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An addition which results not in a number but an interrogation point is likely to have more to do with philosophy than with mathematics. Instead, Mircea Cantor’s seemingly cryptic Addition (2005) (transcribed above) could possibly have something to do with the economy of meaning of the art system—or lack thereof. Handwritten in fluorescent orange spray paint onto the white walls of a gallery space, like a hasty graffiti, Addition reads like a Foucauldian equation about the coercive control system in which art production and reception operates. While the medium of the wall drawing speaks to the underground culture of spray painters and makes it a recognizable sign in the empire of popular culture, the self-referential art jargon complicates its reading and forces us to question the place of artistic production in mainstream popular culture.
Cantor, who was born in Romania where he still lives and works when not in France, the other elected city of his artistic endeavors, has made it a part of his creative ethos to ask the difficult questions that his practice raises. As poetic as it is political, The Landscape is Changing (2003), a group performance held in Tirana, Albania, which took the form of a street protest reminiscent of communist propaganda marches (only that the usual placards with portraits and slogans had been replaced by mirror-like reflective panels), was described by Amiel Grumberg as “[a] collective exclamation point [which] is gradually transformed into a personal question mark.” Cantor’s ability to question his practice, the world around him, and his position in it, in ways that are as subtle as they are incisive, speaks to a keen understanding of the complexities of power structures in the age of late capitalism and of their pervasiveness within the art system. (CT)
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