Reykjavík Grapevine - 21.09.2012, Page 32

Drawing On The Walls
Dan Perjovschi presents his satirical cartoons
on the walls of the world’s museums
Dan laughs as he tells me the story
days before opening his new exhibit.
It’s five years later and he’s in Reykja-
vík, drawing on the walls of the D Gal-
lery on the second floor of Reykjavík
Art Museum’s Hafnarhús building.
The walls are a pristine white, save
for the drawings he’s already com-
pleted spread out across the room. On
the table he has a few possessions—a
black leather notebook full of sketch
ideas, several black markers as thick
as broom handles, his jacket, other
supplies and a cup of coffee, no cream,
no sugar.
For over a decade the Romanian
born artist has been travelling the
world drawing his simple, yet themati-
cally complex cartoons on the walls of
museums. While visiting a gallery in
Germany, Dan says a Reykjavík Art
Museum curator saw his and instantly
thought of the room on the second
floor of Hafnarhús. After completing
this exhibition “News From The Is-
land,” he will head off to Milan, where
he’ll have another week or so to turn
four white walls into an art exhibit.
A TEN-YEAR WORLD TOUR
The thing about painting on the walls
is that, at some point, someone from
the museum is going to come in and
paint over everything. With a few ex-
ceptions—the walls of the National
Technology Library in Prague, his
published books and digital images of
his work—all of Dan’s works are short
lived.
For Dan this has slowly become
part of his practice. He likens the ex-
perience to a musician playing a con-
cert. “When the concert is over you go
and play in the next one. So I’m on a
world tour, it’s just taking 10 years,” he
says.
There is also freedom to his short-
lived works. Dan has a number of
drawings he recycles, changes and
adapts to another era. If he doesn’t like
the version he drew in 2009, he can try
it again in another museum in anoth-
er country. If the politics surrounding
a certain drawing change, he feels
free to address those changes.
“When I know that these are not
meant to stay forever then I’m more
free to draw. I’m not scared that may-
be ten years from now people will not
understand this statement,” he says.
“I’m very free to express myself and
maybe next time when I’m drawing
the same drawing in another city on
another wall maybe I can do it better.”
UNREST IN BUCHAREST
Dan was born in Romania in 1961,
twenty-eight years before Romania’s
communist regime was overthrown.
Under the regime, Dan was put
through a series of art schools for
talented children, from the age of 10
until he graduated from the George
Enescu University of Arts of Iasi in
1985. After four years of working in
Romania’s underground art scene
and avoiding censorship, Dan and
the rest of the world watched Nicolae
Ceauescu’s regime fall on December
22, 1989.
For Dan, this was an “essential
change” to his development as an art-
ist.
“I’d been studying oil painting in
a communist regime and I switched
to graphic art because I thought paint-
ing was too slow. And then this revo-
lution came and for the first time in
the recent history of my country they
could print what they thought. There
was no censorship.”
This new freedom, to print with-
out censorship and travel without
restrictions, led to Dan’s transi-
tion from an artist concerned
with purely visceral art to an
artist drawing with a political
message in mind. He began
drawing political cartoons for
22 Magazine, a Romanian pub-
lication named for the day the re-
gime fell.
“Because it was a political and so-
cial magazine I had to deal with real
life,” he says. “Not my idea of beauty
or whatever—not the contemplative
society but being in the society.”
NEWS FROM THE ISLAND
All that’s not to say that Dan’s draw-
ings aren’t funny. You can laugh. He
expects you to. He might even be a
little upset if you don’t. But when you
laugh, he wants you to “get it”—he
wants you to understand both the joke
and its bigger political and social con-
text.
“You can laugh, it’s okay, but if that
kind of laugh can make you think,
that’s even better,” he says. “These
here are very simple drawings that
are meant to make people laugh, but
laugh intelligently.”
With three days until the exhibit
opens to the public, he gives me a tour
of his work so far. So far each wall
seems to have a unifying theme: soci-
ety’s addiction to technology, the econ-
omy or recent global events. He has a
wall devoted to Iceland—the exhibit is
called “News From The Island,” after
all. There’s a cartoon about the debate
over joining the European Union and
one on the bank bailouts. Higher on
the wall he’s drawn a volcano (labelled
tragedy) erupting lava (souvenirs).
And there’s the mandatory comment
on Icelandic weather, a drawing about
the intense winds the week of Dan’s
arrival.
“It’s always first about the politics
of the moment, both globally and lo-
cally, then it’s about the society, how it
looks, how it behaves,” Dan says of his
themes. “Then it’s about the cultural
aspect.”
There is also a good amount of
wordplay on the walls. For Dan, who
says he considers himself to be a part
of the Dadaist tradition of destroying
order in literature and art, images and
texts are the same thing. Breaking
apart the English language, then, is
just as much of a drawing as a picture.
Not being a native English speaker,
he says, also gives him a more distant
and less reverent view of the language.
“English is not my native language,
so I can maybe break it in way that
maybe a native speaker wouldn’t. I
don’t have this attachment. I can look
at it from afar and play,” he says.
CONTEMPORARY ART FOR
EVERYONE
Perhaps one of the subtler goals of
Dan’s work, however, is to create a
type of contemporary art that’s acces-
sible to everyone, which leads us back
to MoMA.
The MoMA exhibit began while the
walls were still empty. Museum goers
could walk through the lobby where
Dan worked, and talk to him, watch
him work and see how the art came
together. His conversations could con-
tribute to his work, or give him a sense
of who his audience was. When a
group of eight-year-olds walked by, he
was able to ask them which drawing
they thought was most interesting.
They chose one on immigration.
There are benefits to being on dis-
play, Dan says, but still, it was weird,
and not something he’d prefer to do
again.
“I had to be the monkey on the
wall, but I did it with pleasure because
I think it’s fantastic when people see
how the work is done,” he says. “Con-
temporary art sometimes is very scary
for normal people because they don’t
understand it. But a bond is created
when they see it, how it’s made. For
a lot of people there it was probably a
very interesting experience.”
Even if Reykjavík won’t get to see
the pictures drawn, the hope is that
the mutual understanding between
the artist and the audience will still be
there. - ARIT JOHN
It was 2007 and Dan Perjovschi had just finished drawing on a wall in the lobby of the
Museum of Modern Art in New York when a security guard approached him.
Dan, I was just about to lose my job because of you, she said.
He asked what he had done.
I was watching you draw and I was laughing, she explained. My supervisor came and
said ‘You’re here to protect the art, not laugh.’
32 The Reykjavík GrapevineIssue 15 — 2012ART “News from the Island – Dan Perjovschi”15 September 2012 – 6 January 2013
Reykjavík Art Museum – Hafnarhús
INTER
VIEW
Simon Steel
“And then this revolu-
tion came and for the first
time in the recent history of
my country they could print
what they thought. There
was no censorship.„