{"id":1508,"date":"2024-03-20T09:02:22","date_gmt":"2024-03-20T08:02:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/endospory-cms.asp.katowice.pl\/?p=1508"},"modified":"2024-03-21T14:12:01","modified_gmt":"2024-03-21T13:12:01","slug":"the-publicity-of-the-private-performance-in-public-in-eastern-europe-in-the-1970s","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/endospory-cms.asp.katowice.pl\/en\/2024\/03\/20\/the-publicity-of-the-private-performance-in-public-in-eastern-europe-in-the-1970s\/","title":{"rendered":"The publicity of the private: performance in public in Eastern Europe in the 1970s"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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]<\/em> Wenceslas Square (V\u00e1clavsk\u00e9 n\u00e1m\u011bsti) 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: \u2018the people of Prague had decided not to demonstrate so as not to give the Soviet occupiers a pretext for a massacre\u2019.[1]<\/sup><\/a> It turns out that the Artists\u2019 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\u2019s photograph marks a kind of \u2018absent presence\u2019: everyone is elsewhere<\/em>. In photographing a timepiece, he captured a \u2018decisive moment\u2019 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 Gust\u00e1v Hus\u00e1k called \u2018normalizace\u2019 (\u2018normalisation\u2019) after the \u2018restoration of order\u2019, the state sought to maintain its hegemony. It channelled resources\u2014most prominently consumer comforts and increased surveillance\u2014to suppress change. For many contemporaries, the result was a long period of stultifying ennui.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 \u2018era of stagnation\u2019 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]<\/sup><\/a> 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]<\/sup><\/a> By rejecting the theatre stages and galleries provided\u2014and policed\u2014by the state, \u2018alternative\u2019 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]<\/sup><\/a> 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2014whether in the form of buildings, streets or country estates\u2014would end, and universal rights would be extended under the mindful watch of a benign state intent on its own disappearance (Engels\u2019 notion of the \u2018withering of the state\u2019). In the aftermath of the October Revolution, for instance, the \u2018bourgeois conception of home\u2014understood both socially and spatially\u2014was rejected in a series of decrees nationalising land and abolishing private ownership of property in Russia.[5]<\/sup><\/a> 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 \u2018digital natives\u2019 \u2014people too young to remember a time before the Internet\u2014Soviet 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]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2014access to culture, education and healthcare facilities\u2014were 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The utopian vision of shared space proclaimed by ideologues withered, particularly during the Stalin years. The project of building communal homes\u2014still the fantasy of visionary architects in Central Europe well into the 1970s[7]<\/sup><\/a>\u2014was 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 \u2018simultaneously lived private worlds\u2019.[8]<\/sup><\/a> And the failure of publicness could be felt in unlit hallways in housing blocks, broken children\u2019s 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\u2014the principle of communal life\u2014did emerge in this impoverished environment, it was often, as sociologist Kacper Pob\u0142ocki describes, despite rather than because of the activities of the state.[9]<\/sup><\/a> And, despite a loud commitment to equality, the communist authorities also created zones of privilege for their \u2018elites\u2019: 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]<\/sup><\/a> 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\u2014which were accessed by trusted family and friends\u2014became highly valued. In her brilliant study, of everyday life in Soviet Russia, Commonplaces<\/em>, Svetlana Boym singles out the Moscow kitchen from the 1960s onwards as one of these autonomous zones: \u2018The kitchen gathering \u2026 represents a different form of collec\u00adtivity\u2014it is neither utopian nor forced, like that of the communal apartment. It was a company of friends, unofficial though not an\u00adti-official; in this collective the bonds of affection and friendship constituted its ideology\u2019.