Political or social? (Marxism-related problems in art history)
Prof. Andrzej Turowski
Krzysztof M. Bednarski, „Portrait of Karl Marx”, 1978
Throughout the post-war Polish history, until the 1980s, the language of Marxism was quite a common language which abounded in a lot of contradictory meanings. While it was clearly a type of ideological rhetoric for the communist authorities, at the same time, it also constituted one of the languages of the opposition, most readily referred to as “revisionist”.
In many ways, the language appeared in humanities, frequently representing purely opportunistic discourses, as well as various forms of anti-institutional resistance. In particular, like the languages of existentialism and structuralism overlapping Marxism, it was crucial for those unreconciled members of society who did not identify themselves with the religious opposition. In short, Marxism was not only a domain of the colonisers but also a domain of the colonised. After the downfall of the Soviet Union and the end of the communist colonialism, the language of Marxism united the postcolonial society with a sense of guilt. Thus, it remained a hybrid of post-communist attitudes, and gave rise to reluctance, or even hostility, of those individuals who do not want to identify themselves with the post-war past. It is also here that the boundary between a history denied and unconscious fiction goes. Marxism, with its potential for becoming one of the critical methods of post-colonialism in any other place, in the world of the former colonial domination of the Soviets, as a component of internal discourses of both the colonisers and the colonised, lost its critical capabilities, not only in terms of its own historical experience but also in terms of political (war neo-colonialism) and economic (neo-liberalism) hazards of global modernity.
This lecture is a reminiscence of debates on the socio-political issues of Polish art history, conducted in the academic environment of Poznan art historians in the 1960s and 1970s, in the context of Marxism, structuralism, sociology and ideology.
