Art without a Passport

By Sara Bodinson

I’ve never taken for granted the ability to travel internationally; to the contrary, I’ve relished the many opportunities I’ve had to experience different parts of the globe. But as we embarked on our C-MAP trip to Warsaw (my first visit) and Berlin, I admit I did not anticipate that travel and restrictions on the freedom to do so would be such a common thread in the art we encountered. Travel was restricted during the second half of the twentieth century in Central and Eastern Europe as a result of the Cold War, martial law, and economic instability, among other circumstances. This, of course, had a direct effect on many of the artists, impacting their artistic strategies and choice of materials as well as the dissemination of their work. What surprised me was that the subjects of travel and movement—of people and things, across borders and seas, voluntary and forced—still loom so large for the new generation of artists working in the region.

Our first stop after landing in Warsaw was Zofia Kulik’s home and studio, where she showed us her digital and physical archives of decades of work as well as mock-ups of her more recent large-scale photo collages. Later in the trip, we saw an exhibition at Žak | Branicka in Berlin of KwieKulik’s work (which Kulik made in collaboration with her former husband Przemyslaw Kwiek) called The Monument without a Passport. Made during the period of martial law in Poland (1981–83), when citizens were not allowed to travel outside of the country—or, in many cases, even between cities—this body of work explores the restrictions explicitly. The exhibition included everything from barely discernable passport photos to photographs documenting performances in which Kulik’s head and feet were restrained, evoking her inability to move freely.

The next day, we visited The Travellers: Voyage and Migration in New Art from Central and Eastern Europe, an exhibition at the Zachęta National Gallery of Art, curated by Magdalena Moskalewicz (a former C-MAP fellow). The exhibition featured work in a variety of media by nearly thirty contemporary artists addressing “travel in a region where freedom to travel was, until recently, a luxury available to the very few.” We heard from artist Janek Simon about Alang Transfer, an installation of dozens of signs and images salvaged from retired ships—some of which had traveled the world for decades—and sold at auction. This comprised an incongruous and, at times, humorous combination of imagery, languages, and visual systems.

While there, we also heard from Radek Szlaga about Transatlantic, made in collaboration with Honza Zamojski, after their journey, in 2012, on a cargo ship from Belgium to the United States. After just a few days, the two became disenchanted with the ship’s food, ran out of reading material, and grew bored of playing basketball, and they began to long for the convenience, connectivity, and communication so readily available to them in their everyday lives on land. They presented elements of their journey in a multimedia installation including video, plants, a self-published newspaper, and a bunk bed.

When we visited the 9th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, I was drawn to Halil Altindere’s latest rap-video-with-a-political-message called Homeland (no doubt a reference to the television show of the same name, which has been widely criticized for being Islamophobic). The lyrics (voiced by Mohammad Abu Hajar, a Syrian rapper now based in Berlin) and staged footage look at the experience of the forced migration of refugees—an increasing reality in both Turkey and Germany, where the video was filmed. Berlin’s former Tempelhof airport—just a few kilometers from the Biennale venues—has recently been transformed into a refugee camp and it serves as a central backdrop in Altindere’s video. In one of many simultaneously poignant and absurd scenes, refugees wearing orange life jackets run along a beach, while nearby, a group of presumably European women in athleisure wear strike yoga poses as they passively look on.

Looking back over my photos of the trip with a few months’ hindsight, I was struck by one image I took during the group’s visit to Edward Krasiński ‘s studio, in Warsaw, where he lived and worked from the 1970s till his death in 2004. Though Krasiński was reluctant to discuss the meaning of his trademark use of the blue Scotch tape with which he lined walls, works of art, furniture, and other objects, he once commented: “The tape has ascribed meaning to itself. Once it came into being, it was then free to do anything, to frolic. The meaning is inherent in the tape; I inspired only its spirit.” To me, this freedom to frolic—in this case, around a small globe turned on its head and suspended in time and space many years after he placed it there—is a small, but powerfully optimistic symbol of what it can mean to freely travel the globe.

An Illustrated Look at Artists’ Archives in Warsaw, Łódź, and Berlin

By Michelle Elligott

Our trip to Warsaw, Łódź, and Berlin began with a magical evening.

After arriving from New York, we went directly to meet with artist Zofia Kulik at her home and archive. Being in her presence, at that place, brought her work to life.

She shared with us her process of working with her archive, which is divided into three parts: documentation of her collaboration with Przemysław Kwiek as KwieKulik, encompassing more than two hundred events; materials related to other artists and galleries; and contextual materials including her library.

It is not just the archive’s usefulness in documenting the past that is of interest, but also its power and potential to shape the future. Kulik is constantly working in and on her archive, and it serves as source material for her current work. Furthermore, she has promised her collection to the Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw, which intends to install it in the galleries, as a work of art, and not simply to preserve it as a research collection.

Our next visit was to the Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw, where I was eager to learn more about this novel and intriguing approach of exhibiting the Kulik Archive as an entity. There, we benefited from presentations by Joanna Mytkowska and Marcel Andino Velez about the history of the museum’s programs and building project. Robert Jarosz provided an in-depth description of the extensive work they have done to borrow or acquire, digitize, and publish online significant artist archives, including those of Eustachy Kossakowski and Alina Szapocznikow. They all look forward to thinking through the possibilities and the challenges of the future Kulik Archive acquisition and installation, and I eagerly await their results.

Of course, no visit to Warsaw is complete without a stop at the enchanting and captivating studio of Henryk Stazewski and Edward Krasinski. It was like a warm homecoming, as we had visited their studio six years before, on our first C-MAP voyage to Warsaw, when for me, it was the absolute highlight and revelation of the trip. In fact, following that expedition, each member of the team was asked to propose potential future acquisitions. I presented Krasinski, and I am pleased to note that since that time, some half a dozen works have been acquired by MoMA.

Another highlight was in Łódź, where, at the Muzeum Sztuki, I had the good fortune to spend a few hours delving into their archives and speaking with their rockin’ (literally, as in a former punker) archivist, Maciej Cholewiński. Our conversation was recorded, and the video is available here on post.

For me, the most important and meaningful part of our C-MAP trips is the opportunity to meet and speak with the artists themselves and to review and discuss the archives and ephemera that record the history of their production. We had the opportunity in Berlin to meet with Polish artist Ewa Partum at Galerie M + R Fricke. There, Partum regaled us with anecdotes about her compelling and provocative work, as well shared documents from her archive, including those related to her Galeria Adres (meaning Address Gallery, as it was for a time located in her apartment), which promoted ephemeral and mail art practices in the mid-1970s.

These are but a few highlights from a trip that was filled with great encounters with both art and artists.

Highlights from Warsaw to Berlin

By Juliet Kinchin

An unexpected highlight of the trip was an unscheduled visit that several of us made to a new experimental space for contemporary art in the Starak Family Foundation, at the start of our stay in Warsaw. On view was an exhibition of Henryk Stazewski’s monochromatic paintings and metallic reliefs of the 1960s–1970s, displayed against floating planes of color that locked them into the interior space. Adding color in this way was a high-risk but effective strategy on the part of the curators that I found sympathetic to the spirit of Stazewski’s statement on the title wall: “A work of art should neither blend into the surroundings, nor decorate or facilitate anything. It should dominate them artistically.” Nearby was a related exhibition of more Op art black-and-white paintings of the 1970s by Ryszard Winiarski. As someone fascinated by design as an artistic and spatialized practice, I found these installations a thought-provoking start.

A recurrent theme in several of our visits was the rethinking of and response to Communist culture by contemporary artists, for instance the Piktogram “Bureau of Loose Associations” in Warsaw, or the Blockchain Visionaries installation at the Berlin Biennale, presented in the former building of the East German State Council—a largely untouched Communist monument replete with its original stained glass, mosaics, and mural program. It was fascinating to talk with Christoph Tannert about the exhibition he was developing with Eugen Blume, Voices of Dissent: Art in the GDR 1976–1989, which opened in July at Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin. The Hero Mother exhibition at MOMENTUM of Kunstquartier Bethanien exhibited art by post-communist women rethinking heroism in the context of twenty Communist countries, and touching on issues of gender, nationalism, citizenship, and migration. We visited two private foundations in Berlin, the Sammlung Boros and Julia Stoschek Collection, which have reconfigured concrete-bunker architecture of the Cold War era to dramatic effect.

Toward the end of our trip, it was a pleasure to share with colleagues the small treasure house of twentieth- and twenty-first-century product and graphic design culture–the Museum der Dinge in Berlin. The core of this collection is formed by the archive of the Deutscher Werkbund, an association of designers, industrialists, and politicians concerned with industrial design, founded in 1907. In charting the trajectory of design reform on both sides of the postwar divide between East and West Germany, the displays reveal much continuity in the design culture, and an exhibition of East German magazines is a reminder of how vibrant graphic design could be even in the more hardline cultures of the Soviet bloc. It was also a fascinating opportunity to view the museum’s installation of the Frankfurt Kitchen designed in 1926 by Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky prior to my installation of it at The Museum of Modern Art, New York this fall.

1 – WARSAW

Haunted by History

By Ksenia Nouril

The “specter of communism” is still haunting Europe. Albeit cliché, these words penned by Karl Marx in his 1848 Communist Manifesto came to mind when I was in Warsaw, where I felt like I was experiencing a serious case of déjà vu. While Warsaw has rapidly developed into a twenty-first-century, globally networked city since the end of Communist rule in 1989, it has held on tightly to the trappings of its past. The specter of communism is most visible in much of the city center’s architecture, including but not limited to the Marszałkowska Housing District, the Palace of Culture and Science, and Defilad (Parade) Square, all of which are designed in the Socialist Realist style.

The Palace of Culture and Science was built between 1952 and 1955, by order of Joseph Stalin, in the style of the Soviet Union’s “Seven Sisters”—neoclassic structures characterized by single tall towers and elaborate ornamentation. Today, it continues to host a variety of social and cultural organizations, including a cinema, a theater, a technology museum, a restaurant, a bar, and the newly reopened Galeria Studio. Founded in 1972 along with Teatr Studio, the gallery was host to exhibitions and amassed one of the first collections of modern and contemporary art in Poland, numbering hundreds of objects. In 2016, the avant-garde legacy of Galeria Studio was revived (although it never officially closed) with the exhibition From the Archive of Studio Gallery, organized by its new director, Dorota Jarecka, and curator Barbara Piwowarska. They gave us a tour of the exhibition, which traced the gallery’s history and included the designs for the adjacent theater’s remodeling by Oskar Hansen, most famous for his theories of Open Form.

The continued operation of this building has allowed contemporary Warszawiacy (Varsovians) to engage with its history. The resuscitation of the palace as a vital cultural institution, like it was in its heyday, is just one example of the historical turn that has swept Warsaw and other post-communist cities over the last two decades. By historical turn, I mean a looking back on and mining of official and unofficial, individual and collective, real and imagined histories culled consciously and conspicuously from the past and then applied to the present using primary and secondary sources, including artifacts, archives, and reconstructions.

This historical turn was evident already in the year 2000, when Anda Rottenberg, whom we met during this trip at Galerie Isabella Czarnowska in Berlin, curated the exhibition Szare w kolorze, 1956–1970: Kultura okresu gomulkowskiego (Gray in color, 1956–1970: Culture from the Gomulka era) at Zachęta National Gallery of Art. Mounted in honor of the museum’s centennial, this retro exhibition resurrected several key interiors of the period associated with postwar modernity in Poland, such as milk bars and jazz clubs, and made them fully functional and accessible to museum patrons. I first read about this wildly popular exhibition in the book Warsaw (London: Reaktion Books, 2003) by David Crowley, with whom we also met, but I had not had the opportunity to speak to Anda about her experience.

At the Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw (Muzeum Sztuki Nowoczesnej w Warszawie), we found an institution operating out of the famous Emilia, a former furniture store that is a prime example of the brutalist architecture of the socialist period, while it is in the process of building a new structure, designed by Thomas Phifer of New York, across the street on Defilad Square to house the museum as well as a theater complex. Though, as of writing (October 2016), this building is in the processed of being torn down for redevelopment in Warsaw’s bustling center city.

Today, the neon sign that once lit the facade of Emilia can be found at the Neon Muzeum, located across the Vistula in Warsaw’s Praga district. This atypical museum is dedicated to the documentation and preservation of these remnants of Cold War Polish culture.

