•‘Unworlding Slaka’, in ed. Vojtech Lachoda, Local Strategies, International Ambitions: Modern Art in Central Europe, Prague, Artefactum, 2006, pp. 29-40, also published as •‘Welcome

Local StrategiesInternational AmbitionsModern Art and Central Europe 1918--1968

Papers from the International Conference, Prague, 11 – 14 June, 2003

The Institute of Art History, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, Prague / New York University in Prague

edited by Vojtěch Lahoda

ARTEFACTUMÚSTAV DĚJIN UMĚNÍ AV ČR

Praha 2006

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The book was published with financial support from the ASCR.

Published by ARTEFACTUMInstitute of Art History, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic

© Authors, 2006© Institute of Art History, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, 2006

ISBN 80-86890-08-2

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Contents

Preface / 7

Vojtěch LahodaGlobal Form and Local Spirit: Czech and Central Euro-pean Modern Art / 9

Anna BrzyskiCentres and Peripheries: Language Barriers and the Cul-tural Geography of European Modern Art / 21

Katarzyna Murawska-MuthesiusUnworlding Slaka, or Does Eastern (Central) European Art Exist? / 29

Eva ForgácsWhose Narrative Is It? / 41

Nicholas SawickiModernist Paradigms After the War: The Case of Max Dvořák / 47

Annika WaenerbergNational Features in Modern Art: Edwin Lydén (1879–1956) and Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) / 53

Eduards K�aviņšThe Ambivalence of Ethnography in the Context of Latvian Modernism / 59

Martina PachmanováLes femmes artistes d’aujourd’hui: Czech Women Artists in the Context of International Modernism / 65

Damjan PrelovšekThe Architect Jože Plečnik: The Originator of Critical Regionalism / 71

András ZwicklBetween Conservatism and Modernism: Classicisms and Realisms of the 1920s in Central Europe / 77

Ivanka Reberski The Universal and the Regional: Modernism in Croatian Painting in the 1920s and 1950s / 85

Anna Wierzbicka Artists from Central and Eastern Europe in the École de Paris Milieu (1918-1939): The Problem of Assimilation and Identity / 93

Maria Elena VersariThe Central European Avant-Garde of the 1920s: The Bat-tleground for Futurist Identity? / 103 Jeremy Howard – Andrzej Szczerski Ships in the Night along the Coasts of Bohemia? Modern Design Aesthetics and the Turn of the Liner / 111

Isabel Wünsche Biocentric Modernism: The Other Side of the Avant--Garde / 125

Irina GenovaBalkan Modernism / Balkan Modernity: The Difficulties of Historicizing / 133

Darko ŠimičićThe Case of Dada: Searching through the Archipelago of the Avant-Gardes in Central Europe / 141

Myroslava M. MudrakPolish Modernism and Ukrainian Artists: Parallel Stra-tegies / 149

Linara DovydaitytėConstructing the Local ‘isms:’ Paradoxes of Lithuanian Expressionism / 159

Giedrė Jankevičiūtė Traditionalism as Modernism: Neo-traditionalism in Lithuanian Art / 165

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Timothy O. BensonMapping Culture in Central Europe: Dada and Devět-sil / 171

Esther LevingerHungarian Constructivism and Totality / 183

Christina LodderInternational Constructivism and the Legacy of Unovis in the 1920s: El Lissitzky, Katarzyna Kobro and Władisław Strzemiński / 195

Matthew S. WitkovskyThe Cage of the Center / 205

Ljiljana KolešnikDangerous Liaisons: The Relationship Between Art and the Socialist State. The Croatian Experience in the 1950s / 213

Deborah SchultzMethodological Issues: Researching Socialist Realist Ro-mania / 223

Marian MazzoneLocation, Process, Identity: Actions and Happenings in the 1960s / 229

Tomasz GryglewiczIdeology or Culture: On the Art of a Non-Existing Central Europe at the Time of the Avant-Garde and the Yalta Con-ference / 237

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The Institute of Art History of the Czech Academy of Sci-ences, with the support of New York University in Prague, sponsored an international conference in Prague (11-14 June 2003) called “Local Strategies, International Ambi-tions: Modern Art and Central Europe 1918-1968.”

The aim of the conference was to explore the status of Modernism and Avant-garde art in Central Europe. The events of 1989 have had an ambiguous influence on art history research in Central Europe. On the one hand, the internal regional networks in the field dissolved; indeed, today very few people are interested in cultivat-ing contacts within the region, presenting the question of whether the idea of Central Europe isn’t, perhaps, an artificial construct.

On the other hand, since 1989 many political barriers have dissolved and today it’s possible to look at Central European art from new angles. New paradigms, such as Postmodernism came to the fore; the popularity of this trend resulted subsequently in a “Postmodernism hang-over,” which is leading to a rediscovery of the values of Modern and Avant-garde art.

Of course we are aware of the importance of modern art of the pre-war period (before 1918) to our study of the past fifty years. Some of the papers dealt with this topic.

Nonetheless, we were mainly interested in the fifty years of artistic activity that followed the disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, which is for many people a topographic synonym for the idea of Central Europe.

The fifty-year time frame covered by this conference also has much to do with the history of the Institute of Art History as well. In 2003 we celebrated the fiftieth an-niversary of the establishment of this institution, which is officially known today as the Institute of Art History of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic. Originally called the Art History Section, it was initially a part of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences that was newly created in 1953. As if that were not enough as far as an-niversaries go, we must remember yet another. In 1993, upon the division of Czechoslovakia, the Institute of the

Preface

Theory and History of Art of the Academy of Sciences of the Czechoslovak Republic was renamed the Institute for Art History of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic. As one can see, divisions, unions and territorial redistributions enjoy a rich tradition in the area known as Central Europe.

The conference dealt with questions of identity, regionalism and the interaction between the centre and the periphery, as well as with the problem of local centres (cities, art groups and institutions) and of local “isms.” It was focused on the questions of how important figures worked in this region and who actually was regarded as important. The topic of international and domestic rela-tionships was also explored. In addition, the conference discussed the topic of internal Central European networks in the modern art era, but also the development of the his-toriography of modern art throughout the entire Central European region as a whole.

All of these questions and many more, of course, are considered in recent surveys on Central and Eastern European modern art by Steven Mansbach1 and Ákos Moravánsky,2 as well as the exhibition catalogue Central European Avant-Gardes: Exchange and Transformation, 1910 – 1930 (ed. Timothy O. Benson, Cambridge [Mass.] – London 2002).

We may understand much more about the inner intel-lectual spirit of the “world of locales,” as Timothy Benson put it, by reading the collection of Modernist theory and criticism that was published as an accompaniment to the abovementioned exhibition catalogue.3

Equally important in the area of Central and Eastern European is the collection edited by Laura Hoptman and Tomáš Pospiszyl entitled Primary Documents: A Sourcebook for Eastern and Central European Art since the 1950s (New York 2002). All of these sources are essential for the art historian who wants to learn about the particularities of Central and Eastern European modern art and their relationship to the so-called “Western” variety of Mo-dernism.

