Texts

THINKING ON ART NATURE SOCIETY

Art means freedom. A responsible freedom. The artistic medium is, for me, both mat ter and means for communication – a space which is inhabited by the message. To feel / think, an aesthetic, synesthetic experience of knowledge. Truth and ethics, science and faith, all shared with the others. As an artist I observe. My images are eco-poetical, metaphysical and ethical com ments. I hope and believe in humanity. My work-space is a physical space but also a spiritual one, without vectors, which I constantly carry with me, in which I find myself and the strength to continue.

Marilena Preda Sânc 2019

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Fragments from a Possible Journal

I lived 34 years in communism and 31 years in democracy.

I spent the 1980–1989 period mostly in the studio. I often exhibited together with artists of my generation – there weren’t a lot of us. Only a small number of competitors were admitted to the Nicolae Grigorescu Institute of Fine Arts, and quite a lot of the graduates used to flee Romania, hoping to make genuine art and become acknowledged professionals abroad. Unfortunately, the number of those who succeeded at the level they dreamed of was rather small. After 1990 the exodus continued from the desire to know the world, in the hope of a better life.
In the 1980s we perceived intensely the impossibility to be free: we longed for the right to information, for the right to travel without limitations and constraints, we cried for the right to free expression. Besides, qua woman, I wanted to be allowed to decide my privacy.
After the December 1989 Revolution/coup d'état – the historians are going to decide! –, I started a new way of life. I participated in international exhibitions and got grants in Europe and USA by applying myself, not under the aegis of domestic institutions, a fact which gave me courage and confidence in my creation. After the raising of the Iron Curtain, Eastern Europe represented, for the Western culture, a territory to explore. Generously budgeted, the first exhibitions opened in the West were dedicated to the Fall of Communism. As the number of works approaching that subject was small, the artists adapted and, in the following years, produced valuable oeuvres, yet also clichés. For my part, I've never worked at others' command. If I had a say, either in images or in words, I did it in my way, at that very moment, a pattern I still observe today. I trust more in artist's (his or hers) natural and immediate response to the sociocultural context and less in commands or in conjectural self-regimentations and self-censorship.
After more than three decades, I see that the Universal History of Art still offers too little information on the East-European art, especially on the art made by women, i.e. on problems related to national-cultural local feminism. It's a type of hierarchy disadvantaging East-European culture, it's a type of cross-border discrimination, easy noticeable in other domains too. I tried to understand the consumerist society and its multiple democracies, able to balance between ethical universalism and political correctness, between HT, informational society and starvation, between wars waged for natural resources, emigration, covid-19 pandemic, etc., and I reached the conclusion, immortalized in a lettrist work of mine, that “Geopolitics is more important than Humanity/Nations/the Planet and Health”.
Even in the world of art there is a complex mechanism of cultural hegemony propelled by money and controlled by a system of auction houses, galleries, dealers, art fairs, corporatist collections, a.s.o. Certainly, we have online culture too, a second-rate/kitsch mass culture which is visible everywhere, impacting on the knowledge capacity of a great number of virtual users, that manipulates the appetite for a mediocre and cheap culture. In this democratic, diverse, offering and, in the same time, inhibitory context, I opted, qua woman artist, to preserve in images a balance between the utopian, metaphysical world, concentrated on the human being, and the right to reflect and react to the challenges the realities approached from an eco-feminist perspective offer. I feel sympathetic with the world I live in – it's my way to empathize with the others. My life experiences, relationships and reactions vs. the sociocultural context in which I lived and still live are those of a woman. To be feminist is a fact in a world where the political power, the local/global decisions are mostly made by men. In this sense, my last work, One Swallow Does not Make a Summer, is probatory: in 2021, there is only one woman minister in Romanian Government!
