Symposium

Symposium Intro:

10.00 – 10.40 

Andrea Pető, professor in the Department of Gender Studies at Central European University, Vienna Austria, Doctor of Science of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.

Challenges of Doing Oral History Interviews about Difficult Pasts

Oral history is often seen both as a political and as a scientific promise. Collecting stories about the past that we would otherwise would not be known also has a political impact. Meanwhile these stories help to combat the recent populist challenge to history writing as the stories collected in this way changes the ways we look at and write about the past. Oral history, the meaning-making process of the past, and visuality have a complex relationship. Not only because of how the human brain works with scenic memory seeing a picture and describing it, but with what language this picture is believed to be seen is described in testimonies.

The paper explores how scholarship developed from the pragmatist positivist position of accepting the story described as it is to the reconstructionist position of analysing the language and the picture described. The examples are used from the Visual History Archive and my own interviews illustrate the conflicting relationship between narratives and visuality when talking about difficult pasts.

10.50 – 11.30 

Filip Lipinski, art historian and Americanicist, assistant professor at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan.

Several Stories on American Artistic Encounters in Poland under Communism: Net, Kaprow, Exchange and Construction in Process

The presentation focuses on four cases of artistic encounters with American art and/or artists in the communist Poland: the NET project of artistic communication established in 1971 by Jarosław Kozłowski, the visit of Alan Kaprow in Warsaw in 1976, a project of an artistic exchange between Polish and American artists in 1981, conceived by Anka Ptaszkowska and Pontus Hulten, and an international exhibition Construction in Process that took place in 1981 in Łódź. While these events are to some extent known and have been studied, in my presentation I will focus on some seemingly marginal or anecdotal issues narrated during interviews with people involved that were published in writing or were conducted by myself. The oral accounts, based on individual memories, reveal additional material to rethink the artistic traffic across the Iron Curtain and highlight the nature of those unusual projects. 

12.00 – 12.40 

Erwin Kessler, art historian, member of the Bucharest Institute of Philosophy, director of MARe/ Museum of Recent Art.

Seeing American Art & Feeling European Influence

Seeing American Art & Feeling European Influence is an investigation into the contrasting experiences of the local, Romanian artists and larger public exposed during the late 1960s and 1970s to a substantial strain of exhibitions of American art and visual or material culture. The Romanian cultural system was just exiting during the mid-1960s from the confines of the Socialist Realist paradigm imposed during the decades of Sovietic occupation of the country. The ensuing openness of the Romanian culture towards the Occidental cultural system was immediately confronted with the different providers of new artistic models. On the one hand there were the European cultural powers such as France, pressing onto the Romanian public its own version of (late) Paris School modernism, mostly exhibited in the capital city only - Bucharest. On the other hand, the USA strongly intervened with a more ample plan and a long series of exhibitions accross the country, introducing the American way of life through compehensive shows with major artists, ranging from the abstract Expressionism to Pop Art and Minimalism. The oral reception of the Romanian specialized public (artists, students, art historians and critics), gathered through an extensive series of retrospective interviews shows how the enthusiasm of attending the mind-blogging events of American art was largely toned down by the revealed short-range influence of the contemplated works onto the real development of each artist's language, and the ever-present backdrop constituted by the pervasive interest in the European artistic models.

15.00 – 15.40 

Cosmin Popa, historian, scientific researcher at “Nicolae Iorga” Institute of History, Romanian Academy

Consolidation of a Communist dictatorship through false openness - the case of Romanian-American cultural exchanges in the 1970s. 

A key focus of this paper is how the Ceaușescu regime used the simulation of cultural openness towards the West, particularly the United States, in order to increase its influence in international politics during the Cold War. Upon consolidating its independence from Moscow and rejecting the intervention in Czechoslovakia, in the early 1970s communist Romania launched a comprehensive program to enhance its international presence, using a number of cultural institutions as well as foreign policy initiatives to achieve this goal. Cultural openness, particularly towards the USA, was seen as a means to improve communist Romania's access to Western markets and technologies. However, this measure posed a series of ideological and political risks. It was Ceaușescu's greatest dilemma, while simultaneously attempting to identify a new model of economic development, to limit American cultural influence within the country. This carried risky consequences for the regime's stability in light of increasing cultural exchange between the two nations at the time. As a matter of fact, the apex of Romanian-American cultural exchanges coincided with the transition of the regime to the Asian model of development based on control of ideology, reduced domestic consumption, and forced exports. This presentation aims to provide reasoned responses to the following questions: What was the impact of accelerating cultural exchanges between the United States and Romania? The opening up of culture was a diversion from the regime's main objectives or was it merely another illusion? In what ways did Nicolae Ceaușescu use culture to strengthen his reputation as an international leader, and through which institutions were cultural exchanges conducted in Romania?

15.50 – 16.30

Călin Stegerean, art historian, director of MNAR/ The National Museum of Art of Romania

My American Autobiography

The communication is focusing on the influences that American culture exerted on my formation in the 60s-70s-80s through television, cinema, music, fashion, exhibitions, books and magazines. Looking in retrospect, the question arises whether the Romanian communist regime was interested in stimulating this kind of influence or it was just a consequence of the "Romania breach" in the universal communist system, which ended with the events of December 1989.

16.40 – 17.20

Valeriu Mladin, Romanian visual artist, University Lecturer at the Department of Photo-Video and Computerized Image Processing at the Bucharest National University of Arts.

The Sandwich Man

The presentation The Sandwich Man draws several subjective references to the period of 1960-1989 and to the influences of American art with which I took contact - directly or indirectly - in those days. Those influences are still present, under various guises, in my works after 1989.

A personal analysis, illustrated with photo and video images. An opportunity to talk for the first time about things, works and actions that are part of my personal artistic archive.