Hybrids – art from inside the cyclone

With this issue, Revista ARTA attempts an experiment – perhaps a risky one – regarding both the theme and the design. To discuss hybrids, hybridisation, hybridity in the current status of the Romanian art scene, as young curator & art critic Cristina Bogdan, our coordinator, proposes, does not lack showiness, perhaps courage, certainly an amount of danger. Hybridity may seem like an umbrella term for contemporary art, a notion both obvious and difficult to refine in its conceptual ramifications and its psychological, cultural and social effects. Hybridity defines the ecclectic mix of artistic techniques and genres, the suprising articulation of modes of action and aesthetic theoretisation, as well as the ingenious blending of cultural & non-cultural codes and references which the artistic production of the past 10 years has made us witness. A practice embraced by the radical wing of the new generation of artists and critics from Romania and elsewhere, hybridisation refers to a programmatic and fluid transgression of the various aesthetic barriers left standing after modernisms and postmodernisms, to a productive mix between abstract discourse and relational and sociologic gestures in art, in order to invent possible evolution scenarios. It highlights the dominance of super-conceptual artistic actions which chose the amalgam of natural, artifical and virtual to put forth provocative means of questioning the world in socio-political terms. Finally, hybridity announces an ambiguous paradigm change in the contemporary art world, towards an apparent dilution within an immanent philosophy of “art without art”, aiming to rescue the efficiency and relevance of the artistic in a world seen as increasingly relativised and banal, ruled by financial capital. And yet a new, fascinating world.

The texts in this issue of Revista ARTA will inform you, in a highly theoretical style and a language which is itself new, about singularities and performativity, about the destabilising and desirable collision between mediums and disciplines, about Esthetic Entities coming from the future and works which address, modify or create their own conditions of existence, about alienating strategies, about the political & creative hacking of existing codes – in a word, about the need of contemporary art to configure its “own form of hybridity, between the conceptual and the aesthetic”. You will also learn about concepts, actions and projects (additivist litterature, Second Artworld, Second Body, Dead Thinking, Eternal Feeding, End Dream, Black Hyperbox, Postspectacle, institutional hybridity, etc.) of specific artists and groups, in Romania and elsewhere, for whom this practice is symptomatic.

In an artistic world with many cultural speeds – polarised between generations, urban centres and various artistic groups, working on one hand with leftovers of modernism and postmodernism, attempting on the other hand new fluid and ambiguous forms of integrating an immediate reality, non-representable with traditional artistic means, part of a global socio-political problematics – to discuss such artistic phenomena, apparently marginal but in fact situated right at the centre of the cyclone, becomes not a risk, but a duty. Or rather, a commitment.

Magda Cârneci, Editor-in-chief