Goethe Scenes

One among Many

Here I stand. I cannot do otherwise: identified by socialist essayist Georgi Valentinovich Plekhanov as the “decisive role of the individual in history,” Martin Luther recognized it long before. In spite of the body’s disappearance in the crowd, it is always the individual who decides the course of history. The young protester in 1970s Bucharest seems to hear Bob Dylan’s call from offstage. “The times, they are a-changing” may have rattled from the loudspeaker if the Iron Curtain had not thrown back the sound waves of the protest culture. In an exhibition at New York’s Goethe gallery Ludlow38. artist Ion Gregorescu reflects with a sharp eye on the passage of time in his Romanian homeland as well as on his own body, spirituality and on religion.