„DOING PERFORMANCE ART HISTORY. A CONGRESS OF ACTORS AND OBSERVERS“

ZURICH, 3 – 5 NOVEMBER 2016

Thursday, November 3

18.30 Introduction by Sylvia Sasse:
»Doing Performance Art History«

19.00 Philip Ursprung:
»›Zerreissprobe‹: Performance in the Cold War«

20.30 Film Night I
Łukasz Ronduda, Maciej Sobieszczański: »The Performer«

Friday, November 4

DOCUMENTING

9.30 Introduction by Sabine Hänsgen:
»Media of Documentation«

9.45 Art Works I
Ion Grigorescu: »Work«

10.15 Júlia Klaniczay:
»Performing for the Present, Documenting for the Future – Artpool and Performance Art«

11.00 Judit Bodor/Roddy Hunter:
»The Poïpoïdrome in Budapest: a Case Study in Curating Art and Changeability«

11.45 János Vető:
»Lights of the Night. Cooperation and Interaction with Tibor Hajas«

Lunch break

14.30 Tomáš Pospiszyl:
»Reading Performances. Performative and Literary Aspects of Performance Art Documentation from Eastern Europe«

15.15 Marina Gržinić:
»Recycling, Reconstruction and Repetition«

Coffee break

16.30 Vadim Zakharov:
»A Typology of Vadim Zakharov’s Actions 1978–2015«

17.15 Art Works II
Andrei Monastyrski: »Sounds from 1983«

Coffee break

COLLECTING / EXHIBITING

18.00 Introduction by Tomáš Glanc:
»Display Performance«

18.15 Ruth Noack:
»Tales from the Past? When Artists Were Posing the Self against a Political Other«

20.00 Film Night II
Claus Löser: »›Smashing the Black Box‹ – Independent Film and Performance Art in 1980s East Germany«

Saturday, November 5

COLLECTING / EXHIBITING

10.00 Zdenka Badovinac:
»Arteast 2000+ Collection and its Use«

10.45 Sasha Obukhova:
»Keep Acting: A Performative Exhibition Which Pretended to be Academic«

11.30 Art Works III
Milan Knížák: »Slide-Show«

Lunch break

DOING THEORY / THEORIZING

13.30 Introduction by Sylvia Sasse:
»Performance Art (as) Theory«

13.45 Pavlína Morganová:
»Performance Art – Remembered, Described, Interpreted, Photographed and Filmed, Sometimes even Reenacted«

14.30 Nikita Alekseev:
»Low Performance«

Coffee break

ARCHIVING

15.00 Introduction by Dorota Sajewska:
»Performance of the Archive«

15.15 Art Works IV
Zofia Kulik: »The Archive Cultivation«

15.30 Sven Spieker:
»Manifesto for a Slow Archive«

Coffee break

16.45 László Beke:
»Memories of a Witness/Art Historian/Archivist/Conceptor«

17.30 Art Works V
IPUT (International Parallel Union of Telecommunications – Trust.ee in bankruptcy: Tamas St.Turba): »Portable I² Museum – Pop Art, Conceptual Art and Actionism in Hungary during the 60s (1956–1976)«

Coffee break

RE-PERFORMING

18.15 Introduction by Kata Krasznahorkai:
»Performances Never End – and Never Begin«

18.30 Barbora Klímová:
»An Inspiring Misunderstanding«

19.15 Janez Janša:
»WHAT DO WE ACT WHEN WE REENACT? Mount Triglav on Mount Triglav on Mount Triglav«

20.00 Anna Molska:
»Constructing the Archive«

Conférenciers: Little Warsaw & Mózes Márton Murányi

Venue: Cabaret Voltaire, Spiegelgasse 1, 8001 Zürich

ABSTRACTS

Nikita Alekseev
»Low Performance«

In the end of the 70’s our friend art historian Margarita Tupitsyn (she emigrated to the USA some years before) has sent us a copy of N.Y. magazine “High Performance” with her article on Collective Actions group (I was member of it at the time). We were perplexed because most of this magazine contained texts on dance, theatre and music. We simply did not know that “performing arts” is a vague term meaning anything and everything: what is important is that this act is performed publicly (or later exposed in some way, by means of a corresponding medium). And of course, we couldn’t know that the name of this magazine is an ironical reaction at the famous automobile review of the same name.
And we had to find a name for what we were doing. We’ve been feeling ourselves much closer to people like Acconci, Hutchinson or Laurie Anderson but we did not like the word “performance”. So the word was found: action. But what is fundamental is that it was not “aktsia” (it exists in Russian and has strong stock-market or supermarket sales connotations) but “deistviye”, a Russian equivalent for “action”.
Some of our “deistviyas” were public, some not. In both cases documentation (which usually was the only material result) was necessary. It could be later shown at an exhibition, published or even sold. But the medium did not have a strong importance. When only B/W photos were available, it was B/W. When it became possible to make color photos, it was color. When video era arrived – all right, be it video. By the way, Sabine Haensgen was the first, in the beginning of 80-ies, to come to Moscow with a compact camera. (abridged version)

Zdenka Badovinac
»Arteast 2000+ Collection and its Use«

As a Arteast 2000+ is a collection bringing together art from former socialist countries in a process of historicisation, not only in order to confer greater visibility on a previously marginalised region, even less in order to declare some sort of fixed common Eastern European identity, but primarily in order to serve as a tool for research into material conditions of artistic production, of musealisation and of distribution of art in the Eastern European region in comparison with other spaces. With its critical perspective on material conditions both in the local space and in its incorporation in wider geopolitical dynamics, the collection has been developing different approaches to musealisation and creating different narratives.
Through its various presentations over the last fifteen years, the collection Arteast 2000+ has been presented as a tool for analysis of various instances of micropolitics and geopolitics, for exploring new models of historicisation and more equitable exchanges of ideas in the international space, as well as a tool for inter-regional integration.

