same formal repertoire to simultaneously create a global cosmopolitan cultural identity and a collective memory of socialist Yugoslavia is thus not a paradox but the true face of modernism.10 N { p . 1 0 4 } Contemporary art is one of the places where the legacy of socialist modernism remained alive in the post-Yugoslav context. The work of David Maljković is largely preoccupied with the Yugoslav modernist project or, more precisely, its reflections in the present, particularly through the figure and work of Vojin Bakić. What the protagonists of Maljković’s “visions” are looking for is the promise of the past and the belief in the transformational role of the avant-garde. Maljković’s works perform as whirlpools where the protagonists are the mediums, “sucked” in a time machine that takes them away from the present moment, from the state of forlornness, of permanent waiting for a shift that has to happen any moment now, or, as the title of one of his works indicates, “these days”. The vision is only possible to trace when the temporal shift is established through a possibility for an imaginary, futuristic journey to the past, by moving forwards while counting backwards. But the quest for the visionary moment is full of frustration and dull preparations, full of laborious hours with no certain results. A certain “handicap” and physical stagnation should paradoxically serve here as a mental trigger of an inner (modernist) pilgrimage into the future-past, into a completely different atmosphere filled with possibilities, optimism, movement, progress. The key element of Maljković’s film Retired Form, shot at 10 WHW, “Vojin Bakić” in Political Practices of (post-)Yugoslav Art: Retrospective 01, Zorana Dojić y Jelena Vesić (eds.), Belgrade, Prelom kolektiv, 2010, p. 57. 79 europa_051_102_final_Layout 2 11/6/12 12:59 PM Page 80 the Memorial Park Dotrščina, which is dedicated to the victims of World War II in Zagreb, is a small crystalshaped monument by Vojin Bakić. The very title suggests that the form was never just a form, an abstraction. On the contrary, the form was “full of inner movement” and in its purity embodied the unity of contradiction. Today this form rests, retired, against its own will; made redundant, impenetrable and finally emptied, “abstract”. The only way they can be brought to life again is by invoking the new possibilities arising in the minds of their new visitors. Once created, memorials take on lives of their own, often stubbornly resistant to the state’s original intentions. In some cases, memorials created in the image of the state’s ideals actually turn around to recast these ideals in the memorial’s own image. New generations visit memorials under new circumstances and invest them with new memories under new circumstances and invest them with meanings. The result is an evolution in the memorial, significance, generated in new times and company in which it finds itself. (James E.Young, Memory and Counter Memory). N { p . 1 2 8 } COMMUNISM AS A SPIRITUAL PRACTICE It seems that geometry always emerges after the devastation of war; the pure forms are calling for a pure new beginning. As the Italian critic Piero Pacini put it: “On the scene of the early postwar period, geometry is one of the signs of optimistic and conscious reconstruction”.11 Russian painter Kazimir Malevich saw this “self- 11 Ješa Denegri, “Inside or Outside ‘Socialist Modernism’? Radical Views on the Yugoslav Art Scene, 1950-1970”, in Impossible Histories: Historical Avant-Gardes, Neo-Avant-Gardes, and Post-Avant-Gardes in Yugoslavia, 19181991, Dubravka Djurić and Miško Šuvaković (eds.), MIT Press, 2003, p. 182. movement” as the epitome of the production of absolute truth, the truth that would be the sum of all relative truths. He, unlike Lenin, who trusted that the remnants of the old survive in the new, believed that none of the old forms (of economy, art, society) could survive in the new society. Malevich was the ultimate tragic character of the Russian revolution “a true believer” who perceived the revolution as a moment in which “a new phoenix” will arise from the ruins. Materialism was for him just the first phase on the way to “collective spiritual liberation”. In an attempt to establish a new language for this new society, just a year after the revolution, Malevich painted the famous White on White, the first shape of Suprematism, an aesthetic-philosophical project that eventually influenced the rise of abstract art internationally through Malevich’s contacts in the West. His radical step towards “pure art” and the creation of an entirely new mode of perception of reality stood firmly in opposition to the mimetic tradition in art. Mimetism was part of that “old” that, according to Malevich, could not survive; while Suprematism was a revolutionary movement developing hand in hand with the Soviet revolution, moving together with other forms of communist development towards purification and perfection. Hereby, the economic base of society translates into the united, collective spirit of the working class that reaches a common goal. Malevich’s square was supposed to be, the aesthetic manifestation of this principle-the result of his endeavor to create “one”, single “economic image” with the square representing the spiritual essence of all forms. This in itself implied the newly introduced “economic” principle in art through the reduction ad infinitum, purification to bare fundamentals and finally, to the “zero as the infinite”. 