Figure 4.1 Ion Grigorescu, Mirrors, the artist’s studio, 1975.
Courtesy: Ion Grigorescu.
Talking about Eastern Europe, both before and after 1989, seems to be a rather difficult task for the brave few who decide to attend this journey. The geopolitical region was – and still is – not a homogeneous cultural space: the differences are justified by a dissimilar past as well as by a complex present, which, in my opinion, cannot be reduced to the simplifying notion of the “East”. Therefore, analysing certain layers of the public sphere, pointing out random specificities of clandestine event-based art, will draw our attention to the complexity of this large puzzle. The pieces of this puzzle can question the East as a coherent theoretical as well as historical construct. In the present investigation, I intend to shed light on a few specificities of the Romanian second public sphere through snapshot-like glimpses of event-based art, intermediality and communication that were deeply anchored into the country’s social context.
Despite the communist system’s thorough control over the public sphere, a parallel public sphere existed all over the communist bloc with significant regional differences. This second public sphere was a discursive (semi-) autonomous field for creation and communication, with a paradoxical relationship to authoritarian order and features such as elusiveness, sabotage, isolation, border-crossing, escapism and political motivation/politicization. The aspiration to control all kinds of public spheres was characteristic of dictatorships of any kind; this was especially true for Nicolae Ceauşescu’s Romania during the last decade of the socialist order. While at that time the Soviet Union was already dominated by a relative relaxation initiated by Mikhail Gorbachev and carried out in the entire bloc, Romania returned to Stalinist concepts. This was the result of Ceauşescu’s discovery of Asian communism in 1970, followed 1971 by “The July Theses”.1 Over a couple of years, the artistic public sphere’s extension was limited, dominated by party control, causing the opening of ideologically motivated propaganda centres, such as the Council for Socialist Culture and Education and the Inspectorates for Socialist Culture and Education Both of these “fed” the first public sphere.
If Yugoslavia represented the model of disobedient socialism, that of capitalist extraction – and became, to a large extent, an exception within the Eastern Bloc – Romania was, in the 1980s, one of the most isolated countries of the region. Despite a growing retreat from the international stage, the disaster and ruin of cultural institutions, which were under ideological control lacking initiative, artists, as individuals or in small groups, opposed the communist regime by constantly eluding or sabotaging it with their own tools. Even if there was a huge disparity between the repression of cultural institutions, the official ideology, and Ceauşescu’s one-person dictatorship,2 being concerned with the control and censorship of any innovative cultural phenomenon, the presence of tiny islands of the second public sphere, created by a few artists and culture-oriented people, appear almost miraculous.
Under these circumstances in Romania there existed a second public sphere which was at times underground, at times open, in full sight of the authorities, with frequently changing members and supporters. In most cases this parallel culture had a dynamic circulation, with members only staying for short periods of time, occasionally, sometimes by accident, and with others who were participating in the official culture too, for various reasons ranging from cynicism and compromise to challenge. The second public sphere wasn’t free of so-called double agents: artists or art critics being involved in the neo-avant-garde and at the same time functioning as secret police informers.3
I consider this overlapping of the official and unofficial public spheres in the arts as an important aspect of deconstructing stereotypes inscribed into a generalized view of the East. The situation of artists being actively involved both in the first and second public spheres was extremely complex. To reflect on this paradox questioning universalisations, I will consult the example of Ion Bitzan and Ion Grigorescu. Both artists exploited official art structures to achieve public attention – internationally and domestically.
Ion Bitzan (1924–1997) was a favourite of public commissioning. His studio artwork production served more elitist contexts, targeted at foreign curators because he mainly exhibited those works abroad. He is a telling example of the birth and consolidation of a double discourse, in which activities in the local cultural space and the international space collided. The double discourse was a proof of an unscrupulous, ideologically insensitive pragmatism. This contradiction becomes clearer when in 1969 Scottish art dealer Richard Demarco came to Bucharest to discover contemporary Romanian art. He was surprised to see, in Bitzan’s and other artists’ studios, an art perfectly in synchrony with the West. Although Bitzan was interested in Dada textual experiments, object aesthetics, socialist-realist painting, sculpture and postmodernist installations, he demonstrates a clear-cut contrast to Grigorescu, who was not involved in a double discourse.
