THE POLITICS
OF EASTERN EUROPEAN
LANGUAGE BASED ART:
THE 1960s AND NOW
Dovilė Aleksandravičiūtė
University of Amsterdam
Student number: 11399619Supervisor: prof. Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes Second reader: dr. Jeroen Boomgaard
Thesis submitted to obtain a Master’s degree in Arts and Culture in the field of Artistic Research 2018
INTORODUCTION / 3
1. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK / 8 1.1 WHAT IS EASTERN EUROPE? / 8 1.2 LANGUAGE BASED ART / 13 1.2.1 WESTERN ROOTS / 13
1.2.2 GLOBAL CONCEPTUALISM / 16
2. LANGUAGE BASED CONCEPTUALISM UNDER THE SOVIET REGIME / 18 2.1. SAMIZDAT AND A TEXT-OBJECT / 20
2.2. MOSCOW ROMANTIC CONCEPTUALISM – DEMATERIALIZATION OF AN ART OBJECT AS A DESTRUCTION OF EVIDENCE / 25 3. CONTEMPORARY LANGUAGE BASED EASTERN EUROPEAN ART / 29
3.1. IS A GLOBALIZED WORLD AN ENGLISH SPEAKING WORLD? / 31 3.2. DEIMANTAS NARKEVIČIUS AND A SELF-EXOTICSM / 35
3.3. IGNAS KRUNGLEVIČIUS AND THE GLOBALIZED EAST / 40 BEFORE CONSLUSIONS / 42
CONCLUSIONS / 45 ILLUSTRATIONS/ 50 BIBLIOGRAPHY / 51
INTRODUCTION
My research into the politics of Eastern European language based art started once I had paused to consider my own “elevator-pitch” identity and the categorization that I have perpetuated for the majority of my career as an artist living and working in the Netherlands – I am a language based artist. I am also Lithuanian and therefore Eastern European. I am an Eastern European language based artist. Yet a quick closer look at this seemingly finite and convenient claim has unraveled complex histories that led to my ability to form such a claim. Thus, this once stable and arguably neutral statement became more and more problematic and has formed the basis of this thesis.
First of all, what does it exactly mean to be “Eastern European”; who carries that identity and why? Secondly, why is it so ‘normal’ for me, a Lithuanian artist, not to produce any of my work in the Lithuanian language, but rather to adapt English as my primary working language? And thirdly, how do those two entities combined highlight both Eastern European regional history and the contemporary political climate in which such a claim would not be considered problematic at first glance? These questions led me to research the way in which art maneuvers and reflects its immediate political context and how it can work as a platform to articulate one’s voice and claim a political stance, even in times of censorship and restrictions.
Furthermore, how this task can be continued once such restrictions are lifted. Faced with the grandeur of this issue I decided to focus on Eastern Europe as a case study and an entrance point, whilst maintaining consideration for a wider context. László Beke in his text “The Present time of the Conceptual Art: The Political Implications of Eastern European Art”1 humorously addressed the notion of Eastern Europe moving beyond its geographical borders:
“In the end, we reached the quasi dadaist or pataphysical conclusion that Eastern Europe extended across the entire globe. These deliberations were and continue to be aided by the comparison between the case of Eastern-European emigrants, diasporas, nomads, the relationships between different nations and the postmodern principle of “center and periphery” on the one hand, and the “dissidents” of 1956, the immigrant workers of
1 László Beke, “The Present time of the Conceptual Art: The Political Implications of
Eastern European Art,” accessed March 4, 2018,
Yugoslavia, Chilean refugees, Eastern-European Roma, Romanian Saxons or the emigrated Jews on the other.”2
For that reason, Eastern Europe is not just a regional case, but also can be used as a framework through which various global issues can be addressed.
There is a tendency to talk about Eastern Europe in comparison with Western Europe:
“In 1990, while these events [revolutions in communist Europe of 1989–1991] were still unfolding, philosopher Jürgen Habermas subordinated the various meanings of the 1989/1990 reorderings to a single objective: “the catch-up revolution.” Its ultimate goal, he believed, was in clearing the way for the economic and political development that would allow the east to be fully incorporated into the capitalist world order. Roughly speaking, Habermas’ conception is premised on the idea that the east had been prevented by communism from following a standard trajectory of historical development, and that now, after the obstacle had been removed, it would seek to catch up with the west.”3
2 Beke, “The Present time of the Conceptual Art: The Political Implications of Eastern
European Art.”
3 Maja and Reuben Fowkes, “The Post-National in East European Art: from Socialist
Internationalism to Transnational Communities,” accessed February 15, 2018,
http://www.translocal.org/pdfs/thepostnationalineasteuropeanartmajareubenfowkes.pdf.
It is seen as a region which should have been just like the West, were it not for the influence of the Soviet occupation. On the other hand, because of that, it is also seen as less valuable than the West, treating Westernization as a desirable path of development. This attitude leaves the East in the peripheries of Europe, which is an unfortunate result.
The contemporary global world faces a plentitude of issues such as strengthening political right wing movements, ecological crises and oppressive economies. In a situation like this, looking back to successfully executed, peaceful revolutions which have led to fundamental change could be an inspiring and fruitful practice, acting as a catalyst for further change in the future. Furthermore, a closer look into once functioning alternative platforms and strategies to articulate one’s political voice can broaden one’s understanding of works and spaces that can be used for such a change. The historical focus in this thesis is on Cold War Eastern Europe and the peaceful revolutions that led to the fall of the Soviet Union. In addition to that, dissident underground art, more specifically language based art, as it is considered to be an example of an alternative platform for non-conformity. Cold War Eastern Europe offers a multitude of politically motivated artistic
manifestations. This was the region in which every single aspect of life was politicized. The music one listened to, the clothes one wore, the events one attended. Or, equally, the things one did not do. Everything was judged through the prism of conformism versus non-conformism. Therefore, art was mostly seen as political, simply because of its detour from the state-approved Social Realism or even a slightest hint to the Western art movements that were prohibited by the state. At that time one did not have to create explicitly political art to be a political
artist and in this context the production of language based art automatically became a political activity.
Predominantly associated with the Conceptual Art of the West, Eastern European language based art is an example of artists finding their own ways of being involved in the international art scene and forming their own unique reflections of the art trends stemming from behind the Iron Curtain.
