Performative Gestures Political Moves, 2014

SUMMARY The publication Performative Gestures Political Moves evolved from the eponymous symposium held in Ljubljana (at the Scientific Research Centre of the Slovene Academy of Sciences and Arts, June 2010) and organised by the City of Women – Association for the Promotion of Women in Culture Ljubljana. While acknowledging the “problem of performativity”, the present volume, however, (still) lingers on the term, exploring its echoing in the research focused on what should thus also be considered as an effect of the performance of power – on the art and theory production in so-called “Eastern Europe”. A huge body of critical texts has been written in the last decade, emphasising the inscribed geopolitical and (neo)colonial power in the terms “Eastern Europe”, “Former East”, “Post-Socialist” and similar denotations, which have left their footprint (at least partly) on many exhibitions and art projects as well, and collections devoted to the art production from the variably named region. However, as also presented in the following contributions, the region shares, since the dissolution of state socialism(s), (ethno)nationalistic, neoliberal and neoclerical as well as patriarchal, homophobic and racist reversals – most of which are, however, a Pan-European, if not global even, “continental Post-Socialist reality” with regional specificity and intensity.

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In this sense, this book does not (only) represent the research on performance art and performativity in a region denoted as “East European”, but also produces positions that go beyond the representation(s) of what performance art, performativity in/and “Post-Socialist Europe” are. However, as already suggested before, going beyond the representational is not always an easy task – especially when one is confronted with (ideologically) overdetermined (Post) Socialism and gender. In this sense, the following publication is as heteroglossic as the terms performance and performance art are. The book therefore also raises questions of historisation(s) and their ideological positioning. Especially within feminist art history but also in feminist curating, the question of labelling art production as feminist has been till today a burning subject. How, what, when, why, where, by whom and for whom is (performance) art feminist, obviously does not have an unambiguous answer. The same is true for art and feminism as such. Therefore, the present publication has aimed not only to foster a reflection on performative and performance forms by women artists but also to reflect upon current research positions and theoretical considerations of performativity, performance art, feminism, historisation and, above all, their political implications in/and/for the “continental Post-Socialist” condition.



Analyzing the four-word title of the publication Performa- tive Gestures Political Moves, which is the outcome of the [… eponymous] symposium, we can place this into the context of the title of Jon McKenzie’s book Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance. Jon McKenzie detects that, in the 20th and 21st centuries, performance will be that what discipline was in the 18th and 19th centuries: that is, the onto-historical formation of power and knowledge. […] [I]t can be said that the heteroglossic collection […] consolidates contradictory perspectives (e.g., I am referring here to Angela Dimitrakaki’s opinion and Marina Gržinić’s polemics on the exhibition Gender Check), and in these contradictions, I found the backing to Maxine Greene’s saying “Art cannot change the world, but it can change the people who can change the world.” Dr. Sc. Suzana Marjanić, Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research (IEF), Zagreb



IMPRESSUM Publishers City of Women – Association for the Promotion of Women in Culture Kersnikova 4, 1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia www.cityofwomen.org For the publisher Mara Vujić Red Athena University Press Centre for Women’s Studies Dolac 8, 10000 Zagreb, Croatia www.zenstud.hr For the publisher Rada Borić Editors Katja Kobolt and Lana Zdravković Authors Angela Dimitrakaki, Ana Peraica, Barbara Orel, Dunja Kukovec, Grupa Spomenik/Monument Group and DeLVe | Institute for Duration, Location, and Variables, Marija Ratković, Marina Gržinić, Martina Pachmanová, Milijana Babić, Suzana Milevska, Tea Hvala and Waldemar Tatarczuk



Copy Editing Sandra Prlenda, Katja Kobolt, Lana Zdravković



Reviewers Vesna Leskošek Suzana Marjanić



Proofreading Eric Dean Scott Visual Identity and Layout Saša Kerkoš Typeface Minion Pro Paper Munken Polar (FSC™ – The mark of responsible forestry. www.fsc.org. FSC-C022692 and PEFC certified.) Coordinator of the Project Katja Kobolt Administration Amela Meštrovac Printed by Intergrafika ttž d.o.o., Zagreb Print Run 300



© 2014 Authors, Editors, Artists, City of Women and Red Athena University Press ISBN: 978-953-6955-48-0 Printed in Zagreb, June 2014



A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the National and University Library in Zagreb under 879597.



