Courtesy: Constantin Flondor, Iosif Király, Doru Tulcan.
An excessively large envelope lies on the wooden floor of what seems to be an artist studio. It literally wraps up three anonymous bodies that appear to be tucked in like friends in a sleeping bag. Their gestures, though hands are barely visible, are closing the envelope, suggesting that the bodies’ presence inside the envelope is chosen. The envelope is marked with a proportionally enlarged stamp, showing the image of a chain and the words “contact”, as well as another stamp on which one can recognize the writing “Timişoara” and the words “trans-idea”. A date is also marked on the stamp: 12.10.1982. What the photograph of this human-sized envelope does not show is the exact space where the event was taking place; further, it does not provide any information on the conditions of production or the context of reception. The anonymous people tucked in the envelope are artists Constantin Flondor, Doru Tulcan and Iosif Király. The venue of the performance was an artist studio situated in an attic in Timişoara belonging to Flondor, one of the most active neo-avant-garde artists in socialist Romania and one of the main figures of the domestic mail art network too. The photograph, taken by Iosif Király, captures a performative gesture which symbolically reveals and concomitantly contests the communicational confinements and the isolation from the international art world imposed on Romanian artists in the 1980s by Nicolae Ceauşescu’s dictatorial regime. While this particular performance, entitled Contact-Trans Idea, and its photographic documentation was produced for a mail art exhibition and was actually being communicated through this very medium, thus escaping the state-run cultural institution’s restriction on the participation of Romanian artists in national and international exhibitions, the image documents, at the same time, a clandestine performance initially produced for the eye of the camera. Therefore, the resulting image is rather an example of conceptual art than the fragmentary documentation of an event-based artwork. The staged action most often communicates an idea that it supports the event to survive in the absence of a public, challenging the understanding of performance as “live art” that lives in the present (Heathfield and Jones 2012, pp. 9–38) and whose constitutive ephemerality “resists the reproductive ideology of visible representations” (Phelan 1993, p. 31). Such actions are being confined to the materiality of the photographic archive, complemented by subsequent oral testimonies (Pintilie 2014, pp. 86–87; Braşoveanu 2016, pp. 127–129).
Courtesy: Constantin Flondor, Iosif Király, Doru Tulcan.
The interpretation of similar performative artworks requires today further clarification on the liminal condition of spaces, neither fully private nor completely public, where ephemeral artworks were produced. Why did Romanian artists in late socialism feel compelled to construct and present their work outside the dominant, “official” institutional system, and turn to filmed and photographically documented artistic actions instead of palpable objects? What was the condition, the social status and the functionality of these spaces (Cseh-Varga 2018) before and after their transmission to artistic sites of exhibitions? If the exhibition is defined as a performative and discursive intervention in the public sphere, how did such performances contribute to challenging its constituency, facilitating the production and reproduction of alternative cultures during socialism?
Examples like the photographic action Contact-Trans Idea support the “underground” character of performativity in Romanian art in the Ceauşescu era. The term “underground” is used here in the sense of Ileana Pintilie, namely, to designate a regime of limited public visibility and art production in relative absence from art criticism and historical investigations (Pintilie 2014, p. 87). A brief outline of Romania’s political post-war context may explain Pintilie’s claims.
In the late fifties and early sixties, Romanian communist leader Gheorghe Gheorghiu Dej did not adapt to the “thaw” introduced in 1956 by Nikita Khrushchev’s break with the excessively authoritarian Stalinist government. A short “thaw” arrived with Nicolae Ceauşescu, who came to power in 1965. His famous speech against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and the resulting sympathy earned in the Western world coincided with a brief period of cultural openness officially lasting until the so-called “July thesis” in 1971, which marked the subordination of art to party control.1 The centralized system of the Union of Fine Artists favoured conservative art production, characterized by a return to socialist realism and intensified ideological content in line with the ideas expressed in the July thesis. This is the reason why most of the radical artistic actions I will discuss in this paper take place in the eighties, the decade of Ceauşescu’s most brutal economic and social impoverishment, forcing great many artists to make radical gestures of revolt and to express them in spaces where communication/articulation was possible. It is equally relevant that, according to Alexei Yurchak’s cultural analysis of the Soviet context, the eighties were a period of late socialism with an intensification of the formal, performative dimension of authoritarian discourse that replicated social norms, institutions and rituals (2005, p. 25). The gap between these kinds of unsubstantial public rituals and conditions existing in reality in the social and cultural spheres gave way to a more nuanced relation of public and private. The intensification of large-scale propagandistic, commemorative or deferential exhibitions pushed the artists towards less visible spaces of artistic communication while attempting to exploit the existing cultural infrastructure.
