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Przepraszamy, ten wpis jest dostępny tylko w języku Amerykański Angielski.

Telling Stories about Feminist Art in Socialist Europe.or the Archive as a Place of Cross-Generational Remaking

‘Each time a story helps me remember what I thought I knew, or introduces me to new knowledge, a muscle critical for
caring about flourishing gets some aerobic exercise.’
Donna Haraway ¹
‘Archives matter. What is included shapes forever what
we think we were and hence what we might become.’
Griselda Pollock ²

‘Archives matter’ – I use this statement as a guide to reconsider questions related to the historicisation of feminist art in East-Central Europe (ECE) and in particular storytelling from and with the archives of feminist art in former socialist Europe. The ‘matter’ here
reminds us of both: the physical materiality that is preserved in the space of the archives and of the importance of an action of collecting
and accumulating for storytelling. ‘Mattering’ in relation to artistic archives, therefore, means both bringing the short-lived, processual and immaterial to some forms of objective existence and giving meaning to the archives themselves. Archives, in this paper, are understood not as stable repositories of the past, but as important sites of permanent potentiality, ³ as ‘leaky economies of generative and persistent acts in time’. ⁴ From this perspective, the archive concerns the future rather than the past and is always viewed as incomplete, as a stage for processes and collective and intergenerational labour. By referring to artistic archives, I consider, therefore, flexible forms where material and discursive traces of artistic work, accumulate and transform.

In my paper, I propose a reflection through a case study concerning the processes of the feminists’ opening of the artistic archives of female neoavantgarde artists in ECE. The term ‘opening’ is understood here as the material practice of accessing the archive and reshaping it, historicising and instituting the archive, but also narrating and storytelling.

In the first part of the paper, I focus on the recent practices of the historicisation of ECE feminist art and I try to identify the dominant
narrative patterns of stories ‘already written’ about feminist art in socialist Europe. In the second part, I reflect on the question of what kind of stories are possible to tell from the practice of opening the archives. I consider the performativity of the archive through an engagement that ‘erodes conventional antagonism between performance and the archive acknowledging […] that archives perform’. ⁵
My contribution stands at the intersection of a tendency strongly present in feminist art historiography to analyse the
models and modes of art historical narratives, ⁶ and the performative turn in knowledge production, ⁷ which in contemporary curatorial and artistic practice have led to a proliferation of projects devoted to remaking/re-performing the archives, and to which I will return at the end of the article.

My approach is inspired in particular by recent feminist art historiography that reconsiders archives as places of collaboration, as multi authored entities, places of care and control. Victoria Horne and Lara Perry argue that ‘the writing of histories about feminism and art is a process that necessities – simultaneously – fidelity to previous moments and also their renewal and extension in light of current demands’. 8 ⁸ In my paper, I argue that the ‘renewal and expansion’, i.e. ‘caring for this past, while making new perspectives’, is possible as a practice of dialogue within the archives. A dialogue understood here after Marsha Meskimmon not as conversation between two, but a ‘speaking through’, knowing with. 9 ⁹

The stories ‘already written’ about feminist art in socialist Europe

Art created by female practitioners in socialist Europe, and realised in the context of a transnational neoavant-garde movement, aimed – like the art of their male counterparts – to develop a new artistic language that addressed the complexity of a rapidly changing, modernised, standardised, scientifically based and increasingly consumerist world, and articulated the place of art and the individual subject within these new social constellations. In each country of the former Eastern Bloc, the different political dynamics of the socialism that operated there shaped the national cultural policy in relation to local experimental art scenes differently. These relationships differed not only in nuances, but also in essential structural features. Depending on their location on the map of socialist Europe, the corresponding artistic strategies therefore had different meanings. ¹⁰

The ECE was not a culturally and politically unified space – we have to distinguish here especially between the soviet satellite states and the Yugoslav state. The whole region shared the historical experience of the socialist modernisation of the post-war period, and the communist ideological appropriation of public space which influenced the way in which feminisms and feminist art could be practised and theorised. The commonalities in this geopolitical space were the lack of a mass feminist movement, with the exception of Yugoslavia, ¹¹ alongside an official rhetoric of equality, as well as fairly traditional gender concepts and ossified social structures that focussed on the heterosexual family.

