Learning from the Visual Masters of Cold War Subversion

Art in troubled times: thus was it ever.

The new exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery entitled Multiple Realities: Experimental Art in the Eastern Bloc, 1960s-1980s, offers a bevy of ideas about how to resist authoritarian forces. In short, it’s a lot of S-words: solidarity, subversion, sex. And of course, shit disturbing.

Curated by Pavel Pyś, the curator of visual arts at the prestigious Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Multiple Realities could not have arrived at a more opportune moment. We might soon be called to put into action many of the strategies employed by artists in the half-dozen countries featured in the show, including East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and Yugoslavia.

Pyś, who grew up in Poland, is an extremely capable speaker. Multiple Realities originated in part from his personal experience. When Pyś was charged with putting together the exhibition, he explains, he knew “there was an incredibly juicy, diverse and exciting story” about a time and place that wasn’t particularly well-known.

In the media preview at the VAG, he expertly laid out the different national contexts as they relate to the 20-year period that forms the spine of the show. In support of this intent, each section is introduced by information cards displayed on open latticework. This kind of informational scaffolding operates like a second exhibition within the greater body of the show.

As Pyś says, this was designed to be provisional, modular and open, offering a greater understanding of “life behind the Iron Curtain.”

Unlike the clichéd notion of a bleak, dreary existence, the truth was that Eastern Bloc artists living through the height of the Cold War years were doing what artists have always done: experiment, take drugs, have a good time and make work that actively kicked back at the state-sanctioned version of art in those years.

A far cry from grey, cold and repressive, much of the work in Multiple Realities is throbbing with incandescent life.

The opening section, “Public and Private Spaces of Control,” emphasizes photography and film, as well as the spaces where performances and political interventions could take place.

Most often, those spaces were public streets, which offered a site of revolution and a broad canvas for making art.

Humour, an enduring tool to buck the man

Hungarian artist László Fehér’s Underground Passage I., a photo-realistic representation of subway riders ascending and descending stairs, kicks off the show. The work features faux rips painted into the image so that it resembles an old, much-creased photograph.

The painting functions somewhat as an ironic commentary on what follows in the rest of the show. Nothing is quite what you expect; humour plays a large role in many of the works.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in Akademia Ruchu’s Stumble, a short film that captures pedestrians tripping over an imaginary impediment. It’s more than a funny stunt. The action was filmed unobtrusively by a member of the Polish arts collective who captured the performance with a camera at hip level while other members of the group pretended to trip over an invisible obstacle.

After watching, other walkers began to studiously avoid the area, despite the fact that nothing was actually there. The unspoken idea is that the invisible patterns and behaviours shaping and controlling society are just that: arbitrary, odd and powered only by the human force of will. The fact that the film was made just outside of the Communist party headquarters in Warsaw adds another sharp layer of satire.

As a tool to poke holes in oppression, humour is still one of the sharpest instruments available. This is blazingly evident in Sanja Iveković’s Triangle.

In a series of black and white photos, the artist is depicted sitting on her apartment balcony in 1979 while a motorcade celebrating Josip Broz Tito, the then-leader of Yugoslavia, is taking place on the street below.

In the bright sunshine, Iveković reads, sips from a glass of whisky and pretends to masturbate until a secret service official shows up and requests that she cease and desist.

For truth tellers, punishment

The intersections between the personal and the political have a certain poignancy that reaches across the decades, reminding one that artists have been dealing with forces of political control for a very long time.

Surveillance is one of the most insidious of these, but even with full state power marshalled to invade intimate spaces, artists found a way to subvert these actions.

Czech photographer Jan Ságl’s photo series House Search (Domovní prohlídka) came about after he learned that the secret police intended to pay him a visit. These visits were customary in Czechoslovakia in the aftermath of the Prague Spring when government forces were waging a none-too-covert war on artists and the counterculture.

Ságl painstakingly documented the different rooms in his apartment, capturing the intimate details of domestic space, rumpled sheets and cluttered kitchen, before removing everything so that when the secret police arrived, all they found was a series of empty rooms.

In 1973, Ságl gave the undeveloped film containing the photos of his former home to a friend to hide under the floorboards. Years later, the same friend forgot they were there and laid down a concrete floor. Fortunately, a second set of prints was discovered, kept safe by another colleague of the artist.

