Retrospective Exhibitions and Identity Politics: The Capitalization of Criticality in

Curatorial Accounts of Eastern European Art after 1989

Cristian Nae

Retrospective Exhibitions as Art Historical Apparatuses

The end of a decade is always a good opportunity to reevaluate the historical distance that

separates our present from the fall of the Berlin Wall. Curators of contemporary art seem to react

promptly to such opportunities so that at the end of the last decade, just like the end of the

nineties, retrospective exhibitions started to compensate for the still scant art historical

production in the region, also taking over responsibility for compiling relevant theoretical and art

critical texts in the accompanying exhibition catalogues. Therefore, further inquiry into the place

and function of such large retrospective exhibitions in relation to the art historical technology of

power seems appropriate. What part do they play in the distribution of power in present day

identity politics and cultural policy?

I will begin by briefly reviewing the position and importance of large exhibitions (of

which retrospective exhibitions are a subset) in both writing and challenging art historical

practice, that is, in actually making art history. From such a perspective, any exhibition is in itself

an apparatus of power.1 Indeed, exhibitions seem to function in the manner of an “apparatus,” a

term which Foucault understands as a network of heterogeneous elements which appears at the

intersection of power relations and knowledge relations and has a specific, strategic function

affecting the social construction of subjectivity.2 The exhibition addresses and stages formats

from the public sphere, presents selections of artists and artwork and takes part in the art market

and the larger art system by empowering them with a specific institutional legitimacy. It does so

by proposing specific exhibition “devices” or dispositifs, apparatuses of power which are able to

articulate heterogeneous elements in the cultural field (such as the aesthetic, the political, social

theory and ethics, series of discursive practices borrowed from disparate fields such as the media,

etc.), propose different possible art historical narratives and mediate the critical reception of the

artwork (by means of the display and other technical devices such as the catalogue).

Large exhibitions do not present only a mere difference in scale and visibility to the

small, site-oriented and most often, gallery-produced exhibitions; they also differ in terms of

their art historical effect, of the force of their specific theoretical apparatus and most often in

their own legitimizing structures. At the beginning of the nineties, Jean Marc Poinsot compared

large exhibitions with museum collections and raised the question of the historicizing principle

guiding them.3 He noticed that when gathered together, works of art “acquire a normative value

or a program for reproduction,” and thus, by proposing specific (re)distributions of “what have

hitherto appeared to be separate, coherent and homogenous entities,” they function to produce

artistic reality.4 He also noticed that naturalist (chronological) as well as formalist and

iconographic models were often used in setting up curatorial accounts according to the different

categories of temporality that they embody. But he further observed that with the advent of the

neo-avant-gardes and with Harald Szeeman’s paradigmatic exhibitions, When Attitudes Become

Form and Documenta,5 and later, with site-specific and museum-commissioned exhibitions, large

exhibitions changed the nature of their guiding art historical principles and models, heading

towards a different legitimizing structure. Such structure was offered by their relevance to the

present and by their relationships with the social field at large and some of its discourses (often

at once). In brief, we can say that we gradually witnessed a spatializing tendency (sometimes

with “horizontalizing”5 accents) of the legitimizing principles for large exhibitions that

challenged previous art historical models themselves. These models were opened up towards

visual and social studies and were legitimized by theoretical readings and provisional labeling

offered by the curators acting as both historians and mediators in the socio-cultural field at large.

After what Hal Foster termed the “ethnographic turn,”6 which also rested on the spatial

frame of reference, the “spatializing” tendency was followed by a virtualization of the exhibition

temporal frame, the legitimizing principle and criteria for an exhibition being measured by its

potential to open up future developments in the social sphere. Nicolas Bourriaud’s relational art

exhibitions and Hans Ulrich Obrist’s “Utopia Stations” that were developed in the late nineties

represent well-known examples of this tendency. Last, but not least, since the nineties the format

of the biennale has acquired a specific force of legitimation both for the art market as a global

institution and in reproducing cultural industry. According to Caroline A. Jones, this

phenomenon is leading to a specific experience of art as an aesthetic phenomenon instead of

focusing on the presentation of art objects,7 while Boris Groys also noted that the exhibition has

become in itself an autonomous art of installation as the basic unit of artistic analysis and the

reception of art instead of being the mere place and system of presentation and mediation of

autonomous artwork to the public.8

Besides the global cultural industry of the art biennale, retrospective exhibitions have

also been recently resurrected in Central-East European curatorial practice. Exhibitions like “The

Body and the East” (Moderna Galerija, Ljubljana, 1998), “After the Wall. Art and Culture in

Post-Communist Europe,” and, more recently, “Performing the East” (Salzburger Kunstverein,

2009), “Gender Check” (Museum moderner Kunst, Vienna, 2009) and “on the eastern front….”

(Ludwig Museum, Budapest and Zacheta Gallery, Warsaw, 2010) bring into question the old

format of the retrospective exhibition, proposing new directions of reading and interpretive keys

to eastern European art.

Focusing on eastern-European art both before and after 1989, retrospective exhibitions

relate to the art historical apparatus and bring forth the question of the old-fashioned art

historical legitimizing model, although they clearly do not rely on the same formalistic,

iconographic or naturalist ones. However, by looking back to the past under the heading of a

possible continuity with the present and by constructing a thematic homogeneity for a specific

body of artwork, they propose provisional meta-narratives and advance possible relationships

between seemingly singular art pieces. On the one hand, they serve to re-evaluate the past from

the perspective of the present in a more or less holistic manner. On the other hand, they relate to

the question of memory, of socialist amnesia and of the remembrance of our recent past and

interrupted tradition, since they also perform the task of reviewing and remembering what is

important for our present-day condition and self-understanding, and preserving artwork which

continues to exercise an influence today. In other words, they have the additional task of

preserving the past and its “historical effectiveness” (Wirkungsgeschichte), as Gadamer would

call it.9

According to a more radical reading, retrospective exhibitions actually reconstruct the

past in their own curatorial framework, while constructing its conditions of intelligibility under a

specific theoretical determination and with a specific selection of artists and artwork. They are

no different from any art historical proposal but in the sense that, unlike historians, curators work

with limited finances for setting up their account and, most often, their exhibitions also stage an

aesthetic experience and reception of the artwork in question. By reconsidering the recent past,

they also have to reinterpret the discontinuity introduced by the “post-communist” period in

relation to the communist past (which still remains, according to Groys, our “true specificity” 10)

in both its utopian and modernist drive and historical facticity.

