Nuno Faria1
Text from the catalogue Perjovschi, Culturgest 2007 Porto
1. (the context)
Simple, direct, in-your-face, with no trace of erudition or (self)quotation, the drawings of Dan Perjovschi (born in 1961, in Sibiu, Romania)
incorporate a kind of metadiscourse. He tells us that, when it comes to the crunch, what he is saying can be said by anyone in the same or a similar way. His drawing is not complex in itself. It does not elaborate on difficulty or virtuosity (not creating a distancing effect), but it does address complex situations. Tacitly but not only, of course. It is a discourse and not quotation.
In other words, it does not abstract itself from day-to-day reality, from everyday life, the public domain. First assertion – to Perjovschi, the viewers’ responsibility is the central concern of his discursive strategy, making them an active, opinion-producing entity, not enclosing them in the sometimes so comfortable sphere of judgement. Second assertion – Perjovschi’s drawing works at the level of reading and reception, saving on the superfluous to communicate effectively.
We understand that it is here that the issue of context is decisive in Perjovschi’s work. It is not by chance that these artistic interventions occur on the walls of institutional exhibition areas, encoded as such, in which a certain way of acting, looking, thinking and being is activated, with an ambiguous status oscillating between public and private2.
At Culturgest Porto, he emphasises this ambiguity of the status and nature of the institutional space. Taking advantage of the series of large windows looking out from the building (in perfect contradiction to an impressive façade requiring distance), with unusual simplicity and skill, the artist brings the street into the building, juggling trans-generational and trans-geographical concepts such as public and communal space, individual and collective memory, the materialisation of the idea of control and subjugation of the individual by the political powers, by the state.
2. (the place and exhibition)
Culturgest Porto is located in Oporto at the head-office building of Caixa Geral de Depósitos, the state-owned bank. Its architecture conveys an unambiguous impression of power and centralism, reminiscent of the repressive, paternalistic Estado Novo. The building’s orthogonal structure is divided into three high-ceilinged storeys. The upper floor houses the directors’ offices and is profusely decorated with floral motifs and topped by a dome letting in overhead light. The ground floor lined with columns, once the public part of the bank, is now an exhibition area, where Perjovschi presents his work. The basement contains a series of vaults in an impressive panoptic layout.
It is therefore not surprising that one of the specificities of Perjovschi’s exhibition is its irony on the subject of surveillance, which is an issue with which he is very familiar3. Indeed, his work at Culturgest contains several references to the building’s original use, reminding us, sotto voce at each step, of the history and nature of the place. These apparently epiphenomenal references, which have only a residual presence in the building, act as tricks of language, using metadiscourse to anchor us to the veiled symbolism of the space.
We can say that the drawings in the exhibition can be divided into four categories – the local socio-political setting and the idiosyncrasies of Oporto and the Portuguese in general4; the specificities of the exhibition’s physical context, the building and its physical and symbolic characteristics and the history that it holds; the international political context, i.e. the state of the world; and, last but not least, the core of the artist’s reflection, his biography and his background (indelibly marked by the Ceausescu regime), in which he dwells on the posttraumatic condition of Central and Eastern Europe, marked by significant changes in identity5, and comments on the condition or status and position of the artist in an artistic context6. However, the main particularity of this exhibition, what gives it unity, is the use of black to cover the area’s usually white walls, something that the artist rarely does. When we first see this black screen, which is first and foremost a strategy to neutralise the abundant decoration, we think of the cinema and the way in which this discipline has codified and redefined the idea of the body and collective memory, of common experience and perceptive childhood.
The idea of projection that experience of the cinema incorporates and induces in us is made more complex by Perjovschi, who also takes us back to the school slate. Curiously, the artist works at two levels of perception, as we are physically and mentally projected onto the walls. We will come back to these themes later.
3. (the drawings)
Dan Perjovschi has reduced to basics his work process and the material he uses in his projects. From place to place, country to country, continent to continent, he only takes sketchbooks and marker pens. He draws from direct observation, making copious notes on what he sees, and is inspired by the news in the international media. His method is extremely simple and direct and is based on the principle of purge and economy. Drawing is the artist’s only tool. However, we are not talking of drawing in the conventional sense of the term. Perjovschi draws directly on the wall, ceiling or floor of exhibition spaces and needs no paper, supposedly the minimum common denominator when we are talking of this ancestral practice. Less is more – less baggage, less material, fewer objects, less weight, more acuity, more critical sense, more cleanliness, more clear-sightedness, more legibility.
