Between Limits. Escaping into the Concept

Curator: Ileana Pintilie Teleaga

Horia Bernea, Constantin Flondor, Ion Grigorescu, Pavel Ilie, Iosif Kiraly, Paul Neagu, Dan Perjovschi, Grupul Sigma

The period 1965-1989 coincided, in Romania’s case, with the ascension to power of Nicolae Ceauşescu’s Communist Party and the slow but predictable process of the installation of a personal dictatorship. Ceauşescu’s election in 1965 gave the impression of a desirable domestic change, of a liberation from Stalin’s influence and the beginning of a dialogue with the western world. Claiming autonomy from the eastern neighbour was manifest in Romania’s dissociation from the members of the Warsaw Pact, which invaded Prague in the summer of 1968, putting an end, under military pressure, to the Czech government’s reforms. Yet, in 1971, after a visit to China and North Korea, Ceauşescu was seduced by the Asian totalitarian communism and by the „cultural revolution” and, as a result, he strengthened the role of censorship and ideological control in all fields, from education, culture, and the public sphere to a project to increase birth-rate. In parallel with the official art, promoted by the political power, several artists tried to make up „survival” techniques. The development of experimental practices was basically targeted at ephemeral forms, at irony and social criticism. Even if they worked in relative isolation, the Romanian artists managed to exhibit in alternative spaces sometimes – in cultural clubs, the hall of the Architecture Institute in Bucharest, or even in their own studios or flats. Others tried to communicate with each other freely and unconventionally, mail art offering an independent, ironic and subversive medium, as well as a way to defy censorship. (Ileana Pintilie)

WORKS (SELECTION)
All texts if not otherwise noted: Ileana Pintilie

Horia Bernea (1938, RO; 2000, F)
Bernea’s works from 1968 to 1972 are regarded by the artist as “a personal artistic ideology,” an individualistic act of detachment and protest against the communist ideology that all artists had to display during official exhibitions. The exhibited objects and the paintings seem to be remains of some experimental action—highly conceptual and abstract, which he called “an iconography after knowledge”—posited in conceptual expressionism.

Constantin Flondor (RO; 1936, UA)
A member of the most important experimental groups in Romania during the nineteen-sixties and seventies (The Group 111 and The Sigma Group), Flondor is a multimedia artist with an interest in various visual experiments, ranging from constructivism and op art to land art. The photos taken during those years are the result of complex visual research, sometimes with a performative character, which is even more conspicuous in certain films (Bolting and Modelling), while in other films the artist tries to analyze visual perception.

Andplevision, 1979
DVD recording of a two-channel film projection, S8mm, color, 7’ 24’’
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The film is based on a collage of experimental images shot on various occasions. It offers a survey of the artist’s visual research done during the constructivist period and also of natural structures turned into objects of study and employed in future works.

I – You – Witness (The Visual Consciousness), 1979
DVD recording of a three-channel film projection, S8mm, color, 13’ 6’’
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An experimental film about the visual perception regarded as “Trionticity” (after the theory of perception elaborated by the Romanian psychiatrist Eduard Pamfil), postulating the existence of several visual “consciousnesses.”

Bolting and Modelling, 1985
S8mm on DVD, color, 5’ 24’’

Anno-Aversion, January 26, 1982
S8mm on DVD, b/w, 2’ 30’’
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Anno-Aversion was occasioned by dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu’s birthday. The communist leader used to be celebrated on a national scale, with the involvement of all of the media. The national TV channel in particular, which had only two hours of daily broadcasting, was consumed entirely by this event. The title is a pun—on a genuine anniversary and “a stomachache.” The artist is seated in front of the black screen of the national TV channel at a table full of dairy products which were unavailable in those times. When the broadcast begins, the food suddenly vanishes . . .

Ion Grigorescu (1945, RO)
Grigorescu is one of the very few multimedia artists in Romania who during the communist regime conducted visual research on the body: a taboo topic at the time. The artist’s body became work “material”—perceived as a “medium” and surface—onto which mental images are reflected. His body performances are to be seen as “post-happenings,” with the emphasis no longer on the temporal dimension but rather on the photographic snapshot that, however, preserves a performative character. These works, like many others from the nineteen-seventies and eighties, would go public only much later.

Văcăreşti, 1975
Series of 4 photograms, b/w, 20 x 30 cm each
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The photograms show the spaces of a vast complex of sacral buildings (at the Văcăreşti monastery), which was turned into a currently disused prison. The various stages in the buildings’ history are overlapped with graffiti, the subcultural insignia of a marginal world. Secluded and then vanished, these relics are the only remaining traces of its existence.

