ART AND

DEMOCRACY
IN POST-COMMUNIST
EUROPE
Piotr Piotrowski

translated by Anna Brzyski

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reaktion books
Published by Reaktion Books Ltd
33 Great Sutton Street
London ECIV ODX
www.reaktionbooks.co.uk

First published as Agoraphilia in Poznari, Poland, by REBIS Publishing House Ltd in 2010
Translation of this book was funded by the ERSTE Foundation

•
ERSTE Stiftung

English-language translation by Anna Brzyski

Copyright © Reaktion Books 2012

All rights reserved

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or
transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

Printed and bound in China

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Piotrowski, Piotr, 1952-
Art and democracy in post-communist Europe.
1. Democracy and the arts - Europe, Eastern.
1. Art and state - Europe, Eastern.
3. Art, East European - 20th century.
4. Art, East European - 21st century.
5. Post-communism - Europe, Eastern.
1. Title

ISBN: 978 1 86189 895 1

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 SIX

New Museums in New Europe

This text has two points of reference. The first is an assumption that the past
always has a traumatic character, although I am using the concept of'trauma
more in a colloquial and functional, rather than a strictly psychoanalytic sense.
Of course, there are different degrees of such trauma; at points the past is more
traumatic than at others. We know that it is difficult to measure the degree of
trauma, however it is clear that the past almost always appears in some way
as traumatic. The only exception is the myth of a 'golden age', which idealizes
a remote, mythological past. The second point of reference has to do with
the question of art s role in the traumatic past, its participation in 'traumatic
processing' of historical reality, and its position within historical memory.
Using those two references, I will examine the meaning of several museums
of modern and contemporary art in post-communist Europe.
Every Eastern European knows that there was never a single model of
communism that functioned in the same way throughout the former Eastern
Bloc after 1945. On the contrary, the generation that has survived communism
is fully conscious of the fact that Eastern European communism appeared in
various guises and that the experiences of different countries were sometimes
quite dissimilar. For example in Romania, especially after the mid-1970s, the
regime led by Nicolae Ceausescu was extremely reactionary, while in Poland
it was much more liberal. Estonia and Lithuania fell somewhere between
those two extremes. Even though both countries lost their independence and
were incorporated into the structure of the Soviet Union (unlike Romania,
which conducted its own politics of forgetting, independently of the USSR),
their situations were significantly different, in particular wirh regards to the
presence of an independent culture. It should also be noted that independence
was not necessarily conducive to artistic freedom, as the comparison of Estonia
and Romania amply demonstrates. Nonetheless, in each of those four instances
we are dealing with a somewhat different degree of traumatic past. This means
that in looking backwards we are addressing a recollection of a trauma or
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approaching the issue from a somewhat different perspective, a traumatiza-

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tion of memory. Therefore one could say that we are living in post-traumatic
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times. Paraphrasing Roger Luckhurst's definition of traumatic culture, we could

call the post-communist culture post-traumatic.' Luckhurst, following Walter
Benjamin, sees traumatic culture as a syndrome of traumaphilia. Certainly
historical museums such as the House of Terror in Budapest or the Museum
of the Warsaw Uprising in Warsaw could be seen as examples of traumaphilic
institutions. But we could also see an opposite syndrome in the post-traumatic
culture, namely that of traumaphobia. In this chapter I will examine a group of
museums in post-communist Europe through a prism of the tension between
traumaphilia and traumaphobia. I will be referring to the basis of both as a
negative legacy.2 The question that I will address is how traumaphilia and
traumaphobia, seen as specific responses to a negative, traumatic legacy, have
appeared and have been functioning within the museological context and
practice after 1989 in this part of Europe, often referred to as the New Europe
or the Second New Europe, to distinguish it from the Central Europe that
emerged after 1918.
As we all know, a museum is a text. It functions as a special form of
narration constructed and based within its own organizational structure, col-
lections, exhibitions and so on. Mieke Bal describes a museum as a discourse,3
Richard Kendall as a text created through the use of walls and spaces.4 Of
course, architecture plays a significant role in this discourse. There have been
numerous publications dealing with architectures role in shaping the museums
text. Some have addressed the relationship between that text and the archi-
tecture, which bears and creates particular ideological meanings of specific
museological institutions, and as such functions as its symbolic expression.
Most often, those studying museum architecture have written about how
architecture expressed the meaning of the old museums and how it supported
(or even shaped) their discourse. My goal is to follow a different path and to
ask different questions. I am less interested in a museums identity as a text, and
more in its subtext and context created by its not always well-received archi-
tecture or urban location, both of which, for obvious reasons, cannot be without
significance. Therefore I will deal with meanings of particular texts, particular
museological programmes read in the context of the buildings' location and
their relationship with the past.
Before addressing those issues, 1 will describe the general situation of
the new museums in Eastern Europe. Hundreds of new museums have been
constructed in Western Europe in recent years. One can find in almost every
country scores of new museums of modern and contemporary art. Spam, where
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one could speak of the Bilbao effect, has had particularly extensive experience

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in this matter. Almost every city has a new museum of contemporary art: MUSAC
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ART AND DEMOCRACY IN P O S T - C O M M U N I S T EUROPE