[11]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 \u2018rules\u2019 of behaviour in each were rarely articulated but they were well understood. Dissident intellectuals like the playwright V\u00e1clav Havel in Czechoslovakia and the novelist and sociologist Gy\u00f6rgy Konr\u00e1d 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 \u2018Stories and Totalitarianism\u2019 (1987), Havel writes:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The bureaucratic regulation of the everyday details of people\u2019s lives is another indirect instrument of nihilization. It is here that public matters infiltrate private life in a way that is very \u2018ordinary\u2019, 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]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Havel\u2019s view was not only that privacy had been eroded but that that publicness\u2014in the sense of openness and civic-mindedness\u2014had been damaged too. Consequently, the task as outlined by dissident writers like Konr\u00e1d 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]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 \u2018theatre of behaviour\u2019 abandoning the stage for minimal, unlicensed and unannounced performance on the streets.[14]<\/sup><\/a> 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 Potkni\u0119cie I<\/em> and Potkni\u0119cie II<\/em> (Stumble I and Stumble II)\u2014performed in various Polish cities in 1975\u201377\u2014individual members of the ensemble walked along the pavement only to trip over some invisible obstruction. [2] Dressed unremarkably, these pedestrians\u2014one-by-one\u2014stumbled 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\u2019s Party), out of shot but close-by, might be an answer. Other versions of the stumble seemed to occur in sight of the \u2018propaganda of success\u2019 (often literally banners on buildings announcing inflated economic achievements), adding meaning to these minor acts of failure. Other Akademia Ruchu actions included Gazety<\/em> (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<\/em> (Queues, 1976\/7) they formed \u2018queues to nowhere\u2019 in front of butchers\u2019 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 wychodz\u0105ca ze sklepu<\/em> (Queue going out of the shop), the ensemble lined up away from the entrance to a butcher\u2019s shop, expressing a kind of patient disdain for its produce.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Parallels can be drawn with the low-key interventions into urban space made by the Czech artist Ji\u0159\u00ed 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 <\/em>he stood on a busy escalator facing away from the direction of travel, trying to catch the eyes of those around him; in Kontakt<\/em> (Contact) he bumped into pedestrians walking in the opposite direction. [3] These interpersonal but impersonal communications\u2014documented in photographs\u2014broke 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<\/em> was an unwarranted or uninvited act. Occasionally, symbolism entered into his scenes: in XXX 19 November 1976. Prague, V\u00e1clavsk\u00e9 nam\u011bsti<\/em> 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]<\/sup><\/a> Klara Kemp-Welch has interpreted Kovanda\u2019s public appearances as a melancholic search for an audience by an unofficial artist.[16]<\/sup><\/a> In fact, in Pokus o sazenameni<\/em> (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 \u2018I invited some friends to watch me trying to make friends with a girl. October 19, 1977 V\u00e1clavsk\u00e9 nam\u011bsti, Prague\u2019. No one seems to be watching, raising the suspicion that these \u2018friends\u2019 are nothing more than an appellation\u2014a claim made with words. No-one is here.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 \u0100rgale and artist M\u0101ris \u0100rgalis along with Kirils \u0160me\u013ckovs, K\u0101rlis 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]<\/sup><\/a> 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\u2019s 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 \u0100rgalis\u2019s 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 M\u0101ksla <\/em>(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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2014seemingly independently and without connection\u2014throughout the Bloc, a common response the state\u2019s grip on public space. To the examples presented here, we might add the street actions that Bratislava Conceptualist \u013dubom\u00edr \u010eur\u010dek\u2019s called Rezonancie<\/em> (Resonances, 1979)[18]<\/a>, the urban choreography conducted by Do\u010dasn\u00e1 spolo\u010dnos\u0165 intenz\u00edvneho pre\u017e\u00edvania (Temporary Society of Intensive Experience), active from 1979 in Slovakia,[19]<\/sup><\/a> or even the \u2018fashion walks\u2019 orchestrated from 1981 onwards by the Hungarian fashion designer Tam\u00e1s Kir\u00e1ly and his friends to queer the streets of Budapest.