Jan 10, 2024 · Megan Hoetger
Curatorial note
For Edition IX – Bodies and Technologies the art historian and curator Susanne Altmann was invited to develop a new research project, which she calls When Technology Was Female: A Cultural Investigation of Former Socialist Europe, 1917–1989 and After. From the visual detail to production methods, Altmann explores how ‘industrialisation’ meant widely varied things across contemporaneous state socialist contexts and, by extension, across women’s artistic practices that operated therein.
Coordinates
In the post-revolutionary climate of the soon-to-be Soviet territories (c.1918), Communism flashed up as a model that led artists away from classical ideas of the autonomous work. Artistic production moved towards collective all-encompassing installation, participatory performance and ‘intermediality’, as well as applied arts from textile-making to product design. At this historical turn, industrialisation and its technologies were not yet part of a rigidified party ideology and were welcomed enthusiastically by artists, including women, who took on an incredibly active role in the building of this new society. By the 1960s, new generations of women artists in East Germany and the broader Eastern Bloc had come of age. They began to reassess their role(s) in socialist society, as well as their aesthetic ‘performance(s)’ of femininity. The work of these later generations, including their ways of working, were informed that early period of Soviet avant-garde media experimentation, but now with principles critically devoid of the promises of the Communist machine age.
Comparatives
When Technology Was Female is a feminist art history project grounded in the context of (former) Eastern European state socialisms [seminar one], which aims to identify the visual and intellectual continuity among women artists in the early Soviet Union and the erstwhile Eastern Bloc. Building on Altmann’s long-term research into women’s art production in former East Germany (GDR), [seminar two] the When Technology Was Female project marks a turn in the art historian’s research toward a comparative analysis across temporal periods, as well as spatial geographies, from the early years of the Soviet avant-garde up through the last decades of the GDR. This expanded scope has led Altmann to do new archival work in collections of the Soviet avant-garde, including a visit to the Khardziev collection at the Stedelijk Museum (July 2022), as well as a month-long stay in Thessaloniki (October 2022) where she was a resident at the Goethe-Institut while undertaking research in the Costakis collection at MOMus, Museum of Modern Art. [seminar three] Following her stay in Greece, Altmann returned to Amsterdam (November 2022) to publicly present her in-process research within the frame of a public gathering and masterclass workshop on the fraught memory politics of “collectivity” in the context of former state socialist projects. In Spring, she returns again to the Netherlands for a month-long residency with the Goethe-Institut Rotterdam (May-June 2023). During her second stay, a range of activities unfolds between Rotterdam and Amsterdam, opening up different dimensions of her curatorial practice for students and local communities.
Toward a Feminist Form of History-Writing
Following her research period, Altmann turned attention to her writing process, and we invite you to check her new publication! Exploring new directions with voice and experimenting with feminist – and ‘feminine’ – modes of writing, she developed a kind of historical analysis as parallel storytelling, which linguistically (as in, the text) and spatially (as in, the printed page) weaves across personal memory, aesthetic inquiry, and geopolitical context. Entanglements of the personal and political have become a driving force in the conceptualization of Altmann’s form of history-writing, proposing a novel understanding of how material and embodied archives can and do cross one another. Inspired as well by the political and design principles of the samizdat literature movement of which Altmann was a part, the When Technology Was Female publication brings her experiment in conceptualization together with experiments in design, exploring how knowledges might be presented outside the dominant form of the history book with its reliance on singular perspective narration and strict hierarchies of information. Across word and page, then, the art historian provocatively asks that the sphere of feminist art history consider not only the content of its stories, but also, importantly, how it tells them.
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About Susanne Altmann
Susanne Altmann is an independent feminist art historian and curator. It was only after 1989, when educational access outside of party lines became possible, that she could de- vote herself to the study of art history and philosophy, first in Dresden and later at the New School for Social Research, New York. Alongside various curatorial and publishing activities, her historical research focusses on art production in the former socialist parts of Europe before and after 1989, investigating the development of a canon and modes of reception for non-conformist avant-gardes. Increasingly, Altmann aims to recontextualise art created in Eastern Germany, investigating it in relation to Eastern Europe rather than the West. Recent projects include the landmark exhibition The Medea Insurrection: Women Artists Behind the Iron Curtain, Albertinum, Dresden State Art Collections, 2018 and the Wende Museum, Los Angeles, 2020; the exhibition Pants Wear Skirts: The Erfurt Women Artists’ Group 1984–1994 (co-curator), neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst, Berlin, 2021; and a literary transcription of British artist Monica Ross’s text-based work Valentine (2022). Since 2010, Altmann teaches contemporary and German art history as part of the Erasmus/DAAD programme at the Academy of Fine Arts, Dresden.
