Romanian artist Bogdan Achimescu uses things most people would throw away to create his extraordinary installations, says Medb Ruane
In 1984, a Romanian called General Ernu supposedly began building a database of the faces of suspect citizens. Lumbering eastern bloc computers recorded vectoral images taken from photographs. The project collapsed along with the Berlin wall and sister surveillance: systems throughout the former Soviet empire, only to be resurrected by the Romanian artist Bogdan Achimescu.
"We can assume that given certain conditions - an eastern Europe with stable dictatorships, the massive computing power of contemporary machines - the database would have grown to cover the whole population," says Achimescu. His post-Soviet reflection on the database filled the Romanian pavilion at this year's Venice Biennale, using pirated images supplied, he claims, by a former archivist, and then upgraded to make wall-sized projections.
Achimescu's quirky attitude. to the issues of control and personal identity now feature in The Sligo Project, his interwoven series of drawings and installations at the Model Arts Centre. Fact and fiction conflate: the original database may or may not have existed - the General Ernu to whom Achimescu refers, for example, was not in reality a general - and it may or my not be a template upon which to shape his endless storytelling about people, families and communities.
In this show images of faces and bodies turn hundreds of individual studies into whole armies of paper people on the move. They literally move: in the atrium space his drawings float like paper chains, looped from wall to wall and ready to party.
The superficial whimsy in Achimescu's work for Sligo is undercut by the themes of tradition and history he repeatedly picks over. The characters and their author are trying to figure out how they relate to each other and if their individuality can survive the world. If they were real people, they'd protest at G8 summits and anti-globalisation rallies and then go home to wonder if they had achieved anything at all.
Achimescu's materials are so ordinary they are usually thrown into the rubbish bin. Coffee filters, fine rolls and cheap paper turn from notebooks are churned out into artworks that would be kilometres long if they were put end to end.
In old Romania however, such materials were signs of a wealth and status that made their possessors far from ordinary. President Ceausescu claimed he was keeping consumer culture at bay by making them scarce. This meant ordinary citizens didn't have enough toilet paper, while he and his elite could wipe away reality without a second thought. Achimescu was born and educated there, but left for Poland and then America before the empire collapsed.
Every twist in the work links old Romania to the difficult new state now trying to emerge. His emphatically traditional serial drawing style resonates with the academic realist education that it was his only option to learn, lest ornery old imagination started to threaten the system.
His prints are usually made on lithographic stones, which were and are used in the west too, but was one of the few media available to printmakers when he was a young artist. He explains it with a lateral parable. When one of his characters was in Romania, he had to smoke to fit in. In Poland, his desire for company meant he had to drink. The subject did of smoke and drink-related disseases. However, Achimescu has embraced new technology, and is now a professor of fine art at Tucson, Arizona, where he follows his characters, he will presumably start wearing ten-gallon hats and keeping a forked twig to get the rattlesnakes early in the morning.
But he keeps things simple for Sligo. Although his Venice installation was high-tech, his new and collected pieces here are so low-tech they need only daylight, ladders and some masking tape to be realised
The show pulls together his obsessions of the last few years. The works speak to the space by playing with it and then playing with the perceptions of those who come to see. What may look like an intrusive naivety as you read his comments and explanations becomes a quiet probing of how individuals fare in any totalitarian environment.
Imaginary races of people, with imaginary genealogies and customs are drawn and written about in such detail they seem real. The artist tells you who to look at, why they are there and how they got to where you see them. But each time you complete one of the circles he spins for you, the game he plays with control locks you in more deeply. You are being lied to much of the time, but you play along because it becomes an enjoyable conceit.
"Someone told me I use my objects to mark a territory like a dog does," Achimescu says.
The installations in the upstairs galleries start with the fax room, where paper unspools at waist level, right around the walls. You get the impression that Achimescu has been acting as a boulevardier, strolling through cafe culture and the backstreets, collecting faces and glances. Its cartoon-strip format doesn't let the story flow from mark to mark, but is peppered with his comments, shaping the way its viewers put the whole together.
Next door lifesize figures appear on large ceiling suspensions. Achimescu's conceit here is to play at being an anthropologist, telling the viewer of a culture whose people believe you have to draw your descendants so as to bring them into being. The room-filling family album works in reverse because it never speaks to the past.
He wonders if it would be practical for him to draw everybody in die world, and decides it would be impossible. "Thousands of heads per day is a job in itself and anyway others do it better already," he says.
His final room explores that line of thought by covering hundreds of coffee filter papers with portraits, like little people with peaked heads. Each filter is its own man or woman: seen together their individual characters are squashed.
Achimescu is part of what he calls the Context Network, a curated virtual community linked by the web but not in person. Their group photo shows no faces, only the imaginary transmission lines that connect them. The Venice piece was produced as part of its mission to make links in cyberspace.
General Ernu is really a philosopher, or so we are finally told. Known as Vasile to his friends, he edits a discursive journal called Philosophy and Stuff, featured in vectoral form as one of Achimescu's Venice subjects. This may or may not be true, but Achimescu says it is as he strolls along, a boulevardier now sipping coffee somewhere under Ben Bulben.
Bogdan Achimescu: The Sligo Project. the
Model Arts Centre and Niland Gallery, Sligo
until September 15, Tues-Sat 10.30am-5.30nm,
free (07141405). Touring to the City gallery,
Limerick and the Orchard gallery, Derry
Sunday Times, September 2 2001 / Dictatorship
is rubbish by Medb Ruane
Medb Ruane is a writer and critic for the Irish Times