Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship - autonomous ...

5
The Social Under Socialism
This chapter turns to what is perhaps the most complicated episode in the
history of participatory art, namely the impulses motivating collaborative
practice when collectivism is an ideological requirement and state- imposed
norm. Unlike the dominant discourse of participatory art in Western
Europe and North America, where it is positioned as a constructive and
oppositional response to spectacle’s atomisation of social relations, the
participatory art of Eastern Europe and Russia from the mid 1960s to late
1980s is frequently marked by the desire for an increasingly subjective and
privatised aesthetic experience. At fi rst glance, this seems to be an inversion
of the Western model (despite Guy Debord’s observation that
bureaucratic communism is no less spectacular than its capitalist variant: it
is simply ‘concentrated’ as opposed to ‘diffuse’). 1 However, and crucially,
the individual experiences that were the target of participatory art under
communism were framed as shared privatised experiences: the construction
of a collective artistic space amongst mutually trusting colleagues. Rather
than frame this work as ‘implicitly political’, as is the habit with current
Western approaches to Eastern bloc art history, this essay will argue that
work produced under state socialism during these decades should rather be
viewed in more complex terms. Given the saturation of everyday life with
ideology, artists did not regard their work as political but rather as existential
and apolitical, committed to ideas of freedom and the individual
imagination. At the same time, they sought an expanded – one might say
democratised – horizon of artistic production, in contrast to the highly
regulated and hierarchical system of the offi cial Union of Soviet Artists. 2
This chapter must also begin with the proviso that it is diffi cult to generalise
about participatory art under post- war communism. Artistic responses
to the regime vary strongly between different Eastern European countries,
in line with each region’s specifi c relationship to Moscow and their distinct
negotiations of its policies. Certain countries managed to keep Soviet
power at arm’s length during the 1945– 89 period, although the outcomes of
this distance varied hugely, from the crippling dictatorship of Nicolae
Ceauşescu in Romania (1948– 89) to the more liberalising tendencies of
129