Funded by ERSTE Stiftung



Thanks to Mara Vujić, Jelena Petrović



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PERFORMATIVE GESTURES POLITICAL MOVES



―

Edited by Katja Kobolt and Lana Zdravkov ić With contr ibutions by Angela Dimitrakaki Ana Peraica Barbara Orel Dunja Kukovec

Gr upa Spomenik and D eLVe Mar ija Ratkov ić Mar ina Gržinić Mar tina Pachmanová Milijana Babić Suzana Milevska Tea Hvala Waldemar Tatarczuk



CONTENTS 9 – 26 Performative Gestures Political Moves – An Introduction by Katja Kobolt and Lana Zdravković 27 – 46 Master-Slave Dialectics in the Feminine by Suzana Milevska 47 Djedica / Santa by Milijana Babić 47 – 56 “Using Myself to Show What Matters Most for Everyone”: An Interview With Video Performance Artist Adela Jušić by Dunja Kukovec 57 – 64 Laying Diapers, Loving Nature: Maternity as a Private Act and Political Gesture by Martina Pachmanová 65 – 78 Polish Women Performance Artists Between the 1960s and the 1990s: The Polish Feminist Avant-Garde by Waldemar Tatarczuk 79 – 96 Women’s Perspective: The Contribution of the Ljubljana Alternative Arts Scene in the 1980s by Barbara Orel 97 – 122 Working on Gender: New Burlesque and Cabaret in Ljubljana by Tea Hvala 123 – 138 The Biopolitical Character of Performativity in Private Space by Marija Ratković 139 – 148 Censored Images: Women In the Army by Ana Peraica 149 – 184 “The Gender Issue”: Lessons from Post-Socialist Europe. What and Where is Post-Socialism? by Angela Dimitrakaki 185 – 210 The Performative and the Political in Global Capitalism by Marina Gržinić 211 – 238 Matheme by Grupa Spomenik and DeLVe 239 – 242 Index 243 – 248 Contributors



PERFORMATIVE GESTURES



POLITICAL MOVES



– AN INTRODUCTION



By Katja Kobolt and Lana Zdravković



09

An Introduction

1 For a genealogy of the term performative in and from linguistics, cf. the text by Marija Ratković in the present publication. 2 Cf. Wolff, 1994; Buden, 2005; Močnik, 2006; Dimitrakaki, 2012; Komelj, 2012; Tlostanova, 2012; Gržinić, 2004, as well as the texts by Gržinić and Dimitrakaki in the present publication.

Performative (carry into effect, fulfil, discharge; from Old French parfornir, parfurnir – to do, carry out, finish, accomplish) – a heteroglossic term that has by departing from linguistics,1 where it was originally forged (Austin, [1962] 1976), promised to revolutionize the broader field of the humanities and social sciences. In that sense, performative belongs to one of the notions, or better, research positions that have continuously marked the epistemologies of the humanities since the last half of the 20th century. “When the term ‘performative’ jumped from linguistics into literary theory, it promised to break down the boundary between doing, on the one hand, and saying, writing or representing on the other. When it developed in feminist and queer theory to describe the often compulsory and normative character of gender performance, it promised to break down the boundary separating self-conscious and specialised cultural performance from the often unconscious and overdetermined social and psychological aspects of gender performance,” writes Andrea Fraser, who also notes “the rise of the term ‘performative’ in art discourse, where it has come to describe any kind of artistically framed and conceptualised activity, recorded or witnessed, as a regressive re-inscription of these very boundaries” (Fraser, 2014:123). Thus, Fraser suggests a move away from the term, which, as it’s generally used, is in her eyes “a failure of the promise of […] freeing our conception of doing from the constraints of motility…” (ibid.). Instead, Fraser advocates for enactment, which enables us to go beyond the “opposition between doing, acting, or performing…” and “saying or representing” (ibid.). While acknowledging the “problem of performativity”, this volume, however, (still) lingers on the term, exploring its echoing in the research focused on what should thus also be considered as an effect of the performance of power – on the art and theory production in so-called “Eastern Europe”. A huge body of critical texts has been written in the last decade, emphasising the inscribed geopolitical and (neo)colonial power2 in the terms “Eastern Europe”, “Former East”, “Post-Socialist” and similar denotations, which have left their



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footprint (at least partly) on many exhibitions and art projects and collections devoted to the art production from the variably named region as well. However, as also presented in the following contributions, the region shares, since the dissolution of state socialism(s), (ethno)nationalistic, neoliberal and neoclerical as well as patriarchal, homophobic and racist reversals – most of which are, however, a Pan-European, if not global even, “continental Post-Socialist reality” (Dimitrakaki, 2012) with regional specificity and intensity. In order to describe the “ontological” status of the performative in the present publication, we might reach over to a relation described by Ana Vujanović (2004), the relation between representational performance and performative performance, which Marija Ratković also makes use of in her article in the present volume. Whereas representational performance “represents” a meaning, the performative performance “generates”, produces a meaning, a position.3 In this sense, this book does not (only) represent the research on performance art and performativity in a region denoted as “East European”, but also produces (subject) positions that go beyond the representation(s) of what performance art, performativity in/and “Post-Socialist Europe” are. However, as already suggested by Fraser (2014) and many others, going beyond the representational is not always an easy task – especially when one is confronted with (ideologically) overdetermined (post) socialism and gender. In this sense, the following publication is as heteroglossic as the terms performance and performance art are.