In short, going back to the decisive nomadic dimension in Perjovschi’s work, when the time comes to go, he is prepared to take nothing in his case and to arrive with empty pockets.
Very close to graffiti or cartoons in appearance, Perjovschi’s drawings play in a register of immediate recognition, direct reading, not very far, in terms of status, from the flow of images that we see and assimilate in our everyday lives. To Perjovschi, drawing is a kind of continuous writing with no formal or stylistic oscillations, no hierarchy or semantic inflexions of lines. The rigour of his lines is reflected in their clarity, as they are working for an idea, i.e. Perjovschi draws to communicate, to challenge, to interrogate, to assert.
His work process does not begin or end with the exhibition itself. It begins upstream, long before the moment when he draws on the wall – the artist acts as an anthropologist who observes, notes down and organises a discourse – and continues downstream, carried by each person who visits the exhibition, potentially setting up a dialogue and several discourses.
We can say, therefore, that for Perjovschi, drawing is no different from talking, saying or writing. Drawing is not an inner projection, the translation of something that we find cryptic or obscure. The artist saves on all this. He does not care about the drawing as a metaphor. He cares about reaching people and communicating directly and unequivocally with them. Indeed, in his work, Perjovschi often adopts surfaces used by the media, such as newsprint, for example7.
Perjovschi feels that, rather than being a means of cultivating taste, art is a form of knowledge and accountability, a commitment, an exchange, a testimony. Thinking in terms of inner coherence, the artist’s concern for reaching as wide an audience as possible through these publications is echoed in a constant concern for giving public presentations (lectures, talks, etc.), confirming the committed, hands-on nature of his work. We can therefore understand the importance, even in terms of Perjovschi’s discourse, of the performative quality of his drawings8, a decisive stage in his work process.
4. (control)
Irony, humour, sarcasm and irreverence go hand in hand with a clear frailty, which comes, on one hand, from the ephemeral nature of the work and, on the other hand, from a style that never ceases to look rather like a child’s drawings9.
Control in all its forms is a central theme in Perjovschi’s discourse. The question is not in knowing how strategic the choice of a cartoon drawing is, the use of everyday journalistic language, widely codified as a discourse of political commentary10; the question lies in knowing the degree of discursive exigency in a project of this nature. Perjovschi, and this is one of the keys to understanding his work, is extremely demanding of his audience, not only asking for their full attention, maximum vigilance over the reality portrayed and the way it is portrayed, but also allowing them to choose their position and take an active approach to the subject matter. He grew up in a culture of control and limited freedom of opinion, and control has become one of the main focuses of his work, lending it an almost pedagogical facet.
The way in which Perjovschi draws is clearly the result of unlearning and deconditioning11. We must, however, note that this procedure, which is both a strategy and a form of language, walks hand in hand with a refinement, a honing of the critical, analytical and performative capacity of his lines. This is obvious at several levels in his exhibitions: in the proficiency of inscription and diversity of media used – glaze, transparency, incision, chalk, the way he reveals the nature of the space by introducing site-specific devices, the way he controls time (memory) and space (context-specific) and the skill with which he deals with the question of scale (from sketchbook to wall).
Perjovschi’s quote in the title shows the kind of language he uses. Seeing something as if in a drawing is different from drawing something that we see, especially because the artist is already operating in the field of image when he addresses the world, when he filters the things that go on around him. In order to understand the range of this expression, we need to look carefully at the sketchbooks that the artist produces in each project. They provide us with a way of approaching each context that is rooted in attention and curiosity, a kind of look that is both candid and infallibly perspicacious, a great perceptive opening that is the same as saying that everything can be a subject, and the honesty of a look, in order to see for the first time or without prejudice.
However, speaking in terms of a record, the same attentive, systematic examination will, surprisingly, see how everything becomes a theme, from the tiniest to the most obvious of objects/themes, from the most ephemeral of details to the most constant characteristics of the place, from the most ineffable of ideas to the most hidden feeling, all this captured by the artist’s strokes, as if he had become a drawing machine with an unusual ability to translate what is happening around him, not only what he sees but also that in which he plays a part (conversations, ideas, convictions), in a mixture of reactions, actions and emotions that is naturally filtered by a body with a history.
