Artists respond to censorship and surveillance in Walker’s exhibit about experimental art in the Eastern Bloc

“Multiple Realities: Experimental Art in the Eastern Bloc, 1960s-1980s,” on view at the Walker Art Center, takes visitors to Central Eastern European countries during the height of the Iron Curtain, in a sweeping exploration of the experimental art that was flourishing in that time.

Curated by the Walker’s Pavel Pyś, with curatorial assistant William Hernández Luege and curatorial fellow Laurel Rand-Lewis, the show brings nearly 100 artists from East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and Yugoslavia.

Throughout the exhibition, there’s quite a bit of variation of the experiences the artists were living in. Artists in East Germany, for instance, were much more closely monitored than artists living in Yugoslavia, and the political climate of the different countries shifted at different times. The exhibition includes a lot of documentation of performance art, but also includes photography and film, mixed media work, sculpture and more. There are also gorgeous textile works in the show.

As you enter, there’s a strong emphasis on artists responding in some way to censorship and surveillance. In one series made after the fall of the Berlin Wall, German artist Cornelia Schleime was able to obtain the files the Stasi was keeping on her. For the series, she stages photographs of herself doing all of the outlandish things she was reported to have done, juxtaposed with the actual files.

Another section featured artists exploring femininity, though many didn’t ascribe feminism to their practice. “Feminism is a term that many of the artists actually resist,” Pyś says during a media tour. “For many of these artists, they would point to very different realities for working as women artists at the time.” Under communism, women had much greater access to contraception, for example.

Yet there are works that do read as what we in the west would consider feminist, like Sanja Ivekovíc’s series “Dvostruki Zivot” (Double Life), made in 1975 and 1976. It reproduces women’s magazines, juxtaposing them with photographs of herself taken before the magazine publications were produced. Often, both of the juxtaposed images hold the same pose, in a comment on internalized ways women behave, and how media reinforces those social norms. “She’s showing how that personal memory plays into the mass media portrayal of a femininity at the time,” Pyś says.

In “Multiple Realities,” Pyś and the curatorial team don’t leave much room for state-sponsored art or work that celebrates nationhood or communism. There’s quite a bit of social critique in the exhibition — often quite subtle — and it’s not always pointed negatively at the government.

“Often there’s this assumption that when you’re living and working in a society where artistic expression is controlled, and where your voice as an artist is controlled, there’s this expectation that you have to be a nonconformist, or a dissident, and always orient your practice against a dominant ideology,” Pyś says. “That’s really not the case in this region and in this time.”

Instead, Pyś describes artists being political “in the most unpolitical of ways,” with a lowercase “p.”

“What I love so much about the work in this show is that often they’re smuggling political meaning, they’re slyly and in a very cunning way, putting political meaning in their work in a way that’s not immediately legible,” Pyś says. “You really have to scratch the surface or even get the in-joke to appreciate that.”

In “Revisiting of Herakles (Heracles Concept)” (1982/2023), East German/German artist Lutz Dammbeck recreates Neoclassical sculptures of Nazi sculptor Arno Breker and layers them with Grimm’s fairy tales, as well as text by playwright Heiner Müller, to probe Germany’s past, present and future. Dammbeck first wrote the work as a screenplay, but it was rejected by the state-run Dresden Studio for Animation. In 1985, Dammbeck realized the project as a multi-media collage at the first Intermedia Festival at Coswig, and has been continually working on the piece since.

Over one image of a Breker sculpture, Dammbeck projects sprawling text, like “Eigen Sinn” (self-will), and “Once Upon a Time.” At another place, a giant tear seems to divide the projected image in two. The layered work is in constant motion, and its message isn’t a direct attack against the regime Dammbeck was living under. Instead, it asks the difficult questions about where Germany has been, its fractured state, and what the future might hold.

Other artists in the show created work through official channels as their main source of income and did experimental art on the side. In the black and white “akad. mal. (Antihappening)” (Academic painting [Antihappening]), Július Koller poses with a drab painting of a city landscape he painted for souvenir shops, poking fun at his own work. (Koller also created more conceptual works, like an interactive ping pong game, or postcards that invited the public to ponder U.F.O.s, often using irony to comment both on Communist Czechoslovakia and the Western art world.)

Koller’s seeming double life is not so much of an anomaly. According to Pyś, events like the Hungarian uprising in 1956, Prague Spring in 1968 and Marshal Law in Poland in 1981, shifted individual artists’ alliances.

Jürgen Wittdorf, meanwhile, was commissioned by the East German government to create a series called “Jugend und Sport” (Youth and Sport) in 1964. Wittdorf fulfilled the assignment by creating socialist realist linocut prints, but with a heavy dose of homo-eroticism. One of the prints features a group of young men in swimming suits, posing as one of the young men takes photographs. Another features young men showering in the nude, one playfully splashing another. There’s one of young women in swimming suits as well, with one of the young women wrapping her arm around another.

“While homosexuality was decriminalized in the late ’60s in East Germany, it was still a topic that was very taboo and not present in art,” Pyś says. “This is a great example of an artist using an official permission, but also smuggling meaning that was not permitted into their work.”

Pyś has also included a number of examples of artists’ more active subversion of government interference. There’s Sanja Iveković’s “Trokut” (Triangle), where the artist masturbated on her highrise terrace when Yugoslavian President Josip Broz Tito passed by in a motorcade, after everyone was ordered off their balconies.

Gabriele Stötzer, another East German artist, conducted a series of portraits of a cross-dressing model. It turns out the model was a Stasi informant, something Stötzer didn’t find out until after the Berlin Wall fell. “This raises the question who is looking at who?” Pyś says.

The last gallery of the exhibition features artists making work that grappled with technology. Czechoslovakian artist Zdeněk Sýkora collaborated with scientist Jaroslav Blažek, a professor at St. Charles University, one of the first in the country to have a computer. The two created a computer program to determine the shape and color of the painting. “The computer would do a calculation and decide on the final composition of the work,” Pyś says. Sýkora did paint the work, but its composition was decided by the computer. “Today, we’re thinking a lot about these issues of how computer algorithms, how AI, even NFTs, feature in contemporary artistic practice,” Pyś says. “It’s very interesting to come back to this generation who are thinking about a lot of those conceptual problems early on.”

It’s one of the many places where art during the period resonates with our current moment. While it may be a very specific political landscape where the artists were creating work, many of the themes — from mass surveillance, authoritarianism and our human relationship with technology — still inspire artists globally today.

“Multiple Realities: Experimental Art in the Eastern Bloc, 1960s–1980s” runs through March 10 at the Walker Art Center. More information here.