I discovered I was a feminist and I realized the complexity of the phenomenon after 1990, precisely, in 1995, when I participated with the video work Oldness in the exhibition “Stereo Type Femstival – City of Women Festival” (Ljubljana, Slovenia). The experience cleared the position I assumed qua feminist woman artist. The works I made in the 1980s, centred on my body-interfaced-with-the-world, were the issue of a creative process occurred during the communist coercive system, characterized by image censorship, limited access to information, non-connection to the global cultural phenomenon, marginalization of those who refused to adhere to the official models, lack of any art market, etc. The reflexive attitude, investigation and visualization of one's own experiences, represented a natural and compulsory path in my coming-of-age and awareness qua woman within a twisted milieu, in which I used to feel bitterly the deprivation of liberty, seen as a natural condition specific to any human being. The lack of freedom generated reflections, my thoughts belonged to a woman, the images did immerse in the realities I was interacting with rather metaphorically, avoiding them or taking refuge in the world I used to picture.
The series of intervened photos – “My Body is Space in Space, Time in Time and Memory of All” –, the artist's books/drawings/paintings were the products of my introspection, of my readings and meditations based on certain physical and mental states. I conceptualized that position in 2000, in the symposium “Co-operation” (Dubrovnik, Croatia), qua autochthonous eco-feminism, a feminism giving precedence to the ethics of a harmonious, well-balanced human being and to the idea of relationship with nature-as-sociocultural pattern.
In the 1990s, at the beginning of Romania's democratization, I experienced the awareness and networking of the images with some concepts of the feminist trend. Looking back at the Romanian art women made in the 1980s, I consider important, bold and original the visual creation of artists like Geta Brătescu, Ana Lupaș, Wanda Mihuleac and of my generation colleagues Aniela Firon, Roxana Trestioreanu, Vioara Bara, or of the poet and art critic Magda Cârneci, multi-connected to the intersectional domain of the feminist phenomenon of the time. The image of the feminine ego in its various hypostases and interworking, the local ethos in trades and productions specific to women, the aggression of woman's body by banning abortions (still an acute problem in some democracies – see Poland, 2021), were visually materialized through traditional practices and unconventional approaches, some of them, like Body Art, being prohibited. Since the communist power interdicted the nude image display and the use of video cameras. The photos with ink-and-collage interventions of the series “My Body is Space in Space, Time in Time and Memory of All”, which render my body in different attitudes and circumstances, were exhibited, in the 1980s, in Budapest (Hungary), Ljubljana (Yugoslavia), Kyoto (Japan) and Mexico City (Mexico). Most of those international manifestations fell into mail art, as the small size of the works and their circulation (dispatch by mail) eluded the communist censorship.
In the last three decades, thanks to some remarkable women active in the socio-political field – Mihaela Miroiu, Laura Grünberg, Oana Băluță – or in the visual arts' theoretical and curatorial domain – Ioana Vlasiu, Magda Cârneci, Liviana Dan, Olivia Nițiș –, the feminist concepts have influenced the oeuvre of several women artists, who, gradating the local identitary space, related it to certain models of the global consumerist society. Women artists like Aurora Kyrály, Patricia Teodorescu, Alexandra Croitoru, Elian, Suzana Dan, Ana Bănică, Larisa Cruțeanu, Delia Popa, Magdalena Pelmuș, Raluca Ilaria Demetrescu, Ana Petrovici-Popescu, Flavia Lupu (mentioning but some of them) reflect, in works on material or ephemeral support, in performances and installations displayed in (inter)national events, themes connected with woman's condition (woman-qua-object/immigrant woman/woman protester), family, sexism, gender and ageing. Romanian feminism seems a puzzle of spontaneous attitudes in which the personal history in quest of identity in a world disrupted by contextual hierarchies gets priority. The number of women artists expressing the responses and reflections concerning women's status make up a consistent meta-visual construct.
As a woman artist, I tried to express, in still and motion images, the specific condition of the timeless feminine universe and to identify, in the immediate reality, the issues on which to reflect. The possibilities offered by our apparently bulimic transition democracy and by the European Community, which is less inclined to fairly subsidize culture, made me promptly react to the transnational cultural discriminations, often transborder constructions or (centre–edge) cultural hierarchies, and to the disadvantages created by a local fragile economy, dominated by the dictatorship of the global financial institutions.
In the fluid context subdued to an establishment created, for generations, by men for men, I, qua woman artist and woman professor active in the artistic higher education system, consider that my duty, my way of life, is to reflect, to highlight, to criticize constructively, in my works, the different situations/aspects connected to the contemporary decisional world, which is often violent/inequitable/mostly machist (phallocratic).

