Anti-kitsch, or how to make a socialist doily: DIY, folk art, and “open” materialities in late-socialist Slovakia

This article explores the promotion of amateur “folk art” production in the Slovak Normalization-era, lifestyle magazines Dorka and Linia. Scholarship on socialist-era DIY, consumption, and material culture shows that socialist modernity was characterized by a culture of making and repair which relied on the knowledge, skill, and labour of citizens. I argue that the amateur production of “folk art” was an integral part of this culture in late-socialist Slovakia, forming a specific type of material practice which deserves to be studied in its own right. Focusing on projects of vernacular embroidery in Dorka and Linia, I show how the Normalization-era authorities promoted the physical recreation of vernacular culture as an ideologically correct way of incorporating pre-socialist rural traditions into modern socialist interiors and lifestyles. Such projects constituted a type of socialist “aesthetic education,” teaching women how to distinguish “good taste” from kitsch. This official valorization of amateur “folk art” production was accompanied by a particular idea of gendered citizenship, and broader ideological lessons in materialist thinking which encourage socialist citizens to engage in the self-conscious creation of their material environment.