Thank goodness. How joyous. I hated everything about those old days.
All the same, when I see some small relic of that former reality, I relish it. Not because I’m nostalgic, not out of any sense of regret, but because they are tiny reminders embodying the utter trashiness of that old world. As the years go by & the sheer awfulness of Communism as practised in Eastern Europe is remembered by fewer & fewer who actually experienced it, I think the unnoticed relics of the former ghastliness become more & more important to preserve.
Here are some examples I saw today - imagine a whole world of such battered rustiness & flimsy quality. East of Austria, that was the deprived world of every European country from shortly after World War Two until 1989:
I find myself thinking Zoe, not so much about artifacts but of art, and whether those terrible years of suppression actually helped to produce the masterpieces (in all art) that we marvel at now. Shostakovich without the iron heel of Stalin, Prokofiev and Alfred Schnittke towing the line. Solzhenitsyn, Gorky, Bulgakov all, in a way, used that heel, or found ways to circumvent it. And in painting, harder to understand and therefore harder to bully, the list is endless - Vasilyevich, Malevich and dozens of others, putting on dark glasses to go out and buy paint. Yes, a better world now, but where is the great art if you no longer have to look over your shoulder?
ReplyDeleteIf you could imagine for a moment that I had a streak of flippancy, I suppose it's possible that to the question, "Where is the great art?", I might reply, "Probably stuffed down the rusty bottom of that first rubbish bin that seems to be masquerading as a mustard coloured space ship on a stalk." But I do agree that much that is most intriguing in art is work that has constraints imposed on it. The constraint of having to tell the truth but tell it slant, to quote Emily Dickinson completely out of context, can lead to things that are very intriguing. The movie Stalker springs to mind - what it is about is hard to tell, but there is a pleasure in trying to penetrate its obscurity.
DeleteThat is more or less Harry Lyme's argument in The Third Man, isn't it? Yet Bach and Mozart managed to be productive in Germanic states of one sort or another that were not democratic yet not efficiently repressive. Among the writers of the twentieth century, quite a few of those in the more or less democratic west managed to do at least as well as their Soviet contemporaries.
DeleteAs for the rusty objects, I know a home furnishings store in lower Manhattan that would hang astonishing price tags on them.
I don't think totalitarian repression is the only form of restriction that helps creativity. There's an art historian called Michael Baxandall who wrote fascinatingly about how painters in earlier times, rather than making whatever they wanted and then putting out their wares for sale, were constrained by the exigencies of those who commissioned them - given their subject, given even the required composition, told exactly how much they could spend on the paints and gold leaf et cetera. I think those constraints actually gave them a greater freedom to create beauty although I can't explain to you how. Similarly I have read poets who admit that tightly structured forms can be, oddly, very freeing.
DeleteI have to admit that I took rather a fancy to that first rubbish bin, and the chair (which I bet wasn't that rather dashing eau de nil in its original incarnation) and, if I ever was prepared to pay high prices for anything (which I'm not as one of my greatest pleasures is getting bargains), I might be persuaded to pay for them. Lord knows why. They do appeal to me. Maybe because they bring back memories of my youth.