1989. END OF HISTORY OR BEGINNING OF THE FUTURE?
review / Tony Ozuna
Kunsthalle Vienna
Oct 9, 2009—Feb. 7, 2010
At the beginning of the exhibit, “1989. End of History or Beginning of the Future?” in the staircase, there is a video on a wall of the Berlin Wall in three parts—showing fragments and cross-fades of documentary films showing East German (DDR) police beating on protesters; on the other side there are grim images of the former Berlin border zone—known as the death zone—and the frame in the middle shows hands hammering and chiseling away at the Berlin Wall, symbolizing that the Iron Curtain across Europe has fallen.
1989. End of History or Beginning of the Future? 
This means that the 8,500 kilometer barrier in the form of walls, barbed wire fences, guard towers, guard dogs, and military guards with automatic machine guns, which had existed from 1948-1989 between the European states in the sphere of the Soviet Union and the Western European democratic states extending from the Baltic Laplands to the Black Sea had ceased its purpose.
For full effect, the usual entrance to the main gallery seems closed. Normally, it is a high and wide iron door, on the visitor's left hand side, after coming up the stairs. But the door is not locked so one can still push it open and enter. There is also an open door on the other side of the stairway's entrance—but it is necessary to explain even the heavy iron-door arrangements in order to best set the tone for this exhibit.
It is also worth noting that the original term “Iron Curtain” comes from the world of Viennese theater, where it referred to a movable fire barrier designed to protect the audience, which became commonly used after a catastrophic fire at Vienna's Ring-theater in December 1881. In its geopolitical connotation, the term was first used by Winston Churchill even before the “Iron Curtain” took its final form.
Just inside the main exhibition room, Ilya & Emilia Kabakov have “The Big Archive” (1993), which is a vast installation of 800 drawings, 45 tables and 45 chairs all arranged to resemble an orderly maze of bureaucratic offices under Soviet socialism. Tables and a single chair are set apart by two meter high partition walls painted in IKEA colors, earth red and light blue on top. Some tables and chairs are also facing the cement gray wall of the gallery. Each station has a drawing, crudely done and they are of sullen people. It seems that these should represent a typical bureaucratic monster. On gray cards below the faces, there are numbers and likely names or instructions—orders for viewers (in Russian).
Then there are rows of stations, like school or office desks with forms and small sheets of instructions for filling out the forms (in Russian but with English translations). The desk-tables form a labyrinth of stations to sit, read and carry out instructions—and all of the questions lead from the innocuous to the intrusive. For instance, Section 8 A. (in Library Services). “Do you have a home library or do you borrow books from friends or neighbors?” leading to Section B 'A', Do you discuss your impressions from the books you have read with your family? Friends? Co-workers? With whom and which books?” In the Work Section, there are questions like “Do you report idlers and lazy people in your office and daily environment? Do you fight for strengthening of discipline at your factory (or Kolchoz). Do you fight to increase the quality of production? Have you taken new obligations upon yourself?” Etc.
Basically, each station ends up having a list of probing questions about personal habits from reading, work situation, leisure time, and vacations all leading to reveal support (or not) of the ideology. Some stations pry for most intimate replies about sexual relations, tastes in art, and food purchase-diet details.
For anyone who has ever worked in Marketing Research, this installation all might seem like heaven on earth. There are also areas where respondents are given almost impossible tasks in order to receive basic-life services. The classic one, still common for most residents of former Soviet-bloc countries, is the collection of signatures from bureaucratic as well as daily authorities like building owners, employers, etc. under daunting conditions (due to impossible time-frames, deadlines or logistic order).
Single-light bulbs hang from the ceiling over each desk, and some are not working—this is intentional, as such offices would have had dim and broken lights galore. Under such conditions, after trying to read so many questions and just answering them in your head—or if you can imagine that you would really have had to answer such questions in a real life situation, one either feels emotionally crushed or a fiery feeling of “ENOUGH of this bullshit” rises in the throat. Illya and Emilia Kabakov's installation most effectively makes visitors understand how it was for those who lived under Soviet socialism, and why it failed. The government sunk its self (or hung its self) for its persistent obtrusiveness alone. Walking out of this labyrinth-controlled environment and into the rest of the exhibit is liberating.
