This interview was recorded on the C-MAP Central and Eastern European Trip to Warsaw, Łodz, and Berlin in 2016.

Michelle Elligott (ME): I would like to talk about the unique holdings of your institution, Muzeum Sztuki in Łodz (MSŁ). Could you tell us about how the archives were established? Were they kept since the founding of your institution or are they a newer program?

Maciej Cholewiński (MC): Not many people know that Muzeum Sztuki in Łodz was the first museum of modern art in the world, established in 1930 in Łodz’s town hall on Freedom Square (Plac Wolności). We moved into this current building known as Ms1 at 36 Więckowskiego Street in 1948.

ME: Was the archive already established at that time?

MC: The MSŁ library was founded with the museum, and it was public, so anyone could come and access the materials. Today, it is one of the oldest libraries in Poland dedicated to art. We collect books only about art, artists, and exhibitions. 

ME: And unlike The Museum of Modern Art in New York, which is a private museum where we keep all of the archives within the museum, can you talk a little bit about how the museum here is structured and how the archives are organized? It is my understanding that some are transferred to another archive at some point and other, documentary materials are retained here? Do you have a relationship with the Polish National Archives, for example?

MC: We have a couple different collections in our archives. We hold the archives of people who have worked here. We also have files about our exhibitions as well as some very logistical files, like how much we had to pay for new windows or something like that. Those kinds of documents go the National Archive in Warsaw after a few years, but before that happens, we make digital copies of the most interesting documents, so they can still be accessed here. Then, of course, we have books and catalogues, about 60,000 in total, plus newspapers and magazines from all over the world since the beginning of the nineteenth century. We also have press clippings about our museum and a digital collection of interviews with artists. Finally, we have a photo archive of exhibitions and openings and a database of the works in our collection. 

ME: I was very impressed by the photographs in your online digital archive. Can you talk a little bit about the materials you have made available on your website?

MC: The online collection contains between 15,000 to 16,000 photographs –installation images from exhibitions and of artworks—from the 1930s to the late 1980s. I spent nine years digitizing and identifying these materials to the extent that I could recognize all or most individuals in the photographs.

ME: Nine years! That’s a big project.

MC: And we are still working on it, as we are constantly mounting new exhibitions.

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Reflection by Ksenia Nouril, C-MAP Central and Eastern Europe Fellow

After weeks spent busy organizing the second C-MAP Central and Eastern European Group trip to Moscow, I found myself on the nine-hour flight from New York, wondering what to do with a brief moment of respite. Running through my mind were the intricacies of our densely packed schedule of meetings with artists and curators, tours of historic cultural sites, visits to museums, and the grand opening of the first Triennial of Russian Contemporary Art at the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art. There is always so much to do and so little time in a metropolis like Moscow, a city I have come to love dearly through my many visits as an independent scholar and then C-MAP fellow for Central and Eastern European art at MoMA.

I was reminded of Moscow’s entrancing effect when I decided to spend my inflight time re-watching the classic Soviet film Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears (1981), which tells the story of three young women who have moved to Moscow from the provinces in the 1950s to learn about life and love, often the hard way. The film’s opening credits roll on the backdrop of a bird’s-eye view of Moscow. In the city’s skyline, one can spot the many bridges that cross the Moscow River, a few of the tiered-cake-like buildings known as the Seven Sisters, its wide boulevards, and the vast network of housing blocks that encircle the city center with micro-neighborhoods for the proletariat. Moscow has the reputation for being synonymous with Russia. It is the largest city in the largest country in the world, making it the de facto center of Russian politics, economics, and culture. Moscow monopolizes the country’s and the world’s imagination; however, there is so much more beyond it, spanning a Russian Eurasian landmass from the Gulf of Finland in the west to the Bering Sea in the east.

Yet, Moscow continues to be a major crossroads for people, places, and things traversing the globe. The Garage Museum of Contemporary Art actualized this by bringing more than sixty artists from about forty cities to Moscow for the first Triennial of Russian Contemporary Art. This was no easy feat—the result of many months of travel to places with varying languages and customs, in several different time zones. My further comments will focus on just a few artists—both included and excluded in Garage’s Triennial—who caught my attention because of the ways their works navigate complicated geographies.

Based between Dagestan, a republic in the North Caucasus region, and Moscow, Taus Makhacheva mines the histories of her family and her country in multimedia works that engage the viewer through impassioned narrative and performance. Makhacheva screened several films for the C-MAP Central and Eastern European Group, including Tightrope (2015), which most recently was exhibited in the main pavilion of the 57th Venice Biennale. Delving deep into personal archives, the artist researched the lives of tightrope walkers and aligned their previously invisible history with that of the precarity of the art collections in the underfunded and underappreciated regional museums across the former Soviet Union. In the film, a tightrope walker individually carries one of several dozen works from the Dagestan Museum of Fine Arts, named after P. S. Gamzatova, across a sizeable gap between two cliffs. While the elevation goes unstated, it is clear that he is performing a feat of epic proportions. Seemingly futile, the tightrope walker’s action metaphorically points to the urgent need for “keepers” of cultural histories, as Makhacheva herself dedicates much of her work to questioning the parameters of such histories and the role of the artist in their preservation. The film is often accompanied by a performance entitled On the Benefits of Pyramids in Cultural Education, Strengthening of National Consciousness, and the Formation of Moral and Ethical Guideposts, in which acrobats, hired locally at the site of the given exhibition, restage this symbolic movement of paintings in a gymnastics routine.

Sergey Sapozhnikov is a photographer based in Rostov-on-Don in southern Russia, not far from the Ukrainian and Georgian borders. When Sapozhnikov is not shuttling back and forth to Moscow, where he often exhibits, he is photographing his hometown and the cities beyond. His book The City, published in 2016, is composed of black-and-white photographs of freestanding houses, apartment complexes, garages, commercial buildings, and other similar structures in various states of disrepair in Rostov-on-Don; Samara, in the Volga region; and Vladivostok, in the far east of Russia. On the one hand, the photographs document the everyday in Russia today. On the other hand, they also capture an absence, as the figure—human or animal—is conspicuously missing. Unfortunately, the C-MAP Central and Eastern European Group was unable to meet with Sapozhnikov on this trip—having met him on our first trip to Russia in 2015—since he was home in Rostov-on-Don, working on his next project. However, we visited his exhibition The Drama Machine at the gallery at the Udarnik Cinema with Teresa Mavica, director of the V-A-C Foundation, which has supported Sapozhnikov’s work in the past. Through both color and black-and-white photographs, the photographs in The Drama Machine capture the Maxim Gorky Drama Theater, designed by the architects Vladimir Shchuko and Vladimir Gelfreikh in the early 1930s in the Sapozhnikovs’ native Rostov-on-Don. The Constructivist-inspired building itself figures in only a few of the photographs, along with some archival materials, but it serves as inspiration for the artist’s own constructions, namely, images of what appear to be found or partially staged heaps of garbage—wooden pallets, metal crates, bolts of fabric—on and around which actors and dancers—his acquaintances—play in a phantasmagoric mise-en-scène.

Upon hearing his life story, one can say that Haim Sokol is a professional migrant. Born in the northern city of Arkhangelsk to a displaced Ukrainian-Jewish family, Sokol lived in Israel for sixteen years after the fall of the Soviet Union before relocating, in 2001, to Moscow, where he still lives and works. Thus, it is not surprising that Sokol’s work is preoccupied with the topics of dislocation and self-identity. For his film I am Spartacus (2012), the artist hired economic migrants to reenact the iconic scene from Stanley Kubrick’s 1960 Hollywood classic Spartacus. As in the original, these men, who come to Moscow from Central Asia for better yet still low-paying manual-labor jobs, join forces in claiming to be Spartacus, the slave who led the uprising against the Roman Republic around 111 BC. They are stronger together than on their own. The two-minute-and-seven-second film is short but powerful, as the viewer is swept away in solidarity. In keeping with his nomadic lifestyle, Sokol was between studios earlier this year, and so we met him in the Garage Education Center, where he screened his films and shared his installations and works on paper with us. We previously met Sokol on our 2015 trip to Moscow, when we saw his work Well (2013) in a group exhibition at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art. It comprises hundreds of photographic portraits that Sokol had collected over the years, which are laid inside a large, open-top structure that invites the viewer to peek inside and contemplate the histories and fates of these anonymous subjects.

Reflection by Sara Bodison

A few days before our trip to Moscow, the C-MAP Central and Eastern Europe Group had a chance to meet with artist and human rights activist Victoria Lomasko. She was in New York promoting her new book Other Russias and drawing a site-specific mural for an exhibition of her work Unwanted Women at Ortega y Gassett Projects in Brooklyn.

Other Russias is the first collection of Lomasko’s graphic reportage, a body of work that she produced between 2008 and 2016. It features drawings she made directly from life, capturing everything from protests and political trials in Moscow to people she met during her travels across Russia—everyone from school teachers in small villages to sex workers in dying industrial towns to juveniles in a drawing class she taught at a detention center. She said she allows her subjects to review and approve their own words, which she uses as captions. Lomasko explains that by documenting her subjects through drawing, rather than through photography or video, she aims “to break through to a more direct grasp and reflection of the reality around me.” Beginning in 2012 Lomasko curated The Feminist Pencil, a series of exhibitions (and related publications) showcasing socially engaged graphic art by women—from manga to graffiti. When we were in Moscow we met with her co-curator for the exhibition, Nadia Plungian, a historian, artist, and activist whose current research focuses on LGBT history in Russia and queerness and masculinity of female figures in Soviet socialist realism.

We also saw sixteen of Lomasko’s drawings of protestors demonstrating for and against Pussy Riot (among other issues) featured in the inaugural Garage Triennial of Russian Contemporary Art in Moscow. They were on view in a gallery devoted to one of the exhibition’s thematic vectors—“Art in Action”—featuring eleven artists and collectives who “intend to be catalysts for social change.” At the center of this gallery were four sewing-machine stations, where Shvemy sewing cooperative performed 12-Hour Workday, re-creating and critiquing a real workday at a sweatshop, on opening weekend. Over the course of the long day, they worked rapidly in an assembly line to produce fanny packs, taking just three bathroom breaks and a fifteen-minute lunch break, and speaking only of work. The next day they sold the packs, which they had emblazoned with the phrase “Made in Slavery,” for forty-four rubles each—the average sum a Russian worker is paid per garment. The collective takes the sweatshop as the subject of its work because they believe it is “the main place where poverty is propagated today, as well as being a place of subjection to the powers that have created and maintained such labor conditions.”

An adjacent vector titled “Personal Mythologies” featured the work of Gentle Women group, who examine gender issues through the “complex of myths, ideas and common beliefs about what women are. . . .” The video Bread and Salt shows a woman salting the sea, remnants from another performance, archival images, and a visitor’s review, which states: “This is exactly what a woman should do, something that looks beautiful, but is in fact pretty useless. Spending time and energy on salting the sea but forgetting to salt her own soup.” Other works explored aspects of the body and childbirth including a video of a woman squeezing breast milk at the camera.

The last day of our visit we met with Taus Makhacheva, whose work (including The Way of An Object, which was featured in the Triennial) draws inspiration from her native Dagestan. I was particularly delighted to hear her speak about the work of her “colleague and alter ego Super Taus,” who wears traditional clothing and lives in the mountains with her family. In one performance Super Taus carried a giant sculpture on her back through the galleries of Centre Pompidou, stunning passersby. In another, seemingly impossible act, she walked from Dagestan to Moscow carrying a monument. And in yet another she spent nine minutes pushing a giant boulder to clear the road, all captured in a dashcam video circulated on WhatsApp in hopes that it would go viral—heroic indeed!

These diverse works by women artists and collectives—whether drawn, sewn, thrown, or pushed—help to give voice to voiceless citizens, make visible invisible labor practices, and heroicize unsung heroes. The varied perspectives, strategies, and forms of their works offer new insights (and in some cases, much-welcome levity) about many of the most pressing social and political issues facing Russia today.

