Poor but Sexy: Culture Clashes in Europe East and West (28 page)

Hardly “the new socialist realism”, this, as sotsrealism was a state art, if equally an expression of nationalist kitsch - and, of course, there couldn’t be a term that would cause greater offence to the communism-loathing far right. Yet, if sotsrealism was apart from nationalism, an expression of several other ideas, what do the artefacts grouped in Warsaw MoMA represent by comparison? Of course, this isn’t sotsrealism in any practical sense, only metaphorical. The people who make this art do not possess actual political power. But they do epitomize a political force that can’t be ignored, like the Catholic Church. The question about New National Art remains: is the notion of “art” in here actually neutralizing something that is possibly much more dangerous? It wouldn’t be the first time in history that the right wing and avant-garde would meet. Art historians still have problems how to categorize the views of the Futurists, or Vorticists like Wyndham Lewis, and how to appreciate art which was inseparable from their often despicable, fascist political views. So is it merely just “the other side”, we should think, or a reverse of what was happening at Żmijewski’s Biennale? This new ‘folk art’ should be cherished by the artists connected to the relational/participatory/engaged aesthetic: it is popular, it is made by ‘ordinary people’, it is ‘spontaneous’. Yet, how to deal with its ideological content? Doesn’t it rather reflect the social construction of the masses created by the sophisticated, educated, liberal elite?

An equally curious example of reinterpreting Socialist Realist aesthetics is a work by Israeli artist Yael Bartana, shown recently in the UK,
And Europe Will Be Stunned
, a staged video trilogy about a fictitious “comeback” of Jews, killed in the Holocaust, to Poland.
The first part of the video is called “Phantoms-Nightmares”, which could be a semi-conscious reference to the uncanny tradition of Polish Romanticism in the writings of Maria Janion, to whom we referred to in Chapter Three of this book – something which Bartana could have learned via her collaborators from Krytyka Polityczna. It’s also a reference to the evil which was done to the Jews in the Holocaust, who are now called to come back – yet in what form? Does she mean the descendants of those Jews who were killed? Or does she demand a return of the dead Jews? And on which premises, who gives her the right, one might ask? And if they’re dead, are they to make a rebirth, and in what form? As the phantoms in the Forefathers Eve? Or maybe as zombies from a nightmare? Despite being Israeli, Bartana became the artist of the Polish Pavilion in the Venice Biennale 2011. The first part shows the informal ‘leader’ of Krytyka Polityczna, Sławek Sierakowski, stylized as a 1950s Polish ‘intelligent’ – dressed in thick glasses, jumper and in grey colors, as he delivers a passionate speech in the empty – significantly – 10
^th
Anniversary Stadium in Warsaw. This Stadium had a rich history – built in a socialist modernist style, it was one of the first buildings in 50s Poland where architects successfully negotiated the rules of socialist realism, and was recently demolished for the sake of the new, bombastic Polish-flag-wrapped kitsch of the National Stadium, ready for the Poland/Ukraine Euro 2012. The speech, co-written by Sierakowski, is a pathetic address to the – dead? alive? – three million Polish Jews to come back to the land, which previously brought a Holocaust upon them or forced them into emigration in 1968. It’s an apology for their suffering and promise of a new alliance, in which Poles and Jews will no longer be hostile
to each other. The second part of the triptych shows the Jews that responded to the appeal, coming back and building a kibbutz in the place of the former Warsaw Ghetto. In the third part, the Leader, Sierakowski, is assassinated during another speech and buried.

4.6 Polish intelligentsia in the lost cause. Bartana’s fantasy of the Jewish return back to Poland.

Art was in this case to have real life continuation – there was, during the aforementioned Berlin Biennale, a Symposium of the Jewish Renaissance Movement. In Poland, among the Jewish community itself, it caused mixed feelings. We know that the idea of a “comeback” of Jews couldn’t be farther from reality, not only because of the mutual attitudes of Israelis and the continent. The Polish-Jewish historian Jan Tomasz Gross, author of breakthrough books on Polish anti-Semitism during and after WWII like
Neighbours
, on a pogrom in Jedwabne and
Golden Harvest
, on Poles betraying Jews for money, said about this project that only treated symbolically does it make any sense. In the history of Poland we heard various directives telling Jews where they should go, from Madagascar to Palestine, during the anti-Semitic 1930s, so telling them to come back to Poland is not innocuous. Poles need to realize the hole, the void that was left after the Jewish population’s extermination. Bartana’s cycle, even if objectionable, historically simplifying and too easily sidestepping the profound problems it raises, was interesting because of its form: its Sotsrealist aesthetics was partly intended to evoke the lost early socialist past (and political aesthetics) of Israel, land of kibbutzes, where the pioneers were to found a new world. The films, especially the middle part of the trilogy, evoke the socialist propagandist newsreels, full of healthy bodies affirming their physical fitness and beauty so conspicuous in early socialist heroic art. The question whether the film’s message is ‘for real’ or a political spoof and political scandal is hanging there, to the delight of the artist, no doubt. Yet, Bartana seems to take this at face value, unable to give a counter, critical look. The text of the speech is ludicrous, and neglects the contemporary position of Israel as oppressor of Palestinians. It is a mock
politics, conveyed in a knowingly cheesy form.

