London. A black-and-white photograph shows a woman with abundant dark hair sashaying across a wooden pontoon. Then she lies down on her back. She is dressed in a dark bathing suit and long fishnet stockings. Barbarella in black-and-white. A small LCD screen set up next to the photographs shows more clearly what is going on here: the woman scribbles something on a long strip of paper, throws crumpled notes at the camera. On the beach behind the camera, a group of people is watching the woman; someone finally picks up and reads one of these crumpled shreds. The camera watches, focusing on the note: apparently an address. What is only roughly visible in the video »Prohibited Area to Any Exterior Utterance« (1991) is reproduced in blinding color in a catalogue recently published on the occasion of a US retrospective of the work of Romania’s showcase artist couple, Dan and Lia Perjovschi.
The note with the address was wrapped in a bit of bright red tissue paper. But the pictures Anthony Wilkinson shows in his project room are black, gray and white. A photo collage showing highlights from Lia Perjovschi’s performance is on the left, and a video collage with the same scenes on the right. The latter creates a political framework for the works, which begin in Romania’s pre-revolutionary era and finally – after the revolution and a post-revolutionary phase – end in ›capitalism.‹ The pictorial information inserted in the video between the scenes as ›context‹ mainly portrays the parliamentary palace that Nicolae Ceausescu constructed, ostensibly as a house for the people. The stately architecture that today houses parliament and a museum is shown several times. Perjovschi’s attitude toward this reinterpretation remains unclear, however; maybe it is not even an issue. In a video performance entitled »Loop« (1997), you see her torso jumping up and down, with a city somewhere in the background, perhaps a palace-museum-parliament.
At the beginning, in the late 1980s, Perjovschi staged happenings in her high school class or performed before a video camera without any audience at all, her body painted and covered in swathes of cloth. With the advent of the revolution, a sort of internalized audience-bashing began: in a video performance (shown separately), you see a woman in a dark suit, her hair now short or tied back. Sitting next to the woman in a chair is a white, man-sized rag doll. After a while, the woman takes off a second pair of pants and jacket and puts them on the doll. All of a sudden, she throws the figure into a bucket of paint, spilling and splashing the dark liquid; then, the woman starts to madly toss her man-sized doll through the museum lobby. Other visitors, standing in small groups, dodge her, and the woman finally ends her performance in a back courtyard. Anger and aggression hardly begin to describe the acts in »I am fighting for my right to be different« (1993): the woman appears to be working off her anger at life, at the daily routine, the past and the present, at herself even, with every toss of the doll. But later repetitions of that performance appear to have lost their intensity, possibly to make sure the act goes according to plan. Repetition diminishes the anger.
Perhaps Lia Perjovschi simply no longer felt the need to fight to be different. With the progressive introduction of democratic and capitalist structures, different aspects of art and life seem to have come to the fore. Now, she stood next to others in public spaces, often without them noticing or even understanding – but they were always forced to react. Between 1997 and 2002, she repeated the slapstick-like »Lia Approach« in museums, in streets and squares – always to an amused public. A vehement and persistent naiveté left room for her earlier performances’ expressionism and strength of will. On the other hand, a larger number of didactic situations were incorporated to represent this era in the show reel that the Nasher Museum in Durham, North Carolina, put together for the retrospective: Dan and Lia in the studio, in a public debate, during tours, on a TV show. After all, a performance is also a kind of art education, which can be seen here at times as museum didactics or as a teaching method at the university level.
Soundless, often in pixels or other barely defined images, Lia Perjovschi’s concept of a performance moved away from expression to art-related action. The consistent use of black-and-white suggests an historic integration that goes back much farther than the 1990s – maybe to the 1960s or 70s. The imagery, often rather time-worn, supports that impression. But that does not taint the general impression: it lends the documentary photo sequences a blurriness that allows thoughts to emerge. One that gives new meaning to her early works, always striving for expressiveness, and the works from her post-revolutionary period that were so full of anger and rebellion against bans and limitations: every single action goes unnoticed and awareness of their relevance fades. All the more so as time goes by.
Translated by Dagmar Breitenbach, Jennifer Taylor