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Utopians often have a hard time of it in Ciprian Mureşan’s work. The Romanian artist’s hilarious photograph Leap into the Void—after 3 Seconds (2004) mimics Yves Klein’s classic image of the artist in a swan dive from a rooftop. Mureşan’s abject version shows a similar street, a man’s body sprawled on the pavement—the aftermath of a moment of glorious flight. Flight his recent show at David Nolan, his first New York solo, Mureşan (b. 1977) continued sending up utopian artists, though perhaps treating them more gently, while also introducing themes of translation and transmission of knowledge and ideologies.
Greeting the visitor was The Doomed City (all works from the last two years), consisting of a chair and desk on which rest several classic novels by the likes of Joyce, Dostoyevsky and Woolf. Into each book, which viewers could peruse, Mureşan bound two of his own pencil drawings illustrating the 1975 Russian sci-fi novel The Doomed City, by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. Thus, he disrupts the literature of the past with his contemporary interpretations of a futuristic novel.
On a monitor nearby, Mureşan’s 9-minute video The Invisible Hand demonstrated his process, showing him as he bound on of his drawings into a tract by economist Adam Smith, coiner of the titular expression, which has been used by economists ever since to describe the supposedly self-regulating nature of the marketplace. Since the text appears in a Romanian translation and is borrowed from the library at the University of Cluj—the video shows Mureşan leaving the library with it—one couldn’t help but think of the way market economies have been uneasily grafted onto formerly socialist nations.
To create Untitled (Monks), consisting of a 12-minute video and 19 drawings, Mureşan pressed several artist friends into service to play robed monks in a monastery, dutifully hand-copying books, as actual monks did in order to preserve and transmit knowledge and religious doctrine. Rather than bibles, though, Mureşan’s artist-scribes duplicate books on Beuys, Mondrian, Malevich, Duchamp and Sturtevant. The video shows them at their worktables, toiling away; a vitrine displayed the simple pencil drawings, with illustrations and text alike painstakingly reproduced. The piece slyly suggests art is a religion and art texts scripture. At the same time, as he does in The Doomed City, Mureşan pay tribute to the humble book—sensual, long-lived, malleable—in the age of the Kindle.
While Beuys, Mondrian and Malevich each were driven by utopian aspirations, Mureşan’s inclusion of Sturtevant, who created precise simulations of others’ works long before appropriation came into vogue, and of Duchamp, who made all such idea art possible, shifts the tone. At once homage and tender satire, this work targets not only the true believers but the skeptics too—not only the famous, and not only the boys.
-Brian Boucher
By Holland Cotter
Ciprian Muresan, born in 1977, is one of several remarkable young Romanian artists (Mircea Cantor and Serban Savu are others) who were on the verge of their teens at the time of the 1989 revolution, and adults during the period of confused politics and disappointed ideals that followed.
Unsurprisingly, utopianism appears in Mr. Muresan’s art only in ambiguous forms. For the Nolan show he has unbound a printed volume of Adam Smith’s 18th-century, pro-capitalist tract “Wealth of Nations” to insert one of his drawings among the pages. The drawing was inspired by a 1979 Russian sci-fi novel, “The Doomed City,” in which a planet populated by earthlings from ideal-driven eras (1940s Germany, 1960s America) has sunk into a state of armed barbarism. He has placed similar drawings into novels by James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, giving modern literature a Darwinian bottom line.
Modern art gets a reality check too. In a 2011 video we see robed monks in a scriptorium. They aren’t transcribing religious texts, though. They’re drawing copies of art book illustrations: an abstract painting by Malevich, a Mondrian grid, a photograph of Joseph Beuys. All three artists are famous for being utopians; their art has the status of holy writ. Needless to say, Mr. Muresan’s approach to them is not reverential.
The monks, it turns out, aren’t monks; they’re Mr. Muresan’s artist-friends. Most of the images they’re copying are from a catalog of work by the American conceptualist Elaine Sturtevant, who has made a career of recreating art by other artists, specifically male superstars, with the intent of, among other things, puncturing myths of originality and genius. Mr. Muresan pushes her endeavor further with a video of artists making copies of printed reproductions of Ms. Sturtevant’s re-creations, which were themselves derived from printed reproductions of the originals.
Mr. Muresan engineers this meta-art pileup with a straight face and a light touch. In the end, though, he is not above genuine homage. A fluid draftsman, he recently produced 120 graphite drawings of Martin Kippenberger’s 1994 installation “The Happy End of Franz Kafka’s ‘Amerika,’ ” which envisioned the United States as a giant employment agency: a place of both opportunity and cut-throat competition.
Kippenberger, a protean and anarchic figure, died in 1997 and is a hero to many younger artists. Mr. Muresan, I would guess, is one. And he uses his 120 painstakingly executed drawings to create a video animation in which Kippenberger’s grand, doubt-infused installation, and with it his spirit, flicker momentarily to life.