5. (the memory)
Having reached this point, it is worthwhile to relate his work on memory to his archive method, the reuse and recombination of images, which we could in many ways compare to the language of jazz, in which intuition and improvisation and the principles of repetition and variation are structural elements of composition and interpretation (the artist often says that his work method “has moments of intense thought and others of pure jazz”12), or the Atlas Mnemosyne created and developed by Aby Warburg, in which the German art historian combines images from different sources and different times using a method of his own creation called “iconology of the interval”13. Warburg’s Atlas, which consisted of panels covered with black fabric where images of works of art from different ages, magazine cuttings from the time or images of primitive peoples were placed side by side in different combinations and re-combinations, shows different aspects of cinema, in which the revolutionary idea of editing and cutting is equally important.
As we have said, it is impossible not to think of the cinema as a device and as a language when we see Perjovschi’s installation at Culturgest Porto. Firstly, of course, because of the evocative power of the black walls from which his chalk lines clearly emerge. Secondly, because of the actual spatial definition (configuration) with a suggestion of a panorama that includes the viewer (body and sight). Thirdly, because of the particular conception of montage that Perjovschi has developed in his work, combining and sometimes superimposing several layers of time and several subjects that stem from and expand his archive of drawings and thus take part in the construction of his own memory14.
If we look at Perjovschi’s work in general and this one in particular, we might think of Jean-Louis Schefer’s thoughts on what he called “second montage”, i.e. that done by the viewer, “an infinite montage that does not cease to integrate and move very different elements to which it gives variable meanings. The surviving images are an exact relief of memories designating points of contact with the life of their recipient.”15
Like a kind of open camera obscura, this exhibition also reminds us of the enclosed space of a cave, where the origins of art lie (in the end, Perjovschi reencounters, remakes, re-signifies and reinvests this original kind of sketching, of primordial questioning, which is this drawing on walls). The idea of the black walls is not only to highlight the physical plane of the exhibition – a curious disjunction of the plane of representation, the architecture and the plan of action and thought, the drawings. Strictly speaking, the black walls combined with the white chalk also remind us of school slates and childhood, which is a time not only of revelation and discovery, but also of the beginning of standardisation, the control of the individual by the state, of which school is one of the first instances.
One of the most disturbing, complex aspects of this exhibition is certainly the circular form in which time, and more specifically memory, is stratified and presented (here, once again, as a discursive artifice). As viewers, we are confronted with an exhibition in which the language of the drawings sends us back to a certain childish expression, with themes going back to aspects and episodes of our contemporary lives, which are presented to us in a form (chalk on black) that goes back to the time we spent in the classroom, our childhood.
The drawings are not just transferred from one sketchbook to another or from one place to another. They go from one head to another, from one body to another and from one life to another, disseminating relentlessly. The nomadism inherent in Perjovschi’s artistic and existential project is a refusal of the object, a refusal of reification, an ethical and ideological refusal of art as a value of exchange or consumerism.
Notes:
1 Expression used by Perjovschi in his public talk at Culturgest Porto the day after the opening.
2 Perjovschi’s extreme reluctance to intervene in public spaces is crystal clear. He rarely does so and then as ephemerally as possible, using chalk, like he did in Essen in 2003.
3 It is important to remember the socio-political setting in which Perjovschi was born and grew up, which deeply marked his life and his work, many years confined within his country’s borders, muzzled by the iron control of Ceausescu’s communist regime. It is interesting to read Roxana Marcoci’s interview with Perjovschi on the occasion of the opening of his exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (available online). The artist refers clearly and in detail to his relationship with censorship and his choice of returning to biting, critical drawings close to the caricatures that delighted his classmates at school. In the two public talks that he gave in Oporto, Perjovschi joked about the fact that, out of habit and strategy, he had become an obedient artist, but was gradually claiming space and would possibly actually take it.
4 When Perjovschi returned to Oporto to prepare his exhibition at Culturgest, everyone was talking about the legalisation of abortion in a still conservative country that insists on remaining out of step with other European countries, especially in matters interfering with its strong Catholic morality. For a mordant, hands-on artist like Perjovschi, the issue was not only particularly sensitive but also very tempting. The controversy on abortion in Portuguese society occupies a prominent place in the exhibition, though he also addresses other issues attracting less media attention in a heavy mixture between what is tangible (what we can see) and intangible (what we experience). If we leaf through the sketchbooks that Perjovschi drew while he was in Oporto for his project, we realise that he is receptive, a bit like a child, refusing to comment on a reality that is too complex to be understood at one glance. We cannot remain indifferent to his attentiveness, spirit of criticism, fine humour, honesty, clarity and attention to finer points (even the tiniest detail is recorded, the simplest inflection captured).
