The self slides over the self with friction Thoughts on Ion Grigorescu’s “Masculin-Feminin”(1976) Alexandra Corodan

DOI 10.60531/INSIGHTOUT.2024.2.13| CORODAN: THE SELF SLIDES OVER THE SELF WITH FRICTION_ INSIGHTOUT 2(2024) 90 Alexandra Corodan The self slides over the self with friction 1 Thoughts on Ion Grigorescu’s “Masculin-Feminin” (1976) ABSTRACT How does the fragmented and stratified logic of recording technologies interact with perception and what role do experimental film strategies play in the production of alternative narratives of gender? In his practice, Romanian artist Ion Grigorescu countered prevailing codes exuded by the national communist regime, by positively addressing the infrastructure of recording technologies such as analogue photography and film. Not dissociating from the ideological construction by representing the artefacts contradicting its doctrine, but by equally affirming both the fragmented and stratified nature of the media and exploring its semiotic potential, Grigorescu raised questions regarding the nature of machine, body, sexuality and domestic space. Tongue-in-cheek and vaguely crude, his 1976 film Masculin-Feminin film proposes a distinct model of hybridity, that through mechanical eyes, jumping frames, disjointed bodies and almost indecipherable letters, scratches at the codes that sustain dictatorial reality. CV Alexandra Corodan is an art historian and cultural worker; she lives and works in Vienna. She holds a Master's degree in Art History from the University of Vienna and is currently studying Critical Studies at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Her research focuses on the Eastern European neo-avant-garde, media theory and its performative approaches. Using experimental zines and short prose, she investigates the potential of fragmentation and montage as an interdisciplinary practice. Corodan currently works in the archive department of ESTATE Brigitte Kowanz. KEYWORDS Experimental film, Eastern european art, Neo-Avantgarde, Hybridity Alexandra Corodan,“The self slides over the self with friction: thoughts on Ion Grigorescu’s “Masculin-Feminin”(1976)”, insightOut. Journal on Gender and Sexuality in STEM Collections and Cultures , 2(2024), 89–96, DOI: 10.60531/insightout.2024.2.13 DOI: 10.60531/insightout.2024.2.13 Published under license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 1 I. Grigorescu, Ion Grigorescu: Diaries and Dreams 1976–1979, ed. by G. Schöllhammer and A. Mihail(Berlin, 2021), 233.

DOI 10.60531/INSIGHTOUT.2024.2.13| CORODAN: THE SELF SLIDES OVER THE SELF WITH FRICTION_ INSIGHTOUT 2(2024) 91 This re-codification did not aim for the construction of new masculine values or plead for a feminist breakthrough, but rather was concerned with a very peculiar deconstructive and destabilising hybridisation between the two canonically recognised genders. tus, you have an almost feminine sensibility: hysterical, sick and feverish. True turbulences of language.” 2 Occupying the frame for nearly three minutes, this passage provides more than an opening to Ion Grigorescu’s experimental film Masculin-Feminin (1976). Composed of letters that differ in form – similar to a ransom note – the text is initially and only briefly introduced as a stand-alone paragraph, denying the viewers a comprehensive reading unless actively intervening in the playback of the film. After this fleeting encounter, the camera starts performing a radiography of the fragmenting sentences, visually quoting a reading-like motion. Phrases become incomplete as they slip away; letters and syntax interfere, escape, dissolve, not even words are recognisable any more. Deprived of its original logic, this textually dominated image is characterised by breaks in coherence and an arrhythmic, at times shaky movement of the camera recording it(or rather failing to do so). A subtle reference to the nature of film emerges. Turbulences of language become an imperative. Not only because it is poetically declared, but because it defines Ion Grigorescu’s aesthetic methodology, this language comes as no surprise. Marked by fragmentation, narrative incoherence and frenetic camera choreography, a peculiar al“The penis as a brush and the masculine as a mask. phabet(de)coding reality along its artefacts unfurls On the one hand, it occupies too much of my person. itself to the viewer. It is my masculine interlocutor, even though it dreams of a feminine name(penis). It gives me a conception In Romania’s national communist regime of the of myself and of my status in the world. It corrects my 1970s, describing yourself as a realist artist, as Ion behaviour inclining towards the feminine. Our dialo- Grigorescu often and emphatically did, not only gue is not reduced to the organic(things we almost came across as anachronistic, but almost as reacneglect); I must recognise its intelligence, its capacity tionary. In a historical context where Realism connoto create, compose and imagine. Regarding the sta- ted traces of the Socialist Realist genre that domi2 Text translated by the author; original Romanian version shown in the opening sequence of Masculin-Feminin (1976).

