Tracing Queer Narratives in Romanian Time-Based Media Art

Essay by Valentina Iancu

East European Film Bulletin, vol. 128, October 2022

Time-based media art that engages with queer politics is a very recent phenomenon in Romania. During Communism, the use of video technologies for artistic purposes was more or less illegal, while homosexuality was criminalized until 2001. The enormous effervescence of today’s visual art scene is the result of an accelerated and in many ways difficult process of reconnecting with and (re)discovering the rest of the world’s cultures that started immediately after the violent fall of Communism in 1989. On 25 December 1989, Nicolae Ceaușescu and his wife Elena were shot dead, after a military tribunal found them guilty of genocide. The video images of their execution traveled around the world, probably becoming the first televised spectacle of a dictator’s death. In the days that preceded the execution, around 1200 civilians were killed during nationwide protests in which Romanian citizens demanded the end of Communism. The traumatic events from December 1989 marked the end of an age of totalitarianism that had lasted for over half of the 20th century.

During the transition period much hope was placed in the promised freedoms of capitalism. It was a time of rapid socio-economical, cultural and political transformation. The return to private property, the rapid privatization of economic infrastructure, violent workers’ protests and a new wave of nationalism were plaguing Romanian society in the nineties. The art world was shifting to new perspectives, facing a need of major structural reconfigurations. The previous regime, together with its ideological limitations and censorship, had offered artists a system of privileges. But now, studios, galleries, acquisition programs for museums, fellowships etc. were suddenly gone. From one day to the other, the status of the artist, together with that of the Communist cultural institutions, vanished, slowly making way for the organization of a neoliberal art market. “New horizons appeared for the art worlds of former socialist states following the dismantling of the Iron Curtain and opening up of the borders between Central and Eastern European countries that had hindered the free flow of artistic exchange since the 1950s.”​

Queer time-based media art is closely connected to the emergence of new art spaces and practices that started during the transition from Communism to neoliberal democracy. However, understood as a practice of body politics that resists oppressive sex/gender regimes, queer time-based media in Romania can be traced back to the works of earlier actionist artists such as Geta Brătescu and Ion Grigorescu. In that sense, the contemporary “revolution” of queer time-based media art in Romania displays a form of continuity that is in dialogue with the past. While new social constructions map new forms of social control onto the human body – in particular via the revitalization of the church and hetero-patriarchal capitalism – resisting dominant sex/gender regimes through deeply intimate and sensorial experiences thus remains essential to the artistic gesture of queering the body in Romania. In this essay, I wish to draw some parallels between contemporary and past Romanian time-based media art, in order to show how Romanian queer time-based media is shaped by different forms of political resistance ranging from personal emigration to Utopian escapism and from ironic performativity to political activism. 

The rise of time-based media in Romania took place in the first decade of the nineties, at the very beginning of the post-Communist period. It was immediately marred by multiple scandals. Each new media exhibition organized at the beginning of the nineties was met with loud criticism. Romanian video art history needs to be written, re-written, re-thought and more deeply understood. During this period, video art as a medium can be considered queer in itself for the reactions it provoked in some circles of the art world. Ewin Kessler, the most vocal art critic of the time, wrote a series of articles that criticized the rise of video art in Romania:​​

In the Romanian artistic landscape, video art still remains a science fiction entry. For most, video art seems to be undesirable because it does not reflect the true level of socio-economic maturity of Romanian society, which has been dormant for so long in the antechamber of industrial civilizations […] permanently ravaged by those media storms in relation to which video art wants to be a barometer.

The opening of the Soros Center for Contemporary Art (CSAC) in 1993 accelerated the production of time-based media works and the discovery of experimental (private) artistic practices from past decades. It was the CSAC that financially supported the rise of new media art, organizing exhibitions, conferences, publishing books and creating an international art network. From its inception CSAS orchestrated three major projects: a financing line for socially engaged art (favoring time-based media and other experimental practices); an archive focused on contemporary art; and the organization of an annual exhibition dedicated to contemporary art.  CSAS often commissioned socially engaged works for their annual time-based media exhibition. The initiative was received with hostile criticism. The strong debate around the guidance received by artists from the exhibition-making teams sparked accusations of “modeling” the “new artists”, pushing them in a direction of imitating the international creative trends in order to meet global standards. The changes of artistic practices were thus seen as forms of opportunism.

An important discovery of CSAC were clandestine video artworks that were made during the Communist years by a generation of experimental artists. Under the umbrella term “experimental art”, the art historian Alexadra Titu mustered all non-traditional visual artistic practices, such as video art, video installation, video performance, computer-based art, net art and so on. From Titu’s viewpoint, “the experiment as attitude, eluding or integrating the political, certainly is one of the integration strategies, but not only a strategy.”​

The first video art exhibition “Ex Oriente Lux” opened its doors at Dalles exhibition hall in Bucharest in November 1993, inaugurating a series of annual exhibitions organized by CSAC. The show put on display ten commissioned video installations made by Alexandru Antik, Josef Bartha, Judith Egyed, Kisspal Szabolcs, Alexandru Patatics, Dan Perjovschi, Lia Perjovschi, subReal (Călin Dan & Josef Kiraly), Laszlo Ujvarpssy and Sorin Vreme. The exhibition was historically contextualized as neo-avantgarde and, with a few exceptions, negatively reviewed by the press. The second CSAC annual exhibition, “0101010”, gathered multimedia works by Horia Bernea, Gheorghe Ilea, Marilena Preda Sânc, Teodor Graur, Marcel Bunea, Radu Igazsag, Judit Egyed, Rudolf Kocsis, Ion Grigorescu, Alexandru Chira, Adrian Timar and intermedia Group at the National Museum of the Romanian Peasant.

CSAC commissioned socially engaged works, addressing current issues of Romanian society. The 010101 exhibition concentrated on reaffirming the role of artists as social catalyzers, the educational importance of art, as well as the political meaning of artistic practices. It was the beginning of “freak shows”, of poverty porn that focused on an exotic representation of various communities from the Roma minority. Poverty was a recurring subject and was addressed by the act of documenting the life of ethnically and racially marginalized communities. However, sexual or gender marginalization only played a minor role, if any. Despite the criticism they faced, some artists that had been given the opportunity to experiment with video art had taken the practice seriously and continued working with the medium. A case in point is Marilena Preda Sânc.​ CSAC exhibitions were non-normative in terms of being open to different subjects, methodologies of research as well artistic mediums.

In general, political topics were most often received with reservations, if not with hostility, by the contemporary Romanian art world. There was a fear of activism, a fear of political correctness, a fear of critical speech. With the memory of the programmatic politicization of art that dominated the Communist years still fresh, reservations to be branded as political and skepticism towards the politicization of art were widespread. On the other hand, neoliberal democracy brought about new problems such as racism, homophobia, nationalism, gender inequalities and poverty, not to mention the distribution of power inside the reshuffled art scene. Art historian Magda Cârneci remarks​ that by the end of the nineties, we can observe

moments when a political awareness of the urgency of change begins to develop in Romania, of the need to develop critical positions, but also the courage to assume irony, sarcasm, cruel humor and even nihilism against the local mental status quo. It is the moment when many artists begin to assert with enough determination unmistakable truths about inherited clichés and about historicalized, expired, obsolete cultural acquisitions. 

The modest legacy of video works discovered in the context of CSAC, dating from the 70s and 80s, were the result of a process of documenting actions and performances taking place without an audience, in private places indoors or outdoors. Alienation, solitude, identity, surveillance, imprisonment, the human body, and nature were the subjects touched on by the actionist artworks of Geta Brătescu, Ion Grigorescu, Alexandru Antik and later by a younger generation spearheaded by Wandra Mihuleac, Aniko Gerendi, Decebal Scriba, Iulian Mereuță, and Lia Perjovschi, among others. The camera offered the illusion of artistic freedom: the artists had no official directives to follow and only limited information about the developments of the global video art scene. The access to technology was limited and highly regulated. Ion Grigorescu in Bucharest and the Sigma Artistic Group in Timișoara owned amateur Super 8 cameras and the kinema ikon group in Arad had access to a professional filmmaking apparatus. The conditions for producing clandestine experimental films were rudimentary. In their work, experimental artists explored their bodies, shifting towards subjectivity, psychology, and personal emotions. The body was a map of personal subjectivity, a form of internal emigration, which is why these works were later seen as a critique of Communist authority. Ileana Pintilie, who played a significant role in studying the body narratives in these films, singles out Ion Grigorescu (b. 1945) in particular, who she says was “undoubtedly the central figure of body-oriented artistic research in the 70s.”​

Can a poetics of queer culture start here? Using an amateur Soviet camera, Ion Grigorescu’s performances in front of the camera were meant to explore his own flesh, the forbidden territory of nudity. He developed a complex photo-video archive of bodily expressions of feelings that he named a “scientific-mechanical” language. The video action Male and Female recorded in 1976 on 8mm film (black and white, silent) staged what can be understood as a “gender troubled” personality. The artist described his bodily experiences as multiple and complex, going outside the hegemonic understanding of the gender binary:​

Penis as a paintbrush and masculine as a mask. On the one hand, it occupies a large part of my person, but no one should hold this place (for too long). She is a masculine conversation partner, although she uses a feminine name. She gives me an idea about myself and about my position in the world; she corrects a behavior that is inclined towards feminine. Our dialogue is not limited to the organic (things that we almost neglect); I have to acknowledge her intelligence, her ability to create, compose and imagine. As regards the status, your sensitivity is almost feminine, hysterical, morbid and febrile, with real language disorders. The more she asks about my personality, the more I tell her: I give you everything, that is, independence and authority, but not space, because there are others in the body too.

The video Male and Female softly touches on issues of gender transformation without having any awareness of gender theory. Grigorescu’s creative process is guided by intuitions in which vulnerability plays a crucial part. The ways in which this vulnerability is exposed in the creative process can be seen as a queering of masculinity. Grigorescu’s film shows how the complexities of the self cannot be fitted into gender norms. In that way, his film critiques the social pressure to perform the gender assigned at birth and the heteronormative regulations in a totalitarian society. Beyond gender politics, his experiments with the body might have a spiritual meaning as well, Grigorescu being interested in mythology, in particular myths of Androgyny, that fall outside the binary logic.

Ion Grigorescu’s unintentional queer touches were an inspiration for the young artist Alex Mirutziu (b. 1981), one of the first artists in Romania to consciously use a queer vocabulary. In his artworks, Mirutziu explicitly articulates his homosexual subjectivity, exploring his own desire, love, fear, pulsation and compulsion. Mirutziu centers his work on the body, often using his body to return the gaze, while making subtle sense of a “sinful and pathological” desire. Alex Mirutziu finished his visual art studies in Cluj-Napoca in 2001, the same year that homosexuality was decriminalized. He is a multidisciplinary artist working with performance, video art, theoretical texts, poetry, and drawing. His politics are oriented toward personal poetics, queerness being implicit, often abstract. Mirutziu makes use of metaphor to form an abstract queer vocabulary, understanding his art as “a protest”.​ Mirutziu only began including video art in his practice in 2017, extending some performances in new video art works. He doesn’t consider the documentation of a performance a work of art. Similarly, a video-documentation of a painting may not be seen as a new piece of art. His video performances Dignity to the Unsaid, The Gaze is a Prolapse Dressed in Big Business (2018) and Bottoms Know It (2019) have performances as a starting point but end up as unique video artworks often incorporating new scenarios. Mirutziu builds his subjects rhizomatically, carefully connecting ideas so as not to fall into categorical thinking. His work investigates queer issues, mixing theoretical approaches with intuition. For example, Bottoms Know It aims to​ give access to a distinct type of knowledge, that of the complicated relationship we have with our assholes. Centered on the poetics of anality, hence of openings, entrances, closings, exits, centers, and holes it deploys means of seeing and understanding the world and the ‘other’ taking disappearance and debasing of the self as the subject and gateway to a more profound grasp of our humanity.

In the performance/video, three local performers (dancers) are put into situations of visual alienation. Conversing and debating about the limitations of the body, they engage in an absurdist philosophical dialogue. Anal poetics is a way of queering a penis-oriented masculinity. Anal pleasure is seen as a pathological pleasure and as a feminizing pleasure. It is hence often refused by heterosexual males out of fear of homosexuality, largely being associated with gay sexuality.

Alex Mirutziu’s complex explorations of the homosexual body and his inventory of gestures undoing masculinity often touch on religious taboos. The use of Christian symbols in his art can be seen as a powerful way of queering himself, of liberating his symbolic body from the prison of sin. The idea of sin is very present in Romanian homophobic narratives, as the strongest opposition to homosexuality comes from the Orthodox Church, a highly influential institution both inside the state apparatus and within societal structures. Hand in hand with the church, conservative political groups were protesting against homosexual liberation, perceived as something foreign that was closely associated with Western Europe: “Romania wants to join Europe, not Sodom”.​​ In Romanian national myths, the collective symbolic body is identified with the homophobic claims of Christian Orthodoxy.

Part of the construction and preservation of any myth is the exclusion of whatever falls out of the intended narrative. From the simple perspective of statehood, individual bodies reproduce themselves inside nuclear families while working inside capitalist survival economies. The aesthetics of such national bodies associate ability and obedience with religious values. In the process of instituting dominant regimes centered on material production and heteronormative reproduction, some bodies, in this case queer bodies, fall out of the collective national body. Since the national body is in part defined by what it excludes, the narratives it creates to uphold its gender norms can be seen as a form of symbolic violence against those diverting from such norms. Art plays a key part in this process.

An aesthetic concerned with narrating the queer body should thus pay attention to excluded bodies, bodies often targeted by violence. A body that performs an aesthetic different from “the national body”, be it in its life choices, its fashion or even its inventory of gestures and body movements, is a fascinating subject (an object of desire) for artists and at the same time a target for violence (transphobia, lesbophobia or racism).

Alex Mirutziu’s narratives challenge the national body in a way that complements Katja Lee Eliad’s abstractions of lesbian subjectivity. Katja Lee Eliad, a multidisciplinary artist who works with drawing, poetry, painting, and time-based media art often records actions done in the studio or outside, the camera becoming a spectator, witness, and self-surveillance tool. For example, Perform is a poetical reflection on mental health and the abstract language of psychiatric diagnosis. How does a diagnosis affect our mind and behavior? Through the means of a video-performance, she staged an investigation of pain and its effects on the body. The performance compiles footage of skateboard exercises (specifically falls) where Katja stages skateboarding accidents in order to contemplate the crash, the falling, and their effects on the body. The attempt to signify the fall comes from a desire for understanding pain beyond the psychologically pathological. Most information we have about the experience of a mental breakdown comes from external psychiatric observation, rarely from self-study. Through the means of a cathartic artistic process, Katja stages a Cartesian doubt on what we know about brain circuits, affects, the human mind, the body, and the relationships between them. The strong connection between psychoanalysis and spirituality is often a subject of philosophical reflection as the fall and repetition resemble ritualistic processes. Eliad, exactly as Ion Grigorescu, is a spiritual person, and her imagination is rooted in mysticism and mythology, but she intentionally plays with overlapping significations. Spirituality, especially ideas originating in non-white religions, can expand our understanding on yet fragile topics such as gender or same-sex desire, offering alternative views to the dominant Christian Orthodox religion.

European homophobia and transphobia are strongly rooted in religion, therefore a more inclusive spiritual narrative can add some positive tension to the very strong notion of “sin” attached to the queer symbolic body. What are the mythologies of “sin” that justify and normalize the violence against the queer body? A political video that goes deep into questioning the relationship between “sin” and the queer body is Bahlui Arcadia, signed by the artistic duo Simona and Ramona. Simona Dumitriu and Ramona Dima are life partners, working together as an artistic duo since 2014. Since then, they have explored issues connected to gender, sexuality, and non-normative life in general. Inspired by Renate Lorenz’s methodology for making “freaky” queer art, Bahlui Arcadia consists of two superimposed components: a video screening at the artists’ home and a long performance taking place at the same time on the shores of the Nicolina river at its confluence with the river Bahlui, where Simona grew up as a young child. Simona and Ramona are blurring the lines between art, existentialism and politics. Their artistic practice starts from finding meaning in personal subjectivity, which is always understood in a feminist sense as political: “I try to live and to work starting from a set of ethical rules: to not instrumentalize the experience of other persons, to take my own privileges into account, and to speak about what I know, using a language that is as undiscriminating and without able-ing as possible.”​

The video Bahlui Arcadia shows Simona exercising on a stepper outside, in a green space behind some Communist housing blocks. The scene takes place in Simona’s childhood Arcadia, a small green area near the Bahlui River. In the background we can hear a conversation between Simona and Ramona, an intimate dialogue filled with memories, fantasies, and reflections about religion, desire, and ordinary life experiences. The non-linear dialogue is a reflection on the notion of “sin”: the recently renovated blocks of flats from the area where Simona grew up were filled with religious quotations (e.g., quotes from the Bible written on walls). Embodying condemned bodies engaged in an act of sinful love, Simona and Ramona’s work can be seen as a moving poetic visualization of the lesbian body, a powerful story that sews together multiple narratives that shed light on what it means to become a lesbian and navigate the meanings of being Eastern European, Romanian, precarious, Christian, white, female, and educated without falling under any of these possible identarian and constructed categorizations. An old-fashioned love letter softly introduces the viewer’s gaze to the intimacy of lesbian seduction. At one point in the video, Simona introduces Claude, her drag persona:​

What is Claude? A wannabe Catholic priest, the poetic centennial result of the generic liberations brought by the avant-garde somewhere else, a moral being, a leaflet of queer feminist ethics propaganda found 50 years later in a vintage edition of Better Homes and Gardens magazine. Claude was Cahun asking in Aveux non Avenus ‘Surely you are not claiming to be more homosexual than I… ?’ when meeting her postmodern multiples in the ’90s. Confronted to the absence of non-normative stories in history, Claude asks himself ‘Can I become a municipal legend, ready to wear my drag persona as repair of this absence and resistance against the local reproductive machine?

Ramona begins creating Dersch: “What is Dersch? A found object. Contemporary militaria, a piece of cloth randomly retrieved from bric-à-brac. USA official Marine army jacket, size M with NATO identification label.” The work touches on various mythologies strongly connected to the local experience of this specific geography, asking questions about how the lesbian symbolic body is affected by national myths, and especially Christian Orthodoxy.

Alex Mirutziu, Simona Dumitriu & Ramona Dima, Katja Lee Eliad, Sorin Oncu (1980-2016), Manuel Pelmuș, Veda Popovici, Alexandra Ivanciu & Anastasia Jurăscu or Hortensia Mi Kafkin (Kafchin) were pioneers in the field of queer time-based media art. None of them can be considered a “video artist”. They all pursue a multidisciplinary approach, which sometimes includes video. Today, the queer scene is growing very fast. With the internet especially, more and more time-based works touching on queer issues are put on display in various exhibitions. The rise of queer culture started as an alliance between various artistic initiatives and LGBTQ+-right activists. The collaboration between activists, artists, and curators often resorts to a methodology that calls to mind the annual exhibitions organized by CSAC. Commissioned art and solidarity-exhibitions are often financed by NGOs: this led to a new precarious periphery that is still in the process of being recognized.

One of the most active artists in the activist movement was Sorin Oncu, whose artistic practice closely follows an activist agenda. Oncu thus often explored and exposed the topic of his own homosexual masculinity, engaging his art in the fight for homosexual rights. Although his homosexuality was the main topic of his artistic research, he never put images of his own body on display. One exception is his first artivist (art+activism) installation, which he made in the context of a local LGBT-rights NGO, LGBTeam in Timișoara. The work Coming Out included some photographs of him and his partner in intimate gestures. After that his focus shifted towards more general activist claims in accordance with his experiences of discrimination as a homosexual male and a non-European citizen (Oncu was born in Serbia). During 2004-2007 he worked on several series inspired by the dynamics of LGBTQ+ life and the problems faced by homosexuals in post-Communist Romania, most of them being presented in group shows in Timişoara. During those years, he joined the LGBTeam association, getting involved in various activist and educational actions that aim at acknowledging diversity. During this time, the artist worked with flat surfaces, using painting, sketching and collage as his main techniques. Over time, his interest steered towards the bidimensional, opting for the arte povera language in installations of found objects that acquired new meanings via recontextualization. He explored multiple experimental territories: video, animation, found or built assemblages (out of very unusual materials). He considered himself a protest-artist with a critical vocation who “exercises this vocation freely associated with the minorities’ side in a democratic and pluralist society.”​​ Due to his strong political activism, he existed at the fringes of the visual art scene. The connection between activism and visual arts started to grow in Romania after his premature death in 2016. In 2018 a referendum for changing the definition of the family in the Romanian constitution was held. Backed by a highly homophobic campaign, the measure would have made same-sex marriage unconstitutional. The referendum failed, however, as the voter turnout was below the threshold. The homophobic pressure surrounding the referendum succeeded to connect culture and activism, accelerating the steps of what has recently been seen as a “queer revolution.”

Queer politics usually departs from the body, real or symbolic, collective or individual. It does so in opposition to sex/gender regimes that normalize, chastise, or criminalize this body. From this point of view, Ion Grigorescu’s reflections on the body that include, for example, one photography staging a ritualistic castration, can be understood through the lens of queer politics or queering. Is Ion Grigorescu a precursor of queer time-based media art? Is it fair to attach new theories to old works and reflect on meanings that were not necessarily of concern for the artist? Grigorescu’s way of narrating the body resonates with the queer symbolic body narratives built by the first generations of queer artists making time-based media art in Romania. In that way, it may be more adequate to speak about an evolution instead of a revolution. For example, the topic of castration is a subject represented by Hortensia Mi Kafkin (Kafchin), an artist concerned with transgender issues. Kafkin is interested in spirituality as well, with her witch alter ego cutting her own penis (shenis) in a ritual.

