The Walker Art Center stages a rare survey of the courageous work that bloomed in the Eastern bloc, as artists struggled against state repression.
Here at the Walker Art Center, a weighty and ambitious exhibition reorients American audiences toward a generation of artists, writers and musicians for whom free expression was no plaything and no luxury. The show is called “Multiple Realities: Experimental Art in the Eastern Bloc, 1960s — 1980s,” and it’s the most substantial survey of art from the continent’s former Communist states ever to take place in an American museum.
It includes nearly 100 artists, most of whom worked in treacherous conditions and outside of state institutions, in East Berlin or Warsaw, Prague or Belgrade, Bucharest or Budapest. It’s a history lesson, yes, but an uncommonly boisterous one, chockablock with daring street performances captured on clandestine cameras, psychedelic Hungarian posters and avant-garde Czech fashion, documents of queer parties in Warsaw and punk nights in Prague, and some nifty Yugoslav computer art.
“Multiple Realities,” organized over five years by the Walker curator Pavel S. Pys and accompanied by a hefty 400-page catalog, is the kind of historical exhibition that comes along far too infrequently in our diminished museums of modern and contemporary art. (The show runs through March here and then travels to Phoenix and Vancouver.) It concentrates on five satellite states that spent the later 20th century under the thumb of Moscow — Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland and Romania — as well as the nonaligned socialist state of Yugoslavia. (The U.S.S.R. is omitted, though the war in Ukraine has brutally underscored this show’s analysis of Russian cultural imperialism.) It’s fuzzy-edged, nuanced, self-contradictory, and its pluralistic approach to the East has both a historical and a contemporary vocation.
