ARTIFICIAL HELLS

7
Former West:
Art as Project in the Early 1990s
In the preceding chapters I have mapped out the history of significant
attempts to rethink the role of the artist and the work of art in relationship
to society in various forms of participatory art from Europe, Russia and
South America. Significantly, these have clustered around two moments of
revolutionary upheaval: 1917 (in which artistic production was brought
into line with Bolshevik collectivism), and 1968 (in which artistic production
lent its weight to a critique of authority, oppression and alienation).
The third moment, I would like to posit, is 1989. 1 As might be anticipated,
this has a less direct relation to artistic production than the previous two
flashpoints, which were characterised respectively by top- down restructuring
in the wake of revolution and by a momentum of more or less
co- ordinated challenges to authority that were gradually internalised as
institutional reform. By contrast, 1989 marks the fall of really existing
socialism, a collapse that in the early 1990s was initially celebrated as the
end of a repressive regime and then gradually, by the end of the decade,
mourned as the loss of a collective political horizon. In Western Europe,
this melancholy was given impetus by the dismantling of the welfare state
(whose preservation had hitherto provided an important balance to the
state provisions of the Eastern bloc) and numerous other neoliberal
reforms, particularly in education. In Eastern Europe, the introduction of
free market capitalism in the first half of the 1990s was accompanied by an
initial optimism that rapidly gave way to disillusionment when faced with
the reality of privatisation and ‘primitive accumulation’; freedom from the
regime had been delivered in only the form of expanded consumer freedom.
Because of the slow burn characterising these changes, the impact of 1989
on artistic production is less rapid and less straightforward than the leftist
triumph of 1917 and its heroic last moment of resistance in 1968.
What I would like to track in this chapter is the way in which a certain
impulse of leftist thinking visibly migrated into Western European artistic
production after the collapse of ‘grand narrative’ politics in 1989. One of
the main ways this became manifest was in the rise of a particular term to
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