[spectre] Fwd: REVIEW: Ksenya Gurshtein on “Multiple Realities: Experimental Art in the Eastern Bloc, 1960s–1980s” at Phoenix Art Museum

[Andreas Broeckmann]

Betreff: 	REVIEW: Ksenya Gurshtein on “Multiple Realities: Experimental 
Art in the Eastern Bloc, 1960s–1980s” at Phoenix Art Museum
Datum: 	Mon, 29 Jul 2024 14:13:23 +0000
Von: 	e-flux Agenda <art-agenda at mailer.e-flux.com>


“Multiple Realities: Experimental Art in the Eastern Bloc, 1960s–1980s”

Ksenya Gurshtein

July 29, 2024

Review

April 17–September 15, 2024
Phoenix Art Museum

Walking through this exhibition of some 250 works by nearly a hundred 
artists working in the former Eastern Bloc, I was forced at one point to 
turn back and re-enter it through the exit so that a mess left by a 
“service” dog could be cleaned up. Doubling back to go forward was an 
apt metaphor, I thought, for the frequent adjustments to circumstances 
that these artists working either unofficially or within the “second 
public sphere” had to perform throughout the period covered by this 
major historical overview.(1)

Indeed, one of the biggest accomplishments of a show covering six former 
countries that constitute nine present-day ones (Poland, Romania, 
Hungary, the former East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia) is 
that it conveys the complex lived reality of artists who, while making 
work for the same multifaceted reasons as their peers elsewhere in the 
world, were constrained by various degrees of state hostility during a 
series of asynchronous national “thaws” and “freezes” imposed by the 
Soviet “brother.”

The exhibition is noteworthy for how much it tries to accomplish and the 
possibilities for discovery it offers, with works ranging from 
heartbreaking to whimsical. Organized into four large sections, it 
covers the themes of “Public and Private Spaces of Control,” “Dimensions 
of the Self,” “Being Together: Alternative Forms of the Social,” and 
“Looking to Other Futures: Science, Technology, Utopia,” with an 
additional smaller section on “Networks of Exchange: Cross-Cultural 
Dialogues In and Out of the Bloc.”(2) The works that brought me delight 
included Zbigniew Rybczyński’s short film /Oh! I can’t stop! /(1975), 
one of the first things you encounter, made by the filmmaker before his 
1983 emigration and later success in the West as a pioneer of 
audiovisual technology. The film is subtly political in its 
literalization of the idea that life under state-socialism amounts to 
hitting a wall, but it’s also astonishing technically—like a journey 
through Google Street View but surreally playful and analog (it was made 
at the state-run Se-Ma-For Studio in Łódź).

Seeing a recreation of Gyula Konkoly’s /Bleeding Monument/ (1969/2023) 
was, by contrast, a gut punch. It emblematizes both the power of many of 
the works in the show and their context-dependent, performance-based 
elusiveness. It resembles a deathbed with a missing body evoked by 
bloodlike potassium permanganate stains on gauze bandages. At the time 
when it was made, the piece was an Aesopian way of semi-publicly 
mourning the losses (of life, independence, dignity) caused by the 
Soviet invasions of Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. Today, 
the piece also speaks, at least for me, to Eastern Europe’s challenges 
with publicly memorializing and assessing with any finality the legacies 
of the state-socialist period, which left no single “body” to lay to rest.

Janina Tworek-Pierzgalska’s sculptural installation /Places /(1975) 
centers a depiction of a woman’s body while speaking to a more universal 
experience of fragmented self-perception and spiritual seeking, leaving 
me intrigued to see more by this little-known figure. After years of 
wondering about them, it was a true joy to hear Katalin Ladik’s 
unabashedly weird “sung” soundscapes, created in conjunction with her 
inventive collages and best described as Foley on steroids, but minus 
the narrative that makes sense of cinematic sound effects. Finally, the 
installation of objects Július Koller made over several decades to 
explore ping-pong as a pretext for communal togetherness and metaphor 
for fair play is the best I’ve seen of this work. Adding a mirror to one 
half of a ping-pong table, thus inviting viewers to imagine themselves 
playing the game with Koller, is a move ingenious in its simplicity and 
effectiveness.

