Raimund Minichbauer: You are about to finalize your research and publish a book on Valdis Āboliņš, who was born in Latvia and exiled to West Germany as a child with his family at the end of World War II, where he lived and became active in various ways: He was connected to the Fluxus movement, he was a mail artist and an arts organizer, who, among others, coordinated the work at the NGBK in Berlin for almost ten years. He was also a very political person and assumed to be a prominent critical position in the Latvian exile community in West Germany. What was his background?
Ieva Astahovska: Escaping from the Soviet occupation of Latvia during World War II, Valdis Āboliņš’ family left the country in 1944 and moved to West Germany, where after spending several years in DP (displaced persons) camps, they settled in Cologne. Cologne and the Nordrhein-Westfalen region were very vivid and experimental regarding contemporary culture and the avant-garde art scene in the 1950s and 1960s. Āboliņš was deeply curious and interested in avant garde art and music, so while studying architecture at the RWTH Aachen University, where cultural life was not so active, he tried to bring in the newest avant garde art to the cultural program at the Technical University when he became the head of cultural affairs of the General Students’ Commitee (AStA). The most scandalous event turned out to be the Fluxus Festival of New Art, which he organized along with artist Tomas Schmit, who was also the assistant of George Maciunas. In early 1960s, Fluxus was one of the most radical manifestations of new art, and a number of Fluxus festivals took place in Germany and Europe, including Eastern Europe. The Festival of New Art is one of the most political events in Fluxus history: it took place on 20 July 1964, the 20th anniversary of the assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler. Referring to this coincidence, the artists – then young and emerging, but later well-known figures like Joseph Beuys, Wolf Vostell, Tomas Schmit, Bazon Brock, Robert Filliou, Nam June Paik – interpreted political contexts and referred to the fascist past in their actions. The festival was also remarkable because of its unusually large audience of 800 people. Many perceived the artists’ provocative and politically critical actions with irritation. It caused chaos and aggressive confrontations, and the festival was interrupted. Later even criminal accusations were made against the organizers. However, after the festival, Valdis Āboliņš continued to organize Fluxus concerts by Nam June Paik and cellist Charlotte Moorman as well as experimental performances by other avant garde musicians, artists, actors and writers such as Cornelius Cardew and Michael von Biel, Living Theatre, Günter Brus and several others. These events radically confronted the common understanding of art and culture. In 1966, Āboliņš established Galerie Aachen with a few fellow students. It also had a very experimental, socially and politically-engaged program, and had the first solo shows by the currently well-known artists Franz Erhard Walther and Jörg Immendorff as well as happenings by Wolf Vostell, John Latham, Chris Reinecke, Dick Higgins, Alison Knowles, Hans-Peter Alvermann.
Towards the end of the 1960s, when the student movement and the anti-authoritarian movement reached their culmination, Valdis Āboliņš stepped away from organizing avant-garde events, partly because he had to return to his studies and partly – as he mentions in some letters – because he lost confidence that art could have a substantial impact on political and social life.
RM: Would you say that Valdis Āboliņš mainly had that political orientation in the 1960s and around 1968 or during his whole life?
IA: He was always politically engaged, but his attitude and positions changed. This shift is visible through his relations with the Latvian exile community. This community was right-wing and very nationalistic, as Latvia was occupied by the Soviet Union. That was also Valdis Āboliņš’ position until the early 1960s. For instance, in 1963, he organized the exile European Latvian Youth Association's (ELJA) 10th congress in Königstein, entitled "Communism Has No Future." The change in his political views to a leftist position grew with the rise of the anti-authoritarian and student movements, which criticized capitalism and supported the Third World liberation movements. However, in the early 1970s, he was more and more disillusioned with the student movement’s controversies and lack of strategy. He was interested in theory and read Marxist and neo-Marxist authors, starting with Wilhelm Reich and Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, etc. At the same time, he stressed that theory should interact with practice. His practice was confronting the Latvian exile community with his leftist approach. One of his main criticisms of the exile community regarded discussions on Latvia, in which people always ignored the real, the Soviet Latvia. This was a fundamental point, because there were no relations between the exile community and Soviet Latvia on an official level, and Valdis Āboliņš was one of those who sought to diminish this rigid wall. It was quite exceptional in East-West cultural relations during that time.
