I've just spent a week in Romania with students from the Royal College of Art's Curating course. Romania may seem a wild card place to visit, given how much is going on in Berlin, Paris and New York, but the idea of these trips is less to re-encounter the familiar than to learn how art functions in contexts less privileged than our own. Nicolai Ceausescu's dictatorship seriously eroded Romanian morale, and the so-called democracy that has replaced it has left many of the corrupt old organisational structures intact. This means that Romania is an invaluable case study of a country struggling with ideological transition. With the opening of the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Ceausescu's Palace next year, it offers a challenge to international curators and artists who will be asked to work with and around with these structures. What follows is a diary of my week in Romania, and the conflicting positions that emerged to us in trying to understand how contemporary art operates in this country.
Monday 2 June
We fly to Iasi, a remote university town in the north-east of Romania, on
a tiny bone-shaker of a plane with propellers. We are here to see Prophetic
Corners, the sixth Periferic Biennial. This event is yet to make an impact
on the international art world, but this year a non-Romanian curator has been
invited to take charge - the Stockholm-based freelancer Anders Kreuger - and
things might begin to change. The cab ride into Iasi is an allegory of things
to come: the taxis career from left to right in order to dodge vast potholes,
horse-drawn carts and mongrel dogs. The town in a mixture of communist apartment
blocks, monasteries and dusty-looking shops from the 1970s - not a slick urban
metropolis. How do you go about inserting a contemporary art biennial into
this kind of context?
Tuesday 3 June
A Biennial, we decide, is any group exhibition that takes place on more than
one site, usually to promote awareness of the town or city in question. The
Periferic Biennial is located in the vast Palace of Culture (a nineteenth
century building housing four museums) and the decrepit Turkish Baths, but
seems firmly addressed to the local populace - introducing them to international
art, rather than promoting the city to outsiders.
With the title Prophetic Corners, Anders Kreuger takes the future as his theme. He eloquently describes to us its pertinence to the Romanian context: rather than envisaging the future as a remote utopia - the communist future was always something to be worked towards, but which never arrived - Kreuger understands the future to be recursive. In other words, what is to come is a continuity with variations, rather than a radical break. The poignancy of this idea becomes apparent over the next few days, particularly when we meet artists and curators in Bucharest.
Although the poetics of Kreuger's premise are conceptually watertight, the Biennial is visually muted rather than spectacular. While this is appropriate to the situation here, not to mention the budget (60,000 euros), it did mean that the art was often overshadowed by the buildings, which are potent in the extreme. The three-storey Palace of Culture is a vast and rambling pile of ethnographic artefacts, Romanian paintings and early engineering achievements, while the Turkish Baths have the melancholic romance of all grand atmospheric ruins. The latter's crumbling walls and plunge pools were often more compelling than the art; Joao Penalva's video and Nina Roos's paintings were swallowed by the space, but Pawel Braila's dark video of night trains passing held its own, as did N55's Shop in the changing rooms.
That evening we met up with students from the art school who had helped to put on the show, and the significance of the Biennial only now became clear to us. Because of the art education system - which has barely changed since under the dictatorship - these headstrong students have little awareness of developments on the international scene, and cannot afford to travel outside the country. Painting continues to be the dominant medium, so any students wanting to use video, installation and performance have to educate themselves. When we see a selection of their videos and animations the following day, this lack of dialogue becomes evident.
Wednesday 4 June
Matei Bejenaru, the director of the Biennial, gives us a talk on the history
of Romanian art since fall of communism. He is a charismatic and energetic
figure, and tells us about the first wave of Romanian art after 1989 - the
drawings of Dan Perjovschi, and the ironic installations of subREAL - and
the less politicised, more subjective work of the subsequent generation. Bejenaru
is also a practising artist, whose work is broadly describable as socially-engaged
activism, but he seems curiously reluctant to position his work within a broader
art historical and theoretical context. This aside, Bejenaru is clearly a
great organiser, and evidently the main dynamo behind the Biennial.
We fly back to the capital and catch an opening at Galeria Noua in the centre of town.
Thursday 5 June
Irina Cios is the stout and efficient director of the attic-like International
Centre for Contemporary Art (ICCA), the former Soros Center. George Soros
withdrew funding last year, plunging the ICCA from the luxury of a regular
budget and political independence into a 'sunset' programme whereby funding
must be raised for each project. Irina explains to us the frustrations of
trying to work in Romania: the Ministry of Culture pours nearly all of its
funds into the new museum at Ceausescu's Palace, and what remains goes into
making CD Roms about folk art in Transylvania.
In the afternoon we visit the studio of artist Lia Perjovschi, who provides us with a radically different perspective. Lia began making performances in the 1980s, but it was not until the country opened up to the West in 1990 that she learnt that performance art had a long history. Her anger and frustration at this denied history prompted her to research with a vengeance. She began to create an archive of information - about art terminology, art institutions, installations and performances - and to disseminate it in the form of a small newspaper, Zoom. Gradually this newspaper has become her artwork - but its educational and political impetus remains as urgent as ever.
Lia is violently opposed to the new museum of contemporary art in Ceausescu's Palace, because the building also houses the Parliament, and is therefore too loaded and compromising a site in which to present art. Moreover, it's costing $12 million to convert the Palace's 1980s baroque plasterwork into a 'white cube'; it would be cheaper to build something new from scratch. Because they disagree so strongly with this space, Lia and Dan refer to themselves as 'Dizzydents': they are dissident, but they no longer have a clear enemy (as was possible under communism). For me this epithet is telling: this lack of a clear target is what we all confront today in the west; the art world is bound up with corporate sponsorship and government funding, hierarchies, favouritism and networks. There is no clear 'good' or 'bad', but a multitude of positions and compromises that must be continually renegotiated and kept open to discussion. Positioning oneself as an outsider might only be divisive and jeopardise progress.
