On blind spots and artistic interference
Răzvan Anton
More than a year ago we set up the guidelines of this project together with Mihai Iepure-Gorski, my visual arts programme colleague and co-curator at the Paintbrush Factory. Our initial idea was to re-activate The Paintbrush Factory as a node within an ever moving cultural network, as our space became more and more uncertain. The first step in this strategy was to continue a project curated by Cristina Curcan and Mihai last year, where artists of the Paintbrush Factory artistic community would work with a series of local Cluj museums. After that initial project we thought it would be more than needed to get even more within a museum collection or programme and, in one way or another, to influence it, to hack it, or simply to interfere with it.
This is how we came about this series of residencies that were supposed to take place within the building of the Museum of Transylvanian History in Cluj, with a dedicated space for exploration and discussions, something we initially called the Hysteria Space. The choice of the History Museum was quite simple. On one hand, our previous collaboration had been successful. We had found our interlocutors. On the other hand, if we are to look at history museums across the country and their respective programmes, they are some of the most ideologized spaces. Now, for everything that happened in the last 8 months or so, that plan changed significantly.
The initial local residency turned into a virtual residency, where the invited artists worked with museum specialists in order to advance their research. Unable to look at the real objects or documents marked a significant change in their approach. Our plan to interfere with the museum as a physical presence was replaced with an interference by means of correspondence. If history museums illustrate stories with objects that often are disconnected from those narratives, why can’t artists build up their own narratives in relation to these objects? What makes a narrative more legitimate than the other, especially when we operate within the realm of fiction? Looking at how the dialogue with the museum has unfolded, we realize that the specialists of the museum need us more than they might think and that our interference is both legitimate and vital. Different perspectives, or angles, whether professional, cultural or simply personal, are essential in opening up a space for collective interpretation and debate, where the topics of history, memory, identity, and ideological structures hidden behind fields of study or institutions are being opened up as a productive space of knowledge.
0800-SOS-ARTIST
Mihai Iepure-Górski
I don’t understand what people have against artists.
They don’t do a thing. (from Artist Jokes, thanks again Corina)
But they do. Outside (the artifices of power) by now, and it’s been this way for quite a long time (but now ever clearer, ever since those, long forgotten, revolutions), the artist has (finally) found his place. Resilient, solitary, withstanding (extremely high) overloads, he is here, at the service of his fellowmen, as the last hero of a long-lost world.
No longer a slave; he is done being the King’s buffoon; done building (failed) utopias – no one is fooled anymore; he is done pointing the new, the new has lost its appeal (as just another illusion); he is done making, building, adding. He is done producing… no more!
He is here, at the end of time, at the end of history; living outside the image, outside the veil, the cover. Living in the real. His purpose is simple, to reveal. With presence, not product.
Call 0800-SOS-ARTIST if you feel like you’ve lost (sight) of something.
The benefit of doubt
Ioana Savu-Gruiță
A successful implementation of the projects: The Museum Affair. Grafting Exercises in the Museums of Cluj and the exhibition Cluj 1989, both carried out in 2019 in collaboration with the Brush Factory, was the overture of the Hystoria/Hysteria project, a courageous endeavor to organize an artistic residency in NMTH spaces. The Covid 19 pandemic changed the rules of the game and what was supposed to be a physical meeting place between visual artists and museum specialists became a virtual space, still preserving the essence of the project – ideological freedom, meeting the instruments of the two disciplines, a space for documentation/research, discovery and revelation. This new situation generated the need for a mediator between researchers (historians, archaeologists, art historians) and artists – a difficult but fascinating task, my task. The artists established their topics and I identified the specialists to provide information and images with museum artifacts. Virtual Hysteria encouraged artists to become researchers in their own fields of interest and historians to abandon the known ways of identifying patrimonial objects. They had to follow the artists’ requests who this time did not necessarily meet chronological, typological, thematic or geographical criteria. Because a real contact with the heritage happened in few cases, the project relied on the story of the objects and their narrative potential.
History has the power to fascinate, stimulate imagination, to raise questions, to stir controversy and intense feelings, for some to provide answers, certainties, beliefs and to create systems of values. History can be dangerous in the wrong hands. Historians have fought for a long time to prove that history is a science. History can be viewed from social, political, economic, and cultural and mentalities perspectives. All these aspects reflect on the cultural goods, as products of humanity, which a history museum collects, preserves, researches, restores and promotes.
Museum objects carry the message of their creators, which only partially survives encoded in the cultural codes specific to the time of their production and to some extent they also reflect the cultural profile of their collectors. It’s the duty of historians, archaeologists, art historians to extract, systematize and correlate all the information to find the story of an artifact. Each historical time has specific research methods and coordinates. The specific methodology of each researcher – working premises, capacity of interpretation, questioning and synthesis – as well as the key element – objectivity, tools that make history a science, must be used correctly, deontological, for the product of research to be viable and for the message of the past to be understood for what it is and not for what we would like it to be.
