Simultaneous mentioning of contemporary art and Eastern Europe is often accompanied by the suspicion or a patronising tone because it is usually associated with something secondary and deficient. It is far from being true. It is mainly caused either by the romantic misunderstanding of the fact that contemporary art has made secondarity its main principle or everybody forgot that the real contribution in the contemporary art had been made by Eastern Europeans. Whether historic avant-guard was mostly Russian, i. e. East European, the following contemporary art was headed by such artists as Andy Warhol and Josef Kosuth, who had never refused their Eastern European roots. One may also recollect even younger artists, for example, Christo or, at least, Kabakov.
Sometimes quite humorously, or even ironically, often in spite of any logic and correctness, we apply various professions to some national or regional groups. Thus, one may say that any contemporary artist is mostly East European. If, not literally him, then his teacher or someone he follows. That is mostly bizarre. Although, to emerge East European contemporary art into a special problem is also nonsense. Meanwhile, such problem exists. Although, everything is not so clear. As well, as not so clear the existence of the Eastern Europe itself.
A notion "Eastern Europe" has appeared only lately and has developed only in the XX century. To make this notion appear, the Roman Empire had to separate into the Eastern and Western ones. Consequently, the church had also separated and thus, culturally and ideologically fixed the separation of Europe into two parts. The present separation of Europe does not coincide with the traditional religious borders. While speaking about Eastern Europe we always keep in mind post-communist states, ex-socialist countries.
In one of his articles, Claude Levi-Strauss defined Marxist political regimes as totalitarian ones, established in the countries, focused at westernization of their social and political systems. These are all Slavic countries, Hungary, Romania, but also Eastern Germany, having unified with the rest of Germany. Whereas, it has been already found out that the difference between a communist and other totalitarian regimes (for example, national-social) is not so great, or at least, not so principal. Without any ambition to find a new definition of totalitarianism, let's accept a fact that any of its forms is an instrument of forced, accelerated and, thus, one-sided westernization. Any totalitarian regime is always subjectively aimed against the West. The main goal of the Third Reich could be regarded as the deconstruction of American democracy. Though, being interpreted from today, hitlerism can be seen as an effective device of self-destruction, installed to replace the old Germany of "Junkers" and Fachwerk by post-war Bundesrepublik made of glass and ferroconcrete. One is to be grateful not only to American bombardiers but also to those who had counterpoised his country, and then Europe on the whole, to America, and what led to total Americanisation. By following this logic, we can state that once Europe, besides the Great Britain, was Eastern, and each European country at some stage of its history was an Eastern European one. The process of Americanisation started before the war and the October Revolution. Although those who was doing patriotic, anti-bourgeois, anti-Western revolutions at the continent were unsatisfied not by the Americanisation itself (contrary to everything they were talking about, or might be thinking) but by the speed of "natural" Americanisation. They needed very high speed. Besides, they presumed to get "the best", while escaping the additional inconvenience of an open society. The destruction of traditional forms of the social organisation, the appearance of technocratic goals was accompanied by a quite primitive social engineering, represented by mobilisation of large groups of citizens into armoured and labour troops and armies. Usually, organised working people and social masses are regarded as something opposite to the civil society. But the same masses could also be regarded as a transitional form from a destroyed estate society to a civil, modernised one. Nearly everybody is cursing totalitarian regimes, but only few is cursing the modernity itself; the main temptation of modernity is to conquer it and to revitalise all totalitarities. There are a lot of different ones: these are not only political systems, but also totalitarian mass culture and totalitarian sects, including both artistic avant-guard and various alternative movements.
Modernity, in case it exists, does not give a chance to be defined. Modernisation, whether you treat it as an unavoidable benefit or necessary evil, does not represent a forecasting and regular process, but a process which is not to be terminated, which does not have final forms and can not be modelled. "Hot societies" (if we use Levi-Strauss' term), oriented at the innovation races, differ from the "cold" ones, adherent to the once found and modelled relations between internal social structures and external environment, by its attachment to the permanent modernisation. The problem is that the pure final modernised hot society always has traces of the cold, wild, untamed consciousness. It seems that this situation will be like that for ever. Both types of consciousness have their advantages, and can be easily in complement of one another.
The main difficulty arises when these types of consciousness are not in complement but in confusion, and this confusion is often quite ugly. The confusion of hot and cold can only lead to warm. This warm space of confused consciousness gives a birth to the, so called, alternative models of modernity. Totalitarianism is a modelled modernisation. Consequently, all successful (for how long?) models of modernity had and still have obvious or hidden totalitarian character. The experience of Russia, and, probably, of Israel, shows that communism is only possible in a form of the military communism. Swedish, Dutch, of course, German and Israeli models of socialism, whether you wish it or not, make you agree that the real socialism is possible only in a form of national-socialism. Meanwhile, hard ideologies based upon the class struggle and race theories are easily substituted by even more subtle mechanisms, which influence social consciousness.
Let me repeat that totalitarianism could be also discussed outside any political context. Even when an obvious totalitarian structure is absent, totalitarianism is present wherever mass culture is present. But, even if soft, not so obvious forms of masses' regulation are not as much blamed as the known forms of the coarse totalitarianism with its physical violence, that does not mean that totalitarianism with a human face is not to be doomed to the natural reaction of resistance. The resistance to totalitarianism means double resistance as it, in its turn, resists to modernity. Totalitarianism resists unpredictability of direction and uncontrollability of modernisation speed. It is both a negation and appropriation, assimilation of modernity or adaptation to it. Thus, totalitarianism of mass culture is also aimed at the adaptation of the weakly or partially modernised social strata to modernity.
This double character of the resistance to totalitarianism is to be thoroughly understood in the Eastern Europe, where this problem is not only abstract, but a live experience of majority. Till recently the resistance to totalitarianism had been understood as the resistance to resistance (negation of negation) - the resistance to bad modernity in the name of the right modernisation. Today, when it becomes clear that totalitarianism and modernity principally have no difference, the peculiarity of the moment consists in the fact that the resistance to modernity is to correlate with the resistance to the temptation of neo-totalitarianism.
While speaking of the artistic resistance, the dilemma is that any art, no matter what method it uses (whether it uses irony, tautology and deconstruction), is basically totalitarian. It always works with some models, either its own or alien ones. Only one thing can raise our hopes: all models, evoked by art, are not only alternative traps of modernity, but also floating isle of an independent thought.