Book Review: Special Book Review Section

Abstract

In 1995, the Hayward Gallery in London organised an exhibition entitled Art and Power. The aim of the exhibition was to explore the 'totalitarian' aesthetics of a different era. With a sense of nostalgia for the lost utopias that only materialised into tormenting nightmares, the exhibition was filled with threatening pictures of dictators, oversized statues of sexless bodies and ephemeral pavilions celebrating the glory of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, or Communist Soviet Union. In between, a reference to the Spanish Civil War reminded us, only in passing, that there were violent ideological differences within and between these modernisms, lumped together under the term totalitarianism (a sign perhaps that it is not only international political theory that can gain from art, but also art curators that would benefit from a more nuanced understanding of the political). The theme that ran through the exhibition was how the individual artist, like the individual in general, was crushed under the overwhelming weight of social engineering: what united the Sphinx-like statue of Mussolini in Ethiopia, Konstantine Melnikov's futuristic architectural designs in Moscow and the German creations of Albert Speer in Berlin was size (the material, the form, the style did not really seem to matter). Totalitarianism was about the aesthetics of grand scale.In the same year the Centre Pompidou in Paris organised an exhibition by Illya Kabakov, one of the most celebrated members of the former Moscow underground art scene, a dissident who spend most of his life as an illustrator of children's books on the other side of the iron curtain. The installation consisted of the rather unglamorous remnants of an abandoned building site in the former Soviet Union. The scale was large, two floors of the museum, but consisted of wood, household objects and other 'familiar' materials…In the basement there was a recreation centre, with paintings and musical sounds typical of Soviet Realism. The title was simply: 'we are living here ' (pp. 70-73). This was a very different view of 'totalitarian' aesthetics, it was a critique of the every day, of the cheap building and garbage that lay behind the large-scale Art of the 1930s. In Kabakov's world, artists were not crushed by the overwhelming weight of great utopian projects, but rather by the 'unbearable lightness', to paraphrase another famous dissident, of bureaucratic control and forced communal life. As soon as Perestroika became a valid word in the Soviet political vocabulary, building sites that perpetuated the