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Nevertheless, despite the interest in Central and East-ern European art represented by these publications, we felt that there was something missing; namely, direct contact among researchers who deal with issues of modern art in Central Europe. This was one of the main reasons behind this conference. Another aim is to facilitate communica-tion among specialists within the framework of the region itself. It is paradoxical that we in Prague are often far fa-miliar with the state of research on Modernism in places such as Berlin, London and the United States than with publications and art historical projects on modern and contemporary art in Krakow, Vilnius, Bucharest or Bel-grade. That is why the Institute for Art History of Prague would like to focus systematically to the issue at hand, however broad it might seem. We hope this intention might serve as the substantial push towards the promo-tion of Central/Eastern European research, which would lead to a more developed network in Central Europe of studies about modernism and the avant-garde.

The three-day session in June 2003 was divided into sections as follows: 1. Regionalism and Identity (chaired by Jindřich Toman, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor), 2. East Goes West/West Goes East (chair Timothy Ben-son, LACMA, Los Angeles), 3. Whose Modernism and Avant-garde? Local/other/isms (chair Vojtěch Lahoda, Institute of Art History of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, Prague), 4. Constructing Identities (chair David Crowley, Royal College of Art, London), 5. Analo-gous Strategies/Other Histories (chair Lenka Bydžovská, Institute of Art History of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, Prague), and finally 6. Whose Construct?

Dilemmas of Central/Eastern/European Modern Art (chaired by Ján Bakoš, Institute of Art History of Slova-kian Academy of Sciences, Bratislava).

The organizers of the conference were happy they could gather practically all papers for publishing. Un-fortunately, there are some contributions from 2003 that are missing for various reasons, the most simple one being that some manuscripts were not supplied. The editor is very sorry for this, however the deadline for the publication was fixed; otherwise this book could not be published. In any case, we would like to thank those eager participants who intensively collaborated with the editor on this printed version of the proceedings.

The texts published in this volume do not follow the structure of the conference sections. The reason was simple: there were gaps of papers within the sections, so we decided not to divide the flow of texts.

We instead divided them into three sections by topic: at the beginning there are papers dealing with methodo-logical issues of studying Central/Eastern European mod-ern art, followed by a number of papers dealing especially with Modernism and Avant-garde art between the wars, and finally there are several papers that either mix chrono-logical issues, or are focused especially on the post-WWII situation of modern art in the region in question.

It is great pleasure to thank to those indispensable persons whose effort enabled to publish our proceedings. I would especially like to thank the languague editor Seth A. Hindin, and Ivo Purš, who patiently designed and ex-ecuted the layout of the book.

The Editor

PREFACE

1. Steven A. Mansbach, Modern Art in Eastern Europe. From the Baltic to the Balkans, ca. 1890 –1939, Cambridge 1998.

2. Ákos Moravánsky, Competing Visions. Aesthetic Invention and

Social Imagination in Central European Architecture, 1867-1918, Cambridge (Mass.) – London 1998.

3. Tim Benson – Eva Forgács (eds.), Between Worlds, Cambridge (Mass.) – London 2002.

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It appears futile today to repeat the lament about the absence of the arts east of Berlin and west of Moscow from the mainstream western art histories. Indeed, some of the most blatant gaps, especially those in the reper-tory of the twentieth-century “isms,” have already been filled provisionally, not without the familiar rhetoric of rediscovery boasting about the conquest of another terra incognita, which has been claimed by a number of west-ern publications on Eastern or Central European modern art, as the recently preferred geographical label would have it (to stress the exclusion of Russian and Soviet art, which is much better known in the West). The majority of those publications are exhibition catalogues of avant-garde art or of contemporary East (Central) European art, travelling between Bonn, Vienna, Stockholm and Los Angeles during the last few years.1 What appears alarming today is not the absence, but the conditions of the presence of East (Central) European art within the dominant narratives. What is urgently needed now is an inquiry into the persistent strategies of representation and self-representation, which would deconstruct the regimes of the “East European discourse,” the limits of the knowable and sayable about the “region” and its art as established by the writing subject. The most burning issue applicable to the multidisciplinary field of former East European (turned Central European, turned post-Communist) studies are thus the new interpretive strate-gies which would enable non-derogatory ways of talk-ing about the Other Europe, 2 or, to borrow a term from Gayatri Spivak, to unpack and go beyond the “worlding” of the Second World.3

Postcolonial discourse analysis has been considered as a possible point of departure for a new “postcommu-

nist theory,” which would produce “new angles on issues of nationalism, representation and power,” other ways of problematising the truths about the world post-1989.4 Before posing any further questions, one is tempted to ask, paraphrasing Appiah, whether the “post” in post-communism could be the same as “post” in postcolonial; or more disturbingly, is Communism really reducible to colonialism, as the populist Cold War dogma would have it [fig.1]? It might also be argued that the term “postcom-munism,” from an insiders’ point of view, qualifies for the Derridean category of words “under erasure,” often contested as a Western-imposed approximation, loaded and imprecise, and replaceable by the preferred term “postsocialist.” Another issue of prime importance is that the European branch of postcommunist/postsocialist countries had endured many diverse forms of politi-cal-cultural subjugation, as well as developing equally diverse strategies of assimilation and resistance over time. The centuries of territorial conquest implemented by the Ottoman, Habsburg, Prussian and Russian em-pires, experienced in totally different ways by individual states and communities, was followed by a political and economic submission to the Soviet state, misleadingly seen as homogenous and, subsequently, in the “post-communist” stage, by another form of an ambivalent surrender to Western/global hegemony, underscored by the rhetoric of liberation and return to Europe. Hence, the “post” in their variously performed conditions of postcoloniality, could be doubled or trebled, or denied as premature.

Returning to the question of affinities between “postcommunist” and postcolonial, the ideological construction of the racialised colonial Other and the

Katarzyna Murawska-Muthesius

Birkbeck College, University of London

Unworlding Slaka, or Does Eastern (Central) European Art Exist?

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“undeservingly white” East European (br)Other in the dominant western discourses reveal too many points in common to be ignored. The signifying practices oper-ate within the similar phallogocentric binaries, repeat-ing the same strategies of marginalising the peripheral, “underdeveloped,” sexualised stranger, recognisable by the arbitrary pinpointers of difference: colour, dress or a foreign accent. Moreover, while building up resistance to the hegemonic positionality of the Western subject, both East European and postcolonial studies have devel-oped a shared vocabulary, stressing and theorising the “in-betweenness,” the trauma of unbelonging, as well as re-valorising hybridity and impurity as aesthetic categories.

