THE SWEET CHILD IN TIME... HAS GONE TO SPACE

It seem like it was only yesterday when Ivan Moudov was coming of (artistic)
age while waiting for the millennium bug to manifest itself... The text (by Dessislava Dimova) in his work from 1999 (“The 2000 Syndrome”, 1998) says that his generation was expecting that: “the future will happen in one single day and the world will become changed.” It is ironic that nearly 15 years later the artist needs to make a work titled “Performing Time” (2012) where he is physically demonstrating the passage of time minute by minute, and hand by hand in a little-less-than-24-hours long video work. It seems that time has become space, the artist has entered a different stage of his life and career, the space of life is now just as important for him as the space of art.

These 15 years have marked a significant change in the attitudes of artists
in Bulgaria towards the world, towards success and mainly towards their professional engagement with the international art world. Unlike the famous artists from the older generation of contemporary artists from Bulgaria, Ivan Moudov does not crave success as a progressively closer and closer engagement with the international art world; he is rather the kind of artist who wants to have his fair share, nothing more or less. In this way he has been much better fit to deal with the realities of the last decade of fast transformation into capitalism for Bulgaria – in the 1990s capitalism was still a matter of hearsay for the older artists, something you mainly saw and experienced in its developed form in the West – so you could not embrace it by definition, even if you wanted to...
For Moudov and the younger artists capitalism is unquestionably here at home and although you must question it, you also have to somehow deal with it.
The typically Ivan Moudov way is to criticize by mimicking some of capitalisms’ formulas. For instance – the wine making for openings, the Romanian trick of street smarts turned into a way of raising capital to accumulate an art collection and so on. You might say that in the good old tradition of fair play, this artist
wants to have his “market share” in the context of the art world, nothing more or less. This artist is much like a self-made entrepreneur who has defined the spheres of his art activity within the whole spectrum of art, and wants to be recognized for that. This sphere is the mechanisms of the art worlds, the mechanisms of art entering life, the mechanisms of becoming important, known, original, marketable, etc.

The really interesting part is how the mimicking of capitalist entrepreneurship, up to and including the act of sheer theft (to paraphrase an old commercial – “We make a collection (money, in the original version) in the old fashioned way – we steal it! (the art, in the Moudov version)...”), is becoming a fact of art which is producing new meanings and new possibilities to look at both art and life. In this way Ivan Moudov and his art works represent a complex sign of the times we live in without being only about this time.

“The 2000 Syndrome” (1998) is an installation that made extensive point about arranging the space of the gallery as a waiting area for an unknown event (of possibly gigantic dimensions). There is a video part which shows the artist (looking amazingly young and innocent) standing in front of closed door and waiting for something to happen. Eventually, that “something” turns out to be the sudden yet unavoidable act/fact of somebody opening the same door from the other side with the effect of that door hitting the waiting/standing artist right on the face. He is waiting knowing well that sooner or later he will get hit; not surprisingly – he does. This slapstick and somewhat idiotic exercise is the kind of “Waiting for Godot”; at the time, Godot was the Year 2000. Ivan Moudov seemed to have predicted the rather obvious fact that it will come and go just like any other; you will only get hit (by that event) if you want to get hit...

Unlike that and more than 10 years later (also as a comment/homage to the work by Christian Marclay “The Clock”, 2011), Ivan Moudov encounters head on time-as-space, or rather time as a process evolving into a specific space of determination, in “Performing Time” (2012). The idea is for the artist to challenge his own endurance and sense of timing (may be in reference to the famous “at the right time, in the right place”?) by pushing along the hands of a wall clock every minute, on the minute by hand – for all of 24 hours. The process was videotaped; the artist was exhausted, obviously, and the questions raised by the work started pouring in even before anybody has had a chance to see all the video footage. To begin with the whole video “film” is less than 24 hours... Obviously the body of the artist is not as fine-tuned to be a clock as the real mechanism; nor is it as precise. But just as obviously there is something completely meditative and hypnotizing in watching somebody becoming progressively more and more exhausted from just “pushing time” along... That is strange – as if time cannot move on its own, it needs help... That work hints at the possibility that time might in fact stop – and how are we to know if it has not stopped already if we are in an isolated environment with nothing but our body to tell us that time is passing? Maybe we would need to wait until the flesh starts falling apart, or hairs turning white...but then again – would that be some kind of an exhibition, some act of art following life, or vice versa? Another possibility for interpretation is that it is in fact better to push time along at your own not-so-perfect rhythm... Last but not least – what about that useful advise that “time is money”?

