In honor of May 1, today’s post features a full scan of an art album published in 1977 in the People’s Socialist Republic of Albania: Klasa Punëtore në Artet Figurative [The Working Class in the Figurative Arts]. This book represents a kind of companion to the earlier Ushtria Popullore në Artet Figurative [The People’s Army in the Figurative Arts, 1969], and indeed there is some inevitable overlap between the themes of the two, since socialist culture aimed to emphasize the direct cooperation and interdependency of the development of working class consciousness and the legacy of partisan military organization.
The cover of the book, featuring Hektor Dule’s “Në njërën dorë kazmën, në tjetrën pushkën”
The book contains a wealth of images of painting, sculpture, drawings, and prints (unfortunately nearly all reproduced in black and white) focused on workers in both industrial and agricultural settings. It includes scenes of work and leisure alike.
Vasil Kaçi, “Me këtë parti, me këtë pushtet, nuk na tremb ansjë termet”
The earliest images in the book are focused not so much on workers as on the founding of the Albanian Communist Party (later the Albanian Party of Labor) and the partisan struggle, while the later images (especially the prints and poster designs near the end) are keyed to specific political events (i.e. the 7th Congress of the Albanian Party of Labor).
Danish Jukniu, “Në kantierin e dritës”Hasan Nallbani, “Tekstilistja”
Today’s post is a full scan of Albanian photographer Niko Xhufka’s album Ritme të Jetës Shqiptare [Rhythms of Albanian Life], published in 1976. Xhufka was one of the finest photographers working in socialist Albania, and his works evidence the originality and aesthetic force of Albanian documentary and socialist realist photography during the socialist years.
Most studies of photography as it has developed in Albania have focused either on earlier phtographers, such as the Marubis, or else have treated socialist photography in the country as little more than a means of propaganda. Xhufka’s images are striking because they are so obviously ‘artistic’–richly indebted to and conscious of a tradition of avant-garde, realist, and socialist realist photography–even as their ideological content is plainly legible. It is truly impressive to survey this collection of works and see Xhufka shift effortlessly between dynamic, abstract compositons that recall Russian avant-garde photography; clear and legible compositions emphasizing the narrative clarity of socialst realism; and sweeping aerial landscape panoramas.
While the entire album is a treasure, my favorite image is certainly a pair of juxtaposed photos entitled Zëvendësimi (Myzeqe) [Transplantation (Myzeqe)]. The first of the images shows a pair of storks nesting atop a twisted tree against a background of gray, flat fields. In the second image, the stork’s nest sits atop the skeletal structure of an electrical tower, and bottom edge of the photo is filled with stalks of grain or hay. The image succinctly pictures the ‘modernization’ of Albania carried out under socialism in a way that is both iconographically and compositionally striking.
* Several years ago, I first came across Xhufka’s work at propagandaphotos, and I am indebted to that blog for drawing my attention to a truly amazing artist. This interview with Xhufka offers important information on his work, process, career, and life.
Today’s post is the second in a series of posts that will present scans of the historically and critically indispensable publication PamorART, a magazine published by the National Gallery of Arts in Tirana. PamorART began publication in 1997, and was a crucial reflection of the artistic and cultural scene in Albania in the late 90s, providing a specialized venue for discussion and critical assessment of the visual arts in the country. This issue contains, among other things, articles on Edi Hila and Kristaq Rama, as well as an insert in English.
The scans of the PamorART magazines are made possible by the tireless efforts of philologist Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei, who scanned the issues, and art critic Gëzim Qëndro, who made the issues available to us from his private collection. My deepest thanks go to both of them for making these texts available to us.
The order is not rationalistic and underlying, but is simply order, like that of continuity, one thing after another.—Donald Judd, “Specific Objects”
The fortification, once an object, tended to become a “subject.”—Paul Virilio, Bunker Archaeology
Recently the question of the bunkers returned with a vengeance in Albania, and indeed now it is beginning to seem that it never really left. It is almost certainly the case that the frequent, if unsystematic, documentation of the bunkers, together with commentary on them and attempts to appropriate them in various ways all play into an unfortunately all-too-common brand of post-socialist Orientalizing (especially when this commentary and documentation comes from the West). The bunkers are easy ruin porn, and they lend themselves straightforwardly to generalized collective psychological diagnoses about the mentality of peoples that once lived ‘under’ communism—that is in fact precisely what the phrase “bunker mentality” is able to convey.[1] However—despite the fact that many of the Albanians I have met who live outside of Tirana largely regard the bunkers as something to be forgotten or something to store tools in—it seems that the bunkers remain strongly contested in their political, metaphorical, and aesthetic relation to Albania’s past.