in Leon, MACBA in Barcelona, CAC in Malaga, and many others. Sometimes

those institutions do not have a permanent collection. As a result, the viewer
encounters grand empty spaces, which in an obvious way confer on the museums
architecture a certain autonomy. These buildings, often architecturally appeal-
ing, provide the city with significant symbolic capital. A similar situation can
be observed in other Western European countries, as well as in America, Japan
and, most recently, China. One of the latest and most spectacular examples of
museological imperialism is provided by the museum project or rather museum
complex in Abu Dhabi. The plans for the complex include a Performing Arts
Centre (Zaha Hadid), as well as branches of the Guggenheim Museum (Frank
Gehry) and the Louvre (Jean Nouvel). It is easy to agree with Walter Grass-
kamp's observation that museums as institutions thrive in the globalized world.5
This mass development of museums throughout the world unfortunately has
largely bypassed Eastern Europe. Russia, perhaps, constitutes a special case
since it has a number of collectors, some of whom, for example Igor Markin,
plan to create their own private museums in order to show their art collections.
It must be noted that we are dealing with a certain kind of art museum, namely
a museum of contemporary art (MOCA), connected with the global status of
contemporary art, which is supported by a museum of modern art (MOMA),6
implicated in an entirely different ideology, not of global and postmodern
art, but rather of universal modernism ideology linked with the agenda of
imperial universalization of Western modernity. This is not the place to develop
any further the discussion of to what extent 'global contemporary art' is an
expression of post-modern neo-imperialism. In the name of terminological
precision, I will only note that some of the institutions I will be examining
use the name 'museum of modern art', but in reality their identity is closer
to that of a 'museum of contemporary art'.
While noting the low interest in post-communist countries in art
museums - history museums are a different matter all together - I do not
intend to argue that the Bilbao effect is entirely absent in the post-communist
countries of Central Europe that recently entered the European Union. I am
only making an observation, which is not exactly original, that this effect is
much less prominent here than in the rest of the world. There are a number of
reasons for this, but one seems particularly important. In this part of Europe,
after 1989, governments at both the local and state levels have paid little
attention to art museums dedicated to either modern or contemporary art;
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they do not see them as sources of symbolic capital. In those countries, neo-

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hberal politicians have generally presided over economic and social issues.
Leszek Balcerowicz, the two-term Minister of Finance and Deputy Prime
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Minister of Poland in the 1990s, and later President of the National Bank of
Poland (2001-7), is representative of this group. Within his strategy of econ-
omic restructuring of Poland, Balcerowicz implemented the recommendations
of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, institutions whose
economic doctrines were less than sympathetic to the public sector, including
educational and cultural institutions. Eastern European cultural policies are
quite different from those in the West. In her essay on the Guggenheim
museum in Bilbao, Andrea Fraser writes that in the West art institutions as
well as vacant, post-industrial areas converted into entertainment and cultural
centres function for their own benefit.7 Sometimes support for museums
from politicians and the private sector leads to what Mari Carmen Ramirez
has identified as 'brokering of identity', a strategy of financial expansion that
utilizes national culture.8 In Eastern Europe the neo-liberal cult of money
and faith in self-regulation of the markets has created barriers for support
of cultural projects, especially public ones. There has also been insufficient
private capital and an absence of great art collections and of the art market,
both of which tend to put pressure on public institutions and impact their
development. Even neo-liberal businessmen who wanted to utilize culture as
an economic instrument within their market games did not have a coherent
strategy for doing so. The majority of them simply do not believe that cultural
or symbolic capital supports economic capital. Of course, the art market
needs public art museums in order to legitimize its own interests. Other than
in Russia, particularly Moscow - with the exception of Victor Pinchuk in
Kiev, who financed the city's Art Centre - there is no 'big money' invested in
art and the local art market. In particular with regards to contemporary art,
interest is simply too weak to mobilize public art museums and encourage
them to become more active.
This does not mean that Central Europe lacks museums of modern or
contemporary art. On the contrary, it is worth remembering that the first such
museum in this part of the world was created in Poland in 193 2-. when a group
of Polish Constructivists presented the city museum in Lodz with an 'interna-
tional collection' of modern art. The resulting museum became the third
museum of modern art in the world, after New York and Hanover. This historic
collection still constitutes the core of the collection at the Art Museum (Muzeum
Sztuki) in Lodz, an institution that has recently acquired a very attractive new
post-industrial space in the former textile factory complex known today as
'Manufacture'. After the war two museums of contemporary art were created
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in Yugoslavia: in 1954 in Zagreb (the museum's new building was opened to

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the public in late 2009) and in 1958 in Belgrade. In the same year, a museum
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ART AND DEMOCRACY IN POST-COMMUNIST EUROPE

of contemporary arr opened in Yerevan in Armenia, then a republic in the USSR.

We should also mention, among others, the Ludwig Museum in Budapest,
created in the late 1980s, the Moderna Galerija in Ljubljana, one of rhe most
active museums of modern art in post-communist Europe, and Veletiini Palac
in Prague (a branch of the Czech National Gallery), which operates one of the
largest exhibition spaces in the region next to the Eesti Kunstimuuseum
(KUMU) in Tallinn.
Using the theoretical frame mentioned at the beginning of this chapter,
I will focus on four new museums of contemporary/modern art that have been
created in recent years. They are the National Museum of Contemporary Art
(MNAC) in Bucharest, which opened in 2004, the KUMU art museum in
Tallinn, Estonia (strictly speaking a general museum of art with an emphasis
on modern and contemporary art), which opened in 2006, the National Art
Gallery in Vilnius (an institution that emerged from the Lithuanian Museum
of Art and is dedicated to collecting and exhibition of modern art), which
opened in new quarters in mid-2009, and the Warsaw Museum of Modern Art
(at present functioning in temporary quarters, with the permanent building
still under construction).
I would also like to mention an issue crucial for our discussion, namely
that of the location of those institutions. The Bucharest MNAC occupies part
of the gigantic People's Palace, which was built by the regime of Nicolae
Ceausescu in the 1980s and currently also houses the Romanian Parliament.
It is the third largest building in the world (in terms of square footage) after
the Pentagon and the headquarters of Chinese State Television in Beijing. The
Lithuanian National Art Gallery occupies the former Museum of the Revolu-
tion, one of the ideologically most important Soviet institutions. The building

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43 People's Palace housing the National Museum of Contemporary Art (MNAC), Bucharest.

