In the first decade after the Fall of the Berlin Wall the label ‘post-communism’ appeared as the most appropriate term to refer to the overall situation in Eastern Europe and was applied in the first major survey show of the contemporary art of the region. Today, the pressures of the present outweigh the burden of the past to such an extent that contemporary art in Eastern Europe is fast moving beyond the ‘transition’ into uncharted territory.

The socialist past is no longer such a live issue, and is slipping quietly from the category of ‘hot’ to ‘cold’ memory. While reflections on the communist past are just as present in today’s contemporary art as in work produced in the first post-communist decade, that past is perceived from a greater distance, has become a topic for investigation, a curiosity, with a range of possible attitudes from nostalgia to humour, inviting provocative comparisons with the present.
  
The decrepit state institutions that paralysed East European art for decades, with bland official art journals and bureaucratic national museums circulating a small clique of favoured artists, have faded back into the 80s as the machinery of the art world has modernised. The changing of the guard took longer than expected, but a new generation of curators is now at the helm of the many custom-built museums of contemporary art that emerged in tandem with the real estate boom. The new East European art institutions seem in several cases to have leap-frogged over the leading Western museums, adopting the latest practices and avoiding some of the pitfalls of the over-exposure of art to market principles. The KUMU contemporary art museum in Tallinn deservedly won the 2008 European Award for Museum of the Year, owing its success to the stunning green architecture of the building, innovative exhibition programme, and deliberate policy of keeping sponsor’s logos outside of museum, preserving the gallery as an autonomous space out of the reach of commercial branding. They also took what would until recently have been an unimaginably bold step, by including Soviet-era Socialist Realism in their display on twentieth century art in Estonia, presenting it as an unavoidable rather unwanted chapter of national history.

In previous decades East European art suffered from an inferiority complex with regard to the West. The ultimate aim for artists from the region was to enter Western art circuits, with great kudos attached to the occasional recognition of an East European artist in international events such as Dokumenta, or a passing mention in the survey literature on international movements from Dada to Conceptualism. A work from the 90s that described this problem was Luchezar Boyadjiev’s GastARTbeiter, which charted the artist’s path on the periphery of the international art world and survival on travel grants, a precarious existence which he likened to that of the East European guest worker. Today there are dozens of East European artists who circulate on the inside of the international art system, such as Anri Sala, Wilhelm Sasnal, Mircea Cantor and Sanja Iveković, who have a celebrity status equal to that of any artist born in the West. Increasingly the artistic identity of these new art stars has little to do with their origins, or with the repackaging of East European exoticism, but rather with the international relevance of their work.

Another recent phenomenon that has in many ways short-circuited the mechanisms of the international art system has been the emergence of the ‘supercollector’, overturning the inbuilt advantage of the West. While in the 1990s a handful of East European collectors modestly aspired to become the ‘Hungarian’ or ‘Czech’ Saatchi, today Russian billionaires such as Roman Abramovich have the financial power to instantaneously put themselves on the international art world map. Months before the opening of his fiancé’s Center of Contemporary Culture Moscow, an exclusive party was thrown with 300 carefully selected celebrity guests, including Nicolas Serota and Larry Gagosian, who were treated to a live concert by Amy Winehouse. The Supercollector’s approach to the art business has a lot in common with the management of a football club, with success ensured by purchasing the best advisors and players.  Interestingly, the opening show at the CCC Moscow is scheduled to be the first ever retrospective of Ilya Kabakov in Russia. Kabakov left the Soviet Union to become a star of the New York art world in the 1980s, while his artistic critique of Soviet Totalitarianism made him a weapon in the cultural Cold War. Today he is being demonstrably brought back for Russia.

Other longer term investments in East European art are also beginning to have a noticeable effect on the behaviour of local museums, artists and curators. A number of European banks have recognised the excellent value for money offered by the conceptual art of the 1960s and 70s, going on a buying spree to establish important collections, notably in Vienna, that threaten to eclipse national collections of the post-Avant Garde. At the same time, museums have recently changed their modus operandi, with adaption to global market conditions bringing liberation from the pressure to cater to national ideological narratives in their collecting and exhibition policies. Art institutions big and small are now inserted into international circuits for funding and the organisation of travelling exhibitions, and as a result are more aware of the value of their own resources, carefully controlling valuable archives to manage the construction of new art historical narratives that interface with the art market. 

In addition several banks, following in the footsteps of George Soros in the 1990s with his network Soros Centres for Contemporary Art (SCCA), have used contemporary art to enhance their reputation in the highly profitable region of Eastern Europe. Erste Bank’s Tranzit programme has been the most successful in co-opting many serious figures from the local art scenes, partly because of their hands off approach, providing funds for a wide range of artistic programmes, without much interference in curatorial decisions. As a result, Budapest for example has benefited from a series of weekend ‘Tranzit Schools’ for local curators led by international theorists, artists and curators of a very high calibre, reversing a strategic disadvantage in terms of communication and knowledge of the latest trends.

The one area in which the past has been harder to shake off is art history. Research into the art history of the period is held back by the difficulty of surmounting narrow national perspectives, partly due to a lack of translation of new writing originating from the region. In contrast to the dynamism of the new museums, stuffy Institutes of Art History are still largely run by the cadres of the old regime and their protégés. The interests of the old school appear to lie in maintaining local myths, hiding the connection between politics and art, and resisting the integration of local narratives into global accounts of art history. New initiatives to undertake a reassessment of the art history of Eastern Europe have grown from artist’s projects, such as IRWIN’s East Art Map, as well as comparative research projects based outside the region, such as the SocialEast Forum on the Art and Visual Culture of Eastern Europe. Significantly, new research on East European art history challenges not just the positions of the national art histories of the region, but also the stability of dominant Western accounts of the history of modern art formed during the Cold War.

Maja and Reuben Fowkes
www.translocal.org