SocialEast Seminar on Art and Espionage

The SocialEast Seminar on Art and Espionage at the Courtauld Institute of Art in L0ndon on 27th February 2009 was a great success. Here are some images and quick reflections on the day.

The symposium got off to a fitting start with a tour of the For Your Eyes Only exhibition at the Imperial War Museum by one of the curators. We learned disturbing facts from him such as that Ian Fleming killed several enemy agents in New York the 1930s and that he had very low eating and drinking habits, consuming large quantities of ‘bad Hungarian wine’ – which had the Hungarians in the delegation rightly objecting to the survival imperialist attitudes – not surprising really considering the venue.

Next stop was the ICA, which we approached through the back entrance for staff and spies. The proximity of drinking clubs and the MI6 headquarters was not lost on specialists of the CIA’s involvement in the competition for the monument to the unknown political prisoner of the early 1950s. We were treated to a tour by Mark Sladen, curator of the Sean Snyder show, which combines a number of interesting Cold War elements, including a reworking of archive footage of a contemporary art exhibition in a Soviet village from the 1960s.

Laszlo Beke spoke about the ‘Hungarian aspects of the Cambridge Five’.

To be continued…

Overcoming Dictatorships

overcoming dictatorships in a musty seminar room

Recently we gave a paper at a conference organised as part of the EU funded project ‘Overcoming Dictatorships‘ at Birmingham University. The other speakers included Sue Malvern, who offered a digest of published research on Croatian artist Sanja Ivekovic, and Brandon Taylor, well-known for his work on Soviet Art under Stalin, who on this occasion spoke about the negative effect of the British Monarch’s attitude to contemporary art on British art and culture. We spoke about the various faces of art censorship in the context of Csaba Nemes’s project Remake and the Venice Biennial competition of 2007, looking in particular at the press response to his work.

There were a number of curious aspects to this event, probably connected to it being a Euro funded project with a large number of partners and a  need to fulfill certain requirements, and the conference itself felt like a side event – not least because discussion was cut short by the need to gather in a reception area to listen to a speech by Lord Kinnock (which actually wasn’t bad and event touched on art) and enjoy a lavish buffet, the highpoint of which was the cake pictured below, which demonstrated an amazingly skewed sense of European natural and political geography.

europe a la overcoming dictatorships

Post-Communist Visual Culture and Cinema

This Call for Papers for a conference at St.Andrews in March 2009 looks interesting…

‘Postcommunist Visual Culture and Cinema:

Interdisciplinary Studies, Methodology, Dissemination

AHRC-St. Andrews Postgraduate Conference

University of St. Andrews, Scotland

20-21 March 2009

Call for Papers

This AHRC sponsored conference is organised jointly by the Centre for Film Studies and the Centre for Russian, Soviet and Eastern European Studies at the University of St. Andrews. It will bring together doctoral students from the United Kingdom and Europe, whose work is focused on the visual culture and cinema of the post-Communist period. The main objective is to launch a productive dialogue on methodological and practical issues affecting all those engaged in the study of the film and visual culture of the postcommunist period.’

For more details contact:

Lars Kristensen at llfk@st-andrews.ac.uk

Or

http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/filmstudies/

Call for Papers

SocialEast Seminar on Art and Espionage

Proposals for papers are invited from art historians, curators and artists that examine the art and visual culture of Eastern Europe and beyond in both historical and contemporary contexts. Papers are sought for the SocialEast Seminar on Art and Espionage, which will be held at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London on Friday 27 February 2009.

The deadline for submissions is 21 December.

For more details, see the full call for papers on http://www.socialeast.org

Art and Theory after Socialism

A new book co-edited by Malcolm Miles promises to provide critical insights into the ‘collision of art theory from the ex-East and ex-West’:

‘The collected essays assert that dreams promised by consumerism and capitalism have not been delivered in the East, and that the West is not a zone of liberation, increasingly drawn into global conflict as well as media presentation of a high-risk society. ‘

The book includes an essay by Maja and Reuben Fowkes on ‘The Ecology of Post-Socialism and the Implications of Sustainability for Contemporary Art’, as well as a chapter by Klara Kemp-Welch that was originally given at one of the SocialEast Seminars. We’ll let you know more when we get hold of a copy (or tell us…)