To sum up, retrospective exhibitions heavily influence the writing of central-east

European recent art history; but they also produce alternative art historical approaches in

themselves, at least by means of the selection of artists and the use of theoretical criteria for

topical relevance and inclusion/exclusion in the curatorial “cannon” constructed for the topic at

hand and the curator’s interpretive framework. They also have the power to commission and

produce autonomous theoretical reflection. When specifically dealing with the situation of

eastern European art, especially after 1989, retrospective exhibitions still function today to fill in

the gap of art historical knowledge in the region, complementing self-historicizing practices and

initiatives with curatorial research under the usual institutional circumstances.

From authorial exhibitions to collective and collaborative work

A closer look at major retrospective exhibitions presenting Eastern-European art in the last two

decades also reveals structural changes in the form of the exhibition, its research practice and

methodology. The main shift from the nineties to recent exhibitions in the 2000’s can be

expressed by a transformation in curatorial research and production which accompanies changes

concerning the management of work on a broader, global scale and reflects changes in the nature

of institutional structures in capitalism as well. If exhibitions such as The Body and the East

(1998), Blood and Honey: the Future´s in the Balkans!11 and After the Wall. Art and Culture in

Post-Communist Europe12 still belong to the authorial type of exhibition centered around the

figure of the curator and her own research program and theoretical and historic approach, later

exhibitions, such as Gender Check and the Transitland archive (both in 2009) or Promises of the

Past13 reflect collaborative and collective work, coordinated either by a single “senior” curator

(Gender Check), by joint collaboration (Promises of the Past) or by a team of several curators

(Transitland).

The theoretical advantages of such an approach are obvious: such a decentralization of

exhibition research and production structures the curatorial account according to a perspectivist

interpretation of the cultural phenomenon and applies a rhizomatic, horizontal historical

framework in which eastern-European (artistic) identity is set in a continuous interplay of

representations. It presents multiple points of view of the “(Central) eastern-European” region,

allows for multiple art histories and historicities to unfold and accounts for inherent intra-

national discontinuities and discrepancies which exist in both the development of artistic

practices and their own economic and societal transformations. Thus, it is obvious that with the

latter curatorial format a national account based on research made up by selected representatives

is preferred to a single curatorial approach leading to an artist-based, thematic sampling of

artwork under the heading of a transnational “eastern” identity.

The change in the conception of retrospective exhibitions that took place from the

nineties to the last decade is by no means accidental or a mere curatorial trend. But it would be

too naïve to believe that it is only the result of its theoretical advantages in approaching eastern-

European identity. In fact, it is the result of transformations undergone in the means of

production in late and recent capitalism. If the “dematerialization of the artwork” and its shift

towards relational practices and service aesthetics in the art of the nineties broadly correspond to

the development of “immaterial labor”14 in advanced capitalist societies, collective and

collaborative curatorial work respond to collaborative and participatory organizational

management. The decentralization of decisional structures and the rise of “collaborative

leadership” in the conception and implementation of exhibitions share similar traits with

corporate responsibility, whereas collaborative curatorial engagement and art historical expertise

highlights the accuracy of nationalist accounts and justifies the selection of artwork.

Retrospective Exhibitions and Identity Politics

By offering the possibility to speak and a platform of visibility for a specific set of artwork and

artists and by temporarily constructing a provisional identity and a legitimizing narrative for

them, retrospective exhibitions are open themselves to a series of questions regarding their

specific production and reproduction of identity and their internal system of power relations.

Why are certain artists offered the possibility to speak and a manner of speaking? What sorts of

identity representation/enactment/deconstruction are being chosen and exhibited? What are the

criteria according to which Eastern European identity is recognized and produced within the

theoretically predetermined critical interpretive frameworks of the curatorial/editorial approach?

If a “spatial turn”15 in writing art history is to be acknowledged, how important are not only the

geo-political artistic origins, but also the relevance of the work’s content or specific approach to

the topic? Finally, which significant differences regarding the production of identity are to be

observed in art historical practice, as such, before and after 1989, making the post-communist

shift substantively meaningful beyond a mere rhetorical catch-phrase?

I will not try to answer all (or even any) of these questions here. Instead, I will focus on a

specific role that retrospective exhibitions play in both representing and challenging eastern-

European identity. By their very nature, such exhibitions are most often compelled to produce a

specific artistic reality and a specific legitimizing narrative for this reality. They have to produce

ways of strategically presenting a coherent ensemble of multiple and shifting identities and to

justify the theoretical concepts which structure and distribute specific artwork inside the

discursive field they produce. Thus the obvious general question which links them to the

discourse of identity politics is how this image of Eastern-European art is produced, uttered and

received by means of curatorial accounts, in what terms and for whom. The subsequent question

is how the critique of identity as objectified and reified “Otherness” is to be carried out and

which “patriarchal” (or rather, hegemonic) strategies and patterns do they confront?

A remarkable example of how retrospective exhibitions participate in identity politics

(and why they mean much more than a temporary cultural industry event or a mere topological

and temporally limited collection or selection of artists and artwork) is After the Wall. Art and

Culture in Post-Communist Europe of 1998. Commenting on its implications and its curatorial

legitimizing narrative which claimed to highlight freedom of artistic speech and exhibit artistic

production on its way to “normality,”16 Ronald Jones notes that “where artistic repression is

concerned, events followed a trajectory from “Degenerate Art” in 1937 to the likewise infamous

Soviet bulldozing of an open-air exhibition of “unofficial art” in a Moscow suburb in 1974. With

this greater perspective, “After the Wall” becomes meaningful less as a decade-long sampling of

artistic freedom than as a detailed map of the devastating and residual aftereffects on artistic

production in Central and Eastern Europe wrought by hard-hearted authoritarianism and

humorless subjugation that had their beginnings in 1937.”17

The discourse of “normality” cautiously advocated by Pejić sets us in the middle of

identity politics discourse. It is clear today that such a discourse is highly problematic, not only

because it nevertheless affirms the supremacy of “patriarchal” western art institutions and the

capitalist art market system of production, but also because its inherent dialectics18 stems from

the incorrect positioning of eastern-European artists as irredeemably caught between the desire

for a universal artistic language (which implies the desire for the erasure of any “eastern” artistic

specificity, especially constructed as macro-political direct oppositionality) and the “eros of

identity,”19 which, although it is certainly not “the universal breaking away from the particular,”

it is precisely the opposite tendency of the western postmodern deconstruction of subjectivity

and fixed, essentialized identities. In other words, aside from the fact that postmodernism and

post-communism are heading in opposite directions, “normality” in former Eastern Europe is by

no means plain and undifferentiated global, capitalist, artistic and subjective production.

