On ruination: piercing the skin of communism in 1990s Romania

Abstract

This article discusses the relation between aesthetics, politics and ethics in the case of the making of a new display in the National Museum of the Romanian Peasant, following the demise of the communist state in Romania. It shows how the museum’s innovatory aesthetics of display, believed to be ‘escaping history’, in fact cannot avoid being the very product of history. The new aesthetics of display in the museum aimed to objectify and externalise ‘communism’ from the lives of people and institutions in Romania. Going beyond the stereotypical denominations ‘communist’ and ‘anti-communist’, this article aims to explain that demonising the communist past and building in opposition to its aesthetics, leads to actually incorporating and integrating communist values and modes of doing within the present display.

Keywords:

• design of exhibitions
• genealogy
• politics of aesthetics
• ethics
• fascism
• communism
• Romania
• history

Acknowledgements

I owe a great deal to many people working at the National Museum of the Romanian Peasant in Bucharest. I am very grateful to all those who spent time discussing different ideas with me that led to the writing of this article, to the two anonymous reviewers for their useful comments and suggestions, and to Rǎzvan Nicolescu who read and commented on an earlier draft of this article. I hope that the article contributes to a better understanding of the numerous voices and ideas around representation that coexist in and constitute the NMRP.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Gabriela Nicolescu is an Associate Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her general research and teaching interests include tourism and migration, the anthropology of art and museum studies, and medical, economic and political anthropology from material and visual perspectives. She is primarily concerned with the politics of representation and exhibition making in ethnographic museums. She has conducted fieldwork in Romania, UK, Hong Kong and south-eastern Italy and has curated exhibitions in Austria, Romania and the UK. She has published articles for the Journal of Design History and the Journal of Material Culture.

ORCID

Gabriela Nicolescu http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5342-9156

Notes

1. My research in the NMRP took place in 2010–11. However, my knowledge of the NMRP and of the many internal specificities owes much to my previous experience of working in the museum, first as a volunteer (2000–01) and then as an employed researcher (2005–06).

2. Horia Bernea and his team of researchers and artists studied extensively the work of Alexandru Tzigara-Samurcaş, who was the curator of the National Museum of Art from 1912 to 1952. For example, Tzigara-Samurcaş created installations in which, in the middle of an exhibition room, he exhibited pottery on sand. In other rooms, he exhibited textiles, wood and canvases on the same wall (Tzigara-Samurcaș 1937).

3. Over the years, the NMRP building had hosted the National Museum of Art (1912–50), under the auspices of the royal family. Later on, after World War II and the rise to power of the Communist Party, the museum’s building was successively inhabited by institutions such as the V.I. Lenin – I.V. Stalin Museum (1950–55), Marx-Engels-Lenin Museum (1955–66), the Museum of the Party (1966–89) (or more exactly, the History Museum of the Communist Party, of the Revolutionary and Democratic Movement of Romania) and the House of the Pioneers.

4. As architects like to point out, these buildings had covered an area the size of Venice (Iosa 2006).

5. A similar return to a more sensuous materiality and organicity happened in ‘post-socialist’ Hungary. Anthropologist Fehervary (2012) explains this tendency as an opposition to the plainness and seriality of material production during communism.

6. One of his collaborators described Bernea’s art in the museum in the early 1990s as ‘theological freshness’ (Manolescu 2007).

7. This relates to Hegel’s ([1807] 1979) notion of dialectics seen as a form of integrating negation in any definition of an identity, and, consequently, as a process.

8. Under pressure that the museum would enter renovation, to keep Horia Bernea’s displays intact, extensive documentation through photography was carried out. Visitors can visit the museum online and take a virtual tour: http://www.tur.muzeultaranuluiroman.ro/. For a shorter video presentation of the display, see: http://www.muzeultaranuluiroman.ro/daca-revii/linkuri-utile.html.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by PhD Scholarship Open Horizons, Fundația Dinu Patriciu, 2008-2009 and 2010-2012; Getty- NEC Fellowship, Visual Arts in Romania in the Period 1945-2000, Colegiul Noua Europă, București, 2010-2011.