Capturing the Archive with Zofia Kulik

By David Senior

A few months prior to our visit, I did a brief email interview with Zofia Kulik about her activities in the 1970s as both an artist and an archivist. With her partner, Przemysław Kwiek, she was involved in performance activities as KwieKulik, and together, they founded their own institution, the Studio of Activities, Documentation, and Propagation (PDDiU), which actively archived documentation of KwieKulik performances as well as the work of a network of other local and international artists and art spaces. In the interview, Kulik made clear that this archive was meant to be generative, that is, to serve as source material for new work. In her words, “The archive seemed to be for us similar to the clay-plasmatic structure easy for transformation and re-arrangements.” Another aspect was that the archiving of new art practices was not a priority of state institutions: KwieKulik’s labor in accumulating materials was a response to an understanding that they would not be preserved otherwise. Kulik mentioned, “We had a quite deep conviction that something important would be lost if it was not captured by a camera, tape recorder. . . So, in our case, documentation was a weapon against permanent ‘discontinuity’ in art history.”

KwieKulik’s archiving activities were generally conducted in their small apartment in Warsaw. Kulik has maintained this archive over the last forty years and is in agreement with the Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw, which will acquire it. During our research trip, we were able to have a look in its current location at Kulik’s home in a suburb of Warsaw. The materials are well housed in archival folders and, from a quick glance, contain a broad survey of the international artists and artist-run spaces that were focusing on new types of art production and experiments in publishing and correspondence art in the 1970s and 1980s. I noted a folder for Franklin Furnace, which was founded in 1976 in New York as a performance space and archive, and also a folder for Other Books and So, an Amsterdam bookstore run by the Mexican artist Ulisees Carrión, which distributed artists’ publications.

This phenomenon of artist as archivist has been a recurring theme in C-MAP’s research of artists’ networks in Central and Eastern Europe. Contexts and scenarios for these archives are varied, but we have found there to be an overarching narrative of individuals compelled to collect and preserve documentation of art exhibitions and events. The motivation has often been a direct response to the dearth of opportunities for these materials to be preserved in state institutions. In fact, these archives are housing materials often full of oppositional perspectives that may have been, at the time they were made or collected, difficult or even dangerous to publically disperse.

Hitting the Ground Running: An Illustrated Studio Visit with Zofia Kulik

By David Platzker

Every C-MAP trip is an adventure. Though the intent of the program is to expand our curatorial vision beyond the confines of our collective knowledge base—to give aid to our critical need to expand the scope of “our” modernism by seeing works firsthand within the context of their creation, meeting with artists, critics, historians, and museum professionals we would have limited access to otherwise—occasionally these trips are curious in and of themselves. This trip began with a quaint handwritten boarding pass.

After arriving in Warsaw, we immediately embarked on a trip to visit with Zofia Kulik in her studio and home in the northwestern outskirts of the city. Kulik is best known for her powerful photography-based work and lexicon of intricate uses of human forms and objects composed within stark design frameworks. While reviewing her works and listening to her speak about them—and the highly considered craft in the production of her photographs—it became increasingly apparent that her background in sculpture and performance lent a logical pathway to her meticulously crafted silver gelatin prints. The choreography of her darkroom work, which she shared through her archives, was breathtaking to see.

In the image above, Kulik is presenting, to Christian Rattemeyer, a stenciled template with advent calendar–like windows, which was used to produce a single frame of the multi-panel photographic work. Here Kulik is pointing to where the element was utilized within a small reference image for The Splendor of Myself.

We also saw notebooks of her raw photographs, which she draws upon in an encyclopedic manner, occasionally returning to singular images in differing works over a span of years.

After seeing how Kulik builds her images with great precision and many templates, it came as no surprise that her darkroom procedures are equally well managed, like a well-conceived performance executed with split-second timing.

As a prominent and very active member of the Warsaw artistic scene, Kulik has corresponded with a wide range of Polish and international artists since the 1970. Her incredible, highly organized archives are a testament to these relationships, not only documenting her own participation in exhibitions, publications, and performances but also relaying a connectivity between global artists irrespective of national boundaries.

2 – ŁÓDŻ

Snapshots from a fast-moving train: Łódź

By Jon Hendricks

Like lumps of fresh, unmolded clay, we were hurled with unremitting force at one cultural amazement after another, barely having time to take a deep breath, and realign our brain cells to all that we encountered. Our visit to Łódź was one among many whirlwind days. Some of the group had visited Łódź previously, and we had had the invaluable association with Jarosław Suchan, the director of the city’s Muzeum Sztuki, both on previous trips to Poland and in New York. Suchan is a man of contagious energy and brilliance, eager to share his insights on art and vision for a major art center in the middle of Central Europe. He, Department of Modern Art head Daniel Muzyczuk, Department of Modern Art Collection head Paulina Kurc-Maj, and their colleagues Anna Saciuk-Gąsowska, Maria Morzuch, Katarzyna Sloboda, Maria Franecka, Joanna Sokołowska, Paweł Polit, and Łukasz Zaremba greeted our group, upon our arrival, at the trendy ms1 café, where a delicious lunch had been prepared for us to share, giving us the opportunity and time to meet and be reacquainted. The ms1 café, in one of the renovated spaces in the original building, is a gathering spot for Łódź, serving great food in a contemporary atmosphere that evokes the early 1930s, when the museum first opened in 1931. We were showered with conversation and also presents of museum publications and tote bags.

After lunch, part of our group visited the museum’s archives, located in ms1, with archivist Maciej Cholewiński. I chose instead to revisit the fabulous Neoplastic Room with the other members of our group. We were led through the spaces by Suchan. The installation is so fresh and actual—a treasure chest of Neoplastic art given to Łódź with all of the hopefulness and idealism of the early twentieth century. We also visited Daniel Buren and Edward Krasinski’s installation and Igor Krenz’s 2000 video work Prostowanie skrzywienia (Straightening out the curve), which reference works in the Neoplastic room.

We were also very fortunate to meet the Hungarian artist Tamás Kaszás, who was in the process of installing his major exhibition Exercises in Autonomy (June 3–September 25, 2016). Kaszás is one of the new Futurists exploring the post-collapse and destruction of late twentieth-century Eastern European societies and cultures. After Poland, we went to Berlin, where we encountered a number of artists in the Berlin Biennale who shared these concerns and were also exploring a number of ways across many media to express their post-cataclysmic aesthetics. Kaszás’s work is raw and smart, filled with energy about his ideas and vision.

Following our time at ms1, the two MoMA groups reunited, and we walked the few blocks to ms2 for a flyby visit to the fully modernized and installed main museum building. We got glimpses of masterworks like Krzystofa Wodiczko’s Pojazd (Vehicle, 1971–73). We also saw two striking paintings by Fernand Léger; video work by Douglas Davis; major works by Ewa Partum: Legalność przestrzeni (The Legality of space) installation photographs (1971) in Freedom Square, Łódź; some great photomontages by Teresa Rudowicz (1928–1994); and so much more on four floors—or were there ten floors? We all wished that there was more time. I very much liked ms2’s innovative installation design, which breaks the white-cube paradigm and encourages exploration of areas within the spaces, allowing unexpected sight lines.

Leaving ms2, we rushed to the legendary Wschodnia Gallery, founded in 1984, which has a history of supporting progressive artists not only from Łódź, but also from other parts of Poland and other countries. The space was very sparse, with a Minimalist work, perhaps a reaction to the Muzeum Sztuki’s luxuriant installations and holdings. Two of the gallery’s artists briefly spoke with us, and Adam Klimczak, cofounder of the Wschodnia Gallery, talked at length about the gallery’s history in front of a marvelous thirty year–anniversary photographic chart of events at the gallery. Unfortunately, it was impossible to transport ourselves back in time to experience what must have been very artistic and vital activities in Łódź. Hopefully, we will have opportunities in the future to see the gallery’s substantial archives.

During our trip to Poland, we were constantly reminded of the importance of archives, from our arrival and visit to Zofia Kulik’s home, to the presentation at the Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw, about their extensive archives, to the Muzeum Sztuki’s archives, and finally to the Wschodnia Gallery’s archives, which we heard about but did not see. The idea of archives is holding on, surviving, not letting the fragile moments slip through uncaring fingers—all the more important in transitional times. The established is usually saved, while the ephemeral, the naughty, the provocative, the unpopular is so often lost—discarded, destroyed, and forgotten, or never known. We must be very grateful to Klimczak and others who have made enormous efforts to preserve records of their important work and activities.

The Pleasure of Business

By Erik Patton

Midway through the trip, before heading to Berlin, the group traveled to Łódź, Poland (population 760,000) to visit the Muzeum Sztuki (MS), which opened in 1931 and now has an extensive collection of twentieth- and twenty-first-century art. Other members of the C-MAP Eastern Europe group had visited previously—and having heard about MS’s accomplished collection and robust exhibition schedule, I was very much looking forward to visiting for the first time.

While at MS, I met with my exhibitions counterpart to discuss planning procedures, timelines, budgets, and facilities. We toured MS’s two locations, ms1 and ms2. Located in the Poznański family palace, ms1 is home to the museum’s renowned Neoplastic Room and two floors dedicated to showing modern and contemporary art, and ms2, located in a renovated nineteenth-century weaving plant, consists of six vast levels.

Ms1’s annual visitation is twenty thousand and the building consists of five thousand square feet of gallery space dedicated to the permanent collection and loan exhibitions. The main exhibition on view at ms1 was Neoplastic Room: Open Composition, along with a suite of smaller contemporary loan exhibitions.

Ms2’s annual visitation is sixty thousand and the building consists of forty thousand square feet of gallery space dedicated to the permanent collection and loan exhibitions. The main exhibition on view at ms2 was Atlas of Modernity: The 20th and 21st Century Art Collection, which opened in January 2014, and highlights the MS’s vast permanent collection.

What a treat it was to see Daniel Buren’s homage to Henryk Stazewski; the fabled Neoplastic Room; and my personal favorite, Alina Szapocznikow’s Goldfinger, a sculpture with gold-patinated cement and cart parts.

3 – BERLIN

Before Brexit: A Meeting Between Bridges

By Roxana Marcoci

A couple of weeks before the result of the United Kingdom’s European Union referendum was announced, I visited Wolfgang Tillmans’s non-profit space Between Bridges. This is an exhibition and event space, formerly founded in Bethnal Green, London, now in Keithstrasse, Berlin, which provides a discursive platform for political engagement as much as artistic creativity.

Tillmans was born in West Germany in 1968, shortly after the Berlin Wall was completed, when the country was still divided by the Cold War. He studied in Britain, soon becoming a chronicler of contemporary social movements and the youth generation, shooting pictures for music, fashion, and culture magazines such as i-D and The Face. In 2000, Tillmans became the first non-British artist to be awarded the Turner Prize. Between 2009 and 2014 he was a trustee of the Tate, and in 2014 he became a member of the Royal Academy of Art. His stature in England was amplified by his activist work. Over the past thirty years, his work has been a poignant exploration of what constitutes an image, and how that image functions in different contexts—aesthetic, activist—and proliferates technologically and socially.

In June, on view at Between Bridges, was an installation titled Meeting Place, which focused on Tillmans’s pro-EU anti-Brexit campaign. It featured a series of video projections of public speeches and pacifist collective gatherings, showing episodes in which people stood together in situations of crisis. The video program was compiled by independent curator Marianna Liosi and Between Bridges. A selection of political posters combining expressive images with bold texts conceived by Tillmans urged citizens to register to vote in the EU referendum: “Say you’re in if you’re in.” “No man is an island. No country by itself.” “What is lost is lost forever.” Envisioned, in the artist’s own words, “as an attempt to open a space for dialogue about the current political climate,” the exhibition constructed a context conducive to intellectual exchange in which art experimentation matched a strong commitment to urgent political and civic questions.

A Conversation with Ewa Partum

By Ana Janevski

Before settling in Berlin in 1982, Ewa Partum was very active on the Polish artistic scene with her linguistic actions and installations, poetic objects, films, and performances. The C-MAP group met with the artist in her gallery, M+R Fricke, where we had the opportunity to see some of her films and photographs as well as part of her archive and to talk with her, gallerists Marion Fricke and Roswitha Fricke, Polish feminist scholar Ewa Majewska, Polish art historian Karolina Majewska-Güde, and Partum’s daughter Berenika Partum.