Ilya and Emilia were both born in Dnepropetrovsk, USSR (today's Ukraine), though they only began close cooperation as artists in Berlin in 1989 after both receiving a DAAD's Berlin Artists Program grant for study abroad. Ilya Kabakov (born 1933) and Emilia Kanevsky (born 1945) married in 1982 and have merged their efforts as a team since then. They are currently based in Long Island, New York.
Of the forty artists in the exhibit, approximately half of them were born behind the Iron Curtain, and most of them are living in the West today with Berlin, Paris, or New York City as their most popular new home. The rest of the artists have been selected due to their works which focused on the “annus mirablilis” 1989, though not made specifically for this exhibit. This gives the show an international flair as well as an overall force of contradictory messages; in other words, it's a loud, mad rush of artistic (and political) freedom with an atmosphere like a pinball or video game arcade.
Pedro Reyes (born 1972 in Mexico City) has a four minute, humorous video at the entrance titled “Baby Marx” (2008). This puppet animation cartoon battle begins in a post-history world—i.e. post-communist world as forecasted by political scientist Francis Fukuyama in his 1989 article, then later book titled The End of History. As many cartoon action stories begin, a group of curious kids in a library unknowingly put an unknown book, Capital—A Critique of Political Economy by Marx into a microwave to see what happens, and the book explodes before their eyes unleashing (from the dead) Marx, Engels, Lenin, Mao and Che—all the old heroes of the left—in a battle to the death against the old leaders of capitalism, Adam Smith, Fredrich Taylor, etc. Stalin joins the fight just to confound both sides as a rousing 60s surf guitar soundtrack plays in the background. Who will be victorious in the second glorious round of the struggle between revolutionary Socialists & its arch-enemy, Liberal Democracy? Che, the latin lover, seducing the pretty librarian at the end of the story looks like a premonition from this Latin American artist, implying that Fukuyama is off the mark.
A centerpiece painting at the entrance by Komar & Melamid is titled “Between War & Peace (From the Yalta Conference Series. Proposal for United Nations)” (1994-1995) shows Winston Churchill, FDR, and Stalin sitting in regal chairs; behind them is God resting his hands down on busts on either side of him—one bust is of George Washington (the symbol on the American dollar), the other is of Lenin. Vitaly Komar (born 1943 in Moscow) and Alexander Melamid (born 1945 in Moscow) were oppressed artists in the USSR, since they founded the Artists' Collective Sots Art—a Soviet reaction to Western movements like Pop Art by using ideological images from Socialist Realism but with hints of Dadaism and Surrealism, and montage and collage thrown in the mix. After gaining international recognition in the mid 1970s, the artists emigrated to the USA in 1978, and they both currently live in New York City.
An endless chatter near the entrance, and unfortunately heard almost everywhere else in the exhibit, comes from an installation by Barbara Kruger (born in 1945 in New Jersey, and currently living in New York and Los Angeles). In her video installation, “Twelve” (2004), there are four screens and four audio channels facing off against each other in a film-booth cube. In a fifteen minute loop, there are twelve scenes (sequences with arguments/conversations) between talking heads (family members, friends, colleagues, lovers), and all are confrontational, for instance between a husband and wife arguing at the kitchen table while their teenage kids cope with this by laughing or getting more upset than the parents, or a African-American mom arguing with her two street-wise teenage kids, or a young woman struggling to end an abusive relationship. These all have crib-text at the bottom of the screen showing what the characters are also really thinking, but not saying and these are often contradictory statements. These seemingly real-life characters self-censoring themselves are representative of the free world, and particularly realistic ones despite (or due to) their unhappiness and even desperation.
Another powerful multi-screen video installation is presented by Jane & Louise Wilson, twin sisters (born in 1967 in England, currently living in London). Their piece, “Stasi City” (1997) shows deserted former office spaces of the Stasi (East Germany's Secret Police) in Berlin. By showing vertically moving images of empty hallways, interrogation and torture rooms, then rooms with tape machines for surveillance of thousands of individuals and offices, and an occasional floating body, the Wilson sisters evoke painful memories of a sadistically repressive state control, yet it's done in an atmospheric glow.
Still another non-East European artist who has best revealed a changing of the guard in Europe, Sophie Calle has photos of public spaces in East Berlin where symbols, plaques, statues even street signs from the DDR era have been removed or altered since 1989. Her photo of each missing monument is placed beside a personal account or explanation of the disappeared object, by passersby and local residents, collected and presented by the artist with photos of the original site. Calle (born in 1953 in Paris, currently living in Paris and New York City) effectively conducts an inventory of lost relics in the middle of Europe, like a contemporary historian as well as a post-modern archaeologist.