The case of Grigorescu (b. 1945), trained as a painter but interested in mixed media, provides a different example of how public spheres overlapped. Besides performatively researching the human body under clandestine circumstances, he tried, at the same time, to display his avant-gardist art at official exhibitions. These non-canonical artworks censors regarded as provocative were the creative result of artificial “public debates”. These paintings were inspired by reportage photography, like Carrying out the Plan Resides in Team Power (Îndeplinirea planului stă în puterea colectivului, 1972). Such artworks were often removed from the show because of the fear that they could generate a real debate. Grigorescu’s hyperrealistic approach was also part of a collage series entitled The Great Demonstration of August 23 – The Festival of Liberation (Marea demonstraţie de 23 August – Sărbătoarea Eliberării, 1974) presented at the exhibition Images of History (Bucharest, Galeria Nouă, 1975) with 24 snapshots technically extracted from the television broadcast of the parade. While the material itself was based on a political event’s live broadcast of the national television, the collage consisted of subjectively selected images that were charged with a doubled meaning. The initial motivation of organizing the parade was, on the collages, subverted by text on the panel.
In the 1970s Grigorescu was actively engaging in different public spheres, though contrary to Bitzan’s participation in the official double discourse. Because in the following decade he was forbidden to present his aesthetic research on the body and nudity in the first public sphere, he was pushed back into the isolation of private space.
Even in the 1980s, obvious border-crossings between the first and the second public sphere were few. This was especially true for (performance) artists dealing with questions of identity from a concrete, direct, corporeal aspect, who only had rare opportunities to express themselves in the first public sphere, since relocating private intimacy into a controlled public realm wasn’t welcome in Romania, neither in the 1970s nor in the 1980s. Performance art was strictly individual, not very widespread, restricted to workshop experiment or private space, with no real audience.4 The almost complete isolation of Romanian performers both in the 1970s and 1980s originated in the dogmatic rejection of the body, considered a taboo subject, an unartistic element, a problematic medium, not having been acknowledged because it allowed for subjective interpretations, which could escape standardisation. The artist’s body was not to appear in public other than in classical self-portrait.
The fragmentation of the Romanian public sphere in late socialism becomes clear when considering the case of performance art and how it was pushed into marginal zones of creation. The dominant public sphere of the 1980s did not tolerate radical forms of aesthetic provocation, therefore an alternative art area appeared that was already consolidated in the 1970s, mainly through the individual artistic contributions of the performance artists Ion Grigorescu and Geta Brătescu. The lack of publicity and the pressure of censorship forced the two artists to record and take photographs of their event-based works in the privacy of their own studios. Grigorescu used to work alone, positioning his naked body in front of the camera that became his intimate partner and accomplice. For Grigorescu the body was the best available material on which he could act out his interest in visual experiments. This very interest was also fuelled by the discovery and study of various psychoanalytical theories, including those of Freud and Lacan. Based on the notes he had taken of his dreams, Grigorescu turned these thoughts into filmic scenarios reminding us of the inconsistency and absurdity of dreams themselves.
Through the body performances we get an insight into the private sphere, paradoxically deprived of its complete privacy. Grigorescu’s restless experiments are centred around the body, and sexuality indirectly emphasizes the repression of the outside, of the system. In certain series of photographs, such as Pyjamas (Pijama, 1974) and Indoor Body Art (Body Art în interiorul casei, 1976), the images are manipulated to serve the illusion of looking through a prison cell’s peephole. The artist’s body becomes subject to a daily ritual. The mechanical repetition in the photo series reminds us of Focault’s “docile body” pressured by power (Foucault 1975, pp. 137–171).
Those photo-performances and films by Grigorescu focusing on the taboo subject of the body were taken in an abstractly and artificially decorated environment further alienated through the use of a life-size mirror. It magnified the body and transported it into a labyrinth-like infinite space (Mirrors [Oglinzi, 1975]). The lights also adapt to artificiality, the image is usually fixed, only recording the artist’s contorted movements in front of the camera. There are cases when the image grows mobile, with Grigorescu detaching the camera from the tripod, moving it up and down in front of his body or raising it above his head. In this latter example, the movement becomes irregular and hasty, the image is shaking restlessly, as seen in the film Male-Female (Masculin-Feminin, 1976).