Despite the affinities, there are also a number of dif-ferences between East European and postcolonial stud-ies. The most severe one appears to be their diametrically opposed attitude towards Marxism, a haunting spectre for the former, a liberation for the latter. “East European Studies,” developed in the West within the framework of Cold War anti-Communism and focused on the praxis of resistance to Communism and Marxism, situated itself at the entirely opposite ideological pole to postcoloni-alism. Moreover, as argued by Anikó Imre, they have been “hostile to critical discourses, such as feminism, queer and postcolonial studies.”5 The disregard has been in fact mutual. Neither have East European studies knocked on the door of postcolonial critique and its commitment to theory, nor have they been let in and included amongst the marginalised. For its part, postcolonial criticism, confined almost exclusively to the relations between the First and Third World, and espousing the terms such as “Eurocentrism” and “non-western” as its passwords, has silently ignored both the blatant reductivism of the particle “Euro” in the first term, reducing Europe to Western Europe, and the unproblematic identification of the second term with the Third World exclusively. In corollary, the space of the “Second World” has slid off the frame, belonging to neither Europe nor the West nor the “non-western.” It disrupts the dichotomy of the white coloniser and racialised colonised, raising thus an illusion amongst some East European scholars that the East European Other does not make a “real Other.”6 Moreover, the Second World does not fulfil, by itself, any of the postmodern criteria of exclusion from power. And yet, even if Eastern Europe cannot be neatly accommo-dated into race, class, gender, and sexuality binaries, it at-

tracts a wide range of the othering procedures specific to them. Its culture has been repeatedly classified in Western discourses as non-urban and backward, was racialised along the pigmentocracy scale, as well as notoriously gendered and sexualised as a victim of imperialist or Communist abuse, to be also charged, from the other end, with xenophobia, masculinism and homophobia, and even of “pathological heterosexuality.”

So, where does this Second Europe, the other other world, belong? The region has been invented, and re-invented many times, its cartographies, ethnic and lin-guistic boundaries, temporal and fluctuating. Its most persistent qualifying adjective, “Eastern,” has been displaced by “Central” or “East-Central.” Used both as a moral appeal, or as a “strategically essentialist” coun-ter-hypotheses/self-representation, these labels pro-voked in turn the resuscitation of an array of the old/new terms for the constantly dividing and realigning bodies of the Second Europe: “South-Eastern,” “the Balkans,” “the

1. Leslie Gilbert Illingworth, “Now let one of yours go – I dare you!” (Britain’s example to Russia in freeing of “satellites”), Punch,

30 April 1958.

KATARZYNA MURAWSKA-MUTHESIUS

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Baltic,” as well as the fast-rising, ambiguously Orwellian rubric “Eurasia,” articulating the melange of sameness and difference which had been underscoring the Other Europe from the outset of its pronounced alterity. The shocking arbitrariness and ease with which its most per-sistent adjective “Eastern,” framed by the Iron Curtain and sustained by the Cold War binaries, is being replaced by equally arbitrary, loaded and contestable terms, con-notes the profound linguistic and epistemological confu-sion about the subject/object of the investigation. Is there anything beyond the text?

This article can by no means answer all the stated questions, and is dogged by the unstated ones. It is preoccupied with the persistence of the regimes of the Eastern European discourse, pervading all levels of representation, and brought into focus with a fearful clarity by Michael Bradbury’s literary construction of a fictitious Eastern European country called Slaka (1983). Far from extinct in the post-Wall era, they persevere in the recent Western publications on East (Central) Euro-pean modernisms. Defying the truths about Slaka, I want to question the very foundation of the discourse and problematise the validity of the notion of “East (Central) European art” as a separate object of investigation, the validity of the East Central European space as distinct from all other spaces and insertable into the mainstream histories on the condition of its variously defined other-ness [fig.2]. In other words, does East (Central) European art exist?

SlakaMalcolm Bradbury’s Rates of Exchange, shortlisted for the 1983 Booker Prize and proclaimed a “penetrating satire” on East-West relations, describes the vicissitudes of the “hapless Dr Petworth,” a teacher of linguistics at a lesser British university on his lecture tour around “Eastern Europe’s most rigidly controlled country,” named Slaka.7

Not to be found on any map, Slaka is a figment of Brad-bury’s imagination fed on the pre-1989 regimes of truth about the Eastern European difference, and functioning as a simulacrum of an imagined entity of the Iron Cur-tain Europe. Its signifying landscape, its violent history, politics, its magic-realist literature have all been con-structed out of a plethora of primary features taken for the “essence” of Eastern Europeanness, such as spatial indeterminacy, unbelongingness, hybridity, backward-ness, as well as an innate propensity for submission, the

latter exemplified by its hilarious Communist heritage. “Slaka is. . . the historic capital and quite the largest

metropolis of that small dark nation of plain and marsh, mountain and factory known in all the history books as the bloody battlefield (“tulsto’ii uncard’ninu”) of central eastern Europe. Located by an at once kind and cruel geography at the confluence of many trade routes, going north and east, south and west, its high mountains not too high to cut it off, its broad rivers not too broad to obstruct passage, it is a land that has frequently flourished, prospered, been a centre of trade and barter, art and culture, but has yet more frequently been pum-melled, fought over, raped, pillaged, conquered and opposed by the endless invaders through this all too accessible landscape. Swedes and Medes, Prussians and Russians, Asians and Thracians, Tartars and Cassocks, Mortars and Turds, indeed almost every tribe or race specialist in pillage and rape, have been there, as to some necessary destination, and left behind their imprint, their custom, their faiths, their architecture,

2. David Low, “Look Things in the Face,” London Evening Stand-ard, 24 October 1945. The cartoon juxtaposes the Western and

Eastern views of democracy by reverting to the concept of the het-erotopia of the mirror image, in which the idea of sameness reveals that of difference: the Western European subject with a ballot box labelled “Government by the Will of the People” looks perplexedly

in the mirror to find his alter-ego from Eastern Europe, holding a heavy tome of “Marx-Lenin Doctrine” entitled “Government in

the Interest of the People.” The cartoon was used as an introductory image by David Elliott in his text interrogating the issue of Eastern

European difference (David Elliott, Looking Things in the Face, in: Bojana Pejić and David Elliott [eds.], After the Wall: Art and

Culture in Post-Communist Europe, Stockholm 1999 .

UNWORLDING SLAKA, OR DOES EASTERN (CENTRAL) EUROPEAN ART EXIST?

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their genes. This is a country that has been now big, now small, now virtually non-existent. Its inhabitants have seen its borders expand, contract and on occasion disappear from sight, and so confused is its past that the country could now be in a place quite different from that in which it started. And so its culture is a melting pot, its language a pot-pourri, its people a salad. . . .”8

Although the novel is set in the summer of the Royal Wedding in 1981, and thus firmly anchored into British/Western time, the Slakanian time unfolds in a different dimension. It is locked in a heterotopian sphere behind the mirror, pushed back and frozen arbitrarily within the heydays of Communism, within the era of anti-mo-dernity, when the large portraits of the Party leaders surveyed the streets, the pictures of “the happy workers and the clean tractors” monopolised museum rooms, and academics and artists were held captive by secret intelli-gence networks. By 1981, however, the Communist Slaka, as described by Bradbury, was gone, the paraphernalia of Stalinism long demoted, destroyed or shuffled away to the archives of Eastern Europe’s embarrassing past. Moreover, the summer of 1981, which in British records might be memorised by the Royal Wedding, in “Slakan” chronicles would have more likely passed as the preg-nant summer of the workers’ revolution in Poland, which made the headlines on both sides of the mirror, stirring the status quo of the divided Europe. And yet, in Bradbury’s narrative, hyperbolising the Eastern Eu-ropean difference, the disjunction between the “historic” Western and the frozen Eastern European is posed as unbridgeable and eternal, foreclosing any significant transfer between the two incompatible worlds. The last lines of the book assert the reader that Petworth’s lug-gage with the smuggled manuscript of Katya Princip’s magic realist novel, to be published in Paris, was blown up at the airport.

