Access, belonging, citizenship, communality

In 1993, the Zagreb-based artist Mladen Stilinović produced a banner from pink cloth that displayed a slogan: “An Artist Who Cannot Speak English is No Artist.” His piece was a bitter and witty commentary on the condition of the contemporary art world, accessible only to those who mastered its dominant language. The humor of the work being, of course, that the reflection was delivered in that same dominant language too.

Knowledge of a common tongue had been the basic requirement for obtaining citizenship already in Ancient Greece, where a person unable to communicate in the shared Greek language was described with the term “barbaros” – this is the source of today’s meaning of the word “barbarian.” Language inability automatically excluded individuals from the community of polis citizens and from the rights of access to the common, democratically reined space that came with the citizenship.

Over twenty centuries later, it is still language proficiency that often grants – although in a less formalized way – access to particular communities: national, cultural, and other. Especially among European nations that started to be imagined as sovereign communities, to use Benedict Anderson’s term, in the nineteenth century, the sense of unique identity is grounded in national language (Anderson 1983). For the  international art scene, the hard-to-deine, but very active group comprised of people, institutions, art objects, physical spaces, virtual communication, financial resources and symbolic capital, this access is dependent on knowledge of the English language, as Stilinović pointedly observed. His message seems universally relevant today, but his observation is closely linked with its moment of creation: the work seems to grasp particularly well the very struggle that artists from the former Eastern Europe had to undertake in order to enter the broader arena of international (today we would say: global) culture after the political transformations of 1989. This chapter will look at how the changing sociopolitical and cultural landscape pre- and post-1989 has determined Central European artists’ use of particular art languages – that is, both the languages of verbal communication and the visual languages of art.

Identity, inclusion, kinship, location, longing
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Well before the knowledge of English started serving as the demarcation line between the citizens of the international art world and the contemporary barbarians, Central Europeans had already been experiencing the painful burden of a forcibly imposed common language. They also knew the false promises – or better: dangers – of the language’s alleged universality. Russian was the obligatory second language across the Soviet Bloc: taught in schools and used in diplomacy, it infiltrated many elements of cultural life. Additionally, and most importantly for the art scene, the visual language of socialist realism was also imposed on the region. Centralized cultural politics enforced it as the only accepted option in the late 1940s; its regulations extending all the way from authority over art exhibitions and art schools’ faculty positions to the provision of art supplies to individuals. Socialist realism remained the language of the official (that is, the only visible) art at least until the cultural “thaw” after the death of Joseph Stalin, even longer in some countries. For the individuals relieved of the burden of an imposed language after 1989, there was much at stake in striving for a new, supposedly open and freely chosen communality – both of English and the visual language of contemporary art.

To have a common language with someone is to be able to express oneself and expect to be understood. Shared language gives one a sense of belonging and promises further dissemination of one’s thoughts. Language, as the signifier of cultural identity, became one of the few means of resistance against the Soviet – perceived as non-European – domination in arts and culture, as it was exercised through state legislation and control. For post-1945 Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary, the visual language of modern, and later contemporary, art became an important space of preserving identification with European culture.

After the installation of the Iron Curtain, artists from Warsaw or Prague looked toward Paris in their longing for access to the international art community (Markowska 2003). In many of the Eastern European countries, French was the language of the educated and cultured social spheres before the Second World War, and their pre-war artistic connections with French art circles – Cubist for the Czech, Postimpressionist for the Polish, Dadaist and Surrealist for the Romanians – conditioned the direction of their postwar longing. As a result, the Eastern European art world of the 1950s and 1960s was characterized by a persistent use of French as the second language of artist manifestos and exhibition catalogs.

Just as Eastern Europeans saw the French language as the link to the world of modern art and universal culture, they also considered the Paris-derived painterly and sculptural modernist abstraction a powerful counter-trend to socialist realism. Informel, the art of free painterly gesture understood as an expression of artistic freedom, came to Eastern Europe in the mid-1950s, when artists from the region could finally travel abroad as a result of the cultural “thaw.” For artists long constrained by socialist realism, the freedom implied in informel quickly started to be conceived also in political terms (Juszkiewicz 2005). Later, local art scenes equally eagerly followed assemblages, kinetic, and op-art that stemmed from the same source.

The resistance towards the forceful imposition of Soviet culture that made these art scenes look towards the West also affected their communication with each other. Interestingly, if somewhat sadly, the shared orientation meant neglecting one’s neighbors. (One exception was Poland, whose art circles enjoyed relative artistic freedom within the Bloc, and was thus closely followed by its counterparts.) While official cultural connections among the neighboring countries were eagerly fostered by the USSR-dependent governments in the name of friendship among the socialist nations, regional interchange among various Eastern European avant garde art scenes was rather weak. In the 1960s, progressive artists from Prague, Warsaw, and Bucharest would be easier to meet in Paris than in other Eastern European capitals. Budapest and Bratislava were, because of their historical connections and geographic proximity, more directed towards Vienna. Similarly, identification with the cultural concept of Eastern Europe was abandoned in favor of striving for the seemingly universal culture of international modern art (Piotrowski 2009).