To (very) briefly recap:[2] over roughly a ten-year period beginning in 1972, Enver Hoxha, Albania’s socialist dictator, ordered the construction of approximately 750,000 dome-shaped concrete bunkers throughout the entire country. Ostensibly built to shelter the population and provide defensible structures in case of a foreign invasion, the bunkers effectively served as an ever-present reminder of the regime’s paranoia—and continue to do so today, since a large number of them remain in situ. This number is shrinking, thanks to both the landscape itself (which is gradually displacing, upending, or covering over many bunkers) and the concentrated efforts of individuals and companies (many of them foreign, as I understand it[3]) to destroy and remove them.
Even if the bunkers are (very) gradually disappearing from prominence in the Albanian landscape, they continue to live on as both material and symbolic resources for commentary on and re-appropriation of the socialist heritage and past. Bunkers have been the subject of works of art (ex.: Anila Rubiku’s Bunker Mentality/Landscape Legacy, at the First International Kyiv Biennale ARSENALE in 2012). They have been the subjects of theses (ex.: Emily Glass’ A Very Concrete Legacy: An Investigation into the Materiality and Mentality of Communist Bunkers in Albania [2008]) and book chapters (ex.: Michael Galaty, Sharon Stocker, and Charles Watkinson’s “The Snake That Bites: The Albanian Experience of Collective Trauma as Reflected in a Changing Landscape,” in The Trauma Controversy [Albany: State University of New York, 2009]). They have been the subject of projects to mobilize the socialist architectural heritage to create hostels for tourists (ex.: Elian Stefa and Gyler Mydyti’s Concrete Mushrooms, and Iva Shtrepi and Markus Pretnar’s [award-nominated, though to my understanding never completely carried out—not sure how that works] Bed & Bunker), and they have been documented in several photography projects (ex.: Alicja Dobrucka in conjunction with Concrete Mushrooms and David Galjaard’s Concresco). They have lent their name and image to music events (ex.: Bunkerfest). More recently, they have been incorporated into monuments (as in Fatos Lubonja and Ardian Isufi’s Postbllok memorial along Tirana’s main boulevard, installed in 2013). Finally, they lent their image and name to the (now closed—indefinitely?) furiously publicized opening of Bunk’Art, a museum/installation venue/all-purpose-space house in a huge underground bunker on the outskirts of Tirana, originally constructed to house the nation’s socialist leaders in the event of a nuclear attack.
Photo by Carrie Ann Morgan
Then, just a few weeks ago, construction began on a new bunker, modeled on those that still dot the countryside, in the center of Tirana, in the space near the National Theater and the Transport and Interior Affairs Ministries. Vincent WJ van Gerven Oei offered a lucid and searing critique of this new bunker in a recent post on his Unofficial View of Tirana blog; at that time, henoted that there had been little public protest of the new bunker construction. Subsequently, however, the bunker was itself ‘fortified’ (surrounded with metal panels and covered with a sheet), and there have been protests and public pushback against the ‘mushroom.’
Finally, yesterday, the artist Ardian Isufi, one of the two people behind the Postbllok monument, wrote a quite violent condemnation of the new bunker, taking the opportunity to draw a firm line of demarcation between the use of the (pre-existing) bunker in Postbllok and the construction of the new bunker in the center of the city, presumably on the entrance to the network of underground space beneath the square.
