Perhaps the most famous photograph of the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia during the suppression of the Prague Spring in August 1968 was taken by Josef Koudelka. [illustration 1] Wenceslas Square (Václavské náměsti) forms the background for a watch on an arm in his shot. It is 12:22. And the square is empty. The image seems puzzling: where are the tanks and troops, and the angry Czech protests that met the invaders? Many years later, the photographer explained: ‘the people of Prague had decided not to demonstrate so as not to give the Soviet occupiers a pretext for a massacre’.[1] It turns out that the Artists’ Union had used underground radio to call for a silent and unspectacular demonstration of unity in the form of a withdrawal from the streets at midday. Recording the moment of the boycott, Koudelka’s photograph marks a kind of ‘absent presence’: everyone is elsewhere. In photographing a timepiece, he captured a ‘decisive moment’ and, perhaps, also a premonition of the future. In the slow-moving years that the new regime under First Secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia Gustáv Husák called ‘normalizace’ (‘normalisation’) after the ‘restoration of order’, the state sought to maintain its hegemony. It channelled resources—most prominently consumer comforts and increased surveillance—to suppress change. For many contemporaries, the result was a long period of stultifying ennui.
The emptiness of the public realm and the withdrawal into private life might well be taken as a tightly tied definition of the social world which formed during the so-called ‘era of stagnation’ of the 1970s in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic and other parts of the Eastern Bloc. But these arrangements were not firmly fixed in place nor were they uncontested. In fact, historians have done much in recent years to dismantle this bifurcation, not least by developing sophisticated notions of stratifications of the public realm under communist rule.[2] In what follows, I will survey a number of experimental and unofficial performance practices in Eastern Europe that challenged illegitimate and unpopular regimes, often by means of minor gestures in the city.[3] By rejecting the theatre stages and galleries provided—and policed—by the state, ‘alternative’ forms of performance not only had the virtue of independence from censorship and control, they also directed attention to the corruption of public space.[4] But to understand how and why, first it is useful to understand the ideological meanings attached to public and private space in the history of communist rule.
The vision of a better life that stirred the creation of the Soviet Union after the October Revolution, and the socialist states of the Eastern Bloc after 1945, promised many things. Among its many bold assurances was the motivating idea that space would be shared by all. Private ownership of space—whether in the form of buildings, streets or country estates—would end, and universal rights would be extended under the mindful watch of a benign state intent on its own disappearance (Engels’ notion of the ‘withering of the state’). In the aftermath of the October Revolution, for instance, the ‘bourgeois conception of home—understood both socially and spatially—was rejected in a series of decrees nationalising land and abolishing private ownership of property in Russia.[5] Collective forms of housing were not only adopted as a matter of exigency, but also trumpeted as the democratisation of space. Large pre-revolutionary apartments in Moscow, Petrograd and elsewhere, once occupied by the wealthy and their servants, were divided to provide homes for a number of working class and peasant families. The political symbolism of this act of spatial redistribution was clear. The allocation of space was not, however, simply to be a measure of social justice: it was to be organised like a machine for the production of better citizen-comrades. Old habits had to be broken and new ones forged. Just as today we talk about ‘digital natives’ —people too young to remember a time before the Internet—Soviet architects and social reformers in the 1920s imagined that all children born into socialism would be brought up in communal housing where the selfish desire for privacy and private ownership would never be felt, such was the indisputable virtue of an architecture which served collective needs.[6]
Similar fanfares for utopia were to be heard in Eastern Europe after the Second World War. One of the key slogans of the new Soviet-backed authorities that took control at the end of 1940s was that cities would be wrested out of the hands of landlords and capitalists, and given back to the workers. The benefits of the urban life—access to culture, education and healthcare facilities—were to be extended to those to whom they had been long denied. Other instruments for the production of new men and women included the parks of culture and leisure which were created throughout the Eastern Bloc. Decorated with open-air theatres, leafy avenues and classical statuary, facilities for studying astronomy, zoos and botanical gardens, a socialist park presented itself a presentiment of the communist future announced, but never detailed, by Marx in his writing.
