Revived Contexts for Dada. The Cluj School of Art and the Composition of the Avant-garde’s Archive

Abstract

This paper examines, from the interdisciplinary perspective of cultural analysis, the ways in which several artists belonging to the so-called “Cluj School,” such as Adrian Ghenie, Victor Man and Mircea Cantor, share a common need for recontextualizing the “aura” of Dada in their paintings, performances and installations. An apocalyptical reappraisal of the Dada movement is to be found in Ghenie’s famous paintings Dada Is Dead and Duchamp’s Funeral I and II, as well as in his immersive installation The Dada Room, while some of Victor Man’s paintings and installations, and Mircea Cantor’s film Deeparture revive the Neo-Dada artistic subversion of Fluxus and Joseph Beuys’s ironic pedagogical performances. Following a conceptual scheme that blends art theory, cultural criticism and anthropology, I resort to Bruno Latour’s notion of “composition” and to his method of “compositionism,” conceived as an alternative to critique, in order to analyze how the “Cluj School” approaches the Avant-garde’s paradoxical legacy.