Photo by Carrie Ann Morgan
I would like, quite briefly, to raise certain questions about the bunkers (and about the construction of the new bunker in the center of Tirana) that I do not think have been fully examined in the recent commentaries and protests.[4] It is not so much that I disagree with any of the points raised thus far—although, as it will become clear, I have serious issues with the way Isufi tries to distinguish Postbllok from its new cousin—but rather that I think the discussion can be enriched by considering more carefully some of the possible modalities of experience that are actually being presented. At the outset, I will say that my own reading of the bunkers—or ore precisely of their recent appropriation in pseudo-events like Bunk’Art’s opening (and even in Postbllok) is relatively strongly invested in interpreting the bunkers as part of an aesthetically modernist project. Put simply, the bunkers are often treated in a hermeneutical way: as Jameson put it, “the work in its inert, objectal form is taken as a clue or a symptom for some vaster reality which replaces it as its ultimate truth.”[5] This is, I have argued elsewhere, certainly the case with Bunk’Art, which strives to recover the modernist depths of memory in the touristic perambulation of the underground bunker. It is also, I think, the case with Postbllok, which likewise uses the instantiation of a particular “triptych of artifacts” (Isufi’s term) to lay bear a deeper truth about the experience of the dictatorship. (Isufi himself writes that the bunker in Postbllok is “a metaphor of the ISOLATION and the VIOLATION OF THE RIGHTS OF THE INDIVIDUAL” [Isufi’s emphasis]”—that is, it is in keeping with modernism’s metaphorical approach, which asserts deeper meaning, as opposed to postmodernism’s metonymy, which is lateral as opposed to essentializing. Let me be clear: I am not (as some might) using the term ‘modernist’ in a pejorative sense in relation to either Bunk’Art or Postbllok—I simply think that it is necessary to recognize that they bring with them a certain baggage that all models of depth-thinking do. Namely, they really believe in the hermeneutic model; they believe in underlying structures and truths; they believe in deep, shared experiences that pre-exist and underlie surface appearances.
This position, however, is a difficult one to sustain in the case of the bunkers, since they are—fundamentally, also first and foremost a surface phenomenon: they map out a cartography that is lateral and grid-like as much as it is oriented to the depths (of the territory or of the psyche). Thus, the bunkers are useful to think with precisely because (both materially and ‘metaphorically’, if I may be allowed the term) they straddle the seeming schism between depth-models of epistemology/aesthetics and surface-models of the same.
What I am getting at is that I do not think the new bunker under construction (the ‘outer form’ of which is already, apparently, being changed) functions in precisely the same way as either Postbllok or Bunk’Art. (On this much, at least, Ardian Isufi and I apparently agree.) This difference, however is not one between memorializing and aesthetic violence, nor is it one between authentic originality and kitsch inauthentic production. In fact, the dismissal of the bunker as ‘kitsch’ is one of the least convincing points Isufi’s condemnation makes: there is almost nothing sentimental about the new bunker, and the use of the bunker form is hardly some acquiescence to mass taste.
However, what is more problematic is Isufi’s reliance on a model of original/copy to describe the relationship between the bunker in Postbllok and the new bunker under construction. He asserts that the bunker in Postbllok is an “ARTIFACT” (his emphasis), dating from 1976, placed at the entrance to the ‘Bllok’ (the elite section of socialist Tirana) at that time. In other words, he says, the bunker in the memorial is a site-specific work of art, and as such it carries with it a historical, artistic, and hermeneutic authenticity that cannot be produced by a bunker constructed with new concrete, with new iron, by new workers in the center of the city. Setting aside the rather obvious (I think) point that the aims of this new bunker are in no way memorializing, I find Isufi’s privileging of authenticity to be problematic, precisely because it misses an important aspect of what the bunkers are—namely, they are the kinds of structures that are not copies of a privileged original, and that even if they once were copies of such an original, they are now all—as Rosalind Krauss puts it, “multiple copies that exist in the absence of an original.”[6]
Thus, privileging the historical circumstances of any particular bunker (say, the one in Postbllok) as if they made it more closely and authentically linked to traumatic memory is nearer to the kind of misunderstanding inherent in kitsch sentimentality. This is, of course, not to argue against the importance of historical preservation, or a denial of what we can learn about the past and present through concrete engagement with objects. Rather, it is to deny the inherent and underlying link between objects [of heritage] remaining in the present and any particular past. Such links are always in the process of being constructed, or at best re-constructed. The bunker in Postbllok is not a hermeneutic device for confronting and understanding traumatic memories (if indeed it is such) just because it existed in the past. Furthermore, the past (and its emotional or existential valence) is not simply something that can be “revealed” with “transparency.” Isufi seems to like the idea, set by other models, of using transparent materials for monuments to the traumatic past, in order to show an effort at “transparency and tolerance”; I would argue that this version of transparency is essentially a reiteration of the depth-model: it believes both that it is possible to make the veil separating us from the past transparent and that the pasts and presents revealed by this transparency are deeper and truer than those characterized by opacity.
