WHAT WAS CONTEMPORARY ART?

OCTAVIAN ESANU

1
Preamble. Over the past decade critics within various disciplines have
increasingly drawn attention to the category of the “contemporary.”
This interest is notable particularly within the art world as various
institutions, periodicals, critics, and art historians have boldly posed
the question, “What is contemporary art?”1 The question is tricky, for
those who pose it do not merely ask what kind of art is being made
today. In fact the term “contemporary art” has accumulated multiple
meanings, becoming a catchall phrase that, depending on the context
in which it is used, may refer to many different things: a certain kind
of art-making, a particular aesthetic sensibility, an art historical period,
a way of exhibiting, a particular department within a museum of art,
W H AT WA S C O N T E M P O R A R Y A R T ?

or even certain habits, tastes, and prices in the higher echelons of the
art market. Within art critical circles an interest in the contemporary
seems to have overlapped with a fading of interest in the “postmodern,”
a category that dominated critical debate over previous decades. This
fading away, along with a gradual substitution of umbrella terms often
deployed to perform tasks of periodization, may suggest a certain re-
adjustment of the art critical apparatus.
|

1 I refer here to the title of Terry Smith’s book What Is Contemporary Art? (Chicago: University
ESANU

of Chicago Press, 2009), as well as to two special issues of e-flux journal dedicated to the
same question. See e-flux journal vols. 11 and 12 at http://www.e-flux.com/journal.

© 2012 ARTMargins and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 5

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1162/ARTM_a_00003 by guest on 19 November 2023

 Unlike the postmodern debate, however, which was thoroughly
theorized by architectural, literary, and cultural critics and theorists
in its period of ascendancy, recent discussions of contemporary art are
still at an early stage. If the postmodern was understood as a cultural
“mode” (rather than an “epoch”) that came to announce the end of
the grand narratives after the demise of modernism (Lyotard), or as a
periodizing concept employed by critics to express the cultural logic of
late capitalist production (Jameson), little has been said in comparison
about the contemporary. Is contemporaneity a new form of temporality,
and the contemporary a new periodization concept? Is “contemporary
art” a strictly chronological term, or also an aesthetic one, or both?
Does it refer to another temporal frame of cultural history or to a new
paradigm or mode of art-making? What should we make of the relation
between the postmodern and the contemporary, and how do these two
relate to the category of the modern?
It seems to me that the contemporary differs from the postmodern
in one noteworthy respect: it possesses a certain materiality or con-
creteness that the postmodern never had. What I mean by this is that
even at the height of the period of postmodernism there were no insti-
tutions officially called “for postmodernist art.” I have never seen any
art museums or art centers that have their façades inscribed in capital
letters with the words “Museum of (or Center for) Postmodern Art.”
Nor have I heard of art marketing departments specifically devoted to
“postmodern sales.” Aside from architects, who have used the term to
refer to certain stylistic characteristics within their discipline, practitio-
ners of literary criticism and cultural studies have used it abstractly in
order to grasp the cultural logic of postwar capitalism.
In the case of the contemporary, on the other hand, there are
“really existing” practices and institutions such as museums, art
centers, journals, academic courses, documentation programs, job
positions, market niches, and so forth. Unlike the postmodern, which
appeared more as an immaterial mode or an abstract logic introduced
and theorized by critics from within the walls of academia, the phe-
nomenon of contemporary art seems to extend and exist concomitantly
across and within diverse parts of the real art world, academia, the
ARTMARGINS 1:1

culture industry, finance, services, and businesses. This concreteness

is suggestive of the very origins of these two terms—“postmodern” and
“contemporary”—for if the category of the postmodern has primarily
circulated among literary and cultural critics, artists, and architects,

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1162/ARTM_a_00003 by guest on 19 November 2023

 the designation “contemporary art” as we use it today has been persistently
used, in the second half of the last century and beyond, by art managers
to name new types of art institutions and museum departments, or to
delineate a new segment of art sales within major auction houses. At times,
it even seems that the term “contemporary art” has entered critical and art
historical academic discourse through the back door of certain institutions
engaged in distribution of or even speculation with art.2
I do not intend to further pursue a clarification of the differences
between periodization labels, crucial though they may be especially
today, when one senses in the air a “paradigm shift” toward yet another
label: global art.3 Instead, I would like to delve deeper into the contem-
porary itself, which like the postmodern tends to be very forgetful. The
loss of a sense of history or of historicity, a loss that Fredric Jameson
has identified as one of the most distinctive features of the postmod-
ern, 4 also seems to haunt the contemporary. Today special issues and
books dedicated to questioning the nature of contemporary art tend to
remain on the surface of the ever-present contemporary, as if they were
themselves entangled in the ahistorical logic that they try to unravel. I
would like to offer a more historically informed view of what has been
understood by the phrase “contemporary art” in a region of the world
where that phrase emerged most suddenly and unexpectedly. By look-
ing closely at a series of meanings invested in this term and by compar-
ing contemporary and pre- or noncontemporary artistic comportments,
I would like to suggest that contemporary art (as these two words are
used today) refers to specific conditions of artistic production that have
flourished under the latest phase of global capitalism, a phase known
in some areas as neoliberalism, in others as neoconservatism, corporat-
ism, free market ideology, or laissez-faire economics. Contemporary
W H AT WA S C O N T E M P O R A R Y A R T ?

art—insofar as it denotes a segment of artistic production maintained

by a global network of art institutions, a segment that has persistently
claimed and won hegemony over other, “undemocratic” forms—
consolidated itself in the second half of the last century against the

2 Some of the literature relates the origin of the periodizing label “contemporary art” to the
new marketing strategies of the two major British auction houses introduced in the sec-
ond half of the last century. See for instance Elisabeth Couturier, L’art contemporain, mode
d’emploi (Paris: Filipacchi, 2004), 22.
3 See for instance Hans Belting and Andrea Buddensieg, The Global Art World: Audiences,
|

Markets, and Museums (Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje/Cantz, 2009).

ESANU

4 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 1991).

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1162/ARTM_a_00003 by guest on 19 November 2023

 background of receding welfare and socialist states, leaving certain
traces and shadows that await exploration.