81 europa_051_102_final_Layout 2 11/6/12 12:59 PM Page 82 What Communism and Suprematism primarily share is precisely this principle of purification, which manifests itself in the development from complex to fundamental; from variety, multiplicity and specificity to unity. Similarly to Suprematist´s urge to arrive to the basics, Communism as a collective spiritual practice aims at simplification of all social relations and of the multiplicity of differences (national, social, religious). Both Communism and Suprematism work towards the transformation from the material to the spiritual and, in such a view, no individual particle of the form and no individual member of the communist project could ever achieve freedom individually. Rather, every individual (formal artistic element or human) is included in the system of unified action and progression to collective freedom. Thus all “forms” of commonality bear a transformative potential, since the pure, economic image, the “universal” one relies on each of its particles, on each individual form. THE REMNANTS OF GEOMETRY. ON THE UNDEFINED AND UNDETERMINED While discussing the reasons for the popularity of neoconstructivism in Eastern Europe in the 1950s and 1960s, Piotr Piotrowski refers to Rosalind Krauss’ analyses of the status of geometrical abstraction, more particularly to the grid as a Modernist myth, replicating itself in the work of artists as a series of repetitions and (self)imitations. Similarly in Eastern Europe, post-war modernists projects were stripped of their original utopian ideology and became nothing but form: The Communists... compromised the dream of Grand Utopia while using its language well into the 1950s and 1960s... The artists... understood perfectly well that such rhetoric functioned as a fig leaf for the totalitarian system of power, which followed the cultural policies outlined in the 1930s... In such circumstances it would have been difficult for artists drawn to Constructivism to embrace its revolutionary rhetoric, which acquired a very different meaning during the post-war period. Instead of invoking the slogans of Productivism championed by Rodchenko, they embraced the mythology of the “blank canvas” associated with the avant-garde tradition, referencing utopia of the harmonious co-existence of various elements within the non-objective world envisioned by Malevich... Blank canvas signified solidarity with the persecuted avant-garde...”12 In contemplating the post-avant-garde quest for the blank canvas and its meanderings among the neutralities as “inherently political” it is not hard to detect an ever haunting ghost of the Suprematist square, of Malevich’s belief in the political potential of the avantgarde and the modernist participation in the universalist ideas of communism, even in —or especially so— in socialist Yugoslavia where Modernism quickly lost its oppositional character and gained an official status. WEAK UNIVERSALISM AND DECADENT SOCIALISM When an era crumbles, “History breaks down into images, not into stories”. Without the narration of continuous progress, the images of the past resemble night dreams, the “first mark” of which, Freud tells us, is their emancipation from “the spatial and temporal order of events”. Such images, as dream images, are complex webs of memory and desire 12 Piotr Piotrowski, Art in the Shadow of Yalta. Art and the Avant-Garde in Eastern Europe, 1945-1989, London, Reaktion Books, 2009, p. 142. 83 europa_051_102_final_Layout 2 11/6/12 12:59 PM Page 84 wherein past experience is rescued and, perhaps, redeemed. Only partial interpretations of these images are possible, and in a critical light. But they may be helpful if they illuminate patches of the past that seem to have a charge of energy about them precisely because the dominant narrative does not connect them seamlessly to the present. The historical particulars might then be free to enter into different constellations of meaning. The juxtaposition of these past fragments with our present concerns might have the power to challenge the complacency of our times, when ‘history’ is said by its victors to have successfully completed its course, and the new global capitalist hegemony claims to have run the competition off the field. To be engaged in the historical task of surprising rather than explaining the present —more avantgarde than vanguard in its temporality— may prove at the end of the century to be politically worth our while.13 How to surprise the present? What to do with the images found among the ruins in constructing new narratives of the past, present and future? The process of orienting oneself among the iconological debris of the avantgardes started already in the late 1970s and 1980s, a period that some analysts define as late Socialism, or as “the end of Socialism within Socialism”.14 Erjavec constructs a paradigm of a specific post-socialist postmodernism, based on exactly this moment when the “future” stopped progressing and when all that seemed to have been Susan Buck-Morss, op. cit. pp. 68-69. Aleš Erjavec, “Introduction”, “Neue Slowenische Kunst”, “New Slovenian Art: Slovenia, Yugoslavia, “Self-Management and the 1980s”, in Posmodernism and the Postsocialist Condition, Aleš Erjavec (ed.), University of Califonia Press, 2003. 