The most ingenious of Bradbury’s fabrications, and the most pertinent – vis-à-vis professional expertise of Dr Petworth’s – is the Slakan language. This uncanny hybrid of Latin and Slavonic phonemes, morphemes and syntax, made comical by blending familiarity with incongruity, is elaborated into an explicit signifying code of what constitutes the essence of “Eastern European-ness,” the evidence of its impurity. During Petworth’s visit to Slaka it is indeed the language, rather than the socio-political relations, which becomes the terrain of “a small revolution,” prompted by some unspecified

drive towards liberalisation, and resulting in a short-lived displacement of doubled “i” with doubled “u,” and back again. But in spite of its alterity, the Slakan language does not really obstruct Dr Petworth’s entry into its heterotopian mysteries. From the moment of crossing the border, his linguistic expertise allows him to catch, mimic and reproduce the basic tenets of Slakan, and to introduce himself to a Slakan airport officer with confidence: “Prif’sorii universitayii linguistici, hospitalito officiale.”9 Although Petworth’s complacency could be shared by his Anglophone readers, cunningly reassured of their own linguistic potential, those skills are not to be matched by those of his hosts, Slakan university lectur-ers, ministry officials and novelists. Even if they speak English fluently with an equal confidence, their faults (“Do you surprise I like Hemingway?”10) are immediately recognisable, and posed as the most palpable signifiers of the Slakanian otherness. Petworth lectures in Slaka on the “transformation of English as a medium of interna-tional communication,” discussing the inevitability and plurilingual forms of its distortion, and yet the implied binary of purity versus contamination, of self versus other, hides behind the detached academic description of the process.

The same focus on inept English lies also at the core of the novel’s follow-up, a parody travel guide and a phrase-book, titled Why Come to Slaka? which juxtaposes the tellingly surreal, and explicitly humor-ous phrases in faulty English to their ostensibly correct Slakan prototypes (“Our artists love socialist realism/No malori amico realismusim social’iskim”).11 The implied asymmetry between the incorrect English and the cor-rect Slakan, makes clear that it is exclusively the Slakan “I,” attempting to represent itself in English, which is to be inferiorised and mocked, but there is no other way round.12 The Slakan idiom belongs to the realm of the invented/spoken object, the English one – to that of the inventing/speaking subject. If the Slakan speaker of the Western idiom has been disempowered in advance and doomed to enunciate his or her difference, then the Western speaker of Slakan is the master of both idioms, for his or her self-proclaimed correctness is unverifiable. Locked within the representational regimes of the novel, we cannot know the rules of a “non-diegetic” Slakan language. We cannot shift Bradbury’s addressee from an Anglophone reader to a Slakanian one, who would be able to asses the “translation.” When one now draws


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a line between Slaka and its implicit referent Eastern Europe, it is precisely this unverifiability which turns into Spivakian “epistemic violence,” the “worlding” of the voiceless subaltern.

Eastern European difference

I have focused attention on Bradbury’s strategies of othering Slaka, because they are indicative of patterns and positions of the East (Central) European discourse, of the naturalised ways of representing the invented, vic-timised and incompatible Slakan you by the western I. Although the novel was written more than twenty years ago, the ghost of the detached Dr Petworth, executing his linguistic (su)p(erio)urity, his all-encompassing disinterestedness and supremacy over a contaminated, comical, incongruous and malleable Slaka, still haunts the Eastern European discourse well into the second dec-

ade after the Fall of the Wall. Moreover, the assumption of the existence of the geo-political, social and cultural entity, a distinct body of Slaka, remains virtually unchal-lenged.

The rules of the Slakanian/Eastern European dis-course have already become the object of exploration in the pioneering study by Larry Wolff, which employed the Foucauldian/Saidian tools to examining eighteenth-century literature, travel diaries, philosophical and socio-political pamphlets centred on Russia and Poland. He argued that the idea of backward, barbarian and under-developed Eastern Europe was a cultural construction of the Enlightenment, inseparable in the process of inven-tion of the modern, progressive and civilised Western Self. Perceived as an “object under construction,” or an “in-vitation to conquest,” Eastern Europe was positioned from the outset in an ambiguous, detachable space, between Europe and Asia.13 Not wishing to undermine Wolff’s main thesis, linking the genealogy of the derogatory discourse about the Other Europe with modernity and its strategies of classification and exclusion, one cannot overlook the absence of the very label “Eastern Europe” from the 18th and 19th-century Anglo and Francophone writings, addressing nations rather than “the region.” The term “Eastern Europe,” as an overarching category for the lands of eastern peripheries of Europe, did not emerge before the interwar period, and even then was used in conjunction with the ambivalent label “New Eu-rope,” raised in-between the West and Bolshevik Russia by the Versailles treaties.14 It really only became current during the Cold War, paralleling the Iron Curtain meta-phor. Connoting the part of Europe which was domi-nated by the Soviet Union, it became linked to associa-tions with subjugation and rape [fig.3]. It was at that time when the Eastern European discourse was fully put in motion, producing – to paraphrase Said – Eastern Europe as the object “suitable for study in the academy, for display in the museum, for theoretical illustration in anthropological, linguistic, racial and historical theses about mankind and the universe, for instances of economic and sociological theories of development, revolution, cultural personality, national or religious character.”15 Its dominating tropes articulating the major pinpointers of Eastern European difference included an emphasis on backwardness and on the vernacular, as opposed to Western/modern progress; on immaturity and subjection to authoritarian power, as opposed to the Western evolution of democracy; and

3. “The Iron Curtain,” in Sven Öste, Gränsen, Stockholm, 1963 (reproduced by Anders Åman, Architecture and Ideology in Eastern Europe during the Stalin Era, Cambridge [Mass.] – London 1992).


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finally, on passivity and victim status, as opposed to the unhindered agency of the West. Institutionalised by Western political, military and economic organisations, the truth about Eastern European difference was further legitimised and historicised by Western universities and their newly established and mushrooming departments of Soviet and Eastern European studies, and dissemi-nated by their multiplying journals.16

One product of the Eastern European discourse was the numerous histories of the region, manufactured from the late 1950s onwards, both shaping and shaped by the emerging constellation of self-evident truths and all-explaining metaphors of the Iron Curtain and the Soviet shadow, of the captive mind and the raped body. They would invariably begin from a paragraph sum-marising, often in poetic terms, the defining features of the region’s essentialised geophysique as deprived of natural geographical boundaries and composed primarily of forests, marshes and slow-flowing rivers, reminding of an organism “with vertebrae and arteries but no external shell,” and therefore easily accessible open to penetration by “marauders and interlopers” from both East and West.17 The natural conditions of accessibility were thus linked with the ensuing rape and conquest, justify-ing the latter through the former, the trope which was reproduced by Bradbury in his first page introduction of the marshy Slaka.18 The notion of a defenceless body of Eastern Europe, liable to be assaulted and abused by perpetrators coming from every geographical direction, was, according to rules of the Cold War discourse, firmly pasted on its master binary, identifying the rapist with the barbarian from the East [fig.4]. In this vein, it was successfully hijacked by Milan Kundera to claim that it was in fact Central Europe, rather than Eastern Europe – the former identified by him as the part of the West which had been “kidnapped by the East” (1984) – which had become the actual victim of the rape. Introducing thus the claim for difference within the body of the Eastern bloc, divided into the raped and the rapist, Kundera did not question, but reproduced, the rules of the discourse.19

