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Art, Religion and Resistance in (Post-)Communist Romania: Nostalgia for Paradise Lost 1st ed. Edition Maria Alina Asavei full chapter instant download
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MODERNITY, MEMORY AND
IDENTITY IN SOUTH-EAST EUROPE
Series Editor
Catharina Raudvere
Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies
University of Copenhagen
Copenhagen, Denmark
This series explores the relationship between the modern history and pres-
ent of South-East Europe and the long imperial past of the region. This
approach aspires to offer a more nuanced understanding of the concepts
of modernity and change in this region, from the nineteenth century to
the present day. Titles focus on changes in identity, self-representation and
cultural expressions in light of the huge pressures triggered by the interac-
tion between external influences and local and regional practices. The
books cover three significant chronological units: the decline of empires
and their immediate aftermath, authoritarian governance during the twen-
tieth century, and recent uses of history in changing societies in South-
East Europe today.
Art, Religion
and Resistance in
(Post-)Communist
Romania
Nostalgia for Paradise Lost
Maria Alina Asavei
Department of Russian and East European Studies
Charles University
Prague, Czech Republic
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2020
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the
publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to
the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The
publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and
institutional affiliations.
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG.
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
v
vii
Praise for Art, Religion and Resistance
in (Post-)Communist Romania
“This book offers a fascinating window into art production in the former Eastern
bloc that transcends existing artistic labels and genres. Through this comparative
analysis of pre- and post-1989 resistant religious art in Romania, Asavei invites the
reader to re-evaluate ‘religious’ art that is usually pigeonholed into categories of
pre-modern/secular or anachronistic ‘folk art.’ Applying an impressive command
of theoretical approaches, the author draws on multiple disciplines to explore the
religion-politics-art intersection as it emerges in specific historical moments and
places. Particularly, the book illustrates the quest for deeper meanings and higher
ideals that are present in art resistant both to communist totalitarian contexts and
a post-1989 capitalist consumerism. This book is both smartly and accessibly writ-
ten. It will be a gem for social science and humanities scholars alike.”
—Susan C. Pearce, East Carolina University, USA
“Asavei’s book is a carefully documented study of the interactions among art, poli-
tics, and religion in the context of communist and post-communist Romania. I
applaud Asavei’s effort to make visible the ways in which Romanian artists have
drawn on spiritual resources to respond to oppressive regimes and totalizing ide-
ologies. Such a study will likely inspire other researchers to explore art-driven
practices of resistance in other geographic and cultural areas.”
—Iulian Vamanu, University of Iowa, USA
“The particular question tackled in the book, which is also the main source of its
originality, is the extent to which the Orthodox cult and the art built around it,
situated in between the ‘East’ and the ‘West’ of world art at the time, in its various
guises, paradoxically both served and subverted the communist regime. The book
answers this through a number of concrete cases that are analyzed in detail, with
the help of a solid, up-to-date, interdisciplinary theoretical apparatus (coming
from art history, politics and the historical context of the time).”
—Maria-Sabina Draga Alexandru, University of Bucharest, Romania
Contents
xi
xii Contents
Index303
List of Figures
xiii
xiv List of Figures
1.1 Introduction
Apart from the churchgoers and devotees of sacred icons, there is a less
explored category of contemporary cultural artefacts of religious inspira-
tion that populate the public cultural sphere of the former Eastern bloc.
The producers and consumers of these peculiar cultural productions are
devotees of a post-traumatic contemporary aesthetic mysticism. These
movements constitute veritable countercultures where religiosity and
resistance to current hardships overlap in the spiritual-political mission of
salvation. As Tara Isabella Burton noticed, the advent of contemporary
aesthetic mysticism “is a general post-liberal cast: a sense that classical and
contemporary liberalism—and its handmaiden, secularism—have failed,
not just as a political project but also as a cultural one. The ‘modern
world’ … is devoid of mystery, of sanctity, of a conception of a greater and
metaphysically meaningful Good.”1 What must be disentangled is the
extent to which religious cultural expressions not only fuel die-hard
nationalist sentiments, nativism, indigenism, right-wing messianic popu-
lism and homophobia, but the other side of the coin: namely the alterna-
tive narratives according to which religion-inspired cultural expressions
foreground human rights activism through the mediation of religious and
spiritual–inspired “arts of resistance.”
While there is a burgeoning amount of academic work on how right-
wing populism, homophobia, or Romaphobia’s culture war employs
religious tropes to get rid of “the Others,” the use of a Christian artistic
imagination toward the opposite end has received much less attention.
