IT DZA BR 217 A Bloc of SenSAtionS in lieu of GeoGrAphy: rome – AlGierS – SAlvAdor de BAhiA (1959–75) les images aussi souffrent de réminiscences. Georges didi-huberman1 by tarek elhaik Bahia: A primal Scene prior to attending our parallel modernities symposium in Beirut, i had the opportunity to spend five days in Salvador de Bahia. i had been there to participate in a roundtable with two Brazilian colleagues who, like myself, are scholars and curators of media and culture, with a particular predilection for experimental and essayistic forms. i had arrived at our roundtable venue early in the morning after a long walk along Avenida Sete de Setembro, a haussmanized stretch that runs from the bay avenue through the wealthy neighborhood of vitória. vitória is dotted with fancy functionalist high-rise buildings, a trend that continues with the remorseless force characteristic of latin American urbanism, its unforgiving real estate speculation, and its singular Brazilian modernist fervor. i had already visited several latin American cities while i was living and conducting fieldwork in mexico city, and had developed a keen interest in their formal, medial, and experiential interconnections and correspondences. 1. “images are also subject to reminiscences.” Georges didi-huberman, L’image survivante: Histoire de l’art et temps des fantômes selon Aby Warburg [the Surviving image: Art history and the time of the phantoms according to Aby Warburg] (paris, 2002). IT DZA BR TARek elhAIk A BloC of SenSATIonS In lIeu of GeoGRAphy: Rome – AlGIeRS – SAlvADoR De BAhIA (1959–75) 218 our roundtable—contemporary experimental cinema—was programmed as one of three seminars and events accompanying the screenings scheduled for this year’s edition of cinefuturo, a well-established film event in Bahia’s cultural life. located a few blocks from the pelourinho district, which is known for its historical baroque heritage, sumptuous church architecture, and a dominantly Afro-Brazilian culture that nonetheless continues to be marginalized, the event took place at the beautiful and (given the location) relatively sober Barroquinha church, immediately adjacent to the legendary venue that hosted cinefuturo: the Glauber rocha cultural center. the roundtable conversations were stimulating and generated food for thought. i learned a great deal. Before joining my hosts and festival organizers for lunch, i took another stroll through bustling streets that were already gearing up for carnival—four months ahead of the event! i took a few pictures with my cell phone, emailed them to my wife, who is an anthropologist as well and who had in the past done fieldwork around questions of indigenous media in Brazil. i lazily made my way back to the Glauber rocha center. i arrived a bit ahead of schedule, so i looked around the building. i took the stairs to the roof terrace, intrigued by the international Style architecture of the center and of those modernist edifices immediately facing the building, including the elegant, aerodynamic Sulacap building that distributed the traffic along its curvilinear flanks. halfway up the minimally lit stairs i am greeted by a large poster, carefully hung on the white halls, depicting the last scene from rocha’s 1964 classic Deus e o diabo na terra do sol (Black God, White devil). Antonio das mortes, the film’s storyteller and protagonist, is looking at us. this iconic image,2 i thought to myself, was probably placed there to bless and torment visitors with the possessed saint’s mystical persona. i took another picture of this ghost from the cinematic machine. A shiver went down my spine, wiring my Sunday walk to a larger collective scene innervated by the “tricontinental nervous system.” By now the walk began to feel like an uncanny pilgrimage into the optical, ethnographic, and political unconscious of 1960s visual culture. 1960s? What dreamscape was i crossing? What voices was i hearing? Why should i care for these ghosts, and why do they, in turn, survive with and care about us? i could not help thinking of how that decade was captured and inaugurated by a dangerously seductive literary-political ode to decolonization that, not unlike Antonio das mortes, has also become an interpellative force and iconic iteration that governs our psychic lives and political sensibilities. in 1959, as you may already know, the martiniquais psychiatrist and intellectual frantz fanon gave a famous speech at the Second congress of Black Writers and Artists in rome. the speech began with these words: 2. Another specter surrounding the Glauber center is castro Alves, the great poet of the Brazilian nineteenth century, and an ardent abolitionist. the statue can be seen from the window opening onto the bay. Glauber rocha used to say he was Alves’s reincarnation. i thank rodrigo Sombra for this precious detail. IT DZA BR TARek elhAIk A BloC of SenSATIonS In lIeu of GeoGRAphy: Rome – AlGIeRS – SAlvADoR De BAhIA (1959–75) 219 Colonial domination, because it is total and tends to oversimplify, very soon manages to disrupt in spectacular fashion the cultural life of a conquered people. This cultural obliteration is made possible by the negation of national reality, by new legal relations introduced by the occupying power, by the banishment of the natives and their customs to outlying districts by colonial society, by expropriation, and by the systematic enslaving of men and women. the speech would eventually be transformed into the chapter “on national culture” in The Wretched of the Earth,3 a manifesto written in solidarity for, and as a reflection on, the Algerian War of liberation. fanon’s speech in rome not only synthetized anticolonial sentiments characteristic of the era of decolonization4 but also inaugurated and anticipated the now institutionalized academic field of postcolonial studies, often at the expense of the very tricontinentalism that haunted the venue now engendering my thoughts and collective reminiscences. during the 1960s and 1970s, as is now canonically established, fanon’s speech in rome became an aesthetic leitmotif and a conceptual matrix for the political cinema and militant documentaries of an entire generation of latin American and maghrebi filmmakers. With its (problematic) three-stage psychohistorical process of the “disalienation of the colonized,”5 the speech would not only influence the italian-Algerian collaboration that would culminate in Gillo pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers (1966), but would also function as the structuring principle for Argentine political filmmakers fernando Solanas and octavio Getino’s classic militant documentary The Hour of the Furnaces (1968). the disalienation of the native intellectual outlined in fanon’s speech in rome would also serve as the conceptual matrix for the fabled third World filmmakers meeting held in Algiers in 1973. the Algiers meeting was presided over by Algerian director lamine merbah, who, like other prominent latin American filmmakers present in the Algerian capital, such as the Argentine director fernando Birri,6 had studied at the centro Sperimentale di cinematografia in rome. it is also no trivial coincidence that fanon’s psychodynamic 3. frantz fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. richard philcox (new york, 1963), pp. 145–80. 4. it should be noted that decolonization has different historical purchase and connotation in latin America than it does, for instance, in the context of the various wars of liberation from British, portuguese, Belgian, and french empires during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. With the exception of cuba and puerto rico, most latin American countries had initiated nationbuilding projects in the early nineteenth century, well before African and Arab nations, italy, and Germany. much of the profound misunderstanding between latin American studies and postcolonial studies grows out of this discrepancy, a “delay” which should by no means be framed through the trope of “progress” or a chronological and hierarchical continuum that ranks advanced and developing nations. 5. fanon’s conflation of decolonization with disalienation ought to be interrogated and should not be taken at face value. he was, of course, perceptive in examining the intimate relation between psychic and political life in the context of decolonization, by radically refashioning octave mannoni’s psychology of colonization—see octave mannoni, Prospero and Caliban: The Psychology of Colonization, trans. pamela powesland (new york, 1956), and frantz fanon, “the So-called dependency complex of colonized peoples,” in Black Skin, White Masks, trans. charles lam markmann (new york, 1967), pp. 83–108. the nuance is, in my view, important to remediate, today, the legacy of decolonization, not only beyond the narrative of liberation, as david Scott has observed, but also beyond the concept of alienation. david Scott, Refashioning Futures: Criticism after Postcoloniality (princeton, nJ, 1999). 6. Also in attendance were the cuban Santiago Álvarez and the Bolivian humberto ríos. IT DZA BR TARek elhAIk A BloC of SenSATIonS In lIeu of GeoGRAphy: Rome – AlGIeRS – SAlvADoR De BAhIA (1959–75) 220 dialectic of alienation and disalienation resonated with the vernacular and popular aesthetics of director Salvatore piscelli’s films,7 the official italian guest “observer” at the Algiers meeting. on this balmy Sunday morning in Bahia, i recalled that rome was also where Glauber rocha had lived in the early 1970s and had shot one of his last films. conceived during rocha’s period of exile and estrangement from Brazil, Claro (1975) is a hallucinatory and experimental parody of the function of the political filmmaker during decolonization. it was shot amidst the ruins of Western civilization— amidst the ruins of the city freud had famously used as a topological model of the unconscious. erratically structured and staged against the background of the coliseum, Claro’s long opening sequence begins with an angry white woman, dressed in a poncho, screaming and shouting at the man behind the camera. the choice of a poncho—the material index of indigenous culture—is uncanny given that it belongs to both classic ethnographic and third World militant imaginaries, creating an interesting friction between activist anthropology, indigenous media, and political cinema. As the scene unfolds, a performative simulation shows the woman’s body being trampled by the film director character, played by rocha himself. the aggression intensifies, as does the theatrical score by Brazilian composer heitor villa-lobos. A group of tourists passes by. they are unwittingly recruited as horrified witnesses to the performance. the woman’s body is continuously pushed and rolled on the ground. She screams and proffers insults back to the filmmaker. unintelligible communication dominates the scene. not unlike in carmelo Bene’s maddening experimental theater, the alienation of spectators, witnesses, and participants is total. Although Claro echoed the trope of disalienation and violence ambivalently championed by fanon in rome fifteen years earlier, it nonetheless deployed it with a distinctive understanding of the relationship between form and affect. José Gati’s elegant prose comes to mind: Whatever considerations one could make about these sequences— whatever obvious allegories one can find in the Woman or the man [i.e. Rocha], the oppressed and the oppressor, the colonized and the colonizer—all these categories undergo a process of complication and even confusion. Is that a parody of oppression? What voices do we hear? What is the role of the landscape in the definition of the characters?8 7. for example, the deployment of a combination of Gramscian notions of “organic intellectuals” and ernesto de martino’s ethno-psychiatric and anthropological work: the hiring of local non-professional and professional actors, the use of neapolitan dialect requiring subtitling, and so on. 8. José Gatti, “impersonations of Glauber rocha by Glauber rocha,” in Alisa lebow, ed., Cinema of Me: The Self and Subjectivity in First Person Documentary (london, 2012), pp. 44–56. IT DZA BR TARek elhAIk A BloC of SenSATIonS In lIeu of GeoGRAphy: Rome – AlGIeRS – SAlvADoR De BAhIA (1959–75) 221 the cathexis on the neo-hegelian and psychiatric concept of “alienation” in fanon’s rome speech and its subsequent reappropriation by centro-trained filmmakers from latin America and the maghreb in attendance at the Algiers meetings, reflected and refracted anxieties about a locus classicus of political modernism: the role of the filmmaker and the intellectual in decolonization and postcolonial cultural life. the majority of participants at the Algiers meetings were mainly north Africans and latin Americans,9 and it is those trained at the centro who were most involved in delineating the conceptual terms of the charter of third World filmmakers drafted that same year. All the centro-trained filmmakers in attendance in Algiers were politically attuned to “alienation” as the dominant affective and conceptual mode, echoing in uncanny ways franco Basaglia’s radical deployment of psichiatria democratica.10 Claro, directed by Glauber rocha, 1975. film still, screen grab. photograph tarek elhaik 9. mainly from the host country, Algeria, and latin America. the following year a follow-up meeting, of lesser note, took place in Buenos Aires with more or less the same lineup. As mariano mestman notes: “the most important result of the [Algiers] meeting was the creation of the third World cinema committee with permanent headquarters in Algiers, seeking to create a tricontinental organization for film distribution [. . .]. the project was undoubtedly ambitious, but by that time it could count on several countries which had effective control over their cinema industries and had implemented national cinema policies.” mariano mestman, “from Algiers to Buenos Aires: the third World cinema committee (1973—74),” in New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film 1, no.1 (April 2002), pp. 40–53. 10. Gianni pirelli, radical son of the famous italian industrialist, created the frantz fanon center in milan in the late 1960s. in spite of its short lifespan—it closed in 1972—the center was very active in the dissemination of fanon’s work in italy. See Alice cherki, Frantz Fanon: A Portrait, trans. nadia Benabid (ithaca, ny, 2006), p. 129. IT DZA BR TARek elhAIk A BloC of SenSATIonS In lIeu of GeoGRAphy: Rome – AlGIeRS – SAlvADoR De BAhIA (1959–75) 222 i proceeded to the roof, meandering in the process around two small theaters, a small bookstore, and a cafeteria, encountering along the way two flirtatious and chatty young ushers, before finally reaching a large rectangular bay window that superbly framed the Bahian skyline. i was immediately moved by the sense of equidistance and delicate balance created by the window frame. viewed from the Glauber rocha center, nothing needed to be “provincialized,” as is compulsively championed in certain academic circles. i proceeded to the roof and paused to immerse myself in a frameless view. As pressure gently mounted on my lacrimal glands, i shed a few joyous tears. “i want to move here,” i thought to myself. i pulled my phone once again from my bag and took a carefully crafted image, guided, as it were, by a yearning for the landscape, the singularity of which could not find accommodation in the adjective “tropical,” and well aware that Bahia was home to the cultural and popular movement that would bear the name tropicália during those brutal dictatorship years of the 1960s and 1970s. As my impressions grew stronger in intensity, i simultaneously remembered, as in a vertovian montage, claude lévi-Strauss’s iconic hatred for travel in the wonderful opening sentences of Tristes Tropiques (paris, 1955) and the equally iconic politico-cultural hybridity of the historical Antropofágico and tropicália movements. the dialectic of enthusiasm, pride, and melancholy inherited from the visual, film, and media cultures of the 1960s made way for more nuanced affective constellations. enter joy, wonder, endurance, and potentiality beyond the interminable melancholy and impossible mourning evoked by our invisible cities and intermedial worlds. Glauber rocha’s hallucinatory Claro perhaps came to mind, i thought to myself, because it was a sort of bookend to what ros Gray and Kodwo oshun have poetically and affectionately (albeit, perhaps, too optimistically) called the “ciné-geographies of the militant image.”11 to qualify and come to terms with the 1960s visual culture i was beholding on this walk, i could only think of what deleuze has called a “bloc of sensations.”12 A bloc of sensations to make sense of the material generated by this encounter, its relationship to my research, my pedagogical and curatorial work, my personal queries, and the paper i was to present at our Sweet Sixties symposium two months later in Askhal Alwan in Beirut. As in fiamma montezemolo’s cartographic light box series A Map Is Not a Territory, cuba appears as two luminescent tears. there, the ghost of colonization and decolonizing nationalism is made visible as the painful and bloody preamble to the “aggregates”13 of migration and nomadism that populate and torment our tricontinental scenes. 11. Kodwo eshun and ros Gray, “the militant image: A ciné-Geography,” in Third Text 25, no. 1 (January 2011), pp. 1–12. i am trying to problematize both authors’ faith in the historical dimension of the militant image, not on political or geographical grounds, but on theoretical ones. deploying Alain Badiou’s notion of “restoration” to describe contemporary visual culture and morally judging the contemporary as “condescending” will at best confuse the young reader, unfamiliar with the status of historiography in poststructuralist scholarship (and feuds), and at worst suggest a practice of freedom, the ethical substance of which will inevitably be redemptive, perhaps even messianic, à la Agamben. the “contemporary” is not as disenchanted as the authors suggest, although it does of course require a combination of fine-grained ethnographic and archival research to locate those images survivantes didi-huberman speaks of (see note 1). 12. Gilles deleuze and félix Guattari, What is Philosophy? trans. hugh tomlinson and Graham Burchell (new york, 1994), p. 164. 13. Gilles deleuze and félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian massumi (minneapolis, mn, 1987), p. 380. IT DZA BR TARek elhAIk A BloC of SenSATIonS In lIeu of GeoGRAphy: Rome – AlGIeRS – SAlvADoR De BAhIA (1959–75) 223 indeed, there was something here that exceeded the figurative impulse of the ciné-geographies of the militant image. to be sure, this bloc of sensations emanated from these historical forms of solidarity. yet, it inherited these solidarities beyond ontologically determined political forms, beyond the enthusiastic rituals of national communitas we have grown accustomed to through decades of (official and militant) nationalist pedagogy and éducation sentimentale. nor was this bloc of sensations mere internationalism—if by internationalism we mean the coming together of communities hinging on a euphoric transcultural form of relationship between various nationals animated by patriotic love and commitment to their respective national cultures. no, this was rather a tricontinental scene that exceeded historical tricontinentalism with its vertical parade of (mainly male and macho) leaders with blood on their hands, on the one hand, and, on the other, horizontal and equally nationalist militantism with its seductively designed slogans and moralist overtones that could not be dissipated by its genuinely sincere poetry. this bloc of sensations brought back something more oblique, neither horizontal nor vertical: a diagonal that connects through what the mexican essayist carlos monsiváis calls family resemblances—“aires de familia.”14 Salvador de Bahia seen from the Glauber rocha center was a scene in the sense freud talked about: an opsis, a stage, that could have actualized diagonal potentialities if fanon’s speech in rome had put less emphasis on national culture as the supreme cultural form, and fanon’s readers had seized more seriously on his complexities, ambivalences, and malaise, rather than on his thumic nationalist prescriptions; and if we had also, perhaps, read James Baldwin’s essays15 with equal passion, as a tricontinental source of inspiration, in lieu of or together with fanon’s and Grupo cine liberación’s declarations. had we done so, i naively thought to myself, we might then have inherited these visual cultures differently and seen the world less as a sequence of colonial mimicries leading to even more resentful provincializing gestures, and more as the work of both painful and radiant aires de familia. these landscapes and vistas seemed to come from something well beyond the subjective and objective spheres that could be affixed to “tarek the ethnographer of visual and film culture”—something inchoate that went beyond the parochialism of subjectivity and personal feelings, but which nonetheless did not allow (pace deleuze) the impersonal to erode the personal. these landscapes, as the montage of the coliseum and the poncho in Claro powerfully suggests, seem like revenants from another scene, a tricontinental scene that condensed an optical, ethnographic, and political unconscious that was profoundly collective. they activated something deeply imprinted, something i thought i had shed, made peace with, and left behind in a movement of deterritorialization begun years ago in the anthropological and 14. carlos monsiváis, Aires de familia: Cultura y sociedad en América Latina [family resemblances: culture and Society in latin America] (Barcelona, 2000). 15. this particular point is explored in tarek elhaik and dominic Willsdon, “tricontinental drifts,” in Apsara diQuinzio, ed., Six Lines of Flight: Shifting Geographies in Contemporary Art (Berkeley, cA, 2012), pp. 193–99. IT DZA BR TARek elhAIk A BloC of SenSATIonS In lIeu of GeoGRAphy: Rome – AlGIeRS – SAlvADoR De BAhIA (1959–75) 224 cinematic archives. this revenant was not expressed in the lacanian16 sense of a terrifying force that erupts in the familiar, nor did it have the flavor of the “return of the repressed.” (freud had indeed spent a great deal of etymological labor to elaborate his inquiétante étrangeté, a concept he took a great deal of care to nuance.) Aires de familia, that peculiar form of difference, emerged in that moment as the Achilles’ heels of our societies of control and the moralism of decolonizing nationalism. A portal onto a non-exchangist form of relation with “spectral nationalities”17 that release complex repetitions. A more tolerable way to live: to live with the symptomatic repetitions that guide our research desires in the visual, film, and media culture of the 1960s. the task of scholarship-as-curating is, perhaps, to create the parallelism of these mutually contaminated modernities in the interstices opened by the extrañeza18 of these family resemblances and affinities. tricontinentalism can no longer be approached only in historicist terms (new and old), as the historical moment surrounding the material cultures and actual events taking place in havana in January 1966, but also as a potentiality that circulates and that, from time to time, actualizes itself across ethnographically and cinematically generated blocs of sensations that can thus be genuinely transmitted pedagogically and curatorially. perhaps these “incurable images” not only erupt in our collective, optical, ethnographic, and political unconscious but also enable iterations that produce an excess, a network of contagious family resemblances that cannot be curated in the strict, professional sense of the term. What if we considered these images, ethically speaking, as the point of departure for curatorial perseverance and pedagogical struggle? As a trace of a personal and collective escape, of a state of permanent immobility troubled by perpetual movement? to experience and grasp interconnectedness without a “craving for generality,”19 as Wittgenstein says, one has to think about the migration of forms and the borders these forms cross through the concept of family resemblances. on this balmy and sunny Sunday in Bahia, some of the pictures i took could just as well have been a scene from the perspective of the beholder gazing at the sea in Beirut, eerily reminiscent of Walid raad’s The Dead Weight of a Quarrel Hangs, or they could have been a scene around the downtown train station area in rabat—the conservative capital city where i grew up—or for those of you who are familiar with it, the malecón in havana. As paul rabinow soberly notes: Thus, while the principles of urban planning in morocco or Brazil are the same, the well-planned city in morocco will by necessity differ from one in Brazil in accordance with the specificities of the histories, topographies, cultures, and politics of these places. The art of urban planning and of a healthy modern society lies precisely in the orchestration of the general and the particular.20 IT DZA BR TARek elhAIk A BloC of SenSATIonS In lIeu of GeoGRAphy: Rome – AlGIeRS – SAlvADoR De BAhIA (1959–75) 225 Family Resemblances, 2012. photograph tarek elhaik 16. indeed, the aires de familia i am exploring here are the joyful underside, the positive and affirmative points of resistance to and a line of flight in what lacan would call the point de capiton: “a perfectly ‘natural’ and ‘familiar’ situation is denatured, becomes ‘uncanny,’ loaded with horror and threatening possibilities.” Slavoj Žižek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture (cambridge, mA, 1991), p. 88. Aires de familia has affinities with irit rogoff’s elegant notion of “uncanny geography” in Terra Infirma: Geography’s Visual Culture (london, 2000), p. 7. it is the affective modality of joy that i am seeking to underscore, beyond the terror and threats we all experience throughout our border crossings and confrontations with checkpoints. 17. peng cheah, Spectral Nationality: Passages of Freedom from Kant to Postcolonial Literatures of Liberation (new york, 2003). 18. A complex Spanish word, extrañeza’s generous etymology suggests strangeness, uncanniness, alienation, foreignness, surprise, amazement, wonder, and more. 19. ludwig Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Books: Preliminary Studies for the Philosophical Investigations (new york, 1965), pp. 17–18. 20. paul rabinow, “on the Archeology of late modernity,” in Essays on the Anthropology of Reason (princeton, nJ, 1996), p. 59. IT DZA BR TARek elhAIk A BloC of SenSATIonS In lIeu of GeoGRAphy: Rome – AlGIeRS – SAlvADoR De BAhIA (1959–75) fiamma montezemolo, A Map is Not a Territory, 2012. digital duratrans on light box. courtesy the artist 226 IT DZA BR TARek elhAIk A BloC of SenSATIonS In lIeu of GeoGRAphy: Rome – AlGIeRS – SAlvADoR De BAhIA (1959–75) 227 iconic pasts / Aniconic futures in his moving ethnography of a contemporary harki21 community in france, anthropologist vincent crapanzano notes that the sense of passionate solidarity he had felt during the 1950s and 1960s toward the Algerian War of independence often attached itself to a pantheon of legendary figures from fanon to Sartre, who, in retrospect, had too often merely performed the formative yet disappointing function of assembling “icons in the narrative called finding oneself.”22 i have unwittingly done something similar here—namely, wrestled with some of these iconic repetitions. uncanny images of all sorts populate and obstruct the tricontinental scene we continuously seek access to. from che Guevara’s legendary speeches in Algiers between 1962 and 1965 to octavio Getino and fernando Solanas’s mention of frantz fanon in the opening credit sequence of The Hour of the Furnaces, these iconic images seem to resurface when one attempts to disseminate audiovisual material, until they all but disappear in the optical, ethnographic, and political unconscious of political modernism. And political modernism, that peculiar mode of convergence of aesthetics, politics, (inter)nationalist cultures, and the invention of peoples and collective subjects in the throes of revolutionary struggles, seems to incessantly invite us to go for long walks through its ruins. like many colleagues at the Sweet Sixties symposium, i am interested in the articulations and transmission of political modernism and its primary scenes. like many i am hoping that, during the course of our intense encounters with iterative assemblages in contemporary visual culture, we will come across a glimmer of the future perfect, of what might be, or rather what will have been, a glimmer of those complex repetitions Gilles deleuze talks about. these images would not only pervert and refract the transmission of genealogical material but would also enable a form of continuity that learns from ruptures. i write here with the belief that complex genealogies yet to be imagined and created can be found in the contemporary when and where we least expect them. A tricontinental scene is a kind of multimedia stage on which these simple and complex repetitions coexist, the stage where failures are nothing more, but also nothing less, than experiences of the impossible, as well as missed encounters that have already taken place. the linkages and network of images i have invoked and have been summoned by here are attempts to provincialize not only europe and the united States but also the maghreb and latin America.23 indeed, the images and events within this tricontinental scene and visual culture of decolonization (film journals and collectives, third cinema manifestos, events such as the panaf of 1969, powerful political posters from the tricontinental conference in havana, televised public speeches, such as Guevara’s in Algiers, 21. harki is the name given to Algerians who collaborated with the french colonial administration. 22. vincent crapanzano, The Harkis: The Wound That Never Heals (chicago, il, 2011), p. 2. 23. Alberto moreiras speaks for instance of the hope, today, of a second order latin Americanism unmoored from the nationalist fervor of the 1920s–1930s and 1960s–1970s in the region, a second latin Americanism that would eventually break with regionalism once and for all. IT DZA BR TARek elhAIk A BloC of SenSATIonS In lIeu of GeoGRAphy: Rome – AlGIeRS – SAlvADoR De BAhIA (1959–75) 228 images of a collective expression of grief following the death of charismatic political leaders, and so on) have begun to cool down into the “practico-inert,” to use a Sartre expression.24 this tricontinental scene is ironically a scene in which even third cinema—and Glauber rocha needless to say—have long begun to look official and mainstream. We have to be vigilant about this. So, this delicate, tricontinental balancing act requires that we continuously interrogate ourselves, as we struggle with the form of images we impatiently celebrate. What we need is not only more and more refined historiographical conceptualizations but also tricontinental ethnographies of contemporary visual, film, and media culture. i have tried that modestly here, as an anthropologist and film curator. Salvador – rome – Algiers has been a good assemblage to activate and wrestle with this balancing act. i have only begun doing this work, this ethnographic and curatorial work as a form of working-through. i am hoping that, in the future, i will further investigate a period that roughly spans 1959 to 1975, when rome, Salvador de Bahia, and Algiers were the filmtheoretical epicenter, toward which converged, and out of which emerged anew, an internationalist visual and film culture that connected, specifically, latin American and maghrebi political filmmakers who had studied at the centro Sperimentale di cinematografia during the 1950s and 1960s. researching these tricontinental assemblages would make significant contributions25 to our understanding of the transmission of modernist aesthetics in transnational circuits that have not yet properly been investigated. in my view, this form of ethnographic research, curatorial working-through, and historiographical conceptualization would have to initiate a much-needed dialogue and highlight tensions between latin American studies, postcolonial theory based on the experience of decolonization in the maghreb and South Asia, and ongoing historiographies of neorealist aesthetics and film culture in italy after World War ii. With this form of curatorial working-through, other geographies, with different clinical and critical capacities, with different remedial futures, will emerge. And perhaps, if we endure them, they might function as a treatment for the incurable malaise of contemporary life. 24. Jean-paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, trans. Alan Sheridan-Smith (london, 1976). 