Catalog Supliment Venice - Performing History

PERFORMING HISTORY

warts + society #38, 2011, special issue

Romanian Pavilion at the 54th International Art Exhibition – la Biennale di Venezia 2011

PERFORMING HISTORY with Ion Grigorescu and the Artist Duo Anetta Mona Chiøa & Lucia Tkácˇová

Curators: Maria Rus Bojan and Ami Barak With the special collaboration of Bogdan Ghiu

Romanian Pavilion at the 54th International Art Exhibition – la Biennale di Venezia 2011

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Preface Hunor Kelemen, Minister of Culture and National Heritage of Romania

Speaking Thoughts: the History of Performing History 6 The Challenges of Life and History Alessandro Cassin in conversation with Maria Rus Bojan 14

The Permanent Avant-Garde Alessandro Cassin in Conversation with Ami Barak

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Ex-East As Art East: The Ethic Counter-Modernity and the New Battles Alessandro Cassin in Conversation with Bogdan Ghiu

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Ion Grigorescu

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Anetta Mona Chiøa & Lucia Tkácˇová

Performing History, an Open Project (Dialogues & Essays) 70 Critical Resistance from Within Irina Cios in Conversation with Ion Grigorescu 78

From Flirtation through Fatal Attraction to Fixation – Balancing out the Scales of Power Raluca Voinea in Conversation with Anetta Mona Chiøa and Lucia Tkácˇová

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Performing History in Suspended Space Chantal Pontbriand

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Performing History: Try Again. Fail Again. Fail Better Dessislava Dimova

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A General and Universal Concept of Resistance Piotr Piotrowski

The Next East for a New World: Re-thinking Peripheral European Modernities in Decolonial Perspective 94 East–South: The Beginning of a New Performing of History Bogdan Ghiu 95

Reinventing the East through Art and as Art Alessandro Cassin in Conversation with Vasile Dâncu

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Decoloniality As/In/At The Frontier Marina Grzˇinic´

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Decolonizing Eastern Europe: Beyond Internal Critique Ovidiu fiichindeleanu

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Authors’ Biographies

IDEA arts + society Cluj, Romania, #38, 2011, special issue

Edited by:

IDEA Design & Print Cluj and IDEA Foundation Str. Dorobanflilor, 12, 400117 Cluj Tel.: 0264–594634; 431661 Fax: 0264–431603 www.ideamagazine.ro e-mail: ideamagazine@gmail.com and The International Center for Contemporary Art Bucharest www.icca.ro e-mail: info@icca.ro

Editors:

BOGDAN GHIU – coordinating editor MARIA RUS BOJAN – co-editor

Graphic design:

TIMOTEI NÆDÆØAN Assistant designer:

LENKE JANITSEK Translations:

ALESSANDRO CASSIN IRINA CIOS ALEXANDRU DAMIAN DOUGLAS HEINGARTNER JUDITH MIZRAHI-BARAK ADRIANA NEAGU MARIA RUS BOJAN Proof reading:

DOUGLAS HEINGARTNER TÍMEA LELIK Web-site:

HANNA ALKEMA CARMEN GOCIU

ISBN 978–606–8265–03–2 Printing:

Idea Design & Print, Cluj

Performing History Exhibition’s Crew: Curators:

MARIA RUS BOJAN, AMI BARAK Asistant Curators:

TÍMEA LELIK, HANNA ALKEMA Publication Coordinator:

BOGDAN GHIU Commissioner:

MONICA MORARIU Vice-commissioner:

ALEXANDRU DAMIAN Project Manager:

IRINA CIOS Technical Production:

DIERCK ROOSEN, BOGDAN VASILESCU, ALIN POPESCU, DORIN PIfiIGOI Press:

TÍMEA LELIK, DANA DÆRÆBAN, HANNA ALKEMA Accountancy:

DONNA WOLF, DAN CÂRJAN

Cover I: Ion Grigorescu: Whitewash, 1976, digital print mounted on aluminium, 350 × 240 cm, courtesy the artist and JGM Galerie, Paris, Gregor Podnar Gallery, Berlin Cover II: Anetta Mona Chiøa & Lucia Tkácˇová: Try Again. Fail Again. Fail Better, 2011, photo: Nico Krebs, courtesy: Christine König Gallery, Vienna

Preface Hunor Kelemen Minister of Culture and National Heritage of Romania

I had the chance to become an adult at the moment when Romania was giving up many years of humiliation and cowardice, and rediscovering the taste of freedom. In one of the most Ubuesque1 and, at the same time, harshest dictatorships in Europe, the role of the jester was played, many times, by artists. They were permitted, sometimes, to tell the truth, only if it was camouflaged under the ambiguous status of artistic work. There were the years when I, myself, was attracted, like many other youngsters of my age, to poetry, so that I was attracted to this world too. I had to learn, some years later, in the cosmopolitan milieu of the Transylvanian “capital city” of Cluj, that many visual artists didn’t even want to play the role of the fool. They preferred not

1. Ubu Roi [Ubu King] is a play

by Alfred Jarry (premiered in 1896), one of the precursors to the Theatre of the Absurd, in which Jarry satirizes power, greed and their evil practices – in particular the propensity of the complacent bourgeois to abuse the authority engendered by success.

to make any compromise with the political power, and instead to work, to create in the solitude of their studios. Ion Grigorescu is one of these artists. His most preferred themes, which are linked to the political influence on human life, to sexuality and the human body, could not have been accepted during the communist period. His work remained unknown to many of us, until 1989, when he joined the Prolog [Prologue] group of artists (right now, the group includes prominent personalities in the Romanian visual arts, such as Paul Gherasim, Constantin Flondor, Horea Paøtina, Cristian Paraschiv and Mihai Sârbulescu). However, in the last two decades, Grigorescu has become one of the most appreciated Romanian artists, with highly praised exhibitions abroad and many acknowledgements, not only from the inner circle of art critics, but also in the larger space of those who are really art lovers.

The fact that Ion Grigorescu will be exhibiting this summer in Venice, together with the much younger artists Anetta Mona Chiøa & Lucia Tkácˇová, has a double significance. On one hand is the tribute the two artists are paying to a master in his art. On the other hand is a kind of challenge: the new generation of artists, in a country that is no longer limited in terms of its boundaries, but is instead integrated into a more and more united Europe, towards the generation that is right now at its zenith. We are all Europeans, with many similar problems and similar solutions. The three artists, carefully curated by Maria Rus Bojan and Ami Barak, are living proof of the fact that today’s Europe has profoundly changed, leaving behind prejudice and giving space to reflection and introspection. It is a Europe I was dreaming about more than twenty years ago, a Europe that opened to the eyes of the world watcher. It is your Europe, it is our Europe.

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Speaking Thoughts: the History of Performing History The Challenges of Life and History Alessandro Cassin in Conversation with Maria Rus Bojan

From East to West and Back Again Alessandro Cassin ¬ You have spent half of your life under Communism, eventually moving to Amsterdam.

Ironically, as you moved from Communism to capitalism, capitalism moved to Romania. Can we begin by tracing how your professional life has been shaped by the short circuits between these two realities?

Maria Rus Bojan √ Moving from one worldview to another has been the challenge of my generation, a rather schizophrenic one. Growing up under Communism, we had no clear sense of the existence of anything else. Out of necessity we tried to make the best of what was there.

Professionally, this oscillation between two realities has been translated in a positive way: I think I reached that critical distance which allowed me to assess my own life experience, and implicitly the different worlds I lived in.

But at the same time, it was a strange kind of experience as well. I soon discovered that I couldn’t be too detached from my own life context without the risk of losing my core. In this respect, the project I conceived for the Venice Biennale is a rather selfish attempt at re-self-centering, more than it is a merely curatorial project. By means of understanding the very nature of my East and my West. ¬ Was it difficult for you to transfer your professional activities to the West? √ A transfer of activities presupposes an equal status situation, which was not the case. In Romania I had a privileged professional situation as the director of a corporate foundation, with a substantial amount of visibility.

I was lucky that my professional experience in Romania was valued internationally; I had a certain reputation, so I was not exactly starting from scratch. But the most difficult thing for someone coming from Eastern Europe to the Netherlands – with the intention of setting up a professional career – is to demonstrate that one is good enough. Until they see you at work and gain confidence in your skills, you are a nobody. I soon realized that this would in fact mean reinventing myself, and this was both a challenge as well as a good experience.

Creating Opportunities for a New Cultural Community ¬ The interest from the West in contemporary Romanian art roughly overlapped with your career, placing you in the enviable position of helping young artists to go from obscurity to international recognition. Can you describe your role and the satisfaction you derived from it? √ I started my career in the 1990s, as a curator in charge of the temporary exhibitions at the Art Museum in Cluj. Later on I became the director of the Sindan Cultural Center, which at that time was the only corporate cultural foundation in Romania. This was happening during a time of great changes and unforeseen opportunities.

Looking back now, I found immense satisfaction in championing what I saw as promising young artists.

I introduced the new figurative paintings of Victor Man in 1999, for instance. Though he was received with some reservations then, now it has become obvious that this artist has generated an entire movement and influenced an entire generation. I also remember distinctly when Adrian Ghenie, another top Romanian artist, had his first show in our gallery: some critics went crazy, accusing me of having chosen a dilettante. Twelve years ago figurative painting was out, submerged in negative prejudice left over from the use of figuration by the communist propaganda. But these critics further ignored the fact that historically speaking, Romanian modern art was, with some exceptions, realistic well before Communism. These “critics” could not look at new art on its own terms and merits. ¬ It was the art of your generation... √ All the artists I have mentioned are younger. The artists of my own generation were not so lucky: they had to fight hard for everything; the cultural landscape was not what it is now.

I graduated from university in 1990. The revolution occurred in December 1989 in the very square where the university was. We were following every movement of the protest, we were part of it. Of course being part of that change entails a larger responsibility: we felt like we were there to create opportunities for a new cultural community. At times like these, some people stand up to the new challenges, while others just exploit the situation and follow along...

It took everyone, including ourselves, about ten or fifteen years to realize the magnitude of what we had done.

An Ethical Realism ¬ From your base in Amsterdam, you have been involved in curating many international art projects in both Eastern and Western Europe. As Romanian and Eastern European contemporary art is being discovered and appropriated by the West, what role do you feel curators that can play in minimizing the many misunderstandings and cultural gaps that inevitably occur?

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Speaking Thoughts: the History of Performing History √ Keep in mind that the success of Eastern European art is not as recent as one would believe; it is only the commercial success that is a rather new phenomenon. Whether we like it or not, art fairs are more visited than other exhibitions. If the art is good, Eastern or Western, then sooner or later it will be received as such.

My experience is that understanding “the other” takes more effort than simply learning from the pictures in an exhibition. We can create the best context for this “journey of knowledge”, but an effort from the part of the viewers is definitely needed for the right type of comprehension. Certain messages are more effective if they are transmitted via the media or communication technology, and in this respect the exhibition as such has become a rather obsolete medium. I do believe that a curatorial decision should be taken only after a certain audience predisposition has been identified, which justifies the curatorial position. Whether these positions will generate the expected effects, this is another issue to be discussed. ¬ Do you think that the recent commercial success and cultural acceptance of Romanian filmmakers and visual artists can change the perception of Romania as a country? √ I would say that for Romania, culture has often been its best ambassador. But again, whether this is enough to overcome prejudice is another question. The Romanian cinematic realism is best known for its honest frontal approach, not for promoting a glamorous image of our country. These are not propaganda or touristic films, but rather traumatic stories performed under a magnifying glass. Their commercial success is thus a good sign: ethical issues with universal relevance, set in Romania, have an impact on audiences around the world. But above all, their choice of this type of aesthetics, that avoid the spectacular and focus on essential issues, represents more than just an artistic approach; this cinematic humanism in its purest form represents the position of a generation, a generation that had to fight against a system that was never generous and open with them. This success gave everybody the courage to follow, and remarkably the system itself started to change slowly. The same happened in the visual arts: Victor Man and Adrian Ghenie’s commercial success has induced a new dynamic in the art world.

I don’t know if this is enough to change the perception of a country, but the simple fact that it contributed to the establishment of a different set of values in its own environment is a great result.

A Strictly Documentary Perspective on East European Art Is Outdated ¬ In many ways curating the Romanian Pavilion at the upcoming 54th Venice Biennale has provided you with the opportunity to come to terms with your country of origin and its recent past and present... √ When I left Romania I had the bitter feeling of not being perceived and valued according to what I had done for an entire generation of artists. Now, this Venice Biennale project is a reward, the closing of a circle, because this project was selected on its own merits through an open and transparent process. This is very important for me. Incredibly, everything went as it should have with the Romanian Pavilion, with full disclosure: there was a competition, 28 projects were submitted, and ours won.

I never made professional compromises in my career. Instead I created a setting for artists to develop, allowing maximum freedom, while protecting them from any outside manipulation. This stubborn attitude had both personal and social consequences for me: suddenly I became too difficult or impossible to deal with. Since I was the director of a private institution, I enjoyed true autonomy, and people could not influence the scope of my work.

I was effectively outside or beyond the system that many people were used to, and that was not always seen favourably. Today I would not so bluntly defy the mainstream opinion. But at the time, it seemed the only way to break old bad habits and the complex circle of outside interests. ¬ In the past 10–15 years, a growing interest from the West in the vitality of the Eastern European art scene has led to a number of important group shows, as well as the commercial success of several artists. Yet there still seems to be a large gap in mutual understanding. What do you think the recurring problems in these group presentations are? √ I am not sure that the interest in Eastern European artists is really growing. Statistically, in the last international biennials, one can see that the degree of participation of Eastern European artists has never been higher than 10%. I would invite you to check the list of artists who will exhibit in this year’s Venice Biennale; you will not discover more than five or six names of Eastern European artists out of 82 artists... I’m not judging this situation, I’m only observing it.

On the other hand, everyone who knows the history of the blockbuster Eastern European exhibitions well could confirm that all these exhibitions were politically generated: the ten year anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Stability Pact in the Balkans (after the wars in the former Yugoslavia), the first group of countries joining the EU, the second wave, and finally the most recent ones, which celebrate 20 years of democracy in these countries.

I remember the very first exhibition of this kind: After the Wall, curated by Bojana Pejic’ at the Modern Art Museum in Stockholm in 1999. Despite the various critical reactions, that show was historically important: it was the very first to consider the importance of Eastern European art. What Bojana did for the contemporary art of our region is not equivalent to any other promotional efforts made by institutions or ministries of culture from all of those countries put together. But if such an exhibition was necessary twelve years ago, then today, 22 years since the fall of Communism, there are other topics to be considered, because the geopolitical landscape has changed dramatically. It is thus very difficult to make a historical retrospective of the art from Eastern Europe, as almost all the countries from that region have since become members of the European Union... In an integrated system

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Ion Grigorescu Psychoanalytic Sofa, 2011, 200 Ă— 150 cm, digital print mounted on aluminum, courtesy: the artist

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Speaking Thoughts: the History of Performing History

Ion Grigorescu Typewriting Machine, 1978, digital print mounted on aluminium, 250 Ă— 195 cm, courtesy: the artist

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such as Europe, it is odd to keep talking about these categories of East and West, but the simple fact that everybody still does makes these separations gives enough reason for the reopening of the debate. Personally, I am very critical of the last shows on these topics. This is the very reason that I have chosen to go further with this debate through this project for the Venice Biennale, by setting up a framework for extensive research, touching on all of the perspectives: artistic, philosophical, sociological, etc. So far, in the major art exhibitions dedicated to this issue, Romanian artists have mainly been presented as “documenting” a certain period (the 1970s and 1980s, as in the case with Ion Grigorescu). It was a sort of “historicizing” that could not deal with the art on its own terms.

A Statement that Considers the Specific Dialectics of Eastern European Representation ¬ If I understand correctly, with Performing History, rather than wishing to correct the distortions of conventional Western perspectives on Eastern Europe, you are attempting to outline a global perspective on contemporary Eastern European art and society… √ Performing History is first of all an exhibition that focuses on Ion Grigorescu s entire career, as well as on the artistic practices of Anetta Mona Chiøa and Lucia Tkácˇová. The title and the theme of the project are intimately tied to the creative output of these artists. It is extremely important to emphasize this aspect; these topics were extracted following a long process of analyzing their work and of contextualizing it within a larger historical framework. This is how we arrived at the need to go beyond the obvious formal affiliations in order to investigate whether there are different ones to be considered. In this respect, our deepest wish was not to reopen the debate on the Eastern European condition of marginality, but rather to formulate a statement that considers the specific dialectics of visual representation, which in this area are strongly connected to the discourse of modernization.

We have imagined this project as a trans-generational dialogue, taking into account all the tensions that might occur from such an unusual approach. On one hand, we aim to reconcile the generational differences between the two, and on the other hand, we want to emphasize the same critical and ethical commitment in reflecting the major historical challenges and paradigm shifts that we have all faced in this region. ¬ Let’s try to define some of the curatorial guidelines that you set for this project. In order to understand Romania’s present, you want to trace a history that goes from Ceauøescu’s totalitarian regime to the post-Communist period, extending into the “schizo-capitalist” present. The far-ranging scope of Performing History calls for the inclusion of distinct generations, highlighting the radical social, political and artistic changes that swept Romania within one generation. On the curatorial side, you assembled a team composed of yourself and Ami Barak; for the catalogue, you teamed up with the critic and thinker Bogdan Ghiu. They both belong to the generation who grew up under Ceauøescu’s regime. As far as the selection of artists, Anetta Mona Chiøa and Lucia Tkáèová, born respectively in 1975 and 1977, as opposed to Ion Grigorescu, born in 1945, represent a generation that came of age in a post-Communist period and developed a very different sense of cultural identity. Can you elaborate on your selection of both a curatorial team and artists spanning different generations in Romanian art? √ For me this project indeed represents a curatorial assemblage. I have done many collaborations, but not so many at one time, and within the same project. I had several reasons for doing this: on one hand, I learned from experience that major projects are about great contents, and these contents are usually more important than you are. On the other, it became my belief that putting several minds together is better than one, and in this respect, I have to admit that Dutch culture had a great influence on me. Then again, in a way it was chance that brought all of us together at the very moment when the whole idea of applying for the competition for the Romanian Pavilion was emerging. Further, in order to clarify my own feelings, thoughts and approach, I felt the need to confront myself with someone older than me, who had lived under Ceauøescu. Ami Barak not only emigrated from Romania 35 years ago, but also became stateless for a while because of this choice. I think that the confrontation of our two perspectives already begins to tell a story, including my return to Romania versus his. Ami’s and my own history of working with art represent a further level that I wanted to explore. Bogdan’s knowledge and talent as a writer represent a major contribution to the accomplishment of this project. He will edit a special issue of the Idea arts + society magazine, which for years has been the best art publication in Romania. He will curate an entire section of this publication based on this subject: the alternative Eastern European modernities, and the future of the idea of Modern. At a later stage in the development of our project, I realized that our approach to Eastern Europe also had a documented basis in empirical facts, and my friend the sociologist Vasile Dâncu confirmed the existence of several surveys on this topic. Not only that, but he and his institute IRES, the only think-tank of this kind in Romania, will join us and conduct a sociological survey on the specific theme of our project.

More than a Precious Historical Document, Ion Grigorescu’s Work also Represents the Consciousness of those Years.

As far as the choice of artists, Ion Grigorescu’s name came up quite naturally for a number of reasons. At 65, he is a mature artist, and has been a constant presence in the Romanian artistic landscape through the 1970s, 80s and 90s to the present. More importantly, he adopted anything and everything that was available to him as far as means of expression and media. He did not focus only on painting, photography or video. On the contrary, he is that rare kind of artist whose enormous curiosity allowed him to explore from 360 degrees. He wants his art to comprehend and include all aspects of reality. And of course, his understanding of reality is always filtered through his artistic

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Speaking Thoughts: the History of Performing History sensibility and talent. His daily life is his art! The subject of his art, in a sense, is the present, so after working at it for more than twenty years, his cumulative work has become a sort of history of his times. His work is not only a precious personal historical document, but also represents the consciousness of those years. This project had to center around Grigorescu’s long career. He spent his working life recording what was going on around him, with no plan of later disseminating it. In this sense he is extremely modest, unlike many artists of his generation. The girls, Anetta and Lucia, were Ami’s choice; I was not too familiar with their work, but now, since I have got to know them better, I am convinced that the combination between Ion and the girls is not only strong, but downright sparkling.

The Sacrificial Power of Art ¬ One of the stated goals of Performing History is “to provide a sort of meta-display in which history is performed from the perspective of the sacrificial and ethical powers of art”. Can you elaborate? √ The sacrificial and ethical power of creation is an essential theme in the whole Byzantine area of spirituality.

The belief is that the creator should transcend his own destiny, and that means by definition a sacrifice. In Western Christianity, the sacrifice is rather a sort of juridical equivalent requested by God in exchange for the forgiveness of sins. In oOhodox Christianity, the role of sacrifice is to build and sustain an order, which is higher than the human one. In this respect, we are aware that by presenting Grigorescu’s work, which is imbued with such a deep spirituality, implicitly means the challenge of explaining those meanings that are not so obvious. Grigorescu appropriated strong traditional national traits. He is one of these exceptional characters who has arrived at the idea that life should be clean. This cleaning and opening in order to obtain a clear view on art, life, and death cannot be done without an overall world view in which sacrifice is a defining element. Other components span from his interest in sports (he was a national champion of athletics in his youth), psychoanalysis, yoga, and Far Eastern philosophy, which in turn have played a role in the Romanian tradition; think of Mircea Eliade for instance. Grigorescu was also fascinated by asceticism; he became, in his own way, an ascetic.

What is most remarkable is his clarity of vision. He has eliminated all superfluous elements from his art, has resisted embellishing reality in any way, and done away with any sense of vanity. ¬ Westerners used to think of people living under communism as either conformists or dissidents. Looking at Grigorescu’s work, the sense is that he was neither. He found the space, at times publicly, other times underground, to simply be himself... √ Absolutely! His work resists the category of dissident or conformist artist and that is why it’s so great. He has repeatedly stated that he should not be thought of as a dissident. For years he retreated into his studio, where he performed and experimented for himself. To be a dissident is to actively contest the status quo; Grigorescu was more of a participant-witness, who understood everything and recorded everything that was going on around him and turned it into the substance of his artistic practice. He had his finger on the pulse of the collective consciousness.

Precariousness As Self-experimentation ¬ Grigorescu’s work does not offer stylistic continuity or a signature style; instead it poses many questions and unveils contradictions. In his life as well, there seems to have been contradictions, such as holding a day job as a painter/restorer of icons in a church, and then going back into his studio and working as a radical conceptual artist... √ As I mentioned, there is a complete contiguity between his life and his work. When I was still working at the National Art Museum in Cluj, I had to do lots of research on Romanian identity and tradition. I was searching in particular for dominant features. In reading the work of thinkers and philosophers of the period between the two World Wars, I found that there have long been contradictions and oppositions in our national makeup. Think of Constantin Brâncuøi, whose work embodies two oppositions: the temptation of the ancestral tradition and experimentalism. Unable to reconcile the two, Brâncuøi’s desire for innovation made him leave his country. Grigorescu also participates in our own traditional heritage, while being drawn toward innovation and modernity. Without suggesting comparisons between the two, I think Grigorescu, like Brâncuøi, understands the ancestral formal matrix typical of the Romanian tradition. Grigorescu is so important because he is upgrading this pattern in a different manner of expression. He is a believer; he grew up Orthodox, and identifies with that tradition. Yet his belief in God does not prevent him in any way from the most radical and uncompromising self-experimentation.

I don’t see this as a contradiction, but rather as the courage to cope with the two major currents in the makeup of our national identity. ¬ Did he display a growing interest in the spiritual aspects of his investigation after 1990, as religious practice was perceived as a reaction to the communist-atheist recent past? √ Of course, Grigorescu was very close to that spiritual movement! If I remember well, it became an artistic movement even, called Prolog or New Orthodoxism or something like that. The group of artists associated with this movement aimed at new interpretations of the dogmas, and the creation of a new iconography. Don’t forget that after Ceauøescu, the Church immediately became the most important institution. Grigorescu was never part of that movement, but was instead a highly original individual who for a time shared a strong spiritual interest with some other artists. Eventually he developed his own spirituality and philosophy in quite a different direction. While others were interested in spirituality and iconography on a formal level, Grigorescu was the only one to put his finger on the pre-

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cariousness of our condition as a guiding principle. Precariousness at all levels has been a specific trait of Romanian life since time immemorial. Here I should make the distinction between the precarious and the rudimentary; precariousness is about the unpredictable future, about vulnerability of being, about dislocation in forced conditions, or being dependent by chance. Uncertain about the truth and future. I do believe that this concept of precariousness is an essential key for comprehending not only his work, but also the Romanian way of being in general. ¬ What are the main questions that his work addresses? √ Grigorescu has an insatiable appetite for understanding. He asks why precariousness is so pervasive, what does this mean? Why doesn’t anything work in Romania? What is society moving toward? Why can’t things develop in a different way, and what could the role of artistic creation be? In fact he sees more clearly than anyone that the major crises of humanity are mainly rooted in the crisis of the spirit.

A Point/Counterpoint Relationship between Two Different Manners of Artistic Expression ¬ How do you see the dialogue between Grigorescu’s oeuvre and that of the Chiøa & Tkácˇová duo? How does it play out in terms of the relationship to history? √ In deciding to match this artistic duo with Grigorescu, we were looking to emphasize continuity through time.

When Grigorescu was first invited to the Venice Biennale, he was a virtual unknown in the West. Today he is something of a legendary figure. Now we think the Western world is ready to understand his message. His work opened up new space in part filled by younger artists such as Anetta Mona Chiøa and Lucia Tkácˇová.

We were looking to show a sort of point/counterpoint relationship between two different manners of artistic expression. My colleagues see Ion Grigorescu as a representative of a Romanian avant-garde, and Chiøa & Tkácˇová as the post-neo-avant-garde. I have to admit that my interest is less focused on classifying them in this way, but more on depicting a certain mood that is common to both of them, and that has its origins in the same critical attitude, and commitment to commenting on the present. Historical circumstances have shifted radically.

Today the work of young artists such as Anetta and Lucia is no longer local, confined by national boundaries.

Furthermore, if Grigorescu’s work has self-referential, almost autistic characteristic, then theirs is completely open, global, yet touches upon some of the same issues.

The Bodies of the Body ¬ Since the late 1960’s Grigorescu has placed the human body – his own – and issues of sexuality at the core of his work. Can you trace the way in which the body has become both a medium and the instrument through which the East Europeans have searched for a voice in the social and political debate? And further, how has the use of the body in contemporary art followed a different trajectory and scope in Eastern vs. Western Europe? √ The body in Grigorescu’s work is related to the idea of sacrifice. His body became a medium of expression through extreme contortionist practices, endless self-questioning, and experimentation. Since his work centers on himself and his relationship to the world, the body had to be the central element. And it still is today. He is present in all the works he does. Its greatness consists in allowing the emphasis on himself to acquire universal meanings and resonance. In Chiøa & Tkácˇová’s work, the body (that of the performers they employ) is more of a reference to sculpture. The bodies of the performers are, as it were, living sculptures. They become a threedimensional freeze frame of the present. ¬ Grigorescu’s use of the body invites the viewer to make the jump from the individual to the universal: his body as a stand-in for mankind. In the work of the duo, on the other hand, the bodies of the performers become a micro community: a stand-in for a collectivity, “we the people” or perhaps “we the Eastern Europeans”... √ These two young women grew up in a different world, a world where people had passports, used the Internet, and communicated across ideological divides. Their work exists not only in an expanded playing field, but their relationship to mankind has also changed substantially. While Grigorescu can be extremely ego centered, these artists can no longer be: the important question in their work is no longer about themselves, but about themselves in relationship to and within the larger context of the world. I think it is important to point out that they perceive that “we” (Eastern Europeans, individuals) are not that important anymore, we became just an ornament. This is an essential change in perspective linked to the rise of very different paradigms. ¬ Through his art practice, Grigorescu appears to have exerted onto himself the conditioning of history, specifically in his self-torture. √ I don’t think it is about self-torture. Some critics perceived what he was doing as assuming the body of the victim. In my opinion he was not embodying the victim of the regime, but rather the condition of being one’s own victim. It has not to do with the idea of victimization, but rather the idea of a sacrificial body. Or to phrase it differently, his is a sort of lucid understanding of the underlying theme of sacrifice in Romanian art.

For instance, one finds the origin of this attitude in the legend of Master Manole. According to the legend, Manole is building a monastery: he keeps on building, but the next day everything collapses. God or Fate keeps tearing down his efforts. A voice in a dream tells him that he must build that which is most dear to him in the foundation of the church, otherwise it will not last. So finally Manole walls his wife into the foundation of the church. Devastated, he hears her cries, but knows that this is the only way the church will survive. After the completion of the church, he sacrifices himself and transforms into a fountain. The church that he has built for eternity

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Speaking Thoughts: the History of Performing History with this supreme sacrifice is thus not only the symbol of love, but also an endless fountain, seen here as an eternal opportunity for renewal. I think this legend defines a shared Romanian Weltanschauung, which is a recurrent point of reference in Grigorescu’s work.

The Hamlet of Eastern Europe ¬ Can you discuss specifically the work in which he depicts himself as the “Hamlet of Eastern Europe”? √ I find this work one of the keys to his creative universe. It is his most successful attempt to create an image, which could symbolize his take on reality in the largest possible sense. He is standing there in his everyday clothes, without any concern for appearances, holding a sculpture of a head in one hand, his self-portrait in fact. With the other hand he is holding an enigmatic cup; we don’t know if it contains wine or poison or whatever else... It is a meditative pose, but behind it we see some sketches for an image of Lazarus being resurrected from the dead (an image he was working on for a church he was restoring). This Hamlet-like meditation on life and death is related both to the orthodox religious theme of resurrection, and also to a more secular idea of waking up. He is not interested in any form of glamour, yet he seems to be saying: “I (the Eastern Artist) strive to wake up, I dare.” ¬ I would like you to comment on Grigorescu’s assertion that: “The work of art has something insolent, offensive and aggressive.” √ What I think he means is that if a work does not have those characteristics, then it is not truly a work of art.

I think that sentence can be read as his statement of purpose.

Grigorescu “Curates” Us ¬ Curating shows of Ion Grigorescu would be a challenge for anyone. Among other reasons, Grigorescu has displayed curatorial skills of his own. And has expressed the preference for catalogues that are very different from the exhibitions to which they refer. He has clear ideas on how to show his own work, and has lamented the shortcomings of the curators of MAC in Warsaw for not having the patience and know-how to uncover all the different aspects of his work. He said, “Coherence should be found not in the work itself, but in the working style.”

Can you talk about your experience with him so far? √ Working with Ion is a work in progress. It is not as if he presents us with a series of works for us to place in a physical environment. Rather, he entrusts us to present an integral part of his life, so that we as curators also become part of his life. Paradoxically we ourselves are “curated” by him to some extent. I personally have known Grigorescu since the 1990s, and Ami Barak has also worked with him in the past. Knowing him certainly helps, but the crucial thing is not to impose preconceived curatorial concepts on a strong artistic personality such as his, but rather to let things develop in a way that is acceptable to him. And always remember that he is the artist, and our job is simply to help him convey in the clearest possible way what the work already contains. ¬ On the one hand, he compares curators to artists in terms of the need to take risks; on the other he is highly critical of the curators’ role/ profession. √ As a curator, my role and my margin of risk-taking are directed towards creating a context for his work.

Nothing more, nothing less. Without making compromises, this is a matter of adjustment and fine-tuning.

We know what type of exhibition we want to do; we have conceived this project as a two-headed one, encompassing a dialogue between an older artist and younger ones. And yet the show has to be the result of a dynamic interaction between our visions as curators with the artists themselves. We are all too aware of the excesses of the curatorial masterminding of recent years. I firmly believe that some friction is both unavoidable and constructive. ¬ In the era of globalization, the transnational aspirations of the art world come up short. The art world remains a series microcosms rigidly divided along national perceptions, markets, and identities. There are the so-called national artists who enjoy success and cultural relevance in a specific country or geographic area, and so-called international artists, whose markets and sphere of influence are larger. The process of becoming an international artist often begins with national success. The Venice Biennale is still organized in “national pavilions”, as if there were such a thing as national art. Do you think this concept needs updating? √ It is just a format, perhaps an odd one, but a format they came up with almost ninety years ago, and with time it has become a tradition. In reality, it is less rigid than it appears: this year the Russian Pavilion is curated

by Boris Groys, who though of Russian origin was not born in Russia, but in Germany; the Danish pavilion is curated by a Greek curator, the American pavilion will feature an artist duo that includes the Cuban artist – Guillermo Calzadilla, Poland will be represented by an Israeli artist, etc. We have in our own pavilion a duo composed of a Slovak and a Romanian. Ultimately it is more about art than about our origins. ¬ In a nutshell, how would you define the scope of Performing History and how would you gauge its success? √ I promised myself not to get involved with projects where I have any doubts about their necessity. I feel the intensity in Grigorescu’s work and within our collaboration deeply. This together with my belief in Chiøa & Tkácˇová’s work – nourishes me and generates the necessary momentum. Whether the inquiries on the relationship between art and history will be able to fully stimulate the audience in Venice still remains to be seen.

