I saw the exhibition twice: after the opening, when the artist started drawing on the walls of the exhibition space at Kunsthalle and after he finished his work. First it was the performance character of the work that made an impression on me, the next time it was the experience of the space filled with / inhabited by the artist’s drawings.
The walls of the three huge galleries surround the spectator like the pages of a gigantic book whereas the content vectors of the scattered drawings united in a loose composition indicate various directions. They are intellectual drawings of a critical nature inspired with humour and irony, using a single quick stroke (I prefer this designation to the “cartoon quality” as it is often phrased in the Perjovschi bibliographies)1with which we share the space and thus are confronted directly and, so to say, from the inside with the social, political and cultural problems of local and international interest touched upon by the artist.
There is a wide range of conflicts including the latest developments of the Israeli-Lebanon clash (>>), the world-wide expansion of the United States (>>), the spectacular and unspoken problems of EU integration (>>) as well as Budapest with respect to this summer, tourism, the arts, and the spreading of the neo-liberal economy (>>), and the contexts of the exhibitions at Kunsthalle (>>).
The drawings are not intended to arouse passive (or empathic) identification but being the artist’s personal comments which mostly deal with common interests, urge us to take sides, reflect on them, and argue either with ourselves or one another or the artist which is allowed by the open creative process at the beginning of the exhibition. Perjovschi moralizes but does not even spare himself and this peculiar humourous / ironic, self-reflective gesture (>>) helps him not only survive everyday tension but also find the “proper” position in the conflicting situations.
The relationship between artists and institutions has never been free from tension and it still isn’t, although the spreading of the “applied (institution) criticism” of the late years seems to back up the status quo. The trouble must be seated in its “applied nature” since, from this position, it is difficult to authentically criticize the system with which the artist himself / herself is closely linked. 2
However there is no position – or at least no visible one – outside the system. Each case requires an individual analysis; it is worth considering how and for what reasons the mechanism of the artwork developed by the artist functions, what factors make up the artist’s position within the criticized system. The Bucharest based artist has often been invited by various European and overseas art institutions the latest years to make a show similar to that of Kunsthalle, Budapest. His exhibitions in 2006 include the City Gallery of Limerick, the “Member’s Room” of London Tate Modern, the cloakrooms of Moderna Museet in Stockholm, the Kunstverein in Stuttgart, the Portikus in Frankfurt, as well as the staircase of La Caixa in Barcelona, and next year he is invited to have a show at MOMA New York. I would like to point out the antecedents and the broader context of this process briefly.
Dan Perjovschi first projected his visual commentaries into space in 1999, namely on the floor of the Romanian Pavilion at the Venice Biennial. 3 Originally, he wanted to display his small sized note-books in which he made his drawings and recorded his thoughts day by day, responding to the events which took place around him.
These note-books, small enough to be taken out and scribbled in anywhere – an act which sometimes serves as self-therapy – ensured a maximum of freedom for the artist. The idea to transpose the selected drawings of the note-books onto the floor was based on aesthetic and practical considerations: Perjovschi could this way cut free from the Romanian and Eastern European financial and administrative straits. Moreover, the drawings covering the floor and gradually getting blurred behind the spectators’ footsteps resisted the traditional value judgement and the demands of representation of the (show) system.
From this necessity follows the working method of the present projects: the artist works “in situ” and mostly “in progress” accepting the ephemeral nature of his work. After the finisage, the walls are repainted in order to make room for the next exhibition. As with his drawings published in daily and weekly papers, transience is also characteristic to the exhibitions; as the news of today are replaced by the news of tomorrow in the papers so do Perjovschi’s interventions get a meaning within the institutional space. The artist takes sides, comments the events, expresses his opinion but doesn’t want to make his view exclusive and everlasting.
Drawing is first of all the means for the artist to understand the world and respond to the events which take place around him. The emblem-like conciseness of his drawings involves a complex situation and the reaction to it. The note-books are getting filled with drawings continuously, which make up thirty or forty percent of the interventions transposed onto the walls. The rest results from the current boom of events including the place of the show, the local inquiry conducted by the artist, his conversations, sometimes the commentaries of the visitors, as well as the current issues of world politics.
