By Kristine Stiles

Remembrance, resistance, reconstruction, the social value of Lia & Dan Perjovschi's art(2005)1

Remember Timisoara, proud city of the Romanian revolution?

A visit in 2002 suggested that the spirit of a once jubilant middle class, intellectuals, students, and workers has been crushed; their collective and individual hopes for a better future, for which many sacrificed their lives, betrayed.

Meanwhile a website for the city announces: “At present, Timisoara, like all of Romania, is implementing the principles of market economy.”2 Who mourns?
When the Romanian resistance literally cut out the socialist emblem from the tricolor flag and renamed the country to Romania from the Romanian Socialist Republic in 1989-1990, everything promised to change. Today, however, Romanians remain tied to the past, in part because national rites of remembrance and mourning have not taken place. Moreover, although there have been macroeconomic gains, these have neither addressed nor assuaged the poverty of Romania's brilliant and gifted artists and intellectuals. Corruption and bureaucracy continue to hinder foreign investment, while the black market prosperity of the apparachik class escalates. The slow improvement of the agrarian economy (4% in 2003) remains linked to Ceausescu’s destruction of villages and resettlement of farmer-peasants in the multi-storied, neo-Stalinist bloc houses that ring the periphery of Bucharest, with their concrete floors and walls, bare light bulbs and unreliable plumbing. One of the starkest reminders of Ceausescu's legacy persists in the mountains of debris and trash that accumulate in the large vacant lots where once elegant old neighborhoods were razed to create space for the dictator's North Korean inspired high-rise buildings. These structures lead, of course, to Palatul Poporului (Palace of the People), the architectural atrocity that is a reminder of the not as-yet-unmasked Securitate. The abandoned spaces haunted by the hungry dogs around Palatul Poporului, complete the story.

Despite this situation, much change did occur. Already in 1995, a new café at Otopeni International Airport accepted American dollars, and then the airport was renamed Henri Coanda International after the renowned Romanian scientist and aeronautical inventor. A McDonalds followed, soon becoming ubiquitous throughout the country. With capitalism came the sex trade, accompanied by pseudo-chic men and women to sell distraction in bars and nightclubs that epitomize kitsch. Meanwhile, Bucharest is becoming one of the most densely populated cities on the planet, with 22,000 people per square mile. Privatization became particularly visible by the end of the 1990s in the cosmetic renovations of dilapidated 18th and 19th century villas and mansions being sold for exorbitant prices. A Dracula theme park planned for Transylvania that would have threatened preservation of nearby Sighisoara Citadel, a UNESCO heritage site, was shifted to a site near Bucharest after the intervention of Prince Charles of England.
Most symbolic, however, is the renaming of Palatul Poporului. After the revolution it became Casa Poporului (House of the People), although it was popularly known as Palatul Nebunului or the Madman's Palace.3 Now Palatul Poporului has become the Palatul Parlamentului (Palace of Parliament). These name changes set off a cunning linguistic chain of metonymies that transformed “Palace” into “House” only to return it to “Palace.” Such adroit shifts in nomenclature effectively alter the identity and perhaps the memory of the connection between Palatul Poporului and the oppressive Socialist Republic of Romania. Meanwhile the retention of the word “palace” in the title of the “Palatul Parlamentului” summons the memory of the once exiled Romanian monarchy, and restores its presence at the center of parliamentary democracy through the metonymic connection to “palace.” Such new titles for old places conveniently fold the unsavory past into a present-future that sublimates past misery and further resists remembrance and mourning. Nietzsche named the failure to remember nihilism, or the substitution of a constant present that disables substantive reflection and reform, providing no point of reference to facilitate healing. No matter. Romania joined the European Union in 2007 and, in its newly appointed role as the Rumsfeldian “New Europe,” became a “training range and military port” for worldwide US military expansion in its “fight against terrorism.”4 In this regard, two further aspects of Palatul Poporului beg mentioning: it is the third largest building in the world after the Pentagon and the Chicago Merchandise Mart, and is now the site of the National Museum of Contemporary Art (MNAC), which has been in existence for two years.5 With such a move, Palatul Poporului combines all the features of the military-industrial-communication-complex with the addition of now also becoming an entertainment center as well.

