Seductive Powers: Three Romanian artists explore politics, morality, and progress
The exhibition in Venice in 2009 (Alexandru Axiente)
Over the past three weeks, the fourth floor of the University of Chicago’s Cobb Hall has been a bustle of construction. Slowly taking shape inside the Renaissance Society is “The Seductiveness of the Interval,” a two-story structure integrating a series of art pieces by three Romanian artists. Walking through the yet-to-be-completed structure, with its unpainted walls and unfinished floors and with loose wires hanging out of its walls, it is hard to imagine the installation in its fully furnished final form. But in less than a week, this ambitious project will be open to the public.
“Seductiveness,” on display from May 2nd through June 26th, was initially displayed in the Romanian Pavilion at the 2009 Venice Biennial. The project is a collaboration of the artists Stefan Constantinescu, Andrea Faciu, and Ciprian Muresan, and the Romanian architecture firm studioBASAR.
The piece is a self-contained unit of art—nothing lies outside the confines of its walls. A labyrinth of passageways, rooms, and stairs, the building fits as snuggly as possible into the confines of the Society’s exhibition space. Inside, it directs viewers through three video installations, a photography slide show, and a garden that sits on top of the structure.
This elaborate setup acts as a sort of theatrical stage, placing each component of the project in a carefully contrived atmosphere with the viewer. The piece’s website expresses this as “‘performances’ of an interpretative type, generated by an entire set of relationships…between the vision of the author, the expectations of the viewer, and the particular circumstances of the encounter with the work.” Isolated and immersed by the structure itself, the viewer is placed in more immediate quarters with the various pieces.
“Seductiveness” is inextricably tied to Romania’s history as a Soviet bloc country and its relatively recent transition to democracy. The slideshow looks at political graffiti in Romania, and one of the video installations addresses the issue of exile in a series of conversations with Chileans who fled the Pinochet regime to Romania and the rule of Nicolae Ceausescu, the country’s communist leader. The ideas of political freedom and the pursuit of liberty, and the ways in which they are tied to the state, are given a unique interpretation in this framework, an interpretation that is fundamentally shaped by the socio-political climate of Romania.
But the piece is also tangled up in the personal experience. Another one of the videos chronicles a fictional bus ride of a man calmly communicating death threats into his cell phone. The garden, surrounded by a sterile white roof, stands as a reminder of the simplicity and delicacy of life amidst the violent and abstract language of other displays. Even the viewer’s place in the ongoing “performance” of the piece, their immediate role in the production of the art itself, gives “Seductiveness” an introspective and immediate air.
In this relief, the question of Romanian identity or place in the world community passes into the periphery. Instead, lying at the center of all of this is, as the Society’s associate curator Hamza Walker puts it, “the question of moral progress in an existential sense.” Drawing from a fundamentally different set of experiences than one is likely to get, say, on the South Side of Chicago, “Seductiveness” attempts to pose and approach that question from many different standpoints. Be it a Chilean-Romanian nationalist or fictional character on a bus, the capacity for moral progression is addressed at every turn.
In a sense, this question of moral progress is one mark of a more unified world community. On the one hand, there is unprecedented access to new information about events as they unfold across the world, an ever constant reminder of the largeness of the world. In this we are allowed a greater picture of the human race’s capacity for good and for bad. But at the same time, this gives us a greater recognition of the difference between people and defines a more concrete sense of identity. And so perhaps it is fitting that such a work has ended up in Hyde Park, by way of Venice, from Romania.
The Renaissance Society, 5811 S. Ellis Avenue, Bergman Gallery, Cobb Hall 418. Opening May 2. Sunday, 4pm. Runs through June 2. Tuesday through Friday, 10am-5pm; Saturday and Sunday, 12pm-5pm. (773) 702-8670. renaissancesociety.org