25. i am particularly indebted to the curatorial and historiographical work of masha Salazkina, luca caminati, ros Gray and Kodwo eshun, Jesse lerner, rasha Salti, and mariano mestman. Il 229 Some ArchitecturAl conSeQuenceS of politicAl ideAS by yehuda e. Safran it is not often that we reflect on the great formal contributions made by architects who have clearly staked out a political position. for some reason the protagonists on the right have attracted a great deal of attention, while their opposite numbers on the left have been, and remain, in large part unsung. this essay will focus on several architects who were engaged in shaping the typology of the architecture of the communes in israel in the 1960s and earlier. most of these architects, some of whom were painters, were educated in vienna and Berlin and arrived in palestine with very little actual experience. they are not as well known as erich mendelsohn, for example, but their contributions are no less important in certain respects. i will elaborate on the relationship between ways of life and forms of architecture as part of my thesis concerning genuine innovation in the aftermath of World War ii, innovation that took place in opposition to indifferent production on a very large scale. in addition, i will touch upon the work of three Brazilian architects: vilanova Artigas, lina Bo Bardi, and paulo mendes da rocha; as a way of drawing a comparison between the architecture of the communes and works in an urban environment. throughout, the optimism of those years can be seen clearly in these architects’ designs, undertakings, and the quality of their thought. Il yehuDA e. SAfRAn Some ARChITeCTuRAl ConSequenCeS of polITICAl IDeAS 230 it is important to understand what we are actually looking at. it is not sufficient to merely enumerate phenomena; what is required is better understanding. marx’s concept of a general intellect is useful here; no individual effort can be considered outside the framework of a given time and place. But in reality the story is more complex and stretches back a long way with far-reaching hidden complexities. one such complexity is concealed in the word and name palestine, which was invented by the romans. At the time of roman emperor hadrian, the Jews were exiled from their home after the destruction of the temple. it may well be that hadrian did not conceive of the name himself, but that someone in his entourage had the provocative idea to call this territory palestine in order to affirm the end of Jewish identity. the word palestine is taken from philistine / plištim, the name of the coastal people for which very few archeological remains have been found. they were the local tribe who were at constant war with the twelve tribes, as the stories of Samson tell. the word itself therefore carries connotations of invasion and poor defense. in contrast to what is commonly held, it is the concept of history, of relatively recent origin, which is the real chimera. the idea of history as we understand it is a total misconception. in the original Greek, ἱστορία (history) simply means an inquiry; it does not describe any trajectory in time. this temporal dimension was invented by a late old testament prophet in the book of daniel, written in Aramaic. As is known, daniel was a prophet who was in exile in Babylon. the idea that people in exile might entertain hope is the key idea to consider in understanding the introduction of the temporal element: the future will be unlike the past and it will evolve in time. this is when time entered into history. for ancient Greek historians, there was no idea of time as linear since their own time was circular. the West has inherited a christian idea of time. if we are fortunate, we may be able to overcome it and develop a metric more suitable to life on earth, which, as nietzsche observed, is a mere repetition on a large scale. each and every individual life repeats itself. human repetition, as was rightly pointed out by Berardi, follows marx’s idea of the general intellect. each and every person can exercise his or her intellect, which must be commensurate with an average. however, the paradox, irony and, ultimately, the pain of the general intellect is that while it appears best through individual manifestation, this individual manifestation requires a withdrawal from society. rarely is an individual invention or creation in the life of the mind accepted immediately. consider the case of marconi, credited now as the inventor of radio. the citizens of his own town thought he was out of his mind when he first explained his wireless telegraph machine. he was even placed in a mental asylum for a period, Il yehuDA e. SAfRAn Some ARChITeCTuRAl ConSequenCeS of polITICAl IDeAS 231 before the German physicist hertz corroborated the reasonableness of his idea and marconi became a celebrity. the same went for einstein, though luckily max planck immediately realized the importance of einstein’s 1905 relativity paper. Still, to the world at large he was unknown for another fifteen years. it was only when there was something to see, a corresponding empirical observation made during a solar eclipse, that his name became widely accepted and celebrated. ernst mach, an important physicist who inspired not only fellow physicists but also the Secessionists, found confirmation of belief in sensual impressions and held sensation as the sole source of human knowledge. it was mach’s teachings, though, that prevented him from recognizing the validity of the relativity paper. in fact, he rejected it, and by the time observations and impressions confirmed the theory mach was already dead. mach was the godfather of Wolfgang pauli, an Austrian physicist who became one of the key figures in the development of quantum mechanics. living in America at the time, he was also one of the very few physicists to describe the scientists participating in the manhattan project as “gangsters.” heisenberg was able to make the bomb, but he and his friends managed to convince the political authorities in Germany that it would take too many resources and if they succeeded it would be too late for the anticipated victory. they were therefore left in peace. After the war with Germany ended, they were in an isolated farm north of cambridge when they heard on the radio that the Americans had exploded the bomb in hiroshima. According to heisenberg, they were all in shock and tears on the floor. the community of physicists was very small, and naturally they were all friends, at least before the war. franz ollendorff, a former student of einstein’s and a world authority on electromagnetism, was a high school teacher of mine in palestine. i was born in palestine, which then became the state of israel during my childhood. one of the conflicts i saw the consequences of firsthand was the Suez crisis and War of 1956, between egypt and israel, france and Britain. in this case, as always, the consequences of war were not only political. in return for israel’s collaboration with france on their scheme to topple egyptian president Gamal Abdel nasser, israel received french support for its nuclear program. At the time, we read in the local newspaper that our teacher, franz ollendorff, had resigned from the nuclear program committee in israel. of course, the report did not say why, and neither could he, even during all the hours he spent with us in which he said we could discuss anything we wished. At home, however, my parents had many foreign newspapers that stated clearly that he had resigned because he was against the development of nuclear arms. By way of retribution, he was deprived of his research budget. Il yehuDA e. SAfRAn Some ARChITeCTuRAl ConSequenCeS of polITICAl IDeAS 232 the degree to which political ideas or political thinking can create and contribute directly or indirectly to the development of a visual language and particularly to architecture is what is of interest here. the forces that could have become progressive and supportive for social and environmental transformation have begun to change rapidly. in the early 1960s, the state and its administration assumed complete power in opposition to workers’ movements and civil society. A significant number of architects arrived in palestine before 1940, many from vienna, some of whom were part of what was a kind of utopian movement. this movement of communes was meant to be not only utopian but also politically very leftist, or at least, a different kind of left. At the time, the left was ideologically divided between purely utopian ideas related to how man could live more happily (largely the illusion of a certain marxist point of view), and, on the other hand, a very nationalistic idealism. the idea of a certain progression was dominant: there should first be a nationalistic revival and only then a move to the next step in the long path toward the socialist revolution. Within the left, there was also the idea that the conflict between the palestinians and Jews in palestine should be resolved similarly using such steps. Growing up there, it was clear to me very quickly that this was an illusion, an illusion again connected with a certain historical conception. if there was a revolution to come, it should be enacted now and here, rather than following such a miserable view of history. my disillusionment was so great that by 1965 i had already left israel. nevertheless, living in one of the communes as a child (only later did i move to the school where i met ollendorff), i was among people who generally believed in an alternative way of life. i remember listening to discussions between the adults precisely about a new typology of buildings in order to accommodate our lifestyle. even though these conversations were above my head at the time, they still contributed to my formation, as did Johanan Simon, an important painter and student of max Beckmann who had his studio next door. Arieh Sharon, the most important architect in palestine, state planner at the time, was one of the founders of the kibbutz where i was raised. he was committed to the ideal of communal life; he was sent by the kibbutz to be a student of the Bauhaus. there were collective dining rooms for adults and children (separate), and schools where children studied adjacent to their houses. it was a different kind of life, which needed a different and new kind of architecture. leopold Krakauer was one architect who built such spaces and was clearly a product of the viennese architectural culture of the 1920s. one of the founders of this kibbutz, rudi Kleinman, who hebraicized his name (to rudi Zaire), as did many immigrants at the time in israel, wrote a memoir called From Vienna to Il yehuDA e. SAfRAn Some ARChITeCTuRAl ConSequenCeS of polITICAl IDeAS 233 Gan Shmuel—one of the early communes. in his old age he missed the landscape of moravia. it is clear that the dream that these people were trying to live up to was in part really developed in central europe. A member of our commune was the editor of marx’s writings in hebrew, Simcha Aurbach, whose name in hebrew was or (meaning light), and who originally came from poland. there is a model of a project for one of the kibbutzim by another architect who studied at the Bauhaus, munia Weintraub. he changed his name to Gitai and was the father of the quite well-known filmmaker Amos Gitai, and he was also a student of mies van der rohe. there is also an architect who is still alive called Zvi hecker. together with Alfred neumann, another architect who studied in vienna and worked in the office of peter Behrens, he designed a town hall in hulon, a small town outside tel Aviv. the radical geometry of the building is an example of the new version of the idealism i have indicated—it can be also be seen in one of his housing projects outside of tel Aviv. Somewhat later, one of Zvi hecker’s most important works is the Jewish elementary school in Berlin, completed in 1995. the types of buildings—collective dining halls, collective houses for children, laundries, workers’ housing in the cities, schools—are an echo of the mega-structures that were one of the typologies developed everywhere in the 1960s. the political vision of the time required not only different buildings but also a different kind of planning. for example, the planning of kibbutzim in israel demonstrates the extent to which political thinking affects form and concepts of typology. there are cases in which there is an identification of political thinking with architectural form that is totally unjustified, and there are others in which it is entirely justified. the rationalists in italy were mysteriously able to function under mussolini with great success. So much so that after the war, when Bruno Zevi came back to rome from harvard he felt obliged to fight against any rationalist approach. Zevi clearly took a dogmatic approach, arguing that since rationalist architecture could not be considered unrelated to the regime of mussolini it was now unacceptable. in fact, Zevi advocated something impossible for italy, which was the prairie style very much in the spirit of frank lloyd Wright. By contrast, there are the buildings done by vilanova Artigas, lina Bo Bardi, and paulo mendes da rocha, who is still alive and is working in São paulo. these are parallels to the efforts in israel in the 1960s, inasmuch as they too were inspired by a certain political thinking. this is not so important in the case of oscar niemeyer, but in the case of the paulista it is very clear that without their political agenda they would not have been able to go as far as they did in their version of brutalism. this is particularly visible in projects like pompeía by Bo Bardi, the School of Architecture Il yehuDA e. SAfRAn Some ARChITeCTuRAl ConSequenCeS of polITICAl IDeAS 234 and urban planning by vilanova Artigas, paulo mendes da rocha’s sports complex and more recently the sculpture museum in São paulo. the question remains, however, whether the kind of political thinking that was inspired largely by the left in the 1960s was helpful or not. When we consider the large housing block project in israel by munio Gitai Weinraub, we could argue that it was socially and politically progressive, even if the results were not always very flattering. in many cases, buildings that were inspired by such thinking did not really succeed, having developed with great singularity even as a result of a sincere effort to achieve homogeneity in parts. corviale, outside of rome, is a building block about eight hundred meters long, in which some six thousand people were to live. only recently was it restored to some of its original qualities. le mirail in toulouse is another example. Some architects, most famously Alison and peter Smithson, argue that the problem was that the people who were placed into these buildings had completely different desires, dreams, and expectations to their designers. they were clearly “the wrong people.” their aspirations were much more modest—a red roof and lace curtains—and what they received was in opposition to their own sentiment, so much so that they have ended up destroying these buildings. two other important examples are robin hood Gardens in london by the Smithsons, and le corbusier’s unité d’habitation in marseille, which was renamed “maison de fada” or “the fool’s house” by the local people. this housing remained conflictual for a long time, a state of affairs that only changed when the professional classes recognized it as something far superior to anything else on the housing market and began to move in. the place changed dramatically, so much so that the people who moved in often did not understand the qualities that made le corbusier’s building what it was. they began to add pieces of marble and other precious materials in order to elevate it. All too frequently, the ability or failure of individuals, families, and society at large to benefit from the art and architecture of a given period is something that is poorly understood, if at all. i was invited to teach at Goldsmith’s college, at the university of london, in 1972. Goldsmith’s was not yet the college that it is now known to be. thanks to the vision of one man, John thompson, a group of fifteen new recruits were brought in to reinvent the art school. my mission at the college in the early years was to introduce theory into the studio, a concept that derived from the 1960s and was inspired in part by marcel duchamp’s conceptual thinking, his anti-retinal thesis. in the early 1970s there was no social subject, no public to buy new art, nobody to identify with it. After all, most people who buy art do not buy it for what they see in the works, they buy it as a social practice. After just a few years we already had gained the cali- Il yehuDA e. SAfRAn Some ARChITeCTuRAl ConSequenCeS of polITICAl IDeAS 235 ber of extraordinary artists that we became known for in the 1980s, except for the difference in the political climate, that is, thatcher did not yet exist. As soon as she came to power, the people who made her what she became, such as the Saatchi brothers, also became the new social bearers of art, and in turn, their demand and interest were what made it so expensive, so alluring, and so prominent, occupying such a great place in the cultural imagination of the period. they were a new class who could not identify with earlier art because it belonged to another social strata. these newly rich supporters of thatcher’s regime gave rise to this new art because they needed a new art, and it became what it became as a result. the art inspired by our school became known as new art. yet, at Goldsmith’s we were inspired by something much deeper and more comprehensive. in 1969, i began my thesis on empathy and embodiment from a phenomenological point of view, which was hardly a popular topic at the time and unheard of in england. part of the reason it was so little known was due to protestantism. phenomenology, above all, had one of its major points of genesis in the context of vienna, thanks to franz Brentano—who ran away to vienna from a German university because he was more catholic than the pope. he objected to the new dogmas of the pope’s infallibility and immaculate conception that were introduced to strengthen the political power of the church. When Brentano came to vienna, his teaching consisted of the doctrine of intentionality, which was a medieval intellectual discipline that catholic intellectuals relied on. phenomenology, the new phenomenology, not the hegelian but the husserlian version, was invented by the Jew edmond husserl, who became protestant out of convenience, yet introduced a catholic discipline. phenomenology took hold largely in catholic countries, especially in france, and later on in America, where catholics still have some intellectual power. the english translations of books on phenomenology all came out of publishing houses connected to catholic universities. perhaps this example could add to our understanding of the relationship between political and ideological realities on the one hand and art and architecture on the other. if philosophy is deeply connected to political and social convictions and religious beliefs, there is no doubt this would apply to architecture as well. But, just as W.G. Sebald’s hero Austerlitz in the novel of the same name finds it exceedingly difficult to account for a given architecture of the city in terms of the life lived there, the same holds for the examples offered here. nevertheless, it is worth reflecting on these predicaments, as they are reformulated in every age, everywhere. We need to bring our reflections closer to the events under consideration. this cannot occur without rehearsing our concepts on comparable situations in different times and places. Il yehuDA e. SAfRAn Some ARChITeCTuRAl ConSequenCeS of polITICAl IDeAS 236 Il yehuDA e. SAfRAn Some ARChITeCTuRAl ConSequenCeS of polITICAl IDeAS 237 Il yehuDA e. SAfRAn Some ARChITeCTuRAl ConSequenCeS of polITICAl IDeAS 238 Il yehuDA e. SAfRAn Some ARChITeCTuRAl ConSequenCeS of polITICAl IDeAS 239 pS 240 the militAnt chApter in cinemA by mohanad yaqubi in cinematic terms two films form the dividing line between the 1950s and the 1960s: Breathless by Jean luc Godard and Shadows by John cassavetes. Both films were made at the end of the 1950s and distributed in the early 1960s. Besides the fact that both of these films were debut feature films that launched their directors’ cinematic careers, they also introduced the public space into cinema history, an element that became a key topic of the 1960s—the regaining of the space through public involvement, as people fought for social justice within a context of international solidarity. in Godard’s film, michel, the main character, steals a car from a french general in marseille, declaring disobedience to the state that has justified the colonization of Algeria. he runs the streets of paris freely, reclaiming the right to be filmed at any time, an act that broke the sacred rule enshrining cinema as a place of the imagination, only created in the studio. pS mohAnAD yAquBI The mIlITAnT ChApTeR In CInemA 241 cassavetes went a bit further with this idea of real people making real films. he expanded the boundaries of the cinematic medium to emancipate the actors, who were allowed to “move” freely in public spaces— museums, squares, parks, and bars. At the same time, the use in Shadows of a cast of actors from different racial backgrounds broke the rules of commercial cinema, which had racist attitudes toward the black and hispanic communities, and reflected the struggles for social justice that marked the following era. Although these two films cannot be considered political in comparison to what would come after, they paved the way for a film practice that embraced real-world topics, and produced an aesthetics that was later adopted in political cinema. the 1960s witnessed the birth of many political and social movements all around the globe, from cuba to Japan, not only in the anticolonial struggle in third World countries but also in the civil rights and social justice movements in europe and the uSA. these were powered by a range of thinkers whose work was having an enormous impact inside the universities where many student movements started. Among these influences were mao’s Little Red Book and the ideas of frantz fanon and régis debray, who was a professor in havana in the 1960s and is known for his critical theory of the long-term transmission of cultural meaning. this is how Alan Bernstein of the london film School remembers the period: people said sociology could only justify itself if it responded to these forces and these movements, and similarly, and with even more justice in some ways, people were saying cinema could only justify itself if it responded to these thoughts. There was a strong sense of how cultural production and work could change the world, in whatever pS mohAnAD yAquBI The mIlITAnT ChApTeR In CInemA 242 area this production took place. So this wasn’t specific to cinema alone, and within almost every area of the struggle there were adventurous filmmakers who believed that cinema was a tool of social and political change, a way to change the world by changing the perspective from which we see it.1 the Black power movement produced newsreel, an American filmmakers’ collective; may 68 changed the face of france and influenced the direction of many filmmakers, creating a number of different groups; the Japanese “landscape theory” cinema group emerged from leftist movements fighting Americanization and capitalism in Japan; and many other emerging cinema groups coming from different African and latin American contexts developed concepts about the role of cinema in society. in 1968, it was the normal choice for young graduate filmmakers living in Amman to establish a film unit. in an era when the most influential events in modern Arab history were taking place, a complex of ideologies was interacting and percolating at the same time: Arab nationalism, several models of socialism, communism, the muslim Brotherhood, anticolonialism, class struggle, and women’s movements. Against such a background, we can see the palestine film unit (pfu) as a normal expression of the period, a film group that became the cinematic arm of the palestinian liberation organization (plo), placing its faith in the revolution and its development. By the end of 1967, three young filmmakers had crossed paths in Amman. they were mustafa Abu Ali, hani Jawharieh, and Sulafa Jadallah. Abu Ali and Jawharieh had attended the london film School between 1964 and 1967. the school was known for drawing inspiration from russian film schools, social realism, and italian neorealism.2 the uK was coming out of 1. Alan Bernstein (head of studies at the london film School), in discussion with the author (london, october 2012). 2. Ben Gibson (current director of the london film School and former head of production at the British film institute), in discussion with the author (london, october 2012). pS mohAnAD yAquBI The mIlITAnT ChApTeR In CInemA 243 the postwar depression, and the atmosphere in london was changing. it was the time of the Beatles, and many American intellectuals and students were living in the city, mainly to dodge the military draft and avoid being sent to the war in vietnam. many independent cinemas held late-night and all-night shows, screening anything from classics to the more contemporary cinematic forms such as the french nouvelle vague. it was a period when student movements were growing stronger and began to organize themselves so as to push for political and social changes. during the Six day War in 1967, Abu Ali was in london. devastated by the distance from palestine and an event that would become the crux of modern Arab history, he followed the news as israel defeated four Arab armies—overcoming Syria, egypt, Jordan, and iraq—and occupied the remainder of palestine. meanwhile, Jawharieh, who had finished his studies in london and returned to Jordan to work for the staterun Jordanian tv, was on the east Bank of the Jordan river, immersed in the mass of people weighed down by all that they could carry of their possessions. he filmed the crowd of bodies crossing the destroyed Allenby Bridge into Jordan to escape the war, and, looking through the viewfinder of his camera, he witnessed the moment that a people became refugees. L’Olivier, directed by Groupe cinéma vincennes, 1976. film still. original footage from hani Jawharieh, June 1976. courtesy the directors pS mohAnAD yAquBI The mIlITAnT ChApTeR In CInemA 244 pS mohAnAD yAquBI The mIlITAnT ChApTeR In CInemA 245 Sulafa Jadallah and mustafa Abu Ali in front of a burnt-out tank after AlKarameh. photographer unknown. WAfA agency Sulafa Jadallah, originally from nablus, graduated in 1964 from the high institute of cinema in cairo, where she studied cinematography and was the first Arab woman to become a cinematographer. At the time the palestinian Student union in cairo was becoming a stronghold of political activity and had sown the seeds for future revolutionary political movements. Jadallah was active in the union and joined Al-fatah,3 the largest of the organizations, to photograph fighters before they headed into battle. these images were to be used in posters commemorating the fighters if they were martyred. later on, in 1967, Khalil al-Wazir, a palestinian leader and one of the founders of Al-fatah, asked Jadallah to establish a photography unit in Amman. the unit office was called the “Kitchen,” simply because the lab was set up in the kitchen of an apartment that was a secret operations office. in the Kitchen, photographs were developed alongside combatants making bombs and planning military operations. Jawharieh and Abu Ali joined the unit, which would later develop into the palestine film unit (pfu). Besides their day-to-day work at the tv station, they used the professional equipment at their disposal to film some secret activities for the revolution. At that moment, the idea of forming a film group was taking shape, along with an awareness of the role of images in building a national identity. Between 1965 and 1967, palestinian secret guerrilla organizations were building up revolutionary momentum. militant operations were conducted in the occupied territories and carried out from Jordan. in 1968 israel invaded Jordanian territory near the border and moved to destroy the palestinian military training camps. on march 21, they reached the village of AlKarameh, where they were met by palestinian guerrillas offering resistance. After hours of fighting, a number of israeli soldiers were killed, and tanks were destroyed. the israeli army was forced to withdraw. the sense of defeat that had settled over the Arab world after the Six day War had stripped the Arab people of any hopes they had had of ending Zionist colonialism in palestine. israel seemed invincible, a superpower. in Al-Karameh a small group of guerrilla fighters made a crack in this illusion, a crack that brought back hope. 3. the palestinian national liberation movement. 4. Jean-luc Godard, in Godard in America, dir. ralph thanhauser (1970), http://lockerz.com/u/20913170/ decalz/9687175/godard_in_america_1970_ (accessed october 29, 2013). 5. fedayeen, which literally means “those who sacrifice,” is the palestinian name for freedom fighters. 