The Performative Production of Eastern-European Identity in the Artistic Field

In order to attempt an answer to the painful question of identity and the even more problematic

one of its appropriate strategies of construction in the artistic field, I propose shifting away from

the traditional form of analysis of Eastern-European identity in terms of the politics of

representation. Instead, let us start our discussion of Central East-European identity and its

cultural enactment and reproduction through major retrospective exhibitions after 1989 from the

very general (and somehow, tautological) idea that cultural identity, such as the post-communist

Eastern-European artistic identity, is obviously an entirely cultural phenomenon. We might also

wonder about its relationship to the natural given sustaining it (such as the gender/sex

dichotomy) and and about the nature of this difference. We seem to know the answer to the last

part of this question all too well: regarded under specific historical circumstances, the ground is

formed by a matrix of socio-economic conditions usually described as “post-socialist” or “neo-

capitalist” which covers a specific geographic position, formerly drawn geo-politically according

to the Iron Curtain divide. As for the first part of the question, we might therefore inquire about

the accuracy or adequacy of cultural representations and descriptions in relation to these natural

“facts” for each contingent case at hand.

But, unlike the “sex/gender” situation, artistic identity based on such regional, historical,

political and socio-economical differences has no firm or natural ground behind it, except for a

geographic (or rather topological) localization in a specific and given discursive field. Upon

closer inspection, it becomes obvious that material “givens” (related to socio-economic

conditions that can be brought forth in the framework of a renewed historical materialism) are

also completely dependent upon a secondary set of cultural interpretations. As Piotr Piotrowski

noticed,20 the old geography of art (based on national or regional differences and identities)

leaves room today for a “topography” of art which also applies in post-communist countries,

since the localization of the artist or the origin of a work of art surpasses the mere geographical

provenience and transgresses multiple, mobile and often superimposing boundaries and

properties. But such topography of eastern-European art only highlights the constructed character

of the identity we are talking about, if it was not obvious from the very beginning that even the

geographic “given” itself heavily relied on a set of interpretations (which are at the same time

political, economic and cultural, materialistic and idealistic). The historical materialist reading of

its conditions of intelligibility and the naturalistic interpretive framework of its structural

transformations is the first reductionist dogma I think should be avoided when dealing with the

problematic construction of post-communist eastern-European identity.

As for the relationship of the artistic discourse with the reality “behind” it, let us further

assume that artistic identity in the cultural field is not only represented in language or images,

neither described nor invented, it is simply performatively produced: it is, therefore, the result of

performative cultural acts, and not a substantive description or a behavioral attribute of “the

given” set of differences or of any natural grounds for this difference.

These assumptions can be used especially for analyzing the construction of “eastern-

European” in the field of identity politics after 1989. Replacing “gender” with “eastern,” we

might say with Judit Butler that “eastern reality is performative, which means, quite simply, that

it is real only to the extent that it is performed.”21 Its “new,” “post-“(socialist, communist etc.)

identity after 1989 is the result of a series of cultural operations, partially performed on the

former ideological descriptions, images and cultural representation, and which are the result of

performing their local identity in the cultural field against a predetermined set of assumptions

and acting conventions. In the specific case of the retrospective art exhibition, artists produce

their identity against curatorial discourse as interpretive framework, which serves as the first

condition for legitimizing their acts (artwork or representation). Therefore, each artistic

representation acts in the cultural field, while artistic identity is the result of a repeated series of

speech-acts, such as “it’s an eastern European work of art.” Of course, in order to qualify as an

“eastern European work of art” in a given curatorial or art historical discursive framework, it has

to comply with certain conventions and cultural codes legitimizing its identity which clearly

overcome the simple origin of the artist or place of production. It is rather the content of the

work, the way it presents (or deconstructs) its own identity in reference to the social, economic,

cultural, religious and gender problems and conditions that qualify it.

Thus, we can also conclude with Judith Butler that “the ascription of interiority is itself a

publicly regulated and sanctioned form of essence fabrication.”22 By giving up a

representationalist model of identity construction, eastern-European identity becomes neither

true, nor false, neither real nor apparent. However, its performative production on the scene of

utterance is forced to comply with a specific set of “cultural norms” which sanction its

performance and try to maintain it in a binary frame (such as Eastern/Western). While recent

critiques of identity attempt to challenge this binary frame, we still cannot say that they render it

completely inoperative.

The description of the performative process of the production of identity I have offered so

far supposes that a certain disciplinary matrix governs the performance of identity in the artistic

field, just like it does in social reality with cultural production and the reproduction of gender. It

also supposes that there is a discursive configuration of regulations (and institutional regulated

network of sanctions) which govern the ascription of interiority (“eastern”) at a certain period of

time. The artists and their work perform their own identity according to such sets of norms and

regulations (implicit) which ascribe positions of power to various cultural actors. They construct

by a repetition of categories of “legitimate” descriptions which may also vary in time.

In our case, this disciplinary matrix governing the production of identity is nothing else

but the (artistic and cultural) market itself. In simple (and cynical) terms, the expectancies of the

global art market and its recent capitalist expansion after 1989 regulate (or at least used to

regulate) what is legitimate and appropriate in terms of identity production and reproduction,

according to what is desirable and profitable for the market (although its operations are not

unidirectional, but certainly influenced and its expectancies shaped according to the types of

goods it confronts with). It plays the role of a Marxist “superstructure,” a power structure to

which all the other discourses such as identity politics are relegated in the end.

What Does the Capitalization of Criticality Mean and How Is It Produced?

It should be clear by now that, as important actors in such an artistic system of identifications,

retrospective exhibitions on eastern-European art do not produce images of the present and do

not reconstruct collective identity in a neutral discursive space; they also propose intelligibility

frameworks more or less according to the complex “superstructure” which regulates their speech

and influences their identity politics.

In this context, I use the term “capitalization of criticality” in a double sense, in order to

refer to a twofold process of identity production and reproduction that threatens to perpetuate on

the scene of utterance in curatorial accounts of eastern-European art after 1989. The key figure in

this process is its tendency to capitalize the identity of the eastern European (that is, both to write

it in Capital Letters and to transform it into symbolic capital by this very act of writing23) and to

fix its image according to the criterion of criticality itself - that is, not by referring it to a set of

historical prejudices or to a specific cultural imaginary, but by ascribing to it a specific function

in the discursive field of contemporary art. Therefore, if Robert Fleck hastened to proclaim the

erasure of aesthetic distinctions between formerly recognizable categories of Eastern and

Western art (which never existed in a clear-cut opposition except for versions such as socialist

realism) which made it impossible to discern “the geographic origins of the individual artists

from the phenotype of their works,”24 it is only because aesthetic differences paved the way

towards a functional type of identity concerned with the very phantasm of oppositionality.