What Theodor Adorno called “the lost unity between art and religion”
beyond the “late phase of enlightenment and secularization” has to be
further investigated by bringing to the forefront contemporary revivals of
various instances of aesthetic mysticism employed to political-critical ends.2
Against this background, this book focuses on the spiritual and religion-
inspired contemporary art that can function as a form of resistance,
directed against both the dictatorship of Romanian national communism
and against the dictatorship of the consumerist society and its global mar-
ket, dependent on a capitalist economy of images. In addition, it explores
the critical, tactical and subversive uses of religious motifs (and Orthodox
Christian aesthetics) in those contemporary art pieces that confront the
religious “affair” in post-communist Romania. The volume does not
exclusively deal with the relationship between religion-inspired art and
politics during and after the fall of the communist regime in Romania, but
rather focuses on the relationships between art, politics and religion from
a variety of entangled configurations (e.g. political art and religion,
religion-inspired art and politics, politics and religion vis-á-vis the contem-
porary arts).
I contend that art, politics and religion interact in various ways and to
various ends—both during Nicolae Ceauṣescu’s dictatorship and after its
collapse—and these different kinds of concatenation can be regarded as
multifarious configurations of resistance to the dominant status quo of any
specific given moment. Thus, this volume will explore different trajecto-
ries of resistance, as well as the practices of domination that triggered the
specific type of resistance. In line with Paul Routledge’s theorizing about
the spatiality of resistance, this book aims to tackle the resistance(s) to
dominant power, and their elastic boundaries, focusing on how “practices
of resistance cannot be separated from practices of domination.”3 Thus,
religion-inspired art production is not essentially a resistance practice but
it can be approached as such when it is mobilized through specific spaces
and times. Art of religious and/or spiritual descent can function as a prac-
tice of resistance if we understand the concept of resistance according to
its spatiality and temporality and not through an essentialist understand-
ing of the term.
One of the most long-lasting artistic semi-movements that display reli-
gious tropes, symbols and thematic clusters in their cultural production is
the Prolog art collective. The group was born in 1985, during the harshest
1 ART, POLITICS AND RELIGION IN (POST-)COMMUNIST ROMANIA… 3
associated with the Neo-Orthodox milieu shared the same religious, artis-
tic or political agendas. As this study will demonstrate, various ruptures,
schisms and sets of concerns typify the artistic-political agenda of the indi-
vidual artists who are grouped within the label “Neo-Byzantine” and
“Neo-Orthodox.” There are also certain existential concerns that have
contributed to the group’s cohesion and longevity.
The increased prominence of the members of the Prolog group (as well
as of other artists associated with the Neo-Orthodox semi-movement) is
also reflected in the increased number of exhibitions after the fall of the
communist regime. During the Ceauṣescu era, in 1976, the artist, Sorin
Dumitrescu, who would later on be associated with the Prolog (together
with Ṣerban Gabrea), launched a double exhibition of ambient art at the
Ion Mincu Architectural Institute in Bucharest. The unprecedented cul-
tural event is described in Romanian art history as the first conceptual art
approach of the sacred.7 Other art exhibitions by the Prolog artists that
focused on the dimension of the sacred were: the first exhibition of Neo-
Byzantine conception titled, Prologue I Tescani, at the Căminul Artei
Gallery (Bucharest, 1985) and Prologue II at the same gallery in 1986 and
1989 (both curated by Paul Gherasim). After the fall of the communist
regime in 1989, the number of religion-art focused exhibitions proliferate
not only in the capital but also in other cities of Romania.
Little attention has been given in academic studies of religion and poli-
tics to the relationship between religion-inspired art and political resis-
tance during the communist regimes in Central and South-East Europe.
Recently, Dušan Bjelić explored from a post-colonial and geo-
psychoanalytic perspective the scholarly production—literary and philo-
sophical—of several post-communist, Balkan born and Western bred
intellectuals (e.g. Julia Kristeva born in Bulgaria and Salvoj Žižek from
Slovenia). Dušan Bjelić claims that Kristeva and Žižek’s writings universal-
ize the crisis of the post-Communist Balkans, the so-called Balkan mad-
ness, turning this intellectual/philosophical exercise into a process of
self-Orientalization.8
Roland Boer also elaborates on the work of Žižek and Kristeva and
points out that through their writing they actually betray “a residual
socialism,” despite the fact that both of them “search for redemption, of
both personal and social forms,” seeking a “way to salve the ravages of
capitalism.” In this narrative of salvation, Žižek has “recovered a militant
Leninist Marxism through Pauline Christianity” while Kristeva’s
Christianity functions as “substitutes for a sidelined Marxism.”9 Both Boer
1 ART, POLITICS AND RELIGION IN (POST-)COMMUNIST ROMANIA… 5
and Bjelić focus on the redemptive platform of the two Balkan thinkers,
suggesting that the invocation of psychoanalysis in the writings of both is
a way through which “Christianity may be read as compensations for a lost
socialism.”10 Longing for the “lost socialism” in a religious register might
also allude to the revolt of the “incomplete” or “in-between” identities of
those who inhabit the former East’s space. These ontological regimes of
indistinction (of the neither-nor type) of the Eastern European subjectiv-
ity occasion self-cultivation and re-creation of renewed identities from the
bottom-up. Then, as Anamarie Iosif Ross has pointed out, the traditional,
religious modes of engagement, as revealed in some Neo-Orthodox art-
ists’ work, “which might have been thought obscured with the advent of
modernity and capitalism are being reinterpreted and made new, as people
continue their vast ranging searches for freedom and personal fulfilment in
Eastern Europe and the Balkans.”11
Thus, this nostalgia for lost social formats, identities and sense of
belonging can be regarded as form of resistance (i.e. against “the ravages
of capitalism”). However, the boundaries of resistance can be elusive.