The utopian vision of shared space proclaimed by ideologues withered, particularly during the Stalin years. The project of building communal homes—still the fantasy of visionary architects in Central Europe well into the 1970s[7]—was overtaken by the mass production of single-family apartments, the spatial expression of bourgeois life. Thereafter, life was increasingly lived in what might be called ‘simultaneously lived private worlds’.[8] And the failure of publicness could be felt in unlit hallways in housing blocks, broken children’s playgrounds and the dismal waiting rooms in bus and railway stations: each space testified to the anomie and disconnection often felt by citizens. Far from being the uplifting spaces of collective life: these were non-places of a dismal kind. When sharing—the principle of communal life—did emerge in this impoverished environment, it was often, as sociologist Kacper Pobłocki describes, despite rather than because of the activities of the state.[9] And, despite a loud commitment to equality, the communist authorities also created zones of privilege for their ‘elites’: special stores where only party-members could shop; entire housing districts where only the powerful lived; and luxury hotels and restaurants which were not only beyond the means of the majority but widely viewed as evidence of venality and corruption.[10] Moreover, in the suspicious atmosphere fostered by the most paranoid regimes (above all the USSR, East Germany and the Socialist Republic of Czechoslovakia after the repression of the Prague Spring), it was almost impossible to exchange views freely, to gather or to act independently in public without permission. In this setting, domestic spaces—which were accessed by trusted family and friends—became highly valued. In her brilliant study, of everyday life in Soviet Russia, Commonplaces, Svetlana Boym singles out the Moscow kitchen from the 1960s onwards as one of these autonomous zones: ‘The kitchen gathering … represents a different form of collectivity—it is neither utopian nor forced, like that of the communal apartment. It was a company of friends, unofficial though not anti-official; in this collective the bonds of affection and friendship constituted its ideology’.[11]
The summary above is necessarily a brief sketch, one that outlines in broad strokes a world where public and private came, by the 1970s, to be understood by critics of communist rule as distinct and separate zones. The ‘rules’ of behaviour in each were rarely articulated but they were well understood. Dissident intellectuals like the playwright Václav Havel in Czechoslovakia and the novelist and sociologist György Konrád in Hungary called out the contradictions between rhetoric and practice in the management of public space by the authorities in their samizdat essays and books. In his essay ‘Stories and Totalitarianism’ (1987), Havel writes:
The bureaucratic regulation of the everyday details of people’s lives is another indirect instrument of nihilization. It is here that public matters infiltrate private life in a way that is very ‘ordinary’, but extremely persistent. The sheer number of small pressures that we are subjected to every day is more important than it may seem at first, because it encloses the space in which we are condemned to breathe. There is very little air in that space. But not so little that we might suffocate, and thus create a story.[12]
Havel’s view was not only that privacy had been eroded but that that publicness—in the sense of openness and civic-mindedness—had been damaged too. Consequently, the task as outlined by dissident writers like Konrád in the 1970s was to counter the sham publicness of the party-state with new, alternative parallel structures and social movements that would constitute an authentic public sphere.[13]
Social and political criticism published by dissidents was not the only diagnosis being made of the corruption of public space. New forms of performance in the 1970s appears to have made similar critique, if often in far more lyrical or symbolic terms. In Poland, for instance, Teatr Akademia Ruchu, a group that formed in Warsaw in 1973, engaged in what it called the ‘theatre of behaviour’ abandoning the stage for minimal, unlicensed and unannounced performance on the streets.[14] They performed dozens of brief actions in Polish towns and cities that were often barely discernible from the flow of events and traffic of people. In Potknięcie I and Potknięcie II (Stumble I and Stumble II)—performed in various Polish cities in 1975–77—individual members of the ensemble walked along the pavement only to trip over some invisible obstruction. [2] Dressed unremarkably, these pedestrians—one-by-one—stumbled on the same spot, eventually attracting the attention of passers-by. A film documenting the Warsaw performance on Aleje Jerozolimskie (1977) records one perturbed observer going to the site of the disturbance to investigate; another breaks out in hysterical laughter. What caused their fellow pedestrians to trip? What was the invisible obstacle? The answer is not given but the presence of the Dom Partii (Headquarters of the United Polish Worker’s Party), out of shot but close-by, might be an answer. Other versions of the stumble seemed to occur in sight of the ‘propaganda of success’ (often literally banners on buildings announcing inflated economic achievements), adding meaning to these minor acts of failure. Other Akademia Ruchu actions included Gazety (Newspapers, 1977) in which members of the group queued in front of kiosks to buy copies of the first edition of a daily newspaper only for each to throw their purchase, unread, into the trash cans nearby. And Kolejki (Queues, 1976/7) they formed ‘queues to nowhere’ in front of butchers’ shops, often in parallel to those formed by actual shoppers. Waiting in line was perhaps the most evident sign of the economy of shortage that prevailed at the time. In one version called Kolejka wychodząca ze sklepu (Queue going out of the shop), the ensemble lined up away from the entrance to a butcher’s shop, expressing a kind of patient disdain for its produce.
