by Jelena Vesic
“Where is the avant-garde? I don’t see it, point it out to me; .... I see no radical convergence between art, technology and social transformation; art has long thrown off its utopian zeal and the mythos of human emancipation. Forget the avant-garde!”
This are the first words of the essay by John Roberts written for the occasion of the panel "Debate on Avant-garde" for Documenta 12, which I will never hear in the performed version, because I just lost my plane to Kassel due to 'objective circumstances and subjective weaknesses', as one would put it. Obviously, I'm not coming on time to participate in the debate on avant-garde, organized by Moscow - St. Petersburg journal Chto Delat, as it was originally planed. Our discussion was ongoing since a couple of weeks ago trough emails and VOIP chats, and I was receiving piles of new and old reading materials, followed by the new and old questions and new and old dilemmas about forms of politization of art, and so on ... But for now, being two minutes late for the closing of the gate of Germanwings, I really think I have to forget the avant-garde for the moment and try to re-organize my trip for tomorrow.
I had very interesting ride to the airport. I've been stuck it the incredible traffic jam, totally unusual for this period of the year, and I had to pass through the close examination by a taxi driver about my education, purpose of my travel and so on, and in the end to receive the patronizing advice to merry and get the kids. This point of familiarization can only happen to you in Serbia, in a both good and bad way. Belgrade “people of culture” usually hate this imposed closeness. They would always prefer that everybody is doing his or her own business, officially and from the distance. But I always considered this very personal approach somehow interesting. The rules of behavior in the official and professional situations in the former Yugoslavia were quite often replaced by the imposed counter-rule that we are all just people and that everything can be resolved on the subjective level of communication, peer-to-peer. And my taxi driver was considerably less upset then me with our incredibly long ride to the airport. He was absolutely confident that enough of a good excuse opens every gate, and that we had quite a proper excuse for the delay. He also had more of useful suggestions, and with great confidence advised me to approach the check in table with the wide smile in the case the man is sitting there, or with the expression of worry in the case it was a woman. And his strategies were really working out for the period of late 80s and 90s. Not so long time ago, Belgrade was known for it's flexibility and the spaces of negotiation. One could always use his/her charm and skills of persuasion in order to jump over the administrative oppression. That was the challenging game which every citizen performed in everyday life. Some people, including myself, became very good in that. But it does not have to work always, as for example was the case today with Germanwings, the first cheap flights company flying from Belgrade. Together with EU traveling standards comes the pack of EU management rules, administration and professional standards. The space of negotiation is becoming more narrow and slowly disappears. My happy Roma taxi driver has loved the chaos of hybrid “transitional” society, and he obviously didn’t want to allow any changes there, intentionally deciding to live in the past. On the other hand, the prevailing attitude of prosperous Serbian bourgeoisie was to get rid of all the pasts and to finally join civilized societies, where all the things are on it's place and one can get truly professional services.
I wanted to talk in Kassel about this changes from quite anti-nostalgic perspective. I wanted to talk about avant-garde, business and contemporary art, and to examine the politicality of the gesture of building the real-size fragment of the Tatlin's Monument to the III International in Belgrade, under the existing social circumstances and predominant tendencies of the world. The picture I'm posting together with this report is showing the moment before the very revelation of the monument. My friend and colleague Vladimir Markovic-Vladmarx and I are running across the meadow to unpack the speaker stand for the opening political speech just before the public arrives. Vladmarx is political activist and one of the editors of Prelom Journal. He was giving a speech in the front of the monument, before the official revelation. I was curating the manifestation. The skyscraper in the distance is the former building of Central Committee of Communist Party of Yugoslavia. It was heavily bombed during the NATO intervention in 1999, and now reconstructed as the business centre 'Usce' - one of the most expensive business locations in Belgrade. This photo is taken during the celebration called "Appropriate cultural-artistic program on the occasion of opening of the first built fragment of the Tatlin's Monument to the III International", hosted by the Museum of Contemporary Art Belgrade, on the 19th of May 2007. With this program we tried to reconstruct the appropriate/possible/desirable manifestation for the opening of the politically loaded sculpture which encompasses both the past and the future, and we decided to create the program consisting of the speeches and the choir singing of Yugoslav revolutionary workers songs. The project started after the proposition of Henry VIII's Wives - artist collective from Glasgow. They applied the classic [neo-]avant-garde "strategy of proposition" suggesting ‘building the Tatlin's monument, either in total, or in its parts, in different cities around the world’. Some years ago, Henry VIII's Wives launched the website www.tatlinstowerandtheworld.net which became a platform for discussion and support of this idea. There are some interesting contributions, as for example the story about a man who built the postament for his satellite dish in the form of the spiral tower looking like the Tatlin's one, but it seems that we will still wait for more dedicated and elaborated reflection there.