Artist Dan Perjovschi has resisted the establishment of this first museum of contemporary art in Romania in Palatul Poporului, but his effort has been without success. This essay contemplates Perjovschi’s position, one that I argue must be considered as a continuation of the process of healing from the trauma of living for twenty-seven years behind the Iron Curtain and under the ubiquitous surveillance of the Ceausescu regime. One of the first signs of Perjovschi’s recovery occurred in 1993 when he had tattooed on his body the word “Romania,” externalizing the mark of his oppressor for the world to see and thus breaking the code of secrecy that permeates trauma. This action took place during the performance festival Europe Zone East in Timisoara, curated by art historian Ileana Pintilie, who nine years later again invited Perjovschi to participate in Zona 4, 2002. Perjovschi responded to Pintilie with the promissory letter that stated his contribution would be to remove the tattoo on its tenth anniversary, or when he received funds to undertake the process. In 2003, true to his word, Perjovschi performed the “removal” during René Block's exhibition In the Gorges of the Balkan at the Kunsthalle Fridericianum in Kassel, Germany. In Perjovschi's words:
The Block show scanned the Balkan region and I used this project to get out of the Balkanic umbrella. Kunsthalle Fridericianum paid for the [necessary] 3 sessions and partially for the trip and accommodations while I underwent the treatment. It was obligatory to have at least three weeks in between laser sessions. First one I did at the opening (30 August); second at the mid-term (30 September); and the last session at the finissage [closing party] of the show (November 23). As far as I know, they spent about 1500 euro.6
With the tattoo removed, Perjovschi declared himself “healed” of Romania.

I posit that his statement is premature, and that Perjovschi’s healing process has progressed to a new stage of recovery that reflects the transitions in his life over the last fifteen years since the revolution. For example, Perjovschi no longer works in the insular situation that Romanian artists once practiced their art, confined as they were to the provincialism of a sequestered state. He has also gained both national and international prominence for his drawings and installations, is recognized as a key figure in the Romanian avant-garde and intelligentsia, and was the Romanian representative to the 1999 Venice Biennale. Furthermore, Perjovschi is a respected social commentator, the beloved political satirist “Perjo” for 22 Magazine, and a designer of book jackets for prominent Romanian intellectuals. In 2005, he had a one-person exhibition at the Ludwig Museum in Cologne. These achievements show Perjovschi’s integration into society, a preliminary step for any trauma survivor who must first establish safety, re-empowerment, and reconnection in order to normalize life. That Perjovschi ceased identifying himself as the corporeal victim of a perpetrator nation (by having his tattoo removed) reflects changes in how he perceives the interconnection between the state and his body’s welfare, as well as his sense of being-in-the-world. During the decade that he pondered his relationship to Romania (through the daily reminder of his tattoo), Perjovschi committed himself to his country. He made the critical decision to remain in Romania, unlike many artists and intellectuals who left, and despite the fact that he received similar opportunities to relocate abroad.

Clearly, Perjovschi no longer needs to present himself as a victim of “cultures of trauma,” the phrase I coined in 1993 in “Shaved Heads and Marked Bodies: Representations from Cultures of Trauma.” I used the term to designate states, like Romania, within which massive traumatic experience affected entire populations. From 1991 to the present, while conducting research and working in Romania, I have had many occasions to teach and discuss the relationship amongst trauma, art, and culture with Romanian artists, intellectuals, students, and critics.7 Two themes from my essay have been taken up again and again by Romanian art historians and critics: the psychological condition of cultures of trauma, and the psychological problems Romania has experienced from being an historic geographical space of transition between Europe and Asia.8 In addition, my theorization of Perjovschi's tattoo as a visual sign of trauma had an impact on the artist, who has stated that my essay was a motivating factor in his decision to have the tattoo removed. It seems fitting, therefore, for me to now move the theorization of Perjovschi's recovery forward and place the tattoo’s removal in the context of his renewal of “the basic capacities for trust, autonomy, initiative, competence, identity, and intimacy” that are essential for recovery from trauma. I shall identify this process as inextricably connected to his refusal to participate in, or sanction the site of, the National Museum of Contemporary Art (MNAC).9