6. A palestinian leader and cofounder of Al-fatah. [It] was the first victory over Israel ever achieved by Arab people, and not by the regular army but by the palestinian fighters. There were about five hundred palestinian fighters in Al-karameh village, and [. . .], Israel wanted to give them a lesson, so they massed twenty thousand soldiers and intend to crush, definitely, the palestinians. And then the fatah—and there was only fatah—decided not to withdraw, because they needed a political victory, [. . .] and it was the first time they resisted, and the Israelis lost a lot of people and withdrew.4 Zarif, palestinian resistance fighter, Sidon, lebanon, 1970. photograph hashem el madani. Studio Shehrazade, collection Aif / hashem el madani. Arab image foundation the news came out very fast. international media wanted to know who was behind this tactical defeat of the israeli army, and even Time magazine used the story for the cover of its next issue. the images that were produced and distributed afterward put the palestinian struggle in the spotlight, and images of palestinian fedayeen5 and a people in revolution filled the international mass media. the amount of exposure the pfu gained after AlKarameh indicated the power and importance of the images they were producing, and the huge number of requests for their images helped establish them very quickly. they had to organize their team, find a place to work, and get more cameras and more enlargers—they even got a 16 mm camera as a present from Abu Jihad (the nickname of Khalil al-Wazir).6 As more people joined the revolution, more people joined the pfu, and hani started to organize what he pS mohAnAD yAquBI The mIlITAnT ChApTeR In CInemA 246 called “militant filmmaking workshops,” a mix of lectures ranging from basic camerawork and maoist political analysis to the role of the image in the people’s war. the Al-Karameh event happened almost a month before the events of may 68 in france, introducing a new perspective into political life in france, while also developing a new approach to positioning cinema in the capitalist world. With a heritage of socially effective solidarity movements—solidarity with Algeria, vietnam, and several African struggles—the palestinian palestine film unit logo, sketch hani revolution found a central place as one of the most Jawharieh, photograph Sami Said. courtesy hind Jawharieh current issues among the may 68 events. the images that the pfu produced about the palestinian revolution were present at the events in the Sorbonne and other public spaces. While the pro-Zionist students were trying to promote the kibbutz as a successful communal model, palestinian and Arab students were showing hani Jawharieh’s images, and clips from Abu Ali’s film Palestinian Rights. these images later went on to unions, taken there by students, and from unions to factories and strikers, for the long nights of sit-ins. films about social struggles around the world were projected and discussed by the workers at screenings organized by filmmakers. it was in this climate that different film groups started to form. While researching the influence of the internationally changing 1968 scene on the newly formed film group of the palestinian revolution, i came across the name of Jean-pierre olivier de Sardan as one of the first filmmakers in france to make a film about the palestinian revolution. In 1967 and 1968, our group, Gauche prolétarienne, reinvented mass mobilizations and street activism. That was almost forgotten, because of the evolution of the communist party in france, which was a very bureaucratically pro-Russian party. I think, as intellectuals and maoists, we were innova- pS mohAnAD yAquBI The mIlITAnT ChApTeR In CInemA 247 7. tive, organizing mass demonstrations, with all the Jean-pierre olivier de Sardan (anthropologist and documentary filmmaker, drawings, singing, and political speeches in the subauthor of Palestine vaincra [palestine way. With things like that, of course, [the group] had Will Win]), in discussion with the author (paris, July 2010). all the traditions of the communist movement but has mahmoud hamshari (1938–73) was the fatah representative in france. he been almost forgotten. We were concentrated on the was assassinated by mossad after the munich operation of 1972. vietnam War issue, and we took a very activist apezzeddine Qalaq (1936–78) was head proach to that, and part of that was the origin of 68— of the General union of palestinian Students in france between 1968 and and not only . . . the palestinian issue as well, which I 1970, he became the fatah representative in france after the assassination of was absolutely attracted to. mahmoud hamshari. he was murdered I didn’t try to make a big film, just to have a proin 1978. Joris ivens (1898–1989) was a dutch paganda film, an intelligent kind of propaganda, and documentary filmmaker and communist. in fact it worked like that. It was the time when the 8. support for the palestinian struggle was growing, so Jusqu’à la victoire – Méthodes de penthere was a need coming from all these activist comsée et de travail de la révolution palestinienne. this was the working title of the mittees—not only in france, I was told, but also in film that was released as Ici et ailleurs [here and elsewhere], dir. Jean-luc Germany—so it was a very good support for all these Godard et al. (1976). committees around the world, and I think the film has been viewed by thousands and thousands of people. The whole thing was shots of photographs hanging on the wall; that was the whole film, we didn’t have archive material. mahmoud hamshari and ezzeddine qalaq tried to find us as many photos as they could from palestine. We chose from them and put them on the wall, and that was it. But, at the end, we put together a real archive of vietnam—I think I took this from Joris Ivens.7 the film was called Palestine Will Win, but there seems to be no trace of it now. even de Sardan himself hasn’t seen the film since 1972. this was just one from a wave of films that followed, a famous example being the attempt by the dziga vertov group to produce a film about the palestinian revolution. At the end of 1968, Jean-luc Godard and Jean-pierre Gorin were invited by the Arab league to produce a film, which they decided to call Till Victory – Methods of Thinking and Methods of Work in the Palestinian Revolution.8 pS mohAnAD yAquBI The mIlITAnT ChApTeR In CInemA in the film Godard in America—a compilation of different interviews with Godard and Gorin presenting the ideas of the dziga vertov group about the role of images in social change—the filmmakers’ visit to the uSA came directly after they had finished shooting the palestinian film, and Godard thought he could use his reputation to raise money to complete the film. the following conversation captures the real essence of the attitude of international solidarity among filmmakers: 248 pS 9. Jean-luc Godard and Jean-pierre Gorin, in Godard in America (see note 4). Godard: We present the struggle of the palestinian people as a new political and revolutionary fact in the middle east, and this new political, revolutionary fact is related to all the anti-imperialist struggle all over the world. [. . .] It’s related to vietnam, it’s related to laos, to Cuba, to South America, everywhere, and we have to present it that way. [. . .] And then we have images of the Chinese movie . . . Gorin: And why did we put the Chinese movie there . . . Godard (interrupting): . . . because China has already achieved what the laotians are still struggling for. Gorin: And their choice of armed struggle, in their own situation, is a reflection on the situation we have today, the split between the communist world into two lines: the Russian line, which is the, let’s say, peaceful line of peaceful coexistence, and the Chinese line, which is the real revolutionary line of armed struggle. And then after that we have to link ourselves to the film as it is made, to link ourselves as french militants involved in the class struggle in france, and that’s why we show some shots of the may 68 events in a Renault factory near paris at flins, where there was the first merging between the students and the workers, and a very strong opposition and violent action against the police.9 Jean-luc Godard and Jean-pierre Gorin in Al-Baqaa camp, Jordan, 1970. photographer unknown. mohanad yaqubi private archive mohAnAD yAquBI The mIlITAnT ChApTeR In CInemA 249 mustafa Abu Ali and hani Jawharieh joined Godard and Gorin during the production. they discussed finding and developing a new aesthetics and language for the cinema to act as part of a revolution. Khadija habashneh, head archivist at the palestine film institute in Beirut, filmmaker, and wife of mustafa Abu Ali, remembers that period: mustafa and hani left all the work they had to do and went around with Godard. They were speaking all the time about the ideal way to show the palestinian question, and once, when Godard was having dinner with us at home, he was looking at the small library we had, and he found some books about him. he took them out and threw them in the garbage and said, “That was all before; now I am a different person.”10 10. Khadija habashneh, in discussion with the author (ramallah, february 2011). 11. Ici et ailleurs (see note 11). in the last scene of Till Victory, which Godard continued in the mid-1970s and released as Here and Elsewhere, we see a group of fighters discussing the problems facing their operations, and we hear the voice of Godard speaking: I remember when we shot this, it was three months before the September slaughters—that was in June 1970, and in three months the whole little group will be dead. What is really tragic is that they are talking here of their own death.11 pS mohAnAD yAquBI The mIlITAnT ChApTeR In CInemA A decision was made to terminate the revolution, and that was the task of King hussein of Jordan. Alarmed by the growing power of the palestinian militia in his kingdom, and with the full support of the united States, in September 1970 he ordered his troops to seize the palestinian refugee camps and kill anyone who resisted. this event was later to be known as Black September. palestinian fighters stood their ground, ferociously defending the camps against the Jordanian army. the clashes took a bloody course, resulting in the withdrawal of the palestinian militant factions, including Alfatah, who withdrew from Jordan to Syria and southern lebanon, losing a strategic location with more than 600 km of conflicted border between Jordan and the occupied territories of palestine. After two weeks of continuous shelling in Amman and other cities in Jordan, yasser Arafat finally managed to escape from Amman and join the Arab leaders in cairo, where the Arab league reached a deal to stop the fighting. Arafat showed the Arab leaders film reels and images made by Jawharieh and Abu Ali. As one era ended and another began, the revolution opened another chapter in its life. this was also true for the pfu, when Jadallah was paralyzed, after being shot in the head, and Jawharieh’s house burned down, taking his passport with it, forcing him to stay in Amman. it was up to Abu Ali and the others who had joined the group to start over again in a different land, in a different political situation. Abu Ali went to lebanon and edited Bel Roh . . . Bel Dam (With Blood, with Soul), the pfu’s second film, from the rushes shot by Jawharieh and himself in Jordan. the film was completed in 1972 and was screened at the damascus film festival, where it won a prize for the best documentary film. the importance of looking back at the pfu’s production of images in the period between 1968 and 250 pS mohAnAD yAquBI The mIlITAnT ChApTeR In CInemA 251 12. elias Sanbar (palestinian historian, poet, and essayist), in discussion with the author and reem Shilleh (paris, december 2010). 1970 can be traced back to the palestinian question and the presentation of the country as “a land without a people.” palestinians had suffered from invisibility since the early invention of photography, and continued to be on the receiving end of a political settlement built on this invisibility. for a people who had disappeared in 1948, the image was not only a representation, it was a way of existence. for a people who had suffered invisibility, the camera was their comeback weapon.12 the State of palestine disappeared suddenly in 1948 and was replaced by the State of israel. this disappearance was accompanied by the loss of land, institutions, and representation. more than one million palestinians were expelled and gathered in refugee camps in the neighboring countries of egypt, Jordan, Syria, and lebanon. As a result, the palestinian people suffered a severe rupture of their national identify. But it was not only israel that caused this; Arab countries also played a role, denying the palestinians almost all rights, including the right to work, to build, and to travel. the palestinians were left to fade away in the camps, isolated from the outside world, deprived of everything except what the local governments and united nations relief and Works Agency (unrWA) offered. using the unrWA terminologies, the palestinian people were defined as unknown “Arab refugees” who seemed to have survived an act of God or a natural disaster. no mention was made of the political context behind the images the agency showed in front of their international sponsors to demonstrate their achievements in saving the people of the world. palestinians have a chronic contradictoriness of image. Before 1948, palestine was photographed without the palestinian, and, after 1948, the palestinian was photographed outside of palestine.13 pS mohAnAD yAquBI The mIlITAnT ChApTeR In CInemA palestinian refugees were filmed and photographed by professional international photographers, trying to capture the perfect moment, the picture that could tell everything in one frame, and the refugees became a subject without a voice and without an image of itself. the revolution came to present an image of a people struggling, where the images of the people were made by the people, and the fedayeen became living movie stars. the palestinian revolution offered a dream to the people, a place they could consider home, a land, and dignity. At the same time, it showed them the way—armed struggle. this place might only exist in films, but people believed in it and joined the revolution, hoping for a better future. 252 13. essam nassar (historian and photographer), in discussion with the author (ramallah, may 2013). 14. Sanbar (see note 14). The dilemma of invisibility is embedded in the fedayeen image itself. It is true that the palestinian came back into existence after the revolution, but he came back with a covered face.14 the events of Black September were the concluding chapter of the palestinian revolution’s operational existence in Jordan. But they also led into a period marked by new forms and methods of revolutionary work, representation, and image production. the two years in Jordan, 1968–70, formed a brief but seminal period in the life of palestinian revolutionary and militant filmmaking, establishing the revolution as a force for reclaiming representation and as an arena for cinematic experimentation in form, language, and production. the work that came out of those two years, which produced images of palestinians made by palestinians themselves, laid the ground for facing the challenges that were to be posed by the Western and Zionist media, and their depictions of palestinians as terrorists. Su CA 253 meltinG pot, verSAilleS-iZAtion, And peterSBurG-iZAtion europeAn utopiAS in the Architecture of centrAl ASiA palace of Arts (panorama cinema), tashkent, uzbekistan, 1964. Architects: vladimir Berezin, Sergo Sutyagin, yury Khaldeyev, dmitry Shuvayev. Sergo Sutyagin private archive by Boris chukhovich As i have tried to show in my papers for the 19th vienna Architecture congress,1 the Soviet union’s version of orientalism, which shaped the architectural processes of the 1960s through the 1980s in the republics of Soviet central Asia, was largely determined by the imperative of official aesthetics that Soviet culture be “socialist in content and national in form.” this was not usually a matter of reproducing the “national” ingredient but of reinventing it in an orientalist spirit. however, this orientalism in Soviet architectural practices, recomposed in the key of Soviet harmony, concealed something broader that was rooted more in the subconscious of culture than in the slogans of the party: the european utopias that came to central Asia with russian colonialism. the architectural practices of the Soviet period continue to reverberate today, producing variations of these utopias that remain a conspicuous phenomenon in the culture of the now post-Soviet central Asian states. in the following i will attempt to examine several manifestations of these utopias in the 1960s. my analysis will be based on two teleological perspectives: that of the colonial and earlySoviet past on the one hand, and the post-Soviet present on the other. 1. Boris chukhovich, “Building the ‘living east’,” in Architekturzentrum Wien (Katharina ritter, et al.), ed., Soviet Modernism: 1955–1991 / Unknown History (Zurich, 2012), pp. 214–31; and “local modernism and Global orientalism: Building the ‘Soviet orient,’” in Hintergrund 54 – 19th Vienna Architecture Congress: Soviet Modernism 1955–1991. Unknown Stories (vienna, 2013), pp. 31–39. Su CA BoRIS ChukhovICh melTInG poT, veRSAIlleS-IZATIon, AnD peTeRSBuRG-IZATIon euRopeAn uTopIAS In The ARChITeCTuRe of CenTRAl ASIA 254 By way of introduction, i would like to refer to the background of the panorama cinema in tashkent built in 1964. one of the architects, Sergo Sutyagin, tells the anecdote that the idea for the cinema, which is shaped like a section of a fluted doric column, came to him in a dream. of course, we are right to see here an expressive reminder of the ancestral link between central Asian architects and the culture of europe, and in particular that of ancient Greece. in this light we can better understand the specific role played by central Asia’s architectural community in the Soviet years; it felt itself to be a vehicle of Western culture in the east, and at the same time it was called upon to represent the east on the Soviet and international scene. But a rational explanation such as this in no way accounts for the Greek column, which blatantly contradicted the “national in form” dictum. After all, the central Asian architects were supposed to draw inspiration not from Greek architectural history but from that of central Asia. We can primarily assume that the appearance of a Greek column in a dream conceals the workings of the subconscious, whose roots we should seek deep in the collective memory of central Asian society. if we look back into history, we can find traces of the very same impulse in the colonial architecture of russian turkestan.2 Something prompted “the russian europeans” of central Asia to make similar identificatory gestures as early as the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. tashkent, the capital of russian turkestan, soon had not only a “White house,” which served as the residence of the governor-general, but even a local moulin rouge—one of the first cinemas, where european newsreels were shown. from the very inception of russian turkestan the colonists thus strove to be greater Westernizers than in central russia. these early impulses should be taken seriously because we have known since Giambattista vico that understanding the essence of social phenomena is scarcely possible without knowing the history and the conditions of their emergence.3 upon close examination, an equally distinct leaning toward europeanism can be seen in the town-planning policy of the russian settlers. in contrast to the medieval cities of central Asia with their narrow, winding alleys, the colonists built settlements according to strictly geometric master plans. An identical radial planning scheme was used as the basis everywhere, irrespective of the context. We can see its variants both when building from scratch (in margelan), and in the new districts of ancient historical centers (Samarkand, tashkent). this clearly shows that the new town planning of central Asia, at its inception, relied on a certain mental matrix that shaped the face of colonial architecture and continued to influence practices in the Soviet period. What kind of matrix is this and where did it derive from? 2. A governorate-general of the russian empire covering parts of what is today uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, where much of the population speaks turkic languages. not to be confused with turkmenistan. 3. “the nature of things is nothing but their coming into being (nascimento) at certain times and in certain fashions.” Giambattista vico, The New Science of Giambattista Vico, trans. thomas Goddard Bergin and max harold fisch (new york, 1948), p. 58. Su CA BoRIS ChukhovICh melTInG poT, veRSAIlleS-IZATIon, AnD peTeRSBuRG-IZATIon euRopeAn uTopIAS In The ARChITeCTuRe of CenTRAl ASIA 255 radially structured urban systems have existed and continue to exist in a range of different contexts. But let us not forget that the russian cities in turkestan were initially settlements for the army and the colonial administration. As appendages of the bureaucratic apparatus of a huge empire, both these services were culturally oriented toward the imperial center at all times. And so it was not moscow but Saint petersburg—the farthest northwestern point of russia—that became the prototype for building imperial settlements in the remote east of the country. this transfer held utopian potential at several levels. firstly, the model endorsed in the north for “cutting a window to europe” now served as a model for russian turkestan with its southern sun and traditional islamic culture. Secondly, utopian elements were already contained in the primary source, namely peter the Great’s idea of building his capital in accordance with a strictly regular plan on the marshy banks of the neva river. And thirdly, we must not overlook the fact that the radial layout of Saint petersburg was in turn inspired by the park of the palace of versailles—that ideal representation of absolutist order implemented by le nôtre. the central Asian colonial cultural matrix was thus similar to a molecule of dnA with three spiraling strands. Being utopian in itself, it bore within it the utopian seeds of russian europeanism, which in turn had been inspired by the utopias of french absolutism. Which of these cultural genes manifested itself in central Asia to a greater degree? the orientation toward versailles or Saint petersburg was actually not constant over time. let us look at the following detail: the three central avenues of Saint petersburg converged at a towering urban leitmotif—the Admiralty tower, which can be seen from all over the city. “As i write in my room i need no lamp,” pushkin wrote in The Bronze Horseman. “Bright giants are asleep on the empty streets, and the needle of the Admiralty shines.” the radial streets of central Asia never came together at a tall structure like this, although the urban environment certainly did not lack impressive public and religious buildings with their towers and belfries. they always converged at an urban park, in the center of which there was usually a monumental sculpture. this links the cities of central Asia more with versailles than with Saint petersburg. We recall that france’s three main roads met in the large, empty space in front of the palace, behind which the famous park opened up. this architectural nonsense was not rectified until the first half of the nineteenth century, when a monument to louis Xiv was installed at their point of convergence. A similar equestrian statue took pride of place almost two centuries later in the central tashkent public garden. At the place where the key urban axes of tashkent converge, where czarist and Soviet official monuments periodically alternated, we now see a tribute to the main hero of the new, independent uzbekistan: the medieval conqueror timur Su CA BoRIS ChukhovICh melTInG poT, veRSAIlleS-IZATIon, AnD peTeRSBuRG-IZATIon euRopeAn uTopIAS In The ARChITeCTuRe of CenTRAl ASIA Bogdan Khmelnitsky Street, tashkent, uzbekistan, 1974. Architects: Andrey Kosinsky (head of team), yury miroshnichenko, irina demchinskaya. farkhad tursunov private archive 256 (tamerlane). instead of heralding a great future like the Soviet monuments did, the monument to timur would invoke the distant past, when central Asia itself was the center of a mighty empire. But there seems no doubt that the original european utopian matrix is still very much alive although it has been proclaimed overthrown. the type of equestrian statue of an emperor familiar to us from european absolutism, specimens of which can be seen in rome, versailles, and other european capitals, was chosen as the model for the monument to timur. this major new ideological monument can therefore be interpreted as a kind of freudian slip because it confirms what it was actually supposed to refute: the magnitude of the europeanization and Sovietization of russian turkestan and its significance for the region’s contemporary culture. returning to the 1960s, we can find quite Su CA BoRIS ChukhovICh melTInG poT, veRSAIlleS-IZATIon, AnD peTeRSBuRG-IZATIon euRopeAn uTopIAS In The ARChITeCTuRe of CenTRAl ASIA 257 Bogdan Khmelnitsky Street, tashkent, uzbekistan, 1974. Architects: Andrey Kosinsky (head of team), yury miroshnichenko, irina demchinskaya. farkhad tursunov private archive a number of similar examples of parapraxis. one of them was the project for the development of Bogdan Khmelnitsky Street carried out under the supervision of Andrei Kosinsky. Bogdan Khmelnitsky Street is the first thing that a visitor to tashkent sees because it connects the airport with the city center. its designated function was the artistic representation of uzbekistan for guests of the republic. By the late 1960s and early 1970s, central Asian modernism had clearly fused with orientalism, and the development of this street as proposed by Kosinsky reflects this process well, both visually and discursively. in visual terms, the “easternness” of this main avenue was emphasized by its many details. these include geometric ornamentation in the form of mosaics covering blank walls, stylized arched arcades, and bright and colorful execution with a prevalence of the sky-blue majolica associated with the monuments of Samarkand. the orientalness of the primary sources is also confirmed in the architect’s notes. Kosinsky writes: “cascading open loggias and windows facing onto the access route into the city alternate with the theme of the blank wall when one is heading out of it again, as if to recall the grandeur of the monuments of antiquity.”4 furthermore, he and other commentators often point out the “stalactitic resolution” of the balconies, providing a notional link to the traditions of islamic architecture. But overt, ostensible references do not invalidate the others, which are hidden from first perception. Kosinsky admits in one of his interviews: It is quite a way from the airport to Shota Rustaveli Street. But from there you can get straight to the city center. The distance is exactly the same as in Saint petersburg from moscow Railway Station to 4. Andrei Kosinsky in Arkhitekturnyi vestnik [Architectural Bulletin] 81, no. 6 (2004), p. 107 [translated]. Su CA BoRIS ChukhovICh melTInG poT, veRSAIlleS-IZATIon, AnD peTeRSBuRG-IZATIon euRopeAn uTopIAS In The ARChITeCTuRe of CenTRAl ASIA 258 the Admiralty building with its spire. It should be said that nevsky prospect is perhaps the only street in the world that took on a certain compositional proportion, almost naturally. [. . .] Its form suggested to me a possible resolution of the Bogdan khmelnitsky Street development. [. . .] It could be a relatively monotonous type of avenue but with clusters of empire-style ornamentation.”5 thus we can see that even in the 1960s and 1970s, when modernism was in the air in the Soviet union as never before, the image of the former imperial capital, which had once served as a paradigm for the administrative center of russian turkestan, was still thriving behind the orientalized facade of the uzbek capital. nevsky prospect, the main street of Saint petersburg, served as a point of orientation for architects of the generation of the 1960s, just as Saint petersburg’s planning scheme had been a model for the first colonists a century earlier.6 But here another secondary reflection of versailles occurred. nevsky prospect ends at the Admiralty building, whereas Bogdan Khmelnitsky Street looks onto one of the former country parks of prince nikolai romanov, a cousin of the last russian emperor. Without losing sight of the cultural matrix we have glimpsed, i will focus here on some other incarnations of european utopias in central Asia: the socialist melting pot, the versailles-ization of parks and pools, and the Saint petersburg-ization of historical heritage. the detailed plan for the center of tashkent put forward by local architects in the mid-1960s probably best illustrates the first of these, the socialist melting pot. this was arguably the period of the Soviet union’s greatest vigor and vitality. Stalinist repression had been ended, the Soviet economy was experiencing vigorous growth, and the country was outstripping the West in many areas of science and technology. the uSSr’s social policy was developing to take account of the private interests of the individual, and, for a while, Soviet cinema, literature, and art were filled with optimism about the possibility of individual creativity within socialism and thanks to socialism. thus, if we follow the traditional division of utopias into “utopias of freedom” and “utopias of order” (such a differentiation was made in the writings of ernst Bloch in particular), it seems that the ordered and monolithic utopia of Stalinist barracks socialism was giving way to the dream of freedom and “socialism with a human face.” the plan for the center of tashkent was nourished by precisely these ideas. instead of the symmetrical, closed spaces characteristic of the town planning of the Stalin era, here we see an open, park-like esplanade with buildings freely arranged in it, as if floating. What would have been official, prestigious space in Stalin’s empire style was transformed into the concept of a garden city, which modified the 5. Andrei Kosinsky, “moi tashkentskie eksperimenty vyzyvali buriu negodovaniia i kritiki” [my tashkent experiments caused a Storm of indignation and criticism] (part 2); http://www.fergananews.com/articles/4442 (accessed August 5, 2013) [translated]. 6. even the standard russian of Saint petersburg, later leningrad, remained very close to the russian spoken in the cities of central Asia (when cleansed of regionalisms and the local accent). Su CA BoRIS ChukhovICh melTInG poT, veRSAIlleS-IZATIon, AnD peTeRSBuRG-IZATIon euRopeAn uTopIAS In The ARChITeCTuRe of CenTRAl ASIA 259 public functions of the city center to make it more of a cultured zone of leisure and relaxation than a parade ground for the organized mass events of the preceding era. these changes are clearly visible in the central square of tashkent, lenin Square. in the Stalin era, architects reproduced the classicist compositions of Saint petersburg / leningrad here, but the planning of the 1960s provided for separate, spaced-out developments that allowed access from nearby park areas. But in addition to this, another urbanistic idea found its conclusion here, having originated in the 1920s and 1930s. the planned city center was meant to become a space uniting the old town, where the muslim population had lived since the middle Ages, with the new part of tashkent built after russian colonization. its task was to break down the colonial barriers, open up secluded ethnic communities, and join together “east” and “West,” so that “the world shall be one human commonwealth without any russia, without any latvia” (mayakovsky)—that was the ideological core of the intention. the unification of the two parts of the former colonial city was seen as an emancipatory gesture on the path to the “utopias of freedom,” but a serious obstacle emerged in its implementation: the old town. in order for it to form a united whole with the european-style development, it had to be “substantially transformed” or, speaking without euphemisms, eliminated. this was the goal that all master plans for tashkent set themselves as of 1928. Silchenkov’s master plan was like this too, proposing a transformation of the old town and its neighborhoods to a strictly geometric layout in the spirit of the utopias of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries— also in the spirit of ladovsky’s parabola and le corbusier’s early urbanistic projects. the later and more realistic projects of Semenov and Kuznetsov also envisaged the complete extermination of the old town environment. the european part of the city did not amalgamate with the Asiatic part but absorbed it. Broad, straight avenues tore through the medieval fabric of the city and urbanistic compositions sprouted up, many of whose elements revealed Saint petersburg’s legacy and spirit of regularity. unlike the construction of a free, classless society, the extermination of the old town proved to be an entirely feasible task, and toward the end of the twentieth century it had been almost completely realized. in order to see the utopian nature of this plan, we should recall the principle formulated by Karl mannheim: We should not regard as utopian every state of mind which is incongruous with and transcends the immediate situation (and in this sense “departs from reality”). only those orientations transcending reality will be referred to by us as utopian which, when they pass over into conduct, tend to shatter, either partially or wholly, the order of things prevailing at the time. Su CA BoRIS ChukhovICh melTInG poT, veRSAIlleS-IZATIon, AnD peTeRSBuRG-IZATIon euRopeAn uTopIAS In The ARChITeCTuRe of CenTRAl ASIA 260 lenin Square, tashkent, uzbekistan, 1966–72. Architects: Boris mezentzev, Boris Zaritsky, yevgeny rozanov, vsevolod Shestopalov, Aleksandr yakushev, leon Adamov. farkhad tursunov private archive In limiting the meaning of the term “utopia” to that type of orientation which transcends reality and which at the same time breaks the bonds of the existing order, a distinction is set up between the utopian and the ideological states of mind. one can orient himself to objects that are alien to reality and which transcend actual existence—and nevertheless still be effective in the realization and the maintenance of the existing order of things. In the course of history, man has occupied himself more frequently with objects transcending his scope of existence than with those immanent in his existence and, despite this, actual and concrete forms of social life have been built upon the basis of such “ideological” states of mind which were incongruent with reality. Such an incongruent orientation became utopian only when in addition it tended to burst the bonds of the existing order.7 the Saint petersburg-ization of tashkent’s master plan, with the complete replacement of its crooked contours and the mosaic of neighborhoods and communities with the straight lines of parallel and radial avenues, would seem to fully correspond to such a conception of utopia. this becomes even more evident if we analyze 7. Karl mannheim, Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge, (london, 1954), p.173. Su CA BoRIS ChukhovICh melTInG poT, veRSAIlleS-IZATIon, AnD peTeRSBuRG-IZATIon euRopeAn uTopIAS In The ARChITeCTuRe of CenTRAl ASIA 261 several other aspects of the new urbanism, and within the scope of this paper i would like to look in particular at the issue of water supply in the cities of central Asia. let us return to the plan for lenin Square in tashkent in 1966. fountains play an extremely important role here and occupy a significant portion of the space. the freedom with which the water surface—almost a lake—is spread out beneath the blazing sun is quite typical of the urbanism of central Asia in the Soviet era. Beginning in the 1930s, it seems that local architects were obsessed by the idea of creating vast bodies of water in the cities. Water was to abundantly fill the artificial lakes, canals, and basins that were laid out in public-zoned areas. of course, this idea was fitted into the general conception of “the victory of Soviet man over nature,” expressed here in the ability to completely transform the landscape. the mythology of water was one of the cornerstones of the Soviet project, and it is no coincidence that it often figured in artistic representations born in this era, and also in technocratic projects aimed at changing the climate of the region. A famous song of Stalin’s time goes: “he proudly marches along, / changing the flow of rivers / and moving high mountains, / the simple Soviet man.” lenin Square, tashkent, uzbekistan, 1966–72. Architects: Boris mezentzev, Boris Zaritsky, yevgeny rozanov, vsevolod Shestopalov, Aleksandr yakushev, leon Adamov. farkhad tursunov private archive Su CA BoRIS ChukhovICh melTInG poT, veRSAIlleS-IZATIon, AnD peTeRSBuRG-IZATIon euRopeAn uTopIAS In The ARChITeCTuRe of CenTRAl ASIA 262 Su CA BoRIS ChukhovICh melTInG poT, veRSAIlleS-IZATIon, AnD peTeRSBuRG-IZATIon euRopeAn uTopIAS In The ARChITeCTuRe of CenTRAl ASIA 263 in particular, the diversion of