Mobility, networks, participation, recognition

French started giving way to English at the beginning of the 1970s, when British and American conceptual art became more recognized and influential. By then, the world capital of contemporary art had long moved from Paris to New York. Polish artists could follow thanks to scholarships funded by the Kosciuszko Foundation.

The interest was to some extent mutual, with The Museum of Modern Art’s exhibitions of Yugoslav experimental cinema (1969), contemporary Soviet art (1974), Czech photography (1975), and Polish Constructivism (1976). Another important actor on the international art scene, if on a very different scale, Richard Demarco’s gallery in Edinburgh was eagerly showing conceptual and experimental artist from Romania, Yugoslavia, and Poland.

When conceptualism was becoming the dominant trend in the contemporary art around the year 1970, the issue of language became more prevalent – it moved from the realm of art criticism and theory to the foreground of the art making. In the case of abstract painting, the very use of widely accepted forms of gestural and biomorphic abstraction was already seen as a guarantor of inclusion into the international community of modern art. Such belief in the universality of art language was challenged by conceptualism, which was based on experimentation with written, rather than pictorial, language. Vast differences between Western and local art works employing words and sentences were impossible to ignore. This issue of linguistic identity could be either addressed explicitly or renegotiated. The renegotiation came with the popularity of translations – not only the essays or artists bios in the exhibition catalogs, as had previously been the case with French, but also the actual linguistic phrases that constituted the art works. Polish, Czechoslovak and Hungarian artists started producing double versions of their pieces: One in their native language, and one in English, the latter being circulated through mail and internationally available publications (Beke 1999). Interchange with neighbors also became more frequent only in the 1970s, with the emergence of unofficial spaces and networks, as well as easier circulation of works facilitated by the popularity of the easily reproducible and portable conceptual art. Just as it had been with French, the reason for the Eastern European artists to use English was to assure wider circulation and reception of their artistic production.

But this particular foreign language also had an important symbolic value. At the time of the Cold War, with the world polarized by two superpowers, the aspirational aspect of expressing oneself, and being heard, in the language of the other dominant power – the one often considered superior – was of major importance. It gave artists from this part of Europe a strong feeling of participation in broad, unconstrained and unregulated (unlike the Soviet) contemporary art and culture; one with much more direct political agency than the French.

Phrasebook, power, representation, repeat

Already in the 1970s, Eastern European artists conceptualized this desire for inclusion, together with the hazards that came with it. Polish artist Jarosław Kozłowski’s book Lesson, published in 1972, provides an intriguing, if concealed, commentary on the situation (Kozłowski 1972). Based on a popular English teach-yourself handbook, the publication presents to its reader basic grammatical structures of the English language as a set of lessons. “This is a man. He is John Brown; he is Mr. Brown,” starts “Lesson Two”, accompanied by an illustration of Mr. and Mrs. Brown in their living room. Subsequent pages repeat the same phrases, tediously stressing proper accentuation and spelling, but this time, the artist replaced the drawing with photographs of a similar home situation: the photos depict the artist’s parents seated in their living room. Kozłowski’s book is a close investigation into the language’s ability to represent reality, cleverly juxtaposing the limitations of both the verbal and the visual language – as well as their incommensurability. Lesson is clearly inspired by analytical philosophy, a common ground for many conceptual artists at the time. But the book also presents a very multifaceted take on language, both foreign and native. Parents, major agents in learning one’s native tongue, are turned here into mere props. The tension between these two language-learning models reveals all the emotionality and vulnerability of the process. Simultaneously, the book documents the everyday reality of an artist whose path to international communication starts with repetition of tedious schoolbook phrases.

An artist of the same generation as Mladen Stilinović, Kozłowski also presents language as a structure of power. “Slogans, proverbs, and sayings . . . are directly involved in the way power reproduces itself through organizing social relations” (Zabel 2005). Lesson can be read as a commentary on how, by straightforwardly describing the world through communicating the supposedly universal truths, schoolbooks serve to perpetuate existing knowledge and ideologies. Unlike the ironic tone of “An Artist, Who Cannot Speak English is No Artist,” however, Kozłowski’s combination of power (linguistic structures) and identity (parents) can be read as a means of self-empowerment, as an expression of ambition, aspiration, and desire.

Support, subjectivity, translation, transformation

After the fall of the Soviet Bloc and the dissolution of the USSR, it has become clear to artists from the former Eastern Europe that English is the only remaining lingua franca granting the promise of inclusion into the increasingly global sphere of art production and distribution; the language that enables, or disables, communication across geographies. As described by Mladen Stilinović, knowledge of English became the basic requirement for individuals wanting to become the citizens of this very particular polis: the art world.

