Contemporary Art and Capitalist

Modernization

This book addresses the art historical category of “contemporary art” from
a transregional perspective, but unlike other volumes of its kind, it focuses in on
non-Western instantiations of “the contemporary.”
The book concerns itself with the historical conditions in which a radically new
mode of artistic production, distribution, and consumption – called “contemporary
art” – emerged in some countries of Eastern Europe, the post-Soviet republics of
the USSR, India, Latin America, and the Middle East, following both local and
broader sociopolitical processes of modernization and neoliberalization. Its main
argument is that one cannot fully engage with the idea of the “global contempor-
ary” without also paying careful attention to the particular, local, and/or national
symptoms of the contemporary condition. Part I is methodological and theoretical
in scope, while Part II is historical and documentary. For the latter, a number of
case studies address the emergence of the category “contemporary art” in the con-
text of Lebanon, Egypt, India, Hungary, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegov-
ina, Armenia, and Moldova.
The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, globalism, cul-
tural studies, and postcolonial studies.

Octavian Esanu is an assistant professor of Art History at the American University

of Beirut (AUB) and Curator of AUB Art Galleries.
Routledge Advances in Art and Visual Studies

This series is our home for innovative research in the fields of art and visual studies. It
includes monographs and targeted edited collections that provide new insights into visual
culture and art practice, theory, and research.

Dialogues Between Artistic Research and Science and Technology Studies

Edited by Henk Borgdorff, Peter Peters, and Trevor Pinch

Contemporary Art and Disability Studies

Edited by Alice Wexler and John Derby

The Outsider, Art and Humour

Paul Clements

The Contemporary Art Scene in Syria

Social Critique and an Artistic Movement
Charlotte Bank

The Iconology of Abstraction

Non-Figurative Images and the Modern World
Edited by Krešimir Purgar

Liquid Ecologies in Latin American and Caribbean Art

Edited by Lisa Blackmore and Liliana Gómez

Contemporary Art, Photography, and the Politics of Citizenship

Vered Maimon

Contemporary Art and Capitalist Modernization

A Transregional Perspective
Edited by Octavian Esanu

For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com/Routledge-

Advances-in-Art-and-Visual-Studies/book-series/RAVS
Contemporary Art and Capitalist
Modernization
A Transregional Perspective

Edited by Octavian Esanu

First published 2021
by Routledge
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and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2021 Taylor & Francis
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material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted
in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and
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without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Esanu, Octavian, editor.
Title: Contemporary art and capitalist modernization :
a transregional perspective / edited by Octavian Esanu.
Description: New York : Routledge, 2021. | Includes bibliographical
references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020025278 (print) |
LCCN 2020025279 (ebook) | ISBN
9780367490737 (hardback) | ISBN 9781003044345 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Art, Modern–20th century. | Art and society–
History–20th century. | Regionalism and the arts.
Classification: LCC N6490 .C65667 2021 (print) |
LCC N6490 (ebook) | DDC 709.04–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020025278
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020025279

ISBN: 978-0-367-49073-7 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-003-04434-5 (ebk)

Typeset in Sabon
by Swales & Willis, Exeter, Devon, UK
Contents

List of Figures vii

Acknowledgments xi
A Note on Contributors xii

Introduction 1
OCTAVIAN ESANU

PART I 15

1 Toward a Historical Understanding of Post-Soviet Presentism 17

ANGELA HARUTYUNYAN

2 The Long-Lasting Present: Art, Duration, and Contemporaneity 31

PEDRO ERBER

3 Periodizing Latin American Art Since the 1960s 41

KAREN BENEZRA

4 Neue östeuropäische Kunst: The Global Contemporary and the

Eastern European Retrocontemporary 57
IVANA BAGO

5 Art Form and Nation Form: Contemporary Art and the

Postnational Condition 80
OCTAVIAN ESANU

6 Three Questions for Terry Smith: Peripherality, Postmodernity,

Multiplicity – Reconceiving the Origins of Contemporary Art 98
INTERVIEW WITH TERRY SMITH, BY OCTAVIAN ESANU
vi Contents
PART II 119

Case Study 1
Nove Tendencije 2 [New Tendencies 2], Gallery of
Contemporary Art Zagreb, 1963 121
IVANA BAGO

Case Study 2
Rabinec Studio: The Commodification of Art in
Late Socialist Hungary, 1982–1983 139
KRISTÓF NAGY

Case Study 3
The 3rd Floor Cultural Movement, Yerevan 1987–1994 153
ANGELA HARUTYUNYAN

Case Study 4
The First Sanayeh Plastic Arts Meeting, Ashkal
Alwan Beirut 1995 169
NATASHA GASPARIAN

Case Study 5
CarbonART 96 and The 6th Kilometer, SCCA Chișinău 1996 184
OCTAVIAN ESANU

Case Study 6
Meeting Point, SCCA Sarajevo 1997 206
AMILA PUZIĆ

Case Study 7
Khoj International Artists’ Workshop, Khoj
International Artists’ Association, Modinagar 1997 222
SABIH AHMED AND NIDA GHOUSE

Case Study 8
Janja Žvegelj, Squash: Škuc Gallery, Ljubljana, 1998 236
TEVŽ LOGAR AND VLADIMIR VIDMAR

Case Study 9
Al-Nitaq Festival of Art, Cairo, 2000 and 2001 253
DINA A. MOHAMED

Combined Bibliography and Selected Archival Material 267

Index 281
Figures

1.1 Poster for New Tendencies 2 exhibition designed by Ivan Picelj, 1963.
Courtesy of Anja Picelj Kosak 126
1.2 Calendar: individuals, groups, and exhibitions, which indirectly or
directly preceded the phenomena encompassed by New Tendencies.
Page from the exhibition catalog Nove Tendencije 2. Museum of
Contemporary Art, Zagreb 127
1.3 New Tendencies 2, exhibition opening. Getulio Alviani and Eugenio
Carmi in front of Fluid Structure (1961) by Gianni Colombo. Museum
of Contemporary Art, Zagreb 127
1.4 New Tendencies 2, exhibition opening. Visitors interacting with
artworks. Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb 128
1.5 New Tendencies 2, exhibition questionnaire (Page 1 and 3). Museum
of Contemporary Art, Zagreb 128
1.6 Letter from the organizers of New Tendencies 2. Museum of
Contemporary Art, Zagreb 129
2.1 András Koncz, Rabinec Studio Logo, 1982, print. Műcsarnok Library
and Archive, Budapest 146
2.2 “Who is the victim? Who is the culprit? What should be done?” AL
(Artpool Letters), 1983: 18–19. Artpool Art Research Center –
Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest 147
2.3 Zsuzsa Simon, Accounting Records 1981–1983. Műcsarnok Library
and Archive, Budapest 148
2.4 Tamás Király at an exhibition opening in front of a painting by Károly
Kelemen, 1983. Műcsarnok Library and Archive, Budapest 149
2.5 Zsuzsa Simon, Proposal for a Gallery of Contemporary Art (extract),
1980. Műcsarnok Library and Archive, Budapest 150
3.1 Arman Grigoryan, The 3rd Floor poster-painting, 1987, mixed-media.
Courtesy of Vardan Azatyan 157
3.2 The 3rd Floor group photograph, 1992. Courtesy of Nazareth
Karoyan 158
3.3 The 3rd Floor, Collective Action, Exhibition Plus Minus, 1990.
Courtesy of Nazareth Karoyan 158
3.4 Article in Mshakuyt monthly covering the events organized by the
members of The 3rd Floor group. Mshakuyt, 2–3 (1989): 54–57.
Document in personal archive of Angela Harutyunyan 159
3.5 Arman Grigoryan, Vandal, 1990. Courtesy of Arman Grigoryan 160
viii Figures
3.6 The 3rd Floor, Hail to the Union of Artists from the Netherworld:
Happening. Performance at the Artists’ Union, 1988. Courtesy of
Arman Grigoryan 160
3.7 The 3rd Floor, Breakdance, 1987. Performance. Courtesy of Arman
Grigoryan 161
3.8 Arman Grigoryan next to his poster-painting Breakdance, 1987.
Courtesy of Nazareth Karoyan 162
4.1 Invitation card to The First Sanayeh Plastic Arts Meeting, 1995.
Ashkal Alwan, Beirut 174
4.2 Cover of the Sanayeh Plastic Arts Meeting catalog, 1995. Ashkal
Alwan, Beirut 175
4.3 Ziad Abillama’s (right) and Amal Bohsali’s (left) projects in the
Sanayeh Plastic Arts Meeting catalog, 1995. Ashkal Alwan, Beirut 176
4.4 Nabil Basbous’s sketch of a sculpture executed in the Sanayeh Meeting
(left) and Future Television advertisement (right), Sanayeh Plastic Arts
Meeting catalog, 1995. Ashkal Alwan, Beirut 176
4.5 Photograph of a billboard advertisement for Solidere’s reconstruction
project, 1995. Courtesy of Walid Sadek 177
4.6 Page from Dakhaltu Marra al-Guneina, unpublished pamphlet (edited
by Walid Sadek, Ziad Abillama, Rabih Mroue and Bassam Kahwagi)
showing “Interview between the editors and Christine Tohme,” Beirut,
1995. Courtesy of Walid Sadek 178
4.7 Walid Sadek’s project for the Sanayeh Meeting, Beirut, 1995. Courtesy
of Walid Sadek and Ashkal Alwan, Beirut 178
4.8 Map of the Sanayeh Garden showing the location of each participant’s
project. Ashkal Alwan, Beirut 179
5.1 Newspaper ad announcing CarbonART 96 camp. Flux, June 1, 1996.
KSA:K – Centrul pentru artă contemporană, Chișinău 187
5.2 Adina Șoimaru, “The Power to Appreciate ‘Modern Art,’” Flux, June
22, 1996. KSA:K – Centrul pentru artă contemporană, Chișinău 188
5.3 Review of CarbonART 96 artist camp in the Russian-language
newspaper Nezavisimaia Moldova (undated). KSA:K – Centrul pentru
artă contemporană, Chișinău 188
5.4 Cover of CarbonART 96 catalog. KSA:K – Centrul pentru artă
contemporană, Chișinău 189
5.5 CarbornART 96 lake exhibition. KSA:K – Centrul pentru artă
contemporană, Chișinău 190
5.6 Igor Scherbina and Stefan Sadovnikov, Structures, 1996. Performance.
KSA:K – Centrul pentru artă contemporană, Chișinău 190
5.7 Cover of the Kilometrul 6 exhibition catalog featuring Alexandru
Tinei’s installation Madona Mohana, 1996. KSA:K – Centrul pentru
artă contemporană, Chișinău 197
5.8 Car-poster for the exhibition Kilometrul 6. KSA:K – Centrul pentru
artă contemporană, Chișinău 197
5.9 SCCA grant contract, 1996. KSA:K – Centrul pentru artă contempor-
ană, Chișinău 198
 Figures ix
5.10 Iurie Cibotari, The Guillotine, 1996. Installation. KSA:K – Centrul
pentru artă contemporană, Chișinău 199
5.11 Dumaite sami [Think for yourself] exhibition review. Nezavisimaia
Moldova, November 22, 1996. KSA:K – Centrul pentru artă contem-
porană, Chișinău 200
5.12 SCCA Chișinău questionnaire, 1996. KSA:K – Centrul pentru artă
contemporană, Chișinău 200
6.1 Cover of Meeting Point exhibition catalog, 1998. Soros Center for
Contemporary Arts, Sarajevo 210
6.2 The opening of the first annual exhibition of the Soros Center for
Contemporary Art Sarajevo, Meeting Point (1997). Soros Center for
Contemporary Arts, Sarajevo 211
6.3 Sketch of the exhibition space (left) and the installation Untitled (right)
by Izeta Građević. Soros Center for Contemporary Arts, Sarajevo 211
6.4 Alma Suljević, Annulling Truth, 1997. Installation. Soros Center for
Contemporary Arts, Sarajevo 212
6.5 A member of the international jury awards prizes for the best contem-
porary artwork. Soros Center for Contemporary Arts, Sarajevo 213
6.6 Lecture on video art entitled “Fifty Years of Interactive TV 1935–
1998” by the American art critic and curator Kathy Rae Huffman.
Soros Center for Contemporary Arts, Sarajevo 214
7.1 Catalog front cover of the 1997 Khoj International Artists’ Workshop,
Modinagar. Khoj International Artists’ Association 226
7.2 Exhibition view of artworks produced during the 1997 Khoj
International Artists’ Workshop, Modinagar shown at the British
Council art gallery in New Delhi. Khoj International Artists’
Association 227
7.3 Anita Dube’s site-specific work made in 1997, Khoj International
Artists’ Workshop in Modinagar. Khoj International Artists’
Association 227
7.4 Page from 1997 Khoj International Artists’ Workshop catalog
featuring a captioned photograph of the participating artists. Khoj
International Artists’ Association 228
7.5 Ludenyi Omega at work during the 1997 Khoj International Artists’
Workshop in Modinagar. Khoj International Artists’ Association 228
7.6 Subodh Gupta’s Untitled in the process of being made during the 1997
Khoj International Artists’ Workshop in Modinagar. Khoj Inter-
national Artists’ Association 229
8.1 Squash, Invitation Card. Courtesy of Škuc Gallery, Ljubljana 243
8.2 Cover of the Škuc Gallery’s Annual Catalog 1998. Courtesy of the
Škuc Gallery, Ljubljana 244
8.3 Igor Zabel delivering his introductory speech. Courtesy of Škuc
Gallery, Ljubljana 245
8.4 Audience watching the Squash game. Courtesy of Škuc Gallery,
Ljubljana 245
9.1 Front cover of Al-Nitaq Festival of Art 2000 brochure with the
emblem of the Festival. Townhouse Gallery, Cairo 258
x Figures
9.2 Back cover of Al-Nitaq Festival of Art 2000 brochure showing a map
of the locations where the Festival was held. Townhouse Gallery,
Cairo 258
9.3 Poster of Al-Nitaq Festival of Art 2001 edition. Townhouse Gallery,
Cairo 259
9.4 Program of events and locations. Al-Nitaq Festival of Art in down-
town Cairo, 2001. “Al-Nitaq Festival of Art in Downtown Cairo,
15–24 March.” Al-Ahram Weekly (March 2001) 260
9.5 Basim Magdy, The Three Angels, 2001. Installation. Townhouse
Gallery, Cairo 260
9.6 Hala El Kousy and Graham Waite, Bread Seller (Banners at Down-
town Streets), 2000. Installation. Townhouse Gallery, Cairo 261
9.7 Shady El-Noshokaty, Self Annihilation, 2000. Installation at Town-
house Gallery. Courtesy of Shady El-Noshokaty 261
Acknowledgments

