The original photo

by Subreal

The solution

"Daniel Gontz’s ongoing project re-negotiates the position of the Romanian artist in relation to “poverty and the ridicule”, described on one occasion by Călin Dan as the great state secrets of the country, but also in relation to an international art market that still has an inordinate appetite for exoticism. What to “sell”, then, in order to produce a viable discourse, where to position oneself between observation of and participation to poverty, the ridicule, historical delay, loss and social trauma? What should images inoculate their viewers, according to which politics of representation and perception; how to orchestrate political and social ideologies in the image and to whose profit? Chronologically and theoretically, we are today past the ‘90s and the “after-the-wall” shows – when Eastern art works finally made their way to Western museums and galleries -, where the “not-just-art” take, compulsively framing art works as testimonies of conflict and struggle, was dangerously close to “not-really-art”, making pieces almost unrecognizable behind political and historical attachments. As we are past the rhetoric of “blood and honey”, bazaar-like displays saturated by phantasms of the Balkans and the smoke of cevapcici (like a ominous fog or like an aura, take it as you will), delineating a remote and irreducibly alien territory of conflict and melancholy, history and utopia, “this” and “other” collapsed. Gontz decided to initiate the dialogue or polemic by using the emblematic image of post-revolutionary Romanian art, one of subREAL’s ‘Framing Bucharest’ photographs, often instrumentalized in such exhibition contexts to illustrate, in spite of itself, this take on art coming from the East. Like all works in ‘Framing the Cities’, this subREAL picture isolates and frames a fragment of architecture, in temporal discontinuity and ideological opposition to the rest of the setting, while the tropes of mimetic representation are brought into play in the historical and political trompe l’oeil. The subREAL performance was reenacted, with Daniel Gontz and Vlad Nancă playing the part of the masters and using the same frame. The camera was operated by Iosif Kiraly of subREAL and the photograph was reproduced as faithfully as possible, something facilitated by the fact that the urban landscape of the location is the same as it was, in spite of passing years. Nothing has changed architecturally and urbanistically, therefore Gontz’s piece is not to be understood as a demonstration of all-conquering liberal prosperity. The same strategy was followed to remake one of Iosif Kiraly’s ‘Reconstructions’, in which temporally distinct snapshots of the same location are collaged to produce images of time seeping through places. Aside from being visually compelling, both remade images were significant choices inasmuch as they had been used by various international curators to show that East is neither East nor West, but a vast space of contradiction, ceaseless self-reflection and sociological conundrums, where scenarios of past and future are rehearsed and abandoned. The remakes signal the emergence of a new generation, less worried by defining the East, less eager to engage in forms of cultural gesticulation that can be described as ‘map envy’, or ‘history envy’ respectively, to reflect, à la Zenon, on the paradoxes of its marginality. To the extent that it is not just a figment equipped with a manifesto, this new generation could imagine other strategies to write a common history between East and West. The remake of the two photographs closes, in a sense, an era: it renders the model classical by the fact that it has triggered a reproduction. It forces the previous generation into a “master” status, untouchable but also distant. Gontz’s maneuver simulates the canon – first reproduced, then pushed away through acts of differentiation. "
by Mihnea Mircan