Parallels can be drawn with the low-key interventions into urban space made by the Czech artist Jiří Kovanda in Prague in the same period. Kovanda presented himself to bystanders in the city in ways that called their attention: in XXX September 3rd, 1977 he stood on a busy escalator facing away from the direction of travel, trying to catch the eyes of those around him; in Kontakt (Contact) he bumped into pedestrians walking in the opposite direction. [3] These interpersonal but impersonal communications—documented in photographs—broke the conventions of urban city life first observed by Georg Simmel, namely that cities instil in their dwellers a degree of indifference to those around them. Cities are inhabited by mutual strangers. The control of public space in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic only amplified this tendency, making public asociality the norm. Kontakt was an unwarranted or uninvited act. Occasionally, symbolism entered into his scenes: in XXX 19 November 1976. Prague, Václavské naměsti Kovanda stood, immobile, with his arms outstretched forming a human cross in a setting that had been the stage of many episodes in Czech history, not least the invasion by Soviet-led forces eight years earlier.[15] Klara Kemp-Welch has interpreted Kovanda’s public appearances as a melancholic search for an audience by an unofficial artist.[16] In fact, in Pokus o sazenameni (Attempted acquaintance, 1977) Kovanda describes the creation of an audience, presenting series of photographs in which he appears in the company of others. His words accompany the images ‘I invited some friends to watch me trying to make friends with a girl. October 19, 1977 Václavské naměsti, Prague’. No one seems to be watching, raising the suspicion that these ‘friends’ are nothing more than an appellation—a claim made with words. No-one is here.
Other examples of these kind of temporary actions in public space include those undertaken by the Pollucionistu (Pollutionists) group formed by designer Valdis Celms, architect Anda Ārgale and artist Māris Ārgalis along with Kirils Šmeļkovs, Kārlis Kalsers and others that in the late 1970s created a remarkable and extensive body of images which commented on the failures of late Soviet system to meet not just its promises of utopia but also its loud claims on beauty and utility.[17] Walking through Riga in the Soviet Republic of Latvia, the Pollucionistu photographed new panel-construction estates and nineteenth century housing, side streets and back alleys, as well as the slow progress of repairs to the city’s streets. [4] Their interests were neither in the historic landmarks of the city nor the ostentatious monuments to Soviet order which formed the conventional points on an official guided tour. Instead, it was the entropy of the Soviet environment which drew their cameras. The group would bring their images to informal discussions in private apartments, often animated by Ārgalis’s reading of art theory and history. Celms and Borgs reworked these black and white images as montages or drew on their surfaces like latter-day surrealists. Often absurd, their images had limited circulation as grainy illustrations in Literatura un Māksla (Literature and Art), a weekly paper issued by artistic and literary unions in Latvia. Gentle humour eased the passage of these images through the censor’s office: nevertheless, viewed together, the images created by the Pollucionistu constitute a critique of Soviet management of the urban environment. By the early 1980s, the activities of the group drew the attention of the KGB and, facing dark insinuations and intimidation, it dissolved itself.
Akademia Ruchu, Kovanda and the Pollucionistu were by no means the only artists to make these kinds of temporary interventions into the urban realm of Eastern Europe in the 1970s and 1980s. Indeed, the phenomenon was found—seemingly independently and without connection—throughout the Bloc, a common response the state’s grip on public space. To the examples presented here, we might add the street actions that Bratislava Conceptualist Ľubomír Ďurček’s called Rezonancie (Resonances, 1979)[18], the urban choreography conducted by Dočasná spoločnosť intenzívneho prežívania (Temporary Society of Intensive Experience), active from 1979 in Slovakia,[19] or even the ‘fashion walks’ orchestrated from 1981 onwards by the Hungarian fashion designer Tamás Király and his friends to queer the streets of Budapest.[20] Writer and artist Krzysztof Niemczyk might be added to this catalogue. Openly gay and uninhibited, he organized anarchic ‘interventions’ into city life around 1970. They included stripping naked in a fountain in Kraków’s main square and turning his mother into a ‘living statue’ by tying her to a bench in a city park could be invited to join the company of these unlicensed street performers.[21] These and most other actions of this kind were mute, using the body for non-verbal communication, and as such an indirect response to the logocentrism of communist power—speeches, newspapers, banners, broadcasts … But what significance should we attach to this phenomenon? Should we see these small steps, stumbles and gestures in the city as dissent or opposition? So slight were these actions that they had no lasting effects. As such, they were very different to the angry demonstrations which occasionally erupted in Eastern Europe in the 1970s, particularly in the Polish People’s Republic. Stumble and the other Akademia Ruchu actions were, for instance, mounted at the same time as workers in Płock and Radom, and the Warsaw suburb of Ursus massed on the streets to protest the economic reforms which had led to a doubling of the price of essential foods. In Radom, hundreds chanting slogans attacked the local Polish United Workers’ Party headquarters before being brutally dispersed by the authorities. Their occupation of the streets drew tear gas and batons, as well as occasional concessions. The contrast with Academia Ruchu’s droll street theatre could hardly be greater. But this does not mean that the group’s actions should be dismissed as being trivial—after all, their performances drew attention to queues and the inflated claims made by the regime generated in equal measure. In her writings, feminist philosopher Ewa Majewska has made the case for what she calls ‘weak resistance’, drawing much of her thinking from the theorists and agents of dissent in Eastern Europe (even when she does not share the liberal individualism which underscored their politics) as well as queer and subaltern theory.[22] In her analysis, ‘weak resistance’ eschews the idea of the heroic life, instead valuing the political expressions which can happen in the here and now of everyday life. ‘Weak resistance’ is articulated in the ‘smallest gestures’ or in spontaneous acts, and even failures rather than in a meticulously prepared plan or in revolutionary actions. Akademia Ruchu’s ‘theatre of behaviour’, Kovanda’s appearances in Prague and the Pollucionists’ collages might well belong to this page on the dictionary of political economy. Their actions were not demands that required a response from power; rather, they acted to ‘illuminate their surroundings’ (Havel’s phrase adopted by Majewska). This might mean directing attention not only the entropy of Riga and the anomie felt by its citizens in the care of the communist authorities, but also the flat, toneless refrain of progress which played in the official media.