Coordinates
In the post-revolutionary climate of the soon-to-be Soviet territories (c.1918), Communism flashed up as a model that led artists away from classical ideas of the autonomous work. Artistic production moved towards collective all-encompassing installation, participatory performance and ‘intermediality’, as well as applied arts from textile-making to product design. At this historical turn, industrialisation and its technologies were not yet part of a rigidified party ideology and were welcomed enthusiastically by artists, including women, who took on an incredibly active role in the building of this new society. By the 1960s, new generations of women artists in East Germany and the broader Eastern Bloc had come of age. They began to reassess their role(s) in socialist society, as well as their aesthetic ‘performance(s)’ of femininity. The work of these later generations, including their ways of working, were informed that early period of Soviet avant-garde media experimentation, but now with principles critically devoid of the promises of the Communist machine age.
Comparatives
When Technology Was Female is a feminist art history project grounded in the context of (former) Eastern European state socialisms [seminar one], which aims to identify the visual and intellectual continuity among women artists in the early Soviet Union and the erstwhile Eastern Bloc. Building on Altmann’s long-term research into women’s art production in former East Germany (GDR), [seminar two] the When Technology Was Female project marks a turn in the art historian’s research toward a comparative analysis across temporal periods, as well as spatial geographies, from the early years of the Soviet avant-garde up through the last decades of the GDR. This expanded scope has led Altmann to do new archival work in collections of the Soviet avant-garde, including a visit to the Khardziev collection at the Stedelijk Museum (July 2022), as well as a month-long stay in Thessaloniki (October 2022) where she was a resident at the Goethe-Institut while undertaking research in the Costakis collection at MOMus, Museum of Modern Art. [seminar three] Following her stay in Greece, Altmann returned to Amsterdam (November 2022) to publicly present her in-process research within the frame of a public gathering and masterclass workshop on the fraught memory politics of “collectivity” in the context of former state socialist projects. In Spring, she returns again to the Netherlands for a month-long residency with the Goethe-Institut Rotterdam (May-June 2023). During her second stay, a range of activities unfolds between Rotterdam and Amsterdam, opening up different dimensions of her curatorial practice for students and local communities.
Toward a Feminist Form of History-Writing
Following her research period, Altmann turned attention to her writing process, and we invite you to check her new publication! Exploring new directions with voice and experimenting with feminist – and ‘feminine’ – modes of writing, she developed a kind of historical analysis as parallel storytelling, which linguistically (as in, the text) and spatially (as in, the printed page) weaves across personal memory, aesthetic inquiry, and geopolitical context. Entanglements of the personal and political have become a driving force in the conceptualization of Altmann’s form of history-writing, proposing a novel understanding of how material and embodied archives can and do cross one another. Inspired as well by the political and design principles of the samizdat literature movement of which Altmann was a part, the When Technology Was Female publication brings her experiment in conceptualization together with experiments in design, exploring how knowledges might be presented outside the dominant form of the history book with its reliance on singular perspective narration and strict hierarchies of information. Across word and page, then, the art historian provocatively asks that the sphere of feminist art history consider not only the content of its stories, but also, importantly, how it tells them.
–––
About Susanne Altmann
Susanne Altmann is an independent feminist art historian and curator. It was only after 1989, when educational access outside of party lines became possible, that she could de- vote herself to the study of art history and philosophy, first in Dresden and later at the New School for Social Research, New York. Alongside various curatorial and publishing activities, her historical research focusses on art production in the former socialist parts of Europe before and after 1989, investigating the development of a canon and modes of reception for non-conformist avant-gardes. Increasingly, Altmann aims to recontextualise art created in Eastern Germany, investigating it in relation to Eastern Europe rather than the West. Recent projects include the landmark exhibition The Medea Insurrection: Women Artists Behind the Iron Curtain, Albertinum, Dresden State Art Collections, 2018 and the Wende Museum, Los Angeles, 2020; the exhibition Pants Wear Skirts: The Erfurt Women Artists’ Group 1984–1994 (co-curator), neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst, Berlin, 2021; and a literary transcription of British artist Monica Ross’s text-based work Valentine (2022). Since 2010, Altmann teaches contemporary and German art history as part of the Erasmus/DAAD programme at the Academy of Fine Arts, Dresden.