3 Cf. the text by Marija Ratković in the present publication.

Performance art, and especially its politicality, has been addressed in critical literature with prolific voices. According to Jayne Wark (2006), the theoretical focus ranges from the performance’s ephemerality and its transgression of the relation to object-based art, over the living element versus documentation (e.g. Phelan, 1993 and Jones, 1998) to “bodies as metaphors for psychic, cultural and institutional codes and signifiers” (Wark, 2006: 9). In addition, prominent positions within performance studies also hold feminist historisations, or as Marina Gržinić makes the point in her chapter: “The relationship between performance art and feminist activism is, according to Eleanor Antin, constitutive for performance art: ‘practically, it was the women of Southern California who invented performance.’ The Western genealogy of performance, as an effect of feminism, according to Antin, has its roots in guerrilla theatre and



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An Introduction

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4 E.g. Body and the East, Moderna galerija, Ljubljana, 1998, curated by Zdenka Badovinac and the Arteast 2000+ and Kontakt collections; Art Has Its Consequences, Zagreb, Łódź, Novi Sad, curated by WHW, Muzeum Sztuki et. al.; Political Practices of (Post)Yugoslav Art: Retrospective 01, Museum 25th of May, Belgrade, 2009, curatorially co-ordinated by Jelena Vesić, and many others.



in the university and street riots of the American women’s movements of the 1960s and 1970s” (Antin, quoted in Preciado, 2004: 20–22; cf. Gržinić’s contribution in the present publication). If the art of performance was formed in the West during the 1960s and 1970s in a dialogue with student demonstrations, civil rights movements as well as feminist, peace, gay and lesbian activism, and if the majority of East European countries lacked these movements at the time – how is the history of the performance of the East positioned in relation to the political? Selected curatorial and research projects as well as collections have in the last two decades shed light also on the performance tradition in the named region.4 Here, especially important are both editions of the Re.Act.Feminism. A Performing Archive curated by Bettina Knaup and Beatrice Ellen Stemmer (#1: 2008–2009; #2: 2011–2013, shown in various European cities) and the momentous albeit also contested (in this publication) exhibition Gender Check, based on an (inter)national research by “embedded” curators, and curatorially co-ordinated by Bojana Pejić (at Vienna’s MUMOK in 2009 and Warsaw’s Zachęta Gallery in 2010). In this volume, the contributions by Martina Pachmanová, Waldemar Tatarczuk, Barbara Orel and Marina Gržinić especially underline, in regard to the “Eastern” genealogy of performance, the “socialist” specific: the central role of artistic practices and the art context in general in the emergence of political agendas such as feminism, alternative public spaces and, with that, underground or regime-critical movements. (Over)simplified: whereas in the “West” political movements gave rise to performance art, in the “East”, art (especially conceptual and postconceptual) gave rise to alternative political movements and the emergence of public spaces. The book therefore also raises questions of historisation(s) and their ideological positioning. Especially within feminist art history but also in feminist curating, the question of labelling art production as feminist without this art representing an already established feminist agenda (e.g. care work, sex work, violence, LGBTI, etc.), or clear biographical references (e.g. feminist political “coming-out” by artists and their concrete liaisons to a feminist movement) have been till today a burning subject. How, what, when, why, where, by whom and for whom is (performance) art feminist obviously does not have an unambiguous answer (Red Mined, 2014). The same is true for art and feminism as such. Therefore, the present publication has aimed not only to foster a reflection on performative and performance



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forms by women artists, but also to reflect upon current research positions and theoretical considerations of performativity, performance art, feminism, historisation and, above all, their political implications in/and/for the “continental Post-Socialist” condition. Gesture(s) (a bodily movement, a communication form, something said or done to show a particular feeling or attitude: from Latin gestus - gesture, carriage, posture). Within the theory of performativity, the term gestus is most known from the Brechtian legacy: “voice and gesture, discursive and visible, is in Brechtian rhetoric merged into a unified notion of gestus, researching and performing the social conditions in which these practices are performed, repeated, that is, re-produced” (Milohnić, 2009: 82 [translated by KK]). In a similar manner, the present volume has not emerged from a contingent idea or a curatorial and research “trend”, but is rather a gestus of the context in, for and from which it evolved. The publication Performative Gestures Political Moves evolved from the eponymous symposium held in Ljubljana (at the Scientific Research Centre of the Slovene Academy of Sciences and Arts, June 2010) and organised by the City of Women – Association for the Promotion of Women in Culture Ljubljana. “City of Women aims to raise the visibility of high-quality innovative creations by women artists, theoreticians and activists from all over the world. Since 1995, it has presented the artistic and cultural production of women in the performing arts, music, visual arts, film and video, literature and theory, and thereby aimed to provoke a debate and raise awareness as to the currently disproportionate participation and representation of women in arts and culture, as well as in society as a whole. City of Women simultaneously provides a platform that focuses upon and considers pertinent critical contemporary issues. The Association’s primary objective is to produce and organise affirmative action projects in order to draw attention to the disproportionately low participation and representation of women in the field of arts and culture, and its largest endeavour is the organisation of the annual International Festival of Contemporary Arts – City of Women.” Thus claims the mission statement of the organisation, which one of the editors of this book was affiliated with for nearly a decade.5 The Symposium was a part of a two-part project that was initiated by Katja Kobolt and Dunja Kukovec, one part of which (the present volume) is being financed by ERSTE Stiftung. The other part of the project, which was taking place within the “hub” A Space For

