The Green Bloc

"At the end of the book, Fowkes writes that the attitudes and approaches to the environment of the young generation of Central European artists were on the one hand synchronous with other artistic impulses from around the globe which voiced unprecedented awareness of the looming ecological crisis, while on the other hand the specific circumstances in which the many filters of the Iron Curtain acutely influenced the flow of information and exchange resulted in exceptional contributions to the convergence of art and ecology. This book is a rare example of research on the history of environmental concerns at the cross-section of art and politics from the 'other side' of the Iron Curtain. It is a welcome addition to the growing body of Anthropocene studies, as well as the history of East and Central European art."—AM Journal of Art and Media Studies

"As Fowkes notes, the book is 'intended as a contribution to the environmental history of art' and it 'considers the intricate artistic practices formulated as responses to perceived transformations in the environment as a result of ecological crisis, which in the early 1970s was for the first time felt to exceed national borders and span the globe'. This book is a rare example of research on the history of environmental concerns at the cross-section of art and politics from the 'other side' of the Iron Curtain. It is a welcome addition to the growing body of Anthropocene studies, as well as the history of East and Central European art."—H-Net Reviews

Measuring progress in tons of wheat or coal, the communist authorities in Eastern Europe treated the natural environment as little more than a resource to be ruthlessly exploited. But, as Maja Fowkes shows in her pioneering book, environmentally minded artists in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia in the 1970s found highly creative ways of testing official indifference to the effects of industrial modernity. Most of their artworks and actions were ephemeral, leaving few traces either in the landscape or in art history. The Green Bloc is a deeply researched and vividly written act of rediscovery.—Professor David Crowley

The Green Bloc has it all: original research on an uncommon subject, a new approach uniting ecology with conceptual art analysis, as well as a language able to carry the reader all through the text while discovering the particular ways art and nature built up a new social landscape. Using as a ground the socialist environment of Central Europe, the book is concerned with ways of introducing new questions into the narrative of art history, furthering our understanding of how artists managed to expand state ideas of the social and performed the emergence of a discourse on co-evolution that is extremely important today.—Professor Chus Martinez