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 NEW MUSEUMS IN NEW EUROPE

44 Entrance to the National Museum of Contemporary Art (MNAC), Bucharest.

dates from the period when Lithuania was a Soviet republic and to a certain
extent is associated with this period. The Warsaw Museum of Modern Art
will be built in close proximity to the Palace of Culture and Science, a potent
symbol of Soviet domination constructed in the 1950s according to a Russian
design. It is still the tallest building in Warsaw, standing at the intersection of
Swietokrzyska and Marszafkowska Avenues in a part of the city characterized
by the prevalence of the architectural style referred to as 'socialist modernism'.
Only the location of the Estonian KUMU has nothing to do with the commu-
nist past. The museums new and stylistically contemporary building, designed
by Pekka Vapaavuori, is situated outside Tallinn and surrounded by a large
park. The question I wish to pose concerning those art institutions has to do
with the significance of their locations and the meaning of hidden relations
between the present, symbolized by contemporary art, and the past of the
former communist regimes invoked by the museums' locations. This question
interrogates whether such locations have a deeper significance beyond prag-
matic considerations concerning the need to situate a museological institution
within an urban space and the context of existing architecture. Could we arrive
at any conclusions using this proposition regarding rhe location of art within
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history as well as our relationship to it?

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 ART AND DEMOCRACY IN POST-COMMUNIST EUROPE

The National Museum of Contemporary Art in Bucharest opened in

the People's Palace in 2004. Mihai Oroveanu, its director, wrote in the intro-
duction to the book published on the occasion of its inauguration that the
word 'museum' is usually associated with retrospection, maintenance of the
past and of the values sanctioned by that past. Announcing the museum's
future projects, he stressed that here that would not be the case. On the con-
trary, the future rather than the past would serve as the museum's focus. The
new museum would become a 'laboratory' of new values, open to an interna-
tional dialogue, new media, a synthesis of contemporary means of expression
and so on. For our discussion it is important to note that, according to the
director, the mission of this particular museum was to provide means for reject-
ing the negative legacy identified with the People's Palace. The museum should,
in other words, facilitate the process of forgetting the communist regime in
Romania and opening the country to the world and the future.9 Ruxandra
Balaci, the chief curator of MNAC and the organizer of the opening exhibition
'Romanian artists (and not only) love the Palace?!', added that the exhibition
revealed that the iconography and symbolism of the 'monstrous palace' had
changed since the times when it was used in the official art of the Ceausescu
regime. The path leads from its function as a symbol of totalitarianism, to its
critical use in the art of the 1990s by the key Romanian contemporary artists,
such as Ion Grigorescu, S u b m i t and Calin Dan, to those of the youngest
generation, who treat the Palace with an irony that mixes absurdity with sym-
pathy. It ,s those youngest artists, who do not feel any connection with the
times of their parents, who are driving the negative legacy of the Palace
towards oblivion. They look to the future rather than the past, trying to create
something p o s i t ive out of the frustrations experienced by those who have lived
through communism. Balaci reaffirms the directors vision of the museum as
a new institution that must function, above all, as a laboratory of new art,
pen to the international art scene, contemporary innovations and 'ultra-
contemporary challenges'.10

MNAC t i l 0 5 ' S t a t e m e m S k a v e l i t t l e d o u b t concerning the ambitions of the

casing th C ^ m S m U t l 0 n ° P e n t o contemporary international culture, show-
the past T h T " " * " " ^ ^ b d n g * m u s e o l o g i c a l one turned towards
must be r e 0 A " ^ ^ ^ ^ *"** ^ f o r S o t t e n ; t h e n e g a t i v e ]e&cf
posed to creT " ^ ^ ^ a n a l y s e d ° r ' m u c h less> celebrated, MNAC is sup-
for contenT" 6 * ' ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ " * s u P P o s e d t o ^ c d o n a s a type o f salon
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sense In f a c T ^ *"' * Kumthalle> r a t h e r t h a n a museum in the traditional

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Although rh ' U S m ' S S 1 0 n C ° n S i S t S ° f o r g a n i z i n g exhibitions, not collecting.
6 e m u s e " m has a collection of post-war art, which was transferred

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 NEW MUSEUMS IN NEW EUROPE

from the modern art department of the National Gallery of Art of Romania
and mainly, if not exclusively, comprises socialist realist paintings, in particular
portraits of Ceausescu and his wife Elena, it has no intention of exhibiting
them. Its institutional identity is not supposed to be based on those works,
but on contemporary global art practice.
The exhibition programme confirms MNAC'S traumaphobic attitude
towards the past." Over the last few years, the museum has staged many shows.
The first one, 'Romanian artists (and not only) love the Palace?!', seemed very
promising. It had nothing in common with the traumaphobic attitude. On
the contrary, it attempted to work through the past and the communist trauma.
The invited artists, both from Romania and elsewhere, were proposing a type
of playful engagement, sometimes ironic, sometimes completely absurd, with
this spectacular symbol of the Ceausescu era. The exhibition collected not
only works of art but also statements by artists, cultural activists and academics
concerning the social, ethical and architectural aspects of the building that
houses the new museum. Discussions concerning its history and symbolism,
which provided the framework for the exhibition, engaged the viewer in a dia-
logue on the post-communist condition. 12 The exhibition fulfilled the
expectations raised by the location and the institution sited within it. It could
have been a sign of things to come, but it was not. Although the museum's sub-
sequent exhibitions sometimes featured works that took up the analysis of
the post-communist condition, in particular those produced by leading artists
of the Romanian neo-avant garde, such as Horia Bernea, Geta Bratescu,
Roman Cotosman, Ion Grigorescu and Paul Neagu, most of the shows had
the traumaphobic character forecast by Oroveanu and Balaci. The exhibition
programme has featured many shows of international contemporary art that
shared nothing in common with the critical analysis of the post-communist
condition showcased in the inaugural exhibition. These included 'Digital Video
Art', 2005, 'Europe in An - Project of the HGB group', 2005, which presented
the collection of contemporary art amassed by this bank, 'German Art Space ,
1005, 'Deposit', 2005, which gathered a diverse and seemingly haphazard
collection of contemporary art, a show of photographic experiments from the
collection of the Valencia Institute of Contemporary Art, 2006, 'Dutch Instal-
lation Art', 2006, 'Through Popular Culture', 2006, an exhibition of Chinese
contemporary art, a show of Scandinavian video art, 2006, contemporary Japan-
ese architecture, 2006, French FRAC collections, 2007, Brazilian video art, 2007,
works from the collection of the Paris Societe Generate, 2007, and many
others that seem to be a result of the curators' art tourism. Of course, it is easy
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to understand why the museum organizes those types of exhibitions. What