Artists in the 1960s and 1970s started departing from art realised within traditional media such as painting and sculpture. In the case of many female artists (for instance Natalia LL, Zorka Ságlová, Dóra Maurer and many others), their points of departure were often disciplines of applied arts. At art academies, they worked initially with heterogeneous mediums and techniques such as graphic art, fabric, glass or spatial painting, rather than with the highly idealised mediums of painting, as their male colleagues often did. ¹² Some ECE female artists operated within an explicitly feminist rhetoric, demanding equal rights as women and female artists, questioning male privilege and decoding discriminatory practices within visual culture. Many others produced works that engaged with issues of identity, representation and gender, without relying on a feminist theoretical framework. If feminists in the West dealt theoretically with questions of identity and its deconstruction, in the ECE this critique was often performed by artists who did not necessarily identify themselves as feminist, but used art to address and examine the issues of language, subjectivity and identity.

I would like to take a brief look at the recent process of historicising these practices after 1989, at the conceptualisations of the relationship between feminism and art in ECE. From today’s perspective, we can not only identify the patterns of forgetting and marginalising ECE
artists, but also look closely at the patterns for remembering them.

In the early stages of this process, ‘feminism’ was identified and equated with the strategies and goals of the second wave of Western feminism. In many different ways, the question of why women artists in ECE did not identify as feminist artists was asked, and different stories were told to show that feminism was indeed present in ECE. ¹³ These stories, which coincided with the beginning of regional feminist art history, were based on a model that can be described as excavating narratives created against a double lack, absence even – of geopolitical and gender-based marginalisation. They were concerned with the traces that would prove the existence of feminist interests and attitudes among ECE artists, who often operated in isolation from the feminist art movement. These stories were about unveiling and exhibiting feminist traces, often within female-only art exhibitions and other interventions in the existing canons realised from a perspective closed to the pattern described by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak as ‘strategic essentialism’.

This strategy was soon accompanied by a contrary one based on questioning why the patterns of Western feminism should exist in cultural production at all, which was realised under completely different social and political circumstances. ¹⁴ These stories aimed to pluralise and localise the concept of feminism – speaking of many feminisms and in a variety of ways, focusing on ‘common differences’ ¹⁵ – which also coincided with the wave of research exhibitions on ‘global feminisms’ ¹⁶ and their criticism voiced from de-colonial and anti-imperialist perspectives. ¹⁷

These narratives, which could be described as attempts to unlearn the hegemonic patterns of the Western ‘second wave’ feminism, focused
on gender-specific emancipatory politics and actions, on artistic non-conformism and rebelliousness, and clearly distinguished between feminist curating and its aims, and feminist art and its effects. When stories moved from ‘gender checking’ towards narratives on ‘gendered artistic positions and social voices’, and when ‘radical women’ ¹⁸ were replacing ‘feminist artists’, the focus also shifted from similarities to the deviations of these practices from the local and international mainstreams.

The stories told about ‘radical women’ ¹⁹, ‘agents and provocateurs’ ²⁰ can be described as deviant narratives. From this perspective, the broadly discussed refusal of many ECE artists to identify themselves as feminist artists must to be seen as a continuation of this radical stance; it can be understood as a de-colonial strategy, as resistance against being colonised and having one’s own artistic work shaped according to concepts that arose elsewhere in different contexts.

Another series of stories about feminist art in ECE, recently developed, emerge from a new set of questions related to labour, the
socialist politics of welfare, ²¹ and also from the reconstruction of transnational alliances and solidarities in the light of new historical research on global socialism. ²² The contemporary paradigm of transnational intersectional feminism, that pays attention not to the feminist identities, but to the current urgencies and affinities within the common feminist struggle for non-violent world ²³ shapes also contemporary ways of defining and approaching feminists art in former socialist Europe. We are now not so much worried about the particularities of ECE conditions for feminist art-making, but rather thinking about solidarities and alliances that cut across and between former second and third worlds, omitting often overrepresented centres. These generate stories about coalitions, solidarity narratives, which focus on the reconstruction of the actual and potential networks and alliances between feminist struggles – between East and South, margin to margin, ‘forging epistemic communities beyond essence and identity’. ²⁴

There is one more thing to note in this context. In their essay on performativity, Jonah Westerman and Catherine Wood point out that it not only matters how the stories are written/told, but also how they are inhabited and transmitted. They emphasise that history is
always already related to where we are, even constitutive of it, that ‘the inheritance of the past that precedes you, makes you’. ²⁵ Westerman and Wood introduce the term ‘uncertain inheritance’, referring to previous practices that need to be approached and made visible as living concerns. With that in mind, I would like to refer to the question of the opening of the archives of the ‘uncertain inheritance’ of feminist art that can become a living concern during this process. It is not only about the fact that the new, empirical material form the archives acquire can go against existing concepts and narratives, but also about other modes and possibilities of scholarly engagements with the archives.

