ARTMargins

Contemporary art across the evolving global peripheries

Author: ARTMargins

ARTMargins Online: Articles

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 by Axel Lapp (Berlin) ·

Manifesta 4

Frankensteiner Hof, Frankfurter Kunstverein, Portikus, Städelsches Kulturinstitut Frankfurt – May 25 until August 25, 2002

Expectations for this year’s ‘Manifesta 4’ in Frankfurt were high. The previous instalments of this nomadic ‘European Biennial of Contemporary Art’ outside the traditional European art centres, in Rotterdam, Luxembourg and Ljubliana had raised the stakes. Manifesta had become a brand that presented daring and exciting new work by young artists from all over Europe, without dependency and subordination to the art markets – close to contemporary theoretical discourse and on the pulse of the time.

The three curators, Iara Boubnova (Sofia), Nuria Enguita Mayo … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Articles

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 by Antje Weitzel (Berlin) ·

Hey You, Hey Europe

Frankensteiner Hof, Frankfurter Kunstverein, Portikus, Städelsches Kulturinstitut Frankfurt – May 25 until August 25, 2002

Manifesta 4. Frankfurt/Main (various locations).

Since its foundation in 1996 Manifesta has been loosely dedicated to defining a “new Europe,” to responding to the new artistic developments in the whole European territory and offering a general idea of both the overall situation and the most outstanding issues and questions of European art, culture, and society.

Nevertheless, only the last installment in Ljubljana (2000), after Rotterdam (1996) and Luxembourg (1998), provided an opportunity for the show to inhabit a city that might actually exemplify such a … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Book Reviews

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 by Inke Arns (Berlin) ·

Metonymical Mov(i)es

Lev Manovich: The Language of New Media. MIT Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts / London, England 2001. $34.95, 7×9, 354 pages, ISBN 0-262-13374-1

Upon reading Lautréamonts Chants de Maldoror (1869) surrealist king pin André Breton took over the author’s famous words “beautiful as the unexpected meeting, on a dissection table, of a sewing machine and an umbrella”, thus coining the Surrealist aesthetic of jarring juxtapositions.

Almost as beautiful as Breton’s observation was another unexpected meeting taking place some years later, namely, the use of punched 35mm movie film in order to control computer programs in the world’s first working digital computer … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Articles

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 by Kathrin Becker (Berlin) ·

In Memoriam Timur Novikov

In memoriam Timur Novikov

On Thursday, May 23rd, 2002, Timur Novikov died at the age of 44 in St. Petersburg, Russia. He was an artist, writer, theoretician, teacher, and the catalyst of the St. Petersburg artscene for almost two decades.

Since 1977, Novikov was part of the former inofficial Soviet art scene. He was a member of the inofficial group “Letopis” (Chronicle). In the early 1980s, Novikov founded the New-Artists-Group, which was one of the first federations of artists based on aestehtic criteria and whose goal was the integration of art and life. In 1986, he co-founded the “Friends-of-Majakovsky… Read more

ARTMargins Online: Interviews

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 by Sven Spieker ·

At the Center of Mitteleuropa, A Conversation with Peter Forgács

Peter Forgács has a long-standing reputation as Hungary’s most innovative documentary film-maker. His latest film, A dunai exodus (The Danube Exodus, 1998), was a highlight of the 30th Hungarian Film Week and shared the Grand Jury prize for best documentary. Using amateur film taken by a ship’s captain, Forgács relates two stories which took place during the war: the exodus of Central European Jews to Palestine and the exodus of ethnic Germans from Bessarabia to “the fatherland.”

Sven Spieker: The first question I’d like to ask you has to do with the notion of “Mitteleuropa.” The question is … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Articles

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 by Katarzyna Murwaska-Muthesius (London) ·

Oskar Hansen and the Auschwitz “Countermemorial,” 1958-59

The following essay is part of a series devoted to contemporary art and architecture East-Central Europe. It was first delivered as a paper at a conference held at MIT in October, 2001.

