This article investigates exhibitions of Baltic contemporary art in the Early 1990s, that were directed towards an international audience. Notions of an art life finally freed from the heavy institutional power of the Soviet occupation has served to obscure the arrival of other inter-national and political presences, the ones from Norden. While new Baltic art practices were widely made public in the three Baltic capitals after 1991, the fact that the highest political level of Nordic foreign policy provided an infrastructure for this, was not. “The Nordic–Baltic realm,” is here suggested as a notion of interactions between the contemporary art and foreign diplomacy, and the ability to act upon the potential of the other’s experienced “window of opportunity.”

Piotr Piotrowski’s vision of horizontal art history is a diagnosis of severe structural problems with modern West-centred art history writing. As a “model” for future use and a new “paradigm” of art historiography, however, the vocabulary and its generic avant-gardism threatens to short-circuit this critique. Part one of this chapter deals with how the notion of horizontal art history is presented and discussed by the author. Part two argues that to accomplish a truly horizontal or flat art history, we must change our inherited conceptual art-historical infrastructure, which is soaked in hierarchical thinking and binarisms. An “art history of the margins” is inevitably hierarchical vis-à-vis its external “centre” and internally—by differentiating between advanced and mediocre, cutting edge and reargarde, important and less important art, etcetera. The article suggests how Piotrowski’s project of an art history “without domination” could be realized. What I term lateral art studies seek to investigate how the material singularities of art, i.e. artworks, interconnect and relate to each other, what shifting assemblages (DeLanda) they produce, what time layers (Koselleck) they contain, and how such studies could overcome the compulsion among art historians to decide what is in and out, major or minor, central or marginal.

This essay analyses two texts by Polish art historian Piotr Piotrowski (1952-2015) that articulate theoretical stances towards art museography, the one devoted to issues of trauma management, contemporaneity and identity, and the other presenting a methodological tactic to deflect the power of the art-historical museum piece in critical and democratic ways. Reflecting on how they deal with psychological as well as openly political issues, I interpret and assess their joint contribution to the broader interdisciplinary field of (critical) museography. The texts are “New Museums in New Europe” and “Making the National Museum Critical”. The first text discusses four new or newly re-furbished museums in a culture in Eastern Europe since 1989 characterized as “post-traumatic”. These museums are contextualized both in relation to the Western museum boom of the same years, and to the new museums’ recent history, where sometimes the very architecture and site of these institutions renders trauma tangible. The second text is a case-study based on experience and inside knowledge, from the short period when the author directed and together with Katarzyna Murawska-Muthesius oversaw the Warsaw National Museum of Art (2009-2010). Together they developed Piotrowski’s concept of “the critical museum” as a way of dealing with the challenges of running an old national art museum based on masterpieces while also striving to engage with pressing contemporary issues. I contend that the latter concept, in particular, is promising, given that it is possible to maintain a difference within the museum institution as a prerequisite for critical intervention.

This article reviews the anthology Globalizing East European Art Histories. Past and Present. Routledge Research in Art History Beáta Hock and Anu Allas (ed.), London: Routledge, 2018. 

This article derives from the research project entitled "Art, Culture and Conflict: Transformations of Museums and Memory Culture around the Baltic Sea after 1989;" which was financed by the Foundation for Baltic and East European Studies, Sodertorn University. It discusses how history museums in Finland, Sweden, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania have reacted to the fall of the Iron Curtain and the conclusion of the Soviet occupation of the three Baltic states. It argues that the Cold War is understood by the museums as a special historical epoch not comparable to any other historical period in these six countries. It concludes that to be able to deal with this particular point in history we either need to metaphorically put the Cold War in between red brackets, as it were, which makes it possible to address the Cold War when needed, or to place it outside the historical narrative of the modern rise of the five discussed nation-states.

HON – en katedral (SHE – a cathedral, June 4–September 4, 1966) at Moderna Museet in Stockholm, was structured as a giant, reclining woman filling the entire space of the museum’s largest room, more or less to its edges (fig. 1). She was painted white with patterns of clear colors over parts of her body. Entering HON – en katedral (hereafter simply Hon) through its vagina, the audience found themselves walking and climbing in something that has been referred to as a kind of amusement park. The image of the invasive, female body placed directly into the heart of the museum institution served to disturb power relations within artistic networks and cultural life at a time when both the representation of women and gender positions in the arts were being challenged.