László Beke
»Memories of a Witness/Art Historian/Archivist/Conceptor«

I want to combine consciously to different narrative in my presentation: my memories from Zurich during my research in the 1980es on Zurich Dada and Cabaret Voltaire and the story of the beginning of happening, Fluxus and performance in Hungary. starting from themid-1960es. An interface between these two narratives could be the friendship pf Hugo Ball and Wassily Kandinsky, interpreted subjectively by means of the astral bodies of Rudolf Steiner and the Black Holes. (The 100th anniversary of the relativity of Einstein is in 2016 so as that of the Dada in Zurich.)

Judit Bodor/Roddy Hunter
»The Poïpoïdrome in Budapest: a Case Study in Curating Art and Changeability«

This paper explores the relationship between the first exhibition of ‘The Poïpoïdrome’ by Robert Filliou and Joachim Pfeufer in Budapest, 1976 and its later reconstruction in 1998 by György Galántai and Artpool Art Research Center. It does so to suggest a case study for considering challenges in addressing the place of historical situational, performance art works in exhibitions and collections. Artpool’s active and generative approach to the reconstruction uses the work and its archives not as evidence but as resource for the activation of artworks in the present. We will argue that this ‘generative’ archival-curatorial approach is empathetic to the spatial-temporal changeability of performance and ‘preserves’ the fundamental value of the work. This artist-led approach differs from traditional museum practices toward the post avant-garde yet aligns with later emerging sensibility of ‘variable media’ and ‘changeability’. The paper will compare Artpool’s approach to other institutional approaches to historical performance emerging since the late 1990s, such as documentary exhibitions focusing on material remains salvaged from past and those drawing on forms of re-enactment and re-interpretation. The problem and opportunity of the work’s inseparable existence as both itself and its archive will be considered in relation to the radical and transformative ontology of performance. We will also introduce recent theories around the conservation of media arts that call for acknowledging change as fundamental to these artworks’ survival. These include the Variable Media Initiative (Guggenheim 2000) and theorist and conservator Hanna Hölling more recent ideas around ‘the aesthetics of change’ as two forms of critiquing ‘the aesthetics of disappearance’ (Hölling 2015) which defined our understanding of performance practice for a long time. We will evaluate the potential of Artpool’s approach to ‘The Poïpoïdrome’ in realising these ideas in practice and consider its consequences in terms of understanding the identity, collection and interpretation of historical post-avantgarde performance.

Ion Grigorescu
»Work«

Communicating, theater, working, hiding oneself; the image is betraying: if I rise a hand with a hammer, might be only theater, working may be imitated without being done, somebody else working and me posing with utensils.
Could be removed this mask? Could be something truthful, or all is factice (artificial)?
The confusion between communicating and definition of art, and, through definition, configurating the artists’ guild. Those from guild know they are making art, others who don’t know the language of art can pass away without even see that there is happening art, and vice-versa, the artist can think that the worker is expressing himself, has un unconscious relation with his tool.
Hiding himself, being without public. Really working.

Marina Gržinić
»Recycling, Reconstruction and Repetition«

In the talk I will focus on three authors from former Yugoslavia and their works from 1979 to 1990. The cases under scrutiny will be Sanja Iveković, Marjan Molnar and Marina Gržinić and Aina Šmid’s works. The role of the performance will be captured in these works under the performativity of recycling, reconstruction and repetition.

IPUT (International Parallel Union of Telecommunications – Trust.ee in bankruptcy: Tamas St.Turba)
»Portable I² Museum – Pop Art, Conceptual Art and Actionism in Hungary during the 60s (1956–1976)«

IPUT sends his long-term-project “Portable I² Museum –Pop Art, Conceptual Art and Actionism in Hungary during the 60s (1956 – 1976)“ to the conference, where texts are going to be distributed and a recording of one of its presentation projected.

Reporter: Tell us about the 60s.

Timothy Leary: Whoever remembers the 60s wasn’t there.

(…) What is certain is the need to re-evaluate the entire legacy of our recent past, and we could do no better than start with the forgotten, neglected, suppressed, distorted and disrupted cultures of Central and East Europe.

(Henry Meyric Hughes. London, October 1999)
http://www.aspectspositions.org/essays/hughes.html
(…)

Jackson Pollock died in 1956 and the antipole actualized: Pop, Act, Idea. The first signs of the mutation in Hungary, at the end of the 50s and early 60s, was Concrete and Electronic-music and Pop-like poetry. Then from the mid-60s: Pop and Conceptual influenced art, or poetry, intermedia and non-art-art, happenings, action, flux-concerts, action-theatre, action-music, followed by mail-art, rock ‘n roll, film-films, not-stone theatre, Neo-Socialist Realism, etc. (By 1976 the period came to an end: Punk, New Wave, Neue Wilde, Neo-Geo, Bad Art, Appropriation Art followed; then Post-modern torso-complexity, and finally, the last variaties became saturated and then emptied: the monomaniacal movements came to an end. Truth died, long live Truth!)
The bombastic exhibit, The Sixties—New Tendencies in Hungarian Visual Art. organized by the Hungarian National Gallery in 1991; and the even more bombastic international exhibit, Aspects/Positions—Art in Central Europe 1949 to 1999, mounted in 1999 at the Stiftung Ludwig Modern Art Museum in Vienna, and in 2000 also at the Museum of Contemporary Art – Ludwig Museum in Budapest, barely—and even then in a tendentious, phoney context—covered the art produced in Hungary that characterized the 60s.
The publication, Primary Documents: A Sourcebook for Eastern and Central European Art Since the 1950s (Museum of Modern Art, NY), didn’t cover the art produced after the 50s in Hungary that developed in synchrony with international trends—which it might have covered had Hungarian art historians and curators taken upon themselvess the task of informing the unaware public about domestic and foreign developments before and after the 1989 coup. The era’s Hungarian artistic developments aren’t worked up, appreciated, archived or popularized. As a consequence, the artistic common knowledge is truncated and mutilated.
The NETRAF* (Neo-Socialist. Realist. International Parallel Union of Telecommunications‘ Global Contra-Art-Hist.ory-Falsifiers Front – Andrea Tarczali, nurse, András Szőnyi, Tamás Kaszás, and Schmidt “Motor” Péter computer assistances, Tamás St.Auby, agent), in order to fill this neglected gap have put together, with the subtitle Pop Art, Conceptual Art and Actionism in Hungary during the 60s, a collection of dozens of multiples, hundreds of multimedia and projected works and documents by some 70 artists, and is presented by the Portable Intelligence Increase Museum.