[20]<\/sup><\/a> Writer and artist Krzysztof Niemczyk might be added to this catalogue. Openly gay and uninhibited, he organized anarchic \u2018interventions\u2019 into city life around 1970. They included stripping naked in a fountain in Krak\u00f3w\u2019s main square and turning his mother into a \u2018living statue\u2019 by tying her to a bench in a city park could be invited to join the company of these unlicensed street performers.[21]<\/sup><\/a> 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\u2014speeches, newspapers, banners, broadcasts \u2026  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\u2019s Republic. Stumble<\/em> and the other Akademia Ruchu actions were, for instance, mounted at the same time as workers in P\u0142ock 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\u2019 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\u2019s droll street theatre could hardly be greater. But this does not mean that the group\u2019s actions should be dismissed as being trivial\u2014after 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 \u2018weak resistance\u2019, 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]<\/sup><\/a> In her analysis, \u2018weak resistance\u2019 eschews the idea of the heroic life, instead valuing the political expressions which can happen in the here and now of everyday life. \u2018Weak resistance\u2019 is articulated in the \u2018smallest gestures\u2019 or in spontaneous acts, and even failures rather than in a meticulously prepared plan or in revolutionary actions. Akademia Ruchu’s \u2018theatre of behaviour\u2019, Kovanda\u2019s appearances in Prague and the Pollucionists\u2019 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 \u2018illuminate their surroundings\u2019 (Havel\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That these artists documented their activities is important too. Kovanda\u2019s ephemeral performances were photographed, for instance, by an accomplice, Pavel Tu\u010d, 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<\/em> (described above) reads<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On an escalator \u2026 turning around,<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I look into the eyes of the person standing behind me \u2026
September 3, 1977<\/p>\n\n\n\n

V\u00e1clavsk\u00e9 n\u00e1m\u011bsti, Prague.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As he later acknowledged, \u2018I didn\u2019t write the texts out by hand \u2026 I wanted it to be as cool, as impersonal as possible.\u2019[23]<\/a> 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 Ivekovi\u0107\u2019s photo sequence, Trikotnik<\/em> [Triangle, 1979][24]<\/a>).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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]<\/sup><\/a> [5] Dressed in high heels, Partum appears alongside people waiting for the bus, queuing to shop or at work. These \u2018encounters\u2019 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 <\/em>(Self-Identification) that featured these works in Ma\u0142a 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:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2014all 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The events recorded as my personal intervention do not cover this problem fully. They only bring it into focus.[26]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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-G\u00fcde writes \u2018The 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.\u2019[27]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

When the Samoidentyfikacja <\/em>series was exhibited in the Ma\u0142a 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\u2019s nudity dominates Self-Identification <\/em>(and yet, apparently, she rejected some works prepared for the series because they were \u2018too erotic\u2019[28]<\/sup><\/a>). In making her \u2018publicity of the private\u2019, a term deployed by Roland Barthes in his book Camera Lucida<\/em> (1981),[29]<\/sup><\/a> Partum sought to unsettle the ways in which life in the People\u2019s 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\u2019s series was created appeared at a time when sexualised images of female nudity\u2014pin ups in magazines, and exhibitions of \u2018artistic\u2019 photographs (sometimes by the ZPAF membership)\u2014was increasingly forming part of the mainstream culture of the People\u2019s Republic. Licensed permissiveness of this kind, was, as Karol Jachymek has shown, one face of the Polish regime\u2019s programme of \u2018modernisation\u2019: objectification was another form of socialist commodification.