Curator Pavel Pyś’s serious engagement with current scholarship is 
reflected in the show’s key choices: its regional and thematic (rather 
than nation-state) focus; its demonstration of the ways Eastern European 
culture was not completely isolated behind the Iron Curtain and shared 
in international artistic concerns; its extensive representation of “new 
media” (performance, moving image, kinetic, installation, fiber, 
digital, and intermedia art); its choice to frame its main ideas around 
“experimental” work (rather than using more loaded terms such as 
“avant-garde,” “unofficial,” or “dissident”); its acknowledgment that 
experimental work was produced both outside and inside state-run 
institutions; and its commitment to not reducing every creative gesture 
to an up or down vote on state-socialism.

The curatorial team also put impressive effort into mapping out the 
history of what for US art institutions is a /terra incognita /in the 
first survey of this scale in North America, created thirty-five years 
since the collapse of the Eastern Bloc and the USSR began in 1989. 
Placed throughout the exhibition are wooden structures that offer 
socio-historical context, and there is a fifty-five-page illustrated 
“primer” on regional history at the entrance (though I didn’t see anyone 
beside myself crack it open).

Despite its strengths, the selection of the works in the exhibition also 
left me wondering whom the curator was imagining as his audience. It 
often felt like it was a viewer like me, someone looking for new 
discoveries and insights after already being well acquainted with the 
“big names” and “canonical” works, rather than a novice encountering art 
from this region for the first time. The unevenness of the show’s 
checklist was perplexing.

In the cases of the Prague, Bratislava, and Bucharest art scenes, for 
example, the best-known artists (Milan Knížák, Jiří Kovanda, Július 
Koller, Stano Filko, Ion Grigorescu, Geta Brătescu) are all represented 
alongside exciting lesser-known figures (Jan Ságl, Zdeňka Čechová, 
Ľubomír Ďurček, Matei Lăzărescu). Yet in the case of the bigger and more 
heterogeneous Polish, Hungarian, and Yugoslav art scenes, where were 
Marina Abramović and Raša Todosijević to represent the community around 
the Student Cultural Center in Belgrade in a show that foregrounds 
performance art? Where was Tadeusz Kantor, a transnational polymath who 
has a whole remarkable museum dedicated to him in Kraków? Or Magdalena 
Abakanowicz, missing from a show that stresses the freedom to experiment 
that women in the region found by working with fibers and textiles? 
Where was Miklós Erdélyi, who mentored and inspired two generations of 
experimental artists working across multiple media in Budapest, and 
Oskar Hansen, who did the same in Warsaw?

That these figures are mentioned in the excellent but sprawling 
curatorial essay in the catalogue fails to capture their influence. 
While the show still holds together thematically, it is not clear 
whether such omissions were a deliberate, unfortunate choice or 
something else (such as unacknowledged exigencies stemming from what 
could or couldn’t be secured, insured, and shipped as loans?).

Most of the artists missing from this narrative were straight European 
men—a group overrepresented in art history as a whole, but also 
irreplaceable to the story of /this/ time and place. The show’s//strong 
emphasis on feminist and queer histories from the region (which 
dominates in the “Dimensions of the Self” section and is very present in 
Phoenix in “Networks of Exchange”) is both a strength and a drawback, to 
the extent that it overshadows other possible foci. Foregrounded works 
include, among others, those made by queer artists (for example Jürgen 
Wittdorf, whose woodcuts, comparable to works by Paul Cadmus, are 
homoerotic yet anything but formally experimental); those made about 
queer subjects/communities (including documentary photographs by Libuše 
Jarcovjáková); or those resonant with Western feminism (iconic pieces by 
Natalia LL and Sanja Iveković, both produced in countries where 
western-style consumerism made the biggest inroads in the 1970s).