5 On this subject and questions related to the concept of self-colonisation and, grosso modo, the political dimension and modus operandi of Perjovschi’s work, it is essential to refer to one of the main exegetes of the artist’s work, Marius Babias. Cf. “No! A conversation between Marius Babias and Dan Perjovschi”, in The Vincent Van Gogh Biennal Award for Contemporary Art in Europe 2006, exhibition catalogue, Amsterdam: Stedelijk Museum, 2006, pp. 42-55; and “Self-Colonisation: Dan Perjovschi and his critique of the post-communist restructuring of identity”, in Naked Drawings, exhibition catalogue, Cologne: Ludwig Museum, 2005, pp. 19-21.
6 In addition to in loco observation the sources that the artist uses are mainly the media (television, internet, newspapers and magazines).
7 As a complement to a site-specific exhibition or as just the exhibition itself, Perjovschi usually produces small, newspaper-format publications specifically designed for the projects in which he is invited to present new material.
8 We see that, after a series of performances in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Perjovschi continued to develop a performative practice, by other means. On his performances and the way this discipline developed in the Romanian art world, from the 1960s onward, cf. Ileana Pintilie, Actionism in Romania during the Communist Era, Cluj: Idea, 2002, and “Problems in transit: performance in Romania”, in artmargins (www.artmargins.com).
9 On the subject of childhood, which I feel is omnipresent in the artist’s work (although only a meticulous, informed psychoanalytical reading might confirm this), it is necessary to regard it from the point of view not only of recording and expressing it but also of predisposition and approach.
10 We should relate the decision and/or need to develop this language grosso modo from the early 1990s to the end of the Ceausescu regime and Perjovschi’s critical activity as publisher and political cartoonist of the Romanian magazine 22.
11 Cf. interview with Ileana Pintilie, “Drawing for freedom”, in artmargins (www.artmargins.com), in which the artist refers to getting rid of a series of bad habits acquired at the art academy under the communist regime. He said, “Although I had done a little before 1989, my art transformed itself almost radically from poetic to political because of the socio-political transformations in Romania (revolution, democracy, the passage from communism to capitalism); the relationship with the press (I have worked for a political magazine since 1991); access to the international art scene (after 1990 I had the right to travel and take part in biennials, or exhibitions, visit museums). This is how a landscape artist metamorphosed into an artist with a political agenda.”
12 An expression used by Perjovschi on several occasions and mentioned again in the talk he gave at the Oporto Faculty of Fine Arts a few days before the Culturgest exhibition.
13 On the subject of memory and the idea of archives, we must mention the work of Lia and Dan Perjovschi to awaken a critical awareness in the Romanian art world. Lia Perjovschi, Dan’s wife, also an artist, has set up the CAA (Center for Art Analysis), an archive of all kinds of information on international contemporary art (catalogues, books, slides, articles, photocopies, etc) gathered on the couple’s trips since the fall of the regime. This archive is located at their studio and is a material part of a project that includes invitations to agents in the art world to give public presentations whenever in Bucharest. In recent years, one subject has become the focus of this reflection about memory: the location and opening of the recently created National Museum of Contemporary Art in the former Ceausescu Palace, the headquarters and ultimate symbol of the megalomaniac dictatorship. On the subject, cf. the long essay by Kristine Stiles, “Remembrance, Resistance, Reconstruction, The Social Value of Lia and Dan Perjovschi’s Art”, in Idea Magazine, Cluj, Romania, no. 19, March 2005, s. p., republished in Marius Babias (ed.), European Influenza, Bucharest: Romanian Ministry of Culture, 2005, pp. 574-612 (book published for the Daniel Knorr exhibition at the Romania Pavilion, at the 51st Venice Biennale).
14 It was in 2003, in Essen, that Perjovschi’s art freed itself from the grid system that structured it and that made it more schematic, more fixed. This has introduced a profound change in Perjovschi’s work, enabling him to go beyond a narrative dimension more bound to cartoons or caricatures and projecting his drawings to a spatial dimension, binding them to the viewer’s physical space. Since then, the artist has been revolving his work around the idea of migration of motifs from one work to another, increasing possible iconographic and narrative combinations by diversifying his forms of expression – combining humour, irony and gravity, among others.
15 Jean-Louis Schefer, Images mobiles, récits, visages, flocons, Paris: P.O.L. Éditions, 1999, [p. V].