The coming out as a transgender woman of Hortensia Mi Kafkin, through the exhibition “Self-Fulfilling Prophecy” (Judin Galerie, 2016), directly pointed to transgender issues in the Romanian visual art scene. Hortensia Mi Kafkin is a multidisciplinary artist, a visionary dreamer who was already recognized and acclaimed by the local art scene at the moment of her coming out. Transition, transgender subjectivity, and transformation are central themes in her work. Here, bodies change into machines, which appeared in her work long before her coming out, as did witches, reptiles, enhanced humans, and aliens. Hortensia Mi Kafkin’s art conceives a universe filled with the magic of fantasies. She often says that she “is her art”, understanding that her creative endeavors keep her alive. She adapts to the hostile gender norms by dreaming and taking long journeys into the realm of imagination, which she records in various mediums such as drawing, painting, sculpture, 3D sculptures or other digital new technologies, installations, or video art.

In her most well-known video art works Personal Hawking and Bald Commercial, both produced with the support of Sabot gallery from Cluj-Napoca, she develops an aesthetic of the monstrous. The monstrous can convey feelings of surviving the hostile sex/gender regime, staying outside, dreaming in isolation. In Personal Hawking we see the artist performing a seductive demon teaching science, while in Bald Commercial she uses a replica of Brâncuși’s iconic Madame Pogany bronze and a wig, with the bronze figure turning bald over the course of the video. The work uses a punk-pop aesthetic and extraterrestrial iconography (the sculpture has alien eyes). The personal feeling of discomfort and of owning a monstrous body is a recurring topic in Hortensia’s work. Hortensia’s art can be seen as a surreal diary of multiple transitions, which can be interpreted as a queer gesture after her coming out. She had never claimed a queer space before starting the transition, leaving her metaphors unexplained. Her visual language throughout her body of work is implicitly political, articulating a personal queer poetics, but without engaging an activist agenda. She is more recognized in the art world and operates outside the activist scene.

Reality is changing fast. The rise of digital and post-internet art is lately opening up a new chapter on queer time-based media art in culture, extending the explorations to hybrid bodies, non-human emotions, sex ecologies, bacterial subjectivity, and alien experiences with young new voices.

Virusarea identității în era corpului docil/ carantinat/ fără organe

Text de Raluca Oancea (Nestor)

Revista Arta, Martie 11, 2021

RO:

Într-o perioadă traumatică a insecurității și a afectelor mediatice dezlănțuite, în care pandemia COVID 19 provoacă disoluția treptată a comunicării naturale, scena artistică se zbate să rămână în viață, să se implice în procesul atât de necesar de mediere, de dezbatere a unor teme actuale și totodată dureroase. În acest context problematic, expoziția Identitate Ultragiată s-a dovedit oportună, atât ca prilej de resuscitare a unei scene artistice anesteziate de pandemie cât și ca bun prilej de reflecție asupra modului în care astăzi ne privim, ne (re)cunoaștem și ne (re)construim pe noi înșine.

Inițiat de experimentata curatoare Ileana Pintilie, relevantul demers de chestionare a identității în epoca prefixelor post (postmodernitate, postfeminism, postumanism) a adunat media și abordări variate din centre culturale ca București, Cluj, Timișoara, sub egida unei critici ce vizează atât limitările unei societăți bazate pe uniformizare și consum, cât și discriminarea (ultragiere, rănire, virusare, atac) pe motive de gen, orientare sexuală sau locație periferică. Problemelor anticipate de curator și artiști precum cea a propriei lipse de libertate și putere ca actanți ai unei scene dominate de centre de forță instituționale și scheme financiare, cea a intruziunii tehnologice în sfera identității și a autenticității (sinelui, artei), pandemia le-a adăugat un nou layer marcat de înlocuirea atingerii și a comunicării fizice cu interacțiunea la distanță, includerea măștii în pattern-ul feței umane.

În consecință, sondarea identității a fost pusă în relație atât cu tema corpului (fie acesta docil după modelul lui Faucault, fără organe după Deleuze, ori bolnav/carantinat/ închis ermetic într-un sac cu fermoar conform ecuației pandemice actuale) cât și cu cea a tipurilor de media implicate în procesul de analiză și deconspirare artistică a unei identități. Din poziția sa de reputat critic și istoric de artă, Ileana Pintilie a lansat întrebări relevante precum: ce mai presupun astăzi noțiunile de portret, autoportret, acțiune, cum reușește imaginea tehnică să capteze aura și expresivitatea necesară unor astfel de demersuri, cum evoluează relația dintre identitate și autenticitate în era reproducerii mecanice/tehnologice. Investigația a chestionat și modul în care într-o epocă a post performance-ului, în care de multe ori artistul renunță la prezența sa efectivă, retrăgându-se într-o reprezentare, arta mai poate funcționa cathartic pentru genuri, subculturi, comunități defavorizate.

Printre cele cinci abordări intermediale incluse în demersul expozițional, cea a Pushei Petrov abordează cel mai explicit problematica subculturilor. În opinia mea lucrările incluse în expoziția de la București continuă și aprofundează cercetările sale artistice plasate sub semnul erotismului, culturii populare și al asumării sensibilității camp (vezi seria de genți roz, ușor desfăcute, privite de sus, ce amintesc imaginea unei flori deschise sau a organului sexual femeiesc, Marsupium à main, Art Encounters, 2017), adăugând layere antropologice, etnologice, ontologice (finitudine, timp).

Lucrările prezentate la București fac parte, de altfel, dintr-o cercetare artistică mai amplă întreprinsă la Paris în saloanele de coafură africană din zona Gării de Est, în scopul de a explora modul în care părul poate constitui un medium de expresie artistică. Seria de portrete fotografice de mari dimensiuni ale unor împletiturilor capilare africane, (des)coase, 2019, revelează părul ca limbaj, medium artistic, amprentă, tabu. Sunt scoase astfel din ascundere conotațiile erotice ale părului feminin în culturile orientale, statutul acestuia de lucru aproape viu, aproape sacru, ce trebuie ascuns, prins, legat, capacitatea acestuia de a fascina și a înspăimânta totodată, de a încapsula un raport de putere asemeni obiectului de cult.

Pentru Pusha Petrov, aparținând ea însăși unei comunități etnice restrânse de bulgari din Banat, centrul de greutate al proiectului rezidă însă în latura sa participativă. în vizitele la saloanele din Paris unde de regulă se atașează extensii și în conversațiile purtate aici cu membrii comunității. După ce părul artistei a fost împletit și transformat într-o arhitectură organică de către artistele africane, Pusha Petrov a inițiat un nou performance colaborativ, în care mai mulți artiști au intervenit alături de ea asupra arhitecturii capilare cu fire colorate. Observăm aici cum gestul de a coase în păr, cu alt fir decât cel negru folosit de regulă pentru a ascunde actul construirii, cât și cel de a coase împreună, fiecare după legi proprii dar în contextul aceleiași platforme de comunicare, pot fi interpretate ca subtile comentarii aduse de-construcției ca metodă artistică cât și modului în care identitatea noastră se construiește în oglindă (vezi Lacan) și în lume (în raport cu o anumită comunitate, valori, istorie).

Acestui proiect intermedial, situat la intersecția fotografiei cu performanceul și practica body art, i se alătură instalația sonoră Chignon Chouchou (2019), o serie de cocuri împletite în același stil, ce relatează (cu ajutorul unor boxe inserate) mituri urbane construite în jurul podoabelor capilare. Proiectele constituie atât un comentariu pertinent la adresa disoluției genurilor și a limbajelor artistice specifice cât și un discurs existențial, conturat în jurul dezbătutelor dihotomii dintre a fi și a părea (aici extensia de păr oscilează între statutul simplei aparențe și cel al unei linii de fugă către teritoriul vast al trans-umanului), dintre cele două interpretări ale femeii: femeia ca obiect natural și frumoasă aparență (frumusețe vegetală, lipsită de spirit) respectiv femeia ca operă de artă, ca esență și spirit liber a-și remodela aparența.

Pe linia trasată de estetica pragmatistă a lui John Dewey (Arta ca experiență), reluată recent de Richard Shusterman, cercetarea Pushei Petrov din saloanele africane confirmă faptul că aranjarea părului constituie totodată un episod autentic al vieții cotidiene cât și o experiență estetică capabilă a strânge laolaltă o comunitate (fie și pentru o după amiază într-o încăpere modestă, cu scaune și perdele uzate). În acest context practica artistică se încarcă cu valoare existențială, devine un prilej de a dezbate și promova un set de valori și credințe (alternative) capabile a contura fundalul unei existențe și trasarea unei identități în funcție de apartenența la subcultura respectivă.

O a treia lucrare, l’image qu’on a jamais, funcționează după principiul surprizei, al unghiului neașteptat sau al deformării practicate în pictura manieristă sau în filmul expresionist. Ceea ce inițial aduce cu o serie de portrete fără trăsături sau hărți misterioase se dovedește a fi reprezentarea unor creștete despădurite văzute de sus, o serie de configurații alopeciale. Caracterul universal al acestor chipuri fără chip, capabile a revela finitudinea umană marcată de fiecare clipă ce devine la rândul său trecut, de durata bergsoniană, este potențată de tehnica prețioasă a digigrafiei și de ramele aurii.

Un prețios comentariu asupra finitudinii oferă la rândul său artista Olivia Mihălțianu în proiectul Self Portrait as a Drowned Artist and The Portrait Studio (2020). Titlul deconspiră o reinterpretare a celebrului La noyade (1840), autoportretul manifest al lui Hippolyte Bayard, marele pierzător al patentului de inventator al fotografiei în fața celebrului Daguerre, om de știință susținut de Academia Franceză. Într-o inedită încercare de a așeza într-o unică ecuație problema identității și a finitudinii, condiția artistului și modul în care tehnologia influențează practica artistică, Olivia Mihălțianu reia mesajul lui Bayard care, grație paradoxalului său autoportret ca înecat, reușește să sfideze capriciile sorții și limitările tehnologiei (un portret necesita atunci imobilizarea subiectului și închiderea ochilor), încăpățânându-se să rămână în istoria artei fie și ca întemeietor al fotografiei înscenate.

Combinând o incitantă sinteză media (fotografie, video, sculptură) cu teme predilecte precum autoportretul și jocul de roluri (începând cu expoziția Femidon, Galeria Nouă, 2007), raportul fragil dintre natură și tehnologie (vezi intervențiile în natură din grădina Tranzit sau contribuțiile la expozițiile DPlatform, 2018), Olivia Mihălțianu livrează un comentariu matur ce conectează portretul cu tehnologia, poziționează practica foto-video pe linia fină dintre estetic și tehnologic. Cu alte cuvinte, imaginea produsă cu ajutorul unui aparat, desconsiderată adesea ca simplu mijloc de mimesis, de înregistrare a realității își revelează aici abilitățile de unealtă magică, spirituală (Robert Bresson) ce poate capta frumosul, aura, identitatea. Frumusețea tehnicii, a aparatului și a metodologiei sale de lucru, bazată pe substanțe chimice, erori, reușite, se alătură frumuseții naturale.

Instalația Self Portrait as a Drowned Artist and The Portrait Studio, în opinia mea cea mai puternică prezență a demersului expozițional discutat, se distinge prin conturarea unui spațiu în spațiu, prin delimitarea unei felii independente de spațiu-timp. Cu alte cuvinte, artista construiește într-una dintre sălile galeriei o replică a atelierului său din Sofia, în care alături de sculptorul Stoyan Dechev s-a dedicat studiului și înregistrării intermediale a corpului și identității umane, în funcție de perspectivă și lumină. Subtila înțelegere a spațiului o redefinește pe absolventa de Foto-Video drept artist transmedial ilustrând în același timp diferența dintre simplul fotograf (în cuvintele lui Vilem Flusser funcționarul aparatului său) și artistul care lucrează cu fotografia (filmul) sondând limitele imaginii tehnice și interferența sa cu practica tradițională (portret, peisaj).

Spațiul este organizat în patru celule dintre care primele două par a fi dedicate imaginii frumoase ce favorizează contemplarea readucând în discuție studiile anterioare ale artistei asupra naturii dar și sensibilele ei cianotipii realizate uneori în contexte performativ-participative (vechea tehnică a cianotipiei a fost practicată de Bayard însuși). În prima celulă, pentru a evoca statutul fragil al artistului contemporan dar și relația fotografiei cu limitarea corpului, Olivia Mihălțianu alătură un sensibil și prețios print pe bază de sare, ce reia postura înecatului cufundat într-un somn vindecător, unei serii de tije metalice ce invocă suporturile folosite la începutul fotografiei pentru imobilizarea subiectului. Frumoasa fotografie portocalie antrenează conotații multiple, de la imaginea Ofeliei plutind pe apă, calmă, imobilă și seninătatea sepia a fotografiilor mortuare, la redefinirea contemplării (ca soluție asumată a refugierii temporare în vis, în frumusețea liniștitoare) și deconspirarea principiului vechii fotografii în care prețul imortalității reprezentării era plătit printr-un lung exercițiu de imobilizare a corpului în fața camerei. A doua celulă este dominată de un video în care imagini din atelierul din Sofia al artistei întâlnesc imagini din grădina campusului ce îl găzduiește, inclusiv cea a unui bust abandonat de femeie pe care ploaia și vegetația și-au lăsat urmele.

Dacă primele surprindeau prin frumusețea apolinică și îndemnau la contemplare, ultimele celule se definesc ca teritoriu dionisiac al acțiunii: ruperea visului, recontextualizarea protestului lui Bayard pe o scenă artistică dominată de instituții și valoare de piață. Astfel, o a treia cameră, goală, inundată de o lumină roșie ce conferă spațiului o coordonată afectivă, îmbină trăsăturile unui laborator foto, în care developarea poate impune o temporară suspendare a simțului dominant al vederii, cu tensiunea actului erotic, transgresiv, cu aducerea (oricât de dureroasă) la viață. La rândul său, ultima cameră reprezintă un studio foto re-contextualizat în epoca selfie în care tot mai mulți oameni aleg să își realizeze singuri portretul. Aici publicul este invitat să folosească recuzita necesară (un suport pentru cap, setup de lumini pe care mulți și le-au amenajat deja acasă în vederea interacțiunii online din pandemie) realizând un selfie cu propriul telefon.

Imersiv și interactiv proiectul lansează astfel un captivant comentariu asupra evoluției imaginii tehnice, de la primele încercări de a fixa o reprezentare într-o fotografie și până la produsele tipice erei digitale, celebrele selfie, înscenate și prefabricate, create pentru a fi manipulate și distribuite în masă. Simultan, practica artistică este definită ca act dureros și transgresiv, plasat la întâlnirea inspirației și imaginației nelimitate cu finitudinea și condiția tragică a umanității.

Cu un pas mai departe pe linia transgresiunii se situează Adriana Jebeleanu, artistă care în 2012 a ales dispariția de pe scena artei dar și a vieții. Povestea acestei identități rănite și anulate este prezentată odată cu explorarea registrului tragicului, al straniului, al informului, al sublimului într-o serie de lucrări cu tentă afectivă, bazate pe contrastul dintre nonculori (alb, negru) și roșul puternic. Caracterul transmedial al acestor acțiuni ce sunt pe rând fotografiate, filmate sau desfășurate în fața publicului se îmbină cu orientarea anti-artă, revelând o acută criză a reprezentării simțită de artista formată ca pictoriță. Un exemplu în acest sens Blind, Deaf, Mute (2011), în care artista cu capul acoperit de o cagulă (albă, roșie, neagră) stă în fața unui pian fără a-i atinge clapele, reinterpretează celebrul 4 minute și 33 de secunde al lui John Cage.

Imposibilitatea comunicării o face pe artistă să penduleze între soluția romantică a retragerii din lume, a proiecției de realități onirice, deconectate, respectiv implicarea în acțiuni cathartice ce constituie atât un mod de protest cât și o încercare de ieșire din sine, către celălalt. În acest scop starea de vis, urma, absența vor alterna cu prezența, cu cât mai tăcută, mai abstractă, cu atât mai apăsătoare.

Registrul retragerii este ilustrat atât de performance-ul cu capul acoperit Orb, surd, mut cât și de videouri scurte ca I will forget, 2009, construit în jurul dihotomiilor aparență-prezență, veșmânt-corp, corp-spirit. Dacă în primul caz soluția pare a fi sondarea interiorității profunde (angoase, dorințe, pulsiuni) în căutarea ultimelor urme ale autenticității, în cel de-al doilea o serie de veșminte albe, agățate în pădure deconspiră lipsa corpului, artista întoarcându-se către natura încă liberă, către modelul creației spontane. Registrul acțiunii este implicat atunci când artista se hotărăște să privească spectatorul în ochi, direct în contextul unui performance sau mediat prin intermediul unui video ca FAST FOOD, 2008, un protest împotriva lipsei autenticității și a ritmului mașinizant al vieții, în care artista îmbrăcată în alb mănâncă petalele unui crin. Chiar și în varianta video, privirea sa pătrunzătoare depășește nivelul optic înscriindu-se în zona hapticului, a privirii care atinge (the gaze), care neliniștește publicul îndemnându-l la acțiune.

Videouri ca Totally Love (2011) în care un lichid sângeriu se revarsă continuu peste marginile unei căni invocă legătura dintre autenticitate și angoasă, actul ieșirii din sine, actul vărsării din corp, al topirii contururilor dureroase care ne separă iremediabil de celălalt, act ce devine posibil (după cum ne avertizează George Bataille) numai în erotism sau în moarte. Depășirea lumii conformismului, a vidului identitar, a mașinizării trăirii, a șablonizării artei determină astfel angrenarea artistei într-un proces transgresiv de sondare a limitelor psihologice, a frontierelor conștiinței readucând în discuție definiția artistului modern dată de Susan Sontag ca broker al nebuniei. În acest sens, trebuie să acceptăm că practica artistică cu miză cathartică, actul performativ dus până la capăt, până la depășirea limitelor fizice, corporale, recuperează perimetrul sacrului dar în același timp se dovedește riscantă pentru artist ca persoană. În cazul Adrianei Jebeleanu, prețul plătit pentru autenticitatea ultimă, pentru experimentarea ieșirii din sine, pentru trăirea acută a limitei, care în opinia lui Bataille solicită “aprobarea vieții până și în moarte”, va fi trecerea dincolo.

Un demers înrudit, înscris pe aceeași traiectorie a finitudinii și transgresivității este cel al artistului clujean Alex Miruțiu care în cele două lucrări expuse la București testează limitele corpului și ale identității de gen și orientare sexuală. În Feeding the Horses of all heroes, 2010, performance înregistrat la Accademia di Romania din Roma, instituție conservatoare, artistul se lansează într-un exercițiu cathartic al căderii și recuperării. Travestit într-un model de modă, obiect predefinit al admirației, și înarmat cu recuzita corespunzătoare (pantofi cu toc înalt, ținute senzuale, expresie absentă, de nepătruns), el parcurge recurent un catwalk sub privirea atentă a publicului. Chiar dacă pentru o scurtă perioadă el pare a se conforma identității de vedetă specializată în trăire aparentă, artistul rupe parcurgerea ritmică printr-o neașteptată cădere (gest marcat sonor cu un dramatic zgomot metalic, dizarmonic) care apoi se va repeta ritmic. Acest ritual al căderii (coordonată existențială asociată de filosofi cu pierderea sinelui autentic în favoarea unor trăsături impersonale: ce se spune, se crede, se poartă) pare a invoca nu doar condiția artistului și instituția fashion-ului ci întreaga societate a spectacolului (Guy Debord) în care astăzi ne trezim angrenați ca dispozitive, corpuri docile, organe, spectatori anesteziați și izolați, identități prefabricate.

Contrastul dintre cădere și recuperare readuce în discuție cercetările lui Mirutziu asupra luptei scriitoarei Iris Murdoch cu pierderea memoriei și maladia Alzheimer, confirmând abilitatea artistului de a scoate din ascundere finitudinea umană, limitele corpului, voinței, limbajului, anduranței, de a recupera frumusețea și eroismul ce inevitabil se ascund în eroare, în fragilitatea umană. Același contrast revelează un nou tip de tensiune, tensiunea ființei umane între verticalitate și orizontalitate. În acest sens Mirutziu aderă după modelul lui Bataille și Rosalind Kraus la o estetică a informului, a materialismului de bază, o estetică de recuperare a corpului și a fluidelor sale. Scopul acesteia este depășirea idealismului și a pudibonderiei, orizontalizarea, acceptarea faptului că deși capetele noastre se îndreaptă către cer, legătura noastră cu pământul, cu orizontala, rămâne esențială.

Aceeași deconspirare a infatuării omului modern de a fi depășit – odată cu desprinderea de orizontală – stadiul animalic, axa biologică gură-anus, însuflețește și portretul Doings for a Living (2018). Imaginea funcționează după modelul gros-planului deconspirat de Deleuze în cărțile sale despre cinema (Cinema I, Imaginea afect) substituind reprezentării psihologice aducerea la prezență (cu ajutorul trăsăturilor portretizate) a afectelor înseși: tristețea, frica, dorința, plictiseala. În acest caz suntem confruntați cu planul apropiat al unei guri: câmp de luptă (vezi accesoriul Nike purtat de boxeri pentru protecție), orificiu asociat cu declamarea poetică, cu actul nobil al vorbirii, cu exprimarea conceptelor și gândurilor dar totodată emblema actelor biologice de a striga, vomita sau scuipa. În acest sens, lucrările lui Mirutziu ilustrează exemplar teoria lui Bataille despre dualitatea lumii, despre dubla conotație a sacralității (sacer lat.) ce simultan semnifică sfințenia și blestemul, crima.

