Bucharest

Ion Grigorescu

Cover
Softcover

Edition
2020, 23 x 22 cm, 168 pp., 152 ill., Romanian/English

Collection
Architecture Book Series

ISBN 978-973-0-33043-4

Book concept, editor
Alina Șerban

Assistant editor
Ștefania Ferchedău

Authors
Ion Grigorescu, Juliana Maxim, Carmen Popescu, Alina Șerban

Design
Mihai Șovăială

Ion Grigorescu (born 1945, Bucharest) is one of the most significant representatives of Romanian Neo-avant-garde art. His practice, ranging from painting to photography, from film and photo-performance to diary writing, does not necessarily comply with the historical canons of art, in exchange providing an extraordinary unsettled journey towards the disturbing lineage between life and art. Bucharest provides insight into the artist’s experimental photographic and filmic practice seen from the perspective of a recurrent subject he investigates, the city of Bucharest and its surroundings, during the years 1964–1994. Although Bucharest is not necessarily assumed by the artist as a subject clearly defined by a normative way of working, it remains subliminally present in his corpus of works, crossing the extremely varied periods of his activity. Thus, the publication reveals, in retrospect, the artist’s commitment to a practice associated with the phenomenon of “amateur politics.” His flâneur-like walks and unpredictable encounters through the city bring forward under-represented themes of a less-visible city, one affected by the impetus of progress, marked by the imprecise mixtures of urban and rural traits, by poverty, and architectures of ruins. 

Publication supported by: AFCN, Expo Arte, Gregor Podnar

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Interview with
Ion Grigorescu

1 / 5
How do you read the (un)conscious presence of Bucharest in your work? Can it have the bone structure of a main character with whom you enter into dialogue? Or does it remain in the background, like a protagonist of lesser importance, but without whom the artistic narrative cannot be written?
Am I an artist? I stay at home and I’d like to do all kinds of “visuals” from the world of the countryside, from my own move to the village. I recognise Dad leaving home among the lakes and hankering to go back to the Bengești and Corcova of his childhood. But the world of the village is unsustainable in present-day art, partly it was exhausted by the folkloric boom of the sixties, and I risk being mistaken for it. Bucharest has an often naïve parvenu culture and it’s very loudmouthed, I take it as such, in the raw, and nobody views my doing so as harking back to the past or mysticism or thinks I’m engaged in sociology; let them think whatever they want!
2 / 5
In 2005, you observed that the Bucharest of 1977, as you captured it in your film “In Beloved Bucharest,” and the Bucharest of 1994, represented in your film “The Crooked Axes of the City,” have in common the return to ruins, and that your practice was equivalent to a poverist archaeology.
The world is divided into those who love the mementos mori that are ruins (with all the uncertainty of translating today this mode of the verb “to die,” which only Antiquity was able to conceive of) and those who love mementos vivere through images of modern works. The one will not be reconciled with the other. My archaeology is quite complicated, however: there was a cataclysm, the Călărași, Pappazoglu, Dudești districts were demolished, and we have houses knocked to the ground, that is, submerged in their cellars, others abandoned by their owners but not demolished, others that the owners have gradually demolished in order to salvage the materials, in a spatial mixture with housing blocks whose skeleton has been built and housing blocks that have been completed and occupied, without roads or shops. Does this Forum remain? Or do we scornfully trample it and complete the cataclysm, razing and forgetting the past? Who would want to live next to such remnants? How many people would hate me? What for? What do I wish to prove by this? What are we? Nagasaki (Alain Resnais, Hiroshima, mon amour!)?
3 / 5
What role do film and photography play in relation to what interests you (“the world, the image, the constituent”)? Can we speak of periods in which the “theme of Bucharest” breathes with greater intensity?
In one of the years when I was a student, I roamed the streets of Bucharest, I can’t remember for what purpose. Around Piața Amzei there were old buildings that fully satisfied me, with their added sculptures, wrought-iron ornaments, on every storey and on the roof, they were large, they occupied space and provocatively displayed their cast of extras, they demanded of me craftsmanship, perspective, a genius imitative of sculpture in drawing. There have been constant demolitions and housing blocks have been built in Piața Amzei, not only in the communist period. Of course, these are wounds inside me, which don’t appear in the “works,” weeping makes me a laughingstock, the public is harsh and philistine, they live in housing blocks and in the old square they see (where do they see it? in their imagination?) only insalubrious tenement houses. In my first years as a student, I was crazy for a girl who came from a family who lived on the edge of a city, and I used to go for walks with her around the old outlying quarters of Bucharest until late in the evening, looking at the houses no higher than the fence, hidden by a tree, by clothes hung out to dry, houses with glassed in verandas and dismembered cars, motorcycles, bicycles. Later, the Central-European University in Budapest invited me to talk about Poverty, about its vital creative or cultural force, which doesn’t need a Ceaușescu yesterday or a Xi today to abolish it “permanently” etc.
4 / 5
You define art as an afflux into an unexplored region, which you wish to keep unexplored even after it has become art; you are afraid of art turning reality into kitsch. Where do photography and film come into this? Are they capable of articulating the reality of the city without interfering with its representation?
I worked with cheap apparatus and materials, it was as if they sold them deliberately so that they wouldn’t be capable of rendering the truth in detail. Some are nostalgic for those tools, it’s as if I had my eyes closed and the images passed across my mind. The images are raw, if I eliminated the torture of rendering them, the breaks in the film, the artist would appear, the author, covered in kitsch like a general covered in medals.
5 / 5
You note in your diary that the city and the house of your childhood are introductory images to the unconscious. How do the two levels, the city (experienced in the everyday life) and the one (dreaming it) layer each other? Which lingers more? How does the nocturnal presence of the city affect its diurnal “capture” on film or in photography?
In dreams, places can have a name, for example, “Dorobanți,” without being there, or “home,” albeit different, dream is a hesitant realm, and the names there are from habit, a play on words and multiple meanings. Historical events or figures appear in dream without any consequence. Reality, the document, is cutting, direct, it has a name, a time, such and such a person did this, that place is identifiable, nothing has to be inserted by the author, in order to say that it’s his, the document is spoiled like that. The document is convincing in an initial time. Viewing it again you can discover its details, or unknown intentions, or else the person viewing it has a different mood and in that way the document proves to be a kind of dream, through its hesitations, it’s no longer certain. Routine, the habitual, erodes the status of the event and events can be lost. People look down on them, no longer register them. The consciousness of loss is completely uncertain. You start by saying: “It’s as if I can see it!” after which the absent person with a name and a face no longer appears. Therefore, the status of event is added to in reality with the inherently anodyne and boredom. The event is more than that, it is a happening and contains multiple challenges of the future.