13 14 left were scattered utopian images of the past. Erjavec quotes Mikhail Epstein discussing the “reversed” mirroring of the past and future: Postmodernism is essentially a reaction to utopianism, the intellectual disease of obsession with the future that infected the latter half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth. The future was thought to be definite, attainable, and realizable; in other words, it was given the attributes of the past. Postmodernism, with its aversion to utopias, inverted the signs and reached for the past, but in so doing, gave it the attributes of the future: indeterminateness, incomprehensibility, polysemy, and the ironic play of possibilities. What has been left of the sign in the 1970s and 1980s then? Negation, re-signification, void, empty action, noart, negation of negation, anti-happening...? Instead of a universal sign, or Malevich’s “most economic image”, what remains or resurfaces in post-modernism is just a universal question mark pointing to the sky, as proposed in different versions by Július Koller’s “ufological activity”. The copy as the specter of the image started emerging from the repository of the labyrinths of collective image-memory. Repetition and copying did not merely imply ironic demythologizing of the modernist myth. Rather, the copy also started standing for a painful and traumatic “loss” of the “purity” of the belief in the future. The complicated set of relations between the idea of Universalism in the avant-garde and its contamination with “real existing Socialism” is especially present with the neo-avangardes of the 1970s, in the phase of what is often referred to as the “decadent Socialism”. Particu85 europa_051_102_final_Layout 2 11/6/12 12:59 PM Page 86 larly in Yugoslavia, artists started radically questioning the idea of the “pure economic form”, be it in art history or in the decadence of the political project of Communism facing the late phase of economic model of the “workers self-management”. Instead of Malevich’s belief in the progress and the infinite, came the “real” void; instead of nothingness understood as eternity, came nothingness as emptiness, as a graveyard of dead gestures and forms, of languages of art and ideology. In fact, according to Boris Groys, the signs produced by the first avant-garde were always “weak signs” with low visibility. Their goal was not to become strong fundaments for building a new society (that’s how they were later instrumentalized); instead, their mission was to point to the contracting time, the scarcity of time, to intervene and stop the self-destructive project of modernity and progress. They also aimed to produce a universal art that could survive all historical upheavals and catastrophes. However, this project could not be achieved once and for all, because —Groys continues— history has either made these signs appear strong (for the canon of art), or irrelevant (for the broader public, still unsympathetic to the avant-garde’s reduced, weak signs, as they point to the democratic potential of art (“everyone can do this”, instead of “only a master can”). This is why the repetition of weak signs is necessary: “the avant-garde cannot take place once and for all times, but must be permanently repeated to resist permanent historical change and chronic lack of time.” According to Groys, it is exactly permanent change that is the status quo that needs to be reverted.15 The avant-garde, and specifically Malevich and Suprematism, as the radical reductionism and Universalism are 15 Boris Groys, “The Weak Universalism” in e-flux journal, núm. 15, 2010. repeated in specific ways in the work of three Yugoslav artists that, according to Peter Weibel, form the triangle of “retro-avant-garde”, a concept later theorized by Marina Gržinić. These artists are Mladen Stilinović, Kazimir Malevich from Belgrade and the Slovenian group IRWIN. In Stilinović’s Exploitation of the Dead, the remnants of Malevich and the early avant-gardes are part of a vast repertoire of dead signs, drawn from art history, communist ideology, media sphere and everyday life. In the work of Kazimir Malevich from Belgrade, The Last Futurist Exhibition they appear in the form of copy —a representation of art history, and in IRWIN’s Retroavantgarde as a means for creating a self-constructed history of Yugoslav art, a basis for their subsequent, more encompassing project East Art Map. The signs that appear in IRWIN’s paintings encompass the elementary forms investigated by Malevich, such as the square or the cross. For Malevich the cross again formulates the square, and the square stands for the emptied space of the dead God. Now, the second step away from the dead God is the emptied place of the dead ideology in its final stage. However, for Irwin the cross stands for the return of the “pre-ideological” folklore, and acquires geographical connotations as a sign representing the crossroads between the East and the West. As IRWIN themselves put it, the cross: with all the connotations and significations it has acquired until today, is one of the symbols from the picture book of European culture. The cross in Irwin’s picture is therefore a way of translating this culture into consciousness, its mimesis. Nonetheless, the cross carries for us, as members of a small nation, another, fatal significance, as well. With our culture, we are chained to the center of the cross, at the meeting point of the mad 87 europa_051_102_final_Layout 2 11/6/12 12:59 PM Page 88 ambitions of the East and the West. This is an empty space, geometrically defined, but with its meaning never completely clarified.16 The cross is a place of infinitude, a pure surface where Malevich’s tragic voice keeps reappearing throughout history. IRWIN’s Retroavangarde can be thus read as a manifesto rescuing