The Porous Museum: The Politics of Art, Rupture and Recycling in Modern Romania 1350196630, 9781350196636

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The Porous Museum

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The Porous Museum The Politics of Art, Rupture and Recycling in Modern Romania Gabriela Nicolescu

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BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2023 Copyright © Gabriela Nicolescu, 2023 Gabriela Nicolescu has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. ix–x constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Elena Durey Cover image: The busts of Marx, Engels and Lenin covered by snow, 2010. NMRP, Bucharest. Photo by Gabriela Nicolescu. Material from Chapter 3 originally published under the title ‘Decorativa: The Monopoly of Visual Production in Socialist Romania’ in Journal of Design History, 29, 1, 2016, courtesy Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Nicolescu, Gabriela, 1980– author. Title: The porous museum : the politics of art, rupture and recycling in modern Romania / Gabriela Nicolescu. Other titles: Art, politics and the museum Description: London : Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2023. | Revision of the author’s thesis (doctoral)—Goldsmiths, University of London, 2015, under the title: Art, politics and the museum : tales of continuity and rupture in modern Romania. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022056434 (print) | LCCN 2022056435 (ebook) | ISBN 9781350196636 (hardback) | ISBN 9781350400085 (paperback) | ISBN 9781350196650 (pdf) | ISBN 9781350196643 (epub) | ISBN 9781350231115 Subjects: LCSH: Muzeul Național al Țăranului Român–History. | Museums–Romania– Bucharest–Administration–History–20th century. | Museums–Romania–Bucharest– History–21st century. | Cultural property—Romania—Bucharest—History. Classification: LCC AM69.R83 B86 2023  (print) | LCC AM69.R83 (ebook) | DDC 069.09498—dc23/eng/20221215 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022056434 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022056435 ISBN: HB: 978-1-3501-9663-6 ePDF: 978-1-3501-9665-0 eBook: 978-1-3501-9664-3 Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk To find out more about our authors and books, visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

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In memory of my grandparents Constanda, Mihai (Dan), Marieta and Dumitru, who taught me the art of listening

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Contents Acknowledgements Abbreviations

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Introduction: Porous Museums

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Museums as expandable Museums as repositories of garbage and places of concealment Museums as continuities of practice Chapter synopses

6 7 10 13

Two Different Doors: Bureaucracy and Playfulness

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Living among stereotypes Closed rooms ‘Socialist’ white and tidy ‘Anti-communist’ colour and bricolage Negotiating a white overall In search of creativity: The EMYA Conclusion

18 28 32 33 36 41 43

The Staging of History: Ethnography in Museums’ Shifting Archives

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Why silence the socialist past? Golden archives: Aristocrats and peasants in the capital city Finding inspiration in Stockholm and Oslo Partial archives: Partial truths Relocations during the 1950s The 1957 Bucharest exhibition: The difficulty of inscribing difference Where are the peasants? Replies from a photo archive Conclusion

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Socialist Multiplication and the Use of the Future Tense

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Multiplication of employees and the school of seriality Work as a gift: The art of bureaucracy and numbers The 1960s: A marathon of exhibitions, events and the dispersion of technocrats

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49 56 60 62 65 69 73

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The secret police searches the soul of Tancred Bănățeanu Socialism goes global: Travelling folk-art exhibitions to Austria, Belgium, China, Mexico, Switzerland and Vietnam Endless multiplication of collections: Storage fever makes the museum grind to a halt

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A Question of (In)Visibility

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The 1977 earthquake: New visibility and the media Socialist artizanat, naïve art and the mix of values Back to the stores: What museums do not need 1980s: Eating at the Museum of the Communist Party Hunger and collapse

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99 104 108 116 119

What Is Left After a Revolution . . . Fragments

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Priests in the museum: A story of exorcism and sacralization 1990s’ Neo-Byzantinism Paper clips: Fragmentation and assemblage ‘Living’ museography: ‘When museums disrupt and heal’ Conclusion

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Three Faces of Communism

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Anger: Communism as the Plague Practice: The continuity of stores Irony and playfulness: The art of bricolage Conclusion

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Conclusion

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Porous museums: Tales of continuity and rupture in Central and Eastern Europe The politics of display and ‘peasants out of history’ Little space for modernity: The missing metal spoon

Notes References List of Illustrations Index

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166 170 175

179 185 197 199

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0.1 The busts of Marx, Engels and Lenin in the rear yard of the NMRP. Fonds DinescuCaraman/ Film 19/ Image 37, courtesy of the NMRP.

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Acknowledgements This book is based on the research I conducted at the National Museum of the Romanian Peasant during 2010–11 and while I was associated with the museum both as a volunteer in the early 2000s and as an employee from 2005 to 2006. This research would have been impossible without the support, both moral and academic, of a number of different people working in or associated with this museum or its predecessor institutions: Șerban Anglelescu, Simina Bădică, Ion Blăjan, Marius Caraman, Hedvig-Maria Formagiu, Cristina Formagiu, Olga Horșia, Ruxandra Grigorescu, Florin Iordan, Ana-Maria Iuga, Cosmin Manolache, Anca Manolescu, Vlad Manoliu, Carmen Mihalache, Mioara Neacșu, Irina Nicolau, Costion Nicolescu, Virgil Nițulescu, Ana Pascu, Lila Passima, Ioana Popescu, Petre Popovăț, Speranța Rădulescu, Sebastian Sifft, Georgeta Roșu and Lidia Stareș. There are many more people from the museum that I would like to thank. Their names, initials and pseudonyms are all to be found in the book. In England I am much indebted to my research supervisors Emma Tarlo, Frances Pine and Roger Sansi, and to all the other people who inspired and encouraged me at the University of London: Daniel Miller, Michael Rowlands, Chris Wright, Nicholas De Genova, Victoria Goddard, Sophie Day, Stephen Nugent, Henrike Donner, David Graeber, Mark Johnson, Mark Lamont, Charlotte Joy, Ricardo Leizaola, Janis Jefferies, Magdalena Crăciun, Alexandra Urdea, Magdalena Buchzych, Krszystoph Bierczy, Muzna Al Masri, Martin Fotta, Sarah O’Neil, William Wheeler, Aimée Joyce, Zahira Araguete-Toribio, William Tantam and Dominique Santos. I have learned immensely from each of them. From Emma, I have learned how to enjoy writing stories relevant to the world we live in. From Frances, Chris and Danny, I have learned the humanity beyond academia. In Romania and Hungary, I am extremely grateful to some of the teachers who inspired me: Vintilă and Ana Mihăilescu, Narcisa Știucă, István Rév, Ayse Caglar, Don Kalb, Romanița Constantinescu and Simona Popescu. I thank Jo Cook, Haidy Geismar, Adam Drazin, Inge Daniels, Soumhya Venkatesan, and Alexandru Andrășanu for inviting me to give lectures at Goldsmiths and UCL in the University of London, the University of Oxford, Manchester University and the University of Bucharest respectively, where I first delivered this work in its emergent form. Students with whom I have been honoured to work while I was teaching at Goldsmiths, University of London, and at the University of Bucharest, have also shaped some of the ideas presented here.

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This publication would not have been possible without several grants that provided financial support. In 2008–09 and 2010–12, I was granted a three-year doctoral grant by the Dinu Patriciu Foundation, which enabled me to carry out the initial research. In 2020–22, I received a post-doctoral fellowship from the Arts and Humanities Research Council with the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography at the University of Oxford, which supported me during the period of revising the text for publication. I am also indebted to the European Research Council, Concordat, a Getty-NEC Fellowship, RAI and the Rațiu Family Foundation for contributing with smaller grants that have supported my research and exhibition-making. Other colleagues and family mark these pages with the wisdom and sensibility they shared so generously: Muriel Blaive, Alexandra Blidaru, David Crowley, Gabriel Hanganu, James Kapalo, Bogdan Maran, Anca Mihalache, Raluca Mușat, Oana Michael, Lucian Năstasă-Kovacs, Răzvan Nicolescu, Sabina Stan and Calum Storrie. Thanks are due also to the wonderful editors at Bloomsbury Visual Arts for their suggestions and comments, and especially to Lisa Carden and Ross Fraser-Smith. Last, but by no means least, I have no proper words to thank Răzvan Nicolescu, our children and our parents. They were patient and supportive. Răzvan’s encouragements and efforts are immense. Without him, this book would not have been published. Dr Gabriela Nicolescu Postdoctoral Researcher in Material and Visual Culture School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography University of Oxford

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Acknowledgements

Abbreviations ARLUS CNSAS EMYA FSN ICOM IICCMER Archives MAP Archives MFA MNA NMRP UCECOM USSR

Romanian Association for the Friendship with the Soviet Union National Council for Studying the Securitate Archives European Museum of the Year Award Frontul Salvării Naționale (Front for National Salvation) International Council of Museums Archives of the Institute for the Investigation of Communist Crimes and Memory of the Romanian Exile Arhivele Muzeului de Artă Populară (located in NMRP) Muzeul de Artă Populară (Museum of Folk Art) Muzeul de Artă Națională Carol I (Museum of National Art) Muzeul Național al Țăranului Român (National Museum of the Romanian Peasant) Uniunea Națională a Cooperației Meșteșugărești (National Union of Production Cooperatives) Union of Soviet Socialist Republics

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0.2 NMRP employees on one of Bucharest’s main thoroughfares, early 1990s. Fonds Dinescu-Caraman/ Film 400/ Image 1938, courtesy of the NMRP.

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Introduction: Porous Museums

Inscribed on a white textile banner, the name of the museum trembled in the cold winter air. It was late December 1990, and a cheerful procession of museum employees started to walk from the building of the Museum of the Romanian Peasant (henceforth the Museum of the Peasant or the NMRP 1) down the Bucharest’s historic Calea Victoriei (Victory Avenue). A horse-drawn carriage led the procession that marked Christmas, one year on from the fall of the communist regime in Romania and the bloody revolution that made it possible. In the same place, two years later, the same museum employees would organize a similar march to mark 300 years of the avenue that cuts through the historical centre of the city. On that occasion, participants brought a large sponge cake and approximately 300 candles. The two processions were regarded by the participants as acts of free and nonchalant artistic creativity, meant to disrupt the way passers-by lived their lives in a city profoundly marked by the socialist order. The processions were also intended to remind Bucharest’s inhabitants of their peasant roots. In Romania, national identity is closely related to the image of peasantry.2 A photographer was always present to capture the events and the larger context: historic buildings flanked by tall blocks of flats, cranes and construction works dominating the landscape, dirty white snow at the edges of the street, cars jammed in the large intersection and amazed pedestrians looking at the museum employees blowing out the candles stuck into the oversized cake. Initiated by researchers and artists working at the NMRP, the 1990 and 1992 processions show not only that the activities produced in and by museums can have an important impact on the lives of the societies in which they work,3 but also that both the walls and the actions of the museums can be very porous. How profoundly are we shaped by the food for thought with which museums nurture us? When do their stories reach the wider society? Where are the actual borders of museums and what are they made of? These questions refer to the ongoing relations that exist between the public sphere and the public museum, between everyday people and museum employees, the complicated relationship between aesthetics, ethics and politics that I call ‘porosity.’ In The Delirious Museum: A Journey from the Louvre to Las Vegas, architect and exhibition-maker Calum Storrie (2005) argues that not only should museums be free to access, but that they should be designed to encourage visitors through their doors. He disputes the unquestioned authority of the museum and suggests that the life of the museum should be aligned with that of the surrounding city and its

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inhabitants, so that the public might feel part of the different stories museums tell. The procession described above can be understood in Storrie’s terms as a performance meant to overpass the walls of the museum and draw attention to a kind of new museography envisaged by an influential section of the the NMRP’s workforce: a museology and museography that tried to abandon the lasting socialist paradigms of the museum and tried to be relevant for the contemporary wider world. The horsedriven carriage, procured from a village near Bucharest together with a group of young men dressed in traditional costumes, tried to contrast Romanian rurality with the modernism ushered in by socialism. Museum employees raised funds to pay the young villagers to sing traditional Christmas carols. On that winter day, the passersby were greeted with songs and free posters, telling stories about various customs and legends related to Christmas. Two years later, in 1992, museum employees told stories of Calea Victoriei, and its glorious past before the Second World War. In a city dominated by the various clashes between the socialist legacy and the post-socialist urge to contest that legacy and create new institutions and practices, these processions into the heart of the city disrupted the modern visual landscape and presumably reminded local people, many first-generation residents of the city, of who they were. For museum employees, these gestures were intended to extend the active space of the museum and make a clear statement of what the NMRP wished to do in the new post-socialist era, to be a ‘missionary’ and a ‘mobile’ museum, that embedded itself in the city and accepted the provocations of the city it inhabited,

0.3 A carriage in Bucharest city centre, early 1990s. Fonds Dinescu-Caraman/ Film 400/ Image 1009, courtesy of the NMRP.

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The Porous Museum

where “the public is activated [. . .] and trained into various educational and playful programs”(Nicolau and Huluță 2001: 102). This book is about the present National Museum of the Romanian Peasant and its many predecessor institutions. By approaching this museum, the book presents a mixture of people, objects, collections, archives and practices that contributed in different ways to the political regimes (and their various) manifestations that reach back a long way into the history of Romania and of Europe. The book focuses on the materialization of both changes and continuities that were specific to socialist and post-socialist Central and Eastern Europe.4 It shows how political change is accomplished through two types of change: a material one, that is visible, and one of practices and habituses that is less easily perceived. The first change implies taking down leaders’ portraits, statues, buildings and old technologies, consigning them to the dustbin of history and investing into new aesthetics, technologies or fashion, for example. The second type implies the change of practices and of values. As this book suggests, this change takes a very long time to materialize and become visible. However, the chapters that follow invite reflection beyond these geographical and ideological domains on similar materializations of change that occurred throughout the twentieth century all across the world, from China to South America and northern Europe. First established in 1906 by art historian Alexandru Tzigara-Samurcaș and under the patronage of King Carol I as Muzeul de Etnografie, de Artă Națională, Artă Decorativă și Artă Industrială [the Ethnographic Museum of National Art, Decorative Art and Industrial Art], the NMRP was transformed successively into Muzeul de Artă Populară [the Folk Art Museum], three museums of Stalinist and communist propaganda and the House of the Pioneers;5 some of the building also served as the headquarters of the secret police during the socialist era. A ministerial decree issued by the transitional post-socialist government in January 1990 stipulated the transformation of Muzeul Partidului [the Museum of Communist Party] into Muzeul Țăranului [a museum dedicated to the Romanian Peasant] and installed a famous Romanian artist, Horia Bernea, as its manager and chief curator. Historian Petre Popovăţ is one of the museum employees who was part of the processions described above. In a special volume dedicated to the history of the Museum of the Peasant published approximately five years after the events, Popovăţ explains how important Victory Avenue itself was for the history of the museum; so important, that the original Museum of National Art Carol I was popularly known as ‘Muzeul de la Șosea’ [the Museum from the Avenue] (Popovăţ 1996: 24). If Popovăţ’s book focuses primarily on the pre-socialist period of the NMRP, the present volume explains the NMRP as the assemblage of all the institutions, fragments and deletions that preceded the museum as it stood in 1990, considered in the respective cultural and political eras in which they operated. This mix has resulted in conflicting – and often contradictory – views on representation, be they views of the peasant, the past, or the aesthetics of display throughout three different political regimes: monarchist, socialist and post-socialist.6

Introduction: Porous Museums 3

This volume examines the spectacular biography of the NMRP as the assemblage of people, objects and practices as both a container and a refutation of higher political and ideological ideas. These sponge-like qualities allow continuities and disruptions to be enacted on the museum grounds and allow us to ask: where do museums end? For example, at the end of the socialist regime in Romania in December 1989, when the Museum of the Communist Party was closed, no employees were fired. They all continued to work, with very limited retraining, at the NMRP, a newly made ethnographic and anthropological museum. Furthermore, the common nucleus of ‘ethnographic’ objects which traversed the three different political regimes was used by all of them to express quite similar ideas of nationhood and to evoke idealized ‘out of time’ representations of peasants. At the same time, the same objects were used to distinguish one political regime from its predecessor by means of everyday museographical tools such as exhibition design, labelling and indexing (ordering). This volume shows how such continuities and distinctions can be understood when looking not only at the so-called highpoints of national life, but also at the detritus of history – what has been discarded, left aside, partly forgotten, partly remembered, washed away completely or only partially. The main argument of this book is that museums have impact. They reflect and act on the societies in which they live, well beyond their walls, because museums are porous in themselves. The notion of museums’ porosity, as opposed to the idea of their solidity, allows us to think of museums as huge sponges, as noted above, that contract and expand in order to make visible the politics of the moment. This happens in a context in which museums both contain and conceal past and present political ideas. I suggest these processes are objectified in everyday museum practices, such as museum employees’ working methods and daily routines (Macdonald 2002a; Thomas 2016), in the provenance and the afterlives of material objects and archives on display (Daniels 2019), and in the relations of museums and exhibitions with other institutions within the social and cultural space they inhabit, in national and transnational contexts (Carbonell 2012; Meyer and Savoy 2013; von Zinnenburg Carroll 2016).Therefore, this perspective represents an interplay between continuity and change and a narrative of sensible recycling of objects and practices, which constitutes the museum as an integral part of the society at large. ‘Porosity’ is therefore a spatial quality between the floating world of ideas and the finite but numerous nature of the museum objects and spaces that support these ideas. In this respect, spaces, stores and surfaces are key to the museum definition. As institutions which often opened in the previous centuries, museums have buildings into which to dwell and delve into. In their many official and un-official stores, corridors, cellars, attics, offices and exhibition spaces, museums allow for many things to be deposited voluntarily or involuntarily. Like sponges, sedimentary rocks or other living surfaces that permeate physical and chemical responses to the environmental conditions, such as leaking, deposition, evaporation and different flows of substances (Freijsen, Gelderblom and van Hinte 2019), museums have cultural responses to political, cultural and economic contexts,

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and the flows of ideas and materialities in which they operate. The porosity of museums can be static, dynamic, or both. Many authors have investigated the relationship between porosity and permeability, as well as the nature of continuous or discontinuous pores affecting the strength of solids (Neville 1995; Day and Bryan 1988; Kearsley and Wainwright 2001). At the beginning of the twentieth century, Walter Benjamin and Asja Lacis ([1925] 1978) called attention to what they termed as ‘the porous city’ and its caves, cellars, courtyards, arcades, staircases, windows, gateways and balconies, all of which nurtured the ephemeral and the theatrical.7 Visual theoretician Sabinne Haenni (2020) argues that for Benjamin and Lacis, porosity connects the built environment with the social as well as with nature. Its impermanence suggests a tension with order and planning; it plays an important role in questions of social inequality, for the poor mobilize the porous and try to find in its interstices various forms of access to resources. In the museum world, I argue that porosity can be both a quality that is actively sought by different museum actors but also a consequence of museographic discourse and practice. My larger argument is that porosity, a state where aesthetics, ethics and politics coalesce, is a key attribute of museums all over the world. Through a broader anthropological view on museums as porous institutions, I emphasize the importance of undertaking critical integrated research on the impact that these institutions have on, and their understanding of, contemporary societies as stages where stories are told, values are rehearsed and (social) history is not just represented, but also made. While museums play an important role in recreational industries, they also have profound political impact. Cultural historian David Lowenthal (1998: xiv) famously wrote about the importance of heritage in a world marked profoundly by poverty and hunger, enmity and strife: ‘We seek comfort in past bequests partly to allay these grieves. And partly to reinvent who we want to be in the future.’ He mentions that there are two kinds of heritage: good and bad. ‘The first known use of the term is in Psalm 16 the “goodly heritage.” It links us with ancestors and offspring, bonds neighbours and patriots, certifies identity, and roots us in time-honoured ways. But some heritages are diabolical also, oppressive, defeatist or decadent. “Heritage can breed xenophobic hate and bellicose discord’ (Lowenthal 1998: xiv). The Museum of the Romanian Peasant and its predecessors has borne witness to multiple forms of heritage. To follow this line of thought, the rest of this introductory chapter explores various traits of porosity and presents museums as expandable, museums as places of concealment, and museums as continuities of practice. * The book has emerged from more than a decade of engaged work, meeting key players in Romanian cultural politics at different times and witnessing key decisionmaking moments. It also involved working for extended periods with archives and material objects themselves during in-depth ethnographic fieldwork carried out in 2011 and 2012 at the NMRP, as well as studying the archives of the institutions that

Introduction: Porous Museums 5

preceded it and those of other anthropological museums in eastern and western Europe. I present the efficacy of life histories and critical and creative snippets from institutions’ biographies to produce and enact the biography of a nation in its multiple phases of being. In a larger perspective, this volume shows why these transformations should be understood as a narrative of sensible recycling and of the interplay between continuity and change, in which the institution of the museum constitutes an integral part of society. The book questions the regional and media stereotypes of the ‘folk,’ the meaning of socialism, of Eastern Europe and the role of ethnographic and anthropological museums in general.

Museums as expandable Where do museums end is a question that came to mind as relevant during a 2018 Cambridge conference on the decolonialization of museums.8 This question invites us to explore the effects that museums have in our societies rather than describe the technicalities inside museums. The carriage that led the procession organized by museum employees at the beginning of the 1990s is a specific metaphor for the unspecific efforts museums around the world make to reach people and their imaginations. In September 2022, a decisive meeting was scheduled to take place in Prague in order to nail down a new definition of museums. ‘Ideological rift persists as ICOM restarts museum definition consultation’, wrote Geraldine Kendall Adams (2021) for the newsletter of the Museums Association, in March 2021. She went on: ‘There is warfare between reformers and conservatives over the definition of a museum (. . .).The conservatives seem to be happy with the existing definition and want no change; the reformers wish to see a definition that recognises the social roles increasingly played by museums.’ The previous ICOM definition dated back to 1974, although an amendment had been made in 2007 (ICOM Report 2018). On the 10 March 2020,  ICOM had an online meeting attended by more than 4,000 international committee representatives to summarize discussions held over the previous past eight months. The meeting, entitled ‘What Definition Do Museums Need?’, did not result in consensus either. Indeed some key figures in ICOM resigned, despite their leading role in the process. ICOM France chair Juliette Raoul-Duval stated that the new definition of museums could turn ICOM into a ‘political tool, led mostly by scholars’. Turkish delegate Burçak Madran cautioned that asking museums to be ‘polyphonic’ is unrealistic in authoritarian countries. ICOM  France later released a statement arguing that by shifting the definition away from ‘institutions conserving collections’ to ‘multi-purpose institution[s], serving human rights as a whole’, the proposal had failed to distinguish museums as professional institutions (ICOM statement 2020). According to New York Times journalist Alex Marshall, the disagreement about the new definition of museums reflects a wider split in the museum world about whether

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such institutions should be places that exhibit and research artefacts, or rather places that actively engage with political and social issues (Marshall 2020). Are museums definable through the objects in their collections or not? If yes, how? The present volume offers answers to the questions above, but from a broader perspective. I look at the museum as a space and within the dominating social and political paradigms but considered in a temporal perspective. In the case of the NMRP, and arguably in the case of all institutions, the different historical periods during which different museums have operated make an important but tacit contribution to the next historical period and institution. Therefore, the question around where museums’ activities end can be at least as important as the question of what museums are. This perspective leads us to understand that museums and their material content – as well as discourse and realities, with or without artefacts – have an impact on and reflect on the realities of the societies they inhabit beyond their walls, in society in general and in people’s homes. The museum’s existence is, by essence, porous. Museums, like all heritage institutions, are subject to and promoters of socio-political changes. To understand what museums are, and how far their role and actions extend, requires us to look at them as institutions (with their ideas, projects, events, sponsors, practices, values and conditions of existence) within the social and cultural space they inhabit, from a longue durée perspective. In the following section, I briefly introduce few key moments in the convoluted history of the NMRP and the shift of different ‘value regimes’ in both Romania and other parts of Europe.

Museums as repositories of garbage and places of concealment Following the end of the socialist rule in Romania in December 1989, the monument to Marx, Engels and Lenin was dumped in the rear yard of what was (until the revolution) the Museum of the Communist Party, close to the refuse bins.9 This institution started its transformation into what was to become the National Museum of the Romanian Peasant (NMRP). Despite being discarded near the bins, the images show that the triple bust was covered by a wooden crate. The light colour of the white marble indicates that the wooden crate protected it well from dust and that the monument was not damaged during the movement. The noses of the three heroes of communism were intact. Looking closely at the two images, one can see important differences. In the first, one can see a quite considerable distance between the statue and the bins. In the second image, the three communist leaders are very close to the refuse receptacles. What is the relation between the statue and the bins and how does valuation and indexing (ordering) change in museums? The photographer seemed to have played the game of proximity, and literally moved the bins closer to the statue in order to indicate more effectively an association between a symbol of socialist ideology, and the symbol of refuse disposal. A disused wheel, the old metal rubbish bins and other

Introduction: Porous Museums 7

0.4 and 0.5 The busts of Marx, Engels and Lenin in the rear yard of the NMRP during the early 1990s. Fonds Dinescu-Caraman/ Film 19/ Images 30 and 34, courtesy of the NMRP.

items were shifted from one place to another in order to create a more artistic picture and convey a strong visual message. The implied meaning is that museums are good not only at keeping, but also at disposing of objects and at making visible – sometimes theatrically – the dramatic shifts in the fortunes of certain political ideas over time. Discussions about what is kept and what is thrown away, destroyed, reused or recycled in a museum obliges us to discuss value in different cultural and political contexts and the uncertainties of valuation. Anthropologist Igor Kopytoff described objects entering museum collections as ex-commodities ’that are taken away from the chains of exchange and ‘set apart’ through a process of singularization, as opposed to commoditization: ‘[C]ommodities are singularized by being pulled out of their usual commodity sphere’ (Kopytoff 1986: 74). Kopytoff called museums ‘public institutions of singularization’ (1986: 81) because they allow societies to set apart certain portions of their environment, and marking it as ‘culture’ and indirectly as ‘sacred’. However, the discarded monument of Marx, Engels and Lenin indicates that Kopytoff’s description of museums is only partially true when looking closely at the internal operations of a museum. Other than donations and bequests made to museums by private sponsors or public institutions, museums do remove items from the chains of commoditization, but only partially and for longer than the same items would remain ‘out there’ in the world. The rhythm of the movement of objects in museums is usually much slower than it is outside, but notable exceptions also exist, as I will show in Chapter 5. Despite the apparent solidity of walls, stores, collections, ‘permanent’ exhibitions and indexation principles, museums do allow for myriad micro-movements inside and outside their premises and between their stores. In 2006, the noses of the three communist leaders were cut off. The crate had been

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The Porous Museum

dismantled a few years prior. Gossip among museum employees suggested that the building’s fire office, a philosophy graduate, had removed the noses. At some point, obscene drawings were drawn on the faces of the three leaders, only to be carefully cleaned away shortly after. In 2012 the statue disappeared and, to my knowledge, only the director at that time knows where it went. These clashes should be understood in the context of what art historian Dario Gamboni (1997) called a change of paradigm in social and political aspects. There is a relation between acts of vandalism and destruction in art or public goods that tells of revenge. Gamboni argues that the destruction of art shows that art cannot be independent of the social and political context and can represent a medium of social conflicts (1997: 15). Similar conflicts like the ones described in the case of former socialist monuments can be encountered also in the taking down of statues of slave traders like Edward Colston or Robert Geffrye. After years of petitions to have the statue of Edward Colston removed from a public square in Bristol, on 7 June 2020, Black Lives Matter protestors pulled down the statue and threw it into the docks in a little over an hour. One day after the statue hit the bottom of the harbour, the Mayor of Bristol affirmed that most probably the statue would be retrieved from the dock and placed in a museum (King 2020). Reactions among museum employees all over the world followed on social media. Nevertheless, one year later, between June 2021 and 3 January 2022 the statue was displayed on its side, defaced with graffiti, facing the harbour in the M Shed museum (Donoghue 2021). After the exhibition ended, the statue was moved into storage in the L Shed, a space where collections relating to Bristol are stored and can be seen on request in guided tours. At a different site, the Board of London’s Museum of the Home considered removing the statue of Robert Geffrye, a seventeenth-century trader and Mayor of London who had been involved in transatlantic slavery, ‘to an alternative and less prominent space, where we can better tell the full story of the history of the buildings and Robert Geffrye’s life, including his involvement in transatlantic slavery’ (Museum of the Home 2022). The pulling down and the shift in visibility of statues and monuments implies clear purposes but also confusion and complexity, which Gamboni argues it is especially the case of the removal of monuments that do not commemorate anything. These examples show, among other things, that retroactive and retrospective justice is played not only in court and on the streets, but also symbolically and theatrically, on museums’ grounds. Returning to the case of the NMRP, in Chapter 6 I will show why many of the movements and reinterpretations of objects and practices from Romania’s socialist past can be seen as a special kind of reuse and recycling and how and why that socialist past – and representations thereof – are viewed in very different ways by museum employees and society at large. This book is concerned with how the NMRP and its institutional predecessors understand, integrate and represent these kinds of profound shifts in social, political and ethical paradigms. The argument is that it is the porous nature of museums that

Introduction: Porous Museums 9

allows objects and practices, or statues in the examples above, to find places to exist or have their existence contested, at different periods of time. In geological layers there is a space of infusion and transfer of substances between adjacent layers and the materials that constitute them. Museums operate partially according to this logic. Sociologist Bruno Latour and theoretician Peter Weibel argue that after every iconocrisis, fragments stand in for the whole and pull together the need for care and reassemblage of the whole that has been smashed and dismantled (Latour and Weibel 2002). Museums are places that attract, store and protect debris, fragments that allow discussion of bigger wholes. But museums also allow for interstices, for example when they turn visible things invisible and the other way around, or during periodic symbolic restorations. The scale of these transformations can vary massively. An individual object can be removed from display, a permanent exhibition room can be closed or an entire museum can be shut down completely or reinvented into a new institution with a different name and adjustments made to its design and collections. In this context, porosity represents both a weakness and a strength, depending on how curators and other museum actors allow political ideas to emerge, for example, when mediated by objects and the stories displayed or by allowing visitors to make meaning. Ideas, interpretations and adaptations take place in the porous spaces of the museum. Therefore, my argument is that the porous nature of museums does not have an a priori good or bad quality; rather, it is in the hands of all museum employees to exploit consciously or less consciously the porous medium they work with. Throughout the book, we will see different instances in which this exploitation can take place: cleaning and smashing glass cases, plastering and scratching the museum walls, cutting off the noses of the busts representing Marx, Engels and Lenin, or concealing and finding refuge for catalogued or non-catalogued assemblages of objects. Many of these changes go unseen by visitors, while museum critiques and social researchers need long-term ethnographic research to make sense of these transformations.

Museums as continuities of practice It is often believed that museums are places of stability, undisturbed stillness and continuity. Anthropologist Nicholas Thomas (2010) showed that the constancies of museums are not the objects themselves, but rather the numerous practices surrounding them. Knell, MacLeod and Watson (2007) explained that contents and archives of museums move incessantly not only at moments of abrupt political change, but also when ideologies shift inside an existing regime. The nature of objects and the process of setting up museum layounts allows for such versatility and changes at different paces. This book shows that there are several languages via which change can be expressed, and these can determine different layers of visibility. If photographs of destruction are able to suggest change, a minute analysis of museum practices and the internal logic of collections can indicate continuity. The

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The Porous Museum

presence of museum personnel who stayed in role after 1989 is also a marker of continuity. The idea of the museum as practice is essential for the main argument of this book. Practices reveal the existing connections between people and the things they take care of, the bonds existing between curators and ‘their’ collections, but also, outside the museum walls, between everyday people and the objects surrounding them. Recurrent practices become symbolic for their publics. Biographies of museums can be representative for the nations that they serve. Sally Price’s book Paris Primitive (2007) is a critical biography of the Musée du quai Branly, one of the most-visited museums in Paris. The museum, close to the Eiffel Tower, was opened in 2006 by the then French President Jacques Chirac. This museum succeeded the Musée de l’Homme, which itself had taken the place of the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro. Price argues that the Musée du quai Branly, despite the change in name, is a museum that mainly exhibits ethnographic art making use of the same ‘primitive’ categorizations just as its institutional predecessors did. This recurrent way of displaying and interpreting a museum’s artefacts is indicative of multiple power positions between those who display and those who are displayed and indicates the dominant ideology in many French cultural institutions and segments of society (Price 2007). According to this view, Price argues that the city and the society which made possible such a museum layout in twentieth century are those who think in ‘primitive’ terms and distinctions. Anthropologist and historian Annie Coombes (1988, 1994) examines the role played by ethnographic museums such as the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford or the Horniman Museum in London in the life of British society at the beginning of the twentieth century. According to Coombes, the policy of social imperialism was ‘designed to unite all classes into the defence of nation and empire by focusing its campaign on convincing the working classes that their interests were best served by the development and expansion of Empire’ (Coombes 1988: 64). In this respect, ethnographic collections played a crucial role. They made visible the empire and at the same time described and staged the British nation and its colonies, based on ‘a paradigm which emphasised the inevitability and indispensability of the existing social order (. . .)’ (Coombes 1988: 61). As cultural theorist Tony Bennett (2013) showed, it was thought that visitors conform and assimilate the knowledge that museums disseminate with their own bodies, in a self-conscious and self-disciplined act. Museum specialist Eilean Hooper-Greenhill (2013) challenges Bennett’s argument, affirming that visitors, in fact, have power in negotiating what they understand and in refusing to appropriate pre-determined meanings from museum displays. What all these theories have in common is a particular understanding of the role of physical space for disseminating knowledge as encountered in the way displays are organised in space. In all the examples given above, I show that the connection between the museum and its publics is therefore aesthetic, political and ethical. The strong bond between the politics of the state and the politics of the public institutions is a recurrent issue in all political regimes. In the case of the NMRP and

Introduction: Porous Museums 11

its predecessors, this is evident from the main reasons for their existence and their naming through their practices and displays throughout history. One can almost see how various flows of ideas and spheres of influence materialise on the museum ground. Sociologists Pierre Bourdieu and Alain Darbel argued that museums are institutions that accumulate economic and cultural capital that was used mostly in the service of the privileged. In L’amour de l’art: les musées d’art européens et leur public (1997) Bourdieu, Darbel and Schnapper showed how art museums were institutions which reinforce the status of the privileged while disempowering others. Their argument dealt with the practice of museum making and viewing in a way that was inaccessible to large audiences. Nicholas Thomas (2016) argues that Bourdieu and Darbel and Schnapper’s book motivated change not only among art museums, but museums of all kinds. Since the 1970s, attempts to democratize museums have been made and institutions in many parts of the world have tried to be more inclusive, by allowing free access and by placing more emphasis on education initiatives. These ideas were applied to a huge extent in Eastern Europe where temporary museum exhibitions were mounted in the 1960s and 1970s in factories, in case de cultură (cultural centres) and schools (Nicolescu 2016a). In Chapter 3, I show that temporary exhibitions of folk art in these locations during socialism were meant to demonstrate the progress from the peasant condition to the benefits brought by socialist modernization and industrialization. In Chapter 5, I suggest that the first permanent exhibition to exhibit ‘anti-communism’ in Bucharest served as a similar platform to display social change. These two examples suggest that museums are not only stages where social and political transformations are made visible, but also platforms on which to materialise such political changes. This role of museums could also be seen at an international level: ethnographic displays were representing Romania abroad, by preceding economic and diplomatic missions and cultural exchanges throughout the twentieth century. In particular, during state socialism, collections were exchanged as gifts between various socialist museums. In this cultural economy, the standardization of display and techniques was mandatory. The strong bond between the life of museums and the politics of the state was manifest in the important economic support given to museums by the state and its permanent control over everything from the training of personnel to the content and methodology of display. Immediately after the Second World War most Eastern and Central European ethnographic museums marginalized art historians and artists and introduced a new category of employees: muzeografi. Trained in historical materialism and socialist display methods, muzeografi helped dissolve the old museums and establish the socialist ones. After the revolution in December 1989, muzeografi worked together with ethnologists, art historians and artists to establish the NMRP. Their work presupposed not only collaboration, but also conflicts over representations, practices and values. The book explores the museum practices and aesthetics of the NMRP as the complex and controversial assemblage of several institutions that traversed three

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The Porous Museum

successive political regimes in the twentieth and early twenty-first century. The book shows how, in order to understand the present-day NMRP and its cultural and social impact on contemporary society, one has to conduct critical integrated research that digs deep into history and across social and museographical discourses in Europe and in other key global locations. In this complex equation, I suggest that the interdependency between politics, ethics and aesthetics is expressed by means of a continuing juggling with porosity, a special attribute of museums all over the world. In this understanding of museums as porous institutions, the book presents potted histories and creative snippets of institutional biographies to produce a biography of a nation in its multiple phases of being, as well as the cross-fertilization that takes place across global cultural institutions.

Chapter synopses Chapter 1 (Two Different Doors: Bureaucracy and Playfulness) explores conflicts in museums as expressions of binary oppositions in the societies within which the museums operate. I start from recurrent tensions between more conservative curatorship that involves standardized and bureaucratic use and care of objects, and creative use of all sorts of formal and informal archives and collections from and around museums. In the case of the NMRP, the tension is expressed between curatorial and everyday practices of two sets of museum employees: on the one hand, muzeografi trained in historical materialism and socialist bureaucracy; and, on the other hand, artists and researchers practising creative writing, contemporary art and surrealist encounters. In Chapter 2 (The Staging of History: Ethnography in Museums’ Shifting Archives) the book moves away from these conflicts to examine continuities and the way different pasts of the museum have been archived and manipulated since the establishment of the original museum in 1906. Archives and what in recent years has been called ‘fake news’ play an equally important role in the transformations that took place on the museum ground during the monarchy, throughout socialism and to the present day. My ethnographic research shows that beyond the visible changes, museums contain traces of continuities between successive political regimes that make profound change happen over a much longer time than politicians or curators want. Building on important visual material, the chapter shows how in a European and Romanian context these transformations contributed to a continuous re-writing of history and the projection and design of idealized futures. Chapter 3 (Socialist Multiplication and the Use of the Future Tense) explores the socialist modes of practice. Simple and routine ethnographic displays were an essential part of the socialist project to construct a new social and political order based on modest consumption and collectivised subjectivities. From 1964 onwards, a newly established state-owned factory, called Decorativa, standardized both the content and the form of displays to ensure state control over the meaning of displays in general, by means of different practices including the redefinition of folk art, the

Introduction: Porous Museums 13

multiplication of displays and the spectacular increase of collections. Analysis shows how Decorativa specialists, working with museum curators, made visible the introduction of bureaucratic intelligentsia into the arts. While each of the first three chapters talk about porosity in a different perspective, Chapter 4 (A Question of (In)Visibility) explores the unofficial stores of the museums as repositories of contested pasts and hesitant presents. Stalinist paraphernalia that used to be displayed in Lenin-Stalin Museum during the late 1950s were dumped into a hidden basement cellar in the Museum of Communist Party less than a decade later. All the objects on display in the Museum of Folk Art in 1974 were put into storage at the Village Museum in 1978. These acts of throwing away, concealing, making invisible, show how museum employees use the porous nature of their institution to juggle between sudden changes and often contradictory rules imposed by political regimes. The argument is that porosity buys time and allows the necessary space for political ideas and emerging transformations to settle. Chapter 5 (What Is Left After a Revolution . . . Fragments) narrates the way a more dramatic change – namely the passage from socialism to post-socialism – was reflected on the museum’s grounds in early 1990s. The glass, metal and cardboard exhibition walls of the socialist exhibition were pulled out, while the original walls of the interwar museum were marked and painted by contemporary artists; glass cases were destroyed; communist publications were burned in the museum’s backyard; and priests were called to exorcise the rooms in which ‘evil spirits’ were thought to be residing. The chapter shows how the newly established NMRP reflected the turbulence in Romanian society by means of a series of aesthetic and political decisions. A new team of researchers and artists organized vibrant and colourful exhibitions to contrast with the socialist values and practices that were still dominating Romanian society. By connecting back to the original discourse of the museum from the monarchy period, the NMRP turned itself into a stage for rapid political action and change that anticipated the deeper transformations of Romanian society at large. Finally, Chapter 6 (Three Faces of Communism) presents anger, care and playfulness as three ways in which communism is experienced nowadays in the museum discourse and in wider society. We learn why socialist regimes, and indeed all political regimes, produce very specific materialities that help these regimes to exist in the first place and which, materially and bodily, shape people: in particular, their rhythms of work and values attached to labour. If we look at the social realities or events, we grasp fragments of these values. In contrast, research into the history of institutions, like museums, has the inherent capacity to retain / make sense of the political, ethical and aesthetic ideas in the long term. It is this inherent capacity to deposit and make (in) visible social practices and ideas that confers the museums the porosity this book recognizes. In connection to moments of change, the concluding chapter argues that all societies need to find intervals, spaces in time, to reflect and debate their values and heritage, be these material possessions, rhythms of work, values attached to labour or other kinds of material and immaterial forms of heritage. The argument is that the

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porous nature of museums allows for this kind of interval, but most of the time it has been only the museum workers and invited artists who used this quality of museums. Highlighting the backstage of the museum and the continuing negotiations that go on in museum grounds, this book encourages the public and social and visual researchers to play an active role in what happens in museums and to take the museum method and concept out of the traditional buildings into the street, the mall, the airport and the market.

Introduction: Porous Museums 15

1.1 Horia Bernea with the Director of the Museography Department (left) and the Director of the Research Department (right). Fonds Dinescu-Caraman/ Film 777, Image 35A, courtesy of the NMRP.

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Two Different Doors: Bureaucracy and Playfulness

After leading the NMRP for ten years, the artist Horia Bernea died unexpectedly in the winter of 2000, on 4 December. The next morning, at the museum’s entrance every visitor was met by lit candles, deep silence and a black-framed portrait of Bernea. I remember entering the building and descending into a room where that year, students gathered for weekly seminars on ethnology and art held by the researcher Irina Nicolau. Normally the atmosphere was very cheerful, but that day, everybody in the room seemed to be deeply affected. The moment of Horia Bernea’s death proved to be a turning point in the history of the institution. Bernea was more than an influential figure. Anthropologist Clifford Geertz defines as ‘charismatic’ those people who manage to be ‘near the heart of things’ (Geertz [1983] 2000). But Geertz also mention that for each society, ‘the heart of things’ is different. In the Romanian society of the 1990s, appreciative of the fields of arts, culture, and religious life, Bernea had charisma. Always ready to talk to people and to try to understand them, irrespective of their status or background, he managed to build a team and a thriving institution that in 1996 received the European Museum of the Year Award (EMYA), one of the most prestigious European accolades in museography. By the end of the 1990s, the NMRP was one of the most-visited museums in Bucharest and a major cultural hub in the city’s life, although it was also renowned nationally and internationally. But one of the key (if overlooked) personal contributions Bernea made throughout the turbulent 1990s was to keep a great many tensions in balance. In the photograph that opens this chapter, one can see Horia Bernea with Georgeta Roşu, the head of Muzeography Department (dressed in the white overall), and Irina Nicolau, the head of the Research Department. After Bernea’s death, hitherto managed tensions between different museum employees were unleashed. On the one hand, the muzeografi, trained in historical materialism, pleaded for a more conservation-focused curatorship and a highly standardized and bureaucratic use and care of objects. They also insisted that the working hours for all museum staff should be between 9 am and 5 pm, and that everybody should sign condica [timesheets]. They argued that each department should be responsible for conducting audits of materials and costings, such as, how much each department spent on phone calls. On the other hand, researchers were relatively new to the field of museography, having been trained in adjacent disciplines such as philology, ethnology, art history,

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history and theology. They insisted on making creative use of all sorts of archives and collections, indexed or unindexed by the museum, and focused on their desire to innovate and be creative rather than follow standards and rules in curatorship and preservation. One consequence of this preoccupation was that newly recruited museum employees, attracted by this particular way of practising museography, were quickly nicknamed ‘artists’ by the muzeografi. This label was intended to reflect the newcomers’ lack of training in formal museography, conservation and curatorship, while acknowledging their search for more creative ways to think about museums and exhibitions. Muzeografi looked condescendingly towards (what looked to them) a disorganized way of working in the museum, one that lacked structured planning and clear deadlines. After a new director was named and two years of tense interactions and interminable meetings between these two groups, Irina Nicolau, died in 2002 following a period of severe ill health. Some researchers resigned, tired of the seemingly neverending discussions and the uncertainty over the museum’s future. Between 2003 and 2005, muzeografi convinced the new director, to close three rooms curated by researchers, in order to make space for ‘proper’ exhibitions. ‘Proper’ meant a particular way of caring for objects and museum spaces; in short, the use of objects from the indexed collections only, using conventional labelling and displaying objects in glass cases and on neat surfaces. As a reaction to the room closures, researchers and artists took legal action, protested in front of the museum for several days and wrote over eighty critical articles in mainstream and cultural press (Brăileanu 2005; Manolache 2005; Passima 2005; Turliu 2005; Anghelescu, Caraman and Cazacu 2005). Protesters and other supporters were involved in the cultural life of Bucharest, to different extents, ranging from postgraduate students in major universities to high-profile professors and members of the cultural elite. Under pressure from the new Minister of Culture and their predecessor, the philosopher and art historian Andrei Pleşu, the new director of the NMRP resigned. The tension between the two groups escalated and was manifested in many ways – from a refusal to greet each other, to working on parallel exhibitions and events with their different audiences, while being employed by the same institution. Even their intended audiences were strikingly different, based on various exhibition openings and book launches. Researchers and artists called the muzeografi ‘communists’ for being bureaucratic, standardized and too formal. On the other hand, muzeografi labelled researchers and artists as ‘fascists’ on a few occasions, alluding to the dichotomies so marked during the Second World War. Each group defined itself in opposition to the other.

Living among stereotypes In 2005 and 2006, when I worked as a researcher and PR specialist and later, in 2010 and 2011, while I conducted research in the museum, the actual physical space was

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clearly divided along these lines. The two groups of museum employees had offices on the same floor, but the access to the two offices had separate entrances. 1.2 and 1.3 show two very different corridors and entrance doors. One image shows the corridor leading to the Museography Department. The doors are white and clean and have simple typed inscriptions printed in black, such as: Acting Director, Museography Department. The corridor is well kept and ornamented with the portrait of the museum’s founder, art historian Alexandru Tzigara-Samurcaş and few decorative plants. A young French volunteer looks at the camera while I take the picture. The entrance into the researchers’ main office opens from a similar corridor, but this time one that is crammed with cupboards and objects of very different sizes and uses, including puppets used in educational activities, old drawers filled with materials used in past and present exhibitions, cardboard, carpets and various found objects. On the door to the artists’ office one reads ‘Slam the door!’, ‘Hello very much’ and ‘Be catchy! (Is there any difference between catchy and kitschy?)’. The last two slogans are written in English. These situationist and surrealist thoughts, glued onto the colourful door, remind museum staff of the numerous ways in which objects can be encountered and, in a wider context, of the ways one can create and relate to work and art. Other people in the researchers’ team are located in the well-lit library antechamber in the same part of the old building, as is the photo archive team. On entering the Museography Office, one can see the pegs where muzeografi hang their winter coats and their white overalls. The routine of putting on an overall

1.2 The door to muzeografi, 2011. Photo by Gabriela Nicolescu.

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1.3 The door to the artists’ office, 2011. Photo by Gabriela Nicolescu.

