Dan Perjovschi

L-I-F-E
By Andrew Maerkle


All images: Dan Perjovschi – Installation view at “MOT Annual 2016: Loose Lips Save Ships,” Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, 2016. Photo Shizune Shiigi, courtesy the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo.

Known to art viewers around the world for his simple and humorous wall drawings satirizing both current events and ingrained biases, Dan Perjovschi was born in Romania in 1961. Having grown up mainly under the repressive dictatorship of Nicolae Ceausescu, he emerged as one of Romania’s leading cultural figures following the 1989 revolution that overthrew Ceausescu, recognized not only for his art but also for his work in the Ministry of Culture and with the news magazine Revista 22. Since then he has exhibited around the world at institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto; Tate Modern, London; Le Magasin, Grenoble; the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven; and in the Aichi Triennale 2013. Perjovschi recently returned to Japan to make a new wall drawing for the “MOT Annual 2016: Loose Lips Save Ships,” organized by the artists’ cooperative Artist’s Guild in conjunction with the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo. ART iT met with him before the exhibition opening to discuss the context behind his practice.

The “MOT Annual 2016: Loose Lips Save Ships” was on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo from March 5 to May 29 of this year.

Interview:

ART iT: I thought we could start by addressing one of the subtexts of this exhibition, which I view as a gesture toward institutional critique. The formation of Artist’s Guild was in part necessitated by the lack of support for young artists in the institutional framework in Japan, and bringing the group into the museum is an interesting way to speak back to that. In this light, how do you understand the role of the museum from your own experience?

DP: The museum is supposed to be the artist’s ally. Recently, particularly starting around the year 2000, the art world has become like a huge market. Art is a commodity. But public institutions like MOT are not driven by profit. Their mission is to generate new ideas and ways of thinking. This is important for the artists who make challenging works that are not supported by the market. Of course, like any institution affected by globalization, museums face the pressure of providing spectacles to the public, and they are also affected by political pressure, whether it’s because art isn’t fully appreciated within the local culture, or because the museum director is the crony of someone in power. It does not always function the way it should.
I think part of the goal of Artist’s Guild with this exhibition is to make the institution nervous, to remind the institution of its mission to create the possibility for discourse, which is of course a complex thing to do these days. It’s certainly not easy to have my work on the walls. Families come here. Politicians come here – maybe, if they don’t go to football. Contemporary art is hard to accommodate, especially in a place where you have to protect it, educate people, and so on. Museums are here to create platforms for people to experiment. Artists see something in society that they think is bad and they want to articulate it, and the museum is the platform for doing that. That’s what this exhibition is about.

ART iT: Yet the references to censorship in your work here seem to directly refer to incidents of censorship occurring in Japanese museums now, where works with political content have been modified or removed from exhibitions.

DP: Let me tell you something. I grew up in a dictatorship, so I know what censorship means. People here are making signals that it’s started, but there are different kinds of censorship. There is one kind where somebody says you have to pull the work because the prime minister is angry about it. That can happen. Then there is another more subtle censorship, where the artist doesn’t show the work because he already knows it will be censored. That’s the really dangerous censorship. If you want to have a healthy society, don’t let it get that far. All the art and culture in Romania had to pass through the censorship committee, and all of it ended up as a caricature as a result. Romanian artists had to modify their language, and once they got the freedom of expression, they no longer knew what to do with it. That kind of censorship will kill the society.
Of course, freedom of expression comes with responsibility. It’s easy for an artist to blame the curator, blame the institution, blame everybody else. But you also have to take responsibility for your own discourse. This is public space, open for everybody. We also have to shoulder part of the burden. My piece here is not about blaming somebody. It’s about the notion of censorship and how it can happen. I am not battling with the institution. I am here to say, hey, in my opinion, watch out.

ART iT: Has your view of public space changed over the almost 30 years that have passed since the revolutions of 1989?

DP: In Romania alone the public space has changed dramatically, but it’s the same everywhere. Recently in the West there have been all these movements by young people, like the Indignados and Occupy. They are like anti-bodies reacting to a virus. People are seeking to reclaim public space because it has been privatized. I can get in trouble in a museum because my work is outspoken, but on the street anyone can sell any kind of shit drink while saying it’s the best drink in the world, and that’s ok? Why? Everyone sells lies, and I can’t speak the truth? Of course, I don’t pretend to know everything or even that I’m right all the time. That’s why my drawings are cartoon-like. They are an interpretation of the world. They are designed to be both amusing and thought provoking. I don’t say, “This is bad.” I say, “Well, bad is composed of three letters: B-A-D.” It’s like a deconstruction of the concept. However I interpret the world as an artist, it’s only one perspective, but an institution has to accommodate many perspectives. I think it’s courageous that they give me this space and invite me to show here, because no one knows how it will turn out. That’s fantastic.


ART iT: Your works seem to investigate how signs operate in the world and how different ideologies coexist. For example, you have the drawing with the acronyms “WWI / WWII / WWW” all in a row, which shows the overlooked contiguities between different world events.