Reflection by Roxana Marcoci

In March 2017, the C-MAP Central and Eastern European group traveled to Moscow to attend the opening of the first Triennial of Russian Contemporary Art organized by the art museum Garage with works from across Russia’s eleven time zones. The exhibition included 68 artists and collectives and was organized by a six-person curatorial team around seven vectors: “Master Figure,” “Art in Action,” “Fidelity to Place,” “Personal Mythologies,” “Common Language,” “Local Histories of Art,” and “Mythologies.” The exhibition maps Russia today as a place grounded in multiple heritages (Russia comprises two hundred nationalities)—from Siberia to Chechnya—construing a prismatic montage of the different cultures from within its borders. One of the thorny issues surrounding the Triennial was the inclusion of Crimea —the Ukrainian territory that was annexed by Russia in 2014. The curatorial decision was to address the artistic life in the region but also to critically tackle its political underpinnings through a series of actions: a performance by Simferopol-based Free Dance Lab group; a discussion about Crimean artists working in Crimea, Ukraine, and Russia; and a presentation of Chto Delat’s Safe Haven (2016), a film about Crimean filmmaker Oleg Sentsov, who is currently imprisoned in Russia for protesting the annexation.

2017 marks the centennial anniversary of the Russian Revolution, and although exhibitions celebrating the event abound across museums from New York to Chicago, London, Paris, and Venice, no institution in Moscow seems to mention this political milestone, which buttressed the rise of Russia’s first artistic avant-garde—as if the word “revolution” in itself could stir unwanted political discontent. The Garage Triennial may be the exception. A cross-generational exhibition, it includes works that have been made since 2012, the year of the last Russian presidential elections, which brought Vladimir Putin once again to the helm of the Russian Federation. In particular, the section “Art in Action” features urgent, politically charged work by fringe feminist collectives and activists such as Shvemy sewing cooperative, Victoria Lomasko, Urbanfeminism, and Nadenka creative association, who address issues including domestic violence (recently decriminalized in Russia) and the repression of LGBTQ rights (public displays of homosexuality are illegal), as well as sweatshop labor.

The section “Fidelity to Place,” which focused on associating sociopolitical themes with the landscape and broader environment, was particularly well curated. It included various works from Taus Makhacheva’s marionettes, with their emphasis on the traditional, the ethnic, and the modern; to Aslan Gaisumov’s display of recovered house numbers from his partially destroyed hometown of Grozny; to Vladimir Seleznyov’s Metropolis. Nizhny Tagil, an immersive installation filled with empty milk cartons, sardine cans, shoeboxes, and other discarded items that the artist had gathered from his Ural hometown.

Additionally, Garage’s Rem Koolhaas–designed facade was topped with an Ugo Rondinone rainbow sign. As part of the museum’s inclusivity program, children from across the country were invited to collaborate, contributing some 1500 pictures of their own rainbows, which were hung on a wall in front of the museum’s entrance.

With the idea of furthering international exchange, Garage Museum awarded travel grants to ten international curators—Riksa Afiaty (Indonesia), Çelenk Bafra (Turkey), Lizaveta German (Ukraine), Jarrett Gregory (United States), Albert Heta (Kosovo), Li Qi (China), Joanna Sokołowska (Poland), Polly Staple (Great Britain), Chen Tamir (Israel), and Diana Ukhina (Kyrgyzstan)—who were able to visit and reflect on the exhibition.

Reflection by  Ana Janevski

After two rich days in Moscow visiting many museums, seeing historical and contemporary shows, and engaging in stimulating conversations with artists, curators, and peers, we attended the opening of the first edition of the Garage Triennial of Russian Contemporary Art on Wednesday evening, May 9. The opening was very festive, gathering most of the artists presenting works, Moscow’s principal art figures, and several of the ten international curators who had been awarded travel grants, offered by Garage, to visit the exhibition.

What we learned about the Triennial before attending was that it included sixty artists from across the country selected by six members of the Garage curatorial team. The Triennial was commissioned and conceived by Kate Fowle, chief curator of Garage. Overseen by Fowle, Katya Inozemtseva, Snejana Krasteva, Andrey Misiano, Ilmira Bolotyan, Sasha Obukhova, and Tanya Volkova traveled throughout the country, visiting “forty cities and towns, crossing eleven times zones, in climates that range from the subtropical to the subarctic.” Later I learned that there are nearly two hundred nationalities and one hundred distinct languages spoken in Russia.

The two floors of the overall space were broken down by individual curators into seven “vectors,” or thematic groupings, including “Master Figure,” “Personal Mythologies,” “Street Morphology,” “Common Language,” “Fidelity to Place,” “Art in Action,” and “Local Histories of Art.”

Although an opening is not usually an ideal moment to thoroughly view an exhibition, I had a chance to join Snejana Krasteva’s tour, which she gave together with Maria Lind, director of Tensta konsthall in Stockholm, and Zdenka Badovinac, director of the Museum of Modern Art in Ljubljana, Slovenia. I joined them on the first floor, in “Master Figure,” where Krasteva was talking about Andrei Monastirsky, one of the founders of Moscow Conceptualism. Monastirsky was presenting four new videos in a series entitled Four Walks (2017). All walks started in the same place, which was significant to the history of Moscow Conceptualism, but each one ended at a different Moscow landmark. The other artists represented in this vector were Pavel Aksenov, Dmitry Bulatov, Ilgizar Khasanov, Anatoly Osmolovsky, and Dmitri Prigov. Each one of these artists, in his own specific way, has had an impact on the younger generation of artists across the huge territory of Russia. We asked Krasteva why there were not any women artists represented in “Master Figure.” She said the curators were aware of the strong presence of male artists in this section, but that there were no equally influential women artists of this same generation. While this explanation left me and my tour companions a bit perplexed, the next vector, entitled “Art in Action,” presented a very different situation, with a dominating number of female artists, whose work seemed to reference other “master” figures.

The path of the overall exhibition was pretty fluid, with open space, but some of the vectors were more delineated—as was the case with “Art in Action,” which occupied an entire gallery. The evening before, together with my colleague Laura Hoptman, a curator from the Department of Painting, and Viktor Misiano, a well-known Russian curator, we had talked about the important and controversial performances in the nineties by Alexander Brener, Oleg Kulik, and Avdei Ter-Oganian. We ended our conversation by discussing the generation of artists who have followed in their footsteps. “Art in Action” seemed to start exactly where our discussion had ended, by bringing together collectives and artists whose works focus mainly on critiques of social and political issues, and intend art as a catalyst of social change. They often consider themselves more activists than artists, practicing social work, journalism, or political activism, as is the case with Artem Loskutov, the organizer of the annual happening “Monstration,” or Katrin Nenasheva, whose public actions bring attention to the system of “corrective” psychiatry. The artistic collectives from the beginning of this decade, such as Voina, Pussy Riot, and Chto Delat, had a very strong influence on these younger artists, some of whom attended Chto Delat’s School for Engaged Art in St. Petersburg. Special attention was given to feminist issues, including domestic violence and emancipation from patriarchal society and institutions, through the works of collectives such as Shvemy sewing cooperative, a clothing manufacturing cooperative and collective who performed 12-Hour Workday, in which they re-created a factory workday at the opening; Nadenka creative association, who presented embroidered everyday objects and clothing with slogans that address the position of women in Russian society; and Urbanfeminism, who organized, among many other initiatives, self-defense classes for women and also published zines that were distributed in exchange for donations to a center for victims of sexual assault and shown in the gallery.

A few of the other artists represented in this gallery also had very personal and specific ways of dealing with the country’s salient political issues: Victoria Lomasko’s drawings refer to the prerevolutionary tradition of visual reportage. In Chronicles of Resistance (2011–12), she documents the Moscow demonstration from 2012 with direct quotes from participants. Alexey Iorsh’s project Art Activism in Comics (2012–ongoing) champions comics as a tool of activism. Anastasia Potemkina’s Bruise (2014) turn traces of physical violence into aesthetic images using the traditional medium of watercolor, while Alisa Yoffe’s large-format works in black and white present images with revolutionary potential.

The day after the opening, when we returned to the Triennial, we had a tour with another of its curators Andrei Misiano. It was interesting to follow the path of a different curator and to get his perspective on the overall exhibition. I went back to “Art in Action” to confirm that the challenging task of presenting this kind of work, mainly through its documentation, has been well resolved. The display presented a variety of media and was testament to a very vital and engaged artistic scene, one that is responsive in many different ways to current local and international social and political issues.

Reflection by  David Platzker

Myths and religion are the building blocks of art and art history. Artists, artisans, commissioners, collectors, historians, and curators have long reveled in portraying, possessing, and presenting stories of biblical, political, historic, personal, and otherwise divine sagas.

In this very traditional sense, the purest roles of art are that of storytelling, chronicling, interpreting, and messaging narrated moments—as slices of a feed if you will—to audiences as facts, morals, or parables. In eras long before photography was the primary tool of disseminating truths to a public audience, where literacy of images was often greater than that of written language, pictures—chiefly paintings—conveyed the majesty of ideals, since seeing encouraged believing.

In the early years of the twenty-first century, in the post-photography, post-video, post-internet, post-fact world, the art of telling stories has evolved to suit our times. Belief has become restructured by a cynicism that what we see in any medium—whether static imagery, video, aural, or textual—and is strained by an erosion of confidence that what is being conveyed is an objective-based reality. The power of a story solidified as a still image in any medium is tempered too by the locus of the delivery system by which one experiences a captured moment. Here, context drives experience, with perceptions shifting based on where and how an image is presented as much as on what the image is of. The question herein is whether the presentation in the context of a museum or a reputable newspaper connotes a definitional environment—an authentic place of faithful engagement, one that is greater in value—as a substrate for understanding that is the same, or as effective, as if it were presented on the screen of a cell phone without broader contextual surroundings.

Contemporarily tinkering with authenticity and with the crafting of new personal mythologies is the medium for artists Taus Makhacheva (b. 1983) and Evgeny Antufiev (b. 1986), who were featured in the Garage Triennial of Russian Contemporary Art and also made individual presentations to our C-MAP group on March 10, 2017. Rephrasing history and fashioning unique fictional narratives are the subjective materials of both artists, who take divergent, often intentionally humorous approaches to constructing chronicles that teeter between personal and colloquially regional experiences. Makhacheva, who is based in both her native city of Makhachkala, Dagestan, and Moscow, spoke to us about her work and alter ego—a character named Super Taus, who is a nondescript, ethnically clothed woman with the superpower of great physical strength tempered by utmost modesty. Deployed by Makhacheva, Super Taus appears in video works the artist has shared with the public though social media, confusing the underlying interpretation of the works as factual documentation of real feats of strength, as humor, and/or as a product of an artistic process. Equally challenging is whether such differentiations are even necessarily good or an indispensable prerequisite to an appreciation of the endeavor. It can be viewed here.

Falling short of starting his own religion, Antufiev discussed how his sculptures and installations reflect a desire on his part to craft objects that can be read as depicting alleged deities and the their accoutrements in a way that feels ancient formally and materially—conceivably as freshly unearthed artifacts rather than as contemporary works of art. As Antufiev spoke of his activities, it was clear that he has an inherent, contagious sense of humor, which left some of us wishing for more.

In Makhacheva’s and Antufiev’s presentations, we heard from artists who recognize that deploying regionalism and unique cultural identities, and parlaying the ethos or mystique of a nondominant culture within the space—such as a museum in Moscow or a cell-phone screen—enhance a deliberate ideal of separation from cultural dominance toward a fuzzy sense of romanticism of “the other.” This appeal is, in fact, a subversive return to a genuine simplicity predicated on the removal of the layered necessity to understand artworks as composites of the history that backs their places in an expansive, logical march of progression, wherein one form of art owes its existence—or interpretation—to prior works, and how they have become contextualized in word and presentation by their interpreters, such as historians, critics, curators, and educators, to the public.

