Sunday, March 16, 2014
Palladian (Omni Shoreham)
This project looks at how contemporary artists choose Socialist Realism—once an imposed aesthetic in Romania—as an object of artistic interest. One of the most frequent images from the past that artists engage with is Nicolae Ceausescu’s portrait. But what can it mean to repaint large heroic portraits of Ceausescu after he is dead? The dictator’s portrait acts as an intersection between discourses about art and power, culture and politics, space and memory. Doing history then requires a phenomenological quest. To learn about the communist ideology of the new men, the heroine mother, and the scientific mythology of communism (see Lucian Boia’s analysis) often means to repaint Ceausescu as a father figure and as a national hero (Ciprian Muresan and Adrian Ghenie, 2008), to use documents and photographs and reconstruct images of monuments and cities (Calin Dan and Iosif Kiraly, 1995-1996) or to replace the old labels from Socialist Realist sculptures with new ones (Ileana Faur, 2012). Artists deconstruct historical artifacts and their symbolic meaning by dislocating historical facts from their inert official narrative and relocating them in the artist’s current personal instance. By actualizing these symbols, artists also point to the former dictatorship’s lingering ideological specter in today’s society.