these symbols from the domain of folklore and placing them back into the genealogy of the forgotten weak images of the avant-garde and their ability to, if momentarily, reverse the disastrous consequences of constant change —this time reappearing in the moment when yet another radical political change took place after 1989. Mladen Stilinović’s complex project Exploitation of the Dead, executed between 1984 and 1990, is composed as a “cemetery” of dead signs coming from art history, ideology, religion and propaganda. As Stilinović notes, “these signs are dead not just because they lost their meaning but also because their meaning is too transparent”. He poses the question of responsibilities and implications inherent in every recourse to the past-instead of considering words such as revival, tradition or nostalgia, often used both by art and ideology, Stilinović clearly states that every reach into the repository of the past is primarily exploitative. The artist initiated this work at the time when postmodernism and its techniques of pastiche, citation and appropriation were thriving in the field of art and were becoming a mere style and nothing else. Exploitation of the Dead should certainly be read also in this context. In the more specific local context, the work could be read as a slow process of noting, or diagnosing, the coming death of the Yugosla- 16 Aleš Erjavec, op. cit., p. 142. vian Socialism and its symbols, during the last six years of the 1980s, just prior to the war and dissolution of the state. Suprematist signs on canvas or cutlery; Malevich on his death bed along with cakes, ties, five pointed stars and crosses and the colors red and black are here joined with photographic images of collective rituals, representing the collectively rehearsed dream of a communist future. Although the artist claims he does nothing but copy, creating another repository of empty, repeated images of the past, this work is far from being a cynical, postmodernist and relativist statement. Rather, it creates anguish and uneasiness, situating the viewer in the midst of so many ghosts of failed promises. No wonder then that Stilinović describes his decision to exhibit this work on the façade of a workers’ canteen in Zagreb as “painful”, for it is exactly the figure of the worker whom ideology has prompted as the key protagonist of the upcoming liberation in the bright future. The emptied signs of the dying past are confronted with the “brutal”, living organism of the workers’ canteen. Precisely because here, the work does not stand just for an idealized ideological symbol, but becomes “brutal, dirty and desperate”, since for Stilinović the “canteen” is “intact and almost holy”, so much unlike the dead or contaminated symbols that now “adorn” it. In the present era of “memory culture” that has chosen history as one of its major preoccupations and sites of refuge, when no future seems to shine on the horizon, Exploitation of the Dead poses strongly relevant questions regarding the responsibility in defining the meaning of every act of repetition and recourse to the past: What, how and when do we repeat certain things? To what extent is repetition a conscious act? Is repetition the only form of learning? What do we learn by repetition? Repetition itself? Prayer? When does 89 europa_051_102_final_Layout 2 11/6/12 12:59 PM Page 90 an individual learn by repetition and when does he lose his personal integrity? Is repetition a form of death? References to Stilinović’s statements and quotes are from Darko Šimičić, Interview with Mladen Stilinović. Precisely these questions around the status of the original and modes of representation are key in the series of exhibitions that took place since the mid-1980s, first in Belgrade and then internationally, and were organized by an anonymous artist, although they were often related to the work of the academically untrained “ex-artist” Goran Đorđević. The first one, The Last Futurist Exhibition, took place in a private flat in Belgrade in 1985, and then in the Škuc Gallery in Ljubljana where it was accompanied by Walter Benjamin’s lecture on Mondrian work from 1963-1996, culminating with the Armory Show 2013 in the Salon of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade (1986). Those with basic knowledge of the history of art and art exhibitions will realize at once that these could only be repetitions of exhibitions that had already taken place in the past. In the case of The Last Futurist Exhibition —Kazimir Malevich’s installation of his Suprematist works-the anonymous artist reconstructs this historical exhibition according to the surviving black and white photograph of the installation. As in all other exhibitions that followed until the present day, there is always a clear indication that we are dealing with a copy-not a forgery trying to convince us that it is the original. What is at issue is not creating the illusion of the original, but exploring the potentials of the copy: What can it tell us about the original, about art history, about ourselves as interpreters of art history? What makes it different from the original, as well as from its photographic reproduction? These are the questions that are explicitly tackled in Walter Benjamin’s 1986 lecture on Mondrian, where he tells the story of a big earthquake that tears down a museum, from which only two paintings survive: an original Mondrian and its copy. In a more recent lecture, Benjamin in fact proposes that the ruins of the museum should not be brought