There are many people who helped us in the making of this book. In line with its
transregional perspective, we would like to acknowledge their help in traversing
their various regions and countries. To start with – in Beirut, we are grateful to
Rico Franses and Dania Dabbousi from the American University of Beirut Art Gal-
leries; as well as to Joshua David Gonsalves; Walid Sadek and the Department of
Fine Arts and Art History; Christine Tohme and Ashkal Alwan; Saleh Barakat and
Agial Gallery; and to the members of the Beirut Institute for Critical Analysis and
Research (BICAR). In Chișinău, we thank Dan Spataru, Victoria Miron, Mark
Verlan, Lilia Dragneva and KSA:K (Centrul pentru artă contemporană). In Zagreb
we acknowledge the help of Anja Picelj-Kosak, Matko Meštrović, Rafaela Dražić,
Jasna Jakšić and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb; and in Yerevan we
grateful to Nare Sahakyan, Lusine Chergheshtyan, Vardan Azatyan, Nazareth
Karoyan, Armani Grigoryan and the Ashot Johannisyan Research Institute in the
Humanities. In Budapest, our special thanks go to Júlia Klaniczay and the Artpool
Art Research Center; to the Blinken Open Society Institute Archives Budapest; and
to the Műcsarnok Library and Archives. We are grateful to Dunja Blažević and the
SCCA Sarajevo, and in Cairo all of us thank Mahmoud Magde, Mariam Elnozahy,
William Wells and Townhouse Gallery, Mohammed Saad from Al-Ahram Weekly,
and the artist Shady El-Noshokaty. In Ljubljana, we extend our gratitude to
Zdenka Badovinac, Dušan Dovč, Jurij Krpan, Joško Pajer, Mateja Kos Zabel, and
Barbara Borcic; and in the United States we are grateful to Ilhan Ozan. Finally, the
editor adds special words of thanks, once again, to Catherine Hansen and to Audra
Eșanu (Guguța).

Octavian Esanu
Beirut and Tokyo
2018–2020
Contributors

Sabih Ahmed is the Associate Director and Curator at Ishara Art Foundation, Dubai.
Ivana Bago is an independent scholar and writer based in Zagreb. She recently
defended her dissertation “Inheriting the Yugoslav Century: Art, History, and
Generation” at Duke University, where she earned a PhD in Art History and Visual
Studies. She is the co-founder (with Antonia Majaca) of the Delve Institute for Dur-
ation, Location and Variables (www.delve.hr), dedicated to the intersections of aca-
demic, artistic, and curatorial practice, and with which she initiated a number of
projects on Yugoslav and East European art. She has published extensively on con-
temporary art, including conceptual art, the history of exhibitions and curating, per-
formance, feminism, (post)Yugoslav art, and post-1989 art historiographies, and is
a member of the editorial board of ARTMargins. Her curatorial projects include:
Moving Forwards, Counting Backwards (MUAC, Mexico City, 2012); The Orange
Dog and Other Tales (Zagreb, 2009); and Stalking with Stories (Apexart,
New York, 2007). She is currently a lecturer at the University of Applied Arts in
Vienna and is preparing the exhibition Meeting Points: Documents in the Making,
1968–1982, Sanja Iveković’s solo show that will take place at the Museum of
Modern and Contemporary Art in Rijeka in 2021.
Karen Benezra studies twentieth-century Latin American art and critical social
theory. She is author of Dematerialization: Art and Design in Latin America
(University of California Press, 2020) and an editor of ARTMargins.
Pedro Erber is an associate professor in the School of International Liberal Studies at
Waseda University. He is the author of Breaching the Frame: The Rise of Contempor-
ary Art in Brazil and Japan (University of California Press, 2015), Política e verdade
no pensamento de Martin Heidegger (Loyola/PUC-Rio, 2004), and numerous articles
on art and aesthetics, literature, philosophy, and political thought.
Octavian Esanu considers art history, art criticism, curatorship, and art administration
as part of his evolving artistic practice. He is an assistant professor at the American
University of Beirut (AUB) and curator of AUB Art Galleries. In the late 1990s, he
was the founding director of the Soros Center for Contemporary Art, Chișinău, pro-
ducing the first “contemporary art” exhibitions in Moldova, and in the early 2010s
he was the founding curator of AUB Art Galleries in Beirut. He is the author of
What Does “Why” Mean? (J&L Books, 2005); Transition in Post-Soviet Art (CEU
Press, 2013); “Moscow Conceptualism” entry in The Encyclopedia of Aesthetics
 Contributors xiii
(Oxford University Press, 2014); Art, Awakening and Modernity in the Middle East:
The Arab Nude (Routledge, 2018). Among his most recent curatorial projects are
The Arab Nude (2016); One Hundred Years Closer to Communism (2017); Cut/
Gash/Slash – Adachi Masao – A Militant Theory of Landscape (2019). He is part of
the editorial collective ARTMargins.
Natasha Gasparian is a Beirut-based art historian and critic. She has collaborated
on writing, research, and curatorial projects with numerous institutions in Beirut,
Lebanon, including Agial, Saleh Barakat Gallery, Beirut Art Center, and the Saradar
Collection. In 2018–2019, she worked as a research assistant to the curators Sam
Bardaouil and Till Fellrath for the first edition of the Saradar Collection’s web-
based project, Perspective. She is a two-time recipient of The Maria Geagea Arida
Award, granted by The Association of the Promotion and Exhibition of Art in
Lebanon (APEAL). Gasparian received a master’s degree in Art History and Curat-
ing at the American University of Beirut in 2020. Her recent projects include
a publication on the work of artist Aref El-Rayess (1928–2005).
Nida Ghouse is a writer and curator. Her recent essay, “The Whistle in the Voice,”
appeared in the publication accompanying Natascha Süder Happelmann’s pres-
entation for the German Pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale (2019). She co-
curated Parapolitics: Cultural Freedom and the Cold War (2017), is co-editing
a forthcoming publication with Sternberg Press (2020), and is currently realizing
an exhibition on an archaeology of sound called A Slightly Curving Place at the
Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin. Previously she was director of Mumbai
Art Room.
Angela Harutyunyan is an associate professor of Art History at the American University
of Beirut and head of the Art History program. She teaches courses on modern and
contemporary art history and theory. She is editor of ARTMargins peer-reviewed
journal (MIT Press Journals). She has contributed essays on post-Soviet Armenian art
and culture in academic journals, and critical articles related to contemporary art
practices and cultural politics in Egypt and Lebanon. Her current research interests
include the post-Socialist art of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, Socialist
Realism, contemporary art in the Middle East, Marxian aesthetics, historical tempor-
ality, among others. She is a curator of several exhibitions, including This is the Time:
This is the Record of the Time (with Nat Muller) at SMBA in Amsterdam and the
AUB Art Galleries in Beirut (2014 and 2015). Her monograph The Political Aesthetics
of the Armenian Avant-garde: The Journey of the “Painterly Real” was published by
Manchester University Press in 2017. Her second book co-authored with Eric Good-
field After Revolution: Historical Presentism and the Political Eclipse of Postmodern-
ity is forthcoming with Leuven University Press in 2021.
Tevž Logar is currently working as an independent curator, writer, and editor who
works with various galleries and institutions. From 2009 to 2014, he was the
artistic director of the Škuc Gallery in Ljubljana, Slovenia, and a lecturer in
twentieth-century Art History at the Academy of Visual Arts (AVA) in that same
city. He has curated or co-curated a number of group and solo exhibitions,
including the Triennial 54th Zagreb Salon – Without Anesthesia (2019), Goran
Trbuljak: A Never Before Seen Work by an Unseen Artist (2019), Ulay: I Other
(2017), Vadim Fishkin: Light Chaser (2016), Ulay: Irritation (2015), Jasmina
xiv Contributors
Cibic: For Our Economy and Culture for the Slovenian Pavilion at the 55th
Venice Biennial (2013), Bas Jan Ader: The World Was Young When Gravity
Fell (2012). For the 58th Venice Biennial in 2019 he has collaborated with the
Pavilion of the Republic of North Macedonia (as a curatorial consultant) and
for the Pavilion of Republic of Kosovo (as writer). He was the screenwriter for
the full-length documentary Project Cancer: Ulay’s Journal from November to
November (2013) and is a co-founder of the Ulay Foundation in Amsterdam. In
2018, as an editor, he published a monographic publication about the work of
Croatian conceptual artist Goran Trbuljak. In 2014, he was nominated for the
Gerrit Lansing Independent Vision Award (Independent Curators International) in
New York. He currently lives in Rijeka, Croatia.
Dina A. Mohamed is an Egyptian artist and researcher living in Amsterdam, the Neth-
erlands. She holds an MA in Art Praxis from the Dutch Art Institute, ArtEZ Insti-
tute of the Arts, and a BA degree in Philosophy from the American University in
Cairo (AUC). Dina comes from an interdisciplinary background. From 2010 to
2014, she worked as a researcher and a human rights advocate in Egypt focusing
on freedom of expression and creativity, before moving to Lebanon where she
shifted her path to art practice. In Beirut, she attended the Home Workspace Pro-
gram fellowship at Ashkal Alwan during 2016–2017. In 2017 she moved to the
Netherlands, developing her artistic practice and collaborating with different artists.
Her practice covers varied interests, with a core concern in understanding the polit-
ical despondency caused by complex intertwining structures of economics, politics,
and information technology, how individuals and groups can regain political
agency under the deterministic logic of technology and the overflow of information,
and more importantly, how such information can be turned into knowledge.
Kristóf Nagy is a PhD candidate at the Department of Sociology and Social
Anthropology at the Central European University (CEU). His doctoral project
examines the configurations of state infrastructures of professional culture in
socialist and post-socialist Hungary in the context of state formation and hegem-
ony forging. He holds an MA in Eastern European Alternative Art from The
Courtauld Institute of Art, and an MA in Sociology and Social Anthropology
from the CEU, and he is affiliated with the Artpool Art Research Center in
Budapest. He has published in Hungarian, English, German, and Spanish,
including the chapter “From Fringe Interest to Hegemony: The Emergence of the
Soros Network in Eastern Europe” in the volume Globalizing East European
Art Histories: Past and Present (Routledge, 2018). His most recent exhibition
project was Left Turn, Right Turn – Artistic and Political Radicalism under Late
Socialism at the Blinken OSA Archives of Budapest in the autumn of 2019.
Amila Puzić is an art historian and curator based in Gothenburg. She explores
issues of socially engaged art practices and art in public space in (post)Yugoslav
constellations. She is currently finishing her doctoral dissertation titled “Artistic
Practices and Strategies in Bosnian-Herzegovinian Art from 1992 to 1999” in
the PhD program in History of Art at the University of Zagreb. She co-founded
(with Anja Bogojević and Mela Žuljević) the art and curatorial collective Abart
in Mostar (2009–2013). From 2016 she runs (with Anja Bogojević) the Associ-
ation for Contemporary Curatorial and Artistic Practice “Mart.” She has
 Contributors xv
participated in various research and curatorial projects including Young Curators
Academy (YCA) in the context of the 4th Berliner Herbstsalon, 2019; Contem-
porary Artistic Revolutions: An Institutional Perspective (AUB Art Galleries,
2017); The Missing Europe: Baltic and Balkan (Royal Institute of Art, 2016);
and Bauhaus Goes South-East Europe (2013–2015). Her curatorial projects
include: What Can I Not Know About You (2013); (Re)collecting Mostar
(2011); The 1st Biennial of Contemporary Art: Time Machine – No Network
(2011); and Art in Divided Cities (2011). She co-curated the Pavilion of Bosnia
and Herzegovina at the 58th Venice Biennale 2019.
Terry Smith is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Contemporary Art History and
Theory in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at the University
of Pittsburgh, and professor in the Division of Philosophy, Art, and Critical
Thought at the European Graduate School. He is also lecturer at large on the Cura-
torial Program at the School of Visual Arts, New York. In 2010 he was named the
Australia Council Visual Arts Laureate, and won the Mather Award for art criti-
cism conferred by the College Art Association (USA). He is the author of Making
the Modern: Industry, Art and Design in America (University of Chicago Press,
1993); Transformations in Australian Art (Craftsman House, 2002); The Architec-
ture of Aftermath (University of Chicago Press, 2006), What is Contemporary Art?
(University of Chicago Press, 2009), Contemporary Art: World Currents (Laurence
King and Pearson/Prentice-Hall, 2011), Thinking Contemporary Curating (Inde-
pendent Curators International, 2012), Talking Contemporary Curating (Independ-
ent Curators International, 2015), The Contemporary Composition (Sternberg
Press, 2016), One and Five Ideas: On Conceptual Art and Conceptualism (Duke
University Press, 2017), and Art to come: Histories of Contemporary Art (Duke
University Press, 2019). He is currently Board Member Emeritus of the Carnegie
Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, and a member of the Advisory Board of the Biennial
Foundation, New York. See www.terryesmith.net/web/.
Vladimir Vidmar is a curator and writer based in Ljubljana, Slovenia. He is cur-
rently running Mala Galerija, the official exhibition space of Ljubljana Univer-
sity. He was the Artistic Director of Škuc Gallery in Ljubljana from 2015–2019.
He has curated exhibitions for such artists as Tadej Pogačar, Becky Beasley,
Nikita Kadan, Nika Špan, Mladen Stropnik, Katalin Ladik, and many other solo
and group shows. Vidmar also co-curated the decennial exhibition Crises and
New Beginnings: Art in Slovenia 2005–2015 at the Museum of Contemporary
Art Metelkova in Ljubljana. He has recently been part of two research projects:
Inside Out (2017), where he tackled the history of institutional critique in Cen-
tral and South-Eastern Europe, and the international exhibition project started
by Joshua Simon at MoBY Tel Aviv, The Kids Want Communism (2017). In
2016 Vidmar co-managed the research and exhibition project dedicated to the
1990s in Slovenian art (along with Tadej Pogačar). Since the beginning of 2016,
he has been teaching at the Ljubljana Academy of Fine Arts and Design where
he is involved in the course Art System and Theory of Exhibition, headed by
Beti Žerovc. Since 2017, he has been teaching the curatorial module at the
SCCA Ljubljana World of Art School for Critics and Curators.
Introduction
Octavian Esanu