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1.4 and 1.5 Peg holding white overalls and the inscription on the muzeografi’s door: ‘Gently, gently, gently now (. . .)’. Photos by Gabriela Nicolescu.

when visiting the museum and the stores is a practice done by museum staff all over the world. Near the locker, a minuscule rhyming quote from a theatre play that epitomizes stinginess is used to nudge the users to protect both the integrity of the door itself and the quiet work atmosphere in the office: ‘Gently, gently, gently now, these are not steel doors’ (Hagi Tudose). This inscription, glued carefully onto the pristine white door, instils a compliant attitude towards the value of objects and work. This invitation stands in stark contrast to the slogan on researchers’ door that invited people to disturb and interrupt their work rhythm. Behind the doors, the office space stays true to the same aesthetic: painted in white, with clean desks with reference books, ordered files and stationery. Muzeografi usually sit at their desks, in front of their computers. On the walls behind, one can see two large posters: a black and white interwar image of peasants; and the colour poster made for the opening of the Triumf [Triumph] permanent exhibition room in 1997. Georgeta Roşu, head of the Museography Department, and her deputy had their desks in close proximity. Roşu graduated from the University of Bucharest’sFaculty of History and started working in the Museum of Folk Art in the early 1970s, along with other more senior muzeografi. Their knowledge of the collections of folk art and wealth of experience were passed to newer generations of muzeografi, trained in history, biology, sculpture and conservation. The work of the muzeografi encompasses the research and management (including conservation) of folk-art collections exclusively. They are responsible for pottery collections, large textiles, small textiles, ironwork, woodwork and, after the fall of the communist regime, of religious iconography. In preparation of each exhibition, they would put together a proposal,

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1.6 Muzeografi’s office, 2011. Photo by Gabriela Nicolescu.

with a drawing of the room, a summary of the concept and black-and-white typed labels to accompany all the exhibits. Collection attendants are an important part of the muzeografi team. They conserve the objects in stores, organize and catalogue them and prepare objects for new exhibitions. Their work focuses on the objects in the stores, and therefore their offices are located on two floors in the new wing of the building built in 1970s. The whitepainted rooms do not have any natural light. In one of them, attendants work at desks in a quad formation so that they can see each other at all times. These rooms are adjacent to several entrances to the museum stores. I was told that for the muzeografi, it is important that paperwork is regarded as important and filled in correctly long before the deadline. Whenever they go into the museum stores, they wear overalls on top of their clothing to protect both the items in storage and themselves from toxic substances. Protocols on temperatures, treatment of collections and access are very strict. For example, all textiles that are not indexed but on display need to be kept in freezers for at least forty-eight hours before being exhibited in order to destroy any germs. Once a new museum director had been appointed after the death of Horia Bernea in 2000, the muzeografi started to limit access into the stores for researchers and artists working in the Research Department. Gradually that limit turned into a clear denial of access to the official museum stores – a way of demonstrating who held the upper hand in the museum. Muzeografi were afraid researchers would mix objects from indexed and un-indexed stores, failing to treat them appropriately. Furthermore,

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muzeografi feared researchers would bring objets trouvée (‘found objects’) from the streets of Bucharest, including rubbish skips. As a consequence of this kind of due diligence for objects and inventory, muzeografi imposed themselves as the guardians of the official stores and as the keepers of the inventories of folk-art collections in the museum. As a rule, all the exhibitions muzeografi organize make use of objects coming from the indexed folkart collection, and in most cases from one collection at a time. In stark contrast, the researchers continue to accumulate objects in the corridor leading to the office, with the epicentre on the round table in the middle of the researchers’ main room. This room used to be the office where Irina Nicolau organized informal meetings with young researchers and volunteers. At the back of the room, there is an old wooden cabinet with handwritten inscriptions on each drawer, which holds stationary, artistic tools and materials. Above the cabinet, one can see the poster Arca lui Noe [Noah’s Ark], from the exhibition bearing the same name, curated in 2001 by Irina Nicolau, Lila Passima, Cosmin Manolache and other researchers, as well as by a group of volunteers. The exhibition was based only on objects that were not part of the catalogued objects of the museum. After the exhibition ended, some of them remained in the researchers’ offices. Irina Nicolau and her team collected things that were expected to disappear in one way or another. The curators’ intention was to unsettle, to provoke amazement, to destabilize the common understanding of everyday objects and the role and limits of

1.7 Round table in the researchers’ main room, 2011. Photo by Gabriela Nicolescu.

1 Two Different Doors: Bureaucracy and Playfulness 23

1.8 ‘A chacun sa croix’ poster, pinned butterflies and painting featuring a personification of Death. Photo by Gabriela Nicolescu.

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indexation in cultural institutions and also of the museum itself. A folklorist by training, Irina Nicolau was a keen collector of different sorts of materials and of characters. Playing on her Balkan identity, but also on her nonchalant feminism, Irina would wear long colourful dresses, necklaces and rings, and adopt a very open and nonconformist attitude. She used strong language while also attending church services regularly. She obtained a degree in philology in 1969 and worked at the Institute of Ethnology and Folklore between 1970 and 1989. Here, Irina was tasked with taking care of the institute’s archive and, after extensive reading and consideration, reorganized it by introducing new categories and new registers. Very amused by this re-shuffle, Ioana Popescu, Irina’s colleague at both the Institute and later the NMRP, who would become the head of the Research Department after Irina’s death in 2002, concluded that: ‘Nobody managed to find anything after she [Irina Nicolau] reorganised it! It was an archive made according to her own logic’ (Blidaru, Bucurenci and Bucurenci 2003: [online publication]). It is exactly this kind of internal logic that could not be deciphered by museum staff outside the researchers’ group, which explains the seemingly chaotic amalgamation of objects in the researchers’ offices, which overflowed into nearby corridor. In the main office one can see pinned butterflies, communist flags, wall carpets, old photographs, statues of the Virgin Mary and the poster written in French A chacun sa croix [To each his own cross] from an exhibition organized at the Musée d’Ethnographie de Neuchâtel. This particular association of objects indicates the researchers’ passionate search for meaning. Key questions that guided researchers’ exploration with objects and representation included: what is a museum? And what are the limits of museum making? These questions were explored freely by means of creativity and the free association of meaning and interdisciplinary specialisms, rather than by following established rules and standards of conservation and display. The writings of Jorge Luis Borges, featuring the magical realism that was so popular among researchers and some folklorists in Bucharest in the 1980s, were adapted to the museum context. Researchers and artists were particularly taken with his writings around the idea of cabinet of curiosities that took various shapes in The Library of Babel, Labyrinth and The Garden of Forking Paths. At NMRP during the 1990s, art historians and folklorists found the perfect exploration ground for the ways in which the magic of everyday objects could be brought to light and displayed to museum visitors. Researchers thought it was their duty to engage with everyday objects that were otherwise overlooked or neglected, also viewing their efforts as a response to being denied to the museum stores. Mircea Eliade, the Romanian-born historian of religion, also played an influential role in the researchers’ approach to ‘magical’ encounters between people and objects. Eliade’s (1954) writings on the universal cyclical time, as presented in The Myth of the Eternal Return, or Cosmos and History, influenced researchers to use folkloristic understandings of time and forge them into museum displays. Later in this chapter we will see how researchers grounded the permanent exhibition The Time in the cyclical succession of seasons that was revealed as more important and relevant

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1.9 Researchers’ office, 2011. Photo by Gabriela Nicolescu.

than historical time. Eliade’s own magical realism, present in his short novels, further inspired researchers to play with the idea of temporality and focus on the mystical qualities of time and objects. The baroque excess of the interiors of researchers offices made the offices used by the muzeografi look austere. While researchers actively surrounded themselves with objects that inspired them to think of new displays and projects, muzeografi distanced themselves from the objects they curated, which were kept in the NMRP’s official stores. The muzeografi consider this distance an important way of preserving both objects and themselves. Looking at the two sets of pictures taken in the muzeografi and researchers’ offices, one retired muzeograf and ethnographer commented that museum curators never collect objects in personal collections. In 2010, none of the muzeografi or collection attendants had personal collections either at home, or in their offices. In contrast, researchers believe that it is only by touching objects and living with them for a considerable amount of time that they were able to better understand the objects, the worlds they originate from and the complex relationships surrounding them. This process, researchers believe, is crucial to understanding the relation between objects and museum visitors, and this has consequences for the ways in which visitors perceive displayed objects. These tendencies were related to new museums opened in the 1990s; quests to find new heritage, stories told to foster a sense of local belonging and citizenship, were often seen as a counterbalance to the conventional museum institutions, publicly funded and dominated by top–down narratives.1 Researchers and artists were aware of this new wave of museography.

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1.10 The office of Marius Caraman, one of the main photographers at the NMRP, and his private collection of traditional wooden crucifixes. Photo by Gabriela Nicolescu.

Their museum was meant to be a community-oriented institution, similar to the ecomuseums that tell stories emerging from the local actualities and physical existences of objects, the natural world and people in ways that were thought important or relevant especially for local communities.2 In the 1990s, some researchers from the NMRP were invited to visit several eco-museums in France and the Musée d’Ethnographie de Neuchâtel. They were impressed by the playful, inexpensive and unconventional ways they saw of creating exhibits and telling stories by means of objects. They enjoyed improvization and the different ‘patchworks’ curators in Western eco-museums employed in order to express their ideas. The lack of formal archives and collections obliged curators to improvise and be creative. They documented the tumultuous changes of the 1990s by gathering several personal or project-oriented collections, some of which constituted main displays at the NMRP. Researchers and artists therefore found many similarities with the preoccupation of curators in Western eco-museums. During the winter of 2010, I spent three months in the main archival room of the museum looking at and photographing documents. Other than the two filing cabinets, there were two wooden drawers where textiles collected or donated to researchers over the previous twenty years had been kept. Several times I encountered muzeografi who came to look at the textiles. Each of these visits was very brief. The muzeografi used to spray textiles with a moth treatment, but more or less abandoned the textiles

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where they were, in completely inappropriate conditions. During Bucharest’s hot summers and freezing winters alike, the textiles in the archival room were left unprotected; this treatment was very different to that afforded to the other textiles in the indexed collections, and went against the principles of muzeografi. In this context, the gesture of simply spraying the items to prevent moth infestation but leaving in poor storage conditions represents a partial form of care that is indicative of the ambiguous position occupied by the objects collected by or donated to researchers. The spraying was a symbolic gesture to mark a partial recognition of the values these objects held, but the lack of additional care showed they were not regarded as being fully part of the permanent collections: a distinction that marks the porous nature of the museum.

Closed rooms In June 2003, three permanent exhibitions – The Room of Time, The Nun’s Room and The Cross is Everywhere – closed. All of these exhibition rooms were curated by researchers and artists in the second half of the 1990s. The management of the museum, dominated by muzeografi between 2003 and 2005, decided these spaces held little value because they thought most objects on display were insignificant, uncatalogued and mixed with objects in the museum’s official collections in unsafe and risky ways. Moreover, the management of the NMRP considered the spaces of these three exhibitions were not appropriate for display. For example, they considered that Room of Time was too small for visitors and also too close to the fire exit. The Nun’s Room (or Grandma’s Room, as many friends of the museum used to call it) was regarded by researchers as an opportunity to reflect on the contemporary life of Romanian peasants, those low-paid agricultural workers caught between rural and urban lifestyles and spaces. The display was organized in a cramped corner of the ground floor permanent exhibition and contained contemporary everyday objects from rural and urban areas: an extendable sofa, handmade flat-woven rugs, a small square table covered with oilcloth, large margarine tubs used as flower pots, a plastic gold-effect wall clock that could be found easily in flea markets, wall photographs, religious icons and small statues of Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary. Because most objects on display were inexpensive, visitors were allowed to sit on the sofa, touch the exhibits, and open the pantry door beside the sofa. It was the open access, interactivity and unconventional use of objects on display that attracted a lot of attention among students and young visitors. If they opened the pantry door next to the sofa in The Nun’s Room, visitors were surprised to be able to enter another space: The Time Room. ‘Open the door, on the other side of the door there is time!’ stated an inscription hand written on a piece of cloth nailed to the door. The visitor would enter a small, cold and dark room that had also been curated by Irina Nicolau and other researchers and artists. This room displayed three types of temporality: first, cyclical time, as represented by the

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1.11 Image from The Nun’s Room, remade after the curatorial conflict. Photo by Gabriela Nicolescu.

succession of seasons and annual months; second, historical time, as indicated by important dates in the history of the Romanian nation; and third, personal time that started at birth and ended with the ageing and death of a person and of the objects on display. A list of most important events in Romanian history (most of which will be discussed in the next chapter), such as the 1907 peasants’ revolt in 1907, were painted on one of the walls of the room. The references to historical events are integrated in a more general representation of time as cyclical. The display represents time cycles (the seasons of the year and the myth of regeneration, or the stages of the life of objects in the museum and their degradation). In this room, twelve pillows

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Figure 1.12 The Time Room, remade after the curatorial conflict. Photo by Gabriela Nicolescu.

set out on a long table represent the twelve months of the year, a cheap white plastic rocking horse, recycled from some abandoned toys, was transformed by Nicolau into a museum exhibit that spoke to repetitive movements and ancestral rhythms. In a similar way, the peasants’ work was represented as repetitive and obedient to the cycles of nature. A wooden trough that was used traditionally to bathe the entire family was also used to press grapes during winemaking in the autumn, make dough for bread throughout the year and bake Christmas cakes. Wooden troughs were also used to wash and prepare dead bodies for burial in rural areas. This approach calls to mind the ‘social total fact’ (Mauss [1954] 2002; [1972] 2001) that grasps, amid the multitude of facts and actions that form social life, that particular ‘perpetual state of becoming’ (Mauss 2006) which helps us understand any culture. In this sense, the wooden trough was a ‘social total object’ in a similar way in which the ‘soul’, for example, was a total object for Mauss. Researchers believed the wooden trough contained and distilled the quintessential actions of Romanian peasants throughout history. At the same time, The Time Room was one of the few rooms in the museum with direct references to history, although it maintained an explicit silence about the socialist period, which was indicated on the wall as a parenthesis in Romania’s history. Chapter 6 will detail the NMRP’s contribution to ethnographic museums from this point of view, in the context in which time is rarely displayed or problematized in most ethnographic museums in the world.

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As many people in the museum attested, Horia Bernea was amused by Irina Nicolau’s exhibitions, calling them ‘sock exhibitions’ (Nicolau and Huluţă 2001). The notion of ‘sock’, in the register of everyday life objects, indicates that these relatively small displays had something from the nature of a cul-de-sac. They were placed at the end of main exhibition rooms, in relatively cramped spaces that led nowhere. The amalgamation of objects in these displays reminded everyone of contemporary cabinets of curiosities. With his concept of ‘live’ museology, Horia Bernea accepted such improvisations. Irina Nicolau was a very close collaborator of his and one of the researchers who imparted to the NMRP a powerful strand of creativity and playfulness. These two values, as I will elaborate further, were not limited to the aesthetics of display. They extended to a profound critique of communist forms of visibility and habitus by means of focusing on practices, work patterns and values attached to labour. Bourdieu defines habitus as an ‘unconscious’ modus operandi, or embodiment of class attitudes: . . . in each of us, in varying proportions, there is a part of yesterday’s man who inevitably predominates in us, since the present amounts too little compared with the long past in the course of which we were formed and from which we result. Yet we do not sense this man of the past, because he is inveterate in us; he makes the unconscious part of ourselves. Bourdieu [1971] 1977: 78

While Bourdieu defines habitus as unconscious, in the case of the NMRP, the visibility and the awareness of past curatorial practices led both researchers and muzeografi to create very conscious symbolic forms of distinction between each other. For example, in an article published in 2012, a former museum member of staff in the Research Department states that: [t]he NMRP, through style (. . .) was the opposite of the communist institution, and something totally different from a common institution.(. . .) Because of Horia Bernea and Irina Nicolau, NMRP was an institution of freedom and joy of work. It was not the nine-to-five that kept us at the museum, but the feeling of enterprise [preocupare], of a common adventure. Manolescu 2012: [online publication]

At the same, the nine-to-five work schedule, predictable daily routines, and constant caring for the official collections in standardized ways, represented the muzeografi’s own habitus. Going beyond the contrasting pre-dispositions of the two groups, the exhibitions curated by the researchers represented visible marks of underlying visions of the world and political ideologies. For example, the never-ending conflicts around either keeping or closing The Room of the Time and The Nun’s Room could be read in the light of David Lowenthal’s heritage crusades. Heritage is not history at all; while it borrows from and enlivens historical study, heritage is not an inquiry into the past but a celebration of it, not an effort to know

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what really happened but a profession of faith in a past tailored to Present day purposes. Lowenthal 1998: x

Therefore, the conflicts over aesthetical, stylistic and ultimately curatorial practices represent conflicts over what should be remembered or not – and how.

‘Socialist’ white and tidy Cultural and social theorists of socialism, including Boym (1994), Buchli (2000, Reid and Crowley (2000), have written about a constant negotiation of styles inside socialist regimes and explained the reasons for the profound preoccupation of political power with expressing ideology through materiality. Ethnographies of the refurbishments of domestic interiors (Boym 1994) and public housing architecture (Buchli 2000) in the USSR, or constant supervision of window displays in Hungary (Crowley 2000) describe the different ways in which socialist regimes tried to educate the masses through aesthetics. Socialist decision-makers used to butt in on everything that was considered potentially dangerous to the socialist order, such as mass consumption, cosmopolitanism and free artistic expression. One main reason was that ‘people’s taste had to be disciplined both on ideological and aesthetic grounds, as well as to keep aspirations within limits state industrial production might feasibly satisfy’ (Reid and Crowley 2000: 14). The displays in socialist museums were very often simple and almost flat, in an attempt to differentiate themselves from the previous regimes through material form (Nicolescu 2016a). Separation from the old ideology was achieved through a strong discourse on ‘hygiene’ and efficacy, and was implemented by the extensive use of new materials such as glass, wrought iron and lighter timber structures. These transformations were meant to contrast with the prior use of countless superfluous objects and decorations that were considered decadent and immoral. But the authors mentioned above also point to deeper and less often discussed transformations within the socialist regimes themselves that were meant to mark successive internal differentiations, for example, the de-Stalinization period following the Russian leader’s death in 1953. These internal differentiations did not mark dramatic changes in material and visual forms, but rather were expressed in an intense preoccupation with refining the nuances of purity and cleanliness. Buchli shows how the glass and steel adopted in buildings in USSR were considered by Soviet authorities as not only being better quality than other materials but also allowing a cleaner and safer work environment for the emergent working class. In Romania, it is well known that mass production during state socialism promoted a certain standardization of fashion across the Romanian population which left relatively little room for improvisation and personal creativity in most people’s clothing. For example, the textile industry produced neutral or relatively dark colours, such as grey, for the Romanian market, in an attempt to level off differences in terms of

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personal taste, income or profession and to monitor the consumption of the proletariat. At work, blue-collar employees had to wear uniforms standardized at a national level in all state enterprises, the only enterprises that existed in socialist Romania. Factory workers in factories wore blue and dark grey overalls, for example, while white overalls were designed not only for doctors and nurses but also for construction designers, chemical engineers and museum curators. School uniforms were mandated for children and young people from nursery to university age; deviations were sanctioned strictly by school principals – and sometimes by socialist leaders as well. Male pupils had to have short haircuts while girls had to tie their hair up in ponytails, using white hairbands. A haircut that was just a centimetre too long, or long hair that was not tied up appropriately, would be punished.

‘Anti-communist’ colour and bricolage Twenty-first century anti-communist protests have very often been associated with colour. In 2021, the purple toilet brush became a symbol of Russian protests. On 23 September 2020, Boris Lukashenko, president of Belarus, stated that the ‘colour revolution’ had not succeeded in his country. In 2019, a Chinese official warned against Hong Kong attempting the same (Ramzy and May 2019). In all these cases, colour is associated with social, cultural and economic values and a form of liberalism. In contrast, a lack of bright colours is linked to a problematic state-supported regime. After the fall of the communist regimes in Eastern Europe, socialism’s obsession with sanitized, neat spaces provoked a powerful counter-reaction. In her book on the socialist materials in socialist and post-socialist Hungary, Krisztina Féherváry (2012) shows that the post-socialist effervescence in the use of colours and materials in construction and renovation projects was a direct reaction to the perceived monotony and lack of diversity in the socialist urbanscape. For example, post-socialism brought in lively colours – Féherváry compares them to ice cream colours – that replaced the masses of grey-white buildings built during socialism. This change resulted from an emerging preoccupation with ‘organicity’ during the final years of socialism. As a reaction to the officially sanctioned standardized materials, such as prefabricated construction materials and concrete, many people in Hungary started to look for traditional and organic materials, such as wood and more natural paints. Similarly, Mihăilescu (2013) identified in contemporary Romania a strong adoption of ‘rustic’ materials in direct opposition to the cold and impersonal mediums used during communism. In the case of the NMRP, we can see a profound use of colour from researchers and artists. One of the first steps taken in February 1990 to transform the Museum of the Communist Party into the NMRP was to take out previous displays and uncover what could lay beneath the wall-mounted boards. Researchers and artists literally scratched into the neat white walls of the museum, painted them in lively colours and used organic materials, such as rope, clay and wood in order to humanize the spaces. Handmade wooden cases and plaster mannequins were used instead of the

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pinned-out costumes and glass walls, as Chapters 5 and 6 will describe in more detail. The French anthropologist Gerard Althabe described the exhibition that opened in 1993 as ‘a work of art’, an initiatory and hermeneutic journey, a poem (Althabe 1997: 149–51). I suggest that beyond the post-socialist transformations described above in the cases of Hungary and Romania, these rather radical gestures for an ethnographic museum expressed a move towards a particular sensual aestheticism, described famously by Christopher Pinney (2001) by means of ‘corpothetics’. Pinney defines this term as a return to the way images used to be worshipped sensually in early civilizations. ‘Corpothetics’ involves bodily performance and transforms both the image and the beholder. It is ‘the sensory embrace of images, the bodily engagement that most people (except Kantians and modernists) have with artworks’ (2001: 158). Art historians Magda Cârneci (1999) and Alexandra Titu (2003) argue that neoByzantine art was a reaction to the progressive communist modernity in the 1970s and 1980s. The artists’ affiliation with folk customs and the spiritual life of the church was regarded as a form of ‘cultural resistance’ (see Cârneci 1999: 101). NeoByzantinism is a retrospective attitude, an ‘active and conscious orientation towards the sacred’: [Neo-byzantinism] not only wanted to continue a process that was historically interrupted by the dogmatic atheism of scientific socialism in post war Eastern Europe, and which became state politics (. . .) [its] retrospective attitude is not only historical – to go back to a certain moment of civilisation, but it is also ontologically retrospective, in the way in which ‘being’ and ‘effort of knowledge’ are understood, directed interrogatively towards revelation. [This retrospective attitude] is meditative and feeble [and directed] actively towards understanding the inexplicable origins of the being. Titu 2003: 167–8

In Chapter 5, we will see that Neo-Byzantinism is the expression in art of a readaptation of particular right-wing ideas that preceded the socialist regime but which were maintained throughout socialism by sustaining mystical thinking and phenomenological appropriation of religion. In this context, writing on the walls, bringing in organic materials to decorate plaster and on the wall, and striving for a ‘live’ museography were essential ways for the new managers of the NMRP not only to oppose the previous forms but also to express their authenticity and creativity. For example, mannequins were made out of plaster and then modelled using the papier-mâché technique3 in order to capture the physiognomic characteristics of human bodies in different ethnographic regions of the country. The very slow process of putting together the mannequins, with close attention paid to detail and form, was a manifestation of authenticity. The organic materials and the techniques contrasted directly with the manner in which folk costumes had been exhibited during communism. As we will see in Chapters 3 and 4, socialist curators mostly simply pinned the costumes on boards and refused to give the people who would wear them any corporality. Communist curators thought

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1.13 Plaster mannequins handmade in early 1990s. Fonds Dinescu-Caraman/ Film 777/ Image 26, courtesy of the NMRP.

that expressing the universality of folk costumes meant not representing the physical body of the wearers. On the other hand, researchers and artists at the NMRP used organic materials to make visitors feel more connected with their own rural roots. This gesture could be seen as a form of ’distributed self’, in the vein described by anthropologists Gell (1998) and Rowlands (2005), who show that very often material presence is seen as a true extension of the self. This ‘distributed self’ communicates not only the presence of individuals and their power, but also the methodology of doing things. Refining this argument, Miller (2005) and Rowlands (2005) discuss whether the material forms of representation are expressive of ways in which people make sense of themselves and create identities. In this context, on the museum grounds one can witness a biography of the nation being manifested in new material forms and practices. The choice of organic materials and ‘slow’ techniques gave visitors opportunities to experience such self-recognition. This opportunity to create forms and displays via which visitors can understand something about themselves represents a key characteristic of the porous nature of museums. The organic materials used to build the plaster mannequins push the visitors to search for their own essence of being, in a phenomenological approach. This contrasts with communist displays that invited visitors to detach themselves from the peasants, to see them as subjects of the past. I call the distribution of the sensible the system of self-evident facts of sense perception that simultaneously discloses the existence of something in common and the delimitations that define the respective parts and positions within it. A

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distribution of the sensible therefore establishes at one and the same time something common that is shared and exclusive parts. This apportionment of parts and positions is based on a distribution of spaces, times, and forms of activity that determines the very manner in which something in common lends itself to participation and in what way various individuals have a part in this distribution. Rancière 2004: 12

By selecting what to include in an exhibition and how to show it, curators ‘distribute their sensible’ (Rancière 2004) and construct a discourse to be consumed by their public. By allocating ‘parts and positions’, curators not only decide which objects to include in an exhibition, but also how to disclose the past of these objects and the stories and histories associated with them. It is during this process that the curator becomes an artist, as the cultural theorist Boris Groys (2008) showed in Art Power. The public who appreciated the playful and artistic representations of ethnographic objects in the NMRP was more sophisticated (albeit smaller) than the visitors to ethnographic museums during communism. At the same time, some people will always be attracted by formal display styles and a more conventional approach to ethnographic objects. All exhibitions organized after 2000 by muzeografi targeted this kind of public. The displays are clear because they use objects from the same collection, with straightforward labelling. Items are ordered simply and in a formalized manner. This way of displaying objects does not need a high level of education and sophistication, nor does it require a particular perspective on history. In the rest of the book I explain why it is not only visitors who act as consumers of the museum, but also those who work there. We will see in Chapter 3 that this way of engaging with museum displays has a particular genealogy in socialist museum practice and why, for example, a muzeograf from Folk Art Museum wrote in 1952 in the museum’s archives that: ‘This museum should contribute to the liquidation of old bourgeoisie and of the remaining of the bourgeois superstructure, by doing that, helping to build the new socialist structure’. Consequently, ‘folk art would be a means to overcome the chauvinistic cosmopolitanism’ (Marcela Focşa in MFA Archive/ File 64).

Negotiating a white overall The photo in 1.14 was taken in 1996, in the months preceding the opening of the permanent exhibition on the NMRP’s second floor. In the image one can see artist Horia Bernea, then museum director, surrounded by muzeografi dressed in white overalls. Muzeografi offered Bernea a white overall in his size. In the centre of the image, the director of the Department of Museography and Conservation, Georgeta Roşu, looks at Bernea, seemingly taking stock. The garment was very probably a present from the Department of Museography. The entire scene is watched by other collection attendants, all women dressed in white, smiling or looking serious. Sometimes during my discussions with Geta Roşu during fieldwork she used to call

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1.14 White-coated muzeografi with Horia Bernea. Fonds Dinescu-Caraman/ Film 777/ Image 21, courtesy of the NMRP.

the collection attendants, ‘my girls’. This denomination indicates the egalitarian spirit of the technical staff collective and the fact that they were not considered artists and creators, but technicians working with scientific rigour. The muzeografi, dressed in white, contrast with the sombrely clad Bernea. We do not know for certain whether Bernea refused to wear the white overall offered by muzeografi. However, none of the images in the 1990s Image Archive show Bernea or other researchers wearing overalls. Researchers were always dressed colourfully and used to wear arty accessories, like bright chunky necklaces, multiple bracelets, and unusual bags. Many young room attendants who worked in the museum in the early 1990s remembered how sometimes Bernea would remark on someone’s colourful clothes or how they matched colours. Room attendants recognized that they took on some of Bernea’s tastes and incorporated them into their own dress codes. French couture mattered for Bernea. In particular, one researcher told me how particular Bernea was keen for male staff to match their socks and their shoes appropriately, for example. In Chapter 5, we will see that colourful and less conventional dressing represented a visual marker of class and everyday politics that added to the particular sense of porosity inside the NMRP and in the Romanian society at large at this time. On the museum grounds, the white overalls remained markers of the status of ‘technical staff’ long after the fall of socialism. In 2010–11, all collection attendants were muzeografi employed in the most junior positions within the Museography and Conservation Department. They wore white overalls at almost all times. Curators working with Georgeta Roşu, however, wore overalls only occasionally.

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The subject of the photo above seems to embody the distinction between the status of the artist and the status of the technician at the NMRP. During his work there, Horia Bernea considered himself not only the director and manager, but also its main curator. He was tall and bearded, empathetic and friendly with all employees, strict but genial. On the other hand, the photograph also indicates the assimilation of muzeografi to the level of technical staff. That assimilation was facilitated not only by their mode of dress, but also by their number, status and their work in the museum. Their work schedule was fixed, from 9 am to 5 pm, their work organizing exhibitions was planned thoroughly, consistent with conservation rules and checked regularly. In particular, their understanding of ‘folk’ was ultimately the one that they learned and practiced during socialism when it was regulated strictly. The understanding of this aspect in the context of the emergence of folk museums during socialism will be discussed in Chapter 3. On the other hand, the white overalls that professional curators use in museums all over the world were considered during my fieldwork by most of the researchers and artists as a mark of ‘communist museography’, denoting a technical, noncreative, dull and repetitive kind of job. One day, I happened to be in the courtyard of the museum together with the photographer whose office I described earlier in this chapter. Some collection attendants, dressed in white, passed through the courtyard, carrying baskets full of different objects from one part of the building to another. They were walking fast, taking small steps as if on a very important mission. In a whisper, the photographer said, only for me to hear: ‘Look at them!’ This very short remark indicated a certain condescendence towards the appearance of muzeografi and the nature of their repetitive work habits, their obedient rush and rhythm of work and uniformity. Muzeografi were also accused of listening ‘too much’ to their Director of Department, with a certain amount of fear and obedience. In Formations of Class and

1.15, 1.16 and 1.17 Preparations for opening an exhibition room. Fonds DinescuCaraman/ Film 777/ Images 35A, 36, and E, courtesy of the NMRP.

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Gender, sociologist Beverly Skeggs (1997: 83) shows how the body and bodily dispositions carry the markers of social class. The young women in Skeggs’ study associate the working-class body with being overweight, because their high-fat diet was based on fast food and takeaways. One way to escape this class condition was to invest time and energy in changing some of their eating habits and taking more exercise. The photographer’s judgemental attitude towards muzeografi was shared by many other researchers during my fieldwork. Tensions between different approaches to doing things exist among museum staff in many other museums around the world, and class distinctions are not necessarily or explicitly ingredients of such conflicts. In discussions with fellow researchers from museums in Amsterdam, Turin and London, museum staff see divides between what they view as a creative but relaxed side of curatorial work on the one hand and a more restrictive and bureaucratic approach to it on the other. Whilst with the first attitude one aims to innovate and look for new ways and styles of dealing with the museum’s objects, the second attitude is closer to the ordering of objects and collections and is much more focused on the importance of strict roles and practices of museum making. French anthropologist and curator Martine Segalen explains these tensions as ‘institutional divides’ ([2001] 2006: 86) between museum curators and researchers, which are a consequence of how social researchers used to view and deal with museums, images and objects in the twentieth century. Segalen explains that in French museums during the 1970s, curators guarded collections and made exhibitions, while researchers ‘abandoned the collections’ (Segalen [2001] 2006: 86). This difference in attitudes was due mainly to the educational pedigrees the two categories of museum employees had. Researchers studied at universities, which neglected a specific analysis of material culture, whereas curators were taught in the School for Curators, where a historical presentation of art forms dominated. This suggests that the important separation between researchers and curators is due to educational background, museum practices and a certain institutional habitus in terms of how closely they actually work with objects in a museum. In the case of the NMRP, it was muzeografi who worked with objects in the stores every day, while researchers and artists were not allowed to get too close to those items, and therefore felt they had to collect objects at home and bring them into the museum in an informal manner. Taking a wider and historical perspective, sociologists Konrád and Szelényi (1979) famously argue that throughout the Eastern Europe there were two kinds of intelligentsia during communism: technocrat intelligentsia and humanist intelligentsia. Technocrats were a product of the 1960s and 1970s, possessing technical and bureaucratic expertise, whereas the humanist intelligentsia originated from the former aristocracy and bourgeoisie, and were in control of more liberal professions and arts. In Romania during the 1950s and 1960s, the technocrat intelligentsia included the emergent work category of muzeografi. These people were trained in historical materialism, conservationism and folklore as defined by the communist rulers and were employed in the many museums of folk art that opened in the first two decades

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of the socialist/communist regime. Their employment contributed to the marginalization of researchers who used to work in museum institutions, who were accused of having bourgeois tastes and practices, aristocratic backgrounds or simply subversive political views. During the late 1960s, some of the intelligentsia who had been marginalized during the previous decade were released from political imprisonment and professional isolation to be re-appropriated and supported by Romania’s communist regime. At this time the ruling Communist Party adopted clear nationalist rhetoric and practices in order to distance itself politically and economically from the Soviet Union (Ionescu 1964; Verdery 1991; and Kessler 2015). This re-appropriation was done by employing humanist intelligentsia into various institutes of research of folk, history and art. After the fall of the socialist/communist regime, these two kinds of elites co-existed within the Romanian cultural space. The case of the NMRP is particularly important because it was the only museum in Romania which was allowed in early 1990s to have a Research Department. This Department employed researchers from socialist/ communist institutes of research who found themselves having to work together with muzeografi under the same roof. Therefore, in a sense it is to be expected that their differing views on what an ethnographic museum should be would collide frequently in the years that followed. The fact that a post-communist museum had to incorporate very different views, as embodied on the one hand, by muzeografi, and on the other hand, by researchers, meant that the NMRP became a site of what Bourdieu calls ‘a reuniting of tastes’ – something that can be terribly violent. Having a taste for one thing means refusing or disliking something else, by its very nature. An aversion to different lifestyles is perhaps one of the starkest barriers between the classes (Bourdieu [1984] 2010: 49). In the context of the political and professional transformations in Romanian museum space from the 1950s to the present, the negotiation of the white overall, presented in 1.14, can be seen as the forerunner of a veritable war on tastes, political views and ethical approaches, and just one of the many negotiations that took place in the post-socialist society. The following chapters will show how these conflicts and sometimes negotiations were made evident to the public in the appearances of the museum displays: museum spaces, stores, walls, floors and ceilings, glass cases, pins, support textiles, labels, light and sound, images, films and media art. Sometimes even the objects on display were regarded by museum staff as ideal vehicles via which to express dissent. For example, on the second floor of the permanent exhibition, Horia Bernea exhibited an upside down bed and explained that by doing that, the museum talks not only about the bed as we are used to see it in the rural life, but of the idea of the bed as a more universal value. Or, muzeografi often used to laugh at Bernea by saying that if a plate wasn’t chipped, it wasn’t good enough to be displayed. This referred indirectly to Bernea’s taste for imperfect museum items, which was opposed to the way muzeografi conceived museum objects: complete, well ordered and sanitized.

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In search of creativity: The EMYA In 1996 the NMRP gained the European Museum of the Year Award (EMYA), one of the most prestigious recognitions for a European museum. The prize was a mark of prestige for the NMRP’s entire staff, and not only Bernea’s close collaborators. However, the story of how the EMYA was awarded, as told by museum employees, demonstrates that museums – with their visible and less visible layers – are fields of continuous negotiation and involve constant translation between views and the materialization of these views in exhibitions, stores and museum practices. Different museum employees have different explanations regarding the institution receiving the EMYA. One muzeograf who worked in Bernea’s team told me that the award was a clear recognition of the fact ‘we knew how to keep the stores secure during communism and no objects were lost or damaged’. On the other side, one researcher told me EMYA was awarded ‘because we innovated aesthetically’. At first glance, the two explanations seem to contradict each other. At another level of investigation, both explanations are true, as we will see in this book. In a seminar held in 2010 at the museum, one employee related in front of a large audience that in 1996, Hermann Schaeffer, then director of the EMYA, could not travel to Romania to evaluate and rank the museum for the award. Someone else from the EMYA was sent in his place. That official was walked around the NMRP by three enthusiastic researchers, two of them young and one experienced curator. At some point, one of the researchers literally walked arm in arm with the EMYA representative. Researchers explained to the official the innovation that had been taking place in the NMRP in terms of curatorial views and practices, in a combination of French, English and Romanian. The jury member was shown the museum stores and offices in the museum. He was impressed by everything he saw and experienced at the NMRP and decided to persuade the EMYA jury to award the prize to the museum. The walking arm in arm most probably made the visit personal and enjoyable. Visual anthropologist Andrew Irving (2007) shows that the ‘walk along’ is part of an wider performance that creates exchanges of memories and other information with intimate qualities. The walk along adds value to the typical museum visit, that can sometimes be boring. One year later, Hermann Schaeffer arrived unannounced at the NMRP and made an unaccompanied tour of the exhibits. He saw the carved mannequins, costumes with labels written by hand in Romanian only, and all the objects on display presented without a historical context. The word among the museum staff was that after completing his visit, Schaeffer exclaimed: ‘Why did we give this museum a prize? This type of museography was practised 100 years ago!’ If the story is true, Schaeffer’s reaction is partially justifiable: the carved mannequins were similar to the wax models seen in many nineteenth-century museums and to the eye of a Westerner who understood the history of colonialism and early post-colonial critique, they would have been reminiscent of plaster busts of racial stereotypes. For curators in anthropological and ethnographic museums in Western Europe, it was, and it still is, mandatory for objects to be presented in historical context. The date of acquisition is important and

1 Two Different Doors: Bureaucracy and Playfulness 41

special care goes into making it visible, together with the context of the acquisition. Plaster mannequins and atemporal displays were thus very much of the past. But the story reveals more than that: Schaeffer is a German museum curator. For him, revisiting nineteenth-century modes of display represents a retrograde act. However, in the Romanian context, the strategy of using plaster mannequins and displaying objects ahistorically was actually indicative of experiment and innovation and, as we have seen, it signified radical divergence from the socialist modes of display. In their work on the development of notions of creativity, anthropologists Hirsch and Macdonald (2005) argue that creativity must always be viewed in historical perspective. They explain why creativity, as we commonly understand it, is part of a particular Western trajectory associated with people taking individual responsibility and realizing their potential.  At the same time, creativity presupposes a good knowledge of the norms existing in a given space and time. It is these norms that should be understood and challenged by individuals who create and innovate. Therefore, creativity is profoundly embedded in the social transmission and practice of knowledge over time. The case of NMRP shows that researchers build innovatively on the curatorial knowledge and practices of muzeografi whilst also challenging them. In the 1990s, muzeografi and researchers collaborated. Winning the EMYA could be seen as a proof of the value of this collaboration. The award was not a prize to one category or another, but rather the fruit of cross-pollination. From a wider perspective, the story of the EMYA shows that creativity is not simply the product of individuals or groups, but the result of social permeation of tastes and values over time. After Horia Bernea died in 2000, this collaboration diverged abruptly into stereotypical reciprocal blaming. Each side started to build its own identity in opposition to the other. Muzeografi took pride in organizing stores, conserving official collection, planning ahead and in general taking good care of objects – in clear contrast with researchers. On the other hand, researchers took pride into challenging the existing order, setting up ad-hoc collections and improvizing in terms of writing and display. Muzeografi saw their current work as a natural extension of their work to augment collections during the socialist era. Researchers thought the socialist collections did not adequately represent the current post-socialist state of the Romanian society. As a consequence, researchers focused on shaking up the existing inventory and creatively collecting contemporary objects – as well as sometimes finding new meanings for the existing objects in stores. For the muzeografi, keeping the collections safe was top priority; for artists and researchers, it was important to innovate with forms and assemblages. These differences in looking at and caring for objects was also expressed in terms of disseminating knowledge. In 2002, researchers and artists published Noah’s Ark, containing playful lists of objects that researchers and volunteers kept in their homes and some stories relating to these objects. In the same year, researchers published Le Pied Chausse, a handmade book tied with hemp strings like an old parcel, that reuses ethnographic writings from the socialist period about the Romanian leather sandals (opinci). Le Pied Chausse contained

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detachable cardboard pages and hand drawings. In 2000 and 2004 muzeografi published Cahle, Ulcioare de nuntă and Glass Icons (Roşu 2000a, 2000b; and Roşu and Blajan 2000) as well as a museum guide that also functioned as a catalogue, given that it referred only to the indexed collections (Giurescu and Roşu 2004).

Conclusion This chapter introduced two doors. These doors objectify a clear distinction between the two categories of museum staff, which go deep into the convoluted history and opposing traditions of work, education and citizenship practices in both the NMRP and society at large. Ideas of cleanliness and transparency related to the socialist period are juxtaposed with ideas of bricolage, ornamentation and sometimes opulence in the periods preceding and following socialism, and even during periods of intermittent liberalization. The conflict that started manifesting in 2000 has in fact deeper roots into their respective job attributes and professions, which also echoes the resentments surfacing in Romanian politics today. On the surface it can be said that the conflict has to do with what and how to use objects. In reality, the conflict has to do with values and ways of doing in relation with folk-art objects, or any objects in general. Muzeografi care for folkart collections and focus on the museum’s archives. Researchers and artists invest in creativity and innovation and do not shy away from combining different aesthetical traditions from inside and outside the museum world. But the stereotypes these two staff groups throw at each other reflect wider conflicts in society as a whole. The biography of the nation can be seen in the biography of this museum. Structural anthropologist Lévi-Strauss (1982) famously showed how binary oppositions and distinctions exist all around the world and the comparisons transgress cultural barriers, or the visible–invisible divide. Anthropologist Caroline Humphrey (1999) shows that binarism and opposition are central to how post-socialist societies are described in the political imagination in these countries. In post-socialist Inner Asian region, for example, this process led to a certain exaltation of binarism, each side being attached to their own ‘spiritual values’. The chapter showed the use of stereotypy – in this case socialist versus anticommunist – in constructing dichotomic descriptions that are otherwise present in wider society. Nevertheless, oppositions used and described as fixed in their immutable binarism are in fact changing and dynamic. This process involves a constant process of dissolution and recrystallization. Edmund Leach ([1954] 2021) famously showed that in highland Burma, two opposed groups, one egalitarian and the other one hierarchical, adhere strictly to their different settings, although there are certain moments when people can migrate from one group to another. As for Leach, marriage (alliance) and descent are crucial, given that in the museum world training and curatorial practices are central. In the following two chapters I will show how the genealogy of the current conflicts rests precisely in the manner in which museology during socialism was defined in opposition to pre-socialist museology. It is important to understand different traditions in museum practice and display, but also how antinomic dichotomies can be reinforced in a museum context.

1 Two Different Doors: Bureaucracy and Playfulness 43

2.1 Archives in the stores of the Village Museum, 1990. Fonds Dinescu-Damian/ Film 1/ Image 1, courtesy of the NMRP.

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The Staging of History: Ethnography in Museums’ Shifting Archives

‘The question of the archive is not the question of the past but the question of the future.’ Derrida [1995] 1998: 36

In February 1990, forty days after Nicolae Ceaușescu, the last socialist president of Romania, was killed on Christmas Day 1989, Horia Bernea was named the director of a new museum. The name of that museum was not yet known. What Andrei Pleșu, the first post-socialist Minister of Culture knew was that the Romanian nation needed an institution that would symbolically put a clear end to the socialist past, while dealing with socialist employees and institutions. Pleșu, a well-known art historian and philosopher, decided that the new museum would be located in the building where the History Museum of the Communist Party, of the Revolutionary and the Democratic Movement of Romania, henceforth the Museum of the Communist Party (MCP), and the House of the Pioneers had all functioned in the later years of socialism. Among the first things that Horia Bernea did as director of the NMRP was to rescue the archives and the stores of the previous institutions that had operated in different ways and in various times in the building. The archives and stores of the Museum of National Art, which functioned between 1906 and 1950, along with the archives and stores of its successor during socialism, the Museum of Folk Art (MFA), which functioned between 1950 and 1978, have been deposited in the Village Museum in Bucharest since 1978. The minister also knew that the sumptuous Neo-Romanian style edifice that hosted the Museum of the Communist Party was an iconic building that dated from pre-socialist times. It hosted the Museum of National Art (MNA) between 1912 and 1950, having been built at the beginning of twentieth century by Nicolae Gika-Budești and finished by Grigore Ionescu, after plans suggested by the Austrian architect George Niemann and Swiss architect Louis Blanc had been rejected. This building was seen as the perfect place to host the project as it would connect the present with the pre-socialist heritage. The process of the remaking of the new museum implied a diligent deletion of socialist traces in history and museography. Bernea and his team felt that the new institution should host all archives and stores of the pre-socialist museum; they had managed to obtain these as a foundation for the newly established museum and as they would be an essential starting point

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for the future displays. However, the archives and stores of the Lenin-Stalin Museum (1955–66), the Museum of the Communist Party (1966–89), and the House of the Pioneers (mid to late 1980s), were found in offices of the existing museum and in the building’s basement. The new management decided to save only some parts of these archives and stores. The rest was either destroyed, thrown away or donated to the Museum of National History and the National Archives.1 This process invites an obvious question: What are the reasons for keeping, indexing, marginalizing, donating, destroying or throwing away some pieces of archived material but not all of it? The convoluted story of the selection and re-assemblage of the NMRP archives from scattered fragments is indicative of how institutions establish their archives and stores by means of expansion and contraction, collecting, sorting, throwing away, merging and expanding at various levels and times in terms of space, visibility and the dominant or intended ideology. By doing this, institutions prove to be key actors in how societies deal with the broader historical perspective and how they inventory and materialize fluctuations in different value systems (Tsing 2013). Through merging and expanding, the porosity of institutions allow different kinds of material presences to be kept or discarded, and different private views of history to be located and staged in public institutions. This chapter comprises three parts, each of which discusses the history of how the NMRP made use of archival materials. The introductory part explains why the socialist past of the NMRP was silenced in the 1990s. The second part deals with the pre-socialist archives of the museum, while the third and final part discusses the socialist archives.