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ART AND DEMOCRACY IN POST-COMMUNIST EUROPE

seems problematic is its abandonment of the critical perspective demonstrated

in such a promising way by the inaugural exhibition. Be that as it may, it is
clear that forgetting and displacement of the trauma associated with the past,
combined with a refusal to address the problematic of the post-traumatic
(post-communist) condition of contemporaneity, constitutes one of the symp-
toms of traumaphobia.
The exhibitions organized by the MNAC demonstrate that the museum's
attention is focused on the international mainstream culture. Some of the
exhibitions were sourced from the corporate world, which plays a very active
role in the Western art market and has sponsored major art collections in
accordance with the (Western) neo-liberal strategy. I realize that for such an
impoverished (by international standards) exhibition venue the opportunity to
attract ready-made exhibitions featuring works of generally good artistic quality
could be very attractive or, at the very least, economically feasible. Corporations
often cover the costs associated with the staging of exhibitions featuring their
collections, because they see them as an investment in symbolic capital, or a
form of economically affordable advertising. For the Bucharest public thirsting
for the great world of contemporary art, such exhibitions also seem attractive.
In effect, they seem to benefit all concerned: the corporations, the museum
and the public. However, such an exhibition programme implemented at the
site of the People's Palace, perhaps the most important lieu de memoire in
Romania, to use Pierre Nora's phrase, makes apparent not only economic
problems facing the country and its cultural institutions, but also, and above all,
exposes the museum's flight from history and its trauma; it reveals its abnega-
tion of a critical attitude towards the past. The MNAC programme has been
decisively focused on contemporary global artistic culture. And perhaps there
is nothing surprising in this fact. Imitation of the practices of the globalized
art world is common, and as I mentioned earlier citing Walter Grasskamp,
museums provide the most fully realized example of global institutions.'3
However, if a museum such as MNAC chooses to focus exclusively on the
global art scene and to ignore the country's past, then this must be a significant
gesture. Clearly it should be seen as a compensation for and a reaction to a
traumatic past.

Following Homi Bhabha, we could call this type of practice mimicry,

since within it the colonized imitates the colonizer, thereby participating in
his own colonization. His appearance resembles that of the colonizer; he or
she is even more like the colonizer than the colonizer himself/herself and
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this difference, a particular form of excess, reveals that he is being colonized.

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Therefore such mimicry is a self-colonizing practice. When approached from
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the perspective of power relations, it is a manifestation of the colonizer's

dominance. If we translate this into local terms, one could say that MNAC
wants to be even more international, worldly, cosmopolitan and global than
the contemporary world. If all those adjectives really are of Western prov-
enance, and indeed they are (internationalism, globalism, cosmopolitanism
and so on are strategies of Western hegemony), then in attempting to be more
western than the West, and even more global, MNAC is turning itself into a
colonized province.
The strategy used by MNAC denies one of the basic traits of a museum as
an institution, namely its local character. According to Hans Belting, museums
are local by definition. Their functioning inscribes expectations of the local
public. They are instruments that allow us to understand local societies. In
effect, they represent more a pluralistic world than the singularism of the art
world.14 In this particular instance the strategy of the Bucharesr museum -
the one announced by its leadership as well as the one pursued in practice —
provides us, whether we like it or not, with a testimony on the local public.
This does not mean that there are only those expectations I described earlier.
The situation is much more complicated. Some Romanian artists and members
of the public have criticized the museum's policy of adopting a certain attitude
of mimicry and its uncritical desire to inscribe itself into a more imagined than
real art world. As a matter of fact, such criticism deals with a broader issue,
also addressed by Belting in his writings that pose questions regarding the
local character of contemporary art. It seems that contemporary art also has
local character produced by the historical contexts that create interpretative
frames, which, by definition, refer to local culture and local public, even when
artists seem to be escaping them. Therefore a museum of contemporary art in
the era of globalization may be seen primarily through the lens of locality.
However, such 'locality' does not suggest links with 'national heritage', some-
thing that characterizes the attitude promoted by righr-wing politicians.
Belting discusses this in terms of a dynamic tension between a concrere place,
specific topography and processes of globalization.15 It is a confrontation of
two reference points, local and global, and a collision of two perspectives,
also in terms of an audience. The local audience is the audience that defines
the museum at its sources and creates its context; the global audience is the
audience that above all appears though the agency of the powerful art tourism
industry. Of course, not all museums experience the latter phenomenon to the
same extent, MNAC is only in a minor way affected by contemporary tourism,
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which focuses on the great comprehensive, mainly Western European and

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American museums, such as the Louvre, British Museum, Metropolitan
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ART AND DEMOCRACY IN POST-COMMUNIST EUROPE

Museum and Prado, or museums of modern and contemporary art, such as

the New York M O M A or London Tate Modern. Every one of those institutions
has its very local, historically situated roots; each, at the same time, plays a major
role in global art culture and, above all, in global consumer culture through
its collections and 'blockbuster' exhibitions. T h e various biennales, typical
products of the artistic globalization, are their most important competition.
But this juxtaposition also reveals the status of the museum. Although bien-
nales are organized in particular locations, seemingly in response ro the notion
of regional character of global artistic culture, they are in reality deprived of
locality. They are often organized by foreign curators, a fact that is supposed
to raise their prestige and significance within the art world. Their public is
to a significant extent international; it comes specifically for the biennale
and does not demonstrate significant interest in the local culture. If they have
any significance for the local public, it is as a kind of party or window onto the
world; they have no rootedness in the local history or social structures. That
is why a museum of contemporary art always has a dual identity. Even when
it wants to be entirely global, it is in reality local. It was created here, in a con-
crete place; here is its history and public. Therefore it possesses certain
characteristics that biennales do not have. Understood in this way, museums,
in particular (though not exclusively) museums of modern/contemporary art,
could potentially function as political forums, places where the contemporary
condition, whether defined as global, postcolonial or post-communist, could
be debated. They could play this role precisely because they span the distance
between locality and globaliry.

