Identificatory scenarios abound in Rearview Mirror: New Art from Central and Eastern Europe, which is co-produced by The Power Plant Art Gallery in Toronto and the Art Gallery of Alberta in Edmonton. As the site of a subject’s first encounter with their own image as Other, the mirror appears in both literal and figurative guise in a number of the works on display here. And yet the subjectivities invoked in Rearview Mirror resist familiar calls to identification. While the two Canadian venues will undoubtedly introduce well-established artists from the region to new audiences, visitors may not realize to what extent such work comes preloaded with ideological baggage. Historically, neo-avant-garde gestures under socialism were more resistant to being absorbed by market forces than those in the West for the simple reason that an art market did not exist there in the first place. The very different support structures available to artists meant that outwardly similar actions were potentially met with different political consequences and were thus dislocated from their more universalizing counterparts. In an analogous way, every artistic gesture was already politicized because of the context it appeared in.
Canadian-born and US-based curator Christopher Eamon brings together works by 23 younger artists in way that simultaneously utilizes and underplays the legacies of political repression and the realities of economic transition and the attendant problems of exclusion. Rearview Mirror is not about Eastern European art per se, but a vaguely triumphal “new” art whose practitioners have largely overcome the marginality that plagued their predecessors.
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Related posts:
· Alex Mirutziu - "Pop" video at ArtGallery of Alberta until April
· REARVIEW MIRROR at the ArtGallery of Alberta
· Alex Mirutziu in "The RearviewMirror" [catalogue]
· REARVIEW MIRROR: NEW ART FROM CENTRAL ANDEASTERN EUROPE // On view until 5 September, 2011
· Rearview Mirror at THE POWER PLANT - 1 July -5 September, 2011
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Eamon’s second tendency is “an attraction to popular culture as expressed in some of the globally dominant entertainment industries.” For example, Ciprian Mureşan’s Un Chien Andalou (2004) has characters from Shrekappropriate the eye-cutting scene from the Surrealist film, swapping grainy live action for slick 3D animation. Again in single-channel video, Alex Mirutziu’s Pop (2006-2007) re-imagines historical body art through the comparatively sedate act of a hand flipping through a fashion magazine. Both works create a sense of distance from the source material in ways that allow for extended contemplation not of typical Central and Eastern European concerns, but of the wider neoliberal context to which all such images belong.
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Read more:
www.artmargins.com/index.php/2-articles/643-rearview-mirror-new-art-from-central-and-eastern-europe .................................................................................................................................................................