5 Manifesto accessed at www.wunrn.com



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An Introduction



6 www.aspaceforliveart.org 7 Cf. wording of the current City of Women manifesto: “International Festival of Contemporary Arts – City of Women is one of the most prominent festivals which maintains a strong focus on performing arts with aims to raise the visibility of high-quality innovative creations by women artists. The story of internationally well-known festival that is actually becoming a role model for similar festivals around the world has started in 1995... when the first International Festival of Contemporary Art – City of Women was carried out.” Accessed at www. cityofwomen.org/en/ content/content, May 2014. 8 Since the first edition of the City of Women in 1995, acting curators of the Festival have been as follows: Uršula Cetinski, Koen Van Daele, Sabina Potočki, Bettina Knaup, Katja Kobolt, Dunja Kukovec, and, since 2009, Mara Vujić, all of whom have collaborated curatorially with many other individuals and organisations.



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Live Art,6 a European culture programme (2007–2013) for developing and reinforcing live art, was the earlier-mentioned exhibition Re.Act.Feminism, which was presented in Ljubljana in March 2009 at Gallery Vžigalica and was co-curated by Mara Vujić. All of the programme activities by the City of Women evolved not out of the “revival” that the living element – the body and the event actualised by means of performance arts (live art, body art, happenings, performance interventions and/or actions) – has been undoubtedly experiencing during the last decade, but also bore evidence of (one of ) the curatorial focus(es) of the City of Women since its beginnings in the mid 1990s, followed by the City of Women curators and, maybe most exclusively, by the current one.7 But could this focus only be explained away as a contingent taste by the different curators who forged the programme of this unique art and cultural manifestation (the Festival) and institution (the Association) with (for a feminist or a “women only”, unfortunately quite unusual) continuity since 1995? 8 This year – in 2014 – the City of Women Festival celebrates its 20th anniversary! Or can, or even should, performance in an art historical as well as a contemporary perspective and as a material practice be thought of and in a gender(ed) perspective? Does this particular focus of the City of Women – namely, on performance art – have a material “grounding” in art production by women? Or to articulate the question even more directly: Could we bluntly say that the gender of performance art is “female”? Bettina Knaup argues that as the performance “searches for entanglement between art and life, between private and political”, and focuses on the body, it has been a “paradigmatic” form of feminist and gender critical art production (Knaup, 2011: 302; cf. Kreivytė et al., 2014). In addition, she emphasises the material condition of performance, which makes it literally “arte povera”, enabling artists to produce with little means (their body), anywhere (in a private or public space, etc., instead of in a gallery, museum or theatre) and whenever (ibid.). In a similar manner and as a gestus, the described gendered and political dimension of the medium “performance”, discussed here from different angles, echoes throughout Performative Gestures Political Moves, which is coming out as the third publication of the newly established Red Athena University Press – a collaboration of trans-Yugoslav feminist scholars and women’s studies institutes, co-ordinated by the Zagreb Centre for Women’s Studies.



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Political (Old Greek politiká, Πολιτικά, Latin politica, politicus – subjects, matters and activities, which concern “common”, at that time polis. Cf. res publica.) After World War II and especially since the 1970s, it has been known that the most progressive artists from “the East” were precisely those who were critical towards totalitarianism, hierarchy, oppression, which was mostly interpreted (either with or without the help of those authors) as being critical towards the state regime. Since their criticisms were directed (or were presented as such by them or their interpreters) towards the single-party, patriarchal, non-liberal system, it was (more or less) openly welcomed in “the West”, for this was the ideal way to easily and effectively (and above all “culturally”) fortify the capitalistic system, which is proverbially based on the principles of personal freedom (liberalism), democracy (parliamentarism or the multiparty system) and plurality (of products or offer on the market). “The West”, therefore, has also gladly used critical artists from the “Eastern Bloc” for propaganda, to additionally encourage the paranoia towards “Monster Socialism”. In addition, the presentation of such regime-critical art in the “West” might have also had the additional effect of fortifying the capitalistic model, as the critical engagement of the “Eastern” art has been interpreted as its differentia specifica in opposition to the “Western” l’art pour l’art, where there has supposedly been nothing to be criticised at all, the best of all possible worlds. This observation might be put too bluntly, yet nevertheless, the fact is that the contra-revolutionary project has succeeded to the largest degree possible: after and simultaneously with ideological shifts, also important have been financial mechanisms, especially credit policies (Kirn, 2013), structural reforms carried out “in the name of democracy”, ranging from bombarding to encouraging and financing wars, to systematic thefts of the commons supported by laws and regulations. Ever since the dissolution of state socialism (which started long before 1989) and the introduction of the liberal-democratic transition of the Eastern Bloc we have been observing in art production the implementation of the so-called professionalisation, commercialisation and managerialisation. Subsequently, art has become a profitable business for a few (which like every other business, presupposes competition where only “the best” prevail), where the establishing of the “art market” is a necessary condition. The consequence of that “transition” has also been that “East art”,



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An Introduction



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or better, a few representatives of it, now represent a certain market niche. Paradoxically, it has been the so-called critical, engaged and political art, which experienced its peak period in the “Eastern Bloc” from the 1980s to the mid 1990s, that has not only become a relative market success but has also influenced the normalisation of the understanding of contemporary artwork as a market good (as a product, an item, but also as a speculation on symbolic capital: brand, name, stardom). By now, “politically engaged art” has become mainstream also in the “West”. The trends of criticism, engagement and politicality have spread and become a kind of “fashion” or trend of contemporary art on the global scale, thereby taming the art of its criticality.



