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In late October, 50 years ago, the world witnessed one of the largest leaderless spontaneous revolutions. Triggered by a confluence of fateful events, Hungarian students led hundreds of thousands of their countrymen in an open revolt against the Soviet-sponsored government. Matthews, a journalist at Radio Free Europe, realised he had a ringside seat and saved every scrap of news. Here, at long last, from those journalist reports and memoirs, he recreates a picture of what it was like to live through that exhilirating time.
Within the larger context of cultural memory, family pictures have become one of the most intriguing multi- and interdisciplinary fields of investigation in the past decade. This field brings together artists working in different media (e.g. documentary photography and film, photo-based painting and installations, digital art, collage, montage, comics, etc.) as well as academics, critics, theorists and writers working in a wide range of disciplines including literature, history, art history, sociology, anthropology, psychoanalysis, film and media studies, visual culture studies, gender studies, postcolonial studies, and word and image studies. This volume intends to offer a broad, panoramic view of the topic combining West and East European as well as American perspectives.
An account of a major international art movement originating in the former Yugoslavia in the 1960s, which anticipated key aspects of information aesthetics. New Tendencies, a nonaligned modernist art movement, emerged in the early 1960s in the former Yugoslavia, a nonaligned country. It represented a new sensibility, rejecting both Abstract Expressionism and socialist realism in an attempt to formulate an art adequate to the age of advanced mass production. In this book, Armin Medosch examines the development of New Tendencies as a major international art movement in the context of social, political, and technological history. Doing so, he traces concurrent paradigm shifts: the change from F...
The COURAGE Handbook ushers its reader into the world of the compellingly rich heritage of cultural opposition in Eastern Europe. It is intended primarily to further a subtle understanding of the complex and multifaceted nature of cultural opposition and its legacy from the perspective of the various collections held in public institutions or by private individuals across the region. Through its focus on material heritage, the handbook provides new perspectives on the history of dissent and cultural non-conformism in the former socialist countries of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe. The volume is comprised of contributions by over 60 authors from a range of different academic and n...
Expanding the horizon of established accounts of Central European art under socialism, this book uncovers the neglected history of artistic engagement with the natural environment in the Eastern Bloc. The turbulent legacy of 1968, which saw the confluence of political upheaval, spread of counterculture, rise of ecological consciousness, and emergence of global conceptual art, provides the setting for Maja Fowkes’s innovative reassessment of the environmental practice of the Central European neo-avant-garde. Focussing on artists and artist groups whose ecological dimension has rarely been considered, including the Pécs Workshop from Hungary, OHO in Slovenia, TOK in Croatia, Rudolf Sikora i...
This book explores pacted transitions to democracy, in which former autocrats are granted amnesty in exchange for allowing free elections.
This volume is a collection of texts and documents selected from and illustrating the history of Artpool, a non-profit artist run institution in Budapest, established in 1979 by György Galántai and Júlia Klaniczay and operating since 1992 under the name of Artpool Art Research Center. The book focuses on Artpool’s direct antecedents (among them the events at György Galántai's Chapel Studio in Balatonboglár, 1970–1973), on the foundation, development, art projects and events, as well as the preferences and issues pertaining to art research (not independent of the historical and social environment they were conceived in) that had formed throughout the course of many years and decades...
The Berlin Wall was coming down, the Soviet Union was dissolving, Communist China was well on its way down the capitalist path; the world was witnessing political and social transformations without precedent. Artists, seeing it all firsthand, responded with a revolution of their own. What form this revolution took—how artists in the 1980s marked their societies' traumatic transition from decaying socialism to an insecure future—emerges in this remarkable volume. With in-depth perspectives on art and artists in the former Soviet Union, the Balkans and Mitteleuropa, China, and Cuba—all from scholars and art critics who were players in the tumultuous cultural landscapes they describe—th...
The operative role of the photographic media in making and remaking history History is increasingly made in images, not only because its records are largely photographic but also because our ideas about the past are formed in visual terms. This book offers a discussion of contemporary art practices which question the received notions of historical representations after the pivotal changes of 1989 in Europe. These art practices reveal, in different ways, the operative role of the photographic media in making and remaking history. Not limited to a particular artistic medium, they demonstrate how history is forged through enacting or re-enacting its past forms, while, on the other hand, they indicate how copying and quoting can contribute to creating a new, operative aesthetics. By foregrounding a performative character of images, art is shown to construct an alternative knowledge of the past. Among others the works of the following artists are discussed in this book: Zofia Kulik, Yael Bartana, Harun Farocki and Andrej Ujică, Luc Tuymans, Dierk Schmidt.