Adelina Ivan se remarcă în contextul unei serii de acțiuni minimaliste, recente (2020), ce intră într-un dialog relevant cu comentariul despre păr și feminitate al Pushei Petrov, cu analizele dedicate corpului și finitudinii de către ceilalți artiști. În opinia curatoarei, aceste acțiuni se înscriu într-o specie a post-performance-ului: distant, înregistrat, realizat pentru ochiul camerei de filmat, un performance din care artista face parte ca o componentă abstractă.

În Hello Vera, o cercetare pe tema feminității fragile, imperfecte în fața modelelor invincibile din reclame, artista se privește în oglindă pieptănându-și părul. Gesturile sale ritmice aduc în discuție atît statutul de obiect erotic al femeii cât și fenomenul extins al mecanizării vieții cotidiene și al prefabricării identității. Abordarea nu angajează un registru afectiv, expresionist, ci mai curând unul conceptual la intersecția dintre poezie și teoremă (vezi filmele lui Pasolini și investigația poetică a spațiului a lui Georges Perec). Corpul devine la rândul său un concept, un construct virtual. Perierea părului, așezarea și ridicarea de pe pat, trasarea unor linii pe perete sunt transformate pe rând în geometrii artistice care acționează după principiul repetiției, în gesturi rituale de exorcizare a materiei, a visceralului, de anulare a tensiunilor unei lumi nesigure și alienante.

Left square, right square, prezintă încastrarea corpului artistei în două structuri paralelipipedice. Dedublarea este doar aparent simetrică, corpul reușind să evadeze din conturul geometric doar într-una dintre cele două ferestre. Scenariul amintește proiectele lui Bruce Nauman din anii 1970 în care reprezentarea corpului era drastic afectată de percepția anormală a spațiului, precum alienanta instalație Green Light Corridor ce propune traversarea unui spațiu rectiliniu, îngust și inconfortabil, luminat de un neon verde agresiv. Critica rentabilizării și a matematizării spațiului, a reducerii formelor naturale (neregulate, circulare) la linia dreaptă este continuată în Circling, un performance ritualic în care artista se așează și apoi se învârte în jurul unui pat. Imaginea este însoțită de o a doua fereastră cu comentarii textuale despre spațiu și limbajul liniilor (drepte, circulare, organice). Reprezentarea obstinată a patului reiterează poeticele comentarii despre spațiul afectiv din Specii ale spațiului de același Perec: Patul este spațiul individual prin excelență, spațiul elementar al corpului.

Arta scoate astfel din ascundere o interpretare a dureroasei izolări a individului contemporan în perimetrul dreptunghiular al patului, camerei, locuinței, orașului. Dacă noi suntem corp iar corpul nostru nu poate fi separat de lume prin gestul simplist al decupării (înăuntru separat de epidermă de un înafară), dacă dimpotrivă corpul nostru reprezintă extensia până la care ne putem deplasa, cunoaște, atinge, atunci orice act de separare/izolare constituie o amputare a corpului. În acest sens, proiectul curatoriat de Ileana Pintilie constituie un exercițiu fenomenologic ce confirmă în limbajul alternativ al imaginii faptul că a fi nu are sens decât ca a fi în lume, că omul nu poate exista fără corp, corp a cărui izolare (pandemică) este conectată strâns de mutilarea identității.

Expoziția Identitate Ultragiată, curatoriată de Ileana Pintilie, a avut loc la Galeria Anca Poterașu, București, în perioada noiembrie-decembrie 2020.

The Infection of Identity in the Age of the Body Docile / Quarantined / Without Organs

Text by Raluca Oancea (Nestor)

Arta Magazine, March 11, 2021

EN:

In this traumatic period of insecurity and unbridled mass-media affects, when the COVID 19 pandemic is causing the gradual dissolution of natural communication, the art scene is struggling to survive, to participate in the all-so-necessary process of mediation, of debating current and at the same time painful topics. In this difficult context, the exhibition Wounded Identity proved timely, both as a chance to reinvigorate an art scene anesthetized by the pandemic and as a chance to reflect on the way in which we look at, recognize, and (re)construct ourselves.

Launched by the experienced curator Ileana Pintilie, this relevant project of identity questioning in the age of post prefixes (postmodernity, postfeminism, posthumanism) has brought together various media and approaches from cultural centers like Bucharest, Cluj, and Timișoara under the umbrella of a critique directed both at the limitations of a society based on uniformization and consumption, as well as at discrimination (assaulting, wounding, infecting, attacking) based on gender, sexual orientation, or peripheral position. The pandemic added a new layer to the problems anticipated by the curator and artists – such as their lack of freedom and power as actors in a scene dominated by institutional power centers and financial schemes, the intrusion of technology in the sphere of identity and authenticity (of the self, of art) – a layer marked by the replacement of touch and physical communication with interaction at a distance and the assimilation of masks into the pattern of the human face.

As a result, the probing of identity was related both to the theme of the body (be it the docile body, after Foucault’s model, Deleuze’s body without organs, or the sick/quarantined/hermetically sealed inside a zipper bag, as with the current pandemic) and with the types of media involved in the process of analyzing and laying bare identity through art. From her position as a reputed critic and art historian, Ileana Pintilie raised relevant questions like: what do the notions of portrait, self-portrait, and action presuppose today? How does the relation between identity and authenticity evolve in the age of mechanical/technological reproduction? Her investigation also questioned how art can still function cathartically for underprivileged genders, subcultures, and communities, in a post-performance age, in which the artist often forgoes their actual presence, retreating into a representation.

Among the exhibition’s five intermedia approaches, it is Pusha Petrov’s that most explicitly tackles the issue of subcultures. In my opinion, her works in the Bucharest exhibition continue and deepen her artistic research, marked by eroticism, pop culture, and camp sensibility (see her series of pink handbags, slightly opened, seen from above, reminiscent of an open flower or the female sex organ, Marsupium à main, Art Encounters, 2017), adding anthropological, ethnological, ontological (finitude, time) layers.

Her works exhibited in Bucharest are part of a broader artistic research carried out in Paris in African hair salons around the Gare de l’Est with the aim of exploring the ways in which hair can be a medium of artistic expression. The series of large-scale photographic portraits of African braids, titled (des)coase / (un)stitch, 2019, reveal hair as language, artistic medium, mark, taboo. The erotic connotations of women’s hair in oriental cultures are thus unconcealed: its status as an almost living, almost sacred thing that needs to be hidden, tied, bound, its capacity to simultaneously fascinate and frighten, to encompass a power relation similar to that of a religious object.

For Pusha Petrov, herself part of an ethnic minority of Bulgarians living in Banat, the project’s center of gravity resides in its participative side, in her visits to the hair salons in Paris, where they often attach extensions, and in her conversations with the members of the community. After the artist’s hair had been braided and transformed into an organic architecture by the African artists, Pusha Petrov initiated a new collaborative performance, a series of interventions with colored thread in her new hair structure undertaken by her and other artists. We see how the action of stitching hair, with thread of different colors than black, the one often used to conceal the act of production, as well as that of sewing together, everyone with their own laws, but in the context of the same communication platform, can be interpreted as subtle comments on de-construction as an artistic method and the way in which our identity is constructed in the mirror (see Lacan) and in the world (relative to a certain community, history, values).

This intermedia project, situated at the intersection of photography with performance and body art, is complemented by the sound installation Chignon Chouchou (2019), a series of buns braided in the same style that speak (with the help of internal speakers) about urban myths built around hair. The two projects are both a relevant commentary on the dissolution of specific art genres and languages, as well as an existential discourse built around the contested dichotomies between to be and to seem (here hair extensions oscillate between the status of mere appearance and that of a line of flight towards the vast territory of the transhuman), between the two interpretations of woman: woman as natural object and beautiful appearance (plant-like beauty lacking spirit) and woman as artwork, as essence and free spirit able to modify her appearance.

In the line traced by John Dewey’s pragmatist aesthetics (Art as Experience), recently taken up again by Richard Shusterman, Pusha Petrov’s research in the African salons confirms the fact that doing one’s hair is both an authentic episode of daily life and an aesthetic experience capable of bringing together a community (be it just for one afternoon in a modest room with work chairs and curtains). In this context, art practice becomes charged with existential value. It becomes a chance to debate and promote a set of (alternative) values and beliefs capable of outlining the basis for an existence and an identity based on belonging to that particular subculture.

A third work, l’image qu’on a jamais, works by the principle of surprise, the unexpected angle, or the kind of deformation seen in mannerist painting or expressionist film. What at first seems like a series of portraits without features or mysterious maps reveals itself to be representations of hairless heads seen from above, a series of alopecial configurations. The universal character of these faceless faces, capable of revealing human finitude marked by every moment that, one after another, becomes past, by Bergsonian duration, is augmented by the valuable technique of digigraphy and by the golden frames.

A precious commentary on finitude is also offered by artist Olivia Mihălțianu in her project Self Portrait as a Drowned Artist and The Portrait Studio (2020). The title reveals a reinterpretation of the famous La noyade (1840), the self-portrait manifesto of Hippolyte Bayard, who lost the status of inventor of photography to the famous scientist Daguerre, supported by the French Academy. In an original attempt to bring together the problem of identity and finitude, of the artist’s condition and how technology influences art practice, Olivia Mihălțianu picks up the message of Bayard, who, thanks to his paradoxical self-portrait as a drowned man, succeeds in defying the vagaries of fate and the limitations of technology (shooting a portrait back then required the subject’s immobility and the closing of the eyes), stubbornly remaining in art history, even if as the founder of staged photography.

Combining an exciting synthesis of media (photography, video, sculpture) with some of her favorite topics, like the self-portrait and roleplaying (starting with the exhibition Femidon, Galeria Nouă, 2007), the fragile relation between nature and technology (see her interventions in nature at the Tranzit garden or her contributions to exhibitions at DPlatform, 2018), Olivia Mihălțianu delivers a mature commentary that relates the portrait to technology, positions photo-video practice on the fine line between aesthetics and technology. In other words, the image produced with a camera, often dismissed as mere mimesis, a recording of reality, reveals in this context its capacities as a magic, spiritual tool (Robert Bresson) that can capture the beautiful, the aura, identity. The beauty of the technique, of the camera and its working methodology, based on chemicals, errors, and achievements, complements natural beauty.

The installation Self Portrait as a Drowned Artist and The Portrait Studio, in my opinion the strongest presence in the show, is remarkable in that it outlines a space within space, delimiting an independent slice of space-time. In other words, the artist constructs, in one of the gallery’s rooms, a replica of her studio in Sofia, in which, together with sculptor Stoyan Dechev, she devoted herself to the intermedial recording of the human body and identity, relative to perspective and lighting. Her subtle understanding of space defines Mihălţianu, who studied photography and video, as a transmedia artist, simultaneously illustrating the difference between mere photographer (in Vilem Flusser’s terms, the mere functionary of their apparatus) and the artist working with photography (film), probing the limits of the technical image and its interference with traditional practice (portrait, landscape).

The space is organized into four cells, of which the first two seem to be dedicated to the beautiful image favoring contemplation, bringing once more into discussion Mihălțianu’s previous studies on nature, but also her sensitive cyanotypes, some of which were made in performative-participative contexts (the old cyanotype technique was practiced by Bayard himself). In the first cell, in order to evoke the fragile status of the contemporary artist, but also photography’s relation to the limitation of the body, Olivia Mihălțianu juxtaposes a sensitive and precious salt-based print, which restages the posture of the drowned man deep in healing sleep, with a series of metal rods reminiscent of the structures used in the early days of photography to immobilize the subject. The beautiful orange photograph awakens multiple connotations, from the image of Ophelia floating on the water, calm, unmoving, and the sepia blitheness of post-mortem photographs, to the redefinition of contemplation (as the assumed solution of temporarily taking refuge in dreams, in soothing beauty) and the revelation of the principle of old photography, in which the price of the immortality afforded by representation was paid through a long exercise of bodily immobility before the camera. The second cell is dominated by a video in which images from the artist’s studio in Sofia meet images from the garden of the campus housing it, including an abandoned female bust on which rain and vegetation have left their mark.

If the first cells impressed the viewer through Apollonian beauty and invited to contemplation, the final cells are defined as a Dionysian territory of action: the shattering of the dream, the recontextualization of Bayard’s protest on an art scene dominated by institutions and market value. And so, the third room, empty and flooded with a red light that gives the space an affective dimension, combines the features of a photo lab, in which development may impose a temporary suspension of our dominant sense of sight, with the tension of the erotic, transgressive act, with a bringing to life (as painful as it might be). The final room represents a photo studio recontextualized in the selfie age, in which more and more people choose to create their portraits themselves. Here the audience is invited to use the necessary props (a support and lighting that many have already set up at home for online interactions during the pandemic) to take selfies with their own phones.

Immersive and interactive, the project offers a captivating commentary on the evolution of the technical image, from the first attempts to fix a representation in a photograph to the products of the digital age, the famous selfies, staged and prefabricated, created to be manipulated and distributed en masse. At the same time, art practice is defined as a painful and transgressive act, placed at the intersection of unlimited inspiration and imagination with finitude and humanity’s tragic condition.

One step further down the path of transgression is Adriana Jebeleanu, an artist who in 2012 chose to exit the art scene – and life, too. The story of this wounded and nullified identity is presented by exploring the register of the tragic, the strange, the unformed, and the sublime in a series of works with affective notes based on the contrast between noncolors (white, black) and a strong red. The transmedial character of these actions, which are, photographed, filmed, or performed in front of an audience, combines with an anti-art orientation, revealing an acute crisis of representation felt by the artist, who had a background in painting. One example in this sense, Blind, Deaf, Mute (2011), in which the artist sits in front of a piano without touching its keys, a (white, red, black) hood over her head, is a reinterpretation of John Cage’s famous 4’33’’.

The impossibility of communication makes Jebeleanu waver between the romantic solution of retreating from the world, of projecting disconnected dream realities, and becoming involved in cathartic actions that represent both a means of protest and an attempt to escape the self towards the other. Towards this purpose, the dream state, the trace, and absence alternate with presence – the more silent and abstract, the more disquieting.

The register of retreat is illustrated both by the performance Blind, Deaf, Mute and by short videos like I will forget, 2009, built around the dichotomies of appearance-presence, clothing-body, body-spirit. If in the first case the solution seems to be probing one’s deep interiority (one’s fears, desires, drives) in search of the last traces of authenticity, in the second case a series of white garments hung in the forest reveal the lack of a body, the artist returning to a still-free nature, to the model of spontaneous creation. The action’s register is implied when the artist decides to look the viewer in the eye, directly in the context of a performance or mediated through a video like FAST FOOD, 2008, a protest against the lack of authenticity and the machinic rhythm of life, in which the artist, dressed in white, eats the petals of a lily. Even in the video version, her piercing gaze goes beyond the optic level and into the haptic, the gaze that touches, that unsettles the audience, driving them to action.

Videos like Totally Love (2011), in which a blood-like liquid overflows from a cup, invoke the link between authenticity and angst, the act of self-abandonment, the act of flowing out of the body, the painful outlines severing us from the other now melting, an act that becomes possible (as Georges Bataille warns) only in eroticism or death. Overcoming the world of conformism, of identity void, the mechanization of life, the conventionalization of art determines the artist’s engagement in a transgressive project of probing the limits of human psychology, of the frontiers of knowledge, bringing back into discussion Susan Sontag’s definition of the modern artist as a broker in madness. In this sense, we must accept that art practice that has a cathartic aim, the performative act taken to its end, overstepping physical, corporeal limits, recovers the site of the sacred, but also proves risky for the artist as a person. In Adriana Jebeleanu’s case, the price paid for ultimate authenticity, for the experience of self-abandonment, for the acute experience of the limit, which, in Bataille’s opinion, seeks “the approval of life unto death,” was passing away.

Cluj-based artist Alex Mirutziu showcases a similar process, on the same trajectory of finitude and transgression. In his two works exhibited in Bucharest, he tests the limits of the body, gender identity, and sexual orientation. In Feeding the horses of all heroes, 2010, a performance recorded at the Accademia di Romania in Rome, a conservative, institution, the artist engages in a cathartic exercise of fall and recovery. Crossdressing as a model, a predefined object of admiration, and armed with the proper attire (high heels, provocative clothing, absent, inscrutable gaze), he traverses a catwalk under the audience’s attentive gaze. Even though, for a short time, he seems to conform to the identity of a celebrity specialized in apparent living, Mirutziu breaks the rhythmic walk through an unexpected fall (with the sound of a dramatic, dissonant metallic sound), which then repeats rhythmically. This ritual of falling (the existential coordinate philosophers associate with the loss of the authentic self in favor of impersonal qualities: what people say, think, wear) seems to invoke not just the artist’s condition and the fashion industry, but the entire society of the spectacle (Guy Debord) in which we find ourselves today hooked up as devices, docile bodies, organs, anesthetized and isolated spectators, premanufactured identities.

The contrast between fall and recovery brings into discussion Mirutziu’s research on the struggle of writer Iris Murdoch with memory loss and Alzheimer’s, confirming the artist’s ability to unconceal human finitude, the limits of the body, the will, language, endurance, of recovering the beauty and heroism that are inevitably concealed in error, in human frailty. This same contrast reveals a new kind of tension, the human being’s tension between verticality and horizontality. In this sense, Mirutziu adheres, like Baitaille and Rosalind Kraus, to an aesthetics of the unformed, of basic materialism, an aesthetics of recovering the body and its fluids. Its goal is to overcome idealism and prudishness, to become horizontal, accept the fact that even though our heads point to the sky, our link to the earth, to the horizontal, remains essential.

The same revelation of modern humans’ infatuation with having surpassed the animal stage, the biological mouth-anus axis – having emancipated themselves from the horizontal – also animates the portrait Doings for a Living (2018). The image functions after the model of Deleuze’s gros plan, laid bare in his books on cinema (Cinema I, the affect image), replacing psychological representation with bringing affects themselves forth into presence (with the help of portrayed features): sadness, fear, desire, boredom. In this case we are confronted with a close-up of a mouth: a battleground (see the Nike mouthguard that boxers wear for protection), an orifice associated with poetic declamation, with the noble act of speech, with expressing concepts and thoughts, and also an emblem of the biological acts of screaming, vomiting, and spitting. In this sense, Mirutziu’s works perfectly illustrate Bataille’s theory on the world’s duality, on the double connotation of the sacred (Lat. sacer) which simultaneously signifies sainthood and the accursed, the act of killing.

Adelina Ivan stands out in the context of a series of recent (2020) minimalist actions that enter into a relevant dialogue with Pusha Petrov’s commentary on hair and femininity and with the other artists’ analyses of bodies and finitude. In the curator’s opinion, these actions fit into a category of post-performance: distant, recorded, performed for the eye of the camera, a performance in which the artist is an abstract part.

In Hello Vera, an investigation into fragile femininity, imperfect when compared to the invincible models in advertisements, the artist looks at herself in the mirror combing her hair. Her rhythmic gestures bring up both women’s status as erotic object as well as the extensive mechanization of daily life and the prefabrication of identity. Her approach does not engage an affective, expressionist register, but rather a conceptual one at the intersection between poetry and theorem (see Pasolini’s films and Georges Perec’s poetic investigations into space). The body in turn becomes a concept, a virtual construct. Brushing hair, lying down and getting up from the bed, tracing lines on the wall, these actions are transformed one by one into artistic geometries that function by the principle of repetition, into ritualistic gestures of exorcising matter, the visceral, of dispelling the tensions of an insecure and alienated world.

Left square, right square shows the confinement of the artist’s body into two rectangular structures. The doubling is only apparently symmetrical, as the body manages to escape from the geometric outline in just one of the two windows. The situation is reminiscent of Bruce Nauman’s projects from the 1970s, in which the representation of the body was drastically affected by an abnormal perception of space, like the alienating installation Green Light Corridor, which asked you to cross a straight, narrow, and uncomfortable space lit by an aggressive green neon light. A critique of the capitalization and mathematization of space, of reducing its natural forms (irregular, circular) to the straight line, is continued in Circling, a ritualistic performance in which the artist sits down and then turns on a bed. The image is accompanied by a second window with commentary texts around space and the language of lines (straight, circular, organic). The obstinate representation of the bed reiterates Perec’s poetic comments on affective space in Species of Spaces: “The bed is thus the individual space par excellence, the elementary space of the body.”

This is how art unconceals an interpretation of the contemporary individual’s painful isolation within the rectangular perimeter of the bed, the room, the home, and the city. If we are bodies, and our bodies cannot be separated from the world through the simple gesture of division (the inside separated by the skin from an outside), if, on the contrary, our bodies represent the extent to which we can move, know, and touch, then any act of separation/isolation represents an amputation of the body. In this sense, the project curated by Ileana Pintilie represents a phenomenological exercise that confirms, in the alternative language of the image, that being means nothing outside of being in the world, that humans cannot exist without their bodies, whose (pandemic) isolation is tightly linked with the marring of identity.

The exhibition Wounded Identity, curated by Ileana Pintilie, took place at  Anca Poterașu Gallery, Bucharest, during November–December 2020.

Translated by Rareș Grozea

Când Iris Murdoch te așteaptă în atelier

Text by Liviana Dan in

Romanian Contemporary Art 2010-20. Rethinking the Image of the World: Projects and Sketches”, Adrian Bojenoiu, Cristian Nae, (ed.) Hatje Cantz, 2020, p. 190-193, 204-205

RO:

Alex Mirutziu este un poet vizual. Metoda lui de lucru este neconvențională – o meditație privată care explică limpede parcursul, teritoriul și limbajul. Defapt cele trei elemente care transformă arta și percepția. Alex Mirutziu lucrează cu un melange de practici: vorbit, scris, corp, acțiune, desen, muzică, video, fotografie.

Performanța și scrisul, relația dintre gest și cuvinte este pentru Alex Mirutziu o cercetare pragmatică pentru spațiu și loc, lucrând cu timpul într-o manieră neașteptată. În relația dintre sine și celălalt performativitatea devine o urgență.

