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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.