2
Contemporary art, the product of postsocialist transition. An especially
fertile place to begin a historically informed discussion of contempo-
rary art may be found at the margins of the Western world—in the
postsocialist countries of what was once called Eastern Europe. It is
in this region that the “concreteness” of the contemporary—which, in
more general terms, may be understood as a habitualization or institu-
tionalization of certain types of artistic behavior—has manifested itself
most clearly. To be sure, the process of contemporary artistic institu-
tionalization also has a rich history in the Western world, except that
there its development proceeded at its own pace (like Western historical
modernization in general), entangled in the rise of postwar consumer
society. What is radically different about the emergence of contempo-
rary art in the postsocialist countries is that here new and unfamiliar
forms of artistic behavior were hastily transfused into, or grafted onto,
existing cultural scenes. This abrupt institutional transference makes
what goes by the name of contemporary art in this region more suscep-
tible to critical perception.
This process took place during the so-called decade of transition, a
period in which foreign and local governmental and private initiatives
began to assemble new types of institution in every sphere of social
life. Under the slogan “transition to democracy,” a large-scale process of
institution building was unleashed. It was widely believed during this
time that the imitation and implementation of already-tested Western
institutional models was the most effective method of changing the
behaviors of former socialist citizens, in accordance with the logic of
the new political-economic regime. This approach to modernization
has been dubbed “capitalism by design.”5
Similar processes of democratization by design took place in
the field of art. Here, radically new types of art institution, financed
from abroad, sustained and promoted “open” or “democratic” forms
of artistic production, display, and distribution. In this endeavor the
ARTMARGINS 1:1

Soros Centers for Contemporary Art (SCCA) network has been the

5 On “capitalism by design,” see Claus Offe, “Capitalism by Democratic Design? Democratic

Theory Facing the Triple Transition in East Central Europe,” in German Sociology, ed. Uta
Gerhardt (New York: Continuum, 1998).

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1162/ARTM_a_00003 by guest on 19 November 2023

 most effective, and it would later be credited with laying the foundation
of what is today presented as contemporary art in this region. The net-
work was implemented throughout the 1990s in eighteen postsocialist
countries in Eastern Europe and Central Asia,6 and in what follows
I will consider what appears to me to be of critical significance with
regard to this network’s mission and subsequently to the question of
what contemporary art is.

3
The mission of a contemporary art institution. Although many believed
(and some still do) that the main goal of the Soros centers was artistic
charity—that is, providing support for artists in the difficult time of
transition—this was not entirely the case. First of all, one must make a
clear distinction between charity and philanthropy, and the easiest way
to do so is to turn to a proverb that became the motto of many private
and governmental institutions operating at the margins of the Western
world: “Give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish,
you feed him for a lifetime.” The work of the SCCA program, like that
of the Open Society Institute and of many other foundations operating
in the postsocialist countries, has been philanthropic, for each center
was above all a resource that taught artists “how to fish” in the new
sociopolitical and economic waters.
The mission of the SCCA program was inspired by new trends in
cultural policy that were taking shape during the second half of the
last century in the West, in particular in the United States. At the heart
of their activities were a series of changes that followed the so-called
managerial revolution in the arts.7 The main outcome of this revolu-
tion was the eclipse of the individual patron and the rise of nonprofit
W H AT WA S C O N T E M P O R A R Y A R T ?

institutional forms of cultural sponsorship, a shift in cultural policy

that led to the decline of the figure of the art patron, of the so-called
friend of the muses or rich benefactor who has accompanied the artist
through various periods of art history. In the United States, the Ford

6 Western readers often confuse the Soros Centers for Contemporary Art (SCCA) with the
Soros Foundations (or Open Society Foundations). The SCCA or the “Soros centers” were
autonomous regional programs within the local Soros Foundations. For a concise history
of the SCCA network, see the website of C3 in Budapest, http://www.c3.hu/scca/.
7 On the managerial revolution in the arts, see Paul DiMaggio, “Social Structure, Institutions
|

and Cultural Goods: The Case of the United States,” in The Politics of Culture: Policy
ESANU

Perspectives for Individuals, Institutions, and Communities, ed. Gigi Bradford et al. (New York:
New Press, 2000).

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1162/ARTM_a_00003 by guest on 19 November 2023

 Foundation was the first private institution to promote such a radi-
cally new model for cultural philanthropy, introducing for example the
notion of the arts grant. This was no longer regarded as an expression
of personal charity, as a gift offered by a wealthy individual to an artist
out of love for art, but as a highly leveraged investment.8 While the
supporters of the cultural managerial revolution regarded the new poli-
cies as a path toward wider cultural engagement, a more democratic
and decentralized form of culture that would offer a voice to multiple
identities, players, and interest groups by inviting them to participate in
and make culture, critics regarded the turn toward active philanthropy
as an intrusion of private capital into the field of culture, as an attempt
to subdue and control erratic artistic tendencies and to establish instead
a form of “coercive philanthropy,” that is, a form of cultural support in
which artists, in order to survive, must respond “artistically” to specific
programs and projects written by cultural managers.9
In Eastern Europe, dissatisfaction with the new forms of cultural
management came later than in the West, coinciding with the so-called
social turn at the turn of the millennium. At the time that the Open
Society Institute implemented its SCCA program, the centers were
regarded as progressive Western models brought in to contribute to the
democratization of art. The philanthropic activism of the SCCA aimed
at the very roots of a series of questions concerning what the role of the
arts and of the artist in the new posttotalitarian society might be, how
one should perceive the artist’s relation to the autonomous institution
of art, and who will see to the artist’s economic interests.

4
Two institutional models. In the early 1990s, Eastern European art crit-
ics commented on the coexistence of two dissimilar art institutional
models, describing one using terms such as “fine arts” and “elitist” and
the other as “contemporary” and “democratic.”10 From an early stage in
the SCCA program’s implementation many centers found themselves

8 On pre- and post-Fordist eras of cultural funding, see John Kreidler, “Leverage Lost:
Evolution in the Nonprofit Arts Ecosystem,” in Bradford et al., Politics of Culture.
9 See Robert Brustein, “Coercive Philanthropy,” in Bradford et al., Politics of Culture. See
ARTMARGINS 1:1

also Andrea Frazer, “A Museum Is Not a Business: It Is Run in a Businesslike Fashion,” in

Art and Its Institutions: Current Conflicts, Critique and Collaborations, ed. Nina Möntmann
(London: Black Dog Publishing, 2006).
10 I encountered this view in a text written by the Romanian art critic Anca Oroveanu, “Cele
doua modele,” Arta 1–2 (1993): 1–4.

