interview

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LZ: As a curator and theoretician in the field of contemporary art with rich experiences, an active cultural operator with experiences in the non-governmental sector, and as a professor of contemporary art, how would you estimate generally the situation in the field of contemporary art in the Balkans in the last, e.g. ten, years? What is the position of the contemporary art in the Balkans in comparison to European and global trends? What are their main characteristics? 

SM: This is a very broad question and cannot be addressed instantaneously and generally without entering into more specific issues. I have written several times, already in my PhD and elsewhere, that because the Balkans has such a complex historical and political background, the situation in the Balkan art scenes and the art and cultural policies there differ to a very great extent from country to country. Today, even among the countries of ex-Yugoslavia, there are big differences (e.g., I could hardly compare the situations in Slovenia and Macedonia), not to mention Greece, Romania and Bulgaria, on the one hand, and Albania, Kosovo and Bosnia, on the other hand, which, among themselves, have yet again different approaches towards arts and culture... Obviously, the biggest difference between the countries would be their membership in the EU. The second difference would be their previous history – most of the countries went through a socialist period, but Greece and Turkey didn’t (the question as to whether Turkey belongs to the Balkans sounds weird to me because the Balkans inherited most of its stereotypes during the Ottoman period and now the EU does not want to admit this pre-history). This profoundly affects the different cultural policies and the state administrations towards the way they treat art. One could argue that none of this should really be that relevant for the individual artists who can and have always wanted to act contrary to the state apparatus. I would agree only partly with that since even when the artists disagree with the state or deal critically with the different historical and political issues, they in a way define themselves through their position towards the specificity of their own cultural background. I would even go this far, that even those artists who refuse to address the contemporary political, social and economic issues by insisting on modernist, formalist and/or abstract art, they also, even without acknowledging this, define themselves through the political – perhaps as the retort to the interrupted and unfinished business of socialist modernism.  

So to go back to the general framework of your question, the answer would have to be multifaceted and perhaps focus more on the Western Balkans. I could perhaps emphasize that the transition in these states lasts too long, that the neo-liberal economic and cultural policies have already galloped over and in a strange way intertwined with the remains of the previous system, and thus very strange hybrids are created, sometimes provocative but often ridiculous. So for example, in Macedonia, we have a very ambitious plan to re-build Skopje and, by 2014, to build several museums, administrative buildings and bridges and to place 30 public sculptures in a very small circle of the central area of the city, which is obviously a neo-liberal strategy of capitalist investment-revenue calculation. However, the pushing for academic and socialist realism with a nationalistic tendency that was supported through the open competitions for the sculptures and paintings commissioned mostly as portraits of Macedonian historical figures, the employment of hundreds of new administration clerks, etc., are actions that speak contrary to the free market and neo-liberalism.

However, the fact that four countries are already part of the EU is not the only difference in the positioning of the Balkan countries towards the new European and world art and cultural directions, and it is not always enough for a profound analysis. For example, in the case of Greece, this fact did not so much affect the governmental cultural policy towards contemporary art and cultural diversity – could you imagine a presentation of a solo exhibition of a Macedonian artist belonging to the Macedonian minority living in Greece taking place there and addressing the issue of the name?

LZ: As a curator in the field of contemporary art, how would you estimate the position of that profession in the Balkans? What are the work conditions and how is this occupation positioned in society?

SM: I could answer this question in two ways: either very personally, starting from my own experience as being the first curator in Macedonia who fought not only for the introduction of the profession but even for the use of the term as well (e.g., at the beginning, there were colleagues in the national section of the AICA-International association of art critics who were against my use of the term); or I could address the actual situation with curating as I see it now, from the perspective of a experienced curator that does not make a living by curating. It could be relevant to actually compare these two positions; at least for me, this would be the most relevant response. Namely, when I started curating independently, this was a kind of very lonely activist job. There were no fees for curating (I was getting paid only for the texts, so – allow me some self-irony – perhaps that is why I don’t understand curators who don’t write), the state was not supportive of any projects that were not initiated and run by public institutions and employed curators (mostly calling themselves custodians and acting more as administrators than creative curators), and there were no foundations to which one could apply for projects or for establishing non-affiliated organisations; so many of my first projects were literally funded by myself and the artists (I am talking about the first half of the 90s of the 20th century). Actually, there were some custodians who had bigger ambitions and were signing their projects as “authors”, and they were actually the ones most threatened by independent curators acting from outside the institutions. I’d say that this agonistic situation was perhaps the first conscious institutional critique, at least in Macedonia, where the Museum of Contemporary Art was a real fortress of modernist ideology not allowing any alternative art thinking.

