ARTIFICIAL HELLS

artificial hells
non- aligned former Yugoslavia under Josip Broz Tito (1943– 80), where
internationalism was embraced, along with greater ease of travel to and
communication with the West. These geographical variations must in turn
be cross- referenced with a chronology of cultural policy changes in
Moscow itself: Nikita Khrushchev’s partial de- Stalinisation (1953– 64) was
followed by the hardline conservative backlash of Leonid Brezhnev (1964–
82), although policy oscillated even within these respective regimes. A final
point to note is that there are no easily drawn lines of artistic communication
between East and West, since these depended on individual relationships
between specific critics and artists rather than on general international
alignments. However, one can cautiously claim that the most influential
artistic communication took place between individual artists and specific
centres in Western Europe (especially Paris and Cologne) rather than
between neighbouring countries in the Eastern bloc; the relative isolation
of these parallel histories is, among other things, revealed in IRWIN’s East
Art Map (2007). 3
In the present chapter, I want to focus on two moments of socially
oriented, performance- based actions in the 1960s and 1970s: the first in
former Czechoslovakia (with two distinct scenes in Bratislava and Prague),
and the second in Moscow from the mid 1970s to mid 1980s, focusing on the
Collective Actions Group. Participatory art is rare in the Soviet bloc, and
these two contexts form an important exception. Unlike some of the Latin
American artists discussed in the previous chapter, for whom social participation
in art denotes the inclusion of the working class, or at least everyday
non- professionals (rather than the artists’ friends and colleagues), the political
context of the examples in this chapter rendered such distinctions
redundant. The contemporary impulse to collaborate with disenfranchised
communities was an alien concept: under Cold War socialism, every citizen
was (at least nominally) equal, a co- producer of the communist state. Class
difference did not exist. 4 Finding participants for one’s art was therefore a
question of selecting reliable colleagues who would not inform on one’s
activities. In an atmosphere of near constant surveillance and insecurity,
participation was an artistic and social strategy to be deployed only amongst
the most trusted groups of friends. Most of the case studies that follow therefore
break with this book’s criterion for inclusion, since they are concerned
almost solely with participation as a device to mobilise subjective experience
in fellow artists and writers, rather than with the general public.
The restrictions of life under Cold War communism do more than
simply affect who participates in art, they also govern the appearance of
these works: materially frugal and temporally brief, many of these actions
and events were located in the countryside, far away from networks of
surveillance. The fact that many of these actions do not look like art is less
an indication of the artists’ commitment to blurring ‘art and life’ than a
deliberate strategy of self- protection, as well as a reaction to the state’s own
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