But it wasn’t until 2012 that the images were printed and shared publicly: a 40-year delay that speaks to the relevance of the issues being examined.

Ságl’s photos are accompanied by a series of Polaroids from another artist. Simon Menner’s Secret House Searches (2011-12) includes photos that were taken for the purposes of continuity by the authorities.

The thinking was that after the officials rifled through an apartment, the photos would guide them in returning everything to its original state so the residents would never know of their presence.

Artists are often among the first people to be targeted in authoritarian regimes, primarily because of their need to illustrate the truth in all its complication and nuance.

This impulse ranges from the micro to the macro, but often begins with the body. Unruly, contrarian and desirous of things deemed wrong by the state, the body wants what it wants, be it freedom, solace or sex.

In the face of oppression, pleasures of the flesh endure

In a series of woodcut prints designed to celebrate youth in sport, Jürgen Wittdorf offered up exquisitely crafted images featuring young people partaking of the pleasures of the body. Under the Shower depicts a group of nude men in all their youthful glory, suds and eroticism aplenty.

Even as curator Pyś explained that the images had been proudly displayed for decades, I did a bit of a double take. One youth is bent double in front of another man, and at first glance, it looks as though some oral pleasuring is taking place. But on closer examination, the man in question is bent down with a scrub brush, washing his thighs.

Another of Wittdorf’s images, Freundschaftsfoto (Friendship Photo), features a group of singularly handsome young men posing happily for a photograph. The easy sensuality of their postures, not to mention the curious bulges in their shorty shorts, makes it easy to imagine what might take place next.

With more than 100 artists, the work of pulling this show together is considerable. As Pyś explained in the preview, the curatorial work was also a labour of love. His team tracked down artwork from ephemeral clues like a single black and white photograph. They took to Facebook and Instagram and called people, emailed them, visited and talked.

As he recounts, one body of work was secured after spending a day with the widow of a particular artist and pulling work from underneath the bed or the closet, where it had been stored for decades.

Many of the photographs, sculptures and paintings have rarely been outside their countries of origin. The cumulative effect packs a serious wallop. But the show also has the curious boomerang effect of illustrating how strategies of repression and resistance haven’t changed all that much.

In creating her photo series Trans sitzend (Trans Sitting), German artist Gabriele Stötzer was approached by a young subject who asked her if she would be willing to take photos of him dressing in women’s clothing. In the photographs, a young man faces the camera, looking alternately shyly ecstatic and a wee bit wary as he models stockings and lingerie.

It was only much later that the artist discovered that the young man was in fact a member of the Stasi, the infamous East German police force.

As Pyś noted in his introduction, at least Stötzer lived long enough to see her work celebrated. He recounts that at an event organized in tandem with the exhibition, she partied hard, drinking much younger folk under the table.

Despite the fact that homosexuality was still criminalized in many of the countries included in the show, gay and lesbian clubs attracted a raucous crowd, as documented in photos that feature people smooching, dancing and whooping it up.

While the popular conception persists that the artists included in the show were cut off from the western world, creating work with no knowledge of larger trends or movements happening in the international art world, the reality is more complicated. Many of the works, in particular, the fabric and textile-based ones, were deemed less of a political threat and were circulated on the international scene.

Performance, ephemeral and fleeting, was also thought to be less dangerous. The truth is probably just the opposite. The impact of performances, recreated in installations in the show, is wild in extremis.

Multiple Realities takes a while to absorb. There are a great many ideas, experiences and works to take in. I saw the show three times and learned something new, often deeply fascinating, each time.

If you’re visiting the Vancouver Art Gallery, bring a notebook and prepare to take down detailed ideas about how to live and work in a time and place where misinformation, surveillance and oppression are hard at work.

As the adage goes, history doesn’t necessarily repeat itself, but it often rhymes. The echoes between past and present are so heavy in places that they feel positively bludgeoning.

Even as the current political culture seems intent in recreating some of the worst aspects of life behind the Iron Curtain, the show is a shouted reminder that artists will always find a way to kick out the jams and let the light in.

‘Multiple Realities: Experimental Art in the Eastern Bloc, 1960s-1980s,’ is at the Vancouver Art Gallery until April 21, 2025.