Fifteen years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Central and Eastern European museums continue to go through demanding transitions. The former Eastern bloc has dissolved into many countries and cultures. Its cultural sector now openly displays a vivid diversity once hidden under Communism. In the last decade, probably no other region of the world has undergone such a rapid transformation, invigorated by strong contributions and interventions from outside the region. This article explores this vast landscape, through conversations with artists and museum professionals across Central and Eastern Europe. It gathers impressions and perspectives offered by many voices, revolving around the question of how a generation of museum professionals has adapted to the challenge. They have tasted the direct consequences, good and bad, of a free-market economy and borderless communications—and have reinvented themselves while doing so. Achieving much with little, they have had to learn to function within a dramatically changing local environment, and to speak “English” in a globalized world.
THE EAST
When the wall came down, we felt like immigrants in our own country as a whole culture fell apart. —Corina Suteu, president of ECUMEST (Europe Culture Management in the East).
In March 2004, the Salzburg Seminar—an American educational organization that has promoted global dialogue since 1947 through its multifaceted seminars—invited 30 cultural professionals from all over Central and Eastern Europe to convene in Salzburg. The retreat, titled “Central and Eastern Cultural Institutions in Transition,” offered a rare moment to reflect on the immense changes that had occurred in the cultural sector since 1989.
The setting presented an unlikely hybrid of warm, informal American hospitality and picturesque Central European grandeur. The retreat took place in an eighteenth-century Austrian fairytale castle that once served as the model for The Sound of Music. The castle’s interior was vamped up in the 1920s by German-Jewish theater director Max Reinhardt (1873–1940), a co-founder of the Salzburg Festival. There was a Venetian mirror room, a Swiss abbey library, and a Chinese tea room. A local swan and many Austrian cakes completed the frame.
This article owes much to the seminar’s discussions, as well as to subsequent conversations with colleagues across Europe, in large part conducted by email. (All quotations not otherwise referenced here are from these email interviews.) Additional insights come from this writer’s museum work and travel in Slovenia, the Czech Republic, Romania, and Ukraine. These observations attempt to trace some of the impact of American and West-European museum concepts on this region after 1989. How did Eastern and Central European museum professionals react to the challenges presented to them by the fall of the Wall, and how did they translate this cross-cultural dialogue for their own purposes? What worked, and what didn’t, in this interplay between East and West?
Falling apart and coming together—“East, West—I don’t think these easy categories are very helpful after nearly 15 years,” stated Czech curator Iva Knobloch, the head of the print department at the Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague. “Of course, in the beginning, Western museums seemed to be so much more professional. One easily felt inferior and took the West as a glamorous model. Western museums are better funded, of course. But once you start traveling and working with different institutions, you recognize that the West is as different as the East and at times can be as slow and unprofessional as the East. Plus, the notion of the East is outdated.”
In the Western perception, the “Eastern bloc” was simply one entity enclosed by an Iron Curtain. In the last 15 years, the region has been recognized as being much more complex, with many old and new borders. There is now a clearer picture of the divisions between Central and Eastern Europe, as well as an understanding that the Baltic countries constitute a region in their own right. The breakup of Yugoslavia has revived older regional names—such as the Balkans, a term that carries strong negative connotations. “South East Europe” is currently a more neutral designation. The enlarged European Union has brought new neighbors into view: Ukraine, Moldavia, Albania, Belarus, and of course—a force all by itself—Russia. Few Europeans or Americans could draw an accurate map of this new landscape of the former “East.” My colleagues at the Salzburg Seminar all seemed to have at least one anecdote of a Western museum consultant who complimented the great “Polish” food while being in Hungary, or expressed love for the Slovenian landscape while being in Slovakia.
The complexity of the region is not new, in the view of Corina Suteu, president of ECUMEST (Europe Culture Management in the East), a Romanian association she founded in 1998 to develop and professionalize the cultural sector. Suteu says:
Although the Iron Curtain had a potentially harmonizing effect, Communist countries were extremely different already during the Communist regime. Albania and Romania were controlled by totalitarian systems, while at the opposite pole, Yugoslavia was given freedoms unavailable to other Communist countries under Russian rule. It was only with the collapse of Yugoslavia that the situation reverted to the stereotypes of the Balkans: fragmentation, violent conflict, backwardness and misery. Baltic countries (Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania) and Moldavia suffered from “Russification” or cultural colonization. In Hungary and Czechoslovakia, a strong opposition to Soviet ideological pressure—although it came at a high price—gave self-esteem. Poland recovered with difficulty after World War II: it was run by a conservative Communism, and the Polish spiritual resistance, influenced by the Catholic Church, was as conservative as the Communist power.1
After the fall of the Wall, older cultural and religious ties with the West also changed Western perceptions of the West-East division lines. Suteu points out that Catholicism was influential in realigning formerly Catholic countries in the East with their Catholic neighbors in the West.