In the global imperative (Dimitrakaki, 2013), critical contemporary art (and in a certain sense especially performance art) has been moving from representation towards “relation”, “participation”, “collaboration”; the artist has become a thinker, teacher, writer and activist, as well as terrorist and militant. As such, (some) art has aspired to become a part of the community, patching up social ties, filling the deficiency created by the retreat of the political and the public – which is, however, in the global imperative, exactly what it should be, culture instead of art. Today, (some) contemporary artists thus employ themselves in the mission to uncover what has been hidden behind exhibited images (e.g. work) with the desire to put on display something that the recipient may not be aware of, and that will even evoke shame, guilt and move him/her to action. The waytoo-commonly-used platitude that “art only asks questions and does not give answers” only leads towards the belief that the processes of consideration, criticality and action are to be (automatically) initiated on the part of the recipient. However, the very fact by itself that an artist is a conscious being and that an artwork speaks critically, engaged and politically does not mean that it will have on the side of the recipient – really – a political effect, such that the recipient will change his or her opinion about a certain issue or start a political action.



Art is critical, political, engaged only when it is in the position of rethinking its own production conditions, and not only on the basis of the rhetoric associated to it. It is more about the ability to be radical in the processes of “the redistribution of the sensible” which is a part of Rancière’s conceptualisation of the politics of aesthetics



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and the political character of art (Rancière, 2009). In this collection, there are several ways of dealing with the political – in most cases, of course, in connection with gender, women’s position in the neoliberal patriarchal society and the essentialisation of the gender relations. Moves (from Latin movere – move, set in motion, remove, disturb; in Old French movoir also introduce) The starting point for rethinking the politicisation of the “gender issue” through art practices in “the Former East” for many of the authors in this publication is based on an understanding of the official ideology of socialist states that solving of the class tensions would also automatically solve the gender relations issue and bring the patriarchal conditions to an end. Therefore, bringing “the women’s issue” on the public agenda was politically and ideologically stigmatised and labelled as a flirtation with bourgeois traditions and Western influences. We can follow the moves of the critical reflection of that ideology through the art practices developed in different countries of “the East” presented in several chapters.



Gender Transgression



Starting with World War II, the emancipation of women was established in relation to the idea of building the new society. In the first post-war years, a prominent emancipated female character was that of the heroic woman – a fighter in the National Liberation Front, and that of a woman-constructor active at factories and fields, in work brigades as well as in sports disciplines. Women were assimilated into male activities, so their emancipation took place through their showing abilities in traditionally male work spheres. Ana Peraica’s article is problematising exactly on that point. Building her analysis on the precious photographic and filmic material she found in the archive of her grandfather, who was a Commissar of Film and Photography of the 1st Proletarian Brigade during World War II, she thematises a process of the artificial construction of a woman in the public sphere, rather as an object or as a subject and as a product of “machification”, meaning: symbolically becoming a man. The found photos show images of women partisans, which is usually neglected in a historical narrative, fabricated and promoted by historiography, textbooks and (historical, national)



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An Introduction



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museums. As exposed also in the work by Sanja Iveković (Gen XX: Anka Butorac, Nada Dimić, Ljubica Gerovac, Dragica Končar, Sestre Baković, Nera Šafarić), images of women warriors were prohibited or at least very unusual in the aftermath of the war. What is even more curious, women in the photos in question are shown in two roles: one is the role of women, while the other indicates machismo, thus transgendering. Pointing at the difference between machismo and chauvinism, Peraica is exposing that the images are deeply erotic, in a way an ordinary society would be, a society out of war, and that there is none of the discrimination or showing off that we have been used to from other images of an army. Connecting militaristic and sexual sadism (George Bataille), i.e. sadistic homosexuality as performed by institutionalised military power and chauvinism, as the violation of gender via transgressions of gender roles, Peraica contrasts a set of completely different photographs from the war that are non-chauvinistic and in which there is an obvious transgressing of gender roles, however not based on homophobia nor chauvinism but on equality. Starting from the 1960s, the image of women in public space became more and more close to that of mothers and housewives due to the resurfacing of patriarchal values. Although the maternal iconography – images of ideologically obedient, loyal, nuclear-family-oriented mothers – was often used for the glorification of the socialist regime in the so called totalitarian era, in contrast to the capitalist regime and so-called democracy, “the Eastern” mothers were never tied only to the private zone (Kinder-Kirche-Küche/Children-Church-Kitchen). Women were always active in the public sphere as well: they were, also due to economic reasons, forced to enter the waged labour, while at the same time more or less exclusively responsible for the care work (family and child care, house work and care for the elderly and ill).