The film Active Poetry. Poem by Ewa (1971), in which the artist scatters the paper letterforms that make up the words in one page of James Joyce’s Ulysses into non-artistic spaces, was being projected in the gallery. The actual letters were also displayed. Fricke told us that the artist continues to perform this piece, scattering other letters in many different spaces and contexts, including museums and biennales. We learned that the inspiration for this work came from socialist propaganda material. This action instigated a discussion about Partum’s performances in public spaces and what they meant in the context of socialist Poland in the 1970s. Majewska pointed out that while many critics state that there was no public art in Eastern Europe in that period, Partum’s performances belie that claim. She cited the artist’s installation Legalność przestrzeni (The Legality of space, 1971) in Freedom Square in Łódź, where the artist installed prohibitory and other regulatory signage, both real and fictional. The artist told us that actually her first public performance was in 1965, when she was still a student at the State Higher School of Fine Arts in Łódź (now Łódź Fine Arts Academy). During her vacation at the seaside in Sopot, she wanted to paint but then instead decided to lie down on pieces of blank canvas, on some of which she outlined her body; to some of the images, she added accessories, like sunglasses and boots, and then she even made an installation with the canvases. We were able to see photos of these actions, which she entitled Presence/Absence (1965). The question of documentation came up, and the artist revealed that the documentary photos were taken by her friend, in the presence of bewildered tourists, with a very simple camera.

Particularly fascinating was hearing about Partum’s gallery Adres, established in 1972 in the Łódź branch of the Association of Polish Artists and Designers. The name of the gallery, which translates as “Address,” is associated with the mail art tradition that developed in Poland in the 1970s as part of the international artistic exchange network. Materials related to Adres activities were exposed in vitrines at M+R Fricke, along with the rest of the artist’s archive. When Partum was forced to leave her gallery space, she moved it to her apartment. There she organized a film festival, whose motto was film as idea, film as film, film as art. Material related to this festival, including the program of the first festival, was also on display. The list of names of the invited filmmakers was pretty impressive: Robert Filliou, Ben Vautier, Maurizio Nannucci, Jozef Róbakowski . . . The artist talked more about her interest in her own series of short films Tautological Cinema, intended as a structural analysis of the medium itself.

We spent lot of time talking about Partum’s photographic cycle Self-identification, in which the artist’s nude body is inserted in the social life of a Polish city in 1980. “My problem is a problem of all women” was another of the artist’s mottos.

Back in the GDR

By Jay A. Levenson

Christoph Tannert, the artistic director of Künstlerhaus Bethanien, delivered a fascinating illustrated lecture on the exhibition he was preparing with Eugen Blume, head of the Hamburger Bahnhof museum, entitled Gegenstimmen: Kunst in der DDR 1976–1989, which has since opened at the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin. “Gegenstimmen” translates “Voices of Dissent,” but the original German connotes the idea of “counter-voices.” The show picks up from an exhibition that the two curators organized in 1990 in Paris. Remarkably, it took more than twenty-five years to secure a venue for the project in Germany, even though the subject appears to be one that should find a ready audience there.

Tannert explained, very convincingly, that the lack of interest within Germany in researching the art of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) has to do with a national emphasis, encouraged by the federal government, on integrating the two halves of the country, which has led to a tendency to discourage evidence of the stark differences between the two cultures. Underground artists in the east have been undervalued since the reunification of Germany, and critics have often declared the official party artists to be more interesting to study.

In fact, as Tannert explained, there was a significant underground movement in the visual arts, even though in East Germany, it was never as radical as parallel movements in other Eastern-bloc countries. Although the East German artists often did not think of themselves as dissidents, and sometimes did not even see themselves as political, their work documents an intellectual resistance to the authoritarian culture, which deserves to be better known today and is particularly relevant in a period when Russian politics have once again become a divisive issue in Eastern Europe.

Though Tannert’s lecture style was understated, there was an urgency to his remarks that suggested to me his perception of the dangers inherent in attempts to forget the realities of GDR-period repression, especially for the generation that has come of age in Germany after 1990. Hopefully the show and its accompanying catalogue will lead to a reevaluation within the country of this significant period of dissident art.

You can read a illustrated transcription of Tannert’s lecture here.

Retracing the Steps of KwieKulik

By Paulina Pobocha

In the late afternoon on Saturday, June 4, the last day of our C-MAP trip, we visited several galleries on Berlin’s Lindenstrasse, among them Žak | Branicka, where the exhibition KwieKulik: The Monument without a Passport was on view. The show presented a modest but powerful selection of works spanning Przemysław Kwiek and Zofia Kulik’s KwieKulik collaboration, from 1971 to 1987, which focused on the pair’s criticisms of state oppression. Made in Poland during the Communist regime by two avowed socialists whose revolutionary ideas for art and life, paradoxically, proved too extreme for that system, the works on view complicate and challenge basic assumptions about artmaking in Poland during this period. As our colleague at the Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw, Łukasz Ronduda, pointed out, “KwieKulik were a classic example of Žižekian ‘subversion through identification’ . . . trying to realize their ideas in too literal a fashion, [they] were treated particularly harshly by the regime, which did not identify with its own rules.”

The works on view in Berlin were richly complex, mesmerizing, and so very absurd, particularly a series of photographs titled Ameryka. Begun in 1972, these images show a young, smiling couple in a variety of pleasant though largely unremarkable situations—strolling through a park on a winter’s day; at a party toasting to the camera; standing in front of a lush, wooded expanse, etc. Named after the eponymously titled Polish-language magazine published by the United States Information Agency and distributed in Poland by the US Embassy, KwieKulik’s Ameryka is a rejoinder to the idealized images contained within the pages of the original publication. As the photographs attest, people in Poland experienced the same freedoms as those in the West—or at the very least and, in fact, a similar ability to stage reality. The act of representation, no matter how benign, is inherently deceptive, Ameryka tells us, and rarely is it benign. This is underscored by KwieKulik’s own history. Although the Ameryka photographs include images of the couple in front of the Cologne Cathedral in Germany (1983) and in Banff, Canada (1985), the artists’ movements had indeed been curtailed. In 1978 they did not receive passports and could not leave Poland to exhibit their work abroad as a result of the government’s having deemed an earlier project of a “low ethical, ideological, and artistic value.” The decision was appealed during the following year. In 2016, when many political conversations across Europe and United States are centered on issues of movement and migration, opening borders or erecting walls, and aggressively identifying an “other,” these photographs prove to be surprisingly prescient and unwittingly urgent—reminding us of the ease with which reality can be bent out of shape.

4 – AND MORE

Lecture at Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius

By David Senior

As part of my C-MAP trip in June, I traveled to Lithuania at the invitation of the Contemporary Art Centre (CAC) in Vilnius. The CAC has, since 2009, created a public space called the CAC Reading Room. This space houses a library of books and magazines on Lithuania and international contemporary art. Their mission has been to create a working collection of international publications that the local population might not otherwise have the chance to encounter and consult. The reading room staff regularly adds new titles, particularly in the subject areas of cultural theory and philosophy, and also maintains a growing collection of artists’ books and other experimental publications. MoMA Library had sent a donation of experimental journals and magazines (duplicates from our Millennium Magazines exhibition in 2011) after my last visit to Vilnius, in 2010, and a small section of the room is devoted to that donation. The Reading Room also functions as a public work space for local academics, artists, and writers. When I was there, the room was populated by several “readers,” working at tables with books from the collection or just from their laptops. The Reading Room also hosts readings, lectures, and book launches as part of their public program. I was there in the context of this public programming and gave a lecture one evening on the history of artists’ publications. It’s a lively space, with a small cafe adjacent to it that serves a meeting place for the local community of artists, designers, and curators.

During my stay, I visited the Lithuanian Art Museum to revisit a set of photomontages by Mindaugas Navakas, which is installed in the Vilnius National Gallery of Art’s (NGA) permanent display. These works are part of a series of proposals for public sculptures. In each print, examples of Navakas’s sculptural objects are superimposed onto images of iconic buildings and cityscapes in Vilnius. The original prints were shown in an exhibition at the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic Architects’ Union in 1986, but the show was only open for one hour before it was shut down. The artist subsequently self-published a book of the images in 1988 with the title Vilnius Notebooks. Navakas published a second volume in this series in 1995 with the title Vilnius Notebook 2, and he gifted a copy to MoMA when we visited him in 2010.

In a recent exhibition catalogue, published in conjunction with a large retrospective of his work at the Lithuanian Art Museum, these socially provocative gestures intended for the urban sphere, are compared to Claes Oldenburg’s proposals for public monuments (which the artist created in the mid- to late 1960s and that were published in his book Proposals for Monuments and Building 1965–1969 in 1969), which also function as a kind of send-up of the monumental in public space. It seems that further connections could be made to other artists in Central and Eastern Europe who, around the same time, were manipulating the socialist urban landscape by co-opting the idea of the monumental in official state architecture. I think of Tadeusz Kantor’s proposal for a giant-chair sculpture, which was presented at the important Wrocław ’70 Symposium. The organizers of this event had promised that the proposals would be realized, but Kantor’s idea was deemed too much of a provocation to the Polish state program of constructing socialist monuments. Another similar example of socialist fantastic architecture is Julius Koller’s Ping-Pong Monument, in which a photograph of a hand holding a Ping-Pong paddle upright is collaged onto an image of a Czech urban landscape. In revisiting Navakas’s compositions at the NGA, I thought again about the connections between his works and those of Kantor and Koller, and I imagined a show made from these and other examples of fantastic architecture in Central and Eastern Europe under socialism. (If someone has already made one, I don’t know about it!)

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“Scallops St. Tropez” was Raymond Loewy’s contribution to a book of celebrity recipes published in 1958. The book’s editor, Helen Dunn, introduced Loewy, as “perhaps the world’s most renowned designer . . . . Mr. Loewy spends six months yearly in New York designing everything from airplanes to household appliances. The other six months he travels in France, Italy, Germany, England and the Scandinavian countries, developing creative ideas.” Dapper, energetic, and a self-professed gourmet with a keen eye for publicity, Loewy, born in Paris in 1893, brought a dash of French glamour to the world of industrial design in the United States, where he first landed in 1919. Initially employed as a window display designer and fashion illustrator, he established his own industrial design consultancy, Raymond Loewy Associates, in 1929. Within two decades he had become a household name, the first in his profession to be featured on the cover of Time magazine. “He streamlines the sales curves,” purred the editors in the issue dated October 31, 1949.

Loewy’s firm was responsible for a steady stream of U.S. design icons: the Coldspot refrigerator (1934), Lucky Strike cigarettes packaging (1939), Greyhound buses, Studebaker cars, Coca-Cola dispensers, sewing machines, Rosenthal dinnerware, and corporate graphics for Exxon, Shell, and the US Postal Service. This range testified to the potential impact of industrial design on the daily lives of millions, and to its power as a commercial tool. Loewy understood how package design and branding could contribute to the success of a product, an organization or a company. One of his most potent designs was for JFK’s Air Force One, which entered service in the fall of 1962. Loewy’s modern and elegant design of the plane’s livery (the external graphics and color scheme) transformed this particular Boeing 707 into an important element of the Kennedy administration’s global brand. In interviews, Loewy emphasized his connection with this brand by recalling his one-on-one consultation with the President at the White House.

Another commission that took Loewy to the heart of the North American establishment was his appointment as a consultant to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. During his association with NASA, from 1967 to 1973, his firm produced over 3,000 designs for space-related products. It comes as a surprise, then, to learn that Loewy, so closely identified with state-sponsored design and the material culture of postwar America, appears simultaneously to have occupied a unique position in the industrial design of the Soviet Union. ¹ At the height of the Cold War, he was not only one of the very few American designers to make repeat visits to the USSR, but also collaborated with designers and factories there at the request of the Soviet state. (One can’t help wondering how his gourmet tastes fared during this exchange!)

