Time Travel: INSTANT-ART MANIFESTO

TIME IS A BOOK is a project founded by artists Dirk Braeckman and Els Dietvorst. Time Travel spread over 300 books internationally. deBuren went to Bucharest and posed these questions to four young artists. Can art be engaged? Can you, as an artist, still be radical? Today, director David Schwartz responds.

INSTANT-ART MANIFESTO

Obedient televisions. Controlled newspapers. Obeyed art. Official art. Non-reactive art. Absent art. Lack of activism through art. Lack of engaged art. Lack of radical art. Lack of art. Lack of political involvement. Lack of civil rights activism. Lack of sense of justice. Lack of justice. Lack of minority rights. Lack of minorities' public representation. Lack of minorities' right to express themselves and to be represented. Lack of freedom of speech. Lack of spontaneous mass protest. Lack of riot. Lack of community spirit. Lack of community gathering. Lack of community. Lack of gatherings. Lack of social action. Lack of political action. Lack of radical action. Lack of action. Lack of immediate, instant, collective reaction/action.
Refusal of the instant art.
Refusal of the debate.
Refusal of the community.
Refusal of the minority.
Refusal of the representation.

FIGHT BACK! REACT!

The Romanian Orthodox Church is spending one billion dollars on building the biggest cathedral of South-Eastern Europe. REACT!
The government is shortening the retirement payments by fifteen percent. REACT!
The extreme religious right members are throwing stones at the Gay Parade. REACT!
The president is calling a journalist a “stinking gypsy”. REACT!
The ministry of foreign affairs states that “the Roma people should be sent to a camp in Africa”. REACT!
An American marine officer kills a man in a car accident and is protected by diplomatic immunity. REACT!

Right here. Right now. Watch / Observe / Document / Debate / Protest / Perform. React!
Every week.
1.    Instant reaction: act/re-act instantly and respond to present day political issues and immediate events.
2.    Public reaction: perform your statements in public crowded places.
3.    Represent the unrepresented: perform the absent, the invisible, the unpopular.

Immediate response to social and political issues. Perform the political present. Shake the “reality construction”. Fight the passive. Fight the inert. Fight the delay. Act fast and furious.

For three months, every week, a cross-disciplinary team of artists, sociologists, activists will build up performance reactions on major outrageous topics. The subject, the scenario, the set, the rehearsals will be concentrated in one week. Every seven days, a new show will be performed in a public space.

This is a call for instant gathering. For instant reaction. Act here and now. Debate the present. Perform the result. Gather / work together / document / react instantly and furiously / represent the unrepresented / tell the untold. In-your-face.

ART IN PRESENT-DAY ROMANIA

Can art still be radical? In present-day Romania art should necessarily be radical. And therefore it is not. Since the foundation of Romania, in the 19th century, art was, with some exceptions, either totally unengaged or, more often, art obeyed to the political regime. The same with historical and social sciences. As for more than fifty years of the 20th century, Romania has been run by dictatorial regimes (either monarchial dictatorship, fascism or communist totalitarianism), art has rarely been, if ever, allowed the luxury to be provocative, infamous or/and openly against the political leadership. History was changed, forged and mystified, social sciences were adapted to serve the regime and the artists often watched this with silent disapproval or rewarded obedience. On the other hand, the abundance of obedient art called political art and perceived as political art (especially in the communist era) has led to despise and exclusion of any form of political art in the 90s and 2000s. These habits are very difficult to change or shake in present-day Romania. And therefore any engaged form of art, that stands against the political regime, against the religious values, against the common prejudices and beliefs, can be seen as radical.

In this context the Instant-Art Manifesto tries to cover three big issues.

First, the lack of immediate reaction to major scandalous events – so far the artists usually react with 10, 20 or more years later even to big bloody social episodes (the pogroms, the labour camps for Jewish and Roma people in the fascist era; the evictions, deportations and tortures in the 50s; the Coup-d’etat called revolution in 1989; the fights between Romanians and Hungarians in Targu-Mures in March 1990; the repression against intellectuals and Roma people called Mineriad in 1990). These bloody events are always hidden, never discussed and debated in public, absent from history schoolbooks. The lack of immediate reaction is many times followed by no reaction at all. The lack of reaction leads to oblivion.

The second issue is the lack of the custom of gathering, of the community spirit and of the organized collective protest. In recent years Romanians only gathered together in extreme moments of their history. And even in those moments they were often manipulated and forged to react.

The third issue is the lack of representation of ethnic, religious, sexual minorities in Romanian culture, doubled by a refuse to represent the oppressed, the low class, the disadvantaged. Even though 6.6% of the Romanian citizens are Hungarian, very few theater performances and almost no Romanian film pictures Hungarians. With the Roma community, things are more radical, not even the official census offers a credible number of the Roma people among the Romanian citizens. The people with disabilities, the old people, the people affected by poverty, the people in the countryside, have virtually no access to culture and no possibility of representation and of exercising their right to express their beliefs.

In my opinion, art can still be radical in present day Romania, if it aims to shake the lethargy of the spectators, of the street-walkers, of the big cities inhabitants. If it screams in their face what they don’t want to hear, what they are afraid to see, to admit, to think about. If it stands consistently and critically against the political regime. If it promotes and allows to be heard the voices of the unpopular. Of course, the big problem of such an art programme will be the lack of any financial support, private or state-owned.