ARTIFICIAL HELLS

artificial hells
posters around the city announcing events that would never happen,
but which tapped into the unspoken desires of audiences who thronged
to the advertised venues: to see concerts by Bob Dylan and Abba, an
Ingmar Bergman film subtitled Homosexuality in Modern Times, an
exhibition of Dalí and Magritte at the National Gallery, and a play by
Ionesco in a new theatre that didn’t exist. 71 Budaj’s urban interventions,
along with those of L’ubomir Durček, break with the melancholic
introspection of Czech body art in the 1970s, but also with Slovakian
artists’ retreat to the countryside. 72 They begin to imagine what public
space might be – a collective culture founded on shared desires rather
than ideology. Just as the numerous participatory experiments in Paris
contributed in their own way to the events of May ’68, so too did these
events in late ’70s and early ’80s Bratislava serve to continually test and
pressure a system that finally crumbled in 1989. Budaj went on to play
a pivotal role in the Velvet Revolution as leader of Public Against
Violence and, after 1989, as deputy leader of the Slovak National
Assembly.
IV. Moscow: Zones of Indistinguishability
Artists in Moscow, meanwhile, found different solutions to the problem
of individual experience and public space. ‘Unofficial art’ had begun in
Moscow in 1964, after Khrushchev visited the thirtieth anniversary show
of the Moscow Union of Artists at the Manezh Gallery, which had
included a display of non- figurative, abstract paintings; Khrushchev
declared these to be (among other things) ‘private psycho- pathological
distortions of the public conscience’. 73 The extent of his reaction led to
the ever increasing domestic isolation of independent artists and their
being denied the right to show their works to the public in any place or
form. And yet, despite being severely criticised and censured, unofficial
art continued into the mid 1970s, when the first legalised exhibitions took
place and a shadow union for unofficial artists was set up (the Graphics
Moscow City Committee). After the controversial ‘Bulldozer’ exhibition
of September 1974 (in which an exhibition of unofficial art was destroyed
by bulldozer), cultural authorities decided to regulate and legalise their
relationships with ‘underground’ art via the State Committee for Security
(KGB). Most unofficial art took place inside apartments, forcing a
convergence of art and life that surpassed what the majority of twentiethcentury
avant- gardists had ever intended by this term. The phenomenon
of ‘Apt- Art’ (apartment art), initiated by Nikita Alekseev in the 1980s,
loosely matches the Czech work of the early 1970s that I have described
above – exhibitions and performances taking place in private homes, for
small networks of trusted friends.
It was in this context that the most celebrated of Moscow
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