THE END OF MODERNITY - THE SLOVAK WAY

One of the important cultural events of the second half of the 50's was the foundation and activities of the Mikulás Galanda Group and the same can be said about the non-public exhibitions of the loose circle of Bratislava's Confrontations, taking place in the beginning of the 60's. Even if their activities remained unaccompanied by the avant-garde gesture of the programmatic manifesto in the strict sense of the word, they did produce some introductory statements and, above all, significant exhibitions. H. Belting in his book, entitled 'The End of Art History', claimed that the European tradition created a historical cycle, reaching from the times of ancient Greece and Rome till modernity, using the so-called 'cultural archive'. All innovations arise outside of this archive or as its competition. The acceptance of the innovations then means acceptance into the archive of cultural memory. To understand the intent of the above mentioned cultural events we have to deal with the following questions: 1. What was the nature of the respective cultural contexts of the Mikulás Galanda Group and its foundation and the exhibitions of the Bratislava Confrontations group? 2. Can their activities be described as innovation within late modernity? 3. In what sense, intensity and extent were works of art, representing innovation, also an act of artistic experiment? Members of both groups have found themselves inside the cultural archive for a short period of time during the second half of the 60's. That means that in the years od the ideological 'thaw' they relinquished a part of their gesture of revolt in favor of the strategy of reinforcing the closeness of artistic programs of a rather wide and disparate 'cultural front'. Of course, at the end of the sixties they abruptly found themselves outside the cultural archive, which was then being painted in the protective red colour. The 'return' to the archive of cultural memory at the beginning of the 90‘s seemed to be triumphant. Yet it was impossible to engage the young generation from within the cultural archive. The young generation did not believe in the autonomy of the modern art, had no faith in tradition, seeing it only as a deposit to be cited, appropriated, for anything goes... Thus Y. Lotman's axiom: if we look forward, we see incidents, if we look backwards, we see regularities... we serve as an optical device revealing that both events of Slovak figurative art in the 50's and 60's conclude the period of late modernism, naturally in the Slovak way.