Tamás St. Auby, (superintendent of IPUT, agent of NETRAF)
Translated from Hungarian by Csaba Polonyi

Janez Janša
»WHAT DO WE ACT WHEN WE REENACT? Mount Triglav on Mount Triglav on Mount Triglav«

One of the iconic work on the Eastern European avant-garde is happening Mount Triglav, performed in the centre of Ljubljana in 1968, by conceptual art group OHO. Three artists translate the name of the mountain (“three heads”) and cover themselves with black clothes with their heads sticking out. The ironic staging of a national myth was reenacted on the same location in 2004 by the painters from the group IRWIN. In 2007 Janez Janša, Janez Janša and Janez Janša climbed the Mount Triglav and reenacted of the OHO happening on the mountain itself. The journey to the Mount Triglav became inauguration statement before their name change became public. Janša, Janša and Janšaput their performance into a tradition of national contemporary art, questioning relation between contemporary, nation and tradition.

Júlia Klaniczay
»Performing for the Present, Documenting for the Future – Artpool and Performance Art«

In my contribution, I will present with some slides and/or videos on our archiving and self-archiving methods in the 70s and 80s and also our own series of performances starting with the Homage to Vera Mukhina event in 1980.
Further, I want to speak about how our archive was built and how documents about performances of the past 30-40 years can be researched at Artpool Art Research Center today. All this from a witness’ perspective, as I am not an art historian.

Barbora Klímová
»An Inspiring Misunderstanding«

This term was recently used by artist Pavel Büchler to describe how Czech artists in the 1970s “poorly” understood conceptualism, or understood it “in their own way.” The movement made its way into Czechoslovakia only sporadically through international magazines, most of which they did not understand, or thanks to the initiative of various individuals. Nevertheless, Büchler says, although he and his acquaintances misinterpreted this movement, it still managed to inspire them.
Barbora Klímová’s presentation is based on her long-term artistic cooperation and communication with Moravian artists of the 1970s and ‘80s generation, which began in 2006 with the project REPLACED – BRNO – 2006, in which she restaged several performances that had originally been staged in the urban environment during this time. This was followed by activities in which her role oscillated between artist, curator, documentarian, and theorist. She somehow summarized these interests in the publication Mutually. Artists and Communities in Moravia in the 1970s – 80s. Klímová will discuss some of these projects over the course of her presentation, and will provide an overview of the current state of some of the artists’ private archives. The presentation will focus primarily on the impossibility of communicating past experience and the question of intergenerational dialogue, whose main theme, in her view, is misunderstanding. She will open up the issue of what to do with artefacts from the period in question, which essentially defy institutionalization, commodification or medialization, and how to preserve them for the future.

Milan Knížák
»Slide-Show«

Zofia Kulik
»The Archive Cultivation«

A collage of ‘doings’ while creating the archive. Video presentation.

Little Warsaw & Mózes Marton Muranyi
»Unknown – Working title«

The reconstruction of a performance became history itself.
The working of the multiplied past in the present.
Between the asynchrony history and the praxis of the everyday.
In the triangle of the basic colors the life interferes: I have to go! – says the Red.
Stay a bit! – asks the Blue.
-It is already evening and I didn`t even had a breakfast!
Although he is driven by his curiosity and he respects the Blue, hunger is speaking out of him:
-I kill you, if you don`t give me anything to eat!
The Blue nodded gloomily:
– I give you something to eat.

Claus Löser
»›Smashing the Black Box‹ – Independent Film and Performance Art in 1980s East Germany«

This lecture and screening will give an introduction into a hidden chapter of cultural history. In contrast to other socialist countries (such as Poland or Hungary), in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) an independent art scene came late to the public eye. In the late 70s – after poet and songwriter Wolf Biermann was banned and kicked out of his country by the state authority – a new generation of artists made their breakthrough. Punk-influenced and well-connected writers, painters and musicians cut their connections with the „socialist realism“, founded private galleries and zines, looking for something completely new. Without knowing the tendencies of the western art scene well, they tried to find an own path. Filming became an important part of this D.I.Y. movement as well. Since video was not available, the young artists used Super-8 stock. Bizarre films were made, but performances were also documented; so that in the end the Black Box of isolation in a closed country could be smashed.

Anna Molska
»Constructing the Archive«

The film I’m working on will be Anka Ptaszkowska’s personal story about her work with artists and about the places she has created – particularly the Foksal Gallery, one of the first and most influential avant-garde galleries in the Eastern Bloc. The Foksal Gallery’s activity was predicated on very close cooperation between critics and artists, on critical reflection expressed in the manifestoes An Introduction to the General Theory of the Place, What We Don’t Like about the Foksal Gallery and New Rules of the Foksal Gallery, and on unconventional artistic practices. Working in innovative ways, the gallery offered a critique of the exhibition format, the role of the public and institution of the gallery as a privileged and protected space of artistic freedom. This subverted the institutional framework and tested the limits of artistic licence as defined by the socialist state. Anka Ptaszkowska never hesitated to take risks, as evidenced by the Zalesie Party, a private reception for over 100 people held shortly after the May events of 1968, or the happening We Aren’t Sleeping during the Golden Grape Festival in Zielona Góra, where several artists occupied the exhibition space and started provoking decision-makers and official critics. The film will use archival footage from Ptaszkowska’s private archive and from that of the outstanding photographer Eustachy Kossakowski.
A film about Anka Ptaszkowska’s archive is an attempt to enter her head. I am more interested in what she remembers, how she remembers it and what matters to her today than what the truth was. If she says it’s the long curtains she remembers from one of the Foksal Gallery performances then it will be a stronger impulse for me to construct her archive than the fact that it was a Tadeusz Kantor performance.