Even before we attempt to consider it, there is a relatively fixed mental map of post-1945 European visual culture already impressed upon our minds and ready to use.(The paper was made possible through a Henry Moore Research Scholarship at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds and at the Henry Moore Foundation in Perry Green in 1998. It would not have been completed without the help I

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ARTMargins Online: New Media & Film

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 by Sergei Lavrentiev ·

“WAR”, Dir. by Alexei Balabanov (Russia, 2002)

 

The politically correct European has for a long time already considered Alexei Balabanov an out-and-out nationalist. The liberal public opinion in Russia is in agreement with this definition.

Both here and there the director of the film “War” is reproached with presenting only the Russian point of view on the conflict in Chechnya in the film. In the meantime, both there and here, the genre of the film is ignored for some reason.

Alexey Balabanov made “War” as a classical Western. The young Caucasian captive returns to Chechnya to rescue the bride (Ingeborga Dapkunaite) of the British fellow sufferer (Ian … Read more

ARTMargins Online: New Media & Film

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 by Andrzej Pitrus (Warsaw) ·

LOOKING FOR IDENTITY: POLISH CINEMA OF THE NINETIES

Polish cinema had to face a shift in the early nineties. Its goal was no longer to fight the system and express the doubts and fears of an individual living in totalitarian society. The “code” used in many popular and artistic Polish films made in the eighties and earlier had become useless.

Films such as “Seksmisja” by Juliusz Machulski (Sex Mission, 1984) or “Rejs” by Marek Piwowski (The Boat Trip, 1970) listed among Polish cult favourites, could no longer satisfy the needs of the nineties’ audience. Some directors noticed the need for change. Film – both in its popular and

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ARTMargins Online: Articles

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 by Anna Sokolina (New York) ·

In Opposition to the State: The Soviet Neoavant-garde and East German Aestheticism in the 1980s

The following essay is part of a series devoted to contemporary art and architecture East-Central Europe. It was first delivered as a paper at a conference held at MIT in October, 2001.

The integral reading of socialist architecture in the late 20th century presents the evolution of Soviet and East German architecture as a unique model of a governed collaboration. Both the Soviet Union, “the elder brother,” and the GDR, its “little sister” in the family of socialist countries, unfolded a general course toward the total industrialization and the mass production of standard housing for the people. The processes that

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ARTMargins Online: Articles

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 by Marina Grzinic (Ljubljana) ·

Does Contemporary Art Need Museums Anymore?

The 1990s showed an increasing proliferation—indeed a boom—of museums. World architects competed for a dreamy amount of money, capital that was reserved by city councils, state associations, and funds in Western Europe and America for the third millennium deal-of-a-lifetime in culture, from Texas to Boston, from Helsinki to Berlin, to build new museums for art and to renovate old ones.

In the heart of the city of Berlin, in the so-called Berlin inner city island, five museums will be rebuilt in the year 2000 and beyond; the cost of the project is estimated at one billion euros.

According to various … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Articles

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 by Deborah Schultz (Sussex) ·

Displacement and Identity: Arnold Daghani

The following essay is part of a series devoted to contemporary art and architecture East-Central Europe. It was first delivered as a paper at a conference held at MIT in October, 2001.

What was the experience of an aspiring Modernist artist in Romania in the late 1940s and 1950s? Arnold Daghani (1909-1985) may be a case in point.(This paper represents early research for a project now funded by the Leverhulme Trust, to run from 2001-4 at the University of Sussex, where a large collection of around 6,000 artworks and other documentation by Daghani is held in the Arnold

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ARTMargins Online: Articles

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 by Angel Angelov (Sofia) ·

Comics and Temple: “Here” and “There” in Contemporary Bulgarian Art

I suppose the organizers of the conference “Is There Anything In Common Between Here and There In Contemporary Art?” meant by the title a geographical and national correlation, a juxtaposition on the horizontal line of real space.

However, such deictics as here and there do not define space unambiguously. Rather, their definition depends on the speaker’s situation in space, as well as on his or her will. The otherness, promised both by the conference title and the exhibition title, “Ars ex Natio: Made in Bulgaria,” is related to some territorial or social aspects defined by nationality.

