Arts & International Affairs Volume 5, Number 1, Summer 2020 | Seite 20

I’LL DO IT WHEN DAME JUDI DENCH DOES IT.
picion and anxiety. There is�I argue�an unhealthy dose of prescriptivism behind the
good intentions of the funder: detectable both in the mercantilist approach and in the
misconstrued view that artists can somehow deliver mind-blowing experiences with the
snap of the fingers. The particular expectations of the funder have haunted the way we
have dreamed about, structured, and written about (on the application form) our future
projects. The submission of an application for funding from ACE has influenced the way
that we felt obliged to re-evaluate and question�in light of the funder’s expectations
�the dream/idea behind our proposed project. This tedious process of re-editing and
re-writing our ideas in order to get money often results in a sense of having lost sense of
what had initially “moved” us to do that particular project. The overall sentiment is that
the application process perfidiously takes charge of our imagination, displacing us as
makers of the project. As such, we often prefer not to apply for ACE funding at all and
resort to various other survival stratagems.
The purpose of this article is to thoroughly interrogate the source of our anxiety and suspiciousness
vis-à-vis ACE’s public engagement, relevance, and diversity requirements.
The aim is to determine if our anxiety is totally unfounded or if, on the contrary, it is a
response to less detectable nuances in ACE’s funding philosophy. Inevitably, the discussion
will have to visit graver questions, like what makes (or is) an artist? or what is (or
can be) the role of an artist in society? In this context, the approach that I take might appear
somewhat unexpected. I link the sentiment of anxiety vis-à-vis funding from ACE
to the cultural propaganda that we, Nu Nu’s artists, were (often subliminally) exposed to
during our communist and post-communist lives in Romania. Concomitantly, the working
hypothesis is that the anxiety and suspiciousness felt versus ACE’s demands might
indicate nothing more than an unresolved post-traumatic, post-communist fearfulness.
Therefore, there is a danger that this article might be just a paranoid reaction triggered
by a distant, traumatic, and unresolved past.
To begin with, it must be noted that all artistic and cultural activities in communist Romania
were subject to state supervision, censure, and control by representatives of the
Party. Consequently, all such activities were exposed to contamination from Party political
dogma. In conditions of relentless surveillance, Romanian intellectuals and artists
festered an acute suspiciousness towards any kind of institutional language or guidance/
advice/order coming from above. Like a high-resolution scanning device, they directed
a ray of cynical hypersensitivity towards anything emanating from the Communist Party
and its numerous representatives: intellectuals and artists were on alert for inherently
manipulative prescriptions emanating from the elusive above. Eugene Ionesco�in Present
Past Past Present�aptly describes this kind of situation:
You can create a fleas’ circus. They will need to be trained, and the initial
aim is that the fleas stop jumping. How to do that? The fleas are placed
under a glass. They will try to jump, hit the glass wall, fall back. But from
one point onwards, the fleas will stop jumping. The glass can now be
lifted. And behold, the fleas are now advancing dizzily, alienated; they
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