But let's return to our main subject. If MNAC appears here as a typical
example of a traumaphobic response by a museum to the past, such response is
perfecdy understandable in a local context. Nevertheless, the museum's trauma-
phobic character prevents it from functioning as a political forum. By contrast,
two other institutions mentioned earlier, the An Museum KUMU in Tallinn and
the National Art Gallery in Vilnius, come closer to embracing the traumaphilic
attitude. In different ways, unlike the Romanian MNAC, those institutions are
attempting to work through rather than exclude the past trauma.
Neither the location nor the architecture of KUMU relates in any way to
the communist past. Therefore it is impossible to use those features of the
Tallinn museum to identify its relationship to any of the attitudes towards the
historic trauma discussed earlier. This new museological institution occupies
a brand new, custom-designed buildingTM located in a large park situated outside

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the city. More important for our discussion is the permanent installation of
its collection of twentieth-century art. The museum's curator, Eha Komissarov,

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45 Museum of Art (KUMU), Tallinn.

made a decision to include as part of the permanent exhibition socialist realisr

paintings, which are understood in Estonia as art of the colonizers and there-
fore as Soviet art. This decision provoked heated discussion among artists
and, more generally, cultural producers. The detractors accused the curator
of promoting the art of the occupiers, something she definitely did not intend
to do. Komissarov, however, did feel that this type of work provides a neces-
sary historic reference for the independent Estonian art of the communist
period, especially of the 1970s (when Estonia was after Moscow the second
place in the USSR where one could see relatively dynamic development of such
art), but also for Estonian contemporary art.16 The curator maintained that
without such context one could not undersrand any of those phenomena, or
at least could not understand them as historical phenomena. This decision, in
addition to suggesting a number of other references, reminds me of a classic
form of psychoanalytic therapy, which heals by repeating or reminding the
patient of the experienced trauma. In other words, Komissarov was quite
conscious of the fact that repression of trauma (something that was being
suggested by her critics) and therefore certain forms of traumaphobia could
engender, to use Dominick LaCapra's terms, a 'discourse of absence' that could
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produce a state of disorientation or even confusion.17 That is why this effort

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to work though the traumatic past, here symbolized by the exhibition of

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socialist realist paintings, seems to function as an important step towards a

recovery of the historic location of Estonian culture as well as discovery of its
proper location within the contemporary world or, in other words, construc-
tion of its local identity.
The next example is provided by the National Art Gallery in Vilnius,
which is located in the restored building formerly occupied by the Museum
of the Revolution, founded during the period when Lithuania was one of the
Soviet republics. T h e National Art Gallery, which functions as a museum of
twentieth and twenty-first century art, was created in 2002 when the Depart-
ment of Modern Art, which absorbed the Contemporary Art Information
Center (part of the network of institutions created throughout Eastern Europe
in the 1990s by George Soros), separated from the main collection of the
Lithuanian Museum of Art. The museum's still developing programme is
very ambitious and includes collecting modern art, its permanent exhibition,
and temporary exhibitions of local as well as international contemporary
art. 1 The mainly local permanent collection, acquired from the Lithuanian
Museum of Art, will continue to develop. It currently contains Lithuanian art
produced after 1945 during the period of Soviet occupation, including 'social-
ist' art, also understood here in Estonia as art of the occupiers. According to
this programme, the independent as well as official post-war art will function
as a historic reference point for contemporary art, which certainly appears to be
the main focus of the National Art Gallery, as it is at the KUMU in Tallinn. In
contrast to the MNAC in Bucharest, however, which appears to want to function
as an exhibition hall rather than a traditional museum, the National Art Gallery
in Vilnius wants to play the role of a national institutional collector of modern
art. Of course its most interesting feature for our discussion is irs location in
the former Museum of the Revolution. T h e gallery opened in mid-2009 after

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46 National Art
Gallery, Vilnius.

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necessary renovations and modification of the existing building. The project

was accompanied by a certain amount of apprehension. During this period
the Lithuanian government decided to rebuild or rather build (due to lack
of iconographic records that could guide historically accurate reconstruction)
the Lower Castle of the Lithuanian Royal Palace in Vilnius, which functioned
as the seat of the dynasties that ruled historical Lithuania. Because this proj-
ect required a major financial commitment, there was a real possibility that
this would delay the opening of the National Art Gallery.19 Luckily, that did
not occur. During this period, there also appeared a plan based on a collabora-
tive initiative by the Guggenheim Museum and the Hermirage, St Petersburg,
to open a new museum of modern art, designed by Zaha Hadid, in Vilnius.
This project, which does not appear to have progressed beyond an initial stage,
never posed a real threat to the development of the National Art Gallery. Had
it been realized, though, it would certainly have created an interesting oppor-
tunity for discussion of the Russian re-colonization of this territory with the
use of symbolic capital accumulated, in this instance, by one of the greatest
museological institutions of the former (but still powerful and active) empire
undertaken in cooperation with another empire.
Of course, we could approach this history from a much more pragmatic,
rather than semantic perspective and say that the National Art Gallery in Vilnius
does not have to assign great significance to its location. Lolita Jablonskiene,
the gallery's chief curator, worries much more about the limits imposed on
the functioning of the gallery than on the dialectic of traumaphobia and
traumaphilia. That is a typically pragmatic rather than ideological concern. But
for a historian, the museum's spatial context, its location as well as its architec-
ture, cannot be ignored irrespective of the pragmatic concerns of the gallery's
administration. That context cannot be neutral on the deeper semantic level.
In other words, someone working on the history of museums cannot ignore
the spatial context, especially since in this instance one can find interesting
relations between that context and the collecting as well as exhibition plans
of this institution. If those plans deal with works produced in Lithuania after
1945, under Soviet occupation, and include official as well as semi-official art,
since unlike in Estonia there was a significant artistic underground in Lithu-
ania during this period, we could conclude that the gallery is much closer to
the traumaphilic than traumaphobic attitude.
The case of the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw is much more com-
plicated. That museum is still under construction. Currently it has neither a
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building nor a collection, but it does have an architectural design. This fact is