Provisional stories of feminist art in socialist Europe

I would like to propose a reflection on the process of the opening of archives as a way to tell not-yet-written-stories, by the means of historiography through performance, i.e. by traversing disciplinary boundaries via practice-as-research. Marsha Meskimmon writes: ‘Thinking differently requires the introduction of new tools, for as Audre Lorde so eloquently wrote, the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.’ ²⁶ Opening up various methodological possibilities and redesigning the way in which archives are being used by researchers relates in this case to the feminist commitment for thinking – and acting – differently.

In his essay on the archaeological turn in contemporary performance, Nick Kaye deliberates on the contemporary tendency of remaking works of performative art across different media, as ‘simulations and interrogations of past events through new works’. ²⁷ He develops his analysis by recalling practices of interpretative archaeology that refocus ‘on the relationship between material remains of subjects now lost and contemporary archaeologists themselves as social actors’. ²⁸ In this context, Kaye argues that ‘there is no final account of the past as it was, then histories are always not yet written’. ²⁹

Drawing on the concept of an entanglement as a model for cultural encounter and the vision of history as ‘always not yet written’, I developed, together with Dorota Walentynowicz, a project Washkaue: Divining Line, released in 2018 at Viennese feminist Mz* Baltazar’s
Laboratory, an artist-run feminist hacker-space. The works presented and realised in Vienna originated in our collaborative research on re/productive labour conducted during a residency at the Performing Arts Choreographisches Zentrum NRW Tanzlandschaft Ruhr, which
took place in the renovated Bathhouse of an Essen coalmine. ³⁰

For the exhibition in Vienna, apart from creating a relationship with the ‘uncertain heritage’ of feminist past through an enactment of a work by the Polish artist Maria Pinińska-Bereś (1932–1999), we were also concerned with conceptual tools, such as performative research, the questions about conclusions in the creative process, evaluation of artistic knowledge, and transformative relations between them. In our work, we combined historical and factual knowledge with experience-based knowledge. This concept of experience was not only important in the context of the reception of our work, but throughout the process, using thinking, feeling, doing – as ways
of acquiring and creating knowledge about the enacted performance. It was a reflection on the paradigm of performative research – that is, not so much ‘research that manifests itself in the form of a performance, but research that does something’. ³¹ This theoretical model has been described by Barbara Bold as based on the principle of a repetition with difference; this difference enables the production of new knowledge ³² from which new stories can arise.

The project used and incorporated performance archives, reactivating feminist impulses present in the work Washing (Pranie, 1981-82) by Maria Pinińska-Bereś and rewriting a work that constitutes a ‘milestone’ in the history of action art in Poland, Tadeusz Kantor’s Dividing Line (Linia podziału, 1965). The title of the exhibition, and a film realised during the residency in Essen, played a game with Kantor’s disinterested work. Dividing Line was misquoted to refer to the gendered division of labour.

In the performance Saturday is Laundry Day, realised as a part of the exhibition, we enacted the not-yet-written-story of Pinińska-Bereś’s work, re-inscribing it within the vocabulary that refers to the contemporary culture of evaluation, in which the term performance
defines not only ‘a mode of artistic engagement but also a behavioural system tied to monetary benefit’. ³³ Within the enactment of Pinińska-Bereś’s work we also established a temporal constellation with Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s Maintenance Art Manifesto (1969), i.e. with another performative feminist practice concerned with the gendered division of labour and social reproduction. Our performance consisted in repeating differently the scenario of the action realised by the Polish artist (washing). While one of us (the artist) was doing the laundry, the other (the art historian) was evaluating this work in terms of actual and symbolic labour. In the work by Pinińska-Bereś, the artist washed pieces of cloth and let them dry. When they were hung up they formed the word ‘feminism’, which was rewritten as ‘maintenance’ in our enactment.

