fotografia.22474487139…
———
[Phew, WIRE 460, June 2022] However, I feel in my daily life that it is becoming difficult to predict the future based on the law of cause and effect. Suddenly, events can occur that cause everything that has been built up to date to collapse. Some of these events can be narrated on the basis of causality, while others cannot.
———
In the first scene of the movie As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty (2000), Jonas Mekas reflects on how he decided on the succession of images and sounds gathered throughout his life: “the first idea was to keep them [the rolls of film] chronological. But then I gave up and I just began splicing them together by chance, the way I found them on the shelf. Because I really don’t know where any piece of my life really belongs. Let it be, let it go, just by pure chance, disorder. There is some kind of order in it, an order of its own, which I do not really understand, same as I never understood life around me, the real life, as they say, or the real people, I never understood them.” In the present text I tackle a similar mechanism when I talk about the image in the Romanian space: if the historical past has engendered, through a series of micro and macro sociopolitical contexts, a viable generation of artists, I now attempt to destabilize certain unjust beliefs, namely that contemporary artistic manifestations working mostly with photographic images represent only a decentralized echo of the canon. In this sense, I will use as case studies two recent exhibition events: IN sequence (28.06 – 10.07.2022 at Rezidența9, organized together with the Contur Association, in partnership with UNArte) and ON PHOTOGRAPHY… and few other things (01.07 – 26.08.2022 at Strata Gallery, curated by Michele Bressan); the first is an objectual counterpoint that seems to open up a new field of action for Romanian visual culture, while the second is, paradoxically, a visceral conclusion of dry linear history that locks up, behind limits imagined by the local scene, the acute lacks faced by established artists and the institutional shortcomings caused by them. I will select from the two exhibitions only the projects that seem to best articulate the position that the photographic / post-photographic image could occupy in the future in this cultural space.
Between materiality and digitality, IN sequence and ON PHOTOGRAPHY… and few other things examine the harsh conditions that the new generation faces, from unjust power relations, dutifully amended with every opportunity, to the sinister reality of the relevance of cultural dimension(s) locally, giving the audience a coherent view of the potential that the artists involved in the projects display. If almost thirty years ago the virulence of the old new media attacked the working style which parts of the eighties generation and its remains in the nineties were used to within older structures, as they manifested their belonging to the “new new” through event-exhibitions like the annual ones at the Soros Center, Ex Oriente Lux (1993, Dalles Halls) or 010101. exhibition (1994, Romanian Peasant Museum), present waves of artists concentrate their interests not on the media used but on personal investigations filtered by paradigmatic traces of the real. The photographic image in the works of Anca Țintea (Index of Lost Matter, 2022), Ioana Dumitrescu (Past Time Debris, 2022), or Corina Mitincu (Mnezigrame, 2022) is no longer an “image of itself,” but an “image of the self.” Puiu Lățea remarked in his text “Etc.” in PRUT, the book of Matei Bejenaru’s project: “Every now and then, Roland Barthes returns to the quip of his predecessor at the College de France, Paul Valery, who says that in nature there is no et cetera. Only humans allow themselves the luxury of leaving things unsaid, making use of a lazy appendix that they also shorten: etc. Sociologically speaking, it cannot be any other way. With each iteration, etc. renews a pact of social stability, suggesting that the problem being discussed exists in a relationship with social objects that seem to have existed since the beginning of the world – the world as we know it, unquestionable until proven otherwise .” It is exactly this role of et cetera that photography seems to play in the exhibiting artists’ practices. It is disinterested and handy, incorporated into a personal mechanism connected to the urgencies of the present, moving from singularity to universality.
At the same time, the photobook begins to make its presence known as an ideal format when it comes to the options artists have at their disposal. It is a curious medium that is tricky to manifest in a valid fashion, located between the materiality of the images placed on the page and the immateriality of the images between the images – an intrinsic logic of things that is intuited but never deciphered till the end. At the edge of Internet 3.0, the photobook appears as a seductive alternative to the way in which speculated images act. In ON PHOTOGRAPHY… and few other things, Crăița Niga presents her project Rubicon and its “appendix” Bad Luck. She wrote to me that a photobook can be about “what you think you see, not what you really see,” where “only the author can know what they wanted to show.” She explains to me how there is “an entire mechanism that establishes its own rules, because from a certain point on, nobody has any control over the object.” Therefore, by negotiating her narratives in the sequential process, they reveal complete images that we cannot deal with in a pragmatic manner, images that, reproduced in ideal parameters, have the capacity to overcome the problem of the natural (given the reasoning of “anything which is possible is by definition also natural,” taken from the debate between Slavoj Žižek and Yuval Noah Harari, Should We Trust Nature More than Ourselves?, 2022). I agree with Crăița when she says that “In Romania, there is a lack of freedom when it comes to medium,” how “a [photography] book is still seen as something rigid that has to ‘turn out well.’” Still, it seems that the great(er) number of artists who use the format understand that “a photobook is no longer about form and perhaps not even about content.”
The way in which an art project is formulated and manifested speaks first and foremost about human limits. However, we find ourselves at the edge of a historical development that has until now defined art in various ways, but every time in connection to how it is perceived or how it can communicate things to people. And even though there is no popular trend stating that art can have profound stakes separate from the human species, the emergence of new media and technologies has facilitated a precedent for what could happen in a not so distant future – a final fracture of the current meaning of art towards what Ion Dumitrescu, in his book PRE, calls “a state, an incipient, unstable moment, a protracted genesis that can return, not necessarily cyclical or linear. A disposition, a mental ecology, an affective ambiance that precedes the stabilization of structures and the regulation of flows.” But it is not just new media that have played this role of reconsidering art in a broader sense. In the collective volume Speculative Aesthetics, Tom Trevatt talks about “an unpublished fragment of Robert Smithson’s writings on Donald Judd from the late 1960s,” where Smithson states that for him “art was not to be interesting, which always presupposed a human addressee, preserving the personal, anthropocentric sense of authority, but to be ‘a cosmos’, addressed to the universe rather than only the human.” We encounter copy-pasted promises of the speculative future, compilations of fragments of internet culture in post-photographic projects, in the works of Andrei Predescu (flux horizon, 2022 & Black T-Shirt, 2021), Emanuel Ștefan (final fantasy, 2022), or Toma Ștefănescu (Entropy, 2022). By engaging as-yet-unarticulated hybrids that float in an unseen layer of multiple technological temporalities, these artists manage to partially trace the outlines of the incipient points of action for a possible future alternative art network in Romania.
Today, photography enjoys an extensive visibility on the Romanian art scene; if until not long ago it functioned as a secondary medium, it now seems to benefit from new attitudes among young artists. And even though it never required a fundamental resurrection, the various projects that tackle the photographic image situate its manifestations among the positive norms of contemporaneity.
– by Ștefan Simion
