Suchergebnisse

AbstractUsing an approach situated at the intersection of cultural memory studies and (critical) heritage studies, with a focus on the ambivalent socialist heritage of socialist statues and monuments and their changing role in postsocialist public spaces, this article engages with the postcommunist strategies of reckoning with the past in Romania and Bulgaria in the period 1990–2020. Comparing the kinds of monumental memory of communism that were established in these countries, the author discusses how each dealt with their ambivalent socialist heritage through a public memory policy comprising three combined strategies: removal; preservation; and the replacement of communist heroes with anticommunist counter-monuments. The author concludes that stances toward the socialist heritage manifest various tensions in terms of the types of statues that were removed or, alternately, allowed to remain; of the opposition between local and national decisions as well as between the official approach and citizens' perspectives; and, finally, of aesthetic versus political criteria.

AbstractAfter the fall of the socialist regimes in South and Eastern Europe socialist statues and monuments were either removed, dislocated, or resignified. Several performance practices have been employed to engage with these statues and monuments. Focusing on the role played by artistic memorialization in the processes of dealing with the communist past, this article uses the concepts of "performative monuments" (Widrich) and "memory events" (Etkind) to analyze several examples of what can be called "performative monuments events." As many statues were removed, the statues witnessed performative practices in the process of their elimination. The monuments that were conserved were dislocated and exhibited as part of "sculpture park museums" and observed nostalgic, ironic practices of tourists that perform the memory of communism by interacting with the monuments. This article analyzes several examples in Albania, Bulgaria and Romania of socialist monuments that have remained in place or that have been dislocated and resignified by contemporary artists using performative practices of memory events that engage monuments. This exploratory research argues that artists, through their "performative monuments events," try to bring the people back to replace the statues with "living statues" and to question the absurd megalomaniac monuments using metaphorical, material instruments.

This introductory article presents the study of the state artist in the context of the communist regimes in Eastern Europe and the USSR through several case studies. This introduction places the analyses gathered here of the relationship between artists and the state in different phases of the communist regimes, and in different artistic expressions, as well as in several countries. While the focus is on Romanian cases of study, the articles bring forward possible comparisons with neighboring communist regimes. Some of the articles included in this special issue deal with visual arts, literature, photography, amateur rural comedy brigades, and specific cases of artists (Ion Irimescu and Ion Grigorescu), while other articles discuss the specific institutional contradictions of the Soviet cultural framework. This issue advances thus a little bit further in the comparative institutional archive-based study of cultural institutions during communism.

Abstract
This article analyses 'Project 1990' (2010–2014) as an example of 'art of memorialisation'. The project included twenty temporary artistic interventions on the empty pedestal of the former statue of Lenin in Bucharest. The author compares this example of art of memorialisation to other memory strategies found in the Romanian public space after 1990. Building on James Young's concept of anti-monument, 'Project 1990' questioned the ways in which communism is remembered in Romania, and how the transition to democracy, in the opinion of many of the exhibiting artists, failed. This curatorial project is a good example of the aestheticisation of memory—that is the anti-nostalgic and ironic treatment of symbols of the past, among which Lenin himself.

This article presents the relation of East European artists with the Secret Police
institutions. While focused on the Romanian case, several examples from
Poland, Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria help place the topic in a regional context.
The analysis includes both the viewpoint of the Secret Police on the artistic
world as such, as well as the gazes of artists on the reality of their time. The
conceptualization of artistic surveillance includes three types of examples: the
deconstruction of the officially fabricated reality, the focus on the details of the
everyday life forbidden by official propaganda, and the reflection of artists on the
secret police apparatus. The conclusions of this study show that the investigation
of artistic artifacts together with the secret police archives can help bring a new
perspective on the limits of domination exerted by the communist regime.

Art and politics designates an eclectic subfield of political science. The article starts by providing a theoretical framework for this heterogenous field (both institutionally and as several disciplines converge). The relationship of politics and the arts has been dealt with in various ways inside the institutional umbrellas of international political science (APSA and ECPR). The approach of the study of the art from a political perspective has been privileged by Marxist and post-Marxist studies, as well as by the sociological school in Francophone studies. Secondly, an overview of the analysis included in this special issue is provided. Several foci are preferred and multiple case-studies are imagined. The subjects are classified according to several categories: an institutional focus of the postcommunist transformation (film and visual artists), the artistic discourses that discuss the past and the continuous present, memory and its artistic questionings. Imagined as an introduction to the study of art and politics in (post)communism, this article attempts to stimulate a thorough debate on ways to study this complicated relationship, as well as advances a theoretical outline.

This article retraces the contours of the artistic policies applied by the Romanian and Chilean dictatorial regimes in the period 1970-1990. It does so by looking specifically at institutions and policies in a historical perspective (the before and the after). Moreover, the two regimes are placed in a comparative perspective with democratic regimes and totalitarian and authoritarian regimes. The purpose of this double comparison is to advance a framework of analysis of artistic policies in dictatorial regimes that is comprehensive and that could be extended to other cases.

After more than a decade of dictatorship, Chilean arts were confronted, in 1990, to a democratic framework: the common enemy was gone; or not? In this sense, my investigation seeks to answer to two interdependent questions. Which path did the Chilean state follow so as to grant an artistic institutional framework after authoritarianism? How did Chilean artists perceive this transformation, and how did they regard (report themselves to) the past in their works? Besides this double intention, this article seeks additionally, as its title indicates, to verify the persistence or not of "artistic authoritarian enclaves". I will verify how this formula introduced by Manuel Antonio Garretón gains a different sense if we think about it from the point of view of the relation between art and politics.

This study attempts to explain the structuring and the articulation of the Romanian political landscape after more than a decade of democracy and in the specific context of the negotiations for the European integration. More specifically, the investigation bears on the manner in which the principal Romanian political parties integrate in their discourse the "European coordinate" and the modality in which these visions are articulated inside the party system. Therefore the analysis encloses a twofold approach: the systemic level and the party level. The seeming consensus in the auto-definition as European parties (vocationally) is striking. This leads to a closer examination of the parties' ideological manifestos, the discourses/speeches of the different political formations in order to try to decipher the options of each one so as to perceive the nuances/fine distinctions that individualize each party in relation to another. The parties analyzed here are: the Democrat Party (PD), the National Christian Democratic Peasant Party (PNŢCD), the Social Democrat Party (PSD), the National Liberal Party (PNL), the Union of Democratic Magyars of Romania (RDMSZ/UDMR) and the Great Romania Party (PRM). The exploration follows the party development essentially in the period 1996-2004 given the increasing importance gained by the European issue after the 1996 elections (the alternation in power and the victory of the pro-European coalition) and even more important, after the publication by the European commission in 1997 of the Agenda 2000.

This article deals with the 1989 Romanian revolution and its international mediatization. The specific focus is upon Belgian written press in the period of December 1989-January 1990. The study highlights the misinformation at work in the December 1989 Revolution and the internal political effects it produced (external legitimacy of the new NSF government). The theoretical framework uses on one side four modified journalistic questions (Who says? What? How it is said? And with what effects?) and on another side, subdivides the period under scrutiny into four sub-units, relating to the themes and accents emphasized by the Belgian journalists. The media messages are thus deconstructed by this approach. Before concluding on the specific political and media effects, a short review of other cases (Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo, Iraq) of media manipulation is presented.