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Artists from eastern Europe ask themselves how their work can be better received in the west. Don’t try it with what’s familiar! – say experts from abroad and advocate eastern allures. But, as the conference Futures of the Museum shows, they are not without controversy. By Jan Feddersen

Then came that moment in which a dispute became inevitable; that was when Boris Groys, this human Champions League in the interpretation of modern art, got stern. The philosopher and art historian, a professor in Karlsruhe for many years and now in New York, said, “Art is a battle.” The young man, a curator from Armenia, was taken aback by this response – all he had done was to remark that the incomes of artists in his country were also meagre. Groys’s remark was embedded in a realism that at first did not fit in well in this conference climate of curiosity and respect. Was the aim not to offer broader horizons to the foreign guests? The heading of the one-week conference was Futures of the Museum, organized by the Goethe-Institut, inspired and partly moderated by Stephan Wackwitz, the director of the institute in Tbilisi, Georgia.

The aim was to bring together that which belonged together – and certainly not in the post-Soviet regard. All of the men and women represented countries that once were part of the USSR, from Azerbaijan to Belarus to Ukraine, and they all wanted to hear about how it’s done: how to get a foot in the door of the established art world in the prosperous west. How does one manage to become a player and generate relevant awareness? Before Boris Groys pointed out this specific constant of most artists’ lives in a global regard – 95 percent of all who make art their profession can hardly make a living from it – Christian Demand made an important point.

The art historian, presently the editor of the periodical Merkur - Zeitschrift für europäisches Denken, refreshingly sketched out a dissident programme of what might be the opportunities of post-Soviet art. According to Demand, it is not a matter of presenting the same old ranks of artists, painters, sculptors and designers. Not the same old Koons, Richters and Pollocks, not always names like Jacobsen, Breuer or Gropius. If new museums are to arise and if artists in countries like Kazakhstan, Georgia, Armenia or Russia are to make their way, they ought to try doing their own thing – not another edition of what we can already see at the Tate in London, the MoMA in New York or the Louvre in Paris. His analysis, understood correctly, is that what hundreds of thousands of art lovers are shown in museums is merely thetical; the canon can be expanded.

The most important thing is freedom

This was taken as encouragement. Julia Sorokina, curator for contemporary art in Almaty, Kazakhstan, related that she works in cooperation with digital archives, for example with a platform called astralnomads. The name hints at the Kazakh nomadic tradition. Presenting art treasures on the Internet is faster and more practical, now with the rise of de-secularization and severe popularization of Islam in her country Kazakh art can best evolve its forwardness in what is up-to-date and archival. Groys understood this to be their way of enabling something like a “heterotopia”: a space that withdraws from social normality and lends what is yet possible a standing. Over the course of the conference, Groys grew to a kind of master consultant.

But are such demands for a counterpoint to the usual suspects realistic at all? Young nations such as Armenia and Georgia are still fragile enough that different ideas of what is important, en vogue and beautiful are not necessarily considered subversive. Yet if one looks at ex-Soviet countries, in which huge amounts of money – for instance in Azerbaijan with its grotesquely immense reservoirs of oil and gas – are now generating patrons and collectors, we can see where the journey may lead: to the familiar.

In Ukraine, in Azerbaijan as well as in Russia oligarchic cash is seeking the conventional old masters of western art. Nothing is known of aesthetic dissidence, of a will to create and also to advocate a new avant-garde. Until this changes, until Demand’s demand that the traditional be abandoned at least to some extent, questions about individual artists’ livelihoods will remain unanswered. Boris Groys answered the question of guests about how one could get into contact with buyers in the west by saying they ought to resort to communistic art, to radical gestures. In other words, in the west, what’s hot right now among art lovers is radical chic.

Wato Tsereteli from Georgia, an artist who studied in Antwerp and who leads a kind of artistically interdisciplinary life in his country and is not afraid of experimentation, called this pragmatic idea a “mixture of speculation and prostitution.” He does not prefer the cipher named Communism, transcendence in Marx’s political sense, even if he considers himself a spiritual person. For him, everything is only this-worldly – and the most important thing is “freedom.” Is that so hard to understand of countries that have only recently rid themselves of lived communism?

Article courtesy of Taz, in which this article appeared on 27 April 2013.