In this essay, I will map the limits and expansions of the art scene’s public spheres as they were being tested and contested by the artists through performative approaches in Romania of the seventies and eighties. However, I do not intend to picture the artistic non-conformism of actions based on the classical opposition of public and private, corresponding to the censored and the autonomous regimes of art. Heroic narratives of resistance created after 1989 bestowed on these ephemeral gestures new symbolic capital that is in line with the global production of capitalist commodities, often fetishizing and deforming the meaning of their documentation (Morganova 2014, p. 33). The artistic actions I will discuss here were hardly subversive: most of these actions did not openly contest the artistic system, but rather expanded and challenged dominant aesthetic norms as well as traditional visual languages, and very few “underground” actions overtly criticized social or political issues. Although they took place in private or other peripheral cultural locations, bypassing censorship and public scrutiny through a voluntary self-marginalization, their liminal status was also an opportunity for reclaiming artistic agency from a narrow scope of audience. The performative works to be discussed represent a background of the “official” art system rather than a completely independent underground (Braşoveanu 2016). More important, they remained solitary, spontaneous actions, occasionally forming collectives, and never took on the shape of a non-conformist art movement with coherent group programs and institutionalized alternative spaces (Graur 2016, p. 87).2 Some of these almost invisible actions only recently met with art historical interest, even one that was interrupted, suspended and parallel (Groys 2010, p. 13; Badovinac 2006), presenting valuable alternatives to the commodification of the art object, to the newly enhanced solidifying of authorship and to sociability grounded in socialist values such as solidarity and friendship. However, while many of these events appear to be spontaneous, ludic artistic games, at least some of them pursued communication with a wider (artistic) audience.3 In line with Fürst (2016, p. 7), they may also be considered examples of quiet and active disengagement from the then locally dominant aesthetic norms and artistic rituals.
I will briefly outline the relation between marginal urban spaces, the concept of exhibition, and performativity. This will serve as a relational structure facilitating the understanding of the construction of Romania’s expanded public sphere during real-existing socialism. Subsequently, I will identify some of these spaces and analyse their imaginative reinventions.
Since exhibition spaces are the main vehicles of public communication in contemporary art, the institutional particularities of the Romanian art world during late socialism are important, given the non-homogenous nature of Eastern Europe both in terms of artistic production and of political and social configurations which varied from one region to the other (Piotrowski 2009, pp. 241–248). Already in 1988, sociologist Elemér Hankiss sketched the model of an ideal “second society”, characterized by horizontal organization and predominance of non-state ownership (1988, pp. 13–42). In the case of Romania, experimental art was not tolerated, or even encouraged through self-management, and there was no organizational logic that was distinct from the network of artistic institutions operated by the Union of Fine Artists. The centralized system of art production and exhibition, with its own aesthetic norms, reception rituals and institutional networks (Bourdieu 1996), reinforced political control. All art venues were controlled by the same structures. Art spaces, ranging from the studio to the art museum and from local to national (“republican”) propagandistic exhibitions, were hierarchically positioned. Though official venues were dominant, the notion of self-organizing, important for understanding the dynamic of artistic neo-avant-gardes in Eastern Europe (Bryzgel 2017, p. 4), remains important to Romanian event-based art during socialism. Though most of these non-conformist actions were solitary events taking place discreetly, they testify to the existence of an informal network of artistic friendships and personal ties (stretching from local to international) which virtually and temporarily constituted the second public sphere where performances of late socialism gained meaning.4 While I will focus here on examples that investigated their own self-imposed cultural marginality and withdrawal from the (first) public scrutiny, the notion of an informal public sphere I will apply in this analysis is not marked by a sharp internal division of the Romanian art scene into publics and counter-publics, but stands for an immanent process of altering, transforming and expanding the existing public realm as a whole. In the case of Romania one may speak about a formal and informal dimension (Zdravomyslova and Voronkov 2002, pp. 46–69; Braşoveanu 2016) of a single public sphere. This particular sphere included different ways of living and diverse organizational principles shared by the same groups of individuals participating both in “alternative” and “official” artistic events. Counter-publics were constituted discursively by a narrow circle of like-minded art professionals and did not exist as an autonomous social entity (Warner 2002, p. 67).