The wrong wording of

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ARTMargins Online: Articles

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 by Edit András (Budapest) ·

Who’s Afraid of a New Paradigm? The “Old” Art Criticism of the East versus the “New” Critical Theory of the West

Let me begin by promptly apologizing for the apparent arrogance of the subtitle, which, following an old pattern, considers the divisions inherent in Western culture more prominent in the hierarchy of geopolitical divisions and, thus, as more unequivocal than the division between the occidental and oriental cultures.

In this usage, the West stands for Western Europe and the United States, while the East is synonymous with the countries of the former Eastern Bloc; that is, the European post-Socialist countries.

At the beginning of the nineties, in the aftermath of political changes, the world’s attention was focused for a short while

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ARTMargins Online: Articles

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 by Juliana Maxim and Mark Jarzombek (Boston) ·

The Conference “East-European Art and Architecture in the 20th Century” (MIT, 5-6 October, 2001)

The conference “East-European Art and Architecture in the 20th century” (MIT, 5-6 October, 2001)

Juliana Maxim and Mark Jarzombek (Boston)

The “East-European Art and Architecture in the 20th century” conference was held at The Massachusetts Institute of Technology on 5 and 6 October 2001. It was chaired by Prof. Mark Jarzombek and Juliana Maxim, and was hosted by History Theory Criticism (HTC), MIT’s Ph.D. program in the history of architecture and art.

The conference brought together scholars, both young and old, for two days of talks and seminar-style meetings. The keynote speaker was Steven A. Mansbach, who has published extensively … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Articles

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 by Raoul Eshelman (Munich) ·

Performatism, or What Comes After Postmodernism. New Architecture in Berlin

Let’s start with a short test. First, take the four or five criteria most widely used to define postmodernism. Most people would agree that these include things like the disappearance of the subject, the displacement of the real and authentic by the virtual, an ironic metaposition regarding the world and its workings, and an extreme skepticism regarding all metaphysical schemes.

You might want to delete some of these points, fine-tune them, or maybe even add more. However, being a reasonably literate person living in the year 2002 A.D., you should have no trouble coming up with a good working notion

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ARTMargins Online: Articles

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 by Carmen Popescu (Bucharest) ·

The Imagery of Power: Bucharest’s City Hall

The following essay is part of a series devoted to contemporary art and architecture East-Central Europe. It was first delivered as a paper at a conference held at MIT in October, 2001.

In the history of Romanian modern architecture there are few themes that may be followed from its evolution, beginning with its dawn at the end of nineteenth century and ending with the rupture brought upon it by the installment of the communist regime after World War II.

One of the most relevant themes, though, concerns the desire to build a city hall in Bucharest, the capital of the

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ARTMargins Online: Articles

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 by Katalin Timár and Attila Horányi (Budapest) ·

Is Your Pop Our Pop? The History of Art as a Self-Colonizing Tool

The following essay is part of ARTMargins’ series of interventions regarding the state of contemporary art in East-Central Europe. It is based on a panel recently convened by Susan Snodgrass at the College Art Association’s annual meeting.

Repetition seems to be one of the key concepts in the theorization of the “postmodern condition.”(See most eminently Hal Foster, The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1996). Others are, for example,. Rosalind Krauss, “The Originality of the Avant-Garde,” in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT

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ARTMargins Online: Articles

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 by Linvydas Krivickas (Kaunas) ·

Eimuntas. Nekrosius and His Performances: Global Shakespeare – Lithuanian or General Approach

Lithuanian theater in the international context is being more widely associated with the personalities of particular directors. Whereas in a theatrical community of international standing Lithuania’s name is being enunciated and put forth, critics and enthusiasts tend to emphasize the role of stage director Eimuntas Nekrosius.

 

Lithuanian director Nekrosius is important enough to have already received the Italian Ubu award several times. The publishing house Ubulibri gives out their annual prizes to the best Italian theaters and to the best foreign production. Nekrosius was recognized for the best theater production in Italy last season for Othello, just as … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Articles

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 by Margaret Dikovitskaya (New York) ·

A Response to Ekaterina Dyogot’s Article: Does Russia Qualify for Postcolonial Discourse?

