By Giuseppe Marasco
Perhaps the first thing you should say on seeing this show is, Damn you Ciprian Muresan, what are we meant to do without an object to fetishize? Where does, the work exist? Perhaps that’s the big hole that this artist wants you to look at. Placing the work in an unreachable space. The work becomes like a myth. Yet, it is a work, ever turning and opening up new paths.
A critique of our reception and relation as audience\nature of readership.
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Shredded Masaccio Book, presents the shredded paper remains of a hand-drawn version of Ornella Casazza’s text. Muresan’s pencil-drawn book had a short life, remaining intact only for the days that it took for the artist to complete its pages. Before deconstructing the book, Muresan documented its pages and converted them into the form of a video slideshow.
For myself, I’ve always felt suspicious of the unquestionable worldliness, object-hood and accompanying ever-present now. That is pervasive of much recent contemporary art production and general visual landscape. The found thereness of it all, is unlike the soft flesh of paint that can be torn into at any moment. More is at stake than a simple sleight of hand, when an objects begs an innocence and insists it has literally fallen from the sky unblemished by earthly ideologies.
The original is passed through the hand and the eye of the artist. Through his educations, ‘his academy style’, his aesthetic choices. Elements of the Masaccio’s are selected, highlighted, draw out or left out. In the monochrome reproduction, the words are written out in a calligraphic rendering, than draw. Lending a personalised note-book quality. The Hand written element adds a tension, where it parallels deviation from prescribed lines of thought, into original thinking.
This attentive replica. Stands in to undermine the nature of unthinking replicated work, by reinserting this human element. Whilst drawing us closer, to re-examine a too easily won relationship with Masschio. The place it sit in. disturbs, the little slot it sits in, by , holding onto which excepts us know more deeply about Masschio or contemporary Art.
By highlighting… the immediate delicacy… the human element not tolerated and eleminated. Kanif Kureshi.. noting of …the vogue for Koons.
How innocuous the task of stepping out what always seems, remains difficult invisible lines. The same goes for the quotidian, and its repetitions, as it has even less scent to pick up on.
Muresan operates, by opening up the frame letting you in, empty spaces, at multiple seams. The intention is to remain on the move. It’s an operation that demystifies. Authorised history books or any other highly finished product arriving, reporting from some, or any other outer space promising, or insisting on a utopia or a particular reality. ((The fixed totality of glossy magazines))meme)) The implicit relational hierarchy, intruded upon and take time away from one own imagination and necessities. Such items/objects can be see as facilitating a form of relational violence. In the duration which they take up of any persons time, that limited horizon and perimeters demarked by its ethos. Little has to be said, simply as a presence, a reality is proposed. To think of it as sins of omission, is perhaps useful. The omission of certain vocabulary is the omission of different worlds and the interests and products of those worlds. As J.R.R. Tolkein as linguist and Novelist, would have seen it, words produce worlds.
Each mediation, each new reproduction here distances ourselves from the original work. Each a report, each a distance, a gulf. That finds itself more difficult to assign relation and intent from the previous step. Blank dislocations, with little to hang on.
Yet all the more mysterious and beguiling in this ever on going series of progressions, of loss. Like Chinese whispers. Parallels the process of an iconic coming into being . Its like being let in on how to make mystery of glamour itself. By being shown the gaps between the dots.
The blanks in Mureasans’ copy are also interesting because of the multiplying error and the possibility of further drifting dislocations that could occur, if it existed in a world were the knowledge of such a book could only be passed on by another hand, coping, filtering , influencing. While the flickering video frames and the page turning of the catalogue, its meted out rationing, ever supplements the sense of passing in these fugacious glimpses.
A wry detail is that a Tate Modern shredder, was borrowed, (perhaps for its brute industrial force). This wry act is itself another layer of the work, and links thematically with other works in the show, being another form of hiding the work within the apparatus of public institutions.
All the time with thoughts of the different beauty of these images, wondering if it is better, sometimes to see work through the filter of another hand, as sometimes perhaps we never really get enough distance to make our own works. To let the image expand and bleed for our own needs, purposes and imaginings. It has a quality of the beloved self-published fanzines, or the school boys dream of a self-produced comic book. It’s a much richer work of art, than the original Masaccio’s, in the way that the new version of the “original”, is enriched in Luis Borges short story “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote“. Book piracy also comes to mind, where entire books are photocopied. Or historically in the times of South American dictatorships, were proscribed books, passed from hand to hand, sometimes even manually written out.