Andrei Monastyrski
»Sounds from 1983«

Sounds from 1983 is a kind of existential GEO-VIDEO („geo“ as in „geometry“).
1983 is for me a year of REGENERATION of creative activity, a year of RESURRECTION FROM THE HELL of transgression in 1982, when I spent time in a mental institution and didn’t do anything in a creative sense, and then in 1983 I started to work again.
Sounds from 1983 – it’s the SOUND BEGINNINGS OF THE WORLD (in the sense, that the world begins from sound).
And then follows the APPEARANCE OF SIGNS (from geo-figures) and VISUALITY.
In this work images of three performances of the Collective Actions group from 1983 are used:
«Sound perspectives of a trip out of town» , «Representation of a rhombus» (I proposed the sound over the field and generally the sound series, whereas Nikolai Panitkov proposed the visuals) and the action «M» (the opening image with a purple little table and objects on it).

Pavlína Morganová
»Performance Art – Remembered, Described, Interpreted, Photographed and Filmed, Sometimes even Reenacted«

When it comes to Performance Art and its “history making” in the West, it all happened in the 1970s, when books by RoseLee Goldberg and Lucy Lippard, to name just few, were published. East “history making” of Performance Art is a different story. In the 1990s in Central-Eastern Europe we were still waiting for such all-encompassing authors. Due to the region’s national and linguistic fragmentation the task of writing the history of Performance Art in Central-Eastern Europe was undertaken by local scholars, mostly within the existing boarders. It was part of the enormous effort to rewrite, to reconstruct postwar art history of the East. In the case of at least Czech Performance Art it had to be written anew, since just a few articles about this subject existed. In my presentation I would like to describe the process of this first stage of “making history” of Performance Art in Central-Eastern Europe; the question of how the lack of written documents, institutional background and collections, and the fact that many of the “participants” of this history were still alive influenced it.
The second stage of this “making history” was connected to the so-called Documentary Turn. This broadly discussed change of the theoretical and methodological approach influenced not just the perspective of Performance Art, but in its case brought a new look on a key player – the documentation around the turn of Millennium. For performers in Czechoslovakia the documentation originally had a secondary character, it wasn’t the art itself, but the Documentary Turn opened new ways of its interpretation. Much research focused on the character of documentation and finding a new aesthetical and historical value in it. Artists like Barbora Klímová started to work with it as with any other art material. Several documentary publications of the key figures of the Czech Performance artists were published not only in Czech but in English as well around 2000. This opened the field even to scholars who didn’t speak the language. Interesting examples of reenactment appeared from the young generation as another source of possible interpretation in these years.
We are living through the third stage new with books like Fluxus East (2007), Antipolitics in Central European Art (2014) or The Green Block. Neo-avant-garde Art and Ecology under Socialism (2015), to name just few. Conceptual and Performance Art research became, as any other subject in global art history, a very specialized field, in which we can find many angles of the investigation.
In my presentation I would like to examine this history of “history making” and open for the discussion what should be the next stage.

Ruth Noack
»Tales from the Past? When Artists Were Posing the Self against a Political Other«

Nowadays, the practice of self-representation is inseparable from the gouvernmental control that the individual is asked to – and often complies to – exert upon him or herself. And the act of becoming visible is never without its ambivalence: When performance, for example, is turned into an object, it might end up separated from an artist’s practice. Looking in particular – but not necessarily exclusively – at Sanja Ivecovic’s historic performance Trokut (Triangle) from 1979, some of the drawbacks and advantages of picturing the performative self are discussed.

Sasha Obukhova
»Keep Acting: A Performative Exhibition Which Pretended to be Academic«

Russian Performance: A Cartography of its History is the first exhibition to explore a century of the medium’s history and unique traditions in Russia. Spanning the early experiments of the Futurists to the radical actions of today, the project also emphasizes the significance of Russian performance in an international context. Curated by Yulia Aksenova (Curator, Garage) and Sasha Obukhova (Head of Garage Archive) and based on four years of intensive research, the exhibition takes a chronological structure, with the peculiarities of each decade or epoch reflected in the architectural design of the corresponding section of the show.
Russian Performance: A Cartography of its History opens with the artistic experiments of the Russian avant-garde. Covering the 1910s through 1920s, this section is dedicated to the radical works that transcended the boundaries of traditional art. Following a lengthy hiatus spanning several decades, performance experienced a revival in Russian art through the practices of the Moscow Conceptualists in the 1970s, which is where the exhibition traces the origins of the medium as we know it today, presenting groups such as Collective Actions and The Nest, as well as artists Rimma and Valery Gerlovin, Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid, and Dmitry Prigov, among others. As the genre progressed into the 1980s, it remained a largely elitist medium addressed to a narrow, specialized audience. Throughout the period, performances tended to take place in the seclusion of private apartments or studios, or in remote fields and city parks. Notable figures of this time include art groups The Toadstools, TOTART, and SZ. Then, the Perestroika years of the mid-80s witnessed a radical shift in perspective. The socio-political changes occurring across the country presented artists with new possibilities, resulting in both expanded audiences and opportunities for innovation. Associated with the so-called “New Wave” were names as Vladislav Mamyshev-Monroe, Sergey Kuryokhin and his Popular Mechanics Group, and collectives Mid-Russia Heights, World Champions, and The New Artists.
Russian Performance: A Cartography of its History has been in production at Garage since 2011. An online platform recently launched on the Museum’s website presents photographic and video material related to the development of the research into Performance in Russia that Garage has undertaken over this time.
http://garagemca.org/en/event/russian-performance-a-cartography-of-its-history

Tomáš Pospiszyl
»Reading Performances. Performative and Literary Aspects of Performance Art Documentation from Eastern Europe«