In the decade after the much-publicized “Kitchen Debate,” the ideological confrontation between US Vice President Richard Nixon and the Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev in front of a General Electric kitchen at the 1959 American National Exhibition in Moscow, rivalry between the two superpowers in the field of industrial design gained momentum. Materially and theoretically, design was central to the Cold War competition. Recent scholarship has highlighted the importance of that era’s international design exhibitions and trade fairs, through which the United States Information Agency channeled a form of “soft power.”² Specifics of the Soviet side of the story are less well researched, in particular the role of the state-controlled All-Union Research Institute of Technical Aesthetics (VNIITE). New information on this topic is emerging, however, thanks to the efforts of Alexandra Sankova, director of the Moscow Design Museum, and her Russian colleagues, who have been conducting oral history interviews and salvaging design archives relevant to this period. Ms. Sankova has helped C-MAP document a fascinating and little-known episode in Loewy’s career, presented in the account that follows.

In 1962, the year that Loewy’s Air Force One went into service, Yuri Soloviev (1920–2013) was appointed director of VNIITE and charged with expanding design activity in the USSR. Soloviev developed the Moscow-based institute as an umbrella organization with 10 branches and 400 design bureaus linked to various nationalized industries. The goal of VNIITE was to improve the quality and user-friendliness of manufactured goods, replacing unattractive, low-quality products with well-made, appealing ones. The institute organized Soviet design exhibitions around the world as well as international design exhibitions in the USSR. In addition, Soloviev established two centers of “technical aesthetics” (the term for “design” used in the Soviet Union until the 1980s). These centers began to develop new educational programs and quality assurance schemes on an unprecedented scale. However, many design projects initiated by VNIITE never went into mass production; instead, they ended in prototypes relegated to storage or displayed in factory directors’ offices. Visitors were invariably told that these distinguished products would be manufactured in the near future; the common response to questions about why these goods were not already in production was that the designers did not understand the technological processes involved. This overly simplistic explanation appears to have satisfied many in positions of authority, but disguised the more complex problems of facilitating such design innovation within a centralized, state-run system.

Soloviev sought to galvanize Soviet industrial production by developing international relations, and in 1969 he pushed for VNIITE to become a member of the International Council of Societies of Industrial Design (ICSID). As vice president of ICSID from 1969 to 1973, he encountered Loewy on several occasions and later remembered him as extremely interesting and energetic, and as someone who paid close attention to his appearance. The fascination was mutual. Loewy invited Soloviev to visit the US to learn more about American design and designers. Somewhat unusually, Soloviev’s trip was approved by the Soviet Committee on Science and Technology without delay. In return, Loewy was commissioned to design 10 products tailored to the technical capabilities of Soviet factories. His international reputation and experience of running an independent design studio with access to high-level technological innovations and companies in the US, France, Britain, and Switzerland made him an attractive choice, as did the scope of his practice, which ranged from popular industrial products, company logos, and identity design to automobiles, airplanes, and space stations.

The cost of Loewy’s work was very high compared with that of his Soviet colleagues. Nevertheless, a preliminary agreement was signed in Paris in 1971 by Loewy and Dzhermen (Jermen) Gvishiane (vice-president of the USSR Committee on Science and Technology). The Soviet Ministry of Foreign Trade then chose 10 products for Loewy to design for the foreign market, including the Moskvich car, interiors for TU airplanes, and Zenit cameras. The connection with Zenit, a company involved in the manufacture of military hardware, is most surprising, given Loewy’s concurrent work with NASA.

Within a few months, Loewy duly presented the concepts and prototypes he had developed in consultation with the participating factories. A witty raconteur and effective communicator, he apparently charmed his Soviet colleagues by talking humorously about his career and expounding in unfamiliar ways on the differences between socialist and capitalist design. In a culture with little room for independent judgment and a desire for Western-made goods, exposure to Loewy’s ways of talking and thinking was significant.

The designs were approved and paid for, yet the majority ended up alongside other VNIITE prototypes as displays in factory directors’ offices. Only one of them, the three-chambered refrigerator ZIL, was put into production—three years later and with significant changes. Loewy’s designs for the Soviet factories were extremely close to others he had produced successfully in the US, where there was close collaboration between designers, manufacturers, market researchers, and distributors at every stage in the realization of the end product. However, VNIITE’s design concepts and prototypes were developed in a vacuum and ultimately foundered amid the web of bureaucratic procedures. This episode demonstrated that employing a celebrity designer attuned to Western markets was not a magic bullet for modernizing centrally planned industries. Nevertheless, Loewy’s Soviet adventure advanced Soloviev’s work at VNIITE by introducing a new language of design and an appreciation of user-friendly approaches, even as it underlined the extent to which Soviet industry was falling behind in the global marketplace. His involvement paved the way for Soloviev to host the ICSID Congress in Moscow in 1975 and to develop Interdesign, a series of projects conducted worldwide with individual design teams composed of industrial designers, architects, and artists of different nationalities, political leanings, and cultural backgrounds. With respect to industrial design, at least, the Iron Curtain was more permeable than the political rhetoric of both the US and USSR would have us believe.

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Many avant-garde movements in Europe around the time of World War I were linked to radical politics, and in those stormy years, a generation of artists in Budapest created provocative newspaper illustrations, banners, and public posters in a new genre of graphic design that was both artistic and unequivocally political.

In recent years, MoMA has been able to build up an important collection of these early modernist Hungarian materials, including posters from the collection of Julius Paul (1867–1938). Amassed during Paul’s lifetime, his was one of the great collections of Central European posters from the early twentieth century. Born in Hungary, Paul owned a cigarette-paper distribution company based in Budapest and Vienna and was a founding member of Hans Sachs’s Verein der Plakatfreunde. ¹ Among the works acquired by MoMA are a series of visually compelling posters created by prominent Hungarian artists Mihály Biró, Sándor (Alexander) Bortnyik, and Bertalan Pór in the buildup to 1919, the year of the rise and fall of the short-lived Hungarian Soviet regime.

On March 21, 1919, Bolshevik forces led by Béla Kun declared the Hungarian Soviet Republic, replacing the short-lived Hungarian Democratic Republic. Biró, Bortnyik, and Pór all fought with the Hungarian Red Army as combatants and graphic propagandists. They were offered direct roles in shaping the culture of the new society and sought to mobilize thousands of unemployed workers, idle soldiers, and war invalids in the struggle for a world revolution. But the takeover lasted a mere 133 days, at the end of which first the Romanian army and then a counterrevolutionary regime seized power. Fleeing the “white terror”—a wave of vicious reprisals that followed the collapse of the Bolshevik republic—Biró, Bortnyik, and Pór became refugees, moving among European countries to escape arrest and execution and contributing to avant-garde developments in centers including Vienna, Moscow, and Berlin, and in the Bauhaus in Weimar Germany.

Before 1919, Budapest, the thriving metropolis of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, was already developing as a center of modern poster design, and Mihály Biró was one of Hungary’s best-known graphic artists for commercial and political commissions. Through distortion of scale and angle, and dramatic simplification of form and color, Biró created an image of a delivery boy leaping toward the viewer, scattering Pauker stationery products in his haste. Such posters vividly communicate a sense of the congestion and frenetic pace of business in Budapest before World War I. Alluding to his bold use of color, the German magazine Das Plakat (The Poster) described Biró’s visual language as throbbing with “the syncopated rhythms of the Hungarian folk songs.”

Among Biró’s most iconic images is Red Man with a Hammer. Originally designed in 1912, it became inextricably linked with the 1919 Hungarian Revolution, appearing in huge numbers and varied formats—overprinted in this case with an issue of Népszava (The People’s Voice), the newspaper of the Hungarian Social Democratic Party. The image established Biró’s name internationally and has been much repeated in Central European political iconography up to the present day. As an apprentice in Charles Robert Ashbee’s Guild of Handicraft in London, Biró learned the craft of printing and absorbed the socialist ethos and utopian ideals of the British Arts and Crafts movement. His earlier training as a sculptor is also evident in the assured handling of the iconic red man, the model for whom was his lifelong friend, the Hungarian wrestling champion Tibor Fischer.

The designing of political posters demands not only technique and ability to draw but also that the artist should be in close touch with the masses of the people to whom his poster is to appeal . . . These posters intended to work upon the masses must be true art, drawn as simply as possible, and always taking mass psychology into account. “Sachlichkeit” [descriptive representation] puts a brake upon the artist’s energy and hinders every vigorous stroke with which he ought to hammer his poster into the public’s head.

—Mihály Biró, interviewed in the German periodical Gebrauchsgraphik, 1932

MoMA is also fortunate to own a later adaptation of Red Man with a Hammer, one of many produced during the tumult of Hungary’s 1919 revolution. The poster advertised May Day, a holiday associated with the international worker’s movement, the celebration of which would be the biggest public event during the 133 days of the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic. Embodying the energy of the revolutionary masses, Biró’s red man glorified the common worker as the equivalent of a mythological figure such as Hercules, or Vulcan at his forge. The concept of posters as public decorations for May Day was at least partly inspired by Soviet Russian precedents. “The defiant simplicity, the removal of peripheral things, and the menacing power of the delivery—all these are the hallmarks of Biró,” wrote the critic Pál Nadái at the time.

Another poster that remains one of the most memorable images associated with the Hungarian Revolution of 1919 is Világ Proletárjai Egyesüljetek! (Proletarians of the World, Unite!). Striding forward in tandem and bearing elongated red banners beneath the title’s slogan, two nudes of epic scale, set within in a whirling composition, communicate nervous energy and urgency. Naked and classicized, the figures recall Cézanne’s Bathers, but they also symbolize the universality of the revolutionary impulse. After the fall of the Hungarian Soviet Republic, Bertalan Pór spent more than a decade as a political refugee before returning to Hungary once a Communist regime was established following World War II.

This rhythmic and intense composition featuring energetic figures contained by a rectangular field captures the turbulence of the era and a burgeoning taste for Futurist and Expressionist design. The poster publicizes an exhibition by Ma (“Today” in Hungarian), a group that emerged during World War I and which quickly became a leader in the Budapest avant-garde. The first issue of its journal set its revolutionary tone and simultaneously sums up the role of these graphic arts during this era of revolutionary fervor: “The new painter is a moral individual, full of faith and a desire for unity! And his pictures are weapons of war!”

Within a few years, Bortnyik had broken from the Ma group, and in 1922, he joined the flow of Hungarians (among them Marcel Breuer, László Moholy-Nagy, Ferenc Molnár, Gyula Pap, and Andor Weininger) to the Weimar Bauhaus. He remained on the periphery of this group, however, and in 1924 returned to Budapest where he set up his own art school based on Bauhaus principles in 1928. After World War II and the establishment of a communist government, the paths of Biró, Bortnyik, and Pór briefly converged once more in Budapest. Biró, his health now irrevocably damaged by incarceration, was literally carried back from Paris by his wrestler friend Tibor Fischer in 1947, only to die shortly thereafter. Pór also returned from Paris to take up a post in the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts, where Bortnyik had become the director. Both remained in Hungary until their respective deaths.

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Following in the footsteps of MoMA’s founding director, 10 members of C-MAP’s Central and Eastern European group spent five memorable days in Moscow in June 2015. The trip complemented the group’s growing interest in Russian art over the past year. While in Moscow, we visited 13 institutions—museums, private foundations, and commercial galleries—and had meetings with dozens of individuals, including artists, writers, collectors, archivists, educators, curators, and museum professionals, who narrated a deep and rich history of modern and contemporary Russian art, with particular emphasis on artistic movements since 1960. Highlights included attending the inaugural opening of the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, designed by Rem Koolhaas; meeting with Zelfira Tregulova, the director of the State Tretyakov Gallery; visiting the studio of artist and unofficial-art magazine editor Igor Shelkovsky; and touring the late 1920s house of avant-garde architect Konstantin Melnikov. Five days were barely enough time. Between meetings and tours, the group took in breathtaking sunsets over the Moscow River, ate delicious traditional Russian meals of pelmeni (meat-filled dumplings) and borscht, and walked the city’s streets, marveling at the eclectic mixture of Neo-classical, Constructivist, and Brutalist architecture. While getting stuck in traffic on the overcrowded boulevards and bridges is an integral part of the Moscow experience, we did not miss the chance to explore the elaborately designed, extremely clean and efficient Moscow Metro. The group returned to New York with about 50 books to add to MoMA’s library and with recordings of interviews that we conducted with artists in Moscow. They will be published soon, here on post.