Lia takes us to see the best and worst of the many Union of Artists galleries in Bucharest. She is a member of the Union - it is the only way to have a studio - but it seems crazy that she is part of an organisation whose membership largely comprises kitsch still life watercolourists. The so-called 'best' Union space in Bucharest, Galeria de Arta Simeza, is a tragically grubby two-room offering, and there is a waiting list of 2-3 years to have a one week show in these awful premises. The 'worst' space is nearby: the Galeria de Orizont is larger and lighter to my eyes, but entered through a shop selling art trinkets - nasty vases and terrible paintings (visa accepted!).
Friday 6 June
Today we visit the Ministry of Culture's two venues: Artexpo and Kalinderu
Media Lab. We head to Artexpo first and meet the assistant curator Mihnea
Mircan, a bright young twenty-something guy with great English and a wry perspective
on the whole situation. We are then granted an interview with the director,
Mihai Oroveanu (whom Lia had told us about the previous day). We ascend to
his office, past a personal collection of vintage photographs of old Bucharest.
Mihai is a hefty figure: a rugby player, hammer-thrower and skydiver, he also
collects cannons (artillery, not artistic). Under the Ceasescu regime he was
a photographer, but since 1990 has rocketed to a powerful position as a result
of his friendships with both artists and politicians.
Dressed in a Beuysian flak jacket and smoking throughout our interview, Mihai Oroveanu does not appear to be a man whose 16,000 square metre new museum is about to open next year. He is vague on acquisition policy, on the use of the floor-space, on the type of displays planned (touring shows or permanent collection? themed or chronological hangs? 'anything's possible') and on entrance charges ('we haven't thought about that yet'). The acquisitions policy doesn't bode well, as it's monitored by our old friends the Ministry of Culture and the Union of Artists.
We are further taken aback when we shown the Artexpo space, which is not a contemporary art gallery but an exhibition hall whose walls have not been renovated since the dictatorship - they are still covered in brown, pock-marked hessian. The end rooms are decorated with a handful of Ceausescu portraits (they have over 2400 in their collection). These ridiculously megalomaniac Socialist Realist portraits are hilarious and nauseating, but far more interesting than the largely abstract paintings coming up for exhibition. These are casually stacked up in tens, and Mihai rifles through them like posters in a shop, without any concern for white gloves.
And so to Ceausescu's Palace. The building is vast- the second largest in the world - and sits on top of a blistering, baking hill with no shade. It has so many storeys and colonnades that your eyes can't take it in as a whole. The front houses the Parliament, and around the back - in the east wing - is the new gallery. With an October deadline, we expected them to be finalising works - but the place was still a construction site. We were warned that gaining entrance would be tough because of security, but none of us had to sign in or don a hard hat. Instead we slithered over wet concrete and up scaffolding, gasping at the size of the open-plan floor space on three levels, wondering what art could hold its own in such surroundings.
Over lunch we ruminate on the extremity of what we've seen. We conclude that although Mihai Ororoveanu seems to have little vision for the museum, he is the only person who could conceivably oversee the Palace project. This is because he is a bureaucrat, prepared to play with the government (and go hunting with the Prime Minister) in order to keep securing funds. We also suspect that the director's vagueness about the space might be partly intentional, in order not to jeopardise its progress.
We move on to Kalinderu Media Lab, the other half of Artexpo. After the Union galleries, this looks reassuringly like a 'contemporary art' in the west: video and photography by young Romanian artists installed in a beautiful nineteenth century building. But on a closer look, the installation would give western artists and curators a hernia: the photographs are warped, videos are projected onto walls covered in peeling sellotape, and are often near invisible since the space can't afford a blackout curtain.
The day's events leave me feeling battered over the head, less Dizzydent than just plain dizzy. One can sympathise with the Perjovschi 'Dizzydents', since by western standards the situation is fucked up in the extreme: the Ministry of Culture has a stranglehold on funding, and is pouring it into a preposterously oversized museum whose director has no clear vision. On the other hand, the situation is so bad that in order to get any international dialogue off the ground, a major space is essential. Refusing to collaborate with the Palace in the short-term may do more harm than good. Ultimately, the Perjovschi's and the Palace museum team have the same dream - a fully functioning, professional white cube gallery in Bucharest - but want to realise this in different ways. Ultimately the change must come from education and information, which is why Lia's archive project and the Periferic Biennial are so important. Until the art academy education system changes, the next generation of Romanians will continue to only slowly understand that the ability to shape the future lies in their own hands and ingenuity.
Postscript
After Bucharest I travelled to the Venice Biennale, where I found the Romanian pavilion presenting new media work by Calin Man. This seemed to be a puzzling choice - not because it gave the impression that Romania is an affluent country, but because it seemed to say nothing about the cultural situation there - although perhaps this was the point. Man's unmemorable contribution was digital art that could have come from anywhere, and the display was a wasted opportunity. If the Romanian government could only accept that the nation's most interesting art comes from more inventive minds working with less extravagant media, it will realise that it is sitting on a cultural goldmine.
Claire Bishop
Deputy Head of Department - MA in Curating Contemporary Art
Royal College of Art, London
