The site of cultural production, be it a museum, institution or exhibition, offers an instructive look at how paradigm shifts affect cultural production. Two sites in Eastern Europe reveal the role politics and culture conspire to shape society’s understanding of its own history, as well as the way that artists and institutions can operate in this shifting milieu. Moderna galerija in Ljubljana and the network L’Internationale.

In the late 1980s, the postwar paradigm of the world, which had been significantly determined by the Cold War, began to fall apart and the phrase “the end of history” began to be used. At the same time, however, the predominant Western canons of art history and models of art production were called into question. These paradigm shifts challenged the prevailing model of the institution of the museum, in addition to the dominant approaches to knowledge production, the existing discursive positions, value systems, methods of work, etc. Globalization provided the conditions for spreading the potent forms of cultural production (Western epistemological concepts, the model of the museum institution, the art market), and on the other hand triggered processes that undermined them.

We could argue that only with the advent of globalization could we comprehend the full extent of the inequality amongst the positions from which cultural dialogue entered. Numerous critics gained insight into particular local situations and began to warn against the dangers of homogenization and pointed out the importance of diverse cultures working together. At the same time, however, many disregarded the inequality in terms of material conditions, which perpetuated historical patterns of dominance. One of the most influential theoreticians guilty of this is Nicolas Bourriaud; he sees globalization primarily in terms of “planetary negotiations, discussions between agents from different cultures” which define the so-called altermodernity. Although it is indeed important to “translate the values of cultural groups and to connect them to the world network,” we cannot settle for that. We need to ask ourselves: What are these particular local conditions? Is this planetary communication equally accessible to all? Who seems to dominate in it? How is it codified in the first place?

We can agree that there still exist channels of cultural distribution financed by multinational capital and serve primarily Western cultural and epistemological positions. Naturally, multinational capital does not enable equal representation of different cultures, and discourages their active participation in imagining new politics and new forms of social production. This is what makes alternative forms of cultural production that have emerged from local practices and international anti-hegemonic and decentralized networks all the more significant.

 Installation view of the exhibition The Present and Presence – Repetition 1, Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova, Ljubljana

Towards a Critical Museum I would like to introduce our local example of instituent practice, which I call “a critical museum.” The concept of “instituent practices” refers to strategies and initiated processes that in some respects take their bearings from traditions of institutional critique, even as in other respects they go beyond anything recognizable in the movement now canonized as part of an art history.

The precondition for a successful critical museum should be permanent self-reflection and self-criticism. These preconditions involve two main areas: one dealing with the issue of what a museum represents (e.g. art in terms of race, gender, class or region), and the other dealing with the question of whom it addresses (in terms of audiences from various social groups). Nowadays, museums internalize institutional critique, which has opposed political, economic, racial, gender, and class inequalities since the 1960s. Of particular interest to me are spaces on the margins of the global art system, including Eastern Europe. In these arenas, a special variant of institutional critique has developed, which primarily targets ideology and geopolitical hierarchy. Over the past twenty years the focus has been on geopolitical strategies found both in institutional critique and the museum politics. These issues have also featured prominently in my work at the Moderna galerija. 

We could say that a museum becomes a critical museum when it internalizes art institutional critique. On the other hand, not all museums can be labeled thus, even though most museums adopt—at least in principle—a more politically correct representation and a more equal approach to various audiences. We could say that both the critical museum and its opposite, the mainstream museum, are striving for a greater democratization of the museum. The difference, however, is that the critical museum engages in this practice to oppose the total neoliberal commodification and homogenization of the various spheres of social life, whereas the mainstream museum does it to attract the greatest possible number of audiences qua consumers for its museum industry. For example, Tate Gallery concurrently featured Alighiero Boetti exhibition for more demanding audiences, a Damien Hirst show for those craving spectacle, while the Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama addresses the globally-oriented ones.

Let us take a closer look at how differently this varied “supply” can be perceived in the context of the post-socialist parts of Europe. In our countries, programs that cater to a variety of tastes still retain ideological baggage. Consequently, the freedom of choice in a cultural institution is not so much related to consumer logic as it is to correcting wrongs from the recent past. Reactions to our new display of works from the national collection of 20th century art at the Moderna galerija/Museum of Modern Art in Ljubljana constitute an explanatory example. In this case we dedicated some exhibition space to the art of the Partisan Resistance, which is presented as a distinct genre, equal to other art styles in the museum collection. This decision has been criticized on the grounds that if we are presenting the art of the Partisan Resistance, we should also be presenting the art of the White Guard, a movement that collaborated with the occupying forces during the Second World War. The title of the exhibition of the national collection is Continuities and Ruptures. The line of continuities present the line along which art styles developed in Slovenia parallel to the development of Western art. This meandering line crosses with a line of ruptures, that is, the line of the avant-gardes who ranged from practitioners in 1920s, to the art of the Partisan resistance, the avant-gardes of the 1960s, and the retro-avant-garde of the NSK in the 1980s. Every artistic concept on this line strove to genuinely impact its time and effect change in its local social context, breaking free from homogenizing Western styles. The prewar avant-gardes dealt with the bourgeois art in their environment, and the avant-gardes from the period of socialism used their collective creativity to criticize the fake, ideologically imposed collectivism.