Thus, resistance, or better put, resistances—can take various shapes, in
accordance with constantly changing configurations of power. This book
addresses various configurations of the practices of resistance through reli-
gious art in light of the entanglement between practices of domination
and practices of resistance. Unlike Kristeva and Žižek, the artistic formats
analysed in what follows do not long for the paradise lost of the socialist
era. Although many of them are also concerned with redemption of the
soul—and function as practices of resistance—the paradise longed for is a
different one. After resisting communism’s “Godless culture” some of the
artists associated with the Neo-Byzantine/Neo-Orthodox group have re-
shaped the trajectory of their opposition—after the collapse of the
regime—when the practice of dominance changed. Some of them pro-
fessed their distrust against what they called “cultural colonization” of
Romania by the “global catechism” of Western values (Sorin Dumitrescu),
while others have seen post-communist Romania as the holy place where
the Orient and the Occident meet (Marian and Victoria Zidaru).
As mentioned earlier, during late communism the artists associated
with this religious/spiritual milieu were called “Neo-Byzantine,” while
after the fall of the regime, the label “Neo-Orthodox” takes precedence in
the vocabulary of the art critics. Since both labels connote the same thing,
I will use the terms interchangeably. While during the communist era the
6 M. A. ASAVEI
on the grounds that the Union exerts ideological control on artists and
artistic matters, and the Church painters’ activities did not comply with
the mission of the UAP. However, in the official answer of the State
Committee for Culture and Art and the UAP, the group of Church paint-
ers were told that they can form an Artists Association, albeit affiliated
with the Patriarchy of the Orthodox Church of Romania and not with the
Union.20 Another archival document reveals that the UAP recommended
a painter (Comrade Bâşcu Dumitru)—a member of the union—to under-
take a technical expertise of the Church Lunguleţu paintings. The recom-
mendation also displays the address and telephone number of Dumitru
Bâşcu (Fig. 1.1).21
As revealed in archival recordings, the party state art institution known
as Uniunea Artiştilor Plastici [the Romanian Artists’ Union] displayed an
ambivalent position vis-a-vis artistic production of religious inspiration. In
the same vein, the Union of Composers of communist Romania allowed
the Madrigal choir to perform religious carols abroad in order to create a
Nyt oli siis Kautisten synkkä poika poissa. Siinä nyt ei ollut mitään
odottamatonta, jokaisen kohdalle se tulee aikoinaan, kun ennättää.
Eikä Kulhian tytär erikoisesti sure, tai jos sureekin, niin hän on niin
turtunut, ettei sitä huomaa. Kaipa tulee sekin aika, jolloin surun on
päästävä täysiin oikeuksiinsa.
*****
"Kyllä minä sen asian ilmoitin, muttei hän ollut sillä tuulella, että
olisi tullut…"
*****
"Hautajaisiin, luonnollisesti."
Kauppakirja
"Antakaas tänne!"
"Kyllähän me."
*****
Kulhian patruuna ja Kautisten neuvos jäävät kahden kesken ja
patruuna pistäytyy toisessa huoneessa.
"En siksi", jatkaa hän tovin kuluttua, "etten pitäisi hintaa hyvänä ja
sen maksamisen vakuuksia täysin riittävinä, mutta tunnesyistä.
Kulhia on jo niin kauan ollut patruunan suvulla…"
"Hm. No niin."
"Minä ajattelin kysyä, eikö kellokin ole kultaa, mutta ajattelin, että
ehkeipä se ole oikein järkiperäisesti tehty."
"Ei sentään, herra neuvos. Se ei ole teille sama kuin tämä Kulhia
minulle. Ja sitten vielä: Saarijoen tammen ohi en koskaan voi mennä
tulematta pahoinvoivaksi ja synkäksi mieleltäni. Ja se kestää
päiväkausia. Jos minä olisin jyry luonteeltani niinkuin lankomieheni,
Linnan patruuna, ja muutenkin ajattelisin asioita tylymmästi, saattaisi
hyvinkin ehkä olla toista, vaan minkäpä luonnolleen tekee. Kun
joskus iltaisin menen vähän jaloittelemaan kujalle ja sitten kuulen
pauhun Saarijoen tammen vaiheilta, tuntuu minusta aivan kuin tyttö-
vainajani ääni sekoittautuisi joukkoon. Eihän tyttäreni kylläkään ollut
äänekäs, päinvastoin liiankin vaitelias, mutta sittenkin…"
"Kyllä se on selvä."
"Tuossa pöydällä."
Kolmenlaista matkustamista
Mutta nyt he alkavat olla sitä mieltä, että Kulhian isännän olisi
paras mennä kotiinsa, ja yksi heistä menee hakemaan automobiilia.
*****