| Excerpt |
On January 23, 1978, at The History Museum of the Socialist Republic of Romania was opened an exhibition dedicated to “the occasion of comrade Nicolae Ceauşescu’s 60-th anniversary and over 45 years of uninterrupted revolutionary activity”. The gifts received by the Ceauşescu spouses in different occasions (“usual” objects or produced specially for being gifted) were arranged in reason of provenance (from the country or abroad) and grouped by counties, countries and continents. The exhibition is an important source for studying the ideological metamorphosis of the revolution in production, work and in the practice of gift exchange. The ideology of gift exchange with Ceauşescu assumed reciprocity, omitted the obligation, competition and the diplomatic protocol (in the case of the gifts from abroad), did not build any other types of relationships between the givers and the receivers, the gifts only “consecrated” the already existent relationships and feelings, but it contributes to their spreading, and the transfiguration of the participants. The reciprocity established a balance between the scientific, dialectical and historical materialism (the attribute of Nicolae Ceauşescu) and the ecstatic, sentimental experience of the relationship of others with their ruler. The materiality dialectically harmonized this balance. The gift exchange exhibited in showcases, eternal, immobile in significations, but dynamic through accumulation of new items, materialized, adjoined, overlapped, merged, produced and integrated different spaces and times. Some of the objects freeze the flow of a linear, genealogic time. Other objects, paintings, statuary groups are metaphors of the time span and endurance. Together compose a time of visionary insight into the past, an encounter with ancestors’ glances who have dreamed this mighty rooted present. The genealogy and the duration were manufactured, mobilized and crafty fitted in a time of total mobilization in the production of history. The gift exchanges “objectified”, materialized, certified, and accelerated this production. The diversity of objects and their dedications compose an impressive collection of givers who miniaturize in showcases an idealised Romania having the image of Ceauşescu. The original meanings of the “common” objects or received according the diplomatic protocol have been omitted, manipulated or reduced only to the giving-receiving moment to enrich the exotic palette of givers. The global exchange of gifts established in the Center of Universe a celebrating Romania, so scientifically miniaturized in exhibition and having as its heart Ceauşescu’s face. The exchange of gifts became a total social performance only in the exhibition’s transparency. The exchange ceremonial exhibited in the museum blurred the reality of the symbolic goods production, of the planned mobilization of the givers to legitimate and, also, to render the communism through objects and words. “The cult of personality” is closely related to the state of exception “who has become the rule” in modernity, even dressed in the “traditional” costume of the gift exchange. |
