Ilya Kabakov at the Center for Contemporary Art, Prato, Italy, 1990. Photo: Natalia Nikitin.
As I listen today to certain discourses concerning cultural identities and their manifestation in art, I remember the late 1980s and early 1990s, as the Western art world began to discover Eastern European art. At that time, I was actively participating in this process. I had emigrated from the Soviet Union to Germany in 1981—almost ten years before—and, thus, had a chance to look at Eastern European art from a Western perspective. I remember well what kind of expectations Western artists, curators, and art critics had regarding the opening of the East. These expectations were formed primarily by two factors: the acquaintance of Western art milieus with the Eastern European avant-garde and modernist art from the beginning of the twentieth century until World War II, and the firm conviction that after the establishment of the Stalinist system any genuine, creative, artistic activity in East European countries became impossible. Thus, one expected that after this system had been removed, Eastern European art would restart at the point at which it was interrupted—investing a new feeling of liberation from the Stalinist dictatorship into the rediscovery of the utopian visions of the avant-garde. One firmly believed that Eastern European cultural identities were fundamentally different from Western cultural identities because after World War II, Eastern European countries did not follow the same economic and political trajectory as Western ones—and thus it was assumed that their art should also be different. One expected eastern European art to be politically engaged, humanist, and utopian. I remember well the first impression that my acquaintances got after their visits to Eastern European cities, including Moscow. In their eyes, contemporary Eastern European art looked very much like Western art.
That was a disappointment. For the Western postmodernist taste of that time, Eastern European post-socialist art looked too familiar, too Western to satisfy the desire for cultural difference that motivated the Western art world to go looking beyond its borders. Of course, life in the socialist states was indeed different from life in Western states. But it was different in its structure, in the laws that dictated the behavior of the people and their reactions; it was not different in a visually recognizable way. The visual world of modernity is technologically produced, and socialist technology was not so different from Western technology. In his Aesthetics, Hegel famously said that art is a thing of the past because “picture thinking” has lost its power to represent the truth—as was the case in Greek antiquity, for example, since the gods not only could be represented as statues but actually lived in these statues. In modernity, on the contrary, the fate of the world is regulated not by the will of visible gods but by laws, customs, conventions, and bureaucratic regulations. And all of them are invisible. When these laws and regulations lose their power, they do not leave any visual traces that can be musealized and exhibited as manifesting the truth of a past civilization that functioned according to these laws and regulations.
Throughout Western modernity, its central art institutions were—and still are—museums and galleries. In the West the main goal of art is to be collected and made available for aesthetic contemplation, whereas in other cultures art is involved in religious and secular rituals or is exhibited in public spaces. These public spaces can be big, official spaces, representing the powers that be. But they can also be small, even clandestine spaces in which art functions as a sign of common belonging, analogous to the role of art in early Christian communities. It is obvious that after 1989—and, in fact, also before—the main desire of Eastern European artists was to be included in the Western art system and be represented in Western art museums. During the Cold War, such an inclusion was impossible because of the radical division between East and West. However, immediately after the end of the Cold War it seemed that Eastern European art would enter the Western art system and find its place in Western art museums. However, this did not happen to the degree that Eastern European artists expected because Eastern European art was identified by Western art milieus as not different enough from Western art.
The museum has taken its modern shape as a result of the French Revolution and subsequent revolutions and wars; it was created by modern nation-states to save the remnants of the ancien régime from final destruction—but also to collect the remnants of premodern civilizations from around the world. The modern museum is constructed as a system of universal representation within a national cultural context, or as a kind of symbolic empire. In the context of modernity, the museum collects everything that falls out of fashion and out of use, as well as everything foreign, exotic, other. The modern museum is thus a symbolic space of the heterogeneous in the relatively homogenous context of the modern nation-state.
The nation-state needs this space of heterogeneity to formulate its own identity. At the same time the museum poses a constant threat to this cultural identity because the museum presents all sorts of cultural forms that do not fit this identity. This ambivalent, paradoxical position of the modern museum vis-à-vis the modern state nourishes a permanent opposition between the two institutions, but at the same time it makes them closely complicit. In a sense, the museum is the most characteristic institution of modernity. Collecting has always been practiced, but it was only in modernity that the museum—that is, the state collection—was able to attain the central cultural position that it holds today. Since in modernity we no longer believe in a metaphysical order of things, this order must be artificially produced through collecting. Susan Sontag once wrote that Karl Marx was only partially right: the world can in fact no longer be understood, but the world can also no longer be changed. The only thing one can do is to collect the world. The basic metaphysical, religious, or ideological question—namely, the question “What remains?”—has become a technical problem of museum collecting and preserving. We are what we collect.