Another notorious trait of the “Eastern-European history genre” is the unproblematic teleological projec-tion of the twentieth-century concept of Eastern Europe as a distinct geo-political and cultural entity onto the past. The historicisation of the signifier “Eastern Europe” – endowed with transcendental value, absolutised and

petrified in its inherent “Eastern Europeanness,” taken as determined by natural conditions – became so over-whelming that it affects even those who, like Wolff, un-pack the rules of the very discourse. Its most transpar-ent example is Philip Longworth’s book, The Making of Eastern Europe from Prehistory to Postcommunism, which indeed makes Eastern Europe actively, by narrating its story backwards, from the present to the past, and thus claiming the prehistoric origins of Churchill’s frontier of Western Self.20

The Fall of the Wall, paradoxically, only strength-ened the parameters of the discourse.21 Moreover, it is precisely after the 1989 revolutions that the Slakanian scenarios of “worlding” the former Iron Curtain coun-tries have been disseminated with an increasing intensity and speed by all of the contributing bodies, political and academic. The Fall of the Wall might have destroyed the material substance of the Cold War boundaries within Europe, but at the same time it accelerated and intensi-

4. E. H. Shepard, “The Iron Door” (Czechoslovakia overwhelmed by Communism), Punch, 3 March 1948.


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fied the production of the “Eastern European” differ-ence. The urgency of the project might be linked to the post-Wall lack of the discernible “primary” features of racialised difference between Western and Eastern Eu-ropeans, such as the colour of the skin. One might even say that it was the Wall and its attributed chromatism, evoking the monotonous greyishness routinely associ-ated with the lands imprisoned behind the Iron Cur-tain, which, before 1989, had acted as displacement of Eastern Europe’s ”coloured skin.” Thus, the abolition of the Wall, the guarantee of the tangible division between the colourful and colourless, or between deservingly and “undeservingly white,”22 brought a growing anxiety over the absence of immediately perceivable pinpoint-ers of difference. The lack of the Wall as the othering device had to be compensated for, and the difference articulated through other easily recognisable codes, such as differences in climate, dress, gender, sexualities, and the ability to perform in a Western idiom, including the use of English.

The post-1989 explosion of East European studies, disciplining the ways of knowing, interpreting, writing and teaching the Other Europe, constitutes this massive attempt to “fix the sliding meaning” of the Other Europe, to assert its totality and to define its essence, to grasp, verbalise and visualise its inherent Slakanian difference. The new, post-1989 historical and ethnographical atlases of Eastern (Central) Europe help to demarcate, as well as commodify its unstable body and its spatial “evolu-tion” throughout the ages.23 The brand-new histories are luring the readers with a spectacle of the East (Central) European Other; encyclopaedias of Eastern (Central) Europe provide compressed and tailored doses of power/knowledge, ready-to-use for “classroom teach-ing” [fig.5],24 while a cartoon history of Eastern Europe for Beginners (1997) promises a “fast-moving, easy-to-follow guided tour through. . . this explosive, crucial part of the world.”25 Significantly, in the majority of those publications – composed, as during the Cold War era, of a modest and cliché ridden introduction followed by separate chapters devoted to particular countries which are supplied by different experts – Eastern European dia-critical marks are likely to be omitted from names and geographical places for their propensity to confuse the Western reader about pronunciation.26 To secure the in-fallibility of Dr Petworth’s practise of Slakan, Slakan has to be invented in such a way as to suit the inventor.

Writing Eastern (Central) European artAfter 1989, Anglophone art history also joined the cho-rus of the manufacturers of Eastern European difference, however not with the same speed. In a striking contrast to the steady production of the Eastern European past by Western historians since the 1950s, art historians sel-dom ventured into the unknown territory behind the Iron Curtain before the Fall of the Wall, and, apart from rare specialist studies of the art of individual countries, they have not produced any major monographic work on “Eastern European art” as a whole. “We still await a comprehensive study of culture in eastern Europe in the twentieth century,” remarked, not without an admonitory

5. Encyclopedia of Eastern Europe: From the Congress of Vienna to the Fall of Communism, ed. Richard Frucht,

New York – London 2000.

tone, the political historian, R. J. Crampton in 1994 at the end of the footnote giving a lengthy list of the region’s major histories.27

Before the Fall of the Wall it was silently accepted that the arts of the “region” would be invariably excluded from the persistently occidocentric surveys of western or European art history. One might safely assume that it was the opacity as well as refraction of the absolutised East/West divide, or, in other words, the centre/periphery syn-drome, which could be blamed for this neglect.28 Thus, in total opposition to the history, politics and economics


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of Eastern Europe, which have been widely discussed in Western academia as legitimate subjects on their own since the 1950s, the visual arts behind the mirror, ap-parently, were not perceived as forming a self-sufficient topic which would demand a succession of bulky vol-umes devoted to it. This was as if the “region” did have a history – contrary to an earlier proposal by Friedrich Engels, denying any historically validated existence to the peoples of Eastern Europe, or even too much history – but was totally deprived of “historically validated” art, i.e., of “original,” autonomous, non-derivative art that is capable of attracting the gaze of a discerning foreign scholar, and not only that of an indigenous shortsighted antiquarian or a biased native art critic.

This alleged “absence of art” in East Central Eu-rope speaks above all not about art itself, but about the absence of the frame with which to talk about it. It is no coincidence that art history was seldom mentioned, let alone taught, in departments of Eastern European studies before 1989. The arts of the “region” were neither com-patible with the available tropes of the Eastern European discourse, invented for discussing history and politics; nor with those of the normative Western art history, sub-scribing to the modernist imperative of the autonomy of art. Entering the Slakanian genre was tantamount to reproducing the stories of rape and conquest, of barbar-ians who fight their tribal, or fiercely nationalistic battles, of the pre-modern societies off the beaten track, passively submitting to foreign powers and turning without a shot into totalitarian regimes. Accordingly, a story of Eastern European art would have to put stress on folk rather than high art, to emphasise its impurity, primitivism and nationalist agendas, as well as the imported nature of both its historic styles and of the twentieth-century “isms” produced in Paris, including that of the politi-cally contaminated socialist realism, imposed in turn by Moscow. Its general message should leave no doubts that these nations have been incapable of making a lasting contribution to the universal history of art.29 The art of Eastern Europe – if there was one, and if it was to be written about by an Anglophone art historian – had to be presented according to the rules of quite another dis-course, as convincingly autonomous; immunised, so to speak, against the dominant socio-political clichés about rape, backwardness, imitativeness and “clean tractors.” Not surprisingly, the tentative Western research on art in Eastern Europe, underpinned by the Cold War, focused

almost exclusively on modernism behind the Iron Cur-tain, following the patterns of the earlier rediscovery of the persecuted Russian and Soviet avant-garde. The complex political agenda of the process was analysed recently by Evá Forgács.30 And yet, apart from the scat-tered studies of diverse modern movements in separate countries and some rare exhibitions of Osteuropäische avant-gardes, mainly in Germany and France, no major monograph of “Eastern European modernism” had been conceived before 1989, either.31

