Balkan Art in Europe: New Exhibits of an Old Landscape
Looking east from the North American shores of the Atlantic Ocean, it seems that the contemporary western European cultural scene is slowly being flooded with cultural products originating from the Balkans. Art exhibitions in Paris, London, Salzburg, Rome, and Amsterdam, and theater performances in Vienna, Edinburgh, and the Venice Biennale have been gradually shaping (reshaping?) western European sensibilities of modern artistic expressions coming from the countries of the Balkan Peninsula. The organizers of these exhibitions and shows have announced urbi et orbi that what Europe is witnessing is nothing short of a birth of Balkan Art: art that is a powerful visualization of suffering and alienation, and an attempt to search for new meanings and new identities.[1]
It appears that many western European scholars and intellectuals, as well as theater and art critics interpret Balkan Art as a vivid and emotionally charged account of life in a land of historical uncertainties, but most of all they talk about it in terms of homogeneity, thus resorting to the old, easily understandable Eurocentric categorization of a lesser known geopolitical and cultural space. [2] Within the parameters of such categorization, all cultural creations coming from the Balkans are seen as manifestations of a somewhat exotic and distant entity. These creations radiate with passion and blood, and while deep down melancholic, their contents are nevertheless visually aggressive and captivating. However, while the Balkans has once again embraced Europe through its galleries and on the stages of its theaters and the big screens of its cinemas articulated its pain and the absurdity of its geography and politics, and spelled out uncertainties regarding its multiple identities, and even though these artistic expressions emanate from individuality and diversity, it would seem that western Europeans continue to interpret them in much the same manner the French Consul from Ivo Andrić’s novel Bosnian Chronicle interpreted Ottoman Bosnia.[3]
Considering the fact that cultural contents (film, fine arts, theatre, music) of societies and peoples living in the Balkans were, until very recently, only a blip on the wide European horizon, and were seen as manifestations of an overall unhealthy atmosphere in the “zone of uncertainty,” this sudden and overwhelming interest of Europe in its long-overlooked backyard begs a few questions. Is there such a thing as Balkan Art and if there is, what are its main features? Can the Balkans be considered a homogeneous space, either cultural or otherwise? How legitimate is such a categorization? To answer these questions even partially, it is necessary to first revisit the issue of western European stereotypes of the Balkans, and only then, and through the magnifying glass of such stereotypes, attempt to analyze recent western European curiosity.
In 1881, after traveling through Montenegro and Albania as a member of the International Commission to settle the boundaries in the region, Baron d’Estournelles de Constant wrote: “All these countries, not far from us, were then, and are still, unlike Europe, more widely separated from her than Europe from America.”[4] This sweeping generalization seems to have remained for many people the point of departure in defining the Balkans. For many western Europeans, the Balkans was not a landscape “painted with tea,” as the Serbian novelist Milorad Pavić portrayed it, but a land criss-crossed with borders and scarred with innumerable twisted mountain roads of armies and caravan trails.[5] These misconceptions were the product of an adherence to canonized western European historical discourse about the oriental other, and of the insufficient understanding of the regional specificities and the internal dynamics of historical processes in the Balkans.
Throughout the turbulent history of the region, the political elites in the various Balkan countries only reinforced this stereotypical European vista, and more recent events in the region did not bring about any positive changes in this respect. The end of the twentieth century in the former Yugoslavia was the time when the manipulated passions of ethnic nationalism awakened, and old stereotypes of Balkan tribalism and bloodthirsty highlanders became reinforced once again. The region was seen as a rough, rugged landscape of grief. For many westerners the Balkans mark the European border of audibility. From this land of fratricidal murders, blood and belonging, and atavistic tribal passions, western Europeans listened at a distance to the whispers of many voices of “disabled nations.”
However, the Balkans is not only a territory, a mountainous peninsula in southeastern Europe, lacking natural borders with western Europe. Over the last two centuries of war and of borders violently shifting under the pressure of the Habsburg and Ottoman empires, amply assisted by the Western powers, the Balkans also came to serve as a convenient metaphor. It became a metaphor for a particular forma mentis, for a savage and primeval mentality, not subjected to the sway of modern reason, a mentality whose metastases can infest “healthy” civilization in the world of global capitalism. Balkanization is today predominantly a slur, suggesting as it does the narcissistic fragmentation of large collectives into ever smaller splinter groups that assert themselves in bloodshed and cruel hatred, in the cunning moralism of purity and in the ritual evocation of ancient hatreds. “European” habits of life and mind are not immediately available in the Balkans.[6]
This marker, which sets stable and orderly society apart from tribal passions, is but an imaginary one. It can be moved around to meet the changing needs of communities, to help make sense of their fluctuating identities, though the consequences of these shifts affect all sides of the divides.[7]
The artistic and cultural endeavors created in Montenegro are important elements that are slowly reshaping the aforementioned marker of separation. Their role in this process is twofold: they act as both modifiers of past misconceptions and as restorers of margins – and the end result is therefore often a curious contradiction.
