The green bloc Fowkes, Maja
2015, 20150630, 2015-04-10
eBook
This book examines the approaches of renowned Central European artists to the natural environment, uncovering an up till now largely unrecognized aspect of their work, which has regularly been ...analyzed through socio-political contexts, but rarely in terms of ecology. It focuses on the period after 1968, which not only brought changes to the political landscape of Eastern Europe, but shifted artistic practice towards conceptualism and was instrumental in spreading environmental consciousness. It comparatively investigates artists and artist groups from Slovenia, Croatia, Hungary, Slovakia and Czech Republic, at the moment when art exited the gallery and entered the natural environment, while socialist governments attempted to keep control over information about the real state of environmental pollution and block globally emerging ecological discourse. Apart from embedding artistic production in social, political and environmental histories of the region, this book also addresses the problem of art history as a discipline under socialism, presents a more complete picture of its neo-avant-garde art and constitutes an unprecedented application of the ecological paradigm to art history. It demonstrates the creativity, inventiveness and astuteness of Central European artists whose vision could not be controlled by any imposed borders at the dawn of global awareness of ecological crisis.
The tensions between actual and ideal versions of socialism elucidated by East German theorist Rudolf Bahro in 1977 are taken as a starting point for reconsidering East European art from the radical ...effervescence of the 1960s to the post-utopian twilight of the late 1970s. The special issue is premised on the concept that artistic life in Eastern Europe was profoundly shaped by the structures, conventions and workings of the overarching system, with artists and critics compelled to negotiate its productive contradictions. It examines the quotidian functioning of art scenes across the region that entailed the drawing up of tacit compromises and maintenance of calculated ambiguities in relations between party authorities and artists. Ultimately it was the latent and unrealised promise of actually existing socialism as much as its demonstrative failings that marked a crucial difference in the attitude of East European artists to the utopian reverberations of the era.
The tensions between actual and ideal versions of socialism elucidated by East German theorist Rudolf Bahro in 1977 are taken as a starting point for reconsidering East European art from the radical ...effervescence of the 1960s to the post-utopian twilight of the late 1970s. The special issue is premised on the concept that artistic life in Eastern Europe was profoundly shaped by the structures, conventions and workings of the overarching system, with artists and critics compelled to negotiate its productive contradictions. It examines the quotidian functioning of art scenes across the region that entailed the drawing up of tacit compromises and maintenance of calculated ambiguities in relations between party authorities and artists. Ultimately it was the latent and unrealised promise of actually existing socialism as much as its demonstrative failings that marked a crucial difference in the attitude of East European artists to the utopian reverberations of the era.
The recent interest in avant-garde art from Hungary shown by international museums such as Tate has been paralleled by transformations to the country’s art institutions as a consequence of sweeping ...political changes. This essay contextualises these changes in relation to the expanding global market for art from the region, and examines the impact that initiatives by private galleries as well as artists and curators are having on the writing of a critical history of Hungarian art. An earlier version of this text was presented as a paper at the panel on ‘Collecting, Curating, Canonizing, Critiquing: The Institutionalization of Eastern European Art’ at the College Art Association conference, Washington D.C., February 2016.
As the longest river in the heart of the European continent, the Danube has been a recurrent topic for artists, writers, poets, filmmakers, and theorists, and whether their accounts linger in the ...national realm of one of the ten countries through which the river passes, or follow its transnational flow, Anthropocentric undercurrents can regularly be traced in their narratives. Uncovering the environmental history of the Danube, featuring river-centered artistic practices, and investigating the potential for an integrated ecological future of the river were at the core of the interdisciplinary curatorial project the River School, organized by the Translocal Institute between 2013 and 2015. This article investigates ecological challenges to the traditional cultural approaches to the Danube, which reflect the social and political logic that turns the river into a marker of geopolitical struggles, a route for conquest, and a delimiter of national territory, as well as a site for the expression of cultural supremacy. Focusing on the insights provided by the work of contemporary artists, also explored are the potential of the experiential aspect of river research and multispecies perspectives, specific moments in the river's environmental past and their place in social and political upheavals, and the emergence of ecologically attuned approaches in policy, behaviors, and cultural production.
Explores the extent to which ecological understanding and the specific concerns of environmental sustainability are manifest in the art writing of the 1970s. The authors note that many of the issues ...identified by theorists of sustainability were explored in the radical art of the early 1970s and ignored in subsequent decades, and examine some of the writings from that period, including theorists Rudi Supek and Murray Bookchin, Hungarian curator László Beke, Félix Guattari, and Gustav Metzger. They note how Metzger explored the relationship of artists to technology, comment on the view of American land artist Robert Smithson, and consider the environmentalist concerns of the early 1970s.
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