Many of the warps in the political, social and economic structures of post-communist Europe have their roots in the consequences of naive concepts put about by political advisers in the first years after the Wall came down, which often contained the notion of a »shock therapy« necessary to implement »Western« ideas of industry, commerce and democracy.

A decade after the fall of the Wall, in her oft-quoted essay »Spectralization of Europe,« the Slovenian video artist and theoretician Marina Grzinic has denounced this »perverse« logic of masking real conditions by the copying of hegemonic surface patterns and behavior patterns of contemporary art tending westwards. Grzinic's Lacanian analysis led to a symptomatic proposal for a way out of the crisis: the art of former Eastern Europe, as the unpredictable, untamable, essentially Other, had to reject, she said, the tempting possibilities offered by the market, the media and the art institutions of the West, possibilities that all entailed assimilation, and instead use its former marginalization, which, according to Grzinic, is a belated and provincial reflection of Western avant-garde movements. It had to become monstrous and incomprehensible.

Kathrin Rhomberg was also at the receiving end of Grzinic's analysis while taking part, as one of the curators, in a discussion during the opening days of Manifesta 3 in Ljubljana two years ago. The visitors had just experienced an interpretation of Grzinic's »monster theory« during the opening press conference (accompanied by hysterical screams, spraying and an intervention by the stewards complete with the brief arrest of the two artists) in the form of Alexander Brener and Barbara Schurzen's »Fuck Neoliberalism,« a strained, but all in all harmless anti-glob attack on the art industry and its institution, Manifesta. And the visitors still remembered many »cabinets of monstrosities,« obviously intended to satisfy conventional Western views of eastern European art, that European museums and art institutions therefore put up for the celebrations marking the fall of the Wall.

Almost two years later, Kathrin Rhomberg answered the question Grzinic provocatively posed her at that time: what would remain of this curatorial digression about eastern Europe, what changes would be effected locally by the conjuncture of interests with regard to the marginalization still in progress - incidentally, the second marginalization since trophy collectors from Western museums plundered artists' studios in eastern Europe directly after the fall of the Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, making career promises that only materialized for a very few people. Rhomberg's response - the first large, curated exhibition she has held since Manifesta, and at the same time her last in Vienna, which she has left for the Cologne Kunstverein - was clear and succinct even in its title: »Ausgeträumt...« (The Dream is Over).

This presentation of 25 different aesthetic positions and a number of video interviews with theoreticians and activists was anything but a look at the sensitivities of contemporary art scenes in eastern Europe. After all, only somewhat more than half of the works came from the region or had been produced recently. Rhomberg was much more interested in building a larger narrative context in which the hopes of politically committed artists since the seventies from both parts of Europe were reflected. The exhibition was to tell how the positive hopes that artists had in 1989 of the reality of actual transformations, like the strengthening of nationalism, the existing disparities in standards of living, the economically driven change in cultural institutions and the lack of notice taken by the mainstream, were inscribed in esthetic production.

In her curatorial approach, she used a device that can well be suspected of being conservative: she concentrated on individual Oeuvres, striking and erratic approaches, rather than projects, networks and the elucidation of transport or transfer connections. Two small personal exhibitions within »Ausgeträumt...« were devoted to artists of the concept generation whose great local influence up to the present day is matched by an almost complete international disregard for their works: the Slovakian Július Koller and the Zagreb artist Mladen Stilnovic. Koller's poetic, fleeting performances »U.F.O.-Naut J.K.,« for which an anti-happening has taken place once a year since 1971, and some of his hermetic manifestos represented - like Stilinovic's large lexical work »Pain« (1979), the photo action series »Artist at Work« (1973), which shows the artist lying in bed, and the manifesto »Praise of Idleness« - the antithesis of the myths of speed and change typical of the transition.

The first presentation on the exhibition circuit already made it apparent that one of Rhomberg's intentions was to reveal her own curatorial development: in the main room cluttered with tables, monitors showed such widely differing figures as the grand old man of Czech philosophy, Egon Bondy, the filmmaker Trinh T. Minh-ha and the political agitator and stylistically pluralistic factotum of the 70's and 80's Austrian art scene, Oswald Oberhuber, in videoed interviews. Next to these, works by Renée Green or Ricarda Denzer were presented equally prominently. The indicated path, which later led via a back stairway to a dead end in the basement gallery of the Secession, was full of edges, details, reversions; it was locally based with room for extensions.

Werner Würtinger, for example, broke with the sacred axiality of the building (of which he himself was the director in the mid-nineties) by shortening one of the side aisles. And a storeroom that is otherwise never visible became a wondrous cinema for the little migration story »Wagonette« by George Ovashivili from Georgia. The reversion point of »Ausgeträumt« was provided by Josef Dabernig's almost plotless 16mm film essay »WARS.« Against the background of a modernistic dining car belonging to the Polish state railway, Dabernig ironically presents the drama of a service-sector society without any customers, extending this real space into an imaginary one composed of the self-description of a pretend economy.

For a few months, strange, small beige, lime green and russet-orange Skoda cars stood in the small, rarely used private car park behind the Vienna Secession as sculptures from another modernistic world of colors and forms. Roman Ondak had paid the Bratislava owners of these former luxury objects of desire to park them there. The Skoda Generation? The dream is over!

 

Translated by Tim Jones

 

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