I am excited and motivated, but would prefer to refrain from formulating what would constitute its success.

If I focus on the outcome, I lose sight of what needs to be done now. And a lot of work still needs to be done...

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The Permanent Avant-Garde Alessandro Cassin in Conversation with Ami Barak

A Historical Biennale – But the Idea of Thinking of Art and Artists As Belonging to a Specific Nation Is Over Alessandro Cassin ¬ When did you leave Romania?

Ami Barak √ In 1974. ¬ After such a long absence, what does it mean to you to be co-curating the show for the Romanian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale? √ Of course I am proud to participate in this project. Professionally I am convinced of its value. I consider the Venice Biennale one of the most important international events for contemporary art. I have attended the Venice Biennale for decades with only one exception, and that was a form of boycott of that particular edition. ¬ When was that? √ In 1986, when Maurizio Calvesi was in charge. He was interested in the concept of Arte Colta and had a strong reactionary slant. The director was Jean Clair, whose approach I detest... But other than that, I have not missed one Biennale since 1979. ¬ As a regular visitor, what do you think constitutes the importance and relevance of the Venice Biennale? √ It has a special place among art events: it is a historical biennale, probably the most significant one, with a very specific tradition and character. What people expect from Venice is to be brought up to date. It is an event that deals with what is current now, with an eye toward the future. It has large ambitions. Over the years it has never failed to build up expectations for the public and the professionals. ¬ At its 54th edition, the Venice Biennale has maintained a format conceived back in 1895. In these 115 years, the ways of presenting, thinking about, and interacting with contemporary art have changed radically. Do you think the format needs updating? √ For example, the idea of thinking about art and artists as belonging to a specific nation is over, outdated.

However, I never found the national pavilions to be the main attraction. I was always more drawn to what used to be called the “aperto”. Today the focus of the event is the exhibition, which takes place in the general pavilion (the former Italian Pavilion). Aside from the flaws of the concept of national pavilions, the format was always unbalanced: only established countries like the US, Germany, UK, France, Belgium, the Netherlands etc. were able to present interesting artists in creative ways.

One example comes to mind about a way in which the concept of a national pavilion can still be used powerfully and intelligently: Hans Haacke’s piece at the 1993 Biennale. The German Pavilion contained a single installation by this political-conceptual artist (now living in the US). The first thing you saw was a wall with a blown-up image of Hitler visiting the 1934 Venice Biennale. The floor of the rest of the gallery had been torn up into pieces of marble debris, on the wall behind, a single word: GERMANIA. A very powerful statement indeed. ¬ Ion Grigorescu was featured in Venice fifteen years ago. What went wrong? √ What he presented then was simply not strong enough, and was completely lacking in context.

Ion Grigorescu, or How Is Avant-Garde Possible under Totalitarian Regimes ¬ To what extent does contemporary Romanian art represent Romanian neo-capitalist society? √ I am not sure that one can say that contemporary art “represents” in meaningful ways the country or society. After having lived abroad for so long, I would need to do additional very specific research. What interests me more, and is central to our thesis for Performing History, is the idea of an avant-garde in the East, not only in Romania. It is about historical momentum: the frame of mind of an artist who operates in a transgressive, nonacademic manner, venturing into uncharted territories. ¬ The classical stance of historical avant-gardes... √ Exactly! The avant-garde artists operate from a kind of crisis in the Greek sense of the word. “Krisis” means breaking point. ¬ In what sense do you feel Ion Grigorescu can be defined as an avant-garde artist? √ My interest in Grigorescu originates precisely in having detected in him the typical and specific traits of the avant-garde. What I mean is that he expressed himself through the vocabulary of the avant-garde: performance art, emphasis on the body, issues of sexuality, transgression, always with a strong critical/ironic political awareness. But what sets him apart is that unlike his counterparts in the West, he lived and worked under a totalitarian regime. ¬ What were the consequences? √ Most strikingly that he was not allowed to express himself. This is crucial when you think that public expression and provocation are at the core of the avant-garde stance as developed in the West. In Grigorescu’s case, you find the paradox of an avant-garde mind that adopted autistic behaviours. This creates a fascinating dilem-

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Speaking Thoughts: the History of Performing History ma: on one hand avant-garde means communication, and on the other autism is an extreme form of inability or unwillingness to communicate... Grigorescu is a paradox in this respect! ¬ Would you say that the autistic aspects of his work were directly connected to the political situation? During the 1980s, he chose the reclusion of his home in which he performed in front of his camera, because there was not a possible audience for this. √ I think so. In fact after 1990, the work changed and lost the autistic elements. What I notice today is an uncertainty as to what direction to take and the feeling that he does not really trust anybody with his own work.

A Different Avant-Garde ¬ For a Western audience, the whole idea of an avant-garde artist working behind the Iron Curtain under Communism is problematic. If I understand it correctly, part of the curatorial thesis is to reveal the specificities of the Eastern European avant-garde. √ The ideas of avant-garde in the West and under communism are radically different. The avant-garde has been theorized and discussed as a typical Western phenomenon. This meant that it was run by ideology, originating in individual histories and aiming toward something more collective. Lucy Lippard wrote about annihilating and de-materializing the subject. In her arguments, she perceived the avant-garde as being fuelled by utopian perspectives, the aspiration toward progress and better possible worlds... Naturally her discourse did not work, and could not be embraced in the communist countries. Under communism, any notion of a utopian collective future was not credible, a shop-worn notion. The question is how did an avant-garde exist and thrive without an ideological foundation. ¬ Yet it did... √ Absolutely. We now know about Ion Grigorescu and other personalities in Eastern Europe that prove this point beyond any doubt. Their itinerary is precisely inverted: instead of going from individual toward collective aspirations, they came from a collectivized society, toward individual, personal affirmation. This implies a weak ideology, a concept that the West is resistant to, but it is the truth.

More strikingly, Eastern European artists gave birth to an avant-garde with no audience. Yet the work has the urgency of life and death. ¬ Are you suggesting that there were really two different kinds of avant-garde in the West and in the East? √ I would say that there is one avant-garde, which expressed itself in the same language, but in totally different historical and ideological contexts. Eastern European artists embodied the same avant-garde spirit: they wanted to innovate, challenge the status quo, and create different life conditions.

Self-referentiality, Spirituality, Transgression ¬ Having been alone with his work for so many years must pose serious problems in terms of finding a congenial way of placing it in the world or on the market... √ In his relationships with art dealers, curators and critics, he is sceptical and very cautious. It is not that he does not want to participate in the process of promoting his work, but he would like to do it on his own terms.

It’s as if he is under the impression that he is being asked to sell his soul... ¬ This is somehow touching and coherent with the way he has lived before. √ Absolutely, it is touching. Yet like any artist, he needs to make a living. ¬ What were the criteria in the selection of his works to be included in Performing History? √ We wanted to provide a historical overview of his career, displaying significant works from the 1970s, 80s, and 90s up to very recent ones. He made initial suggestions, and we went back and forth until we reached a consensus. The second criterion was choosing pieces with strong visual impact that would work in the site-specific location we have in Venice. ¬ How much of his work is known in the West? √ Some of the historical works had been shown in Kassel in 2007 and later in Stockholm, Vienna, Warsaw, and elsewhere. We tried to select works that have not been seen yet. ¬ What do you perceive as the connective tissue between the three phases of Grigorescu’s work, the public works of the 1970s, the underground work of the 1980s, and the work he engaged in after 1990? √ The constant reference to himself. His body, his persona, his vision, together with the strange occurrence of having been “embedded” by the regime in his own apartment/workspace for a very long time. In preparation for the show that I curated for him in Paris, I had a colleague of mine do research in his archives in Bucharest.

I was impressed by two characteristics: the rigorous rendition and circumscribing of his environment – think of the fish-eye photos of his apartment – and a desire to escape or transcend. This desire for escape is the way I interpret many things, from his interest in yoga (levitation, transcendence) to the works in which he dematerializes into a ghost. ¬ What about the political aspects of his work? √ I find them prominent and of particular interest because of their ambiguity: they are never obvious.

For instance, the images and video in which he pisses and defecates in front of the camera, I believe should be read as political actions, statements.

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Anetta Mona Chiøa & Lucia Tkácˇová Memory Without History (Memorial to Lida Clementisová), 2009, Clematis Hybride flowers in pots, slide projection, courtesy: Christine König Galerie, Vienna

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Speaking Thoughts: the History of Performing History

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¬ How much do you feel his religious and spiritual belief system informs his work? √ As a person, Grigorescu is deeply religious. In his work, at times you do find religious symbols such as bread, but I do not find them compelling. In the 1990s, he participated for a while in a movement that was rediscovering “spiritual art”. When he tried to make his religiosity the object of his art, the works became less interesting in my opinion. With all due respect for the Orthodox religion, it is so immersed in the past, and certainly not an avant-garde issue... ¬ In the West, we think of artists working under totalitarian regimes as either conformists or dissidents; Grigorescu does not fit either of these categories... √ He does not. He was resisting the regime in his own way, but he cannot be thought of as a dissident.

He did not outwardly protest, hold signs, or go to jail. Very few people were aware or understood that what he was doing was both artistically and politically transgressive. This knowledge was acquired much later. ¬ Do you think Grigorescu’s work has impacted the new generation of conceptual artists both in Romania and in Eastern Europe in general? √ Young Eastern European artists, particularly the good ones, mostly recognize Grigorescu as a historically important figure. Some of them might not see a direct influence in their own work, yet they all agree that he has opened doors and shown that an avant-garde stance was possible. He is the real deal. ¬ What sets him apart from other artists of his generation? √ In the Romanian context, clearly there were other artists of talent. But legitimate doubts remain in evaluating the quality of their work as a whole, as well as their belonging to the avant-garde. Grigorescu was the most powerful, talented, clear headed, and visionary of them all. His work set him securely within the avant-garde tradition. Conceptually and formally, he is in a league with the very best international avant-garde artists.

Performance Was a Preferred Means of Expression for Avant-Garde Artists in the East ¬ Born in 1945, Grigorescu’s highly personal artistic trajectory during and after Communism incorporates the specific history of Romania in interesting ways. To what extent is his experience representative of artistic practices and struggles in Eastern Europe in general? √ Though we are presenting Performing History in the Romanian Pavilion, our thesis regards Eastern Europe in general. Grigorescu and the Chiøa & Tkácˇová duo are interesting and relevant in this larger, super-national context of former communist countries. ¬ Chiøa & Tkacova have been working together since 2000. Much of their work hinges on the relationship between the individual and the collective, precisely an area that has been turned upside down by the fall of the communist regimes in Eastern Europe... √ This is surely the departure point of their artistic discourse. In addition, there is a strong concern for gender issues as well as great irony in depicting historical processes. ¬ Grigorescu is a painter and media artist who has worked extensively in the field of performance; Chiøa & Tkácˇová are also best known in the field of performance. Do you feel that Performance Art captures, better than other forms of expression, the way that contemporary life in Eastern Europe is reflected in art? √ Performance was a preferred means of expression for many avant-garde artists in the East. Let me just mention Jiri Kovanda’s pioneering work in Czechoslovakia. A very interesting example is Sanja Ivekovic’ from Croatia.

She lived in Zagreb, where she staged one of her historical performances during Tito’s official visit to the city (Triangle, 1979). She lived in a centrally located building. Her apartment had a balcony facing one of the main boulevards, along which Tito was supposed to pass in a motorcade. The police were everywhere on the roofs, with guns, in a show of power and to prevent trouble or assassination attempts. What Sanja did was simply to step out on her balcony naked and sit down in a reclining chair, and then proceed to masturbate. The idea was to get the police to focus on her, rather than on what was going on around her in the street. Of course she succeeded. Sexuality in that context was a totally subversive way to have them focus on her. The subtlety of the performance was its reversal of expectation. Under communism, everyone was doing their best not to draw the attention of the police, while she was doing the exact opposite. Her audience was not the art public, but the sharp shooters who did not suspect they were watching an avant-garde performance. ¬ Do you think performance art was particularly congenial for disenfranchised artists in the East? √ My personal feeling about this (although any conclusion would need further investigation) is that performance art came into the field of contemporary art in the late 1960s as part of a process of radicalization in politics, society, etc. The nature of performance art, which is spectacular and event-like, in some ways guaranteed an audience to its practitioners. Performance allows one to express something in a very direct and confrontational way. If you alert people that a performance will take place, an audience will gather for it. If you hang a white canvas in a gallery, they may not... Performance answers a need to express something and fits well within the spirit of the avant-garde, going back to the early Dada, and their performances at Cabaret Voltaire.

Many of its “agents provocateurs” were Eastern Europeans: Tzara, Marcel Janco.

Talking specifically of the Chiøa & Tkácˇová collective, performance is closely related to both gender and the idea of sculpture. They use the bodies of the performers as living sculptures. Grigorescu arrived at performance from painting, whereas the women in the collective arrived there from sculpture, which is one of the big differences.

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Speaking Thoughts: the History of Performing History ¬ Grigorescu elevates the individual – himself/his body – to a stand-in for mankind. Chiøa & Tkácˇová instead start from a collective feeling: their performers are a stand-in for “us”, the Eastern Europeans, or perhaps mankind... √ Yes, Grigorescu’s is a one-man story, while theirs is a story of collective destiny. One of the interesting things that happens in placing them together is that even Grigorescu’s work can appear retrospectively to deal with gender. I doubt he was ever aware of this, but knowing what we know today, informed by the current discourse, it is difficult to look at images of a naked man, of his genitals, without asking oneself who they were taken by and for what purpose... A gender question arises: is this a gay context or not? Of course Chiøa & Tkácˇová incorporate gender in their work in a much more manifest and deliberate way. ¬ Since the late 1960s, Grigorescu has placed the human body – his own body – and issues of sexuality at the core of his work. Some have stressed the self-sacrificial aspect of his work; do you see this as an important element? √ I could not say if the sacrificial propensity is either core to his work, or to a Romanian sensibility. This is not something that I connect to. As far as I’m concerned, the sexuality issue should be seen as an act of transgression in the tradition of the Viennese actionists. The communist regimes, while claiming emancipation, were in fact extremely prudish in matters of sexuality. Sexuality was repressed and censored as much as possible.

Grigorescu photographing and filming himself naked, and taking close-ups of his penis was, in my view, a political act. He was showing something that the regime censored.

Distortion and Counter-Distortion: An Aesthetic of the Rudimentary ¬ Grigorescu produced performance art, documenting it with 8 mm films. One of his techniques consisted of distorting images with circular lenses. Would you interpret this as a metaphor for the artist’s situation under totalitarianism, distorting an already distorted reality? √ I think this is an open question. What I find interesting is that while most of his work centres around his body and his immediate environment, his apartment, there are also interesting landscapes. His landscapes, far from “pastoralia”, are tortured landscapes, or as you say, distorted. He was taking pictures of what I perceive as a “stressed” landscape. This might be related to something very specifically Romanian, whose origin is in the myth of Miorifla (a ballad and one of one of the most important pieces of Romanian folklore). The poet and philosopher Lucian Blaga theorized the mioritical space. The idea is that there is some kind of solidarity and synchronicity between the landscape and the human being. If you suffer, the landscape suffers, and if you rejoice, the landscape rejoices. Grigorescu’s work landscapes are not peaceful at all, but rather disturbed. ¬ In describing his techniques, many critics have used the term “rudimentary”, which seems quite correct in describing work realized with very minimal technical means. How do you think this aspect informs his aesthetic? √ He likes it! As far as his photography is concerned, for instance, he prefers the “stressed” prints that he made in an amateurish darkroom to the idea of having “professional” prints made for him today. He is not convinced that this is better for his work; at times he has accepted it, but with reservations. He developed an aesthetic of the rudimentary and is hanging on to it.

Dreaming & Digging History: A More Interesting Type of Narcissism ¬ Are there any specific works that you will exhibit in Venice that you would like to discuss more closely? √ Everybody will focus on the historical material, but I find great interest in the very new works. Specifically, there are works (we won’t show the videos, but rather the stills) depicting him naked on a sofa, sleeping (Sleep, 2008). The body of an older man, a very skinny one, can appear like a corpse. ¬ It is very disturbing and emotional to look at. √ The video shows him sleeping and in parallel shows a diary type text that narrates a dream. It is at once a dream and a nightmare. I consider this an important work for many reasons, including the reference to Andy Warhol’s famous avant-garde film, Sleep. In Grigorescu’s video, the dream cannot be just a dream, but also becomes a nightmare. An interesting concept that applies to the post-Communist reality, which was far from a dream, has its own trappings... If Communism was hell, this is certainly not paradise. ¬ What other new work intrigues you? √ He produced many images of himself digging the earth around his house, literally unearthing its foundations (Work, 2010). I think this touches on something that he might develop. And it again relates to the works of other artists, for example Chris Burden, the American artist. For his first show at MOCA in Los Angeles, he dug all the way to the foundations of the museum, in order to expose the foundation to the visitors. The work revealed a critical stance toward the museum as an institution, while Grigorescu is dealing with complex feelings toward his own house. In the 1970s, he was embedded there, like a prisoner or an animal in a cage, and now that it’s open he is digging to somehow weaken the house... He is exposing the foundations of where he lives. The work is conceived as a slide show, images that appear like the pulsing of a heart. ¬ How do you think that his narcissism manifests itself? √ Grigorescu certainly has a very strong narcissism, but of a very specific type. The narcissist admires himself, whereas Grigorescu I would say uses his physical appearance, his beauty, as a tool. He uses his body as some-

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thing, which mirrors something else, whatever that may be. He was always a handsome guy, yet what he was mirroring was a distress of sorts: this creates a more interesting type of narcissism. It has nothing to do with beautifying himself... but rather with using his beauty to show suffering and stress.

The New Ironic Body ¬ Can you elaborate on the political aspects of Chiøa & Tkácˇová’s work? Do you think that showing their piece together with Grigorescu’s work will be enough to reveal these aspects? √ The way I see it, their work is the next step. They belong to a new generation; they have a political background, which is very different. They deal with the body issue in a new way, linking it to the manner in which power and regimes function. The freshness of their outlook, their open-mindedness, allows them to reveal lucidly how ideological manipulation occurs. ¬ It seems that what is new in their approach to a politicized art discourse is that while they are astute and aware of the political mechanisms, they also have the detachment and freedom to make fun of it. They are playful and light, yet very serious about assuming an ironical stance... √ Yes! You can see it in two ways: you can look at reality as something truly horrible and oppressive, or you can choose to be ironic, which is what they do. Think about the sculptures of the Stalinist era. I hate them: for my generation they evoke state lies and oppression, but for the duo, for the new generation of artists, they hold some interest. They see them as grotesque, humorous, potentially satirical, disconnecting them from the ideology. ¬ In a nutshell, how would you define the scope of Performing History and how would you gage its success? √ If the public and my colleagues will recognize the issue of the avant-garde as a relevant one (which is of course an open question), then I would feel it has achieved its goal. The second thing that would constitute a success is the possibility of creating consensus around Ion Grigorescu as a major historical figure, defining his place and position among the artists of the late 20th century.

Anetta Mona Chiøa & Lucia Tkácˇová Stills from the The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, 2010, video, 35 min., courtesy: Christine König Galerie, Vienna

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Speaking Thoughts: the History of Performing History

Ex-East As Art East: The Ethic Counter-Modernity and the New Battles Alessandro Cassin in Conversation with Bogdan Ghiu

The Poet in the Project Alessadro Cassin ¬ Performing History is a highly suggestive title. How did you come up with this title and how do you think it applies to the work of Ion Grigorescu and to that of the Anetta Mona Chiøa/Lucia Tkácˇová duo?

Bogdan Ghiu √ This project grew out of an ongoing dialogue which Maria Rus Bojan and I have conducted over the past five years or so, one that materialised in several notable collaborative efforts and joint ventures. It is the culmination of an intellectual and creative “like-mindedness”, one that the expertise of an experienced curator of Ami Barak’s status could only enrich and heighten. And while it has now reached the production phase, it continues to generate, being born again and again in the dialogical encounter; as with all acts of artistic expression, it has yet to reveal its full potential.

I have a distinct recollection of finding myself in Vienna sometime at the beginning of 2010, and having this long telephone conversation with Maria. She was recounting a meeting she’d had with Ami Barak. As she spoke, I remember writing down “Performing History”. The words stayed with me, and were to become the title of this project.

The core idea behind the project was to work our way around the “case” of Ion Grigorescu and use this as a starting point (this was Maria’s idea). Then came the title, which sketched out a preliminary conceptual framework (my idea), only for Amy Barak to then come up with this brilliant plan of combining, in the selfsame dialogical, or shall I say “dramaturgic” manner, the exploration of Ion Grigorescu Sr., in other words of the “veteran” and of the younger Anetta Mona Chiøa and Lucia Tkácˇová. All three artists practice body art and performance, but do so in totally different historical periods: one under the totalitarian regime experienced by Eastern Europe, and the others in the current global age. ¬ Maria Rus Bojan referred to you as the originator of some of the underlining ideas for this project. She mentioned that over the years, you have helped her conceptualize the relationship between art and philosophy, and better understand the dialectics between East and West. Co-curating shows is a relatively common practice, yet your specific role as a thinker and essay writer in this project is not immediately apparent. Can you describe your contribution? √ The logic informing the Performing History project is neither politological, nor geopolitical in nature. Rather, it partakes, as I have already intimated, in a sensitive, inbuilt artistic rationale, and hence one of central “messages” the project conveys: the need for sensitivity and for a somatically integrated insight into reality, above all, for the rendering accessible of reality.

My role in this project has been that of a poet with a taste for philosophical reflection, himself given to some sort of textual “performativity”, someone who sets out to embody or indeed to represent the bodily presence of thought, rather than dissect it discursively. The body of thought is the “natural” language of thought, and the artists involved in this project are aware of the fact they need to sacrifice their bodies to history if they are to partake actively, as subjects, in the writing of history, be that an alternative, ideal, or “performative” reconstruction.

As well as this project being my brainchild, I am also the poet in this project, my role being to give it a philosophical and linguistic expression. Structurally much closer to artists, I need the strong grip and tempering of two opionated curators who are able to bring me back down to earth.

Modernity Redeemed by Modernities ¬ One of the declared goals of Performing History is to “articulate key topics regarding the comparative study of Eastern European modernities beyond the conventional Western Perspective, and to emphasize the need for a non-historicized re-evaluation from a global perspective”. Could you elaborate on this? √ Talk of modernities in the plural, i.e. of a plural, enriched perspective, is a fairly recent development, and in my view has yet to be fully elaborated upon. Modernity was a Western phenomenon that ruled the world not just by conquering it, but by seducing it, and prompting imitation. There was thus a prime modernity, singular and integrative, standardising at the level of concept, or even of input. And then there were multiple replicas that came as reactions to modernity, replicas that sought to adapt to this aggressive, prime modernity. After the project of postmodernity was completed – a project in itself meant to eliminate the dire consequences of prime, hard modernity – we witnessed a return to, in fact a revived interest in, those marginal, derivative modernities, the kind that for instance manifest themselves in Eastern Europe. In a manner that is seemingly paradoxical, these are now credited with providing universal solutions, and are deemed the only genuinely “organic”, sustainable modernities that can be retrieved and practiced in the future. To simplify matters, it may well be that it is only on the margins that replicas of modernity can resurrect the project of modernity, purged of its violent, colonialist,

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and imperialistic residues. It may well be that Modernity in the singular, unique and ideal, did not even exist in the first place, and that there was only a plurality of conflicting modernities – the West being no exception – silenced and rendered ideologically occult by a doxa turned dogma. Industrial modernity, which totally suppressed and manipulated nature by means of technology, may well be a distortion of the very “essence” of modernity, one that inevitably led to the disastrous historical discreditation of the project of modernity. The project therefore calls for an immediate rescuing of the notion, if only in an ethical, responsible and thus sustainable form, by revisiting these so-called “minor”, repressed modernities; Modernity redeemed by modernities. To this we can add the need to redefine modernity as an open-ended, dialogical space debating itself, and the need to identify ways of adapting its ideal-intellectual substance to existing local realities.

Reconceptualising modernity in a pluralistic dialogic context is all the more urgent, since one of the avatars of prime, hard modernity – unique, incontrovertible and ideal – is globalisation, viewed as a singular, unquestionable, and inevitable process originating exclusively in the Western world (and in the Nordic hemisphere at that).

No Art Market for Peripheral Countries ¬ Over the past 10–15 years, there has been a growing interest from the West in the vitality of Eastern Europe’s art scene. This has led to a number of important group shows, which have resulted in the commercial success of quite a few artists. Nevertheless, there seems to be a wide gap that is preventing mutual understanding. What do you think the recurring problems are that occur in conceptualizing these events? √ On the one hand, the global art market in general and the contemporary art market in particular find themselves in constant search of new, gullible avenues, of sources of deceit and sales placement; this is an otherwise extremely resourceful pursuit, we will admit. China and India are going through a process not unlike the one Eastern European countries underwent in the post-1989 period; their art is now being rediscovered and reintegrated into the global markets. Following a reversed movement – relative to the “generalist”, consumer market that spread to the East, rather than markets pursuing artists – artists have been drawn to the markets, which is why in Eastern Europe there are currently high-ranked artists who feature in the portfolios of established galleries in the West, but no art market per se. On the other hand, art nowadays, to a far greater extent than politics or economics, and with the exception of technology, is about the only remaining universal meeting place of the global individual. It forms the sole global democracy, and this is precisely why it will not be standardised. There is so much art and creativity in the world that there is room for market monopolies and for revolutions. As a result, the fact that we can agree to disagree, that differences in views should not spark wars, that there are no single conceptual frameworks but rather alternative categories, and that, at least in the realm of the art markets, these need not be standardised, is something to be cherished. If only this were entirely the case. As it is, the pressure of standardisation, of excluding local singularity and difference, is hugely present in the art market as well. The art market is the sole political and planetary economy that is at once successful and viable, sustainable and free of loss; for only on the art market does difference, rather than compliance and conformity, continue to act as added value.

Dreaming, Dramatizing the History ¬ You referred to the two shows Gender Check (Vienna, Warsaw) and Promises of the Past (Paris) as landmarks in defining the rapport between the historiography of Eastern and Western art and curatorship. In your view, where does the dynamic and force field lie between the two, and where do you place Performing History within your field of discussion? √ The two major retrospective documentary exhibitions did not come out of nowhere; they commemorate twenty years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, and it will be long before we see anything else of this scale.

They iconocise, classify, objectify, and historicise an age, and in so doing, they provide us with insight and analytic distance.

Meanwhile, in the East and West alike, a new generation was born in the wake of the 1989 revolutions, one that is devoid of all short-term memory. As far as I am concerned, exhibitions such as these have instilled in me the need for a more profound, text-based reflection on the body politic-art relation, one that is capable of taking stock of the East-West difference. This has among led to, among other things, a preliminary drafting, together with my collaborators, of the Performing History project. The project – and I would like to stress this again, as I find it very important: is not a discursive or documentary one; we are not dealing with the theme of a symposium on philosophy or politics-political science – rather, it is envisaged as a “dramatisation”, the essence of which is purely artistic. The stream of continuity running through Performing History on the one hand and Gender Check/ Promises of the Past on the other is thematic in nature; the differences arise from elements having to do with exhibitional and curatorial expressions and approaches. Thus while two of the exhibitions were designed as typically Western, rationalist-discursive events, Performing History is an “East-European” event, grounded in the implicit expressive potential of sensitivity and imagination, of dreamwork...

Self-colonisation, De-colonisation, Re-modernization ¬ From World War II until the fall of communism, Eastern Europe was largely a military geo-political construct.

In both cultural and historical terms, large sectors of the populations felt that their cultural place and point of ref-

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Speaking Thoughts: the History of Performing History erence was the West. However, with few exceptions, Western Europe progressively developed a mystique about what was going on beyond the Iron Curtain, which was perceived as a largely unknown “other”. After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the various ensuing national “revolutions”, Western Europe began to rediscover Eastern Europe. Could you talk about the cultural biases on both sides, that rendered the concept of cultural integration so problematic? √ It is crucial that cultural integration remains “problematic”; to solve it would be to create a holocaust, at least from a symbolic point of view. Granted, the post-war reality of the so-called “Cold War” gave rise to false alterities and to an entire “mysticism” of reciprocity, illusions – and alibis – on both the Eastern and the Western sides, idyllic expectations regarding a shared future, and to a situation involving a true ideological “noise” that the political nomenclatures would exploit and abuse. Whereas in the East, our parents, our grandparents and ourselves have mistaken democracy for capitalism, some of you in the West may have been inclined to mistake genuine socialism for democracy. Within the system of oppositions, it was the opposition itself that was mechanical, and thus false.

The absence of an alternative and the obstruction and indeed impoverishment of the difference embedded in dualism; or else, Manichaeism. Both ideological Manichaeism as well as cultural integration, it seems to me, constitute themselves in false solutions that disregard reality and hence pose risks that need to be avoided.

If I were to give an account of Eastern versus Western societies during (but not confined to) the Cold War period, I would argue that they underwent a symbolic and imaginary self-colonisation of sorts, having had recourse to an invitation to a colonisation launched without the consent of, and indeed against the will of, the coloniser; a process of colonisation that appears in turn soft, informal, and of a cultural, mental and symbolic nature. This imaginary desire for cultural “Westernization”, nurtured by the East, did not spare the East Europeans the shocks caused by various “reality checks” when they finally got the chance to experience the West firsthand in the 1990s. From this point onward, it all becomes a matter of real, beneficial differences not being obliterated and parasitically drained by false, confected differences, ideologically and politically disastrous, reductive, black-and-white, easy dualities. ¬ If I understand it correctly, more than wishing to correct the distortions of conventional Western perspectives on Eastern Europe, you seek to articulate a global perspective on contemporary Eastern European art and society... √ I do not think it is merely a question of “correcting” distortions; on the contrary, it seems to me the issue is to rid ourselves of all claims to a unique, monolithic, and domineering truth. Insofar as it is mediated by mental pictures and ideas of the other, monopolised as it is by the media, then the sphere of human relations, especially at the macro level, is equally one that offers infinite possibilities of distortions, particularly of oversimplification and reduction to cliché – or stereotype. For the notion of globalisation to be understood as standardisation and homogenisation, we need to oppose pluralisation of perspective as the instantiation of infinite difference.

This is where art and cultural practice play such a tremendous, irreplaceable role as mediators-correctors, being the only ones to provide an alternative to the oversimplifying mediations that are driven by the will to power, imposed by the body politic or body economic.

Ion Grigorescu Ame (detail), 1 min. 55 sec., 1977, Super 8 mm film transferred on DVD, courtesy: the artist and Galerija Gregor Podnar Berlin

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The increasing fascination that Eastern European art exerts – and in saying this, I can only hope not to fall easy prey to the very fallacy I denounce above, i.e. oversimplification and convenient reductiveness to a false unity, economic in all respects – lies perhaps in the residues of pre-modernity – the dream, the fabulation, the delirium, the black humour, the sense of the absurd, the primitive survivals – and, above all, a certain precariousness, simplicity, and humanisation of the means. What has until recently been viewed as a qualitative difference in the development of East and West, in the sense of the backwardness, and indeed the “inferiority” of the East, of its belonging to a “second world” of (by Western standards) “developing countries”, is now beginning to appear as the ethical alternative to sustainable development, to the hyper-development that comes with the depletion of all types of resources (including cultural and human ones).

The Forbidden Actuality, the Overtaking of the Exotism, the Production of the Universal ¬ What are the main challenges in conceptualizing and mapping out the aesthetic and specific artistic practices that have emerged in post-totalitarian Eastern European societies? √ At the moment, after the “home detention” experienced not just by artists, but by all the citizens of the former Eastern bloc until the collapse of Communism, one is faced with the reverse problem: the loss of a certain sense of local specificity and the dissolving into the global field of the arts. I tend to believe that art can be compared to a form of “radical journalism”, its role being exactly one of identifying the local and the current, of materialising, rendering corporality, indeed of giving away its own corporality to the trends running through the era, and giving voice to them. Without art and philosophy, even more than without media, we would literally not know which world we are living in.

The universal, out-of-synch note that Eastern European art sounds at this juncture in time, as a region undergoing a novel transition from Communism to capitalism or, in more political, clear-cut terms, as a region that finds itself under enormous recuperative and re-colonising pressure, is that of articulating a critique of this recolonisation, and of the process of recuperation involved. The tragic breaks and leaps of faith that are constitutive of Eastern Europe history enable it to see through the holes, beyond appearances; first, the onset of Communism by invasion, then the re-emergence of capitalism by recuperation, and, who knows, it may well be that Eastern European art is destined to have a “historical vocation”, that of conveying universality to an experience, the traumatic revelation of which the West, which benefited from a far stronger steadfast evolution, devoid of hiatuses, has been spared. And since we can never be absolutely sure, and because there are no guarantees, we would be able to see what we went through with our own eyes. We want to show this to the whole world, through projects such as Performing History, literally “putting on display” our unique historical condition, in various forms and modes, and for the benefit of everyone.