DOI 10.60531/INSIGHTOUT.2024.2.13| CORODAN: THE SELF SLIDES OVER THE SELF WITH FRICTION_ INSIGHTOUT 2(2024) 92 nated the artistic output during the 1940s and 50s, the art that was produced during the 1970s mostly distanced itself from propagandistic imagery and ideological inherence. After the 1989 revolution, when Grigorescu’s mostly hidden art saw daylight, scholars often discussed his Realism as a documentary endeavour. When discussing works like In My Beloved Bucharest (1977) or the photographic series Electoral Meeting (1975), Ileana Pintilie implies a kind of data-collecting behaviour in Grigorescu’s artistic method. 3 Maria Alina Asavei describes Grigorescu as a“social historian of average everydayness under oppression” 4 and for Georg Schöllhammer, Grigorescu“memorializes a country being industrialized and modernized at any price[…]”. 5 In the slow canonisation of the Eastern European Neo-Avant-Garde, Ion Grigorescu became something akin to a narrator or documenter of an obscure so-called objective reality under Nicolae Ceau ș escu’s national communism; the idealised propagandistic imagery produced by state affirming apparatuses contrasted with the country’s dirty streets, claustrophobic apartments and surveilled public spaces. Indeed, it is difficult to look at Ion Grigorescu’s work without succumbing to the impulse to read it through the lens of a socialist dictatorship while yearning for a beacon of artistic resistance. As a matter of fact, it is difficult to look at Ion Grigorescu at all: flaccid penises, foetuses made of bread and an impeding sense of precariousness – all dominated by latent awkwardness and subsumed under one intertextual, self-imposed and self-defined prerogative: Realism. Despite acknowledging Grigorescu’s procedures of distortion, scholars have continued to discuss his work as objective and/or documentary. Yet there is a way of looking at Ion Grigorescu as an artist who does not aim to dissociate himself from the construction of an ideological reality by revealing the artefacts that do not coincide with its produced representations, but who actively counters its algorithm by turning towards the inherent technique of the apparatuses he engages with. Or one can understand his practice as a proposal for a logic by which reality can arrange itself, a logic that actively departs from the dominant model issued and naturalised during the communist environment of the 1970s in which he was artistically active, even if only from a cupboard. 6 And from this elusive cupboard, a recurring theme, intertwined in superimposed layers, Dutch angles and distorted images, lingers. With flaccid penises, foetuses made out of bread, gymnastic-esque choreographies and birthing poses, a specific language questioning not only reality, but also the meaning of gender emerges. In its dual architecture composed of two main sections – the corporeal inspection and the relationship between the inside and the outside – Masculin-Feminin evokes a vocabulary of fragmentation not only on the formal level of the image, but also in its narrative skin. 3 I. Pintilie,“Arta în spa ț iul public sau arta pentru sine: ipostaze ale artistutlui Ion Grigorescu în epoca comunist ă ș i posttotalitar ă ”, Politica: Romanian Political Science Review, 17/3(2017), 399–415: 402. 4 M. A. Asavei,“The Aesthetics of Resistance and Persistence”, in A. Ș erban(ed.), The Man with a Single Camera (Berlin/Bucharest, 2013), 189–213: 201. 5 G. Schöllhammer,“The Double Body of the Artist: Ion Grigorescu’s reflections on the public sphere and life in Nicolae Ceau ș escu’s Romania”, in M. Dziewa ń ska(ed.), In the Body of the Victim, Museum under Construction 2(Warsaw, 2009),48-60: 51. 6 With some minor exceptions(mostly at the Friedrich Schiller Culture House in Bucharest, where he showed films such as Âme and Box ), Grigorescu did not partake in the mainstream cultural platforms and avoided the monopoly of the galleries controlled by the Artist’s Union; see A. Ș erban,“Chronology”, in id.(ed.), The Man with a Single Camera (Berlin/Bucharest, 2013),324-349: 337. As it is known today, his body of work only came to light after the 1989 revolution; this phenomenon is discussed in detail in C. Nae, “Messages in bottles: Documented performance and performative photography in Romanian art during late socialism”, Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe, 27/1(2019), 81–97.

