Thursday 12.11.2015

The Green Bloc: Neo-avant-garde Art and Ecology under Socialism

The Green Bloc: Neo-avant-garde Art and Ecology under Socialism
by Maja Fowkes

New York / Budapest
Central European University Press
2015
308 pages
ISBN 978-963-386-068-7 cloth $65.00
ISBN 978-615-5225-92-5 paperback $40.00


Expanding the horizon of established accounts of Central European art under socialism, this book uncovers the neglected history of artistic engagement with the natural environment in the Eastern Bloc. The turbulent legacy of 1968, which saw the confluence of political upheaval, spread of counterculture, rise of ecological consciousness, and emergence of global conceptual art, provides the setting for Maja Fowkes's innovative reassessment of the environmental practice of the Central European neo-avant-garde.

Focusing on artists and artist groups whose ecological dimension has rarely been considered, including the Pécs Workshop from Hungary, OHO in Slovenia, TOK in Croatia, Rudolf Sikora in Slovakia, and the Czech artist Petr Štembera, The Green Bloc: Neo-avant-garde Art and Ecology under Socialism brings to light an array of distinctive approaches to nature, from attempts to raise environmental awareness among socialist citizens to the exploration of non-anthropocentric positions and the quest for cosmological existence in the midst of red ideology. Embedding artistic production in social, political, and environmental histories of the region, this book reveals the Central European artists' sophisticated relationship to nature, at the precise moment when ecological crisis was first apprehended on a planetary scale.

Dr. Maja Fowkes is Co-Director of the Translocal Institute for Contemporary Art Budapest. She has a PhD from University College London and is author of several books, including River Ecologies: Contemporary Art and Environmental Humanities on the Danube (2015) and Loophole to Happiness (2011).

Book presentations:

13 November 2015
Igor Zabel Association for Art and Culture, Ljubljana


25 November 2015
Translocal Institute for Contemporary Art, Budapest


21 January 2016
tranzit.sk, Bratislava



About The Green Bloc:
'Measuring progress in tons of wheat or coal, the communist authorities in Eastern Europe treated the natural environment as little more than a resource to be ruthlessly exploited. But, as Maja Fowkes shows in her pioneering book, environmentally minded artists in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia in the 1970s found highly creative ways of testing official indifference to the effects of industrial modernity. Most of their artworks and actions were ephemeral, leaving few traces either in the landscape or in art history. The Green Bloc is a deeply researched and vividly written act of rediscovery.' Professor David Crowley, Head of Critical Writing in Art & Design Programme, Royal College of Art, London

'The Green Bloc has it all: original research on an uncommon subject, a new approach uniting ecology with conceptual art analysis, as well as a language able to carry the reader all through the text while discovering the particular ways art and nature built up a new social landscape. Using as a ground the socialist environment of Central Europe, the book is concerned with ways of introducing new questions into the narrative of art history, furthering our understanding of how artists managed to expand state ideas of the social and performed the emergence of a discourse on co-evolution that is extremely important today.' Professor Chus Martinez, Head of the Institute of Art of the FHNW Academy of Arts and Design, Basel