Alex Mirutziu are o abordare tot pragmatică, apropiată de scrisul lui Wiegenstein și de existențialismul patronat de Iris Murdoch. Provoacă mereu o discuție integrală despre cum se face performanță cu obiecte, cuvinte...

Preocupat de ideologia contemporană și de formele pe care ideologia le poate lua, Alex Mirutziu este atent la material și loc. Materialul aparține printr-o tradiție narativă experienței emoționale. În organizarea materialului și locului Alex Mirutziu este ajutat de idee și de atitudine. Corpul folosește narativismul până la limita maximă. Teribil, audiența este adusă de multe ori în apropierea unor părți ale corpului. Limbajul oferă posibilități de analiză pentru corp, mișcare, imagine. Adeseori totul se desfășoară în același timp. Sursele materialului sunt eclectice. Se fac referiri la tehnicile baletului, la gesturi excentrice, la o mișcare atletică. Ficțiunea și autenticitatea nu sunt contradictorii.

Alex Mirutziu nu folosește timpul real. Sensul vizualului este diferit. Diferența dintre ontologie și emoție este însă o practică singulară. Uneori poate sfârși în abstract.

Există întâlnirea reală, întâlnirea fără întâlnire, întâlnirea care esențial lipsește. O stare care poate destabiliza puterea ochiului și sistemului de indexare.

Aici începe să fie prezent cu certitudine spiritul lui Iris Murdoch. Sau poate lumina unui joc al spiritului ei.

Alex Mirutziu este independent, critic, rațional romantic, cu o mare curiozitate intelectuală.

O oglindă senzitivă și un exercițiu de stil aduc putere magică pentru artă și pentru etică. Artă și etică tot în spiritul lui Iris Murdoch și a apropiatelor ei, Jane Austen și Virginia Wolf.

Ceva real, ceva perfect.

Existențialismul preluat de la Iris Murdoch și regizat la rece apare ca o structură clară. Alex Mirutziu își remaniază sinele dar rămâne solidar cu estetica și cu temel sale.

Un sistem biografic este mereu disponibil. Alex Mirutziu face o grupare cu el însuși TAH-29 / The Artist and Himself at 29. Puternică și necesară, o anduranță post-minimalistă este când atletică, când estetică.

Cercul, pătratul, triunghiul și orice altă formă constrângătoare devin câmpuri de emoție.

Apar și dispar castele, ruine, grădini englezești, ramuri negre care asemenea cuvintelor se apără greu de vânt. Gramatica vizuală și un tip bizar de alegorie sunt aproape tactile.

Asemenea unei performanțe cu Iris Murdoch în atelier privind pe cineva care privește / la / ceva....

EN:

When Iris Murdoch is waiting for you in the workshop

Alex Mirutziu is a visual poet. His work method is unconventional – a personal meditation that clearly explains the way, the territory, and the language. In fact, these are the three elements that transform art and perception. Alex Mirutziu works with a combination of practices: speech, writing, body, action, drawing, music, video, photography.

For Alex Mirutziu, performance and writing, the relation between gesture and words, are pragmatic research into space and place, whilst he works with time in an unexpected manner. In the relationship between Self and Other, performativity becomes an emergency.

Alex Mirutziu’s approach is equally pragmatic: close to Wittgenstein’s writing and the form of existentialism embraced by Iris Murdoch. He always initiates an exhaustive discussion about how to achieve performance by means of objects, words….

Preoccupied with contemporary ideology and with the various forms ideology can assume, Alex Mirutziu pays close attention to material and to place. By virtue of its attachment to narrative tradition, the material belongs to emotional experience. In organising the material and establishing the place, Alex Mirutziu is assisted by idea and by attitude. The body uses narrativity to the maximum. Shockingly, the audience is often brought close to certain parts of the body. The language offers various possibilities of analysis for the body, for movement and image. Quite often everything happens at the same time. The sources of the material used are eclectic. There are references to ballet techniques, eccentric gestures, or athletic movement. Fiction and authenticity are not contradictory.

Alex Mirutziu does not use real-time. The significance of the visual is different. The difference between ontology and emotion represents a unique practice. It may sometimes end up in the abstract. The real encounter exists, that encounter without encounter, the encounter which is essentially missing. It is a state that can destabilise the power of the eye and the system of indexation. It is here that Iris Murdoch’s spirit is certainly present. Or maybe the light reflected by her painful spirit.

Alex Mirutziu is independent, critical, rationally romantic, endowed with great intellectual curiosity. A sensitive mirror and a stylistic exercise add magic to art and to ethics. Art and ethics are once again understood in the spirit of Iris Murdoch and of her kindred souls, Jane Austen, and Virginia Wolf.    

It is something real, something perfect.

The existentialism inspired by Iris Murdoch, and rationally staged, seems to be a clear-cut structure. Alex Mirutziu readjusts his self, but always manifests his solidarity with aesthetics and its principles.

A biographic system is always available. Alex Mirutziu makes an association with himself in the exhibition  TAH-29/The Artist and Himself at 29. Powerful and necessary, a post-minimalist endurance is, at times, both athletic and aesthetic. The circle, the square, the triangle and any other constrictive form become fields of emotion. Castles, ruins, English gardens, black branches which, like words that can hardly defend themselves against the wind, appear and disappear. Visual grammar and a bizarre type of allegory are almost tactile.

All this seems similar to a performance with Iris Murdoch in the workshop looking at somebody looking/at/something….

***

Liviana Dan lives and works in Sibiu. She is an art historian, art critic and curator at the Contemporary Art department of the Brukenthal National Museum in Sibiu, and the Kunsthalle Bega, Timisoara. She studies art history and theory in Bucharest, Prague and Vienna. She has organised dozens of exhibitions and has published articles in Balkon; IDEA arts+society; Euphorion; Artelier; architect design; Revista 22; Dilema; Observator Cultural; Secolul 21.

***

About the content and cultural issue:

Editors / Adrian Bojenoiu, Cristian Nae

While watching the live broadcasts of the 1989 Romanian Revolution, philosopher and media theorist Vilem Flusser identified an inversion in the way images were understood. According to Flusser, technical images were initially not supposed to manipulate the events they used to document. In the twentieth century, political events testified the power of images to construct history since they began to take place in order to be captured in an image. The goal of history seemed to be that of becoming an image. Such a reversion of causality between reality and representation was highlighted by the historical moment of the televised Romanian Revolution, where, in Flusser’s account, images produced the events they were supposed to record. Flusser famously claimed that this inversion marked the end of history, inaugurating the post-historical age – an age of “the (technical) image in power”.

Taking into account such an inversion in the logic of cultural representation and the power of technologically mediated images to control and construct reality and social experiences, a new generation of Romanian artists, who did not directly experience living and working in communism, marked a radical shift in the discourse and the logic of artistic production in contemporary art in Romania in the last decade.

Romanian Cultural Resolution 2010-2020. Rethinking the Image of the World is the first major survey of the transformations taking place in Romanian art in the last decade, focusing on the art of bright young artists with received international confirmation, as well as on significant changes perceived in the artistic practice of the more established ones. It continues the Romanian Cultural Resolution catalogue (2010), which explored the artistic discourse of first twenty years after the fall of the socialist regime that took place in 1989.

Throughout the 2000s, the discourse of contemporary Romanian art has visibly transformed. In the ‘90s, prevalent topics included the remembrance and recovery of the communist past, regarded as traumatic, the exploration of social conditions, marked by economic precariousness, or the ironic subversion of the perceived cultural marginality. The beginning of the 2000s witnessed a recalibration of these attitudes and interests. The analysis of the shortcomings of primitive capitalism, documentation of the slow dissipation of the social tissue, the exploration of the lapses of memory and the investigation of alternative forms of social life were articulated in more complex artistic frames and languages.

Around 2010, going beyond the socially engaged critique and the analysis of the post-communist condition, that formed the core of the previous publication, the younger generation of artists approach topics of potentially global interest by take the problem of image-making, with its political and social implications and limitations, as their main field of artistic research and inquiry. What can images do, and how can we assess their power? To what extent is artistic labour still implicated in changing the world today? Their representational and performative practices affirm their interconnectedness with the current circulation and critique of ideas and capital, while nevertheless remaining attentive to the local modulations and adaptations of such artistic concerns and discursive practices, which, on the other hand, ensures their singularity and authenticity.

The book is structured on five major sections, identifying major directions and shifts in visual arts from Romania, in tune with the transformations taking place in contemporary art at a larger scale:

1. The focus on the very materiality and the circulation of the image (including the post-photographic or other media hybridizations and inter-media transfers. Lucian Bran, Andrei Nacu, Ciprian Muresan, Taietzel Ticalos, Laris Sitar, Irina Botea Bucan, Mihai Iepure Gorski, Stefan Sava, Adi Matei, Iulia Nistor, ALB, Kafchin, Gili Mocanu,

2. The persistence of socially-engaged critique as a subversion of semio (or cognitive) capitalism, or as revealing cracks in the discourse of mass- (and social) media. Anca Benera & Arnold Estefan, Silvia Amancei & Bogdan Armanu, Dan Acostioaei, Nona Inescu, Dan Perjovschi, Lia Perjovschi, Iulia Toma, Mona Vatamanu & Florin Tudor, Apparatus 22

3. The rise of performativity in the last decade as a highly choreographic, yet critical gesture. Alex Mirutziu, Farid Fairuz, Biroul de Cercetari Melodramatice & Candidatul la Presidenei, Alexandra Pirici & Manuel Pelmus, Cristina David, Geta Bratescu.

Doing sub Thinking in Canvas Magazine March/April 2020

click on image

Alex Mirutziu - ”Around the Truth is the Truth”

Text by Diana Weis

2018

Romanian artist Alex Mirutziu explores the fringes of what can be seen or represented. His lightly rendered strokes, referred to as „homeless lines“ by the artist, approach the portrayed objects without ever keenly contouring them.

This intended vagueness, leaving room for inconclusiveness, misunderstandings or the indefinable, is also palpable in the artists’ installations and performances. Mirutzius work surveys the periphery of things and inquires the possibilities of intervention into a fixed order.

Like many artists of his generation growing up in the former eastern bloc, Mirutziu names the wishfully observed culture of the west as an important reference point to his practice. Yet his escape route from limitations of a post totalitarian Romania wasn’t shaped by the pop cultural iconography that we soften see imprinted in contemporary visual aesthetics, but rather radical poetic and philosophical ideas.

Mirutzius interventions, inscribing bodies, overpainting photographs or installing objects resembling rearview mirrors, often feel crude, direct and brutal. They expose the relationship between concrete reality and subjective actuality as deceptive and constructed. Truth, as reflected in the title of this solo exhibition, is not understood as a moral or absolute category but as an empty center within a complex system of ascriptions, presumptions and fictionalizations. 

In his piece „The urgency of the idea of closure in drawing“ Mirutziu will perform alongside his younger self, symbolized by a graphite mask, on the opening night. The project The Artist as Himself at 29 (TAH 29) focusses on the instability of self-narrations and the inevitable distortion of past events

Studio International

‘I’m interested in error, misunderstanding, correction’

An interview by Izabella Scott

26.06.2018

The Romanian artist talks about his latest exhibition, examining the life and work of Iris Murdoch, and discusses the biomechanics of writing, necrophilia and the novelist’s teddy bear.

Alex Mirutziu (b1981, Romania) is a sculptor, poet and performance artist. In his first solo exhibition in the UK, Between Too Soon and Too Late, shown at the Delfina Foundation in London, he examined the life and work of the writer Iris Murdoch (1919-99). Visiting Murdoch’s archive at Kingston University, Mirutziu looked at the work the author made in the final 20 years of her life, when she had Alzheimer’s disease. He gave attention to errors, cuts and repetitions found in Murdoch’s notebooks, and transposed the markings into sculpture, video work and performance.

I meet Mirutziu on a stormy day in June at the Delfina Foundation. He is a slight man with arctic-blue eyes, in a tailored tweed jacket and DayGlo socks. After suggesting that we sit on the gallery floor, he produces a pair of white cushions from a cupboard and perches among his sculptures. I follow suit and, as lightening flashes outside, we discuss the biomechanics of writing, necrophilia and Iris Murdoch’s teddy bear.

Izabella Scott: We are sitting in a corridor of the gallery, taken over by your sculptures. They take the form of scribbles and crossed-out words, made of black wire. Why are you taking broken sentences and making them concrete?

Alex Mirutziu: I’m interested in error, misunderstanding, correction – and all these sculptures show an error of sorts. For some time now, I’ve been making work around the life of the British writer and philosopher Iris Murdoch. As part of my residency at Delfina Foundation in London, I visited her archive at Kingston University. I’ve been looking at the last period of her life, when she had Alzheimer’s disease, which she was diagnosed with in the 1990s, but which had been brewing for some time before that. Looking at Iris’s archive, and particularly the errors and mistakes in her later work, I wanted to take some of the erratum, and reverse the idea of these thing being left out – and instead to put emphasis on them, to make them so big that you can’t help but encounter them.

IS: Are these marginalia, or edits she made herself?

AM: They are tiny marks that she made on to her writing. The archive at Kingston includes diaries, poems that haven’t been published, 3,000 letters, postcards and a lot of notebooks. Many of these papers were taken from Iris’s house in Oxford, and there are some objects, too, such as a teddy bear that Iris is said to have held in her arms when she died. There are also books taken from Iris’s house, which have notations in them. Iris was unusual, because she established herself as a philosopher and a novelist in the 60s. The Kingston archive contains philosophical books rather than novels – treatises on logic and ethics – and you can see her markings on the pages.

IS: Often, writers and biographers want to connect with their subject via certain significant objects – and you mentioned Murdoch’s teddy bear. For example, the writer Wayne Koestenbaum, who wrote a biography of Andy Warhol, tried on Warhol’s corset. Are you looking for some kind of transference – intimacy?

AM: Visiting the archive and seeing Iris’s objects was a new experience for me and I felt something that I can only describe as uncanny. Prior to this, I was experiencing what Iris wrote at a distance – in republished books, say, or pdfs. Then I went into the archive. It was overwhelming. You touch something that she has touched. Between the pages, sometimes I would find a hair. Who knows if it’s hers? You see the coffee stains, and it’s emotional. There is a feeling of being close to her – maybe too close to her – and this was another thing that I felt. Was I interfering too much? Would Iris have wanted this? Going into the archive is a kind of necrophilia, to go where you shouldn’t go, and there is always an ethical question that must be grappled with. I have often thought that Iris would not have liked to be seen in this way, for her errors to take centre stage. After all, the back cover of her complete letters [Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch, 1934-95] has the instruction, “Destroy this and all letters. And keep your mouth shut”, which is taken from one of her letters.

IS: Pure objectivity is probably impossible when writing about another life, and in that sense there is always a gap between biographer and subject – there is always a betrayal, no matter how true you might want to be. But in this case, you seem to have a strong inkling that Murdoch would have disliked the focus on her errors, on her Alzheimer’s, and on her decline. So why do it?

AM: She was on my mind; I felt connected to her. And because Iris fell between the cracks. I went in carefully – cautiously. My entry point to Iris was her philosophy. I was on a residency in Ireland in 2016, at Cow House Studios. The project was called The Centre for Dying on Stage, and we were looking at artists or creatives who had died on stage. There are numerous cases – a conductor who had a heart attack, for example. I was interested in the theme tangentially, because my work is often concerned with death, addiction, passion, or artists that consume themselves in their lifetime. I was a little anxious during this residency – lonely and disconnected – and I began to think about Iris Murdoch. It was an incubation period for the work to come.

IS: Murdoch became widely known for her novels, and I’m much less familiar with her philosophy. What parts of her thinking do you find so engaging?

AM: Iris theorised the inner life: what happens philosophically within, the intellectual movement inside in your head. She talks of the “tiny space” where meaning stays unspoken, immaterial – and the works in this show try to occupy this tiny space, to prolong the process of establishing meaning. I’m also interested in Iris’s concept of “goodness”. She wanted to be “good” – but not in a moral sense, but “good” being a way of getting as close to your intentions as possible. To be true to your work. To be faithful to what you beliefs are. To follow it. I found that to be really important to the way I think. But I also read many of her novels, too, which also explore inner life – in this case, the interior worlds of her protagonists, the complexity of the mind. I find her transgressive in the way that she wrote about relationships between men and woman, especially gay relationships. It’s very unusual for the 1960s. She often spoke of her writing process, establishing a situation with two or three characters, and then letting the novel develop out of that. She sets the stage and the rules, and then the action happens. In some sense, the characters being to emerge independently, as if they have a will of their own, as if the writer is collaborating with the characters.

IS: Murdoch’s first novel, Under the Net (1954) is about language. In the novel, she stages characters who are trying to express themselves, but who get caught in the net of language. Are you thinking of the mental deterioration of Alzheimer’s disease in linguistic terms? You seem to want to show Murdoch getting caught up in her own net.

AM: Iris was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 1995, when she was 76 years old. But she actually had symptoms that dated from more than 25 years earlier. You can read it in her letters: she felt that something wrong. She wrote many times that she felt tired, that writing was hard – and this goes right back to the 1970s. She is at the peak of her career. In 1978, her novel The Sea, The Seawon the Booker Prize – but already she can feel the decline. Looking back, it’s obvious that it began early on. This sculpture in front of us, Continue or abandon? (2018), is taken directly from her notebook. In them, she wrote cuts on the left margin, and notations on the right. I pulled out the words that felt significant.

IS: Is there a sense that, retrospectively, you can find meaning where there is none? That your eyes in the future take something else from her past?

AM: Yes – and sometimes it isn’t fair. But I think the corrections, errors and inserts that Iris made are very important, if you want to think of her in retrospect. There are poems in her archive that she wrote out over and over again, that she clearly struggled with. I think that through repetition, through correction, you can begin to get a fuller sense of her work. Iris was always attentive, and in both her novels and philosophy she searched for order. When you look at the material from the later part of her life, you can see that she still wanted to make sense, She still wanted to arrive at meaning.

IS: To turn to another work in the show, Gestalt me out (2018), which is a desk and a chair that has one of Murdoch’s coffee-stained notebooks on it, is this the desk she wrote at?

AM: It’s not her desk – it’s mine. I made a cast of the positions in which I sit and write, thinking of the biomechanics of writing and also the surroundings; how the light comes in, where the wrist and elbow sit. Writing is not only on the page, and I wanted to conjure all that surrounds the writer. So, it’s a self portrait, and the question I am asking, rhetorically, is: can you remove the writer from his text? Can you get the author out? The answer is: no – never.

IS: Are you always the protagonist of your work?

AM: Yes, I think I have to be. Another ongoing project of mine is titled, The Artist and Himself at 29. I decided to work with myself at 29 years old, to go back to a stage in my life that is no longer present. The age I chose has no particular relevance – it was just a way to go back in time. I made a series of masks cast from my own face at 29 – made first from plaster and graphite. I began to draw with them – like a strange mask-pen – drawing images of my own face.

IS: As with the desk, the mask-pen, you are the primary prism. What does this mean for Murdoch?

AM: I am thinking through her philosophy, the notion of the immaterial, inner life. Choosing the form for an idea is always difficult. I have a flow of ideas – but how to get them out my head? I constantly ask myself: what form? Should I draw it, perform it, write it? In the case of these sculptures, they came to me quickly: to crop the errors, then blow them up, to make them concrete. The rest of the works in the show were more complicated, and some of them depart from Iris entirely. Prepared Poem # 3 (2018), for example, is a poem that unfolds across a slanted magazine stand, each of the words at different sizes, and printed on transparent paper. It is somewhere between language, poetry and sculpture, and you can walk around the object, read it from many angles, find different fragments.

I always go back to the idea of the writer at the desk, the ontological aspect of how you sit, draw, write. Even if the desk I have put in the exhibition is mine, I think about Iris at her desk, too. She wrote with a Parker pen, in longhand. Not any pen, the Parker pen. She was disciplined and she would sit for four hours a day to write letters. This is one reason why there are so many in the archive – she was a prolific letter writer.

IS: In Hilton Als’s White Girls (2013), he writes about the way in which, as a black gay man, he tends to identify with, or think through, the position of a white woman. He shows how these very different positions also contain intersections of privilege and oppression. In some ways, White Girls is about over-identification. I wonder: do you see your works about Murdoch containing a kind of over-identification, as you think through the position of a white woman – a white girl?

AM: There is a tendency to get too close, to get immersed. I am a Romanian man; she was a British woman, but it’s possible to see her struggles and my struggles. This over-identification – it happened. There is so much projection. I quote her, I remember something that she said – it feels significant. But I see her as a mirror. I come back to me, through her.

IS: Do you think about your archive? Who will look at it?

AM: I would be very careful about what I show, and I would try to impose a kind of control. I wouldn’t want to show sketches that are not finished, for example, nor would I want to show my notebooks. I will burn them all, if I can.

Central and Eastern European London Review

European ArtEast and Delfina Foundation present: Alex Mirutziu ‘Between too soon and too late’ – ‘a window that could take one closer to the essence of things’

Camelia Ciobanu

05.05.2018

With distractions pulling us in all directions, Alex Mirutziu wants to stop us in our tracks.  He’s done this on many occasions, not least with his video Tears are precious, which received the Best Independent Artist Award at the Optica International Video Art festival in 2008. Between too soon and too late, Mirutziu’s first solo show in the UK, is an invitation to go where not many have gone before, in a particular time and place. Inspired by Iris Murdoch’s philosophical work, Mirutziu identifies an ‘in between’ dimension, a window that could take one closer to the essence of things. Murdoch’s philosophy articulates meaning though physical experience, the way we perceive and relate to our immediate environment. An affinity with her approach provides Mirutziu not only with a philosophical frame but also with ‘a mirror’ that allows for thorough exploration. Between too soon and too late translates Murdoch’s theories into objects, words and body language.  They’re the dividing line between time and space as mediators of meaning. With the belief that meaning is dependent on time and space, Mirutziu strategically fills the gallery space, challenging the visitors’ expectations. His complex practice proposes drawing, photography, video and installation as different ways of accessing an ‘intermedial’ time and a place that’s so often withheld from us.

