440 RECENZE REVIEWS UMĚNÍ  ART       5      LXIV       2016 Weibel, however, suspected that Prototypes were inspired Schuler’s description of the approach of Schilling and by his own plans for as yet unrealised objects, which he Weibel as empathic scientific orientation. In their work had mentioned earlier in conversation with Pichler. In this they basically use the empirical method, which the author conflict Schuler clearly backs Weibel and reproduces only compares to the positivist procedures of Ernst Mach and his view of the whole matter. She even reproduces one of other scientists of the 19th century. The question is whether Pichler’s works from the series in question and in the cap- such a conclusion is sufficient and whether the original tion puts Peter Weibel in first place as the author. ambitions of the book were not set higher. A certain personal bias can also be felt in the criti- cism that Schuler levels against the artists Carsten Höller TRANSLATED BY JOANNE DOMIN and Olafur Eliason. According to her, these successful contemporary artists, whose work focus on visual percep- tion she has not even dealt with in detail, are merely ‘reconstructing’ the scientific discoveries of the past. As notes opposed to the authentic Shaw, Schilling and Weibel, they infiltrate their work with solely ‘borrowed” scientific con- * This article was written at the Academy of Performing Arts tent (pp. 169–170). The reader is not, then, surprised that in Prague as part of the project ‘Film Besides Film; Influence of Film in his short afterword Weibel does not forget to mention on Visual Art and Culture in the 20th Century’ with the support of fellow-artist Höller as someone who just imitates the in- the Institutional Endowment for the Long Term Conceptual Development ventions of others and presents them to the uninformed of Research Institutes, as provided by the Ministry of Education, Youth public in a calculating manner. and Sports of the Czech Republic in the year 2016. The main challenge of the kind of interdisciplinary 1 The Czech reader may currently acquaint himself with part of study that the book by Romana Karla Schuler undoubtedly this tradition in the anthology entitled Medienwissenschaft. Východiska represents is, however, first and foremost the method- a aktuální pozice německé filozofie a teorie médií [Starting points and present ological aspect. From what angle to observe the findings positions of German philosophy and theory of the media], edited by Kateřina from the field of art and the field of science, where to seek Krtilová and Kateřina Svatoňová from the Academia publishing house. their common denominator? In the outcome the chapters 2 For instance, the author repeatedly makes a mistake in the first of the reviewed book aimed at the scientific and artistic name of the founder of informatics and cybernetics Alan Turing or discourse do not communicate much together; they create places the discovery of PVC several decades away from when it actually various narratives for the reader, where we find many took place. similarities, but less substantiated connections. In this 3 Schuler evidently did not manage to get hold of the publications spirit the time shift is clearly also a problem: Whereas that came out in 2012 for the anniversary of Duchamp’s stay in Munich, Duchamp is confronted with the scientific discourse of thanks to which this ‘blind spot’ took on somewhat more concrete con- his time, the contemporary artists selected by Schuler tours. See, for instance, Helmut Friedel, Thomas Girst, Matthias Mühling are separated from the scientific experiments discussed and Felicia Rappe (eds), Marcel Duchamp in München 1912, München 2012. by several decades. I therefore consider as most accurate 4 Lars Blunck, Duchamps Präcisionsoptics, München 2008. KAREL CÍSAŘ — ACADEMY OF ARTS, ARCHITECTURE AND DESIGN IN PRAGUE Mária Orišková (ed.) Curating ‘Eastern Europe’ and Beyond Art Histories through the Exhibition Frankfurt am Main, Peter Lang GmbH — Bratislava, Veda, SAS Publishing House 2014, 205 20 pp., colour illus. (Spectrum Slovakia — Volume 4) When the Slovak art historian Mária Orišková wished Eastern Bloc since 1989, she did not turn to any example to demonstrate, at the end of her book Dvojhlasné dejiny from art-historical literature, but to the installation of umenia (Two-voiced History of Art), what changes had Roman Ondák Osudy moderného umenia (Fates of Modern occurred in this field within the framework of the former Art) from 1993.1 The work consisted of books about UMĚNÍ  ART       5      LXIV       2016 RECENZE  REVIEWS       441 art published under socialism, which were placed in a similar opinion to that of the editors of one of the first tanks filled with formaldehyde. Orišková interpreted anthologies on the history of exhibitions, Thinking the laboratory aesthetic of the work as something evoking about Exhibitions.2 As opposed to them, however, she disease and perversion, as though the one possibility did not divide her book up into themed sections and for dealing with our own interpretive tradition was to also she did not indicate her editorial intention only in reject it. Twenty years later, however, it turned out that the introduction. The first four essays, the authors of after 1989 one