In a collective, the artists ruthlessly deconstructed the social norms
The phenomenon called the “Edge Group” by far exceeded its preceding history and the
parameters of that which had cohered as “nonconventional,” conceptual or contemporary art in
the country up to that point, and the work of the group expanded and deepened its horizons.
In a collective, the artists ruthlessly deconstructed the social norms and redrew the
meanings of the matter and practices we had been made of, and generally of everything that
surrounded us. In the interminable chaos that surrounded us, the “edges” took apart and put
back together the entire world around them both spatially and semantically, creating a
whirlwind that would radically displace, rearrange, and once again disrupt all established
norms.
There was also the biting humor and whit in the form of authorities and established figures
in the sphere of the arts. “We had the nerve to do such daring things and hence we weren’t
favored very much, we were radical in these things. This is why it is ‘edge’” – recalls Emil
Mirazchiev on the occasion of the retrospective “The Edge Museum” in 2016.1 Their art happenings would turn the power dynamics upside
down with audacity, sarcasm, and with so much ease and lightness that those elements which
headed downwards, did not fall on a hard place but had the honor of being transformed into
art and lighten the day with some collective humor.
In the work of the Edge Group, the process was always present as a theme – it was something
that the group constantly interrogated and self-examined, disclosed and deconstructed. The
process was at the core of gallery exhibitions such as “The Ideal” and “Large Photography”
as well as art happenings such as Black Happening, Root High Up in the Sky, The Body of
Water, Bright Light, and The Overt Breakfast. In their exhibitions sometimes one could not
find any “finished” works – “The Ideal,” for example, began with ten empty canvasses and
ended with ten different artworks, which were created in front of the visitors and in
conversation with them. In these projects, the interactive process in contact with the
people and the site determined the directions as well as the forms and meanings that their
works engendered. The sarcasm, dynamism, the dismantling of the process – all these elements
which inevitably accompanied the work of the group – reflected the unruly times of the
beginning of the 1990s. And in the midst of this chaos of the early “transition”, the art
collective turned into a powerful magnetic force, which not only staged sharp confrontations
with their questions but opened the doors to the higher and unfathomable dimensions.
One of the main political effects of the overall presence of the group was to replace the
capital as the center and
leading place for artistic life and activity with the country – in fact, displacing the
capital was a tendency which had started developing back in the mid-‘80s. The conditions in
the smaller towns and at the open-air workshops in the villages turned out to be much more
favourable for experimental political and artistic ventures.2
On the one hand, the geographical marginality of these remote, harder-to-access places made
possible the actual events, far away from the “center” and its institutions, regimes, and
norms. At the same time these events were conceived as openly oppositional in a geographical
sense. Born in different parts of the country outside the capital, many of the artists who
took part in these events consciously opposed the dominating presence of the center in
artistic life and the stagnation reproduced by its institutions. The Edge Group was an heir
of sorts to these politics and refused to follow the inertia of this centrism in the
contemporary arts. Many of the group’s members had already taken part in such events
scattered across the country, at the open-air workshops in Dospat, Targovishte, Yasna
Polyana, and others. But this effect was not even consciously elaborated – consumed by what
was happening around the group, the artists simply abandoned Sofia's art scene and turned it
into their periphery. Consciously or not, during the time of their existence as a group,
they displaced the center and “provincialized” the capital.
This was the case because the interventions of the collective, until their very last
appearances, were uncompromisingly situated in the social, political, and spatial context of
the locations they engaged. The works of “Edge” remained way too specific to
their sites and contexts to become convertible, translatable, and transportable – because
their aim was to be radically present “here” and “now”, to intervene into and activate the
social environment and the context of the place they were situated in, to bend the space as
well as the social relations they inhabited.3Here it was not
only about an intervention into a preexisting place and time, but about how the actual
intervention produced both the time and the place, and vice versa—how the site and the
historical context made the actions possible. In this sense, the work of the collective
could be defined as an idiosyncratic form of political and social situationism, which
emerged with the new art forms.
The question of how the Edge Group was positioned in the uneven political terrains of the
early 1990s could be answered in unequivocal ways. Their work was uncompromisingly critical
of the preceding “regime,” its hierarchies, bureaucracies, elites and ideologemes, and the
historical exhibition “Symbols and Signs” critiqued and ridiculed like no other the visual
language of state power of the socialist government. Their work contained political messages
for direct democracy, for direct social control over the material, social, and public
resources as a form of critique of the socialist system. But it was also critical of newly
emerging privileges and the uneven access to the most basic material needs at a time of
economic crisis and extreme privation – themes which were present in performances and
happenings such as Black Happening, Bright Light, and The Overt Breakfast.
