Erwin Piscator (1893-1966), theatre director and political theoretician, initiator of the political theatre. In Berlin, Piscator founded the Proletarian Theatre (1920), Central theatre (1924) and Piscator Bühne (1927-1929). In 1934, he emigrated to the U.S.S.R. , then to France and United States. He returned to Germany after the second world war and was in charge of Freie Volksbühne (1962-1966). Naturalism and the people’s stage are the underlying principles of the proletarian theatre theorized by Erwin Piscator in his work, Political Theatre. The establishment of the Volksbühne theatre constituted a radical rupture with the bourgeois theatre which emphasized aestheticism, grandeur in…

by Costi Rogozanu Why would I go to the theatre? Why would I go out for “art consumption”? Certainly not to look for something “nice” or to change the scenery for a while. The need for bourgeois catharsis can be easily fulfilled at home by downloading texts, films and music online. No. I only go out to a performance for its message. I only go out when I feel that the artists are “my guys”, that they’d like to get together and break some windows (metaphorically, since I’m no longer that age, unfortunately). I don’t even go out to socialize,…

by Valentina Iancu Andre Breton’s concept of revolutionary surrealism was introduced in Romania by a group of artists and writers gravitating around the magazine unu. Founded and financially supported by the military doctor and poet Saşa Pană, unu was the longest-running surrealist magazine in Romania. All the published works followed the two defining directions of surrealism: the Freudian-inspired automatism and left-wing activism. Uniştii (Victor Brauner, Marcel Iancu, Geo Bogza, M.H. Maxy, Saşa Pană, Ilarie Voronca, Claude Sernet) took baby-steps towards positing the socio-political determination of art. Throughout its activity, other young artists joined the initial group and radicalized the endeavor…

by Vlad Petri  The protests that took place in Bucharest in January 2012 led to discussions on the role of street protests and problematized the relation between the authorities, the protesters and those documenting the events. The article Visual Representations of the 2012 Protests. Whose Side Are You On? tackles several issues: the partitioning of the physical space of protest, the existence of a “supervised protest”, authorized by law enforcement institutions, the representations of protesters in the media, the construction of a fictitious context of the protest different from the one on the scene, the meaning of the perspective one…

Art Up Against Political Systems The theme of the first issue of Gazeta de Artă Politică is Art Up Against Political Systems, a recurring topic in debates about the positioning of artists in relation to various forms of power, as well as in those about the ubiquitous “resistance through culture”, about the need for politically involved art or about the radical nature of artistic endeavors which discuss the political. We settled on this theme because we believed it was essential to problematize the artists’ role in society and the relevance of politically-charged interventions in a context where concepts such as…