Now turning to the relation between performance art and marginal social spaces, it becomes quickly obvious that experimental actions at such venues produced their own regime of publicity. As Piotr Piotrowski had shown, the exhibition is in etymological terms a gesture of placing artworks in the public sphere, instead of a material presentation or a collection of objects (2005, p. 155). Exhibitions define the scope of visibility, a forum in which an artwork acquires public existence and accessibility, and they are inextricably linked to the production of the public sphere. Unlike in the United States, for instance, where in the sixties and seventies alternative spaces were often associated with process-oriented, post-minimal and performative activities that emerged at the time as alternatives to commercial gallery shows, the event-based character of actions performed in solitude or in closed circles did not arise out of a white-cube protest, but rather as aesthetic and political necessity (Apple 2012, p. 18). Alternative cultural spaces in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union faced a certain degree of ideological censorship, reflected in a conservative art language favouring traditional media such as painting and sculpture. While performance art was certainly a preferred form of artistic communication, the studio and the street became spaces of reclusion and contestation where alternative subjectivities might have been reclaimed through a poetic use of artistic language; they were also used as spaces of experimentation that imagined a more direct, authentic and spontaneous form of sociability.
It would be misleading, however, to construct a simplistic binary description of the capitalist West versus socialist East in terms of resistant collectivism in times of dominant individualism versus desirable individualism in times of imposed collectivism, mainly because the strategic drawback from the existing public sphere is often accompanied by the imaginative reinvention of alternative artistic networks, collectives and publics. The proper framework for bridging cultural differences in understanding artistic space may be Henri Lefebvre’s theory of space (where spatiality is a social product rather than a material reality existing prior to and independent of social conditions; 1991, pp. 26–33), as well as Michel de Certeau’s understanding of space as a dynamic, practiced place (1984, pp. 117–118). Just as the public is constituted by discourse, artistic space is being produced by action rather than existing as a purely material enclosure determining what can be exhibited there. Therefore, artistic venues are socially constructed, depending on the particular social configuration in relation to which it is produced.
Concerning the marginal situation of the spaces where performances were created in Romania, many of the analyses on socialism in Eastern Europe tend to focus on imposed control over the private sphere through surveillance and the accompanying creative resistance of individual artists. Although generalized surveillance and a high degree of formal conformism in pervading ideology that dominated the public sphere accurately depict Romanian cultural life during late socialism, it should also be noted that, in the case of art practice, there existed a sphere of publicity. Namely, the private was transformed into a semi-public sphere by means of artistic events and actions. Counter-cultural performative gestures temporarily transformed private or ordinary public places into spaces of artistic encounter and experimental artistic communication. The existence of such venues shared the ephemeral nature of the performative action that coined them.
During Ceauşescu’s regime, the intimacy of the living environment became the preferred site for artistic self-examinations such as body actions and spatial interventions. The gaze of an external spectator and witness of everyday life, to be considered archival and voyeuristic, is best represented by Ion Grigorescu’s films and photographs, produced in his own house in the seventies.