Political topics are also processed in the atmosphere of the closed space trimmed with a curtain as background. The context of these mediatised performances, namely the second public sphere, was through its oppositional position to a ruling publicity heavily politicized. And so was the (indirectly) system-critical and subversive content of the event-based art pieces. In the film entitled Dialogue with President Ceauşescu (Dialog cu Preşedintele Ceauşescu, 1978), belonging to this category of Grigorescu’s oeuvre, the artist was, in a claustrophobic setting, playing two roles at the same time: himself and the Romanian dictator. The plot is centred around the dialogue of the two characters, where Grigorescu confronts Ceauşescu with his questions and thoughts concerning the dictator’s responsibility in current economic and social circumstances. Thoughts and questions were faded in as subtitles and the figures stayed mute, which shifted the atmosphere of the film into absurdity, because no conversation was actually happening – and in this moment lies the subversive nature of the piece, with its heavily politicized message. The same interpretation is true for Bucharest, My Love (În Bucureştiul iubit, 1977). Here Grigorescu gets on a tram to record images of the city, focusing on the physical demolitions and destructions caused by construction of the president’s new palace, The People’s House. The visual effects are blurred images and anxiety, there are long shots, the pictures are moving in a somewhat random manner (Pintilie 2013, p. 28). This form of subtle aesthetic criticism directs our retrospective attention to the harm the Romanian dictator caused on multiple levels of social, political and cultural life. In both cases, it was only possible to express politically motivated / politicized creative opinion using media that created a specific, autonomous public sphere, of a kind that only very rarely appeared in historical discourses of the East.
As an allusion to her experience of censorship, an addition to the line-up of politicized / politically motivated performances, Geta Brătescu (b. 1926) created a series of provocative photograph / collage self-portraits entitled Censored Self-Portrait (Autoportret cenzurat, 1978), with her mouth and her eyes sealed by a paper strip. With this gesture, she referred to the inability to communicate freely in the deviated first public sphere. Self-portraits appeared in Brătescu’s work of the 1970s very often. A representative example is her individual show Towards White (Către alb, Galateea Gallery, Bucharest, 1976) presenting a great number of her photo-performances (Guţă 1999, p. 119), in which the artist’s face was reproduced obsessively. These photo-performances interlinked her studio research and the phenomenon of the second public sphere. Self-Portrait towards White (Autoportret către alb, 1975), to name an example, consists of a series of seven juxtaposed frontal portraits of Brătescu, where the lines of the face dim from photograph to photograph until the contours vanish completely, and projected film on Brătescu’s face.
Brătescu produced some filmed and photographed performances in the 1970s as well, focusing on herself and her studio. The studio was a central space of her experiments that was not to be separated from her personality or imagination. Brătescu’s best known performance is entitled The Studio (Atelierul, 1978), filmed by Ion Grigorescu. Inside the studio, Bratescu is constructing a mental space, by measuring the physical space with her body – walking, stretching her hands, etc. Then she draws a square in the studio having the size of her own body, where she symbolically falls asleep and then wakes up. Like Ion Grigorescu, Geta Brătescu also made efforts and sometimes even succeeded in presenting some of these mediatised experiments in her exhibitions, though she never performed in front of an audience. This is the reason why the studio, as an intimate public sphere, was still Brătescu’s most important production site. The theme of the studio appeared in another photo-performance, also entitled Towards White.
Geta Brătescu channelled her research on embedded identity into self-portrait and used the studio as a symbol of her work. The filmed actions were only meant for a very small, unofficial public, contributing to the second public sphere and consequently consolidating the artist’s authority and her recognition within the artist community.
When one is posing the question about the retrospective legitimacy of the Eastern Bloc and the functioning of the public spheres in the arts, the extension of the latter – as a source for information – becomes also a relevant issue. In the 1960s–1980s information circulation about art and culture was ensured through the contemporary art journals available in the American, French, or Italian cultural centres in Bucharest. Direct communication within the communist camp was more opaque, mostly limited to official exchange, though information on contemporary art in socialist countries was made available in journals selling in Romania. Unofficial Western exchanges continued with the help of emigrated mediators still staying in touch with Romanian acquaintances.