Reflection by Jon Hendricks

Beautiful Moscow! I was so happy to return and to be embraced by its extraordinary art and architecture, and especially by its people. We have made many friends on our two trips to the city, and it is really unfair to single out just a few to write about. In 2015, we saw Sasha Pirogova’s work in Berlin at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Kreuzberg, and I had the very special treat of sitting with her during a luncheon in the garden. She is an absolutely brilliant artist and thinker. This March she presented her work—a large-scale projection of choreographed waiting, anticipation, the not-yet-seen, the unknown—in the Garage Triennial of Russian Contemporary Art. Deceptively simple, and even seemingly trivial, this work is a profound metaphor for the future: What will it be? Who will be a part of it? Who will be excluded? It is about the inevitable . . .

Pirogova also gave our group a private presentation of her work the day following the opening of the Triennial, showing us several video works, and talking about her concepts and approaches to her practice. This year she will be one of the representatives of Russia in the Venice Biennale and so is in the process of preparing a new work, which we all are eager to see and experience. Pirogova is one of a small group of the new generation of artists around the world who has the ability to perceive the direction of our time and to open our eyes to it.

Another artist our group met in 2015 in Moscow, and whose work I have been very impressed with, is Alisa Yoffe. She was represented in the Triennial by a stunning wall of brutal drawings—stark and ominous in their direct confrontation with viewers. They have anger and, at the same time, anxiety, as well as convey Yoffe’s concerns about the world around her—temporal, fleeting, meaningless, seeking. We were very fortunate that she and three of her friends, Veronika Aktanova, David Ter-Oganyan, and Phillip Hulamhanov, could join a few of our group in the rooftop lounge of our hotel, following the opening of the Triennial, to talk and drink some delicious vodka. I think that this informal, spur-of-the-moment gathering was an important interaction with these young Russian artists—giving us unscripted insight into their work and thinking—something that I hope will happen more frequently in the future.

I also want to say how important I found our meeting with George Kiesewalter. He gave us a brief presentation of his work as part of Collective Actions group and also of his amazing photographic documentation of the Moscow avant-garde. I so hope that we can meet with him again in Moscow, and spend an afternoon talking and looking at his work. I think that this will be essential to our deeper understanding of this very vibrant and significant period in Russian art.

Of course, there is so much more to talk about. There was the fantastic exhibition at the New Tretyakov Gallery, The Thaw. At the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, the very stimulating exhibition Facing the Future: Art in Europe 1945–1968, curated by Peter Weibel, places Russian art in the context of other European art of this time—and we were fortunate to have Weibel talk with some of us about the works as we looked at them. And yes, I did like the NAÏVE . . . NO exhibition at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art, and the Sergei Eisenstein exhibition at the Multimedia Art Museum.

Reflection by Erik Patton

Midway through the trip, after a visit to the Foundation of Vladimir Smirnov and Konstantine Sorokin, the group found its way to the soon-to-be V-A-C Foundation’s new Moscow site, GES-2, a former power station (built in 1907) that is being re-envisioned as a major site for contemporary art and culture. The Renzo Piano Building Workshop has been commissioned to revive and redesign the GES-2 main building and the surrounding area on the banks of the Moskva River. At the center of the newly imagined site is the institution’s commitment to performance (a large performance and theater-like space will take up a sizable footprint), which V-A-C has prioritized in recent years as made evident in its V-A-C Live programming with Whitechapel Gallery in London.

In fact, Moscow-based artist Evgeny Antufiev, with whom we met later on for a group-on-one studio visit (Antufiev’s work is also included in the Garage Triennial of Russian Contemporary Art), performed as a special guest at CABARET KULTURA with V-A-C Live (in September 2016 at Whitechapel), a series of experimental events inspired by Russian early twentieth-century avant-garde theater that took place in Russian artist Sergey Sapozhnikov’s site-specific stage set. For his performance, Antufiev created an absurdist and humorous lottery game featuring his objects-as-gifts in a playfully dark performance Dead Nation: Bingo Version.

Antufiev’s work in the Garage’s Triennial continued his interest in active mythmaking, the absurd, and his commitment to collecting and studying materials on Russian history and culture, including a monumental wooden sculpture in the tradition of the Scythians or the Etruscans. Other reliquaries on view referenced his personal history and family lineage (his grandmother’s teeth had found their way into his work).

At and around Garage MCA by Michelle Elligott

Reflection by Juliet Kinchin

Around the world there has been a rash of exhibitions and publications responding in some way to the centennial of the Russian Revolution, including MoMA’s own A Revolutionary Impulse: The Rise of the Russian Avant-Garde, which gave us all the chance to wallow in the riches of the Museum’s Russian avant-garde works from the years 1912 to 1935 while in the process of planning and discussing our Moscow trip. Yet evidence of a comparable Russian interest in this centenary was conspicuous by its absence from our Moscow itinerary. A couple of our Russian colleagues suggested that in the current political climate, the authorities have been reluctant to draw attention to a time of seismic revolution and a violent overthrow of the status quo. Instead there seemed to be a citywide focus on a less traumatic period of technological modernization and cultural cross-fertilization—the years of the “Thaw” after Stalin’s death in 1953 and before the “Stagnation” of the 1970s. The largest and most ambitious of these exhibitions was The Thaw at the New Tretyakov Gallery, which presented a nuanced view of the period’s achievements and conflicts, addressing the shadow cast by hidden histories of wartime suffering and Stalinist internment camps, as well as the triumphalist rhetoric of land reclamation, space exploration, and technological progress. The exhibition was organized like an urban plan, the thematic sections’ skillfully integrated displays—of paintings, sculpture, prints, photography, and film, with architectural models, samples of industrial design, household objects, and popular magazines—radiating out from an evocation of Mayakovsky Square. There was a wealth of mesmerizing design material: photographs of Kalinin Avenue under construction in the 1960s; an experimental electronic-music studio; abstract printed textiles; a 1967 “Saturn” vacuum cleaner; a scary-looking 1965 model of a mobile nuclear power plant; Hula Hoop, painted in 1968 by D. I. Blokhintsev, head of the Institute for Nuclear Research and world authority on quantum mechanics; and the intriguing discovery that a woman, Galina Balashova (b. 1931), designed the interiors of the Soyuz space capsule in 1964.

An exhibition on the design of everyday life, Moscow Thaw: 1953–1968 at the Museum of Moscow was less coherent in both concept and installation, an impression not helped by the minimal, Russian-only labeling. It was interesting, nevertheless, to see materials from little-known archives and collections being documented and brought together in a public display for the first time. At the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, curators chose to lead off from Ossip Zadkine’s sculpture The Destroyed City in their wide-ranging survey of fine-art trends in Eastern and Western Europe after the war, entitled Facing the Future: Art in Europe 1945–68. Art from the Soviet Union was combined with that of seventeen other European countries in a series of telling juxtapositions, such as Hungarian Béla Kondor’s Phenomenon and Constant’s New Babylon (1967), challenging the conventional binary narrative of West = Abstract Expressionism versus East = Socialist Realism. Alongside familiar paintings were many I had never seen before, including Picasso’s Massacre in Korea (1951) and two Leipzig artists’ responses to the Hungarian Revolution: The Dead Dove (1956) by Harald Metzkes, and White Terror in Hungary (1957) by Werner Tübke.

An exhibition of photographs from the 1980s by Igor Mukhin was the Multimedia Art Museum’s contribution to Fashion and Style in Photography 2017, part of the 10th Moscow International Biennale. Compared to Moscow’s Garage Triennial of Russian Contemporary Art, this biennale did not seem to have a high profile. It was interesting to see Mukhin’s photographs of crumbling Soviet sculptures, part of his Monuments series (1988), after visiting Muzeon, the park of similarly uprooted and toppled sculptures next to the New Tretyakov Gallery. Many of the images were reproduced as attention-grabbing floor-to-ceiling wallpapers rather than as vintage prints. Some of the music-based alternative culture Mukhin captured in the 1980s I had encountered last year in the excellent Notes from the Underground: Art and Alternative Music in Eastern Europe 1968–1994, curated by Daniel Muzyczuk and David Crowley at Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź. Also, at the Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow, there was an exhibition that took a deeper dive into the films, drawings, designs, and photographs of Sergei Eisenshtein. Eisenshtein’s film and visual ideas drawn from the time he spent in Mexico, and his 1931 drawing of Saint Veronica as the patron saint of photojournalism remain among my favorite memories of this trip.

Reflection by Maria Marchenkova

One of my favorite things about Moscow is its panoply of architectural styles—medieval churches, audacious Stalinist skyscrapers, and gaudy post-Soviet, postmodern developments, to name just a few—and the dramatic history they evoke. In Moscow the past seems especially strongly imprinted on the urban environment, because the country’s sharp breaks with its own history have repeatedly involved drastically, even violently, reshaping the landscape, with seemingly little regard for its value.

I was reminded of this during the C-MAP trip when I picked up an issue of the Moscow Times that contained an article about the city’s plans to demolish eight thousand local Khrushchevki, five-story apartment buildings named after Nikita Khrushchev, who initiated their construction on a vast scale in the 1950s in response to the country’s postwar housing shortage. Granted, these buildings have few defenders: they are not considered architectural gems and are generally in bad shape. But even structures that are esteemed by scholars and experts around the world, particularly those designed by the Soviet avant-garde, have generally not fared well. The Melnikov House (1927–29), designed by Konstantin Melnikov, might qualify as a rare success story, but even its long-awaited opening as a museum in 2014, after years of legal battles over ownership, was controversial, with architects and other experts protesting that proper renovation work hadn’t been done. Most historic avant-garde work has fared much worse. The iconic Shukhov Tower, by Vladimir Shukhov, for example, which was completed in 1922 and transmitted the first radio and television signals in the Soviet Union, has been mired in disputes about its conservation for years. Sadly, the official attitude toward the city’s rich modernist architecture seems to range from ambivalence to hostility.

There are, however, a number of individuals and organizations advocating for awareness and preservation of these historic treasures. One of them is Natalia Melikova, who founded The Constructivist Project, a website that contains invaluable research, documentation, maps, and news, in 2010. Having recently discovered this resource, I was delighted when Melikova agreed to join the C-MAP group on an unofficial architecture tour. On our last day in the city, we set out to look at some early twentieth-century avant-garde buildings. The first stop was a bit of an outlier: Le Corbusier’s Centrosoyuz headquarters (1928–36). Although designed by an architect from outside the USSR, for our group, this building, the only one by the modernist master in Russia, was a must-see. We also visited the Zuev Workers’ Club (1927–29), designed by Ilia Alexandrovich Golosov. One of many such projects executed by the Bolsheviks to provide spaces where workers could be entertained and educated in line with socialist values, the club now houses a theater; its exterior has remained largely intact even as its interior has sadly been altered.

And we were fortunate enough to be able to get inside what is perhaps the most famous surviving example of Soviet avant-garde architecture: Moisei Ginzburg and Ignatii Milinis’s Narkomfin building (1928–30). Commissioned to house employees of the finance ministry, Narkomfin was originally conceived as a four-building complex where private quarters would be mixed with shared amenities, including a library, fitness center, laundry, and nursery, thereby facilitating a new communal mode of living. Although it was never completed as planned, it is nevertheless exemplary of a brief period when architects of the young Soviet Union were deeply engaged in a radical experiment in housing and had some official support. As the well-known story goes, that period quickly came to a close, as the state, under Stalin’s leadership, clamped down on the avant-garde. For a building that has been extensively studied and continues to be admired as an incredible expression of the Constructivists’ vision, Narkomfin is in a shocking state of disrepair. As our group wandered the halls of the six-story apartment block and visited several units, the beauty of the entire scheme and of the double-height apartments was still evident despite the decades of neglect. It was a privilege to see this historic site, whose future is still uncertain.

