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In the shadow of Alexander the Great: censorship, ideology and contemporary art in Macedonia

In this chapter the author discusses how censorship affects discourses of contemporary art in the Republic of Macedonia. The cultural, political and social contexts in Macedonia are outlined and differing standpoints on what constitutes contemporary art practice in that country are discussed. Two case studies are highlighted to allow the reader to gain an understaning of how censorship is deployed as a tactic in erasing, or in rendering illegitamte, critical contemporary art.


Censoring Contemporary Art in Macedonia Introduction
In this essay, we will consider how censorship affects discourses of contemporary art in the Republic of Macedonia. To do so, we must first outline the cultural, political and social contexts in Macedonia; consider some differing standpoints on what constitutes contemporary art practice in the country; and, having done so, develop in detail two case studies which will allow the reader to gain an understanding of how censorship is deployed as a tactic in erasing, or in rendering illegitimate, critical contemporary art. Although, as we shall see, contemporary art occupies a marginal and, arguably, subterranean position in Macedonia, such censorial interventions are an acknowledgement of its potential to shape cultural debate in a different way.
The censorship we will be discussing here is not of the blunt, totalitarian kind, involving bans, exile, prison or other judicial punishment for the artists concerned.
The artists we mention in this text are still working as artists, and have not been subjected to a judicial process on the basis of the work censored. Nonetheless, in the case studies that follow, works of art, commissioned and following all proper legal procedure, have been removed from public scrutiny by being destroyed, on the orders of persons unknown.
The censorship we are concerned with here, is a censorship of deletion and erasure, and the troubling traces of these events remain foremost in the consciousness of critical artists in Macedonia. Moreover, this is a censorship by stealth; those doing the censoring have remained anonymous, and therefore beyond democratic accountability. It is a pattern wearily familiar to those observing different 'managed democracies', in the former Communist world, in Central and Eastern Europe. It is also an irony that seems lost on Macedonia's politicians that, in censoring artwork, they give to them a life and notoriety that they might otherwise not have enjoyed, had they been ignored.
To begin, we shall turn to an overview of contemporary art in Macedonia, and in particular, that part of it subject to censorship by those who occupy positions of political and religious power, in Macedonian society. Public art works produced from a position of critical opposition cannot be fully understood without the brief ecology of contemporary Macedonian art that follows.

An Ecology of Contemporary Art in Macedonia
The Republic of Macedonia voted to secede from the disintegrating former Yugoslav federation on 8 September 1991, and in so doing effected the only peaceful withdrawal from Yugoslavia, of all its six constituent republics. Not that Macedonia's history since independence has been entirely peaceful; the country suffered from a long international isolation in the 1990s, owing to Greek objections to the country's name and flag. 1 In 2001 an insurgency to the north and west of the country saw a small but vicious war fought between ethnic Macedonians and Albanians, in the short lived so-called Macedonian insurgency. 2 The current political epoch in Macedonia begins in 2006, with the election of a   conservative nationalist government under Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski, leader of   VMRO-DPMNE, the biggest right wing party in the country. VMRO-DPMNE, which traces its roots to Macedonian secessionist nationalism in the late nineteenth century, 3 has remained in power ever since, winning four successive elections and currently governing in partnership with the largest party representing the Albanian minority, the DUI. 4 The political turbulence and popular demonstrations against the government, from May 2015 onwards, derive in part from the questionable legitimacy of some of those election 'victories'. 5 The type of government represented by VMRO-DPMNE and its allies has been characterised by the social scientist Katerina Kolozova as a 'hybrid regime'. 6 Kolozova defines a "hybrid regime" in patriarchal terms, as follows: …Typical of the state model at issue is the centrality of the role of a strong leader, such as Victor Órban in Hungary or Vladimir Putin in Russia. As a rule, it is an authoritarian figure enacting the essentially patriarchal role of paterfamilias whereby the nation is treated as a community of genetic kinship, a 'family' (ethnos as genos) rather than a nation (or demos)…The general trait of the style of ruling is, I would argue, patriarchalism. The latter enables ethnocentrism, religious conservatism and strong state control. 7 It is Nikola Gruevski who has, since 2006, sought to build for himself an image as a firm but fair paterfamilias; someone not afraid to make necessary reforms, such as the 2009 overhaul of a previously sclerotic and widely ignored tax system, but also someone who defends and defines the ethnic group of which he claims a leading role-Macedonians. It should be noted that, by implication, Gruevski regards the Macedonian nation as congruent with this largest ethnic group, rather than as representing a mix of differing ethnicities and religious beliefs.
