Authors

Mihai Țapu¹;  ¹ Babeș-Bolyai University, Romania

Discussion

Florin Flueraș, a contemporary Romanian performance artist, gained recognition at the beginning of the 2010s for his provocative and socially engaged work alongside Ion Dumitrescu in the Presidential Candidate” performance series. It combined criticism of political power structures and the “manufacturing of consent” by mass media (Herman & Chomsky 1988) with different forms of institutional critique (Smithson 1996). In recent years, however, Flueraș's artistic trajectory has shifted significantly, with his practice (both solo, as well as in his collaborations with performance artist Alina Popa) increasingly reflecting conspiratorial ideas. These latter performances build on themes such as a global “reptilian” elite which manipulates the population, or the need to “awaken” a “second” (“astral”) body, echoing various forms of “local spiritualities” embodied by ‘90s conspiracy figures such as Lorin Fortuna or Gregorian Bivolaru. This paper traces the evolution of Flueraș’'s work from a politically engaged delivery of critiques targeting systemic corruption and societal power imbalances, to a creative output reliant on conspiracy theories. 
To this end, I focus on the fluctuating conceptualization of the term “spectacle” in his performances. Flueraș’s trajectory is showcased through analyses of several of his performances, from the above mentioned “Presidential Candidate” series (started in 2008), to more recent ones, such as “Second Body” (started in 2012), “Collapse Yoga” (started in 2016), “The Clinic” (2018) and “Political Sorcery” (2024). The aim of this paper is to show that Flueraș’s initial understanding of spectacle, highly indebted to Guy Debord’s idea of a “society of spectacle,”  which materialized in performances questioning the increased economic inequality engendered by the Great Recession transforms into a neo-reactionary understanding of spectacle (Moldbug 2007). This latter conception of the spectacle is closely reflected in the right-wing populist and conspiratorial “Manichean divide” between an “evil elite” and the “pure people” (Mudde&Kaltwasser 2017; Bergmann 2018). By undergoing this conceptual shift, Flueraș accepts and reinforces contemporary art’s status as an “art of collusion” (Baudrillard 1972), a form of art which does not structurally question the current social order, thus paradoxically and conspiratorially embracing the spectacle of the “liberal imagination” (Guilhot 2022) he once sought to criticise.