Introduction: Exhibiting Eastern Europe

Introduction: Exhibiting Eastern EuropeAuthor(s): Mary NeuburgerSource: Slavic Review, Vol. 69, No. 3 (FALL 2010), pp. 539-546Published by:Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25746271 .

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NATIONS ON DISPLAY: WORLD'S FAIRS AND INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITIONS

IN EASTERN EUROPE AND BEYOND

Introduction: Exhibiting Eastern Europe

Mary Neuburger

There is something fantastically seductive about world's fairs. Not today's fairs, mind you, which pass without a whisper in the news. I have in mind the fairs of the past, the fin-de-si?cle phantasmagorical spectacles that drew crowds of eager pilgrims, voyeurs from around the globe. Displays of

grandiose artifacts of "progress" or exotic and "savage" tableaus of "back wardness" shocked and awed the world, which was both present and rep resented at the annual events. And to be sure, the lure of fairs, and indeed their significance, was hardly fleeting. Events such as the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 have virtual cult followings to this day, from amateur collec tors of souvenirs and relics, to pop-historians, whose obsession only grew

with the closing of the fair gates. A range of scholars have also been drawn to the fair phenomenon, largely because their core features?commerce,

display, and participatory entertainment?became the hallmarks of the next century. In a certain sense many of these features were also harbin

gers if not catalysts of modernity, in all of its complicated incarnations.

Moreover, the fair experience inevitably spread beyond the fair gates,

transforming host cities, as well as the broad array of visitors, domestic and international, who witnessed the events. Many features of the fair were echoed in smaller, more intimate, but also historically significant phenomena, like international exhibitions of various stripes, in which

display was also central and transnational exchange essential. From the

fairgrounds, to the transformed fair city, to the art exhibition, this cluster of articles endeavors to begin to unpack the eastern European place in

what has come to be known as the "exhibitionary complex," which was

arguably as critical to the making of modernity in the region as it was in

the "West."1

This cluster was the product of a symposium entitled, "Exhibiting the Nation: World's Fairs, International Exhibitions, and the Place of Southeastern and East Central Europe" held at the University of Texas, Austin, in October 2007. Thanks go to the University of Texas for funding the event and to the fourteen participants for sharing their new and

intellectually exciting work. I extend particular gratitude to Christopher Long, my co

organizer, for facilitating the event. Finally, I would like to recognize the special efforts of Cathleen Giustino, one of the symposium participants, in helping to coordinate the

publication of this cluster.

1. Fairs were one of the institutions that, according to Tony Bennett's influential for

mulation, best exemplified the "exhibitionary complex" that included the nineteenth

century phenomena of the museum and the department store. See Tony Bennett, "The

Exhibitionary Complex," New Formations 4 (Spring 1988): 73-102. This "complex" has attracted increased attention in the east European field. For example, this fall (2010) the

Slavic Review 69, no. 3 (Fall 2010)



540 Slavic Review

Perhaps not surprisingly, the west hosted most of the better-known and most-studied fairs and exhibitions of the period.2 These events, in

Chicago, Paris, London, and other cities, were above all imposing show cases for carefully appointed displays of European and American techno

logical progress, cultural achievement, as well as imperial dominance. As a

wealth of scholarship has shown, fairs and other exhibitions of the period were key contexts in which east and west, north and south, colonizer and

colonized, core and periphery, and other oppositional categories were

constructed and encoded.3 At the same time such events provided sites where such categories and power structures were complicated and actively contested.4 Looking at fairs and international exhibitions from outside the western core opens up a new range of possibilities for reimaging the

complexity of east-west engagements?as well as the range of domestic encounters with modernity?that defined this period.

More pointedly, the insertion of the decidedly liminal "eastern Eu

ropeans," into the story of international encounter and display is par

ticularly illuminating.5 Since they were perennially left out of the western fair story, their inclusion obscures and decenters the binary categories of east and west, requiring a reconsideration of the imaginary global map of

modernity. But perhaps more important for scholars of the region, the rich cultural layers of the exhibition experience also help deepen our

understanding of the core issues of east European history, in this period as in others.6 Indeed, fairs and exhibitions offer a conceptual opportu nity for unearthing the region's past through a wide range of phenomena

University of Western Ontario will host the conference "Museums and the Exhibitionary

Complex in Central Europe, 1850-1939." In using the terms east and west here, I acknowl

edge the very constructed and problematic nature of these designations. On the question of the east, see Edward Said, Orientalism (New York, 1978), and on the west, see James Carrier, ed., Occidentalism: Images of the West (Oxford, 1995).