That these artists documented their activities is important too. Kovanda’s ephemeral performances were photographed, for instance, by an accomplice, Pavel Tuč, at a distance using a long lens. Some were recorded in simple sequences of two or three shots. Kovanda would paste the prints on to sheets of file paper with laconic typewritten captions. The caption for XXX September 3rd, 1977 (described above) reads
On an escalator … turning around,
I look into the eyes of the person standing behind me …
September 3, 1977
Václavské náměsti, Prague.
As he later acknowledged, ‘I didn’t write the texts out by hand … I wanted it to be as cool, as impersonal as possible.’[23] In one sense, these sheets are records of events that otherwise would have been forgotten. But the form suggests meaning. One cannot help but imagine these documents as looking much like the files of the Czechoslovak secret police conducting some kind of surveillance of the artist. It is as if Kovanda, perhaps unconsciously, imagined the state as a second audience for his minor demonstrations of existence. This was an eccentric form of validation but one found in other artistic practices of the era (most famously Sanja Iveković’s photo sequence, Trikotnik [Triangle, 1979][24]).
At the end of the 1970s Polish feminist artist Ewa Partum created a now much reproduced and much-analysed series of photomontages in which she collaged images of her naked self into ordinary street scenes (and occasional interiors such as a television shop).[25] [5] Dressed in high heels, Partum appears alongside people waiting for the bus, queuing to shop or at work. These ‘encounters’ with others invite comparisons to be drawn: nudity against the effects of uniform; or individuality against the conformity; or vulnerability verses authority. Conforming to the laws of photographic perspective, these prints were not intended to deceive but to reveal. Partum made this clear in a performance at the opening of the exhibition entitled Samoidentyfikacja (Self-Identification) that featured these works in Mała PSP ZPAF Gallery, the home of the Polish Association of Art Photographers, in downtown Warsaw in 1980. Naked, she wrote the following words on a blackboard and read them aloud:
These photographs make us aware of the existence of a specific relation between the existing reality and that which they present. The determinants of social life, the strictly defined set of patterns concerning the function of an individual with a particularly social and cultural status, in its case a woman. Where the notion of its role (being a woman, mother, housewife, a person with a given profession, member of a local community) understood as a something of a sum of roles, a model arising out of tradition in the form of a specific pattern, the personality model of a woman functioning social awareness, the product of patriarchal culture, function as norms of social life—all that effectively belittles or outright deprives a woman of the right to a feeling of freedom, personal dignity and spiritual autonomy, while morality norms clearly discriminate against women under the guise of respect for her.