Although development within the cultural sector now differs from country to country, the long-term effects of Communist rule still exist as a shared past and a burden. The alignment of state power with culture, so typical of all Communist countries, still poses long-term problems: the existence of large state museums, overstaffed and inefficient; the relative lack of independent cultural NGO’s to build new venues and initiatives; the necessary effort to reclaim national histories; the contrasting demands for a wider European and global orientation; and most significantly, the lack of funds and resources. Suteu says:
Even today, one would still consider the ministries of culture to be the guilty bodies for everything lacking in the cultural sector. It is this legacy that made a new beginning so hard. The fact that all cultural infrastructures were subsidized and promoted by the State undermined all kinds of autonomous art or cultural initiatives. The relationship between the artist and the public was alienated. Without understanding the past, one cannot understand the problems of transitions. All Communist governments had a strong cultural agenda based on large cultural state institutions.
The Communist utopia of a unified Communist internationalism—as expressed in the anthem of the International (“Arise, the wretched of the earth”)—informed cultural policy, at least on its surface. Milena Dragicevic-Šešic, professor in the Faculty of Art at Belgrade University, writes about the claim of internationalism in socialist cultural policies: “In their rhetoric, the socialist states used cultural policy to propagate internationalism: in reality, however, their cultural policies contributed toward the complete isolation of their arts from world trends in both artistic and managerial terms” (2000).2
A sense of artistic stagnation and isolation was the consequence, as Suteu explains with the example of so-called traditional art:
In Bulgaria and Romania, as well as in Communist countries under Russian occupation (Baltic states, Moldavia) so-called genuine folklore products were, in fact, artificially invented. Communism had erased all individual rural property and replaced it with community farms. Isolation had two dimensions in the Eastern Communist states: first from the Western world and Western values, and second, from the inner genuine values and traditions.
WEST TO EAST
After 1989, many museums and cultural initiatives looked towards Western Europe and the United States—rather than within their region—for approval of their cultural policies. The reasons were manifold: Funds were often more easily secured through Western “tutors” than through the respective governments. Many programs were developed by Western European and American sources: the Council of Europe; the cultural institutes of Western European nations (British Council, Goethe Institute and others); IPAM (International Partnerships Among Museums), administered through AAM; and as the biggest investor, the Soros Foundation. These groups attempted to jump-start and facilitate museum and wider cultural operations. A whole new generation of cultural operators passed through this circle of travel, applications, conferences, grants and artistic exchange. The Fondazione Fitzcarraldo has summarized the effects:
The task of internationalization is often achieved through informal, non-structural, almost “incidental” networking activities. This approach includes instances such as feedback provided by grant applicants, or agreeing on applications that are partly international in scope, or where the involvement of international players ends up having an impact on the foundation itself. Such informal approaches to international relations suggest the existence of quite adaptive behavior, which is not captured by specific evaluation processes, but still allows for a flexible case-by-case response (2003).
As Matei Bejenaru, president of the Romanian Vector Cultural Association, puts it, “I learned to understand the differences, to listen to the others, or better, to ‘speak English.’”3
Bypassing overstaffed and inefficient state institutions, new cultural foundations have been vital in developing new venues and larger cooperative frameworks. A wide array of smaller and larger Western European and American foundations and NGOs contributed to facilitating change and communication. To name just a few: Gulliver Connect (by the Dutch Felix Meritis Foundation); S.T.E.P beyond (European Cultural Foundation); Looking Inside (The Open Society Institute Arts and Culture Network Program in Budapest); the Silk Road Project—Artist in Residence (Siemens Corporation and Siemens Arts Program).
Jillian Poole founded the American Fund for Arts and Culture in Central and Eastern Europe in 1991. She explains:
Our nonprofit American Fund helps cultural institutions adjust to a free market economy. In our view, the largest help can come from Westerners listening and then responding to what they hear. One size definitely doesn’t fit all in any part of the world, and the post-totalitarian world is no different. What works in the West cannot be transplanted wholesale. But with careful listening, we in the West can offer ideas and links that our friends can adapt to their own needs.
