Breaking the Rules

In 1983, performance and textile artist Heike Stephan staged impressive sculptures of light and air on a hill near Erfurt, a city in central Germany.

A strong wind sent 120 square yards of silk flying over a hillside. This may not seem like a risky undertaking, but for an artist living and working in the authoritarian regime of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), it was.

A Getty Research Institute project, On the Eve of Revolution: The East German Artist in the 1980s, is uncovering the history behind pieces like this one. Through interviews and research, the stories of artists like Stephan are being preserved to provide information about artistic practices and networks in the last years of the East German regime.

Art Making under an Oppressive Regime

Following the end of World War II, Germany and its capital were divided into American, British, French, and Soviet occupation zones. The GDR was established in 1949 in East Germany as part of the Soviet sphere and governed by one ruling party, the Socialist Unity Party of Germany until the dissolution of the state in 1990.

Citizens were not allowed to leave the country except for visits to other socialist nations. The Berlin Wall, constructed in 1961, blocked people from crossing over to free West Germany, the Federal Republic of Germany. Functioning as a socialist “workers’ and peasants’ state,” the GDR used art as a political tool to propagate the Marxist-Leninist understanding of history and fundamental Communist values. The government, through the Ministry for State Security (“Stasi”), controlled (and censored) artistic production and kept a close watch on cultural activities.

For artists, crossing political boundaries could have dramatic consequences, such as being censored, imprisoned, or even expelled from the country. For most of her career, Stephan performed behind closed doors in her studio.

But to capture the silk sculptures, Stephan had to go outside. She photographed and filmed a friend moving his body underneath the enormous fabric. Fixed on a wooden scaffold on one side and held by a single person on the other, the light silk banner rose into enormous shapes due to the strong wind on the hilltop, forming wings and evoking associations of levitation and flying. The police showed up, apparently under the impression that something illegal was happening and the performer was attempting to take off and fly away. Four years earlier, two families had managed to escape to West Germany in a homemade hot air balloon.

Stephan explored the boundaries between visibility and invisibility, appearance and disappearance in her performance. She also addressed thoughts of freedom and the difficulties artists like her were facing, with little freedom to show their work.

Creative Subversion

Stephan was part of the first generation of artists born during the regime, and she and her contemporaries questioned the terms and concepts of the official cultural landscape and started to take action. In the early 1980s, their search for loopholes in the rigid system led to a simple but innovative method of creating alternative spaces to show and communicate art outside of the controlled structures. They started producing independent, self-published magazines that subverted official censorship.

Interested writers, painters, printmakers, and photographers sent their work to a specific magazine editor, who collected and assembled the various pages and then returned the stapled magazine issues back to the authors. The collaboration between different artists was the driving force in creating those magazines.

Photocopiers were rare, and reproductions were subject to strict controls, so each magazine was made by hand. Combining text with different visual media was also a strategy for getting past various policing agencies and bypassing censorship.

Combining Different Media and Techniques

These magazines show how vibrant and experimental artmaking was in the 1980s GDR. They included poems, prints, drawings, photographs, and found material; there were no limits. Stephan submitted not only gelatin silver photographic prints of her silk performance but also various other works to the magazine Der Schaden, which was an essential communication and exhibition platform for artists working in East Berlin. Copies of Der Schaden—meaning “damage”—are housed in the GRI’s Special Collections.

Stephan’s works included in Der Schaden also provide insights into the artist’s evolution. As a young woman, she had worked as a seamstress on the assembly line in a state-owned clothing factory. There she learned to sew, but she also experienced the difficulties women faced in industrial textile production. In her art, she processed her very personal experiences as a working single mother and female artist and dealt with the perception and representation of the female body.

Later, her studio in Erfurt became a venue for collaborative nude drawing sessions. There she began to experiment using the sewing needle as a drawing tool, producing various sewn graphics of nude female bodies.