Copyright 2000 www.cosmopolis.ch Louis Gerber All rights
reserved.
Eastern European Art Fiction Reconstruced - Eastern
Europe, Post-Socialism and the Retro-Avant-Garde
Written by the Slovenian philosopher and media artist
Marina Grzinic. Published by edition selene Vienna +
Springerin, Vienna, 2000. In Englih, 230 p. with b/w reproductions.
From the introduction in the book Fiction
Reconstructed by Marina Grzinic. Published by the permission of the
author. All rights reserved.
In this book, my point of departure is a difference
between Eastern and Western Europe that I try to conceptualize
philosophically, insisting on a difference - a critical difference within
and not a special classification method marking the process of grounding
differences, such as apartheid, as Trinh T. Minh-ha has suggested. The
question of who is allowed to write about the history of art, culture and
politics in the area once known as Eastern Europe must be posed alongside
questions of how and when those events are marked.
Trinh T. Minh-ha has proposed a model for re-thinking
Asian space and the so-called third world through the concept of the
“inappropriate/d Other”. This can also be seen as a possibly useful
tool to develop specific concepts of reading - the former Eastern European
territory. It is time to find and to re-write paradigms of specific
spaces, arts and media productions in Eastern Europe. This book can be
perceived as a radical theorization of a particular (Eastern European)
position; here positioning means repoliticization.
The biggest part of the book focuses on selected artistic
projects and concepts by Mladen Stilinovic (Zagreb), Kasimir Malevich
(Belgrade, 1986), and the group Irwin (NSK) (Ljubljana), which were
developed in the territory of the former Yugoslavia, and continue to
function, develop, and mutate. These projects are read via dialectic
positioning (i.e., thesis, anti-thesis, and synthesis) within not only
countries of the former Yugoslavia, but also Eastern Europe in general.
Finally, they are linked with the notion of ‘Retro-Avant-garde,’ or,
as I label it, the new ‘ism’ of the East. ‘Retro-Avant-garde’ has
developed before the entrance to the third millennium and represents,
metaphorically speaking, the ‘soft revolution’ in Eastern European art
and culture. However, these artistic processes, as I demonstrate, can be
ascribed to numerous philosophical about faces brought on by the media
culture itself. They - not only visualize and conceptualize the processes
of thought developed within new media and technology, but also
conceptualize the system in itself and the operational logic of new media
and technology. Within the framework and context of these works, it became
possible to detect models of thought and perception, which allows one to
question the visible and the political. Moreover, similar strategies are
now being developed by new media technologies and interpreted
philosophically and theoretically. Consequently, classical arts strategies
and concepts have acquired a radically different meaning compared with
this reversed media logic.
If these projects give ‘only’ the appearance of
dissimilarity and idiosyncrasy, we should consequently question the
genesis of this appearance, and attempt to decipher how and by which
mechanisms the events themselves created this phantasmagoric surface.
Set in relation to foreign Western European and American
capital centers, the media events (i.e., virtual reality, the Internet,
the ‘media obsession’ over the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina, etc.)
literally metastasized from day to day, opening up innumerable
interpretations. I treat new media in an attempt to re-define certain
fundamental concepts in the history of philosophy and theory, notably the
subject, real/virtual, (public and media) space, in relation to the real
war in Bosnia-Herzegovina and the virtual war of the subject with its
so-called double in virtual environments.
I deal therefore with political and ethical questions
concerning processes of the (de-)visualization and re-articulation of
space and time in relation to new media. I inquire whether it is possible
to provide - and if so, how - a positive political image of the visible,
which opens new possibilities for creating emancipated politics and,
albeit in a limited scope, the project of the positive social environment.
The very process of negotiating the mutations of
Post-Socialism requires the development of new visual and media strategies
that problematize representation and self-representation. In the last part
of the book, I propose models and paradigms of alternating identifications
that question familiar forms of representation and allow the formation of
new forms of articulation. However, and this is the interesting twist,
such an interpretation can be also used for positioning and for raising
questions of reflection on and articulation of the Post-Socialist
‘Eastern European’ condition. There is something very definite about
this condition – it produces a specific spectralization of
representation, space and time.
Fiction Reconstructed is also placed within a certain
personal interpretative system, a logic in which to develop the theory of
aesthetics and politics, and to re-philosophize the Eastern European
region. It is the successor to the book entitled In the Line for
Virtual Bread. Time, Space, Subject and the New Media in the Year 2000
(ZPS, Ljubljana 1996), in which I presented, linked and supplemented for
the internal, Slavic space, the general paradigms of theories and
philosophies of the new media in connection with our post-socialist
reality. Fiction Reconstructed, on the other hand, offers a very
detailed inquiry into specific Post-Socialist art and media strategies.
The essays in the book are therefore the fruits of more
than a decade of writing about the artistic, cultural and media events
that have taken place in the former Yugoslav territories throughout the
1980’s and 1990’s. Over the years, a number of these essays have been
widely published in Slovenia and abroad. All the essays presented in this
volume are revisited.
In many ways, the East has not provided the West with the
relevant theoretical and interpretative instruments to recognize the
uniqueness, idiosyncrasies, diversity and originality of artistic projects
in Eastern Europe. There is very little documentation of this history, and
sometimes it seems as though even the cultural and theoretical domain of
Eastern Europe is incapable of offering interpretation or self-reflection
on these projects and phenomena. I hope that this book will help to fill
that void.
___________
Marina Grzinic Mauhler (margrz@zrc-sazu.si) is
doctor of philosophy and works as researcher at the Institute of
Philosophy at the ZRC SAZU (Scientific and Research Center of the
Slovenian Academy of Science and Art) in Ljubljana. She also works as a
freelance media theorist, art critic and curator. Marina Grzinic has been
involved with video art since 1982. In collaboration with Aina Smid she
has produced more than 30 video art projects, a short film, numerous video
and media installations, Internet websites and an interactive CD-ROM (ZKM,
Karlsruhe, Germany). Marina Grzinic has published hundreds of articles and
essays and 5 books, including In a Line for Virtual Bread. Time, Space,
the Subject and New Media in a Year 2000, Ljubljana 1996 and Zagreb 1999.
In the year 2000 two
of her essays were published, one for MIT Press and the other for Ablex
Company: Grzinic, “Exposure Time, the Aura, and Telerobotics” in The
Robot in the Garden: Telerobotics and Telepistemology in the Age of the
Internet, ed. Ken Goldberg (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000) and Grzinic,
“Strategies of Visualisation and the Aesthetics of Video in the New
Europe” in Culture and Technology in the New Europe: Civic Discourse in
Transformation in Post-Communist Nations, ed. Laura Lengel (London: Ablex
Publishing Company, 2000).
Marina Grzinic: Fiction reconstructed. Eastern Europe, Post-Socialism
and the Retro-Avant-Garde. Published by edition selene Vienna +
Springerin, Vienna, 2000. In English, 230 p. with b/w reproductions. ISBN:
3852661536.