It would be inappropriate to state that the distinction between the private and public dimensions of existence did not influence Grigorescu. On the contrary, in the seventies, he was mainly interested in constructing an alternative subjectivity and he seems to have constantly sought a marginal social space (such as the intimacy of the house or the space of the churches painted in the eighties), from which he could react, speak and act autonomously from ideologically charged public rituals and codes. His house was used both as a photography and film studio and as an exhibition space, his experimental works being shown to a close circle of friends. As a studio, it was used mostly for introspection, a space where contradictions are exhibited, confusion is welcomed and transgressive states are experimented with, ranging from the sexually transgressive to the imaginary redoubling of his persona. The latter is the case of Boxing (1977) and perhaps Grigorescu’s most famous film, Dialogue with President Ceausescu (Dialog cu Preşedintele Ceauşescu, 1978), which manifests a symptomatic state of isolation and lack of political communication. The ambiguity of this dialogue is essential for Grigorescu’s incessant unsettling of stereotypes and fixed identities. Ileana Pintilie also notices the changes in the setting of Grigorescu’s films that initially were shot in the real space of his apartment that was also his photo-studio. Given that a photography studio was prohibited in the seventies, the living space is forced to become the working space, only to be replaced later with the abstract background of the mirror or of a black, indeterminate space, equated by Pintilie with a symbolic interiority in relation to which Griogorescu stages his investigations (Pintilie 2013, p. 33).
Unlike nonconformist art in Russia, where apartment exhibitions were already a self-historicized and often self-ironic version of unofficial art conscious of its own peripheral condition in history (Tupytsin 1989, pp. 60–114), in Romanian art, the apartment was less used as an exhibition location than as a secure space of performance production only visible through documentation, or to a close circle of fellow artists participating in a collective art event. Besides Ion Grigorescu, in the late eighties Dan and Lia Perjovschi also used their Oradea apartment as a performance venue that only existed virtually, circulating as photographic documentation.
In The Test of Sleep (Testul somnului), a photo-performance from 1988, the body of the artist appears as a surface for the projection of written language as graphic signs that are animated by the artist’s hands and corporeal gestures fragmentarily captured by the remaining photographs. According to art historian Kristine Stiles, between 1987 and 2005, Lia Perjovschi treated the body as a physical entity that was affected by historical political circumstances and contained ephemeral will (2008, pp. 41–42). Lia interpreted the action as a discreet form of communication, associated with existential discontent, grief, pain and other emotional conditions that were left unspoken in an oppressive political climate (ibid., pp. 44–45). Although the images and graphic marks remain voluntarily allusive, transmitting the impossibility of communication rather than a definite meaning, the implied reference to silenced sociocultural activities (e.g. the prohibition on traveling or reading) is supported by the performance’s background setting, consisting of assembled envelopes from Perjovschi’s mail art practice. Existential struggle and “muted communication” is radicalized in the 1989 performance Annulment (Anulare): Lia wrapped her body in medical gauze, then folded it in strings, so that she had to struggle to untie herself. In line with Grigorescu’s virtually public use of privacy, Lia’s apartment performances can be regarded as therapeutic processes, revealing suppressed communication and private anxieties as a collective state of mind. It was also an informal space for the production and distribution of uncomfortable artistic ideas.
Collective actions that used private spaces simultaneously as venues for art production and exhibition were present in Romanian art of the eighties as well. Unlike in Russia, “where blood ties and friendly relations were held in higher esteem than professional roles and links” (Erofeev 2002, p. 40), the friendly but serious atmosphere found in the intimacy of private spaces also encouraged Romanian artists to exhibit unrestricted creativity and testified for the existence of similar informal artist networks. One of the most relevant “alternative” collective events in Romania was house pARTy, a series of artistic interventions and performances taking place in Decebal and Nadina Scriba’s house located on Petru Cercel street in Bucharest between 1987 and 1988. The first event, taking place in the summer of 1987, was a spontaneous setting resulting from the necessity to find an alternative art venue to the galleries provided by the Union, the dominance of which was more and more difficult to subvert. Decebal and Nadina came up with the idea of a ludic artistic experiment in their house that subverted and expanded the socially acceptable form of a private one-night party.