10

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1162/ARTM_a_00003 by guest on 19 November 2023

 in opposition to the local Unions of Artists (the professional associa-
tions of artists akin to the socialist trade unions)—an opposition that
was not always, or not necessarily, confrontational but that neverthe-
less persisted due to contrasting missions and modes of operation. The
Union of Artists was an organizational model under Soviet socialism
that evolved through multiple institutional formats (cooperatives, trade
unions, committees) and whose social tasks were close in scope to
those of the SCCA network. However, aside from their common goals
of supporting artistic production and the distribution of art, the two
differed significantly in how they proposed to achieve these goals.11
Unlike the Unions, which provided professional support to large
numbers of artists based on their membership, the privately funded
Soros centers assisted artists without demanding membership or any
other form of professional affiliation. While the Unions were (and
many still are) ruled by collectively elected committees and chairper-
sons—with the latter position usually occupied by a painter or sculptor
elected by the members on the basis of his or her professional achieve-
ments—the SCCA offices were mechanisms run by hired managers
recruited among local liberal art historians and critics, following a
posted job announcement (or, in the early phases, hired upon recom-
mendations received from the network’s executive director). While
a Union’s artist-chairperson ruled in accordance with resolutions
taken collectively (de jure but not de facto) at all-Union congresses,
the SCCA managers conducted their activities in accordance with
decisions approved by a small board of experts (a relationship com-
parable to some degree to that existing between executive managers
and legislative company shareholders in the West). While the exhibi-
tions organized by the Unions were juried by committees of artists,
W H AT WA S C O N T E M P O R A R Y A R T ?

the SCCA annual exhibitions were juried, in most cases, by a board

consisting of critics and art historians, and in later phases by commis-
sioned curators. While the Unions oversaw almost all aspects of their
artist-members’ lives (from offering exhibition space to distributing,
through the Artists’ Funds, state commissions, studios, materials,
or even apartments, summer holiday trips, pensions, and subsidized
kindergarten facilities for children), the SCCA network operated on a

11 In those parts of this text where I discuss the differences between the SCCA network and
|

the Artists’ Unions I draw primarily on the situation in the former Soviet Union, with
ESANU

which I am most familiar, as well as on my personal experience as the founding director of

the SCCA Chisinau, Moldova.

11

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1162/ARTM_a_00003 by guest on 19 November 2023

 time-to-time basis, offering only short-term contractually based grants,
or renting and subcontracting goods and services through third-party
agents, often through a publicly announced tender. While the Unions
served only those who were their members (and in order to become one
an artist had to have first completed formal training in one of the state’s
art academies), the SCCA offices were formally open to anyone regard-
less of education, and artists who collaborated with these institutions
did not always hold an arts degree. Finally, the institutional structure of
a Union was organized in accordance with the taxonomy of particular
arts—the Artists’ Unions were divided into such departments or sec-
tions as Painting, Sculpture, Graphic Arts, and Decorative Arts, whereas
a Composers’ Union consisted of such sections as Symphonic, Chamber,
and Choral Music. The Soros centers, on the other hand, operated along
a cross- or intermedia pattern, with no preferences given to any particu-
lar technical agency, remaining open to all artistic formats and media.
Even if there did exist a certain internal structure, it was organized not
according to art genres that had historically evolved around a particular
medium or métier but rather according to the partition of their budgets
into three main categories of general activity: artists’ grants, art docu-
mentation, and contemporary art exhibition.12
It is not necessary to recall here that the contemporary art model
popularized by the SCCA network embraced a different artistic and
aesthetic agenda as well. To better understand this difference, a dichot-
omy that has been widely exploited by the ideologues of postsocialist
transition might be useful. Karl Popper’s distinction between open
(democratic) and closed (totalitarian or authoritarian) societies was
adopted by Western private and governmental agencies and deployed
to deliver the message of transition. This dichotomy, so favored by neo-
liberal social scientists and policy makers, may also be well suited to
describe the clash between the two aesthetic and artistic principles that
divided the postsocialist cultural field during the transitional period.
One may describe the contemporary art model, for instance, in terms
of an “open art” that was promoted by the Open Society Institute, and
define this type of artistic production along the lines of what Umberto
Eco calls the “open work” (opera aperta).13 Eco calls “open” that segment
ARTMARGINS 1:1

12 For a concise review of the Soviet Artists’ Unions, see M. Lazarev, “The Organization
of Artists’ Work in the USSR,” Leonardo 12, no. 2 (Spring 1979): 107–9.
13 Umberto Eco, The Open Work (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989).

12

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1162/ARTM_a_00003 by guest on 19 November 2023

 of art and poetics that builds upon the modernist cultural heritage, and
whose artistic and aesthetic properties allow for a wide range of interpre-
tive possibilities and readings thanks to a democratic conception of form
that permits various constellations of artistic elements to form multiple
relations. A “closed” artwork, then, would be the opposite; it would be an
artwork produced in accordance with pre-established hierarchical orders
and sets of preconceived principles in which poetic or artistic relations
are mediated through one or several central categories, as in premodern
art founded upon metaphysical or Christian theological assumptions.
The above differences between opposing artistic models—which I
have gathered here under such umbrella terms as “open” versus “closed”
or “contemporary” versus “fine arts”—have wide implications for artistic
production. Each model encourages a different type of artistic comport-
ment. I will list a few of these differences by drawing upon a relatively
little-known book by Thierry de Duve, who has compared two conflicting
models of art education: the beaux arts and Bauhaus models.14
If the Union of Artists model, which would correspond to de
Duve’s “fine arts” model, was based on the assumption that an artist
must have talent (a natural aptitude with which only a few have been
gifted), then within the democratic contemporary art model all artists
are equally gifted (think of Joseph Beuys’s slogan Jeder Mensch ist ein
Künstler—“everyone is an artist”), for what in this model counts is
not the artist’s talent but his or her attitude. If in the precontemporary
model the artist knew a technique, a craft, or a métier (for instance,
painting or sculpture taught within the apprenticeship system of
workshops), then in the contemporary art model the artist works with
various media (understood as data or information delivered through
a particular channel of communication), and the process of learning
W H AT WA S C O N T E M P O R A R Y A R T ?

may not necessarily be confined within the art school, as was widely
believed to be necessary within the context of nineteenth-century artis-
tic academism. If a métier is practiced, a medium is questioned; if a
profession is taught, a medium is discovered; if a craft relies on techni-
cal experience, a medium benefits from constant experimentation; if at
the heart of the fine arts model is the notion of imitation, one might say
that by contrast the contemporary paradigm privileges invention (the
“concept” or “conceptual acuity” that was favored by so many on the
SCCA juries).
|
ESANU

14 Thierry de Duve, Faire école (Paris: Les Presses du réel, 1992).

13

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1162/ARTM_a_00003 by guest on 19 November 2023