Any discussion of Dan Perjovschi’s resistance, however, must also include commentary on his collaborative work with artist Lia Perjovschi, his wife. For it is Lia’s synthetic and conceptual approach to art - her critique of institutions through curatorial and pedagogical means - that provides the aesthetic vocabulary for their collaboration. While Dan adeptly and decisively interacts with the media and with institutions, Lia offers their collaboration a more critical position vis-à-vis political and art world institutions. For as Dan admits: “I was in the system (working in the Ministry of Culture and then exhibiting in official Romanian or East European shows) and the system corrupted me; I am tempted to understand them [those that work within the system] and forgive them.”10 While much critical and art historical attention has been paid over the last decade to the notion of artists as activists and/or “social workers,” the latter term used by Nicolas Bourriaud,11 Lia’s focus on education and criticism as aesthetic tools for social intervention have been in place at least since she was a student at the Bucharest Art Academy, and she has personally discussed this aspect of her work with me since 1992.
Moreover, the notion of artists as active agents in the social arena is neither new nor postmodern but has a long history in modernism, particularly in the Russian avant-garde. This legacy prevailed especially in Soviet bloc countries where artists like the Bulgarian Christo and the Pole Krzysztof Wodiczko grew up with the concept of putting art in the service of nation.12 Lia and Dan Perjovschi were also educated under such a system, a legacy that is vivid in their sense of a need to serve society. In Europe, one of the earliest expressions of social engagement undertaken by artists was Artist Placement Group (APG), founded in 1966 by the British artist John Latham and his wife Barbara Steveni. APG anticipated by several years Joseph Beuys’ notorious social actions, and emerged from Latham’s observation that artists are a socially underused human resource, isolated from the public by the gallery system.13 APG was founded to place artists directly in government, commercial, corporate, and industrial organizations, as well as other kinds of institutional settings where their ideas and practices would have an impact upon institutional thinking over long periods of interaction. The point is that art as social praxis has a venerable tradition to which Lia’s individual and the Perjovschis’s collaborative work belongs. They have forged a collaborative practice as a response to, and reconstruction of, Romanian cultural institutions and practices, and this, I believe, is an act of remembrance and mourning undertaken through resistance. In other words, I posit that the social function of the Perjovschis’s collaboration is one of remembrance for the purpose of mourning, and is conducted in acts of resistance that contribute to the reconstruction of Romanian cultural life.

I shall begin with a discussion of the Perjovschis’s collaboration, and then turn to their conflict regarding the site of MNAC in the Palatul Poporului. In my writing, I shall use different names for Palatul Poporului in order to refer to its chameleon nomenclature, and to emphasize how its identity has been repeatedly accommodated to fit a new context, adding layers of history to its original meaning without ever altering its pernicious impact on the history on the Romanian people. Finally I will make a case for considering the Perjovschis’s battle over the new museum as a struggle for two mutually inclusive goals: the construction of a sound national dialogue on the Romanian past under the brutal dictatorship (remembrance/mourning), and an insistence on the integrity and independence of art from the state; art carried out in a socio-political field that includes critique and education (resistance/reconstruction) for the purpose of healing.

II

Like many artists living in Ceausescu's Romania who used their homes as gathering places, in 1985 the Perjovschis began to organize meetings with artists in their apartment in Oradea. They continued this practice in their Bucharest studio after 1990, a site that in 1996 they began to consider a “public space” for cultural action and education. At that time, they launched “Open Studio” for three days, inviting the general public into their private space for discussions that lasted from ten in the morning until midnight each day. They staged this event in dialogue with the extraordinary Bucharest exhibition Experiment: Romanian Experimental Art from 1950 until Today, a survey of the performance, photography, video, and installation of the post-1945 Romanian avant-garde.14 In their discussions, the Perjovschis challenged some of the basic premises of this show (in which their art was included). In particular, they questioned why the curators commissioned new artworks for an historical exhibition, and argued that such an exhibition first needs to establish its authority has an historical document of what had been achieved in the past before showing new art. Such a strategy was particularly important because Romanian experimental art had been suppressed and was unknown to the public and artists alike. The Perjovschis further insisted that by exhibiting new works next to historical works, curators reshape a history that was yet to be established. This critique launched the Perjovschis’s more systematic and comprehensive examination of art and institutional practices in Romania.

From 1996 to the present, they have increasingly used their studio as a site for discussions amongst Romanian artists, journalists, art critics and historians, writers, and filmmakers on a wide range of topics. They also invite scholars and artists from the US, Sweden, England, Germany, and elsewhere to give talks (one, for example, was given by Claire Bishop, Royal College of Art in London), and workshops (as the one offered by Werner Meyer, Director of the Kunsthalle in Goppingen, Germany). They have borne the cost for most of these presentations themselves.15 In short, the Perjovschis maintained a spontaneous and open studio for Romanian and foreign artists and scholars, creating a forum for constructive dialogue.

