Utopians often have a hard time of it in Ciprian Mureşan’s work. The Romanian artist’s hilarious photograph Leap into the Void—after 3 Seconds (2004) mimics Yves Klein’s classic image of the artist in a swan dive from a rooftop. Mureşan’s abject version shows a similar street, a man’s body sprawled on the pavement—the aftermath of a moment of glorious flight. Flight his recent show at David Nolan, his first New York solo, Mureşan (b. 1977) continued sending up utopian artists, though perhaps treating them more gently, while also introducing themes of translation and transmission of knowledge and ideologies.
Greeting the visitor was The Doomed City (all works from the last two years), consisting of a chair and desk on which rest several classic novels by the likes of Joyce, Dostoyevsky and Woolf. Into each book, which viewers could peruse, Mureşan bound two of his own pencil drawings illustrating the 1975 Russian sci-fi novel The Doomed City, by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. Thus, he disrupts the literature of the past with his contemporary interpretations of a futuristic novel.
On a monitor nearby, Mureşan’s 9-minute video The Invisible Hand demonstrated his process, showing him as he bound on of his drawings into a tract by economist Adam Smith, coiner of the titular expression, which has been used by economists ever since to describe the supposedly self-regulating nature of the marketplace. Since the text appears in a Romanian translation and is borrowed from the library at the University of Cluj—the video shows Mureşan leaving the library with it—one couldn’t help but think of the way market economies have been uneasily grafted onto formerly socialist nations.
To create Untitled (Monks), consisting of a 12-minute video and 19 drawings, Mureşan pressed several artist friends into service to play robed monks in a monastery, dutifully hand-copying books, as actual monks did in order to preserve and transmit knowledge and religious doctrine. Rather than bibles, though, Mureşan’s artist-scribes duplicate books on Beuys, Mondrian, Malevich, Duchamp and Sturtevant. The video shows them at their worktables, toiling away; a vitrine displayed the simple pencil drawings, with illustrations and text alike painstakingly reproduced. The piece slyly suggests art is a religion and art texts scripture. At the same time, as he does in The Doomed City, Mureşan pay tribute to the humble book—sensual, long-lived, malleable—in the age of the Kindle.
While Beuys, Mondrian and Malevich each were driven by utopian aspirations, Mureşan’s inclusion of Sturtevant, who created precise simulations of others’ works long before appropriation came into vogue, and of Duchamp, who made all such idea art possible, shifts the tone. At once homage and tender satire, this work targets not only the true believers but the skeptics too—not only the famous, and not only the boys.
-Brian Boucher
In Romanian artist Ciprian Mureşan’s first US solo exhibition, I caught myself thinking about E.H. Gombrich’s 1960 art history classic Art and Illusion, an unfashionable book that could very well have appeared in the show alongside other volumes featured in the artist’s pedagogically themed films and sculptural works. Addressing the question of style and mimesis, Gombrich recounts a little-known German artist’s memory from the 1820s about a group of fellow art students—friends—out sketching in Tivoli. Each one was bent in youthful earnestness upon the faithful and objective rendering of the landscape. But when comparing their finished sketches, they discovered that, rather than displaying the objectivity of straightforward imitation, he works revealed immediately apparent individual styles, readable like each of their personalities.
The five artists featured in Mureşan’s short film Untitled (Monks) (all works 2011) seem to succeed where their German predecessors did not. Playing the part of novices in a scriptorium, they are also engaged in a task of mimesis with pencil and paper. But rather than a scene from nature, these artists are drawing pages—image and text both—from Western art books, featuring artists such as Piet Mondrian, Joseph Beuys and Susan Hiller. The ironic negation of the modernist investment in the authentic mark, although a well-worm aspect of postmodern art, is addressed here anew through a post-Communist lens.
Mureşan came of age in the wake of the 1989 revolution, an adolescent at the time of the Ceausescu’s violent demise. His brand of ostalgie—a German term meaning nostalgia for the Communist East—is filtered through the wry humour of postmodern trickster Martin Kippenberger. Indeed the most intriguing work in Mureşan’s exhibition also serves as a touching homage to the late German artist. Untitled (Kippenberger) is a hypnotic ten-second animation featuring 120 unique graphite drawings of Kippenberger’s 1994 installation The Happy End of Franz Kafka’s ‘Amerika’. The individualized style of each drawing, although clearly traced from a reproduction, becomes a rhythmic shimmering in tones of white and grey.
As with the facsimiles produced in Untitled (Monks), the individual drawings used to make this time-lapse film are also displayed in the exhibition. But the fact that they do not appear on the checklist suggests that they are more like artefacts, remainders from the final works.
Style has become a vehicle for political reflection here. This is not the authentic autographic mark that surprised the nineteenth-century German students (an issue that must have seemed newly relevant to Gombrich with the meteoric rise of Abstract Expressionism in the 1950s). Instead, Mureşan knowingly aligns mimesis with the capitalist ideology of individuality. His drawing style is a demonstration in mannered facility that declares the emptiness of the individual mark. The drawn artefacts from the aforementioned films, as well as those used in the sculptural work The Doomed City and the film The Invisible Hand, look like exercises from a ‘how-to; drawing textbook. This only serves to highlight Mureşan’s ironic reflection on capitalist modernization as training in imitation for former Communist artists, ostalgie nonwithstanding.