The closer focus on Eastern European Conceptual Art from a contemporary academic point of view comes with a current upsurge of initiatives aimed towards expanding the stagnant cannons and taking in the histories of periphery. In addition to this, an academic perspective offers a diverse and complex picture rather than a linear finite history. Initiatives such as Global Conceptualism4 at
Queens Museum of Art in New York, Vivid Radical Memory5 initiated by Antoni
Mercader in collaboration with the Württembergischer Kunstverein and with the Center for Culture and Communication Foundation in Budapest or Former West: Art and the Contemporary after 19896 contribute to the expanded understanding of Conceptual Art and has served as a great help and source of information for this
4 Exhibition was held in 1999. Later the book was published. Global Conceptualism: Points
of Origin, 1950s–1980s, ed. Philomena Mariani (New York: Queens Museum of Art 1999).
5 “Vivid [Radical] Memory. Radical Conceptual Art revisited: A social and perspective from
the East and the South,” accessed May 19, 2018, http://www.vividradicalmemory.org/.
6 Former West. Art and the Contemporary after 1989, ed. Maria Hlavajova and Simon
Sheikh (BAK, basis actuele kunst and MIT Press, 2016).
thesis. Furthermore, it led to confidence I have in in the importance of looking at Eastern European Conceptual Art as an independent art movement that has its own traditions and influence on Eastern European contemporary art. While in the West the transition between Conceptual Art and contemporary art came gradually and is rather blurred, in Eastern Europe it came with a great break, namely – with the fall of the Soviet Union. And this break is still visible in various aspects of contemporary political and social life. Furthermore, this unique situation exposed the inner workings and potential of political art and became a historical context for contemporary language based art produced in the region.
After the fall of the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe has been slowly coming to terms with its past and the consequences of its unique history, which has shaped its present and will continue to influence future decisions. Furthermore, the region now claims its rightful place as a participant in the European and global political scene and is learning how to formulate and be responsible for its own voice. Art plays a significant role in this process by critically evaluating local specificities and establishing future desires, which is predominantly an ability to participate in the global art scene and communicate one’s ideas directly to broader audiences, whether that means producing the majority of one’s work in English, exhibiting internationally as much as possible, or immigrating to various, mainly Western, countries.
This thesis researches to what extent Eastern European language based art is reflecting its regional political situation, and, more importantly, how can it be perceived as a current issue.
The research in the thesis is structured into three main chapters: Theoretical Framework, Language Based Conceptualism under the Soviet Regime and Contemporary Language Based Eastern European Art.
The first chapter Theoretical Framework establishes the theoretical background for further chapters and clarifies such terms as Eastern Europe, Conceptual Art and Conceptualism that are used throughout the thesis. It works in a two-fold manner. First of all, this chapter elaborates on the complexities of defining what Eastern Europe is. Leaning on a post-colonial discourse, it then addresses an issue as something that is formed because of an uneven power dynamic between Western Europe and Eastern Europe. As seen through Edward Said’s concept of imagined geographies the issue is considered to be a stereotype constructed by the West in order to distance itself from the East and to categorize it as ‘other.’ In this context art is perceived as a tool to articulate one’s voice in a situation when it is not allowed or is not heard. This stems from Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s idea that “subaltern can not speak”7 and bases its argument on Aleš Erjavec’s elaborations that when one (subaltern) is silenced it employs other tools to form its voice.8 In this context the language based art is seen as a way to form one’s voice and a litmus paper for regional political issues.
7 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the
Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (London: Macmilaan, 1988), 24–28.
8 Aleš Erjavec, “Eastern Europe, Art, and the Politics of Representation,” Boundary 2
(2014) 41 (1): 51–77, accessed February 2, 2018, doi.org/10.1215/01903659-2409775.
Further on in this chapter a short theoretical background for language based art is given, elaborating on its connections with the language philosophy of mid 20th century when the focus was on materiality and the potential of language not only to communicate realities but also to influence and shape them. In this paragraph Conceptual Art is seen as an immediate artistic reaction to language philosophy, and language based art is considered to be one of the manifestations of Conceptual Art. Further global conceptualisms are introduced, underlying the differences between Conceptual Art of the West and Conceptualism of the ‘periphery.’ Conceptualism is approached as political Conceptual Art that, due to the local complexities, has had to adapt various modes of survival and become politically engaged.
The second chapter Language Based Conceptualism under the Soviet Regime details the historical background in which the Conceptual Art was developed in socialist Eastern Europe. Through a close examination of samizdat publications and Moscow Romantic Conceptualism the chapter focuses on the use of language as a way of dematerialization of an art object, which served as a tool to evade Soviet censorship and avoid collecting or producing objects that could have been incriminating. The particular focus of the chapter is set on the fact that an artist during this time was considered to be a political artist; not because of the nature of the content they were communicating but just because they were producing works that were either not part of Social Modernism or they were consciously calling themselves conceptual artists.
The third chapter Contemporary Language Based Eastern European Art focuses on the artistic developments directly after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1990 as
well as more recent productions. The region is now perceived as being in a transitional phase, when both artists and the public are trying to understand what happened and establish their own unique identities. At the same time, artists are claiming their place in the globalized art world. Case studies of Deimantas Narkevičius and Ignas Krunglevičius help to unravel the complexities of the contemporary Eastern European art field. Narkevičius case shows that by using strategic self-exoticism an artist can address not only regional issues and also more general topics such as personified histories, identity and representation. Krunglevičius’ case highlights the artistic practice of a “truly globalized” art which aims to eliminate all regional references and to directly address multicultural issues of human psychology, technological society and power plays that come with communication. In any case Eastern Europe is perceived as a region that viciously chooses globalism and tries to adapt to it by all means.
As this thesis is considered to be an integral part of my own artistic practice, the chapter Before Conclusions shortly addresses my personal experience of being an Eastern European language based artist living and working in the Netherlands. Through a close examination of the work How to Focus on Becoming and the Vanish Anyway the focus is set on the ways to generalize very specific personal experiences and produce a more open universal space for reflection.
This research has led to more questions than answers. Especially to one of the most fundamental questions, if Eastern Europe is a fictitious, unstable construct that might not even exist, how can art produced there be researched in a productive manner? This thesis is an aim to investigate this possibility, valuing questions and open answers over rigid and definitive statements and maneuvering
its way through the vague definitions and multitude of opinions, the thesis claims that the in-betweenness that region finds itself at is in fact its identity which could and should be treated as a productive state. This identity, which is constantly questioned and not taken for granted, works as a strong catalyst and turns the region into a vivid and multilayered part of Europe with equally vivid and multilayered art that closely observes and reflects local and global politics.
1. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
1.1
What is Eastern Europe?
NOUS SOMMES DES BARBARES!9 Contemporary Eastern Europe is a complex region and its demarcation lines are constantly shifting. In 2017, the United Nations changed its categorization and now considers Belarus, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Republic of Moldova, Poland, Romania, Russian Federation, Slovakia and Ukraine to be officially Eastern European countries. Prior to that, Eastern Europe was also the Baltic States – Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. However, now these countries are
9 A title of an essay and a text on the postcard by Kajet magazine. Petrică Mogoş, “Nous
Sommes des Barbares,” Kajet 1 (2017): 12–18.
considered to be a part of Northern Europe and are grouped together with Denmark, Finland, Iceland, the Republic of Ireland, Norway, Sweden and the United Kingdom. While these countries have obviously not moved their geographical location, yet as they have turned from Eastern European into Northern European countries the change indicates that Eastern Europe is undeniably more of a concept or “a prism through which certain nations are viewed. Rather than simply a geographical distinction, “Eastern Europe” is a stereotype.”10
Some authors, such as Jill Owczarzak, have argued that the stereotype of Eastern Europe came into being during the Enlightenment, as a representation of the
10 David, “The Baltics: Now in the Northern Europe?” Baltic Run, October 3, 2017,
“West’s intermediary ‘Other’, neither fully civilized nor fully savage.”11 Others, such as Laura Hoptman and Tomáš Pospiszyl point to the Yalta Conference as the root of contemporary Eastern Europe: “the concept of ‘Eastern Europe’ as it has been understood in the past several decades [...] is neither geographic nor social: it is economic and political. A product of the Yalta Conference of 1945, it was created with the intention of outlining zones of influence in Europe.
Subsequently the territory between Germany and Russia fell under the influence of Soviet Union and soon became isolated from the rest of the world, and, in the eyes of the world, politically homogenized.”12
Whether this construct came into being with the Enlightenment or the Yalta Conference it was undeniably strengthened with an expansion of the post Second World War Soviet Union and the Cold War that followed. Throughout those years a rather clear and rigid understanding of what was the West and was the East seemed to form. In the eyes of rest of the world the region became not only politically homogenized but also became a region with unified cultures, social mentalities, histories and identities.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union things started changing rapidly and this homogeny became difficult to sustain. Quickly, it became clear that the main unifying factor holding the region together was indeed belonging to the Soviet
11 Jill Owczarzak, “Introduction: Postcolonial Studies and Postcolonialism in Eastern
Europe,” Focaal: European Journal of Anthropology 53 (Spring 2009): 6.
12 Laura Hoptman and Tomáš Pospiszyl, introduction to Primary Documents: A
Sourcebook for Eastern and Central European Art since the 1950s, ed. Laura Hoptman and Tomáš Pospiszyl (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2002), 9.
Union: “Since Eastern European countries are relatively small, developed to different degrees, with their cultures being principally the national ones, they resemble a random collection of countries that by accident occupy the same region. What continues to hold them together is their shared recent belonging to the Soviet system.”13 Which brought forward another crucial question – if we still refer to a certain cluster of countries as Eastern Europe and not just Europe, what makes them East, besides not being West?
Petrică Mogoş tackles this issue from a geographic perspective in detail in her text “Nous Sommes des Barbares”14 for the Kajet magazine:
“By negation, this area is neither Western European, nor Russian; then, what is it? The intricacies of the region are greater then ever – how come that Prague is regarded as more ‘Eastern European’ than Vienna, despite that it is situated further Westward? Are Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia part of Central Europe, or what Milan Kundera and other refer to as Mitteleuropa? Slightly moving away from the postcolonial paradigm of otherness and subalternity and hopefully not falling into the tangled tentacles of post-modernist social constructionism, a distinctive (and increasingly popular) premise can be put fourth. What if Eastern Europe actually never existed? What if the space demarcated by Churchill is nothing less but the result of Western socio-cultural production of knowledge? Or, what if Eastern Europe is nothing less but a space of
13 Erjavec, “Eastern Europe, Art, and the Politics of Representation,” 72. 14 Petrică Mogoş, “Nous Sommes des Barbares,” Kajet 1 (2017): 12–18.
transcultural existence – a transitory stage toward a geopolitical arena of the future, an experimental post-Europe, or a mere project under continuous construction? Alternatively, what if Eastern Europe is only a figment of Cold War imagination? Assuming that some (if any) of the above mentioned predicaments may be veracious, what is it that actually holds the idea of Eastern Europeanness together, beyond its utter struggle, obscurity, oddity, and rotten luck?”15
The idea of the Eastern European identity as a Western construct is echoed in the majority of discourses concerning the issue: “When they [Eastern Europeans] did [move Westwards], they did not bring Eastern Europe with them – Eastern Europe only exists in the West. It was hovering around, abstract, and devised for lands far away, when physical representations of Eastern Europe started appearing
everywhere in the West, in the form of immigrants from Poland, Slovakia, or Latvia. Eastern Europe, with all its ancillary meanings – of barbarism and savagery – got plastered on immigrants, and they became Eastern European. […] Eastern Europeans are an imagined community, nation born out of transition, imposed and defined by others, rather than its nationals.”16
The concept of imagined community addressed in the quote above comes from the book Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
15 Mogoş, “Nous Sommes des Barbares,” 14.
16 Bojana Jankovič and Dana Olărescu, “Eastern Europeans for Dummies,” Kajet 1
(2017): 25.
Nationalism17 by Benedict Anderson, in which he used the term to analyze nationalism. For him, a nation is not a pre-determined but a collectively
constructed concept by people who themselves identify with a certain community: "[a nation] is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion."18 It works as a building force based on a shared past, close proximity and presumptions.
On the other hand, the quote referring to the ‘imagined community’ underlines a major issue – Eastern Europe is not a community which is actively imagined by its participants. It is a community imagined for them. It is a given construct coming from outside, which furthers the discussion to postcolonial discourse.