Interestingly, the language of art used in this part of Europe post-1989 was also brought in by the democratic – and capitalist – changes. The network of Soros Centers for Contemporary Art, founded by the American philanthropist of Hungarian descent, Georges Soros, presented a new model for institutional engagement in the production of contemporary art. Founded in as many as nineteen postsocialist and postsoviet cities, the goal of these centers was to “support the development and the international exposure of contemporary art in Eastern and Central Europe, the countries of the former Soviet Union, and Central Eurasia as a vital element of an open society.” Focused on supporting and promoting contemporary art, the SCCAs provided generous funding that facilitated young artists’ access to new art technologies: video art, installation, and computer art. As a result, the network of Soros Centers influenced the spreading popularity of new media art that successfully replaced more traditional media and became characteristic of Central European art in the 1990s (Esanu 2013).

The sense of a common, Central European identity came to the Polish, Czech, Slovak and Hungarian art world only in the 1990s. The concept of Central Europe as a source of cultural identity started gaining traction in the 1980s (Neumann 1999), but it was then more in intellectual and literary circles, rather than artistic ones. Interestingly, one of the very first reflections on the identity of Eastern European art was published in French. Andrzej Turowski, an art historian and theoretician from the circle of Galeria Foksal, who emigrated to France, authored a comparative study of Eastern European avant garde under the title “Exite-t-il un art de l’Europe de l’Est?” (Turowski 1986) Published in 1986, it came right around the time when the cultural and historical identity of the region was being discussed by such authors as György Konrád, Adam Michnik, and Vaclav Havel. Attention from the art world came later, and it was, quite paradoxically, caused to a large extent by the interest of the (former) West (and often encouraged by the Western art markets). Demonstrated through numerous exhibitions in various Western European centers, this interest found its first embodiment in the 1994 monumental show Europa Europa. Das Jahrhundert der Avant-Garde in Mittel – und Osteuropa. Co-curated by Ryszard Stanisławski and Christoph Brockhaus in Bonn, the exhibition attempted to define the identity of Eastern European modern art through a monumental overview of 700 works by 200 artists. The sense of a particular subjectivity to this part of the world was later canonized in shows such as Body and the East. From the 1960s to the Present (Ljubljana 1998); Aspects/ Positions. 50 Years of Art from Central Europe 1949–99 (Vienna, Budapest, Barcelona, Southampton, Prague, 1999–2001); or After the Wall. Art and Culture in Post-Communist Europe (Stockholm, Budapest, Berlin, 1999–2000).

Mladen Stilinović’s pink banner has been included in many of these exhibitions of art from the former Soviet Bloc and Yugoslavia. It is now prominently featured in “Arteast 2000+”, the most comprehensive collection of art from Central and Eastern Europe, held at the Moderna Galerija in Ljubljana. As relevant now as before, Stilinović’s piece addressed the issues that have been further problematized by the recent discussion surrounding International Art English. The artist who does not speak English might be no artist, but mastering the language, as the exclusionary authors of the term seem to suggest, does not necessarily make one into a respected participant of the global art world.

The normative attitude hidden behind the concept strived to evaluate the usage of, specifically, English language but I would like to claim that each country with a relatively well-established art scene has its own version of IAE: their own International Art Language. If we see this phenomenon as related to the problem of mistranslations of philosophical writing, erroneous appropriation of academic definitions, and overuse of professional jargon, each of the countries of Central Europe undoubtedly has its own. In those cases, local art languages, derived of the power to facilitate cross-geographical communication, truly contribute to linguistic chaos (Moskalewicz 2014). Their presence cannot be excused on the basis of inclusivity.

The presence of IAE, the global art world’s English, however, can, and it should be. The language’s unavoidable porosity can be considered empowering for its non-native users. I would like to suggest Mikhail Bakhtin’s understanding of language as an antidote to the normative English-centered attitude: It is always “half someone else’s” (Bakhtin 1935). “The word in the language,” writes Bakhtin, “becomes one’s own only when the speaker populates it with his intention, his accent, when he appropriates the word, adapting it to his own semantic and expressive intentions” (293–294). This reflection further discloses the naivety of universalism shared by artists in the 1950s and 1960s, who wished to believe that they could be granted access to the international art world simply by using the existing language of abstraction – the naivety that had already been challenged by conceptualism. But Bakhtin’s thought can also be used to read the Central European artists’ striving for inclusion somewhat against the grain: to see it as a simultaneous striving for their own artistic and cultural identity. “Prior to this moment of appropriation, the word does not exist in a neutral or impersonal language (it is not, after all, out of a dictionary that the speaker gets his words!), but rather it exists in other people’s mouths, in other people’s contexts, serving other people’s intentions: it is from there that the one must take the word and make it one’s own.”

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