Third Text, Vol.

23, Issue 1, January, 2009, 1524

Remembering the Art of Communism

Analysis of Contradiction: Approaches and Transgressions
uvakovic Mis ko S

What does it mean to remember? What does it mean to invoke in ones mind the images, sounds, smells, words, touches, identifications, rejection, moments of pleasure or pain? What is memory? Shaping a screen full of blurs and opaque forms that refer to something in the past? But memory is not a secure and frozen trace of the past, it is an uncertain event that intervenes inside the field of culture the field that looks like an autonomous field within society, while actually it is not. Memory is woven into an infinite texture of differences that are being changed from one case to another, from one inscription to invitation, and from invitation to erasure in any context which is never simply given. Memory resembles and acts as a text, but it does not have any stability, ie, the quality persisting like texts in a library. Memories are an event through which the expectations of my actual I are performed. Therefore I have to pass from psychologising and cultural analysis to a social analysis with which I will try to show how the memories or images of I relate to the contradictory paradigms or images of modern art. And this will be my first task Remembering Communism. Which Communism, whose and what kind? Clusters of representations from memory do not talk so much of one kind of Communism but of certain diachronic and synchronic dispersions. Actually, it is as if when we say Communism from 1917 to 1989 we mean a number of quite different things: the preparation of the Revolution, the hybridity of revolutionary events, the Revolution itself, anarchism, counter-revolutionary tendencies, breakdown, rise, time of terror, time of one-party rule, bureaucratisation, dissidence, orthodoxy, liberalisation, breakdown, fall, entropy, memory But we also think of building everyday utopias as discourses of a society and the decomposition of great narratives that advocate utopias of Communisms classless society through decentralisations. Sometimes memories scare, sometimes

Third Text ISSN 0952-8822 print/ISSN 1475-5297 online Third Text (2009) http://www.informaworld.com DOI: 10.1080/09528820902786594

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they provoke nostalgia, they are sometimes spectres, sometimes close companions or distant threatening figures. My intention in this text is to question the relations of modernism and Communism in specific cultural texts, ie, artworks and artistic paradigms. In Cold War Western literature we usually find authors who write about the difference and distance between modernism in the West and Communism in the East of Europe, in other words, about the East West divide in the world. Today it seems as if these differences and distances vaporise and in memory or in erased cultural traces we recognise behind them different modes of modernism. Modernism and Communism are no longer seen as relatively different (for modernism and against modern), but as relatively different answers to similarly contradictory stimuli. I will also view the status, function and performance of contemporary art in the Communist condition (of real socialism, state socialism, selfgovernment socialism) as the symptom which points to culture and society. Here art will not be understood as an image of society, but as an identificational instrument of the memory of Communisms ideological screens.

APPARATUSES AND SPECTRES OF IDEOLOGY: THE REMEMBERING MODEL OF HARD IDEOLOGY

In this discussion my interest will be to indicate the way in which certain artworks, or the integrating relationship between artworks and their creators and users, represent ideology: a concrete historical ideology. But how is it possible to introduce a notion of ideology? The answer is both simple and tricky the notion of ideology could be introduced in several ways: from 1. Ideology is the sum of positive and programmatic beliefs, values, forms of behaviour and actions shared by a group of theoreticians or practitioners, ie, members of a culture or of some differentiated formation within that culture; through 2. Ideology is a sum of wrong representations, false beliefs and effects of illusions shared by members of a social class, nation, political party, specific cultures or artworld, projecting the images of a possible, actual and provisional existential world; to 3. Ideology is a system of signs and signifiers by which one society posits itself in relation to any other society and even in relation to itself as a society, culture, world, etc In a historical sense, the word ideology means to fix different statuses of phantasms or beliefs. Ideology for me is a phantasm of ordinary language driven to propositional language:

