By Kristine Stiles

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

II

One could easily argue that the Perjovschis’s work helped to set up the conditions for the reception and establishment of a Museum of Contemporary Art in the first place.

But their desire to initiate serious spaces for the exhibition and discussion of contemporary art and the MNAC could not be more different. This is made very clear in the views of Ruxandra Balaci, the artistic director of the MNAC, to which I shall now turn.

Balaci curated the opening exhibition of the MNAC in its new site, Palatul Poporului. The show is entitled Romanian artists (and not only) love the Palace?! To begin, the awkward title betrays a self-conscious, defensive staging of Romanian artists and a transparently coercive insistence that artists should “love the Palace.”26 While exuberant in its declaration, the title also relies implicitly on the affirmation and authority of people other than Romanian artists as signified in the parenthetical “and not only.” In itself, this insistence implies confusion over whether or not Romanian artists do, in fact, “love” the Palace, a query that the title acknowledges with a question mark. In other words, for all its brash confidence and aggression, the title pointedly concedes that there are those who do not “love the Palace,” and that something is amiss with the site after all. Dan Perjovschi reports that,
Since the launching of the show, some artists and an art critic from Cluj, Cosmin Costinas, refused to participate. Of course, IDEA art magazine played an important role, along with Attila Torday of Protokoll.

To my knowledge it is the first group of young artists to do so [reject participation]. These artists include: Ciprian Muresan, Duo van der Mix, Supernova Group and Costinas.27
Not only is the placement of MNAC in Palatul Poporului problematic, but also the curator’s attitudes toward the public are equally so. Referring to her curatorial activities, Balaci explained that she had “very little time to write,” but that when she did it was “almost exclusively [published] in the foreign press [where] the public is prepared for the type of discourse that I maintain.”28 This statement shows that whatever her style of writing, Balaci disdains the Romanian public's ability to understand her “discourse” and feels justified in reserving it for the West. Her ambitions for the museum are clearly focused on a public outside of Romania:
We hope to do our work at international parameters, not local [my emphasis]. MNAC's strategic direction nowadays [is] the creation of an international base for the realization of the project.

Balaci's disregard for her fellow countrymen belongs to a centuries-old struggle of Romanian cultural orientation between the West and East that dates from its relationship with Roman (Italianate) culture, the Ottoman Empire, and its own indigenous Dacian culture (a problem I discussed in “Shaved Heads and Marked Bodies”). Branislav Dimitrijevic has thoughtfully compared Le Corbusier's view of the Balkans to the ideas of a Westerner traveling in Africa, and linked them to contemporary curatorial practices:
The curators from the West…could hardly see “authentic” art in these [African] works. Most probably, they understood them as provincial copies of Western originals; but for them they were non-authentic not only because they were copies, but also because they were signs of loss of the roots, traditions, and thus the very identity….It is not a surprise then, that they preferred artists who were openly using the “indigenous” traditions; for them this was the genuine, real African art….Under these circumstances, to be progressive means to be “inauthentic,” whereas to be locked within ethno-myths means to be “authentic.”29
I do not want to suggest that Balaci validates a naïve “indigenous” art. She does not. But her sights are set on the West as a standard against which Romanian art must measure up.

Clearly a sense of Romanian cultural inferiority is connected to this Western orientation, combined with a characteristic – and, again, centuries-old - Janus-faced self-aggrandizement that has also dominated Romania. For example, Balachi characterizes the Romanian art world as, “a small and poor community…eroded by egos and resentments [and] far from the monolithic unity with which the Slovenian art, for example, has crossed with success the symbolic border between East and West (a still active border), generating one of the most interesting phenomena in European contemporary art.” She continues: “We,” in contrast, don't have the cultural cohesion of the common effort, even though the purposes are similar more often then not.” Balaci also insists that the museum is “not to the liking of the wide and implacable local mediocrity.” She is certainly not referring to the Perjovschis here, but rather expressing once again her disdain for the public at large, a view that could not be further from the Perjovschis’s embrace of and confidence in the public. Furthermore, her comment fails to consider the reasons why the locals (among them the Perjovschis) might not love the museum. She continues: “Falsehood is overwhelming us, false values, false modesty, a culture of mediocrity, when we have all the possibilities not to be like this.” Again, this view of the Romanian art as mediocre dates to a continual tendency to locate the Romanian cultural situation within a semiotics of “poverty” and “misery.” In this regard, I am thinking of the book Critique of Misery, written in 1945 by Bella Naum, Paul Paujn, and Virgil Teodorescu, Calin Dan’s “Aesthetics of Poverty,” 1996, for the exhibition catalogue Experiment, Magda Carneci’s Art of the 80s, Texts on Postmodernism, 1996, which closes with a lament about the poverty of the situation in Romania, and many other Romanian cultural texts.30

