Politically unbecoming: critiques of "democracy" and postsocialist art from Europe

Abstract

This thesis presents a theoretical and historical account of how artists have responded to politics of democracy since the late-1980s. Three questions guide the direction of this analysis. Firstly: why, during its apparent apotheosis in recent years, have numerous artists critiqued democracy as the political, critical and aesthetic frame within which to identify their work? Secondly: how have artists undertaken this critique? Thirdly, and most importantly: what aesthetic and political discourses have artists proposed in lieu of the democracy that they critique?

Particular case studies of art from Europe help us to address these questions, for Europe has been an important crucible for vociferous, and often fraught, arguments about democracy in recent aesthetic, philosophical and political discourses. The first chapter of this thesis rigorously contextualises these discourses in relation to historical mobilisations of democracy since the Iron Curtain’s collapse. Relying on writings by Pat Simpson, Slavoj Žižek, Alain Badiou and Mario Tronti, I chart the significant imbrications of political ideology, philosophy and what I call ‘aesthetics of democratisation’ from the end of European communism, through the democratisations of postcommunism to the militarised democratisations of Iraq and Afghanistan after 2001. Notions of democracy shift and change during this period, becoming what Žižek calls a problematic ‘transcendental guarantee’ of assumed values and self-legitimation.

These shifting values in turn propel the concurrent critiques of democracy that are the subjects of the five subsequent chapters: Ilya Kabakov’s ‘total’ installations; Neue Slowenische Kunst’s mimicry of the nation-state during the 1990s; Thomas Hirschhorn’s large-scale works from the late-1990s onwards; Christoph Büchel and Gianni Motti’s collaborative ventures; and the co-operative practices of Dan and Lia Perjovschi. Through examination of the artists’ installations and voluminous writings, and based primarily on archival research and interviews, this thesis examines how their aesthetic politics emerge from the remobilisation of nonconformist art histories, through self-instituted contexts and alternative models for art production, exhibition and interpretation. These models, I argue, counter our usual understandings of art practice and its politics in Europe. They cumulatively assert ‘postsocialist aesthetics’ as an impertinent, yet urgent, prism through which to analyse contemporary art.