In recent years documentation of performance art draw a lot of critical attention. Art historians from all over the world are trying to relate original and no more accessible performances to remaining texts, photographs, films or videos. Today, we can see these relics in art galleries and art history books. We rarely question their status of art objects or think about their original functions.
Performance art in Eastern Europe developed in an environment with limited impact of art institutions: galleries, schools or theoretical discourse. Artists in places with no artworld (or art market) were not pressured to produce artworks; their problem was isolation. Therefore their documentation played a dominant role as a tool of communication in restrictive conditions. Documentation of performance art from behind the Iron Curtain is typically preserved not as individual art works, but coherent archives of individual artists. It was rarely exhibited or published for wider audience, but rather shared in highly aestheticized or even ritualized way. These archives often take forms appropriated from literature, theatre or state bureaucracy and move away from the realm of visual art.
Using Collective Actions Group, Jiří Kovanda and Vladimír Ambroz as a major examples, the paper will attempt not only discuss forms in which their performance documentation was produced, but analyze ways it was handled in its original environment. It will stress the differences between public and private presentation needs of performance art that lead to rather textual artifacts than visual artworks. It will try to argue that performance art in Eastern Europe was predominantly mediated in a reading mode, as an individual flipping-through or theatrical process, sometimes relapsing back into performance.

Sven Spieker
»Manifesto for a Slow Archive«

Perhaps it is time then to invoke the “slow” archive—which is not synonymous with analogue media, or with slowness literally understood—as way of obviating the constraints of enforced archival productivity, yet without reverting to the humanist archive with its emphasis on the metaphysics of arkheion (the original archival site), trace, provenance, and original order. Running counter both to the humanist archive and the neoliberal archive of fast (capital) flows alike, the slow archive establishes itself in the margins and blank spaces that permit documents to function. The slow archive’s element is speed, not space: the (varying) speeds, slowness included, with which we focus on a document and its surroundings, and the difference that makes.

Philip Ursprung
»›Zerreissprobe‹: Performance in the Cold War«

Günter Brus’ performance Zerreissprobe (Tearing Apart) in the Aktionsraum 1 in Munich in 1970 tends to be, like the art of the Viennese Actionists in general, interpreted in relation to the issue of guilt and trauma of the Second World War. In my paper, I will propose another reading of this performance, namely its relation to the European Welfare State during the Cold War. I will argue that Brus’ performance deals less with psychological work-up of past violence than with the ambivalent status of the subject during the economic boom time of the 1950s and 1960s. Furthermore, I will argue that, unlike painting and sculpture, performance art in general does not fit into the interpretational model of a dichotomy between art practices in Socialist and Capitalist contexts. By comparing Western performances by Brus, Joseph Beuys and Allan Kaprow with Eastern performance by Andrei Monastirski, Ion Grigorescu and Christine Schlegel, I will focus on the similarities rather than the differences of performance art on both sides of the iron curtain. My hypothesis is that one of the reasons for art historical and institutional marginalization of Performance Art both in the West and the East between the 1960s and 1980 lies in its role to mirror the tension between the individual and the authority of the art institutions of the States.

János Vető
»Lights of the Night. Cooperation and Interaction with Tibor Hajas«

A few sentences about what I will show. At the turn of the millennium, when my technical capacities finally made it possible, I spent nearly three years cramming my early analogue black and white photographs into simple video clips. It had been my longstanding dream to represent the temporality of the photograph. When I first accessed a video camera in 1975/76, I came up with the idea of declaring the temporal quality of photographs with the help of video technology. As the so-called “chicken bowels”, the ¼ inch magnetic tape format of early video technology was identical to the audio tape used in magnetic tape recorders, it was evident that I would instantly try and listen to the sound of the images. Much time has passed since, and thanks to outstanding programmers, today there are a number of computer programs that make this possible, providing much more musical results than listening to the image recorded by a 1975 AKAI ¼ inch reel video tape recorder.
Already when we were working on the photo project with Tibor Hajas, we had come up with the idea of a diaporama-like video presentation. But at that time, we were consumed by the genre of panel pictures, the juxtaposition of physical images.
If these “tableaus” were to be created today, I think even Hajas would prefer having the photographs of the first phase printed in one plane. (Flesh Painting I – lV.)
After the death of Hajas I could realize his film treatment in András Kisfaludy’s EXPERANIMA project along with my own, which he had prepared specifically for this project but his sudden death prevented him from directing it. His death rewrote the film and this was the first time I managed to put still pictures into motion. In fact, this was in direct contradiction with the original script, which was supposed to be a manifesto against animation. But this does not mean that Hajas would not have agreed on using animation in another film.
In 2002 I began producing these etudes with sound, and I was obsessively engrossed in working on nothing but this until 2006. Their production took very long because of the slow computers, but they are finished and I would like to present them here. I have already remastered them with better equipment for the show Emergency Landing – Tibor Hajas Retrospective at the Ludwig Museum Budapest, a little tamed and using better resolution images – but what I want to present now are my first transcripts, infused with my emotions. Technically they are low quality, but perhaps they bring back some of the intense atmosphere radiated by the tableaus composed of static images. I would also like to screen a video composed of the photo documentation of Tibor Hajas’ last performance entitled Vigil (photos by János Szerencsés and Tibor Zátonyi), with words written and spoken by Tibor Hajas at the original performance. As in all of his performances in Hungary, the assistants were István Csömöri and I. The authorities at the time would not permit me to travel abroad to Poland, Belgium, the Netherlands or Czechoslovakia. I feel sorry that Hajas cannot see these films, but I am happy that you get to see them now. Fasten your seatbelts!

