Central Europe as a Hypothesis and a Way of Life Lóránd Hegyi Central Europe The concept of Central Europe is hardly an unfamiliar one, enjoying wide usage and being considered by many to be unproblematic owing to its self-evident and legitimate nature. Viewed from beyond the region's boundaries, Central Europe, Central European history along with its ideological and political development, its culture and art, appear as a rich, highly complex, controversial, fascinating if somewhat baffling phenomenon. The readiness to accept its idiosyncratic, specific mental characteristics as a result of historical determination is proportionate to one's distance from this geopolitical and cultural entity. It seems logical to assume that social and economic, political and ideological circumstances have created a specific social, mental, cultural situation which differs from development models such as they apply to both West- and Eastern Europe. Nonetheless, this term's definition, relevance, usefulness or disqualifications continue to be the subject of heated debate. Perhaps Thomas W. Simons Jr's excellent book provides the simplest and most pragmatic solution to this problem by suggesting that one should simply employ the concept within the clearly defined context of history, the history of culture as well as art, and sociology, mainly because for the task at hand and under the ruling circumstances it is useful to do so. Useful in a historical, cultural, art historical sense, since the concept refers to certain identifiable characteristics within the wider context of Central European history, and useful in a contemporary political and strategic sense in so far as it is a fact that we habitually distinguish between the West, the East, and the countries of Central Europe. Far from being sign of ahistorical mystification of historical and mental reality, employing the term Central Europe helps to bring universal, global issues down to a more concrete level. Although Thomas W. Simons, Jr addresses the social and political development of Eastern Europe as a whole, the results of his far-reaching analysis are equally apposite in regard to the specific situation of Central Europe. His informed pragmatism is founded in two facts: the de facto difference of the political development and thought as they affect the majority in Central and Eastern Europe, when compared to Western models; and the economic and sociological circumstances arising from the fact that Central and East European societies were industrialised at a later stage and to a lesser degree, remaining underdeveloped and basically agrarian, while at the same time invariably being subject to at least a certain degree of long-term isolation. „Eastern Europe is very diverse. The very question of whether it should be treated as a region - whether there is an Eastern Europe, as distinguished from Central Europe, or East-Central Europe, or Russia - is controversial. So is the question of which peoples, nations, or states should be included if there is a region defined. There are no perfect, objective answers to these questions, and I am not offering any in what follows. Whether they are asked, and what answer is offered, depends on whether the questions and answers are useful to specific people at specific times. At most times in history most people have found it useful to stress diversity, to focus on the separate experiences of the individual peoples and nations of this part of the world." In his book, Thomas W. Simons ? for political reasons ? advocates an integrated approach to the wider East European region, one that does not differentiate between Central and East European configurations. However, given the pronounced historical differences and in light of the fact that an integrated approach is neither differentiated enough nor, owing to its homogenising nature, can suitably be applied to the general ideological and historico-cultural development of Central and Eastern Europe as a whole, I find myself unable to go along with the author's proposal. His analysis of the Central and East European situation in terms of political science, on the other hand, I am in a position to accept, as the author's main focus lies on Central and Eastern Europe's historical development and political, ideological tendencies during the period between 1918 and the systematic transformation that took place around 1989 and during the immediately ensuing period. In this, his point of view is determined by the rivalry and struggle between the two superpowers, the USA and the Soviet Union. Multiculturalism, multi-identity Throughout its history, Central and Eastern Europe has always been multicultural. However, this multiculturalism is not founded in the acceptance and tolerance of the other but rather in a forced coexistence of numerous ethnic, religious, and linguistic groups of varying size. The distrust of the other, the fetishist fear of the foreigner, the latent hate towards one's neighbour, continue to exist side by side with the phenomenon of intermingling and of multi-identity, which itself is the subject of severe anxieties. The danger of a potential explosive release of these tensions, the fear of discrimination and exclusiveness all have an impact on questions relating to identity, integrity, and individuality. Limited possibilities Central European historical and political experience are marked by a strong feeling that here everything is rather restricted and limited, that nothing is quite perfect or has been fully realised. Social and political projects are constantly reduced, nothing is carried to its conclusion, and major ideological drives were only half-heartedly put into practice in society as there was a tendency to de- rather than accelerate their realisation. In the West, political, economic, and social projects were first examined and subsequently realised in an objective, professional, impersonal, and relatively emotionless