back to life at all, if this would be in the service of the narrative on art consolidated by the Enlightenment, but merely approached as “museological artifacts” themselves, informing of the past era in which Art was perceived as an authentic expression of an extraordinary individual. Just as the narrative of Art once replaced the narrative of Christianity, so we are now at a turn, awaiting a new transformation. No longer believers in Art or the Artist, we copy and repeat their past, in order to understand it and create a caesura in time, an intervention into the constant lack of time, as Groys defines the necessity of the repetition of the weak signs of the avant-garde. EMPTY ACTION, NON-ACTION AND INFINITUDE The performances of Collective Actions, happening in nature, outside Moscow, often in the woods and fields covered in snow were imagined as actions for a small number of invited participants, who were not aware of what was going to happen once they would reach their destination. These trips kept happening over several decades as a series of socio–aesthetic situations where the invited participants were either to follow a simple instruction or just observe the empty “scene” while a new element would enter it, usually as a sudden appearance of an object or a sound or, for example, as an unexpected emergence of a person coming from the woods. The mechanism of the “empty action” can be very clearly seen in Comedy (1977). The draped figure moves in the direction of the audience. With his arms raised underneath the drapery the participant imitates the space which —for the observers— contains the second participant. In reality, the sec91 europa_051_102_final_Layout 2 11/6/12 12:59 PM Page 92 ond participant is not there. It is as if the draped participant is carrying a “hidden emptiness.” Then he lifts the drape and the “hidden emptiness” becomes apparent. The draped participant withdraws into the forest. The viewers are left before an empty field. But now, the emptiness of this field is not the same emptiness that was there before the action, it is “not arbitrary”... Before the draped participant lifted the drapery and uncovered the “hidden emptiness”, everything that had been taking place on the field was merely preparation, and the audience remained in an ordinary state of anticipation. But after the emptiness was liberated and “filled” the demonstrational field, anticipation was transformed into event, that is, what we call in the commentaries —“completed anticipation” took place. (Andrei Monastyrski, Seven Photographs, 1980). Through these situations, the participants were supposed to get confused and enter a suspended state of the “empty action”. Needles to say, it was the ostranenie of the ordinary, de-contextualization of an insignificant particle of life, brought outside the realm of ideologically saturated urban environment of manifestos and slogans. The attempts of creating empty actions on an empty field seem to have been directed towards the constitution of a different understanding of togetherness where the “performers” were not only “demonstrators” and participants those that “perceive”, but were both involved in a common “reflection” of the event that emerges from the mutuality of time, space and the collective action. At the same time, “Collective Action” stands on the opposite pole from the understanding of collective action in the Avant-garde from the beginning of the century. Unlike the art of the Avant-garde, that saw itself as a constitutive element in building new society, here “collec- tive action” is everything but “efficient”. It is rather —counterproductive, standing on the opposite side of the belief in progress and productivity. The “collective” here is not really collective but functions more through the coming together of a core community of artists and an unstable association of performers and participants. The action itself does not produce anything and the only visible trace is perhaps a decontextualized object or a rare piece of photographic documentation. It is activity rather than “action”, the real “result” being just a temporary togetherness and a potential of a joint effort in understanding what actually happened during the event, performed through layers of interpretation, entering together into an “infinite interpretive spiral, in which text and situation produce each other in a recurring, reciprocal manner”.17 Are the alarm clock and other traces of collective actions in the countryside indeed the leftovers of the shamanic activity, a communal endeavor of talking to the spirits, to the void? (as Mikhail Epstein has suggested in Post-Atheism: from Apophatic Theology to “Minimal Religion”), or rather attempts to find nodes of establishing contacts with the infinitude of Malevich? As Nikolai Berdiaev remarked in The Russian Idea, “There is that in the Russian soul which corresponds to the immensity, the vagueness, the infinitude of the Russian land: spiritual geography corresponds with physical. In the Russian soul there is a sort of immensity, a vagueness, a predilection for the infinite, such as is suggested by the great plain of Russia”... Through division, new structures come into existence. But the spirit is undivided and indivisible. It is both total and negative. It negates all Sabine Hänsgen, “Collective Actions. Event and Documentation in the Aesthetics of Moscow Conceptualism”, http://conceptualism.letov.ru 17 93 europa_051_102_final_Layout 2 11/6/12 12:59 PM Page 94 forms because it moves in the void and