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07/11/2005: "The Art of Eastern Europe"
This trip starts like many I’ve made, loading up the VW bus, and heading off to parts unknown. Returning on a ferry from Greece, we drove up the East coast of Italy and crossed into Slovenia at Gorizia. Rather than use highways, as my motor’s getting tired, we took back roads, two lane blacktops winding through towns and countryside. The main focus here was to see where the line is between what’s heavily influenced by our own culture, and what remains untouched by us. The first thing you notice once you cross the border into Slovenia are the crucifixes. They’re everywhere. At nearly every intersection, in the midst of corn fields, on people’s lawns, and I don’t mean little ones. Huge ones, life size, towering at fourteen feet cross included, and many painted to look real.
It’s the only public art you see, except in cities like Lublijana, where there are sculptures, fountains, and architectural decorations. There is a certain macabre feeling that goes along with these, especially seeing the old people who cross themselves each time they walk by one. Art should be meaningful and noticed by the people around it, and in that country, these get more of that than anything else. I saw a set of four bronze dragons on the corners of a bridge, and couldn’t help but associate them with the former evil empire of Communism. Done long before all that, their tails wrapping around the pedestals they were on, they seemed like guardians at the gates of Mordor.
Near the border of Croatia, we stop for gas and ask if this is the right road for Budapest. Our questions are answered with worried looks from the gas station attendants, who tell us it’s much wiser to forget about going into Croatia, and go around it instead. The road on the map appears to go straight for about eight miles through this northwest corner of Croatia, and bang! You’re at the border of Hungary. Instead they want us to go forty miles out of our way. Just to be sure, we stop and ask again, and are told the same thing. But, seeing the NY plates, this one says, We always have problems. But you won’t. So we go. And there’s no problem. A side note; the Croatians tell us the same thing about the Slovanians on the way back, and try to send us to Austria. And the signs! All the way from Hungary they steer you to the long way around, and to the middle of nowhere where there are no more signs. If you do this, bring a compass, and don’t listen to anybody.
I didn’t see any art in Croatia. Just corn fields, without the crucifixes. Then again, this was in fact, eight miles of country road in the middle of nowhere.
In Hungary, I saw this monument to fallen soldiers along the shores of Lake Balaton. Is that a Nazi helmet? I’ll never know, unless one of you who speaks Hungarian can tell me what it says. Anyone remember whose side they were on?
Arriving in Budapest, we are impressed by the modern superhighways, but are dismayed by their not having signs, exits, or illumination. After three hours criss crossing the inner city seeking enlightenment we get out heading north. During that time, we are stopped by the local gendarmes three times, in groups of seven, five, and three. Among those 15 policemen and women, not one knew where the road out of town was.
Asking us how to get out of this city, is like asking us how to get to Albania one said.
We were impressed by one policewoman’s extreme facial piercings. And by the city. There’s a ton of public artwork, from all periods. It’s everywhere. This century old piece jumped out at me, and I said when I saw it,
Is this Sandro Chia? No? It sure looks like it is. Or, maybe, his work looks like this?
A boy perched on a rail by the river was dated 1989. It’s clearly not ancient, everything about it, even though figurative, screams, Contemporary! It’s funny that without the base that most old work has, the way you see it changes completely. Despite these frequent public works, we see that the city around them is crumbling.
We didn’t stay that night, but since we did on the way back, I want to keep to the topic of this city. The Ludwig Museum of Contemporary Art is worth a visit, but only if you want to see what you’ve already seen in just about any contemporary art museum. Lichtenstein, Warhol, Johns, and Oldenburg, etc. The Ludwigs, Irene and Peter, were among the largest collectors of pop art in the world, and established another Ludwig museum, in Cologne, Germany. Single handedly, they made Picasso by buying over eight hundred of his paintings. This Hungarian version proclaims that it has introduced young Hungarians to ‘the international language of art’, which probably means that if you ask these youngsters a question about art, they’ll give you the right answer. It also has sponsored the Italian, French, and German trans avant garde movements.
A retrospective of Hungarian artist Tibor Hajas was curated poorly enough to be forgettable, but remains one of the more interesting parts of what I saw there, and I could imagine how it might look if exhibited well. A conceptualist, his work is derivative of the German artist Wolf Vostell, (remember John Cage, Wolf Vostel, and Nam June Paik in Germany in the early sixties? Fluxus?)and this show seems to be the museum’s half hearted attempt to keep itself current and interesting. Any major contemporary museum will have his work on file, so if this kind of thing appeals to you, you can find it easily. I think the fact that the work was not presented at its best indicates that whoever’s running things, and I don’t just mean here, is losing steam in the promotion of conceptual work. There’s a lot of other things to see in Budapest. Go, if you can.