See also Ekaterina Dyogot’s original article, How to Qualify for Postcolonial Discourse. 

Two pertinent anecdotes:

1) Several years ago, during a seminar on postcolonial studies, a fellow doctoral student (a white, middle-class American female) asked, “Why are we talking about the First World vs. the Third World? Where do these ordinals come from?”

“Once upon a time, there was the Second World,” I replied.

2) Earlier that year, I had discovered that I was eligible to apply for the Margaret McNamara Fellowship, offered by the World Bank to women who wished to continue their studies in the USA and

… Read more

ARTMargins Online: Interviews

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 by Birgit Beumers (Bristol) ·

Russian Film in the US: Interview with Alexander Zhurbin

Alexander Zhurbin is the director of the New York Festival of Russian Film. Zhurbin is, in fact, a composer living in New York. About three years ago, he started organizing an annual festival of Russian films, initially for the Russian community in and around New York, which later grew in popularity and began to attract broader American audiences as well. The festival presents the best films of the last film season, and all screenings are introduced by directors or actors. The festival was held this year, in spite of the events of September 11. When I met Zhurbin in Moscow … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Articles

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 by Marina Grzinic (Liubljana) ·

Dispatch From Ljubljana

Fiction Reconstructed. The Last Futurist Exhibition, Armory Show, Salon de Fleurus. Belgrade Museum of Contemporary Art, January 2002.

In January 2002, at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade, visitors could see the exhibition entitled Fiction Reconstructed: The Last Futurist Exhibition, which was originally produced by two institutions in Slovenia- the Gallery Skuc in Ljubljana and the Gallery of Contemporary Art in Celje.

I.

In the 1980s, several projects based on the reconstruction of works of art from the avant-garde took place in Ljubljana, Slovenia, where The Last Futurist Exhibition, by Kasimir Malevich (Belgrade), The International Exhibition of … Read more

ARTMargins Online: New Media & Film

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 by Stanislava Padna (Prague) ·

The Czech Cinema After the “Velvet Revolution” (1990-2000)

In the last decade, after the so-called “Velvet Revolution” of 1989 in which the totalitarian regime in the country collapsed and was replaced by a democracy, Czech cinema has undergone a number of developments.

First, let us look at the general state of film production during the ’90s. I should say that, when selecting the films to be discussed in this article, I grew intensely skeptical because of the blandness and mediocrity of most of the Czech film production in the past decade. Was there anything of universal interest, something that transcended the merely local, if not provincial dimension?

I

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ARTMargins Online: Book Reviews

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 by Irina Sandomirskaja (Stockholm) ·

And the Winner Is…

Mikhail Berg, Literaturokratiia: Problema prisvoeniia I pereraspredeleniia vlasti v literature (Literaturocracy: Problems of Appropriation and Redistribution of Power in Literature). Moscow: NLO, 2000. 352 pages.

A colleague of mine once confronted me with a strange question: In terms of success and posterity, who did I think was the winner: Bakhtin or Academician Viktor Vinogradov?

In spite of the question’s absurdity, both of us seemed to understand perfectly well what it was about. In this imaginary literary race, my friend was betting on Bakhtin, whose speech genre theory gave him a life after death in worldwide recognition.

Purely out … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Articles

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 by Stephan Küpper (Berlin) ·

Magical Mystery Tour

Davaj! Russian Art Now. Aus dem Laboratorium der freien Künste in Russland (From the Laboratory of Free Arts in Russia) 10.1.2002 – 27.2.2002. Open Tue – Sun 1-8 p.m., closed on Mondays Postfuhramt, Oranienburger Strasse 35-36, D-10117 Berlin, Germany www.davaj.de

When I entered the “Davaj! Russian Art Now” showroom, my first impression was that I had somehow fallen into Ilya Kabakov’s 1993 installation “Noma”, which presented his fellow Moscow Conceptualists as inmates of a lunatic asylum.

