Katarína Rusnáková
DANGEROUS MEMORY LOSS

Il. Alicja Pakosz

Slovak society is once again experiencing eerie déjà vu, a frustrating return to the harsh Meciarism of the 90s: wild Carpathian democracy, kleptocratic economics marked with barefaced corruption, disrespect for the rule of law, the unprecedented kidnapping of President Michal Kováč’s son, the murder of Róbert Remiáš, and foreign policy that steered Slovakia into isolationism. Madeleine Albright, then‑U.S. Secretary of State, accurately called Slovakia a black hole, a state to which the country was led by Vladimír Mečiar.

This piece compares the cultural, artistic, and institutional backdrops in the 1990s and the present day, emphasizing the wider socio‑political and sociocultural context of Slovak realities. Just as Mečiar’s “steamroller” was in full force in 1992–1998 and began to crush all societal spheres including culture and art, the coalition of Smer (Direction), Hlas (Voice), and the Slovak National Party (Slovenská Narodná Strana, or SNS) has initiated actions similarly destructive of the foundational principles of our democratic state after the September 2023 elections. The “Phoenix Effect” applies both to four time Prime Minister Robert Fico and to other repeating politicians from the parties of this coalition, with whom the Slovak public already has largely negative experiences.

Mečiar’s Ministers of Culture – first Dušan Slobodník and then Ivan Hudec – enacted an agenda connected with the ideology of national culture, through which they prioritized conservative and traditional expressions of art, emphasizing the presentation of folklore and uncontroversial middle‑of‑the‑road fine art. This led to eighteen directors of Slovak galleries, who did not yield to these professed cultural politics, being sacked without justification.

The corridor of two banalities: an exemplary model of an artwork connecting the dark past, unteachable present, and lost future (?)

Despite the tense, turbulent socio‑political climate in 1990s Slovakia, despite three years’ obstructions and scrutiny from the authorities, even conscious of my dismissal from my position,¹ I enthusiastically (though after serious consideration) welcomed the offer to coordinate a unique exhibition: The corridor of two banalities (1994),² in cooperation with the Soros Centre for Contemporary Art – Slovakia and the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art in Warsaw. This was a joint project of two key conceptual artists, Joseph Kosuth (b. 1945, Toledo, Ohio) representing the world of the West, and Ilya Kabakov (b. 1933, Dnepropetrovsk – 2023, New York) the world of the East. This was the first time that the expansive work from the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art collection, of Milada Ślizińska’s curatorial concept, had been reinstalled abroad, and it fit perfectly into the political, cultural, and social situation of Slovakia at the time. It was thanks to Mária Hlavajová, the director of the Soros Centre for Contemporary Art in Bratislava, that this exhibit was made possible, and a true feat that, with all of its international collaborators and institutions, it was pulled off in Žilina of all places (then the bastion of Ján Slota’s SNS). No less notable was the publication of an accompanying book, at the heart of which were the appropriated texts of Ilya Kabakov and Joseph Kosuth, presented on the tables as carriers of their specific communication.³

From today’s perspective, over 27 years later, we can say that the installation The corridor of two banalities has lost none of its multifaceted connotations, which overlap with the current realities in Slovakia. The nuances of this work’s meanings have only grown, and many of the texts’ messages have gained additional semantic layers that reference the current, in many ways flawed, socio‑political reality in both the Slovak and wider geopolitical context.

The leitmotif of The corridor of two banalities, which consists of 120 tables with chairs in two parallel facing rows that ran the length of the Museum of Art in Žilina, is that of dialogue, an attempt at communication: the hampered communication between East and West. The two coextensive rows of tables are distinguished by their differently finished tabletops, bearing contrasting texts. Observing this discursive installation demands that the viewer dedicate sufficient time for phenomenological perception, and sets requirements for their intellectual participation. The aim of the conceptual work was to stimulate the viewer to reflexive and associative thinking, founded on knowing and making connections between multiple spheres of society and art. On the one hand, the audience saw the scratched, distressed tops of Kabakov’s tables, featuring glued‑on “xerographic collages of typewritten texts and correspondence adorned with iconography of Soviet propaganda”⁴ of the 1960s, where the texts themselves are a multifaceted criticism of Soviet citizens’ everyday lives. Notes of complaint and informing on one another, taken from the apartment corridors’ bulletin boards and utilized by the artist in this installation, testify to the fact that the isolation of a totalitarian regime, insufficient information, and material destitution contributed to this perfidious behaviour of communal apartment residents (with fifty or sixty living in a single apartment).

