Про східноєвропейський перформанс і те, чому він (поки що) не потрапив до історії мистецтва

Bryzgel, A., 2017, Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Анотація

It is rare that, when reading an art history book, whose geographical scope is claimed to cover the whole world, one is not confronted by a major recurring issue. ‘The world’, for some reason, is only represented by Western Europe and North America. Of course, the art of Asia or Africa may occasionally appear but they get othered and their historical, aesthetic or any kind of value is evaluated solely based on ether how well it aligns with the Western standards, or how much impact the work made, when it was presented to the Western public. Eastern Europe, on the other hand, is usually omitted completely. To Western scholars, the region appears to be too European to be an ‘Other’ but not European enough to be included into cannon. 

In this article, I familiarise the reader with professor at the Northeastern University Amy Bryzgel’s 2017 book “Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960” in which the author, aware of the above issue, aims to research performance art in the region through an independent, though not isolated perspective, possibly pioneering in this intention. In succession, I consider some of Bryzgel’s arguably most important and peculiar conclusions regarding the development and forms of performance art, as well as the author’s methodology and some points on the nature of performance art. 

However, the book fails to avoid the unequal treatment of the countries within its scope. Resulting partly from its institutionalisation and partly from the relatively relaxed type of regime in Yugoslavia in the 1970s, the dynamism of performance art in Marina Abramović’s homeland is of great interest to Bryzgel, but Ukraine’s performance art and culture in general seem to be obscure in this study. This is why I attempt to investigate the reasons for this inequality of representation, as well as do justice to Ukrainian performance art by examining what Bryzgel’s book could benefit from – the context of the country where East and West meet.