They are modifiers because, as far as materials, composition, structures, and performance techniques are concerned, such creations hardly differ from those presented throughout the western European art scene. Their multilayered structure, semantics, adherence to multiple reference points, and, above all, usage of contemporary artistic techniques indeed westernized such expressions in the region, thus partially diluting some of the earlier misconceptions about Montenegrin highlanders and the South Slavs in general.
There are numerous examples of western influence on the Montenegrin cultural scene, such as the extensive use of Internet, video, installations, and performances, and the Western coloring of the Montenegrin cultural space is also clearly visible on the more general level of popular culture. Among many rather curious artistic mixtures, the most interesting is a group of young musicians who call themselves The Books of Knjige, ie. The Books of the Books. Aside from composing songs and performing them in front of live audiences, members of this band are prominent video-artists. Naturally, this westernization of the local cultural scene could be explained in more ways than one and analyzed accordingly. It could be approached as a symbolic distancing from a traditional notion of homeland. Names of restaurants, cafés and clubs, such as City Hall, Piccadilly, Soul to Soul, Mr. Good, Irish Pub, and many others, seem for young Montenegrins to be a way of stepping out and away from their parochial local framework. These, and the many other examples of linguistic borrowings from the English language used to “grace” various local cultural events, seem to also manifest a desire to be recognized as a full-fledged member of the “European family.”[8] However, the visibility of these contemporary points of contact between the “two worlds” constitutes the outer limits of their modifying function.
On the other hand, the exchange of meanings and impressions with western European audiences that Montenegrin artists desire seems, more often than not, to end up in a cul-de-sac of cultural miscommunication. The thematic clusters depicted in the works of art from Montenegro often serve to reinforce existing western European stereotypes about the cultural content in Montenegro. It is the content and not the form that simultaneously attracts and alienates western audiences because it is visually aggressive and demands full attention and an emotional investment on the part of a viewing public. The content is unavoidably pregnant with dark memories of exodus, ethnic cleansing, borders and boundaries, exclusion and inclusion, identity and self-recognition. For the most part, western Europeans do not concern themselves with such issues, except when it is absolutely necessary for them to display proverbial compassion with victims of unfortunate historical or political circumstances. It is necessary, however, to recognize and give due credit to western European foundations and non-governmental organizations for their activities in helping to keep open the lines of communication between local artists and the outside world. Such efforts indicate that creative artists in Montenegro and in the Balkans in general are not, after all, the lost citizens of an imaginary country.
This is not to deny that many Montenegrin artists view western Europe and a chance to exhibit their artwork or perform their plays there as the ultimate proof of the artistic value of their work. Being included in recent exhibitions at galleries and places such as Arte in Guerra, at the Palazzo Reale in Naples, Blood and Honey and TransArt in Vienna, Venice’s Biennale, Le Monde de l’Art Gallery in Paris, and participating in the Edinburgh Theater Festival carry more weight than any hometown exhibition or theater performance. Such a notion is undoubtedly anchored in reality, but it becomes problematic when the validity of western European artistic judgment is overemphasized and taken at face value.
There is another dimension to this urge to be seen and recognized by Europe. The reality of harsh economic conditions in Montenegro and the possibility of selling one’s art abroad often results in various compromises in terms of thematic frameworks offered to the viewing public. Since the viewing public in western Europe is accustomed to approaching the South Slavs and the Balkans with the aforementioned stereotypes and expect to see more of the same, Montenegrin artists, musicians, film and theater directors are inclined to provide in their works at least a hint of what is expected of them. To put it more specifically, local artists are aware that cleverly manipulated images of bloodthirsty tribal chiefs, the high resonance of the patriarchal logic of life in their plays, and the fascination with the mythologized past in their songs have acquired significant market value throughout western Europe.[9] A successful local artist inevitably reinforces western misconceptions.
In the contemporary world of instant gratification (cultural and otherwise), making an emotional investment vis-à-vis a work of art created in Montenegro, and the Balkans in general, is seen by many western Europeans as somewhat of an imposition rather than an invitation to a dialogue, and as an opportunity to decipher the meaning of one’s melancholy and passion. Given such sentiment, the growing number of exhibitions of so-called Balkan Art only reinforces the demarcation line between “us” and “them.”
