From worse to worse. This is how one might qualify Eastern Europe’s conception of History. Under Communist rule History was the reliable almighty but a perfect lie. Since, it has become fickle and fragmented, a constant and simultaneous a succession of various versions. Already accustomed, Eastern European artists play along its cluttered borders.

Imagine this: once upon a time I held history in my hands. My history was a school book, with a soft cover in white and red, the colours of the ancient Belarusian flag. I don’t remember exactly now, but it was something around three hundred pages with no pictures and horrible paper quality. It was the first text book on Belarusian history for high school published after the Soviet time, and I and I still remember looking at it for the first time and thinking: ‘this is my history. This is the real one’. But as soon as I began to read the pages, the illusion collapsed in a thousand shattered pieces. This essay is an attempt to describe a very specific approach, contextualized by the pre-conditions of communist and post-communist historical constructs. My relationship to history is divided into two periods that provide me with a foundation for exploring history and art. The first period corresponds with Guy Debord’s classic analysis of the Spectacle; the second, to the last modifications of his concept by Nicolas Bourriaud and Steven Best & Douglas Kellner. I would like to show how these two approaches are reflected in some contemporary artistic practices.

BEFORE Under Soviet rule, there was only one false history, one mainstream-fake invented recount of events. This bogus history, invented by those in power, somehow produced the illusion of there being a hidden, genuine history somewhere, an objective account, the ownership of which could only be attributed to the highest authorities. We were led to believe that the sham hid a truer story, the One true history. And that this ‘real’ history, by remaining undisclosed -only surfacing through vague rumours- carried much more weight than the ‘fake’ one every one knew; simultaneously coming from and sustaining a belief in a sort of inevitable historical justice. Historical consciousness, created in totalitarian societies, can best be described as pure spectacle, in Guy Debord’s words: ‘In a world that is really upside down, the true is a moment of the false.’ For Debord, the modern dual-opposition of real vs. fake is crucial to his analysis of the spectacle. Communism, as one of the very last projects of modernity, created for itself a false history that served as a justification for reality (in the history books of that time, each chapter ended with words like ‘but the oppressed classes were still waiting to be liberated’); at the same time it produced a new reality, one more believable than the ‘real’ one, corresponding again to Debord’s theory: ‘reality emerges within the spectacle, and the spectacle is real’. What is important here, paradoxically, is the modern idea of history as a project, just as spectacle itself is a project. The central notion being that the spectacle of history is created by various forces belonging to the ruling social order, in order to cut individuals off from their real history and, consequently, from any reflection on their real present. Debord: ‘The spectacle is the ruling order’s non-stop discourse about itself, its never-ending monologue of self-praise, its self-portrait at the stage of totalitarian domination of all aspects of life’. This role as creator of the spectacle is indeed often assumed by the ruling parties but, interestingly, also by artists reflecting on history. An artwork presenting history as spectacle is a closed-circuit imaginary system, which both subdues and alienates the viewer, because only the artist, as its creator and highest authority, holds the key to its understanding. Or, at the very least, he should pretend to hold it, in order to sustain the fake-real opposition needed as the basis of such an artwork. Alexej Koschkarow (Belarus) produces numerous supposedly historical artefacts that recall certain periods in history and do not pretend homogeny, like in his Lachende Creole (2003). His project, Untitled (Fake Wood, Fake Marble, Fake Documents), 2002, is a space built out of the materials listed in the title. The room, designed in a baroque style, looks like a monster archive, an impossible, and yet physically oppressive materialization of invented history. The architecture of the space suggests authority, the shelves filled with crumbling papers. A rich, old, and long-forgotten history is implied, but any shred of truth is instantly annihilated by the title. In the realm of the spectacle the line between the fake and the real is blurred but the false is not only restricted to the use of fake materials, as the Russian artist Petljura demonstrates. Next to gathering real artefacts from the Soviet era, Petljura has kept his vast collection of clothes from that period that he later used in a work called The Empire of Things (2000). Upon entering the installation, the viewer is immersed in the ‘reality’ of a gone epoch – smells, colours and textures of these old pieces of clothing inhabit the senses. A certain drabness might appear to undermine the power of the spectacle here but in the second part of the installation - large colour photographs of people dressed in these clothes - it is lifted to new heights. The photographs, each representing a certain period in the history of the USSR, portray a group of accordingly clad people, who pose as though illustrations of ‘a spirit of a time’. These images present the perfect, purified, flat spectacle of history, absolutely unreal in all their static excellence. Another way of dealing with history as spectacle is to concentrate on its symbolic materialization. Alexander Komarov, in his project ‘The Palace’, reflects on the symbol of Belarusian forged history: The Palace of the Republic, for Komarov ‘a metaphor for Belarus’ written history”. The construction of the Palace, a monumental building in the heart of Minsk, the capital of Belarus, had begun 30 years ago. Since, social order in the country has changed twice, and the start and the end of its construction connect two totalitarian regimes. In his digitally reproduced images of the Palace, Komarov focuses on the building’s spectacular nature as a brand new curtain to veil reality. Towering over the landscape, the impossible edifice imposes an image of the power of the spectacular history of totalitarianism.

