PERFORMANCE ART IN EASTERN EUROPE

"While performance art, or live art created by visual artists, in Western Europe and North America has been the subject of numerous exhibitions, texts and studies, performance art in Eastern Europe remains under-studied. This research, then, will probe the following questions: what does it mean to create performance art in the specific socio-political circumstances of Eastern Europe? What was the function and significance of performance art in this context? How does the knowledge and understanding of performance art practices from Eastern Europe enhance our understanding of the genre in a global sense?

Performance art emerged as a genre in its own right in Western Europe and North America in the 1960s and 1970s. Its function and significance varied, but one of the main drives behind creating an ephemeral art form was to both expand beyond the frame of the canvas, and to escape the commodification of art by refusing to produce art objects. Feminist artists also seized upon the genre because it enabled them to become active agents, instead of passive subjects.

In Eastern Europe, however, there was no art market to speak of. The state was the main patron, and painting and sculpture were the only officially tolerated genres of art. Nevertheless, artists in Eastern Europe developed their own performance art traditions, and these manifestations often varied depending on the country in question. For example, in the former Yugoslavia, performance developed on a semi-official level among artists in Student Culture Centres, established by Tito across the country to contain student unrest. In other places, such as Czechoslovakia and Russia, artists retreated to the countryside, where they experienced freedom from surveillance and an escape from the everyday, which they used to create. In Hungary, especially in the more liberal atmosphere of the 1970s, performances often took place at art openings, a liminal space between the official and unofficial where a more relaxed atmosphere provided room for experimental work.

One of the first and only explorations of performance art in the region took the form of an exhibition and catalogue in 1998, entitled Body and the East (Moderna Galerija, Ljubljana), curated by Zdenka Badovinac. Due to the nature and range of its scope, the analysis of artworks remained limited to single-country studies and brief catalogue entries. This project will result in a comprehensive monographic study, Performance Art in Eastern Europe, that expands on this groundbreaking undertaking and provides a thorough narrative and analysis of the development of the genre in the region. I organise my book thematically, so as to avoid a broad-brush approach inherent in a country-by-country study. This research also provides an additional dimension, by examining the work of artists working nowadays in the context of their predecessors, to examine how the significance, manifestation and function of performance art has changed since the communist period, if at all.

While the research will fill a gap in the literature on performance art, this new knowledge and information is targeted at a non-academic audience as well. Dynamic and interactive activities have been integrated into the project so as to involve artists and art historians in the region, such as a conference and exhibition that will solicit both papers and performances through an open call. Just as the book and conference aim to integrate Eastern European artists into the discourse, school workshops, with both educators and pupils, will integrate contemporary art practices, such as performance art, into the curriculum."