But not all works by the group had “political” content. They rather succeeded in
politicizing all elements of the contemporary moment by transgressing established
institutional practices, disciplines, genres, materials, and norms, opening the space for an
alternative publicity that was horizontal, dialogical, collective, critical and semantically
open. Many of the group’s events aimed to intervene in deconstructive ways into the fixed
dichotomies of artwork-spectator; artist-audience, artist-critic, process-product, etc.,
creating dynamic, surprising, and disorienting environments which would rewrite the
grounding elements and coordinates of the social norms, and would turn the hierarchies
upside down. The shuffling of objects and the clash of meanings impeded our ability to
articulate and threw us into confusion, sending us into a zone of groundlessness. This was
the groundlessness of the times in which we continued to meander despite the predetermined
scenarios and directions – economic, political, and geographical – characteristic of the
“transition”.
“Edge” was a product of late socialism and early postsocialism, or the juncture of 1989 in
another sense – that the group emerged as part of the strong tendencies toward collective
work in the alternative forms of art which emerged in Eastern Europe at that time. They had
a strong presence at the end of the 1980s and the early 1990s and began to disappear with
the formation of the individual subject that was taking shape with the new market economies
and capitalist relations, and with the assimilation of contemporary artists in he
assimilation of contemporary artists into Western norms and narratives. “Our new society
from the mid-‘90s did not tolerate such a phenomenon, and the Edge Group was in total
contradiction with this society,” Albena Mihaylova shared with me about the dissolution of
the group in 1994. “‘Edge’ was an anarchist, and it imploded.”4
While taking part in the group’s activities, all of its members continued to work
independently in mostly traditional mediums such as graphic art or painting, and their work
as individual artists often did not bear a direct relation with the strong conceptual
tendencies in their group appearances. At first sight this may seem like a contradiction,
but it is a fact that the “non-conventional” arts in the country, as well as conceptual art
in Eastern Europe from the period, was born in the atmosphere of collective practice and to
a great extent was an heir of socialism. As a group, “Edge” would overcome the sum of
individuals in it and would create something qualitatively new, something otherworldly,
which contained magical power. As the art historian and critic Diana Popova states, the
constellation called “Edge” not only succeeded in speaking the new language, but masterfully
created poetry.5 And indeed, the group not only unfolded,
deconstructed, and reassembled social and political space, but also created poetic
environments which crossed visual, spatial, textual, sound, and other dimensions and
inhabited them effortlessly. In their scale and power they were possible only through the
mobilization of collective critical, intellectual, and creative energy.
In their collective work, however, there was always space and “porousness”. The artists
recall that their concepts were never fully thought-out, to leave space for improvisation
and spontaneity, as well as for the individual energy and expression of each of the
artists.6
This was how the end result was never clarified in advance but emerged in the alchemy that
was a product of their spontaneous creative action, collective energy and individual
self-expression. “Opus Pobect 93” was one of the most astonishing results of this approach:
unified by the image of the apple, the exhibition combined installations, objects,
theatrical lighting, and diverse mediums from painting to plaster molds, which were
synchronized into a holistic environment filled with symbolism, poetry, and a surreal
experience.
When the Edge Group appeared on the art scene, I was a first-year school student in the
Foreign Languages High School in Plovdiv. I have already been pulled into the multifaceted
time of 1989 – into the whirlwinds of the November events and the ceaseless demonstrations
in the city, the euphoria, the chaotic cataclysms which radically reshaped social relations,
rearranged established registers of meanings, and generally transformed the world around me
and everyone as I was grappling with the collapse of a continuous, if only very modest,
stability. Those of us who did not have connections with the political and bureaucratic
elites of the former socialist state, nor were among those who had property “restored” by
the new regime, nor were able to adapt to the new entrepreneurial spirit of the era, were
jostled around by the endless economic crisis, the unemployment, the inflation and the
struggle for survival, out of which began to emerge the contours of the new social
inequalities, of the new cultural and social norms.
I signed up for the art workshops led by Nadya Genova, one of the founding members of the
Edge Group, which were first held in the House of the Syndicates (now Boris Hristov House of
Culture), then later moved to the new Akrabov Gallery and other places. The art classes were
not like the other classes in the city: they turned out to be rather a series of bizarre and
inexplicable experiments in visual practice, which often intensified the sense of
displacement in the social environment around me and opened the space for its processing.