In his book Imaginative Geography and Its Representations: Orientalizing the Oriental19 Edward Said uses the term imagined geographies. The concept refers
to the Middle Eastern territories which have been objectified and “othered” through the Western academic and popular discourse that bases its
understanding of the region on a generalized and exoticized vision of the Orient, and which created the Orient – a mystical distant exotic land without shared meeting points with the West:
17 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism (London, New York: Verso, 1991).
18Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, 6–7.
19Edward Said, Imaginative Geography and Its Representations: Orientalizing the Oriental, (New York: Vintage, 1979).
“…this universal practice of designating in one’s mind a familiar space which is “ours” and an unfamiliar space beyond “ours” which is “theirs” is a way of making geographical distinctions that can be entirely arbitrary. I use the word “arbitrary” here because
imaginative geography of the “our land—barbarian land” variety does not require that the barbarians acknowledge the distinction. It is enough for “us” to set up these boundaries in our own minds; “they” become “they” accordingly, and both their territory and their mentality are designated as different from “ours.” […] The geographic boundaries accompany the social, ethnic, and cultural ones in expected ways. Yet often the sense in which someone feels himself to be not-foreign is based on a very unrigorous idea of what is “out there,” beyond one’s own territory. All kinds of suppositions, associations, and fictions appear to crowd the un-familiar space outside one’s own.”20
In the book, Said considers power and knowledge as always intertwined and Europe is described as “powerful and articulate”21 whereas Asia is described as
“defeated and distant."22 This power imbalance means that even though “stories
are at the heart of what explorers and novelists say about strange regions of the
20 Said, Imaginative Geography and Its Representations: Orientalizing the Oriental, 54. 21 Said, Imaginative Geography and Its Representations: Orientalizing the Oriental, 57. 22 Said, Imaginative Geography and Its Representations: Orientalizing the Oriental, 57.
world; they also become the method colonized people use to assert their own identity and the existence of their own history.”23
The idea of imagined geographies is applicable to Eastern Europe as well. It is a both physical space and a community that came into being through the Western imagination and which continues to exist with its constantly shifting borderlines and vague identities. The term also refers to patronizing tendencies; seeing other non-Western countries as beneficiaries from the Western – non-Western contact and exchange. Jill Owczarzak addresses the issue: “as the European Union expands eastward [it] casts Eastern Europeans as uncultured, economically underdeveloped, politically unsavvy, and therefore in need of assistance to bring them up to European standards.”24 This includes not only the tendencies of “othering” but also broad generalizations when addressing the region.
Such an approach paints the region as a passive and artificially constructed entity, falling victim to the discourses coming from outside – regardless of the
sovietization or Western view. In this way, the region confirms the legitimacy of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s question “Can the subaltern speak?”25 To which the
23 Mohamed Hamoud Kassim Al-Mahfedi, “Edward Said’s ‘Imaginative Geography’ and
Geopolitical Mapping: Knowledge/Power Constellation and Landscaping Palestine,” The Criterion vol. 2, issue 2 (September, 2011), accessed January 11, 2018, http://www.the-criterion.com/V2/n3/Mahfedi.pdf.
24 Owczarzak, “Introduction: Postcolonial Studies and Postcolonialism in Eastern Europe,”
6.
answer is “The subaltern cannot speak.”26 Only by having an articulated voice can one participate in politics and be in charge of their own representation. On the other hand, looking closer it is apparent that the region finds other ways to articulate its voice. Erjavec argues the case:
“May we equate “speaking” with “making visible”? Apparently, although only to the extent that images, persuasive as they are, don’t thwart understanding. The phrase making visible can thus be regarded as an index of a specific instance of speech and therefore as an articulation carried out via pictorial representation. It may also denote unintended and passive forms of visibility – something that does not apply to speech. […] artists – often regarded within the region under discussion as socially and politically marginal and useless – have at some points of historical unfolding also contributed to the identification (and the obvious and visible consubstantionality) of art, artworks, and their creators with national and political entities in the region. In this sense art functioned as a form of speech, voicing national specificities across the former European political divide that stretched from Baltic to Adriatic, with this speech revealing their potentially reemergent common and shared historical denominator, which existed before the constitution of this divide.”27
26 Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” 308.
27 Erjavec, “Eastern Europe, Art, and the Politics of Representation,” 54.
Therefore, the articulated forms of speech can be found outside the public socio-political field - in the underground, alternative art scene. One of its manifestations is a language based art, which came into play in the late 1960s along with Conceptual Art and a desire to create a platform for free thought and speech. As it moved to contemporary times it became a reinforcement and a litmus paper for current socio-political situations. In order to move forward to examining regional cases of language based art, the theoretical backbone and background of language based art has to be shortly discussed.
1.2. Language Based Art
1.2.1. Western Roots
The immediate background of language based art is mostly considered to be the development of Western language theory, the philosophy of the mid 20th Century and Conceptual Art, which heavily drew inspiration from those theories. At that time, philosophy of language had set its focus on understanding what the potential power of language could be. It was no longer seen as a transparent vehicle to communicate the content and describe the realities around people. Instead the focus was set on its potential to influence and shape realities. Furthermore, language was seen as a medium which contains information in itself and works as a membrane between reality and the way we think and
communicate: “The philosopher, as an analyst, is not directly concerned with the physical properties of things. He is concerned only with the way in which we speak about them.”28
The focus on the usage of language was an influential thought that caught the attention of artists as well: “[…] it is precisely this recognition of the materiality
28Alfred Jules Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic, (New York: Dover Publications, 1952),
57.
of language that made way for artists to use it as material for their practice.”29 Therefore, by the 1960s and early 1970s, conceptual artists such as Lawrence Weiner, Edward Ruscha, Joseph Kosuth, Robert Barry and the British
Art&Language group were producing works in which language was used as a main material and not only as a visual element.
In 1968 Lucy R. Lippard and John Chandler wrote a widely popular essay Dematerialization of Art30 in which they focused on Conceptual Art as something
that dissolves the physicality of an art object. By introducing the categorization system of Joseph Shillinger,31 they observed that by the 1960s art was in a transitional phase between the fourth and the fifth zone of its historical evolution: “4. Rational-aesthetic, characterized by empiricism, experimental art, novel art; 5. scientific, post-aesthetic, which will make possible the manufacture, distribution and consumption of a perfect art product and will be characterized by a fusion of
29“Conceptual Art and Eastern Europe: Part II.”