Reflection by Samantha Friedman

Many things struck me on my first trip to Moscow—also my first trip with C-MAP—from the imposing width of the streets to the incisively personal nature of much of the art we saw, at a time when international production can seem increasingly characterless. One of the things that left an especially strong impression on me, as we zipped from venue to venue, was something between architecture and the art itself, namely the presence of highly visible, anything-but-neutral exhibition design. Perhaps this should not have been surprising in Russia, a country whose avant-garde (which continues to haunt the contemporary in myriad ways) included a deep commitment to the design of all aspects of art and life. Seeing Gustav Klutsis’s radical designs for radio orators and propaganda kiosks at the New Tretyakov Gallery reminded me of this tradition in which the mechanics of display are as fully imagined as the message:

The lineage of this practice was visible just a few rooms away, where Kazimir Malevich’s Black Suprematic Square—Moscow’s art pilgrimage site par excellence—was guarded by a barrier of very particular design. At MoMA, we adopt bland metal stanchions (or, even better, sparkle tape on the floor) to avoid competing with the work itself. But here, the spirit of a Stenberg brothers’ spatial construction was incorporated into the institutional identity of the gallery:

From there it was on to Moscow’s Multimedia Art Museum, where an extensive exhibition on Sergei Eisenstein was the main attraction. The artist and filmmaker’s revolutionary theories of montage were expressed not only within the film excerpts on display, but also in the exhibition design. With a dizzying mix of large hanging projections, smaller wall-mounted screens, and framed drawings and photographs, the gallery space itself fulfilled Eisenstein’s call for “an idea that arises from the collision of independent shots.”

Something more roughhewn, if no less idiosyncratic, awaited at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art’s NAÏVE . . . NO exhibition, which sought out “historical and stylistic parallels between naïve art and primitivism of the 20th and 21st centuries.” Galleries were organized thematically—under such rubrics as “Childhood” or “Labor”—and each had a corresponding mise en scène, from painted white wood plinths for the former to tall grasses for the latter:

At the Museum of Moscow, the exhibition Moscow Thaw: 1953–1968 explored the material culture of that post-Stalin period. Fine art, as well as design objects, graphics, fashion, and cinema were arrayed across a white skeletal structure, vaguely reminiscent of the exhibition design for the Russian room of the 1929 Film und Foto exhibition in Stuttgart:

Finally, while the overall exhibition design of the Garage Triennial was relatively straightforward, certain of its artists seemed to reference the tradition of avant-garde display structures in the works themselves. In their 1.5 x 1.5 SCHOOL, the Zip Group set up an apparatus containing multiple “schools”—“The School of Collective Actions and Debates,” for example, and “The School of Rave and Performance.” Each operated as a laboratory for visitor participation—whether to converse, to draw, to exercise, or to nap—and all were encompassed within an overarching, crudely Constructivist architecture. Welcoming and exuberant, providing both a place of culture and a place of rest, this work harnessed the best of the spirit of revolutionary Russian exhibition design.

Reflection by Paulina Pobocha

The New Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow houses an extraordinary collection of Russian art, with an especially strong selection of work from the early twentieth century. Its holdings include terrific examples of work by the greats: Alexandra Exter, Natalia Goncharova, Alexei Jawlensky, Vasily Kandinsky, Gustav Klutsis, Mikhail Larionov, Lyubov Popova, Aleksandr Rodchenko, Varvara Stepanova, Vladimir Tatlin, and many others. Malevich’s Black Suprematic Square (1915) casually hangs in a gallery sparsely populated with visitors but richly contextualized by other paintings and a selection of sculptures by the artist, made both before and after this iconic work of the Russian avant-garde. The galleries that lead up to Black Suprematic Square and those that follow insist, by virtue of the collection, on the local (national) history against which it should be read. The relationship between Malevich’s radically reductive abstractions and Russia’s rich tradition of folk art and religious (Byzantine) painting becomes paramount to an understanding of the latter and its broader milieu. In this context the artist’s stated desire for “a renovation of life through artistic form” seems less utopian and almost nearly attainable. Though we all know it didn’t turn out that way, the Tretyakov can make the case for what could have been in a way impossible for any Western museum. It is also uniquely equipped to show what followed: decades of Socialist Realist genre paintings, heavy with symbolism and propaganda. Though not uninteresting, they extinguished the promise of the Revolution with every committed comrade depicted. After seeing rooms of paintings and sculptures of mothers, farmers, soldiers, bureaucrats, and even astronauts meticulously and idealistically rendered as though out of time—in staunch defiance of reality, for all their realism—the need for Gorbachev’s twin policies of glasnost and perestroika felt almost as urgent as they must have been. They resound across the art produced in the 1980s, vibrantly on display in newly installed galleries devoted to Sots Art, where work by Erik Bulatov and Ilya Kabakov joins that by Yuri Albert, Ivan Chuykov, Nest (Gndezdo) Group, Boris Orlov, Leonid Sokov, and others to reintroduce a desperately needed critical perspective and an as-urgent dose of humor. Above all, and in contrast to that which had immediately come before, it felt unequivocally of its time. Our aim at MoMA is to expand the story of modernism that we are able to tell. To do so meaningfully depends on a deep knowledge of art historical contexts at far remove from our own. The Tretyakov presents precisely this—from its holdings emerges a rhythmic and episodic narrative that tells a story of the twentieth century, narrow in geographic focus but rich in texture, nuance, and detail, critical to any serious understanding, let alone future research.

Reflection by David Senior

Since I had never been to Moscow before, everything was of interest to me as we took in the city, its layout, and the architecture while being toured around the city center. Often, we had extra time to take it in as we sat in Moscow’s traffic.

When we arrived at the New Tretyakov Gallery, I sprinted past most of the special exhibits on my way to the Russian paintings, sculpture, and prints from the historical avant-garde, which make upthe core of the permanent collection. It was especially thrilling, of course, to land in front of Kazimir Malevich’s very cracked Black Suprematic Square (1915). It was quiet in the galleries and I lingered for a while, going back to the works that were most surprising and making note of the names of artists I didn’t recognize. A few smaller galleries held framed prints, collages, and examples of book cover designs. These galleries led to a reconstruction of an interior of a workers’ club, which was originally designed in 1925 by Aleksandr Rodchenko for the Soviet pavilion at the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes. The clubroom features a long reading table, newspaper racks, and a curious photo-viewer with a lever that when cranked allows one to scroll through photographs affixed to a cylinder. It’s an exciting room to stumble upon—and to see again. I have a vague memory of its re-creation at a Rodchenko show at MoMA in 1998.

My eagerness to linger in the permanent collection caused me a bit of dismay later, when I eventually made it into the temporary exhibitions, which included The Thaw, a survey of art, design, and material culture of the postwar Soviet period, and also a large, chronological survey of Soviet Nonconformist art from the 1960s to the 1990s. Both of these shows demanded more time. The Thaw was especially of interest in its positioning of visual-art experiments with artifacts and other visual evidence of advances in Soviet science, technology, and industrial design in the 1950s and 1960s. In The Thaw, the kinetic or Op art experiments by Russian artists of the 1960s associated with the Movement Group, like Lev Nussberg, Rimma Zanevskaya, and Francisco Infante-Arana, seemed to be inevitable partners in terms of their design and materiality to the new ways of visualizing space, particles, and sound associated with the technological advances in cosmic and atomic research. At the same time, fresh from viewing the legion of Constructivist forms from the permanent collection, it was hard not to also project onto these kinetic experiments the lineage of applied abstraction and to affirm them as a kind of Neo-Constructivist practice. The last layer from the Treytakov, in regards to these particular artists, was their presence in the beginning of the display of Nonconformist art. In this narrative, the work of these Movement Group artists was presented as reflecting one of several originating tendencies in the timeline of the so-called Nonconformist practices in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and elsewhere.

Having no real expertise in these particular art historical matters, but eager to know more, I was pleased to run into more works by Nussberg, Zanevskaya, and Infante-Arana, and the work of another Movement Group participant Vyacheslav Koleichuk, at the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, which was our next visit. These works were in Facing the Future: Art in Europe 1945–1968, a traveling exhibition organized by Eckhart Gillen, Peter Weibel, and Danila Bulatov, which had just opened at the museum. At the Pushkin Museum, the work of these artists was featured in a constellation of postwar art from East and Western Europe. One aspect of this broad curatorial assemblage of European art from the 1950s and 1960s was to put the kinetic and optical experiments of the Moscow scene alongside works by Otto Piene and Heinz Mack of the Zero Group; Julio le Parc and François Morellet of Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel (GRAV); and Yugoslavian designer/artist Ivan Picelj. These international groupings suggested a more expansive kinetic and Op art map than is usually presented.

In retrospect it was an interesting encounter with a condition of exhibition-making, of how works can be used to push a curatorial narrative. In each case, the Movement Group works were used to promote a different set of curatorial ideas. The works by Nussberg, Zanevskaya, Infante-Arana, and Koleichuk were characteristic of a Soviet postwar imaginary, driven by cultural and political promotions of new technologies in communication, space exploration, and atomic science. As examples of Nonconformist art, they challenged former modes of artistic expression and opening up new spaces for artists to occupy in the face of an entrenched social and political reality. And in the context of a new postwar Europe, they were a part of a broad trend of experimenting with sense art and how perception can be challenged through the design and production of light images and sound environments. All of these ideas might be true, and either way, I was more than happy to experience these works in this new setting and to learn about these artists and this scene in Moscow that I hadn’t known about before.

More photos from the trip:

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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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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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Day 1

Keio University Art Center and Archives

By Michelle Elligott

Great to see the Sogetsu ephemera collections at the Keio University Art Center. The Sogetsu materials dovetail nicely with pieces we have (including great Akiyama Kuniharu material) in the Museum’s Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Archives. The unique materials (like the letters in the Takiguchi Shuzo Papers) were wonderful.

Materials at the Keio University Art Center and Archives

By Michelle Elligott, Christopher Y. Lew, Nancy Lim

Roundtable at Tokyo University of the Arts

Organized by Kobata Kazue, the roundtable at the Tokyo University of the Arts started with Kobata’s introduction on performance and perfomativity in Japanese art in the 1960s. She screened 8mm film footage of Hijikata Tatsumi’s performance Revolt of the Flesh, and spoke about the activities of the Ankoku Butoh movement. Kobata raised an interesting point regarding the relation of painting and performance in 1960s Japanese art.

I was particularly struck by the work of Tadasu Takamine (born in 1968, lives and works in Kyoto), who was a member of a radical performance group Dumb Type. Tadasu is a very interesting artist with radical video and performance practices dealing mainly with politics and sexuality. During the roundtable, the artist screened his controversial video piece Kimura-san (1998), featuring footage of the artist providing sexual relief for a disabled friend, as well as the performance he did during his residency in New York of exchanging clothes at flea markets in the East Village in 1993. He is well-known for his video God Bless America, shown at the Venice Biennale in 2003. For eighteen days, Tadasu and his female partner lived in an entirely red room, filming themselves as they worked, ate, slept, and had sex. In the resulting time-lapse footage, we see them kick and punch a sculpture into being: a giant head, resembling George W. Bush, which continually sings God Bless America.

Roundtable at Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music

By Nancy Lim

Day 2

Meeting with Hisano Atsuko of the Saison Foundation

Founded in 1987, the Saison Foundation is one of the leading organizations providing grants to contemporary theater and dance groups from Japan and abroad, offering residency and studios for rehearsal. Its origins are in Studio 200, an experimental artistic space from the 1980s that was situated in the Ikebuko department store. The white box of Studio 200 hosted performances by Hijikata, Teshigawara Saburo (an important figure in contemporary dance during the ’80s), and concerts by rock groups from Korea and China.

The Saison Foundation, with Hisano Atsuko

By Nancy Lim

Chim↑Pom: Not Just Provocations

By Doryun Chong

I used to feel unsure as to where this young group’s provocations were headed. In the wake of the disasters in Tohoku in 2011, and seeing their courageous series of projects and performances, I’m beginning to think that they really have a sense of purpose and mission—trying to shake the art scene and even the wider society, which perhaps have grown too comfortable and complacent after many decades of stability and prosperity. http://chimpom.jp/

Meeting Chim↑Pom

By Christopher Y. Lew

Chim↑Pom presented an overview of their work, which includes projects from their solo show Real Times, made in response to the March 11 disaster at Fukushima. It’s amazing how quickly they reacted. They made a powerful series of videos and actions: they collaborated with local youths in Soma City, raised a flag in dangerous proximity to the Daiichi plant, and made a polemical intervention in Taro Okamoto’s mural in Shibuya train station.