Eastern European museums have changed in the last 14 years. They have established a wider range of contacts with other similar institutions in their own countries and abroad. The Internet has helped, although its use is still limited in many parts. Isolation, of course, was the challenge of totalitarian eras in all the countries that those regimes embraced. And with those regimes came thought dictation. Being told what to think and being instructed to think no further was inculcated into all parts of life for over 40 years. Breaking that isn’t easy. The legacy dies hard.4
Within the difficult accession negotiations prior to the enlargement of the European Union in May 2004, cultural self-representation of the accession countries in the European Union played an important role. “Between 1990 and 1994, no tours of theater companies or exchanges of exhibitions took place bilaterally East-East, unless initiated from the West. Even now, exclusive East-East artistic exchange is rare,” says Suteu. “It was a kind of ‘quick fix internationalization’—only what Western cultures accepted and appreciated was considered valuable.”
The Soros Foundations—No other foundation has had such an impact on post-Communist countries as the educational and cultural network developed in Eastern Europe by the Soros Foundations. Billionaire philanthropist George Soros—who was born in Hungary in 1930 and survived the Nazi occupation of Budapest before moving to the US in 1956—established the Open Society Institute-Hungary in 1984. Its $3 million budget rivaled that of the Hungarian Ministry of Culture. Soros expanded the Open Society Institute (OSI) in 1993, creating an umbrella organization for the work of his foundations in Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, with additional funding from other governmental and non-governmental sources. OSI today supports foundations in more than 50 countries, with its main focus on Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. With an annual overall budget of nearly $500 million, the Soros Foundations develop and support an open society in diverse fields such as the arts, education, media, public health, and human rights as well as social, legal, and economic reform.5 George Soros has said:
The goal of the foundation network is to promote an open society. The concept of an open society is based on the recognition that people act on the basis of imperfect truth. This leads to a respect for the rule of law, to a society that is not dominated by the state, to the existence of democratic government, to a market economy, and above all, to respect for minorities and minority opinions. The key point that needs to be recognized is that an open society is more complex, more sophisticated than a closed society (Soros 1994, 83).
The foundation network’s Arts and Cultural Programs division serves a variety of needs, such as the promotion of contemporary art, professional capacity and regional network building, the development of cultural policies, and cross-border artistic exchange. OSI’s program of Centers for Contemporary Art, established since the mid-1990s in 17 countries in Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, created what were often the first independent cultural venues in their respective countries, with varying success. Throughout the 1990s, OSI Arts and Culture Programs strongly influenced the revival and future infrastructure of cultural institutions in post-Communist countries.
Solvita Krese, director of the Latvian Center for Contemporary Art, explains: “In Latvia, the Soros Center for Contemporary Art was an essential source of support for contemporary art. Actually, it was the only source of support. The main work has been and is the creation of a database of those Latvian artists active in the sphere of contemporary art, the organization of the annual exhibition and other contemporary art events, as well supporting the projects of individual artists. The articulation and expression forms of art have changed a lot. And the perception of art has changed as well.”6
Lidia Varbanova, former program director at the Arts and Culture Network of the Open Society Institute in Budapest, agrees: “The Soros Centers for Contemporary Arts were important when they started, as they supported artists and art forms that were ignored by the national Ministries of Culture. Some centers established themselves in time as important NGOs and international partners. They accumulated and disseminated much-needed information in the field, through case studies or good practices.”7
Due to their restructuring in 2000-2001, all Soros Centers for Contemporary Arts started to become independent, non-governmental organizations under the membership of the new association ICAN (International Contemporary Art Network). But the rapid transformation into supposedly self-sustainable public institutions with overall business plans and successful fundraising efforts might endanger the future of at least some of the former Soros art centers. A recent research report by Fondazione Fitzcarraldo (2003) observes that: “Most OSI/Soros Foundations art departments closed down activities between 2000 and 2001, with a dramatic financial downscaling, and radical departmental reorganization…. To help understand the impact of today’s reorganization phase and the entity of past initiatives, the Arts and Culture Network Program has collapsed from $2,700,000 in 2002 to $500,000 in 2003. Today the destiny of the program is still uncertain: For the year 2004, $500,000 was granted.” The broader donor base envisioned in at least some of the respective countries did not emerge, although some centers were able to secure both local and international funds.
Varbanova explains: “Mr. Soros wanted the Centers for Contemporary Arts to be less dependent on the Open Society Fund and to find, step by step, other sources of funding. Some of them succeeded, others did not. One reason might be the absence of enough management skills of the directors and staff of the centers, or the fact that the respective boards of the centers were not sufficiently used to the development of fundraising strategies. But in general it is very difficult for contemporary arts to rely on self-generated incomes. They need reliable subsidies from the government, sponsors, or foundations. In Central and Eastern Europe where only limited sources of funding for arts and culture exist, this task is not an easy one.”
