Art, Politics and Cultures of Dissent in the Former Socialist Eastern Europe - JTM747
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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. 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/) Photo: Necrorealists staging of the “living dead” with zombie make up 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) Photo: Miroslav Tichy and his home-made camera 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 Mihkel Ram Tamm in Estonia | Photo © Vladimir Wiedemann 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. 10. 11. 12. Poslední úprava: Asavei Maria Alina, doc., D.Phil. (17.11.2025)
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