A Visit to MUJIN-TO Production’s Gallery

By Nancy Lim

Mori Art Museum

By Nancy Lim

“METABOLISM” Exhibition at Mori Art Museum

Visit to the Mori Art Museum and the exhibition METABOLISM: The City of the Future. Dreams and Visions of Reconstruction in Postwar and Present Day Japan. Very extensive exhibition about the most widely known modern architectural movement to have emerged in Japan in the 1960s. Meeting with Mami Kataoka, the museum’s chief curator, after a walkthrough.

Kudos to the “METABOLISM” Team!

By Doryun Chong

I think we were blown away by the depth of the scholarship, impeccable installation, and of course, the richness of the subject itself. Kudos to the Mori!

Dinner with Minemura Toshiyaki, Hirasawa Go, and Hayashi Mihchio

By Nancy Lim

Film Critic Hirasawa Go’s Shinjuku Night Tour

By Doryun Chong, Christopher Y. Lew, Nancy Lim

Day 3

A Visit to the Hara Museum

By Doryun Chong, Michelle Elligott

Utterly delightful: loud, semi-naked cabbage throwing and water spitting

By Sarah Suzuki

We Are BANANA!!

By Banana Gakuen Theater Company

Hello Guys!! We are BANANA!! from Tokyo made in Dangerous JAPAAAAAAAAAAAN!!!!!

Thanks for your LOVE to BANANA.

Ecstatic Critique?

By Doryun Chong

There are about 40 to 50 performers, split equally between men and women on a stage that’s barely big enough to hold all of them. But somehow, they manage to jump up and down and around, dancing and singing like a giant boyband or girlband-cum-cheer squad en masse in constantly changing formations for over an hour! It’s also like Billy Blanks’ Taebo or one of those extreme, military-style workouts. We were overwhelmed by the constant sensory overload, including some of those sweat-drenched actors running into the audience. The director, Nikaido Toco, who later joins the troupe on the stage, was incredible too. She sounded like Kim Carnes screaming at the top of her lungs while doing all those moves in perfect sync with her actors. In the midst of this madness, there’s actually something serious and a complexity there. Sonically and visually, they reproduce a struggle of the sensory overload of Japanese mass media, where any meaningful message is impossible to hear unless you can project even louder over that noise. Maybe their performances are an ecstatic critique of the uniformity that they at the same time wear and abuse in school uniform.

Day 4

National Museum of Art, Osaka

By Michelle Elligott

Two highlights of the National Museum of Art, Osaka, included a Shiraga Kazuo painting dedicated to Michel Tapié and a wild, surrealistic Tiger Tateishi painting depicting a samurai, the KKK, Mao, and a crawling child. (We all agreed Doryun should include it in his Tokyo exhibition!)

Breaker Project

By Nancy Lim

Breaker Project

By Nancy Lim

Breaker Project is a cultural organization that started in 2003. Based in Osaka, it supports a variety of community-based art projects and presents them in temporary exhibition spaces throughout the Kansai region. At the time of TsukaharaYuya’s installation, Breaker Project occupied a two-story, multifamily residential unit from the early 20th century that the current artist-in-residence discreetly transformed by means of delicate light, sound, and sculptural installations that fiddle with the infrastructure. One room was also modified to include a sleeping area for overnight visitors, and on the floor above, an enclosed platform was built in the otherwise unstable attic (the artist had fallen through the attic floor a few months prior and broken his arm). The project was accompanied by varied educational programming intended to engage the local community indefinitely — even after the show closes and Breaker Project moves on.

Contact Gonzo

By Nancy Lim

Contact Gonzo is a performance group from Osaka founded in 2006 by Tsukahara Yuya and the dancer Kakio Masaru. Gonzo means “eccentric” or “hooligan”; the name comes from Gonzo journalism of the ’70s in the United States. The group has developed a very specific form of contact improvisation and Russian-style Aikido. Based on physical ability and trust, its innovative practice is at the crossroads of contemporary dance, performance, and street actions. Contact Gonzo’s first works were performed outdoors, mainly inspired by street and skate culture, and uploaded on YouTube. Recently they have been performing in many festivals and art spaces in Japan and Europe. The group has also developed a an innovative strategy of documenting their performances.

Contact Gonzo Live

By Eva Respini

I traveled across town to the Kichijoji area of Tokyo to catch a performance by the Osaka-based performance collective contact Gonzo. We met the members of contact Gonzo in Osaka, and they showed us documentation of their performances. This young collective straddles the worlds of dance, performance, and visual art: the founder is trained in theater design and dance, but other members come from the fields of graphic design and art, as well as dance. When I heard they were performing as part of the Teratotera Festival of contemporary dance and performance, I jumped at the chance to see them live. Contact Gonzo performed for 20 minutes on the roof of the Tokyu department store, in front of an audience of about fifty people.The performance included five of the six members (the sixth member was photographing and videotaping), was improvisational, and included water bottles and a single illuminated lightbulb as the only props. It was one of the most exhilarating performances I have seen, especially since it was punctuated by a dramatic darkening of the skies and light rain.

Day 5

Interviewing Shiomi Mieko

By Michelle Elligott

I had the honor and privilege of conducting an interview with Shiomi Mieko. A strikingly elegant and articulate artist, she spoke with insight and ease about her work and her participation in Fluxus activities. I especially appreciated her explanations of how she arranged the cards for the MoMA exhibition Thing/Thought: Fluxus Editions, 1962–1978 and her inspirations for Spatial Poem and Disappearing Music for Face. In regards to the latter, she stated her belief that anything can be music, even the shifting clouds. She once saw a young girl’s smile fading; she said it was like beautiful music.

Day 6

Yumiko Chiba Associates, Ginza Showroom

By Eva Respini

My day in Tokyo began with a viewing of vintage photographs by Uematsu Keiji at the Ginza showroom of Yumiko Chiba Associates. We have only one work by Uematsu in MoMA’s collection, and I was excited by the opportunity to see more. The Uematsu exhibition included vintage 1970s prints of his performative actions in the landscape. With these works, he was seeking to draw out shapes in space and use his body to find the equilibrium point within a gravitational field, creating mutual interrelationships between the body, the object, and space. He is an artist who later became associated with the Mono-ha movement. It was interesting to see the little-known photographic works of an artist mostly known for his sculpture. In addition to the exhibition of works by Uematsu, there was a fascinating exhibition of conceptual photography titled To the 1970s: The Turning Point of Photography and Art. The exhibition traced conceptual photographic practices in the 1970s in Japan, including works by Masafumi Maita, Kanji Wakae, and Takamatsu Jiro’s 1972–73 series Photograph of a Photograph (one example is in MoMA’s collection). Many of the works in the exhibition explored the materiality of photography and an intermedia relationship. The works were made by artists rather than photographers, and at this time, photography emerged as a tool to escape known forms of visual perception and forge new visual languages. Many of the works and artists in this exhibition were new to me. It was exciting to become acquainted with a different tradition in Japanese photography.

Day 7

Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography

By Eva Respini

The Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography has one of the best photography programs in the world. Kasahara Michiko is their chief curator and a friend. She is ambitious and inventive in her programming, and I was happy to see her again and to meet her fellow curators at the museum, Fujimura Satomi and Tasaka Hiroko. We viewed works from their storage collection, including Otsuji Kiyoji prints. The images dated from the 1950s, but the artist made the prints in 1989 and ’90, at the time of the museum’s opening. We also looked at photographs by Hosoe Eikoh, including works from his seminal collaboration with Butoh legend Hijikata Tatsumi for the book Kamaitachi, which involved a series of journeys to northern Japan in order to embody the presence of mythical, dangerous figures at the peripheries of Japanese life. At MoMA, we have works by Hosoe in the collection, but only a few from his collaboration with Hijikata. As always, there is no substitute for seeing works in the flesh, so to speak. We ended our visit of the museum with a viewing of the Naoya Hatakeyama exhibition Natural History. The exhibition was a survey of some 150 color photographs focusing on the landscape, including pictures made in Switzerland, France, and Japan. The exhibition included new work detailing the aftermath of the March 11 earthquake and tsunami in Hatakeyama’s hometown, one of the hardest hit areas. The work juxtaposed a slide show of pictures Hatakeyama had taken in his hometown before the destruction with some sixty photographs of the disaster and its aftermath. The exhibition also included a new video animation of his well-known explosion series, for which he scanned and animated his previously still photographs. This step represents a new artistic endeavor for Hatakeyama.

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Under the leadership of Christophe Cherix, and accompanied by Jarosław Suchan from Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź (PL), the group met with longtime colleagues and made numerous new acquaintances in Bucharest, Vilnius, Belgrade, Novi Sad, and Berlin. We visited museums, foundations, and contemporary art centers; looked at paintings, documents, and PowerPoint presentations; talked to artists, curators, and archivists over office desks and café tables; and experienced art exhibited, among other places, in the former museum of Soviet Revolution in Vilnius, in Ceauceşcu’s monumental palace in Bucharest, as well as in the basement of a block of flats—a vestige of the Communist era—in Belgrade. We were welcomed into museum storage spaces and people’s kitchens, and the inspiring encounters in each city left our minds racing, while our travel bags were got heavier and heavier with the books we were given by our hosts.

Here we share our impressions from some of the more than fifty meetings we held in the five cities. This experience has turned out to be invaluable for our ongoing C-MAP research in New York. As we look back at it now, we would like to know: Did we miss anything? As visitors to this region, we are aware of the limitations to our own knowledge and we invite your comments, and critique of our itinerary.

MM

May 24th: Bucharest

Day One in Bucharest: Visit to MNAC

By Roxana Marcoci

As soon as our plane landed on May 24 at Otopeni airport in Bucharest, we headed to Hotel Intercontinental, dropped off our luggage, and went straight to the Palace of Parliament, better known as “Casa Poporului” (House of the people). We learned that this is the largest building in Europe and the second largest in the world after the Pentagon. The edifice was designed during Nicolae Ceauşescu’s regime, after the Romanian dictator returned from a visit to North Korea in the early 1970s. Today, the building functions as the seat of political and administrative power, and it also houses MNAC (The National Museum of Contemporary Art), which opened in 2001. Our first visit was scheduled with MNAC’s director, Mihai Oroveanu, and Chief Curator Ruxandra Balaci. Oroveanu, a photography historian who oversees the museum’s collections, took us on a walk through the architectural photography exhibition on view, featuring International-style buildings from the 1920s and ’30s in Bucharest, many of which have since been destroyed. We also visited the museum’s underbelly, its hidden, residual storage spaces, where we saw a trove of Socialist Realist paintings—all official portraits of Ceauşescu and his wife, Elena. At MNAC we met with two members of subREAL, a group founded in 1990 by Călin Dan, Iosif Király, and Dan Mihaltianu, whose conceptual works were being installed for a retrospective that was opening the following week. Later that evening, we had dinner with artist Dan Perjovschi, curator Alina Serban, and philosopher Erwin Kessler.

MNAC: National Museum of Contemporary Art in Bucharest

SubREAL at MNAC

By Michelle Elligott

One of the highlights of the trip for me was meeting Iosif Király and Călin Dan of the group subREAL and visiting the preliminary installation of their exhibition at MNAC with them. It was great to see one of their iconic works, Draculaland, in person. But perhaps of even more interest was viewing their poster for Dataroom while listening to the artists describe it: a yearlong live/work project in which they inhabited a room whose walls and ceiling were covered with reproductions of artworks from Arta, the official art magazine in Romania, and where they staged events. Truly a living archive… (and nice to know that the Arta image archive now resides in MNAC’s documentation center).

Bucharest

By Jon Hendricks

I felt great excitement about going to Romania for the first time, with visions of Brancusi’s Endless Column in my mind and amazement that I would be visiting the source from which so much Dada sprang—Tristan Tzara, Arthur Segal, Marcel Janco and his brothers, like a bookend to Berlin for the fusion in Zurich. Excitement also that we would be meeting the great artists Ion Grigorescu and Geta Brătescu, both of whom deserve much greater recognition in the world. There were no disappointments in Bucharest. We were warmly welcomed by Mihai Oroveanu and Ruxandra Balaci at the National Museum of Contemporary Art. Mihai has encyclopedic knowledge of the Romanian avant-garde, and they both shared so much with us. At dinner, I had a chance to speak at length with Erwin Kessler, who also has a vast knowledge of the Romanian avant-garde. The food was delicious as well.