Barr visited Moscow at a pivotal time in the history of the city and the Soviet Union—just 10 years after the Russian Revolution and only a few years before Socialist Realism was decreed as the official style of Soviet art and literature. The C-MAP Central and Eastern European group has increased its research and programming of Russian art at an equally critical time. Russia today is at the center of several international conflicts, and the effects of this involvement can be felt in art and culture in Moscow. Maintaining C-MAP’s commitment to understanding the historical imperatives and changing conditions of an increasingly global art world, the group will continue its studies of Russian art.

Ksenia Nouril

0. PROLOGUE

Views of Moscow

Moscow Musings

By Jon Hendricks

Many years ago, I bought an artwork in Denmark by Stanley Brouwn. It is titled Path and was “a project for USSR.” It is 600 x 70 centimeters, graphite on acidic paper that is now crumbling and tearing in spots. Brouwn drew two parallel lines that extend for a while from the left of the sheet, then jut up a bit, and finally continue onto the right toward the end of the paper. What a stunning work for the world’s largest nation! A six- meter “path.” There is no location indicated for this path and no indication of what the path is to be made of, but I sure would like to walk on this “path” in either direction—left to right or right to left; north to south or east to west.

For a number of years our C-MAP group at MoMA has been studying and traveling to Central and Eastern Europe, but somehow avoiding Russia. RUSSIA! The land of Constructivism, Agit Prop, Stravinsky, Gogol, Pavlova, Nijinsky, Goncharova, Popova, Rozanova, Stepanova, Udaltsova, Larionov, Malevich, Tatlin, Kandinsky, Puni, Berliok, Mayakovsky, Rodchenko, Gabo, El Lissitzky, Suetin—the land of ideas and innovation, hopefulness, and vision.

We are studying the post-war avant-garde. Each country has its own vocabulary, its own needs for a new art that is defined by that culture and its peoples. We can’t be judges—only observers. If we can be open and not prejudge or artificially compare, we have a chance of seeing and learning. As La Monte Young told me in a different context: “Listen and observe. ”It’s hard to do. We find what we are looking for, but we have trouble uncovering what’s in front of us.

So we went to Moscow for five days, more or less, and took a fleeting stroll, about the length of Stanley Brouwn’s Path, in Russia. We saw old and very old art, and new art. We met extraordinary artists, thinkers, curators, art historians, and museum directors. Let me say, Moscow is an extremely beautiful city that cares greatly for its past, for its architectural history, but it is also a city moving into its future. I was very impressed by its care for memory, perhaps obscuring some, but presenting it all the same.

We went looking for insight into parallels to our own avant-garde of the 1960s and ‘70s, and to those of other Central and Eastern European countries that we had been studying, discovering what we, as an institution, had missed and overlooked. Could we find enlightenment in five days? Could we see or at least sense what was not on our itinerary? We met some great artists, but then had to move on, hardly having time to catch our breath or for the artists to express their ideas. We spoke English and hardly gave a second thought to the fact that almost all those we met spoke English back to us. We asked to see what we wanted to see but were hardly open to what might appear by chance or accident.

To be continued . . . .

Jon Hendricks
New York City, August 27, 2015

1. CENTER OF MOSCOW

Meeting with artist Igor Shelkovsky

By Magdalena Moskalewicz

It took us a while to find the way to the studio of Igor Shelkovsky among the entrances to local stores on Gogolevsky Boulevard, across the street from the Cathedral of Christ the Savior. After we finally found the right door and made our way to the 4th floor, we were welcomed into a large, bright space by a tall, strong man with white hair, intensely blue eyes, and an elegant demeanor. The studio was filled with Shelkovsky’s work: small-scale geometric wooden sculptures, mostly white, were resting on numerous tables, on shelves, and directly on the floor. The walls were crowded with other wooden structures, this time flatter and black, and abstract paintings of various shapes, each filed with stripes of white, green, red and blue—the artist’s proposition for a new Russian flag, as we learned later. Among this abundance of art objects, on the table closest to the entrance, lay a pile of papers: documents, bound photocopies, and original publications with the familiar Cyrillic letters “a-Я” immediately recognizable on their covers.

These were the eight issues of the art magazine A-YA that Shelkovsky published in Paris from 1979 to 1986, the primary reason for our visit. At a time of limited information exchange between East and West, every issue of this periodical—published in 3000 copies in Russian and English, with an insert of French-language summaries—provided a unique source of knowledge about the Russian contemporary art scene. It was A-YA that first acquainted Western audiences with the work of artists such as Ilya Kabakov or Eric Bulatov, and the critic Boris Groys.

Without much prompting, Shelkovsky began telling us how the magazine was produced. The contents of A-YA were based on materials smuggled out of the Soviet Union by various trusted travellers to the West. An underground editorial office was active in Moscow, in the person of Alexander Sidorov, who conducted the initial selection and made sure the texts and images reached Shelkovsky in Paris. (Sidorov appeared in the magazine under the pseudonym Alex Alexejev, to avoid prosecution.) A-YA cost 10 francs in France, where it was circulated via subscription, while another collaborator and compatriot, Alexander Kosolapov, distributed it in New York. Most importantly, however, Shelkovsky presented it for free to anyone traveling to the USSR, where A-YA was extremely popular in the art circles. While the culture of literary samizdats was flourishing in Moscow at the time, art-focused magazines were virtually non-existent when Shelkovsky was leaving for France in 1976. A-YA filled that void. That’s what’s incredible about the magazine: It wasn’t simply a publication about Soviet contemporary art made for the Western audience. The first of the set of goals stated in the first issue’s editorial was, in fact: “To acquaint Russian artists —in and outside Russia—with each others’ work.” The authors and the primary readers of A-YA were largely the same Russian crowd, but their own periodical could only reach them after a huge detour, via France.

Our host told us that the KGB made sure to inform all the known Moscow-based contributors that they were engaging in a dangerous, capitalist enterprise funded by the CIA. (In fact, Shelkovsky had to fundraise and sell other artist’s works to fund the periodical, after the initial funding, from a private collector, fell though just after the first issue.) But Igor Shelkovsky lost his Soviet passport only after he released the special literature issue, published only in Russian, which came out after A-YA #6 (without a number of its own). Socialist states of the former Eastern Europe are known for having imposed much stronger censorship on the written word than they did on visual arts, and this case was no exception. “The government wasn’t that interested in images or music,” Shelkovsky explained. “It wanted to control the thoughts of the people.”

The last issue of A-YA was published in 1986, and Shelkovsky got his passport back during Perestroika. When years later he released an almanac of the magazine—all 8 issues bound together—the 1,000 copies sold out immediately. Today, Shelkovsky credits A-YA with raising art consciousness in the Soviet Union in the 1970s and 1980s. “You have to understand,” Shelkovsky explained to us, “my generation of artists did not know anything about Russian art. We did not know anything about Western art. We started from nothing.”

Visit to the Konstantin Melnikov House

By Juliet Kinchin

During a previous visit to Moscow, I peered through a fence and overgrowth at this avant-garde masterpiece, which, like so many other Constructivist buildings of the late 1920s, was obviously in a sad state of disrepair. Today, the stucco exterior is still cracked and patched, and wrangles over the Melnikov estate and archive are evidently still ongoing, but there has been a turn for the better since the city took over the day-to-day care of this precious architectural structure. Ambitious plans to preserve, research, and publicize the property are under way. And what a joy finally to get inside! Expertly guided by the director, Pavel Kuznetsov, and architectural custodian Elizabeta Lihacheva, who since childhood has been familiar with the house and the Melnikov family, we were given privileged access to all its nooks and crannies.

This extraordinary manifesto of modern living, like the contemporaneous Rietveld-Schröder House in Utrecht, is modest in scale and located on an otherwise unprepossessing street. The environs have changed since Melnikov’s day. The neighboring church on which Melnikov deliberately trained a view from his interior is now long gone, and with it the visual echo of the Melnikov’s interlocking cylindrical volumes with those of a traditional ecclesiastical structure. From the roof terrace it is hard to imagine away the overbearing presence of a pumped-up block of luxury apartments next door. But Melnikov’s radical exercise in economic construction—using as few bricks as possible and piercing the exterior with strange hexagonal windows—still holds its own. The peppering of windows combined with the dramatic glazing of the double-height studio above the entrance really opens up the internal spaces. At the same time, one can see why El Lissitzky had a problem with this somewhat Art Deco spin on Constructivism—perhaps feeling that Melnikov had been overexposed to decadent forms of modernism at the 1925 Paris Exposition Internationales des Arts Decoratifs et Industriels Modernes while erecting the USSR pavilion there. Inside, the curved exterior walls create oddly shaped spaces, but one can sense the underlying grasp of an engineer’s or craftsman’s intuitive understanding of the technical and load-bearing aspects of the design and features, like the hand-built Constructivist stove. It was fascinating to see a couple of the windows opened up.

The house was one of the few homes that remained private in Soviet times. It was preserved by Melnikov’s son, Viktor, also an artist, who died in 2006. Even knowing this, I was unprepared for the extent to which the contents have survived, all now bearing inventory tags: solid bourgeois furniture (including a kitchen cabinet given as a wedding present by Melnikov’s in-laws); a mauve Art Nouveau carpet that set the color scheme of the double-height studio; the white wool dress coat Mrs Melnikov acquired in Paris and two of Melnikov’s beautifully preserved hats; a clunky, rusting film projector in the basement, so redolent of the avant-garde fascination with film; a bust of Homer above the telephone in the stairwell. Thankfully, such artworks and furnishings from two generations have not been purged in a futile attempt to recreate an aura of “authentic” purity. In line with revisionist views of modernism, the curators are keen to emphasize the combination of avant-garde and traditional elements at work; they do not hesitate to describe the Melnikovs as coming from god-fearing, bourgeois-peasant stock. The term “iconic” seems doubly relevant in view of the house’s spiritual aura—the glowing yellow walls of the bedroom, apparently once gilded, give one the impression of walking right into an icon painting or Russian Orthodox interior. At the same time, the yellow and blue triangles on the ceilings of the boy’s and girl’s rooms reminded me of Vilmos Huszaàr’s designs for children’s rooms and the strong links between De Stijl and Russian Constructivism. Documents and vintage photographs from a recently discovered trove in the house are integrated in the displays throughout. It was exciting to see the house at a time of such rich new discoveries.

Visit to Galerie Iragui

Artist Nikita Alekseev at Galerie Iragui

Meeting with artist Yuri Albert at Stella Art Foundation

By Sara Bodinson

On the third day of our Moscow visit, the group ventured to the Stella Art Foundation, which was established to promote cultural exchange, support Russian art and young artists, and establish a contemporary art museum. There we met Yuri Albert, an artist from the second generation of the Moscow Conceptual School, to see an exhibition of his work. Aptly titled I Need To Tell You So Much with My Art, the exhibition featured several works that, in Albert’s words, continue his investigation of several related questions: What is the content of abstract painting—or any works of art, for that matter? What does an artist mean or what is he or she able to tell through abstraction? What do viewers see in it?” In the main gallery hung several large white canvases with prompts written at the bottom stating, in Russian and English, “After viewing this picture, please sign and date it.” Already quite full of signatures—including a slash that one woman insisted represented her signature—the canvases playfully and critically evolved into a collectively authored work.

Another gallery featured a work comprised of more than a dozen small, black paintings that at first glance appeared abstract. Upon closer inspection (and in just the right light), sighted visitors could see that the canvases were printed with braille. Albert said the texts were excerpts from Vincent van Gogh’s letters describing his paintings to his brother, but that only blind visitors would be able to know this. He said that he develops many of his works with an ideal audience in mind. However, he noted that in this and many of his other works, any audience is missing some aspect of the work and its meaning: sighted visitors cannot read the braille descriptions, but visitors who are blind cannot see Van Gogh’s original paintings.

After leading us through the exhibition, Albert presented an overview of his work beginning in the 1970s, including one work in which he advertised his availability to perform chores or other small domestic jobs for people he knew. Participants filled out a work request and then, using photography, documented him executing the task.