RM: How did he put this into practice?
IA: He wrote several polemicizing articles and had talks in exile community seminars and congresses, and already developed his arguments and his position in letters to other new leftists. Āboliņš of course was not alone. There were like-minded people from the young generation of exiles who criticized nationalist positions. Their position was that official relations should be established. That led to controversies which were perceived as an opportunity to weaken and split the exile community. The organization in Latvia called The Committee for Cultural Relations with Compatriots Abroad, which was closely affiliated to the KGB, gladly offered to cooperate with those exiled new leftists. The strategy of Valdis Āboliņš and his like-minded friends was to accept this cooperation – with that strategy they saw the possibility to organize seminars and meetings and to establish contacts with the people from the arts and cultural sector in Latvia. When researching this history now, not all of the former participants want to talk about this, as it refers to their involvement in accepting or collaborating with the totalitarian system. However, for Valdis Āboliņš, it was a very instrumental approach and strategy. Although he wrote that he had no illusions about the Soviet state, it seems to have also had to do with a somewhat idealized perception of the Soviet Union. In his writings, he declares that socialism a priori is better than capitalism, and that despite all the problems and tragedies such as deportations, the Soviet Union, and with it Soviet Latvia, is still an important step beyond capitalism.
RM: Did he travel to Latvia?
IA: He visited Latvia for the first time in 1973, and only went there three times. His travels to Latvia had a more comprehensive aim, e.g. the first visit was related to planning an exhibition of Latvian contemporary realist painting in Düsseldorf. He met a lot of people there and started to exchange letters with them. He was a "man of letters" so to speak since the early 1960s. Letters were the best way of keeping in contact with both very close as well as more distant friends with whom he wanted to share his impressions and thoughts. Now these letters are a valuable source of information.
RM: He was a mail artist, but not a member of the international mail art network?
IA: He created his letters as works of art. They were very experimental, involving lots of different materials written on different sorts of paper, even napkins from the airport bar or toilet paper. He frequently and ironically referred to his letters as examples of the mail art movement, which also was related to Fluxus, but he had a different approach than most mail artists – the letter was always a medium for correspondence and exchange, not a purpose.
RM: Was it exclusively one-to-one communication or did Āboliņš make any of this public?
IA: He did not publish any of the letters, but in some cases he reflected on the possibility. In one of his letters from the mid-1970s to exiled poet Velta Toma, he even mentions that he would like it if an archive would collect the letters he sent all over the world after his death, because they are a valuable source for understanding the development of the exile community’s relations with Latvia. It was touching to read that, because the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art has become such an archive.
RM: When we tried to describe his correspondences as a network, it appeared that Valdis Āboliņš would be very much at the center of it with a lot of one-to-one connections, but it would not be the type of network where the correspondents were also connected to each other, right?
IA: This is true (to be precise: we do not know exactly, because possible connections between the other correspondents was not part of this research). In his archive, there are mainly incoming letters, and some of them are also very experimental. It seems that Āboliņš’ letters inspired his correspondents. Also, those who were not part of the art and cultural scenes became sort of occasional mail artists in a way.
RM: Do you think that this was also a kind of postscript, of second thought in his letter writing, to spread this practice?
IA: Yes, I think so. People remember him as charismatic, but at the same time also as a person who initiated things and made things happen, while not always standing at the center of them. I think there is a correlation between his personality and his perception of how creativity can be brought in to real life.
RM: His relations to people in Latvia also remained mainly one-to-one connections?