Macedonian people who adhere to the Orthodox Christian faith may well constitute the largest ethno-religious group in the country, but to limit a definition of contemporary Macedonian statehood to this group, by implication, excludes Albanians, Macedonian Muslims, Roma people, and smaller ethnic minorities such as Vlachs, Bosniaks and Turks from ever being regarded as full and equal citizens within the modern Macedonian state. This is a type of nationalism that has been transmitted through 'official' Macedonian culture, more so than in any other sphere of government influence.
It is in this context that we should approach the highly controversial Skopje 2014 programme, publically announced by VMRO-DPMNE planners in February 2010, and which, five years later, is yet to be completed. This scheme is nothing less than the biggest 'neo-classical' and 'Baroque' building scheme anywhere in the world. For proponents of the makeover, Skopje 2014 aims at a truly Macedonian style of architecture; for opponents, it is nothing more than aesthetically and architecturally illiterate kitsch, which has ruined the city.
The aim of this scheme has been to alter, fundamentally, the appearance of late Yugoslav Skopje. The city was eighty percent destroyed by a disastrous earthquake on 26 July 1963, and had to be rebuilt with international help. The renowned Japanese architect Kenzo Tange devised a masterplan for the city centre, arranged according to his architectural principles; 8 a broader reconstruction plan for the urban area was devised by the Polish architect Adolf Ciborowski, and a Greek architectural practice. Macedonia's 'European' character among international publics via branding strategies, Macedonian leaders hope to secure economic advantages and also to trump regional and internal challenges to state authority and national authenticity. 9 It is this complicated, delicate and overlapping set of competing cultural discourses that frames the terrain for the production of contemporary art in Macedonia. In response to these circumstances, artists have four broad choices. Firstly, they can seek to take part in the Skopje 2014 re-building process itself, as many artists have chosen to do, for reasons of material gain or ideological conviction.
Artists from late Yugoslav avant-gardists, such as Aleksandar Stankoski, 10  A second group of artists chooses not to take sides; not to participate in the Skopje 2014 project personally but, equally, not to condemn it either. In many ways, this is an insidious form of self-censorship and is rooted in the pre-independence academic idea that '"great'" art should not be '"political'" art, but rather that any art work produced, should address the audience on its own terms.
Artists from the Renaissance, such as Leonardo or Michelangelo, a French modernist like Henri Matisse, or American pop artists, would be held up in academies of Fine Art as examples of "great" artists addressing their audience in aesthetic, rather than in political terms. By implication, Yugoslav-era artists such as Borko Lazeski 12 , whose work addressed specifically political narratives of the Yugoslav state, can be dismissed as second rate, as the primary motivation for the work can be deemed political. The irony of a parallel silence on the overtly political nature of the Skopje 2014 scheme, tells a story not only about the selective application of modernist aesthetics in judging artworks, but also about the quality of aesthetic debate within contemporary Macedonian educational institutions.
In terms of Macedonian artists' perceptions of art, this apolitical position, taught at Fine Art Academies, is still unchallenged by a significant majority active in producing and consuming art. Evidence for such a position can be found in the widespread appreciation of dead Macedonian painters from the last century, such as Petar Mazev, whose work continues to exert a disproportionate influence on the work of students who were not born at the time of his death in 1993; and reference, in particular, to French and American modernist painters who were most active in the early to mid-twentieth century. This is a position partly deriving from self-censorship, and partly from the comparative isolation of Macedonian art, internationally.