in darkness, on "the earth without form".18 There was a time when people believed to come time and again across inexplicable traces of some indefinite presence, signaling the existence of active and purposive forces that acted beyond the limits of commonsense explanations. These indications pointing to the presence of magic forces can be regarded as facts of reality —facts that cannot be explained only interpreted. The artists of Collective Actions endeavor to involve the contemporary observer into such accidental encounters or discoveries, discoveries that will compel him to engage in the process of interpretation.19 Similarly, Gorgona group from Zagreb worked towards establishing a space for a special kind of spiritual practice, creating a space for a different sort of collectivity and a mental retreat from the bureaucratic Socialism in Yugoslavia. In terms of its relation to art history, Gorgona was in many of its aspects certainly the first critique of modernist painting in Yugoslavia. However, it kept the modernist quest for the universal idea and Truth, that for them could not be situated and thus found in any object, but could rather only appear and be recognized through the commonality established by the spiritual togetherness of its members. Gorgona did not search for the Universal through a modernist vision embedded in a strict agenda or program of actions but 18 Mikhail Epstein, “Post-Atheism: from Apophatic Theology to ‘Minimal Religion’”, in Russian Postmodernism: New Perspectives on Post-Soviet Culture, Mikhail N. Epstein, Alexander Genis y Slobodanka Vladiv-Glover (eds.), Berghahn Books, 1999, p. 388. 19 Boris Groys, When History Becomes Form: Moscow Conceptualism, The MIT Press, 2010. rather it opened itself to a potential of encountering it through its anarchic and non-programmatic existence and in the interstices of the ordinary. If we wish to perform a paradoxical art historical claim here, we could claim that Gorgona was simultaneously both always and never modern. By its continuous, “semi-clandestine” and unofficial life as an artistic group that took forms such as joint walks, exchange of letters or walks in the woods, Gorgona actually ridiculed the bureaucratic power apparatus that was supposed to posses mechanisms for the recognition or rather for the production of common “truths”. By this alone, Gorgona was, in a radically different way than any other practice before in the region, actualizing a search for what lies outside the communist bureaucratization of life, enabling a space for a “blank canvas” of imagination, transience and spectral dimension of life. In one of the explanations of Gorgona, the most prominent of its members, Josip Vaništa writes: Gorgona stands for absolute transience in art... Gorgona is contradictory. She is defined as the sum of all her possible definitions. Valuating most of which is dead. Gorgona speaks of nothing. Undefined and undetermined. Once again, the ghost of Malevich can be felt, lurking from the crevices of manifold “Gorgonic existences”, invoking transcendence, spirituality and the absolute harmony in the co-existence of contradicting individual elements. This claim calls for reassessing Malevich’s understanding of “nothingness as eternity”. After the communist regimes either embraced and instrumentalized the ideas of modernism or enforced the mimetism of socialist realism, the avant-garde specters of Malevich’s square started inhabiting different transient and tired forms under the pressures of bureaucratic state apparatuses, deviating and bastardizing in different ways the 95 europa_051_102_final_Layout 2 11/6/12 12:59 PM Page 96 remnants of universality. Gorgona actively avoided ascribing any function to art in society. It rather resided on the margins of the (art) world that was at the time much more in favor of high socialist modernism. The geometric abstraction most prominent in the shape of meander persisting in the work of one of Gorgona’s members Julije Knifer, is thus, as P. Piotrowski pointed out, a sophisticated critique of neo-constructivism and the established modernist avant-garde. What seems more important though is the fact that already in Knifer´s work we encounter the repetition and copy as a continuous element in what is going to follow after the life of Gorgona in the framework of the post-modernist tendencies of the late the 1970s in both East and the West. Actually, Knifer’s paintings are very close to Western critique of modernism, its insistence on the deconstruction of the artistic genius, demystification of the originality of the artwork, etcetera. Or, in other words, “To reproduce Mona Lisa is the same as leaving an empty page” as suggested by Gorgona’s Josip Vaništa when he made the 6th issue of Gorgona magazine in 1961, consisting exclusively of photo reproductions of Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. The individual artistic practice of one of Gorgona’s members, Dimitrije Bašičević Mangelos’ revolved around the idea of “non-art” and of establishing “a negative of negation”, which indeed was still an “affirmation” and as such, entered into a complicated relation with “empty actions”, “negatives of action”, “impossible projects” and similar notions that we can trace all through the 1970s in the art of Yugoslavia and much of the Eastern Europe. Were Gorgona’s activities that could be gathered under the umbrella of these concepts primarily a critique of culture associated with the existentialist philosophical attitude? That would denounce