DOI issue:
Nr. 1
DOI article:Mansbach, Steven A.; Friedman, Victor A.; Kreslins, Janis: New histories and new methods in engaging the Eastern European Avant-Gardes: introduction
DOI Page / Citation link:https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.51715#0010
ing and promote vibrant exchange rather than to
shore up established positions or consolidate ac-
cepted views. Bringing together younger and senior
scholars, museum and academie professionals from
Europe and the United States to address the varied
avant-gardes in and from “Eastern Europe” af-
forded a breadth of viewpoints and an exchange of
perspectives that are already yielding “new historiés
of modern art”.
The Conference itself was organized in two
overarching thematic sessions. The hrst treated the
general theme of “New States, New Realities, New
Art” by looking at Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary,
Romania, Bulgaria, the Western Balkans, and the
Baltic States. It included a range of visual media
— architecture and planning, painting, sculpture, pho-
tography, the graphie arts, “visual poetry”, and more.
The second was devoted to “New Avant-Gardes,
New Modernisms, New Arts?” and examined the
“neo-avant-gardes” that emerged in the wake (or
in anticipation) of the political events of ca. 1989
— 1991 in Southeastern Europe, Poland, and Russia.
Many of these latter developments reprised, adapted,
or rejected the styles, idéologies, and social implica-
tions of the earlier avant-garde movements that had
defined the classical period of modernism in Central
and Eastern Europe. But many more inflected the
history of modern art in créative ways in order to
engage pressing contemporary issues, investigate new
applications and forms of aesthetic (or anti-aesthetic)
expression, or otherwise to articulate new forms of
critical discourse (mostly) visually.
The extraordinary range of papers delivered, top-
ics covered, and ideas adumbrated cannot be easily
summarized or practically reprised in the present is-
sue of this Journal. However, what can be effectively
and appropriately presented here are variations on
those présentations that collectively opened up the
greatest potential for a fundamental reconsideration
of how we might examine, interpret, and ultimately
differently (and more richly) comprehend the histo-
riés of modern and avant-garde visual expression.
Toward this audacious objective, five diverse essays
hâve been selected. Although each might fonction
as a telling assessment of how a spécifie body of
work might be approached, collectively the group
can be read suggestively as an invitation to rethink
avant-garde art itself as a practice, a historical tax-
onomy, or as a confounding category of communi-
cation. They challenge us to reflect on and reassess
our understanding of the role, contributions, and
methodological contradictions that engaging mod-
ernism and the avant-garde necessarily entail. Thus,
the five areas selected for présentation here afford
collectively a rieh mix of media, methods, and ma-
terials: 1. film as a medium for représentations of
social and political changes, and how the moving
image can be related to the stasis (literal and figurai)
of architecture; 2. the aesthetics of the invisible; 3.
and 4. the nature and practice of seeing and reading,
and their interplay within the liminality of geography
and vision; and finally 5. how visuality allows us to
negotiate that which is universal and that which must
be comprehended as local and personal. A more
spécifie précis follows.
Juliana Maxim, of the University of San Diego,
treats communist architecture in Romania through
examining its représentation in post-communist
cinéma. Her focus on film necessarily recasts the
perception of architectural représentation. In par-
ticular, she investigates its categorical “spatiality” as
it was reconfigured cinematographically. By examin-
ing Romania’s unique form of spatial représentation
through the film-makers’ lens, Maxim reveals the
ways in which that nation’s communist architecture
became the dramatispersona of a national trauma. Her
novel filmic approach “makes recourse to the expérience of
architecture to suggest some of the intangible and intractable
aspects of life un der and after communism”.
Matthew Jesse Jackson, of the University of Chi-
cago, addresses a singulár determinant of visuality
under Soviet communism through a different theo-
retic lens; námely, that of a “distinctive and combative
way of thinking about the relationship between the Seen and
the Unseen in a modern[tyàng] society”, or what the author
juxtaposes as the inexorable modern impulse toward
the duality of Sex and Death. Jackson focuses on the
reasons why and the nature of the regime’s résist-
ance to what the author characterizes as a pervasive
twentieth-century erotic/thanatotic démiurge. With
these emphases, Soviet communism’s aestheticized
social aspirations can be revealed as channeling “the
pain and suffering of others in visually captivatingforms”.
