Notes on the translation of the book Beyond Welfare, 1974–1984
by Nomeda and Gediminas Urbonas
My mother bought this book in the seventies after half a day of queuing. For the generations of the seventies and eighties this book was one of very few sources of information on styles, trends, art and discourse in Western culture, and this fact made the book a hit in the Soviet era. It was first of its kind; offering a vast overview of developments in capitalist culture from a critical perspective, introducing works, names and concepts of western artists, and revealing the schizophrenia and critical discourse within western society.
The official task was to smash the façade of bourgeois culture, unveil its inhuman perspectives, and the inevitable collapse of the value system of the West.
But it simultaneously presented names, contents and concepts otherwise impossible for ordinary people to gain access to.
The first Russian edition was published in 1974, printed in only 75000 copies, and therefore sold out at once. This first edition was inadequate for a large population curious about Western culture. Information had to be leaked in controlled doses, that’s how state control operated, therefore the small number of copies released each time. Within ten years it was translated into many of the languages of the colonized countries, foremost to educate the youth of the Soviet republics. The book was meticulous and rigid , dissecting the rotten body of capitalist culture with the critique that everyone buys. It was the most successful example of its kind.
The book scrutinizes bourgeois culture using quotes from debates at the time in the West. Information was selected from various media sources; affected by the researcher’s strict approach and journalistic style.
A.V.Kukarkin must have had exceptional access to sources for collecting information. I always thought the book was written by some spy, or group of spies who traveled the West, visiting various exhibitions like Documenta, the Venice biennale, MOMA, The Whitney Museum or even the World Expos’. She or he must at least have been a KGB colonel, as only the KGB could have the capacity to produce such analytic work of the scale required to convincingly beat the West at the time. It was impossible for anyone else not only to travel to the West, but also to get access to most of the titles in the bibliography. We had no idea magazines like Amerika and Anglia (both published in Russian), quoted in the book, existed. Besides a great number of references, the book has numerous illustrations, some even in color. Later editions of the book (1977 and 1981) lost that appealing list of illustrations, and at the end the Lithuanian edition (1984), our major source for education, had only poor, bleached, and heavily retouched, small images printed on what is seen today as trendy recycled paper.
Today this book is discarded, disregarded and banned from the public libraries. Politics have changed. It is a Russian book, conceived within the ideological demands of those times. Lithuanian national politics probably considers that this book questions the basic foundation of the culture the country has reconnected to after the years of communism.
The most amusing thing about the book today may be that this heavy, hard-covered book was supposed to provocatively inform Soviet citizens about the repulsive West, and it’s decaying society.
But the book had a totally different effect on the reader. Besides the clichés similar to the Pravda newspaper, one could recognize the heartfelt emotions Mr.Kukarkin deployed in his descriptions of meticulously selected cult images, quotes and discussions from Western sources. It showed you what to desire. It had a stunning effect. Instead of being swayed by critique, you would disregard any social or political context in which the work was conceived, and indulge in the culture so well scrutinized in the book.
Most of the arguments in the original book turned on a critique of art’s autonomy, attempting to reveal the lack of values in the consumer society of the West, obsessed with the accumulation of things and objects. It was therefore also a harsh critique of the “anti humanistic” abstract art famously branded by the US. The culture of the accumulation of things was criticized as lacking any social conscience. It was presented as alienating, as disengaged from any social or political conscience. The Lithuanian translation of the book is almost impossible to understand. For instance; all the names of the bourgeois cultural figures were literally translated from Russian, so one could not relate them to the names we later encountered in life. For example: Brousas Noumenas (Bruce Nauman), Viljamas Berouz (William S.Burroughs) and Sjuzena Zontak (Susan Sontag). Endis Vorolas (Andy Warhol), Teit galerija (The Tate Gallery), Vitnio muziejus (The Whitney Museum). Minimalism translated into miniart, whereas Arte Povera translated into poor art. It created a parallel, a lateral world where names and concepts circulated apart and not in synch with the other reality. It was simply hidden from our eyes, only discovered after the fall of the Berlin wall.
“Campbell’s Soup Cans” was for us only known as an artwork, and what a great surprise to discover the canned food years later! The local censorship in the Soviet republics was so paranoid, people were so afraid of the regime, that translation of the book did not try to clarify facts, on the contrary, similar to the exhaustively retouched images, names and concepts were so filtered that the original meaning or connection was lost forever. The two worlds were split, and the translation brought this reality to the forefront.
To open this book today might evoke some fun, but it is still a complicated process. Much of the critique, neglected at the time for idealizing the Soviet system and perceived as being ideologically commissioned by the Communist party, today reveals a unique debate; questioning hegemony and showing the history of attempts to deconstruct power structures. Now, in the process of translating this book into English, it is not enough to match the Lithuanian with the Russian original (which in it’s turn translated quotes from English), but necessary to test the efficacy of critique in its temporal dimension, suspended between the Soviet times and today.