[30]<\/sup><\/a> And yet, in her photomontages, Partum appears to be invisible or unseen by those around her. This was not\u2014or not only\u2014a visual metaphor: in the video recording of Partum\u2019s temporary appearance outside, even the wedding party fail to notice her. One of most affecting aspects of Self-Identification <\/em>is the fact that Partum can be so exposed and so invisible at the same time\u2014a condition which might describe that of women in Poland at the time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 \u2018Carnival of Solidarity\u2019 in Poland in 1980\u201381 (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 \u2018publicness\u2019 in the Eastern Bloc. The temporary transformation of \u2018private\u2019 settings into public spaces might form another case of \u2018weak resistance\u2019. There is a long history of theatres and exhibitions, as well as intellectual \u2018salons\u2019 for discussions and lectures, being organised in private apartments in the Eastern Bloc (and earlier too). In 1955, for instance, poet Miron Bia\u0142oszewski established Teatr na Tarczy\u0144skiej (Tarczy\u0144ski Street Theatre) in Lech Emfazy Stefa\u0144ski\u2019s apartment in Warsaw. Three years later, Bia\u0142oszewski with Ludmi\u0142a Murawska, a painter and actress, and Ludwik Hering formed a small company,Tear Osobny Trzech Os\u00f3b (The Individual Theatre of Three Individuals) that performed in ia\u0142oszewski\u2019s apartment on D\u0105browski Square (as well as in the Hybrydy student club in the city). [6] The company\u2019s repertoire included works by Shakespeare as well as the classical canon in Poland (Norwid, S\u0142owacki, Mickiewicz) as well as his own plays. Unticketed, the performances drew their audiences from the close intellectual networks of the city. Outside official culture, Bia\u0142oszewski\u2019s 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\u2019s death, a period known as the Thaw.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Things were very different in Prague in the 1970s. There, Vlasta Chramostov\u00e1\u2014a popular and celebrated actor who had been blacklisted for her support of the Prague Spring\u2014established the Bytov\u00e9 divadlo (Living Room Theatre) in her Prague apartment. [7] Early performances included Chramostov\u00e1\u2019s 1976 reading of the All the beauties of the world (V\u0161ecky kr\u00e1sy sv\u011bta), <\/em>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 Chramostov\u00e1 read from the manuscript to an audience in her apartment that included Seifert.[31]<\/a> Appellplatz II<\/em> (1977), the next performance, was a collage of readings combing the texts of banned Czech authors including Ivan Kl\u00edma and Ludv\u00edk Vacul\u00edk, as well as the German modernist Bertolt Brecht, and was based on Jerzy Andrzejewski\u2019s story Apel (Roll Call) <\/em>set in Auschwitz.This was followed in 1978 by a run of Macbeth<\/em> with five actors playing the 25 characters to audiences sitting on the floor or perched on armchairs in Chramostov\u00e1\u2019s elegant apartment. Unfolding doors between the two large rooms created a proscenium arch. One member of the audience reported the reaction of the authorities:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 Chramostov\u00e1’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 Chramostov\u00e1’s husband was arguing with the uninvited guests in the hall\u2014and while Macbeth (Pavel Landovsky) was about to be killed by Macduff (Pavel Kohout) before an audience of approximately 20 in the living-room\u2014a 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]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

While, of course, Shakespeare\u2019s theme of illegitimate power had considerable appeal to critics of Hus\u00e1k\u2019s regime, Macbeth<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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, Bia\u0142oszewski\u2019s 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 Bia\u0142oszewski 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 \u2018on hand\u2019. The illusionism characteristic of conventional theatre was replaced by the insistence of mundane reality\u2014the 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\u2014the \u2018fourth wall\u2019 that maintains the distance between audience and performer. In Chramostov\u00e1\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Chramostov\u00e1\u2019s Living Room Theatre might be taken as a paradigmatic example of what has been called the \u2018second public sphere\u2019 in Eastern Europe under communist rule. This term\u2014derived from the ideas of dissidents like Gy\u00f6rgy Konr\u00e1d and now widely employed by cultural historians of the Bloc[33]<\/a>\u2014emphasizes the organisation of culture outside the official sphere. Although autonomous and uncensored, these forms of culture were not illicit or private. In Konr\u00e1d\u2019s terms they sought to \u2018extend the possibilities of a given public system\u2019 rather than change it.[34]<\/a> 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 \u2018publicity of the private\u2019 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.    <\/p>\n\n\n\n

