by Dana Fabini
In an interview recorded in December 2004
in Cologne, as he was recounting the path
of his life and art, Achimescu uttered
the revelatory affirmation that he exists
in no country.
For the past 15 years, Achimescu’s
artistic perambulations over three continents
have given him no anchor in any clearly
delineated social or national territory,
therefore, not allowing him to be identified
with a stable set of coordinates. All of
this movement constitutes the de-facto
etymological basis for the baffling affirmation
that, although formally a Polish citizen,
since he never positions himself anywhere
for a significant period of time, Achimescu
does not exist in any country.
Themes and Techniques
Wherever
he moves on his trajectory (Achimescu calls
it, proudly, serendipitous) he steadfastly
follows themes with social implications
and keeps returning to a number of printmaking-specific
techniques.
Until the year 2000, in his work that represented
particular individuals as well as in the
ones that depicted homogeneous crowds,
there was a motionless, hieratic expressivity.
People stand still, frozen in various stages
of evolution, their figures multiplied
in mind-boggling conglomerates of de-personalized
emblems.
Inspired by television reports of the first
Gulf War, he conceived the series Cities
(1991-2001) as a long-term grouping of
well over 4000 heads of different sizes
that could be configured as large-scale
installations intended to fit a variety
of exhibition spaces. Rapidly drawn, summarily
featured, the heads are perceived more
as objects than as living beings equipped
with a brain. In a ranting, personal text,
their maker complains about the platitude
of these creatures but is satisfied with
their lack of voice, as this prevents them
uttering boring complaints.
Similarly, the Kukes Love Parade series (1999) is another archive of about 4000 heads, drawn even more schematically on paper coffee filters capable of being deployed on a six-by-six-yard surface. Made during two residencies in Germany while watching Kosovo war reports on SkyNews, this series indicates a preoccupation with crowds and the mix of human relationships. Kukes is the name of a Kosovar border town that became a refugee holding tank for groups of ethnic Albanians that, in their sheer numbers, were reminiscent of the Berlin Love Parade. With evident irony, the author of these heterogeneous swarms pragmatically noticed the fact that these installations were conveniently easy to manipulate. Grouped in packages of 100 heads each, these ergonomic entities can be stocked without too much fuss, in half an hour, in a very small space.
In keeping with the multiplicity and large social mutation themes, the Bunai series (1992-93), consisted of large format prints (seven by three feet), and are accompanied by pseudo-scientifically explanatory texts about the hypothetical existence of the Bunai people. For once, Achimescu seems to approach his offspring in a more emotional manner, by visually inventing and verbally documenting a fictional anthropology. He presents it as a sample of folklore from a hypothetical region, discovered at random during a military expedition occurring more than a century ago. According to his pseudo-mythology, the prints are “child projects” meant to aid genetic perpetuation of young married couples. The project’s authors don’t hold any claims to artistry; the prints themselves, following a successful childbirth, are burned or, in case of a miscarriage, sold to the tourists for peanuts or thrown to the dogs. The fictional bibliography that accompanies the texts references Achimescu’s native Romania as an example of similar habits of families planning ahead for their descendant’s generations and fictionally decodes the notion of bunai as meaning “irresponsible” in the author’s local dialect. Romania is, in fact, the only country where Achimescu has spent a significant period of time. There, his serendipitous travels around the globe were prevented not only by his young age, but also by the political regime and Romania’s then closed borders.
In 1966 in Romania, the Decree #770 forbade all means of contraception and the practice of abortion. This was part of a larger project of population growth and planning meant to help in creating the new human. Systematic medical checks were conducted in work or study institutions and women were periodically sent to doctors in mass groups in an attempt to achieve a nation-wide detection of pregnancy and obstruct attempts of abortion. During its period of validity, that is, until the dictatorship fell in 1989, this decree led to the forced birth of over 2,000,000 unwanted children and to the death of over 10,000 women who attempted abortion in unsuitable, illegal, and unsanitary conditions. It lead to the abandoning of thousands of children in under-funded and de-humanizin ment of sex as the only means to prevent an unwanted pregnancy.
The same
Stasi-style system is the theme of RCF – Registrul
Centralizat de Fizionomii (The Centralized
Physiognomy Registry), a five-channel video
projection that includes drawings, kinetic
photography and fictional texts and was
presented for the first time as part of
the Context Network project in Romania’s
National Pavilion at the Venice Biennale
in 2001. Starting from two or three photographs,
software can easily extract the image of
a person seen from different angles and
with different facial expressions. The
idea was to create a centralized physiognomic-traits
database of “potential suspects” and
then share this database among Secret Services
across the former Eastern Block. Starting
from an Orwellian scenario that is daily
bread for dictatorial regimes, Achimescu
envisages a relational database that pathologically
stores information about imaginary suspects.
Blurring the borders between truth and
fiction, he claims to use photographs of
family, friends, and unknown people, picked
at random from his photo archive and manipulated
without the models’ approval. In
a parody of manic dictatorial behaviors,
he presents himself as an anonymous archivist
whose civic duty greases the wheels of
the system, a character that frantically
thanks the state institutions that supported
him in supervising and archiving his fellow
citizens.