The most popular printed periodicals as information sources on art were the Polish Project and the East German Bildende Kunst (Fine Arts). Arta (Fine Arts), appearing in Bucharest since the 1950s, played an important role in transmitting filtered information suiting both official and unofficial categories. The ambiguity of published discourses, editors’ policy and placing ideologically adequate articles at the beginning and those about international art at the end of each issue, was the way how a certain degree of intellectual freedom could be practiced despite control and censorship. These editorial policies of Arta and Secolul 20 (The 20th century), a literary review informing on contemporary art, reflected the complicated situation in communist Romania, where even contrary discourses existed simultaneously. These journals can be considered as influential pillars of the second public sphere, although their circulation was very limited and they were only able to address a small community of readers with special interest. A group of art critics5 who desired a lively cultural discourse, constantly promoted the artists they considered interesting and encouraging for their research. They even found ways how to promote controversial artworks.
The 1980s’ generation of artists, more motivated and determined to reach the public, was supporting “new” media (performance, body art, installation, experimental film, video). This was a time when, despite of pressure from institutional structures, the official movement of young artists that was protected and controlled by the communist creative unions, gained strength to formulate a separate opinion and was able to put pressure on the system.6 This group, known as Studio 35, was promoting new media and searched for the official legitimacy that could be provided by the artists’ union. The 1980s’ generation, by joining international art networks such as mail art (Röder 1996, pp. 7–318), aimed to sabotage the blockades of the official system, that throughout the decade became more and more restrictive and isolated. Like the information channels, mail art, as a form of lively exchange, further extended the second public sphere’s influence.
To photographer Iosif Király out of the large scale of new media photography was the ideal tool. It offered a format for concentrated information he intended for the future and that could easily reach an anonymous audience, “traveling” via mail art. The desire to escape the dreadful isolation of the 1980s made him try to contact other artists from remote cultures. Practicing mail art was an attempt to break the blockade imposed on all the citizens of the country during the last stage of Ceauşescu’s paranoid dictatorship. Király made of autobiographical photos small-size collages, afterwards turning them into mail art works in order to exchange them with other artists. These photographs resulted of performances held in his own studio or home, expressing the artist’s exasperation and frustration caused by daily life in the 1980s. Mail art became for him an escapist, albeit temporary, strategy, to fight the segregation of the communist regime, the abusive control of censorship and the threat of dictatorship. The discouragement culminating in being cut off from the international stage, resulting from the limitation of information and creation was compensated by gestures of solidarity as the case of Shimamoto will demonstrate. The exchanges of messages by mail contributed to the creation of a small nucleus of Romanian artists, who achieved a short-lived but significant solidarity despite the atomization of the local cultural environment and enabled contacts with international artists. During the 1980s, Király corresponded with Japanese artist Shozo Shimamoto, a member of the Gutai group, who even visited Timişoara to see him. Mail art helped the artist to justify his search and finding a purpose in an exasperating reality, offering him a satisfactory feedback, an opening and a novel, creative impulse. At that time, mail art became, for the isolated Romanian artists a second public sphere, a field of artistic, cultural and even human escapism. The artists’ contributions in various foreign publications remained unknown to the authorities and the general public, but were accessible to a small circle of colleagues in the second public sphere.
The principle of mail art, as a possibility of outsourcing the second public sphere’s potentialities, was employed by several Timişoara-based artists – Constantin Flondor, Doru Tulcan and Iosif Király – who in 1984 invited fellow artists to participate in a nation-wide survey posing the following question: “Life without art?”. Visual artists were joined by writers and musicians, each having the freedom to choose the medium for how to answer the question. Of the material, collected as a result, the initiators intended to organize an exhibition,7 the plan of which was rejected by the authorities without any explanation. As a result, the exhibition was organized in Flondor’s studio open to the public. The private sphere of the studio was, for the duration of the show, transformed into a (second) public sphere.
