Art, Politics and Cultures of Dissent in the Former Socialist Eastern Europe - JTM747
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The course is open only for students of master's degree programmes.
This course aims to explore in-depth the theoretical debates on art, politics, and cultures of dissent and resistance in the former Socialist Eastern Europe. We will explore a variety of cultures of dissent/resistance, ranging from openly politically oppositional art to euphemized submission to authority and self-inflicted marginality of the artists and art collectives. This self-inflicted marginality, inner exile and self-estrangement represented a way and, in some cases, a political strategy, to transcend cultural and political conformity and the values embedded in such conformity. In addition to explicit forms of artistic opposition like “defying authority” or “beating the system,” which overtly and publicly questioned the legitimacy of the regime, there were also subtle forms of resistance and cultural dissidence such as feigning madness or obsessively documenting the “average everydayness” of socialist everyday life. The course is structured into two main parts: First theoretically engaging with the main conceptual and theoretical debates on what is political art; when is art politically effective; what is cultural dissent to power; how “resistance” can be conceptualized, on which grounds and how we recognize it (if at all). We will also focus on issues related to the “aesthetitzation of politics” (Nazism) versus the “politicization of art,” (Communism), as well as on the phenomenon of the so-called “unhealthy aestheticism in political art,” and “political art and beauty.” The second part of the course focuses on concrete instances of cultures of resistance and dissent in the former socialist/communist Eastern Europe, such as: religious revitalization movements and their cultural (artistic) productions; artists departed, “dropping-out” from communist-imposed “reality” via internal escape routes (as reflected, for example, in the Budapest Psychiatric Art Collection); necrorealistist art movement in the late 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s in Leningrad (Saint Petersburg); music of dissent; samizdat literature; humorous brigades; hippie communes; vernacular photographs (such as Miroslav Tichy and Ion Grigorescu’s photographic archives) and so on. Aims The course has three interrelated aims. First, it aims to offer an interdisciplinary account of the relationship between art and politics, and between aesthetics and the political under state socialism in the former Eastern bloc. Second, it aims to explore what exactly makes cultural and artistic production a form of political critique when democratic political agency is threatened. Finally, to illuminate the relationship between critical political theory, on the one hand, and art, on the other by highlighting artworks’ moral, political, and epistemic abilities to reveal, criticize, problematize, and intervene politically as democratic interpellations about imperative aspects of our political reality. Course Requirements Attendance is not optional. Reading of all assigned texts is required. For each text, the presenter will be selected in advance. Presentation and critical discussion of the assigned text should normally last for 20 minutes. The presenter should summarize the main argument and key concepts, identify what is unclear and what should be further investigated and list questions for the following discussion. A final paper (3000 words) closely linked to the issues discussed in the class is required. Final Grade Distribution: Class participation 20% Student Presentation 30% Final Paper 50% Final Paper: The final paper can address the following issues: a critical reading of one of the papers discussed in class; A detailed analysis of the site or memory event (including film, monuments, rituals, state-sponsored commemorations, theatrical plays, exhibitions, etc.) practices or sites of memory that relate to a historical event. The final paper should start with a paragraph that provides an overview of the whole paper and end-up with a meaningful conclusion. All your statements must be supported by evidence. EVALUATION A - "excellent - A" B - "excellent - B" - "excellent - B" C - "very good - C" - "very good - C" D - "very good - D" - "very good - D" E - "good - E" - "good - E" F - "failed - F" - "fail - F" Detiled Description of the Grades; A - Excellent performance. The student has shown originality and displayed an exceptional grasp of material and deep analytical understanding of the subject. Good performance. The student has mastered the material, understands the subject well and has shown some originality of thought and / or effort. C- Fair performance. The student has acquired an acceptable understanding of the material and essential subject matter of the course, but has not succeeded in translating this understanding