Art and Theory of Post-1989 Central and Eastern Europe: A Critical Anthology by Janevski Ana (review)

Abstract

SEER, 97, 4, OCTOBER 2019 778 Janevski, Ana and Marcoci, Roxana, with Ksenia Nouril (eds). Art and Theory of Post-1989 Central and Eastern Europe: A Critical Anthology. Primary Documents. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2018. 408 pp. Illustrations. Figures. Notes. Index. $40.00: £31.00 (paperback). The difficulty of defining Central and Eastern European art after the region’s transition from socialism to neoliberal capitalism hangs over the introduction to Art and Theory of Post-1989 Central and Eastern Europe, edited by Ana Janevski and Roxana Marcoci with Ksenia Nouril. Keen to avoid reifying the East/West binary, the editors of this ambitious follow-up to MoMA’s Primary Documents: A Sourcebook for Eastern and Central European Art since the 1950s (New York, 2002) turn to Jelena Vesić, an independent curator and member of the Belgrade-based Prelom collective. Vesić claims that ‘Eastern European art’ can refer to everything from all art made in conditions marked by socialism to only art that engages with the socialist legacy — or even only those practices that were supported by the Soros Centers for Contemporary Art (SCCAs), a network of twenty institutions established around the region to grease the wheels of post-socialist transition in the 1990s (p. 13). Wisely, the volume avoids any clear consensus on the meaning of Central and Eastern Europe and its art as it divides its seventy-five contributions into seven themed chapters rather than organizing them into geographical or chronological schema. Certain themes, particularly the focus on activism and collectivity in the second chapter, reflect the collaborative structure of the book itself, which is a product of multiple research trips and seminars organized by the Central and Eastern Europe group of MoMA’s Contemporary and Modern Art Perspectives (C-MAP) project between 2015 and 2017 (these exchanges are listed at the end of the book). Each section comprises a mix of re-publications from English and other languages and newly commissioned texts. Each chapter begins with three new texts: the first is a theoretical introduction by an outside adviser and expert in the field, the second a chapter summary by a C-MAP member and the third an interview with an artist or collective. The first chapter, titled ‘Reckoning with History’, delves into the legacy of the socialist era. In an email conversation with compatriot Jonas Valatkevičius from 2000, Deimantas Narkevičius emerges as the rare Lithuanian artist ready to violate a major taboo on the country’s art scene by engaging with history through the prism of personal experience. Exploring the extra-legal codes that guide interpersonal conduct in post-Soviet society, Narkevičius frames them as a kind of popular truth that protects against both the obligatory rule of law and the trauma of processing past events (pp. 37–38). Socialist baggage remains a topic of interest in the second chapter, ‘Exhibiting the “East” since 1989’. In one highlight, Polish art historian Piotr Piotrowski argues that REVIEWS 779 the unstable nature of borders after the fall of socialism compelled Central European artists to submit their work for Western inspection, and that the thematics of transition and EU integration of the early 1990s and early 2000s, respectively, were informed by geopolitical lines that ‘exist and at the same time do not exist’ (p. 85). As the post-Communist context began to retreat from view, interest shifted from centre/periphery relations to relations between various peripheries (p. 85). Through all this, the concept of Central Europe only maintained coherence from the perspective of actually existing socialism. Once its memory began to wane, the concept was kept alive by nostalgia for the Hapsburg Empire in countries like Hungary and Czechoslovakia (p. 84). Chapter three expands this look at the ideological value of exhibitions to consider the value of archives. Slovenian curator Zdenka Badovinac leads the charge with a look at the strategy of self-historicization adopted by artists at a time when state institutions either ignored or condemned the neo-avant-garde (p. 145). Key projects include Romanian Lia Perjovschi’s Contemporary Art Archive (begun in 1985) and East Art Map (begun in 2001) by the Slovenian retro-avant-garde group IRWIN. The Romanian collective...