Performance art in Western Europe and North America developed in part as a response to the commercialisation of the art object, as artists endeavoured to create works of art that could not be bought ...or sold. But what are the roots of performance art in Eastern Europe and Russia, where there was no real art market to speak of? While many artworks created in the ‘East’ may resemble Western performance art practices, their origins, as well as their meaning and significance, is decidedly different. By placing specific performances from Russia, Latvia and Poland from the late- and post-communist periods within a local and international context, this book pinpoints the nuances between performance art East and West. Performance art in Eastern Europe is examined for the first time as agent and chronicle of the transition from Soviet and satellite states to free-market democracies. Drawing upon previously unpublished sources and exclusive interviews with the artists themselves, Amy Bryzgel explores the actions of the period, from Miervaldis Polis's Bronze Man to Oleg Kulik's Russian Dog performances. Bryzgel demonstrates that in the late-1980s and early 1990s, performance art in Eastern Europe went beyond the modernist critique to express ideas outside the official discourse, shocking and empowering the citizenry, both effecting and mirroring the social changes taking place at the time. Performing the East opens the way to an urgent reassessment of the history, function and meaning of performance art practices in East-Central Europe.
This is the first comprehensive academic study of the history of performance art in Eastern Europe. It is a comparative study that covers twenty-one countries across the region, highlighting the ...unique contribution of these artists to the genre of performance art.
In this article, I explore two case-studies, from Central and Eastern Europe, of artists using participatory art practices in the 1960s and 1970s. All of these artists used participatory strategies ...to open up a free space for interaction to gain greater contact with their viewers, as a mode of survival in an otherwise heavily policed and surveilled environment. This type of contact and interaction would have been impossible outside of the realm of art. In Czechoslovakia, participatory art enabled contact with the passerby that would have been challenging in the political climate of the 1960s and 1970s, while in Yugoslavia, these activities rehearsed the policy of self-management promoted by Tito's government, to counteract the hegemony of art institutions in relation to experimental art. I provide a comparative study of artists in both contexts, and the methods they used to interact with a wider public, in order to highlight the different socio-political contexts across a region, usually viewed as uniform in its implementation of state-sponsored socialism. I also use this approach to underscore the different strategies of participatory art and its varied meanings. As a result of the different socio-historical and socio-political circumstances that artists in Eastern Europe encountered, they developed their own forms of participatory art, in a region where participation had a very real power in offering individuals an albeit fleeting agency and release from the surveillance and restrictions that were part of everyday existence under communist rule.
The relationship between performance art and the camera - be it the photographic or video camera - in Central and Eastern Europe is a special one. Because of the manner in which performance art ...developed in the region, remaining mainly an alternative form of art, artists preserved their work visually for a range of reasons: as evidence of it having occurred, as a witness to the event, for a future audience that could someday appreciate it, or to be sent abroad as mail art - one of the few ways artists could participate in international exhibitions and networks if they were unable to travel abroad, which they often were. Unlike in Western Europe and North America, where performance attempted to eschew the grasp of commodification, in Central and Eastern Europe, artists did not want their performative work to remain ephemeral. This article will demonstrate how documentation played a very important role in insuring its longevity, and argue that rather than creating performances to avoid commodification, artists deliberately used the camera to preserve these ephemeral acts, either for distribution at the time, or as a record of the event. It will also show how artists developed innovative ways to integrate this essential tool, the camera, into their actions.
Politics and identity Bryzgel, Amy
Performance Art in Eastern Europe Since 1960,
03/2017
Book Chapter
Roselee Goldberg reductively characterises performance art from the former communist countries in Eastern Europe prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall as almost ‘exclusively’ political.¹ As I have ...already shown through numerous examples of performative work that did not engage with politics, these instances are far more limited than Goldberg asserts. In fact, more often than not, performance and Conceptual Art offered artists an arena in which to experiment, rather than providing a vehicle for dissident political activity. There were artists who made overt or deliberately political statements in their work, but this is only part of the story
Institutional critique Bryzgel, Amy
Performance Art in Eastern Europe Since 1960,
03/2017
Book Chapter
The 1960s and 1970s in the West were a time of great civic protest and challenging of the status quo. The institution of art was not immune to these challenges, and as numerous received ideas such as ...gender and racial equality were questioned by activists in the social sphere, artists likewise began to contest the long-held assumptions concerning art itself and the institutions that developed and promoted art. As art historian Alexander Alberro writes, it was at this time that artists began to ‘expose the institution of art as a deeply problematic field, making apparent the intersections where political, economic
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