Stefan Arteni

The East-Central
European
Cultural Model
I

SolInvictus Press 2009

Orpheus in Thrace, Attic krater, 5th century BC (Orpheus was the son of
Oeagrus, a Thracian king, and of the muse Calliope)

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 Stefan Arteni

The East-Central European

Cultural Model
(a revised and illustrated version
of the essay published in
www.asymetria.org , 2009)
I

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1560 Europe

1923 Europe

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Stefan Arteni
The East-Central European Cultural Model. 1.Cultural Polyglotism.
[February 5, 2009]

Motto.
Through time's howling clamor
a voice of the nothing.
Through chattering aeon
a wailing of humans.
(Lucian Blaga)

A limes runs through the middle of Europe, the old Roman limes on the Danube.
Charlemagne created a new borderline down the centre of Europe, the Limes
Sorabicus, that clearly marked also a cultural border. In the early 1950s, the
historian Oskar Halecki sketched a model of Europe, identifying three
macro-regions: Western Europe, Central Europe and Eastern Europe. In
Halecki’s view, Central Europe consists of two parts – West-Central Europe
(Germany and Austria) and East-Central Europe (the territories between
Germany and Russia). Historically, East-Central Europe includes the group of
countries which fell under Soviet domination.

East-Central Europe is not a static abstraction. The complex pattern of

interaction rises out of the peculiar aspect of limes ethos as the site of continuity
of the archaic and of a paradoxical fatalistic optimism, and can provide a picture
of comprehensive correspondences in space and time - the multiscale and
many-valued chronotope. To paraphrase Milan Kundera, it is a culture or a fate.
If it may be said that there is a longing for an escape from the terror of a linear
meaningless history – for example, after modernity’s attempt at ‘memory
erasure’, Boris Groys proposes ‘erasure of erasure’ to describe the
contemporary ‘global’ situation - it may also be said that the East-Central
European cultural space, the ‘liminal locus’ where semiospheres come into
contact, intersect and overlap, necessarily denotes the potential of possibilities
that culture is able to realize by attempting to make sense of the past in the
present.

Maria Todorova suggests that memory, identity, and historical legacy are the
pertinent categories of analysis. Piotr Piotrowsky speaks of “the other Europe”,
while Arpad Szakolczai holds that the area may be viewed as borderlands of
Western civilization, as located “between the both mythical and very real entities
‘West’ and ‘East’ “. However, “the concept of Borderline is twofold”, remarks
Alexander W. Belobratow. “On the one hand it has a separating function and on
the other hand a binding one”. Unfortunately, notes Szakolczai, the area has
been stuck too long in transitoriness, “in a precarious liminal condition”.

There may be an alternative, non-canonized history of twentieth century culture,

a history of periphery input and dispersed diasporas, a history of the

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omnipresence of present pasts playfully renegotiated by every new work that is
itself informed by what precedes it. One may also underscore the ambivalence
of the center and periphery concepts and of the hierarchic differentiation
center/periphery. Czeslaw Milosz once remarked: “And the intellectual Paris of
the 1950s and the 1960s turned with expectation towards the East…It tells the
story of how a center, by losing faith in itself, changes through resignation into a
periphery”.

When one considers culture, it is the intersubjective schemas pertaining to the

'consensual domain' that are relevant. Roy D'Andrade employs the term 'cultural
models'. According to D'Andrade, "a cultural model is a cognitive schema that is
intersubjectively shared by a social group". A reinterpretation of Michael
Kimmel's notion of dynamic switches between culture-embedded ontologies
through image-schemata transformations and encompassing cases of partial
compatibility, may be horizontally extended to include non-linguistic phenomena.
In the case of East-Central Europe, a world constantly wracked by changes that
raise again and again the identities dilemma and the threat of oblivion, the
cultural Dasein of the individual consists of a positive heterarchy that couples
various languages and cultures toward a cooperative survival unity, without
giving up the autonomy of parts. Evidently, there are several different cultural
logics at work at the same time, involving interaction and conflicting interaction,
and, occasionally, the phenomenon of mimetism, understood both in the
Girardian sense of ‘mimetic desire’, and in the sense the term is used in biology,
as a way to ‘trick’ the environment.

