ARTMargins Online

Contemporary art across the evolving global peripheries

Tagged: special issue

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ARTMargins Online: Articles / ARTMargins Online: Special Issue

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 by Raino Isto, Caterina Preda ·

Special Issue: Creating for the State: The Role of Artists’ Unions in Central and Eastern Europe

Introduction to the Special Issue

In recent decades, the history and criticism of Western contemporary art has turned its attention to art institutions and their curatorial and administrative practices. This attention derives, in part, from the rise of institutional critique as an almost ubiquitous artistic strategy, and from the corollary realization that institutions—including museums, galleries, heritage associations, membership organizations, nomadic biennials, funding entities, arts and culture nonprofits—play a key role in establishing the social spheres in which diverse audiences encounter contemporary art. If we consider Eastern Europe during the Cold War era, there is one type of institution that played … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Articles / ARTMargins Online: Special Issue

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 by Caterina Preda ·

The Role of the Romanian Artists’ Union in the Production of State Socialist Art

During the establishment of the new socialist regime in Romania, “in order for visual artists to be it was felt necessary to create a new form of organization, a new organism that [would] become an active factor in the work of culturalization of the masses, and for the development of creation.”(“Introductory remarks for the future Country Conference of the Romanian Artists’ Union (UAP) of the Romanian Popular Republic (RPR),” File 1/1950, Fund UAP, The Central National Archives of Romania (ANIC), f. 1.) This article is an adaptation of part of a forthcoming book about the role of the … Read more

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ARTMargins Online: Articles / ARTMargins Online: Special Issue

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 by Raino Isto ·

“Criticism Should Open Up Horizons for the Future”: The Albanian Union of Writers and Artists and the Status of Art Criticism in the People’s Republic of Albania

This article presents part of the history of the Union of Writers and Artists—the official organ devoted to literature and the fine arts in the People’s Socialist Republic of Albania—and examines (in an incomplete way, of course) the contours of art criticism produced in accordance with official doctrine in Albania, especially in the 1970s decade. Like much Socialist Realist criticism, the output of the Union of Writers and Artists was frequently formulaic, but it also offered a field for artists working beyond the visual (and the union’s critics were almost invariably also practicing artists) to navigate Albanian art’s place vis-à-vis … Read more

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ARTMargins Online: Articles / ARTMargins Online: Special Issue

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 by Johana Lomová ·

Forms of Involvement: The Czechoslovakian Artists’ Union and Its 1964 Congress

During the past decade, contemporary artists in Central and Eastern Europe have renewed their interest in Artists’ Unions, and have begun to self-organize.(This article is based on a study by Johana Lomová and Karel Šima, “Sjezd Svazu československých výtvarných umělců v roce 1964. Poznámky k úspěšnosti performance,” (The Conference of the SČSVU in 1964. Notes on the Success of One Performance) in Umění a revoluce (Art and Revolution), ed. Johana Lomová and Jindřich Vybíral (Praha: UMPRUM 2017), 512–545.) After years of what scholar Piotr Piotrowski termed “anti-communism,”(Piotr Piotrowski, Art and Democracy in Post-Communist Europe (London: … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Articles / ARTMargins Online: Special Issue

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 by Kristóf Nagy ·

Whose Land, Their Art? Debates over the Tendencies Exhibition Series (1980–81)

Money and Morals Then and Now

While at first glance the Artists’ Unions seem to be fossils of Eastern Europe’s state-socialist past, in fact they are still living with us, in several ways. First of all, they persist in the dream of a political utopia: after the short belle époque of welfare states, the current precarization of the cultural sector—especially affected by the COVID-19 crisis—provokes debates on the possibility of cultural workers’ unionization even in Eastern Europe. Secondly, while new institutions emerged after the political transition of 1989, the Artists’ Unions did not completely lose their importance as integrators of … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Exhibition Reviews

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 by Sven Spieker ·

Eastern European Pavilions at this Year’s Venice Biennale: Parsing the Contemporary

ARTMargins Online asked writers and critics close to the journal to respond to several Eastern European national pavilions at this year’s Venice Biennale. Our interest was in parsing the way in which pavilion curators approached the problem of nationhood and representation in a region caught between the Socialist past and an uncertain present marked by nationalism and neo-liberal economic policies. This series of responses is supplemented by an interview with Berlin-based artist Maria Loboda.