This, finally, brings me to a point about the kind of memorial (and remember: it still seems fairly clear to me that the new bunker in Tirana is not meant as a memorial, but also that, for Isufi, it represents the wrong way to memorialize), or even the kind of public intervention in space, that might be appropriate in contemporary Tirana. It seems quite clear to me that many of the protests related to the bunker relate to the fact that it is divisive, even violent: it stands as a mockery of certain members of the population, who were persecuted under the socialist regime, and it prevents a safe and shared public space from developing. It is, to adapt Isufi’s language intolerant.
However, the dream of tolerance, of shared remembrance, of the role architecture or public art could play in the peaceful cohabitation of public spaces, is as dubious as it is important. What is ultimately at stake here, I think, is the vision of democracy that one hopes to advance. Is it a democracy based on shared and essential conditions, including the shared understanding of a traumatic past (the socialist one), based upon the belief that mutual respect and rational discussion between subjects will bring about an ideal political condition, one in which “the rights of the individual” are paramount? This is a popular image of democracy, one that is—I would argue—both quintessentially modern and quintessentially neoliberal. An alternative would be the model of democracy as agonistic, one that does not dream of installing a permanent consensus, either in the present or with regards to the past (I am of course referring to the kind of democracy advanced by Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau, among others). If this second model of democracy, one that recognizes the persistent possibility and indeed necessity for conflict in the public arena, is more appealing as a radical possibility against the incursions of global neoliberalism, then we must—I think—abandon the depth-model of historical epistemology, especially in cases like the bunkers.
I began this consideration with Donald Judd’s famous quote on order and repetition because I think it encapsulates, quite well, the logic of the bunkers both in the past and in the present case of the new bunker under construction in Tirana. “The order is not rationalistic and underlying, but is simply order, like that of continuity, one thing after another.” The bunker, in other words, is not always deeply and essentially linked to a memory, or an identity, or even a history, and treating it as such will never fully combat either the violence or the constructive work it can do. The logic of the bunkers was and is both the logic of modernist depth and the logic of postmodernist surface: they both are and are not ‘rationalistic and underlying,’ and they are not originals and copies, but simply ‘one thing after another.’ Although I do not much like (from what I have seen and read of it in the media) the new bunker in Tirana, I do not think that arguments about its psychological violence or lack of historical authenticity, its ugly or kitsch aesthetics, are very credible in the contemporary world. Indeed, if nothing else, the new bunker has shown us what Miwon Kwon asserted over ten years ago now[7]: that the notion of “site-specificity” continues to be hotly contested, and that no straightforward return to essentialist models of site and community will sort out the conflicts surrounding public space and art or architecture.
[Right around the time I initially published this piece, Vincent WJ van Gerven Oei published a second post dealing with the background of the Tirana bunker in greater depth than previous articles. It is invaluable for its speculations on the political role (and reason, or lack thereof) for the bunker’s construction. However, I still think that it takes the talk of “redering the past transparent” too much at face value, and thus some of what is important about both bunkers is missed.]
[1] I should say that I am not in any way condemning the use of the term “bunker mentality,” which has now almost become a kind of vernacular. The phrase itself neatly encapsulates both the dangers of extending descriptions of psycho-spatial states to collectives, and also the concise explanatory power that such psycho-spatial concepts can hold.
[2] The following overview of the bunkers does not intend, in any way, to be comprehensive. The point is simply to give a bit of history of the bunker as both a material entity and a symbol.
[3] For example, I have heard –though cannot verify—that foreign firms were contracted in the large-scale removal of bunkers from the fields in the south of the country, near Gjirokastra.
[4] I also fully realize that I have not had time to read everything on the subject, and thus—as always—welcome comments that would direct me to other sources that have already made the same points I make here, or raise questions I have not adequately addressed.
[5] Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 8.
[6] Rosalind Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), 152
[7] Miwon Kwon, One Place After Another (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002).