DOI 10.60531/INSIGHTOUT.2024.2.13| CORODAN: THE SELF SLIDES OVER THE SELF WITH FRICTION_ INSIGHTOUT 2(2024) 93 Citing filmic infrastructure(visible cameras, framejumps, spontaneous cuts, scratches on the film), Grigorescu performs exaggerated, essentialising and even ironic stances of the masculine and the feminine, both united and ruptured in a single yet multiple body. These stances, movements and explorations not only allow a destabilisation of strictly separated gender codes, but also construct new ones, integrating them in Grigorescu’s new system of references, his own language. In the first five short scenes, the mirror becomes the first agent of duplication and stratification. During these, Grigorescu is not alone, but doubled, representing the two(two?) actors present in the dialogue which is not reduced to the organic. The element of the mirror, a recurrent feature in Grigorescu’s work, has a long tradition in the iconography of art history. From representing vanity in the Middle Ages, the mirror has told a tale of introspection and self-referentiality as well as inviting psychoanalytical readings. In this specific prose, Grigorescu’s mirror is many: a delegate flirting with the history of self-referentiality and arrogantly quoting Lacan, but also, at the most rudimentary level, a simple, yet extremely complex prop. This object, oscillating between technical trickery and leitmotif, produces agglomerations of images, each different in their logic of production, and unifies them on the film strip. These medially divergent entities are not two visually isolated morphologies – one organic, one projected – but merged. The mirror, interconnected with his flesh at the level of the image, cuts through the architecture of his body, building a chimera with two torsos and two heads. In the middle of this monstrous stage design, the performance of the feminine and the masculine elongates itself beyond one singular body. This elongation: not homogenous, it exerts disruption. The iconic masculine organ: cut, almost castrated from this collaged duality. The body: incomplete, its multiplicity refrains from presenting itself as whole. This theme: reiterated. With a title gravid with denotation, Delivery/Birth (1977) captures Ion Grigorescu performing a faux birth; a baked pastry and jam(one imagines) embodies his newborn. Fourteen analogue photographs stumble in their resemblance to a chronophotographic sequence, negating linear narrative progression and quoting the essence of photography’s more mobile relative – film. Based on différance and incongruence, not only the film but also the body of the artist oscillates between the child and the mother, yet is consistently marked, almost haunted, by the man. A proposition: instability of identity. This trembling subject, much like Freud’s Oedipus, cannot separate itself from its mother, a mother(to be read also as artist, to be read as man) whose integrity is continually fractured by the violence of the frame. Affirming the medium and its ability to counter reality by constructing divergent renditions by manipulating the index, Ion Grigorescu proposes an alignment of fractured units – both physical and medial – that(dis)connect. When viewing the photographic series as a unified single image, the limbs of the artist melt across the frames, forming abstract and biologically impossible shapes, starting from and leading to nowhere. Not yet a comic strip, however resemblant of its structure while also denying its coherent narrative progression, this grotesque montage proposes along its chimeras an investigation into the potential of photographic production, in which the paradox of denotation and connotation intertwine and conflict. It is here where Barthes’ structural analysis of photography becomes entangled in Grigorescu’s metaphorical language. Barthes’ self-procreating method describing photographical genesis serves as a tongue-in-cheek analogy to Grigorescu’s pictorial objects that oscillate between motherhood, manhood and birth – a metaphor for(artistic) creation – as they are“glued together, limb by limb,[…] as though united by an eternal coitus”. 7 7 R. Barthes, Camera Lucida. Reflections on Photography (New York, 1981), 6.

