DOI 10.60531/INSIGHTOUT.2024.2.13| CORODAN: THE SELF SLIDES OVER THE SELF WITH FRICTION_ INSIGHTOUT 2(2024) 93Citing filmic infrastructure(visible cameras, framejumps, spontaneous cuts, scratches on the film), Grigorescu performs exaggerated, essentialising andeven ironic stances of the masculine and the feminine, both united and ruptured in a single yet multiplebody. These stances, movements and explorationsnot only allow a destabilisation of strictly separatedgender 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 thefirst agent of duplication and stratification. Duringthese, Grigorescu is not alone, but doubled, representing the two(two?) actors present in the dialoguewhich is not reduced to the organic. The element ofthe 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, themirror has told a tale of introspection and self-referentiality as well as inviting psychoanalytical readings. In this specific prose, Grigorescu’s mirror ismany: a delegate flirting with the history of self-referentiality and arrogantly quoting Lacan, but also,at the most rudimentary level, a simple, yet extremelycomplex prop. This object, oscillating between technical trickery and leitmotif, produces agglomerationsof 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 thelevel of the image, cuts through the architecture ofhis body, building a chimera with two torsos and twoheads. In the middle of this monstrous stage design,the performance of the feminine and the masculineelongates itself beyond one singular body. This elongation: not homogenous, it exerts disruption. Theiconic masculine organ: cut, almost castrated fromthis collaged duality. The body: incomplete, its multiplicity refrains from presenting itself as whole. Thistheme: reiterated.With a title gravid with denotation,Delivery/Birth(1977) captures Ion Grigorescu performing a fauxbirth; a baked pastry and jam(one imagines) embodies his newborn. Fourteen analogue photographs stumble in their resemblance to a chronophotographic sequence, negating linear narrativeprogression and quoting the essence of photography’s more mobile relative – film. Based ondifféranceand incongruence, not only the film but alsothe body of the artist oscillates between the childand the mother, yet is consistently marked, almosthaunted, by the man. A proposition: instability ofidentity. This trembling subject, much like Freud’sOedipus, cannot separate itself from its mother, amother(to be read also as artist, to be read asman) whose integrity is continually fractured bythe violence of the frame. Affirming the mediumand its ability to counter reality by constructing divergent renditions by manipulating the index, IonGrigorescu proposes an alignment of fracturedunits – both physical and medial – that(dis)connect. When viewing the photographic series as aunified single image, the limbs of the artist meltacross the frames, forming abstract and biologically impossible shapes, starting from and leadingto nowhere. Not yet a comic strip, however resemblant of its structure while also denying its coherent narrative progression, this grotesque montageproposes along its chimeras an investigation intothe potential of photographic production, in whichthe paradox of denotation and connotation intertwine and conflict. It is here where Barthes’ structural analysis of photography becomes entangledin Grigorescu’s metaphorical language. Barthes’self-procreating method describing photographical genesis serves as a tongue-in-cheek analogyto Grigorescu’s pictorial objects that oscillatebetween motherhood, manhood and birth – a metaphor for(artistic) creation – as they are“gluedtogether, limb by limb,[…] as though united by aneternal coitus”.77R. Barthes,Camera Lucida. Reflections on Photography(New York, 1981), 6.
