ABSTRACT

This edited collection reassesses East-Central European art by offering transnational perspectives on its regional or national histories, while also inserting the region into contemporary discussions of global issues. Both in popular imagination and, to some degree, scholarly literature, East-Central Europe is persistently imagined as a hermetically isolated cultural landscape. This book restores the diverse ways in which East-Central European art has always been entangled with actors and institutions in the wider world. The contributors engage with empirically anchored and theoretically argued case studies from historical periods representing notable junctures of globalization: the early modern period, the age of Empires, the time of socialist rule and the global Cold War, and the most recent decades of postsocialism understood as a global condition.

chapter |22 pages

Introduction—Globalizing East European Art Histories

The Legacy of Piotr Piotrowski and a Conference

part I|57 pages

Challenging the National Container

chapter 1|14 pages

Uprooting Origins

Polish–Lithuanian Art and the Challenge of Pluralism

chapter 2|14 pages

Managing Trans/Nationality

Cultural Actors within Imperial Structures

chapter 3|11 pages

From Fringe Interest to Hegemony

The Emergence of the Soros Network in Eastern Europe 1

part II|52 pages

Hybridity

chapter 6|15 pages

Eastern Europeanizing Globalization

Polish Artists at the Venice Art Biennale and the Historical Microcosms of Globalization

chapter 7|19 pages

Modernism on the Margins

Breslau’s Architectural Future Between High-rise Utopia and Down-to-Earth Realism

part |1 pages

Plates

part III|42 pages

Global Communities and the Traffic in Ideas

chapter 9|13 pages

“Our Imaginings Unite with Reality”

Ideological Encounters in Milan Knížák’s Ten Lessons

chapter 10|13 pages

Transculturation, Cultural Transfer, and the Colonial Matrix of Power on the Cold War Margins

East European Art Seen from Latin America

part IV|41 pages

Contemporary Art Praxis and the Production of Discourses

chapter 11|10 pages

Undoing the East

Toward the World’s (Semi-)Peripheries

chapter 12|15 pages

Performance Art in the Global Flow of Cultural Goods

Some Eastern European Positions

chapter 13|14 pages

Artistic Responses to LGBTQI Gaps in Archives

From World War II Asian America to Postwar Soviet Estonia