Disavowing her public, on the one hand, Balaci exaggerates and aggrandizes Palatul (Poporului) Parlamentului on the other. For her, it has the capacity to draw the Romanian people “(and not only)” to its doors:
It is said to be…the first time something like this takes place, and the successful outcome belongs to a large degree to me, as well as the heroism to dominate, in a Romanian context, the site of the biggest Museum of Contemporary art in Eastern Europe. [This achievement] belongs completely to Mihai Oroveanu, who succeeded in overcoming the suspicions and endemic “bad-faith” that naturally appears when something “constructive” is undertaken….[He] is undoubtedly the charismatic personality able to realize this project in Romania.
The “dominating” pluck of being the “largest” museum of contemporary art in Eastern Europe balances Balaci's lament that Romania is a “culture of mediocrity.” Her presumption seems to be that in a country of such “mediocrity” at least its museum will be the “biggest.” The aim for Romania to loom large in European esteem is a nationalist desire that has long held Romanian intellectuals hostage and relates to an unspoken racist shame of being the home of Europe's gypsies, to say nothing of Dracula and Dictators.

Meanwhile Palatul Parliamentului - part Pentagon, part Merchandise Mart - will make a show of splendor that for some will equate to power. But it will be a dominance that does not, however, mask the bloated gigantism of the place itself and its unresolved history of suffering and loss so vividly displayed in the desolate landscape surrounding this monster building.
Sadly, Balaci’s suspicion of “bad faith” on the part of her public, and her assumption that anything “constructive” will be criticized in Romania, is also characteristic of the mentality of the oppressed. This frame of mind was contagious during the Ceausescu years when the will for change was systematically destroyed, contaminated, and undermined by surveillance, fear, defeat, and shame, which in no small part was due to his authoritarian possessiveness of what constituted “authentic Romanian culture.” Similarly, Balaci and Oroveanu, by way of their legitimized institutional positions, present a learned version of this kind of behavior that reflects how trauma transfers across generations. The shadow of this Romanian past animates Balaci's description of the curatorial team at the MNAC:
[There is] the absence of money….A poor artist in the computer era doesn't work anymore, the romantic cliché is worn out. A poor university professor becomes automatically corrupt; a good Romanian curator must act abroad as s/he cannot survive financially here….We are an extremely united team, yet I wonder every day why my young and capable colleagues still come to work, why they don't leave the country permanently with the scholarships they receive, with the 'indecent' salaries that they have.

Balaci concludes her comments in this part of the interview with the further astonishing admission: “Sacrifices and a general feeling of senselessness make the Romanian curator a mystery.” This is an extremely poignant and self-revealing comment. Balaci's recognition of the low pay and sacrifice of her young colleagues seems a heartfelt lament for the wider situation in Romania. It also seems to reflect her own sense of surrender and futility at the job she tries hard to perform. As I stated in this essay’s opening paragraphs, the situation to which Balaci refers is, indeed, very real. There is no reason to doubt that her ambitions for the National Museum of Contemporary Art and hopes to revitalize Palatul Poporului are in “good faith,” which is why I have drawn on her public record as an insightful official view of the administration of the MNAC. Yet while Balaci’s situation and experiences are lamentable, her attitudes present the internal mechanisms and thinking around the construction of the MNAC unfavorably. They suggest that the instantiation of a museum in Palatul Poporului will further complicate the situation for contemporary art practices in Romania, to say nothing of contributing to the suppression of memory and, thus, the retardation of healing in Romania’s culture of trauma, as I shall presently discuss.

