Ciprian Mureşan

Persecuted by a phantasmagorical fascism, the protagonist of Elias Canetti’s 1935 postutopian novel Die Blendung (literally “The Blinding,” published in English as Auto-da-fé) feverishly addresses his library, marshaling his books for war. For the artwork Auto-da-fé, 2008, the centerpiece of Ciprian Mureşan’s second solo show in the US, the artist graffitied this monologue throughout urban Romania—broken into slogans such as A CRIME HAS BEEN COMMITTED AGAINST YOU and MY PEOPLE! and simply, NO. The artist photographed these sites and then reconstituted the images in a mural-size grid that bridges dispersed cries of resistance. The piece posits an alternative, vernacular monument to Canetti, and to a marginalized (though unclear) social movement.

From here, the other works in the exhibition undermine notions of centrality and authorship in various ways, and likewise urge a reexamination of monumentality in the wake of modernism. In Untitled (Kippenberger’s Catalogue), 2010, twenty double-sided, hand-copied pages culled from Martin Kippenberger’s 2000 exhibition catalogue The Happy End of Franz Kafka’s “Amerika” are spread across a table (alongside cotton gloves for handling). Kafka’s novel, the catalogue text, and Mureşan’s own agency are subsumed in his Photorealist drawings, which are neither descriptive nor expressive, and these diverse elements become instead textual strata of a cultural formation: polyvalent bodies of work by multiple authors compacted into a single piece. Nearby, two large framed drawings depict bodies lying on the ground in postures that simultaneously suggest modern dance, figure studies, and casualties. Where Auto-da-fé is a rallying cry, the lack of (cont)text renders these figures as victims, dissolved icons of a vague (art-historical or political) struggle. Thus Mureşan reenvisions the battleground between the dreams of modernism and its dystopian manifestations as an anonymous, scattered, textual territory.