Art History & Archaeology
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Item The Sloth of the Author: In Defense of a Call to Inaction(2020) Brady, Laura Michiko; Mansbach, Steven; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Mladen Stilinović’s (1947-2016) text “In Praise of Laziness” (1993) makes seemingly absurd claims about the relationship between art and laziness which are most often interpreted as political commentary in his typically cynical brand of humor. While this humor is indeed a consistent and essential element of his work, such readings fail to critically assess the depth of his notion of “laziness.” I conduct a thorough unpacking of his definition in order to reveal “laziness” as a form of constructive passivity with a potentially pacifist dimension. With particular focus on his artist books and works dealing with themes of time and pain, I demonstrate the myriad ways in which Stilinović’s notion of “laziness” manifests throughout his oeuvre. Contextualization of “In Praise of Laziness” has been dominated by oversimplified narratives of a global “East/West” divide while Stilinović’s particular geopolitical circumstances as a member of the last Yugoslav generation have been overlooked. Following a careful recontextualization of “In Praise of Laziness,” I suggest that this work may be considered a critical response to the violent dissolution of Yugoslavia in the 1990s.Item THE ARTĚL COOPERATIVE (1908-1934): CRAFTING CZECH MODERNITY(2020) Bratton, Lyndsay; Mansbach, Steven A; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Eight founding members of Artěl—the Prague avant-garde’s response to the Wiener Werkstätte—united in 1908 with a manifesto proclaiming their goals to combat inferior factory substitutes for handcrafted designs and to restore society with a sense of taste through affordable products for everyday life. Across Artěl’s stylistic, political, and ideological development, its members consistently demonstrated the complementary relationship between the folk and the modern. Whether working in the Czech variant of Cubism in the final years of the Habsburg Dual Monarchy, the folk-infused nationalist “decorativism” of the First Czechoslovak Republic after 1918, or the sober Functionalism of the late 1920s, Artěl designers struck an aesthetic balance between regional Czech folk arts and international avant-garde styles. The group thereby served to construct and promote a distinctively Czech visual culture for the international stage at a transformative moment in Czech history.Item Monumental Endeavors: Sculpting History in Southeastern Europe, 1960–2016(2018) Isto, Raino Eetu; Mansbach, Steven A; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation focuses on monumentality and the ways it has developed in the sociopolitical conditions of late socialist and postsocialist Southeastern Europe. It examines monumental production in this region between the 1960s and 80s, and the artistic practices that constitute responses to socialist monumentality undertaken in the postsocialist period in the republics of the former Yugoslavia and in Albania. It considers the relationship between ways of remembering the Second World War and the monumentalization of what is often referred to as ‘actually existing socialism.’ Additionally, it explores how legacies of socialist monumentality have affected contemporary artists working in relation to socialist heritage and to more recent traumatic experiences, such as the wars coincident with and following Yugoslavia’s dissolution. Southeastern Europe’s modernity has been a particularly conflicted one, both geopolitically and culturally. Home to an overwhelming number of (frequently overlapping and amorphous) ethnic, linguistic, and religious groups, the region is notable for the hybrid and disparate ways political and cultural actors—from dictators to democratically elected officials—have attempted to cultivate a collective historical consciousness. Monuments serve as particularly rich examples of the ways politicians, artists, and publics navigate collective values and contest both projected pasts and futures. The transition from late socialism to postsocialism provides diverse examples of how public monuments in countries such as Macedonia, Croatia, and Albania relate to debates on ethnicity, gender, political economy, and class-consciousness in the context of continued redefinitions of Europe’s borders and culture as a whole. Furthermore, ongoing attempts to preserve, restore, relocate, or destroy socialist-era monuments offer a rich and complicated body of evidence for the ways that histories are repurposed, especially the histories of the Partisans’ transnational antifascist struggle during the Second World War. This dissertation argues that many contemporary artists from Southeastern Europe have focused precisely on the ambiguous and conflicted meanings of socialist monuments, and have avoided treating monuments as monolithic forms associated with official ideological forces, in need of demythologization. Instead, these artists have turned to monuments in order to address the disparate histories of struggle that have given rise to Europe’s current sociopolitical situation.Item "In It We Should See Our Own Revolution Moving Froward, Rising Up": Socialist Realism, National Subjecthood, and the Chronotope of Albanian History in the Vlora Independence Monument(2014) Isto, Raino Eetu; Mansbach, Steven A; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)November 28, 1972 saw the inauguration of one of communist Albania's largest and most significant works of public sculpture, the seventeen-meter tall bronze Vlora Independence Monument. The work, created by Kristaq Rama, Shaban Hadëri, and Muntas Dhrami, represented an unparalleled attempt to visualize both the geographical and historical unity of the Albanian people, assisting in the cohesion of a modern national identity created and reinforced by the communist government. This paper argues that the Independence Monument, as an exemplar of Albanian communist art, represented not the propagandistic revision of national history--as is often claimed of socialist realism--but rather the establishment of a spatial and temporal ground from which its viewers could come to understand themselves as possessing a shared national heritage and participating in the common construction of a uniquely Albanian socialism.