into consistently creative or original work. D- Poor. The student has shown some understanding of the material and subject matter covered during the course. The student's work, however, has not shown enough effort or understanding to allow for passing grade in the School Required Courses. It does not qualify as a passing mark for General College Courses and Electives. F - Fail. The student has not succeeded in mastering the subject matter covered in the course. For more detail on evaluation system see Dean´s provision https://www.fsv.cuni.cz/opatreni-dekanky-c-172018aj . More in SMĚRNICE S_SO_002: Organizace zkouškových termínů, kontrol studia a užívání klasifikace A–F na FSV UK. Syllabus 1. Introduction. No reading assigned. The introductory class surveys the main theoretical debates around the concepts of “dissidence,” “resistance” and “political art” under dictatorship, oppression, and coercive regimes. 2. Theoretical vantage points 1: Art, Politics and Political Art (A Conceptual Clarification) This class focuses on the conceptual engagement with the meanings of “political art” and the relationship between art, politics and the political. We aim to clearly distinguish political art that is propaganda in support of power from political art that is not propaganda as I call it critical-political art (Asavei, 2018)). Why is this distinction important? Propaganda art supporting power is only political in a minimal sense of the term. Propaganda art is political in the sense that it is concerned with politics, attempting to reinforce, legitimate, and impose whatever regime of representation the power wants to be enforced at a certain moment, while political-critical art can be politically plurivalent. The distinctive ways of framing the meaning of “political art” are suggested because these conceptual demarcations are nevertheless crucial for understanding the ways in which the public engages politically with political art. 3. Theoretical vantage points 2: Political Art and the Aesthetic versus Political-Critical Art and the Aesthetic We will critically discuss both main aesthetic autonomy claims pertaining to art (namely, “art and politics cannot mix,” and “art and politics can mix, but they should not”) on the grounds that both theories inappropriately regard the autonomy of art in terms of “separateness”—whether of the art-work as an end in itself, or of a mode of experience (aesthetic) with which it usually is associated. Political art’s autonomy is not a matter of separateness—a separate object/a separate experience. 4. Theoretical vantage points 3: What is Cultural Dissidence? Conceptualizing Resistance: Cultural Dissidence versus Cultural Resistance Dissent is regarded as a precondition for cultural resistance to take shape because one must first digress from the dominant political culture before engaging in active cultural resistance. We will survey the trajectory of cultural unrest from disagreement with power (dissidence) to challenging power (resistance). The first half of the class will be dedicated to “cultural dissidence” concept. The second half of the class will deal with the concept of “resistance.” There is little academic consensus on what resistance is and means. What do we mean by “Resistance”? What exactly we mean by “Cultural Resistance”? To what extent counter-hegemonic cultural movements can foster economic, political, social and epistemic justice? Hollander and Einwohner engage in a thorough examination of the concept as their detailed review “illuminates both core elements common to most uses of the concept and two central dimensions on which these uses vary: the questions of whether resistance must be recognized by others and whether it must be intentional. We use these two dimensions to develop a typology of resistance, thereby clarifying both the meaning and sociological utility of this concept.” (Hollander and Einwohner, 2004). Readings Mandatory: Falk, B. J. (2011). Resistance and Dissent in Central and Eastern Europe: An Emerging Historiography. East European Politics and Societies, 25(2), 318-360. https://doi.org/10.1177/0888325410388408 (Original work published 2011) Jocelyn A. Hollander and Rachel L. Einwohner, “Conceptualizing Resistance,” Sociological Forum, Vol. 19, No. 4 (Dec. 2004), pp. 533-554 Recommended Reading: Diène, Doudou. “The Notion of Cultural Resistance.” History News, vol. 69, no. 1, 2014, pp. 11–14. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/43503085. 5. Horizontal Solidarities Beyond the Official Unions of Artists This course focuses on artist created collectives from the former Eastern bloc who formed alternative and/ or underground artistic communities, managing to organize systematically and programmatically a counter-public or a micro-public that was, sometimes, separated from the larger public of the official cultural sphere of the socialist regimes. Mandatory Readings: Raino I., and C. Preda. 2020.