Art History最新文献

This essay traces the histories and reverberations of the socialist scholarship programmes which brought art and graphic design students from Africa to the USSR during the 1980s. Drawing on the accounts and archives of art students and cultural workers who participated in or supported these programmes, it follows the path of one Mozambican cohort through a Graphic Design degree in Uzbekistan. It shows how, by navigating between the emancipatory opportunities offered by the programme, and the pedagogical expressions of state power that constrained it, the students developed affiliations and aesthetic positions which would survive, appropriate, and resist dominant geopolitical epistemologies. Ultimately, I argue that their artworks and recollections allow alternative, unofficial histories of Cold War solidarity networks to come into sharper focus.

Beginning in the early 1950s, North Korea and Hungary forged a friendship in anticipation of building a new socialist world. In 1954, a team of Hungarian architects led by Emil Zöldy (1913–82) travelled to Pyongyang to design a broad spectrum of buildings and spaces in collaboration with North Korean architects and workers. Separate groups of Hungarian experts were also commissioned to design factories and plants in provincial North Korean cities such as Kusŏng. This essay examines how these large-scale construction projects operated on the ground, including some of the fissures and give-and-take of the friendship that was built between the Korean and Hungarian comrades. Their designs and construction projects, we argue, concretized and cemented the ephemeral and contingent experiences of socialist friendship between Korea and Hungary, even if its memory has been subjected to erasure in both the North Korean and Hungarian contexts.

Craft exhibitions were one of the major forms of cultural and economic exchange among socialist countries, a key feature of friendship exchanges that mapped Cold War alliances at mid-century. This essay examines the implications of craft exhibitions exported between China and her ‘brother’ nations, especially in Eastern Europe. Export exhibitions enabled the circulation of objects, craftspeople, and students, and trod a grey zone between art and industry, mutual cultural appreciation, and mutual economic dependency. Promoting craft as the epitome of socialist culture's diversity also questioned Soviet hegemony over the forms associated with high state culture, opening the way for other routes of formal experimentation and abstraction. Mapping craft exhibitions underscores how the socialist valorization of the ‘folk’ was not solely an enterprise of national identity, but construed as part of a crafted internationalism.

This essay examines the efforts to construct an image of global socialist society in post-war Albania, looking closely at the images published in a 1959 travelogue by artist and art critic Andon Kuqali, chronicling his visit to the People's Republic of China. This piece of writing and the accompanying sketches and prints created by the artist reflect the cultural aspects of Albania's efforts to position itself within the socialist world in the period after Stalin's death. In this decade, Albania broke with the Soviet Union and moved towards stronger political and economic alliances with socialist nations in East Asia, including China. Kuqali's travel essay represents a key document in the formation of a global socialist identity in Albania, an effort to find common ground and shared purpose – in both life and modes of artistic production – between peoples who had relatively little knowledge of each other.

Drawing on Theodore Roszak's 1969 classic, The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and its Youthful Opposition, this essay argues that the difficulties experienced by members of the counterculture in establishing bonds of solidarity with potentially like-minded groups were often shared by alternative artists working internationally post-1968. Opening with a case study in hostile American feedback on the politics of Russian émigré art in early 1980s New York, the article works through a range of unintended and intentional misunderstandings among leftist art workers and countercultural figures, whose political positions were formed in different centres and peripheries. Arguing that alternative art should be viewed as part of a shared, anti-technocratic project, the article proposes that glitches in communication are worth lingering over, as we continue to grapple with different accounts of historical developments, and seek to find ways of working across borders in polarized times.

On 1 November 1989, when the third edition of la Bienal de la Habana opened its doors, the show included ink paintings from North Korea called chosŏnhwa (literally ‘Korean paintings’). By that time, the Korean–Cuban friendship had lasted for more than three decades, following its formation after the 1959 Cuban Revolution, and based on the principle of Third World solidarity. But this encounter in 1989 illustrates that their contemporary art was out of sync with one another. The Korean presentation contrasted with the more installation-oriented, inter-media works submitted by Cuban artists who were part of the ‘New Cuban art’ wave. As an archeological study on these two starkly different visions of ‘contemporary art’, this essay sustains a bifurcated view onto Pyongyang and Havana as a method with which to reassess the culture of Third World politics and post-coloniality at the Cold War's end, and to propose a translocational, South-to-South method of art history.