Art, Religion and Resistance in (Post-)Communist Romania

Nostalgia for Paradise Lost

Maria Alina Asavei

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9783030562540
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030562557
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Art Theory & Criticism
• Index: History

This book illuminates the interconnections between politics and religion through the lens of artistic production, exploring how art inspired by religion functioned as a form of resistance, directed against both Romanian national communism (1960-1989) and, latterly, consumerist society and its global market. It investigates the critical, tactical and subversive employments of religious motifs and themes in contemporary art pieces that confront the religious 'affair' in post-communist Romania. In doing so, it addresses a key gap in previous scholarship, which has paid little attention to the relationship between religious art and political resistance in communist Central and South-East Europe.  

© The Author(s) 2020

M. A. AsaveiArt, Religion and Resistance in (Post-)Communist RomaniaModernity, Memory and Identity in South-East Europehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56255-7_1

Begin Abstract

1. Art, Politics and Religion in (Post-)Communist Romania: An Introduction

Maria Alina Asavei¹

(1)

Department of Russian and East European Studies, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic

Maria Alina Asavei

Email: [email protected]

Keywords

Spiritual revitalizationReligion-inspired art in communist RomaniaPolitical art and religionReligion and art in post-communist Romania

End Abstract

1.1 Introduction

Apart from the churchgoers and devotees of sacred icons, there is a less explored category of contemporary cultural artefacts of religious inspiration that populate the public cultural sphere of the former Eastern bloc. The producers and consumers of these peculiar cultural productions are devotees of a post-traumatic contemporary aesthetic mysticism. These movements constitute veritable countercultures where religiosity and resistance to current hardships overlap in the spiritual-political mission of salvation. As Tara Isabella Burton noticed, the advent of contemporary aesthetic mysticism “is a general post-liberal cast: a sense that classical and contemporary liberalism—and its handmaiden, secularism—have failed, not just as a political project but also as a cultural one. The ‘modern world’ … is devoid of mystery, of sanctity, of a conception of a greater and metaphysically meaningful Good.”¹ What must be disentangled is the extent to which religious cultural expressions not only fuel die-hard nationalist sentiments, nativism, indigenism, right-wing messianic populism and homophobia, but the other side of the coin: namely the alternative narratives according to which religion-inspired cultural expressions foreground human rights activism through the mediation of religious and spiritual–inspired “arts of resistance.”

While there is a burgeoning amount of academic work on how right-wing populism, homophobia, or Romaphobia’s culture war employs religious tropes to get rid of “the Others,” the use of a Christian artistic imagination toward the opposite end has received much less attention. What Theodor Adorno called “the lost unity between art and religion” beyond the “late phase of enlightenment and secularization” has to be further investigated by bringing to the forefront contemporary revivals of various instances of aesthetic mysticism employed to political-critical ends.²

Against this background, this book focuses on the spiritual and religion-inspired contemporary art that can function as a form of resistance, directed against both the dictatorship of Romanian national communism and against the dictatorship of the consumerist society and its global market, dependent on a capitalist economy of images. In addition, it explores the critical, tactical and subversive uses of religious motifs (and Orthodox Christian aesthetics) in those contemporary art pieces that confront the religious “affair” in post-communist Romania. The volume does not exclusively deal with the relationship between religion-inspired art and politics during and after the fall of the communist regime in Romania, but rather focuses on the relationships between art, politics and religion from a variety of entangled configurations (e.g. political art and religion, religion-inspired art and politics, politics and religion vis-á-vis the contemporary arts).

I contend that art, politics and religion interact in various ways and to various ends—both during Nicolae Ceauṣescu’s dictatorship and after its collapse—and these different kinds of concatenation can be regarded as multifarious configurations of resistance to the dominant status quo of any specific given moment. Thus, this volume will explore different trajectories of resistance, as well as the practices of domination that triggered the specific type of resistance. In line with Paul Routledge’s theorizing about the spatiality of resistance, this book aims to tackle the resistance(s) to dominant power, and their elastic boundaries, focusing on how “practices of resistance cannot be separated from practices of domination.”³ Thus, religion-inspired art production is not essentially a resistance practice but it can be approached as such when it is mobilized through specific spaces and times. Art of religious and/or spiritual descent can function as a practice of resistance if we understand the concept of resistance according to its spatiality and temporality and not through an essentialist understanding of the term.