manner, in a factual context that was likewise impersonal and determined by material and social reality, historical determination, and economic circumstances. In Central and Eastern Europe, on the other hand, the same process of putting social, political, and ideological projects into practice was, throughout, distinguished by a number of „unprofessional", personal, emotional, and irrational elements. One is left with the impression that in Central Europe decisions frequently occur on a „pseudo-level" of emotionally charged, unprofessional, and inadequate arguments; and it is noticeable that in some cases proposals, projects, or strategies are actually replaced by other, inadequate, ones in an attempt to prevent an objective and competent decision. This „double talk" (Danebensprechen) might be described as a typical method of control or self-control. Another typical method of obstruction derives from the unprofessional maximalism that does not base its assessment of reality on serious analysis but on wishful thinking, on an irrational imperative, regarding the way reality is supposed to be. Instead of trying to effect change in a gradual manner, and rather than incorporating the fact of historical determination into the relevant strategy so that objective reality finds its expression in appropriate action, the maximalist seeks to accomplish everything now, in accordance with some abstract perfection which turns out to be nothing but an actual impossibility. The confrontation with impossibility causes frustration, disappointment, spiritual self-torment, as well as barren passivity, all of which are based on the feeling that nothing changes, that everything is pointless and hopeless, because subjective activity is too feeble to affect objective circumstance. In this manner, unrealistic maximalism soon results in irrational fatalism and paralysing indifference. Studio as sanctuary In the former Communist countries, in particular during the period of the 50s, 60s, and 70s, art studios acted as an intellectual sanctuary for alternative artists and dissidents, combining the function of artistic or literary salon, with that of a gallery, museum, and collection. The arrangement of such a studio, documented in period photographs, reflects the complex function of a meeting place for alternative intellectuals: they are simultaneously salons complete with regular visitors, small museums with a collection and a number of rare objects not accessible to everybody, and a venue for intellectual, aesthetic, political debate, such as could not take place within the institutions of official culture. As the pictures of Karel Malich's studio in Prague during the 60s and 70s, show quite clearly, the studio was both a workshop and a museum, a salon and a meeting place, a spiritual sanctuary, and offered an intimate home to dissidents. His disembodied, suspended wire sculptures, centred on various energy sources and evoking the artist's mystical experiences, fill the limited space of his studio, where he is constantly involved in creating new works, where friends of the artist are able to meet and converse, where the artist inhabits a world of his own, where work and life, personal and collective space become inseparable, and where the spirit of art and his vision determines the physical surroundings. In its own fashion, the Budapest studio of György Jovánovics, where he spent years designing his installations, is as typical. In his work, this artist realises individual narrative mythology in the form of a peculiar, extremely coherent, poetic-mystical, intellectual environment. The studio does not simply offer the necessary protective and isolating space that permits the artist to carry out his intense, introverted, and time-consuming artistic efforts but is also a place where the artist receives a select few. It is not only typical of his individual artistic strategy but of an entire art historical era that the artist immediately integrates ephemeral, transitory, frequently random elements into the complex structures he creates, because the structure itself is made up of just this ephemeral and at the same time visionary, spiritual matter. In an attempt to immortalise part of his personal history and introduce it into an intellectual constellation, Jovánovics frequently integrates fragments of real space, of his studios, apartments, or workshops, into his installations. His objects, installations, series of photographs reconstruct imaginative, fictitious spaces, fictitious spatial arrangements, in which individual details are moulded after real or constructed objects, while simultaneously realising the material and intellectual relationships between experience, memories and fictitious-imaginative elements. The studio acts as a physical and intellectual reservoir, as a catalyst, bringing together different levels of artistic thought, provoking encounters between different individual or social experiences, and allowing the artist to express his personal, private and simultaneously microcultural world within a ? confined ? reality. Private mythologies In the Communist states of Central Europe studios became, during these decades, true meeting places, alternative institutions, where the circle surrounding an eminent artist or art theoretician was transformed into a small intellectual group, a creative collective workshop, into a kind of unconventional „private academy". The isolation and unity brought on by political conditions induced studios to develop their own private mythology, an esoteric, intellectual aura, and a peculiar pseudo-religious cult of the artist ? as victim, prophet, mentor, or healer. Distinguished by exclusivity, mystery, emotion, and a sense of vocation, this aura was at the same time creative and self-restricting as it functioned along the lines of a closed, introverted community, mistrustful of others. As a result the artist's life was treated as a fetish and the