Postmodernism and the Postsocialist condition

edited by Ales Erjavec

Post-Utopian Avant-Garde Art in China  (p247-283)    高名潞
（other works by Gao:  Inside/out : new Chinese art
                                   Total modernity and the avant-garde in twentieth-century Chinese art
                                   others）

late 80s  Xu Bin  "book from the sky"

(think about Xu Bin together with Wang meng and the computerization of Chinese characters)

China/Avant-Garde exhibition       89现代艺术大展




Introduction by Ales Erjavec

p2-3qutoing Bauman "what has happened in recent years could be articulated as the apperace of a vantage point which allows the view of modernity itself as an enclosed object, an essential complete product, an episode of history, with an end as much as a beginning." Late socialism is in this sense "postsocialism"— the proclamation of the end of socialism rom within socialism itself.


p4 the link between the ideological signifier and the social referent was irreparably destroyed, and the gap between the two was becoming an abyss , server as an argument for the view that socialist countries had actually entered the "hyperreal" postmodern world before their western counterparts
Mikhail N, Epstein   After the Future: the Paradoxes of postmodernism and contemporary russian culture



Cuba, china, solvenian and romania,  artists were often not aware of what artists in another were doing
yet startling similarities between their works


In cuba   eclecticism of despair
subservient and fragmentary mimesis blends with a defensive syncretic use of resources and with recontextulization. the result is an aesthetic  that long predates postmodernism but that often matches it in visual terms