Art and Theory After Socialism

Art and Theory After Socialism

Edited by Mel Jordan and Malcolm Miles

Editorial Assistant Karen Roulstone

First Published in the UK in 2008 by

Intellect Books, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK

First published in the USA in 2008 by

Intellect Books, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street, Chicago,

IL 60637, USA

Copyright© 2008 Intellect Ltd

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Cover Design: Gabriel Solomons

Copy Editor: Holly Spradling

Typesetting: Mac Style, Beverley, E. Yorkshire

ISBN 978-1-84150-211-3

EISBN 978-1-84150-265-6

Printed and bound by Gutenberg Press, Malta.

CONTENTS

Introduction

Chapter 1    From Shamed to Famed – The Transition of a Former Eastern German Arts Academy to the Talent Hotbed of a Contemporary Painters’ School. The Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst, Leipzig

Sophie A. Gerlach

Chapter 2    Attacking Objectification: Jerzy Bere in Dialogue with Marcel Duchamp

Klara Kemp-Welch

Chapter 3    On the Ruins of a Utopia: Armenian Avant-Garde and the Group Act

Angela Harutyunyan

Chapter 4    Art Communities, Public Spaces and Collective Actions in Armenian Contemporary Art

Vardan Azatyan

Chapter 5    Appropriating the Ex-Cold War

Malcolm Miles

Chapter 6    The End of an Idea: On Art, Horizons and the Post-Socialist Condition

Simon Sheikh

Chapter 7    Exploring Critical and Political Art in the United Kingdom and Serbia

Sophie Hope & Marko Stamenkovic

Chapter 8    Other Landscapes (for Weimar, Goethe and Schiller)

Daniela Brasil

Chapter 9    The Ecology of Post-Socialism and the Implications of Sustainability for Contemporary Art

Maja Fowkes and Reuben Fowkes

Chapter 10   Functions, Functionalism and Functionlessness: On the Social Function of Public Art after Modernism

Freee Art Collective

INTRODUCTION

The papers collected in this book concern recent and contemporary European art and theory in context of the end of the Cold War, dismantling of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991. They range from theoretical reflection to accounts of art practice and curating, from Armenia (an ex-constituent republic of the Soviet Union), Germany and the United Kingdom. For want of a better term, the condition of post-socialism indicates the conceptual arena opened by the demise of the East bloc (and, hence, of a West bloc defined in opposition to it). More accurately, it indicates European culture after the demise of state socialist regimes in the East bloc while, I would argue, socialism as an ideology is not erased by the failure of state socialist regimes. The book offers a series of specific windows on this field, and does not aim to be comprehensive or to offer a definitive critique of a still shifting cultural, social and political re-alignment. The chapters are more like snapshots of a partly disappearing and a partly emerging terrain.

This book and its companion volume, Public Spheres, originated in collaboration between the Critical Spaces Research Group at the University of Plymouth and the National Association of Art Critics, Armenia. In June 2005, a seminar was held at University of Plymouth. In October 2005, a group of UK-based academics took part in a major conference on the public sphere at the American University, Yerevan, organized by the National Association of Art Critics. Other speakers were from Armenia, Austria, France, Germany and Turkey. The debate was robust. There were interesting overlaps and edges between readings of modernist art theory in Armenia and re-readings of the same material in the West. Meanwhile, much of the city’s centre was under reconstruction. Several nineteenth-century buildings in a characteristic dark grey volcanic stone were prepared for removal to storage and eventual reconstruction elsewhere by the numbering of each stone. Yet the eventual reconstruction remains as unlikely in popular estimate as the re-erection of a statue of Lenin currently in storage in the basement of the National Museum, replaced after 1991 by a large public video screen.

It is too easy for a westerner such as myself – whose student years were those of the boom economy and expansion of contemporary art of the 1960s – to be nostalgic about a political system under which I never lived. In fact, I never even went to an East bloc country until 1986 (although I was one of a peace movement delegation to the Russian Embassy in London in about 1967 – we were well received, but disappointed to be offered American cigarettes). Ian McEwan writes, in the voice of Florence, the female protagonist of On Chesil Beach, this part of the narrative set in the early 1960s, that she ‘knew in her heart that the Soviet Union, for all its mistakes – clumsiness, inefficiency, defensiveness surely, rather than evil design – was essentially a beneficial force in the world.’ (McEwan 2008: 53). I would have shared that view. Of course, I realize that to hold such views seriously today is a luxury, and that to lament the passing of the East bloc is enabled by temporal and cultural distance. Still, however, I remember a conversation in an eco-village in the ex-German Democratic Republic, in 2004, when a member of the community recounted the sense of loss among local people when a previously widespread non-money economy in which skills were freely shared was replaced by consumerism and prices on everything. He and I are not alone in this feeling.