Gestalt me out, is a play on presence and absence, a kind of monument to what was and could still be. A desk and a Xerox copy of Murdoch’s tea stained note… golden indentations of the author’s arms in the desk … an empty chair. The individual objects testify to an absence, their synergy suggests presence.  Gestalt me out, hints at a myriad of interactions that produce meaning. In order to experience this interconnectedness, the viewer’s asked to step into the ‘in-between place’– ‘a tiny place, that one has to enlarge and sit on it…until it hurts’, says Mirutziu.

The works in the show are performative. They require the viewer’s engagement and don’t yield themselves to easy consumption. Mirutziu studied Iris Murdoch’s archive of late writings, after the philosopher’s onset of Alzheimers. He found that what she almost said could potentially be more meaningful than what she did say. One of the installations of the show’s a narrow space filled with blown up crossed out words, cast in metal. The visitors have to battle with these words that block their way through the exhibition space. There’s no other way but to face them, make out what they could mean or accept their titillating mystery. Either way, one’s almost trapped in their inescapable materiality. The artist’s aim is to expose their weakness. They’re only one piece of the puzzle, ‘half spoken’: their crossings hide but also reveal. For Mirutziu, a clinical understanding is far from his goal. He accepts the possibility of not grasping their meaning– in fact, he embraces it. He wants to revel in it, to make it secondary to the physical experience of being, of slowing meaning in its tracks and having it at arm’s length and a little bit further.

A framed page with a title ‘Where is the poem?’ demands a contribution: our own personal poem, there and then, in the exhibition space; an arrested moment that will ‘destabilize’ our daily routine, make us think, react and churn out poetry.

Poetry’s the driving force throughout the show. Drawings with wonderful titles (Heavy X looks at thick slow on blue thick blue) are visual labyrinths that aren’t meant to be solved. They engage us in a Sisyphean action of making a narrative, only to be pulled back into anunfathomable maze of possibilities.  It’s the exercise that matters and the exaltation that comes from refusing to accept defeat. Mirutziu expects us ‘to put in the effort, to be as close as they can to the work and fill it up with meaning’. In exchange, he offers us the chance to get closer to ourselves than we were when entering the gallery. It’s an offer we shouldn’t refuse.

Alex Mirutziu lives and works in Cluj. His exhibition’s the result of a residency at Delfina Foundation, supported by European ArtEast Foundation. It’s on show until 2 June 2018.

Camelia Ciobanu

Camelia Ciobanu is an Art Historian, with an MA in Art History and Photography from Birbeck College, University of London. Her interests are Being, Observing and writing about either of them. She lives in London.

"Between Too Soon and Too Late"

Alex Mirutziu discuss his current exhibition "Between Too Soon and Too Late" curated by Aaron Cezar at Delfina Foundation, co-presented with European Art East Foundation

2018

Alex Mirutziu in conversation with Aaron Cezar

2018

On the occasion of his exhibition Between Too Soon and Too Late at Delfina Foundation, London, Alex Mirutziu (b. 1981, Romania) speaks to Delfina Foundation Director, Aaron Cezar.

"I attempt to suspend viewers in [Iris Murdoch's notion of] 'tiny space', which requires a certain level of commitment in order to arrive at meaning."

Aaron Cezar: Throughout your career, poetry, philosophy and literature have strongly influenced your artistic practice. How do you relate to words versus images?

Alex Mirutziu: For me, words are more powerful than images. The image is always in the word.

I am interested in how words conspire to bring forward meaning in relation to other words or body language. I feel intimately close to the poetry of Graham Foust and W.H. Auden. In Where is the poem(2013-), I bring these two poets together in the prospect of establishing meaning by destabilising each other. Foust highjacks Auden and vice versa. Auden’s texts are footnotes to Foust, which are performed by one hand and graphite powder. The hand gestures are an attempt to get into the text, to then try to overcome it – a movement that makes the poem vulnerable in my opinion.

This strategy is also part of the performance-video Dignity to the unsaid (2017), where the actors punctuate their choreography with instructions for the public in the form of notes. By doing that, they create a subtle movement between the presence and absence.

AC: What drew you to the work of writer and philosopher Iris Murdoch?

AM: I was aware of Iris Murdoch’s oeuvre for a long time before I decided to look deeper into her philosophical work. As an artist, I am particularly interested in her thoughts on how it takes courage to destroy what one thinks is not good in one’s work and the omnipresent temptation to be good, philosophically speaking [which by her moral philosophy definition would mean the opposite of expression and projection of the ego].

During my residency at Delfina Foundation, I visited Murdoch’s archives at Kingston University. Rather than focus on the period of her career when she was the most prolific, I looked at material that she produced later in life when signs of Alzheimer’s Disease were noticeable. Much of her work from this period is unfinished and littered with corrections and unformed thoughts.

AC: Can you expand on the title of the show, which is inspired by Murdoch’s concept of approximation, where one locates or loses meaning?

AM: The exhibition’s title is a quote by Murdoch that discusses the problem of form and time, loss of form, perfect timing and bad timing, in relation to the production and reception of creative works.

In the exhibition, I try to configure what is between ‘too soon’ and ‘too late’, which Murdoch defined as a ‘tiny space’ which one has to enlarge. She implies that one should prolong the experience of this space, to sit on difficult questions, and resist the temptation to quickly move from the provisional to the finished thing. In the exhibition, I attempt to suspend viewers in this tiny space, which requires a certain level of commitment in order to arrive at meaning.

AC: How did you try to make sense of Murdoch’s archival material through some of the works in the exhibition?

AM: Heavy X looks at thick slow on blue thick blue(2018) and White rocks up, pink went out to distant ships (2018), I attempted to give a form to Murdoch’s incomplete descriptions and erratic metaphors about the sky and natural landscape. The title of the works are the descriptions that inspire the drawings.

The series of works entitled To continue or abandon(2018) are large metal sculptures of hand corrections or scribbles that Murdoch made while working on poems and lectures. These sculptures physically place the audience within Murdoch’s thoughts without any context.

While in Gestalt me out (2018), I wanted to put forward the idea that the author is always included in the inscription of what he/she is inscribing, that there is no way out. The desk includes impressions of my hands and elbow and an image of Murdoch’s tea-stained notebook.

In the video The best I can do at the moment (2018), which can only be viewed through a QR code, I use the format of promotional trailer to sum up, and perhaps even, destabilise the exhibition through humour and happenings in my studio. I go about half routines in the studio and in the meantime reflect on my own instability and intellectual ‘muddle’.

AC: What is the role of time – or more precisely, timing – and space in the context of the exhibition?

AM: They play a crucial role. For example, Prepared Poem #3 (2018), a sculpture layered by transparent slides with lines from one of my own poems, requires visitors to move around the space in order to read the work. However, any attempt towards a perfect reading results in failure. It is, therefore, up to each viewer to make sense of the poem from their own perspective in their own time.

AC: Can you talk about the nature of performativity in your works?

AM: Generally, my works are performative in the sense that they allow viewers the freedom to adapt and complete the work, physically or metaphorically such as Prepared Poem #3.

Because my works touch on ‘what’ and ‘how’ something is held together (not ‘why’), I am interested in ways to approach, find or loose meaning. One must not forget that even stasis is an action, moreover the outcome of a decision. My intention is to slow down the viewer, to challenge one’s presence.

I am also interested in the sort of commitment that comes from doing by being, not the other way around. For example, I am making a new performance for Block Universe 2018 entitled Doing Sub Thinkingthat addresses this. Referencing philosophical thought, national displays of power and collective agency, the work seeks to illustrate the performative forces at play in society. We are exploring the de-personalisation of an individual within a crowd to reveal the intangible gaps between thought and action within group dynamics.

Arta Magazine

”Dignity to the Unsaid”

Flora Gado

April 24, 2018

I said he was trying to play the ruthless male, not to mention the fascist, just a little too transparently.
I was being sentimental, he said.
Maybe, I said, but I couldn’t express myself properly in this rotten language.
He’d do the expressing for me.
Please, stop acting silly.
Is that what he was doing? he asked.
He could go on acting silly, if he liked.
Did I still know what we were talking about?
Did he?

Péter Nádas: A Book of Memories, Jonathan Cape, London, 1997, 222-223

Prologue

After visiting his solo exhibition in MNAC Bucharest, I met Alex Mirutziu in Cluj-Napoca in his studio at Centrul de Interes in October 2017. He showed me the short film of his latest performance Dignity to the Unsaid, which is, and at the same time is not an homage to the English author and philosopher Iris Murdoch. The video reminded me of the oeuvre of the well-known Hungarian author, Péter Nádas and especially his novel from 1987, A Book of Memories. Nádas examines our emotional states, mindsets, feelings and anxieties with an extraordinary accuracy and sensitivity. He emphasizes and transforms into literature the constant approach to understand what cannot be understood, the irrational, the unsaid as well as an unexplainable mystery of human existence: how can something which didn’t even happen, affect our life in a strange way. These are also the fluid territories that are – in my opinion – the most interesting questions in Mirutziu’s work.

Since his early works, Alex Mirutziu challenges the notion of meaning, representation and language. He examines the often invisible power structures and dynamics which are connected to the different modes of expressing ourselves. In his performances and videos the body and its gestures function as a platform where those things could be expressed which otherwise (e.g. through language) are not possible. It would be however a misunderstanding to say that language and ratio are opposed to the free bodily expressions in his work; Mirutziu concentrates much more on the relationship between these two terrains and the shifts, passages, collisions and dynamics between verbal and body language, written and oral tradition, finding and losing meaning.

When we are trying to express ourselves, we constantly reveal our incapability of total accuracy – this happens through errors, mistakes, stammered words that appear also in our body movements, gestures. Mixing the different ways through which we communicate and navigate in the world, Mirutziu highlights those talemonger signs – errors, collisions, fragments and confusions – that are impossible to hide, as well as “ordinary” gestures. We hide ourselves behind the construct of language and “appropriate” behavior as well as bodily gestures, but through sudden ruptures, fragments and failures those things that we try to hide often appear. For a better understanding of gestures and movements in Mirutziu’s works, an essay of Giorgio Agamben would serve as a good example. Agamben quotes in Notes on Gesture, Marcus Terentius Varro, ancient Roman poet and philosopher, who differentiated gestures as a third type of action, distinguishing it from acting (agere) and from making (facere). Agamben summarizes the paradoxicality of gestures in an interesting way: “What characterizes gesture is that in it nothing is being produced or acted but rather something is being endured and supported. (…) The gesture is, in this sense, communication of a communicability. It has precisely nothing to say because what it shows is the being-in-language of human beings as pure mediality. However, because being-in-language is not something that could be said in sentences, the gesture is essentially always a gesture of not being able to figure something out in language (…).” [i] In Mirutziu’s performances we can witness this specific terrain of different levels of communication.

Language and typography as a compass

In his early works Mirutziu experimented with performative-subversive ways of playing with gender roles and stereotypes. These powerful performances (like Feeding the Horses of All Heroes, 2010) already addressed critically the expression of identity through different symbolic structures, what effects global industries and market economy have on our life etc. In his most recent works a shift could be detected: firstly, he stopped “using” his own body and started to delegate his performances. Secondly, from this quite personal starting point he began to focus on questions about the politics of reading and writing and how we constantly reconfigure ourselves through language. What kind of order and security could language give and how do we navigate in it?

Before analyzing more thoroughly one of the artist’s latest pieces, Dignity to the Unsaid, it is important to mention some of his previous works, in which he focuses more concretely on the notion of design and typography. The artist examines these territories through their relationship with the “user” and tries to highlight the invisible mechanisms, power relations inherent in them. The performance documentation The Finnish Method (2015) focuses on how design – especially the famous Scandinavian one – creates a sense of security as well as functionality, which helps us to find “our place” in the world. Taking the brand Martela as an example, which is known as creator of the “best working environments”, The Finnish Method criticizes in a sense this secure functionality. In the video one can see the artist – at first only his legs, later his hands – as he follows carefully a set of instructions, a step-by-step manual, which seems to illustrate the most effective way to function within this working environment. The ironical performance is in contrast with the act of working itself – instead of doing his “job”, the artist only repeats these movements. The performance raises the question: can these design elements really help us to function better in the world or are these only substitutes for realizing to what extent we are depended on our environment and on outside factors? If every step is regulated, designed, how can we move freely?

The notion of different structures, systems etc. is also important in those performances that put typography, poetry and their translation into dance in focus.[ii] But as a document (2015), which the artist made during his residency in IASPIS – The Swedish Arts Grants Committee, Stockholm, at first looks like an “average” dance piece. However, the work has many layers that open up a complex network of meanings. As I have mentioned earlier, Mirutziu is interested in the politics of reading and writing. More closely he examines how our body takes part in the process of reading (how it is not limited to the mind and the eye), how typography (as an aspect of design) helps us to navigate easier in the world and understand it better. Mirutziu suggests that the fields of poetry and dance, typography and gesture are not so far from each other, as every letter, text, language has its own rhythm, inner logic and basic movement.

For But as a document the artist used the typeface Sweden Sans (created by Söderhavet agency) and transformed its fonts into movements, gestures – thus creating a special kind of choreography. Sweden Sans is not chosen randomly: it is part of the new, national branding of Sweden and according to the designers, this typeface is considered to be the best to represent the country. This way Mirutziu also emphasizes the power relations behind such “casual”, everyday things as fonts and typography. Within the performance, each letter was given a specific set of movements (these instructions were also on display in MNAC Bucharest) and on the video we can see the dancer Pär Andersson performing. What shaped these movements were the movement of the eyes (how your eyes move from left to right while reading) as well as the dynamics of reading (slow, fast etc.) and most importantly as the artist summarizes it: “how we read with our entire body.” As the exhibition text concluded, Mirutziu “transferred from plain page to plain space” the typeface, producing a “live reading” of poems by contemporary Swedish and American poets, Karl Larsson and Graham Foust.[iii]

But (how) do we understand these poems? They appear in a very different sense than reading in a book – we have to decode it while watching the performance / choreography and because of this, the meaning transforms: it becomes fragmented, destabilized, momentary. The moment we grasp it, it disappears. According to my interpretation Mirutziu’s goal was precisely for the viewer not to “understand” the poem through a traditional way – while emphasizing the rhythm and movement in the fonts as well as how eyes are moving while reading – he speaks about a different kind of meaning, understanding, communicating. Yet if we get the fragmented lines: “let your animal mind prevail / and become not as a cage / but as a document”, an enigmatic sentence appears.

This piece also reminds me of the work by Ula Sickle (Canadian artist with Polish origins), which was recently presented in U-jazdowski Castle Center for Contemporary Art, Warsaw. In the choreographic exhibition Free Gestures (2018) the performers reflected on five short stories, written by contemporary authors about the topic how ideologies become incorporated in our bodies, what is the relationship between everyday gestures and the terrain of politics, activism etc. We can’t understand or put together each story, but we listen to fragments, look at different kinds of constellation of movements, interactions, relations between the performers. Sometimes we notice as a dancer imitates how we scroll on our smartphones or use a touch screen, other occasions we can listen to a monologue in various ways, about punching someone in the face. The audience can participate yet it is clear that their participation won’t change the choreography, which also many times seems to be improvised. The relationship between literature and choreography, gaining and losing meaning, translating words to movements and understanding the different aspects of bodily gestures is what connects the two artists.

Should we talk about what we cannot say?

In one his new works, Dignity to the Unsaid (2017) Mirutziu moves to even more poetical and abstract terrains, to examine the notions of meaning, understanding, memory and forgetting. He abandons the typographical starting point yet still focuses on another figure from literature: the English author and philosopher Iris Murdoch. Both on her oeuvre (which for example in Hungary is not very well-known) as well as how she suffered in her late years from Alzheimer’s disease. Mirutziu is interested in the question: how someone whose primary mode of expression is through writing/speaking deals with the process of fading memory and how this becomes manifest in her public speeches, interviews (and how she reflects on it). As curator, art historian Eugenio Viola summarized, for Mirutziu “Murdoch becomes an occasion or pretext to construct a story that deals with his recurrent themes: otherness, marginalization, exclusion.” Yet from the works a deep understanding and solidarity towards Murdoch becomes visible, as the artist not only uses her as a starting point but through this, tries to deal with often unsaid, repressed notions. That is why Dignity to the Unsaid becomes one of this strongest works, a performance where the emphasis is on such uncanny questions as how to say things which couldn’t be said, how do we constantly fail in communicating with each other, how despite the fact that language always fails us, we try to hide behind it. The three “word workers” (as the artist calls them) in the performance brings into notion those fractures, errors, mistakes when these notions of “normality” or expressing ourselves properly shatter.

In the enigmatic, fragmented yet perfectly shot video we can see three performers who are walking/dancing in an abandoned building, sometimes talking to each other or to themselves. The texts we can hear are poems, written by Mirutziu inspired by the English author, except the one in the elevator scene, which is constructed form an interview with Murdoch. The symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease – confusion, the inability to associate words and concepts – become visible in a subtle way through fragmented gestures, accents, stammering, repetitive movements and the tangling narrative which won’t make a coherent story. Again the essay by Agamben is worth mentioning here, as what he writes about the Tourette syndrome and explains the situation when “catastrophe of the sphere of gestures” arrives. As the philosopher concludes: “patients can neither start nor complete the simplest gestures. If they are able to start a movement, this is interrupted and broken up by shocks lacking any coordination and by tremors that give the impression that the whole musculature is engaged in a dance (chorea) that is completely independent of any ambulatory end.”[iv] The movements of the performers could also remind the viewer about this “catastrophe of the sphere of gestures”, and Agamben’s sensitive comparison between these specific bodily movements and dance is also worth underlining.

The fragmented story parts are telling about sensitive observations and poetic reflections about the day, light, and also about the mind, which again connects Mirutziu’s interest not only to the psychological/emotional aspect, but to the cognitive processes and the “scientific” explanation about what happens when we lose our memories. One of the strongest parts of the film is the scene that takes place in the constantly moving elevator while a red light is shining. In this scene two performers out of three are always “silent” – or as their post-it says: they will be back in x seconds – while the third one is speaking. These are the most coherent parts of the narrative which could be understood as interpretations of the interviews conducted with Murdoch, where the gestures, repetitions are exaggerated in a strange way (as mentioned above). Here the topics are becoming more concrete: the performers speak about dogmas, beliefs, also about language and the fragmentation of the self (“one part of you disapproves to another part of you.”) – thus they seem to appear as three versions of one person.

In the last, powerful scene the performers are marking a starting line. They get into the position, commence the preparation, but they just keep repeating this movement without actually running. This hesitant movement and the delay itself summarizes perfectly that kind of constant incertitude, doubtfulness which characterizes our life in the current moment: whether about deciding on taking a new job, leaving the country or getting into a relationship with someone. The performers yet suggest that there is a way to escape this “blocked” state, stop postponing the start and step out.

Epilogue

As I have already mentioned, the performance reminded me of Péter Nádas’s novel The Book of Memories and especially the storyline set in East-Germany in the 70’s: a sudden yet deep and disturbing love story between a Hungarian and a German man. The narrator describes their first encounter and the weeks that followed, where time disappeared and only the two people mattered. Even though it is one of the most beautiful romances in literature in my opinion, it also tells a lot about communication, understanding and the constant failure to get to know someone truly. Thus I would like to end my essay with a paragraph that is about how two people communicate with each other through language, which is always, essentially, through the body as well.

“We talked, as I say, though it would be more correct to say that we told each other stories, and even that would not be an accurate description of the feverish urging to relate and the eager curiosity to listen to each other’s words with which we tried to complement the contact of our bodies, our constant physical presence in each other, with signs beyond the physical, with the music of spoken sound, with intelligible words, and at the same time to use words to envelop, to obscure the physical relationship; we soliloquized, we gabbed, we inundated each other with words, and inasmuch as speech has a sensual, physical significance in the meaning, we used it to enhance our physical closeness, knowing well that words could only allude to the mind, to what’s beyond the body, for words may be genuine but they can never tell the full story; we kept gabbing away – interminably, insatiably, in the hope that with our chaotic stories we would draw each other into the story of our own bodies (…).”[v]

THE TEXT WAS WRITTEN AS PART OF FLORA’S RESIDENCY IN CLUJ AND BUCHAREST IN 2017, PART OF THE PROJECT EAST ART MAGS. CO-FUNDED BY AFCN. WITH THE SUPPORT OF THE HUNGARIAN INSTITUTE IN BUCHAREST.

[i] Giorgo Agamben: Notes on Gesture in: Means Without End: Notes on Politics, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis-London, 2000, 57-59.

[ii] See also the performance: Stay(s) against cofusion, http://www.alexmirutziu.com/performance-documentation/.

[iii] When Andersson performs a letter, that specific letter is written below on the screen in the video work.

[iv] Giorgo Agamben: Notes on Gesture in: Means Without End: Notes on Politics, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis-London, 2000, 51.

[v] Péter Nádas: A Book of Memories, Jonathan Cape, London, 1997, 205-206.