First of all, the capitalization of Criticality refers to a specific essentialist reification of

the eastern-European identity, which, unlike representational reification25 or strategic

essentialism,26 I consider to belong to a subtler type of discursive reification: one which is not

representational in character, but purely functional. Such reification can sometimes occur in

curatorial legitimizing discourses of identity construction by succumbing to a realist-essentialist

type of identity construction which equates the “Eastern European” with a certain Critical

production/representation of the West, despite their attention to national differences, historical

discontinuities and geographic “fuzziness” in defining the (central) “Eastern European”. The

result is that different types of critical agency are thus being reduced to criticality with a Capital

letter, understood as the subversive potential, or the possibility of producing Otherness as such to

the Western capitalist system of artistic production/reception - that is, to the art market as

institution. As I will try to show, such tendency of capitalization finds its origins in a specific

reception of the eastern-European neo-avant-gardes, which, during the Iron Curtain divide,

produced art often in conditions of market-free production and often understood as gestures of

political oppositionality and aesthetic dissidence.

But the reification of identity which occurs by means of the above-mentioned

capitalization of Criticality is also dependent on a broader interpretive framework, namely, the

economic superstructure which supports institutional cultural policies according to the general

logic of global capitalist expansion. In this context, it describes the transformation of inherent

criticality into symbolic artistic capital in the framework of the present-day “former west/former

east” dialogue. That is, in this second sense, the capitalization of criticality refers to the

discursive and cultural process by means of which criticality is being turned into a commodity

value and is enhanced as a commodity as such. By means of such a simple discursive procedure,

difference and identity is itself are being produced and reproduced as a commodity, which Boris

Groys already observed in relation to the taste for local difference when attempting to interpret

post-communism according to the logic of postmodern cultural studies.27

If I set the discussion of eastern-European identity in terms of identity politics from the

very beginning, it is also because, as Groys puts it, “the discourse of the politics of diversity and

difference cannot be seen and interpreted correctly without being related to the market-driven

practice of cultural diversification and differentiation in the last decades of the twentieth century.

This practice opened up a third option beyond suppressing it or finding a representation for it in

the context of existing political and cultural institutions. This third option is to sell, to

commodify, to commercialize this cultural identity on the international media and tourist

market.”28 Groys also mentions that “becoming universal, abstract, uniform makes you

aesthetically unattractive and commercially unoperative.”29 But at the same time, this means that

essentialized Eastern European Identity has to be produced as being as refined, diverse, local and

specific as possible - with a flavor of exoticism, if possible.30

Criticality and the New Spirit of Capitalism

If we pay closer attention to the economic reasons behind the integration of criticality into the

discourse of eastern-European artistic identity, as being one of the main virtues that can fix in

essentialist terms its otherwise fragmented and unstable artistic identity, one may also notice

that, in this very process of capitalization, criticism itself as an artistic attribute loses its strategic

function and ceases to be operative (unless in the precise confinements of the meta-narrative in

question). It thus, becomes actually part of the criticized system, since it constructs a different

otherness in the framework of its own (self-produced) logic and discourse. On the other hand, the

value of criticality as “knowledge potential” and “knowledge production” responds to the

structure of post-Fordist capitalist production in which “general intellect” has become the basic

tenet of accumulation and production, a “linguistic reiteration of living labor.”31 It is part of the

current system of production in what is also called “cognitive capitalism” and replicates its

proper system of values such as “creativity.”32

Therefore, the radical difference in terms of power relations related to the question of

how to represent “post-communist” eastern European art in relation to the western art historical

theoretical apparatus doesn’t lie in the terms of the discourse we use to represent ourselves. Nor

does it lie exclusively in the methodological principles we use or their limitations, but plainly

between being able to speak in a certain vocabulary that can also be understood by the west and

which is comprehensible on the global art market, and not being able to speak at all. This

economy of forces is ensured as long as the positions of both speakers can be incorporated into

the logic of cultural production – that is, as long as the “subaltern” is not the radical Other, but a

fashionable otherness.

Not surprisingly, the internalization of critique is one of the key factors of “the new spirit

of capitalism”. Boltanski and Chiappelo use the term “spirit of capitalism” to refer to “the

ideology that justifies people’s commitment to capitalism, and which renders this commitment

attractive.”33 They go on to explain that “far from being a simple adornment or “superstructure”

(as Marxist ideology would have it), it is central to the process of capitalistic accumulation that it

serves because it applies constraints to this process.”34

The two authors observe that, from its inception, capitalism survives by endogenizing the

criticism it faces. Moreover, they notice the occurrence of a rather recent “spirit” of capitalism,

in which criticism is a key factor of capitalist expansion. Therefore, the critique of capitalism,

just like commodity critique, is not only necessary, but it is also a major drive in

correcting/changing capitalist procedures and operations, and especially in finding out new (and

improved) self-legitimizing discourses. When it is not entirely circumvented, criticism functions

to correct errors of the existent system or suggests that several legitimizing procedures should be

entirely abandoned. “But the very idea of criticism only makes sense if it is seen as the difference

between a desirable state of affairs and a real situation.”35 That is, by ensuring space for

criticism, capitalism also projects its permanent perfectibility and utopianism, which legitimizes

the otherwise brute (and all too simple) logic of capital accumulation.

Therefore, the critique of capitalism itself plays an important part in legitimizing the

discourse of capitalism: the critic not only projects a world in which hypocrisy hides imbalances

of power, domination, exploitation etc., but is also forced to legitimize its own position, that is,

to indicate a normative foundation that supports the very act of criticism. Most often, the

internalization of criticality by the criticized system (and thus, the deflation of its force) supposes

the legitimization of a new type of inoffensive critique, one which offers as a normative basis

that which is already inherent to the system’s binary oppositions in use.