Election meeting, 1975
6 photograms (from a series of 28), b/w, 20 x 30 cm each
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Snapshots taken during a rally in Bucharest, with a camera hidden on the artist’s hip, catching Securitate agents supervising the crowd and contrasting this view with that of with the ordinary participants, who were relaxed, tired, or bored.

Trăisteni, 1976
Series of 5 photograms, b/w, 20 x 30 cm each
Photos: Andrei Gheorghiu.
Photographs taken near the village of Trăisteni

Pyjamas, 1978
Series of 4 photograms, b/w, 20 x 30 cm each
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The photographs are the outcome of an ambiguous performance, apparently an invigorating domestic ritual of breakfast taken by the artist still wearing his pyjamas. The situation can also be regarded as the “ritual” in a prison, given the stripes on the artist’s outfit, the circular lens (similar to a surveillance “eye”), and the state of closure and alienation suggested by the entire context.

Party, 1960s
Series of photos, readymade, b/w
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The photos show an open-air party with live music attended by somewhat familiar faces. They express an almost ecstatic state of happiness caused by the dance—in more general terms, a state of highly intense “joie de vivre.”

Snagov, 1971
Series of 4 photograms, b/w, 20 x 30 cm each
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Snapshots of a trip to Snagov, a popular leisure place for the inhabitants of Bucharest.

Masculine – Feminine, 1976
N8mm film on DVD, 11’ 21’’

Mimicry, 1976
N8mm film on DVD, 1’

Boxing, 1977
N8mm film on DVD, 2’ 44’’
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Boxing dwells on the theme of the double. The artist is boxing, knocking out his alter ego shrunk to the size of a mere shadow.

In Our Beloved Bucharest, 1977
N8mm film on DVD, 14’
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Grigorescu uses a hidden camera to make a documentary film of life in the capital, seen from tram no. 26. The film was made in 1977, after the earthquake that had struck the city and engendered a series of systematic demolitions for the dictator’s megalomaniac project of erecting a new town on the ruins of the historical center.

Dialogue with Ceauşescu, 1978
N8mm film on DVD, 7’ 11’’
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In Dialogue with Ceauşescu the artist plays two opposing roles, in one of which he is wearing a mask with the face of Ceauşescu.

Pavel Ilie (1927, RO; 1995, CDN)
Pavel Ilie is an artist with a peculiar presence in Romanian art of the early nineteen-seventies. His artistic endeavor capitalized on the concept and placed it above its forms of visual manifestation, be it in drawing and photography or in object and environment. The successive forms the objects can take are only “work hypotheses”—transitory moments of an intuitive process, subject to creation. Ilie also emphasized the fact that these open visual forms can be altered according to various conceptual and artistic desiderata.

Iosif Kiraly (1957, RO)
Kiraly’s debut, in the early nineteen-eighties, is linked to photography as an art form that can express the performative character of his visual experiments. Familiar with the visual research of The Sigma Group members, in whose company he reached artistic maturity, Kiraly later moved to photography as a means of communication. This was an important aspect in the eighties when the isolation of the Romanian cultural and artistic elite had become oppressive. Joining an international mail art group, Kiraly found a strategy of artistic survival in these conceptual works—photos or small-sized collages—addressed to other artists in the mail art network. Among these counted the Japanese artist Shozo Shimamoto, a member of the Gutai group, who even paid Kiraly a visit in Romania.

Paul Neagu (1938, RO – 2004, UK)

Collector, 1971
Drawing, Courtesy: Paul Neagu
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The artist’s debut took place in Romania, with a series of ironic works entitled Neagu’s Boxes, ephemeral objects, made of trivial materials and bearing a neo-dada imprint, as a form of protest against the closed regime of official art in the country at that time. The drawing Collector is a repetition of the image of some of the "boxes."

Merit Collector, 1968–1972
Series of drawings and objects, Courtesy: Paul Neagu
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In 1968 Neagu started his series Merit Collector, consisting of drawings and objects. Intrigued by the way in which merit could be “measured” in the bestowal of titles, honours and “merit”-medals in communist Romania, Neagu imagined some ironic machinery which would be able to collect and apply the merit selection criteria as well as conferring the
honours on randomly selected people passing by. This series culminated in the first street action presented in Romania. In 1968, on a busy main road in Bucharest, the artist placed his “merit-collectors” right in the middle of the traffic.

Anthropocosmos series, 1968–1974
Series of objects, paintings, drawings and performances
Courtesy: Paul Neagu
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Gradually the artist built an entire system of mental organization, matching simple geometrical forms – the square, the triangle and the circle, then the spiral – with various levels – individual, social, and cosmic. With the help of this system, he began to include all his visual creations in a coherent pattern. Devoted to the individual level the Anthropocosmos series consisted of objects, paintings, drawings and performances taking the shape of a human figure, which also reminded of a coffin. The body was de-constructed into its component elements in the form of “honeycombs”.

