The exhibition »Blut & Honig. Zukunft ist am Balkan« is a very fine and thoroughly successful misunderstanding. This is because its »author«, the legendary Harald Szeemann, is so hopelessly in love with art and artists. Since Freud, however, we know that falling in love is always based on a misunderstanding: the extreme overestimation of the love object. Consequently, what Szeemann admires about art is those qualities that objective, coolly post-modern viewers have not craved for a very long time: its pre-reflective, emancipatory power, its socio-critical instinct, its ability to construct its own utopian worlds in the face of reality and even to improve our real world. The main theme of this exhibition is to be found in this blind love of art, in Szeemann’s unshakeable belief in its innocence and creativity. The rest consists of compromises, makeshift constructions and shaky ideological frameworks. This applies above all to the actual topic of the exhibition: the Balkan region and its art.

The curator sees “Blut & Honig” as belonging to the same series as his themed exhibitions, such as »Visionäre Schweiz« (1991), »Austria im Rosennetz« (1996) or the earlier project »Monte Veritá. Der Berg der Wahrheit«, with which Szeemann repeatedly tried to construct a utopian home for discarded ideas and eccentric life projects within the symbolic bubbles of art exhibitions – a sort of alternative to official historiographies and prevailing ideologies. In other words, in Szeemann’s projects it is the old mole of counterculture that is still burrowing its way through today’s art world. And it has a mission to carry out or, to be more exact, a task of integration: »This is not about displaying the exotic, but about the integration of a cultural landscape into the consciousness of Western sensibilities«, Szeemann writes in the foreword to the catalogue. In so saying, he also explains the subtitle of the exhibition: »Future’s in the Balkans«. This future is to be a new coming-together of different language communities, religions, minorities and majorities in the Balkans, and their joint integration into the Western world. And it is art that is meant to herald this future today and set it in motion.
Unfortunately there is also a political reality outside of the art scene that has its own ideas about the future of the Balkans and Europe. In the very next article in the catalogue, »Österreich und der Balkan« (Austria and the Balkans), written by the Austrian politician Erhard Busek, the present coordinator of the Stability Pact for South Eastern Europe, the reality principle already makes a forceful appearance. Its voice is unyielding. Any country wanting to become integrated in the new Europe has immediately to abandon the word »Balkans« and replace it with »South Eastern Europe«. Why? »There is a psychological devaluation associated with the word ›Balkan‹ that, without a doubt, affects people’s sensitivities. ›Balkan‹ is the term applied to situations that are corrupt, disordered and anything but likeable. Who likes being insulted...« writes Busek.

Isn’t this discouraging? No sooner does art pick up a new utopia when it has to chuck it away around the very next corner. This is a humiliation that everyone who builds parallel worlds apparently has to accept. However, compensation is fast in coming. The word ›Balkan’‹ discarded with disgust on the ground of social reality, is successfully integrated at the level of aesthetic taste. And the narcissistic benefit for art is immense. The less acceptable the object of its admiration is in reality, the more intensively it can admire itself for its subversiveness. It is not only irresistibly beautiful: it even breaks social taboos.

Szeemann is fascinated by the theme of taboo-breaking in »Balkan« art. He sees it chiefly in the works of some Albanian and Kosovan artists who critically examine the petrified value structures in their societies, the victims of which are primarily women. For example, Erzen Shkololli, a young artist from Kosovo, shows in his videos the highly ritualised and often extremely dramatic scenes of leave-taking between newly married women and their families before they enter a marriage with a man they have not chosen themselves. Adrian Paci, an Albanian artist who lives in Milan, subverts the funeral ritual. In his video »Vajtojca«, he puts on his burial raiment, which every Albanian usually keeps in his wardrobe during his lifetime and which is only allowed to be worn on the death bed. Paci also calls in a female mourner and has himself mourned by her while still alive. Then he gets up, pays the woman and leaves the scene, where only his mother remains, in despair at the spoiled ritual.

Social and cultural taboos are challenged by the other »Balkan artists« as well. The Turkish artist Cem Aydogan, for instance, who lives in the USA, takes a provocative look at the strict sexual morals that prevail in his native land. He shows two young men, in traditional dress, in homoerotic poses in the cosy atmosphere of a Middle Eastern lounge room. His video is called »Haram 3«, which in Arabic not only indicates something forbidden, but also something that is impure. His compatriot Esra Ersen shows three girls on an artificially set-up soccer ground who cut out the black stripes from two German flags and use the remaining colours to make the flag of the Turkish soccer club Galatasaray. In »Im Strafraum« (In the Penalty Area), as the video is called, the transformations of identity are presented as an iconoclastic game. The sacred is parodied even more crassly by the Serbian artist Vladimir Nickolic. In his video work »Rhythm«, five young people are crucified to the sound of a techno rhythm. The »East Art Map« by Irwin, which tries to construct an independent universe of eastern European art, is also to be seen, above all, as a subversion of the balance of power existing in the art world. What Irwin aims to challenge with her remapping is the absolute dominance of Western art.

