Ediorials - Again, Art with Message: The Exhibition Ironical Trans(a)gressions of the Artists Miruna Hasegan and Daniela Frumuseanu

Finding out that the title of Miruna Hasegan's PhD thesis, submitted in 2005, had been Ideals and Aesthetical Ideas and making the connection with this exhibition's title, Ironical Trans(a)gressions, in which she exhibits along with Daniela Frumuseanu, I remembered the theory of the sociologist and aesthetician Theodor Adorno (1903-1969), one of the most brilliant representatives of Frankfurt School, founder of music sociology. The most difficult, he says, is to demonstrate the ideological nature of instrumental music, this being relatively easy to detect for the other artistic fields - literature, plastic arts, opera. And, yet, demon-strates he, Bach' music, for instance, expresses the ideology of the triumphant bourgeoisie, while, as he appreciates in his youth, Schönberg' atonal music would represent the equiva-lent of ideology disappearing, with music. The same way abstract art would also be, at its turn, non-ideological. At the same time, Adorno attacks Stravinski' music, for instance, as being outdated - a position firmly rejected by Schönberg himself, who appreciated the great Russian composer's music. Later on, Adorno changed his theory, by stating that the lack of ideology was another form of ideology. Of course, this aspect is even more obvious with plastic arts, where both abstract art and a painting dedicated to landscape, to still life, to the nude in an interior, are forms of escaping from the social reality the artist is disappointed of, the same way as, often and throughout all epochs, their retreat into monasticism represented another refusal and escape from what man regarded as unacceptable in the world he lived in.
A translation into the field of plastic arts of the youth theory of Adorno would be, for in-stance, to refer to an illustrious example, the condemning of Guernica composition (1937) by Picasso as being reactionary, because it is figurative and has a clear ideological message, by stating that, for these reasons, it is inferior to the gestural painting The Cathedral (1947) by Jackson Pollok. Which is obviously not true. There is only good or bad artistic creation, be it abstract or figurative, or even with an explicit ideological message.
In our country, at the end of the '90s, when, at last, any shade of censure in art had disap-peared, but also on the background of the aversion against the ideological art ordered by the previous regime's authorities, an extreme reticence regarding the message art of any kind was manifested, despite that, as the period was extremely confuse, the artists were in search of new reference points, including those with ideological charge, such as the free expressing of religiosity. In the recent years, in literature and art, in the context of dissipa-tion of the illusion that we had reached the "end of ideology", as Daniel Bell had announced ever since 1960, or even more, that we had reached "the end of history", as Francis Fuku-yama adjudged in 1991, an obvious refreshment of both the political novel and the message art is being manifested, not only in our country, but throughout the whole Europe. A creator such as Marilena Murariu, for instance, attacks, directly and in a personal manner, the dis-appointing political class. Others, like Mircea Deaca, dedicate themselves to a "conceptual" critique of today's society, the same way Miruna Hasegan and Daniela Frumuseanu do.
Another sociologist, Georg Simmel, ever since 1903, in his book, Metropolis and Mental Life, highlighted an idea that we notice in numerous works of the two artists in this exhibition, according to which modern man is involved in the fight for preserving his individuality, against the levelling tendencies of the society that oppresses him by its various subsystems. If, in XVIII century, man had fought and obtained his liberation from the political, religious and economic bounds, and in XIX century had discovered his individuality and non-repeatability, starting from the beginning of the XX century and even from the last decades of the XIX century, this unequal fight started with a society that, as Simmel was saying in another of his works, Philosophy of Money (1900), has become more and more financial, the result being the fact that it now matters what you do, not who you are. A plastic synthesis of this theory - that she probably did not know, but whose social relevance she had experi-enced - is what Daniela Frumuseanu does in her composition The Life Price, where human individualities characterized by bar codes are placed into boxes.
Treating people like a flock, controlling them in various ways seems now more obvious than ever, the Big Brother law, which has stirred up the reaction of many, as being another form of levelling, of transforming the individuals into modern slaves. But, not only us - the flock - are being levelled, but also the top of the pyramid becomes uniform, obviously in a different way, the metaphor chosen by Daniela Frumuseanu being the "white collars." From a book-object called The White Collar Book, to the monumental installation, passing through the artwork White Collar Brotherhood or the artwork called The Pyramid, Daniela Frumuseanu offers a plastic image of the levelling of ruling elites, after all uniformed slaves themselves, too, despite their power, inevitably limited at its turn. A close idea appears in the object collage of Miruna Hasegan, entitled Romanian Politicians, where the latter are represented by ties of which their symbols as slaves are clamped: symbols of people sold to different parties, as the currency clamped to the ties indicates, of slaves of pleasures, etc.
