Alexandru Antik. ”Romanian art wasn't moved by those artists I mentioned in my list. Maybe now that the art world has also become globalized.”

Alexandru Antik, b. 1950, artist

1. What American art exhibitions did you see between 1965 and 1989?

The Disappearance and Reappearance of the Image: American painting after 1945, Dalles Hall, Bucharest, 1968.

The Visual Artist at Work in America, Sports Hall, Cluj-Napoca, 1979.

2. Between 1965 and 1989, did you see American art in Romania or abroad?

In that timespan, I saw the two American art exhibitions, the first being American Art... at Dalles Hall in Bucharest in 1968. I was in eleventh grade and I heard there was as American art exhibition at Dalles Hall, so I went to see it with a classmate from school. The journey from Târgu Mureș was quite a wild ride, hitch-hiking and taking a freight train, so by the time we got to the exhibition we were tired and cold and we almost fell asleep in the exhibition hall. It was a teenage adventure, but also an impactful experience on us as future artists. 

The second exhibition was The Visual Artist at Work in America at the Sports Hall in Cluj-Napoca, 1979. Exhibition catalogue The Visual Artist at Work in America, Romania, 1979. Project director Gail Becker. Edited by Ursula Devgon. 

During and after college, I went through multiple materials on American art, but I didn't get the chance to see any other real exhibitions. 

3. Which American artists and what American approaches/trends/styles interested you at the time?

I graduated an arts high school, but unfortunately didn't get any information on American art in general in school, nor about approaches/trends/styles of modern or contemporary American art of the 20th century. Universal art history in high school was focused on West-European or East-European art history. In college, I had the chance to get to know the work of some famous American artists and some of them fascinated me, but I can't say they had a major impact on me. 

I can give you a list of the American artists that were on my radar throughout my 50 years of practice. Some of these artists had input and contributed to forming my artistic vision in some way, but I can't make a hierarchy of it. 

The list of American artists: pop art (Robert Rauschenberg, Richard Hamilton, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtensein), action painting (Jackson Pollock), fluxus and media (Wolf Vostell, Ken Friedman), land art (Robert Smithson, Robert Morris, Richard Serra), concept art and performance installations (Joseph Kosuth, Allan Karpow, Chris Burden), minimal art (Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, Richard Serra, Frank Stella, Robert Smithson, Barnett Newman), amerikai absztrakt expresszionisták (Frank Stella, Barnett Newman, Arshile Gorky, Willem de Kooning), various generations of feminist art (Nancy Spero, Miriam Schapiro, Betsy Damon, Judy Chicago, Mary Beth Edelson, Ana Mendieta, Cindy Sherman...), neo-pop művészet (Allan McCollum, Haim Steinbach, Jeff Koons...).

4. What position did American art and visual culture have in the artistic milieu you frequented at the time; was it a topic of conversation, was it influential?

Please compare it with the influence of European art or art from communist spaces.

In the art scene I was part of, I don't think contemporary American art was a primary influence. We were more interested in the great West-European artistic events or the ones in neighboring countries. This is easily explained, given that my generation was culturally isolated from everything that was happening in the world at large, information got to us very slowly, which we experienced as history, not as experiments we could use in our own cultural context. We often filled in what seeped through to us with fantasy. I'll tell you a story. In high school, I had an experience around a fictional novel, Hungarian writer Tibor Déry's An Imaginary Report on an American Rock Festival. It was only a while later that I found out it wasn't a real report and that the writer had never been to America. I was a bit disappointed, but I came to terms with it after a while and I thought "I don't have to get to America as an artist, the thing that's important is to want to get to America".

5. Retrospectively, do you think that American art and visual culture were a decisive factor in your development as an artist/theoretician?

Unfortunately, I was completely out of sync with the international art scene. I understood a lot of things completely the wrong way around when I was young, I lived in my own world, I even distorted some things with my fantasies. I felt a lot of things, I lived in a different context. That's how it happened that I saw American pop art in 1968 and only understood it much later, after 1989. Without ever having been to America. 

6. Did the American art exhibitions organized in Romania during that period contribute decisively in this sense, or did the information you had about American art and visual culture in general contribute more to this impact?

Only after 1989 did I have a revelation about Jackson Pollock's action painting, but especially about Marcel Duchamp's work. There are two works by Duchamp that really inspired me and I made two artistic paraphrases:

Alexandru Antik: Voyeur Art Show (2017), multimedia installation – a paraphrase of M. Duchamp: Étant Donnés (1946–1966). 

https://www.facebook.com/100000277857080/videos/pcb.1755195757833002/175 5189544500290 

Alexandru Antik: The Machine of Desire, multimedia installation, 2017 – a paraphrase of M. Duchamp: The Large Glass, 1915.–1923, Museum of Art Philadelphia 

https://www.facebook.com/100000277857080/videos/pcb.1755195757833002/175 5187917833786 

I even held a conference on this adventure of mine with Duchamp and these two paraphrases. The contents of the conference:

1. Paraphrases, reconstructions, references to the original cultural icon that is Marcel Duchamp's Fountain.

2. A presentation of my artistic projects: The Machine of Desire and Voyeur Art Show, inspired by Duchamp's works The Large Glass and Étant Donnés. 

7. Do you remember whether the presentation and reception of American art and visual culture were encouraged by the communist regime?

While Ceaușescu was still establishing himself, the regime facilitated some cultural and artistic exchanges out of political interest. The two American exhibitions I mentioned were done just in such circumstances.

8. Was being a sympathizer of American art esthetically/ideologically/politically risky?

What can I say, back then I wasn't aware of certain phenomena, such as the fact that American abstract art was itself part of the Cold War, somehow in opposition to the communist regimes' social realism, so if I knew I might've had a different attitude. But since I was unaware and saw abstractionism as a purely aesthetic phenomenon, I didn't feel this tectonic shift in universal art. 

Sometimes when I went to Bucharest I would visit the American Library and I never had anything bad happen to me because of it. I think they were innocent visits, I was happy to find some of the catalogues they had there. Here are some of them:

9. Retrospectively, do you think the influence of American art and visual culture on Romanian art and visual culture between 1965 and 1989 contributed to the transformation/development of Romanian culture and society? If so, in what way?

I think that in my entourage of the art world people weren't very interested in contemporary American art. It was only in the '90s that we felt and understood the true value of American art and visual culture. Of course, certain artistic inspirations and influences did exist. But Romanian art wasn't moved by those artists I mentioned in my list. Maybe now that the art world has also become globalized.