 From these differences between the SCCA and the Unions—
the list above is by no means comprehensive—one may draw some
preliminary conclusions regarding the novelty of the model of con-
temporary art popularized by the SCCA. Politically speaking, we
may distinguish between a state-supported mass organization based
on a collective decision-making mechanism (even if it was a formal
one) and a private office-based model in which artists do not have the
formal right to influence the decisions of the managers. (It may be
relevant here to mention the Chto delat collective’s insistence—follow-
ing Jens Hoffmann—that the next Documenta be curated by an artist.)
Institutionally speaking, we may distinguish between a somewhat
anachronistic association organized in accordance with a craft-guild
division and with certain historical genres or métiers (painting, sculp-
ture, graphic arts) and a contemporary inter- or cross-media model that
like a contemporary business enterprise is structured in accordance
with broadly defined activities or services, as with the tripartite budget-
ary division of the SCCA. Professionally speaking, we can distinguish
between the Union artists who were provided with full and comprehen-
sive working conditions, though at the price of control and censorship
over their artistic product, and the contemporary art model that allows
and even encourages artists to “do whatever,” but that provides only
“outward preconditions,”15 and only to a select few in accordance with
capitalist criteria of success. Artistically, we can distinguish between
the regulated craftsmanship practiced within historically established
fine arts genres (these must remain “socialist in form and national in
content”) and an “open work” modernist (or postmodernist) attitude
that considers the aesthetic problematic of form and content somewhat
outdated. The contemporary attitude looks instead for new means and
media of individual expression, or aims for a constant construction and
invention of artistic affects, percepts, and concepts (as Deleuze would
have put it).
Institutionally, the arrival of the SCCA network in Eastern Europe
in the early 1990s may bring to mind what happened in Western
Europe after the French Revolution, when many craft guilds that had

15 The expression “outward preconditions” comes from Ludwig von Mises’ best-known book,
ARTMARGINS 1:1

Liberalism (1927). Here he argues that liberals do not concern themselves with spiritual
goods because they believe that the “highest and deepest in man cannot be touched by out-
ward regulation.” Accordingly, a liberal position on supporting the arts would be to provide
only “outward preconditions to the development of the inner life.” See Ludwig von Mises,
Liberalism: The Classical Tradition (1927; repr., Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2005), xx.

14

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1162/ARTM_a_00003 by guest on 19 November 2023

 successfully operated under the ancien régime were abolished, con-
sidered impediments to liberalization and true market relations.16
Similarly, in the postsocialist countries, the socialist craft guild–like
model of the Unions was discredited and its influence over the field
of art drastically reduced, as the new cultural elites considered it too
regulated, egalitarian, monopolistic, and anachronistic—in short, an
impediment to the development of contemporary capitalistic rela-
tions of artistic production. With the arrival of the SCCA network, the
Unions lost their legitimating power; they ceased to be the exclusive
mechanism for deciding who was or was not an artist.

5
A contemporary artwork is a document. The differences between contem-
porary and socialist art institutions are the result of divergent outlooks
and approaches. Each model has its own specific agenda and organi-
zational structure. Recall that administratively, an SCCA office differs
from a Union in that it does not organize its activities in accordance
with the internal logic of what, since the eighteenth century, has been
known as beaux arts, which is to say a division into the historically
established arts of painting, sculpture, or graphics—often hierarchi-
cally subdivided in turn using such terms as “fine” and “applied,” or
“high” and “low.” In the spirit of democratic egalitarianism and the
free market, the SCCA performed a deregulation of the field and a
decentralization of artistic production by abandoning the rigid divi-
sions among arts and media, insisting that in an open and enlightened
society all artistic techniques must be treated equally. The contempo-
rary, which implies temporal equality, does not bend down before any
authority, be it a long-lasting tradition or history; it refuses to foster or
W H AT WA S C O N T E M P O R A R Y A R T ?

privilege a particular technique, medium, or trend (even though—and

let’s keep this between us—most of the SCCA offices implicitly and
insistently promoted and favored the newest formats and media, espe-
cially those that relied on the latest Western gadgets and technologies,
many of which were available for cash or credit in the department store
next door). A postsocialist center for contemporary art does not direct
its operations in accordance with the immanent logic of beaux arts, that
is, in accordance with certain historically evolved métiers or crafts that
|
ESANU

16 On the history of craft guilds, see Maarten Praak et al., Craft Guilds in the Early Modern
Low Countries (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2006), 231.

15

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1162/ARTM_a_00003 by guest on 19 November 2023

 produce beautiful objects, as was the case with the Unions. Instead, it
positioned itself above the entire field of cultural production with its
multitude of means and forms of expressions in order to better manage
it in accordance with certain general types of activity or project.
Budget-wise, the activities of a typical SCCA were divided along
three main lines of spending: art documentation, annual exhibition,
and artists’ grants. Documentation lies at the origins of the SCCA
network, from the moment that a small program by the name of Soros
Fine Arts Documentation Center was launched in Budapest in 1985.
The primary task of this program—established in cooperation between
the newly inaugurated Soros Foundation Hungary and the Budapest
Mûcsarnok (Kunsthalle) in 1985—was “to support modern Hungarian
culture which was banned or at least forced into the background by offi-
cial cultural policies; in essence support Hungarian artists in ‘counter-
cultural’ circles.”17 Accordingly, the roots of the postsocialist centers for
contemporary art can be directly traced to the agency of documentation
and the task of recording and preserving instances of countercultural
modernism (or postmodernism). The historical transition to contem-
porary art took place in 1991, when the Soros Fine Arts Documentation
Center was renamed the Soros Center for Contemporary Art Budapest.
This first center can be regarded as the pilot of the SCCA network,
whose mission, tripartite budgetary structure, and major activities
were established throughout the 1990s in twenty cultural capitals of
the former socialist bloc.
The SCCA network described the objectives of its documentation
program in the following terms:

In most cases, little or no documented information exists on the

artists selected by the SCCA. Therefore, the SCCA prepares a
comprehensive account of the selected artist’s work, including bio-
graphical details, bibliography, copies of relevant articles, published
catalogues. . . . The documentation can be utilized by the artists
themselves, curators, art historians, and any other visitors.18

In the postsocialist countries the SCCA network was the first official
ARTMARGINS 1:1

institution to document living (or recently deceased) artists. The fading

17 http://www.c3.hu/scca/index.html.
18 Description of the SCCA network activities (document intended for internal circulation
within the offices of the SCCA network).