A number of years passed until we realised that this world, which we had idealistically hoped was a world of freedom, is, at its turn, far from being perfect. Daniela Frumuseanu names it a "vitiated society" in her text for this exhibition, where, in a concise, but percu-tant, manner she expresses her deep discontentment regarding the world we're living in, and her works, by means of plastic metaphors, are illustrating the same ideas. In Straw Men, she presents an aligned raw of scarecrows, those people who cannot do anything by their own initiative, who can only obey. She uses here a plastic solution I have never encountered in her works, a paste that creates three-dimensionality, but at the same time immerses into the same viscous „medium" the individualities without individuality. Finding various three-dimensional solutions represents, for that matter, a common preoccupation of both artists; preoccupation that is present in all the exhibited works.
A delight for detail, but which she handles very well in the whole construction, characterizes Miruna Hasegan, who, in Ethno Globalization, uses the well-known blue of jeans, in order to highlight a form of levelling, active in every single village on the planet, as a result of American acculturation.
Visual artists are represented by creations that are perceived instantaneously and as a whole, unlike music and literature, where the "speech" involves an interval of time and an evolution of the parts coagulating into a whole. For this reason, the artist's challenge is to find the percutant visual metaphor, which can convince at a glance. One such solution has Miruna Hasegan found in the collage Romanian Medical System, characterized by an over-whelming irony, by joining small, cheep, large circulation lithographies with religious sub-ject, to small packets of medicinal tea, a suggestive metaphor of the fall from modernity, of the involution in the field. Another of her collages, Homage to imposture, captures another chronic illness of today's system: the collection of diplomas, from licence to the doctor hon-oris causa, passing through a lot of "excellence diplomas" offered by obscure organizations, in order to build an impressive social status, by a contentless person, who, for this reason, is represented by the artist without features. She also critically approaches some other punctual aspects, such as The Miraculous Draught of Fishes, yet today's fishnet being full of consumerist residua, the Eternal Feminine - a prey of the cosmetic supra-offer, or the Un-employment, a collage of various used and already useless work gloves.
One of the things that Daniela Frumuseanu greatly admires is the philosophy of Mihai Eminescu contained in the poem Glossa; so, she presents in this exhibition another plastic variant of the poem, this time a three-dimensional variant, where each of the ten stanzas is presented as a page placed above a thick tome, marked by the passing of time. "All is new and new is all", but also: "What is wave, like wave passes" represent, for certain, the hidden meaning of many other of the artist's works.
The perverse effect of manipulation is its spreading and transforming into opinion or norm for large categories of people, without the latter being conscious that they become the slaves of those ideas. This type of exhibition has precisely this function, of urging to a reflec-tion on the "ready chewed" ideas, and Daniela Frumuseanu' work, See, offers the solution for saving ourselves by passing these ideas by our own filter - an individual fight against levelling. She brings a tribute to the individuality that succeeds in this respect in the artwork In a Different Way, where a flock of majestic birds are all floating toward the same direction, except for one, who chooses the opposite direction. Or maybe it is that they "let themselves carried away", while a single one is swimming against the current - a beautiful and subtle metaphor of the person who "sees", who understands and does not abandon themselves to ready-made thinking.
Miruna Hasegan seems to be more pessimistic, despite her creations with ludic appearance, as she decrees, in an artwork's title: Butterflies are Free, only them. In the interior of the rich, sumptuous embroidery, a golden thread birdcage appears, too, but, as we all know, no birdcage can keep butterflies shut inside it, no matter how much gold it is made of. Leaving irony for a tender and nostalgic self-irony, Miruna Hasegan places, in Autobiographical Tree, on the background of a geometrically schematized tree, a series of collages of photos representing her at different ages; photos that had not accidentally been cut into leaf shapes, the evanescent character of leaves symbolizing the sum of all past moments that form today's identity of each and every one of us.
Which are the other bounds between the two artists, besides their beliefs, clearly expressed in the exhibition? Both are academics, one in Bucharest, the other in Iasi, both have been organizing numerous exhibitions in which they foster the creation of their young students. Many other academics do nothing for their students, except teaching the courses; it is for this reason that their effort deserves to be highlighted. Furthermore, each of them is an organizer and a curator of national exhibitions and one international exhibition, gathering around them numerous artists from all around the country. They practically lead informal artistic large groups, without a name and without a fixed composition, but which count nu-merous talented young people, but also visual art personalities with constant participations in the exhibitions organized by these artists, who are so active in the branch.
Coming back to their creations, mention must be made of the fact that both have gradually included, during the recent years, artworks with social critique message, until this exhibi-tion, where almost all their exhibits refer to the aggression to which society submits the individual, intending to subdue him/her by sophisticated methods, of the "trans" or "meta" kind; methods that, most often, we don't even perceive. Both artists' messages are more percutant than the early ones, some of the creations have monumental dimensions, which indicates an artistic and intellectual effort that is increasingly tireless and elaborate.

Mihaela Varga