Flóra Gadó

Flóra Gadó (b. 1989) is a freelance curator, art critic and Ph.D. student. She graduated in 2015 from Eötvös Loránd University with an MA in Art Theory. Currently, she is enrolled in the faculty’s Ph.D. program in Film, Media and Cultural Theory. She curated several exhibitions for example in the Studio Gallery (Mindsets, Ongoing Histories), 2B Gallery (Lilla Szász: Our house) and Labor (Zsófia Keresztes: Holyland). She also organized exhibitions in the region, for example at Tabacka Gallery (Kosice) and IGLOO Gallery (Jihlava). In 2014-15 she was part of the organizing team of OFF-Biennale Budapest and since 2016 she is the member of the research group Open Museum, which focuses on participatory and collaborative practices in museums. In Spring 2016 she spent one month in Rennes with the GENERATOR residency program. She contributes critiques and reviews to several online and offline magazines, like Artportal.hu and Balkon. She lives and works in Budapest.

artportal.hu/

ARTRIBUNE

Comunicare l’esperienza. Alex Mirutziu a Bruxelles

Martina Lolli

October 8, 2017

Dello iato fra il detto e il non detto aveva già parlato Derrida, teorico della “différance”, ponendo l’accento sul gap fra il messaggio e l’essere che lo enuncia. E quando la possibilità di una chiara espressione è ostacolata da un malessere fisico ‒ come il morbo di Alzheimer contratto da Iris Murdoch in tarda età – non si può che ricorrere alla plasticità fatta di gesti corporali ed espressioni del viso. Attraverso le sculture e i disegni realizzati per la prima personale belga, Alex Mirutziu (Sibiu, 1981) indaga i meandri della comunicazione ‒ i suoi margini ‒, scomponendo letteralmente i pensieri e l’immagine della filosofa inglese. I costrutti logici di Murdoch divengono impalcature precarie su cui si erge il suo capo, mentre i disegni mettono a fuoco la difficoltà a richiamare i concetti archiviati nella nostra memoria.

Nel mediometraggio Dignity to the unsaid (2017), un ascensore diviene il contesto straniante in cui tre personaggi riflettono sull’esperienza e su quanto ci sia di soggettivo in essa. Tacendo a turno, i tre enfatizzano l’apparato meta-espressivo della comunicazione verbale, la gestualità, l’unico a cui la filosofa aveva potuto affidare la divulgazione dei più sottili pensieri.

Three shots at why I draw the way I draw

by curator Liviana Dan

2017

1. Alex Mirutziu, performanta si pasajele performative transforma desenul si gravura firesc la tine. La ce te raportezi cu precadere?

Eu atac desenul prin irezolutie. Astfel destabilizez ‘ce este’ — asa cum mi se proiecteaza acum si aici, favorizand contingenta a ‘ce este’. Cand desenez vreau sa rezolv obiectul prin ‘ezitari’, prin proximitate, nu folosesc analiza clasicismului care determina o intelegere patriarhala a liniei. Nu am constiinta inceputului, nici atunci cand performez nici cand desenez. Insa eu nu pot sta pe linie, aproape ca nici nu le vad atunci cand lucrez.

2. Cum ai ajuns la desenul clasic in structura, dar cu narativitate romantica?

Cred ca abordarea mea conceptuala cat si referintele istorice din desenul meu fac parte dintr-o tesatura mai mult performativa sau fenomenologica decat sa spunem de reprezentare. Problema mea e cu rationalizarea formei, cu un soi de redare a naturii dinauntrul ei, nu din afara ei —  iradiat de ea. Romantismul asta a facut. A introdus o sudare de tot si de toate a individului. Cum sa desenezi in detasare?

3. Cum au functionat desenele tale si lucrarile video in Gradina Imposibila? A existat vreo distanta?

Pentru ca m-ai asezat in forme limpezi in propria mea natura, cred ca asa se poate merge inainte. Tu m-ai invatat cum sa navighez dincolo de estetic, in transee filosofice. Transee. Problema filosofica din Gradina Imposibila e cea care ma instiga dar respir in si prin natura pe care tu o intelegi foarte bine ca pe “locul cel mai prielnic in care te poti gandi la altceva.”

Eugenio Viola

This text was written on the occasion of ”THIS, LIKE...”, solo show at Marie-Maure Fleisch Gallery, Brussels

Sept 8 - Oct 21, 2017

In his work, the eclectic artist Alex Mirutziu (Sibiu, 1981), explores two parallel trajectories with ease: performance, a discipline he has practiced for over fifteen years, and another more related to “the reasons for doing”. The former, presented “live” and through post-production with photography and video, often takes on a provocative and protesting vein, sometimes evoking autobiographical references; other times it underlines the raison d'être of fundamental or existential differences. This approach has led many critics over the past years to define Mirutziu as the enfant terrible of Romanian art. His second artistic trajectory starts with drawings to which he attributes a gnoseological value, denoted by a (poorly-concealed) manual dexterity which is irremediably unveiled in his sculptures, often representing a fragmentary aesthetic. The progressive comparison of these two lines of artistic research reveals an interesting intrinsic divergence: although his performances embody an expressive vividness and plastic vocabulary, these characteristics are seemingly contrasted by a metaphorically investigative approach which could be defined as a renewed classicality.

Both of these veins are seen in This, Like…, a complex project entirely dedicated to the tormented figure of Iris Murdoch (1919 – 1999), the prolific British author and philosopher, destined to live out her last years with Alzheimer’s disease. The exhibition opens with About the word experience, 2017, a “performative” drawing in which Mirutziu's edgy pen creates 92 separate frames of a conversation filmed in 1984 between Murdoch and the stateless philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895 – 1986). Indeed, the title of the exhibition also subtly alludes to mental distress and moments of confusion to which persons like the British philosopher have to face, unable to associate words and concepts correctly. The work Dignity to the Unsaid, 2017 – a performance first shown at the MNAC in Bucharest – also refers to this same phenomenon. Presented in the form of a harrowing short feature film, it gives a metaphorical, hypertextual insight into the semantic relationship between the said and the unsaid. In the exhibition-specific sculptures, Mirutziu's aesthetic stratagem favours the evocative property of the object. He weaves a visual score of protective signs connected with experience, creating a somewhat hermetic resonance in which the object’s real existence counts less that the evidence of its existence; the phenomenon or its essence manifested through the conscience of its creator who undertakes actions in creating the work. This is the approach the artist has adopted to go beyond the epidermis of the physical object: a stratagem to reiterate his poetics and his stylistic bent in which the subversive capacity of art to reveal and present new alternatives, or new attitudes and new ways of thinking is innate, thus conferring voice and dignity to the unsaid or the unexpressed.

Suspended between abstraction and representation, the sculptures in the series This, Like… tell an anguishing tale in which the existential-artistic experience of Iris Murdoch becomes an occasion or pretext for the Romanian artist to construct a story that deals with the recurrent and somewhat disturbing themes of his creative research: otherness, marginalisation, and exclusion. Thus, we have a trajectory which pays homage to the artist in the very instant in which affection and the fleeting form restore the macerated traces of the intellect. His is a continual struggle beyond the concrete reality of the material, blurring the frontiers between objectivity and subjectivity, between realistic and sentimental representation until they become labile; a tiring process of subtraction leading to the progressive "in-definition" of the features of a woman destined to progressive dementia. Thus, Mirutziu's work is agonizingly impacting, animated by a system of unstable equilibria of diverse elements which create disturbing connections and short circuits between the familiar and the unknown, the logical and the absurd, eternity and intransience, illusion and reality. 

Eugenio Viola

Eugenio Viola, PhD is an Italian Curator and Art Critic. Since 2009 he has held curatorial positions at Madre, the Contemporary Art Museum of Naples. From 2013, as Curator at Large, he has been responsible for the research and development of the museum’s collection and co-curated the first Italian large-scale exhibitions of Boris Mikhailov and Francis Alys;  a complex Daniel Buren project, conceived in two parts and across two years; and the largest exhibitions ever devoted to the Italian artists Vettor Pisani and Giulia Piscitelli.

From 2009 to 2012, he was the Curator of the museum’s Project Room. During this time he was responsible for presenting “Transit” Project (2009 – 2011), a series of exhibitions and residencies in partnership with institutions from the Middle East  as well as an annual performance festival named Corpus. Art in Action (2009-2012).

Eugenio has also worked as a guest curator for several Italian and International institutions, curating amongst others solo exhibitions devoted to: Regina José Galindo (Frankfurter Kunstverein, Germany, 2016); Karol Radziszewski (CoCA – Centre of Contemporary Art Znaki Czasu, Torun, Poland, 2014); Mark Raidpere (EKKM – The Contemporary Art Museum of Tallinn, Estonia, 2013); Marina Abramović (PAC – Contemporary Art Pavilion, Milan, Italy, 2012); Francesco Jodice (MSU – The Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb, Croatia, 2011); and ORLAN (MAMC – Musée d’art moderne et contemporain, Saint Etienne, France, 2007). In 2015 he curated the Estonian Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale.

He is a scholar in theories and practices related to performance and Body Art and has published and lectured extensively on these subjects.  Apollo art magazine has described Eugenio as “one of the most talented and inspirational young people who are driving forward the art world today”.

www.galleriamlf.com

REVISTA ARTA

Pesimisme de export

Roxana Sima

26 august 2015

Expoziția “Few were happy with their condition”, organizată la Kunsthalle Winterthur, reunește doisprezece artiști români cu opere recente. Într-o intenție curatorială de a expune și de a înțelege arta din România de astăzi, Olga Ștefan asamblează producția artistică românească și, prin ea, face constatarea dificultății românilor de a-și găsi fericirea, de a traversa nesfârșita perioadă de tranziție, de la comunism spre o democrație de tip occidental, pe care o îndură această țară de mai mult de 25 de ani. Așadar, few were happy!

Expoziția se concentrează asupra a două mediumuri, pentru valoarea lor de imediatețe: fotografia și videoul. Mai exact, videoul are în sine capacitatea de a servi ca indicator simptomatic suprem și privilegiat al Zeitgeistului, adică de a reprezenta o dominantă culturală a unei noi situații economice și sociale. Videoul este vehicolul alegoric și hermeneutic cel mai pregnant, specific unei descrieri reînnoite a sistemului.

Una dintre dominantele aceste expoziții este aceea că mai toți artiștii par a avea conștiinta deplină a ocupării unui loc aparte în timp și, mai precis, dau o viziune specială a istoriei, a trecutului românesc.

Istoria, odată asumată de către artiștii reuniți de Olga Ștefan (Ciprian Mureșan, Dan Acostioaei, Jozsef Bartha, Alexandra Croitoru, Cristina David, Monotremu, Claudiu Cobilanschi, Vlad Nancă, Bogdan Gîrbovan, Ștefan Sava, Alex Mirutziu, Ștefan Constantinescu, Cristi Pogăcean și Dan Perjovschi) oferă ocazia câteodată a unui angajament specific, apariție salvatoare și de aducere aminte, câteodată a unei simple ilustrări sau a unei elaborări de parabole, o sursă de inspirație în contumacie.

« Few Were Happy with their condition », este titlul expoziției. La ce condiție se face referință? Titlul este extras din piesa Cristinei David The Voice (2013). În acest video artista îi ajută pe cei morți să comunice cu sfera celor vii prin intermediul unui panou informativ de gară. Alegere pertinentă, pentru că expoziția acoperă pe parcursul ei subiectul condiției bărbaților și femeilor din trecut și prezent și a legăturilor dintre ei. Morții, în starea lor de invizibilitate par să împartă acceași condiție cu cei vii, și ei nevăzuți în video, și în egală măsură cu condiția artistei, aparținînd și ea acestei invizibilități. Una dintre intențiile majore ale expoziției este de a vorbi despre condiția artistului și poziția sa în societate și în final trasează un bilanț depresiv al situației ; câteodată timpurile se suprapun, trecut și prezent alunecă unul în celălalt.

Povestea autobiografică prin autoportret este esența metodei artistice a lui Alex Mirutziu. În Self portrait at 32 (2014), două videouri în plan fix sunt expuse în buclă. La granița fotografiei și a imaginii în mișcare, ansamblul operei prezintă imaginea unui arbust care crește pe clădiri abandonate. Cu o melancolică poezie, atristul angajează o metaforă cu condiția homosexualitații și declară un tribut celor marginalizați. Minunat fel de a se reprezenta printr-un arbust care crește pe ruine. A trăi este o suferință, o însingurare. Corpul ? un « non-corp ». Dar în acest spleen  al poziției sale în societatea românească, arbustul își ridică ramurile spre cer. Această poziție ar putea aminti autoportretul intitulat Situație ideală : pământ-artist-cer  (1969) al Ginei Pane, în care artista ne înfruntă în picioare, pe un sol pietros, înfiptă ca un copac.

Imobilitatea care se traduce în opera lui Alex Mirutziu se redublează în cea a Alexandrei Croitoru. The Cabbage Process  (2012) urmărește cu camera un administrator cu vechime al Academiei de Artă din București care pune varza la murat în incinta instituției. Acest tradițional gest gospodăresc care a traversat odată cu noi cele două epoci, comunistă și post-comunistă, este martorul permanenței lucrurilor. Procesul de fermentație a verzei ia timp, și devine o analogie a timpului necesar transformării unei țări.

Dar, să remarcăm o tendință! După 1989, imediat dupa căderea Cortinei de fier, mulți artiști internaționali și-au asumat istoria, au integrat trecutul în gândirea producției lor artistice. Este chiar una dintre componentele fundamentale ale artei postmoderne. În acest punct, o întrebare se impune: există o legitimitate în a expune artiști, în funcție de naționalitatea lor, în contextul de globalizare pe care îl trăim? Să considerăm și parcursul educațional și profesional al artiștilor și al curatoarei, parcurs forjat de cele mai multe ori în afara României, unii dintre ei locuind sau rezidează/au rezidat pe perioade lungi în afara țării. Și, aici, o alta întrebare intervine: unde sunt acei artiști români care nu produc “românește”? Există o anume cerere de nuanță “exotică” a unui anumit tip de artist român, o artă pentru export care ne-ar consolida imaginea pe care o avem despre România? În ce masură succesul în Occident al lui Mircea Cantor se datorează folclorizării producției sale? Și chiar trebuie să continuăm să facem “românește”, să vorbim despre nefericirea noastră de a trăi în România, de lipsa banilor pentru a produce, de dificila situație a artistului și de lupta sa permanentă de a convinge lumea și, mai ales, pe el însuși că iși are locul în societate?! Oare pesimismul acestei expoziții este o dominantă a creației contemporane românești?!

Aparent, prejudecata expoziției este de a arăta și de a interpreta operele, câteodată, prin poziția victimei și, alteori, prin prisma unei depresii generalizate, dar, pe alocuri, acestea sunt cultivate cu un umor care (ne) salvează. Această prisma constituie una dintre realitățile creației românești actuale, dar ar fi tot atât de interesant de a îndrepta căutarea spre opere mai exaltate, mai orientate spre viitor. A te înscrie în permanență în aceeași intenție a realismului social, nu este tocmai aici blocajul ieșirii din această condiție pesimistă?

Noul val românesc pare să întrețină un raport direct, în afară limbajului și formei specifice cinema-ului, cu estetică și gândirea expoziției. Apărut la începutul anilor 2000, acest cinema este interesat de trecutul României, de conditia sa istorica pe care o natiune a indurat-o timp de jumatate de secol. Cu un ochi asupra realitatii sociale specifice, cineastii si-au extins curiozitatea artistica la contemplarea condiției umane. Noul val românesc este marcat de un realism social și de o apropiere limpede de trecutul comunist, dar și de viitorul neoliberal. De mai mult de zece ani, acest mod de a face film acumulează constant succesul pe scena cinematografiei internaționale. Nimic nu pare să evolueze. Oare acest tip de a face expoziție este și el un vector al stagnării generale în această condiție românească, postcomunistă? Ne obstinam în a rămâne pesimiști pentru ca această este imaginea dominantă și, prin urmare, «vandabilă»?!

Few Were Happy with their Condition
22 februarie – 6 aprilie 2015
Kunsthalle Winthertur
Artiști: Ciprian Mureșan, Dan Acostioaei, Jozsef Bartha, Alexandra Croitoru, Cristina David, Monotremu, Claudiu Cobilanschi, Vlad Nancă, Bogdan Gîrbovan, Ștefan Sava, Alex Mirutziu, Ștefan Constantinescu, Cristi Pogăcean, Dan Perjovschi
Curator: Olga Ștefan

IDEA art + society #44

”The Right to Opacity”

Diana Marincu

2013

Alex Mirutziu, ”Each Thought’s an Instant Ruin with a New Disease”

Sabot Gallery, Cluj, 15 November 2013 – 24 January 2014

One of the most widespread and circulated principles of the contemporary world, marked by the phenomenon of globalization and the overrating of a communication based on the diversity and plurality of perspectives, is transparence – the transparence of the relation - ships between people, the transparence of the flux of information, the transparence of the process of globalization, all of them under the sign of a terminology which is way too decrepit. Édouard Glissant, the well-known Caribbean writer and theoretician of post-colonial - ism, further complements the semantic field of the utopia of globalization with an opposite notion, which is essential for the ethics of human relationships: the right to opacity. This term is not synonymous with the right to being different, but signifies instead the limit up to which the Other can be known and his or her acceptance in spite of inaccessible, coded peculiarities.

Alex Mirutziu does not explain, does not represent and does not demonstrate through his works something that, as soon as it reaches the public, would “close“  itself within an interpretation. The question that the artist uses as a point of departure is “what happens when the objects, bodies and all things from our surroundings stay silent?“ Their language is untranslatable, their background empty and their field of reaction fragmented in a multitude of different temporalities, desynchronized. 

By Each Thought’s an Instant Ruin with a New Disease, which is his second personal exhibition at Sabot Gallery in Cluj, Alex Mirutziu keeps on resisting to a visual regime based on transparency and certitudes about reality disguised in artworks. He claims the right of objects to withdraw from the invasive gaze of the visitors, in other words, their right to opacity. The concepts supporting this exhibition are “pending works“  and “bureaucratic objects“. The first has already been tested in quite a few formulae up to now, the most “extreme“ being PW#4, a work hidden by the artist in the Swiss Alps and for which he promised a reward of 10,000 euros if somebody finds it and brings it to the Barbara Seiler Gallery. Another “postponed“ work, Five Moments of Silence for Pending Work #7, from the exhibition What Is the Reality of Never? (IASPIS, 2012), has been a performance carried out by six people “conducted“ by the artist into a few moments of silence dedicated to this work, which has initially been formulated in the guise of a contract with Rüdiger Schöttle Gallery from Munich. The idea of works suspended in an indefinite time or never concretized is not new and marks undoubtedly the creation of all artists. But Mirutziu sees in this postponement of transposing the idea into an object a limit of human perception in covering the conceptual territory of the work and the duration of the process. A “pending“ work is always too big for the geographic space in which the artist is located and for the present moment. These “pending works“ test not only the perception of the public about an absent thing, but also the mode of functioning of the relationship between work and art market and between the artist and the gallery owner. The validation mechanism of an artwork goes through a short-circuit and is replaced with the complicity between public and artist in order to form a fissure in the very roots of art.  The concern for the aesthetic form is substituted with a network of ideas that do not exhaust reality, but accept its irreducible and often hazy core, according to the theories of object-centered philosophy, whose partisans (such as Bruno Latour or Graham Harman) are among the documentation sources of the artist.

The performance that took place at the end of the exhibition from Sabot, Scotopolitic Objects #2 [for one performer], triggered precisely the situation mentioned by Graham Harman in his writings, namely the one in which the object proves itself to be immune to the attempts at deciphering it. The scenario of the performance has been thought out in such a way as too cover both the empty space of the exhibition and every corporeal presence. The artist used five big ceramic pots placed one next to the other, in which he has placed five microphones in order to create an unpredictable sound platform that included all sounds from the space of the gallery and all movements of the visitors. These improvised sound tools reacted and changed their vibrations or the volume of the sound according to the gestures of the artist (each move of his palms have been captured by the microphone) or to the distance between the objects. The failure of the public in clarifying the sonic and visual situation placed the artist in the posture of continuing his action, improvising and reactivating the potential of objects otherwise “calcified“, as he calls them. 

Using all possible media, Alex Mirutziu outmaneuvers our perceptual habits and brings the exhibition in a new zone of tension between the sensorial qualities of the objects and their mental representation.  In 2009, Mirutziu has formed an artistic collective with one of his alter egos – the artist at the age of 29 – and all works made in this way are based on the body as a primary tool. Within the exhibition, The Artist as Himself at 29 is an example of a paradoxical object which migrates from medium to medium. After the process of fabricating the physical mask of the artist, this mask has become a drawing tool in a performance and, simultaneously, an extension of his own body, one of the conditions of making this drawing being the permanent contact between the mask, the hand and the paper. Finally, the mask-object has been exhibited together with a video that documented the performance and has been placed next to the final drawing as a radio - gram of the whole process. Following the same subtle link between sculpture and the ephemeral performative gestures among which the artist finds many affinities, even though they seem incompatible at first sight, two photos – Weight of Sleep as Temporary Sculpture Present in Flesh of Face – try to capture the moment of waking up in which the body is the raw material for an ephemeral sculpture.  The traces on the face of the artist keep the memory of abstract forms imprinted on it, their source being quite enigmatic precisely because everything has taken place during sleep.  

“The bureaucratic object“, another important concept for the exhibition, is a conglomerate of oppositions to which the artist leaves open a way to reciprocally reconcile or annihilate each other. The language of the bureaucratic object is political par excellence. Each word through which we explain reality bears within itself an intentionality and a power of manipulation highlighted by the poetry of post-language. One of the works in the exhibition is a “prepared“ poem that generates two extra works – a video and a series of sculpture-objects. The visual allure of a text is what pushes the artist to research and renegotiate the identity of each word. Starting from the poem Politics by Graham Foust, Mirutziu cuts out and inserts certain passages from Our Circumlocution of W. H. Auden, reflecting upon the time of pronouncing a text, the pauses between the verses and the spontaneous alliances between words. The tridimensional objects extracted from these imbrications, Architecture for Page Turn, coincide as form with the empty spaces between the lines that determine the entire architecture of a page of text. The utility of these small lead objects is to keep open the page of a book in different angles, covering more or less the words and contributing to a certain kind of reading. Each glance at a text, even when the latter is not complete, inevitably determines the spontaneous selection of a set of words with which our mind creates new semantic contexts.  Each Thought’s an Instant Ruin with a New Disease passes finely over the invisible membrane that coats the idea, the object and the artistic process in order to create a new conceptual relationship between human and non-human, solitude and togetherness, artist and viewers, marked by opacity and the lack of a common language.  The theories about postmodern networks of objects (called “plasma“ by Latour) always ignore the irreducible properties of individual elements, while privileging their relations. Instead, Alex Mirutziu interrupts the circuit and awaits to see what comes out from notions such as opacity, failure, impossibility, closing and postponement.  