16

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1162/ARTM_a_00003 by guest on 19 November 2023

 Unions had also, at one time, catalogued socialist artworks, especially
those commemorating socialist heroes and events, but they did not
keep systematic records of current events and artists. Documenting and
cataloguing live events, in the way in which this has been done in the
West since the emergence of ephemeral or immaterial art forms, took
place only within the local “countercultural circles” of artists and critics
who had launched unofficial archives (including the Artpool Research
Center in Budapest and the Moscow Archive of New Art [MANI], to
name only two).
Within the contemporary art model, documentation plays a key
role; in the present case it explains why, for instance, most of the
directors, staff, and board members within the SCCA network were
art historians and critics (unlike the socialist Unions, which were
run primarily by artists). The practice of gathering biographical and
bibliographical data, of compiling lists of works, collections, exhibi-
tions, slides, articles (all of which were then translated into English and
made available to local and foreign artists, scholars, and collectors or,
in some cases, digitized and sent to the Center for Advanced Studies in
the Visual Arts at the National Gallery in Washington),19 seemed like a
very novel activity in the early 1990s. Within the countries of the Soviet
bloc, the gathering of specialized documentation had been the preroga-
tive of various research institutions, academies, archives, and libraries,
and, most often, these activities were directed at gathering documents
on individuals and events from the past. Collecting information on cer-
tain living artists and current or contemporary events was performed
either by the state security committees (the KGB) or within local dis-
sident circles. With the collapse of the socialist state, the contemporary
art institution took over this task and performed it on a professional art
W H AT WA S C O N T E M P O R A R Y A R T ?

historical basis.
But what is art documentation? Art documentation may be
regarded as a branch of documentology, a field that emerged in the first
half of the twentieth century at the crossroads of library, archival, and
information sciences. The emergence of this modern discipline has
been regarded as another consequence of the Gutenberg revolution
and, later, of the typographical explosion that took place in the second
half of the nineteenth century, prompting many Western countries
in the early twentieth century to establish documenting agencies and
|
ESANU

19 Ibid.

17

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1162/ARTM_a_00003 by guest on 19 November 2023

 institutes.20 In the postwar period, specialists in this field regarded
documentation as a cultural technique and as a tool for the diffusion of
Western ideals of modernity within different cultural and geographical
spaces.21 There was also a conviction that documentation was to serve,
above all, the humanities, and in this respect it was distinguished from
information sciences oriented toward engineering and computing. As
the French documentalist Suzanne Briet writes, “[D]ocumentation is
to culture as the machine is to industry,”22 while a document, simply
defined, is “a proof in support of a fact,” or more abstractly “any con-
crete or symbolic indexical sign [indice], preserved or recorded toward
the ends of representing, of reconstituting, or of proving a physical
or intellectual phenomenon.”23 The French Union of Documentation
Organizations includes in its definition “all bases of materially fixed
knowledge . . . capable of being used for consultation, study, and proof.”24
Generally speaking the document is the trace of something that is
not instantly available (for example, a zebra in an African savanna is a
natural phenomenon, whereas a zebra in a European zoo is only a docu-
ment), or it is a trace of something that has ceased to exist (for example,
an endangered species that today can be seen only at the zoo).25 Indeed,
thinkers who have reflected upon modern practices of documentation
often center their reflections around the fundamental concepts of life
and death. Of course, most often documents take inorganic or even digi-
tal forms, especially with the proliferation of different techniques of rep-
resentation when “documentary forms are increasingly taking the shape
of ‘substitutes for lived experience’—that is, representational forms that
assume the illusion of lived experience itself (film, photographs, etc.).”26
Documentologists who consider the meaning of the document and its
relation to reality have largely understood it within the same frame of
reasoning that earlier twentieth-century critics such as Walter Benjamin
employed to speak of the relationship between the modern artwork and
new technologies of mechanical reproduction.27

20 See Suzanne Briet et al., What Is Documentation? (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2006).
21 Ibid., 58
22 Ibid., 17.
23 Ibid., 9–10.
ARTMARGINS 1:1

24 Ibid., 10.
25 Briet et al. offer as an example of a document an antelope of a new kind caught by an
explorer in Africa and brought to the Botanical Garden as proof (or document). Ibid.
26 Ibid., vii.
27 Ronald E. Day, in ibid., vii.

18

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1162/ARTM_a_00003 by guest on 19 November 2023

 Contemporary art documentation shares with documentology a
similar historical background and set of concerns. Art critics have also
argued (along the lines of Benjamin’s theory of modern art’s reproduc-
ibility) that art documentation is in fact a substitute for artistic experi-
ence. “Art documentation is by definition not art; it merely refers to art,
and in precisely this way it makes it clear that art, in this case, is no
longer present and immediately visible but rather absent and hidden.”28
The absent and hidden aspect of art documentation is related to major
changes that took place in post-1945 art, to cultural processes that
unfolded under the sign of what Lucy Lippard theorized in the 1970s as
the dematerialization of the art object. More recently, John Roberts used
the concept of intangibility in order to analyze transformations that
took place in the very nature of artistic labor, following the reception
of Duchamp’s readymade in the 1960s.29 (In passing, one can say that
from the perspective of documentology Duchamp’s infamous urinal
itself appears as a document, that is, as an object that has lost its initial
function and has become a sign, a trace, or an object of knowledge.)
Art documentation begins to occupy a more prominent role especially
following the transition from art understood primarily in terms of the
production of tangible objects (paintings, sculptures, graphics) to intan-
gible or ideatic artistic experiences (actions, performances, immaterial
conceptualism). Such experiences are always in urgent need of proofs
that underwrite their objectivity. Contemporary art criticism resorted
to various traditions in order to explain the dramatic transformations
that bestowed a new status upon the art document: from reading
Hegelian portents of the “death of art” to tracing the effects of changes
within the mode of economic production (the managerial revolution);
from lamenting the rise of the “totally administered society” to detect-
W H AT WA S C O N T E M P O R A R Y A R T ?

ing radical changes in the nature of human life made by contemporary

biopolitical technologies of governance.30
But the rise of art documentation is also closely related to twen-
tieth-century political processes, to the global advance of democracy
and the market. Take the history (and the name) of Documenta—a, or
perhaps the, major forum of international contemporary art. Its history
is connected to the political processes that unfolded in the aftermath

28 Boris Groys, Art Power (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 60.
|

29 John Roberts, The Intangibilities of Form: Skill and Deskilling in Art after the Readymade
ESANU

(London: Verso, 2007).