We are touching here the primary factor behind the absence of East Central Europe from the histories of art before 1989, namely the problematic existence of the “re-gion” as an artistic province, a homogenous spatial unit, distinguishable as far as its art was concerned both from the West and from Russia (standing for the East). When composed, hypothetically, not of historians’ narratives but of the endless variety of artefacts, hybridising in unequal measures Latin, Orthodox, Jewish and Islamic cultures, the Habsburgian, Hohenzollern and the Ro-manovs hegemonies, as well as Parisian, Viennese, and Soviet canons, the “region” collapses in the process of its construction, unmasking the absence of its imagined essence, and revealing too little of its “purely Slakanian” features. A presumed “Eastern Europeanness” is as prob-lematic as the notion of the all-embracing “Africanicity.” There is so much undigested art in “the region,” as well as so much national-oriented art history written in Eastern European languages (continually reproached as daunt-ing by Western experts) that a comprehensive study of the art of the whole of “Slaka” in English, thoroughly professional, involving a close reading of the original, multilingual sources, turns out to be a gigantic effort indeed, if not a contradiction in itself.

Accordingly, the art of the “region” has rarely been perceived as a coherent whole by East European art historians either, who would often stress their inability to follow an academic argument in the whole array of relevant languages. In spite of abundant national art histories devoted to individual countries, the existence of a distinct artistic province of Eastern Europe has been disputed rather than ascertained by both local and émi-gré authors. A few conscious “strategically essential-ist” efforts were made, however, to re-insert what was considered as unjustly marginalised art of the highest standards produced in Eastern Europe into mainstream art history; the most prominent, albeit relatively isolat-


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ed, publication of the 1970s was that of Jan Białostocki, a Polish art historian very widely connected to Western scholarship, presenting his Wrightsman Lectures on the Renaissance in Eastern Europe, delivered in the Metro-politan Museum of Art in New York in 1972.32 Writers from the diaspora, more exposed to the general rules of Eastern European discourse, have been especially prone to interrogate the identity and inter-subjectivity of the presumed region. The title of Andrzej Turowski’s 1986 book Existe-t-il un art de l’Europe de l’est? sounds today like a liberating call to break the iron habits of thinking; however, firmly rooted in the dissident rhetoric of the re-discovery of Central Europe, the publication constitutes another effort to reinsert the selected movements of art of the “region” – in this case, of the Polish, Czech, and Hungarian avant-garde – into Western art history.33

If before the East European revolutions the aim to provide a “comprehensive” history of the arts trapped behind the Berlin Wall had not manifested itself with a particular urgency, neither in the West nor in the East, the post-1989 process of fixing the sliding meaning of Eastern (Central) Europe repositioned the field com-pletely. It brought a stunning number of studies and exhibitions, bulky catalogues and anthologies of texts translated into English, while still dealing mostly with modernism, avant-gardes and contemporary arts of the “region.” Authors, curators and editors of those multi-plying volumes, often beautifully produced and lavishly illustrated, see their task in terms of the truly pioneering work of recovering the arts behind the Iron Curtain from both the Communist-inflicted oblivion and the chauvin-ist bias of the fiercely nationalist Eastern European art histories, and thus of a “true” insertion of those arts into an “objective,” i.e., Anglophone, art history. The latter is identified with displaying them in recognised art in-stitutions, as well as with writing about them in correct English, purified from Slakanian residues, and with their publication under reputable Anglo-American imprints. The existence of the “region” – albeit undefined, unstable and diversified – is produced in the discourse.

The most widely acclaimed and still hotly discussed book in the field is Steven Mansbach’s survey Modern Art in Eastern Europe, supported partly by the Getty and awarded a major prize. The book, published in 1999, has been credited with pioneer status as a major synthesis of the still-unknown and confusing territory, “the only study of its kind in any language.”34 Undoubtedly, it is a very

competent survey of modern art movements from the end of the nineteenth century to 1939 in eleven countries (excluding, however, Bulgaria and the Ukraine), with a good bibliography and index, moreover admirable also for an utmost attention given to diacritical marks. And yet, the major tropes of the Slakanian fable about Eastern European difference, about the “small dark nation[s] of plain and marsh,” rape and impurity, politicisation and sins of nationalism, about Slakanian misuse of West-ern idiom, are still present in its narrative. Although Mansbach repeatedly warns against the “misleading monolithic label ‘Eastern Europe,’” by the very act of en-closing the description of modern movements of those countries in the same volume bearing this misleading and telelogically applied term, he implies their assumed kinship, their belongingness together, which so far had been overlooked by indigenous, and therefore biased, art history. The rules of the Slakanian discourse, the unrep-resentability of the Slakan “you” on its own terms when it enters into dialogue with the West, are proclaimed as a manifesto in the preface to the book. It promises an access to a “world of seldom-considered material,” as well as and “interpretive overview [which] reclaims the essential role played by eastern European artists in the genesis of the modern aesthetics with which we [my emphasis] are familiar in the West.” Thus, to mark its separateness, to assert its integral power and its “have-always-been-thereness,” the Western condescending “we” is in constant need of the Slakanian Other, the “you” which is producible or retrievable only by the western “I,” and whose language could be imagined as a “salad.”

A number of Eastern European critics hailed the book optimistically as not only a simple expansion of the modernist canon, but also a revision of its prevail-ing Western bias.35 Some others, however, would ques-tion the existence of a separate category of the Eastern European modernism, stretching from the Baltic to the Balkans, from the end of the nineteenth century onwards, thus projecting the Iron Curtain boundaries and imposed “(br)otherly” subjectivity onto the past. What has been also designated as problematic is the fact that the imagined Eastern European modernism – the Slakanian “you” as it were – is spoken for, rather than speaking in its own voice. This was articulated strongly by Martina Pachmanova during a round-table discus-sion concluding a panel on Central and East European Art after 1945 at the College Art Association conference


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in Chicago in 2001, where she asked in reference to Mansbach’s book: “Who really speaks for us? (…) Not that I don’t trust a foreign person voice. . .[but] it doesn’t present any points of view from the region. Also I doubt if it would be possible for an East Central European art historian to propose such a project to a publisher in the United States or Britain. Obviously there are a lot of political and economic interests at stake.”36 From the Western side, James Elkins attacked “Mansbach’s project” even more forcefully, assessing it in a review in America’s major art history journal, the Art Bulletin, as “nothing less than a kind of Orientalism,” as driven by the old mission to “complete the picture of the Western avant-garde,” as “doomed to deflate the artists it means to promote,” and, despite the accumulation of superlatives, presenting them as repetitive, parochial, locked their in nationalist agendas, and, ultimately, “when all the arguments are made – inferior.” Elkins pointed also to the “formidable problems that entangle the very pos-sibility of writing the history of any modernist movement outside of Western Europe,” and, whilst focusing on Hun-garian modernism, proposed some thoughts on how to “improve the situation,” including the deconstruction of the centre/periphery binary, and of the universality of Western aesthetic judgements.37

