When Mr. Kern visited Poland in the late ’90s, “it was a Kafkaesque kind of moment,” he said. “The situation there was really dire.” The Eastern Bloc economies were struggling to find their footing, and the art infrastructure was weak. But many of the nations in the region thrived over the past decade, and many of the artists in “Ostalgia” have exhibited widely across Europe, though they remain far less known in New York.
“The world is moving further and further east, especially the art world,” said Maria Baibakova, the 25-year-old Moscow-born collector and curator who runs Baibakov Art Projects, a foundation that organizes exhibitions with Russian and international artists in Moscow and abroad. “New York is becoming a more distant capital.” But Ms. Baibakova said that she feels the New York art world is working hard to keep up.
“We’re becoming more aware that there is a very thriving new world that we need to engage with or we’ll cease to be relevant,” Ms. Baibakova continued. “But New York is very good about being flexible and aggressive when needed.”
Andra Ursuta, a Romania-born artist who has lived in the U.S. since the mid-1990s, when she was a teenager, and who presents a miniature model of her childhood home in “Ostalgia,” agreed. “It’s very validating to see this kind of show, to see the depth with which it looks at this part of the world,” she said. “Maybe it’s signaling that art from the region is no longer such an enigmatic thing; it’s been catalogued.”
At a time of economic uncertainty, despite an apparently thriving art market, there is also a hope that Eastern Europe’s art may present alternatives to the status quo. “We in New York are very familiar with the idea that with recognition comes the recognition of the market,” said Mr. Gioni. “But many of the artists in the show worked without markets and without money, which made their ethical responsibility much stronger and much more important.”
Mr. Gioni cited as an example the Russian artist Andrei Monastyrski, whose Collective Actions group staged ephemeral events on the outskirts of Moscow, beginning in the mid-1970s, apart from the official state-sanctioned art institutions of the time, and who is represented in the exhibition by a small photograph of an action on Governors Island. “The role of the artist cannot just be an object provider for a system,” the curator said.
Among younger artists in “Ostalgia” who take up such a cause, there is perhaps none more celebrated than the Russian collective Chto Delat?, which was founded in 2003. (Its name translates to “What is to be done?”—the title of a democratic-minded novel by the 19th-century writer Nikolay Chernyshevsky that Lenin commandeered as a title for one of his pamphlets at the turn of the century.) “It would not be an overestimation to say that we are the most exhibited Russian artist internationally,” one of the group’s 10 members, artist Dmitry Vilensky, 47, told The Observer last week, over cappuccinos in a Le Pain Quotidian on Grand Street in Soho. However, they haven’t been offered a show in Russia in five years, according to Mr. Vilensky, owing to what he termed an unofficial “professional ban.”
Works by the left-leaning Chto Delat?, whose members include artists, philosophers and a poet, often do not take the form of salable artworks. The group organizes marches, prints free publications and holds seminars. On the fifth floor of the New Museum, it has created a mural that presents a history of socialism in the 20th century, and the U.S.’s complicated role within it.
Mr. Vilensky, like Mr. Gioni, suggested that the Western curators’ interest in Eastern European art may, in part, be motivated by the ongoing economic crisis. “People are starting to think about what has occurred and about how to go forward,” he said. “To do that you need a map, and you draw maps from the past, where there were other relations and institutions.”
Of course, the art market has a habit of transforming even the most radical, apparently noncommercial practices into tradable commodities. How long will the West be able to admire the ethical fortitude of Eastern European artists? The Observer asked Mr. Gioni. What will happen if money and attention continue to flow into the region’s art market? “That’s the drama of today in those places, particularly Russia, where there’s been an embrace of anything glamorous and fashionable,” he said. “It’s too early to say.”
Mr. Gioni is quick to note that the show is not meant as a history of avant-garde Soviet and post-Soviet art. “It’s a show about memories, and it operates like memory of itself,” he said. “It’s selective, it’s unreliable, and it’s very emotionally charged.”
Hanging in one of the galleries, tires to the wall, is a 1974 Fiat that British artist Simon Starling drove from the car company’s decommissioned factory in Turin to its new center in Poland, where Mr. Starling replaced many of its original red parts with white ones. “That car is very much what the show is about,” Mr. Gioni said. “It’s about taking a trip to look for a place, and both the person who takes the trip and the place itself are transformed by that exchange.”
Asked if he was optimistic about the future of Eastern European art, Mr. Vilensky responded by reading a quote by Mr. Groys from the “Ostalgia” catalogue in which Mr. Groys calls for “the emergence of a new socialist/communist perspective” in order to “redefine the art scene.”
“I totally agree,” Mr Vilensky said enthusiastically. It is hard to imagine many major American artists supporting that statement. (A more international art world may not automatically be a more homogenized one.) But the artist emphasized that he was not calling for a return to the past. “There are so many opportunities for art today,” he said. “I grew up with the old system, so I have no ostalgia. None at all.”
arusseth@observer.com
