| When recalling the beginning of the end of Communism in Eastern Europe, vague visions of the fall of the Berlin Wall and thousands of screaming teenagers are inseparable from images of music videos on MTV that so powerfully marked that moment of transition. In a way, the two will always be linked. If the 1980s were the era of home video recording and the maturation of video art in the West, then the 1990s were certainly a similar period of consciousness for Eastern Europe. Many artists of Eastern Europe continue to express a deeply felt connection to the particular medium of video art, as it was an integral part of their transition from isolation to becoming full participants in global popular culture. |  |
Keep on Rockin’ in the Free World – Christine Cavallomagno
When recalling the beginning of the end of Communism in Eastern Europe, vague visions of the fall of the Berlin Wall and thousands of screaming teenagers are inseparable from images of music videos on MTV that so powerfully marked that moment of transition. In a way, the two will always be linked. If the 1980s were the era of home video recording and the maturation of video art in the West, then the 1990s were certainly a similar period of consciousness for Eastern Europe. Many artists of Eastern Europe continue to express a deeply felt connection to the particular medium of video art, as it was an integral part of their transition from isolation to becoming full participants in global popular culture. Because television was a window to the rest of the world, video was naturally the very medium that symbolized freedom. This is part of why the videos of “New Video, New Europe,” when viewed together as one cultural document are so powerful. Curator Hamza Walker created the show for the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago and has brought together 48 videos from 40 artists varying in genre and style that take on questions of ethnicity, residual tensions of war, the legacy of Communism and national and individual identity.
Often in exhibitions dealing with the transition of post-Communist Eastern Europe, Russia is the sole focus. This exhibition instead chooses to focus on the more marginalized Socialist Republics of Eastern Europe, whose histories of civil war and ethnic struggle give an even more magnified example of that transition. In some ways, the countries under the spotlight of this exhibition were able to flourish in artistic expression in ways that those more closely surveyed under Moscow’s radar could not. For example, as Estonian artist Ki’Wa explained in a recent panel discussion at The Kitchen, the northern Estonian capital of Talinn’s proximity to Finland enabled many of his peers to watch Finnish (and therefore Western European) television while living under Communism. An intense fascination with Western culture developed, which he playfully examines in his work, My Dream Pop Star, 2003, where he films a friend imitating the over-the-top glam of 1980s Estonian pop star, Anna Veski, as nonsensical subtitles skim the screen. Similarly in HH (2002), Anna Niesterowicz of Poland films three teen girls from Warsaw as they imitate perfectly in dress and style the attitude of Western hip-hop culture. Two of them are awkward and can’t quite catch the rhythm, while the other performs perfectly, mirroring the varying degrees to which Eastern Europe has found it necessary to adapt in its increasing obsession with the West.
The videos of “New Video New Europe,” which span the last decade or so in video art, grapple with this complex relationship, and, although they are artifacts of a particular place in time, they do not brim with nostalgia, nor do they brood with hopelessness and vacancy. In a way, they are a door into a rapidly changing confluence of cultures that have been geographically torn between Europe and Asia, politically tied to both the USSR and the West, and culturally split between their own histories and the Communist regimes that governed them.
The recent admittance of Slovakia, Estonia, Latvia and the Czech Republic (as well as several others) into the EU in 2003 is, in some way, the beginning of the end of the period of self-exploration and identity-forming that has characterized the Eastern Europe of the last two decades or so. It is significant that several of the artists chose to examine conditions in their countries that are a result of increasing globalization. Kristina Leko’s ten-minute video, In Her 25,803rd Day (2000), looks at how European Union agricultural requirements have affected women who make their living by employing traditional farming methods, now discouraged in favor of more efficient means of production. The women, whose ages are measured in days, range from very young to very old. There is a surprising intimacy to these videos, in which the women go about their tasks largely oblivious to the camera.
Echoes of wars and revolutions haunt many videos in the exhibition and provide a powerful backdrop against which to view the current evolution. Dragana Zarevac’s MOST (2000) includes footage of the destruction of a historic 16th century Ottoman bridge in the historic city of Mostar during the 1993 civil war, which is interspersed with more recent interviews with townspeople reflecting on the events of that war. Particularly powerful is Dan Mihaltianu’s reflection on the Romanian revolution of 1989. During the video, recordings of the radio broadcasts, which aired literally as the citizens were taking control of the government, are played back. The radio broadcasters are heard for the first time, apologizing to their listeners for not telling them the truth during all the years of the Communist regime. The voices call on the people listening to come to the radio station and help them, while images are shown of a man grooming himself; first shaving, then brushing his teeth, cutting his hair, etc. The most dramatic is shown alongside the most mundane, and we see that life goes on; despite bloody revolutions, a day’s activities remain basically the same. Going back in history a bit further, Moldovan, Stefan Rusu’s Brezhnev Likes Mamaliga and Mamaliga Likes Brezhnev, (2001), is an instructional type video in which the viewer is shown how to make Mamaliga, a kind of chicken peasant soup. We watch as the chicken is beheaded, gives its final death throes and is cooked, during which images of Brezhnev are interspersed. The Soviet leader was especially significant to Moldova as he headed the Moldovan Communist part from 1950-1952, during which he praised Moldovan nationality as part of Stalin’s legacy of encouraging national identities among the individual Socialist Republics. Eating the meal is a kind of closure, a communion in which the symbol of the nostalgic worship of the State must be consumed before the people can move beyond memory and nostalgia.
Croatian philosopher Milan Kangrga once said, “Homeland is not only the place we were born in; Homeland is also a spiritual landscape that we acquire over the entire course of our lives.” Dario Bardic’s one-minute film Time Travel evokes this feeling of looking back over a course of great change, through vintage photographs that morph into images of present day Croatia, showing the change in buildings and landscapes over a century as if it is happening in an instant. In a way, this one-minute video is a microcosm of the exhibition in its remarkable capacity to reveal enormous change in a series of brief moments.
