Politically Unbecoming: Postsocialist Art against Democracy by Anthony Gardner (review)

In the late 1980s, as the former USSR and its empire of state-socialist satellites was crumbling, it was hard not to be an enthusiast of democracy. In the ensuing two and a half decades—which have brought various failures of the “free market” in those territories, as well as antidemocratic measures in defense of democracy, including the imposition of democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan and new waves of illiberal democracy in places like Budapest and Moscow—the democratic system has become less universally admired. It is difficult, however, to revolt against democracy: what are the alternatives, and how can one stage a rebellion when democratic institutions are so good at making criticism appear as evidence for their own success, as long as the critic is relatively well behaved? Gardner’s book is an intelligent examination of a series of artists, collectives, and particular works and shows that have undertaken the hard task of critique, starting with Ilya Kabakov’s famous 1988 installation 10 Characters and progressing through some of Oleg Kulik’s and Alexander Brener’s provocative protest art-actions, to various projects of the Slovenian IRWIN and NSK groups, Thomas Hirschhorn’s installations, Gianni Motti and Christoph Büchel’s 2004 installation project for the inaugural year of Romania’s Museum of Contemporary Art, and finally to Lia and Dan Perjovschi’s installations and archival projects. In other words, Gardner ranges impressively across territory, describing the criticism, on the part of artists in both Eastern and Western Europe, of the rhetoric and practices of triumpha-list democracy and exploring their efforts to develop nonconformist politics and aesthetics of their own.

The ambitious range, however, leads to some lapses. Although many of the artists whom Gardner studies have emerged from and drawn on varieties of nonconformist art and dissidence that developed under state socialism, the book flattens those phenomena out to the point of myth and seemingly is oblivious to important critical work of recent decades describing their social and political complexity. It is peculiar that this critique of the post–Cold War settlement, concerned with specters of the socialist past, mostly confines its analysis to the political and is so little interested in the economic institutions that dominate the contemporary art world. It is no less odd that a book challenging the hegemony of Western institutions in Eastern Europe cites critical literature about those places written almost exclusively in Western European languages. It is as though not only democracy but also the criticism of it were games that Western critics played, in the postsocialist landscape, over the heads of its inhabitants.