art and politics

Art and politics in (post)communism. Special issue of Studia Politica

2011-12-11T09:51:00.001-08:00

I have edited a special issue of the journal Studia Politica. Romanian Journal of Political Science with the title Art and politics in (post)communism.

The selection of articles published in this special issue shows the plurality of foci and approaches the study of art and politics entails. The interrogations this special issue addresses situate communist art (visual arts, film) and culture in their connections to politics in the post-communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe. Several reviews of essential texts of art and politics accompany this special issue.

Propaganda zilnica invizibila. Sablonul gandirii unice

2011-11-28T03:21:00.001-08:00

Am scris un text cu acest titlu "Propaganda zilnica invizibila. Sablonul gandirii unice" pentru cel de-al doilea volum din Grafica fara computer editat de niste oameni entuziasti de la Atelierul de Grafica. Ideea acestui nou volum era documentarea tipurilor de scris prezente inca in spatiul nostru public, majoritatea fiind create in perioada regimului comunist. De la firmele pentru magazinele Nufarul, Paine, Alimentara, Cinematograf si asa mai departe, la tabilitele - facute de mana sau produse in serie - de protectia muncii. Se alatura colectiei afisele de propaganda si enunturile politice. Trecutul vinde inca si el este inca accesibil in spatiul nostru public, este inca frecventabil desi incet dispare. Undeva intre nostalgie si necesara colectionare a semnelor trecutului se afla si acest volum.

2nd CFP: Studia Politica, Special issue on “Art and politics” no 4/2011

2011-08-01T04:45:00.001-07:00

We invite contributions for a special issue of Studia Politica that explores the relationship between art and politics in postcommunist contexts. We welcome interdisciplinary approaches of these topics in English, French or Romanian.

We are especially interested in submissions that situate communist art and culture in their connections to politics in the post-communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe.

Questions contributors might address include, but are not limited to:

How were artistic institutions transformed by the changes of regime?

How did the double transition (political and economic) affect the artistic domain?

How are artistic discourses transformed in the aftermath of communism?

How is the communist past deconstructed by artists?

Which is, comparatively, the approach of the post-communist states towards the artistic world?

Approaches of the various artistic contexts during the communist period are also welcomed.

Submission Guidelines: the articles should have 40.000 characters (including spaces).

Please consult our Author Guidelines before submitting your article at:http://www.studiapolitica.eu/Author-guidelines.

The deadline to submit your articles is November 5, 2011.

The editor, Caterina Preda may be contacted at: caterina.preda@studiapolitica.eu

Minimal histories (Petite histoire)

2011-07-23T04:05:00.001-07:00

I stumbled upon a beautiful book that evokes what I like to call minimal histories, the lost details, the personal memories. Its name is Petite histoire and the project belongs to the Galeria Posibila in Bucharest. The volume reassembles amateur photos taken by anonymous authors but it evokes so many worlds in its pages and holds a distinct poetic feeling.

I love this kind of lost, not so important, even marginal topic. The images are all black and white and seem to be taken at the beginning of the 20th century in Romania.

Art of memorialization in Romania

2011-04-22T04:26:00.001-07:00

I wrote a chapter about this trend of contemporary art in Romania to memorialize communism through different means. You can check it out at this address:
http://unibuc.academia.edu/CaterinaPreda/Papers/538711/Looking_at_the_past_through_an_artistic_lens_art_of_memorialization

Ion Grigorescu, Posthumous dialogue with Ceausescu (2007)

"the romanian dream"= "a country as outside"

2010-12-02T11:03:00.000-08:00

Two very different types of artistic expressions that I have seen in Romania recently have provoked my reaction to write this post. The first one is part of a broader and very interesting artistic project "Project 1990" curated by the visual artist Ioana Ciocan. The project has started by imagining different types of artistic interventions which are presented on the now empty pedestal of the former Lenin statue in Bucharest as a signal of the communist heritage and/or postcommunist problems. The latest intervention is called "the Romanian dream" (by artists Matei Arnăutu, Andrei Ciubotaru, Florin Brătescu & Iosif Oprescu) and sought to materialize, by creating an object that represents the Romanian dream, the conclusions of a discussion launched on an open forum available at: www.visulromanesc.ro. The result was the creation of a suitcase with all sorts of objects emerging from it. The idea behind this being, as I read it, that Romanians all want to leave their country.
The second example comes from popular culture and it is the latest song released by a Romanian band, Vunk. The song is called "I want a country as outside (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqFHJAeyLv0). One must know that Romanians continue to refer to other countries as "outside" as a direct reminiscence of the communist period when this had a significance, as Romanians were not allowed to travel freely. The title of this song, as well as the conclusion of the artistic project quoted above are symptoms of what seems to have become a Romanian obsession at least as it translates in public discourse and mass-media discourse. There seems to be an omnipresent double question: when are you leaving the country? why aren't you? This seems to me to be an attitude that cannot produce any positive results on the needed reform, not only of the state and its institutions, but of the positioning of citizens in relation to the latter as well as to each other. Always looking to other spaces, political cultures and national experiences not as possible solutions providers but as escape-places is not a plausible solution.