On the other side were Kosuth’s tables, unified with a modest grey coat of paint, white silkscreened words in an elegant font, written in English, filing across the surfaces. In this flood of informational chaos resound the divergent assertions of politicians from both the democratic and authoritarian camps, as well as quotations of intellectuals, philosophers, and artists. Through these, Kosuth appeals to the critical thinking of the viewer and encourages them to thoroughly distinguish between the true meaning of the words and their hollowed‑out contents. Per Milada Ślizińska, “Kosuth’s speech is formed by the voices of the ‘world’s giants’: politicians, scientists, authors. Concise, confident statements create an atmosphere of communication in the global village, which is also inhabited by world citizen Kosuth. The proclamations, more or less banal truths, and obvious lies construct a mosaic of the world that leaves no room for unified thinking or an idea that would harmonize everything.”⁵

Let us now focus on one part of Kosuth’s installation, whose topical directness surpasses the period of its (1994).
“Democracy doesn’t mean electing a dictator every five years.” Hernando de Soto, economist and governor of Peru’s Central Reserve Bank
“Patriotism is when love of your own people comes first; nationalism, when hate for people other than your own comes first.” Charles de Gaulle
“The great nations have always acted like gangsters, and the small nations like prostitutes.” Stanley Kubrick
“Intellectual activity is a danger to the building of character.” Joseph Paul Goebbels
“If one man dies it’s a tragedy. If millions die that’s just statistics.” Joseph Stalin
“The best way to make your dreams come true is to wake up.” Paul Valéry
“A statesman is a politician who places himself at the service of the nation. A politician is a statesman who places the nation at his service.” Georges Pompidou
“Only constant repetition will finally succeed in imprinting an idea on the memory of the crowd.” Adolf Hitler

In the Žilina installation of the exhibition, Kosuth also decided to respond to the political and socio‑cultural situation of Slovakia in 1996, by means of Slovak politicians’ quotes pulled from daily newspapers, presented as text screen printed on natural paper and stuck to the tabletops. He asked me to choose the quotes of four Slovak politicians that most concisely characterized the atmosphere of the disintegration of society at the time. After two days’ research of Slovak newspapers, I presented Kosuth several quotes by establishment politicians, from which he chose four phrases. With this creative gesture, he enriched the global and regional aspects of section of the installation with a local dimension, and widened the reading of his meanings by important connotations in the Slovak and English languages:

“Come on, have I ever disappointed you?” Vladimír Mečiar, Slovak Prime Minister
“We don’t want yours, and you can’t have ours!” Ján Slota, Chairman of the SNS
“Actors are the spoiled children of the revolution.” Slovak Minister of Culture Ivan Hudec
“National culture should contribute to the self‑confidence of the nation, while non‑national culture contributes to its weakening in the name of chimeric globalism and universalism.” Slovak Ministry of Culture

The exhibition of The corridor of two banalities by Joseph Kosuth and Ilya Kabakov (key figures of conceptual art), the press conference, the gallery opening in which Joseph Kosuth participated: these comprised a series of paramount happenings of international influence, carried off at the Museum of Art in Žilina during “Mečiarism” at the peak of ideological pressure on independent culture. At the same time Joseph Kosuth supported the initiative of the Slovak cultural community by signing the Slovak citizens’ petition Let’s Save the Culture, which criticized the steps taken by the Slovak Ministry of Culture aimed specifically against Slovak citizens and at the destruction of culture in Slovakia under the leadership of Ivan Hudec, Minister of Culture.⁶