Vadim Zakharov
»A Typology of Vadim Zakharov’s Actions 1978–2015«

“Without an encounter with the unknown, creativity is impossible. In this encounter, there is no possibility for understanding anything, neither in terms of culture nor psychology. This is no dead end. Quite on the contrary: by finding your way out of the dead end, you can attain total freedom. Encounters with the unknown are extremely rare. The unknown is something you need to search out, overcoming the stereotypes of your thinking, the attitudes of your life and the dummies of your emotions. Our (creative) paths need to strike up against the unknown, no matter how thoroughly we build them and no matter which goal we pursue. The edges of my activity are always in some extreme, liminal state. My face is turned toward the unknown, while my masks address that which can be recognized by culture”. Vadim Zakharov

BIOGRAPHIES

Nikita Alekseev (born 1953 in Moscow) studied at the Year 1905 Art College (Section of Industrial Graphics and Advertising) from 1968–1972 and at the Moscow Polygraphic Institute (Department of Artistic and Technical Design of Printed Matter) 1973–1976. From 1976–1983 he was a member of the Collective Actions group and in 1982–84 a co-founder and director of the AptArt Gallery. He is a painter, graphic artist, author of artistic actions, objects and installations. Curator of contemporary art exhibitions. Journalist, art critic, author of numerous publications in Russian and international press.
He now lives and works in Moscow.

Zdenka Badovinac is a curator and writer, who has served since 1993 as Director of the Moderna galerija in Ljubljana, comprised since 2011 of two locations: the Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova.
She has curated numerous exhibitions presenting both Slovenian and international artists. She initiated the first collection of Eastern European art, Moderna galerija’s 2000+ Arteast Collection. She has been systematically dealing with the processes of redefining history and with the questions of different avant-garde traditions of contemporary art, first with the exhibition Body and the East – From the 1960s to the Present, staged in 1998 at Moderna galerija, Ljubljana, and travelling to Exit Art, New York in 2001.
She continued in 2000 with the first public displaying of the 2000+ Arteast Collection: 2000+ Arteast Collection: The Art of Eastern Europe in Dialogue with the West at Moderna galerija, (2000); and then with a series of Arteast Exhibitions, mostly at Moderna galerija: Form-Specific (2003); 7 Sins: Ljubljana-Moscow (2004; co-curated with Victor Misiano and Igor Zabel); Interrupted Histories (2006); Arteast Collection 2000+23 (2006); The Schengen Women (2008), Galerija Škuc, Ljubljana, part of the Hosting Moderna galerija! project, Old Masters (2008), Zavod P.A.R.A.S.I.T.E., Center in galerijaP74, Ljubljana, part of the Hosting Moderna galerija! Project; Museum of Parallel Naratives/ In the Framework of L’Internationale, MACBA, Barcelona,2011
Her other major projects include unlimited.nl-3, DeAppel, Amsterdam (2000), (un)gemalt, Sammlung Essl, Kunst der Gegenwart, Klosterneuburg/Vienna (2002), ev+a 2004, Imagine Limerick, Open&Invited, different exhibition venues, Limerick; 2004;Democracies/the Tirana Biennale, Tirana, 2005
Slovenian Commissioner at the Venice Biennale (1993–1997, 2005) Austrian Commissioner at the São Paulo Biennial (2002)
Badovinac is a president of CIMAM.

László Beke (1944, Szombathely) is an art historian and curator who has been a leading figure in the Hungarian art field since the late 1960s. He was an active contributor to the development of the neo-avant-garde and Conceptual art in Hungary, and wrote important articles about the theory of photography.
Beke studied art history at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest. From 1969-86 he was a research fellow in art history at the Research Institute for Art History of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.
In 1971, he initiated the project WORK=the DOCUMENTATION OF THE IMAGINATION/IDEA by sending a call to twenty-eight contemporary Hungarian artists—including Miklós Erdély, Tamás St. Turba, Endre Tót, and others—asking them to submit A4-sized works on paper in response to the concept of the work’s title. Beke arranged and preserved the sheets in folders, which have been available for viewing over the last forty years in his apartment and only rarely in exhibitions. A comprehensive selection of these documents was published in 2008 and 2014.
In the 1990s, due to his status as an expert of Eastern European art, he curated shows that represented the region’s Conceptualisms, such as the exhibition Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s-1980s, at the Queens Museum in New York in 1999.
He had been teaching at the University of Lyon 2 – Louis Lumière (1988-89) and was Chief Curator of the 19th and 20th Centuries collections of the Hungarian National Gallery (1988-95) and General Director of Műcsarnok/Kunsthalle in Budapest (1995-2000). From 2000-12, Beke was Director of the Research Institute of Art History of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest. He is Professor at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts and teaches in several Hungarian institutions. Ex-Member of the Hungarian National Committee of Art History and of AICA.
He lives in Budapest. 

Judit Bodor (b. Hungary) is an independent curator living and working in Glasgow, Scotland. A trained art historian and curator, she holds degrees from Eötvös Loránd University and Dartington College of Arts. She is currently completing her PhD through an AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Partnership with Aberystwyth University and National Museum Wales. Her research-led curatorial practice engages both with artists’ archival collections and collaborative event-based production and she has worked internationally on a range of archival exhibitions, site-specific commissions and residency projects over the past 15 years. She was research archivist at Artpool Art Research Center, Budapest, Programme Curator at East Street Arts, Leeds, and has held academic positions at Dartington College of Arts, York St John University and Cardiff Metropolitan University. Her doctoral research resulted in a major retrospective exhibition of Ivor Davies at National Museum Wales focusing particularly on curating the archives of the artist’s 1960s performances. This had led to interest in conservation and curation of historical performance art in museums and research exploring notions of variable media and changeability. She regularly presents her work at conferences internationally, has been published by Occasional Papers and Palgrave Macmillan amongst others, writes reviews for academic journals and is contributing editor to Gordian Projects.
https://aber.academia.edu/JuditBodor
https://www.aber.ac.uk/en/tfts/study-with-us/postgrad/phd/phd-students/judit-bodor/