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(a) within the tradition of liberal Western ideology it is present almost as a natural world in which a subject is plunged and which sees its ideological sub-determination, determination and under-determination only through the transcendental (quasitranscendental) possibilities of differentiation between inner and outer identities (existence in the world as a necessary context); (b) ideology in modernism is instrumentally imposed from outside, although it is often described as unspoken, a great story (metalanguage) of the past (dialectic of history), present (phenomenology of the human mind) or future (all utopian stories which promise a better new world, from Christian dissidence and theosophy through social utopianism and Marxism to New Age and youth movements in the 1960s); (c) in the postmodernism of the late 1970s and 1980s ideology is presented as a fragmentary local, singular or transgressive story which is an erased, postponed or removed trace of a utopia (phantasm) or an erased, postponed or removed trace of an identity (the penetration of the first-degree language of representation by the legitimacy of the masters meta-language, the disappearance of the borders of intelligibility between thoughts language, private language, tacit knowledge of the paradigm and public language). If we consider the relation between ideology and art it is possible to distinguish four positions: 1. Art is that which, in order to be created, experienced, accepted and identified as art, will be offered as an effect of the speech of ideology (of regulation or deregulation between environment, identity and the description of that identity) this definition could be termed the ideology of art or ideology in art. 2. Art is one possible material context in which apparatuses material order is manifested, expressed and shown, and by which society is confirmed and recognised as a specific historical or geographical entity this definition could be termed the social ideology of art. 3. In an ideological sense, art is a possible (regulated or deregulated) relation between the ideology of art and the ideology of a given society, in other words, art appears to be a naturalisation, or even denaturalisation, of arts own symbolic order in interactive relation to the symbolic social order of a given society (such relations are in the traditional sense of the singular-sensual and universal mind, as well as the relation of singular product and legitimised meta-language in modernism, or the relation of production of a fragmented unwhole (pas tout) possible world and available narrations in postmodernism). 4. In an ideological sense, art is a mode of producing ideology as aesthetic effect, in other words, a specific art production in modernism (such as avant-garde and post-avant-garde), while postmodern art (post-historical eclectic and/or technological art) becomes a form of intended representation, expression and production of exclusive isolated and artificial situations in which

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naturalisation or denaturalisation of the symbolic order is performed, in other words, regulation and deregulation of the relation between the ideology of art and social ideology as that which is done in the artwork.

MULTIVALENT FIGURES OF MODERNISM1

There is no doubt that modernism is modernism. It seems as if this tautology liberates us from any further effort to search for the identity of modernism. But if we have in mind the numerous contemporary approaches to ideology,2 we have to pose a question: What is the function of tautology in this power game? Is it not the case that tautology is an effect of the ideology of modernism? But what kind of modernism is in question here? Is it not the case that modernism as a cunning beast in a forest of signs in which the struggle for survival is taking place, takes different faces and offers an unexpected blurring of figures? Let us therefore move from one to another example: from one to another model.

FIRST MODEL: BINARY CHARACTER OF THE 1950s

The first model by its images opposes Western capitalist modernist art and culture to the Real Socialist anti-modernist ones. Western modernism is seen as an expression of the autonomy of art within the developed societies of industrial capitalism from the mid-twentieth century. The bourgeois modernism from the nineteenth century till the First World War is considered to be a modernism of an emerging culture of specialised competences, which conquers, for example, autonomy in art (in the formal sense of the relation to the tradition of mimesis/representation and in the social sense in relation to the institution of public opinion/ doxa3). The modernism of developed capitalism in the 1950s,4 on the contrary, was the ruling, dominant and hegemonic culture of the epoch which integrated: (a) high formal aestheticism; (b) developments of industrialised usage of high art within mass culture; and (c) the individual position of a subject (artist) in society. Contrary to this, Socialist Realism in the political East although the very notion of political East is not coherent at all criticised and rejected the ideal of autonomous art in the name of social revolutionary needs. Besides that, Socialist Realism before the victory of the October revolution was a critical Socialist Realism which by artistic means represented tensions of class struggle in bourgeois society. After the victory of the Bolshevik revolution in 1918, critical Socialist Realism in the USSR was transformed into an apologetic art which realised the functions and interests of the Party leadership and class struggle. In the Eastern European countries in the late 1940s and 1950s Socialist Realism was, in most cases, the model of the representational optimal projection of the social and revolutionary situation which was imposed from the outside.