Why silence the socialist past? In January 2010, the main rumour haunting the employees of the National Museum of the Romanian Peasant [henceforth NMRP] was that the institution would be closed temporarily due to imminent renovation. The Romanian Ministry of Culture had received European Union funds to restore and repair old buildings affected by past earthquakes and the museum was on the list. Without knowing either an exact start date for the works, or details about the procedure, everybody was anxious about the consequences of the renovation and attendant relocation. Some employees were fearful they would lose their jobs, while others welcomed the opportunities that might result from such massive change. I imagined large tarpaulin sheets covering exhibition rooms while offices and storage rooms were locked and sealed. Access to the NMRP archives, which were spread out none too tidily across different offices, was about to be restricted. In the context of the curatorial conflict, the museum’s archives had a major importance. They seemed to be a useful resource into a past I was exploring. Derrida’s observation that archives are oriented towards the future rather than the past is instrumental in understanding the ambition of the NMRP in the early 1990s to establish an archive from past fragments from institutions and individuals as an exercise to selectively use the past in order to define the future. At the same time, the

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story of the selection of the NMRP fragments of archives between institutions, collectors, donors and users shows how archives themselves are instruments of power in the hands of all those who control them or have access to them. Prompted by the imminent renovation of the building in the spring of 2010, I remember asking the museum’s archivist where I could start my research. She opened her arms wide and pointed in two opposing directions: the administrative building and the researchers’ office. She meant that the archives of the museum were scattered on different sites of the building, on different floors and in different rooms. Despite the archivist’s role to take care of all of the museum’s archives, various employees were de facto responsible for different parts of them.2 Following the archivist’s advice I started to investigate the archives from the researchers’ offices situated on the second floor of the building, opposite the library of the museum. At the end of the researchers’ offices, there was a large archival room – known as the main archive room – with huge windows and a high ceiling. Inside that room, two cupboards housed the text archives recovered in 1990 from the Museum of Folk Art. One cupboard stored the archives dating from the Museum of National Art (which functioned between 1906 and 1950) and contained mostly documents from the interwar period. The official name of this archive is Arhiva de Aur [The Golden Archive]. The second cupboard stored archives from the socialist period (1950–78). Its official name was Arhiva Muzeului de Artă Populară [The Archive of the Folk Art Museum]. Archives from 1978 to the end of communism are to be found in the Village Museum that merged with the Museum of Folk Art. This is because the Museum of Folk Art and the Village Museum merged in 1978 for both technical and cultural reasons that will be explained in Chapter 4, and the new management decided to unite the archives and stores belonging to the two institutions. All archives that had belonged to the Museum of Folk Art prior to 1978 were not part of this merger and therefore kept their old inventory number. As a consequence, in 1990 it was relatively easy for the NMRP’s new management to claim possession of the archives and stores dating to before 1978. Some people claimed that NMRP also should have claimed rights over some of the archives and stores from that time, because muzeografi were involved in the process of collection, preservation and archiving. The physical separation between the two cupboards containing two archives reflected the ideological rupture at the NMRP. Researchers worked mostly with The Golden Archive because they placed a higher value on the pre-socialist views and attitudes towards art, culture and museography. Researchers claimed their roots in the interwar Museum of National Art and excluded de facto the socialist period of the institution. In contrast, muzeografi considered the second archive as equally important because it showed the transformation of the original institution and the major expansion of collections during the socialist period. These contrasting attitudes could be seen in the indexing of the files in the second cupboard. Each file has two different inventory numbers: the first was given in a chronological order by archivists during the socialist era, while the second was given arbitrarily by researchers in the 1990s. To them and to many people studying the socialist period in Romania, the chronological

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order of events during socialism was not important. It was as if time during socialism had no linear trajectory. Therefore, researchers constantly neglected the archives from the socialist period. In contrast, the muzeografi used to take care of the presocialist archive during socialism, while also building up the new socialist archives and institution. The irony is that without this care, The Golden Archive would not have made it to the fall of socialism and the present day. In this context, looking at the two cupboards as totally distinct from each other, one can see a major split in history and politics at large and within art in particular. Analysing the two cupboards in depth, however, one can see continuities as well as ruptures, the drive for conservation and the coexisting drive for destruction. This observation reminds us of Derrida’s ([1995] 1998) main argument in Archive Fever that all archives are governed by two opposing forces: one that preserves and one that destroys the life of people, objects and histories that have been documented at some point in time. The combination between the drive for conservation, the Eros of archives, and the drive for destruction, the Thanatos of archives, harnesses the functions of unification, identification and classification as well as the power of consignation and the power to deposit ([1995] 1998: 3). The most important book to tell the story of the NMRP during the 1990s focused on and glorified the pre-socialist period of the museum. Researcher and historian Petre Popovăț’s (1996) account constantly and consistently silences the socialist period of the institution. As we will see in the third part of this chapter, the early socialist leaders emptied the museum of its collections and established new institutions: the Museum of Folk Art and the Byzantine section of the Museum of National Art, based in the former Royal Palace. Popovăț’s argument is that once the Museum of National Art was dissolved, it ceased to exist, even if its archives and collections continued to exist elsewhere and in other contexts. Around the same time Popovăţ’s book was written and published, French anthropologist Gerard Althabe visited NMRP. Althabe writes his understanding of the history of this institution in the 1997 issue of the anthropological review published by NMRP. Althabe argues that at the NMRP, ‘the only reference to communism is the lack of any reference to it’ and that communism is theatrically repressed (Althabe 1997: 155). He describes the permanent exhibition in NMRP as ‘an a-historical aesthetic pleasure with political implications’ (Althabe 1997: 155) and argued that the way NMRP was set up in 1996 was a response to the ‘realist’ museography of the socialist times and an assumed revisitation of the museography of the First World War period. Other historians argued that during the early 1990s any reference to communism at the NMRP was banned from the display, in a desire to make a temporal bridge over communism (Bădică 2010). Visual historian Elizabeth Edwards argues that ‘the archive not only preserves, it reifies, it frames and sets meanings; it also structures silences’ (2001: 107). My argument goes beyond this observation: the interpretation of archives depends on the user of the archive and what kind of stories that user wants to find in the archives. Other authors have noticed that the spatial fragmentation and taxonomy of the

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archive represents a decisive factor in setting meanings for the research itself (Appadurai 2003; Ferguson 2008). From a broader perspective, historian Eric Wolf cautioned us that ‘(a)nthropologies should look towards history as to a discipline that was written by somebody with a certain purpose in mind – to decode this and to include also the one that is missing from the picture’ (1997: 23). Therefore, all the variables and mystifications of a certain event are equally important. But in order to show these discrepancies, and how data about the past is sometimes silenced, other times staged, we should look into how continuities and differences have been taking form since the establishment of the museographical institution in 1906. Archives allow for historical glimpses of both continuities and ruptures. Archives constitute themselves as partial, messy and porous, ultimately just like museums.

Golden archives: Aristocrats and peasants in the capital city In 2.2, C.C. Arion, the Minister of Culture reads the document announcing the beginning of the museum’s construction in 1912 in front of King Carol I, Elisabeta, the queen consort, the future king of Romania, and other ministers (Tzigara-Samurcaș 1999). 17/30 June 19123 looks like a bright summer day and the official ceremony is

2.2 17/30 June 1912, old and new calendar. Fonds Dinescu-Caraman, Film 1/ Image 3, courtesy of the NMRP.

2 The Staging of History: Museums’ Shifting Archives 49

being held under a canopy. Under participants’ feet lies a huge carpet woven in ‘national art’ style. Light filters through the trees, shining onto two future kings of Romania, both dressed in military costumes. The few ladies present at the ceremony wear long light dresses, elegant hats and carry parasols. Looking at the photo, one can almost sense the perfume in the air. To the left of the photograph, the initiator of the entire museum project, the art historian Alexandru Tzigara-Samurcaș holds his hands together deferentially as he listens to the minister’s speech. The construction plan of the museum was made public in 1906 (Tzigara-Samurcaș 1937). In the same year, the Romanian royal family opened the Royal Jubilee Exhibition in Bucharest to celebrate the country’s economic development and culture, an event in the vein of similar European international exhibitions at the time. An important part of the Royal Jubilee Exhibition was ‘the celebration of vernacular art and culture through the display of folkloric artefacts’ (Urdea 2018: 32). Many of the artefacts exhibited had been collected from peasants or crafted in workshops run and led by societies sponsored by Queen Elisabeth of Romania, the Crown Princess Marie and other women in Bucharest’s aristocracy. After the closing of the Royal Jubilee exhibition, the folkloric artefacts became the founding collection of the Museum of National Art. The Golden Archives at the NMRP do not mention what happened between 1906 and 1912. From the history books, we learn that in 1907 the biggest peasant uprising in the recent history of Romania took place. The uprising was brutally suppressed. After an abrupt change of government, the Romanian army intervened firmly and killed approximately 11,000 thousand peasants over the course of the revolt, accounting for two in every 1,000 peasants in Romania at the time (Ministerul Industrii 1909: 40). The revolt was deemed to be of frightening significance for the country’s leaders. After the rebellion, records were destroyed by the government to conceal the extent of the bloodshed (Chirot and Ragin 1975: 433). In 1899, 81 per cent of the population was rural (Ministerul Industrii 1909: 23). Peasants were rebelling against the market forces that pressurized them to produce grain for exports and against the high rents established by estate administrators in the context of absentee landowners. Following land reform legislation in 1921, property was distributed from large landowners to peasants and the market pressure decreased greatly (Chirot and Ragin 1975: 443). As a result of the reform, large landowners (moşieri) owned less than half of the arable land they had possessed before (Hitchins 1994: 351). Nevertheless, most peasants remained poor because of population growth. All of this complex history of Romania’s rural population remained undocumented in the Museum of National Art’s archives. However, the images of rural workers were archived and remained highly visible both before and after socialism. One man, wearing light-coloured traditional clothes and rawhide mocassins (opinci) made of dyed pork skin, and surrounded by men in modern clothes, with hats and cigars, welcomes us from the visual archive’s Glass Slides folder [Clișee de Sticlă]. In nineteenth-century Romania, the word opinci described not only these shoes but the people who wore them – the peasants (opincari) (Popescu 2002: 120).

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2.3 A peasant man surrounded by men in modern clothes. Fonds C.S./ Image 186, courtesy of the NMRP.

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This folder contains just over 1,200 glass slides that Tzigara-Samurcaș took or collected mainly in the countryside. As I explain later in this chapter, this represents only part of what Tzigara-Samurcaș collected. Along with this folder, at the time of my research the NMRP’s visual archive contained another nineteen folders bearing the name of photographers, collectors and organizations that took or collected pictures and drawings of peasants and peasant art.4 In the Glass Slides folder, some images are dated 1904. In line with the practice of other art theoreticians, social researchers and museum curators in Europe, Tzigara-Samurcaș collected images depicting people, landscapes and rituals in various regions and cities of Europe. Tzigara-Samurcaș, who completed his studies in Germany and was the first Romanian to gain a PhD in art history, adopted a model of the ‘Kunstmuseum’ but with even greater pretentions. For him, the institution of the museum ‘produces a stronger effect than the theatre and influences [people] more than books’ (TzigaraSamurcaș 2003: 356). The Museum of National Art aimed to gather folk art, but also unrelated fine art, painting and sculpture. However, the Golden Archive tells us that in 1912, the museum had plans for three rooms and funds to acquire and accommodate ‘peasant art’ only. The museum was able to expand considerably only after 1934,5 but the plans for it to become a true national museum of art, like TzigaraSamurcaș’ models in Stockholm and Oslo, were never realized. However, he employed artists and art historians to work in the museum. From his research trips,

2.4 Three children in the fields. Fonds C.S./ Image 40, courtesy of the NMRP.

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he brought back to Bucharest by car, but even by carriage, traditional items such as wooden spoons, wooden stalls and folk costumes, as well as photographs of rural life. Images of rural workers in cities are rare. 2.5 and 2.6 show them selling food out of wicker baskets and large bundles of clothes placed on a street paved with granite stone. They are dressed in traditional white clothes, and wear rawhide mocassins. The women have their heads covered with simple head scarves while the men wear astrakhan hats. City-dwellers pass by, wearing modern black clothes and hats. The background shows the towers of an orthodox church and two-storey buildings with large windows. It is only after the relocation of the NMRP’s visual archive to a new building that I am introduced to the archive’s catalogue. Looking to the old and torn catalogue, I find out that the last two images are taken in Sofia, Bulgaria’s future capital. Over the image, the archivist has made a note in light blue ink in the catalogue, that says vânzător ambulant [itinerant seller]. With darker blue, a new inscription says oltean cu cobiliță [Oltenian, person from the south of Romania with yoke]. We know that in 1906 Tsigara-Samurcaș went to Bulgaria on a research trip. We know that before 1908 the Balkans were populated by various ethnic groups that could travel relatively freely and that ideas of the Romanian state taking control of regions south of the Danube would became a reality just a few years after those photos were taken.6 In Tsigara-Samurcaș’ 1937 catalogue of the Museum of National Art, he explains the role of peasant art in relation to the dominant classes. He describes examples of

2.5 and 2.6 Peasants selling food in a city. Fonds C.S./ Images 56 and 101, courtesy of the NMRP.

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peasant art in three main regions of Romania (Transylvania, Moldova and Wallachia) and deplores the vanishing of peasant culture. As a notable member of the Conservatory Party, Tsigara-Samurcaș argues that Romanian governments should offer better living conditions to agricultural workers so that they could continue to express themselves freely and support themselves (Tsigara-Samurcaș 1937: 22–3). He ends the introduction to the catalogue by saying that the societies organized for peasants to produce traditional art make them rush their work, which in turn spoils their art. His affirmation stood in contrast to the realities of his time. Wealthy women from the higher social echelons of Bucharest and other large Romanian cities established several societies, such as The Bee [Albina] or The Ant [Furnica], to produce expensive costumes inspired by folk models for the Romanian aristocracy and the Royal Family. These societies employed peasant women to sew costumes using stylistic interpretations of peasant clothes with hundreds of precious stones and expensive threads (Urdea 2019: 181). Famously, the English-born Queen Marie of Romania would often wear such peasant-inspired clothes on official occasions, which contributed to her popularity among the Romanian people but also among the French and the Americans during the First World War. Queen Marie’s gesture inspired many women from the Romanian aristocracy to follow suit. Historian Raluca Mușat (2017) has described how every spring in Bucharest, between 1935 and 1940, aristocrat women would wear such clothes and would admire peasant crafts and modes of living during the Târgul Luna Bucureștilor [the Month of Bucharest] annual fair. The NMRP’s stores contain objects acquired at this annual fair. The archives show that while the worlds of the urban and rural Romania respectively were very distinct from each other, there were particular meeting points in relation to peasant art and these had enormous potential in terms of national and cultural politics. The documentation of these meeting points represents the ‘shiny things’ in Ferguson’s terms, which the archives of the NMRP record. Historian Katy Ferguson (2008) called ‘shiny things’ those items that stir the imagination and provoke those who enter archives to make their own connections and dreams. Researchers in archives need to perform a process of locating, noticing and understanding details, thus making distinction between what is important or shiny and what it is not. Each individual and each era regards different things as ‘shiny’. The NMRP archives show that ‘shiny things’ account for partial truths of the political and economic situation – that is, glimpses of realities. In this case, these ‘shiny points’ make visible and help us understand the paradox anthropologist Alexandra Urdea (2018) noticed: a peasant class that is at once mired in poverty is at the same time considered to be the collective author of national art and the repository of the entire values of the nation. It was only in the mid-nineteenth century that serfdom was abolished in Eastern and Central Europe. In the early twentieth century, all over Eastern Europe peasants were valued as a symbol of national identity while their actual living conditions were rarely improved. Between the two World Wars and post 1945, peasants accounted for almost 80 per cent of

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2.7, 2.8, 2.9, 2.10, 2.11 and 2.12 The Romanian countryside at the beginning of the twentieth century: women embroidering and working the land, a household, a traditional fair with a wooden spinning wheel, a woman – probably from a south Carpathian region – posing in front of her house in her best traditional outfit, including an apron and heavily embroidered blouse. Fonds C.S./ Images 386, 387, 388, 389, 390, 391 and 392, courtesy of the NMRP.

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Romania’s total population. Almost all of them were illiterate (see Murgescu 2010: 342 and 348). Images from the NMRP archives focus on them as a symbol, and show those peasants that had houses, land and elaborate costumes, rather than reflect the actual social and economic context. But notable exceptions are also to be found.7

Finding inspiration in Stockholm and Oslo Tzigara-Samurcaș was a keen visitor of national and ethnographic museums across Europe. He was also a keen photographer. He photographed many things he enjoyed on his visits in Europe: public squares, sumptuous buildings, institutions and museum displays. Architect Irina Calotă (2010) enumerates the countries from where the glass slides collected by Tzigara-Samurcaș originated: Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, England, France, Germany, Greece, Holland, Hungary, Israel, Italy, Poland, Portugal, Republic of Moldova, Norway, Russia, Serbia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey and Ukraine. Other than that, Tzigara-Samurcaș collected images from Armenia, Canada, China, Egypt, India, Lebanon, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and the United States (Calotă 2010: 20). He used these photographs in the lectures he gave between 1899 and 1938 at the School of Fine Arts in Bucharest and Cernăuți (now in Ukraine) on aesthetics and history of art (Popescu 2010:14). The Glass Slides folder contains postcards from the Nordic Museum [Nordiska Museet] and Skansen Open-air Museum in Stockholm and the Norwegian Museum of Cultural History [Norsk Folkemuseum] in Oslo. Reading his memoirs, we discover

2.13 Image from the Nordiska Museet. Fonds MAP/ Image 708, courtesy of the NMRP.

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that Tzigara-Samurcaș was impressed by the model offered by national and ethnographic museums in northern European countries. Tzigara-Samurcaș was very much attracted by comparisons. He wanted to show his contemporaries the common roots of European peasant identity and wanted to influence and change the relatively new Romanian institutions. For example, this European comparative perspective brought new, cosmopolitan, meanings to the entire museum endeavour. The Museum of National Art was conceived not as a museum to show off Romanian peasants but rather a museum that celebrated the contribution of peasant culture and materiality to national culture, and from a wider perspective to a common European heritage. But this latter endeavour was not unique. Irish folklorists also undertook long research trips to Northern European countries, to understand the folklore archives and academic institutions for the study of folklore long established in those countries. These expeditions were also funded by the government of the new Irish state. (Both Ireland and Romania became nation states in 1918.) For example, in 1928 folklorist Séamus Ó Duilearga made an initial six-month trip to Sweden, Finland, Estonia and Germany in order to research the practices of collecting of folklore and the ways in which those could be implemented in Ireland (Catháin 2008). In 1935, Ó Duilearga was appointed as the first director of the government-established Irish Folklore

2.14 Image from the Museum of National Art, c. 1934. Fonds C.S./ Image 8, courtesy of the NMRP.

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Commission. In the preface to A Handbook of Irish Folklore, Irish folklorist and the first archivist of the Commission, Seán Ó Súilleabháin ([1942] 1970), writes: In the spring of 1935, I was sent to Sweden to be trained as Archivist for the cataloguing of folk-traditions which would be collected under the auspices of the Irish Folklore Commission, which the Irish Government had decided to set up. After a week spent in Lunt as a guest of Dr. C.V. von Sydow, during which time I was shown the system of classification used in the folklore archive there, I went to the university of Uppsala. [1942]1970: vii

Similarly to his Irish contemporaries, Tzigara-Samurcaș used the trips to northern European countries to familiarize himself with the system of visual presentation and classification used in museums in this region. For example, the Nordic Museum in Stockholm contains over one million exhibits, including exclusive items and everyday objects that reflect clothing and fashion, home and living, customs and practices from the sixteenth century to the present day. The Nordic Museum is located in an impressive building that was completed in 1907 after a nineteen-year construction process, and which was intended to be a national monument housing the material inheritance of the nation. The scope and the organization of the Nordic Museum had a major impact on Tzigara-Samurcaș. He wanted a similar museum, albeit with much smaller dimensions, for the newly formed Romanian nation but adapted to his own tastes. He was keen on a display aesthetic that worked in conjunction with a

2.15 Exhibit from the Museum of National Art, c. 1934. Fonds MAP/ Image 1045, courtesy of the NMRP.

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comparative approach in art, combining everyday objects with exclusive artworks. In the 1937 catalogue of the Museum of National Art, Tzigara-Samurcaș argues that peasant art should have a dedicated section in the museum. He compares peasant wooden carving in Romania with both similar northern European works and with high art. The categories of items collected by him are very similar to those found in other indoor European museums. The idea of exhibiting rural practices was not foreign to Tzigara-Samurcaș either. He asked peasants to pose in front of items that were taken from villages and brought in to the museum for display. The museum exhibited the house of a real peasant, Antonie Mogoș from Ceauru village, Gorj County, but unlike in the case of the Skansen Open-air Museum and Norwegian Museum of Cultural History, where peasant houses are exhibited outside, the Mogoș house was displayed indoors. In the Golden Archives we find out that Mogoș was paid for both the house and travelling to Bucharest to install it. However, Tzigara-Samurcaș’ approach of research and exhibition making in the field of peasant culture was not singular. On 10 May 1936, Dimitrie Gusti, a famous Romanian sociologist and professor at the University of Bucharest, opened the Village Museum [Muzeul Satului], the first open-air museum in what was then the outskirts of Bucharest. Gusti had trained in Berlin, Leipzig and Paris where he studied with leading sociologists of the time, including Georg Simmel, Ferdinand Tönnies and Émile Durkheim. The museum opened on Royalty Day, also the National Day of Romania

2.16 and 2.17 The house of the Mogoș family in its original location (left). Antonie Mogoș in his village (right). C.S.-10 and C.S.-11, courtesy of the NMRP.

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before socialism. This, together with Gusti’s collected research and writings, indicates a major preoccupation with the creation of institutions that show the contribution that Romanian peasants made to the young nation. While Tzigara-Samurcaș had a top– down artistic approach to do this, Gusti conducted long-term ethnographic fieldwork in various regions of Romania in multi-disciplinary research teams, following the European sociological traditions of his time. Gusti tried to both research and influence the lives of peasants from a sociological and philosophical point of view. In the museum he created, peasants were brought to live temporarily in some of the houses on display so that visitors could have a direct experience of peasant practices, customs and lifestyles8; Tzigara-Samurcaș displayed peasant objects and lifestyles to glorify a nationalistic view of Romania. However, despite the many differences that existed between the two museums at the time of their founding, under the socialist regime these differences were levelled under the unifying category of folklore.9 The next section discusses the period of the 1940s in the history of the Museum of National Art, a predecessor of the NMRP. Ideas of partiality are important in how museums function as porous institutions.

Partial archives: Partial truths Tzigara-Samurcaș died in 1952, and the whereabouts of all the glass slides he had collected during his life remains unknown. Most probably the collection was divided between different institutions, including the Museum of Folk Art, the Bucharest University of Architecture and the Fine Arts Institute “Nicolae Grigorescu”. The architect Toader Popescu (2010) argues that professor and architect Grigore Ionescu transferred parts of Tzigara-Samurcaș’ archive from the Fine Arts Institute “Nicolae Grigorescu” to the Department of History & Theory of Architecture and the Conservation of Patrimony at the University of Architecture after 1952. The management of the NMRP began to lobby for the transfer of more files of the Tzigara-Samurcaș collection to its own archives almost forty years later. The photographs and glass slides that were held at the Museum of Folk Art during socialism were recovered in the early 1990s together with the documents and collections of objects that used to belong to Museum of National Art. In 2000, the Fine Arts Institute “Nicolae Grigorescu” (renamed as the National University of the Arts) donated to the NMRP more than 1,200 glass slides, but only those that were related to ethnography and folklore (Cultura 2011). Over 2,300 glass slides showing public spaces and the built environment in Europe and around the world were kept by the University of Architecture.10 This dichotomy of content, dating back to 1952, makes even more powerful the split between the image of peasants in various regions of Romania and the images showing buildings and public spaces in Europe and beyond. It reminds us that archives not only preserve, but also reify, frame, set meanings and structure silences (Edwards 2001: 107). Another type of partiality of archives and of the stories museums narrate is the fact that in the Archives of the Museum of National Art, one cannot read about the

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tumultuous years of the Second World War, but one can see glimpses of that reality. Documents in the archive explain the MNA’s structure between 1938 and 1939. The museum had nine employees: one director, two curators responsible for conservation, one assistant curator, one archivist and librarian, one steward (intendant) and three security guards. In 1939, all of these employees had to write letters to the Ministry of Religious Cults and Arts to confirm their ethnic origin, date of birth, religion, personal and familial circumstances and political affiliation. This measures were taken in the context of the accession to power of General Ion Antonescu’s right-wing government on 4 September 1940. Romania became a major ally of Nazi Germany. This regime was characterized by numerous dictatorial and extremist acts, including the suspension of democratic political parties, the bloody repression of a rebellion by the extreme right-wing legionary movement, and the deportation to concentration camps of the Jewish and Roma population from different regions of the country, including Bucharest. Archives give direct access to a certain extent but in a partial and limited way. Historian David Lowenthal famously wrote that ‘the past is a foreign country’ (1998). People just do not know how the past ‘looked’. When they dig into it, historians are subjective and selective. Researchers take from archives only what they need for a certain purpose. Museum archives and other archives related to the museum reveal myriad possibilities of looking into the past, but it is often a particular combination of these possibilities that are used to model or justify the present. Therefore, museum archives seem to be even more subjective than other types of archives. As Lowenthal put it, ‘heritage is not an inquiry into the past but a celebration of it’ (1998: x). Heritage is, therefore, the sum of material and immaterial matters that any given generation considers valuable and worthwhile to be preserved. By way of this preservation, each generation is actually celebrating the past, rather than scrutinizing it critically. In this equation, museums have been very selective in what they chose to preserve and exhibit from the past. The reason for this inherent selectivity was most museums focused on various ways to celebrate the past, which opened the door to relatively facile manipulations and staging of history. Historians working in the field of heritage have shown the manipulation of memory that takes place in public-funded museums in Europe which talk about the two World Wars (Crane 2004; Macdonald 2013; Rév 2005; Richardson 2008; Ludwig 2011; Stone 2012). These works show how, in such museums, conflicts over display strategies hide deeper social and ideological misunderstandings and clashes. For example, the way colonialism, market liberalism, state socialism or fascism are displayed do not always reflect accurately the deeper social realities of their times. Istvan Rév (2005) explains that the House of Terror in Budapest – a museum dedicated to the atrocities of the twentieth century – has twenty-two rooms dedicated to communist regimes and only two dedicated to the fascist era. The strong bond between the politics of the state and the politics of the publicly funded institutions is a recurrent issue in all political regimes. In this context, museums can be very active political actors. While they can idealize certain pasts, they demonize others.11 But there is little indication to the general

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public and for researchers alike about what the reasons for such choices actually are. It is important for the argument of this chapter to be conscious of how museums and other heritage institutions allow for manipulations of the past through discourse around and the staging of histories (see also Bal 1996).

Relocations during the 1950s On 30 December 1947, King Mihai I of Romania was forced to abdicate by the hostile socialist government supported by the Soviet Union. Four days later, the royal family flew into exile in Lausanne, Switzerland. These events happened as result of fraudulent parliamentary elections held in November 1946, after which democratic parties were dissolved or were forced to self-dissolve. The abdication of King Mihai I was followed by a succession of illegal acts that happened in late December and during the winter holidays and led to the change of the country’s official political system. The communist authorities declared the Popular Republic of Romania. Together with other countries in Eastern Europe, Romania remained in the Soviet sphere of influence until the revolution in December 1989. The Romanian monarchy remained in forced exile until 1997. On 13 April 1948, the new Communist regime adopted a republican constitution. On 11 June 1948, Law No. 119 nationalized all Romanian industry, including familyrun and small businesses, the financial sector and any privately owned natural resources. Two years later, the communist state nationalized the real estate that belonged to Romanian bourgeoisie, including former business owners, landowners and bankers. In March 1949, it started the collectivization of agricultural land and agricultural means of production, a process that ended formally in 1962. Many people who objected or rebelled against these measures were imprisoned on political grounds, joining the leaders and members of the former political parties, religious leaders of various faiths and intellectuals who either opposed the regime or were considered dangerous by it.12 In this context, the early 1950s marked the official marginalization of sociology while ethnology was considered as carrying fascistic connotations. Ethnography was associated to folklore and this discipline was the only form of social study accepted and encouraged by the socialist regime. A total of fifty-one ethnographic, folkloric and art museums with a section dedicated to ethnography and folklore were established up to 1970 (Opriș 2000). The archives and collections of the pre-communist museums were recategorized, split between the new institutions and often moved to different locations. Museums, like all institutions in Romania, went through an elaborate process of reorganization, redefinition and implementation of new meanings according to the official principles. Chapter 3 outlines how a new set of employees and management was chosen and trained to implement the new directions taught by the communist authorities following strict instructions from the USSR. The archives and the collections of former museums were kept in the custody of the new institutions, but they were given new meanings through relocation,

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2.18 Știrbey Palace on Calea Victoriei. The Museum of Folk Art was based there for twenty-seven years (1951–78). Fonds Clișotecă/ 5275, courtesy of the NMRP.

recategorization and reuse. The archives and collections of the Museum of National Art were removed from that building and given to two newly minted institutions: The Museum of Folk Art and the Museum of Art of the Republic of Romania, both established in 1950 in former palaces. A limited number of folders regarding the activities of the Museum of National Art, particularly letters and other correspondence with the Ministry of Religions and Arts, are still kept by the National Archives. The Museum of Folk Art was established in the Ştirbey Palace which had once belonged to the aristocratic Ştirbey family in Romania. Documents in the MFA archives show that converting the building into a museum required extensive work. Tancred Bănăţeanu, the new director of the museum, used to keep extremely detailed notes about the state of the building and required renovations, and these became part of the archival files. In those notes we can see how important funds and human resources

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2.19 Hedvig-Maria Formagiu at her desk at the Museum of Folk Art. Personal Archive FHM, courtesy of Cristina Formagiu.

were used to change the palace into a museum. For example, some high-ceilinged rooms were not properly heated, mostly because they contained large ceramic stoves. Other rooms necessitated a good deal of refurbishing and redecoration. Various items that belonged to the Ştirbey family, such as armchairs and other pieces of furniture, were used to decorate the offices of the new museum. Muzeografi remembered some of the expensive pieces of furniture that they had in their offices. The image of Hedvig-Maria Formagiu at her desk shows one of these aristocratic armchairs in use by muzeografi. The Știrbey Palace received most of Museum of National Art’s text and visual archives as well as around two-thirds of its collections. The remaining archives were dispatched to the National Archives, while objects bearing religious messages were donated to the newly established Museum of Art of the Republic of Romania, established in the Royal Palace in Bucharest.13 (The building was damaged heavily by German bombing raids in 1944, and required repair on a massive scale.) These objects accounted for about one-third of the Museum of National Art’s collections. In their new home, they were ‘rebranded’ under the categories of fine art, oriental, Byzantine religious or medieval art (Cârneci 2000: 20): having been rebadged as ‘art’, religious objects were allowed to survive. Folk items were stripped of religious connotations at all hierarchical levels: from the political leaders to employees of the Ministry of Culture’s academic elites and new museum workers (Popescu 2002).

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A similar recategorization of objects also happened at other socialist museums in Eastern Europe, like the National Museum in Lviv, which today is in Ukraine. In the 1940s, the archaeological and historical collections that had belonged to the National Museum since 1909 were transferred to a newly established National Museum of History; a few years later, part of the folk-art collections would go to the Museum of Ethnography and Crafts, established in 1951 (Yaniv 1996 and Struk 1993). The fact that new socialist museums were created from the relocation and re-indexation of old museums confirms art historian Boris Groys’ ([1988] 1992) observation that the socialist realism did not destroy museums but rather remade them. This reinterpretation was a much more conservative approach if compared to the Russian avangardist ideas that wanted to destroy ‘the bourgeois’ museums and monuments.14

The 1957 Bucharest exhibition: The difficulty of inscribing difference Three years after moving in the new building, the MFA opened an exhibition. The editor of a journal – The Cultural Life of the Capital City – did not shy away from criticizing it. In the MFA archives I found a cutting from the article, glued on to a piece of once white paper, now yellowed by time. The article appeared with the daring title ‘Let’s improve the activity of museums and exhibitions’ and accused the museum of not being ‘new enough’. The same editor wrote that the exhibition featured ‘unscientific and aesthetical conceptions about folk art, which one could have seen in the exhibitions of the past’ (Viaţa Culturală a Capitalei 1953). In 1951–2, a total of 34,738 people were arrested for opposing the ideas of the Communist Party.15 Reading those articles, one can only imagine what it must have been like to curate exhibitions in a period of such great upheaval, suspicion and fear of persecution. During the early years of the communist regime, officials had a constant preoccupation with the renewal of Romanian society and the world in general. They felt that museums could achieve these ideals by using new materials, new means of display, and a new discourse, all of these ultimately aiming at helping create the new citizen, ‘the new man’. The editors of Viaţa Culturală a Capitalei regarded the aesthetic conception of folk art as highly unscientific. They criticized the tendencies of ‘aestheticism’, ‘cosmopolitanism’ and ‘avantgardism’ as reminiscent of an older understanding of art. The editors’ position was in line with the ideology of the Communist Party and the campaign ‘against cosmopolitanism’ promoted by the USSR at the beginning of the 1950s (Vasile 2010: 84). In response, the new director of the museum, ethnologist Tancred Bănățeanu, wrote a letter explaining the stages necessary for making a ‘scientific’ display. First, the museum needs a new building. It then needs new collections and for existing personnel who had been educated in the ‘old school of museography’ to be ‘retrained’ (MFA Archive/ File 13). This re-training was aimed at creating the profession

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of the muzeografi, experts who would be able to construct innovative and ‘scientific’ displays, in the spirit of historical materialism. The episode shows that the process of transformation from ‘unscientific’ into ‘scientific’ was difficult and involved new ideological, material and professional hurdles. Tancred Bănăţeanu was himself a product of the old regime. An ethnologist by training, he decided to come to Bucharest and work at the MFA after the Institute of Ethnology in Cluj was closed in 1950, as part of the national policy to eliminate the social sciences. It was a tense period when the political transformations were being closely monitored by the Stalinist cadres. Museum displays did not escape such attention as their visual and material messages were made for public consumption. At an ideological level, ‘materialism’ meant an analysis of the means of production and of economic circumstances. In practice, starting in the late 1950s, most muzeografi working in the MFA limited their understanding of ‘materialism’ literally to the material from which objects were made. Leszek Kolakowski, philosopher and historian of ideas, defines ‘the materialist interpretation of history’ as ‘the genetic dependence of the history of ideas on the history of production’ (Kolakowski [1978] 2005: 125). In this interpretation, ideally any exhibition based on materialist socialism principles had to explain the progress of humanity by exploring the means of production in each historical age. However, in museum practice, things were more complicated. While at a philosophical level, economic and social aspects were central to the theory of materialism, curators in Romania did not problematize them. MFA curator Marcela Focşa wrote in an internal report that ‘The Marxist exhibition’ considers that ‘economic conditions are the most important type of explanation of all social phenomena’ (MFA Archive/ File 285). Therefore, in practice, curators did not consider the economic and social aspects of their work; in their view, these aspects were beyond their practical training and professional duties. Therefore, curators focused only on the categories and functional uses of objects under their custody, stripping away other levels of meaning. Four years after the first exhibition opened in the new setting, and following massive acquisition campaigns, the permanent display was opened to the public in 1957. One can sense that after the inventory was accomplished and the collections of folk objects were finally placed in the new building, there was a lot of concern among cultural workers and cultural commentators concerning what and how folk art should be put on display. The images from the permanent exhibition illustrate how difficult it was for newly trained muzeografi to attain and communicate a clear split from past displays. According to material from the archives, this exhibition was made in order to celebrate the opening of the new museum. The accompanying catalogue explains that the display presents a historical perspective on the social transformations from antiquity to socialism across fourteen rooms. Room one presented ancient times with a focus on slavery, room 13 presented ‘Folk Art Transformations under Industrial Capitalism’ and room 14 was dedicated to ‘The Valorisation of Popular Art in Socialist Times’

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(Bănățeanu 1957). Even if the text of the catalogue and the maps presenting two floors of the exhibition constructed this historical perspective, in reality the exhibition itself failed to do so. A tiny note on the catalogue’s final page indicates that three rooms of the exhibition were changed at the very last moment. The museum curators declined to exhibit the room about ancient times, containing archeological objects, and the last two rooms about Capitalism and Socialism. The reason given was: ‘to make space for new temporary exhibitions’ (Bănățeanu 1957: last page). These lastminute changes indicate that the historicism in the display was not particularly important for the museum team. Moreover, the exhibition catalogue presents only two small corners of the display in its 150 pages. Generally speaking, in the entire archive of images and text in the MFA, there are very few images of exhibitions but plenty from the collections. I argue that this lack of images from displays can be understood as a fear of materializing a certain view on the past, as well as fear of fixing an image of an unstable reality. Objects were considered truthful and could be assembled or reassembled at any time; displays, on the other hand, presented fixed interpretations of realities and were avoided when possible. In the MFA archives there is one footnote explaining that a professional photographer was called to take pictures of the exhibition displays. We cannot find any of these photos in the archives. However, four decades later (in the early 1990s) later artist and curator Mihai Oroveanu found photographs of peasants and displays of peasant objects in Bucharest’s antique markets. He donated most of these to the NMRP, which filed them in the visual archives’ Oroveanu file. Looking through the over 2,000 photographs in this file, one can find several photographs of folk-art displays, not attributed to any institution or dated, which represent the 1957 permanent exhibition at the MFA. This only becomes apparent, though, if one notes the architectonic details of the MFA rooms, such as wooden floors and display cases, and by comparing them with the two corners of the display in the official catalogue of the exhibition. One former employee of the MFA confirmed the photographs in the Oroveanu files are from the original display in the museum. The fear of taking photographs of displays and the insistence on instead photographing standalone objects or series of objects based on common functionality shows how challenging it was for curators to actually materialize the ideas promoted by the new regime while still having to use old objects collected by past institutions. Art historian Magda Cârneci (2000: 41) affirms it was difficult for socialist realism in art to establish a difference from the anti-modernist and anti-technicist realism which existed in Romania before the Second World War. She argues that one of the main promoters of the anti-modernist and anti-technicist realism current was the MNA, the forerunner of the MFA. In the context in which most of the MFA’s collections came from the MNA, the desire for ‘newness’ was very difficult to fulfil. In the next chapter, I will detail the changes that took place during the socialist regime and how the MFA actually failed to represent even a basic scheme of humanity’s unilinear progress in its displays.

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2.20 and 2.21 Images from the 1957 exhibition at the Museum of Folk Art, showing the room displaying textiles and objects made of ivory. Fonds Oroveanu/ Images O-1597 and O-1611, courtesy of the NMRP.

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Looking at the images above, one might wonder, to paraphrase the historian Siegfried Kracauer ‘from what age does this exhibition come?’ (Kracauer 1969: 147; cited in Pinney 2005: 259). Museum exhibitions aim to integrate the political momentum of their times, but they actually do that only partially. Very often, the stories museums tell by means of objects are stories of the past rather than of the present. Porosity in museums accounts for this space and interplay between the world of ideas and the world of objects and possibilities. Museums are dominated by old collections and it is therefore difficult for them to represent and account for the present. In the case of the MFA, in 1957 the process of the collectivization of agriculture had been unfolding for nine years. However, as I detail in Chapter 4, that process was difficult to understand, let alone to represent, particularly by using old objects. It was not until 1985 that Bănățeanu wrote critically about the representation of Agricultural Collective Farms (Gospodărie Agricolă Colectivă) in a volume dedicated to the aesthetics of folk art (Bănățeanu 1985). This happens in the context in which the MFA had been closed since 1978 and the objects were locked in stores in the Village Museum. This distancing from objects and displays probably allowed Bănățeanu to question the limits of past museographic practices. The second aspect Kracauer’s interrogation prompts has to do with the categories of display. We can see each room in the exhibition was dedicated to one category of items or material. The exhibition had rooms dedicated to pottery, wood, ceramics, textiles and so on. This taxonomy could be found not only in socialist museums, but also in museums from the interwar period (Tzigara-Samurcaș 1937). The difference consists in the means used to exhibit objects. While socialist museums preferred relatively simple glass cases, foldable iron shelving and neat surfaces that could be replicated in any venue or cultural event, the pre-socialist museums used impressive installations made of bricks, wood and other natural materials to create more impressive settings in which to display objects. Therefore, despite the constant struggle for ‘new’ socialist display methods or settings via which they could differentiate themselves from ones used in the past, the differences between displays in the two historical periods were in terms of form and visual means rather than content.

Where are the peasants? Replies from a photo archive After a few months of conducting research in the Golden Archives and the Museum of Folk Art Archives located near the researchers’ offices, I went to visit an office of two researchers who were working on a different floor. I looked towards a cupboard that was located on one side of the room and asked: ‘What’s in there?’ To my surprise, I found a drawer containing photographs from the MFA. At the time of my research I was told that those photographs had not been catalogued. The images documented the acquisition campaigns conducted by MFA and some of the permanent and temporary displays organized by the museum between 1950–78. In 2010, this visual archive was not labelled. A number of reasons could explain this omission: one could be that the museum contained multiple archives distributed

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across its many offices and storerooms, reflecting its multiple institutional pasts; another is related to the priorities of institutions. In 2010, this archive was not considered important. When I returned to the NMRP in 2021, the same MFA (MAP) archive was part of the visual archive of the NMRP. It contained each acquisition campaign conducted in the socialist years, documented in twenty to thirty photos, stored in small white envelopes. Each photograph is glued to a piece of cardboard that sometimes contains basic information such as the place and the date when the image was taken, as well as the name of curators who took it. Looking through the many folders I noticed a general pattern of how socialist material and visual explorations of the village took place. First, museum employees captured wide angle images of the village, for example from a hilltop. Second, we can see images of some village streets and houses. Third, the photos document old ethnographic objects acquired by the museum, such as pottery, wood carvings, embroidered louses, skirts, sewn leather belts and handmade bedding found in attics and dowry chests.

2.22, 2.23, 2.24 and 2.25 Ethnographic research conducted in southern Romania. Fonds Clișotecă MAP/ File 4524/ Images 15, 35, 04 and 14, courtesy of the NMRP.

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2.26 ‘Poienile de sub munte’ village in Maramureș Region. Fonds Clișotecă MAP/ File 4341/ Image 4, courtesy of the NMRP.

Ethnographers used the same logical organization when writing monographs about the villages they researched. A typical monograph would start with a general presentation of the village and its surroundings. The first chapter proper would focus on the architecture and interior of a house, and remaining chapters were dedicated to different types of objects and materials, such as textiles, clothes, pottery, wood or iron work. It is striking that with very few exceptions, in hundreds of images people are absent. Where they do appear, they wear modern clothes. It is as if the objects mattered rather than the people who owned or made them. One can read in this use of photography the same object-centred discourse that is present in exhibition-making or in communist folklore studies (see Hedeșan 2008). In the next chapter we will see why folkloric and ethnographic research and display during communism worked with absent peasants. The images in the archive show peasants dressed in their everyday clothes. As noted above, thumbnails are glued onto cards and explain where the image was taken, the year and eventually the photographer. For Figure 2.26 the caption on the card reads ‘near the car which sells clothes made by cooperatives of production every Sunday’. For Figure 2.27, ‘the driver of the car which sells the products of cooperatives of production for clothes’. displayed in the museums. Peasants were buying new modern clothes made in production cooperatives, while ethnographers were buying their traditional clothes to be displayed in the museums. They wear modern hats and pullovers. While the social realities of traditional communities were

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2.27 Maramureș Region (Vișeu). Fonds Clișotecă MAP/ File 4341/ Image 44, courtesy of the NMRP.

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undergoing a profound transformation, due to collectivization, the nationalization of land, massive industrialization and rural-urban migration, the Museum of Folk Art continued the same principles of collection as the MNA, its pre-communist predecessor. In the next chapter we will see the difference consisted in scale and numbers.

Conclusion This chapter brings together paper-based truths and visual truths, different kinds of documents from various sorts of archives from the National Museum of the Romanian Peasant and other institutions or people connected to the museum. It shows that the original museum and its successors staged history using the same core material but presented it in different ways. Curators attempted to use this material to promote the mainstream ideas of their time in all historical stages involved (the parliamentary monarchy, the socialist and the post-socialist periods), but they actually managed to do this only partially, for several key reasons. First, there is never enough time and space to collect and represent the present as a consequence of the past, or present as the starting point for the future as was attempted during socialism. Second, the images and object collected are a quintessence of political choices, individual or institutional, and therefore they show certain aspects of reality while hiding or downplaying others. Third, the language of museums is limited, leaving huge gaps between the finite world of objects in collections or on display and the expanded word of ideas. All these partialities contribute to the inherent porous nature of museums. It is the archives and stores as archival devices that illuminate, even if partially at their turn, some of the blind spots the displays and collections cannot or do not want to show. The socialist Museum of Folk Art has very few images of peasants in its archives, but many images of objects. In contrast, the original Museum of National Art showcased mainly wealthy and well-dressed peasants coming from the upper crust of the Romanian peasantry, traders and manufacturers with connections with urban areas and elites of the time. The process of keeping, donating, throwing away, indexing or preserving certain fragments of archives (but not others) allows institutions to be processual in nature, to merge and expand on various levels of space and visibility. Derrida observes that ‘the question of archive is not the question of the past but the question of the future’ ([1995] 1998: 36). This observation explains why all three institutions that shared a common nucleus of archives and objects during three different political regimes used the device of the archive to use the past selectively in order to define the future. There were ruptures as a result of relocation and reindexation, but the overall trajectory of archives through the history of these institutions alerts us to the significant inertia of material continuities.

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3.1 Muzeografi on an ethnographic research trip to Caransebeș, Romania, late 1960s. Personal Archive FHM, courtesy of Cristina Formagiu.