2. See, for example, Robert Rydell, John Findling, and Kimberly Pelle, eds., Fair Amer

ica: World s Fairs in the United States (Washington, D.C., 2000); Robert Rydell and Nancy Gwinn, eds., Fair Representations: World s Fairs and the Modern World (Amsterdam, 1994); and

Paul Greenhalgh, Ephemeral Vistas: The Expositions Universelles, Great Exhibitions and Worlds

Fairs, 1851-1939 (Manchester, Eng., 1988). 3. See Robert Rydell, All the Worlds a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International

Expositions, 1876-1916 (Chicago, 1987); Peter Hoffenberg, An Empire on Display: English, Indian and Australian Exhibitions from the Crystal Palace to the Great War (Berkeley, 2001).

4. For a few "eastern" reactions to western displays, see Carter Vaughn Findley, "An

Ottoman Occidentalist in Europe: Ahmed Midhat Meets Madame Gui?ar, 1889," Ameri can Historical Review 103, no. 1 (February 1998): 15-49; and Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 2d ed. (Berkeley, 1991), 1-134.

5. Although the term eastern Europe has fallen out of favor, especially with scholars

working on regions and peoples north of the Danube, I have consciously used it here, to suggest that there was a shared eastern European experience?even before the Cold

War?namely, declining and reforming multinational empires, fluid and "hermaphro dite" identities, "small nation" complexes and dynamics, and ambiguous entanglements with "west" and "east." For the purposes of this introduction and the cluster, Russia is

largely left out of the discussion.

6. Work on Cold War fairs in eastern Europe is also a relatively new and productive area of study, one recently given an intellectual boost by a symposium organized by Gy?rgy P?teri in Budapest in May 2009.



Introduction 541

that are still relatively undertheorized in the region, such as the intercon nected fields and concepts and of visual culture, representation, display, reception, participation, and subjectivity. At the same time, exploration of these events also offers insight into the better-traversed themes of east

European history, specifically nation building and the tensions between

empire and nation, between east and west, between tradition and moder

nity, between authenticity and foreignness, and between popular (or folk) culture and high culture.

In this cluster of articles, fairs and exhibitions offer a window onto the panorama of aspirations, collective efforts, and cultural dilemmas of a swath of fin-de-si?cle eastern Europe, namely, Bulgaria, Hungary, and the Czech Lands. By analyzing exhibitions in the region, and (at least for

Bulgaria) pavilions in the west, the authors explore how national imagin ings were constructed and contested through carefully rendered pavil ions, visual displays, and staged spectacles on and off the fairgrounds.

The articles all reveal the extent to which "display" was never neutral but

always mediated by a number of vested interests; that is, meanings were

imposed and negotiated within a matrix of competing interests. In addi

tion, the various artifacts on display, from buildings to art, machines, and

goods, were fetishized?imbued with new meanings that reflected the

changing cultural and political priorities of local elites. As local "cultures of display" were created in this period, so too were experienced audi ences who developed new "modes of looking" in a period when tableaus of progress, plenty, and high art were carefully assembled for observa tion.7 Yet the readings of such objects was as dynamic and problematic as their well-appointed arrangements. Messages of "power" were broad cast to ever more discerning audiences, whose own identities and acumen were very much in flux.

Indeed, the ambitiously engineered exhibitions in Plovdiv (1892),

Budapest (1896), and Prague (1902) were deeply implicated in the local transformations wrought by visitors and participants, as well as organizers.

As the authors explore, these events were enacted in the shadow of west ern fairs that had drawn east European elites as pilgrims in the course of the nineteenth century. For many such elites, their desire to carve a place among "civilized" nations of the west drove them to stage their own gran diose events and to send ever more elaborate displays abroad. In a sense, the fair experience hastened and sharpened east European nations' tan

gible engagement with the west, driving both "modern" innovation and defensive quests for authenticity. The tensions between these competing objectives were, in fact, defining features of the broader fair and exhibi tion experience in the region. Though progress was a key theme at the Plovdiv International Agricultural and Trade Exhibition of 1892, orga nizers were also deeply ambivalent about becoming "slaves" to the west.

7. For an insightful theoretical discussion of the concept of "display," see Emma

Barker, Contemporary Cultures of Display (New Haven, 1999), 8-17. See also David Carrier, Museum Skepticism: A History of the Display of Art in Public Galleries (Durham, 2006) ; and Deborah Cherry and Fin tan Cullen, eds., Spectacle and Display (New York, 2008).



