Looking in from the outside of the Romanian art scene, one could observe that this country benefits from an art infrastructure that is similar to that of any Western country. There are speciallized galleries, a Museum of Contemporary Art, 3 important art magazines (Idea, Pavilion and Vector) and 3 international biennials.They are the Periferic Biennial in Iasi run by the Vector Association; Young Artists’ Biennial in Bucharest run by the Meta Cultural Foundation and the Bucharest Biennale run by the Artphoto Association.
Yet one might also wonder how many Romanian people could answer the question: “what is a biennial?” The whole art scene involves only 100 people, yet has 3 biennials in the same year. Periferic used to be a performance festival from 1997 till 2003, when it suddenly metamorphosized into the format of a biennial with an appointed curator.
The transitional conditions of Romania, which still replaces old values with borrowed ones without investigating the causes, are also reflected on the art scene. This rush to be part of the bigger European organism makes us accept the provisions stipulated in the contract. The hunger for shinny wrappings determines the construction of cultural supermarkets using the Western model. In order to increase the value of a product/event in the art world, you have to label it with the most convincing brand name: biennial. This way your ‘product’ has all the chances to be internationally recognized and to attract a certain number of sponsors, without whom your scaffolding could not be built.
Focusing Iasi
The remaining question is: is it worth organizing another biennial within the international circuit of biennials at a time when, everywhere in the world, these kinds of events are criticized for their obsolescence, their consumed character, their political and economic interests and their minimal artistic engagement? And therefore, is a more flexible format of a lower budget festival, which doesn’t consume itself so rapidly and still builds something enduring, a paradox? In this respect, the seventh Periferic Biennial, Focusing Iasi, tried to extend the formal display of the exhibition as a result of the fore-run workshops and conferences, where the local socio-political context of Iasi was debated.
Focusing Iasi was developed on a highly theoretical platform divided into three independent curatorial segments. Social processes, curated by Marius Babias and Angelika Nollert was at the Turkish Baths. Strategies of Learning curated by Florence Derieux was at the Cupola Gallery, Museum of Natural Sciences and the Palace of Culture and Why Children? was curated by Attila Tordai at the “George Enescu” Arts University Sports Hall, Goethe Zentrum, public spaces and high schools. All three sections offered source-books which supported the exhibited works on the theoretical level.
Babias’s section Social processes is a term imported from Sociology. It defines the fact that art can both erupt from, and generate social processes. The artworks included in the Turkish Bath were a cartography of socio-cultural contexts. They looked more like a stenograph of a sociological study. Most of the works dealt with globalization and the personal interferences caused by it, such as Andrea Faciu’s Black on White & Vice Versa, John Miller’s The Middle of the Day and Lia Perjovschi’s Timeline. Babias is a surgeon on the body of globalization, always using politically correct utensils. His macro lens went too near and risked breaking the shape into millions of pixels. Although the theoretical support of the exhibited works was faultless, it was almost impossible for the viewer to compose an image out of the dispelled pixels.
Two projects were referential for this particular curatorial segment. Dan Perjovschi’s Big Romanian Graffiti, with his self-proclaimed “naked drawings,” did not take us by surprise and performed again as a barometer of Eastern vs. Western culture, or the lack thereof. H.arta, a Romanian, art-female collective, made a project called About Art and the Ways We Look at the World. It reacted really well in the context of a deficient Romanian educational system, whose art history ends with The Modernist period. H.arta offered an alternative manual of viewing art as a methodological study, to be taught in art universities.
In a “peripheric” city like Iasi, where local and national myths still persist and irrelevant names for the universal cultures still have strong resonance, F. Derieux introduced in her project Andrei Ujica; an almost unknown name on the Romanian scene, but whom Western culture places in Virilio & Baudrillard’s gang. Just like his self-exiled co-national, Tristan Tara, who left because he was too depressed in his country, A. Ujica uses a “language code” which can be perceived in Romania only after 14 years. Ujica’s Videograms of a Revolution should be introduced as a strategy of re-learning the Romanian history from a mediological or “gate-keeping” point of view. If we understand repetition as a learning process, Derieux introduces artists whose understanding is based on using the keyword “simulation” associated with “duplication”. This duplicate can be found in the artworks of Pierre Joseph, Sean Snyder and Mathias Olofsson.
Commonopoly
The third section of the biennial, Why children?, curated by A. Torday used spaces like sports halls, school radio and bars, which enabled interaction with the public. Mircea Cantor’s Ping Pang Pong and Big Hope’s Commonopoly are constructed like games. The Ping Pang Pong table, a traditional Ping Pong table but with two nets, is a strategy of learning through games; a way of learning to readapt to the new conditions in the contemporary society. It was organized as a school championship, a metaphorical social experiment in the educational domain of practice and exercise. Initially the project was conceived to penetrate even further into the public space but because of financial restrictions, some artistic productions had to be mere sample displays. For example, Nedko Solakov’s Salvaging-Your-Future-Life-From-Unnecessary-Good-Citizen-Feelings Children Toys Kit, consists of toys with the instrument for their destruction attached. It was intended that these assemblages would be serialized and launched on the market and introduced into toy shops. Solakov’s toys are the perfect capitalist product; designed to break easily to encourage the never-ending buying of another one and then another one, in order to accelerate the consumption process.
The play with the words monopoly and common in the section Commonopoly by Big Hope, is that whereas the word monopoly deals with ownership and property rights, Commonopoly is concerned with property lefts; about sharing and offering, about unpossessive goods and services. This experimental model of social coexistence could be successfully applied in the Romanian art scene. It would mean the successful coalition of business and pleasure of each institution involved in the art scene.
PLAY NICE KIDS!
* a shorter version of this article was published in UMELEC 3 /2006
http://www.divus.cz/umelec/en/pages/umelec.php?id=1137&roc=2006&cis=3#clanek