If Balaci’s comments are compared to the resistance of the Perjovschis to the MNAC, another picture emerges. They describe their resistance in the following terms:
In an emerging art scene with no production funds, no mobility funds [funds for travel], and basically not enough white cubes [exhibition spaces] to show the art works [of contemporary artists], the making of such a cultural Pentagon is not the solution. More than 2 million euro was spent to adjust the building [Palatul Poporului ] for art purposes. 2) The building is the Parliament. On one hand, we do not know of any good art institutions located in the Parliaments buildings [of other nations], and on the other after having culture under [the thumb of] politics for 50 years to put it [here] is like a bad joke; 3) This is the ugliest building on Earth. This is the dictator's Palace; 4) Between the city and the building is about one mile of empty fields. That is exactly the distance between the leaders and the citizens [my emphasis]. Now this distance will apply to visual art too; 5) Absolutely nobody was consulted. This is Romania where the process should be more transparent. The Prime Minister (the art collector) is quoted as saying about the location: “Either here (Ceausescu Palace) or nowhere...”; 6) The museum was established, putting all the state spaces together (6 venues) under the same umbrella. This was the year, 2002, when things were supposed to go the other way, decentralizing State Power.31

Backing up this commanding argument with action, when invited to contribute artworks to the museum Dan refused, in his words, to give anything to “the infamous museum exhibition.” Lia was never invited; and neither artist was asked to participate in the opening exhibition. This oversight reflects the continued failure of most Romanian critics and art historians associated with official Romanian cultural institutions to grasp the significance and function of her work. It is also, however, an overt repudiation of Lia’s assertive development of the CAA and its argumentative critique of their practices; for there is no question but that CAA, and especially Lia, present an aggressive refusal to compromise with practices and values with which the Perjovschis disagree. The result is a stand off between the official Romanian art world and the Perjovschis guerrilla tactics. For his part, Dan responded to the official invitation with an antagonistic and hostile retort: he posted his invitation on the Internet so that any artist could respond. He laughs when he reports that, “the officials got loaded with offers from other artists” who were to participate and to give works to the new museum.
The Perjovshis’s resistance principally underscores this conflict: the association of contemporary art with the very building that signifies the former dictator's most heinous acts seriously compromises artists' ability to comment critically on the state and its social, political, and cultural practices and policies. By participating in the MNAC - located in the bowels of Palatul (Poporului) Parlamentului - contemporary artists become complicit with the state both in the present and also, by association, in the past. The placement of experimental art in this building usurps the very possibility of contemporary artistic opposition, compromising artists’ independence. Just as problematic as the inference that contemporary art serves the state by being located in Palatul Parlamentului is the not so subtle coercion of artists to show their work in such a place when so few other venues for the support and exhibition of contemporary art exit in Romania. Worst of all, this invitation recalls the psychological intimidation practiced by Ceausescu, who required Romanian artists to create works for both his private and state collection, to say nothing of the endless portraits he and his wife Elena demanded of themselves.32 Both situations - past and present - capture contemporary artists in a noose of power. Hanging contemporary Romanian art in Palatul Parlamentului is tantamount to hanging art in Palatul Poporului. Then as now, those in control have the power and authority to marginalize artists who do not conform. This is an old and familiar form and structure of intimidation that appears to be reinstated under an alleged democratic system. Dan and Lia Perjovschi have consciously taken the difficult decision to remain outsiders to such institutional compulsion and intimidation so that it may be examined and remembered as a legacy of Romania’s painful past. Their position enables the Perjovschis to resist for the purpose of reconstruction.

IV.

Through resistance and reconstruction, the Perjovschis’s activist position connects the ethics of art to national remembrance and mourning that is critical to recovery from trauma. In Remembering to Forget, Barbie Zelizer has discussed the sequence of “forgetting to remember,” “remembering to remember,” and “remembering to forget” that represents a mourning process that often occurs in traumatic situations. At first a “period of high attention” prevails that is followed shortly by skepticism about the extent of the trauma suffered, during which time the “frame for bearing witness [becomes] highly formulaic.”33 Within a decade, people become so saturated with and numbed by their own and others' suffering, she writes, that “survivors…learn to keep their experiences private,” and for the next thirty years “very little institutional memorial response” takes place and people “forget to remember.”34 Forgetting to remember marks the first period of dissociation, a sublimation of the past that returns as the repressed in destructively painful psychological and social ways. The second phase, a period of “remembering to remember,” is a period of zealous memorializing.

Today, for example, by continually memorializing the Holocaust (in museums, books, and international culture), the world remains locked in “remembering to remember.” Finally, in the third phase, “remembering to forget,” a population heals enough to no longer need to repress the past, and becomes psychologically healthy enough to consciously decide to “remember to forget,” namely to let go of the past.35 But remembering to forget may only occur when the memories have been so thoroughly confronted and integrated that they form a conscious part of the reality of a person or a society.
If this succession may be taken as a prognosis for Romania's future with regards to its dictatorial traumatic past, Romania remains in the first period of “forgetting to remember.” The suppression of the history of Palatul Poporului with the new Palatul Parliamentului, and the papering over of pain with the National Museum of Contemporary Art precisely demonstrates this state, and appears to be a vain hope that contemporary art will heal the rift of the past.