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Socialist Multiplication and the Use of the Future Tense

The photograph of muzeografi from Muzeul de Artă Populară [the Museum of Folk Art, henceforth MFA] conducting ethnographic research in the 1960s shows four museum employees sitting on huge wooden logs. On the left of the people photographed is the museum’s then director, ethnologist Tancred Bănățeanu. At the time when the image was taken his surveillance by Securitate – the Romanian secret police – had already ended. He was under suspicion and watched for five consecutive years between 1959 and 1964 for not putting on (in the authorities’ eyes) proper socialist realist ethnographic exhibitions and for promoting cosmopolitanism, as explained in the previous chapter. One of the white-clad young muzeografi in the photograph is Hedvig-Maria Formagiu who had joined the MFA in 1950, immediately after graduating from the University of Fine Arts in Bucharest. In the spring of 2011, I visited Hedvig-Maria twice, in her apartment situated in an elegant 1950s two-storey house in Bucharest. Now in her nineties, she had witnessed the moving of the collections from the old building of the Museum of National Art to the Știrbey Palace, the ‘new’ building where the new Museum of Folk Art was established in 1950. Looking at images of exhibitions organized during those years, Hedvig-Maria recounted how the new displays were designed and how the smooth transition from the old MNA to the new museum actually took place. All collections from the NMA were moved to the MFA over several months. However, some workshops – such as those dedicated to the conservation of textiles – remained in the MNA for several years more. Hedvig-Maria’s daughter, who kindly facilitated the meetings, recounted how, as a young girl, she used to visit the MNA building and climb up into the main tower of the building to see the city from above. On one of the walls of the room where we chatted, there was the portrait of a shylooking blonde girl, dressed in a simple blue dress. This was a portrait of HedvigMaria during her graduate studies in Bucharest, looking very young and beautiful. Mrs Formagiu told me the story of the painting, created by her professor in Bucharest, painter Camil Ressu, had come about. One day, when a model did not show up, the professor asked Mrs Formagiu to pose for her colleagues. While she did so, Ressu remained at her desk and painted her portrait – the one on the wall. Spring sunshine and birdsong filtered through the window as our conversation unfolded. She was originally from multicultural Cernăuți, a city that on the 28 June 1940 instantly became Soviet territory, following the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact.1 She and her Polish family

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had to leave Cernăuți for Bucharest in the early 1940s. She recounted her trip from Cernăuți to Bucharest as dangerous. She remembered that many families in the north of the country were trying to escape the Soviet occupation and find safer places to live in the southern regions. According to the 1941 census, the total number of refugees from the evacuated territories amounted to 68,953, but as the ultimatum came unexpectedly, many people did not have time to evacuate, and over 70,000 requests for repatriation to Romania were later recorded. For her family, Bucharest proved to a be a good destination. She married an economist in 1945 and started at the Faculty of Arts in 1946. After graduating in 1950, her ‘controversial professor Maxy’2 (in her words) offered her a job at the newly established Museum of Art of the Republic of Romania (situated in the former Royal Palace). She gently refused that offer and decided to work at the MFA instead, which she considered (under the leadership of Tancred Bănăţeanu) to be a safe place of work. Bănățeanu too was originally from Cernăuți. As she put it: ‘(e)ven if the work of muzeograf was hard and not so well paid, I did it with passion and joy.’3 Trained as a painter, Formagiu learned from the work with older and more experienced muzeografi what she was meant to do in the Museum of Folk Art. In our long conversations Hedvig-Maria Formagiu did not remember participating in any museography classes or courses. Even if the re-making of the new institution meant also ‘re-training’, in the ‘new school of museography’, to borrow the terms used by the director of the Museum of Folk Art (report from 1953, MFA Archive/ File 1), no other mention of such a school emerged in any interviews I made with former muzeografi, nor in the archives.4 This was part of the complex process in which a new category of museum curators – muzeografi – was established. They were trained in historical materialism and replaced the previous museum curators, who were mostly artists and art historians who supported and were considered to represent a very different political regime. Muzeografi complied with the rules prescribed by the Ministry of Culture, which stipulated, for example, that only objects made of a particular material should be displayed in the same glass case or on the same wall. But these rules were also profoundly political. A manual, entitled The Basis of Soviet Museology (Galkina, Gardanov and Ivanitki 1957) was translated in Romanian in 1957 and distributed internally to all museums in the country. It was seen as the norm that all museographic institutions should follow. It contained ample explanations on how to set up exhibitions, display photographs, design labels and organize group visits for workers, bureaucrats, students and soldiers. Recommendations stipulated that, for example, glass cases should be exhibited chronologically to facilitate comprehension, and that ‘all contents of visits [. . .] should be profoundly and ideologically targeted, in order to be truly scientifically and politically oriented’. The idea of ‘scientificity’ was used as proof of progress in mainstream media, in scientific journals, in conferences and in particular in the Museums’ Magazine and the relatively numerous books that were printed in the 1960s on the importance of research and display of folk art. The profession of muzeograf became even more important in a context where the number of museums was growing and their practices, modes of doing and designs

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were dispersed across the country. Between 1960 and 1970, nine completely new folk-art museums were opened in Romania. Indeed, starting with 1950s, the number of museums focusing on this medium that opened throughout Central and Eastern Europe increased massively (Cvetković 2008; Kaneff 2004; Petriakova 1996). Whereas in 1960 in the whole of Romania there were only nineteen art museums that included sections of folk art, by 1970 there were fifty-one; by 1980, that number had jumped to ninety-one (Opriș 2000: 219). The growth in museum numbers and personnel led to the establishment of the Association of Museographers by the People’s Republic of Romania in 1962 and of Revista Muzeelor [the Museums’ Magazine] in 1964. The association was established with the strong support of muzeografi from the Museum of Folk Art (MFA Archive/ File 60) and was later affiliated to UNESCO (MFA Archive/ Files 58 and 60). The Museums’ Magazine was the successor to Revista Muzeelor Ethnografice [the Folk Museums’ Magazine], established by the MFA few years earlier.5 The magazine followed the model of Revista Monumentelor Istorice [the Review of Historical Monuments] that had been popular among historians and academics before socialism. In the 1950s the socialist regime shifted emphasis from monuments to museums, on the basis that socialist officials knew that monuments played a crucial role in instrumentalizing pre-socialist nationalism as well as royal regimes and tradition (Anderson 2006). In this context, the numerous exhibitions of folklore displayed in newly opened museums, and also in schools, factories and houses of culture, played an important role in the dissemination of an official narrative about the transformation of the country from a monarchy into a People’s Republic. Folkloric displays were easy to make, had mass appeal and were also politically useful in distancing the newly emancipated peasants from their own past. Display methods were powerfully embedded in the ideology of the state and gave material form to socialist ideas of work, innovation and progress. Such methods demonstrate how planning was central to the methodology of artistic creation. Focusing on the means of display employed in ethnographic exhibitions highlights various concerns, including the high number of exhibitions organized during the period and the impact of these exhibitions on both their makers and visitors. Anthropologist Victor Buchli suggests that during socialism, many architects could be regarded as ‘cultural workers attempting to realise the material terms of socialism’ (2000: 108). Following this line of thought, I suggest that muzeografi were empowered by the communist regime to display and justify the historical materialist ideas of the new state. Muzeografi were considered one of the factors which contributed to making museums ‘scientific’. Still, looking at the materials coming from the archives, other manuals of museology (Nicolescu 1975) but also after conducting interviews with muzeografi trained in the 1950s and 1960s one can see that they did not necessarily engage critically with Marxist texts. By contrary, muzeografi used to learn one from another and their specific knowledge was transmitted through practice and engaging with materials. Many muzeografi I interviewed praised both Hedvig-Maria

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Formagiu and Tancred Bănățeanu for passing on their vast museum knowledge and practical skills. As cultural theorist Buck-Morss observed, in fact, ‘the general Soviet public did not read Marx himself’ (2000: 220). The emerging category of muzeografi, as cultural workers, was responsible with the implementation and preservation of a new lexis and representation of socialist reality, mostly using technocrat and bureaucratic terms (Nicolescu 2016b). The communist regime regarded the new museum professionals as technocrats whose work was geared to fixed and quantifiable bureaucratic tasks: writing entries for each object in the collection, reading and writing articles and books, and preparing the numerous acquisition campaigns, as well as doing patriotic work and other recreational activities on Sundays. In the museum’s image archive, the card accompanying the thumbnail for Figure 3.2 reads ‘Youth exercising’. This image of muzeografi was taken in the museum’s courtyard.

3.2 ‘Young people [muzeografi] exercising.’ Photo by Ieremia, 1963. Fonds Clișotecă MAP/ File 5275, courtesy of the NMRP

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Multiplication of employees and the school of seriality All muzeografi who were still working at the NMRP at the time of my research confirmed that their knowledge was based mostly on practice and working together with other colleagues. The majority joined the Museum of Folk Art in late 1960s and early 1970s, during the practical work experience required by their university courses. Gaining experience of work in institutions used to be an important part of the pedagogical module for all postgraduate training. Most of muzeografi were history graduates, but there were several who graduated in very different disciplines, such as biology. Yet although most of the NMRP’s muzeografi held a history degree, their displays were not historically driven. One example of an ahistorical display – and one that would be taken subsequently to many other venues, including factories and schools – was Ornaments of the Head (1961). As one can see in the picture, the exhibition was created by nailing textiles onto grey cheap boards and by using mobile iron structures which allowed the exhibition to travel. Looking at the images, Hedvig-Maria Formagiu recognized that the X metal

3.3 The Ornaments of the Head exhibition, 1961. Fonds Oroveanu/ Image O-279, courtesy of the NMRP.

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structures and the ceramic heads represented an innovation for their time. On the walls, black-and-white photographs from the museum’s interwar archives were used as auxiliary materials to augment the objects on display. Images of interwar peasants used in socialist displays had the purpose of creating a temporal distance between newly urbanized peasants and their own recent past; it was a means of creating distance with the rural workers’ pasts for all those visitors that would enter the museum’s doors. Many of those visitors would be first-generation urban dwellers: they would be able to recognize costumes and objects from the ethnographic regions they originated from, but at the same time feel proud of their new status as city-based factory workers. The uses of images from the interwar archives in socialist displays indicate two other important aspects of porosity. Exploring the MFA archives, we can see variations and ruptures regarding the reporting of the MFA displays to authorities and different kinds of publics. For example, in the written texts, muzeografi declared a complete rupture with the interwar museum. However, contrary to their declarations, muzeografi continued to use the archives of images from the past and the objects that they had inherited without changing their meaning and significance too much. For example, head ornaments (such as scarves and coin necklaces) were displayed in 1961 as they had been originally by the MNA before the socialist regime. There was, however, one key difference in terms of the quantity and the coverage of Romania’s national territory. Before socialism, head ornaments were gathered casually during personal or professional trips or cultural events; during the socialist era, they were collected systematically from all of the country’s ethnographic regions. Indeed, throughout socialism’s hold over Romania, there was an evident preoccupation with numbers and with mapping ethnographic objects from every region. Looking at the socialist displays, one realizes how preoccupied and anxious socialist institutions were with making visible a split with the past. In a text preceding the opening of this exhibition, written by one muzeograf who had just come back from visiting another museum in the country, it is said: The use of mannequins becomes more and more upsetting and disturbing. At the same time, I find also disturbing the use of the colour brown for the wooden structure of the glass cases. MFA Archive/ File 202

We do not know whether these ‘problematic’ ceramic heads had a negative influence on the secret service file held on the museum’s director. We do know, though, that from 1959, Tancred Bănăţeanu was watched by the secret police for four years. Formagiu remembered that the director was criticized by party officials for allowing the introduction of ceramic heads in displays. While muzeografi considered this to be an innovation, ideologically, the party apparatchiks considered ceramics an old material – one that allowed a certain type of materiality that was not considered ‘proper’ by the new socialist regime. Therefore, during socialist times, folk costumes were typically exhibited by pinning them down onto boards. Glass cases were also

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permitted. By using these transparent techniques of display, the authorities felt that museum visitors could focus solely on the objects themselves, rather than be distracting by other elements that might be perceived as political or ideological. In 1961, the museum’s activities began to be overseen by the Ministry of Culture and a special file opened to detail all of the museum’s activities.6

Work as a gift: The art of bureaucracy and numbers File no. 218 in the MFA archive contains the museum’s extensive activity plan for 1961; a condensed archive in itself. In 1961 alone, employees from the Museum of Folk Art were responsible for curating exhibitions to be placed in the museum itself, and for opening hundreds of displays of folk art in factories, schools and houses of culture throughout Romania and abroad. They were also tasked with guiding group visits in order to disseminate knowledge in a collectivized form. What is noticeable about this endeavour is its urgency. In just one year, the museum’s activity plan contained: the launching of the exhibition Ornament of the Head (on the national day, 23 August 1961); the opening of a new museum of folk art in the city of Golești-Pitești coordinated by a team of muzeografi from the Museum of Folk Art (opened on 1 May 1961); seven exhibitions in factories in Bucharest and the surrounding areas; three exhibitions abroad, nine conferences; twenty-four scientific communications such as reports, chapters in edited books and journal articles; and several radio and

3.4 Muzeografi and pupils on the steps of the MFA after a ceremony. Reproduced courtesy of Georgeta Roșu.

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newspaper competitions. The museum was ‘present’ in many places, ranging from remote villages to Bucharest’s Athenaeum Palace.7 The idea was to allow a large and diverse audience to become familiar with the museum’s message inside and outside of its walls. Peasants, workers, pupils, regular visitors, foreigners and museum specialists were all invited to witness the museum’s discourse in different settings. Mandatory visits for school children were considered an integral part of the school curriculum. During the socialist period, visitors’ views were not recorded anywhere in the archives of the Museum of Folk Art. One possible explanation is that the communist system was not concerned with the consumption of displays, but rather with their production and dissemination. The intense activity organized in 1961 alone supports Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikov’s argument on the marked sense of urgency that characterized many of the exhibitions mounted during socialism. For example, according to his description (2006) of the making of the ‘Birthday Gifts to Stalin’ exhibition in Moscow in 1949, work was completed in just ten days by a team of dedicated museum curators. The same kind of sense of urgency was apparent too in the five-year plans,8 as well as in the Stakhanovist obsession for breaking national work targets. Ssorin-Chaikov characterizes this forward momentum as a gift in itself, offered first by the workers to their managers, and then by the managers to their own superiors and other agencies: ‘Stakhanovism took the form not merely of the fulfilment of plans – on time, in theory – but of their “over-fulfilment” in terms of the quantity of what was produced or, more importantly, of the time necessary to fulfil the plan. The over-fulfilment of a plan of industrial output was its fulfilment “ahead of time” [dosrochno]’ (2006: 362). According to this logic, this over-fulfilment introduced a time-gap into the cycles of the planned socialist economy and transferred the meaning of labour to a higher semiotic plane, which contributed ultimately to defining the Stakhanovite rush as material fragility and vulnerability. Ssorin-Chaikov calls this process a ‘leap forward’ (2006: 361) in the value of labour, where the labour itself could be seen as a gift. In the Romanian case, the immense stream of exhibitions could be seen as adding to the supreme effort that both workers and managers thought would propel them into the glorious communist future. Therefore, it was perfectly plausible that the relatively small team of just nine museum curators employed in the Museum of Folk Art could organize in just one year seven exhibitions in Romanian factories and houses of culture, three exhibitions abroad and numerous radio transmissions and twenty-four conferences, while also conducting six acquisition campaigns in different regions of the country, logging microfiche files for objects after acquisition, photographing items and publishing thirteen articles in dedicated journals. On top of all the above-mentioned activities, every muzeograf was also held responsible for supervising two group visits every month to the exhibitions curated in Bucharest. In this context, the intensive rhythm of work and the balancing of many responsibilities were also supposed to mark a clear distance from pre-socialist work practices in Romania. However, it equally indicates a lack of certainty about the

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present on a setting in which most energies were dedicated to build the future. As art historians Crowley and Reid (2010) argue, during socialism the accent was put on the future, not on the present. ‘Pleasure was integral to the utopian promise of communism, based as it was on notions of future abundance and fulfilment’ (2010: 3). The gift-like nature of over-work and the high number of curatorial activities precluded muzeografi from being criticized about the quality of their work. Indeed, there are few accounts of visitors’ perceptions of socialist museums. In a system concerned with the production of things outside of the free market, it was the making of displays that was registered, not viewing statistics. The archives from the Museum of Folk Art demonstrate that state officials and museum curators were not concerned with the reception of exhibitions and other cultural products. Instead, they fretted about inspections carried out by the Party Apparatus of the Ministry of Culture, or with denunciations to the secret police/security services made by their own colleagues.

3.5 Tovarăș [comrade] Matiș at work. Photo by Ieremia, 1963. Fonds Clișotecă/ Film 5275, courtesy of the NMRP.

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3.5, one of the few images in the MFA archive to represent muzeografi at work, shows ‘tovarăș [comrade] Matiș at work’ and the large ledger which was the register of objects. All the objects in the museum’s collections were registered in this and a filing cabinet by muzeografi. These files provide the description of each object, the year of acquisition, the ornamentation and the name of the last owner. I argue that this type of fastidious work, focused on looking at the details of objects, as well as the organizing of as many events and exhibitions as possible, influenced not only the type of exhibition making, but muzeografi’s approach to the objects and the type of knowledge and research they were doing while collecting objects in the villages. It was a way of valuing objects for their typology, muzeografi’s classifications of types, areas, materials were always supported by reading books and research. But though this culture of bureaucracy and numbers, the socialist state also kept other major promises on its agenda, such as giving unprecedented opportunities for the employment of women. Most muzeografi were women, which confirms the central role female workers played in socialist Romania.

The 1960s: A marathon of exhibitions, events and the dispersion of technocrats In this culture of urgency and over-performance from muzeografi, the importance of temporary exhibitions outweighed that of permanent exhibitions during socialism. Kenneth Hudson, the founder of the European Association of Museums, and one of the founding members of the International Council of Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS), once remarked that socialist museums were keener on temporary and travelling exhibitions than their Western European equivalents. This simple but astute observation is based mostly on the work of technocrat cultural workers, called the ‘technocrat intelligentsia’ by sociologists George Konrád and Ivan Szelényi (1979). They describe how, during communism, the national intelligentsia in this part of Europe constituted two main groups: the technocrat intelligentsia and the humanist intelligentsia. Technocrats were a product of the 1960s and 1970s, and possessed technical and bureaucratic expertise and political power; by contrast, humanist intelligentsia had emerged from the former aristocracy and bourgeoisie, and were in control of the more liberal professions and arts. A similar process of bureaucratization and standardization also took place in the field of art. From 1964 onwards, a newly established factory called Decorativa standardized both the form and content of displays. Composed of more than 7,000 artists, architects and manual workers who had been hired, trained and given responsibility for public displays in any location considered ‘cultural’, Decorativa was at the core of Romanian national aesthetics and design throughout its existence under communism (Nicolescu 2016a). Decorativa’s employees specialized in iron work, wood carving, stage design, costume design and embroidery, as well as the organization of interior settings for workshops and conferences. The company was designed so as to have the workforce,

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materials and means to provide all the display materials for virtually every cultural institution in the country. Consequently, it manufactured glass cases, cupboards, mannequins, stage scenery and the interior fittings for theatres, cinema houses and festival venues. It basically produced everything from maps, pictures and labels for museums, to the grandiose scenery required for Shakespeare plays, or the front cover designs, graphics and typography for mainstream journals such as Femeia [The Woman] or Cinema [The Cinema]. Decorativa specialists, collaborating with museum curators, made visible the introduction of bureaucratic intelligentsia into the arts. This cooperation, which took the form of adaptation and improvisation, allowed the circulation of design knowledge outside museums among other technocrat workers. As architect Ş.G., one of the former directors of Decorativa, asserted in an interview with me in 2010: Decorativa was a state monopoly; [f]or anything you wanted to do in a museum or theatre you were not allowed to work by yourself. It was a visual control. Our solutions and our materials were imposed. People in museums were passive.

Decorativa was a key institution for socialist planning in the field of art. Its name can be literally translated into English as ‘the Decorative’. It was a factory responsible for what we might today call the interior design of public venues. A former director of Decorativa, Ş.G. remembers that at its opening in 1964, the factory was filled with employees from the recently dissolved Romanian Association for the Friendship with the Soviet Union (ARLUS). ARLUS closed after Romania demonstrated its loyalty to the USSR by invading Hungary in 1956. While the Red Army remained in Hungary, it withdrew from Romania. Where ARLUS had the task of promoting the cultural model of the Soviets, Decorativa instead had the important role of empowering the national agenda in the context of the de-Russification of Romania. In this context, the director’s quote might easily be read as indicating that a form of aesthetic dictatorship was in operation. As various authors have argued, the elimination of the market also eliminates change and adaptation in the design of products. But the director’s affirmation is followed by others which highlight specific kinds of freedom, for example: ‘The design for exhibition was not the same; we were inspired by what we were seeing abroad. [. . .] The vision of the architect of the exhibition was important.’ My interview with S.G. raised two important points: on the one hand, state propaganda controlled the Decorativa exhibitions; on the other hand, these exhibitions were innovative, new and modern, and the architects were in constant contact with the work of their peers in other Western European countries. As is the case with most muzeografi, exhibition organizers accompanied their work as it travelled to museums in other countries. If there was very little exchange in certain contexts, in others muzeografi and Decorativa specialists collaborated extensively. These collaborations were not only products of ‘friendships’ between socialist countries, but of profound similarities of practices of conservation, indexation and display, existing in ethnographic museums throughout the world.

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This proliferation of muzeografi, of collections, exhibitions and folk-art museums can be seen as part of a larger trend of technocrat dispersion taking place in socialist Romania and in other socialist countries in Europe. In neighbouring countries, like Bulgaria, Serbia (former Yugoslavia), Republic of Moldova and Ukraine (former USSR), old museums were rebranded into ethnographic museums in 1950–1 and went through a period of massive expansion in the 1960s. In her writing on socialist Bulgaria, Deema Kaneff argues that folklore helped to dislocate the past from the present: In representing a past that was spatially and temporally dislocated from the present, folklore was a transformational process by which traditional practices were appropriated by the state and then exhibited as objects belonging to another time. Kaneff 2004: 152

The history of the Ethnographic Museum in Belgrade has many similarities with that of the Museum of Folk Art in Bucharest. The former is one of the oldest museums in Central and Eastern Europe. It was established in 1901, at the time of the Kingdom of Serbia, when the Ethnographic Department was separated from the National Museum of Serbia. Curator Marina Cvetković describes how, in 1951, the socialist authorities transformed the original institution into a socialist museum through the relocation and reclassification of its objects (2008: 291). In the first two decades after these radical changes, the collecting campaigns were so intensive that, just as in the case of the Romanian MFA, curators struggled to find space for storage (Cvetković 2008: 299). In late 1960s and early 1970s, the Ethnographic Museum opened many temporary exhibitions outside the museum building in Belgrade. Its exhibitions toured the countryside as well as in various city venues, from factory halls to recreational sites such as Belgrade’s Youth Centre in Belgrade, various fairs (for example, the Belgrade Fashion Fair and the Belgrade Furniture Fair) and both the city’s drama theatre and sports stadium (Cvetković 2008: 298–9). Moreover, the museum organized a series of international exhibitions in England, Germany, Mexico, Norway and Vietnam. Numerous radio transmissions promoted the outreach activities of the museum, too. While Cvetković argues the exhibitions staged abroad were a component of the politics of openness during the tenure of President Tito, I argue that the reasons might go beyond national politics. Throughout the entire Cold War, folklore played a crucial role in building friendly relations and unity between nations. In the context in which tensions between socialist states and Western states were extremely high, rural heritage, in the form of folk art, was one of the few opportunities to realize exchanges and find common ground despite the differences. Folklore was seen both by the socialist states and the Western states as searching and accounting for symbolic essence of people, regions and nations, that had some sort of ‘neutrality’9 in the sense it was not obviously politically charged. However, I suggest it is exactly this ‘neutrality’ that makes folklore extremely political. First, this kind of symbolism

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can become easily reductive and stereotypical of the human diversity, populations, beliefs and practices. Second, it runs the risk of making folklore appear like an empty vessel that can be filled with any kind of political and ideological content. For example, traditional peasant songs from Romania were promoted by socialist promoters of folklore as popular manifestations of the masses. Because of this relatively facile opportunity to reinterpret their roles and meanings, the nucleus of ethnographic collections from the ages of monarchy in Romania and Serbia became the core of the folkloric museums during these countries’ socialist era. Cultural theorist Shanny Peer (1998) and anthropologist Regina Bendix (2002) show how, in both French and German contexts, folklore was used equally by fascist and communist regimes. The methodology of folklore itself allows that ‘the expressive culture is being culled from the flow of everyday life’ (Bendix 2002: 111). It was not only the socialist institutions that searched for connections with the capitalist ones. Museums and individuals from Western Europe also wanted to contribute to promotion and proliferation of the socialist ideas and values in their own countries and in the greater world. The story of English communist Albert Lloyd is particularly evocative. Albert Lloyd was a professor of ethnomusicology in Goldsmiths, University of London, where he taught for many years uninterrupted. Between 1950 and 1970, Lloyd often travelled around socialist Europe, especially Romania, Bulgaria and Albania, in order to facilitate different kinds of cultural exchanges. He was a passionate collector of workers’ songs in particular, and socialist Romania proved to be a fertile repository of these. Romanian authorities invited Lloyd to many traditional competitions, particularly those celebrating music and dance. On these occasions, Lloyd took the time to visit numerous ethnographic museums and collected leaflets and newspaper cuttings which referred to folklore in one way or another.10 We do not know how Lloyd actually perceived the proliferation of folklore-related events in Romania, or whether he had a critical or appreciative eye towards the many folkloric museums he visited and the festivities he joined. What we do know is that under the umbrella of tradition and folklore, Lloyd’s personal and professional interests used to meet socialist folkloric institutions and ideas. But the story of Albert Lloyd also shows that the Western Marxism was very different from the ideology of Marxist-Leninism. While Western communists were free to travel and debate Marxism in many contexts, in Eastern Europe people were controlled strictly, their movement restricted and their actions subject to the official ideology of the state.

The secret police searches the soul of Tancred Bănățeanu As noted above,Tancred Bănățeanu, the director of the Museum of Folk Art, was put under the surveillance of the secret police between 1959 and 1964. This was the museum’s busiest period, when it organized hundreds of exhibitions across the country and abroad, recruited and trained a new generation of muzeografi, and disseminated research in numerous conference, publications and events held at popular locations such as schools, factories and houses of culture.

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Dedicated personnel from the Ministry of Culture or the Ministry of Foreign Affairs used to inspect the museum on a regular basis and without notice, permanent as well as temporary displays. Some muzeografi employed at the Museum of Folk Art were members of the secret police and used to report on the museum activities. Two muzeografi, Ion Vlăduțiu and Olga Horșia, were responsible for monitoring acquisition campaigns and the organization of exhibitions. Upon completion of his studies in Moscow, Ion Vlăduțiu started an intense publication campaign against non-Marxist ethnography. He chose Marxist class struggle (lupta de clasă) as his main theme of research (Eretescu 2008: 51). Like all muzeografi in the MFA, the director Tancred Bănăţeanu was well aware of Vlăduțiu’s education and political position. The archival material from CNSAS suggests that some of the museum employees, not necessarily Vlăduțiu, used to send surveillance notes to the secret police accusing the museum management of not following the party line and directives from the Ministry of Culture in their various prospects. Some of the surveillance notes were so detailed and described Bănăţeanu’s everyday activities so accurately, that they were probably written by some of his close collaborators. In an attempt to neutralize such accusations, Bănăţeanu encouraged (but did not oblige) young muzeografi to become party members and send positive reports to the different state institutions. In early socialist Romania, while the collectivization process and the repression of political dissidents were gaining momentum, belonging to the party was seen as indubitable proof of loyalty to the socialist regime. That said, several muzeografi did not become party members. The historian and muzeologist Ioan Opriș (2009) studied Bănăţeanu’s secret police file in the archives of the Romanian Council for the Study of Securitate Archives (CNSAS). The file contains all of the surveillance notes. In 1960, the officer responsible for Bănăţeanu’s case wrote in this file that: In the period 1940–1950 Tancred Bănăţeanu situated himself in a non materialist, non-scientific position, of embracing and praising different bourgeois currents in ethnography characterised by mistakes: [it was a] cosmopolitanism, formal comparison and an a-historical position. Opriş 2009: 110

For the surveillance officers, what Bănăţeanu was thinking and reading represented elements that had to be controlled. In the archival files we find partial truths and fragmented testimonies. A ‘non-materialist, non scientific position’ would have been considered an important failure to toe the party line. Reading authors published in the UK, like Malinowski and Schmidt, was considered a real danger. The surveillance believed these authors were infusing Bănăţeanu with ‘cosmopolitanism’ and ‘British imperialism’, and that their writings represented ‘unhealthy modes of thinking’ (Opriş 2009: 108). This represents a clear distinction in terms of freedoms that Western variants of Marxism used to have at the time, as discussed briefly above. Opriş observes that another reason for putting Bănăţeanu under secret service surveillance might have been the close contact he had with two political emigrants in Geneva during the organization of an exhibition in

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that city in the 1950s. The famous Romanian ethnomusicologist Constantin Brăiloiu and the medical anthropologist Alexandru Manoilă escaped the socialist regime in the late 1940s and emigrated to Switzerland. Other muzeografi also recollected that Bănățeanu’s first wife had emigrated to Germany. The two divorced eventually. The divorce, suggests one of the former employees of the Museum of Folk Art, was intended to ease Bănăţeanu’s situation in Romania. That era involved surveillance, violence and deliberate forms of cruelty, from physical imprisonment and torture to the demolition of careers, aspirations and thoughts (Deletant 1993; Stan 2013). Undercover secret agents used to follow Bănăţeanu in all his daily activities. One note reads that Bănăţeanu: [He] works all the time, he is dedicated, well informed, he has an alive and systematic targeted curiosity, he knows how to make himself useful and how to be nice.

Still, the conclusion of this report is: But what he has in his deep soul we do not know.

With a French mother and an erudite Romanian Orientalist father, Bănăţeanu was raised in Cernăuţi, a Romanian city before 1940, but now part of Ukraine. (Formagiu was also born there.) Bănăţeanu graduated with a degree in literature and philosophy from the University of Bucharest and then took his PhD in ethnography at Cluj. From 1946 he was assistant at the Ethnographic Museum in Cluj and taught folk literature at the city’s University of Philology (Datcu 2006: 91–2). After that museum closed in 1950, Bănăţeanu came to Bucharest where the following year he was employed at the Museum of Folk Art. In 1953, he became the institution’s director. Very familiar with western culture, Bănăţeanu inevitably provoked surveillance attention. One note from 1959 reads: ‘In his house one would live very well. You could find chocolate, coffee and whisky!’ (Opriş 2009: 115). In 1963, an ‘informant’ using the pseudonym ‘Oleg’ declared: ‘Generally speaking one cannot have doubts and question marks about [Bănăţeanu’s] attachment to our country and for the political line of the party. By means of the museum’s activities, he leads the institution and the employees towards the fulfilment of the targets that we have in the field of Cultural Revolution and the cultivation of the masses. [Bănăţeanu] strives to encourage students to feel love for the creative work of our people, for our culture and folk art. Opriş 2009: 136

Indeed, all the texts found in the Museum of Folk Art signed by Bănăţeanu, praise the works of the Romanian Communist Party. In many introductory paragraphs to his articles and books, Bănăţeanu praises the cultural and political system and promotes the idea that folk-art research and displays represent important realizations of the communist state. In 1964, the surveillance ended. After five years of watching Bănăţeanu, the Secret Service concluded that he was ‘reliable.’ The fear that he would flee the country

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3.6 Muzeografi doing patriotic work. Photo by Ieremia,1963. Fonds Clișotecă/ File 5275, courtesy of the NMRP.

diminished considerably. Bănăţeanu often travelled abroad to organize folk-art exhibitions, but always returned to Romania. Furthermore, says Opriş (2009), surveillance ended because of favourable reports from ‘good’ informants in the secret police. Their positive opinions, and sometimes even praise, helped Bănăţeanu to regain the confidence of the Securitate. In 3.6, one can see a glimpse of a mundane activity: tidying the museum’s garden. On the white paper accompanying the images the text reads: ‘members of the Communist Youth League doing patriotic work.’ This label suggests that such recreational activities, outwith the museum walls, were a combination of joy and duty. During the communist era, employees were expected to undertake periodic non-paid activities – ‘patriotic work’ – for their institutions. These activities usually took place on Sundays, the only free day in a week, and were meant to save money that would otherwise be spent on maintenance, campaigns of reuse and recycling and show

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enthusiasm and adherence to communist ideals and general work ethic. Some people believed that Sunday work was meant to prevent people from attending church services. We do not know the reasons why these photographs were taken and inserted in the archive of photography of the Museum of Folk Art, but we do know that they are among the very few photographs in the entire photo archive originating from the MFA showing muzeografi. This image contributes to a more nuanced understanding of the different layers of discourse one can find among archival files. Bănăţeanu was an important character in both the establishment of the Museum of Folk Art and in the dissemination of museographic work in museums in Romania and abroad in the 1960s and early 1970s. Muzeografi and art historians trained by Bănăţeanu at the Institute of Art in the 1970s often praise him for the knowledge and skills he passed on to them.

Socialism goes global: Travelling folk-art exhibitions to Austria, Belgium, China, Mexico, Switzerland and Vietnam Temporary exhibitions were one of the most used tools of dissemination knowledge and practices in the Museum of Folk Art. The museum praised itself for the flurry of exhibitions, conferences and other events it organized in the country and the several exhibitions it toured abroad. A text from File 15 in the MFA archive reads: Even if compared with the number of the interwar exhibitions organised by the predecessor museum, the large number of the exhibitions organised by the communist institution is unprecedented. In the period 1950–1978 the Museum of Folk Art organised temporary folk art exhibitions in about 20 countries, very often more than once in each of them, or in different cities. Bulgaria, Vietnam, China, Russia, Korea, Hungary, Switzerland, France, UK, India, Mexico, Algeria, Iran were some of the favourite destinations of these exhibitions. MFA Archive/ File 15

One of the things Formagiu enjoyed most was the fact that she could travel abroad to mount folk-art exhibitions, in a period when few Romanian citizens were allowed to do so. In a Cold War context, when most Romanian’s citizens could not travel overseas without express approval from the Ministry of External Affairs, muzeografi were encouraged to represent Romania on the international stage. In the MFA archive, muzeografi carefully cut and glued images and texts from Romanian newspapers. The files are not numbered chronologically, and some documents, like the newspaper clips, are not dated. On one page in File 36 from the archive, three hand-written texts read respectively: ‘The success of the folk art exhibition in Belgium’, The Romanian Folk Art exhibition in Austria’ and ‘Romanian exhibitions across the border’. A long list of places can be read in the glued clippings form a newspaper article from Agerpres, the Romanian state-owned news agency. The article announces that an exhibition then on display in Helsinki, Finland, will travel to Sweden before moving on to Denmark and to Vienna, Austria. At the end of April

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3.7 Image from a MFA exhibition in India. Personal archive FHM, courtesy of Cristina Formagiu.

that year (possibly 1969 or 1971 n.a.), another exhibition designed in Romania will be travelling to Germany and then to Hungary. In June, another exhibition of folk art will head to China – first to Beijing and then to Shanghai. Costumes were the easiest and safest objects to be transported. The news items declares that ‘Romanian fine art and folk art are well known and appreciated in many countries’ and ‘[T]hese days, a folk-art exhibition will be opened in Bulgaria. The exhibition of folk art that was visited by a numerous public in Brussels, Gant and Liege will also go to Anvers’ (MFA Archive / File 36) . We note again the long list of activities and the frequent use of the future tense. In a Marxist-Leninist understanding, socialism was thought of as an ongoing process towards increased welfare for communist nations and their citizens. Therefore, it was natural that most of the discourse regarding the transformations in the lives of socialist people and institutions should be in the future tense. The desire to achieve socialist ideals was so strong that communist propaganda and news items had just little time and space to reflect what actually going on, and instead were focusing on what will, or should, be going on. The international exhibitions that were organized to precede and introduce a diplomatic mission in a particular country – such as the UK (1968), Switzerland (1968) and China (1966, 1976) – were larger and contained wooden objects, pottery and carpets alongside typical folk costumes. The representation of Romania abroad by means of folk art was a consequence of two main factors. First, the exhibitions

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3.8 Image from the opening of the MFA exhibition in China. Personal archive FHM, courtesy of Cristina Formagiu.

abroad were organized because of the existing connections between Romanian and foreign ethnographic institutions. Second, the so-called neutrality of folklore discussed in the previous section allowed politicians to present socialist achievements without serious political and ideological connotations, thus opening diplomatic doors and opportunities in many contexts. For example, the visit of Nicolae Ceaușescu in China and North Korea in mid-1960s was preceded by two large folk exhibitions organized in these countries by the MFA. Newspaper images of the official openings showed besuited but smiling and relaxed politicians visiting the museum. The political role of museums was emphasized further by exchanges of collections, gifts and counter-gifts between institutions. The Romanian Ministry of Propaganda paid the MFA large sums of money to acquire folk-art objects in order to send them as gifts to museums abroad. For example, the Horniman Museum in London received a donation of approximately 300 objects in 1956 (Buchczyk 2018). In one case, a collection sent to Mexico was en route and had to be replaced. In turn, the Museum of Folk Art often received reciprocal gifts from international museums, such as collections of folk-art objects from India, China, Korea, Mexico, Vietnam and Belgium. In 1966, the MFA received a collection of ethnographic objects as a gift from North Korea. The MFA received three ritual objects from Belgium, that were originally from Benin and a collection of miniature decorative objects from Germany. It is important to note, however, that the Horniman Museum did not reciprocate its 1956 gift from the MFA (Urdea 2018). At the NMRP, the ‘Foreign Countries’ [Țări Străine] store, from the MFA details all the gifts received from foreign institutions between 1950 and 1989.

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3.9 Entrance to the Folk Art Ru-Ma-Ni Exhibition in Hanoi, Vietnam. Personal archive FHM, courtesy of Cristina Formagiu.

In 1966, two years after his surveillance by the secret service ended, Tancred Bănăţeanu was invited to give lectures on ethnography and folk art at the University of Montpellier, France. On that occasion, he brought a gift of 250 volumes on ethnography and folklore to the Section of Romanian Language at that university. This gift is documented in a letter in the MFA archives written by Bănăţeanu and addressed to ‘The Romanian Institute of Cultural Foreign Affairs [Institutul Român pentru Relaţiile Culturale cu Străinătatea].’ This document shows the complexities of cultural affairs between socialist and non-socialist countries in a Cold War situation. As muzeografi recounted, upon the receiving of a gift from foreign institutions, the Museum of Folk Art would organize a temporary display so that the general public could see the objects and appreciate the international connections and exchanges enjoyed by the museum. Muzeografi remarked that such temporary displays were one-off events and there was virtually no further use for the foreign collections received as gifts. Therefore, any subsequent displays of objects from different national contexts happened only rarely.11 It has been argued that the scope and traditions of museographic, and academic, research differed widely between Western and Eastern Europe. While most Western museographic efforts served the ideology of ‘empire building’, in Eastern Europe, they served the ideal of ‘nation building’ (Stockings 1968). This means that in Eastern Europe, the need to display and showcase to the world the unity and integrity of the national territory was the most important goal for institutions and academic traditions. This contrasted with the situation in most ethnographic museums in the Western Europe, which throughout the twentieth

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century focused on accumulating collections of ethnographic objects from colonies. These objects were either donated by individuals and institutions or were obtained following acquisition campaigns or looting (Coombes and Philips 2020; von Zinnenburg Carroll 2016; von Oswald and Tinius 2020). These methods were at odds with the socialist principle of ‘friendship among people’ – that, is the vision in which all nations around the world should live with each other in peace and true friendship. However, recent research shows that the concept of ‘friendship among people’ was implemented by socialist authorities at the expense of their own people. For example, the massive campaigns to collect folk items involved generous payments to people who agreed to donate their own possessions. However, the money they received then went on paying quotas and taxes to the collective farms (Buchzych 2014 and Urdea 2018).

Endless multiplication of collections: Storage fever makes the museum grind to a halt The political pressure put on the MFA and its employers was reflected in its displays and publications and in the acquisition campaigns conducted by the museum. Throughout the 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s, the displays of the MFA were numerous, standardized and controlled heavily by Communist Party footsoldiers. The consequence was that socialist displays could not exhibit the actual life of peasants, but rather focused on folkloric interpretation of ethnographic objects that had to be displayed in a historical materialist perspective. However, historical materialist displays were never staged in the MFA. This represented a subtle form of (maybe involuntary) resistance to the political pressures because museum curators continued to work in the traditions learned through practice from their predecessors. Previously the objects themselves obliged museum curators to talk about ‘old’ peasants and customs, rather than about the ‘new’ man envisaged by the socialist ideology. In this context, museum workers focused on an endless multiplication of collections through multiple acquisition campaigns. This activity was welcomed and generously supported financially by the Ministry of Culture and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The rush for ‘scientificity’ was seen as part of the rush for numbers. One document in the MFA archive states that between 1950 and 1953, 6,000 objects were collected. In the summer of 1953, a total of six acquisition campaigns in various regions of Romania were made. One muzeograf remembers that after each acquisition campaign, the museum worker who had led it wrote one academic article about it and curated a themed exhibition at the Museum of Folk Art. The efforts to make the new acquisitions public underlined the educational intent of the museum and the importance of the collection to the museum team. It was as if the museum had ‘covered’ a new ethnographic region and was representing all of Romania’s regions. Documents from the archive show that these frenzied collection efforts lasted until the late 1960s. The acquisitions served not only the displays and the collections of

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the MFA, but also the opening of ethnographic museums and ethnographic sections in local museums in other regions in Romania, as well as national and international exhibitions and international gifts. The practice of collecting ethnographic objects on this scale could be easily seen as obsessive or compulsive collecting. Unlike the presocialist Museum of National Art, which focused on collecting very few objects from a small number of Romanian regions, and focused mainly for the objects’ aesthetic qualities, the acquisition campaigns during socialism focused on the covering the entire country; the number of objects collected soared in response. Anthropologists Graeme Were and J.C.H. King (2012) discuss the practice of ‘extreme collecting’ in museum contexts in relation to the peculiarity of the objects museums collect. For example, everyday objects made of plastic and objects from refugee camps represent for the authors unusual collections that are actively sought by museums. I suggest that the numerous acquisition campaigns conducted by the MFA in the 1950s and 1960s represent a particular kind of extreme collecting, not because the objects are marginal, overlooked or exotic, but rather because of their number and multiplicity in the name of safeguarding ethnographic objects from the consequences of socialist modernity. Paradoxically, the socialist regime invested indirectly money and human resources in preserving traditional objects when confronted with disappearance in front of the new materials and practices brought by socialist modernity. In many letters submitted to the Ministry of Culture, MFA director Tancred Bănăţeanu argued that the museum under his care was different from its predecessor during the interwar period. He focused almost obsessively on the importance of acquisition of new objects. Bănățeanu described the collections of the interwar institution as ‘sporadic and irregular’ (Bănăţeanu 1957: 4). Contrary to these, communist collections strove to be ‘regular’ and ‘constant’; they would also ‘cover’ all the regions of the country. By shifting the accent from exhibition making onto collecting, the museum incorporated into its work policies the socialist dogma of improvement, of a process of accumulation in relation to an idealized potential future. In this process of becoming, numbers mattered: how many objects have been collected? How many regions researched? And how many exhibitions or cultural events organized? In the work of muzeografi, these numbers were seen as having a particular significance that can be related with a culture of urgency (see SsorinChaikov 2006) and with a constant projection into the future. Then, collecting was seen as a relatively humble activity, based on hard work, completely opposite to the pre-socialist elitism or connoisseurship that was associated with the activity of collection. The story of Samurcaş hiring a carriage and paying to be taken to collect one wonderfully carved spoon was well known among NMRP’s researchers. The price of the spoon was much smaller than the price of the trip. In an article published in the journal Museums’ Magazine (Bănăţeanu 1966), the MFA director presented important data about the number of objects, photos and exhibitions before and after the installation of the communist regime.12 If in 1948 the Museum of National Art had 6,027 objects, five years later, the Museum of Folk Art had three times more objects (18,144), and in 1966 almost seven times more (39,500

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objects). This important information is mentioned in a footnote in the article. The article did not mention anything about the number of photos, films and slides inherited from the pre-socialist institution, or the fact that the MFA actually used many presocialist images in all their displays and exhibitions. I suggest that this partial interpretation of data and the ambiguity concerning the realization of museums contributed to the state propaganda being propounded in the cultural sector. The numbers are used to show realizations of, and compliance with, official state policies. Literary critic Susan Stewart affirms that: ‘The collection is not constructed by its elements; rather, it comes to exist by means of its principle of organisation. If that principle is bounded at the onset of the collection, the collection will be finite or at least potentially finite’ ([1993] 2001: 155). In the case of the Museum of Folk Art, the urge to collect and cover all of Romania’s ethnographic regions was not intended to change the principles of collection radically, as the socialist apparatus wanted, but rather to complete the pre-socialist principles of collections. As noted above, the presocialist museum focused on collecting old ethnographic objects with some artistic or aesthetic value, while the socialist museum focused on collecting large numbers of ethnographic objects with the same artistic and aesthetic qualities. Therefore, the paradox is that because of the practices of the museum workers, the socialist state actually sponsored the completion of the collections that had been initiated prior to socialism.13 As a consequence of the high level of acquisition made in the previous two decades, in 1971 the permanent display of the MFA became a storage space. Its doors were closed to visitors and for three years it functioned as a storage facility. Museum bosses decided that there was simply not enough space to deposit all the objects that have been collected. Museums prove to be porous institutions that allow us a glimpse into bygone ways of living, old routines, and to understand values attached to labour as well as important political and social contexts, such as the secret service’s surveillance activities. It is this porous quality of museums that facilitates the analysis of differences and continuities between the past and the present, which for this book means the time between socialist and non-socialist institutions.

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4.1 Room 45 at the NMRP, 1990s. Fonds Dinescu-Caraman/ Film 17/ Image 1501, courtesy of the NMRP.

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A Question of (In)Visibility

One senior researcher and archivist at the NMRP recounted that back in the early 1970s, the permanent display of the MFA was closed for several consecutive years. During those years, he would pass every day in front of the MFA building located on Victory Avenue [Calea Victoriei] on his way to work and back home. He remembered how impressed he was to see that while the museum was closed to the public, museum employees seemed just as busy as usual, as he watched them going in and out of the building. For him and for many of his colleagues, a museum with no permanent display was a nonsense. ‘Museums are made to showcase things, not just to store them,’ he told me. His observation is a good starting point for this chapter, which discusses the relation between visibility and invisibility in museums. In the museum world, it is well known that a large percentage of museums’ space and resources are dedicated to storage and only a relatively small amount to displays. In this chapter, we will see how and when objects move from the visible to the invisible, or from the most prestigious regime of value to a much less important, often ambiguous, one. In their many official and unofficial stores, valuable collections of objects live alongside the remnants of dismantled collections, renamed items, objects that cannot be assigned to any existing category, such as donated pieces, or objects that are hidden from public view for all sorts of political, ideological and other reasons. All this richness, which is most of the time invisible to the public, represents an important attribute of the porosity of museums. In this chapter, I tell the stories of museums which contract and expand into storage spaces, of hidden (or only partially hidden) collections of Stalinist objects and of artizanat objects (modernized folk art). I also tell the story of food and nourishment on the museum grounds and some underground spaces/ the intestines of the museum.

The 1977 earthquake: New visibility and the media On 17 August 1974, the MFA reopened its gates with a major exhibition, ‘Folk Costume in Romania’. The exhibition displayed ethnographic costumes from all regions of the country. Its special design was conceived by specialists from Decorativa, the state monopoly for the design of cultural venues that had been established one decade earlier. The folk costumes were displayed on human-sized mannequins made of glass and lit from inside.

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4.2 Image from the 1974 exhibition at the MFA. Personal archive FHM, courtesy of Cristina Formagiu.

Muzeografi remember they worked for three consecutive years to get ready for the opening of the 1974 exhibition. Their experience was, in their words, extremely ‘fulfilling’ and ‘unique’. Geta Roșu, one of the muzeografi responsible for this display remembers: It was a beautiful and very modern exhibition. The walls were painted in black, as well as the interior stairs and very tall and imposing mannequins constructed from transparent glass, lit from inside, were used. These mannequins had no feet but stood on a structure of glass blocks that gave the impression of height. One could admire the folk costumes on these mannequins by looking upwards.

