A SPECTER HAUNTS CONTEMPORARY ART—the specter of modernism. For some years now, artists and institutions have been invoking the disparate shades of the modern in terms that vary from the melancholic to the hortatory, from what sometimes seems a relapse into ruin aesthetics to the urgent call for a newly expanded, even universal, avant-garde. As an instance of the former we might adduce the ubiquity of work that treats of the architectural remains of modernism and the Eastern bloc; as an example of the latter, the renewed question of what comes “after” (surely a question-begging preposition)

Ion Grigorescu has recently received well-deserved recognition, the culmination of which—following his participation in Documenta 12, 2007, and other big international exhibitions—was the first retrospective of his work, at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Poland, this past year. Such reevaluations of the Romanian artist’s long career, though, have centered on his production from the 1970s, paying particular attention to the political context of the rule of the Ceauşescus, which deeply affected Grigorescu’s videographic work and even his isolated and marginal performances. Nonetheless, what