Representing the Worker in Postsocialist Public Space: Art and Politics under Neoliberalism

Abstract

Across former Eastern Europe, the transition from state socialism toward neoliberal capitalism has been accompanied by a marked reduction in emphasis on working-class identities. Because of the centrality of class to socialist-era identity-construction projects, the recent and relatively sudden ascendancy of various forms of individualist, consumption-oriented subjectivity in postrevolutionary societies has produced conflicts that are often more visible than in societies where capitalism has been the accepted economic paradigm for much longer. This shift can be seen in the realm of art and visual culture: Images of the worker once dominated public spaces under state socialism, competing in number with representations of leaders and communist ideologues, but since 1989 they have often been vandalized, dismantled, or else relocated to decay in relative obscurity. Where new public images of the worker do appear in postsocialist neoliberal conditions, they frequently serve as nexuses of controversy, where generational and ideological conflicts regarding current labor conditions and the legacy of worker solidarity play out. The debates surrounding representations of workers in postsocialism are both part of a global history of postsocialist art and part of the history of labor and its relation to contemporary urban space. This article examines artistic representations of the worker sited in public space in postsocialist Albania, in order to map the political and artistic discourses that animate engagements with working-class identity in conditions of neoliberal social transformation.