Ion Grigorescu (b. 1945), who was trained as a painter but is best known today for his work in film, photography, and installation, has been one of the most influential figures in Romanian unofficial art since the 1970s. He has received this retroactive recognition even though the work he created before the collapse of Nicolae Ceauşescu’s dictatorial regime in 1989 was made in private for the consumption of a small circle of friends.[1] Working in this way, Grigorescu enacted in his apartment a series of solo performances as part of “a process of self discovery” that he photographed and filmed. Boxing belongs to this group of works and exemplifies both Grigorescu’s tendency to perform fully nude and his ability to use the camera’s technical capacities to create allegorical meanings for his stripped-down acts. In Boxing, he double exposed footage of himself throwing punches in two opposite directions to produce the appearance of the artist having a boxing match with a ghostly version of himself.

Writing in the catalog of a Grigorescu retrospective titled In the Body of the Victim, Joanna Mytkowska and Marta Dziewanska note the artist’s “radical consolidation of artistic activities with quotidian life” and contend that “Grigorescu’s oeuvre can be seen as a classic example of Central European experimental art, which the artist deploys in his search for a place within the extremely oppressive political system.” They continue, “The singularity of Grigorescu’s contribution rests in his introduction of religious and spiritual motifs into conceptual art, as well as his conviction that political crises are rooted in a crisis of the spirit.” The desire to examine his own psychological and spiritual condition accounts for Grigorescu’s confessional nakedness in his performances, as well as his recurring exploration of the theme of a split personality or self. The latter can be clearly seen not only in Boxing but also in other films and photographic series,[2] such as Masculine-Feminine (1976), a film in which Grigorescu takes on the attributes of both sexes, or Dialogue with Ceausescu (1978), in which the artist has an imaginary conversation with the dictator, whom he conjures on camera by wearing a mask of Ceauşescu’s face. As if commenting on these films, in one interview, Grigorescu has compared the experience of living in postwar Romania “to the silent struggle of two equal opponents. May be one is stronger, but does not try to make noise or criticize others, and instead criticizes himself.” In the same interview, he notes, “I tried to live in harmony with my ethics.” Though Grigorescu does not elaborate on the difficulties he encountered in this deceptively simple quest, his works and particularly his films eloquently show the internal struggles that resulted for a person who tried “living within the truth” (as Václav Havel put it) under one of socialist Eastern Europe’s harshest dictatorial regimes.[3] — Ksenya Gurshtein

The screening of this film was made possible courtesy Galerija Gregor Podnar, Berlin/Ljubljana. With thanks to staff members Marie Graftieaux, Nicola Mafessoni, and Kati Simon for their help in making a screening of this film possible in Washington.

Along with her friend and occasional collaborator Ion Grigorescu, Geta Brătescu (b. 1926) is today widely acknowledged as one of Romania’s most significant unofficial artists of the socialist era. Brătescu’s artistic interests were less obviously subversive than Grigorescu’s, and her biography demonstrates [that she straddled successfully the realms of official and unofficial art production.[4] In doing so, she created both work that was seen publicly and work that she made for herself and a small circle of likeminded artists. Brătescu’s 1977 experiments with film—for which Ion Grigorescu served as the cameraman—fall into the latter category. For an artist whose lifelong practice has been rooted in drawing (a selection of her works can be seen here, these were playful exercises that she undertook with a medium fashionable during a political “thaw” and the materials available at hand.[5]  In the case of this film, the artist’s actual hands were what she turned to. In The Hands (whose title is sometimes given as The Hand of My Body), Brătescu explores with playfulness and curiosity her hands as her primary tools with (and on) which she performs a variety of activities. “When I made films and videos in which I played with my hands, I was seeing my hands as objects,” she explains, adding that she focused on this subject “because the hand is the most complex organ in the human body. The most complex, but it is not as ostentatious as the face. The hand is space, a play with space, like drawing.” The Hands captures the artist as she considers her behavior and creative process in the studio, a very important space for her where she is free to express herself and pursue “responsible play”—an idea she explored further in her second 1977 film, The Studio.[6]  Of that film, which also focuses on her exploring materials with her hands, she says, “The film I made in the studio was, for me, an apologia for drawing. . . . I wanted to demonstrate how a body, a hand can draw something. I wanted to show that you could do everything on a vertical plane as well as a horizontal plane.” And even though film disappeared from Brătescu’s art in the 1980s, two of the video works she made in the early 1990s, 2x5 and Automatic Cocktail, both from 1993, capture her distinctive interest in the process of creation and present direct echoes of The Hands and The Studio, respectively.  — Ksenya Gurshtein

The screening of this film was made possible courtesy Galerie Barbara Weiss, Berlin. With thanks to Kirsten Wandschneider at Galerie Barbara Weiss for her help in making a screening of this film possible in Washington.