In 1997, they came to the United States for a semester to teach art at Duke University. During their six months in Durham, North Carolina, Lia began to assemble what would become CAA, the “Centre for Art Analysis,” an archive she initially entitled “Contemporary Art Archive.”16 Collecting a mass of information and images, she conceptualized the archive as an “institution” with an obligation to share its knowledge with the public.17 At this time both artists realized that they needed to begin, “to teach Romanian students, not Americans!!!!”18 They set about doing just that upon their return to Romania, as I shall presently discuss, and from 1997 to the present CAA has continued to grow under Lia's direction. Drawing on the CAA archive that she established, the Perjovschis have presented public programs and lectures throughout Romania (including Brasov, Oradea, Braila, and Cluj) and Europe (including Glasgow, Frankfurt, Amsterdam, Vienna, among other cities).

With each presentation, they distribute and display catalogues and books on the topic of each lecture. They also write and assemble a newspaper publication, which they distribute free, but at their own personal cost for each show. They began such publication practices in 1988, and continue today.
Another area where CAA lends its authority and knowledge has been through consultation with and the support of numerous young Romanian artists. The Perjovschis have backed the independent art scene in Romania, and lobbied for artist-run spaces like H.Arta (Timisoara), Protokoll (Cluj), and Vector (Iasi). They provided contacts, funding opportunities, and media-coverage for such spaces. For the 2002 exhibition “Position Romania” that they mounted in Vienna, they used 40% of the budget allocated by their Vienna host to bring some twelve young Romanian artists to Vienna, many for the first time. Their mentorship enabled Maria Crista, Anca Gyemant, and Rodica Tache, the three artists who founded H.Arta, to secure a two-month artist residency fellowship in Vienna.

In addition, Raluca Voinea, who edits the online art journal www.e-cart.ro, went to study at the Royal College of Art in London, thanks in no small measure to introductions to British critics made by Lia.19 In addition, Attila Tordai, Protokoll’s artist manager, received a Rave Fellowship for six months study in Germany, and the Perjovschis acted as advisers. In such ways, the workshop sessions, debates, lectures, and meetings coached younger artists and helped introduce them to principles of organization.
CAA also launched a public art and education program by mounting numerous exhibitions. “Dia(pozitiv),” 1998, was principally organized by Lia at Atelier 35 in Bucharest, to expose the public to installation art. For this show, she made some one hundred slides of various modes of installations. Together the Perjovschis provided a gallery lecture program with speakers from various fields for the show. In 2000, again at Atelier 35, the Perjovschis organized an installation and public dialogue on the subject of “kitsch” with Razvan Exarhu, a well-known FM radio “star” announcer.

They designed the exhibition space as a fictive apartment that included objects appropriate to the kitchen, living room, bedroom, and so forth placed on the floor as in a flea market. They hung nothing on the walls. During the exhibition’s two week run, unsolicited by the Perjovschis, the public brought objects to add, resulting in an exhibition that had become a kind of joint installation-happening. As the Perjovschis recall, “It was not a great project, but a popular one!” The following year, they installed “Vid (Visual ID),” at Atelier 35, to examine western visual and conceptual strategies for exhibition design. They subsequently curated “Position Romanian,” in 2002, at Q21 Pavilion in Vienna’s Museum Quarter.

“Position Romanian” introduced the Viennese public to the independent art scene in Romania, including new alternative artist-run spaces, magazines, and festivals. Building upon this exhibition, the Perjovschis presented “Enlargement of The Mind,” 2003, at the European Cultural Foundation in Amsterdam, a three-day event of artists from countries that the Perjovschis described as “leftover from the European process of accession (Romania, Bulgaria, Moldova, Albania, Turkey).”20
The Perjovschis have been especially successful in utilizing mass media to educate Romanians about art. In addition to interviews and events broadcast from their studio on national television, they also became part of a “think tank team” with Ruxandra Garofeanu, an art historian and TV producer with whom they had previously collaborated and with whom Lia, in particular, had had numerous discussions about the idea for a television series. This team created a live television program entitled “Everything on Sight” - meaning in “full view” or “transparent” - which was directed by Aurel Badea. The three-hour show ran each Saturday for ten weeks on national television from October to December 1999, from ten in the morning until one in the afternoon. With historian Adrian Cioroianu, the Perjovschis served as moderators, as well as worked with the state television editors. The visual art section of the broadcasts, however, came from Lia’s CAA archive. Each of the ten shows had a theme: Globalization, Manipulation, Center and Periphery, Love, Body, and so forth. There were six foci for all: literature, theatre, dance, music, visual art, film and politics. The show’s unconventional content and new forms of visual presentation (that demonstrated how experimental art intersected with politics and society) made it particularly popular.

