Spectres in the museum

With the aid of leading Italian private collectors and works by international artists, Marco Scotini has conjured up the spectres of Eastern Europe and presentiments from its recent past. From 24 January to 16 March, Arte Fiera presents “Il Piedistallo vuoto. Fantasmi dall’Est Europa”, an extensive overview of the art scene of the contemporary post-Soviet area held in the splendid 15-century interiors of the Museo Civico Archeologico in Bologna.

At the beginning of his essay Specters of Marx, Jacques Derrida confessed that he had not reread the Manifesto of the Communist Party for a long, long time, nearly 20 years. A question of commitments and need – you may say – because scholars cannot have everything under their noses and many texts, however important, lie in the active substratum of our memories; there where we place them when they are first discovered, archives of the spirit and memory, a brick with which to build more monuments. Sometimes, it is true, we do not read books; we hear of them from indirect sources, or by emulation, because we have already moved on to analysing what we do not possess but that, like a memory produced by others, haunts the emotional sphere of our creations. As we are reminded, for example, by Walter Benjamin and the Angelus Novus, when he warns readers not to move on to the essay on Elective Affinities without first reading the novel. That is precisely how I discovered Goethe, out of the fear of a spectre: the book cited but not read. Because of that question asked by Derrida “Repetition and first time: this is perhaps the question of the event as question of the ghost. What is a ghost?” An interesting answer is provided by this exhibition, curated by Marco Scotini at the Museo Archeologico in Bologna for – the 2014 edition of which examines the role of the collector. Starting from the 1970s, it develops an attentive reflection on two major timeframes: 1989 and the fall of the Berlin Wall; and 1991 when the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact were dissolved.

The philosophical questions seem only to spawn more questions but perhaps the aesthetic field can offer potential projects, permutations of the application of a fascinating but sterile paradigm, partial and concrete answers, accomplishable because material. We ought to be able to say this of the Scotini exhibition because it has the material bases, the works appear, they occupy a physical and conceptual space, they refer to a whole host of artistic paths: 45 to be precise. We certainly ought to were it not for that sophisticated theoretical argument that, closed within the prized catalogue and the museum route, confuses visitors, constantly directing them to an elsewhere, demanding the all-holy effort of active participation and observing more than being observed the mental movements behind the gaze of the spectator. “Il piedistallo vuoto. Fantasmi dall’est Europa” is an absence that is present, an ectoplasm that blurs certain contours to disclose different forms, a game for adult and elastic minds, a journey East to be travelled with your eyes wide open because the themes addressed, as the curator reveals, concern us all.

The title and subtitle are an enigma in themselves because the pedestal, the functional element required to exhibit a work, is the symbol of every institutionalised presence, a metaphor for power and a necessary reference to a hierarchical spatial positioning: there is an above and a below of the work, a recognizable syntax. The pedestal heralds and prefigures everything except the presence of an absence, the spectre. An empty pedestal is a paradox, an oxymoron almost, the prospective negation of the very principle of exhibition: what do you show if the content of the exhibition seems to be a void? Or rather a spectre? This, or rather these (in a round-up that conjures up the precision of Shakespeare’s spectral figures, from Hamlet to Macbeth passing via Julius Caesar) refer us instead to the different regimes of visibility in East and West, what lies this side and that side of the Wall. As the curator says “What was on the other side of the iron curtain was invisible to us and likewise, our world was invisible to the East; indeed, the most subversive artists, those working with practices and themes not popular with the regime, had to be invisible.” This careful reflection prompted a need: to compare two generations of artists, an invisible one that worked mostly before the fall of the Berlin Wall and a hyper-visible one that pursued its artistic path after 1989, an integral component of that Debordian society on which Scotini has already focused masterfully in major exhibitions – “Beautiful Banners: Representation, Democracy, Participation”, “Revolution Reloaded” and “Disobedience” to mention but a few – precious mechanisms poised between engagement and describing actions.

In Bologna, by contrast, rather than the public space he has chosen museum rooms where only the spectres can appear, framed by a seemingly classical route based on the rhythm of a succession of closed and open spaces, corridors and octagonal plans, carved out in an enfilade with Renaissance perspective and in great harmony with the architecture: an archaeology museum, a place with the greatest proliferation of pedestals and spectres. The exhibition looks as if it has been packaged in a secret wing, reached along an itinerary that introduces the visitors into an emotional universe, distancing them from the chaos of the simultaneous city and driving them – coded routes do this – towards hard labour, almost as if they themselves had to retrace the stories enclosed in the 45 works on display.

The works share an element clearly highlighted by Scotini, turning the exhibition into an opportunity for exploration as well as an aesthetic experience of the highest degree (thanks partly to the quality of the individual works). They all speak of the Socialist spectre, all refer, more or less explicitly, to the “unreal” promise of a universal solution, a political cure – an obvious paradox in the works by Ivan Mikhailov, Artur Zmjewski and Deimantas Narkevicius – although the political transition is over in the post-Soviet phase and there is nothing to abandon. The ghost is no longer linked to a principle of nostalgia and the spectre of Socialism appears before us in all its invasive absence. It is a thought that is both latent and present; a thought in the undercurrent of a geographical area that the exhibition certainly does not strive to determine. The provenance of the artists is often not stated unless they reveal it themselves – as with the rugs of Said Atabekov and Thea Djordjadze – offering a glimpse of a geopolitics that, from Albania to Turkey, includes an “East” redefined by new interpretations of transnational regimes.

The pedestal is most of all in the gallery, at the centre of which a Yona Friedman model of a city, a utopian maquette with elevated conceptual content, looks to the futuristic  drawings of Vyacheslav Akhunov who, back in the 1970s, heralded the disappearance of the great icons of Lenin in a series of realistic pedestals bearing words such as “back soon”, with an irony that was as pleasing as it was uncommon.

These works are on one of the two exhibition routes created by Scotini to steer the spectator’s gaze, L’archeologia delle cose; Il teatro dei gesti, on the other hand, contains familiar performances such as one by Marina Abramovic (photograph of the star cut into her stomach) and a series of works by Julius Koller whose table-tennis racket delves into an imagery that reaches far beyond Eastern Europe. In fact, rather than speaking of “Eastern Europe” we should really refer to a “journey East” in the sense of a path of learning, a total rejection of an individual Western dimension and an annulment of the public/private dialectic principle that fuels our experiential tradition, in favour of a principle of sharing that we clearly struggle to grasp. So, the biggest spectre of the whole exhibition reappears, the ghost of Marx and his red book, accompanying us along the way, sometimes annoyingly, sometimes frighteningly and even amusingly, but always there thanks to this new reading offered by Scotini. A number of curtains open before the visitors, e.g. for Ilya & Emilia Kabakov’s amassed furniture and the leftover apartment by Petrit Halilaj, reminders of the degree to which the Soviet universe was formed of familiar routines. Indeed, it is hard not to agree with Derrida when, on the subject of the Manifesto of the Communist Party, he wrote “Je savais bien qu'un fantôme y attendait, et dès l'ouverture, dès le lever du Rideau”. Those keen to encounter it should visit Il Piedistallo vuoto and see the catalogue which, if it is possible, adds to the already rich array of meanings.

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Until 16 March 2014
Il piedistallo vuoto
Museo Civico Archeologico
via dell'Archiginnasio 2, Bologna