The events recorded as my personal intervention do not cover this problem fully. They only bring it into focus.[26]
After her reading, Partum left the gallery for the city square outside, where, naked, she joined a wedding party that happened to be leaving a Registry Office before returning a few minutes later. Karolina Majewska-Güde writes ‘The artist confronted working in the real public space of the gallery and the street, as if it was not sufficient to photograph the body in the studio and represent it in her collages. In that way Partum activated the body as a tool of social dissent available to everybody.’[27]
When the Samoidentyfikacja series was exhibited in the Mała Gallery, the censor demanded that one of the photomontages be withdrawn: it depicted Partum in front of Namiestnikowski Palace, then the headquarters of the Council of State. Nudity, it seems, undermined the dignity of power. What was its disruptive force? Indeed, Partum’s nudity dominates Self-Identification (and yet, apparently, she rejected some works prepared for the series because they were ‘too erotic’[28]). In making her ‘publicity of the private’, a term deployed by Roland Barthes in his book Camera Lucida (1981),[29] Partum sought to unsettle the ways in which life in the People’s Republic locked women into prescribed roles and spaces. In coining the phrase, what the French writer had in mind was the way in which the invention of photography in the mid nineteenth century provided new ways in which intimacy could be shared (and, sometimes, breached too). The rapid rise of candid celebrity shots and pornography serve to illustrate his point. Partum’s series was created appeared at a time when sexualised images of female nudity—pin ups in magazines, and exhibitions of ‘artistic’ photographs (sometimes by the ZPAF membership)—was increasingly forming part of the mainstream culture of the People’s Republic. Licensed permissiveness of this kind, was, as Karol Jachymek has shown, one face of the Polish regime’s programme of ‘modernisation’: objectification was another form of socialist commodification.[30] And yet, in her photomontages, Partum appears to be invisible or unseen by those around her. This was not—or not only—a visual metaphor: in the video recording of Partum’s temporary appearance outside, even the wedding party fail to notice her. One of most affecting aspects of Self-Identification is the fact that Partum can be so exposed and so invisible at the same time—a condition which might describe that of women in Poland at the time.
The streets of the cities of the Eastern Bloc only ever became authentic civic spaces in the sense understood by critics like Konrad during the periods of reform and crisis like the Prague Spring in 1968 and the ‘Carnival of Solidarity’ in Poland in 1980–81 (of which more below). Societies united in their desire for change and the authorities struggled to contain the flow of ideas and demands which were released during these periods, eventually clamping down on the pressure for reform by means of considerable violence. But these periods of liberalisation were not the only times and spaces of uninhibited ‘publicness’ in the Eastern Bloc. The temporary transformation of ‘private’ settings into public spaces might form another case of ‘weak resistance’. There is a long history of theatres and exhibitions, as well as intellectual ‘salons’ for discussions and lectures, being organised in private apartments in the Eastern Bloc (and earlier too). In 1955, for instance, poet Miron Białoszewski established Teatr na Tarczyńskiej (Tarczyński Street Theatre) in Lech Emfazy Stefański’s apartment in Warsaw. Three years later, Białoszewski with Ludmiła Murawska, a painter and actress, and Ludwik Hering formed a small company,Tear Osobny Trzech Osób (The Individual Theatre of Three Individuals) that performed in iałoszewski’s apartment on Dąbrowski Square (as well as in the Hybrydy student club in the city). [6] The company’s repertoire included works by Shakespeare as well as the classical canon in Poland (Norwid, Słowacki, Mickiewicz) as well as his own plays. Unticketed, the performances drew their audiences from the close intellectual networks of the city. Outside official culture, Białoszewski’s two apartment theatres were not subject to censorship or control. That they prospered was itself a sign of the relative freedom in the years after Stalin’s death, a period known as the Thaw.
Things were very different in Prague in the 1970s. There, Vlasta Chramostová—a popular and celebrated actor who had been blacklisted for her support of the Prague Spring—established the Bytové divadlo (Living Room Theatre) in her Prague apartment. [7] Early performances included Chramostová’s 1976 reading of the All the beauties of the world (Všecky krásy světa), the memoirs of Jaroslav Seifert, perhaps the most important figure in post-war Czech literature. His text had been pulled from the publishing schedule by the Ministry of Culture and so Chramostová read from the manuscript to an audience in her apartment that included Seifert.[31] Appellplatz II (1977), the next performance, was a collage of readings combing the texts of banned Czech authors including Ivan Klíma and Ludvík Vaculík, as well as the German modernist Bertolt Brecht, and was based on Jerzy Andrzejewski’s story Apel (Roll Call) set in Auschwitz.This was followed in 1978 by a run of Macbeth with five actors playing the 25 characters to audiences sitting on the floor or perched on armchairs in Chramostová’s elegant apartment. Unfolding doors between the two large rooms created a proscenium arch. One member of the audience reported the reaction of the authorities:
The Czechoslovak secret police tolerated only 17 performances of the living-room Macbeth before they came to the irrevocable conclusion that William Shakespeare was an enemy of socialism and had to be silenced. As usual, they tried harassment first. One evening, shortly before the end of the play, 15 uniformed policemen came to Vlasta Chramostová’s apartment. They said that they had reports that orgies were taking place there and that they intended to identify all those present. While Vlasta Chramostová’s husband was arguing with the uninvited guests in the hall—and while Macbeth (Pavel Landovsky) was about to be killed by Macduff (Pavel Kohout) before an audience of approximately 20 in the living-room—a young photographer leaned out of a window and made a documentary picture of some very un-Shakespearean police cars down below in a dark Prague street.[32]
While, of course, Shakespeare’s theme of illegitimate power had considerable appeal to critics of Husák’s regime, Macbeth was not a prohibited play. What made this performance threatening to power was that it had been staged without permission in a place which was beyond its immediate command. In other words, it was the eschewal of the public/private divide that was judged to be a provocation.