But “Everything on Sight” was eventually cancelled when the liberal President of Romania, Emil Constantinescu, unexpectedly dropped out of the 1999 election, leaving the field to a choice between several candidates, including the anti-Semitic extremist Vadim Tudor, with the result that the Romanians chose Ion Iliescu, and a new slate of programming for state television began in 2000 with the new administration.21
Dan has described this television adventure “as a splendid failure,” because he felt that the team lacked the time to cover their complex subjects adequately. But, more importantly, the very idea of a team failed because of sharp differences in their individual levels of cultural knowledge. Moreover, while the entire program constituted a performance before the nation for the Perjovschis, for other members of the group it was simply a job. These discrepancies resulted in battles that “made everybody nervous, which was good,” Dan remembered.22 It is interesting to note that commercial television programmers quickly adopted, as cutting edge innovations, some of the technical failures on the show, such as off-camera conversation and the simultaneous presentation of black and white and color footage. Such novelties have animated visuals on Romanian television ever since; and the editor for the literature section of the show, Daniela Zeca-Buzura, was later appointed director of the Romanian Cultural Channel, State Television 3.

These are just a few of the activities on which the Perjovschis, under the umbrella of CAA, have collaborated. I want to point out that their works cumulatively made three fundamental contributions to Romanian culture over the past decade: a) support for the independent art scene of young artists' alternative spaces, magazines, and visibility abroad; b) partnership with various cultural institutions and interaction with the media;23 c) emphasis on the expansion of art centers and cultural dialogue with artists throughout the country with the cumulative impact of decentralizing art in Bucharest. While other artists and curators have organized important international festivals that brought many artists from abroad to Romania - I am thinking particularly of the international festivals organized by Imre Baasz, Gusztav Uto, Matei Bejenaru, and Ileana Pintilie, to name a few, the Perjovschis have aimed their work at the broad Romanian public, as well as other artists and curators.24

The content and creative imagination presented in these kinds of events, exhibitions, and media interaction has had an affect in Romanian culture, infiltrating and operating on it in ways that are not too difficult to trace. In some cases, the Perjovschis’s concepts and aesthetic structures have been imitated outright as, for example, the founding of a gallery in Bucharest in a city-owned space. This idea came directly out of negotiations with CAA (initially in conjunction with the Swiss Foundation Pro Helvetia) and the Bucharest City Council. Speaking on behalf of CAA, Lia proposed to develop the space as a gallery that would launch “a series of show-debates, which aimed to change the usual relation between gallery-art and object-viewer.”25 But after delays in planning and disagreements with Pro Helvetia, the Perjovschis left for an artists’ residency in Stockholm. When they returned and in spite of the fact that Lia had organized a meeting to discuss creating a common agenda for, and cooperation among, all active artistic entities in Bucharest, the former Soros Center (now with support from Pro Helvetia) took over the gallery with a nearly identical proposal to that of CAA.

This kind of appropriation is fascinating and historically significant for the ways in which it testifies to the affect of the Perjovschis’s art and ideas in saturating and reshaping Romanian cultural practices, whether those who have borrowed and learned from them care to acknowledge the Perjovschis or not. Dan and Lia Perjovschi's collaboration is a time-based, social model that draws on theory and practice for the purpose of public education, the production of knowledge, and cultural renewal. Their collaborative practice filters aesthetic, educational, and informational innovation into society, deepening the public's historical and cultural understanding and creating a model for other Romanians.

