Cultural Identity Politics in the (Post-)Transitional Societies

Cultural Identity Politics in the (Post-)Transitional Societies
“direct payment for work” (the “wage”) and “secondary revenues” (the “rent”), or
between being someone who wants freely to participate and compete with his/her
commodity (the manuscript) in the free market. At the same time he or she hopes to
secure a guarantee from the public foundations for his/her existence as a “productive
force”. This contradiction has far reaching political effects, as Breznik notes, so that an
author “can identify neither with wage workers nor with the capitalist class. For this
reason the ‘author’ is twice déclassé in respect to both the labour class and the capitalist
class” (Breznik, 2011: 12). This elementary contradiction which could be generalized
as the contradiction between the productive force and the relations of production is
illustrated by the impossibility, stalemate and paradox and recapitulated as the specificity
of the transitional identities. We will further magnify these identitarian discourses of the
ideology of transition by shifting our focus from the “book business” to the “visual art
business”. With this shift we will see that things get even more complicated.
Maja Breznik’s report dealing with the field of cultural production in the sphere of visual
arts, based on interviews with the participants (Slovenian artists) in the research study
“Contemporary culture in the crisis of social cohesion”, points out that the main discourse of
visual art is also based on similar contradictions. These could be reduced to the contradiction
between the international and the provincial art market, and more generally between the
private art market and the “paternalist role of the state”. The state and the private market are
no longer two antagonistic determinants, and this contradiction leads to the impossibility
of any kind of cultural policy in the sphere of visual culture. This does not mean that in the
transition period there is some confusion which suspends the dividing line between these two;
it would be more accurate to describe this as the attempt for “complete commercialization
and privatisation of the public sector” (Breznik, 2009: 79; Wu, 2002). Breznik best described
this situation which leads to the impossibility or stalemate in cultural policy with the case
of the collection 2000+, initiated by the Museum of Modern Art, Ljubljana. “To be able to
collect for the collection [as the public sector/institution] they had to establish connections
with private investors; however, the latter withdrew when the state refused to support the
establishment of the foundation as a form of public-private partnership. This is when the
work on the collection ground to a halt” (Breznik, 2009: 74).
This perplexity of different and contradictory tendencies in the same system is
normalized by the discourse of transition. The immediate effect of this discourse is
ideological, and it functions as the normalization process in the transition from the
planned to the open and free market economy. Furthermore I want to propose that
this ideology of transition also aims to restore the concept of “collective” in the arts by
transiting the conceptualization of collective from the productive to the creative forces.
In order to penetrate and magnify these perplexed identities of the art system I propose
the analysis of a few texts (two essays, an exhibition catalogue introduction and an essay)
which will make the relation between the contradictions of art and the ideology of
transition more explicit.
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