Zdenka Badovinac

What Will the Next Revolution Be Like?

When we try to resolve
the problems of the present, we often look to the past. One chapter from the
unfinished past is, without doubt, the project of communism. What can cultural
revolution have in common with potential solutions to the current financial
crisis? Today the world's most esteemed economists and sociologists assert that
the key to solving the economic crisis lies not in some new mechanical device,
but rather in the creativity of as many people as possible and the development
of new ideas.¹ The idea of
the socialist cultural revolution was, in fact, based on the deliberate
education of the masses: on giving them the knowledge and skills they needed to
participate as fully as possible in the public affairs of the community.

Numerous Eastern
European artists (among others) have recently been reflecting on the notion
that communism is a yet-unfinished project; for them, this idea is also part of
their cultural tradition. While we must not lump together all those in Eastern
Europe-from serious artists to pop entertainers-who, in one way or
another, are today trying to revive the memory of communism, and with it the
Partisan resistance movement, we can perhaps find in current events a number of
shared motivations behind this heightened interest in the past. Among these,
certainly, are the worsening social position of workers, the rise of
nationalism, and the rightist attempt to equate communism with fascism. The
response to all this is extremely varied, ranging from nostalgic retrospection
to serious reflection on the future of the idea of communism. Here I am
primarily interested in artists who see this tradition as offering great
potential for designing alternatives to the dominant forms of globalization.
These artists are returning to their local tradition not because they want to
resist the homogenizing power of globalism, but just the opposite: because they
want to draw as much attention as possible to the universal potential of the unfinished past.

Despite the more or
less cruel reality of life in Eastern Europe-or indeed because of it-people
in these countries were constantly talking about the future, about communism as
the ideal society that would follow the period of "real socialism" then taking
place. Boris Groys says that as a result of the strong presence of this future
dimension, post-colonial cultural theory is of little use in the study of
Eastern European art:

Although the post-communist subject takes the same route from enclosure
to openness as his post-colonial counterpart, he moves along this path in quite
the opposite direction-against the flow of time. While the post-colonial
subject proceeds from the past into the present, the post-communist enters the
present from the future. . . . Ultimately, communism is nothing more than the
most extreme and radical manifestation of militant modernism, of the belief in
progress and of the dream of an enlightened avant-garde acting in total unison,
of utter commitment to the future.²

Inke Arns writes about
the difference between two types of Eastern European art that both come to
grips with the discourse of the avant-garde and socialist realism through a
strategy of repetition and appropriation. Using examples from Soviet
post-utopianism (Ilya Kabakov and Victor Pelevin) and the Yugoslav
retro-avant-garde (Neue
Slowenische Kunst, Mladen
Stilinović, and Kazimir Malevich of Belgrade), both from the 1980s, Arns
distinguishes between the post-utopian attitude toward the past of a failed
utopia that is now over and the retro-avant-garde's
treatment of an unfinished past and its still-open conflictedness.³

Recurrence and Repetition

Quite a few writers
today, all connected in various ways to Eastern Europe, are devoting themselves
to the question of repetition, and in doing so rely on similar philosophical
(Deleuze and Kierkegaard) and psychoanalytic (Freud and Lacan) traditions. Like
Arns, Mladen Dolar defines repetition in contradistinction to remembering. Both
Arns and Dolar cite Kierkegaard's timely thought: "Repetition and recollection
are the same movement, only in opposite directions; for what is recollected is
repeated backwards, whereas genuine repetition is recollected forwards."⁴
In his text "Automatism of Repetition: Aristotle, Kierkegaard, Lacan," Dolar
discusses several thinkers who explain repetition through paradox: that which
is repeated cannot be ascribed an identity (Deleuze); that which is repeated is
the incapability of repetition (Kierkegaard). When something is repeated, then,
we encounter a present reality that demands of us an active position. In his
discussion of Lacan's treatment of repetition, Dolar underscores precisely this
encounter with the real.

Psychoanalysis is not about remembering the past, reintegrating banned
memories and censored chapters, but rather about the capacity to change the
past and relegate it to becoming. It espouses the great paradox that
Kierkegaard tried to promote: that the way to change, and to freedom, to use
this highly laden word, leads through repetition.⁵

Groys, too, refers to
Kierkegaard when he speaks about the new in art:

But for Kierkegaard the new is a difference without a difference or a
difference beyond difference-a difference which we are unable to
recognize because it is not related to any pre-given structural code. As an
example of such difference, Kierkegaard uses the figure of Jesus Christ.
Indeed, Kierkegaard states that the figure of Christ initially looked like that
of every other ordinary human being at that historical time.⁶