Since the potency of local artistic imagery and its regional and/or ethnic specificities is difficult to avoid, organizers often resort to misconstrued generalizations, such as the one about the Balkans as a homogeneous entity, at least as far as art is concerned. The most recent example of such a perception of the Balkans is an art exhibition put together by the museum in Kassel (Germany). In the Balkan Gorges features the works of 88 artists from twelve countries of eastern and southeastern Europe. It is noteworthy that the exhibits selected in cooperation with a number of artists, art critics and museum directors from various Balkan countries, including Serbia and Montenegro. Aside from the Montenegrin Petar Ćuković, an advisory committee responsible for selecting the works of art included, among others, Škeljzen Maliqi from Kosovo, Dunja Blažević from Zagreb, and Branislav Dimitrijević from Belgrade. The exhibition prospectus emphasizes some of the features all 88 artists share, such as the application of new techniques and technological innovations in their works and their effort to addressing anew questions about the status of the artist in a given society. According to the organizers, these elements show that artists from southeastern Europe are fully integrated in a global artistic discourse.[10] Those who adhere to postcolonial discourse would say that the European fascination with Balkan Art represents a polished version of the old colonial attitude.
Thematic clusters such as war, exodus, displacement, identity, alienation, and transition are mistaken as the common denominators of almost all works of art created in the Balkans. Two important characteristics are overlooked: a strong sense of regional and local specificities with regard to content, and the position of the individual artist with respect to the work of art. Local specificities indeed dissolve any thesis about the homogeneity of the Balkans as an artistic and geographic space (not to mention numerous other levels of heterogeneity that characterize this region). Even though an individual artist might not be visible in a particular work of art at first glance, it is the power of her absence that is often misinterpreted as a lack of individuality. The artist is indeed present but his presence is shrouded by the broader context of social change expressed through his/her work. This is the point where, in the minds of many westerners, art and politics meet and political or economic traumas (or a combination of the two) of many peoples from the Balkans merge with individual artistic expressions. Naturally, artists’ immediate political, economic and social environments are usually their first source of inspiration, but it would be a mistake to consider them the only or the exclusive one.
For a western European observer, it seems much easier to glance from a distance at these multicolored and vivid expressions of angst and then categorize them as confirmations of one’s earlier views about eastern exoticism of the “other” than to engage in a potent encounter with the reality of others’ lives and participate fully in cultural and social exchange.
Notes
[1] André Rouillé, “Becoming with the World,” Introduction to Devenirs: Contemporary Art (Paris: Cultureaccess, 2001), pp. 1-2. Also see Lara Boubnova, ”Are we all real ‘Polar Bears’ or Not?” Gazetta, Vol. 02, Zagreb 2002, as well as Jadranka Vinterhalter, “Contemporary Art Scene in Croatia,” Gazetta, Vol. 03, Zagreb, August 2002.
[2] Among many prominent art curators in Europe, Rene Blok and Harald Szeemann have shown particular interests in exhibiting “Balkan Art.” Andrea Saula, “Interview with Erzen Shkololli,” UNMIK on AIR, November 21, 2003. Available at:
http://www.unmikonline.org/radio.scripts/English/november03/211103.htm. See also Dobrila Denegri, “Balkan Art,” Arte e Critica, available at: http://www.artantide.com as well as André Rouillé, Ibid, pp. 3-4.
[3] Ivo Andrić, Bosnian Chronicle, trans. Joseph Hitreck, Arcade Publishing, 1993.
[4] “Reéit de moeurs de la Haute Albanie par P.H. Constant,” Revue des Deux Mondes, March 1, 1881.
[5] Milorad Pavić, Landscape Painted with Tea, Knopf, 1991.
[6] Srdja Pavlović and Aleš Debeljak, “Gingerbread Hearts,” in Srdja Pavlović and Aleš Debeljak (eds.), Studies in the Social History of Destruction: The Case of Yugoslavia. Special issue, International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society, Volume 17, Number 1, New York, Fall 2003, pp.7-9.
[7] S. Pavlović and A. Debeljak, ibid. pp. 7-9.
[8] Linguistic borrowings and attempts to “Europeanize” local cultures are neither exclusive to the former Yugoslavia nor to the Balkans. Similar trends could be observed not only in most (if not all) of the countries formerly part of the Soviet zone of influence, but are examples of the global trend toward the either “Europeanization” or “Hollywoodization” of local cultures.
[9] This is particularly visible in plays recently produced by the Montenegrin State Theater, such as Bokeški D-Mol, Jelena Savojska, and Krsto Zrnov. Another example is the summer 2003 Montenegro Music Festival. The Montenegrin daily press went on to transliterate the English title into Montenegro Mjuzik Festival, thus further highlighting the constructed nature of the whole endeavor.
[10] N.N., “U Gudurama Balkana: Reprezentativni Projekat Muzeja u Kaselu,” Pobjeda, section “Kultura,” Podgorica, August 15, 2003.