- Siona Wilson
By Holland Cotter
Ciprian Muresan, born in 1977, is one of several remarkable young Romanian artists (Mircea Cantor and Serban Savu are others) who were on the verge of their teens at the time of the 1989 revolution, and adults during the period of confused politics and disappointed ideals that followed.
Unsurprisingly, utopianism appears in Mr. Muresan’s art only in ambiguous forms. For the Nolan show he has unbound a printed volume of Adam Smith’s 18th-century, pro-capitalist tract “Wealth of Nations” to insert one of his drawings among the pages. The drawing was inspired by a 1979 Russian sci-fi novel, “The Doomed City,” in which a planet populated by earthlings from ideal-driven eras (1940s Germany, 1960s America) has sunk into a state of armed barbarism. He has placed similar drawings into novels by James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, giving modern literature a Darwinian bottom line.
Modern art gets a reality check too. In a 2011 video we see robed monks in a scriptorium. They aren’t transcribing religious texts, though. They’re drawing copies of art book illustrations: an abstract painting by Malevich, a Mondrian grid, a photograph of Joseph Beuys. All three artists are famous for being utopians; their art has the status of holy writ. Needless to say, Mr. Muresan’s approach to them is not reverential.
The monks, it turns out, aren’t monks; they’re Mr. Muresan’s artist-friends. Most of the images they’re copying are from a catalog of work by the American conceptualist Elaine Sturtevant, who has made a career of recreating art by other artists, specifically male superstars, with the intent of, among other things, puncturing myths of originality and genius. Mr. Muresan pushes her endeavor further with a video of artists making copies of printed reproductions of Ms. Sturtevant’s re-creations, which were themselves derived from printed reproductions of the originals.
Mr. Muresan engineers this meta-art pileup with a straight face and a light touch. In the end, though, he is not above genuine homage. A fluid draftsman, he recently produced 120 graphite drawings of Martin Kippenberger’s 1994 installation “The Happy End of Franz Kafka’s ‘Amerika,’ ” which envisioned the United States as a giant employment agency: a place of both opportunity and cut-throat competition.
Kippenberger, a protean and anarchic figure, died in 1997 and is a hero to many younger artists. Mr. Muresan, I would guess, is one. And he uses his 120 painstakingly executed drawings to create a video animation in which Kippenberger’s grand, doubt-infused installation, and with it his spirit, flicker momentarily to life..
Ciprian Mureşan
Neuer Berliner Kunstverein and Galeria Plan B, Berlin, Germany
In the midst of an unseasonably hot Berlin summer, Patriarch Teoctist, former head of the Romanian Orthodox church, found himself pinned between a stray meteorite and the floor of the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein. This blasphemous tableau, The End of the Five-Year Plan (2004), is Romanian artist Ciprian Mureşan’s interpretation of Maurizio Catellan’s La Nona Orta (The Ninth Hour, 1999), in which Pope John Paul II is felled by a meteorite. Teoctist’s inert body lay opposite Incorrigible Believers (2009), an arrangement of eight black pews and an altar, topped with an open copy of Franz Kafka’s unfinished novel The Castle (1926).
These installations formed the weighty epicentre of Mureşan’s first institutional solo exhibition in Europe, coinciding with the smaller show, ‘How I Wonder What You Are’, at the Berlin outpost of Cluj-based Galeria Plan B. While re-purposing a plethora of appropriated images, Mureşan maintains resolute faith in the ability of his own hand to conduct expression and experience.
Pioneer (2010), an animation comprised of loose graphite drawings, presents the flickering visage of a boy blowing into and sucking the air out of a plastic bag, a handkerchief around his neck signifying membership in the Pioneers, a ‘value-building’ youth group initiated by the Soviet Union in the 1920s. Is this youngster huffing glue, as photographs of Romanian children recognizable from post-1989 revolution media reports might suggest, or mischievously anticipating the bag’s inevitable explosion? Without missing a beat, the child glances up to meet the viewer’s perplexed gaze. In this fleeting moment, a fissure appears in the persistent attempts of a state to compose its own image.
From multiple historical channels, Mureşan has located and extracted instances of disagreement between official cultural ontologies and conflicted human situations. 3D Rubliov (2004) is a digital re-creation of scenes from Andrei Rublev (1966), a film by Andrei Tarkovsky that is loosely based on the life of the canonical Russian icon painter from whom the film takes its name. In a scene borrowed from the film’s prologue, a character named Yefim escapes his earthbound existence to float in a hot air balloon over surreal visions of the Russian countryside which, in Mureşan’s work, take on the simple quality of the three-dimensional computer games of the late 1990s. As the animation’s eerie minimal soundtrack hastens towards an anxious crescendo, Yefim and his balloon follow the same path as the cosmic rock that made short work of Teoctist, tumbling violently towards the earth.
Mureşan, and the rest of the ‘Cluj Generation’ with which he is loosely affiliated, came of age in post-communist Romania. It was in the revolutionary climate of 1989 that our prone Patriarch resigned under accusations of collaboration with Nicolai Ceauşescu’s brutal regime. But it was in the murky circumstances that followed that he was reinstated by the Holy Synod of the Church, which refused to accept his resignation. Comprehensions of reality have the troubling tendency of dissolving into fogs of confusion and cliché. Against this predicament, Mureşan offers a diverse selection of works that behave as so many awry lenses, providing refractory visions of the collusion between urges to simultaneously emulate and interrogate the figures and systems that give our lives form. – MITCH SPEED