The series of Hibrida exhibitions

and events between 2005 and 2008 takes as its context the enlargement of the European Union, building on links between artists associated with the School of Art in Bradford, Yorkshire and the University of Brno in the Czech Republic. Hibrida aims to promote that commerce of images and ideas which characterises our world and for which printmaking continues to offer its dexterity. Printmaking since the 1960's has been associated with a mischievous as well as more critical symbiosis with our mediated-consumer world. What new ideas and images will be produced in the mix of cultures now, in some sense, coming together in a new europe? Will the prevailing genres and techniques of a globalising world be their inevitable-historical context?

We are familiar with the historical fact of globalisation bringing structural change to western europe: post-industrialisation; crises of a recognisable social project; a popular affective void being addressed by new kinds of commerce; options being homogenised. What its implications for eastern europe will be at this new juncture is an extraordinarily interesting question, summoning up as it does a richness of histories and traditions. I would like to sketch here some connections between philosophical themes and qualities of art which might enable a pluralistic way of approaching these; in particular the role of imagination in rethinking our relations to the present and past.

I begin with a familiar anxiety about globalisation. Following a meeting in June 2004 of the now 25 european ministers of culture, France's Renauld Donnedieu de Vabres wrote an article entitled 'Culture, a new idea in Europe' warning that,

'whilst we have never had such a need for culture to move Europe forward, cultural diversity has never been so threatened. It is threatened from outside by the misdoings of an ill-dealt with globalisation which leads to the treating of cultural goods and services as ordinary products and thus is in danger, sooner or later, of reducing what is culturally on offer to what the most powerful industry will produce.' (1)

A concrete instance of such fears, the merger of Sony and BMG, a Bertelmans company, prompted an article two weeks later, 'Constructing a cultural Europe', by a barrister specialising in artist copyright and the director of a private company (2). They argued that the sanctioning of the merger, without conditions, by the European Commission was a very bad precedent 'at the dawn of a new Europe'. A choice had been made to put culture at the service of the economy, whereas the reverse should be the case 'for the sake of civilisation'- or, as they also put it, to encourage 'the diversity of what is on offer and freedom of choice for the consumer.'

The sentiment is echoed, at another level of critique, in a recent essay by Jacques Ranciere (3). He questions an assumption that the modern consumer is unskilled at responding to the mass-mediated environment, a telling example being how galleries show new media work:

'the encounter has to be organised [...] the advertising images, disco sounds or television series have to be re-presented in the museum space, isolated behind a curtain in small, dark partitions which give them the aura of the work stopping the fluxes of communication. Even then [...] there often has to be a little panel [...] spelling out to the viewer that, in the space he is about to enter, he will re-learn to perceive and place at arms' length the flux of media messages which usually overcome him.'

For Ranciere this is a 'somewhat simplistic view of the poor society of the spectacle fool'. He makes a counter-claim that 'The interruptions, deroutings and reassemblings which modify [...] the circulation of images have no sanctuary. They take place everywhere and any time.' This notion of the vagaries of responses to our media environment recalls a theme in Habermas:

'those domains of action which are specialised for the transmission of culture, social integration or the socialisation of the young, rely on the medium of communicative action and cannot be integrated through money or power. A commercialisation or bureaucritisation must therefore generate [...] disturbances, pathological side-effects in these domains.' (4)

Some assuaging side-effects first, which seem to support Ranciere's relative optimism: First, a decision by Berlin city council to keep the former eastern sector's traffic-light icons (a man walking or not walking). This was agreed to be a good bit of its past as reviewed by communal 'ostalgia'- of course including TV, a popular ex-ice-skater doing a series on an A-Z of East German culture- but not 'of course' because this vox-pop hadn't happened in such a way before- an example of an openness, or fluidity of imaginative life through and across the historical and tele-landscape. Second, A38 Budapest is a former Ukrainian stone-carrying ship, now moored in Budapest and a venue for an eclectic mix of music from avant-garde jazz to rock- the subject of much punning on their website. This may be a commercial venture but represents itself in relaxed, wide-ranging cultural references. Third, 'It was the sheer ironic zest of it all that warmed me': Peter Aspden's response to the 'Crazy Guides' leaflet, 'Wild Times in the Eastern Bloc', in his hotel in Krakow. It advertises tours round the Nova Huta district: 'Experience Stalin's gift to Krakow!!! Witness one of the world's only centrally planned cities in a genuine eastern bloc Trabant 601S automobile!!! (5)

Such phenomena, let us remind ourselves, are in stark contrast to what one might call the halucinatory experiences of the Second World War. Two recent discussions of the cities of Gorlitz/Zgorzelec and Breslau/Wroslaw make disturbing reading (6). I will quote at some length from the latter.

Breslau, in historian Gregor Thum's words, 'is a prism allowing reognition of Europe's self-destruction.' Reviewing Thum's book on the city, Wolfgang Thiers, Speaker of the German Federal Parliament, writes,

'The dimensions of what is termed a "population transfer" were enormous. For four years almost ten million human beings were pushed backwards and forwards across hundreds of kilometres. They included 3.5 million Germans who had to leave their Silesian homeland. Most of the new inhabitants came from areas of East Poland lost to Stalin's Soviet Union. [...] initially East Polish peasants were lost in an urban centre, trying as they did to continue rearing cattle or to establish allotments. [...] A completely Polish history was invented so as to make the newcomers feel at home [...] Right from the start the communist rulers [...] set about establishing a myth about the "originally Polish" city of Breslau. [...] after 1945 a process [of] "memory policy" was set in motion.'

