The Representation and Agency of Artistic Interventions in Community in Mainland China

Based on immersive participatory observation of the curatorial practice of the 2019 OCAT exhibition Rural Construction through Art in Shenzhen, we identified two modes of community-based artistic interventions: a cultural “governance/capital” intervention deeply embedded in the social structure and a collective experimental art production intervention dissociated from the social structure. However, both forms of “production art” are essentially “unities of opposites” integrating incorporation and resistance, consistent with the socialist art policy of promoting the flourishing of all types of arts. Though the aesthetic divide between “art for society’s sake” and “art for art’s sake” positions these artistic interventions in different places in society, we argue that the domain of Chinese contemporary art is shifting away from the studio and toward scenes, events, experience, and dialogue. The approach of “the era of mass art” also means that “art-as-resistance” is being legitimized as “art-as-incorporation” in a subtle but unremitting way.

“What Is to Come After This?”

This chapter engages with Britain’s fin-de-siècle socialist revival by investigating its presiding spirit, William Morris. Morris is revered for inspiring a socialist culture characterized by its fusion of artistic and emancipatory commitments. From the longer perspective that Imagining Socialism affords, however, this synthesis of aesthetics and socialism looks less like an unprecedented development than a change in modalities. Imagining Socialism demonstrates that the aesthetic was constitutive of an important strand of the British socialist tradition; sublimated aesthetic energies underpinned and invigorated a succession of anti-political schemes of communal regeneration. Morris corrected this excessively instrumentalizing tendency by promulgating a highly self-conscious aesthetic of sensuous surfaces. By desublimating socialism’s aesthetic impulse, he fostered an environment in which successful socialist art and literature was finally possible. But despite Morris’s own intentions, this chapter contends, his intercession also conspired to drain socialism of its anti-political vitality. This argument is staged through a thickly contextualized reading of News from Nowhere. In his utopia, Morris employs an erotically saturated style and plot to entice readers to embrace his own vision of Britain’s socialist future. However, this approach sanctions the emergence of a privatized aesthetic ideal that is fundamentally at odds with the nongovernmental utopia of the craft arts that News from Nowhere officially espouses. By desublimating the aesthetic impulse, Morris inadvertently contributed to the dispersal of the vitality and resources that the aesthetic had hitherto lent Britain’s socialist anti-political tradition.

The Art of Forgetting

Chapter 4 examines decivilizing moments that constitute silences in national art histories and yet are formative for the art world in Germany and Turkey. These silences include art collections that are historically related to the dispossession of minorities during the Holocaust in Germany and the Armenian genocide and subsequent discriminatory practices (e.g., the wealth tax for non-Muslims, 1942) in Turkey. The chapter traces the tensions that have arisen in Germany’s struggle to re-acquire modernist works purged from its institutions during the Third Reich, a process that has often been aided by capital that is itself of Nazi provenance. It shows how East Germany’s socialist art came to be seen as a deviation from the modern paradigm in a reunited Germany, so much so that it was declared aesthetically and morally bankrupt and equated to Nazi cultural production. It outlines similarly forgotten processes in Turkey, e.g., a series of works created during the Anatolian painting tours (1938–43). “Failing” to adequately represent Turkey’s modernization, they have been lost to this day. Discussing artistic interventions of Stih and Schnock (Berlin) and Dilek Winchester (Istanbul), it shows how artists break these silences on historical instances deemed unspeakable within the civilizing narrative of the state.

The Role of Artists' Collectives in Producing State Socialist Art in 1950s Romania the Bottom-Up, Pragmatic Professionalization of State Commissions

This article analyzes the collective basis of the establishment of the Socialist Realist model of production for the fine arts in Romania in the early 1950s. It discusses the unstudied case of the “artists' collectives” (of production) together with other collective forms, such as the collective studios and the guiding commissions. This is an archive-based study of cultural institutionalism of socialist regimes, based on the analysis of under-explored archival sources such as those of the Romanian Artists' Union (UAP) or the Artistic Fund (FP). Focusing on two specific case studies, those of the artists' collectives “Progressive art” and “Th. Aman”, both founded in 1951, it provides more context to the establishment of the socialist model in Romania. The article finds the state assumed definition of art considered the artist as a simple executioner, and the “artists' collectives” participated in eradicating the individuality of the artist, one of the goals of the new socialist model.