Siberian rivers to central Asia was to symbolize the “victory over nature.”8 this colossal project of the Soviet era influenced many strategies of central Asian town planners. When implementing the water supply system of the cities in the region, they did not assign primary importance to water-saving technologies. evidently they considered there were prospects for the resolution of its water problems through global climatic engineering—and thus believed they could tailor reality to match the imagination. it should be said that russia already saw the hot, arid climate of central Asia as inimical in colonial times. Gradually it began to be perceived as a problem that was solvable. it is no coincidence, therefore, that the first project of diverting some of the flow of the Siberian rivers to central Asia originated in the colonial era, when the local population had no clear notion of Siberia and its rivers, or that something was wrong with the climate of the region in which they lived. this could actually be seen as a specific form of climatic xenophobia formed by colonial consciousness. A first book on the topic was published in 1871, six years after russia’s conquest of central Asia.9 this attitude endured in the Soviet period, unrevised and even reinforced. the climate of central Asia was presented as a difficult and burdensome problem, and an entire section of the famous 1929 documentary film Turksib, for example, was devoted to water. its makers showed the fundamental shortage of water and the sporadic nature of its appearance, which allegedly condemned the peasants to a life of hunger and drudgery. Given the romantic task of the “subjugation of nature,” every inch of irrigated urban space in central Asia was meant to represent a symbolic oasis of the future. But laying out huge areas of water beneath the desert sun stood in stark contrast to the limited water resources of the region. We should recall for a moment how precious water has always been in central Asia and what diverse means the local urban culture devised to protect water from evaporation. Suffice to mention the existence of a special type of building in local architecture, the sardoba, designed for the accumulation of rain and meltwater.10 Structures of this kind were vital even before central Asia became a region specialized in producing cotton, a crop requiring particularly intensive irrigation. urban reservoirs known as howz were built in the shade and had a small surface area. long before the advent of today’s technologies, the traditional urbanism of central Asia allowed the greening of cities and the distribution of water within them most efficiently and with minimum loss, using an intricate system of canals and the regulated lifting of water to the upper levels of a city. the artificial lakes and numerous fountains laid out in central Asian cities in the Soviet years disrupted the equilibrium of these historical urban ecosystems, which became visible in the early 1980s against the background of an increasingly acute water crisis. there was a shortage of water for agriculture and also for the urban population, whose access to water was often limited to several hours a day during the long summer months. the reality of this hydraulic utopia was paradoxical. in official, public space water belonged to all, but it became ever less available for private consumption. it was at this time that environmentalists began protesting against the plan to divert Siberian rivers to central Asia, which led to the shelving and effective annulment of the project. returning to lenin Square, we see that the fountains and pools of this development stand out for their remarkably extensive layering. they are virtually rectangular mini-lakes with decorative fountains, providing an attraction and allowing people to enjoy the cascade effect from an adjacent walkway. this genre of the decorative fountain was extremely well developed in the parks of Saint petersburg (peterhof) and versailles, and so we encounter another echo of the familiar matrix. We can satisfy ourselves once more that the utopia of versailles is closer to that of tashkent than is the utopia of russia’s former imperial capital. After all, Saint petersburg is situated at the mouth of a mighty river, whose surface naturally becomes an element of the urban environment. the city of peter the Great is traversed by natural and artificial canals, and its byname “venice of the north” is no coincidence. versailles, on the other hand, is located far from any water sources. the functioning of its many water systems was ensured by complex and expensive engineering structures that bring water from dozens of miles away and provide the necessary pressure. in this regard, versailles anticipated the “subjugation of nature” in Soviet central Asia, although in france this gesture did not appear so radical. the versailles project could actually be qualified more as a “civilizing” of nature than a subjugation of it. We know that it was the park at vaux-le-vicomte, laid out by nicolas fouquet very close to the Seine, that served as the inspiration for louis Xiv. What made the versailles project so innovative was the complex hydraulic engineering required to bring water from a distant source; at the same time, the artificial canals and fountains of versailles were not incompatible with the landscape and climate of Île-de-france. it is a different situation in central Asia—here the extravagant use of water in urban areas has contributed to the general overconsumption of water in the region, which has radically influenced the macroclimate. A conspicuous consequence of this water wastage is the large-scale environmental catastrophe of the Aral Sea—once the fourth-largest lake in the world—which has now almost completely disappeared from the map.11 But why insist on tashkent’s lenin Square being linked with versailles and Saint petersburg, when we know of a closer and more manifest source of borrowing— the government buildings in Brasilia designed by oscar niemeyer. A communist, 8. for a collection of material on diverting some of the flow of the Siberian rivers to central Asia, see http://arbuz.uz/w_aral_ perebr.html (accessed June 16, 2013). 9. iakov demchenko, O navodnenii Aralo-Kaspiiskoi nizmennosti dlia uluchsheniia klimata prilezhashchikh stran [innundation of the Aral-caspian depression to Ameliorate the climate of Adjacent countries] (Kiev, 1871). 10. tigran mkrtychev, “voda, bogi, liudi v tcentralnoi Azii” [Water, Gods, and people in central Asia], in Tcentralnaia Aziia [central Asia] 13. 11. the main reason for the shallowing of the Aral Sea was of course the massive irrigation of central Asia for the growing of cotton, the main agricultural product of the region. But this does not override all that has been said about the extravagant use of water in the cities of Soviet central Asia. Su CA BoRIS ChukhovICh melTInG poT, veRSAIlleS-IZATIon, AnD peTeRSBuRG-IZATIon euRopeAn uTopIAS In The ARChITeCTuRe of CenTRAl ASIA registan Square, Samarkand, uzbekistan, with its three madrassas, the ulugh Beg madrassa (1417–20), the tilya-Kori madrassa (1646–60) and the Sher-dor madrassa (1619–36), after reconstruction. Wikipedia 264 Su CA BoRIS ChukhovICh melTInG poT, veRSAIlleS-IZATIon, AnD peTeRSBuRG-IZATIon euRopeAn uTopIAS In The ARChITeCTuRe of CenTRAl ASIA 265 Su CA BoRIS ChukhovICh melTInG poT, veRSAIlleS-IZATIon, AnD peTeRSBuRG-IZATIon euRopeAn uTopIAS In The ARChITeCTuRe of CenTRAl ASIA 266 niemeyer was actually one of the few foreign architects whose work was widely publicized in the uSSr, and it is no surprise that his Brasilia buildings had a marked influence on the architecture of the administrative buildings built ten years later in the southern Soviet republics. Without denying the obvious, i would like to consider the versailles / Saint petersburg utopian matrix of central Asian architecture from a different teleological perspective. up until now we have basically been speaking about the origins and means of dealing with the past of central Asia, but a better understanding of the projects of the 1960s can be gained by looking at today’s situation. i think it would be apt here to mention the methodological principle of Karl marx, who considered that the anatomy of a human provided a key to the anatomy of a monkey. it is a fact that the regimes formed in central Asia after the breakup of the uSSr, particularly in uzbekistan and turkmenistan, not only did not cast off their old aspirations regarding urban water supply, but even breathed new life into them. Several new artificial lakes were created in tashkent in the years of islam Karimov’s rule, while in the turkmen capital, Ashkhabad, numerous complexes of fountains and cascades were built. the first turkmen president confessed his love of Saint petersburg’s architecture on numerous occasions. “I saw and learned a great deal there,” he said. “I walked along nevsky, looking at the buildings and their construction, starting with those from the time of peter: straight lines, architecturally very beautiful, with ensembles.”12 the “fountainization” of uzbekistan and turkmenistan is continuing at a rapid pace, and it is not hard to see that modernist influences on the form of the fountains are now minimal. rather, the matrix of european imperial utopias is tangible once more, this time in the form of nouveau-riche kitsch. the multilevel cascades adorned with equestrian and other sculptures prove that the collective memory of central Asia has retained the initial cultural injections of russian colonization in its inmost recesses. it had digested and assimilated the modernist influences of the 1960s, only to return to orientations of the colonial period. this is similar to the return of the repressed in psychoanalysis. values that have been proclaimed overthrown return unconsciously to the active field of culture. the overthrow of europeanism is propagated under the banner of a “return to our cultural roots.” the representations of these roots are the last manifestation of Saint petersburg-ization i would like to touch on here. in particular, i would like to draw attention to the metamorphosis of spatial organization in historical cities, 12. igor Solovev, “niiazov otkryl pitertcam vse dveri” [niyazov opened the doors Wide for Saint petersburgers]; http://www.turkmenistan.ru/index.cfm?r=3&d=3615&op=viw (accessed february 2, 2004) [translated]. Su CA BoRIS ChukhovICh melTInG poT, veRSAIlleS-IZATIon, AnD peTeRSBuRG-IZATIon euRopeAn uTopIAS In The ARChITeCTuRe of CenTRAl ASIA 267 which began with russian colonization and continues into our time. one example of this phenomenon is the never-ending reconstruction of the registan, a public square in Samarkand. in the nineteenth century, this square served as a semi-functional urban locus, a place where edicts were pronounced and death sentences carried out, where people relaxed, chatted, argued, or did business. the registan was never symmetrical, and the integral role it played in that medieval environment further increased its asymmetry; it was abutted by a howz, the chorsu Bazaar, the Shaybanid mausoleum, and many other buildings. in the 1960s, a project began for sterilizing the registan and progressively extirpating all its “irregularities” and asymmetrical elements. the ameliorators were at pains to emphasize the principle of a regular, symmetrical u-shaped square in the style of Saint petersburg classicism. the transformation is rounded off by two marble fountains and, adjacent to the madrassa, a row of firs (a characteristic tree of northern russia that gives neither shade nor fruit and practically does not occur in uzbekistan’s natural environment). here we have a new, more total kind of architectural utopia. the former, established order of things has been ruined in the name of a new future—here we see a utopia appealing to the past (the “golden age” of timur and the timurid dynasty) and radically changing that past with the aid of a different past (the “golden age” of the russian empire), whose cultural matrix, even when it has been banished into the subconscious, proves to be more vibrant. it would seem most appropriate for postcolonial research to use the conceptual apparatus of psychoanalysis to analyze this phenomenon. the historical derivations and parallels i have attempted to trace demonstrate that the collective unconscious of today’s rulers continues to reproduce the european utopias and discourses that they themselves so vehemently criticize—ideas brought to central Asia with russian colonization. the 1960s played a pivotal but ambivalent role in this process. on the one hand, this period was characterized by a second attempt by central Asian architects (the first was the constructivism of the 1920s and early 1930s) to see the world through the prism of cosmopolitanism, and specific local versions of international style and brutalism emerged in uzbekistan, tajikistan, and turkmenistan. on the other hand, the cosmopolitan and modernist discourses that came from the West, embedded in an amorphous discursive field, were ambiguously repackaged in the ideological wrapping of the Soviet project. the 1960s could thus be called a time of discursive syncretism containing many strands of potential that would seem mutually exclusive. As the Soviet project forfeited its emancipatory, cosmopolitan promise, these strands took second billing or simply came to naught; others mutated into aspects of our real-existing, contemporary surroundings, in which we can view the utopias examined here. translated from russian by Will firth fR DZA 268 Jeune peinture: the pAriSiAn third WAy of the 1960S by catherine dossin As international attention shifted away from the parisian art scene in the early 1960s, the city experienced a period of intense activity. collectors were leaving and galleries were closing, but artists rebounded with renewed energy. the lack of commercial and institutional prospects seemed to have freed them and triggered a new array of alternative practices and discourses. not only was the parisian art scene more effervescent than ever, it was also more international. paris remained a center for the reception of artists from all over the world, especially those who could not or refused to go to the united States. moreover, having fallen from their pinnacle, the city and its artists started to look at a world that was no longer looking at them. the Association de la Jeune peinture best exemplifies the renewed vitality, originality, and internationalism of paris in the 1960s and 1970s. As the critic Gérald Gassiot-talabot declared: “if one seeks a proof of the vitality of the young school of paris this season [1965], one may find it at the Salon de la Jeune peinture.”1 this was rather surprising since until then the Jeune peinture had been a rather quiet salon. founded in January 1950 as the Salon des Jeunes peintres, it took the name Salon de la Jeune peinture in 1953 when the painter paul reyberolle became president. on march 9 of the same year, the Association de la Jeune peinture was created. Although the works presented at the Salon were politically neutral, the Association had strong ties to the french communist party (pcf). its mission was to defend “the moral and material interests of the young artists of france.”2 in the following years, the Jeune peinture would become a place where young artists were given a chance to exhibit their works, but it would play a very small role in the parisian artistic landscape overall. everything changed after the Salon of January 1963, when new members were elected to the Jeune peinture committee and the quiet salon transformed into an intense center of political and artistic experimentation.3 1. Gérald Gassiot-talabot, “lettre de paris” [letter from paris], in Art International 9, no. 1 (february 1965), pp. 49–51 [translated]. 2. francis parent and raymond perrot, Le Salon de la Jeune Peinture: Une histoire 1950–1983 [the Salon de la Jeune peinture: A history 1950–1983] (paris, 1983), p. 12 [translated]. 3. catherine masson, “dossier Jeune peinture et malassis: une histoire politique” [dossier on Jeune peinture and malassis: A political history], in Opus International 52 (September 1974), pp. 18–21. fR DZA CATheRIne DoSSIn Jeune peInTuRe: The pARISIAn ThIRD WAy of The 1960S 269 the radicalization of Jeune peinture in the early 1960s must be considered in the larger context of the re-politicization of parisian artists during the Algerian War (1954–62), which culminated in fall 1960 with the publication of the “déclaration sur le droit à l’insoumission dans la guerre d’Algérie” (declaration on the right to insubordination in the Algerian War), a document that had been signed by 121 intellectuals and artists. the terrorist actions launched by the organisation Armée Secrète (oAS) after february 1961 to hinder the peace process, and the General’s putsch in April 1961, where french generals attempted to seize power, brought back dark memories of World War ii and created an urge among artists to act against fascism.4 on october 13, 1960, the french surrealist artist Jean-Jacques lebel and the critic Alain Jouffroy organized a debate on Western civilization and the manifesto of the 121 in collaboration with the italian artist enrico Baj at the milanese gallery of Arturo Schwarz. this was followed by three exhibitions entitled Anti-procès, which took a position against the war, fascism, and the use of torture by the french army against members of the national liberation front (fln).5 Anti-procès 3 took place at the Galleria Brera in milan in June 1961 and brought together several generations of artists, including roberto matta, Wildfredo lam, valerio Adami, Antonio recalcati, roberto crippa, and Gianni dova. during the exhibition, lebel, recalcati, crippa, Baj, dova, and erró created a large collective painting that denounced fascism and torture.6 the result was a violent combination of images and symbols: screaming mouths, bulging eyes, a quartered female body, collages of a virgin and child in the mouth of a decorated general, a swastika, photographs of pope John XXiii and cardinal ottaviani, painted words (moral, fatherland, death), and names of Algerian towns (constantine, Sétif) that evoked dark moments of the war. on June 14, 1961, the italian police confiscated the Grand tableau antifasciste collectif (Great Anti-fascist collective painting), considering it to be an attack against the state, religion, and the pope.7 Although the work disappeared for years in the cellars of the local police, it was extremely influential and marked the beginning of the kind of collective political activities that would come to characterize the activities of Jeune peinture. the re-politicization of the parisian art world in the context of the Algerian War and the renewed fear of fascism resulted in a revival of interest in the situation in Spain and portugal, where General francisco franco and António de oliveira Salazar continued to rule. Since the 1930s, france had been the country of exile for thousands of Spaniards and portuguese, forced to flee their countries for political and economic reasons. one of them was a young writer, eduardo Arroyo, who arrived in paris in 1958. unable to earn a living as a writer, he started to paint and make money sketch4. laurent Gerverau, “des bruits et des silences: cartographie des représentations de la guerre d’Algérie” [noise and Silence: A cartography of representations of the Algerian War], in laurent Gerverau, Jean-pierre rioux, and Benjamin Stora, eds., La France en guerre d’Algérie: Novembre 1954–juillet 1962 [france in the Algerian War: november 1954–July 1962] (paris, 1992), pp. 178–209. 5. robert fleck and Annie Gouëdard, “tableau d’histoire ou histoire d’un tableau?” [historical painting or the history of a painting?], in laurent chollet, ed., Grand tableau antifasciste collectif [Great Anti-fascist collective painting], (paris, 2000), pp. 65–130. 6. lam participated in the project, but one evening recalcati, who was drunk at the time, painted over lam’s section. 7. laurence Bertrand-dorléac, “un tableau collectif contre la torture” [A collective painting against torture], in chollet, Grand tableau, pp. 37–63 (see note 5). fR DZA CATheRIne DoSSIn Jeune peInTuRe: The pARISIAn ThIRD WAy of The 1960S 270 ing tourists. he then met reyberolle, who took him under his wing and introduced him to the Jeune peinture, where he started exhibiting in 1960. in paris, he also met older Spaniards who had fought during the civil War. through them, Arroyo became more political. Around the same time, he befriended recalcati, who had participated in the creation of the Great Anti-fascist Collective Painting, and Gilles Aillaud, a french artist with radical political views. At the paris Biennale of 1963, Arroyo organized, along with a few other artists who shared his views, a small exhibition entitled Dead Hostages. While mark Brusse denounced torture, Jorge camacho the practices of the vatican, and Gérard Zlotykamien the death camps in the Soviet union, Arroyo presented violent caricatures of four dictators, easily identifiable as hitler, mussolini, franco, and Salazar. following protests from the Spanish embassy, Arroyo was forced to cover up the background of his paintings, which displayed the national colors of each figure. A few weeks later, Arroyo had a solo show at the gallery Biosca in madrid. Soon after the opening the police closed the exhibition, and Arroyo became unwelcome in his own country.8 this experience, combined with the censorship of the paris Biennale and the attack on the Great Anti-fascist Collective Painting, convinced Arroyo, Aillaud, and recalcati of the necessity to find a platform where political art could be displayed in complete freedom. the Salon de la Jeune peinture, where Arroyo had been exhibiting, seemed to provide such a framework. With reyberolle’s help, Arroyo and Aillaud convinced henri cuéco, the new president of the Jeune peinture and a committed communist, to transform the quiet salon into a political war machine. the following year, Arroyo and other more politicized artists joined the organizing committee.9 from there they scared off the more timid members of the Association with events such as La salle verte and vociferous political statements.10 At the end of the 1964 Salon, Arroyo could assert: After fifteen years of nonengagement with the world, of informal experiences, and exaggerated narcissism, we are entering a new phase—an art that engages more with the spirit of art than its vocabulary. We intend to participate totally in the real. That is to say, to accuse, to denounce, to cry out, and not to be afraid of taboo subjects such as politics and sexuality.11 8. Gérald Gassiot-talabot, “les années scandaleuses d’eduardo Arroyo” [the Scandalous years of eduardo Arroyo], in Arroyo, exh. cat. centre pompidou – musée nationale d’Art moderne (paris, 1982), pp. 8–11; Jean-paul Ameline and cécile debray, “entretien avec eduardo Arroyo, 2 novembre 2007” [interview with eduardo Arroyo, november 2, 2007], in Jean-paul Ameline and Bénédicte Ajac, eds., Figuration narrative: Paris 1960–1972 [narrative figuration: paris 1960–1972] (paris, 2008), pp. 283–88. 9. the coup took place in fall 1963, a year after the beginning of the crisis of abstract art in 1962 that had led to the collapse of the parisian art market. this period of transition and uncertainty helped transform Jeune peinture. on the collapse of the parisian art market, its causes and consequences, see catherine dossin, Geopolitics of the Western Art World, 1940s–1980s: From the Fall of Paris to the Invasion of New York (Burlington, vt, 2014). 10. on La salle verte of 1965, see parent and perrot, Le Salon de la Jeune Peinture, pp. 48–50 (see note 2). 11. Jean-Jacques levêque, “le Salon de la Jeune peinture écartelé entre Bonnard et Bacon” [the Salon de la Jeune peinture torn between Bonnard and Bacon], in Arts (January 1964) [translated]. fR DZA CATheRIne DoSSIn Jeune peInTuRe: The pARISIAn ThIRD WAy of The 1960S 271 their success in transforming Jeune peinture and rallying young artists was due in no small part to a compelling reflection on art and politics. Aillaud, who had studied philosophy and was strongly influenced by louis Althusser, maurice merleau-ponty, and other contemporary french thinkers, developed a very original understanding of modernity and the avant-garde, which became the driving force behind the Jeune peinture’s activities.12 he regarded modern art as a myth created by the bourgeois capitalist society to serve its own interests. part of the myth involved the concept of creative freedom, according to which artists are totally free to create whatever they want. yet, artists have to express themselves within the limits of a physical medium and a formal language that restrict their freedom of expression. moreover, artists are always the product of a general and artistic education that shapes their creativity such that they are never absolutely free. Artistic freedom is nothing but an illusion— a perverse illusion which makes artists believe that they are free so that they see no need to fight for their freedom. this led the Jeunes peintres to declare: The artist in the bourgeois society plays the role of a free man. he spreads, by exhibiting it through his works, the image of the total freedom and the unlimited creative power of the human mind. It is in that sense that he is a particularly effective defender of the capitalist system of exploitation. It is his duty to make us understand that the fight is meaningless because we are already free. The artist in our society can thus be defined, above all, as the prisoner of an illusion.13 Another aspect of the bourgeois myth of modern art was the autonomy of art, which postulates that art exists outside the real world and can remain unaffected by the logic of society. however, as Althusser had demonstrated, culture and art are an apparatus through which state ideology is diffused.14 the Jeune peinture regarded art for the sake of art as a trick: In the face of bourgeois thinking, we maintain that the universality of culture is a decoy, that above the inequalities and conditioning of the material world of work there is no supra-temporal field of reconciliation, which would be one of ideas and of art, and that there is no culture that transcends class.”15 12. on Althusser’s influence at the Jeune peinture, see Sami Siegelbaum, “the riddle of may ’68: collectivity and protest in the Salon de la Jeune peinture,” in Oxford Art Journal 35, no. 1 (march 2012), pp. 53–73. on the thinkers who influenced Jeune peinture, see “lectures marquantes” [landmark readings], in françois derivery, michel dupré, and raymond perrot, Le groupe DDP 1971– 1998: Pratiques collectives, pratiques artistiques [the ddp Group 1971–1998: collective practices, Artistic practices] (paris, 1999), pp. 123–33. 13. Gilles Aillaud, “‘police et culture’: notes préliminaires pour la prochaine manifestation de la Jeune peinture” [“police and culture”: preliminary notes for the next event of the Jeune peinture], in Le Bulletin du Salon de la Jeune Peinture 4 (march 1969), p. 3 [translated]. 14. louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (new york, 1972). 15. Aillaud, “police et culture” (see note 13). fR DZA CATheRIne DoSSIn Jeune peInTuRe: The pARISIAn ThIRD WAy of The 1960S 272 By making art autonomous, it becomes disconnected from the real world and its problems, and reduced to the world of forms and colors. yet, as merleau-ponty had shown, even paul cézanne was by no means disconnected from the real. he was not merely trying to solve formal problems; he was “attempting a piece of nature.”16 But by confining artists to the realm of art and art history, bourgeois society successfully prevents them from intervening in society. Aillaud thus invited artists to reject the illusionary autonomy of art and, instead, “to manifest themselves as true individuals in time and space,”17 because “only then [can] we show that as painters we intend to get involved in what they want us to believe does not concern us, that is the affairs of the world and not of forms and colors.”18 the third aspect of the myth Aillaud attacked was the quest for originality, which leads artists to always try to be more autonomous from the world. “‘Why is the bourgeoisie systematically encouraging cultural novelty?’” asked the Jeune peinture. “the answer may be found in this assertion—because it does not call anything into question.”19 Besides carrying artists deeper into formal investigations and farther away from the world, the cult of originality also isolates artists from one another, trapping them in their individual styles and personalities. As solitary individuals, artists have no power. the Jeune peinture thus encouraged artists “to really change our attitude, because everything in the bourgeois education which we received has prepared us to cultivate our own individuality as an end in itself. it is obviously not by accident that it is like that: to stay closed in on oneself is the surest way of being harmless.”20 the quest for originality and individuality culminates in the myth of the avantgarde, in which formal revolution is mistaken for real revolution. the problem, according to Aillaud, originated not with the artists but with the critics, who believed in the autonomy of art and consequently only paid attention to the form of the works, not their content. thus, in the eyes of bourgeois critics, edouard manet had no interest in the world around him. examining the Execution of Maximilian (1867–69) and Olympia (1865), Aillaud argued: “Where malraux, Bataille, and others see ‘the refusal of any value foreign to the painting,’ we see, on the painter’s side, a fervent interest in the reality of the world in which he lived.”21 manet was not trying to solve formal issues with those paintings; he was commenting on the world that surrounded him, searching for the form which would best express that reality.22 16. maurice merleau-ponty, “cézanne’s doubt,” in Sense and Non-Sense (evanston, il, 1964), p. 12. 17. Gilles Aillaud, Vivre et laisser mourir ou la fin tragique de Marcel Duchamp [live and let die, or the tragic end of marcel duchamp]. Aillaud wrote the preamble to this ensemble of eight paintings, which was originally shown as part of the exhibition La figuration dans l’art contemporain [figuration in contemporary Art] (Galerie creuze, paris, 1965). reproduced in Jean-louis pradel, La Figuration Narrative [narrative figuration] (paris, 2008), p. 163 [translated]. 18. “editorial,” in Le Bulletin du Salon de la Jeune Peinture 2 (december 1968), p 4 [translated]. 19. Gilles Aillaud, “essai de developpement. Atelier populaire: oui. Atelier bourgeois: non” [A developmental Attempt. people’s Workshop: yes. Bourgeois Workshop: no], in Le Bulletin du Salon de la Jeune Peinture 2 (december 1968). reproduced in Opus International 7 (June 1968), pp. 64, 66 [translated]. 20. Gilles Aillaud, “les raisons de continuer notre action” [the reasons for continuing to take Action], in Le Bulletin du Salon de la Jeune Peinture 3 (march 1969) [translated]. 21. Gilles Aillaud, “Bataille rangé” [pitched Battle], in Rebelote 3 (october 1973) [translated]. 22. Aillaud’s critique of the autonomy of art and the avant-garde echoes peter Bürger’s theses. peter Bürger, Theory of the AvantGarde, trans. michael Shaw (minneapolis, mn, 1984). fR DZA CATheRIne DoSSIn Jeune peInTuRe: The pARISIAn ThIRD WAy of The 1960S 273 the Jeunes peintres were thus united by their recognition of their non-freedom, their disregard for originality, and their acceptance of the ideological nature of art because, as françois derivery explained: “to free art from ideology, propaganda, proselytism [. . .] is to put it at the service of the banking ideology, to spread its propaganda, its proselytism.”23 the only solution was to deliberately choose the ideology that artworks would convey and to work together as a group. the Association de la Jeune peinture therefore offered the perfect framework within which “the usual confrontation of trends and styles [could be dispensed with], allowing art to engage with something other than itself, thereby calling into question its very necessity.”24 in 1964, Aillaud, Arroyo, and recalcati painted a collective manifesto Live and Let Die, or The Tragic End of Marcel Duchamp, in which they symbolically killed duchamp and through him the myths of the avant-garde, autonomy of art, creative freedom, and originality. As they explained: “it is indeed culture as ‘nobility of the world,’ our Western culture itself, at which we are taking aim through the work and the person of the man who best embodies it today because he embodies it in a masked way.”25 the work caused a scandal and was negatively received by the parisian art world, which mistook it for an act of provocation instead of recognizing it as a serious condemnation of the avant-garde.26 the duchamp incident demonstrated the gap that separated the Jeune peinture from the Western art establishment and incited the Jeunes peintres to connect with artists from other parts of the world. in the catalogue of the 1965 Salon, they announced their desire to invite and collaborate with artists from countries that were engaged in the revolution. Such a confrontation, they believed, would allow “the debate [to be moved] from the aesthetic plane, that is to say from the plane of the relationship between art and art history, to the plane which interests us, that of the relationship between art and history.”27 Such an opportunity came in 1967, when the cuban government invited parisian artists and intellectuals to havana as part of the celebrations for the fourteenth anniversary of the revolution. Several Jeunes peintres, including Adami, Arroyo, Aillaud, erró, Jacques monory, Bernard rancillac, recalcati, and reyberolle, traveled to cuba in may as part of the “Salon de mai” delegation to create artworks that would be given to the havana museum. for the Jeunes peintres, the trip was an opportunity to meet cuban artists, see works created by revolutionaries, and more generally confront their ideas with the political reality of the revolution. in July, when they were joined by the rest of the guests, Wilfredo lam proposed that the french and cubans paint a work 23. françois derivery, “esthétique de ddp” [the ddp Aesthetic], in derivery, dupré, and perrot, Le groupe DDP, p. 89 (see note 12) [translated]. 