Art Against Art. Rethinking the Role and Position of the Artist in Estonian Art in the 1970s
Art Against Art. Rethinking the Role and Position of the Artist in Estonian Art in the 1970s

Summary/Abstract: This article observes how the new understanding of art which was introduced at the end of the 1960s by pop art influenced groups was pursued and perhaps even radicalised in the second half of the 1970s, in a period generally referred to as the weakening of the avant-garde. The starting point for the analysis is the speech Leonhard Lapin gave at the last unofficial art exhibition, Event Harku ’75. Objects, Concepts, which promoted art as a means of creating a new living environment. Taking Lapin’s text as a framework, the author analyses the intervention in the official exhibition of monumental art in the following year. The pronounced interdisciplinarity is seen not as a compromise, but as a critical experiment to transform official art and its hierarchy, which leads to the suggestion of postponing the ‘death of the avant-garde’.

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