Installation view of the exhibition The Present and Presence – Repetition 1, Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova, Ljubljana

The most socially emancipatory among the avant-gardes was Partisan art: it was intended to agitate, raise the morale among the fighters in the National Liberation Struggle, and mobilize the creative potential of the masses. This kind of emancipatory potential cannot be found in the art produced by the White Guard, and therefore, the latter could not be included in the line of ruptures. The expectation that a national collection should fairly and equally include all the diverse social and cultural movements reflects the ideology of reconciliation espoused by certain intellectuals in Eastern Europe. This can, certainly, be justified in terms of a reaction to the historical wrongs perpetrated under the communist regimes. But at the same time, we should keep in mind the danger of equating emancipatory and reactionary historical movements. Making a distinction between the different understandings of democracy is particularly important today, when both right-wing and left-wing politicians draw on similar rhetoric of the democratic society. As a result, the democratization of the museum doesn’t resonate everywhere. In regions where the museum industry is highly developed, the rhetoric of the democratization of the museum serves primarily the market logic of “something for everyone.” In Slovenia, as well as in many other countries however, democratization is understood as reconciliation between former enemies by some, and as referring to the emancipatory local traditions in order to accumulate symbolic capital with which these spaces are now entering international communication on a more equal footing by others. The non-Western museum does not see itself merely in terms of the position of power of an institution that can open to various marginalized social groups, but as a representative of the margin, which must still secure for itself a position of more active participation to shape global trends in culture.

When a critical museum speaks about representing various social groups within a museum, it does not aspire to proportional representation of the various social, political or ideological groups, but to acknowledge deeper, more fundamental changes in the conception of the museum. These changes require taking a stand that can at times also be antagonistic toward various sociopolitical options. A critical museum takes the side of traditions that have historically proven to have emancipatory social potential, building on its efforts to challenge the homogenizing processes of the neoliberal society. It draws up programs that contribute to decoloniality in its various forms, and to political and corporate deinstrumentalization of life. It keeps in mind that it cannot equally represent all traditions and address all social groups, nor can it provide an encyclopedic picture of the world. But what it can do is draw, through its new museum politics, a more just mental map of the world that can be realized on a micro level. A critical museum not only exhibits works of art, it also shows the reasons for, and the consequences of, their representation. It addresses their non-representation as it were, as well as their exclusion from the dominant art system, which is especially true of non-Western parts of the world. A critical museum exposes the hierarchic relations between various local histories, emphasizing that it is not enough to include local histories within broader international histories, but to also make known the ways in which they have influenced the global imagery and the dominant cultural paradigms. Such museum politics is based on constant self-reflection. It is only through self-reflection that a museum can avoid merely reproducing what is already known. Repetition is not relevant as a method to reaffirm the dominant mental frameworks, but as reiterating the traumatic and the unresolved. It is this aspect of repetition that is the focus of our latest exhibition in the new museum unit MSUM, entitled The Present and Presence – Repetition 1.

It is constructive to present this exhibition from the vantage point of its radical difference from exhibitions that merely reproduce established formulas. Exhibitions are increasingly expected to bring previously unseen things: new faces, new regions, new media. This understanding does not necessarily relate to exploring the ways in which such differences and novelties impact existing cultural paradigms and relations. Rather, it serves to meet the need for multicultural tolerance or simply builds on the effect of surprise, on spectacle. Thus we often see pseudo-events, which do present new and different exhibits, but do not change the dominant paradigm of museum politics. The exhibitions that do bring about change do not necessarily look completely new, and they are often attributed the significance of an event retroactively. They can become “initiating events” in Badiou’s sense, and act as points of reference for whole generations of artists and curators to come. The exhibition The Present and Presence, is not an initiating event, but rather takes as its focus initiating events and stresses the importance of repetition as a precondition for constructing a narrative and an art system. The Present and Presence – Repetition 1 was staged at the Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova in Ljubljana and predominantly featured works from the museum’s collection. The exhibition centered on various ideas of time—Lived Time, Future Time, No Future, War Time, Ideological Time, Dominant Time, Quantitative Time, Creative Time, Time of the Absent Museum, Retro Time, Time of Passage—and marked the opening of the new museum. Now, a few months later, this first installation of the exhibition is being partially changed and expanded to include a special concept of repetition. Complementing the repeated exhibition, which presents works primarily from the Arteast 2000+ and Moderna galerija’s national collections it includes five special projects: The Body and the East Archive, The Bosnia Archive, NETRAF: Portable Intelligence Increase Museum, An Archive of Performance Art, and An Archive-in-becoming. Underlying as a uniting principle, repetition is here conceived as yet another dimension or form of time, added to our original “list” of times.