Lit from inside, the mannequins respected the ‘rule’ of the disembodied figure of the peasant which governed ethnographic display in Romania, but this very transparency also allowed for socialist dreams – such as mass provision and bright futures – to be made present and enacted through peasant costumes. This notable

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object-free and translucent display evoked arguments raised in other ethnographies of Soviet space concerned with the refurbishment of domestic interiors (Boym 1994) and the architecture of public housing in the USSR (Buchli 2000). In their ethnographies, cultural theorist Svetlana Boym and anthropologist Victor Buchli each reveal how socialist regimes struggled with the sheer weight of material objects, and sought to prohibit anything that was thought of as threatening to the socialist order – namely opulence, bourgeois ornamentation and the new fetishization of capitalist consumption. In Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia, Boym explains how, after the Bolshevik Revolution, architects, designers, artists and party acolytes wanted to make sure that the aesthetics of the communal spaces exhibited properly socialist values and that any trace of alternative lifestyle had been removed. Therefore, elaborate and decorative furniture was banished, walls were always painted white, and even the rubber plant, rubber dandelion, was considered ‘decadent’ and banned from communal flats by both avant-garde artists and the Bolshevik fraternity. Anthropologist Victor Buchli (2000 and 2015) shows how different waves of purges were in fact markers of political and ethical decisions. Ultimately these aesthetic decisions of ‘cleanliness’ led to the general perception that socialist modernity could be related to a demise of materiality, and to a profound preoccupation with immateriality (Buchli 2015). These studies show that in socialist regimes, there was a constant search for and negotiation of the ‘approved’ or ‘dominant’ style that could range from obsession with materiality to ideology expressed through immaterial forms (Buchli 2015). In this context, the glass mannequins displayed in 1974 at the Museum of Folk Art suggest a certain demise of materiality. The translucent glass is thought to give some sort of immateriality to the human body that until that moment has usually been represented in museum displays by means of conventional materials, such as wood or clay. However, this sense of immateriality is realized by means of a certain opulence. Glass, cast iron and lightbulbs illuminate the mannequin from within, indicating that muzeografi and designers found ways to innovate within the relatively ‘neutral’ set of rules and narrow standards of Romanian museum practice. These displays were in accordance with the stuffed and pinned costumes and textiles so prevalent in the late 1960s. The archives of ethnographic museums from the socialist period contain abundant images of such displays, which can be seen as a different technique of disembodiment. In the epistemology and methodology of the ethnographic and folkloric research of the time, the makers and wearers of these garments had to be excluded from displays and only the qualities and design of materials were considered important. There are three primary reasons for this absence. First, it was thought that disembodied objects could be analysed more effectively in terms of their function. The study of objects was prioritized and real efforts were made to keep well away from the study of people (Hedeșan 2008). Second, stripped of any traces of human presence, objects could be reinterpreted more easily and invested with ideological meanings. Finally, it was difficult to display the lived reality of peasants: modern objects from collectivized villages and agricultural

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4.3 Exhibited folk costume. Fonds Oroveanu/ Image O-503, courtesy of the NMRP.

farms were not considered ‘beautiful’ and, as such, displayable. One sees the curators, the muzeografi, wearing the peasant clothes. The permanent display had been open for only three years when, in March 1977, a devastating earthquake measuring 7.4 on the Richter Scale shook southern and eastern Romania. In Bucharest alone, the earthquake accounted for over 1,500 deaths. Thirty-three buildings were destroyed and many others were damaged extensively (Georgescu and Pomonis 2008). Muzeografi recall that most of the glass

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mannequins in the MFA were broken. When they fell to the ground and smashed, glass shards perforated many of the costumes on display. The head of one mannequin that survived the earthquake was collected by one muzeograf and kept at her home for many years as a reminder of the unique 1974 display. In 2010, in her office at the NMRP, this muzeograf told the story of the glass mannequin head to all of the museum’s young employees. The 1977 earthquake led to the closure of the MFA and the transfer of its collections and archives to the National Theatre; however, a subsequent fire damaged some items and other archival material was lost.1 All the remaining archives, collections and personnel moved swiftly on to the Village Museum, an open-air venue opened in 1936 by the famous sociologist Dimitrie Gusti. The MFA’s stores were combined with the Village Museum’s, but contents kept their previous inventory numbers and classification. The moment the MFA stores were separated from the building of the MFA marks the point at which this institution started to contract. We do not know exactly how severely Știrbey Palace, the building that hosted the MFA in Bucharest, was affected by the earthquake. We can be sure, however, that in the second half of the 1970s the communist authorities stopped seeing ethnographic museums as the prime locus for the expression of their ideas of folk and the unity of the national territory that had been so strong a couple of decades before. In these two decades, two major changes happened. First, a whole network of institutions and practices for researching and promoting folk art and peasant customs had reached maturity in Romania. From 1965 onwards, communist authorities invested extensively in the standardization of folk-art production and in increasing its appeal to popular tastes. A system of small workshops and regional contests that were coordinated by stateowned enterprises started to produce what has become known as artizanat, commodities derived from folk-art objects but designed with modernized aesthetics, and for mass consumption. The second change is represented by the founding of the national Song to Romania festival just one year before the earthquake (Mihăilescu 2008). The festival focused on music and dance and was open to dance and musical ensembles from Romania who wanted to express their talents on a national stage. Museum curators working for the Song to Romania festival recall it was designed to drive and proclaim with maximum visibility the equality of amateur, naïve and fine art at all levels of society. In this context, the socialist authorities felt that folk-art museums were too limited in scope and could not engage with the masses in the way in which the new forms of folk expression could. As the first decades of socialism had shown, museum curators and researchers – as well as the products of their work, ethnographic research stores and exhibitions – could be difficult to control entirely and might even be regarded as subversive if represented on a national scale. This was not the case with top–down endeavours such as socialist artizanat and the national Song to Romania festival. In the following section, we will see how and why the artizanat collection at the NMRP was scrutinized and renamed as ‘Various’ during the 1990s.

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Socialist artizanat, naïve art and the mix of values From necessary objects of peasant life – textiles, costumes, pottery, wooden tools, we have evolved to the creation of art objects meant to help and beautify the life of workers from the countryside (sic.)’ (. . .) Ornamented objects for the house, clothing adapted to urban style, maps, lamps, office objects, small statues, covers, etc. This means a profound transformation of the conception of folk art as well as a change that became present in the life of the people. MFA Archive/ File 331

All the items enumerated above abound in the contemporary markets of urban Romania. When they were written in 1955, the words above were revolutionary because they proclaimed the transformation of folk objects into commodities designed for mass consumption. They formed part of the concluding remarks of a conference held at the MFA and geared to specialists hoping to ‘increase their own professional level’. Seven years after the establishment of the socialist regime in Romania, museum workers speaking at the conference felt that the conception of folk art needed to change. The process of making art for new socialist contexts, including urban uses or for local and national contests held on stage, is described under the umbrella of artizanat and is very often related to the concept of ‘valorization’. In the archival material from the Museum of Folk Art, ‘valorization’ is used very often as a substitute for the term artizanat. Both terms meant a transformation – the creation of new objects inspired by traditional ones, making use of new materials and new techniques of mass production for a population that is supposed, as an effect of socialism, to have new tastes: urban workers who were the first generation to make their homes in the city. The 1955 conference organized at the MFA is one of the first instances in which muzeografi were invited to not only collect art, but to reflect and help with the creation of art objects following folk-like models. In other texts from the same archive folder, these specialists ought to be trained in ornamentation, new techniques and new materials and collaborate with national institutions that promoted standardization and consumption of folk art, such as the Song to Romania festival. As noted above, Song to Romania was established in 1976 and lasted until the end of the communist regime. The festival functioned as a platform for presenting local traditions, performances, crafts and talents on a national stage. The preliminary local and regional rounds were promoted extensively in local media while the final national phase involved a few hundred participants, lasted several days and was televized by the national broadcaster (Popescu 2002; Mihăilescu 2008; Urdea 2018). All echelons of the communist authorities were actively involved in the festival’s organization and delivery. Local communist leaders put significant effort into finding local talent and convincing them to participate in the competition. In the festival, professional artists performed alongside amateurs and competed for the same prizes. The jury included specialists from various fields – cultural workers, art historians, muzeografi and communist leaders – the aim being to cement a

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‘communion’ of values. As one muzeograf remembers, muzeografi from the Museum of Folk Art were involved in the Exhibition Section of the festival and helped organize it for several years in a row in Sala Palatului, a concert hall in central Bucharest. However, despite its massive promotion in mainstream media, Song to Romania was not popular among many peasants and amateur artists who were asked to make pottery or contribute objects to the different contests set up by ‘specialists’. The festival wanted to embody a common platform that united various backgrounds and professional categories: fine artists and amateur artists, peasants and city-dwellers, muzeografi and art historians, choreographers and ethnomusicologists. However, their cooperation and the mix of values was far from smooth. Art historian Ioana Popescu argues that Song To Romania Festival was meant to fabricate on a large scale ‘the national talent’ and ‘to humiliate the ellites’ (Popescu 2002: 151). Between the two World Wars and post 1945, peasants accounted for almost 80 per cent of Romania’s total population. Almost all of them were illiterate (see Murgescu 2010: 342 and 348). State socialism in this part of Europe imposed compulsory education and massive changes onto rural and urban life. These changes included the nationalization of land and possessions, and the state imposition of completely new means of production and exchange: industrialization and massive urbanization. Work patterns and production methods changed not only in Romania, but across other Eastern European states (Pine 1992). Even so, twenty years after the fall of the communist regime and the closing down of many factories and collective farms, Romania reverted to being a country with one of the biggest rural populations in Europe (Murgescu 2010; Mihăilescu 2013: 68). During the 1990s and 2000s, 46 per cent of the population was living in rural areas (Sandu 2011; Raport INS 2011). My research reveals the visual implication of this social reality and shows how museums could easily constrain the imagination into stereotypical representations. Some of the archival images in the exhibition indicate this progression from the state of ‘peasantness’ to the state of being modern. In 2011, two ethnologists from the Institute of Ethnography and Folklore in Bucharest remembered how, during the Song to Romania festival, party activists invited fine artists to make objects imitating the style of amateur artists and peasants in order to compensate for the lack of participation of those very groups. If, in theory, the festival aimed to promote a united idea of ‘art’, this idea was never realized in practice. For example, it was rumoured that in one year the same jury organized two separate contests – one for muzeografi who worked with folk art, and one for artists and art historians with expertise in fine art. These different professions had very different training and convictions about art. While most art historians and artists were totally against such practices of amalgamation and had a hierarchical understanding of value, muzeografi supported mixes of values as these were generated by the social world. Muzeografi were professionally inclined to recognize and appreciate various regimes of value. For most muzeografi, it was nonsense to compare and rank a ceramic pot produced by an amateur potter and a carpet woven manually by a few

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women in the same village or in other parts of the country. But when the ceramic pot and the carpet were considered folk art, especially in the context of a national contest, specialists from other disciplines were called to appreciate and rank those objects. Therefore, by appreciating the coexistence of multiple regimes of value, muzeografi, enforced a certain social levelling of skills and tastes as well as lack of disparities between producers of objects. The MFA archive at the NMRP contains posters from many local festivals and contests organized in different regions of the country. As custodians of collections in the MFA explained, the costumes in these stage performances were used differently from the ways that peasants would wear them in traditional settings. Stage costumes were less embroidered and cut was made differently by designers from state-owned Decorativa or National Union of Cooperatives of Production [UCECOM] to meet the requirements of dancing and spinning on stage. During socialism, especially because muzeografi from the MFA worked in collaboration with specialists from Decorativa and UCECOM, the MFA received several such costumes to display in temporary exhibitions, and to keep in its collections. In 1960s, custodians and muzeografi from the Museography Department started to put together these adapted versions of costumes in a collection called Artizanat. UCECOM was a national union of cooperatives of production focusing mainly on artizanat objects. This cooperative undertook the export of artizanat objects in massive numbers to many western countries. In the 1970s, the covers of several western fashion magazines featured examples of the artizanat blouses produced in Romania (Nicolescu 2018). Olga Horșia, a former muzeograf working at the MFA, joined UCECOM in 1968 and soon after became its main manager for a few decades. Until the end of communism, the cooperative exported thousands of artizanat products to western European countries. UCECOM’s activities were not limted to urban centres and institutions: it also started to coordinate research in every region of the country through a subordinate institution: Centrul Naţional al Tradiţiilor (the National Centre of Traditions). This centre, with branches in all of Romania’s large towns, was a new place of employment in which designers, ethnologists, musicologists and muzeografi could research and create new art based on interpretations of folk traditions (Popescu 2002). The National Centre of Traditions not only undertook research into existing costumes and objects, but also ‘intervened’ in and amended certain traditions. For example, potters and tailors from one region of Romania were not allowed to adopt colours, ornaments, and models typical in other parts of the country unless they were given specific permission to do so. Such instructions were usually given when UCECOM specialists wanted to introduce new materials produced in UCECOM facilities, thereby making them much easier and cheaper to obtain. This shows the level to which such centralized knowledge of the field and the production of artizanat items was paralleled by innovative techniques and means of production. This knowledge was essential in the reinterpretation of folklore and was indicative of a particularly powerful shift in the 1950s. Before socialism, costumes were specific

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to regions, villages, ages, marital status and even class. For example, folk costumes objectified differences between poor peasants and their wealthier peers. But artizanat cancelled out all of these differences and hierarchies. Muzeografi were perfectly aware of the transformation folk art was undergoing and had two opposing strategies to deal with changes. On the one hand, they salvaged old ‘authentic’ peasant objects; on the other, they contributed with ideas of how folk items could be fabricated on a larger scale in production cooperatives. Some of these ‘modernized’ versions of folk items were produced for export, while others were made for performances in local or national contests and for urban consumption. As the previous chapter has shown, this apparently contradictory attitude was a consequence of the fact that muzeografi had been invented by the communist authorities as a new category of specialists working in the field of art. Therefore, many muzeografi balanced their support of the socialist views on the role of art as a tool to level social disparities with their sense of urgency to safeguard what they saw as the authentic production of folk art. By travelling along both paths, the MFA continued to be very visibly a museum of ‘art’ and not one of society, but traces of society – in the form of regional or gender distinctions – could be found in its stores. This effect was possible because of the porous nature of the museum. By the time I conducted my research in 2010–11, for all the reasons mentioned above, researchers and artists at the NMRP were totally against artizanat. They opposed the display of artizanat objects or objects that resembled them, and some even wanted to avoid the use of the word in the museum’s publications and labels. This rejection of artizanat was closely tied to the extensive interventions that the socialist regime had made into the lives of farmers and peasants. For these specialists, artizanat represented a clear break from tradition, authenticity and hierarchy. Under the directorship of contemporary artist Horia Bernea, in early 1990s the Artizanat collection was renamed Various. In support of the hierarchical understanding of value in art and in the Romanian society at large, Bernea said: I wish for Romania a rebirth of the hierarchic spirit (. . .) Do you know when a hierarchy appears? When the essential conditions are remade for a person to say to another person: ‘What a wonderful person!’ Now, [instead of recognition people throw to each other] only insults! They always have the intention to belittle the other: this is the effect of communism. [We live] Communism in a democratic state. Interview with Bernea in Tatulici 2000: 107

Bernea’s words encapsulate his desire that the entire Romanian society should recognize and accept a system of values that was operating before the establishment of socialism in Romania. Bernea and his followers objectified this vision in the exhibitions they curated in the tumultuous 1990s. This book reveals the mechanisms in which post-communist curators and researchers tried to find creative ways to challenge, and make visible, the attempted levelling of the Romanian society that had

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occurred during socialism. At the same time, muzeografi continued to demand mechanisms in which this social levelling would continue after socialism. This happened not only in curatorial practice but also in larger spheres of life such as the administrative realm and in personal lives. In the first chapter we have seen the attempt of muzeografi to compare the budgets of each department in the NMRP down to smallest details, such as the telephone bills. We have seen that this collision between two different value systems happened throughout the 1990s in Romanian society. These conflicts between two types of modernities often took the form of cultural, ideological and political wars. So far, we have seen how the entire collection of national art was moved from the original stores of the Museum of National Art and contributed to the founding of the Museum of Folk Art. But this new institution did not come to an end with the 1977 earthquake, when all its collections curated by the new category of muzeografi were transferred to the stores of the Village Museum. In its second phase, the communist project of the Museum of Folk Art became a store within a store. After 1989, the stores and muzeografi would transfer to the Museum of the Romanian Peasant. In the remaining part of this chapter, we will enter the building of the Museum of National Art to understand how this space was transformed, from 1955 onwards. Understanding of the history of the building during the period of communist rule is essential if we are to explain the extensive post-communist overhauls of this space and the creation of the NMRP.

Back to the stores: What museums do not need On a hot summer day in 2010, I meet historian Simina Bădică, researcher and archivist at the NMRP. She is at this time in charge of the communist uncatalogued stores and unindexed archives of the NMRP. In the previous couple of years, there have been several reports that some of the communist archives and stores had been looted, misplaced or damaged. Simina invites me into her office in the basement of the museum. From the interior courtyard, we descend underground through a tiny metal door: we have to bow our heads to fit through it. Despite its size, it is used constantly: dozens of manual workers, technicians and cleaning personnel walk through it every day as it is the single point of access between the offices of the support staff and the rest of the museum. Some researchers have to pass through this little door on their way to their offices next to the library of the museum. Simina and I descend into a service corridor topped by several pipes of different sizes which hang below the ceiling over our heads. Some pipes are covered in silver insulation material, while others are rusty. At the end of the corridor, there are two large rooms that, for several years, were the offices of three researchers. Tiny windows deliver the little amount of light that enters into the semi-basement rooms. The rooms feel dark and chilly. I am invited to sit on a retro wooden chair covered with green velvet. In front of me there is Simina’s massive vintage-style wooden desk. On one side, there is the empty desk of an artist who works for the Education Department but who rarely

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uses her office. Old inventory numbers written on paper, white fabric or nailed-on small metal plates show that all pieces of furniture in the office used to belong to V.I. Lenin–I.V. Stalin Museum, one of the important museums of communist propaganda in Romania, established in the late 1950s: I can see a wooden hanger, massive chairs, metallic and wooden cupboards and metal desk lamps. The second room, darker than this, is the office of a technician responsible for the visual archive of the museum. A door and a dull-coloured curtain cover the entrance into that office where parts of the interwar image archives are located. In an article on the history of national museums during communism, Simina Bădică (2011) enumerates in chronological order all the institutions that were in the building where she works. After the collections of national art were evacuated from the building, in 1955 the V.I. Lenin–I.V. Stalin Museum opened in the right wing of the building. After just a few years, this museum was renamed as the Marx-Engels-Lenin Museum. In 1958, the History Museum of the Romanian Workers Party was opened in the left wing of the building. The two museums functioned simultaneously. In 1966, the Marx-Engels-Lenin Museum was ‘silently dissolved’ into the History Museum of the Communist Party, of the Revolutionary and Democratic Movement of Romania (Museum of the Communist Party, henceforth). This new museum slowly occupied the entire building until 1990 (Bădică 2011: 723–5). The long name of the latter museum, Bădică believes, indicates a moment of tension in the diplomatic relations between Romania and USSR. The 1960s were marked by the political and economic efforts of the young Romanian communist state towards de-Stalinization of the country, which was meant to bring relative independence from the strict Soviet influence that characterized the early years of communism. This independence was materialized symbolically in the museum’s setting. The main objects that used to be exhibited before, such as statues of Marx, Englels and Lenin, portraits of former Stalinist leaders and political banners, were taken down from display and placed in a basement room. Paintings, statues and inscriptions that mentioned the Stalinist USSR ceased to be displayed and were replaced by displayed images and texts that made visible the accomplishments of the Romanian Communist Party. On that summer day, researcher Simina Bădică asks one of the workers of the museum to open for us one of the storage rooms situated in the basement of the museum. ‘Room 45’, as it is known, is formed by a narrow corridor and two rooms close to each other, situated in the middle of the building. The corridor has no windows and is packed with all sorts of pieces of former exhibition displays. ‘The light bulb does not work today,’ I am told. It is dark and we walk carefully, trying to avoid some pieces of cardboard and other harder materials. Moving around becomes easier when we see a bit of light at the end of the corridor. The worker who was kind enough to open the storage room for us, knew the place well and managed to turn on another light a bit further along. One of the two nearby rooms contains Stalinist statues, such as a heavy iron globe with the axis in the shape of a hammer and the sickle, statues of Lenin of different sizes, socialist-realist busts and multiple statues of Marx, Engels and Lenin.

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4.4 Objects and documents in Room 45, early 1990s. Fonds Dinescu-Caraman/ Film 17/ Image 1506, courtesy of the NMRP.

The second room contains paintings of important Soviet leaders, Soviet scenes of work showing factory workers, cornfields, tractors and the portrait of the first Romanian Communist president Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej. This is the room where I was asked to bring objects that had featured in a couple of temporary exhibitions I co-curated at the NMRP in 2000 and 2006.2 This suggests that, through temporary exhibitions, the NMRP attracted objects that remained in its stores unindexed. Museums tend to attract remains of the past through various forms of temporary exhibitions, borrowing or donation. This unexpected quality of the museum, to attract other fragments and remains brings them the particular aura as silent, overlooked landfill of history. This quality invites research and historical introspection and represents one of the deepest expressions of the porosity of museums. Remains are buried formally but also symbolically in the deepest places available into museum stores, locations one might regard as the intestines of the museums. But just like intestines, these often-overlooked stores are extremely

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important to the very existence of the museums. These stores are necessary to the digestion of their past, of history at large, especially of the more problematic, convoluted and controversial aspects of those histories. Bădică tells me that most of the statues made from bronze or marble and all the paintings in Room 45 were produced and reproduced on a large scale in the USSR in the early 1950s. Such replicas of Stalinist symbols used to be produced and distributed to all communist satellite countries under the influence of the USSR. These countries had at least one or two national museums dedicated to communist propaganda. Communist leaders used to see socialist realism as a relatively simple style that could be apprehended by masses in a way that broke with the bourgeois tastes that used to dominate the public sphere before communism. Socialist realism was deployed massively in USSR in the 1930s and in early 1950 it was imposed as the dominant style in communist countries in Eastern and Central Europe. In Destruction in Art, art

4.5 Other objects in Room 45, early 1990s. Fonds Dinescu-Caraman/ Film 17/ Image 1512, courtesy of the NMRP.

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historian Dario Gamboni (1997) argues that artistic statues of communist leaders and monuments once had a ‘cult-like’ nature. The sculptures were massive and had a dynamic – almost heroic – appearance that was meant to instil rapid progress and visions of majesty to communist society. Statues used to work both as sacred images and prototypes of socialist values such as friendship among people, labour and improvement. At the same time, they used to reflect the political and ideological changes or shifts in the communist society itself. For example, numerous statues of Lenin were erected in many city centres in Romania in the context of de-Stalinization to mark a certain departure from the Stalinist years and a return to communist ideals and values. According to art historian Dario Gamboni, ‘these statues contributed in the making of the new man, a new society’. They were ‘representations of the primacy of the collective over the individual’ (Gamboni 1997: 57). But the point I want to make is that communist regimes also knew the violent destruction of their own powerful symbols, such as when the statues of Stalin were torn down aggressively during the popular anti-Soviet uprising in Hungary in 1956. Subtle forms of destruction that happened during communist regimes can be traced back to museum archives and stores. In 1965, most of the items that had been part of the permanent display of the Marx-Engels-Lenin Museum in Bucharest were moved to the museum’s basement, in what we know today as Room 45. At the beginning of the 1960s, the Marx-Engels-Lenin Museum was transformed into the History Museum of the Communist Party, of the Revolutionary and Democratic Movement of Romania. These important shifts from visible displays into invisible storage, were supposed to illustrate the departure of the Romanian Communist Party from the Soviet sphere of influence. As a result, until the end of communism in Romania, Room 45 functioned as a hidden space, torn between giving away objects and storing them. This tension is close to what Peter Weibel and Bruno Latour called ‘iconoclash’ (2002), the indecision over what to do with items displaced from previous displays. In the Romanian case, ‘iconoclash’ accounts for an ambiguous, indecisive relationships caught between destruction and care. However, it was this indecision that led to a certain preservation of objects, even if deposited in improper conditions, unindexed and unmanaged for twenty-five years. This situation is what made the rediscovery of the underground storage possible in 1991 by researchers in the newly established NMRP. The story of the communist objects from Room 45 resembles similar processes to turn invisible objects that were once prestigious and very visible into invisible. Famously, the Polish film Man of Marble [1977] directed by the director Andrzej Wajda features a case of an important symbol of the Stalinist era, a Polish bricklayer, Mateusz Birkut. Overnight, Mateusz Birkut attains the attention of the central Polish authorities and media who present him as a Stakhanovite symbol of an over-achieving worker in Nowa Huta, a new socialist city near Kraków. Birkut becomes a heroic figure for his nation. Giant posters and statues are made in his honour. The title of the film refers to the massive marble statues of Birkut that were made for state propaganda reasons. However, at some point in the film, Birkut starts to protest at what he sees

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as the disjuncture between the realities of life and the communist propaganda. As a result, he becomes persona non grata. Birkut is removed from records and one of his statues is sent to the stores of the Muzeum Narodowe [National Museum in Warsaw]. Its massive stores allow symbols that were once considered valuable to the nation to recede into the background: these objects are now in an in-between state, not really kept but not really thrown away. From this point of view, the communist mode of presenting history resembles a palimpsest: in order to inscribe the present, one always needs to overwrite what was presented before. But the palimpsest always leaves a trace of the previous inscription: details and fragments that escape deletion. Milan Kundera’s (2000) novel The Book of Laughter and Forgetting presents (among many characters) the story of an almost invisible hat. In February 1948, two Czechoslovak communist leaders stand together on a snowy Prague balcony. One of them gives his own hat to the other leader. The two men are photographed and this image becomes emblematic of the Czechoslovakian revolution. Four years later, the owner of the hat is expelled from the Communist Party and executed; he is removed from all official records, including the now-famous photograph. All that survives of him – in the photograph – is his hat on other leader’s head. This process of re-working the past is captured in one popular Soviet anecdote featuring the imaginary Armenian Radio Yerevan station: Armenian radio is asked: Is it possible to foretell the future? Answer: yes, that is no problem! We know exactly what the future will be like. Our problem is with the past: that keeps changing. Watson 1994: 2

The anecdote expresses one of the biggest paradoxes of communist practices. We can see an obsession with archiving/recording the present, and at the same time, a fear of what these archives contained. There was a hyper-need to manage and carefully store these archives and collections, and limit access to them. In the processes of storing, archiving and re-writing, there was always a hat, a statue, a collection or a store that did not conform to the changing visions of the past. Therefore, communist authorities were confronted with a double problem. On one hand, the glorious present had to be thoroughly documented and archived. On the other hand, the representation of the past had to be either changed, or simply hidden, when subversive or unpleasant elements showed up. An additional problem resided in the fact that when the present had to be changed, communist authorities had to re-write the past that they themselves have re-written several years before. In this continuous process to document the present while keeping an attentive eye on history, the communist institutions, museums included, allowed multiple versions of the past to co-exist in the stores. This gave flexibility (and some peace of mind) to museum curators who could dig into archives for objects that could be displayed or, by contrary, place in inaccessible places objects that (for one reason or another) had fallen into disgrace.

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Historian David King (1997) shows us how Joseph Stalin manipulated the science of photography to advance his own political career and erase the memory of his victims. Historian Alain Jaubert (1986) argues that the manipulation of photographic images is what all leaders of totalitarian regimes do, ultimately. An article I co-authored explains how penal files retrieved from the Archive of the Ukrainian Security Service (former KGB Archive) contain two sets of photographs: prints from the original negative and ‘adjusted’ copies of so-called anti-religious operations (Vagramenko and Nicolescu 2021). Museums operate similar processes of manipulations, but do so by playing with different fields of visibility: what and how things are displayed for the public and what put into storage. This process of shifting objects, images and inscriptions from display into storage – from visible into invisible – gives museums, as institutions dealing with visibility but also with storage, a certain porosity in terms of the official ideology and instructions that made it possible to retain, or safeguard, objects and documents for possible future use. In their many spaces, classical national museums have rooms and corners where such single items or ambiguous collections of objects are located for a while, to escape the critical judgements of today and to preserve something that yesterday was once valued. This temporary oblivion also gives researchers and curators time for reflection and recognizes that memory has a processual nature. Therefore, the porous nature of the museums is related to a certain passing of time. The case of Room 45 shows that storage spaces are not static, but alive. Transformations happen also in more ambiguous storage places because of a series of other events that happen over time but are not related to conservation, such as decay, theft, misplacement of objects, and short-term loans. It was only after hiding Soviet propaganda items that The History Museum of the Communist Party, of the Revolutionary and Democratic Movement of Romania opened to the public in 1966. Nicolae Ceaușescu, the newly elected prime secretary of the Romania’s Communist Party and the future head of state, attended the museum’s opening, surrounded by a large delegation of senior party members, security officers and bureaucrats. Looking at images from the archives of The Institute for the Investigation of Communist Crimes and Memory of the Romanian Exile (IICCMER), we notice that almost the entire delegation was composed of middle-aged men. The displays were glued to the wall: paper documents, slogans and images, behind large transparent glass walls. Only a few objects were on display. This relatively simple presentation lay in stark contrast to that deployed in the Marx-Engels-Lenin Museum, which had been dominated by massive statues and colourful paintings in vivid colours. During the latter part of the 1960s, neat surfaces like glass and steel were prized by museums for their clean, efficient and modern appearance which stood in contrast to the heavy and less practical materiality of the 1950s. As discussed in Chapter 3, socialist regimes were constantly searching and negotiating for a ‘dominant’ and ‘approved’ style that would align with their ideology and values. This search could range from an obsession with materiality to ideology expressed through immaterial

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4.6 Prime secretary Nicolae Ceaușescu opening the Museum of the Communist Party, Image #A107/1966. Reproduced courtesy of the Archive of the Institute for the Investigation of Communist Crimes and Memory of the Romanian Exile (IICCMER) [Fototeca online a comunismului românesc].

forms (Buchli 2015). In the case of museums that opened during communism, displaying items in glass cases allowed visitors to see images and documents more clearly. Later in the 1990s, researchers working at the museum argued that the Museum of the Communist Party contained numerous copies of original images and documents, as well as some fakes (Bădică 2014: 281). One former employee of the MCP gives more details about the design of the museum. D.A. joined the Museum of the Communist Party as a translator and guide for foreign groups of visitors in the 1970s, when she was in her twenties: On both floors we had separate rooms where the guides sat. We would be telephoned by reception , and we would turn on the lights and receive the groups that entered the exhibition. Interview with D.A., 2010

Visitors moved round the museum on a unidirectional circuit: they entered via the main entrance and they passed through each room only once, which was suited to directed a historical and educational presentation. The visitors were supposed to start in the first room, showing the antiquity of Romanian ancestors, and end their journey in the final room, which displayed the achievements of the Socialist regime.

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The texts and documents on display were in Romanian and had been translated by the museum’s guides for foreign visitors. Following D.A.’s testimony and those of other former employees, it is clear that visitors were not left to discover the meaning of the displays by themselves. Similarly, Romanian visitors could visit the museum only in organized and guided groups – for example, school parties, students, workers and other professional groups from Bucharest and beyond who were spending time in the capital. The museum had a single didactic narrative. But the process of rendering invisible that which had previously been visible on the museum grounds was not limited to the exhibition rooms. The furniture in the museum’s offices, as well as its red carpets, black curtains and green velvet upholstery all continued to be used in an institution that appeared to have undergone massive changes on the surface. Although the displays had certainly been transformed on the surface, the museum actually retained much of the past materialities, human resources and practices of its previous iterations. In the NMRP archives I did not find any information relating to staff changes that one might have expected to take place in 1966 when the Marx-Engels-Lenin Museum became the Museum of the Party. However, it is possible such information exists in some unindexed corner of an institution, such as the National Archives or the NMRP itself, waiting to be discovered. The process of transferring the archives from the Marx-Engels-Lenin Museum to the Museum of the Communist Party and then to the NMRP took many years and still needs to be researched. During one lunch break in the summer of 2010, as I was passing through the corridor that led to the underground offices and Room 45, a museum worker unlocked a narrow white door that I never noticed before. From the interior of that cramped room, a pile of documents over one metre high fell into the corridor. As the documents hit the floor, I could see the phrase ‘Museum of the Party’, which was the popular name for the Museum of the Communist Party. This informal way of naming the museum indicates that at some point, most probably after the 1990, some museum employees stashed the documents away in the basement. Staff from the National Archives came to collect them when they reappeared that day in 2010.

1980s: Eating at the Museum of the Communist Party On the same underground corridor of the museum, a small but very clean room, with white-painted walls, is the office of N.L. In her early sixties, N.L. welcomed me in for a chat. Sitting at a retro wooden desk, she was waiting for museum employees to bring her documents to sign. N.L. supervised all purchases at the NMRP. That winter day, her room felt warm. The pipes that heated the exhibition rooms and other offices went through N.L.’s office. While chatting about the communist times and her work duties in that period, N.L. explains that what was commonly known as the Museum of the Communist Party actually contained two separate institutions, with separate entrances and different employees: The Museum of the Communist Party, which functioned under the

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umbrella of the Ministry of Propaganda, and the House of the Pioneers, financed by the Union of Communist Youth. N.L. was a room attendant and then archivist of the House of Pioneers. ‘The Pioneers’ was a youth organization aimed at children between the ages of ten to fourteen, and had been established to diffuse communist values to younger generations by means of different practical and cultural activities, such as volunteering work in the community, dancing and singing clubs, the acquisition of practical skills, and participation in communist commemorations and national celebrations. The House of Pioneers organized temporary exhibitions dedicated to children and young adults. To enter, one needed a membership card. N.L. recalls the exhibitions usually included displays of technical objects, maquettes and drawings. Technical devices were very much appreciated by school children. Many films were screened and theatre shows were played on the stage of the large

4.7 Constructivist Building, built in the 1970s with a realist socialist mosaic depicting people on their glorious march towards the sun. The building has no windows and during the communist era hosted the display rooms of the House of the Pioneers and stores for the Museum of the Communist Party. Fonds Dinescu-Caraman, 1990/ File 65/ Image 2, courtesy of the NMRP.

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festival hall situated on the ground floor of the new museum building. (This building was erected in the 1970s behind the original palace built at the beginning of the twentieth century.) At some point during our conversation, N.L. referred to the room in which we were sitting. ‘This was the place where food used to be cooked and where employees came and had their lunch.’ During the 1990s, the kitchen and stoves were dismantled and the entire space was redesigned as administrative and office space. She continued, remembering that the Museum of the Communist Party and the House of the Pioneers had one canteen for employees and one restaurant and one cafeteria for visitors. Employees could also buy food in the restaurant. We always had meat to eat. And very good cakes from the cafeteria. All the best cafeterias in Bucharest were providing cakes for it. If you were an employee here, it was best to obtain a monthly pass. Without one, it was more expensive. There was always plenty of food there – so much that I would even take some home. We all did that. Interview with N.L., 2010

Her narrative is revealing. As noted above, the Museum of the Communist Party and the House of the Pioneers used to be visited by numerous groups of tourists or pupils from all regions of the country. Because these institutions were in the vanguard of showcasing the achievements of communism to an internal and international audience, their restaurant and cafeteria always had to be well supplied. Curators were in constant contact with some national and international cultural and educational institutions, as well as with foreign visitors. It was therefore not only visitors who benefited from these supplies, but also the employees of the two museums. In the context of the extreme shortages of necessities such as food, fuel and energy, it was considered a privilege to work in the Museum of the Communist Party or the House of Pioneers in Bucharest. These shortages, which drastically lowered living standards, were a direct result of the Romanian Communist Party’s policy of exporting most of the country’s agricultural and industrial products in order to pay the large foreign debts its government had accumulated during the massive development of energyintensive industries in the 1970s. ‘Today, again, on TV news I saw cheese’ goes a refrain of a popular 1980s underground song. To many Romanians, this line encapsulated many of the tensions over food procurement in relation to public visibility outlined above. While in most shops there was no cheese on sale for long periods of time, images of well-catered shops and markets and the impressive achievements of the agricultural sector were often presented on national TV. People used to queue for many hours to procure basic items such as meat, dairy products and eggs. Oil, butter and sugar were rationed. In rural areas in particular, bread was often hard to find. Oranges, bananas or other imported fruits were a rarity. Shopkeepers would fill the empty shelves of their shops with endless bottles of Romanian sparkling wine, tins of fish, jars of mustard and bags of prawn crackers imported from Vietnam (Rostás 2012).

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Unlike most of the citizens of Bucharest, the employees of the Museum of the Communist Party and the House of the Pioneers could eat cheese and meat in the canteen on a regular basis. The politics of working in the two institutions was connected to the politics of consumption during communism. Both the most senior leaders and the cleaning staff who worked in a privileged space benefitted. N.L. then explained how the privileged situation of the employees in the 1980s led to their marginalization after the fall of the regime in 1989. N.L. argued that the colleagues who joined the newly established NMRP in early 1990s used to downplay the achievements and skills of the museum’s previous employees and were reluctant to involve them in the new institution’s projects. Privilege – or the lack of it – constituted oppositional identities: ‘us’ and ‘them’, in N.L.’s words. For those who had done relatively well during communism, including the muzeografi working in the Museum of the Communist Party and the House of the Pioneers, the shift from one regime and institution to another was so abrupt that many struggled to deal with the change. People who used to be in certain positions of power, who used to be respected and appreciated for their work during communism, were neglected and regarded as insignificant after its fall. This was unbearable for some. V.A. used to be a cleaner at the Museum of Communist Party. Her version of ‘privilege’ during communism is somewhat different. She explained that the only way she could purchase meat for home use was to eat in the canteen twice a week. Because her job was in the cleaning department, she was supposed to finish work at lunchtime. Even if she did not need to buy food at lunchtime, she had to stay at the canteen and eat (or pretend to). The stories are complicated, and different strategies of coping with communist shortages are revealed in my conversations with different employees of the museum. The Museum of the Communist Party was not only an institution where values and ideas were transmitted to its visitors, like the young pioneers, but where the availability of cakes, coffee and meat also ‘enriched’ the museum experience. Consequently, the changes in the 1990s not only transformed the museum’s aesthetics and display, but the role of nourishment as an important inner function of the museum. By converting the canteen space into offices, the NMRP also converted vital communal social spaces into individual spaces. While the building’s exterior remained the same, its interior structure and content changed radically. Paradoxically, for many years the post-1989 directors (and some of the employees) petitioned the Ministry of Culture to open a restaurant and a canteen. They succeeded temporarily in 1993 and permanently in 2006: that which had been dismantled in 1990 returned sixteen years later after persistent effort – albeit in a very different form.

Hunger and collapse At the museum, socialism itself transformed over time: indeed, multiple forms of socialism unfolded, with their respective forms of visibility. As in all socialist regimes in Europe, there was a constant search and negotiation for the ‘approved’ or

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‘dominant’ style that could range from obsession with materiality to ideology expressed through immaterial forms. This chapter analysed the storage facilities of two museums: the Museum of Folk Art and those of the Museum of the Communist Party. In the MFA, after the 1977 earthquake and the move of its stores, muzeografi started to cooperate with the specialists from the Song to Romania festival. One prominent result of this work was the museum’s Artizanat Collection. This collection represents one objective of the socialist state’s policy to impose and proclaim equality among amateur, naïve and fine art. While all these changes were happening to the MFA, in the original location of that museum, the Lenin-Stalin Museum and its successor, the Marx-Engels-Lenin Museum, took very different approaches to visibility. Given the importance these institutions held in the political economy of the state, this chapter has shown that the two museums were not only depositories of objects, but also used to hide objects as an ambiguous form of concealment. The political economy led to specific aesthetic and ethical choices. For example, the two-dimensional displays and the immense glass windows seen at the opening of the Museum of The Communist Party were meant to display a clear departure from the recent communist past of Soviet inspiration that had been dominated by heavy materials and monumental statues and socialist realist paintings. Beyond objects, institutions were also repositories of privileges and habituses. For example, museum employees had certain economic and social benefits that were evident during the shortages of the 1980s. The next chapter describes the years after the demise of the socialist state. The economic and social inequalities during the late period of the socialist regime turned into major ideological and curatorial conflicts in the new post-socialist regime. For example, the hidden Stalinist-inspired statues became valuable and valorized in the early 1990s as a reaction to the decision taken more than ten years before to hide them. Doing so represented an ambiguous form of rendering invisible an uncertain past. Therefore, on one level, communism did not end in the violent bloodshed of December 1989 but continued in many ways throughout the 1990s and can be traced in the present.

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5.1 Priests sprinkling holy water on the emblem of the socialist state. Fonds Dinescu-Caraman/ Film 14/ Image 1509, courtesy of the NMRP.

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What Is Left After a Revolution . . . Fragments

(. . .) this revolution was a miracle. The Holy Spirit descended for a moment, above the destiny of our people (. . .) [But] we should not delude ourselves, we need to remember the many who, until the last second of the power’s agony, were its supporters in the media and in the public institutions. The majority did not participate. Nicolau, Rădulescu and Huluță 1990: 336

On Christmas Day 1989, dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu and his wife, Elena, were executed after a mock trial. The execution and its urgency was mirrored by the similarly abrupt dismantling of other key symbols of the communist regime. The fall of Ceaușescu and his acolytes is commonly called the ‘Revolution’, a spontaneous protest against dictatorship. Even so, the involvement of the army and the massacre that took place during those days in some of Romania’s cities, as well as the omnipresence of Ion Iliescu and other ex-Communist Party members who came to positions of power after December 1989, made some people think that Ceaușescu’s defenestration could be more accurately characterized as a coup d’état (Gallagher 2005; Tismăneanu 2003; Stewart 1998; Roper 2000). The Ceaușescus may have left the stage of power, but the basic communist apparatus continued to function. Although a good deal of continuity remained in Romania’s public institutions, inside what was to become the future National Museum of the Romanian Peasant in Bucharest, a keen photographer was taking photos, like the one introducing this chapter, which captured the atmosphere of the revolution. Objects, statues and other symbols of the communist regime were removed from display. The exhibition panels and glass cases were taken out piece by piece and smashed with a hammer. Even the walls covered with glass or boards inscribed with slogans about the achievements of the socialist state, were torn apart. Iron brackets, used to hold in place the false walls of the exhibition rooms, were pulled down, leaving huge holes. Those items which escaped destruction were taken out of the building and thrown round the back of the museum, near the rubbish bins. Trucks came to take some of these discarded items, as well as parts of the archives, to other institutions like the Museum of National History and the National Archives. What was left, including boards from the display, printed propaganda material and documents from the museum’s offices, were thrown away or burned. The destruction was documented particularly through photography and film in order to relay very clearly this radical change to a broad audience. At the same time,

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the chapter suggests that these acts continued the tradition of mixing politics with religion, a practice dating back to Romania’s pre-communist past. In the second section of the chapter, I show how, despite the desire to eliminate all traces of the previous regime, people’s memories (not to mention their practices) could not be removed. Although the deletion of every trace of communism was meant to be ‘total’, that would never happen. No one was fired from the Museum of the Party, for example: its employees worked alongside the new employees of the NMRP. The chapter concludes with a consideration of how the extensive postcommunist ‘cleansing’ activities at the NMRP contribute to the literature on heritage as disruptive and healing in similar abrupt political transformations elsewhere.

Priests in the museum: A story of exorcism and sacralization As the epigraph at the start of this chapter suggests, during the 1990s Romanian society was affected enormously by the opposition between ‘the many’ who supported the old regime and ‘the few’ who participated in the revolution; between the two stereotypical denominations of ‘communists’ and ‘anti-communists’. In this process of differentiation, NMRP took a political side: it promoted an anti-communist discourse and made the change of regimes visible. As this chapter indicates, cultural institutions are not only fields where political decisions are mirrored, but also active agents in political transformations. The first privatization of a state institution in Romania was not related to industry, agriculture or any other activity sustaining the basic needs of the population. It focused instead on the field of culture. As Minister of Culture in the newly formed Frontul Salvării Naționale, [the Front of National Salvation, FSN], Andrei Pleșu signed the first official document of privatization: the Political Publishing House (where Ceaușescu’s speeches were printed) became Humanitas, which was owned by a very good friend of the minister, the philosopher Gabriel Liiceanu (Înapoi la argument – ‘Horia Roman Patapievici and Gabriel Liiceanu’, 2010). Minister Pleșu also appointed directors of the National Theatre and of the Museum of the Party (Şerban 2006). As the minister later affirmed in a filmed interview in Muzeul de la Şosea (2006), in that period he had the power to ‘make or break new institutions’. This is how the Museum of the Party was dismantled and made into the Museum of the Romanian Peasant; the artist Horia Bernea was named as director. Many years after the decision was taken, Pleșu remembered: ‘There was a need for somebody to “exorcise” with his personal power, that type of place’ (Muzeul de la Şosea 2006). Horia Bernea was able to do just that. On 5 February 1990, Bernea and his team entered the Museum of the Party and started to dismantle its displays. With devotion, creativity and the charisma to persuade many employees to support his cause, the new director literally transformed the space exactly as the minister had hoped. Bernea’s efforts were not limited to the most visible representations of change, though: one year later, he brought in priests and asked them to perform a ritual that would cleanse and purify the museum building.

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5.2 Priests sprinkling holy water on former exhibits from the Museum of the Party, including the busts of Marx, Engels and Lenin. Fonds Dinescu-Caraman/ Film 14/ Image 1517, courtesy of the NMRP.

The image above is representative of what happened: the statue of Marx, Engels and Lenin was ‘purified’. Employees and their acquaintances assisted, carrying holy water in a bucket, showing the priests where to go and how to open new rooms, joking, mocking and laughing, making the sign of the cross, bowing their heads and singing with the priests. Photographs and testimonial films shot at the time document the process. The latter include the sounds that employees remember: echoes of voices in empty rooms, the crunch of shattered glass on the floor, as well as the noise of hammers and bulldozers. On top of these, the songs of the priests – ‘Christ is Risen from the Death, by Death He trampled upon Death’. The hymn ‘Christ is Risen’ is sung in the Romanian Orthodox Church for forty days after Easter Sunday in all the ceremonies that take place in the church, be they marriages, funerals, Sunday liturgies or blessing

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5.3 and 5.4 Priests in a devastated museum. Previously the walls had been hung with pictures, documents and display boards, and the glass cases had housed exhibits. Fonds Dinescu-Caraman/ Film 14/ Images 1508 and 1514, courtesy of the NMRP.

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ceremonies like the one discussed here. It is possible that the priests were asked to come and purify the building at that time of year, and consequently sang the hymn as part of their everyday ceremonies. Still, I consider that this overlapping is not arbitrary, and that Easter, and its significance of resurrection in the Romanian Orthodox tradition, lent even more importance to the purification event. The metaphor of the hymn was powerful in its meaning for the museum: re-birth. According to some museum staff, the communist past was seen as Evil and as Death itself. These pictures capture empty rooms, dismantled displays, smashed bricks and mortar and huge symbols of communism, like the emblem of the Romanian communist state, broken into pieces. Each conjure up feelings and memories. They make us think at a variety of emotions: joy, fear, irony, even mockery for some, ‘duty’

5.5 ‘Start towards the future!’ Fonds Dinescu-Caraman/ Film 14/ Image 1513, courtesy of the NMRP.