30 Lucy R. Lippard and John Chandler, “Dematerialization of Art,” in Lucy R. Lippard
Changing Essays in Art Criticism (New York: E. P. Dutton & co., 1971), 255–262.
31 Joseph Schillinger (1895-1943) was a Ukrainian-American composer and music
theorist who is 1943 published a book called The Mathematical Basis of the Arts. In it he “divided art’s historical evolution in five different “zones”, which according him will replace each other in increasingly speeding manner: “1. preaesthetic, a biological stage of mimicry; 2. traditional-aesthetic, a magic, ritual-religious art; 3. Emotional aesthetic, artistic expressions of emotions, self-expression, art for art’s sake; 4. rational-aesthetic, characterized by empiricism, experimental art, novel art; 5. scientific, post-aesthetic, which will make possible the manufacture, distribution and consumption of a perfect art product and will be characterized by a fusion of the art forms and materials, and, finally, a “disintegration of art,” the “abstraction and liberation of the idea.”’ (Lippard and Chandler, 258).
the art forms and materials, and, finally, “disintegration of art,”32 the “abstraction and liberation of the idea.”33 Therefore, the physicality of an object had begun to be seen as a cage which either traps ideas or merely functions as a container in which ideas are assembled.
The art world was witnessing a rather drastic shift when, in certain instances, the content of an art work was seen as more important than its form: “[…] art changed its focus from the form of the language to what was being said. Which means that it changed the nature of art from a question of morphology to a question of function. This change – the one from “appearance” to “conception” – was the beginning of “modern” art and the beginning of conceptual art.”34
This tension between form and content challenged the traditional understanding of what a work of art is and questioned the role of aesthetics, making some of the artists, such as Joseph Kosuth, totally shun the criteria: “aesthetics, as we have pointed out, are conceptually irrelevant to art.”35 Symptomatically, the form tended to be more simplified. Lippard and Chandler associated this tendency with an aim for “nothingness” or as José Ortega y Gasset put it almost thirty years earlier: “The task it [new art] sets itself is enormous; it wants to create from
32 Lippard and Chandler, “Dematerialization of Art,” 258. 33 Lippard and Chandler, “Dematerialization of Art,” 258.
34 Joseph Kosuth, “Art after Philosophy,” in Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz, Theories and
Documents of Contemporary Art. A Sourcebook of Artists’ Writings (University of California Press, 2012), 978.
35 Kosuth, “Art after Philosophy,” 979.
nought. Later, I expect, it will be content with less and achieve more.”36 This aim to achieve more with less became one of the key focus points in 1960s conceptual art: “We still do not know how much less “nothing” can be. Has an ultimate zero point been arrived at with black paintings, white paintings, light beams,
transparent film, silent concerts, invisible sculpture, or any of the other projects mentioned above? It hardly seems likely.”37
The tension between an object and its content can be understood similarly to the tension between language and the reality it represents, which was addressed by Ludwig Wittgenstein: “When works of art, like words, are signs that convey ideas, they are not things in themselves but symbols or representatives of things. Such a work is a medium rather than an end in itself or “art-as-art.” The medium need not be the message, and some ultra-conceptual art seems to declare that the conventional art media are no longer adequate as media to be messages in themselves.”38 Therefore, even though not all Conceptual Art was using language literally by employing words or letters, the logic behind it can be seen as a linguistic one.
Kosuth also addressed this parallel: “For the artist, as an analyst, is not directly concerned with the physical properties of things. He is concerned only with the way (1) in which art is capable of conceptual growth and (2) how his propositions are capable of logically following that growth. In other words, the propositions of
36 Lippard and Chandler, “Dematerialization of Art,” 275. 37 Lippard and Chandler, “Dematerialization of Art,” 276. 38 Lippard and Chandler, “Dematerialization of Art,” 260.
art are not factual, but linguistic in character – that is, they do not describe the behavior of physical, or even mental objects; they express definitions of art, or the formal consequences of definitions of art.”39
In the 1970s Kosuth became one of the members of the British Conceptual Art group Art & Language, which was concerned with similar linguistic issues. The group was founded around 1967 by Terry Atkinson, David Bainbridge, Michael Baldwin and Harold Hurrell, and by 1982 it quickly expanded to almost fifty members. The group used the magazine Art & Language40 as their main platform to discuss Conceptual Art issues and to exchange ideas. All participating artists also worked as independent professionals outside of the group and even though not all of them had a unified idea of what Conceptual Art should look like or what the issues were that it should address, they all had similar oppositions to other art movements, especially to Modernism and Minimalism – Modernism for its focus on form and historicism and Minimalism for its philosophical conservatism. The artists of Art & Language used theory as a basis of their practices and text became the main medium.
Dematerialization, simplification of the form and textualization of the art
production were also strongly connected to the commercialization of the artworks and can be seen not only from a philosophical point of view but from a political and economic one as well: “In the capitalist West, the artwork is above all a
39 Kosuth, “Art after Philosophy,” 980.
40The first issue of Art &Languagewas published in May of 1969 and was called The Journal of Conceptual Art. But by the second issue in February of 1970 it changed its name to Art & Language to underline the specific focus to linguistics that the group had.
commodity. Art is primarily defined by the art market. Every commodity, however, is first and foremost a material object. Hence it was very tempting at first to see the substitution of the artwork by the word as a path from the “materialist” art market to the freedom of the immaterial and hence the unsalable, the
“unexchangeable.”’41 On the other hand, this initiative can not be considered fully successful: “In the meantime, of course, it has become clear that text is also a kind of image, because language has its own materiality, and that Conceptual art cannot, therefore, lead the artwork to immateriality or to liberate if from
commerce. In retrospect, Conceptual art can rather be seen as a crucial step toward objectifying and hence commercializing language. In any case, the
relationship of art to the art market – and to the market in general – was and is a central theme for Western Conceptualist theory and praxis.”42
41 Boris Groys, “Communist Conceptual Art,” accessed January 6, 2018,
http://www.conceptualism-moscow.org/page?id=1565&lang=en.
