3rd Conference of Baltic Art Historians
REPRESENTING ART HISTORY IN THE BALTIC COUNTRIES: EXPERIENCES AND PROSPECTS
Riga, 6–8 October 2016
Abstract
This paper traces the ideas and transitions in Estonian design as they emerged from the 1980s during the global ideological confrontation unfolding in Eastern Europe. It will examine the contradictions of reality and imagination played out through creative interventions, and consider the circumstances of design in their regional context at the point of the switch-over from one political system to another.
In the 1980s, designers in Estonia (and in the Baltics) were operating in an ideologically contested space of oppression and resistance. Now, increasingly revisited by art and design historians as part of the process of coming to terms with complexities of these final years of the Cold War, the 1980s have been described as a decade of disconnected irrational contradictions. Estonian design commentators find it difficult to identify a common denominator for the decade. The beginning and ending of the 1980s are seen as incompatible, making it hard to find ideas with a continuity into the 1990s, as if, as Ando Keskküla has put it, “they began, ended and possessed a meaning only within their time.”
Young Estonian design of the 1980s was driven by an ambition to articulate its purpose and identity. Through a series of exhibitions (Time and Place, 1986; ACTA ’87), the fictional – both in making the space and the object – was meant to become visible and tangible. Searches for visibility and recognition led to new forms of interaction, not just across discipline boundaries, but also in the form of design diplomacy and politics in pursuit for regional clusters of cultural compatibility.
From Dreams to Reality: Baltic/Scandinavian Applied Art and Design Exhibition
(Tallinn–Vilnius–Gothenburg–Helsinki, 1993–1994) could be seen as a culminating outcome from that process. It became the largest collaborative design event ever organised between Baltic/Scandinavian countries. With eight participating countries supported by respective ministries of culture and endorsed by the Nordic Council of Ministers, the event represented 75 artist-designers with more than 400 objects ranging from design products to artefacts.
For participants and design commentators, it was a unique moment to test possible new meanings, and to project them against the changed background of the socio- political system. This paper re-engages with some of the key questions from the conference, which accompanied the event:
How does the discipline of design (and its regional history) articulate uniqueness and similarity? As for the Baltic countries, was there a possibility of avoiding the pathway into the Western model of the consumer society? How?