What comes out of this proposition, and what results gives the artistic operation of lobbying?
For the exhibition in Berne, Henry VIII's Wives suggested the placement of a small (nevertheless monumental) part of the basis of the monument tower near the fountain in front of the Swiss Parliament at Bundesplatz. In doing so they focused on the propaganda aspects of this public event – from posters and T-shirts, to the Radio Tatlin as a platform for a public debate over the project. The technique they used here is similar to the one than collective 0100101110101101.org developed for the project of building Nikeplatz at the place of Karlsplaz in Vienna. But, in the well regulated world, Henry VIII's Wives couldn't find the political subjectivity to reply to this provocation. Therefore, they ended up with the results of classic public opinionism, which stated the obvious - the domination of petit-bourgeois pragmatism in the Western world. Answering the question ‘Tatlin, yes or no’, the citizens of Berne did not discuss it’s ideological substance, but rather inquired about the modernity of the monument, and of course about the amount of taxes they will have to pay: ‘If Berne tax payers have to pay, it is a bad idea, but if all of the Swiss pays for it, it's a good idea’.
In Belgrade the situation was different, and the proposition met the chain of willingness to negotiate it with all the instances involved, and to face the consequences of it's fulfillment. It was interesting to observe how the space of intervention opens up in the institutional sphere of new business and contemporary art, because, as you can imagine, building the fragment of Tatlin's Monument to the III international as the sculpture in public space in significant location in New Belgrade (between the Museum of Contemporary Art, Business Center 'Usce' and never built Museum of Revolution) was an incredibly huge organizational investment, including the complicated process of negotiation with the business and governmental sphere. Of course, what we dealt with here was something that can be called 'indecent proposition', and we had a task to persuade the officials to build the public sculpture dedicated to communism in the times of general fashion of tearing down all the communist monuments and wiping out all the signs of unwanted past. In the well regulated societies this operation would be almost impossible. Here, and in many ways exactly because of the remnants of the logic of communication that my taxi driver to the airport on August 13th was so confident about, the monument is finally built... Suddenly, unexpectedly and thanks to the flow of contingency.
How do we read this provocation in the existing social circumstances, and what is the meaning of avant-garde in the contemporary institutionalized sphere of art?
This fragment of 'real' avant-garde in contemporary Belgrade can be seen as the portal of different political desires, the point of agreement of the fundamental political disagreement of: artists, curators, sponsors, institutions, city officials, constructors, builders, and so on. In my opinion, this process is a good example for questioning of what we call a participatory form of art, art of collaboration, collective art project and so on, which is quite often taken as an example of art contribution to the development of alternative social techniques and emancipatory potential of contemporary art. And this was what I wanted to discuss with my colleagues during the 'Debate on avant-garde', if I haven't lost my plane. But, OK, next time.
My companion in blogging from Documenta 12, David Riff, proposed to think about what we as Eastern Europeans can address as the urgent problem in contemporary reading of avant-garde, concerning specific political experience that we had during the XX century. For me it was an interesting question, especially in the light of representation of the experience of communism presented in different East European blockbuster shows starting “After the Wall" until today. Together with the administrative concepts of “civil society” and “democratic culture” those shows promoted numerous post-socialist stereotypes, from Socialist aesthetics and Socialist nostalgia to dissident emotions of solitude and vulnerability. That phenomenon reached the popular scale in contemporary cultural production, the example being, among many others, the movie “Goodbye Lenin” by Wolfgang Becker. In the contemporary appropriation of communist art legacy it’s original meaning is being lost and is safely integrated in the global concepts of pop-iconography, or depoliticized concepts of aesthetics and formalism. The same approach is taken in contemporary art history, which in it’s overview of art before WWII establishes paradigms of totalitarian art (applied to socialist realism, nazi kunst and fascist art) and avat-garde-modernist practice (treated as a form of free [democratic?] art).
I think this approach is neglecting the common ideological assumption of certain realist practices with avant-garde and modernism (the problematics already more consistently analyzed through the Brecht-Lukacs polemics on the questions of realism, or the argumentation on the Left regarding the Kharkov conference). It seems that in contemporary Eastern European art discourse historical and neo-avant-garde serves to confirm the genuine ‘creative’ identity of Eastern Europe in the newly established post-Socialist context. And it is an ideological speech, of course. It underlines the endurance of the tradition of specific East European contribution to the art world, as well as it’s discontinuity with totalitarian demands by Soviets, who did not have the “feel” for contemporary art. In this context the avant-garde becomes the art of identity, not a political project.
That’s all from me for now, more tomorrow...
Tagged as:
avant-garde
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