Marina Gržinić is a philosopher, theoretician and artist from Ljubljana. She is a prominent contemporary theoretical and critical figure in Slovenia. Since 1993 she is employed at the Institute of Philosophy at the Scientific and Research Center of the Slovenian Academy of Science and Arts (short ZRC-SAZU in Slovenian and SRC-SASA in English). Gržinić has been active as a video artist since 1982 and in the last 34 years has also been making installations and performative exhibitions in collaboration with the artist and art historian Aina Šmid from Ljubljana. http:// inic-smid.si/
Since 2003, she also serves as Full Professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, Austria.
Marina Gržinić’s theoretical work focuses on contemporary philosophy and aesthetics after modernism. Her work is directed towards a theory of ideology, theory of technology, biopolitics/necropolitics, video technology and transfeminism in connection with decoloniality. She regularly implements her research results in the processes of education and as well in other disciplines, especially art disciplines, finally she engages significantly in the public life at home and abroad, being part of different struggles politically and socially motivated against capitalism and its processes of dispossession, racism, and brutal discrimination.
She has published ten books (monographs and translations). In 2014, in collaboration with Šefik Tatlić, she co-authored the book Necropolitics, Racialization and Global Capitalism: Historicization of Biopolitics and Forensics of Politics, Art, and Life (Lexington Books, USA, 2014). 

Roddy Hunter (b. Glasgow, 1970) is an artist, curator, educator and researcher. He lives and works in Glasgow and Carlisle. He is interested in art and networks as a subject of critical study and site of intervention. He participated in international performance art networks, was a member of Hull Time Based Arts and gained an MA Contemporary Arts from Nottingham Trent University in the 1990s. Exhibitions and performances of work have been held in major festivals, galleries, museums and arts centres across Asia, Europe and North America. He has taught and led academic programmes at Dartington College of Arts, York St John University and Middlesex University, London and is currently Director of University of Cumbria Institute of Arts, appointed March 2016. In 2011, he began doctoral research in curatorial practice at CRUMB, University of Sunderland that continues currently at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art, University of Dundee. This research, entitled ‘Curating The Eternal Network After Globalisation’, takes the work of artist Robert Filliou as a starting point to develop ways of curating post-avantgarde network art practice after the net. He is the self-appointed curator of the Art-of-Peace Biennale 2015-17 to resume the project conceived by Robert Filliou and René Block in its inaugural, sole edition of 1985.
www.peacebiennale.info
http://www.dundee.ac.uk/djcad/research/researchstudents/roddyhunter/

Júlia Klaniczay is co-founder of the illegal Artpool (with artist György Galántai in 1979), and since 1992 director of Artpool Art Research Center, operating till 2015 as a public nonprofit institution and since 2015 as a department of the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest.
From 1977 to 1992 editor responsible of Akadémiai Kiadó, the publishing house of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and from the beginnings leader of Artpool’s archives and editor in chief of all Artpool’s publications: (samizdat) magazines, books, printed or online; translator or author of several articles; researcher in the alternative art forms and activities of the 1970s and 1980s.
From 1976 participant or assistant of many art projects concieved by György Galántai and realized in the framework of Artpool.

Zofia Kulik (b. 1947, Wrocław, Poland) lives and works in Warsaw (Łomianki). From 1965 to 1971, she studied at the Sculpture Department of the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts. After her graduation, Zofia Kulik and Przemysław Kwiek formed the artistic duo KwieKulik, a project which lasted until 1987 and was one of the most important groups of the Polish neo-avant-garde. They carried through countless performances, interventions and artistic demonstrations, as well as creating objects, films and photographs. In their private apartment in Warsaw, the duo set up an independent gallery called the Studio of Activities, Documentation and Propagation (PDDiU), in the frame of which an archive of polish art from the 70s and 80s was created. Since 1987, Zofia Kulik has been working individually, creating black-and-white multiple exposure photographs, objects, installations and films.

Through a wide variety of media, Little Warsaw addresses historical memory and confronts personal encounters with social experience. The role of the artist, a producer of situations, an agent of the context he/she is embedded in, thus through their manifold investigations presented as a subject of continuous political, sociological and ideological changes. By deconstructing myths and reconstructing contexts, they attempt to restore the missing pieces to a puzzle of histories.

Murányi Mózes Márton (1985, Budapest) lives and works in Budapest. 2009-2016 Studied at the Intermedia Faculty of the Academy of Fine Arts Budapest. 2012 research trip to Talling with an Ersamus Grant. 2004 joined the group Csakoda. 2014 member of the Studio of Young Artists Budapest. Head of the Publishing House Karate Zines with Bence Bálint.

Anna Molska (born 1983 in Prudnik, Poland) lives and works in Warsaw. She studied Art in Warsaw and Stuttgart and is the recipient of several awards (among which the Film Award ‘Młoda Polska’ in 2012 and the ‘Views 2009’ – Deutsche Bank Foundation Award). She has shown her work in many solo and group exhibitions in Poland and abroad, in Berlin, New York, Modena, Beijing…

Pavlína Morganová is an art historian and curator, based in Prague, Czech Republic. Works as a director of the Research Center and vice-rector for study affairs at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. She is an author of the book Czech Action Art / Happenings, Actions, Events, Land Art, Body Art and Performance Art Behind the Iron Curtain, which for the first time systematizes and interprets Czech Action Art as a vast and very original stream of Czech post-war art in the context of the complex socio-political context in this part of Central and Eastern Europe. It is based on the more then decade-long research, author’s interviews with most of the artists and in-depth interpretation of many their performances and other actions. Her recent book/guide published in Czech Action Prague is mapping the places where the happenings, performances and other actions took place in 1960s, 70s and 80s. She lectures on Czech Art of the 20th century, is a co-editor of the anthologies of manifestos and documents from Czech art 1939-1989 (Academia 2001) and Czech art 1980-2010 (VVP AVU 2011). Published number of texts in the art journals and catalogues, e. g. Jiří Kovanda / I Haven’t Been Here Yet (Wrocław Contemporary Museum, The Brno House of Arts, 2013), Between the First and Second Modernity 1985-2012 (National Gallery in Prague, 2011), Fluxus East (Künstler-haus Bethanien, Berlin 2007); Action, Word, Movement, Space (Gallery of the City of Prague 1999). Author of the exhibitions e. g.: Sometimes in a Skirt / Art of the 1990s (Moravian Gallery in Brno and Gallery of the City of Prague, 2014); The Beginning of the Century 2000-2010 (The West Bohemian Gallery in Pilsen, 2012; Gallery of Fine Arts in Ostrava, 2013), Insiders / The Unobtrusive Generation of the Late 1990s (The Brno House of Arts, 2004; Prague, Futura, 2005).