A third position is associated with those who work at national institutions and galleries in Macedonia. On paper, there is a strong network of national galleries and museums, with a comprehensible funding system, little changed from Yugoslav times, in place. By common consent, however, national institutions in Macedonia do not function as they should, and have arguably been in crisis for the last decade. There are two reasons for this.
Firstly, there is a lack of managerial and organisational capacity in Macedonian cultural institutions. Directorial appointments are made on the basis of political loyalty rather than professional competence; those still on the staffs of national institutions, who have professional competence, find themselves working to management who have no understanding of or sympathy with development strategies.
Further, in a country with around 28fifty per cent unemployment, officially, and up to 50% according to unofficial figures, the vast majority of all cultural funding has been channelled towards the realisation of Skopje 2014.
Self-evidently, the ideological trajectory of the re-building of the Macedonian capital sees national institutions starved of the funding necessary to develop a genuinely independent or critical discourse on contemporary culture. In the shadow of Alexander, audiences for cultural events have fallen away significantly, as has the ability of national institutions to mount them. In these circumstances, the National Gallery of Macedonia, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, struggle to fulfil their basic functions as cultural institutions. Regional galleries such as the 'Marko Čepenkov' Cultural Centre in Prilep, and independent cultural festivals such as the long established AKTO festival in Bitola, run on little more than enthusiasm in present times 13 .
It may seem remarkable that an independent cultural sector can exist in the circumstances outlined above. It is this small independent group of artists, curators and activists whose work is the obvious target for censorial intervention by the state. Politicians are known to use art as a propaganda tool, but it is the artist who can recognize the manipulations concealed behind these strategies and is capable of exposing the workings of such mechanisms. Therefore, it becomes a responsibility to challenge these and similar issues by any means possible. In this context, art is indeed a powerful tool: it can deliver a high impact by sending a strong message while using simple means. 14 By the time that this statement was written, three of the artists had direct experience of the spectacular response that such critical actions, based on expressing a clear Territories revisits the language of Utopian modernism and re-casts this in temporary free locations, in urban spaces. The space of each 'Territory' is delineated by yellow plastic tape which is durable, and which can be easily removed. The future methodology of KOOPERACIJA, of which Toševski was a founder member, can be found here; using simple ephemeral aesthetic means for the strongest impact.  15 The focus of the protests were differing groups of students, and NGO activists, with Plotsad Sloboda (Free Square) prominent amongst them. The peaceful protests were confronted with violent disorder on 28 March 2011, when a group of Orthodox believers, estimated at 1500, physically assaulted those protesting at the building of the church, with the police standing by idly. 16 The grim events of the day, with a peaceful demonstration violently dispersed by hooligans, was described by the journalist Harald Schenker as follows: On this sunny Saturday, a group of young urbanites was prevented from expressing two of their fundamental rights: the one to gather in peaceful protest, the other to freely express their opinion. And to make it worse -they were "prevented" by blank violence, exercised by a bunch of hooded hooligans -in the name of the church, in the name of Christianity. 17 The increasing sense of foreboding at the direction the government was taking culminated in the tragic murder of 22year old Martin Nešovski, on 6 June 2011, at the hands of a Macedonian police officer. 18 Protests against the plans, merged with citizen outrage at Nešovski's death, and demands that individuals and government agencies responsible be held accountable for their actions, continued throughout June and July of that year.
In this fraught political context, Toševski's territory piece was bound to provoke strong reactions. The unveiling of the piece was scheduled for autumn 2009, as part of a broader exhibition with three German artists. The necessary permits to install an artwork, temporarily, in a public space, were obtained from different levels of city authority. As a final hurdle, the artist had to get the approval of the city mayor of Skopje; this was forthcoming a matter of days before the exhibition opened. The quick process of establishing the artwork in its position was completed, in the presence of police who, with all legal and administrative formalities complete, supervised the work, but did not intervene.