Analysing the happening Kladení plín u Sudoměře [Laying Diapers at Sudoměře] performed by Zorka Ságlová – one of the first and most active women performance artists of former Czechoslovakia – Martina Pachmanová discusses in her article exactly that problem. Shaping the giant diaper triangle in the public space (nature) – in a time when performances and happenings were considered by the state apparatchiks a potential source of civil disobedience and, as such, belonged to the sphere of “unofficial art” – was the brave start of a symbolical process of crossing borders between the



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private and the public, between the familial and the political. What Pachmanová wants to point out is that “the Eastern” maternity was a more political and politicised subject than it was in “the Western” feminist agenda, where images of mothers (especially when related to nature) were seen as a manifestation of essentialism. She thereby also implicates “Eastern” art practices in the establishment of the relation between motherhood and erotic desire, sexuality and political potential, and the introduction of femininity as a diverse and multifaceted phenomenon. Rethinking the position of women in a patriarchal society and actively intervening into the situation with the clear aim of deconstructing power relations was significant for Polish artists Maria Pinińska-Bereś, Natalia LL, Teresa Murak and Ewa Partum, whose art practices are presented in Waldemar Tatarczuk’s article. Experimenting with forms of presentation and ways of expression, introducing the performance, happening, body art, video art as opposed to “official art”, and especially exposing their own bodies as the political body, liberated from the stereotypes of the dominant ideology, these artists were real pioneers of the contemporary politically engaged art, so popular in today’s globalised art-system. In the 1970s and 1980s, however, emancipatory practices began to develop in relation to the ideology of desire, which drove the newly emerging consumer society. Images of women no longer arose from the sphere of work or maternity but that of leisure. The focus shifted to the attractive female body, which has been perceived as a sexual object. These became the themes problematised by the women’s artists and groups mostly in the spheres of theatre and the performing arts especially in former Yugoslavia.9 Barbara Orel’s article sheds light on some of the overlooked chapters from the – still famous – 1980s Ljubljana alternative arts scene, which created a space for social and political critique in the entire former Yugoslavia. This space was not only symbolic, this process included the creation of a variety of “alternative places”, a network of clubs and venues that began to generate a space of provocative difference and introduce both new aesthetic as well as new production forms, which importantly contributed to the transformation of the dominant culture, as well as generated the emancipatory potential that co-shaped the women’s perspective (in the art scene) to an important extent. Presenting the work of women artists Ema Kugler

9 Of course, we need to keep in mind that the state socialism in former Yugoslavia differed, as is many times emphasised, from the state socialisms of the rest of “Eastern Europe”. Due to its more liberal character (travelling and immigration policy, inner market competition, international trading relations, etc.), discussed art practices were also more radical, conflictual and direct (especially in terms of aesthetic regime). However, at the same time, they were flirting with the more liberal (to become neoliberal) ideas, which went hand in hand with the ideology and structural reforms, leading to the disintegration of socialist Yugoslavia in favour of a market economy, which has deeply affected the transformation of the art practices as well.



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An Introduction



and Zemira Alajbegović and the first Slovenian groups consisting of exclusively female authors, which were the first groups of this kind in Yugoslavia, such as PPF – Podjetje za proizvodnjo fikcije [The Fiction Production Company] and Linije sile [Lines of Force], Orel is aiming to describe the rearticulations of women’s identities on the Ljubljana alternative scene, defining them in relation to the traditional patriarchal relationships supported by Yugoslav socialism.



Tea Hvala’s article is in a way continuing this research in contemporary times, as she discusses a selection of burlesque and cabaret shows made in Ljubljana between 2011 and 2014: Cirkus Kabare (Circus Cabaret), Fem TV, Rdeči kabaret (Red Cabaret), Cabaret Lounge Rouge, Tatovi podob (Image Snatchers) and Somrak bleščečih sprevržencev (Twilight of the Glittery Perverts) among others. However, Hvala is not focusing on women artists or women-only artistic groups and collectives but rather on queer, not only in terms of their content but also in terms of production mode and ways of expression. She presents those performance troupes whose production mode positions them either in the alternative or the independent culture and places (as opposed to institutionalised culture and places). She does not focus on whole performances but rather on individual acts by performers enacting a specific feminine, masculine or queer identity. Her view on the issue is especially precious and non-dogmatic as the author herself participated in some of the shows as an organiser, performer or both and with her article starts a certain “real time” or “embedded” historisation of the contemporary especially queer burlesque scene in Ljubljana, Slovenia.



