Networking the Bloc: International Relations and Experimental Art in Eastern Europe (1968-1981)

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The proposal is to complete a monograph entitled Networking the Bloc: International Relations and Experimental Art in Eastern Europe (1968-1981) surveying key instances of international exchange among East European unofficial artists in the period spanning the long decade between the Warsaw Pact troops' invasion of Czechoslovakia and the emergence of the Polish Solidarity movement. This time-frame is designed to coincide with the re-emergence of civil society in the region, post-thaw, taking as pivotal 'Basket Three' of the Helsinki Agreement (1975) guaranteeing the 'free movement of people and ideas' across divided Europe, to investigate both the opportunities for and impediments to these freedoms in the periods immediately preceding the Agreements and the changing position in the years that followed. The primary aim of the book is to chart a topography of experimental exchanges within the Soviet bloc itself, but the geopolitical scope of the material necessarily extends beyond the borders of the USSR and the Soviet Satellite countries to include important contacts with former Yugoslavia (independent of the USSR after 1948), Western Europe, the USA and Latin America. By weaving together minor narratives, Networking the Bloc seeks to reposition East-East exchange within a global art historical field and to challenge accounts of the late Cold War period that emphasize isolation over connectivity. Hungarian dissident György Konrád asked "How can we strengthen the horizontal human relationships of civil society against the vertical human relationships of military society?" in 1984. By then, I argue, experimental artists had been exploring such questions, in their own way, for two decades. The book explores how artistic ideas were relayed among like-minded artists across ideological and national frontiers in a period characterised by political polarisation and a network of censors, informers and secret police. The focus is on the following: the pioneers and publications that fostered and facilitated exchange; the places that served as hubs for personal encounters among artists and artistic propositions; the events that brought art and artists together in new constellations; artists' accounts of their excursions abroad and, finally, the experiences of émigré artists who were able to play a part in facilitating international collaboration and the circulation of materials in the Soviet bloc after having decamped to the West. Networking the Bloc will be a richly illustrated volume of around 100 000 words, to be published by MIT Press in 2018.