_{▴  Walter Benjamin, Mondrian  '63-'96, lecture held in Cankarjev dom and organized by Gallery ŠKUC, Ljubljana, 1986.
Photo: László Moholy-Nagy.}

A large part of the
(post)Yugoslav neo-avant-garde over the past thirty years has understood the
new as the repetition of that which visually already exists. The Belgrade
Malevich's "Last Futurist Exhibition" (Belgrade and Ljubljana, 1986) and "The
Armory Show" (Ljubljana, 1986) with its copies of Mondrian, raised questions
about the differences between the original and its repetition. The same is true
of the first lecture by "Walter Benjamin" (Ljubljana, 1986).⁷
In this lecture, entitled "Mondrian '63-'96," Benjamin speaks of two
alleged copies of the same Mondrian painting (signed as Mondrian, but dated
1983) and how they differ from the original:

Even those so-called answers which we've arrived at in this lecture are
only conditional answers. They are based on assumptions and not on facts. The
only true facts are these paintings which stand in front of us. Such simple
paintings and such complicated questions. We still don't know who is the author
of these paintings, when they originated and what is their meaning. They rely
neither on the co-ordinates of time, nor on co-ordinates of identity, nor on
co-ordinates of meaning. They simply hover, and the only comprehensible sense
of their existence which we can accept with certainty are these questions
themselves.⁸

Such a statement is
not so far from David Hume's thesis, quoted by Deleuze: "Repetition changes
nothing in the object repeated, but does change something in the mind which
contemplates it."⁹ Eastern
European art has its own tradition of repetition, and unless we take this
tradition into consideration, it will be difficult to understand the current
art practices under discussion. For example, the Yugoslav retro-avant-garde
has, from the very beginning, always made clear reference to the Russian
avant-garde and its utopian revolutionary context.

What I would like to particularly
emphasize here are the universal elements in the art of the revolution, which
itself had an international character (and which, unfortunately and by
contrast, ended in severe isolation). Abstraction in itself was a visual
message about this art's universal nature, and its distinctive shapes-Malevich's
black square and cross, for instance-have been repeated ad infinitum by
both the post-utopians and the retro-avant-garde. We might also understand such
pure geometric forms as being easily repeatable, which makes them easier to
distribute. Regardless of how badly things failed, with the Russian avant-garde
we must always remember that these repeatable forms were intended to foster the
greater democratization of art by providing a universally accessible formal
language.

_{▴ Laibach, Interview, June 1983.}

The tradition of
socially critical art, then, includes both impersonal forms as well as
processes borrowed from real life. Here of course it is necessary to emphasize
the reality that is most accessible to the masses: the mass media. One of the
retro-avant-garde's most provocative actions involving the media occurred in
1983, when members of the group Laibach (part of Neue Slowenische Kunst, or
NSK) gave an interview to TV Slovenia. Instead of answering the reporter in the
usual way, they responded by assuming the roles of particular totalitarian
types and reciting their answers in an impersonal, alienated manner, which
baffled the public and created a huge scandal. Back then, Laibach's practice of
provocation and alienated consciousness was much riskier than, say,
the distribution of alternative content through counterfeits of such media as The New
York Times, which the leftist group The Yes Men carried out last year in
the United States. This action was recently copied by the anti-globalization
German group Attac, who published a counterfeit of the respected Hamburg weekly
Die Zeit with content that described
the positive results of solutions to the financial crisis, hunger, and the
world's ecological problems. Despite their differences, all these actions are
characterized by a repetition that cannot be fully controlled and that includes
as an integral part the response of the real.

_{▴ NSK Passport. Photo:Haris Hararis}

A similar encounter
with reality and unpredictability also characterizes several actions by Eastern
European artists in recent years. These artists are not so much interested in
repeating knowledge about local cultural gestures or memorializing them as they
are in reactivating past conflicts and testing their vitality in the present
moment. In the early 1990s, the Neue Slowenische Kunst State in Time was
founded and soon began issuing its own passports, which were remarkably like
genuine passports. In the years since these NSK passports have been requested
by many people-mainly, to be sure, art world representatives-who by
becoming members of the NSK State became at the same time voluntary
participants in an art scenario. At the time NSK began issuing its passports,
there were many new states in Europe and war was raging in the Balkans-circumstances
that led to increased interest in these artistic copies of official documents, at
times out of entirely practical motives. Most of the passports were issued in
Sarajevo, largely to members of the art world who used them as an additional ID;
many people out of necessity even risked using their NSK passport as a
substitute for a real one. A few years ago, NSK's Internet address began
receiving passport requests from people in Nigeria who were interested in the
passport solely as a document they could use in a time of crisis. Irwin, one of
the groups that make up NSK, documented all these stories and in this way
brought them back into the sphere of art. As the Irwin members point out, all
these different worlds have today become much closer to each other because of
contemporary technologies, especially the Internet, which make access to
information possible even in areas that not long ago were quite isolated.