Prelude
Somewhat earlier this century, there was a sudden stir among art historians and art
critics, as if they had been taken by surprise. A phrase that had been in frequent
use seemed illegally to have crossed over and settled down right next to well-
established and respected categories of cultural periodization like “modernism” and
“postmodernism.” Art historians, critics, journal editors, one after another, rushed
to ask: “What is contemporary art?”1 As often happens in the history of art and
culture, a word or phrase used out of convenience or habit to name some new
sensibility or way of art-making is discovered to have been covertly reified or insti-
tutionalized. “Contemporary art” – as an idea or as an art historical, critical, or
world historical category of periodization – is no exception, even though its story
(or theory) is broader in scale due to its direct ties to the processes of globalization.
Having sporadically been deployed throughout the twentieth century to identify
new artistic practices or to name new art institutions, new forms of patronage, or
new selling strategies on the Western art market, the phrase became – by the end
of the Cold War – the mascot and emblem of a newly emerging global art system
brought under one regime of temporality and obeying a single logic: that of global
capital.
Over this past decade discussions about the meaning of this term have proliferated
to become a lucrative trend, a wave of events touring the contemporary geography of
art under the casual banner phrase: “the contemporary.” This “contemporary” has
been examined from a variety of methodological and ideological perspectives. Perhaps
the most widespread art historical strategy of dealing with contemporary art is most
successfully represented by members of the October group. For the latter, “the con-
temporary” is gradually “discovered,” and then smoothly stirred into the simmering
pot of Western modernism and postmodernism along with metanarratives produced
by the group itself over the last four decades.2 In this process of art historical discovery
or recovery, the contemporaneity of art is often understood as the latest terminus in
the unfolding of the Western art historical narrative; as art made by prominent living
artists in the US and Western Europe in the late twentieth and early twenty-first cen-
tury; or also, gradually, through the careful and selective disclosure and recognition
of art made in what was once called the Second or Third world. Certain Octoberists
or their direct ancestors have become “pioneers of contemporaneity,” as is the case
with Alfred Barr or with Rosalind Krauss, who until not long ago were celebrated as
America’s foremost modernists or postmodernists.3 Others sought to “recover” the
2 Introduction
contemporaneity of global art from the grip of Western grand modernist and postmod-
ernist narratives, presenting it as a new global, or even “Global South” artistic phe-
nomenon constituted by completely new conditions of cultural production:
blockbuster events, museums, institutions, markets, fairs, biennials and other world
sensations (Terry Smith).4 There are also views that contemporary art might be some-
thing totally new with regard to the Western historical idea of art – that it is the prod-
uct of a rupture which occurred after “the end of art,” sometime in the 1960s (Arthur
Danto), or even that it is the beginning of a new “third system of the arts” reached
after 2000 years of premodern art and 200 years of bourgeois-autonomous or modern
art (also called in certain studies the “second system of the arts”).5 Then there is the
theorizing or philosophizing type of critic for whom “contemporary art,” a recent
manifestation of the post-1989 “neoliberal” world, is a critically meaningless term,
and represents a discourse that must therefore be “constructed” through commitment
to a particular philosophy of time, and to a critical analysis built upon the post-
Hegelian Romantic philosophy of art that saw its culmination in Adorno’s monumen-
tal Aesthetic Theory (Peter Osborne).6
Without lessening the importance of these influential approaches to dealing with
“the contemporary,” this edited volume wishes to join these debates from
a different perspective. It is the editor’s intention that Contemporary Art and
Capitalist Modernization suggests that in addition to art historical “discovery,”
“recovery,” or critical “construction,” contemporary art (whatever the phrase may
or may not mean today) must also be submitted to something resembling decon-
struction. There is an urgent need, in other words, to re-examine what already
appears basic and familiar: a need to look for a “trace” of what is absent or
hidden, of that which is other in the discourse of contemporary art. The contribu-
tors to this volume do not necessarily follow deconstructive strategies, and the
editor uses “deconstruction” in the broader and more permissive sense of a critical
evaluation of some of the foundational assumptions of a made or assembled thing.
The book starts from the premise that in its global reach, “contemporary art” (as
idea, emblem, or label) has already undergone significant construction and recon-
struction by powerful historical forces: the rise and spread of global capital and the
fall of socialism and the welfare state; transitions to the market and to democracy;
the impact of Western developmental industry on former Second- and Third-world
art and culture; and many other processes associated with liberalization, deregula-
tion, privatization, marketization, and neoliberalism. In part this book suggests that
“the contemporary” was constituted by and alongside these very practices, and that
for this reason its major contradictions are especially visible at the peripheries of
the Western art world.
The volume does not simply approach contemporary art from a non-Western stand-
point. Instead, the editor proposes to critically engage with art’s contemporaneity from
the perspective of what the social sciences call “modernization” – the worldwide social
transformations spreading and intensifying in the aftermath of WWII. And now, after
three decades of intense study of what is often regarded as the failed “socialist modern-
ization” carried forward by the USSR (and of how, for example, artists in the Eastern
Bloc or other non-aligned countries heroically resisted or even sabotaged this historical
process) this volume proposes a critical re-examination of the impact of global “capit-
alist modernization” on art. The volume invites the reader to consider the emergence
of new artistic forms, institutions, and practices following the introduction of late
 Introduction 3
capitalist modes of production, circulation, accumulation, and consumption – along
with political principles of liberal democracy – in regions of the world that had either
chosen or been forced upon an alternative modernity (as in the so-called “postsocialist
world”), or in areas once identified as “traditional societies” (as with “postcolonial
modernity”). In other words, and in the context of the approaches mentioned above
(art historical discovery and recovery, or critico-theoretical construction), this volume
proposes to re-examine contemporary art with an eye to the historical phenomena that
have directly affected the postsocialist and post- or neo-colonial world caught in the
most recent phase of global capitalist development known also as “modernization,”
“transition,” “neoliberalization” – a historical phase that is seriously tested today
amidst the spring 2020 COVID-19 global pandemic.

Pretext
This volume is partially the product of an encounter between methodologies that
took place during an exhibition and conference organized at the American Univer-
sity of Beirut Art Galleries under the title Contemporary Artistic Revolutions.7 The
event encouraged participants to historicize and theoretize the paradigm of “con-
temporary art” from perspectives that less frequently dominate debates on “the
contemporary.” As organizer of this event, I invited critics, curators, artists, and art
historians from countries including Lebanon, Egypt, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and
Herzegovina, Armenia, Moldova, Hungary, India, and the UK (and was also in dia-
logue with researchers in Turkey, Chile, Iran, Afghanistan and a number of ex-
Soviet Central Asian republics) to discuss the historical, political, and economic
conditions under which “contemporary art” – as a distinct mode of artistic produc-
tion, and/or marker of art historical periodization – emerged, so to speak, or was
constructed within the concrete particularities of local art historical contexts. The
idea was simple. We all know, more or less, what contemporary art is, was, or
should have been when it is presented from a bird’s (or drone’s) eye view at confer-
ences in New York, LA, or London. But, to use one of Slavoj Žižek’s expressions,
what about the “stupid particular”?8 That is to say, how has contemporary art his-
torically materialized in more peripheral locations, or in contexts marginalized by
the universal power of global capital?
At the Beirut conference, the participants worked on a series of case-studies,
some of which are included in Part II of this volume. They researched an exhib-
ition, festival, workshop, new type of art institution, or other significant artistic
event, and used it to examine a historical shift, transition, or conversion of
a previous paradigm (modernism) to what is called contemporary art. Most partici-
pants worked within their familiar art historical contexts, albeit with an eye to
broader historical processes (for example, the postsocialist “transition” in Eastern
Europe, the period following a civil war, the “war on terror” and the Arab Spring
in the Middle East, or processes of modernization in general). At a certain point in
the conference, one of the Western guests declared that the conference had slipped
into what he described as “nationalism.” As organizer, I instantly felt guilty of
taking a wrong path, of falling into the arms of the enemy and succumbing to
a nationalist-bourgeois false consciousness.
This warning implied that the conference presenters had offered a picture of “the
contemporary” that was somewhat too particular, or at least distinct from better-
4 Introduction
known or more influential accounts. It is often believed that contemporary art must
be discussed in universal terms, and certainly in relation to Western modernity,
modernism, and postmodernism (as in the October group’s model). Or, it is to be
presented as a fusion and diffusion of global sensibilities within a postnational
multiculturalism produced by a global economic neoliberalization that suddenly
broke loose at the “end of history” in 1989 (as per the critical art history of
Osborne). And though the conference participants did not ignore such universal
frameworks, nor denied the significance of the year 1989 (especially the Eastern
Europeans, and the Lebanese whose Civil War at least officially ended in the
same year, far from Berlin), they chose to analyze contemporary art also in their
own national art historical contexts. Participants would presumably have avoided
falling into the “nationalist” trap if they had spoken, for example, about the heroic
struggles of the historical avant-gardes, the socialist dissidents or the postcolonial
modernists (topics that are still topping the charts of Western academia and of the
corporate museums), or if at least they had chosen to feature an artist from the
former Second or Third world who had “made it” in New York and London.
Instead the participants dealt with “obscurities”: with names, art scenes, and condi-
tions that are largely unknown or of little interest to the Western-centric art critical
apparatus, and against a background of events shaped by radical terminations, con-
versions, and dissolutions of previous structures by radically new economic and cul-
tural policies, by new conditions, laws, grants, projects and other instruments
provided by local or foreign private or governmental benefactors.
But “nationalism” was not the only criticism heard at the conference. Other reactions
came from those who did not share the methodological positions of the conference par-
ticipants. Some in the audience waved objections to historicism, or to the very idea of
engaging with the historical conditions of “the Lebanese contemporary,” of the “Leba-
nese past,” or any “past” in general. Concepts like “memory,” “history,” “the past,”
and “tradition” were used interchangeably and often in relation to “trauma,” “mourn-
ing,” and “disaster.” The past was declared beyond reach, with no document or other
instrument of time capable of shedding light on it.
This position is particularly strong in Beirut, where the exhibition-conference
was organized. Here, a radical form of anti-historicism has evolved to constitute
the aesthetic core of the Lebanese contemporary art scene, as it started to consoli-
date in the 1990s.9 Some artists and writers on this scene have dedicated their life-
work to critiquing the politics of memory formulated during the post-Civil War
reconstruction of Lebanon – amid neoliberal Harirization – arguing that this
“memory” is in fact a form of oblivion. Their form of anti-historicism is certainly
more diverse, ranging from positions embracing Nietzschean forgetfulness (a rever-
sal of Christian forgiveness), to the Benjaminian view of history as that which con-
fronts the materiality of the present, to various postmodernist postures where
knowledge production is understood in terms of play, metahistory, hermeneutics,
and textuality, none of which is capable of dealing with social trauma, art history,
or any referent in the past or indeed in empirical reality. In Jalal Toufic’s The With-
drawal of Tradition Past a Surpassing Disaster,10 Toufic argues that in the after-
math of a “surpassing disaster” (Hiroshima, post-communism, the Lebanese Civil
War) there is an immaterial withdrawal of tradition (or perhaps of “history”), and
that tradition is not any more accessible by conventional historical methods.
A number of Lebanese artists have given this idea artistic form. They do not simply
 Introduction 5
reject the historical document but divert it, radically altering and transforming it
into art. The result is what I call a “mockument” – a double-edged construction.
A mockument is a fiction based on historical material and/or endowed with the
status of historical fact. The contrast between a document and a mockument might
be explained by the Aristotelian distinction in the Poetics between “history” (which
concerns itself with the particular of “what [actually] happened”) and “poetry”
(which addresses in universal terms “what might happen”). On the Lebanese post-
Civil War contemporary art scene, and in the ways in which it reflects on its past,
one can say that poetry has taken charge of history, constructing a parallel reality.
Many Lebanese artists have successfully created fictionalized accounts based on his-
torical material. Archival photographs and documents have been liberated of their
referents and turned into pure aesthetic objects. In this transmutation the particular
is converted to the universal, the historical “what happened” to the poetic “what
might happen,” (leading to what the historical Romantics called “creations,” and
in Leibnitz’s terms we may still call “parallel worlds,” or “possible worlds”).11 If
like Francis Bacon we divide human faculties into memory (history), reason (sci-
ence), and imagination (poetry),12 then in Lebanese post-Civil War contemporary
art, imagination rather than reason has taken control of memory (that is, of trad-
ition and history). The pathos of romantic imagination and of “artistic creation”
has in some ways become a path to dissolving complex political, economic, reli-
gious, or sectarian divisions into the new religion of contemporary art. To para-
phrase Nietzsche: “Art and nothing but [contemporary] art! It is the great means of
making life possible . . .”13
The romantic-postmodernist admiration for the powers of imagination and “cre-
ation,” along with the anti-historicist techniques practiced on and around the
Beirut contemporary art scene, have also been embraced by first-world critics who
have transformed Lebanese “mockumentary artistic practice” into an ontological
ingredient of “our contemporary.”14