This touch on censorship, has other proximity to the Argentinian and Chilean experiences. Mensajes fantasmas produced in this era, also critiqued the void in media or mediates objects.
Muresans’ position is that of a generation that …
all history is maladjustment. Which is really a wise attitude. On the one hand alone, as history really
Just a set of possibilities that once where among many possibles, so to speak, at an earlier stage where amongst many fictions. Maladaptions in that most actions are taken in an ever-changing climate with what every best knowledge is at hand. The real crime, of stupidity, is to insist on a path or way of doing things as being the only way possible. At the center of Muresans Practice is the consideration of the past critically, and its conceptualizing and problematizing.
placing together the ‘utopia of segregating the fairy tale like, idyllic oasis and the perverse, brutal reality.’ Allegories of contemporary post-Soviet life in Eastern Europe.
Veering entirely away from the simple selection of an image or idea from the past and presenting it uncritically, George Orwell said
unthinking use of ready-made phrases covers up meaning, often brutal political truths. , vague, lazy, unthinking
we hear the unthinking, when as stock Phrase is used,
Away from the unthinking.
making it a personal responsiblity for each person. Art that is the criticism.
Fundamentally democratic engagement. The site of the art object become a public forum.
the personal “romantic nostalgia” is a danger, in that when in “ideas or objects exist only insofar as you remember relating to them – they are for you only, part of your personal past.” impedes a proper relationship, one of self-development but also of an interrogation that understands the history and one relation to the times.
Seeing the over-simplification of symbols and icons, as an ever dangerous trap that enables. reduced images, to be used to seduce or persuade.’
Circling around the object, noticing the absences, the lack of presences within it. Applying new focus and perspectives are applied to analyse and understand them in new ways. gestures, events roles are switched contexts changed.
He further adds, Art and popular culture are not a closed system, Stagnates. Repeats insists straightjacket is unintelligent. A system may have more information
Shaping new questions and drawing out new histories by isolating contradictions.
putting to the viewer: which of these is true?
For Mureşan all history is maladjustment, and stultifying sanctity of the art object is addressed.
From the beginning creates work that as their premise, sees Art as having to be remade recycle and develop instead, of letting any work of art, to be considered finished.
The world to keep on entering… adding, art is “not the closed system or object.”
Seeing fundamentally the worlds’ prerogative to be let in and ‘to take the works’ ideas or images or meaning, and to continue it, to develop and build upon it.’
Often the translating literary models into imagery, manifest as drawings, film or hybrids of both.
His large theme is to use comic tools and devices , to reinterpret Western models into a more local, and personal tradition. This delicate sense of humour, the artist is enabled to cheerfully face and not lose heart whilst interrogating contemporary reality, history, and arts uncountable failures.
OTHER WORKS IN THE SHOW
A precise… analysis. Borders.
A series of etchings, based on the short story the Story ‘Invisible Clerk’ by the Soviet era novelists, Ilf and Petrov. A committee in making the error confusing the codes and language of power, by assuming greatness is equated with prowess in battle, create a public monument to an artist, as if he were a Medieval knight. The error is only corrected by replacing the Hero’s sword with a giant turnip. Reminds us why Committees aren’t very good at works of art
In, another video Muresan worked with two stage directors to simultaneously orchestrate two different performances on the same stage.
The overlap in the same space pursuing their own course, ignoring each other, invisible, meaningless to the other story happening at the same time.
As if he had tilted the world, so that parallel worlds touched and affected each other just a bit. Like the waves violently butting against a shore, no one knowing where the swell and the surge will come up, but this collision highlights … the experienced reality of cross purposes. The feeling is like having teeth pushed out-of-place. But thats our problem. What is emergent, is the gift to us. The multiplying possibilities and meaning that can be generated from these works. Letting the world back in.
Watching the actors blindly following their lines, may strike us a poignant. Capturing some of the alienating sea of locked in Language-syndrome, differing idioms jarring, different courses never meeting.
For what love is all this labour and this loss? What is its worth, what is in the end its object?
Taken through loss, perhaps, come to terms with loss, understand something of it and feel
you can step out and make own world, gaining the compulsion to have your hand in it and remake regularly.