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Eco Art - Ecomind

Eco Art sums up a large diversity of artistic concepts and practices, using them as means to underline issues regarding the environment: the destruction of ecosystems and our quality of life through wars, pollution, exacerbated consumerism and “a global, metaphysical collective obedience” (Hannah Arendt, 1973) subduing us to the interests of powers that solely serve the global financial imperialism, the category of ,,happy few’’. Very often, our lives, the lives of common people, the destiny of an entire community or nation are altered by the will of a cynical Power that assumes the right to brutally interfere, without evaluating the (oftentimes nefarious) consequences, solely driven by the desire to satisfy their yearning for more power and wealth. Technology is often used by this Power to dominate, manipulate, monitor, censor and destroy. Tolerance, multiculturalism, care for one another and for the fate of planet Earth, democracy (the true kind, not its postcolonial surrogate) become unreachable objectives.
TV channels, newspapers and different types of cultural events are frequently engaging in the compromise of “self-censorship” and of reframing a story “within accepted parameters”. The multiple modern democracies are riding herd, between political correctness and more theoretical efforts of ethical universalism, on a topsy-turvy world, where geo-political interests provoc trauma, histories full of suffering for both man and the life of the planet. In the rush for immediate prosperity, one forgets that the Earth, as a living organism, has a limited degree of endurance, and that the wounds we cause it can end up destroying us and the world we live in.
I believe that this state of affairs has helped diversify the concepts and artistic practices originally stemming from Land Art. The aesthetic, introverted, or demiurgic dimension in the relationship between artist and nature are reflected in the 1960s and 1970s environments has become increasingly participative-militant, centered on lived-and-relational aestheticsin contemporary art. Over the past two decades, many critical studies, performative action, site-specific urban installations made with natural and recyclable materials, abandoned industrial spaces turned into green cultural areas, media works and transdisciplinary exhibitions have been aimed at raising awareness, education and action to protect the environment and quality of life in the globalized digital age.
Mixt team of artists, scientists, anthropologysts and sociologists, carry out in situ or virtual multimedia projects engage in debates, think holistically starting from heoristically possible assumptions in search of models of living and cohabiting with reality in a postcolonial and posthuman future. There is an ethical aspect of Eco Art pieces, the result of a balance between the two cohabitant attitudes, the one of the neutral observer, and the identitary one, specific for a local social/cultural matrix. Eco Art works contain direct or subliminal militant messages, in a spatial-corporeal continuity inhabited by an Eco-mind, an artistic conscience that is capable to mirror its era, true to size, an Ars Memoria – repository of our passage, and also model new possible worlds, intelligent worlds conceived in the spirit of hope and love for others – humans, animals, plants, the entire universe.
Art means freedom. A responsible freedom. The artistic medium is, for me, both matter and means for communication – a space which is inhabited by the message. To feel / think, an aesthetic, synesthetic experience of knowledge. Truth and ethics, science and faith, all shared with the others. As an artist I observe. My images are eco-poetical, metaphysical and ethical comments. I hope and believe in humanity. My workspace is a physical space but also a spiritual one, without vectors, which I constantly carry with me, in which I find myself and the strength to continue.
In my personal artistic work, I have experienced several stages of relating to nature and society. During the first stage, in the 80s, my work contained an existential interest concerning the connection with nature, viewed as refuge and consubstantiality. I viewed my body as a place for meditation, an inner/outer landscape built from personal and collective memory. I translated these experiences in painting, drawing, body photo action, and, after 1990, in an artist book and video (My Body is Space in Space, Time in Time and Memory of All, 1983).
After 1990, the newly found access to information, the freedom to travel and the freedom of expression lead me to Visual Critical Thinking and Present Historically Reflective Art. Integrating traditional forms of art and new media, my art works visualize and investigate the body/mind/soul/behavior in relation to nature and social/political and representational space, gender / ageism, and women as leaders, in an eco-feminist key. The last series of works, which I began in 2016, is influenced by a state of restlessness that is present in society, due to economic and military aggressivity, which made me remember the 60s, the Flower Power Age. This general mood was considerably amplified by the pandemic and the war. The lettrist works are militant, they contain clear anti dictatorship and antiwar messages, vehemently criticizing the post-truth, completely lacking empathy towards the other era we live in. Eco Art, in this context, blends forms of art, generates attitudes, a constructive way of thinking, of imagining a world. It provide a home for the living.

Marilena Preda Sânc
(keynote lecture at the conference Nature – Arts Interconections, Mansarda Faculty of Arts and Design, West University of Timisoara (November 2-4, 2022)