25th Anniversary Reflections: Whither the Postcommunist? Edit András and Piotr Piotrowski, “Provincializing the West,” 2012
ARTMargins Online is celebrating 25 years! To mark the occasion, the editors invited past ARTMargins Online authors and other writers from the region to select one article from AMO’s online archive of more than 1000 texts, providing a brief introduction that highlights the chosen item’s continued relevance. ARTMargins Online published its first article on January 15, 1999. Today, the publication is one of the largest online archival resources for contemporary art from East-Central Europe and beyond. Our reflection project celebrates AMO’s 25 years, but it also aims to highlight our unwavering commitment to promoting research, criticism, and artistic projects that advance our understanding of contemporary art from the region in a critical global perspective.
Re-reading this interview between two titans of art history—Edit András and Piotr Piotrowski—what stands out most is Piotrowski’s insistence on a comparative analysis of art and (perhaps most importantly) art historiography between postcommunist Europe and other regions in the world. This approach is more rigorous than the casual happenstance of adjacencies between different cultural contexts (following the great work of Tina Campt), and also less prone to the optimistic rhetoric rather than progressive action that underpins calls for solidarity. Comparativism demands an exacting study of two or more contexts and the tensions, connections, and frictions between them. Such exactitude, such painstaking exploration of how different contexts respond to parallel conditions (of marginalization, of crisis, of resistance) is precisely what we need to pierce both the flabby op-ed prose that often inflates contemporary art discourse. It overcomes the wafty airs of globalism that often accompany such prose, with its assumptions that “we’re all in this together” and that we work from an equalized position of power and relevance. (We don’t, of course).
I would want to push Piotrowski’s thinking much further and in two particular directions, however. First, comparativism is not possible through translation, as Piotrowski suggests. To truly understand different contexts, their art, and their histories, we need to work in the languages of those contexts and the specific worlds they create: their idioms, their nuances and wordplays, their varying registers of time and place, etc. The documents we work with (whether primary archives or subsequent art-historical tomes) are rarely encountered in translation except when they have already been digested, selected, and curated into a pre-determined narrative of importance (especially for an audience in an imperialistic language like English). In other words, translation only makes us a tourist through histories, not someone who can transform or redirect them.
My second respectful disagreement is that postcommunist studies are not simply beholden to theories and discourses developed elsewhere. There is still much to learn directly from postcommunism and its legacies. There is, for example, the resurgence of illiberalism and neo-fascism, and the ousting of cultural directors and trustees and their replacement by apparatchiks in France, Germany, or the UK after—and often catalyzed by—what’s happened in Hungary, Poland, Slovenia. Resources, power, and support are unevenly distributed in a European Union still dominated by select coteries in Europe’s west. Fears of war and the populist violence persist against those migrating to or through a nation, and Europe’s eastern threshold remains a crucial site where those fears intersect. States of exceptionalism and discourses on the supposedly irreducible difference from elsewhere are widespread, even as the spread of illiberalism and populist uprisings after decades of uneven resource distribution are clearly no longer exceptional. Perhaps most significantly, we have much to learn from the cultural, social, and political resistances that persist against these resurgent conditions. Rather than forgo the region’s thinkers in favor of discourses and politics developed elsewhere, such as decolonization and the decolonial, it is the latter’s entwinement with (and redirection following) the longstanding work of Šejla Kamerić or Nikita Kadan, Vaclav Havel or GM Tamás (whose writings have never seemed more relevant than now)—and of course Piotrowski and András themselves—that is pivotal to comparativist studies today and their reimagining of contemporary conditions.