There are many things to be said about the way in which homes became public spaces of performance during but two themes are particularly relevant here: one is the way in which the domestic nature of these spaces lent meaning to the performance. Fascinated by everyday life, Białoszewski’s own plays drew upon the language and experience of Warsaw life, finding absurd proportions in the most ordinary of things. His dilapidated flat was dressed like a set with Białoszewski and Murawska producing crude costumes from rags and backdrops by painting cardboard. Homes also furnished props. If the drama called for a door or a dog, one was ‘on hand’. The illusionism characteristic of conventional theatre was replaced by the insistence of mundane reality—the broken chair, the crown made from a newspaper, the blunt knife and so on. The second theme concerns the audience: traditionally, theatre has drawn a line between the stage and auditorium—the ‘fourth wall’ that maintains the distance between audience and performer. In Chramostová’s Living Room theatre, the sense of connection was not simply enhanced by proximity but by the risk of arrest that the audience shared with the performers.
Chramostová’s Living Room Theatre might be taken as a paradigmatic example of what has been called the ‘second public sphere’ in Eastern Europe under communist rule. This term—derived from the ideas of dissidents like György Konrád and now widely employed by cultural historians of the Bloc[33]—emphasizes the organisation of culture outside the official sphere. Although autonomous and uncensored, these forms of culture were not illicit or private. In Konrád’s terms they sought to ‘extend the possibilities of a given public system’ rather than change it.[34] Moreover, they sought to form publics rather than serve audiences, i.e., to form social relations that endure after the moment of performance and restore the possibility of critique. The concept of the second public sphere has deep footings in a deeply-felt desire for transparency and reason, imagining its various actors (in the wide sense) as being motivated by virtuous principles like freedom and truth. As such, it does not necessarily describe well the phenomena which have featured in this essay. What is striking about what I have called the ‘publicity of the private’ is also that marked an appetite for strangeness and absurdity. In their irrationality, perhaps these unlicensed actions constituted a measured response to the management of public realm. It hardly needs to be said that the gulf between official rhetoric and actual life was itself a measure of irrationality. The art of Kovanda, Partum and others marks an interest in the stranger too. After all, strangers may act strangely.
One further example of the publicity of the privatemight be offered by means of a conclusion to this survey as well as the ‘era of stagnation’ that it covers. In December 1981 the communist authorities in Poland introduced the tightest-possible restrictions on public expression, travel between cities and the use of public space. In the previous eighteen months, a period sometimes called Karnawał Solidarności (the Carnival of Solidarity), the country had spun in an exhilarating cycle of protest and concession. The newly formed, independent trade union Solidarność had swelled into a national movement campaigning for economic and political reforms, the right to religious expression, as well as free speech and the reform of education. The legitimacy of the state was called into question with each demand and every compromise, much to Moscow’s alarm. Only in December 1981, fearful of Soviet invasion, did the authorities put an abrupt and brutal end to the Carnival by declaring a state of martial law and announcing rule by Military Council of National Salvation. Poles woke up on the snowy morning of 13 December 1981 to find that tanks were on the streets, and Solidarność’s leaders had been imprisoned or were in hiding. For the next nineteenth months, strict controls were placed on society: curfews, limits on gatherings, the wiretapping of telephone conversations and heavy censorship. Many magazines were closed down and the associations and unions of artist and other cultural workers were closed down. In response, artists boycotted the remaining official cultural institutions and co-opted churches and apartments for exhibitions of art, often in forms expressing the deep frustration with the turn of events in the country. One of the least known but perhaps most poignant unofficial exhibitions of the period when the country was under martial law was mounted in the independent gallery apartment of artists Emilia and Andrzej Dłużniewski in Warsaw. Opened in May 1980, Galeria Piwna 20/26 was a public space in the sense that the talks, exhibitions and performances which took place in the apartment were open to the wider community of artists and critics. It continued to operate throughout the period of high restriction, addressing contemporary events only obliquely. In autumn 1982, the Dluzniewskis created an installation called Teatr Nieobecności (Theatre of Absence) which accentuated its domestic character of their gallery home. [8] Fashioned from the clutter of everyday life, they described the installation as a play in three acts:
It is set in a room of our little flat in Piwna Sweet. The first act presents a situation where the hero of our show, ‘our guest’, has gone way leading a trace of small objects, a characteristic neatness of the furniture, a marked void. Although the whole story begins from the end, HE ‘emerges’ in the very first act, physically the most modest one; we construct him in our thoughts.
The second act is about his temporary absence: HE is there, but he has just gone out. A number of objects permit us to build his image more and more complete.