Ruth Noack (1964) is a curator and art historian. Noack’s writings have been concerned with subjects including global art and the translocal museum, conceptual art in the East, feminist aesthetics and film theory. Noack’s numerous publications and lectures include monographs on the work of Eva Hesse, Alejandra Riera, Danica Dakic, Ines Doujak, Sanja Ivekovic and Mary Kelly. In 2000 she began teaching at the University of Vienna, the University of Applied Arts (film theory). In 2007 she co-curated documenta 12 in Kassel together with Roger M. Buergel.

Sasha Obukhova is an art historian currently working as Curator of Archive at the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow. In 1992 she graduated from Moscow State University. In 1993 she studied at Central European University in Prague. During 1990-2000’s worked in ICA Moscow, State Tretyakov Gallery, National Centre for Contemporary Art, Art Project Foundation. Member of expert council of Kandinsky Prize. Winner of Kuryokhin Prize in 2014.

Tomáš Pospiszyl (1967) is an art historian, critic and curator based in Prague. He worked as a curator in The National Gallery in Prague (1997-2002), was a research fellow at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (2000), and served at the editorial board of Umelec magazine. Since 2003 he teaches at the Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague, and since 2012 also at the Academy of Fine Arts, Prague. He is a board member of tranzit.cz. His publications include anthology Primary Documents; A Sourcebook for Eastern and Central European Art since the 1950s (2002), which he edited with Laura Hoptman, two volumes of his essays, Srovnávací studie (2005) and Asociativní dějepis umění (2014), and numerous catalogue essays and magazine articles.

Sven Spieker teaches in the Comparative Literature Program at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He specializes in modern and contemporary art and literature, with an emphasis on Russia and East-Central Europe, and a special interest in issues related to documentary and knowledge production in art. Spieker has lectured and published on topics ranging from the historical avant-garde (Malevich, Rodchenko, Dziga Vertov) to late 20th-century and 21st art and literary practice, especially in Central and Eastern Europe. His books and articles have appeared in German, Korean, Russian, Swedish, Polish, and English. Spieker has organized several international conferences (most recently: The Office in the Studio: The Administration of Modernism at the University of Jena, Germany). Spieker’s latest book publication focused on the archive as a crucible of European modernism (The Big Archive, MIT Press, 2008; Korean translation 2014). Spieker is the founding editor of ARTMargins Print and a member of the editorial collective that runs ARTMargins Online.

Tamás St.Turba (Trust.ee in bankruptcy of IPUT
/International Parallel Union of Telecommunications/),
Agent of NETRAF
/Neo-Socialist. Realist. IPUT’s Global Counter Arthist.ory-Falsifiers Front/)
Tamás St.Turba (Szentjóby, St.Auby, Emmy Grant, Staubsky, etc.), after being involved in Happening & Fluxus from 1966, founded the IPUT in 1968 in Hungary. IPUT started to deal with the St.Rike in 1972 which led to the Subsist.ence Level St.andard Project 1984 W in 1974. After being supervised, interrogated and censored by the secret police over years, St.Turba was charged by the pseudo-communist authority with porno-anarchistic subversion due to his non-art-artistic radicalism and participation in the Samizdat-movement, got arrested and was sent to exile in 1974. Being a Swiss citizen, he settled down in Geneva, CH.
IPUT continued the SLSP1984W-operation and established the Near-East-European Free University for West-European Jobless People (Ast.Ronomy-, R’n’R- and St.Rike Departments). After the Domino Effect Putsches driven to the pulsation of the Iron Curtain in 1989 he returned to Hungary in 1991 to chat free-speech-defect in the global-chauvinist-capitalist counter-revolution for credit and profit. Between 1991 and 2012 he was a lecturer at the newly established Intermedia Crèche of the Hungarian Mercantile-Military Penalty-University of Fine Arts till he was kicked out for demanding Direct Democracy day and night during 21 years and for the opening of NETRAF in 2001. IPUT organizes referendums since 2002 in favor of the Basic Income Allocation for the Eternal Jobless People financed by the military budget, the Prohibited Surplus Fruit.

DOWN WITH THE ELECTION!
LONG LIVE THE VOTE!
LONG LIVE BASIC DEMOCRACY!
LONG LIVE BASIC INCOME!
WHO IS AGAINST US, IS WITH US!
TRUST IN BANKRUPTCY!

Philip Ursprung is Professor for the History of Art and Architecture at ETH Zurich. His most recent books are Die Kunst der Gegenwart: 1960 bis heute (Beck Verlag, 2010) and Allan Kaprow, Robert Smithson, and the Limits to Art (University of California Press, 2013).

Vadim Zakharov was born in Dushanbe in 1959. He is an artist, editor, archivist of the Moscow Conceptual art scene, collector. Since 1978 he has participated in exhibitions of unofficial art and collaborated with such artists as: V. Skersis, S. Anufriev, A. Monastyrski, Y. Leiderman. In 1982–1983 he participated in the AptArt Gallery, Moscow. Since 1992 he has published the Pastor magazine and founded the Pastor Zond Edition. In 2006 he edited book Moscow Conceptualism. In 2008 he founded the website www.conceptualism-moscow.org. Since 2010 collaborated with
N. Nitschke. Vadim Zakharov is an author of the Adorno Monument in Frankfurt am Main (2003). His retrospective 25 Years on One Page was held at the Tretyakov Gallery in 2006. He represented Russia at the Venice Biennale in 2013 with the project Danaë. He lives and works in Berlin and Moscow.