The participants of the 1987 collaborative production included the artists and art critics Călin Dan, Dan Mihălţianu, Wanda Mihuleac, Andrei Oişteanu, Nadina Scriba, Decebal Scriba and Dan Stanciu. In 1988, the group grew with two more members, artists Teodor Graur and Iosif Király. Wanda Mihuleac also suggested that the performances should be recorded, so they were filmed in real time, and the results were edited minimally afterwards. The first “edition’s” performances appear to be spontaneous performative interventions connected with improvised spatial installations. Initially, house pARTy aimed at transforming the private space into a series of artistic installations: each participant should have chosen a space in the house and focus on redefining that space through material and performative interventions. Some artists, such as Dan Mihălţianu, only produced art installations with water pouring down on an exterior wall. Only two participants of the 1987 event actually appeared performing in the recording (Andrei Oişteanu and Dan Stanciu). For the second edition, planned one year ahead, the participants developed scenarios transforming the performances into a series of single-authored video pieces. In the second edition’s VHS, the recorded performances of all participants were separated by a clapboard and assumed a more cinematic character, while losing some of the collaborative spontaneity of the first event. The unconnected and apparently chaotic actions with surrealistic and Dadaist overtones further emphasize the house pARTy’s non-conformist aura.
Some performances of the second edition bear clear traces of the revolt against an oppressive social system. Iosif Király constructed a claustrophobic space in the garden: a one meter cube built on a wire structure, covered with architectural drawings of typical communist buildings, on which images of houses built before 1945 were projected. In the cube (simulating an apartment space), Király, wearing pyjamas, was reading a seemingly academic text on the relationship of space and human behaviour, before everything collapses and is set on fire. The action was intended as a clear reference to Ceauşescu’s destruction of architectural heritage and built environments replaced with alienated modernist living spaces. It also suggested the desire to “burn down” the entire political system – which actually happened the next year in the December revolution.
A similar collective action taking place in private space was recorded in Târgu Mureş as early as 1982. On July 17, 1982 members of MAMŰ art collective, Károly Elekes and Árpád Nagy, celebrated their birthday as a collective art action, though it mostly comprised a single performance of Nagy. The birthday party took place at Nagy’s house in Târgu Mureş and artists from both Romania and Hungary were invited.
As art historian Mădălina Braşoveanu recalls it, invitations were sent to artists and art critics Wanda Mihuleac, Mihai Drişcu, Zoltán Szilágyi, András Butak (Bucharest), Alexandru Antik from Cluj, Ioan Bunuş and György Jovian from Oradea and Imre Baász from Sfântu Gheorghe (Braşoveanu 2014, p. 129). The invitation mentioned that an alternative soiree will take place on the occasion of the birthday. All the participants were handed badges with images of people – but Nagy’s badge depicted a fish. During the so-called Anniversary multimedia action (Acţiune aniversară), Nagy had live-drawn cardboard news about the economic, political and social achievements of the Party and its Supreme Leader. With each finished drawing, a photograph was taken out of a water bowl, on the surface of which different photographs recording everyday life scenes were floating, and stuck on the glass of the aquarium. The 25-minute performance ended when the fish was completely covered by the photographs and the television set nearby got covered by a wreath (ibid., 131). The performance had a therapeutic impact on the participants, bearing obvious political and existential overtones, and suggested a profound feeling of isolation and cultural entrapment shared with many audience members. Moreover, at the unofficial level of the public sphere it commented on the discrepancy between the official discourse and its actual materialization, the projected social phantasies and the social reality failing to live up to its expectations.
Attics of existing public spaces became, from time to time, favourite “homes” to artist studios, where experimental actions, only witnessed by the camera, had taken place in complete solitude. For instance, since 1979 artist Dan Mihălţianu used the attic and the rooftop of the building located in Gheorghe Dem Teodorescu street 20b in Bucharest, where he produced a series of photographic experiments with long exposition, installations and photo-actions. But attics even functioned as public event locations. In 1976 the exhibition Designing the Signifier (Desen Contact de Semn) opened in the attic of the so-called Engraving Studio in Bucharest, with a collective performance initiated by artist and exhibition organizer Wanda Mihuleac in collaboration with Ion Grigorescu, Matei Lăzărescu, Sergiu Dinculescu and Doru Covrig. In the action, silently documented on super-8 film, participants were stripped to the waist, sitting in a circle. The naked backs were transformed into drawing surfaces for the person sitting behind.