In choosing to foreground these works, the show is both rooted in 
contemporary scholarship (the catalog has a thorough roundtable 
discussion on queer archives) and linked to matters of contemporary 
political urgency. In Poland, “LGBT-free zones” were legal up until this 
year, and abortion is virtually inaccessible. Public anti-queer 
sentiment remains strong in many parts of the region, and the situation 
of women has, in at least some respects, arguably gotten worse since 
1989.(3) As an engaged citizen, I get why foregrounding these legacies 
is important. Yet as a historian, I worry that visitors might leave the 
show with the mistaken idea that there is little daylight between the 
social stances and agendas of Eastern European dissidents/unofficial 
artists/cultural intelligentsia of the socialist era and present-day 
culture workers based everywhere from Brooklyn to Berlin to Bucharest.

Some big omissions here have to do with the region’s notoriously complex 
ethnic and religious make-up, made messier by the legacy of World War 
II, as well as a broad spectrum of opinions concerning socialism, at 
least through the mid-seventies. In all its multiple realities, this 
show ignores how issues such as anti-Semitism, prejudice against the 
Roma, desire for religious freedom, or efforts to reclaim a purer form 
of “socialism with a human face” were, for better or worse, more 
prominent in the public discourse of Eastern Europeans interested in 
“alternative forms of the social” from the sixties through to the 
eighties than gay liberation or women’s rights as understood in the 
West. These are not small things, and leaving them outside the show’s 
narrative is at best a missed opportunity.

“Multiple Realities” does//convincingly demonstrate that, /pace/ the 
stereotypes of a gray and monolithic cultural wasteland, Eastern Europe 
under state-socialism did produce multiple, heterogeneous realities.(4) 
Many of the works and themes presented here could open out onto both 
future solo retrospectives and thematic exhibitions, thus integrating 
them into a global art history. I can imagine a show, for example, 
tracing the careers of the artists from state-socialist countries who 
became diasporic, creating complex dialogues between their “old” 
countries and new cultural homes (mostly in the West). I deeply hope 
that this exhibition, rather than closing the book on its subject, will 
open doors for more explorations.

“Multiple Realities: Experimental Art in the Eastern Bloc, 1960s–1980s” 
was organized by the Walker Art Center (November 11, 2023–March 10, 
2024) and travels to Vancouver Art Gallery (December 14, 2024−April 21, 
2025).


(1) The term “second public sphere” comes out of the work of Hungarian 
sociologists Elemér Hankiss, Miklós Haraszti, and György Konrád. It is 
now widely used by cultural historians of the region after being 
popularized by the book /Performance Art in the Second Public Sphere: 
Event-Based Art in Late Socialist Europe,/ eds. Katalin Cseh-Varga and 
Adam Czirak (New York: Routledge, 2018). See Stefanie Proksch-Weilguni, 
“Performance Art in the Second Public Sphere,” /ARTMargins /(April 15, 
2019), 
https://artmargins.com/performance-art-in-the-second-public-sphere/ 
<https://email.e-flux-systems.com/campaigns/oz3729oxbo884/track-url/tp12937jyq133/19c2ef653cf8179a4c7b743706dd1eb7e3efe331>.

(2) The exhibition layout described here pertains to the Phoenix Art 
Museum presentation. Based on reading reviews of the Walker Art Center 
presentation, I believe it was somewhat different there and concentrated 
works focused on queer representation and feminist ideas in closer 
proximity to each other.

(3) Slavenka Drakulić offers an excellent discussion of the complexities 
of this question here: 
https://www.iwm.at/transit-online/how-women-survived-post-communism-and-didnt-laugh.

(4) Critic Peter Plagens nonetheless described this exhibition as 
“comparatively cold, gray, but occasionally lively,” lest we forget that 
the adjectives “cold” and especially “gray” must be mandatorily applied 
to any mention of Eastern Europe. See “‘Multiple Realities: Experimental 
Art in the Eastern Bloc’ Review: Creativity Under Soviet Constraints,” 
/The Wall Street Journal/ (December 28, 2023), 
https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture/fine-art/multiple-realities-experimental-art-in-the-eastern-bloc-review-walker-art-center-minneapolis-f7848c35.


Ksenya Gurshtein is an independent curator, arts writer, scholar, and 
translator based in Wichita, Kansas.