The Latvian Soros Center, according to Krese, might be successful in its search for new partners: “In cooperation with the Riga City Council and the Latvian Ministry of Culture, a new institution is going to be established—the Latvian Center of Contemporary Art. Of course, due to our frequent changes of government, the situation is a potential object to change, too. The primary task of this new institution would be to work out the conceptual and development model of a Latvian Museum of Contemporary Art that continues and broadens the promotion of contemporary art in Latvia. Contemporary art has become the language of its time, reflecting the contradictions and problems of society today. It is the lingua franca of international communication.”
THREE EXAMPLES
While American and Western European programs and funds certainly helped to facilitate some of the transformations in the cultural sector, initiatives to create new cultural venues depended on artists, museum professionals, and cultural operators in the respective countries. Three examples might give an indication of the exchange and relation of these local initiatives to global resources and networks. (Each example consists of an email interview with a question-and-answer format.)
ROMANIA
Matei Bejenaru, artist by profession, heads the Vector Cultural Association and the yearly Periferic Biennial Exhibition of contemporary art in Iasi, Romania. The biennial is the largest contemporary art initiative in Romania after the fall of the Wall. Even if Romania is accepted into the European Union in 2007, Iasi still would mark the outermost distance from the center of the E.U., being situated at its future border with Moldavia and Ukraine.
Matei Bejenaru: When I decided to stay in Iasi, I knew that it would be a difficult thing to do contemporary art in the provincial cultural context of Iasi. Being an artist, I decided to build my own cultural network, because there is no infrastructure for contemporary art in Iasi. If you want to move faster from a place to another, you need a car, a machine. Art is such an accelerator. I understood that I needed to build a machine to “move faster.” Also, as a person, I can’t culturally exist in Iasi alone. We need an art scene and a public.
The Periferic Biennial Exhibition has grown a lot since 1997, because there is a strong motivation to do it. Our capital is sympathy, we play fair, and we always try to upgrade our knowledge in arts and culture. And… we respect people and they see this. In the last years, when we started to grow as an institution, we have more links to the art world and, of course, more visibility. Until 2003, foreign money played an important role—for example, from the German state foundation, the French-German Cultural Fund, Pro Helvetia or the British Council. In the last year, we tried to find more local money, especially from companies in Iasi.
Klaus Müller: What, for you, is the relation between the periphery and the center in a global world?
M. Bejenaru: The periphery always looks to the shining center, because it is poor, less sophisticated and less connected. But the center needs peripheries to legitimate itself and to export its model. A very interesting phenomenon is now the connection of peripheries that bypass traditional centers. For example, I am developing a project with a group of artists from Santiago de Chile, and it is fascinating to discover the differences and similarities between our post-totalitarian contexts.
K.M.: How do you use the Vector Cultural Association to change your local frame?
M. Bejenaru: Our Vector Cultural Association is changing the local context because we have the knowledge and the connections to bring new ideas and to adapt them. We work with professional foreign curators and have established an international board. Our global visibility and discourse can be seen like that: We use the “English language of arts” to talk about local problems. Of course, we try to analyze this by using global concepts. We do not work with museums. In Romania they are too traditional and unable to adapt to our demands. In previous years, we lost a lot of resources and energy, and the results were below our expectations. These old museums will die a natural death in the next 10 years. In five years I hope Vector will run the Turkish Bath of Iasi as an international contemporary art center and that the Periferic Biennial will be one of the respected art events in Europe, not because of its size, but of its ideas and content.
CROATIA
Tomislav Šola, professor of museology (he calls it “heritology”) and head of the Information Science Department at the University of Zagreb, developed the Best in Heritage Conference in Dubrovnik. Each year, in September, the conference brings together an impressive selection of awarded projects from the museum, heritage and conservation fields, and international museum professionals to discuss best practices. Best in Heritage is an unlikely event—with very little funding, it managed to attract a wide range of museum professionals from around the world. Although Šola is a pessimist about worldly matters, his event is all about the future.
Klaus Müller: Why did you decide to build your own cultural network?
Tomislav Šola: Out of spite. Wherever I proposed it internationally, it did not work, it was not accepted, and I was not given the chance…. Eastern European countries are disregarded. Most of the colleagues from the West have difficulties overcoming their misconceptions about that “barbarous” part of the world. Frankly, though provocatively, our wars were, cynically speaking, “internal.” They were fought because we live in an area where big political, economic, and religious interests meet. And they meet fiercely, throughout our history. But we never colonized nor enslaved nor killed industrially.