One further example of the publicity of the privatemight be offered by means of a conclusion to this survey as well as the \u2018era of stagnation\u2019 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 Karnawa\u0142 Solidarno\u015bci<\/em> (the Carnival of Solidarity), the country had spun in an exhilarating cycle of protest and concession. The newly formed, independent trade union Solidarno\u015b\u0107 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\u2019s 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 Solidarno\u015b\u0107\u2019s 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 D\u0142u\u017cniewski 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 Nieobecno\u015bci<\/em> (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:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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, \u2018our guest\u2019, 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 \u2018emerges\u2019 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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<\/em> 12 o\u2019clock.[35]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Although the installation called to mind other plays in which the central character never appears (Samuel Beckett\u2019s Waiting for Godot<\/em> comes to mind as well Andrzej D\u0142u\u017cniewski\u2019s own Ikonogramy<\/em> (Iconograms), drawings of frames of non-existent pictures from the mid 1970s[36]<\/sup><\/a>), Theatre of Absence<\/em> addressed grievous situation of the moment. Created just months after the lockdown, it clearly alluded to recent experience: 5,000 activists\u2014factory workers, bureaucrats, journalists, actors, writers and artists\u2014had 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 \u2018absent presence\u2019\u2014a someone elsewhere\u2014<\/em>on the basis of the most ordinary possessions. And like Koudelka, witnessing the occupation in Prague in 1968, the D\u0142u\u017cniewskis insisted on the moment \u2014\u2018The time is 12, really<\/em> 12 o\u2019clock\u2019.  (I godzina 12, prawdziwa 12-ta)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

[1]<\/sup><\/a> \u2018Koudelka\u2019s Prague, Fifty Years Later\u2019 (an interview by Melissa Harris) in Aperture<\/em> August 20, 2018, https:\/\/aperture.org\/editorial\/josef-koudelka-68\/<\/a> (accessed July 2023).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[2]<\/sup><\/a> See for instance, Jan C. Behrends and Thomas Lindenberger, eds, Underground publishing and the public sphere <\/em>transnational perspectives<\/em>, Vienna, Lit. Verlag, 2014; David Crowley and Susan Reid, Socialist spaces<\/em>, Oxford\/London: Berg, 2002.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[3]<\/sup><\/a> For recent studies on performance in Eastern Europe, see Amy Bryzgel, Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960<\/em>, Manchester, MUP, 2017; Katalin Cseh-Varga and Adam Czirak, eds, Performance art in the second public sphere: event-based art in late socialist Europe<\/em>, London, Routledge, 2018; Agnieszka Sosnowska, Performans oporu<\/em>, Warsaw, B\u0119c Zmiana, 2019; Tomas Glanc, Zornitza Kazalarska and Alfrun Kliems, eds, Performance\u2014cinema\u2014sound: perspectives and retrospectives in Central and Eastern Europe \/ Das Andere Osteuropa: Dissens in Politik<\/em>, <\/em>Vienna, Lit Verlag, 2020.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[4]<\/sup><\/a> 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, \u2018Escape into nature! The politics of melancholy in Czechoslovakian performance art\u2019 in Cseh-Varga and Czirak, Performance art in the second public sphere<\/em>, pp 151\u00ad\u201364; Maja Fowkes, The green bloc: neo-avant-garde art and ecology under socialism<\/em>, Budapest, CEU Press, 2015; Z Mesta Von \/ Out of the city<\/em>, Bratislava, Gal\u00e9ria mesta Bratislavy, 2007.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[5]<\/sup><\/a> See Lynne Attwood, Gender and housing in Soviet Russia<\/em>, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2017, p 34.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[6]<\/sup><\/a> Karel Teige, The minimum dwelling<\/em>, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 2002; Milka Bliznakov, \u2018Soviet housing during the experimental years, 1918 to 1933\u2019 in William Craft Brumfield and Blair A. Ruble, eds, Russian<\/em> <\/em>housing in the modern age: design and social history<\/em>, Cambridge, CUP, 1993;and Tricia Starks, \u2018A revolutionary home: housekeeping and social duty in the 1920s\u2019, Revolutionary Russia<\/em>, vol 17, no 1, 2004, pp 69\u2013104.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[7]<\/sup><\/a> 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<\/em>\u2013<\/em>1980s<\/em>, Tallinn, Lugemik Publishing, 2023.