SERVING ART

"Serving Art" is a collection of about 2,000 b/w negatives coming from the archive of "Arta" - a Romanian magazine who controlled the public image of the local art world between 1953 and 1989. Those negatives, meant to provide reproductive material for printing, were produced in an approximate working context and relayed completely on the final cropping in order to adjust the framing and concentrate on the art reproduction aspect of the content.

What saves those images from being just flat reproductions of uninteresting art works is precisely the fact that they are all framing the subject in a wrong manner. By this process art becomes just a centered detail, dominated by an aura of events, objects, people, all speaking about the flux of history perceived as a flux of data. This stream of information is frozen in images with a presence as strong as of any artistically composed photograph from the history of the genre. With the difference that here the image is an "objet trouvé", born from the magic coincidence of the innocent camera and of the unaware subject. Before we started to look at them as a whole independent image, those photographs didn't exist, neither in the mind of the photographer, of the accomplice artist, or in the consciousness of the public. By the act of printing those forgotten negatives, we checked upon the statement of Henri Cartier-Bresson, a classic of the reportage: the best pictures need no cropping. We hopefully succeeded to transform an accident in a meaningful event.

We are currently processing this material by submitting to the public eye some semiotic consequences of this technical censorship, such as: interaction politics/culture, historical aura of the art object, material culture versus cultural propaganda, photography as spontaneous analysis of the art world, photography as an instrument for relating private and public ideologies, the ambiguous innocence of the camera, social participation versus social convention, selective memory etc.

The instruments of our discourse are both social and object oriented: lectures/workshops, monumental photographs, photo installations, custom designed show cases, publications.

The ongoing process of sharing the information extracted from the existing archive is therefore doubled by the process of building simultaneously a potential equivalent for the 90s. Artists we met in various working contexts and in places like Bucharest, Stockholm, Berlin, Amsterdam, Stuttgart, Santa Fe supported our effort to build a dynamic database reflecting the art/art mentalities of this decade. By accepting to be photographed as remote figures gravitating in the aura of their own work, they joined us in an effort of exploring private domains, analyzing public discourses, and - last but no least - establishing human contacts.

subREAL