122 SEPTEMBER 2015 123 ART IN AMERICA by Olga Stefan FREEDOM IN THE GRAY ZONE Experimental films and photographs produced by Romanian artists under Communism continue to resonate in the free-market era. OLGA STEFAN is a writer and curator based in Zurich. See Contributors page. Ion Grigorescu: Trăisteni (The Pole), detail, 1976, gelatin silver print, 19¼ inches square overall. Courtesy Galerija Gregor Podnar, Berlin. Photographs really are experience captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood. To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge—and, therefore, like power. —Susan Sontag IT’S POSSIBLE TO come away from many art fairs and international biennials with the impression that Romanian con- temporary art is deined largely by the work of painters from the city of Cluj, who found critical and commercial success in the years following the 1989 revolution. he Romanian pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale, organized by the ministry of culture and the Romanian Cultural Institute, features the work of young Cluj painter Adrian Ghenie, whose richly colored canvases, blending iguration and abstraction, are highly prized by collectors. However, the story of Romanian art since the 1960s can be told from another perspective, one that fore- grounds experimental—if visually understated—work in ilm and photography. Often produced illicitly, the ilms and pho- tographs of vanguard Romanian artists are being reexamined today because they ofer some of the most incisive relections on the country’s tumultuous political history—and because they may provide a guide for addressing contemporary social realities in Romania and throughout Eastern Europe. It is well known that in the 1960s and ’70s, ilm and photography began to igure prominently in the work of Conceptual, performance and Land artists active around the world. But while in the West the ilms and photographs of such artists as Yoko Ono, Robert Smithson and Carolee Schneemann were written about, exhibited in important art institutions and integrated slowly but surely into the con- temporary art world, in Romania such practices remained underground, undertaken by a very limited group. he oicial art system was controlled by the oicial artist’s union, Uniunea Artiştilor Plastici (UAP), which distributed funds for commis- sions and maintained a monopoly on the country’s network of exhibition spaces. In turn, the UAP answered to the state,