This is what draws the world toward Eastern European artists, the way they knew how to convert the impoverished condition imposed on art into a spiritual force that goes beyond any form of religious feeling. ¬ What can be done in terms of showcasing Grigorescu’s work in the West on its own conceptual terms, rather than as some sort of exotic representation of the struggle of an artist living under a totalitarian regime? √ To my mind, this sublimation of exoticism has luckily already taken place in the case of Ion Grigorescu, who is regarded as an extreme case, the “extreme athlete” of Eastern European art. Itself the expression of an out-ofthe-ordinary performance, Grigorescu’s art succeeded in setting its own terms and conditions, its own metalanguage and categories, universal, accessible, and necessary to all. A local historical experience of a break with the universal resulted, by way of art’s exemplary, painful alchemy, in a universal experience and universal solutions. Grigorescu’s art is symbolic of the art of the marginal areas of Europe and outside of it, those dominated and peripheral areas, which thus which makes it anti-exotic, universal par excellence; furthermore, it is an art of demonstration, one that meta-performs the birth, the expression, and the retrieval of the universal. “Staging” this production of the universal is one of the chief aims of the Performing History project.

Delayed Modernity, Continuous Discontinuity, Infinite Modulable Difference ¬ In contrast to the idea of modernity that was developed in the West, you speak about “minor”, marginal and “soft” modernities, specific to Eastern Europe. Could you elaborate on this, and relate the concept to the work of Grigorescu? √ If Eastern European art exerts a fascination for the West today, it is because of the humanity that is still visible in Eastern Europe, one that strove to run counter, in implicit, creative terms, to the singular, colonising modernity, extinct in the West, i.e. at the epicentre of modernity. Like all peripheral spaces, the East is equally a historical “preserve”, some sort of museum of modernity in which modernity can be revisited for pedagogical purposes, as process and struggle, something that has now become an impossibility in Western Europe. ¬ Why do you believe that historical discontinuity is one of the keys to understanding the original artistic expressions of Eastern Europe? √ In my view there are two things that Eastern European art proves in this respect: (1) that discontinuities are to be desired; conversely, that continuities are false, hypocritical, pointing to the kind of peace that is either maintained by force or that results from the disarming of the enemy; (2) that these discontinuities, in order not to be fuelled from the outside, must however be actively created; not socially, but mentally, artistically, and symbolically. Peace and social prosperity can only be endorsed by a tumultuous cultural and spiritual existence.

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Speaking Thoughts: the History of Performing History It is not the linear type of discontinuity that forms the experience of Eastern Europe, but rather an extraordinary dynamic of late comings and isolations, followed by bouts of recuperation and sublimation fever, of transposition to a whole new level, of the accumulations of the very idea of modernisation. Thus from the start, the East has completed Western modernity, the distance from the epicentre, the marginality, the peripheral, albeit non-colonial character, becoming an advantage over time, a chance to cultivate a nuanced, delayed form of modernity.

The Counter-Canon: the Artist As a Battlefield, Soldier and Upholder of the Law ¬ In a large international art exhibition such as the Venice Biennale, still organized along national divides, what can be done to avoid what you call the “the co-optation to domination by integration”, as a “poor relative”, within the Western canon? √ Since Eastern Europe is neither Occident nor Orient, neither North nor South per se, as a space of limited liberty, and of actual cultural liberty at that, we cannot but raise our degree of awareness of this state of affairs and act upon it, turning relative marginality into distance toward all centres of power, simultaneously “performing” “grand history” at a micro level. Within this space of transition and modulation, one which all imperial and postimperial powers claim as a “theatre operation”, we will probably spark a merry scandal, engendering the realisation that the condition to be disputed by multiple centres of power at the same time is in fact far more common than one is inclined to believe; it is one that is in fact embodied by the entire world. This history can be judged and performed, but this takes total existential embrace, i.e. the artistic kind. We can take full liberty in regard to the history that others are writing for us, a fundamentally artistic liberty. Often “poor relatives” are those who prove an embarrassment, who ruin the party, and pose existential problems that no one in the “civilised world” would ever dream about touching upon at the dinner table. ¬ To what extent, if at all, do you think that Ion Grigorescu or Chiøa and Tkácˇová are aware of their role in what one would call a counter-canonic battle? √ Artists conceptualise their mission, their battles, in a far more concrete and “technical” language, one that perhaps is far more adequate. Criticism and philosophy often distort the battles of artists, or superimpose on them their own interpretive significance. But at this moment in time, with the artist-curator-critic borders becoming increasingly permeable, such meta-languages tend to unify. This does not come not without a price, as connotations and meanings are being lost along the way. More often than not, uniformisations of this kind point to victories, and hence to defeats, dominations, and to an impoverished “performing of history”.

The artist is primordially a justice maker, a soldier fighting for man; were there no wrongs to right in the universal field of humanity (and not just in one’s own backyard), then there would be no art. Ion Grigorescu, Anetta Mona Chiøa, and Lucia Tkácˇová are far more aware in a practical way of the battles they fight, battles that bring out the best in them, existentially and artistically. And if they accepted being “cast” in our project, that means that they felt conceptually represented and supported in their battles, by the terms in which we coached the conditions of this battle, linguistically and conceptually “performed”.

East Modernity As Artistic Modernity: History Has to Be Performed by All ¬ Could you briefly try to place the contribution that artists such as Grigorescu and Chiøa/Tkácˇová have made to redefining the concept of Eastern Europe? √ The precariousness of the East ought to remind us that, for the realm of possibility to remain open, the means are not the issue. We can make do with the intelligence of our mind and body, which must give themselves ethically to the battle of history in order to steal the blueprint, and by stealing it, to process and vanquish it.

The message that the East conveys is in itself a preponderantly artistic one, yet it is formulated from the perspective of an art that is fighting for the survival of the human. And it is to this notion of permanence that Eastern European art, the East as artistic modernity, calls attention today. ¬ In a nutshell, how would you define the scope of Performing History, and how do you gauge its success? √ Performing History is a “historical poem” featuring hero artists, a dramatisation, a conceptual spectacle of the at once ludic and sacrificial powers of art. Active resistance that manifests itself in totally assumed creation is the chief legacy of the East, a legacy that calls for dissemination to today’s world, as well as to that of the future.

Regardless of time and circumstances, we can always perform/make history alternatively, as active subjects.

But for history not to be as criminal as it has been so far, and for it not to so dramatically diminish the richness of the human, it needs to be performed by all, as a fact of art.

If those who are visiting the Romanian Pavilion today were to literally perform the “hermeneutic circle” live, by moving between the two projects, between the two centres of gravity of this project-ellipsis, we would know – in the absence of the words, of the verbal feedback – that our intention embodied, going across, from the performances of the artists to those of the “visitors”.

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Ion Grigorescu Born in 1945, lives in Bucharest.

Solo shows (selected): 2011 Horse/Men Market, Museum Sammlung Friedrichshof; Zurndorf, Ion Grigorescu – The Mircea Pinte Collection, Museum of Art, Cluj; 2010 Oedipus the Wanderer, Gregor Podnar Gallery, Berlin; 2009 The Poor People Are Fending for Themselves, Angels Gallery, Barcelona; Ion Grigorescu: In the Body of the Victim 1969–2008, Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw; Ion Grigorescu (with Lili Dujourie), Ludlow 38, New York; 2008 Retrospective, Artra Gallery, Milan; Superpositions, JGM Gallery, Paris; 2007 Ressources (with Geta Brætescu), MNAC, Bucharest; 2006 Ion Grigorescu: Am Boden, Kunstverein, Salzburg; 2004 Recent Photography, Galeria Nouæ, Bucharest; 1998 Documents 1967–1997, National Museum of Art of Romania, Bucharest.

Group shows (selected): 2011 Out of Place, Tate Modern, London; 2010 Subversive Practices, Trafó Gallery, Budapest; Promesses du passé, Centre Pompidou, Paris; After The Fall, Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art, Peekskill; 6. Berlin Biennale; Bucharest Biennale 4, The Realism Question – Epilogue to Bucharest Biennale 4, Romanian Cultural Institute, Stokholm; Agents & Provocateurs, Hartware Medien Kunstverein, Dortmund; Romanian Art, Spinnerei, Leipzig; Frieze Art Fair, London; Changing Channels, MuMoK, Vienna; 2009 Subversive Practices, Württembergischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart; Agents & Provocateurs, Institute of Contemporary Art, Dunaújváros; Gender Check, MuMoK Vienna; Performing the East, Kunstverein, Salzburg; 2008 Le Temps a modifié les lieux, Enseigne des Oudin, Paris; Crisis, Angels Gallery, Barcelona; Between the Images, IASPIS, Stockholm; 2007 Possible in Art, Kunsthall, Lund; documenta 12, Kassel; Dada East?, Zurich, Prague, Stockholm, Sibiu, Warsaw; October. Exit. Memory. Desire., Artra Gallery, Milan; Social Cooking Romania, NGBK, Berlin; Art of the Possible, Konsthall, Lund; 2006 Kontakt. The Art Collection of Erste Bank Group, MuMoK, Vienna; Autopoesis, National Gallery, Bratislava; Fremd bin ich eingezogen, Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel; October Salon 2006, Belgrad; East Art Map: IRWIN/NSK, Basekamp, Philadelphia; Grey Zones, Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst, Leipzig; Trans:it – NowHere Europe, MNAC, Bucharest; 2005 Paradoxos: Incorporar a Cidade – Romanian Artists, Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon; 9. Baltic Triennial, BMW Contemporary Art Center, Vilnius; On Difference #1, Württembergischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart; 2004 Love It or Leave It, Cetinje Biennale; Revolutions Reloaded, Artra Gallery, Milan; Arteast, Moderna Galerija, Ljubljana; Prolog, Art Museum, Arad; Formate/Moving Patterns, Kunsthalle Vienna; Romanian Artists (and Not Only) Love the Palace?!, MNAC, Bucharest; The First Balkan Biennial, Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki; Love it or Leave it, 5. Cetinje Biennale; Trans:it. Moving Culture Through Europe, Adriano Olivetti Foundation, Rome; Arteast 2000+, Moderna Galerija, Ljubljana; 2003 Prophetic Remix, MNAC, Bucharest; Periferic 6 – Prophetic Corners, Contemporarty Art Biennial, Iaøi; Auf der Suche nach Balkanien, Neue Gallerie, Graz; In den Schluchten des Balkan, Museum Friedericianum, Kassel; 2002 In Search of Balkania, Neue Galerie, Graz; 2001 Double Life, Generali Foundation, Vienna; Remedy for Melancholy, Edsvik Art, Sollentuna; 2000 Collection 2000+, Moderna Galerija, Ljubljana; 1998 Out of Actions, MOCA, Los Angeles (touring exhibition: MuMoK, Vienna, MACBA, Barcelona, MOMAT, Tokyo); Body and the East, Moderna Galerija, Ljubljana; 1997 The 47th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, Romanian Pavilion; 1994 XXII São Paulo Biennale; 1992 Mahlzeit für eine tote Kultur, Schauplatz Zeitgenössischer Kunst, Vienna; 1991 Wanderlieder, A Journey through the New Europe, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; 1990 Points East, Third’s Eye Gallery Glasgow; 1981 XVI São Paulo Biennale.

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Hamlet, 1998, digital print mounted on aluminium, 240 Ă— 150 cm, courtesy: the artist and JGM Paris and Galerija Gregor Podnar Berlin

Ion Grigorescu

Sleep, 2008, digital print mounted on aluminium, 140 Ă— 105 cm, courtesy: the artist, JGM Paris and Galerija Gregor Podnar Berlin

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Ion Grigorescu

Throat (Self portrait with Tutankhamen), 1975, vintage silver print with watercolour intervention, 100 Ă— 83 cm, curtesy the P.J. van Sluijs collection Amsterdam and JGM Paris

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Dilatation, 1976, digital print, mounted on aluminium, 100 Ă— 300 cm, courtesy: the artist and Artra Gallery Milano and Andreiana Gallery, Bucharest

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Ion Grigorescu

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I in the studio, 1976, digital print, mounted on aluminium, 100 Ă— 300 cm, courtesy: the artist and Artra Gallery Milano

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Ion Grigorescu

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Work, 2011, digital animation, 27 sec., photo: Maria Grigorescu, courtesy: the artist and JGM Paris, Galerija Gregor Podnar Berlin, Artra Milano

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Ion Grigorescu

Top Bottom, 2008, black and white digital print, 120 Ă— 90 cm, courtesy the artist and JGM Galerie Paris, Galerija Gregor Podnar Berlin, Andreiana Mihail Bucharest

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Ion Grigorescu Carpet, 2008, video transferred on DVD, 1 min. 4 sec., courtesy: the artist and Galerija Gregor Podnar Berlin, JGM Galerie Paris

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Ion Grigorescu

Selportrait, 2006, white embroidery on white fabric, 220 Ă— 120 cm, courtesy: the artist

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Boxing, 1977, 16 mm film (film still), courtesy: the artist and JGM Paris, Galerija Gregor Podnar Berlin

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Ion Grigorescu

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Meal, 1976, vintage color photo, 75 Ă— 72,5 cm, courtesy: the artist

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Ion Grigorescu

Washing of the Face, 1976, series of 6 black and white photos, 75 Ă— 72,5 cm, courtesy: the artist and JGM Paris, Galerija Gregor Podnar Berlin

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Ritual Bath, 1978–1979, series of 37 color photos, courtesy: the artist and JGM Paris, Galerija Gregor Podnar Berlin, Andreiana Gallery, Bucharest

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Ion Grigorescu

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Ion Grigorescu

Manifestation on the Street, 2011, video animation, 9 minutes, projected on a white sofa, 220 Ă— 150 Ă— 110 cm, courtesy: the artist

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rovat

Mimics (series of 6 photos), 1975, silver prints, 40 Ă— 30 cm, courtesy: the artist and Galerija Gregor Podnar Berlin

Pyjamas, 1978, series of 4 black and white silver prints, courtesy: the artist and Galerija Gregor Podnar Berlin

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Ion Grigorescu

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Anetta Mona Chiøa & Lucia Tkácˇová ANETTA MONA CHIØA (born in Romania) and LUCIA TKÁCˇOVÁ (born in Slovakia) collaborate since 2000. They both graduated at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava and currently they live and work in Prague. www.chitka.info Solo shows (selected): 2011 Material Culture/Things in our Hands, Christine Koenig Gallery, Vienna; The More You Tell Me, the Stronger I Can Hit, Társaskör Gallery, Budapest; 2010 How to Make a Revolution, MLAC, Rome; Far from You, Karlin Studios, Prague; 2009 Wager, Collectiva Gallery, Berlin, Fair Sex, Hermitage Gallery, Chicago; Footnotes to Business, Footnotes to Pleasure, Christine Koenig Gallery, Vienna; 2008 Anetta Mona Chiøa & Lucia Tkácˇová, Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Berlin; Blondes Must Be Stopped, Purple Room, Rome, Romantic Economies, Medium Gallery, Bratislava; 2006 Everything is Work, Tranzit Workshops, Bratislava; Magical Recipes for Love, Happiness and Health, f.a.i.t. Gallery, Cracow; Ortografio de Potenco, Futura Gallery, Prague; Man, Hero, Spirit, Machine, Medium Gallery, Bratislava; 2005 The Red Library, Jeleni Gallery, Prague; Videosomic, Space Gallery, Bratislava; 2003 A Room of Their Own, Medium Gallery, Bratislava.

Group shows (selected): 2011 Rearview Mirror, The Power Plant, Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto; The Bergen Accords, Hordaland Art Centre, Bergen; Über Dinge, Kunsthaus Muerz, Mürzzuschlag; Models for Taking Part, Presentation House Gallery, Vancouver; 2010 Hard to Sell, Good to Have, Palais Sturany, Vienna; Figura cuncta videntis (the all-seeing eye)/Homage to Christoph Schlingensief, Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna; Transition Times – Art vidéo d’Europe centrale, Paris Photo 2010, There Has Been No Future, There Will Be No Past: Surviving cultural profiling in contemporary Central and Eastern European visual arts, International Studio and Curatorial Program in Brooklyn, New York; Erased Walls, Mediations Biennale Poznan’; First Ural Industrial Biennial, Shockworkers of the Mobile Image, Ekaterinburg; As You Desire Me, Contemporary Art Gallery of Brukenthal Museum, Sibiu; Beyond Credit, Sanat Limani, Istanbul; Over the Counter – The Phenomena of Post-socialist Economy in Contemporary Art, Mûcsarnok Kunsthalle, Budapest; Videodrome, Autocenter, Berlin; A bas Lénine ou la vierge à l’écurie, Christine König Gallery, Vienna; Starter – Works from the Vehbi Koç Foundation Contemporary Art Collection, ARTER – space for art, Istanbul; Gender Check, Zache¸ta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw; The artist in the (Art) Society, Motorenhalle, Dresden; The Atrocity Exhibition, Feinkost Gallery, Berlin; Cinema X: I Like to Watch, Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Toronto; While Bodies Get Mirrored, Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich; Formate der Transformation 89–09, Museum auf Abruf, Vienna; The Romance of my Young Days, the Future of my Nostalgia, Central Slovakian Gallery, Banska Bystrica; History, Memory, Identity: Contemporary Photography from Eastern Europe, Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Modena; 2009 Communism Never Happend, Feinkost Gallery, Berlin; Until the End of the World, AMP Gallery, Athens; Formats of Transformation – Seven Views on New Czech and Slovak Identity, Brno House of Arts, Brno; The Reach of Realism, Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami; Gender Check, MuMoK, Vienna; Donumenta, Kunstforum Ostdeutsche Galerie, Regensburg; Totale Erinnerung, Fotofestival, Mannheim, Ludwigshafen, Heidelberg; The Making of Art, Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt; Der Schnitt durch die Oberflache legt neue Oberflachen frei, Temporary Gallery, Cologne; One Day I Will Be a Star, Maison du Livre, de l’Image et du Son, FMG, Villeurbanne; Working Memory, Tranzit, Bratislava; Things and Thoughts, Collectiva Gallery, Berlin; 2008 Young Artists’ Biennial, Bucharest, 6th Taipei Biennial, Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Manual CC – Instructions for Beginners and Advanced Players, uqbar, Berlin; All about Museum, Slovak National Gallery, Bratislava; EL Gabinete Checo, Czech Centre Madrid; Do Something Different, Barbican Centre, London; Petit Histoires, Espace Apollonia, Strasbourg; L’Art en Europe, Domaine Pommery, Reims; The Way Things Are... Works from the Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Collection, Centre of Contemporary Art, Torun’; Flowers of Our Lives, Centre of Contemporary Art, Torun’; 2007 GDP, M’ars Gallery, Moscow; L’Europe en devenir, Centre Culturel Suisse, Paris; Equal Opportunities, C2C Gallery, Prague; Humor Works, Skuc Gallery, Ljubljana; Public Art Bucharest, Bad Beuys Entertainment, Boling, Bruno, Chiøa & Tkácˇová, collectif fact, Matsoukis, Mirza, Prévieux, Rungjang, Zucconi, Galerie West, Hague; Bio Power, Medium Gallery, Bratislava; Shooting Back, Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna; GDP, Municipal Gallery, Prague; Prague Biennale 3, Karlin Hall, Prague; The Space Between, The Daryl Roth Theatre, New York; New Video Art from Central Europe: Art Power, RISD Museum, Providence; Locus Solus (talks of inanimate reason at the country estate), Myto Gallery, Mexico City; “art world etiquette”, ThreeWalls, Chicago; The Collection, Trafó Gallery, Budapest; Partners in Crime, Gallery MC, New York; Culture Clash, Bastard Gallery, Oslo; 2006 Transfer, Muzej savremene likovne umetnosti, Novi Sad; Arrivals>Slovakia, Turner Contemporary, Margate; Marketenderin, Hartware MedienKunst Verein, Dortmund; Contemporary art from Slovakia, ECB Frankfurt am Main; Runaway, Space Gallery, Bratislava; Kuba: Journey Against the Current, Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna; Shadows of Humor, BWA Awangarda, Wroclaw/Bielska Gallery BWA, Bielsko Biala; Keine Wunderkammer, C2C Gallery, Prague/Hit Gallery, Bratislava; My Love Is Dead, Gallery Oel-Fruh, Hamburg, Innenansicht, Kunstraum NOE, Vienna; Frisbee, Dum panu z Kunstatu, Brno; 2005 The Artist With Two Brains, NAB – Jewellery Quarter, Birmingham; It Happenned Elsewhere, Vision Center, Cork; Prague Biennale 2, Karlin Hall, Prague; Iconoclash, The Spitz Gallery, London; RE-SHUFFLE: Notions of an Itinerant Museum, Art in General, New York; 2003 Seconds, Open Gallery, Bratislava.

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Anetta Mona Chiøa & Lucia Tkácˇová

Try Again. Fail Again. Fail Better, 2011 photographs courtesy: Christine König Galerie, Vienna photo credits: Cristian Chiøa, Nico Krebs

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Try Again. Fail Again. Fail Better, 2011, stills from making of the video, courtesy: Christine König Galerie, Vienna

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Try Again. Fail Again. Fail Better, 2011, collage on paper courtesy: Christine König Galerie, Vienna

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Mural on the façade, courtesy: Christine König Galerie, Vienna

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Performing History, an Open Project (Dialogues & Essays) Critical Resistance from Within Irina Cios in Conversation with Ion Grigorescu Part 1, Bucharest, February 2000 Part 2, Bucharest, April 2011

Looking through an artist’s files, one may enjoy coming across copies of handwritten diary pages or personal notes: “Ion Grigorescu is a 26year old person, therefore born in 1945, graduated from the Fine Art Institute in Bucharest, an institute named after the artist Nicolae Grigorescu.1 The name Grigorescu seems predestined to make history in Romanian art, although the first who bore the name was so great that he was bound to outshadow everything around, in space and time, that there would be no room left for others.

But the facts have disproved this kind of superstitious fixation, and along came Lucian Grigorescu, one of the most prominent artists of the postwar period. There are currently several established artists, both men and women, who bear the same name, Vicenfliu G., Ioana G., and Geta Næpæruø G. Ion G. is the younger brother of Octav Grigorescu, who played an instrumental role in Ion’s discovering his calling. Maybe because his early exploits stood under the sign of his elder brother’s art – a painter endowed with a private universe, like the great artists – I. G. has developed a phobia of the poetic. Not that he doesn’t have a feel for poetry: the poetry in art as well as in life. He is someone who knows how to filter emotion, and this is all too apparent in the images he casts.

Rather, the fear of abandoning himself to the poetic spell, of allowing himself to be spellbound by a reality outside of his own psyche, by an external event, a natural object, by ambiance or by contact with the work of fellow artists, with literature, the fear of finding himself engulfed by the rhythms of other people’s lives, exerted a negative impact on the 2 young artist’s thematic choices”.

This is how Ion Grigorescu refers to himself in a text that appears to have been written in 1972. The text, a medium accompanying or commenting constantly on his works, lays bare a latent propensity for a double identity, being both a creator and an observer, prone to self-analysis and to evaluating one’s resources from an “outside” perspective.

Bucharest, February 2000 Irina Cios ¬ In light of the identity – alterity syntagm central to the present dialogue is the BODY. How would you define the role of the body in your work – in your early work as well as in the latest work, in performances? Among your texts published in Arta3 magazine, I came across a series of references on the one hand to approaching life as it is, and on

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the other hand to the impact of film, of seriality, of cliché on your work at the time.

Ion Grigorescu √ It is important, to begin with, to clarify a set of tendencies that remained constant throughout my work, regardless of where my exploits have led me: the attachment to a certain “photographic” realism. This was manifest very early on, already at my first exhibitions. I felt very close to Pop Art. After having experimented with and exhausted the formula of painting imitating photography, I tried to explore alternative sources of images. I gave up the pencil and the brush, and started looking toward other tools such as film and photography cameras. Images less related to the local social reality emerged, exploring the reality ‘“outside”. Through images of the body, I was reconnecting with the general trends in art. What I was doing was to a certain extent similar to what passed under body art, whether film or photography. In parallel, I grew closer via other sources – literary or critical – of a similar attitude. I started to use things I had researched earlier, psychoanalysis for instance. ¬ You have always shown a preference for theorising. Among the texts you wrote for Arta magazine, one may discover either theoretical articles on your own artistic pursuits, or research pieces on the history of photography. How would you define this area of your work? √ I believe that I produced the larger body of theory the moment I noticed that I wasn’t producing much on the level of my own imagery.

Or else, when I tried looking at myself with sincerity, from the outside – with the conventional view towards assessing an artistic career – in search of my contribution to image-making, the impression was that my works (in the 1970s) did not bring a major novel contribution, or even no contribution whatsoever. This conclusion led me to develop a theoretical approach, an attempt to account for my place in the world of art, for where I stood in it. Judging now what I was doing then, my work came close to conceptualism. However, the other tendencies in my endeavours remained present, but to a lesser degree, to be abandoned at the beginning of the 1980s. I had the feeling that I had exhausted them, that there was not a whole lot left to explore, and hence the need to leave it behind in earnest. I took my time, waiting to see whether I could come up with something that would make me rejoin the tide. But I do not think my comeback in the 1990s brought much; not as long as a certain social dimension through which I was responding to the imperatives of others rather than, for the larger part, my own was there. ¬ One may trace in your work several paths that start being developed in parallel, then intertwine, are abandoned, and recuperated: painting, performance, religious metaphysics, text, mural painting, installation… √ This is an attitude that defines me. All these “devices” – whether technical, critical or theoretical – were employed as a means of emphasizing matter, rather than as a form of theorising spirituality. Like a sort of distinction between “soft” and “hard”. ¬ To return to the ‘body’, there was a stage in your work when you focused on the flow of vital energies. Looking back on these preoccupations, would

Performing History, an Open Project (Dialogues & Essays)

you say they resurfaced, or remained attached to that specific moment in time? √ There were several moral laws that my generation abided by. One was to contribute something new, to be original, or else there would be no point in making an appearance. Another was for the work to find correspondence in the moral status of one’s own life.

To return to your point above, at the time I had some knowledge of Buddhism, based on a certain limited, very personal practice, which led me to a kind of imaginary geography of the body. Related to reality to a certain extent, I was in fact trying to have these practices materialise in the field of the image. At one point my interest in these practices dried

Ion Grigorescu Meeting Electoral, 1975, silver print, collage on medium, 34 × 51 cm (detail from a series), courtesy the artist and Galerija Gregor Podnar Berlin

up. This remains as a moment in my work, now long buried. It may eventually resurface in a different shape.

Talking about performance with Ileana Pintilie, I was telling her I had always been inclined to observe the body, my own body movement - a sort of continuous performance whereby I perform and observe at the same time. Awareness of this general human trait is probably something inherent to all individuals. I suppose you can look at it as a feminine trait – popular wisdom tends to view women as the who that constantly analyse themselves. I for one do not think it is uniquely feminine, but a generally human trait. This self-analysis may easily lead to inhibition, even to paralysis. It can make one pass like a shadow past the walls, trying to elude everyone, as in literary representations. It may equally be that observation generates cumulative experience. It’s as though you were to store various daily events in the folders of the computer with a view to displaying them in public at a later date. ¬ Performances result from personal cumulative experiences, or depend on a proposal advanced by the organiser of a public event, say, the festival type? √ Performances from the 1970s happened in my studio, with me and the camera as the audience. Even if there were a live audience – I now refer to the Træisteni performance4 – people were not aware. At Træisteni I performed throughout the course of a day without people know-

ing what was going on. I practiced an “imaginary archaeology”, endowing found objects with meaning through photographing them and thus extracting them from oblivion. People around had no idea about all that while it was going on.

In a sense, I am nostalgic about this. One can hardly do anything now without the audience being fully aware. Back in the 1990s, in front of an informed audience, I sought to rely on the representation launched in people’s imagination by the title of the performance. I first created an Oedipus, then a Hamlet; I tried, relying on the script the audience would have in the back of their minds, to develop something personal. ¬ What became new in your performing activity after 1990? √ At the beginning of the 1990s, when I resumed exhibition activities, also with solo shows, I realized that the first thing that needed reforming, or rather starting anew was raising the audience’s awareness on the general concept of “exhibition”. I then asked myself how to get the public to come and take part in a performance. The preparation of the first performances resembled an exhibition opening: letters would be sent out, people would be invited to a certain place at a given time, without them knowing exactly what was to take place there, nor what the place looked like. Thus I started to include in my performances the establishment of places, the digging of foundations, the erection of walls, defining gradually the reason for the “images” expressed. ¬ There was a great deal of subsidiary commentary regarding the pre1990 period gravitating around many of your works. How would you define this? Would you say it was the expression of an intimate, personal position, or rather of a statement being made, a militant attitude? √ It was a habit I had acquired during socialism. A certain militantism that people abroad also noticed in my work – one that we were told the Greeks had also experienced during the Regime of the Colonels of the 1970s; a kind of involvement, a critical resistance from within the phenomenon. It was, as I’m sure you realize, something minor, but at the time, it felt like playing ping-pong with “power”. The “power” in question was in fact colleagues of ours, or people holding administrative positions within the Ministry of Culture.

It continued to manifest itself well into the 1990s, in group exhibitions.

I remember exhibiting for instance a work that featured a goat that recalled Da Vinci’s image of the Vitruvian man inscribed in the pentagram. On the ark above the circle that featured the polygon, it said: “The Romanian lied”. Through this, as through other explanatory notes, I wanted to convey the message that our commitment to regaining freedom in 1990 also rested on lies, in the sense that we were not able to truly fee ourselves. Such sentiments were nurtured by a certain militantism that had little to do with myself as a creative individual, but rather reflected my civic self, my commitment to the public interest. With the passing of time, I realised that art history is something very fleeting, and people no longer need militantism; what they do need is what is known as “art for art’s sake”. ¬ In your approaches, one can notice a restless quest: the search of the self, with a very personal direction, even an intimate one, as well as another aspect, which is manifestly engaged with social and political militancy. √ I do not know what to say. Firstly, I’m not so involved with that.

You couldn’t say that I cling to the occasion of every exhibition I partic71

Ion Grigorescu Performance at Træisteni, 2nd May 1976, photo: Andrei Gheorghiu, courtesy: the artist

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ipate in, using it as a platform to launch a new attack on someone. Secondly, I have lately resumed reading a written manifesto – it was the case of the symposium “Vagant Creation” organised by the Meta Foundation in Bucharest in 1999, voicing a critique of the theme. I have now reverted to a kind of standby mode. In fact, I don’t do anything actually. Clearly people get together, talk, and go through the same subjects over and over again. There are animosities among the various art groups, such as for instance between the Prolog groupv and avant-garde artists, younger or older. This constant debating and re-debating, and the overtones of the arguments that go along with it, may at times give the impression of a certain militantism. Essentially, my attitude is grounded in a sense of preserving a certain moral conduct, Christian or otherwise. As for the quest for self, I have reached a conclusion regarding art, and it seems to me that herein lies the element of difference: I don’t agree with the attitude based on nulla die sine linea. I do not see the point of such things, and it seems to me that it leads to a kind of intoxication.

The artist releases, through his/her work, some sort of “toxins”, personal stuff that is not always beneficent. And I do not wish to bring up here the especially powerful types of expressivity. Quite the opposite, for I have had recourse to those myself. I want to raise awareness of the damaging effect that some actions may have on the audience, and of the need to be aware of this. Performance art, for instance, is always on the edge.

It comes close to the limits beyond which the public can feel disturbed, either by powerful noise, or by way of aggressive gestures. It may involve exposure of body parts or fluids – I don’t mean that should be taboo – such as the genitals, blood, or others. Performance artists must consider this even if they express a vital, indeed moral meaning through it; you simply can’t do whatever you want to, not without being fully conscious of what you’re doing. Many artists are excessive, and therefore the phenomenon is not necessarily uniquely associated with performance art. In my view, an artist must, at least as far as public presence is concerned, be aware that she/he “is” a whole performance. To say nothing of blood or cuts, or other things that need careful consideration, rather than being used as part of a compulsory repertoire, as was the case of certain performance festivals I have attended (a performer’s “repertoire” was covering everything ranging from running to haircuts and inflicting wounds on the skin). Performing should not include futile, meaningless gestures, without the sub-textual element that I have talked about. ¬How do you think audiences perceive performance art? At the international level, we may define several directions and conceptual approaches. In Austria and Poland, artists tend to make use of physical aggression and gestures laden with significance; in Switzerland, it has different connotations, such as for instance that of entertainment broadcast by mass media. What about the expression it assumes in Romania? Is there an audience for it? And is performance an art in its own right, or is it regarded as borderline art? √ In Romania, performance is far from having entered mass consciousness. It is fortunate that, as a Latin people, we can strike up a conversation with strangers without any fear. Dropping a few remarks to someone in the street does not mean much, and it most certainly does not carry any intrusive connotation; no one takes offense. From what I know, however, theatre has moved way ahead of us. And I mean alter-

Performing History, an Open Project (Dialogues & Essays)

native theatre, which is not performed within its conventional institutional boundaries.