Equipo Cronica - pop art against Franco

2010-10-26T07:59:00.000-07:00

Guernica (1971)

preparing my class about authoritarian art, I stumbled upon this pretty interesting artistic group from the Spain of the 1960s, Equipo Cronica (active between 1964-1981, including Juan Antonio Toledo, Manolo Valdés and Rafael Solbes) which used pop art to criticize the society. Inspired explicitly by Cezanne, Velasquez and Picasso (which they quote and reinterpret extensively) they alluded to the commercialism of the period in which they were creating. Namely, la "cultura de la evasion" as the mass culture phenomenon of the mid-60s in Franco's Spain came to be known; it encompassed everything from bull fights to football, bad literature and bad cinema. I chose to show their reinterpretation of Guernica by Picasso because it strikes me how pop-art inspired this piece is and how the symbolism of the first Guernica is even more striking.

Chto Delat

2010-10-25T12:41:00.000-07:00

Chto Delat or What is to be done is an artist group from Saint Petersburg explicitly demanding for a reevaluation of left values. An exhibition of their work is on display at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London. Here can be seen the video which was part of the exhibition: http://vimeo.com/12130035. The video stems from the documentation of the art collective of the social and political actors intervening in a controversial plan to build in the center of St Petersburg "the Okhta Center with a Gazprom skyscraper". But more than this the video shows Russian society divided by fractures ironically sung about.

the database of art plundered by the nazi

2010-10-18T06:46:00.000-07:00

Today was launched a database that collects information about works of art plundered by the Nazi from Jewish owners in France and Belgium . This project is interesting as it offers this search-able database and it continues the judicial fights already under way in Austria and Hungary (some of the most visible scandals/trials of last year). Hitler's project to create the art museum of his dreams also with the help of "loans" from other museums in the countries occupied is known but what seems still surprising to me is the way in which people like Goring would hold a discourse publicly and would thereafter try to do their best to collect some more "degenerate art" (!)
The database can be accessed at this address: http://www.errproject.org/jeudepaume/

Susane Meiselas

2010-08-31T13:26:00.000-07:00

A photographer and documentarist, Meiselas is most famous for her work on Central America both through the use of photographs and film. The most important body of work she did, from my point of view, concerns the portrait of a revolution (the Sandinist revolution in Nicaraguain the 1980s) by registering history in its making which she characterizes as follows: "what happened in Nicaragua, I wanted to register the voices of the subjects that are embedded, I hope, as objects in my photographs. By knowing and recognizing its limits, the voice of the protagonist within the picture, challenges the image as a fixed moment in time" (see more).

Alexander Kosolapov

2010-07-22T03:01:00.000-07:00

Kosolapov is a very interesting artist which mixes symbols or icons of both the West and the East in his work (a representative of Sots art, an ironic Soviet version of the Westerners Pop art). An exiled artist in New York during the Cold War he is most famous for his Lenin+ Coca Cola works; the mixing is the most interesting part of his work as it helps bring irony to the images created (see the Lenin series on the artist website at: www.sotsart.com).

in fact he never left*

2010-07-14T02:50:00.001-07:00

Dragos Burlacu, from the Understanding History series

This is one of the paintings by Dragos Burlacu who used the newly available photographic archive of communism to paint new, less familiar images of Ceausescu including stills of the dictator having fun, with his family, almost in intimacy. The laughing, clownish Ceausescu makes me think of the portrait of the ridicule that was transposed onto his image after 1990 when he became only the illiterate shoemaker (or alternatively the tyrant) that ruled us for so many years. The intention of the painter seems to me close to that of Ujica and Grigorescu which I was mentioning in my previous post: humanize the dictator or at least provide a more complete image of his persona. Ceausescu the clown in the gray on gray atmosphere alludes to his other history; not to be forgotten, still to be explored.