This is the thirteenth in a series of posts containing PDFs of texts that may be of interest to those studying Albanian socialist realism. More posts with critical content are in the works, but for the time being I’m too busy to do anything except scan more documents…
Today’s post is the January 1966 issue of Nëndori, which contains the proceedings of the 1965 Plenum of the Albanian Union of Writers and Artists. The opening speech for the plenum, which took place on December 3-4, 1965, was delivered by Shevqet Musaraj, author of the satirical poem “Epopeja e Ballit Kombëtar” [1944]. The writer and poet Dhimitër Shuteriqi, director of the Union of Writers and Artists at the time, also delivered a lengthy speech related to the proceedings of the 15th plenum of the Central Committee, which called for “an increase in the role played by literature and the arts in the communist education of the masses.”
The issue also contains summaries and excerpts of the talks and discussions held by other members of the Union in attendance, including Andon Kuqali, Foto Stamo, Odhise Paskali, Kristaq Rama, and Pandi Mele.
Three of Pandi Mele’s graphic works are reproduced in the issue, including the dynamic (and undeniably Modernist) linocut Thatësira po mposhtet [The Drought is Being Defeated]. There is also a review of Mele’s October 1965 solo exhibition written by Vangjush Tushi, which gives a partial picture of the early reception of Mele’s painting and graphic works.
Perhaps most interesting (and most frustrating in the lack of information given) is a short note in the back matter of the issue describing an exhibition of works by the Korean painter Lju Hien Suk (in the Albanian transliteration), held in November of 1965 at the Puppet Theater. Liu Hien Suk was, the note informs us, vice-director of the central state Gallery of the Fgurative Arts in the Korean Democratic Republic, and his month-long stay in Albania (part of the still woefully understudied cultural exchange between socialist nations in the mid-20th-century) had included time spent in the Albanian Riviera—the landscapes of which inspired his painting. The exhibition opening was attended by officers of the Union of Writers and Artists such as Foto Stamo and the note in Nëndori contains excerpts from Rama’s speech. Although much of the study of Albanian socialist-era art has focused on the specificity of the conditions in Albania during its increasing isolation, and although much of the commentary produced within the country during the socialist years does not readily acknowledge the role of international cultural exchange in shaping Albanian art, it is precisely events like Lju Hien Suk’s exhibition that deserve our close attention and our greatest efforts in attempting to recover documentary evidence. These events, if we could trace their genesis and impact more fully, would give us a more fully rounded picture of how Albania related to international networks of socialist culture, and how artists from other nations participated in the formation of the narratives socialist Albania told about itself.
Today’s post is a special one: a complete scan of the 1969 publication Ushtria Popullore në Artet Figurative [The People’s Army in the Figurative Arts], a massive publication featuring paintings, sculptures, prints, and posters chronicling the glories of the Albanian People’s Army. The book should be invaluable to anyone studying Albanian art and culture in particular, or socialist realism in general.
The album features a number of works I’ve never seen published elsewhere (including works by Edison Gjergjo, Danish Jukniu, and Isuf Sulovari) and, with over 100 illustrations, represents on of the largest collections of visual art published during socialism in Albania. Some of the images are in color, others in black and white, and their quality varies drastically, but some of the reproductions are quite clear and details are visible.
This is the twelfth in a series of posts containing PDFs of texts that may be of interest to those studying Albanian socialist realism. More posts with critical content are in the works, but for the time being I’m too busy to do anything except scan more documents…
Today’s post contains selections from the September 1977 issue of Nëntori. The first selection is Dalan Shapllo’s fascinating “Mësimet Konsekuente Revolucionare të Partisë dhe të Shokut Enver: Mbi Letërsinë dhe Artin,” a review and ‘study guide’ for Mbi Letërsinë dhe Artin, a collection of Hoxha’s writings and speeches on the subject of literature and the fine arts, produced between 1944 and 1976. (The full text of that book is available here.) Shapllo concludes his review of the collection by drawing the reader’s attention to two sections of the book in which Hoxha made concrete statements and suggestions regarding the realization of works of art. The first is, of course, the well-known letter written (in 1969) by Hoxha to the trio of monumental sculptors Kristaq Rama, Shaban Hadëri, and Muntaz Dhrami in connection with the realization of the Independence Monument in Vlora. The second is the 1962 statement made by Hoxha to the Shkodran creators of the drama Plaku i maleve [Old Man of the Mountains], devoted to Bajram Curri. Shapllo points out that in both cases, one of the key ideas expressed by Hoxha was that the ‘great figures’ of Albanian history (Ismail Qemali and Bajram Curri, respectively) should be depicted as acting in close concert with the masses. Shapllo notes that Hoxha’s aesthetic interventions can be summarized as expressing the following two key principles: “1) Historical works [of art] must be characterized by revolutionary ideas, thus preserving their historical truth; and 2) the relationship of the masses and of the hero must be conceived as a dialectical and materialist one, in order to show that the masses create history and heroes can emerge from the masses and play a positive role only when they embody and reflect the interests of the people” (19). As formulaic and ambiguous as these principles might be, one can’t help but think that they might prove instructive for current politicians and artists in Albania.