There are some supporters of actionism in Romania, but not too many. There is a shortage of managers and organisers. There are a few performance artists, but in most cases, they promote and organize themselves. There are those who like working with a casual audience, among people, directly, but that is not a real audience. In fact, the public that is invited is made up of colleagues, a few friends, and representatives of cultural institutions, but this is not enough. ¬ I think the only festival or event in Romania that connects directly with the public is the one held at the St. Ana Lake, and which has a real audience that actually takes part in it. √ Indeed, that event has the advantage of being organised in the proximity of a very popular camping site. I only attended it once, but there were people coming all the way from Budapest to participate in it, as they had heard something was going on there worth seeing. They were school teachers.

Also, I came to think that in Transylvania, people hold art in certain esteem, whereas in the rest of the country, arts are granted a minor status. The arts belong to those who are devoid of power, against the backdrop of a dominant macho style, of people with a lot of “clout”. People still carry the romantic vision of the artist with long hair, poor, dreamy, and sensitive, whom they tend to underestimate and treat with aggression. To a certain extent, we have yet to rid ourselves of the spirit of the Maoist Cultural Revolution. To free ourselves from venerating the working man with strong dirty hands, he who makes things, or who can fight. These are the dominant figures that artists need to take refuge from, sneaking into exhibition halls. ¬ You are one of the pioneers of photographic experimentation. What is your current relation with photography? √ Photography for me works like a scrap book, working with memories, texts, exploring its articulations with the letter, the document. ¬ You never seemed to harbour a passion for the technical performance of photography. √ No. I don’t adhere to the circle of the Photographers’ Association, very keen on technical excellence (although my experiments with macro-photography made a strong impression on them). I am very attached to the image, and I think that I wouldn’t be able to live only with text. For instance, while for the last half a year or so I have waited for inspiration to strike – and it occasionally does – I have been longing for images. But this does not make me a creator of images. I am extremely self-critical and painfully aware of the fact that a lot of things are not worth being explored, either because others have done so before me, or simply because they are marginal things. Why would I take the trouble? It’s best to be honest about it and not do it. Only this comes at the expense of a sense of ruin. I feel much deprived, saddened by not doing anything. I have the feeling that when I do choose to, I may not be able to paint or press the button and produce an image any more. ¬ You also experimented with 8 mm film. At this stage in your career, have you returned to film or video? √ I haven’t done this either. I have this project of making a film on geometry. I started on it about seven years ago in Venice (1993). I then

shot a few very distinct images, and I would like to focus on commenting on their role in the city. But my interest does not lie in the images themselves, as photos or filmed shots; what really interests me is commenting on and animating them. This is about my only film project at the moment. A film! ¬ In Masculine-Feminine6 you explored the human body in relation to the architectural framework. √ Indeed I have. For architecture, especially that of the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century is humanised in the sense that the elements of architectural decor, of the façade, gloss the human body. I made use of them as parallels. I started with the objects around me that were present in the room. I then continued with the general volumes and shapes of the roof (with triangular gable) and then got into details like awning, porches, windows, doors, statues, etc. ¬ In this evaluation and self-evaluation period, you will have most certainly tapped into the resources of digital art. Have you considered a project in the media or multimedia environment? √ Not at the moment, no. The computer is of enormous help. To me, it is something immensely enabling as I discover myself, with my mental structure, in the filing system and in all the concepts involved.

The computer reveals me to be a kind of bourgeois gentilhomme. I will not say that I organize myself emulating the ordering principle of the computer, but there is a certain resemblance involved. I know that I am orderly, that the computer perhaps makes me more orderly, more complex as well. It is an excellent collaboration. And yet I have not considered turning this into a project. A web page or computer art are not exactly what I would like to do. I put my hands on the keyboard late, so to speak, too late to be able to get so passionately close to it. But I find the concepts extremely useful and, as you can see, I use them more and more in my current expression. In a sense, I find myself still caught up in a process of self-discovery. I search for myself in wait to see if there is something else of myself showing.

Bucharest, April 2011 ¬ Eleven years on, our conversation continues. Last time we spoke about the performative dimension of your work in the context of the 1970s and 1980s, about your way of relating to the body and your views on yourself as an artist at the beginning of 2000. Here you are, after seven biennials, back in the Romanian Pavilion, preparing your participation in the Performing History project initiated by curators Maria Rus Bojan and Ami Barak in collaboration with Bogdan Ghiu. The curatorial concept revolves around your work and that of the duo Anetta Mona Chiøa and Lucia Tkácˇová. How did this collaborative endeavour come into being? √ Rather than “coming into being”, the project was brought into being by the curators, but there is nevertheless a high degree of similarity between our approaches, if anything, in provoking the galleries, the critics, and the audience. Anetta and Lucia, take chances too. ¬ What are the articulations between your artistic statement and theirs?

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√ The proposal was only half mine; it was the curators who took the initiative. At some stage in the development of the project, I even suggested that works be mixed in the display, but the curators did not go along with the suggestion; they saw these as two distinct compartments, me voicing from the past, and them from the present, as part of a generational logic. That’s it. ¬ Upon revealing the theme of the project, many said that the choice of artists was not a suitable one. √ I beg to differ. I find it really well grounded. Anetta and Lucia are far more daring artists than I am, which is only natural, for they began their artistic life in freedom. I had a different context, and I still keep my old habits. ¬ Performativity is a dominant feature of your work. Even in the recent past, I noticed that your action is witnessed only by the camera, just as it was in the 1970s. How do you relate to the camera these days? √ When I started recording events, back in the 1970s, I was not too much into theory, my relationship was with technology. It exerted a magnetism on me that was similar to that of the TV set, or to the vision provided by the camera obscura, to looking through spy holes, or to voyeurism. It was leading to the same solitude and illusion of communication as the Internet platform of today. In the 1980s, my vision on this changed. I stopped being interested in the actual recording process and developed an interest in living among others, in society, in finding my own place among people. My comeback in the 1990s made me finally think performance over, and position it in between theatre and everyday life – on stage, actors play a role, repeatedly; but playing a role in everyday life may be a dangerous thing to do, and so is improvising ad infinitum. ¬ From what I noticed, over the past decade or so, in most of your shows you update images that have different temporal references by articulating new pieces with old ones, exhibited previously or not. Is this a programmatic thing, a signature mark? √ It is the effect of the 1989 Revolution. At the age of 45, after getting over the feeling of game over (of having lost in favour of the younger generations), I took it upon myself to give voice to a past lived under a damned regime. As it happened, the works depicting the past proved to be acutely contemporary. Among other things, I displayed for instance the remnants of a broken piano, to stand as visual accusation; or my notebooks from Dialogue with Comrade Ceauøescu (a work from 1978 that I only showed after 1989). It is still very timely, as it was the time for the vast majority of people to develop a free political opinion.

I went on with this in the exhibitions to follow. The result was that some works appeared so remote, on the visual level (not only time-wise), that they seemed coming from different authors. This gave me the liberty to escape categorisation. I was an artist who was discovered far too late to be labelled in a jar. Even if all the invitations were persistently asking for works from the 1970s, I was sending the message that I was active and free. I certainly had to prove my works to be not dead but alive, contemporary, actual. ¬ Artists whose works shaped the neo-avant-gardes of the 1970s and the 1980s now seem to display a sense of renewed attention towards that phase in their careers. Marina Abramovic´ coined some years ago the con74

Ion Grigorescu Masculine–Feminine, 1976, black and white photos, courtesy the artist

Performing History, an Open Project (Dialogues & Essays)

cept of “re-performance”, questioning the legitimacy of performing a personal project again, by the artist him/herself, or by other performers.

Against the backdrop of the term “contemporary”, having gradually lost its inclusive ambiguity, there is now talk of re-performance, re-installation, of re-modernity as a theoretical solution to re-defining the exit from postmodernity. What is your way of “re”positioning towards your own work? Have you considered re-performing old projects? Re-contextualizing older projects would inevitably invite new readings. The diary is for instance a form that surfaces and resurfaces at various stages in your work. √ The diary was an excellent return. Without re-reading it, I would have thought that my texts were getting better and better, which was not the case. My first texts – the ones I wrote as a student – are daring, virulent, and they contain in inception the gist of what I was to say later. They are neither simplistic nor infantile; nor are they stylistically heavy; the will to express is a sign of coming of age. Different ages brought with them the family, parts of a common edifice, one that is much harder to build.

Indeed it has occurred to me to re-perform some of my projects. I already re-enacted Dialogue with Comrade Ceauøescu in the mid 1990s.

It was a lapse of seventeen years. I grabbed the masks and went to Ceauøescu’s palace, the House of the People, which now hosts the Parliament. I created a new dialogue, one that featured the relation between the dictator and the new governors, the new political systems.

In it, everything was relying on his policy, on his attempt to reform socialism, economy, toward a more orderly system, combining capitalism.

In a sense, this was the evolution of my perception, too, of my understanding into the new state of affairs we lived in. My travels abroad made me realise that I had been living in socialism under the illusion that socialism and Communism were two completely different, totally unrelated worlds. I then realised they were not that different after all. Socialism was autocratic and more dictatorial, imposed from the Centre, and a single-party system. But then again, there were also misunderstandings, injustice and deceit at the other end, as I came to learn.

In the end, the result was not a remake of the old dialogue, but a new one. Also, this time around it was more technical means. I got better sound and a far clearer picture compared to my struggles from 1977–78.

A couple of years before this, I had tried to redo Masculine–Feminine.

The original project was sort of unaccomplished. It didn’t come out well, it was untangled, and the subject was not well explored. I only remade part of it. I wasn’t interested in re-enacting it, as that would have been pointless. At the time, I was in a hotel in Lisbon and had a TV set in my room; I could thus check on the camera while shooting. This resulted in a slowness of the moves due to self-surveillance. It came out as a totally different thing, although I referred to the same concerns. I had the same shots on the skin, trying to get sharper details of its structure. It came across as more confident this time.

I’ve had a word with Sanja Ivekovic´ about remakes. She was noticing with disappointment a real fashion of remakes, and I, for one, am resilient to the fashionable. With remakes, other “needs” are at issue. Take the case of the Agents & Provocateurs7 exhibition in Hungary. The curators wanted Dialogue with Comrade Ceauøescu (the first and the second), and I tried to decline. What was it to Hungarians anyway, why would they take an interest in Ceauøescu, and how was 1978 relevant to them at

Ion Grigorescu Kitchen, 1976, black and white silver print, courtesy the artist

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all at that stage? I suggested some new material about censorship in current times. But they insisted, arguing that people had to know, that it was mainly important for the youth to see.

In Stuttgart, for the Subversive Practices8 project, they went for all kinds of events in South America, Hungary, Russia, Germany and Romania.

They exhibited older works, some of which had been re-photographed, re-printed or re-filmed. These were things that had been displayed illegally at the time, the representation of which had been done in secret, or under a lot of risk, some having been created in the woods, in the snow, and were now presented in a grand festive manner, meant to make an impression. It was something else. It had a whole different atmosphere. Then it came a symposium, at which everybody spoke of themselves in overly praising terms. You could tell that the status of the artist who had created these works in a moment of tenseness, who was at the time a rebel, an outcast, a dissident, had changed entirely.

She/he was now a celebrity. Somebody in the public then asked the question: “So what is the situation today? Do you create stuff like this anymore? Are attitudes such as these still common? And who are they directed against? Are you on good terms with the current governors?” The questions could hardly have been more legitimate. The works were still powerful, but totally misplaced. One ought to beware of recontextualising, as it can convey a sense of falseness. Re-makes can at times sound immensely factitious. ¬ What is the status of the body in your works? Is it a carrier of history? Is it a path to the inner self? What does it trigger in the image? √ I do not believe in fantasies, in projections of any kind; I believe in what I see. When I take pictures of myself or when I look at myself on the screen, what I see is a dummy, in fact a common individual, Musil’s man without qualities. The body and the camera compete with each other over the production of images. I am not used to working with a photographer, I let the camera get a reading of me; analog cameras were easy to adapt, as their moves were mechanical; digital ones come with settings that I cannot change in any way. ¬ The curatorial concept here foregrounds the idea of multiple modes of relating to/living HISTORY as a hypostasis of Modernity, and of history as a hypostasis of Post-Modernity, deconstructed and reconstructed, ephemeral and subjective, one in which “living” in itself defines history as performative, the multiplicity of personal histories. In your works, you often question historical milestones. How do you integrate history? √ I am an adept of the concrete. In 1974, I took part in an exhibition called Art and History. The Artists’ Union was keen on complying with the political impositions of the regime, and on producing images of utterly overblown heroism, past and present, the kind that would, by a ricochet effect, make the present appear as unforgettable history.

I was invited to take part in it as a young artist. I presented photos – TV screen shots of the “popular” parade on the occasion of 23 August9 – some of the few live broadcasts (the pictures will feature in the Venice Biennale as looped digital animations, with my original comments as subtitles). I cannot speak of “living” history as I hide behind documents, and documents are manipulated. Why is that? Because they were the same for every edition, every year, icons cast in the same mould: that of the parade – by the army, by the guilds, etc. The same old story, 76

regardless of whether it was the king’s anniversary, that of the proletariat, or of the people’s army. Granted, between the 1950s and the 1970’s, the difference was in the number of “stage directors”. The spectacle was refreshed with stadium rallies in which people were turned into living “carpets”. One needs to sit and examine the picture frame by frame (as I did), to be able to tell what each icon stood for, to detect its underlying message.

Would you be able to delineate the relation between “living” and “performing”? In 1997, in the performance Hamlet (an image of it features in the Venice exhibition) I voiced the Shakespearean dilemma of Ophelia’s gravediggers: is Ophelia’s suicide a fact of life, or a performance? Or else, it’s hard to draw the line in our acts between living and performing. In Hamlet, the one behind the curtains, Polonius – is he a spectator (a mouse) or a relative? Is there wine or poison in the chalices?

I experienced the same dilemma for the project Work (images of which feature in the Venice exhibition). I needed someone to take a picture of me, so I asked my daughter. But then, when I look at the pictures, I cannot help wondering whether people wouldn’t rather think that I just took the credit for someone else’s work.

Who is the author of the work, of a performance, of the act? Is in fact history a means of entering into communion with the others? This is why the footage containing pictures shot on 23 August is called Manifestation on the Street, because at the end, there are images of 1990, taken shortly after the revolution, images showing us taking to the streets in order to act, not to turn again into the herd of sheep led by dogs, like at the parades.

Is living unique and performance multiple (following a script)? In my view it isn’t; to me they go together, hand in hand. From the point of view of morality, we were brought up to look down on public displays, and shooting an event was supposed to be discreet, so as to get a “natural” look as opposed to a “posed” one (that would be fabricated, staged). Today no one believes in tricks anymore, no one believes in the TV news, no one believes in documentaries anymore. Art has discredited the testimonial.

In 1990, after the revolution, I participated in the symposium “Pointing East” that was held in Glasgow, and I was astonished by how fast the myth of Communism and of socialist realism had been desecrated; how suddenly everyone was laughing at Stalin, both the youth in the East and the public opinion in the West; a rush to simplify and to act politically correct, according to new rules. This made me want to perform history with no fear of the falsehood of enactment. ¬ The formal dialogue between early works and recent ones, the re-readings, creates a temporal ambiguity, multiplying meanings. There is no clearcut line between old and new in your work. How do images work in relation to time – historic and lived time, especially in video, which is a timebased medium? √ I used to shoot a lot. I still do it quite frequently. Back in the old days, when I didn’t own a camera, I felt a compelling desire to shoot everything I saw, so I was telling to myself: “Shut your eyes now and then!” since not everything was worth being shot. Now I have two cameras, but am no way near that assiduous. And yet, I am constantly on the lookout, trying to capture an event when I see one.

Performing History, an Open Project (Dialogues & Essays)Î

I have not exhibited everything I have shot. Who knows when these works will be on display, if ever. There are some things I have on tape that are not consonant with any project, nor do they meet the expectations of gallerists or curators. Various shots, I took I don’t know when, often come to mind, and I realise they would come in handy at a certain moment in time. And it doesn’t matter if they are dated, it makes no difference whether they are in synch or not; in fact, temporal planes will be juxtaposed anyway. ¬ You are now an established artist, internationally exhibited. How do you look at your work today, especially at performance? √ Performance appeared in the 1970s, and it took away art galleries’ very selling object. Eventually a solution to selling it was found. Today performance is included in galleries as it is in art fairs. I ran into fellow artists of my generation at many exhibitions that were re-reading the 1970s. We were attending the openings and as we gathered there, we had the air of blasé old men who no longer bought into consumerist stories of money or representation. And we could not wait to get back home and return to the state of semi-anonymous heroes. It’s interesting when fame strikes you in art, and what you do with it.

Ion Grigorescu Ritual Bath, 1978–1979, series of 37 color photos, courtesy: the artist and JGM Paris, Galerija Gregor Podnar Berlin

Notes: 1. Nicolae Grigorescu (1838–1907) was one of the founders of modern Romanian painting.

2. Ion Grigorescu, Diary, manuscript page from Ion Grigorescu Artist File realizsed by Cristian Robert Velescu, vol. 1, ICCA Bucharest’s documentation.

3. Monthly art magazine published by the Romanian Union of Artists during communist times.

Continued after 1989 as a quarterly, and it ceased publishing regular issues in 1993.

4. Performance dated May 1976. Photo documentation: Andrei Gheorghiu.

5. Prolog – creative initiative launched in 1985 by a group of artists including Constantin Flondor, Paul Gherasim, Cristian Paraschiv, Horea Paøtina, Mihai Sârbulescu. Ten more, including Ion Grigorescu, joined in timeeventually.

6. Masculin–Feminin, 1976, 8 mm, 14 min.

7. Agents & Provocateurs, Institute of Contemporary Art, Dunaújváros, Hungary, curators Beata Hock and Franciska Zólyom.

8. Subversive Practices: Art under Conditions of Political Repression, ’60s–’80s/South America/Europe, Württembergischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart, Germany 2009. Idea and concept by Iris Dressler, Hans D. Christ. Co-curator for Romania: Ileana Pintilie Teleagæ.

9. The official Romanian National Day under the Ccommunist regime, when parades were held as part of celebrations.

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From Flirtation through Fatal Attraction to Fixation – Balancing out the Scales of Power Raluca Voinea in conversation with Anetta Mona Chiøa and Lucia Tkácˇová

¬ Anetta and Lucia, you have been producing projects together since 2000. Was back then (compared to now) a golden time for starting to work collaboratively? Today it seems notions of individual authorship are associated either with the academic past, or with the most efficient model of business; in both cases, they are discredited as forms of indulging in capitalist structures. Instead collaborations, alliances, teams, collectives are now the avant-garde, in an artistic field which is imagining (and sometimes testing) alternative forms of economy, offering clusters of resistance, and manuals of protest. How do you see your partnership in this context, and how has it changed (if it has) your working methods when approaching a topic, over the past ten years?

Transcending the Self, Re-inventing the Creative Subject √ Starting to work together was more of an intuitive momentum back then. Gradually we began to see our collaboration as a Socratic adventure, and we started to consider it as a foetus of a possible Amazonian clan.

Although we are a duo, and not a collective, we speak of ourselves as “we” instead of “I”, which changes radically our way of reasoning and our grammar. Since we work in a permanent dialogue, in an endless conversation, we are constrained to ceaseless verbalization. Words became our primary tool for transmitting thoughts and feelings. Besides just being means of production, words surmounted to being the theme, the enemies, and the amalgams of our ideas. It is as if, while yearning to get as close to each other as possible, we are trying to abolish the language (logocentrism, reason, the nature of Western thought and culture) through words. This is why many of our works deal with text and translation. Our projects are in fact crystallized exchanges of words (ideas) that form a whole in which content and form are intermingled. As you pointed out, we have lived and worked in a liaison for more than ten years, and we have learned during this time that the aspects of compromise and negotiation are extremely important. We see it as a method of how to overcome egocentrism, competition and emulation. The aspect of reflection (self-reflection) crops up as a continuous questioning and mirroring of ourselves in the other. During the creative process, we truly dissolve into each other, beyond the boundaries of the ego, otherness and own existence and re-create ourselves as a temporary “we” without any reserves. It is very liberating, provoking and exciting at the same time. Usually a female duo is perceived as the incarnation of standard erotic male fantasies. Yet precisely because we are a female duo, we generate the cockiness and strength to wrestle with the sublimations of these fantasies. Forming and 78

performing a female duo is a way to outdare the scripts inflicted on women by the society, as well as a way to dismantle the self-imposed (internalized) mechanisms of male domination that women carry out. ¬ Your recent works, especially the performative ones, stage collective situations, in which anonymous bodies brought together create an ephemeral (albeit strong) picture, with different meanings: stirring memories of a history which is still very present in the collective imaginary, transferring abstract figures into material shapes, freezing gatherings which by their nature should be tumultuous, etc. Most of these works take place in the public space, whose codified and ritualistic functioning they are challenging. Do you believe in the power of human bodies to effect significant change in a society of immaterial relationships and delegated decision-making?

Bodies of Resistance: The Anorexia Principle √ We understand human bodies as potential barricades and loci of resistance. We believe in disobedient bodies, which surpass the enchainment imposed on them by the Empire and its minions. We activate the body in order to break the restraints of somatized habitus (gender, geographical, social...). This resistance of the body can manifest itself in different ways: in choreography (i.e. in the way it is employed) or as form (how it looks).

Lately, we have been fascinated with the phenomenon of anorexia, as an evolutionary advantage, a strategy for survival, as well as a purposeful and politically engaged expression. Anorexia is the extreme expression of self-control, a way of preserving the self and a manner of breaking free of sexual and emotional entanglements. We place the anorexic body in a tradition of self-starvation that stretches from hunger strikers to mystics, and that utilises the human body as the ultimate form of political protest or spiritual devotion. We believe the position of the anorexic tribes – with their tendency towards asceticism, dematerialization and defeat of the selfish cell – to be a powerful opposition to consumerism, and by transcending the imperative of beauty they become an uncanny threat to male domination.

In our works, we approach bodies in many diverse ways – as living memorials, time-banks (Monument to Yesterday), as transmitters of secret and forgotten messages (Manifesto of Futurist Woman), as detectors of hidden class/power structures and as a collective incarnation of a hierarchy which is oppressing them (After the Order), or as physical obstacles and catalysts of behavioural situations (Uncomfortable Heritage). We believe that in our world, ruled by invisible economies, it is the body, with its physical presence and its material urgency, that remains as the ultimate structure that embodies (through its ornamentation and ritualisation) the potential of change. ¬ You were mentioning the different languages, as well as their use and translatability, which are a constant in your works, as is the significance of the physical carrier of a specific vocabulary or even, I would add, its reduction to the bare formal elements that structure it in writing. I am thinking of works such as Manifesto of Futurist Woman, Here and Elsewhere, Haiku, All Periods in Capital... You are not only confronting the given linguistic (and theoretical) framework in which you are supposed to move (as women, as artists, or as East-Europeans), but also contesting

Performing History, an Open Project (Dialogues & Essays)

the domination of visual and rational paradigms over other forms of communication. Is this a way for you to challenge Art History itself, in the way it was written for centuries and has been deconstructed in the past few decades? Is it also a way to link to different practices from outside of the artistic field, in which the unexpected and the magical can still occur?

Magic, Alchemy, Divination and Other Destabilizations √ For us it is history as such that is interesting, the zombiesque monads from the past that hunt us till today, and the embryos of the future in the past. Today, we are living the return of history. After the triumphalist “end of history” became “old news”, it was again time to re-imagine the past and to begin from the beginning (Lenin). Moreover, we think today’s obsession with history, with re-living the past, is eschatological and could be related to demographical cataclysm and to the threat of a global catastrophe.

In our works, we like to interlink all kind of practices and thus to destabilize the historical, scientific and philosophical pillars of our society. Since our world is constituted by words (language = spectacle = nomenclature), in order to bring forth a change we are looking for

words/language that are capable of creating transformation, i.e. gossip, jokes, mantras, incantations, oral instead of written history, etc. For example, in our video The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, we focus on Darwin’s theory of evolution – one of the fundaments of our notion of the past and present state of mankind. The video depicts a kind of a “corporal translation” of one of the fundaments of our contemporary Weltanschauung. Oral transmission of scientific axioms functions here more like delivering personal experiences and interpretations. In this way, the Great Theory turns into a poetic and silly version of itself.

You mentioned the unexpected and the magical. This is exactly the way we think about art. Art is for us an alchemistic process that should have a transformative (magic) effect, a homeopathic process with re-forming consequences on the world. The retreat to the kingdom of magic is also a political decision, an escape into a field that is out of any kind of economic, legislative, or political surveillance, and beyond any control of the Empire. ¬ As “one communist and one socialist feminist”, how would you describe your relationship with Marxism and with the spectre of Marx himself?

Private Collection since 2005, Private Collection in the show “The Making of Art”, photo credits: Norbert Miguletz Fotografie 2009 for Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, courtesy: Christine König Galerie, Vienna

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√ We see Marxism as a spiritual doctrine, as a way to transcend the self. We are fascinated by how dialectical materialism culminates in the promise that only materiality will emancipate one from materiality.

Common spiritual ways lead to transcendence beyond materiality in an opposite manner, through refusal, abnegation, and denial of materiality. Nowadays, when we live in a society capable of generating superabundance, Marxism could work as a catharsis of consumerism.

We can mention here a piece of ours, the video Capital: Magical Recipes for Love, Happiness and Health, in which we use Marx’s magnum opus as a tool for divination, a device for foreseeing the future. It’s funny how Marxism is obsessed with tomorrow, inherently futurological, as if the classless world were predestined to remain unrealizable. Exactly this tragic flaw is reflected in our piece, where we subject Das Kapital to the use of a fortune teller, sort of a popular futurologist. Looking for prophecies in Marx’s writings is a performative interpretation that has the ability to transform the subject it interprets. We had an urge to update and upgrade the prevalent view of Marx, perceived as an uncomfortable ghost here in our region, which is still writhing in the purgatory between yesterday and tomorrow. It was interesting to discover how personal future is always conditioned by the collective past, and how the individual past can be shaped by shared future. ¬ For the Romanian Pavilion in Venice, you are preparing an in-situ version of your 80:20 work, inspired by the Pareto Principle, also called the rule of the vital few and the trivial many. What made you decide to assess your private and professional lives following this objective statistical rule?

Anetta Mona Chiøa & Lucia Tkácˇová Stills from the The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, 2010, video, 35 min., courtesy: Christine König Galerie, Vienna

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The Great Work of Pussifying the World √ When we bumped into the Pareto Principle it was an eyeopening moment, and we realized the obvious fact that the “just” balance of things, the 50:50 ratio, does not exist. The equilibrium of the universe lies in the paradox that most things in life are not distributed evenly. It became fascinating to try to trace this asymmetry in our lives, and we ended up frenetically balancing various aspects of how we live, think, and act.

The last version of 80:20 that we developed especially for Venice Biennale comments on the mission, structure, and potency of this institution.

We confront 80% of the reasons to be in the biennale with 20% of the reasons why not to be there. The slippery aspect of these lists is that the reasons “against” can also be seen as the reasons “pro”, and vice versa.

In these listings, we want to speak out for ourselves as artists, as women, as Easterners, but also to tackle the conscience of the depraved art world.

Furthermore, we intend to create a situation of solidarity (with both those included and not-included in the biennale), to uncover the skeletons of the power structures, to form a TAZ [Temporary Autonomous Zone], to confess without expecting absolution. And, after all, we want to pussify this choking-on-money mercantilist fossil. ¬ This is a very good description not only of the Venice Biennale but also of the art world at large, which you have mocke and challenged, and whose (unwritten) rules you have turned upside down many times. At the same time, you have proved its inexhaustible capacity for integrating in its mercantile circuit everything that once seemed to be opposing it. Do you still own the work Private Collection or has it been sold?

Performing History, an Open Project (Dialogues & Essays)

√ Yes, the impossibility of subverting the system is inciting us all the time. But besides being an attempt to mock the valorization of art, we like how Private Collection deals with the act of collecting and owning as such. As Susan Sontag points out, collecting is not characteristic of women, but rather is symptomatic of men. Collecting means belonging to a world where circulating objects are being hunted down, fought over, bought, and passed on. Women are usually not great collectors, since they are deprived of membership in this privileged universe.

Also, women are traditionally brought up not to find pleasure in competing and plundering, both of which collecting encompasses. On the other hand, it is uncommon to collect collectively, since everyone wants to own (and be owned) by himself. So we see our approach to collecting as “unorthodox” in many ways.

We employ the method of collecting in many of our works; the listings we do, for instance, are also sort of collections. The groupings and hierarchies we make are like immaterial collections, spiritual gatherings of items or people that wouldn’t otherwise meet. One does not need to be in possession of the things themselves, since to know already means to have. Collecting as writing and enumerating, as compiling a wish-list or a to-do list is already a way of owning, an expression of desire to know and to remember.

And, yes, we still own our Private Collection. ¬ Since you brought into the discussion today’s obsession with history, I would like to ask how you “dig out” forgotten characters such as Valentine de Saint-Point or Lida Clementisova, and whether you see it as a sort of “duty” of the contemporary artist to look at the unofficial or unrecorded his (her) stories and bring them into the spotlight.

Invisible Bodies Reborn √ We belong to a generation which had to learn to forget and to re-discover a new version of the past. Everything we learned at school suddenly became false, and this shift strongly relativized our trust in the institution of history as a record of “truth”. Our interest in unknown women is actually a consequence of our pre-setting towards history, and our fascination with the invisible. Every time we come across traces of a forgotten woman, of her dramatic life, we tend to project ourselves into her story. It is like reading someone’s biography and looking for blueprints of your own life, and mirroring your own past and future in it. Other women’s lives function like some kind of reflection screens for our own lives, as a means to foresee our futures.

From the first moment we found out about Lida Clementisova’s life, we started to become possessed by it, and we knew we had to chew and digest her story into art in order to let it go from our minds. We heard about a woman who spent two years in jail just because she married a man who was considered uncomfortable by the Stalinist regime.

She was incarcerated almost next door to her husband’s cell, without him ever knowing about it. Moreover, she was forced to maintain a correspondence with him and to pretend she was free, at home and doing well, even though she was being tortured and harassed. The “game” went so far that the farewell meeting with her husband, just few hours before his execution, was staged like a theatre play for one person – her husband, who was in fact the only one to not know the truth. This 81

drama was so entrapping for us that we just needed to know more; Lida just wouldn’t let us go. The interest in Valentine de Saint-Point was pretty much the same, from flirtation through fatal attraction to fixation.

What we find to be an intriguing feature of these unknown women is their invisibility. They are not pinned onto the map of history, and they didn’t make it into the collective memory; it’s as if they never existed.

In our society, based on spectacle and surveillance, invisibility is the state out of control; it’s the strength of the weak. These women are outstanding in their inconspicuousness and their weakness.

We realized that, strangely, our interest is usually in known and powerful men, and in unknown, invisible women. This apparent antinomy in fact has the same motivation, and is in the end oriented towards the same mission of balancing out the scales of power. ¬ One of your works which I like very much is Dialectics of Subjection #4, in which you bring politics into the boudoir and replace important male leaders’ aura of power with that of physical seduction. You create a situation in which messing up the world order suddenly seems possible and easy, at everyone’s hand. Do you believe that women are better leaders, or is power indiscriminately corrupting? √ We believe everyone should be able to mess with the world order from their bed. You don’t have to be strong in order to make a change. Here’s few hints for indirect action: – don’t read anything for a year – sleep only with married men – never use proper English – learn to write with your left hand – let tarot be your manager – always say yes – talk to strangers – convert to Islam – imagine your father dead – put on make-up with eyes closed – gossip – burn your favourite book – rename yourself

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Performing History in Suspended Space Chantal Pontbriand

The Question of the Leap One of the most touching images in photography’s history is Vaslav Nijinsky levitating in one of the rooms of the sanatorium where he was interned until the end of his life. Nijinsky had captured the awe of a very large public in Europe and in the Americas as the lead dancer for the Ballets Russes, the company that the inspired Serge Diaghilev had assembled and brilliantly led from 1907 to 1929. Nijinsky, also a choreographer, displayed enormous charisma, and his leaps were as renowned as his inventiveness and risk-taking in such ballets as L’aprèsmidi d’un faune. He was a member of the company from 1909 until 1919, the year his schizophrenia obliged him to be interned. His ability to master leaps and, especially, to give the impression that he could stay up in the air is what still characterises the aura of Nijinsky today.

The paradoxical stillness in the photograph is the amazing thing. Nijinsky, aged fifty in 1939, in a thickened body quite unlike the one he had during his days of stardom, is suspended in space. The impression one gets from this snapshot is very daunting, as it exhumes enormous nostalgia and a sense of loss, as well as a magical feel. Something like the possibility of impossibility appears in this image. Or, something of the “infinitely demanding”, the expression Simon Critchley uses for the latent feeling which lies between the sense of being and that of un-being.1 The space that corresponds to this uneasy feeling is a space of potential. It is where potentiality arises, and it is the place from which potentiality can lead to the leap that reflects one’s sense of existence. Through his illness, Nijinsky had crossed the threshold of being able to make ends meet, his extraordinary talent as a dancer, and the materiality of the world.