Artistic Capitalization: Critique as Commodity

Boltanski and Chiapello’s account of the mechanics of recent capitalism can be applied to the

post-communist artistic production of identity as follows: with the collapse of the Iron Curtain

ideological apparatus sustaining such clear-cut oppositional projections, the other is being

projected from within the capitalist system as such. It thus becomes the “eastern” as “the (still)

uncontaminated” e.g. “the critical” or “the resistant” etc. The former ‘Eastern’ loses its former

firm ideological oppositional grounds; however, it acquires a different critical position within the

expanded capitalist system, becoming a threat to capitalist homogeneity and integration,

especially after the recent border erasure project assuring the EU’s complete eastward expansion

– a phenomenon that Marina Gržinić analyses as a strategy of “accumulation by dispossession,”36

that is, by the slow erasure of any specificities in favor of a universal language and the free

circulation of products and goods. However, presenting its own identity as ‘the critical other

from within’ became a desirable art-marketable product after 1989, as Groys also noticed

concerning the use and limits of postmodern cultural studies in analyzing post-communist

identity.37 On the one hand, such a critical “in-between” situation ensured that the identity in

question is at the same time specific and different, that is, marketable. On the other hand, it

created the illusion of maintaining a critical oppositionality to the actual capitalist expansion

which is proclaimed to be desirable, but only as long as, unlike the 1968 protests, it is socially

ineffective, becoming, in the end, a mere rhetorical exercise. In brief, critical discourse itself

tends to become a value for the capitalist system since it represents “the promise of otherness,”

as long as it comes from within. It sustains global capitalism’s constitutive illusion: integrated

capitalism simply cannot project its illusions without creating an illusory outside and projecting a

certain gap between reality and promise, which, on the other hand, masks the real “outside”

(which actually does not have a voice at all).

The situation corresponds to a progressive shift in terms of how oppositionality and

social and self-criticism can be effective in artistic practices, which ranges from the direct

(bodily expressed) or the poetic (the destabilization of ideology in its linguistic structure)

oppositionality to complex versions of identity critique and the critique of the Otherness by

means of simulation/over-identification/displacement. During this transitional process, the very

idea of criticality as a potential oppositionality to both the market and identity reification, as well

as the critique of capitalist expansion (“the critical analysis of economic and social transition”)

acquired a specific value in itself. This value not only connects regional art history to the

dominant logic of postmodernist narrative in western art history as a “deconstruction of

modernity,” but also instantiates a specific position and a specific continuity for the Eastern-

European post-communist art in relation to its proper neo-avant-garde tradition. To sum up, the

discursive process of capitalization of criticality in post-communist art rests on a threefold

argument, which can be structured as follows:

1) The critical position of eastern-European art towards the art market, which constituted

a real outside before 1989, later became slowly a part of it, but one which is still

uncommodified in its entirety. Therefore, due to its former socio-economic conditions, eastern-

European art still preserves a critical potential which has already been commodified in the West.

2) Instead of pointing at materialist conditions of production or geo-political localization

as key factors in constructing its identity, critical oppositionality is being advocated as an

“essentialist” denominator for Eastern-European art (and pervades it discourse of identity).

3) The incomplete commodification of eastern-European art can be finally achieved by

turning the very uncommodified critical potential (and its actualizations) as such into symbolic

cultural capital - hence, into a cultural commodity. Criticality is transformed into an artistic value

in itself and is thus reintegrated into the logic of the global art market.

Historical Continuity: The Authenticity of Performance Art (and Other Critical Myths)

One of the legitimizing discursive structures of this commodification of criticality is based on the

purely conceptual and art historical value of criticality in eastern European art, as a principle of

continuity between socialist and post-socialist periods. Its art historical value is borrowed from

such a supposed continuity with its “pure” critical past. According to this logic, the commodified

value of criticality as such for post-communist artwork is being constructed in an art historical

manner, in relation to its former value of political oppositionality and creative freedom in

eastern-European neo-avant-garde-practices, which (for this narrative) actually were producing

art outside the western art market system. Unlike the late capitulation of the neo-avant-gardes to

(and even complicity with) the art market and bureaucratic system, and the eventual reductionist

aesthetization of these practices in terms of mere formal or linguistic achievements,38 eastern

neo-avant-gardes would preserve their uncommodified and, therefore, “authentic” critical

potential.

I call this line of argumentation capitalization by “critical continuity,” that is, by the very

continuity of critical opposition towards the art market and the inherent political oppositionality

that can be found in Eastern European art both in the neo-avant-gardes of the sixties or seventies

and in its later offspring, such as the retro-avant-garde or some of the post-communist “neo-

conceptual” art. An example can be found in Zdenka Badovinac’s The Body and the East

exhibition of 1998, recently repeated on a larger scale at Salzburger Kunstverein in 2009 in

Performing the East (curated by Hemma Schmutz). The Body and the East remains a landmark

exhibition for presenting a structured account of performance art in Eastern Europe, starting with

the neo-avant-gardes of the sixties and leading to the nineties, that is, the first post-communist

decade. In the curatorial text of the exhibition catalogue, Zdenka Badovinać structures its

interpretive logic of the artistic phenomenon according to two major assumptions concerning the

history of performance art in former Eastern Europe. One is the fact that during communism,

performance art was the purest example of an art produced outside the art market, while

institutional critique related not to the art institutions as such, but to the media and the state

ideological apparatus.39 The other assumption concerns the fact that the body was nevertheless

the ultimate space for political oppositionality (since it was also the ultimate support for the

exercise of disciplinary power). From the sixties to the eighties, “the personal was political” - or

so goes the dogma. Although it is not explicitly stated as such, this idea is expressed by

explaining the difference between Eastern and Western performance art by stressing the political

implications of some gestures which remain invisible outside their proper context of production,

such as the use of the naked body in Tomislav Gotovac’s public actions or Ion Grigorescu’s

photographic documentation of his own sexual apparatus and bodily functions.40

In her curatorial essay, the position of the body is questioned as both a representational

vehicle and support, a plane for the articulation of multiple discourses and forces, inscribed in a

chronological and “horizontal” (that, is theoretical) network of power relations: between the

body and the art institutions, as well as “between the individual and the collective as evidenced

in Eastern European body art in the sixties and seventies, between identity and the assumed role

of the body in the framework of art in the eighties and between the new and the old identity of

body art in the period of social and political transitions in the East in the nineties.”41 Thus, while

assuring historical continuity through the three above mentioned periods (the sixties and

seventies, the eighties and the post-communist nineties), its different inscriptions serve to

reaffirm its critical and strategic function in the artistic field and in the field of cultural policies.