Also of interest is the second part (I regret that I don’t have the previous issue of Nëntori, so I can’t offer you the first half) of an essay by aesthetician Alfred Uçi entitled “Arkitektura dhe Estetika.” Uçi, the author of the monumental Labirintet e Modernizmit, was one of the most prolific and distinguished aestheticians of socialist Albania, and his analysis of the relationship between architecture and the other arts—including the factors that distinguish socialist architecture from Modernist formalism—is enlightening for anyone interested in considering the precise character of the relationship between representational art and abstract arrangements of space and form in socialist Albanian culture.
Finally, the issue contains several great prints and drawings highlighting the activity of the Albanian youth in aksion in agricultural development.
This is the tenth in a series of posts containing PDFs of texts that may be of interest to those studying Albanian socialist realism. I am still in the process of planning several posts with actualcontent—that is, analysis, rather than simply more scanned texts—but they are still some ways off, so I’m going ahead and posting more scans for the time being.
Today’s (rather short) text is some selections from the March 1955 issue of Nëndori, the monthly journal of the Albanian Union of Artists. The issue contains the texts of some of the talks given at the annual plenum of the Union, as well as a summary of the events and discussions that took place. Given that the Union had been in existence for only about two and a half years at this point, it is particularly interesting to read painter Foto Stamo’s assessment of “The Development in the Figurative Arts” at this early stage in socialist Albania’s cultural project.
Of equal interest is Baki Kongoli’s “Activity of the Union of Artists from its Beginning till Now,” which summarizes the Union’s work in the preceding two years. In part this overview is notable because it specifically makes note of the help given by outside artists and cultural producers (such as composers, painters, and sculptors from the Soviet Union) to Albanian artists. Even more interesting, however, is the fact that Kongoli’s assessment of the Union’s efficacy largely takes the form of a collective self-critique. In contrast to later plenary speeches, which would assert the endless successes of the Union and of Albanian culture in general, the middle section of Kongoli’s speech is grim. For example, he writes: “Ne mund të themi me keqardhje se konferencat dhe leksionet me karakter ideoprofesional nuk janë ndjekur jo vetëm nga anëtarët e Lidhjes por shpesh herë edhe nga anëtarët e komitetit drejtonjës.” No one has been doing their job. No one has shown up to the meetings. None of the annual goals have been met. In fact, not only were the goals not met, but the following year no one even tried to address what hadn’t been done the year before. No one has made contact with artists in communities outside of Tirana. …and so on and so forth.
In perhaps the most damning sentence, Kongoli writes “Nuk është përfituar sa duhet nga eksperienca e artit sovjetik.” Reading these early assessments of Albanian culture reminds us that the assertions of complete cultural independence—of a kind of socialist cultural apex ex nihilo—that would characterize later socialist discourse in Albania in publications like Nëndori were not always the norm.
This is the ninth in a series of posts containing PDFs of texts that may be of interest to those studying Albanian socialist realism. I am still in the process of planning several posts with actual content—that is, analysis, rather than simply more scanned texts—but they are still some ways off, and I wanted to go ahead and post today’s rather imposing volume. Nonetheless, the book’s visuality demands at least some analysis—and no doubt much more than I offer here.
