Cultural Identity Politics in the (Post-)Transitional Societies

From productivity to creativity - the role of art collectives in solving the contradictions...
I want to start with the highly influential and frequently reproduced article of Victor
Misiano (2003), “The Institutionalization of Friendship” about the Moscow and
Ljubljana art communities and their relationship, which started in 1992 with the Apt-Art
International exhibition organized in Moscow, and was followed by the Moscow Embassy,
Interpol and Transnacionala. What all these projects have in common is their approach
to dialectics between Eastern and Western Europe as a starting point, and the restoration
of earlier avant-garde movements and political systems. Misiano writes that the real thing
that all these projects have in common is the “[employment] of the resources of friendly
relationship as part of the program”, and he calls these projects “confidential projects” with
the strategy of “institutionalization of friendship” (Misiano, 2003: 169). Collectivity is
almost a “natural” phenomenon in this statement on the institutionalization of friendships.
It claims that these “confidential projects” are characterized by a “freedom from hierarchy
and functional specializations” and an “absence of thematic programme”, as well as
describing this situation as “where themes emerge spontaneously out of communication
itself ” (Misiano, 2003: 170). Misiano is making clear that this friendship is between artists.
This transcendental friendship becomes more clear and material when Misiano tries to
explain the logic of its existence; the “structure of the confidential project is nothing but
an attempt to create a structure for a collective artistic practice in the situation of the
absence of an art system … which is a type of transitional society characteristic of Eastern
Europe”. So, apart from the friendly relationship, which is above any kind of opportunism
as Misiano claims at the beginning of his article, the reason why these two artistic
communities have such a strong relationship is that they both suffer from an “institutional,
ideological and moral vacuum” of transitional misfortune. This brings them together
in the “last shelter of art”, which is friendship of artists. This togetherness is historically
familiarized in the article through the banned conceptual artists’ strategy of “apt-art”
practice during communist times. While in the 1960s and 1970s “the common affair” of
avant-garde artists was the rigorous system of communism, today’s avant-garde artists are
suffering from the “transitional mad dynamics of social transformations” (Misiano, 2003:
171). This is pandemic to all the post-socialist states and this is how Moscow and Ljubljana
now have a “common affair” in Apt-Art International. Furthermore, this togetherness
is not at all without a “thematic programme” as Misiano is suggesting. First of all, the
“confidential community” is not about deconstruction, but reconstruction, and what is
most significant as Misiano claims is that this “openness of confidential community can
avoid ideological dogmatism, and can remain open to the chaos of the transitional epoch”
(Misiano, 2003: 172). The silent political conclusion of this “reconstructive openness”
is that artisticcommunities managed to survive communism, and can now easily adapt
themselves to the chaos of capitalism. 1
1
Misiano demonstrates this confidence of friendship by transcribing the ideological fight
between participants, especially between Alexander Brener, Yuriy Leiderman and the group
Irwin. Even if they are not arguing about anything; there is some invisible “glue” of friendship
which ties them together.
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