080018 SE Body Concepts in Socialist and Post-Socialist Art (2023W)

The importance of body politics is currently undeniable: ideologically motivated idealizations or denigrations of bodies, restrictions on abortion rights, the exploitation of migrant bodies and labor are global phenomena that are also present in democratic forms of government. This is evident in the post-socialist countries of East Central Europe, where in recent years we have witnessed, among other things, the explicit body politics of the Polish government and the return of the heroic body in the media iconography of the Ukrainian war. In most of these examples, control over bodies – economic, political, or otherwise – occurs not only within the framework of jurisdiction or citizenship, but also, importantly, through means of spatial construction and boundary as well as visual representation, negotiation, and, not least, negation of bodies. These current phenomena shed new light on the political meanings of the body and its representations in the former socialist countries of Europe – meanings that have been questioned for some time. An example of this would be the critique of Polish so-called Critical Art of the 1990s and 2000s, an artistic movement largely devoted to reflection on the social and cultural construction of the body. Critical art has recently been condemned for not being politically relevant because it allegedly did not reflect its own neoliberal conditions the economic hardships of the then freshly introduced turbo-capitalism. Contrary to this view, the assertion of the political and ethical significance of the body as a motif, material, and vehicle of art is reinforced not only by the current developments mentioned above, but also by the fact that the preoccupation with the body in East-Central Europe has been going on for a very long time. In the 1970s, for example, body and performance art flourished in the ČSSR within the framework of restrictive normalization policies, with the body quite obviously functioning as a space of resistance. To make a long story short: The body could be defined as a common denominator for the art of the region, as it was claimed in the seminal exhibition "Body and the East. From the 1960s to the Present" (Ljubljana 1998, curated by Zdenka Badovinac). The seminar will devote time to the various conceptions of the body expressed therein through readings of exemplary texts and analysis of selected works of art.

The courses are held in German, the term papers have to be written in the course language.