The reaction to this new territory was almost immediate. The work was condemned by the NGO Plotsad Sloboda as a provocation, and this narrative was taken up in the local media. Within a matter of hours of the work being completed, un-named government officials ordered the work painted over as a priority, by city council workers. Reflecting on this experience, Igor Toševski said: …the government ordered the erasing of the yellow cross, and it became the black cross, which was lovely in a way[…]it was a really interesting situation, as everyone saw one another naked[…]I didn't expect such a reaction, I had done thirty-eight territories before and never encountered such a response. The whole context is important; I suppose it was a good time and a good place, to do this. 19 The resonance of this work lasted longer than the tense situation in Skopje in 2009. It is important to acknowledge that, whilst this work took place in the context of the beginnings of protest at the Skopje 2014 scheme, it was not a protest against that scheme itself, whose details were not officially announced until February 2010. People became more and more aggressive…people like this have support from higher up. When you discuss religion, it is problematic, as you appear to be attacking their beliefs. When we made the project, we realized it would have consequences…but we didn't think that response would be so intensive. It was a good experience, and good for our work. 21 From the other side, the KOOPERACIJA grouping, which had had its first public exhibition in a Skopje laundromat in April 2012, rallied all the support they could in defence of the image. By this stage, however, events had taken on their own momentum. The image was unveiled on the 10 June; within 24 hours, an agent, acting on the orders of unknown officials, had ripped the image off the billboard, Further, it opened out discussion on the acceptable boundaries of image making, and on the responsibilities of the artist in a society such as Macedonia. Notions of taste and decency, humour and offensiveness, those who exercise power and those who are subject to the actions of power, were all issues furiously debated in mainstream media, and in on-line and social media forums. This was a brief and intense paroxysm of discussion surrounding an artwork that would simply not have taken place, had it been exhibited in a gallery context. Consequently, this is also a work that deals implicitly with self-censorship, and the failure of art institutions and artists to function in any meaningful way. If engagement with the public is an afterthought, then what is the purpose of making the image in the first place?
Finally, this image laid bare the close inter-relationship between church and state, and the unspoken power of the church to affect offense on behalf of their congregation, and demand immediate action accordingly. In the vacuum left by the collapse of Titoist Communism and Yugoslavia, and in a post-ideological age, the church has capitalised adroitly in filling these vacated spaces. The visible destruction of this artwork -exactly the same fate as happened with Toševski's work-produced an image that was much more powerful and raw than these artists had ever expected. In many ways, the destruction of OPA's billboard was the final manipulation by the Church of the 'miracle' at St. Demetrius.

Conclusion
'The question remains though: how can art actually participate in society as an instrument of change and as such make a difference? ' 22 In this essay, we have provided an ecology of Macedonian contemporary art, in outline, and identified those 'critical' artists who employ mixed strategies of institutional critique, site specificity, and gentle humour, as being most likely to suffer some kind of censorship. It would be nice to be able to present our two case studies as isolated and atypical responses to critical contemporary art, but it would also be untrue.
Had there been greater space and time, we could have considered many more examples--the response of the authorities, suing 'outraged citizens' as a proxy, to Velimir Zernovski's exhibition All Beauty Must Die in 2013, again in Plotsad Makedonija, or, more recently, the refusal of any Macedonian printer to produce a copy of an image produced by Irena Paskali, for another exhibition on advertising billboards, in 2014. More insidious than these actions is the prevailing air of selfcensorship; the quiet accommodations with prevailing political and religious orthodoxies that sees artist either attaching themselves to the antiquization projects of the government or, at the very least, retreat into a kind of twenty-first century 'art for art's sake' position, represented by exhibitions attended by derisory audiences and evincing few if any comments in the mainstream media.
In this sense, then, the ability of critically minded artists to provoke a reaction from both the state and the public, to open out discussion-even if it may be passingly unpleasant discussion, in the form of a social media feeding frenzy-is a precious one.
It is precious as it still claims a small public profile for contemporary art in a country where visual culture has been dragooned into the service of a right-wing ethnonationalist view of Macedonian history, and its present neo-liberal reality.