“Daß wir allein dank des Imaginären kommunizieren”:: Imagining a New Artistic Language in the Samizdat Production of the Late German Democratic Republic

Abstract

The Getty Research Institute (GRI) in Los Angeles holds one of the largest collections of samizdat artist books of the GDR outside of Germany. This collection allows to study these precious artist books that are often neglected by art historical scholarship. This study will focus on issues of autonomy and authenticity in relation to socialist realism vis a vis these books’ recourse to artistic practices of the avant-garde. As a result of the formalism controversy at the beginning of the 1950s, modernist art was long rejected by socialist realism as reactionary and formalist and therefore denied as an artistic reference. From the 1970s, however, there was a renewed openness to classical modernism. Especially in the artists' books and samizdat publications of the 1980s, there is a conspicuous appropriation of artistic practices from Dada and Surrealism. Since the avant-gardes, the concept of autonomy has been understood primarily as the artist's claim to self-expression and as the purification of the work of art from extra-artistic functions and claims, as well as the resulting self-referentiality of the work. This raises several questions. On the one hand, it seems possible to understand the work of these artists thanks to a concept of autonomy of the avant-gardes regarding their will to an artistic self-expression free from the dictates of the official discourse. On the other hand, they permanently undermine it by internalizing the fundamental ideas of socialist realism to actively act socially.