The works made from 2000 onwards acquire
the brevity and speed of stenographic notes
or sketches. The drawings gain in mobility,
their themes multiply, their hieratic character
disappears, personal and collective histories,
subjective and official chronologies intersperse.
In Event Photography (2003) Achimescu uses
cartoon-type imagery to recall events he
witnessed during the Romanian Revolution
in December 1989. He blows up small sketchbook
drawings and prints them on vinyl using
a technique developed for producing commercial
banners. Each image is accompanied by a
spontaneous explanatory paragraph, free
of rhetoric or over-inflated documentary
claims, written in subjective, journalistic
terms and focused on a caricatured view
of the rendered situations.
Within the same illustrative style, Raj (2004) is one of Achimescu’s few works that features relaxed people, experiencing hedonist, laissez-faire states, free of military-type alignment or censorship-induced regulation. The installation consists of large tents made of lightweight structures of steel and semi-transparent material. Their surfaces are covered with drawings representing a paradisiacal hypostases of daily life: people embracing or on the beach, tables set with alluring victuals, erotic scenes, peaceful graveyards, idyllic panoramas. All of the above, set in the natural beauty of the hills of Taiwan (the work was commissioned by Taipei’s Juming Museum), is an invitation for the viewer’s reverie. Although the depicted situations are typical for everyday life and have a distinct genre character, for Achimescu they are not the attribute of a terrestrial location but a rupture from the real world and an evasion into an ideal one. Raj means “paradise” in Polish. For people used to relaxation and entertainment these may be pages from a vacation journal. For the author, who has a predilection for heroic visions of reality and its existential conflicts, these heavenly representations on holiday tents seem to be a rest between two ideological wars.
The recent works shown in Charlottesville at Second Street Gallery and at Les Yeux du Monde Gallery mark another unexpected divergence from Achimescu’s usual imagery as they do not represent people and crowds but clusters of artifacts. Although he uses his favorite and adroitly mastered toolkit and keeps his narrative-illustrative concentration on archiving a topos and a multitude, Uglyplaces is an environment without inhabitants. It is a huge theater of urban spaces with the actors and spectators missing. All that is left is the set, reminiscent of past richness and glory long gone; there are fields of abundance, residential villas with square, Roman layouts, gardens mounted in masonry or cast iron enclosures, greenhouses, buildings of a temporary character or a presumed religious purpose, groups of mechanisms and memorials, mutant vegetations, spare parts for fossilized machinery and fortifications decayed from their initial, apparently military functions and sometimes human limbs spread on the fields. One might assume that globalization has finally been accomplished, historical eras have amalgamated and their artifacts have been superbly cloned into scores of small images, aligned pedantically on large axonometric plains. A dizzying and artificial macroambience deserted by human identity. These Uglyplaces are visually seductive, the imagery is gorgeous down to its last punctilious minutiae and the overall makeup is conducted with expertise. It’s a dictionary of artifacts that assembles terms, processes, archaeological traces of apparently unrelated civilizations, all bound in a useless and megalomaniac classification. It reminds me of two things that a fleeting look might see as unrelated: a catwalk and Ernesto Sabato’s novel, Sobre Héroes y Tumbas (On Heroes and Tombs). Both elaborate on human identity through its absence.
The Ideal and the Idyll
This
is something that has always struck me
as extraordinary both with Achimescu’s
persona and with his artistic productions:
this amalgamation of ideal and idyll. Hero
and victim of globalization, Achimescu
fights an ideological war for art in search
of absolute truth and for artist-ascertaining
meanings, while at the same time practicing
a self-made culture grounded in ordinary
everyday habits (or methods). His works
are like TV: concurrently multivalent,
univalent, and bivalent. Being polyvalent
generates progress, being univalent generates
popular success, and being bivalent almost
always generates problems.
Today, in the art of the western hemisphere
where cultural forward-thinking is born
and certified, the heroic-elitist tradition
and its creative ideals are permanently
metamorphosed into a paradigm of individualism
and self-made culture. Personal artistic
production as reflected in all means of
expression seeks private truths. The old
artistic ideals, whether myth-grounding,
aprioric or non-historic have mutated into
a well-delineated concept that hinges on
the creative documenting of processes rather
than on finished products. Today’s
artists research and project in conjunction
with personal and social reality. While
Achimescu also researches and projects
in conjunction with personal and social
reality, he has the nostalgia of the heroic
artist.
Topographically detached and multiculturally blended as he is, it would not surprise me to see Achimescu become like Cat Stevens one of these days: he could earnestly convert to Islamism, change his name to Ivan Turbincă, put on a pair of flamenco underwear over a Hindu sari, travel with a suitcase on wheels full of laptops and digital cameras or wear a huge sign that says “Television Lies.” In his lack of respect for the consensual directives of society, he would not even be surprised when security singles him out as a suspicious person.
I already know what I would tell him in such circumstances: “It’s a wild world.”
Dana Fabini is an artist, writer and independent
critic of Romanian origin, living and working
between her native Cluj, Romania and her
adoptive Cologne, Germany.