In Requiem for Communism, Charity Scribner notes a performance artwork in Berlin in 1996 in which a mock funeral procession crossed the city from west to east. She comments: ‘This collective sorrow [for the collapse of the workers’ state] has motivated a proliferation of literary texts and artworks, as well as a boom of museum exhibits that survey the wreckage of socialism and its industrial remains.’ (Scribner 2005: 3). Later in the book she writes of the Ostalgie as this nostalgia for a socialist past is known in Germany. Perhaps my own paper in this volume is an example of such nostalgic reverie, or, and more, it is necessary to differentiate the history that took place, with its industrial pollution and abuses of human rights, from the ethos of solidarity and value of public welfare that remain key to a vision of socialism. As Scribner states, ‘The strongest accounts of the second world sound out the potentials sedimented into the most obstinately inaccessible moments of history.’ (Scribner 2005: 87). Art does not reproduce such moments but is a route by which cultural memory takes form to offer a basis for continuing critical, dialogic encounter.

Malcolm Miles

References

McEwan, I. (2008), On Chesil Beach, London, Vintage Books.

Scribner, C. (2005), Requiem for Communism, Cambridge (MA), MIT.

1

FROM SHAMED TO FAMED – THE TRANSITION OF A FORMER EASTERN GERMAN ARTS ACADEMY TO THE TALENT HOTBED OF A CONTEMPORARY PAINTERS’ SCHOOL. THE ‘HOCHSCHULE FÜR GRAFIK UND BUCHKUNST’, LEIPZIG

Sophie A. Gerlach

A decade and a half after the fall of the Berlin Wall the output of cultural heritage and theoretical production in the two former German states needs to be critically revised. During the early times of governmental and societal change and reorganization, Eastern German frameworks were generally regarded as politically unacceptable and immoral whilst Western German cultural politics a priori claimed to be just and politically correct having been created within an essentially liberal and democratic system.

While there are no doubts about the totalitarian nature of the former GDR per se, the developments of the past years have proven that such polarized dichotomies are not tenable. Some of the attitudes and modes of artistic production, specifically in the East, turned out to be nonetheless valid, adding a surplus value to contemporary debates and developments. As a result, western theoreticians, critics and artists alike needed to accept that their belief system had to be critically re-examined. In addition, the tasks that governments, cities, districts, schools and individuals had to face were so manifold that theoretical blueprint planning was simply impossible. Many changes happened organically or were brought about by individuals who exposed specific situations and set about the process of change by refusing to work under conditions which were not yet clarified or reorganized, or by proposing different and new approaches.

The developments within the cultural scene are evident when considering the art academies, as the institutional setting allows an analysis of the kinds of changes being made including their purpose and timing. The former Eastern German state only maintained four main centres for artistic training: Berlin, Dresden, Halle and Leipzig. The latter proves a useful example as it is the one academy which is currently well discussed within Germany and abroad, due to the success of the New Leipzig School of Painting, a heterogeneous painters’ group closely tied to the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst (HGB), Academy of Visual Arts Leipzig. The prominence the artists are currently receiving can partially be attributed to the traditional painter’s training at the HGB which follows curricula different from the majority of other art academies in unified Germany. Although this study will take into account the situation of the entire HGB, it must be clarified that changes happened in very different ways for the four different departments: namely photography, book art and graphic design, media art (founded in 1993) and painting and graphics. I will be focusing attention on the developments in the latter department. In the following chapter, I will discuss how theories, curricula and academic structures were altered or accepted in transition after 1989 and what the specificities of the HGB are today.

In order to discuss these ideas, the historical background of the academy needs to be clarified. This exploration will include brief explanations of cultural policy made by the former Eastern authorities at specific times, as developments within the arts were closely monitored and even influenced by the Eastern German government. Furthermore, the term ‘Leipziger Schule’, Leipzig School, which dates as far back as the early 1950s, shall be explained. Finally, an evaluation will be made of how the bringing together of two diametrically different political systems has worked out at the level of artistic production looking at its successes and failures.