1.2.2. Global Conceptualisms
Even though it is common practice to associate the artistic developments mentioned previously with Western practices, different conceptualisms were simultaneously developing all over the world. One unifying denominator for those world-wide initiatives was the focus on the local socio-political context rather than philosophical and (anti)aesthetical issues: “the need for an urgent response to social and political conditions encouraged artists in the Soviet Union, South Korea, China and parts of Africa to abandon formalist or traditional art practices for conceptualist art. […] Art’s role as catalyst, as stand-in for forbidden speech, as exemplification of systems of thought and belief, and as vehicle for dissent became central.”43 To underline these differences between various conceptualisms Luis Camnitzer, Jane Farver and Rachel Weiss introduced a distinction between Conceptual art and Conceptualism:
“It is important to delineate a clear distinction between conceptual art as a term used to denote an essentially formalist practice developed in the wake of minimalism, and conceptualism, which broke decisively away from the historical dependence of art on physical form and its visual apperception. Conceptualism is a broader attitudinal expression that summarizes a wide array of works and
43 Luis Camnitzer, Jane Farver and Rachel Weiss, “Foreword,” in: Global Conceptualism:
Points of Origin, 1950s–1980s, ed. Philomena Mariani (New York: Queens Museum of Art, 1999), VII.
practices which, in radically reducing role of the art object, reimagines the possibilities of art vis-á-vis the social, political, and economic realities within which it is being made. With the art world embracing ‘modern art’, its informality and affinity for collectivity made conceptualism attractive to those artists who yearned for a more direct engagement with the public during these intense, transformative periods. For them, the deemphasis – or
dematerialization – of the object allowed artistic focus to move from the object to the conduct of art.”44
The practice of art was seen as a tool to articulate and be in charge of one’s own alternative discourse and to create a platform for the free exchange of ideas. In this context the language played an important role:
“Conceptualism’s affinity for language and linguistic theory was based on the relatively more “elastic” nature of language as
compared with objects, and the fact that language promised an open space where art could intersect with other fields and bring art and artists into a more vital, effective conversation with society. The use of language also gave artists a means to tackle the problem of official information by appropriating the space of media or replacing official information with their own analysis. […] the
instrumentalization of language could […] be a more important strategy in developing alternate meanings of art, and for the critical
investigation and subversion of the underlying premises of art. […] Conceptualism frequently replaced the object with discourse. Art not only used language, it became “language-like,” implying that art is a broadly cultural, rather than personally expressive, activity. For conceptualist artists, the use of language could be a way of
reconstituting the work of art into an active – interactive – circuit.”45 The Soviet Union was one of the geographical points in this global map of Conceptualism. The intelligentsia of the Soviet Union showed great interest in Western developments and, although it was rather hard to obtain primary literature and fully participate in the discourse, by the 1960s and 1970s, certain conceptual tendencies could be witnessed in the unofficial art scene. As Boris Groys witnesses, not only the ideas by Joseph Kosuth and Art & Language were known to the Moscow’s intellectuals: “The decisive influence came from French structuralism more than from English linguistics (in the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s, everybody spoke of Lévi-Strauss, Jacobson, Foucault, and so on) and from Russian formalism, where everything was a statement, everything was language, a move inside a system.”46
This aim to expand the geographies and appreciation for a more varied understanding of Conceptualism can be seen as a current trend that can be witnessed in various study fields, which is to be more inclusive and critical towards
45 Camnitzer, Farver and Weiss, “Foreword,” VII.
46Badovinac, Čufer, Freire, Groys, Harrison, Havránek, Piotrowski, and Stipančić,
“Conceptual Art and Eastern Europe: Part I.”
the established cannon. Exhibitions and symposiums such as Conceptualism – Intersectional Readings, International Framings47 organized by van Abbe museum
in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, Global Conceptualism48, Vivid Radical Memory49
initiated by Antoni Mercader in collaboration with the Württembergischer Kunstverein and with the Center for Culture and Communication Foundation in Budapest or Former West: Art and the Contemporary after 198950 are of the examples of this tendency. This inclusivity paints a more diverse picture of places, times and people which influenced and is still influencing Conceptual Art. A closer look at each and every case contributes to this ever-expanding picture of networks, personal and communal struggles and the legacies of those art practices.
47 Full program can be found at “Conceptualism – Intersectional Readings, International
Framings: Black Artists and Modernism in Europe after 1968,” accessed June 21, 2018,
https://vanabbemuseum.nl/en/programme/programme/conceptualism-intersectional-readings-international-framings/.
48 Exhibition was held in 1999. Later the book was published. Global Conceptualism:
Points of Origin, 1950s–1980s, ed. Philomena Mariani (New York: Queens Museum of Art 1999).
49 “Vivid [Radical] Memory. Radical Conceptual Art revisited: A social and perspective
from the East and the South,” accessed May 19, 2018,
http://www.vividradicalmemory.org/.
50 Former West. Art and the Contemporary after 1989, ed. Maria Hlavajova and Simon
2. LANGUAGE BASED CONCEPTUALISM
UNDER THE SOVIET REGIME
Broadening geographies of the Conceptual Art or Conceptualism has meant that the scope of artistic practices huddled under the term is also rather broad. Because of that, it is important to specify what the term implies when applied to Eastern European Conceptualism. When reading literature regarding the issue, one will quickly notice that the term is used rather vaguely and subjectively. A lot of artists self-identified with a term, producing works based on their own subjective interpretation of what being a conceptual artist is. This created a plethora of different practices referred to as Conceptualism. For example, in
former Yugoslavia the term “Conceptual Art” was used to discuss anything that was anti–modernist, which included some works of language art, performances or Fluxus events. Simultaneously, other terms like “expanded media” or “new art practice” were used.51
51Badovinac, Čufer, Freire, Groys, Harrison, Havránek, Piotrowski, and Stipančić,
“Conceptual Art and Eastern Europe: Part II.”
Despite that, there are some anchoring notions that are helpful in specifying what Eastern European Conceptualism might be. In the discussion initiated by Zdenka Badovinac and published by e-flux in 201252 Zdenka Badovinac, Eda Čufer,
Cristina Freire, Boris Groys, Charles Harrison, Vít Havránek, Piotr Piotrowski, and Branka Stipančićattempted to find some common ground: “While the discourse and study of conceptual art in the West is supposedly well-formed, artists in Eastern Europe have worked with a similar formal vocabulary for decades. […] yet for many highly complex reasons the history of conceptual art in the West has been systematized, while we are almost without a history in the East.”53
The discussion led to some open conclusions, which are helpful guidelines for further consideration. First of all, Eastern European Conceptualism is described as critical towards Modernism. Secondly, Conceptual art is somewhat subversive,
52Badovinac, Čufer, Freire, Groys, Harrison, Havránek, Piotrowski, and Stipančić,
“Conceptual Art and Eastern Europe: Part II.”