It must be borne in mind that, as Caryl Emerson points out, “Central and East
Europeans (for all their contributions to the avant-garde) have routinely stood up
to Western models.” (To approach the question of modernism’s relationship to
tradition, it may be briefly noted here that, paradoxically enough, to transgress
is to reaffirm a limit). Emerson argues that “exile, displacement,
multi-languagedness, heteroglossia, outsideness to oneself and thus a taste for
irony…” constitute the defining coordinates of a unique heritage, a
polycentered identity connected to “finding themselves always between several
cultures and unable to lose themselves in any one of them…” or, so to speak,
"planted in each reality, informed by all, circumscribed by none".

What is interesting about multilingualism is the unique state of compound

multi-competence postulated by Istvan Kecskes and Tunde Papp, that is a
common underlying proficiency and two or more constantly available interacting
systems, none of which is the same as the language system of a monolingual.
Brian MacWhinney points out that in case of childhood multilingualism, it appears
that multiple languages are acquired as separate entities. Ulrike Jessner argues
that the increased metalinguistic skills trigger a heightened awareness of the
arbitrary aspects of language, of cognitve styles and of syntactic factors. All in all,
the dynamic of systems creates new structures and emergent properties within
the playfulness and variation of culture-specific metaphoric fields.

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Language is a repository of culture. The fact is that, in the age of Empires,
cultures located at a crossroads and subjected to repeated colonization and
assimilation attempts may feel the need of an encounter with the cultures which
exercise widespread influence. Karen Wong remarks that an individual needs “to
become fluent in the language of knowledge” and to acquire “the language of the
currently predominant culture”. The polyglot inhabits someone else's culture,
including ‘the’ culture or cultures. What this helps instigate, and continues to
finesse, is a cultural polyglotism. From the beginning, a translocal multi-identiy
web and a recursiveness of identity recreation, a being between and astride
cultures and moving across languages and cultural contextures set side by side,
imply a second-order perspective, an experiential metacultural sensibility.
An inner metalanguage, multiple inheritances and multiple codings, are at work.
Second-order culture delineations are continuously reconstructed. The new
entities produced by the peripatetic impulse open up a situational space which
revels in the freedom of a horizonal in-between transcending untranslatable
knots. Doris Runey points out that polyglots are "not 'in the world' but rather 'in
worlds', dwelling in the liminal space of simultaneous belongingness and
non-belongingness.

Giovanni Boldini, Portrait of Parisian Art Collector Dr. Georges de Bellio

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Jacques Emile Blanche, Study for a Portrait of Writer Anna de Noailles

Edouard Vuillard, Study for a Portrait of Anna de Noailles

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 Giovanni Boldini, Portrait of Writer Marthe-Lucile Bibesco, 1911

Edouard Vuillard, Portrait of Princess Marthe-Lucile Bibesco , 1912

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 Theodor Pallady, Self-portrait, 1937-1939?

Dan Barbilian, pen name Ion Barbu (poet and mathematician - the Barbilian
spaces are named after him)

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Constantin Brancusi (sculptor)

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Eugenio Coseriu (linguist)

Vintila Horia (writer)

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 Henri Matisse, La Blouse Roumaine,
a February 1939 study executed during Pallady’s visit to Matisse in Nice

Henri Matisse, Portrait of Theodor Pallady

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Stefan Arteni
The East-Central European Cultural Model. 2.Artistic Polyglotism.
[March 8, 2009]

Motto.
Behold the road inscribed in time,
Comes from the dead, drawn does it
Seem from song,
The heavy cart which in the evening's
Dust is groaning,
Is brother to an old iconostasis.
(Radu Gyr)

Itamar Even-Zohar discusses the continuous process of cultural interference:

“We all tend to attribute much more meaningfulness and expressivity to words in
a foreign language than to those of our own. While for a native speaker certain
expressions, utterances, and texts are definitely ‘banal’, for a non-native speaker
they may sound powerful and fresh.” This conclusion may be also applied to
visual systems: “…an appropriated repertoire does not necessarily maintain
source culture functions…Transfers [of organization, structure, or representation
systems] often involve functional shifts.” Let us, with the help of an example,
demonstrate these statements.