PS: the disinterment of the Ceausescu couple (July 21, 2010) has made them all so present again in the media, so I guess the title I chose was not so wrongly coined!

* allusion to the stencil showing Ceausescu and the tag: I'll be back (see below)

The new//artistic memory of Ceausescu

2010-05-19T12:36:00.001-07:00

A new docu-film was launched yesterday at the Cannes film festival by a Romanian director, Andrei Ujica, "The autobiography of Ceausescu". The film is made of various archive images of Ceausescu. What seemed very interesting to me in this piece of news is the way the movie is announced: it humanizes the dictator. This reminded me of another filmic "re-construction", that of Ioan Grigorescu who continued in 2007 a previous work (Dialogue with Ceausescu, made in 1978) by showing a new imagined dialogue with the now defunct dictator: "Post-mortem dialogue with Ceausescu". This piece of art had the same purpose as Ujica's: present Ceausescu in a realist light, showing all sides of the character and affirming that his demonization and caricaturization have provoked the loss of the true man.

I believe this is an interesting phenomenon, part of our artistic memorialization of Ceausescu. Perhaps we'll even have next the occasion to read a novel of the dictatorship!

Ion Grigorescu, Dialogue with Ceausescu, 1978

Art or the memory of it (1)

2010-04-25T05:47:00.000-07:00

Artistic memory represents one of my topics of interest of the moment. I am discovering several ways in which art is used to remember the dictatorial past as well as manners in which art memorizes the past (independently of a political order). Currently I am looking at the official memory of art through the establishment of museums in South America. Chilean president Michelle Bachelet ended her term by inaugurating (as Chirac did in 2006 with Musee du Quai Branly although with a higher symbolic weight in the Chilean case) the Museum of Memory and Human rights in Santiago de Chile. Such museums exist in several parts of Argentina (Museum of Rosario), including Buenos Aires where the infamous ESMA has been (partially) transformed in a museum. A museum of memory was opened in Uruguay and another one in Asuncion, Paraguay. A plan to open a museum has been also discussed in Peru in the aftermath of the regime of Fujimori and the repression launched against the Shining Path; there already is a small museum in Ayacucho as well as a permanent exhibition (Yuyanapaq) in Lima's museum of art.

The museum in Santiago

Dictators and Dictatorships: Artistic Expressions of the Political in Romania and Chile (1970s-1989)

2010-03-03T12:14:00.000-08:00

This is the title of my PhD thesis defended in December 2008. Before publishing it (I am working on the manuscript that needs certain modifications and updates) I decided to use the opportunity offered by dissertation.com and have it transformed in an E-book accessible to anyone (who pays a small price). Looking forward to any comments, remarks or critiques.
Dictators and Dictatorships: Artistic Expressions of the Political in Romania and Chile (1970s-1989)

(Yo soy autoritario he dicho by Carlos Apablaza)

the invisible artist (who is an artist, part deux)

2010-01-22T05:02:00.001-08:00

the anonymity of the character is part (if not the most important part) of the street artist (turned film maker with the screening of his first "pseudo-documentary" at the Sundance festival) Banksy. where does the anonymity end and the branding begin (from street, fugitive art he has been transformed in a gallery sold artist) is another question. Banksy makes art with no official approval, even despite it, and he is sold, and famous for it. I wonder where would Banksy find himself in the planned - by the Romanian Union of Visual Artists - law to create an "official statute" of the artist to be confirmed by a committee or something as such.

the Romanian state artist today as yesterday

2009-12-22T14:40:00.000-08:00

I listened tonight at a conference organized by the Romanian Cultural Institute to a Romanian artist, Alexandru Antik, famous especially for one action (performance) that was considered as one of the most important [artistic] acts against the communist regime (his 1986 performance in the underground space of the Pharmacy Museum of Sibiu) when members of the Securitate had intervene but not for the outrageousness of the work itself but for the effects it had had on the public, two had fainted. At no point, someone questioned the artistic state given space as the already marked context of all this art. Antik himself said tonight his work was done for the [defense of the] freedom of expression. They were all members of the UAP/the "younger branch" - Atelier 35 and had all finished the Artistic Universities' classes. Their fights were with the artistic system per se, and not with it as a representative of the totalitarian regime. The thorough analysis of what this system meant is still lacking as is a questioning of the state given system (art academies and artistic /state/ unions. To be further discussed: the state artist in the afterworld

American art and politics: 3 images and a feeling

2009-11-09T05:46:00.001-08:00

I recently saw two great exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The first one was the presentation of the work by American photographer, Robert Frank, The Americans, an album in fact dating of 1959. Frank shows America the way he saw it by traveling across the country in 1955-1956. So many opposite images: political men, the desertness of the paysage, the new Hollywood stars, the diners, the poor, the left behind, the blues and the open horizon.

