CURRENT EXHIBITION ::::
Dan Perjovschi:
The Institute Drawing
Opening Reception: Wednesday, 16 June, 5:30 - 7:30
Exhibition Dates: 17 June - 30 October, 2010

Visiting Artist Lecture: Monday, 13 September, 7:30
Lecture Hall, 800 Chestnut Street Campus
Free & Open to the Public

On the face of it, it would be hard to find an artist whose practice is simpler than that of Romania-born and -based Dan Perjovschi. His medium is site-specific drawing, albeit often ramified as installation and performance. His “canvas,” like that of the graffiti artist (from whose “baroque” and territory-marking methods he nevertheless firmly distinguishes his own), is the nearest wall, preferably topographically marginalized or, in his own word, “leftover.” And his utensils are nothing more than those easily accessible in a grade-school classroom: chalk, marker, pencil, or pen.

But if prima facie simplicity is a virtue, it’s a virtue, in the case of Perjovschi, made of a fairly dire necessity. Though deposed and executed Romanian autocrat Nicolae Ceauşescu’s notorious austerity programs might be retroactively interpreted as one of the principal catalysts behind the Romanian revolution of 1989, living that program before the fact—whether as artist, as Perjovschi did, or as ordinary citizen—could hardly be described as prospective of impending emancipation. With shortages and rationing of most vital essentials throughout Romania during the 80s, not only were artist’s supplies obviously—and comparatively unimportantly—difficult to come by, but so was the very lifeworld, the shared communal background, within (or against) which the artist devises her concepts and objects. In fact, Perjovschi has freely acknowledged that, contrary to Romantic notions about the artistic inspiration to be won through hardship and deprivation, inescapable-seeming misery is not artistically enabling or “sexy” at all. Nevertheless, the artistic voice he developed as his native land began to turn away from Ceauşescu-style communism toward its 2007 inclusion in the EU is a voice that retains the traces of its passage—the madness of political austerity and censorship having been transmuted into a method of simplicity and candor, at once humorous and pungently critical.

Above all, it’s Perjovschi’s candor, his commitment to what he calls “leav[ing] the idea intact,” that has carried over to his current practice: drawing (and writing) against the grain of one-dimensional transnational media conglomerates whose Big Brother–like “right” to stay—and to keep their target audience—on message seems all but indefeasible. All but. And it’s within the interstices and ambiguities of what otherwise would amount to a discursive hegemony that Perjovschi plies his trade—reappropriating, dismantling, inserting, x-ing out, ironizing, subverting. Definitely striving to turn things on their heads, he nevertheless eschews the all-knowing, all-negating perspective born of distance and critical superiority. With a lightness of gesture, his aim is to activate and to celebrate the space he has been given to work on and with, as well as to avoid the surface cheer but deep cynicism of the cultural, social, political, and economic prerogatives he counters.

Though airy and ephemeral, the marks Perjovschi makes are not intended as yet another chapter in the postmodern panegyric on impermanence-as-metaphysical-absolute. Rather, the fleetingness he embraces in his drawing—a medium he renders transdisciplinary and multidimensional—is an empathetic opening of the self both to others and to the otherness of real opportunities to revise, renew, and repeat. Such openness to nonassertiveness, relinquishment, and self-transformation complements Perjovschi’s unpessimistic belief, this late in the day, in the possibility of art’s genuinely mattering—a belief, wrought by hard experience rather than naiveté, in something not altogether unlike the artist as unacknowledged legislator of the world.