Method
It is partially in response to and in dialogue with such positions that this volume
was produced. The book represents a search for a method allowing a broader
engagement with contemporary art which could unfold beyond the current frame-
works. It seeks to show, first, that scholars have dealt critically with the conditions
and contradictions of “the contemporary” in diverse regions of the world, in the
context of postsocialism, postcolonialism, and capitalist modernization. Second, the
volume aims to suggest that a more particular and historical engagement with con-
temporary art should not be dismissed as “cultural relativism,” “particularism,” or
even “nationalism,” but is in fact useful for current “global art history.” The book,
in places, also acts on the assumption that as part of common efforts to construct
a truly critical discourse of contemporary art, one must reflect more carefully
before completely renouncing traditional art historical methods, including the inter-
pretation of documents, monuments, and archives.
Ultimately, the volume concerns itself with the methodological and historical con-
ditions in which a radically new mode of artistic making – called “contemporary
art” – takes historical shape in different parts of the globe. The book’s chapters (and
especially the “case-studies” in Part II) – dealing with Eastern Europe, the post-
6 Introduction
Soviet republics, the Middle East, or Asia – are to be taken less as empirical evidence
of some unknown contemporary art that remains to be discovered than as points de
repère for imagining the complexity and multiplicity of the manifestations of global
contemporaneity that fall through the cracks of metropolitan art history and criti-
cism. The case-studies also come to support the main argument of this book, namely
that one cannot fully engage with the idea of contemporary art, which is most often
presented as a manifestation of trans- or postnational social experience, without also
paying some form of respect to the particular, local, and/or even “national” symp-
toms of the contemporary condition, as methodologically outdated, or theoretically
peripheral as they may be made to appear. It is here – in what were once commonly
called the Second and the Third worlds – that global processes of the reproduction of
capital and of capitalist modernization are most clearly translated into new artistic
practices, audiences, habits, institutions, and ideologies. It is also here that many
contradictions of “the contemporary” are most prominent and pervasive.
Parts of the book engage with contemporary art in the context of historical pro-
cesses most acutely felt at the peripheries of capitalism, and against ideologies that
have normalized new relations, modes of production, or artistic values. To adapt
and modify a sentence from Theodor Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, a quote that
might have been used as the epigraph for this book: “something in reality, some-
thing back of the veil spun by the interplay of institutions and false needs demands
[contemporary] art, and . . . it demands an art that speaks for what the veil
hides.”15 We have the most to gain from lifting this veil (to invoke the old-
fashioned metaphor of ideology critique and Orientalism) in places where it was
woven with the most urgency, as part of the takeover of the national state and cul-
tural institutions by new forces.
It is common knowledge, for example, that what is currently called “contemporary
art” in the postsocialist countries of Eastern Europe, and the republics of the former
USSR, has been closely linked to the 1990s rhetoric of “transition to democracy”
and the market, and above all to the social engineering efforts of philanthropist and
businessman George Soros. In the historical context of postsocialism, the term “con-
temporary art” had a concrete meaning: it served as a vehicle of “freedom” and
of many other promises of the Popperian “open society” – the twentieth-century
bourgeois utopia that George Soros attempted to build on the historical ruins of
socialism. And in the Middle East, contemporary art has been often understood
either in economic terms – within the context of the rising power of the local
private art galleries (as for example in Cairo where the al-Nitaq Festival pre-
sented in this book was launched by a few private art galleries with the goal of
freeing art and artists from the control of the state).16 And in Lebanon, part of
the largely untold story of contemporary art involves complex relations with
certain Western donors (the Ford Foundation, in particular) that turned to offer
generous support to a certain category of Middle Eastern artists following the 9/11
events. Or to take another illustrative example, the first Center for Contempor-
ary Art emerged in Kabul, Afghanistan soon after the invasion of this country
by American troops.17
Contemporary Art and Capitalist Modernization asks, then, whether such global
manifestations of “the contemporary” might also be helpful in the art historical “dis-
covery,” “recovery,” or critical “construction” that currently preoccupy our leading
critics and art historians. It must be emphasized that “capitalist modernization”
 Introduction 7
does not necessarily imply that contemporary art was mechanistically “imported”
by Western structures operating at the margins of capitalism. Such ideas of “capit-
alism by design,” popular in Easter Europe during the 1990s, are now considered
outdated.18 Instead, the relation between contemporary art and capitalist modern-
ization must be regarded in terms of a series of conversions, alterations, and trans-
mutations of artistic energies following ongoing dialogues between local and
metropolitan players, between former socialist nonconformists (in Eastern Europe)
or the “90s generation” (in the Middle East), and Western museum critics, curators,
and donors. The conversion of postcolonial, nonaligned, and/or socialist modernity
into neoliberal contemporaneity follows broader processes of liberalization, economic
deregulation, and the temporal degradation of modern futurity into post-historical
presentism, and was fueled by profound anti-socialist, anti-universalist, and anti-
modernist resentment. Moreover, and by way of dispelling a common misreading
with regard to art’s relation to capitalist development within non-Western contexts –
it is not that installation, conceptual, process, or other forms of “new” artistic ten-
dencies did not exist in these regions (they certainly developed in the nonconformist
circles of the USSR, in Eastern, or Central Europe, in the “new artistic practices” of
Yugoslavia, or in some contexts in the Middle East, above all in Beirut and particu-
larly around AUB).19 Rather, the conversion into contemporary art has been com-
plete when the last barriers preventing the circulation and allocation of capital, and
its accumulation, have been removed, and when cultural producers – often pressed
by the need to secure their material subsistence – suddenly find themselves illustrat-
ing, willingly or unwillingly, a novel ideological position: individual freedom, the
open society, the “war on terror” or on religious fundamentalism (similarly to how
abstract expressionists discovered themselves serving the modernization agenda of
the State Department during the early days of the Cold War).
As this volume in part suggests, the regional or national iterations of “the con-
temporary” must not be regarded in their isolated, particular contexts, but as part
of broader post-WWII historical processes of capitalist modernization taking place
at different times and scales in various transitional regions of the world (starting
with the Marshall Plan conversion for Western Europe in the late 1940s; the dem-
ocratization of South Europe in the 1970s; of Latin America in the 1980s; of East-
ern Europe in the 1990s; and of the Middle East in the 1990s and 2000s)20 under
US political and cultural hegemony. It is also to be noted that most critical points
of global capitalist modernization historically aligns with, and in part overlaps
with, the best recognized periodization markers of contemporary art: 1945, 1968,
and 1989.21 What this suggests is that “the contemporary” is not one sudden rup-
ture or avalanche of new forms of de-bordered cultural “newness” unleashed by
capital after 1989.22 Instead, this new global system called “contemporary art”
unfolded more gradually, following the logic of neoliberalism, constructed in paral-
lel through multiple dialogues among transnational and local elites. These con-
structive efforts of global contemporary art developed in a way that recalls what
Jamie Peck terms the “constructions of neoliberal reason.”23 As Peck suggests,
there is no one major transition to neoliberalism but multiple transitions that
occurred over the course of the second half of the last century, as part of “heart-to-
heart” interactions among various forces across the globe. Thus the impact of
Milton Friedman’s “Chicago Boys’” on Latin American art, and Chile in particular,
during the 1970s and 1980s is comparable in scale but does not correspond
8 Introduction
chronologically to the impact of the “Viennese Cold War liberals” (such as Fried-
rich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, or Karl Popper and ultimately George Soros) on
Eastern Europe in the 1990s.
Although this volume, unlike others of its kind, addresses contemporary art by
focusing on “non-Western” instantiations, it does not do so in isolation from influ-
ential art critical and art historical theories and positions on contemporary art. The
book seeks to subvert dominant principles of methodological totalization currently
prevalent in debates around contemporary art. It leaves behind the most common
discursive terrains traversed by the forces that circulate around museums, biennials,
world exhibitions, academia, and curators seeking overlooked methodological per-
spectives and/or exotic instances of “the contemporary.” It trespasses across
regional barriers in order to cut new transregional discursive corridors that stretch –
for this particular project – through the art historical woodlands of Central and
Eastern Europe, the republics of the former Soviet Union, and countries in the
Middle East, Latin America, and Asia. It does not do so in order to reveal some
unknown aspect of contemporary art, or to offer new answers to the question of
what it is in the first place. Neither does it promise to accomplish the impossible
task of fully accounting for the global “manifold of sensibilities,” and of national
art historical particularities, including nations without countries. Instead, it searches
for alternative ways of understanding artistic production, within a wider cultural
and historical context inclusive of diverse artistic scenes.
Finally, what the editor regards as the unique methodological approach of the
volume may also be used to explain the perspective, structure, and choice of mater-
ial included in this volume (especially in Part II). The book goes beyond established
“regional” or “chronological” typologies favored by art history and criticism over
the past decades. It does not discuss contemporary art by remaining within the con-
fines of particular regionalisms (e.g., Contemporary Art in the Middle East [2009],
Contemporary Art in Eastern Europe [2010] from the “Artworld” series, or the
East Art Map [2006] project). Neither does it follow established art historical
chronologies (e.g., “art post-1989,” or “art since 1945”), or even a mix of the two
(e.g., MoMA’s Art and Theory of Post-1989 Central and Eastern Europe [2018]).
Instead the book seeks new ways to connect seemingly heterogeneous temporalities
and places by highlighting the material conditions and the common historical pro-
cesses determining the historical conversion of late and postcolonial modernism, of
social and socialist realism, and even of postmodernism into contemporary art, at
a time when this new art had not yet entered the circuits of global cultural
exchange. The choice to allow for manifold temporalities and artistic contexts in
Part II is informed by the view that the shift from “modern” to “contemporary” –
and the emergence of “the contemporary” as part of global neoliberal ideology –
should not be seen as one clean “break” marked by the year 1989 (the liberal
chronological monument to the “end of history”) but should be considered within
a longer durée and in its complex global multi-dimensionality.24
Before proceeding to discuss the structure of the book and its chapters and case-
studies in more detail, it must be emphasized that though this introduction seeks to
articulate one or more common denominators (whether “modernization,” “trans-
national capitalism,” or a “non-” or “post-Western contemporary”) it does not
seek to articulate one single thesis, or speak with one voice, given that the volume
brings together contributors from diverse academic and cultural backgrounds.
 Introduction 9
Structure
The book is divided into two parts. Part II derives primarily from the material pro-
duced during the exhibition-conference in Beirut, with several additional case-studies
commissioned afterwards. Part I was subsequently assembled to offer methodological
reflections and conclusions. In opting for this structure, the editor was mainly con-
cerned with how to bring about a reconciliation between the particular, empirical, or
“nationalistic” (Part II) and more general, speculative, and internationalist research
(Part I). Moreover, the methodological contributions in Part I also aim at placing
into question the authority of the document, of the “fact,” and of art historical
empiricism that hovers over Part II. In its entirety, the two parts can be seen as
a process of mediation between universal factors (temporality, periodization, history,
capitalism, the nation-state, and globalism) and on concrete art historical events said
to have contributed to the rise of contemporary art within various national contexts
and alongside broader socioeconomic change.
The methodological reflections included in Part I consider contemporaneity in
light of its most common problematics and topics. Here the contributors concerned
themselves with temporality, periodization, and the relation to other ideological
frameworks, or in some cases approach contemporaneity from less expected
perspectives and discourses. And even though such topics have been common in the
ongoing global debates on contemporary art, it is the angle from which the authors
have approached them (postsocialism, post- and neo-colonialism, Stalinism, Soviet
studies, or Latin American and Asian studies) that constitutes their unique
contribution.
In its unity and its contradiction, its consistency and its heterogeneity, the
volume hopes to put forward a thesis: that one cannot approach global contempor-
ary art from an arrested perspective or “captured hill.” Instead one must learn to
dance, stepping forward, sideways and back, and seeking a possible opening. Part
I starts, then, with an invitation to take a look at “the contemporary” from an
unusual perspective, that of the Soviet Stalinist experience. Angela Harutyunyan’s
chapter “Towards a Historical Understanding of Post-Soviet Presentism” engages
with the temporality of contemporaneity from the position of Soviet history (or
what used to be called “Sovietology” before this field of area studies was trans-
formed into “transitology,” or “transition to democracy studies”). Harutyunyan
provocatively argues for a form of contemporary “presentism” – as proposed by
François Hartog, in terms of a new regime of historicity governed by the tyranny
of the present25 – that was triggered by Stalin’s takeover and freezing of revolution-
ary dialectics. Stalin’s regime, in other words, plays a part in the current regime of
temporality, for it was among the first significant blockages of “futurity” (which
contemporaneity is often said to be lacking), Leninist or otherwise. Like Lenin and
Buratino [Pinocchio] in Mark Verlan’s drawing illustrating the cover of this
volume, there is a historical moment when revolutionary energy and consciousness
makes a turnaround from progressive futurism to concerns over past or present.26
Harutyunyan suggests that in addition to explaining the contemporary in light of
the dissolution of futurity, and/or solely from the perspective of post-WWII West-
ern historical and cultural processes, one can take a step back or sideways to
regard both sides of the Cold War, within a wider historical and political frame:
both Western and so-called Soviet Marxist ideology and history.
10 Introduction
Stalin’s role in creating a present without escape must be considered beyond the
dominant narratives of Western-centric art criticism. It is from such an angle that
Pedro Erber engages with the “contemporaneity of contemporary art” in his chapter
in this volume “The Long-Lasting Present: Art, Duration, and Contemporaneity”
(Chapter 2). Erber surveys contemporary art across the art historical and critical con-
texts of Brazil, Japan, and the United States. He deals with the temporality of con-
temporaneity through the writings of the Brazilian Mario Pedrosa (1900–1981), the
Japanese critic Miyakawa Atsushi (1933–1977), and the American modernist
Michael Fried (b. 1939). Erber argues that a radical change, led by epochal trans-
formations of art sometimes in the 1960s, resulted in art’s “resacralization” (from
the secularization of “religious art” in modernism to “art as religion” in contempor-
aneity). This process, argues Erber, has also been accompanied by temporal shifts or
deep transformations in the temporal structure of art, which he analyzes in terms of
a new form of duration, understood as infinite delay, and contrasts to the “immedi-
acy,” the “here-and-now” moment, of total presentness in modernism. Ultimately,
the contemporaneity of art, as it is further discussed by Erber following Fried, is
a new experience of history and art, one that replaces the holistic temporality of
modernism with a new sense of time based on the logic of event (of what Fried calls
literalist “presence”) and composed of fragments of experience.
The Thermidorian degeneration of revolutionary futurity under Stalinism (as pro-
posed by Harutyunyan), leading to ruptures in the perception of time, history, art,
and politics (as theorized by Erber in the global cultural context of the 1960s) is
then carried forward through an engagement with the problematic of periodization
in Latin American art since the 1960s. Karen Benezra addresses the issue of period-
ization by examining the treatment of national self-determination, or the so-called
“national question,” in certain theories and a few recent exhibitions that historicize
Latin American art since the 1960s. Taking as a point of departure a critique of
Osborne’s historical ontology of postconceptual art, Benezra considers how the
national question mediates the relationship between art and the social forms that
capital assumes in the work of an older generation of Latin American theorists,
such as Ticio Escobar and Néstor García Canclini. At the center of Benezra’s
engagement with contemporaneity are conflicting accounts of global contemporan-
eity: on one hand, modernizing aspirations treating the sociocultural particularity
of non-US or European art as a condition for its representation within
a “universal” art history, and on the other a “metropolitan” critique of the global
contemporary as an ideology of the present. We then move to Eastern Europe,
where the Stalinist impact on futurity, or Stalin’s conflict with socialist leaders over
the most “correct” form of socialism, had its ramifications in other regions. Ivana
Bago offers a revisionist interpretation of Eastern European contemporary art in
terms of “retrocontemporaneity”: the emergence of contemporaneity through
a process of conversion and objectification of, and distancing from, the communist
past. Writing from the position of the former Yugoslavian republics, where progres-
sive (Western-like) art and institutions were part of a unique version of anti-
Stalinist worker self-management or “market-socialism,” Bago looks for inspiration
in postcolonial studies, feminism, and anthropology in order to engage with one
problematic aspect of Eastern European art of the 1990s, namely its representation
as a terra incognita that had to be “discovered” and gifted to the world by the Slo-
venian group Irwin.
 Introduction 11
Finally, these transregional engagements with the periodization, the mapping, and
the temporality of “the contemporary” in Latin America and/or Eastern Europe are
carried forward by further methodological reflections on the relation between the his-
torical categories of “art” and “nation,” and “contemporary art” and the “postna-
tional condition,” in order to conclude Part I with an interview with Terry Smith
regarding his past and current perspectives on “the contemporary.”
Part II of the volume rehearses similar ideas but from a more identifiably art his-
torical position. The contributions have been assembled from archival material docu-
ments by art historians, researches, curators, and artists from different countries and
at various career stages. Each case-study, or case-history, unfolds within the context
of a particular national art history, and against the background of wider trans-
national and global art geographies. The cases draw attention to concrete actors (art-
ists, curators, organizers), the institutional players most actively contributing to the
rise of “the contemporary” (both local artist associations and galleries and foreign
foundations, such as Soros and the Open Society Institute, the Ford Foundation,
Goethe Institute, the Triangle Art Trust), notable events (exhibitions, workshops, fes-
tivals, meetings), and their impact on local art scenes. This combination of forces
was part of the transition to what we today call “contemporary art.”
The case-studies concern themselves with what one may call “early portents” of
contemporary art. Part II also starts from moments of radical rupture within the
anti-capitalist camp. Ivana Bago examines the 1963 exhibition New Tendencies 2,
regarding it in terms of a catalyst of the birth of “contemporary art” in Yugoslavia.
Bago insist on an early form of “the contemporary” that has begun to take root at
the margins of socialism, or in the market-socialism of non-aligned (and “pro-
Western”) Yugoslavia. The case centers on the Gallery of Contemporary Art in
Zagreb, which according to the author was among the earliest institutions in the
world to use the term “contemporary art” as we understand it today. One of its
meanings reflects the complex intimacies and relations of art to social, economic
and market forces (for example, Zagreb Gallery’s “Commercial Department” paral-
leled the equally new tendencies of certain leading Western art institutions27 –
which chose to be called “for contemporary art” in the aftermath of WWII – to
outgrow modern art’s historic antagonism toward the market).
As we approach the 1980s, we can see how market and economic rationality
more directly affects artistic production in the Eastern Bloc. Kristóf Nagy’s case-
study “Rabinec Studio: The Commodification of Art in Late Socialist Hungary,
1982–1983” tells of a Hungarian art historian and group of artists who – one
might say – embraced a form of “cultural resistance” to socialist modernization (a
kind of “nonconformism”) by setting up the earliest pro-market mechanisms on the
Budapest art scene of the early 1980s. And a few years later, we witness the begin-
ning of the disintegration of the USSR and the radical transformations that fol-
lowed, via the example of Soviet Armenia (case-study by Angela Harutyunyan).
A form of artistic protest – launched by perestroika-generation artists in Yerevan –
sought inspiration in Western art and culture (in consumer culture, for example,
from breakdancing to fashion) in order to discredit the obsolete model of painterly
national modernism dominating Soviet Armenia’s Union of Artists. As we reach
into the 1990s, we witness the expanding processes of capitalist modernization
unfolding on regional and global levels with support from Western private or
public institutions (see case-studies dedicated to the impact of the Soros Centers for
12 Introduction
Contemporary Art Network by Amila Puzić and Octavian Esanu). By the late
1990s one witnesses a full process of conversion. The reshaping of cultural policies
in favor of the private members of “civil society” created the most favorable insti-
tutional conditions for the emergence of “the contemporary.” Tevž Logar and
Vladimir Vidmar’s case-study Janja Žvegelj, Squash walks us though the transform-
ation of the ex-socialist Škuc (the Student Center in Ljubljana which served as
a local hub of alternative cultural practices during the 1980s) into a gallery of con-
temporary art by the late 1990s.
Leaving Europe behind, we move to the Middle East where similar conversions
gradually translate into contemporary art. The end of the Civil War in Lebanon
brought about not only Rafic Hariri’s economic reforms but also new forms of artis-
tic production and new formats for art institutions. Natasha Gasparian’s case-study
is dedicated to The First Sanayeh Plastic Arts Meeting, an event in 1995 that led to
the foundation of the Ashkal Alwan artists association. Ashkal Alwan has emerged
over the past decades as a major player in contemporary art in Beirut and in the
Middle East. Dina Aboul Fotouh discusses the Al-Nitaq Festival in Cairo (2000)
organized by a host of private art galleries (such as Mashrabia Gallery, Cairo Berlin,
Arabesque Art, and Townhouse Gallery) with the goal of loosening the modern
state’s political and economic control over Egyptian art. By the turn of the millen-
nium artists supported by public, corporate, non-governmental entities, or small busi-
nesses gather on local, regional, subcontinental, or global levels to launch new
platforms for the exchange of information and experiences (see Khoj International
Artists’ Workshop Modinagar, India by Sabih Ahmed and Nida Ghouse).
What the methodological reflections in Part I, and the case-studies (covering
almost half a century and linking regions from early 1960s Yugoslavia to early
2000s Egypt) suggest is that “contemporary art” is the byproduct of gradual eco-
nomic, political, and cultural transformations unfolding on the global level. These
transformations resonate across regions (from Beirut to Budapest and from Yerevan
to Cairo) revealing a demand for a new kind of art. This art is fully aware of the new
economic or market “reality”; is often “a”- or openly “anti-” political; or it prefers
to address more immediate issues, leaving the future, mass or collective politics,
class, and national identities behind or aside. The volume, and its contributors,
encourage us to think contemporary art between existing discursive boundaries, and
in relation to other frames of reference. The becoming of contemporary art, which
took place at different rates on national, postnational, and transregional levels, was
accompanied by historical alterations in our sense of temporality, periodization, spa-
tiality, or ontology of aesthetic experience. Ultimately, it is the global modernizing
force and spirit of late capitalism that has been translated into new artistic practices,
behaviors, and habits that we have come now to call: “the contemporary.”