Bucharest Biennale Opening Performance by Klas Ericsson

By Paulina Pobocha

Soon after our lively dinner with Dan Perjovschi, Alina Serban, and Erwin Kessler in the restaurant of the Intercontinental Hotel in Bucharest, where the C-MAP group had checked in several hours previously, we made our way outside to view the Bucharest Biennale’s inaugural event, a work titled Com’on You Reds by Swedish artist Klas Ericsson. The sun had set, and it was just beginning to rain as we joined an already assembled group of onlookers in the plaza directly in front the hotel’s entrance. Slowly, the building seemed to set aflame. It was impressive. (In fact, in a highly coordinated effort, several dozen volunteers positioned on the hotel’s balconies lit red flares, beginning on the lower floors and working their way up, creating the illusion of fire.) I had learned during dinner that prior to 1989, the Intercontinental was the premier hotel in Bucharest (though it’s older now, I think it still is), attracting primarily foreign patrons. During the 1989 revolution, the hotel’s balconies offered privileged views of the protests happening in the immediate vicinity of University Square. Ericsson’s work thoughtfully engaged the history of the city and the building. It was an effective start to a Biennale staged, in part, in the city’s unused, dilapidated, or otherwise peripheral corners.

Bucharest Biennale 5 opening

By Roxana Marcoci

That same evening we attended the opening performance of the Bucharest Biennale, Tactics for the Here and Now. Organized by Ann Barlow, the biennial responded to the shifting conditions of economic culture and recent political revolutions through a series of new commissions by seventeen emerging artists, including Alexandre Singh, Wael Shawky, Haris Epaminonda, Aurélian Froment, and Marina Albu. The opening performance was by the Berlin-based Swedish artist Klas Ericsson, who set Hotel Intercontinental ablaze. Titled Com’on You Reds, the performance took us by surprise when one hundred volunteers began burning red flares from the balconies of the hotel in which we stayed. This hotel is a landmark of Bucharest. Situated in University Square, site of student protests, the hotel is the seat from which foreign journalists reported during the 1989 revolution.

At dinner

May 25th: Bucharest

Bucharest Biennale 5

By Roxana Marcoci

The next morning, we visited other venues of the biennial. A highlight was the House of Free Press, an edifice previously closed to the public. This structure is practically a copy of the Lomonosov Moscow State University, the largest university in Russia. Erected in the 1950s, it was the headquarters of state media, the printing press, and of the newspaper Scînteia, which emerged as the official voice of the Communist Party of Romania. Interestingly, the legacy of Communism was displayed alongside the city’s burgeoning capitalist spring: when we saw the building, the top of its facade was emblazoned with a Citibank banner. Another venue worth visiting was the Institute for Political Research, which opened ten years after the 1989 revolution and serves as one of the few platforms for debate and critical analysis of the political environment in Romania. Here we saw Marina Albu’s The Real People’s House, an environment that re-creates the living conditions during Ceauşescu’s power supply blackouts; and Janice Kerbel’s Remarkable, a series of faux agitprop posters inspired by nineteenth-century fairground posters.

Bucharest Biennale 5

By Jon Hendricks

The Bucharest Biennale is a raw and vital gathering of artists doing current and essential work. One really feels a sense of discovery, a sense of immediacy, and a need to better understand the work. Many of the installations are demanding and provoking. I was especially taken with the work of Marina Naprushkina from Belarus, who is challenging not only herself but the structure of her society.

MNAR (National Museum of Art of Romania) and Around

MNAR, Food, and Thought

By Jon Hendricks

While in Bucharest, we were treated to a tour of the National Museum of Art of Romania (MNAR), where we not only saw displays of their permanent collection of twentieth-century Romanian avant-garde art, but also were very privileged to look at works by Maxy, Janco, and Segal in their vaults. Curator Valentina Iancu was most helpful and informative. For lunch, we went to the small vendors behind the museum and had enormous, dripping sandwiches that were delicious.

Ion Grigorescu Studio Visit

By David Senior

The first formal studio visit of the trip did not take place in a studio and was not that formal. The entire MoMA group descended upon Ion Grigorescu’s apartment for a conversation with the artist. We talked of older works from the 1960s and the social setting of these works. He told of the necessity of developing his own films in secret and the degree of difficulty in making and showing work in Bucharest at that time. The discussion turned to Grigorescu’s current practice, and he passed around daily journals annotated with notes and drawings. We were short on time, and some of group left to meet with Geta Brătescu while a few of us stayed behind. We went downstairs to a cafe, and in this setting, Grigorescu spoke more about his journals and his interests in writing and psychoanalysis. He currently records his dreams. Some of these dream writings have been published in a Bucharest art magazine, but we talked of the possibility of a book project to assemble all of these materials in one place. He also discussed some his long-ago travels, such as the time he went to Paris and met Christian Boltanski and Jean Le Gac. It was a gorgeous afternoon as we finished our drinks in the outdoor cafe and finally said goodbye to Mr. Grigorescu.

Meeting Ion Grigorescu

By Paulina Pobocha

During our visit with Ion Grigorescu at his studio, he mentioned that the political situation in Romania was such that, until the 1990s, after the fall of the Ceauşescu regime, his seminal 1978 film Dialogue with Ceauşescu had only been viewed by a handful of people. In fact, he made it in complete seclusion, playing both roles, operating the camera, and later developing the film in his studio. He stressed that everyone was a potential informant, and there were very few people including fellow artists, friends, and family that he could trust. The reception of an artwork is predicated on an audience. For many artists the prospect of reception, intertwined as it is with a desire to communicate, drives their practice. Given the oppressive censorship in Romania during the 1970s and throughout the 1980s, which virtually robbed Grigorescu of an audience, it is remarkable that this and his other films exist at all.

Ion Grigorescu

By Roxana Marcoci

While in Bucharest we made two memorable studio visits, one with Ion Grigorescu, an iconic figure of performance and Conceptual art. Increasingly acclaimed for his role in effectively cultivating resistance and underground art under Communist totalitarianism, Grigorescu’s work has recently been added to MoMA’s collection, filling an important gap in the history of media and performance art.

Geta Brătescu

By Roxana Marcoci

The other visit was with Geta Brătescu, who at age eighty-six works daily in her studio. During the two decades of Ceauşescu’s regime, Brătescu’s studio served multiple functions: as a space of interaction for artists working outside the official art scene (she did a number of film collaborations with Grigorescu), and as a site where she developed performative choreographies that took on political implications. Christophe Cherix conducted an interview with Geta about the influence of Chaplin on her work and the special role that the studio plays in her practice.

Geta Brătescu Studio Visit

By Paulina Pobocha

Our group split into two, and five of us took the van to a residential area of Bucharest to visit 86-year-old artist Geta Brătescu. We were warmly greeted by the artist and her gallerist Marian Ivan in a well-lit and very much in-use studio. During the course of our visit, we saw many works still in her collection, among them a series of intricate sewing-machine drawings titled Medea’s Hypostasis and Pafnutie’s Box, and a collection of performative objects related to her 1978 film The Studio. I was as much impressed by her personality as by her art. Almost forty years after her first films, she remains equal parts exuberant and irreverent. There has been a recent surge in interest surrounding Brătescu’s practice. It is well deserved.

May 26th: Vilnius

National Gallery of Art

By Magdalena Moskalewicz

The National Gallery of Art in Vilnius was designed in 1966 and erected in 1980 as the Museum of the Revolution of the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic, which was part of USSR until its dissolution in 1991. What used to be a monument to constructed history and, ultimately, oppressive ideology now houses twentieth-century art. The story was told to us by Lolita Jablonskienė, the gallery’s chief curator, as early afternoon sun from over the nearby Vilnia River entered the modernist building through its massive windows. We were amazed by (and also slightly jealous of) the building’s 2009 additions: two freestanding, wall-like, shiny, black structures of almost sculptural quality that house staff offices.

Lolita gave us a fascinating tour of the collection, which has been gathered over the past century and reflects Vilnius’s complex history. (The city belonged to Poland before World War II and is an important part of the history of Polish avant-garde art.) She explained that the lack of more experimental artistic trends in the collection reflects the general lack of such trends in Lithuanian postwar art. Lolita also told us that the urge to build a national cultural identity for the relatively young democratic Lithuanian state has had repercussions on the local art market, which remains rather closed to foreign artistic production.

After this illuminating walkthrough we found ourselves in yet another seminar on Lithuanian art. Elona Lubytė gave us an extensive presentation of the exhibition Quiet Modernism in Lithuania 1962–1982, which she curated in 1997. She made the claim that in Lithuania, unlike in many other countries of the region, there was no clear division between official and unofficial artists (those supported by state institutions and those working underground). There were only official and unofficial art spaces, in which the same artists exhibited very different types of production. She showed us a set of beautifully crafted handmade Christmas cards that local artists used to send to each other in the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s, as a form of independent, very personal art practice. After the viewing, we were treated to more presentations. Dovilė Tumpytė gave an overview of an extremely ambitious archival project that the gallery is participating in, called Parallel Chronologies: An Archive of East European Exhibitions and organized by tranzit.hu, and Ieva Mazūraitė-Novickienė showed us books on photography recently published in Lithuania.

Before we left the National Gallery, we met with the artist Dainius Liškevičius and the curator Giedrius Gulbinas in the space of their show The Museum. And so, by the time we found ourselves once again on the monumental steps outside the museum, the sun was sinking behind the Old Town’s historic buildings on the other side of the river.

Old Town in Vilnius

Sunny Vilnius

By Paulina Pobocha

The Old Town of Vilnius is extraordinarily clean, composed of newly renovated buildings whose freshly painted facades are spotlit in the evening to maximum dramatic effect. We checked into our hotel on a warm and sunny Saturday when the Lithuanian Heritage Festival was in mid-swing, aurally evidenced by the folk music filling the square. After Bucharest, a very lived-in city, I wondered if I hadn’t just walked onto a film set. The effect was so pronounced and startling that I asked Virginija Januškevičiūtė, a curator from the Contemporary Art Center, about it. As it turns out, in 2009 Vilnius was selected as the European Capital of Culture, which spurred much restoration across the city and particularly in the historic district. Of course, most residents of Vilnius live outside the Old Town under comparatively normal lighting conditions.

May 27th: Vilnius

Contemporary Art Center in Vilnius

Mindaugas Navakas

By Magdalena Moskalewicz

One of the artworks we found most impressive in the National Gallery’s vast collection was a set of collages showing imaginary monuments inserted into Vilnius’s urban spaces. The collages were produced by Mindaugas Navakas between 1981 and 1985. We visited the artist the next day: he hosted us in a sculpture garden just outside of the city, in a place where the artistic community started setting up studios and open-air exhibition spaces in the 1980s. Navakas himself gained wide international recognition after representing Lithuania at the Venice Biennale in 1999, and although he mainly produces monumental stone sculptures, the artist shared with us his former fascination with industrially produced materials. It was a fascination he developed in the early 1990s, when these materials suddenly flooded the Lithuanian market, prompting him to produce a very different body of work. For his successful Frieze Project installation commissioned for London’s Frieze Art Fair in 2009, Navakas used windows that had just been removed from Vilnius’s Center for Contemporary Art during its renovation. We found some of those in his garden, mounted directly on the ground. They surrounded a medium-sized, sarcophagus-shaped piece executed in red granite and hollowed out in the middle, creating something similar to a mini shaded glasshouse for the sculpture. The artist presented the piece to us as his outdoor bathtub, and just as we started giggling at what we assumed was a joke, we noticed that the granite tub did indeed have a stopper…

Jonas Mekas Visual Arts Center

By Gretchen Wagner

Through my work with the Silverman Fluxus Collection Gift at MoMA, I had heard much about the Jonas Mekas Visual Arts Center and looked forward to finally visiting in person. Having spearheaded the influential Anthology Film Archives and Film-Makers’ Cooperative in New York, Mekas, a Lithuanian filmmaker, returned home to initiate yet another site for creative production and research. Fundamental to the Center’s mission is the desire to establish Vilnius as “avant-garde’s new capital” and to do this by exhibiting historical material, including Fluxus objects and documents acquired by the city, as well as presenting contemporary projects. Considering this ambitious call for a hub of radical activity, it was peculiar to find the Center located in a recently constructed high-rise office building. Perhaps this is a comically subversive gesture on the part of Mekas? The space opened to the public in 2007 with the exhibition The Avant-Garde: From Futurism to Fluxus. At the time of our visit, young local artists from the Ministry of Fluxus collective performed and discussed their installations. It was disappointing that we could not access works in the collection during our stay for reasons that were not altogether clear; however, perhaps the works will return to view soon and be made available to the public as the Center initially intended.