Through his body, he had been able to go beyond what one can expect from being-in-the-world, from a quotidian and mundane experience of the world. Through his body, he had been able to seek potentiality and reveal it to himself as well as to others. As tragedy struck, he was left with himself, an introverted mind in an introverted body. The moment captured in the photograph is reminiscent of what Nijinsky could do, and of the underlying capabilities in the man’s body/mind. The body carries traces of the mind’s meanderings through material and spiritual life. These memories are never lost, even though they may be suppressed or repressed by many factors, be they sickness, age or violence.

Memory is embedded in the body’s deep layers of nerves, muscles, bones and fluids. To the very material body corresponds a history which is inscribed in its very substance, and which defines the subject.

This subject is formed by memory and history, a cultural DNA that is made up of individual metabolisms, family history, individual choices as well as social history. All are vast and complex issues that play upon the making of the self through time and space. The Nijinsky photograph shows us that we carry our destinies in ourselves, and that we are forever (however diminished in comparison to our past lives, or to our potential at birth) the same unique subject.

Performing History, an Open Project (Dialogues & Essays)

Before going on with the subject of Performing History per se, and the situation of “East Europe”, there is one more leap that comes to my mind, that of Yves Klein. Klein’s Leap into the Void (1960) is a photographic landmark of twentieth century art, just as is Nijinsky’s L’aprèsmidi d’un faune with its scandalous underpinnings because of the sexual enactment in it. Leap into the Void is a work of art, although it does take the appearance of a snapshot. It is, in contrast to the Nijinsky image, a staged photograph taken by the German Harry Shunk with the collaboration of the Hungarian János Kender. What we see is a man leaping out of a window. Yves Klein himself played the part. The action of the body leaping in a horizontal mode, with arms and legs raised as though a bird in flight, is photographed in counter-shot looking upwards. The body is hovering, as it has just ejected itself from the top window of a house. The front part of the house is visible on the left side of the image, and a cyclist is going by in the street. Foliage surrounds the scene. The aura of the scene is typically traditional French, although it was shot in 1960 and the choice of location and décor could have reflected a more modernist view of the country. What was the flamboyant Yves Klein getting at here? The suicidal act of leaping into the void, placed in a reassuring French environment, as it is represented here in a somewhat bucolic village environment, is itself suspended between divergent interpretations. It could be a prank (and it is – the photograph is a montage and not a snapshot), and this indication is primarily given to us through the “pose” in which the figure presents itself, the open arms, the raised head and torso, the unassuming cyclist below who rides by nonchalantly. The pose is more that of a free glorious bird than that of a desperate renegade. Still, the figure is leaping into the void, which is quite a risk-taking activity. Is he defying nature, defying life, defying history? Again we ask: what was the artist Yves Klein aiming at? As a French artist in the 1950s and 1960s (Klein died at thirty-four and was a practicing artist from 1948 to 1962), Klein positioned himself in the context of the art world of his time, knowingly so with regards to the French avant-garde, triumphant American art, and the Asian influences he had as a judo master before he became an artist.

The “leap into the void” is an act to be examined in terms of its relevancy in defining one’s identity and one’s sense of belonging. One is to leave the material world in order to embrace the void, the unknown.

One escapes from the Real in order to experience one’s fantasy, or to question immateriality itself. Yves Klein was to put value on the unvaluable, on that disposition in art that, until then possibly, escaped the traditional economy of art. He went on to show the “void” by exhibiting it, to sell the void even in terms of giving it an exchange value through bonds. He turned painting into performance, and was in a constant search for what this void that art is made of could possibly mean if it was exposed, brought to the foreground.

In his Thesis on the Philosophy of History, Walter Benjamin compares history to the tiger’s leap into the past.2 The leap is elliptic: it goes beyond any precise reality, and is enabling in the sense that it gives you the ability to extract yourself from the present and to jump into the future, while jumping from the past. Both of the figures being discussed here have this latent desire in common. In the leap, one does not, in fact one cannot stay in place. The leap can be involuntary, mechanical, as one might

say it was in Nijinsky’s case, or it can be concocted, prepared and then performed, as it was for Yves Klein. In the latter case, the leap becomes a metaphorical act, an act of rhetoric that aims at provoking change and developing new knowledge.

East Europe is a reality that in principle has no longer existed since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, although this year has become a symbolic one with regards to the emancipation of countries that were associated with the Eastern bloc. The situation evolved differently in each country, and came out of a history where different languages, cultures, and political formations had played a determinant role. This should not be forgotten in thinking about the artists who experienced the onset of communism in their respective countries, the often-dictatorial and opaque regimes that followed, and the “colonialist” imperative of Soviet influence. Post-communism is another story, creating drastic change in these countries’ economies and political structures, veered towards profit-making, personal enrichment, and often corruption. The leap into the future can be a leap into the past, as it can signify regression as well as emancipation.

Confronting the Mirror Ion Grigorescu is now seen as one of Romania’s leading artist coming out of the 1960s. Throughout his works, he has enacted his personal mode of being in the context of a situation that became more and more contrived for decades until Ceauøescu was pushed out of power in 1989, a consequence of the Romanian revolution. Quite early on in his artistic career, Grigorescu’s works were no longer allowed to be shown in public, because they were seen as defiant of what the regime would allow. Working in his home, painting, or using photography or 8 mm film, he nevertheless developed an oeuvre that has been rediscovered in the past decade through exhibitions in different countries, including a retrospective in Warsaw in 2009. There were approximately ten years (corresponding to the 1980s) during which he stopped doing artwork and turned towards restoration. One can think that this “isolation” from the art world carried more than the just bare necessities of livelihood. The restoration he was doing was going on in churches and monasteries in Romania’s countryside and, considering Grigorescu’s interest in the Romanian patrimony, it can even be seen as a political act in itself. Grigorescu was critical of Ceauøescu’s doctrine with regards to the necessary destruction of an “old” Romania, with its traditions and beliefs, in order to install his vision of communism and modernization, following Engel’s ideas on systemization and the reduction of the differences between the city and the country. The ambition underlying these important transformations in Romania was to build a socialist society that could be multilaterally developed. Ceauøescu destroyed whole quarters of Bucharest, Grigorescu’s own city, as well as whole villages, and relocated their inhabitants to city dwellings in order to fulfil his dream. With his 8 mm camera hidden, Grigorescu went out and filmed these destroyed parts of the city and the new buildings (and often deplorable living conditions) that resulted from this policy. Later on, he would film the city again, this time destroyed by the very strong earthquake of 1977. Every thirty or forty years, major earthquakes have struck Romania, and Grigorescu has been quick to note that another one is lurking on the horizon.

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Grigorescu has developed a philosophical attitude to the context in which he has evolved. He has never left Romania, as many other avant-garde artists did even many decades ago, such as for example Cadere, who was active in the Parisian avant-garde in the 1970s. I mentioned before that his retreat from an active life as an artist was not necessarily circumstantial. In his work, we can witness an attitude that constantly manifests itself, and is embedded within the banality of everyday activity. He photographs, for example, the interior of his living quarters from all angles.

The black and white photographs are made with a fish-eye lens, hence encircling the image, confining the spaces of the dwelling even more, distorting them at the edges, and somewhat blurring parts of the them.

One is reminded that he could not show his work publicly, and that the private “sphere” was his domain.3 In this sphere, Grigorescu carried out an intense investigation of himself, the artist, the Romanian, the incarnate figure of a contemporary life evolving on the threshold of his home and of his country. In a series of performative photographs, he portrays himself in many guises: often nude, he is seen sitting or standing in his dwelling, assuming different poses. Many of these are uninhibited poses where he displays his body, with his genitals often at the forefront, such as in At Home (1964). In a series called Delivery (1977), he enacts a woman in the process of giving birth. Putting sex and sexuality at the forefront of these images, he tackles gender questions that would later become major ones in intellectual discourse in the West, but that remained taboo in a society dominated by maleness, even in art circles. The images are greyish but altogether bold, as the body inhabits the frame to its edges. There often are overlays, with the same body covering itself in another pose, so as to erase the “original” one, or to suggest in the stillness of the image some sort of movement, some form of oscillation or trembling. Or, the overlay is of a different kind; in Washing of the Face (1976), for example, he simply goes through the motions of washing himself with water, whereas in Ritual Bath (1971), he covers his body with blue paint. In both cases, he is metaphorically dealing with the void, through the “invisibility” of the water, as through the use of the colour blue – associated with the celestial void of infinity (Yves Klein used this strategy as well).

The liquids in the latter case redouble the body itself, covering it with an instance of the Other that is the same. In Washing with Light (1978), a similar process occurs, as light, although present, is seemingly immaterial and “invisible”. Tautology and energy, personal stamina and presence are constantly at play. In a film called Boxing (1977), Grigorescu, again nude, fights the image of himself, a disappearing shadow, constantly reappearing, only so that the boxing can continue. Life here takes on the stale taste of something that possibly has too much to do with the haunting ghost. Ghostliness is something to be fought, but doing so seems somewhat hopeless, although confronting it means coming face to face with a manifestation of energy and some kind of (ghostly) willpower (in another duel, also a film where Grigorescu himself appears with his double, a conversation with Ceauøescu is staged: Dialogue with Comrade Ceauøescu, 1978. The artist puts a mask on an effigy of the dictator, and argues with him about the regime).

The redoubling of the subject as rendered in these works is closely linked to the blurring of the lines, the disappearance of the outline, and of the 84

other. The insistent use of the mirror, necessary to create the images of the self that are characteristic of this period in Grigorescu’s photography and film work, recalls Jacques Lacan’s essay on the “Mirror Stage”.4 Although the artist read psychoanalytic theory, it seems to me quite doubtful that the photographic and filmic works in question can be seen as direct applications of these readings. These were first and foremost performances. The “performances” go beyond words or theory, as performance does, being an attitude that is mostly related to a specific time-place. It is, however, convenient here to recall Lacan’s theory, which says that the mirror stage is an essential one in the formation of one’s identity, as it enables the subject to realize that one is an entity and not a fragmented body. In the stream of consciousness that runs through this essay, relating the mirror stage to the leap into the void is a pathway that enables us to understand Grigorescu’s unique work and its relation to the dynamics of Eastern Europe, to the past, and to the lingering ethos that subsists in today’s new context.

If the mirror stage is endemic to the formation of one’s identity, the leap is just as essential in order to be accountable to the other, even more so to that larger other that constitutes history itself. This interstice is where Grigorescu’s work inscribes itself. Through his work, he leaps into the mirror, just as Alice does in Lewis Carroll’s novel.

What is behind the mirror, on the other side, is a trembling world. Grigorescu’s films and photographs are most often quite blurred, and defy gravity as the images are seemingly taken in a random way. Self-portraits done in front of mirrors such as Mirrors (1976), Head Movements (1977), Self-Superposed (1977) or Super-position (1979) display the blurred body, an effect that is often multiplied in the work through superpositions, overlaying of the bodily images of the same into multiple compacted bodily imagery. Series such as City in Socialism (1974–87) or Election Rally (1975), however, represent moments when he departed from this type of auto-imagery and investigation and instead went out into the city to seize images revealing the (in)consistencies of the regime, its effects on the built environment, the living conditions, and the body language of its inhabitants. These randomly taken images, which scrutinize the absurd uniformity of the new cityscape, or the equally absurd gestural activity of make-believe politics in the making, render a personalized view of an oppressive situation. In the trembling, in the off-focus, a view emerges that is truer to reality as experienced by the individual, than to any “perfect” documentary image (in any case controlled by the state apparatus). Through the off-focus, the infra-thin space that occurs when taking images with a simple camera, the individual is permitted to reappear in the context of a socio-political environment thwarted by communist ideology.

The off-focus also appears in moments of flight and leaping. It is almost as though Grigorescu’s images have something of an aerial view, shot from a distance. His images signal distance and presence simultaneously, the view of an observer-participant. He co-inhabits, and co-shares the space that he shoots in, and never abandons this position. The blurred gaze is his gaze, but it nevertheless connects him to a reality from within. Far-sighted or near-sighted, his view is “off”, tangential, to the side, and, in being so, becomes more revelatory of a common condition.

The gatherings he photographs in series such as Florina’s Party (1974)

Performing History, an Open Project (Dialogues & Essays)

or Snagov (1971) portray intimate gatherings in a home, or picnicking at the lakeside. Yet beyond the presumed innocence of the scenes, the interplay of private and public and the weight of surveillance are constantly present. As viewers, we ignore what all these eye glances are about, as a seemingly incoherent scene is fragmented through the camera lens. The underlying opaque agenda appears as a latent threat to the conviviality on display.

The apparatus of image making itself is constantly at play in this work, as it is in much of the art that came out of the Eastern bloc. Conceptual strategies such as working with language, photography, and actions were employed profusely because of the flexibility, the discreteness, and the low cost they represented. The apparatus was part of the leap. In a situation where art-making was contrived and restricted, alternative strategies had to be developed. The body, always a thermometer of the world, became a unique and necessary tool in art-making. It played the role of an immediate respondent to the situation, an incubator as well as a mediator in the context.

The Next Steps The body is still a main concern of artists today, who are active in the post-communist era, and who come from these countries, many of which have joined the European Union, and hence now form the New Europe. The issues are numerous and complex, as one does not emerge from the communist joug easily. Memory, language, image forms, and vocabulary still carry the imprint of past times. The two women artists who have been invited to share the Romanian Pavilion with Grigorescu, namely Anetta Mona Chiøa and Lucia Tkácˇová, display in their work strategies that address this new era. Working in video, performance, installation, and text, they use conceptual strategies that deal with questions of gender, as well as post-communist and post-capitalist issues. In video works such as Porn (2004–2007) or Dialectics of Subjection (2006), they criticize and question the language of politics, pornography and media by enacting visual or spoken sequences in which they themselves appear. In other works, such as International Art Collection (2005), they comment on the status of the object as a work of art, its marketability and exchange value. These works arise from banality, the banality of the everyday conversation, or objects, or images; it is in the observation and remixing of this banality that they seek to elucidate meaning and transformation. In Manifesto of Futurist Woman (Let’s Conclude) (2008), they film a group of young women parading as majorettes, with their batons playing out a futurist manifesto written in Semaphore signals by Valentine de Saint-Point (all about transformation and woman’s roles), highlighting contradictions in history. They have transformed the Pyramid of the Capitalist System caricature into a human pyramid with participants dressed in different colours, reflecting statistical charts. The film being shown at the Venice Biennale again demonstrates the ironic stance that their work takes vis-à-vis history. Here a group of people hold up a balloon in the form of a huge fist. The “fist”, emblematic of the worker’s revolution, the communist revolution, floats somewhat chaotically, held by today’s protagonists who are caught in the uncertainty of the times, and who are no longer driven by utopian dreams. Their work is edgy and bold, and finds ways to question

situations, conflicts, and paradoxes that constitute social and political blockages.

These blockages continue to be at the heart of Grigorescu’s work as well. He has manifested his concern yet again in a recent video, Sleep (2008), where we see him sleeping in the nude, fragile and emaciated, a living incarnation of the passage of time. As he turns around and around from one side to the other, we wonder, possibly as he wonders, where the next leap will come from, or what it might lead to.

Notes: 1. Simon Critchley, Infinitely Demanding, London, Verso, 2007.

2. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History”, in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, trans. Harry Zohn, New York, Schocken, 1969, pp. 253–264.

3. On the concept of spheres, Bruno Latour recently published an essay in which he contrasts networks and spheres in the context of a “globalized” world. Grigorescu’s sphere was a strong point of his activity, more so than connecting to networks. “Unlike networks, spheres are not anemic, not just points and links, but complex ecosystems in which forms of life define their ‘immunity’ by devising protective walls and inventing elaborate systems of air conditioning. Inside those artificial spheres of existence, through a process Sloterdijk calls ‘anthropotechnics’, humans are born and raised. The two concepts of networks and spheres are clearly in contradistinction to one another: while networks are good at describing long-distance and unexpected connections starting from local points, spheres are useful for describing local, fragile, and complex ‘atmospheric conditions’ – another of Sloterdijk’s terms.

Networks are good at stressing edges and movements; spheres at highlighting envelopes and wombs.” Bruno Latour, “Some Experiments in Art and Politics”, e-flux journal, #23, March 2011.

4. Cf. Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience”, in Ecrits: A Selection, New York, W. W. Norton & Company, 2004, pp. 1–8.

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Performing History: Try Again. Fail Again. Fail Better Dessislava Dimova

There is a constitutive misunderstanding in the relationship between the former East and West. A misunderstanding so obstinate that even though it seemed to be resolved, at least in the globalized world of art, the myth of the “wild” Eastern European artist who cannot quite grasp the critical role of art within capitalism or the codes of post-colonial critique continues to persist.

Anetta Mona Chiøa and Lucia Tkácˇová certainly understand the politics of this misunderstanding, and have crafted their own, distinctively pleasurable (although no less disquieting) image of the wild East. But more significantly, they have also managed to develop a method of critique that represents a certain break with some of the characteristics with which we have become used to identifying the art of the post-communist transition.

While few Eastern European artists were concerned (or felt comfortable) with the critique of commodity fetishism that has consistently been part of Western discourses of art, the duo effortlessly, though somewhat irreverently, operates with Marxian terminology, having perfectly understood and appropriated the language of the West. There is undoubtedly a generational shift in the work of Chiøa and Tkácˇová, as during the last twenty years, Eastern Europe has managed to catch up with the experience of capitalism, and its art has more or less successfully joined the Western institutional system.

But speaking the same language does not necessarily mean that we want to say the same things. The work of the two artists is not a labour of translating one historical experience into the language of another. Chiøa and Tkácˇová use translation as a means of revealing the dominance of one discourse over another, and the fact that, despite the ideology of diversity, there is only one language that one needs to speak today in order to be understood.

The artists’ method of addressing this domination seems like reading the notion of critique somewhat in reverse. After all, it was Marx who said that the world of capitalism is topsy turvy, and who himself favoured inversion in the form of his writing. In a world where humans are reduced to objects, and where objects have a social life, it seems only appropriate to keep an eye on the opposites and thus to eventually try to reverse the roles of West and East, of woman and man, of materialism and spirituality, and to see the critique of domination as the domination of critique.

What Chiøa and Tkácˇová propose from their own temporal and cultural position is an effective historical understanding of critique that allows them to use the experiences of both East and West. They assemble a method that is both critical and productivist, a method that develops the Western notion of art as critique of society through the perspective of the avant-garde actualization of art in life.

Here I shall try to map out some of those historical references, and how they are brought together to play out a critique of history itself.

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Subjects of Transformation Capitalism has been as appealing and promising to the most radical Eastern European artists and intellectuals as communism has been to the left in the West.

The work of Anetta Mona Chiøa and Lucia Tkácˇová operates precisely at the intersection of these two mutually attracted and inspired but diverging intellectual and artistic traditions.

The social role of art in the socialist East did not allow for a notion of the autonomous work of art to appear. Art was not for sale, be it for personal contemplation or even as a product defined by formal aesthetic demands. From the programmatic early avant-gardes and their radical redefinition of both form and function to socialist realism’s canon for realistic form and socialist content, it was the ideological purpose of art rather than its specific manifestations that was leading the way. Critique thus developed over different lines in this case. It became a mode of inclusion and expansion rather than of exclusion and differentiation.1 It manifested itself in implying a communist content in industrial and technological development in the case of the Russian avantgardes, or in expanding the field of the authorized by including more topics, and more formal approaches in the framework of socialist realism. The critical autonomous artwork produced by and for (but simultaneously functioning against) the market was a notion that Eastern European artists had to grapple with post-1989.

The Soviet avant-garde suggested an equivalence between, on one hand, the creation of a new communist human body engaged in production, and on the other hand, the new communist productivist objects as “comrades” (as Rodchenko called them). If Marx lamented the fact that exchange relationships changed the nature of human relationships from social to material and vice versa – that is, if they turned relationships between mere things social – then for theorists like Arvatov, there was a way of using this inverted schema in positive terms. Instead of simply trying to bring things back to their “natural” state and recuperate living relationships between humans and material connections between things, the avant-garde saw a permeability in commodity fetishism that offered a model of a new subject-object relationship, where objects were human counterparts.2 This productivist form of “critique”, which embraces and works with, and not against, the contradictions of the social system it is embedded within, is the operational model of the works of Chiøa and Tkácˇová.

Thus for example in the 2007 series The Trivial Few (80:20), the realities of the art world and the position of the female artist are simultaneously radicalized and banalized by being subjected to the Paretto Principle – the law of the “vital few” according to which about 20% of the effects are responsible for about 80% of the causes. This principle famously translates into the fact, for example, that 20% of the population owns 80% of the riches. Political and pure artistic concerns are mixed together with worldly preoccupations in the latest version of the piece, which discusses 80% of the reasons to take part in the Venice Biennale versus 20% of the reasons not to. Some of the reasons for look more like reasons against, and the list against is longer than the one for, but still the work embraces the dissension as part of the inner conflict that defines the position of the artist in society today. The work

Performing History, an Open Project (Dialogues & Essays)

thrives on contradictions on every level: the triumphant facade of the pavilion is completely feminized by the confessional mode of the arguments, enumerated in an unpretentious and quite “trivial” list-of-ingredients form. The open display of the moral and professional torment of the artist seems to seek redemption in the humorous attitude and the unavoidable practicalities of life. But any hope has already been denied in the very principle of the work, as the 80–20 rule is essentially about incongruence and injustice. Thus the entrance to the pavilion serves as a purgatory, an antechamber of the art institution, where all of its sins are laid bare. All false promises and hopes should be abandoned not only by the artists, but also by all those who enter the exhibition space.

What happens then when this inclusive critical model encounters the politics of inclusion of global capitalism? Might the positive mode of finding radical terms of existence for even the most conventional objects (as in Tatlin’s primitivism) collapse into the optimism of global expansion and the co-existence of differences of post-industrial capitalism?

In fact, the over-accumulation of inclusions eradicates the exoticism of difference.

In If not Us, Who? If not Now, When? (2010), the slow-motion performance of a group of protesters dressed in grey produces a generic image of revolution: raised fists, banners, determined facial expressions.

This is an image that not only signifies protest, but is also the image that any protest should adopt in order to be recognized as such. Revolution is a branded image. But the elimination of any specificity in the performance – there are no slogans, no colour, no specific context – paradoxically rescues the revolutionary image from its “commodity aesthetics”. The infinite inclusiveness – to the point of becoming generic – ultimately undermines the value producing difference of the inclusiveness of capitalism.

The work enacts the contradictions that any protest or revolutionary movement faces today – in the West, East or South. On one hand, there is the image of the revolution – impossible, repeated and mediated until specificity has been completely lost – ready to accommodate any program, any slogan. On the other hand, there is the question of whether the generic, unspecific aspect of protest – the physical gathering of angry human crowds – has become the only way for voicing and enacting political discontent today.

Anetta Mona Chiøa & Lucia Tkácˇová Memory Without History (Memorial to Lida Clementisová), 2009, Clematis Hybride flowers in pots, slide projection, courtesy: Christine König Galerie, Vienna

The (Post)Communist Body is a Woman’s Body The body had a particular importance in the history of the Eastern European neo-avant-gardes. For the artists from the highly controlled totalitarian societies, the body was the only possible site for regaining an individual subjectivity, and thus became one of the earliest media and tools for artistic experiment. Some of the first avant-garde gestures of the 1960s and 1970s were in effect body-related and private.

The first efforts to recuperate power over the body by post-totalitarian artists came as an immediate reaction to the mythological system of the late totalitarian state. The body had to acquire an actuality unrelated to myth, a body-in-reality. This was a painful re-appropriation. This body was often naked, lonely, cast into doubt and then reconstructed, either by the means of technique (camera angles, collage, composition), or by self-aggression and manipulation: tying, enclosing, tattooing, etc.

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It was subjected to the post-communist transformation in a very physical way, almost as an object.

The work of Anetta Mona Chiøa and Lucia Tkácˇová, on the contrary, is more directly concerned with the empowering of the body. The notion of empowerment that they develop is not unequivocal, and is in turn subjected to a redefinition. It is through the female body – individual and collective, personal and socially constructed – that the artists unfold the complexities of the body as a political territory.

The video Monument to Yesterday (2008) by Chiøa and Tkácˇová is a mise-en-scène where the naked body is confronted with the set of constructions that has transformed it from a conscious actor into a mere performer of its historical conditions.

A woman is performing a clumsy striptease in front of a photo-wallpaper reproducing an autumn forest. The appearances of the performer do not correspond with the aesthetic canon of the media and beauty industry, which we almost automatically apply to any visual representation of the female body. The woman dances for herself, and is not promising anything to the spectator. Consequently, her dance does not appear immediately erotic. In short, the woman in the video looks too “real”.

As if to address the lack of eroticism in the image, the text of Valentine de Saint-Point’s Futurist Manifesto of Lust (1913) runs as subtitles: “Flesh creates as spirit creates.”

“Lust is the carnal quest for the unknown.”

“Lust is the expression of a being projected beyond itself.” “... we must make lust into a work of art.”

Valentine de Saint-Point’s manifestoes were aimed at combating the futurists’ “scorn for woman”, but her answer to Marinetti was not exactly feminist. It criticised precisely the feminist who sought equal rights to men, and claimed instead that only understanding and employing the instinctual and irrational aspects of feminine nature can bring real change.

The body in the video is reclaimed in its materiality as pure flesh, capable of creating as well as destructing in Valentine de Saint-Point’s terms. Recapturing the power of this materiality is only possible if it is rescued from both the ideological body of the masses of the communist state as well as from the unified perfection of the image of the “star”, in which the desires of the masses are projected.3 Although there is nothing identifiable as specifically post-communist in the performance or in the woman herself, the presence of the photo-landscape glued onto the wall that the dancer leans against for support is quite symbolic. The natural background recalls the promise of capitalism as a “return to nature” for the former socialist subjects. But privatization (including the regaining of ownership over one’s own body) turned out to be an artificial construct, as fabricated and as theatrical as that of the socialist expropriated communal existence.

What rescues the commodified human body in the work of Anetta Mona Chiøa and Lucia Tkácˇová is that it performs its commodificiation with the same consciousness of theatricality and Brechtian distancing that the socialist body used to perform its ritualized ideological existence.

The artists return to the collective, organized body in the video Manifesto of the Futurist Woman. (Let’s Conclude) (2008). The final part of 88

Valentine de Saint-Point’s Manifesto of the Futurist Woman (1912) is this time transmitted as a message in Semaphore flag signal language through the choreographed movements of a group of majorettes dressed in quasi-military uniforms. This now antiquated and largely military language is of course impossible to understand for most people today. The girls seem unaware of their instrumentalization, smiling and enjoying their performance. Without the knowledge of the message, their perfectly co-ordinated movements and short red skirts represent a purely erotic phantasm of political power – a happy marching army of beauty and youth. But the words of Valentine de Saint-Point hidden in the choreography of the bodies imbue their seeming naiveté with a power that should ultimately liberate not only women themselves, but also men: “Woman, for too long diverted into morals and prejudices, go back to your sublime instinct . . . Instead of reducing man to the slavery of . . . sentimental needs, incite your men to surpass themselves. . . . You are the ones who make them.”4 Angels of History Eastern European art has long time been trapped in a search for an identity, and in mapping out the never-ending differences that had been defining it as “other”. In the meantime, the West’s choice of “others” kept changing, and art from Eastern Europe had to accept its fading into the category of not-quite-different-and-exotic- enough.5 Besides the “self-colonizing”6 attitude of the East, there was a genuine difference in terms of the world-view and the tools for analyzing the post-communist situation. Questions of power and dominance were treated from sometimes incommensurable standpoints, and the effort to translate and exchange historical experiences for the purpose of a common critique of society was often far from successful. Among the problems of some early East–West exchanges, organized and documented by Susan Buck-Morss, is the frustration of Fredric Jameson following one such discussion: “To put it briefly, the East wishes to talk in terms of power and oppression; the West in terms of culture and commodification. There are really no common denominators in this initial struggle for discursive rules...”7 The “identity roller-coaster” on which post-socialist art embarked not only failed to resolve this discursive problem, but also relegated Eastern Europe to the role of the one who always needs to “catch up”. Anetta Mona Chiøa and Lucia Tkácˇová continue to explore the persistence of these imbalances, and to work on the emancipation of the Eastern discourse.

But seeing their work simply as a form of recasting the struggle for discursive rules and manipulating its results would be missing the most important part of their project. Because ultimately, beyond the pleasure of confusing and destabilizing the winners, Chiøa and Tkácˇová’s quest is into history, in an effort to clear the visual and ideological clutter, and to rescue for the present what is still alive from the historical emancipatory projects.

Returning to the avant-garde projects of the early 20th century has been a way for a new generation of Eastern European artists to explore their common past with the West, and for Western European artists to reconnect with the utopian and programmatic past of art. While Chiøa and

Performing History, an Open Project (Dialogues & Essays)

Tkácˇová readily explore various manifestations of modernism (futurism, the body as mass ornament), they do not simply succumb to the appeal of the forms it has produced. Instead, they re-enact the fixed historical notions, bring them back to life, and reveal both their contemporary inadequacies as well as their potential for re-actualization.

Thus in After the Order (2006), the crowds that have been gathered into mass ornaments become actual sculptures of people cluttered on top of each other, instead of being organized in the geometrical structures of the human pyramids from the modernist past. But although the work is a comment on the aestheticised use of the human body and its dangers, these living sculptures are also a contemporary re-enactment of a 19th-century caricature representing the pyramidal structure of capitalist society. In the performance staged by the artists, a new level of division is added to the class separation of society from the original drawing – the historical one. The new, contemporary crowd is not identifiable by class; any passer-by, rich or poor, could have participated in this barely organized human mass. This shift points towards a contemporary situation where wealth, power and domination in Western democracies are distributed differently, and are more complex to identify, and thus to combat.

In the video Try Again. Fail Again. Fail Better (2011), the fist as a universal symbol of protest is another historical representation that is reactivated as a revolutionary image. As an impressive balloon that dominates and drags along the people who are trying to navigate it, it reveals its nature as a fixed ideology that, despite the airy promise of its new and lighter form, takes on a life of its own, different from the hopes and beliefs that were initially invested in it. At the same time, people themselves are weighing down the balloon, trying to control its movement and direction, and turning it into an aesthetic device, a theatrical prop.

The question the artists seem to raise here is how to free revolution and protest from their own representations, from their ideologically reified and commercially fetishized image.

This video shows one possible strategy for dealing with this problem of image: it is in the materialization of the image, in its making into a quasiliving object – if not a friendly comrade, then certainly a subjective counterpart of the human subjects.

The series of collages Before or After (2011) takes on a specifically Western history of protest – the feminist demonstrations of the 1960s and 1970s. The slogans from the images of feminist protest are replaced by new ones, which seem to undermine the determination of the dissent they document. “Left or right”, “Magic or Logic”, “Yesterday or Tomorrow”, “Cool or Hot” are contradictions that shockingly take any programmatic logic away from the protest. How can a protest succeed if the protesters themselves are not certain of what they want? There is undoubtedly an allusion to Valentine de Saint-Point here, with her appeal to a feminine and not feminist approach. But the conviction with which the women in the pictures hold the banners of their contradictions, uncertainty, and confusion makes one think of the nature of recent protests and upheavals, which confused the observers with their lack of political program, but which were also automatically attributed to leftist dispositions. While the grey manifestation in If not Us, Who?...suggests a degree zero of protest as a form of political action, Before or After

is an experiment in the actualization of a specific historical construction – the feminist protests and the liberation of the woman’s body (and the deliberately feminized body of the crowd) from “prejudices and morals”.

“Alongside modern evils, we are oppressed by a whole series of inherited evils...”8 Marx’s ghostly warning “Le mort saisit le vif” (the dead holds the living in his grasp) is being programmatically and systematically materialised by Chiøa and Tkácˇová in an effort to make the present truly come alive.

The works of Anetta Mona Chiøa and Lucia Tkácˇová thus indicate yet another shift, one away from the notion of “performing” history towards one of “enacting” history. The difference might seem subtle, but it is also historically determined. While socialist subjects were performing the theatre of ending history in the communist future (a very realistic, Stanislavsky method performance indeed), as post-socialist subjects they found themselves in another end-of-history scenario – that of the triumph of capitalism. What the two artists are attempting today from the position of these dead-end historical experiences is to recover a possibility for acting in history. In their work, historical subjects, objects or images acquire a life and the possibility to act, and are thus subjected to the test of time – that of the present moment. Ultimately, through reconnecting with history, a hope to recover a notion of the future, and thus of politics, emerges.