It is sufficient to recall a few artists included in the ‘first’ and in the ‘new’ École de
Paris: Constantin Brancusi, Louis Marcoussis (Ludwik Kazimierz Wladyslaw
Markus), Jules Pascin (Julius Mordecai Pincas), Marc Chagall, Chaim Soutine,
Moïse Kisling, Ossip Zadkine, Serge Poliakoff, Nicolas de Staël, André
Lanskoy, Magdalena Dumitresco-Campigli, Alexandre Istrati, Natalia Dumitresco,
Dimitrie Varbanesco. The teaching and theories of André Lhote have influenced
many East-Central European artists. The transfer of East Asian Calligraphic Art
traditions was mediated by the artists of the same École de Paris, and by Julius
Bissier and Hans Hartung of the Gruppe Zen. Many of the artists of the École de
Paris were self-exiles, refugees, expatriates - Mihai I. Spariosu suggests that
exile is a “ludic-liminal experience”. Alan D. DeSantis quotes L. Grinberg and
R. Grinberg: “…for the exile, departure is imposed and return impossible”. One
may speak of ludic dislocation, or, as Rico Lie says, “the concept of
displacement…is intrinsically linked to migration and diaspora”.

The artists enumerated above were, obviously, bi- or multi-lingual. Multiliteracy

enhances the ability to manipulate language form, including the graphic written
form - thinking skills are built on a foundation of concrete learning, which
includes experience, visual feedback and motor activities. There is evidence
that human cognition is oriented around vision, indicating also that linguistic
memory is different from visual memory. Stephen Kosslyn's work on visual
memory and visual perception has implicated motor control in visual imagery.

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Danilo Kis indicates that the characteristic shared by East-Central European
artists is the “awareness of form…form as possibility of choice, form that is an
attempt to locate points of fulcrum like those of Archimedes in the chaos around
us”.

"A cybernetic model works by setting up constraints," remarks Ernst von

Glasersfeld. Art operates with constraints rather than with efficient causes - it
only eliminates what does not fit, and this means learning the viable path.
"Forms are created from the concatenation of operations upon themselves
and…are…rather indications of processes…The closed loop of perception
occurs in the eternity of present individual time," writes Louis H. Kauffman. Thus
one may speak of circular operationality, of the recursive self-implication of form,
and also of indirect recursion when two or more procedures cyclically call each
other. Form implies itself as a meta-distinction, as a form of form. Implicit in this
is a de-privileging of logocentrism and metanarratives.

An artist's split between cultures becomes a potential means of deautomatizing

worn-out formal devices, a strategy of inserting and asserting, of uprooting and
defamiliarizing. Milena Dolezelova-Velingerova suggests that for the
border-crosser, “an alien system is ‘empty’ and can be appropriated”. Semiotic
empty signs, semiotic manipulations, perceptual, hermeneutic, semiotic strands
intersect within the ‘empty’ matrix. Moreover, Czeslaw Milosz insightfully
observes: “ ‘To see’ means not only to have before one’s eyes. It may mean
also to preserve in memory. ‘To see and to describe’ may also mean to
reconstruct in imagination”. One can grasp the stochastic and the necessary
within the transformative force of far reaching transcultural processes viewed as
hybrid process. There is always an opportunity for cross-code interference,
code-switching, discontinuity or pseudomorphosis, and a many-valued
approach. The creation of a mixed code will not always follow the rules of either
initial code. Culture is complex and dynamic, i.e. constantly subject to change
and learning. An ‘overcode’ does not erase earlier or alternate semiotics. For
Michel Serres, complexity, and its preference for boundary, expresses an ethos
of decentredness and names a wandering through the criss-crossed tapestry of
cultural crossroads.

It cannot be stressed too much that indifference to the notion of a telos can be
related to the development of a mythico-ritual mode of apprehending and of a
ritual orthopraxy - dromena, litterally things performed, which have endured in an
a-modern East-Central Europe and are connected with the spirit of play for its
own sake. Joseph Needham has beautifully discussed the correlative view
prevalent in premodern cultures, that is layered traditions and the dissipative
forces involved in transmission. Following Steve Farmer, it is perhaps worth
pointing out that correlative perspectives or correlative systems and their
self-similar and fractal structures have deep neurobiological roots.

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In the final instance, the all-embracing interwoven web of operational cultural
dynamics disseminates over different models a practice simultaneously
underpinning and negating human understanding. Eugene Gorny suggests that
experiencing is a result of auto-communication - in auto-communication the
content of the message is less important than its form and it involves a constant
reviewing under a more marked formal organization. “Art as form is the locus
where the absolute becomes knowable. This locus, however, does not coincide
with the absolute”, writes Antoon Braeckman.