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significant in this particular context, because the plan to create a museum of
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contemporary art has been under discussion in Poland, with interruptions,

since 1945. Actually the Warsaw museum is already operating in a temporary
building, but it is impossible to see this space as anything resembling a proper
museological context. However, this is not the source of the complication.
What makes the situation in Warsaw so much more complex than that in the
other cities mentioned is the nature of dialectic relationship between trauma-
phobia and traumaphilia, which in Poland simply is not as obvious as in the
other countries. My decision to discuss the Warsaw Museum of Modern Art in
this chapter creates a certain paradox, but also gets to the heart of the matter.
The argument behind such a thesis seems fairly obvious. Polish post-war art,
with the exception of a short episode in the early 1950s regarded today as an
exotic experience understood more in rerms of post-memory than memory as
such, is not associated with communist trauma in the way that it is in Estonia,
Lithuania or Romania. I am willing to risk oversimplifying the issue by sug-
gesting that for many years, beginning in 1956 and ending with the fall of
communism in 1989, art was (and continues to be) understood in Poland more
within categories of 'joy' than of trauma, with a few notable exceptions. Of
course, this does not mean that the tension between traumaphilia and trauma-
phobia cannot be used here to analyse the history of art or of the museums.
On the contrary, it can, but it requires a more complicated frame of reference.
The museum will be erected on a site that faces one side the Soviet-
era Palace of Science and Culture and is in close proximity to the 'socialist
modernist' architecture of Swietokrzyska and Marszalkowska Avenues. When
the architectural competition (or rather two competitions) for the building
was announced, it was initially expected that the museum would function a
counterweight to its architectural surroundings, especially the massive Palace
of Science and Culture. The expectation was that the architectural design of
the new museum would challenge the privileged position of the Palace within
the city's centre. Ar one point during the ceremonial signing of rhe contract
between representatives of the city and national governments, the project's
rwo main backers, which took place on the future site of the museum, the
lights in the nearby Palace of Science and Culture were temporarily turned off.
This was supposed to symbolize rhe fact that the new international and modern
culture represented by the museum and its architectural design would con-
front the Stalinist architecture of the Palace and the historical memory it
embodied. However, the international jury of the architectural competition
selected Christian Kerez's project, which challenged neither the Palace nor the
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'soc-modernist' environment, and instead inscribed the museum's structure

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into the latter. It harmonized the new building with the urban environment

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of the Palace by visually extending the line of its side wings. After strident
public debate surrounding the jury's verdict, and under pressure from the press
(mainly the newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza, which took a very partisan position
on the issue), as well as state (Ministry of Culture) and local (city government)
officials, the museum's director, Tadeusz Zielniewicz, who wanted to reject the
jury's verdict, resigned. The museum's Programming Board and some of rhe
members of its Board of Governors also resigned. In reality many, though not
all, of the board members as well as Zielniewicz favoured a typical' architec-
tural design submitted by Jarostaw Kozakiewicz, working with the design
company Grupa 5 and Ala Architects, which won an honorable mention in
the competition.
In strictly architectural terms, the meaning of the winning design was
clear; it challenged neither the soc-realist Palace of Culture, nor the surrounding
soc-modernism. In historic terms, Kerez's project represents neither disavowal,
nor an effort to address the trauma. It neither rejects nor wishes to repeat the
negative legacy. Instead it functions in terms of coexistence, as a certain corres-
pondence between the present and the past. This is particularly apparent if one
pays attention to the 'L' shape of the building, to a significant extent imposed
on the design by Warsaw City Council, which was trying to harmonize the
urban areas surrounding the Palace of Culture, to close off the plaza, and to

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47 Project design for the new Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw, 2007.

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ART A N D D E M O C R A C Y I N P O S T - C O M M U N I S T E U R O P E

establish the main axis of its spatial composition along Zfota Street. It is worth
mentioning thar another new building that is supposed to be built on the
other side of the Plac Defilad, and which is also using the 'L plan, will function
as a pendant for the Museum of Modern Art. In short, the architecture of the
museum slips away from the tension between traumaphilia and traumaphobia,
and, precisely for that reason, zeros in on the problem of the Polish memory of
communism. In order to explain this paradox more fully, we have to examine
the plans for the future collection of the Museum of Modern Art, which were
developed before the architectural competition was decided.20
Unlike MNAC, but similarly to KUMU and National Art Gallery in Vilnius,
the Warsaw museum plans to create a collection of not only contemporary art,
namely art created after 1989, but also, as much as possible, of historic works
created before the fall of communism. According to the planning documents
and discussions taking place within the museum, the institution is supposed
to focus much more on contemporary than on modern art. In general con-
temporaneity', as conceived by the museum's vision of history, begins in 1989
with the fall of communism. Everything before is 'historic', everything after
'contemporary'. If the museum maintained this date as an absolute line of
historical demarcation of its programmatic activities, then we could see this
as a symptom of traumaphobia. But that is not the case. A decision was made
to extend the collection's historical depth, including art of the 1960s, referred
to within Polish art history as post-thaw art and associated with the neo-avant
garde. Such understanding of contemporaneity is typical for museums of con-
temporary art in Europe and the us. And that is the heart of the problem. In
Poland, unlike in most of the other communist countries (with the exception
of Yugoslavia), neo-avant garde an cannot be seen as a victim of the communist
system. One could even say that Polish neo-avant garde art was created within
that system. It is true that to a certain extent this work took a polemic stance vis-
a-vis the system, but it is clear that in the majority of its manifestations it was
not (especially not openly) critical of the system. There were a few exceptions.
The vast majority of experiences within the sphere of the Polish neo-avant
garde were not traumatic but, as I have already mentioned, 'joyful.' There
was no painful oppression or repressions: rather one encountered a colourful
festival atmosphere. This constitutes a very different context for any discussion
of the museum's historical references than one would find in Romania, for
example, where repression was severe, or Lithuania and Estonia, where artistic
freedom was significantly restricted compared to the situation in Poland. Social-
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ist Realism, which as a rule functioned as a negative point of reference for