The most politically challenging and literally “underground” action remains probably Alexandru Antik’s The Dream Has Not Died (Visul n-a murit), performed during the Symposium of Young Art Critics taking place in 1986 in Sibiu. The conference was organised by artist Ana Lupaş, following the suggestion of art critic and curator Liviana Dan to transform Sibiu into a modern city that could offer artists and art critics alike an unprecedented environment of creative freedom. More than twenty artists from diverse Youth Studios of the Union of Fine Artists took part in an art camp and the resulting exhibition hosted by the Union’s gallery in Sibiu. The “alternative” part of the event series was relocated to the basement of the Pharmacy Museum – a “safer” place, protected from the curious eyes of passers-by. Moreover, the Union of Communist Youth financing the event only provided restricted access to and the exclusive use of that basement and its lobby, not allowing the artists to enter the public area. The permitted audience of the basement performances and installations consisted only of the participating artists and art critics. This was the context of Alexandru Antik’s public performance with shamanic overtones (inspired by Joseph Beuys), at the same time reminiscent of Viennese Actionism (Guţă 2015, pp. 62–65). The action, taking place in a smaller room, presented a prison, with a small iron-barred window and a single open entrance, comprised gesture, text and soundtrack. It mixed poetry with body action and ritualistic symbols equating to Dadaist nonsense (Bryzgel 2017, p. 73). Stripped naked and having his hair cut by a female assistant, the artist recited, in a whisper and in a jerky manner, a poem by László feLugossy. At the same time, he was wailing and blowing air into animal bowels that collaborators previously brought to him and left them on the floor. According to Adrian Guţă, one of the art critics present at the performance, the whole space was dominated by a spirit of sacredness, resulting from the candles lit and placed near animal organs moulded in plaster and stuck to the walls (Guţă 2015). The artist started to write the text “The Dream Has Not Died” with a gas lamp on the walls, suddenly being interrupted by the authoritarian voice of a person entering the basement and shutting down the entire event. While art historian Amy Bryzgel (2017, p. 74) presents this intervention as a previously planned element of the performance, Guţă recalled it being an actual intervention of the communist authorities that censored the art piece (2015). In any case, the abrupt ending intensified the emotional overtones of a brutal existential statement publicly enacting an individual mythology, a ritual of surviving social imprisonment, also displaying a courageous form of artistic resistance against social and cultural conformism. While Antik’s performance appears to be a clearly disruptive intervention in an already confined public sphere, it is obvious that the concrete liminality of attics and basements as a materialization of counter-cultural practices was meant to restrict the mass effects of such potential disruptions and support their discretion.
While the street is certainly an important landmark of urban public space, its position in the public sphere of state communism is mostly unclear and paradoxical. While in the West the street could be perceived as “a free communal domain, that was unfinished and mutable” (Apple 2012, p. 19), opposed to the increasing commodification and privatization of the conservative gallery space, it was rarely used in this way in Romania due to harsh political constraints and intense police surveillance. The rare actions taking place in the street stand, rather, for the slow dissipation of the public space as a catalyst of true sociability, increasingly withdrawn from the informal circles of friends in the background of the eighties’ social and art life as an “isolated public space” (Braşoveanu 2016, p. 131). Artist Decebal Scriba’s 1974 action The Gift (Darul) is remarkable in this respect. The artist walked on the streets of Bucharest, from Dacia to Eroilor Boulevard, holding in his hands an imaginary object. The series of four photographs record the lonesome walk of the artist, passing by unrecognized by others. The passers-by become an involuntary public, who do not acknowledge the artistic act and do not seem to be willing to participate in the action. The action is turning into an implicit statement of non-conformism on an ideologically predefined social space. If one may speak of resistance in Scriba’s case, it remains as a withdrawal into an autonomous mental space, which challenges the interference of political ideologies in the process of artistic conception. Scriba subtracts himself from everyday life through an imaginary recodification of ordinary gestures, producing transformations of outer reality while displaying constructed visual and symbolic representations of the authoritarian order. Taking the position of an external, impersonal observer is a fundamental gesture of conceptual art, allowing the artist to act both as subject and agent.