Today’s text is Labirintet e Modernizmit: Kritika e Estetikës Moderniste by aesthetician Alfred Uçi. The copy of the book I own is the 1987 2nd edition of the book; I have flipped through the earlier edition of the book, which I believe is from 1978, but I’ve never had a chance to sit down and see exactly what was added to the subsequent version. First off, I don’t recall the original edition having much in the way of color illustrations (and the 1987 version certainly has several of those), but I could be wrong about that. Certainly some or all of the final chapter on “Postmodernizmi” must have been written for the second edition, but it is unclear to me precisely what other changes and additions were made.
Uçi (who continues to publish on aesthetics today) was one of the most prolific writers on art and literature in socialist Albania, and—together with writers like Tefik Çaushi and Andon Kuqali—he was one of the most sophisticated aestheticians and art critics of the period. His work, of course, carries a high ideological charge, and nowhere is this charge felt more directly than in this truly mammoth (over 400 pages) volume on The Critique of Modernist Aesthetics. (It was, nonetheless, to be dwarfed two years later by the 1989 publication of his three-volume Estetika; I understand that, in the postsocialist period, he has published another such multi-volume work on aesthetics in general.) I was first introduced to this book by the philosophy and literature teacher at the high school I taught at in Albania—at the time he showed it to me, I could barely read any Albanian, otherwise I might have been a bit horrified that he was using it as a reference for teaching a high school art history course—and I have always been fascinated by Uçi’s compendious (if decidedly one-sided) knowledge and presentation of the history of aesthetic modernism. Indeed, I would venture to say the book is more thorough (in its elaboration of different persons and movements), at least with respect to Modernism, than many texts now used in America to teach Modern Art.
While I think the content of Uçi’s book is certainly interesting and useful for understanding the context of Albanian socialist aesthetics, I think its form is much more interesting (and it is here that I would very much like to be able to compare the earlier edition to this post-Hoxha, late-80s one). As Alban Hajdinaj has written, “Alfred Uçi’s theoretical writings, from the 1970s, could very well have been called postmodernist in the context of our country.”[1] Indeed, it seems to me that Uçi’s book occupies precisely a time of “the deepening of crisis” (which is the title of the first section of the last chapter, on Postmodernism)—and this is particularly the case in the insistent presentation of the apparent (but always defeated) correspondence between text and image. Indeed, the book is perhaps one of the best illustrations (forgive the pun) I have seen of the overwhelming failure of images to precisely convey what the author wants them to, and both in relation to other images and to the text of the book.
The cover of the book is already a fascinating example of this: Standing tall next above the title Labirintet e Modernizmit is Sali Shijaku’s Vojo Kushi (1969), and placed precisely below him—as if it will receive the explosion of the grenade he is about to hurl downwards—is one of Malevich’s Suprematist Paintings, alongside of which appears the book’s subtitle: Kritika e Estetikës Moderniste. However, Malevich’s painting has already been truncated, cut off perhaps to ensure that it remains subordinate to Vojo Kushi‘s violence both in its position and in its proportion. Already on the cover, then, the book pathologically turns a kind of violence back on Modernism —pathologically, because throughout the text the book (like almost all moral condemnations of Modernism) accuses Modernism of precisely this kind of corporeal violence.
In one particularly telling comparison, Uçi places the Venus de Milo alongside an egg by Brancusi and declares “Before the works of antiquity, which celebrate the beauty and purity of mankind, Modernism puts forth, with cynicism, works that scoff at human dignity.” A few pages later, he blithely dismisses the Futurists by setting the Nike of Samothrace opposite Boccioni’s Development of a Bottle in Space (1913) and simply asking “A human being in flight, or a bottle on a pedestal?” The problem with this strategy should be almost immediately obvious— Uçi wants these juxtapositions to be completely self-evident and self-transparent, to the point that sometimes he provides no aesthetic judgment whatsoever, simply placing (in another of my favorite examples) a seascape by Vangjush Mio above a work labeled simply “Op-Art.” The clustered color illustrations in the book seem to relate only vaguely (at least as far as I have been able to discern) to what Uçi specifically says in the text, and sometimes the black-and-white illustrations interspersed directly throughout the printed text perform—in their seemingly complete dissociation—precisely the function of high Surrealism (or else the best practices of postmodernism). An image of Kristaq Rama’s Shote Galica dropped right into the section detailing Kafka is brilliant precisely in the way it causes one to question precisely what kind of aesthetic response the book is aiming for in its use of image-paired-with-text.