Artists today can once again take Marxism seriously, yet its effect is necessarily weakened by the lack of a strong movement such an art could represent. But is another weakness leftist art’s devotion to old notions of the avant-garde? Andre Bazin in his essay on realism pointed out its hunger to “bring back to life”, a hunger (not accidentally having here sexual connotations), that can be compared to Badiou’s passion of the Real. What lies behind the fear of realism? It’s an aesthetic that has been ridiculed and become politically bankrupt, as in the cases of sotsrealism in the Soviet Union or China. Socialist Realism was a question of life and death to many under socialism, and hence is part of post-Soviet trauma. We often see it and think about it with shame. Not only in art, but also in literature and architecture, sotsrealism is an easy straw man, as it’s easy to see an oppressor and oppressee in there, and we’re never the oppressor. Surveying Sotsrealism requires from us a complete redefinition and rethinking over what was the function of the artwork, what was the idea of an artist, what was his role.

It was in the 80s that artists and critics began to confront Sotsrealism again, after Martial Law in Poland, when the disgust at the system reached its limits and the system itself began to decay. There were new possibilities for boycotting the system, there appeared new options for democratic opposition, and critics wanted to somehow regain sotsrealism, as the style-purveyor of realism, figuration and painting. At this time people were disillusioned with the avant-garde. And exactly then the slim but controversial book by Boris Groys was published, in 1987:
The Total Art of Stalinism (Gesamtkunstwerk Stalins
in the German original).

Historically the first avant-garde was trying to bring art back to the everyday, and its practices were eventually to transform political and social reality. In every respect, ‘avant-garde’ is a retrospective, synoptic term, used by critics such as Clement Greenberg
(late 1930s), Harold Rosenberg, Peter Burger (since the 1950s), to describe more than just art itself, often conflated with modernism, but also its political context. ‘Avant-garde’ artists were in fact calling themselves the Neues Bauen, Neue Sachlichkeit, Futurists, Constructivists, Expressionists or Dadaists. Later, with the consolidation of Stalinism in the late 1920s USSR, a new style, ‘socialist realism’, was the expression of the spirit of ‘socialism in one country’. Art was supposed to be ‘national in form, socialist in content’.

In recent years, some historians and critics have started to re-examine Sotsrealist artists like Alexander Deineka or Yuri Pimenov, both of whom had participated in the experimental period of Soviet art during the NEP era, before turning back to the style of the nineteenth-century Society of Easel Painters. In their work it was possible both to fulfil the rules of sotsrealism and still retain an ambivalent, uncanny avant-gardism. In Pimenov’s painting
New Moscow
we see for instance a New York-like landscape of skyscrapers, and a girl in the car riding through this uncanny atmosphere, with the allure of emancipation from the usual feminine fate of kitchen and family. In the example of Sotsrealist artists who managed to retain and entangle the new demands with their previous personality, like Deineka, we can see a continuation of avant-garde stylistics taken into new territory. In many 1930s paintings we can still see the remnants of other, pre Sotsrealist styles, before they were banned, especially Expressionism and Neue Sachlichkeit, with their montage-like, overtly industrial, half abstract compositions experimenting with perspective. But while their earlier works genuinely tried to work out the contradictions within the socialist reality of the 1920s, after that they presented too easy a pictoriality, and a problem-free vision of collective life.

Presently the viewpoint that the Sotsrealist doctrine was simply “imposed” on artists is being actively challenged by art historians. As Christina Kiaer writes in her essay
Was Socialist Realism Forced Labour? The case of Aleksandr Deineka
, artists were not only victims
but also necessarily helped in constituting the predominant ideology. The opening of their art to the widest possible public by the state might have just as well freed the artists from the market necessities. Yet their pictures of the “collective laboring body” create all sorts of negative as much as positive images of the meaning of communism in Russia. As Sotsrealist paintings are both realistic and heavy on metaphor, they are in their idea not dissimilar to the avant-garde, Constructivist idea of a work of art which would use both modernity (photomontage, abstraction) and a literal socialist message (slogans, lettering). Technology meets abstraction, and a photorealism of depiction meets a crass yet optimistic message.

The replacement of the precious collective genius by the sole leader must’ve meant a readjustment - hence the endless production of ‘heroes’. All Soviet art, regardless, was characterized by a positive take on materiality, and extreme juxtapositions. At the same time, Deineka produces the complete vision of the New Person, accentuating physical strength as beauty, which was at the same time, a realisation of Meyerhold’s avant-garde ambitions: ‘the biomechanical actor partook of the discipline of the dance’, through linking the dancer to a good laborer. A distrust in Freudianism was shared both by the avant-garde and sotsrealism, with their biomechanics and focus on materiality. As art historian Hannah Proctor writes, “the oft-repeated Soviet injunction to make sacrifices in the present in order to reap the eventual benefits of the bright Communist future corresponds to Freud’s reality principle, which he defines as the ‘temporary toleration of unpleasure as a step on the long indirect road to pleasure’.” If we take up this distinction between the critical and automated consciousness, we’ll have the avant-garde and Sotsrealism described quite adequately.

The Russian formalists and constructivists saw the new art movement in terms of how it displayed its modes and devices of operation, art being its own undoing, a defamiliarizing, critical negativity. In sotsrealism the consciousness of an audience was automated, in the Pavlovian sense. Yet sotsrealism was far from simple. It wasn’t only a state, total art, creating a whole with the state apparatus, it was also intended to act dialectically. The dialectical act was constituted when a person was seeing not what
is
but what
should be.
Sotsrealism, though claiming realism, was never realistic in the veristic sense. It was projecting the reality that didn’t exist, but was to be created as the final goal of Soviet history. We were anticipating the future of socialism that never came. Also, Sotsrealism is devoted to depicting a time and space richly filled – quite contrary to the stagnant, eventless, empty and wasted time of the reality of socialism. Sotsrealism represses eventlessness, in
theory precisely to liquidate the gap between life and art apparently created by formalism. The relation Sotsrealism had with reality was schizophrenic, with its tension between what ‘should be’ and what really is.