Notes: 1. Boris Groys sees the post-socialist attitude of inclusion as a continuation of the universalist logic of communist ideology, and as being in contrast to the Western post-modernist logic of opposing and combating the infinite repetition of appropriation and privatization that manifests in a generally critical approach. “... hence it [the politics of inclusion] is a utopian radicalization of the communist demand for the total inclusion of one and all, including those who are generally considered dictators, tyrants and terrorists, but also capitalists, militarists and profiteers of globalization... [which] was often misunderstood as irony...” Boris Groys, “Privatizations”, in Art Power, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 2008, p. 170. Here I expand the term through a reference to the “inclusive” notion of the socialist object of the Russian avantgarde.

2. Christina Kiaer, Imagine No Possessions: The Socialist Objects of Russian Constructivism, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 2005, pp. 31–32.

3. “Hollywood created a new mass figure, the individualized composite of the ‘star’. . . . The star, quintessentially female, was a sublime and simulated corporeality.” Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 2002, p. 148.

4. Valentine de Saint-Point, “Manifesto of the Futurist Woman”, 1912, in Aneta Mona Chiøa/Lucia Tkácˇová, Berlin, nbk/Cologne, Walter König, 2009, p. 100.

5. Ekaterina Degot, “How to Obtain the Right to Post-Colonial Discourse”, Moscow Art Magazine digest, 1993–2005 at http://xz.gif.ru/numbers/moscow-art-magazine/how-to-obtainthe-right.

6. Alexander Kiossev, “Notes on Self-colonising Cultures”, in B. Pejic´ and D. Elliott (eds.) Art and Culture in post-Communist Europe, Stockholm, Moderna Museet, 1999, pp. 114–118.

7. Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe, p. 237.

8. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. I, London, Penguin Classics, 1976, 1990, p. 91.

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A General and Universal Concept of Resistance* Piotr Piotrowski

Male body art, or body art produced by men, functioned during the 1970s within different frames of reference. As the exhibition Body and the East persuasively demonstrated, this type of work found many enthusiasts in Eastern Europe.1 One could cite here a long list of examples.

The majority of artists addressed the issue of the body’s physical and psychological condition and the limits of its endurance when exposed to various external factors. In general, the body was defined in those works according to individual (my body) as well as universal (human body) categories. Sometimes it was instrumentalized and treated as a foil (a quasi-transparent surface) to the presumed interior depth of the artist, which had to be penetrated. Those types of projects tended to confirm the traditional dualism of the body and the soul without questioning its hierarchical assumptions. Self-knowledge of the body was supposed to lead to general conclusions concerning the body as such (conceived within that dualistic tradition), and the general human condition. The process of coming to bodily and psychological self-knowledge often occurred through action which took the form of a happening or performance, something that could be easily inscribed within the traditional male role of the active subject.

Paradoxically, the issue of the gendered definition of the male body was rarely raised, and the works tended to accept – rather than question – the traditional parameters of male sexuality. In many projects, the male body simply confirmed the functions assigned to it by tradition. It did not become an instrument of critique. At most, it challenged social norms of behaviour but did not question the philosophical foundations of traditional identity politics. Of course, there were departures from the norm.

But the most interesting meaning that appeared in this context related to the political dimension of male body art. Any process that led to selfknowledge and questioning of conventions and that breached official ideological indoctrination and challenged accepted morality, in particular in those countries where the scope of tolerance was minimized or entirely eliminated, acquired political significance and as such deserves careful analysis. [. . .]

One could say that, in general, male body art tended to desexualize the body, to marginalize or eliminate gender. The exhibition and the use of the male body was therefore connected during the 1970s and 80s with completely different meanings from the exhibition and use of the female body, since the latter was consistently subjected to a strong influence of heterosexual eroticism grounded in the dominant male gaze, which in turn linked the male gaze with male desire and pleasure. Early * Excerpts from the book Piotr Piotrowski, In the Shadow of Yalta: Art and the Avant-garde in Eastern Europe, 1945–1989, trans. Anna Brzyski, London, Reaktion Books, 2009, chapter 9, “The Politics of Identity: Male and Female Body Art”, copyrights the author and Reaktion Books London.

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psychoanalytic studies applied to visual culture subjected those issues to an extensive and probing analysis. Unlike the female body, the male body was never objectified from the perspective of the external viewing. It was always treated as a subject. The male body in classic European culture has been connected with the representation of power and heroism, concepts identified with active, rather than passive, being. It is, therefore, more closely associated with action than exhibition. This relationship was interrupted by medieval Christian culture (based in Judaism), which, according to Mario Perniola, associated nakedness of the body (not only of the male body) with humiliation, degradation and denial of dignity or of the possibility of action. When that tradition was rejected during the post-Renaissance period and new links were forged with the classical tradition, the female body became the topos of pleasure and passivity and male body of power and action.2 Deeper changes in the contemporary significance of the male body could be observed only with the appearance of the neo-avant-garde and gay subculture. Such artists as Robert Morris (for instance in Waterman Switch, 1965), Robert Mapplethorpe (in x Portfolio, 1977–78) or Andy Warhol (especially in his films produced during the Factory period and in the photographic documentation of that environment) reversed the relationship developed within the European tradition between the gaze, desire and pleasure, exchanging the female body in this relationship with the male. Those processes occurred within the already prepared ground of the gay subculture of the interwar period and in the context of the post-war sexual revolution.

Eastern Europe did not experience such a revolution. Here, when the male body appeared within the context of visual culture, it did so – especially during the 1950s – as a representation of heroism within Socialist Realism. It was rarely completely nude: the sex organs were generally obscured by various means. If the conservative and prudish society of this part of the continent allowed nudity, it preferred to deal with it from the male perspective of strictly heterosexual voyeurism, rather than to seek radical models for overturning of gender roles. The exception to this case was the gdr, where nudism was relatively widespread and broadly accepted.

When the East European male viewer saw the naked female body, sometimes presented in photographs, film or happenings, he reacted with a degree of excitement. And he was not alone. His Western European counterparts often responded in a similar way. According to Amelia Jones, the postmodern rhetoric of the identity of the female body very easily slipped into traditional, phallocentric modes of viewing that were dominated by the culture of the male gaze. According to Jones, this problem effectively prevented the understanding of body art conceived within the context of feminist identity politics. This was one of the reasons why feminism of the 1980s rejected body art as too risky. It was simply too easily compromised by the omnipresent male gaze. However, Jones’s critique is not directed against that heterosexual, male viewer, who (in this case) remains rather indifferent, but rather against the naïveté of feminism, which too easily succumbed to the formations it aimed to reject and which approached body art too cautiously, given its true revolutionary potential. Body art offered grounds for the radical questioning of the Cartesian conception of subjectivity and for the taking up of a radical cri-

Performing History, an Open Project (Dialogues & Essays)

tique of the subject-body relationship, a strategy that deconstructed the metaphysical objecti fication of the (female) body.3 In East European countries, where feminist theory and the politics of gender identity developed slowly (if at all) under communist rule, this type of practice was particularly threatened by the danger of phallocentric reassimilation. The work of Natalia L. L., which can be read according to feminist categories but which was framed by the artist within a Modernist or even formalist discourse, offers a good example of this tension. The ideological and critical dimension of her work, considered within the context of the masculine culture of male and female representation, is certainly revolutionary. Paradoxically, the work was accompanied by theoretical statements published by the artist, which focused on the morphological character of the photographic image and the tautological conception of art.4 Those statements did not mention the gendered definition of visuality or any revision of the codes of female representation. In fact, the artist did not mention the issue of gender at all. Instead, she focuses on the discursive character of conceptual art practice, in particular those forms of conceptualism that could be inscribed within the formalist tradition of Modernism that was particularly strong in Eastern Europe.

This tension has a much broader resonance than the history of Polish culture: it affects the art of the whole of Eastern Europe. The paradoxical linking of artistic forms inherently critical of Modernist practice with the values of the supposedly critical Modernism, such as the autonomy of the work, formalism, irreducibility of aesthetics, the apolitical character of art, purity and independence of the creative act and so on, throw suspicion on the depth of the reception of postmodern critical practice in this part of Europe. On the other hand, they pose an interesting challenge for historians, who are forced to question the usefulness and suitability of the theoretical and methodological instruments developed in the West. Postmodern artistic formulas, including those of the neo-avantgarde, are not necessarily synonymous in the East European context with a critique of the Modernist system of values. Sometimes they are even inscribed into its axiology. I mention this not to devalue this movement, but rather to describe and analyse it within its proper frames of historic reference. Simply put, the culture of this region is different and is governed by its own rules.

The difference between male and female body art, irrespective of on which side of the Iron Curtain it was produced, was based in the different points of departure and statuses of men and women in European culture. In a phallocentric culture that associates masculinity with action, the male body was an active and acting body that created situations. In contrast, according to Jones (citing Craig Owens), women’s body art tended to present the female body according to the rhetoric of the pose.

Such a presentation had a passive character within the system of the assigned social gender roles and meanings that were externally conferred.

In other words, the meaning of the male body was created immediately, in the moment of its action, while that of the female body was deferred and mediated by the images produced by the masculine culture that defined woman’s existence in reference to the desire of the “other”. This was the main source of the difference in the strategies as well as the meanings of body art practised by male and female artists.5

To return to the theme of the male body, as I mentioned earlier, there were many male artists in Eastern Europe who used the body in their art. However, the number of artists who used their gender as a means of communication, or who “gendered” their body through art practice that assigned particular gender-specific meanings, was much smaller. I will mention only two very different artists who used quite different strategies, references and ideologies. One of them is the Polish artist Jerzy Beres´, the other the Romanian artist Ion Grigorescu. [. . .]

The work of Ion Grigorescu, identified by Ileana Pintilie as one of the members of the Romanian “post-happening generation”, an artist who preferred to use photography and film rather than “live” performance, is based on very different assumptions.6 Grigorescu is one of the most interesting members of the Romanian neo-avant-garde. He began by painting conventional canvases and producing equally conventional prints. However, he rapidly broadened his inventory of media, reaching for photography and film and creating para- or rather quasi-documentaries, such as Election Rally (1975), which commented on the Ceauøescu dictatorship. I would like to mention in particular two interrelated works, a film produced in 1976 entitled Masculine/Feminine, which analysed the idea of gender identity presented in popular movies, and a series of photographs, Delivery (illus. 198, 199).

In both of those works, the artist photographed and filmed his genitalia in a way that transgressed male gender identity. He photographed his body in positions that referenced the birthing process. He also supplied it with female attributes such as ovaries and a folded placenta. The feminized male body was opened to experiences that were biologically inaccessible to it and, simultaneously, by inscribing itself into the role of a female body, it defined gender differences in cultural rather than biological categories. If, as Amelia Jones has noted, the male body was in the European cultural tradition fulfilled in action and the female body took on the poses assigned to it by the phallocentric culture, then the strategy of the Romanian artist could be seen in terms of such “posing”, or acceptance of the poses assigned traditionally to women. This claim can be made not only in reference to “natural” female attributes (ovaries or placenta), or her “natural” function (pregnancy and birth), but also her behaviour in front of the camera. The artist took on poses traditionally associated with the female body. Grigorescu’s radically anti-masculine presentation reveals the conventional character of the gender roles and therefore of the authority. The phallus, the symbol of power, is here degraded; its role appears to be contingent and unstable. The authority is revealed not as a stable function but as a conventional one. This destabilization of gender difference is fundamentally subversive in character; by revealing the conventional character of the legitimacy of any power, it suggests the possibility of its overturn.

The historic context of Grigorescu’s work is particularly important for understanding its significance. After a short period of liberalization in the second half of the 1960s, the early 70s were marked in Romania by renewed efforts to impose strict controls over the population’s social lives. The system of police control was accompanied by one that enforced a prudish moral code, which stabilized sexual behaviour and was, generally, observed by the local population. Considered in this con91

text, Grigorescu’s work revealing and exploring gender, its function and significance (more as a contingent rather than stable social order) acquires a decidedly political character. The artist’s effort to blur the boundaries between phallic and vaginal representation questioned the very basis of social order. It undermined not only the phallocentric legitimacy of authority, but also the stability of the construction of subjectivity. According to those terms, the subject is not given or defined a priori by a metaphysical dictum, but rather negotiated from the perspective of meanings assigned to gender by various forms of social practice, including those forms involved in the visualization of gender. The stable Cartesian cogito is replaced by a dynamic construction that acquires its meanings through persistent, endless confrontation.

In the traditional system, gender identity is permanent and unchanging. It is determined by the biological function of the body. The difference in biology defines the gender difference, or, more precisely, its hierarchical character. Within the new way of understanding gender, this naturalistic determinism is undermined and gender difference is defined on the level of culture. Jacqueline Rose, commenting on Lacan, observed that anatomical differences are not gender differences but rather gender “forms” that allow the gender difference to come into being through language and, therefore, culture.7 Hence, gender difference has a symbolic, cultural character, rather than a biological or natural one.

This understanding of gender challenges the stability, inevitability and finality of the subject-construction, opening the way for undermining traditional gender roles as well as gender hierarchies.8 Identity politics formulated by various subgroups, including feminists, have explored this opportunity, creating critical tools for the analysis of authoritarian social and political structures. Grigorescu inscribed himself into this movement and, because he had to operate within the context of a totalitarian regime, his art had particularly subversive and critical implications. Any authority system, including the totalitarian system that is its extreme version, can function safely only under conditions that ensure stability of the hierarchically defined social structures based in phallocentrism. That is one reason why the policies of the Stalinist and post-Stalinist regimes were so antiwomen, even though they were often masked by such cosmetic measures as the founding of women’s organizations (official and controlled by the Central Committee of the Communist Party), or even by appointing women to leadership positions within party and state organizations. Paradoxically, the communists were aided by the traditional conservatism of the societies they ruled. I say paradoxically, because at first glance one would assume that tradition would have been a natural antidote for the ‘proletarian revolution’. However, if one examines the actual function of those societies more closely, going beyond the class struggle, the replacement of market mechanisms by economic plans or the transition from democratic to Soviet institutions, it is quite clear that conservative models of social behaviour, among them those governing gender, helped to ensure the stability of the regime. Therefore a challenge posed to those principles also posed a challenge to the totalitarian regime.

The problem posed by Grigorescu’s art is that his work did not have a public character. It not only did not explore the issue of the body’s presence in the public space, but the artist’s work had an essentially private 82

character. Illeana Pintilie writes that Grigorescu created his own theatre, in which he was the actor, the director and the audience. His work did not have any other audience. It was created in the privacy of the artist’s own apartment and focused on prosaic activities. Be that as it may, Pintilie notes that his pieces Masculine/Feminine and Delivery touched forbidden territory, a body that was a taboo subject for the Romanian society of that period.9 When considered from the perspective of the artist’s decision to produce the work, rather than the reception of his work, Grigorescu’s photography and films have to be seen as having a subversive character, especially because they questioned traditional gender differences.

Beres´ and Grigorescu adopted different strategies for opposing the regime. My decision to discuss and compare them here is intended to demonstrate the range of the male body art practice and theory and to suggest some questions regarding its critical function. Although it is clear that using the male body and exposing male genitalia in this type of work, carried out within the context of a heterosexual and homophobic society, had subversive meanings, the broader social impact of this work was rather modest. It is worth stressing that even though the work may have had such meanings, it did not necessarily have a real political function. On that level the similarities between the work of the Polish and the Romanian artist end. While the former invoked tradition, the grand narrative of the Polish culture inherited from Romanticism as the authority of his opposition strategy, the latter chose to question the traditional gender identities situated at the core of the society’s functioning, suggesting that destabilization of those identities posed a radical challenge to the system of power. Bereœ opposed the totalitarian regime with the authority of the tradition. In other words, he opposed one authority with another, one hierarchy with another. In contrast, Grigorescu rejected the principle of authority based in hierarchy in his critical method: he rejected hierarchy as such. Because hierarchy is the base of any power system, the Romanian artist in effect rejected the very principle of power, confronting it with his own critical practice, which destabilized the basis in which that power was grounded.

Both Beres´’s Prophesy and Grigorescu’s Delivery have a historic character. They were created in a particular place at a particular time and they defined their own position in reference to that location. Beres´’s art referenced the issue of national identity. It invoked the grand narratives of Polish culture and the Romantic myths of the artist-bard and of national destiny. The Polish artist builds the politics of identity based in a defined authority. He does not question that authority, or engage in a critical discourse on tradition. Just the opposite: he seeks within it the strength to oppose the communist reality. But such recourse to the authority of the nation raises the spectre of national mystification, which is the foundation of the nationalist ideology. Of course nationalisms can be more or less insular, to a greater or lesser extent defensive, surrounded by walls behind which everything that is different and “other” is kept at a safe distance. It can lead, naturally, to ethnic fundamentalism. I do not intend to suggest that Beres´’s body art slides into the sphere of such nationalism. However, it is important to point out the danger inherent in his strategy, which, in name of a noble cause, invokes the authority of a national tradition. This danger threatens in particular those strategies that do not have a critical relationship to that tradition.

Performing History, an Open Project (Dialogues & Essays)

Grigorescu’s art, which explorer the politics of identity through the deconstruction of gender, faces other threats. Clearly, the definition of the subject has here a dynamic and – most importantly – critical character. Similarly, the destabilization of authority appears to safeguard the work against ideological co-option. The danger that can be found in the context of such a strategy has to do, paradoxically, with such dislocation. It is the danger of creating a statement that does not belong to anyone because it is not localized, or rather, it is located beyond any place or space, and as such can be manipulated by the system of power. On the most basic level, the danger comes from the absence of the geopolitical perspective. The Romanian artist forms the meaning for his art somehow in reference to a specific context, but, in reality, he is mainly interested in the universal method for the deconstruction of the language of gender. Unlike critiques emerging from within feminism, gay subcultures or ethnic diasporas, which negotiate identity politics through deconstruction of patriarchal, heterosexual and imperial subjectivity, Grigorescu avoids such contextual declarations. Unlike artists who define the exact location from which they speak and values in whose name they make statements, Grigorescu does not formulate a clear identity politics based in a particular location. He creates a critical method for identity politics rather than politics as such. The artist’s position has a general and universal character, which acquires concrete historic significance only after it is contextualized and framed by art-historic research.

Paradoxically, the artist inscribes himself into a Modernist discourse of the universal subject, and thereby provides evidence of the tendency typical for Eastern Europe, namely, that of linking postmodern critical methodology and visual forms with Modernist, universalizing values.

Despite himself, he also reveals the source of this tension. In the West, where the system of power has a much more dispersed character, art has adopted a much more concretely political form. Its critical edge has been aimed in a particular direction, namely against the system of surveillance. In the countries of Eastern Europe, during the period when political authoritarianism was well defined and more interested in terror than surveillance, forms of strategic resistance took on a more generalized, universal character. Whereas liberal, dispersed power was opposed with a concrete political critique, totalitarian, focused power was opposed with a general and universal concept of resistance.

Notes: 1. Zdenka Badovinac, ed., Body and the East: From the 1980s to the Present, Cambridge, MIT Press/Ljubljana, Museum of Modern Art. See also Piotr Piotrowski, “Mosˇko umetnikovo telo: Nacionalna identiteta proti politiki identitete/Male Artist’s Body. National Identity vs. Identity Politics”, M’Ars, i–ii, 1998, pp. 14–30; on-line version: “Male Artist’s Body: National Identity vs. Identity Politics”, Art Margins: Contemporary Central and Eastern European Visual Culture, www.gss.ucsb.edu/artmargins, 5 December 1999; repr. in Laura Hoptman and Tomásˇ Pospiszyl, eds., Primary Documents: A Sourcebook for Eastern and Central European Art Since the 1950s, New York, 2002, pp. 225–34; longer Polish version, “Sztuka me˛skiego ciala: toz˙ samo narodowa i polityka toz˙ samos´ci”, Format, xxxi–xxxii, 1999, pp. 15–20.

2. Mario Perniola, “Between Clothing and Nudity”, in Fragments for a History for the Human Body, Part 1, ed. Michel Feher, New York, 1989; see also Margaret Walters, The Male Nude: A New Perspective, New York, 1978.

3. Amelia Jones, Body Art/Performing the Subject, Minneapolis, 1998, p. 21 nn.

4. Józef Robakowski, ed., Nowe zjawiska w polskiej sztuce lat siedemdziesia˛tych: teksty, koncepcje, Sopot, 1981, pp. 60–73.

5. Amelia Jones, Body Art/Performing the Subject, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1998, in particular pp. 121, 149–50.

6. Ileana Pintilie, “‘Ulysses’ Masks: Introduction to Ion Grigorescu’s Visual Mechanics”, in Culture of the Time of Transformation – II International Congress: The Cultural Identity of CentralEastern Europe, ed. János Brendel, Poznan´, 1999. See also the documentation of the artist’s work at the Soros Center for Contemporary Arts, Bucharest.

7. Jacqueline Rose, “Introduction”, in Jacques Lacan, Feminine Sexuality, eds. Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose, New York, 1982, p. 42.

8. Within the enormous literature on the subject see the classic, one could even say paradigmatic, statement by Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, New York and London, 1990.

9. Ileana Pintilie, Acflionismul în România in timpul comunismului, Cluj, Idea, 2000, pp. 99–100.

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The Next East for a New World: Re-thinking Peripheral European Modernities in Decolonial Perspective East–South: The Beginning of a New Performing of History Bogdan Ghiu

I find it only appropriate to rejoin the debate right here and right now, at this very juncture. For it is precisely at this juncture, and right now, that the field of the arts, and indeed their role, appears to be coming to an end, and giving way to a newly emerged sense of the political.

And it is at this precise juncture that the medial, process-like essence of the Performing History project lies, and hence the very raison d’être of this catalogue.

So following is not a “bonus”, or some kind of a “supplement”, but rather the beginning of the second part of the Performing History project: its ideal-logical sequence, i.e. the meta-political transposition of the artistic script, itself articulated in a twofold manner, connecting as it does two historical periods of the contemporary age by virtue of the artists Ion Grigorescu and Anetta Mona Chiøa/Lucia Tkácˇová. This part is continuous in structure, modulating the same “narrative”: a tentative rearticulation and relaunching of History.

After a memento evoking the exemplary role played by the arts in recent Romanian history, we set the tone for an ample, philosophical-political enterprise, describing an ongoing project in full swing.

It is a work-in-progress undertaken by the editorial board of the Idea arts + society review, which consists of decolonising the thinking about the post-communist, East European space by adopting, adapting, and furthering the process of decolonialisation that was initiated in the Southern hemisphere as a sign of non-alignment with (or departure from) canonical Western categories and concepts. For a long time, we only appropriated Western ideas and concepts; it is high time for us to mediate between North and South by constructing a structural and typological cardinal point that able to bridge the East-West divide, i.e. a South-East point of connection. In the process of sharing decolonised thinking with the North, South-East mindsets are bound to undergo change themselves and experience a process of filtering and modulation.

By virtue of this process of trans-categorialisation (i.e. of engendering counter-concepts to mark our epistemic “insubordination” and nonalignment) that has been undertaken by both the Idea review and (on a different scale and at a more immediately permeable level) the Performing History project, we invite a collective exploration of the task of re-internalising this hybrid, intermediate cardinal point that we are partaking in.

South-East Europe has always acted as a mediator, a transition point and a meeting place, a threshold to interpretation and interspersing, connecting the Orient and the Occident, the North and the South. The various historical misfortunes and vicissitudes, plus a long history of foreign rule, have made it oblivious to its mediating, negotiating role, and the role of forging articulations between living, creative historical influxes.

The exploration and engendering of this trans-geo-political form of subjective rendering in South-East Europe unfolds in the arts scene. The fine arts become a defining site of epistemic trans-categorialisation and

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decolonising, i.e. the arts as manifest in the South–East context. And this occurs by envisioning a South–East that is capable of creatively rearticulating the North and the South, the Orient and the Occident. And what is being configured, on a different, historiographic level, is the very relaunching of modernity, and a departure from a domineering historical modernity (namely one that is now exhausted, having been grounded in a North-centric paradigm: that of the scientific-technical metaphysics once denounced by Heidegger) toward a new, artistic-ethical modernity.

And it is this new modernity that defines the direction, the pole, and cardinal point towards which the Performing History and the Idea projects are heading. We aim at getting there by retrieving the dominated, marginal, repressed modernities, by retrieving the process-like and procession-like nature of history.

Performing History is only the beginning. It marks the early stages of a broader, ongoing project.

The Next East for a New World: Re-thinking Peripheral European Modernities in Decolonial Perspective

Reinventing the East through Art and as Art Alessandro Cassin in Conversation with Vasile Dâncu

Alessandro Cassin ¬ From the point of view of a sociologist, what do you think are the main questions that Performing History raises?

Vasile Dâncu √ For one thing, I believe it to be a powerful and daring idea. A politically stifled modernity always existed in Eastern Europe, so that mere shadows and indistinct bodies were discernable from behind the cloth of the Iron Curtain wall. I believe that what is at stake in this artistic act is to show the world that in Eastern Europe, while history “was constantly railing in the streets”, people deserted the streets and the public arena and continued to create, to dream and love in spaces especially designed to live life in an elevated way. And this is no ordinary thing. In spaces such as these, art reconnects with the individual’s innermost self, with his body, with his feelings and gives him strength to cope with the pressures of social and ideological command. Paradoxically, although social and political command was still there, the public arena was but a simulacrum, a space of total human vacuity; a resurrection of individual values comparable to the great interrogating practice Socrates brings to Athens.

A Sociological Research of Eastern Europe ¬ What is the objective and the scope of the questionnaire you intend to distribute to visitors of the Romanian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale? √ There are several underlying objectives. Through the questionnaire, we seek to test the water and get a sense of the project presented by Romania’s Pavilion and of the actual artistic performance. Such a perspective is of utmost importance, benefiting both the artists and the organizers alike by providing them with a complex, systematic feedback to the reception and interpretation of the artistic act. ¬ Could you discuss briefly the study/experiment you plan to conduct around Performing History with respect to the collective memories of the East and the West? √ The second component is targeted at the reception of the project and comprises a tentative exercise in immersion into the collective memory of Eastern and Western Europe. The exercise is targeted at the distinct evaluation of the viewers at the biennale, based on geographical areas and includes a distinct set of questions regarding the perception of the East by the West and questions pertaining to image projection and engaging spontaneously produced stereotypes. The main objective is to identify the perception of the East by the West in general, and of communism in particular, and to assess the memory of communism from an Eastern perspective as well as Eastern European stereotypes regarding capitalism. This is a crucial step as it calls for an act of remembrance, one which is gradually disappearing from society, or one that the society seems to be ignoring when assessing its values. It will be interesting to note the extent to which the two types of memory, of the East and of the West, overlap or where the two come close. ¬ What do you think are the main factors that have constituted a new Romanian identity of the 20 years since the fall of communism in Romania, viewed through the eyes of the West? √ We spent 20 years trying to show we are Europeans and that we did not cease to exist during the five decades of Occidental betrayal.

We copied all Western social forms only to realize at the end of the day it did not do us any good. Though the West did not benefit from this, either, for the East it was a loss at the societal level. We failed to understand the West needed us simply as something to define itself against, without the slightest interest in what we had to offer in terms of art and

human values. All that the West wanted was reassuring new evidence of its superiority. I for one look forward to the emergence of a new generation of intellectuals, a new elite able to redefine ideals and decree the return of the prodigal sons to our values. I make a point of writing as much as I can on the theme in the hope of fighting mainstream ideologies, which is why everything that I publish or lecture about at conferences is labeled as “counter ideologies” and “critical sociology”. I honestly do not think we can speak of a new identity so long as we are dominated by an apprehension of the future and by the lack of faith in our potential. Ours is in fact a hybrid identity; we are caught in a state of limbo between the nostalgia over communism and the mimetism of the European forms without content. Fortunately, however, we note in the young generation of today a new sense of dignity, which is of inspiration and gives us strength to re-connect to ourselves and further our process of self-discovery.

Unfortunately, we have not yet come out of the identity crisis. When the communist cages opened up, we spread our wings and flew to a fatigued and polluted Europe. Many imagined that Europe would recognize their wounds. But instead of finding compassion, love and affection, they ended being hurt even more, their wounds were only deepened. This is a generation that has lost hope in the European dream.

A General Iconoclasm: Art As a Tool Against Eastern Europe's Repression ¬ How do you account for the fact that art has been at the forefront of Eastern Europe’s ambition to redefine itself? √ During the communist dictatorship, art was the only site of resistance, impermeable, except for for the infiltratied informants of the Securitate. It was a congenial site for a certain kind of iconoclasm.

I do not know how many of the Eastern European artists are aware of it, but iconoclasm is our most distinct, typifying label (in the sense that it particularizes us most in comparison with the West); it distinguishes the East in terms of contesting authority, disrespect for traditions, the dissolution of the official word. The vast majority of artists were forced to become iconoclasts and live between two artistic and ideological discourses, the official and the underground one. This schizophrenic exercise has set the brain of the iconoclast in a certain way, and this becomes transparent in his/her perception of the world, in the way s/he responds to fear, in the social intelligence underlying the act of making an image public or of looking for adepts. In my view, this holds the key to the great East–West divide. The idea is best formulated by Marcel Proust, who says, “The true journey of discovery consists not in the search for new landscapes, but in looking at things differently, in seeing them with new eyes.” Ion Grigorescu’s art is paradigmatic in that it dramatizes this particular experience of a different way of seeing, which makes it a veritable metaphor for the repressed modernity of Eastern Europe. ¬ From a sociological perspective to what extent (if at all) do you think that the East–West dichotomy has become outdated? √ The dichotomy is indeed outdated as it was in the Cold War, and by it I mean the “culture war”, it was the West that came out a victor.

To the East, the West represented a dream of freedom and a role model.

It acted as a cultural model and a purveyor of cultural patterns, it created mythologies. It absorbed all that Eastern European culture had as most valuable without acknowledging the source. Brâncuøi, Cioran, Ionesco are Romanian products, yet they were assimilated and legitimated by the West as Western ones and their real origins are rarely acknowledged.

Divided, caught in an inferiority complex, and lacking legitimating instances as it is, the East lacked the strong moral fiber to pursue its cultural difference after the 1990s. For the larger part, it thus started copying the West, if anything, perfecting a few formulae here and there.

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Even so, the East was soon to realize that to follow the same beaten path leads nowhere, and only results in exhausted artistic modes.

One way to reinvigorate the distinction between East and West is for the West – the all-time mentor – to start taking a genuine interest in it, supporting Eastern Europeans in their process of self-discovery. It would be a productive turn for modern European art and culture. This is especially the case since there is a whole potential yet to be valorized, the Eastern European creative drive, in full swing in Romania at this very moment, can still bring a breath of fresh air, as it distils the experience of two generations: the young artists and writers whose careers have been shaped in liberty, and their mentors’ and role models’ who experienced the stifling of liberty and of classic modernity in the last decades of communist rule.

Modernity, Precarity, Existential Self-referentiality ¬ Do you feel that social sciences can provide evidence in support of Performing History’s claim that there is indeed a specifically Eastern European road to modernity? √ Oh, yes. I am certain of it. I believe that fragmentation and the experience of discontinuity and change have effected serious mutations at the level of mentalities, of the manner in which Eastern Europeans project themselves in modernity. This has engendered a sense of the fragility of individual and social history, which transforms the social forms of culture into paroxysmal acts, lived to an extreme, massively subjectivized. The fragility of institutions, the fact that they are the product of the great empires resulted in the prevalence of informal formulae, group works, workshops, magazines, seminars, trends. This is why I am deeply confident when it comes to the lyrical force of Eastern art and literature. During the period of suppression by the ideological censorship, Eastern and Central European art and literature accomplished an intense refinement of its message in the direction of the parabolic and the semiological. Informing this was a flight from realism in search of new counter-ideologies, political, artistic and cultural, a sort of deconstruction of the grandiloquence and of the ideological ritual of the age; it was a resurrection of the individual through the medium of corporal techniques, the expression of feelings, sensorial perception. Corporal expression, standardized in social life and in the public arena, is now thematized and becomes a nucleus of the private, innermost, most personal message. ¬ What are the conceptual models, the bias and stereotypes that must be overcome in order to take a fresh look at the concept of Eastern Europe today? √ To begin with, the idea that totalitarianism hampered these societies in their way to modernity. And here I would exaggerate to make a point, adding that it was in Eastern Europe where modernization mainly took place in the main. Beyond the social stagnation, for the individual and for society, and especially for the artist, there was a violent break with old ways of seeing, thinking and feeling. The official discourse was beyond credibility and the “construction of the new man” had to be conducted in the private sphere. The moment the individual is suddenly deprived of a significant part of his/her freedom, s/he is bound to act fast and intermittently in order to pull something off in his/her private life, to which all priorities shift. What was formerly the public arena was now fully confiscated by the body political, and which the individual now simulates, all authentic potential and resources now moving toward the private space, creative art included, as that which leaves no room for simulation.

This is why the individual was not vanquished in the East, he was not totally deprived of liberties and authenticity; this is what Western Europeans do not get. Whereas the West forced the individual to exert adaptive, responsive and flexibility strategies, with us, in the East, the

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imperatives were to safeguard humanity amid concerted, general simulation; the Eastern European had to urge him/herself to “be on the lookout”, hence the prevalence of the visual. A look at Ion Grigorescu’s work points to continuity, to an art-therapy project even, a sort of sublimation in a purely Freudian acceptation of the term. The Eastern European senses that he or she is to adapt by simulation alone to a politically corrupted world, the reward being total recuperation of the self by means of the artistic act. ¬ What are the consequences of the political, social and cultural discontinuity of modern Eastern Europe? √ I believe it is a matter of fragmentation rather than of discontinuity.

