UC Santa Cruz

Art and cultural historians have long characterized the relationship between East Germany’s experimental artists and its state bureaucrats as at best one of division, opposition, and hostility. In this view, artists are either victims or pawns of the state. In “Infiltration and Excess: Experimental Art and the East German State, 1980 – 1989” I expand this framework to reveal how experimental culture actually engaged with the state and exposed and critiqued its core disjunctions. I focus on artists who used body-based practices, like performance, film, and photography, to create new vocabularies for representation, as well as their uses of reproducible media in the creation and circulation of their work.

By the Cold War’s final decade, the GDR government’s inability to produce a collective and coherent public significantly frayed its power. Thus, I argue that experimental practice was not only an antidote for, but also a diagnosis of a weakening state: a foil and a mirror to official culture. In fact, the East German experimental arts scene produced an alternative public—a counter-public—with commitments to culture, community, and interdisciplinarity that state socialism had sought to inspire. This irony, really an inversion of state socialist principles, lies at the heart of my dissertation.

Oversimplified narratives of the Cold War era have consistently defined the Eastern Bloc by its victimization or complicity under Communism, leaving little room for details about regional variation in culture or civic politics. My scholarship—based on substantial archival research and numerous interviews—highlights one case among many, joining an emerging field of academics and artists whose work examines the Cold War past as a means of revitalizing and globalizing areas of the world once again at risk of cultural and political isolationism.