DP: It’s about context. Anything you articulate has its own context, its own history. There are no longer just one or two superpowers running the world, there are many, so now it’s more complex. Look at the drawing with the Japanese flag here. It’s both the Japanese “rising sun” and the Romanian revolutionary flag, with the hole cut out where the symbol of the dictatorship was.
I try to speak on multiple levels when I make my drawings. I start with my own experience and judgment and then I try to put it in a broader frame. I try to make an intellectual language. I’m highly educated, I read a lot, so this is not a language of the rebellion of the street. This is a language that can simplify complex issues while somehow retaining their complexity, and in a funny way. Is this a Chinese yuan symbol, or a Japanese yen symbol? It could go either way. It’s like, does your currency define you?
I always start with a package of drawings that already exist and have been done elsewhere, and then combine them with new drawings that refer to the topic of the exhibition or local events. Because this exhibition has a theme, I was more focused here. There is the museum theme, the censorship theme, the Olympics, a bit on government, and then some other things. It’s a bit more refined than usual.

ART iT: But putting all these images in relation to each other in a dynamic way also exposes how signs are altered and recombined to create new meaning. For example you start with an L, then take away one mark so it becomes an I; then add two lines to make an F; and add a third to turn it into an E. Put them together and you get: L-I-F-E.

DP: It’s also a question of language. My drawings are quite similar to newspaper drawings – many of them could be paired with an article. But both the text and image become a general image. I want to collapse the distinctions between language, word and image, because for me a word is already an image – an image that encapsulates a concept. But viewers are free to combine them in their own ways. In my experience, people see only a part of the drawings. They see what they recognize or what they understand. So it’s like a supermarket of ideas from which viewers can pick and choose. I don’t think too much about the composition. I let things be random. Often after getting home from an exhibition I look at the photographs and say, oh, why did I do that, and that? There is no definitive piece. It can always be modified. Even the drawings evolve over repetition. It’s as though I am writing a novel that changes a bit with every writing.

ART iT: In that sense do you feel any affinity with conceptual artists who work with language, like Lawrence Weiner, for example?

DP: Of course. But I would say that I belong more to a family of people using drawn images in a direct and simple way, like Raymond Pettibon, David Shrigley, or Nedko Solakov. On the other hand, I’m not poetical, I’m political. Each of us uses the language in a different way. For me it’s like reportage. I try to create a philosophy in two or three lines that gives viewers the sense that they could do it, too. It’s not so complicated. We all have this language. Kids can draw, even though nobody teaches them. Where does it come from? It comes with us. We are now living in a time where people constantly use images – they take a photo and immediately post it to Instagram or Facebook. People talk through images, but I’m not sure they know what they are communicating. I try to remind people that they already have a way to visualize their ideas.


ART iT: I’m interested in your work with the Romanian news publication Revista 22. What is your perception of how news and politics travel in the world today?

DP: We all share the same news at a certain level, and the stupid thing is that what we share is the star gossip. It’s infotainment. Of course each country still has its own particular news, and the same phenomenon is reported differently in different places. At the hotel they have the Japan Times with the New York Times as an insert, and I enjoy comparing the lead items they choose for the same day. So news is by no means uniform.
I’m old school, as they say, but I think the printed newspaper is very interesting, because with everything else – television, the Internet – you are tempted to react too quickly. Newspapers need time to print, and this time is essential. Revista 22 is a weekly magazine, and I have to say that at the moment we are in a bit of an ideological conflict. Coming from a former communist society, the intelligentsia tried to compensate for the years of forced collectivism by championing individual rights, human rights – fantastic! – but in my opinion they have gone too far to the right, and need to come back to the center.
So news is very important to me and these outlets are important. I love newspapers. I love the combination of the title, the image, even the advertising, all on one page. It’s a package of knowledge. With online media, even though there is no space restriction, and you can link every word to something else, I find it harder to stay focused. I’m 55 years old. I can focus better on printed paper than on a scrolling screen. But I think the Web is fantastic too, because it’s global. I’ve been using Facebook, adding drawings to my wall and leaving the settings open. Normally a work can be seen only by the people who come to the museum, but with Facebook people can share it around the world and you don’t know where it will end up.
You asked me about museums: they can’t afford to stagnate because they have to adapt to the new media. Lately when I go to an exhibition and meet the press, most of them are from online platforms. It’s a clear shift. The interesting thing in Romania is that visual art is covered more on the radio than on TV. On TV they don’t care about culture any more.

ART iT: What do you think about the labor situation in the arts? You have referred to your work as “naked drawing,” but we could perhaps take it further and imagine a “naked artist.” You show up with a pen, but there’s nothing else that signifies you as an artist, so it could be easy for people to dismiss you.