The West is characterized by continuous instability in movement, whereas typical of the East is a kind of stability within which individual uniqueness is not acknowledged at the level of the official discourse but retrieved in the private space. The consequence of the absorption of the civic space by the body politic is the fact that the artistic act goes in the direction of a self-referential autonomy, whose underlying principle and existential evidence is self-referential autonomy.

As far as I’m concerned, the break with the media left “blank” spaces for reflection and creation. In Romania, television air space was limited to two hours and there were few newspapers; the sports ones came in “magazine” fashion and had a very limited circulation. The dialogue with art was thus spared of “background noise”, and the creative act made the most of this proximity of the individual. Whereas the West lived under the utopian impression of barbarity ending with the end of World War II, in the East art lived at the limit of barbarity, in the vicinity, better still, in the midst of one it was running away from. The artistic act cannot open up to a world whose gates are closed and, as a result, to another world, that of the other. The gaze of the other is a fundamental act, if anything, as a testimonial of existence. In the West, fear of the other is born (“L’Enfer c’est les autres”, said Sartre). In the East, we witness the longing for the other, which is why eastern European art has a much more distinct dialogical dimension to it.

Visibility As Salvation ¬ Can you share some of your findings on what patriotism means to Romanians at the beginning of the 21st century – often described as the age of globalization? √ Patriotism may be declining, but in communism it was a survival reflex. We were all aware of the fact we could not think as “individuals without qualities” (in Musil’s sense), that we could not embrace the official definition of us. To be able to choose something of the official definition that was authorized, we chose ethnocentrism, as the sole condition of rootedness in the world. We could not be citizens of the world because of civic space was closed and confiscated; on the other hand, we were allowed to be ethnic Romanians, Hungarians, Czechs or Poles. Ethnocentrism gave us a common sense of belonging to humankind. ¬ Do Western stereotypes about the East affect Eastern Europeans in their self-perception? √ They do. One’s self-image is to a very large extent formed in the comparison with the other, the foreign in the mirror. A whole series of collections of documents gathering bestselling travel writings, the Foreign Travelers on Romanian Countries anthology type were published during the communist regime. History textbooks would conveniently feature the positive stereotypes derived from the paradigm of the “tender-hearted savage”, in vogue in the European cultural anthropology of the age.

The appropriation of negative imaging post-1990 sparked at some point a whole series of masochistic writings, especially manifested in post-1990 cinema.

Fortunately, the wave is bygone now, but in Romania it manifested itself quite strongly and is exceptionally captured by Luca Piflu, a former dissi-

v dent who marketed the syntagm, the “Romanian sentiment of self-pity”.

But then again, Western culture also suffered of a “Polish plumber” syndrome, a form of weakness and apprehension in the face of competition by the East European. It will be interesting to observe what this artistic “competition” generating the new cultural paradigm will give rise to in the future. ¬ Can you contrast and compare the impact of contemporary Eastern European cinema, literature and visual arts in shaping the awareness of a new reality for the West? √ Indeed, visual arts and literature were the first to blossom artistically due to the continuity that existed here. However, the prevalence of the visual is due to the fact that censorship was especially focused on the word. Polysemic, par excellence, image was harder to censor, and interdiction is not easily standardized in the framework of the visual.

Foucault’s statement, “visibility is a trap”, does not apply to the East; for Eastern Europeans, visibility was salvation and a way of fighting schizophrenia.

the use of the body as an insignia of the social status, by means of doing away with beauty and narcissism as exchange values. To the Occidental individualism dictated by consumerism, one marked by the commoditization of the body, the East hereby opposes the test of an authentic corporality, as incarnation of the self rather than as transitory, improvable, changing object liable to manipulation. Grigorescu shows that between the individual and his/her body a different relationship can be established, one residing in maintaining the connection as a sign of normality and fighting collective neurosis.

Art and the Public Space: A New Relationship with the Body, a New Relationship with the Others ¬ What do you consider the most important and innovative aspects in the curatorial approach of Performing History? √ I believe it is an act of great creative power and daunting courage that best captures the theme of the ILLUMInation Biennale, the need to engage definitions of identity from a period when Europe was brutally divided by arbitrary political decisions. The curatorial act sends the message that while the West was chasing authenticity, and was doing so in an all too often faked or mimicked authenticity corrupted by consumerism and hyper consumerism, beyond the Iron Curtain, modernity continued on an authentic path, that of the resurrection of the visual.

While the individual is abandoned to the benefit of collectivity, and public arena standardized by means of ideological symbols (embodied by proletarian statues and visual ensembles), private space becomes a zone of creative effervescence. Envisioned as “primitive”, the East, one in a series of Western stereotypes of the East, the East paradoxically becomes a haven of humanity, an oasis and reservoir of the idea of authentic living. Thus, while social space is mortified, corporal techniques are thus a memento of the preservation of humankind. The death of public performance is made up for by a shift to a spectacle capturing the needs and longing of individual imagination.

This is a curatorial act that seeks to reveal the annihilation of spatial proximity and of the distance between the artist and the public with emphasis on expressing sentiments as a way of preserving humanity and as the expression of freedom. It is only in this way that the social can survive, feelings being the expression of social projection. Artists depend on the universality of emotion and of gesture expressivity for the endorsement of the continuity of an authentic modernity, a social discourse without a spectator, grounded in excessive emotionality. The recourse to the visual equally signifies therefore the silent rebellion of the artist under totalitarianism; it is the reutilization of communication with the other, a form of communication banned from the public arena.

What Ion Grigorescu says is that the rhetoric of the body is subservient to that of fear of domination, of conquering the fear of the inauthentic.

The second component of the project is the message it conveys on the need to reconstruct a public arena now empty in both East and the West.

The two artists, Anetta Mona Chiøa and Lucia Tkácˇová, show ways in which public space needs reinventing by means of emptying it of gesture and corporal synchronicity, a process which took place in the East, as well as of consumerism and hedonism, one currently ongoing in the West. This artistic act shows the need to rearticulate the rhetoric of the body by means of the rhetoric of the Human Being, rid of hedonism, and

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Decoloniality As/In/At The Frontier Marina Grzˇinic’

Decoloniality/Former Eastern Europe/Africa Decoloniality presents a clear political intervention, positing, I would say, a frontier in the indeterminate (to borrow a term used so much by the new philosophers these days) of coloniality.1 However, precisely for this reason, it is being contested. A process of undermining the meaning and politics of DeColoniality (if we use it the way in which Alanna Lockward2 uses it) is at work, which functions with the constant focus on the phenotypic aspect of the term, which situates decoloniality in relation to a colonial past and dismisses it as a “marginal” preoccupation of the oncecolonized people, thereby turning it into a political-yet-historical event.

This puts forward a colonial setting for intensified contemporary racism.

Grada Kilomba describes the process clearly: “Once confronted with the collective secrets of racist oppression and the pieces of that very dirty history, the white subject commonly argues ’not to know...’, ’not to understand...’, ’not to remember...’, or ’not to believe...’. These are expressions of this process of repression by which the subject resists making the unconscious information conscious; that is, one wants to make the known unknown [EntErwähnung]. Repression [EntErwähnung] is, in this sense, the defense by which the ego controls and exercises censorship of what is instigated as an ’unpleasant’ truth. They say they do not know! But if I know, they too have to know as we co-exist in the same scenario. They say they have never heard of it! But how come, if we have been speaking about it 500 years? Five hundred years is such a long time. What do they want to know? And what do they want to hear?”3 Achille Mbembe distinguishes two colonial traditions. The first is Hegelian, which treats the native subjected to colonial power as being “encapsulated in himself or herself, he/she was a bundle of drives, but not of capacities”.4 The second could be called Bergsonian, as the one which “rested on the idea that one could, as with an animal, sympathize with the colonized, even ’love’ him or her; thus, one was sad when he/she died because he/she belonged up to the point, to the familiar world.

In the Bergsonian tradition of colonialism, familiarity and domestication thus became the dominant tropes of servitude.”5 Further, Mbembe conceptualized the “postcolonial mode of domination” as a “series of corporate institutions and a political machinery that, once in place, constitute a distinctive regime of violence”. Therefore, at stake within colonialism/ coloniality is the whole system of life, social and political structures, economies, epistemologies and discourses that asks for a clear act of decoloniality.

Decoloniality is instrumental in understanding the First World’s capitalist colonial regimes, the larger geopolitical body of knowledge in a modern/ colonial world, and the reproduction of racial and class matrices within the Euro-Atlantic colonial axis. It is instrumental in understanding the current situation of “former Eastern Europe” vis-à-vis “Western Europe” or the European Union, as the European Union appears to be the modernizing savior of the whole region. It is said that Eastern Europe no longer exists and it is therefore called former Eastern Europe. However, paradoxically, its very non-existence as former Eastern Europe is over-present, over-existent, when we consider the allocation of Western European capital. This move allows me to interpret, read and understand Eastern Europe as the non-existing frontier of (as/in/at) the new Europe, more precisely of the European Union, which sets its hegemony against the rest of Europe. To formulate this differently, former Eastern Europe is a frontier, but it is a spectral frontier; it does not divide, as a frontier normally does, but rather allows for a repetition and reproduction within

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itself of the modes of life (biopolitics), modes of death (necropolitics), structures of governmentality, institutional control, system of knowledge and regimes of aesthetics and contemporary art and theory from “former” Western Europe. Therefore, I am interested in this new Europe that (as global capitalism) can be described, as Angela Mitropoulos has described it, as the “confluence of foreigners, slaves, women and children”.6 And, I will hasten to add, migrants, queer, – all those who disrupt “a question of genealogy, of the authentication of power through origin-stories and their transmission, as fact and naturalised foundation” of Europe and of the global world.

In its most basic sense, Europe today is constituted by “the problem of the legal form of value, of its imposition and perseverance”. as well as by the problem of “origin and lineage”. To this I will add that Europe’s migration/labour, capital, sexual reproduction and race “are nowhere more disputed and uneasy than in the frontier”. Or, as was pointed out

by Kwame Nimako, director of NiNsee (The National Institute for the Study of Dutch Slavery and Its Legacy), Amsterdam: “Now that the Berlin Wall (in 1989) had fallen, Western Europe had Eastern Europe to go to and they could do away with Africa. Africa was no longer relevant.

African migration started to be controlled. This is the major preoccupation of Europe today – how to prevent Africans from coming to Europe.

Now Eastern Europe has become the source of full agricultural production. Another factor is the civilization mission of the ’former’ Western Europe in Eastern Europe. They are going to civilize the Eastern Europeans to teach them democracy, to teach them how to treat the Roma citizens, to teach them about race relations and human rights.

Western Europe ’solved’ all these problems – the problem of education, the problem of development, the problem of freedom – and it is the rest that has to be taught. From the point of view of race relations, it also marginalizes the black community, because once Europe becomes larger, the black community becomes small”.7 If we do not take into account this substitution of roles – or to be even more accurate, this repetition of roles – the replacement of Africa by the former Eastern Europe (as a paradoxical and obverse repetition) – we cannot understand decoloniality in the European context. Why? Because decoloniality functions as/in/at the frontier where past colonialism and the neoliberal colonial present meet. It is at this meeting place where slavery, wage labour, aesthetics and political economy take place. In other words, as stated by Mitropoulos, “origin and lineage are nowhere more disputed and uneasy than in the frontier”, or, it is at the frontier that the boundaries of property law and its tenure unfold. This is the place where legitimate labour (that is today nothing more or less, as argued by Mitropoulos, than the very distinction between wage labour and slavery) and authorised reproduction are decided.

The European Union functions in precisely such a way today by transforming mostly migrant labour into pure slavery (and not only in Spain, Italy, France, Austria, Slovenia, etc.). In Slovenia, migrant workers coming from the former republics of a common state known as Yugoslavia are today working in conditions of slavery; excluded from the law, they become “nonexistent”, lacking the most basic humans rights. Or even more precisely, what occurs at the Schengen border (that is, the frontier between the European Union and the rest of Europe) can be paralleled with another border, the Tijuana border (32 km from downtown San Diego, the busiest point of entrance into the USA from Mexico).

At the frontier, according to Mitropoulos, that is “a violent positing of the frontier as a space of exploration, cultivation and extraction of wealth – in the scarcities that are obliged as precondition and condition of a market in labour, in the criminalisation and recapture of fugitive and wayward (re)production . . . – there would be a periodic recourse to the naturalising magic of genealogy to settle matters of orderly progression and authenticity.”8

The Next East for a New World: Re-thinking Peripheral European Modernities in Decolonial Perspective Europe is reborn through a genealogy that excludes all those who are seen from its Western perspective as unimportant. Araba Evelyn Johnston-Arthur9 describes the situation in Austria as twofold. On the side, we have migrants who were invited into the country by the government in the 1960s to help the post-war reconstruction of the country, and on the other, we have a new, vast group of refugees, fugitives, asylum seekers and deported persons (as in August 2010, when France – supposedly “legally”, as it was based on EU laws – deported hundreds of Roma back to Romania and Bulgaria) who find themselves caught in the ever-changing immigration laws established and reinforced daily by the EU laws and implemented and improved nationally.

Post-Cold War Some of the processes of the “vanishing Eastern Europe” parallel the Latin American situation. Instead of recognizing larger social, self-organizational and communal possibilities for new politics, Latin America was “sold”. sacrificed to the infrastructure of a capitalist mode of production.

With such a move, a critical power was taken from communities and a passage from public to private took place. In such a way, a perverse process of capitalist modernization took place, one that expropriated the social space and nullified indigenous revolutions and other systems of knowledge.

The modernity in Eastern Europe has been and is still passing through similar capitalist visions of modernity that are seen only as a historical repetition of Western modernism in the local (Eastern) framework. What we have “managed to bring to the present” is the old and dead conceptualism from the 1960s/1970s, now rediscovered in the former Eastern European context, but not as a political demand to change the ossified institutions of art, but as an individual “existential ethos”. Therefore, the social space of socialism is nullified through a Western individualism; Rambo politics is repeated in the former Eastern Europe through the figure of the existentialist conceptual artist that fights for freedom in the totalitarian society.

This brings us close to a more specific point, and this is the Cold War. Throughout the Cold War and in today’s post-Cold War period, former Eastern Europe is specifically important for decoloniality. Nikhil Pal Singh argues that the Cold War discourses and particularly the theory of totalitarianism (as the Cold War’s primary ideology), born immediately after World War II, displaced the imperial and colonial genealogies of the Nazi Holocaust, as a form of industrialized killing, outside the context of Western history and theory.10 So the period of decolonization or, to be more precise, the anti-colonial struggles of the 1960s, were filtered through the Cold War discourses on totalitarianism, allowing for a disavowal of colonial violence and its undisturbed continuity. It allowed the shift toward an opposition between democracy and fascism that was soon replaced by totalitarianism. Singh cites William Peitz’s essay “The Post-Colonialism of Cold War Discourse”.11 Which states that “what happened in the debate on the Cold War and totalitarianism helped to frame a profoundly dishonest historical conversation”.12 Singh writes that the theory of totalitarianism “enacted a displacement of fascism outside the main historical currents of Western moral, political, and intellectual life”.13 The result was that Nazism, first identified as being part of “the family of Western imperialisms and as the exemplary modern instance of rationalized, technology-driven state terror”,14 was transferred elsewhere. This also resulted in shifting the debate regarding the systematic procedures of death exercised in the colony away from the systematic procedures of death in the concentration camps in Europe in the time of the WWII. Aimé Césaire, in his book on colonialism (Discours sur le colonialisme, originally published in 1955), elaborated clearly “that Hitler applied to Europe colonialist procedures, which until then had been reserved exclu-

sively for the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India and the Blacks of Africa.” As Singh states, “the theory of totalitarianism (as the major ideological point of the Cold War), not only linked fascist destruction to the Soviet regime, it also suggested an extended chain of reasoning about existential dangers posed by terrorist uses of technology, by those lacking proper philosophical conditioning and historical preparation for exercising state power.”

One such reasoning was put forward in July 2007, when Nicolas Sarkozy, the actual French president, while visiting Africa, stated that: “One cannot blame everything on colonization . . . the corruption, the dictators, the genocides...” Achille Mbembe dismantled, piece by piece and word by word, this contemporary racist Eurocentric colonial ideology, stating that Sarkozy’s Dakar speech is unacceptable, or even bordering the incredible. Mbembe argues: “Colonialism is now presented not as the crime . . ., but as a simple ’error’ that should now be wiped from the slate: massacres perhaps, but bridges and railways too; institutionalized racial discrimination maybe, but also clinics...” Mbembe asks in his critique: “How is it possible to come to Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar at the start of the 21st century to address the intellectual elite as if Africa didn’t have its own critical traditions and as if Senghor and Camara Laye, respective champions of black emotion and the kingdom of childhood, hadn’t been the object of vigorous internal refutations?”15 The specter of colonial violence reappears over and over again. In the end, the theory of the Cold War, which for Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri presents the passage from imperialism toward Empire, i.e., global capitalism, in which global society had to be defended, “forgot” to underline, as elaborated by Leerom Medovoi, that this passage occurred through rather than against the discursive and material orderings of colonial violence.

Biopolitics/Necropolitics Natasˇa Velikonja, a Slovenian writer and lesbian activist, brilliantly stated on the eve of the capitalist financial crisis in 2008 that “Europe is boring”.16 Then, with the crisis and the subsequent rescue of banks rather than people, Étienne Balibar proclaimed, “Europe is dead”. Though he did not make a reference to Achille Mbembe’s “Necropolitics”, it is becoming clear that in the last decade the logic of death organizes and manages life, modes of life and the social and political space of global capitalism. In “Necropolitics”,17 Achille Mbembe discusses this new logic of capital and its processes of geopolitical demarcation of world zones based on the mobilization of the war machine. Mbembe claims that the concept of biopolitics, due to the war machine and the state of exception being one of the major logics of contemporary societies, should be replaced with necropolitics. Biopolitics is a horizon of articulating contemporary capitalist societies from the so-called politics of life, where life (it does not matter anymore, via Giorgio Agamben, if it’s bare/naked life or life-with-forms) is seen as the zero degree of intervention of each and every politics into contemporary societies; but today, capital’s surplus value is based on the capitalization of death (in Latin: “necro”) worlds.

Biopolitics was coined by Michel Foucault in the 1970s.18 I can propose a short definition of biopolitics in order to understand Foucault’s conceptualization of it: “make live and let die”. It is obvious that Foucault’s biopolitics, coined in the 1970s, in the time of the Cold War, is a specific conceptualization of capitalist liberal governmentality exclusively reserved for the First Capitalist World. It presented the 1970s liberal capitalism as “taking care” only of the citizens of the First Capitalist World nationstates. What was going on in the Second (the Eastern European space) and Third Worlds was not at the center of the management of life in the First Capitalist World. One of the 007/James Bond films from the 1970s is an accurate description of biopolitics: “Live and Let Die” (1973).

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As with biopolitics, I can propose a short definition of necropolitics in order to understand Mbembe’s conceptualization of it: “let live and make die”. If, in the 1970s, the First Capitalist World, through its biopolitics, built structures and institutions and provided labour and wages for its citizens, but only for the legal ones, meaning in-the-blood-and-soil-ofthe-nation-state-born citizens, in order to make their lives better and at the same time more and more productive for capitalism (with strengthening consumerism, social and health benefits), it left all the others, those outside of the First Capitalist World, to die. But today we have another management of life that bypasses the divisions of the world in the 1970s.

Necropolitics presents a management of life for the global neoliberal capitalist world. It transforms the aim to “make live” into “let live” and “let live” is a form-of-life that is far from the cozy structures of better life (“make live”). “Let live” presents a pure abandonment. You can live if you have means (with the help of a lineage-pedigree of money and power), and all those who cannot live in the situation of a pure abandonment by the neoliberal public capitalist structures are to be left to die, or in many other occasions made to die, as, for example, in New Orleans, Haiti, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc.

Though Mbembe elaborated necropolitics in order to term an intensified subjugation of life to capital exploitation and governmentality of the social, political and economic through the war machine in Africa (which he named, already in 2001, as the “postcolony”,19 proposing a view on Africa different from post-colonialism), necropolitics got a palpable shape throughout the world with the “War on Terror”, launched by the USA (supported by Great Britain and NATO) as a response to the 9/11/ 2001 attack on the Twin Towers in New York. Necropolitics precisely defines neoliberal global capitalist forms of extreme cut down measures; extreme cut down of money for support of public health, social and education structures. This extreme cut down presents an intensive neoliberal “rationalization civilization” procedures. The outcome is privatization of all public services that comes together with structural racism, massive poverty and class divisions. In such a context, necropolitics presents the repoliticization (and historization) of biopolitics.

This intensification of brutal exploitation and the intensified management of the whole of society only and solely to extract more and more profit can be connected with what was argued by Walter Mignolo in 2010: that in between the 16th and 21st centuries, capitalism went through many mutations – one being that, in the 16th century, the economy was part of society, whereas in the 21st century, society is part of the economy.20 It is possible to argue that, in global capitalism, the institutions – primarily – of the ideological state apparatuses function as biopower; therefore art and culture, along with theory and criticism, and education as well, are today pure biopolitical machines (only taking care of themselves and their hegemonic Euro-Atlantic interests), while the social and the political (with its, as it is claimed, “autonomous” judicial system) are pure instruments of the necropolitical global capitalism.

To conclude, I can state that the way to recast the decolonialism is to engage in the analysis of the complicity between racism, Eurocentrism, capital and us!

References: 1) Special number, “A Story of an Erasure” (“Erased People” in Slovenia), Journal for Critique of Science, Ljubljana, 2008. See at http://www.reartikulacija.org/?p=299.

2) Tatjana Greif, “Schengen in Practice”, Reartikulacija, no. 3, (Ljubljana), 2008.

3) Maiz, Linz; maiz is an organization by and for migrant women and was created out of the necessity for changes with regard to the living and work situation of migrants in Austria as well as in accordance with the strengthening of political and cultural participation.

4) Subhabrata Bobby Banerjee, “Live and Let Die: Colonial Sovereignties and the Deathworlds of Necrocapitalism”, (Sydney), Borderlands, no. 5 (1), 2006.

5) Marina Vishmidt, “Human Capital or Toxic Asset: After the Wage”, Reartikulacija, no. 10–13, 2008.

Notes: 1. Cf. Vocabulary of Decoloniality, edited by Editorial Group for Writing Insurgent Genealogies (Carolina Agredo, Sheri Avraham, Iris Borovcnik, Annalisa Cannito, Miltiadis Gerothanasis, Marina Grzˇinic’, Niki Kubaczek, Marissa Loˆbo and Ivana Marjanovic’), produced by the Post Conceptual Art Practices Class at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, published IN Vienna, by Löcker Verlag, forthcoming 2011.

2. Cf. Alanna Lockward, “IngridMwangiRobertHutter: Masks and Skin Politics as a German DeColonial Knowledge Production”, (Ljubljana), Reartikulacija, no. 10–13, 2010, http://www.reartikulacija.org/?p=1449, retrieved on January 16, 2011.

3. Cf. Grada Kilomba, Plantation Memories: Episodes of Everyday Racism, Münster, Unrast Verlag, 2008, quoted in Alanna Lockward, ibid.

4. Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony, Berkeley, University of California Press, 2001, p. 26. Quoted in reference to a discussion with Sˇefik Tatlic’.

5. Ibid., p. 27.

6. Cf. Angela Mitropoulos, “Legal, Tender”, Reartikulacija, no. 7, 2009, http://www.reartikulacija.org/?p=698, retrieved on January 16, 2011.

7. Cf. Kwame Nimako’s talk at the workshop on Education, Development, Freedom, Duke University, Durham, USA (February 25–27, 2010), workshop organized by Walter Mignolo at the Center for Global Studies and the Humanities, Duke University, http:// trinity.duke.edu/globalstudies/education-development-freedom, retrieved on January 16, 2011.

8. Cf. Mitropoulos, op. cit.

9. Cf. as well Araba Evelyn Johnston-Arthur and Belinda Kazeem, “CAFE DEKOLONIAL. ’SAG ZUR MEHLSPEIS’LEISE SERVUS...’” [Decolonial café: “Say silently Good Bye to the pastry”], Reartikulacija, no. 1, 2007, http://www.reartikulacija.org/ ?p=418, retrieved on January 16, 2011.

10. Cf. Nikhil Pal Singh, “Cold War”, Social Text, no. 100, Durham, Duke University Press, 2009, pp. 67–70.

11. William Peitz, “The Post-Colonialism of Cold War Discourse”, Social Text, nos. 19/20, 1988, quoted in Nikhil Pal Singh, ibid.

12. Ibid.

13. Ibid.

14. Ibid.

15. Cf. Achille Mbembe, “Nicola Sarkozy’s Africa”, Le Messager, August 1, 2007, available online: http://www.metamute.org/en/Sarkozys-Dakar-Speech, retrieved on January 16, 2011.

16. Natasˇa Velikonja, “Europe Is Boring”, Reartikulacija, no. 3, 2008, http://www. reartikulacija.org/?p=250&langswitch_lang=en, retrieved on January 16, 2011.

17. Cf. Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics”, trans. Libby Meintjes, in Public Culture 15, no. 1, Durham, Duke University Press, 2003, pp. 11–40.

18. Cf. Michel Foucault’s lectures at the Collège de France in 1979, “The Birth of Biopolitics” published in many edited selections of Foucault’s texts after his death.

19. Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony.

20. Cf. Walter Mignolo’s presentation in the framework of the project “Estéticas Decoloniales” [Decolonial Aesthetics] organized by Walter Mignolo (Argentina, USA), Pedro Pablo Gómez (ASAB, Bogota) and altri in Bogota, Colombia, November 7–12, 2010.

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The Next East for a New World: Re-thinking Peripheral European Modernities in Decolonial Perspective

Decolonizing Eastern Europe: Beyond Internal Critique Ovidiu fiichindeleanu

The social and cultural history of the “postcommunist transition” has been marked throughout the region by the return of two dominant phenomena of modernity: capitalism and coloniality. The fall of the Iron Curtain meant to a significant degree the re-absorption of the socialist bloc into larger and long-durée structures of world history. In this sense, the “postcommunist transition” has been a process of structural and segmented integration of the former socialist bloc into Western or Westernlead formations of political, economic and military power such as the European Union, World Bank and IMF, and NATO. Accordingly, I proposed elsewhere conceiving the meaning of transition as the top-to-bottom alignment of East European governmentality into the order of Western governmentality, of local economies into the world system of capitalism, and of local knowledges in the global geopolitics of knowledge, at the cost of the general population.1 If this is the case, then the possibilities of developing a critical theory of postcommunism depend logically on movements and critical reflections on capitalism and coloniality, coming from such different bodies of critical theory as Marxian studies and decolonial thought. Marxism does not suffice to open an option, and neither does postcoloniality, but both are relevant. However, the power of capital and the coloniality of power took on specific forms in Eastern Europe, given its recent history of seeking modernity differently, and such powers were countered during the transition by particular forms of resistance. Moreover, without giving currency to the ubiquitous theme of the “stolen revolution”, one can argue that the process of transition itself instituted a radical change in the horizon of expectations, placing in a different frame the historical experience and aspirations of the popular movements that brought the revolutions of 1989.

One can thus identify a crucial and unique task for critical postcommunist thought and artistic practices: the continuous public creation of an epistemic space of resistance and alternatives to both capital and coloniality, articulated from the location of Eastern Europe, which could be based or could fortify a form of regional internationalism and solidarity.

In other words, I propose a sort of Pascalian wager on the historical experience of Eastern Europe, by way of a project that gives epistemic dignity to expressions of resistance and difference towards both capitalism and coloniality. The goal is moving towards a philosophy of transition, a border epistemology that embraces the specificity of Eastern Europe as location of thought for critical visions, with the hope that such a space of criticality will avoid the pitfalls of both internal critiques of Western modernity, and of externalist critiques of hegemony, imperialism, and domination. Here, the problem with internal critiques is not as much that they are not right, but of where they stand, when they are right. To give an example, even in the case of a committed philosopher like Foucault, one can point to the lack of a theory of resistance complementing his great studies of power formations; one can also argue that Foucault’s model of the specific intellectual “recognizes structures but fails to confront them”.2 An additional and very different precaution, related to the political potential of internal critiques, can be observed in Eastern Europe, and particularly in Romania, where prominent anticommunist dissidents renounced the pursuit of resistance after 1989, becoming supporters or direct partners of new governmental and capitalist powers. As for externalist or dominationalist critiques, particularly

poignant in anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist movements, my issue is with the recurrence of a certain failure to recognize the interconnectedness of struggles and oppressions and the constant fallback to the nation-state as the fundamental framework of the political. Therefore, the practical issue is not the “abandonment” of European critiques of Western modernity, and neither the legitimation of some judgment that everything about Europe is bad, but the ethical concern for speaking truth to power, articulated here by giving epistemic dignity to a major transformation and considering it in its own immanence or concrete historical forms.

As Walter Mignolo and other collaborators emphasized, decolonial thought brings a necessary challenge to contemporary critical social theory: moving from internal critique – such as it has been practiced in many forms of Marxism, postmodern theory and poststructuralism, but also in liberal human rights and technocratic feminism – to what could be called an “actually existing transformative knowledge”. To paraphrase one of Giovanni Arrighi’s teachings: internal critique only criticizes the weakness of a certain power structure: the point, however, is to counter its strength. Thus, the unfolding vision of decolonial thought is not one of alternative modernities (reaching the same goals through other means), but of an “other modernity”,3 as it can be glimpsed also from the World Social Forum slogan, “another world is possible”.

If Eurocentrism, North-Atlantic universals and neoliberalism tend to eliminate all options, the horizon of criticism of decolonial thought is based on the intellectual commitment for a transcultural and pluritopic ecology of knowledges, and the principle that political resistance needs to premised on epistemic resistance.

Much in this sense, I propose the elaboration of a critical theory of postcommunism at the intersection of decolonial thought and what I would call epistemic materialism. The historical experience of actually existing socialism, the revolutions and fall of socialist regimes, and finally the post-communist transition to capitalism compose such a radical history of collective transformation and opening of differing paradigms, accompanied by such quick enclosures of possibilities, that in light of these major changes, the ongoing and slowly unfolding crisis of the world, together with the political rise of the Global South, could be seen as an immense and immediate site of opportunity. Instead of seeing in the new-found postcommunist situation of dependency a throwback to the 1970s, and thus yet another retrograde and predictable devolution of Eastern Europe, I propose considering the recent transformations as a movement that raises questions and brings to visibility crucial directions taken from the 1970s by global capitalism and global political powers, to the effect of limiting the direct dialogue and relations between socialist and decolonization movements.

However, defining the locality of one’s thinking is no easy task. After two decades of postcommunist transition, “Eastern Europe” is disappearing as a category of analysis, becoming simply “New Europe”, a “part of Europe” or a “semi-periphery” of global capitalism. Brian Holmes recently deconstructed the binarity of Donald Rumsfeld’s famous distinction between “Old” and “New” Europe, bringing in the same time an update to Wallerstein’s categories of the world-system (core, semi-periphery, periphery): he proposed recently the process of expansion of EU as a new hierarchical distribution of citizens between Core Europe (Germany, France, etc.), New Europe (Poland, Czech Republic etc.), and Edge Europe (Moldova, Ukraine, Turkey etc).4 In this sense, one can argue that an integral part in the constitution of the new European identity was assumed also by Libya, whose new-found postcommunist identity can be glimpsed from Colonel Gaddaffi’s reported words from Rome, on August 30, 2010, about Lybia’s role as a “defense for an advanced and united Europe”, a bloc against the “barbaric invasion of starving and ignorant Africans”.5 In direct relation to this, the official disappearance of borders, as part of

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the process of EU integration, has also meant the unprecedented rise of an international web of European policing, a gigantic industry of confinement and control whose size is visible even in the imposing headquarters of FRONTEX, the European Union agency for exterior border security, situated not accidentally in Warsaw, Poland. One can further refine the sense of East European locality by referring, as Marina Grzˇinic’ proposed, to the “former Eastern Europe”, namely a region subjected to reduced identity or epistemic relevance, transformed into a borderland of Europe, or more generally a borderland of “the Western world”,6 both in the sense of a buffer zone to non-European territories and as a territory defined by the condition of border-crossing and checking points. In this sense, one can notice that the differences between New Europe and Edge Europe are overdetermined by Core Europe.

At the Frontier of Change In the process of European integration, what actually disappeared is the articulation of knowledge from a position of non-ethnocentric locality or epistemic autonomy. During the Cold War, the differences between Western and Eastern Europe referred to two radically different epistemic spaces, relatively autonomous in their own right, and which could not be reduced to a difference between nation-states. As opposed to that situation, the European integration coincides with the tendential reduction of differences to a mode of colonial difference, which draws distinctions between what is modern and what is non-modern, resting on the overarching image of thought of Western universality. Simpler put, in the workings of the postcommunist transition, the European identity of East Europeans is lesser than the European identity of West Europeans.

