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“springerin” at the VIENNAFAIROn occasion of the VIENNAFAIR, the art magazine “springerin” is publishing a supplement exclusively available for visitors of the fair.EDITORIAL: It took almost a decade until the masters of a post-war avant-garde, which had been working behind the semitransparent cultural demarcation line of the Iron Curtain, found themselves more frequently invited to the institutional art world of the former West. And it took almost another decennium before this widening and the shifting of the perspectives of European art histories was recognized by a still West-West orientated art market.That the stories and spirits of a parallel avant-garde whose silhouettes had yet to be identified gained recognition happened only in recent years, subsequently appearing on the walls of Western galleries and art fairs. One among these platforms was the VIENNAFAIR, founded with the programmatic call for giving the art of the Former East an international podium. While Europe is turning increasingly into a combat zone of regions and a new xenophobic identity politics is mainstream in its populist politics, the cultural sphere has apparently become increasingly depoliticized. In these contexts it almost seems as if the way the masters of the Eastern European avant-gardes are introduced to the Western markets serves the amnesiac hope that art could be severed from this and its political momentum. A nostalgic re-commodification of pre-1989 alternative art is one of the strategies of this de-politicization, related to global forms of retro-culture and consumption. The Former East has lost its dangerousness; it has been made identical to the West. This small leaflet collects images of some works by unique figures of the neo-avant-garde behind the line: the Romanians Geta Br ătescu and Ion Grigorescu, the Polish couple KwieKułik, the Turkish artist Yüksel Arslan, and the most recently re-discovered Slovak Miloš Laky, who passed away at the age of twenty-seven in 1975. These names, whose works have just recently found major attention in exhibitions and publications, are now read more frequently on the labels in booths of art fairs. Their oeuvre, the stance of their work, does not easily find comparison in the already written histories of Western post-war art. Dealing with the politics of the spectator, the double identities and complex relationship of and between the official and the unofficial spheres, between the private and the public in the societies they worked in, their positions are situated on an interface of visual art to the realm of politics. Our small imaginary springerin booth at VIENNAFAIR combines these names with those of a younger generation of artists. Dealing with the subject of iconic representation of the political, they tie up with the generation of their predecessors. In arranging this small printed stand, we hope to contribute to pointing at the specificity and peculiarity of the images on display. And we too hope to help to avoid that the current market moment – a long desired moment in the personal lives of so many artists in the once market-free socialist art worlds – does not cover the hidden differences in and the epoch-making momentum of these artistic practices. A too simple parallel running of a capitalist and a post-communist situation might support such amnesia. Even more so, as the West and its art market see themselves as being radically and dynamically transformed by the appearance of other new powerful centres. “springerin – Hefte für Gegenwartskunst”, 1070 Vienna, Museumsplatz 1 editors: Hedwig Saxenhuber, Christa Benzer Cover: KwieKułik, “Open Form – Game on an Actress`s Face”, 1971 Sponsored by Erste Bank Related external links: |
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