Can utopia be depicted? Can it be realized or actualized? Editors, illustrators, graphic designers, and photographers responsible for the visual and textual material of my dataset violated the image ban, in the extended – or secularized – sense concerning utopia. In this context, the imagery of real socialism could serve as a prime example of the cheap, false, and marketable utopia despised by Adorno and Bloch – in a joint radio discussion in 1966 – essentially, in practice, a dystopia or anti-utopia. (Bloch 1988, 10–13.) So, what does the realized nature of my study in terms of observation and drawing reveal about the imagery of real socialism? Doesn’t the human collectives I’ve realized using different means and the individual images I’ve copied with a pencil simply repeat the same thing: the ideology and false utopia of real socialism?
In Bloch’s utopian hermeneutics, the dialectic of utopia and dystopia plays a central theoretical role. In this interpretive horizon, the utopian and dystopian elements of the historically and politically charged imagery of real socialism become apparent. Originally driven by anti-fascist ideals of equality and justice – utopian ideals – real socialism was left behind by totalitarian administrative machinery, closed societies, and human rights abuses – dystopian outcomes. However, the dialectic of utopia and dystopia is more complex than the Cold War – or condensed facts – opposition. A leap in time from the era of real socialism to the post-real socialism era allows for the examination of the imagery in different capitalist conditions – in other words, conditions where global capitalism doesn’t have an equivalent counterpart as it did in the 1980s before the fall of the Berlin Wall. In the mentioned radio discussion, Adorno states that utopia appears as a specific negation of the prevailing – or “that which just is” – that is, a denial or protest. According to Adorno, by concretising itself as something false, this prevailing simultaneously points towards how things should be. (Bloch 1988, 12.) In other words, through this dialectical turn of history, the imagery of real socialism would refer beyond itself, its era, and its dystopian elements towards an unfading optimism that, according to Bloch, is fundamentally inherent to humans. Thus, the imagery of real socialism that violates the image ban – that is, describing utopia – contains a window into utopia because a) its surface representation does not actually represent what it represents, and b) the concept of utopia refers to a not-yet-present future. [6]
Therefore, the imagery of real socialism points towards an alternative both to capitalism and to failed authoritarian real socialism. Hence, my drawings are both images and counter-images in the sense of critical utopia within the framework of the specific negation inherent in their mode of realization. The expressions of the people I’ve drawn exude a hopeful optimism. Their gazes are directed towards the horizon, where something that might be coming awaits. They gaze towards the ultimate political ideal: the realm of freedom as the highest political good. What this realm is like, we cannot know.
[6] Wayne Hudson notes how Bloch reevaluated the concept of utopia in his philosophy. Bloch aimed to demonstrate that utopia is not a non-place, a literary genre, or a so-called societal utopia, like a blueprint for a better world. For Bloch, utopia signifies a dream of fulfillment, happiness, and homecoming. In other words, utopia is found within the darkness of the lived moment and its transcendent dynamism. The dualism between utopia and reality is impossible, as utopia spreads into the experienced reality as an unattainable unknown. Therefore, demystifying or translating utopia into academic or everyday language is challenging. No one can know what utopia corresponds to. (Hudson 2013, 26–31.)
One characteristic feature of artistic research is its connection to alternative modes of perception and forms of knowledge. Henk Slager illustrates in his book “Pleasure of Research” through concrete examples of art projects how artists can challenge established ways of observing, researching, and archiving, in other words, producing knowledge. The uniqueness and distinctiveness of artistic research are precisely related to this so-called artistic added value, which is based on the fact that research doesn’t solely materialize according to established models in a verbal manner. Alongside the verbal level – and sometimes even in place of it – research materializes in auditory, visual, silent, aesthetic, expressive, and emotional ways (Borgdorff 2012, 21), in other words, physiognomically or multisensorially, often at the boundaries of knowledge and understanding.
What kind of artistic added value do I then produce through drawing? As I mentioned earlier, my artistic research work began when I first started looking at images from GDR revues and Soviet magazines. Gradually, a conceptual construction of the artistic process also emerged, based on the visual expression made possible through the imagery of real socialism, which I conceptually refer to as “utopian representation”. After analyzing this imagery for about three years through drawing and constructing collages, I began to notice visual differences between the photographs I used and the large pencil drawings I created.[7] All the photographs are analog, and of course, the manual printing technique – most likely rotogravure – has left its mark on the images. The quality of the images also varies. Some of the images I used are blurry, with low resolution, and especially the black-and-white photographs from the GDR revue have a kind of gray film overlay. It’s easy to see how these images are composed of dots. Time has also left its mark on the images in the form of slight yellowing and spots. (See images 22-26.) How faithful have I been in copying, scanning, and printing the images in a multi-device-like manner? These questions began to trouble me, especially when drawing the last image of Ljubov Antoštšuk. The image of her is so precise that I could replicate individual eyelashes and eyebrows.
In the digital reproduction process, I could have accurately expressed the blurriness of the images, for instance, by scanning the images at the highest resolution and printing them in a large size. In doing so, I would have visualized real socialism by re-presenting people and the technology of image communication from that era that had already been captured in photographs and left traces of time. Trusting in drawing and selective precision, I created drawings based on photographs using the line, the fundamental element of drawing. With the line, I aimed to reproduce the main features of the images’ tonal values. I didn’t build the images by drawing dots (instead of lines) and copying the images as they were using magnifying lenses. I clarified the images. My drawings have more contrast than the original photographs. They also contain white and black (as black as can be achieved with a pencil), which are hardly visible in the original images covered by a gray veil. By brightening the images, I also brightened the people depicted in them into a sort of ideal figures of utopia. This is the added value that drawing as a research method and the drawings as research conclusions and outcomes illustrate. This addition is, of course, directly related to the verbal conclusions I presented concerning the future orientation evident in the images. However, I wouldn’t have been able to produce the visual addition solely relying on verbal representation analysis or the toolbox of technical research methods. The visual addition is a research result because it emerged as its own concern from the artistic process. It wasn’t known or foreseeable in advance. The visual addition embodies the persistence of political utopia and drawing as an expressive way of creating images.
[7] I thank my spouse, Aika Urata, for helping me realize the significance of this distinction. She has pointed out – and continued to remind me – that I have been creating my own versions of the images rather than merely copying them.
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