What do the Louvre, the British Museum, and all museums that have come after them represent? Do these museums manifest the subjectivity and cultural identity of collectors—in this case, the states of France and England during a particular epoch of their existence? To assert this is to deny the claim of these museums to a neutral, objective representation of world history; without this claim these museums are not relevant or interesting. Incidentally, Hegel, the father of modern historicism, also saw it this way: historical consciousness, which manifests itself in the institution of the museum, reflects history without itself being historical. The Hegelian vision of Absolute Spirit as an identity-free curator of its historical memories lives on today in the internet, this virtual worldwide museum which is perceived as a museum without an author, without an individual curator, beyond any specific cultural identity. Only those who are represented in this museum by certain symbols and artifacts—that is, virtually collected and represented—are supposed to have an identity. But not the internet itself. In view of this inner division of museum practice, we must ask ourselves what we really want: Do we want to collect or to be collected? Do we want to become identity-less curators or identifiable museum objects?
Admittedly, the whole cultural-political impact of this question can only be appreciated if we realize that the overwhelming majority of newly created nation-states and regional cultural entities on the territory of old empires, as well as many of the old nation-states of Europe, clearly chose the option of being collected. Today, from all sides we hear demands for the representation of national or regional cultural identities. Anyone who seeks such a cultural representation tries to distinguish themself as clearly as possible from all the others in the virtual museum collection so that one’s own cultural identity becomes visible and distinct. One’s identity is thus defined as a specific cultural form in the context of other cultural forms. And that in turn means nothing other than that a specific cultural identity is seen through the eyes of a virtual, identity-less visitor who can view the virtual museum that contains all cultural forms.
Therefore, a certain unpleasant complicity arises between defenders of national or regional cultural identities and the international cultural tourism that today recruits visitors for the worldwide museum of cultural identities. The postmodern, global, identity-less flaneur is certainly extremely skeptical of any claim to universal truth. But this postmodern tourist is always ready to accept any kind of cultural fundamentalism, which seeks to establish absolute truth only regionally. Every museum is constructed in such a way that the cultural forms presented in it are distinguished by means of certain externally identifiable formal characteristics. The conservation work of the museum curator includes stabilizing and securing these formal differences. Thus, for the museum’s trained gaze, a local dictator who imposes a stable cultural identity on his subjects comes across like an overzealous but somehow sympathetic curator—because if he moderates his zeal, the identity he cares about will dissolve. The local identity seeker and the international tourist in search of cultural differences are therefore internally connected by the same museum-informed gaze.
It is basically the desire to be accepted by the Western art system that brings non-Western artists and intellectuals to reflect on the specificity of their cultural identities. Eastern European artists weren’t an exception and still aren’t. To formulate their cultural identity, they took two different paths, which were also combined from time to time. Some of them turned back toward their national traditions, which were suppressed by the socialist regimes. But others concentrated on the specific visual world created by public art during these socialist regimes—architecture, public monuments, visual propaganda, aesthetic of mass parades and festivals, etc. In a very interesting and telling way, the artists who turned back to nationalist traditions mostly found their place in a more conservative political sector of their societies, whereas the artists who worked with socialist iconography—even if they did it with an ironic, deconstructive, and even directly critical intention—found themselves in the left-liberal sector of contemporary societies. Here, critique becomes a form of protection against historical forgetting. To understand critique, we have to understand what is criticized. Walter Benjamin famously spoke about the replacement of cult value by exhibition value, which always happens when an individual artwork is removed from its original place and put into the context of art institutions. This is, of course, correct. The images of the socialist cult also become merely museum items when they are situated inside contemporary art exhibition spaces. However, exhibition value can also be reversed into cult value. One can see this in the Renaissance, when ancient Greek and Roman statues became a model for the self-styling of a new, humanist subject. What is said here about the art of Greek antiquity is also true for other forms of life that have produced the art we see in our museums and art exhibition centers: this art can be viewed as autonomous but also as an advertisement for a certain form of life that we can find attractive even if we would not like to, or be able to, return to it. The same can be said about the forms of life of Eastern Europe socialist states before 1989. They still have a certain attraction that finds its echo in the West, with its long tradition of socialist romanticism.