DOI 10.60531/INSIGHTOUT.2024.2.13| CORODAN: THE SELF SLIDES OVER THE SELF WITH FRICTION_ INSIGHTOUT 2(2024) 94 The previous chapter in this pulp fiction is more abstract yet predictive. In the photographic series Our Home (1974), Grigorescu embodies a constant fluctuation of identity through allegorical poses. He proposes a hybrid of four different subjects: the mother, the child, the man and the woman. Adopting a pose on his back with his hips open, legs and arms levitating, Grigorescu’s stance allegorises two figures: a baby just discovering their locomotor skills, becoming aware of their corporeality, only lucid of its fragments, and a mother-to-be in a modern birthing position. The fragmentation of these subjects takes place not only on a narrative level – a baby unconscious of its corporeal integrity and a female’s oscillating status between woman and mother – but also on the visual level of the object itself, as we see the referents signified by their other: the man. In this network of relationships, the other is present in a constant state of uncertainty, much like Heisenberg’s particles: never fully determinable, always in motion, always in exchange. In Masculin-Feminin , when Agent-Delegate-Mirror suddenly disappears, Grigorescu’s hand becomes infested with the technology responsible for reproducing it: the camera. Morphed with his hand – an eye in his palm – it becomes part of his corporeal movement. He traces this monstrous visual object around his body in scanning motions, reproducing the choreography exhibited in the first frames of the film. A reading of the body – palpably informed – from the toes upwards refrains from a totalised unity as the movements are shaky and the light impedes an integral observation. The(eye-hand) camera is not the substitute for a creeping voyeur; its glance does not come from hidden corners and peepholes. Almost masturbatory, it is paradoxically exhibitionistic: Grigorescu slides it along his entire body in an intimate encounter. He examines himself(themselves?), interlacing tactility and visuality. Beyond a commentary on the hierarchy of knowledge, of reason and abstract facilities above somatic experience(Paul Neagu sends his greetings!) and a critique on the act of understanding film as mere visual experience, Grigorescu’s hermaphrodite reveals itself to be a cyborg: an entity surpassing the border between the organic and the machine, not born in a garden and not seeking unitary identity, generating endless antagonistic dualisms. 8 And as Donna Haraway states, as we know ourselves in our formal discourses of biology and daily practices,“we find ourselves to be cyborgs, hybrids, mosaics, chimeras”. 9 These biotic systems that we have become, that Grigorescu has become, act as communication devices. That which the cyborg communicates, in a polyphonic chorus with a medial architecture that rewrites meaning by clinging to the veridicality of indexicality while shaping, morphing, cutting, layering and fragmenting it beyond its carcass, is a history of transgression. As“the Centaurs and Amazons of ancient Greece established the limits of the centred polls of the Greek male human by their disruption of marriage and boundary pollutions of the warrior with animality and women[…] and hermaphrodites were the confused human material in early modern France who grounded discourse on the natural and supernatural, medical and legal, portents and diseases – all crucial to establishing modern identity”, 10 so does Masculin-Feminin infect the cells of ideological constructs, rewriting them, even if only from the safety of a cupboard. When the eye of the camera departs from Grigorescu’s hand, it observes him from a distance. Still not a voyeur, this is pure exhibitionism! It observes his gymnastic-like uncoordinated movements, movements alluding to something between a baby lying on his 8 Cf. D. Haraway,“A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in id., Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York, 1991), 149–181: 180. 9 Haraway,"A Cyborg Manifesto", 177(see n.8). 10 Haraway,"A Cyborg Manifesto", 180(see n.8).

