Monthly Archive: December 1999

In 1993, a Danish critic reviewing Dubravka Ugresic’s novel Fording the Stream of Consciousness, a clever satire of a literary conference, accused her of engaging in a crass form of literary escapism when she should have been writing about the”bloody war” raging at home in her native Yugoslavia. Since the novel was first published in 1988, this criticism was entirely misplaced. In fact, the war has been on her mind the entire time, as is evident from her two most recent books, The Culture of Lies (essays 1991-1998) and The Museum of Unconditional Surrender (1991-1996). Her reflections, which are … Read more

28 June, 1999 – 22 August 1999, Mûcsarnok (Palace of Art), Budapest, Hõsõk tere

“Perspective is old evidence that we use fragmentally. By rethinking its structure, we can reach a dialogue covering everything that is essential to contemporary art. Questions arise, such as: what is the picture? What are the systems in space and their anti-systems like, where are the limits of artistic discourse?” These questions were asked by János Megyik, a Hungarian artist who was one of the participants at a summer exhibition/series of events entitled Perspective, presented by the Hungarian Palace of art (Mûsarnok) in cooperation with … Read more

Quite a few people were astonished when a few months ago the portrait of the young “revolutionary” poet Dmitrii Pimenov appeared on Russian televsion. Anchormen and women quoted his revolutionary verses and commented on his performances. Why so? Had another of Mayakovskys’ or Lenin’s grandchildren appeared? Far from it: the cause was the bombing of the underground shopping center on Moscow’s central Manege Square on August 31, 1999, where 41 people were wounded. A German reporter commented that the “President of the Association of Russian Revolutionary Poets” had detonated the bomb in order to express his opinion about Russian consumerism. … Read more

In order to arrive at the present moment, to bring you “live from Russia,” which I intend to do in the second part of my essay, I will introduce the archeology of Russian historical and geopolitical “identity.” By doing that, the subsequent examples will appear as a part, hopefully, of a more systematic historical, or geopolitical, pattern. So, let’s situate Russia. Two preliminary theses:

1) Russia is after history. I will repeat it. Russia is after history. Which of these statements came first? Which second? I invite you to read in this repetition two regimes that constitute Russian history, its … Read more