engleski

Neue östeuropäische Kunst: The Global Contemporary and the Eastern European Retrocontemporary

By initiating collaborations with Moscow artists and curators in the early 1990s, the Slovenian group Irwin – part of the more expansive art collective Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK, or “New Slovenian Art”) – made a decisive contribution in the creation of the paradigm of Eastern European art which, in alliance with their principle of ironic overidentification, this paper dubs Neue östeuropäische Kunst, or “New Eastern European Art.” Conceived during their NSK Embassy Moscow project (1992), East Art Map aimed to examine “how the East sees the East, ” in order to assert the status of art produced in the formerly socialist East in the face of its simultaneous absence from the Western canon and the artworld’s newly revived interest in it, following 1989. Despite these intentions, however, the project and its offshoots entailed, the chapter argues, an evacuation of the historicity of the socialist experience, including the futural temporality of the communist project, in exchange for the sublime of an art historical and epistemic terra incognita: an overwhelming historical and historiographical lack that now invited supposedly pioneering discoveries and interpretations of heretofore “parallel, ” “invisible, ” and “impossible” histories. In Irwin’s terms, the process of Eastern Europe’s transition into the contemporary implied a shift from the “retroavantgarde” – a concept Irwin used to construct an Eastern genealogical tree of avant-garde art – to what could be called the “retrocontemporary”: an accession into the global contemporary of timeless exchange, but only while carrying the sign of the aberrant yet exotic communist past, as a marker of cultural and temporal difference.

Contemporary art ; Eastern European Art ; Neue Slowenische Kunst ; post-Cold-War art historiography

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