DOI 10.60531/INSIGHTOUT.2024.2.13| CORODAN: THE SELF SLIDES OVER THE SELF WITH FRICTION_ INSIGHTOUT 2(2024) 95 back, experimenting with their movement possibilities, and a hyper-sexualised feminine body before intercourse. Déjà vu. This very strange and unidentifiable status of the body – its status in the world – underlines the processes to which this corporeal entity is subjected: male behaviour inclining towards the feminine is corrected, so the text reads. Freed from the recording eye of the camera’s lens, Grigorescu’s hands move around in an almost symmetrical choreography along his face, tracing its contours. The morphology of his body becomes slowly visible, a little bit more comprehensible: a centre, for which the head, neck and torso are representative and almost static, annexed by the dualities of extremities that fail to move synchronically. Turbulences of language, turbulences of the lens, turbulences of the image, yet the pursuit of duality continues: tracing along his face, along his legs; nothing but disruptions of the body and the frame. Duality fails, as is to be expected. The second half of the film constitutes a refrain between the interiority of the private space – the artist’s studio – and the outside sphere. Five repetitions show urban architectural elements – windows, doors, pillars and a magnitude of hole-like objects – paired with scenes of Grigorescu sensually, sluggishly and awkwardly occupying his studio chair. Actual architecture, as represented in these scenes, is not rationalised. It does not serve the purpose of housing or protecting, it does not follow any function, it is not a documentation of the living conditions in Ceau ș escu’s Bucharest: it is mere metaphor. Is the door open or closed? What about the window? The holes: entrance? Escape route? Where to? The womb? Maybe a glitch. What kind of pillar supports the balcony? What is this infrastructure? Maybe phallic impertinence. How does one know? Grigorescu:“I was trying to discover, by moving the camera over the surface of the body, which are the fragments that give the viewer the certainty of being face to face with a man or a woman. I was trying to help the viewer by showing him various architectural forms with a pronounced masculine or feminine aspect. For example, a round open window, or a glass-roofed porch, the transparent form of a shell.” 11 Metaphors compare a first subject to a second subject, and even if controversial in the history of philosophy and rhetoric, this ambitious methodology sometimes exposes the intricacies of both discussed entities. Or perpetuates new constructions: a refrain of photographic procedures. And what a comparison, what a construction: a slapstick comedy of a man lethargically reclining on his studio chair, no Benny Hill or Buster Keaton, but Olympia and Venus facing a gendered outside sphere, carved in stone – perennial, though not everlasting – asking their viewer: how do you know? Ileana Pintilie describes Masculin-Feminin and its gender dimension as a work that pleads in favour of the defining traits of both sexes, the construction of which gives birth to the“full, balanced, complete man”. 12 While I do agree that Masculin-Feminin works with the signifying traits of both female and male sexuality, I oppose the view that Grigorescu’s unity, if we are to call a fragmented chimera unitary, is in any way balanced or complete. Similarly, in Our Home and Delivery/Birth, Grigorescu confronts viewers with a fractured subject, disrupted along the frame and in its psychology, disrupted in its actual infrastructure, organic and technical, yet very affirming of this disruption. Inconsistent in its presence, painted by the penis, consistently marked by it, but corrected by the feminine, Grigorescu’s chimera is both and none at the same time, a hermaphrodite in continuous exchange, shifting its identity after and before every frame, doubled by the mirror, once again fragmented by this medium par excellence of subject formation and self-reflection. The masculine 11 Șerban,"Chronology", 337(see n. 6), quoting Grigorescu. 12 I. Pintilie,“Between Modernism and Postmodernism: A Contextual Analysis of Ion Grigorescu’s Work”, in A. Ș erban(ed.), The Man with a Single Camera (Berlin/Bucharest, 2013), 10–86 at 35.

DOI 10.60531/INSIGHTOUT.2024.2.13| CORODAN: THE SELF SLIDES OVER THE SELF WITH FRICTION_ INSIGHTOUT 2(2024) 96 is only the mask, the presence in the outside world; the desire of this machine is feminine, and in this conceptualisation the feminine takes on destructive ambitions, sick and feverish. Masculin-Feminin ends with Grigorescu trapping himself in a pyramidal construction of mirrors, forced to confront himself with his other selves in an architecture where one is too few, and two are too many. For a binary gender system in which the masculine ideal was a menial version of the New Soviet man and the feminine ideal flirted between domesticity and women-empowering working-class prerogatives, Grigorescu offered a re-codification – even if only from the cupboard. This re-codification did not aim for the construction of new masculine values or plead for a feminist breakthrough, but rather was concerned with a very peculiar deconstructive and destabilising hybridisation between the two canonically recognised genders. Through a paradoxical alphabet, caught between the real and the constructed in its affirmation of incoherency, with fragmentation and disruption at the core of every letter, Grigorescu stratified the duality of the masculine and the feminine as different layers are merged in a superimposed sequence, crossing the boundaries between corporeal performance and film. So the camera fails, we fail together, in union and division, denying duality while also embracing it. An infrastructure collapsing, I collapse with it, in construction.