Book

The extraordinary artist, Geta Brătescu, is one of the most radically experimental creative spirits of the Romanian contemporary culture. At the age of 84, the graphic artist, authoress of collages, videos, installations, performances and many other things, created in many formulas, even improvised ones that are documented photographically and filmic, now, publishes books in addition.

The most recent book of Bogdan Ghiu, Telepitecapitalism, continues further the same thread from The Glass Eye and from Middle Ages Media or The Terminal Man, the volumes where the author has collected “TV chronicles” written since 1991. I haven’t gotten handy the first account from this series, The Glass Eye (All Publishing House,1997) in order to check, where the adventure begun.

The book, that I am going to talk anout and which is going to be released on the 10th of February at The Possible Gallery in Bucharest, presents an uninhibited look at the vernacular photography from Romania. The authors’ approach (Magda Radu, Oana Tănase, Nicu Ilfoveanu, Eugen Gustea şi Matei Câlția) doesn’t look into the creation of photography history, or at the map of its circulation on the chosen space and it certainly isn’t trying to create a subjective and nostalgic album.

So far, Bogdan Ghiu’s essayistic style, collected in Eye of Glass. Texts regarding television (1991 – 1997) (1997), Grams (1997) Media Eve or The Terminal Man (2002) and The Faculty of Letters (2004), is targeting primarily the press, mainly the tele-visual, today’s world, hyper-technologized and “globalized” sometimes with more specialized philosophical formulas, especially in those accompanying prefaces and postfaces of its countless translations of the recent French profound thinkers.

It is a new volume from the ample journal of the front-rank man of the National Peasants’ Party, published starting with 1997 by his son-in-law, the historian Dan Berindei, at different publishing houses: Wind Rose, The PRO Foundation, The Parallel 45, Lucman, the European Institute, etc. In The Introductory Study it is announced another volume with which the 1938-1945 period will be completed, with a total of 13 volumes.