“The rhetoric of silence“, the phrase by which in her “The Aesthetics of Silence“(1) Susan Sontag names the resistance strategy of art before the imposture or erroneous interpretation, can be viewed as a “zero degree“ at which the intentionality of the artist or the aesthetic frame disappear, leaving a void right in the middle of the stage and provoking the spectators to rethink their own position towards art; in this “aesthetics“ silence is nothing but an attempt at liberation from the spectator, client, evaluator or any other type of constraints, a decision that brings with itself also its other side – the dialectics of a symmetric exchange, in which one could answer to the void with the substance of ideas, to silence with the eloquence of the demonstration, etc. Sontag refers to André Breton’s concept of “pleine marge“ in order to explain the tendency of art to isolate itself in a (spatially and mentally) peripheric zone, the central void pushing to the margins the true, authentic experience. The result – new ways in listening, viewing and understanding art – is a conceptual and sensorial exercise of transgressing the eternal mediation task of art and of denouncing the “bureaucracy“ signaled by Alex Mirutziu. This is why dominant terms in the contemporary discourse about art, such as “to exhibit“, “to illustrate“, “to discover“ ,“to share“, “to translate“, “to demonstrate“(2) should be removed at least for a split second from the art vocabulary, just as in a workshop of “potential literature“ (starting from the OULIPO(3) experiments) in order to create new “constraints“ and “liberties“.

Translated by Alexandru Polgár

DIANA MARINCU (b. 1986) is a Ph.D. candidate at the National University of Art in Bucharest, Art History and Theory Department, with a research focusing on the curatorial narratives/discourses built in relation with political and geographical criteria in the last twenty years of exhibition making. She writes art reviews in Arta, Observator cultural, Dilema veche, Poesis International, and other publications.

Notes

1. Susan Sontag, “The Aesthetics of Silence“, in Styles of Radical Will, Picador
US, 2002.
2. Observation borrowed from the essay “Opacity“ by Ulrich Loock, published
in Frieze Magazine, no. 7, winter 2012 and read at http://friezemagazin.de/archiv/features/opazitaet/
“Imagining the world in terms of opacity as a chaotically resonating whole appears as an unparalleled challenge to current notions of the global. In this light, it was striking to see the terms used in the exhibition
catalogue for The Global Contemporary (2011) at the ZKM in Karlsruhe to describe the artistic aims of individual works in the show: examine, uncover, unmask, expose, reveal, reflect, illustrate, comment
– a language of transparency that translated the works themselves, whichever part of the world they came from, into a dominant aesthetic of allegory.“
3. Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, a group for experimental literary creation formed in the 1960s by writer Raymond Queneau and mathematician François Le Lionnais, which considers voluntary formal constraints
to be effective in the stimulation of creativity and imagination. This group functions today as well and, periodically, they propose new “constraints“ for an “anti-hazard“ practice.

Art Cities of the Future. 21st Century Avant-Gardes

Jane Neal

Phaidon Press, 2013

p. 78—79

Alex Mirutziu is Romania's leading young performance artist. His arresting practice hovers at the limits of self-exploration, experimentation and extreme personal discomfort. There is a retro quality to his work; its dark, ironic humour and masochistic edge evokes the oeuvre of Viennese Actionist  Arnulf Rainer or seminal performance artist Vito Acconci. What distinguishes Mirutziu is his focus on 'when' rather than 'what'. He is fascinated by the chronicling of time and how it determines the significance of events. This is best expressed in the series Pending Works, which Mirutziu originated in 2009. But what must be understood is that each work is as much about its promise as its occurrence. For Pending Work #4 (2011-12), for example, a block of clay was buried on a mountain in Uetliberg, above Zurich. At the site, Mirutziu recorded data such as radiation and humidity and installed a CCTV camera, which is later controlled from his studio thousands of miles away. In one sense the work could be considered dormant and invisible, but it also functions as a kind of satellite, collecting information about itself and its surroundings, which are then broadcast to the artist. These covert behaviors and distancing tactics call into question whether Pending Work #4 is private act or public work. 

The politics of performance has been a constant in his practice. Mirutziu can turn from using explicit homoerotic imagery in a performance context to using video to depict the Srebrenica Genocide (Moment of Silence 2011). His biography states, 'Mirutziu is the only artist to have made a group with a hyper-object (namely with himself at twenty-nine) and exhibit as a collective.' That is, he represents his twenty-nine-year-old self time and again, as if freezing this version of himself, by using photographs and videos shot during his twenty-ninth year. The relationship that forms between the artist in the instantaneous present and the artist at twenty-nine forms a rhetoric, though an unusual one. Unsurprisingly, Mirutziu's striking individualism and chameleon-like approach have gained him increasing visibility on the world stage. 

Mirutziu was featured in 'Ars Homo Erotica', curated by Pawel Leskowicz at Warsaw's National Museum, in 2010. In 2012 he participated in 'European Travellers: Art from Cluj Today', curated by Judit Angel at Kunsthalle Budapest. One year previous, Rudiger Schottle invited Mirutziu to make a solo exhibition comprised of Pending Works and the 2011 work entitled Scotopolitic Object . The later features an attractively decorated vase wired up to a speaker and  projector. As the viewers are drawn to the object of their gaze, it in turn is affected by their presence; if they touch it they disturb the image projected from its interior and change the amplified sound. It is an acutely observed demonstration of the strained relationship between the love of looking and the obsessive invasion of the object's space. 

Mirutziu's insightfulness enables him to take what he needs from a given situation. This in no way detracts from the consistency of his practice; it simply suggests an artist who, independent of his peers, seeks to find ways to work within specific frameworks. During his studies at the University of Art and Design, he was affiliated with the painting department. There he encountered more difficulty than support, but the experience encouraged him to work independently. Though he found his studies frustrating, he remembers productive exchanges with photographer and video artist Grit Hachmeister, and he cites poet Angela Marinescu and filmmaker Lucian Pintilie (known as the creator of 'corrosive cinema') as influences. Mirutziu's difficult, elegant work suggests he has in fact taken a cue from Marinescu, who has said, 'Everything will be poetry if you are good at saying it.'

European Travellers — Art from Cluj Today

Judit Angel

/excerpt 

p. 97

Alex Mirutziu's performance art focuses on (his own) body, which is the subject of cognition and confrontation and also serves as a means of communication. In his early works — some of which are on display here— Mirutziu's body problematics are based on sexual identity and the related individual and social conflicts, in which the body is formulated as a political tool (Tears are Precious, Heaven Knows I Feel Miserable Now, Sock Face).

Jane Neal

Cluj International

p. 81

Alex Mirutziu is the most avant-garde of Sabot's artists, participating in 2007 in English director John Britton's experimental master class with seven other heterogeneous performers. Subsequently he toured England with his performative social - commentary Leave Gordon Brown Alone. Mirutziu received international recognition in Madrid and Paris at the Optica Video Art Festival, where he was awarded ' best independent artist', as well as presenting two solo projects (2010 and 2011) at Rudiger Schottle, Munich. His present collective exhibitions include The Power Plant in Toronto, the National Museum in Warsaw, and Spazio Vault in Prato. 

ALL HOLLOW

2012

Rearview Mirror

New Art from Central & Eastern Europe

Christopher Eamon

The Power Plant, 2011
Art Gallery of Alberta, 2012

Fellow Romanian artist Alex Mirutziu’s practice is mainly performance based and photographic. His video Pop, included in this exhibition, is perhaps exceptional of his work in the sense that he appears in it only marginally; his hand turns the pages of the British fashion magazine Pop.
Slowly, page after page, a narrative of imagery emerges, a found narrative that is at once appropriation and meditation. Most of Mirutziu’s work is based on gender and gender transformation. In many ways, as a kind of body artist, he is the closest of his generation to one of the lone heroes of the Romanian art scene, the conceptual and body artist of the 1970s Ion Grigorescu. While Grigorescu is almost a lone figure in Romanian history, his work is still very much of a piece with international task-based, performance and body art. Mirutziu does not in any way ape this 1970s form. Rather, he “queers” it in an altogether different way.

Lamono #76

2011

You play the most varied disciplines: from photography to performance and installations or conceptual writing. Do you think it is important that, today, the young artist is versatile?

Of course there are no rules and standards regarding the versatility of one artist, but I generally think that freeing myself of a specific medium, in other words remaining free, suits best my practice. I was never afraid of approaching territories that can articulate my metier in a valid way, not to say of the constant searching for the best way to say it. Therefore it’s a matter of what one questions conceptually speaking. My work has no other option being anchored in a processual research; it offers no escape but to mediate different practices, that I consider fit for one proposal or the other. But, never forget that sometimes definitions like performance or installation prove to be weak and unsatisfactory vis-à-vis a conceptual discourse.

You’ve researched and worked on projects where looking connections between artistic expression and the nature of the human body, almost as if an art-biological question. Why are you interested in the connection between these areas?

It’s true that my performance based work looks within these fields. As it is expected, I am after all interested in expression. There is this notion that one thinks with his brain and express what he thinks with his body, so this corporeal machine has many implications when thrown into art. What interests me more is the capacity of an action to put a mass in movement, to silence, or balance fields of power. What are the conditions that an idea has to satisfy to become physically potent?

Do you consider yourself a scientist-artist?

I wouldn't call myself like that; still science as I see it makes a brilliant capital in my work. There are many things to be discussed here, especially because I consider art as thinking, one that make use of concepts like time, action for instance which have been massively debated and documented by philosophers and scientists.

In your work exhibition is a clear gesture obsession to intervention and modeling facial expression. Why?

You may say that in regards to some previous works that are centered on the portrait. It is a different issue that distance itself, for example from Arnulf Rainer’s compulsive obsession with the expressive body. My intention back then was not to put forward a psychotic self, or to over express it; but to indicate a sort of masochistic desire to disappear, to manipulate the fragility of the skin, to show its estrangement and disillusion with both the inside and the outside. This desire dates a long way back, and I think it is one of the pillars that holds the scaffold of what my work is all about.

What is for you “body”?

Most importantly the body is a powerful medium, maybe the most difficult to work with. But nevertheless is a medium for communication. Having said that, I truly take it as a social construct that needs mediation. It is not a choice, but a fact and therefore it has language embedded in its molecules. It is therefore inescapably a mass that needs to be negotiated, every millisecond.

How important would you consider the body to express themselves artistically?

The body never looses its flagrant expression and outspoken desire to manipulate and be manipulated.

In your work is appreciated in some connection with performing work by artists such as Marina Abramovic or Anika Larsson. What artists, genres or artistic tendencies you feel more sympathetic?

It’s always hard to pinpoint references that mark my work. Writing may be a strong and constant marker, therefore it’s more a problematic of language than of let’s say fine art. Nevertheless I feel close to some approaches in art but not necessarily to specific artists, even if I made sometimes direct reference to W. H. Auden or Mickey Rourke.

Nudity and naked bodies are plentiful in your work. To what extent you are interested in erotic art to incorporate into your work?

I think the problem of eroticism in my work is a false problem. If there is an order in the layers of my works nakedness resides at the periphery. I would explain it as a nuance.

Do you feel sympathetic to provocative performers and artists who use sex as a weapon and fetish artists such as Bruce LaBruce, Larry Clark, Jonathan Meese and Joan Morey?

Over the years I have meet and exhibited with some artists mentioned above, but I wouldn’t say I feel sympathetic towards their practice.

Do you consider yourself an artist provocateur?

Better said, an artist that likes being provoked by reality.

In your recent exhibition “Critique on How Temples Move Faster Than Their Shadows” was appreciated a taste for chaos and disorder. What is it that strikes you about this?

That solo show came painstakingly slow and quick at the same time. Why? Slow, because there were lots of philosophical edges to it, many fractured ideas that stayed with me for some time, and needed a formulation, and quick, because the opportunity to articulate and produce a show came as an ardent deadline. This incredible force to stage a massive event was maybe a clear balance between the two.

Do you plant in the near future to jump into genres such as drama (theater) or cinema or a longer format or still prefer the video installation and performance short to work?

There is always a question of the format and medium as I already pointed in a previous statement, so what I want is to detach from any medium confinements and rebuild them; what matters is to remain free.

Do you consider your work please provide good information sciences such as sociology?

I have studied Theory of Communication and Systems Theory by Jürgen Habermas, Niklas Luhmann, and Humberto Maturana since 2002 and extensivelly introduced them into my projects as well as Alfred Gell’s anthropological theory of art and theory among others.

Do you think a conceptual artist like you should educate people with their artistic practices?

I never think of educating people really. Maybe art is not destined to educate or to give answers but to propel the possible and ask.

With what concepts you want people to associate you to see your work?

The public should remember that my work is artificial, culturfactured - a construct, and that it is my construct and should be seen as such with directness and ruff poetics, as art in its form signifies nothing but representation of heterogeneous time.

To what extent a country like Romania influenced your artwork? Maybe that’s why you find more shelter in Central Europe?

To be honest Romania has only given me the place of my birth. It’s almost impossible to project more besides, and don’t even want to. It may seem strange saying it so drastically but it is nevertheless true even if I spend most of the time in it.

Flash Art

Anne Martens

March-April 2011

With the current trends, one can argue whether identity politics in art is now dead. But really all art is rooted in self-identity at its most sublime and political. Alex Mirutziu is queer, Romanian, lives in the UK and employs these personal facts to convey broadest human  experiences.

In a half-hour performance that opened his recent Los Angeles exhibition, Mirutziu wovea tale of personal experiene with universal resonance. Through projection, music, sound effects and acting he conveyed the anguish of a lost relationship. With grief, time can be perceived as both eternal and specific; a time warp in which the individual suffers in isolation. 

This sensibility was imaginatively conveyed through the lens of a specific event: last year's resignation speech by Gordon Brown. In an apartment at night, the protagonist lies and writhes while internalizing the event's telecast.

He even identifies with the politician's wife  -- wearing a similar dress and high-heeled pumps - then rejects her supportive role. Later, naked exept for the shoes, he lip-syncs to a song's heart wrenching lyrics. This humor, strong narrative devices and a minimalist touch took the performance to a provocative level.

For the remainder of the exhibition, the gallery was rearranged to include a video of the performance plus drawings, photographs, sculptures and performance objects. Of these, my favorite a pair of cage -like platform shoes welded together to force its wearer into a contorted position. Two self portraits with a sadomasochistic bent, the artist wearing face masks made of medical socks, straps and ball gags, while visually powerful left less to the imagination. But in the context of the artist's body of work, they support a theme: everyone - whether queer, straight, male or female - experiences the coexistence of pleasure and pain in relationships, if not life. 

Through a kind of perverse logic, that Molotov cocktail of lust, longing and loneliness may itself be a norm within the human condition.

Monopol Magazine

Barbara Gartner

April 2010

What is the body itself for you? Using your body as extensively as you do in your work, do you regard yourself being part of the long list of tradition of performance artists using (and to some point also torturing) their body?

First and foremost I treat my body as a vessel, as a medium, and then as a space of resistance. I used to name it revolution wise instrument embedded with political meaning and transversal power, transversal meaning any force physical or ideological, friendly or antagonistic that inspires emotional conceptual and or material deviations from the established norms.

First and foremost I treat my body as a vessel, as a medium, and then as a space of resistance. I used to name it revolution wise instrument embedded with political meaning and transversal power, transversal meaning any force physical or ideological, friendly or antagonistic that inspires emotional conceptual and or material deviations from the established norms.

In this respect I consider a dense and risky business to take my own body as the main place of confrontation and communication with my own memory and suffering and most of all to articulate this in a conceptual way and so forth; therefore any historical contextualization that deals with the use of the body worth’s all my attention. I was struck by works of Pierre Molinier, Romeo Castellucci, Neil Jordan, where I’ve immersed myself attracted by a dense use of loneliness especially in Molinier’s case that I have found very rich and inspirational.

How close is the “figure Alex Mirutziu” that one faces in your performances, photos, installations to the “real” Alex Mirutziu? Are those narratives in “There is no fit memorial for our love” or “Unforgotten if unpunished” true?

My work always indexed my figure as you call it, and its been corruptible in this sense, as my work is a lot about coming back, about introspection on one hand and about a return to something that had somehow broke me... so there is this discussion of fitting, positioning and a sort of carrying interiorities within me and within the work itself. It has to do with a sort of movement first experienced and consumed by me and then produced; in this respect my work touches on the notion of formulation: is my body ornamental (outside the work), or structural (inside the work) or decorative (inside the work), or symbolic (outside the work)?

Therefore the two works that you refer to have to do with these interrogations, so one shall search in the mentality of the work, and in its mental structure rather than in its representation or narrative potentiality. I am interesting in the notion of location of art where it may exist in the mind– but also in its epidemiological place, objects that perform and actively engage with the exterior.

The literalist sensibility with its own kind of agency can only add to the confronting presence of an orthopedic wholeness of the work and demands that the beholder take into account a nexus of relational functions. To a certain degree the work itself refuse the human body being either because the beholder is to close to the object either emotionally or physically - bringing fragility to the understanding these objects are physical of physical acts, therefore imply a need to be perceived in constant process of making, and never isolated from the context.

What is your approach to fashion?

The entity of fashion as a gerund status: fashion - a thing happening now, where the focus is on the emergent, potential ability to signal and set in motion moments during the performance. I am captivated by the performative aspect of runway presentations rather than on fashion as a socio - cultural instrument.

The effect is a humanized approach to a specific artistic protocol...where the established focus is blasted and twisted making the performers mise-en-scène the motor of the whole process.

What is it that strikes you about pictures of models crashing on the runway?

What is striking in these pictures and implicitly in the series of video performances called “Runway spills”, is the diffusion of focus away from the garment and onto a situation that disrupts a specific convention (falling on the catwalk); the now of fashion live performance that sometimes corrupts, and contradicts itself, in its redeployment of functions from the existence of an abstract idea to the tangible production.

Can you elaborate a bit on “Unforgotten if unpunished”. What does the toy mean to you?

“Unforgotten if unpunished” is a metaphor that speaks for itself. The use of toy cars being smashed by different branded trainers is part of a whole trend on youtube and had even been contextualized in Christian Louboutine’s “Barney’s trash” double platform slingbacks. I use toy cars from my childhood, and not at all without their own memory. Ripping apart from the outside an object that is hundred times smaller than the real one, acts as a perpetual replacement for the lost object of desire – where the sorrow goes on and on, a perpetual return to a lifeless center.

And on “There is no fit memorial for our love”.

In “There is no fit memorial for our love” installation I was interested in the problem of representation ... the objects that make the work itself are generated by storage devices. Each object gathers in itself different assembly of relevant procedures and trigger occasions to differ and dispute. Moving away from my own imagination has brought me to research emergence and interaction as main

constructs irreducible to regular laws and novel. In so doing this work together with the one mentioned above (“Unforgotten if unpunished”) emerged from complex systems of production via telecommunication and its permanent or ephemeral means of recording, clandestine digital migration, safe – unsafe algorithms, calculated irrelevance, vari-frequencies per second, video scanning, luminance and color. What initially interested me was to use my laptop as another performer that mediates the void between possible collective work, implicating other possible web users.

The work is not staged, managed, or dramatized, liberated by anonymity being anchored in process rather than in the outcome, exploiting the existing given moment. I’ve been paying attention to the element of distortion, internal and external coming from the medium itself.

Is being Queer still as a matter of social political rebellion for you? Can you elaborate a bit on that?

As a Romanian artist I try not to conceptualize restrictions, but act upon them; I’ve wrote Romanian because I grew up in Romania where being gay was hard to be comprehended by the majority and as a consequence misjudged and still is. In this sociopolitical environment being outside the bounds of normal society has its price, but today this manifestation is much more a part of research as it was while at university.

Very often my readings led to queer literature and many times I would have liked to relate to an openly gay Romanian artist being either writer or of any other discipline. The symptoms of an uneducated Romanian society makes its mark now more than ever among decision making entourages and in these issues the general public discourse is always insulting and ludicrous.

Would you agree that the condition of being queer is an intrinsic part of your art making? If yes has it always been like that?

I would say the same, if queer implies a sort of attitude or approach, resistant to monolithic definitions, resistant to a single appellation – and to representation. In my recent work, I try to operate within notions that emerge and coagulate in the mind and perform beyond the spectators’ understanding. Queer entails these sub notions that causes the possibility for art to explode outward and more than before my work furthers these into language.

Why did you chose Oscar Wilde's “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” to name your exhibition in Munich?

“Some kill their love when they are young”, the title of my newest exhibition, is one that is dear to me as it adheres to a specific period in my life. I have found it to be poignant and urgent, and the selection of works from the Munich exhibition needed a perfect fit. Oscar Wilde’s poems are very important to me and especially the “Ballad of Reading Gaol”, written to denounce the solitude and harsh life from prison. Two years ago, I’ve been part of a GayWise festival that had its opening evening at the House of Commons, London - in the company of esteemed British politicians like David Lammy and Trevor Philips - the place where Wilde was convicted of gross indecency. It wasn’t a simple coincidence that after more than one hundred years I was able to celebrate freedom of expression in the same place it was supposedly banned 1895, and to some extent I empathize with his suffering and come back to it often.