Notes
1 I am referring to the question-format titles of some of the early books, journal special issues
and roundtables: Terry Smith, What Is Contemporary Art? (Chicago University Press,
2009); Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, and Anton Vidokle, “What Is Contemporary
Art? Issue Two,” e-flux Journal 12 (2010), www.e-flux.com/journal/12/61332/what-is-con
temporary-art-issue-two/; and Richard Meyer, What Was Contemporary Art? (Cambridge,
MA: The MIT Press, 2013).
 Introduction 13
2 For an example of stirring “the contemporary” into modernist and postmodernist narra-
tives see Hal Foster, Yve-Alain Bois, Rosalind Krauss, Benjamin H. D. Buchloch, and
David Joselit, eds., Art since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism
(London: Thames & Hudson, 2011). See in particular how art from the USSR or Brazil
is carefully added to the Western narrative.
3 See for example chapters on Rosalind Krauss and Alfred Barr in Meyer, What Was Con-
temporary Art?
4 See Smith, What Is Contemporary Art?
5 The first reference is to Arthur Danto, Art after the End of Art: Contemporary Art and
the Pale of History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997). The “Third System
of the Arts” Is a Reference to Paul Oscar Kristeller, “The Modern System of the Arts:
A Study of the History of Aesthetics (I),” Journal of the History of Ideas 12, no. 4
(October 1951): 496–527. See also Larry Shiner, The Invention of Art: A Cultural His-
tory (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2001).
6 Peter Osborne, Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art (London:
Verso, 2013).
7 Octavian Esanu, ed., Contemporary Artistic Revolutions: An Institutional Perspective
(Beirut: AUB Art Galleries, 2017). Exhibition publication. www.aub.edu.lb/art_galleries/
Documents/ContemporaryArtisticRevolutions.pdf
8 The “stupid particular” is a reference to Slavoj Žižek’s address to Palestinian culture:
“It’s not that you are here some stupid limited culture. No, you are the universal!
Enemies are making you particular!” See Hanan Toukan, “Picasso Is Mightier than the
M16: On Imaging and Imagining Palestine’s Resistance in the Global Community,” in
Cultural Politics 13, no. 1 (March 2017), 112.
9 For the evolution of the Lebanese contemporary art scene see Natasha Gasparian’s case-
study in Part II of this volume.
10 Jalal Toufic, The Withdrawal of Tradition Past a Surpassing Disaster (Beirut: Forthcom-
ing Books, 2009).
11 For a discussion of various historical interpretations of the poetic, historic, fictional, and
empirical see Shiner, The Invention of Art.
12 Ibid., 124.
13 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power (New York, NY: Random House, 1967), 452.
14 See, for example, Osborne’s treatment of “fiction” informed by examples of Lebanese
contemporary art in Osborne, Anywhere or Not at All.
15 Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (New York, NY: Continuum, 2002), 18.
16 See in Part II of this volume Dina Aboul Fatouh, “Al-Nitaq Festival of Art, Cairo 2000
and 2001.”
17 On this process in the context of Lebanon see for instance Hanan Toukan, “Art, Aid,
Affect: Locating the Political in Post-Civil War Lebanon’s Contemporary Cultural Prac-
tices” (PhD diss., University of London, 2011), 7. For the rhetoric of open society dem-
ocracy and freedom in the context of Eastern Europe’s “transition to democracy” and
contemporary art see Octavian Esanu, “What Was Contemporary Art?” in ARTMargins
1, no. 1 (Winter 2012): 5–28. On the Contemporary Art Center in Afghanistan see for
instance interventions by Rahraw Omarzad in Octavian Esanu, “Critical Machines: Art
Periodicals Today (Conference Report),” ARTMargins 5, no. 3 (October 2016), 32.
18 On “capitalism by design” see David Stark and Laszlo Brust, Postsocialist Pathways:
Transforming Politics and Property in East Central Europe (Cambridge University Press,
1998).
19 For an example of “advanced” artistic practices in the Middle East see the activities of
John Carswell at AUB during the 1960s. See Octavian Esanu, ed. Trans-Oriental Mono-
chrome: John Carswell. Beirut: AUB Art Galleries, 2015. www.aub.edu.lb/art_galleries/
Documents/pamphlet-carswell.pdf
20 For “transitions” see for example Thomas Carothers, “The End of the Transition Para-
digm,” Journal of Democracy 13, no. 1 (2002), 6.
21 For a discussion of these markers see the chapter on periodization in Osborne, Anywhere
or Not at All.
22 Osborne in particular is insistent on the post-1989 contemporary. Ibid.
14 Introduction
23 Jamie Peck, Constructions of Neoliberal Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2010).
24 This also recalls Peck’s multiple “constructions” of neoliberal reason. For the promin-
ence of the idea of the contemporary as a shift from “late modern,” see Terry Smith,
Contemporary Art: World Currents (London: Laurence King Publishing, 2011).
25 François Hartog, Regimes of Historicity: Presentism and Experiences of Time
(New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2015).
26 In most Soviet depictions, Lenin looks – following the Russian reading convention –
from left to right, that is, in anticipation or towards the future. In this 1980s drawing
by Mark Verlan, both Lenin and Buratino [Pinocchio] look right to left, or into the
“past,” conveying the degradation of futurity, and the radical turnaround from future-
oriented progressivism to the past, or to presentist investment in the preservation of the
status quo.
27 See for instance the Boston ICA, which opened in 1947. See David Ross et al., Dissent:
The Issue of Modern Art in Boston (Boston Institute of Contemporary Art, 1985); also
Meyer, What Was Contemporary Art?
Part I
1 Toward a Historical
Understanding of Post-Soviet
Presentism
Angela Harutyunyan

