DOI Heft:
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DOI Artikel:Piotrowski, Piotr; Wilczyński, Marek [Übers.]: Modernism and totalitarism II: myths of geometry: neo-constructivism in Central Europe 1948 - 1970
DOI Seite / Zitierlink: https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.28179#0104
102
PIOTR PIOTROWSKI
smali groups of intellectuals who did not like any version of communism
at all, and nationalists who voiced specific ethnic ambitions were
energetically persecuted by the police. This, perhaps, explains the failure
of Yugoslavia and the conflicts which at the end of the 20th century even-
tually tore that multi-ethnic state into pieces.
Of course, a particular domain where various political developments
intersected was that of culture. I say “of course” because in Yugoslavia,
just as in any other country of the postwar communist Europę, regard-
less of its distance from Moscow, culture was a kind of substitute of
politics. Due to the restrictions imposed on political rights and institu-
tions, it took over the function of articulating political ambitions and ex-
pressing dissident ideas in a morę or less (usually morę than less) covert
form. The communist regimes all over the so-called “Eastern” Europę (in-
cluding Yugoslavia) employed ąuite diverse strategies which, however,
had a few characteristics in common: while, on the one hand, they did
not tolerate (using various methods of suppression) any art openly criti-
cizing the political system, on the other, (with a few exceptions) they
tolerated modern art that remained indifferent to politics, even though it
did not conform with the ideas of the socialist culture. At times, depend-
ing on a specific country, the post-Stalinist thaw would bring about a
relatively high degree of toleration, yet in some cases the artists who ad-
hered to modernism could be happy if they did not serve long prison sen-
tences and the regime mercifully” limited its punitive measures to isolat-
ing “unruly” individuals and marginalizing their art. In comparison with
the Stalinists period that was undoubtedly some kind of “progress”
which, nonetheless, lead to what a Hungarian critic called a “velvet
prison.”1 Needless to say, each country had in this respect a specific his-
tory - the eastern, communist part of Europę from Bułgaria and Ro-
mania to the GDR, and from the Soviet Union to Poland and Yugoslavia,
was by no means uniform, the cultural policy including. Still, in almost
every country, the situation of the art which was critical in the political
sense of the term (provided that there was any art of that kind in the
first place) was much worse than that of the neutral and autonomous for-
mal experiments of modernism, with the so-called abstract art as its clas-
sic example. The communist regimes were generally much less
apprehensive about the modernist universalism, the cult of form and the
autonomy of the work of art, etc. than about the critical approaches ana-
lyzing the system of power. It was precisely because of the emphasis on
1 M. Haraszti, The Velvet Prison. Artists under State Socialism, New York: Basic
Books, 1987.
PIOTR PIOTROWSKI
smali groups of intellectuals who did not like any version of communism
at all, and nationalists who voiced specific ethnic ambitions were
energetically persecuted by the police. This, perhaps, explains the failure
of Yugoslavia and the conflicts which at the end of the 20th century even-
tually tore that multi-ethnic state into pieces.
Of course, a particular domain where various political developments
intersected was that of culture. I say “of course” because in Yugoslavia,
just as in any other country of the postwar communist Europę, regard-
less of its distance from Moscow, culture was a kind of substitute of
politics. Due to the restrictions imposed on political rights and institu-
tions, it took over the function of articulating political ambitions and ex-
pressing dissident ideas in a morę or less (usually morę than less) covert
form. The communist regimes all over the so-called “Eastern” Europę (in-
cluding Yugoslavia) employed ąuite diverse strategies which, however,
had a few characteristics in common: while, on the one hand, they did
not tolerate (using various methods of suppression) any art openly criti-
cizing the political system, on the other, (with a few exceptions) they
tolerated modern art that remained indifferent to politics, even though it
did not conform with the ideas of the socialist culture. At times, depend-
ing on a specific country, the post-Stalinist thaw would bring about a
relatively high degree of toleration, yet in some cases the artists who ad-
hered to modernism could be happy if they did not serve long prison sen-
tences and the regime mercifully” limited its punitive measures to isolat-
ing “unruly” individuals and marginalizing their art. In comparison with
the Stalinists period that was undoubtedly some kind of “progress”
which, nonetheless, lead to what a Hungarian critic called a “velvet
prison.”1 Needless to say, each country had in this respect a specific his-
tory - the eastern, communist part of Europę from Bułgaria and Ro-
mania to the GDR, and from the Soviet Union to Poland and Yugoslavia,
was by no means uniform, the cultural policy including. Still, in almost
every country, the situation of the art which was critical in the political
sense of the term (provided that there was any art of that kind in the
first place) was much worse than that of the neutral and autonomous for-
mal experiments of modernism, with the so-called abstract art as its clas-
sic example. The communist regimes were generally much less
apprehensive about the modernist universalism, the cult of form and the
autonomy of the work of art, etc. than about the critical approaches ana-
lyzing the system of power. It was precisely because of the emphasis on
1 M. Haraszti, The Velvet Prison. Artists under State Socialism, New York: Basic
Books, 1987.