Is this subversiveness really the main characteristic of »Balkan« art? Is it really the feature that essentially distinguishes it from Western art? Szeemann is completely convinced that it is. In his foreword to the catalogue, he never tires of quoting from the »Kanun des Lekë Dukagjini«, the codex of Albanian common law – the cruel scenario of blood feud and the most appalling oppression of women. »The artistic form is a documentation of suffering and of the desire for emancipation from rigid rules«, he writes. In this way, the entire Balkan art utopia is revealed as a projection of Western emancipation nostalgia, in which art still has something to say in its own reality and where its effect cannot be immediately reduced to the effects of the art market. Harald Szeemann’s view of things is guided by the old myth of decadence: »The future is in the Balkans because the entire West has become pretty colourless. I mean, there’s simply no subversiveness there any more«, he said in an interview with the weekly magazine »Profil«. This future in the Balkans evoked by »Blut & Honig« is thus nothing but a memory of the good old days, when breaking a taboo in the West provided double benefits: the appearance of social relevance, and cultural recognition. These days there is nothing more to be uncovered in the West. The thing the old kind of art was ashamed of – its dependence on the expansionist interests of capital and power politics – are proudly displayed by the new. The same applies to the »Blut & Honig« project. Its only socially relevant motto is therefore: Taboos are broken by the others. Tu Felix Austria, make a profit on it!

But even if there were really to be a future in the Balkans, a view like this would not be able to recognise it. This is shown best by the way the past is treated in »Blut & Honig«. To fulfil his task of integration, Szeemann has the hearse of Franz Ferdinand put on display. The idea is clear. This quote is meant, by its sheer referentiality, to evoke the common element in the past and, particularly, to point out a special position of Austria in relation to the Balkans. Szeemann: »They were down there for long enough!«

The »Balkan« artists, for their part, use quotes from the past in a completely different way. The best example is the red swastika that Rasa Todosijevic built into his installation »Gott liebt die Serben« (God Loves the Serbs). He shows it on a slant, or even in motion, tilted; one could say, falling, and that means in its declination. Here, the swastika became the sign of a language that does not awaken the past from oblivion, but articulates it as a direct experience. The contrast with Szeemann’s hearse could not be greater: there, history in its dead, corpse-bearing movement; here, the movement of a deadly, corpse-producing history. With the swastika of Rasa Todosijevic, the language of art has not spoken up to evoke a dead name, but to decline the name of death.

In this context, the fairy tale of integration also turns out to be a sad misunderstanding. The historical experience of which Szeemann speaks and within whose horizons he constructs the exhibition, and the historical experience treated by his »Balkan« artists diverge widely from one another. This fact is reinforced by the other works dealing with the past as well. Neither in Sanja Ivekovic’s installation, which never – not even in post-communism – wants to finish the story of a communist heroine killed by the fascists in the Second World War, nor in the action by Maja Bajevic, which has three Srebrenica women washing cloths embroidered with Tito slogans for days on end, is there any »poetical process of coming to terms with the past« in Szeemann’s sense. On the contrary: these works show that the idea of definitively coming to terms with the past is nothing but a symptom of a dangerous megalomaniac delusion.

The cliché is inherent in the view. Fortunately, there is a kind of art that does not arise solely through identification with this view, even when it is presented as »Balkan art«. In this regard, it is easy to answer the rhetorical question of the politician Busek. It is the artists themselves that are happy to be insulted as »Balkan artists« as long as that can be sold as art. For they are anything but naïve. They know very well that »Balkan« is neither the name for a community bound together by a common fate or culture to which they necessarily belong, nor is it the right label for the art they make. It is the technical term used to describe their relationship to the global (Western-dominated) art market, and determines the conditions at present imposed on them by the latter. Otherwise, »Balkan« is nothing but a misunderstanding - like every other cultural identity, by the way. Erzen Shkololli has fully realised this. In his work »Transition«, he shows three self-portraits: as a child dressed for circumcision, as one of Tito’s »Young Pioneers«, and today under the starry aura of the European Union. Here, there is no belief of any kind to be seen anywhere – least of all a belief in the Western nonsense about integration.

Before the word »Balkan« disappears once and for all from our culturo-historical experience in the course of the post-communist reconquista - which, in the language of liberal-democratic apparatchiks, is also called »eastward expansion« - and with it the bad habit of name-calling, which will only be heard as subversive art in European »white cubes«, please allow us one last act of Balkan barbarism. In some parts of the Balkan, there is a saying that – perhaps brutally, but all the more precisely – describes the ur-scene of each human misunderstanding. In the Serbo-Croatian language it is: »Jebe lud zbunjenog«, which in English means something like: »The madman is screwing the lunatic«. This saying means to say that a misunderstanding can also be seen as one of the most intensive forms of interpersonal communication: a form of communication that seeks pleasure, often brings it and, in some cases, also produces a new life – a future? Let us remember »Blut & Honig« as this kind of misunderstanding.

 

Translated by Timothy Jones

 

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