Abstract
In this chapter, I analyze subtle forms of artistic/everyday resistance during the late socialist period in Eastern Europe, focusing on the artistic practice of several artists who were considered "mad." I survey several individual forms of artistic self-estrangement, arguing that political resistance can take place in different force fields: not only in mainstream institutions and in the public sphere, but also in the remote zones of the "inner self" where one's inherent "reality" and its subversive performance become the expression of an existen-tial rebellion. In addition to explicit forms of artis-tic opposition like "defying authority" or "beating the system," which overtly and publicly questioned the legitimacy of the regime, there were also subtle forms of resistance such as feigning madness or obsessively documenting the "average everydayness" of socialist everyday life.
The association between critical art and madness is not accidental. Many artists throughout the Eastern bloc spent years in mental institutions (or were confined to their home and placed under a physician's supervision) although many of them did not actu-ally have a mental disorder.
In this case, psychiatry was used as a means of social and political control and sham psychiatric diagnoses were imposed on perfectly sane people. However, one could analyze the other side of the same coin, namely situations in which mental hospitals or/and the invocation of "madness" were used to protect people from worse fates at the hands of the regime.