DP: It’s true. But the dismissal is also part of my work. Somebody says, my five-year-old can do that. I say, well, the five-year-old can do it, but you don’t. The five-year-old still has some joy, but you have forgotten it.
What I want to say is that my practice is the result of years of effort. I’ve already been working for 30 years now, and have been doing what you see here for the last 15 years – half my career. But it’s the result of struggle, and the desire to make things more simple and efficient. I don’t get involved in the complicated machinery. Transporting art is expensive: there is insurance, crating, storage. When you create something that has value you are in trouble – what do you do with it? But what I do is free. The drawings are all stored in my head, and I can take them out whenever and wherever I want. That gives me room and elasticity. It’s just me and some markers.
It also comes from the idea of not depending on anyone else. I don’t need technicians. It was a conscious decision. I want to be free from the apparatus that modifies my work through regulations. I don’t have to wait for the technician with the cable to come around. I’ve seen so many fantastic artists who were terrorized because of whatever technical problem they had. So I try to give myself more time for thinking.
But it took many attempts to get here, and not all of them were good. I started with small drawings in my notebook, and then in time they became poster-sized statements. And then because I had to cover a big space, I grew more confident with my work, because there’s still something performative in my drawings. With the marker there is solid contact with the wall – not smooth, but hard and resistant. I like that.

ART iT: Erasing is an important part of your work too. For example, you made a performance where you tattooed “Romania” on your shoulder, and then 10 years later you made another performance in which you had it erased. When I first read about these performances it was hard to relate them to the cartoons, but actually this notion of erasure seems to be at the root of the visual language you have created.

DP: Yes. It’s not about the cartoon in itself, it’s about me and the body. Tattoos were not so popular in 1993 when I did the first performance in Romania, but the body was still a radical tool for expression. During the revolution about 1000 people were killed and another 5000 or so wounded, so it was strongly associated with blood and the body. And also we were very poor; the body is cheap. You have it with you already for free – even the markers are expensive! So that’s why I did it. It was anti-nationalist. And then I took it away 10 years later in a gesture that was similar to the drawings, where the act of painting it over creates a new possibility. It’s not the destruction of the work but a new birth. A lot of artists paint something at a certain moment and then it stays that way forever. I can continuously upgrade my drawings, enhance them. It’s like my notebook – a new page.


ART iT: In a previous interview you discussed your activities during the dictatorship era in the group Studio 35, with which you organized many exhibitions. In hindsight, you said, “We sacrificed the truth.” What did you mean by that?

DP: Yes, that was during the dictatorship. We could not directly confront the censorship regime, so we had to circumvent it through metaphors and other tactics. It happened instinctively, but one thing we decided to do was to be hyper active in a country where nothing happened. We tried to do something every week, and it was almost too much for the censors. They said, come on, are you doing another exhibition? Sometimes they didn’t even show up. But we sacrificed the confrontation. We avoided it. Instead of looking the monster in the face, we stayed in the shadows. If you were to look now at the work I made then, you wouldn’t even know what I was trying to say. I learned from that and now I always try to speak the truth.
In a way I like the ethos of Artist’s Guild and this idea of coming together to find ways to tackle the problem. They’ve come up with some interesting solutions. Based on my experiences under both dictatorship and democracy, I have to say that anything that is not true will not make sense once its context disappears. You cannot always have the dictator next to your painting to explain what it’s saying. He’s long gone. But the painting stays. So you must be aware that artworks function in parallel universes, both in the present and then in some other time. I escape that a bit because ultimately my work is erased. Still, it’s possible to look at a drawing of mine from 20 years ago and say, it was a bit on the right side then, now it’s more center-left. I’ve pushed them in different directions.
Getting back to my experience with Studio 35, it was simple survival mode then. You are young, you want to show. Now I’ve moved back to my hometown in Transylvania, and some artists there are trying to create a new platform. In a way it’s the same thing: how can you organize a place where you can share your ideas and communicate with people? It’s so complicated for artists. We are citizens just like anyone else, but then we want something extra – some support. How can you claim this extra in a world where people have so many problems? Why should the state help you? So the contexts are different between dictatorship and democracy, but I realize the young artists are facing the same problem I was 45 years ago. My advice to them is to try to be honest to your work. Don’t worry about fitting in somewhere. It’s all so delicate and fragile. Tomorrow you could be a superstar and the next day nothing. It’s a life full of amazing moments but also contradiction and instability. You must have a strong character to deal with that. It’s like going to war with a tank made of cardboard.
My history and my present are connected, but I’m also constantly reinterpreting my past. I was angry with myself because I thought I had not been courageous enough during the dictatorship. Now I’ve come to terms with it. I can say that I did some good things. Because ultimately nobody cares. If you go to protest and get killed, they say, we’ll always remember you, and by the next day they’ve already forgotten. You have to be smarter than that. I think I found it. I make the effort to extract the drawing and then I put it on the wall and people do the rest for me on Facebook, spreading it across the planet. Amazing! People don’t have time now. They don’t have time to read a long article, but they can see an image. So that is what I do. I give them the image.

Dan Perjovschi: L-I-F-E

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