1.

uvakovic Mis , ko S Umjetnost i ideologija pedesete u podijeljenoj ivot Europi, in Z umjetnosti, nos 7172, Zagreb, 2004, pp 914
c a o s r n [ ] S [ c a o r n ] c a [ c u e ] t Z [c a o r n ]

2.

iz Slavoj Z ek, How did Marx Invent the Symptom?, in Mapping Ideology, Verso, London, 1995, pp 295331
Z [o a c r n ] z c a o r [ n ]

3.

Briony Fer, Invisible pictures: visual representation and language, in Modernity and Modernism. French Painting in the Nineteenth Century, Francis Frascina, Nigel Blake, Briony Fer, Tamar Garb and Charles Harrison, Yale University Press, New Haven London, 1993, pp 15-23 Jonathan Harris, Part 2: Abstract Expressionism and the politics of criticism, in Modernism in Dispute: Arte since the Forties, Paul Wood, Francis Frascina, Jonathan Harris and Charles Harrison, Yale University Press, New Haven London, 1993, pp 4265

4.

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Socialist Realism ceased to have a critical function, as its apologetic functions gained the rhetorical-ornamental or trivially didactic effects of promises or projecting specific modern times. If we focus our attention only on the questions of function, it could be said that in the Western bloc the social function of art was projected in such a way that art did not appear to have any social function. On the other hand, in the Eastern bloc, arts function was projected at the service of the Revolution, which meant of permanent progress. But function without function and utilitarian function were the effects of the speech of ideology which seems to hide the real state of affairs. We might notice that Western (as if without function) autonomous modernism was represented and interpreted as genuine modernism, while Eastern modernism was taught to be engaged (functional or utilitarian) modernism, a kind of anti-modernism. But historical examples assure us that Western modernism without function had its own utilitarian goal of building a specific type of social relations (liberal society), while Social Realism in the 1950s and 1960s was often merely rhetorical (decorative, didactic) referring to a state of affairs in which no one any longer believed, although

SECOND MODEL: HEGEMONIC IMAGE OF WESTERN MODERNISM IN THE 1950s AND EARLY 1960s
In this model Western high modernism is represented as dominant and is considered to be the only modernism in relation to all other possible variants and side modernisms (popular culture modernism, avant-garde modernism, modernism within Real Socialism, moderate modernism, regional modernism). High modernism was imagined, represented and realised as the historical evolution or self-advantage of artistic-aesthetic formalism and cultural institutions which accompanied that self-advantage. High modernism is based on an ideology which represents art through non-ideological terms and expressions. It points to the developments of aesthetic formalism, abstract art and the achievement of the aesthetic visual autonomy of the artwork. The artwork is liberated from its mimetic identity and representations and the artist is considered to be an extraordinary autonomous individual who through his/her human drama (pain or pleasure) transcends his/her existence in which work is done, and so confirms the truth of the artists existential gesture or act. In this sense, we could compare Jackson Pollocks words: I am nature. and Ivo Gattins words: The effect of creation between me and the object is proportional to the relation between the torrent and the rock.5

THIRD MODEL: ASYMMETRICAL MODELS INSIDE WESTERN MODERNISM IN THE 1950s

5. Il Manifesto di Ivo Gattin, in Ivo Gattin, ed Branka ic Stipan c , Galerije grada Zagreba, Zagreb, 1992, pp 24
c a o r [ n ] c a [ c u e ] t

The starting point here is the idea that Western modernism is a dominant hegemonic culture, but it is not a totally unifying paradigm. This dominant conception of modernism is based on the dialectical relation between high and critical experimentation and emancipatory modernisms. High modernism is then understood as the modernism that arose

