The Green Bloc: Neo-Avant-Garde Art and Ecology Under Socialism

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Expanding the horizon of accounts of art under communism, The Green Bloc uncovers the history of artistic engagement with the natural environment in the Eastern Bloc. The book focusses on artists including the Pecs Workshop from Hungary, OHO in Slovenia, TOK in Croatia, Rudolf Sikora in Slovakia, and the Czech artist Petr Stembera, Fowkes’s research brings to light an array of distinctive approaches to nature, from attempts to raise environmental awareness among citizens to the exploration of non-anthropocentric positions and the quest for cosmological existence in the midst of red ideology. The study deals with the specific historical period of the early 1970s in the light of the changes in cultural spheres brought by the social and political upheavals and disturbances of 1968, recognizing the more systematic appearance of art practice in the natural environment, as well as art’s engagement with environmental problems. Embedding artistic production in social, political, and environmental histories of the region, this book reveals the artists’ sophisticated relationship to nature, at the precise moment when ecological crisis was first apprehended on a planetary scale.