Cake man event, 1971
Performance documentation, film on DVD, 8’, Courtesy: Paul Neagu
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The Cake man performance-rituals, first presented in 1970 in Bucharest, at the home of an artist before an invited audience, were related to the Anthropocosmos series. In the performance, made later in UK, a human figure was filled with waffles with some notes attached to them. They were then "devoured" by the participants, receivers of those messages.

Ramp, 1976
Performance documentation, film on DVD, 10’, Courtesy: Paul Neagu
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In the performance Ramp the artist jumped on a wall, while his partner, blind-folded, tried to assess and put down in figures the height of the jump.

Ritual-Performances, 1970-1978
16 photo documentations of the ritual-performances Horizontal Rain, Cake-man, Going Tornado, Ramp, and Blinde Bite, Courtesy: Paul Neagu
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For his ritual-performance the artist made himself a costume with many small transparent pockets in which he habitually put messages for the public. These messages suggested "the level of human communication" and their development within society. In the performance series Gradually Going Tornado – combining performances, drawings and other art forms –, the artist like a dervish brought together all disparate parts in a circular movement.

GAG – Generative Art Group (UK, 1970-1975)
In his British exile Neagu invented the Generative Art Group (GAG). The artist publicly declared that he had founded a group of five artists, going as far as to give the names of his four partners. For a few years, he supported this fictitious group, exhibiting and publishing works in various "styles", all of them signed by the members of the GAG.

Dan Perjovschi (1961, RO)

Confessional, 1986–1994
Rolls of black plastic
Courtesy: Lombard Fried Gallery, New York
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Confessional is an installation from the nineteen-eighties in which the artist uses long strips of drawn paper for his drawings of caricature-like, schematic figures, the strips of paper being arranged in the form of an enclosed space.

Red Apples, 1988
Series of 7 photos, b/w, 17 x 12 cm each
Photo: Dorel Gaina; Courtesy: Lombard Fried Gallery, New York
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Red Apples was an intervention in the artist’s apartment in Oradea, Romania, where he lived with his wife Lia, consisting of a “wrapping up” in white paper of their dwelling. On the paper support he drew and wrote texts about the couple. The bed, the bedside table, the windows, and the TV set were covered in large sheets of paper. On the TV set he drew a new screen and two twin figures contemplating the room. The couple lived in this space for two weeks. Taking up the subject of intimacy, the action also indirectly referred to the artist’s desire to isolate himself from the social and political context.

Romania, 1993, Timişoara
Removing Romania, 2003, Kassel
Wall installation with video (b/w, color) and letter
Courtesy: Gregor Podnar Gallery, Ljubljana.
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The feeling of fear and frustration in Perjovschi’s earlier work reached a climax in the years following 1990, when in Romania everything that had been silenced for such a long time came to surface. Under this impression he carried out in 1993 at the Zone Performance Festival in Timişoara his “anti-performance” (Perjovschi) Romania, in which he tattooed the country’s name on his shoulder. Ten years later in the context of René Block’s show In den Schluchten des Balkans (In the Gorges of the Balkan), he decided to remove the tattoo. The surgical procedure of the new work entitled Removing Romania consisted of laser bombardment of the tattoo, each black dot splitting into millions of pieces and each of the pieces carried away through his skin by molecules. Perjovschi’s idea was that the tattoo would not be erased but instead spread throughout his whole body.

The Sigma Group (Constantin Flondor, Ştefan Bertalan, Doru Tulcan), 1970–1978
Initiated in 1970, Sigma was the only experimental group in Romania to conduct research targeted at the Bauhaus model, geared toward the visual language based on form. Although it had more numerous membership in the beginning, in 1974 the group was reduced to its three senior members, with Bertalan and Flondor having been, in fact, the founders and also followers of the Group 111 spirit.

Multivision, 1972–1978
Video of a studio reconstruction of the original shooting place, sound, 15’ 45’’
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First presented in 1978 at the exhibition Study I in Timişoara, the work consists of experimental recordings of natural phenomena (waterdrops, soap bubbles, etc.) on S8mm, edited with a sound track and texts read by the three members of the group in turn, as well as by Eduard Pamfil, a psychiatrist and the head of a bionic society. The film was presented with two projectors on ten semitransparent screens, in an environment created by the artists. Due to its performative character, there were only three projections under the original conditions (Timişoara, Cluj, 1979 and Bucharest, 1980).