Dan Perjovschi: Drawing Criticism
Dan Perjovschi at work on Late News at the Royal Ontario Museum's Institute for Contemporary Culture, February 2010 © Royal Ontario Museum 2010 All Rights Reserved / photo Brian Boyle
Romanian artist Dan Perjovschi is no stranger to the turbulent ebb and flow of modern history. Schooled in the era of hardcore communism and underground revolution, Perjovschi emerged in the late 1990s as a linchpin connection to the unmapped terrain of contemporary art in post–Cold War Europe. His large-scale installations of critically edged drawings applied directly to the walls of galleries and other institutional spaces have been featured at the Venice Biennale, the Museum of Modern Art and Tate Modern, among other notable international venues, delivering an informed perspective on the great optimism and paradoxical failure of the global era. In February, Perjovschi was in Toronto to install his latest project, Late News, at the Royal Ontario Museum. Canadian Art’s Bryne McLaughlin caught up with him there to discuss the specifics of his practice and the challenging histories that inform his unique worldview.
Bryne McLaughlin: Let’s begin by talking about process. Your work has been shown at venues all over the world. Each installation is devised as a site-specific response that merges issues ranging from international politics to local gossip. You begin with sketches that you accumulate in notebooks and then draw on the walls and sometimes windows of the spaces you’re working with. How do you choose which subjects you’re going to work with?
Dan Perjovschi: You can imagine me as a rock band. I’ve been in a world tour since 2000. So I play favourite tunes. I have a mental repertoire of drawings and if they fit here I will do them. This is the first stage because then I control the space a little bit and I’m more familiar with the white territory [of the gallery walls]. Then I start to hunt around for subjects as much as I can—in the city, in the newspaper and in discussions. It is a process of selection and transference. I do about 200 drawings in a notebook and maybe 20 or 30 will go to the wall.
BM: So the drawings that pick up on local histories or issues act as an entry point for viewers to engage with images that tackle the big global themes you’ve observed?
DP: If I draw a local hint, then people can understand how I think. If I refer to something that they are very familiar with, then they understand the other subjects that they are not so connected to. Let me give you an example here in the drawing Flower Power. The first time I did this was in 2008 because it celebrated the revolutionary year of 1968. I carry it with me because it can stand. Even if you have no idea about 1968’s movements or whatever, just the relationship between these two words can mean something. Another one called Bringing Western Democracy was made in 2003 when the Americans were invading Iraq. So it’s connected to the beginning of that war, but it still stands up critically.
You could say that these drawings criticize the powder versus the wick. I don’t have necessarily a moral stance, but I don’t shy away from ideas of bad and good. I can also change my mind. I have drawings that are 15 or 20 years old that I disagree with now. My practice is temporary, which allows me to change my mind. Maybe my next project will be different.
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