Is it thus at all possible to write about modern art in Eastern Europe without reproducing the Slakanian paradigm? Or, to recall Rasheed Araeen’s metaphor: are there any non-patronising and non-derogatory tropes and standards for the Other Story? And, how important is the position of the narrator? Could the fallacy of Orien-talism be redressed by parallel efforts – by “strategically essentialist” efforts, as it were, to use Spivak’s much-dis-cussed notion – to produce a new kind of art historical textbook on Eastern Europe, undertaken from within or written jointly with Western colleagues, books which would lay bare both the traps of binary logic leading to marginalisation and of the impotent efforts to extend and strengthen the Western canon? Furthermore, should those new books be written in English, and published by Anglo-American publishers? Does this not bear the dan-ger of internalising the patterns of a discourse? Finally, returning to my initial claim, should the story about East (Central) European art be told at all? This indeed means disseminating the Cold War/transitionalist geography and declaring that Slaka and its art does in fact exist and can be described as a spatial and artistic unit? And that the only problem is that it must be described anew, in

such a way as not to reproduce the persistent patterns of the Slakanian discourse?

A plethora of exhibitions, events and conferences staged by curators and critics from, and in East (Central) European countries after 1989 testify that such a counter-project, undertaken both in parallel with, and cautiously against, the patriarchal conquest of Eastern European modernism and Central European avant-gardes by “the West” has been launched. The repositioning vis-à-vis the West and the interrogation the once-enforced trans-iden-tities has become the target of the post-Wall decade.38 The once-abhorred notion of the brotherhood of Slakanian countries has been not only deconstructed and demas-culinised (albeit tentatively), but also re-invested with a new significance, as one of the tools of problematising and defying – even if belatedly – the traps of occidocen-trism and of the centre vs. periphery aporia.39

And yet, even if the traps of succumbing to occido-centric and phallogocentric premises are fully articulated, the deployment of the Third World critical apparatus is pushed aside by the protagonists of a new discourse. Although coming very close, Elkins stopped short of considering the applicability of discourse analysis and postcolonial theory as one of the possible ways to de-centre the established regimes of truth of Western art history, and, quoting Spivak again, to realise the necessity of “unlearning one’s privilege as one’s loss.”40 While debat-ing in Chicago the interpretive strategies allowing for a “proper contextualization” of East-Central European art, the round-table speakers from “the region” were firmly denying the applicability of postcolonial theory, insisting on the difference between the “real Other” and the East-Central European Other, i.e. the white, neigh-bourly Other.41 In doing so, they perpetuated the Euro-centric narrative of an absolute Other, while overlooking the constructed nature of the imagined identity of any Other or Self, black, white, or curly. And yet, I do believe that the repositioning and self-conceptualisation of the post-Wall Other might be helped by extending the post-colonial grid to address the “subaltern” from the Other Europe. And if we look for ways to theorise the new phenomenon of re-affirming the existence of Slaka and its art, of searching the unity in difference as the means to acquire the voluntarily renounced voice of the “Slakanian subject,” what comes to mind is Gayatri Spivak’s “stra-tegic use of positivist essentialism in a scrupulously visible political interest.”42 One might argue, however, that the


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hypothetical “East (Central) European subject” cannot claim the status of the subaltern, as theorised by Spivak. It has never been entirely mute, but it repudiated volun-tarily its totalising “internationalist” voice in the act of denying the reductivness of the essential attributes of its sameness, while at the same time succumbing to the bla-tantly essentialised position of the marginalised victim constructed by the occidocentric discourse, the position which was to be strongly articulated and claimed by its Central European metamorphosis. But it is precisely this underdetermined status of the East (turned Central) European subject and its ambiguous refusal/desire of its theoretical self-representation that can be “helped” by the concept of the self-limiting tactics of strategic essential-

ism “in a scrupulously visible political interest.” Thus, in theory, the newly appointed transnational sisterhood of post-Slakanian artists, curators and critics – while invok-ing their “essential attributes” when it is politically useful to do so – might be able to maintain the power to decide when those attributes are “essential” and when they are not, thus never forgetting about their instrumentality and their status “under erasure.” This is how I am prepared to interpret some of the very recent voices affirming the essential separateness of Eastern European culture, ut-tered at the conference “East of Art,” which was held on the occasion of the publication of the Primary Documents volume at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in March 2003.43

A firts version of this article was published in Third Text 18, 2004, No. 1, pp. 25-40.

1. Cf. S. A. Mansbach, Modern Art in Eastern Europe: From the Baltic to the Balkans, ca. 1890-1939, Cambridge 1999 – Lóránd Hegyi (ed.), Aspects/Positions: 50 Years of Art in Central Europe 1949-1999, Wien 1999 – Bojana Pejić and David Elliott (eds.), After the Wall: Art and Culture in Post-Communist Europe, Stockholm 1999 – Timothy O. Benson (ed.), Central Euro-pean Avant-Gardes: Exchange and Transformation, Los Angeles 2002 – Laura Hoptman and Tomáš Pospiszyl (eds.), Primary Documents: A Sourcebook for Eastern and Central European Art since the 1950s, New York 2002.

2. Piotr Piotrowski, The Grey Zone of Europe, in: After the Wall (see note 1). pp. 35-41 – Central and East European Art and Culture 1945-Present, a round-table discussion convened by Susan Snodgrass, ARTMargins, 15 October 2001.

3. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, The Rani of Sirmur: An Essay in the Reading of Archives, History and Theory 24, 1985, No. 3, pp. 247-272.

4. Cf. Postcommunism: Theory and Practice, Call for papers for a conference, Centre of Translation and Comparative Cultural Studies, University of Warwick, June 2002. The topic was taught at the Central European University (Bu-dapest) Summer Course 2002: Cultural Diversities East and West: Postcommunism, Postcolonialism and Ethnicity. On the applicability of postcolonial theory to research on Eastern (Central) European arts, see Bojana Pejić, The dialectics of normality, in: After the Wall (see note 1), pp. 18-29; Igor Zabel, “We” and “the Others” (1997), in: ibidem, pp. 110-113; Ekaterina Dyogot, How to Qualify for Postcolonial Discourse, ARTMargins, 1 November 2001; Margaret Diko-vitskaya, A Response to Ekaterina Dyogot’s Article: Does

Russia Qualify for Postcolonial Discourse?, ARTMargins, 30 January 2002.

5. Anikó Imre, White man, white mask: Mephisto meets Venus, Screen 40, Winter 1999, pp. 405-22. The political agenda of East European studies in the West, established en mass in Western universities during the Cold War, is referred to in Arnold Buchholz (ed.), Soviet and East European Studies in the International Framework: Organization, Financing and Political Relevance, New York 1982.