24. Catalogue du 17e Salon de la Jeune Peinture [catalogue of the 17th Salon de la Jeune peinture] (paris, 1966) [translated]. 25. Gilles Aillaud, eduardo Arroyo, and Antonio recalcati, “comment s’en débarrasser ou un an plus tard” [how to Get rid of them, or one year later], in Opus International 49 (march 1974), p. 102 [translated]. 26. Jill carrick, “the Assassination of marcel duchamp: collectivism and contestation in 1960s france,” in Oxford Art Journal 31, no. 1 (march 2008), pp. 1–25. 27. Catalogue du 17e Salon de la Jeune Peinture (see note 24). fR DZA CATheRIne DoSSIn Jeune peInTuRe: The pARISIAn ThIRD WAy of The 1960S 274 fR DZA CATheRIne DoSSIn Jeune peInTuRe: The pARISIAn ThIRD WAy of The 1960S 275 photo documentary of the artists of the Salon de mai invited to havana. from Opus International 3, october 1967 together as had been done in milan in 1961. Arroyo suggested drawing a spiral and dividing it into segments that each of them could paint. one hundred artists and writers from all over the world participated in the creation of the Collective Cuban Mural on the night of July 17 in front of cuban tv crews. At the end, only the twenty-sixth section, which had been reserved for fidel castro, was left empty.28 the following year, the mural was shown in paris at the Salon de mai and became part of the events of may 68.29 for the Salon of January 1967, the Jeune peinture invited a South vietnamese delegation to visit them. upon attending the show, the vietnamese delegates commented that making a protest painting could be as effective as throwing a grenade— an empowering statement that reinforced the convictions of the Jeunes peintres. following this visit, they organized a fund-raising event, vietnam, a drawing for their Battle. the event was supposed to be called A drawing for a Grenade, but the artists who were members of the pcf disagreed with the title. in vietnam as in Algeria, the pcf wished mostly to promote peace, not war.30 for the 18th Salon planned for June 1968, the Jeune peinture organized a Salle rouge pour le Vietnam, a collective exhibition in which individual creativity would be subsumed under a common political goal. the paintings were to have the same size (2 by 2 meters) and a clear ideological content. the content of each work would be discussed beforehand by all the participants. their form would be considered only to the extent that it influenced the message. the success of a painting would not be measured in terms of its formal quality but its ideological legibility. henri cueco’s Barricade appropriated the iconography of delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People (1830); rené Artozoul drew three men, identifiable by the flags they wore on their backs as a Japanese, a french, and an American, leaving vietnam one after the other; louis cane painted a soldier brandishing a Kalashnikov and the words “laos” and “fnl”;31 Gérard Schlosser represented a torso freeing itself from bindings made of a uS flag. Based on press photographs, Aillaud’s The Battle for Rice depicted an American poW led by a small vietnamese soldier through rice fields in which vietnamese peasants are working peacefully. the artist played upon the space and palette of the work to highlight the power imbalance between the united States and vietnam. When a delegation of the fnl came to visit the Salle rouge, they particularly commended lucio fanti’s portrait of a well-dressed vietnamese family looking over rice fields for its comforting image of peace.32 28. Gérald Gassiot-talabot, “la havane: peinture et révolution” [havana: painting and revolution], in Opus International 3 (october 1967), pp. 14–18. 29. When castro supported the uSSr’s intervention in prague in August 1968, he lost the support of french intellectuals. 30. parent and perrot, Le Salon de la Jeune Peinture, pp. 67–68 (see note 2). 31. front national de liberation du Sud viêt nam (the national liberation front for South vietnam, popularly known as the viet cong). 32. parent and perrot, Le Salon de la Jeune Peinture, p. 72 (see note 2). due to the events of may 68, the 18th Salon was postponed and the Salle rouge was presented at the Arc33 in January 1969 as an independent exhibition, before going on tour. in order to reach the largest possible audience, it was hung at the Alsthom factory in Belfort, on the street in front of the Berliet factories in Bourg-en-Bresse, in the streets of Besançon, and in several maisons des Jeunes.34 critical reception was lukewarm. for Aillaud, the lack of response demonstrated the failure of traditional art criticism when faced with works that aimed at escaping the limits of the bourgeois avant-garde system. even critics friendly to the vietnamese cause showed an inability to change their criteria when visiting the Salle rouge. they could only think in terms of form and individual creativity, not ideological legibility and collective message.35 the pcf and its art critics were likewise critical of a project and works that did not fit their political and aesthetic vision, so much so that the show could not be presented in communist venues, aside from Bagnolet, where three of the participants lived.36 Jeune peinture was at odds with both bourgeois and communist ideology, and as such presented a unique attempt at finding a third way for those who rejected both the facileness of pop art and the dogma of socialist realism. may 68 occupied an important yet complicated position in the history of Jeune peinture. When the students of the École des Beaux-Arts seized control of the school on may 8, Jeune peinture artists stepped in to help organize the siege and set up collective projects. their first idea was to make a lithograph and sell the prints for the strikers’ benefit. As Gérard fromanger explained: The idea was to bring them to an art gallery to sell them. But we had hardly stepped out in the streets when the students took them and posted them on the wall. Then we got it: of course, this is the idea; this is how it should be used! We quickly went back to the print shop. 33. l’Arc (Animation, recherche, confrontation) is the department of contemporary art at the musee d’Art moderne de la ville de paris. in those years, it was very important and existed more or less as an independent entity. 34. parent and perrot, Le Salon de la Jeune Peinture, p. 73 (see note 2). 35. Aillaud, “les raisons de continuer” (see note 20). 36. parent and perrot, Le Salon de la Jeune Peinture, p. 93 (see note 2). fR DZA CATheRIne DoSSIn Jeune peInTuRe: The pARISIAn ThIRD WAy of The 1960S 276 fR DZA CATheRIne DoSSIn Jeune peInTuRe: The pARISIAn ThIRD WAy of The 1960S 277 Gérard fromanger, La police s’affiche aux beaux-arts, les beauxarts affichent dans la rue (the police Are posted at the BeauxArts, the Beaux-Arts [Students] poster the Streets), Atelier populaire des Beaux-Arts, June 1968. Silkscreen on newsprint, 64 × 48 cm. Bibliothèque nationale de france the Atelier populaire des Beaux-Arts was born at that moment. in the following weeks, many Jeunes peintres would participate in the activities of the workshop.37 like the Salle rouge, the workshop was a collective endeavor in which there was no room for individual style and personal expression. Artists were at the service of the revolution and the works they created had to serve a purpose. every evening there would be a meeting of the General Assembly of the Atelier populaire, during which artists would propose designs for posters. these proposals would be discussed and voted on. Although this sounded similar to the Jeune peinture’s principles, the control of the discussion by non-artists and their total disregard for the creative process were rather distressing for the Jeunes peintres. cuéco recalled: yes, I was there, but I was rather paralyzed. The fact that painting was to assume a direct role as a propaganda tool was none of my concern. I did not think that painters were meant to make instant signs. We were not there to create posters inviting people to a meeting. 38 the Jeunes peintres were first and foremost painters and they wanted to make a statement in painting. they asserted: “in the fight against bourgeois society we intend to fight in the field of ‘culture’ according to our specific means and by transforming the Salon de la Jeune peinture into an instrument of ideological fight.”39 they recognized that a gun or a grenade would be more efficient than a painting, but they were painters not soldiers, so they had to use their own means of action. they also realized that a bad painting would not help the revolutionary cause: “it is obvious that a discourse poorly uttered will never be a very good lawyer for the cause it defends.”40 Artists could play an important role by unveiling and revealing the world: “one forgets that reality is full of meaning and that it is under our eyes, and that it is not a question in art of inventing ‘something else,’ but of understanding and showing what is there.”41 he concluded: “it is precisely because paintings are images, and are only images and not things, that they can lead us to the things themselves.”42 the 22nd Salon of 1971 reflected the belief that painters could contribute to social change by exposing the reality of the world. the Salon was organized around several themes including “police and culture” and “work accidents”. those collective themes allowed artists to collaborate and put their art at the service of a larger cause. the first theme was particularly relevant both in the post-1968 context and in light of the Jeune peinture’s concern with the hidden ideological dimension of art in bourgeois capitalist society. equipo crónica, for instance, created a series of paintings in which policemen arrested artworks. for Spanish artists, the theme of police and culture resonated strongly in the context of francoist censorship.43 responding to the theme of accidents occurring at work, ernest pignon-ernest created an installation consisting of 156 painted men. every day during the twelve days of the Salon, he came and put a cross through thirteen men, that is to say the number of individuals that would die at work on any one day in france. By the end of the Salon, all the men had been crossed out. With this powerful installation, pignon-ernest revealed the scope of the problem and gave visibility to the anonymous victims of capitalism.44 in the 1970s, the roster of the Jeune peinture changed as new artists arrived and others, like Arroyo, left. yet, the ambitions of the Association remained largely unchanged. Several collectives were created to support specific projects and causes. in 1975, the year franco died, the collectif Antifasciste was established around fromanger, Julio le parc, and maurice matieu in order to continue fighting fascism and oppression throughout the world.45 the first action of the collective was to create 37. rancillac, for instance, designed the famous poster of daniel cohn-Bendit, Nous sommes tous des juifs et des allemands [We Are All Jews and Germans]. 38. Jean-paul Ameline and cécile debray, “entretien avec henri cuéco, 26 septembre 2007” [interview with henri cuéco, September 26, 2007], in Ameline and Ajac, Figuration narrative, p. 291 (see note 8). 39. “editorial” (see note 18). 40. Aillaud, “les raisons de continuer” (see note 20). 41. Aillaud, “police et culture” (see note 13). Aillaud’s comments echo roland Barthes’s Eléments de semiology [elements of Semiology] (paris, 1964) and pierre francastel’s Peinture et société [painting and Society] (paris, 1965). 42. Aillaud, “Bataille rangé” (see note 21). 43. thomas llorens, Equipo crónica. La distanciation de la distanciation: une démarche sémiotique [equipo crónica. the distancing of distancing: A Semiotic process] (Saint etienne, 1974). 44. ernest pignon-ernest, elisabeth couturier, and paul veyne, Ernest Pignon-Ernest, rev. ed. (paris, 2003). 45. raymond perrot, Le collectif antifasciste: 1974–1977 [the Anti-fascist collective: 1974–1977] (paris, 2001). fR DZA CATheRIne DoSSIn Jeune peInTuRe: The pARISIAn ThIRD WAy of The 1960S Le Bulletin de la Jeune Peinture 6 (September 1970). issue devoted to police and culture. Jeune création, paris 278 Le Bulletin de la Jeune Peinture 7 (november 1971). Jeune création, paris a poster done in response to the killing of mohamed laïd moussa, a young Algerian immigrant. in 1973 moussa had accidentally killed a frenchman during a neighborhood quarrel. released after eighteen months in jail, he was summarily executed by a commando from the extreme right.46 together with matieu, philippe carré designed a blue, white, and red poster displaying moussa’s portrait on the left and, on the right, the superposed silhouettes of his killer holding a gun, a policeman brandishing his billy, and president Giscard d’estaing standing in the background. As with the posters of may 68, the print was then plastered all over paris. the fight against apartheid in South Africa holds a special place within the history of Jeune peinture. the first Anti-procès show of April 1960 at the Galerie des Quatre Saisons in paris had actually been triggered by a trial in South Africa where the fortytwo accused black men refused to plead guilty. Jouffroy and lebel had then decided to organize the event to support people’s right to self-determination. over the years, the situation of black South Africans was the subject of many Jeunes peintures. in 1974, when the city of nice decided to establish a partnership with Johannesburg and invited South African representatives, pignon-ernest responded by covering the streets of nice with images of an African family behind barbed wire. Nice–Le Cap did more than simply alert the french public to the issue of apartheid, it gave visibility to the silenced black South Africans. the following year, an action was undertaken to obtain the release of Breyten Breytenbach, a white South African writer, artist and anti-apartheid activist, who had been living in france since the early 1960s.47 At the 1975 paris Biennale, Jeune peinture artists staged an anti-apartheid demonstration in which they appropriated and altered the poster of the movie Mandingo, playing upon the words “mandingo—mendigot” (mandingo—beggar) “immonde in gold” (squalid in 46. nicolas Brino, “Qui est raciste?” [Who is racist?], in L’Unité, march 28, 1975, pp. 1–2; hervé chabalier, “la loi de lynch à marseilles” [lynch law in marseilles], in Le Nouvel Observateur, march 24, 1975, pp. 24–25. 47. Breyten Breytenbach had married a french woman of vietnamese ancestry. this was regarded by the government as a criminal offence since South Africa prohibited white people from having sexual relations with people of different races. he was sentenced to seven years and released in 1982. Breyten Breytenbach, The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist (new york, 1985). fR DZA CATheRIne DoSSIn Jeune peInTuRe: The pARISIAn ThIRD WAy of The 1960S 279 gold).48 in 1976, for the 27th Salon, the ddp group created a large painting, A-fric, that addressed the poverty and exploitation of the African people through a series of images and a title that played upon fric, a colloquial term for money.49 the spread of military dictatorships in latin America and the military putsch of 1973 against president Allende in chile became another crucial cause for the Jeune peinture. in response to the coup, artists created posters and organized an exhibition Viva Chile at the Galerie du dragon. latin American artists associated with the collectif antifasciste, including le parc and Gontran netto, who had come to paris to flee the military dictatorship in Brazil, organized a demonstration at the venice Biennale and a show at the Arc in 1973. titled Sala escura da tortura, the exhibition consisted of a series of life-size paintings that engulfed viewers in dark scenes of tortures. At the Salon of 1974, chile was chosen as one of the collective themes. the fate of the palestinian people was another major concern of the Association. in 1970 Aboul hasssan, a fatah official, published a text in the catalogue of the Salon in which he explained the meaning of palestinian resistance and revolution. that year, as part of a movie festival, fromanger and Jean-claude latil organized a palestinian evening.50 for the 1976 Salon, an entire room was devoted to palestine. the main proponent of the palestinian cause at the Jeune peinture was claude lazar, a close friend of ezzeddine Qalaq, the plo’s representative in france since 1973. in 1976, at the venice Biennale, the collectif palestine, spurred on by lazar, rachid Koraïchi, and dégo, took part in a public action against the ongoing siege of the palestinian refugee camp of tel al-Zaatar in northeast Beirut.51 At the Salon of 1977, lazar presented a series on daily life in the occupied territories.52 in 1978 he was instrumental in helping Qalaq organize the international Art exhibition in Solidarity with palestine, which took place in Beirut. While works were given by many Jeunes peintres, including cuéco, fromanger, latil, le parc, matieu, and rancillac, some, like lazar and the critic michel troche, traveled to Beirut for the exhibition, organizing the kind of public events for which the Jeune peinture had become famous in france. As for the Salle rouge, they brought the paintings onto the streets of Beirut and organized workshops with local artists and soldiers as they had done in cuba ten years earlier. lazar’s painting of an arm wrapped in a kaffiyeh brandishing a Kalashnikov behind barbed wire echoed cane’s work for the Salle rouge and pignon-ernest’s Nice–Le Cap, thus demonstrating the strong continuity of Jeune peinture over the years. 48. parent and perrot, Le Salon de la Jeune Peinture, p. 168 (see note 2). 49. the ddp group (1971–98) consisted of three artists: françois derivery, michel dupré, and raymond perrot. the painting A-fric features scenes of apartheid, north African immigrants, etc. derivery, dupré, and perrot, Le groupe DDP, pp. 96, 157–58 (see note 12). 50. that year, the Jeune peinture also invited delegates from the irA, Black panthers, and other revolutionary groups from latin America and Greece. parent and perrot, Le Salon de la Jeune Peinture, p. 127 (see note 2). 51. in the context of the lebanese civil War, the camp was besieged from January to August 1976. the camp fell on August 12. for more on this project including an image, see ibid., p. 182. 52. ibid., p. 190. fR DZA CATheRIne DoSSIn Jeune peInTuRe: The pARISIAn ThIRD WAy of The 1960S 280 WoRlD 281 philippe carré, Mohamed Laid Moussa assassiné par les fascists (mohamed laid moussa assassinated by the fascists), collectif antifasciste, 1975. claude lazar archive this exhibition marked a turning point in the history of Jeune peinture. in the early 1980s, the Jeunes peintres would take action one last time in response to the political unrest in poland. the group had always been supportive of Soviet dissidents and its membership included many eastern european political refugees. in January 1982, they organized a demonstration in support of the Solidarity movement, which took them through the streets of paris to the Soviet embassy, which they encircled. in the following years, the Salon would continue to take place, but it would no longer be the same. With the opening of the centre Georges pompidou in 1977, paris recovered a central place on the international art scene, thereby ending the period of isolation during which the political and artistic activities of the Jeune peinture had flourished. the election in 1981 of a socialist president, françois mitterrand, further contributed to the political and artistic transformation of the country, marking the beginning of a new era. reflecting on the activities of the Jeune peinture, fromanger concluded: So what is the work of the Jeune peinture—both in general and now in particular—if not, amongst other things, the translation of certain efforts, be they great or small, constituent, militant, or year-round phenomena? for some it will be in connection with the migrant workers, for others, the organizing committee of Renault or some other committee, for others, the repression in latin American countries, etc. All of these works reflect the struggles facing each participant as they strive for a collective assessment that allows every one of them, as individuals, to progress.53 53. ibid., p. 147. nineteen SiXty-eiGht: GloBAl or locAl? by emin Alper We can speak of three major historical moments when revolutionary movements became global as they transcended national borders in unexpected ways: 1848, 1968, and 1989. if one of the aspects that distinguishes 1968 from the other two dates is its failure to have staged successful revolutions, the other is the fact of its having been a uniquely global and worldwide phenomenon—in contrast to 1848, which was limited to europe, and 1989, which was limited to eastern europe—such that there is almost no place in the world which has not lived a “68,”1 barring a section of sub-Saharan Africa, the southern part of the Arabian peninsula, and a number of eastern european countries.2 As yet, historians have been unable to provide completely satisfying answers to the question of what the basic dynamics were that made 1968 so global. how countries with thoroughly different political and economic conditions could, at around the same time, witness radical student movements and a correspondingly radical ethos is still a subject of critical discussion and a topic for research. 1. it should be noted that when we say “68,” we are not talking about a single year. We should emphasize that even though 1968 is indisputably the year when the protests were the most intense, the “68” of some countries happened in different years (for instance, the 1973 Athens polytechnic uprising in Greece), and therefore we use 1968 more as a symbolic year. in this sense, 1968 may be considered a long year that covers 1965–73. for a similar discussion, see Kostis Kornetis, “everything links? temporality, territoriality and cultural transfer in the ’68 protest movements,” in Historein 9: “historising: 1968 and the long Sixties” (2009), pp. 34–45. 2. michael Kidron and roland Segal, The State of the World Atlas (london, 1981). this map of major student disruptions in 1968–69 is reproduced as “the Student Sixties” in carole fink, philipp Gassert, and detlef Junker, eds., 1968: The World Transformed (Washington d.c., 1998), pp. 14–15. WoRlD emIn AlpeR nIneTeen SIxTy-eIGhT: GloBAl oR loCAl? 282 Since we are faced with a global phenomenon, the first explanation that comes to mind is based on an understanding of global dynamics. viewed from this perspective, the dynamics that need to be examined at first hand are as follows: first, the almost universal explosion in the number of students in the 1960s; second, significant events like the cuban revolution, vietnam, and the prague Spring, whose impacts shaped world politics; and, third, the proliferation of media such as the press, radio, and television. yet the main question is whether these three dynamics suffice to explain such radical and global movements. in fact, any account of 1968 that eschews a narrative emphasizing its own national dynamics and relies instead on the “global” explanation finds itself to be deficient, weak, and far from persuasive. Since this is the case, is it more rational to speak of the contingent juxtaposition of movements produced by different localities and local experiences? of course, it is possible to ask the same question not only in terms of the determinant dynamics but also at the empirical and descriptive level. Was there a single 1968? or did every country live its own “68”? What was common to the “68” of the West and the “68” of the third World? let us begin by seeking answers to these questions. how many “68s” Were there? undoubtedly the “68” phenomenon has many qualities that make it both common and particular to every single country. in Arif dirlik’s words, the 1968 student movements used a common vocabulary but worked according to the logic of a different grammar.3 can we then argue that there were different demands and concerns underlying the numerous common slogans and symbols like che (Guevara) and vietnam? to begin with, we can broach the subject with the most conviction by mentioning the difference between the “68” of the West and that of the third World. in this respect, a brief overview of the history of student movements may be helpful. According to edward Shils, what rendered the 1960s distinctive was not the emergence of student movements in those years. Both in europe and in the third World, student movements had entered the stage of history a great deal earlier.4 for example, in the 1930s there was a noteworthy leftist student movement in england.5 As for the third World, student movements had been very powerful since the beginning of the century. thus, in some countries they reached their peak not in 1968, but well in advance. Argentina in 1918, egypt in 1937, and india in the independence war years witnessed radical student activism and massive protests.6 Still, there was something that distinguished the 1960s. first of all, contrary to the dispersed and relatively weak movements of the previous years, a movement of unprecedented extent and simultaneity emerged in the uSA and Western europe. 3. Arif dirlik, “the third World in 1968,” in fink, Gassert, and Junker, 1968, pp. 295–320 (see note 2). 4. edward Shils, “dreams of plentitude, nightmares of Scarcity,” in Seymour martin lipset and philip G. Altbach, eds., Students in Revolt (Boston, mA, 1969), pp. 1–35. 5. Brian Simon, “the Student movement in england and Wales during the 1930s,” in The State and Educational Change: Essays in the History of Education and Pedagogy (london, 1994), pp. 103–26. WoRlD emIn AlpeR nIneTeen SIxTy-eIGhT: GloBAl oR loCAl? 283 And in the third World, even though the student movements in many countries had reached their climax in different years as mentioned above, in the 1960s there was a significant intensification. According to Shils, what rendered the 1960s different was a qualitative change rather than a quantitative one. previous movements had mostly functioned within a traditional left-wing framework, as extensions of the political lines of the “big” parties. the political activity of the youth movements, which had internalized the traditional revolutionary political lines, was generally under the command or in the shadow of the communist parties (or the leftist-nationalist parties in the third World). in this sense, 1968 was strikingly different. to begin with, the youth now absolutely rejected the tutelage of any “big” or “paternal” party, and on top of that, they also declaredly disavowed the conception of politics represented by these parties. the communist parties evoked as much disgust with their bureaucratic structures as the traditional bourgeoisie parties. new politics was much more anarchistic, decentralized, and spontaneous. the youth wanted to start the revolution here and now in their daily lives; they replaced all notions of bureaucratic transformation with spontaneity and the emancipatory force of revolt. According to Wallerstein, hopkins, and Arrighi, in this sense 1968 sounded the death knell of traditional radical-populist politics. in the view of these writers, both the radical parties in the West and the left-wing nationalist movements in the third World had gradually fallen short of keeping their promises; they had not been able to bring about any significant transformation in the countries in which they had come to power. therefore, 1968 was a reaction against “paternal” politics and the bankruptcy of old school revolutionism.7 it had become obvious that the revolution was not going to take place through the appropriation of the power apparatus. hence, the revolution had to be initiated in ourselves, in our everyday lives, and somewhere beyond the power of the state. this distinction, which sets forth the qualitative difference of the 1960s, is rather illuminating, at least in the case of Western europe. it may, however, tend to be somewhat misleading when we come to consider the situation in the third World. Although the rejection of the tutelage of “paternal” parties was a more or less common characteristic of the student movements of the third World countries, this rejection never amounted to a disowning of the political conceptions of these parties. in other words, the radical student movements of the third World were a continuation of traditional radical politics and social movements. these movements were angry at the reformist or left-wing nationalist parties for not doing anything after seizing power, but this anger did not bring about a radical questioning of the conception of 6. for Argentina, see richard J. Walter, Student Politics in Argentina: The University Reform and Its Effects 1918–1964, (new york, 1968). for egypt, see Ahmad Abdalla, The Student Movement and National Politics in Egypt 1923–1973 (london, 1985). for india, see philip G. Altbach, “Student politics and higher education in india,” in lipset and Altbach, Students in Revolt, pp. 235–57 (see note 4). 7. Giovanni Arrighi, terence K. hopkins, and immanuel Wallerstein, Anti-Systemic Movements (london, 1989). WoRlD emIn AlpeR nIneTeen SIxTy-eIGhT: GloBAl oR loCAl? 284 politics held by these parties. on the contrary, what needed to be done was to repeat what had previously been attempted in a more radical and genuine way: to mobilize people, under the leadership of a party or vanguard group, to try to take over the state apparatus, and to take the fight to the political arena, ignoring the micro-level struggles in the cultural and social realms. And there was nothing surprising in this. for the radical leaders who acted within a sociopolitical context in which poverty was still a major problem, industrialization was the most important common goal; populist politics had not completely exhausted itself, and as the state still maintained vital leverage, there was much to achieve by taking control of it. While, in the West, 1968 marked the beginning of antimodernist movements, in the third World modernization was definitely an unfinished project, and the state continued to be the motor of modernization. of course, it is extremely dangerous to draw this differentiation in a rigid way. there were certainly many student groups in the West that maintained their traditional political lines, just as outside the West there were student circles that experienced the cultural revolutionary dimension of 1968. i will try to touch on these points below. despite all its vulgarity and the unfair generalizations it implies, and, even more crucially, despite the borderline examples where the two categories intersect (such as in italy, where countercultural movements were weak compared with the classical revolutionary movements), a distinction can be made between the “68” of the developed countries and that of the third World;8 albeit without forgetting the common features and qualities that render 1968 indisputably global beyond this differentiation. Anti-imperialism was the most prominent of the features common to almost every country’s “68.” even though it was much more strongly emphasized in the third World, it was also one of the elemental agendas of the developed countries— the most important symbol that held the “68” of the world together was definitely vietnam. the slogan that united almost all of the student movements in 1968 was: “one, two, three, four! We don’t want your fucking war!” Both the red Army faction in Germany, the guerilla groups in latin America, and the people’s liberation Army of turkey had chosen the American military bases as their prime targets, and they considered the weakening of American imperialism a precondition of the liberation of the world’s peoples. Another global characteristic of 1968 was that almost everywhere in the world it was lived as a generational experience involving a certain degree of intergenerational conflict. We mentioned above the break from the “paternal” parties and political movements; even in the third World, where the foundational lines of this “paternal” politics were not questioned, the youth organizations quickly became autonomous 8. dirlik, “the third World in 1968” (see note 3). WoRlD emIn AlpeR nIneTeen SIxTy-eIGhT: GloBAl oR loCAl? 