542 Slavic Review

Indeed, they consciously also sought ways of displaying authenticity (and rendering profit) through tableaus and sales of folk culture and even

"oriental" exoticism. East central Europeans shared a measure of ambiva lence toward the west, but they were also more directly involved in what Cathleen Giustino has called the "transnational synergies" of the period. Fairs and exhibitions were prime locales for the diffusion of advances in

technology and design, and the major Habsburg cities of the period were centers of vital innovation.8 Dorothy Barenscott explores the significance of Hungarian city planners building the first underground subway on the

European continent just in time for the Budapest Millennial Exhibition in 1896. In a related vein, Giustino looks at the cultural implications of the Czech-staged exhibition of Auguste Rodin's work in 1902, which se

cured a Czech place in the international spread of high modernism. At the same time, these events?or their ancillary sites or activities?were not without carefully integrated "native" Hungarian and Czech elements.

While Czechs lured Rodin to Bohemia, the "threshold of the Slavic Ori

ent," Hungarians embraced their nomadic past and their city as a stop on the Orient Express. And in a certain sense, this native flavor was exactly

what western audiences wanted to see, but not just for a taste of the ex otic. Western onlookers were also impressed by the native handicrafts on

display, which from a quality and a design perspective contained elements of tradition and authenticity seemingly long lost in the flood of western industrialization.9

In all of these cases, exhibition organizers were simultaneously attune to the gaze of the west and their imperial cores, which to varying degrees

were challenged as political (or economic) overlords and universal mod els of modernity. Among other things these exhibitions became critical

grounds for east European nations to assert independence, cultural and

political parity, or even superiority?through visual or material means? vis-?-vis ruling empires. Bulgarians displayed their cultural and economic

"progress" in Plovdiv in 1892 and St. Louis in 1904 as a purported result of

autonomy from the Ottomans in 1878, implying that they were deserving of full political independence and even expansion into Ottoman territories.

Similarly, as Barenscott argues, the spectacular reconfigurations of Buda

pest in 1896 were meant to show how Hungarians could rival if not displace Vienna as a center of imperial power and modern achievement. Finally, in the Czech case, Giustino uncovers how cultural prowess was expressed

8. In many cases, east (or central) European design innovations?such as the mod

ernist Austrian pavilion in St. Louis in 1904?drew the attention of and had an impact on American designers such as Frank Lloyd Wright. See, for example, Christopher Long, "Modernism and National Identity: The Austrian Pavilion at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase International Exposition in St. Louis" (paper presented at the conference "Exhibiting the Nation," University of Texas, Austin, October 2007). See also Christopher Long, "The

Viennese Secession's Stil and Modern American Design," Studies in the Decorative Arts 14, no. 2 (Spring-Summer 2007): 6-44.

9. In fact, "folk," like "oriental," themes, as well as the materials and form of east Eu

ropean handicrafts, became important inspirations for turn of the century "arts and crafts"

design sensibilities. Eric Anderson, "Transylvanian Villages to Viennese Salons: Culture on Display at the 1873 World's Fair" (paper presented at the conference "Exhibiting the Nation," University of Texas, Austin, October 2007).



Introduction 543

through Czech connections in the world of high art, as well as finesse in advertising and display. In all three cases, expressions of modernity? and hence foundations for sovereignty?were literally on display for do mestic and international audiences to read and interpret.

But foreigners were by no means the primary spectators at fairs and exhibitions that were, above all, visual experiences. Indeed, visual ar

rangements of artifacts?and to be sure grandiose building projects? most likely had a far greater impact on local populations than nation alist texts in this period. This would have been especially true for the still largely illiterate rural populations that were encouraged to attend

many such events in large numbers.10 But fair spectacles, and what Baren scott calls the "visual vocabulary" of urban transformation, would have also had a major impact on urban populations in the increasingly visual world of the late nineteenth century. The exhibition hall?and indeed the city itself?was a kind of panopticon that allowed observers to view collections of elaborately displayed articles (or buildings) from a range of

vantage points.11 Within the panopticon, organizers were able to inscribe and broadcast messages of power or cultural meaning. But the panopti con also, of course, allowed viewers to see themselves and others as well as be seen and "disciplined," transforming "the crowd into a constantly surveyed, self-watching, self-regulating, and . . .

consistently orderly pub lic?a society watching over itself."12 Fair visitors themselves were also on

collective, dynamic display, an integral part of the overall visual experi ence. This experience, at home and abroad, contributed to the making of nations (and more broadly modernity) in the region, as east Europeans became participatory subjects in their rapidly transforming societies.