Thierse then follows Thum's sorry example in architecture:

'The best-known example of a falsification of history is provided by Breslau's old city centre. It seems today to have been spared by war. In fact it was almost completely destroyed and great efforts were deployed in its rebuilding- in accordance with Polish traditions. Jugendstil facades were removed so as to give houses a baroque exterior [...] Nothing was done for damaged buildings from the Prussian period whereas pre-Prussian structures were comprehensively rebuilt with the cathedral close serving to symbolize a "Polish Middle Ages"...'

Such actions, because they are about what is at stake in the cultural sphere, an emotional investment, are testimony to a kind of communal pathology we can be led into. Stepping back from this is just the contribution a critical, historical reflection like Thum's can achieve, as Thierse notes; adding that its framework is 'Walter Benjamin's call for [...] searching for knowledge in rupture and ruins [...] in conjunction with Jan Assmann's research into "cultural memory".' I will return to Benjamin shortly, after looking at some other side-effects I think will help illustrate the approach to history, renewal and art I am exploring.

Hito Steyerl is a documentary filmmaker and writer based in Berlin. Her work is centred around globalisation, racism and post-colonial critique; those conditions of history and identity which actually confront immigrant or former immigrant communities in what they had imagined to be the 'rich and peaceful' west (7). Her current film project is called 'Europe's dream'. The title is significant for my purpose here in that it points to the power of imagination, and the dangers when its relation to the real moves into grave disequilibrium. Significant too is the fact that Steyerl has argued for documentary adopting rhetorical strategies associated with the fictionality of art (8). This, it seems to me, for the very goal of approaching that real which cannot be simply recorded because it is already exhibited and represented in pathological ways.

Truths and untruths about history and identity bring me back to Benjamin and then to Marx. One of Benjamin's themes is that of fragments of 'messianic time'which, as I understand it, break through the closure of what seems to be the case. I presume this is able or made to happen because we are endlessly processing reality and checking the history and significance we are making it into; and because institutional power does the same thing but badly. Somewhere here there seems to be an enlargeable version of Marx's dialectic; probably, for me, with the help of psychoanalytic insights about the unearthing of repressed histories which are not immediately available to us. Somewhere here is a critical space where an analytic thinking and one provoked by art enjoy both shared and divergent ground. And putting the terms like this would then also take us back to Kant's examinations of aesthetic experience; that it is a mode which makes more transparent the mechanisms and resources of our constructions of meaning (9).

In order to begin to develop imaginative frames of reference for a new european sense of identity I want to suggest two starting-points. First, and more generally, a more awkward dialectic could disrupt arguments framed by a certain version of globalising. The term, as John Tomlinson has pointed out, can still be bound up with the same idea of forward movement as modernity, that is with a sort of inevitability or seamlessness (10). This is well put in comments by Volker Braun, a poet and playwright from former East Germany:

'We are submerged by information but the real questions are hidden [...] The real discussions about property and work are passed over in silence. Capitalist reason which replaces State reason blocks alternative thought, as if we were subject to a sort of fatalism. Of course, every action is based on an understanding of a series of probable outcomes but fatalism is a letting go and thinking that the world is in order.' (11)

Second, if art has a distinct dialectical quality, it is through its juncture of imagination and fictionality. As well as our cognitive life, its inventions engage our affective one- pleasure, memory, aiming. Its capacity for 'deroutings and reassemblings' was enriched by one of europe's newer traditions dating from the time of high modernism in the arts around 1910-20: a tradition of play: play as play and play as research. We trust this will be celebrated in new work in the spirit of Hibrida- and Benjamin.

Robert Galeta

Bradford

Notes

1 . Le Monde 9/7/04 p.14.
2. Isabelle Wekstein-Steg, Patrick Zelnik, Le Monde 23/7/04 p.13.
3. Le Destin des Images , Paris 2003 pp.36-7.
4. 'Jurgen Habermas, A Philosophical-Political Profile' in New Left Review 151, May/June 1985 pp.94-5.
5. Financial Times Ftmagazine 11/12/04 p.46.
6. 'The Enlargement of Europe- Where are the Limits?, Gorlitz/Zgorzelec- from the Periphery to the Centre', Dagmar Giersberg, Kulturjournal , Goethe-Institut, Bonn (English version) 01.2004 pp.8-11; 'Gregor Thum's "Breslau, the Alien City", Unfamiliar Homeland', ibid. pp.12-14.
7. A review of her work appeared in Springerin Magazine , online at http:// www.springerin.at .
8. 'Politics of Truth, Documentarism in the Art Field' in 'Ficcions' documentals , Fundacio la Caixa, Barcelona 2004 pp.122-7 (in english).
9. For a recent useful discussion of aesthetics in Kant, see Andrea Kern 'Reflecting the Form of Understanding: The Philosophical Significance of Art' in Kant after Derrida , Manchester 2003 pp.106-26, esp. pp.121-2 on aesthetic play, interesting for my final paragraph here.
10. 'The Agenda of Globalisation' in New Formations 50 autumn 2003 pp. 10-23. One interesting part of his argument is that globalising, from a juridical dimension, actually enables communities to identify and stand up for their particularity because difference has now been established as a universal category. The independent European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies similarly warns against 'rigid concepts of a uniform culture which should provide Europe or the European Union with an identity and/or image...': http://www.e-c-b.net . See again the comment by Mohammed Harbi on modernity as a 'raw break with a historical fabric' cited in my essay for the previous Hibrida catalogue, in his book review of ' The West and the others' , Le Monde des Livres 15/6/01 p.VII.
11. Le Monde 10/8/01 p.25.