East European Art: Unearthing the Subversive Side of Ecology

Balatonboglar, image from Torvenytelen avantgard (Artpool, 2003), 73.

The rise of sustainability coincided in a remarkable way with the fall of communism around 1989 to suggest that it was only with the overcoming of the bipolar division of the world along the ideological lines of the Cold War that a truly global understanding of profound ecological issues could emerge. Over the following two decades, just as the world-changing hopes and desires of popular revolutions in Eastern Europe were squeezed into a narrow model of economic transition, the notion of sustainability was appropriated by big business and the machinery of governance and stripped of its radical connotations with the need for global social justice to be reduced to the spectacle of scientific and political elites bickering over the virtual trade in carbon emissions.  Back in the beginning – which as so often means the 1960s and 70s - ecology was recognised as a ‘subversive science’ for the holistic challenge it poses to all aspects of human activity and for the way it brings out the connection between environmental problems and human systems, and it is this subversive core of the ecological idea that we will focus on in our discussion of East European art. A concern with a broad and far reaching understanding of sustainability in the context of a globalised Eastern Europe turns out to be manifested as much through artistic projects dealing with the impact of globalisation on post-communist societies, from the social and psychological effects of mass unemployment to a nascent cosmopolitanism that is transforming formerly closed societies, as through works addressing more specifically environmental issues.  Even 20+ years on, East European art is still caught up with the multifarious legacy of socialism, while connections can also be drawn between the work of contemporary artists and the achievements of the neo-avant-garde generation, whose preference for dematerialised and ephemeral art practices in a market free context chimed with the principles of sustainability in interesting ways.