Small countries have little means to defend their “little” identities and their pride. In brief, I wanted to prove locally and internationally that this situation could be turned into something positive, both through creativity and courage, and against the prevailing subservient mentality.
K.M.: What are the goals of Best of Heritage?
T. Šola: Excellence. Every September we invite the best awarded museum, heritage, and conservation projects from all over the world to Dubrovnik. There they present their achievements to those who wish to become equally successful. Last year we had 27 projects and 112 participants from 29 countries. We offer a three-day intensive program in one of the most inspiring environments of the world, followed by a program about innovation and alternative practices. We want to become the place where the future is forged.
It was hard to get it funded, but the Ministry of Culture of Croatia accepted the challenge and financed it with Euro 20,000. On that money we have operated for two consecutive years. All other local help amounted to Euro 2,000. Tiny as we are, we tried to apply for money internationally, but without any success. We practically lost the hope and manage with what we have.
Now I do not search for recognition internationally any more, but wish to break the hardest barrier: local reticence and refusal. Small countries, especially when traumatized by transition or wars, readily accept subordination and second-class status. Their young mostly wish to emigrate and get rid of their deficient image. This emphasizes their provincialism and peripheral psychology. As a consequence, they never trust their own innovations or creative potential—be it people or anything else. Any change of administration may mean the end of subsidy, no matter what the program brings as local revenue. The ruling oligarchy is mediocre and visionless. The Best in Heritage operates on half of the necessary budget; the rest is earned through registration fees. To be clear, almost all our guests pay all their expenses themselves. The global frame is, however, impressive: We stand under the patronage of ICOM, ICOMOS, Europa Nostra, the City of Dubrovnik and, quite possibly in the future, of the regional UNESCO office.
K.M.: What is the relation between periphery and center in a global world?
T. Šola: My experience is that we have to be always exceptional to be acceptable, whereas some colleagues from Western countries profit much from the impeccable image of their shining institutions and powerful countries.
SERBIA AND MONTENEGRO
Zoran Pantelic, artist by profession, created his own network by founding APSOLUTNO, a collective artists’ group, and kuda.org (http://kuda.org/_kuda_info.htm), a new media center in Novi Sad, the country’s second largest city. NGOs do not find much support in Serbia; international contacts and resources are essential. Media pluralism and new media are high on the agenda of both initiatives in a country that not too long ago was ruled by Slobodan Milosevic.
Zoran Pantelic: When you look back at the last decade in Serbia, culture certainly has been a strong force in creating national illusions and a closed and xenophobic society. Mainstream culture, that is. All other forms of cultural expression were marginalized, without media, without authority…. After the recent political changes and the fall of Milosevic, things started to be much better, but not enough.
As an artist, I realized that we would need to educate the audience for new meanings, for new expressions of artistic presentations. For traditional state-sponsored art institutions and organizations, it is more difficult to follow the changes that now affect the whole planet. That’s why we started, in 1993, an independent artist group APSOLUTNO in Novi Sad, Yugoslavia, focusing on interdisciplinary art work and media pluralism. Our work started in the field of fine arts. Gradually, it developed to include not only aesthetic, but also cultural, social and political aspects.
Klaus Müller: From an artist collective, you went on to found a non-profit organization, kuda.org, in the field of information and communication technology. How does kuda.org relate to international networks?
Z. Pantelic: kuda.org [http://kuda.org/_kuda_info.htm] encourages new ways of artistic production, as well as media literacy. We are applying to many international foundations—such as Pro Helvetia, the Dutch embassy, the Goethe Institute, and the European Cultural Foundation—that deal with this kind of work, as well as on the local and state level up to the ministry of culture. Our position is “in-between”—we largely depend on the political authorities in power. The present government, for example, does not regard the NGO sector as relevant, and only invests in mainstream national institutions. It is hard to develop something sustainable.
Kuda.org functions as a provider, as a sort of transmitter from the outside to the inside. In the last few years, we invited a lot of people from abroad, for example from the United States, France, or the Netherlands. Through this process we created a critical platform that deals with contemporary art and culture.
Many experts from abroad share their knowledge. They come to Novi Sad and help us with setting up our network. With their help we have been able to build our center, for example our library.
I also learned a lot from the Soros Foundations, especially in regard to self-promotion. Artists need to learn how to present their work. It gave me a better understanding of the problems that arose during the transition period and of the strong connections between economic, political, and social aspects in the arts.