The same white, shabby walls, the same central room, from which corridors led into various directions, the same cells in which the artists presented … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Book Reviews

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 by Dirk Uffelmann (Erfurt) ·

Boris Groys’ “Under Suspicion”

Boris Groys: Unter Verdacht. Eine Phänomenologie der Medien. Munich: Hanser 2000, 232 pp.

“Nothing is itself”, declares Rilke in the fourth Duino Elegy. For Rilke, this sentence is less an ontological stocktaking than an incentive to seek a poetical form to be able to express the “authentic”.

If this sentence were to be the header for Boris Groys’ new book Unter Verdacht (Under Suspicion), it would serve more as an expression of an irrefutable hunch that something else is concealed behind everything than as a description of a state. Groys calls this hunch “suspicion”.

Everything that presents itself as a … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Book Reviews

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 by Wojciech Tomasik (Warsaw) ·

Out Looking In

Jan Cavanaugh, Out Looking In: Early Modern Polish Art, 1890 – 1918, University of California Press: Berkeley 2000.

Having read Jan Cavanaugh’s Out Looking In, two different opinions are called to mind. In defense of the impressionists, whose works had been widely attacked, Emile Zola claimed in 1877, “The artists ought to find poetry in the stations as their fathers found it in the forest and fields.”

Promoting modern French art in Poland, painter and art critic Stanislaw Witkiewicz argued in 1884 that it is quite insignificant whether a work depicts Jan Zamoyski’s victory over Prince Maximilian or … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Articles

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 by Luiza Barcan (Bucharest) ·

Bucarest’s Curtea Veche Gallery

Only a small area of the old medieval Bucharest, featuring narrow streets and historical buildings, escaped the demolition campaign initiated by Ceausescu in the 1980s. During the “black period” of Communism, intellectuals who enjoyed old books and old objects could view and buy them at a small gallery, named “Curtea Veche” [“Old princely court”] because it was placed opposite the medieval princely court, right at the center of historic Bucharest. This gallery is in fact a room of an old building, full of second-hand books, old maps, and modern art objects.

From the early 1980s through the present day, Marius … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Articles

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 by Matthew Jesse Jackson (Berkeley) ·

Ilya Kabakov and the Concentrated Spectacle of Soviet Power

Painting, that is, the idea of painting, dominated Ilya Kabakov’s formative years as an artist in the Soviet Union. These were the late 1950s and early 1960s, the years of de-Stalinization and Nikita Khrushchev’s faltering reform of the Soviet state.

Remembering those years, Kabakov recalls, “One must say that the fetishization of the word ‘painting’ at the time was very great. It was endlessly discussed, what is genuine painting? What is not genuine? What is its relationship to nature, to the truth of life?”(Ilya Kabakov, 60-e — 70-e…zapiski o neofitsial’noi zhizni v Moskve (Vienna: Wiener Slawistischer Almanach, Sonderband 47, … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Articles

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 by Roann Barris (Casper) ·

The Rape of Bucharest

If artists use art to make political statements, is it legitimate to understand the blatantly political actions of politicians as performances and art?

If in some sense it is, does that allow us to see the performances of artists as models for the performances of ordinary citizens in their everyday lives, and can we then see both of these performances as the completion of or response to the performances initiated by a political ruler?

I hope to provide a preliminary and partial answer to these questions through my exegesis and interpretation of the Bucuresti 2000 architectural competition, a competition held … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Articles

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 by Martina Pachmanová (Prague) ·

The Muzzle: Gender and Sexual Politics in Contemporary Czech Art

Introduction

While feminism has been part of Western art and art history since the end of the 1960s, it continues to be suppressed in this field in most Eastern European countries. However, the number of remarkable women artists who deal gender, sexuality, or the role of women in society has increased enormously during the last ten years in this region.

Many of them exhibit extensively and receive a lot of attention in press. Yet the perceptions, interpretations, and promotion of their work are usually either framed in a gender-neutral category of “Art” (which, however, is historically and culturally gendered male) … Read more