Matthew Rampley
Networks, Horizons, Centres and Hierarchies: On the Challenges of Writing on Modernism in Central Europe
The place of the Modernism of East-Central Europe in the wider landscape of modern art has been a recurrent topic of debate in the last 30 years. Long-standing structural inequalities and ideologically-shaped habits of mind have ensured that international scholarly interest in the modernist practices of the states of central and eastern Europe is still often a marginal activity. Despite concerted efforts to overturn long-established inequalities, the landscape of Modernism is still little changed, dominated by Paris, Berlin, London, New York and Moscow. This article examines some of the recent attempts to rethink writing about Modernism, as part of a project of redrawing the map of modern art. Such attempts have often resulted in striking formulations, drawing on metaphors of entanglement, horizontality and transnational analysis. Yet the article asks: How conceptually coherent are they, and how effective are they as the basis for counter-narratives? Moreover, when concrete case studies from the history of Modernism in Bohemia, Czechoslovakia and Hungary are considered, how convincing are they? The article suggests not only that such models may misrepresent historical situations, but that also, if existing hierarchies are to be broken down, then it is necessary to address the pragmatic factors that lie behind them, rather than focusing on new theoretical models of interpretation alone.
Author's email:
rampley@phil.muni.cz
Full-text in the Digital Library of the Czech Academy of Sciences:
https://kramerius.lib.cas.cz/uuid/uuid:994970e5-e343-47f9-a977-c46eeafc2b87
< back