Daring to create free art behind the Iron Curtain

Saying what you want, doing how you want, living and not fearing reprisals: there are some rights you can start to take for granted. Liberal democracy has struggled this century, and perhaps it was inevitable, as elite institutions sputtered and populist backlash increased, that some American artists and writers would forget why free speech matters. Why has the recent response to free speech hypocrisy and disinformation, at least in some cultural sectors, been aimed at denigrating free speech itself? From Turkey to China and India to Zimbabwe, artists continue to face censorship, lawsuits, prison sentences or worse for the crime of creativity; maybe some of us are too comfortable to take it seriously.

Here at the Walker Art Center, a weighty and ambitious exhibition is reorienting the American public toward a generation of artists, writers and musicians for whom free expression was neither a toy nor a luxury. The show is called ‘Multiple realities: experimental art in the Eastern Bloc, 1960s – 1980s’ and it is the most substantial survey of art from the continent’s former communist states ever presented in an American museum. It includes almost 100 artists, most of whom worked under treacherous conditions and outside state institutions, in East Berlin or Warsaw, Prague or Belgrade, Bucharest or Budapest. It’s a history lesson, yes, but an unusually rollicking one, packed with daring street performances captured on clandestine cameras, psychedelic Hungarian posters and avant-garde Czech fashion, documents from gay parties in Warsaw and punk nights in Prague, and a few nifty Yugoslav computer games. art.

Devoted museumgoers will recognize some artists here, such as Croatian photographer Sanja Ivecovic and Polish sculptor Alina Szapocznikow, both of whom had retrospectives at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in the 2010s. Quite a few more have never exhibited in this country. Some were precise and academic, but many were crafty and funny. They were locked behind the Iron Curtain, except when they traveled to India and China and even (sometimes) to the west of the continent. The one thing that truly unites them all is courage: the belief that restrictions on movement, government censorship, and secret police surveillance were no match for artistic freedom.

Organized over five years by Walker curator Pavel S. Pys and accompanied by a hefty 400-page catalogue, “Multiple Realities” is the kind of historical exhibition that occurs far too rarely in our ever-shrinking museums of modern and contemporary art. (The show runs here until March, then travels to Phoenix and Vancouver.) It focuses on five satellite states that spent the later 20th century under Moscow’s thumb — Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland and Romania — and on the non-aligned countries. socialist state of Yugoslavia. (The Soviet Union is omitted, although the war in Ukraine has brutally underscored this show’s analysis of Russian cultural imperialism.) It is vague, nuanced, contradictory, and its pluralistic approach to the East has both a historical and contemporary calling.

It aims primarily to reform a narrow view of ‘European’ art as something primarily French, German or Italian, and to challenge the enduring stereotype of the communist East as a homogeneous and isolated backwater. (Let me now grumble that the adjective “Eastern” has always been annoying and inaccurate: Prague is west of Vienna, Warsaw is west of Athens.) In fact, the bloc was never culturally uniform, nor was it closed to influences from outside. Artists in Yugoslavia and Hungary enjoyed freedoms that Romanians and East Germans did not enjoy. And artists in communist countries experimented just as much as their colleagues in the NATO states – only they did not do so in painting and sculpture, disciplines that the party state regulated more heavily.

Their most compelling work took place in domains that the regimes considered marginal, such as performances documented with black-and-white photographs or small handheld cameras. On May 1, 1971, Dora Maurer from Budapest smeared her bare feet with red paint and walked around in circles: a dissident, pointless march to her own drum while the army paraded outside. In a video, members of the Akademia Ruchu collective strolled past propaganda posters in Warsaw in 1977 and suddenly came across an invisible object, to the bewilderment of passers-by and the party’s irritation. Ivecovic sat on the balcony of her apartment in Zagreb in 1979 as President Tito’s motorcade passed by, smoking and drinking whiskey, holding a Marxist book in her right hand and pleasuring herself with her left hand. (She got away with it for 18 minutes before a police officer came to her door.)

While much of the best art of the period took place in alternative scenes and behind closed doors, there were also public expressions. Mail art, for example, whose absurd or conceptual missives evaded censorship as it traveled west. Textile art, whose practitioners were exempt from the ideological constraints of painting or literature.

And there were opportunities to disrupt even within some official institutions. Jürgen Wittdorf, a member of the East German ruling party, was commissioned to decorate a gymnasium in Leipzig in 1964 – and made unmistakably homoerotic linocuts of model workers fraternizing in the showers. In 1971, the avant-garde filmmaker Jozef Robakowski managed to produce a beautiful minimalist film in the laboratories of the Polish state broadcaster – a red rectangle, pulsating and vibrating to an electronic score by Eugeniusz Rudnik.

None of this came without cost. One of the big revelations of ‘Multiple Realities’ is Gabriele Stötzer, a photographer and performance artist who worked fearlessly in Erfurt and East Berlin: shooting punk films with her Super 8 camera, running an illegal alternative gallery, distributing her art through the mail, and spent a year in prison after protesting the ruling party’s decision to strip a singer-songwriter of his citizenship. Stötzer stayed in East Germany even when she had the chance to defect, and in 1984 she took a series of photographs of a man in drag, looking proudly at the camera in stockings and high heels. She only knew her model as ‘Winfried’ – but after the fall of the wall she discovered that this so-called outsider was in fact a Stasi agent. Freedom? Self-expression? They were always images of surveillance and paranoia, and politics extended into the private sphere.

It is that indivisibility of aesthetics and politics, of inner and outer life, that gives ‘Multiple Realities’ its contemporary power and application. Time and again, in front of the camera or in the concert hall, they modeled in which forms and in which locations artists can succeed in making the structures of society visible. Unlike their colleagues in the West, whose freedoms allowed them to make a clear distinction between ‘art’ and ‘activism’, here no easy division was allowed between dissent and independence, between commitment and refusal. That is why the former East is not an offshoot of some ‘dominant’ cultural history, nor is it a specialist subject. It is a prefiguration – of how to think, how to collaborate and how to stay sane when private life is gone.

“We always select what we say and what we don’t do,” says the narrator of “The Land of Green Plums,” Romanian writer Herta Müller’s demanding 1994 novel about dissident students tormented by both the Securitate and their own fears. “Why do we say one thing and not another? And we do this instinctively, because whatever we talk about, more is left unsaid than is said.”

That kind of state control may be over, even in illiberal Hungary. East Berlin has become the Shenzhen of the art world, a low-paid back office for a global cultural industry. Pace Edward Snowden, there is no comparison between Eastern Bloc surveillance and today’s digital monitoring. But the selective silence of artists, writers, intellectuals: that feels all too familiar. These artists, like Müller’s narrator, asked a question that is not historical at all: “How should you live, I wondered, to be in harmony with what you honestly think?”

Multiple realities: experimental art in the Eastern Bloc, 1960s – 1980s
Through March 10 at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; walkerart.org.