Hans Haacke (born 1936 in Cologne, now living in New York City) embodies both gravitas and controversy in the art world, and so his installation “Oelgemaelde, Hommage a Marcel Broodthaers” (1982) is an expected centerpiece. This work includes a regal oil portrait of an arrogant and hawkish-looking Ronald Reagan (as president of the USA at a the time). The painting is cordoned off by red velvet cord and placed on a red wall. Red is the color of the Left, but here it symbolizes power and luxury of the Right. A plush red carpet extends from the painting across the room to connect with a large photo (in black and white) of protesters, essentially facing off with Reagan. Haacke's photo of common-looking citizens is from a demonstration, recognized as the largest protest rally in the history of West Germany since World War II against Reagan's plan to station nuclear missiles aimed at Eastern Europe on their territory. Reagan's speech, held at a NATO summit in Bonn in June 1982, seeking to gain consent from West Germany, ultimately proved to be futile. Haacke's installation begins the process of chipping away at the wall, years ahead of its fall, thus the piece also proved to be prophetic.
This exhibit curated by Gerald Matt and Catherine Hug, however, claims no side as true victors, as people from the former Soviet bloc as photographed by Boris Mikhailov (Ukrainian now living in Berlin), as much as well-off Westerners (as projected by Barbara Kruger) or young, nouveau-rich Russians (photographed by Martin Parr, from England) can all be claimed as losers.
If there is anything lacking, it is the absence of Czechs, Slovaks and Hungarians in this exhibit. After all, Austria shared a major portion of the Iron Curtain with these nations for a 700 kilometer span along its northern and eastern border (also including the former Yugoslavia). The wall also first came down along a part of this border. Not long after the introduction of Gorbachev's policy of Perestroika, Hungary abolished tourist visas in early 1988, and in 1989, this was followed by partially dismantling of the barriers along the border, simply since there was not enough money nor the political will to make the necessary and extensive repairs. Then in June 1989, the mortal remains of the victims of the 1956 Budapest uprising against the USSR were exhumed and ceremoniously reburied, and the foreign ministers of Austria and Hungary together cut the last remaining portions of wire representing the border between the two countries. This set off a domino effect, beginning with hordes from the DDR crammed in their little Trabants headed toward Hungary, through Czechosloavkia to then enter into Austria (the West). The DDR's government started to unravel about this time anyway, and by early November 1989, the wall in Berlin was being dismantled by the people, not government officials.
Then with all due respect to the heroes of the Czech Velvet Revolution, it was clear that the socialist Czechoslovak government could hardly put up a fight when university students finally took to the streets of Prague to protest for their rights in mid November, 1989. So for their various roles in the events of 1989 alone, it would have been good to have at least one Czech, Slovak and an Hungarian artist to contrast with the others, and especially since most of the Soviet Bloc artists are from the former USSR—and all appear to be emigrants, now Westerners themselves.
There is actually one artist born in the Moravia-Silesian region of Czechoslovakia in the show; however he also emigrated in his teens and he is a Romanian. Harun Farocki (born in 1944 in Nový Jičín) and currently living in Berlin has a collaborative video with Andrej Ujica (born in 1951, in Timisoara, Romania, and currently living in Heidelberg and Berlin). Their work pieces together TV video recordings and found footage offering a chronological view of the overthrow of the Romanian government, which ended with the public execution of Ceaucescu and his wife in the main square of Bucharest. This revolution was televised live (by protesters who had occupied the broadcasting studios) for 120 hours—and Farocki's video combines both official TV footage and raw/private uncensored scenes. In other words, viewers must grapple with many layers here to get to the truth.
The curators efforts to grapple with the effects of 1989 is thus unfortunately lacking a critical layer, by not including artists from neighboring nations who had lived under the Eastern Bloc's socialism (as adults or even if only as children), and more importantly, they are still living in their countries; they are almost all struggling for international recognition, so their omission from such an exhibit underlines their dilemma. This form of division is a bitter truth, twenty years after the fall of the Iron Curtain.
The curtain is down, and most of the region is in the European Union now, but the conscious or not lingering separation between neighbors, East and West, is still a reality.
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