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for others. Although sometimes some of the participants in the ritual seemed to enjoy the statues’ fate, film footage also manages to capture how rigorous participants were. Locked doors are opened and the priests are taken into the little corners of each room of the (now emptied) exhibition space as well as the offices and even the storage spaces. Following the camera, the viewer gains a fresh perspective: the ‘backstage’ of the museum. These pictures convey a sense of the split between apparent transparency and communist censorship. This attempt to penetrate the space and show it in a fresh way can be seen as a symbolical taking into possession. Participants believed the communist regime robbed them of not only a space, but also time. By conquering the space, they gained possession of the ability to control both time and the recollection of it, using photography. Figure 5.5 shows an ironic situation: an optimistic communist slogan meets the ‘future’ of its own disappearance. In the NMRP’s image archive from the 1990s, Figure 5.6 attracted my attention. This picture shows people moving about, priests sprinkling holy water, and Horia Bernea on the right of the image with an icon of the Virgin Mary hung on the wall above his head. The focal point of the photo is a poster glued on the wall. It shows a ruin, the remains of a destroyed building. The caption reads: ‘Romanian Heritage’ (in French, Patrimoine Roumain). One can imagine how just one year earlier, in the same office, the director of the communist institution had probably sat with the portrait of Nicolae Ceaușescu hung above his head on one of the walls. This image of a ruin in the NMRP director’s office echoed how, during communism, heritage sites were turned into state institutions or demolished (Suditu 2016). For example, to build the Palace of Justice in Bucharest, surrounded by large boulevards and residential neighbourhoods of modern blocks of flats, Ceaușescu had ordered that one of the city’s oldest buildings, the Vacărești Monastery, be totally destroyed. Built between 1713 and 1736, the monastery was considered one of the most precious monuments in Bucharest. After 1848, it functioned as a penitentiary but after 1973 lay empty for some time before finally being demolished in 1986, despite protests. In the final ten years of the communist regime, another 485 hectares of old buildings were torn down in central Bucharest to build the world-famous House of the People. As architects like to point out, these buildings had covered an area the size of Venice (Iosa 2006). This image of a ruin is a reminder of the old monastery and of the old texture of Bucharest. The monastery’s absence is what is recollected as ‘Romanian Heritage’ through this image. Indeed the radical restructuring of Bucharest described above haunted many of the NMRP’s projects. One of these was the publication of the 2000 issue of the museum’s anthropological journal, Martor, which focused on this destructive time. The photograph used on the cover is significant in this case too. The name of the magazine, Martor, which in Romanian can be translated as ‘witness’, is written in yellow on a red background. It seems that the sky surrounding the remnants of the old church and the bulldozer’s wrecking ball are red as well. The demolition is

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5.6 The director’s office, 1991. Fonds Dinescu-Caraman/ Film 14/ Image 1510, courtesy of the NMRP.

seen as a tragic act in Romania’s history and represents just how much of its heritage was lost in the face of harsh communist/ socialist modernization. Three years later, in 2003, a fragment from another demolished church in Bucharest was inserted in the permanent display of the NMRP with a label saying: ‘This brick was taken from the remains of the Sfânta Vineri [Saint Friday] monastery. This monastery was destroyed in a very similar way to the Vacărești Monastery in 1986.’ This list of ruins and fragments of former communist destructions, like a material chain of cause and effect, links the NMRP with the ultimate site of the communist forces in Romania, the House of the People. It is as if the NMRP needed an enemy to fight against, in order to construct its own sacredness within its dislocated space. In so doing, it mirrored the way in which the socialist institutions constructed their power through similar processes of dislocation. Against a backdrop of piety, justice and revenge, the brick of a demolished church contained and conveyed the power of

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its whole and, once placed in the new NMRP, it justified the dismantling of the Museum of the Party. Talking of Horia Bernea’s attraction for fragments, a former researcher in his team at the NMRP affirmed in a published text: Horia Bernea always talks about this [fragments]. A detail, a fragment from a work of art displayed in a different context or background than the original one, he says, draws the attention and stirs the gaze and intrigues it. A finite ensemble is ”solved”, closed; it is less stimulatory than the vestige invested with value. The fragment, the ruin, the trace invites one to follow its path and to mentally reconstitue the objects, the culture and the spirituality from where it came. Manolescu 2001: [online publication]

This brick refers to an entire object – the monastery – just as sacred relics reference the bodies, deeds and powers of saints. The monastery/the destroyed church functions as a metonym. In an institution like the NMRP which dealt with Romanian heritage, the poster of a destroyed monastery together with the brick were efficient tools to explain the reason that had laid the foundations for the destruction at the NMRP and they also shed light on the quest for religiosity and its political nature during the 1990s. Only a fraction of the photos and films of the old displays’ dismantling still remain. Some of the images disappeared after one of the three museum photographers left, taking parts of the archive with him. A great importance was attached to the process of documenting the dismantling and re-making of the displays in those years. I argue that this documenting process also aimed to change beliefs. As Bridger and Pine (1998) suggest: The acts of protest themselves can be interpreted not as total catalyst of change, but as ritual acts of symbolic expressions of a much longer process. Bridger and Pine 1998: 5

In 2010, I showed some of the pictures reproduced above to one of the photographers who were still working for the museum. While looking at them, C.M. asked me: ‘Do you know what this is?’ He answered his own question very quickly: ‘It is the devils being taken out of the museum!’ His reply shows not only how the presence of the priests in the museum indicates the intense religiosity of Horia Bernea and his followers, but also how anti-communists supporters in the 1990s believed that anything to do with the communist past was ‘evil’. I have suggested previously (Cristea and Radu-Bucurenci 2008) that the extensive use of Christian symbols is a specific form of memorializing communism in post-socialist Romania. This chapter, built on that argument, suggests that such uses of religious symbols in commemorating the communist past are connected mostly with the Romanian cultural elite, which attempted to bring back values and ideas from the interwar period in Romania – including some fascist ones. In the discussion which followed I asked the photographer why he took pictures at that time and why the destruction mattered. C.M. (2010) said: ‘Because

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we felt we were doing something important (. . .) we were living through a historical moment.’ His answer indicates that the pictures were more than documenting a historical moment. As in Scribner’s (2003: 9) argument about a similar photographic project, the photographs formed ‘a project that registers the politics of memory’.1 Other authors such as the anthropologists Sue Bridger and Frances Pine (1998) and the historian Elizabeth Edwards (2001) have commented on the use of images of destruction at moments of political change. Because such images manage to construct knowledge about the past, Edwards affirms that photographs are ‘social actors, impressing, articulating and constructing fields of social actions in ways that would not have occurred if they did not exist’ (Edwards 2001: 17). Art historian Hans Belting (2004: 8) famously asked ‘where is the image?’ in his discussion about the where and when, the space and time, when an image appears. He argues that images appear in contexts of memorialization, closely connected to ideas of life in correlation to death and to disappearance. He also talks about the powerful material relationship which exists between images and the process of immortalization. Following Belting’s argument, the images taken in the early 1990s have a role in immortalizing the removal of certain items and bodies in order to leave space for others. The museum’s destruction was somehow a ‘where and when’ moment of making history and consequently, it activated people’s belief that the change was happening. Throughout the Soviet bloc, the socialist state was dismantled in public, in an extremely ritualistic way. It is undeniable that crowds of protestors spontaneously pulled down statues of Lenin, destroyed party slogans and replaced flags and other communist iconography with national or western symbols. This was the dramatic face of change, captured on camera throughout Eastern Europe. What the TV crews were less likely to record was the unchanging pattern of daily life, which went on much as before in many of the less central, off-camera regions. Bridger and Pine 1998: 5

In the museum’s case, the dismantling was certainly ritualistic, but as the quote above suggests, not necessarily representative of the entire political situation in the country. These photographs worked not only as witnesses of destruction, but also as ‘performative acts’ (see also Edwards 2001) which had political and social agency. A wave of annihilation of communist symbols took place in many public places and institutions in Romania during December 1989, and television images captured at length how a state of rage transformed into an immense sense of joy at that destruction. Paint was thrown over statues of communist leaders either before or after these were pulled off from bases in front of thousands of jubilant people. Portraits of Ceaușescu and other communist emblems were taken off the walls of factories, schools, police or army stations and smashed up or set on fire. Others were thrown from balconies or high windows in front of crowds who watched the scenes in an intense state of excitement. Yet even though these images of destruction dominated Romania media for several weeks, the country did not change very much.

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Talking about the events in December 1989, the historian Timothy Garton Ash affirmed: Curiously enough, the moment when people in the West finally thought there was a revolution was when they saw television pictures of Romania: crowds, tanks, shooting, blood in the streets. They said: ‘That – we know that is a revolution,’ and of course the joke is that it was the only one that wasn’t. Tismăneanu 2003: 233

The role of the massacre, and the capture of it through images, were, according to many people that watched the events live, proof that a revolution took place. As I will show in the third section of this chapter, following free elections and a brutal dispersal of protesters in University Square, a new type of communism, through its second echelon of leaders, assumed power. In contrast to the national situation, erasing the previous regime in the NMRP took many months (if not years) rather than days, culminating in the curatorial conflict discussed in Chapters 5 and 6 of this book.2 In a similarly powerful and manipulatory sense, the images of destruction also have the paradoxical ability to document not only the change, but also how the museum looked before. When looking at these images, people recall not only the final deletion, but also the fragments of the past. The deletion of any trace of communism, meant to be ‘total,’ in a way, never took place. Former employees of the communist institution have spoken about how the museum was before. As these testimonies suggest, fragments from that ‘deleted’ past always re-appear. As Latour and Weibel (2002) point out, things are destroyed precisely because they are important – because of their value. Otherwise why bother to invest so much energy in taking them into pieces? The photos and films shot in the NMRP in the early 1990s indicate that the subjects of the ‘sacralization’ were not only the exhibition space and storage facilities, but – crucially – the museum’s personnel.3 Figure 5.7 shows the priests in the museum performing a ritual in front of its staff. What does this image reveal? What does it hide? In front of the camera, and in front of the priests, the museum staff seemed to be united in a common understanding of the events, by what Maurice Bloch calls ‘the formalised language of the ritual’, a language where those in attendance lacked ‘authority’ (Bloch 2004: 81). Looking closely, one can see how some people are holding candles, others not; I observe different inclinations of the head, different postures and gazes. What are the people thinking? One cannot know for sure whether taking part in this ritual was a matter of sincere belief, duty, curiosity, fear or a mixture of all these. I recognize about half the people in the image. They were still employed at the museum when I was researching there years later. Some are researchers who had been at the Institute of Folklore, some are administrative staff who had worked previously at the former Museum of the Party, while others are muzeografi from the Museum of Folk Art (that merged with the Village Museum in 1978); last but not least, there are friends and associates of the museum. Associates

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5.7 Museum staff praying with the priests in the museum. Fonds Dinescu-Caraman/ Film 14/ Image 1535, courtesy of NMRP.

are people employed by state institutions in Romania, including museums, for specific projects. Some of the friends and associates of the museum became its employees: in the image, to the right of the priests’ group, looking behind himself stands Virgil Niţulescu, a passionate promoter of cultural events. He would later become director of the institution (2010–16 and 2019–present). In this case, the ritual seems to unite a multitude of people and their various institutional trajectories into a common corpus. It locates them within a special type of time: the time of the ritual, introduced into the museum space by Horia Bernea. Most of the priests in the image came from the church across the road from the museum in which Bernea was buried in 2000. As C.N. (2010) stated, while director of the NMRP, Bernea maintained very good relationships with high-ranking members of the Romanian Orthodox Church. Horia Bernea brought what Bloch (2004: 81) called ‘the formalised language of ritual’ into the museum so as to impose consensus

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in a country profoundly affected by tensions associated with the fall of one regime and the raising of another order. This ritual was meant to oppose socialist practices, aesthetics and ethics by using ‘unusual’ methodologies of coming together, of collection, indexation and display inspired by surrealist use of fragments (Edwards 1997; Kelly 2007). As a result, an eclectic assemblage of objects, people and methods was bound together by Bernea’s dedication as well as his particular view on what is valuable and what makes the museum an art object that is ‘alive’ and ‘healing’.

1990s’ Neo-Byzantinism The NMRP changed its approach by combining contemporary art practices with religious symbols. To paraphrase the words of a Romanian art historian referring to setting up of the NMRP during the early 1990s, the museum space was transformed into a work of art by means of re-sacralization (Titu 2003: 178). This idea is also confirmed by museum employees, like P.L. who affirmed (2011) that the way visitors perceive the new institution is like ‘a museum full of crucifixes’. Even if in Romanian society at large the second echelon of communist leaders remained in power, in the museum’s space anything which was considered ‘communist’ was valued less than items of religious art which were meant to be as powerful ideologically as the Marxist and communist doctrines had been in the past. Some walls of the permanent exhibition rooms were inscribed and painted by Bernea himself, so that they resembled the painted walls of old Orthodox churches. His decorations deliberately referenced the painted walls of ancient Pompeii so as to evoke the myth of common roots with Greek and Roman antiquity (Baconschi and Bernea 2000). The first rooms in the new museum were all named using religious themes (The Beauty of the Crucifix, The Crucifix – Tree of Life, Icons I and Icons II). The first ethnographic expeditions were not to villages to collect ethnographic objects, but to monasteries and churches all over the country. Between 1990 and 1993, the museum bought six wooden churches. Three of them remained in situ, with the museum paying for their maintenance. The two others were transported and exhibited in the museum. In the museum grounds, a wooden church was installed to neutralize the presence of the socialist-realist mosaic constructed in the communist era and to build in ideas of the museum as a healing space, in line with the ideas of heritage as disruptive and healing (Basu and Modest 2014; Butler 2012). To reinforce the reference to a religious theme, the official opening of the new display in the NMRP coincided with Easter 1993. As one former employee recalled, the opening date was not arbitrary; it was chosen on purpose to indicate a ‘resurrection from communism which equals a resurrection from death’ (Interview with M.C., 2010). The fact that the artworks Bernea produced in the museum space and on its walls were profoundly influenced by religious Orthodox themes was not unique in the European context. Other Eastern Europe artists did the same during the 1980s and

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5.8 Detail of walls painted by Horia Bernea to look old and worn by time – part of the NMRP’s permanent display. Fonds Dinescu-Caraman/ File 236/ Image 65, courtesy of the NMRP.

1990s. Many Romanian art historians like Pintilie (1994), Cârneci (1999), Titu (2003) and Dan (2006), classify this recurrence of religious themes in contemporary art as Neo-Byzantinism. As art-historian Magda Cârneci explains: The first signs of this trend [i.e. Neo-Byzantinism] appear around the 1970s, when due to the renewal of Stalinist Ideology under Ceaușescu’s dictatorial regime, the cultural environment experienced isolation, interiority and individualism. (. . .) The spiritual was channeled toward archaic or Orthodox Christian Traditions. Cârneci 1999: 99

Both Cârneci (1999) and Titu (2003) argue that Neo-Byzantine art was a kind of reaction to the progressive communist modernity prevalent during the 1970s and 1980s. The artists’ affiliation with popular customs and the spiritual life of the church was a form of cultural resistance (see Cârneci 1999: 101). By being an ‘active and conscious orientation towards the sacred (. . .) neo-byzantinism is a retrospective attitude’, says Titu. This attitude ‘is meditative and feeble [and directed] actively towards understanding the inexplicable origins of the being’ (Titu 2003:167–8). To explain the above quote, I would argue that Titu used many carefully nuanced terms to talk about a difficult moment in the recent history of Romania. NeoByzantinism was the expression in art of a re-adaptation of right-wing ideas to uphold mystical thinking and the phenomenological appropriation of religion during the

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communist regime. But although the Neo-Byzantine project triumphed at the NMRP, as Horia Bernea himself acknowledged, working as ‘a curative museology and a heritage healing’ (Butler 2012) there are limits to this destruction and sacralization. In an un-screened interview with a Romanian TV producer, Bernea talks about the NMRP project as a continuation of the ideas of his father, the ethnologist Ernest Bernea (see Tatulici 2000: 89). He also talks about the difficulty of eradicating communism and its symbols completely. After a pause, he affirms: ‘[w]e did not manage to demolish this thing [that was touched by communism] not even now. . . in the people’ (Tatulici 2000: 90). People’s work habits and practices cannot be deleted – these are indelible testimonies of the past. Anthropologists Katherine Verdery (2012) and Roland Littlewood (2009) investigated the correlation between different spheres of cleansing at the passage from communism to post-communism. Verdery talks about the imposition of lustration laws at the time of the fall of communist regimes in Eastern Europe by using Mary Douglas’ ([1970] 1991) theory of pollution. Verdery shows how lustration etymologically means cleaning and clearing, separating good from evil and, last but not least, anticommunists from what they perceived as being ‘communists’. In the absence of an early lustration law in Romania, like the ones in Germany or the Czech Republic (Stan 2013), in Romania, lustration took a very personal form. My research shows how the cultural elite in Romania found an equivalent to legal lustration: the strong opposition to any remnants of communist traces being visible to the public. In the following section of the chapter, I return to the image of the staff assisting in the cleansing ritual in the museum. Among the people gathered around the priests were former employees from the Museum of the Party. In interviews with them, I analyse their memories of destruction, and of how the Museum of the Party looked prior to it.

Paper clips: Fragmentation and assemblage As NMRP employees remember, nobody was fired in the 1990s while institutions changed. This meant that original employees of a given institution worked alongside colleagues newly appointed to the successor institution. The former director of the Party Museum requested voluntary retirement (interviews with D.A., N.A. and V.F., 2010). People left the museum when they found a better job, but this happened only rarely. Many former employees of the Museum of the Party worked in the newly created NMRP for many years, despite the verbal complaints of other employees, who considered that the future of the institution would have been totally different without the presence of the original employees (Interview with R.S., 2011). During my fieldwork at the NMRP, I met at least five people who had worked in the communist institution before the 1990s. All women, they included an archivist, two cleaners and two attendants. The two cleaners became attendants in the new museum, and the archivist remained in a similar position to the one she had before. I heard of many other people who had been employed at the Party Museum prior to

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its next iteration, but the purpose of these stories is not to make an inventory of those who remained working in the museum, but rather to describe how the changing of regimes and the changing of the function of the museum institution affected people’s lives. D.A was in her forties at the time of the 1989 revolution. She started working at the Museum of the Party in 1970s as a translator and as a guide. She recounted not only how the museum looked like during communism and her daily job as a guide. She described with a certain irony in her tone how, in the early 1990s, she was asked to throw away all the documents from the office of the communist director – but to keep the paper clips. ‘In those years there was a real shortage of office items,’ she explained. ‘And the point of socialist principles of modest consumption and recycling is very important to remember. ‘But they asked us to throw away everything,’ she said. She explained this deletion of communist traces in terms of the fact that Horia Bernea was an artist; hence ‘he wanted to throw away everything’. Later on, however, researchers and artists at the NMRP – whom she refers to as ‘they’ – realized that some of the discarded items had been valuable (Interview with D.A., 2010). As I already have shown in Chapter 2, the distinction between ‘us’ and ‘them’ indicates that opposing identities were formed in the 1990s and early 2000s. My second interview with former employees of the Museum of the Party was with V.F., who worked as a cleaner in the communist institution. After 1990, she remained in the same position for many years at the new museum (NMRP) but would later become an exhibition attendant. It was in this role that I met her in a winter’s day in 2011, sitting in a chair and supervising the few visitors entering the exhibition room on the second floor of the new museum. The silence in the large high-ceilinged room filled the space and made one feel the cold even more. – ‘How was the museum back then?’ I ask. – ‘It was nice, she said, ‘very nice and clean’. [Pause] – ‘What did it contain?’ – ‘I do not know to describe it. . .red carpets everywhere. I do not know to describe it to you exactly; I was only cleaning it.’ Interview with V.F., 2010

She told me a bit of how, in fact, she had spent much of her time cleaning the glass cases and the walls covered in glass in the exhibition rooms. I understood from her that the ‘permanent’ display consisted in fact of walls covered in glass and cardboard walls with slogans ‘glued’ onto them. She remembered that, in the early 1990s, when all of the Party Museum’s displays were dismantled, these false cardboard walls – as well as entire glass walls that had been attached to the original walls of the exhibition rooms – were taken out, loaded into trucks and carried away – nobody knows where. Iron brackets were used to support the huge glass walls. V.F. remembered that (as noted above) once the brackets were taken down, huge holes were left in the walls. Piles of shattered glass remained on the floor. She and other

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employees spent months sweeping up the shattered glass that lay everywhere. The employees who had previously been tasked with maintaining the museum’s immaculate glass walls were now being asked to help disposed of that very same glass (i.e., the dismantling of the display). In her answers, V.F. was reserved. Long pauses were common. Even though she had known me for many years, she seemed suspicious of my attempts to find out about how the museum had looked during communism. She seemed to suggest that in the present institution, asking about its socialist past was not done. Her reluctance to talk about the content of the museum by limiting herself to only describing its form implies not only a refusal to enter ideology issues, but also her preference to talk about her current position and the type of work she was doing during my research. Her promotion from a cleaner to a room attendant may also have made her reluctant to discuss certain issues about the present. The difficulty here arises also from the transformation that she experienced personally in those years. She witnessed with her own eyes the abrupt shift from one regime to another, the pulling down of displays, the sweeping of an immense quantity of shattered glass that she used to dutifully clean in the previous regime: in other words, she witnessed the change of values. Moreover, she saw herself getting old: if in the 1980s she was around thirty, now she was in her late fifties, about to retire. The irony of this seismic change might also come from how the display changed in the 1990s. From a ‘clean’ museum with glass walls and neat wooden boards, the institution took on a radically different look in the 1990s: there were no glass cases, labels or explanatory texts. Unenclosed objects could be touched by enthusiastic visitors. The work of a museum attendant became much more demanding. Her different jobs in the museum valued different things: there was a shift from order and cleanliness towards visitor participation and being present. Apart from the paper clips, the NMRP kept other fragments from preceding communist institutions, be they items, fragments of items, people or their ways of doing things. In the previous chapter I have showed how Room 45 functioned as the hidden store of statues from the Stalinist museum. The fragment always wants to rejoin the whole and fragments of communist symbols to regain status after attempts at their destruction. Similarly, art historian Reuben Fowkes (2002) tells the story of how a Stalin statue had different fates in socialist and post-socialist Hungary. After communism ended, the monument was torn to pieces; Stalin’s hand was retrieved by an artist and then sold to a museum. This section of the chapter showed how, in the life of material fragments, one can see how people reuse bits of items used before and how fragments of past buildings, statues or institutions (with their documents and paper clips) are important in the present for more than just their material presence. One can see a correlation between materiality, modes of doing and practices. In the last section of this chapter, I discuss the relationship between the museum and the University Square Protests.

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‘Living’ museography: ‘When museums disrupt and heal’ Outside the museum itself, fierce debates raged over the fate of Romania. The museum was not only a mirror of the political events taking place, but was also a stage for political action. While the NMRP’s old display was being dismantled, in Bucharest’s University Square a new wave of anti-communist protest was gathering momentum in the spring of 1990. Supporters of parties from the interwar period (Liberal and Peasant Parties) took to the streets. After the fall of Ceaușescu’s regime, a new government was installed. Frontul Salvării Naţionale [The Front for National Salvation, FSN] was in charge of taking the first decisions about the organization of the new state and the first free elections. FSN was composed of people who had been revolutionaries during the events of December 1989, dissidents like the Minister of Culture, Andrei Pleșu, and exCommunist Party members like Ion Iliescu and Petre Roman (who became President and Prime Minister respectively after the elections). Before the elections in May 1990, this second echelon of communists (and their aspirations to power) sparked further protests in Bucharest. Old members of the historical parties from the interwar period, many of whom had been imprisoned in the 1950s when communism took hold, started to protest in University Square. Their hatred, which had been distilled over forty years of communism, erupted in the 1990s in the central squares of main cities in Romania. In Timișoara, the city in western Romania, where the 1989 ‘revolution’ started, protesters asked for a law preventing former members of Communist Party from occupying positions of power. In Bucharest, protestors from all social backgrounds made reference to the ‘proclamation of Timişoara’. For many months, students and intellectuals gathered in University Square, and the protests did not stop when elections were won by Iliescu and the FSN with an 80 per cent majority. Outcries against ‘communism’ started up once more. The protesters included many researchers and artists working at the NMRP as well as important ‘friends’ of the museum, such as Marian Munteanu, a very wellknown figure of the University Square Movement. Museum employees, including recently employed researchers at the NMRP, took to the streets of Bucharest and visited University Square to conduct research. They published a book with slogans recalling the events of December 1989 (Nicolau, Rădulescu and Huluță 1990). I transcribe some of the inscriptions that were handwritten in the book to mirror the graffiti on the walls of the buildings in the square: 1 There is no democracy without political pluralism. 2 Who is small, waves his hand and can’t spell? [referring to Nicolae Ceaușescu]. 3 Down with the analphabet! [referring to Elena Ceaușescu, the wife of the president]. 4 I can hear the larvae; unseen butterflies, that want to go back to the worm that ate the country.

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5 We want to make trousers out of your skin [referring to scarcity and imposed modest consumption]. 6 Do not forget Timișoara. 7 Heroes in Timișoara are immortal. 8 [They] need to be judged! 9 Down with the dictatorship. 10 Down with communism. 11 Down with communism. 12 Down with Ceauşescu. 13 In Sibiu the people are shot. 14 Down with Ceauşescu. 15 Down with Ceauşescu. 16 Down with Ceauşescu. The title of the book – ‘We will die, but we will be free!’ – indicates a decisive movement towards a revolutionary mood. This movement, as well as the idea of urgent publication, was catalyzed by the University Square protests. The slogans from December 1989, painted on the walls of the university buildings and written by hand in the pages of this book, were a means of sustaining the new protests. The book, which gathered memories of those days, was a reminder of the ‘revolution’ and, in a certain way, the first interpretation of it. Despite the results of the elections, for the protestors in the square, the revolution was still very much on. Because of this political determinism and division, the new president, Iliescu, asked the miners from the Jiu Valley to come and restore order in the capital. The miners were also expected to physically and symbolically ‘clean’ the University Square. Miners came to Bucharest by train and, controlled and conducted by security officers (Rus 2007), they attacked and beat not only the protesters in the square but anyone who had a beard and glasses and looked like an ‘intellectual’ (Cesăreanu 2003). During the confrontations that took place in June 1990, 1,300 people were injured and imprisoned, four people were killed and many others died later as a result of their injuries (Raport Asociaţia Victimelor Mineriadelor 2008). Scores of institutions in Bucharest (headquarters of historical parties, universities, institutes of research) were vandalized during those events (Raport Asociatia Victimelor Mineriadelor 2008), in the same attempt to destroy ‘the intellectuals’. These confrontations between anticommunist protesters and miners came to be regarded as an internal/ civil war between the ‘working classes’ and ‘bourgeois intellectuals’ (Stan 2012) – despite the presence of a range of social classes in the square, as more recent documentary films indicate (După Revoluţie [After the Revolution] (2010)). In opposition to the protests in the square, rallies in support of Iliescu took place in other parts of the city and country. Here, Iliescu was described as a national hero

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and the University Square Movement was accused of being composed of profascists (Cesăreanu 2003). Iliescu himself used the terms ‘golani’ [‘thugs’/ ‘hooligans’] when referring to protesters, and the same terms were used also by the public television station when describing protesters in University Square. The use of such terms as ‘hooligans’, ‘thugs’, and ‘fascists’ sustains the idea that in the ‘Piaţa Universităţii’ context the same rhetoric as the one used by the communist propaganda in the 1950s was utilized. This rhetoric is characterized by a binary opposition of ideas and values (communism opposed to fascism, order opposed to disorder caused by hooligans and thugs). I argue that the hatred of the 1990s was a response to the political convulsions and ‘class struggle’ of the moment of the installation of the socialist regime in Romania during the 1950s: working class opposed to bourgeoisie, fascism and communism. After Ion Iliescu characterized them as thugs, the protesters in the square adopted the title, proclaiming themselves ‘golan’ and wearing these names as badges of honour quite literally by pinning them on their clothes. The folk song chanted by a famous Romanian folk singer rapidly became the hymn of the square: ‘Better hooligans than activists, better dead than communists!’ The words ‘thug’ and ‘hooligan evoke not only Iliescu’s terminology, but also the interwar novel written by the famous historian of religions, Mircea Eliade, Hooligans (Eliade [1935] 1992).4 Many protesters in the square were supporters of historical parties, and had deeply held right-wing political inclinations. As many authors have argued, the national face of Romanian communism legitimated pro-fascist ideas and pro-fascist authors from the interwar period (Verdery 1991; Stan 2012). This is how authors like Mircea Eliade, the philosopher of nihilism Emil Cioran, philosophers of culture like Constantin Noica and Lucian Blaga, as well as the ethnologist Ernest Bernea, came to be published during the last years of the regime. Their ideas of ‘salvation through culture’ (Noica [1978] 1996 but also Liiceanu 1983 and Pleșu 1993) or of escaping history through a mystical interpretation of religion (see Eliade [1954] 1991 and Noica 1989) gathered momentum in the 1990s. These authors and their ideas influenced the thinking of many intellectuals in the last decade of the communist regime and constituted the basic readings of anti-communists in the 1990s. The anti-communist movement in ‘Piaţa Universităţii’ not only opposed the communists in power in the 1990s, but also made reference to, and quoted, similar revolts that took place in the period preceding the installation of communism to power. These events from the past were re-enforced in the present, repeating the same old cultural opposition that would become the historical pattern of twentiethcentury Romania: left versus right, workers versus intellectuals, communism versus fascism. The political affiliation of the museum as anti-communist (on the side of the ‘hooligans’ and celebrating disorder in the square and in the museum) was already known. In an interview with M.V. (2010) a researcher at the NMRP, he stated that in the 1990s the NMRP was known as a ‘far-right institution’ among other cultural institutions supported by the Romanian Ministry of Culture. As people who worked at

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the NMRP confirm and recall in interviews, miners entered the museum and searched for weapons, dollars and cigarettes. Their visit found the museum in the process of transformation and devoid of items and display. As D.A. (2010) noted, miners asked for certain cupboards to be opened and found a pistol that was said to have originated from the display of the Party Museum. Their visit to the museum was explained by the fact that the museum was near the headquarters of the secret police. More to the point perhaps, the miners were aware of the political views of the museum’s researchers and artists, as well as of director Bernea and his supporters in the Ministry of Culture and other civil society organizations, like Group for Social Dialogue (GDS), a non-governmental body formed in the 1990s. All were anticommunists and followers of Noica’s precepts (see Tismăneanu 2003).5

Conclusion This chapter has shown the intricate relationship between objects and people, and how in the attempts to cleanse the museum space of communist things, former employees of the Museum of the Party started to be considered as ‘vestiges from the past’, objectified as communists, and marginalized. The porosity of museums, and in this case of NMRP, made the institution a target for the miners’ visit. While participating in the events in Piaţa Universităţii as ‘hooligans’ (writing down and publishing in a creative form the anti-communist slogans that were painted on the old buildings in the square), artists, art historians and researchers from the NMRP believed they were materialising a ‘creative enlightenment’. This conviction was a consequence of the fact that those NMRP employees belonged to a certain elite in Romanian culture, the humanist intelligentsia, which was related to key institutions in post-communist Romania: the Humanitas Publishing House, GDS, and various journals associated with these institutions. The museum was believed to be an antidote museum – a museum that would heal the faults of the past. The museum had various types of employees: some who marched in the streets and others who talked to the miners and convinced them to leave without any harm being done. Various people in the museum managed to adapt to the political situation in different ways. The museum having many spaces, practices and forces at work mean it could support or resist certain regimes at the same time. Asavei (2020) talks about scales of resistance to power. ‘Resistance depends, in other words, on the type of regime it is directed against, as well as on the various understandings of the political’ (Asavei 2020: 15). The next chapter will show three faces of communism and how the NMRP turned from a museum which, in the first years of its existence, desperately tried to delete any trace of its communist past, into one of the few institutions in Bucharest to research and exhibit communism.

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6.1 The busts of Marx, Engels and Lenin covered by snow, 2010. Photo by Gabriela Nicolescu.

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Three Faces of Communism

In February 2010, when I started my research at the National Museum of the Romanian Peasant (NMRP) in Bucharest, it was winter. The monument to Marx, Engels and Lenin laid in the museum’s back garden, partly covered by snow. The nose of each of the three figures had been cut off. It was intriguing to find such a powerful representation of the former communist regime thrown out of a museum theoretically exhibiting ‘peasant’ art. But, as I argue in the conclusion to this book, in contrast to other former communist capitals, where museums have been constructed specifically to house items from the communist past, in Romania, such statues were for many years unceremoniously dumped outside main museum buildings or relegated to improvised storage spaces positioned tentatively between destruction, mockery and care.1 As noted in Chapter 5, in Romania the demise of the Ceauşescu regime was followed by a second echelon of communists coming to power. This political context had two important effects on the life of socialist material symbols during post-socialism. On the one hand, it froze any attempt to build public institutions to interrogate the recent communist regime; on the other, it radicalized anti-communist discourse. For example, two important museums were opened in former prisons in order to exhibit Romanian communism on a huge scale: one in the very north of the country, and another one 100 kilometres north of Bucharest run by two anticommunist private initiatives.2 The absence of such a museum in the capital city, however, meant that many material fragments from the former regime, including the statue of the three communist leaders, lingered in unexpected places: there was no obvious setting where they could be grouped together. Across Eastern and Central Europe in 2022 there were museums that were dedicated to presenting socialist and Soviet propaganda, such as the Statue Park in Budapest, the Muzeon Park of Arts in Moscow, the Museum of Socialist Art in Sofia, the Sofia Central Museum, and The Museum of Communism in Prague. To date, however, no similar park exists in Romania, and this absence tells something about the particular natures of Romanian post-socialist regimes. Looking at the photo taken that day in February I felt that the statue’s vulnerable, naked, vandalized presence, and its placing near a well-covered bulldozer, was not only peculiar, but also full of paradoxes. What looked more cared for and valued, the bulldozer or this statue, a symbol of an era, which had most probably been displayed in the museum before the fall of communism? Despite their undignified condition, the posture of the leaders and their determined looks seemed still to retain some sort of

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power. With their noses broken, they were in an in-between state: in the back garden, near the rubbish bins, but still not thrown away. Was this statue the one purified with holy water, prayers and incense that I discussed in the previous chapter? Most probably. Some years later, the statue almost became extremely visible when it was slated to appear in an exhibition organized by the NMRP at the Museum of Young Art in Vienna (April–May 2006). As part of the curatorial team of that exhibition I witnessed how workers tried to lift the statue and get it into a transporter lorry, but without success: it was too heavy. The statue remained in the rear yard, while other items were chosen to represent Romanian Stalinism on the international stage. After that moment of ‘almost glory’, obscene drawings covered the faces of the three leaders for some weeks. It is very likely that museum employees drew them. Other staff members washed off the graffiti. One night, the busts were found to have no noses, even though the rear yard was protected by the museum’s guards. Rumour had it that the person responsible was the museum’s fire officer, who had trained as a philosopher. This person was well known at the museum for his (loudly expressed) anti- communist views. This story of the statue indicates the complexity of how different layers of history and value co-exist in ambiguous, indecisive relationships, caught between destruction and care. I will call this state an ‘iconoclash’, using Latour and Weibel’s term (2002). The indecision about what to do with this statue – a ‘medium’ which embodies a symbol of the former regime, to use Hans Belting’s (2004) term. Similarly, this chapter deals with different modes of building against, caring for or exhibiting communism in this museum as in-between care, neglect and contestation, as an epitome of the social dissonance in the current Romanian society, where all the three perspectives described below continue to coexist and reinforce each other. The chapter has three parts. The first section deals with the ‘accusatory look’. It talks about political party items found in the museum’s unofficial storage rooms, which instead of being thrown out became subjects of critique. The second section discusses folk collections’ categories and their meaning for the present institution. The third examines the post-modernist playful collecting process and the use of everyday objects in a museum context. By talking about three different approaches towards communism, manifested at the same time, this chapter also talks about the distribution of the museum’s space between different groups and policies, as well as about the intersection between space and time, about special moments/ events. This particular interpretation of museum biography and practices symbolically breaks the walls of the museum and diligently reflects and illustrates the fashionable ideas present in the wider society. Are museums spaces of ‘in-betweeness’? What happens when different people working in the museum space dispute it and each other, when different hands at work disagree (in) the museum space?

Anger: Communism as the Plague In 1997, a team of researchers and artists in the museum, coordinated by its director, Horia Bernea, opened an exhibition related to the socialist period in Romania. The

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show was located in the underground of the museum, near the toilets, in two connected rooms and was supposed ‘to disgust the visitor as much as clogged toilets would do’ (Bernea and Nicolau 1998: 226). The curators’ accusatory view of socialism is made very obvious in the museum layout and in the name of the display: The Plague: A Political Installation. One can see how multiple paintings of communist leaders refer to or talk about the excessive cult of personality, statues of Lenin placed in odd positions (looking at the wall, placed near fire-extinguishers or with painted-on eyes), four aluminium ashtrays at the four corners of a red carpet and in the middle a porcelain vase received as a gift by Ceaușescu himself. Other objects include a vase of plastic flowers to refer to the way in which these symbols imitate immortality and a dusty worker’s cap. A switched-off lightbulb with the inscription ‘Light comes from the East’, reminds one of the geopolitical positions of Romania: so close to the former USSR, but also the meeting point of East and West on the European continent. The upper level of the walls is painted greyish blue, with red hammer and sickle motifs. On the walls one can see glued newspaper cuttings from The Starch publication of the 1950s. Underlined in red are the names of peasants praised or imprisoned for accepting or rejecting collectivization.3 One installation exhibited in the first room drew my attention particularly. The sculpture of the two Lenins giving a speech to each other looks like ‘Lenin preaches to Lenin’. This duo resembles Giulio Paolini’s postmodern sculpture, L’altra figura [The Other Figure], where two identical plaster heads of a Roman copy of a Hellenistic bust are placed one before the other, as if in a kind of dialogue of gazes and thoughts.

6.2 The Plague: A Political Installation, 2011. Photo by Gabriela Nicolescu.

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On the pavement surrounding the two statues are the fragments of a third identical plaster head, now ruined. Both duos, the Lenins and the heads, seem to interrogate each other on the nature of personal aura, the ruins of demised empires, and on what an art object ultimately is. Finally, these installations examine how the notion of value changes through time. In the case of ‘Lenin preaches to Lenin’, I would argue that there is a ‘third’ part of the installation which both Lenins hold in their hands and contemplate: the book and the knowledge promoted therein. The installation seems to deal with the idea of something that was valuable before it fell to pieces; now, its remaining vestiges contemplate what is left. The powerful and ironic side of this postmodernist installation is that the gazes of the two Lenins seem to reassure each other and are not overly concerned about the broken empire. I wondered why this installation, as well as all the other statues and paintings from Room 45, had been placed in a room about collectivization. In fact, the exhibition worked more like an angry, ironic parody of communism. The objects on display were just a support for this irony and anger towards communism. But precisely because this is the only room displaying ‘communism’ (or, more accurately ‘anti-communism’) permanently in a public (state-owned) museum in Bucharest, many foreign visitors come to the museum to see it. A second room was attached, as a kind of appendix, in 2005. Its main curators, two researchers (one a historian, the other trained as an engineer), set up the room as a ‘diorama’ of a communist office. It contains a massive wooden desk, found somewhere in the offices of the NMRP (from the furniture used

6.3 Two Lenins in The Plague room at the NMRP, 2011. Photo by Gabriela Nicolescu.

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in the communist museums), with some cracked nuts and an empty red-wine-stained glass on display. According to its curators, the dirty office was intended to indicate how uncouth and uneducated Communist Party leaders were. The same room contained a table with some photocopied books about collectivization, portraits of peasants stuck on the wall, and a prison door to suggest the imprisonment and death of those peasants who resisted collectivization. The images of peasants displayed as victims were taken from the NMRP’s image archive irrespective of their attitude to the communist collectivization process, or to the era when the images were taken. This use of images indicates the pressure from the museum discourse, and implicitly of the elites who manoeuvre it, over the reality and sensitivity of peasant realities. In Southern and Eastern Europe, the image of peasants is used synecdochally to talk about the nations at large. Similarly, in this case, peasant faces talk about peasants in general. But, at the same time, these images refer to a common way of representing victims in communist museums in Eastern and Central Europe (see for, example, the wall of victims in the House of Terror Museum [Terror Háza]). These essentializations would not have been possible if the image of peasants had not been associated with many others, equal and non-represented. On a different wall there was a quote from Lenin (stating that work should not be combined with thinking) and some caricatures taken from 1950s’ newspapers about rich peasants who refused collectivization. After visiting The Plague, very few visitors realized that this exhibition space dealt with the process of collectivization during communism. In the interviews I conducted, seven out of ten visitors said they entered the room because they were interested in seeing symbols of a past regime or because they had been directed by tourist guides to visit this museum because it contains symbols of the communist regime. Both rooms indicate the generalizing critical attitude towards communism held by researchers and artists at the NMRP during the 1990s. To them, the socialist regime was conceptualized as a linear regime, with a beginning and an end and with no transformations happening in-between. This can be related to researchers’ and artists’ political views in the 1990s, as active anti-communist supporters of the University Square Movement. More than that, these people saw communism as a malignant force. Consequently, the only possible representation of it could be displayed in an underground room, in the basement, in an in-between condition between life and death or between heaven and hell.4 This idea could be also read into the words of Horia Bernea at the launching of the exhibition in 1997, as published in the exhibition catalogue: Communism is a disease of the society and of the spirit, opposed to life; communism is an ‘ideal’ foolishness, oriented completely against life; a damaging atheist sect; . . . an absolute hatred, affirmed with no reservations; an attempt to destroy all the multi millennium effort for spiritualisation; a sinister utopia . . . Nicolau and Huluţă 1997: 1

Roland Littlewood (2009) analysed how people in a post-socialist Albanian village used to relate to the communist past by ignoring both vestiges and people associated

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with that past. In the Romanian case, Badică (2010) wrote about the case of anti-communist intellectuals who considered that the communist past was a ‘black hole’ and attempted to write the history of Romania without mentioning it. When analysing history textbooks written in the 1990s, Murgescu (2004: 341) refers to this rejection of ‘the historical memory developed under the communist rule’, as well as the idea that communism perverted ‘authentic’ national memory was not limited to the 1990s. The attempt to eliminate from history the communist past, encapsulated in the aesthetics and proceedings of the museum, transformed the NMRP into an institution highly visited by ex-political prisoners and members of the historical political parties, artists and patrons of fine art galleries, intellectuals, all ‘friends of the museum’. The political affiliation was very transparent. One can even argue that most of these people were descendants of the aristocratic and upper middle-class families in interwar Romania who had suffered enormously during the instalment of the socialist regime. The objects on display in the Plague Room are often described by researchers and artists at the NMRP as ‘dead’ objects (Nicolau and Huluţă 2001: 42). The use of this term contrasts with the obsessive use of the term ‘live’ in relation to the new projects realised by researchers and artists in the rest of the NMRP: live display, live objects, live museography. As the art theoretician Boris Groys has argued in his book Art Power, this obsession with newness in the museum discusses the knowledge of history and about ‘the obligation to be historically new’ (Groys 2008: 23). To be new means to know the past, so that one can construct in opposition to it. The art historian Dario Gamboni argues that ‘[t]he fall of images seems to tell of a revenge (. . .) of the living over the petrified’ (Gamboni 1997: 51). Like Groys, Gamboni argues that any construction of the ‘living’ seems to demand a complementary location and construction of the ‘petrified’ and in the case of the NMRP the ‘dead’. By integrating Groys and Gamboni’s points of view, I argue that in the NMRP, objects on display in The Plague: A Political Installation were specifically used to incorporate the ‘petrified’ version of the past, as ugly and grotesque, and to offer the possibility of creating in opposition to them something ‘new’ and alive. This need to create vitality and newness to stand in opposition to a dead, petrified past leads to the conceptualization of ‘heritage as pharmakon’, as discussed by Butler (2012) following Derrida ([1972] 1981). Pharmakon is defined by Derrida as ambivalent; ‘the medicine and/or poison’ and ‘simultaneously- beneficent or maleficent’ ([1972] 1981: 70). The principle of healing by using poison, with all its inherent contradictions, seems to be recurrent in heritage institutions, as Butler (2012) has shown. The objects used for making the display The Plague: A Political Installation can be analysed by using the idiom of pharmakon. Although the NMRP had become a symbol of the destruction of the Museum of the Party, it nevertheless made use of objects that had been subject to a previous attempt at erasure during communism. ‘Operating through seduction, the pharmakon makes one stray from one’s general, natural, habitual paths and laws’ (Derrida [1972] 1981: 70). In the case of the NMRP the idiom of seduction consisted

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in not throwing away the objects from Room 45. The Plague exhibition, mounted in the 1990s, used former communist objects in the same way as powerful voodoo figures: they were activated as subjects of irony, triggers for the anger of a generation of intellectuals and artists. In assembling this exhibition, researchers and artists at the NMRP mobilized what they called a ‘witnessing’ and ‘healing’ museology [muzeografie mărturisitoare] (Bernea 2001). For them, giving an exhibition the name of a calamitous disease, was an act which invoked the power to heal the wounds of the Romanian nation.

Practice: The continuity of stores This section continues the arguments developed in Chapters 3 and 4. Previously I analysed how a nucleus of folk-art objects survived three political periods: before communism, during communism, and after it. I also referred to the relationship between the physical presence of these collections and the muzeografi’s practices. In this section I draw together these ideas to show how muzeografi’s obsessive care for folk-art collections in the NMRP can be understood as a subtle and silent form of resistance against researchers’ and artists’ interpretations of history and against the dominant views these groups expressed publicly there. By working with the collections from the 1950s up to the 1990s, by participating in the process of collecting, and by always being close to the collections, the muzeografi acquired a thorough knowledge of the collections which far surpassed the knowledge of researchers and artists. Horia Bernea, as director, was allowed to make use of collections whenever and however he wanted to, but artists and researchers were not, especially after his death in 2000. Bernea’s close access, wearing no gloves or white overalls, touching objects from the collections with his bare hands, is indicative of his attempts to symbolically re-appropriate them, to get to know them. Following Stewart’s ([1993] 2001) analysis of the making and use of collections, I believe that this re-appropriation could be seen as a symbolic act of compensation. By being hands-on with all the objects in the collections, Bernea compensated for the fact that he missed the physical dimension of the collecting process itself. But, as outlined in Chapter 1, little recognition of the muzeografi’s contribution to the making of these collections was given in the 1990s, 2000s and even during my research. Many muzeografi remember that Horia Bernea acknowledged their intimate knowledge of the collections, but recognition of the collection process was not mentioned. It was as if the collection during the communist times was something ‘given’, taken for granted, and no words were necessary to recognize either the care of objects or the increase in their numbers. Because the muzeografi were employed in the Museum of Folk Art, indirectly they were blamed for the communist regime’s decision to shut the Museum of National Art and to split the collections. In a conference held on 5 February 2010, to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the making of the NMRP, a rather tense discussion took place on what had been

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done over the last twenty years in the NMRP.5 The muzeografi did not participate in the meeting but instead stood back in a corner of the conference space. No recognition of their contribution in the making of the NMRP was expressed, except one reference to the ‘dull communist museography’. One year after this conference, and in reaction to the muzeografi having been airbrushed out of the museums work during during communism, Georgeta Roșu, Acting Director and Head of the Museography Department, said: In 1990, on 5 February, Horia Bernea and his team would have achieved nothing if there had been no Tancred Bănăţeanu [the director of the Museum of Folk Art] or all those who collected objects for thirty years [muzeografi]. That is why I am saying nothing. I am waiting until that reality is recognized.

In other words, without the communist past and its obsession for collecting, ‘ordering’, caring and controlling, the artistic initiatives of Horia Bernea and his followers could not have existed, nor would their explosion of boundary-breaking creativity have taken place. Being ‘communist’ appeared to be both a reality and a projection, a construction of a stereotypical enemy (see Humphrey 1999) capable of empowering the ‘artist’. As Georgeta Roșu said above, the period of the Museum of Folk Art’s existence in the history of the museum’s collections played a vital role in how collections are made and staged today. This understanding of the past is reiterated in the following table, which a collection attendant showed me during my research in the stores.

Objects acquired in the period:

Costume

Tapestry

Ceramics

Small Textiles

Various

1906–52

4,620

582

2,713

1,576

540

1953–78

8,946

1,085

7,987

3,358

3,644

---

---

---

---

---

4,629

399

2,405

2,604

3,843

1978–89 Pause The Village Museum period 1990–present

This table contains the numbers of objects collected in each period in the history of the institution: the interwar period, the socialist period and the post-socialist era. The dates in the table can be read in multiple ways and not all the dates are completely clear (for example, the total number of objects that the Museum of National Art collected from 1906 to 1952 is not the same as the one presented in a text written by a muzeograf in 1963).6 But this table indicates that muzeografi operate with the objects, numbers and information from all the three institutions: the Museum of National Art, the Museum of Folk Art, and the NMRP. Talking about continuity and the relationship between collections and archives, a collection attendant, M.N., showed me the registers written by hand by the interwar

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director, Alexandru Tzigara-Samurcaș. After the 1950s, these registers were followed by other collection records, which organized the material differently (not according to the entry date, but according to the material from which an object was made: costumes, textiles, pottery, wood, iron, metal. These registers were kept from the 1950s until the present day. This indicates, once more, that in the 1990s the NMRP continued the paradigm of collecting that had been initiated during communist times, which implies that the collecting process had a logic of its own, one that extended beyond particular political ideologies or time frames. As I argue, it is not only the straightforward care that mattered, but also the keeping and preserving of the categorization of collections as it was instituted during socialism. For the muzeografi, the collections’ inner classifications and taxonomies functioned like a witness to the NMRP’s history, and differed from the official discourse of the museum made public by researchers and artists. The categories of the collections as divided into stores (costumes, textiles, and so on) date back to the communist era. The same applies to inventory numbers, registers of each object from each store, knowledge and practice, and taxonomy. Colletions were ordered during the 1990s just as they had been during communist times, and more importantly, this practice of ordering and care stayed in the same hands as before communism – that is, in the hands of the muzeografi. In the 2000s, to continue their care for collections and in the hope that through the collections, their version of the past could be made public, the Museography

6.4 Collection attendant dressed in white overalls opening the new drawers in the Religious Objects Store, NMRP, 2010. Photo by Alice Ionescu, courtesy of the NMRP.