K.M.: Do you work with museums?
Z. Pantelic: Yes, but the whole infrastructure in the cultural sector in Serbia is very rough, especially where it concerns human resources. Cooperation with museums, therefore, mostly means improvisation. Museums still promote mainstream culture. Their visibility is much better than that of NGOs like kuda.org. Depending on the idea, we are making progress, though. In 2003, we cooperated with the museum of contemporary art in Belgrade on the world-information.org exhibition that explored the complex sphere of information production, manipulation, control and distribution.
K.M.: Where are you in five years?
Z. Pantelic: Who knows?… This is a very open question and position…. In Serbia it is still an unclear situation…. We should keep our international network and at the same time try to develop our world here.
Change as a stable factor—Most of the colleagues interviewed from Central and Eastern Europe agree that the vast array of exchange programs, grants, conferences and consultancies offered by American and Western European foundations, museums and embassies helped to regenerate the cultural sector. These programs also helped them to reconnect to an international network of museums and cultural projects, and to import global models for their environments—or, as Matei Bejenaru put it, to learn to use the “English language of arts” to talk about local problems.
They also seem to agree that the image of a “golden Western solution” fades away. As Corina Suteu explains, “After having implemented, for example, the Dutch cultural policy model in Hungary, and having been inspired by a number of French laws on cultural heritage and decentralization in Romania and Poland, the organizations that were functioning within these borrowed patterns still had to adapt to the local context and to the economic limitations of transition, quite different from their potentials for efficiency in a Western context.”
Stability, a key element of a civil society, was often lacking in the transition period. Change was the only stable feature. Suteu adds, “In Romania, Ministries of Culture changed 10 times in 14 years, in Bulgaria eight times, and in Poland 16 times over the same period. No cultural policy outlived the mandate of a minister.”
How can one develop efficient management without reliable institutional infrastructures?
The outcomes of the transition period seem to depend, once again, on geographic divisions. Milena Dragicevic-Šešic states: “The countries of Central Europe, above all the Czech Republic, Poland, Slovenia, and Hungary, as well as to a great extent the Baltic countries, have nearly completed the transition process even in the field of culture. That is to say that a new legislative system has been introduced, a multiparty democratic system is functioning, privatization is already underway, and the economy is making strides towards being market-driven and showing signs of growth again. These societies are open towards the world, and appear ready to be integrated into the global world cultural system” (2000).
Eastern and South Eastern European countries face a harder challenge, according to Maleševic: “An overall view of Eastern European societies reveals a picture of two different groups of values that go to make up, to a greater or lesser degree, the dominant cultural values of the populations living in this part of the world. The first group is related to those ideas and values which have their origin in the particular histories of each individual region and society, including the effects of 50 or more years of state socialism. The second group has to do with the impact of new ‘modernizing’ values that have their origin in the West or are the result of the contemporary trends of globalization, unification, the new information age, and so on. The influence of these two groups is something that is common to all post-Communist societies, while its extent differs for each individual case” (1997, 60).
While all countries of the former Eastern bloc gained a greater sovereignty with its abolition, some additionally gained national independence for the first time. Slovenia, Croatia, Ukraine, and the Baltic countries consequently have invested considerable resources and concepts into a newly defined national heritage. In the midst of this process, the European Union—as well as rising worldwide tourism—has pressured these countries to develop transnational and multicultural identities. Two countries, Slovenia and Estonia, and their solutions might illuminate this challenge. Their relatively small size also might have contributed to the successful introduction and implementation of new forms of museum management and decentralization that are still strong challenges for large countries such as Poland or Romania.
Slovenia—After gaining national independence for the first time in 1991, Slovenia invested substantially into its national cultural heritage—which for the longest time had substituted for its lacking state independence. With a population of close to two million, but with nearly 2.2 million domestic and foreign tourists coming to Slovenia every year, Slovenia seems—even more than other countries—to face one of the signatures of globalization, a rapidly growing worldwide tourism. With heritage travel as one of tourism’s fastest growing segments, Slovenian museums (like museums worldwide) need to find ways to be accessible and understandable to visitors from very different backgrounds.
There are many examples that succeed. The exhibition concept at the Museum of Recent History in Celje illustrates how to inform a Slovenian and international museum audience at the same time. The exhibition leads its visitors through the drastic and complex changes in twentieth-century Slovenia with a fictional “diary of three generations,” thus using a powerful but familiar narrative concept for Slovenes and tourists alike. The diary is translated into English and connects the displayed artifacts to a meaningful ensemble. Again, English functions as the lingua franca.