Closer to the spirit of the Moscow-based Group of Collective Actions, organized as a dialogical, self-interpretive artistic community (Jackson 2010, p. 224), in 1980 artist Ioan Bunuş used the urban public space in Oradea as a field of constructing human relations and alternative forms of sociability, resulting in the establishment of an informal group of artists. He invited some of his colleagues from the Youth Circle to a silent walk along all the city tramway lines, as an opportunity to meditate on movement and immobility. At the end of each line meetings were held in order to discuss possible artworks inspired by the walks (Braşoveanu 2016, p. 120). Action T (Acţiunea T), as the event-based piece was called, was close to conceptual art, where instructions and ensuing discussions were more important than the actual production of material objects or information. Although this was not a trip out of town, as in the case of the Group of Collective Actions, but rather a psycho-geographic journey inside urban space reminiscent of French situationism, and it was not regarded as an art event at the time, Action T may nevertheless be interpreted as a self-referential conceptual artwork. Since the invitation was sent to a larger group of people than the actual participants, it was spontaneous to select an informal circle of young artists collaborating in an experimental production.
Although this short paper is not an adequate setting to explore the question of artistic autonomy, it can be stated that art performed in solitary or marginal spatial environments was not only reluctant to undertake a direct criticism of the social, political or artistic system in state-socialist Romania, it also remained isolated from the larger, official layer of the cultural public sphere. Such self-organized art events, however, constituted exceptional atmospheres for escaping isolation, inventing practices of self-empowerment and shaping an alternative micro-publicity within the existing network of artists to create an “improvised community” (Kemp Welch 2014, p. 219). They also supported the invention of new spaces of artistic production and the emergence of alternative forms of artistic communication that transgressed the boundaries of official/traditional exhibition spaces and rituals. The political and social “reticence” of these actions may rather mean that performing artists were most often in search for aesthetic autonomy in an a-political sense, closer to what Kemp-Welch (2014, pp. 141–220) has described in the case of Czech or Hungarian neo-avant-gardes, though the Romanian ones often presented darker and more brutal, sometimes even hysterical, existential overtones. A voluntary retreat from the immediate social life is consistent with the refusal of an imposed political engagement. Performance art in Romania during socialism is merging the personal with the political, while existing in a virtual social reality, a dystopian mental space shared by artists with similar ideas and a similar language. At the same time, as one may easily notice, most of these artistic actions are to be characterized as solitary therapeutic gestures, aimed at transforming, first of all, the self, and second, the surrounding artistic community. They often witnessed overlapping feelings of entrapment, despair, the grotesque, isolation and lack of authentic communication which seem to characterize the pervading artistic sensibility of the last decade of Ceauşescu’s authoritarian regime.
1On July 6, 1971 Ceauşescu delivered a speech called Proposals for improving the politico-ideological activity and for the Marxist-Leninist education of the party members and of all working people before the Executive Comitee of the Romanian Communist Party. As a result, the entire artistic production was subjected to the newly established Council of Culture and Socialist Education.
2Self-organized art collectives existed in Arad (Kinema Ikon) or Târgu Mureş (MAMŰ).
3Some performances were already produced to let them circulate as mail art. See Trans-Idea Art, discussed above, or Lia Perjovschi’s The Test of Sleep, 1988, staged for a mail art exhibition in Mexico. For a similar reading of Ion Grigorescu’s works as postcards in time see Verwoert 2011, p. 43.
4See for instance, the mail art network, fueled by Constantin Flondor’s connections with Robert Rehfeldt, MAMŰ group’s ties with the Hungarian art scene or Iosif Király’s acquaintance with Shozo Shimamoto in Timişoara in 1985.
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