I
discovered Mircea Cantor by chance, leafing through a French art
magazine. And I immediately liked his works. In the beginning it was
the UNPREDICTEBLE FUTURE: the handwriting on a
steamy, wet window. I think each of us has, at least once in his
life, put his finger on a dusty car or a steamy window, wrote
something and left there a short message. A message addressed to
everybody, to who ever happens to pass by and spot it.
In Mircea
Cantor's work the letters leave their traces as they start to melt,
before they will disappear. Letters: evanescent, living traces...
The
spelling mistake is charming and it made me think of a child having
written this on his way to school, home, to the playing ground, ...
through life.
A short
poem on fragility, evanescence, surprise, hope and the imagination.
The artist
is renown for his film entitled Deeparture, in which a wolf
and a deer were brought in a white, empty gallery and left to watch
each other, make each other nervous and unsettle our own senses and
expectancy. The tension surfaces from challenging the instincts, from
the crude beauty of bringing together two creatures which in a
different environment (their natural one) are destined to play the
roles of pray and hunter. The viewer of this film witnesses the
exchange of glances between the wolf and the deer, their breathing,
restlessness and calm.
This is a
simple, almost minimalist film. Bringing together the two animals is
a challenge Mircea Cantor addresses to death and survival instincts
(both violent and fully natural) and it is also an invocation of the
unexpected. Things no longer happen according to a preconceived
scenario.
When I
read in his CV that he lives ”on Earth” I remembered
another work, also made in a minimalist manner, namely by adding a
single letter: the French title Le Monde becomes for Mircea
Cantor Les Mondes. The critics read in this an
anti-globalisation message; I rather see it as a small manifesto of
freedom, an apparently simple game, with letters and a marker: the
artist-child and the artist-protester play with the world, correct
it, complete it. The artist’s toy, the world, becomes a multitude
of toys (les mondes). There is a Dadaist feeling in his work,
drawing back to the Romanian inception of modern art.
In
a video entitled The Landscape
is Changing a
group of protesters
carry
mirrors
instead of banners with slogans. In their mirrors you see how the
environment changes while the people themselves walk and change their
position. As the artist himself confesses, he is interested not in a
global discourse, but rather in a universal one. The
protest takes places in an unknown city, no words are written
anywhere, there are only people and the world they transform. The
image (the reflection in the mirror, the video itself) mediates
between us and the world.
Although
The Title is the Last Thing,
(Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2006), I confess I like Mircea Cantor’s
titles: Changing Sky
(Ciel Variable, Frac,
Champagne-Ardenne, Reims, 2007),
Born to be Burnt
(GAMeC, Bergamo, 2006). Works such as The
Second Step and Double-Heads
Matches raise
my good spirits: a double-headed match is a sign that the world keeps
on being reinvented.
The
second step: is it Armstrong’s second step on the moon, taken
out of anonymity by the artist or does it belong to another lunatic
astronaut? In both cases, it is a fresh, cheerful and optimist
imprint upon the open world we live in.
I
like Mircea Cantor’s humour: regarding the for or against
discourse on globalisation, he brings in a mischievous smile: ”I
hear a lot of this official, left-winged discourse about the
periphery. Berlin, Los Angeles... I myself came to live in Paris in
order to be at the periphery of Romania. It’s my manner of keeping
a distance from everything.
(”J'entends beaucoup ce discours
officiel, de gauche, sur les peripheries. Berlin, Los Angeles...
Moi-meme, je suis venu habiter a Paris pour vivre a la peripherie de
la Roumanie. C'est ma maniere d'avoir une distance avec tout”,
Beaux Arts,
No.275, May 2007). The artistic credo of a man living in exile, but
”on Earth”.
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