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modernist and neo-avant garde art throughout Eastern Europe, did not play

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such a role in Poland. Here, unlike in other Eastern Bloc countries (with the
exception of Yugoslavia), Socialist Realism disappeared in 1956, while in
Romania and the Baltic republics it continued to function as a state an doctrine
until the very end, namely until 1989. Therefore collecting art of the 1960s,
'70s and '80s in Poland means something very different than it does in the
other Eastern Bloc countries (again with the exception of Yugoslavia). In short,
it is difficult to connect such collecting interests with any references to the his-
toric trauma.
Of course, I do not intend to claim that Poles and Polish artists were
free under communism. This country may have been a 'velvet' prison, but it
was still a prison. If Poles were satisfied with the system, they would not have
struggled against it for so many years. After all, the events of the year 1989 were
a result of their long-term resistance. This date not only has historic signifi-
cance, but also, however flexibly, it limits and defines the geographic interests
of the Warsaw Museum of Modern Art. It should also be noted that the year
1989 as a date is shared by the whole of Central Europe, unlike orher politically
significant dates, such as 1956 or 1968—70, which had different, sometimes con-
trary artistic resonances in different areas. Therefore this date, which symbolizes
the fall of communism, has been functioning as a shared historic base for cre-
ation of regional programmatic strategies. It appears that the Warsaw museum
plans to take advantage of this opportunity in developing its programmatic
course, though naturally that is not its only, or rather not its main, focus in
the context of the shared historic interests in post-communist Europe. The
Warsaw Museum of Modern Art plans, among others, to draw on such experi-
ences in developing its permanent collection and exhibition programme to a
much greater (one could even say incomparable) degree than either MNAC or
the museums in Tallinn and Vilnius. Already one can clearly see those interests
in the programme rhat the Warsaw institution is realizing in its makeshift, tem-
porary and rather modest quarters. This was apparent in three events that took
place in 2008: an exhibition of the Yugoslav neo-avant garde documentation,
the conference '1968, 1989', and an exhibition of works by Ion Grigorescu, a
key figure of the Romanian neo-avant garde. All three events took place in the
temporary quarters occupied by the museum. This means that if this project
succeeds - if the museum maintains its commitment to those interests - then
its collection will be the third collection, after the Moderna Galerija in Ljubljana
(2000) and Erste Bank in Vienna (2006), to focus on Eastern European post-
war art, in particular the neo-avant garde. By stressing those geo-histonc
interests, the museum is naturally inscribing itself into Poland's desire to be
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seen as a country that led political changes and caused the fall of communism,

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ART A N D D E M O C R A C Y I N P O S T - C O M M U N I S T E U R O P E

something that the world appears to underestimate and that seems, perhaps,
to be overestimated in Poland.
As I have argued, the architecture of the Warsaw Museum of Modern
Art parallels the institution's collecting programme in so far as it appears to be
neither traumaphobic nor traumaphilic. It reveals, however, the softness of the
transition from communism to post-communism in Poland. If the former was
not particularly traumatic for the Poles, or at least is not currently associated
with a major trauma within the collective memory along the same lines as it
is in the other countries of the former Eastern Bloc, then the history of art of
this period also cannot be associated with a traumatic past. If one can speak
of a Polish historical trauma, at least in reference to the recent past, then per-
haps one should relate it to the period of economic and political transition,
the increase in poverty and the enormous wave of unemployment (at times
reaching 20 per cenr) caused by the neo-liberal policies of the 1990s, rather than
the preceding communist period.21 One could say that there is no clear basis in
Poland eirher for traumatophobic or radically traumatophilic cultural strategies
(despite repeated appeals for such by some right-wing politicians) because the
negative legacy is not fully, or at least not to an overwhelming degree, perceived
as negative.
However, it is clear that everywhere, including Poland, the communist
system was intensely claustrophobic. People could not travel, or could not travel
freely, which meant that they could not freely participate in the international
art world. The regime of Nicolae Ceausescu creared a particularly harsh prison
for all Romanians. Now, when Romania is a free country and a member of
the European Union, its interest in the global art scene seems completely
understandable as a reaction to the traumatic past. However, if those interests
fill almost the entire programme of the country's largest museum dedicated
to contemporary art and, moreover, are not accompanied by the critical attitude
towards the past that one would expect given the particular specificity of the
museum's location, then it is impossible not to see them as a symptom of trauma-
phobia. On the other side there are the former Soviet republics that today are
independent countries affiliated with the European Union. During the period
from 1940 to 1990 they lacked sovereignty and were fully integrated into the
Soviet organism. This prolonged absence of independence appears to have en-
gendered an attitude resembling traumaphilia within the ongoing project
aimed at defining national identity in relation to the past and confrontation
with the Russian aggressors. Such an attitude towards the past seems to provide
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useful tools for dealing with the trap of the 'discourse of absence' and disorien-

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tation described by Dominick LaCapra," and what follows, for constructing

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national identity. Poland faces a unique situation. Because definition of the

past in terms of a trauma is not obvious to everyone, or even commonly
accepted, especially now, when twenty years have passed since the fall of
communism, the dialectic of traumaphilia/traumaphobia seems less useful
for historic analysis, at least in its clinical form. But as we have seen through
the example of the architecture as well as the programme of the Warsaw
Museum of Modern An, it is precisely this lack of clarity surrounding those
concepts that reflects the idiosyncratic character of the country's collective
memory as well as its ambition to be seen as a place that led the region in its
historic Transformation.

