Writing by Klara Kemp-Welch
.indd 1 28/06/2015 17:00 'There are histories that are risky to rescue. The required factography ... more .indd 1 28/06/2015 17:00 'There are histories that are risky to rescue. The required factography was rarely gathered in time and is thus largely contaminated (however innocently) by the ahistorical. Luckily, that is not the case here. Klara Kemp-Welch's book is illuminating and thoroughly written.'
https://artmargins.com/ricochets-ukrainian-solidarity-venezia/
![Research paper thumbnail of Katia Denysova, Klara Kemp-Welch and Maria Mileeva, « In the Eye of the Storm », Critique d’art [Online], 60 | Printemps/été, Online since 01 June 2024](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/116350362/thumbnails/1.jpg)
Maria Mileeva: Russia's unprovoked, full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 was a huge im... more Maria Mileeva: Russia's unprovoked, full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 was a huge impetus for the realisation of this important project in record time (just over 7 months). Although an exhibition of modernist art in Ukraine at a major European museum had been in planning for some time, there hasn't been a show on this scale or an equally significant scholarly publication until now. We are more familiar with contemporary Ukrainian history and art produced during and after the 2004 Orange Revolution, the 2013-14 Revolution of Dignity and Russia's ongoing war of aggression. Looking back to the period of 1900-1930s, which is the focus of your book, is instructive in helping us understand the historical causes and genealogies of cultural imperialism, appropriation and violence that we are witnessing today. Katia Denysova: Yes, the historical context is crucial. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the territory of present-day Ukraine was split between two empires-Russian and Austro-Hungarian. Western Ukraine, with Lviv as its capital, formed part of the latter, while central and eastern regions were under the former. While the officials in St Petersburg prohibited the Ukrainian language and suppressed local culture, their counterparts in Vienna pursued a more lenient policy towards Ukrainians, encouraging the development of a Ukrainian national project to counteract the more active Polish nationalism. After the 1917 February revolution in the Russian empire, Ukrainians on both sides of the border seized the opportunity to create their own state. Initially, they envisioned Ukraine as remaining in a federative union with Russia, but after the Bolshevik takeover in Petrograd and their ensuing military In the Eye of the Storm Critique d'art, 60 | Printemps/été
Cold War period. This article explores misunderstandings among representatives of the internation... more Cold War period. This article explores misunderstandings among representatives of the international alternative art scene, working outwards from one instance of Western feedback on the politics of Eastern art-a 1982 review of a show of Russian art published in The Village Voice (The Weekly Newspaper of New York), by American critic Lucy Lippard. The International Context By the early 1980s, many members of the Moscow conceptualist circle had made one-way journeys to New York, nourishing ambitions to develop their careers and to participate in the international art world. 10 Boris Groys recalls that unofficial life in the Soviet Union was unfulfilling for its most ambitious artists, in spite of its remarkable day-today functionality: it could not deliver the external feedback Moscow conceptualists craved. Russian intellectuals or artists […] built the networks and circles and black markets that are present in all the major cities of the country. One could live and survive in these networks without having any need to deal with anything 'Soviet'. The majority of unofficial artists of that time were satisfied with this lifestyle. Only the circle of Moscow Conceptualists was unsatisfied, because the members of this circle asked themselves a disturbing question: How does the art production of the unofficial Russian scene look in the international context? 11 In emigration, artists were able to test, first hand, how the sorts of projects they had hitherto been sharing in private would be received by non-Russian publics. They found that international conversations in the late Cold War era could be mired in misunderstandings around the political dimensions of alternative culture. These new exchanges proved as troubling as the absence of wider feedback had once seemed. 12 As Margarita Tupitsyn has noted: 'left critics and artists [in New York] were not prepared to embrace Soviet counterculture as a successor to the Russian avant-garde'. 13 Lucy Lippard's response to Rimma and Valery Gerlovin's 1982 exhibition of 'Russian Samizdat Art 1960-1982' at Franklin Furnace was ambivalent at best. 14 If the 'cheerfully chaotic' show sought to display a 'politics of neutrality bravely pursued amid the ruins of a revolution', Lippard noted that 'Pravda and posters of Lenin, and workers, taped to the floor' were 'the only political gesture' she could discern. 15 She commented on a hand-painted banner welcoming visitors to 'the first Russian vagabond reading room in the USA' and the 'childlike glee' of projects such as 'Dmitry Prigov's Telegrams from Dostoevsky, the Sports Committee of the USSR, and God' and the pranks of the Toadstools, such as 'riding the subways for 19 hours'. 16 Ultimately, though, she felt that 'in the Tribeca context it all looks rather quaint, even a bit precious', especially when compared with the latest 'oppositional art'. 17 Echoing Peter Bürger's misgivings about the neo-avant-garde, Lippard proposed that: Samizdat shares an image with much of the New Wave. It is an image purportedly anti-ideological in content (though in fact supporting the ideology of the status quo), while taking on the 'look' of ideological art-lots of red and black, banners, graffiti-like scrawls […] an apolitical imitation of an earlier, politicized tradition […]. 18 According to Lippard, the exhibition propagated 'the myth of the artist as enfant terrible': 'God forbid', she cautioned, that 's/he grow up into a politically responsible
https://courtauld.ac.uk/research/courtauld-books-online/a-reader-in-east-central-european-modernism-1918-1956
Edited with Beata Hock and Jonathan Owen
https://mitpress.mit.edu/contributors/klara-kemp-welch
Extract from Networking the Bloc
https://artmargins.com/performing-the-east/
Art historians have tended to frame late-socialist Central European art as either 'totalitarian' ... more Art historians have tended to frame late-socialist Central European art as either 'totalitarian' or 'transitional'. This bold new book challenges this established viewpoint, contending that the artists of this era cannot be simply caricatured as dissident heroes, or easily subsumed into the formalist Western canon. Klara Kemp-Welch offers a compelling account of the ways in which artists in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary embraced alternative forms of action-based practice just as their dissident counterparts were formulating alternative models of politics - in particular, an 'antipolitics' of self-organisation by society. Drawing on Vaclav Havel's claim that 'even a word is capable of a certain radiation, of leaving a mark on the 'hidden consciousness of a community", the author argues that all independent artistic initiatives in themselves served as a vehicle for opposition, playing a part in the rebirth of civil society in the region. In doing so, she makes a case for the moral and political coherence of Central European art, theory and oppositional activism in the late-socialist period and for the region's centrality to late-20th century intellectual and cultural history.Spanning a period punctuated by landmark events - the crushing of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956; the Warsaw Pact troops invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968; the signing of Charter '77 by dissident intellectuals in 1977; the birth of the Polish Solidarity movement in 1980 - while presenting powerful new readings of the work of six key artists - Tadeusz Kantor; Julius Koller; Tamas Szentjoby; Endre Tot; Jiri Kovanda and Jerzy Beres - Antipolitics in Central European Art anchors art historical analysis within a robust historical framework. It traces the passage from a modernist commitment to 'disinterest', through successive waves of doubt, dissent, ironic disengagement and reticent engagement, to the eventual exhaustion of antipolitics as a strategy in the 1980s as imperatives to engage in direct political dialogue gained ground. This richly illustrated study reveals the struggle of Central European artists to enjoy freedom of expression and to reclaim public space, from within a political situation where both seemed impossible.
https://artreview.com/reviews/ara_spring_2018_book_review_russian_cosmism/
Uploads
Writing by Klara Kemp-Welch