AFTER Let’s go back now to the moment from where we started and see what happens after that. In the early stages of independence, a disaster strikes – instead of only one fake history we are faced with many. Instead of having to deal with only one we have to deal with several. I felt like Little Red Riding Hood who, even though suspicious and critical of her grandmother’s new appearance, ends up, despite her critical stance, in the wolf’s stomach. And the only way out of this wet, smelly and uncomfortable place is to stop asking questions and take the grandmother’s appearance at face value. As the appearance itself. As the spectacle, again, but this time of another kind. I’m not implying here that this acceptance, this back door escape, is as heroic a rescue as one by the muscular wood-choppers we had all hoped for, but it was -and is- more realistic in given societal conditions. Seeing history as a spectacle provides a disillusioned mind with justification for not participating in its endless interpretations. Multiple historical spectacles produced in contemporary society allow for the possibility of a restricted form of participation, or, to use Bourriaud’s wording, a ‘standing-in’. Developing Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle, Bourriaud in his ‘Relational Aesthetics’ offers a concept of ‘society of extras’: ‘Here we are summoned to turn into extras of the spectacle, having been regarded as its passive consumers.’ Bourriaud sees the reason for the spectacle becoming accessible to ‘infamous man’ as the result of the self-confidence of capitalistic forces that no longer have any major power to compete with, and thus ‘can permit individuals to stir themselves to frolic about in the free and open spaces that it has staked out’. Steven Best & Douglas Kellner, concurring with this theory, announce a new stage of interactive spectacle, determined largely by the fact that the media has become far more accessible for a larger number of people. This new development has enabled different opinions to be expressed and heard and has created a network for the dissemination of alternative histories: feminist history, various religious histories, post-colonial history, black history, gay history, etc. Such a diversity of histories denies any fake-real opposition, and makes the issue of ‘real’ history irrelevant. The situation thus is closer to Baudrillard’s simulation, where ‘the territory no longer precedes a map’ but allows the traveller to select his route freely while still crawling around the map. In other words, while remaining in the dominion of the spectacle the consumer becomes an active agent of this realm and acquires a new benefit: multiple choice histories-spectacles. The multiplicity of historical spectacles weakens their individual power and provides a possibility of escape, as described above. Much like the classic tactics of a virus, the artist turns the spectacle of history into an interactive play with various visual codes from different spectacles, using them simultaneously to achieve the effect of a little explosion within an otherwise strong and impenetrable system. The motto, therefore, becomes: mix and rule! Zbigniew Libera, a Polish artist who became popular after his Lego Concentration Camp in 1996, showed a series of three photographs in 2000 that can be viewed as a perfect illustration to this approach. The black and white images were taken in 1982 in a Polish prison, where Libera, a Solidarnosc activist at that time, was a political prisoner. The images show men sunbathing in a prison yard. The half-naked male figures bathing in the sun and the impressive prison fences around them belong to two completely different historical spectacles – the spectacle of ‘good life’ and the spectacle of ‘resistance’. The obvious contradiction between them creates a confusing result and undermines the power of both. Another apt example of cracking the spectacle is the video Invasion by the Lithuanian artists’ group G-Lab. Playing with the idea of popular TV programmes about ‘making a music video’ or ‘filming a movie’, Invasion (2003) shows the viewer the moment of the creation of the spectacle. Invasion was filmed on the set location of a movie about the Second World War, during a break between shooting sessions. The scenes unfold in slow motion and are accompanied by poignant music. You see the onlookers caught in the dream of the spectacle that is emerging just before their eyes: a military truck passing a minivan, soldiers drinking coke from a plastic bottle and talking with the crew members, historical, TV and casual’ images interrelate and merge, keeping the viewer of ‘Invasion’ glued to the screen in a state of total confusion about the nature of the spectacle he is witnessing. What happens when art manages to crack the spectacle of history? What is it you glimpse through the cut? Certainly not the ‘real’ that Debord, after the Marxists, was advocating. And I don’t think you see the wolf through the grandmother’s clothes either. I think what you can see is the process, the process of the wolf becoming the grandmother: how he clumsily applies her make-up, chooses a wig, slips into a flowery dress, meanwhile whistling an unrecognizable tune.