Performance served as an individual escape from the ideological system and as a strategy of

subjectification; it served as a collective enactment of identity in the eighties (sometimes by

means of overidentification performative strategies, as in the case of NSK); finally, it functioned

to express insecurity, critically trying to react to the dissolution or loss of identity in the nineties.

But it is precisely the historically constructed critical “authenticity” of performance art

which becomes the trademark for a commercial product after 1989 – its capacity for producing

critical effects in the social field and for staying outside the critical logic inherent to the art

market in the former West, while also proving its continuity with the Western neo-avant-gardes.

While presenting a coherent and accurate selection of body actions in their own context of

production and thus reconstructing the conditions of intelligibility for the Western spectator

beyond their formalistic “experimental” character, Zdenka Badovinac’s seminal exhibition

unwillingly created the perfect precedent for packaging the Eastern neo-avant-gardes in

commodified terms and for assessing their critical identity on the global cultural market.

A curatorial reading which actually drew on the historical authenticity of performance art

in Eastern Europe and its political oppositional character after 1989 was undertaken ten years

later by the Performing the East exhibition presented at Salzburger Kunstverein in 2009. The

ambitious retrospective exhibition took over the two assumptions concerning art in former

Eastern Europe from its well-known predecessor and extended it to the post-communist period.

Indeed, the exhibition not only presented performances and actions taking place “after the wall,”

but also invited artists to produce several performances for this occasion. This strategy actually

presented a discontinuous image of Eastern-European art as a homogeneous practice rather than

a smooth and continuous practice which simply adds a prefix to its characterization. A closer

analysis of these performances, such as Tanja Ostojić’s Strategies of Success: Curators Series,

Ivan Moudov’s Traffic Controll, or Roman Ondák or Matei Bejenaru’s commissioned collective

actions reveals not only that overt macro-political and biopolitical criticism and freedom of

artistic expression are hardly conditions of artistic practice that can be simply and entirely

transferred to the post-communist condition, but they are also hardly typical for eastern-

European art as such (which becomes obvious if we only step out of such a Eurocentric

framework of discussion and think about South American or Middle East art and performance in

the last fifty years).

Let us take a closer look again at how the identity of post-communist performance art is

constructed in relation to its neo-avant-garde legacy by Zdenka Badovinac’s curatorial essay

accompanying her exhibition. Although it stresses the difference in strategic solutions, it also

highlights the continuity in critically redefining their identity and position: “The works of these

artists leave the relationship between identity and otherness an open question, a never ending

process (…) the deconstruction of the play of representation distinguish the works of

contemporary artists from their older colleagues, who used ancient practices and esoteric rituals

to overcome the otherness.”42 In further addressing this difference, she also states: “it is true,

however, that numerous artists from the East have been critical of their own otherness as the

identity constructed through the play of representations.”43 Although she accurately describes the

self-critical interest of post-communist artists regarding their Eastern-European identity (mostly

in the nineties), and the shift that occurred in critical strategies between neo-avant-garde identity

critique and the more recent strategies adopted by the artists in post-communism, the main

cultural operator in describing Eastern-European art as a specific artistic attitude remains

criticality, understood as both a critique of the market and a critique of identity.

Historical Materialism vs. Gender Politics: A Possible Counter-Critique

The most common but misleading strategy of interpreting east-European artistic identity is to

overdetermine it as an essentialist post-communist condition, by interpreting it in the narrow

framework of historical materialism. The unforeseen risk of such an interpretation is to capitalize

once more criticality as the common denominator accounting for the obvious differences in

artistic strategies and approaches, media and vocabularies used and topics addressed (not to

mention the much too singular differences in aesthetic appearance and experience). Historical

materialism finds a common denominator in the specific conditions of artistic production and in

the broader economic transformations. For instance, a similar account has been proposed by

Zsolt Petrányi and Eszter Lazar in their recent exhibition Over the Counter. The Phenomena of

Post-Socialist Economy in Contemporary Art (Mücsarnok, Budapest, 2010) dealing with the

artistic analysis of socialist transformations in last twenty years. Except for the common topic of

the selected pieces, that is, the analysis of post-socialist economic conditions and

transformations, as well as the shared interest in the investigation of memory, what could further

construct a common artistic identity for approaches as different in their research methodology as

documentary and field work, the recording of a staged collective performance and docu-fiction

cinematic video art, to mention just a few examples in the exhibition? Over the Counter

proposed the image of the exhibition as a laboratory of historical and social analysis in which

artists reveal a critical interest in their material conditions of production. However, it eventually

capitalized on the good old Greenbergian image of the eastern-European critical artist which

produces artistic research in a social sphere only to “better entrench it in its area of

competence,”44 in the end. The figure of the artist as ethnographer, journalist, investigator,

prosecutor and observer of the social field (with an awareness of its own unprivileged position)

connects in this case the function of the Eastern and Western Critical Artists and distinguishes

them by the context in which they operate (a transitional one).

In this respect, I mention Piotr Piotrowski’s suggestion that the analysis of gender in

eastern-European art should not start from the material and historical post-communist conditions,

but rather, from a larger shift of subjectivity deconstruction in which both western and eastern art

took part as different ways of acknowledging the demise (and failure) of modernism.45 Indeed,

unlike the assumption of a shared socio-economic identity, gender politics and gender-focused

retrospective exhibitions seem to represent a field where the performative enactment in order to

produce a subsequent disruption of identity as the best suited critical strategy for coping with

eastern-European identity politics is the most obvious.

In my opinion, such an approach was undertaken in a curatorial example related to the

disruption of gender differences by means of a performative enactment, but whose strategy could

be further expanded to identity politics at large. Schengen Women, a relatively small group

exhibition of eight women and a man, also curated by Zdenka Badovinac in 2008, staged a play

of gender identities focusing on the situation of women on the “other” side of the Schengen

borders. In her account of the exhibition, the curator used the term “active Otherness” to refer to

the ability of the person in the position of objectification as “Other” to re-subjectify herself by

enacting its position of otherness and thus responding to the objectifying gaze. In fact, the

exhibition itself proposed a cross-play of gender roles in which not only a male artist displaced

his assigned position, but also women artists deconstructed their own assigned positions in social

life. They shifted the discourse altogether from gender towards queer politics.