ideological interpretation had merely which are the young American art historians Louisa been replaced by another, this being the linear narrative Avgita and Kelly Presutti, the Romanian critic Christian of traditional western art history. In opposition to her Nae and Orišková herself, are devoted to key questions original interpretation, Orišková therefore limited about how the exhibitions of East European art after 1989 herself to a sort of ‘new reading’ of Ondák’s work, in rewrote the art history of this region. A further part of which she no longer explains it ideologically, but rather the book contains articles by Gábor Ebli, Piotr Piotrowski, through melancholia, which reveals the provisional Zdenka Badovinac and Steven ten Thije on museology and fragmentary nature of all knowledge. Rather and the problems of representation. Badovinac and than bringing some new universalistic conceptions, Piotrowski expressed themselves on this theme not only then, the author feels that art history should uncover from the position of art historians, but also as those who the myths, clichés and stereotypes that are usually have become involved in the management of institutions. linked with the presentation of knowledge in this The subsequent texts of Andrzej Szczerski and Izabela discipline. Mária Orišková hereby methodologically Kowalczyk concentrated on the contemporary exhibition acknowledges a new history of art, which, at the very presentation of historical material. Branka Stipančić and least from the beginning of the eighties of the 20th Edit András then analyse the construction of the national century, accepted stimuli from critical theory, post- identity in West European and American exhibitions of structuralism or deconstruction. It is characteristic of East European art. The final three texts by Jana and Jiří her work, however, that she did so not only on the basis Ševčík, Suzana Milevska and Zuzana Štefková are devoted of discussion within art history, but also and especially to curatorship. The first three texts were originally thanks to the effort to come to terms with the current presented at the colloquium entitled ‘Art History on development of contemporary art. the Disciplinary Map in East-Central Europe’ in the panel The same may be said of Orišková’s anthology ‘Exhibitions as Art History’.3 The next four were reprinted Curating ‘Eastern Europe’ and Beyond: Art Histories from publications that appeared earlier and only through the Exhibition. In a similar way to the previous the remainder were written especially for the presented publication, here, too, the Slovak editor is dealing with anthology. We should ask ourselves, therefore, whether a problem introduced to art history by current artistic the editor was successful in compiling the book in such practice, the problem of the exhibition as a specific art a way that the texts entered into mutual discussion medium, in which an exhibition is raised to the level and were enriched in significance in the same way as of an independent unit of significance. Interpreted in active works of art at a successful group exhibition, and this fashion, the exhibition has become, in the last two whether they contributed in a significant manner to decades, the subject of extensive art-historical research. the methodological development of art history. This shift in the understanding of the exhibition is, In spite of the statement about the non- of course, of special significance for the art history of chronological nature of the history of exhibitions, the countries of the former Eastern Bloc, for it is with the introductory block of the publication offers in the help of exhibition presentations, rather than through general the traditional periodization of reviews of written histories, that the art of this region has been East European art after 1989. All four texts from this introduced to the western public. Due to the temporary block agree that what was typical of the beginning of nature of their subject of interest the history of the nineties of the 20th century was the effort to construct exhibitions corresponds in addition to the provisional and an actually non-existent ‘East European identity’. At fragmentary approach, which Orišková emphasised in the same time, this concept was not only elaborated her book Dvojhlasné dejiny umenia. by western exhibition institutions in reviews, such In the introduction to the publication Curating as Der Riss im Raum in the Berlin Martin-Gropius-Bau ‘Eastern Europe’ and Beyond: Art Histories through (1994–1995) or Aspekte/Positionen: 50 Jahre Kunst aus the Exhibition, the author states explicitly that she Mitteleuropa 1949–1999 (1999) in the Vienna Museum interprets the exhibition, being the spatial organisation of Modern Art, but also by the artists themselves, for of works of art, as an alternative to the conventional instance the Slovenian group Irwin, which in the East Art written history, which tries to present a cohesive and Map project merely repeated the binary logic of ‘West’ chronologically ordered history of art. The literary against ‘East’, instead of undermining it. A different counterpart to the exhibition is, in her opinion, an view was promoted by exhibitions only by the turn of anthology, which presents opposing