How important is growing up in Romania for your work?

Romania provides me with a lamentable and frigid tradition and not with argumentative ideologies. Many times I have felt alienated and ideological estranged, where issues that I thought were far gone like collective schizophrenia and uttered stupidity, lack of social participation and pragmatism were prime-time trophies.

Romania had lost me irremediably a while back with its stench of dead carcass and lack of reputation. In this geography of exclusion represented by my city and as a whole by Romania I can only engage with myself forever questioning “What I am doing here? And is there any hope?” It is the people who live here, who are lost and disillusioned. Romania is a country that cannot deliver me out of my sadness. Perhaps it is a pathological anger over Romania that can only be born out of running. And running has become modus vivendi. Running of being trapped; running of lack of instruments; and lack of air to breath.

ArtNet

PAIN BALLET AND HISTORICAL PASSION

Goshka Macuga, Alex Mirutziu – Galerie Rüdiger Schöttle, München. From February 5 till March 20, 2010

Evelyn Pschak

March 3, 2010

The gallery owner is beside himself with joy. He claims to have made “a discovery in No Man's Land”. Even Rüdiger Schöttle's eyes glow with euphoria from behind his horn-rimmed glasses, as he recalls setting out for the Transylvanian Cluj-Napoca last autumn, without having put his hopes up too high. He was in fact heading for the mothballed brush manufacturing plant Perom that today hosts art galleries, among which the Sabot Gallery. The name refers to a program that is meant to “sabotage the fundamental segregation between E- and U-culture” - as the founders put it. Thus, discoveries may be made even in a highly capitalized art business. As the world agonizes over crises and cries about prices, treasures are dug out. Schöttle on his way to the terra incognita.

Now as you stand in front of the Discovered, it is presumably difficult to ignore him, even though the appearance of Alex Mirutziu – born in 1981 in Sibiu – is not what we would call monumental. His slimness is outweighed by the zooming focus on the aestheticized ego, on self-experienced agony of love, on his sexual orientation that is no longer homosexual but deliberately queer, on his urge for the fashionable and the caricaturesquely inflated glamour. This draws an almost omnipresent attention to the Discovered. In 2010, Mirutziu shall be represented on the satellite art fair Independent at the same time as the Armory Show in New York; he may be seen at the art biennial in Bucharest and has penetrated the shooting star lists of popular magazines.

At the February oppening – his first in Germany – Mirutziu is told to have worn a head contraption that enabled him to mince through the audience with a high-heeled pump in his mouth, a fur coat casually slung over his shoulders, posing, nudging people.

“The audience went completely silent”, says the gallery assistant with an unwaning enthusiasm. The fur coat is still lying on the gallery floor – as if it had just dropped off the shoulders – reminding of Sacher-Masochs famous novel “Venus in Furs” (1870) which inspired the medical doctor Richard von Krafft-Ebing to find the concept of masochism. Anyway: the cross-references. At a first sight (at least at this small exhibition on the gallery's ground floor) you're tempted to tag Mirutziu's art as too deliberately flamboyant, too close to the excesses and stencils of Andy Warhol and his Factory. A second intake though reveals the desperately manic, the subtle line between self-iconization and self-destruction, the critical reflexiveness behind the shrill gestures. You may grasp the inscrutable behind the apparent shine more easily if you are prepared for the encounter with Mirutziu's art – perhaps through his text “Hot Mess. Contemplating the body at war with itself”, prefaced by a quote from Rilke's “Duino Elegies”: “For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror”.

And Rilke is not the last in line. Mirutziu’s fundamental belief is infused just as much by Vilém Flusser's contemplations on the “self” and the “mask” as it is by the sociological theories of Niklas Luhman or by Descartes' questioning the possibility of a positive balance of pain incurred: “For what can be more intimate or internal than pain?” Such is the theory that Mirutziu bases the fact on: “Pain makes us not only human, but real creatures of the world, it gives us a meaning”. Pain is allotted a special role in his art: be it in his acrylic painting “Painting # 2 for bank vault” (2009) resembling a Pietà and portraying his boyfriend, or in the light box Sock Face (2010), rendering the artist himself – a shirted, severely combed snoot – but for the crumpled sock in his mouth.

A knob reminding us that before 1989, neither the artist nor his art would have been safe in Romania. Homosexuality was just as undesirable as western consumerism. However, status symbols don't seem to arrest Mirutziu's interest anymore – an iPod belonging to an ex-boyfriend has been retooled to art: Unforgotten if unpunished (2009). The gadget now displays a video with Mirutiu trampling down a small plastic car. But the destructive snorting of the painful memory does not swallow this action which is rather the evidence of the balletesque, body-controlled ability of the artist. Suffered pain may translate as bitterness.

Or catharsis.

SOME KILL THEIR LOVE WHEN THEY ARE YOUNG

Text by Oana Tanase - curator MNAC (National Museum of Contemporary Art, Bucharest)

24-Fun / February 25, 2010

[EN] Rüdiger Schöttle Gallery in Munich is located in the nice neighborhood bordered by university, library and art museums. Well, if I missed the display of Geta Bratescu in December, during my recent trip to the heart of Bavaria, I managed to be present at the exhibition of the young artist Alex Mirutziu (born in Sibiu, 1981).

Last autumn, I briefly met him in Cluj, sometime after the opening of Sabot gallery from the Paintbrushes factory complex, together with his displays, out of which the video Tears are precious, distinguished itself by far. Yet, for the exhibition in Munich, Mirutziu came with a new series of works (painting, photos, objects and video), the title “Some kill their love when they are young” – though cut up from Oscar Wilde’s poem “The Ballade of Reading Gaol“ – gaining personal vibrations, since the pieces of the exhibition bear a self referential charge. There are two photo self portraits – a print, “Unforgotten if unpunished” (self portrait with medical sock, lycra panty hose, ball gag) and a light box, “Sock face”, both dated 2010 – dominated by the sight of the artist, frozen with fear and helplessness; nevertheless the body – as a fighting field, as an instrument aimed to speed up self destruction and to outline ambiguities is one of the reoccurring topics when we speak of Mirutziu.

Thus, video recording of a pseudo-static performance, only two-three minutes long “Runway spill #1” – a ‘quote’ from the fashion parades when the model often has slips of ankles – works as energy core of the exhibition. “I deliberately use my body as place of confrontation and communication with my own memory and suffering”, says Alex Mirutziu in a recent text.

***

[RO] Galeria Rüdiger Schöttle din München se afla in simpaticul cartier delimitat de universitate, biblioteca si pinacoteci. Ei bine, daca in decembrie am ratat display-ul Getei Bratescu, in recenta calatorie in inima Bavariei am reusit sa prind expozitia tanarului artist Alex Mirutziu (nascut in 1981, Sibiu).

Toamna trecuta, l-am intalnit pe fuga in Cluj, la ceva vreme dupa inaugurarea Galeriei Sabot din complexul Fabricii de Pensule, odata cu personala sa, suita din care cu usurinta se dezlipea filmul video Tears Are Precious. Pentru expozitia din München insa, Mirutziu a produs o serie de lucrari noi (pictura, fotografie, obiect si video), titlul Some kill their love when they are young – desi decupat din poemul „The Ballade of Reading Gaol“ al lui Oskar Wilde – castigand vibratii personale, de vreme ce piesele din expozitie poarta cu ele o incarcatura autoreferentiala. Doua dintre lucrari sunt autoportrete fotografice – un print, Unforgotten if unpunished (self portrait with medical sock, lycra panty hose, ball gag) si un light-box, Sock face, ambele din 2010 – dominate de privirea artistului, inghetata de teama si de neputinta; de altfel corpul – ca un camp de lupta, ca un instrument menit sa accelereze autodistructia si sa accentueze ambiguitatile constituie una dintre temele constante ale lui Mirutziu.

Iar in acest sens, inregistrarea video a unui performance pseudo-static, de doar doua-trei minute, Runway spill #1 – un „citat“ din defilarile de moda, in care adeseori manechinului ii fuge glezna – functioneaza ca nucleu energetic al expozitiei. „In mod deliberat, imi tratez corpul ca loc al confruntarii si al comunicarii cu propria memorie si suferinta“, noteaza Alex Mirutziu intr-un text recent.

”Opening of Paintbrushes Factory”

Bogdan Iacob

February 2, 2010

(exerpt)

Sabot Gallery opened its exhibition programme with a show of Alex Mirutiu, namely Manifest of Flaw. The exhibition confirmed Mirutiu’s ability of intelligently deploying a variety of artistic media in order to circumscribe a conceptual proposal: video, photography, drawing and sculpture were the means used to build up Manifest of Flaw. It also showed a sensitive and genuinely reflexive artist at work, one that can relevantly address issues such as queer status in contemporary social perception, the politics of the body or the abyss of sheer feeling and suffering.

The flaw is aptly the main concept to underline his works. Almost all of them retain an experimental quality which itself constitutes a manifest against the fixity of the standard, against society’s claim to define and impose legitimate behaviour and levelling normality. At the core of this experimentation lies the body. As in our social life precisely, in Mirutiu’s art the body, or, better said, his body as epitome of the body, is functioning at the same time as object of scrutiny, as tool of expressivity and as symbolic (with reference both to the social and the psychological realm) battlefield. What is recurrent in the works exhibited at Sabot is that this body is always under pressure, under siege, it is squeezed and somewhat victimized.

Thus, in the photograph titled Heaven knows I feel miserable right now, this (beautiful) victim is placed in a spatial surrounding equally defined by the so bourgeois look of the props and the slightly perverse baroque quality of lighting and chromatic. The piece of sculpture in the show presents a distorted, yet pristine white body lying on the floor as if it were a precious, yet paradoxically disposable item. The drawings reveal it in all its frailty, taking the form of trembling, somehow feverish lines. In regard to these, one is to acknowledge that the added lines of the textual insertions in the works do not add anything significant to the meaning of the work, but rather tend to flatten their peculiar and charming pathos by artificially overcharging it. Finally, the short video called Tears are precious presents us with a sort of a flaubertian self-portrait, with tears slowly flowing on the artist’s face, without any other physiognomic indication of feeling being detectable. The work is visually arresting and savvily approaches dialectics of inside – outside, felt – shown or expressed – repressed.

In the case of the drawings, as well as in that of the mentioned video piece, references are almost inevitably generated in the mind of the viewer. This referential slip may carry the spectator towards rather broad cultural and aesthetics paradigms such as conceptual art, queer visual politics and so on, but equally towards much more clearly determined contributions to contemporary art (the graphic works of Tracey Emin or Bas Jan Ader’s masterpiece from the early seventies,I’m to sad to tell you, for example).

FRIEZE

City Report: Cluj

Richard Unwin

January 3, 2010

”Similarly diverse in his approach is artist Alex Mirutziu (b. 1981) who trained at Cluj University, but is based in Sibiu, Southern Transylvania. His recent solo exhibition, ‘Manifest of flaw’, inaugurated the new Sabot Gallery. Founded by art critics Daria Pervain and Marcel Janco, Sabot will seek to provide a counterpoint to Plan B’s commercial dominance. Mirutziu’s exhibition provided a strong opening with a coherent, well-installed selection of work. While Mirutziu describes himself as being protective of his inner feelings, the exhibition delved deep into his reflections as a ‘queer’ artist, utilizing an impressive combination of diagrams, drawing, video, photography and sculpture. Backed up by a feeling of emotional weight, Mirutziu’s work plays with the interaction between sexual and violent desires, in a manner reminiscent of William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch (1959).”

DE-LIBERATING SEXUALITY

Arandjel Bojanovic

'Manifest of flaw' exhibition and publication / Sabot, 2009

There has been a time when people from pre-transitional Romania tried to reach the television signal from across the borders of their country, i.e. from Yugoslavia who happened to be the most consumerist, Western-like society of the so called Communist Bloc. For the people this underground access to the broadcasting space was the only window to a mediascape radically different from the one they used to enjoy. According to a story, the content many people tended to consume the most had been of pornographic provenience. It is a kind of oral history report that has been in circulation ever since. Usually this was taken to be an anecdote, a simple straightforward yet heroic story of the unfulfilled desire finding its ways to the satisfaction. Alex Mirutziu, however, is aware of the fact that sexuality and its popular elaboration in pornography has traditionally been the entrance to consumer society. He is working within that consumer society that presented itself at the time as a renaissance of Romanian society. The question constantly being asked by the author is: what does it mean to be a consumer of sexuality? What is being offered as an answer goes from political readings to relentless physicality. 

This question at its basic is concerned with anthropology of consumption. The author threats it in respect to the analysis of sexual discourses in general. Discourse is understood in Foucauldian terms as any language, text, spoken word, theory or practice that structures some domain of human life. The author goes about doing the inquiry through the medium of photography. Haven knows I feel miserable now and  Self portrait with a hood on are openly reminiscent of the works of Robert Mapplethorpe who is known for his engagement in the so-called cultural war during the 70's and 80's that was fought for sexual emancipation, gay and black liberation as well as other progressive causes. His ultra-aestheticized photography of BD/SM subculture found the way to galleries and became, as it were, the manifesto of the movement. Alex Mirutziu is aiming at the cultural effects by performing this sexualized identities in his local context where, he believes, they still have a local logic. The move undertaken can be seen as a remake, the practice conscious of presence of historic and cultural amnesia. However, photography he uses is more of a document of appropriation of information about performance conducted in theatricality of private space, than an object made for aesthetic contemplation, and as such is being installed before the viewer. Most of the time the 'art' is invisible, hidden behind more urgent need to explore the role sexual discourses play in our lives. What is underscored is the rhetorical space of the bedroom which is out of the reach of biopolitical technology of the polls. This works are presentation of site-specific performance art, the exploration of space of sexuality consumption in solitude. 

At the same time, the author's pop-cultural erudition comes to the fore in the practice of  designation of his experiments within the phenomenon of art. Everyday objects, utilitarian objects such as chairs, spoons, cars, etc. don't have proper names. Art objects necessarily do, even when they are of the same kind as former. Haven knows I feel miserable now alludes to the similar title of the song of the The Smiths whose author came out as an asexual. Now both the paradoxical slave identity deprived from its relation to the master ironically solitarily performed in the bedroom and possibility of being asexual stand up in opposition to genitally-dominated, penetration-oriented sexual protocol delivered by mainstream pornography. Yet there is a tension between sado-masochism and asexuality. SM subculture has become the subject of transactions within the mainstream culture whereas asexuality is still underdeveloped/unrecognized politically identity.  

Alex Mirutziu in the series of his earlier works deals with the issue of sexuality in such a way questioning/complicating/displacing presuppositions that are (sub)textually present in any sexual discourse whether its being scientific or of some other kind. The artist does it by the way of cultural experiments aiming at production of local-ized excesses. The striking instance of this practice would be the 24 hours donation of sperm performance held at the University of Fine Arts, Cuenca, Spain. Semen has been used with the plethora of metaphoric and narratological meanings. Mainstream pornography represents it as the quintessential feature of sexual intercourse, as the ultimate pleasure. The spill over effect onto the culture is overwhelming. The grand narrative - foreplay, intercourse, cumshot - is unavoidable. Pleasure embodied in sperm tends to present itself as genderless. It allegedly escapes every ideological codification; it does not matter whether a person being the male or female, an anarchist or fascist, a wealthy or poor – when it comes to the sperm as an element of sexual intercourse every identity is irrelevant and therefore redundant. Its ontological hegemony is indisputable. Everything is measured by semen. It is the self-contained absolute telos of the activity in question. It is good in itself. The author decides to conduct the crucial experiment, that is, to test the myth repetitiously masturbating. By means of experiment one is able to reveal only things that are socially constructed yet regulated by some scientific regime and offered as a natural necessities. Therefore, no one is supposed to use the bodily liquids without its natural sphere, that is, private and/or scientific discourses which are heavily protocoled. 

The Atrocity exhibition and Boys first time present a viewer with one more tactics of signifying. Striking aesthetic resemblance between saliva and sperm is evident. The very recognition of the matter determines politically different readings. Cumface became a standard of mainstream heterosexual pornography. As yet it is not equally distributed. Male is rarely to never subjected to ejaculate. Sperm on male face is tabooed event in dominant homophobic culture. Its shock value is intensive. This maneuver of producing the indecisive readings is in some respects similar to Duchamp's logic of ready-made manipulation. Duchamp's works not only fly in the face of the institution of art itself, but also show that two aesthetically even physically equivalent object can be of different metaphysical orders at the same time underscoring artworld's aura-giving powers. At the time, Fountain, the urinal, still had the signature that supposed to distinguish it from other products. 

When it is disclosed that any matter can instantiate various auratic features it is possible to go a step further. Namely, not only things that surround us and interact with our skin causing sensations in us, but the things that are under the skin, within our body, can also be (re)auraticized. Sensations and meanings of our inner body are not self evident, private and primitive in contrast to our believes in other entities such as money, marriage, university, state, bathtubs... which social subject-dependent nature is demonstrative. Corollary of this way of reasoning is possibility of (re)connection of sexual pleasures to juices other than sperm, sensations other than orgasm - scatology, pissing, fisting, etc. Not in a way of checking off some already existing objectified patterns of perverted identity from the given cultural stock but by hinting toward a possibility of redrawing ontological lines of bodily inside/out. 

The author's ongoing effort to understand commodity culture, to see how what we consume defines us, leads him toward the queer paradigm, into such a mode of being which is ultimately resistant to biopolitics, to the processes of comodification/objectification, to the identitarian mode of thinking that revealed itself to be dangerously in tune with the logic of Capital, too claustrophobic and parochial.

Today when transitional Romania lives the extension of the mass media - television, color-magazines, billboards, cinema, newspapers, radio and Internet - the artist grounded in this material and political realities bodily reflects on his ideas of sexuality by assessing the possibility of articulating a view of the sexual beingness which can be translated into effective political strategies. Alex Mirutziu treats the artworld as a terrain of political, anthropological, sexual... experimentation disconnected from any utilitarian considerations imposed by the society. His works are not pleasant and one would feel even threatened by them if not necessarily on the sentient level as an organism, than certainly metaphysically as a self.

Head_Start / Alex Mirutziu & Roxana Ionescu

Liviana Dan

(Text for the opening of Head_Start exhibition at Gallery of Contemporary Art — Brukenthal Museum) 

Sibiu — 31 iulie 2002

Arta nu mai este doar o problema de limbaj, arta nu mai este doar o problema de invatare, dar arta ramane o problema de imaginatie. Cat de chic poate fi imaginatia? De ce sufera artistii de o incredibila insecuritate emotionala si financiara? De ce nu accepta formula: Fac expozitii pentru viitor — nu pentru pereti? Este arta un cer absolut si liber? O bucata de lux? Depasind cinismul anilor ’90, se poate folosi nonsalanta ca material de lucru?

Mult timp arta a fist blocata. Inghesuita in proiecte periferice. Confuzia a inlocuit aproape totul. Apoi momentul estetic a castigat in sensul lui Habermas. Paradigma a fost schimbata: paradigma vizuala a devenit paradigma acustica. Nu se mai dau raspunsuri. Se pun doar intrebari. Se renunta la tipul de situatie acum ori niciodata. Expozitia iese din noaptea neagra a teoriei. A descoperi, a regasi, a experimenta devin oportunitati radicale. Se preia riscul de a inlocui reprzentarea teoretica cu teoria locului. 

O anumita istorie devine baza locului intr-o expozitie. Ruptura plina de radicalitate, ramane omogena; aplica pentru globalitate. Noul spirit depaseste procesul artei. Tot ce tine de arta e supus schimbarii. Strategia este de protectie, de reflexie, de recunoastere a spatiului folosit ca mediu de idei de dezvoltare a unui grup, care sa functioneze ulterior pentru formarea altui grup artistic. 

In incubatorul Universitatii de Arta Head_Start a auzit comentarii despre nobletea artei si vulnerabilitatea vietii. Si au fost mai ales nefericiti cu Cezanne. Singuri si-au impus un sistem de auto-aparare de tip Max Beckmann si au invatat sa nu reduca profunzimea si scopul. Pentru Head_Start arta nu este numai forma. Arta inseamna si vulnerabilitate si fragilitate. Imaginile dispar in suprafata: puritate asemenea parfumului, hartie sub hartie, parte ascunsa, care se descompune in altul ideal. 

Head_Start are acces la asa numitul sistem textual. Impresie morala contra impresie sensibila. 
Head_Start comunica imaginea intr-o larga ambiguitate. Repertoriul artei si elementele de viata / amintiri, imagini, idei compuse pentru eternitate, zgomote, franturi muzicale / sunt inghesuite intr-un continuu proces de disolutie. 

Head_Start recunoaste ca oamenii sunt mult mai sofisticati vizual, decat sunt creditati de institutiile care controleaza vizualul. Dar cat de dificile sunt portretele? Cat de dificili sunt oamenii? Portretele lor pot fi anonime, asociate cu vulnerabilitatea, speranta sau anxietatea. Portretele lor pot fi istorice - portrete / obiect al asteptarii, portrete obiect al anticiparii. Asemenea unui stilist, Head_Start, se privesc ca pe o compozitie a tuturor lucrurilor pe care le fac. 

Si ce faci, cand florile, culorile, viata, arta, ce faci cand totul este disparitie? 

Cand totul este disparitie dezvolti metode de control vizual, cauti ordinea in momentele de confuzie, accepti ca fiecare are dreptul la o iluzie, inveti subtilitatea alegerii. Si te gandesti la intrebari de tipul: Ce sunt norii? si gasesti un raspuns de tipul — o metafora pentru viata interioara si realitatea exterioara. Si iti permiti, si Head_Start imis permite cu adevarat, sa deseneze solitudinea sexuala a norilor de pe cer si solitudinea lingvistica a omului de pe pamant. Eu imi permit doar sa-i percep mereu in aceasta tensiune abstracta.