The Future is Between Your Legs: Sex, Art and Censorship in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia
This is a draft version of a text which will be published by Nottingham Contemporary in 2016. In spring 1970 a small audience gathered in a church in the Old Town in Zagreb to watch a performance by the poet, actor and artist, Katalin Ladik. Dressed in nothing but a loose fur, Ladik … Continue reading
Hasior’s Dreck
This essay is a transcript of a talk given in Zakopane in late 2014. It will appear in a book edited by Kola Sliwińska. Junk and trash seemed to rise to the surface of Polish culture in the mid 1950s. Of course, in the aftermath of the catastrophe of the Second World War, … Continue reading
Interview with Herito magazine
In May Herito published an interview with me on socmodernist architecture in Eastern Europe – you can read it here.
Staging for the End of History: Avant-garde Visions at the Beginning and the End of Communism in Eastern Europe
In 1967 Stanislav Kolibal, the Czech artist, was commissioned to design the August-September cover of Výtvarné Uměni (Fine Arts) (fig 1). This was to be a special issue of the periodical, commemorating – like many other magazines and newspapers published in the Eastern Bloc that autumn – the fiftieth anniversary of the October Revolution. He … Continue reading
A Little Music: Sound Works by Wojciech Bruszewski
This essay will appear in 2015 in a book reviewing the work of artist Wojciech Bruszewski. In 1982 Wojciech Bruszewski compiled a number of experiments with sound that he had been making since 1976 in a short VHS compilation called ‘A Little Music’ (‘Trochę Muzyki’). Short films like ‘TV Music’ (1979), ‘Sternmusic’ (1979) and ‘Behaviour … Continue reading
Empty Plots – Art and Environment in Latvia in the 1970s
This short essay was written for a publication accompanying the Visionary Structures exhibition at BOZAR, Brussels, opening in January 2015. In the early 1970s Environment occupied a central place in the lexicon of art and design on both sides of the Cold War divide. It was not, of course, a newly-coined term: more than a … Continue reading
Echo Translation
In his book La voix au cinéma (The Voice in Cinema), Michel Chion coined the word ‘acousmêtre’ to describe a character that can be heard but not seen on screen. Rather than nail down his term with a comprehensive definition, Chion introduces his readers to various kinds of disembodied voices in the cinema. They include … Continue reading
Nervous Systems: New Machines and Bodies in Polish Art and Film after the Thaw
This essay was published in the catalogue accompanying the Cosmos Calling! exhibition at Zacheta, Warsaw, summer 2014. In 1973 Krzysztof Zanussi made a movie, ‘Iluminacja’(Illumination), to explore the ways in which science, the state and religion understood life in its most immediate sense, that of the living human being. Relaying the fictional career … Continue reading
Poster maths
This short text appears in the catalogue of the International Poster Biennale which opened in Warsaw in June 2014. I was one of the jurors. The jury of the 24th International Poster Biennale used a website gallery to make their first assessment of the 3814 entries in this year’s competition. Each poster was viewed on-screen as … Continue reading
Pop Effects in Eastern Europe under Communist Rule
In September 1974 Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid exhibited four works at an exhibition of nonconformist art in Moscow, which had been reluctantly permitted by the authorities. Two weeks earlier, the artists had had an artwork – a double self-portrait as Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin – destroyed in the notorious demolition of the ‘Bulldozer … Continue reading