Tour of the Moscow Museum of Modern Art (MMOMA)

By Magdalena Moskalewicz

The library of the Moscow Art Museum is a researcher’s dream and is newly accessible to the public. It is housed in an all-white, perfectly orderly room filled with tall bookshelves that glow with the colorful covers of the volumes they hold. Our visit to the library completed our tour of MMOMA, which started with the exhibition Fortune Museum, a show celebrating the museum’s 15th anniversary and featuring works from the collection. Initially conceived to focus on art from Western Europe and the U.S., MMOMA now includes contemporary art from Russia in its programming and acquisitions, a policy change that was reflected in the exhibition. In Fortune Museum we saw works by Igor Shelkovsky, Irina Korina, Vadim Zakharov, and Haim Sokol, who were among the artists we met in Moscow. Other artists, such as Boris Orlov, Igor Mukhin, and Olga Chernysheva, were familiar to us from their works in MoMA’s collection. The exhibition was introduced by poetic phrases hidden in fortune cookies given out at the entrance, but we were doubly fortunate to have as our guides the show’s curator, MMOMA director Vasili Tsereteli, and his team. We toured the galleries and impressive open storage spaces, learning about the museum’s history and mission from Tsereteli, grandson of the museum’s founding director, artist Zurab Tsereteli. We enjoyed lunch with our hosts in MMOMA’s café, where monumental bronze reliefs depicting erotic mythological scenes are framed by colorful modernist mosaics designed for the museum by Zurab Tsereteli, who is currently president of the Russian Academy of Arts.

Visit to the Ostengruppe Studio

By Juliet Kinchin

Meeting with artists Dmitri Gutov and Haim Sokol and scholar Ekaterina Degot

Tour of the Multimedia Art Museum Moscow (MAMM)

By Sara Bodinson

One morning the group visited the Multimedia Art Museum Moscow (MAMM), a state museum founded in 2010 to introduce Russian audiences to both contemporary art and multimedia technologies. We saw a diverse array of exhibitions, including the first Robert Capa retrospective in Russia as well as exhibitions of war photography, fashion photography, and solo exhibitions of work by Herb Ritts and Joseph Kosuth. We were guided by Anna Zaytseva, chief curator and deputy director of MAMM, who, prior to her tenure at the museum, worked with Joseph Backstein on the first few iterations of the Moscow Biennial. She highlighted her work with contemporary artists to activate the museum’s atrium, which cuts through several floors of galleries, where recently Rebecca Horn had developed an installation visible from all floors.

We then retreated to the office of MAMM director Olga Sviblova to look at some of the museum’s rich holdings from the museum’s collection of photographs, including a number of vintage prints by Alexandr Rodchenko and Max Penson.

Meeting with artist Taus Makhacheva and curator Joseph Backstein

2. GORKY PARK AND AROUND

Scenes from the Garage Museum Opening

Archives exhibition at the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art

By Michelle Elligott

The Sixties: Points of Intersection, a project by Garage Teens Team

By Sara Bodinson

One of the highlights of the inaugural exhibition program at Garage Museum of Contemporary Art’s new building was The Sixties: Points of Intersection. This beautifully designed and engaging exhibition was the result of two years of research conducted by the Garage Teens Team. This group, comprised of high school seniors and first year university students interested in contemporary art, attends lectures, visits exhibitions, writes, and hosts tours. For this project, they focused their research on the study of five characters from the period of the Khruschchev Thaw: Nonconformist, Student, Worker, Woman, Scientist, Architect. Of these characters, the teens wrote, “We were guided by two ideas: first, this selection really conveys the spirit of the era; and second, the era itself chose them as its heroes.”

In collaboration with the Multimedia Art Museum of Moscow, the teens produced a video that posed questions about their own relationship to the 1960s through the lens of these characters. Their insights were informed by interviews they conducted with people who had experienced the 1960s and by researching these characters through music, literature, and films from the decade. Each character had its own display of related resources and ephemera, smartly designed to match each persona. Throughout the run of the exhibition, representatives from the Garage Teens Team led tours of the exhibition in Russian and English.

Scenes from theTeens Team’s exhibition at the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art

Meeting with artist Olga Chernysehva

By Ksenia Nouril

While in Moscow, we met with the artist Olga Chernysheva and were able to ask her questions about her film The Train (2003), which is part of MoMA’s collection. Reflecting on why she made the film, Chernysheva said, “I really wanted to see the train as a technical material, as a machine . . . like an organism . . . a living being.” Over several months, she shot hours of footage, walking through train cars with a hand-held camera. What she told us that was most surprising is that the film was almost never made. “I had all of this material, but I didn’t know what to do with it,” she said. Then on one of her journeys, she crossed paths with the rhapsodist (bard) who features prominently in this seven-minute film. He appears almost out of nowhere—down on his luck, traveling the rails reciting poetry for spare change. Chernysheva was fascinated by this man, who, she claimed, “saved” her film. She was impressed by how he humbly bridged high art and everyday life through his recitation of an early and little-known poem by the Russian writer Alexander Pushkin on a crowded commuter train. Capturing this moment was very important to Chernysheva because “The Train is not about traveling, but about being. For me traveling is about moving from point A to point B, but the film is about looking around at where you are. Even after the train leaves the picture, we remain.”

Tour of Fallen Monuments Park in Gorky Park

Meeting with artist Andrei Monastyrski

Tour of the Tretyakov Gallery on Krymsky Val

By Magdalena Moskalewicz

At the Tretyakov Gallery on Krymsky Val, or the New State Tretyakov Gallery, which is the part of the larger State Tretyakov Gallery dedicated to art of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, we met with director Zelfira Tregulova and curator Kirill Svetlyakov. Upon entering the permanent collection, we were stunned by the colors in the paintings of the early 20th-century Russian neoprimitivists. Yes, we had all seen works by Mikhail Larionov and Natalia Goncharova in books and slides, and some of us had actually encountered one or two of their paintings in museums, but the richness of color that hit us in the first two rooms of the New Tretyakov left us breathless. We were lucky to have Svetlyakov as our guide, as he introduced each work and told us about the early reception of this group of painters, known collectively as the Jack of Diamonds and later as the Moscow Cezannists. Surprisingly, four rooms farther on, even the celebrated Black Square, by the group’s most prominent member, Kazimir Malevich, seemed to be full of color: red and green tones lurked behind the fading black surface, which was covered with a web of craquelure.

In the room where Malevich’s later, figurative work was shown, Svetlyakov explained that after 1932, the museum’s avant-garde holdings were hidden away in storage. Within just a few years, Socialist Realism had replaced avant-garde painting and sculpture both in artists’ studios and in Soviet exhibition halls. This dramatic, imposed shift in artistic orientation was apparent in the exhibition’s narrative. Stepping from one room into the next—from the intimate scale and intellectual focus of Constructivist pieces to the inflated glory of pretentious but technically ingenious canvases of the Socialist Realists—felt like landing on a different planet.

Meeting with artists Igor Makarevich and Elena Elagina

By Ksenia Nouril

Artists Igor Makarevich and Elena Elagina, key figures of the Moscow Conceptual School, joined us at the New State Tretyakov Gallery. They guided us through their special project Analysis of Art, which was installed in the galleries dedicated to Socialist Realism. This placement within the history of official Soviet art was strategic, although we found it very ironic, since the artists are well known for their work in unofficial art circles of the 1970s and ’80s. In the first room of their exhibition, we saw works from their series Mushrooms of the Russian Avant-Garde. Combining mysticism and modernism, this series remixes many recognizable works, such as Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International (1919–1920) and Malevich’s Black Square (1915), which we had just seen on our tour of the New Tretyakov. The installation also made direct reference to the centenary of the Black Square. In the second room of their exhibition, Makarevich and Elagina interspersed several vitrines featuring materials and apparatuses of other artists and other craftsmen. Particularly clever are their conceptual plays on words. For example, the stenciled Russian letters УНОК appear in a floating frame filled with rice, or “рис” in Russian. While “УНОК” is a nonsense word—perhaps referencing the famous Russian avant-garde school UNOVIS—the two words together make up the word “рисунок,” or “drawing.” By means of this subtle engagement with language, Makarevich and Elagina introduce a self-reflexive meditation on the life and work of artists.

Scenes from Igor Makarevich and Elena Elagina’s exhibition at the Tretyakov Gallery on Krymsky Val

Meeting with artists Dima Vilensky and Olga Egorova of the group Chto Delat? and scholar Ilya Budraitskis

By Magdalena Moskalewicz

“Education is impossible without entertainment,” asserts the collective Chto Delat?, with a nod to Bertolt Brecht. On a windy afternoon we met with Dmitry Vilensky and Olga Egorova, two of the 10 artists and activists who make up this group, which formed in St. Petersburg in 2003. They began by explaining that Chto Delat? models its artistic and political inquiries on the Brechtian triangle of speculation and critique, aesthetic pleasure, and political engagement. Their work is often embodied in films, actions, and newspapers. Today, it is circulated largely via the Internet, but before the era of widespread digital connectivity, the collective engaged a lot with radio.

Chto Delat? means “What is to be done?” or “What to do?” Although the name is usually associated with Lenin’s famous pamphlet of the same title, Vilensky and Egorova told us that it actually comes from a 19th-century novel by Nikolai Chernyshevsky, from whom Lenin borrowed it in the first place.

Together, we watched excerpts of Chto Delat?’s Tower Songspiel (2010), the final piece in a video trilogy of socially engaged musicals that addresses current political issues with the theatrical means employed by Brecht. The music was still reverberating in our heads as we left for lunch, where we discussed the role of art activism in Russia today. Ilya Budraitskis’s essay on the topic, which provided the basis for our conversation, is published soon on post.

Meeting with artist Vadim Zakharov

Meeting with artist Arseniy Zhilyaev and scholar Keti Chukhrov at the Strelka Institute

3. OUTSIDE MOSCOW

Visit to Regina and XL Galleries at Winzavod

By Ksenia Nouril

Winzavod, or the wine factory, is an epicenter for contemporary art in Moscow. Built in the late 19th century as a brewery, the complex later served as a winery and since 2007 has been home to numerous galleries, design boutiques, educational spaces, and cafes. We visited Regina Gallery and XL Gallery there and met with several artists. At Regina, Anna Parkina showed us a selection of her iconic collages, which were composed from colored paper and photographs, as well as her more recent collaged sculptures, in which she applied the same technique to abstract, three-dimensional forms. Viktor Alimpiev shared one of his films with us. Having seen his meticulously orchestrated works at various international biennials, we made the most of this opportunity to ask him questions about his process and production. On view at Regina were 60 portraits of Moscow artists, curators, dealers, and collectors by Alexey Kallima, who is best known for his light-hearted, brightly-colored, large-scale, neo-expressionist paintings. At XL Gallery, Irina Korina spoke to us about her major works, including Chapel, which she made for the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2013. While her installations and sculptures address serious and even controversial social and political issues in post-Soviet Russia, Korina has not lost her sense of humor. For a past project, she made and wore a larger-than-life head of the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy. She appeared in this full-body costume at the Lenin Library in Moscow as well as outside Moscow at Tolstoy’s estate, Yasnaya Polyana, where she attracted crowds with her performative sculpture.

Visit to the V-A-C Foundation (VICTORIA — The Art of Being Contemporary)

Visit to the Smirnov and Sorokin Foundation Studios

The post From the Red Square to the Black Square: Memos from Moscow appeared first on post.

15 years later a leading Slovenian theorist of art from the former Eastern Europe, Igor Zabel, could already state in the past tense: “There was once a time when people knew exactly where the center of the art world was located and where the provinces where”. His words clearly reveal the pre-1989 geopolitical hierarchies that laid the foundation for the exoticizing representation of the region. Back in 2001, Zabel’s statement was still rather a desire for the final dissolution of these hierarchies than an actual assessment of the status quo. But his words can be repeated with full force today.

In 2014, when a group of curators and researchers from The Museum of Modern Art travels to Central and Eastern Europe, it is not to experience a mythically enchanted and bewildering art scene, but to revisit old colleagues, with whom the relationship dates back decades, to meet with the artists represented in MoMA’s collection, and to try to keep up with the rapid development of the local art scenes as well as the growing number of institutions and bottom-up initiatives.

Our 10-day research trip to Central Europe took us to multiple cities whose names start with “B”: Budapest, Bratislava, Prague, Brno and Wrocław (don’t be fooled by the last one – pre-1945 it used to be called Breslau). The visit was a brisk run through public museums and artists’ personal studios, through cozy apartments and vast storage spaces, contemporary art galleries and used books stores. We decided to focus our attention on the art of 1960s and 1970s, but were too often positively distracted by the appeal of early 20th century avant-garde architecture and design that is so prolific in these cities.

