Revista Arta (14-15): Performance in Eastern Europe (2015) [Romanian/English]

Special dossier of the magazine.

“Under such names as happening, processual or performative art, situationist or contextual art, actionism or corporal / body art, performance art has remained since the 1960s maybe the most direct, incisive, and cutting-edge form of artistic expression of the last decades. Positioned at the cross-point between the visual, the discursive, and the theatrical, involving the artist with his/her entire physical, psychological, and spiritual being, in front of the public or together with it, performance art has not yet run out of resources in the context of the last years, when other forms of visual intervention have become more fashionable. Since the 1960s, performance art has represented a form of protest of the artists against the aesthetic establishment, accelerated muzeification, and the consumerism of the art market. The dossier coordinated by Ileana Pintilie demonstrates all these assertions, but also underlines the emancipating dimension performance art has had in the former communist countries of Eastern Europe – the fascination and fear which totalitarian regimes developed in front of this provocative form of social and artistic non-conformism.”

Edited by Ileana Pintilie
Publisher Romanian Artists’ Union (Uniunea Artiștilor Plastici din România), Bucharest, 2015
98 pages

Publisher

PDF (3 MB)

Les Promesses du passé: une histoire discontinue de l’art dans l’ex-Europe de l’Est (2010) [French]

“Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Les Promesses du passé [Promises of the Past] questions the former opposition between Eastern and Western Europe by reinterpreting the history of the communist block countries. To draw this discontinuous history of art in Former East, this transnational and transgenerational project features works by more than fifty artists from Central and Eastern Europe but also from other European Countries (to name a few: Marina Abramovic, Yael Bartana, Tacita Dean, Liam Gillick, Sanja Ivekovic, Július Koller, Jiri Kovanda, David Maljkovic, Marjetica Potrc and Monika Sosnowska).

Gathering together newly commissioned essays, art documentation, artists’ pages, unpublished documents and an anthology of historical texts by authors such as Slavoj Zizek, the late Igor Zabel and Svetlana Boym, this volume is an invaluable survey of the Eastern European art scene of the last decades—a scene which is gradually shifting from the periphery to the centre of current art-historical debates. ”

Published as catalogue of the exhibition Promises of the Past. A Discontinuous History of Art in Former Eastern Europe held at Centre Pompidou, Paris, 14 April – 19 July 2010, curated by Joanna Mytkowska and Christine Macel.

Edited by Christine Macel and Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez
Publisher Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2010
ISBN 9782844264411, 2844264417
255 pages
via Gioni

Exh. reviews: Mateusz Kapustka (Kunsttexte 2011, DE), Ana Bogdanovic (ArtHist 2013, EN).
Curator’s commentary: Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez (aprior 2011, EN).

Exhibition
Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (39 MB)

Magiciens de la Terre (1989) [French]

Catalogue of an exhibition held 18 May-14 August 1989 at the Centre Pompidou and La Grande Halle-La Villette, curated by Jean-Hubert Martin with the assistance of Jan Debbaut, Mark Francis, Jean-Louis Maubant, Aline Luque, André Magnin and Jacques Soulillou.

“An exhibition loved and hated in equal measure, Martin curated the show to address the fact that there were, as he put it, “one hundred percent of exhibitions ignoring 80 percent of the earth.” He attempted to engage critically with certain aspects of neo-colonial mentality in the West, particularly a resurgent interest in ‘primitivism,’ which Martin felt aestheticized exotic cultures without destablilizing western definitions of fine art, modernism, or identity. The exhibition included works by 100 artists (50 from the so called ‘West’ and 50 from the ‘margins’), attempting to show all on equal footing. The success of this attempt is still disputed and discussed in terms of the exhibition history of the past twenty-odd years, but it remains undeniable that the exhibition enacted an important break with some of the conventions of exhibition-making and strictly defined notions of modernism. Exhibited artists included Marina Abramovic, John Baldessari, Mike Chukwukelu, Braco Dimitrijevic, Yongping Huang, Boujemaa Lakhdar, Richard Long, Sigmar Polke, Jangarh Singh Shyam, Ulay, Jeff Wall, Jimmy Wululu, etc. ” (Source)

With essays by Jean-Hubert Martin, Aline Luque, Mark Francis, André Magnin, Pierre Gaudibert, Thomas McEvilley, Homi Bhabha, Jacques Soulillou, Bernard Marcadé.

Publisher Editions du Centre Pompidou, Paris, 1989
ISBN 2858504989, 9782858504985
271 pages
via Gioni

Interview with curator (Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, Art in America, 1989, EN)
Reviews: 10 French press reviews (1989), more, list of reviews (1989, 30 pp).
Analysis and commentary: Special issue of Les Cahiers du Musée National d’Art Moderne (1989, FR, 101 MB, added on 2019-8-14), Special issue of Third Text (1989, EN), Thomas McEvilley (1990, EN), Cesare Poppi (engage, 2003, EN), Hal Foster et al (2004/07, EN), Daniel Soutif (2005, FR), Reesa Greenberg (Art Journal, 2005, EN), Maureen Murphy (Critique d’art, 2013, FR/EN), Lucy Steeds et al. (book, Afterall, 2013, EN), Pablo Lafuente (2013, EN), Annie Cohen-Solal (Stedelijk Studies, 2014, EN), Adam Jasper (AU&NZ Journal of Art, 2014, EN), Julia Friedel (C&, 2016, EN).
Short documentary (1989)
Wikipedia
Pompidou’s 25th anniversary exhibition (2014)
Film retrospective at Tate (2014)

Exhibition website
Press release (FR/EN), Petit journal (FR)
Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (168 MB)