Meeting Vytautas Landsbergis

By Jarosław Suchan

It was an intriguing experience to sit face-to-face with the distinguished deputy of the European Parliament and a prominent conservative politician, while being aware that a few decades ago he was associated with Fluxus, one of the most radical (also politically) experiments in art. George Maciunas, the leader of Fluxus, exchanged correspondence with Landsbergis, and at the same time, he was writing letters to Khrushchev trying to convince him to make the USSR the center of the Fluxus movement. You can say: a typical story. Many contemporary American neocons used to be involved in the countercultural revolt of the 1960s. But this instance, I think, is more complex. This is not necessarily a case of political “conversion.” In the art of Central Europe, we can find quite a few examples proving that artistic radicalism went hand in hand with political conservatism (or a kind of pro-aristocracy stance), since they both contested the then status quo.

Darius Mikšys

By Barbara London

In the lounge of our Vilnius hotel, part of the group met with the soft-spoken Darius Mikšys. The artist talked about his practice, in which social networks take on new forms. For Mikšys, installations provide the opportunity to experiment, conceptualize, and reimagine processes of making, displaying, and engaging with art. Representing Lithuania at the Venice Biennale in 2011, Mikšys invited all Lithuanian artists who had received Lithuanian government grants to submit a work to his project, titled Behind the White Curtain. Visitors to the Lithuanian pavilion were able to access a database and select from these works, enabling them to create their own displays of Lithuanian art. This resulted in a continuously changing narrative of collective identity.

Meeting with Arturas Raila

By David Senior

Virginija Januškevičiūtė, the curator from the CAC, told me when we met the first night in Vilnius about a coming project that the center was doing with the artist Arturas Raila. Raila produced a video project, Under the Flag (2000), of a Lithuanian neo-Nazi group as they commented on videos of various street scenes that the artist had filmed during a residency in Lenz, Austria. The video had never been screened in Lithuania because of an agreement that Raila had with the subjects of the film. Virginija explained that the CAC was planning to do a reenactment of the film with actors as a way of getting around the issue of screening the original version in Lithuania. We met with Raila at the Academy of Fine Arts on our second day in Vilnius, and he screened Under the Flag for us, as well as another video piece, The Girl Is Innocent, about the traditional academic training and review process that still existed in Lithuanian art academies in the 1990s.

May 28th: Vilnius

Vilnius: The Ministry of Fluxus, Republic of Užupis

By Gretchen Wagner

George Maciunas envisioned the interpenetration of art and life as a core proposition of Fluxus, and in Vilnius we encountered examples of this put into practice, with some cases very specifically citing the legacy of the historical movement. Maciunas’s work to establish Flux Houses, cooperative living for artists in downtown New York during the 1960s and 1970s, finds resonance in developments currently taking place in Vilnius. The Ministry of Fluxus, opened in 2010 by the city’s mayor, Artūras Zuokas, housed studios and workshops with the aim of fostering community among local artists of all disciplines. The short-lived space has since closed; however, the Republic of Užupis, its more established counterpart, continues. Located in the city’s Old Town, the Republic was founded in 1997 when the district declared itself independent, with its own flag, currency, president, and constitution. The terms of the latter are nonsensical and contradictory, and mostly point toward total freedom in all aspects of life. Our tour of the district revealed Fluxus landmarks, including a footbridge dedicated to the movement and alleyways tagged with Maciunas’s spray-painted portrait. Maciunas’s efforts in New York sparked SoHo’s status as an artists’ enclave and eventually a gentrified commercial district. Will these same results come to pass in Vilnius?

Užupis

Constitution of Užupis

By Magdalena Moskalewicz

The 41 rights, which form this constitution, were officially announced on April Fool’s Day of 1997, and the citizens of the Republic annually celebrate April 1 as their Independence Day. These rights are now engraved on mirrors that are attached to a wall in one of the district streets, Paupio Street, where they can be read in eight languages. Here is the English version:

Constitution of Užupis

Everyone has the right to live by the River Vilnelė, while the River Vilnelė has the right to flow by everyone.

Everyone has the right to hot water, heating in winter and a tiled roof.

Everyone has the right to die, but it is not a duty.

Everyone has the right to make mistakes.

Everyone has the right to individuality.

Everyone has the right to love.

Everyone has the right to be not loved, but not necessarily.

Everyone has the right not to be distinguished and famous.

Everyone has the right to be idle.

Everyone has the right to love and take care of a cat.

Everyone has the right to look after a dog till one or the other dies.

A dog has the right to be a dog.

A cat is not obliged to love its master, but it must help him in difficult times.

Everyone has the right to sometimes be unaware of his duties.

Everyone has the right to be in doubt, but this is not a duty.

Everyone has the right to be happy.

Everyone has the right to be unhappy.

Everyone has the right to be silent.

Everyone has the right to have faith.

No one has the right to violence.

Everyone has the right to realize his negligibility and magnificence.

Everyone has the right to encroach upon eternity.

Everyone has the right to understand.

Everyone has the right to understand nothing.

Everyone has the right to be of various nationalities.

Everyone has the right to celebrate or not to celebrate his birthday.

Everyone shall remember his name.

Everyone may share what he possesses.

No-one can share what he does not possess.

Everyone has the right to have brothers, sisters and parents.

Everyone is capable of independence.

Everyone is responsible for his freedom.

Everyone has the right to cry.

Everyone has the right to be misunderstood.

No-one has the right to make another person guilty.

Everyone has the right to be personal.

Everyone has the right to have no rights.

Everyone has the right to not be afraid.

Do not defeat.

Do not fight back.

Do not surrender.

May 29th: Belgrade and Novi Sad

From Belgrade to Novi Sad: Van Ride with Miško

By David Senior

We assembled in the early morning to make our trip to Novi Sad, and we were joined in our van by curator, art historian, and writer Miško Šuvaković. I noticed that he was carrying a rather large bag but did not think too much about it at that early hour. As we departed from downtown Belgrade, we asked Miško some questions about the artists we would meet at the reception in Novi Sad and the historical lineage of neo-avant-garde groups and artists that had formed in the late 1960s and early ’70s in Belgrade, Novi Sad, and the neighboring city of Subotica. As he proceeded with the discussion, he would pull books out of his bag and send them around for us to look through during the road trip. As time passed, more and more books emerged from the bag until all of us had things to look at and piles accumulated. Astoundingly, all of these publications were books that Miško himself, our gracious guide sitting in the front of the van, had authored, edited, or contributed to in some form. We perused exhibition catalogues and monographs of Bogdanka and Dejan Poznanović, the OHO group, Group KOD, Atila Černik, as well as a selection of surveys of the historical avant-garde and mid-century New Tendencies artists and designers in the former Yugoslavia. The level of scholarly production was incredible, and the van ride had quickly turned into an intensive seminar.

Visit to the Museum of Contemporary Art of Vojvodina in Novi Sad

Novi Sad: Museum of Contemporary Art of Vojvodina

By Paulina Pobocha

We left Belgrade very early Tuesday morning and headed by car to Novi Sad, accompanied by the gracious and incredibly knowledgeable Miško Šuvaković. (If you have an interest in learning more about avant-garde and neo-avant-garde art practice in Yugoslavia, I recommend consulting one of the many books Šuvaković has authored.) At the Museum of Contemporary Art of Vojvodina, Vladimir Kopicl, the museum’s director, himself an artist and poet, had invited many, primarily Conceptual artists active in the region during the 1970s to the museum for a conversation. It was a nicely orchestrated event that enabled us to view works in the collection, including photographs and documentary materials, while speaking to the people who made them. The museum in Vojvodina has a strong commitment to collecting and exhibiting Conceptual and performance-based art. They employ a curator who deals specifically and exclusively with this material and have begun an impressive project of digitizing the works in their collection as well as related archival matter, making it available to the general public online.

Novi Sad: Museum of Contemporary Art of Vojvodina

By Michelle Elligott

During our visit to the Museum of Contemporary Art of Vojvodina, I was impressed to learn that they have a Department of Conceptual Art, with its own curator. Coming from a museum where the departments are divided by medium/discipline (Painting and Sculpture, Photography, Film, etc.), it was a nice change to think about grouping works by their aesthetic sensibility rather than medium. Furthermore, the department has done an admirable job of digitizing its complete assets.

Novi Sad: Ilija & Mangelos Foundation

By Michelle Elligott

Our visit to the Ilija & Mangelos Foundation was a surprise and delight. The foundation is headquartered in the apartment of Mangelos’s brother, and we were not sure what to expect. First, we were treated to an introduction to the foundation provided by Mangelos’s very knowledgeable niece, Ivana Basicević, who is currently completing her PhD on Mangelos and Marcel Broodthaers (which resonated with us due to MoMA’s extensive recent acquisitions of work by both of these artists). But the story literally came alive when Mangelos’s brother became animated, leapt to his feet, and began recounting stories about the two of them as young men. His subjects ranged from working in the fields to his brother studying art history. The residential backdrop was enlivened by artworks and a manifesto on the walls, and we sat enraptured as we inspected countless examples of handwritten letters, texts, diaries, painted notebooks and sketchbooks, and unique artist books, all displaying Mangelos’s distinctive cursive handwriting on ruled lines. The grand finale was when Ivana displayed the smallest of all of Mangelos’s legendary globes; this gilded example fit in the palm of her hand.

Novi Sad: Visit to kuda.org

By David Senior

A group of us took a car to a residential neighborhood in Novi Sad to meet with the members of kuda.org, a media and arts organization that is both an experimental Internet platform with international scope and an active participant in the local cultural scene. The office space houses a study center, a small library, and a meeting area where they stage events and talks by visiting scholars. The talks are streamed and archived on the kuda.org site. The site is also home to their digital journal and an extensive set of links to events in Novi Sad, Belgrade, and other international locations that the group is participating in or promoting. We were shown copies of the catalogues Political Practices of (post) Yugoslav Art and Art Always Has Its Consequences, to which kuda.org contributed, along with other groups like the Zagreb-based curatorial collective WHW (What, How and for Whom) and transit.hu. Among other things, the exhibitions that gave rise to these catalogues highlighted the practices of the Yugoslavian neo-avant-garde of the late 1960s and ’70s and collected extensive documentation of this generation of artists. These contemporary curatorial groups have done interesting work to rehabilitate these particular histories of an older generation of artists and filmmakers.

SKC in Belgrade

By Roxana Marcoci

In the 1970s, some of the most advanced, politically engaged exhibition spaces were the student centers that proliferated in Belgrade, Zagreb, and Novi Sad, which served as platforms for ideas that were largely informed by neo-Marxist critical theory. Although today they don’t serve the same purpose, they preserve important archives about those years. We made a stop at the Archives of the Student Cultural Center in Belgrade and reviewed some of their publications. Beuys was there in the 1970s, numerous exhibitions by the New Art Practice generation took place there, and the famous two-day feminist conference “Comradess woman: the women’s question; a new approach?” was hosted there, the first of its kind in a Communist country. Although heavily criticized by the official Yugoslavian women’s organizations “on the grounds that a feminist stance was superfluous in Communist society, which had already ‘overcome’ gender differences in the Revolution,” the event marked a turning point, since for the first time Yugoslavian feminists were able to publicly question the rule of patriarchy in socialist society.