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from the development and aesthetic improvements of the individual artists act, who existentially tests the nature of the medium he/she works with. The artwork of high modernism is esoteric: it is based on extraordinary values which do not belong to mundane existence and ideology, on the original, sublime and unspoken. Some works of Abstract Expressionism, lyrical abstraction and informel were made in this spirit, although the works from the late 1950s and early 1960s were canonised by Clement Greenberg as the pictorial-metaphysical horizon of modernism.6 These works were not created on a clear formalistic basis, but rather from certain non-consequential conjunctions: (a) the existential belief in individualism (a paradoxical binding of the French existential atmosphere of the 1940s and 1950s with American pragmatic individualism); (b) the concept of symbols or archetypes as direct traces or expressions of human action; (c) formalist realisation and development of the work; here formalism is not something connected with mathematical formalism or Russian avant-garde literary theory formalism, but with Kantian and Neo-Kantian ideals of disinterestedness and the autonomy of the manual-haptic-gesture in the pictorial field; and (d) belief in the universality of the modernistic experience and understanding of the artwork and art. These positions, on the contrary, point to principles that take art to be a social rather than a pictorial field and the act of creation as a way of problematising and criticising a legitimised environment (the artworld) rather than the forcing of unconscious traces within human experience.7 To the ruling dominance of taste is opposed the notion of concept and conceptualising process and the context of making, exhibiting and receiving art. The artist is the one who works within his/her medium, with conceptualisations of conceptions and culture. This other line (of history, correlation of the scenes) is not as homogeneous as the first one, but is present mostly through four models: 1. the individual approaches of painters who with their status were close to high modernism but who did not accept its universal aesthetics, instead provoking transgression of the status of the work (painting), the subject of the art (painterartisthuman being) and the artworld as a function of artistic and cultural institutions within the American environment these were artists such as Ad Reinhardt, Frank Stella, Jasper Johns, Robert Raushemberg, and among the Europeans Georges Mathieu, Lucio Fontana, Piero Manzoni and Yves Klein; 2. individual or collective approaches which reconstruct the tradition of historical Constructivist (geometrical painting, Neoconstructivism, cinetics) and Dadaist (Neodadaism, Fluxus, Happening, letterism) avant-gardes in the late 1940s and in 1950s these were neo-avant-gardes rightly or wrongly identified by Peter Brger as second-hand avant-gardes; 3. individual or collective approaches which re-established existential artistic and theoretical critique of high modernisms dominance in

6.

Clement Greenberg, Modernist Painting, Art and Literature, no 4, 1965, pp 193201 Charles Harrison, Modernism in two Voices, in Essays on Art & Language, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1991, pp 221

7.

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the West and Social Realisms and aestheticisms dominance in the East. In other words, avant-garde experiments, innovations, excesses, subversions were considered replicas (remakes) of preSecond World War avant-gardes, as well as the answer of the new art generations to the canonisations, anomalies and crises of the 1950s (examples could be found among the artists who worked after informel, Fluxus, Happening among which the most distinguished were John Cage, Yves Klein, Piero Manzoni, Group N, Group T, Group Zero); and 4. different incompatible approaches which were identified with the critique of modernism in the range from left-oriented strategies of Social Realism to the right-oriented procedures of post-Surrealism, Fantastic Realism and the renewal of national and regional styles. This hegemonic non-whole model demolishes the wholeness of the previous understandings of modernism and points to the fact that body of modernism is more similar to the rhizome in the sense described by Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, than to the shiny round billiard ball as had been believed by the fathers of modernism.

FOURTH MODEL: RENEWAL OF MODERNISM IN THE COUNTRIES OF REAL SOCIALISM

In the countries of Eastern Europe, several crucial paradoxical processes can be highlighted in positioning the relations of socialist (Communist) Realism and Western (capitalist) modernism. An atypical example here will be the case of second Yugoslavia, ie, postwar Socialist Yugoslavia.8 After the Second World War, in Yugoslavia, Socialist Realism was multiply identified: (a) as the continuation of critical Social Realism between the two World Wars, actually as a victorious tendency in relation to dominant, roughly speaking, moderate bourgeois modernism, elitist Western-oriented modernism, avant-gardes, and some specific national art tendencies developed within different Yugoslav cultures; (b) as a movement imported from the USSR, which with the victory of socialist revolutions gained within the new society a politicalutilitarian and normative-regulatory function; (c) as a rhetorical utilitarian context which had to be, at the discursive level, bureaucratically maintained in the name of realism (ie, in the name of revolution, class struggle and working-class identity), but at the level of concrete pictorial shaping it could be gradually modified by some formal solutions which belonged to historical or current modernism; and (d) as a context which by rejecting the impact of the USSR and developing socialist self-management was gradually modified into modernist art. Within the concrete historical space of second Yugoslavia, Socialist Realism showed itself to be a dynamic and open formation which over time

