[spectre] CFP: Intellectual Art History in Cold War Eastern Europe (Wien, 24 Oct 24-31 Jan 25)

[Andreas Broeckmann LEU]

From: Katalin Cseh-Varga
Date: Jul 6, 2024
Subject: CFP: Intellectual Art History in Cold War Eastern Europe (Wien, 
24 Oct 24-31 Jan 25)

Academy of Fine Arts, Institute for Art and Culture Studies, 
Schillerplatz 3, 1010 Vienna, Austria, Oct 24, 2024–Jan 31, 2025
Deadline: Aug 5, 2024

Intellectual Art History in Cold War Eastern Europe – Seminar Series 
Winter Term 2024/25. Organizer: Katalin Cseh-Varga.

While a transregional and transcultural approach has perhaps been the 
most influential current academic turn in East, Central and Southeast 
European art in and beyond the state socialist period, little attention 
has been paid to the circulation of ideas and their absorption during 
the Cold War. Numerous recent publications underline that socialist 
people’s democracies were not isolated in the era of bloc polarity. For 
instance, they developed their own official cultural diplomacy programs 
based on socialist internationalism and decolonial solidarity (see, 
e.g., Gabriel/Kácsor 2023; Stanek 2020; Videkanić 2019; Piškur 2019). 
Artists with little or no state support often invented their own mail 
communication channels that crossed the Iron Curtain in all directions - 
from east to west, and from north to south (see, e.g., Fehér 2024; 
Kemp-Welch 2019; Nae 2016). The complex structure of art production of 
which international exchange was a part has already made its way into 
the scholarly consciousness of all the academics engaged in area studies 
investigations into art and culture. There are still some conditions 
that have not yet been strongly integrated into the transregional and 
transcultural Eastern European art historiography, though. We do not 
know much about how contemporary non-realist artists and art theorists 
engaged with and absorbed the dominant intellectual currents that washed 
over Europe during the Cold War. Figures such as art historian and 
critic Éva Körner embraced and modified structuralism and semiotics, 
movements that went hand-in-hand with a growing cult of the ready-made, 
Wittgenstein’s influence and minimal art in the Hungarian art scene 
during the 1960s and 1970s, while Czech performance artist, scholar, and 
translator Karel Miler became a proponent of Jan Patočka’s phenomenology 
and Zen Buddhism.

It turns out that we know relatively little about the intellectual 
background of art production in socialist states such as Czechoslovakia, 
Hungary, Poland, and Romania, although it may have generated the factors 
that influenced what type of art was regarded as innovative, modern, or 
rather subversive. By looking into the role of mediators, trends in 
philosophy, and the journey of ideas from source to agent and medium, we 
can gain a comprehensive view not only of the region’s art scenes, but 
of the working mechanisms of the respective political regimes and how 
they presented themselves within and outside the Eastern Bloc. There is 
an organic and dialectical relationship between mediators and 
philosophical currents, including their carriers. Important figures in 
art theory and criticism and artists themselves in socialist people’s 
democracies absorbed, translated, and networked philosophies. The 
journeys of these travelling ideas resulted in discussions, 
publications, events, and of course, in works of art.

Against the background outlined above, this call invites the 
participation of advanced MA students, doctoral students, and 
postdoctoral researchers interested in these topics to take part in a 
series of three seminars on October 24-25 and November 21-22, 2024, and 
January 30-31, 2025. Each one-and-a-half-day seminar will be devoted to 
one theme and will be accompanied by one expert from the respective 
field. The first seminar will track down the philosophies and 
intellectual currents which acted as formative factors in artists’ and 
art networkers’ thought and creative practice. The second seminar will 
focus on mediators and key cultural players to uncover which 
personalities turned the tables and created opportunities for their 
peers, and how they shaped the canon of Eastern European art. The third 
and final seminar will build on the insights of the first two and will 
investigate and test historiographic methods for building an 
intellectual art history for understanding the region’s art.

The seminars will consist of expert talks, discussions, round tables, 
project pitches, and interactive small group work. Three weeks prior to 
the first seminar, participants are expected to submit a short 
thesis/concept paper that will serve as the foundation for group 
discussions and pitches, and which will be revised and expanded over the 
course of the workshop series.

The confirmed keynote speakers are:
•First seminar: Anna Markowska, University of Wrocław
•Second seminar: Juliane Debeusscher, Autonomous University of Madrid
•Third seminar: Simone Wille, University of Innsbruck

Send your applications, including a motivation letter and project 
description (1-2 pages) and a short biography (up to 300 words), to 
k.cseh-varga at akbild.ac.at by no later than August 5, 2024. Notifications 
of acceptance will be emailed to the attendees by August 31, 2024.

Future participants are strongly encouraged to apply for the entire 
seminar series as the workshops’ contents are interrelated and build on 
one another. Nevertheless, the organiser will also consider applications 
for one or two of the three seminars. Please indicate any limited 
availability in your motivation letter.

The seminar series Intellectual Art History in Cold War Eastern Europe 
is the concluding event of the research project Behind the Artwork. 
Thinking Art Against Cold War’s Bloc Polarity (Hertha Firnberg project 
T-1074, funded by the FWF. Austrian Science Fund, 2019-2025).


Reference / Quellennachweis:
CFP: Intellectual Art History in Cold War Eastern Europe (Wien, 24 Oct 
24-31 Jan 25). In: ArtHist.net, Jul 6, 2024. 
<https://arthist.net/archive/42279>.