What happened to us?

http://www.perjovschi.ro/projects-85-dan-perjovschi-moma.html

Dan Perjovschi spent a few months basically scribbling ironic stick-figure/cartoonish political commentary on the walls of the MoMA.

On the one hand: it's total bombardment with at times very incisive political commentary to the point that it becomes impossible to ignore. There is a kind of rebelliousness in the aesthetic of the piece. No apparent thought was given to the overall form and ideas are stripped down to the bare minimum to speak for themselves; because, I guess, form/frills/aesthetic beauty don't matter compared to what he's saying. And the form was in itself a type of commentary: has it gotten so bad here that we've been reduced to scribbling on walls to get this shit recognized? Are there really so many problems that we can fill up the walls of this huge room?

On the other hand: he's doing playfully immature drawings, having fun and hanging out in the MoMA. There's an ambiguity here about the possibility of critique in a society in which critique is buried in an onslaught of stimulus - just as any particular critique of his is lost in the overall impression of the piece. Similarly there's ambiguity resulting from the way the creative process is occurring here: he's drawing these things directly onto the walls of the MoMA. It almost seems like he's bypassing the practical world where proclaiming his ideas would actually be making a political statement.

It reminds me of a line in Annie Hall in which Woodie Allen says he thought that dissent and commentary had merged to form "dysentery." Ha.

-Dave Hanyok