But fairs and exhibitions not only transformed east Europeans in this

period, they also shaped cities. In virtually every instance, the organiza tion of such events meant an extensive face-lift if not a total overhaul of the host cities. Because fairs or exhibition halls offered a showcase for architectural innovation, many fair pavilions survived in situ or were

moved to other sites in perpetuity. But while separate and often tempo rary fair venues were generally constructed, fairs also wrought perma nent and in some cases architecturally pioneering changes in the urban

landscape. This is most evident in the Hungarian Millennial Exhibition of 1896 but was also the case in Plovdiv in 1892, and even in Prague in

1902. The expression of meanings in stone, glass, metal, and concrete was

undoubtedly one of the most significant legacies of such events. For this

reason, architectural historians are some of the scholars most engaged in

10. Alice Freifeld, Nationalism and the Crowd in Liberal Hungary, 1848-1914 (Balti more, 2000), 230-54; Patrice Dabrowski, Commemorations and the Shaping of Modern Poland

(Bloomington, 2004), 181-26. On the Vienna Universal Exhibition of 1873 and also the L'viv exhibition of 1894, see, for example, Daniel Unowsky, The Pomp and Politics of Patrio tism: Imperial Celebrations in Habsburg Austria, 1848-1916 (West Lafayette, 2005), 54, 72.

11. See Bennett, "The Exhibitionary Complex," 78.

12. Bennet also talks about the fair as a site for the development of academic "dis

ciplines" like anthropology; this theme has been developed elsewhere in the fair litera ture. Bennett, "The Exhibitionary Complex," 81. See, for example, Nancy Parezo and Don

Fowler, Anthropology at the Fair: The 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition (Lincoln, 2007).



544 Slavic Review

exploring fairs and exhibitions as engines of change in the built environ ment as well as landscape design.13 But fairs also provoked developments in transportation and urban tourism, including the expansions of leisure

venues?hotels, restaurants, theaters.14 Fairs and international exhibi tions were meant to draw domestic and foreign tourists to the metropolis to bear witness to national progress and to share in the newly minted (or traditional) delights of the city. For rural citizens, who were lured to fair cities through offers of subsidized housing and transportation, the city was meant to provide a prime context for "nation building."15 East Euro

pean peasants were not only exposed to the spectacle of the fairs, includ

ing careful juxtaposition of "native" products and high art, but also to the rapidly transforming east European city.16 At the same time, because the peasant, in the abstract, continued to play the role of the imagined repository of national culture, rural bodies also provided local color for the urban exhibitions or excursions beyond, and indeed constituted a

part of its offerings. As the peasant bore witness to the flags, monuments, and frantic labeling of the city as a national space, their presence spread a national patina on the city's palpable cosmopolitanism. Hence as the east

European city was marked and marketed as both modern and national, so too were east Europeans expected to become both; with the mix of urban

modernity and rural authenticity as guide. Undoubtedly, however, the inevitable variety of exhibition experiences

and readings at times foiled the organizers' grandiose expectations. For

many, urban or rural, domestic or foreign, the fair experience was more about enjoying a beer, a sausage, a ride on a motorized boat, or a bizarre

spectacle, such as the "white Albino" who sang in Czech at the Czecho Slavic Ethnographic Exposition of 1895.17 Indeed organizers and exhibi tors were aware of the major profit-producing potential of these events, and entertainment and refreshment had become increasingly central by the turn of the century. And in many cases, as in Plovdiv 1892 and the

"Bulgarian Curiosities" kiosk on the Midway in Chicago 1893, the drive for profits was in direct conflict with other imperatives or sensibilities of national display. But at the same time, participation in the more decadent

aspects of exhibitions, and subsidiary events, was part of the making of

13. See, for example, Zeynep Celik, Displaying the Orient: Architecture of Islam at

Nineteenth-Century World's Fairs (Berkeley, 1992). See also Long, "The Viennese Secession's

Stil."

14. On the Budapest fair and urban tourism, see Alexander Vari, "Commercialized

Modernities: A History of City Marketing and Urban Tourism Promotion in Paris and Budapest from the Nineteenth-Century to the Inter-War Period" (PhD diss., Brown Uni

versity, 2005). 15. See Freifeld, Nationalism and the Crowd in Liberal Hungary, 230-54; and Dabrowski,

Commemorations, 181-26. 16. Rachel Rossner, "The Culmination of a Dream: The Exhibition of Croatian Art

at the 1896 Exhibition in Budapest" (paper presented at the conference "Exhibiting the Nation," University of Texas, Austin, October 2007).