The wooden Franja Partisan Field Hospital near Cerkno, an amazing site of partisan activities during World War II, has been saved through intense international cooperative conservation efforts. The Salt-Pans Museum near Secovlje, consisting of the salt house itself and its shallow ponds, is a fascinating example of how traditional salt harvesting can be turned into a museum as well as a partially working small salt-production facility—a site accessible to both Slovenes and international visitors alike.
Since the early 1990s, Slovenian museums also promoted their institutions across borders, through a variety of art manifestations, biennials, or museum conferences such as the 2003 ICOM-3 conference that brought three ICOM commitees and hundreds of international museum professionals to the capital, Ljubljana.
Estonia—After 1989, the Baltic countries of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania seemed to gravitate to another model—that of the Scandinavian countries. Their jump-start from neglected provinces of the former Soviet Union to fresh members of the European Union in May 2004 capitalized on their geographical vicinity to the Nordic countries, helped by their relatively small size of 1.4 million inhabitants (Estonia), 2.4 million (Latvia) and 3.5 million (Lithuania), and the highest growth rates (averaging five to six percent) of all new European member states. After these countries’ isolation under the Soviet regime, free and open communication was key to many of their projects. Today, the so-called “Baltic tigers” have implemented modern information and communication technologies and have integrated these new modes into their daily life to a degree that equals or surpasses the West. For instance, Estonian citizens, by law, are guaranteed free access to the Web through 700 public Internet access points throughout the country.
In the Estonian museum landscape, the resolve to change finds its strongest expression in the new Art Museum of Estonia and its spectacular building currently under construction in Tallinn. The new structure, designed by architect Pekka Vapaavuori, extends the exhibition space of the old art museum, founded in 1919, from 10,130 to 51,340 square feet. Tiina Abel, vice-director of research at the new museum, says: “The new building of the Art Museum of Estonia has a symbolic value for all Estonians. It is the first museum building ever purposely constructed by the state—an act of good will, intelligent behavior, and sacrifice, inspired by our newly attained political independence and a feeling of national pride. In the beginning of the 1990s we had to close our main building due to deterioration; essential parts of our collection were scattered to temporary premises all over Tallinn.”8
The plans for the new building, conceived two months after Estonia’s declaration of independence in August 1991, went through a long period of reorientation and discussion. “For the first time in our history,” says Abel, “we had to think seriously about our mission and our possibilities in the contemporary Estonian, Baltic, and global cultural field. Creating the mental space for our work within our society has been challenging. We also had to face the fact that—although we are very good critics, art historians, and museum professionals—we felt rather uncomfortable. We had operated on limited financial resources and without international contacts or a solid theoretical background for such a long time. We all had to learn. But we have learned indeed.”
Reaching out to both colleagues and potential donors outside the country was one key element of the project. Abel says: “In the beginning it was a very hard time for us. The museum was considered a threat to our limited public funds. There were constant discussions about the right site of the building, and the need to preserve the geologically valuable limestone bank and historically valuable barracks of the 1930s. Fortunately, all these discussions have come to an end. We are very happy that many common people are involved in creating the new institution, including Estonians who are living abroad. We got a lot of support from many institutions in Estonia, as well as from abroad, especially from museums that were newly founded or went through extensive reconstructions, such as the Ateneum and Kiasma in Helsinki, the Museumsquartier in Vienna, the Moderna Museet in Stockholm or the Dublin Museum of Modern Art.”
With the completion of the Art Museum, expected in 2005, both classical and contemporary Estonian art will be displayed in the new facilities. Tiina Abel hopes that it becomes a “multifunctional, alive and dynamic institution” both for Estonians and tourists alike, portraying Estonian art and cultural history.
EAST TO WEST
While Eastern and Central European museums might incorporate Western concepts, they—like all other museums—continue to function within their historical framework, culturally defined practices, and specific audiences. Eastern and Central European museum professionals share the experience of having gone through a complete overhaul of their institutions and culture. This experience of dramatic change, and the long-term effects of a totalitarian past, will inform cultural practices for a long time, and museums need to find ways to mediate both. Of course, they do not start at point zero, but benefit also from inheriting a rich cultural history that has to be disentangled from its once-tight embrace by Communist cultural politics. Their solutions have to be home-grown while at the same time accounting for the rapid changes of globalization. “Speaking English”—seen as a metaphor—bridges the tensions between local and global demands.