Fortress Europe and “The Former East”: From Gender To Class, From Class To Gender



After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the world “triumphed” in the total defeat of socialism. The way for marching democracy was open. The attacks on the twin towers in New York on September 11, 2001, symbolically marked the shift to a new paradigm of governmentality, exploitation, domination and, at the same time, subjectivity production, which has been empowered by normalising and hybridising life of individuals with technologies of control, mechanisms of power and violence. As Marina Gržinić claims in her profound analysis, we have obviously moved from the biopolitics



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regime (as defined by Michel Foucault and re-elaborated by Giorgio Agamben) to the regime of necropolitics (developed by Achille Mbembe). This social, political, economic and cultural change influences both: contemporary art with its representational formats and aesthetic regimes, as well as feminist struggles and insurgencies. The outcome of globalisation is the growing precarisation of life and work, and struggling (just) for gender equality is no longer an emancipatory action since the global domination is genderless. That’s why Gržinić is critical towards feminist practices that expose and analyse patriarchal structures and relations, but did not substantially tackle the issue of heterosexuality. She is especially keen to show that the only emancipatory female performances and performative art works in the “former Eastern European space” are those who went from heterosexual feminist to lesbian and gay art performative interventions towards queer and masculinity critique projects. In order to understand these shifts, which are conceptual and political at once, it is necessary to understand the changes in the passage of the whole space from a paradigm of Eastern Europe to that of “former Eastern Europe” to the present condition of “former West”. In that context, she is criticising those practices and strategies that are reproducing the colonial matrix of power in the name of feminism, women or equality. At the same time, art institutions as well as universities are taking an active role in the evacuation of critical knowledge, de-linking art from political and social questions, producing only one history (of arts) and dismissing any possibilities for an understanding of new alternative histories and new platforms of knowledge. By appropriating the arts and performative practices of “Eastern Europe” mainly through a restrictive gender normative perspective, argues Gržinić, heavily queer positions and the multiplicity of demands for dismantling binaries of gender roles are banally overlooked. These lesbian, gay and transgender demands in art and culture in “the East”, specifically their political and social demands for rights in every sector of life, are connected with counter positions that question the turbo capitalist reshaping of “the East”, socialism and Post-Socialist realities. With her art insert the multitalented artist Milijana Babić is continuing (with means of documentation) her Djedica (Santa) performance, where she is opening the question of biopolitics turning into necropolitics regime of our global “democratic” realities. Being



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An Introduction



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dressed as Santa Claus – this universal symbol of “the Western” ideology of liberty, freedom and abundance – begging on the streets, at shopping miles and malls (mainly in the Christmas shop till you drop time), by this very simple but very well-rethought and conceptualised gesture, she reveals the whole misery of today’s global paradigm of nightmares come true in a post Coca-Cola society. In the art insert, she re-enacts the individual acts’, contexts’ and public’s (a)political (un)awareness.



As Gržinić in her text reminds us, 2014 represents 30 years since Donna Haraway’s seminal text “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century” – performance and performativity could not be thought without new media technologies. Suzana Milevska in the opening chapter is rethinking exactly the question as to whether new media art has contributed in any substantial way to the deconstruction of inherited gender roles and hierarchies within the hegemonic art system, culture and society in “the East”. She is especially curious about if, and how, new media enable and bring forth new answers to the “old” questions, such as how national identity interferes with gender difference, whether modernism and state socialism merged through a technologically advanced society, whether social inclusiveness and other social changes in transitional states quickened the leap towards a more democratised society with the use of new technology-based art, taking a closer look at the works of several women artists who have worked with new media, such as Tanja Ostojić, Sandra Sterle and Danica Dakić, Andreja Kulunčić, Milica Tomić, Marina Gržinić and Verica Kovačevska. Milevska is specifically interested in the connection between new media technology and exploitation, which she explains from a gender perspective through the concept of G.W.F. Hegel’s master-slave dialectics. She is presenting the above-mentioned artists practices which deconstruct pure exploitation, domination and hierarchisation through hyperbolic rendering of concepts such as gift, friendship and hospitality and argues that it is only within art that such a hyperbolic rendering becomes possible without being sanctioned by state authorities and mechanisms of power and violence. The perversion of hospitality, being in the hands of the “master of the house, the host, the king, the lord, the authorities, the nation, the State, the father, etc.” is possible only through such “hyperbolisation”, she claims together with Jacques Derrida.



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With Dunja Kukovec interviewing the video performance artist Adela Jušić, for whom precarious conditions are one rule she has never obeyed, the question of medium of performance is tackled from another perspective. In her works – predominantly video performances – Adela Jušić thematises intimate elements of her life profiled through the “objective” socio-political situations and narratives. Her and Lana Čmajčanin’s I Will Never Talk About The War Again exposes the contemporary situation in Bosnia and Herzegovina, where war still remains the central topos, or Artist’s Statement, which rethinks the position of peripheral artists within the contemporary globalised art world. Although working mostly in the domain of video performance – usually exposing herself, understanding that as being the only truthful option – Adela Jušić is also co-author of the performance Bujrum – Izvolite (Bujrum – Help Yourselves), which she developed together with Danijela Dugandžić Živanović, Lana Čmajčanin, Leila Čmajčanin and Alma Suljević in the form of catering where the menu consists of Bosnian-Herzegovinian traditional dishes, exclusively prepared on the basis of ingredients that were available in Sarajevo under the siege. With her statements, Jušić reveals a clear and inexorable position on inherent links between art presentations and ways of production: “At the beginning, I didn’t think about it like that, but soon I realised it was all actually a direct result of socio-economic realities. Since I didn’t have any substantial means for production, I used one bad camera. I had no cameraperson or video editor, so I did everything myself. So at the beginning the camera and video editing were very simple, and it’s been like that till today, in spite of having better cameras today and a good knowledge of video editing. I like it that way. It’s not that I don’t ever want to try out a bit more expensive production – it just doesn’t make real sense for me. It is hard enough to earn money as an artist, even harder as a Bosnian artist and even more so as a Bosnian video artist, the hardest being a Bosnian female video artist.” She does this as well on the issue of gender equality: “It is true women need to take over that part of world wealth belonging to them, but this will not happen if we have thousands of rich female artists. We need to rethink our system of values and beliefs in order to achieve the better world of economically equal individuals, and not just be stuck in a world of equal economic opportunities.” Angela Dimitrakaki in her chapter focuses specifically on labour and production relations and how they influence (women’s) life in