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[8]<\/sup><\/a> Lauren Berlant\u2019s phrase employed by Paulina Bren, The greengrocer and his TV: the culture of communism after the 1968 Prague Spring<\/em>,Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2011, p 149.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[9]<\/sup><\/a> \u2018The Eastern roots of sharing: interview with Kacper Pob\u0142ocki\u2019, Magazyn Miasta<\/em> 2, 2018, pp 12\u201315.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[10]<\/sup><\/a> See David Crowley and Susan E. Reid, \u2018Introduction: pleasures in socialism?\u2019 Pleasures in socialism: leisure and luxury in the Eastern Bloc<\/em>, in David Crowley and Susan E. Reid, eds, Evanston, IL, Northwestern University Press, 2010, pp 3\u201352. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

[11]<\/sup><\/a> Svetlana Boym, Commonplaces: mythologies of everyday life in Russia<\/em>,Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1994, p 148.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[12]<\/sup><\/a> V\u00e1clav Havel, \u2018Stories and totalitarianism\u2019 (1987) in Paul Wilson, ed., V\u00e1<\/em>clav Havel: open letters; selected prose 1965<\/em>\u20131990<\/em>,London: Faber & Faber, 1991, pp 331\u201332.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[13]<\/sup><\/a> Gy\u00f6rgy Konrad, Antipolitics: an essay<\/em>, New York, Henry Holt and Company, 1987.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[14]<\/sup><\/a> See Akademia Ruchu. Miasto. Pole Akcji<\/em>,Warsaw, Centrum Sztuki Wsp\u00f3\u0142czesnej Ujazdowski, 2012; Tomasz Plata, Akademia Ruchu Teatr<\/em>, Warsaw, Instytut Teatralny, 2015; Wojciech Krukowski, Tyle lat, co Polska Ludowa albo 45 lat od wtorku<\/em>, Warsaw, Instytut Teatralny, 2016; and \u0141ukasz Ronduda, Polish art of the \u201970s<\/em>, Warsaw, CSW Zamek Ujazdowski, 2009, pp 344\u201361.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[15]<\/sup><\/a> V\u00edt Havr\u00e1nek in conversation with Pawe\u0142 Polit and Igor Zabel in Ji\u0159\u00ed <\/em>Kovanda actions and installations 2005\u2013<\/em>1976<\/em>, Prague\/Zurich, Tranzit \/ JRP \/ Ringier, 2006, np.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[16]<\/sup><\/a> Klara Kemp-Welch, Antipolitics in Central European art: reticence as dissidence under post-totalitarian rule 1956\u20131989<\/em>, London, Bloomsbury, 2014, pp 194\u2013222.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[17]<\/sup><\/a> See David Crowley, \u2018Empty Plots\u2019 in Ieva Astahovska, ed, Visionary structures: from Johansons to Johansons<\/em>, Riga, Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art, 2015, pp 62\u00ad\u00ad\u201367.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[18]<\/a> See Richard Gregor, \u2018Ten, kto zostal v meste. Komunik\u00e1cie \u013dubom\u00edra \u010eur\u010deka v r\u00e1mci Bratislavsk\u00e9ho Konceptualizmu\u2019, Jazdec<\/em>, vol 6, no 2, 2014; \u013dubom\u00edr \u010eur\u010d<\/em>ek: Situa<\/em>\u010dn<\/em>\u00e9 <\/em>modely komunik\u00e1cie<\/em>, ed Mira Keratov\u00e1, Bratislava, Slovensk\u00e1 n\u00e1rodn\u00e1 gal\u00e9ria, 2013.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[19]<\/sup><\/a> See Andrea B\u00e1torov\u00e1<\/em>, The art of contestation performative practices in the 1960s and 1970s in Slovakia<\/em>, Bratislava, Comenius University, 2019, pp 145\u201355.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[20]<\/sup><\/a> Gyula Muskovics and Andrea So\u00f3s, eds., Tam\u00e1<\/em>s Kir<\/em>\u00e1<\/em>ly \u201980s<\/em>,Budapest, Tranzit, 2017.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[21]<\/sup><\/a> Krzysztof Niemczyk, Kurtyzana i Piskl\u0119ta<\/em>, Krakow, Koorporacja Ha!art, 2007.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[22]<\/sup><\/a> Ewa Majewska, Feminist antifascism: counterpublics of the common<\/em>, London, Verso, 2021, chapter 4.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[23]<\/a> Kovanda in Ji\u0159\u00ed Kovanda actions and installations 2005\u20131976<\/em>, np.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[24]<\/a> See Ruth Noack, Sanja Ivekovi\u0107: Triangle<\/em>, 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 \u2013 performance art and secret services<\/em>, Hartware MedienKunstverein, 2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[25]<\/sup><\/a> Tomasz Za\u0142uski, \u2018Kobieta walcz\u0105ca o pozycj\u0119 w polu produkcji artystycznej. Samoidentyfikacja, samoorganizacja i samoemancypacja wed\u0142ug Ewy Partum\u2019 in Anna Ka\u0142u\u017ca, Katarzyna Szopa, Marta Baron-Milian, eds, P\u0142e\u0107 awangardy<\/em>, Katowice, Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu \u015al\u0105skiego, 2019, pp 305\u201331; Karolina Majewska-G\u00fcde, Ewa Partum’s artistic practice: an atlas of continuity in different locations<\/em>, Bielefeld, transcript, 2021; Aleksandra Gajowy, \u2018Queer-feminist hospitality: Ewa Partum\u2019s indifferent body in the public sphere of socialist Poland\u2019, Oxford Art Journal<\/em>, vol 44, no 3, December 2021, pp 463\u201380.