53Badovinac, Čufer, Freire, Groys, Harrison, Havránek, Piotrowski, and Stipančić,
which could be perceived as a parallel to the institutional critique in the West. And thirdly, an art object is dematerialized, giving priority to ideas instead of
craftsmanship.54
Even though it might seem to be a close copy of Western Conceptual Art and in many cases might even visually resemble it, the reasons and the context in which the art is formed are rather different and must not be overlooked. This is especially prominent when it comes to language based Eastern European Conceptualism.
54“To avoid this—a thousand things under the same umbrella term—we should have
some points and agree on a basic definition. I think we’ve agreed at least about the deconstruction of modernism. Next, we’ve discussed the question of subversion, which I would put in dialogue with institutional critique in the West. The critique of ideology or the question of the subversiveness of Conceptual art would be something that could be analogous to institutional critique.” (Zdenka Badovinac, “Conceptual Art and Eastern Europe: Part II.”)
“This raises two points. A crucial one is the collapse of the frontiers between art and theory. The other is not dematerialization, but the critique of the unique object. So instead of art being defined in terms of the uniqueness of a signed, handmade object, you get artists who start thinking more in terms of the way a literary or musical work might be defined. For instance: What is the authentic form of a symphony? Is it the single
performance, the score, and so on? Those questions get injected into the practice of art. So the whole idea that your concept of art resides in the one object in front of you— that’s gone.” (Charles Harrison, “Conceptual Art and Eastern Europe: Part II.”)
2.1.
Samizdat
and a
Text-Object
In the East, language based Conceptualism encountered a strong literary tradition of classical Russian literature and the strategies of samizdat (dissident self-publishing), which continues to develop in the Soviet Union. Furthermore, there were practical reasons that came into play. Faced with strong censorship and very real punishments for forbidden underground publishing, writers leaned on allegorical speaking, metaphors and symbols to avoid addressing issues in an obvious manner or being directly critical or political. This strategy is usually referred to as “Aesopian speaking.”
Aesopian language was specific not only to samizdat literature – it was also a well known tactic in the public realm, adopted to every day communication from journalism or art criticism. In brief, it is described as “a communication of illegal content through the legal means under the political censorship.”55 Therefore,
stronger cases can be found outside underground publishing. The main strategies of Aesopian language included; displacements in time or space, analogies, indirect comparisons, unreliable protagonists, shifting in between the speakers, genre of science fiction, hints, allusions, silence, irony, over-use of official language or
55 “yra politinės cenzūros sąlygomis legaliomis priemonėmis perduodamas nelegalus
pranešimas.” [Translation by the author]. Dalia Satkauskytė, “Poetikos negalimybė, arba Ezopo kalba semiotikos ir literatūros sociologijos akiratyje,” Colloquia 36 (2016): 16, accessed January 21, 2018, http://www.llti.lt/failai/Colloquia36_spaudai_13-30.pdf.
discourse, complicated and murky text structures that could hide the critique of official discourse or politics.56 In its entirety, this complicated system meant that
literature had a specific task for a reader – one had to be sensitive, intuitive, focused, associative and in some cases trained in order to read in between the lines and to decipher the true meanings of the texts. Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes underlines this co-dependance on the capable audience: “There [in the East], one was also not allowed to travel so comparatively freely and thus establish face-to-face contacts necessary to explain the inevitably cryptic artistic strategies. Because, many surmised, what could texts be – if produced at all – but cryptic and hermetic, when one wanted to be intelligent, honest and not be persecuted. Mediation and audiences always to be thought of as part of the making.”57
In addition to that, samizdat created another, at points overlooked, phenomenon – the ‘text-object’. Samizdat publications had very strong visual aesthetics, which
56 “Ezopo kalbos poetinių priemonių ar retorinių technikų repertuaras, regis, nėra labai
didelis; nemaža jo dalis tinka ne tik literatūrai. Laikinis ar erdvinis perkėlimas, turintis daugybę variacijų, bet visais atvejais veikiantis analogijos, netiesioginio lyginimo principu, pasakojimas nepatikimo personažo balsu ar tų balsų kaitaliojimas, tam tikri žanrai (fantastinė literatūra) ar žanrinės orientacijos11 (parabolė), užuominos, aliuzijos, vadinamųjų perkūnsargių jimas, nutylėjimai, ironiškas naudojimasis oficialaus diskurso priemonėmis, oficialaus diskurso ar politikos kritika, panardinta sudėtingoje teksto struktūroje ir pan.” [Translation by the author]. Satkauskytė, “Poetikos negalimybė, arba Ezopo kalba semiotikos ir literatūros sociologijos akiratyje.”
57 Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes, “Avoiding Texts and Statements: Art in Eastern European
Peripheries During the Cold War and Its Mediation” (paper presented at "Écrits et paroles d'artistes d’Afrique du Nord, du Moyen-Orient et de l’Europe de l’Est dans la Guerre froide (1947-1989)" conference, Paris, November, 2015).
arose from practical considerations as the state had a monopoly over publishing, most of dissident literature was multiplied by a typewriter on cheap, thin paper. The designs were also striped down to the basics in order to simplify and speed up the production: “The typical samizdat typescript was characteristically wretched and frequently featured mistakes and corrections as well as blurred or pale type. Occasionally copies had lines running off the page. Highly circulated typescripts became brittle and worn from handling”58 (fig. 1).