perspectives and the nineties and the noughties, an example of which enables non-linear reading. Orišková has thus supported was the exhibition Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 442       RECENZE  REVIEWS UMĚNÍ  ART       5      LXIV       2016 1950–1980 in the Museum of Modern Art in the Queens The next two texts by Polish art historians district of New York (1999), which not only included link, on the one hand, interest in the possibility of artists from former Eastern Europe on the basis of the updating of historical problems through the medium thematic proximity, but also showed how different of the exhibition and, on the other hand, connection in nature the beginnings of the seemingly uniform to the thinking of Piotr Piotrowski. Szczerski, using movement were in different regions. This development the example of his own curatorial project Modernizations: reached its climax so far in the exhibition Les Promesses The Future Perfect 1918–1939, which he prepared in 2010 du Passé in the Centre Pompidou in Paris (2010). Its for the Museum of Modern Art in Lodz, shows how curator Christine Macel started off from the interest the spatial layout of an exhibition enabled, better than at the time, not only of East European contemporary a monographic publication, the presentation of different artists, in archival and other historical material, and forms of modernisation in various regions of Eastern adapted the exhibition to their artistic practices. As Europe. Whereas in the Yugoslav section, devoted to the name of the exhibition also indicated, referring the avant-garde periodical Zenit, modernisation took to the well-known Benjamin text ‘On the Concept of on the form of the Utopian vision of the Balkanisation History’, the development model was replaced here of Europe, the Czechoslovak ‘department’ pointed out by anachronism, which tries to update forgotten and the realised Utopia that was Baťa’s Zlín. Kowalczyk then suppressed layers of the past. analyses exhibitions of contemporary art dealing with Theoretically more rewarding are the essays in the traumatic experiences of the recent past, whether the following section of the book, devoted to museology. the Nazi period or that of state socialism. For instance, In particular, Piotr Piotrowski and Zdenka Badovinac the fourth Berlin Biennial. Of Mice and Men, which was demonstrated the ability to effectively apply and prepared in 2006 by Maurizio Catelan, Massimiliano transform theories originally created in a different, Gioni and Ali Subotnick, tried to deal with the tragedy western, historical and geopolitical situation. Piotrowski, of the Holocaust with the help of various spiritualist for instance, using the example of the Romanian narrations. Also in keeping with this was the selection Museum of Contemporary Art MNAC, which was of the locations, from an evangelical church through opened in one wing of the former ‘Ceausescu’ Palace a former school for Jewish girls to a cemetery. The Polish in 2004, develops his theme of ‘traumaphilia’ and historian shows, in this and other examples, how histories ‘traumaphobia’. Piotrowski sees the sign of a traumatic constructed with the help of exhibitions differ from state in the inability to come to terms with one’s own those based on written books. The exhibition, as a way past, which shows in the simple imitation of museums of making suppressed historical memories present, in in the west. In opposition to this, the author connected her opinion fulfils a therapeutic function, which written to Belting’s statement that ‘museums are essentially history always only presents in part. local’4 and serve as an instrument for the critical In contrast to the examples of exhibitions that reflection of their own past. For many years Director successfully rewrote the history of East European of the Modern Gallery in Ljubljana, Zdenka Badovinac art, the articles by Branka Stipančić and Edit András linked up with Foster’s thesis on the constitutive role analyse negative examples, in which they reveal hidden of difference and repetition in the development of prejudices and stereotypes in various forms of East West European modern art.5 This is because, even European identities. Stipančić, in the examples of though the East European artists proceeded similarly to the exhibitions of Harald Szeeman Blood and Honey — their western colleagues, they could not, unlike them, Future’s in Balkans (Sammlung Essl, Klosterneuberg, 2003) depend on the institutionalised history of avant-garde and René Block In the Gorges of the Balkans — A Report art in the form of museum collections and academic (Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel, 2003), convincingly histories and often repeated something that in reality demonstrates the ethnographic approach of both did not exist. This is why museums of East European the above curators from the West. Although both of them art must, according to Badovinac, come to terms are exhibition organisers who provide space for artists with the individual procedures of such artistic self- and do not hamper their works with too theoretical an historicisations and encompass contradictory narratives. interpretation, they did not manage to avoid a number of A positive example of such