The second exhibition, American Stories looked at American painting of the everyday in the period 1765-1915 and spoke of the American society. The political was present everywhere: be it race discrimination, be it women disenfranchisement etc. What struck me is the way the two exhibitions could have been thought of together. Maybe because it was my first encounter with America, I saw these paintings also as historic snapshots, just as Frank's photos. They spoke of the construction of a nation, of its different components, faces and perspectives. I particularly loved this one, by Winslow Homer (American, 1836–1910), Dressing for the Carnival (1877).

The third element to my American equation was the Kandinsky superb exhibition at the Guggenheim. I was not a particular fan of K (I loved the painting that opens the exhibition) but the expo greatly recaptures his evolution in parallel to politics. He is the artist that invokes the right to create "art for art", not tainted or influenced by the politics of the time. In his search for the spiritual in art he leaves aside the political.

Still at the Guggenheim I saw the work of an English artist, Anish Kapoor entitled Memory that seems so right these days when all is talked about is the memory of 1989. His work has to be seen on site to feel its weight, to be confronted to the feeling of asphyxiation. I of course took the literal translation of the work and saw it as the unbearable weight of the past... (a link to a recent show by Kapoor in England)

film \fiction\ and politics

2009-09-07T13:24:00.000-07:00

seeing Chavez walking proudly, smilingly on the tapis rouge in Venice cote a cote with Oliver Stone I got struck by the way fiction in a filmed form interferes with the 'real politics'. How much of the political imaginary is, nowadays at least, made of filmic images about our past, present and future? Oliver Stone with his JFK, W. and now South of the Border (which started as a bio of Chavez and was transformed in a look at the "new left in Latin America) or Michael Moore with his "documentaries" can attest to this fictionalization of our realities.

Ion Barladeanu or who is an artist [marginality]

2009-08-07T03:04:00.001-07:00

Ion Barladeanu is an artist discovered a few years ago by a Bucharest based gallery owner, Dan Popescu from H'Arta gallery. His story seems amazing and I found out about him reading the newspaper; I was fascinated by the images published by the H'Arta gallery website. He is not a professional artist in the consecrated sense, still he creates art. At a time when the Romanian state still dedicates important resources to the education, promotion and exhibition of state-sponsored artists, one can be but dazzled by the output of such a policy inherited from the communist regime and that was not really questioned after 1989. My opinion is that it does not belong to the state, to the political to decide who is an artist and must be encouraged to create. Private interests should articulate the arts.

missed exhibited art in/from Romanistan

2009-05-26T15:06:00.000-07:00

the first thing I would like to mention is the publication of a book - catalog for an exhibition I couldn't get to and regret it enormously. It is called "Cel ce se pedepseste singur" (the one that punishes himself) and accompanies the travelling exhibition with the same name that recollects the works of 3 Romanian artists of the 1980s/19990s: Ion Grigorescu, Florin Mitroi and Stefan Bertalan. The first one is in my opinion the most interesting case as he developed an aesthetic of marginality and criticized without saying so the communist power. But most importantly he also engaged in a relationship with the communist power. Analysing his or other important Romanian artist work of those decades (especially the 80s) without taking this into account seems to me a failed attempt at understanding. Placing this artist as well as others in a logic of for or against/ pro or resistance is a false dichotomy for the Romanian case. Comprising the way their relationship with power articulated together with or despite their "private art" is a must. At the launching of the album the terms lacked this coordinate...

the second thing I would like to signal is the exhibition I would love to see and hopefully will! It is held in Stuttgart at the Württembergischer Kunstverein and it is called "Subversive practices" . It encompasses besides works from Romania (including art by Grigorescu), works from other dictatorships: Chile, Argentina and Brazil but also Russia, Spain, Hungary and GDR. It poses the question of artistic subversion by an appeal to artistic means in the sense that "it is only aesthetically that art is political" that is oh so true under dictatorial regimes. Hopefully I shall be going there and will write more after seeing the works.