On the other hand, this visual code in some cases overshadowed the actual content of the published text. Anything that was typewritten on a cheap thin paper and looked like samizdat was perceived as something unique, exclusive, dissident and therefore considered more valuable:
The mythologizing relationship to the samizdat text depended on unambiguously linking the signifying typescript to idealized “truth,” “heroism,” and “genius.” A curious feature of this attitude involves decoupling the signifier from the “actual” message it bears. Dissident ideology reduced the text to a text-object or “object-sign” within a hierarchical system of cultural exchange on the basis of difference coded as physical form. Thus the amateur typescript, the deformity of the text, the characteristic mistakes, corrections, fragile paper, and degraded print quality had value because they marked the difference between samizdat and official publications. The
58Ann Komaromi, “The Material Existence of Soviet Samizdat,” Slavic Review 63, nr. 3
(Autumn, 2004): 603, accessed February 5, 2018, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1520346.
message carried on the samizdat page ceased to matter.59
Dmitiri Prigov is one of the artists who addressed samizdat literature as a physical medium. In one of his works he re-published Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin60 imitating the aesthetics of samizdat literature – printed on a thin paper with a typewriters font, it had a small drawing of Pushkin in the corner on the book – once the pages were flipped fast the drawing of Pushkin tipped his hat off (fig. 2). In the
introduction to the publication Prigov stated his reasons for this seeming contradiction: “Associations with samizdat literature … are natural, inasmuch as this was one of the goals – to introduce exalted, officialized literature into the context of the once stormy and selfless underground and the intimate relationship to the text. But that is as may be […] of course, the main thing was the
monastic-humble copying of a sacred text (sacred text of Russian culture).”61 With this publication, Prigov tried to address an important issue – not everything that was approved by the State was worthless and of no cultural value and a ‘pure form’ should not fool an attentive reader and narrow down the sources one prioritizes.
59Komaromi, “The Material Existence of Soviet Samizdat,” 609.
60 Through the Soviet years Pushkin was a celebrated author by the state and slowly he
turned into almost a cult figure.
61Komaromi, “The Material Existence of Soviet Samizdat,” 611.
In another project, Prigov addressed another consequence of samizdat – ’graphomania.’ In a relatively short period of time he wrote thousands of poems that were published in ten samizdat style volumes, mimicking the over-saturation and over-production which came with samizdat. Anna Komaromi addressed this issue: “The excessive authority of the written word spawned an embarrassing twin in the form of excessive writing, or “graphomania.” Svetlana Boym describes “graphomania” as writing perceived to be “unhealthy,” “excessively banal, ideologically incorrect, or culturally improper.” […] The samizdat era witnessed a plethora of un-self-conscious and self-conscious “graphomaniacs.” With its lack of authorial control and the prestige attached to its object-sign, samizdat
encountered abundant writing. No one in the history of Russian oppositional movements wrote as much as dissidents of the samizdat period.”62
Another artist who leaned heavily on literature in his practice was Pavel Büchler. He employed written word and literature as a material for his artistic production: “Büchler, as a trained typographer, turned for his artworks to writing tools themselves and – sparingly employed – words with deliberate, meaningful use of typography, as well as found books. […] Books in the Eastern Block were prized possessions, windows into other worlds, status symbols of free-thinking people, and one of the few available sources when living under the impression that all that mattered (in the West) was unavailable (and all that was available had passed the censor and was tainted).”63
62Komaromi, “The Material Existence of Soviet Samizdat,” 611–612.
63 Lerm Hayes, “Avoiding Texts and Statements: Art in Eastern European Peripheries
During the Cold War and Its Mediation.”
Büchler’s work The Castle (fig. 3) is a recording of passages from Franz Kafka’s novel of the same title – The Castle. In his piece, the text was played through Marconi loud speakers, which were produced at the same time as the novel was written in 1936. This can be read as a reference to the pre-Second World War period in Europe when growing fascism led to the Second World War. In this interpretation, the sound itself refers to the street propaganda announcements and the text focuses on the impossibility to assimilate, of one’s destiny to always be a stranger: “You are not from the Castle, you are not from the village, you aren’t anything. Or rather, unfortunately, you are something, a stranger, a man who isn’t wanted...”64
These examples show a close connection between visual art and literature. In the East, instead of sharpening the language one used, making it more specific like the Western linguistics and language based art was aiming to do, language was used in a much more open and humorous way in order to address the local social and cultural landscape. Language was seen as a physical material, it was wide spread (inhabitants of the Soviet Union are known to be ferocious readers) and therefore widely used by conceptual artists.
64 ShanghART Gallery, accessed June 19, 2018,
2.2. Moscow Romantic
Conceptualism –
Dematerialization of an Art
Object as Destruction of
Evidence
One of the most notable art movements in the region, which arose out of a mix of local cultural background and international influence is Moscow Romantic Conceptualism. In 1979 Boris Groys wrote an essay entitled “Moscow Romantic Conceptualism”65 in which, at the very beginning, he addresses the polar
oppositions that artists found themselves maneuvering in between at that time: “The general tenor of emotional life in Moscow, thus forming a lyrical and romantic blend, still stands opposed to the dryness of officialdom.”66
This essay is usually used as a historical springboard for understanding what Conceptual Art in Eastern Europe could be. In the essay Boris Groys discusses works by Lev Rubinstein, Ivan Chuikow, Francisco Infante and the Collective
65 Boris Groys, “Moscow Romantic Conceptualism,” in Primary Documents: A Sourcebook
for Eastern and Central European Art since the 1950s, ed. Laura Hoptman and Tomáš Pospiszyl (The MIT Press, 2002), 162–174.
66 Groys, “Moscow Romantic Conceptualism,” 164.
Actions Group. But more importantly Boris Groys offers a framework to be used when addressing Conceptual Art initiatives in the entire Soviet Union, not only Moscow: “The word “conceptualism” may be understood in the narrower sense as designating a specific artistic movement clearly limited to place, time, and origin. Or, it may be interpreted more broadly by referring to any attempt to withdraw from considering artworks as material objects intended for contemplation and aesthetic evaluation. Instead, it should encourage solicitation and formation of the conditions that determine the viewer’s perception of the work of art, the process of its inception by the artist, its relation to factors in the environment, and its temporal status.”67
In the quote above, Boris Groys directly addresses dematerialization of an art object, which proved to be a key to understanding Eastern Conceptualism, but which also proved to be one of the most multi-layered and complex issues surrounding Conceptual Art.
In 1968, when Lucy Lippard and John Chandler published their essay “The Dematerialization of Art”68 in the Art International magazine the idea “spread like
wildfire.”69 Dematerialization of an art object proved to be one of the most
prominent ideas that shaped the understanding of what Conceptual Art could do. Mainly, shifting emphasis to the idea rather than the object: “During the 1960’s, the anti-intellectual, emotional/intuitive processes of art-making characteristic of
67 Groys, “Moscow Romantic Conceptualism,” 162.
68 Lippard and Chandler, “Dematerialization of Art,” 255–262.
69Badovinac, Čufer, Freire, Groys, Harrison, Havránek, Piotrowski, and Stipančić,