Thus, there is a telling parallel between the trauma
of communist Romania’s architectural représentation
and that of Soviet Russia’s “orchestrations of vicarious
4
shore up established positions or consolidate ac-
cepted views. Bringing together younger and senior
scholars, museum and academie professionals from
Europe and the United States to address the varied
avant-gardes in and from “Eastern Europe” af-
forded a breadth of viewpoints and an exchange of
perspectives that are already yielding “new historiés
of modern art”.
The Conference itself was organized in two
overarching thematic sessions. The hrst treated the
general theme of “New States, New Realities, New
Art” by looking at Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary,
Romania, Bulgaria, the Western Balkans, and the
Baltic States. It included a range of visual media
— architecture and planning, painting, sculpture, pho-
tography, the graphie arts, “visual poetry”, and more.
The second was devoted to “New Avant-Gardes,
New Modernisms, New Arts?” and examined the
“neo-avant-gardes” that emerged in the wake (or
in anticipation) of the political events of ca. 1989
— 1991 in Southeastern Europe, Poland, and Russia.
Many of these latter developments reprised, adapted,
or rejected the styles, idéologies, and social implica-
tions of the earlier avant-garde movements that had
defined the classical period of modernism in Central
and Eastern Europe. But many more inflected the
history of modern art in créative ways in order to
engage pressing contemporary issues, investigate new
applications and forms of aesthetic (or anti-aesthetic)
expression, or otherwise to articulate new forms of
critical discourse (mostly) visually.
The extraordinary range of papers delivered, top-
ics covered, and ideas adumbrated cannot be easily
summarized or practically reprised in the present is-
sue of this Journal. However, what can be effectively
and appropriately presented here are variations on
those présentations that collectively opened up the
greatest potential for a fundamental reconsideration
of how we might examine, interpret, and ultimately
differently (and more richly) comprehend the histo-
riés of modern and avant-garde visual expression.
Toward this audacious objective, five diverse essays
hâve been selected. Although each might fonction
as a telling assessment of how a spécifie body of
work might be approached, collectively the group
can be read suggestively as an invitation to rethink
avant-garde art itself as a practice, a historical tax-
onomy, or as a confounding category of communi-
cation. They challenge us to reflect on and reassess
our understanding of the role, contributions, and
methodological contradictions that engaging mod-
ernism and the avant-garde necessarily entail. Thus,
the five areas selected for présentation here afford
collectively a rieh mix of media, methods, and ma-
terials: 1. film as a medium for représentations of
social and political changes, and how the moving
image can be related to the stasis (literal and figurai)
of architecture; 2. the aesthetics of the invisible; 3.
and 4. the nature and practice of seeing and reading,
and their interplay within the liminality of geography
and vision; and finally 5. how visuality allows us to
negotiate that which is universal and that which must
be comprehended as local and personal. A more
spécifie précis follows.
Juliana Maxim, of the University of San Diego,
treats communist architecture in Romania through
examining its représentation in post-communist
cinéma. Her focus on film necessarily recasts the
perception of architectural représentation. In par-
ticular, she investigates its categorical “spatiality” as
it was reconfigured cinematographically. By examin-
ing Romania’s unique form of spatial représentation
through the film-makers’ lens, Maxim reveals the
ways in which that nation’s communist architecture
became the dramatispersona of a national trauma. Her
novel filmic approach “makes recourse to the expérience of
architecture to suggest some of the intangible and intractable
aspects of life un der and after communism”.
Matthew Jesse Jackson, of the University of Chi-
cago, addresses a singulár determinant of visuality
under Soviet communism through a different theo-
retic lens; námely, that of a “distinctive and combative
way of thinking about the relationship between the Seen and
the Unseen in a modern[tyàng] society”, or what the author
juxtaposes as the inexorable modern impulse toward
the duality of Sex and Death. Jackson focuses on the
reasons why and the nature of the regime’s résist-
ance to what the author characterizes as a pervasive
twentieth-century erotic/thanatotic démiurge. With
these emphases, Soviet communism’s aestheticized
social aspirations can be revealed as channeling “the
pain and suffering of others in visually captivatingforms”.
Thus, there is a telling parallel between the trauma
of communist Romania’s architectural représentation
and that of Soviet Russia’s “orchestrations of vicarious
4