Gorgona as “reactive”. However, we do not wish to proclaim Gorgona as proactive either, but rather as a phenomenon that es- tablished a space outside of these parameters. Most importantly, we perceive Gorgona as a spiritual practice emerging from the “spiritual togetherness”, the unity of mutual existences, instead of the bureaucratized “brotherhood of people”. Gorgona simply “did not create a clean break between Modernism and the neo-avant-garde”, as Piotrowski also suggested. Gorgona’s avoidance of the “original” objects, no matter how ephemeral, is thus in line with Gorgona herself. Let us thus leave the blank space for Gorgona to materialize if she would wish to do so. And, furthermore, echoing Vaništa’s proposal for an exhibition without the exhibition and Mangelos’ issue of the magazine that was not to be published, we symbolically liberate Gorgona from the chains of representation on either side of the pole of figurative, abstract or conceptual, and establish in this project and exhibition merely a place for Gorgona’s thoughts, a place where the Gorgonic imagination can occur. UNIVERSAL QUESTION MARKS And as we stand among the ruins made up of forms, images and signs, we need to inquire whether they are indeed dead, as Stilinović proclaims, and contemplate about the purpose and a potential way or to resurrect them? The Slovak artist Július Koller performed his “anti-happenings” as minimalist gestures in private or public space. He kept insisting on replacing all “signs” with a “universal question mark” that appears in different forms, first in 1969 as a flag and then again, in 1978, formed by the bodies of the artist and a group of children on a hill (Universal Futurological Question Mark [U.F.O.]). Koller’s activity also takes shape under different names, such as Universal Futurological Organization, 1972–3), Universal Philosophical Ornament, 1978 or Underground Fantastic Organization (1975). All these fictive “initia97 europa_051_102_final_Layout 2 11/6/12 12:59 PM Page 98 tives” pointed to the disappeared utopian principle and used real objects and situations, and everyday aesthetics to point at the universal infinitude, the imaginary futurity and opened empty field. Koller’s investment in the continuous replacement of signs and in the tactics of re-signification opens up the space for universalist infinitude. Koller’s production of non-normative signs invites us “to an idea”, to that which is eluding and could never become fully graspable, to something that could only emerge in the future. The question mark formed by the artist and the children sitting on a hill is pointed at the sky; it is an empty sign on an empty field that does not count on an addressee. It points to the potentiality that awaits. THE LAST EASTERN EUROPEAN EXHIBITION...? THE NEW SENSE OF TRAGEDY...? Leon Trotsky once said: You see, visiting art exhibitions is a terrible act of violence that we perpetrate on ourselves. This way of experiencing artistic pleasure expresses a terrible barracks-capitalist barbarism [...] Let's take a landscape, for example. What is it? A piece of nature, arbitrarily amputated, that has been framed and hung on a wall. Between these elements, nature, the canvas, the frame and the wall, a purely mechanical relation exists: the picture cannot be infinite, for tradition and practical considerations have condemned it to be square. So that it should not crease or buckle, it is framed, and so that it should not lie on the floor, people hammer a nail in a wall, fix a cord onto it, and hang up the picture by this cord. Then, when all the walls are covered in pictures, sometimes arranged in two or three rows, people call this an art gallery or exhibition. And then we are forced to swallow all this in one gulp: landscapes, genre scenes, frames, cord and nails.20 Art in the 21st century might seem as a worn out stuffed animal. It has been exhausted in the cage of the art world’s traveling circus, and especially so in the two decades after the fall of the Berlin wall, i.e. since the so-called former East came to being. On both sides of the imaginary Europe, art has gone through utter commercialization in the spectacle of “culture” and has been systematically used as a tool in the procedures of “normalization” of the East and its relation to the West. This text (and its many meanderings) was envisioned as a set of open reflections departing from the artworks presented in the exhibition Moving Forwards, Counting Backwards. It wishes to methodologically align itself with a specific, open form of almost 'Gorgonic' quest for truth, seeking to tackle that element by which these artworks propose rather then diagnose, ultimately making way for what is not yet visible, tangible but resides in that contingent space of our common future. In doing so, we attempted to delineate a tentative space where the life of art in the 20th century (seen from a perspective marked by the experience of Communism and Socialism in Yugoslavia and Eastern Europe), can be thought in line with the ideas and beliefs surrounding historical and present struggles for a radically different society. In this attempt, we looked at those actions, appearances and forms where art and intellectual prac- 21 Alan Woods, “Marxism and Art: An Introduction to Trotsky's Writings in Art” en http://www.marxist.com/ArtAndLiterature-old/marxism_and_art.html 99 europa_051_102_final_Layout 2 11/6/12 12:59 PM Page 100 tice dared to question the immediacy of its present and its diverse realities and remained determined