This post continues a series of scans of the issues of PamorART, a magazine published by the National Gallery of Arts in Tirana, during Gëzim Qëndro’s time as Director. The editor-in-chief of the publication was Eleni Laperi, and its editorial staff included Suzana Varvarica Kuka, Ylli Drishti, and Edi Muka. PamorART began publication in 1998, and was a crucial reflection of the artistic and cultural scene in Albania in the late 90s and early 2000s, providing a specialized venue for discussion and critical assessment of the visual arts in the country. PamorART holds a tremendous significance for histories of contemporary Albanian art, since it is one of the few publications where we can get a glimpse of the relationship between the developing post-socialist and post-1997 art scene, in dialogue with the central artistic institution in the country, the National Gallery. It’s also a tribute to the important work done by the longstanding research staff of the gallery (including Eleni, Suzana, and Ylli)–work that I think is seldom recognized. The issues of PamorART are very hard to find–hence my desire to make them widely available to researchers. Thanks to Suzana Varvarica for lending me this issue to scan it.
The fourth issue of PamorART was published in October of 1999, and its cover shows a close-up of the shelving units that housed Homo Socialismi, one half (the sculptural half) of Gëzim Qëndro’s reconceptualization of the National Gallery’s collection. In 1999, Qëndro’s new display of the Gallery’s massive collection of socialist-era artworks split that collection along medium lines, creating two separate exhibitions: (Sur)Realizmi Socialist (a painting exhibition, displayed in a room with red walls), and Homo Socialismi (a sculpture exhibition in a room with blue walls and shelves, featuring a maze of shelving units primarily containing busts). With these two exhibitions, Qëndro sought to confront the complex phenomena of Socialist Realism, to understand what it could mean as an art history for Albania and what it had to say as a style and method to audiences at the close of the first decade after the end of state socialism.
(Sur)Realizmi Socialist and Homo Socialismi are undoubtedly two of the greatest legacies that Qëndro left behind as a curator and as a director of the National Gallery. (For a brief TV spot on the exhibitions, with views of the installation, and brief statements from both Qëndro and Edi Rama, click here.)
I’ve written elsewhere about the meanings that the Homo Socialisticus (as it was called in English-speaking texts) display was later utilized in the context of the renowned Swiss curator Harald Szeemann’s 2003 exhibition Blood & Honey: The Future’s in the Balkans. In Blood & Honey, displayed alongside works by some of the region’s best known contemporary artists–the shelving unit bearing the busts was painted red to match the red walls of the first room of the exhibition, and positioned opposite Marina Abramović’s Lips of Thomas—Homo Socialisticus was discursively deployed to ironize Socialist Realism.
But if Szeemann’s exhibition produced a simplified reading of the Socialist Realist busts as merely relics of a violent past driven by ideology (thus reinforcing the already common stereotype of the Balkans as a region torn by violence, home to zealous authoritarian leaders promoting conflicting belief systems), Qëndro’s installation of the works in Tirana was inspired by a much more postmodern reading of its objects. In the essay on (Sur)Realizmi Socialist in this issue of PamorART, Qëndro reads Socialist Realist paintings through a Lyotardian lens that explains power in terms of the production of knowledge. Thus, for Qëndro, Socialist Realism is not evidence of some authoritarian force imposed in the past, but rather of the effort to construct a unified metanarrative of state socialism in Albania. Moving from Nexhmedin Zajmi’s Tregim nga lufta Nacionalçlirimtare (Story from the National Libeeration Struggle, 1954), through Sali Shijaku’s Zëri i Masës (Voice of the Masses, 1974), Qëndro argues for a reading of Socialist Realist painting that emphasizes how visual artworks reinforced the telling of narratives. These are pictures that show the creation of a narrative, not simply images from that narrative, and as such they reveal the ways that artists and cultural administrators (although Qëndro is less interested in speaking about individual creators than he is about ideas) knew the importance of creating new regimes of knowledge. Put simply, they knew that a key aspect of art’s power was its ability to produce new patterns of knowledge, and they did not try to hide this behind some veil of ideology: they put it boldly on display. (Unfortunately Qëndro does not explicitly analyze how this very openness about the artificial construction of ideology clashes with the dominant–and primarily Western, neoliberal–view that condemns Socialist Realism for what it supposedly hides. In fact, the point was that it did not always, or even primarily seek to hide reality, but to show how a new reality was being created.)
If Qëndro’s essay on Socialist Realist painting openly follows poststructuralist readings of knowledge and culture, his essay on Homo Socialismi (the sculptures–primarily busts–displayed on blue shelving units in blue rooms) is much more essentialist. It purports to present the consolidation of a ‘Socialist person’ (the New Man [sic] of socialism), but it also seeks to narrowly define this figure as an unchanging product; Qëndro calls homo socialismi “a being created in the laboratory of Socialist Realism” and characterized by its “anonymity,” its “rejection of every possibility for dialogue,” its “unflinching belief in Marxist-Leninist Philosophy and the Infallibility of the Leader.” This sudden shift, in the quality of Qëndro’s thought as he moves from painting to sculpture, is hard to reconcile, and perhaps it simply reflects a duality that underlay his fundamentally late modernist thinking: the struggle to embrace both an open and critical attitude towards claims of objectivity, and simultaneously the desire to seek deep and fundamental truths about human nature. (How, we must ask, could he possibly ignore the very diversity of images present amidst the busts displayed in Homo Socialismi, which ranged from Chinese and Vietnamese fighters to village women from the north of Albania, to Partisans and industrial workers? What does it mean to look at this plethora of images and perform a new act of curatorial violence, that of consigning all of them to a singular cultural expression, in spite of the differences in style, material, content, and so forth?)
Nowadays, Qëndro’s approach to Socialist Realism appears undeniably lacking in nuance, but regardless of this, his curatorial gesture is one that sought new horizons. Less than ten years after the end of state socialism in Albania, Qëndro was looking for significant ways to bridge the art historical narratives that had dominated in the capitalist world with those that had developed in the socialist sphere during the Cold War. If his solution was not successful or convincing, it is still productive as an exercise, and its failure was certainly no more spectacular then many other exhibitions (including Szeemann’s Blood & Honey) that reduced the art of the socialist past to a mere token.
This issue of PamorART contains other texts of interest, including Edi Muka’s text on “Albania Today: The Time of Ironic Optimism,” the exhibition of Albanian artist at the 1999 48th Venice Biennial (the first time Albania had been represented).
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