Maurizio Cattelan: Your first solo exhibition in New York, at Ramiken Crucible in 2010, was titled The Management of Barbarism. What kind of barbarism were you managing?
Andra Ursuţa: My own. The Management of Barbarism is actually the loose translation of the title of an ‘Al-Qaeda playbook’ that describes tactics of fostering nationalist and religious resentments and violence as primers for Jihad. I wanted to reverse-hijack the concept and use it to funnel my own nationalist and religious resentments I feel towards my own country.
MC: That’s so strange—I’ve only heard good things about Romania.
AU: We take pride in our misery.
MC: Congratulations. Is it so miserable to be an artist?
AU: Not at the moment. But it is a little embarrassing.
MC: You’ve made works that would make most people want to go into hiding. Your self-portraits are so rude that I’ve heard people assuming you are a man, exploiting a model. How do you respond to this?
AU: They would be very offensive if made by a man, but I actually see them as very feminine exercises in extreme passive aggression.
MC: Crush (2011) is a very realistic full body cast of you, nude, as a flattened stone age peat bog mummy, covered in what appears to be an enormous amount of semen. Why put yourself in this position? And how did you make such a thing?
AU: It’s a very uncomfortable and slightly melodramatic description of an emotional state, of feelings of rejection and worthlessness. Like most of my works, it started with a very dumb, literal understanding of the word “crush.” Crush is the sum of all crushes that lead to heartbreak experienced over a lifetime, or over centuries, if you think of the female protagonist as an archetypal used and discarded woman.
MC: That seems like an incredibly negative statement—that women are essentially “cum dumpsters,” defined by their relationships to men, and literally crushed by the disappointment of their expectations.
AU: Yes, I’ve been there. Crush is a self-portrait that fulfills all those requirements. It’s made from a female perspective that tries to mimic macho detachment and fails, implying a violent and degrading self-annihilation. The female subject’s expectations are only part of it, there are also cultural expectations that go against them. I rejected the misogynistic culture I came from and at the same time, although it’s not cool to admit it, I don’t relate to the liberal sexual attitudes of the ultra-civilized society I now live in. They both lead to the sense of being interchangeable and therefore worthless. So Crush is really about a personal and somewhat neurotic failure to optimally function in the contemporary world.