Introduction
The recent debates on world historical periodization in critical theory, philosophy,
art history, and theory as well as in historiography have been increasingly engaged
with interrogating the “contemporary” either as the cultural face or logic of global
capitalism, or as a term possessing a certain conceptual and periodizing power in
the wake of the supposed demise of “postmodernity.” Remarkably, these debates –
while not confined to any particular field or discipline – have most actively evolved
within discussions of art historical periodization: art, in both its mode of produc-
tion and its institutional status, is thought to have seen a shift first from modernism
to postmodernism, and then from “contemporary art” to what some even call
“global contemporary art.”1 What is instructive about these debates is that they
situate this shift within the art world in relation to broader epochal changes, even
if some voices argue for art’s relative autonomy vis-à-vis world historical periodiza-
tion. While in this chapter my focus is not art per se, these debates are helpful for
historicizing the “contemporary” as a presentist quality of historical time, one
which, I argue, cancels historicity.2
By engaging with the recent debates on the historicity of the present and the
quality of time in the contemporary, this chapter presents the argument that, if
considered from the perspective of the Soviet historical experience, presentism – as
the quality of historical time marked by the omnipresence of the present, or by
what Terry Smith calls “a permanent seeming aftermath”3 – doesn’t simply arise
out of the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and of the Soviet Union in 1991.
Instead, the chapter argues that in the post-Soviet condition, contemporary present-
ism ties together three temporal orders: the long disintegration of the Bolshevik
revolutionary project; Stalinist presentism defined by the freezing of the revolution-
ary dialectic in the space of the Soviet State as a permanent formation; and the
neoliberal regime of temporality, where time stands still in the order of deadlines,
fiscal “futures,” the exploitation of nature, and the looming planetary ecological
catastrophe. After outlining the debates on the contemporary and describing the
specificity of presentism in historical theory, the chapter pursues an outline of the
specific character of Stalinist presentism. It puts forward the argument that this
presentism was to haunt the temporality of life in the Soviet Union beyond Stalin-
ism, where Stalinism is understood as a historical time that results in the teleo-
logical fulfillment of historical necessity in the Soviet state identical with the party
and the leader. The supposed completion of the logic of history in Stalinism is
18 Angela Harutyunyan
analogous to the supposed completion of history in the logic of late capitalism that
triumphs in the 1990s as a global condition. Thus this chapter makes the argument
that the post-Soviet contemporary was not simply born of the collapse of the USSR
and its subsumption into the market economy so much as an already-existing arrest
of historical temporality in Stalinism was conjoined with the formation of the neo-
liberal project. But if the post-historical ideology of the “end of history” declares
history as such to be fiction and narration, in Stalinism the post-historical con-
sciousness is “arrived at” in the name of History. The supposed triumph of History
in Stalinism was anchored on a conception of synchronicity between the means of
production, the relations of production, and consciousness that guaranteed the
completion of socialism (the correspondence of the means and relations of produc-
tion, as well as consciousness, was ratified in the 1936 Soviet Constitution).
The completion of historical movement in the one Party-State was to facilitate
the identification of Stalinism with the Soviet experience as such. This identification
was precisely what was taken up by the dissident intelligentsia that acquired
a public platform during Gorbachev’s programs of perestroika and glasnost in the
1980s, as a ghost to be expelled. To break from official orthodoxy, the semi-
official and unofficial artists sought a rupture from the permanent triumph of his-
tory, a breakthrough or escape to the other side of the Curtain, in the consumer
paradise of capitalist democracies. But this rupture was a spatial rather than
a temporal one. The futurity that the perestroika “avant-gardes” envisioned was
ultimately a spatial futurity. The dreamed-of freedom to be actualized was con-
ceived as existing in space rather than in time, as the realized utopia of the dream-
world of Western freedom and consumerism. Perestroika’s cultural and intellectual
“avant-garde” imagined the content of the new art in and through the freedoms
and lifestyles denoting all that was non-Soviet. Often, the semi-official and unoffi-
cial artists in the Soviet Union sought the form of new art in the styles, methods,
and techniques that official Soviet criticism designated as “bourgeois formalism”:
abstract expressionism, pop art, minimalism, the objet trouvé, performance, and
other forms repressed by socialist realism. Nevertheless, at the structural level, this
new form of (anti-Soviet) art that in the 1990s would be institutionalized as “con-
temporary” was prepared in the interstices of the Soviet experience, and was made
visible because of glasnost’s calls for transparency and freedom of speech. And as
such, it conforms to the late Soviet dissident vision of a contemporary that exists
on the other side of the Soviet historical experience, in Western liberal democracies.
To be contemporary in the late Soviet and post-Soviet world means to treat the
Soviet historical experience as a ghost to be expelled.

The Presentism of the Contemporary

Art historian Bill Roberts distinguishes three approaches in recent debates on the
theorization of the temporality of the present, whether a “postmodern” or
a “contemporary” present: gradual, differential, and ruptural. To these, I can also
add the anachronistic and achronistic approaches that are prevalent in philosophy,
cultural studies, and new art history.4 The question that is often asked is whether
contemporaneity has supplanted postmodernity, and the positive or negative
answer determines where the speaker stands in relation to the question of the
transformation of the mode of production.5 Fredric Jameson still maintains the
 Post-Soviet Presentism 19
formulation of postmodernity as the cultural logic of late capitalism that has gone
global since the fall of the Berlin Wall.6 This implies that capitalism has not
undergone drastic transformations since it entered into its “late” stage marked by
globalization, the dominance of the financial and knowledge sectors over the pro-
ductive economy, and so on. As opposed to this form of periodization, many of
those actively involved in the debates on periodization put forward the collapse
of the Berlin Wall in 1989, accompanied by intensifying signs of the disintegra-
tion of the USSR, as the year of the advent of the contemporary as a world his-
torical condition.7
In his article “Contemporary Art and Contemporaneity” and subsequent book
What is Contemporary Art?, Terry Smith views the contemporary as an indetermin-
ately extended present moment.8 According to Smith, the contemporary is qualita-
tively different from both modernity and postmodernity because of the conflicting
and plural temporalities of the premodern, modern, and postmodern that coexist
within it. If modernity and postmodernity are products of the West, with the first as
a broader epochal notion and the second as an outcome of a specifically Euro-
American culture, Smith upholds that contemporaneity is a global condition, one
that is a mosaic of disjointed temporalities that heterogeneously coexist. According
to this view, contemporary is the new modern, but without the future-directedness of
the former – the condition of a “permanent-seeming-aftermath.”9 If this last formu-
lation might sound like a nightmarish eternal return of the same for some, for Smith
it is a liberation from the ruse of history conceived as synonymous with totalitarian
ideologies. Unlike Smith, for whom the contemporary is a permanent presence in the
post-1989 world, for art historian Alessandro Alberro it has no ontological ground.
Instead, the contemporary is an episteme, and the word doubles as a periodization
tool that enables thinking about social formations in their structural sense, under the
sign of the hegemony of global capital and neo-liberalism.10 In a Foucauldian move,
Alberro proposes thinking about subject positions under this hegemony, both those
that reproduce and those that subvert the existing social order.
Philosopher Peter Osborne discusses the contemporary through a philosophical
lens, posing the question of the epoch’s consciousness of itself.11 For Osborne the
contemporary, as the temporality of transnational capital, is a fiction insofar as it is
a conceptual “umbrella” notion that subsumes differentiated temporalities within it,
but it is also a reality that structures one’s very engagement with the world. As
a historical phenomenon, the contemporary for Osborne is not merely a periodizing
concept but a philosophical engagement with time, wherein the three main periods
of the contemporary – post-1945 (the advent of US hegemony), the 1960s (the dissol-
ution of high modernism), and post-1989 (the collapse of the Berlin Wall) – represent
different intensities of contemporaneity. Unlike Smith’s and Alberro’s approach,
Osborne’s is differential: the contemporary, another name for the historical present,
is “a temporal unity in disjunction or . . . a disjunctive unity of present times.”12 For
Osborne, the contemporary incorporates futurity in the structure of its temporality,
even though this futurity is disavowed within and by the very concept of the contem-
porary. Even if there are differences in the above-mentioned conceptions of the con-
temporary, they all share a fundamental assumption: the contemporary is the
temporality of transnational capital and of the latest stage of globalization. In any of
the above theorizations, the contemporary comes to displace the progressive tempor-
ality of modern political and aesthetic projects.13
20 Angela Harutyunyan
Whether one adheres to the Jamesonian formulation of the persistence of post-
modernity or conceives of the contemporary as a novel epochal designation that
displaces the postmodern, these debates take up the demise of the Soviet bloc as
a watershed historical moment. The disintegration of the USSR signals a shift from
the Cold-War-era battle of rival ideologies to the post-ideological moment of the
so-called “end of history” and the triumph of presentism understood as time
emptied out of the past and future alike. It is this presentism that has come to
designate contemporaneity, as both a quality of historical time and a theory of
history which takes the present as incommensurable with past and future, without
a unifying narrative logic and thus precluding the possibility of normative rupture.
The quality of our contemporary time is the ruptured time of the perpetual loop of
the now that stands as infallibly singular. Whether we adopt postmodernity or the
contemporary as a periodizing category for our present, they both share a quality
of time that is ultimately presentist, where the present appears as a “permanent-
seeming-aftermath.”14
As recently as the early 2000s, the historian and theorist François Hartog dedi-
cated a book to “presentism” as a conceptual and historical category. In his
Regimes of Historicity: Presentism and the Experience of Time,15 Hartog discusses
the advent of contemporary presentism as a regime of historicity where the present
is both “omnipresent and omnipotent.”16 According to him, presentism is preceded
by two modalities of historicity: if before the French Revolution of 1789 the past
dominated the future, modern historicity is marked by the domination of the future
over the present. The prime example of modern times’ future-directedness for
Hartog is the “Manifesto of Futurism” of 1909. However, if one looks at some of
the symptomatic shifts in the latter part of the twentieth century (such as the prolif-
eration of heritage discourses and of “global architecture”), it is not hard to detect
a transformation from the modern regime of historicity to our contemporary world
where historical time is seemingly suspended, and where the present dominates
over the past and the future alike. Hartog characterizes presentism as “permanent,
elusive, and almost immobile,” though it nevertheless attempts to create its own
historical time. Whether we conceive of presentism as an exit from modernity or
not, it is clearly, according to Hartog, the crisis condition of modern time.17
Hartog’s periodization is rather Eurocentric, or perhaps Franco-centric: for him the
modern regime of time encompasses 200 years, from the 1789 French Revolution
to the 1989 commemoration of the Revolution’s 200-year anniversary, as well as
the collapse of the Berlin Wall. Even if descriptively convincing, Hartog’s present-
ism is not anchored in concrete historical and material forces and their develop-
ment, and thus remains somewhat “hanging in the air.” In a sense, Hartog updates
Reinhart Koselleck’s discussion of historical time in modernity as a specific spatio-
temporal conjunction and brings it to the contemporary present, even though his
account differs from Koselleck’s more systematic endeavor.
In his influential work Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, Kosel-
leck conceives of historical temporality as a relation between the space of experience
that is the past and the horizon of expectation that is the future.18 This spatio-
temporal relation of expectation and experience is inversely proportional: the decline
of the one brings about the ascent of the other, and this is specifically a modern con-
figuration. If premodern time was dominated by the eschatological prophecies of the
end times with a theologically prescribed horizon of expectation, early modern time
 Post-Soviet Presentism 21
brought about the control of politics over the future, where ecclesial prophecies gave
way to rational prognoses and to the philosophy of historical processes: “Prognosis
produces the time within which and out of which it weaves, whereas apocalyptic
prophecy destroys time through its fixation on the End.”19 It is the belief in progress
characterized by the acceleration of the future and “its unknown quality” (because it
abbreviates the space of our experiences by bringing in perpetually new ones), as
well as the delegation of the present to the future,20 that launches the Western world
into modernity, or what Koselleck calls Neuzeit.
Koselleck’s horizon of expectation and space of experience – two interdependent
anthropological categories that refer to the human condition as such, without
which history is impossible – constitute “the conditions of possibility of real his-
tory,” and “are, at the same time, conditions of its cognition” that bring past and
future together.21 Both applicable to empirical historical research and conceivable
as meta-historical categories, the space of experience and the horizon of expectation
in their asymmetrical interrelation and tension bring out a sense of historical time
generated by distance. The horizon of expectation is an outcome of the modern
idea of progress. Hence, in Neuzeit or in modern times, there is an increasing gap
between the space of experience and the horizon of expectation with the latter dis-
tancing itself from the former. Modern time, with its belief in progress, brings
together experience and expectation, where both are “endowed with a temporal
coefficient of change,” and where prognoses become the legitimation of political
action.22 What this means is that modern history, with its horizon of expectation
animated by utopia, and the politics of change are interconnected. This is so
because the idea of progress brings about both acceleration in its promise of perpet-
ual renewal and an awareness of differing levels of development between the
people and the nations cohabiting different spaces at the same time. This, in turn,
creates an impetus “for the active transformation of the world.”23 Here, previous
experiences no longer prepare for a future that is indeterminate. Thus it becomes
precisely the task of politics to bridge the difference and the gap between experi-
ence and expectation.
Koselleck’s book in its German original edition came out in 1979, at a time of
evolving debates on postmodernism. However, it does not deal with the “postmod-
ern” relations of experience and expectation. It is with Fredric Jameson that we
have one of the most potent theorizations of temporality in late capitalism and in
postmodernity, which Jameson characterizes as the spatialization of time.24 If we
were to put Jameson’s thesis in Koselleck’s terms, in postmodernity the horizon of
expectation collapses into the space of experience. However, Koselleck’s theoriza-
tion appears rather general, since it fails to come to terms with the way in which
historical temporality is generated by concrete socioeconomic processes in the
modern period, which itself requires periodization. While in Koselleck’s account
“progress” appears as a neutral motor of history that shapes modern time, Jame-
son’s “spatialization of time” brings both concreteness to the experience of time
and a differential treatment of it according to the abstract movement of capital
itself and the specific appearance it acquires through this movement. According to
Jameson:

at the very heart of any account of postmodernity or late capitalism, there is to

be found the historically strange and unique phenomenon of a volatilization of
22 Angela Harutyunyan
temporality, a dissolution of past and future alike, a kind of contemporary
imprisonment in the present – reduction to the body as I call it elsewhere – an
existential but also collective loss of historicity in such a way that the future
fades away as unthinkable or unimaginable, while the past itself turns into
dusty images and Hollywood-type pictures of actors in wigs and the like.25

