Courtauld Institute London
27 February 2009
This SocialEast Seminar considers the involvement of art during the Cold War with espionage, both on the level of international exchange and in specific national contexts. It deals with attempts within the Eastern Bloc to monitor artists through surveillance and networks of informers, the role of art espionage as an instrument of Sovietisation, and the methods used to control the involvement of artists in the international art world. There will also be discussion of the parallel role of Western organisations in activities from cultural espionage to the use of art as a propaganda weapon. The seminar will also consider artistic responses to the phenomenon of spying and the wider legacy of artistic espionage for the topography of contemporary art.
A) WEST-EAST ART ESPIONAGE
Mark Boswell (Filmmaker, San Francisco Art Institute)
Gaczyne (or) Deep Inside the KGB Infiltration of Walt Disney’s Brain
László Beke (Institute of Art History, Budapest)
Communication and Disinformation: Hungarian Aspects of the Cambridge Five
Catherine Fraixe (Ecole nationale supérieure d'art de Bourges)
Inventing a European Art : US Involvement in the Struggle for a United Europe
Kädi Talvoja (Kumu Art Museum, Tallinn)
Missionary Work of an Pollockian in Moscow in 1957
B) SECRET POLICE AND ARTISTIC UNDERGROUND
Doina Anghel (National Museum of Art Bucharest) and Raluca Voinea (Curator, E-cart.ro)
Surveiller et partir: Lists, informers networks, espionage, cultural censorship during 1945-1989 in Romania
Kata Krasznahorkai (University of Hamburg)
Code Name: "Schwitters". The First Hungarian Happening in the Reflection of a Secret Agents Report
Łukasz Ronduda (Center of Contemporary Art, Warsaw)
Neo-Avant-Garde Movements in the Polish Secret Services Files
C) CONTEMPORARY ART AND ESPIONAGE
Nina Levitt (Artist, York University, Toronto)
And She Was: Installations Inspired by Women in WWII
Anthony Downey (Sotheby’s Institute, London)
The Lives of Others: Artur Zmijewski’s ‘Repetition’ and the Ethics of Surveillance
Franciska Zólyom (Curator, Institute of Contemporary Art Dunaújváros)
Missing Evidence: an Artistic Attempt to Reconstruct the Story of an American Superspy
Paolo Cirio (Artist, Italy)
The Big Plot
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