Gradually the artists in the group accepted us nonchalantly as their regular company in
their exhibitions and events. And so the events around the Edge Group accompanied me until
the end of my high-school years. Those of us who had the courage participated in happenings
and exhibitions, but the process of the group itself and their projects was so open, at
least towards us, that we were drawn into its life and became part of the process in one way
or another. Their art was unfathomably moving. It left a deep mark in me and had a formative
role for my interests in the next few years. Thanks to the Edge Group I turned my interests
to contemporary art while an art history student at the National Academy of Arts and
absorbed with great ease the first critical theories that I came across later. I devoured
postcolonial theory and poststructuralism, I studied in depth Dadaism, situationism, Fluxus,
the history of conceptual art, searching for the most complex and interesting formulations
of the relations between arts and their social and political dimensions. My mistrust towards
universal and totalizing frameworks of thinking surely bears the stamp of their influence as
well as the stamp of the times. The truth is that the Edge Group introduced me like no other
into the infinite worlds of interpretation. They taught me about its power as well as its
limits, and to wander freely and without fear the terrains traversing the visual and the
textual.
The current monograph is the product of collective work, which has taken years to build, and
which began with the work on the retrospective exhibition “The Edge Museum” in 2016 in
Plovdiv’s Banya Starinna (The Ancient Bath). It aims to make publicly available a multitude
of historical and archival materials, collected and preserved over the years, and to
hopefully fill a gap in the history of contemporary art in the country from the last thirty
years. The publication includes visual materials, documents, texts – these are archival
documents, photos of the artworks and the overall exhibitions, documentary shots capturing
fleeting moments of history and the forms of publicity which unfolded through these events.
The monograph also includes historical and contemporary texts – materials republished from
specialized periodicals and the local press, as well as an art-historical study of the
group, which I had completed in 1999 and which has not been published before.
A large part of these materials were collected from the personal archives of the artists
themselves, whose documentary practices were an indelible part of their exhibitions and
creative activity. This self-documentation was borne out of the temporal dimensions which
the group experimented with (performances, happenings, interactive pieces and installations
that unfolded in space) and out of their approach, which placed great emphasis on the
process. It also came from the artists’ sense of direct collective control over the material
resources, evaluation frameworks, and the historical narrative – in other words, over the
material and discursive environment which they depended on. It was also related to their
sense of the power dynamics embedded in the structures of historical understanding and the
geography of contemporary culture, which were being actively redesigned and redrawn. It was
also possible thanks to their intuition about historicity at the time of the actual event.
And perhaps because of the chaos of the times, the artists took into their own hands the
control of their own history in the moment of its actualization, and in their hands the
process of documentation itself turned once again into art.
Many of the materials here are being published for the first time in the present book.
Others are being published again so that we can appreciate their archival value. We will let
them speak in their own voice with their documentary and visual power and we hope that they
are a valuable contribution to the contemporary arts from the last thirty years. We hope
this monograph will present material for a lot more questions and will serve as a basis for
multiple studies, rereadings, and rewritings of this history. One thing is certain – that
the spirit of the “Edge” will roam around with its unruly temper to raise its wiry head in
the face of the hegemon, to inspire with the courage of its imagination, to make us laugh
with its daring sarcasm in the face of power, and to captivate with its magic, which
contains the key to a better and more meaningful life.
Text: Zhivka Valiavicharska
*
Plovdiv/New York, 2022.
Translated from Bulgarian by the author
1 Stefan Dvambazov, Kritichen pogled: Grupa Rab sabra aktsii, parformansi i tvorbi v “muzey.” Vapreki.
2 For further discussion, see the study in the current monograph, “The Edge
Group
and the
Non-Conventional Artistic Forms in Bulgarian Art, 1984-94”; as well as Vesela Nozharova,
Introductionto Bulgarian contemporary Art, 1982-2015 (Sofia: Foundation Open Arts,
2016),
pp. 18-31.
3 The actionism of the work of the “Edge” group is very well formulated in
the
text of Katrin
Sarieva. Idealat na Rab. 20 Years from the Founding of the “Edge” Group (catalogue).
Plovdiv: Sariev Gallery, 2009.
4 In conversation with Albena Mihaylova, January 2022.
5 Diana Popova, “Muzeiat Rab ili kak se razhdat legendite.” Kultura, 16
September, 2016.
6 In conversation with Albena Mihaylova, January 2022.
* Zhivka Valiavicharska is an art historian and political theorist,
and Associate
Professor at Pratt Institute, New York. She graduated in Art History from the National
Academy of Arts in Sofia in 1999, studied Modern Art History
and Theory at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and completed a PhD in
political and social theory at the University of California, Berkeley (2011). In 2003,
she became a Marjorie Susman Curatorial Fellow at the
Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Valiavicharska is the author of multiple writings
on the cultural, social, and art histories of Bulgaria, the Balkans, and Eastern Europe
during the twentieth
century and in a contemporary context.
Valjavicharska is the author of the monograph "THE EDGE GROUP AND THE NONCONVENTIONAL ART
FORMS IN BULGARIA (1984–1994)"