Although rather minimal and referencing classical conceptual and performance art, this work is full of tensions rising from the contradiction between the face of the clock and the body of the artist – it is moving within the video frame but it is not always so active – he is pacing around, resting, bending over, etc. The whole work is like homage to the Absurd – you show nothing but the passage of time; but in order to show that you are actually pushing time along. Maybe Moudov is hoping that at some point the clock hands will get stuck, and he will be free of the self-imposed captivity?

Both these works trigger heavy existential agenda that is not so typical for the rather easy going, jocular and irreverent nature of the artist. In both works there is a titanic battle between time and man where there are no winners – time is wasted, artist is either hit or exhausted (and getting older)... In both works there is the time barrier against which the artist is pushing with the rather deterministic idea that he cannot possibly win – but it is still worth trying!

The barrier or at least the idea of a barrier in the form of a fancy movable panel that is meant to function as a separation wall between two protagonists of a questionable interaction is developed in “Glory Hole” (2012). This object – with a prominent hole in the middle at waist level, and the hole enjoying refined, well-rounded edges, refers to the infamous practice from (mainly male) public toilets of anonymous sexual encounters. In real life this practice is equated with illegal procedures, coded messages of offer and acceptance, usually rough material “accommodations” and strange contexts – all of them obviously contributing to the acceleration of desire. In the Moudov wall-like panel everything is made to high designer finish and is thus de-contextualized. The result is a question posed about barriers – are they to enjoy as much as to annoy you, to challenge as much as to connect?

In any event “Glory Hole” is about transgression and the possibility to see it in creative though rather shaky terms - the work is positioned as a test of will and willingness to transgress, maybe even in public view. In this way this work is related to the earlier practice of the artist, the infamous cycle of “Fragments” (2002–2007), which is based on the act of theft as a method of accumulating an art collection of fragments (strictly replaceable) taken from works by other contemporary artists in public shows. The moment of transgression is related there to questions of originality, authorship, ownership, compensatory mechanisms of catching up and overcoming cultural lacks and civilization gaps. It is about transgressing one’s own accepted (or socially imposed) limitations. Somehow these concerns and issues has stayed with Ivan Moudov through the years to manifest every now and then in various forms and guises. For instance, the theft-as-creative-act issue came back to haunt the artist at the end of the “Fragments” period. Around 2007 another classical practitioner of the theft creative act (the artist Timm Ulrichs) challenged the originality of Moudov’s action. That started a loop of strange logic – can an act of appropriation art ever have an original or is it (the answer of Moudov) always contextually determined and thus – original in a repetitive but unique way for every place and time? What would be the measure of creativity then for such acts and actions from the point of view of classical artistic notions?

The answer from Moudov came in a beautiful, exquisitely conceptually “crafted” series of works titled “Already Made” – the issue of originality is understood there as a ready-made in its own right. The “Already Made 4 (Timm Ulrichs)” (2007) is a cycle of 4 photographs where the artist is seen “measuring” himself up to the “original” of Ulrichs, and then again and again measuring his own “creativity” in every new cycle of appropriation, re-appropriation and self- appropriation in an endless row of visual “Matryoshka”-like sequence of image- within-the-image. It is as if the artist is insisting that the more you repeat yourself, the more creative you are because that shows persistence, perseverance, dedication, and so on.

Moudov’s contribution to a collective action (videotaped and exhibited as a collective project) by the ICA-Sofia marks the next stage in the evolution of his ideas about creativity and originality – he seems to have become able to “resurrect” from the dead... In 2009 the ICA-Sofia gallery hosted the exhibition of Dan Perjovschi, the internationally acclaimed Romanian artist famous for his political wall drawings full of humoristic observations and clinically sharp comments. The show literally covered all walls and ceiling of the space; the show was so much liked by both the ICA-Sofia group and the audience that it stayed for much longer than originally planned. It became a matter of conceptual dilemma – how to end it in time, provided no one wanted to “end” it in space... - but after all there were other shows coming up. Solution came with the idea of Luchezar Boyadjiev (another artist from the ICA-Sofia group) - the end of the show had to come in a creative way, or at least in a more meaningful way than the sad repainting of the walls by some anonymous worker; the whole group had to come together and “erase” Dan’s show in its final moment of being; the process had to be documented in a video (“Unmaking Dan”, 2010, ICA-Sofia).