In contrast to NSK,
which issued its own passports, the three artists who renamed themselves "Janez
Janša," after the prime minister in Slovenia's former right-wing
government, relinquished their personal documents, including even their bank
cards, and displayed them in a gallery for a month; by doing this, they tested-in
reality-what life was like without official documents. They demonstrated
that forms defined by repeatability are an essential condition of our
life and work, and that what is increasingly important is the difference beyond
difference: new forms of citizenship that transcend political and formal
identity.

_{▴ IRWIN, NSK Passport Holders, 2007-2008. Photo: Haris Hararis.}

Learning from Brecht

Eastern European
artists are interested in gestures associated with historical situations that
have certain features we see repeated today. The present financial crisis is in
many aspects comparable to the one in the 1930s, which precipitated both the
rise of the fascist movement and the radicalization of leftist positions. The
Croatian curatorial group What, How & for Whom (WHW), which is curating
this year's Istanbul Biennial, has linked the biennial's concept to the social
and political context of the pre-World War II era as treated by Bertolt
Brecht in his plays; as WHW points out, this era bears a strong resemblance to
the present period of pseudo-morality, fast-growing poverty, and repression.
The title of this year's biennial is borrowed from the song "What Keeps Mankind
Alive?" from Brecht's revolutionary Threepenny
Opera (1928). In its concept statement, WHW highlights the fact that
Brecht's play is itself a repetition, or adaptation, of John Gay's The Beggar's Opera, from the eighteenth
century, the period of early industrial capitalism, which in many ways
resembled the time of Brecht's "opera" (as Brecht himself pointed out: "Just
like two hundred years ago we have a social order in which virtually all
levels, albeit in a wider variety of ways, pay respect to moral principles not
by leading a moral life but by living off morality").¹⁰
This was the play in which Brecht established his concept of "epic" (later,
"dialectical") theater-a theater without illusions, where the actor does
not identify with the role but rather simply presents it, while the viewer
follows the theatrical event with a critical mind. One of the main principles
of Brecht's theater is the "alienation effect" (Verfremdungseffekt), which performers achieve through songs,
commentaries, insertions in dialect and slang, and signs bearing labels,
comments, and paraphrases. As the WHW group notes, Brecht used the alienation
effect as a means of exposing and deconstructing the workings of the
"theatrical apparatus"; similarly, in their repetition of The Beggar's Opera in Istanbul, they are seeking to avoid the traps
of the "contemporary art apparatus."

_{▴
Matej Bor, Sebastijan Horvat: Ragged People (Raztrganci)/ Pupils and
Teachers (Učenci in učitelji), production: E.P.I. center, MG Ptuj in
Cankarjev dom, 2007.
photo:Marcandrea.}

Brecht did not combat
the prominent ideological slogans by using critical distance, irony, and
rational argument; rather, he used these slogans in an even more radical form-essentially
repeating them-and thus exposed their meaninglessness. The artists I am
discussing have a similar relation to repetition, whether of ideological
gestures or of models from the past: they appropriate them in order to make
more visible who it is that speaks through them and what message is being
conveyed to whom.

Last year the mandate
of Slovenia's right-wing government ended; in its re-evaluation of history,
this government had begun to equate WWII collaborationism with the resistance
movement and communism with fascism. It is fair to say that this phenomenon is
present throughout Eastern Europe, and this is the context in which we must
understand the current return to the history of revolutionary art. The Slovene
theater director Sebastijan Horvat has staged a number of works in recent years
that make direct reference to Brecht's radical theater. The production that
garnered the most attention was Ragged
People (Raztrganci), the
legendary play written by Matej Bor in 1943 between the battles he participated
in as a member of the Slovene Partisan army. Horvat gave this play the
Brechtian subtitle Pupils and Teachers (Učenci in učitelji), thus
underscoring today's need for a didactic theater and the importance of
communicating with the viewer. At the end of the production, to everyone's
surprise, members of the Partisan Choir in the audience stood up and started
singing well-known Partisan songs, which triggered a powerful emotional
response among the theatergoers, who showed themselves to strongly relate not
only to the Partisan movement but, as one critic has said, to the power and
ideology of contemporary theater as well.11
By repeating not only the text but also the form of an ethically and ideologically
engaged Partisan play, Horvat (naturally with certain modernizations,
stylizations, and emphases) was testing today's theater public and the
possibility of a subversive political theater in a time of capitalist and
political pragmatism.