30 For a biopolitical understanding of art documentation, see Groys, Art Power.

19

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1162/ARTM_a_00003 by guest on 19 November 2023

 of World War II in West Germany, for its early artistic objectives
were closely interwoven with the political agenda of the “transition to
democracy” that unfolded within the so-called postwar transitional
countries (Italy, Austria, Japan, and West Germany). In other words,
one of the initial missions of Documenta was to “document” the
advance of democracy and of the free market, offering cultural proof of
West Germany’s break with its authoritarian past.31
The early history of SCCA’s documentation program can be
regarded in similar terms, for one of its main tasks was to bring into
the spotlight “degenerate” artistic experiences that had burgeoned in
the shadow of state socialism. Aside from conceiving this program as
an alternative space of knowledge—a space established in opposition
to the library and the archive—the SCCA documentation program was
also co-opted as a tool for the diffusion of Western ideals of modernity,
serving the general process of democratization. One of its tasks was
to assist in what during the transition was known as the “rewriting of
history,” when local historiography strove to lift the ideological screen
from distorted national history. A cleansed history was needed for the
construction of new postsocialist identities, which would then tend to
orbit around national categories.32 Socialist history was declared “pol-
luted” or “communist propaganda,” and the main task of the historian
was the “renovation,” “reconstruction,” and “nationalization” of his-
tory.33 In art the processes that unfolded around the new documenta-
tion programs established by the SCCA were similar in many respects
within this network, as art historians resorted to documentation in
order to bring to light artistic experiences hidden during socialism
under the thick ideological cloak of official art history.34
The document, however, is not a favored tool only for the art
historian and critic. To once again invoke the zebra, one might say
that a contemporary piece of art is above all a document, given that

31 On the political mission of the first Documenta (1955) and the role it played in the processes
of postwar democratization (for instance presenting artists who had been considered
“degenerate” during the 1930s), see the first Documenta catalogue (Kassel, Germany: Druck
Verlag, 1955).
32 See Ulf Brunnbauer, (Re)Writing History—Historiography in Southeast Europe after Socialism
(Münster: Lit Verlag, 2004).
ARTMARGINS 1:1

33 Ibid., 21.
34 Many publications in recent decades have fallen within the boundaries of postsocialist
art historical rewriting. One good example is the catalogue Experiment, produced by the
SCCA Bucharest in 1997. See Magda Cârneci, ed., Experiment in Romanian Art since 1960
(Bucharest: SCCA Bucharest, 1997).

20

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1162/ARTM_a_00003 by guest on 19 November 2023

 today it is difficult to imagine a legitimate artwork in the wilderness
of the savanna—that is, outside of the confines of contemporary art
institutions. This became apparent in Eastern Europe during the
1990s. Unlike Union artists, who spent most of their time in the studio
perfecting skills and producing tangible artifacts, contemporary artists
spent most of their time in offices, engaged in poststudio practices
such as editing or recording videos, preparing technical drawings of
objects that awaited their installation in various institutional settings
(like the zebra on its way to the zoo), or negotiating new projects and
opportunities with various institutions. In some countries it was
within the SCCA offices during the 1990s that one could have wit-
nessed the birth of a new type of artist: the artist-as-entrepreneur.35 The
latter operates within a complex division of labor, manipulating and
working—for the most part—with documents.

6
The plan and the project. The business of art documentation popular-
ized by the SCCA network brings us to another topic: the difference
between contemporary and precontemporary artistic mentalities.
Under socialism, for an artist to receive benefits from the bureau-
cratized professional associations, he or she was expected to become a
member of the Union and then to pledge allegiance to its statute and
to the socialist plan. The socialist five-year plan was directed toward
coordinating human efforts and material resources to attain higher
productivity and standards of living. Like the representatives of other
professions, artists were not absolved from participating in these
formal procedures, a ritual that has since become the object of ridicule
and contempt. When the SCCA network entered the Eastern European
W H AT WA S C O N T E M P O R A R Y A R T ?

artistic scene, it introduced a new way of formulating artistic intention-

ality: the “project.” Each artist who collaborated with these institutions
during the 1990s knew that in order to receive a grant for travel or for
an exhibition, a catalogue, or any other activity, he or she had to submit
a document or a project explaining, in minute detail, the proposed
artistic activity, aims and objectives, time frame and budget, idea and
realization. The “project” became a prerequisite for an artist to benefit
from resources offered by the Soros centers as well as by many other
Western cultural donors that operated in the postsocialist region.
|
ESANU

35 For a more detailed discussion of this term, see Roberts, Intangibilities of Form, 11–13.

21

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1162/ARTM_a_00003 by guest on 19 November 2023

 What makes working according to a socialist plan (or ignoring it,
as many did) so different from working within the logic of the project?
Here is what, for example, Ilya Kabakov says:

The projects that contemporary artists are proposing today radically

differ from the indefinite projects of the artists of the past. To the
question: “What do you want to paint or to make?” the artist of the
past could have calmly answered “I will start and then—I will see,”
“And when are you going to finish?”—“Well, this is such a pro-
cess. . . .” Today every sign of ambiguity in your project announces
your defeat.36

In fact, what Kabakov above calls the “indefinite projects . . . of the

past” are hardly comparable with those projects on which Russian and
other Eastern European artists learned the ropes after 1989. In most of
the Soviet Union, the Russian word proyekt (which entered the Russian
language during Peter the Great’s first major pro-Western transition or
modernization in the eighteenth century)37 was used primarily among
technical and scientific specialists. Within the Soviet art scene, both
official and unofficial, the term “project” was used by architects, but
not by artists.
Among all art-related professions, in fact, it is the contemporary
architects and urban planners who have drawn the clearest distinc-
tions between the “project” and the “plan” within the limits of their
disciplines. The relationship between the two in urbanism, urban
policies, and all those activities that involve the rational management of
a territory concerns above all a distinction in scale. Planning involves
large-scale decisions, a long-sighted gaze, a complex reconciliation of
conflicting interests, a maximizing of compatibilities, and a need to
account for an immense number of details and persons. A plan (as the
terms “master plan” and “five-year plan” suggest) is a proposal that
involves large-scale totalizing decisions made over great spans of time
and space; it is a macro proposal that attempts to account for multiple
variables and details. It is above all the scale of the future intention that
ARTMARGINS 1:1

36 Ilya Kabakov et al., Dialogi: 1990–1994 (Moscow: Ad-Marginem, 1999), 157, translated
by the author.
37 Russian etymological dictionaries trace the origins of the word proyekt to the German projekt
and date its origins to the reign of Peter the Great. See, for example, Max Vasmer et al.,
Etimologicheskii slovar russkogo iazyka, vol. 3 (Moscow: Progress, 1987), 3:373.

