Parallel Public: Experimental Art in Late East Germany

Parallel Public is an important and truly thought-provoking contribution to the study of the art and life of the avant-garde in a non-Western and noncapitalist country, the former German Democratic Republic. The book should be read in tandem with Sarah E. James’s Paper Revolutions: An Invisible Avant-Garde (reviewed here in June 2022), even if this new publication has a totally different take on the GDR avant-garde. It foregrounds indeed another generation, that of the young artists coming to the fore in the 1980s, the first ones to be born “into” the communist system and aggressively opposed to it, which was not the case of the first GDA avant-gardists, while also living in a decade in which this system had started to dissolve and would eventually collapse. It also foregrounds forms of art that avoid the traditional genre and medium boundaries, namely performance and intermedia art. Finally, it looks very carefully...