6. Central and East European Art and Culture (see note 2).7. Malcolm Bradbury, Rates of Exchange, Harmondsworth 1985,

blurb. The author acknowledged that Slaka is an amalgam of his experience of Bulgaria and Poland, as well as China. I owe this information to George Hyde.

8. Ibidem, pp. 1-2.9. Ibidem, p. 40.10. Ibidem, p. 76.11. Malcolm Bradbury, Why Come to Slaka? (1986), Harmonds-

worth 1991, p. 64. Slaka has made a subsequent appearance in Bradbury’s television comedy-drama The Gravy Train Goes East (Channel 4 Television, 1990), discussed by Paul G. Nixon, A Never Closer Union? The Idea of the European Union in Selected Works of Malcolm Bradbury, in: Susanne Fendler – Ruth Wittlinger (eds.), The Idea of Europe in Literature, New York 1999, pp.138-55.

12. Bradbury often exercised his skills of parodying the misuse of English by foreigners, but the “Slakan case” differs here precisely in the impossibility of verifying his impersonat-ing faculty. On linguistic racism, see David Cairns –Shaun Richards, Writing Ireland: Colonialism, Nationalism and Culture, Manchester 1988 – Maggie Ronkin, Helen E. Karn, Mock Ebonics: Linguistic racism in parodies of Ebonics on the In-ternet, Journal of Sociolinguistics 3, 1999, No. 3, pp. 360-80.


40 41

13. Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civiliza-tion on the Mind of the Enlightenment, Stanford (California) 1994. A comparable study of Maria Todorova (Imagining the Balkans, New York – Oxford 1997) focused exclusively on the production of the derogatory image of the Balkans. An interesting paper on the origins of the French discourse on Eastern Europe (“The Making of the Idea and Concept of Eastern Europe in France, c.1810-1880, and Some Hypotheses on Euro-Orientalism”) was presented by Ezequiel Adam-ovsky at the BASEES Annual Conference in Cambridge, April 2003.

14. W. B. Newsome, “Dead Lands” or “New Europe”? Recon-structing Europe, Reconfiguring Eastern Europe: “West-erners” and the Aftermath of World War I, East European Quarterly 36, 2002, pp. 39-62.

15. Edward Said, Orientalism, Harmondsworth 1995, pp. 7-8.16. Buchholz (see note 5).17. Adam Palmer, The Lands Between: A History of East-Central

Europe Since the Congress of Vienna, London 1970, p. 1.18. An extensive bibliography of Eastern European histories

appears in R. J. Crampton, Eastern Europe in the Twentieth Century–and After, London – New York 1997; Robert Bideleux – Ian Jeffries, A History of Eastern Europe: Crisis and Change, London – New York 1998.

19. Milan Kundera, The Tragedy of Central Europe, New York Review of Books, 26 April 1984, pp. 33-38. For a critique of Kundera’s essay, see Iver B. Neumann, Uses of the other: “The East” in European identity formation, Manchester 1999, pp. 149-153.

20. Philip Longworth, The Making of Eastern Europe from Prehis-tory to Postcommunism, Basingstoke 1992.

21. Cf. the critique of the process of dividing Europe in Adam Burgess, Divided Europe: The New Domination of the East, London – Chicago 1997.

22. Julie Burchill, After the Flood, The Guardian Weekend, 28 July 2001, p. 7.

23. Paul Robert Magocsi, Historical Atlas of East Central Europe, Toronto 1993; Richard – Ben Crampton, Atlas of Eastern Eu-rope in the Twentieth Century, London – New York 1996; D. P. Hupchick, H. E. Cox, A Concise Historical Atlas of Eastern Europe, Basingstoke 1996.

24. Joseph Held, Dictionary of East European History since 1945, Westport (Connecticut) 1994 – Richard Frucht (ed.), Encyclo-pedia of Eastern Europe: From the Congress of Vienna to the Fall of Communism, New York – London 2000.

25. Paul Beck – Edward Mast – Perry Traper, The History of Eastern Europe for Beginners, Beginners Documentary Comic Books, New York – London 1997.

26. Cf. Bideleux and Jeffries (see note 18), p. x.27. Crampton (see note 18), p. 549.28. Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann (review), Jan Białostocki, Art of

the Renaissance in Eastern Europe: Hungary–Bohemia–Poland, The Art Bulletin 57, 1978, pp. 164-69.

29. Cf. Preface in Anthony Rhodes, Art Treasures of Eastern Europe, London 1972, pp. 8-9.

30. Evá Forgács, How the New Left Invented East-European Art, Centropa 3, 2003, pp. 93-104.

31. Cf. Avantgarde Osteuropa, 1910-1930 (exh. cat.), Deutsche Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst und Akademie der Künste, Berlin 1967 – The Hungarian Avant-garde: The Eight and the Activists (exh. cat.), Hayward Gallery, London 1980 – Hilary Gresty and Jeremy Levinson (eds.), Constructivism in Poland, Cambridge 1984.

32. Jan Białostocki, Art of the Renaissance in Eastern Europe: Hun-gary–Bohemia–Poland, Oxford 1976.

33. Andrzej Turowski, Existe-t-il un art de l’Europe de l’est? Utopie et idéologie, Paris 1986.

34. James Elkins (review), S. A. Mansbach, Modern Art in Eastern Europe, The Art Bulletin 87, 2000, p. 781. The pioneer status of the book has been significantly enhanced by the way in which the bibliography is organised at the end of the book, i.e., divided into countries, analogously to chapters of the book, and not including a “general bibliography” section which would list those rare publications or exhibition catalogues that have attempted a general overview of avant-gardes in Eastern Europe, such as Avantgarde Osteuropa, 1910-1930 (see note 31), or Turowski’s book (see note 33). Those posi-tions have been listed, but only in the section on Poland and Lithuania.

35. Vojtěch Lahoda (review), S. A. Mansbach, Modern Art in Eastern Europe, Umění 49, 2001, pp. 86-93.

36. Central and East European Art and Culture (see note 2).37. James Elkins (see note 34) pp. 781-85; see also an exchange

of letters between Anthony Alofsin and James Elkins, in re-action to this review, published in The Art Bulletin 84, 2000, p. 539.

38. To mention, amongst others, Zdenka Badovinac (ed.), Body and the East: od šedtdesetih let do danes/From the 1960s to the Present, Ljubljana 1998; After The Wall (see note 1); as well as this conference (Local Strategies – International Ambitions: Modern Art and Central Europe 1918-1968, a conference held at The Institute of Art History of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, Prague, 2003).

39. See Piotr Piotrowski, Central Europe in the Face of Unifica-tion, ArtMargins, 28 January 2003.

40. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, The Post-Colonial Critic: Inter-views, Strategies, Dialogues, Sarah Harasym (ed.), New York 1990, p. 42.

41. Central and East European Art and Culture (see note 2)..42. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Subaltern Studies: Deconstruct-

ing Historiography, in: Donna Laundry and Gerald MacLean (eds.), The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, New York – London 1996, p.214.

43. Audio-files of the papers by given at the conference East of Art: Transformations in Eastern Europe are accessible in ART-Margins, 5 June 2003.