 Installation view of the exhibition The Present and Presence – Repetition 1, Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova, Ljubljana

Repeating an Exhibition, Recycling in a Moment of Crisis

The motives leading us to repeat The Present and Presence exhibition are as follows:

1 – Moderna galerija and its new unit, the Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova, have had their exhibitions program budget so drastically cut that it hardly allows for new exhibitions and catalogues to be produced. Repeating an exhibition is a recycling in a moment of crisis, a revamp of an existing product. It aims to maximize on the potential of the preceding exhibition, to re-examine its contents and fashion a new product. This recycling builds on the foundations of past work (including a few other exhibitions staged by the Moderna galerija), bringing to the fore the potential of the conditions of crisis. In our case, recycling has become the only way we can work—a critical reaction to the existing local and global conditions rather than a response to the pressures of the market.

2 – We live in a time when culture and art are succumbing to the dictates of capital that drives consumers to crave new things. The market is flooded with content that has to rapidly become obsolete and be replaced by new content; repeating what already exists is boring, and if something old does get repeated, it is done just for effect, as a fad, and not to articulate some complex relations. Our repetition, on the other hand, aims to draw critical attention to the excessively fast and superficial consumption of intellectual content and underscore the significance of rereading.

3 – Repetition is one of the fundamental features of contemporary art and of the time as well as the place we live in. For example, the usual method of showing video art in a gallery is the video loop—repetition par excellence. Apart from this, what we are largely dealing within contemporary art exhibitions is the documentation of a particular art process, which is in itself a kind of repetition and which can also serve as the basis for possible later repetitions. International curatorial jargon is full of such words as redefine, rethink, revisit; reenactment is one of the popular art genres today. Particularly in spaces that have recently undergone great historical change, local history is something that needs to be revisited. All social actors do this—from politicians, for whom history is an instrument in their games of power; to historians, who must constantly redefine it; to contemporary artists, who seek in it the points of trauma that are important for an understanding of their own practices.

4 – Repetition is one of the crucial principles by which history is created. There is far too restricted emphasis placed on the key role repetition plays in the construction of narratives. As Hal Foster has noted, no work becomes historic at the moment of its creation but only later, through the “retroactive effect of countless artistic responses and critical readings.” In order to facilitate this kind of repetition, a developed art system that enables continual reference to art practices through research, publications, collections, and, not least of all, the art market must exist. Today, for spaces outside the dominant system, it is important to analyze the traumas of local histories in this light as well.

5 – Repetition is driven by trauma, the same kind of trauma that had led Moderna galerija in 2000 to found its collection Arteast 2000+, now one of the conceptual cornerstones of the Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova. Here our interest rests principally with two traumas associated with the territory of Eastern European art: the trauma of the absence of a developed art system and the trauma of the unrealized emancipatory ideals of communism. Many of the key thinkers who shaped today’s understanding of the world, from Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Freud to Lacan and Deleuze, have seen the repetition of some unrealized past potential as a way for the subject to be free. Repetition, as Mladen Dolar writes, “concerns some piece of the past which troubles us and drives us to act it out (Agieren, says Freud), to re-enact it, to perform it.”

The exhibition The Present and Presence – Repetition 1 presents mainly Eastern European artworks from the Arteast 2000+ collection, seeking to underscore the significance of collections in constructing histories. Collections are the traditional trophies of the victors and, at first glance, it hardly seems possible they could be anything else. Each object is placed in a collection as a way of repeating the victorious view of history. And, it seems, the only way to challenge the dominant view is through objects that testify to other, different, past events. However, simply adding testimonies about a different past is not enough to change the existing system. In the process of historicization, the challenge for the system is to be taken over by the defeated. To put it another way, for the museological work on the East to be done by the East itself—for the East itself to trigger the initiating event of its own historicization. With regard to our exhibition, we can say that one such initiating event was the creation of the Arteast 2000+ Collection, which was, essentially, the first collection of Eastern European post-war avant-garde art.

And how, in concrete terms, are we repeating the exhibition The Present and Presence? In its original installation, the exhibition occupied one of the floors of the new museum. In the Repetition, we focus on certain sections of the exhibition, to which we are adding new elements. The exhibition is now larger by an entire floor, where we have expanded one of its eleven “times”: namely, Lived Time. This section presents various time- and site-specific works, which develop in real time. We have decided to repeat Lived Time as the Repetition also looks more closely at the material conditions under which art is made. Special emphasis is placed on performance art: in performances, artists deliberately relive the patterns in which social circumstances determine an individual’s conduct. American anthropologist Katherine Verdey recognized a “social schizophrenia” in socialist Romania, which she described as an ability to experience “a real meaningful and coherent self only in relation to the enemy party.” In his films, Romanian artist Ion Grigorescu fights a double of his own body. Verdey’s observation can also be applied to other Eastern European performance and body artists, not just Romanian. Serbian artist Marina Abramović tests the limits of her physical and mental endurance in performances in which she tortures herself, or invites others to do so. Czech artist Petr Štembera treats his body as if it were his enemy, exploring his self under impossible conditions.

Installation view of the exhibition The Present and Presence – Repetition 1, Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova, Ljubljana