Finally, the third Act. HE is virtually present because everything is there: a cigarette has been lit, the radio is on, we can see his shoes and socks, etc. This is the culmination of absence, and this the HE whom we recognise. The time is 12, really 12 o’clock.[35]
Although the installation called to mind other plays in which the central character never appears (Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot comes to mind as well Andrzej Dłużniewski’s own Ikonogramy (Iconograms), drawings of frames of non-existent pictures from the mid 1970s[36]), Theatre of Absence addressed grievous situation of the moment. Created just months after the lockdown, it clearly alluded to recent experience: 5,000 activists—factory workers, bureaucrats, journalists, actors, writers and artists—had been arrested without warning and interned without trial; others went into hiding and some decided the leave the country at very short notice. Here, in a private apartment made into a public space, the audience were encouraged to imagine an ‘absent presence’—a someone elsewhere—on the basis of the most ordinary possessions. And like Koudelka, witnessing the occupation in Prague in 1968, the Dłużniewskis insisted on the moment —‘The time is 12, really 12 o’clock’. (I godzina 12, prawdziwa 12-ta)
[1] ‘Koudelka’s Prague, Fifty Years Later’ (an interview by Melissa Harris) in Aperture August 20, 2018, https://aperture.org/editorial/josef-koudelka-68/ (accessed July 2023).
[2] See for instance, Jan C. Behrends and Thomas Lindenberger, eds, Underground publishing and the public sphere transnational perspectives, Vienna, Lit. Verlag, 2014; David Crowley and Susan Reid, Socialist spaces, Oxford/London: Berg, 2002.
[3] For recent studies on performance in Eastern Europe, see Amy Bryzgel, Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960, Manchester, MUP, 2017; Katalin Cseh-Varga and Adam Czirak, eds, Performance art in the second public sphere: event-based art in late socialist Europe, London, Routledge, 2018; Agnieszka Sosnowska, Performans oporu, Warsaw, Bęc Zmiana, 2019; Tomas Glanc, Zornitza Kazalarska and Alfrun Kliems, eds, Performance—cinema—sound: perspectives and retrospectives in Central and Eastern Europe / Das Andere Osteuropa: Dissens in Politik, Vienna, Lit Verlag, 2020.
[4] In placing an emphasis on the spaces of the city, this essay does not address the equally important setting of the countryside. Often understood as zone of escape from the scrutiny of the state, the countryside was the setting of numerous artistic experiments in Eastern Europe in the 1970s. See Adam Czirak, ‘Escape into nature! The politics of melancholy in Czechoslovakian performance art’ in Cseh-Varga and Czirak, Performance art in the second public sphere, pp 151–64; Maja Fowkes, The green bloc: neo-avant-garde art and ecology under socialism, Budapest, CEU Press, 2015; Z Mesta Von / Out of the city, Bratislava, Galéria mesta Bratislavy, 2007.
[5] See Lynne Attwood, Gender and housing in Soviet Russia, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2017, p 34.
[6] Karel Teige, The minimum dwelling, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 2002; Milka Bliznakov, ‘Soviet housing during the experimental years, 1918 to 1933’ in William Craft Brumfield and Blair A. Ruble, eds, Russian housing in the modern age: design and social history, Cambridge, CUP, 1993;and Tricia Starks, ‘A revolutionary home: housekeeping and social duty in the 1920s’, Revolutionary Russia, vol 17, no 1, 2004, pp 69–104.
[7] For a recent survey of visionary architecture and urbanism with a strong emphasis on the Eastern Bloc see Andres Kurg and Mari Laanemets, Forecast and fantasy: architecture without borders, 1960s–1980s, Tallinn, Lugemik Publishing, 2023.
[8] Lauren Berlant’s phrase employed by Paulina Bren, The greengrocer and his TV: the culture of communism after the 1968 Prague Spring,Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2011, p 149.
[9] ‘The Eastern roots of sharing: interview with Kacper Pobłocki’, Magazyn Miasta 2, 2018, pp 12–15.
[10] See David Crowley and Susan E. Reid, ‘Introduction: pleasures in socialism?’ Pleasures in socialism: leisure and luxury in the Eastern Bloc, in David Crowley and Susan E. Reid, eds, Evanston, IL, Northwestern University Press, 2010, pp 3–52.
[11] Svetlana Boym, Commonplaces: mythologies of everyday life in Russia,Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1994, p 148.
[12] Václav Havel, ‘Stories and totalitarianism’ (1987) in Paul Wilson, ed., Václav Havel: open letters; selected prose 1965–1990,London: Faber & Faber, 1991, pp 331–32.
[13] György Konrad, Antipolitics: an essay, New York, Henry Holt and Company, 1987.