8.

c s a [ o r n ]

Miodrag B Proti c , ed, Jugoslovensko slikarstvo s este decenije, Muzej savremene umetnosti, Beograd, 1980
c a [ c u e ] t

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had been changing its figures (the modes of representation and shaping). At the same time it safeguarded and maintained regulative functions within the culture. This case helps us to understand that an ideology could have at its disposal different ideospheres, different ways to communicate its ideologies and its demands. Modern art in second Yugoslavia in the 1950s escaped from several incompatible sources: 1. by rejecting Socialist Realism in the name of current highmodernist-oriented art, which was understood as an expression of the progressive development of Socialist society, this could be seen in the works of Socialist Realisms advocates who in late the 1940s and in 1950s were approaching aesthetic modernism (in Croatia it was Edo Murtic , in Slovenia Pregelj, in Serbia and Montenegro Petar Lubarda); 2. by gradually transforming Socialist Realism into moderate modernist art which, on the one hand, relied upon the tradition of modernist intimism between the two world wars, and on the other hand, current moderate (neither abstract nor figurative, apolitical) second-hand, primarily modernist influences of the Paris school this tendency was identified as Socialist aestheticism;9 3. Socialist aestheticism appeared at the moment in which the postrevolutionary period was established in Socialist revolutionary society and when revolutionaries were replaced by bureaucrats and technocrats, this meant that Socialist aestheticism was an expression of the interests and tastes of a new managerial class whose goal was not only to change the world but also to enjoy it; 4. in contrast to the evolution of Socialist Realism into Socialist aestheticism there were some radical tendencies which provoked the conventions of canonical realism and the ruling Socialist aestheticism, in other words, these tendencies tended toward transfiguring the painting itself: these were the appearance of Slovene, Croatian and Serbian informel, but also there were the tendencies that established the status of the neo-avant-garde (group Exat 51 from Zagreb) as a withdrawal from the functions of Socialist Realism and emerging Socialist aestheticism; 5. but those radical tendencies also were, naturally, the import of the new, actual and fashionable movements from international art with this real or plausible (real and plausible) openness the new art in second Yugoslavia was formed with a certain consciousness (ideosphere) that it belonged to international art; and 6. certain tendencies appeared that were a critique of any kind of modernism through the return to pre-modern sources in traditional European painting, primitive painting, individual post-Surrealist fantastic or painting in the national tradition.
c a [ u e ] t

9.

Jes a Denegri, Socijalisticki estetizam, in Pedesete: Teme srpske umetnosti (19501960), Svetovi, Novi Sad, 1993, pp 10410
c a s o r [ n ]

YUGOSLAV POST-AVANT-GARDE OR THE END OF COMMUNIST/SOCIALIST MODERNISM

The term post-avant-garde designates the analytical, critical, parodical and simulational strategies of ending, critique, and second-degree (meta-)usage

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10. Ale Erjavec, ed, Postmodernism and the Postsocialist Condition, Political Art under Late Socialism, California University Press, Berkeley, 2003; Irwin, ed, East Art Map Contemporary Art and Eastern Europe, Afterall Books, London, 2006 11. Marijan Susovski, ed, ka praksa Nova umjetnic 19661978, Galerija suvremene umjetnosti, Zagreb, 1978
c a o r [ n ]