studios' aura as a taboo, while the private mythologies of the individual groups acquired the status of secret cults. Aesthetics of isolation While there are certain parallels between this peculiar esotericism, the strong presence of various private mythologies, the quasi sacred, absolutist view of the artist, and similar forms of the cult of the artist in the West ? e.g. in the case of Yves Klein, Andy Warhol, or perhaps most strikingly with Joseph Beuys ? Western examples tend to reflect the artist's different status in the social context, and in the area of political activity. Western artists, certainly during the past forty years, occupied a territory that was accepted, tolerated, and even ? indirectly ? protected by society. Notwithstanding such incidents as the attack on Joseph Beuys by a right-wing radical student or the attempt on Andy Warhol's life, the artistic territory, the authority of the artist, was primarily criticised, attacked, or protested against by way of artistic activity or via cultural institutions. The cult of the artist in Western Europe was determined by aesthetic, strategic, ideological issues rather than by a position of compulsory isolation, while in Central Europe, with the possible exception of Austria, the opposite was true. Though official cultural policy responded to different forms of artistic expression either with tolerance or rejection, there was no fundamental acceptance of the complete autonomy of the artist's authority in regard to his own activities. Art and culture fell under the authority of the state; aesthetic decisions were the prerogative of official cultural policy; the appraisal of artistic production rested in the hands of legitimate, official art theory. Whenever a more liberal, comparatively pluralist, cultural or political climate produced a number of tolerant, free thinking officials ? as was for instance the case in Hungary or Poland, and even earlier and more noticeably in former Yugoslavia ? decisions continued to depend on individual representatives of official infrastructure rather than being based on a more general liberal attitude that would have demonstrated a fundamental acceptance of the autonomy of artistic activity. As a consequence, one would be mistaken to refer to a stable ? because ideologically legitimised ? order in which professional authority is properly attributed to professionals, when, in fact, we are only dealing with the liberal, positive, and tolerant decisions of individual tolerant officials. Issues of periodisation and exhibition structure The countries presented in the exhibition can be divided - along approximate political lines ? into three different categories: the so-called „Eastern Bloc" countries, i.e. Poland, Czechoslovakia (after 1991 the Czech Republic and Slovakia), Hungary; non-aligned, neutral Yugoslavia (after 1991, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia/Herzegovina, SFR Yugoslavia, and Macedonia); and the neutral, market-economy orientated Austria. Whereas the social development and cultural life in the former „Eastern Bloc" states after 1949 shows a clear military, strategic, political, and economic dependence on the Soviet Union, non-aligned Yugoslavia was not only independent of the Soviet Union but engaged in an attempt to realise a different type of socialism. The „self-organised" socialist society of Titoist Yugoslavia guaranteed a ? limited ? participation of citizens in political and economic decisions; especially on the level of unions and „company democracy", i.e. in economic life and social distribution mechanisms. In Yugoslavia cultural life remained comparatively free of the influence of party ideology, cultural institutions benefited from a high degree of autonomy, and the aesthetic preferences of the state respectively of the Communist party had never been set down in a definite, doctrinal, or dogmatic manner. All the artist had to accept as his civic „duty" was the loyalty towards socialist Yugoslavia, towards the maintenance of the multinational state, and not to the formal or stylistic primacy of official art. In Yugoslavia's case official art was not bound by formal regulations and museums and galleries, institutions of youth or corporate culture were free to develop their own artistic programme ? and could still receive state subsidies. There was an unrestricted openness towards the West: International exhibitions presented Western art in Yugoslavia and, conversely, Yugoslav artists were never prevented from showing their art in the West, the state even supported an intense cultural exchange. All these factors resulted in a comparative independence from political events, from the changes in strategy on the part of the Yugoslav Communist party, and from the preferences of official ideology. While the political structure and the ideological situation of various former „Eastern Bloc" states share certain fundamental similarities, they are also marked by significant differences. Part of the reason for these differences are the individual countries' different development patters, in particular concerning industrialisation, modernisation, and the emergence of capitalism, as well as related social issues. Whereas for instance in Poland, Hungary, but also in Austria, many elements of agrarian society and the rural mind-set had a lasting influence on the general world view, Czechoslovakia was among the pioneers of modernisation and bourgeois, capitalist ascendancy in Central Europe. The significance of the so-called historical classes, i.e. the aristocracy and the Catholic church, was much greater in Polish, Austrian, and to a lesser degree in the religiously more varied Hungarian society, than in Czechoslovakia where the bourgeoisie and later the industrial working class had a more pronounced influence on political, moral, and cultural thought. Bourgeois-emancipatory tendencies, freemasonry, Western-type liberalism, the integration respectively