In all these accounts above, what is clear is that terms like postmodernity, the con-
temporary, or presentism all refer to a crisis of historical time within and of mod-
ernity, which if historicized can be best understood against the backdrop of the
failure of twentieth-century revolutionary and humanist projects, and of an end to
the possibility of progressive and universal visions of the future. A seminal histor-
ical marker for these accounts, one that Koselleck could not account for, was the
collapse of the USSR and the expansion of global capital to hitherto unconquered
territories.
While agreeing that the disintegration of the Soviet Union, and the subsumption
of its sphere of influence under global neoliberal capital and liberal democracy, is
one key event whose aftermath still weighs heavily over our so-called post-political
present, to repeat the argument that this chapter makes, any historical and dialect-
ical account of the contemporary present and the presentism of the contemporary
needs to come to terms with the Soviet historical experience. That is to say that the
recent accounts of the contemporary or of postmodernity, even if critical of cap-
ital’s valorization of time, nonetheless unwittingly reproduce the victorious side of
the Cold War narrative marked by the triumph of market capitalism and liberal
democracy in the 1990s. What is forsaken here is the specificity of the Soviet
experience as such. This chapter presents the argument that, if considered from
a Soviet historical perspective, the presentism of the contemporaneity can be seen
as an intensification of an already-existing Soviet presentism that, in the post-Soviet
sphere, signals the convergence of two homologous temporalities: that of Stalinist
presentism on the one hand and the contemporary presentism of neoliberal capital-
ism (the contemporary as the temporality of transnational capital) on the other.
Thus, the post-Soviet contemporary weaves together the extended temporality of
the disintegration of the revolutionary time of the Leninist project with the triumph
of Stalinist presentism in instituting the Soviet Party-State as a supposedly trans-
historical form – one that abandons the idea of the “withering away” of the state
in communism – and finally culminates in the presentism of the global triumph of
the market economy and liberal democracy.
This approach calls for a periodization of the Soviet historical experience, one that
today is largely considered to be a uniform totality – a conception that both complies
with and reproduces the very logic of Stalinism, in that it identifies the Leninist project
with Stalinism. This lack of differential treatment of early Soviet history succumbs to
the theoretical and practical normalizations of the present. This thesis goes against the
prevailing assumptions that historical temporality in the Soviet Union was that of
a future-oriented temporality of progress and utopia. Both progress and communism
as a utopian horizon are assumed to have served as minimum ideological require-
ments, since Stalinism, and the character of Stalinist temporality itself, was presentist.
However, as opposed to postmodern presentism, Stalinist presentism – the contours
of which I outline below – was constituted in the form of a future-directed modern
temporality, and was launched in the name of the historical dialectic of progress.
 Post-Soviet Presentism 23
The thesis developed here takes its cue from the historiographical theory devel-
oped by art historian Vardan Azatyan in relation to the cultural politics generated
in the period of the New Economic Policy in the Soviet 1920s. His article “Timing
Against Time: Lost Modernism of the 1920s” discusses the dialectical historical
time of the Leninist project throughout the Soviet 1920s and the disintegration of
this temporality with Stalinism as indexed in the architecture of Soviet Armenia.26
Azatyan conceives of the process of the disintegration of the Leninist revolutionary
project as akin to Marx’s “putrescence of absolute spirit” in German Ideology,
where the decomposition of the Hegelian spirit is considered as a material process
of transformation into new substances.
Ultimately, in its general contours, my argument agrees with Boris Groys that the
post-utopian condition is characteristic of post-Stalinism.27 According to Groys, in
the aftermath of the ideologically fabricated utopian future as played out in the pre-
sent, in the wake of Stalin’s death when “homo sovieticus wanted most of all to leave
the utopia and return to history, there suddenly was the discovery that history no
longer existed and there was nowhere to return to,” since the West itself had been
ushered into the post-historical condition with postmodernism.28 But my claim also
diverges from Groys’s argument that in Stalinism, homo sovieticus lived in a utopia
and outside of history. Rather than utopia being characteristic of Stalinism, and the
post-utopian condition arriving in its aftermath, I argue that Stalinism itself is post-
utopian in the way that it appropriates utopia for post-utopian purposes: in Stalinism,
the image of the bright future, as actualized in the present, arrives “on the wings” of
historical necessity to cancel history itself. And this logic was to recur in various farci-
cal repetitions, especially during Brezhnev’s “developed socialism” of the 1970s. The
Soviet state during Stalin’s reign is the incarnation of the triumph of the dialectic of
history, one that is beyond historical time in a way that Western postmodernism
could not be. This is because Stalinist presentism both relies on and cancels the revo-
lutionary temporality of the Bolshevik project, whereas postmodernism declares the
modern historical temporality of revolutions and progress as mere ideological fictions.
It is for this reason that I characterize Stalinism as a form of presentism (since it radic-
ally differs from postmodernity) but one with specifically Stalinist characteristics.
How then can one describe the contours of a historical time punctured and enabled
by the revolutionary rupture that, as I claim, became subjected to the long process of
disintegration initiated in Stalinism? In order to start answering this question, it is
necessary to subject key moments within early Soviet history to a historical and theor-
etical reconsideration: Lenin’s “dictatorship of the proletariat” and “the withering
away of the state” in conjunction with the New Economic Policy (1922–1928); Sta-
lin’s Great Break of 1928 or his so-called second revolution; and finally, the consoli-
dation of the Stalinist state in the second part of the 1930s, in conjunction with the
notorious Short Course: History of the Bolshevik Party of the Soviet Union of 1938,
a textbook that cements the Stalinist version of Soviet history.

The Revolution and Historical Time

It is important to grasp the dialectical historical temporality opened up by the
October Revolution, and the specific mode of its disintegration with Stalinism, in
order to engage with the post-Soviet presentism of the contemporary. Lenin’s 1917
pamphlet The State and Revolution offers a glimpse into this temporality prior to
24 Angela Harutyunyan
the Revolution, one that was to be validated by the Revolution. The pamphlet is
a practical-historical articulation of the dialectical method wherein historical
change is said to occur through the unceasing movement of contradictions gener-
ated by the material conditions of development, interrupted by revolutionary vio-
lence. The revolution, in turn, is both prepared and objectively necessitated by the
social and economic processes endemic to capitalism, namely the development of
the means of production (which is capitalism’s “permanent” revolution), the forces
of production (labor as commodity), and the relations of production (the contradic-
tion between labor and capital). Yet this development is neither even nor uniform,
and while the temporality of capitalism – as Lenin, following Marx, saw it – is
punctured by the surviving afterlives of the previous modes of production, it also
carries the seeds of the new one. It is the dialectic of necessity and contingency, the
evolutionary development of political forms in response to actual material condi-
tions and their abolition and withering afterlife (Aufheben), that characterizes his-
torical movement.29 It is within temporality that the historical necessity of
establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat as the most radical available form of
democracy ultimately gives way to the withering of the state in communism.
If the accelerated temporality of the revolution both reveals and exacerbates class
antagonisms (and in the Russian context, this accelerated revolutionary temporality
is not confined to the moment of the October Revolution but also extends to the
civil war of 1917–1922, a period known as “war communism”), the transition to
a new mode of production – to socialism – is a multilayered and patient struggle
that decelerates the fast tempo of the revolutionary tide. Lenin stresses, over and
again, the heterogeneous and uneven temporality of extended transformation, as
the Soviets were transitioning from the accelerated class struggle of war commun-
ism and the militant rhetoric of the civil war years to the period of peaceful recon-
struction in the 1920s initiated by the New Economic Policy in 1921. Perhaps
Lenin’s dialectical conception of historical time as constantly moving, flexible,
contradictory, progressive, and non-linear can best be summarized in Marx’s lines
in a letter to Engels, made famous by Lenin in his 1914 Karl Marx, A Brief Bio-
graphical Sketch with an Exposition of Marxism. In historical development, “20
years are no more than a day,” Marx wrote to Engels, “though later on there may
come days in which 20 years are embodied.”30 This expansion and contraction of
historical time vis-à-vis the abstract calendar is informed by the law of the dialectic,
of transformation from quantity to quality: there are periods of slow evolutionary
quantitative change that can be interrupted by a sudden eruption that brings about
qualitative change.
The 1921 New Economic Policy, a year prior to the declaration of the USSR,
introduced elements of the bourgeois mode of production: private trade, ownership
of small enterprises, and limited accumulation, all under state control. Ultimately,
NEP was not Lenin’s deviation from the course of achieving socialism and then
communism, but in a way the confirmation of this course: the very Marxian con-
ception of history that was implemented by Lenin in a revolutionary situation con-
ceived of historical time in heterogeneous terms where older modes of production
continued their withering afterlife within the ruptured time brought about by the
revolution. NEP can be understood as the economic equivalent of Lenin’s “wither-
ing away of the state.” As Azatyan argues, what NEP proposed was a “temporary
economy of time” within the fast-racing revolutionary temporality of historical
 Post-Soviet Presentism 25
change. The withering away of the state that Lenin theorized in The State and
Revolution and that was to succeed the “dictatorship of the proletariat was pre-
cisely about using the remnants of the older apparatus towards a new social order
that the NEP institutionalized at the level of economic policy.”31

On the Desert of Presentism

The temporality of NEP was terminated in 1928 with Stalin’s Great Break which
coincided with the institution of the first Five-Year Plan (1928–1932). It is during
this time that the infrastructure of Soviet society was being constructed – from
social institutions to the consolidation of the political structure in the identification
of the Party with the State and – subsequently, as the 1930s rolled forth – with
History as such. The formative role that the Great Break played in consolidating
Soviet institutions and social relations had an extended impact far beyond the ini-
tial five years, right through to the collapse of the Soviet Union. The social and eco-
nomic processes of the Great Break – characterized by the acceleration of the
tempo of socialist construction, the implementation of central and teleological eco-
nomic planning, sharpened class war, and the so-called cultural revolution – were
to prepare the ground for what I have characterized as Stalinist presentism in the
latter part of the 1930s, as the social and cultural processes of the Great Break
were giving way to the deceleration of both the cultural revolution and class war.
Without those processes the final fulfillment of History in Stalin and the Party later
in the 1930s could not triumph.
The Great Break, also known in historical scholarship as Stalin’s “Leap Forward,”
“The Second Revolution,” or “the Soviet Thermidor,”32 fabricated a revolutionary
situation to create a state of pseudo-emergency in order to launch a wholesale and
fast-paced transformation of Soviet society in its entirety. The First Five-Year Plan,
comprising the large-scale execution of a centrally pre-planned collectivization of
agriculture and industrialization in the entire country, was implemented under what
Azatyan has called a regime of deadlines that replaced historical time with “timing,”
“expelling time from social life.” “In Stalinist politics,” he writes, “there was no
time but timing, which itself should be overcome by its even more accelerated modal-
ity—‘planning.’” According to Azatyan, whereas NEP relied on “historical conscious-
ness” and on multilayered and non-synchronous historical time, Stalinism relied on
“deadline consciousness,” and within Stalinist imperatives there was “no time to give
space to time.”33
The Great Break created the infrastructure of what would be consolidated in the
1930s as Stalinism, but was not yet Stalinism. The First Five-Year Plan’s compres-
sion of time could not guarantee the final triumph and completion of the dialectic
of history. For this to be achieved, a more synthetic and all-encompassing rhetoric
was needed. Stalinist presentism, I argue, is prepared through the acceleration of
the stages of historical development throughout the Great Break (1928–1932) in
order to arrive at developed socialism as the final historical stage. Here, the “dicta-
torship of the proletariat” in one country triumphs as a permanent formation, but
in the conditions of the coercion of the proletariat by the Party-State, and of the
Party-State by Stalin. In the 1930s the alienated state apparatus identified with the
Party (in name rather than in function) in turn identified with Stalin, who had
become the demiurge of History, with the latter having supposedly dialectically
26 Angela Harutyunyan
culminated in the present. The motor of the class war that was driving the Great
Break had brought history as a “history of class struggle” to its final completion in
“socialism in one country.” It was now time to write the history of the Party. But
the triumph of History – and this is the characteristic logic of Stalinist presentism –
is not static, and requires constant mobilization, a periodic implementation of the
regime of urgency, in order to maintain its claim to incarnating the highest stage of
the dialectic of Nature. Here the past is understood as a synthetic appropriation of
tradition according to the ideological needs of the present, while the future is the
utopian horizon of communism so removed from the possibility of its actualization
that it comes to supplant the Biblical paradisiacal afterlife. As opposed to this,
Lenin, following Marx and Engels, conceived of communism as the ideal in the
real, anchored within historical conditions themselves and made possible by them:

Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal

to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real move-
ment which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this move-
ment result from the premises now in existence.34

With Stalinism and beyond, communism becomes a utopian ideological horizon

that needs to be maintained as such by an entire apparatus for the fabrication of
the bright future in the present.35 Hence, a full artistic, literary, and cultural arsenal
had to be launched under the principles of socialist realism to maintain the illusion
that this fabricated reality was more real than reality itself. The Stalinist present
compresses the two temporalities of the past and the future into the present: the
radical utopian future appears through a synthetic appropriation of various
national and world historical traditions actualized as an image, as a simulacrum. In
Stalinism, futurity is either infinitely deferred or appears as an image in and of the
present. In short, communism remains a horizon within Stalinism, but one that so
distant as to be unrealizable. This is the key distinction between the Marxian and
Leninist conceptions of communism as an actual possibility and as both real and
ideal, and the permanent deferral of communism in Stalinism justified by “socialism
in one country” and by external threats to the Soviet Union.
Stalinism shares a fundamental affinity with postmodern presentism in that it
requires a vast media apparatus and resources to maintain the illusion of reality
while burying reality as a historically evolving movement of material contradictions
under thick layers of “simulacra.” But Stalinist presentism also has qualities differ-
ent from the presentism of the contemporary, or the postmodern post-histoire: the
Stalinist presentism that freezes dialectical movement into the permanent present
does so in the name of the dialectic itself. As opposed to the deconstructive critique
of the dialectical view of history as totalizing and potentially totalitarian in post-
modern theory, Stalinism “cements” the triumph of the dialectic in the Party-State
as a permanent formation. This form of presentism was to haunt the temporality of
social life up until the collapse of the Soviet Union. It establishes itself not through
the defeat of revolutionary time but through the all-encompassing appropriation
and co-option of all revolutionary experience, and does so in the name of Marx-
ism-Leninism. And if in capitalist postmodernity it is the media apparatus and spec-
tacle that acquire the status of reality, Stalinism rules through the transparency of
language. Its ideological function is that it is ultimately the rule of rhetoric over
 Post-Soviet Presentism 27
actually existing reality. For ideology to work as a material stratum formative of
reality itself, it has to co-opt and re-channel both the experience and the theory of
the revolution to legitimize the completion of the historical dialectic. Without
Dialectical Materialism as an “outlook and science” at once, the historical justifica-
tion of Stalinist post-history could not be provided. The special feature of Stalinism,
as opposed to all hitherto existing ideologies, is its rejection of one-sidedness, and
its synthetic character. This is grounded in Stalinism’s conception of Soviet state
socialism as the accomplishment of the historical dialectic as such, and establishes
the Soviet monoculture as the highest point of material historical development, one
that would encompass all the progressive achievements of hitherto existing human
culture.
The final nail on the coffin of the heterogeneous and complex temporality of the
early Bolshevik years was the 1938 Kratkiy Kurs: Istoriya kommunisticheskoi partii
sovetskogo soyuza/bol’shevikov (Short Course: History of the Communist Party of
the Soviet Union (VKP(b))) where the party was conceived as the historical embodi-
ment of the triumph of the Revolution in the space of the Soviet state, and where
the history of the Revolution itself was rewritten. Full of distortions and falsifica-
tion, this textbook identified the history of the country with the history of the
party, and presented the latter as a history of intraparty struggle. However, if with
Khruschev’s famous denouncement of Stalin in his speech at the 20th Party Con-
gress in 1956, distortions of history would later enter a long and often flawed pro-
cess of correction and rectification, and even if many of the Bolshevik leaders
would be rehabilitated, the impact of the Stalinist version of Dialectical Materialism
(officially known as Diamat), as drafted in the Short Course by Stalin himself,
would persist in Soviet thought until the disintegration of the USSR and beyond.
I cannot go into the ways in which Stalinist Diamat underwent various complex
fermentations in the decades following Stalinism. What is more important for the
purposes of the argument in this chapter is that distortions and purges of the his-
tory of the Party could only be justified through the imperatives of historical neces-
sity as enabled by Dialectical Materialism. But for the annihilation of lived history
and of dialectical historical time to be conceived as the triumph of History as such,
Diamat had to resort to Aristotelian metaphysics to justify the Stalinist state as
a permanent formation. And in a typical Stalinist move, we have the annihilation
of dialectics in the name of dialectics itself.
While presenting an amalgam of quotations from Marx, Engels, and Lenin, the
chapter on Dialectical Materialism, however, introduces a crucial Stalinist “innov-
ation” in the conceptualization of the materialist dialectic, an innovation that is
latent and not explicitly stated: while presenting the two basic laws of the dialectic
(the law of the transformation of the quantity into quality and the law of the inter-
penetration of opposites) it omits the final law of the dialectic, the negation of neg-
ation, which is the precondition for revolutions conceived as ruptural events. In
Stalinist Diamat, history is overdetermined by laws of nature, while revolutions
appear as evolutions. “Further, if the passing of slow quantitative changes into
rapid and abrupt qualitative changes is a law of development, then it is clear that
revolutions made by oppressed classes are a quite natural and inevitable
phenomenon.”36 It is this naturalness and inevitability of historical events, includ-
ing revolutions, that provides the ultimate justification of the Soviet Stalinist state
as a historical-transhistorical formation:
28 Angela Harutyunyan
the party of the proletariat should not guide itself in its practical activity by
casual motives, but by the laws of development of society, and by practical
deductions from these laws . . . Hence, socialism is converted from a dream of
a better future for humanity into a science.37

Thus the Stalinist version of Diamat as philosophy and science at once, a science
materialized as a particular social formation, had reached its triumphant fulfillment
in the Party-State of the proletariat as a permanent ahistorical formation. The para-
dox is here: while rhetorically insisting on the interpenetration of opposites, and
thus also on contradictions and on the law of unceasing movement and negation,
Dialectical Materialism as Stalinist orthodoxy froze all further historical develop-
ment and territorialized movement within the extant Soviet state. Read dialectically,
we could say that in this conception, once History had been fulfilled in Stalin’s stat-
ist formation it accomplished a full circle and rejoined Nature. Here history
appears as natural history. Once Diamat triumphed as power, the dialectic was sus-
pended and its past and future ceased to be regarded as ideologically consequential
moments in its development. We thus arrive at the Stalinist presentism that was to
haunt Soviet historical life up until its disintegration in 1991. If in the period of
stagnation (1965–1985) presentism appeared in its most crystallized form as the
mummification of the past (including the Stalinist past), in the era of “developed
socialism,” Khruschev’s (1953–1964) and Gorbachev’s (1985–1991) attempts to
return to Lenin and the experience of the revolution failed when confronted with
the calcified layers of bureaucracy. If Khruschev’s Thaw which attempted to open
up culture and politics to state-managed and tightly controlled liberalization ended
with the Brezhnevian coup, Gorbachev’s initial attempts to humanize socialism by
his return to Lenin opened up the Pandora’s box of nationalism and other seem-
ingly repressed sentiments that ultimately culminated in anti-Soviet protests and
strife and brought about the disintegration of the Soviet Union.
The contemporary in this post-Soviet context is an amalgam of different tempor-
alities at first sight diametrically opposed – the eternal time of the primordial
nation, the Stalinist institution of Soviet presentism, and the permanent present of
neoliberal globalization with its time-management economy. But all these moments
of contemporary’s temporality which converse today are qualitatively one and the
same, marking the ideology of the post-historical stage that has gradually arrived in
the Soviet space since the 1930s. In a way, the post-Soviet contemporary is the
post-Stalinist afterlife of Stalinism. But underneath the surface of the neo-liberal
post-Stalinist present lingers the repressed modality of the revolutionary time of the
1920s, dormant in the KGB dungeons, in uncovered and unrecoverable archives, in
buildings on which the names of those who carried forth this historical temporality
are unwittingly preserved, and in the material traces of Soviet modernization.

Notes
1 For instance, in the last few years there were a number of advertised university positions
for “Global Contemporary Art.” There are also a number of art courses and exhibitions,
the most prominent amongst them The Global Contemporary: Art Worlds After 1989 at
ZKM, Karlsruhe.
2 For an excellent and comprehensive discussion on the relationship between Jameson’s
postmodernism and the current debates on the contemporary, see Bill Roberts,
 Post-Soviet Presentism 29
“Unnaming the System? Retrieving Postmodernism’s Contemporaneity,” ARTMargins 4,
no. 2 (2015): 3–23.
3 See Terry Smith, “Introduction: The Contemporaneity Question,” in Antinomies of Art
and Culture: Modernity, Postmodernity, Contemporaneity, eds. Terry Smith, Okwui
Enwezor, and Nancy Condee (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 3.
4 Amongst those dealing with the question of temporality in art in relation to historical
time, or with periodization, are Peter Osborne, Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of
Contemporary Art (London: Verso, 2013); Terry Smith, What Is Contemporary Art?
(Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2009); Octavian Esanu, “What Was Contem-
porary Art?” ARTMargins 1, no. 1 (2012); Pamela M. Lee, Forgetting the Artworld
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012); Alexander Alberro, “Periodizing Contemporary
Art,” www.columbia.edu/cu/arthistory/faculty/Alberro/Periodising-Contemporary-Art.
pdf; Boris Groys, “Comrades of Time,” e-flux 11 (December 2009), www.e-flux.com/
journal/comrades-of-time/; Alexander Nigel and Christopher Wood, Anachronic Renais-
sance (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010); Richard Meyer, What Was Contemporary
Art? (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013); Mieke Bal, “Anachronism for the Sake of His-
tory: The Performative Look,” keynote lecture delivered at the AAH 40th Anniversary
Conference, RCA, London, 2014; Pedro Erber, “Contemporary and Its Discontents,”
Diacritics 41, no.1 (2013): 28–48, amongst others.
5 For a more thorough discussion of the debates on the contemporary see Angela Haru-
tyunyan, The Political Aesthetics of the Armenian Avant-Garde: The Journey of the
“Painterly Real,” 1987–2004 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017), 23–28.
6 Fredric Jameson, “The Aesthetics of Singularity,” New Left Review 92 (March–April 2015):
101–132.
7 These authors include Smith, Osborne, Lee, and others.
8 Terry Smith, “Contemporary Art and Contemporaneity,” Critical Inquiry 32, no. 4
(Summer 2006): 681–707. See also Smith, What is Contemporary Art?
9 Smith, “Introduction: The Contemporaneity Question,” 3.
10 Alberro, “Periodizing Contemporary Art.”
11 Osborne, Anywhere or Not at All.
12 Ibid., 22.
13 Danto tells the reader that he detected a qualitative break from the logic of modernism
when in 1964 he encountered Andy Warhol’s Brillo Boxes. However, he conceptualized
this break only in the early 1980s. Arthur C. Danto, “Approaching the End of Art,”
lecture delivered at the Whitney Museum of American Art, 1985. Arthur C. Danto,
Beyond the Brillo Box: The Visual Arts in Post-Historical Perspective (Los Angeles, CA:
University of California Press, 1998).
14 Smith, “Introduction: The Contemporaneity Question,” 3.
15 I am grateful to Octavian Esanu for introducing me to Hartog’s work.
16 François Hartog, Regimes of Historicity: Presentism and the Experience of Time
(New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2015), xviii.
17 Ibid., 18.
18 Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (New York, NY:
Columbia University Press, 2004).
19 Ibid., 19.
20 Ibid., 22.
21 Ibid., 258–259.
22 Ibid., 266.
23 Ibid.
24 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 1990).
25 Jameson, “The Aesthetics of Singularity,” 120.
26 Vardan Azatyan, “Timing against Time: Lost Modernism of the 1920s,” trans.
A. Harutyunyan. Unpublished manuscript.
27 Boris Groys, The Total Art of Stalinism: Avant-Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship and
Beyond (London: Verso, 2011).
28 Ibid., 110.
30 Angela Harutyunyan
29 In “Hegel’s Conspectus” Lenin comments on the concept Aufheben: “aufheben=ein
Ende machen= erhalten (aufbewahren zugleich), [supersede = terminate-maintain (simul-
taneously to preserve)].” Vladimir Lenin, Philosophical Notebooks in Collected Works,
vol. 38 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1982), 115.
30 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Der Briefwechsel zwischen Friedrich Engels und Karl
Marx, vol. 3, (Stuttgart, 1913) p. 127, quoted in Vladimir Lenin, Collected Works, vol.
21, Karl Marx: A Biographical Sketch With an Exposition of Marxism (Moscow: Pro-
gress Publishers, 1974), 43–91.
31 Azatyan, “Timing against Time.”
32 Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed (1936) (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications,
2004), 80.
33 Azatyan, “Timing against Time.”
34 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, ed. C.J. Arthur (New York,
NY: International Publishers, 1970), 39.
35 Koselleck recalls a political joke about the communist horizon: “Communism is already
visible on the horizon,” declared Khrushchev in a speech. Question from the floor:
“Comrade Khrushchev, what is a ‘horizon’?” “Look it up in a dictionary,” replied
Nikita Sergeevich. At home the questioner found the following explanation in
a reference work: “Horizon, an apparent line separating the sky from the earth, which
retreats as one approaches it.” A. Drozdzynski, Der politische Witz im Ostblok (Düssel-
dorf, 1974), 80, quoted in Koselleck, Futures Past, 261.
36 Kratkiy Kurs: Istoriya kommunisticheskoi partii sovetskogo soyuza/bol’shevikov [Short
Course: History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (VKP(b))]. First published
in English in 1939. Moscow: International Publishers. Quoted from the transcription of
Marxists.org. www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1939/x01/
37 Ibid.