The final act of “deleting” took place in early April 2010 and the video documentary shows not only the process but also the individual reactions and choices of the ICA-Sofia members to the situation, their decisions as to how exactly and what exactly to delete, in what order and so on. Moudov’s decision
was to delete by “saving the ashes”... He used a power tool to erase physically the drawings off the wall; in the process he accumulated the “ashes” of the show of Dan’s in small paper envelopes. The contents of these envelopes are unverifiable (much like the contents of Piero Manzoni’s can works...) though one can open them and see the powdery substance. But what exactly is it; can you sniff it, for instance (as the implication of the packaging goes, and as one Rolling Stones member is famously said to have done with other “ashes”...); and in general – what does it signify apart from that action in Sofia?

This “work” is titled “DAN, DAN” (2010) and it points in the direction of “life-after-death.” How do temporary art works survive in time; is it only through documentation and the memories of the audience? Or is it possible to think of any material trace of an art work as having some kind of art value invested in it by the simple fact of anybody’s attention paid to it – after wall people keep memorabilia
of such events as the fall of the Berlin Wall, so why not keep memento-as-art from aesthetic encounters? Ultimately – isn’t the visitor’s digital photograph of the Mona Lisa in the Louvre a kind of “ashes” of the great master’s idea and work?

It would be interesting to think of the ashes form “DAN, DAN” (2010) making it into an art museum’s collection... It might be just a question of time. But it is also a test of the entrepreneurial ability of the artist – after all, he is a true child of the last decade in Bulgaria, a decade of heavy investment then crash, on one side, as well as accelerating social awareness, on the other. Artists are pressed to make a living as never before in this country... And so, goes the thinking of Ivan Moudov, why not try and sell literally everything that has even the slightest mark of artist’s aura and/or product? After all, the dilemma for artists (those who need to make a living rather than cut off an ear or something...) has always been how to transform their individual creative (immaterial) capital into financial (preferably monetary) gain?

Over the years other artists have tried to customize the individual copies of their catalogues – upcoming or already published, thus turning the relatively anonymous product of typography into a unique art object. However, few artists have tried to do that while using the tools of marketing/promotion/advertisement and yet have it all still a catalogue. In “Full Pages” (2012) Ivan Moudov is offering selected full pages from his upcoming catalogue, ones that he considers works
of his art by duly designating them as such in a special text/certificate (rather than just blank pages from a book like any other). These pages are offered for sale to willing collectors. After the act of purchase, the pages are further designated with the name of the project, artist, and collector. The pages thus become not only works of art but also collected works of art and at the same time they function as certificates of ownership as well as certificates of authorship. To author is to own, which is also to collect, which in this case also means – to author... The catalogue becomes a unique piece of art/orienting with a dubious status; the intrusion of the force of collecting is seen as a partner in creating/collecting a unique edition; the merger of functions is paralleled by the merger in status and the resulting product becomes a partnership meant to beat the market at its own game.

“Full Pages” (2012) is the latest stage in the development of the “having a fair art world share” (as in “market share”) drift in the artistic work and development of Ivan Moudov. It is also ironic – if one wants to have a “share” in the art world than it is only natural to let the art world have “a share” in one’s own creations – in this case the art world is represented by collectors. I do not think Moudov will ever go as far as to ask collectors to design works they want to see in their collections... but it is not surprising that he has found a way here to question the role of the collector in the definition of the art work, after all – he used to be a collector himself...

In the last few years the art of Ivan Moudov has evolved in the direction of providing ever larger conceptual as well as spatial role for the audience in the final presentation of his works. His methodology to achieve that has been to mimic other practices or situations in life. Along the way he has created a unique mixture between the forces of art, life and economy that offers the viewer not only fun but also food for though and ammunition for transgression. Will the offer be taken – that remains to be seen.