“Creating for the State: The Role of Artists’ Unions in Central and Eastern Europe,” Artmargins, 19 October 2020, https://artmargins.com/special-issue-creating-for-the-state-the-role-of-the-artists-unions-in-central-and-eastern-europe/. Mazzone, M. 2009. “Keeping Together: Prague and San-Francisco: Networking in 1960s art.” Technoetic Arts: A Journal of Speculative Research 7: 275-292. 6. Necrorealist Art Movement in the Late 1970s and the Beginning of the 1980s in Leningrad (Saint Petersburg) This course focuses on the art and politics of the Necrorealist movement. “Necrorealism overturned the established Soviet concept of death as the only possible heroic ‘death in the name of Motherland” (https://www.artartworks.com/exhibitions/necrorealism-at-moscow-museum-of-modern-art-5696/) Mandatory Reading: Alexei Yurchak, "Necro‐Utopia: The Politics of Indistinction and the Aesthetics of the Non‐Soviet", Current Anthropology , Vol. 49, No. 2 (April 2008), pp. 199-224. 7. Vernacular Photographs and Photography under State Socialism This course focuses on photography of everyday life in late socialism, analyzing the photographic production of various artists and vernacular photographs from private scrapbooks, family albums and art collections. On a theoretical level, it disentangles questions concerning the production of ideological images; the political dimension of the act of photographing/documenting everyday life; the relationship between photography and cultural memory; the question of the forbidden gaze and the ‘reality’ of the visual document versus the ‘reality as it was supposed to be’ (the official cultural policies) Mandatory Reading: Maria Alina Asavei (2021). “Indexical Realism during Socialism: Documenting and Remembering the ‘Everyday Realities’ of Late Socialist Romania through Photographs,” Photography and Culture 14 (1): 1-17. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17514517.2020.1824723. 8. Alternative Lifestyles: Hippies Cultures of Dropping Out of Socialism Mandatory Reading: Toomistu Terje (2016). “The Imaginary Elsewhere of the Hippies in Soviet Estonia” in Dropping Out of Socialism: The Creation of Alternative Spheres in the Soviet Bloc. Ed. Juliane Fürst and Josie McLellan. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017, pp. 41-62. Recommended Reading: Dropping Out of Socialism: The Creation of Alternative Spheres in the Soviet Bloc. Ed. Juliane Fürst and Josie McLellan. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017. 9. Dropping out Economics Mandatory Reading: Anna Kan, "Living in the Material World: Money in the Soviet Rock Underground,"Dropping Out of Socialism: The Creation of Alternative Spheres in the Soviet Bloc. Ed. Juliane Fürst and Josie McLellan. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017, pp. 255-277. 10. Representations of Dissent (A Case Study) Caterina Preda, "Representations of Dissent against Communism in Romania: Anti-Communist Heroes, “Prison Saints,” and (Extra)Ordinary Citizens. East European Politics and Societies, 38(3), 2024: 887-909. https://doi.org/10.1177/08883254231158817 11.Communism, Religion and Dissent Mandatory Reading: Victoria Smolkin, "Utopia's Orphan: Soviet Atheism and the Death of the Communist Project," A Sacred Space is Never Empty, Princeton University Press, 2018, pp. 228-245. 12. Tracing The Duble Erasure of Memory: Compliciy and Resistance Mandatory Reading: Mihaela Mihai "Tracinf the Double Erasure," in Political Memory and the Aesthetics of Care, Stanford Press, 2022, pp.22-45. Poslední úprava: Asavei Maria Alina, doc., D.Phil. (07.02.2026)
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Use of generative AI tools: The use and citation of generative AI tools (such as ChatGPT or MS Copilot) in seminar papers and other coursework must comply with the decrees of the IMS Director No. 7/2023 and 9/2023. Generative AI tools may be used unless explicitly prohibited by the instructor. However, they may not be used to generate substantial sections of the text or replace the student’s own intellectual contribution. The student remains fully responsible for any content generated with assistance of AI tools. Presenting AI-generated content, whether verbatim, rephrased, or only slightly modified, as one’s own work constitutes plagiarism. Every submitted paper must include a transparent statement specifying which generative AI tools were used, in which stage of the work they were employed, and how they were used, or confirming that no generative AI tools were used. If this statement is missing or incomplete, the instructor is not permitted to accept the paper for evaluation. Unless the instructor explicitly prohibits the use of generative AI tools, the decision to use or not to use them rests fully with the student. The student has the right to request that the instructor does not use AI assistance for evaluating their work. Poslední úprava: Hrubá Kateřina, Mgr. (07.01.2026)
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