While understandable, albeit inadvisable, such a strategy maintains the developmental evolution of trauma that is unchecked by intervention, and will most likely result in the prolongation of the period of dissociation. Eventually, however, the traumatized remember. This means that a long period of “remembering to remember” will occur in Romanian in the future, at which time the site of the MNAC in the “Palace” will be questioned again. Understandably, Romanians want to put the past behind them, exhausted by sorrow and struggling to take their rightful place in European society – a Europe to which Romania has already contributed so much. But resurrecting the “Palace” as a different sort of “Palace” - an art “Palace,” in which art is marshaled to elevate the past and present simultaneously - is only a short-term solution. For such a reconstruction of national history, contaminated by the legacy of terror and totalitarianism for which Palatul Poporului stands, will haunt Romanian culture. Thus, if observed within in the context of the stages of healing, situating the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Palatul Poporului can only be compared to the moment in 1993 when Dan Perjovschi tattooed himself with the name of his oppressor. Hopefully, the removal of the MNAC from the “Palace” will not take a decade and will not be financed in Germany.

The fraught debate over how to use Palatul Poporului recalls the transition to democracy in South Africa and debates over the fate of Robben Island, where black male political opponents of apartheid, including Nelson Mandela, were exiled and imprisoned. Annie E. Coombes recalled that proposals for the island,
ranged from a casino and leisure complex for the international moneyed classes to a Disney-style amusement park, a rehabilitation camp for street children, and a center for correctional rehabilitation running courses to reestablish the inmates' sense of moral values. The British founder of the Open University, Lord Young of Dartington, proposed reviving the reputation of the island as a 'university'… with a focus for education about the liberation struggle…. Nongovernmental organization Peace Visions promoted the idea of the island as a center for international peace studies and a training ground for international brokers to learn the art of peace negotiations. In 1993 it was clear that the future of Robben Island was a preoccupation among various factions of local, regional, and national government.36

In the end, South Africa declared Robben Island a national monument and a museum was established in September 1996. It has become a World Heritage Site, as well as a tourist site for ecology and wildlife. Coombes points out that while “overall consensus” for such sites is almost impossible to reach, an engagement with cultural heritage is central to any discussion over places that are such “international, socio-political and cultural symbols.”37
Palatul Poporului is an international symbol, and because it is the symbol of Romanian national traumatic experience, how it is used effects how Romania recovers from its history of abuse. In this regard, survivors of trauma must learn to “articulate the values and beliefs that the trauma destroyed,” in order to rebuild their systems of belief.38 Thus recovery requires that a story be repeatedly told about the history of Palatul Poporului as a primary means “for reconciliation with repressed material.”39 The Perjovschis’s refusal to capitulate to the installation of contemporary art in the “Palace” must be understood as a public service of remembrance that articulates the values and beliefs destroyed by everything represented by Palatul Poporului and for which they mourn.

Their resistance, in the name of art, is an effort toward Romanian reconstruction. Even though the Perjovschis have fought and lost this battle against tremendous odds, their resistance is an ethically constituted opposition consonant with a healing process from trauma.40 Indeed, survivors often engage in moral battles for socially beneficial ends, advancing the healing process through social activism and political advocacy for the disenfranchised and abused or fighting for ethical rights.41 By developing and adhering to their principles, the Perjovschis offer an example of an ethical conscience operating on behalf of Romanian cultural remembrance, which is a form of mourning in a nation where the population was forced to observe and live by the destruction of ethics and morality, and whose aspirations were curtailed. The Perjovschis present a paradigm for renewal, in which aesthetic concepts and critical practices serve Romania's own psychical and cultural restoration. For without such consciously considered acts of recollection and grieving, in conditions where there is much to evoke and lament, traumatic dissociation will be augmented, as the growing field of research on “transgenerational trauma” shows, trauma will return in younger generations.