art and (its Bucharest) democratization

2009-05-24T10:57:00.000-07:00

for some years in Bucharest there has been a night of museums when every citizen can visit the museums of his town for free. I went again this year (after having missed one year) to 3 museums. At the first one, the museum of national art (MNAR) the exposition we wanted to see (photos done by Magritte) was not open for the nocturne public. The second museum, the Museum of Bucharest was impossible to see as a crowd (literally) had entered the premises and suffocated there. Summer has come to stay in our beautiful city and the air was missing in the Sutu Palace. The third and last attempt to see some "free art" was at the oh so controversy ridden Museum of contemporary art hosted by the House of the People. There we stood for almost 1h and a half in a line waiting to get in. Staying in line for an art exhibition beats any line. right? well not in practice. The question that came to my mind after this triple attempt to enjoy a night at the museums and saw so very different people entering these spaces as they enter stadiums with no reverence what so ever was: is democratization of art such a good thing? Knowing how museums were exactly imagined as places meant to open up a closed space to the grand public, to the people, posing this question might appear strange. I wonder if confronting art can have the effects one expects when opening the doors of art to the grand public. My conclusion that hot Saturday night was negative.

OBAMArt

2009-04-30T14:28:00.000-07:00

I already noticed and I was of course not the first or only how candidate Obama became so rapidly a passionate subject for all sorts of artists. Obama as president and as an art subject or pretext has come to the fore once again with the occasion of his 100 days in office. Michael D'Antuono's painting The Truth picturing Obama in a Christic position has risen discussions. The cult of the image of a democratic president, his transformation in a symbol or basically an image tout simplement is rare in democracies. This is an interesting future theme to discuss larger I think. I attach the image of D'Antuono's painting taken from here

"The Truth" by Michael D'Antuono

CEAUsescu

2009-02-13T03:32:00.000-08:00

I bought today an album which could have served me well while writing my Phd but I guess I will now be able to use it for the volume I will publish. The album entitled Ceau consists of the collection of images inherited from the ex Museum of the Romanian Communist Party that are deposited inside the Museum of Contemporary art (MNAC) of Bucharest. It was realized by the Swiss artist Cristoph Buchel and the Italian curator Giovanni Carmine. The album is printed in excellent conditions and is organized around several of the grand themes of the iconography of the Ceausescus (as the Romanian leader appears together with his family): Ceausescu in his youth, him and his wife receiving flowers from pioneers, the two of them hunting., etc The album is an excellent resource, as it shows - by the way the reproductions are displayed - not only the rudimentary visual rhetoric of these representations but also the inter-exchangeable figures and poses. The same contours of the Ceausescu couple are applied in two different contexts as some kind of passe-partout figures.

art and the street in art

2009-02-07T12:30:00.000-08:00

street art or art in the street can denominate quite different things. I thought to write a bit about this topic after reading that one of the creators of the "Obama visual myth" was arrested recently for tagging...and this is not surprising. A rather recent form of art, street art (including graffiti and the youngest, the stencil) has been recognized as such (as a form of art) by the consecration of its anonymous artists as mainstream artists. Shepard Fairey is one of these artists that gained world fame by making the red and blue Obama poster. He is also a street artist dedicated to the futile passing signs along with some of his most famous colleagues such as Banksy (frescoes and stencils) and the Poster Boy (rather close to French New Realism). Yet street art even though appreciated as a form of art remains in the same time assimilated to vandalism and thus, a nowadays artist who communicates through everyday signs which he intervenes is still considered a vandal and risks prison... Controversy, the indispensable artistic ingredient, passes no more through the exhibition and declamation of long hidden taboos but through colored or simple lines drawn i/on the street there where everyone can “participate”. As participation is a verb that characterizes this new form of art: it nurtures itself on the passersby. Street Art is of course at a certain level continuing the anti-institutional artistic discourse that most link back to Duchamp’s gesture. Democracy also punishes art in this way. If the Chilean Muralists of the 1970s were punished by the Pinochet regime for their colored drawings politically driven so is Fairey; in his case not by the implications of his artistic gesture but for the gesture itself: one does not draw on the walls.

For what happened to Shephard Fairey check this out

Terror and the Arts

2009-01-25T08:03:00.000-08:00

a very interesting book to which I also collaborated by writing a piece discussing the art of the regime of Ceausescu and of the Pinochet regime. You can find it presented on the Palgrave website

Art and politics

2008-09-17T11:13:00.000-07:00

This is my blog about art and politics. I mainly work with this topic in modern dictatorships. But I am interested in all topics related to this theme. I am trying it to shape it right now.