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 REFERENCES

Postsocialist Condition: Politicized Art under Late Socialism, ed. Ales Erievac
(Berkeley, CA, 2003), pp. m - 1 3 .
28 Inside I Outside. Niezalezni artysci z R. F. fugoslawii/ Independent Artists
from F. R. of Yugoslavia, exh. cat., Galeria Zacheu, Warsaw (2000), p. 22.
29 Ernesto Laclau, Emancipation(s) (London, 1996).
30 See mainly Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (Oxford, 1997).
31 Kendell Geers, T h e Work of Art in the State of Exile', in Milica Tomic:
National Pavilion. La Biennale di Venezia. $oth. International Art
Exhibition, ed. Branislava Andjelkovic, exh, cat., Museum of
Contemporary An, Belgrade (2003), pp. 1-2.
32 Adelina von Fiirstenberg, ed., Marina Abramovic: Balkan Epic (Milan,
2006), p. 10.
33 Bojana Pejic, 'Balkan for Beginners', New Moment, no. 7 (1997) [special
issue for the Venice Biennale, n.p.]. Also published in Laura Hoptman and
Tomas Pospiszyl, Primary Documents: A Sourcebook for Eastern and Central
Art since the I9$0s (New York, 2002), pp. 325-39.
34 Hans-Peter von Daniken and Beatrix Ruf, 'Marina Abramovic in
Conversation', in New Moment, no. 7 (1997) [n.p.]. See also David Elliott,
'Balkan Baroque', in Marina Abramovic. Objects, Performance, Video,
Sound, ed. Chrissie lies (Oxford, 1995), pp. 55-73.
35 Pejic, 'Balkan for Beginners', in Hoptman and Pospiszyl, Primary
Documents, p. 337.
36 Steven Henry Madoff, 'The Balkans Unbound'," in Marina Abramovic:
Balkan Epic, ed. Adelina von Fiirstenberg, p. 23.
37 Frederic Carlstrom and Marina Abramovic, 'A Conversation on Balkan
Erotic Epic', in Marina Abramovic: Balkan Epic, ed. Adelina von
Fiirstenberg , pp. 65-9.
38 Ibid., p. 67.
39 Ibid., p. 67.
40 Todorova, Imagining the Balkans.

six New Museums in New Europe

1 Roger Luckhurst, 'Traumaculture', New Formations, no. 50 (Autumn

2003), pp. 28-47.
2 See Lynn Meskell, 'Negative Heritage', Anthropological Quarterly, LXXV/3
(Summer 2002), pp. 557-74-
3 Mieke Bal, 'The Discourse of the Museum', in Thinking about Exhibitions
ed. Reesa Greenberg, Bruce W. Ferguson and Sandy Nairne (London and
New York, 1996), pp. 201-18.
4 Richard Kendall, 'Eloquent Walls and Argumentative Spaces: Displaying
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Late Works of Degas', in The Two Art Histories: The Museum and the

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University, ed. Charles W. Haxthausen (Williamstown, MA, 2002), p. 63.
5 Walter Grasskamp, T h e Museum and Other Success Stories in Cultural
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 AND DEMOCRACY IN POST-COMMUNIST EUROPE
ART

Globalisation', Museums: Intersections in a Global Scene: C/MAM 200s

Annual Conference, at www.cimam.org.
6 Hans Belting, 'Contemporary An as Global Art: A Critical Estimate', in
The Global Art World: Audiences, Markets, and Museums, ed. Hans Belting
and Andrea Buddensieg (Ostfildern, 2009), pp. 38-73-
7 Andrea Fraser, 'Isn't This a Wonderful Place? A Tour of a Tour of the
Guggenheim Bilbao', in Museum Frictions: Public Cultures! Global
Transformations, ed. Ivan Karp, Corinne A. Kratz, Lyn Szwaja and Tomas
Ybarra-Frausto (Durham, NC, 2006), pp. 135-60.
8 Mari Carmen Ramirez, 'Brokering Identities: An Curators and the Politics
of Cultural Representation', in Thinking about Exhibitions, ed. Greenberg,
Ferguson and Nairne, pp. 21-38.
9 Mihai Oroveanu, MNAC: The National Museum of Contemporary Art
(Bucharest, 2005), pp. 20—21.
10 Ruxandra Balaci, 'Romanian Artists (and not only) love Ceausescu
Palace?!', ibid., pp. 36, 40, 41.
11 See the website: http://www.MNAC.ro.
12 See MNAC: The National Museum of Contemporary Art.
13 Walter Grasskamp, T h e Museum and Other Success Stories in Cultural
Globalisation'.
14 Hans Belting, 'Contemporary Art and the Museum in the Global Age', in
Contemporary Art and the Museum: A Global Perspective, ed. Peter Weibel
and Andrea Buddensieg (Ostfildern, 2007), pp. 30—32.
15 Ibid., p. 37.
16 Eha Komissarov, T h e Era of Radical Changes: Estonian Art from the End
of the Second World War until the Restoration of Estonia's
Independence', Art Lives in KUMU: The Main Building of the Art Museum of
Estonia - KUMU Art Museum, ed. Anu Alias, Sirje Helms and Renita
Raudsepp (Tallinn, 2006), pp. 97-143.
17 Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore, MD,
2001), p. 46.
18 Lolita Jablonskiene, 'Lithuanian National Gallery of Art', paper presented
at the conference Problems in Displaying Communist Second Half of the 20th
Century Art, State Art Museum and Goethe-Institute, Riga 2005. I would
like to thank the author for making the text of her presentation available.
19 Elona Lubyte, 'Lithuanian Art Museum: Latest News from Building
Grounds', ibid. I would like to thank the author for making the text of her
presentation available.
20 Archive of the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw.
21 See Piotr Sztompka, The Trauma of Social Change: A Case of Post-
communist Societies', in Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity, ed.
Jeffrey C. Alexander, Ron Eyerman and Piotr Sztompka (Berkeley, CA,
2004), pp. r 55-95; Edit Andras, 'An Agent that is Still at Work: The
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Trauma of Collective Memory of the Socialist Past', unpublished essay.

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22 LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma.

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