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This book illuminates the interconnections between politics and
religion through the lens of artistic production, exploring how art
inspired by religion functioned as a form of resistance, directed
against both Romanian national communism (1960-1989) and, latterly,
consumerist society and its global market. It investigates the
critical, tactical and subversive employments of religious motifs
and themes in contemporary art pieces that confront the religious
'affair' in post-communist Romania. In doing so, it addresses a key
gap in previous scholarship, which has paid little attention to the
relationship between religious art and political resistance in
communist Central and South-East Europe.
This book illuminates the interconnections between politics and
religion through the lens of artistic production, exploring how art
inspired by religion functioned as a form of resistance, directed
against both Romanian national communism (1960-1989) and, latterly,
consumerist society and its global market. It investigates the
critical, tactical and subversive employments of religious motifs
and themes in contemporary art pieces that confront the religious
'affair' in post-communist Romania. In doing so, it addresses a key
gap in previous scholarship, which has paid little attention to the
relationship between religious art and political resistance in
communist Central and South-East Europe.
The closer the past is, the less penetrable it becomes for the
historian. The scholar's task is to recollect possible surviving
data and to make them intelligible. This book explores some of the
most important "existential programs" of the artists who lived in
communist Romania. My main attempt in this study is to correct the
canon of visual arts of the communist period by including some
neglected "unofficial" artists in. I hope that the great majority
of artists who have been at history's margins will be acknowledged
and remembered, and I also hope that this rehabilitation will
create a different panorama of the "new history." I am sure that
here are many other artists and cultural workers of that time
waiting to be discovered. It is the task of their contemporaries to
make their stories visible and useful. It is a duty as well. In
this sense, I believe that artists, art historians and cultural
historians will find this book quite interesting.
The essays in this collection make up the first study of "dropping
out" of late state socialism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet
Union. From Leningrad intellectuals and Berlin squatters to Bosnian
Muslim madrassa students and Romanian yogis, groups and individuals
across the Eastern Bloc rejected mainstream socialist culture. In
the process, multiple drop-out cultures were created, with their
own spaces, music, values, style, slang, ideology and networks.
Under socialism, this phenomenon was little-known outside the
socialist sphere. Only very recently has it been possible to
reconstruct it through archival work, oral histories and memoirs.
Such a diverse set of subcultures demands a multi-disciplinary
approach: the essays in this volume are written by historians,
anthropologists and scholars of literature, cultural and gender
studies. The history of these movements not only shows us a side of
state socialist life that was barely known in the west. It also
sheds new light on the demise and eventual collapse of late
socialism, and raises important questions about the similarities
and differences between Eastern and Western subcultures.
The essays in this collection make up the first study of "dropping
out" of late state socialism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet
Union. From Leningrad intellectuals and Berlin squatters to Bosnian
Muslim madrassa students and Romanian yogis, groups and individuals
across the Eastern Bloc rejected mainstream socialist culture. In
the process, multiple drop-out cultures were created, with their
own spaces, music, values, style, slang, ideology and networks.
Under socialism, this phenomenon was little-known outside the
socialist sphere. Only very recently has it been possible to
reconstruct it through archival work, oral histories and memoirs.
Such a diverse set of subcultures demands a multi-disciplinary
approach: the essays in this volume are written by historians,
anthropologists and scholars of literature, cultural and gender
studies. The history of these movements not only shows us a side of
state socialist life that was barely known in the west. It also
sheds new light on the demise and eventual collapse of late
socialism, and raises important questions about the similarities
and differences between Eastern and Western subcultures.
Should politically concerned and engaged artistic production
disregard questions or/and requirements of aesthetic reception and
value? Whether art should be "aesthetic" or "political" is not a
new question. Therefore, in spite of those several contemporary
approaches of this issue, the answer is not set in stone and the
debate is still going on. This volume aims to broaden these debates
and it stems from numerous conversations with politically engaged
artists and artist collectives on issues related to the
"aesthetitzation of politics" versus the "politicization of art,"
as well as the phenomenon of the so-called "unhealthy aestheticism"
in political art. Thus, this study has three interrelated aims:
Firstly, it aims to offer an interdisciplinary account of the
relationship between art and politics and between aesthetics and
the political. Secondly, it attempts to explore what exactly makes
artistic production a strong - yet neglected - field of political
critique when democratic political agency, history from below and
identity politics are threatened. Finally, to illuminate the
relationship between critical political theory, on the one hand,
and the philosophy of art, on the other by highlighting artworks'
moral, political and epistemic abilities to reveal, criticize,
problematize and intervene politically in our political reality.
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