IA: Yes, but his influence was much broader, for instance, the exhibition “20 Realist Painters from Soviet Latvia,” which was organized as part of the IKI (Internationale Kunst- und Informationsmesse) art fair in Düsseldorf in 1973 – it was seen by 45,000 German and international visitors, and I don’t think there were any other events where Latvian art was presented with such a scope. For Valdis Āboliņš, it was important to show that art was another, non-Western art paradigm, with realism as the art that correlates with life. Thanks to him, Latvian painter Maija Tabaka (at that time, she was not recognized by official structures and was closer to the semi-non-conformist art scene) applied and received the DAAD grant for a one-year stay in West Berlin in 1976. She became the first artist from the Soviet Union to receive such a residency and subsequently had a solo show there, etc. These events also show the complex relations between the contemporary art of the time and the official structures. For instance, Maija Tabaka became part of the art establishment through this "affair." After coming back from West Berlin, she received the position of secretary of the Latvian Artists Union, the most important art institution in Latvia, among other official jobs. These are just a few cases, but they are paradigmatic.
In the case of the exchanges with Latvia, it was important that the information that Āboliņš sent was widespread. In some of his letters, he ironically refers to himself as a "Kulturträger" to Soviet Latvia, which was very isolated, through his letters and his shipments. He sent catalogues, magazines and posters. He wrote many of his letters on the backs of posters or flyers, explaining and commenting on who the people mentioned in those materials were. He would send them to one person, who then shared the material with others.
RM: There seemed to be two parallel worlds: On the one hand, there was the focus on Latvia, and, on the other hand, the focus of being part of the avant garde art, student and anti-authoritarian movements that were internationalist and hardly interested in single nations, as opposed to patriotism, etc. How did he deal with those two worlds?
IA: Yes, he was in a very international context, and people could not understand why as a leftist he was simultaneously so deeply involved in the exile community that remained a closed society. However, he was of the opinion that the only possibility for influencing and changing something was through establishing relations with Soviet Latvia. Nevertheless, although he was only four years old when his family fled from Latvia and settled down in Germany, "being Latvian" was always a major part of his identity, which he also endlessly discussed in his letters.
After visiting Latvia, especially around the late 1970s, he became much more skeptical in his letters regarding the Soviet Union. For instance, he reflected how deeply upset he was by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. He moved to West Berlin in the mid-1970s, which was the political epicenter in terms of East-West relations. He could see the international, political and diplomatic games at play there.
RM: He received the opportunity to move to West Berlin with a new position at the NGBK (Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst).
IA: He moved to West Berlin at the end of 1974, when he got the position of executive secretary of the NGBK. The NGBK was a leftist organization with a very horizontal structure. The exhibition projects were developed in a de-centralized form by working groups. Therefore, his position was not like being an artistic director who can initiate or influence the projects and exhibitions content-wise, he was the person in charge of the institution who had culturally and politically relevant status in West Berlin. Also, when we take a look at the NGBK activities of that time now, a lot of the topics coincided with Āboliņš’ interests.
RM: What are your main sources of information?
IA: The most comprehensive sources have been his letters. My whole research on Āboliņš started with his letters to artist, designer and art historian Jānis Borgs, one of his friends here in Latvia. In 2013, together with Antra Priede-Krievkalne we made the exhibition Berlin-Riga. Scores for Indeterminate Places where Valdis Āboliņš was the central figure. After that, Valdis Āboliņš’ brother Kārlis Āboliņš brought the entire archive that their family had kept. It mostly consists of incoming letters. We identified with whom he had corresponded, and then we tried to find and contact those individuals. In some cases, we succeeded and correspondents agreed to share the letters they had. Another important source is Āboliņš’s friends, people who knew him – both from the exile community and from here in Latvia.
RM: The main source has been the letters, but what did he publish?
IA: He published a few articles in the exile press, but they only circulated in the exile community. There are also some reviews he wrote on avant garde music and theatre, and a retrospective essay on the 1960s – the decade that affected so much in the arts and in social life.
RM: What exactly will the content of the book be? You said you were not going to translate everything, right?
IA: Substantial parts of the book are Āboliņš’s letters, though they will only be published in Latvian. Another part consists of essays (both in Latvian and English), written by his contemporaries and by scholars today. Some of them are memories, some more distant views and interpretations – not just about Āboliņš, but the broader context – of avant garde and Fluxus art, the leftist discussions, the exchanges with Soviet Latvia, West Berlin, etc. I hope that the book will create interest in these subjects and also initiate further research.
Riga, September 2017