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An Introduction



Post-Socialist times in “the East”, concerning both women’s art and debates around feminism in “Eastern Europe”, suggesting a complex signification of gender in the given context. Her main point is that Eastern Europe’s transition to capitalism should not be thought of as a regional specific, but as a global imperative, a process of re-gendering women’s lives at the same time that it enables the spread, and also contestation, of feminist politics. In addition, Dimitrakaki re-thinks the (mis)understandings of “Western” and “Eastern” feminisms, “[u]nderstanding the encounter with Western feminism as taking place after the ‘re-signification’ […] of feminist demands can help refocus the dialogue between Eastern European and Western feminisms in the arts on emergent commonalities rather than past differences. More generally, elaborating on this knowledge can aid a more constructive dialogue on the roots and direction of transnational feminism, as long as we bear in mind that transnational feminism is also fraught with materially grounded and ideologically expressed divisions,” states Dimitrakaki.



Troubles With Representation: Blurred Boundaries Between Private And Public



Marija Ratković is opening one of the burning questions of critical theory of our time: the question of representation. Having in mind Alain Badiou’s understanding of politics as a non-representative thought-practice, this article can be understood as an important attempt to transform this understanding in the art theory as well, considering artistic practices that engage the private space in terms of the performative and to regard art as a performative practice as opposed to art as a representative practice. Ratković is relying on Foucault’s understanding of the representative not as a mere representational or expressive practice but as an archaeological practice. Her starting point is the biopolitical character of performativity, where biopolitics is seen as a way of contextualising those performative activities through which social institutions influence the individual and vice versa, as a process in which art practices question or obstruct institutional practices, and then re-signify and reconstruct the subject. Biopolitics produce completely de-personalised and implicit social norms – abstract demands of the healthy, good and beautiful – which we implement ourselves without institutions, by the classification of each other and by determining the Same



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and the Other and thus establishing our own micro politics of discipline and punishment. In such a situation, the possibility of the constitution of the subject in society, that the possibility of his political subjectivisation, as well as freedom in terms of biopower, is somewhere between the two conflicted fields (private/public) with blurred boundaries (which is the opposite of Hannah Arendt’s strict division of the private and the public spheres), so that the emancipatory character of performative (artistic) practices lies in the infinite potentiality of a singular action, which Ratković illustrates with the works of Katarzyna Kozyra and Marina Marković – both are experimenting on the borders between the private and the public. Last but not least, the art insert by Grupa Spomenik (Monument Group) is a script entitled Mateme (Matheme), which they – in their latest edition – together with Delve performed in the form of a Pythagorean lecture at the Forensis exhibition (curated by Eyal Weizman and Anselm Franke, HKW, Berlin, 2014). By removing any visualisation of the axioms, the script is de-personalised in the name of an attempt to excise any trace of representation from the text, to bring the acousmatic voice, a pure record that erases that ultimate object of the human world – the voice. Wanting to speak without a voice but with the voice – “the acousmatic voice brings to the fore exactly that remaining, irreducible surplus matter that refuses to be forensified” – Mateme paradoxically speaks about the unspeakable – the Srebrenica genocide, re-ethnicising through annihilation, bureaucratic violence, and about the “laboratorial” state of Bosnia-Herzegovina, which has became a laboratory for the “global imperative” and necropolitics. With obvious references to psychoanalysis (matheme is a concept introduced by Jacques Lacan) and Alain Badiou’s understanding of the political) they are together with readers, recipients, listeners searching for the answer on how do we escape the prison of language and the horror of representation? Being interested in the politics of truth and not in the question of the rebuilding of the society, their ultimate demand is that genocide is speakable! – even when there is no one speaking. Grupa Spomenik started from the questions: is it possible, and if so, how to transfer the knowledge about genocide into the medium of performative art? Can performative and visual arts exist after genocide and, if so, in what context? Answering to this post Theodor Adorno’s questions they came to the conclusion that the genocide should be the very topos of art, questioning art institutions



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An Introduction



and their involvement in the ideologies that perpetuate violence and genocide in actuality.



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