285 and declared their independence. one of the most striking examples of this was the turkish student movement’s initial break from the gerontocratic structure of the turkish labor party and, following that, its refusal to accept the leadership of another “father,” mihri Belli, who was one of the main originators of the national democratic revolution thesis, which had a strong influence on students in 1968. the ideological and political leaders of the youth movement were figures who had not yet reached the age of twenty-five. A third commonality was high doses of voluntarism, which left its mark on the movement, and the belief in both the effectiveness and the remedial power of violence.9 political violence was both an effective tool of revolution in the hands of a voluntarist avant-garde group and was emancipatory and healing in itself. While the instrumental aspect of violence came more to the fore in the third World, in the West it was more frequently a question of experiencing violence as an existential practice and an act of revolt by closed groups that had detached themselves from the pacifist countercultural movements. however, all the different perceptions of violence held by these movements intersected in a fanonist sublimation of violence. causes We can repeat the categorizations we made above at the empirical level on the plane of causality. in other words, we can distinguish between global dynamics and dynamics specific to the individual categories that guided the movements. first of all, we should proceed from a common finding. A precondition of youth movements is the existence of an influential youth or student identity and culture in the national context in question. meyer and rubinson, as well as others, detected a significant correlation between the rates of recognition of student status at the cultural, juridical, and official levels, and the intensity of student movements in all the sample countries they examined.10 therefore, both in the West and in the third World, we can take the existence of a strong youth and student culture as the precondition of student politics. however, it seems that this condition has been shaped in different ways and under different historical conditions in the cases of these two categories. the emergence of “youth” as a pervasive category in the developed countries coincides with the rise of the consumerist society after World War ii. in these countries, youth was originally a category discovered and put into circulation by the market. the postwar welfare state and the wealth produced by the golden age of capitalism had made it possible for households to subsist on the income of a single member (that is, the father), and, as a result, the urgency young people felt to join the workforce had been removed. Above all, the “youth” period of not only the middle 9. Kornetis, “everything links?” p. 39 (see note 1). 10. John W. meyer and richard rubinson, “Structural determinants of Student political Activity: A comparative interpretation,” in Sociology of Education 45, no. 1 (winter 1972), pp. 23–46. WoRlD emIn AlpeR nIneTeen SIxTy-eIGhT: GloBAl oR loCAl? 286 WoRlD emIn AlpeR nIneTeen SIxTy-eIGhT: GloBAl oR loCAl? 287 classes but also the working class was prolonged to at least the age of eighteen, before which time these youngsters did not work. moreover, they had the opportunity to cultivate a consumption pattern suitable to their tastes with the allowance they got from their fathers.11 thus the market discovered a new consumer group, “the youth,” a category that was highly distinct and innovative with its tastes and habits. throughout the 1950s, the youth had turned into a sociological category characterized by the accessories they used (leather jackets), the vehicles they drove (motorcycles), the music they listened to (rock ’n’ roll), and the way they spent their leisure time. And the youth culture of the 1960s was the product of the radicalization of the apolitical yet rebellious culture of ten years previously by an intellectual-political youth (that is, the university youth). As for the developing world, here youth identity was produced in a completely different way. in these countries, where the processes of the construction of the nation and a national identity still set the agenda, the state itself played a major role in the production of “the university youth” identity. the youth was the source from which to nurture the future ruling elites, the guarantee of the country. So they had to be educated, but even during their education they had to be placed in a privileged position and treated as the future elites, rulers, and bearers of national culture. moreover, they were needed not only in the future but also in the present day. in the event of war, they were the ones to be recruited first, with their dynamism, physical capacities, and patriotism. therefore, in these countries, the youth became the privileged subject of a nationalist-militarist (and at times revolutionary) discourse. the youth was brave, pure and uncorrupted, idealist, and ready to fight in the name of these ideals—just as mustafa Kemal had described it in his Address to the youth of turkey and in his far more controversial Bursa speech.12 in parallel to this, in developing countries the youth usually not only had a strong identity but also powerful mechanisms of representation and semi-corporatist organizations. of course, the politicization and radicalization of this powerful student identity had required certain conditions. these conditions were mainly the political conflicts that, to a large extent, had simultaneously cut through the third World in the postwar period and were the products of the cold War. from latin America to Asia, reformist, development-oriented political platforms, dependent on an educated middle class, had exerted dominance over the political lives of these countries in the postwar era. these political movements defined themselves as being opposed to rich land oligarchies; they designed partial nationalizations, notably land reform, and radical actions for the development of a national industry. the natural rivals of these groups that sought to rely on a worker–peasant–middle-class alliance were landowners and the peasants dependent on them through patronage, a considerable part of the bourgeoisie, and, after the 1960s, the military.13 the radicalization of these conflicts under cold War conditions led to the politicization of students. At times through the conscious mobilization of the reformist parties in question, and at times through a more spontaneous process, the university youth entered the political scene as the natural ally of these middle-class parties. prompted by a feeling of national responsibility, these young “intellectuals,” who used their powerful and prestigious positions in society, participated in the social conflicts and sided with the modernizing powers as required by their education and sense of mission; however, in time, they quickly became independent of these “paternal” political movements. So how did it come about that these two different sociopolitical dynamics that were at work in the West and in the third World, whose intersection seemed in no way inevitable, merged and caused a global explosion in the 1960s? We can reply by recalling the three fundamental dynamics we mentioned at the beginning: an almost universal explosion in the number of students in the 1960s; significant events like the cuban revolution, vietnam, and the prague Spring, whose impacts determined international politics; and the quick dissemination of action forms and symbols by means of the press, radio, and television. it was truly difficult to find a country that did not double its number of university students through the 1960s.14 the welfare-state administrations in the developed world, and the efforts toward an import-substitution industrialization policy in the developing world had caused a boost in the demand for technocrats, engineers, and social workers, which had in turn resulted in a growth in the number of students. While in the West this growth further augmented the social visibility of the youth, in the developing world, the increase in the number of students—who had started to become politicized many years prior to this—automatically translated into a growing mass of people who were ready to behave as political actors. in the meantime, the national liberation movements that had left their mark on the 1950s and 1960s were inspiring and encouraging youth, especially in the third World, to conduct an anti-imperialist struggle. As for the cuban revolution, by demonstrating the effective outcome of a revolutionary struggle initiated by an avant-garde force, first in latin America, then across the world, it turned guerilla warfare into a widespread strategy on a global scale. And, needless to say, vietnam was fomenting unrest among both uS youth at risk of being conscripted and third World youth ripe with anti-imperialist sentiments. the student radicalizations, which had taken place at different times, now converged, intensified, and sharpened—as if coordinated by an invisible hand—with the emergence of common global causes in 11. for a good summary of this explanation, see tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (new york, 2005), pp. 346–48. 12. leyla neyzi, “object or Subject? the paradox of ‘youth’ in turkey,” in International Journal of Middle East Studies, 33, no. 3 (August 2001), pp. 411–32. 13. especially in latin America, until the end of the 1950s, the armies had supported the reformist middle-class parties and had even carried them to power in some countries, but later on, when these movements were radicalized and had begun to move further to the left, the armies had taken sides with the oligarchic powers and the bourgeoisie. 14. John W. meyer, francisco o. raminez, richard rubinson, and John Boli-Bennett, “the World educational revolution, 1950– 1970,” Sociology of Education 50, no. 4 (october 1977), pp. 242–58. WoRlD emIn AlpeR nIneTeen SIxTy-eIGhT: GloBAl oR loCAl? 288 international politics in the second half of the 1960s. As the protest repertoires, imaginative inventions, and slogans of different national movements were spread quickly by the media organs, these movements attained a common vocabulary as well. even though, besides this common repertory, there were specific words used by youth movements in each country and sometimes the same words signified different things, this quickly led to the spread of a language by means of which youth across the world could more or less communicate.15 therefore, it was inevitable that the characters of the youth movements of two separate worlds stemming from diverse sociopolitical dynamics would be different, even though they converged around common symbols and causes. While the Western youth movements bore a lifestyle-oriented and countercultural tone, those in the third World were more political and nation-centered. for this reason, the “68” of the West moved side by side with a cultural revolution and generated new social movements which placed new conflicts at the center of politics, whereas the “68” of the third World generally left its mark on the political sphere rather than the cultural one. cultural revolution? in europe and the uSA a cultural revolution took place in the 1960s and 1970s.16 A fast transition was in process toward a more tolerant society in which moral criteria were changing, taboos were being shaken one by one, and sexuality was lived more freely; easiness, sincerity, and freedom replaced a puritan morality based on selfcontrol, and warmth replaced formality in relations, as the authoritarian remnants of the former society were erased. the question of whether this cultural revolution created “68,” or vice versa, is open to debate. even if, according to many writers, the beginning of this cultural transformation could be traced back to the 1950s, and even earlier, and even if it was rightly claimed that 1968 had arisen on the grounds of this cultural revolution,17 there can be no doubt that the social dynamic engendered by 1968 had further radicalized this cultural transformation and carried it even further. Actually, this transformation was the natural consequence of the conscious provocations of the students of “68.” the radical student groups of the time were aiming to reveal the authoritarian faces of the respectable, official institutions and their representatives, and to bring down their democrat masks, which they used as a form of cold War rhetoric, by deliberately trying their patience and provoking them. And to a large extent they succeeded in clearing european public life of bumptious formality, authoritarianism, and religious morality—which were, for the most part, remnants of the old aristocracy. i said that 1968 was more truly political in nature in countries outside the West. 15. there is a highly advanced literature on the spread of the protests and protest forms that transcended national borders. As an example, see doug mcAdam and dieter rucht, “the cross-national diffusion of movement ideas,” in Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 528: “citizens, protest, and democracy” (July 1993), pp. 56–74. 16. eric hobsbawm, “cultural revolution,” chap. 11 in The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991, (london, 1994), pp. 320–43. 17. Arthur marwick, The Sixties: The Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy and the United States, c.1958–c.1974 (new york, 1998). WoRlD emIn AlpeR nIneTeen SIxTy-eIGhT: GloBAl oR loCAl? 289 in these countries cultural struggle yielded more complicated results. for example, ethiopia’s “68” effloresced as a reaction to the parade of models in a fashion show that took place at the university, and throughout the movement the mini skirt and various notions sexual freedom, which were the symbols of Western imperialism, were condemned.18 the cultural revolution motifs which were the symbols of emancipation in the West could be taken in the third World as attempts on the part of the degenerate Western world to invade the local culture. But not everywhere was like this. for instance in turkey, at least until 1969, rock— the rebel music of the West—the miniskirt—the symbol of casualness and disobedience in one’s way of dressing—long hair, and accessories in general had gradually gained wide currency among the left-leaning youth. the situation in mexico was more or less the same. new trends were being adopted by the youth; to consume these symbols while at the same time being anti-imperialist and leftist was not considered to be a contradiction, even though a significant section of the youth was doing so with completely apolitical intentions.19 the years 1965–68 in turkey marked a cultural revival beyond the universalization of the symbols in question. the launching of the literary magazine Yeni Dergi, the establishment of the cinematheque, the emergence of the Anatolian pop movement, and the quickly increasing number of translations created an unprecedented air of cultural abundance for the younger generation. many witnesses reported that in this period the precondition of being a leftist was reading literature. in the summer of 1968 this cultural climate fused with the rebellion of the university students, engendering a unique summer of liberation. however, this atmosphere was short-lived. the urgency, currency, and gravity of the political struggle put cultural pursuits and transformations on the back burner. the preoccupation with reaching out to and meeting the people as the requirement of a radical politics tended toward rediscovering the authentic, and reuniting with the folk culture instead of discovering the culturally new. Just like in mexico, before long rock was forgotten, its place taken by folk music. miniskirts were thrown aside, longhaired students were forcibly removed from demonstrations, and symbols militarized. hence, 1968 did not become the turning point of a new cultural and artistic transformation in turkey. it did not herald in a new modernism in art or mark the beginning of an avant-garde wave. Artistic pursuits inclined toward new realisms, or the rediscovery and recovery of the true folk culture with new tools, or the balancing of avantgarde forms with a more leftist and populist content. the results were not of the kind to be made light of, and the new experiments were in line with the questing spirit of Western modernism. however, there was no turning point, no radical change in view. 18. dirlik, “the third World in 1968” (see note 3). 19. for the mexico example, see eric Zolov, Refried Elvis: The Rise of the Mexican Counterculture (Berkeley, cA, 1999). WoRlD emIn AlpeR nIneTeen SIxTy-eIGhT: GloBAl oR loCAl? 290 conclusion, or What remains Behind As mentioned above, the imprints of the Western “68” on daily life and culture have been much deeper and more permanent. As for the “68” of the third World, it mainly witnessed the suppression of the social movements it had encouraged and pioneered through military coups and authoritarian regimes. in these countries, the political traces of 1968 were deliberately and mercilessly erased by the reactionary regimes. it was not only leftist political movements and culture that suffered from this. the crushing of the youth had paved the way for the recovery of the gerontocratic regimes. indisputably, turkey was one of the places where this could be observed most clearly. the September 12 coup of 1980 systematically took away from the youth all its prestige and freedoms. the education system was redisciplined with an archaic authoritarianism and a new period began in which the “anarchic” memories from the past were remembered as nightmares, and the authority of the teacher, the schoolmaster, and the disciplinary board, who became sources of fear and terror, were unshakably constructed. the relationship between youth and politics was decisively disrupted. in any case, the new liberal order had already eroded the identity of students as intellectuals responsible for the future of the country and transformed them into competitive investors, who were compelled to increase their human capital in order to survive in the labor market. from now on, “youth” was far from being a political category or subject. the political heritage of the “68” in turkey is highly controversial. Both the radical marxist politics of the day and nationalist Kemalism claim to have their roots in 1968, as do some of the liberal intellectuals (although the majority of these intellectuals cannot desist from furiously attacking it). it is very hard to argue that any one of them is wrong. turkey’s 1968 was indisputably marxist and revolutionary; but at the same time it defined this revolutionism with a discourse that was interpenetrated with an anti-imperialist, nationalist Kemalism. And the majority of today’s liberal intellectuals were brought up in the school of “68.” Apparently, when asking the question how many 1968s there are, one needs to take into consideration not only the different “68s” lived by different countries but also the different ways 1968 is remembered today. translated from turkish by Ayşe Boren Am 291 BlAnK ZoneS in collective memory, or the trAnSformAtion of yerevAn’S urBAn SpAce in the 1960S moscow cinema open-air hall in yerevan, 1964–66. Architects: telman Gevorgyan, Spartak Kntekhtsyan. Artsvin Grigoryan archive by ruben Arevshatyan the moscow cinema open-Air hall (part i) the beginning of 2010 in yerevan was marked by an unprecedented activist movement that began immediately after the Armenian Government had made certain changes in the city of yerevan’s official list of historical and cultural monuments. the changes concerned the open-air hall at the moscow cinema—a bright example of the late modernistic architecture of the 1960s—which was removed from the list with a subsequent order being issued that it should be demolished, and that the church of St. poghos-petros, which had been destroyed during Stalin’s antireligious campaign in the 1930s, be reconstructed in its place. Am RuBen ARevShATyAn BlAnk ZoneS In ColleCTIve memoRy, oR The TRAnSfoRmATIon of yeRevAn’S uRBAn SpACe In The 1960S the decision provoked an immediate and, in terms of its scale, rather unexpected reaction. A facebook group called “SAve cinema moscow open-Air hall” was formed, and 6,000 members joined the group within a short period of time. in addition, an activist initiative that organized various types of actions, public discussions, etc., was formed. one of the most effective actions was the signature campaign that was held for a week, during which more than 26,000 signatures were collected. different professional unions, nGos, and other public institutions also supported the initiative. the campaign started to resonate with a broad section of the public, shifting the discourse to broader sociocultural and political levels and giving the government and the church an unwanted surprise. After fierce debates in the press, tv, radio, and internet, the church, along with the government, decided to pull back and suspend the implementation of their plans for the time being. they announced that the question was being considered by different commissions, which could mean either real discussions or the usual tactic employed to take the heat out of a problem by freezing public attention. the question regarding the moscow cinema open-air hall is actually more complex than it may seem at first sight. in a strange way, it links the epoch in which it was built, with its tensions, emancipatory energies, and paradoxes, to the neoconservative context of neoliberal sociopolitical and cultural actuality. the open-air hall was constructed between 1964 and 1966 by architects Spartak Kndeghtsyan and telman Gevorgyan. it was one of the best examples of the revived functionalist approaches in post-Stalinist Soviet Armenian architecture that were developing parallel to the intensive urbanization of the city of yerevan. Architects masterfully transformed a constricted backyard between two buildings into a rational space, 292 Am RuBen ARevShATyAn BlAnk ZoneS In ColleCTIve memoRy, oR The TRAnSfoRmATIon of yeRevAn’S uRBAn SpACe In The 1960S 293 where the combination of concrete forms with developed surplus spaces, mixed with integrated natural elements, created a distinguished ensemble in the very heart of yerevan. An amphitheater was built, with an extensive foyer underneath that used to be one of the most popular and active cafes in the city. the wide terrace that united the amphitheater with the sidewalk broke up the rigidness of the existing topography in a way that was at once interventional and obedient to its geometrical form—trees were allowed to grow on the sidewalk, pushing up through the firmness of its concrete and so creating many new perspectives for observing the surrounding environment, as well as the architecture itself. But one of the most important features i would like to focus on in this architecture (as well as in many other architectural forms created in the very same period in yerevan and Armenia) is how it generated certain surplus spaces in the urban environment, spaces that could be regarded as a kind of blank, or what one might call “extra territories.” these territories shaped new perceptions of urban space, and new urban cultures and politics, the formation of which was tightly intertwined with the appearance of qualitatively and essentially new public spaces in the city terrain. however, since the mid-1990s, those particular spaces have been vanishing from the urban environment having either been destroyed or corrupted beyond recognition. it might seem that, in a newly developing postideological society, these constructions and spaces have remained as examples or reminders of something “other” that, from today’s perspective, would not easily fit the logic of the economy and politics of the current sociocultural paradigm. the tendentious demolition of these structures and spaces went hand in hand with reconsiderations of historical narratives, and the occupation of these “extra territories” of the city was in Am RuBen ARevShATyAn BlAnk ZoneS In ColleCTIve memoRy, oR The TRAnSfoRmATIon of yeRevAn’S uRBAn SpACe In The 1960S 294 Am a symbolic way an erasure of certain zones from collective memory—a phenomenon that, in a paradoxical way, juxtaposes a certain 1960s-style tendency to create blank spaces in the urban environment with the formation of blank spaces in collective memory. thus, we are dealing here with a forced or natural collective amnesia, the symptoms of which could be traced right back to the 1960s. collective Amnesia and/or Blank Spots of the 1960s reflecting on the Soviet 1960s nowadays, we are faced with such an enormous wealth of information, images, personages, and narratives and their interpretations that (both during the Soviet period and in post-Soviet times) there have been only a few low-key reconsiderations of the changes in the political and cultural paradigm. the connection between these elements may seem quite contradictory and at times even rather forced, as if you were trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle, with the knowledge of a certain image in mind, but confronted with pieces that either do not fit this image or make up other, different, fragmented pictures, leaving extensive blank zones in between. despite the fact that the epoch of the 1960s is firmly stamped in the collective memory of ex-Soviet societies as an extremely important part of their histories, which conditioned, in many senses, the subsequent development of their cultural, social, and political environments, one may also note how this memory is fixated on certain events and data that are only associated with the established local historical master narrative, which is mainly invoked to rationalize the present state of those societies. the rare publications about the period mainly focus on specific subjects and mostly deal with them in quite narrow and particular contexts. But as soon as you try to step beyond Stalin monument in yerevan, installed 1950, removed 1962. Architect: rafael israelyan; sculptor: Sergey merkurov. Armenian national Archives monument of mother Armenia, 1967. Sculptor: Ara harutyunyan. photograph ruben Arevshatyan 1. Sergey dmitrievich merkurov a prominent Soviet sculptor-monumentalist of Greek Armenian descent. he was a people’s Artist of the uSSr, an academic at the Soviet Academy of Arts, and director of the pushkin museum of fine Arts from 1944 to 1949. merkurov was considered the greatest Soviet master of post-mortem masks. he was the author of the three biggest monuments of Joseph Stalin in the uSSr. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Sergey_merkurov (accessed october 22, 2013). 2. it was also impossible to find any archival photos of a missing monument, although taking family photos with the monument of Stalin and later mother Armenia in the background was popular. i am still in the process of looking for such an image, but at the same time it is clear why such images are missing: it did not occur to anybody to have a picture taken in front of an empty podium—a missing icon. RuBen ARevShATyAn BlAnk ZoneS In ColleCTIve memoRy, oR The TRAnSfoRmATIon of yeRevAn’S uRBAn SpACe In The 1960S 295 the trite notions and general stories like “the thaw,” “Khrushchevki,” “dissident culture and politics,” or “revived national self-consciousness,” and just talk to people of the 1960s about the 1960s, you will often confront an interesting, yet paradoxical situation, where even a minor allusion to that period arouses an intense flow of fragmented private memories, intertwined with scrappy, but at the same time bright images and emotions that are generally interrupted by a memory effect that is deep, impenetrable, and spotty. it might seem that the selective processing of private memory is constantly correlating personal data with the junctures inscribed in the time line of the historical narrative (believed to be a collective memory), as well as with the contemporary context, which seems to be in total opposition to the paradigms of the “romantic rebellious epoch.” And whatever does not fit in the narrative is self-censored, ignored, or just deleted from memory. in exploring yerevan’s transformation in the 1960s, i discovered a very interesting case of collective memory loss related to the changes that took place in the city’s most visible symbols. At the beginning of 1962, the monument of Stalin, which had “watched” the city from the heights of one of yerevan’s hills, was displaced, and the roof of the World War ii victory museum building, which had served as a huge podium for the monument, remained empty until 1967. After a five-year break, another monument, mother Armenia, was put on display to replace the “father of the nations.” though it might sound ironic, it took quite a long time and a lot of effort to figure out the exact date the monument of Stalin in yerevan was displaced. despite the fact that it was one of the biggest and best-known monuments in the Soviet union made by Sergey merkurov,1 its displacement has not been well enough covered either in books or in documentaries. 2 Am RuBen ARevShATyAn BlAnk ZoneS In ColleCTIve memoRy, oR The TRAnSfoRmATIon of yeRevAn’S uRBAn SpACe In The 1960S for some people, the date the monument was taken down was associated with the 20th congress of the communist party of the Soviet union (cpSu) in 1956, where Khrushchev denounced Stalin’s crimes and the “cult of personality.” Alternatively, there was another fixed notion that the monument had been removed in 1967, right before the mother Armenia statue was installed in the same place. the only thing that got imprinted in the collective memory was the case about the two workers who were killed during the removal process. in the book about yakov Zarobyan (the first secretary of the communist party of the Soviet republic of Armenia in the period 1960–66) written by his son nikita Zarobyan, there is a very interesting detail that describes the whole political context of the period when Stalin’s monument was displaced in yerevan. it was, in fact, one of the last displacements of a monument to Stalin in a Soviet capital, and the son of the former first secretary describes the reason for this delay as a form of hidden diplomacy between Armenia and Georgia. this story is also connected with another veiled and/or forgotten episode from the Soviet past. Spontaneous large-scale demonstrations took place in tbilisi and other cities in Georgia (Gori, Sukhumi, Batumi) right after the 20th congress of the cpSu in 1956, with the offended protesters trying to defend the outraged honor of their compatriot Joseph Stalin. the tbilisi revolt, which lasted five days (march 5 through 10) and was violently suppressed by military forces (the number of estimated casualties varies from several dozen to several hundred), could be considered a breaking point and a symptomatic event in Soviet history. Apart from being the painful reaction of a society at the end of the Stalinist myth, it also became the starting point for the development of new nationalistic contexts and separatist discourses in Soviet sociopolitical and cultural situations that were being shaped 296 demonstration of students and intelligentsia demanding the recognition of the Armenian genocide of 1915, lenin Square, yerevan, April 24, 1965. from nikita Zarobyan, Yakov Zarobyan i ego epokha (yakov Zarobyan and his epoch) (yerevan, 2008) Am RuBen ARevShATyAn BlAnk ZoneS In ColleCTIve memoRy, oR The TRAnSfoRmATIon of yeRevAn’S uRBAn SpACe In The 1960S 3. in his book Unknown USSR, vladimir Kozlov wrote about the development of the tbilisi outbreak in 1956 among many other small- and large-scale outbreaks in the Soviet union during the Stalin, Khrushchev, and Brezhnev eras. he identified it as one of the most symptomatic outbreaks, as its start had a rather symbiotic character where advocacy for Stalinism was intertwined with a nationalistic background, which in the end (on the fourth day of unrest) turned into appeals calling for the separation of Georgia from the Soviet union, an unbelievable idea at the time. the author of the book thinks that, even if those appeals had a fragmented and particular character, their effect on the subsequent development of the sociocultural and political situation in Georgia, as well as in other republics of the uSSr and the communist bloc, was tremendous. vladimir A. Kozlov, “politicheskie volneniia v Gruzii posle XX Sezda KpSS” [political unrest in Georgia after the 20th congress of the cpSu], chap. 7 in Neizvestnyi SSSR: Protivostoianie naroda I vlasti 1953–1985 [unknown uSSr: Antagonism between Society and the power System 1953–1985] (moscow, 2005), http:// krotov.info/lib_sec/11_k/oz/lov_va4.htm (accessed october 22, 2013). parallel to the evolving social disbelief in the feasibility of a new social order.3 the connection between the tbilisi demonstrations and the late displacement of Stalin’s monument in yerevan is explained in Zarobyan’s memoirs as the very concrete and simple intention of the first secretary of the Armenian communist party of that period to keep good neighborly relations with Georgia.4 Although this description might seem somewhat unsophisticated, it also signified another important contextual shift: the peripheral republic decided to pursue its own autonomous politics by defining its strategic priorities with an eye to the future development of relations with its neighbors. there was to be a clear understanding that the regulation of national questions was no longer under the same authoritarian central control as it had been during the Stalin period. this supposed the advance of the individualization process that had started to develop in the sociopolitical, economical, and political situations in each of the fifteen Soviet republics. the tbilisi riot, as well as many other insurrections that took place in the Soviet union in the Khrushchev period (murom in 1961, novocherkassk in 1962, Sumgait in 1963, etc.), had a very complex, diverse, and intertwined character (pro-Stalinist, social, political, anarchistic), where there might be significant discrepancies between people’s essential motivations and their final demands. demonstrations in the early Brezhnev period took on a more specified character in the sense of asserting concrete political demands (yerevan in 1965, moscow in 1965, etc.). But, in any case, all those important historical episodes of public uprisings were strictly tabooed during the Soviet period. they remain only in the memories of the local participants in those rebellions, but are now fading away through being mythologized and losing their contextual particularities. 