22

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1162/ARTM_a_00003 by guest on 19 November 2023

 distinguishes a plan from a project. The Oxford English Dictionary gives
the following entry for the word plan: “a general schema or programme
for conducting a particular project or operation.”38 The difference
between a plan and a project can be understood as the relation between
the general (or universal) and the particular, between the abstract and
the concrete. A plan is a manifestation of universal intentionality, as
in the deistic belief that God is the Supreme Architect or the Eternal
Watchman who has a plan (not a project) for the entire universe.
Similarly, the socialist plan is a universal form of projecting inten-
tionality. The socialist subject submits to the five-year plan in order
to receive material benefits in the same way in which the Christian
consents in his or her faith to be part of God’s universal plan in order to
gain access to salvation.
A project, on the other hand, is concerned with the secular and
down-to-earth particular; it is (as one might say) God’s plan scaled
down and adjusted to the reality of the individual believer, and is simi-
lar in this sense to Protestant personalism. It is a concrete programmed
realization set in precise terms: “a project is a reality which, once it has
completed, ceases to exist.”39 “Project” bespeaks technical rationality,
success, effectiveness, productivity, resources, means-end thinking,
quantitative values, economic interests and instrumental execution,
control and monitoring of performances, and carefully choreographed
and staged processes (all epithets collected from architectural manage-
rial literature). “All projects share common features: they are one-off,
unique, finite, purposive, goal-oriented enterprises undertaken in real
time.”40 In other words, unlike a plan, which aims at a comprehensive
totalization—and which the pragmatic critic of socialist or welfare-state
macro planning, professing a nominalist disbelief in universals or pure
W H AT WA S C O N T E M P O R A R Y A R T ?

ideas, would call utopian and unattainable—a project is a proposal that

addresses only the here and now of a concrete subject acting within a
concrete empirical reality in accordance with pre-established rules and
constraints. A project is concerned only with that which is graspable
and perceptible, tangible and attainable, with what is calculable, plan-
nable, or achievable. To have a project, in other words, is to be rational,
pragmatic, and entrepreneurial. It is to be “smart.”

38 “Plan,” in Oxford English Dictionary, http://oed.com/view/Entry/145022.

|

39 Roberto Gerundo, “Salerno: A Daring Approach to Town Planning,” Urbanistica 122

ESANU

(December 2003): 35.

40 Kenneth Allinson, Getting There by Design: An Architect’s Guide to Design and Project
Management (Oxford: Architectural Press, 1997), 7.
23

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1162/ARTM_a_00003 by guest on 19 November 2023

 However, the project mentality made popular by the SCCA
network is not only about scale. Prior to becoming an indispensable
utensil of contemporary free market capitalism, projective thinking
was associated with certain traditions of Western thought, in particular
with those that made empirical objectivity, positivist and purposive
thinking, or utilitarian goals their main objectives of study. What was
known in the early twentieth century as the “project method” referred
to an educational technique that spread from the philosophy of educa-
tion of the American pragmatist John Dewey. The project method,
which is today known as the “project approach,” was a popular method
of institutionalized instruction that was frequently regarded as the
most effective for democratic societies. Projects cultivate individual
responsibility, entrepreneurial thinking, competition; they encourage
students to devote less time to abstract and speculative theories and
focus instead on the useful, the concrete, and the purposeful. 41 In the
United States the roots of the project method have been traced back to
the architects of the Italian Enlightenment who were the first to resort
to progetti during the emergence of architecture as an independent
profession from its former artisan state. 42 It was not only American
pragmatism or instrumentalism that made use of the project method.
The concept of “project” has also occupied a central position in certain
Continental traditions of thought that have presented themselves as
humanistic—as, for example, in Sartrean existentialism. Sartre uses
the term “project” to express the relation of the modern subject to the
world, his or her being-in-the-world, with the actions, deeds, behaviors,
and choices that a person makes throughout his or her life all bound
together in the “original” or “fundamental project.”43 In Existentialism Is
a Humanism and other writings, Sartre insists that the modern subject
is a project (“But we are project”) for “man is, before all else, something
that projects itself into a future, and is conscious of doing so.”44

41 See for instance William Heard Kilpatrick, The Project Method: The Use of the Purposeful Act
in the Educative Process (New York: Teachers College, Columbia University, 1929).
42 See for instance Michael Knoll, “The Project Method: Its Vocational Education Origin and
International Development,” Journal of Industrial Teacher Education 34, no. 3 (1997).
43 The “Key to Special Terminology” section in the appendix of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness
ARTMARGINS 1:1

defines the project in the following way: “Project. Both verb and noun. It refers to the
For-itself’s choice of its way of being and is expressed by action in the light of a future end.”
Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness (New York: Washington Square Press, 1966), 776.
44 Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007),
23. See also Sartre’s Situations I (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), 187.

24

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1162/ARTM_a_00003 by guest on 19 November 2023

 However, not everyone embraced such an understanding of
modern subjectivity. Georges Bataille—one of the twentieth cen-
tury’s most devoted defenders of unprojected and undirected action,
of unrestrained, eroticized, ecstatic, transgressive, and irrational
experience—also considers the contradictions involved in the project
mentality and what this might entail for artistic comportments in
general. Bataille deploys the term “project” as a critique of modern
rationality, as a critique of calculated utilitarian reason that projects
experience forward, postponing and delaying it, of a rationality that
enslaves the present moment to the future. Bataille prefers painters
to architects, for painting leads away from rationality toward “bestial
monstrosity,” further away from the “architectural straightjacket” and
from the rational architectural forms that tend most often to please
official power. 45 Inner experience understood as “project” is nothing
else than a delayed, prepared, or precooked experience that creates an
abyss or disparity between the present and the future by subordinat-
ing the former to the latter (“the animal eats immediately, animals eat
voraciously . . . the animal postpones nothing”). 46 Bataille’s expérience
intérieure discredits, with Nietzschean pathos, the utility that Nietzsche
once called the morality of the slaves, responding to the Sartrean proj-
ect-subject (with Lacanian insight) that “man is not a project . . . but
rather unrest, uneasiness . . . a being that is lacking.”47
The project-rationality of directed and calculated action became
an intrinsic part of contemporary art mentality. After 1989, artists and
cultural organizers (especially the younger ones) who collaborated with
contemporary art centers had to adjust to this mode of thinking by
sitting in workshops led by Western experts and learning how to make
projects and portfolios, implement strategies, produce documents, or
W H AT WA S C O N T E M P O R A R Y A R T ?

write grant proposals. From then on, for artists to be considered for
grants (or highly leveraged investments), they had to learn how to pro-
vide precise details regarding their future artwork; to know in advance
what they would produce, how, and why; to consider how and whether
their projects agreed with the missions of the new institutions; and to

45 See Georges Bataille et al., Encyclopædia Acephalica: Comprising the Critical Dictionary
& Related Texts (London: Atlas Press, 1995), 36.
46 Georges Bataille, The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge, trans. Stuart Kendall
|

(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 126.

ESANU

47 Peter Bürger, The Thinking of the Master: Bataille between Hegel and Surrealism (Evanston, IL:
Northwestern University Press, 2002), 35.

