Parapolitika = Parapolitics

Róka, Enikő (2024) Parapolitika = Parapolitics. ARS HUNGARICA, 50 (1). pp. 63-76. ISSN 0133-1531

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Abstract

AParapolitik. Kulturelle Freiheit und Kalter Krieg című kiállítás, amelyet 2017-ben a berlini Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) rendezett, az intézménynek otthont adó ikonikus épületből indult ki, s a Berlinhez és az épülethez egyaránt szorosan kötődő Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) 1950‒1967 közötti történetét dolgozta fel.1 A HKW a 2016-ban indított Kanon-Fragen kutatási program keretében megrendezett kiállítása egy olyan történeti pillanatot helyezett a fókuszba, amikor Berlin kulcsszerepet játszott a világpolitikában, a CCF pedig a modern művészet propagálásában. A CCF német megfelelője, a Kongress für Kulturelle Freiheit adta a kiállítás találó alcímét: a „kulturális szabadság” képzete és fennen hangoztatott szlogenje eredményesen szolgálta a hidegháborús politikát, s lényegében az egész világra kiterjedően meghatározta a modernizmushoz való viszonyt. A kiállítás jó példája annak, hogy szimbolikus jelentéseket hordozó építészeti emlékből – mint autentikus helyből – kiindulva hogyan bontható ki történeti, ideológiai, politikai és művészeti kontextusok sokasága. Az alábbi tanulmány célom szerint azt kívánja bemutatni, hogy a kortárs kritikai muzeológia eszközeivel hogyan lehet dekonstruálni és új alapokon felépíteni a közösségi identitást, és rávilágít arra, hogy az eredeti dokumentumok, egykorú és későbbi tárgyak köré vont értelmezési háló hogyan köti össze az egyidejű, valamint a jelenkori tudományos és társadalmi diskurzusokba ágyazott olvasatokat. | The exhibition entitled Parapolitik. Kulturelle Freiheit und Kalter Krieg [Parapolitics. Cultural Freedom and the Cold War], held in the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (House of World Cultures; HKW) in Berlin in 2017, started out from the iconic building that is the home of the institution and explored the history of the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), which is closely tied to the building itself and to Berlin, and the questions it raised. It focused on a moment in history when Berlin played a key role in global politics and the CCF played just as important a role in the propagation of modern art. The Congress for Cultural Freedom was established in June 1950 in West Berlin to counterbalance the spread of Soviet propaganda. Its aims were to bring together the world’s conservative, but not far-right intellectuals, and moderate, left-leaning intellectuals who were disillusioned with the Stalinist dictatorship, and to establish a united front against left-wing and right-wing totalitarian systems. The new Congress Hall (which now houses the HKW) was built with financing from the USA for the Interbau (Internationale Bauausstellung) architecture exhibition of 1957, and in 1960 it hosted the tenth-anniversary congress of the CCF. The cultural programme advocated by the CCF during its almost twenty years of activity, namely modernism combined with the artistic expression of freedom against tyranny, spread across the entire world. In 1967, however, it was revealed that the CCF, through private foundations, was in fact ultimately sponsored by the CIA. The operations of the CCF can be described using the Orwellian term doublethink, for in the name of anti-communism and with the loudly proclaimed slogan of the ideal of “militant liberty”, the USA was in fact furthering its own political and economic interests using every means available. The title Parapolitics alludes to this pursuit of politics beyond its official frames, characterised by the organisation of covert, secret missions operating outside democratically controlled, legitimate institutions. The exhibition is a good example of how, starting out from an architectural monument bearing symbolic meanings (and conjuring up connotations of freedom with its wing-like roof), as an authentic place, it is possible to unravel a multitude of historical, ideological, political and artistic contexts. The exhibition was connected to earlier projects of the HKW (Kanon-Fragen), in which they presented different cultural and power relations and interpretations that are relevant to today. The HKW is not a museum with its own collection, but this exhibition fits in with the critical direction that has been taken in the last two decades, especially by museums of contemporary art. Since the turn of the millennium, besides the neoliberal approach that sees museum exhibitions as business ventures, the international art scene has also witnessed the arrival of so-called radical (Claire Bishop) and critical (Katarzyna Murawska-Muthesius, Piotr Piotrowski) museology. In this discourse, museums act as institutions that attempt to process and reinterpret their own past while simultaneously reflecting on current social issues. The museum is seen as a critical actor, which through its exhibitions and programmes engages in dialogue with society and deconstructs power systems and associated forms of thinking, thereby taking an active role in the process of building democracy. It moves beyond merely offering rows of objects, data, the results of specialist research, or a purely aesthetic experience, and encourages visitors to change their points of view and to reconsider their conventional thought patterns. When the HKW – not as a museum, but as a cultural institution with a pronounced image – organises an exhibition out of its own building – as an authentic monument – and its related history, precisely illustrating the relations of power and politics, then it is reacting to its own institutional situation with the critical attitude of contemporary art museums. But why is the history of the CCF important today? On the one hand, mainstream Western intellectual values are, even today, based on the postwar democratic principles that formed the subject of the exhibition and, from a cultural perspective, on the modernist canon that was established at the time, so confronting these origins and their political context may result in a clarification of these values. On the other hand, both nationalist, autocratic, populist political systems and political forces that espouse left-wing ideas while in practice subordinating them to global capitalism startlingly reproduce Orwellian doublethink, and intellectuals flounder just as confusedly between politically manipulated alternative realities today as they did back then. Discourse is directed and thematised by the powers that be, but an understanding of Cold-War logic may perhaps help us to understand the processes currently at play, and at least the intelligentsia may acknowledge its own responsibility. The exhibition mobilised different viewpoints, interconnecting fields of science and a heterogeneous set of exhibits to present the interweaving history of this emblematic building in Berlin and the postwar cultural canon. This kind of facing up to the past and canon criticism can foster interpretations of the past and the present, and may have a role to play in the mechanism of self-image-forming.

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