12. Andrej Medved, Poetike osemdesetih let v slikarstvu in kiparstvu, Edicija Artes, Kopar, 1991 , Fiction 13. Marina Grz inic Reconstructed Eastern Europe, Post-Socialism & The Retro-Avant-Garde, Springerin, Vienna, 2000
z c a o r [ n ] c a [ u e ] t

of modernist and avant-garde arts and culture conducted by some art movements, groups and individuals. In contrast to avant-garde (idealist utopia) and neo-avant-garde (concrete or critical utopia), the post-avantgarde is a post-historical complex of manifestations that challenged, represented, destroyed or deconstructed the archaeological archives of modernism, avant-gardes and neo-avant-gardes10 by penetrating them. The early post-avant-garde was active at the end of the 1960s and during the 1970s at the turn of high (Western) and moderate (Eastern) into late modernism,11 anticipating postmodern plural and decentred consciousness and culture. It was based on the critique of modernist dogmas, especially on the critique of the theory of modern painting developed, for example, by Clement Greenberg and on the relativisation of media and disciplinary borders based on one medium, for example, Pop art, which blurred the high art/popular culture divide, or Minimalist art within which some neither painterly nor sculptural objects and installations were realised. Late 1970s and early 1980s eclectic post-avant-garde was also designated as eclectic postmodernism and was marked by the poetics of a soft post-historical return to fiction and narrative in literature, painting, theatre and film (transavanguardia, neo-romanticism, neo-expressionism).12 It was based: (1) on the belief in the end of history and the epoch; (2) on the idea that art which appeared at the end of twentieth century had the character of a post-historical style, which meant that it represented a transitional (trans) form of the work that filled the historical void between the finished art history of the West and the future new cycle which was about to appear, but was still impossible to imagine and predict; and (3) on the expectation that current art would simultaneously question and consume the historical and stylistic meanings of Western art (retro tendency) and search for possible alternatives to cultural domination (the pro-avant-garde tendency). The special case of post-avant-gardes was the art of post-Socialism.13 Post-Socialism is the postmodern condition of former Real Socialist societies/states. It is described as a transitional period between bureaucratic Socialist Realist society and late liberal market capitalism. Post-Socialism was, first of all, characterised by the paradoxical conjunction of different and heterogeneous social systems and forms of production and the consumption of culture; for example, in these societies, institutions of Real Socialism simultaneously coexisted with liberal capitalism and national bourgeois early modern capitalism. In question here is the relation of the real social order (the confrontation of Real Socialist and late capitalist institutions) and the functioning of the social order (confrontation of forms of representation of pre-modern sources of the nation and society, of omitted/censored phases of modernism during the time of Real Socialism and unattained forms of consumption or pleasures of late capitalism). Considering art in Post-Socialism, it could be said that it is characterised by four global systems of representation: (a) the art which is a symptom of Real Socialist ideological powers (phantasms), which means a kind of subversive production of wrong sense, as in Russian Perestroika art, Chinese cynical realism or Slovene retro-avant-garde; (b) the return to the pre-modern or early modern forms of expression established within realism, romanticism and neoclassicism, ie, within Socialist Realism, Fascist and National Socialist art these phenomena could be

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roughly identified as Post-Socialist national realism (modernism after postmodernism), and (c) phenomena that are accompanied and co-acted with the phenomena at the level of the transnational scene, first of all, of first world postmodernism. The development of the post-avant-garde in second Yugoslavia and after, from 1969 to 1995, could be identified as a set of phenomena within conceptual art (19691971), eclectic postmodernism (19811986) and the retro-avant-garde (19812000). That which appears a problem is not the turn from the historical formation of modernism to a post-historical formation of postmodernism from event A to event B. On the contrary, in question here is the complex and ambiguous process of deconstructing the homogenous body of modernism into a plural cluster of potential possibilities by referring to the memories of the contradictory and mutually confronted modernisms. The end of Socialist Realist art, which seemed to evolve gradually from Socialist modernism through neo-avant-gardes towards postmodernism, was not the achievement of postmodern art as a new style (tendency or movement). The postmodern condition was actually an open and plural context for producing the inconsistency of modernism. It was a paradox and this paradox occupies my memories.