Gradually, this situation changed, the curatorial profession became socially acknowledged and many things became possible. Because of the conflicts in ex-Yugoslavia, many funds for endangered territories became available and many different cultural policies became possible. Curators use all these opportunities and often act as kinds of conveyors and translators of contemporary art world trends in local contexts where the artists are not so aware of the changes, especially because of the slow change of the other institutions dealing with arts. Here, I mostly address the issue of art education that, in most of the Balkan countries, hasn’t changed at all over all the turbulent years of the transitional period. Therefore, the curators take over the roles of both educators and promoters, unfortunately often complying with the policies that are propagated and prescribed by foundations that have various agendas. When reading Hardt’s and Negri’s Empire, one cannot help but think about the Balkans and of how, through art and culture, the neo-liberal capital has entered and at the same time has helped the shaping of new societies. This is not the same as saying that we, the curators, are the ones to blame for the hard-core politics; all I want to stress is the importance of this profession that is sometimes treated as being very innocent and only art- and culture-oriented. One thing that I often think and which is perhaps contextually relevant is that it happens that, on the way to individual success, the curators, as well as the artists, have a responsibility to see the bigger picture – what their projects do not only for their careers and for artists, but also for society in general – and how they affect each part of society. Let me be more precise; when a project attacks one-sidedly the capitalist and neo-liberal policy and uses, let’s say, a bank foundation, there should be a kind of justification for such a hypocrisy (if there is one at all).

Of course, there are curators who succeed in preserving their integrity and even while using funds from either the state (some countries support the independent curators for many years, depending on the ruling governments and the institutional managers), independent or private funds, or even all of them, in their projects, still manage to preserve argumentative and not only ideological critique.

LZ: There is a kind of myth that art from the Balkans and Eastern Europe is usually mainly politically and socially engaged, that it is strongly politically and socially orientated. For example, the last Istanbul Biennale exhibited mostly politically and socially engaged artworks, which were in a certain way critical reflections of the current unstable and usually controversial political and social situations in their countries. Is the more or less constant unstable political and social situation in the Balkans and in Eastern Europe somehow predetermining the issues to deal with in art in that region?

SM: Perhaps, in this context, one should rephrase Deleuze’s very well known statement about the inevitable nature of minority literatures – that everything in them is political: that, in minor cultures and art, the individual is inextricable from the socius, that the subject is inevitably linked to the political. When I say that one needs to rephrase this, it is not only because here we are talking about the art language and not about literature; I also mean that the re-interpretation of this concept should go in the direction of a clarification, again in the same direction – by an emphasis on the more important statement by Deleuze from the same text – that the literature (and I’d add here art in minor cultures) is realized in the dominant language of the colonial powers – in contemporary art, this language is obviously the one of Western art. I am not saying that this is bad – actually, I am only stating that this is inevitable. Therefore, it sounds paradoxical to say that the critical engagement of the artists is a kind of specificity of the artists from the East. In fact, there are lots of artists who are not from the Eastern countries but who are profoundly engaged with political issues and are in fact even closer to activists’ circles. Perhaps the only reason that it looks as if the politically engaged art practices are not so present in the West is that the Western societies are more cautious with exhibiting artists who are concerned and critical towards the inner political system. In fact, perhaps this has to do also with the interest of the Western audience in knowing more about the societies that were once so isolated and such interest not being able to be quenched by exhibiting abstract or other formalist works of any modernist artists and works from the Eastern art scenes.                        

LZ: Can you give some examples?

SM: One interesting example of a politically engaged artist and work from the UK that confirms that such work exists in the West, too, is the work Battle of Orgreave (2001) by the British conceptual artist Jeremy Deller. However, it is important to clarify that its political engagement, even though critical towards the conservative British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, was realized during Tony Blair’s government. Deller organised a re-enactment of the confrontation between police and picketing miners at a British Steel coking plant in Orgreave in 1984, during the UK miners’ strike. In 1991, South Yorkshire police were forced to pay out half a million pounds to the 39 arrested miners. Deller’s work included 800 people: 280 local residents, a number of people (police and picketers) from the original encounter and re-enactors, which obviously would not have been possible to realise in such a spectacular form without the big support from the state. Still, I anticipate that now the West is getting ready to find out more about socialist modernism and other forms of art that somehow were neglected; but again, it is only because the discussion around modernisms has been revived in the West already that the Eastern counterparts can now be heard.

LZ: What is your understanding of art and its position in society? What do you think about the phenomenon of politically and socially engaged art and to what extent can art really be politically and socially engaged? Jacques Rancière, in his book Emancipated Spectator (and in some other books and texts as well), claims that for contemporary art, it is significant that – as a consequence of the weakness of the political conflict – art occupy the eminent place of the political, which means that art take over the issues which were usually in the domain of politics (such as: social and political inequality and exploitation, consumerism, a critical position towards the state with all its elements, such as citizenship and minority/majority concepts, the situation of migrants and migrant workers, the question of the liberation of animals, protection of nature, etc.). At the same time, Rancière raises the question as to whether art, just by showing, presenting and representing some important problematic issues in society, just by the monumentalization of the image, can really change something in society, i.e., producing emancipatory potential.