One of the most long-lasting artistic semi-movements that display religious tropes, symbols and thematic clusters in their cultural production is the Prolog art collective. The group was born in 1985, during the harshest years of Nicolae Ceauṣescu’s National Communism and it was known in the era under the label of “Neo-Byzantinism.” After the fall of the communist regime in December 1989, Romanian art critics and historians re-baptized the artists associated with the Prolog group, calling them “Neo-Orthodox” or even “Neo-Traditionalists.”⁴ In 2015, the Prolog artists celebrated 30 years of incessant cultural activity and organized a retrospective group exhibition titled “90 × 30” (at the Roman Gallery in Bucharest). It is not without significance for the main argument of this book that the artists associated with this religion-inspired movement held dissimilar, if not conflicting views, on the resistance potential and intention of their cultural production.

While Ion Grigorescu—a renowned artist associated with the Neo-Orthodox movement—claims that there is incompatibility between combat (oppositionality) and Christian Orthodoxy because “an Orthodox does not fight anything,”⁵ Valentin Scărlătescu—one of the artists associated with Prolog —posits that the artistic production of the Prolog group is “resistance combat.” In his view, the artists associated with the Prolog group perpetuated to this day the resistance potential of their art. He poignantly points out that “resistance has to continue because the reasons that have triggered its necessity are not over. Perhaps today’s resistance is more important than our past resistance.”⁶ However, it is of utmost importance to state from the beginning that some thematic clusters and topics of religious descent that emerged during late Romanian communism were recuperated and multidimensionally developed after the fall of the regime. At the same time, there have been noticeable splits and changes of direction, as well as multifaceted instantiations of the artists’ prophetic activism.

While the Neo-Orthodox group, Prolog , had a rather peripheral status in relation to the culture of national communism, after the collapse of the regime, it became a mainstream artistic phenomenon at the national level, managing to acquire art galleries’ spaces, publishing houses and the support of fractions within both the Romanian official art world and the Romanian Orthodox Church. In addition to these waves of institutional support, a growing number of Neo-Orthodox artists have succeeded to secure an increasing number of art/religion lovers who regularly attended their individual and group exhibitions. All these aspects culminated in the Neo-Orthodox semi-movement’s good reputation and notoriety among their detractors. This does not mean, of course, that all of the artists associated with the Neo-Orthodox milieu shared the same religious, artistic or political agendas. As this study will demonstrate, various ruptures, schisms and sets of concerns typify the artistic-political agenda of the individual artists who are grouped within the label “Neo-Byzantine” and “Neo-Orthodox.” There are also certain existential concerns that have contributed to the group’s cohesion and longevity.

The increased prominence of the members of the Prolog group (as well as of other artists associated with the Neo-Orthodox semi-movement) is also reflected in the increased number of exhibitions after the fall of the communist regime. During the Ceauṣescu era, in 1976, the artist, Sorin Dumitrescu, who would later on be associated with the Prolog (together with Ṣerban Gabrea), launched a double exhibition of ambient art at the Ion Mincu Architectural Institute in Bucharest. The unprecedented cultural event is described in Romanian art history as the first conceptual art approach of the sacred.⁷ Other art exhibitions by the Prolog artists that focused on the dimension of the sacred were: the first exhibition of Neo-Byzantine conception titled, Prologue I Tescani, at the Căminul Artei Gallery (Bucharest, 1985) and Prologue II at the same gallery in 1986 and 1989 (both curated by Paul Gherasim). After the fall of the communist regime in 1989, the number of religion-art focused exhibitions proliferate not only in the capital but also in other cities of Romania.

Little attention has been given in academic studies of religion and politics to the relationship between religion-inspired art and political resistance during the communist regimes in Central and South-East Europe. Recently, Dušan Bjelić explored from a post-colonial and geo-psychoanalytic ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Art, Politics and Religion in (Post-)Communist Romania: An Introduction
• 2. On the Varieties of Cultural Resistance During Romanian Late Communism
• 3. Godless Religious Art of Romanian National Communism
• 4. Art, Nature and Ecologies of Transfiguration during Romanian National Communism
• 5. Spiritual Ecologies and Meta-Byzantine: Music During Nicolae Ceauṣescu’s Regime
• 6. Contemporary Aesthetic Mysticism and Religious Revitalization Movements
• 7. The Body in (Post-)Communist Art: A Site of Salvation and Resistance
• 8. Religion Inspired Art and Politics: Neo-Orthodoxism as Neo-Traditionalism?
• 9. Art as Resistance to the “Religious Affair” and Consumerist Religion in Post-Communist Romania
• 10. Looking Forward: Looking Back Through the Three Lenses of Art, Politics and Religion
• Back Matter