Against this prejudice, by articulating knowledge from the location of the European borderland, Eastern Europe can also be understood as a crucial space of transformations of the meaning of European identity itself. Thus, contrary to the fears of ethnic-nationalists, who came to fore throughout the region immediately after 1989, the process of integrating states from Poland to Bulgaria into the European Union did not shatter as much the nationalist identity and national symbols, as it did with the regional sense of the former socialist bloc. After the integration into EU, racist ethnocentrism has been on the rise throughout Eastern Europe, but instead of being directed against neighbors of different ethnicity, as it was the case in the 1990s (Romanians vs. Hungarians, Serbs vs. Croats etc.), it currently tends to be expressed in forms reproducing the global, eurocentric idea of race,7 namely in expressions of radical disaffection towards African, Asian and Arab peoples and individuals. Such gestures range from intellectual dismissals of multiculturalism and political correctness in favor of “objective European values”, to blatant offense and abuse. The negative disposition against the global “non-Europeans” is accompanied in the public sphere by racist resentment (and policies) against the local Roma people, who are subject to systematic portrayal, in the postcommunist culture industries, as the local model of “non-Europeans”.8 These model dialectical images are integral dimensions of postcommunist racism, that is, of a specific phenomenon situating the emergent postcommunist middle-class within the global matrix of the coloniality of power. Fundamental to this construction of white identity is the idea of passing, the assumption that East-Europeans can “become European” or are “essentially European” because they can pass as white – as opposed to Roma, blacks or Arabs. For East Europeans then, passing overdetermines integration (the operative concept of transition), which means both that local whiteness is continuously subjected to tests of passing, and that the postcommunist subjective identities are open to experiments of passing. However, on the dark side of such transformations, postcommunist racism, through its construction of image of the self, entitlement and the racial Other, provides a particular sense of the open world for East-Europeans, after the fall of the Iron Curtain, defined

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by the idea of social domination at global scale, where the process of “becoming European” as “integration” is the royal road of subjectivity.

It can be said that a parallel phenomenon traverses Western Europe, where the figure of the immigrant worker, especially from Eastern Europe or Africa, has emerged during the postcommunist transition as a category informing the vision of the European Union itself, as a negative presence which justifies the return to the model of fortress-Europe, to a Europe of the master/subject relation and of many ethnocentrisms.

In this sense, one can point not only to the rise, during the postcommunist transition, of populist right-wing politicians in the West, united in their hatred for immigrants (Jean-Marie Le Pen in France, Jörg Haider in Austria, Pim Fortuyn in the Netherlands, Filip Dewinter in Belgium, Nick Griffin in England), but also to what Okwui Enwezor called the “official disappearance of immigrants in Europe from its cultural institutions”, as well as the established policies of “integration” viewing immigrants and native black people as a “them” who must become “like us”, such as the color-blind French modèle d’intégration, which stresses the individual over community, race or culture, placing thus subjects in direct relation with powerful institutional structures.9 The pressure of such policies was not met without resistance, and one can argue that the French revolts from 2005 were preceded by the emergence, in the independent pop culture of the 1990s and 2000s, of a manifold of multiracial political artists such as Islamic Force in Germany, Asian Dub Foundation in England or La Rumeur in France.

Consequently, the expansion of the European Union with ten new members after 2004, a collective postcommunist transformation that engaged together Western and Eastern Europe, and institutionalized the disappearance of the latter, cannot be separated from a global history of drawing hierarchies based on metonymic distinctions between “Europeans” and “non-Europeans”, understood respectively as “moderns” and “primitives” who are following the same order of development, but in different rhythms, either by natural necessity (long run) or through political coercion (short run). In this sense, the “integration” of the former socialist bloc into Europe re-actualized the assumption that “they” must become “like us”, or that all non-European peoples are in a sense preEuropean, and brought, in the same time, the category of the “internal other” to a new level of generality, which justifies the extraordinary rise of internal security in the order of Western democratic governance.

The same process that transformed Eastern Europe into a borderland of the Western world, brought also the border within the West, with the effect of heightening internal security, but also resistance and the consciousness of new enclosures and marginality.

In relation to capitalism, East European governments engaged after 1989 in a “catch-up” game with the developed market economies. Capitalist power did not emerge in the postcommunist transition only as a negative force of violence and repression, but through spectacle, seduction and the productive colonization of the spheres of social life and the inner lifeworld. In the process, Eastern Europe emerged in reality, during the two decades after 1989, as a new laboratory of neoliberal experiments, including shock therapy, radical austerity, privatization of commons, flat tax, wage cuts, flexible employment and forced vacation.

Through the reforms of the EuroPact and the Stability and Growth Pact, some of these ideas are poised to redefine the meaning of the whole European Union in the summer of 2011.10 The exceptional austerity measures against the “temporary crisis” could be transformed thus into a permanent basis of economic governance in EU, and in the process, more European citizens will be accommodated to precarious conditions hitherto reserved to the immigrant worker and the borderland European. Such a chain of events would confirm David Harvey’s recent thesis on the flow of capital, according to which capitalism never really resolves its major crises, providing instead new roles within the system to the determinants

The Next East for a New World: Re-thinking Peripheral European Modernities in Decolonial Perspective of the crisis,11 while also restating the role of colonial difference as a pillar of historical capitalism. As Salma James and Mariarosa Dalla Costa have showed already in 1972, the politics of austerity are based on pushing the exploitation of unpaid or underpaid labor, whether that of women or immigrant workers or workers beyond the borders of colonial difference.

And indeed, capitalism does not reduce all forms of labor to the wagecapital relationship, but on the contrary, is a form of global power that works by integrating completely different forms of labor, fragmented by imperial, colonial and gender differences. As Boaventura de Sousa Santos put it, a society is not capitalist because all the social and economical relations are capitalist, but because the capitalist relations are determining how the economical and social relations existing in society work.

In this sense, East-Europeans should be understood if they profess a sense of déjà vu upon hearing pleas for “austerity” and “a return to normal” coming from world leaders,12 as this is all they heard during the postcommunist transition, and even in the decade before the revolutions of 1989. In fact, with the global crisis of capitalism which exploded in 2008, Eastern Europe is confronted with the third depression in three decades, with barely any period of recovery, after the socialist slump of the 1980s and the destructive market-reform years of the 1990s.13 Thus, in an ironic twist of the narrative of transition, it would seem that instead of Easterners catching up with the West, precariousness has caught up with the Western world. Considering such collective transformations of Europe during the postcommunist transition, as seen from the borderland of Eastern Europe, it appears that the struggle against capitalism cannot be separated from resistances against the coloniality of power.

The Historical Experience of Communism Eastern Europe is an epistemic borderland between communism and capitalism, and it was defined as such also prior to 1989, when the statesocialist regimes devised their policies and five-year plans in order to complete the transition from capitalism to socialism. In fact, in so far as official ideology goes, no Eastern European socialist regime ever reached the level of Chapter 40 of the Polecon, the Soviet textbook of Political Economy, namely the transition from socialism to communism. However, after 1989, the fall of the socialist bloc was widely interpreted from Western standpoints as a proof of the “death of communism” and definitive confirmation that there is only one option for development: the 1990s were, more so than Thatcher and Reagan’s 1980s, the great years of TINA, There-Is-No-Alternative. It would be hard to find another moment in history when capitalism was identified with democracy to such an extent.

For leftist thinkers, the only way to keep alive other options, including the “hypothesis of communism”, was to state that whatever happened in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union was not communism, and neither socialism. The predominant views brought up to date C.L.R. James and Raya Dunayevskaya’s thesis on state capitalism and the abandonment of workers’ councils. Different forms of the same argument repeated that, since the workers councils lost control already from 1923, whatever followed in the Soviet Union and the socialist regimes was basically irrelevant for a positive renewal of leftist theory. However, a side effect of this direction of criticism, developed in different directions by theoreticians such as Perry Anderson and Alex Callinicos, was to accept the idea of failure as a framework and thus to abandon in final instance Eastern Europe as a valid category of positive analysis. Furthermore, through the efforts of finding an appropriate name for the recent history of Eastern Europe (state capitalist regimes, Stalinist socialism, national-communism, centrally-planned economy or even centrally-managed consumerism etc.), the focus was moved away from the people, and towards a debate focused on superstructures and arts of governing. After the fall of social-

ist regimes and the conservative aftermath of the revolutions of 1989, the irrelevance of the experience of Eastern Europe for Marxist, postMarxist or other form of critical social theory, in any positive sense, tended to be generally accepted. There is a big difference in the way in which, for instance, the concept of class has ceased a long while ago to be the master concept of Marxism, but retained great importance in theory and movements alike, while the unique experience of Eastern Europe ceased being a reference at all (except as a negative illustration). Whereas the concept was de-essentialized but kept its weight in connective frameworks such as the analysis of intersectorial oppressions, the location of experience was simply abandoned. Could it be that this happened because the locus of enunciation is subject to a logic of discovery rather than connection in the colonial matrix of power?

Meanwhile, in Romania and other parts of the former socialist bloc, anticommunism emerged as a dominant and institutionalized cultural ideology of transition. The postcommunist anticommunism was generally pronounced from the right, ignored leftist social theories and ideology critiques, but focused equally as much on superstructures and arts of governing. Thus, the meaning of “ideology” tended to be reduced to the ideology of the Communist Party (implying that the age of ideologies has ended in the present), and even oral histories tended to be reduced to histories of government abuse and representations of totalitarianism.

In this sense, one can argue that the established anticommunism failed as a project of social justice: by defining history through the experience of trauma, and by accepting that the lives of people were simply “lost” or “sacrificed”, what was actually lost and sacrificed was their epistemic relevance. Anticommunism emerged thus in the cultural history of transition as the main cultural ideology that tried to radically change epistemic references, by reducing the past to a homogenous totality identified as a bad deviation from the “normal” course of history.

Through the cultural practices of its supporters, anticommunism also assumed a sort of proto-political role in the postcommunist public sphere, working as a principle for the selection of new cultural elites and thus as a condition of visibility. Anticommunism was also the main orientation justifying the introduction of a new official history, sanctioned by state institutions such as the Presidency. Finally, one can understand anticommunism – as the local instantiation and reconnection to the coloniality of power, in so far as it proposed considering communism as an essentially pre-modern past,14 introduced the idea of a lesser humanity of the “communist man”, instituted tribunal-thought (as in “the condemnation of communism” and “lustration” projects) as the undisputed way of considering the historical experience of Eastern Europe, and opened the way for the other two dominant cultural ideologies of transition, Eurocentrism and Capitalocentrism.

What both Western critics and Eastern anticommunists, either ignored or reduced to a secondary role, was the actual historical experience of the peoples of Eastern Europe. Both gestures, from left and right, reproduced thus a central tenet of coloniality: the historical experience of people is irrelevant. The actual lives of people have been generally subsumed to negative frameworks of analysis, undermining the epistemic relevance of practices and knowledges emerged behind the Iron Curtain and in the postcommunist transition.

The historical experience of real socialism then, and not simply Marxism, should be the point of departure for the development of an epistemic materialism. In fact, this is a way of answering to Marx’s early question: “Will the theoretical needs be immediate practical needs? It is not enough for thought to strive for realization, reality itself must strive towards thought.”15 The revolutions of 1989 turned conservative, and the term “revolution” itself may be contested, but in reality the main forces of revolutionary pressure have been without doubt the workers from industrialized cities. Outside the worker movements, it is hard to find “organized

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resistance”, but oral histories abound in recollections of people who were not resigned to the status quo or intimidated by the powers, and of real acts of resistance without infrastructure, which cannot be simply reduced retrospectively to forms of anticommunism or anti-totalitarianism. The regime may have acted like the owner of production units and labor force, but people developed independently a plethora of noncapitalist forms of economic activity: informal markets (bazaar, video market etc.), sustainable food and living systems (family and group gardens), friendship economies, long-term investments (house building and reparation, etc.), long-term savings, workplace exchange, barter economies of services, collectible values, gift economies, gypsy banks, and so on. The immanent field of such alternative economies cannot be reduced to an undeveloped form of market economy or capitalism, since they reverse the basic order of institutions of capitalism, subordinating economy to social life. Similarly, the regime may have reproduced patriarchy, the bourgeois idea of nuclear family through mass urbanization and absurd reproduction policies, but life in real socialism abounded in nonbourgeois and non-nuclear forms of socialization and cultural exchange, of women and solidarity networks that cannot be reduced to the state/civil society dichotomy. These are just a few examples of concrete forms of the historical experience of real socialism that have been subject to intense pressures by the new formations of postcommunist power, being either colonized and/or commodified (postcommunist anticommunism for resistance, pawnshops and micro-credit banks for friendship economies etc.), or reduced to forms of non-existence in the postcommunist transition and annihilated as social practices and cultural memory.

Considering the epistemic dignity of such concrete forms of reality as they strive for thought in a process of radical transformation is the first step towards a positive epistemic evaluation of real socialism. At its turn, the latter is vital for achieving a sense of social justice and a reconciliation with the past that includes all its traumas, and which could offer collective self-confidence and a vision for future transformations. This is the first condition for a movement beyond internal or reactive critique.

The further development of epistemic materialism is important in a wider sense for the renewal of critical thought, since an actual transition beyond capitalism and coloniality can only start from alternative concrete historical experiences, only by considering the real lives and stories of people as a relevant epistemic site, worthy of an other modernity, whose sense emerges only in their interconnectedness. Resistance only stems from the past, and more precisely from the cultural memory of radically different historical experiences, and real socialism provides an abundance of such instances, which could only gain from being placed in relation with other global experiences of resistance. This would be the condition for gaining an internationalist and non-ethnocentric sense of Eastern Europe as a region, beyond paradigms of dependency.

The establishment of anticommunism and the dominant cultural ideologies of transition gravitated in the direction of capturing, museifying or destroying the cultural memory of real socialism, leaving people with no other cultural life than the one offered through television, workplace and the new culture industry. The postcommunist colonization and capitalization changed minds and bodies, alienated existential territories and shattered the staying power of local epistemologies. However, there is also a resistant side of transition. By acquiring a sense of the evolution of concrete forms of resistance and alternative historical experiences, from real socialism to the postcommunist transition, one can start glimpsing the real possibilities of decolonizing Eastern Europe. And thus, as one can already get from this brief coup d’oeil, in spite of the forlorn affection of recent great transformations, what emerges is an enormously generous field for research, experimentation and creative change, which opens firstly to the last remaining generalist disciplines: philosophy and contemporary arts.

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Notes: 1. See also Ovidiu fiichindeleanu, “Towards a Critical Theory of Postcommunism?”, Radical Philosophy #159, 2010, and “Vampires in the Living Room: A View of What Happened to Eastern Europe After 1989, and Why Real Socialism Still Matters”, in Corinne Kumar (ed.), Asking We Walk: The South As New Political Imaginary, Bangalore, Streelekha, 2011.

2. See George Ciccariello-Maher, “European Intellectuals, and Colonial Difference, Césaire and Fanon beyond Sartre and Foucault”, in Jonathan Judaken, (ed.), Race after Sartre: Antiracism, Africana Existentialism, Postcolonialism, Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008.

3. Walter Mignolo, Desobediencia epistémica: Retórica de la modernidad, lógica de la colonialidad y gramática de la descolonialidad, Buenos Aires, Ediciones del signo, 2010. See also “Delinking”, Cultural Studies, vol. 21, no. 2–3, March/May 2007, pp. 449–514.

4. Brian Holmes, “Invisible States: Europe in the Age of Capital Failure”, in Simon Sheikh (ed.), Capital (It Fails Us Now), b_books/NIFCA, 2006.

5. Hama Tuma, “Of Gaddafi and Arab Racism towards Blacks”, The Other Afrik, Friday, 3 September 2010.

6. Marina Grzˇinic’, Communication in the workshop Critical and Decolonial Dialogues Across South-North and East West, Middelburg, The Netherlands, 7–9 July 2010.

7. For the idea of race see Aníbal Quijano, “Colonialidad del Poder, Eurocentrismo y América Latina”, in Edgardo Lander (ed.), Colonialidad del Saber, Eurocentrismo y Ciencias Sociales, Buenos Aires, CLASCO-UNESCO, 2003. Translation in English by Michael Ennis, “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America”. Nepantla: Views from South, 1.3, 2000, Duke University Press, pp. 533–556.

8. For more details see the series of articles on the Romanian online journal CriticAtac: Cristina Rat, “Locuinfle anti-sociale à la Cluj: Nu se øtie cine dæ øi cine primeøte”, CriticAtac 25 March 2011; Iulia Haødeu, “Sexism, rasism, naflionalism – privire dinspre antropologia feministæ”, CriticAtac, 24 February 2011.

9. Fred Constant, “Talking Race in Color-Blind France: Equality Denied, ’Blackness’ Reclaimed”, in Darlene Clark Hine, Trica Danielle Keaton and Stephen Small (eds.), Black Europe and the African Diaspora, Champaigne University of Illinois Press, 2009, pp. 148–149.

10. See “Business Against Europe”, Corporate Europe Observatory, 23 March 2011.

11. David Harvey, The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism, London, Profile Books, 2010.

12. Brian Holmes, “Fault Lines & Subduction Zones: The Slow-Motion Crisis of Global Capital”, Occupy Everything, July 28, 2010.

13. In Romania, according to the very conservative measurements of the World Bank, during the austerity poverty rose from an estimated 6% of the population in 1987– 1988 to 39% in 1993–1995. Victor Axenciuc, Introducere în istoria economicæ a României: Epoca modernæ øi contemporanæ, Bucharest, Editura Fundaflia România de Mâine, 2000. See also World Bank reports on Romania from 1995–1996 retrieved from http://www-wds.worldbank.org.

14. See Red Tours (2010), film by Joanne Richardson and David Rych.

15. See Karl Marx, Introduction, Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1843).

Authors’ Biographies AMI BARAK is an independent curator and art critic based in Paris.

He has curated numerous international exhibitions in the past few years, for instance House Trip, ArtForum Berlin (Berlin, 2007); Can Art Do More?

(Jerusalem, 2008); Re-construction, Young Artists Biennale, Bucharest, 2008; Elixirs of Panacea, Palais Benedictine, Fecamp, 2010, among many others. His most recent curatorial project was Art for the World: City of Forking Paths, Art for the World [the Expo]/The City of Forking Paths, the Sculpture Project of the Expo Boulevard at the World Expo Shanghai 2010. He is currently a lecturer at the Paris Sorbonne I University, works as an art adviser, and is a permanent collaborator for the IDEA arts + society magazine.

MARIA RUS BOJAN is a Romanian art critic and curator living and working in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. She has been a curator at the Museum of Art, Cluj, and the general director of the Sindan Cultural Foundation Bucharest. She is known for debuting internationally an entire generation of artists: Victor Man, Adrian Ghenie, Ciprian Mureøan and many others at the beginning of the years 2000 within the art program of Sindan Foundation and the series of exhibitions entitled generically Re:Location & Shake. Together with Martin Sturm, she curated the exhibition Re:Location 2 (2002, OK Centrum Linz) and with Enrico Lunghi, Re:Location 4 (2003, Casino Luxembourg and Tranzit Foundation Cluj). Since she moved to Amsterdam, she curated and produced several international exhibitions such as Ulay’s major retrospective – GEN.E.T.RATION ULTIMA RATIO (2005, Centro Parraga Murcia, Spain); the symposia and exhibitions program Art in the New Field of Visibility (2008, De Appel, NIMK, De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam) and Ready Media (2008, NIMK Amsterdam, The Contemporary Art Museum, Belgrade); Locked-In (2008, Casino de Luxembourg), Strategies for Concealing (2008, C-Space Beijing), Tales of the Unexpected (2010, in the framework of Art Rotterdam) and ULAY – a Retrospective from the ‘70–80’s (2010 at MB Art Agency Amsterdam). In 2008, Maria Rus Bojan founded Project Foundation, and since February 2010, she is the director of the international and curatorial program of Art Rotterdam.

She is the initiator of the project Performing History.

ALESSANDRO CASSIN (born in Florence, Italy), is a journalist based in New York, covering culture and the arts for L’Espresso, The Brooklyn Rail and Arquine. He is currently director of publishing for Centro Primo Levi in New York.

IRINA CIOS lives and works in Bucharest. Art critic and curator, she is director of the International Center for Contemporary Arts, ICCA Bucharest, and also guest lecturer at the National University of Arts, PhotoVideo Department. She initiated and curated gallery projects, international collaborations with European Art Centers, symposia and conferences.

Since 2007, she initiated in the frame of ICCA a residency for artists developing community based projects. Editor of contemporary art publications, she contributes with articles and interviews in Romanian and international catalogues, journals and magazines.

VASILE DÂNCU is chair of IRES, the Romanian Institute for Evaluation and Strategy, a multi-disciplinary research body founded in 2009, the first think tank in sociological, political and social science, market, media, brand consulting, strategic, and security research in Romania.

He is founding member of ARES, the Romanian Association for Evaluation and Strategy, professor of Sociology, Communication, Market Research

and Strategic Management at the Faculty of Sociology and Social Work, The University of Bucharest, and consulting professor at the National Information University, Bucharest, and Babeø-Bolyai University, Cluj.

Vasile Dâncu is also a member of ESOMAR, European Society for Opinion and Marketing Research. He is founding member of Metro Media Transilvania, the Institute for Social Science, Marketing and Advertising.

Between 2001 and 2004, he was minister for Public Information and between 2005 and 2007, senator in the Romanian Parliament. He is the author of numerous books on the sociology of culture, sociology of communication, political science and communication and has contributed to over ten reference works and redears. In 2002, he was awarded the national distinction the “Romanian Star”, the Chevalier degree by the Presidency of Romania.

DESSISLAVA DIMOVA is a writer and curator based in Brussels. She is a Ph.D. candidate at the Institute for Art Studies, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Sofia. She holds an MA in philosophy from CRMEP, Middlesex University, London and in Art History from the Bulgarian Academy of Arts, Sofia. In 2010, she curated Thank You for Your Understanding – 2.

International Antakya Biennial, Antakya, Turkey. Her first novel The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was published in Bulgarian in 2009 (Razvitie, Sofia). She is a founding member of Art Affairs and Documents Foundation, Sofia and founding editor of blistermagazine.com.

BOGDAN GHIU is a Romanian poet, essayist, cultural critic and theorist (literature, media, art, urbanology), “French Theory” translator and journalist. Former student of Jacques Derrida, he is the author of many books, among which Manualul autorului [The manual of the author] (1989), Poemul cu latura de un metru [The 1 meter side poem] (1996), Arta consumului [The art of consuming] (1996), Arhipelogos (1997), Pantaloni øi cæmaøæ [Trousers and shirt] (2000), (Poemul din carton) Urme de distrugere pe Marte [(The cardboard poem) Traces of destruction on Mars] (2006), and the essays Ochiul de sticlæ: Texte privind televiziunea. 1991– 1997 [The glass eye: Texts (while) watching television, 1991–1997] (1997), Grame [Grammes] (1997), Evul Media sau Omul terminal [Media Middle Ages or the Terminal Man] (1997), Facultatea de litere: Mic îndreptar de gîndire greøitæ [The Faculty of writing: Small guide to erroneous thought] (2004), Eu(l) Artistul: Viafla dupæ supraviefluire: Cod de bare pentru viitorul monstrous al artei [I, the Artist: Life after survival: Bar code for art’s monstrous future] (2008), Telepitecapitalism: Evul Media 2005–2009 [Telepithecapitalisme: Media Middle Ages 2005–2009] (2009), Contracriza [The counter-crisis] (2011), Dadasein (lotopragmatism) (2011), Inconstrucflia: Pentru o arhitecturæ eticæ [In-construction: For an ethic arhitecture] (2011). He has also translated more than 60 books from Bataille, Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, Bourdieu, Baudrillard, Guattari, Bergson, Ricœur, Veyne, Rorty, Baudelaire, Artaud, Duras, etc.

He received many times the Writers’ Union Prize and the Bucharest Writers’ Association Prize. He is one of the editors of IDEA arts + society magazine and special contributor of Arhitext magazine.

MARINA GRZˇINIC’ is researcher director at the Institute of Philosophy Scientific Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Ljubljana, Slovenia, and Professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, Austria. She has lectured widely (inter alia École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Kyoto Biennale, UC Berkley’s Centre for New Media, USA, etc.). Grzˇinic’ is a co-founder and co-editor of Reartikulacija, a journal for politics, art, and theory, Ljubljana. Selected monographies and volumes: Re-Politicizing art, Theory, Representation and New Media Technology, (ed.) Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna and Schlebrügge, Vienna, 2008; Une fiction reconstruite: Europe de l’Est, post-socialisme et rétro-avant-garde [Fiction reconstructed: Eastern Europe, postsocialism

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and retro-avantgarde], Paris, L’Harmattan, 2005; Aesthetics of Cyberspace and the Effects of De-realisation, Multimedijalni institut mi2 – MaMa Zagreb, Croatia and Kosˇnica – centar za komunikaciju i kulturu, Sarajevo, Bih, 2005, etc.

HUNOR KELEMEN is minister of Culture and National Heritage (an office he has held since 2009) and leader of UDMR, the Democratic Union of the Ethnic Hungarians in Romania. 2007–2011, he was executive president and chairman of the Coordination Council (1999–2007) of UDMR, party deputy (2000–2008), secretary of state in the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage (1997–2000). He was professor of philosophy at the Faculty of Philosophy, Babeø-Bolyai University of Cluj, and co-editor of the cultural review Korunk. He is the author of two volumes of verse, Minuszévek (1995) and A Szigetlakó (2001) and of the novel, A Madárijesztôk Halála (1999). In 2008, he was awarded the Middle Cross Order of the Hungarian Republic. He is Commander of the Order of the Star of Romania (2000), was awarded the Litea Prize (Budapest, 1996) and Romania’s Writers’ Union Award (1995).

PIOTR PIOTROWSKI is professor ordinarius at Art History Department, Adam Mickiewicz University, Pozn’an, Poland, which he has been chairing between 1999 and 2008. He also was the co-editor of the annual journal Artium Quaestiones (1994–2009), Director of the National Museum in Warsaw, 2009–2010, and senior curator of Contemporary Art at the National Museum in Poznan, 1992–1997. Visiting professor at Humboldt University (open contract: 2011–2012), Warsaw University (2011), the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College USA (2001), Hebrew University in Jerusalem (2003), and Central European University, Budapest (2002, 2009). He was a fellow – among others – at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts, Washington DC (1989–1990), Columbia University (1994), the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton NJ (2000), Collegium Budapest (2005–2006), and the Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA (2009). He is the author of dozen books including: Meanings of Modernism (1999, 2011), In the Shadow of Yalta: Art and the Avant-garde in Eastern Europe (2005, 2009), Art after Politics (2007), Agoraphilia: Art and Democracy in Post-Communist Europe (2010), and Critical Museum (2011). For his scholarly achievements, Piotrowski received among others Jan Dlugosz Award for the best book of the year (In the Shadow of Yalta), Krakow 2006, and Igor Zabel Award for Culture and Theory, Barcelona, 2010.

CHANTAL PONTBRIAND, until recently Head of Exhibition Research and Development at Tate Modern, is living in London and working as an art consultant, critic and curator. She founded Parachute contemporary art magazine in 1975. Her work is based on the exploration of questions of globalisation and artistic heterogeneity. She has curated numerous international contemporary art events: exhibitions, international festivals and international conferences, mainly in photography, video, performance, dance and multimedia installation. From 1982 to 2003, she was president and director of the FIND (Festival International de Nouvelle Danse), in Montreal. She recently curated the exhibition HF|RG [Harun Farocki | Rodney Graham] at the Jeu de Paume in Paris in 2009, Higher Powers Command (after Sigmar Polke, 1968), for the Lhoist Collection in Belgium, and The Yvonne Rainer Project, at the BFI Gallery in London, both in 2010. Selected publications: Performance, Text(e)s & Documents (ed., PARACHUTE, 1980), Geneviève Cadieux: Canada XLVI Biennale di Venezia (commissioner,1990), Fragments critiques (Jacqueline Chambon, 1998), Communauté et Gestes (PARACHUTE, 2000), Dance: Distinct Language and Cross-cultural Influences (ed., PARACHUTE, 2001), Art et Psychanalyse: Sur ma manière de travailler (co-ed. with Hervé Bouchereau, PARACHUTE, 2002), PARACHUTE: Essais choisis 1975–2000 (ed.,

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La Lettre volée, 2004). Among her upcoming books: PARACHUTE: The First Twenty-Five Years, JRP/Ringier, and an anthology of her essays from 2001 to 2010 on the Common and the Contemporary.

OVIDIU fiICHINDELEANU is a philosopher and culture theorist, writing on critical social theory, contemporary philosophy, decolonial thought, and the cultural history of communism and transition. Studies of philosophy in Cluj, Strasbourg and Binghamton, New York. Ph.D. in Philosophy (Binghamton University) with a thesis on monolinguism, modern media and the archeology of knowledge at 1900, currently prepared for publication in English. Editor of IDEA arts + society (www.ideamagazine.ro); collection coordinator at Idea publishing house (www.ideaeditura.ro).

Editor of the online journal CriticAtac.ro. Co-founder of the independent journal Philosophy & Stuff (1997–2001), and of the Romanian indymedia platform (since 2004). Editor, with Konrad Petrovszky, of Romanian Revolution Televised: Contributions to the Cultural History of Media (Cluj, Idea, 2009, 2011). Editor, with V. Ernu, C. Rogozanu, C. Øiulea of Iluzia anticomunismului (Chiøinæu, Cartier, 2008). Forthcoming book: The Postcommunist Colonization. A Critical History of the Culture of Transition (Cluj, Idea, 2011). Recent articles: “Vampires in the Living Room: A View To What Happened to Eastern Europe After 1989 and Why Real Socialism Still Matters”, in Corinne Kumar (ed.), Asking We Walk: The South As New Political Imaginary, vol. III, Bangalore, India, Streelekha 2011; “Towards A Critical Theory Of Postcommunism?” Radical Philosophy #159/2010; “Where Are We When We Think in Eastern Europe?”, in Art Always Has Its Consequences, WHW/Tranzit/kuda/Muzeum Sztuki, Zagreb, 2010.

RALUCA VOINEA is an art critic and curator, based in Bucharest.

She holds a B.A. in Art History and Theory from the Arts University in Bucharest (1997–2001) and an M.A. in Curating Contemporary Art from the Royal College of Art in London (2004–2006). In 2006, she co-founded E-cart.ro, a non-profit cultural institution based in Romania. Since beginning of 2009, E-cart.ro is developing a new programme of cultural debates and artistic interventions, “The Department for Art in Public Space”. E-cart.ro was one of the four co-organizers (with Goethe-Institut Warsaw, Polish Institute Berlin and raumlabor berlin) of the project “The KNOT: Linking the Existing with the Imaginary”, which took place in 2010, in the public space of Berlin, Warsaw and Bucharest. Since 2008 Raluca Voinea is co-editor of IDEA arts + society magazine. In the section of the magazine called “Gallery”, she presented projects of the artists: Anetta Mona Chiøa/Lucia Tkácˇová, Lisa Torell, Antoni Muntadas, h.arta, Maria Eichhorn, Øerban Savu, Pavel Bræila. She worked as assistant curator for the 5th Berlin Biennale, with a RAVE Scholarship. She curated exhibitions such as The Way Politics Influences Art and Vice Versa – Daniel Knorr, Fondazione March, Padua (2008), Provisional Dwellers, Salzburger Kunstverein, Salzburg (2009), As You Desire Me, Contemporary Art Gallery of Brukenthal Museum, Sibiu (2010).

Acknowledgments: Paul van Sluijs, Judith Misrahi-Barak, Helga Lasschuijt, Florin Colpaci, Adriana Miclescu, Alessandro Cassin, Jan Grosfeld, Fons Hof, Dana Dæræban, Cornel Hirean, Mihaela Orban, Ana Maria Micu, Simona Tænæsescu, Monica Joifla, Tania Radu, Daria Ghiu, Mædælina Ghiu, Hunor Kelemen, Vasile Dâncu, Teodor Frolu, Mihai Cocea, Iulian Damian, Eugen Iordæchescu, Piotr Piotrowski and Reaktion Books London

Producers: The International Center for Contemporary Art Bucharest

MB Art Agency Amsterdam

Partners: Romanian National Lottery IDEA arts + society The Romanian Institute for Assessment and Strategy (IRES) Project Foundation TVR Cultural

The artists’ participation is supported by: JGM Gallery, Paris Galerija Gregor Podnar, Berlin/Ljubljana Artra Gallery, Milan Christine König Gallery, Vienna

Sponsors: Group Transilvae ENEL Italia Iordæchescu, Udrescu & Asociaflii VenhoevenCS

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PERFORMING HISTORY warts + society #38, 2011, special issue

OARE! T Ă IG T Ş Â C T TOATE SUN