an approach is given by clichés and stereotypes. Block, for instance, took the title the Dutch historian Steven ten Thije, who devotes of the exhibition from a novel by Karel May In the Gorges himself to the network of museums and archives known of the Balkans, in which the inhabitants of the Balkans are as L’Internationale. The polyphony of this initiative is described as evil and ugly people fighting for survival on already guaranteed by the differing geographical and the very edge of Europe. Szeeman opened the exhibition institutional character of the participating subjects, in Klosterneuberg with a historical portrait of Vlado among which there are both large museums like MACBA Tepeš, known first and foremost from the Dracula novel in Barcelona or the Modern Gallery in Ljubljana, and also by Bram Stoker, and the coach in which Franz Ferdinand small archives of artists such as the Július Koller Society was shot on the way to his coronation. Although in Bratislava. this was clearly intended as an exaggeration, these UMĚNÍ  ART       5      LXIV       2016 RECENZE  REVIEWS       443 artefacts presented the Balkan mentality to the western the time and later historicisation. The editor herself is, public as quarrelsome and bloodthirsty. The works of in any case, aware of this danger, for in the introduction contemporary art presented at these exhibitions were she mentions the possibility that, under the influence mainly ‘documentary’ and committed works, which of the speed of change, the volume may easily become were intended to show the emancipatory potential, but a mere document of changing art history and curatorial in reality it was a matter of western nostalgia for those discourse. If, then, I were to accept the author’s metaphor, forms of art that were last exhibited in art centres at that an anthology is a literary genre well suited the turn of the sixties and seventies of last century. to exhibitions, and compare the anthology under Although it might seem that these stereotypes conformed consideration to one of the reviews dealt with, I would to the time when the mentioned exhibitions originated, probably choose something like the praised project similar nostalgia was also inscribed in the recent review L’Internationale, but would not avoid the traits of Ostalgia (New Museum, New York, 2011), which, according the criticised Ostalgia. to the Hungarian historian and critic Edit András, did not manage to avoid a tendency to present East European art TRANSLATED BY JOANNE DOMIN as a cabinetof curiosities. Strategies for the avoidance of such pitfalls are then offered by the three final, more personally formulated texts by practising curators, of which the one by Suzana Milevska, for example, notes does not reject only the regional, but also the family essentialisation, which the Macedonian curator has come 1  Mária Orišková, Dvojhlasné dějiny umenia (Two-voiced History of up against in her projects. Art), Bratislava 2002, pp. 178–180. This book contains a number of significant 2  Cf. Reesa Greenberg, Bruce W. Ferguson and Sandy Nairne (eds), contributions to the history of exhibitions of Central and Thinking about Exhibitions, London and New York 1996, pp. 1–2. East European art after 1989, among which in particular 3  Art History on the Disciplinary Map in East-Central Europe, those reprinted or newly written by the editor are Moravian Gallery in Brno, Masaryk University and The Sterling and undoubtedly among the best published on this theme. Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA, U.S. 2010. If, however, we were to turn in conclusion to the above- 4  Hans Belting, Contemporary Art and the Museum in the Global formulated questions of the internal composition of Age, in Peter Weibel and Andrea Buddensieg (eds), Contemporary Art and the anthology and its significance for the methodological the Museum. A Global Perspective, Ostfildern 2007, pp. 30–32, cit. in Piotr development of art history, the book is successful only Piotrowski, New Museum / New Europe: Traumaphilia — Traumaphobia, in part. Although the texts often touch on similar events, in Mária Orišková (ed.), Curating ‘Eastern Europe’ and Beyond: Art Histories they only rarely view them from different positions through the Exhibition, Frankfurt am Main — Bratislava 2014, p. 94. and enter into mutual discussion. In the better cases 5  Hal Foster, The Return of the Real: Art and Theory at the End of they apply and transform existing theoretical concepts the Century, Cambridge, Mass 1996, p. 29, cit. in Zdenka Badovinac, methodologically effectively, in the worse ones they slip The Museum of Contemporary Art, in ibidem, p. 102. into descriptiveness. As opposed to the best that has been 6  Cf. for instance the publication from the Exhibition Histories written about the history of exhibitions,6 the majority series, published by Afterall Books in cooperation with the Bard of the texts also lack more detailed archive research, College Centre of Curatorial Studies, the Vienna Academy of Arts and which would not trace only the ideological prerequisites the Eindhoven Van Abbemuseum, in which there was also a contribution for the origin of exhibitions, but also their reception at from one of the authors in the presented volume, Steven ten Thije.