In short, intergenerational trauma will continue - and already is afoot in Romania, albeit in new and different experiences and behaviors – in future generations if the original trauma is not healed.
In conclusion, I want to point out that the long-term time base and social value of the Perjovschis’s collaborations, or acts of healing, involve the organization of contexts for remembrance that contribute to the process of a return to normalcy. In the end, that they failed to convince the authorities to select a better site for the National Museum of Contemporary Art does not reduce their contributions to Romanian society. It is the affect of their practice throughout Romanian society and what their work stands for that counts historically, not whether it succeeds or fails in the moment. The Perjovschis have already bequeathed a legacy of ethical resistance that is being carried on by younger Romanian artists and will be remembered in the history of art.

Notes:
26 Dan Perjovschi email to the author 11 October 2004.
27 All quotes from Balaci in this essay come from “Interview with Ruxandra Balaci, Scientific Director of MNAC,” in Observator Cultural 220 (2004): www.observatorcultural.ro
28 See Dimitrijevic's excellent essay “Works-of-Art vs. Artefacts (Blood, honey, guns'n'pumpkins: Exhibiting the Balkans),” in Atelier 8 (2004): www.mnac.ro/events%20main.htm
29 Many thanks go to Octavian Esanu for pointing out the parallelisms in these texts. See, Bella Naum, Paul Paujn, and Virgil Teodorescu, “Critica Mizeriei, 1945” reprinted in Bucuresti anii 1920-1940 intre avangarda si modernism, Simetria and Bucharest: UAP, 1994; Dan, Calin Dan, “Estetica saraciei,” in Experiment; and Magda Carneci, Art of the 1980s in Eastern Europe. Texts on Postmodernism. Bucharest: Colectia Mediana, 1999.
30 See the following for studies of transgenerational trauma: Y. Danieli, ed., International Handbook of Multigenerational Legacies of Trauma. New York: Plenum Press, 1998; R. Yehuda, J. Schmeidler, M. Wainberg, et. Al, “Vulnerability to posttraumatic stress disorder in adult offspring of Holocaust survivors,” American Journal of Psychiatry 155:9 (1998): 1163-1171; A. Novac and S. Hubert-Schneider, “Acquired vulnerability: Comorbidity in a patient population of adult offspring of Holocaust Survivors,” American Journal of Forensic Psychiatry 18 (1998): 45-58.); S.J. Suomi and S. Levine, “Psychobiology of intergenerational effects of Trauma: Evidence from Animal Studies,” in Danieli. Y., ed. International Handbook of Multigenerational Legacies of Trauma: 623-637; Chalsa M. Loo, “PTSD Among Ethnic Minority Veterans: A National Center for PTSD Fact Sheet,” National Center for PTSD www.ncptsd.org/facts/veterans/fs_ethnic_vet.html.
31 Dan Perjovschi email to the author 25 August 2004.
32 The late Ion Bitzan recounted to me one of the most painful stories of this kind of official coercion. The memories were so emotionally wrenching for the famously reserved artist that he left the room to compose himself. This was 1992.
33 Barbie Zelizer, Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory Through the Camera's Eye (London and Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998): 160.
34 Ibid: 163.
35 Ibid: 169-170.
36 Annie E. Coombes, History after Apartheid: Visual Culture and Public Memory in a Democratic South Africa (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2003): 55.
37 Ibid: 56.
38 Ibid: 178.
39 Herman: 175.
40 The MNAC numbers powerful economic and social entities as backers, including the JW Merriott Grand Hotel in Bucharest to Sony, Tarom Airlines, the Goethe Institute, and the British Council, as well as an authoritative international board of “Supporters” such as René Block (Director Museum Kunsthalle Fredericianum, Kassel), Enrico Lunghi (Director Casino Luxembourg - Forum d'Art Contemporain and one of the founder members of Manifesta), Anders Kreuger (ex-Director Nordic Institute for Contemporary Art, now free-lance curator in Stockholm), Catherine Millet (director Artpress magazine, Paris), Nicolas Bourriaud (art theoretician, curator and Director of Palais de Tokyo, Paris), Ami Barak (curator, President IKT, Paris), Heiner Holtappels (video artist and media theoretician, Director of the Netherlands Media Art Institute, Montevideo Time-Based Arts, Amsterdam).
42 In his book Charisma in Politics, Religion and the Media: Private Trauma, Public Ideals, David Aberbach points out that many of the most important – as well as heinous – leaders have been trauma survivors, among them Gandhi, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill – and Hitler. See Aberbach’s Charisma in Politics, Religion and the Media New York: New York University Press, 1996.