A Conversation between Chinese Artists and Mexican Painter David Alfaro Siqueiros

In October 1956, the Mexican muralist David Siqueiros traveled Beijing and engaged in two dialogues with artists from the Chinese Artists’ Association. His visit came at an inflection point in China’s foreign and cultural policy. As Sino-Soviet relations deteriorated, China used cultural diplomacy to cultivate relationships with unaligned countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. China’s cultural policy mirrored this shift by relaxing its adherence to Soviet-style Socialist Realism and promoting new stylistic practices, including a revival of ink painting techniques. This policy shift re-animated a debate among Chinese artists over the best mode of representation for socialist art, with one side arguing that Soviet-style Socialist Realism was the only acceptable style, and the other advocating for the reform of Chinese ink painting techniques. Within this context, Siqueiros’s criticism of Soviet artists and his advice to follow Chinese stylistic traditions set off a rich discussion on new approaches to Socialist Realism within China.

Introduction to “A Conversation between Chinese Artists and Mexican Painter David Alfaro Siqueiros”

In October 1956, the Mexican muralist David Siqueiros traveled Beijing and engaged in two dialogues with artists from the Chinese Artists’ Association. His visit came at an inflection point in China’s foreign and cultural policy. As Sino-Soviet relations deteriorated, China used cultural diplomacy to cultivate relationships with unaligned countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. China’s cultural policy mirrored this shift by relaxing its adherence to Soviet-style Socialist Realism and promoting new stylistic practices, including a revival of ink painting techniques. This policy shift re-animated a debate among Chinese artists over the best mode of representation for socialist art, with one side arguing that Soviet-style Socialist Realism was the only acceptable style, and the other advocating for the reform of Chinese ink painting techniques. Within this context, Siqueiros’s criticism of Soviet artists and his advice to follow Chinese stylistic traditions set off a rich discussion on new approaches to Socialist Realism within China.

Toward a New Concept of Progressive Art: Art History in the Service of Modernisation in the Late Socialist Period. An Estonian Case

The paper deals with renewal of socialist art history in the Post-Stalinist period in Soviet Union. The modernisation of art history is discussed based on the example of the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic (Estonian SSR), where art historians were forced to accept the Soviets’ centrally constructed Marxist-Leninist aesthetic and approach to art and art history. In the art context, the idea of progressiveness began to be reconsidered. In previous discourse, progress was linked with the “realist” artistic method that sprang from a progressive social order. Now, however, art historians found new arguments for accepting different cultures of form, both historical and contemporary, and often these arguments were “discovered” in Marxism itself. As a result, from the middle of 1950’s Soviet art historians fell into two camps in interpreting Realism: the dogmatic and revisionist, and the latter was embraced in Estonia. In 1967, a work was published by the accomplished artist Ott Kangilaski and his nephew, the art historian Jaak Kangilaski: the Kunsti kukeaabits – Basic Art Primer – subtitled “Fundamental Knowledge of Art and Art History.” In its 200 pages, Jaak Kangilaski’s Primer laid out the art history of the world. Kangilaski also chimed in, publishing an article in 1965 entitled “Disputes in Marxist Aesthetics” in the leading Estonian SSR literary journal Looming (Creation). In this paper the Art Primer is under scrutiny and the deviations and shifts in Kangilaski’s approach from the existing socialist art history canon are introduced. For Kangilaski the defining element of art was not the economic base but the “Zeitgeist,” the spirit of the era, which, as he wrote, “does not mean anything mysterious or supernatural but is simply the sum of the social views that objectively existed and exist in each phase of the development of humankind.” Thus, he openly united the “hostile classes” of the social formations and laid a foundation for the rise of common art characteristics, denoted by the term “style.” As is evidenced by various passages in the text, art transforms pursuant to the “will-to-art” (Kunstwollen) characteristic of the entire human society. Thus, under conditions of a fragile discursive pluralism in Soviet Union, quite symbolic concepts and values from formalist Western art history were “smuggled in”: concepts and values that the professional reader certainly recognised, although no names of “bourgeois” authors were mentioned. Kangilaski relied on assistance in interpretation from two grand masters of the Vienna school of art history: Alois Riegl’s term Kunstwollen and the Zeitgeist concept from Max Dvořák (Zeitgeist, Geistesgeschichte). In particular, the declaration of art’s linear, teleological “self-development” can be considered to be inspiration from the two. But Kangilaski’s reading list obviously also included Principles of Art History by Heinrich Wölfflin, who was declared an exemplary formalist art historian in earlier official Soviet historiography. Thaw-era discursive cocktail in art historiography sometimes led Kangilaski to logical contradictions. In spite of it, the Primer was an attempt to modernise the Stalinist approach to art history. In the Primer, the litmus test of the engagement with change was the new narrative of 20th century art history and the illustrative material that depicted “formalist bourgeois” artworks; 150 of the 279 plates are reproductions of Modernist avant-garde works from the early 20th century on. Put into the wider context, one can claim that art history writing in the Estonian SSR was deeply engaged with the ambivalent aims of Late Socialist Soviet politics, politics that was feared and despised but that, beginning in the late 1950s, nevertheless had shown the desire to move on and change.