25

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1162/ARTM_a_00003 by guest on 19 November 2023

 constantly defend their artistic intentions before a bar of managers
and curators.
The wave of institutional critique witnessed over the first decade of
this century in the postsocialist countries had no doubt something to
do with what these critics perceived to be the “soulless” instrumental
technicality of postsocialist modernization. The implementation of the
project method within the arts seemed to have altered certain essential
aspects of the free professions. It has not always sat well with those, for
example, who choose to be called artists in order to commit to an expe-
rience understood, ever since the Romantics, to be enigmatic, erratic,
indefinite, individually spontaneous, unforeseeable, inexpedient,
unknowable, and lacking. It now feels difficult if not impossible for an
artist to live without a project, or without a head (as in André Masson’s
infamous drawing on the cover of Bataille’s magazine Acéphale), or to
remain (as with Kabakov above) in that innocent state of “creative loiter-
ing” and “idling” that the precontemporary artists, both official and
unofficial, had too often taken for granted. Now, an aspiring van Gogh
might be expected well in advance to submit a project proposal with a
tentative schedule detailing when and how he would become insane,
and how, when, and why he would slice off that ear.
Like other critics of the project mentality, Bataille regards it as
an essential feature of capitalist activity. 48 His position resonates
with those elaborated by an early generation of critical theorists who
accused modern positivism and instrumental reason of impoverish-
ing experience, of making the new predictable or old. When critical
theory critiques the instrumentalization of thought, it usually implies
the substitution of purposive systematic procedure for the imagina-
tion, of reason for feeling, of predictable reactions for active emotions. 49
However, one must not jump to conclusions and always see, behind the
project method, conspiratorial forces and interests, though of course
neither class contradictions nor the patronizing character of modern-
izer-modernized relations can be totally ignored. In fact the “new proj-
ect rationality” points to broader social changes that follow the agenda
of progress and the ideology of the Western European enlightenment.
And of course, one can also approach the emerging “projective” experi-
ARTMARGINS 1:1

48 Fred Botting and Scott Wilson, Bataille: A Critical Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 204.
49 For the critique of instrumental reason, see Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno,
Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972).

26

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1162/ARTM_a_00003 by guest on 19 November 2023

 ence that informs postsocialist contemporary art mentality from the
perspective of the neoliberal spirit that manages Eastern European
modernization. In this sense the concept “project” that entered the
vocabulary of artists during the 1990s, thanks to institutions of transi-
tion such as the SCCA network, was indicative of the upsurge of a new
mentality that was essentially economic.
In The Birth of Biopolitics Michel Foucault examines the evolution
of modern governmental practices informed by the neoliberal tradition
of thinking, suggesting that with the rise of the neoliberal art of gov-
ernmentality, all of society is perceived as consisting of economic units:
the person, the family, the group, the community, and even the sacred
liberal notion of the civil society50 —these are all judged, first and
foremost, according to how successful they are in managing, bringing
under control, or reifying one form of projected experience or another.
The neoliberal art of governmentality rejects socialist (or for that mat-
ter any other form of state) interventionism and macro planning as
utopian because, according to its logic, there cannot be a sovereign, a
state, a seraph, an apparatchik (or a chairman of an Artists’ Union) who
could hover above and grasp from a bird’s point of view the totality of
the market, or of the cultural field.

7
Postlude. No one is excused from participating in this postsocialist
economic theater, and the (contemporary) artist is no exception. He or
she must, like everyone else, resort to an all-pervasive entrepreneurial
logic and enter the free competition between projected cultural experi-
ences.51 In this theater the project mentality and the art document (in
various media) becomes the favored technique of contemporary art. It
W H AT WA S C O N T E M P O R A R Y A R T ?

is worth recalling that within certain art critical circles, Western con-
temporary art trends such as project art and conceptual art have often
been offered as proof of recent economic transformations. Artistic
conceptualism in particular has been understood as a consequence of
post–World War II changes in the mode of capitalistic production, and

50 Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–79 (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).
51 The impact of project rationality on specifically artistic and aesthetic comportments would
require a lengthy discussion. For a more detailed consideration of the emergence of the
|

term “project” in the vocabulary of Moscow conceptualism, see Octavian Esanu, Transition
ESANU

in Post-Soviet Art: “Collective Actions” Before and After 1989 (Budapest: Central European
University Press, forthcoming).

27

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1162/ARTM_a_00003 by guest on 19 November 2023

 as a cultural upshot of the managerial revolution—a conclusion many
practitioners find hard to swallow.52
From a historical perspective (and seen through the prism of
periodization), the emergence of contemporary art in the postsocial-
ist countries echoes similar modernizing processes that took place
in the West earlier in the second half of the last century. The logic of
postmodernism—viewed as a reaction to utopian modernism and as
a consequence of what critics have called the “institutionalization”
(Eagleton) or the “domestication” (Huyssen) of modernism—at times
draws very close to the missions of new art institutions. In the United
States the managers of the first major institutions “for contemporary
art” often framed their institutional missions in accordance with the
central tenets of postwar liberalism. They sought, for instance, to forge
a stronger alliance among art, commerce, and industry, or strove to
distance themselves and the art they had promoted from the political
radicalism of prewar “modern art.” In fact the very substitution of the
term “contemporary” for “modern” was in some cases motivated by this
neoliberal mission.53 The appearance of contemporary art in Eastern
Europe, similarly, signaled a deregulation of or an assault on the last
bastion of historical modernism and its institutional, political, and
aesthetic practices—the difference being that in this case what was at
stake was an assault on the Soviet version of modernization and cul-
tural modernism—based artistically on the outdated “fine arts” system
of handcrafted or skilled production, ideologically mummified in the
doctrine of Socialist Realism, and preserved institutionally within the
anachronistic guild-like model of the Unions of Artists.

52 See Benjamin Buchloh, “From the Aesthetic of Administration to Institutional Critique

(Some Aspects of Conceptual Art 1962–1969),” in L’Art Conceptuel, Une Perspective: 22
Novembre 1989–18 Fevrier 1990 (Paris: Musee d’art moderne de la ville de Paris, 1990).
See also Joseph Kosuth and Seth Siegelaub, “Joseph Kosuth and Seth Siegelaub Reply to
Benjamin Buchloh on Conceptual Art,” October 57 (1991).
53 One of the earliest major contemporary art institutions in the United States was the Boston
Institute for Contemporary Art, which was renamed in 1947 (from “modern” to “contem-
ARTMARGINS 1:1

porary”). The renaming led to a controversial debate within artistic circles known as the
“Boston affair.” See Institute of Contemporary Art, Dissent: The Issue of Modern Art in Boston
(Boston: Institute of Contemporary Art, 1985). For a short comparison of the SCCA network
and the Boston ICA, see Octavian Esanu, The Transition of the Soros Centers to Contemporary
Art: The Managed Avant-Garde (2008), http://www.contimporary.org/project/view/10.

28

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1162/ARTM_a_00003 by guest on 19 November 2023