To return to the examples of the Venus de Milo and Bracusi, and the Nike of Samothrace alongside Boccioni: what is most striking about these comparisons of classical and Modern sculpture is the corporeal woundedness of the works Uçi chooses. Indeed, the comparison is decidedly morbid—in spite of Uçi’s caption, the reader is almost forcefully directed to think instead “The works of antiquity celebrated the beauty of humanity, but now they are broken, and Modernism reminds us of these wounds.”… Or even more straightforwardly in the case of the Nike: “A human being without a head, or a bottle on a pedestal.” Thus, even as Modernism is accused of abusing the human figure and destroying its body and its dignity in the move towards formalism, the evidence as presented is somehow unable to convincingly argue that there is any true wholeness to human being—in art or elsewhere. Above all else, Uçi’s text (and his use of images) seems to be profoundly unable to put forward an alternative. Of course, the text is in the form of a critique, rather than a celebration of—obviously—socialist realist aesthetics…but the fact that it does haphazardly throw in a few illustrations of (Albanian) socialist realist works only makes the relationship between these works and Modernism more confusing. Even the cover image reads both as the undisputed triumph of socialist realism over Modernism and simultaneously as an assertion of the profound similarities between the compositional strategies of both.
It is perhaps simplest to say that I have rarely seen a book in which the image (here, the photographically reproduced work of art) fluctuates so aggressively between two positions somewhat analogous to studium and punctum. Uçi’s book constantly has something quite clear to say, but at the same time both the text and more assertively the images in their discontinuity with the text wound us, suggesting disorder, fallibility, misunderstanding, the slow and gradual accumulation of crisis beneath the veneer of ideological and epistemological certainty. Viewed in this way, it is unsurprising that the book (both in its first, 1978 edition and in this subsequent edition) struggles to chronicle the degeneration of modernism in precisely the years (the late 70s and 80s) when the situation in socialist Albania began to slip towards its own constellation of unravelings.
Happy reading!
[1] Alban Hajdinaj, “Piktura e Jetës Moderne,” in Onufri XVIII (Tirana: Galeria Kombetare e Arteve, 2012), 10.
This is the eighth in a series of posts containing PDFs of texts that may be of interest to those studying Albanian socialist realism. Initially I had planned to write thorough descriptions and analyses of the content of the documents, but I barely have the time to scan them, much less write extensive commentaries.
Today’s text is the complete volume Shënime për Pikturën dhe Skulpturën, published in 1987 by Albanian artist and critic Llambi Blido. Blido is quite an interesting figure in his own right; as a painter and as an illustrator of children’s publications, his works often experimented explicitly with stylistic strains of Modernism that—by the mid-1970s in Albania—came under harsh institutional criticism as ideologically dangerous. (See, for example, his Vajza në Pultin e Komandimit [Young Woman at the Controls](oil on canvas, 1971), hanging in the National Gallery of Art in Tirana and visible here. Toni Milaqi’s text “Emancipimi i Gruas dhe Ndikimet e Huaja” provides an insightful overview of Blido’s career and significance. An interview with Blido from 2009 is available here.)
Blido’s Shënime për Pikturën dhe Skulpturën is a collection of essays written, it seems, throughout the artist’s career up to that point, thought since the original sources and dates of the essays are not given, it is a bit difficult to determine their chronology. Some (particularly the exhibition reviews) are clearly from Drita, the weekly publication of the Albania Union of Writers and Artists, while others may have appeared in Nëntori (the aforementioned Union’s monthly journal) or elsewhere. Despite the lack of information about original publication (and indeed some may not have been previously published), the breadth of the sort essays is impressive and insightful. Blido’s writings span both analyses and interviews, and he engages with many of the greatest figures from Albanian twentieth-century art, including Abdurrahim Buza, Kristaq Rama, Mumtas Dhrami, and Vilson Kilica. While the book is not illustrated, images of several of the major works discussed can now be found floating around the internet. Blido’s observations are particularly enlightening given the specificity of many of his aesthetic discussions (a specificity sometimes—often intentionally—lacking in official discourses on art from the socialist period); he discusses the details of color and composition, and asks important aesthetic and ideological questions based upon these formal observations.
afterart 