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[26]<\/sup><\/a> Reproduced in Samoidentyfikacja<\/em>, 1980, exhibition catalogue, Warsaw, Ma\u0142a Galeria PSP\u2013ZPAF, 1980, np; available online: https:\/\/artmuseum.pl\/pl\/archiwum\/archiwum-polskiego-performansu\/2521\/127180<\/a>, accessed June 2023.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[27]<\/a> Majewska-G\u00fcde, Ewa Partum\u2019s artistic practice<\/em>, p 163.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[28]<\/sup><\/a> Partum cited in Majewska-G\u00fcde, Ewa Partum\u2019s artistic practice, <\/em>p 158.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[29]<\/sup><\/a> Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida<\/em>,New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1981, p 98.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[30]<\/sup><\/a> Karol Jachymek, \u2018Seks w kinie polskim okresu PRL\u2019, Pleograf. Kwartalnik Akademii Polskiego Filmu<\/em>, no 1\/2018, https:\/\/akademiapolskiegofilmu.pl\/pl\/historia-polskiego-filmu\/artykuly\/seks-w-kinie-polskim-okresu-prl-wprowadzenie\/626, accessed July 2022.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[31]<\/a> It was published in 1985 in a heavily censored version by the \u010ceskoslovensk\u00fd spisovatel (Czechoslovak Writer) publishing house.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[32]<\/sup><\/a> Karel Kyncl, \u2018A censored life\u2019, Index on censorship<\/em>, February 1985, p  41.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[33]<\/a> See Cseh-Varga and Czirak, Performance art in the second public sphere<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[34]<\/a> Konr\u00e1d cited by Cseh-Varga and Czirak in their \u2018Introduction\u2019 to Performance art in the second public sphere<\/em>, <\/em>p 7.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[35]<\/sup><\/a> Maryla Sitkowska, ed, Piwna 20\/26. <\/em>Emilii i Andrzeja D\u0142u\u017cniewskich 1980\u20131993<\/em>,Warsaw, ASP, 1994, pp 86\u201387.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[36]<\/sup><\/a> Andrzej <\/em>D\u0142u\u017cniewski. O Nic nie jest pytany<\/em>, Warsaw, Fundacja Profile, 2019, 151\u201364.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 (V\u00e1clavsk\u00e9 n\u00e1m\u011bsti) forms the background for a watch on an arm in his shot. It is 12:22. And the square is empty. The image seems […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":898,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1508","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-text"],"acf":{"content_type":["texts"],"intro":"","person_related":[{"ID":1511,"post_author":"3","post_date":"2024-03-08 14:14:13","post_date_gmt":"2024-03-08 13:14:13","post_content":"","post_title":"David Crowley","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","post_password":"","post_name":"david-crowley","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2024-05-29 15:39:08","post_modified_gmt":"2024-05-29 13:39:08","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"https:\/\/endospory-cms.asp.katowice.pl\/?post_type=people&p=1511","menu_order":0,"post_type":"people","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"related_content":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/endospory-cms.asp.katowice.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1508","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/endospory-cms.asp.katowice.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/endospory-cms.asp.katowice.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/endospory-cms.asp.katowice.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/endospory-cms.asp.katowice.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1508"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/endospory-cms.asp.katowice.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1508\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1512,"href":"https:\/\/endospory-cms.asp.katowice.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1508\/revisions\/1512"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/endospory-cms.asp.katowice.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/898"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/endospory-cms.asp.katowice.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1508"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/endospory-cms.asp.katowice.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1508"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/endospory-cms.asp.katowice.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1508"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}