The way the researcher communicates with the historical object can offer a variety of narrative paths, i.e. several truths, and all the above are sine qua non conditions for the results to remain in scientific and not the science-fiction area. Most of the time the way we relate to an object changes its history and can turn it into a subject of propaganda or manipulation. For this reason museographers put great value on objectivity and on approaching history without prejudgments. The historian works with solid evidence, contextualizes using analogies, comparisons, alternative sources and does not make risky statements that he/she cannot sustain or prove. This precaution is reflected on the rigorous way in which the explanatory or scientific texts about patrimonial objects are produced and altogether in the way the researchers want to keep the same objectivity and correctness of the historical information in any other reference to the object.
On the other hand, artists have always been a subjective barometer of society, they mirrored it aesthetically or in critical notes, they questioned it, they manipulated it, they turned it on all sides. Viewed and analyzed from an historical perspective often their productions reflected the subtle social, political, or even mentality changes. Artists have the freedom or they take the liberty of thinking outside the box, of problematizing a subject from unexpected angles, many of them being visionaries of their times. Art is also dangerous, or at least not innocent. Especially in the last decades, art provokes, is subversive, tests limits and at a conceptual level plays with notions, symbols and with ideologies. In relation to history, from the interrogations of art new perspectives on the phenomena studied and researched by specialists in the historical field can be born. Reinterpreted from an artistic point of view an artifact without special scientific value and with minimal chances of being exhibited, but carrying a certain symbolism or specific formal attributes, can receive new values. Re-contextualized it can be capitalized from other perspectives; its narrative can access individual and collective memory and I am thinking of Fred Wilson’s Mining the Museum project. The artist worked with apparently innocent historical artifacts raising questions about the social and racial differences in American culture in the early 1990s only by associating them. Often art manages to attract attention and convince where science can fail, can mediate, can convert information into visual discourse, using a completely different code to communicate with the public. The artists have their own methodology, their recipes, they interrogate the objects and tell a story, only their questions change perspective and the answers thus obtained can be multiple and also ambiguous.
Removed from their context, artifacts might lose their identity, sometimes even their meaning, or receive a completely different symbolism. The study of an Egyptian human mummy hosted by a Transylvanian museum might tell an interesting story about the Egyptian culture that produced the artifact, about everyday life in Ptolemaic Egypt, but most likely it tells more about Transylvanian society in the late nineteenth century, about the nobleman who had interest and financial strength to support an archeological expedition to Gamhud. The fact that a Transylvanian history museum carefully preserves Avram Iancu’s pipe and whistle, donated at the beginning of the 20th century by a Hungarian, next to Gábor Áron’s stirrup and equally promote them in exhibitions, says a lot about the professionalism of museographers from the beginning of the last century, who saw the potential and historical value of the objects, as well as about the healthy attitude of the contemporary museographers. The artist’s vision can associate the arching of the back of an acrobat, represented on a candlestick, dating from the Roman period, with the shape of a reconstituted bow, beyond the fact that both artifacts date from the same historical period. Going throughout a formal transmutation, postcards printed during the communist period can be loaded with another message and can symbolically mark the becoming / evolution of an institution. Roman stone inscriptions can be used as inspiration for a new computer font. These are some of the problems raised in the virtual realm of Hysteria and the final artistic products of this cultural experiment will probably say more about the creators, in search for their own meanings, and the mentality of the society we live in, than about the cultural goods that triggered their research. The artists will offer also an alternative perspective on the place of these artifacts in the contemporary world.
Claire Robins observed that at the border between the XXth and the 21st century, there was a paradigm shift in the museum field. The museum as a keeper and neutral space for the presentation and exhibition of cultural goods was gradually abandoned in favor of the museum as a space for cultural production, the museum as a forum, as a meeting place for various narratives, a place of learning and an active element in the community. In recent years, museums, including NMTH, search for alternative methods for conventional interpretive models, tried new ways of display, used new technologies, and created interactive exhibits in numerous interdisciplinary projects. NMTH organized numerous collaborative events, in which artifacts were involved in conceptual dialogues with visual or performative art. The artists, always connected to the pulse of the community, managed through their interventions to short-circuit the traditional strategies for presenting museum cultural products and thus reached to a young and very young generation, which needs real and virtual spaces such as History and Hysteria.
*Please note the existence of the homonymous project “History/Hysteria” (1996/2007) by the artist Dan Perjovschi.
Information about this project, here: Monument (Istorie/Isterie 2).