The temptation of implementing new media prevailed for several artists because it secured a field of (semi-)autonomous action, the chance to cross borders in the heat of experiment. Various artistic practices, like intermediality, were attractive for artists like Alexandru Antik, Teodor Graur, Dan Mihălţianu, Wanda Mihuleac, Iosif Király and others. In order to tie these artistic practices to public space and obtain them official recognition, in 1986 Studio 35 organized the Symposium of Young Visual Art and Art Criticism in Sibiu, an event which lasted for several days at several locations in town. The event was attended by the above-mentioned artists, who performed in front of a selected, rather closed public, consisting of artists and art critics of the same generation. Alexandru Antik’s happening The Dream is not Dead (Visul nu a pierit) represented a statement of hope in times of great national depression and was the most famous event-based piece in Romania of the 1980s. Antik performed an action with the naked body as a scene of immanent reality. The happening modelled the situation of imprisonment: the artist acted behind prison bars separating himself from the audience. Antik cut his hair, displayed animal organs filled with blood that were cast in plaster. László feLugossi read a neo-Dadaist text, in candle light, he was acting among objects presented in a personal micro-exhibition. The action was abruptly interrupted by the authorities, who prompted the public to leave and the organizers to clean the blood. Antik created a tension between intimate reflections about life, art, oppression and the absence of freedom – in the action the body was the immediate victim of punishment.
Figure 4.2 Life without Art, Constantin Flondor’s Studio, Timişoara, 1984.
Photo: Iosif Király. Courtesy: Iosif Király.
If Antik’s performance was a failed attempt to display the second public sphere in the first one, other performances confirmed the separation of public spheres, strengthening the pseudo-institutions that functioned parallel to official ones. Such example were the 1987 and 1988 performances called House pARTy in the home of the Scriba artist family. The hosts accommodated Teodor Graur, Dan Mihălţianu, Iosif Király, Călin Dan and Wanda Mihuleac, Nadina and Decebal Scriba, who in the house were able to give free vent to their ideas. Some of these ideas resulted in installations, few were remaining as mere performances, but they were all recorded on video.8 The most interesting action was performed by Doru Graur, entitled The Sport Centre (Complex sportive, 1987). With a bare chest, the artists pretended to be a young man working out: the dumbbells were replaced with a TV screen presenting the sports news. In this action Graur ironized the communist clichés like the sheer physical force of the “new man,” who strengthens his muscles, at the same time having an inferiority complex.
Performance was an intermediate language of the 1980s artists’ generation. Occasionally they tried to transport this artistic research into the public space of galleries. They were partially successful outside of Bucharest in important cultural centres of the country. In a politically centralized country like Romania, the capital was supposed to bring together most of the artists and was expected to have the most dynamic improvements. However, already by the end of the 1970s and especially in the 1980s, other cities in the province, became “strategical” venues in which alternative artistic events or expressions of a parallel culture could occur without the fear of immediate restrictive reactions. Timişoara, Sibiu, Oradea, Baia Mare, Cluj became spotlights on the country’s cultural map, more favourable to public artistic experiments, without the problems occurring in Bucharest, where censorship was extremely prompt and efficient. Artistic exchanges supported by Studio 35 grew more intensively between various cultural centres, so that the young artists’ exhibitions, which were considered less important and therefore were less controlled, could be more easily organized, moving from one city to another. Under the pretext of organizing mere exhibitions, these artists continued to favour various media – land art interventions, performances, installations, photography, and film. The first public sphere, however, constantly posed obstacles, through the filters of which each action had to be justified and approved, so artists in the 1980s still had to turn to the private space of their homes, like their predecessors in the 1970s, to create what could not be shown in first public sphere. The private space was thematised in Dan Perjovschi’s performance Red Apples (Mere roşii, 1988), in which the artist “dressed” the space of his apartment in white paper, on which he made narrative drawings commenting on the couple’s life. He dedicated this event-based artwork to his wife. The flat, with all the furniture, vanished in white paper wrapping. On the wrapping Perjovschi drew scenes inspired by the couple’s life – e.g. the TV monitor showed the drawing of two heads appearing on a screen.
