Performance Art in Eastern Europe since 1960 by Amy Bryzgel (review)

Abstract

SEER, 95, 4, OCTOBER 2017 746 painters were engaged both with each other and with realist writers. They reflected and challenged, in and through their paintings, the dominant literary discourse on realism. Theorizing ‘interart encounters’ requires a vigorous, new language of its own. The Renaissance acknowledged the proximity of the verbal and the visual. It acts here as a channel for some of the rhetorical terms chosen for this study, such as, for example, ‘paragone’, ‘enargeia’ (as opposed to ‘energeia’) and ‘ekphrasis’. Brunson takes great pains to explain her usage of these terms in her Introduction (for the first two, but not until p. 186 ff. for the last one), but they remain strongly reminiscent of old language, rather than new. This point may be unwelcome to some. However, we should at least question anything that interferes with the broader discussions that Russian realism, operating across discrete artistic disciplines, deserves. Brunson puts forward the following sound reasons for the international neglect of Russian realist painting: the claiming of this period for social, political and pseudo-aesthetic considerations in the Soviet twentieth century; and the fact that much art criticism was conducted by writers and literary critics whose natural inclination was to perceive the verbal, and so particularly the novel, as dominant over the visual. Her analyses of the painterly aspects of the novels are acute, but are reliant on already established literary criticism. Nevertheless, Brunson redirects focus onto the debates about the visual and its place in the realism engaged in by the novel. In general, there is much less written on Russian painting as an art form within the axis of realism. A substantial achievement of this study, then, is that it indulges, excites and greatly enhances modern insights into nineteenth-century Russian realist painting. Department of Russian and Slavonic Studies Cynthia Marsh University of Nottingham Bryzgel, Amy. Performance Art in Eastern Europe since 1960. Rethinking Art’s Histories. Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2017. xvii + 366 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Select bibliography. Index. £18.99 (paperback). Performance Art in Eastern Europe since 1960 represents Amy Bryzgel’s decidedly ambitious endeavour to write the first comprehensive account of the titular subject. The task of setting into dialogue time-based artworks emerging in twenty-one countries over the course of half a century has required Bryzgel to traverse a number of conventional boundaries: geographical boundaries between Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe; temporal boundaries between the Communist period, the years of transition and the post-Cold REVIEWS 747 War era; geopolitical boundaries between the former Soviet republics, satellite states and Yugoslav nations; and art-historical boundaries between the genres of performance art, body art, conceptual art and land art. Descriptions of the performances that Bryzgel studied during two years of fieldwork are framed by theoretical discourses advanced by scholars from both Eastern Europe (Piotr Piotrowski, Slavoj Žižek) and the United States (Amelia Jones, Lucy Lippard), as well as by insights offered by the 250 artists, art historians and critics interviewed by the author. The result is an accessible introduction to an understudied body of material that makes strides towards amending the longstanding misperception that performance art in Eastern Europe functioned predominantly as a vehicle of dissident political activity. ‘Performance art,’ Bryzgel writes in her introduction, ‘developed in Eastern Europe in parallel and in dialogue with practices in Western Europe and North America, despite its exclusion from the canon of that history’ (p. 1). A central aim of Performance Art in Eastern Europe since 1960 is to support this opening assertion of performance art’s concurrent — and at times synergistic — evolution in the East and the West, while inscribing Eastern European artists into what many of these individuals viewed as a shared tradition. The objective of charting her subjects’ simultaneous connection to and independence from the activities of their Western counterparts also motivates the overall structure that Bryzgel selected for her book. After an introductory section titled ‘Sources and Origins’, the remainder of the text is arranged into thematic chapters that purposely correspond to the categories frequently found in extant studies of Euro-American performance art: ‘the body’, ‘gender’, ‘politics and identity’ and ‘institutional critique’. While Bryzgel notes that the aforementioned categories emerged...