DOI 10.60531/INSIGHTOUT.2024.2.13| CORODAN: THE SELF SLIDES OVER THE SELF WITH FRICTION_ INSIGHTOUT 2(2024) 95back, experimenting with their movement possibilities, and a hyper-sexualised feminine body beforeintercourse. Déjà vu. This very strange and unidentifiable status of the body – its status in the world – underlines the processes to which this corporeal entityis subjected: male behaviour inclining towards thefeminine is corrected, so the text reads. Freed fromthe recording eye of the camera’s lens, Grigorescu’shands move around in an almost symmetrical choreography along his face, tracing its contours. The morphology of his body becomes slowly visible, a little bitmore comprehensible: a centre, for which the head,neck and torso are representative and almost static,annexed by the dualities of extremities that fail tomove synchronically. Turbulences of language, turbulences of the lens, turbulences of the image, yet thepursuit of duality continues: tracing along his face,along his legs; nothing but disruptions of the bodyand 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’sstudio – and the outside sphere. Five repetitionsshow urban architectural elements – windows, doors,pillars and a magnitude of hole-like objects – pairedwith scenes of Grigorescu sensually, sluggishly andawkwardly occupying his studio chair. Actual architecture, as represented in these scenes, is not rationalised. It does not serve the purpose of housing orprotecting, it does not follow any function, it is not adocumentation of the living conditions in Ceaușescu’sBucharest: it is mere metaphor. Is the door open orclosed? What about the window? The holes: entrance? Escape route? Where to? The womb? Maybea 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 givethe viewer the certainty of being face to face with aman or a woman. I was trying to help the viewer byshowing him various architectural forms with a pronounced masculine or feminine aspect. For example,a round open window, or a glass-roofed porch, thetransparent form of a shell.”11Metaphors comparea first subject to a second subject, and even if controversial in the history of philosophy and rhetoric,this ambitious methodology sometimes exposes theintricacies of both discussed entities. Or perpetuatesnew constructions: a refrain of photographic procedures. And what a comparison, what a construction:a slapstick comedy of a man lethargically recliningon his studio chair, no Benny Hill or Buster Keaton,but Olympia and Venus facing a gendered outsidesphere, carved in stone – perennial, though not everlasting – asking their viewer: how do you know?Ileana Pintilie describesMasculin-Femininand itsgender dimension as a work that pleads in favourof the defining traits of both sexes, the constructionof which gives birth to the“full, balanced, complete man”.12While I do agree thatMasculin-Femininworks with the signifying traits of both female andmale sexuality, I oppose the view that Grigorescu’sunity, if we are to call a fragmented chimera unitary, is in any way balanced or complete. Similarly, inOur HomeandDelivery/Birth,Grigorescu confrontsviewers with a fractured subject, disrupted along theframe and in its psychology, disrupted in its actualinfrastructure, organic and technical, yet very affirming of this disruption. Inconsistent in its presence,painted by the penis, consistently marked by it, butcorrected by the feminine, Grigorescu’s chimera isboth and none at the same time, a hermaphroditein continuous exchange, shifting its identity afterand before every frame, doubled by the mirror, onceagain fragmented by this medium par excellence ofsubject formation and self-reflection. The masculine11Șerban,"Chronology", 337(see n. 6), quoting Grigorescu.12I. Pintilie,“Between Modernism and Postmodernism: A Contextual Analysis of Ion Grigorescu’s Work”, in A.Șerban(ed.),The Manwith a Single Camera(Berlin/Bucharest, 2013), 10–86 at 35.
