title: "Communims never happened" and "Communism manifest"
"Ciprian Muresan’s ‘Communism never happened’ describes the facets of a complex anachronism, a rapport between time and history where they accelerate and decelerate past each other, where the former hemorrhages and the latter is overabundant. It is the definitive answer to Winston Churchill’s observation that Eastern Europe has produced more history than it could consume, and it simultaneously states that Eastern Europe will never cease to aspire to a place in what it projects to be the grander, subtler map of things geopolitical. Its relationship to facts, statistics and painful recollections, replicates the relationship between communism, liberalism and the idea of historical catastrophe in the Eastern political imaginary. Bound up with the certainty that communism certainly happened, it mirrors the way in which post-communism and globalization endlessly complicate each other. It could headline a political agenda or announce the inauguration of a gigantic shopping mall. It is pure, implacable revisionism, needing no further proof than mired memory and the savage exuberance of ownership. It will create new martyrs and new kinds of martyrdom, or perhaps a generation of artists that no longer reflect on trauma and analyze geographical or historical marginality as if it were a Zeno paradox. It is a slogan that bypasses political disputes about the Left and personal histories: if more people agree that ‘Communism never happened’, the possibility of a community discreetly arises.
title: "Communims never happened" and "Communism manifest"
"Ciprian Muresan’s ‘Communism never happened’ describes the facets of a complex anachronism, a rapport between time and history where they accelerate and decelerate past each other, where the former hemorrhages and the latter is overabundant. It is the definitive answer to Winston Churchill’s observation that Eastern Europe has produced more history than it could consume, and it simultaneously states that Eastern Europe will never cease to aspire to a place in what it projects to be the grander, subtler map of things geopolitical. Its relationship to facts, statistics and painful recollections, replicates the relationship between communism, liberalism and the idea of historical catastrophe in the Eastern political imaginary. Bound up with the certainty that communism certainly happened, it mirrors the way in which post-communism and globalization endlessly complicate each other. It could headline a political agenda or announce the inauguration of a gigantic shopping mall. It is pure, implacable revisionism, needing no further proof than mired memory and the savage exuberance of ownership. It will create new martyrs and new kinds of martyrdom, or perhaps a generation of artists that no longer reflect on trauma and analyze geographical or historical marginality as if it were a Zeno paradox. It is a slogan that bypasses political disputes about the Left and personal histories: if more people agree that ‘Communism never happened’, the possibility of a community discreetly arises.
The manifesto/ counter-manifesto dynamic translates to Muresan’s later project, a transcription of the ‘Communist Manifesto’ in Pig Latin, that could, equally legitimately, be understood as an oblique denunciation of political brutality or as the coded signal of a secret collectivity, of an improbable, diffuse uprising. The relevance of the Manifesto today and the confused language of the revolution hold each other in check, but how they conspire against a stable meaning suggests the significance of the piece lies elsewhere, in a territory that is only half-revealed yet radically political. The East awaits its Derrida of reconstruction. "
Mihnea Mircan 2008