Traveling like this was not possible even 10 years ago: With all the world’s knowledge accessible online at our disposal, we were able to check New York libraries holdings when exposed to a rare book on sale or access MoMA archives when in need of answers to questions about the Museum’s past travelling shows. Needles to say, it was the smartphones that possessed the most magical powers available. However, these powers could be only used well with the local help. Our generous hosts took us to back streets and alleys not visible on google maps. Here, we share our experience of these places as well as impressions and observations from encounters with art and people of Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovakia and Poland, as well as individuals we met on the occasion of the opening of the biennial in Berlin.

Magdalena Moskalewicz

1. BUDAPEST

At the Ludwig Museum of Contemporary Art

Visiting Katalin Ladik

By Jon Hendricks

It’s hard to describe the shock and pleasure of first experiencing the work of a great artist one has never heard of. Katalin Ladik is one of those special artists who is all too hidden from public perception. On our C-MAP trip to Budapest, we had the chance to first see a group of her works at the Ludwig Museum: scores constructed of sewing patterns, seemingly random found bits of score, and other interventions. Then we visited her, and she showed us more works, works that we could look at closely, and we asked if we could hear what the scores sounded like. And then, she vocalized the scores, transfixing us. But this is not her only work. We saw more, and there is more to see: photographs of her powerful performances, poetry that mesmerized her contemporary, young generation of Hungarian artists, and a captivating soul. We were all so taken with Katalin Ladik.

Katalin Ladik’s spontaneous performance

Kassák Museum

By Juliet Kinchin

On the second day of our visit, we traveled under clear blue skies to the opposite end of the city from the Ludwig Museum, to the sleepy district of Obuda, an area of lowrise 17th- and18th-century buildings that is also the site of the Roman remains of the ancient city of Aquincum. Busy main roads and high-rise housing from the 1970s now encircle those historic structures. The Kassák Museum opened in Obuda in 1976 as a branch of the Petofi Literary Museum, an affiliation that positioned Lajos Kassák (1887–1967) first and foremost as a poet and critic rather than an artist-designer In recent years this emphasis has been inverted, with greater prominence given to his work as a visual artist in the newly refurbished displays. The current installation and programming feels fresh and accessible, serving to contextualize the long career of this seminal avant-garde figure both synchronically and diachronically and exploring his diverse international connections across Europe. The museum’s present and planned activities speak to a renewed interest in early modernist avant-gardes among the younger generation of curators, historians, artists and designers. The bold design of the new permanent displays effectively complements but does not overwhelm the art and documentary source material—a particular challenge, since the collection of works in various media is graphically so strong. The red and black display furniture and exclamatory texts screened directly on the walls blend with the more intimate scale of the printed ephemera on display.

János Szoboszlai and Katalin Szőke talked to us about the current thematic exhibition, Kassak and Kassak 2. The show addresses Kassák’s reworking in the 1960s of his 1920s output, a project undertaken after a successful exhibition in Paris. Questions of authenticity and originality have been a long-standing problem in considerations of Kassák’s early and later works. In tackling this question head-on and unraveling the complex history of Kassák’s 1960s reprints, the museum is offering fascinating perspectives on the trajectory of the artist’s practice and reputation on both sides of the Iron Curtain.

This is one in a series of research and exhibition projects on the historical avant-garde in Hungary undertaken by the staff at the Kassák Museum. Another currently in progress and outlined by curator Katalin Szőke during our visit is an international, interdisciplinary examination of Budapest’s dance and movement avant-garde of the 1920s, paying particular attention to the experimental pioneers Valeria Dienes and Alice Madzsar. Embracing numerous key figures in Central European art, music, drama and dance, this project whose development we will be watching closely over the next year or two.

Artpool

By Milan Hughston

The group’s focused visits in Budapest included a site visit to Artpool, one of the most active and comprehensive collections of experimental art practice in Europe. We were hosted by its founders, Júlia Klaniczay and György Galántai, at Artpool’s large archive located in the heart of Budapest.

Artpool was established in 1970 to produce, network, curate, and document avant-garde art practices in all formats. The resulting collection is astounding in scale and scope, covering contemporary art practice from the 1970s to the present.

In 2013, Artpool published a 535-page history of their efforts in a beautifully produced catalogue that is available in its entirety through the MoMA Library online catalogue.

In spite of their success, Artpool and its founders face serious financial and space issues in the contemporary climate of Hungary. It is vital that this unique centre of visual art action and documentation continue to tell its story.

Miklós Erdély Estate

Views of Budapest

At Budapest Art Galleries

Meeting with Tamas St.Auby

By Jon Hendricks

Tamas St. Auby is a legendary figure in the avant garde. He is one of them. He continues to be one of them. You kick over a stone, and there he is. You open a door and peek in— there he is. Hungary hid from him for twenty years. The art world has hidden from him even longer. What are we afraid of? His mind is a provocation; his mind is a revelation. He has so much to say, and our group was treated with an amazing and lucid presentation of his work.

Walk through modernist villas in the Napraforgó street, with Pal Ritook and Ardnas Ferkai

Villas in Napraforgó utca

By Juliet Kinchin

Given Budapest’s spectacular and rich architectural fabric, it has been disappointing to learn of the closure of the Museum of Architecture formerly situated near the Kassák Museum in Obuda. The entire staff has been dismissed (except for the current director Pal Ritook) and the collections have been removed to inaccessible, off-site storage pending possible inclusion in an expanded fine arts museum campus in the Varosliget. An equal if not greater loss is the closure of the museum’s display space in the Castle District and the program of excellent traveling exhibitions that the museum organized regularly for venues throughout Hungary and abroad.

Despite these problems, Ritook and Prof. Andras Ferkai of the Moholy-Nagy Művészeti Egyetem (Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design) prepared a collection of archival materials that they circulated during our architectural walking tour of modernist villas in Napraforgó utca (literally Sunflower Street) in residential Buda. Having started the day with a focus on Kassák and modernist graphics, a few of us ended the day with another journey back to the utopian future in this delightful enclave of early 1930s modernism, a legacy of Hungary’s influential participation in the Bauhaus. We began in Pasaréti tér, a square framed by a modernist bus station on one side and a Roman Catholic church and monastery on the other, all designed by the architect Gyula Rimanóczy in 1933. Alongside this is Napraforgó utca, an ensemble of twenty-two modest family houses built in 1930-31. This project was the culmination of several years of campaigning to encourage the authorities and the public at large to adopt modern principles in house design. It started in 1925, when Farkas Molnár, a star graduate of the Weimar Bauhaus and an assistant in Walter Gropius’s architectural office, returned to Budapest to spread the modernist gospel. Pointing to the success of the 1928 modernist housing exhibition at the Weissenhof estate in Stuttgart, Molnar and a group of up-and-coming architects petitioned the Budapest Public Works Council in 1930 to build a whole street of small houses. The group also included Jozsef Fischer and Lajos Kozma, the finest modern architects in Hungary. The names of all involved appear on a stone block at the center of a small square on one side of the street, where locals still gather to chat and play. This project, like the one in Stuttgart and others in Wrocław (then the German Breslau) and Prague, was to demonstrate that the main task of modern architecture was the construction of practical, affordable housing and rationally designed buildings. The neo-conservative social and political climate in Hungary between the Wars meant that, compared to Germany and the Netherlands, the country had very little public or collective architecture. Rather, new modernist ideas were applied mostly to the design of single-family homes and villas. Within a year of the initial proposal, the twenty-two houses had been built. With all of the architects working on plots of the same size, this little development shows what a small group of enthusiasts with a utopian vision could achieve in a year.

2. BRATISLAVA

Bratislava City Gallery

By Juliet Kinchin

It did not take long to travel from Budapest to another country and to Bratislava, the second of five cities on our itinerary beginning with B, if one counts Breslau, now Wroclaw. Traveling between these major cultural centers in a minibus was a reminder of how diverse and concentrated Central European culture is, with different peoples, languages, styles, and values often co-existing in cities just fifty or sixty miles apart. In Bratislava, we were met by Juraj Carny and taken directly to the City Gallery in the heart of the Old Town. In advance of the string of meetings scheduled with artists that afternoon, the gallery’s survey of Slovak conceptualism of the 1960s and ’70s (Koller, Bartoš, Filko, Sikora, Mlynárčik, Ďurček, etc.) gave us an excellent overview and preparation. Chief curator Zsófia Kiss-Szemán explained that there had been a great push in recent years to build up this part of the collection, which in its totality ranges from the Gothic to the art of the present. Some types of work fared better than others in the relatively intimate and historical atmosphere of spaces carved out of a former palace. One of the most successful was the vertiginous passageway created by Matej Krén between seemingly endless walls of books. Proceeding gingerly along the narrow path that Krén describes as a kind of symbolic “short cut across the world”, we felt the weight of the inaccessible knowledge locked within the tomes on either side. The books were those censored or discarded in Communist times.

Galéria Cypriána Majernika

By Juliet Kinchin

Despite a prevailing climate of censorship in the 1960s and the controversial closure of several of its exhibitions, the Galéria Cypriána Majernika clearly provided an important forum for young Czechoslovakian artists under the age of thirty-five. A state-run organization similar to Young Artists’ Centers in several other Soviet Bloc countries, the gallery had the prerogative to retain work by the artists it showed. The collection that has accumulated in this way is a fascinating time capsule of semi-official art from the 1960s to the 1980s, with limited additions of more recent work. I was particularly intrigued by a picture entitled Tesco Woman. Originally painted by Julián Filo, a politically engaged artist of the 1980s, it has been given a contemporary makeover by Veronika Rónaiová – the artist’s daughter. Due to the current restructuring of visual arts venues in Bratislava, this gallery’s function has been largely superseded. With the transfer of former director Richard Gregor to the City Gallery and a tightened budget, it remains to be seen whether the Galéria Cypriána Majernika can reinvent itself to perform a new role in the visual culture of post-Communist Slovakia.

Seminar with Slovak Artists and Curators at Kunsthalle Bratislava

Milan Adamčiak

By Jon Hendricks

Our trip to Bratislava was my first trip to Slovakia and my introduction to a number of marvelous artists and very generous and gracious curators and directors of cultural institutions. I was very taken by the work of Adamčiak, whose intriguing art takes several vigorous forms. He described an early piece where he went under a bridge and played his violin under water. It must have been so beautiful. He entranced us with descriptions of other sound explorations and innovations. We were shown scores that he has composed; it was so marvelous to be introduced again and again to artists who have been working with scores and sound art in the various cities that we visited.

Stano Masar

By Michelle Elligott

During a full afternoon conference organized by the Kunsthalle Bratislava, which was commenced by an excellent overview of Slovak art from the 1960s-on by Chief Curator Richard Gregor, we enjoyed presentations by a handful of artists.  Stano Masar presented an overview of his practice.  Notable are his two series of Global History of Art, 2004 and Contemporary Art, 2007.  In these series, Masar selects icons of art, from old masters to recent wonders, and translates them, if you will, into the language of infographics to create uniform pictographs.  The artist succeeds in distilling the image to its immediately recognizable, core form – its dna; utilizing the pervasive international language of graphic signage; and instilling a hint of humor to create a wonderful body of work.

Studio visit with Otis Laubert

By Milan Hughston

While visiting Bratislava, Jon Hendricks and I were taken by Juraj Carny to the studio of Otis Laubert, a Slovakian artist born in 1946. Upon arrival, it was apparent why a studio visit to Laubert’s home and workshop was necessary to understand the full breadth and scope of his work. The studio and home are located in a dense warren of buildings located in a suburb of Bratislava. It is a wonderland of found objects beautifully incorporated into all mediums—collage, paintings, and furniture, to name just a few genres.

Artist and theorist Jiří Valoch characterizes Laubert’s practice succinctly: “We could say Otis’s major summarizing work is his deposit—the collection of various objects, originating in about 1965 and containing thousands of things ordered according to certain rules.” Our visit with Laubert confirmed that.

Monogramista T.D.

By Jon Hendricks

Later that same afternoon that we met Milan Adamčiak, we visited the studio of Monogramista, an artist who also works with scores and installations. Unfortunately, we did not have the opportunity to hear his works, but visually they were very striking and beautiful. I look forward to seeing more work by Monogramista and Adamčiak and hope we will have the opportunity to meet both again soon.