And here it is again: déjà vu and having a short memory

George Santayana: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.“

30 September 2023 saw parliamentary elections followed by the rapid formation of a ruling coalition consisting of Smer, Hlas, and the SNS. The Slovak citizenry is experiencing déjà vu in the area of social frustrations from the 1990s “Mečiarism” era and twelve years of Robert Fico’s rule (2006–2010, 2012–2018). The government with three‑time Prime Minister Fico at the helm resembles Mečiar’s, but with even greater corruption – we were receiving European Union grants by then – a slide into mob‑like operations and the moral bankrupting of civil society, including the premeditated murder of investigative journalist Ján Kuciak and his partner Martina Kušnírová in 2018. Yet even the coalition of centre right parties that gained power after the parliamentary elections of 2020 did not manage to govern the country competently. Although they came to power in a remarkably complicated situation, during which the COVID‑19 pandemic broke out in Slovakia and two years later the Russian Federation unleashed an aggressive war on Ukraine (24 February 2022), their inability to constructively implement policy and the absence of consensual governance, alongside its chaotic features, brought the rule of Eduard Heger to a parliamentary vote of no confidence.

The result of this status quo was that in the early parliamentary elections, a majority of the electorate chose representatives from the political parties of Smer, Hlas, and SNS, which created a coalition with four‑time prime minister Robert Fico at its head.

Our reality, now worse than the past, entails leading politicians addressing only their own voters, not even pretending to manage the country in a way that benefits all of Slovak society. They make a point of prioritizing those who elected the ruling parties, informing and addressing them mainly through alternative social media, which in the spirit of post‑truth do not utilize verified information; in fact, they spread disinformation and lies. Another symptom is various conspiracist web sites becoming pro‑government after the shift in ruling parties. The new establishment practices nepotistic policies for its own, as attested to by amendments to the Slovak Penal Code that were largely approved by the Constitutional Court in June 2024. The amendments were conceived in the favour of amnestying oligarchs, politicians, and those close to Smer and Hlas. Objections from the European Commission made further amendments necessary.

Let us look more closely at some of the statements of these political “elites”. What kind of messages do they send? Do they not bring to mind the rhetoric of the 1990s Slovak politicians whose quotes Kosuth presented in The Corridor of Two Banalities (1994)? Do they not veer towards the even deeper past of the 1970s, 50s, or 30s? Do their lamentable intellectual standards, cynicism, lies, and demagoguery not surpass their predecessors of the 90s?

“Oh, we’ll chase them out, don’t worry. If we all do well, then after September 30th there won’t even be a greasy spot left behind.” Robert Fico, at a pre‑election meeting, Rimavská Sobota, August 2023
“You really think there’s a war in Kyiv?… It’s absolutely business as usual there.” Robert Fico, at a press conference during a government retreat in Kamenica nad Cirochou, 23 January 2024
“I am in favour of the state’s having a firm hand.” Andrej Danko, chairman of the SNS, appearing on the television program Téma v televízii on TA3, 12 February 2024
“I don’t even want public television, I want state television… Quite simply, if you’re in power, you get to decide a great many things.” Andrej Danko, appearing on the television program Téma v televízii on TA3, 12 February 2024
“The culture of the Slovak people should be Slovak and no other. We tolerate the cultures of other peoples, but our culture should not be a mix of other cultures.” Martina Šimkovičová, Minister of Culture, 6 November 2023

Can one identify in these statements any hint of the sound vision or strategies characteristic of the new, 21st century variety of politician interested in moving the knowledge economy towards a better‑governed society in important areas: education, healthcare, the social sphere, culture? Or do their verbal communications and actions indicate an opposite movement? Do they not demonstrate the effect that Polish‑British sociologist Zygmunt Bauman termed “retrotopia”, which expresses an about‑face, a shift into reverse, a doubling‑back?⁷ The opposite of utopia, it is nostalgia calling for a past that indicates a threat of nationalism, national symbols, a revival of myths, a saturation of conspiracy theories. For Slovakia this means isolation, a shift to the periphery of the European Union. After all, the prime minister and minister of foreign affairs have declared a change in the course of foreign policy “towards all global parties,” which in truth means an autocratic, pro‑Putin orientation towards Russia.