SM: What you state in your question was already formulated by the Situationists and Guy Debord in their theory of recuperation, and I was using it as a mental exercise while addressing the societal role of curators. The Situationists had even gone this far already by stating that the artists, with their critique, actually contribute towards the recuperation of the corrupted society exactly by revealing its shortcomings, thus enabling society to reclaim a stronger position by incorporating the critique.

But, at the same time, this is not to state that the artist cannot be critical and should not deal with society at all in any of the domains that are not purely aesthetical, because this stance turned out to be impossible even during the most purely modernist and formalist times, when pure aesthetics was worshipped and seen as the worthiest of all artistic credos. What I am saying is that Rancière did not discover anything new, though perhaps he did explain more profoundly the paradox of emancipation and the institutional critique (although not directly addressing it). This criticism and disclosure of the paradox behind the political engagement of art was still applicable as long as he was discussing the strategies so well-known from the 1980s and 1990s, for example, the mimicking and over-identifying with certain societal flaws. Interestingly enough, I wrote a review of the Istanbul Biennale, already in 1999 (ten years ago), that opened up the discussion of the ethical vs. aesthetical, which followed an article (both texts were published in the review springerin) about the contradictions of politically engaged art.

However, by the end of the 20th century and throughout the first decade of this century, in the art scenes all around the world, it became possible that art could be considered as another kind of alliance – the alliance between artists and activists (and here I don’t refer only to the artists turned “artivists”), between art and activism that somehow moved beyond what Rancière (and earlier Debord) had in mind. In artivism, the critique of society (elsewhere, I called this art about political) moves towards art as a means for social change and art as agency (I dubbed this art within political), which is in a way an answer to your question – that the question of whether art critique is possible today should be reformulated and take a more performative direction, what and how an artist could change with his/her critique. Hereby, I have to clarify that by “change” I do not understand this that an artist should become a revolutionary and fight on barricades; and I personally think that it is wrong to expect from art and artists a revision of society where we did not succeed as citizens, but I do hold that they are citizens as well and that, in their art, not only is critique possible but that there is a certain performative potentiality of this critique that goes beyond “words”.  

I’ve recently come to think about another possible criticism of Jacques Rancière’s own concepts of art rendering visible the politically invisible – whatever new actions of rendering visible certain prohibited structures (minorities and immigrants’ rights, for example) – they inevitably overwrite other things that once were visible (e.g., the social equalities in ex-Yugoslavia when one criticized the communist ideological power regime). Then I came across the text Crisis in the Visual System by Paul Helliwell and it became clearer to me that, actually, the vicious circle of Rancière did not bother only me and that other writers had problems with his, a kind of obsolete, understanding of the relation between art and political intervention. I often think that, for the philosophers of this generation, there is no chance of redemption so long as they do not give up on aesthetics as a kind of overarching discipline that should still be consulted whenever we discuss art. Ever since Hal Foster’s reader The Anti-Aesthetic was published, it has helped me understand that aesthetics has become a discipline that is not completely unnecessary or abandoned, but belongs to the discussions of art in formalist and crafty ways. One could have hardly imagined that Benjamin’s distinction between nationalist and socialist understandings of the aestheticization of the political and the politicization of art could still be discussed and have serious implications for art, although presented in such a complex way, as it is by Rancière (here I refer to his The Politics of Aesthetics).

LZ: How would you estimate the practises of cultural politics in the Balkans? How are they shaped and by whom, what is the relationship between government and non-government organisations in that field? Can you compare the situation with other European countries, keeping in mind that you are pretty much engaged internationally, too? At the same time, how do you understand the term – so popular lately – “European integration”? What, in your opinion, does it mean, the “entering” of the Balkan countries into the EU, and what do you see the role of the EU in the Balkans as, if at all?

SM: In 2006, while still a Director of the Centre for Visual and Cultural Research at the Euro-Balkan Institute in Skopje, I organized a conference about postcolonial theory and cultural policy. The title of the conference Translating the Self points to the main impact of the “European integration”, at least as discussed during that conference. The notion of cultural translation in this was elaborated through the relation between the socio-cultural and political processes of the translation of European laws and policies and the position of the self and subjectivity throughout these processes. One provocation for such a take on this topic was the fear that appeared in the smaller and marginalised cultures of the cultural integration and immersion in the bigger context of an enlarged Europe. I saw an urgency to address the emergence of this fear and the questions, such as: what happens when an individual is exposed to large processes of cultural shifts, how does this transition reflect on the self, and how is the personal realm affected by, and how does it affect, these large social and intercultural entanglements and transitional processes? The conference also dealt both with artists’ practices that engage in these issues and how these issues are tackled in larger frameworks by cultural institutions, cultural managers and policy makers. Of course, one should not forget the question of how the gradual entry of the Balkans into the EU will affect the EU itself – that should also start translating and re-interpreting itself – that was already anticipated with Igor Zabel’s term “former West”.

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