This snapshot-like overview of case studies reflecting on event-based art, intermediality and information channels shows the wide range of potentials inscribed into the second public sphere of late socialist Romania the nature of which was mostly adapting to current trends in politics and social life. The variety of examples analysed in present paper, together with the following brief outlook, help us the de-mythologize the historical East as a homogeneous phenomenon.
After 1989, the parallel culture continued its existence for a while, being, though, much more visible than before, becoming “popular” and known even to the street’s people. It is for this particular reason that, in Romania, underground art shifted in the early 1990s, from the background into the foreground. Forbidden during communism, performance art became a language favoured by many young artists who intended a direct and spontaneous communication with the public. As an artistic expression, it had proven suitable to comment on the social and political situation in Romania as well as in the whole of Central and Eastern Europe.
This direction in the art of the 1990s, the opening toward regional spheres first, and toward the international milieu later, reshaped and strengthened the extent of regional and international networks. At the moment of this genuine opening, Eastern European art regained similarities to the West it had lost in isolation. The East European geopolitical area fully recovered and gained prominence in a series of important international exhibitions. The debut and recognition of several East European artists was the result of an inclusive, enthusiastic cultural reclamation. The art market developed inside the former Eastern Bloc, and some of the artists continued their career even on the global free art market. From the perspective of an international opening in the 1990s, I would like to bring out two significant examples – that of Ion Grigorescu and Dan Perjovschi: the aura of suffering and misery, supported by an impressive artistic oeuvre under the repressive conditions of communism, propelled Grigorescu into the limelight of the international stage, while the critical spirit, flexibility, and irony characteristic of Perjovschi transformed the latter into a resourceful performer and commentator of international social and political life. Thus, it seems that the second public sphere was given up forever.
1This was due to Ceauşescu’s enthusiastic discovery, in the 1970s, of Asian communism, while travelling to China and North Korea; as a result, he published “The July 1971 Theses”. The theses were the signal of intensifying ideological pressure and control on art and culture.
2Significantly, this was a time when the Ministry of Culture was called the Committee for Socialist Culture and Education.
3These cases were revealed rather late, when the archives of the former secret police were opened for researchers in the 2000s. An interesting example of such a shocking “revelation” was the activity of critic Petru Comarnescu as a secret police agent, who used to be pro-American and the supporter of the 1960s neo-avant-garde. His mission was directed toward recruiting the young conceptual artist Andrei Cădere (Boia 2014, pp. 47–65).
4A note-worthy exception, at least in my opinion, is Alexandru Antik’s happening The Dream is not Dead (Visul nu a pierit, 1986) in the cellar of the Sibiu Museum of Pharmacy History, performed for a privileged audience consisting of artists and art critics, interrupted by the secret police.
5Anca Arghir, Dan Hăulică, Mihai Drişcu, just to name a few of the editors-in-chief of Arta and Secolul 20.
6The Visual Artists’ Union was an officially acknowledged organization of the visual artists under the control of the state.
7In the 1980s most artists applied performance art mainly as an unofficial medium but the artworks could be multiplied by means of photography and collage – this happened in the exhibition.
8Video was unusual at that time, since such devices were strictly controlled and suspected, the regime being determined to avoid any possibility to have citizens document the reality of the dictatorship and perhaps offer the recordings to international television channels.
Boia, L. (2014). Dosarele secrete ale agentului Anton. Petru Comarnescu în Arhivele Securităţii. 1st ed. Bucharest: Humanitas.
Foucault, M. (1975). Surveiller et punir. Naissance de la prison. 1st ed. Paris: Gallimard.
Guţă, A. (1999). From Self-Portrait to Artwork-as-Self-Portrait. In: The National Art Museum of Romania, ed., Geta Brătescu. 1st ed. Bucharest: The National Art Museum of Romania, pp. 118–119.
Pintilie, I. (2013). Between Modernism and Postmodernism; A Contextual Analysis of Ion Grigorescu’s Work. In: A. Şerban, ed., Ion Grigorescu. The Man with a Single Camera. 1st ed. Berlin: Sternberg Press, pp. 10–35.
Röder, K. (1996). Osteuropa Mail Art im internationalen Netzwerk. 1st ed. Schwerin: Staatliches Museum, pp. 7–318.