Notes:
1 This essay was first printed as a broadside by Idea [Cluj, Romania] 19 (March 2005). It was reprinted in in Marius Babias, ed., European Influenza (Venice: Romanian Pavillon, La Biennale de Venezia, 51. Esposizione Internazionale D'Arte, 2005): 574-612. I would like to thank Octavian Esanu, Laurel Fredrickson, Dan Perjovschi, and Raluca Voinea for their discussions with me on this essay. Finally, I wish to thank Lia and Dan Perjovschi for including me in the rich intellectual and artistic circle of their Open Studios in Bucharest since 1992.
2 See: www.uvt.ro/ri/Survival%20Guide/timisoara. My observations are based on a week in Timisoara in 2002 when I participated in the symposium and performance festival Zone 4 and had the opportunity to talk with a broad segment of the population there.
3 Among many other things, the construction of Palatul Poporlului required so much Romanian marble that tombstones throughout the country had to be made from other materials!
4 Robert Burns, “Military sets up outposts,” The News & Observer [Raleigh, North Carolina] Thursday, September 23, 2004: 3A, an Associated Press article.
5 The MNAC opened in Wing E4 on October 29, 2004.
6 Dan Perjovschi email to the author 26 September 2004.
7 I first lectured on avant-garde art (and especially the history of Happenings, Fluxus, and Performance Art) in Romania in 1992 at the Bucharest Art Academy and the University of Bucharest. I taught a seminar on trauma at the University of Bucharest in 1995, and gave papers at numerous conferences in both Romania and Moldova. Friends in these countries include: Octavian Esanu, Mark Verlan and Pavel Braila, the late Ion Bitzan and Alexandru Antik, Matei Bejanaru, Geta Bratescu, Magda Carneci, Irina Cios, Maria Crista, Liviana Dan, Theodor Graur, Ion and Ruxandra Grigorescu, Adrian Guta, Anca Gyemant, Dan Mihaltianu, Paul Neagu, Anca Oroveanu, Lia and Dan Perjovschi, Ileana Pintilie, Marilena Preda Sanc, Carmen Savu, Doina Simionescu, Mircea Stanescu, Rodica Tache, Alexandra Titu, Raluca Voinea, and Gusztav Uto.
8 Recent examples of how these ideas have filtered into aesthetic and cultural discourse include Ruxandra Balaci's discussion of what she calls “the complexes of Balkan cultures” in an essay that will appear in Tema Celeste [Milan]. See the “Interview with Ruxandra Balaci,” in Observator Cultural 220 (2004): www.mnac.ro/events%20main.htm See also Dusan I. Bjelic, who has discussed Eastern European identity as a transient and always “in-between” site in Bjelic's “The Balkans: Europe's Cesspool,” å8 (2004): www.mnac.ro/events%20main. See also Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans. Cambridge: Oxford University Press, 1997.
9 E. Erikson, Childhood and Society (New York: Norton, 1963) as quoted in Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery: 133.
10 Dan Perjovschi email to the author 11 October 2004.
11 The term is the much celebrated wording of Nicolas Bourriaud, in his “Today's Art Practice,” 21.09.2001: http://www.sanalmuze.org/etkinliklereng/nicolasbourriaod.htm
12 As Andrzej Turowski has pointed out, “Krzysztof Wodiczko finds the roots of his…work in his questioning of the Polish cultural ideology of the 1970s and, in a wider context, in the ethos of the Left, which is itself deeply rooted in the intellectual thought and social and artistic activity of the twentieth-century avant-garde.” See Turowski in Laura Hoptman and Tomas Pospiszyl, eds., Primary Documents: A sourcebook for Eastern and Central European Art since the 1950s (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, distributed by MIT Press, 2002): 161.
13 See John A. Walker, John Latham: The incidental person – his art and ideas. London: Middlesex University Press, 1995.
14 Alexandra Titu, ed., Experiment in arta romaneasca dupa 1960. Bucharest: Soros Center for Contemporary Art, 1997.
15 When the Perjovschis orchestrate meetings that bring young artists and curators to Bucharest from around the country, they often provide accommodation and meals and sometimes even travel. As Dan has noted: “It may not look like very important, but when you think that a round trip Timisoara-Bucharest is a quarter or more of the monthly salary of a young teacher, you think again.”
16 Dan Perjovschi email to the author 26 September 2004. The reason for the 2001 change of the name was, in Dan's words, to “preserve a space for criticism” in a country where criticism of institutional practices may quickly isolate artists like the Perjovschis. They relish their independence, a freedom from coercion that enables them to be free to critique their cultural and political institutions.