Onward northward. Slovakia has a central highway that is lined with sculptures from two distinct periods. When they were divided from the Czech Republic, their artistic heritage lost Prague and everything that city has, really, the jewel of the area. During the Communist era, huge cement sculptures were put up lining a stretch of highway we drove down. They’re all the same. After a while, after flying by three or four of them, on the left, on the right, always too covered with shady tree leaves to see, I realized they were a negative relief of a worker waving a Kalashnikov. At once I saw a change now, down the center of the highway, were even bigger contemporary abstracts, which by their appearance showed themselves to be a collaboration between the highway department and the artists who created these works. This country is very, very, poor, and yet they find the money which enables artists to participate in the construction of a new country being made on the foundations of a former communist wasteland. Bravo!
We cross into Poland at six AM. I don’t know why I didn’t stop since Venice, I just felt like driving I guess. At my in laws we are forced to eat tons of kielbasa and pickle soup, and then we sleep. Krakow’s an hour away, so we’re there the next day in a flash to visit the ‘hot’ museum/gallery of the moment, Bunkier. But inside, the show, called, Boys, boys, boys is an unwarranted mix of five different types of art made by eighteen Polish artists. Video has the spotlight, and takes me back to my days studying under Bill Viola, and setting up a show for Nam June Paik in Syracuse, NY, in the seventies. The work I see here is so derivative of those times and that technique that I cringe. You can see by the clothes, the hair, and the confident knowing smiles in the photos of the artists that these guys think they’re the newest thing in art. Maybe in Poland they are, but laughable anywhere else. I’m embarrassed to bear a Polish last name. The worst part of this travesty was the curatorship. How can you put five video artists together with one twenty year old making pretty good (but not that good) academic pencil drawings? And a sculptor who does a wolf’s headed fur human figure with a fur erection? Male nudity was big in this mélange. One video captures a man first cross dressing as a woman, and then doing a slow strip tease to final full frontal wagging. The effect is enhanced by two copies of the loop being shown staggered but simultaneously, and the whole thing taking place in a huge space closed off by black velvet drapes. A very interesting bit to watch was the expression of the visitors, as they came in, realized what it was, and then that they’d be sharing this experience with a total stranger. I should mention that Poles as a whole are very inhibited, and the ones I saw there certainly were. Shocking! Unless you’ve been to New York and seen Jeff Koons and Cicciolina doing the ‘wild thing’ What next? Two sets of paintings from the Trophy series, groups of antlers painted more or less academically, sort of with a little primitive thrown in. Where’s the connection? Maybe the fur statue?
Warsaw would be better, I said to myself. I think back to the Cirque posters, done by Polish artists, that almost all my Wasp college friends had in their dorm rooms; some still do in their suburban homes. And the Solidarnosc posters, too. These really had a worldwide effect, and if anyone owns one of the original paintings from which they were produced, today it is quite a treasure. I saw them everywhere, in every city I’ve ever visited. Protest limited by punishment gave birth to a style that will take a long time to be forgotten.
The main contemporary museum in Warsaw is the Ujadowski Palace. There’s a coffee shop with a kind of university feel to it, paintings on the walls, and each chair different from all the others. You are greeted by a Jenny Holzer (haven’t heard of her in a years!) and then by a Japanese artist who reveals foundations of buildings, conserves them with glass plates, and creates unbelievable spaces for performances and other events. If you review the past shows, you’ll see a bunch of names you will recognize if you frequent contemporary art museums anywhere. Not very many Poles.
Maybe if I go a little further east I’ll find something different. Our Western art culture seems to have spread like an oil stain to everywhere that isn’t a small town lost in the wheat fields of Lithuania. My trip showed me the most original work in the most off beat places. Small galleries in both the country town of Zakopane, Poland, and in Budapest had more stimulating work than either country’s largest museums. This painting changed as you walked by it. Ok, some kind of cheap trick, but I looked twice. 
I can understand the reason why people strive to obtain what other people already have, to show that they’re just as good as them. But using possessions to show who you are has always been a trademark of the insecure. No ground breaking here. I can see why artists like Jenny Holzer come here using their New York cache to conquer a potential future hot spot, and to achieve worldwide recognition. But I don’t think Warsaw’s got a significant role to play until it comes up with something as good as what Communist oppression produced, a resistance movement in the arts. And she’ll be eclipsed if that happens. Capitalism has pretty much destroyed the artistic strength of rebellion, so the next big thing’s going to be a surprise for everyone.
Warsaw’s been called the gateway to the East, and has a lot of large international corporations based here, like Sony Poland, etc. so it’s not surprising that insecure but enterprising Poles want to impress the Westerners running them. It seems like a good move for trade, but in the end is not destined to do much for the arts nationally or for Poles with new ideas. We have to remember that Magdalena Abkanowicz was a nobody in Poland, and destined to remain that way, until she achieved fame in the United States. Now the Poles love her.