SKC: Student Cultural Center in Belgrade

SKC in Belgrade

By Michelle Elligott

It felt like stepping into history when we assembled in the archive of the Student Cultural Center in Belgrade, with a large photo mural of Joseph Beuys’s performance there in 1972 gracing the walls. We were treated to a presentation by Dragica Vukadinović, who is in charge of the documentation center and is herself a living archive, as she has been with the Center since its early days. She is undertaking the large-scale, painstaking process of digitizing the entire photo archive, an admirable ambition, which can be found here.

Belgrade: Visit to the Student Cultural Center (SKC)

By Jarosław Suchan

The history of this place proves that the reality of art in socialist countries can’t be described in black and white. It is much more complex that we used to think. It is true that the SKC was established due to pressure from student revolts, as an answer to their demands for a space for independent culture to thrive. But it may also be true that the state created the place to channel the students’ rebellion and to control “independent” culture. This was a place where one could go much further than in other spaces—but does this mean that everything was possible? How far one could go in criticizing the ruling political system? By saying this, I don’t want to diminish the importance of what was going on at SKC. Regardless of the fact that the freedom it offered was licensed, it was a place of authentic experiment: cultural, artistic, social. The list of events that took place there in the 1970s and ’80s is really impressive. However, I wonder if there were any events that were not realized for political reasons…

Meeting Raša Todosijević

By Jarosław Suchan

I liked his honesty, his reluctance to portray as heroic his own activity in the 1970s (although he is aware of its importance) and to mythologize the reality in which this activity took place. Today we observe a tendency to idealize the times of Tito’s socialism. The activity of SKC and radical artists like Raša Todosijević is to confirm the democratic character of Tito’s Yugoslavia, so different from the nationalism of the 1990s. Todosijević shows that the 1990s were horrible, but that doesn’t mean that the 1970s were OK.

Belgrade: Meeting Raša Todosijević

By Roxana Marcoci

In Belgrade we visited the studio of Raša Todosijević, a protagonist of the Belgrade group of Conceptual artists best known for the series of performances Was ist Kunst? (What is art?), which he held between 1976 and 1981 in various settings. In these, Todosijević touched, slapped, and smeared the face of his partner while whispering, shouting, screaming, pleading, begging, or simply demanding an answer to the question, “What is art?” A discourse on authoritarianism, the piece probes the nature of art itself, a duality that is prevalent throughout Todosijević’s work. Todosijević also talked about his controversial sculptural installations, performances, and pseudo-advertisements with which he denounced the dominant Serbian culture of exalted nationalism during the 1990s. In 1989, with the historic turn to post-Yugoslavian states, he began a series of installations titled God Loves the Serbs. In these works, he inverted symbols of totalitarian ideologies and religions to offer a political critique of the right-wing, ultranationalist daily culture that pervaded the region throughout the 1990s. He arranged ordinary restaurant tables to form the shape of swastikas, on which traditional Serbian dishes (beans, bread, and beer) were served, and mounted a giant red swastika on a wall with a text underneath, written in heavy black typeface, about a Serbian woman who curses God and Communism alike.

Meeting Branko Vučićević

By Jon Hendricks

In Belgrade, Gretchen Wagner and I had the honor of meeting with the legendary filmmaker, writer, and catalyst Branko Vučićević. Living in Belgrade in 1966, Vučićević was interested in Fluxus and contacted George Maciunas, who was living in New York. Maciunas corresponded with him and sent him Fluxus material, which Vučićević included in the publication Rok, put out by Bora Ćosić.

In 1967, Vučićević made this prescient statement, which I believe sums up his attitude toward art:

DOWN WITH ART, LONG LIVE LIFE!
(Mayakovsky)

If after next fifty years Fluxus finds itself in possession of the historical
and social status Dada enjoys today then
all Fluxus activities will have been in
vain.
Every anti-art gesture is inevitably and
inextricably coupled with so-called art
and is finally assimilated by it. The desti-
ny of Dada bears witness to this. At this
stage anti-art activity should represent
only a small part of Fluxus program.
(Performer of anti-art gestures finds him-
self in the position of worm in some sorts
of cheese who imagines that he is undermi-
ning cheese with his burrowing when in fact
giving it a piquant taste.) Such as it is
it should be more in the nature of Chinese
Red Guards’ undertakings.
Primary tasks of Fluxus (based on Maciunas
letter to Tomas Schmit, January 1964) should
be in the area of everyday life.
Therefore is proposed the compiling of
FLUXUS MANUAL OF EVERYDAY LIFE
a) Fluxus enrichment of basic everyday
activities (eating, work, sexual intercourse
etc. etc);
b) creation of n e w activities.
Fluxus should be interested not in artist
but in man.

Meeting Biljana Tomić and Jesa Denegri

By Magdalena Moskalewicz

On our second and last evening in Belgrade, we dined with Biljana Tomić and Jesa Denegri, a remarkable couple of art historians and curators who for several decades directly influenced the Yugoslav, and later Serbian, experimental art scene. In the early 1970s, Jesa, as curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade, exhibited art by the most experimental and progressive members of the local art scene, including Marina Abramović and Rasa Todosijević. At the same time, Biljana, herself a poet, mixed visual poetry and performance with other contemporary art production while running the gallery of the Students Cultural Center. She also established direct contacts with the Italian Arte Povera movement and the Slovenian OHO group. The stories Biljana and Jesa shared with us added so much to our understanding of the Yugoslav experimental art scene in the 1970s that by the time dessert arrived, we had decided that this could not possibly be our final meeting with them, and that we should see them again, in New York.

May 30th: Belgrade

Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade

By Magdalena Moskalewicz

During our morning meeting at the temporary headquarters of the Museum of Contemporary Art, curators Dejan Sretenović, Branko Dimitrijević, and Zoran Erić shared with us the history of the institution as well as stories of its difficult present. Founded in 1958 as a Museum of Modern Art with the aim of collecting Yugoslav art, the museum faced the challenge of defining its new role as the Serbian Museum of Contemporary Art after the dissolution of the Yugoslav state. Since 2007, it has been even more challenged by the lack of a proper exhibition space. The museum produced a traveling project, Museum on the Move, that enabled at least parts of the collection to be shown around the country. The curators prepared a real book feast for us: numerous exhibition catalogues of their recent projects and rare historical artists’ publications from the 1960s and 1970s occupied a huge wooden table around which we eagerly gathered. We also received a few of these books as a generous gift to our MoMA Library. Among them was a copy of Political Practices of (post-)Yugoslav Art, a publication that we had encountered before in various institutions and had read in preparation for our visit to Serbia. Even though MoMA’s Library holds a copy of it, this red book had become, by this stage of our trip, an object of personal desire to every single one of us.

Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade

Belgrade Museum of Contemporary Art

By Paulina Pobocha

Currently there is no museum devoted to exhibiting modern or contemporary art in Belgrade, a city where neo-avant-garde art practice flourished during the 1970s. The building that had been home to the Museum of Contemporary Art has stood abandoned near the banks of the Sava River since 2007, awaiting restoration. The windows are broken, and grasses and other vegetation have overtaken the landscape, still inhabited by the outdoor sculptures placed there more than a decade ago. The museum’s staff works out of temporary offices located in a mid-century residence initially intended for the U.S. ambassador and directly across the street from the “House of Flowers,” Tito’s mausoleum. At the moment, their collection is in storage and inaccessible.

Kunsthistorisches Mausoleum

By Roxana Marcoci

The last stop in Belgrade was a visit with curator Jelena Vesić to the Kunsthistorisches Mausoleum, a space named after the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna that could easily be described as a tomb of art history. In two adjacent rooms, this Mausoleum contains original paintings of illustrations from two canonical books of art history: A Concise History of Modern Painting by Herbert Read and the History of Art by H.W. Janson.

May 31st: Berlin

Berlin Biennale

By Roxana Marcoci

On our last day in Berlin we met with Gabi Horn, director of Kunst-Werke, and Joanna Warsza, associate curator of the Berlin Biennale, who took us on a walk through the exhibition. Titled Forget Fear, the biennale’s starting question, as posed by Artur Żmijewski, was, “What can art do for you?” The show focused on the intersection between the global Occupy protests, the Arab Spring movements, and the art world. Palestinian artist Khaled Jarrar stamped people’s passports both in Palestine and in West Germany near Checkpoint Charlie, a symbolic location that echoes the wall dividing Israel from the occupied territories. Dutch artist Jonas Staal built an installation of hanging banners and an architectural model titled New World Summit, which functioned as an alternative parliament for representatives of organizations on international terrorist lists, who were invited to debate the limits of current democratic systems. Mexican artist Teresa Margolles conceived a mural-scale display of the front pages of the daily tabloid PM, published in Ciudad Juarez, one of the most dangerous border cities in Mexico. Each front page featured a soft porn image alongside a picture of a gruesome crime. In Berlin, at sites with historic connections to the Holocaust and deportations, Polish artist Łukasz Surowiec planted birch seedlings from the area around the former Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. Occupy Museums filled the entire downstairs of KW, raising questions about the relationship between activism and cultural institutions—a relationship somewhat weakened here, since the movement’s leaders were paid by the biennale’s organizers to come to Berlin to be part of the show.

“Forget Fear”: 7th Berlin Biennale

Tomas Schmit Archiv

By Gretchen Wagner

In Berlin, members of the group visited the Tomas Schmit Archiv, administered by Barbara Wien and Wilma Lukatsch. Creating drawings, texts, and books, Schmit began submitting his works to George Maciunas in 1962 with the idea that they would be included in publications and festivals. Eventually, his involvement grew, and he worked with Maciunas to produce Fluxus Editions, typing up handwritten scores and translating texts. Upon Schmit’s death, in 2006, Wien and Lukatsch published his final two publications and founded the archive. Their goal is to compile an illustrated catalogue raisonné online and to collect the complete correspondence with Scmit’s peers, including a number of artists involved with Fluxus during the 1960s. Once launched, this will be an incredible asset to researchers.

John Cage at Akademie der Künste

By Barbara London

Dr. Wulf Herzogenrath, a knowledgeable old friend, veteran curator, and museum director, , guided the group through John Cage und …, a gem of an exhibition that he co-organized with Barbara Nierhoff-Wielk at the Akademie der Künste. Extraordinary lifelong art historical research radiated out of the compact galleries. We all discovered new Cage connections. Most revelatory was Alexej von Jawlensky’s painting Meditation (1934), acquired by Cage at age twenty-two. Displayed on an adjacent wall were late 1940s tapestries by Anni Albers. They had the same playful geometries as Cage’s own drawings of that time. Another insight could be found between Cage’s score for his composition Apartment House 1776 (1976) and Duchamp’s La Boîte en Valise (1941/66). We all left savoring the experience and wanting more.

“John Cage und …” Exhibition at the Akademie der Kuenste

Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin

By Barbara London

After a delightful lunch with Media Archive curator Henriette Huldisch and director Udo Kittelmann, our group fanned out through Hamburger Bahnhof’s vast spaces. These had more than quadrupled since the building opened in 1996 as the Museum für Gegenwart. While I enjoyed seeing Bruce Nauman’s installation Room with My Soul Left Out, Room That Does Not Care, first experienced in 1984 at Leo Castelli’s Green Street Space, I spent most of my time in Anthony McCall’s exhibition Five Minutes of Pure Sculpture. Where else would I ever again enter such a cathedral-like space, plunged into hazy darkness and experiencing McCall’s sculptural installations, which consist solely of projected white light? I moved among the slowly shifting, geometric light shafts thinking about the intangible nature of much contemporary art.

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In the course of the interview, Elligott draws out the complexities of Fluxus as a group identity that at times conflicted with the creative agencies of individual artists. What was Shiomi’s relationship to Fluxus? What is Fluxus? What was Fluxus in Japan in the 1960s and 1970s? Was Fluxus an artistic movement with a unified purpose, a support network for artists, or a vision of a misunderstood, autocratic Maciunas?

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