A much more substantial exhibition that took place at Museum moderner Kunst in

Vienna (and other related spaces) in 2009-2010 under the title “Gender Check” focused on a

wider framework of reference and addressed the socialist and post-socialist condition of women

in eastern-Europe. While discussing the shift from socialist imaginary, with its iconography of

the woman-heroine advocating proletarian egalitarianism, to the clearly patriarchal condition of

post-socialist societies, Bojana Pejić, the curator of the exhibition, notes that the shift of cultural

regimes brings forth not only a deconstruction of “femininity” which is typical for modernist art,

and of ideologically constructed egalitarian imaginary, but also a generation of new images of

woman as housewife or whore – two clearly masculinist projections46. Pejić also equates

nationalist ideology which emerged “after the wall” with sexism, fundamentalism and

masculinism. Thus, she briefly but insightfully outlined the cultural and material conditions

structuring gender iconography. Therefore, the distinctive feature (if any) of Eastern-European

identity critique to be found in visual artwork produced in the post-communist period lies in the

way women responded to these specific conditions by performatively reacting to such sexist

projections.

But the most powerful critical strategy borrowed from gender identity politics remains

operative when both sexist and eastern projections are confronted at the same time, that is, when

at least two types of identity politics superimpose in the same theatrical scene, allowing for a

“cross-over” effect of overlapping identities to take place.47 In this respect, Tanja Ostojić’s

Looking for a Husband with EU Passport remains an exemplary critical artistic device for the

way it dismantles Eastern and gender associations, an operation that can be generally labeled as

“post-identity” enactment.48 She performs its eastern identity as a weak economic position, while

making herself unattractive as an object of sexual desire.

Performative Enactment and Strategic Essentialism: Identity Critique and its Limitations

Thus, if the eastern-European identity can be perceived as the result of a performative action in

the cultural sphere as I proposed earlier in this text, it also means that it can be performatively

subverted and simulated, in order to expose the “nomadic” character of the subjectivity in

question as a radically “unstable identity.” Although I have mentioned above several curatorial

and artistic examples which happen to remain in the narrow field of gender identity politics as

such, I believe that the strategy can be nevertheless enlarged to approach any other aspects of

eastern-European identity.

What it is does not explicitly express its theatrical character; such a critical strategy can

be easily misread as an essentialist stance or an identity assertion. Therefore, we should be

careful not to confuse it with the simple capitalization of Eastern European Identity in terms of a

specific cultural imaginary or historical materialism, or the capitalization of Criticality (which I

consider to be the subtlest form of identity reification), or with strategic essentialism, which

often occurs in curatorial and artistic discourses after 1989 as another important political strategy

of counter-hegemonic identity affirmation. In the last case, artistic identity can be strategically

essentialized (at least in the case of national art) not in order to conform to the existent

“disciplinary matrix” (that is, the art market), but, by simulating such an essentialist description,

in order to deconstruct its legitimizing principles and terms which construct its ideological

representations. Indeed, some recent retrospective exhibitions actually manifested a clear

awareness of the point of view from which they are constructing the past (that of the present) in

order to challenge assumptions on post-communist identity constitution and dismantle the reified

system of differences whose echoes influence the present. Thus, they performed a genealogical

redistribution of shared prejudices and challenged already established positions in the present

configuration of representation politics.

Indeed, the term eastern-European was also often used in curatorial discourses in a

strategic manner, in a way that can be referred to as a form of “strategic essentialism,”49 in order

to construct unstable, though seemingly referential points of view upon the Eastern-European

condition. According to Gaytari Chakravorty Spivak, “strategic essentialism” is the discursive

use of a specific stable identity or the pragmatic ascription of a stable, fixed and essential subject

as a locus of critical agency with the awareness that such ascription is only a practical and

political move necessary for the existence of antagonism. In her own terms, it is “the strategic

use of positivist essentialism in a scrupulously visible political interest,” projecting a discursive

fictional subject which is nevertheless necessary from the political point of view.50 Such a

strategic use of stable and essentialist identities permits the avoidance of the dissolution of the

subject together with its cultural identity and the construction of clear-cut positions of

antagonism which may further help rejecting hegemonic tendencies by means of a Realpolitik.

A curatorial example of the use of strategic essentialism in the field of art exhibitions is

Zdenka Badovinac and Igor Zabel’s Seven Sins: Ljubljana-Moscow exhibition in 2004, (co-

curated with Viktor Misiano), in which Eastern European identity was represented by means of

seven attributes seemingly typical both for Russian and Slovene artists: collectivism, utopianism,

masochism, cynicism, laziness, unprofessionalism and love of the west.51 From such a position,

the attributes of the Other clearly emerged in an antagonist manner: individualism, pragmaticism,

diligence, professionalism. However, each of this attributes was ascribed to an interpretive

matrix in which it performed a double function: it enacted identities and projected a stable

collective subject behind them while at the same time they functioned to deconstruct this very

identitary framework according to the logic of the pharmakon, by representing weaknesses and

virtues for the Western point of view.

If strategic essentialism often uses the “eastern-European” label as if to cover a coherent set

of attributes which describe a stable cultural entity, the reverse process of the simple reification

of identity happens at the very moment when strategic essentialism is confronted with plain (and

vulgar) linguistic essentialism and ontological realism. Strategic essentialism fights precisely

against this situation. While it projects a stable ontological subject and critical agency, it also

acts in a deconstructive manner and performs an identity oscillation which is ascribed to the

eastern European. This oscillation can deconstruct binary oppositions in a specific cultural

discourse, while identity reification brings to an end this oscillatory process between points of

view and referential systems.

But the rhetoric and political force of strategic essentialism ceases the very moment when

a specific meta-identity tends to take over the other possible descriptions, surpassing its operative

framework and showing its limitations. This happens when capitalized Criticality takes over the

function of locating the specificity of the Eastern in relation to the West. In that case, a certain

description tends to reify itself into an image of the eastern-European with capital letters. The

major problem is that there is no outer point from which such stable meta-description can be

confronted, and it thus includes even strategic essentialism by simply bypassing it. By referring

to a cultural function rather than to a specific cultural imaginary or historical materialism, this

type of identity capitalization is able to completely circumvent the opposition between simple

identity reification and strategic essentialism. Thus, the oscillatory force of using eastern-

European identity as a strategic supplement in the cultural discursive field (the eastern-European

as “the other from within,” neither European nor completely Other, both European and Other) is

being interrupted and eventually annihilated.

Note: I am grateful to Edit András for her critical observations.

This paper has been presented at the colloquium Art History on the Disciplinary Map in East-Central Europe, organized by the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute (Williamstown, USA) and the Moravian Gallery in Brno, November 18–19, 2010.

1

For a thorough critical analysis of the art exhibition as a Foucaldian dispositif , see Brian Holmes, ‘The Artistic

Device, Or, The Articulation of Collective Speech,’ ephemera: theory and politics in organization, vol. 6, 4 (2006), pp.