4. nikita Zarobyan, Yakov Zarobyan i ego epocha [yakov Zarobyan and his epoch] (yerevan, 2008), p. 92. 297 Am RuBen ARevShATyAn BlAnk ZoneS In ColleCTIve memoRy, oR The TRAnSfoRmATIon of yeRevAn’S uRBAn SpACe In The 1960S it might sound paradoxical, but, even after the fall of the Soviet union, only a minor portion of these historical episodes were uncovered, and then only partially. the multifarious essence of these social rebellions, which represented, in a certain way, the ambiguous character of the epoch itself, was perhaps the main reason why those narratives were retold to the public via selective and fragmented interpretations. the editing of history that started in post-Soviet societies with the revision of the narratives and images (the demolition of monuments and symbols) of the communist past to a certain extent revitalized some of those episodes that fitted in with the political and cultural contexts of the liberalizing post-ideological society. As a rule, these interpretations obeyed the mythical narration, and, what is most interesting, they were mainly deprived of the affirmation of imagery. By the same logic, just as there were no images of an empty podium from the interval between the displacement of Stalin’s monument and the erection of the new monument to mother Armenia in yerevan, a host of other images that might provide some information about the phenomenon, and/or propose other contextual readings of it, had been either lost or removed from public circulation, and later on from collective memory. coming back to the period between 1962 and 1967—the specific temporal “void” that was opened wide in the midst of an epochal shift marked by the change of two monumental symbols in yerevan, signifying different epochs and different political and cultural hegemonies—it is possible to trace how the same kinds of voids were appearing in the different strata of the sociocultural, political, and even economic reality of that period. And these were not the type of voids that could be allowed to appear in a confused society that, after losing its leader, also lost its belief in the ideas of a “bright future.” they were very soon filled 298 5. in the same period of time, the monumental symbols of the “motherland” were erected in almost every Soviet national republic (mother Georgia, the statues of mother motherland in Kiev and Belarus, etc.). Am RuBen ARevShATyAn BlAnk ZoneS In ColleCTIve memoRy, oR The TRAnSfoRmATIon of yeRevAn’S uRBAn SpACe In The 1960S 299 by substituting the “personality cult” with the “cult of the nation”5 as a new system for controlling a society stripped of ideological bias. the process was much more complex and multilayered, as complex and multilayered as the society itself. maybe it is appropriate to mention that, aside from that great inter-ideological void, there were many other voids of different scales and different characters that had appeared in or were generated by the same society, either in order to extend certain spatial and ideological (formal and informal, new and old) limitations, or to prolong the absence of autonomous reconsiderations of the past, the present, and visions of the future. the actively evolving urbanization of yerevan and its rural areas, the intensive development of diversified industries throughout the republic with a gradual shift toward advanced technological products, the establishment of scientific institutes, the improvement of living standards, intensifying interrelations with the world (in the 1960s there was the last great wave of repatriation of Armenians from the diaspora), and many other progressive developments in the 1960s, had really influenced the country’s reality by reviving Soviet utopias. yerevan, as well as many other cities in the republic, had gained a new modernistic appearance that was in contrast to Stalinist architecture. in parallel to the appearance of new environments in the urban space, new urban cultures were emerging that were also shaping new individual images. reintegration (although partial and distanced) with worldwide sociopolitical and cultural processes and a clear vision of Armenia’s involvement in the big cold War–period geopolitical setup on the one hand stimulated universalistic perspectives, albeit considered with a local focus, and, on the other, suggested reconsiderations of the known, as well as forgotten, narratives of its own history of modernization—such as the formation of the Am RuBen ARevShATyAn BlAnk ZoneS In ColleCTIve memoRy, oR The TRAnSfoRmATIon of yeRevAn’S uRBAn SpACe In The 1960S 300 construction of the memorial for the victims of the Armenian genocide of 1915, April 24, 1965. from nikita Zarobyan, Yakov Zarobyan i ego epokha (yakov Zarobyan and his epoch) (yerevan, 2008) first republic between 1918 and 1920, followed by the formation of the Soviet Socialist republic in 1920. in the 1960s, Sovietization started more and more to be considered in intellectual, cultural, and political discourses solely as an imported project and a new form of colonization. this was propagated in society in direct and indirect ways, despite the fact that since the beginning of the twentieth century, the caucasus had been one of the key centers for the development of communist and socialist revolutionary movements. this placed in doubt not just the history of Sovietization but also the prospects for the socialist system itself. the other important event in that period that determined the subsequent development of the whole sociopolitical and cultural paradigm was the demonstration staged by students and the intelligentsia in yerevan on April 24, 1965 (which overflowed into a large-scale nationwide protest), demanding the recognition of the Genocide of Armenians in the ottoman empire in 1915—an issue that was strictly banned during the Stalin period. in two years, the memorial to opening of the memorial for the victims of the Armenian genocide of 1915, April 24, 1967. Artur tarkhanyan archive Am RuBen ARevShATyAn BlAnk ZoneS In ColleCTIve memoRy, oR The TRAnSfoRmATIon of yeRevAn’S uRBAn SpACe In The 1960S 301 Genocide victims was raised on tsitsernakaberd hill in yerevan and became a unifying symbol for Armenians scattered all over the world. All those and many other processes and newly developing discourses concerning identity, history, perspectives about the future, etc., have opened new spaces in the collective consciousness and memory. Besides activating some forgotten segments and driving others out into the zone of oblivion, they have also opened up a space between perceptions about utopias and the doomed constancy of existence, between modernisms and antimodernisms. An open space for contemplation, tensions, confusions, drifting, flânerie . . . A space that appeared in the Armenian literature, cinematography, and architecture of the mid-1960s. Artavazd peleshyan, applying in his films his method of “distance montage,” based on a redefinition of spatial-temporal structure and the relationship between image and sound, created a certain kind of space between sequences, bringing them closer to or further from each other, and letting the spectator enter that space and contemplate it, switching between images of modernisms and antimodernisms. in his short films, peleshyan used his method to structure the simultaneity of diverse episodes taking place in different temporal and situational contexts, and depicted vanity as the poetics of the modern epoch, contrasted with the ontology of existence (presented with images of constant movement, migration, transitions and transmutations, cataclysms, etc.). vanity was universalized and identified with the notion of eternity.6 in frunze dovlatyan’s film Hello, It’s Me (1965), the young scientist Artyom7 endlessly strolls in and between yerevan and moscow, in his own memory space, having a dialogue with his alter ego; he drifts between the past and future, contemplating as he goes. his flânerie in a certain way becomes the main process Am RuBen ARevShATyAn BlAnk ZoneS In ColleCTIve memoRy, oR The TRAnSfoRmATIon of yeRevAn’S uRBAn SpACe In The 1960S and meaning of the whole film, which at the end is unexpectedly interrupted, when, all of a sudden, the protagonist wraps up his analysis of the past, perceives (as a kind of epiphany) his identity and destiny, and leaves the boundless space of idle drifting, going away toward the mountainous landscape in the final scene. the physical materialization of these blank, open free spaces could be better observed in the transformations in urban spaces and in Soviet Armenian architecture of the mid-1960s, particularly in the case of yerevan. “extra territories” metamorphosing yerevan in the transformations of the 1960s in comparison to other cities in Armenia, yerevan experienced the most intensive and radical transformations in the 1960s, which affected the whole character of the city. one of the most important reasons for such an active development of the city was the intensive growth of the city’s population, which massively exceeded the population growth stipulated by the 3rd master plan of yerevan developed in 1951. in 1961, work began on the 4th master plan, which not only posited a new scale and new strategies regarding the city’s development but was also based on a new philosophy somehow related to Soviet utopias (like Khrushchev’s famous declaration that Soviet society would attain communism as early as the 1980s). moreover, it also had to deal with a social and cultural structuring that was different from the radical visions of early Soviet utopias. the modernistic trends in early Soviet architecture and urbanism that were interrupted in the 1930s experienced a revival in the 1960s. once more, there was demand for the rationalist creative approaches of the important architects that belonged to the avantgarde constructivist groupings of the 1920s and 1930s, such as michayel mazmanyan and Gevorg Kochar (both of whom had just returned from exile) and Samvel Safaryan and hovhannes margaryan, architects who 302 6. See Artavazd peleshyan, Mardkants yerkire [the earth of the people] (yerevan documentary film Studio, in association with the All-union State institute of cinematography and hayk Studio, 1966), black and white, 10 min.; Skizbe [Beginning] (yerevan documentary film Studio, in association with the All-union State institute of cinematography, 1967), black and white, 10 min.; My [We] (yerevan film Studio, 1969), black and white, 27 min. 7. the protagonist was based on a real character, physicist Artyom Alikhanyan, one of the founders of nuclear physics in the Soviet union, the founder of the yerevan physics institute and the cosmic ray station on mt. Aragats (at an altitude of 3,250 m), and one of the creators of the yerevan synchrotron. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Artem_Alikhanian (accessed october 22, 2013). Am RuBen ARevShATyAn BlAnk ZoneS In ColleCTIve memoRy, oR The TRAnSfoRmATIon of yeRevAn’S uRBAn SpACe In The 1960S 8. the district was composed of only prefab slab houses (so-called Khrushchevki). this was the city’s first residential district in the usual sense of the term, as a district with structural and functional importance for the urban system. energetically joined in the creative process of devising new forms of urban planning and architecture. Since 1956, a group of architects led by mazmanyan had been busy with the new urban planning projects and their realizations, such as the residential area for the Achapnyak district in yerevan8 and extensive work on the master plan of yerevan. Kochar realized several interesting architectural projects. in the 1960s he had the chance to continue and complete some of the complexes and ensembles that he had started to design and build in the late 1920s. the best example of these is the canteen of the summer resort for the Writers’ union in Sevan. Safaryan headed a workshop for the standardized design of housing that became a real school for the young generation of architects who would later shape the language of late modernism and postmodernism in Armenian architecture. Besides those architects that belonged to the early constructivist groupings, there were many other architects from the younger generation who had managed to travel abroad, sometimes even for short-term study or research projects. in the 1960s, architectural communities throughout the Soviet union started to organize specialized professional trips and exchanges inside and outside the union parallel to the activated reciprocal professional visits of architects from europe, the united States, and Japan. that was also a period when some european professional architectural magazines were in regular circulation, and the library of the Architects’ union was daily enriched with professional literature that was coming to Armenia by various routes (through professional exchanges and connections with the diaspora, etc.). At the time, the Architects’ union was one of the important public institutions that, along with the state architectural firms, municipalities, and government, participated in decision-making processes and provided a venue for active discussions on architectural 303 Am RuBen ARevShATyAn BlAnk ZoneS In ColleCTIve memoRy, oR The TRAnSfoRmATIon of yeRevAn’S uRBAn SpACe In The 1960S and urban development projects. those discussions tackled different subjects, one of the most dominant of which was the question concerning form-building principles regarded from the perspective of the functionality of architecture and its relationship to the specificity of the local context. this involved considering not only the relation of architecture to the natural but also the cultural environment. it was, in fact, the continuation of a rather tense discourse that had begun in the 1920s and had been interrupted in the mid-1930s by two major architectural groups or schools (the national school and the constructivists) and was revived in the new ideological context of the Khrushchev period, which put strict limitations on construction norms, correlating them with restricted financial means. faced mainly with a dull, standardized form of architecture in the second half of the 1950s, when it was only possible to make innovations in the field of urban planning, architects and local authorities started, at the beginning of the 1960s, to find some ways out of the monotonous construction and budget dictates, creating low-budget but extremely interesting architectural forms that imparted new energy and new images to the city character of the 1960s. While aware of the context in which they were working and complying with the standards imposed upon them by the Snip,9 architects manifested a truly modernist enthusiasm in concentrating their creative thinking on achieving the objectives set by the system, i.e. on creating and developing additional capabilities— extra functions and extra potentialities of materials, technology, form, space, and context. coming back to the tendencies in the 1960s mentioned earlier with regard to the formation of blank spaces, the Armenian architecture that started to develop in that period presented perfect examples of such “extra” territories, or “extra” volumes, despite the 304 Am RuBen ARevShATyAn BlAnk ZoneS In ColleCTIve memoRy, oR The TRAnSfoRmATIon of yeRevAn’S uRBAn SpACe In The 1960S 9. the Snip (Stroitelnye normy i pravila) were the construction standards and rules commonly applied as part of Soviet building code. fact that the ideological doctrine of the period was waging a war against excesses in architecture. there was a story about Khrushchev’s visit to Armenia in 1961, when the Soviet leader became furious (and his anger turned into a major scandal that was widely propagated by the Soviet press of the time) after seeing a small architectural volume in the form of a seagull displayed as a roadside sign for the northern exit of yerevan city. this architectural volume made of concrete (actually a very low-budget construction) became an object of Khrushchev’s harshest criticism. his phrase, “So that is how you are squandering public resources!” became a warning to other republics to steer clear of that kind of dissipation. Although Khrushchev saw this small architectural volume as a “squandering,” there was an intensive development of new spaces and volumes in urban environments that could be associated with a waste of means, territory, and purpose. Without going over budgetary limits, architects, together with local authorities, employed new tactics as well as a new philosophy regarding the organization of urban space. in yerevan, the construction of new streets and avenues (like Sayat nova Avenue, which was inaugurated in 1963), the reconstruction of some of its old streets, the improvement of its parks, and the development of new recreation areas were imparting to the city a new horizontal character, creating spacious zones for pedestrians. Water features of different sizes and geometrical shapes appeared in the parks and even on the sidewalks of some reconstructed streets. next to them, there were often pergolas that were either used as open-air cafes (new and important public spaces in yerevan developed in that period) or marked out functionless or multifunctional territories on the sidewalks. the open-air cafes that appeared in yerevan in the 1960s were not just a new type of public space that “Seagull” on the road at the northern entry into yerevan, 1960. Architect: hovhannes hakobyan; artist: van Khachatour. from G. Asratyan, r. mazelev, Erevan i ego okrestnosti = Erevane ev nra shrjakayke (yerevan and its environs) (leningrad, 1973) 305 Am RuBen ARevShATyAn BlAnk ZoneS In ColleCTIve memoRy, oR The TRAnSfoRmATIon of yeRevAn’S uRBAn SpACe In The 1960S 306 Am RuBen ARevShATyAn BlAnk ZoneS In ColleCTIve memoRy, oR The TRAnSfoRmATIon of yeRevAn’S uRBAn SpACe In The 1960S 307 chess player’s house in yerevan, 1967– 70. Architect: Zhanna mescheryakova. Zhanna mescheryakova private archive formed a new city culture but were also bright examples of new horizontal architecture, where it was possible to see the direct influences of organic architecture, as well as some echoes of the concept of emptiness coming from modern Japanese architecture. the liberation and democratization of urban space in yerevan paralleled the revival of modernistic trends in architecture, and the historicist principles of the national style (which since the mid-1930s had been integrated into the Stalinist style) retreated, opening up a short temporary gap for free experimentations that were more universalistic in their essence. these experimentations were in contrast to existing national and Stalinist styles in architecture and succeeded in shaping not only the new character of yerevan but also a new social, cultural, and psychological situation in urban life. this short-lived transformation of the city, which occurred in the midst of replacing two hegemonic monumental symbols, succeeded in giving rise to a new society and to new individuals who had the chance to choose their positions when strolling around the “extra spaces” of the new city amid new architecture that was free from the aesthetics of the past and did not have direct ambitions concerning the structuring of the programmed future. the functional essence of that architecture, which was based on the principles of a rational distribution and usage of space also brought forward a discourse concerning “other” possible functionalities of space that might stimulate a sense of commonality outlined by the simple compositions of concrete forms and structures, as well as a sense of individuality conveyed by individual aesthetic and conceptual solutions. yet the most important change suggested by these architectural forms was a new correlation between architecture and the recipient, where the extra space provided required first and foremost the presence of someone who would modify, articulate, and subjectify Abovyan Boulevard, improvement in the section between toumanyan Street and moskovian Street in yerevan, 1962–66. Architects: feniks darbinyan, James Avetisyan, Karlen martirosyan. from A. A. Aslanyan et al., Soviet Armenia (yerevan, 1971) Aragast café and a segment of the circular park in yerevan, 1963–64. Architects: feniks darbinyan, margarita hayrapetyan, feliks hakobyan. eduard papyan archive pergolas on Abovyan Street as part of Abovyan Boulevard improvement in the section between toumanyan Street and moskovian Street in yerevan, 1962–66. Architects: feniks darbinyan, James Avetisyan, Karlen martirosyan. Artsvin Grigoryan archive Aragast café in yerevan, 1963–64. Architects: feniks darbinyan, feliks hakobyan. from varazdat martirosovič Arutjunjan et al.,yerevan (moscow, 1968) that architecture. in return, this new feature formed a novel but at the same time ambiguous interrelation between the notions of particularity and commonality, between the subject and the universal. on the one hand, there was great excitement about the self-potency granted by the universalist world outlook, which offered an opportunity to shape reality, but, on the other, it generated tensions related to a fear of being absorbed or lost in the “extra territories” of commonality that belonged to no one. the trend changed in just a few years (we may even say it was developing as a parallel process), and particularity turned into a main principle regulating local social, political, and cultural processes. By the end of the 1960s, new models of “local modernities” had begun to appear. they were either large-scale representatives of supranational architecture—although it might sound contradictory, Armenian late modernistic architecture of the 1970s and 1980s was also considered in the Soviet union as a certain national particularity— or examples of a new national style in architecture that had conceptualized and contextualized structures and forms of traditional architecture inside a modernistic Am RuBen ARevShATyAn BlAnk ZoneS In ColleCTIve memoRy, oR The TRAnSfoRmATIon of yeRevAn’S uRBAn SpACe In The 1960S 308 modus operandi. the stratum of “extra-territory” architecture with its new urban structures and landscapes was soon overshadowed by the particularity of largescale representational architecture that continued to develop “excessive” spaces that were to fulfill “other” functions but were already different from the “extra territories” of the 1960s. the fate of the “extra territories” and the moscow cinema open-Air hall (part ii) today, the architecture of the 1960s in yerevan has been almost completely swept away or has been distorted beyond recognition. the effects of neoliberal economics and urban policy were first felt in public spaces, recreation areas, historical centers of the city, and so on. of course, in this process of violently reshaping the city, buildings and districts that belong to different periods of time were destroyed, and each of these destructions had its own history and problems. As a matter of fact, certain projects relating to the radical modernization of the city center (like the construction of northern Avenue) had been in development since the very early master plans of yerevan were made. of course, questions concerning the “ephemeral” spaces that were developed during the 1960s can sound somewhat naive and romantic at a time when the city was losing districts developed at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries, when symbolic buildings of constructivist and Stalinist styles, and late modernistic architecture had been partly or completely destroyed or terribly corrupted (the Sports committee Building, the Sevan hotel, the former russia movie theater, the youth palace, etc.), when the continuous green zones and recreation areas of the city were fragmented and hidden behind the facades of the newly erected buildings, and when the problem of the loss of public spaces in the city, Sketch of rossiya cinema, yerevan, 1968. Architects: Spartak Khachikyan, hrachik poghosyan, Artur tarkhanyan. Artur tarkhanyan archive construction of yerevan youth palace, designed late 1960s, constructed early 1970s. national Archives of Armenia Am RuBen ARevShATyAn BlAnk ZoneS In ColleCTIve memoRy, oR The TRAnSfoRmATIon of yeRevAn’S uRBAn SpACe In The 1960S 10. tigran Sargsyan, “the end of the State – or a new form of Societal organization” (yerevan, 2008), p. 13, http://www.gov.am/files/docs/217.pdf (accessed october 22, 2013). which is a social problem and a matter of town planning, had become a burning political issue. however, the case of the moscow cinema open-air hall, which led to the explosion of such an incredible self-organized public reaction and turned into a serious social movement struggling with the political authorities and the church to protect an architecture that embodied, in its structure and form, something that had been neglected, covered, and forgotten, was really symptomatic of the complexity of current social, political, and cultural processes in Armenia. one of the keys to understanding the complexity of the situation that developed around the cinema theater can be found in a text entitled “the end of the State,” published in 2008 by tigran Sargsyan, the current prime minister of Armenia. Analyzing the evolution of states in the context of postindustrial societies, tigran Sargsyan concludes that: The state as we perceive it today is nearing an end. new forms of networked structures of public organization are coming to replace it. [. . .] In a postindustrial world, in accord with the new philosophy and ontology, we should first conceptualize our competitive advantages in networked forms of selforganization. We have an opportunity to pull through the periphery of history and create a new networked civilization—the Armenian World. from the perspective of the above described methodology and hypothesis, we can conceptualize Armenians as a network. history testifies that after the loss of statehood, the Armenian people demonstrated an alternative form of self-organization that helped this nation to survive. The church came in to take on that function of self-regulation. As such, the methods and the form of organization the church used were complying with the network logic.”10 309 Am RuBen ARevShATyAn BlAnk ZoneS In ColleCTIve memoRy, oR The TRAnSfoRmATIon of yeRevAn’S uRBAn SpACe In The 1960S this fragment from the prime minister’s text could, in fact, serve as a key puzzle piece that will bring together the whole picture. And it deals with the same space or void, the same tension between modernistic visions of universalism and phobias regarding loss of particularity, i.e. control over societal self-organization processes. in the Armenian context and in many others, the end of the 1960s suggested a simple superposition of these two visions, as a result of which particularity had been universalized, revitalizing and universalizing good old institutions of power like the nation and the church. the struggle for the moscow cinema open-air hall was, in fact, the continuation of that old conflict, in which the architecture of the theater (as well as other rare examples of modernistic architecture from that period that have been preserved) has, in a certain way, turned into evidence of, and a vessel for, other models of universalism that have succeeded in encouraging a sense of unity and self-organization in post-Soviet fragmented societies. postscript: in the summer of 2013, after many years of disuse, the moscow cinema open-air hall was temporarily reopened for public screenings for the Golden Apricot international film festival. 310 Am deconstruction of yerevan youth palace, 2003–4. photograph hayk Bianjyan moscow cinema open-air hall in yerevan, 1964–66. Architects: telman Gevorgyan, Spartak Kntekhtsyan. onik minasyan archive RuBen ARevShATyAn BlAnk ZoneS In ColleCTIve memoRy, oR The TRAnSfoRmATIon of yeRevAn’S uRBAn SpACe In The 1960S 311 IR 312 nArrAtiveS of the 1960S by Sohrab mahdavi it is significant that the question of the impact of the 1960s on the non-Western world is always framed as the struggle of intellectuals and artists from the lesser nations to come to terms with their own sense of artistic or intellectual inadequacy. the art scene in third World countries had lagged behind, it seemed, always trying to catch up with a tectonic force that had swept the globe with unbound youthfulness and energy. the pressure was on the third World artist to surrender and to produce. for the iranian visual artist of the 1960s, the main preoccupation was always two pronged: the question, on the one hand, of how to be modern in an age that demanded nonconformity, rebelliousness, and a breaking away from tradition, and, on the other, of how to preserve a distinct identity as the only way to lessen the pressure of measuring up to an ideal of Western art whose place of origin was always elsewhere. it is the pull between these two forces that constitutes the zeitgeist of the 1960s for the third World artist. At one end of the scale, the values of the decade were being harangued for being revolutionary, groundbreaking, unprecedented, and universal. the youth rebelled against state domination in all aspects of life, against the onedimensional organization man and the shackles of conformity. the vietnam War became a pretext for questioning the status quo as well as the power structure. At the other end of the scale, the third World artist was facing another challenge, one that his 1950s’ predecessors, for whom “originality was submerged in the effort to absorb new outlooks and to learn and master new techniques,”1 did not concern themselves with. it was a time when the question of originality was posed with increasing passion and urgency. 1. ehsan yarshater, “contemporary persian painting,” in richard ettinghausen and ehsan yarshater, eds., Highlights of Persian Art (Boulder, 1979), p. 363. IR SohRAB mAhDAvI nARRATIveS of The 1960S 313 it was the Armenian iranian marcos Grigorian who, having graduated from the Accademia di Belle Arti in rome, returned to iran in 1954 to open a gallery and to prepare the ground for modernist artists in tehran to explore their own roots.2 in his Galerie esthétique in tehran, alongside modernist works, he put on display the work of traditional artists like the qahveh-khaneh painters.3 he was also one of the organizers of the 1st tehran Biennial in 1958. 1st tehran Biennial poster, 1958. Sohrab mahdavi private archive Grigorian was an influential teacher at the university of tehran’s fine Arts Academy. he encouraged his students to look for elements of their own popular culture. this was in direct contrast to the universalist orientation of 1950s’ artists like Jalil Ziapour who embraced Western mandates in an age when this was seen as an acceptable means to progress. Grigorian’s works inspired many 1960s’ iranian artists, notably hossein Zenderoudi, to look for and make use of native materials and themes. in one picture, Zenderoudi copies, scene-by-scene, the theme of a qahveh-khaneh painting. one must view this newfound interest in religious iranian elements against the backdrop of the American-led coup in 1953 and the attempt by the Shah of iran to project himself as the heir to 2,500 years of civilization. Government organizations only commissioned works that emphasized the pre-islamic grandeur of persia. indeed a group of modernist artists were increasingly appealing to religious symbolism to bring originality to their works.4 Art critic Karim emami called them “Saqqakhaneh” artists, to underline their shared sense of religious fetishism.5 A parsons School of Art and design graduate, monir Shahroudi farmanfarmaian was 2. fereshteh daftari, “Another modernism: An iranian perspective,” in Shiva Balaghi and lynn Gumpert, eds., Picturing Iran: Art, Society and Revolution (new york, 2002), pp. 39–87, here: p. 48. 