Arts & International Affairs Volume 5, Number 1, Summer 2020 | Page 21

ARTS & INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS
can now be pushed, blown over but they won’t jump anymore. (Ionesco
1993:160)
I dare say that Ionesco was wrong only in one way: whilst he perfectly describes the conditions
and methods imposed/utilised by a(ny) totalitarian regime (seeking a political
dressage of its citizens), he errs when describing the fleas as being reduced to catatonic,
disabled, and dizzied entities. What Ionesco did not intuit was that many of the fleas
trapped in the circus had metamorphosed into cynical beings, triggering their ultimate
survival mechanism. With laser-sharp attention fixed on the dressage “master,” the fleas
return to the catacombs of cynicism and suspicion in order to resist, expecting a very
distant liberation. Such irony-laden, suspicious moods have continued to characterise
intellectuals, artists, and normal citizens in Romania long after the fall of communism.
Romanian citizens to this day display great mistrust towards political institutions (Parliament,
national government, local government, and their representatives).
This deeply embedded cynicism has probably rubbed off on us too�the émigré artists
of Nu Nu�and it has now become manifest in our attitude vis-à-vis ACE’s expectations
from a funded artist. Such a particular state of mind (this time seen in relation to the wider
question of Eastern and Western Europe united by the EU) is aptly described by poet
and former dissident Ana Blandiana, in a speech given at the Babeș-Bolyai University, in
Cluj, in 2016:
Those eyes that were trained for decades to sharpen their vision in darkness
finally got accustomed to the light of freedom. It was observed
though that those who had encountered the totalitarian dogma could
not be convinced as easily as Western intellectuals to accept another
type of dogmatism, no matter how noble its intentions were. At the end
of the day, Communism was too the tragic materialisation of a beautiful
utopia. (Blandiana 2016)
Therefore, this article is underpinned by a fear of manipulation inherited from a distant
past: it consists of a keen, paranoid search for details that might identify state/political
dogma or any intent to instrumentalise the artist’s expressive freedom, by seeking to
subsume it to political and other kinds of agendas.
One additional question that characterises this article is: can the funded artist�faced
with all the additional filters imposed by the funder (deadlines, diversity requirements,
the extra chores of engaging with certain members of the community, etc.)�ever retain
and act upon his/her artistic freedom? Evidently, the underlying preoccupation refers
to the relevance and indeed the value of artistic freedom�the freedom to do whatever
the fuck I dream about without you, the funder, holding me accountable in any way or
demanding something in return for your money. Throughout the article, I define artistic
freedom in a gradual fashion, adding extra nuances as the argument progresses. I start by
quoting Felix Guattari’s concept of the “value of creation”:
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