By re-enacting Pinińska-Bereś’s performance Washing, we sought to do two things – to maintain her work and reinforce the distinct motives that lay behind it, but also to reflect on its potential feminist impact today, in relation to contemporary evaluative culture and the issue of reproductive labour, maintenance and care work in a post-socialist transnational context. We were also interested in using this work to reflect upon the actual process of historicisation of feminist performance, i.e. its maintenance. At the same time the experiential knowledge acquired by engaging with the materiality of Pinińska-Bereś’s performance allowed us to understand, or imagine the course of the performance itself, how this work was embodied by the artist, how the audience might react, how doing the laundry in a gallery space resonated.

There are several stories about the feminism of Maria Pinińska-Bereś’s art already told through solo and group exhibitions, art historical analyses ³⁴ and also re-performances. ³⁵ The story, told through a collective re-enacting of her work by an artist and an art historian,
was not about retelling them. Instead, our story transversally connected narratives about the evaluation of productive and reproductive labor, with a question about the evaluation of a feminist performance – in the geopolitical context (by recalling Ukeles’ canonical work) and local art historical context (by a reference to Kantor’s canonical work). The problems of evaluating feminist artwork and evaluating productive and reproductive work intertwined in a similar way in Pinińska-Bereś’s life. Throughout her creative life, she worked alongside Jerzy Bereś, her husband and one of the most celebrated protagonists of performance art in Poland in the 1960s and 1970s. This biographical context seems particularly important in the case of work Washing.

The temporal narrative, created within the framework of the ‘Dividing Line’ exhibition, was not historically situated. It didn’t follow
a timeline, had neither a beginning nor an end – it was just a fragmented, open, and tentative story. In her book on the global history of feminisms, Lucy Delap defines feminisms as attempts to politicise the injustice of gender, and she argues that the ability to name themselves as feminist always remains provisional. ³⁶ Also Masha Meskimmon elaborates on the question of provisionality in this context: ‘No text can be classified once and for all as wholly feminist or wholly patriarchal: these appellations depend on its context, its place within this context, how it is used, by whom and to what effect. These various contingencies dictate that at best a text is feminist or patriarchal only provisionally, only momentarily, only in some but not in all of its possible readings, and in some but not all of its possible effects’. ³⁷ In the same ways, the stories created through the performative engagement with ECE feminist art, such as the one proposed in
the ‘Dividing Line’ research exhibition can be described as provisional narratives, i.e. narratives that update past feminisms and feminist
art, but also address contemporary feminist urgencies through and with the works realised in the past. Provisional narratives are located
between two opposite positions, which Angela Dimitrakaki defines in her discussion on feminist political curating in a post-socialist transnational context as preserving or forgetting the historical meaning of an art work. ³⁸ Instead, they aim to repeat it, with a difference.

Conclusion

Today, more important than the question about the relationship between art and feminism in former socialist Europe, is the question
of what kind of stories do we need about this art, to strengthen our transnational solidarities and empower our intersectional struggle. In other words, ‘we need a history that does not save in any sense of the world; we need a history that performs’. ³⁹ To that end, artists and researchers reopen the archives to use them not only as sources of feminist art historiography, but also as ‘reiterations to be acted upon, as potential evidence for histories yet to be completed’. ⁴⁰

If the stories on feminist art in socialist Europe described in the first part of the paper as excavated, deviant and solidarity narratives were based on a vision of history created through research in the archives, through speaking from the archives, provisional narratives represent a model of engagement with the past described by Meskimmon as speaking with. This model, which can be described as a cross-generational reshaping of the archive, is related to the practice of ‘making and maintaining the past’ ⁴¹ rather than discovering it. In the case of feminist art historiography in particular, provisional narratives offer parallel accounts in contrast to the re-narrations that ‘often rely on producing corrective accounts’. ⁴²

In a broader perspective, provisional narratives can be situated within a tendency of reorganisation in knowledge production – from representative research to performative research. If the ‘the aim of representative research is to produce constant and parameterised knowledge, and to introduce a strictly defined methodology’ ⁴³ the purpose of knowledge produced performatively relates to its applicability and agency. The usefulness of the knowledge generated in our project concerns practising intergenerational solidarity between an artist who dealt with feminist issues from the perspective of socialist Poland and contemporary feminist researchers. The aim of this knowledge is to produce ‘transformative lineages’ ⁴⁴ which are ‘passionate historiographies’ ⁴⁵ that can bring the ‘the conviction that we might, once again, be agents of change in time and history’. ⁴⁶

The stories, which I have called provisional narratives, produce but do not sustain the knowledge of past feminist artistic practices, and in that sense they rather create a constant demand to revisit the archives, a demand for speaking with them.

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Karolina Majewska-Güde