411-432.2 This analysis of the Foucaldian term is undertaken by Giorgio Agamben, What is an Apparatus? And other essays,

(Stanford, CA, 2009), pp. 2-3.3 Jean-Marc Poinsot, ‘Large Exhibitions. A Sketch for a Typology,’ Thinking About Exhibitions, ed. Reesa Greenberg,

Bruce W. Ferguson and Sandy Nairne (London, 1996), pp. 39-66.4 Ibid., p. 40.5 I use the term in a complementary manner to the one used by Piotr Piotrowski in his influential book In the Shadow of

Yalta (London, 2009) to refer to a both non-hierarchical and spatial distribution of artwork in art historical accounts of

Eastern-European art, in order to denote the shift from a temporal frame to spatial, non-hierarchical and socially

discursive oriented exhibitions. 6 Hal Foster, The Return of the Real. The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century (Cambridge MA, 1996), pp. 171-205.7 Caroline A. Jones, ‘The Historical Origins of the Biennial,’ The Biennial Reader, ed. Elena Filipovic, Marieke van Hal

and Solveig Øvstebø (Ostfildern and Bergen, 2010), pp. 66-88.8 Boris Groys, ‘Politics of Installation,’ e-flux Journal ≠2, 1 (2009). 9 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (London and New York, 2006), pp. 290-305.10 Boris Groys, ‘Back From the Future,’ Arteast 2000+: The Art of Eastern Europe, ed. Zdenka Badovinac and Peter

Weibel (Vienna, 2001), p.10.11 Curated by Harald Szeemann at Sammlung Essl, Vienna/Klosterneuburg in 2003. 12 Curated by Bojana Pejić, David Eliott and Iris Müller-Westermann at Moderna Museet Stockholm in 1999; the

exhibition later travelled to the Ludwig Museum, Budapest and Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin.13 Promises of the Past: A Discontinuous History of Art in East Europe, curated by Christine Macel, Joanna Mytkowska

and Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez, took place at Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris in 2010.14 Maurizio Lazaratto, ‘Immaterial Labor,’ Radical Thought in Italy, ed. Michael Hardt and Paolo Virno (Minnesota,

1996).15 Piotr Piotrowski, ‘The Spatial Turn,’ Promises of the Past. A Discontinuous History of Art in Former Eastern Europe,

ed. Christine Macel, Joanna Mytkowska and Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez (Zurich, 2010).16 Bojana Pejić, ‘The Dialectics of Normality,’ After the Wall: Art and Culture in Post-Communist Europe, ed. Bojana

Pejić (Stockholm, 1999), pp.16-28.17 Ronald Jones, ‘After the Wall: Art and Culture in Post-Communist Europe,’ Artforum, March (2000). 18 Bojana Pejić, ‘The Dialectics of Normality,’ pp.16-28.19 Ivaylo Ditchev, ‘The Eros of Identity,’ Balkan as Metaphor: Between Globalization and Fragmentation, (Cambridge

MA, 2002), pp. 235-51.20 Ibid.21 Judit Butler, ‘Performative Acts and Gender Constitution. An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,’

Theater Journal, vol. 40, no. 4 (1988), p. 527.22 Ibid., p. 528.

23 The “double meaning” of the term Capitalization is used according to a deconstructivist stance which should be

acknowledged at this point of my argument.24 Robert Fleck, “Art after Communism,” Manifesta 2 catalogue (Luxemburg, 1998), p. 195.

25 By this term I refer to the reification of identity by a single prejudice or a set of prejudices active in cultural

imagination that belong to the representational regime and a specific iconology. 26 I use here the well-known term proposed by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak to denote the conscious use of essentialist

descriptions of identity for political purposes of oppositional action. I will return to this point in a later part of this

essay. See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, In Other Worlds. Essays in Cultural Politics (London, 1998).27 Boris Groys, Art Power (Cambridge MA, 2008), pp. 149-163.28 Ibid., p. 150.

29 Ibid., p. 151.

30 Such a well-known exotic approach to Eastern-European identity can be found in the rhetoric of balkanization which

also occurred in the nineties in large exhibitions such as Harald Szeemann’s Blood and Honey: The Future is in the

Balkans. 31 Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude. For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life (Los Angeles and New

York, 2004), pp. 105-107.32 C. Azais, A. Corsani and P. Deuiade, ed., Vers un capitalisme cognitif (Paris, 2001).33 Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, ‘The New Spirit of Capitalism’, International Journal of Politics, Culture and

Society,’ 18 (2005), p.162.34 Ibid., p. 163.35 Ibid. p. 168.36 Marina Gržinić, ‘Video in the Time of a Double, Political and Technological Transition in the Former Eastern

European Context,’ Transitland. Video Art from Central and Eastern Europe 1989-2009, ed. Edit András (Budapest,

2009), pp. 21-23.37 Boris Groys, Art Power, pp. 149-163.38 Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, ‘Conceptual Art 1962-1969: From the Aesthetics of Administration to the Critique of

Institutions,’ October, vol. 55 (1990), pp. 105-143.39 Zdenka Badovinac, ‘Body and the East,’ The Body and the East. From the 1960’s to the Present, ed. Zdenka

Badovinac (Ljubljana, 1998), pp. 13-14.40 Ibid.41 Ibid., p.13.42 Ibid., p.10.43 Ibid., p. 9.

44 Although artistic research defines itself by a heteronomous position and interdisciplinary strategy of artistic

production in the social and cultural sphere, it may be noticed that any difference between art and social sciences

reinforces the argument of art’s special, unique features and position (that is, a sophisticated version of autonomy). 45 Piotr Piotrowski, ‘Gender after the Wall,’ Gender Check, ed. Bojana Pejić (Vienna, 2009), p. 239. 46 Bojana Pejić, ‘Post-Communist Genderscapes,’ Gender Check, pp. 250-251.

47 I borrow this term from musical postproduction to denote the effect of blending one musical score into another. For a

short period of time, both scores remain audible at the same time.48 Bojana Videkanic, ‘Tanja Ostojić Aesthetics of Affect and Postidentity,’ artmargins, September (2009).49 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, In Other Worlds. Essays in Cultural Politics (London, 1998), pp. 205-214.50 Ibid., p. 205.51 Seven Sins: Ljubljana – Moscow, ed. Zdenka Badovinac, Viktor Misiano, Igor Zabel, exh. cat., (Ljubljana, 2004).