Olia Mishchenko, Mona Vatamanu and Florin Tudor: New World
Exhibition Essay by Mona Filip
New WorldKoffler Gallery, 2008
"Reconstruction, no matter how difficult, is one of man’s greatest joys… One who truly rejoices is alike to someone whose house burnt down yet who, stricken by misfortune deep in his heart, starts rebuilding a new home. And for each newly placed brick, his heart fills with joy.” 1 These are the teachings of a Hasidic story recounted by Martin Buber and referenced by Romanian philosopher Andrei Plesu in a lecture on happiness in the East and the West. Construction and reconstruction are unavoidable and indispensable life processes. Yet, almost twenty years after the fall of Communism, reconstruction is still delayed and obstructed in parts of Eastern Europe. The prospects of national and personal happiness remain uncertain under the sign of deflated hopes and bloated cynicism.
Artists Olia Mishchenko, Mona Vatamanu and Florin Tudor share the experience of growing up in Communist systems. Born in Ukraine and later immigrating to Canada as a teenager, Mishchenko has experienced the transitions and shifting perceptions of space inevitable in the course of being displaced and settling in a new environment. Romanian born and based Vatamanu and Tudor continue to witness the hopes and anxieties of a post-Communist society struggling to recover, redefine, and reconstruct itself. Originating from distinct but overlapping perspectives, the works presented in New World address the turmoil and expectations intrinsic to rebuilding one’s life on unknown territory, evoking the current circumstances of many Eastern European countries.
Infused with insight into bureaucratic structures and utopias of efficiency, Olia Mishchenko’s work situates itself ambivalently, with humour and tenderness, between a critique of productivity gone mad and an enchantment with poetic idealism. Her meticulous pen and ink drawings depict what appears to be a pre-industrial society of builders in the process of endless production. Relinquishing the pragmatic constraints of utilitarian architecture, Mishchenko embraces the unrestricted potential of drawing. Idiosyncratic, makeshift and outright impossible building methods take precedence over practical design. In an unfolding visual narrative, identical characters relentlessly fabricate an ever-expanding environment. For the Koffler Gallery installation, Mishchenko created a site-specific project developed over a month-long residency, transferring this world-in-process directly onto the gallery walls. Without the limiting borders of a sheet of paper, the minutely drawn landscape embraces a panoramic viewpoint. To incite exploration, viewers are invited to discover the site through binoculars and an improvised viewfinder imitating the coin-operated devices found at major tourist attractions. Curious visitors can indeed discover “homemade” versions of famous architectural feats such as Vladimir Tatlin’s Constructivist tower2 and Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic domes — a spectacle of North American utopias intermingled with Eastern European state-imposed idealism, redeemed here by individual inventiveness.
In their work, Mona Vatamanu and Florin Tudor investigate the visual, emotional, and socio-political impact of architecture. For them, the landscapes of Bucharest and other Eastern European cities reveal layers of social and political meaning. Examined as documents, urban sites disclose a traumatic history in which the personal clashes with political ideology and state control. In Vatamanu and Tudor’s video, Il Mondo Novo, the construction site becomes a metaphor for a nation that faces, with wary anticipation, its own political transformation. Through its formal composition, monumental scale, and painterly quality, the work references an Eighteenth-century fresco by Giandomenico Tiepolo.3 In Tiepolo’s original, a curious crowd gathers in front of a street performer’s tent, presumably to view images of the “new world” — the Americas — projected through a new optic invention. With backs turned to the audience and facing the performer’s tent, the group blocks our view. In the background, beyond the tent, blue waters and the horizon allude to the fantasy of distant travels. Vatamanu and Tudor’s video transposes the group of onlookers to the edge of a construction site, gazing out into the yet formless terrain. Silent and slowed-down to near stillness, the video resembles a mural hesitantly coming to life. Gallery visitors extend the scene beyond the frame of the projection, joining the rank of spectators to an obscured view, with no knowledge of what will eventually be there to see. Marking the transition from the old torn down structure to the new layer of architecture underway, the construction site becomes a space of expectation, enticing both the viewers’ gazes, and their subjective projections along with it.
Situating viewers on a symbolic threshold, Vatamanu and Tudor’s Il Mondo Novo positions us in a place where nothing has yet begun and all is still in a state of potentiality. We are waiting, just like the artists’ compatriots, for a reconstruction that keeps being postponed. The prolonged transition in post-1989 Romania secured power for new waves of second-hand ex-Communists born-again as wild capitalists. For fifty years, until 1989, the totalitarian regime had imposed a regimented way of life focused primarily on the suppression of individual liberties. A society of people accustomed to having their lives dictated by the state does not adjust easily to sudden freedom. Fears set back development, confining societal as well as individual advancement, to a status of unattainable desire.
On the other hand, the world created by Mishchenko is a place where all possibilities are attempted with utopian enthusiasm. Using any means at hand, potential is pushed overboard, producing an excess that never reaches completion. Under Communism, state-designed model life was unliveable, as the Western dream remained intangible. “Incapable of providing a decent level of life (not to mention well-being) and concerned rather with compromising through terror the joy of living,” points out Andrei Plesu, “Communist ideology was very fond of the theme of happiness and the tempo of the victorious march. In other words, happiness was at the same time impossible and mandatory.”4 The only escape was a self-made reality produced against all odds: by breaking down a wall inside a standard apartment to create a breathable space; by closing a balcony to achieve privacy; by establishing underground networks of food provision; by stealing telegraph poles just for the sake of it.
Underlying both works in the exhibition is the pervasive sense that progress remains elusive. We continue to live with the residues of different utopias that time has proved inadequate for real human needs and desires. Negotiating these territories involves a difficult process of remembering and forgetting painful public and personal histories. We constantly readjust to new grounds in order to actively construct our happiness. To examine and process past traumas is essential for re-building on a stable foundation. Real change requires a critical reconsideration of the past and a lucid scrutiny of contemporary reality. Exploring the collective projections manifested in the construction/reconstruction impulse, New World offers thoughtful commentary on the idealism that ultimately incites us towards true personal and social transformation.
1 Andrei Plesu, About Happiness in the East and the West, and Other Essays, Bucharest: Humanitas Multimedia, 2006, Audiobook. (Quote translated from Romanian by Mona Filip.)
2 The Monument to the Third International was designed and blueprinted by Tatlin but never built. It was intended to be raised in Petrograd after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, as the headquarters and monument of the Comintern, as well as a symbol of modernity that would overpower the Eiffel Tower in Paris.
3 The original among several versions was painted by Tiepolo in 1791 for his villa in Zianigo. The fresco was later painstakingly transferred to the Venetian museum Ca’Rezzonico.
4 Andrei Plesu, About Happiness in the East and the West, and Other Essays, Bucharest: Humanitas Multimedia, 2006, Audiobook. (Quote translated from Romanian by Mona Filip.)