The show at Kunsthalle is also an experiment since it is the first time that Perjovschi’s work (including his examination of the spot) commenced at the opening. He took the risk consciously partly because of an urge for renewal, partly because as an outsider who is familiar with the Budapest art scene he could relate in a relaxed way to the institution which often taxes the local artists’ and curators’ powers with its tense atmosphere. It also follows from the experimental character of the show that Perjovschi’s work grows more complex through a new motif, namely that this time he fits the boom factor – which so far served as a content element of his drawing -interventions and installations – as a structural element in the work in progress.
When discussing Perjovschi’s relationship with the institutions and the socio-political system, we must take into consideration the extension of critical attitude on his entire activity. He has been working with the Bucharest based socio-political weekly magazine “22” as a graphic artist and publicist since the beginning of the 90s, published a great number of critical analyses in Romanian and foreign art journals. Together with his wife Lia, he founded in 1990 the CAA (Contemporary Art Archive, later Contemporary Art Analysis), which is a portable museum documenting contemporary art, an “institution” which aims at supporting independent positions and initiatives within the art scene, as well as mediating between local and international contexts.
Lia and Dan Perjovschi have committed themselves to perform criticism upon the Museum of Contemporary Art in Bucharest, including its construction, its location in the building of the present Parliament – previously Casa Poporului built by Ceausescu at the cost of human lives and garbling history – as well as the mechanisms by which the institute functions. 4 The fact that Perjovschi had the legend “Romania” tattooed on his upper arm at Zone International Performance Festival in Timisoara, in 1993 and had it removed in 2003, during the exhibition „In the Gorges of the Balkan” organized at the Kunsthalle Fridericianum in Kassel is proof that for him, everyday life and art practice are entwined. Having publicly identified himself with the Romania image of the so called “transition period” for 10 years, the artist liberated himself from it in the course of an exhibition which made a survey of the Balkans. 5
It is beyond question that performing criticism is a way of life for Pejovschi. We can distinguish “soft” and “hard” criticism; whereas the drawings, as a genre close to the artist’s personality through which he can most directly express his thoughts, belong to the former category, while the rest of his activities are part of the latter. Apart from mediating an artistic attitude, the drawings give us pleasure and we are delighted at every visual, intellectual bull’s eye hit; to put it with Pejovschi’s words: “first we laugh at it and then think about what we have received”.
The more they merge in the social sphere the more minimalist the visual language of his actions and projects become. To understand the whole thing somewhat symbolically, the wall drawings have another dimension as well. The walls covered with drawings are repainted before the next exhibition but the drawings work their way into the spatial structure of the institution as a critical-experimental layer.
We could go on analyzing Perjovschi’s position within the interaction of art, institutions, and social space but I think that we have reached the point where it is clear, apart from what we think, that the artist does his best as he has already found his proper place and knows how to proceed so as not to lose his way in the labyrinths of the system.
1 See one of the latest interviews with Perjovschi, Kritikus vagyok – klinikai eset, 2006-08-11. An Interview with Graphic Artist Dan Perjovschi, Editor and Illustrator to Weekly Magazine “22”. Krónika online: www.kronika.ro/nd.php?name=Sh&what=4846
2 In our case, not only the artist but the author too, as an employed curator of Kunsthalle and curator of the Romanian Pavilion at the Venice Biennial in 1999. Thus my positive attitude towards the exhibition is easy to understand. However, by discussing the relationship of the artist and the (institutional) system, I put my prepossession / openness to the test.
3 Perjovschi made his first work-in-progress in 1996, at Franklin Furnace in New York (“Anthroprogramming”) which was erased by the spectators themselves. This work, which was concerned with the relationship of censorship and self-censorship, did not include the present commentary drawings. For more information, see Michael Wilson, Graphic Equilizer, Artforum, May 2006, http://www.perjovschi.ro/pages/review2.html
4 L. Lia Perjovschi, Dan Perjovschi: Detective Draft, 2005, http://www.perjovschi.ro/pages/projects.html
5 L. Kristine Stiles, „Remembrance, Resistance, Reconstruction, the Social Value of Lia & Dan Perjovschi’s Art”, http://www.perjovschi.ro/pages/art6.html
Translated by Agnes Ivacs