Liviana Dan. ”After 1989, the "America effect" became a personal experience.”

 Liviana Dan, b. 1953, art historian and curator

Cold, impersonal censorship failed to curtail the permissiveness that enabled the American experiment in Romania. 

The year 1968 was significant because of its extravagance. 

The Dalles Hall hosted the exhibition The Disappearance and Reappearance of the Image - American painting after 1945, featuring works by Gorky, Pollock, Warhol, Newman, M. Louis, Stella, Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns. Along with my parents, who were schoolteachers in a village in Transilvania, I came to Bucharest especially to see this exhibition of American art. I was too young for artistic experiments, but I remember the hordes of people waiting in line down the street to see the show. There were certainly hundreds of people who did not conceive of abstract expressionism as an adversary of socialist realism, as per the CIA's agenda. I don't know if they all understood the triumph of free culture over totalitarianism. Maybe they didn't even understand the technique, the style of the works, the poetry of the titles, but they definitely recognized the artists' absolute freedom. It was a kind of ground zero, lacking any whiff of ideology. Then came Jasper Johns at the Atheneum and Rauschenberg at the American embassy, and in 1972 The Form and Process of Creation in American Painting of the XXth Century, also at the Dalles Hall, and New American Sculpture at the American library. 

A pathos of distance would sweep over Romanian art - works that were seductive through their lack of functionality, through an abstract poetry oriented towards white / Robert Ryman / iridescent white, white and moist installations. Washes of an utopic vision with hurt sensibilities / Mark Rothko began to pop up. The influence of the American spirit was hugely bolstered by institutions and agendas and also brought conceptual elegance. Artists believed in utopias. Their imagination allowed them to demand the impossible. The political could become culture. 

I believe more and more strongly that, at that time, the art critic Anca Arghir already knew about Rosalind Krauss. 

***

After 1989, the "America effect" became a personal experience. 

The limits of critique and radicalism imposed an objective detachment from the more dangerous areas of visual language. I learned that, sometimes, artistic behavior has the value of a work of art. I learned to see objects in esthetic terms. Illusion lost its scope and essence. The kind of emotion and positioning changed the basic elements that made up a work of art, an exhibition, a museum. Experimentation was still radical, but rooted in reason and logic. 

The main actors are still the MOMA / actually Alfred Barr / David Smith's acute violence kind of intellectual structure and a combative candor in any discourse. 


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