17. Michael W. Dean, "Dz?n Kudla at the Fair: The American Settlement at the

Czechoslav Ethnographic Exposition of 1895" (paper presented at the conference "Ex

hibiting the Nation," University of Texas, Austin, October 2007).



Introduction 545

a modern, consuming citizenry. Certainly, as numerous scholars of the west have shown, leisure and consumption played a central role in the transformations of the modern era.18 In eastern Europe, however, there are precious few windows into the history of consumption in the late nine teenth century.19

It perhaps goes without saying that the fair experience was profoundly transnational, in both the global and the regional sense. During every

world's fair or international exhibition large numbers of people, goods, and ideas were carried across borders, facilitating large-scale interac tions. East-west, empire-nation interactions have been touched upon, but the fair experience also highlights the deep connections between the

Habsburg lands and the (post-) Ottoman Balkans in the late nineteenth

century. Such connections are often downplayed in recent literature in the field that is keen upon distinguishing the "central European" experi ence from the Balkan one. But as the fair story shows, the separation of these worlds is profoundly artificial. Large numbers of Balkan peoples lived within the Habsburg empire, and these peoples, as participants or

"displays," formed a critical part of the various fairs that took place in the

imperial capitals, Vienna, Budapest, and Prague. In fact, the Viennese Exhibition of 1873 was perhaps the first world's fair to put the empire's "peoples" on display, something that became a prominent feature of the western fairs to follow.20 Notably, such displays were deeply embed ded in Habsburg imperial politics, and it is quite telling that Hungar ians displayed Romanian folk crafts from Transylvania as "Hungarian" in this period, part and parcel of their assimilationist policies toward non

Magyars.21 The Austrians, in contrast, in Paris in 1900 allowed separate pavilions for Hungarians (as co-imperials) and Bosnians (as conquered peoples) but not for Czechs?with whom they were engaged in power struggles at that time.22 Amid the complex cultural politics of the late

Habsburg empire, Balkan peoples and cultural products were alternately appropriated and displayed as "native" or imperial conquests. But Balkan -

Habsburg entanglements were also important outside Hapsburg bor

ders, as is quite clear in Plovdiv in 1892, where Austro-German as well as Hungarian and Czech architecture, design, and technology provided the inspiration and explicit model; indeed the Austro-Hungarian empire

18. See, for example, Woodruff D. Smith, Consumption and the Making of Respectability, 1600-1800 (New York, 2002); Daniel Roche, A History of Everyday Things: The Birth of Con

sumption inFrance, 1600-1800 (Cambridge, Eng., 2000) ; Martin Daunton and Mathew Hil ton, eds., The Politics of Consumption: Material Culture and Citizenship in Europe and America

(Oxford, 2001). 19. For one example, see Gyani Gabor, Parlour and Kitchen: Housing and Domestic Cul

ture in Budapest, 1870-1940 (Budapest, 2002). 20. Anderson, "Transylvanian Villages." 21. See Rebecca Houze, "Austrian, Hungarian or Romanian? Embroidery and Em

pire at the 1873 Wiener Weltausstellung" (paper presented at the conference "Exhibiting the Nation," University of Texas, Austin, October 2007).

22. On the Bosnian pavilion, see Emily Gunzburger Makas, "The Bosnian Pavilion at

the 1900 Paris Exposition Universelle" (paper presented at the conference "Exhibiting the Nation," University of Texas, Austin, October 2007).



546 Slavic Review

was the imagined west, a closer and more intimate model for emulation than the United Kingdom or the United States. The intimacy and deep connections (as well as similarities) between the Habsburg and (post-) Ottoman worlds?so often left out of studies of the period?were deeply manifested in the fair-exhibition experience.

Opening the gates to the world of exhibitions invites an intellectual

pilgrimage in which discoveries abound. First and foremost exhibitions transformed east Europeans, their cities, and their hinterlands. The fair's

provocation of contact and encounter, competition and innovation, in struction and participation wrought change in the region during an in

credibly formative period. But fairs and exhibitions were also part of a more generalized process of global change in which the east European part of the picture should no longer be ignored.



Documents

Introduction: Exhibiting Eastern Europe