3. “coffeehouse” painters were known for the religious themes of their pardeh, or drapes, that told the story of religious legends in pictorial form. When hung on one of the walls of a coffeehouse, these drapes would become the backdrop of a oneman theater, where a reciter of epic poetry would tell the story depicted on the drape for the clientele. 4. Jinoos taghizadeh (performance artist and writer), in discussion with the author (tehran, winter 2010). taghizadeh maintains that religious codes were used by Western-oriented iranian artists as a political tool to oppose cultural oppression under the monarchy. 5. A water fountain, or saqqakhaneh, serves the thirsty in an arid climate. it is surrounded by mementos and objects offered as gifts. most cities in iran no longer have these fountains. IR SohRAB mAhDAvI nARRATIveS of The 1960S 314 IR SohRAB mAhDAvI nARRATIveS of The 1960S 315 tehran contemporary Art museum, 1976. Architect: Kamran diba. Wikipedia mesmerized by mirror works in mosques and islamic architecture, as well as by primitive textile patterns. Another student at the Accademia di Belle Arti in italy, parviz tanavoli came back to iran to hunt for artifacts—locks, keys, knobs, grillwork, prayers, talismanic messages, tribal rugs, and gravestones—not only to collect but also to incorporate into his sculptures. Zenderoudi, educated in paris, painted elaborate canvases filled with numerological charts, qahveh-khaneh themes, and inscriptions on vestments. faramarz pilaram applied gold and silver paint to a canvas to depict the Mosques of Isfahan. they all invariably made ample use of persian calligraphy, which opened the door to a whole new set of meanings and interpretations. this did not mean that they believed in the religious/iranian content of their works. they saw in these objects, detached from their universe of meaning, the power to break free from the trap of copying the West, and a way to come up with an authentic art movement. in fact, the desire to give wings to a “movement” was probably the reason why Saqqakhaneh was used with increasing frequency by cultural authorities, who saw it as the beginning of a genuine artistic movement that could put iranian art on the Western artistic map.6 outside of modern arts, things were a little different. Blighted by failed attempts during the 1940s and 1950s to establish a participatory government that would reflect the will of a people hungry for autarky in the colonial era,7 the iranian political milieu moved on to a different plane in the 1960s. the easing off of the political crackdowns of the 1950s (which had followed the 1953 coup that reinstated the Shah) facilitated the politicization of the decade. many intellectuals and writers, who previously had predominantly formed leftist, secular groups, couched their words in religious symbolism because in that way they could voice their demands without being red-baited. this is a period when the call to “go back to the roots” was often heard in intellectual circles.8 in 1962, the same year that modernist iranian artists staged their first show in the uS to coincide with the 3rd tehran Biennial, Jalal Al-i Ahmad’s Occidentosis was published.9 According to Al-i Ahmad, the disease plaguing third World countries, as the title of his book suggests, is their inability to hold on to an independent identity. instead, he advocates a return to the roots that were presumed lost in the fevered rush to catch up with the West. during the 1960s, the official center for the visual arts in iran became highly active, and this was in large part due to the patronage of farah pahlavi, the Queen, whose husband did not necessarily share her enthusiasm for the arts.10 many of the 6. Abel Saeedi (1960s visual artist), in discussion with the author, April 2010. 7. the constitutional revolution (1906–11) marks the beginning of a pivotal era of iranian public activism in the political arena. Since that time, the yearning for democratic rule has been kept alive in people’s hearts in spite of repeated disappointments, notably the uS/uK orchestrated coup of 1953 that toppled a democratically elected government and effected a draconian regime of repression for the next decade and a half. the many attempts at democratic reform have met resistance both internally—the strong-arm rule of reza Shah pahlavi (1925–41)—and externally—the coup against prime minister mohammad mosaddeq (1950–53), which brought back reza Shah’s son, mohammad reza, to the throne with the help of the uS and the uK. 8. See, for example, ervand Abrahamian, Iran: Between Two Revolutions (princeton, nJ, 1982). 9. Jalal Al-i Ahmad, Occidentosis: A Plague from the West, trans. r. campbell (Berkeley, 1984). 10. Abel Saeedi, in discussion with the author, April 2010. artists who had studied abroad or had chosen to live in exile in the 1950s, were invited to come back to the country with prospects of a lucrative career. the center commissioned works by many of the young artists of the decade, including Shahroudi farmanfarmaian, Abol Saeedi, Ahmad esfandiari, mohammad Javadipour, Zenderoudi and tanavoli, massoud Arabshahi, manuchehr yektaii, Sirak melkonian, and mohsen vaziri-moghaddam. their works appeared in urban public spaces as well as in hotels and in the houses of the wealthy. needless to say, these works were void of any political content. many of these artists did not follow the calling of their Saqqakhaneh colleagues to go back to their roots and stayed well within the established Western modernist tradition. in short, there is not a single thread that can connect all the various artistic activities that were taking place within the country in the 1960s. A number of the artists, like hanibal Alkas, harbored revolutionary sentiments, but these did not catch on until the late 1970s. Because of the official support they received, the visual arts thrived. tehran contemporary Art museum, under the tutelage of Kamran diba, who was a relative of the Queen, as well as the museum’s architect, acquired works by notable Western artists like Alberto Giacometti, umberto Boccioni, frank Stella, rené magritte, Joan miró, and Alexander calder, and in this way built a reputation for the modern arts establishment in iran. the dominant narrative that regarded the 1960s as a revolutionary decade tends to overlook several developments that preceded and ran parallel to the decade’s subversive potentials. first, the youth rebellion owed a great deal of its intellectual vitality to the liberation movements inside and outside the West. the third World “project” unleashed a tremendous wave of dissent across the globe and against the violent legacy of colonialism and cold War brinkmanship. coming in the wake of the indian independence movement and inspired by the Gandhian philosophy of non-violence, the three major leaders of the former colonies joined hands in the Javanese island of Bandung in 1955 to denounce the hegemony of the West.11 they ultimately estab- IR SohRAB mAhDAvI nARRATIveS of The 1960S 316 IR SohRAB mAhDAvI nARRATIveS of The 1960S 317 lished a force that refused to abide by the bipolar mandates of the cold War. it is this very force that, aided by third World artists and intellectuals, inspired the rebel youth in Western countries to stage their own opposition to the power structure. Within the uS, the civil rights movement broke ground for a critical evaluation of racism and its relationship to the power structure upon which empire was built. it was oakland, rather than Berkeley, that in the 1960s became the site of the struggle against imperialism. Both the civil rights and the third World movements created a great wave of questioning that challenged the dominant ideological hold of Western nations. Second, the 1960s is thought of as a unique decade, unmatched in the way it unfurled its colors, the way it incited the creative energies of young men and women in the West, and the way it fought the powers that be. We are told that the 1960s was an irregularity, an anomaly, a schism in the history of Western civilization. for American conservative politicians and scholars like Allan Bloom, newt Gingrich, and robert Bork, the 1960s was infested with hedonism and bad faith. they scolded (and Gingrich still does) its tendency to ignore the foundations of Western civilization, and they decry an educational system that fails to teach students the classics of Western literature and art. to them, the decade and its remnants were a disgrace to the highbrow values of the white man. this idea of the 1960s as a Western wonder is not limited to conservative social scientists. leftist and countercultural thinkers, too, saw it as an unprecedented decade in which idealism reigned supreme, and the society moved toward challenging the capitalist order. they seldom, if ever, paid attention to the creative power and theoretical foundations of commercial culture. through them, we also tend to overlook the global implications of a commercial apparatus that thirsts after a channeling of desires. the same cultural revolution that took place on the streets in the West in the 1960s—anti-vietnam War protests, sexual liberation, student rebellion, rock ’n’ roll, hippie-ism, Woodstock, avant-gardism, nonconformity, and dissent—was echoed in the commercial world: “American business was undergoing a revolution in its own right during the 1960s,” argues thomas frank in The Conquest of Cool, “a revolution in marketing practice, management thinking, and ideas about creativity.”12 frank lists several books (The Organization Man, The Human Side of Enterprise, Up the Organization) in which business pundits laid out their manifesto: advocating the new business values and lauding their antagonism to the fetid air of the 1950s. the 1960s is the site of a major explosion in visual culture, and nowhere is this more evident than in the commercial world. While we tended to locate the social movement within intellectual and artistic activities, european and American managers, graphic designers, and marketing agents were busy finding new ways to construct desires and to influence their audiences on the streets and in homes. Advertising shifted gear to stage an uprising against mass society. new ads mocked and made fun of the “square” culture. the cola Wars between 1960 and 1963 are emblematic of this shift in public relations. pepsi cast itself as the soft drink for “those who think young [with] a modern enthusiasm for getting more out of life.”13 the 1960s managers emphasized creativity, nonconformity, rebellion, individualism, being hip, and thinking young. With tv sets comfortably installed in suburban homes and ad agencies in their prime, the public was treated to an increasing number of visual registers whose power and impact still remains to be analyzed by social scientists, for whom the power and influence of the commercial culture is seldom a topic of interest. yet, it is enough simply to look at our surroundings to realize how successful the marketing and advertising revolution of the 1960s has been. “design” has now become the ultimate art form, and our visual space is inundated with signs and images that determine not only what we should buy but also how we should be. in a sense, some of the values of the 1960s (think young, united colors, Just do it, the revolution Will not Be televised) were kept alive by the new managers and ad agencies that built their edifices in the “Sweet Sixties.” of the few iranian books written about the decade that found their way into the market, one is by journalist faramarz Barzegar. The Sociology of Hippie-ism is a travel account describing a journey through the uSA. 11. vijay prashad, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World (new york, 2007), pp. 31–50. 12. thomas frank, The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism (chicago, 1997), p. 20. 13. ibid., p. 171. The strongest, most exciting, most colorful encounters and events, and at the same time the most peaceful and interesting social, political, artistic, and literary movements took place in this decade. But there is a single thread that runs through all of these: a fresh, totally new, and socially active element that human civilization has not seen in its thousand years of evolution in such magnitude, diversity, and power. This element was called the “youth movement” and included 55 to 75 percent of the world and manifested itself in every situation.14 the book is a paean to the 1960s, not because of the absence any strong, emotional criticism of the decade’s anarchic tendencies, rootless rebelliousness, and fascination with the spiritual power of an imaginary east, but rather because of the presence of it. its overall tone is supportive of the youth and their struggle to unleash the creative powers of the “social.” it reflects the views of such figures as henri lefebvre, Stanley Kauffmann, and herbert marcuse, the latter in a personal interview. it offers IR SohRAB mAhDAvI nARRATIveS of The 1960S 318 hR yu 319 farmarz Barzegar, Sociology of Hippieism, 1972. front cover. Sohrab mahdavi private archive Chelcheragh magazine, “An Appeal to the values of the 1960s,” April 2010. Sohrab mahdavi private archive an enthusiastic analysis of the musical Hair, the avant-garde production Oh! Calcutta! and a profile of 1960s activists like Angela davis, Jane fonda, and muhammad Ali (cassius clay). But nowhere do we see in the book a connection between commercial culture and visual culture. the same tendency exists today. the 1960s for us is still the story of the counterculture. The Sociology of Hippie-ism shows how fascination with the “youth culture” was in full swing in iran during the same period. the youth culture inspired dozens of periodicals aiming to cater to the demands of a young population whose government and notorious security apparatus did not tolerate even the remotest form of protest. hence, many of the modernist artists of the decade in iran found another way of expressing their concerns—by using a religious language that ultimately culminated in the 1979 revolution. “in the cultural lexicon of iran, the ‘West’ did not simply represent a higher civilizational model to be emulated, but an imposing presence on its national autonomy,” maintains Shiva Balaghi. “their work suggests that modernity in the iranian context was a complex field of negotiation and accommodation—and not a simple act of imitation and mimicry.”15 for the iranian artists of today, the question of originality is still as strong a preoccupation as it was for the artists of the 1960s, as is the enigma of combating the Western ideological and commercial stranglehold. three decades into a revolution that sought to establish a new identity for iranians, artists are now trying to divest themselves of the religious symbolism that characterized the works of their predecessors. Almost all the Saqqakhaneh artists of the 1960s left the country after the revolution.16 meanwhile, the state is happy to open the country’s doors to a rainbow of products that construct desires through an aggressive visual language. our cityscape is studded with increasingly taller and wider billboards that flood our field of vision with impunity. in the midst of this circus of messages and visual assaults, the daunting task of artists is to come up with a visual language that can be heard above the din of commercial culture and the clamor of originality. 14. faramarz Barzegar, Jame’e-shenasi Hippie-ism [the Sociology of hippie-ism] (tehran, 1972), p. 3 [translated]. 15. Shiva Balaghi, “iranian visual Arts in ‘the century of machinery, Speed, and the Atom’: rethinking modernity,” in Balaghi and Gumpert, Picturing Iran, pp. 21–37, here: pp. 24–25 (see note 2). 16. charles hossein Zenderoudi left iran for france in 1960 and has chosen to remain there to this day. monir farmanfarmaian left iran immediately after the revolution and returned only a decade and a half later. parviz tanavoli migrated to canada in 1982 and comes back to the country for special events. the SiXtieS – SWeet or Bitter? by matko meštrović i must confess that the title of the Sweet Sixties project came as a surprise to me, following a period of our history that was proclaimed to be a “socialist hell”—a description that met with no serious protest from the public—and after numerous anathema figures had outlawed any reminiscences of these now bygone years and discouraged any other value judgment of them. how then did this particular expression arise? the most intriguing thing, at least for me, is the allusion to sweetness. it can invoke a pleasant feeling of the utopian spiritual atmosphere of those times, but it can also signify an ironic provocation or an intention to expose a historical delusion. Both interpretations encourage critical reflection, so with this in mind i gladly responded to the kind invitation to join the project. hR yu mATko mešTRovIć The SIxTIeS – SWeeT oR BITTeR? 1. While making preparations to participate in the “Socialist Self-management” panel, held in Zagreb on december 3, 2010, and organized by the What, how & for Whom curatorial collective (WhW), the first thing i did was to read what contemporary croatian history books have to say about this period. in the works of ivo Goldstein, a relatively young historian, born in 1958, whom i found trustworthy enough, i found only an essential factography, a mere positivist description, and his assessment that the 1960s have absolutely no importance for the future of this country and of croatian society.1 in short, he mentions the Worker’s Self-management Act (1950), which was meant to secure the gradual transition from state ownership of the means of production, of factories, mines, and railways to a supposedly higher stage of socialist ownership. By enacting this law, the idea of self-management was created, and “self-management society” began to be developed. Within this system, independent production entities were created. then the 1976 law on Associated labor is mentioned; this led to the creation of the “basic organizations of associated labor” and established local communities as the basic cells of territorially associated citizens and “self-managing communities of interests.” As Goldstein explains, this was meant to enable direct democracy, but instead it only served to bolster the administration to the point of insanity. it turned out that the idea of self-management, which brought progress during the 1950s in relation to the command economy, gradually transformed in the mid-1960s, and especially in the 1970s, into a mere pose or empty form, a kind of ideological-political framework that was disconnected from the real needs of the society and was leading both the state and the society toward a dead-end. 320 1. ivo Goldstein, Hrvatska povijest [A history of croatia] (Zagreb, 2003). hR yu mATko mešTRovIć The SIxTIeS – SWeeT oR BITTeR? 2. matko meštrović, Teorija dizajna i problemi okoline (Zagreb, 1980). the necessary changes in the system could not be made, Goldstein continues, because they required an extremely complicated procedure and the consensus of the republics, and the governing bureaucracy had neither the will nor the agreement to do it. tito left a paralyzed system, the system of collective management, with mandatory rotations; its main weakness was its inability to repair itself. in the meantime, the economic and political crisis was deepening, the sense of apathy was increasing, the socialist ideology was disintegrating, the league of communists was losing its reputation, and the structure of the state and of society was in the process of slow but inevitable decomposition, as ivo Goldstein concludes. i tried to recall what i was thinking at the time about all this. i skimmed through my thesis Design Theory and Environmental Problems;2 in the 1970s, i was working intensively on it and defended it in 1978. its final chapter is titled “Social Availability of Space and time,” and it relies on lefebvre’s book The Urban Revolution,3 which was very much in vogue at the time. there, in succinct form—restated here even more succinctly—i outlined the propositions from lefebvre’s work that i found important for understanding this newly christened revolution. Without denying the controversies of the industrial, but seeking rather to expose them to an ever-greater extent, the improving of the urban is, as lefebvre says, tied to the rejection of economic growth as an absolute quantitative goal and to the simultaneous orientation of production to other, more diverse goals of qualitative development. this requires liberation from all the reducing factors of urban practice, i.e. a radical critique of the state as a force above society, and of politics as an expression of its will—and therefore a rejection of urbanism as theory and practice, because when owned by the state, it is simultaneously both anti-theory and anti-practice. 3. henri lefebvre, The Urban Revolution (minneapolis, mn, 2003). 321 hR yu mATko mešTRovIć The SIxTIeS – SWeeT oR BITTeR? As a transmission of a limited and tendentious rationality, whose object and goal is to form the political space which is only ostensibly neutral and apolitical, urbanism forbids thought from becoming reflection on the possible (a hint of the future), and blocks the way to the urban, while imposing its own models on it; urbanism does not see that it is all about a confrontation with contemporary political and scientific thought, the confrontation between the path and the models. to free the path, one must break the models. if it is even possible to positively determine the urban, because it does not divide but connects, then the basic goal of urban development is the human being’s reappropriation of its condition in time, space, and the world of objects. this perspective, as lefebvre emphasizes, cannot be understood without a form of universal self-management that connects urban with industrial self-management, realizing the authority of self-managerial production in territorial units; this presupposes not only the withering away of the state but also the end of the political as such. i understood these lefebvre’s propositions, which are corroborated by other sources, as the need to engage in the activity of reappropriating the conditions of our development in the space and time that are given to a society. this is a space where social communication expands as a human need, and the time in it is the temporal process of actualizing human potential as the realization of society. i added a note: as long as the consequences of the disintegration of the community endure in the class division of state and society, of private and general property, of individual and social power, politics will be understood as the technology of power, and its work in the community will necessarily advocate particular interests. And here is the final paragraph: only to the extent to which community is understood and experienced as a way of existing, will general interest be able to reach 322 hR yu mATko mešTRovIć The SIxTIeS – SWeeT oR BITTeR? 323 the particularized consciousness as the articulated need for meaning in life. Self-management, as a selfactivity in space and time, as a work that itself exudes the standards of its creativity, will within this framework be both the end and the means: the future in the present. in post-war development, as explained by luka marković in his 1978 book Class Struggle and Conceptions of Development,4 revolution was the higher principle of all the incidents in our lives; revolution dominated everything, even planned economic development. if some particular plans were wrong, the practice itself would repair them, because all particular intents and all special practices were directed from a higher, allencompassing practice: the revolution—based, that is, on the presupposition of changing the existing social relations. hence, in his opinion, for the real communists, the problem of long-term development in yugoslavia resurfaces as the problem of revolution here and now. But, instead of making a concrete historical analysis of the position and of the historical interests of classes and their factions, the discussion of our future was moved from the field of social development to the field of economic development—that is, of economic usefulness, understood in an abstract, unhistorical way, seemingly transcending the concept of class. 2. All my intellectual efforts in those years—in the late 1970s and early 1980s—were devoted to the latent task of questioning, recognizing, and discerning the real prerequisites for the historical outcome of potential revolutionary starting points, to a theoretical and practical bridging of the gap between utopia and reality, even more so because the discrepancy between what was obvious and what was promised, what was hR yu mATko mešTRovIć The SIxTIeS – SWeeT oR BITTeR? declared and what was realized, what was doctrinaire and what was real, was becoming increasingly visible. only then did i venture into a serious reading of marx. in the book in which i collected my works from this period, i put this note: i give this collection of texts to the reader with the conviction that he will benevolently accept my efforts to get acquainted with what i did not know, but about which i knew that it should be known in a different manner than it is known. All of us are in the world by means of our awareness of our own lives, and our world is what prevents our awareness of ourselves: a social distance between me and the other.5 At the international conference World communications: decisions for the eighties, at the Annenberg School of communication, philadelphia, about ten days after tito’s death, i submitted my contribution, “the World as communication process: Setting a paradigm.” in it, not a word was dedicated to selfmanagement, but i did implicitly question its theoretical and historical conditions. in this text i offered these thoughts, among others: the emergence of awareness of the fact that social systems are not a natural given that cannot be questioned and changed is a truth that was discovered only about one hundred years ago. today, all of us acknowledge it, and all societies of today are trying to develop strong visions of their future, hoping that they will live to see it.6 if these mental images of possible social transformation are a general motivational agent, both for societies and its individuals, then what is essential for our cognition is the social process of their forming, the process in which we ourselves participate. if we agree that the human being is the basic value, then a measure of the social possibilities for free development of all an individual’s capabilities be- 324 4. luka marković, Klasna borba i koncepcije razvoja (Zagreb, 1978). 5. matko meštrović, Svijet, svijest i zavisnost [the World, consciousness and dependency] (Zagreb, 1983). 6. ibid. hR yu mATko mešTRovIć The SIxTIeS – SWeeT oR BITTeR? 325 comes the basic criterion for the answer both to the first and the second part of the most critical question: how can something be socially valued and how can a society be valued? if there is a dialectical unity of the ideal-political consciousness of a society and its objective social statics and dynamics, this unity must also exist between the conception one has of a society and one’s conception of one’s position in that society. our limits are not based on whether we are free or not, but on what we are free to do, living in an economic system which, by transforming work into a commodity, has found ways to exploit all its environments—geographic, human, natural, and temporal; this system, continuing in this way, seems to meet with the extreme phase of this exploitation—exploitation of its own future. for centuries, bourgeois thought has been creating prerequisites for its own overcoming, and the capitalist mode of production, from which and for which it speaks, has always been creating its historical alternative. the liberation of revolutionary potential can be conceived of only from the perspective of the subject who liberates work by his or her own liberation: work as the subject-substance of history, of the human being, and of nature. reflecting on the question of what communication is in this sense, we will seek the answer by establishing what preconditions improve the liberation of this subjectivity (of work)—that is, how the subjectivity manifests itself and how it is recognized in the social process of communication. how does it manifest socially on the level of information? What is its means of historical action on the level of social organization? What is its consciousness on the level of the epoch, as the message of a unity of conception, thought, and action, as a self-activity—that is, as a practice of truthfully conscious being? hR yu mATko mešTRovIć The SIxTIeS – SWeeT oR BITTeR? 3. At the invitation of the Naše Teme journal, i participated in the debates on the conception of long-term development in yugoslavia with an ambitious text, titled “temporal-Spatial orientation of Self-management interests and Social planning,” the first section of which bore an even more ambitious heading: “intentions, modalities, and Signs of manifestation of Social Subjectivity in the Social-economic Space: An Approximate System of criteria.” it was only an attempt to raise such essential questions as: Who analyzes social needs, and how? on what basis does he or she establish the priorities of development; namely, what is the subjective ability of society to objectively assess these needs, and what are the objective preconditions for this subjective assessment on the level of the working organization and of large international entities? What are the objective determinants of the existing spatial organization of production, how do they determine the producers’ interests—and which producers’ interests—and what can make them connect temporally and spatially on some of the levels mentioned? Who can assist in critically recognizing the forms of social consciousness as an expression of dominant relations of production, and how can this be done, subjectively and objectively speaking? how can such a person contribute to changing their objective character through their subjective activity on all the levels mentioned? it was obvious that the Social plan of yugoslavia for the 1976–80 period, formulated in an economistical manner, did not have any of the mobilizing or organizing ability that was expected of it, not only because it was very abstract but above all because it was removed from the dialectic of reality and because it conceived the topics of socio-economic development on the homogeneous terrain of abstractly formulated economic theory. 326 hR yu mATko mešTRovIć The SIxTIeS – SWeeT oR BITTeR? 327 i then stated the following: getting into bed with bourgeois science in our theoretical thinking also manifests in the ability to present the political problems of realizing the ideology of socialist self-management as theoretical problems—and, vice versa, to present the theoretical problems as political ones; to reduce economic problems to political economy, and to identify the politics of the social economy with economic policy. from this viewpoint, and in the interests of establishing political power, all developmental problems are quantifiable and subject to objectification. With these illusions, economic theory seduces political practice as all the while it disperses its class-consciousness. there is no social reality of a single country or single society, independent of class intentions that manifest in the global class constellation and in global social process; the general and particular interests of a society are not generated by the nature of its social structure alone. universally conceiving the dialectic connections of its historical position and the structural elements that are determined by this position, revolutionary theory and practice could assess, both objectively and subjectively, where and what is the revolutionary developmental potential of society, and how we are to creatively develop the modalities of its actualization and its structuration of interests. Because temporal-spatial orientation based on interests—be they existential, reproductive, or productive—also determines the cognitive level of action motives and their value interpretations, in the end, average behavior in every social space depends not only on the realization of existing possibilities and the possibilities of realized achievements but also on the achievement of unrealized possibilities in the self-realization of individuals, of specific parts of society, and of the social community as a whole. hR yu mATko mešTRovIć The SIxTIeS – SWeeT oR BITTeR? 4. how, and why, did the enormous interest in the idea, theory, and practice of self-management, both here and abroad, suddenly wane? Why are there no universities today exploring its historical roots and experiences? Why do even the most prominent thinkers in the field of democracy and revolution today barely mention this experience, even the authors who speak about autonomy, empire, multitude, and the commons? does the explanation hide only in the consequences of the fall of the Berlin Wall, or also in the causes of its fall? 328