In Romania an abyss separates the pre-1990 communist era from the so-called transitional period from the 1989 Revolution to today. In the visual arts, for example, a break was established between conventional modernism controlled by the political power of the 1980s on the one hand, and the institutional and aesthetic upheaval of the 1990s due to the opening of the country to the capitalist, free world on the other. Caught in a political and economic chaos inevitable then, the Romanian artistic world saw the explosion of a new aesthetic era, radically modifying the previously accepted cultural paradigm. This break – the fruit of contact with the mass culture industry and the international artistic community – was then subjected to the pressure of neoliberal globalization and the ideology of multiculturalism.Two important moments came to light simultaneously in the context of Romania during this period, which lasted more than twenty years. In 1988 the Biennial of Young Artists of the city of Baia-Mare showed a new artistic generation referred to as “1980s” and “postmodern”, composed of painters, sculptors, graphic artists and people working in the decorative arts. In 2010 an imposing art book, 100 to Watch, featured the most recent generation – proclaimed cosmopolitan – of artists working in graphic design, advertising, film, television and comic strips. Starting from these two benchmarks, with their different taxonomy according to the area of activity, we note the magnitude of the change of visual paradigm and the road traveled between the two artistic eras. mentioned.
NEW URBAN CULTURE
The artistic evolution of these thirty-odd years highlights two important changes: that hinged on new visual technologies and that related to institutional reconversion. In the 1990s and especially in the early 2000s, new artistic techniques gradually developed – video art, computer art, multimedia art, online art – alongside photography, installation and performance, an artistic form that began in Romania in the 1980s. Thus, new forms of artistic intervention have appeared in unconventional spaces, radically modifying exhibition strategies and public recognition. Diverse, innovative, visual elements exploded in cities. New social and political attitudes
were emerging, unconventional and aggressive, as well as new, more direct relationships within public and private spaces. More attentive to the immediate context and more responsive to local civic and human issues, these aesthetic attitudes were gradually being imposed on the artistic scene as part of an increasingly exuberant urban culture. The most radical trend of this period is the rejection of the idea of the work of art as a self-sufficient entity, rooted in concepts of perfection and aesthetics considered elitist and outmoded. This new trend, radically different from previous production, was oriented towards an open and improvised practice, integrating the fragmentary, the provisional, happenstance, and preferring interaction with the public and the immediate environment. This new artistic orientation, sensitive to the social and political context, has a relational and sociologizing dimension, as well as a certain contingent quality, even relativistic, from the point of view of values, and sometimes a minimalist or miserabilist aspect from the point of view of the works.
RETURN FROM EXILE
The major exhibitions of the 1990s and 2010s, between prospecting and recovering, tackled themes such as the use of new technologies and the artist’s commitment to immediate socio-political current affairs; highlighting the feminist dimension of past and present artistic approaches; the appearance of a new perspective of museum curators on contemporary art; the reconstitution of a pole of national identity in the form of the neo-Byzantine/neo-Orthodox trend; the recovery of native modernism between the wars and the post-war period. Several retrospective exhibitions brought to light exiled visual artists who had returned to Romania. Thus the National Art Museum of Romania invited Horia Damian, Victor Roman, Ion Nicodim, George Apostu and Christian Paraschiv from France, Paul Neagu, Peter Jacobi, Diet Sayler, Roman Cotoşman and others exiled to England and Germany. Exhibitions devoted to sexual or aesthetic taboos, political bans or the demystification of national icons, subjects that were impossible to broach before, were the subject of scandals: Mozart’s Sex (1991),
F.A.Q. about King Steve the Great (2004), Daniel Knorr's empty pavilion entitled European Influenza at the Venice Biennale in 2005, The Last Temptation (2008, Bochum, where Alexandru Rădva presented Tribute to Judas XXXI, a canvas showing a hanged man with an erection), and Euromaniac (2008), an exhibition in which Benedek Levente represented the map of Romania in the form of female genitals. A rather bleak vision of the first post-communist decade was presented by the Transitionland exhibition in 1999, while a “normalized” vision was presented by the Romanian Cultural Reso
lution exhibition in 2010. The world of institutions dedicated to the visual arts has also experienced major changes and spectacular repositioning. The relationship between the public and the private sector has been profoundly changed and new collective actors have emerged.The role of the Ministry of Culture, like that of the Union of Plastic Artists (UAP), so important and centralizing before 1989, has greatly diminished in the local cultural economy, as in the whole of eastern Europe, while new institutions, mostly private, have taken over. After the 1990s, marked by the major influence of the Soros Center for Contemporary Art in Bucharest (1993-2001), in the introduction of new artistic technologies and underlying aesthetic thought, other private centers and foundations have emerged, offering an artistic alternative. In 2004 the National Museum of Contemporary Art (MNAC) opened in Bucharest. The aesthetic options of the first management team, directed almost exclusively towards the international vanguard, provoked virulent polemics between the different aesthetic tendencies and generations of artists, but this pole, important for local artistic activity, is currently offering, under the direction of Călin Dan, a much more balanced vision of recent and contem
porary local visual production, drawing on the research of younger artists. In the 1990s, art festivals were organized in several cities, exhibiting an effort at cultural decentralisation’ which had some success. From the 2000s to the present some international curatorial experiments have been organized, such as the Biennial of Young Artists, the Bucharest Biennial and the International Biennial of Experimental Engraving (IEEB) in Bucharest, the Peripheral Biennale in Iaşi and the International Cluj Ceramics Biennial. After a first timid appearance in the 1990s of private art galleries, supported by institutions and foundations, a second wave emerged in the second half of the 2000s and especially in the 2010s. These galleries, created by professionals and oriented towards avant-garde art, continue to work despite contingencies (Plan B and the Brush Factory in Cluj, Vector in Iaşi, Calina, Triade and Jecza in Timişoara , Konstant in Oradea, Anaid Art, AnnArt, Alert Studio, CIV (Center for Visual Introspection), H'Art, Ivan Gallery, Garaj Paradise, Galeria Posibilă, Anca Poteraşu, 418 Gallery, UNA Galeria, Victoria Art Center in Bucharest). Reassured by the recent phenomenon of artistrun galleries and by museum curators (Project Fair, ODD, Workshop 030202, Workshop 35) and encouraged by auction sales, a vision of up-to-date art and art open to the market is starting to gain ground.
