On Directing Air - 2: Selforganization and the Art System in Central Eastern Europe

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The theme of self-organization has acquired a wide currency in contemporary international art circles. In the times of network cultures and in the wake of the absorption of institutional critique, critical practitioners often talk about producing new culture through cooperation and sharing, through platforms and networks, through working outside of ‘isolated’ and ‘traditional’ state-run institutions and their representative and repressive socio-political functions. Proliferating declarations of the value of self-organization come from an ever- increasing number of (so-called) ‘independent’ cultural actors, regardless of their actual material ties to institutions of culture and of governance. In the similar manner, the global art history in its post-colonial sweep (re)discovers, time and again, independent art movements and self-organized cultures of the (former) East. In the mirror of global contemporaneity the Eastern independents are often observed as the harbingers of freedom, experiment, innovation and risk. Art museums trough their monumental white spaces are re-producing the “second life” of the documentation of ephemeral actions, informal happenings, and “secret” exhibitions over and over again; they monumentalize grained black and white images of Eastern European art experiment in order to confirm the own fantasy-search for what is invisible, forgotten, non-represented, suppressed, censored, and therefore truly free.