TransStates: Conceptual Art in Eastern Europe and the Limits of Utopia.

Abstract

This dissertation explores the utopian and metaphysical aspirations found in the pockets of collective creativity that drove Conceptual art in Eastern Europe in the 1960s and 1970s. It does so by focusing on two groups of artists from the places that defined the limits of relative freedom and unfreedom in Cold War Eastern Europe: the former Yugoslavia and the former USSR. Thus, I trace the trajectories of philosophical and stylistic developments in the work of the OHO collective, which worked in Ljubljana (Slovenia) from 1965-1971 and the work of the duo of Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid which they did between 1972 and 1980, before and immediately after their emigration from Moscow to the U.S. In narrating the groups’ histories and addressing the existing narratives about them, I pay particular attention to the way the groups’ work was tied to both local forms of protest and desire for self-governed spaces of freedom, as well as to a larger global shift in both the production and display of art taking place in the 1960s and 1970s. Moreover, I argue that within the global Conceptual shift of which these collectives were part, their practices were singularly representative of the preoccupations broadly shared by artists in Eastern Europe. In both cases, the oeuvres encompassed diverse media and spoke to multiple audiences, both actual and imagined, often using similar tropes. Even more importantly, in both cases, the groups’ projects were driven by a desire to respond to utopian aspirations through artistic practice, self-consciously modeling through art the possibilities of personal politics in one’s particular time and place. It is in these responses to the utopian impulse that one also finds the stark contrast between OHO and Komar and Melamid, who define the far opposite ends of the spectrum of good and bad faith in utopia. In doing so, they offer insight both into the wide array of roles that unofficial art sought to play in Cold War Eastern Europe and into the limits to which utopianism could still be reconciled with artistic practice in the wake of the Conceptual shift.