Louis Marcoussis

Louis Marcoussis

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Louis Marcoussis

Louis Marcoussis

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Louis Marcoussis

Louis Marcoussis

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Ossip Zadkine

Ossip Zadkine

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 Ossip Zadkine

Ossip Zadkine, tapestry

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Jules Pascin

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Jules Pascin, Portrait of Princess Ghyka

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Moïse Kisling

Moïse Kisling

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Chaim Soutine

Chaim Soutine

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Constantin Brancusi

Constantin Brancusi

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Constantin Brancusi

Constantin Brancusi

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Constantin Brancusi

Constantin Brancusi

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Constantin Brancusi

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Marc Chagall, mosaic, Vence cathedral

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Marc Chagall, window, Chichester cathedral

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Marc Chagall, study for window, All Saints church, Tudeley

Marcg Chagall, study window for St Etienne cathedral, Metz

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Marc Chagall, window, St Etienne cathedral, Metz

Marc Chagall

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André Lhote

André Lhote

André Lhote

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André Lhote

André Lhote

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André Lhote

André Lhote

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André Lhote

André Lhote

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André Lhote

André Lhote

André Lhote

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André Lhote

André Lhote

André Lhote

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André Lhote

André Lhote

André Lhote

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 André Lhote

André Lhote, Traité du Paysage André Lhote, Traité de la Figure

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Henri Catargi (he studied with several teachers including André Lhote)

Henri Catargi

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Henri Catargi

Henri Catargi

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Henri Catargi

Henri Catargi

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 Henri Catargi

Henri Catargi

Henri Catargi (recto and verso)

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Henri Catargi

Henri Catargi

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Henri Catargi

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Alexandru Ciucurencu (he studied at the Academy Julian and also apprenticed
with André Lhote)

Alexandru Ciucurencu

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Alexandru Ciucurencu

Alexandru Ciucurencu

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Alexandru Ciucurencu

Alexandru Ciucurencu

Alexandru Ciucurencu

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Alexandru Ciucurencu

Alexandru Ciucurencu

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Alexandru Ciucurencu

Alexandru Ciucurencu

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Alexandru Ciucurencu

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Alexandru Ciucurencu

Alexandru Ciucurencu

Alexandru Ciucurencu

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Alexandru Ciucurencu

Alexandru Ciucurencu

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Magdalena Radulesco Campigli

Magdalena Radulesco Campigli

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Magdalena Radulesco Campigli

Magdalena Radulesco Campigli

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Alexandre Istrati

Alexandre Istrati

Alexandre Istrati

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Alexandre Istrati

Alexandre Istrati

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Alexandre Istrati

Alexandre Istrati

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Alexandre Istrati

Alexandre Istrati

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Alexandre Istrati

Alexandre Istrati

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Alexandre Istrati

Alexandre Istrati

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Natalia Dumitresco

Natalia Dumitresco

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Natalia Dumitresco

Natalia Dumitresco

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Natalia Dumitresco

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Dimitrie Varbanesco

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Horia Damian

Horia Damian

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Horia Damian

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André Lanskoy

André Lanskoy

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André Lanskoy

André Lanskoy

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André Lanskoy

André Lanskoy

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André Lanskoy

André Lanskoy

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Serge Poliakoff

Serge Poliakoff

Serge Poliakoff

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Serge Poliakoff

Serge Poliakoff

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Serge Poliakoff

Serge Poliakoff

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Serge Poliakoff

Serge Poliakoff

Serge Poliakoff

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Serge Poliakoff, diptych

Serge Poliakoff, diptych

Serge Poliakoff

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Serge Poliakoff

Serge Poliakoff

Serge Poliakoff

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Serge Poliakoff

Serge Poliakoff

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Serge Poliakoff

Serge Poliakoff

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Nicolas de Staël

Nicolas de Staël

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Nicolas de Staël

Nicolas de Staël

Nicolas de Staël

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Nicolas de Staël

Nicolas de Staël

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Nicolas de Staël

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Hans Hartung

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Julius Bissier

Julius Bissier

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Stefan Arteni

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Stefan Arteni

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Stefan Arteni

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