[14] See Akademia Ruchu. Miasto. Pole Akcji,Warsaw, Centrum Sztuki Współczesnej Ujazdowski, 2012; Tomasz Plata, Akademia Ruchu Teatr, Warsaw, Instytut Teatralny, 2015; Wojciech Krukowski, Tyle lat, co Polska Ludowa albo 45 lat od wtorku, Warsaw, Instytut Teatralny, 2016; and Łukasz Ronduda, Polish art of the ’70s, Warsaw, CSW Zamek Ujazdowski, 2009, pp 344–61.
[15] Vít Havránek in conversation with Paweł Polit and Igor Zabel in Jiří Kovanda actions and installations 2005–1976, Prague/Zurich, Tranzit / JRP / Ringier, 2006, np.
[16] Klara Kemp-Welch, Antipolitics in Central European art: reticence as dissidence under post-totalitarian rule 1956–1989, London, Bloomsbury, 2014, pp 194–222.
[17] See David Crowley, ‘Empty Plots’ in Ieva Astahovska, ed, Visionary structures: from Johansons to Johansons, Riga, Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art, 2015, pp 62–67.
[18] See Richard Gregor, ‘Ten, kto zostal v meste. Komunikácie Ľubomíra Ďurčeka v rámci Bratislavského Konceptualizmu’, Jazdec, vol 6, no 2, 2014; Ľubomír Ďurček: Situačné modely komunikácie, ed Mira Keratová, Bratislava, Slovenská národná galéria, 2013.
[19] See Andrea Bátorová, The art of contestation performative practices in the 1960s and 1970s in Slovakia, Bratislava, Comenius University, 2019, pp 145–55.
[20] Gyula Muskovics and Andrea Soós, eds., Tamás Király ’80s,Budapest, Tranzit, 2017.
[21] Krzysztof Niemczyk, Kurtyzana i Pisklęta, Krakow, Koorporacja Ha!art, 2007.
[22] Ewa Majewska, Feminist antifascism: counterpublics of the common, London, Verso, 2021, chapter 4.
[23] Kovanda in Jiří Kovanda actions and installations 2005–1976, np.
[24] See Ruth Noack, Sanja Iveković: Triangle, Cambridge MA, MIT Press, 2013. For discussion of the interplay of secret police image-making practices and those of artists in Eastern Europe, see Inke Arns, Kata Krasznahorkai, Sylvia Sasse, eds, Artists & agents – performance art and secret services, Hartware MedienKunstverein, 2019.
[25] Tomasz Załuski, ‘Kobieta walcząca o pozycję w polu produkcji artystycznej. Samoidentyfikacja, samoorganizacja i samoemancypacja według Ewy Partum’ in Anna Kałuża, Katarzyna Szopa, Marta Baron-Milian, eds, Płeć awangardy, Katowice, Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego, 2019, pp 305–31; Karolina Majewska-Güde, Ewa Partum’s artistic practice: an atlas of continuity in different locations, Bielefeld, transcript, 2021; Aleksandra Gajowy, ‘Queer-feminist hospitality: Ewa Partum’s indifferent body in the public sphere of socialist Poland’, Oxford Art Journal, vol 44, no 3, December 2021, pp 463–80.
[26] Reproduced in Samoidentyfikacja, 1980, exhibition catalogue, Warsaw, Mała Galeria PSP–ZPAF, 1980, np; available online: https://artmuseum.pl/pl/archiwum/archiwum-polskiego-performansu/2521/127180, accessed June 2023.
[27] Majewska-Güde, Ewa Partum’s artistic practice, p 163.
[28] Partum cited in Majewska-Güde, Ewa Partum’s artistic practice, p 158.
[29] Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida,New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1981, p 98.
[30] Karol Jachymek, ‘Seks w kinie polskim okresu PRL’, Pleograf. Kwartalnik Akademii Polskiego Filmu, no 1/2018, https://akademiapolskiegofilmu.pl/pl/historia-polskiego-filmu/artykuly/seks-w-kinie-polskim-okresu-prl-wprowadzenie/626, accessed July 2022.
[31] It was published in 1985 in a heavily censored version by the Československý spisovatel (Czechoslovak Writer) publishing house.
[32] Karel Kyncl, ‘A censored life’, Index on censorship, February 1985, p 41.
[33] See Cseh-Varga and Czirak, Performance art in the second public sphere.
[34] Konrád cited by Cseh-Varga and Czirak in their ‘Introduction’ to Performance art in the second public sphere, p 7.
[35] Maryla Sitkowska, ed, Piwna 20/26. Emilii i Andrzeja Dłużniewskich 1980–1993,Warsaw, ASP, 1994, pp 86–87.
[36] Andrzej Dłużniewski. O Nic nie jest pytany, Warsaw, Fundacja Profile, 2019, 151–64.