Tomislav Šola says: “This could mean that we might build smaller structures than the ones we see in the West—less big, but more feasible for long-term support within the financial resources given.” The challenge of limited resources will not only remain, but might increase in at least some countries. Both a worldwide economic depression and the integration into the European Union have put the young democracies under considerable pressure and could lead to a revival of separatist or totalitarian tendencies.
Another challenge will be the structural growth of cross-border cooperation, instead of the prior dominating orientation towards the West. “Fresh borders” do not make an easy situation to build on: Issues of trust, and in many occasions, reconciliation, have to be cleared first. The patchwork of ethnic minorities could complicate such necessary long-term initiatives.
But on the whole, many achievements have been made, and secured, in much less time than anybody probably expected in 1989. A new generation of cultural leaders developed during this overhaul. Some of their experiences on how to endure and shape such dramatic change might prove to be of great benefit for the cultural sector in Western countries, where state subsidies decline from year to year. Corina Suteu quotes Romanian Philosopher Gabriel Liiceanu, who explained that post-Communist societies have the luck to still live in a “potential” world, so different from the “saturated” western reality. But many in the cultural sector in the West have become familiar with a less-saturated cultural environment where funds are increasingly difficult to secure.
Jillian Poole, president of the Fund for Arts and Culture, says: “As with our Eastern friends, we too have changed over the last 14 years. We listen better. We are perhaps a little more creative in suggesting solutions to a larger variety of challenges. There are many more ways to skin a cat than we ever dreamed of! There is no ‘right’ way to do things.”
WEBSITES CONSULTED
Best in Heritage, Croatia
Soros Foundation
Soros Foundations Arts and Cultural Program
International Contemporary Art Network
Periferic Biennial, Iasi, Romania
Policy Resources for Culture in South East Europe
Europe Culture Management in East; Romania
European Cultural Foundation
Balkan Cultural Cooperation
Budapest Observatory on Financing Culture in East-Central Europe
Fund for Arts and Culture in Central and Eastern Europe
kuda.org, Novi Sad, Serbia
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I sincerely wish to thank the Salzburg Seminar for their generous invitation to this seminar and especially Program Director Susanna Seidl-Fox for all her support. I also want to express my gratitude to my colleagues from Eastern and Central Europe for their joyful help, advice, and patience with my lengthy email correspondence.
NOTES
1. These passages are quoted from Suteu (2003), in a slightly revised, shortened form prepared in cooperation with Corina Suteu. All further quotes from Suteu originate in this paper.
2. See also Yerkovich (2002).
3. Email interview with Matei Bejenaru.
4. Email interview with Jillian Poole.
5. In 2002 the Soros Foundations Network expenditures totaled $474,402 million. See Soros Foundations Network (2003).
6. Email interview with Solvita Krese.
7. Email interview with Lidia Varbanova.
8. Email interview with Tiina Abel.
REFERENCES
Dragicevic-Šešic, Milena. 2000. Cultural policy in the post-totalitarian period in Eastern and Central Europe—between local and global. The 2000 Reader of the Summer University Course: Innovative cultural policies and cultural management in societies in transition. Budapest: Central University Budapest.
Fondazione Fitzcarraldo. 2003. Cultural cooperation in Europe: What role for foundations? Research Report on Behalf of Network of European Foundations for Innovative Cooperation. http://www.fitzcarraldo.it/ricerca/pdf/Volume.pdf
Maleševic, S. 1997. The Czech Republic and Slovakia: Two different roads to cultural development. In: Culturelink, Special Issue, Zagreb: http://www.culturelink.org/review/s97/s97cont.html.
Soros Foundations Network. 2003. Building Open Societies: Soros Foundations Network 2002 Report. New York: The Open Society Institute. http://www.soros.org/resources/articles_publications/publications/sorosannual2002_20030801/a_complete_report.pdf
Soros, G. 1994. Build an educational and cultural network for Eastern Europe. In The Arts in the World Economy: Public Policy and Private Philanthropy for a Global Cultural Community, O. Robison, R. Freeman, and C. A. Riley II, eds. London: Salzburg Seminar.
Suteu, C. 2003. Overview on cultural policy in Central and Eastern Europe between 1990/2003. Policy paper, UNESCO.
Yerkovich, S. 2002. Destination Murmansk! Learning to speak a common language about museums miles above the Arctic Circle. Museum News (July/August): 42-45, 66-67, 69.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL REFERENCE ARTICLE
Klaus Mueller: “Speaking English”: A Dialogue with Eastern and Central European Museum Professionals. In: Curator. A special issue on Museums and Globalization. Vol. 48: No. 1, 2005