Troubling practices of the Ministry of Culture

After one hundred more‑than‑controversial days in power, Minister of Culture Martina Šimkovičová⁸ earned an unprecedentedly rapid reaction not only from the Slovak cultural community, but from the wider public too. An Internet petition – Open letter for the resignation of the Minister of Culture⁹ – was published on 17 January 2024 and closed on 26 January, 2024 having been signed by over 180,000 individuals.¹⁰ Despite this vehement resistance, the opposition in parliament has not yet managed to force her resignation. The Open letter was followed by the creation of the Open culture! platform,¹¹ a “non‑partisan citizens’ initiative of the cultural community across Slovakia, a reaction to the arrogance and incompetence of the current management of the Ministry of Culture. Its long term goal is to point at wider issues of cultural politics, and bring together involved persons from the various branches of culture across Slovakia.”¹² Our cultural community’s issues are even being noticed abroad. Malgorzata Kazmierczak, the president of Paris‑based AICA,¹³ “expresses concern at the arbitrary merger of Kunsthalle Bratislava with Slovak National Gallery” and “urges the Minister of Culture of the Republic of Slovakia to put an immediate stop to the non‑transparent dismissal or pressed resignation of the heads of institutions under her ministry.”¹⁴

Returning to Šimkovičová’s words, “The culture of the Slovak people should be Slovak and no other,” do they not seem to echo not only the requests issued by Mečiar’s culture minister Ivan Hudec in the 1990s, but also the well‑known motto of Joseph Goebbels, “One people, one empire, one leader”? Hitler’s Reich Minister of Propaganda was an uncompromising guardian of the Nazi ideal of the purity of German art.¹⁵ The Ministry of Propaganda was responsible for controlling print and radio, as well as political oversight of German culture.

With her inexpert statements, autocratic exercise of power, and objective of carrying out changes to cultural institutions without any kind of expert discussion, the minister of culture has incited to outrage a majority of the arts and cultural community. Instead of sound leadership of the department, an improvement to its functions of supporting art and culture, and ensuring the fulfilment of the objectives formulated in The Slovak Republic strategy for culture and the creative industry 2030, she has brought contamination to the cultural community and institutions with the toxic atmosphere of her statements and the exercise of incompetent interventions into its structures.¹⁶ The culture minister and members of the coalition minority SNS unleashed a legislative hurricane on parliament in the first half of 2024. Neither the reservations of the opposition, nor numerous citizens’ protests, nor the strike actions of institutional and television employees prevented the approval of multiple laws. Let us consider, for instance, the amendment that abolished the democratic hiring procedures for directorships of museums and galleries and made it possible for directors to be fired at will, or the amendments on the Slovak Arts Council and the Audiovisual Fund, which until now were independent of the Ministry of Culture, with grants being approved transparently by professional commissions. These amendments reformatted the principles of grant policy in the interest of the minister’s control and interference in the decision‑making process. The negative effects of these changes will be felt by the arts community in the near future. Yet another example is the 1 July 2024 dissolution of the public institution Radio and Television of Slovakia (RTVS) on the basis of the law on Slovak Television and Radio (STVR), in the interest of the removal of its general director Ľuboš Machaj and the ideological subjugation of this public institution.¹⁷ This is at odds with the STVR law and the European Media Freedom Act, forbidding the politicization of the organs of public media. Due to critical journalism, which they view as an obstacle, the government’s politicians have been exerting enormous pressure not only on public television channels, but also on the owners of private channels, prompting multiple political programme hosts to resign. The fomenting of hatred – homophobia and transphobia towards LGBTQI+ individuals and organizations – by the culture minister and Slovak National Party can also only be considered hostile. Homophobia was known in Nazi Germany, too, where hatred and eradication were aimed primarily at Jewish and Roma people. Today, xenophobes have replaced them with LGBTQI+ people and migrants.