Read more… 

 

ARTMargins Online: Articles

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 by Amy Bryzgel (Aberdeen, Scotland) ·

Special Issue: Artistic Reenactments in East European Performance Art, 1960–present

The reenactment of artistic performances and actions has garnered much curatorial attention in recent years. Life, Once More: Forms of Reenactment in Contemporary Art, at Rotterdam’s Witte de With in 2005 was an exhibition that explored the reenactment of historical events, while Marina Abramović’s series of performances, Seven Easy Pieces, which took place that same year at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, involved Abramović reenacting artistic performances both by herself and other well-known and established performance artists, such as Joseph Beuys, VALIE EXPORT, Gina Pane, and Vito Acconci. Other, perhaps less well-known explorations of performance reenactment include: Czech … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Articles

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 by Janeil Engelstad ·

Special Issue: Art and the Environment in East-Central Europe Introduction

Art and the Environment in East-Central Europe is an editorial project born from interviews and other forms of interaction with artists and cultural producers concerned, in one way or another, with the idea and the material reality of what goes by the name of the “natural environment.” In the different pieces collected within this project, the term “environment” unfolds into a broad variety of concepts and artistic practices that do not, and should not, become homogenized. A survey rather than a deep investigation, Art and the Environment in East-Central Europe covers a wide range of art and ideas connected to … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Interviews

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 by Edit András (Budapest) ·

Hungary in Focus: Conservative Politics and Its Impact on the Arts. A Forum

In 2003, Hedvig Turai, Allan Siegel and I put together an overview of diverse aspects of the Hungarian art scene. What gave urgency to providing an update so soon is that within just a few years, the cultural landscape has undergone significant change. Fidesz, the conservative right-wing party, has been in power for three years now in Hungary, gradually transforming the country into an isolationist, ethno-nationalist, authoritarian state not unlike Russia.

Concerning the post-Cold War world, Jürgen Habermas’s notion of a “post-national constellation” seems to be an outcome of wishful thinking, since despite the recurring prognosis of the death … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Interviews

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 by Beti Žerovc (Ljubljana) ·

The OHO Files, Updated

In October 2011, ARTMargins Online published a block of texts on the Slovene art collective the OHO Group, including interviews with Milenko Matanovi? and David Nez. The texts were accompanied by an afterword by Ksenya Gursthein. We are now adding interviews with OHO members Marko Poga?nik and Andraž Šalamun, together with an updated preface.

The OHO Group, a Slovene artistic collective formed in the late 1960s, consisted of Milenko Matanovi?, David Nez, Marko Poga?nik, and Andraž Šalamun as the permanent, core members. Other artists, for example, Tomaž Šalamun, who is well known as a poet today, often contributed or acted … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Interviews

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 by Nikola Dedić ·

Focus Issue on Serbian Art in the 2000s

I was invited by ARTMargins editorial team to write a text and edit a special issue about the art scene that has developed in the past ten years in Serbia. For those readers who are not familiar with the local, political, artistic, and cultural context of Serbian art, I will first point out the historical circumstances that determined the development of the scene, and then I will sketch the theoretical framework that is relevant for the understanding and interpretation of contemporary Serbian art. I will also write about the institutional context in which this art is produced and, finally, I … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Articles

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 by Hedvig Turai (Budapest) ·

Special Section Focus: Public Art in Hungary

On Moscow Square, Budapest, it is the morning rush hour.(I would like to thank Edit András and Tyrus Miller for discussion and revision of my text.) A young man appears to be walking on the wall of the subway station building, defying gravity. Those who had arrived earlier and stayed till the end of the performance, of course, already knew the trick: A metal construction, concealed by his clothes, sustaining him, making it a real spectacle.

People stop a minute, stare up, guess at what he is doing and why; others take no notice at all and pass

… Read more

ARTMargins Online: Articles

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 by Anna Sokolina (New York) ·

East of Art: Transformations in Eastern Europe. Introduction

East of Art: Transformations in Eastern Europe, Museum of Modern Art, New York City, March 11, 2003

On March 11, 2003, between the daily UN Summits and in anticipation of the war with Saddam Hussein, New York City housed an international symposium East of Art: Transformations in Eastern Europe, arranged and hosted by the Museum of Modern Art.

The event was conducted in conjunction with and as an inauguration of the recent, seminal MOMA publication Primary Documents: A Sourcebook for Eastern and Central European Art since the 1950s, edited by Laura Hoptman and Tomáš Pospiszyl, with a … Read more