In Moscow, in 1974, diplomatic negotiations began between the USSR and the United States for the renewal of trade treaties. Discussions focused on large deliveries of American wheat due to poor harvests. America tries to obtain, in exchange for some favors on the sale of wheat, to grant the freedom to emigrate to a certain number of Jews.
All this is taking place against the backdrop of the Helsinki discussions initiated in 1973 to adopt a common charter on human rights between 35 states, including America and the USSR. The United States is in an advantageous position and negotiating hard... the failure of the USSR to comply with the Helsinki freedom of emigration is an important means of pressure. Do they not therefore deserve restrictions rather than benefits ?
The agreement is about to be concluded, the diplomatic negotiations have attracted many journalists to Moscow and it is in this context that a clandestine exhibition of painting is organized by dissidents, in a vague terrain of the suburbs. Reprisals are not long in coming, and the exhibition is crushed by bulldozers repressing the disorder on the public road. Western journalists, having been informed, are on the spot. The scene is filmed, photographed, communicated, and commented all over the world. "Bulldozer Exhibition" made headlines in the New York Times. The world press denounced the lack of creative freedom in Russia, another human right of the Helsinki Decalogue. Thanks to Western media, this exhibition became the most documented event in the history of Russian dissident art. The consequences for the negotiation of the treaties were immediate: in exchange for the most-favoured-nation clause the USSR agreed to let the Jewish artists who requested it go to America, as well as a large quota of other Jewish emigrants, as had been practised regularly for twenty years. The catastrophic image of artists fleeing the socialist paradise made the world tour in a short time.
The following year, in August 1975, the Helsinki Agreements were signed, the first treaty, after the Second World War, governing relations between the participating States, including the USSR, which agreed to join. It includes a clause on human rights and freedom of expression that will immediately be seized by artists from Eastern countries to demand more freedom. They organise "Helsinki groups," whose mission is to denounce breaches of these internationally recognised rights.
Left-wing intellectuals, European and French in particular, now find consolation in responding to the advances of the American left, which invites them through their foundations and universities. They will discover other forms of leftism, which they in turn will influence. Some will become campus stars. Thus Foucault, Derrida, and Deleuze were magnified for their innovative philosophies, deconstruction, in particular. The movement had already started discreetly in the 1960s, but left intellectuals returning to France did not boast about it. Often they could compare with the "trip to Moscow" and remained discreet. In the 1970s, the "journey to New York" became the obligatory part of any consecration.
1975 is a landmark year. The intellectual and artistic prestige of the communist left in the world belongs to the past. The USSR can no longer hide the lack of freedom behind its anti-fascist and pacifist discourse as an intellectual shield. It is also the year of Mao's death and the end of his bloody Cultural Revolution. Therefore, the expression "Contemporary Art," which the critics of this semantic hold-up will reduce to the acronym' AC, "replaces that of" avant-garde, "with a passeist and communist connotation. This is the year in which the United States believes it has won the cultural Cold War: Conceptual Contemporary Art is now the only international art, going "in the direction of History"! One international art has just replaced another.
Henceforth any art not labeled "contemporary" in New York instantly joins "the trash bins of history."
