In his essay »The Ideology Of Exhibition: On The Ideologies Of Manifesta« at the Manifesta exhibition, Miško Šuvakovic coined the term »Soros Realism« and defined it as follows: »This term refers to a kind of art: (a) that has a function, (b) that has a relation of presentation and representation to a concrete reality of society and culture, and (c) that has an ›optimal projection‹, which means a positive social exchange project (emancipation, education) that is represented ›through‹ the work of art. ›Soros Realism‹ is not realism in the sense of a return to the realism of the paranoid nationalistic type that emerged in most post-Socialist societies in the 1980s and 1990s. Nor is it a brutal variation of the Socialist Realism that laid down the canons of expression in the East from 1930 to 1960. On the contrary, it is a ›soft‹ and ›subtle‹ standardization of post-modernist pluralism and multiculturalism as a criterion of enlightened political liberalism that has to be realized by European societies at the turn of the century.«

A variety of other realisms can be analyzed by looking at their representative function. Socialist Realism uses a particular set of themes, the most frequent being representations of its own leaders, from Lenin to Tito, which are used as a symbol of promise / threat, but usually emptied of all other meanings. The second motif was the one of »the worker.« However, although a real worker actually posed, this image of »the worker« was never personalized and never bore the characteristics of a portrait. Both leaders and workers were faceless symbols - indicators of the ideology.

In reviving a classicistic allegory with a new iconography, Socialist Realism did not introduce any formal novelty or refer to art of the modern era, except for rare »quotes.« That was the reason why this period can hardly be named a style and has been rejected by Eastern European art historians as being »worth nothing at all.« Nonetheless, theoretically speaking, it is one of the most interesting terrains of completely useless productions in popular culture, which always extols the same unfinished product. The crucial re-interpretation of Socialist Realism in the light of cultural analysis and media theory was undertaken by Groys, who frees it from art-historical elitism by applying a broader cultural analysis and draws attention to many ideological corrections of reality.

It has been shown that a painted image can not only be a vehicle for pedagogically or ideologically corrected reality, but also a visual tool, like a posed photograph or a movie, and later on, video technology, that is sometimes hostile to fiction. By using a painting as a photo and then as a technique for correcting reality, a fiction of reality aros. Since the time of Socialist photo paintings, new media have been discovered and employed, and not only by state ideologists. But, owing to the same interaction that exists between the state and the individual in a liberalistic market, the utopian optimism inherent in them has been replaced by a pessimism of reality produced by the same ideology. Utopian society falls into pessimism and produces a dystopian scenario, collapses – and suddenly the view of the worker has also changed.

This break is already apparent in a series of photographs by Boris Cvjetanovic. The »Workers« series (1981-2002) was produced precisely at the time of the »swansong« of socialism and culminates in a sense of already present nostalgia for an ideal community. The start of the end of socialism, which did not manage to keep the economy of own promises, had already arrived, but the society was in the last phase of its dream state. Cvjetanovic’s workers do not resemble ideal figures of the utopia of the workers’ society, but they seem already to be in the forgotten territory of metaphysics. Behind the innocence and smiles of the workers, they are worn-out factory »machines« that are not managing to keep up. Or, from today’s perspective, could they look less like threats stemming from real socialism than »angels« of another fiction, still happy in their own small workers’ paradise?

The time during which these images were produced already overlapped with the time of the fall of the utopia, so they in a way depict a dystopian reality in which a story persists. Or, if we want to use a parallel with the ideology, they promise a shift to the ideal state of communism from the overly long transition of Socialism, in its very last moments. But all of this was schizophrenic, as are all heterotopias.

We can compare these happy workers amidst a decaying ideology with Neli Ružic’s photographs (1992-1993) of a dry-cleaning firm. Here, we see a worker destroyed by the environment of the war, his face completely exhausted, dried out by the chemicals, his body on the edge of life as if it were being attacked by all of war’s viruses. In comparing the two series, we can notice the remains of the original »faith«, the fight for the »common purpose«. But this time it is a nationalist cause in which workers again find themselves united.

A few years later, the hybrid reality disintegrates fully. Most of these factories, along with their workers, have been so to speak sold out. In the work by Andreja Kuluncic on the socialistic commercial enterprise Nama: 1,908 employees in 15 branches, some of whom appear on Kuluncic’s posters as unemployed. Now they are particular people with their own personal dramas, instead of being a mere channel for the socialist drama.

Finally, in the video of the young artist Goran Cace, »Škver blues« (2005), which documents the production at one of the most successful socialist boat factories, one cannot identify with the workers at all any more. They seem vulgar, dirty, exhausted. They do not function as carriers of any ideologies that we recognize. Abandoned, unimportant, having fallen from the center of the whole utopia and lost the feeling of their importance as a support during the war, replaced by the product, they are now just people and not representative at all.

Strangely, as is sometimes the case with representations, they do not bear any memory traces of a previous society, a moment when they were glorified. They neither pose, nor do they demonstrate their importance. In these terms, the »fallen angels« of an ideology do indicate the story that happened in Berlin. The fall of the Wall, as in Wim Wenders’ movie, has exchanged metaphysical authority with reality, leaving the angels behind, abandoned.

In such heterotopian places, as Foucault named them, a distortion of meaning comes to be obvious. A narrative between the metaphysical space of ideology and real, cruel facts becomes apparent. Between Social Realism and Soros Realism, the workers are strange places where ideologies, utopias of workers’ paradises and dystopias of war intersect, at a market in which they do not appear to be important, but find themselves becoming products too.

 

 

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