Brief Historical Overview

Founded in 1764, the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst in Leipzig by the 1920s had become one of the most important art schools in the country. Renown for its letterpress and printing faculty, the school attracted students from all over the country. All this came to a halt during the Nazi regime and the academy had to be re-established in 1945. A quick succession of two headmasters defined the formative years of the school in the about-to-be-founded German Democratic Republic: Walter Tiemann, who had been headmaster since 1920, and who was reinstated as a commissioned director in 1946, followed by Kurt Massloff, who became headmaster in 1946 and remained in this post until 1958. Massloff was a highly politically active anti-fascist whose goal was to turn the school into a socialist visual art school where the concept of realism (as developed by Andrei Zhdanov) was to be taught and produced without any inquiry into, or consideration of, other art forms. This development turned into the harsh and highly politically charged ‘Formalism-Debate’ which led, in 1951, to the dismissal of any member of the GDR community of artists and teachers who did not conform to the state-affirmed version of realism (Hübscher 1989; Gillen 2005; Goeschen 2001; Thomas 2002; Schuhmann 1996; Vierneisel 1996). Any continuation of the art forms of the early twentieth century was regarded as a deliberate separation from the socialist people, portrayed as formalistic and condemned as the remains of a bourgeois attitude. Therefore, teaching focused on the imitation of classical and traditionalist styles of the nineteenth century. This concept paralyzed the entire development of art and literature for a long time in the GDR, specifically because the ‘humanistic cause, which had become an issue for many artists through the acquisition of important artistic tendencies of the 20th century were questioned in their moral integrity and artistic substance’ (Pachnike 1989:16). It was a step back towards traditions of the past, where the artist was trained to fulfil the wishes of the patron who commissioned a painting, but no individual artistic education took place. Werner Mittenzwei describes the situation as follows: ‘The criterion for realism and popularity was not its testing as a means to the political class battle and in the cultural practice, but to what extent the new socialist art works followed the traditional norms and laws’ (Mittenzwei in Pachnike 1989: 16). The dismissal of the expressionist artist Max Schwimmer in 1951, among other faculty members, led to the voluntary withdrawal of two of his students in protest against the unfair treatment of their professor(s). One of them was Bernhard Heisig, who was later to become one of the most influential headmasters. Quite a few, even among the faculty, were extremely dissatisfied with the situation:

The new fact is that we are opening our mouths and have stopped allowing them to step over us. Doing this we have certainly already accomplished quite a bit for our situation here. On the other hand I am certainly aware that still an incredible amount remains to be done. Our faculty is still a quantitatively large pile but qualitatively quite thin. It is not easy but we’ll keep on banging the drums. Either we accomplish a situation in which it is possible to work at the academy or they kick us out (Meyer-Foreyt in Blume 2003: 293).

Some tension was lifted from the ‘Formalism-Debate’ situation in 1954 when the state commission for art, which was directly linked to the Soviet forces, was disbanded and the ministry for culture was founded. However, cultural affairs from 1959 onwards were treated along the guidelines of what became known as the Bitterfelder Weg (Bitterfeld Path).

The first Bitterfeld Conference, in April 1959, was organized by the government and brought together authors and working people with an active interest in writing. It took place in a chemical factory in Bitterfeld. The conference set the course of how cultural affairs and specifically painting had to be dealt with in order to serve the socialist cause. The aim was to bring together ‘art and life’ in order to blur the lines between professional art production and the working-person’s life. Three main goals were to be reached: a close-to-life depiction of the working world and cultural influence in the life of workers according to the party’s ideas; the early recognition of talent among the workers in order to educate them to become faithful interpreters of the socialist image of the people; and the mixing of academically taught artists with workers in order to dilute the intellectuality of the former and to introduce them to the real worker’s life (Thomas 1980: 55–58).

The programme was, as would be expected, unsuccessful and the motto and resulting programme of the second Bitterfeld Conference in 1964, ‘The Arrival of the GDR in the Socialist Everyday’, addressed itself once again exclusively to professional artists (Thomas 1980: 55–58).

The artistic atmosphere in the HGB firstly became more liberal in the department of letterpress and bookbinding when Albert Kapr was appointed head of the department and, in 1959, also headmaster of the school. An even more open and critical discussion about Socialist Realism and how it could be applied politically was introduced when Bernhard Heisig, a former student, became headmaster in 1961. His aim was to give academy students the possibility to find their own means of expression, including critical approaches, to serve the socialist cause as artists. The same year he also introduced the first independent painting class, although director König stated explicitly in 1964, ‘The faculty holds the opinion that studying painting can be a positive influence on the use of colour in the graphic arts’ (Schiller 1964: 38). Judging from this quote, it becomes clear that painting had to establish itself slowly in order to become an equally accepted subject. It would, however, later receive the status of a main discipline at the Leipzig art academy.

The following years, during which time the term ‘Leipziger Schule’ was coined, were strongly