SMOCK’N’ROLL
At the invitation of L’Officiel Art, artist Mircea Cantor (b. 1977 in Romania, lives and works in Paris and Cluj) talks to art historian and theoretician Philippe-Alain Michaud, head of the cinema department at the Musée national d’art moderne – Centre de Création Industrielle (Mnam-CCI). They discuss the origins of one of the artist’s most recent works, Anthroposynaptic, an installation that uses the motif of the Romanian peasant’s smock, interrogating its emotional charge in an invitation to unravel the thread of memory. PHILIPPE-ALAIN MICHAUD: The piece you presented at Art Basel in June 2015, in the Unlimited sector, is titled Anthroposynaptic, a word you invented. What can you tell us about its genesis? MIRCEA CANTOR: The title of a work is crucial to me. I only decide on a title after the piece is completed and I leave no creation without a title. This neologism combines two terms: anthropology, the study of humans, and synaptic, relating to the synapses. The point for me was to create a new world, in the manner of James Joyce, so I had to find a name for the concept.
In Anthroposynaptic, I also hear an echo of synoptic, as in "presenting an overview of humans." When you look at the piece, it is indeed an overview—of a collection of smocks. What is their story? I bought around fifty smocks from farmers in villages in northern Romania and I dreamed up the motif with the rope, which I then had embroidered by Romanian artisans. At first, I tried to follow a pattern, like a constellation, but I saw the difficulty of going down that path. It confused the issue. Picture instead a monster, a nerve cortex, or a texture enlarged in macro mode.
The rope binds all the smocks into a whole, yet the smocks are in all kinds of positions, flat or rumpled. It feels like seeing the body’s casing in all its facets. At the end of the embroidery process, I asked the women to hold the smocks out in front of them. The lines shooting off in all directions created tension with regard to the body. It immediately brought to mind a ballet.
The composition does indeed evoke the sets and costumes of a performance, but I also detect a pictorial allusion: Matisse’s The Romanian Blouse. Was that where this work originated? The patterns on Matisse’s blouse show that it comes from southern Romania, whereas I found mine in the north. In recent years, I have become close to artisan woodworkers, I have attended weddings and immersed myself in that context. The northern peasant smock has a different architecture. It is not so ornate. It has a style that appealed to me. Even so, it was thanks to Matisse that the Romanian smock had such an impact on creators, such as Yves Saint Laurent, who have revisited it. My aim is to transcend the object and restitute its heritage.
In your piece, the smocks are placed on a cardboard surface in the manner of a drawing. A drawing that might be ornamental, a nonfigurative way of occupying the surface, whereas the smock is a highly figurative article (shaped like the body it enwraps): it constitutes the sole and modular element of the installation, and you use multiple specimens to occupy the surface. I can see the drawing reference, in the sense that each smock would be a stroke of the pencil. Initially, I planned to cover the whole surface without the slightest gap between the smocks, in order to create symmetry, but it would have been too decorative, divested of spontaneity. As I worked, structures emerged naturally. For example, I tried to juxtapose pairs of smocks—man/woman, woman/woman, man/man—in a tangible but relatively random circuit. If you look at the righthand side of the piece, it’s more airy because I tried to space the smocks out as much as possible in order to generate tension, like a pencil pressed down firmly, then released so that the line fades out.
Where did you get the idea for the rope binding the smocks together? It comes from a very powerful childhood memory. Aged 7-10, in my village in Romania, I went to church every Sunday. It was a 17th century wooden church adorned with a sculpted rope that went around the whole building. After the service, we walked around the church touching the rope. It’s a motif to be found in all Romanian vernacular architecture.
The rope motif crops up in various forms in your work. In sculpted form, in Threshold Resign, or in your film Sic Transit Gloria Mundi in the form of a burning fuse. A rope is also a complex, enlarged version of a thread. Your piece Tasca che punge, Armani pants with nettlefilled pockets, which is in the Pompidou Center’s collection, is also a textile work, a work that is woven. DNA Kiss also comes to mind,
“I bought around fifty smocks from farmers in villages in northern Romania and I dreamed up the motif with the rope, which I then had embroidered by Romanian artisans.”
showing women drawing a DNA structure in lipstick on the wall of Ceausescu’s palace, creating ropelike motifs on the surface.
Yes, we are all made up of this ornamental DNA. It’s the way the surface develops and overlaps. We consist of these ornamental surfaces, of mathematical interconnections, of surfaces that touch and interweave, bringing to life other things on different planes.
In the Pompidou Center’s 2012 Marcel Duchamp Prize show, you presented DNA-type structures made of golden safety pins...
The aim was to reproduce that motif. I’ve always been fascinated by the origins of longlasting things and I wondered where the safety pin came from. Why is it called nappy pin in many languages? During my research, I found out it had been invented in the 19th century by an American whose inspiration was the fibula, which the ancient Greeks used to hold their tunics together. Few forms have gone through the ages retaining contemporaneous functionality.
That reminds me of a text written by Alois Riegl in 1901, The Industry of Late Roman Art, and specifically a chapter, devoted to Byzantine jewelry, in which he discusses the pins that make up the fibulae. Riegl posits a connection between the microstructure of the item of jewelry and the macrostructure of paleo-Christian basilicas, suggesting that, in cross-section lengthwise, the basilicas are identical to the jewelry’s frame and prong. That brings to mind your use of DNA to build structures on any scale. What’s fascinating about the ornamental art you mention is the knowledge it requires, which underpins what is shown. What we may see as no more than visually beautiful in fact conceals inconceivable depth, which is not gratuitous, just like DNA stocks all kinds of information that comes out in various contexts. A rope contains similar signification. In the Bible, Absalom invents the monument when he builds an edifice for future generations to remember him by. This notion of memory is also linked to the representation of the rope, which becomes a kind of thread of memory. This is very important in Anthroposynaptic—the idea of the thread bringing things together through memory. In the past in Romania, until thirty years ago, there was a whole tradition around hemp and linen. When I went to see these women to ask them to embroider the motifs on the shirts, they told me that they kept the smocks they wore at weddings and various celebrations, stowed away like a kind of family treasure. When I asked them why they didn’t hand them down to their daughters, they replied that they would just make new ones. That’s when they began to tell me how they made them.
In Anthroposynaptic, the absence of bodies inhabiting the smocks almost turns them into death shrouds, so that the rhythmical layout of clothes on the surface seems to depict a community that has vanished. The smock carries the heritage of the person who made it through their participation in the fabrication, as well as the heritage of the person who wore it and the person who took it a step further, in this case the artist. That thread is invisible but very present. The archaic form of community, as it existed in the villages, has disappeared. I’m trying to revisit it and discover the forms community is taking nowadays. To my mind, the notion of community is the crux of the piece, the synapses’ point of liaison, this utopian idea of networking between humans that takes shape with the Romanian smock. Today, I think we need more powerful forms than those offered by the present. Recourse to a Romanian smock symbolizes the idea of very direct contact with an object invested with memory. When you see that smock, it’s not as if you are looking at the latest trend in shirts. Behind it, you glimpse something of our human heritage. What is the visual impact of the piece when it is exhibited on a wall? What is the intensity of that impact? That’s the question the artist should be asking, while remaining sensitive to the power of the image and the material, and how it speaks to contemporaneity.