THE WESTERN MODEL
Generalizing, it can be said that the unofficial and non-institutional art prior to 1989 – considered at that time as resistant or even dissenting – gained visibility during the 1990s, relegating to the second level the accepted, official artistic discourse from the previous period. Alternative or underground art, before and after 1989, has become, through media and institutional promotion, the dominant discourse – the official art, one might even say – of this last period, according to the Western model. Remember, for example, the renown of artists such as Ion Grigorescu, Geta Brătescu or Dan Perjovschi, or the fame of some groups such as subREAL, 2META, EuroArtist Bucureşti, Kinema Ikon from the years 1990-2000, invited to exhibit their works in exhibitions, galleries and prestigious museums of France, England and the United States. However, painting has not completely lost its position as a major traditional genre, thanks to the still classical education taught in art establishments. It is experiencing a new beginning, documented by Bucharest artists such as Roman Tolici, Francisc Chiuariu, Mircea Suciu, Petru Lucaci, Suzana Dan, Dumitru Gorzo and others, and Cluj artists such as Ioan Sbarcuru, Simon Cantemir Hauşi, Adriana Elian among others. Photography is also very present, with artists such as Nicu Ilfoveanu, Alexandra Croitoru, Michele Bressan, Alexandr Gâlmeanu, Daniel Djamo and Stefan Sava, to name just a few. A significant number of visual artists travel the world or live abroad – and some of them are internationally successful, such as Mircea Cantor, Adrian Ghenie, Victor Man, Irina Botea Bucan, Ciprian Mureşan, Serban Savu, Matei Beje-naru, Daniel Knorr (as well as more famous names, such as Wanda Mihulae, Serge Spitzer and Decebal Scriba in France).The new generation of Romanian artists is increasingly detached from the national past and more and more connected to the current transnational world – remember here names like Mircea Suciu, Mona Vatamanu & Florin Tudor, Olivia Mihălţianu, Nicu Ilfoveanu, Stefan Constantinescu, Andreea Faciu, Nita Mocanu, Marieta Chirulescu, Anetta Mona Chisa and Lea Ratsovsky. During the most recent period, through the use of digital technologies in a post-conceptual context in multiple forms, there is an expansion of multimedia art and a growing interest in choreographic and sound performances of young artists (Delia Popa, Stefan Sava, Anca Benera & Arnold Estefan, Raluca Popa, the groups Apparatus 22, Biroul de cercetari melodramatice/The Bureau of Melodramatic Research, Monotremu).
STILL FIGHTING
So an abyss therefore seems to separate art before and after 1989 in Romania. Nonetheless, we can ask ourselves if enough innovative elements have really succeeded in influencing and transforming local cultural mentalities: these seem to be still torn between two opposite poles, inherited from a century-old cultural tradition, between cosmopolitanism and tradition, between European integration and the conservation of an irreducible national specificity. Beyond the alternative artists mentioned, who are quite few in the end, the Romanian artistic community does not seem to have analyzed in depth the totalitarian inheritance. Before 1989 it was necessary to fight for the freedom to practice video art, installation and performance. Today, it is necessary to fight for a critical art to be maintained, in a context of brutal liberalization and an impoverishment of the socio-professional condition of the artist. If the socialist realism of the communist era has been replaced, during these decades, by a capitalist realism, or even by a “socialistcapitalist neo-realism”, as the Cluj school of the late 2000s has sometimes been called, it is not sure that the visual paradigm – marked by a tenacious figurative art, which recycles various forms of realism present throughout the 20th century – has really changed in depth. If the “academic modernism” before 1989 is replaced by neo-pop, life-style and consumerist art, it is not certain that the artists have integrated the playful, lucid, critical dimension involved in the reality of the artistic act, despite their former communist experience. Nevertheless, are Romanian visual artists very different from their Western counterparts? Or rather, do they share an increasingly homogenous, more levelled, space-time, in which historical and cultural differences will eventually disappear over time, be perceived as political repercussions on the way to extinction or as exoticism worthy of being developed and cultivated for the sake of difference.
Translation: Chloé Baker Magda Carneci is a writer and art critic, editor-in-chief of the magazine ARTA (Bucharest). Former director of the Romanian Cultural Institute of Paris.