_{▴ Chto delat?/What is to be done?, Angry Sandwich-People or In praise of Dialectics, 2005. installation view from the exhibition "Prekinjene zgodovine/Interrupted Histories," Moderna galerija, Ljubljana, 2006.
Photo: Dejan Habicht}

In 2004, the members
of a group with the evocative name Chto Delat? (Russian for "What is to be
done?") conducted extensive research in the contemporary urban setting of a
working-class neighborhood in Saint Petersburg that had been the focal point of
the workers' uprising of 1905. The objectives of their research were directed
toward an analysis of possible forms of resistance against new systems of
exploitation and alienation. One of the results was the action "Angry
Sandwich-People, or, In Praise of Dialectics," which was dedicated to the
centennial of the first Russian revolution. The action, which they carried out
in collaboration with local activist groups, took the form of-as the
artists themselves put it-a theater happening in the urban space.¹²
Participants in the project sought to visualize one of Brecht's most powerful
poems, "In Praise of Dialectics," the verses of which were displayed on
sandwich boards worn by the "protesters." In their action, the sandwich boards
were worn by children, activists, and pensioners, who as a group kept shifting
positions and thus changing the arrangement of the signs until, as they
themselves have said, the silent mobility of the political potential erupted in
resolute poetic speech-in the end the "protesters" recited, in "Soviet"
fashion, Brecht's poem, which resounded with the empty pathos of the
revolutionary past. The repetition of this language made it possible to
demonstrate that the gestures of the failed revolution had lost all meaning and
that the real political potential now resided in the consciousness of this
fact.

Brecht also wrote a
number of short works known as "didactic pieces" (Lerhstücke), which were primarily intended as lessons for
performers. In order for the actors to gain as great a distance as possible
from the material they were dealing with, they had to follow Brecht's rules for
performing these "didactic pieces." Instead of having his actors identify with
their roles, what Brecht required, among other things, was the mechanical
repetition of certain gestures. The identity of the individual was sacrificed
for the sake of broadening the common idea. We could say that today Eastern
European artists are once more putting forward art as a "didactic piece"-for
artists themselves and for participants. We would probably be entering into
dangerous speculation if we started ruminating about why the communist idea was
so well received in Eastern Europe and why the spirit of collectivism is so
strongly felt in the work of Eastern European artists. Here it is enough to
establish certain facts that are necessary for reflecting on repetition. The
affinity we see in various Eastern European artists for utopian content,
abstract forms, and the ritual nature of repetition are the characteristic
features that obscure their exclusive Eastern European identity, and it is here
they become universal.

_{▴
Matej Bor, Sebastijan Horvat: Ragged People (Raztrganci)/ Pupils and
Teachers (Učenci in učitelji), production: E.P.I. center, MG Ptuj in
Cankarjev dom, 2007.
photo:Marcandrea.}

Today we can hardly
imagine that something like Russia's October Revolution, which thoroughly
destroyed the tsarist regime in 1917, could ever be repeated. But it is getting
easier and easier for us to take part in protests initiated by all sorts of
blogs, social networking sites, and so forth. Regardless of how trivial their
content might be, in the end we have the feeling that we have done something
and have even made a difference. All of this is made possible by the same
Internet that is also developing a new economics of culture through the
improved distribution of content and the sharing of knowledge. Again we can
learn something from Brecht: to demystify the contemporary means of
communication, to recognize the repressive power of illusions and, stripping
these away, to reveal knowledge-the tool of the cultural revolution. If a
revolution lies ahead of us, it will be a cultural revolution that is different
from any that has happened before, for it will take full advantage of the
educational and informative power of the new technology, as well as the social
distress of all the victims of the first global financial crisis.

Though many people
proclaim Brecht as the father of postmodern theater due to his demystified
illusions and heterogeneous formal methods, it is crucial to underscore here
the essential difference between Brecht and postmodernism, a difference that
also suggests possible reasons for his renewed relevance today. Where
postmodernism relativizes truth, blurs boundaries between the virtual and the
real, and injects doubt into clear positions and firm reactions to the social
reality, Brecht's mechanical repetition was a way of constantly encountering
the real. In place of Aristotle's famous catharsis, Brecht employs in his works
the alienation effect; in place of taking pleasure in illusion, a stance of
constant critical thinking. Only thus does contact with the real become
possible; only thus does repetition become possible as the realization of the
unpredictable. And it is the unpredictable that enables our creativity and
freedom. Or, as Mladen Dolar says, repetition "concerns the core of our being,
it is what enslaves us and what brings forth the tiny crack for subject's
freedom."¹³
And it is only through constant contact with the real that we are able to rid
ourselves of vacillation, take a firm position, and go back to the future.

☁

_{Translated from the Slovene by Rawley Grau.}

_{A Chinese translation of this text has been published in issue #7 of Contemporary Art & Investment.
本文的中文版发表在《当代艺术与投资》第七期上.}