We must mention parallels with developments in Hungary, in connection with Fico’s government’s remarkably rapid passing of laws weakening democracy and the independence of art. What took Viktor Orbán ten years, Robert Fico managed in ten months! It is evident that Orbán’s regime of illiberal democracy and his methods of rule have inspired Fico’s exercise of power. In her book Cultural Crossdressing: Art on the Ruins of Socialism and on the Pinnacles of Nationalism,¹⁸ Hungarian art historian Edit András analyzes the effects associated with authoritarian and nationalist tendencies after the changing of the guard in culture that occurred with the rise to power of Orbán’s Fidesz party (2010). András points out that “typical of this system are populist elements: anti‑elitism, anti‑pluralism, an anti‑liberal mentality. Other important features include male dominance, martial rhetoric, and the incessant search for enemies and transgressors. The result is a maximally polarized society.”¹⁹ The first step was a change of the elite and a “decisive political battle” over long‑term dominance of culture.²⁰ High levels of societal polarization are present here, too, thanks to the escalation of aggressive rhetoric and spread of anger and hatred, primarily by members of the ruling coalition. Even the period after the attempted assassination on Prime Minister Fico (15 May 2024), a contemptible act, did not have the anticipated effect of respite and calming down in society. Quite the opposite: the social crisis in Slovakia deepened. In the prime minister’s radical ideological speech at his first public appearance post‑assassination attempt, at the Saints Cyril and Methodius Day celebrations at Devín Castle in Bratislava (5 July 2024), he continued his fragmentation and polarization of society. His criticism of liberalism and progressivism, which he says necessitate barricading because they spread like a cancer, was aimed at the strongest opposition party, Progresívne Slovensko (Progressive Slovakia), insulting liberal democracy voters.

The culture minister’s first victim was the Bratislava Kunsthalle, when the Ministry of Culture refused to finance the director’s proposed exhibition and educational program for 2024, resulting in Jen Kratochvil resigned from his post as director in January. This minister thus ruled without a detailed analysis of the institution’s work, quickly ridding herself of the institution by redirecting it to its erstwhile less than ideal position as a part of the Slovak National Gallery. All employees were terminated. Kunsthalle has been closed since the beginning of the year – with the exception of a short‑term group exhibition in May – and the crisis commission from the National Gallery has been tasked, on the basis of professional analysis, with proposing an optimal model of its future financing and functioning by the end of the year. Zuzana Liptáková of Bibiana, International House of Art for Children, is another director terminated without substantiation; the culture minister replaced her with an unqualified person, without going through proper hiring procedure.

We are once again – how many times is it now? – experiencing a cultural crisis. Culture should not be controlled, and certainly not with a firm hand. Culture should be competently led and administered, but above all, it should be supported. In The Crisis in Culture, German philosopher Hannah Arendt points out that “Culture, word and concept, derives from the Latin word colere – and means to inhabit. Therefore, to cultivate, includes to dwell, to stay, to take care, to tend and finally, to preserve.”²¹ It is vital to guard against the repeated censorship of art, and assessment of art by incompetent inspectors – protagonists of the disinformation scene – by detecting their attempts at mental intoxication and menticide.²²

The attitude of the artist Oto Hudec, author of multimedia collective project Floating Arboretum²³ (curator Lýdia Pribišová) at this year’s Venice Biennale, is an example of this. It expresses disagreement with the destructive practices of the Ministry of Culture and the cabinet towards free culture and contemporary art. At the opening of the exhibit, which consists in large part of a mural of endangered trees painted on the Czechoslovak Pavilion (also a nod to activists), visitors carried out a quiet protest, holding signs in their hands reading “The Ministry of Culture does not represent us.” The Czech and international public have expressed solidarity with this.

The irony of present‑day Slovakia is that it largely presents as a confused society,²⁴ unanchored by values, with an unstable, vulnerable democracy, which autocratic politicians are attempting to weaken and dismantle in a way that evokes the narratives of two totalitarian regimes: the Nazi Slovak Republic and communism continuing into the new, updated Russian propaganda. For this reason, we realize all the more clearly that we have not resolved the heritage of these totalitarian regimes and their newer forms,²⁵ which work together to erode democratic society. Its main causes are insufficient education and its declining quality, the absence of rational reasoning and critical thinking, and a weak understanding of history and corresponding loss of memory, along with the mindset of homo consumens, the human with no other values. We find ourselves in a crisis of education, a crisis of culture, a crisis of authority. Hannah Arendt regards the “disappearance of common sense” as the most certain “symptom of crisis”.²⁶ For this reason, American historian Timothy Snyder’s words on the importance of protecting institutions and acting with strict professional ethics resonate once again today;²⁷ we must believe in the truth that “to abandon facts is to abandon freedom.”²⁸ The battle is long, and it will be won only by remobilization and patient determination from decent people from civil society, who will stand up for the renewal of democracy, freedom, and the anchoring of Slovakia in the company of the democratic states of the European Union.