Studio visit with Monogramista

Tranzit.sk

3. BRNO

Moravian Gallery – Jiří Valoch Archive

By Michelle Elligott

Moravian Gallery graphics

By Juliet Kinchin

In 1961, the same year that the Bratislava City Gallery was established, Brno’s Museum of Applied Arts morphed into its current form as the Moravian Gallery of Art. With rich historical collections, several branch museums and ambitious plans to accommodate the living archive of Jiří Valoch and other contemporary artists from the region, it remains the most significant cultural institution in Brno. Curator Marta Sylvestrova took time out from the final stages of preparation for Brno’s renowned International Biennial of Graphic Design to lead a few of us behind the scenes. I was particularly keen to explore the posters and graphic design collection and to catch up with her research for a forthcoming exhibition on Zdeněk Rossmann (1905–84), a former Bauhaus pupil and pioneer of the New Typography in interwar Czechoslovakia, whose work is represented at MoMA. I had just come across mention of Rossmann in Bratislava, where he and the photographer Jaromír Funke taught in the avant-garde School of Applied Arts, known as the Bauhaus of the East. This link was typical of the personal and cultural connections we encountered among many of the cities on our itinerary.

Moravian Gallery collections

Jiří Valoch

By Jon Hendricks

Dear Jiří Valoch—he so kindly came to greet us at the Moravian Gallery, where he has installed his archives. Jiří is an artist whose work has been in contact with many in the Fluxus group, and there is a good exchange of material in the Valoch archives and in the Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Archives now at MoMA. I am certain that many scholars will be making good use of the material so that we can come to a fuller understanding of Valoch’s work.

Villa Tugendhat

By Paul Galloway

On May 24 the C-MAP Fluxus group visited the city of Brno in the Czech Republic. In addition to visiting local artists and curators, the team made a pilgrimage to one of the most important modernist houses of the 20th century: Mies van der Rohe’s Villa Tugendhat. Recently reopened after a long and thorough restoration, the Villa Tugendhat is a stunning example of Mies’s explorations in spatial and material design. After the harried first few days of the trip to Eastern Europe, the C-MAP group greatly enjoyed a lengthy tour of the Villa with the site’s director, Iveta Černá, followed by a leisurely exploration of the grounds.

As steward of the Mies van der Rohe Archive, the Museum of Modern Art has an important relationship with all things Mies in the world. MoMA’s Department of Architecture and Design played an important supporting role in the long and complex restoration to the Villa Tugendhat, which was undertaken by the city of Brno under the auspices of UNESCO’s World Heritage program. Teams of researchers from Brno spent hundreds of hours at MoMA’s Lily Auchincloss Study Center for Architecture and Design poring over the Museum’s holdings. By the end of the project, a partnership was formed between the Villa’s Study and Documentation Centre and MoMA’s Mies Archive. After the much celebrated reopening of the Villa to the public, curator Juliet Kinchin and I were, in particular, thrilled to visit and cement the lasting friendship with our brilliant colleagues in Brno.

Studio visit with J.H. Kocman

By Milan Hughston

The group visited the home and studio of J.H. Kocman, a prolific book artist and craftsman born in Brno in 1947. Especially after the Prague Spring of 1968, Kocman, like many artists of his generation, had to resort to alternative art practices in order to produce and distribute his works. Primarily, he turned to mail art and rubber stamps to disseminate his work, and in spite of the repressive political climate, he was very productive. The Artists’ Books collection of the MoMA Library contains eleven of his books dating from 1970 to 1995, illustrating a wide range of techniques from stamps to marbling.

Kocman’s studio is filled with evidence of his love and use of paper, particularly marbling. The group admired many of his later books—proof that he has continued to work steadily in the medium for many years.

4. PRAGUE

Jan Ságl and Zorka Ságlová

By Michelle Elligott

Jiří Kovanda and Pavlina Morganova

By Jon Hendricks

In Prague, Pavlina Morganova very kindly arranged for Jiří Kovanda to show us his stunning exhibition at the City Gallery of Photography, where we had fun trying to identify artists’ work that he referenced in his own work.

We then walked to the center of Prague with Jiří Kovanda and Pavlina Morganova, and with Pavlina showing us photographs of Jiri’s gesture actions from the mid-1970s, Jiří showed us the exact spots where he had performed them, and we were able to envisage the power of the actions in the context of the surrounding cityscape during a period of restricted freedom in the country. We then all walked to the escalator, and in a way reenacted his 1977 Untitled action. He is a fascinating artist who I knew too little about and I think is someone who has continued to do very strong work up until today.

Pavlina Morganova

By Jon Hendricks

Pavlina is a brilliant scholar who has dug deeply into the history of Czech action art, and her new book Czech Action Art: Happenings, Actions, Events, Land Art, Body Art and Performance Art behind the Iron Curtain (Prague: Karolinum Press, 2014) is an invaluable reference for all of us who are so interested in Czech art. She was extremely generous with her time, and I know we’re all grateful to her for her kindness.

Meeting Jiří Kovanda

By Roxana Marcoci

One of the highlights of our C-MAP trip was the time we shared with artist Jiří Kovanda, a leading figure of Czech Actionism, in Prague. Our meeting point was the Prague House of Photography, where we viewed the exhibition Jiří Kovanda Against the Rest of the World, featuring his legendary actions of the 1970s within the context of the history of performance art. Then, we took a walking tour with him and Czech curator Pavlina Morganova around the city to revisit the sites of his public actions.

Kovanda began his career in the radicalized climate of the 1970s (following the 1968 Soviet reoccupation of Czechoslovakia), during a period of forced “normalization” of his country by the Soviet military. Working against the backdrop of political repression, Kovanda asserted his difference amid hardline social conformity by performing minimal yet disruptive gestures. Looking at art as a vehicle for change, Kovanda simply carried water from the river in his cupped hands, releasing it a few meters down the river; he gathered rubbish, and once he had made a pile of it he scattered it all over again; he invited friends to watch him try making friends with a girl; and he walked around Prague, casually touching, in a gentle brushing gesture, passersby—an action that was kindred to Vito Acconci’s “following” pieces of the same period. While walking with Kovanda around Prague, we arrived at one of the city’s subway entrances. Here, the artist allowed us to reenact with him one of his most influential works: Untitled (On an escalator . . . turning around, I look into the eyes of the person standing behind me . . . ), from September 3, 1977). This was a private moment with a generous artist, which left an indelible memory. Analyzing ideas about conformity and malleability, in works such as On an escalator, Kovanda encouraged critical reflection on the relationship between the individual and the ideological forces that shape social reality.

Walk Through Prague with Jiří Kovanda and Pavlina Morganova

Museum Kampa

Kveta Pacovska

By Milan Hughston

When visiting the Moravian Gallery in Brno, we were encouraged by Marta Sylvestrova to meet with the Prague-based artist and illustrator Kveta Pacovska, who is married to Milan Grygar. Pacovska has enjoyed a long career as one of former Czechoslavakia’s most recognized and published artists of children’s books. In fact, one of our hosts, Tomas Pospiszyl, said that all children of a certain age in Slovakia immediately recognize the whimsical yet instructional images that Pacovska has been producing for forty years.

When in Prague the next day after visiting Brno, I took a taxi to her studio in a residential suburb of Prague and found her to be an enchanting, modest, and hard-working artist, still going strong at the age of 86. Each of her many books takes an often unique approach in teaching children how to count, spell, and recognize shapes. She is too modest to note that her books continue to sell well internationally and that she was awarded the Hans Christian Andersen Award in 1992, the premier honor for writers and illustrators of children’s books.

The rest of the CMAP group had the privilege of meeting her when we visited Milan Grygar’s studio later that day.

Milan Grygar’s Acoustic Drawings

Walk through Prague Art Galleries

Views of Prague

5. WROCŁAW

Muzeum Współczesne-Ludwiński Archive

By Michelle Elligott

Muzeum Współczesne

Meeting Natalia LL

Olympic Stadium

By Milan Hughston

It is often a good idea to listen to your taxi driver when visiting a city you are not familiar with, especially if you are interested in modern architecture. As we were departing Wroclaw for Berlin, our driver, knowing of our interest in the Centennial Hall, suggested that we visit the Olympic Stadium in Wroclaw. The stadium was built in 1926–1928 by German architect Richard Konwiarz (1883–1960) as Schleisierkampfbahn (Silesian Arena) when Wroclaw, then called Breslau, was part of Germany. Like many other visitors, we were confounded by its name, since no official Olympics took place in Breslau. However, it is acknowledged that it could have been planned as a venue for the Summer 1936 Olympic Games held in Berlin.

Konwiarz’s design was awarded a bronze medal in the art competitions held during the Summer 1932 Olympic Games in Los Angeles. Although it has seen constant use as a motor speedway and soccer stadium, it still retains its essential character and modernist feel.

Architecture in Wrocław/Breslau

By Juliet Kinchin

Less well known than the Weissenhofsiedlung in Stuttgart is the Deutsche Werkbund’s comparable initiative known as Wohnungs- und Werkraumausstellung (Workplace and House Exhibition, WUWA), carried out in 1929, when Wrocław (then Breslau) was still part of Germany. The posters and graphic identity created by Johannes Mohlzahn for this event are among of the highlights of MoMA’s New Typography collection. The exhibition took the form of a housing development made up of functional “type” houses by a group of modernist architects. One of the most interesting buildings in the complex was Hans Scharoun’s house for singles and young couples, which now serves as a hotel. Noting our interest in modernist architecture, our driver took us on a short detour to the somewhat derelict “Olympic” Stadium built in 1926–28, then extended from 1935–39 as the Hermann Goring Stadion. Before leaving Wroclaw, we also paid homage to a pioneering work of modern engineering and architecture, Max Berg’s Centennial Hall of 1911–13 (now known as the Hala Ludowa, or People’s Hall). The importance of the hall has been recognized and it is now a UNESCO site. This massive recreational and performance space was constructed of reinforced concrete, providing a powerful example of the potential of this material to enclose and span huge spaces without the need for supporting columns. It survived the devastation of World War Two, becoming the setting in 1945 for the International Congress of Intellectuals in Defense of Peace, which was attended by György Lukacs, Pablo Picasso, Louis Aragon, Paul Eluard and Julian Huxley, among others. Perhaps MoMA’s founding director Alfred Barr was there also, since he acquired a printed textile square designed by Picasso to commemorate this event. Barr later donated the piece to the Museum.

Centennial Hall

6. BERLIN

Fahrbereitschaft, Haubrok Collection

By Michelle Elligott

Dorothy Iannone

By Jon Hendricks

I had the opportunity to see Dorothy Iannone’s major retrospective at the Berlinische Gallery days before it closed, and also to visit her in her studio. She is a dynamic and bold artist whose work I’ve admired for many years, and her retrospective gave a chance for many to become more familiar with her work over a long career. She is a political artist in the best sense of the word who spares no one. She is bitingly honest and direct. Her retrospective will be traveling to Zurich later this summer (Migrosmuseum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich, August 30–November 19, 2014), so many more will have a chance to see it there. It was strange to be in her home with the usual cacophony of work momentarily stilled by the retrospective, but she was there and made up for any lack of the work’s presence, as she was present, and her voice and ideas are like her work.

Bazon Brock

By Jon Hendricks

Bazon Brock is an artist who I am familiar with only by name, by association, and by traces of his work. He was part of 24 Stunden at the Galerie Parnass (Wuppertal, 1965) and was also part of the legendary Aachen, July 20, 1964 events titled Actions, Agit-Pop, De-Coll/age, Happenings, Events, L’Autrisme, Art Total, Re-Fluxus, which included works by Eric Andersen, Joseph Beuys, Stanley Brouwn, Henning Christiansen, Robert Filliou, Ludwig Gosewitz, Arthur Koepcke, Tomas Schmit, Ben Vautier, Wolf Vostell, and Emmett Williams, which is most famous in our consciousness for a photograph of Joseph Beuys with a bloody nose, holding his arm up, and with the other hand holding an assemblage with a crucifix. Brock was fascinating to talk with and had very different points of view about Fluxus and the period than I have, and I hope that we will have an opportunity to have him visit the Museum in New York to discuss his thoughts further.

Seen at Berlin Biennale

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