17 In 2003, Lia drew on her Duke experience to inform a new installation and pedagogical project entitled “Lia Perjovschi: A Day at Northwestern University.” Of particular interest is how the Duke student-evaluations helped Lia to understand critical practices she had not encountered in Romania, and to augment her own critical practices. See e-cart 4 (February 2004): http://www.e-cart.ro/3/LIA/UK/GRI/LIA_G.HTML In this work, Lia compared the teaching evaluations that professors at Duke receive from their students after teaching a course with teaching practices and experiences at Northwestern University. Duke evaluations ask students to estimate a teachers work as “excellent, good, satisfying, or weak,” to consider the course “content, structure, approach, and educative value,” and to comment on the Professor’s “presentation, organization, authority of knowledge, accessibility, and interactivity with the students.” Other evaluative criteria concern the “level and quality of intellectual stimulation in course requirements,” and the use of such visual aids as photographs and slides, video, CD, DVD, and the Internet.
17 Dan Perjovschi email to the author 26 September 2004.
18 Raluca Voinea email to the author 2 October 2004.
19 Other group shows CAA presented (or are forthcoming), include “The Last East European Show,” 2003, at the Belgrade Museum of Contemporary art, “Balkan Consulate,” 2004 in Budapest at Rotor Graz, and “Cordially Invited,” which will take place in 2005 in Utrecht at BAK (Basis voor Actuele Kunst), a venue for avant-garde art.
20 President Iliescu took control of government after the assassination of Ceausescu on December 25th, 1989, and at that time represented the National Salvation Front. June 20th, 1990, Iliescu was elected President of Romania. Six years later in 1996, Emil Constantinescu defeated Iliescu. Constantinescu, a founding member and vice president of the Civic Alliance, the most comprehensive organization of Romanian civic society, was also the acting chairman of the Romanian Anti-Totalitarian Forum, the first associative structure of the democratic opposition in Romania, which was transformed into a political and electoral alliance - the Democratic Convention of Romania (CDR). In 1992, Constantinescu was elected rector of Bucharest University and became CDR’s candidate for president. He lost the election to Iliescu after a second round. In 1996, the CDR won and Constantinescu was elected president of Romania, only to withdraw from the election.
21 Dan Perjovschi email to the author 11 October 2004.
22 In 2004, for example, CAA was a partner in two international efforts: 1) “Vienna days in Bucharest,” which included music, performance, and public debate at their studio and including Austrian and Romanian artists, curators and journalists, also in partnership with the German-language quarterly Springerin, a journal on contemporary art published in Vienna; 2) “Swedish days in Romania” (with Index Gallery, Stockholm), an event that included sound, performance, public lecture and video presentation, also in their studio.
23 For more about the festivals at at Sfanta Ana Lake, Adrian Guta has reported: “It started early in this decade and has been repeated at Sfanta Ana Lake every summer, thanks to the organizers' perseverance. In 1990 its founder was the artist Baasz Imre, who had also organized the interdisciplinary exhibitions "Medium" in the town of Sfantu Gheorghe, the first of which was in 1981. 'Medium' was resumed a decade later, when it was established as a triennial event with an international statute. After Baasz Imre's death, in 1991 Uto Gusztav successfully took over.” Adrian Guta “Riders of the Storm: Performance Art in Romania between 1986 and 1996,” Experiment: 88. See also, Ileana Pintilie, Actionismul in Romania in timpul comunismului. Cluj: Idea Design & Print, 2000.
24 Dan Perjovschi email to the author 11 October 2004.
25 Artists include: Irina Botea, Christoph Büchel, Jordi Colomer, Nicolae Comanescu, Stefan Cosma, Alexandra Croitoru, Josef Dabernig, Calin Man, Euroartist Bucuresti, Daniel Gontz, Dumitru Gorzo, Teodor Graur, Ion Grigorescu, Karen Kipphoff, Iosif Kiraly, Peter Jacobi, Dan Mihaltianu, Gianni Motti, Vlad Nanca, Mihai Oroveanu/ Constantin Chelba, Marilena Preda-Sanc, Cristi Puiu, subREAL, Mona Vatamanu & Florin Tudor. Texts for the catalogue are by: Ruxandra Balaci, Ami Barak, René Block, Nicholas Bourriaud, Luchezar Boyadjiev, Mariana Celac, Liviana Dan, Razvan Exarhu, Heiner Holtappels, Anders Kreuger, Enrico Lunghi, Mihai Oroveanu, Bartolomeo Pietromarchi, Marco Scotini, Stefan Tiron, Alexandra Titu, Nina Vagic, Raluca Velisar and artists statements.