“This exhibition will go down in our history of painting”
This article explores the reactions to and critical discussions surrounding exhibitions in the first few years of the 1970s, primarily focusing on the 1971 National Figurative Arts Exhibition and the Pranvera exhibition of 1972. It looks closely at the responses of artists to the developments taking place – especially in painting – during Albania’s Ideological and Cultural Revolution, and to map out the ideas and aesthetic approaches that both clashed and mutually reinforced each other during these years. It considers the early reception of works by artists such as Edison Gjergo and Edi Hila, analyzes the complexities of debates over pictorial references to historical modernist styles (such as Cubism and Expressionism), and analyzes the significance of these debates against the background of Albania’s international cultural exchanges at the time. Treating the exhibitions that took place in the early 1970s as a kind of ‘new beginning’ – as contemporary critics in fact saw them – the article explores the direction of culture in state socialist Albania before the more conservative turn of the Fourth Plenum in 1973, arguing for a more diverse and nuanced definition of what artists believed Socialist Realism could accomplish in the Albanian context.
Review: Arian Leka, realizëm socialist në Shqipëri
Where did Socialist Realism come from, and what was it, really? Was it a style, a movement, or something else entirely—a “method”, as its proponents so often characterized it? How did it relate to modernism, that similarly ambiguous phenomenon that dominated so much of cultural discourse—in the West, and beyond—during the 20th century? Arian Leka’s book Realizëm Socialist në Shqipëri attempts to offer answers to these questions, focusing specifically on Socialist Realism in the Albanian context, and looking primarily at poetry and literary criticism (although the book does examine visual culture as well, in its concluding chapter).
Is socialist realism an archive?
A number of scholarly efforts have attempted to delineate the modernist (and postmodernist) attraction to the archive, as both content and as an (an)aesthetic form. However, there has thus far been little effort to understand the precise relationship of socialist realism to the archive, either as a theme or as a mode of historical understanding. There are good reasons for this: socialist realism’s avowedly synthetic ideology, which generally aimed to distil and purify a coherent image of societal development towards the projected communist future, is most frequently regarded as an illusion, a distortion of history that is revealed (ironically) by the kinds of documentary evidence present in archives. Socialist realism’s difficult relationship to photography (its simultaneous reliance on the documentary image and its need to remove ‘problematic’ historical details, to rewrite the past) also seems to place it at odds with the archive’s ambition towards completeness and objectivity. But there are also important reasons to assume that socialist realism (considered as a particular kind of modernism) indeed functioned archivally. Like the archive, socialist realism’s history is closely intertwined with bureaucracy, and like the 19th-century archive, its ideological apparatus was crucially tied to the investigation of temporality. And furthermore, socialist realism often developed alongside archival projects (such as nationalist efforts to document ‘folk’ culture in the periphery, or to produce exhaustive narratives of antifascist activities). Finally, for post-socialist artists and historians, socialist realist cultural objects have undeniably become an archive, a body of evidence to be mined, reconfigured, and questioned. The present essay poses a cluster of questions about socialist realism and the archive, specifically in the context of socialist-era art in Albania: To what degree was socialist realism an archival art form? If socialist realism functioned as an archive in its own time, what kind of archive was it? How are contemporary interventions that engage socialist realist art to be understood as similar to (or different from) other post-socialist artistic interventions in (other kinds of bureaucratic) archives? Was socialist realism’s view of the archive modernist, postmodernist, or something else entirely?