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Dan Perjovschi Late News 2010 Installation view / photo Bryne McLaughlin |
BM: Is there any difference in your approach to the sites you work in, specifically with this installation at the ROM?
DP: The drawings are partly from my repertoire and partly from the images I can discover on the spot. I’ve never had this kind of architecture to work with. So I was thinking for the first time about how people will look at the work as they are travelling though the space. I had to compose the drawings, which for me is important. I can imagine a time in the future even constructing an architecture to draw on.
Everywhere I am I try to find something specific for the place besides the story. After all, the stories of 2005 are sometimes different than the stories of 2010. But there is something that unites all of my projects. They are always unique because even if I work with the same drawings I will never work with the same combinations. On the other hand, these installations are like a retrospective. It’s more or less the “best of” drawings. In some cases I use different types of markers so I have different lines, here it is thick because this is a very brutal sculptural object that I have to cut up. I don’t plan in advance. I come to the place, I live here for a while and then I decide what kind of technology and subjects I will work with.
BM: You’ve spoken in other interviews about how you were trained academically as a painter…
DP: In communist Romania! It was a really bad school that was not academic enough. It was based on some kind of post-impressionist thinking, more craft oriented. But it was a chance in the communist time because they didn’t plant too strongly in my head the rules of what they thought was right. This work is a rebellion against that.
When I graduated I ceased to paint immediately. I tried installation art, but at the time I didn’t even know it was called installation art, or performance art or happenings or whatever. We didn’t know the history. We’d been totally cut out of the circuit of ideas. We had missed about 50 years of universal culture. We experimented with the situation in our flats because it was out of the control of the ideological censorship. Visual art was never very important: the dictatorship was afraid of the written word. They could control visual imagery but the power of the word made them really afraid. So they let us play.
Then the world changed with the fall of communism. Everything was suddenly open. The printed media helped me to find a language to express. For one year I had done nothing but fighting for democracy in the streets. I had no shows in 1990, I just did revolution. Then because of this newly independent media and the freedom of expression—it was extraordinary—my language, my drawings became more and more graphic. I had a moment somewhere in 1997 when what I did in the newspaper and what I did in the galleries or the art system merged. But it was a long process. Along the way I tried all kinds of stuff that went nowhere; with photography and with video, which was a very popular medium because video meant “western” world, it meant “international” level. We were a very low-tech country so with high-tech stuff you became somebody. But that didn’t go well with me. I can’t edit, I can’t choose. I have to work in this very direct fashion that suits me much more.
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