to look for what was not yet there. It is our hope that this might lead the reader (the one who managed in making way, together with us, through all the dust, debris and ruins scattered in this text), towards the recognition of art’s intrinsic potential to be the art of the impossible, the art of the imaginary, reclaiming the future and appearing as a prolepsis, an announcement and bearer of change. If it cannot do that, if both art and history have indeed failed us, they should now leave the stage and give way to the new partisans. The first step in encouraging them/us might be clearing up the melancholic haze in our view of both past and future and setting up the stage for the yet unknown collective action on a newly discovered empty field of whatever this allegedly united new Europe of fear and crisis might be. This time, however, we might need to recognize the crisis through the prism of tragedy if we wish for a new potential for a radical change to emerge among the ruins of the short twentieth century on both imaginary sides of Europe. bibliografía / bibliography Berardi “Bifo”, Franco, “After the Future”, Gary Genosko y Nicholas Thouburn (eds.), Edinburgh, Oakland, Baltimore: AK Press, 2011. Buck-Morss, Susan, Dreamworld and Catastrophe. The Passing of Mass Utopia in the East and West, The MIT Press, 2002. Denegri, Ješa, “Inside or Outside ‘SocialistModernism’? Radical Views on the Yugoslav Art Scene, 1950-1970” en Impossible Histories: Historical Avant-Gardes, Neo-Avant Gardes, and Post-Avant-Gardes in Yugoslavia, 1918-1991, Dubravka Djurić and Miško Šuvaković (eds.), The MIT Press, 2003. Derrida, Jacques, “Des Tours de Babel”, Psyche: Inventions of the Other, vol. I, Stanford University Press, 2007. Epstein, Mikhail, “Post-Atheism: from Apophatic Theology to ‘Minimal Religion’”, Russian Postmodernism: New Perspectives on Post-Soviet Culture, Mikhail N. Epstein, Alexander Genis y Slobodanka Vladiv-Glover (eds.), New York, Berghahn Books, 1999. Erjavec, Aleš, en los capítulos (in chapters) “Introduction” y “Neue Slowenische Kunst” en “New Slovenian Art: Slovenia, Yugoslavia”; y “Self-Management and the 1980s” en Posmodernism and the Postsocialist Condition, Aleš Erjavec (ed.), University of Califonia Press, 2003. Groys, Boris, History Becomes Form: Moscow Conceptualism. The MIT Press, 2010. Groys, Boris, The Communist Postcript. Verso Books, 2010. Groys, Boris, “TheWeak Universalism”, e-flux journal, núm. 15, 2010. Hänsgen, Sabine, “Collective Actions: Event and Documentation in the Aesthetics of Moscow Conceptualism” en: http://conceptualism.letov.ru/Haensgen-CollectiveActions-Eventand-Documentation-Aesthetics-Moscow-Conceptualism.htm Holert, Tom, “Julius Koler; Kolnischer Kunstverein” en 2004: Julius Koller. Univerzálne Futurologické Operácie, Kathrin Romberg & Roman Ondak (eds.), Kölnicher Kunstverein y Verlag der BuchhandlungWalter König, 2003. Kabakov, Ilya, “Foreword”, in Primary Documents, Laura J. Hoptman & Tomáš Pospiszyl (eds.), The Museum of Modern Art, 2002. Mouffe, Chantal, The Democratic Paradox, Verso Books, 2000. 101 europa_051_102_final_Layout 2 11/6/12 12:59 PM Page 102 Piotrowski, Piotr, Art in the Shadow of Yalta. Art and the Avant-Garde in Eastern Europe, 1945-1989. London: Reaktion Books, 2009. Schöllhammer, Georg, “Engaging instead of Arranging. Július Koller's erratic work on the reconception of the aesthetic space 1960ff” en Julius Koller. Univerzálne FuturologickéOperácie, Kathrin Romberg & Roman Ondak (eds.), Kölnicher Kunstverein y Verlag der BuchhandlungWalter König 2003. Woods, Alan, “Marxismand art; An Introduction to Trotsky'sWritings on Art”, en (http://www.marxist.com/ArtAndLiterature-old/marxism_and_art.html) activo de hasta 7 de marzo de 2012 WHW, “Vojin Bakić” en Political Practices of (post-)Yugoslav Art: Retrospective 01, Zorana Dojić y Jelena Vesić (eds.), Belgrade: Prelomkolektiv, 2010. europa_001_050_final_Layout 2 11/6/12 12:56 PM Page 2 andando hacia adelante, contando hacia atrás moving forwards, counting backwards curadoras/curators ivana bago antonia majaca vojin bakić walter benjamin collective actions chto delat? / what is to be done? & vladan jeremić gorgona igor grubić tibor hajas irwin sanja iveković július koller andreja kulunčić kazimir malévich david maljković ahmet öğüt dan perjovschi anri sala mladen stilinović nicoline van harskamp želimir žilnik artur żmijewski muac/2012 europa_001_050_final_Layout 2 11/6/12 12:56 PM Page 4 6 Diseño Design Mónica Zacarías Najjar Coordinación editorial Editorial Coordination Ana Laura Cué Vega Traducción Translation Pilar Villela Mascaró D.R. © 2012 de la edición Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo Ciudad Universitaria, Delegación Coyoacán, C.P. 04510 México, Distrito Federal www.muac.unam.mx © por las fotos, los fotógrafos the photographers for the photos ISBN xxx-xxxx-xxxx Prohibida la reproducción total o parcial por cualquier medio, sin la autorización escrita del titular de los derechos patrimoniales. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, except where permitted by the law, without the previous consent of the intellectual property rights holders and the publishers. Primera edición / First Edition México, 2012. 21 de mayo de 2012 Impreso y hecho en México Printed and made in Mexico andando hacia adelante, contando hacia atrás moving forwards, counting backwards ivana bago y antonia majaca 101 bibliografía/bibliography 103 artistas/artists 144 catálogo de obra/works 149 agradecimientos/acknowledgements 152 créditos/credits