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Department applied for EU funding to build brand-new stores for the NMRP’s official folk-art collections. Once the EU funds were granted, only the folk-art objects were relocated to the new stores, while objects in other, unofficial, museum’s storage were kept less well and not given inventory numbers. This deep care for the collections inherited from the Museum of Folk Art was undertaken in order to keep this understanding of the past secure. The muzeografi and the collections’ attendants also ensured that they had access to the collections themselves. One could even say that the care was so strict, that it resulted in a literal spatial split of the museum – that is, between the spaces used by researchers and artists and those used by the muzeografi. During my research, all the stores containing the museum’s ‘folk-art’ items were placed on the second and third floors of a newly renovated building. The collection attendants’ office was located nearby. In front of these, the offices of the muzeografi and the Head of Museography Department had an excellent point of surveillance: occupants could see anyone who attempted to enter the stores. As a direct consequence, many of the events and exhibitions organized by researchers contained very few items from the official folk-art collections. N.M., one collection attendant, even stated proudly: ‘In the exhibition room [called] The Time, only one object comes from our collections.’7 I suggest that this terminology – ‘ours’, ‘theirs’ – has to do not only with a desire to classify the collections of the museum, but also with the broader social groups inside Romanian society.

Irony and playfulness: The art of bricolage Because the muzeografi would not allow researchers to use objects from the museum’s official stores, Irina Nicolau initiated a new parallel collection, Furnica [The Ant] with the subtitle The Archive of the Present Tense.8 Being an archive initiated by researchers, The Ant collection started with texts. I would even say that there was something else that preceded texts too: the collection of people with close affinities, enthusiasm and a desire to join in. Irina Nicolau taught a Master’s Degree Course in the Faculty of Philology in the University of Bucharest. Many of her students were inspired by their teacher, and became part of a group called The Ant: Cultural Action Group. Students became aware of the museum and its activities and wanted to donate some of the heirloom clothes they inherited from their mothers and grandmothers. In time, some of them became researchers at the NMRP, others lecturers in the University of Bucharest or department heads at other museums. As part of this group, they organized many events and performances. They also collected stories and objects. Irina Nicolau’s approach to collecting seemed to combine all these fields in a playful and innovative way, working at the borders of art and ethnography. It could be read as the ethnographic turn in art, or I would argue, the artistic turn in ethnography, very much in tune with Marcus and Myres’ (1995) postmodern attempt to question the boundaries of what objects a museum should collect

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and how to label them and place them into categories of ‘authentic’ or ‘in-authentic’, high or low, unique or produced for mass consumption. Art and ethnography, everyday objects, fragments from rubbish bins, fine art and kitsch, all are equally invited to sit at the table of history and be represented in exhibitions. Her projects innovated not only through form, but also through content. The inclusion of kitsch objects, plastic copies and memorabilia (souvenirs) in parallel collections meant a certain liberalization of the vision of history and value which the museum disseminated. The discourse on kitsch is not defamatory or derogative, but rather inclusive. The permanent exhibition rooms curated by Irina Nicolau, that had been closed during the curatorial conflict described in Chapter 1, contained kitsch objects such as statues, crucifixes and popular contemporary textiles. One cannot see any clear demarcation between everyday objects and folk-art objects. I argue that this inclusion of fragments of very different provenances and temporalities in the making of new books or artefacts resembles how Irina Nicolau and other researchers made use of communist texts and materialities. For example the handmade book, Le Pied Chausse [The Foot in a Shoe] was re-written in 1992 by Irina Nicolau, based on compendiums published during communist times like that by Bobu-Florescu (1957) on raw-hide mocassins (opinci), the shoes that rural labourers would wear. Another example is Povestea Cerului și a Lunii [The Story of the Moon and the Sky]. This handmade book about cosmological systems of representation was written in the 1990s, based not on information found during the researches conducted during the same period, but from compendiums published before (Manoliu 1999). These handmade books, published in up to 200 editions, had – outside of their phenomenological, sensorial, artistic and playful qualities – the role of re-framing the organized and detailed knowledge accumulated during communist times into a fresh story for participatory encounters with the public, the close friends of the museum, from the post-communist period. Based on the knowledge of communist books, the researchers and artists disseminated the idea of creativity and liveliness related to the NMRP. This leads to the understanding of ‘playful creativity’ being an essential part of a constitutive opposition. It is this creativity which disrupts the previous two positions, while also making partial use of them: it uses the process of re-categorisation and fragmentation of the past at the more accessible level of the everyday.9 Nicolau’s contemporary approach to collecting everyday objects and stories in a museum context always led her to the category of the archive. The Ant collection, with the subtitle The Archive of the Present Tense was initiated in the 1990s. As argued by M.H.C. (2011), the researcher who introduced me to the cupboard where these objects were stored during my research, these objects are ‘modern and contemporary’. They are ‘samples of life which are relevant for an epoch, like a document. If we do not collect them, then who else would?’ The Ant collection cupboard was kept in the same room as archives of texts from the Museum of Folk Art, near the researchers’ offices. It was a very tall cupboard crammed with textiles mainly, such as cheap traditional embroidered shirts, plastic dresses and doilies with Socialist designs, some of them eaten by moths. During my

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research, despite regular visits from the muzeografi, the Ant collection was not cared for properly in the official new NMRP stores. In that room, with huge windows and high ceilings, the objects were exposed to dramatic changes in temperature and humidity. But despite these conditions, it seems that it was not the objects in themselves that mattered, but rather the collecting process and what it produced. Here I see similarities to the work of the artist Ilia Kabakov. Kabakov’s The Garbage Man (The Man Who Never Threw Anything Away) from the late 1980s and early 1990s, is a project in which the artist kept a careful archive and collection of everyday objects from communist times, in an attempt to catalogue both the recent past and the quotidian present. Kabakov’s art makes use of simple, apparently banal, objects to tell stories about common people during communist times in his native USSR and after perestroika. During communist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe, there were artists whose art was joyful, ironical and colourful and who reacted to the sterile whiteness of the communist regimes (Kemp-Welch 2017). Notoriously, after emigrating to the US, Ilia Kabakov painted different kinds of white on different exhibition walls to point to the many nuances that white can have in socialist regimes and beyond them. For example, white can mean control and cleanliness but can also express the desire to cover traces of the past and search for renewal. Kabakov’s work was an inspiration for many researchers and artists at the NMRP. Sitting at the round, jam-packed table in the researchers’ office, R.G. – a painter in her early sixties who had joined NMRP immediately after Horia Bernea’s death – told me how Kabakov’s understanding and practice of art inspired researchers and artists to acquire everyday objects for potential future exhibitions. Researchers in Nicolau’s team followed the same strategy of collecting everyday objects as proof of being ‘undisciplined’ and their break with the conventional norms of museum display. The Belgium anthropologist Marianne Mesnil remembers Irina Nicolau staging an exhibition in a suitcase in the early 1990s in Paris. It was not just the device which mattered, said Mesnil, but the entire joy associated with doing things unconventionally, linking together different people and breaking the barriers of conventional displays. In a similar way, Nicolau also initiated a project called Noah’s Ark, from the Neolithic to Coca-Cola, as a means of excavating in order that a totally new future be created. Noah’s Ark in particular was a metaphor for safeguarding anything and everything against being forgetting over the passage of time. Objects both important and less significant, large or small, perfect or broken, and of very different provenance were all equally praised and piled up in this impromptu archive: shopping lists from the year 2000, items from volunteers’ homes and objects from public spaces like benches, streetlamps and street signs. The project took the form of a heap of objects, a publication (Nicolau 2002) and an exhibition. As Susan Stewart remarked in her analysis of collecting, ‘Noah’s Ark is (. . .) the archetypal collection (. . .) a world which is representative yet which erases its context of origin. The world of the ark is a world not of nostalgia but of anticipation’ (Stewart [1993] 2001: 152). Similarly, through using the biblical and wide-reaching metaphor

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of the ark, Nicolau wanted to create a new logic of collecting at the NMRP, a logic that allowed for the common, ephemeral and pop culture to be collected, no matter their value and status in the museum. Those volunteers on this project, like myself, were supposed to safeguard vestiges of the present day for a future purpose: the re-making of Romanian society after an abrupt change. In an archival understanding of collecting, Irina Nicolau suggested that people make lists of what they found in their mothers’ cellars, in grandparents’ attics, inscriptions on gravestones, recipes from communist times, lists with messages from mother to daughter and so on – lists of all kinds, in fact. This collection of lists from past and present took the form of a published book (Nicolau 2002) and of an exhibition, as noted above. One can see a surrealist approach into collecting strange objects from everyday life. In many of Irina Nicolau’s projects, the collected objects were used as they would have been in contemporary ephemeral art – to produce an emotional effect at the moment of their collection, to create an ambience, to constitute the moment of an encounter, of a relation. ‘Objects (. . .) constitute social life and bring it into being’, claims Pearce (1992: 262). Ultimately our ideas and our social life can only be realized through objects in the real world, Sansi explains (2012: 219). Even if not making direct reference to socialism, both collections of these unusual objects included items from socialist times too. The accent was not historical, but political in terms of daily life, and very different from what the contents of the official stores of the NMRP, guarded so fiercely by muzeografi. One can see certain resemblances between Nicolau’s approach and what other anthropologists like Inge Daniels (2019) and Roger Sansi (2012) describe as a ‘suspicion’ towards everyday objects. In her analysis of contemporary exhibitions in ethnographic museums, Daniels (2019) talks about the importance of introducing to exhibition displays everyday objects (objects that do not necessarily belong to or need to remain in the museum), as well as multisensory exhibitions, theatricality and performativity, and last but not least about using research photography not as object, but as context and as a facilitator of creating atmosphere. Just as Nicolau used objects as pretexts of encounters between visitors/ friends of the museum/ volunteers and the curators, and of knowledge creation, Sansi (2012) explains how the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art MACBA was established in the 1990s as an archive and only later as a collection of objects. Daniels believes that we should try to operate with a new conceptualization of authenticity in museums, based not on the aura of the objects but on creating an atmosphere and on ‘mimesis’ – that is, as a faithful reconstruction of reality. If in many displays, ‘(o)bjects are the stars of the show’ (Daniels 2019: 134), giving away the objects on display at the end of an exhibition is an ultimate symbol of this lack of reification. This example allows us to think creatively that working with museum practices, and at the same time challenging them, is a productive way of creating participation in the museum space and making exhibitions that are relevant for the times we live in. The raffle Daniels organized at the end of At Home in Japan: Beyond the Minimal House exhibition at

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6.5 Primenire [Purification] exhibition in front of the NMRP, 1991. Fonds DinescuCaraman/ Film 148/ Image 31, courtesy of the NMRP.

the Museum of the Home in London also points to the fact that museums have limited storage space and need to think creatively about how they might prolong displays in people’s homes. At the same time, it is important to recognize how visitors themselves are a very useful source of the everyday objects that can be used in museum displays. Irina Nicolau was one of the few at the NMRP to lobby persistently for the introduction of the theme of time in the museum, reflected in her diaries and writings about the recent history of this institution, and in curating exhibitions that relate to the concept of time.10 The Time Room was one of the few permanent exhibition rooms in the museum that made direct references to history but which remained conspicuously silent about the socialist period, drawn on the wall as a parenthesis in Romania’s history. The Conclusion will detail the NMRP’s contribution to ethnographic museums from this point of view, in the context in which time is either displayed only rarely or problematized in most of the world’s ethnographic museums. Nicolau also initiated projects directed explicitly towards re-writing of the recent history of Romania. Six tapes with the ‘short history of Romanians’ narrated by a leading Romanian historian helped to correct and revise the history that had been written during communist times. Using the same line of thought, she also initiated a project dedicated to the study of the 1980s in Bucharest. A special edition of Martor, the museum’s journal, appeared in 2002, entitled The Eighties in Bucharest. It was designed as an inventory of words or lexicon of this period. It contained entries on the banning of abortions,

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food rationing, queues, and other measures implemented by the communist regime during that decade.11 This research project, carried out with the help of museum researchers and volunteers like myself, ultimately led to a collection of objects from the 1980s being assembled for a temporary exhibition. Those items included party membership cards, sofas and tables, clothes from that period, TV sets, radios, TV aerials that helped transmit Bulgarian television.12 After the project finished, some of these objects were left at the museum, and lingered for years in various unofficial stores. During my research in 2010–11, they were put into Room 45, together with all the other items from former communist propaganda museums. Each project initiated by Irina Nicolau, playful or not, aimed at destabilizing something: a way of doing ethnographic research at the University of Bucharest, the process of deciding what is important and what not (the passion for small things and details) in a museum context. All the projects had a huge impact on the way volunteers and collaborators in the Research Department started to interpret and understand the past. One could even argue that a collective memory was about to be made and that the collection process itself and this institution helped that memory to materialize. In this process of memory construction, those who worked on those projects were not only consumers of a message, but also active agents in the making of it. The previous chapter discussed the destruction of communist symbols and outlined some people’s desire of total destruction of ‘communist practices’ and people’s ‘communist’ past. In opposition to that argument, this section shows that in terms of collections, the newly founded museum produced an ‘installation’ of the previous communist past. The same force that had generated destruction returned to attempt re-construction. The newly installed collections of fragments of a past regime stood for the original whole system prior to its dismantling. As Latour and Weibel (2002) affirm, the fragment references other fragments. Following Belting (2004: 11–12), I affirm that ‘destruction’ at the NMRP was followed by ‘installation’: ‘The iconoclastic acts of symbolic destruction mirror the equally solemn acts of installation which such images have experienced in the public space’ (Belting 2004: 11). The paradox is that, in the case of this institution after twenty years, artists and researchers’ initial intention to destroy all traces of communism was transformed into a determination to collect objects which ultimately interrogate and reflect on the nature of that past. The NMRP became the only public institution in Bucharest to display communist objects both permanently and in many temporary projects and exhibitions.13

Conclusion In this chapter I have analysed three different meanings associated with the ‘socialist/ communist’ modes of doing and being in the world. First, the anti-communist phase where communism is an absolute evil that attracts anger and political contestation – expressed through anger against the ‘communist’ objects; second, communism as

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embodying care and standardized organization of work and time learned during the socialist period – expressed through bureaucratic and standardized care; and third, communism that allows often overlooked spaces for playfulness and creativity – expressed through experiment and mocking. Despite the iconic image of communism as a one uninterrupted linear regime, this chapter has, by contrast, highlighted the existence of a multiplicity of communist pasts and politics. The three co-existing faces of communism as lived in present Romania, each one contesting the two others, destabilizes the idea of communism as a single monolithic entity. They also show the use of heritage as political participation. As the chapter has indicated, each of the perspectives required different kinds of objects from the various stores of the NMRP. The selection of specific objects at specific times supported each of the three views I describe and contributed to a modelling of the past in accordance with the desires of the present. The anti-communist perspective used objects from the Stalinist period in Romania in order to link the communist regime with the peak of totalitarianism, an era when the communist state committed innumerable crimes. In turn those who subscribed to the integrating view on communism chose items from the folk-art collections to advance or reflect their particular views. Both in the past and in the present these folk collections were perceived as ‘neutral’. The muzeografi’s efforts to care for and accumulate items, and the absence of any criticism directed to such collections, were founded precisely on this notion of neutrality. The organized ‘folk-art’ collections contributed to the muzeografi’s sense of professional continuity, familiarity and a positive recognition of their socialist ‘neutral’ past. The playful surrealist-inspired re-discovery of ‘everyday’ objects from the present as well as from communism could be considered as a phase of ‘installation’ which followed the destruction of the anti-communist mode. It was a phase of accumulation which could be understood as a reaction to the previous campaigns of dismantling and disposal. The act of entering other stores and mixing different categories of objects in the museum carried a deeper significance than a mere whim. The enthusiasm for creating ‘disorder’ can be read as the visual manifestation of the critical mind of the artists and the researchers. It provided a subtle way of both destabilizing the established order and alleviating the boredom projected through the muzeografi’s bureaucratically inflected work. This chapter has not only been concerned with the powerful relationship of interdependence that existed between museum employees and objects in the stores. It has also demonstrated that the three ways of looking back at communism affirm that all past and present political regimes determine not only flows of ideas and material presences, but also practices and embodied expressions of the way people actually lived through and within such regimes. In their porous nature, museums allow for such various accumulations to co-exist. This finding is of particular importance for arguing that this book is relevant not only to the fields of visual arts and museum studies but also to social anthropology and social sciences in general. I propose that

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similar conflicts to the one experienced within the NMRP, as a site of open debates and confrontations, existed across the whole Romanian society. The museum, its objects and its displays together facilitated the materialization of these conflicts into visible forms. There are distinct parallels between the way in which certain collections were organised and the professional traits of those who made them or cared for them: the clean and ordered offices of the muzeografi were mirrored in the cultivation of care shared amongst a larger category of technocrats working in state institutions across Eastern Europe. Similarly, the disorganized offices of artists and researchers, were indicative of the less rigid work patterns of the humanist intelligentsia in contemporaneity. I argue that despite their different practices, these groups also reinforced the distinctions between themselves by organising themselves differently, and by using contrasting visual registers and different media to convey their public positions and messages. They gave their social difference a material form and objectified it in highly visual terms, in the style of their exhibitions, their posters and their dress codes. Where researchers and artists manipulated the use of artistic imagery, the muzeografi were restricted to an institutionalized form of resistance: not allowing others to get into what they called ‘our’ stores. Some of the tendencies described above can be encountered outside museum walls too. Artists and researchers from state institutions very often collaborate with or accept part-time contracts for other private companies – at the same time as receiving their full salary from the museum. Unlike the researchers and artists, the muzeografi – old or new – have no way of boosting their salaries in this way, however. They always ask for institutional and state sponsorship, asking to be paid overtime or for working in dangerous conditions where appropriate. If artists and researchers know how to sell their ‘creative’ work very well, the muzeografi seem to lack the knack for promoting their own interests. The same is true with regard to social media: researchers and artists are very good in advertising their projects and ideas on Facebook or Instagram, while young muzeografi have very personal profiles and very rarely talk about their work on these platforms. What can we learn from these three faces of communism? First, we learn that creativity and innovation is the result of a profound understanding of the language of tradition and norm. We learn that most of the time there is a split between art galleries and museums. Some are associated with creativity, others with more fixed approaches. After the death of the director and main curator, Horia Bernea, the NMRP’s display remained unchanged for almost thirty years. Liveliness and creativity, some argue, can turn into ossification and fetishism all too easily. Second, we learn that socialist regimes (in fact all political regimes) are not just flows of ideas – they also produce very specific materiality that helps these regimes to exist in the first place and that shape people materially and physically. For example, they influence their rhythms of work or values attached to labour: working in a group, say, or equalitarianism all become embodied practices. The problem is that once these regimes disappear, the material traces may or may not vanish with them, but people’s practices will definitely remain.

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Third, if we look at social realities or events, we can grasp fragments of these things. Research in state institutions, like museums are in this case, have an inherent capacity to retain this for the long term and make social practices visible. This visibility and materiality confer to museums the porosity recognized in this book. I started this chapter with the monument of the three communist leaders. Now it’s time to finish it up. You might think that the monument of the three communist leaders left in the back garden of the MRP is still in there. In 2012 I went to give a lecture to university students in one of the exhibition rooms of the NMRP. I talked about the statue with broken noses too. During a break all the students went to search for the statue – only to find it had gone. I started to ask around where it might be and some museum employees told me that the statue had been taken away but they did not know where. A similar story happened to another famous statue of Lenin which laid in a back garden of a different museum for more than twenty years. Maybe in few years’ time we will find these statues exhibited in a museum – whether or not they have noses, we do not know yet. Many attempts to create exhibitions that focused on these statues have been discussed in the last twenty years in Romania, but little has been done. This may well prove that many cross-currents remain in Romanian society currently, in all sorts of directions.

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7.1 Agricultural workers in the middle of the harvest, Room 45/ NMRP/ 2022. Photo by Vladimir Bulza, courtesy of the NMRP.

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Agricultural workers in the middle of the harvest is a Stalinist propaganda painting that stayed hidden for more than forty years in Room 45, one of the NMRP’s unofficial stores. In the spring of 2011, I selected this painting alongside another 106 objects from the stores and displayed it in a temporary exhibition called Connections: Objects in relation and context. In mid-May 2011, when the museum director visited the exhibition space half an hour before the official opening, he advised me to be more selective about what kind of objects I used from that source: ‘You won’t manage to achieve anything by displaying ugly objects,’ he assured me from a safe distance. What constitutes ‘ugly’ or ‘problematic’ represents a constant headache and subject of negotiation in museums. Looking at Agricultural workers in the middle of the harvest, one’s gaze slides from the clothes of the people in the painting to their apparently pleased tasting of the grains during the engineer’s inspection. The viewer is attracted by the abundance of the harvest, the optimistic looks exchanged by the people in the painting and their modern apparel. The optimistic guise of the painting indicates subtly that agricultural work needs to be done in socialist farms while making use of authoritative state-sponsored knowledge. As we have seen in Chapter 2, the modernization of agricultural processes across the whole of Eastern Europe also meant the speedy (and problematic) process of transforming peasants into workers employed by production cooperatives. In rural areas, the nationalization of private property meant that the state seized most private land and means of production. Traditional clothes, which used to be sewn in private homes, were slowly replaced by clothes produced largely in urban centres and distributed through a centralized commercial network set up by the state. In this context, the meaning of ‘ugly’ and ‘problematic’ objects in museum settings across Central and Eastern Europe points in different ways to the socialist period, and in particular to the difficulties contemporary societies have in integrating the socialist modernisation process into present accounts. Writing about patterns of memory in Eastern Europe, Vukov (2008) discusses the absence of any museums displaying socialism in Bulgaria. He notes that in Bulgaria there is a certain part of collective memory that he calls ‘unmemorable’: [The unmemorable] does not designate things that memory cannot hold and has relegated to the realm of forgetting, but rather things that are not ‘worthy’ of remembrance and that, although remembered, never enter the realm of representation. Vukov 2008: 311

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Vukov relates the ‘unmemorable’ to the ‘unrepresentable’ but does not explain how this relation functions. The present volume suggests an answer to the question which Vukov’s study implies. We have seen in Chapters 1, 3 and 6 that socialist regimes – and to a certain extent, all political regimes – actively seek material ways to objectify their specific political and economic flows of ideas. The combination of ideas and materialities shapes people through the imposition of specific work rhythms, values attached to labour, and tastes – for example, working in state-designed teams or showing a certain uniformity in line with the socialist ethics. This book has shown first that people embody such values through their constant practice, and second, that promoters of political and social change operate primarily by contesting existing practices.

Porous museums: Tales of continuity and rupture in Central and Eastern Europe Many people who lived and worked in former socialist countries in Central and Eastern Europe remember and talk about their socialist past with pride. The two aspects of socialist life they appreciate most were the predictable rhythms of life and work, and the rewarding values associated with their work. For them, these aspects were incorporated physically into the daily and seasonal rhythms of life, from a work schedule that remained fixed for several decades to annual holidays spent in specific holiday resorts. This suggests that socialist systems managed to bodily incorporate their ideologies into what Bourdieu called habitus, which makes no obvious references to history, even if it is massively the product of it.1 The problem is that once the communist order had disappeared, while its material traces may or may not have vanished, people’s own practices struggled to persist. Because the NMRP contains not only objects, but is also composed of practices, modes of action and different attempts to categorize the world (taxonomies), this institution currently retains and performs certain socialist modes of thinking and acting. As the anthropologist Mary Douglas (1986) has shown, changes in the way institutions think are always slow and never really complete. Similar slow changes took place, not only in museums, but also in most state institutions in the former Soviet bloc. Throughout the book we have seen that within each employee at the NMRP there are degrees of latent socialism/communism, which in turn determines how people relate to each other (or not). The adjective ‘communist’ is used everywhere in contemporary Romania, mainly as an insult. It is usually associated with dullness and stupidity (Solomon 2008: 104). Like this book, socialism is a way of thinking and acting that is incorporated intrinsically in the groundbreaking creativity of the anti-communists. Chapters 1 and 6 show that people with a clear anti-communist stance make recourse to socialist practices and materials even if just to deride them, contradict them or make use of and build on them. Therefore, oppositional behaviours between people who continue communist practices in different forms and those who completely oppose them,

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between standardized and innovative, between ‘static’ and ‘live’ museography, fuel antagonistic behaviour. This phenomenon is recurrent in broader society and is central to how, for example, academic knowledge is built. In a larger perspective, we have seen that fragments from past regimes – such as buildings, collections and practices – have a key role to play in the innovations of new regimes. This kind of incorporation of difference and opposition within the NMRP is similar, I argue, to Navaro-Yashin’s (2009) description of ‘ruination’ as a process of incorporating historical objects into constructing present meaning. In this understanding, NavaroYashin shows that identities in opposition are not static, but dynamic.2 Aesthetics represents an important part of the shift from one regime to another, and of the incorporation of past elements in innovation. The present volume has shown why and how the aesthetics of museum display is always in relation to both the high-level politics of the state and the micro-level politics of the everyday. Even if objects themselves cannot be moved or changed, the surfaces of displays and the meanings of collections of objects can easily be reinterpreted. The anthropologists Pinney and Thomas have suggested that aesthetics is a form that mediates social action, a ‘technology that captivates and ensnares others in the intentionalities of its producers’ (2001: vii). One of the arguments of the book is that within the NMRP, aesthetics and taste are used to differentiate between social categories, professional backgrounds and political convictions. Bourdieu claims that: Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier. Social subjects, classified by their classifications, distinguish themselves by the distinctions they make, between the beautiful and the ugly, the distinguished and the vulgar, in which their position in the objective classifications is expressed or betrayed. Bourdieu [1984] 2010: 6

As we have seen, by painting and scratching into the walls of museums, using organic materials, refusing labels and glass cases, researchers and artists expressed their distinction from what had gone before them as well as from their colleagues, the muzeografi. Thus, their ‘live’ and colourful museography challenged a previous period which they considered dull, insignificant and unjust. Chapters 1 and 5 showed that art historians working at the NMRP thought that art during socialism was used to ‘indoctrinate’ and ‘subjugate’ the people, whereas their own art was supposed to ‘liberate’, ‘heal’ and be ‘creative’. One of the aims of this book has been to show that similar distinctions were made by all political regimes in Romania at their installation. In this context, a useful way to encapsulate the important tension between visibility and invisibility, between what museums make public and what they conceal in their stores, is by employing the term of porosity. Museums are the meeting point of myriad factors: the world in which they exist, their stores, collections and displays, museum employees, their practices and ideologies, and all the categories within which people operate. All these aspects deal with multiple temporalities. Therefore, a museum operates as an assembly of multiple museums, each replete with their own

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temporalities, but with only one prevalent at any given time. This is why I argue that the NMRP is not simply a classical ethnographic institution, a folk-art museum or a showcase for socialism; it is not even a contemporary art museum (having been curated for ten years by a famous contemporary artist), but is in fact all of these things in one. This mix of institutions shows the contingency of ethnographic objects, of social anthropological and cultural research, of folk art and arguably, of any museum object. In this book, I have shown how what is called ‘national art’, ‘folk art’ and ‘peasant art’ are products of a series of categorizations. Taxonomies of objects, other than creating ideas of purification and general consistency inside a category, work to expand some meanings and to repress others. The common nucleus of objects which traversed all these categories from one institution to another makes the various attempts to create differences between these regimes extremely difficult. The main difficulty resides in marking differences inside this collection, given the commonalities between its objects. From outside the museum, the permanent struggle over representation might look futile and based on insignificant differences but this book shows how it is in these tiny differences that people recognise themselves. In a larger context, the translation into visible forms of identities, antagonisms and affiliations to political and cultural values is not limited to the museum space but is also encountered in the whole of Romanian society. The way in which public personalities or museum employees dress, the objects they display, the speed at which they move and even their manners are the subjects of permanent preoccupation. The museum space, in being a physical presence that enables so many different groups to co-exist, accumulated all these potential manifestations of difference such that existing and latent conflicts in society broke out. The museum not only encapsulates these conflicts, but also stages them, in the same dialogue between people and things. My research has indicated why all the struggles that were played out in the realm of display aesthetics reflect much deeper conflicts in Romanian society. In the Romanian context, these conflicts have to do with identity and opposition, as well as the successive regimes and ideologies which have prevailed over the last 100 years: from monarchy to fascism, socialism and latterly neo-liberalism. During historical encounters between these regimes, and following a rapid modernization process, different distinctions within society were objectified in notions of class. Despite the socialist attempts to level class distinctions in modern Romania, conflicts previously described as class conflicts resurfaced in new forms and regained importance. The museum as a porous zone, integral to a porous city, as defined by Benjamin and Lacis ([1925] 1978), reunited different histories and people, ideologies and materialities, and accepted people’s multiple identities and desires. The porous museum provided the possibility for me to look through a keyhole at the whole of Romanian society. By doing this, I ended up revising the accepted history not only of the museum, but of Romania at large. The museum as a porous reality proves to be an important tool in the analysis of change in moments of abrupt shift. As many analysts have argued, although the fall

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of the communist dictatorship looked spectacular on TV, little change actually occurred during the first years after the regime’s collapse: many high-level officials remained in positions of power, all major institutions remained state-owned, and most people continued their everyday activities, although had to contend with a different set of challenges. In this context of relative continuity, discourses of rupture, like the one the NMRP produced, deserve attention. We have seen how continuity and change have been interrelated in an emblematic post-communist institution, and transformation and creativity could be seen in fact as by-products of this coexistence. In this context, I argue the porosity of museums manifests itself in two main forms. First, museums retain some of the ingredients of the epochs they have lived through. Therefore, museums inherently contain multiple layers of dense history, residues of past regimes, which are evident not only in material forms but also in people’s practices. Despite abrupt political changes that are most often associated with visible ‘cleansings’, museums’ stores as well as curatorial and sometimes managerial practices retain these successive layers which are mostly not completely visible. This layering brings museum institutions into close connection with the political and social realities of the city and the nation. At the NMRP, the curatorial conflict of the 2000s reflected existing conflicts at the level of Romanian society at large: while a ‘humanist intelligentsia’ (largely anti-communist) made their points of view relatively more visible because they had direct access to cultural resources, including media, the nation was moved forward mainly by the constant everyday practices of a ‘technocrat’ working force. The second way in which porosity of museums manifests itself relates to the interstices between the finite nature of the material world and the infinite world of ideas. These are the spaces where the negotiation between what curators intend and what audiences acquire and understand takes place. This perspective suggests that the political and ideological power of objects and curators rests in being able to fill, shrink or expand this intermediary space. The book shows different ways in which curators of the NMRP capitalized on this intrinsic value of museums and enabled a diversity of people and objects with multiple pasts and meanings to come together at the same time. Through their ongoing conflicts around representation, people and objects extended and increased the visibility of the meanings that were being shaped at the museum’s interstices. Therefore, porosity can be defined as the space between the floating world of ideas and the finite nature of the museum objects that support them. Porosity is the tension between the solidity of the apparent immobility of the museum as institution versus the changeability of its contents, archives, practices and personnel over time. The paradox is that this kind of fluidity is made possible by the museum precisely because most of its contents remain relatively fixed and rigid: not just objects, stores and buildings, but also practices and personal ideologies. Furthermore, I suggest that this fluidity is not caused by some sudden transformation in these entities themselves but by the fact that because of their fixity, these entities leave important spaces between them. It is in these spaces where ideas, interpretations and adaptations take

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place. Therefore, the porous nature of museums is based on the principle that all these fixities exist at the same time and permit ideas to circulate amongst them. Once located in a museum, objects cannot easily escape it. If they do so, it can only be partially. For example, as I have shown in Chapter 2, in 1950 two-thirds of the collection of national art was relocated as ‘folk art’ to the Museum of Folk Art. Then, from Chapters 3 and 4 we see how and why this initial collection was multiplied fifteen times in twenty-eight years. Between 1960s and the end of 1980s, items from the socialist museums that occupied the building that was later home to the NMRP were removed permanently from display, but nevertheless they left major traces behind. A similar dismantling happened – making political and curatorial space for the NMRP in the process – after socialism collapsed. At the beginning of 1990s, numerous communist objects were either donated to other institutions or hidden in underground stores, while the statue of the three communist leaders, Marx, Engels, and Lenin was abandoned in the museum’s backyard. The concept of porosity begs scrutiny, as does the issue of fragments or residues. Objects, archives and even people can be seen as fragments bearing different temporalities and inhabiting spaces within the broader assemblage of the institution. The practices and ideologies of museum employees, but also the way they dressed themselves and relate to each other, define a space with multiple layers of discourses. It is the porous nature of museums that allows for different layers of discourse to be soaked up, or built next to each other – or on top of another; they allow for washing outs, fissures, fragments and depositions. I suggest that the porosity of museums is not something for which key museum players actively search, but rather a consequence of museographic discourse and practice. Although concerned with surfaces and what is visible in the display, this book shows that the porous nature of museums allows for otherwise hidden and sometimes neglected content to have strong outward impact. From this perspective, porosity represents both a weakness and a strength, depending on how curators and other museum actors allow political ideas to emerge or be transmitted, and on the other hand, how visitors make meaning by observing and participating. In this context, I argue that the porous nature of museums does not have an a priori good or bad quality; rather, it is in the hands of curators to exploit consciously or less consciously the porous medium they work with. On the other hand, the porosity of museums allows visitors to glimpse between and beyond the objects on display. In this context, much of the connections between politics, aesthetics and ethics take place in subtle ways that are not always visible to visitors, museum critics and social researchers.

The politics of display and ‘peasants out of history’ Connections: Objects in Relation and Context, the exhibition I curated at the NMRP in 2011, displayed 107 items from different stores of the NMRP.3 The items included classical folk-art objects (wooden carvings, ceramic pots, textiles), communist propaganda artefacts from different periods of the socialist era, images from the

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Image Archive and six songs from Arhiva Sonoră [the Song Archive]. I planned the curation of this exhibition strategically in collaboration with the representatives from different offices and especially from the two groups that had been in conflict for more than a decade, as presented extensively in Chapter 1. I aimed to understand this conflict by working closely with museum workers from all sides. Art theoretician Brian Holmes (2006) describes exhibition making as a device, something that transforms itself in the process of making, and not as an end. It is this transformation, Holmes argues, that captures the attention of public discourse. The concept of exhibition as a process and device helped in my exploration of the freedoms and constraints of the practices and social and cultural outputs of the NMRP. For example, in Chapters 2 and 3 I showed that folk-art objects were represented in an atemporal manner by all three political regimes. In contrast, Chapter 4 explains that propaganda objects from the socialist period were invested with the temporality of socialist modernity. Therefore, in the Connections exhibition, we tried to counterbalance the lack of temporality of folk objects with the overwhelming temporality expressed by the socialist propaganda items and archival images from the pre-socialist period. For example, we selected photographs showing leading Romanian political figures during the time of the Romanian monarchy, the front page of a mainstream newspaper announcing Romania’s entry into the Second World War, soldiers reading the news and a soldier with his family in the countryside. Most of the objects we selected for the exhibition alluded to peasants in the process of modernisation. In Chapter 3, I discussed how peasants were presented as historical subjects in socialist displays. Peasants were presented as wearers of ‘folk costumes’ and makers of ‘folk objects’ but also represented an active and fundamental part of Romanian modernization through their transformation into workers, the new generation of city-dwellers. In the painting that opens this concluding chapter, we see peasants dressed in modern clothes presenting grains to the engineer during a field inspection. The painting does not show us whether the people painted wore the plastic wellington boots or leather shoes that might represent distinct markers of modernization. Modern clothes like those in the image are almost impossible to be found in any ethnographic museum store in Europe. The main reason is that such museums in Europe tend to collect and display ‘old’ or traditional clothes (Macdonald 2002b). Among the 107 items in the Connections exhibition, we added five relatively recent objects from the unofficial collection The Archive of the Present Tense, and seven from the Foreign Country Collection. The aim was to put all these objects into a global perspective. For example, the objects selected from Foreign Country Collection included two African amulets, one pair of trousers and one pair of wooden slippers from North Korea, one Mexican chair, and a Japanese basket, all donated to the Museum of Folk Art between the 1950s and 1960s. Every item on display had its own unique story, and their innovative grouping outside their respective stores invited new meanings for the visitors of the exhibition. We have seen that folk objects exhibited in classical folk-art displays always had strong nationalist connotations in Eastern and

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7.2 Soldier with his family. Fonds Constantinidis/Image 3, courtesy of the NMRP.

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Central European contexts. The economy of meaning of the Connections exhibition aimed to dismantle this logic and invite people to think outside the national, ethnic, class and spatial-temporal confines they were used to. The old politics of displays and narratives constructed by the stores were ‘distorted’ by the new associations that were proposed to happen in the exhibition space. But even my attempt to propose new meanings by way of new connections, was challenged by some of the visitors who entered the exhibition. This happened because I designed the exhibition to be as participative as possible. Every object on display was photographed and miniature prints were produced. Then, a magnetic strip was attached to every print and each visitor was invited to manipulate these replicas on two big metallic white boards in order to make their own exhibition: visitors were free to select any replicas they wanted and to arrange these in a way that was meaningful for them. This experiment was quite successful, as many visitors found the opportunity to ‘engage’ with replicas of the objects on display and use them in a self-referential way extremely attractive. Through detailed observation and interviews, I documented how visitors seemed not to care too much about the distinctive provenance of objects or their original political affiliation. Instead, what visitors felt was really important to them was the possibility to integrate these objects into stories relevant to their own personal lives. One day a young couple entered the temporary exhibition: he had long hair in a plait and was dressed in black; she was not very talkative. They looked around as if in search of something familiar. From all the objects on display, the young man picked up the replica of an artisanal ceramic tractor and asked: ‘Where is the alpaca spoon?’ Alpaca is a copper alloy combining nickel and often zinc, a very soft, light and cheap metal, from which cutlery used to be made in the rural areas of Romania during socialism. He continued, confused and a little annoyed: ‘How can you exhibit peasants without including a pair of rubber boots, an iron plate or the basic alpaca spoon?’ This reaction illustrates a popular critique of the fact that a most prestigious institution like the NMRP, even when attempting to locate peasants in history, lacks the ‘salt and pepper’ of everyday peasant life. The alpaca spoons, the rubber boots, modern clothes, or transistor radios were completely ‘forgotten’ by museum employees who were preoccupied with projecting peasant images in a kind of ‘atemporal’ past. Contemporary museum practices are very resistant to display contemporary social realities, which represents an institutional form of ‘cultural forgetting’. In Chapter 2, I showed that this process of taking objects out of history or detaching them from their time was specific to both the pre-socialist and socialist museography. This museography used to detach folk objects from their producers, a process which turned folk art into a synecdoche of the nation. In the post-socialist era, the NMRP struggled in different ways to challenge this sort of a-temporality, for example by means of creating a series of unofficial stores like The Archive of the Present Tense and organising temporary and critical exhibitions. The reaction of these visitors relates to what anthropologist Michael Herzfeld describes as being self-imposed traditionalism (2004) and crypto-colonialism4 (2002).

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In Body Impolitic: Artisans and Artifice in the Global Hierarchy of Value (2004), Herzfeld argues that artizanat could be seen as a re-interpretation of tradition for modern usages. One consequence of this process is that the associated discourses of tradition make groups of people, communities and countries feel at the periphery of things, while working under the auspices of political and economic subordination to what is believed to be the centre of the world. This narrative assumes that this centre stays always under the sign of innovation, while countries which adopt the language of tradition as their national stand or symbol place themselves in a position of subordination. ‘Tradition is not any more part of the self’, Herzfeld says. ‘It became something outside of the self. (. . .) Artisanship moved from a process of production, into an object of trade and exhibition’ (2004: 195). Following Herzfeld’s arguments, we can recognize the extent to which the NMRP has been dominated by this vision from the institutions that preceded it and is currently struggling to get rid of this way of staging and dramatizing tradition. Taking a broader perspective, we note the general tendency among national museums in Central and Eastern Europe to ‘orientalize’ peasants, low-wage workers, farmers and artisans, and to present them as inner others, for example, to exhibit peasants as objects of history rather than makers of it (Mihăilescu 2008; Hedeșan 2008). Even though the colonial experience in this region was very different from colonialism in other parts of the world, it has been argued that peasants were exploited mainly by national political, economic and some cultural elites. Romania is a country that has been situated at the intersection of various political empires, such as the Russian Empire to the east, the Austro-Hungarian Empire to the west and the Ottoman Empire to the south. Cultural influences were therefore strong: most of the time these stood in opposition to each other but they did blend at points into various social and cultural forms. One key attribute to result from this cultural blending, and one that was perpetuated extensively throughout the different political regimes of the twentieth century – and indeed in all historical periods before – was the strong accent placed on tradition. Tradition, in the Romanian context, has always been rooted in its rural native population, the so-called ‘peasantry’. The founding fathers of the NMRP understood this cultural leitmotiv extremely well, and placed it at the very centre of the (then) new cultural institution. The museum was dedicated to the Romanian peasant and the idea of peasantry as the synecdoche of the nation (Bernea 1993; Mihăilescu 2006). However, within museum itself, we have seen that things were more complicated. First, the NMRP was not established from scratch. Rather, it inherited both an immense collection and its personnel from previous institutions. Second, the NMRP worked in the context of strong cultural disputes around extremely sensitive issues, such as recent collective memory, the institutional role of the museum, the social role of the museum, and everyday work practices. In this context, museographers at the NMRP focused on the folk objects, as the kind of items that could be accepted by all, museum workers and visitors alike, and also represent the quintessence of the Romanian people. Paradoxically, even if the management of the NMRP strongly

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opposed the socialist legacy in museography, and in wider cultural and social terms, they worked with the same nucleus of objects that all of the NMRP’s predecessor institutions worked with during their own eras. We have seen that one major reason for the focus on folk objects was that they were seen as having a certain political ‘neutrality’ that could be easily filled in with political claims (Bendix 2002). Folk objects used to be seen as empty canvases on which political powers can draw and present their specific ideologies. Therefore, folk objects were used to push political ideas towards both the far right during the pre-socialist regime and towards popular nationalism during the socialist regime. In turn, the NMRP chose to use folk objects to express a very particular understanding of modernity, which represented an original expression of the self-imposed traditionalism discussed above, combined with a notable direct opposition to socialism.

Little space for modernity: The missing metal spoon Objects in museum stores and collections have a powerful ability to constrain people who work in museums. Caring for objects requires repetitive everyday tasks, strict procedures and a very predictable way of handling objects. All of these practices constrain curators to daily routines and the original principles of organizing and enlarging collections. Contemporary museum professionals believe, for example, they can write a history of the world in 100 objects from the stores of a museum like British Museum (MacGregor 2012). However, this book showed that museums’ stores are not only imperfect and limited, but also generate limitedness. This is so mainly because the numerous constraints to which stores and museum personnel are subject, strip objects of their multiple social meanings and emplace a very narrow, and often singular, perspective. It is easy for such a reductive perspective to be taken over and distorted by political and ideological forces. When a challenge to the principles of the stores’ organization arises within an institution – as in the case of researchers and artists at the NMRP – the very rationale of the museum itself is challenged. This argument led me to interpret the reaction of the disillusioned young visitor who wanted to find a cheap metal spoon and other basic items belonging to peasants in a museum called the NMRP as a reaction to the far more general limits and confinements of museums. In the NMRP’s stores, there are no such everyday objects. The only spoons collected are wooden ones, which allude to how philosopher Blaga (1996) defined the Romanian culture as a culture working in wood, and not in stone, unlike most Central and Western European cultures. None of the institutions that collected and exhibited national, folk or peasant art in Romania ever collected cheap metal spoons and forks, or the Eastern European variant of wellington boots, or up-to-date clothes. While this may not be surprising for the interwar museums of national art, it is quite surprising for a museum of folk art during socialism. In Chapters 3 and 4, we have seen that despite its insistence on differentiating itself from the previous regime, the Museum of Folk Art (MFA) continued many practices from the

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pre-socialist period. For example, the MFA had no room dedicated to socialist transformations, while it displayed the folk objects in its collection in an ahistorical way, rather than following historical-materialist principles of display as one would have expected. In Central and Eastern Europe, museums have an important history of organizing displays in alternative exhibition spaces, such as schools, factories and houses of culture. In Chapter 3, we saw how, during the Soviet system, museum institutions had to adapt their curatorial practices and displays to political and ideological directions and target a larger public through numerous exhibitions, while collecting ‘old’ or ‘traditional’ objects rather than contemporary ones. During these encounters with groups of visitors such as school pupils, students and workers, recording the accounts of visitors’ perceptions happened rarely. The MFA archives demonstrate that museum curators were not concerned with the reception of exhibitions and other cultural products: instead, they worried about inspections carried out by the party officials and the Ministry of Culture, or with denunciations to the State Security Office made by their own colleagues. Therefore, the high number of curatorial activities during socialist times precluded museum curators from receiving any criticism from the public about the quality of their work. Throughout the entire book, but especially in Chapter 5, we have seen that in all political regimes, museums are characterized by constant flows of attributes from objects to people, that generate not only display styles but also tensions between freedoms and constraints, and between alternative ideologies. These flows, styles and tensions contribute to the theorization of museums as ‘porous entities’. The porous nature of museums urges museum curators to curate exhibitions by making use of the objects they have in their stores, but also by exhibiting contemporary social research even when they do not have a dedicated collection at hand. This line of theorization contributes to a general tendency in established museums to innovate by allowing contemporary research to step in. The anthropologist Rebecca Empson participated in the Assembling Bodies: Art, Science and Imagination exhibition (2009–10) displayed at the University of Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Other colleagues in this field have followed suit. Inge Daniels curated At Home in Japan: Beyond the Minimal House (2011), an exhibition displayed at London’s Museum of the Home. Daniel Miller contributed to acclaimed The Power of Making (2011) exhibition displayed at the V&A Museum in London, Roger Sansi edited a volume dedicated to anthropologists as curators (Sansi 2019) and Emma Tarlo was the main curator of the Hair: Untold Stories (2022) at the Horniman Museum. Beside the exhibition described above that I organized at the NMRP, I was involved in a series of other curatorial practices, including the making of Beyond Myself display at Goldsmiths, University of London, The Vargas Museum, Quenzon City, Manila, and the Hive Spring in Wong Chuk Hang, Hong Kong (2017–18) as well as Hidden Galleries: Clandestine Religion in Secret Police Archives at the National Museum of Arts in Cluj-Napoca (2019) and Trust, Faith, Secrecy at Galleria Centralis, Vera and Donald Blinken Open Society Archives in Budapest (2020).5

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One feature that all these curatorial works of anthropologists have in common is that the process of exhibitions provides first-hand insights into the outcomes of ethnographic work. The dual role of participant academic means that the relationship between theory and practice, and the ways they inform and reinforce each other, has become an important concern in the museum space. For museums, displaying social research also represents an option to evade and confront the limitations of conventional stores and archives. On the other hand, social scientists learn how to refine their understanding of knowledge production and assimilation practices, inside and outside the museum walls. In Chapters 1 and 6 we have seen a series of innovative ways of thinking through exhibitions while working with classical museums. In the book What Are Exhibitions For? (2019), Inge Daniels argues for the importance of bringing everyday objects into museum displays that do not necessarily belong to the museums’s layout, and that multisensory, theatrical and performative experiences are introduced so that art and objects are not reified. In these contexts, the visitors’ attention and perception shift from the objects on display to the context and the atmosphere they evoke. A similar accent was placed on the ‘everydayness’ of museum visits and the many reasons that draw people to the museum space by early curators, researchers and artists at the NMRP, including Horia Bernea, Irina Nicolau, Ioana Popescu, Anca Manolescu, Silviu Anghelescu, Petre Popovăț, Lila Passima, Cosmin Manolache and Ioana Bătrânu. Chapters 1 and 6 explain how these museum makers operated with a revolutionary concept of authenticity, which in that cultural and historical context radically opposed all sources of socialist museography, including the predictable and formal display of objects, uniform labels and glass cases. Nevertheless, this innovation would not have been possible without the everyday work of many muzeografi like Tancred Bănățeanu, Hedvig-Maria Formagiu, Maria Neacșu, Olga Horșia, Georgeta Roșu to systematically collect, research and preserve objects in the stores. In this context, the curatorship of the early NMRP represented innovative ways of doing and created an atmosphere they called ‘live museography’, which was meant to transport the visitor in a time and space where they could witness ‘the revenge (. . .) of living over the petrified’ in the terms of art historian Dario Gamboni (1997: 51). In this context, the NMRP’s early curators did not aim for a faithful reconstruction of reality, but rather invited visitors to plunge into a pre-modern world by means of magical realism. This method invited museum workers to reconsider the meaning and limitations of objects on display and in collections, and the principles of storage in general. We can now see the struggles among ICOM specialists to find a proper definition for contemporary museums as a continuing attempt to understand when and to what extent museums can be selective in what they collect and display in the context of a rising awareness of the limitations that collections can put on the stories museums narrate. There will always be cheap metal spoons missing from their collections. However, museums, their curators and their publics should talk not only about what they have and what they know, but also about the things they miss and long for and the questions raised by the wider society in which they live. The good news is that, in

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their porous nature, museums have the required space and time that would allow these dialogues to take place if creativity and innovations are allowed to manifest. * In the socialist past, as well as during the tumultuous 1990s, people lived through an unprecedented mixture of rhythms, practices and movements that corresponded to often irreconcilable contrasting ideals. Nevertheless, contemporary society evidences the collaboration of all these forces. This book details the difficult co-existence and materialization of such ideals, played out in the lively and uneven gallop that propels the Romanian carriage through modernity. I started this book with the museum employees walking at the speed of a horse-drawn carriage, in a significant event in the life of both Bucharest and the city’s inhabitants. I end up the book describing the NMRP as an uneven gallop of two sorts of modernity: the socialist version and the post socialist other. It is this uneven, but nevertheless paired and strenuous effort, that characterizes important parts of Romanian society at large.