assimilation of Jewry on the other hand are much more conspicuous in Hungary, Bohemia, the later Czechoslovakia, than they are in Poland or Austria. The role of social democracy, respectively of the Communist movement, is likewise the subject of remarkable variation within the Central European region. It is factors such as these that explain the subsequent differences between individual Communist „Eastern Bloc" countries, even where they share a similar political framework, as did Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary. In Hungary and in Bohemia, later also in Czechoslovakia, especially from the second half of the 19th century onward, it was the bourgeois, urban intellectual who embodied the development of modern culture. Urban, and hence quintessentially modern life, industrialisation, as well as the attending sense of alienation, urbanisation, the disappearance of small-scale, intimate, patriarchal communities, the transformation of private life, a radically new, modern conception of love, the uncertainty of old, traditional values, all these became the grand motifs of the new culture. The triumphant years of Hungary's rapid capitalist development, the build-up of a modern industrial infrastructure, the emergence of an industrial working class, were accompanied by an influx of Austrians, Bohemians, and Jews into the local middle class that not only strengthened the impression of multiculture but also affected traditional society's homogenous character. Like the bourgeoisie, the Hungarian working class also came from a very mixed ethnic and religious background and the resulting combination of different „foreign elements" caused the new to become associated with the foreign, and the old with the indigenous. It was this perception, this irrational feeling, that had a long-lasting effect on political and ideological conflict and explains why the opposing forces of progress and conservatism frequently came to be misrepresented as cosmopolitan and rootless on the one hand and patriotic, nationalist on the other. All of these historical, political, and cultural influences need to be taken into consideration when attempting a periodisation of Central European art between 1949 and 1999: 1949 - 1955/1956 In the „Eastern Bloc": totalitarianism, isolation, breaking off of ties with the West, installation of the Stalinist system of cultural production and infrastructure, with total control in the areas of education, media, institutions, artist associations. Following Stalin's death in 1953, onset of a slow process of „destalinisation" of political life. Critical junctures are the popular uprising in Poland, the Hungarian revolution in 1956; consequences: heavy reprisals, however, „destalinisation" continues. In Austria: occupation by the Allied powers until the signing of the Austrian State Treaty; comparative isolation from both East and West, limited audience for art, limited cultural infrastructure. In Yugoslavia: In the wake of its conflict with the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc, Yugoslavia follows its own path. Absence of repressive, monolithic cultural policy, diversity of cultural infrastructure. The presentation of art in Yugoslavia is structured along the lines of the different constituent republics, its periodisation is different from that of the „Eastern Bloc" states. 1956 - 1968 In the „Eastern Bloc": The revolutions in Poland and Hungary put a radical end to Stalinist hegemony and prepare the way for a consolidation of „socialism", accompanied by a greater acceptance of social, economic issues, and a greater understanding for the life of the majority. The parallel existence of official and unofficial culture, of primary and alternate public is tolerated. From the middle of the 60s onward, onset of reform Communism and party renewal in Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary; simultaneous liberalisation of cultural life. Crucial juncture: the „Prague Spring", success and defeat of reform Communism's attempt to establish „socialism with a human face"; followed by reprisals in Czechoslovakia. 1989 - 1999 In the former „Eastern Bloc": following the collapse of the Communist system, establishement of a free market economy, new galleries, independent institutions. Original euphoria, then signs of disillusionment: political crisis, economic problems, unemployment, national and minority conflicts. Fresh nationalists tendencies disrupt European integration, which nevertheless continues. The emerging generation of artists moves onto an international level; nomadism, transnationalism, multiculturalism. Intensification of ties between various Central European countries. In Yugoslavia: Following Tito's death crisis of the multinational state. Decentralisation, intensification of international ties; increasing tension between the party leadership in Belgrade and the constituent republics. Starting in the summer of 1991, dissolution of Yugoslavia and outbreak of local wars between Croatia, Bosnia, SFR Yugoslavia. Relationships between constituent republics are discontinued, increasing isolation of Yugoslavia, in particular after the war in the Kosovo. Intensification of cultural activity in Sarajevo, Zagreb, Ljubljana; participation of artists from former Yugoslavia in international events, exhibitions. In the form of this flexible periodisation, we hope to be able to paint a historically correct and at the same time sensitive picture of Central European art without giving rise to a mistaken impression regarding the homogeneous nature of this region's varied cultural activity. At the same time, we also portray a number of common elements which represent an either direct or latent connection between the modern and contemporary art and culture of this region ? notwithstanding the significant difference of specific regional development models and of the political configurations in Central Europe's individual nations.