Category: ARTMargins Online: Articles

Let me begin my essay by telling a short anecdote: “Once upon a time, somewhere close to the North Pole, one baby polar bear asked his mother:
-Mommy, are you sure that I am a real polar bear?
-Yes, she answered.
-And all our family members are real polar bears as well?
-Absolutely, said she. Your father, me, your grandmothers and grandfathers, and all our relatives are real polar bears. But why do you ask?
-You know, he said, I trust you, of course. But why then do I feel so terribly cold?”

I would like to use this simple … Read more

With new cafes, galleries, theatres, and cinemas springing up all over Prague, it seems this city is justified to once again call itself a metropolis of culture. There is such a wide range of places to choose from that every evening presents the challenge of just deciding where to go, a far cry from days not so long ago. Yet just imagine a single place that can offer everything culture and the arts demand; a place where people from every nationality can get together and find something they have in common. This is not a utopia, but the Universal Space … Read more

Curated by John E. Bowlt, Matthew Drutt, and Zelfira Tregulova. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, September 14, 2000 – January 10, 2001

On January 11th 1927, after visiting the Moscow Museum of Painting and encountering its collection of works of the Russian avant-garde, Walter Benjamin wrote in his diary: “Their stuff is worthless. Just like most of the things hanging in the three rooms, they seem to be massively influenced by Parisian and Berlin painting of the same period which they copy without skill”. But did they merely copy? The legacy and innovations of early 20th century European avant-garde … Read more

 This essay is a preview of his preface to the catalogue of the exhibition “Conceptual Reflection in Polish Art. Experiences of Discourse: 1965 – 1975”, published by Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw.

before
we fell
and got up
vertically
now
we fall
horizontally
(Tadeusz Rozewicz, Falling, 1963)

“The most striking property of doors (although not unique to doors) is RESONANCE between two states, which can be conveniently labeled as “open” and ‘closed'”. (Richard Artschwager, The Hydraulic Doorcheck, 1967)

“…a work and a text have the characteristics of an event and that is why they come too … Read more

Preface to the Museum of the USSR

— Vladimir Paperny (Los Angeles)

A quarter of a century ago, I started looking at the shapes of the Soviet architecture, trying to “read” them as cultural utterances. The results were published in Russian under the title Kul’tura dva (Culture Two) first by Ardis Publishers (1985) then by Moscow journal Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie (1996). The English translation will be released by Cambridge University Press next year.

A few years ago, a young Russian architectural student at the University of Utah, Olga Filippova, started thinking in the opposite direction. She took the basic concept … Read more

The following text was commissioned for the 46th Oberhausen Kurzfilmtage Festival, as part of a special retrospective program curated by Slovenian video artist and media theorist Marina Grzinic. “Sex, Rock-n-Roll, and History: Video & Films from Eastern Europe 1950-2000” will be the most comprehensive retrospective devoted to Eastern Europe to date, consisting of 10 video programs (over 100 works), and numerous guest presenters, including Slavoj Žižek, Stephen Kovacs, organizer of the Ostranenie video festivals at Bauhaus Dessau since 1993, Gleb Aleinikov, co-founder of the Russian experimental film collective CineFantom, and Olia Lialina, Moscow net artist. (An interview with … Read more

Javor Gardev, one of Bulgaria’s most innovative directors, lives and works in Sofia. He is a member and co-founder of the Triumviratus Art Group, a collective whose activities focus on the theater, performance, literature, video art, and the radio. Now that theater in the countries of the former Eastern Bloc has the freedom to speak its mind, it seems to have lost all interest in doing so. Born in the 1970s, the youngest generation of theater directors, with Gardev among them, does not seem interested in social concerns, preferring more existential dilemmas and the art/life divide instead. from its current … Read more

Politically, socially, and economically speaking, the collapse of communism has brought about a lot of changes to the countries of East-Central Europe. The demise of the communist system in Romania in 1989 exposed a political, social and economic crisis that had been hidden for decades. The consequences were dramatic: After more than twenty years of dictatorship – with the 1980s as the most oppressive period – the overthrow of the totalitarian system culminated in a coup d’état. Romanian society was shattered and traumatised to the core.

Beginning in 1990, for the first time in many years, Romanian performance artists came … Read more

Focusing on Czech women artists working in installation, photography, performance, and sculpture, I want to explore the subversion of phallocentric paradigms in East-Central European culture and society from a feminist perspective. In discussing various historical, ideological and theoretical formations that have contributed to the discrimination of women, I will examine the reasons for the absence of an explicit political dimension in contemporary Czech womens’ art. I also want to draw attention to the alternative ways of marrying the personal with the political that have been developed by Czech women artists during this period of transition.

Czech women artists frequently politicize … Read more

On December 4, 1998 Avdei Ter-Oganian performed in Moscow’s Manezh exhibition hall an action he called the “Desecration of Holy Objects”. Simply speaking, he took an axe and proceeded to chop up photographs of several Russian orthodox icons. The action had grave legal consequences: the Moscow prosecutor’s office started a process against Ter-Oganian, accusing him of arousing national and religious hatred. If found guilty, the artist would spend two to four years in prison. The process against Ter-Oganian is far from over: the municipal court of the Khamovniki district met on April 20, 1999 but then adjourned without reaching a … Read more

The goal of the Freud-Lissitzky Project is to reconstruct the mythical computer game whose history spans the 20th century. As we uncover more elements of the game, they will be added to the site.

FAQ:

1. What is Freud-Lissitzky Navigator?

Freud-Lissitzky Navigator is a computer game prototype; a software narrative (re: a theoretical or fictional narrative about software); a virtual exhibition; an imaginary software; a tool to navigate through 20th century cultural history; an experiment in developing analysis of new media which uses the very forms of new media (in this case, computer games and software interfaces).

2. Where is … Read more

Laibach and NSK analyze nationalism through the aesthetic dimension. By placing “national and subnational” symbols alongside each other, we demonstrate their “universality”. That is, in the very process of one nation defining its difference against the other, it frequently uses the same, or almost the same, kind of symbols and rhetoric as the other.

(–Laibach, from on-line interviews)

Laibach is a musical group that first began performing in the mining town of Trbovlje in central Slovenia in 1980. With Tito’s death that year, the future of Yugoslavia became uncertain, and throughout the 1980s youth subcultures engaged in agitation in the … Read more

It is possible to consider technology as a complex combination of technical means and logical representations. When it forms part of technology (in the broad sense of that word, encompassing mnemotechnics as well as space ships), logic (or rather ideo-logy) remains unconscious, even though generally speaking it is, of course, part of consciousness. In the general evolution of imagery, it is not only the technologies of representation that change, but the representation of technology is likewise in a process of constant change. We have to distinguish between these two components of technology in order to escape the often cited cliché … Read more

The Russian visual sensibilities (if there is such a thing) are formed by two contrasting influences. On the one hand, there is a natural attraction to decorative surfaces, to richness of colors and shapes. Historians tell us that in the 10th century Prince Vladimir decided to convert to Christianity mainly because of the visual experience his emissaries had had in Constantinople: “The Greeks led us to the building where they worship their God,” they wrote to the Prince, “and we knew not whether we were in heaven or on earth. For on earth there is no such splendor or such … Read more