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Notes Introduction 1. The denomination of the museum as ‘national’ dates from the mid-2000s. After the fall of the Ceaușescu regime in 1989, few Romanian museums were called ‘national’. All the employees of ‘national’ museums received a salary rise of 25 per cent. In the legal context, this increase was highly significant and many employees were rather fond of the new appellation. For this book I adopt the contemporary name of the museum, NMRP, as encountered during my research. 2. The term ‘peasants’ has no derogatory sense in Romanian. It reflects the way low-wage workers worked in Eastern and Central Europe, not necessarily on their own farmland, but very often on the estates or holdings of landlords as detailed in Chapter 2 (see also Mihăilescu 2008, 2013 and Verdery 1991). Following the socialist attempts to modernize agriculture, peasants were referred to as ‘agricultural workers’, especially when working on collectivized lands, following a state schedule and management, with modern machines. 3. I took the dates of the two events from the table of NMRP’s exhibitions, publications and concerts from Nicolau and Huluță 2001: 192. 4. Throughout the book I use the terms ‘communist’ and ‘socialist’ interchangeably. The label of ‘communist’ corresponds with the everyday terminology of people in Romania. Romania was a People’s Republic (1947–65) and a Socialist Republic (1965–89). In both periods the majority political party was always called The Communist Party of Romania (as it had been since its inception in 1921). It is true that official state ideology claimed throughout its tenure that Romanians were living under socialism, whereas communism represented a more distant ideal. However, Romanians always referred to the society they knew both before and after 1989 as ‘communist’, while specialized publications opted for the socialist and post-socialist denominations. 5. The House/ The Palace of the Pioneers was a state-sponsored institution where children were educated after school in subjects ranging from dance and the arts to applied engineering. Such houses existed in many countries in the Soviet bloc. 6. ‘Display’/‘displays’ in the book may sometimes mean museum layout, as well as the display of items/objects in other visual contexts. 7. Erben (2018) points out that the term ‘porosity’ has been used by Lacis and Benjamin in 1924 and one year later by Ernst Bloch ([1925] 1998) who knew Benjamin and Lacis’s essay, and followed up with his own ‘Italy and Porosity’.

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8. The conference was called SWICH: Creating Futures, Exhibiting Cultures, Exhibiting Empire, Exhibiting Europe, Museum of Archeology & Anthropology & King’s College, University of Cambridge, 11–13 July 2018. 9. As I will develop in Chapter 4, this triple bust had been on display in the early 1950s in a predecessor institution of the Museum of the Communist Party.

Chapter 1 1. See Peter Vergo’s book New Museology ([1989] 1997) and Fiona Candlin’s work on micromuseology (2017). 2. For example, the Ecomuseums in Creusot-Montceau-les-Mines in France, in Agenta (Emilia-Romagna, Italy), in the Elvo Valley (Piedmont, Italy) and Acquarica and Neviano (Puglia, Italy). 3. Papier-mâché is a composite material consisting of paper pieces or pulp, sometimes reinforced with textiles, bound with an adhesive.

Chapter 2 1. Such donations have been made over the last thirty years. Archival documents about the History Museum of the Communist Party can be accessed in the Romanian National Archives in BU-F-01409 Fond since 2018 (I thank Corina Doboș for this information). 2. My ethnography in the museum’s archives included dozens of visits to all of the archives dispersed across the museum. Following the traces of the Museum of National Art and the Museum of the Communist Party, I visited the National Archives in Bucharest several times as well as the online archive of the Institute for the Investigation of Communist Crimes and the Memory of the Romanian Exile (IICCMRE), which contains images from the Museum of the Communist Party. See: https://www.iiccmer.ro/resurse/arhiva/. 3. Romania adopted the Gregorian calendar on 1 April 1919, which became 14 April 1919. Many dates, at the beginning of the twentieth century, use both calendars for clarity. 4. Other than Clișee Sticlă [Glass Slides], the NMRP Visual Archive contains the following folders: Adler, Leopold; Bădescu, Irena; Bauch, Aurel; Berman, Iosif; Bernea, Ernest; Boicescu, Mugur; Constantinidis, Iulian; Cristodulo, Duschek Franz; Filipescu, Teodor; Fischer, Emil; Kiruleanu, Manakia Brothers; Mihăilescu, Claudia; Muzeu Artă Populară [Museum of Folk Art]; Oroveanu, Mihai; Roșu, Alexandru; Schwarz, Emil; Societatea Furnica [The Ant Society]; and Szatmari. One can find between five and 1,000 images in each folder. 5. The Museum of National Art opened officially in 1946 (Tzigara-Samurcaș 2003: 27). 6. Romania annexed territories that are now part of Bulgaria between 1913–18 and 1919– 48. The heart of Queen Marie was to be found in Balcik, a seaside resort on the Black Sea in Bulgaria, that used to be a favourite place for the Romanian royal family and the aristocracy of the time. 7. This chapter presents very limited parts of the Visual Archive of the NMRP. The richness of the visual material invites more research to be conducted into the various contents and

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illuminating aspects of the archive, including its geographical, social and ethnic coverage. For a more detailed analysis of peasants as makers of history, see the concluding chapter. 8. The Village Museum was designed to have two parts. One part included old houses collected from different regions of the country. Peasants were brought to live temporarily in this part of the building. After a few months, this experiment was stopped because of ‘accusations of embarrassing public order issues and misuse of one of the houses to receive male guests day and night and for parties’ (Mușat 2017: 131). The second part of the museum was intended to be a ‘model village’ where peasants were supposed to live permanently in improved conditions. The maquette of the model village was presented in 1937 at the Paris World’s Fair (Mușat 2017). 9. Chapter 4 tells the story of the unification of the Museum of National Art and of the Village Museum in 1978. 10. The archive which remained at the University of Architecture can be visited online at: https://tzigara-samurcas.uauim.ro/ 11. For example, researchers and artists valued and used images from the interwar archives in the displays and visual projects of the NMRP, but devalued the images from the socialist period. Ochi în Ochi [Eyes into Eyes] (2001) is a series of five CDs containing the visual archive of the museum organized into five categories: The Impressionistic View; The Romantic Nationalistic View; The Social Militant View; The Blind View of Communism (sic!); and The Democratic View. 12. Out of this number, 20,088 were chiaburi, peasants with extensive agricultural possessions, 7,226 were mijlocași, the so-called ‘middle peasants’ (middle in relation to large landowners) and 5,504 were poor peasants (Dobrincu 2006: 118). 13. Informed by Pauncev in a document from 1963, MFA Archive/ file 347. 14. If museums were changed through relocations, recategorizations of their collections and change of design, when the communist regime came to power, central monuments of public squares, representative of the ‘old regime’ were demolished in Bucharest, some with bulldozers and tractors (Vasile 2010: 164). 15. Official data reports that in Romania between spring 1948 and summer 1964, more than 600,000 people were imprisoned on political grounds, across forty-four main prisons and seventy-two labour camps (Tismăneanu 2006: 232).

Chapter 3 1. The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact was signed on 23 August 1939 by German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov. The pact was known as the Treaty of Non-Aggression between Germany and the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics. It had hidden clauses that allowed both powers to invade and occupy territories they were interested in: Poland and Bessarabia, for example. 2. Max Hermann Maxy (1895–1971) was a constructivist artist who combined expressionist and cubic techniques in painting and scenography. He studied and worked in Berlin and Paris in the 1920s. After the Second World War, he organized an exhibition in Bucharest entitled ‘Work and Art’ followed by his naming as the director of the new Museum of Art

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in 1949. After two years in this role, he moved to the University of Bucharest as a professor of art. 3. In 1971, the salary of the director of the Museum of Folk Art was 3,300 lei. In the same year, a car produced in Romania costed 40,000 lei. 4. The only mention of a school called The Central School of Museography, opened in 1949; Teodora Voinescu and G. Oprescu taught there (see Opriș 2000: 219). 5. File 280 from the MFA archive. 6. In a different file in the MFA Archive (File 156), I discovered that in 1961–2 an audit commission looked at all the activities of the museum. 7. Famous concert hall opened in Bucharest in 1888. 8. Five-year plans is a method of planning economic growth over limited periods, through the use of quotas, implemented first in the Soviet Union and later in other socialist states. 9. I take this idea of neutrality as politics from The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology [2012], a film by Sophie Fiennes. Here Slavoj Žižek discusses the principle of the empty centre which can be refilled by multiple contents. 10. For a more detailed account of Albert Lloyd’s life, communist views and professional career see D. Arthur (2012). 11. Georgeta Roșu remembers that in 1980s, the MFA (as part of the MFA-Village Museum in Bucharest) organized an exhibition with Astra Sibiu Museum with their ‘Foreign Countries’ collection. 12. On 25 November 1906 – 1,100 objects; 1948 – 6,027 objects; 1953 – 18,144 objects; 1966 – 39,500 objects. On 25 November 1906 – 32 photos and 4 books; 1966 – 55,000 photos, films and slides and 9,000 books. From 1953 to 1966, fifty-three exhibitions were mounted in the country and sixty-five abroad (Bănăţeanu 1966: 419). 13. It was only in 1974–5 that Bănățeanu initiated a new collection called Creatori Populari Contemporani (CPC, Folk Contemporary Makers) at the MFA. Muzeografi would collect here artwork produced by contemporary artisans. This collection was different from Artizanat – to be discussed in Chapter 4.

Chapter 4 1. To my knowledge, the MFA archive does not hold any pictures or published materials with images of the exhibition or its opening. Only one document in the MFA archive confirms that images from the display were screened in the news programme on the national TV channel on the day of the opening. During research, I have obtained images from the 1974 exhibition from the private collection of Hedvig Maria Formagiu. 2. In 2000 I co-curated ‘1980s in Bucharest’ at the NMRP as a volunteer and in 2006 I cocurated ‘Realismus vs. Realitaat’ at the Museum of Young Art, Vienna.

Chapter 5 1. Concerning Joseph Beuys.

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2. Despite the claims of many people I talked to, who affirmed that the word ‘destruction’ cannot be associated with the transformation of the museum, my observations indicate that in the NMRP there was a great deal of focus on destruction. Even during my research, an exhibition with the title Între Şantiere [Between Working Sites] provoked panic among museum employees and close friends of this institution. This exhibition was officially opened on 5 February 2010, twenty years after the dismantling of the Museum of the Party began. Usually, anniversaries celebrate a completion of something but the date of 5 February is the anniversary of renovation work starting. This proves again that in the NMRP’s economy of meaning in the NMRP, the dismantling was just as important as the new museum’s establishment. 3. I refer to films made by Laurenţiu Calciu and one made by Marius Caraman, screened on 5 February 2010 at the NMRP. 4. Hooligans, according to Eliade were ‘[T]hose young people who prepared a spiritual revolution, a cultural and if not “political,” at least a real and concrete one. The characters were young writers, teachers, actors who talked a lot. A group of intellectuals and pseudointellectuals who resembled the Huxley’s Counterpoint’ (Rocquet and Eliade [1978] 2006: 87) 5. Grupul pentru Dialog Social (GDS) [the Group for Social Dialogue] whose mission is to protect democracy, human rights and civil liberties, was founded in January 1990 mainly as an non-political organization. However, many of its members, a large number of whom worked in the arts and humanities, often expressed anti-communist opinions in DGS main’s publication, Revista 22. Andrei Pleșu, Gabriel Liiceanu, Theodor Baconsky, Dan Hăulică were GDS members.

Chapter 6 1. I refer to this example, and a more famous one: the statue of Lenin taken from Piața Scânteii (The Starch Square, now Free Press Square) in Bucharest and deposited in the back garden of the Mogoșoaia Palace up until 2012. 2. The Memorial of the Victims of Communism and of Resistance in Sighet and Pitești Prison Memorial. 3. As they appear in Scânteia [The Starch], the Communist Party newspaper. 4. For a fuller description of this mode of representation of Romanian anti-communism, see a co-authored article (Cristea and Radu-Bucurenci 2008). 5. In fact, twenty years from the initiation of the Museum of the Party’s dismantling. 6. Instead of 6,000 objects, the total rises to 9,000. 7. The Time exhibition, as discussed in Chapter 1, was curated by researchers and artists. 8. Furnica [The Ant] is a name of a pre-socialist manual embroidery society supported by Queen Elisabeth of Romania. The use of the name relates again to the constant reference researchers and artists make to the monarchic period of Romania. 9. As we have learned from Chapter 2, Irina Nicolau worked at the Institute of Ethnology and Folklore between 1970 and 1989. Here, Irina was tasked with taking care of the institute’s archive and, after extensive reading and consideration, re-organized it by introducing new categories and new registers that were not recognised by other employees.

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10. See The Plague, Political Installation, and The Time permanent exhibition rooms (subject of the curatorial conflict). 11. In the 1980s, Nicolae Ceaușescu had a plan to repay all Romania’s debts to The World Bank. In order to do that, different economic measures were taken: food and energy were rationed, electricity and gas reduced and hot water rationalized. By 1989, Romania was debt free. 12. In the 1980s, Romanian national television broadcast for only two hours per day. In order to watch more TV, people in different parts of the country had special devices that allowed them to access programmes in other neighbouring socialist countries like Bulgaria (in the South), Serbia and Hungary (in the West and North West). 13. Like for example ‘Realism versus Reality’: Stalinist Romanian Art in the 1950s, curated by Ioana Popescu, exhibited in Museum of Young Art in Vienna (April 2006); The Golden Flat, Ultimul Carnaval [The Last Carnival], artist and curator Alexandru Poteca (August 2010); Între Şantiere [Between Renovations], curators Simina Bădică and Cosmin Manolache (February 2011); Balcanian XXI. Meștereala și reciclare [Craftmanship and Recycling], an exhibition of artistic installations by Theodor Graur, curated by Erwin Kessler (March 2011); an exhibition about birth policies during Ceaușescu’s Romania in partnership with the Romanian Institute for the Investigations of the Communist Crimes, curators Passima, Manolache, Doboş and Soare, see http://politicapronatalista.iiccr.ro/

Conclusion 1. As discussed in Chapter 2 of this book. 2. This relates to Hegel’s ([1807] 1979) notion of dialectics, seen as a form of integrating negation in any definition of an identity, and, consequently, as a process. 3. For a detailed account of the process of exhibition making, and of the items on display, please read Gabriela Nicolescu (2016a), ‘The Museum’s Lexis. Driving Objects into Ideas,’ Journal of Material Culture, 21(4): 465–89. 4. Herzfeld defines crypto-colonialism as ‘the curious alchemy whereby certain countries, buffer zones between the colonized lands and those yet untamed, were compelled to acquire their political independence at the expense of massive economic dependence, this relationship being articulated in the iconic guise of aggressively national culture fashioned to suit foreign models’. Such countries were and are living paradoxes: they are nominally independent, but that independence, says Herzfeld, comes at the price of a sometimes humiliating form of effective dependence (Herzfeld 2002: 900–01). Herzfeld’s examples of crypto-colonialism refer to Greece and Thailand, but many more examples in Central and Eastern Europe, South America and in Asia can be given. 5. These exhibitions are part of a series of research projects with a strong material, visual and curatorial component: Austerity Bites: Food stories from Lewisham; Curating Development: Filipina Migrants’ Investments in the Philippines’ Future; Disobedient Buildings and Hidden Galleries Project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the European Research Council, respectively.

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References

Illustrations 0.1 0.2

The busts of Marx, Engels and Lenin in the rear yard of the NMRP. Employees of the NMRP on one of Bucharest’s main thoroughfares, early 1990s. 0.3 A carriage in Bucharest city centre, early 1990s. 0.4 and 0.5 The busts of Marx, Engels and Lenin in the rear yard of the NMRP. 1.1 Horia Bernea with the Directors of the Museography Department and Research Department respectively. 1.2 Muzeografi’s door, 2011. 1.3 Artists’ door, 2011. 1.4 and 1.5 Peg holding white overalls and inscription on muzeografi’s door: ‘Gently, gently, gently now (. . .)’ 1.6 Muzeografi’s office, 2011. 1.7 Round table in the researchers’ main room, 2011. 1.8 ‘A chacun sa croix’ poster, pinned butterflies and painting featuring personification of Death. 1.9 Researchers’ office, 2011. 1.10 Marius Caraman’s office. 1.11 Image from The Nun’s Room. 1.12 The Time Room, remade after the curatorial conflict. 1.13 Plaster mannequins handmade in early 1990s. 1.14 White-coated muzeografi with Horia Bernea. 1.15, 1.16 and 1.17 Preparations for opening an exhibition room. 2.1 Archives in the stores of the Village Museum, 1990. 2.2 17/30 June 1912, old and new calendar. 2.3 A peasant man surrounded by men in modern clothes. 2.4 Three children in the fields. 2.5 and 2.6 Peasants selling food in a city. 2.7, 2.8, 2.9, 2.10, 2.11 and 2.12 Images of the Romanian countryside at the beginning of the twentieth century. 2.13 Image from the Nordiska Museet. 2.14 Image from the Museum of National Art, c. 1934. 2.15 Exhibit from the Museum of National Art, c. 1934. 2.16 and 2.17 The house of the Mogoș family in its original location.

viii xii 2 8 16 19 20 21 22 23 24 26 27 29 30 35 37 38 44 49 51 52 53 55 56 57 58 59

197

2.18 Știrbey Palace on Calea Victoriei. 2.19 Hedvig-Maria Formagiu at her desk at the Museum of Folk Art. 2.20 and 2.21 Images from the 1957 exhibition at the Museum of Folk Art. 2.22, 2.23, 2.24 and 2.25 Ethnographic research conducted in southern Romania. 2.26 ‘Poienile de sub munte’ village in Maramureș Region. 2.27 Maramureș Region (Vișeu). 3.1 Muzeografi on an ethnographic research trip to Caransebeș, Romania, late 1960s. 3.2 ‘Young people [muzeografi] exercising.’ 3.3 The Ornaments of the Head exhibition, 1961. 3.4 Muzeografi and pupils on the steps of the MFA after a ceremony. 3.5 ‘Tovarăș [comrade] Matiș at work.’ 3.6 Muzeografi doing patriotic work. 3.7 Image from a MFA exhibition in India. 3.8 Image from the opening of the MFA exhibition in China. 3.9 Entrance to the Folk Art Ru-Ma-Ni Exhibition in Hanoi, Vietnam. 4.1 Room 45 at the NMRP, 1990s. 4.2 Image from the 1974 exhibition at the MFA. 4.3 Exhibited folk costume. 4.4 Objects and documents in Room 45, early 1990s. 4.5 Other objects in Room 45, early 1990s. 4.6 Nicolae Ceaușescu opening the Museum of the Communist Party. 4.7 Constructivist Building, built in the 1970s. 5.1 Priests sprinkling holy water on the emblem of the socialist state. 5.2 Priests sprinkling holy water on former exhibits from the Museum of the Party. 5.3 and 5.4 Priests in a devastated museum. 5.5 ‘Start towards the future!’ 5.6 The director’s office, 1991. 5.7 Museum staff praying with the priests in the museum. 5.8 Detail of walls painted by Horia Bernea. 6.1 The busts of Marx, Engels and Lenin covered by snow, 2010. 6.2 The Plague: A Political Installation, 2011. 6.3 Two Lenins in The Plague room at the NMRP, 2011. 6.4 Collection attendant dressed in white overalls opening the new drawers in the Religious Objects Store, 2010. 6.5 Primenire [Purification] exhibition in front of the NMRP, 1991. 7.1 Agricultural workers in the middle of the harvest, Room 45. 7.2 Photo of a soldier with his family.

198

Illustrations

63 64 68 70 71 72 74 78 79 81 83 90 92 93 94 98 100 102 110 111 115 117 122 125 126 127 129 133 135 144 147 148 153 158 164 172

Index An entry followed by the letter f indicates a page with a figure. An entry followed by the letter t indicates a page with a table. acquisition campaigns 95–7 aesthetics 167 Agricultural workers in the middle of the harvest 164f, 165, 171 agriculture 165 see also peasants/rural workers collectivization 62, 69, 147, 148 Althabe, Gerard 48 L’altra figura (The Other Figure) (Paolini, Giulio) 147–8 L’amour de l’art: les musées d’art européens et leur public (Bourdieu, Pierre; Darbel, Alain; Schnapper, Dominique) 12 anti-communism 33–6, 124–30, 141, 146–50, 166 Arca lui Noe (Noah’s Ark) exhibition 22 Archive Fever (Derrida, Jacques) 48 The Archive of the Folk Museum (Arhiva Muzeului de Artă Populară) 47–8 Archive of the Present Tense, The collection 171, 173 archives 45–9, 61, 73 communism/socialism 113 records, destruction of 50 Tzigara-Samurcaş, Alexandru 60 Arhiva de Aur (The Golden Archive) 47–8 Arhiva Muzeului de Artă Populară (The Archive of the Folk Museum) 47–8 Arion, C. C. 49f ark metaphor 157 ARLUS (Romanian Association for the Friendship with the Soviet Union) 85 art destruction of 9 ethnographic turn 154–5 folk art 65, 104, 106, 170

peasant 53–4, 59 Song of Romania festival 105 art historians 105 Art Power (Groys, Boris) 36, 150 artists. See researchers/artists artizanat 103, 104, 106, 107, 174 Artizanat collection (Various) 106, 107, 120 Assembling Bodies: Art, Science and Imagination exhibition 176 Association of Museographers 77 At Home in Japan: Beyond the Minimal House exhibition 158, 176 Bădică, Simina 108–9, 111 Bănăţeanu, Tancred 65–6, 74f, 89, 91, 152 acquisition 96–7 collectivization 69 gifts 94 Ştirbey Palace 63 surveillance of 75, 80, 87–90 Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art (MACBA) 157 Basis of Soviet Museology, The (Galkina, P.I; Gardanov, V.K.; Ivanitki, I.P.) 76 Belting, Hans 131 Benjamin, Walter 5 Bennett, Tony 11 Bernea, Horia 3, 16f, 17, 31, 38 archives 45 clothing 36–7f collections 151, 152 communism/socialism 149, 152 discarding 137 fragments 130 MCP, dismantling 124, 128, 128f Plague: A Political Installation, The exhibition 146–9, 150, 151 religion/ritual 133–4, 135f, 136

199

taste, war on 40 value ranking 107 Beyond Myself display 176 binarism 43 ‘Birthday Gifts to Stalin’ exhibition 82 body, the 34, 39, 101 see also disembodiment Body Impolitic: Artisans and Artifice in the Global Hierarchy of Value (Herzfeld, Michael) 174 Book of Laughter and Forgetting, The (Kundera, Milan) 113 books, handmade 155 Borges, Jorge Luis 25 Bourdieu, Pierre 12, 31, 40, 167 Boym, Svetlana 101 Bristol 9 Bucharest 1, 2, 128 Calea Victoriei (Victory Avenue) 1, 3 Sfânta Vineri (Saint Friday) monastery 129–30 University Square Protests 139–42 Vacăreşti Monastery 128, 129 Buchli, Victor 32, 77, 101 Bulgaria 86, 165–6 bureaucracy 78, 81–4 Butler, Beverley 150 Cahle (NMRP) 43 Cârneci, Magda 34, 68, 135 Carol I (king of Romania) 3, 49f categorization 153–4, 168 Ceauşescu, Elena 123 Ceauşescu, Nicolae (president of Romania) 114, 115f, 123, 128, 183 n. 10 Centrul Naţional al Tradiţiilor (National Centre of Traditions) 106 churches 134 civil war 140 class. See social class cleansing rituals 124, 136–8, 140 clothing 32–3, 102f ‘Folk Costume in Romania’ exhibition 99–103 folk costumes 106–7 folk inspired 54 peasants/rural workers 50–1f, 53f, 71, 165, 171 stage costumes 106 collecting 96–7, 153, 154–7, 159, 176 see also personal collections

200

Index

collection attendants 22, 153f collectivization 62, 69, 147, 148 colonialism 174 colour 33, 156 Colston, Edward, statue of 9 Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia (Boym, Svetlana) 101 communism/socialism 12, 62, 152, 159–60, 179 n. 4 see also state control accusatory view of 147 aesthetics 101 anti-communism 33–6, 124–30, 141, 146–50, 166 appreciation of 166 Bernea, Horia 149, 152 commemorating 130 exhibiting 145, 146–9, 150–9 five-year plans 82 folk-art production 103 ‘friendship among people’ principle 95 future tense, use of 92 historical memory 149–50 history, rewriting 113–14 life under 166 materiality 161–2 museums emphasis 77 objectification 166 opposition to 65, 139–42, 166–7 post-communism/socialism 33–4, 124–8 removal of 123–9, 131–2, 134, 135–6 Serbia 86 social levelling 107–8 socialist realism 111 Song to Romania festival 103, 104–5 statues of 112 style 101, 111, 114–15 symbols 112, 131, 147–51 urgency 82, 84 Connections: Objects in relation and context exhibition 165, 170–3 conservation 48 Coombes, Annie 11 corpothetics 34 creativity 39, 42, 155, 161 Cross is Everywhere, The exhibition 28 crypto-colonialism 173 curatorship 17–18, 36 historical context 41–2 institutional divides 39 materialism 66 Cvetković, Marina 86

Daniels, Inge 157–8, 176, 177 Darbel, Alain 12 de-Stalinization 109, 112 dead/live binary 150 Decorativa 84–5, 99, 106 Delirious Museum: A Journey from the Louvre to Las Vegas, The (Storrie, Calum) 1–2 Derrida, Jacques 48, 150 destruction 112 Destruction in Art (Gamboni, Dario) 111–12 disembodiment 101–2 distributed self 35 distribution of the sensible 35–6 donations/gifts 93–5 După Revoluţie (After the Revolution) (Calciu, Laurenţiu) 140 earthquake (1977) 102–3 Eastern Europe 33, 94, 131, 165, 166, 176 folk-art museums 77 intelligentsia 39–40 Neo-Byzantinism 34, 135 outreach 12 peasants/rural workers 54, 105, 149, 174 religious themes 134–5 state control 87 eco-museums 27 Edwards, Elizabeth 48, 131 Eighties in Bucharest, The (NMRP) 159 Eliade, Mircea 25–6, 141 Elisabeth (queen of Romania) 49f, 50 empire building 94, 95 Empson, Rebecca 176 EMYA (European Museum of the Year Award) 41–2 Engels, Friedrich, monument to Marx, Engels and Lenin xif, 7–9, 125f, 144f, 145–6, 162, 170 ephemera 157 ethnographic collections 11 ethnographic objects 4, 157, 175 acquisition numbers 152t centring 71 Daniels, Inge 157 dead 150 Sansi, Roger 157

Ethnographic Museum, Belgrade 86 ethnography 62 artistic turn 154–5 European Museum of the Year Award (EMYA) 41–2 exhibitions 18, 21–2, 36, 68–9, 176–7 see also invisibility/visibility closure 28 Daniels, Inge 177 displays 69, 80–1, 84–5, 115, 137–8, 167 folklore 77 making 171 permitted 80–1 political uncertainty 65 reception 83 sock exhibitions 31 temporary 84, 86, 91, 110 travelling international 91–3, 94f urgency 82, 84 export 106 extreme collecting 96 fake news 13 fascism 141 fashion 32–3 Féherváry, Krisztina 33 Ferguson, Katy 54 folk art 65, 104, 170 see also MFA research 106 state control 106 folk-art production. See artizanat ‘Folk Costume in Romania’ exhibition 99–103 folk objects 104, 174–6 folklore 62 see also Irish folklorists Bulgaria 86 exhibitions 77 Irish folklorists 57–8 politics 86–7, 93 food shortages 118–19 Foreign Country Collection 171 Formagiu, Hedvig-Maria 74f, 75–6 travelling international exhibitions 91 Formations of Class and Gender (Skeggs, Beverly) 38–9 fragments 10, 129, 130, 138, 159, 170 France 11, 39 ‘friendship among people’ principle 95 Frontul Salvării Naţionale (The Front for National Salvation [FSN]) 139

Index

201

FSN (Frontul Salvării Naţionale [The Front for National Salvation]) 139 Furnica (The Ant) collection 154, 155–6 Gamboni, Dario 9, 112, 150 garbage 7–10 Garbage Man, The (The Man Who Never Threw Anything Away) (Kabakov, Ilia) 156 Garden of Forking Paths, The (Borges, Jorge Luis) 25 GDS (Group for Social Dialogue) 142 Geertz, Clifford 17 Geffrye, Robert, statue of 9 gifts/donations 93–5 Glass Icons (NMRP) 43 Golden Archive, The (Arhiva de Aur) 47–8 Great Britain, imperialism 11 Group for Social Dialogue (GDS) 142 Groys, Boris 36, 65, 150 Gusti, Dimitrie 59–60 habitus 31, 166 Haenni, Sabinne 5 Hair: Untold Stories exhibition 176 Handbook of Irish Folklore, A (Ó Súilleabháin, Seán) 58 head ornaments 80 healing 151 heritage 5, 31–2, 61, 128–9 European 57 as pharmakon 150 Herzfeld, Michael 173–4 Hidden Galleries: Clandestine Religion in Secret Police Archives exhibition 176 Hirsch, Eric 42 history 61, 146, 149–50 inventory 159 manipulating 113–14 materialism 66 petrified vision of 150 History Museum of the Communist Party, of the Revolutionary and Democratic Movement of Romania. See MCP History Museum of the Romanian Workers Party 109 Holmes, Brian 171 Hooligans (Eliade, Mircea) 141 House of Terror 61 House of the People 128, 129 House of the Pioneers 46, 117f–18, 118

202

Index

Hudson, Kenneth 84 humanist intelligentsia 39, 40, 84, 142 ICOM (International Council of Museums) 6 iconoclash 112, 146 identity 35 Iliescu, Ion (president of Romania) 123, 139, 140–1 images 131–2, 149 see also photography MFA 68, 69–72f, 73 immateriality/materiality 101 immortalization 131 imperialism 11 inclusivity 12 innovation 39, 41–2, 101, 161, 167, 176, 177 ceramic heads 80 Decorativa 85 Nicolau, Irina 154–5 UCECOM 106 institutional divides 39 intelligentsia 39–40, 84, 142 International Council of Museums (ICOM) 6 Între Şantiere (Between Working Sites) exhibition 183 n. 2 invisibility/visibility 99, 103, 112, 114, 116, 119–20, 167 Irish folklorists 57–8 Kabakov, Ilia 156 Kendall Adams, Geraldine 6 King, J.C.H. 96 kitsch 155 Konrad, George 39, 84 Kopytoff, Igor 8 Kracauer, Siegfried 68–9 Kundera, Milan 113 labour 82 Labyrinth (Borges, Jorge Luis) 25 Lacis, Asja 5 land reform 50 Leach, Edmund 43 Lenin, Vladimir duo sculpture 147–8 monument to Marx, Engels and Lenin xif, 7–9, 125f, 144f, 145–6, 162, 170 Lenin-Stalin Museum 45–6 Library of Babel, The (Borges, Jorge Luis) 25 live/dead binary 150

live museography 31, 34, 150, 167, 177 Lloyd, Albert 87 London 9 Lowenthal, David 5, 61 lustration 136 MACBA (Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art) 157 Macdonald, Sharon 42 magic realism 25–6, 177 Man of Marble (Wajda, Andrzej) 112–13 Marie (queen of Romania) 50, 54 Martor journal 128–9, 159 Marx, Karl, monument to Marx, Engels and Lenin xif, 7–9, 125f, 144f, 145–6, 162, 170 Marx-Engels-Lenin Museum 109, 112, 114 mass production 32–3 materialism 66, 95 materiality/immateriality 101 materials 32 organic 33–5 Matiş, tovarăş (comrade) 83f–4 Mauss, Marcel 30 Maxy, Max Hermann 181 n. 2 MCP (History Museum of the Communist Party, of the Revolutionary and Democratic Movement of Romania [Muzeul Partidului ]) 3, 4, 7, 109, 116–17f archives 46, 116 building of 45 cleansing rituals 124, 136–8 dismantling 124–31, 137–8 opening of 114, 115f, 120 purification rituals 122f, 124–8, 129f restaurants 118, 119 shortages 137 space, use of 115 staff changes 116 visitor control 116 memory 149–50, 159, 165–6 Mesnil, Marianne 156 MFA (Museum of Folk Art) 3, 45, 47, 48, 108, 170 acquisition campaigns 69–72f, 95–7 activity of 81–2 archives 68, 69–72f Artizanat Collection 106, 107 closure 103 communism/socialism 80, 83

criticism 65 donations/gifts 93–5 earthquake damage 102–3 ‘Folk Costume in Romania’ exhibition 99–103 folk objects 175–6 Formagiu, Hedvig-Maria 75, 76 images 68, 69–72f, 73 installations 159, 160 object acquisition 152t opening exhibition 66–8 Oroveanu files 68 outreach 81–2, 91–3, 94f permanent exhibition closure 99 register of objects 83f–4 state control 87–8, 95 Ştirbey Palace 63f–4 travelling international exhibitions 91–3, 94f Mihai I (king of Romania) 62 Miller, Daniel 176 miners 140, 141–2 Ministry of Culture 76 MNA (Museum of National Art) 48, 52, 57f, 58f–9, 68, 170 archives 45, 47–8, 50, 60–1, 63, 64, 73 Arhiva de Aur (The Golden Archive) 47–8 Formagiu, Hedvig-Maria object acquisition 152t structure 61 Victory Avenue 3 modernity 178 Mogos·, family and house 59f Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact 181 n. 1 Muşat, Raluca 54 Musée d’Ethnographie de Neuchâtel 25, 27 Musée du quai Branly 11 museography/museology empire building 94, 95 live museography 177 nation building 94 rules 76 Museum of Art of the Republic of Romania 63, 64 Museum of Communism, Prague 145 Museum of Folk Art (MFA). See MFA Museum of National Art (MNA). See MNA Museum of Socialist Art, Sofia 145 Museum of the Communist Party (MCP). See MCP museums 1–2, 4–5, 167–8

Index

203

as continuities of practice 10–13 definition 6–7, 176 eco-museums 27 as expandable 5–7 as garbage repositories 7–10 Kopytoff, Igor 8 number of 77 as places of concealment 7–10 porosity of 169–70, 175 muzeografi, 17–19, 21f–3, 26, 27–8, 81f, archives 47–8 bureaucracy 78 collection knowledge 151 communism/socialism 77, 108 conflict 17–19, 22–3, 31–2, 40, 42, 43, 119 contribution 151–2 creation of 65, 76 Decorativa, collaboration with 85 education 39, 76, 77–8, 79 ethnographic research 74f, 75 exercise 78f folk art 107 formal displays 17, 18, 36 habitus 31 identity 42 materialism 66 object acquisition 152t patriotic work 90f–1 secret police members 88 status 38, 39–40 taste, war on 40 value ranking 105–6 white overalls 19, 21f, 33, 36–8f work practices 81–4, 161 Muzeon Park of Arts, Moscow 145 Muzeul de Artă Populară (Museum of Folk Art). See MFA Muzeul de Etnografie, de Artă Naţională, Artă Decorativă şi Artă Industrială (Ethnographic Museum of National Art, Decorative Art and Industrial Art) 3 see also MNA Muzeul Naţional al Ţăranului Român (National Museum of the Romanian Peasant [NMRP]). See NMRP Muzeul Partidului (Museum of the Communist Party [MCP]). See MCP Myth of the Eternal Return, or Cosmos and History, The (Eliade, Mircea) 25–6

204

Index

nation building 94 National Museum, Lviv 64–5 National Museum of the Romanian Peasant (NMRP) (Muzeul Naţional al Ţăranului Român). See NMRP National Union of Cooperatives of Production (UCECOM) 106 Navaro-Yashin, Yael 167 Neo-Byzantinism 34, 135–6 Nicolau, Irina 16f, 17, 18, 23, 25, 154, 159 collecting 154–5, 156–7 exhibitions of 23, 28, 30, 31 Furnica (The Ant) collection 154, 155–6 history, re-writing 158 Noah’s Ark, from the Neolithic to Coca-Cola project 156–7 Pied Chausse, Le (The Foot in a Shoe), 155 suitcase exhibition 156 time, theme of 158 Niţulescu, Virgil 133f NMRP (Muzeul Naţional al Ţăranului Român ([National Museum of the Romanian Peasant]) 168, 170, 179 n. 1 see also muzeografi; researchers/artists aesthetics 167 Althabe, Gerard 48 anti-communism 124, 141–2, 149, 150 Arca lui Noe (Noah’s Ark) exhibition 22 archives 27–8, 44f, 45–8, 50–2, 54, 60, 108 Bernea, Horia 17 Cahle 43 categorization 153–4, 168 change 166 churches 134 closed rooms 28–32 collection attendants 22, 153f collections 151–4 colour, use of 33 communism/socialism 166 communism/socialism exhibiting 145, 146–9, 150–9 construction 49–50 dead/live binary 150 destruction 132 employee collaboration 42 employee conflict 17–19, 22–3, 31–2, 40, 42, 43, 119, 154 employee sacralization ritual 132–4 employee’s procession xvif, 1, 2f–3

EMYA 41–2 folk costumes, displaying 34–5f folk objects 174–5 Glass Icons 43 handmade books 155 history of 3, 7 live museography 31, 34, 150, 167, 177 magic realism 25–6, 177 Martor journal 128–9, 159 monument to Marx, Engels and Lenin xif, 7–9, 125f, 144f, 145–6, 162, 170 newness 150 Noah’s Ark 42 object acquisition 152t Pied Chausse, Le (The Foot in a Shoe) 42–3, 155 politics 124, 141–2, 149, 150 Popovăţ, Petre 3 post-communism/socialism 124, 129–30 Povestea Cerului si a Lunii (The Story of the Moon and the Sky) 155 purification rituals 122f, 124–8, 129f registers 152–3 religious symbolism 134, 135f renovation 46 revolution 123 Room 45 98f, 109–10f, 111f, 112, 114, 115, 159 socialist past 46–9 space, use of 18–28, 108–9, 154 spoons 173, 175 storage 22–3, 109–11, 112, 153, 154, 155–6 textiles 27–8 time 25–6 Time Room, The exhibition 28–30, 31, 154, 158 tradition 174 Tzigara-Samurcaş collection 60 Ulcioare de nuntaˇ 43 University Square Protests 139–40 visual archives 50–1 Noah’s Ark (NMRP) 42 Noah’s Ark, from the Neolithic to Coca-Cola project 156–7 Nordic Museum (Nordiska Museet) 56f, 58 Norway 56 Norwegian Museum of Cultural History (Norsk Folkemuseum) 56, 59 Nun’s Room, The exhibition 28, 29f, 31

Ó Duilearga, Séamus 57–8 Ó Súilleabháin, Seán 58 objects. See ethnographic objects and folk objects open-air museums 56, 59, 103 opposition 166–7 Opriş, Ioan 88 Ornaments of the Head exhibition 79f–80, 81 Oroveanu, Mihai 68 outreach 12, 81–2, 86, 91–3, 94f, 176 Paolini, Giulio 147 Paris 11 Paris Primitive (Price, Sally) 11 patriotic work 90f–1 peasants/rural workers 1, 28, 30, 52f, 53f, 54–6, 171 art 53–4, 59 clothing 50–1f, 53f, 71, 165, 171 culture 59–60 European identity 57 images 149, 164f, 165 museum exhibits 59, 173, 174 population numbers 105 social realities 173 songs 87 spoons 173, 175 tradition 174 uprising 50 personal collections 26, 27f pharmakon 150 philosophy 141 photography 114, 123, 130–1 Pied Chausse, Le (The Foot in a Shoe) (NMRP/Nicolau, Irina) 42–3, 155 Pinney, Christopher 34 Plague: A Political Installation, The exhibition 146–9, 150, 151 Pleşu, Andrei 45, 124, 139 politics 11–12, 61–2, 66, 109 see also communism/socialism change 168–9 folk objects 174–5 folklore 86–7, 93 MFA 95 oppression 181 n. 15 photographing change 131 regimes 168–9 rules 76 slogans 139–40 University Square Protests 139–42

Index

205

Popescu, Ioana 25 Popovăţ, Petre 3, 48 porosity 4–5, 167, 168–70 post-communism/socialism 33–4, 124–8 Povestea Cerului si a Lunii (The Story of the Moon and the Sky) (NMRP) 155 Power of Making, The exhibition 176 practices 11 Price, Sally 11 privatization 124 privilege 12, 119 production 105, 107, 165 purification rituals 122f, 124–8, 129f, 130 Rancière, Jacques 36 realism 68 refugees 75–6 religion purification rituals 122f, 124–8, 129f, 130 religious symbols 130, 134–5 sacralization ritual 132–4 renovation projects 33 research 106 researchers/artists 17–19, 20f, 22–3f, 25–8, 31 aesthetics 167 archives 47–8 clothing 37 conflict 17–19, 22–3, 31–2, 40, 42, 43, 119 education 39 identity 42 status 39–40 surveillance 154 taste, war on 40 work practices 161 Ressu, Camil 75 restorations 10 retrospection 34 Revista Monumentelor Istorice (Review of Historical Monuments) 77 Revista Muzeelor (Museums’ Magazine) 77 Revista Muzeelor Ethnografice (Folk Museums’ Magazine) 77 revolution 123, 131–2 see also University Square Protests rituals cleansing rituals 124, 136–8, 140 purification rituals 122f, 124–8, 129f, 130

206

Index

Roman, Petre (prime minister of Romania) 139 Romania 1, 53, 105, 179 n. 4 see also Bucharest communism 112 cultural blending 174 de-Stalinization 109, 112 economy 183 n. 10 fashion standardization 32–3 history, re-writing 158 intelligentsia 39–40 monarchy 3, 49f, 50, 54, 62 museum reorganization 62 museums, number of 77 nationalization 62 as People’s Republic 77 politics 61–2 privatization 124 revolution 123, 131–2 society 43, 107–8 Timişoara 139 tradition 174 University Square Protests 139–42 USSR, relationship with 109, 111, 112 Romanian Association for the Friendship with the Soviet Union (ARLUS) 85 Romanian Heritage 128–9 Roşu, Georgeta 16f, 17, 21, 36–7f, 152 Royal Jubilee Exhibition 50 ruination 167 rural workers. See peasants Sansi, Roger 157, 176 Schaeffer, Hermann 41–2 science 65 scientificity 76, 95 Second World War 61 Segalen, Martine 39 Serbia 86 Sfânta Vineri (Saint Friday) monastery 129–30 shiny things 54 singularization 8 Skansen Open-air Museum 56, 59 Skeggs, Beverly 38–9 social class 39, 140, 168 see also peasants/ rural workers class struggle 141 clothing 54, 107 intelligentsia 39–40, 84 social media 161

socialism. See communism/socialism socialist realism 111 society 43, 107–8, 168 sock exhibitions 31 Sofia Central Museum 145 Song to Romania festival 103, 104–5 Soviet Union. See USSR Ssorin-Chaikov, Nikolai 82 stage costumes 106 Stakhanovism 82 Stalin, Joseph, monument to 138 standardization 32–3 state control 80–1, 83, 87–90, 95, 103, 176 aesthetics 101 Decorativa 84–5 folk art 106 history 113–14 inventory 159 production 105 Statue Park, Budapest 145 statues communist/socialist/leaders 112 destruction of 112 duo sculpture 147–8 monument to Marx, Engels and Lenin xif, 7–9, 125f, 144f, 145–6, 162, 170 removal of 8 Ştirbey Palace 63f–4 storage 22–3, 99, 109–11, 112–14, 158 Storrie, Calum 1–2 Sweden 56, 58 Szelényi, Ivan 39, 84 Târgul Luna Bucureştilor (the Month of Bucharest) fair 54 Tarlo, Emma 176 taste 167 war on 40 taxonomy. See categorization technocrat intelligentsia 39, 40, 84, 86 television 159 temporality/time 158, 171

The Ant: Cultural Action Group 154 Time Room, The exhibition 28–30, 31, 154, 158 Timişoara 139 Titu, Alexandra 34, 135 tradition 106, 174 traditionalism 173 Trust, Faith, Secrecy exhibition 176 Tzigara-Samurcaş, Alexandru 3, 49f, 50, 52–4, 56–7, 58–9, 60 UCECOM (National Union of Cooperatives of Production) 106 Ukraine, museums 64–5 Ulcioare de nuntaˇ (NMRP) 43 uniforms 33 University Square Protests 139–42 USSR 75–6, 109, 111 V.I. Lenin–I.V. Stalin Museum 109 Vacăreşti Monastery 128, 129 valorization 104 value ranking 105–6, 107 vandalism 9 Various (Artizanat collection) 107 Verdery, Katherine 136 Village Museum (Muzeul Satului), 47, 59, 103 visibility/invisibility 99, 103, 112, 114, 116, 119–20, 167 Vlăduţiu, Ion 88 Vukov, Nikolai 165–6 Wajda, Andrzej 112–13 ‘We will die, but we will be free!’ (Nicolau, I.; Popescu, I.; Rădulescu, S.) 140 Were, Graeme 96 Western Europe 41, 85, 87, 94–5 What Are Exhibitions For? (Daniels, Inge) 177 white 156 white overalls 19, 21f, 33, 36–8f, 40

Index

207

208

209

210

211

212